The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel

Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Mitchell B. Merback

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781861898258
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Christ's Crucifixion is one of the most recognized images in Western culture, and it has come to stand as a universal symbol of both suffering and salvation. But often overlooked is the fact that ultimately the Crucifixion is a scene of capital punishment. Mitchell Merback reconstructs the religious, legal, and historical context of the Crucifixion and of other images of public torture. The result is a fascinating account of a time when criminal justice and religion were entirely interrelated and punishment was a visual spectacle devoured by a popular audience.Merback compares the images of Christ's Crucifixion with those of the two thieves who met their fate beside Jesus. In paintings by well-known Northern European masters and provincial painters alike, Merback finds the two thieves subjected to incredible cruelty, cruelty that artists could not depict in their scenes of Christ's Crucifixion because of theological requirements. Through these representations Merback explores the ways audiences in early modern Europe understood images of physical suffering and execution. The frequently shocking works also provide a perspective from which Merback examines the live spectacle of public torture and execution and how audiences were encouraged by the Church and the State to react to the experience. Throughout, Merback traces the intricate and extraordinary connections among religious art, devotional practice, bodily pain, punishment, and judicial spectatorship.Keenly aware of the difficulties involved in discussing images of atrocious violence but determined to make them historically comprehensible, Merback has written an informed and provocative study that reveals the rituals of medieval criminal justice and the visual experiences they engendered.

1 ‘A Shameful Place’: The Rise of Calvary

The pains of the Passion were fivefold. The first pain consisted in the shame of the Passion. For he bore it in a shameful place, Calvary being reserved for the punishment of criminals.

JACOBUS DE VORAGINE, Legenda Aurea (c. 1260)¹

Going to Calvary

Pilgrims and tourists who want to walk the via cruris, ascend Mount Calvary and witness there the climax of Jesus’s Passion, his agonizing death on the Cross, can still, without going to Jerusalem, visit the well-known pious simulation, the Sacro Monte (Holy Mountain), which looms above the town of Varallo, in the Piedmont region of Italy (illus. 10). Conceived by an Observant (Franciscan) Friar, Bernardo Caimi, in the old Milanese duchy as an accessible European substitute for the perilous and expensive journey to the Holy Land – a painted inscription there once claimed, ‘so that those who cannot make the pilgrimage see Jerusalem here’² – the project began in 1486, shortly after Caimi received papal permission for the plan. In 1491 it opened to pilgrims, with only the first three chapels ready for viewing. This makes Varallo the oldest of the sacri monti, versions of which can be found in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Brazil and elsewhere in Italy, each with its own programme of sacred imagery.³ The most dazzling of these multi-media spectacles, Varallo is also the best loved and most widely studied.

Over the centuries of its growth, decline and modern recuperation, the Sacro Monte has earned a reputation as a monument of ‘popular’ art for two related reasons: because its founders built it as an elaborate stage set for their missionary activities, first among them preaching; and because the striking, often grotesque hyper-reality of its many tableaux vivants, what one scholar calls its ‘almost hallucinatory style’, fails to sit still inside any established art-historical categories.⁴ Familiar biblical scenes are enacted by hundreds of life-sized and lifelike poly-chromed sculptures, replete with the stiff gestures, glass eyes, real clothing, hairwigs and props (including stuffed horses at Calvary and seasonal fruits on the table of the Last Supper) which we often associate with religious kitsch (illus. 11). To cultivated tastes, the tableaux might appear more like a strange hybrid of folk theatre and wax museum than Renaissance Art. Yet we know that the work in all media represented there was in fact executed by some of the leading artists of the day. The spacious and turbulent Calvary scene, for example, was part of the statuary programme begun by the Lombard painter and sculptor Gaudenzio Ferrari — whose fame rested upon it for most of his career – in 1490, though it was not completed until about 100 years later by others.⁵ Furthermore, the apparent pitch to ‘popular’ sensibilities which permeates the whole did not, as one historian notes, prevent Milanese aristocrats, various heads of state, Church officials and the celebrated humanists of the day from making the journey, praising its beauty and feeling moved by the devoutness of the scenes.⁶

