El milagro en la pasión del apóstol Santiago el Mayor: imágenes medievales para el relato hagiográfico

Abstract

The passion of the apostle James the Greater is one of the main cycles of his hagiography. It is worth recalling the various medieval texts and traditions that recreated the narrative, although the Passio Iacobi and later the Legenda Aurea should be singled out as the most important sources for the iconographic elaborations. There is also room for the miracle exercised from the thaumaturgic condition granted to James by Christ: the healing of a paralysed man is the decisive motif for the conversion of the scribe Josiah. However, the iconographic representation of this event was not very abundant in the Romanesque and Gothic centuries, as opposed to the baptism of Josiah and, above all, his beheading together with the apostle himself. Apart from possible theological considerations, the lesser fortune of this figurative register must also have been influenced by the synthetic nature of the iconographic cycles themselves, therefore its evocation was necessarily implicit in the inclusion of the conversion-baptism of Josiah