The saint appears twice in this same painting. Originally this altarpiece panel was flanked by two paintings identical in size that also depicted scenes from the life of St. Nicholas. In the 19th century the altarpiece was broken up and its parts today reside in Perugia and in the Vatican Museum in Rome.
Patron Saint of Mariners
At the time Fra Angelico painted this piece, St. Nicholas was among the most popular of the saints. He was never beatified by the Catholics yet is the only saint to survive the Protestant Reformation. He has come to be associated with the real-life figure of Bishop Nicholas of Myra.
Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of children and is the saint behind Santa Claus. St. Nicholas’s Day is officially December 6, which falls around the time that winter storms start to hit the Mediterranean, making seafaring treacherous. Where the ancient peoples had appealed to Poseidon and Neptune, gods of the sea, they now prayed to St. Nicholas who became the patron saint of mariners.
The story of St. Nicholas saving the sailors is an ancient one. The “Golden Legend,” a collection of readings about the saints compiled in the 13th century, states that on one perilous journey in bad weather [“a voyage into the abyss”] the seamen prayed to St. Nicholas who miraculously appeared to help them with “sails and ropes and other rigging of the ship and the storm died down immediately.”
In Fra Angelico’s painting, St. Nicholas appears in the sky to the right, causing the wind to blow off the shore and fill the sails in order to save the ship from ruin.
Miracle of the Grain
Nicholas was also the patron saint of merchants, especially corn and wheat merchants, shippers, millers, bakers, and brewers. Bread and grain played an important role during Fra Angelico’s time and were a popular theme because of the ever-present threat of famine. Everyone was familiar with it and many people suffered from it. Wheat was an important source of food. Families typically stockpiled what they could of their harvest, but several poor harvests in a row could drain their supplies.
Grain was an important food staple for the ruling class and a portion of the population's grain harvests was collected as tax. In “Saint Nicholas of Bari,” ships full of wheat sit in the harbor at Myra preparing for their winter voyage during a time of famine. Nicholas begged the people to help those who were starving by giving them a hundred measures of wheat from each ship. The sailors were too afraid to do so, stating “our cargo was measured at Alexandria and we must deliver it whole and entire to the emporer’s granaries.”
Nicholas promised them that if they were to help their starving countrymen by donating grain, there would be no shortage upon their arrival to the emporer. Indeed, acording to the tale, the wheat was not short. In fact, Nicholas multiplied the donated wheat so that it fed the whole region for two years. This scene of grain being taking from the ships’ stores is portrayed in the foreground of the painting.
Source:
Hagen, Rose-Marie & Rainer. What Great Paintings Say: Old Masters in Detail. Cologne: Benedikt Tasche, 2000.
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