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Filippino Lippi, St. Paul Visiting St. Peter in Prison Italian, 1481-1482 Florence, Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Brancacci Chapel, |
“I say to you, you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my Church,
and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of heaven.
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:18-19)
Excerpt from the Gospel for June 29, 2012However, today I am going to concentrate on the First Reading for the Mass of today. This reading from the Acts of the Apostles recounts the miraculous liberation of St. Peter from imprisonment in Jerusalem by Herod.
"On the very night before Herod was to bring him to trial,
Peter, secured by double chains,
was sleeping between two soldiers,
while outside the door guards kept watch on the prison.
Suddenly the angel of the Lord stood by him
and a light shone in the cell.
He tapped Peter on the side and awakened him, saying,
"Get up quickly."
The chains fell from his wrists.
The angel said to him, "Put on your belt and your sandals."
He did so.
Then he said to him, "Put on your cloak and follow me."
So he followed him out,
not realizing that what was happening through the angel was real;
he thought he was seeing a vision.
They passed the first guard, then the second,
and came to the iron gate leading out to the city,
which opened for them by itself.
They emerged and made their way down an alley,
and suddenly the angel left him.” (Acts 12:6-10)
Excerpt from First Reading for June 29, 2012
The illustrations for this passage from Acts range from barebones representations in the early medieval period to complex works of the late Baroque. At the beginning representations are almost schematic. They feature the bare minimum needed to tell the story: Saint Peter, the angel and a suggestion of prison walls.
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Liberation of Saint Peter From Lectionarium officii s. petri cluniacensis, France (Cluny), 11th-12th Century Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France MS Nouvelle acquisition latine 2246, fol. 113v |
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Initial N, Liberation of Saint Peter from a Gradual, Sequentiary, Sacramentary German (Weingarten), 1225-1250 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.711, fol. 25r |
Later on, there is a fairytale quality to the representation: St. Peter and the angel appear much larger than the tiny symbolic prison.
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Liberation of Saint Peter From Bible historiale by Guiard des Moulins, France (St. Omer), 14th Century Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France MS Francais 152, fol. 457v |
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Liberation of Saint Peter, West Facade Tympanum German (Regensburg), 1411-1421 Regensburg, Cathedral of Saint Peter |

Claes Brouwer and the Alexander Master, Liberation of Saint Peter
From a Historiated Bible
Dutch (Utrecht), ca. 1430
The Hague, Koninklijk Bibliothek
MS KB 78 D 3811, fol. 213v
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Tapestry, Liberation of Saint Peter Flanders (Tournai), 1460 Part of a set commissioned for the Cathedral of Beauvais Paris, Cluny Museum |
It remained for the Ranaissance to bring the picture into focus, as it were. The prison is now in scale (mostly) with the figures.
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Filippino Lippi, Liberation of Saint Peter Italian, c. 1481-1482 Florence, Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Brancacci Chapel |
But it is Raphael, in his design for the depiction of the scene surrounding one of the doors in the Stanza d’Eliodoro at the Vatican Palace in 1514 that finally “set the scene” firmly in time and space.
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Raphael and Assistants, Liberation of Saint Peter Italian, 1514 Vatican City, Vatican Museums, Stana d'Eliodoro |
Raphael tells the story in three sections: a scene of the guards outside the prison on the left, the scene of the sleeping Peter being roused by the angel in the center and the scene of the angel leading Peter out of the prison on the right.
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Raphael and Assistants, Liberation of Saint Peter Left Section |
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Raphael and Assistants, Liberation of Saint Peter Central Section |
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Raphael and Assistants, Liberation of Saint Peter Right Section |
Leading the way to the future is Raphael’s exploration of the effects of light. We see the effect of moonlight as well as the mysterious light that emanates from the angel.
This is quite different from the flat lighting that was seen in earlier images and leads to the development, which gathered strength during the century after Raphael and leads to the Baroque experiments with light and darkness that sprang from the work of Caravaggio and his followers.
We can see this in later representations of the Liberation of Peter by Steenwyck, Carraciolo, and others.
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Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger, Liberation of Saint Peter Dutch, Oil on copper, 1619 Hampton Court Palace, Royal Collections Trust |
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Giovanni Batista Carrociolo, Liberation of Saint Peter Italian, 1615 Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte |
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Antonio de Pereda, Liberation of Saint Peter Spanish, ca. 1643 Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado |
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Mattia Preti, Liberation of St. Peter Italian, 1650-1660 Vienna, Akademie der bildenden Künste |
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Bartolome Murillo, Liberation of Saint Peter Spanish, 1667 St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum |
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Gerrit van Honthorst, Liberation of Saint Peter Dutch, 1616-1618 Berlin, Gemäldegalerie der Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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Guercino, Liberation of Saint Peter Italian, 1620-1623 Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado |
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Sebastiano Ricci, Liberation of Saint Peter Italian, 1722 Venice, Church of San Stae |
Peter was led out of prison in Jerusalem to spread the Gospel and lead the Church in its formative years. Eventually, he came to Rome where he was again imprisoned and, finally, executed in the circus of Nero at the base of the Vatican hill, across the Tiber from Imperial Rome. Afterwards he was buried in the cemetery across the road from his place of death and, in the year 319 Constantine began construction of a large basilican church above his grave. Today, Pope Benedict XVI, the 265th successor of Peter, and Metropolitan Emmanuel Adamakis, leader of the Greek Orthodox in France, representing Patriarch Batholemew I of Constantinople, the successor of Peter's brother, Andrew, prayed together above Peter's tomb, while the combined choirs of the Sistine Chapel and Westminster Abbey (Anglican) sang the moving anthem "Tu es Petrus" ("You are Peter", quoted from the Gospel reading of the day) by Lorenzo Perosi (1872-1956). It was quite a moment!
© M. Duffy, 2012