Keith Haring (American, 1958–1990), The Life of Christ, 1990. Bronze altarpiece with white gold leaf patina, 81 × 60 × 2 in. Edition of 9. Chapel of St. Columba, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York. All photos by Victoria Emily Jones.
Keith Haring [previously] was a popular artist and activist on the New York scene during the 1980s. Inspired by graffiti art, he started his career by filling empty poster spaces with chalk drawings in the city’s subway stations. He wanted to make art accessible to everyone and believed that it “should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination, and encourages people to go further.”
His style is characterized by bold black outlines, vibrant colors, a sense of rhythm, and simple iconic figures like the Barking Dog and Radiant Baby, which recur again and again in his oeuvre.
Sadly, Haring’s career was cut short by AIDS, which he died of on February 16, 1990, at age thirty-one. The last work he completed, just weeks before his death, was a Life of Christ altarpiece, a work that conveys eternal love and loss, divine suffering and hope. Without any preliminary sketches, he cut the design into clay using a loop knife. It was posthumously cast in bronze and covered in a white gold patina, an edition of nine.
The first edition is housed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, the world’s fourth-largest church by area, where Haring’s memorial service was held.
Chapel of St. Columba, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, designed by the architectural firm Heins & LaFarge, dedicated 1911. The stained glass windows are by Wilbur Burnham of Boston and Clayton & Bell of London, and the altarpiece, a later addition, is by Keith Haring.
Pulsating, cosmic, and somehow both mournful and joyous, the altarpiece is a triptych, meaning it has three panels. The central panel shows, at the top, a cross, below which is a multiarmed figure holding a baby. The top figure I interpret as God the Father, his arms all-embracing. Below him, at torso level, I discern a second figure (though the head is not clearly defined), who must be Mary, a shining heart over her face. Nestled in her arms is, irrefutably, her infant son Jesus.
Another possible reading is that this is the Trinity—Father, Spirit, and Son—united in an act of self-giving.
The surplus of arms (I count thirteen, plus the baby’s two) reminds me of the Thousand-Armed Avalokiteśvara in Buddhism; a bodhisattva associated with limitless compassion, his arms represent his extending aid, his reaching out to touch, heal, and uplift. One of the arms here stretches down to bestow a halo on humankind, which in Christianity symbolizes the grace/light of God.
Below this primary grouping is a crowd of people who appear to me to be dancing and celebrating, lifting their arms to receive the blessings that flow forth from the holy child. (Or are they clamoring, turning away, resisting? Without facial features and fingers, it’s hard to tell!) Drops of Jesus’s blood fall over all, bringing redemption.
On the two side panels, angels careen down from the heavens, surfing, leaping, tumbling, one screeching to a halt.
Haring’s Life of Christ combines, as have many artworks before it, Jesus’s birth and death, collapsing his time on earth, his ministry of salvation, into a single image of incarnation and atonement. Mary holds him as a newborn, but she also holds him as a lifeless adult after his crucifixion—a traditional representation known as the Pietà. Many artists have given Mary a sad twinge in her eye at the nativity, suggesting a premonition of loss.
Haring’s figures are faceless, so we can’t look there for emotional clues, but Mary’s body language suggests both a desire to keep and protect her son, and a willingness to give him up for the greater good.
I wonder whether, when Haring incised the sacred blood drops, he was not only thinking of the “power in the blood” that Christians sing about in reference to Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice—and all the weight that bodily fluid as Christian symbol carries—but also lamenting the HIV infecting his own bloodstream, ravaging his body and stigmatizing him, and that had already killed many of his friends and his partner.
Haring’s friend Sam Havadtoy, who was present at the altar’s creation, reports that when Haring finished the piece, he stepped back and, gazing at it, said, “Man, this is really heavy.”
I think the prominence of blood must have been at least partly influenced by the destructiveness of the AIDS epidemic and the artist’s meditation on his mortality, perhaps even hope for transcendence through death. And if so, then the Radiant Baby, who, the artist’s title would lead us to assume, is Jesus, could also double as the soul of an AIDS victim being taken back up to God.
