THE DOUBTING THOMAS CONSOLE

THE DOUBTING THOMAS CONSOLE

by Joan K. Yanni  

With the return of the Doubting Thomas Console (49.76) after a two-year session with conservators, a brief reminder of the background of the piece is in order.

The 12th century limestone console was purchased in 1949 at the auction of art dealer Joseph Brummer’s collection.  Isabel Herdle, then assistant director to the Gallery, chipped a piece of its surface as she accidentally backed into it, and realized that the sculpture was polychrome beneath its whitewashed surface. To capture it for the Gallery, she not only threw her raincoat over it, but sat on it.  The fact that we have the console proves that her ruse worked.  She spent the next year removing the whitewash with Q-tips.

There was one more crisis for our console to overcome: that of authenticity.  The French art historian Leon Pressouyre, while teaching a term at Yale, saw a picture of the Doubting Thomas in a Gallery handbook and recognized it as coming from Saint Martin de Candes, a church in southwest France.  However, an identical console was in place in the church.  One was a fake.  The art historian came to Rochester to examine our Doubting  Thomas

and declared it to be authentic.  The church had been renewed in the 1880s and the original replaced with a reproduction!  (Further details can be read in Volume VIII of Porticus or Betsy Brayer's MAGnum Opus.)

The story of St. Thomas can be found in the New Testament gospels, in particular John 20:16,17.  After the Resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples in a locked room.  Thomas was not with them at the time, and he refused to believe that Jesus had appeared to his friends.  (Thus the term "Doubting Thomas" originated.) "Unless I see the marks of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe," he said. The next time Christ appeared to the apostles, Thomas was with them.  "See the wounds from the nails in my hands and feet, and put your hand into my side, Thomas," said Jesus.  Thomas was convinced.  Our console shows Jesus, Thomas, (now headless, but kneeling and putting a finger into Jesus’s side) and Peter (with a key, of course), plus two unidentified apostles.

A console is not a freestanding sculpture, but an architectural element: a decoration for the end of a vault rib in a medieval church.

April 1989

The Doubting Thomas