studies in iconography: themes and variations

Studies in Iconography: Themes and Variations

Studies in Iconography: Themes and Variations is a scholarly series that will present collections of essays on topics of interest to readers of the journal Studies in Iconography and to medievalists in a wide range of disciplines.

Editorial Board

lv'Iichael Curschmann, Princeton University Colum P. Hom:ihane, Princeton University

Lucy Freeman Sandler, New York University

Medieval Institute Publications is a program of The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences

@WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSrTY

New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows

Edited by Catherine R. Puglisi and William L. Barcham

Studies in Iconography: Themes and Variations

MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS Western Michigan University

Kalamazoo

76 GrazynaJurkowlaniec

65. The scenes relating to the Passion and Resurrection were formerly often emphasized by sch I ars· see for exam I L ··m "Ik h d o -' ' P e, o er, onograp ie es Schmerzensmannes," 40-42; Osten, Der Sch zensmann 60· d Wil d M mer-' ' an tru ersmann, Der Schmerzensmann (Diisseldorf: L. Schwann 1952) ··

66 S h · I , , xu. · ee t e mva uable study by Tadeusz Dobrzeniecki, "Niekt6re zagadnienia ikonografi1" M ·

B I ""R i:tza 0 esc1, ocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Wl:zrszawie, 15, no. 1 (1971): 7-219.

~7.1he relationship between death and life in the iconography of the Man of Sorrows has bee object of an extended debate in the scholarly literature, which cimnot be analyzed here for rea: an of length. 0 ns

~8. The Achatius dipty~h, the wing of an altarpiece, and a panel with scenes of the life of Christ, all m Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (inv. no. 822; 831/832 and 6)· see Alexandra Ko"n

1"g n·

.A ,r,; di Kil · ' ' ze nJange er 0 ner Tefelmaleret (PhD diss., Heinrich-Heine-Universitiit Diisseldorf 2001) 29-30

38,42,191-200. ' ,

69. ~or t~e wall paintings in the churches of Fide (ca.1361-the date is contained in the chronogram mscnbed above the Man of Sorrows: "Edes succense gens cesa dolens ruit ense") and Bun (ca. 1380), see Bengt G. Soderberg, Gotlandska kalkmalninrrar 1200-1400 cv· b . F" . G ge I d F .. · o is y. orenmgen ot-an s ornvanner, 1971), 2?8~10 an~ 177-83, figs. 104 and 85. In the fifteenth century the Man

of Sorrows can be found w1thm Pass10n cycles in the churches of Anga Etelhem d · F"d see Bengt G Sod b D G .. d k , , an , agam, 1 e;

l • .· er erg, e otan s a passionsmalningarna och deras sti!friinder, studier i birgittinskt

mura malerez (Stockholm: Wahlstrom & Widstrand 1942) 42 62 7 Ali. . ' , , . . 0. , c!a Karl~~s~-Kamzowa, !'undac;e artystyczne ksircia Ludwika I Brzeskiego: Studia nad roz-

wo;em swtadomom historycznd na Slqsku XIV-XVIII w. (Opole: PWN, 1970), 34-47· Jurkowlan· Chrystus Umrczony, cat. no. 146. ' iec,

C 71. Em~a Urbankova and Karel Stejskal, Pasionril Premyslovny Kunhuty-Passionale Abbatissae uneg~ndts (Prague: Odeon, 1975); Gia Toussaint, Das Passional der Kunigunde von Bohmen· B'/-

drhetorik und Spiritualitiit (Paderborn: Schoningh, 2003). · 1

72. Z~zana, Vseteckova et al., Stfedovekri nristennri malba ve Stfednich Cechrich 2nd ed. (Pra . Narodm pamatkovy ustav, 2011), 244-46. ' gue.

73. Zu~~na Vs~teckova, "Stredoveke nastenne malby na pilii'ich mezilodnich arkad a triumfiilniho

o(;~o:~~ ~n J a~ A~mek,J an Sommer, and Zuzana Vseteckova, Stfedovekj kostel Panny Marie v Pisku 1se . rachenske nakladatelstvf, 2001), 118-20, fig. 139.

The Man of Sorrows in Northern Europe: Ritual Metaphor and Therapeutic Exchange

Mitchell B. Merback

J\ nyone who has studied premodern Christian art's changing forms will appreciate how fi dazzlingly varied the imagery centered upon, or incorporating, the figure Hans Belting dubbed the "Passion portrait" became in the half-millennium following its earliest formulation, an origin scholarship now places in the mid-twelfth century. Better known as the Man of Sorrows and by its medieval Latin title, Imago pietatis, the image type-in its celebrated passage from Byzantium to the West and its exemplary transformation from iconic Repriisentationsbild to an affective Andachtsbild-spread out over an iconographic territory so expansive that, despite a century of dedicated scholarship, a convincing genealogy of the many affiliated types continues to elude us.1 With the possible exception of the Crucifixion image, with its numerous narrative, devotional, allegorical, and votive variations, no other image in the repertoire of Christian art has lent itself to such an array of permutations and recombinations. To map them all is the iconographer's impossible dream, a totalizing ambition no art historian would dare entertainespecially after the critique of iconography that accompanied art history's realignments in the 1970s and 1980s.2

What pathways, then, are open to us today? How should we try (again) to make sense of the whole? Along with the fine exhibition staged at the Museum of Biblical Art in early 2011, and the symposium that accompanied it, came the chance to confront these problems anew. For me there were two notable things that, each in its own way, stimulated the undertaking. First was the productive frisson felt by someone unconsciously stamped by Erwin Panofsky's assertion that it was only the visibly living type of the Imago pietatis-the animated Christ who, with eyes open, wields the arma Christi or advances through space; the Christ who, with arms raised, offers himself or spouts blood into the chalice-that strictly speaking, deserved the mantle (and the nomenclature) of Isaiah's Suffering Servant. 3 Yet most of the blue-chip works one encountered in the show depicted not the type of Christ German artists had, since the early fourteenth century, ventured to "set on his own feet" (auf eigene Fiige zu stellen), but the dead Christ, typically mourned by angels who support him in the tomb. This was the interpretatfon that attracted Veronese and so many other Italian painters: the Christ who, replete with all

77

78 Mitchell B. Merback

the "motifs of helplessness" (Motive der Hilflosigkeit) tl1at conveyed the impression a lifeless corpse, could nevertheless be animated by the painter's vivifying art. 4 Bo:~ ever, ~ecause sue~ divergences within the progressive development of the type cannot be ~xplamed solely m terms of national traditions-north or south-or by di courses of the image, they beg the question of whether all of our starting iconographic definitions do not have to be fundamentally rethought.

Equall.y pivotal for my own thinking about the image was a happy accident that occurred on my way to the symposium in 2011. Due to an innocent clerical error, the talk I wa intending to give, "Confrontations with the Man of Sorrows' -a title informed b ear~ier research into the antagonistic power of the image-wa suddenly being billed in~ decidedly more ecumenical spirit: conversatiom with the l\llan of Son- ws. ere fortune had delivered something reason could embrace (a rare occurrence, according to Petrarch). In fact, a new line of_thought w~s born from the episode. For the idea of conversations aL-eady seemed to crystallize s.ometbing I had long suspected: that across its many changes of form function, genre, and symbolic meaning; the Pa ion portrait of Christ is an image unique! 1

define~ by its capacity to organize exchanges and compel reciprocities.1hat is, whateve1• w~

may WLSh to say, or refrain from saying, about the "agency" of images, an entirely new vista open when we acknowledge that for beholders across the different domains in which the

Man ofSorro~s 1'.ughtbe glimpsed, admired, encountered, and addressed, it was perceptions of mutual ob~gation that provided the p ychological groundwork for response. Sometimes these percept10ns were geared toward specific benefits, sometimes to the intcrsubjective virtues of trust, loyalty, love, and worthiness. Exchange is the mech ani m, reciprocity the ethos (tfJor;).

. Foll~w~ng this profane illumination, it seemed desirable to attempt a new kind of funct10~ahst. mterpretation of the Man of Sorrows using these two concepts-exchange and reciprocity-to rethink the way certain images behaved, or could behave under certain conditions of interactive use. Of course, identifying and isolating the mai~ functional

contexts int~ whic~ ~he Man of Sorrows was enlisted, in one form or another, during its ~ong career m Chnstian art presents methodological problem no less daunting than the iconographic taxonomizing I just declared bankrupt. A case can be made however for organizing the whole according to functional genres a notion heralded f~r moder~ art

history by Jacob Burckhardt's wish for an "art history according to tasks" (Kunstgeschichte nach Aufgaben): tasks set for the artist and tasks set for the work of art.5 In a similarthough more determinedly ethnographic-spirit I want to offer six rubrics, each of which both demarcates a .functional context broadly conceived and privileges the functional form of the Man of Sorrows that was more or less dominant within it:

1. Passion liturgy in the Greek East I Akra tapeinosis

2. Passion mysticism and devotions in the Latin West I Imago pietatis 3. Holy Blood cult and pilgrimage I "Blood-shedding Savior"

4. Pious charity and the Works of Mercy I "Image ofloving mercy"

5. Mortuary and purgatory cult (i.e., tombs and epitaphs) I multiple types 6. Meditative "spiritual exercises" I Christ in Repose

Man of Sorrows in Northern Europe 79

. anged in a way that shadows the image's accepted morphological history '11 ·s list, arr, 11 aking snecific claim about it, is offered here at the outset merely to suggest

"thout m :r · · h '"'1 s of a larger proiect to be pursued elsewhere. Its working assumptions, ow-l contour J ll 1 ·1 ne i: h t follow Among· them is the observation that structural para e s prevai er jmorm w a . . . . . ev ' h different roles the Man of Sorrows image was enlisted to play m these different

ross t e ( h' h d nl ac . l contexts and the pictorial gemes particular to them w ic correspon o y funcuona · l b 'ld Tr. · b 'ld · i... t generic categories such as Reprii.sentationsbild, Andachtsbild, Ku t t , yofzv z , rou.g1uY to fi d h · · f · and Meditationsbild). For each functional context broadly de ne , eac situat10n o mter-