While I hesitate to ascribe prayers or intentions to others that they have not clearly voiced, I can’t help but think that this last artwork of Haring’s, executed in the final throes of his illness, its subject returning him to the Christianity of his youth, to a story that once captivated him, was in one sense a plea for (physical and spiritual?) cleansing, for deliverance.
LISTEN: “We Sing Glory” by Fred Hammond, on Fred Hammond Christmas . . . : Just Remember (2001)
Little baby boy, sent as God among us For your plan to free all humanity We sing glory to your name Sing glory to your name
Tiny fragile heart Pumped your blood to save us For you’ve come to be a sin offering Singing glory to the Lamb Sing glory to the Lamb
Singing glory to the one Who saved the whole world Born to die but you live again And take all our sins away
Little hands and feet Made for nail and hammer For the pain and grief you suffered for me I sing glory to the Lamb Oh, glory to the Lamb
Tiny arms and legs Broad, strong, and sturdy You carry the key to our victory We sing glory to your name We sing glory to your name
We sing glory to the Child Who will save the whole world Born to die and then live again To take all our sins away
Glory, glory to the one Who was born to save the whole world You died but you’ll rise again So Jesus, we praise your name
Hark the herald angels sing Glory to the newborn King Peace on earth and mercy mild God and sinner reconciled Thank you, Jesus
Hark the herald angels sing Glory to the newborn King Peace on earth and mercy mild God has come to save us Yes, he has
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Pelican in Her Piety, 1880–81. Mosaic, Palatine Chapel, Aachen, Germany.
The pelican was one of the most popular animal symbols for Christ in the Middle Ages, appearing widely in art and literature. The association was first made in the Physiologus, a Late Antique Greek compilation of moralized animal lore written (probably around the year 200) in Alexandria and intended for Christian edification. Its anonymous author says the mother pelican is such “an exceeding lover of its young” that, to revive them from death, she pierces her breast with her beak and spills her blood over them.
The church sometimes refers to this allegorical bird as the vulning pelican (from the Latin vulnerō, “to wound”), or the Pelican in Her Piety.
The Christological parallel is obvious: Jesus submitted to being pierced with nails and spear on the cross, his heart’s blood spilt, in order to give life to his children. But the Physiologus cites a more obscure biblical passage: “ὡμοιώθην πελεκᾶνι ἐρημικῷ” (Ps. 101:7a LXX). In the Latin Vulgate, that’s “Similis factus sum pelicano solitudinis,” and in English, “I am like a pelican of the wilderness” (Ps. 102:6a KJV). The Physiologus author puts these words of the psalmist, which express a sense of isolation, into the mouth of Christ, lonely in his messianic ministry and in his passion.
Detail from the 13th-century Redemption Window at Chartres Cathedral in France, showing a pelican (a figure of Christ) feeding her young with her own blood as King David looks on, holding a scroll with the inscription “Similis factus sum pellicamo,” from Psalm 102:6. Photo: Adrian Barlow. There are similar glass panels at Rouen and Le Mans.
Not all parts of the pelican legend recounted in the Physiologus map easily onto Christ’s love for his church. The chicks are dead because they kept striking their parents in the face, and their parents, striking back, killed them. The parents feel bad, and it’s after three days of mourning that mama bird breaks herself open to bring back her little ones.
In his commentary on Psalm 102, Augustine writes, “Let us not pass over what is said, or even read, of this bird, that is, the pelican.” Standing over her dead chicks, “the mother wounds herself deeply, and pours forth her blood over her young, bathed in which they recover life. This may be true, it may be false: yet if it be true, see how it agrees with him, who gave us life by his blood. It agrees with him in that the mother’s flesh recalls to life her young with her blood; it agrees well. For he calls himself a hen brooding over her young. If, then, it be so truly, this bird does closely resemble the flesh of Christ, by whose blood we have been called to life.”
Augustine then goes on to explain how the mother’s killing her young relates to God metaphorically killing our old self so that he can then raise us up to new life in Christ; he likens conversion to death and rebirth. Medieval theologians loved to stretch allegories to the extreme!
