It is, indeed, doubtful whether Christianity would ever have been established but for the courage and companionship of women. I feel sure they tidied up the catacombs and gave a feeling of home to the crypts and caves. “It was the women who spread Christianity in the family,” says Harnack. St. Augustine’s father was a heathen; it was his mother, Monica, who taught him to pray. The Virgin Martyr, like Santa Reparata of Florence, or St. Catherine of Alexandria, is a stock figure of the Roman calendar. As in all great movements, differences of station were forgotten, and Blandine, the servant-girl of Lyons, played as majestic a part as the royal-blooded St. Catherine, whose wheel of martyrdom finds such quaint perpetuation as a firework.
Popular imagination added the Madonna to the Trinity as a sort of female representative. In Tintoretto’s _Paradise_, as I have already noted, she figures as authoritatively as the Christ, and in a picture at Vicenza, attributed to Tiepolo, she stands on the world, crushing the snake with her foot.
Her companions were usually divided in sex and united in glory. Luca della Robbia, in his charming relief in the cathedral of Arezzo, scrupulously places one male and one female saint on her either hand, and even one male and female angel: doubtless had cherubs possessed sex possibilities, his cherubs too would have been impartially distributed. In the Accademia of Florence, Cimabue’s Madonna is entirely surrounded by female saints, though a few males loom below her throne; Giotto’s shows a female surplus; Bernardo Daddi’s redresses the balance. Fra Angelico gives us _Jesus carried to the Tomb_ by nine women to four men.
Italian art is full of symmetrical paradises of sex-equality, and if a church was decorated with male saints down one aisle, they would be scrupulously balanced by female saints along the other. An old Byzantine Basilica of Ravenna, which displays twenty-two virgins arrayed against thirty saints of the dominant sex, first set me wondering whether, since the Dark Ages, woman has not gone back in Christendom instead of forward. Here at least was the atmosphere for the legend, if not for the reality, of a Pope Joan, whereas at the period in which I first opened my eyes upon the world and woman, she appears to have become reduced to an absolute industrial dependence upon her lord like the fifteenth-century chicken in Giambattista della Porta’s “Book of Natural Magic.” For according to the delightful recipe (cited by Corvo) for inducing affection towards you in a chicken, you must—before it has its feathers—“break off its lower beak even to the jaw. Then, having not the wherewithal to peck up food, it must come to its master to be fed.”