. " " so far as we can recon truct it, allowed the Man of Sorrows to become more acnve use, . . . . h " . . 1

the representation or communication of a theological idea, more t an a pictona than t" (BildP"edank). Rather I want to see the image serving as the prompt and the fulconcep 0 ' f, r d

fa r;tual action an action that can be understood, first and foremost, as a orma ize ~mo • ' h h ge Sometimes this exchange takes the form of a dialogue, as Belting and ot ers exc an . . . f

h emphasized-though not always a dialogue of real or implied words. Just as o ten, ave f, f · l · · Wi'll see it was a matter of reci1lrocal giving and offering, a orm o ntua mteraction

as we ' T . . . • 1 hich the Man of Sorrows figure, in its distinctive metaphoncal layenng, is umque Y

to w f Ch . ' ffi . suited (I suspect this has something to do with the sui generis nature o nst s su ermg

body, which appears to supplicants not simply as the ~e.hicle of ~ift ex~hange but ~s the offering itself; but the labors of comparison and exegesis mvolved m testmg that particular

hypothesis cannot occupy us here). . . . My principal terms-interaction and ritual, exchange and gift, reciprocity. and

obligation-will be broadly familiar to students of social anthrop~logy and b~hav10ral sociology as staples of the symbolic interpretation of culture. As with all analytical co~

cepts, the inflections they acquire depend on which across-the-boar~ pu~pos_e of_symbohc human action a particular writer happens to subscribe to. My own mclmat10n is to look for the underlying purpose behind ritual actions not in the soteriological arguments a~d promises images were authorized to make in the Midd~e Ages, but in the therapeutic expectations that surrounded and informed them: therapies for_ the soul'. for the body, for the religious conscience (or ego), indeed, for the entire personality. Tracking the northern Man of Sorrows across the full range of ritual contexts into which he entered, and grappling with the distinct modes of therapy these appearances betoken, reveals the dominant role played in some settings (for instance, pilgrimage) by the hopes and_ deman~s _of a grassroots religiosity; and in another setting (for example, in private Pass10n mystic~sm) by elite forms of spiritual training and self-fashioning. Still other settings (here p10us charity comes first to mind) are characterized by the bridges built ~e:ween po~ular and elite-or clerical and lay, or collective and personal-tasks for Chnstian devoti~nal ar:. Here I report on only three of these contexts: the third, fourth, and sixt~ on my list. This will serve as one way, at least, to fulfill my charge for the present collecti~n, of r~presenting something of the distinctive life (Eigenleben) of the Man of Sorrows image m northern European art.


Cult of the Holy Blood

In the story of the European reception of the Byzantine icon known alternately as King of Glory (Basileus tes doxes) and Utmost Humiliation (Akra tapeinosis), told so richly

by Hans Belting, the Latin Imago pietatis, even before it had a name, found its earliest enlistment in the West as a devotional image. 6 The dominant forces shaping and reshaping the functional form of the image at this early stage seem to be a Passion mysticism indebted to Bernard of Clairvaux's writings, and a penitential ethos long rooted in monastic culture but slowly translated into new forms of affective piety by the mendicant orders-Franciscans first, then Dominicans.7 Within a century of its coming ashore, however, powerful eucharistic connotations would come to define the Imago pietatis and its permutations. This second major transformation in the Passion portrait's Western career was fueled in large part by a pious legend put into circulation through Carthusian networks around 1400, according to which the bleeding Savior appeared in a vision on the altar during a Mass celebrated on Good Friday by Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), who later commemorated the event in an image and granted indulgences to pilgrims who venerated it. The primary beneficiary of this legend was the little mosaic icon at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome (Fig. 1), now known to international exhibition audiences-an imported, relic-like image, whose Carthusian caretakers succeeded in elevating to the status of an "original" worthy of being copied, disseminated, and indulgenced.8 The story has become a staple of the art historical literature on both the Man of Sorrows and the iconography of the Mass of St. Gregory, and needs no rehearsal here. 9

Alone, the Gregory legend would not have stamped the northern European Man of Sorrows with such an enduring sacramental identity, nor would it likely have prompted such innovative eucharistic figurations as Meister Francke's breathtaking Man of Sorrows in Leipzig (ca. 1420; Fig. 2).10 For all this to happen two further alignments were necessary: the legend had to conjoin with liturgical representations of Christ as the new manna and the "the living bread which came down from heaven" (from John 6, a text that provided the gospel for the feast of Corpus Christi during the later Middle Ages); and the "iconic" Man of Sorrows had to cross-fertilize, so to speak, with two important eucharistic allegories first developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christ in the Winepress and the Fons

pietatis, both of which emphasized Christ's body as the source oflife-giving substance and imagined his tomb as a vivifying fountain of life (fans vitae).11 It may be that the reshaping of the Imago pietatis into a "Eucharistic Man of Sorrows" occurred from two different directions, concurrently folding two processes of assimilation.

A third key impetus in these iconographic and formal developments was the emergence of a new functional context: pilgrimage shrines to the Holy Blood, or Heilig-Blut,

which proliferated throughout German-speaking lands between the last decade of the thirteenth century and the onset of the Reformation in the 1520s. One type of Heilig-Blut

shrine centered on relics of Christ's blood called Blutreliquien, typically claimed by their custodians to be identical with the historical blood shed on Calvary; meanwhile, a second type acclaimed as miraculous the blood that materialized on eucharistic hosts when they were abused. The resulting stained or flecked wafers were displayed in monstrances and referred to as Bluthostien, the term from which our somewhat misleading term "bleeding

Man of Sorrows in Northern Europe

Fig. 1. Utmost Humiliation icon. Mosai.c: on wood panel, Constantinopolitan, ca. 1300. Rome, Santa Croce di Gerusale~me. (P~o:o: Courtesy of Soprintendenza Speciale peril Patrimonio Stonco, Artist1co ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della citta di Roma.)

81


Fig. 2. Master Francke, Man of Sorrows. Tempera on wood 42 5 x 31 3 cm ca 1420 L · · M d · . ' · · , . ; e1pz1g, ~se~m er b1ldenden Kunste, inv. 243. (Photo: pbk Berlin/ Museum der Bildenden Kiinste,

Le1pz1g I Ursula Gersternberg I Art Resource, NY.)


host" is derived.12 Eucharistic cult figmes, some with wonder-working powers, can be traced to a number of these sites, among them Iphofen (Lower Franconia), Deggendorf and Mainburg (Lower Bavaria), Erding (Upper Bavaria), Pulkau (Lower Austria), Grillham (Upper Austria), Wilsnack (Brandenburg), and several others; a few of these "bloodshedding Savior'' (blutvergi":fiende I-lei/and) figures survive in situ. 13 As cult images, these heroic .figures stand as the mimetic doubles of the embattled sacrament and express in their dynamic gestures a whole phenomenology of salvific action, one that appealed to the popular desire to see Christ's "glorified blood." As an instrument of legitimation, the German Man of Sorrows had his work cut out for him at shrines whose foundation legends linked th.em to eucbaristic miracles prompted by the host's sacrilegiou abuse (Hostienfrevel), since suspicions of fraud dogged many of these cult startups. Clerical planners at the Church of the Holy Blood in Pulkau, for example, seized upon the explosion of peregrinating piety that marked the two decades before the Reformation to renew their church, commission a massive Schnitzaltar by leading Viennese artists, and break with all known iconographic precedent by placing the Man of Sorrows on center stage as the shrines patron (Fig. 3) . Yet the installation did not go forward until nearly 175 years after the shrine's founding miracle, which occurred in 1338-a miracle remembered as a sacrilege committed by Jews, a "crime" whose punishment unleashed a wave of massacres reaching nineteen different Jewish communities in Lower Austria, a dark episode I treat at length elsewhere. 14

Visual metaphors of offering and outflow, cleansing and renewal, unite this family of cult images. At Pulkau, in the shrine's Holy Savior figure (attributed to the sculptor Michael Tichter), bold intimations of blood's virtual movement through space test the strictures of clerical mediation and control. A panel now in Cologne brings together these same metaphors by visualizing the outflow from Christ's body as a mingling (but not a merging) of solid and liquid substances, body and blood cascading down into a font that runs red below the cross then clear in the pool surrounding it (Fig. 4). What flows in offering from the side wound of these visionary Man of Sorrows figures-here and, significantly, in many Gregory Mass images a well-is a moving, sparkling, living blood that betokens a perpetual therapy. Traditional German Catholic culture employs the plural noun Spenden to characterize the "blood poured out" for humankind's redemption. Christ's merciful gift is his Blutspenden.

What did pilgrims arriving at the shrine with their afflictions and needs offer in return? In what form did they make their donations, their Pilgerspenden? We know they brought their prayers and their gratitude, and to the extent that "blood piety" is always suffused with the intensity of Passion devotion, they also brought their pity and contrition. But pilgrims also brought material things like votive candles; wood, metal and wax ex-votos; and they brought their coins, those most abstract tokens of value. A pen and colored-ink drawing from a miscellany produced in Nuremberg around 1480, a manuscript containing the Seven Works ofMercy depicts the "poor souls" in purgatory as an almost palpable presence beneath the feet of pilgrims (Fig. 5). 15 Approaching the church with rosary in hand, a well-dressed burger drops an obligatory coin into the Opferstock, the alms box;, outside the portal. Opfer, it should be added, is one of those polysemic terms in German religious


Fig. 3. Michael Tichter (attributed), Man of Sorrows flanked by SS. Bartholomew and Sebastian. Shrine figures from the Pulkau Passion Altarpiece, limewood and polychromy; Pulkau, Church of the Holy Blood. (Photo: Author.)

•


Fig. 4. Christ as Blood Source. Mixed technique on panel, 39 x 26 cm, lower Rhen-ish, ca. 1480; Cologne, Kolumba: Kunstmuseums des Erzbistums Koln. (Photo: Kolumba: Kunstmuseums des Erzbistums Koln.)

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Fig. 5. Pilgrims Perf~rming Good Works for Poor Souls. Colored pen drawin ' south German, ca. 1:8~; Nurnberg, Stadtbibliothek, Handschrift Cent. V App. 34a /1 129 (Photo: Stadtb1bliothek Niirnberg.) ' ' 0

· v.

