by Nigel Spivey
So no vows of poverty prevented art. Not long after Suger’s church at Saint-Denis was raised, one of Catholicism’s best-loved heroes, St Francis of Assisi, abandoned a life of bourgeois ease in the central Italian region of Umbria to go about as a mendicant, like Siddhartha, with little more than a pouch for alms or the fruits of wayside charity. By his kindness and good works St Francis earned the reputation of being ‘another Christ’. But what St Francis stressed was a particular identification with Christ in his suffering. Chronologically, as charted by the gospel writers, Christ’s Passion was a relatively brief period, from his arrest on a Thursday evening to his burial in a tomb by Friday night – a matter of hours.Yet for St Francis and his followers, the drama and intensity of this Passion could sustain a lifetime’s dedication to the Christian ideal.
St Francis himself so empathized with the figure of Christ suffering on a cross that he became, during an intense session of prayer in the mountains, stigmatized – that is, impressed with the five stigmata marks of the crucified Christ. Associates of St Francis – his so-styled ‘brothers’, or friars – verified the scars, and relayed that they had been transmitted from a Christ-like apparition in the sky. In due course an artist imagined the event, with connecting filaments threading to the points where nails had pierced feet and hands, and where a Roman soldier had jabbed his lance into Christ’s torso to test for death on the cross (Fig. 110).
109 (top) Scene from a stained glass window originally at Saint-Denis, Ile de France, c.1140–4.
110 (above) The Stigmatization of St Francis, attributed to Giotto, Assisi, 1295–1300.
Franciscan monks, dressed in dun-coloured robes like their founder, propagated this Passion-focused mode of Christian worship far beyond the green hills of Umbria. Across Europe, from the early thirteenth century onwards, the conscious imitation of Christ became a spiritual task widely preached and practised. And it gained ground thanks not only to a proliferation of religious images, but also a marked increase in their vivacity. In terms of devotional practice, the prickly compunction urged by Pope Gregory became something altogether more drastic, as rites of fasting, flagellation and other forms of self-chastisement were cultivated. Places of pilgrimage and church buildings alike would feature formal sequences of statuary or paintings to conduct worshippers along the Stations of the Cross, rehearsing the miserable route of Christ from his condemnation by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate to the hill of Calvary, the place outside Jerusalem specified for his crucifixion.The earnest desire to participate as closely as possible in Christ’s suffering gave extra impulse for Christians in Europe to journey towards Jerusalem. In 1095 the phenomenon known as the Crusades had been launched by a pope calling for the Holy Land to be wrested from Muslim control by a holy war. Over the next two centuries, many European nobles volunteered for the cause combining it with anti-Semitic hostility towards those blamed for Christ’s death.
In terms of papal doctrine, crusading was proposed as a mode of doing penance. To embark upon a crusade was expensive and dangerous; the reward was remission of sins.That logic, minus the element of danger, may also be applied to the patronage of art.
There was a generally accepted requirement for churches to provide images with scriptural or, more importantly, liturgical significance – ‘liturgical’ meaning the prescribed conduct of public worship, especially the rite whereby Christians honour and imitate the Last Supper shared by Christ with his disciples. Holy Communion, or the Eucharist as it is also called, was instituted as a regular and rather joyous observance by the early Christians. Its formal Catholic conduct, however, developed into a more plangent meditation upon the meaning of the Passion, for which many images were appropriate – not only evocations of the original Last Supper, and the events of the Passion, but also related episodes from the gospels, such as Christ’s premonition of death in a garden called Gethsemane, and his betrayal by the disciple called Judas. The clergy of each church could regard it as part of their vocation to commission frescoes, sculptures, painted panels and so on, to create the ambience of worship. Chalices, basins, pulpits, lecterns and vestments were among the other items of equipment necessary for worship, and also offering occasions for artistic patronage.
So there was, to put it simply, a normal or ordinary level at which any Christian church or chapel might be decorated. But that did not preclude further embellishments, and the building of other places of worship, financed from outside.These were votive opportunities, on small scale and large, individual and collective.
