Iconography

The iconography of St. Thecla — the visual forms in which the Church and the late-antique cult depicted her. The window scene of her conversion, the beasts and the reverent lioness of the arena, the cross-dressed traveler, and the abundant small images on pilgrim flasks and funerary objects from the cult centers. This file sets out the recurring types and their sources in the Acts, East and West.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Early Church / Equal-to-the-Apostles)

A Saint Made Visible Early

Thecla is among the earliest non-biblical saints to receive a developed iconography, and the visual evidence is itself part of the well-attested cult (as distinct from the legendary biography; see What Can Be Known). From the fourth and fifth centuries, images of Thecla appear across the Christian world — in the cult centers of Asia Minor and Egypt especially — on pilgrim tokens, ampullae (flasks for holy oil or water), carved ivories, textiles, and funerary art, as well as in later panel icons and frescoes of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine tradition. Stephen Davis’s study makes this material culture central evidence for the reach and the character of the cult, particularly as a tradition of women’s piety (Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, chs. on the visual and material evidence). The recurring iconographic types each derive directly from an episode of the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

The Window Scene

The most distinctive Theclan image is her conversion at the window (Acts of Paul and Thecla 7; see The Narrative). Thecla is shown seated at an upper window of a house, sometimes with her mother Theocleia or her betrothed Thamyris below or beside her, listening — the Apostle Paul depicted preaching nearby or in an adjacent building. The image dramatizes the gospel reaching her by hearing: she is won by the word before she meets the preacher. A celebrated example is a fragmentary fresco of Paul and Thecla in the so-called “Grotto of St. Paul” near ancient Ephesus, which shows the two figures together, with the window-and-listening motif — an early visual witness to the pairing of the apostle and his disciple. The window scene became the iconic shorthand for Thecla’s whole story: the moment of her turning.

The Beasts and the Lioness

The second great iconographic theme is Thecla among the beasts in the arena (Acts 28–35). She is shown standing or seated, often between or among wild animals that do not harm her — the lioness that defends her lying at her feet, lions and bears held at bay. This is the type that the Fathers themselves evoked: Ambrose describes the lion that “lay down upon the ground” in reverence for the virgin (Ambrose, De virginibus 2.3.19; see The Patristic Thecla). On pilgrim flasks and tokens from Seleucia and from Egypt (notably the Abu Mina complex, where Thecla’s image appears alongside St. Menas), Thecla is repeatedly shown frontally, flanked by beasts, sometimes between two animals in a heraldic arrangement, occasionally bound to a stake or standing amid flames — a compressed image fusing the pyre at Iconium and the beasts at Antioch into a single emblem of the saint delivered from death. These small, mass-produced images are among the most numerous early depictions of any female saint, and they document the cult’s popular reach.

The Cross-Dressed Traveler and the Teacher

A third motif draws on the close of the narrative, where Thecla cuts her hair and sews her cloak into a man’s mantle to travel and to seek Paul (Acts 40), and is commissioned to “teach the word of God” (Acts 41). Here Thecla may be depicted in the austere garb of the ascetic or in a mantle marking her as a teacher and apostle — the visual counterpart to her title Equal-to-the-Apostles (see The Title and the Model). In Byzantine and later Orthodox icons she is most often shown as a holy woman in the dress of a consecrated virgin or martyr, frequently holding a cross (the martyr’s emblem) and sometimes a scroll (the teacher’s), her name inscribed with her titles. The flames and the beasts may appear as small attributes beside her, identifying her by her ordeals.

East and West

In the Christian East, Thecla’s image belongs to the standard repertoire of the holy women — depicted among the female saints and martyrs in church programs, in menologion illustrations under September 24, and in panel icons honoring her as Protomartyr and Equal-to-the-Apostles. In the Latin West her cult generated its own iconography, centered on the places that claimed her: the ancient Basilica di Santa Tecla in Milan (the city’s summer cathedral, now beneath the Duomo), and above all Tarragona, where as patroness she is depicted throughout the cathedral and the city, frequently with the arm-reliquary that is the focus of her Spanish cult (see Feast and Relics). Across both traditions the iconography stays anchored to the Acts: the window, the flames, the beasts, the lioness, the cross and scroll — the same episodes that carried her story in words carried it in images, making Thecla one of the most widely depicted as well as most widely read saints of the early Church.

The Pairing with Paul

A distinct and important iconographic type shows Thecla together with the Apostle Paul — the disciple beside her teacher. This pairing, of which the Ephesus grotto fresco is the most discussed early example, is theologically pointed: it depicts Thecla precisely as the disciple of Paul and the recipient of his commission, the visual assertion of her apostolic standing. In some examples of the type the two figures are shown in roughly equal scale and posture, both with the raised hand of teaching or blessing — a composition that itself became a focus of scholarly debate, since at least one such image appears to have had Thecla’s authority deliberately diminished (her hand and eyes effaced) by a later hand, which scholars have read as a trace of the very contest over women’s authority that the Acts and the Pastorals attest (the “battle for Paul”; see Women Apostles and the Debate). Whether or not that particular reading holds, the Paul-and-Thecla type is a reminder that the iconography, like the texts, carried and contested Thecla’s apostolic dignity, not only her martyrdom.

See Also

References

  • Acts of Paul and Thecla 7, 28–35, 40–41. In J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 365, 369–372.
  • Davis, Stephen J. The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. (The visual and material evidence: pilgrim flasks, the Abu Mina images, funerary art; the cult in Asia Minor and Egypt.)
  • Ambrose of Milan, De virginibus 2.3.19 (the reverent lion). NPNF II/10.
  • Nauerth, Claudia, and Rüdiger Warns. Thekla: Ihre Bilder in der frühchristlichen Kunst. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1981. (Catalogue of the early Christian images of Thecla.)