A more streamlined version of the pelican legend that got passed down omits the filicide, focusing simply on the bird’s animating sacrifice—on how her shed blood raises the dead to life. And after the Feast of Corpus Christi was established in 1311, a variant emerged that said the pelican feeds her young with her blood when no other food would satisfy, a picture that resonated with the increased attention on the Eucharist in the Latin West.
The Physiologus, which contains the earliest known appearance of the pelican legend, was translated from Greek into Latin sometime between the fourth and early sixth centuries, and from there into Ethiopic, Armenian, Syriac, and a multitude of European and Middle Eastern vernaculars. By the end of the twelfth century its legends were absorbed into the bestiary, a genre of popular nature-book in keeping with the encyclopedic taste of the High Middle Ages.
In Art
The vulning pelican has appeared in all kinds of visual media from late antiquity through the medieval and premodern eras and on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including illuminated prayerbooks, missals, bestiaries (as in the tiled gallery below; hover to view captions, or click to enter carousel); panel paintings, frescoes; mosaics; stained glass windows; tapestries; lecterns, roof bosses, bench ends, misericords, corbels; and a range of liturgical objects and vestments.
From a miscellany containing an illustrated copy of Hugh of Fouilloy’s De avibus, Italy, late 13th or early 14th century. Biblioteca Statale di Cremona, MS 199, fol. 11v. https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastgallery244.htm
From an illuminated copy of Der Naturen Bloeme (The Flower of Nature) by Jacob van Maerlant, Flanders, ca. 1350. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KA 16, fol. 96vb. https://manuscripts.kb.nl/show/images/KA+16/page/26
Pelican in Her Piety, 1331–32. Stained glass, Lady Chapel, St Michael and All Angels, Felton, Northumberland, England. Photo: Ann Chapman.Pelicanin Her Piety, 15th century. Stained glass, All Saints Church, Oaksey, England. Photo: Rex Harris.Pelican in Her Piety, All Saints Church, Bishop Burton, East Riding of Yorkshire, EnglandPelican in Her Piety, 1476. Fresco, Bollerup Church, Sweden. Photo: Stig Alenas.Painted choir vault, 15th century, Mariakerk (St. Mary’s Church), ‘t Zandt, Groningen, Netherlands. Photo: Ana Sudani.Oak wood roof boss, ca. 1470–80, St Mary the Virgin, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. Photo: Ana Sudani.Bench end by Henry Ringham, 19th century, St Margaret, Ipswich, Suffolk, England. Photo: Simon Knott.Carved oak misericord from Sheffield Cathedral, England, 1920Sculpture with Pelicans, Switzerland, 16th century. Painted linden and willow wood, 29.5 × 27 × 26 cm. Landesmuseum (Swiss National Museum), Zurich, LM-3972.Triptych with the Virgin and Child (detail), Cologne or Lower Rhine, ca. 1425–30. Tempera and gold leaf on oak wood. LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn, Germany. [view full triptych]Plate with the Pelican in Her Piety, Dinant or Malines, Netherlands, 15th century. Brass, diameter 19 7/8 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It’s unknown whether this plate was used domestically or liturgically (i.e., for the Eucharist).Tapestry with a Pelican Feeding Her Young (detail), Germany (Lüne Abbey), ca. 1500. Linen and wool, 65 × 233 cm. Kloster Lüne Museum für sakrale Textilkunst, Lüneburg, Germany, Inv. LUEKO Ha 010.05. Source: Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, cat. 41bCushion cover (detail), England, ca. 1640–70. Wool and silk embroidery on linen, 55.9 × 107.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The primary scenes are the Hospitality of Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac. [view full cushion]Pelican in Her Piety, Russia, early 19th centuryPelican in Her Piety, 1907–9. Relief carving from the exterior of Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews, Scotland. Photo: Joy Marie Clarkson.Pelican of Mercy, 1956. Stone relief carving, exterior of Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, Sioux City, Iowa.