The Italian city of Venice contains many examples of such endowments from church members who were not actually in Holy Orders – the laity.Venice, a port of departure for crusaders, was capital of a Christian mercantile empire by the fourteenth century, thanks to connections made with the East by spice traders and outbound travellers such as Marco Polo (whose journeys through Asia were made between 1271 and 1295). It was a republic with plenty of wealth in private hands. It also subdivided socially into a number of artisans’ guilds.These were not unusual as such: clubs of cobblers or cabinet-makers could be found in most medieval European cities. But the Venetian guilds were especially zealous in defining themselves as devotional fraternities. They built meeting-places for which they commissioned not only altars for worship, but also programmes of imagery that would heighten the sense of Christian togetherness.
Barbers, belt-makers, boatmen and butchers are among the known commissioning bodies of religious art in Venice. Even the association of dealers in second-hand rags raised funds for an altar in their clubhouse. Collectively they were able to make the same bid for divine audience as an aristocrat – not to mention some magnate who had cornered the market in pepper or peacock feathers.
Archival correspondence regarding these commissions, whether collective or individual, makes it quite clear what votive intentions were lodged with them. In 1475, for example, we find one Marco Zorzi, a minor nobleman, writing to the prior of San Michele, an island church in the Venetian lagoon, for permission to build a chapel annexe there. Zorzi sought to establish a family tomb in this chapel; he was prepared also to fund the daily recital of a mass for the souls of himself, his ancestors and his descendants (‘mass’ being the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, conducted by a priest, with little or no lay participation). So Zorzi’s proposal entailed not only the costs of building work and the chapel furnishings – including an altarpiece painting, and the accoutrements of the Eucharist: chalices, altarcloths, candlesticks, a crucifix – but also a capital fund to supply or supplement the income of a priest to perform the daily mass.
111 The Resurrection, altarpiece by Bellini for the Zorzi chapel in the church of San Michele,Venice, c.1476–9.
Zorzi at first suggested the dedication of his chapel to the Virgin Mary, but he seems to have been persuaded that a more suitable theme was the Resurrection – that miracle, celebrated by Christians on Easter Sunday, whereby Christ vacated his tomb and ‘rose from the dead’. Giovanni Bellini, the painter who undertook to provide the visual focus of Zorzi’s chapel, came from a family of specialists in such work. His picture of the event, complete with dumbfounded soldiery and rabbits frisking in delight, was fresh and inventive (Fig. 111).Those worshipping here may have experienced from the officiating priest a ceremony muttered in Latin and mostly out of earshot; but in a mortuary chamber, even by candlelight, Bellini’s painting cheered its viewers with the bright expectancy of life after death.
Zorzi’s first choice of votive title for his chapel was not eccentric.The cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the Madonna (My Lady) as the Italians called her, was as extensively respected in the West as it was in the Byzantine world. And although her role in the gospels made Mary an obvious successor to the childbirth and fertility goddesses of pagan antiquity, Mary’s shrines were open to a wide range of reverential attentions. She could be thanked for deliverance from every imaginable disaster; she was beseeched for cures to all sorts of illness and disease; prayers and gifts to
her might vouchsafe anything from a good crop of grapes to a criminal pardon. Looking at one German votive image of the Virgin, which shows tiny devotees peeping and imploring from the shelter of her mantle (Fig. 112), it is hard to resist summarizing that Mary served as a sort of universal ideal mother. At the same time, it is worth noting that inscriptions attached to votive offerings at popular Marian sanctuaries often reveal an overt faith in such-and-such an image. A man who had, say, escaped unhurt from brigands did not simply thank the Blessed Virgin in the usual formula – per gratia ricevuta (for kindness received).Thanksgiving would be due to the Madonna of So-and-So – a particular picture or sculpture located at a place where homage could be made with the blessing of tradition.