•


cttlture; denoting both "offering" and "victim," it neatly captures the substitutional logic of sacrifice and atonement that underlies all of this imagery.

That such participatory giving had an important place in the gift economy of Holy Blood shrines where the Man of Sorrows resided a the patron image is demonstrated in a set of pen and watercolor drawings depicting the choir area of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at Deggendorf, in Lower Bavaria. 16 The drawings in question illustrates a petition prepared by Deggendorf's newly installed city priest-Johann Riepl, a former canon at SS. Martin and Kastalus in Landslrnt- whose zealous efforts to turn back Protestant reforms included interventions in the liturgical furnishings of the choir, among them the removal of a beloved stone cult figure. 17 The first of the two Riepl drawings reproduced here shows an over-life-sized Man of Sorrows perched atop a stone column that houses an alms box, with the whole installation set before a ciborium-shaped sacrament house (Fig. 6); against propriety (in Riepl's view), worshippers kneel in the direction of the statue rather than the high altar. Another drawing from the report shows the same area after the statue had been prescriptively removed (Fig. 7). Burghers marked with the letter A kneel in orderly devotion toward the high altar; several others marked B face the sacrament house rising next to the sacristy door, their view no longer impeded by the statue; while two women, C and D, gaze longingly toward the blank space atop the ruined pedestal.

We need not concern ourselves here with the complex rationale for the renovations, nor the chain of events that ultimately led to Riepl's departure. Both the drawings and the petition itself, which describes the local custom of praying before the image, verify the existence and veneration of a eucharistic Man of Sorrows statue at Deggendorf's influential Holy Blood shrine, an object which has left no other material trace. 18 And not just the figure's existence is verified: also visible in the drawing is that distinctive language of gesture that links the type of the "blood-shedding Savior," who stands over the Fountain of Mercy, with the Christ of intercession (Furbitteschmerzensmann), who displays the wounds to prove his merit before the Father (or who frames the side wound as a mystical portal opening into the safe harbor of his heart). German scholarship calls the type that encompasses both gestures the Erbdrmdebild, or "image of loving mercy," an identity that also offers a bridge to the next functional context we shall consider.

Fragmentary though this evidence may be, together it strongly suggests that at Heilig-Blut shrines featuring the cult image of Christ as blood source, and especially where these figures were brought into a symbolic proximity to holy wells, 19 pilgrims were called upon to imagine hosts, blood, and water cascading-as Blutspenden-from the side wound of Christ as they prayed and gathered water and as they let their coins-their Pilgerspenden-clatter down into the alms box.


Fig. 6. Interior of the Church 0£ the Holy Sepulcher, Deggendorf, showing the earlier plac~ment of the M~n of orrows statue in the choir. Pen and watercolor drawing; StaatsarchLv Landshut, Z1vilakten Rep. 97d, F. 674,Nr. 83. (Photo: Eder, Deggendoifer Gnad p. 373.) '

b


Fig. 7. Interior of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Deggendorf, showing the choir area after the removal of the Man of Sorrows statue. Pen and watercolor drawing; Staatsarchiv Landshut, Zivilakten Rep. 97d, F. 674, Nr. 83. (P.hoto:

Eder,Deggendorfer Gnad, p. 455.)

89


Works of Mercy

No one, to my knowledge, has attem~ted to wr~te a cultural history ~f the a1m box (Fig. 8), although antiquarians have surely classified the different types one still encounters across the length and breadth of Catholic Europe. Arrayed in pilgrimage chW"che at key points in a visitor's circuit, these simple metal, wood, and stone depositories appear a the pecuniary counterparts, so to speak, of the Eucharist's glorious abode, the sacrament tabernacle that not only reserves the consecrated species near the altar but broadcasts its presence throughout the whole space of the church.20 At the site of donation basic security is often provided by large padlocks or barrel locks conspicuously placed; "enhanced security' comes from holy persons, whose nearby images may have served a talismanic function akin to that of guardian figures on altarpieces. In northern Italy-at San Marco's in Venice, for example--one can find the Man of Sorrows himself (elsewhere it is the Ecce Homo) rising over the alms box, shoring up the close association between sacrifice and pious charity (Fig. 9).21

This parallelism of host and coin is neither accidental nor purely formal: the reciprocal dynamic of pietas also informs the relationship, as the following two examples, one Italian and one German, demonstrate. In the first we find the Imago pietatis appearing as the "logo" of a charitable program conceived in northern Italy by Franciscan friars, the so-called monti di pieta (Fig.10). This was essentially a communal banking and loan cheme designed to offer small-scale loans-today called microcredit-to the deserving urban poor. A promotional image painted for one of these outfits shows the Man of Sorrows in half-length, seated in the tomb, which in turn is perched atop the "mountain'.' of communal wealth. Clients line up with their pledges, or pegni, before the bank's loan officers, who dispense the seed capital in small bundles. Catherine Puglisi and William Barcham have interpreted the enlistment of the Man of Sorrows as the bank's patron and emblem, its visionary mascot as it were, as a "model of compassion" for urban elites, whose philanthropy had to be prodded, sometimes quite aggressively, by the friars.22 Observant Franciscans such as Bernardino da Feltre, who deployed an Imago pietatis-emblazoned banner in his fundraising spectacles, saw in this almost ubiquitous devotional image a "figural ins.ignia well-suited to their needs," precisely because Christians had to be shown, as Puglisi and Barcham explain, that "through [the suffering Christ] they could help others."23 A penitential connection.had long existed between Passion commemoration and charitable giving: friars routinely raised funds during Lenten services and processions.24 But what specific aspects of the image, what metaphorical motifs, made it so powerful in organizing the symbolic reciprocities that structured pious charity? Consider those signs of the body' pathetic morbidity that were so central to the Passion port ait: within the context of pious charity and its penitential imperatives, "motifs of helplessness" inspired pity and demonstrated the need for mutual aid. In other words, they functioned as ritual metaphors, visual codes of pious charity's rites of mutual assistance: nourishment and shelter, protection and companionship, and, of course, funding. Also operative here are figurations of the Eucharist and its special form of Christological immanence. As the ultimate expression of God's mercy, Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist sanctifies all forms of merciful giving. Otherwise "dead" tokens of exchange-cold metal coins-are enlivened by Christ's presence in the Eucharist, they become salvific surrogates in the hands of the needy.

-


·fix "th Mater Dolorosa with votive candles; Fig. 8. Alms box beneath a bar~q~e cruc1 h w~ fM ria Himmelf~hrt. (Photo: Author.) Upper Bavaria,Tuntenhausen,pilgnmagec urc o a


Fig. 9 ·Paolo Tremignon, Imago pietatis ahnsbox. Bronze, signed and dated 1710; Venice, San Marco. (Photo: William Barcham.)


Fig. 10. Giambattista Bertucci, Bank and Pawnshop of the Monte di Pieta. Oil on

canvas, ca.1500-1515. (Photo: Banca di Romagna Spa, Faenza.)

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Fig.11. Hans Schaufelein, Man of Sorrows and Works ofMerc 'u d I 140 x 135 1522 N.. . Y· vvoo pane

. . /sm,d ; ordlmgen, Stadtmuseum. (Photo: Author- used by per~ m1ss10n o ta tmuseum Nordlingen.) See plate 2. ,

Urban elites in Germany fixed . dynamics of reciprocal giving, as we se:~~n a a :1~ :~~=t pi t~rial :ormula to evoke the work signed and dated 15

22 (Fig ll) R .dinP · Y. s S_chaufelem (ca. 1480-1540), a

. . esL g now tn the city muse f N·· d.li . was once on display in the city's St. Geor skirch . h . . um o or . ngen, it g e, w ere the ongmal convex construction

r I !


Fig. 12. Albrecht Durer, Man of son=ows Standing. Engraving, 11.8 x 7.4 cm, ca. 1500; London, British Museum. (Photo: ©Trustees of the Brit-

ish Museum.)

of the panels provided for its secure installation on a cylindrical nave pier (it has since been

flattened from a Si.i.ulenbild into a gallery picture). In the panel's lower zone, prosperous bur

ghers responding to the Isaianic injunction of the inscription ("Deal thy bread to the hungry, and bring the needy and the harborless into thy house") enter the church with food for the assembled poor and coins for the alms boxes.2; Above them, with outstretched arms display

ing blood-streaked wounds, hovers Schaufelein's Man of Sorrows, a figure clearly indebted to

Durer's engraving (ca.1500), which was on display in Passion in Venice (Fig.12).26

A powerful visionary presence seen only by the panel's beholders-the illusion of corporeality would have been enhanced by the panel's bowed form-the figure casts an anxious sidelo_ng glance to the

left, presumably the direction from which one approached the installation which almost certainly paired a real alms box with the pictured one. Offering himself in loving mercy, the Man of Sorrows appears as something like the patron saint£ r "vie works of charity. Vouchsafed


in their power to cancel out sin, the clattering coins of the Nordlingen panel-offered in emulation of Christ's sacrificial giving- descend into a heavy wooden chest that doubles as a tomb and spring back, so to speak, as salutary reward. Their therapeutic potency moves in ~o directions: toward the poor and needy, comprehended in the later Middle Ages as a living image of the suffering Christ (a notion expressed in the formula "pauperes Christi heredes nostros instituimus," frequently used in testaments and donations), and toward the spiritual "health" of the souls of their donors ("pro remedio animae").27

Clearly we've stepped into a different functional context for the northern Man of Sorrows than the pilgrimage shrines discussed in the preceding section. But when we think of these exchanges in terms of their penitential and therapeutic effects, the two contexts draw closer together. Consider how the rituals of obligatory pious charity, formalized in the Works of Mercy (of which there were two kinds, corporeal and spiritual), extended over a continuum that united the nee?ful living and the grateful dead. This is revealed at a glance in a homology revolving around the German adjective arme (meaning "poor,'' "lacking,'' or "needful"). The fund accumulating at the feet of Schaufelein's Christ is addressed to the needs of arme Leute