The bird doesn’t always look like an actual pelican, though. It could be that some of the artists had never seen one, although the Dalmatian pelican, which has the long bill and the expandable throat pouch that we most associate with the genus, had been widespread across Europe since ancient times. More likely, the imaginative rendering of the pelican in Christian art derives from the account of the bird in book 12 (“De animalibus”) of the widely influential compendium Etymologies by the Spanish archbishop Isidore of Seville, written around 623, which repeats the popular legend and adds that the pelican lives in Egypt. An exotic bird therefore required exotic treatment.
Neither does the behavior the Physiologus ascribes to pelicans have any basis in natural fact. It’s possible the legend arose from the observation that the pelican sometimes bends its beak into its chest, which may look like it’s piercing it, and that some pelicans have a reddish tinge on their breast plumage and/or a red tip on their beak. However, zoological accuracy was not the point; the point was to convey theological truth.
In The Bestiary of Christ, Louis Charbonneau-Lassay says the pelican first started appearing as a Christian symbol on clay oil lamps in ancient Carthage (present-day Tunisia), citing “L. Delattre, Carthage,Symboles eucharistiques, p. 91”—the French archaeologist Alfred Louis Delattre (1850–1932). But I’ve not been able to track down the cited text or find any such examples. If you can point me to photographs, please do!
In the “Ējmiacin [Etchmiadzin] Codex” entry in The Eerdmans Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology, Paul Corbey Finney identifies the border illustrations in that Armenian Gospel book’s Baptism of Christ miniature from ca. 600 as depicting a pink-bodied pelican spreading its blue wings and pecking its breast while standing in a bejeweled chalice. The figure is repeated ten times.
Pelican detail from The Baptism of Christ in the Codex Etchmiadzin, an Armenian Gospel book. Yerevan, Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Matenadaran), Cod. 2374, fol. 229v. The image is dated to ca. 600, but it was added to a 10th-century manuscript.
Finney mentions that a vulning pelican also appears in the Rabbula Gospels from sixth-century Syria. I think he’s referring to the bird at the top of the canon tables on folio 5a, which also shows the prophets Joel and Hosea and the Wedding at Cana. The iconography is far less obvious here.
One illuminated manuscript page I love that makes use of the pelican symbol comes from the late Flemish Boussu Hours, a prayerbook made for Isabelle de Lalaing, probably after the death of her husband Pierre de Hennin, lord of Boussu.
Master of Antoine Rolin (Flemish, active 1490–1520), Le pélican, symbole du Christ (Pelican, symbol of Christ), from the Boussu Hours, Cambrai, France, ca. 1490–95. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms 1185 réserve, fol. 187r.
Appearing opposite a full-page miniature of Christ in Gethsemane, folio 187r opens the Hours of the Passion prayer cycle:
V: Domine labia mea aperies. R: Et os meum annunciabit laudem tuam. V: Deus in adiutorium meum intende. R: Domine ad adiuvandum me festina. Gloria Patri, et Filio: et Spiritui sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper: et in saecula saeculorum.
English translation:
V: O Lord, open my lips, R: And my mouth shall declare thy praise. V: Incline unto my aid, O God. R: O Lord, make haste to help me. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.
The historiated initial “D” shows Christ before Pilate, and in the margin a pelican exudes her lifeblood into the mouths of her two chicks, a scene set against a gold background likewise dripping with blood—as well as sweat and tears. It’s “almost as if the gold margin were an expanded microcosm of the bird’s broken breast,” writes Katharine Davidson Bekker in her essay “Those Who Weep: Tears, Eyes, and Blood in the Boussu Hours.” Bekker further notes that “the pansy flower in the margin, the name of which references the French penser (‘to think’), . . . encourages the reader to think deeply about the images on the page.”
Another remarkable appearance of the pelican in medieval manuscript illumination is in the Holkham Bible Picture Book from fourteenth-century England—remarkable because it appears not in a passion cycle, as was typical, but in a creation cycle!
The Tree of Knowledge, from the Holkham Bible Picture Book, southeastern England, ca. 1327–35. British Library, Add MS 47682, fol. 3v.