Mary was adored as the Queen of Heaven and the Mother of God; depictions of the Madonna with child probably dominate the iconographic record in most Catholic countries. But Mary was also the Mater Dolorosa (Sorrowing Mother), to whom the corpse of her son was immediately entrusted when brought down from the cross. Franciscan writers scripted the tender process of preparation for burial with a degree of realistic detail not to be found in the gospels: it was all part of a religious culture that fostered and approved outbursts of weeping in worship.
Whether nursing or grieving, Mary will often be painted in robes of finest blue (Fig. 113).The colour was allusive, evoking Mary’s celestial status as Queen of Heaven. It was also symbolic of votive generosity, since ultramarine – derived from the precious mineral lapis lazuli – was one of the most costly pigments available to painters (and their patrons).
Christian altarpieces at the time, whether sculpted or painted, were, by convention, not documentary scenes.They tended to offer ideal, timeless images, typical of which is the stationary gathering of clerical worthies, saints and angels in a holy conversation around an enthroned Madonna and child. Sometimes a likeness of the patron or donor was added to this group. But the cultic function of an altarpiece might also require that artists be bold in seeking an effect upon those who came there to offer prayers. The images of certain martyrs regarded as having therapeutic powers – for example, St Sebastian – might be produced in such a way as to make the endured misfortunes of that martyr nauseatingly explicit. Or, indeed, the suffering of Christ crucified could be depicted in such a way as to relate his agony to the worst of mortal afflictions.A remarkable example of this is attributed to a German painter called Matthias Grünewald, who in the early sixteenth century designed a complex folding altarpiece for the chapel of a monastic hospital at Isenheim, in the Alsace region (Fig. 114).When swung open on their hinges, the altar panels would display a tableau of Christ's birth and resurrection. That opening happened only on special days in the religious calendar, however. Normally, what confronted those coming to worship here – many of whom, we presume, were hobbling along with leprosy and other such infirmities – was the double image of Christ in the festering extremes of bodily disintegration.The main panel is flanked by images of St Sebastian and St Anthony; Christ dangles abjectly amid figures who swoon or fall to their knees on one side (his mother faints in the arms of the disciple John, Mary Magdalene prays), while the prophetic person of St John the Baptist – in the gospels, Christ’s forerunner or herald – indicates and pronounces the greatness of this putrefying man. Below, in the altar’s base or predella, women tend to the corpse before its entombment – aghast and caring all at once.
In the Christian rite of Holy Communion, performed at an altar such as this, a chalice of wine is held up by the priest with the words, ‘This is my blood, shed for you.’ Bread is then broken, with the words, ‘This is my body, take and eat … ’ However, during the period in which Grünewald painted the altarpiece at Isenheim, Christians in Europe were arguing fiercely among themselves about a number of doctrinal issues, including the question of what was meant by those four words, ‘This is my body’.The full reasons for the subsequent rift in Christian credence between Catholics and Protestants, and the complexities of theological dispute at this time of Reformation, need not concern us here. But we may register that this was also the period when the printing press began to impact upon the lives of many people.The Bible, which for centuries could be read only in manuscript form by those who knew Greek, Latin, Hebrew or Aramaic, was not only translated into the many vernacular languages of Europe, but expressly into the sort of idiom that could be understood by ploughboys and weavers and published, along with other tracts of devotional literature, at a price affordable to everyone. Pope Gregory’s sanction of church images as scripture for the illiterate became less pertinent now.
112 (above left) Virgin of Mercy by Michel Erhart, c.1480–90.
113 (above right) Mary’s celestial blue robes in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Maestà, c.1335–40.
114 The Isenheim Altarpiece, Colmar (Alsace), attributed to Matthias Grünewald, c.1513–15.
Yet there was little slacking in the production of divine and votive images. On the contrary, senior Catholic bishops, convened between 1545 and 1563 for a series of meetings known as the Council of Trent, reaffirmed the necessity of images to clarify articles of faith, encourage imitation of the saints, and above all to stimulate viewers ‘to adore and love God’. Images, they said, should be charged with energy and conviction, with the aim of instilling the same energy and conviction in whoever beheld them. If good Christians were to adore and love their God, then let the images of worship deploy the full figurative expression of love and adoration.
