Retreat Guide
James Clifton
The Face: Jesus in Art was conceived and funded by the Catholic Communication Campaign of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), with additional funding from other (including non-Catholic) sources: The Dolan Family Foundations, Family Theater Productions, United Methodist Communications, Our Sunday Visitor, and The Aztec Foundation. It was co-produced by Thirteen/WNET New York and Voyager Productions.
Although funded largely from Christian sources, the film was intended to be suitable for secular contexts (such as public television). It is an art historical program based on scrupulous scholarship without implication of any proselytizing. Implicit, however, is the important role that Christianity and the Church have had in the creation of some of the most important works of world culture.
Most of the works in the film were created "before the era of art" (in Hans Belting's words), before our modern conception of what constitutes a work of art was formed. That is, although the aesthetic appeal of works became gradually more important, culminating in the "art for art's sake" creed of the late nineteenth century, most of the works in the film had primarily a religious (whether ecclesiastical or devotional) rather than aesthetic function. The film seeks to evoke the devotional history of the works by leaving room for devotional engagement by the viewers, if they wish. The film is cast in historical terms, but we may recognize that a part of the potency of these works, at least for some viewers, stems from the fact that they are part of a still vital tradition that has spanned two millennia.
The purpose of this retreat guide is to help direct that devotional engagement as well as to prompt further considerations of the intellectual, theological, and even pastoral issues raised by the film.
The Face: Jesus in Art was written by a team of professional art historians: Gauvin Bailey, Marcus Burke, James Clifton, Keith Christiansen, Charles Cooper, Kathleen Corrigan, Dorothy Kosinski, Walter Melion, David Morgan, Carol Purtle, Elizabeth Sears, and Joanna Ziegler.
Preface
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things came to be through him . . . . Through him was life and this life was the light of the human race. . . . The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. . . . And the Word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father's only son, full of grace and truth."
Who is this Word made flesh? This Christ? This Jesus? What did he look like? Christ's image, often different yet always familiar, has appeared in the art of cultures worldwide for nearly two millennia. But there are no known portraits made while he was alive–or even contemporary descriptions of his physical appearance. How then does an artist portray him? If the man Jesus is also God, as most Christians profess, should he be portrayed at all? Why the attempt to make Christ visible? What are images of Christ for?
From the third century to the twentieth, from Italy to Japan to Mexico, this is a story of the attempt–through art–to comprehend and touch the divine.
Christian images have had at least a double purpose: to strengthen the faith of the viewer and to teach the stories of the Bible, of the Church and of the lives of Christ and his followers. Many are among the greatest works in the history of art, cherished for their beauty and power apart from their religious content. Already in the fourth century after Christ's birth, images from the Christian Gospels were being promoted as the "books of the illiterate." In the seventh century, in the West, Pope Gregory the Great wrote that: "images are to be employed in churches, so that those who are illiterate might at least read by seeing on the walls what they cannot read in books." Episodes from the Bible were a constant source of inspiration for artists. But most of the details and even entire scenes were based on non-biblical texts or on the artistic imagination. There have been very few moments in history when artists and viewers have insisted on historical accuracy.
The Gospel According to Giotto
A small chapel in the north Italian town of Padua was built at the beginning of the fourteenth century on the site of an ancient Roman arena. A later writer saw this as the triumph of Christianity over paganism–a popular theme when Christians looked to the past. The chapel was built adjacent to the palace of a wealthy man named Enrico Scrovegni. Like many other patrons of the time, Scrovegni saw his donation as a good work that might atone for his sins. In this case the sin was usury–lending money for interest, considered a sin at the time. It earned Enrico's father a place in the seventh circle of Dante's inferno.
The monks of the neighboring church complained of the size and richness of this new chapel. Much of it seemed created "more for pomp, vainglory and wealth than for praise, glory and honor of God."
In the chapel, the lives of Jesus and his mother were presented by one of the most important painters in the history of European art, Giotto di Bondone. The medium is fresco in which the pigments, dissolved in water, are applied directly to wet plaster, becoming a very durable part of the wall itself. The brilliant–and expensive–blues couldn't be dissolved. They had to be applied after the plaster was dry. This unique pigment was made from grinding lapis lazuli–a stone brought to Italy from Afghanistan, thousands of miles away. Ounce for ounce the cost was far greater than covering the chapel in beaten gold.