In the garden of Eden, God the Creator, portrayed here as Christ, instructs Adam and Eve that they may freely eat of any tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which he points to with one hand and with the other wags his finger in a forbidding manner. Various birds perch atop the adjacent trees, but at the apex of this fateful one at the center is the vulning pelican, foreshadowing the sacrifice of Christ that will be required for humanity to reenter Paradise after the fall.
Compare this image to the diagrammatic one on folio 125v of the De Lisle Psalter, which was inspired by Bonaventure’s meditational treatise the Lignum vitae. It shows a pelican nesting atop the tree of life on which Christ is crucified, wounding herself to feed her offspring with her blood:
Tree of Life, from the De Lisle Psalter, England, 1310–39. London, British Library, Arundel MS 83, fol. 125v.
The Latin inscription above it in red reads, Pellicanus dicor, pro pullis scindo mihi cor (“I am called a pelican, because I tear open my heart for my chicks”). The twelve branches contain texts relating to Christ’s humanity, passion, and glorification, while the surrounding panels contain Old Testament witnesses.
The Crucifixion is the narrative context in which the vulning pelican most often appears in art, reinforcing the notion of Christ’s self-emptying sacrifice. It was especially popular in proto- and early Renaissance panel paintings from Italy—which the gallery below reflects, in addition to featuring a few other examples from France, Greece, and Armenia.
Fra Angelico, Christ on the Cross, the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, and Cardinal Torquemada (detail), ca. 1453–54. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones [view full painting]
In the Simone di Filippo Benvenuti example above (third row, left), notice the little winged dragon fleeing the pelicans’ nest as the mother pelican undoes the harm he has inflicted. A similar detail can be found in the Crucifixion fresco from the altar wall of the Oratory of St. John the Baptist in Urbino, which shows a snake slithering away from the perishing chicks, who are brought back to life by their intervening mother:
Lorenzo Salimbeni (Italian, 1374–ca. 1418) and Jacopo Salimbeni (Italian, ca. 1370/80–after 1426), Crucifixion (detail), ca. 1416. Fresco, Oratorio di San Giovanni Battista (Oratory of St. John the Baptist), Urbino, Italy.
The snake motif references a version of the pelican legend found in De natura rerum (On the Nature of Things) by the Flemish Dominican friar Thomas of Cantimpré (ca. 1200–1272) and the slightly later De animalibus (On Animals) by the German Dominican friar Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280). According to these two works, when the mother pelican leaves her nest to find food for her fledglings, she returns to find them dead from the bite of an ambushing snake. She then tears her own flesh to revive them with her blood, which is full of healing properties.
One of the most unique visual treatments of the vulning pelican that I found is a painting by the Dutch Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch. Rendered in grisaille (gray monochrome), his pelican appears in the center of a ring depicting scenes from the passion of Christ. It’s painted on the reverse of a panel that shows John the Evangelist in exile on Patmos, penning the book of Revelation.
Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlandish, ca. 1450–1516), Scenes from the Passion of Christ (reverse of John on Patmos), ca. 1500. Oil on panel in grisaille, 62.8 × 43.2 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.
Staged around mountain crags, the passion cycle begins on the right with Jesus praying in Gethsemane and continues clockwise with the Arrest of Christ, Christ before Pilate, the Flagellation, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, the Crucifixion, and the Entombment.
Outside this ring of scenes is a darkness populated by shadowy demons:
But the inner disc, the focal point of the composition, contains the promise of redemption. Emerging from the still waters of a vast postdiluvian landscape is a hillock with a hollow that houses a burning fire. On the summit, a large mother bird spreads her protective wings over her brood, inclining her head toward her chest—an iconography we recognize as the vulning pelican, symbolic of the deep, saving love God embodied on the cross.
As we view this painting, we progress from the outer darkness with its infernal powers, to the growing light actualized by the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and finally to the brilliant center with its red flame—which, other than two dim, flickering torches in Gethsemane, contains the sole bit of color in the whole painting. Images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which would gain prominence in the seventeenth century, feature a flame, representing Christ’s ardent love burning bright. And that’s what we have here.
Red is also the color of blood. I’m reminded of Robert Southwell’s poem “Christ’s Bloody Sweat,” which combines imagery of the pelican and the self-immolating but ultimately indestructible phoenix, marveling at “how bleedeth burning love.” (I’ll explore a few more poems about the pelican in the next section.)