In order to reach the building housing Gaudenzio’s Calvary, visitors must first wend their way through 45 chapels (called luoghi sancti), each containing their own scenographic tableaux displayed behind iron or wooden grilles, through which one looks. Beginning with the Fall from Grace and the Annunciation, and climaxing in an expanded version of the Passion, over 600 statues and 4,000 painted figures greet the pilgrim.⁷ To engage all the senses visitors physically ascend the mountain slope upon which the chapels are arranged (unlike modern theme-park visitors, whose effortless movement via monorail creates a kind of spectatorial distance which is compensated for by loud special effects). As they trod the simulated via sacra, medieval pilgrims would survey the holy places, perhaps pause to touch the sculptures (cuddling the Nativity’s Baby Jesus, for instance), and listen to the precise descriptions of the Holy Land offered by the friars. Physical movement contributed to a feeling of being personally involved in the events. Once inside the Calvary chapel, visitors were surrounded by a dizzying array of carved and frescoed figures – in a sense, by other ‘participants’ in the Passion, whose postures, gestures, expressions and responses must have in turn elicited certain responses. They might also be urged by the friars to recite familiar prayers, or to immerse themselves in a deeply felt, affective contemplation of events. At the Sacro Monte, then, physical effort would have been not only rewarded but also, as George Kubler observes, required if the pilgrims were to approach the scenes with the proper mindset. The tour itself became a rite of passage undertaken, in all likelihood, by communities of fellow travellers, each of whom earned the privilege of witnessing the tragic and turbulent climax of Christ’s Passion personally. Every exhausted tourist knows how the hardships of a journey can, at unexpected moments, melt into moods of reverential awe and gratefulness for the things seen; here, at the summit, such an effect on sensibilities and pious feeling was no doubt calculated, its psychological impact sustained through exhortations and prayers, and its educational potential exploited to promote specifically Franciscan spiritual ideals (later it was used for explicitly anti-Lutheran purposes).⁸

Unlike medieval pilgrimage shrines, the Sacro Monte boasted no wonder-working relics, no miraculous images or saintly patrons – the attraction, like that of today’s theme parks, was the very experience of moving through the simulation: ‘The early sacri monti, from Varallo on, first answered the need for scenographic spaces shaped for human motion in sacred history.’⁹ This ‘New Jerusalem’, as the Milanese Archbishop Carlo Borromeo called it, therefore became more than a sanctuary and more than a centre for Franciscan preaching; it served as a great conduit for channelling popular religious feeling into the empathic forms commensurate with Franciscan spirituality. And it did so by placing pilgrims in direct, imaginative contact with the people and events of the Passion.

Direct, imaginative contact with the people and events of the Passion. Here I must choose my words carefully. For surely biblical events were regarded by pious medieval Christians in the way we regard historical events today, as singular, unrepeatable occurrences. Personal experiences of these events therefore had to be achieved through the imagination; one simulated pilgrimage and the sense of place mentally. This was one of the primary goals of religious life in the so-called ‘Franciscan Middle Ages’¹⁰: the training of the imagination for making interior pilgrimages to the Holy Places (loca sancta), especially Golgotha and the Lord’s Sepulchre, the sites of the Passion. Perfected in the monasteries, visual meditation was disseminated to the laity primarily – at least in the three centuries prior to the Reformation – by the Franciscans and Dominicans, who cultivated it intensively themselves. But how exactly was the image-forming capacity of each person to be cultivated and used? As difficult as a human faculty like imagination is to study, we must consider what medieval people saw as its psychological dynamic and spiritual purpose if we are to understand the role it played in devotional practice. What did the first pious audiences at Varallo think they were seeing in Gaudenzio’s re-creation of Calvary, and of what use was it to them?

Judging from the hyper-realism of the scene, one could begin by inferring that ordinary folk thought they were seeing accurate reconstructions of the biblical people and events. This might sound condescending, but it is not unjustified. Caimi and his brethren were very explicit in their claims that Varallo was to be experienced as an accurate topographical reproduction of Jerusalem and its sites. In his sermons Caimi often referred to his personal knowledge of Jerusalem (for a time he was chief among the Franciscan caretakers of the Holy Sepulchre). Further, when reassuring his audience about his experience showing pilgrims in the East the real thing, he evidently gave free play to what Alessandro Nova calls the ‘Franciscan obsession with numbers, dimensions and distances’: the height of the True Cross, the shape and manufacture of the table of the Last Supper, the distance of Calvary from the city walls, etc.¹¹ Gaudenzio’s attention to the minutest details in his sculptural renditions, the use of all types of material props and accoutrements to bring the scene on Calvary to life, accorded with and reinforced the friars’ claims to accuracy.

However, when pilgrims stopped at the Observant church before ascending the Holy Mountain, we are told, they were diligently reminded that what they were going to be visiting were, in fact, reproductions of the Holy Land, and that the statues they were going to be seeing were replicas of the people and events of the Bible (not, of course, replicas of statues in Jerusalem, which never existed).¹² Why, then, did the friars keep their auditors aware of the simulated nature of the spectacle before them, but at the same time vaunt its unparalleled accuracy? Numerous inscriptions throughout the complex appear to claim authenticity for its features: outside the Lord’s Sepulchre, for example, there is a stone that claims to be ‘similar in every detail to the stone slab which covers the tomb of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Jerusalem’.¹³ Yet at the same time the friars were careful not to overstate their claims. The reasons behind this circumspection reveal much about the interconnections between pilgrimage, imagination, devotion and religious images in the later Middle Ages.