' the poor among the living (and a designation that allowed for a distinction between the poor residents of a city, the "deserving poor," and their opposite-vagrants, drunks, and the like). Meanwhile, pilgrims who brought their coins and their prayers to Holy Blood shrines did so with the expectation that they were joining Christ in assisting theArmeseelen, the "poor souls" in purgatory, whose legitimate demand for pious charity paralleled that of the arme Leute.28

Every economy has its spectrum of exchangeable goods, preferred modes of exchange, and privileged currencies-all referring back to a common source of value. Reciprocal offerings in the salvific economies I have sketched as functional contexts for the northern Man of Sorrows meet all of these requirements in a way that would be tiresome to rehearse here. Two things, however, are crucial to point out. The first is that the ultimate source of value in these economies is Christ's sacrificial blood, the sanguinis Christi. Blood as sacrifice and blood as gift permeate the language of reciprocal offering in the pilgrimage economy. Leviticus 17:11 furnished the <leep roots of this notion: "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life that is in it." Everything within the commerce between God and man-and, likewise, between the living and the dead-is vouchsafed by Christ's living blood, and in a profound way becomes a token of it. The second crucial point is that the sacrificial reciprocities demanded by late medieval Passion piety yield something along the lines of what philosopher Georges Gusdorf would call a "paradoxical form of exchange," meaning a sort of commerce, in this case, a commerce between heaven and earth, never fully exhausted by the process of exchange but rather open-ended, perpetual.29 If in late medieval perception Christ's Blutspenden continued to pour forth, if souls in purgatory continued to cry out for rescue, if the poor continued to go cold and hungry, if the Opferstock was ever in need of replenishment, it was because human sin perdured. Atonement is always ever an incomplete project. No final cancellation of humanity's debt would occur before the end of time. Christ suffers the pains of the Passion and distributes the fruits of sacrifice as long as he must.


Spiritual Exercises

t a Very di . .a-erent set of therapeutic ritual behaviors whose set-Let us turn now o u 1

·u t £ormed a hitherto unrecognized functional context for the northern . I w1 sugges , . . . ong, f S rrows from the later fifteenth century onward. In spite of its complexity, I will

fan o 0 h · h. · h. hole range of practices under a simple rubric and refer to t em, using istorian

ct t JS W . . d ' k . 5 bilosophy Pierre Hadot's term, as spiritual exercises. Ha ot ~ wor tr.ac~s ~ massive of P . r u· ·ty· the ancient model of a programmatic and disciplined self-. beptance rrom an qm . . . in c ation-born in the schools of Stoic, Epicurean, and Skeptical philosophy-was rransLonn ki fi h d t Christianized and set on its own course of d velopment, r~~ghly ~pea ~g, ro~ ~ e ~ser

h t Ignatius Loyola. Hadot identifies this long tradition with philo-sophta itself. not

fat ers o . . . . al h .

h b tract discourses of speculation rooted in the universities but the practic t erapies

t e a s . " Ph'l f Al d . ll d 't f h 1 rooted in the world-the "training for wisdom as i o o exan ria ca e i ,

o t e sou . . h 1 " f

h £ormation of the individual's total attitude and vocation-in short, aw o e way o t e trans . . 30 I ·

l·c " ode of"existing-in-the-world which had to be practiced at each instant. tis my ue, a m · · · £ r£ d d th contention that within those personalized practices of spiritual trainmg or i e an ea known to late medieval and early modern Christians, images such as the Man of Sorrows,

and perhaps especially the Man of Sorrows-reframed and up~ated for new styles of subjective engagement after 1450, as this section will show-~ad im~ortant roles to play, :oles that transcended the divisions between monastic and lay piety, ehte and popular devotions,

and, perhaps most significantly of all, between devotion and philosophy. Around 1500, ambitious artists found in the multiple transposable types of t~e late

edieval Man of Sorrows a license to invent, explore, and test a wide new range of meta;horical statements," to use Bernhard Ridderbos's term.31 Liberating t~e Man of So~rows from its established "iconic" schema was part of this effort; also renegotiated, as we_ will see

presently, was the passage from narrative back to icon. In the imag~ ~pe ~own vari~usly as Christus in der Rast (Christ in Repose) and Christus im Elend (Christ in Misery or Distress),

Jesus is portrayed during a suspended interval prior to t~e Pa~sion's ~limax; seate~ upon ~he Cross he appears in a state of sorrowful dereliction while action swirls around him. ~tists migh: alternately perch him in solitude upon the "cold stone" of Golgotha, a prisoner_ silently awaiting execution, bound with ropes at the wrists and ankles.32 Both formulas, w~ich find liturgical parallels in texts such as the "Dies irae" of the Requiem Mass, are expressive o~ th~ tendency within late medieval mysticism to visualize moments of calm b.etween the Pa~si~ns crests of violent action and mark them out as occasions for contemplating the d,e:p sig~ificance of Christ's sufferings.33 Drawing metaphorical depth from the formulas intervis~al connections to other seated Christ themes-the Crowning with Thorns and the Mocking of Christ-the genre has been likened by iconographers to the "ti~eless" -~an of Sorr~ws for its capacity to condense the whole of the Passion. Passion narrative tradition an.cl Passion portrait innovation thus converge on a holistic image of the seated su~erer that ~s at once abject and poetic. Were the new forms adaptations to certain new functional requirements?

Did new practices emerge in response to iconographic and formal novelty? -Revisiting a few well-known examples will help pry open these_ p_roblems anew.

Painters for their part understood that the portrayal of the dereli~tio C~nstt could succ~ed amidst the scenographic hustle and bustle of Calvary or in the interstices of the Passion


drama, with extras momentarily off-camera. By the time Hans Holbein the Elder produced

his version for the so-called Graue Passion, a series of twelve panels from a dismembered

altarpiece dated ca. 1495-1500 (Fig. 13), both conceptions were widespread; the idea of

freezing the Passion's cinematic progress here, just before the torturers begin their bloody

work of affixing body to cross, had already been established in northern German panel painting for two full generations.34 Yet Holbein's version, a relief-like picture cast in somber

tones like some kind of mortuary decor, is particularly affecting. In it we find Christ sitting upon the Cross, pausing in mournful anticipation of the Passion's climax. While several

executioners attend to the technical prerequisites of the crucifixion, the unbound prisoner, raising his hand to his chin, becomes sport for others, in particular a malevolent bearded Jew who thrusts a cursing gesture-the so-called mano jica, the medieval equivalent of our raised middle finger-at the holy face. At once forlorn and serene, tormented and passive before the abuse, Christ exemplifies patience. In perfect obedience to the will of the Father, silent like a lamb before its shearer in the words of Isaiah 53:7 ("quasi agnus coram tondente obmutescet"), he submits to whatever comes next.

Holbein undoubtedly knew that sculptors of the preceding generation, first in north

ern Germany then in the imperial south, had pressed the logic of Christ's contemplative isolation to its starkest realization: independent or semi-independent figures, carved nearly in the round. On its own, such a format created an entirely new object for Christian medi

tation, and a new subject as well. Now that the visual field has been evacuated of everything extraneous to it, the beholder's attention can fix exclusively on the very thing that mirrors

it: Christ's own meditations on the Passion. In otl:J.er words, where the seated Christ is condemned to a solitary contemplation on Golgotha, the subject of meditation crosses imperceptibly from a known genre-the narrative excerpt, the "devotional close-up" com

pellingly described by Sixton Ringbom-into something unfamiliar and "undetermined": it becomes something like the emblem of a cognition that mirrors our own, unfolding in real time, perhaps even in response to ours. Not a stilled action but an active stillness, form

now figures the beholder's properly inward attitude toward the Passion and models the self-examination essential to it. The devotional-philosophical attitude proper to this new reflexive-functional form of the seated Christ I would like to call vigilant repose.

Oldest among surviving examples of this theme is a wooden figure today in the Cathedral of Braunschweig, part of a tableaux that includes a totemic "Passion column'' adorned by the Veronica and the arma Christi and topped by St. Peter's Cock, the whole

dated on dendrochronological grounds to about 1460 (Fig. 14).35 Lonely and despondent, the arm resting on one tensed leg, the torso hunched, and the rest of the body slackened in exhaustion, this Christ is just barely able to shoulder the scourge and the birch. His face expresses neither physical agony nor mental anguish; he is carried away by neither fear nor sorrow; rather, he appears lost in tranquil reflection while a storm of forces, a violence

to which he must soon submit again, gathers around him. Not only the look on his face but the stereotyped support of his sunken head in his hand-already by this time a conventionalized sign of interiority-convinces us that Christ has become a model of that

tragic-poetic absorption that ancient, medieval, and modern beholders would recognize as melancholic.


F. 13 Hans Holbein the Elder, Christ in Repose before the Crucifixion. Panel from the Gray ig. · s al · Stuttgart )

n · 1495 1500· Stuttgart Staatsgalerie. (Photo: taatsg ene · rasston, ca. - , '


Fig.14. Christ in Repose with Passion Column. Oak with traces of original polychrom ca. 1460; Braunschweig Cathedral. (Photo: Jacqueline £.Jung.) y,


Early in the sixteenth century ambitious German painters and sculptors refined and further modernized the "melancholic" type of Christ in Repose into independent works of art yielding some of its most powerful conceptions. A masterfully carved limewood figure at present in Berlin (Fig. 15), its arresting corporality dramatized by a baroque polychromy, js one of two known versions of the theme a sociated with Hans Leinberger of Landshut (active ca. 1510-30).3 ' Leinberger offers us a hrist of herculean bulk whose delicate, and somewhat und rsized, head presses down through a rigid diagonal column composed of forearm and lower leg, the whole powerfully planted in the ground by a massive foot with almo t amphibious, played toes. For aU its awesome monumentality, however, the figure measures a mere 75 cm in height, suggesting an original placement in a small niche (the figure's back is cut away to accommodate this). Likewise conceived as a complete and selfsufficient work, in all likelihood for an educated patron with humanist inclinations, is the large chalk drawing Swiss artist Urs Graf made late in his career, and which is now in Basel (Fig. 16).37 In place of the calligraphic bravura characteristic of the greater share of his 180 preserved drawings, Graf here works his materials across the muscular contours and projecting joints of the body-all of them smooth and clean, unharmed-to achieve a luminous, painterly finish. Provocatively, the artist eschews both the tragic downcast eyes and the distant pensiveness of the sculptural tradition. From under an explosive, quill-like tangle of thorns Christ confronts us with a mesmerizing glare that seems to come from the right eye alone, propped up and locked on its target by the powerfully cramped left hand, whose upward pressure also distorts the features of his face, producing a down turned mouth that seems to snarl as it tries to speak.