In 1562 a Spanish nun called Teresa, celebrated for her piety and well-organized kindness, issued her spiritual autobiography, in which her mystic achievement of closeness to God was described in terms not remote from the sensual jargon of an intense love affair. Not long after her death in 1582,Teresa was officially canonized as a saint, and when a certain Cardinal Cornaro came in 1647 to establish a memorial chapel for himself and his family in a Roman church, this St Teresa was his preferred subject for an altarpiece sculpture.The artist commissioned for the work, Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), chose to show the saint at the moment of her most ecstatic encounter with God, which she herself had described as follows:
‘Beside me … appeared an angel in bodily form … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the steely tip there appeared to be a point of fire.This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God.The pain was so severe that it made me gasp some moans out loud. But the sweetness brought on by this intense pain is such that one cannot possibly want it to cease; and one’s soul is then content with nothing save God.’
Bernini’s rendering of this final ‘transverberation’ causes nudges and winks from viewers alien to its devotional context (Fig. 115). For the sculptor and his contemporaries, however, the statue was a proper aid and inducement to prayer. Far from being suggestive of orgasmic bliss, it was a signal that to find divine love was pure pleasure – in Teresa’s words, ‘no sense of anything but enjoyment, without any knowledge of what is being enjoyed’.
THE FUSIONS OF STYLE AND BELIEF
The renewal of Catholic evangelism in the mid-sixteenth century, historically known as the Counter-Reformation, not only gave fresh impetus to the making of inspirational votive and divine images in those European countries loyal to the papacy; it fostered militant missions abroad, too.These included such formidably drilled and dauntless campaigners as those gathered under the banner of the Society of Jesus, established in 1542.The Jesuits, as they were known, often took care to master the dialects of the people they wished to convert, but they also understood well the power of images. Squadrons of Spanish Jesuits penetrating into the forest heartlands of South America had with them not only picture-books of the Christian faith, but also trained sculptors. Among the semi-nomadic Guaraní inhabitants of the area that now corresponds to Paraguay a model Jesuit state was created, and one of the factors that held this curious mixture together was t
he fusion of indigenous and imported styles of religious art.The Guaraní had their own tradition of investing surface patterns and geometric designs with spiritual significance.The Jesuits brought the figurative naturalism of the West. A hybrid ensued. Guaraní sculptors took up the Western way of making figures on a life-sized scale, or grander; but into the coiffures and draperies of these figures they carved the pattern devices of their own repertoire, including those of body painting.The Jesuits have a reputation for strict dogmatic teaching, but here it seems there was not so much imposed doctrine as a process of uniting two belief systems. Guaraní who converted to Christianity were able to retain many of their own religious traditions.
115 The Ecstasy of St Theresa by Bernini, Rome, 1644–7.
116 (above left) St Dominic with a crucifix by El Greco, c.1606.
117 (above right) A wooden figure of a Buddhist worshipper, from AngkorWat, c.16th century.
A Guaraní-made Christ displays certain ethnic features that are clearly Guaraní – high cheekbones, wide nostrils and so on.This was as the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes would have predicted: humans making divine images according to their own characteristics of physiognomy. Xenophanes specifically mentioned the example of Ethiopians, and we duly find that Ethiopian Christians depicted Christ and his apostles with familiar local features. But no amount of customizing religious imagery can mask the similarity in human religious behaviour.
The gestural language seems universal. On his knees, hand to heart, there is an Italian monastic founder, St Dominic, as painted for the decoration of a Spanish cathedral by an artist of Greek origin (Fig. 116). On his knees, with hands together, there is an unknown Buddhist disciple, as sculpted for the Khmer temple of Angkor Wat (in modern Cambodia) by an unknown but probably local artist (Fig. 117).We could, if we wished, compile a list of those elements of comparative belief shared between Counter-Reformation Catholicism and Theravada Buddhism, but that is hardly necessary.The doctrines and theories of religious practice may differ very much. However, as William James concluded, the feelings and conduct of religious practice are essentially similar the world over; so similar as to make religious behaviour a component of both human psychology and human biology.