The Saint Bartholomew’s Church, Confolens

Romanesque in design, the Saint Bartholomew’s Church is distinguished by its ornamental detail in the sculpture of its façade and most notably on its great door on which a Lamb of God is surrounded by fantastical animals, one of which is a camel. In the medieval imagination, this animal stood for the exotic and for faraway lands, but it also incarnated a symbolic sense—often quite complex—developed in exegetic texts and in the discourse of moralists.

Isidore de Séville distinguished the camel (camelus) with two humps, which originated above all in Arabia, from the animal with one hump found in “other regions”. While a rarity in the West, the camel was present as a beast of burden, especially in the southern regions. Originally from Bactria, the two-humped camelus bactrianus was introduced in Europe from the east with the dispersion of the Goths in the 4th century and from the south, beginning in the 7th century, with the Arab conquests. It thus appears in certain texts that date from the Merovingian dynasty, as in the Historia Francorum by Grégoire de Tours.

Medieval authors such as Raban Maur, however, only speak of the camel with references to the Bible, in which it is cited many times: in the Old Testament (Genesis, Kings, Job, etc.), and in the New Testament in extravagant images (Matt. 19, 24; Matt. 23, 24)[1]. In exegetic writings, it is evoked from a symbolic standpoint. Hence Grégoire le Grand presents the camel as a being “whose head complies with the law but whose feet depart from it”[2]. It thus came to symbolise the individual torn by the two choices of either aspiring to the higher aims of the soul or of attending to worldly concerns. But when it lies down, the camel is, both for Grégoire le Grand and Raban Maur, a symbol of humility, the lowering of human pride, and fraternal compassion.

Hence the image of the camel is a fairly familiar one in medieval literature, despite the rarity of the animal in the West. And the same holds true for its iconography, which is far from negligible. What the camel evokes in illustrations of stories from the Bible is first and foremost the sense of faraway lands. We find it, for instance, in the story of Eliezer and Rebecca at the well (Genesis of the Vienna library, 6th century: mosaics in the Monreale Cathedral, Sicily, twelfth century) or again in the story of Joseph being sold to Egyptian merchants (mosaics of Saint Mark’s, Venice, 13th century). And likewise, camels appear in the caravan of the Three Kings as early as the fifth century on Christian sarcophaguses, as an evocation of the far distant Orient to which Mathew refers in the Gospels.

We also find the iconography of the camel in the sculpted bestiary of Romanesque churches. It takes its place among disparate fauna, in which real animals—more or less familiar or wildly exotic—take up their place amidst fantastical animals. In Saint-Gilles in the Gard region of France, the dromedary on the base of the pillars has a certain refinement of stature and perfect movement. In Saint-Ours of Aoste, a capital of the cloister shows a scene of a troop of harnessed camels. In Andlau, the head is far from realistic but one does recognise the animal with its two humps, the camel rider firmly in place between them. The representation of the animal, sometimes a camel, sometimes a dromedary, is often far from realistic. And while it was particularly well depicted in Italian mosaics, on the whole it tended be imprecisely rendered, with only the hump as its decisive characteristic. In the sculpted ornamentation in Confolens, the camel is not wholly part of the bestiary, but figures half crouching in response to the Lamb of God. Thus it can incarnate humility in the face of Christ and be interpreted in the words of Raban Maur to mean: Camelus (…) significat (…) gentilem populum conversum ad fidem christianam[3].

[2] S. Gregorii Magni Moralia in Job, Libri I-X, M. Adriaen, Brepols, 1979, I, 40.

[3] “The camel means the pagans converted to the Christian faith”, Raban Maur, De rerum naturis, P.L., CXI, 211B.