At Varallo the friars defined the line between reality and simulation because they sought, as the foundation of all their other educational goals, to train their audiences in the proper uses of the imagination and memory, not to furnish them with fixed images for easy recall. This may seem paradoxical in light of the specificity of detail which the spectator encounters at every ‘station’ – and modern visitors may well complain that ‘nothing is left to the imagination’. But listen to what the Franciscan author of the popular devotional tract, the Meditations on the Life of Christ, advises in this key passage: ‘For the sake of greater impressiveness I shall tell [the events of Christ’s life] to you as they occurred or as they might have occurred according to the devout belief of the imagination and the varying interpretation of the mind.’¹⁴ For the Poor Clare (a Franciscan nun) for whom the guidebook was originally penned, the distinction between what ‘occurred’ and what ‘might have occurred’ is meant to be fluid and creative, not a dead end to interpretation. It was drawn to remind the meditator that the Evangelists, though the primary sources of information, do not tell all that Christians need to know about the Passion. ‘There are still many other things Jesus did,’ we read at the very end of John’s Gospel, ‘yet if they were written about in detail, I doubt there would be room enough in the entire world to hold the books to record them’ (21: 25). What the Gospels did tell was, of course, unimpeachably truthful, but when it came to the specifics of Christ’s suffering and death, Scripture was woefully sparse from the perspective of late medieval piety.¹⁵ Details which they passed over in silence had to be furnished by the imagination – but for the lay person this could hardly be expected to happen unaided. To feed the growing appetite for detail, writers of Passion narratives like the Meditations, following the great Franciscan theologian Bonaventure (d. 1274), practised a form of biblical exegesis that F. P. Pickering famously described as a ‘translation of ancient prophecies, metaphors, similes and symbols... into “history”‘.¹⁶ The result of their labours was a class of expanded, popular accounts of the Passion that focused the reader’s imagination on the historicity and actuality of biblical events.

Devotional authors sought to compel their readers, as the friars did their peregrinating visitors to the Sacro Monte, to fuse within themselves the roles of spectator and participant in the Passion. Believers were to cultivate the mental power to witness the events with their own, spiritual sight, deploying fragments of experience gleaned from corporeal vision and whatever else might serve as a catalyst.

And then too you must shape in your mind some people, people well known to you, to represent for you the people involved in the Passion – the person of Jesus himself, of the Virgin, Saint Peter, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Mary Magdalene, Anne, Caiaphas, Pilate, Judas and the others, every one of whom you will fashion in your mind.¹⁷

So advised the author of the Zardino de Oration, a spiritual guidebook published in Venice in 1454. Meditative practice meant learning to cast and direct the actors of one’s inner Passion play in order to make their performances as absorbing as possible. The importance of such devotional ideals for grasping the character of later medieval imagination and image-making can hardly be underestimated. In tandem with them evolved a mutual dependence between the painter’s and the spectator’s efforts at visualization. One of the best formulations of this intervisual collaboration is Michael Baxandall’s investigation of the ‘period eye’:

The painter was a professional visualizer of the holy stories. What we now easily forget is that each of his pious public was liable to be an amateur in the same line, practised in spiritual exercises that demanded a high level of visualization... The public mind was not a blank tablet on which the painters’ representations of a story or person could impress themselves; it was an active institution of interior visualization with which every painter had to get along. In this respect the fifteenth-century experience of painting was not the painting we see now so much as a marriage between the painting and the beholder’s previous visualizing activity on the same matter.¹⁸

The physical pilgrimage to the Holy Land or its European surrogate, limited in time and space, was to be matched if not surpassed in the believer’s lifetime by countless mental journeys, interior visualizations of the personages, places and events which comprised the corpus of sacred narratives. Among these narratives, the story of the Passion demanded, and rewarded, the most intensive mental efforts at ‘mystical witnessing’.

Many of the pictures illustrated in the following pages were expressly designed to facilitate such acts of ‘mystical witnessing’, but some also thematized the pilgrim’s journey and explicitly showed the patron spectating within the spectacle itself. One such picture is the so-called Wass...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 ‘A Shameful Place’: The Rise of Calvary
• 2 The Two Thieves Crucified: Bodies, Weapons and the Technologies of Pain
• 3 The Broken Body as Spectacle
• 4 Pain and Spectacle: Rituals of Punishment in Late Medieval Europe
• 5 The Wheel: Symbol, Image, Screen
• 6 The Cross and the Wheel
• 7 Dysmas and Gestas: Model and Anti-model
• 8 Image and Spectacle in the Era of Art
• Epilogue
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Photographic Acknowledgements
• Index