Dominican symbolism help?

[psocoptera]

Can anyone tell me what is up with these letters? AE with a superimposed V and m with a superimposed... lambda? a compass? This is a photo of a small side chapel containing the tomb of Thomas Aquinas in the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, and that choice of decoration clearly means something.

Comments

[carnap.livejournal.com]

Beats the heck out of me. Alpha (capitalized or not) is a traditional Christian symbol (God's role as beginning) but I don't know about sigma, and the lowercase m doesn't correspond to any Greek letter. It looks more like an upside-down omega to me, and omega's another traditional Christian symbol, but I don't have any idea why it would be upside-down. And what the v and lambda(?) are doing there I have no idea.

[carnap.livejournal.com]

How did you encounter this building?

[thoroughbass.livejournal.com]

Two hunches: first, that it's not medieval wall-painting but nineteenth-century fancy (witness, after all, the garbled inscription on the stone, where the restorer has somehow managed to put in & leave out letters more or less at random; second, that it might be donors' initials.

Maybe years of encountering the "sekrit arkane symbologist zOMG" system in art-history has made me unnecessarily wary.

[crystalpyramid]

The m-thing looks like this:


I think, but I'm not sure, that it's some form of what the internet is telling me is called the "Virgin Mary monogram". It seems to be at least somewhat associated with Aquinas, anyway. With an M and a superimposed cross and maybe a carpenter's square? Or a crown? The internet is bad at having good pictures and good descriptions in the same place. Maybe it's related to this?

I would guess all the "superimposed compasses" are carpenter's squares, unless they are in fact compasses.

Maybe the AE just stands for a word beginning with AE, like aeternitas or something?

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Ooh, awesome research. Thanks!

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

The m looks sort of like this one (description fifth from bottom here), so it seems likely that it stands for Mary, and maybe the lambda is actually a triangle, for the Trinity.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that does seem similar! Awesome research!

[jaipur.livejournal.com]

That's a surprisingly hard question to find an answer for! Let me know if you find out, I can't find anything...

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

Your best bet would probably have been to ask someone on-site. I bet there's a local historian you can email and ask.