As John writes in the wonderful prologue to his Gospel, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it” (John 1:5).
In Bosch’s painting, the Christbrand bursts, like the pelican’s split side. The flame of redemption is lit, like a lighthouse, calling us home into the love of God.
Another especially compelling art object that draws on the pelican legend is a silver-plated tabernacle monstrance from Portuguese Goa in southwestern India.
Tabernacle monstrance made in Goa, India, 17th century. Silver on wood, glass, 142 × 72 cm, globe 66 cm. Museum of Christian Art, Convent of Santa Monica, Old Goa, India.
In the Roman Catholic Church, a tabernacle is a container in which the consecrated hosts (small unleavened wafers of bread) of the Eucharist are stored as part of the “reserved sacrament” rite, and a monstrance is a vessel that displays the consecrated host on the altar and in procession. This object combines both into one—the spherical base serving as the tabernacle, with access gained through an opening at the back, and the bird’s breast bearing a transparent aperture surrounded by a golden sunburst halo, through which the host can be viewed. The body of Christ, broken for you.
In researching this essay, I found that the pelican is a subject that recurs (so charmingly!) in the folk art of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pennsylvania Germans:
A Pelican in Its Piety, Bucks County or Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, ca. 1800. Watercolor and ink on laid paper, 8.9 × 8.3 cm. Promised gift of Joan and Victor Johnson to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.David Kulp (American, 1777–1834), Pelican in Its Piety, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, ca. 1810. Watercolor and ink on wove paper, 18.6 × 12.2 cm. Free Library of Philadelphia.Pelican, Pennsylvania, ca. 1850. Watercolor and ink on wove paper, 31.6 × 25.4 cm. Free Library of Philadelphia.A Pelican in Its Piety, Pennsylvania, ca. 1825. Watercolor and ink on wove paper, 24.1 × 19.1 cm. Promised gift of Joan and Victor Johnson to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
From the Victorian era, I’m especially fond of the stained glass pelican design by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, fabricated by Morris & Co. to serve as part of the East Window of St Martin’s Church, Brampton, in Cumbria. Burne-Jones drew his design in 1880, and after the window was completed the following year, he returned to the drawing out of personal fondness, embellishing it with colored chalks, and gold for the blood drops, thus developing it into a more substantial work.
Edward Burne-Jones (British, 1833–1898) and Morris & Co., Pelican on Nest (detail), 1880. East Window, St Martin, Brampton, Cumbria, England. Photo: Dave Webster. [view full window]Edward Burne-Jones (British, 1833–1898), Pelican in Her Piety, 1880–81. Pencil, colored chalk, and gold on paper, 172.7 × 57.3 cm. William Morris Gallery, London.
Contemporary artists have also turned to the subject of the vulning pelican, especially the Ukrainian Catholic women iconographers of Lviv:
Natalya Rusetska (Ukrainian, 1984–), Pelican, 2017. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, 19 × 15 cm.Natalya Rusetska (Ukrainian, 1984–), Jesus the Grapevine and the Last Supper, 2021. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, 30 × 24 cm.Kateryna Kuziv (Ukrainian, 1993–), Pelican, 2021. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, 30 × 30 cm.Kateryna Kuziv (Ukrainian, 1993–), Crucifixion, 2022. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, 65 × 49 cm.Ulyana Tomkevych (Ukrainian, 1981–), Pelican, 2021. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, diameter 30 cm.Olya Kravchenko (Ukrainian, 1985–), Sacrifice and Victory, 2022. Tempera and silver leaf on gessoed wood, 40 × 40 cm.
Addendum, 4/8/25: Shortly after publishing this, a reader reminded me of Josh Tiessen’s painting All Creatures Lament from his Vanitas and Viriditas series, which shows an American white pelican protecting her chicks in the face of another oil spill and the accumulation of fishing-related plastic waste. Tiessen, an artist of faith, directs the symbolism of the pelican toward a call for wildlife conservation. (I previously featured Tiessen’s work here.)
