Saint Eligius  

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A Goldsmith in His Shop, Possibly Saint Eligius

Saint Eligius (also Eloy or Loye) (Template:Lang-fr) (c. 588 – 1 December 660) is the patron saint of goldsmiths, other metalworkers, and coin collectors. He is also the patron saint of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), a corps of the British Army, but he is best known for being the patron saint of horses and those who work with them. Eligius was chief counsellor to Dagobert I, Merovingian king of France. Appointed the bishop of Noyon-Tournai three years after the king's death in 642, Eligius worked for twenty years to convert the pagan population of Flanders to Christianity.

Iconography

The saint is invariably depicted in bishop's garb, holding his emblem, a goldsmith's hammer. The only exceptions are in illustrations to his vita, that depict episodes before his investiture as bishop. The Petrus Christus panel of 1449 illustrating this article, since the removal of its overpainted halo in 1993, is now recognized in the Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the Vocational Portrait of a Goldsmith, and not as a depiction of Eligius



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Saint Eligius" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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