St. Maximinus
Circa 1520
Stained glass
Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. o8.52.1a
Maximinus was bishop of Trier in the 4th century, during the Arian controversy. He was a strong supporter of the Nicene position and harbored Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria and foremost opponent of Arianism, when the latter was exiled from his see. His feast is on May 29. His career is summarized briefly in Butler (II, 419-20) and more fully in the 8th-century vita published in the Acta Sanctorum (May vol. VII, 21-25).
The vita is the source of the legend of the bear pictured at the saint's feet. On a journey to Rome with St. Martin, Maximinus stops for a nap while Martin goes off to buy food. While our saint is sleeping a bear comes by and eats the men's pack donkey. When the saint awakens and sees what the bear has done he conjures him to carry the luggage that had been the donkey's charge all the way to Rome. The serene look on the bear in our stained glass reflects the vita's remark that "the bear strove to do what he had been told without a murmur and he went along obediently…." On arrival in Rome, Maximinus releases the bear and promises that it will never come to any harm if it just avoids harming others.
The same bear story is told of St. Corbinian, who was also a bishop and who also has a bear as his attribute, but most likely the figuew in the stained glass represents not Corbinian but Maximinus, as the likely provenance stated by the museum's label is Trier. Corbinian was bishop of Freising.
The promise to the bear is also in the legend of St. Gall, and the story of St. Jerome's lion similarly inducts a wild beast into the service of the saint.
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Photographed at the museum by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.