Giotto's images are unrivaled for their clarity in story telling and the expression of human emotion. One of the aims of Giotto's commission was to portray in a cycle of frescoes all the major events from Christ's life commemorated in the church calendar.
According to the Gospel of Luke, Gabriel brings Mary the message that she would bear a son to be called Jesus. It is the moment in which the young virgin conceives the Son of God–the Incarnation–in which God takes on human flesh, becomes a human being. It is one of the central tenets of the Christian creed and the ultimate justification of all representations of Christ. In the Nativity, an angel announces Christ's birth to shepherds and Joseph sleeps. Mary hands her child over to a nurse, gazing at him with both adoration and a presentiment of his ultimate sacrifice. Her relinquishing the child is an unusual subject in western European art but Giotto uses it to explore Mary's conflicting emotions at this first moment of separation.
As an adult, Christ is baptized by his cousin the prophet John the Baptist. According to the New Testament, the Holy Spirit descends like a dove and a voice from heaven proclaims: "This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased." Following his baptism, Christ begins a life of public ministry, teaching and performing miracles. His most astonishing miracle: he raises Lazarus, four days dead.
Having taught for three years, Christ enters Jerusalem, knowing that it is there that he will meet his death. On the day before his death, Christ gathers his disciples together one last time to celebrate the Passover with them. Here, at the Last Supper, he reveals that one among them will betray him. It is Judas, identifying Christ to the arresting soldiers with a kiss. In one of the most striking images of all Giotto transforms Christ's arrest at night in the garden of Gethsemane into an epic drama of good and evil, focusing our attention on the extraordinary interlocking gazes of Christ and Judas. Judas's great yellow cloak envelops Christ, its lines leading our eyes to his face–solemn and intense.
Brought before the high priest Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea, Christ is condemned and mocked as King of the Jews, a crown of thorns pressed into his brow. His hair and beard are pulled. Christ is crucified. This is to become another central article of Christian belief. Sinless himself, by his death Christ atones for the sins of all.
After his burial and resurrection from the dead–scenes which Giotto, curiously, did not depict–Christ spent 40 days with his followers before ascending into heaven. In the words of the Apostles' Creed, recited since the fourth century, "He will come again to judge the living and the dead." Giotto has filled the entrance wall of the chapel with a great scene of the Last Judgment. Christ's left hand, palm down, condemns the damned to the horrors of Hell. His right hand, palm up, beckons the blessed to join him in heaven–and with them a hopeful Enrico Scrovegni.
The Beginnings
The search for the earliest images of Christ takes us underground, into the catacombs of Rome where the Christians buried their dead. Christ's followers were persecuted, sometimes violently, in ancient Rome and their religion was outlawed. But the catacombs were known as gathering places for Christians and tolerated as such by the pagan authorities. The images here are very unpretentious. Many are symbolic in nature. Others represent in simple form events from the Old and New Testaments. The cross–the most potent and recognizable symbol of Christianity throughout its entire history–appeared in many cryptic forms, here on a tombstone, as an anchor. An equally early symbol of Christ was the fish. The Greek word for fish is an acronym for the Greek phrase meaning: "Jesus Christ Son of God, the Savior." Similarly the first two Greek letters that make up the word Christos are Chi and Rho. These became the monogram of Christ to which two other letters were added. In a vision recorded in the Book of Revelation, Christ uses letters of the Greek alphabet to describe himself: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
Early Christian authorities rejected the adoration of idols, influenced perhaps by both the Ten Commandments which forbade the making of images and the Greek philosophical tradition that asserted the invisibility of divinity. Yet images of Christ came to play an essential role in the expression of belief.
