The Battle of St. James The Greater at Clavijo (n.d.): Artwork and History

The Battle of St. James The Greater at Clavijo (n.d.) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as school of Martin Schongauer German, c. 1430/50-1491.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Saint James the Greater (died a.d. 44) was one of Christ’s apostles and the patron saint of Spain. He was said to have miraculously appeared, sword in hand, to help the Christian Spaniards defeat a Muslim army in a.d. 844—a battle that in fact never happened. The scene here abounds in gritty details such as the beheaded enemy corpse and various dismembered limbs. The saint wears a scallop shell on his hat, an allusion to the sign pilgrims wore on their long journey to revere his relics at the Spanish cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

Object facts

• Title: The Battle of St. James The Greater at Clavijo
• Date: n.d.
• Artist attribution: school of Martin Schongauer German, c. 1430/50-1491
• Place of origin: Germany
• Medium: Engraving on paper
• Dimensions: Sheet trimmed within platemark: 28.7 × 42.3 cm (11 5/16 × 16 11/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1956.920

Collection credit

Bequest of Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.