Human Flower Project
St. Elizabeth’s Bread and Roses
A saint of Hungary was a bread smuggler, disguised with roses.
St Elisabeth
Image: Helmut-Zenz
It’s from Barbara Irwin, artist and friend, we first learned of Hungary’s floral saint. In an alcove of Barbara’s former house, we spotted an odd sculptural assemblage: the cement statue of a woman in a long, gathered apron, with a sugar-rose attached where her head should have been. Very spooky, very lovely.
“That’s St. Elizabeth,” Barbara explained, and told the story.
Elizabeth was nobly born in 1207. She also married nobly, to Prince Louis of Thuringa at age 13. Like Francis of Assisi, she wasn’t much for palace parties and the like. Rather, she enjoyed mortgaging the family castles to build hospitals for the poor, the kind of thing that royally annoyed the in-laws. As with so many hagiographies, we get more than a bit snarled up in the mortifications, switchbacks, and other biographical turns, but we have been looking forward to recognizing St. Elizabeth. As usual, flowers clarify the portrait.
It’s said that Elizabeth preferred plain clothes to regalia, and twice daily would leave home to deliver food to the sick and shut-ins, Meals on Wheels, minus the axles. Her family, wishing she’d cut all this out and behave more like a princess, confronted her one day as she went about her deliveries. They demanded to know what she was carrying so she opened her big apron, suddenly filled not with loaves but roses.
In some renderings she’s shown holding bread behind her back, while the roses in her lap serve as distraction. Our favorite image, however, is Barbara’s, though we understand the rose-head, which really had been sculpted of sugar, eventually melted onto the statue’s shoulders and breasts.
Elizabeth is the patron saint of (among others) the falsely accused, the homeless, nursing services, young brides, and bakers. This is her feast day, November 17.