Josh Tiessen (Canadian, 1995–), All Creatures Lament, 2023. Oil on braced Baltic birch, diameter 26 inches.
In Poetry and Song
Probably the most universally famous poetic treatment of the pelican as an emblem of Christ is the eucharistic hymn “Adoro te devote” (Hidden God, Devoutly I Adore Thee). Written around 1260 by Thomas Aquinas, it is one of the most beautiful medieval poems in Latin. Aquinas did not originally write it for the liturgy, but it was added to the Roman Missal in 1570 and since then has been used in the Catholic Mass. The penultimate stanza reads:
Pie pelicane, Jesu Domine, Me immundum munda tuo sanguine, Cujus una stilla salvum facere Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere.
Like what tender tales tell of the Pelican, Bathe me, Jesus Lord, in what thy bosom ran— Blood that but one drop of has the pow’r to win All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.
Trans. Gerard Manley Hopkins
Here’s a great video of the hymn put out by the Fundación Canto Católico, set to a Benedictine plainsong melody from the thirteenth century, as has become standard. Our pelican passage appears at the 4:10 mark. The subtitles are in Spanish, but you can turn on CC for English.
(If, like me, you’re wondering what in the world the video’s images are from, an explanatory note in the YouTube comments section explains: they are from the Cuasimodo festival in Chile, celebrated the second Sunday of Easter. The festival has nothing to do with Victor Hugo’s famous hunchback but rather is about bringing Communion to the sick and elderly who were unable to leave their residences to participate in the sacrament during Holy Week. [The Spanish Cuasimodo comes from the Latin Quasimodo, from the incipit of the day’s introit based on 1 Peter 2:2: “Quasi modo géniti infántes . . . ,” or “As newborn babes . . .”] Traditionally for this task, priests were escorted by horsemen, who showed them the route and protected them from assaults.)
The vulning pelican also appears in the liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, whose members sing at Matins on Good Friday evening, “Like a pelican wounding her breast, Thou, O Word, hast made Thy mortal children to live, for Thou hast shed upon them life-giving streams.”
Dante Alighieri, the great medieval Italian writer, calls Christ “nostro Pelicano” (our Pelican) in canto 25 of his Paradiso, the third book in his Divine Comedy trilogy of extended narrative poems.
The Christ-pelican appears, too, in English poetry from the late Middle Ages onward. One Middle English poem found in a prayerbook from ca. 1460 reads:
The pellicane his bloode dothe blede Therwith his birdis for to fede. It figureth that God with his bloode Us fede hanging on the rode, Whane he us brought oute of hell In joy and blis with him to dwel, And be oure fader and oure fode, And we his childerne meke and good.
[Bodleian Library MS Douce 1, fol. 57r]
The pelican his blood doth bleed, Therewith his birdies for to feed. It figures God, who, with his blood, Fed us hanging on the rood, By which he brought us out of hell, In joy and bliss with him to dwell, To be our father and our food, And we his children meek and good.
Our Pelican, by bleeding thus, Fulfill’d the law, and cured us.
Look here, and mark (her sickly birds to feed) How freely this kind Pelican doth bleed. See how (when other salves could not be found) To cure their sorrows, she herself doth wound; And when this holy emblem thou shalt see, Lift up thy soul to him, who died for thee.
For this our hieroglyphic would express That Pelican which, in the wilderness Of this vast world, was left (as all alone) Our miserable nature to bemoan; And in whose eyes the tears of pity stood, When he beheld his own unthankful brood His favors and his mercies then condemn, When with his wings he would have brooded them, And sought their endless peace to have confirm’d, Though to procure his ruin, they were arm’d.
To be their food, himself he freely gave; His heart was pierc’d, that he their souls might save, Because they disobey’d the sacred will, He did the law of righteousness fulfill; And to that end (though guiltless he had been) Was offered for our universal sin.
Let me, oh God! forever fix mine eyes Upon the merit of that sacrifice: Let me retain a due commemoration Of those dear mercies, and that bloody passion, Which here is meant; and by true faith, still feed Upon the drops this Pelican did bleed; Yea, let me firm unto thy law abide, And ever love that flock for which he died.