lconographers grant the theme of Christ in Repose a privileged metaphoric fungibility-and for this reason it has emerged as a prime occasion for intervisual thinking and symbolic interpretation. A fair consensus points to the figure ofJob suffering on the dung heap, naked but for his loincloth, as the key biblical prototype behind the conception. But in excavating the sessio Christi theme's typological and allegorical strata, scholars have exposed other likely models: David the psalmist's entreaties to God for guidance and peace; the German Minnesanger's plaintive meditations on justice; Jeremiah's dolorous cry for Israel's repentance (Lamentations 1:12); Adam's sorrowful meditations on the Expulsion; even Aeschylus writing and philosophizing in the open air.38 Few other iconographic themes have so illuminated what F. P. Pickering called "the dangers and delights of associative thinking about pictures," nor proven, as he also remarked, how infrequently those dangers curb our rampant exegetical enthusiasms.39 Furthermore, all this splendid iconographical research has somehow only reinforced our collective certainty that the theme is, in some sense or another, an Andachtsbild in the classic sense defined by Panofsky: an image styled for "contemplative immersion" (kontemplative Versenkung), a work whose visible form invites an affective, subjective response from the beholder (and then harnesses that response to the mystical goal of union with God). Recognizing the evocative power of Christ's absorbing inwardness, scholarship has, by and large, persisted in describing Christ in Repose as the outgrowth of a Passion mysticism whose Franciscan, Carthusian, and Dominican sources and inspirations are well-known.

•


Fig. 15. Hans Leinberger, Christ in Distress; Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Skulpturensammlung, inv. 8347. (Photo: pbk Berlin I Skulpturensammlung und Museum fur Byzantinische Kunst, Staatliche Museen Berlin I Joerg P. Anders I Art Resource, NY.)


' .

Fig. 16. Urs Graf,. Christ in -~istress. Bla~k chalk heightened with white, 45 x 35 ~m, signed with monogram and dated; Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, U.III.76. (Photo. Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Buhler.)


Rather than rely on the .Andachtsbild model for an understanding of the image, I

propose we recast the image a a Meditationsbild and resituate its functional form within

that emergent Christian philosophical culture that first penetrated Renaissance ethics

in the later fourteenth century and then made gradual inroads among educated urban

elites in northern Europe in the course of the following century. William J. Bouwsma regards this tendency toward a revaluation of Hellenistic and Roman Stoicism as so sig

nificant that he christened it, alongside Au1~ustinianism, one of the "two faces of Renaissance humanism."40 By juxtaposing the premises and principles of this revaluation with the iconographic developments we have been describing, I believe we can grasp a special therapeutic potential for art that, at first glance, may look similar to the mystic's goal of purifying the human soul in preparation for union with its Creator but in fact differs dramatically from it. 41 The literary touchstones of this emerging philosophical culture are well-known: Petrarch's De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (On the Remedy of Two Kinds of Fortune; ca. 1370), the immensely popular Narrenschijf(Ship of Fools; 1494) by Sebastian Brant, and Erasmus of Rotterdam's beloved Enchiridion Milites Christiani (Handbook of the Christian Knight; 1503), to name only the most widely read. Illustrated here is an

emblematic image from that tradition, the Wheel of Fortune by Hans Weiditz, who was once known only as the "Petrarch Master" for his work on the 1532 German edition De

Remediis, for which the woodcut version of this drawing, now in the British Museum, served as the frontispiece (Fig. 17).42 Guided in large part by a renewed Christian valu

ation of Hellenistic and Roman Stoicism, these authors promoted the view that reason and the rational application of rules of the mind would guide the soul toward perfection.

Calming the passions had to be the first step. As a practlcal craft, philosophy meant forg

ing weapons to battle down the turbulent spirits that left the mind vulnerable to attack. Erasmus says as much in his conclusion to the Enchiridion, where he clarifies his purpose in writing about Christian virtue as a kind of inner training:

This only was my desire . .. to show a certain manner and craft of a new kind of war, how one might arm oneself against the evils of the old life burgeoning forth again and springing afresh. Therefore, as we have done in one or two things [here in this treatise] so must you do . .. in everything, one by one: but most of all in the things wherein you perceive yourself to be stirred or instigated ... whether it be through vice of nature, custom, or evil upbringing .... [Against] these things some certain decrees must be written in the tablets of your mind and they must be renewed now and then, lest they should fail or be forgotten through disuse, as against the vices of backbiting, filthy speaking, envy, guile, and other [such vices]: these are the only enemies of Christ's soldiers, against whose assault the mind must be armed long beforehand with prayer, with noble sayings of wise men, with the doctrine of Holy Scripture, with example of devout and holy men, and specially [that] ofChrist. 43

Erasmus spent the rest of his career as a reformer elaborating what he set down in the

Enchiridion. With a proper conversion to reason, he argued, Christians could concentrate wholly on calming the storm of the passions that led to confusion and discord, an inner


•


training that rendered the soul invulnerable to fortune's arrows, a program of "ethicalspiritual exercise" that aimed at the complete "metamorphosis of [the] personality."44

Albrecht Diirer's melancholic Man of Sorrows in Karlsruhe, a small devotional panel evidently made during the young painter's sojourn in Basel and Strasbourg (1492-94), where he found work and contacts among humanist publishers, offers a compelling test for this effort to resituate the Imago pietatis within a renewing tradition of spiritual-ethical training (Fig. 18).45 Tear-swollen eyes, set deeply in dark sockets ringed with weariness, look out at us from beneath a blood-drizzled brow. Freighted with its garland of twisted thorns, Christ's head weighs down heavily on the flexed right hand, whose rent flesh puckers at the site of the nail wound, eerily echoing the man's pursed lips. The body's sole support comes, it seems, from the bent right knee, anchored invisibly behind the marble parapet (possibly meant to stand for the edge of the sepulcher). This stony threshold is shown from above, to foster the illusion of a presence emerging from a visionary "no place" into the space we occupy. That empty silent space, a blue ether charged with faint radiance, seems torn open at the threshold between two realities, a screen consubstantial with the panel's worked gilded surface. Counterposed to the body's tension on the right, the left arm falls slack across the stony threshold-a canonical motif of lifelessness recommended by Alberti in Della pittura (on the basis of the Meleager reliefs, so admirable because in the dead man carried in procession "there is no member that does not seem completely lifeless"). 46 In the Karlsruhe panel such motifs take their place within a surplus of signs clearly calibrated "to move the soul of the spectator."

Like the Christ in Repose theme, Diirer's melancholic Christ is typologically infused with the symbolism of Job's faithful patience in suffering. But Diirer's composition also troubles the standard iconographic definitions on which Christ in Repose rests: by virtue of the visibility of the stigmata, he is simultaneously the dead Christ and the living Imago

pietatis; whatever tortures he contemplates, he also suffers in the present. Several scholars have therefore seen in the figure a kind of innovative fusion of the Imago pietatis and Christ in Repose. 47 Yet Diirer was not the first to invest the Imago pietatis with the attributes of melancholic inwardness-which here include aspects of his own face-or if we view this moment of genre "fusion" from another angle, to rework the iconography of Christ in Repose along such lines.48 Working with a similarly limited color palette, the unknown Alsatian painter responsible for the beautiful panel now in Boston transports the Man of Sorrows back to the hill of Golgotha, pictured as a verdant mound in a visionary no place, and casts him in the role of the melancholy thinker (Fig. 19).49 Although this is a full-length figure in a scenic setting, it shares one remarkable feature with its earliest bustlength counterparts, from the Byzantine Akra tapeinosis to its earliest western adaptationsthat is, the uncrowned head. This makes the figure, in a sense, the purest example of a fusion across the icon-narrative divide that separates, in theory at least, the Man of Sorrows from Christ in Repose.

Diirer's Karlsruhe panel carries off this fusion in a different way, however, one that will repay closer attention as we near this essay's conclusion. Both the Karlsruhe and Boston panels reflect the beholder's self-activity in provocative ways, and both could therefore be said to culminate a devotional tradition that, in Joseph Koerner's words, "emphasized the


0 .1 fi 1 30 1 x 18 8 cm· Karlsruhe, Fig. 18. Albrecht Durer, Man of Sorrows. 1 on r pane, · · ' Staatliche Kunsthalle, inv. 2183. (Photo: Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.)


Fig. 19. Man of Sorrows in Repose. Oil on panel 69 2 39 4 Al . B M ' · x · cm, sat1an·

oston, useum of Fine Arts, inv. 56.262. (Photo:© 2013 Museum ofF· ' Arts, Boston.) me


self's properly inward response to the entire Passion."50 But Diirer's panel would seem to go beyond this, staking a different kind of claim to mirror the soul's painful passage from distress to tranquility. 'Ibis claim is lodged, on the one hand, in the immediacy of the dialogue instigated by the figure's penetrating gaze and, on the other, in the mirroring operation the performance of this di~ogue entails. ~e degree.to which Diirer has perso~alized the Im~go pietatis through re:flecnve resemblance ts less at issue than the open potential any such mirroring operation-whlch one recent writer describes as a "splitting" of the self into viewing subject and viewed object51-has to instigate a breakdown of fixed subject positions for the beholder. Here that mirroring works as both risk and opportunity for the beholder and I contend that for this Ieason it promises a better kind of therapy.

