St Cunera

Entry

Restoration work in the tower of the Oude Kerk in Soest in 1905 uncovered in a bricked-up area an important treasure trove of statues, albeit in a deplorable condition.² It is assumed that the figures were hidden there either in 1566 at the outbreak of the Iconoclasm or in December 1580, when Calvinists in the Eemland region endeavoured to destroy every last remnant of religious art.³

Among the statues found was a figure of St Cunera, identified by the scarf with which she was strangled that is crossed around her neck. She wears a coronet and a rosary hangs from her girdle. The legend of Cunera is connected to that of St Ursula.⁴ When St Ursula and her virgins were attacked by the Huns near Cologne in the fourth century, one of the virgins – a Scottish princess named Cunera – was able to escape and was rescued by the Frisian king, Radboud, who took her to his castle in Rhenen in the Bishopric of Utrecht. There the friendly, caring princess soon endeared herself to the people, and this aroused the jealousy of Radboud’s consort, Aldegonde. One day, when the king was out hunting, she strangled the princess with the scarf Cunera’s parents had given her. The supposed original scarf used to strangle her is now held in the Museum Catharijneconvent.⁵

Whereas the story of St Ursula was well-known and popular throughout almost all of Western Europe, the Cunera legend had a much smaller reach, confined to the County of Holland, the Bishopric of Utrecht and the duchies of Cleves and Gelders, with Rhenen at its centre. In Soest, for instance, the road to Rhenen was called the ‘Cunera way’ right up until the Reformation.⁶ Other late-medieval statues of St Cunera from these areas can be found in Museum Catharijneconvent,⁷ Berne Abbey in Heeswijk-Dinther (North Brabant), the Roman Catholic church in Terborg (Gelderland), the Sankt-Nicolaikirche in Kalkar and the Museum Kolumba in Cologne.⁸ The Rijksmuseum has two paintings on the subject of St Cunera (SK-A-1727 and the right-hand panel of SK-A-3141).

Nederveen attributed the figurine to the same Utrecht workshop as the two statues of a Virgin and Child, from a Marianum (BK-NM-12006-16 and -17) and the female saint who can probably be identified as St Agatha (BK-NM-12006-3), all figures that come from the Soest find.⁹ Bouvy had already recognised the latter object as being by the same hand.¹⁰ The similarities between these statues, particularly in the faces, are indeed convincing enough for an attribution to the same workshop. The shoes with round toes and the busy folds of the garments indicate that they were made between around 1500 and 1520.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024