I already mentioned, in relation to Bosch’s pelican painting above, “Christ’s Bloody Sweat” by the English Catholic martyr Robert Southwell.
More recently, the Anglican priest Matt Simpkins, who performs music under the name Rev Simpkins, wrote a song titled “Pelican,” which he released on his album Big Sea (2020). Gritty and impassioned, here’s a live performance at Colchester Arts Centre:
Pelican feeds the hungry and needy I kneel before her My throat like an open grave
Food cannot fill me Water dilutes me Nothing contents me Pelican, pity me
She tears her breast, her children to refresh By her I am blessed, led to life from living death
Though death entreats me Her life flows sweetly Given so freely Given in flesh and blood
She tears her breast, her children to refresh By her I am blessed, led to life from living death
Pelican feeds me Loves me completely Though I’m unworthy She gives so graciously
She tears her breast, her children to refresh By her I am blessed, led to life from living death
She crowns the whole earth, the heavens and seas The Pelican tears her breast for me
She’s queen of what was and what is to be The Pelican tears her breast for me
She gives of herself in infinity The Pelican tears her breast for me
She’s compassion and love, she’s strength and glory The Pelican tears her breast for me
I love it when contemporary artists engage with historical Christological symbols, whether from the animal world or elsewhere, tapping into a creative wisdom the saints of ages past have bequeathed to us but that is too often dismissed in favor of literalism or wordy, intellectual articulations of doctrine.
I wholeheartedly support the endeavor of academic theology, but it must be remembered that for centuries, the church has developed her theology not just through discursive prose but also through liturgy, verse, and visual art. While many modern Christians may discount medieval allegories of Christ as naive, backward, too fanciful, or too obscure, I want to suggest that there’s value in learning (at least some of) them and even incorporating them into new material, to explore how they might come alive in new contexts.
By studying the pelican of ancient lore, for example, as it has been adapted in Christian art and literature, I’ve grown in my appreciation for the mother-love of God, who, to restore me to life and to nourish me—his child, his dependent—allowed his sacred flesh to be torn, so that I might know the power in the blood.
This essay took many hours to research and write and came to fruition only after several years spent collecting enough Pelican images to reach a critical mass. If you have the inclination and means to support more essays like this, I’d really appreciate a donation!
Mariia Bilas (Марія Білас) (née Ivaniuta) (Ukrainian, 1992–), Crucifixion, 2015. Tempera and gold leaf on canvas, 40 × 50 cm.
one
he lays his left hand along the beam
hand that moulded clay into fluttering birds*
hand that cupped wildflowers to learn their peace
hand that stroked the bee’s soft back and touched death’s sting
two
he stretches his right hand across the grain
hand that blessed a dead corpse quick
hand that smeared blind spittle into sight
hand that burgeoned bread, smoothed down the rumpled sea
three
he stands laborious
sagging, split
homo erectus, poor bare forked thing
hung on nails like a picture
he is not beautiful
blood sweats from him in rain
far off where we are lost, desert dry
thunder begins its quiet roar
the first drops startle us alive
the cloud no bigger
than a man’s hand
* According to a legend first recorded in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, when Jesus was a child he molded sparrows out of clay and then brought them to life. This episode is also referenced in the Qur’an 5:110.
This poem appears in Faith in Her Words: Six Centuries of Women’s Poetry, compiled by Veronica Zundel (Oxford: Lion Books, 1991). Used by permission of the author.
Veronica Zundel is a writer of Christian books, articles, and poetry, living in London. She was born in England in 1953 to Austrian refugee parents (her mother was Jewish) and graduated with a BA in English from Oxford University in 1975. She came to faith in a Baptist church as a teenager and spent time in the Church of England and the Mennonite Church before joining the Methodist congregation she worships with now. Her books include Crying for the Light: Bible Readings and Reflections for Living with Depression, Everything I Know about God I’ve Learned from Being a Parent, and The Lion Book of Famous Prayers, and she contributes regularly to periodicals such as New Daylight and Woman Alive.
Art & Theology 