To see this consider two opposing subject positions from which dialogue can proceed. The first is governed by the codes of compassionate identification that have constituted something of an unbroken tradition in Christian devotional art since the mid-thirteenth century. Approaching the panel with this hermeneutic, we beholders see the image through the eyes of a lover who is transfixed and transformed by the sorrowful gaze of a beloved (to paraphrase the famous Bonaventuran formula). "I am You,'' we hear ourselves saying, hopefully, prayerfully, penitently. A different dialogue ensues, however, when the same image is approached as a lvleditationsbild styled to reflect the embattled condition of the soul as it withstands the turbulences of the world . Now Christ in Repose is not only a model for emulation or penitential identification but a reflexive symbol of the soul's distress-its stoic struggle, as it were, for peace amid the tempests brought by fortune and the disorder of the passions. "I am You" is again spoken, but now the word Me spoken by Christ himselt~r, we should say, by the figuration Christ has become--as his gaze penetrates the soul of the beholder. The mystic's anagogical ascent to a higher realm is here replaced by something like the philosopher's dialogical excavation of the soul's rooted disturbances a therapy of the passions aimed at both consolation and repair. Such was, after all, the prime benefit of philosophy, according to Diirer's close friend Willibald Pirckheimer, who explained (with Cicero in mind) that philosophy "heals souls, dispels needless care, and banishes all fear."52

From the Karlsruhe panel's flickering space of solitude-an evocation of the tomb, a place of stillness where the passions are quieted-Christ counsels us in a wisdom, a constancy of mind, and a tranquility that consoles and heals; we consent to enter this place of repose beside him, endure fortune girded by his example, and offer consolation in return.

To review: under theAndachtsbildparadigm the image of Christ in Repose functions as a vehicle for compassionate identification, contemplation of the Passion's mysteries, and eventually a catharsis of the religious ego-steps along the mystic's vertical path toward the visio Dei, toward the soul's union with the divine. Under what I am calling the Meditationsbild model, the image of Christ's melancholy distress appears by contrast as a speculative reflection of the soul's inner strife and an instrument for its restoration and repair. Spiritual regeneration is now staked upon the cultivation of practical wisdom for living in the world, in reason's prescriptions for coping with adversity, and the discovery of ethical pathways in a world whose myriad disturbances-everything from the threats of war and plague down to the pettiest human follies and annoyances of urban life-affiicted the soul like so many fists, clubs, whips, and chains in the hands of the wicked. In the Karlsruhe panel, upon

-


the nebulous gold ground that surrounds Christ--a threshold that acts like a projection screen for the agitated mind-Diirer thematizes wisdom's affiictions: in delicately pounced outlines we make out the form of an owl directly above the head of Christ, perched upo 11

an arbor grown with thistle-like flowers of the genus E1yngium (the same plant held by the journeyman painter in the self-portrait dated 1493, now in Paris).53 Wings spread and head feathers bristling in fright, the owl (a nighttime creature) is being attacked by smaller (daytime) birds an assault that, for its learned audience, surely evoked Christ's persecution at the Passion and his loneliness in the tomb (cf. Psalm 102:6: "I am like a desert owl of the wilderness, like an owl of the waste places"). 54 Meanwhile, other visual devices similarly capable of reflecting the subject's self-activity extend beyond the figurative imagery of the panel's obverse. On the reverse the artist offers up a dazzling trompe l'oeil section of cut agate, a symbolic evocation of the tomb and, according to some authors, the theme of the contemptus mundi. 55 Whatever artistic ambitions Diirer might be declaring in this haunting flow of abstract color, we might productively think of it as another kind of space for vigilant repose, a tranquil and otherworldly formlessness that, complementing the instrumentality of the mirror, soothes the soul after its painful labor of self-examination.

Diirer worked through the protean possibilities of the Man of Sorrows and the Dead Christ throughout his career, and it was surely Diirer who succeeded in giving the boldest visual expression to the reflexive mode of ethical-spiritual therapy these images made possible. I speak-here only in closing-of the self-portrait the painter signed and dated 1522, six years before his death, a drawing once in the Bremen Kunsthalle but displaced and presumed lost during the Second World War (fig. 20). Seeing this work as a kind of ascetic counterpart to the glorious christomorphy of the Munich self-portrait of 1500, Panofsky proclaimed it "a supreme symbol of the likeness of man unto God"; and it is indeed tempting to see it as a meditation on the suffering solidarity of God and man in a fallen world, the proclamation of a shared experience of pain that linked the artist-so prone to extravagant worries about his bodily health-to the Schmerzensmann.56 Might it be, however that instead of a fantasy of fasion-the folding and merging that comes with compas ionate identifi.cation-Diirer's ultimate experiment with the sessio Christi theme is better understood as an ethical exercise in.fission: an insistence on the self-splitting and self-distancing required for the examination of conscience? "Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith," exhorts Paul in 2 Corinthians 13:5, "Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?-unless indeed you fail to meet the test!" Anyone could proclaim the gospel, as Diirer knew acutely in 1522, and already numerous voices were doing so, to the detriment of Christian unity. For peace to descend between Christians, let alone between God and man, something different was needed, a different kind of penitential practice: not the feverish ascent of the mystic toward the godhead, and certainly not the embrace of dead "externals" (adiaphora) in rite and cult, but a therapeutics of the soul-a conversion to reason, a vigilant attention to oneself, and the self-knowledge that comes from spiritual exercise, constantly renewed as the indispensible core of the Christian life. Prosoche was the name Stoicism gave this careful attention to conscience, considering it the fundamental philosophical attitude.57 We need not decide if Diirer had Epitectus, Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius in his library, or if he pondered their


F' 20 Albrecht Di.irer Self-Portrait as Man of Sorrows. Metal pen d~:~in~; formerly in the Bremen Kunsthalle. (Ph~to: Erwin :an~fsky, 'Jhe Life and Art of Albrecht Diirer [Princeton: Princeton Umvers1ty

Press, 1955], frontispiece.)


wisdom with h" fi · d p· kh . B d

is nen ire eimer. As a chill wind blows over the sitter's should . remen ra · er 10 th

wmg, we can see for ourselves how he lowly reluctantly turns to f: "t w· e scourge and d h d ' ace i .

1th.

th d fi r~ at t e rea y but without guarantees, the sufferer girds himself for th ~t e nes him as a man created in God's image, condemned to live lll. a f::.11 eldtask

qmet the · d b t.l.llen wor · t passions an attle melancholy, to gill.de the will toward . .d ·

0

fortun l" . reason, an to endur e-to ive m a state of vigilant repose. e

NOTES

1. 'lhis embattled distinct'o · l f . in Erwin Panofsky's l . t n _is ~n y one o the inescapable fundaments of the field presented c as 1 · exeretse m Tuhmgesch · ht "'I p · . , £j schichre des• ch ¥ , • H " e, mago ietatls : · n Beitrag zur Typeng ~

me.i:zensmanns und der 'Maria Mediatrix "'· Fi h ·•Afi· M · .. e 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig: E . A. eemann 1927) 26 - ' m estsc 1!f~ ur lfaxJ Friedlander zum article was pIOvided by Alexandra Letvin'. nl ' 1 3~8. Research assistance for portions of this

2. 'Il1at the Man of o. " ' u ess otherwise noted, trn.11 lations are my own. .uows overtaxes traditional iconog ·a >h" "fi . "

made by Hans Belting in Das Bild u d . p btk i I ic a SJ canon was a point already mond !vleyer as The lmaue and Its p ':.l. se:nth uM.1. ~,~:· 1981' tran. slated by Mark Bartusis and Ray-

o uu ic in e tcuue Ager Ft · d P. · the Passion (New Rochelle NY· Ar" t tl D C . mm an •unction of Early Pai11ti.ngs ol'

, ' · is o e · aratzas, 1990), 131. :; 3. Paoofsky, 'Imago pietatis, • 280. 4. Panofsky, "Imago pietatis,'' 276. 5. Unrealized in Burckhardt's lifetime th . . . .

Altarbild," published as one of three ext, cl de move~ m this d1recaon can be glimpsed in "Das rz . en e essay m the volume Jacob B kl d B . .. .n.unstgesc~ichte von Italien (Basel: G. F. Lendorff, 1898) 1-141. \1rc 1ar t, etirage Ziff

6. Bel ttng, Image and Its Public, 131-85. 7. 1he most important case studies h' 1 I . above) are H. W. van Os '"TI1e D' . .. on ft JS ear y talian reception, apart from Belting (cited

Ji ' 1scovery o an Early Man of Sorrows o D . . Ti ournal of the 1#.irhurg and Courtaul.d Institute; 41 (1978)· 65-75 · J Cn a o~irucan riptych '

of Sorrows': A 1hirteenth-Cent . Di r • ;, • ' oanna annon, The Sroclct 'Man 1999): 107-12; Amy eff. "B ury_ P,~~h Re~mted, Burlington Magazine 141, no. 1151 (Feb. S . . ' yzant1urn vvesterruzcd, Byzantium Ma · ali d T- T •

upplicationes variae," Gesta 38, no. 1 (1999)' 81-102· . rgm zc : wo icons m the ch.am, "Bernardino da Feltre, the Mollte d" p· t~ . d, abnd Cathenne R. Puglisi and William L. Bar-L " A • I ie " an t e Man of Sorrows · A t' . M. d"

ogo, ~rtilms et historiae 29, no. 58 (200S): 35_63. · c rv1st, 1crocre tt and

8.1hc most comprehensive treat! f h · of Pity in Santa Croce in Geru ~c~nt o_ t E~ tco.n~ early career remains Carlo Bertelli, "Th Image l d .e, 10 ssays m the H islo1y 0 t: A t p -' R tlowa~ c .. Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard and . . , . :; r resmtea to udolph 1..f!itt-For the legend-tradition and its earl • lld .Milton J. Lewme (London: Phaidon, 1967), 40-55. R ealitiit, ed. Uwe W estfehling. ex1 .b~ :onso alatlo(n, see Die Messe Oregors des Grossen: Vision, Kunst.

, 11 mon cat, og Cologne· ch .. t ' 9. Fundamental to both is J A E d ' D' D · nu geomuseum, 1982) 16-22.

Z · . . · · n res, lC a.rstellung der Ore · · · . ~eitschrift jill' chi'istliche Kunst 30 no 11/12 {1917)· gonu messc im M1ttclalter,"

zur Psalmodia Euchari.stica des M;lch; p . t · 14

(6-56

; and Ewald M. Vetter, Die K11.pftrstiche The most recent addition to the l arge~it;eto vo~11D622B~Ilin ter: Aschendor:ffsche, 1972), 172-242.

