NONFICTION - June 12, 1994

ONE HUNDRED SAINTS: Their Lives and Likenesses Drawn From Butler’s “Lives of the Saints” and Great Works of Eastern Art (Bulfinch Press/Little Brown & Co.: $35; 279 pp.). Who should you pray to if God is busy? Well, if you have a toothache, you might appeal to St. Apollonia, Virgin and Martyr. Zurbarian’s portrait makes her look competent, if not sympathetic. And she is holding an unappealing tool. Or if you’re in public relations for hospitals, you might appeal to St. Paul, Apostle of the Gentiles. El Greco’s St. James the Less, Patron Saint of Druggists and Hatters, like most of the portraits in “One Hundred Saints,” tells us much more about the man than the text. He is careworn, pragmatic, but stylish. Caravaggio, Rubens, Tintoretto, Titian, Murillo and Botticelli, to name a few of the artists represented here, are richly reproduced, with plenty of space, and in most cases they put the somewhat humorless and often convoluted text to shame. The excerpts from Butler don’t really answer our most fundamental questions, like how on earth St. Clare became the Patron Saint of Television or why St. Anne is the Patron Saint of Canada, Cabinetmakers and Women in Labor. It’s all very mysterious. But here is St. Lucy, Patron Saint of Sufferers of Eye Trouble and Writers, in a portrait by Pietro Perugino, in case you think you need her.