St. Bernard of Clairvaux Presented to the Virgin by His Parents

Circa 1505-1508
Panel from a stained glass
Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 41.170.105a,b

The saint is tonsured and dressed as a monk while the crozier he carries identifies him as an abbot. The white dog at his feet is one of his attributes. The words inscribed on his halo are monstra te esse matrem, "Show thyself a mother," a phrase from the hymn Ave Maris Stella, which he was thought to have written.

Behind Bernard are his parents, identified by the inscriptions on their halos as sancta aleidis and sanctus tesselinus (St. Aleth and St. Tescellin or Tecolin). In the complete window from which this panel was taken, the parents would have been presenting St. Bernard to the Virgin.

Read more about images of St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

• Home Page
• Iconography of St. Bernard
• This Page

Photographed at the museum by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.