,

1

' ra ure is as ild der Erschein D · r< te1a1ter, ed. Andreas Germans and Th I (B

7.mg: ie vregorsmesse im Mit-

10. See esp.Michael Camille ''Mi o~asid_,ent.cfis .crlin: Dict1·ich Reim. er 2007).

A ' metic enti caaon and Pas · D · ·

ges: A Double-Sided Panel by M . t F· k ". • s1on evotlOO m the Later Middle

M C1S er •cane e in 7he B1·oke1 B d n . D

edievQ/ C11lturc ed. Alasdair A M cD ald H ' 1 0

;y: c'Cl.mon e1.1otion and Late-. ' · a on errnan B Ridd b ·

(Gromngen: Egbert For. ten, 1998), 183

_210

_' · · er os, and Rita M. Schlusemann

-------------------~ tr


11

. for the liturgical images of Corpus Chri ti, sec Ann Eljenholm Nichols, "The Bread of Heaven:

retaste or Foresight?" in 'Ihe Jco11ography ofHcaven, ed. Clifford Davidson, Early Drama, Art, and ~usic JVfono~r~~h Series 21 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), 40-68; for

fountain of Life iconography, see below.

12. On blood relics and shrines in the north, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theol-f/.1/d Practice in Late M edieval Northem Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Penn

o~vania Press 2007); on miracle hosts and their shrines in the south, see Mitchell B. Merback,

fa;Lgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory a11d Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany

mid/Jvstria (Chicag : University of Chicago Pres , 2013). 13. Romuald Bauerreiss, Pie Jesu: Das Schmerzensmann-bild und sein Einjluss auf die mittelalterliche

Frommigkeit (Munich: Widmann, 1931), lists ten places where the Imago pietatis is associated with

host shrines, but some of these involve postmedieval figures (83nl 76). 14. Mitchell B. Merback, "Fount of Mercy, City of Blood: Cultic Anti-Judaism and the Pulk.au

Passion Altarpiece," Art Bulletin 87, no. 4 (Dec. 2005): 589-642; and Merback, Pilgrimage and

Pogrom, 69-100. 15. For the manuscript, sec Leonie von Wilckens, "'o mensch gedenk an mich .. .'Werke der Barm-

herzigkeit fur die Armen Seelen: Zur einer spatmittelalterlichen Handschrift in der Nurnberger Stadtbibllothek," in Frommigkeit: Formen, Geschichte, Verhalten, Zeugnisse; Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck zum

70. Geburtstag, ed. IngolfBauer (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1993), 73-80. 16. Deggendorf has long been notorious among Germany's Eucharistic shrines as the site of a

brutal anti-Jewish massacre in 1338, a long-standing blood-host cult, and an annual pilgrimage festival featuring anti-Semitic plays; those shameful aspects of its history have to remain in brackets here. Indispensable is Manfred Eder, Die "Deggendorfer Gnad": Entstehung und Entwicklung einer Hostienwallfahrt im Kontext von Theologie und Geschichte (Deggendorf: Stadt Deggendorf, 1992); and

I profile the case in Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom, 33-37. 17. Staatsarchiv Landshut, Zivilakten Rep. 97d, F. 674, Nr. 83, an illustrated "Aktenvorgang"

addressed to Riepl's superior in Straubing, the Vicedominius Ferdinand von Khuen-Belasy (1604-18). Exactly how long prior to 1611 the Man of Sorrows figure seen in Riepl's drawing stood in the Deggendorf Grabkirche is a question the foremost scholar of the pilgrimage does not attempt to

answer; see Eder, Die "Deggendorfer Gnad,"with the additional drawings from the Riepl correspon-

dence (370-78). 18. Discussed in Eder, Die "Deggendorfer Gnad," 376. 19. On this important issue, see Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom, 265-83. 20. On the form and function of the sacrament house, see Achim Timmermann, Real Presence:

Sacrament Houses and the Body of Christ, c. 1270-1600 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). 21. Illustrated here is a bronze signed and dated 1710 by Paolo Tremignon, though its original

provenance is unknown; my thanks to Catherine Puglisi and William Barcham for this information. An example of an alms box associated with the Ecce Homo can be found against a nave pier facing

the north aisle at Sant' Antonio, Padua. 22. Catherine R. Puglisi and William L. Barcham, "The Man of Sorrows in Venetian Art," in Pas-

sion in Venice: Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese; The Man of Sorrows in Venetian Art, ed. Catherine Puglisi and William Barcham, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Biblical Art in association with D. Giles, 2011), 12-27, at 21; see also Puglisi and Barcham, "Bernardino da Feltre," 35-63.

23. Puglisi and Barcham, "Bernardino da Feltre," 53; and for the staging of Bernardino's public

event, coordinated with the bishop of Padua in 1491, see 53-56.

24. Puglisi and Barcham, "Bernardino da Fcltre," 37.


25 · "Erich dein brot den hungerigen: und die armen und die elenden fur in dein ha us" (from Is

58:7); the second inscription, below Christ's feet, is from Daniel 4:24. For further references, se: Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom, 282.

26. Engraving, 11.8 x 7.4 cm.; London, British Museum. See Puglisi and Barcham, Passion in

Venice, no. 35. See also Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, eds.,Albrecht Durer: Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 1 (Munich: Prestel, 2001), no. 26.

27. Such notions informed visualizations of mercy, charity, and the iconography of Works of Mercy; for the poor as an "image" of Christ, see Ralf van Biihren, Die Werke der Barmherzigkeit in

der Kunst des 12.-18. ]ahrhunderts: Zum Wandel eines Bildmotivs vor dem Hintergrund neuzeitlicher Rhetorikrezeption (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1998), 45-47.

. 28. ?n the network of exchanges that brought annual commemorations for the dead (Jahrtage) in lme with both manner of good works, see Hann:> Koren, Die Spende: Eine volkskundliche Studie uber

die Beziehung 'Ylrme Seelen-Arme Leute" ( Graz: Styria, 19 54 ), esp. 129-60; and Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom, 179-83.

29. Georges Gusdorf, L'Experience humaine du sacrifice (Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1948), cited and discussed in Jill Robbins, "Sacrifice," in Critical Terms far Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 285-97, at 289.

30. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way ef Lift (ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase [Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)), who guotes Philo (from On the Special Laws, bk. 2) on p. 264.

31. Bernhard Ridderbos, "The Man of Sorrows: Pictorial Images and Metaphorical Statements" in MacDonald, Ridderbos, and Schlusemann, 1he Broken Body, 145-81. '

32. In the Low Countrfos the theme was called "Cbr.istus op de koude steen." See, for example, the workof ca. 1480-90 by a north ethcr,landisb follower of Derick Baegert, now in the Christian Museum in Esztergom (inv. 55.451); Dirk Bouts (ca. 1410-1475), eim Vlaams primitiif te Leuven, ed. Mauritis Smeycrs, exhibition catalog (Leuven: Uitgevcrij Peeters, 1998), no. 53.

33. Gert von der Osten, "Job and Chdsr: The Development of a Devotional Image,"journal ef the

Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16, nos.1-2 (Jan.-June 1953): 15-58; Gert von der Osten "Christus im Elen.d (Christus in der Rast) und Hergottsruhbild," Reallexikon z11r deutschen Kunstges;hichte, vol.

3 (Mumch, 195~), c~l · 644-5.8; ~rederick P. Pickering, Literature and .Art in the Middle Ages (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1970), 92- 114; Sabine Fehlemann "Christus im Elend: Vom Andachtsbild zum realistischen Bilddokument," in Ikonographia:Anleitung zum Lesen von Bil

dern (Festschrifi Donat de Chapeaurouge), ed. Bazon Brock and Achim Prei~ (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1990), 79-96; and Ulrike Surmann, Christus in der Rast (Frankfurt am Main, 1991). A related type with arms crossed in front, the so-called "Herrgottsruhbild," is distinguished by the royal mantle worn by Christ. For the relevant passage from the "Dies irae" sequence ("You sat down wearied while seeking me ... "), see Puglisi and Barcham, "Man of Sorrows in Venetian Art" 14.

34. Origi~~I provenance of the group is unknown, but is dated on stylistic evidence to the years after Holbems return from Ulm to Augsburg in 1494; see Katharina Krause, Hans Holbein der A!tere (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002), 119-39.

35. Westfehling, Die Me.rse Gregors des Grossen, nos. 21 (figure) and 32 (column); Stadt im Wandel·

Kunst und Kultur des Burgertums in Norddeutschland 1150-1650, ed. Cord Meckseper, exhibition catalog (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Cantz, 1985), 2:no. 1104, 1105 [by Anton Legner], with further refe~~nces; also Surmann, Christus in der Rast, 14. The cock is a sixteenth-century replacement (or addit10n); the chest of the figure is fitted with a cavity enclosed by a green crystal that may have served as a monstrance for the host, or possibly a relic of another kind. My thanks to Jacqueline Jung for kind permission to use this photograph.


