Feast of All Saints (Saint Paul)

My noon Highlights tour last Sunday (November 1) had "Saints" as its theme in honor of the feast day.  I didn't mention my own atheism to the marvelous group of people who did the tour with me, certainly not wanting to influence their response to the art or my thoughts with what might be reasonably interpreted as a twist of the knife.

We started the tour with the work above, Lorenzo di Niccolo's fourteenth century image of Saint Paul holding sword and book.  The web image does no justice at all to the luminosity of the red, orange and gold of the painting, which could have been painted yesterday rather than six hundred years ago (and I don't know the extent of recent restoration, so some of that luminosity might be a result of that rather than sheer survival).  Both the coloring and the intensity of Saint Paul's face and gaze call the viewer with a kind of personal reach quite different from neighboring paintings of the Madonna or Christ.  I asked a question of the group, something to the effect of "What does this painting convey about sainthood?"  The answer of a young man matched mine: the saint is looking at me, reaching out to me, attesting to his humanity.  The paintings of saints in the collection, even in this semi-medieval period, are all portraits of a sort, meant to imagine human beings with certain capabilities or meanings, but to really imagine them, to identify them as real individuals at the same time that they are categories or types or characters.