I went to a recital of Mozart’s Requiem at lunch the other day, held in a Catholic Church around the corner from where I work. Behind the alter was a gilded nativity scene, to either side of which stood several gilded figures. At first I assumed that they were the twelve disciples, but then I thought “Would they include Judas - surely not?”, and counting them revealed that there were only ten.
So, which of the remaining eleven (since Matthias seldom gets a look in) would have been left out (fro symmetry’s sake I assume)? Or were they just ten randomly selected saints?
What was the name of the church? That may have something to do with which saints were represented.
Do you know if both men and women were represented by the figures?
Judas and the rest of the disciples weren’t on the scene when Jesus was born, he met them along the way.
Mary, Joseph, the Three Kings, a few shepherds and the angel Gabriel are the usual contenders in a Nativity scene
Judas wasn’t at the Nativity, which as you know is the manger scene when Jesus was born. He is, however, on the famous Last Supper painting that everyone has seen and which is so famous I can’t remember who painted it.
You’re probably thinking of the famous one by Leonardo da Vinci, whose work overshadows all the others – although lots of artists have painted the scene.
Well, I was trying to hunt down some information from a church website - I did find http://www.stmw.org - this looks like it should belong to that particular church (I’m not positive though). Most of their site is still under construction and there’s no information about interior of the church currently available.
I’d go with the idea that the figures included the ‘three kings’, some shepherds, angels and the like. Perhaps they’ll eventually update their website and we can figure out who they are.
St. Matthew’s have their own website but it appears to be under construction.
The photograph on the first website does match your description but it is too tiny to make out the details. I would assume that the ten figures are simply ten miscellaneous saints selected because they had particular association with the church, although, in such cases, ‘association’ can be a very elastic term. They doubtless include St. Matthew himself and other saints with obvious Westminster connections would be St. Peter, St. Stephen and St. Edward the Confessor.
Incidentally, one rarely gets sets of twelve statues of ‘the Disciples’ in churches, because of the Judas problem. What you do is call them the Apostles and thrown in St. Paul as the substitute to make up the numbers.
At the bottom of the list of “under construction” links on http://www.stmw.org/ is an apparently active e-mail address. You might ask them who was up there.
If St. Andrew was up there with his X cross, they might be a partial list of apostles. If not, they are probably some other group of saints. (If it’s in Winchester, how many saints are associated with the city dating back to Bede and Augustine and so on?)