6 'Ihe second is in the city church of St. Nicholas, in Landshut. For the Berlin figure, see

~chael Baxandall, 1he Limewood culptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale Univer~ity 1980) pl. 98; and Der Mensch um 1500: Werke aus Kirchen und Kunstkammern, ed. Sabme

~:~~el, Ulr;ch Bischoff, and Margret Homann, 2nd ed., ~xhibitio~ catalog (Berlin: Staatliche 1977) no 3 For the Landshut version (almost twice the height at 140 cm), see Ausstel-

JV1useen, • · · . . .b. · 1 1000 Tahre christliche Kunrt im Z etchen der Passion, ed. Karl Feuchtmayer, exhi it10n cata og Jtmg J'

(JVfunich, 1950), no. 39. . . . , J7. 45 x 35 cm, black chalk heightened with white, signed with Graf s VG monogr~m and dated

(Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, U.III.76). Sometime in the 1560~ t~e dra~~ng, along with numerous

h by Graf was acquired for the collection of the Basel JUnst Basilius Amerbach (1533-91), ot ers , . . .

h h i.t remains unclear whether it resided earlier with another patron or with the artist himself . t oug . For catalog information, see From Schongauer to Holbein: Master Drawings from .~asel and Berl'.n,

exhibition catalog (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1999), no. 149; and Grunewald ~nd sezne

Zeit: Grofle Landesaustellung Baden-Wurttemberg, ed. Dietmar Ludke, Jessica Mack-Andnck, and

Astrid Reuter, exhibition catalog (Karlsruhe: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 2007), no. 136. 38. As in the Florentine Picture Chronicle (later fifteenth century) in the British Museum; see

Ursula Hoff, "Meditation in Solitude," journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1, no. 4 (1938):

292-94. 39. Pickering, Literature and Art, 96. Pickering's own contributions to the exegesis-cited above,

though they defy summary here--should be considered essential reading. . . . . . 40. William]. Bouwsma, "The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustmiamsm m Renais

sance Thought," in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of Cali

fornia Press, 1990), 19-64. 41. Recent work on early modern wisdom books and the allegorization of the Christian "pilgrim-

age oflife" topos in early modern genre painting sets the stage for the ap~roach ta~en in this section of the present essay. Especially noteworthy in this rich vein of scholarship are: Remdert L: Falken

burg,Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Lift (Arns~_erdam, 19~~); Remdert L. Falkenburg, "Speculative Imagery in Petrarch's Von der Artzney bayder Gluck (1532), m Petrarch and

His Readers in the Renaissance, ed. Karl A. E. Enenkel and Jan Papy (Boston: Brill, 2006), 171-92;

and Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, Landscape and Philosophy in the Art of Jan B~ue~hel the

Elder (1568-1625) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). Especially productive for my own thmking has been Prosperetti's characterization of several early modern genres of"ethical art" as an extension and

transformation of the therapeutic impulse behind medieval devotional imagery. 42. Pen and black ink with colored wash, 20.6 x 15.8 mm; London, British Museum, 1997,

0712.22. The German edition of Petrarch, conceived by Sebastian Brant, was Von der Artzney bayder

Gluck des guten und widerwiirtigen (Augsburg, 1532). For the complete cycle, see Walther Scheidig, Die Holzschnitte des Petrarca-Meister zu Petrarcas Werk "Von der Atrzney bayder Gluck des guten und

widerwiirtigen-Augsburg 1532 (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1955). 43. Erasmus Manual of a Christian Knight (Enchiridion milites christi), (London: Methuen

and Co., 1905;' Online Library of Liberty), chap. 38 ("Against Wrath and Desire of Vengeance," online translation with my stylistic modifications), http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_

staticxt&staticfile=show. php%3Ftitle=191&chapter=55 82&layout= h tml&I temid=2 7 ·

44. This phrase is from Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Lift, 82. - . . 45. Oil on fir panel, 30.1x18.8 cm.; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, inv.2183 (acquired m ~941).

For essentials: Christus und Maria:Auslegungen christlicher Gemiilde der Spiitgotik und Fruhrenatssance

aus der Karlsruher Kunsthalle, ed. Ines Dresel, Dietmar Ludke, and Horst Vey, exhibition catalog


(Karlsruhe: Staatliche Kunsthall Kl ·I h 1992) .. stell: B - e ru sru e, 'no. 2; Grunewald und seine Zeit: Grefie Land . ung aden-Wurtlemberg, ed. Dietroar Ludke, Jessica Mack-Andrick, and Astrid Reuter c~au-

tiOn catalog (Karlsruhe: Staatlichc Kunsthalle, 2007) no. 135. Out of the large Dlirer bibli' exhtbi

·ssee es.li~ecl i.ally Johann Eckhart von Borries,AlbrechtDiirtr: Christw als Scbmerzensmann (K:7raphhy, taat c ie KunsthaUe Ka ·l I 1972) d r I L K r sru e·

n . · . r sru 1e, ; an JOsep l eo . oerner, The Moment or Scl!f-Portr,, ·,., . · ue1 man R enai•sn• A t (Ch' ·u 'J .. t.are in . " ,.,1ce r icago: nive.r ity of Chicago Press 1991) 17- 19 Tu . . tion by Beate Frick ''A . ifi . : . . . .. ' . e recent coutnbu-. cl a· G . e, 1ft ex mgred1tur m artijiczum suum: Durers Schmerncn mann in I<arlsr h un 1c eschichte eines ArP11m t J h D u e . th o .:. ens von o annes von amaskus," pursues a very different th matic an the one developed here (' J. t II. k t: · . . e"IG Lb 'Id"· . . . . m 11 e e tua ur.erung und Mystifizierung mitteldlt'l!1·1icher Ku· . 20;~T,i18J~~~):.on emes Begrijfi, ed. Martjn Buchsel and Rebecca Miiller [Berlin: Gebr. M.a:~

46. Leon Battista Alberti On R · t · d M . K 1991), 73. , am mg, e . artm emp, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin,

47. E.g., von Borries, Albrecht Diirer, 18.

48. Koerner notes t11e close resemblance with features fo cl . D .. ' . . self~portrait (ca. 1491)., now in Erlan.gen (Univcrsitiitsbibli w;h ~- . ur~ slightly earlier pen and ink (with the Eclangen drawing as fig l) Th h ll th

0 c 'see oment ofSe!f-Portraihl1·e, 17

. . e aut or ca s e Karlsruhe panel a" d ' al . f project of self-portraiture into the domain of devotional art" (21) . ra ic extension o· the

49· HaDlls Swarzcnski, "APaintingofthcMa fS " . no. 298 (Winter 1956) · 82-87· B . J1 o o~rows, Bulletin if the Museum ef Fine Arts 54

· , von ornes,Albrecht Durer 18 fig 10 ' 50. Koerner, Moment of Se!f-Port1-ait11re, 19. , , . .

E1~~~,.:h(~:~;g:~cUh,ru7!1v:~s·~·rofroCflt~e Se(fp· Sexuality, Se(f-K11owledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman r · ...... •··/ o ucago ress, 2006), 23.

~2. ~oted in ~ouwsma, "Two Faces of Humanism," 41. -

3. Mixed media on vellum, transferred to canva 56 x 44 cm (Pan' M "" d L 54 N b w, 1£ A ' ' · ' · s, u .. e u ouvre) · or ert O , L.i.lvrecht D1irer 1471-1528· ']7J G , · .r h Q . ·

Taschen 2010) 28· cf. B · · e emu.s °-' l e ennan Renaissance (Cologne· ' ' • · · von ornes, Albrecht Dtirer 18-21 · Fricke "A 1;r, . d' ,. ·

the owl symbolizes Christ's innocence at th P .' ' r 1..tex mgre ttur, 192-93. Thar th . e ass1on seems confirmed by a later vers ' f th

eme attributed to Durer: a woodcut ublished b H G . ion o e same ably based on a sketch by the artist) de~icting a wTcie-:;:d o1:ie~.m ~e;bficrg ar.ound 1515 (probbandcrole .fitted with the caption "Der E I . d all .. arassc y our buds under a blank ed. , 7he Complete Woodcuts o+ .A!.,·r~cht D - ~[eNn seyYcn kt ,Ce Vogel neydig und gram" (Willi Kurth,

';J · v • um cw or · rown 1946] 300) Liidke, and Ve~, Christus tmd Maria, 22 (.fig. 10). . ' ' no. ; as noted in Dresel,

55. Wolf, Durei; 28. Sec also von Borries,A.lbrecht Diirer 33 "4· d . " . who aptly calls it a "ein fiammendes Parbs k k J" d . ' -.> an Fncke, '.Artifcx iizgreditur," marble ledge on the painting's obverse, a p; ta e anthms~e~d considers it <'I.long with the dappled

56 E . P r k . re ercnce to e dwmus m·tifix (195-96). . fW.lJl anors ')', The Lffe and Art "'Alb . h D - (P . ,

1955) 241· see also K u °-' 1'i!c, t urer rmceton: Princeton University Press 1

' oerner, lvi.oment ef Se(f-Portraiture who g h 1 self-portrait of ca. 1512-13 still . . . B ' roups t e ost work with the drawn

• surV1v.mg m remen (Kunsthalle fig 91) · I · h 1 to the site of aHl.ictfon on hi left abdomen (179, 241-42). ' . ,.tn w lJC t 1e anist points

57. Hadot, Philosophy as a "Way o}Life, 130-32.

From Book to Song: Texts Accompanying the Man of Sorrows in the

Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Susan Boynton

T he verbal contexts for the image of the Dead Christ formed an important compo

nent of its received meaning for medieval viewers and readers. 1 While most of this

volume focuses on the Man of Sorrows as an autonomous image in panel painting and

other media, the sheer variety of texts he illustrates in manuscripts signals the polyvalence

of the figure as a sign and reaffirms its centrality to the religious practices of the late Middle

Ages. Before turning to specific instances of texts accompanying the Dead Christ, let us

consider the nature of their interrelationships. One question that should be asked is how,

exactly, the images are connected to their texts, whether as illustrations or as parallel forms

of expression. I favor the term "accompaniment," which implies nothing more than the

physical juxtaposition of text and image; viewer and reader determine the meaning of the

pairing and the balance between the two media. Thus the reception of the image and text

together constitutes a cognitive response in which the text plays a far more important role

than as an accessory to the illustration. As Flora Lewis states, "the texts provide the words

through which devotion speaks, the images through which the objects of devotion are visu

alised, and thus they play an affective as well as reflective role."2

While particular combinations of text and image are conventional in the manuscript

tradition, each image is effectively also in conversation with other images that may relate

less well to the text at hand. As Bernhard Ridderbos points out, "different versions of the

Man of Sorrows do not represent theological concepts directly but rather refer to existing

representations, between which a certain tension results as properties have been selected

from them."3 A similarly creative tension can emerge between the Imago pietatis and the

texts it illustrates, for neither of the two components was originally intended to be accom

panied by the other. Consequently, in many cases the connection between the Dead Christ

and his accompanying texts demands explanation, for which reason we turn first to the

manuscript context.

The texts considered in this study occur in books of hours and prayer collections, but

also appear in liturgical books, such as missals and graduals, intended for the "iise of the

clergy. Even more numerous are the types of texts illustrated by the Dead Christ: many are

"devotional" offices such as the short Hours of the Cross, but the image also accompanies

117

studies in iconography: themes and variations

Documents