The effort to give Christ visible form or to represent the events of his life only begins in the third century. Jesus first appears in catacomb paintings dressed in a simple tunic, without special distinction and identified only in relation to the miracles he performs, as when he raises Lazarus from the dead, offering the promise of eternal life. Christ was often shown in symbolic guise, appearing very frequently as the Good Shepherd. This image was adopted from pagan art in fact–its source can be found in images of the pastoral musician Orpheus. But it had particular resonance for Christians, because Christ spoke in the gospels of the "Good Shepherd who knows his own sheep and will lay down his life for them."
The catacombs are now stripped of their dead. Stone slabs once covered the open niches where thousands of bodies originally lay. But elaborate sarcophagi, where wealthier Christians were buried, still survive. And on some of these Christ appears as the Good Shepherd, rugged and bearded. When a pagan scene of the harvesting of grapes appears, this may be because Christ described himself as the vine, and his disciples as the branches. The vine and the grapes would become an important symbol of the sacrificial shedding of Christ's blood.
A statue in the Vatican Museum from around the year 290 is probably one of the oldest sculptures associated with Christ in existence.
There was no single image of Christ–he was shepherd, healer and miracle worker, teacher and philosopher.
Perhaps the most unexpected crossover from pagan art is found on the damaged mosaic floor of the tomb of an important Roman family. It shows the sun god re-invented as Christ, the Sun of Righteousness. Behind his head are the rays of the sun–the nimbus representing his solar divinity–a symbol of Christian imagery known as the halo.
Christ's association with the sun god may have had an important consequence. In the year 312, on the eve of an important battle, the Emperor Constantine, a self-proclaimed follower of the sun god, was reputed to have had a vision instructing him to use the Christian monogram on his battle standard. His subsequent victory effectively ushered in an era of favor for Christianity which, in time, became the official religion of the empire. In 325, Constantine presided over the Church Council of Nicaea. The Council's Creed–the Nicene Creed–became the basis for the summary of faith most widely used among Christians to this day. It affirms that the Word, God's Son, is "true God from true God, begotten not made, one in Being with the Father." Thus the Word made flesh–Jesus Christ–is both God and Man. And so the Council confirmed the doctrine that has challenged Christian artists: How to convey the image of Jesus as, at once, both God and Man.
One solution appears on a fourth-century sarcophagus. In one scene, Jesus is shown as a man making his entry into Jerusalem. However, he is also portrayed as the divine ruler in heaven seated above a personification of the cosmos. To convey his status Christ is shown handing out the law like an emperor to Saints Peter and Paul, the apostolic martyrs of the church at Rome.
The Emperor Constantine and his successors began sponsoring Christian art. Regal and imposing, Christ dominates the space of churches in the monumental mosaics of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Mosaics had traditionally been reserved for floor decoration but Christian artists adapted the technique of fitting together the small pieces of colored stone and glass to decorate the walls of basilicas being built throughout the empire. This was a technique that could only be financed on an imperial scale. Real gold and silver had to be fused into the glass along with other rare and precious colors. In the great apse mosaic in Santa Pudenziana in Rome, made shortly after the imperial edict in 380 declaring Christianity the state religion, the bearded Christ is the teacher, speaking to his apostles and the congregation, but he is also God, "true God of true God," enthroned.
With the fall of Rome in the fifth century, the northern Italian city of Ravenna became the capital of the Western Empire. One of the most splendid early Byzantine churches to survive from this period is the Basilica of San Vitale. Preserved are the superb mosaic panels emphasizing the strength of imperial power. The Emperor Justinian is shown amongst his entourage. Alongside, his armed guard displays Christ's monogram on his shield. Above this imperial procession is the image of a youthful Christ in glory, seated astride the globe of the cosmos. In his hand is the scroll with seven seals as written in the Book of Revelation. He offers the promise of paradise to the church's founder, Archbishop Ecclesius, who appears with the church's patron, Saint Vitalis. At his feet is The Garden of Eden, with the four rivers described in Genesis. Above the altar Christ is again symbolized as the Mystic Lamb, a visionary image also taken from the Book of Revelation.
In the remote mountains of the Sinai, hermits came in the fourth century to the supposed site of Moses's encounter with God in the burning bush, at the foot of the mountain where he was said to have received the Ten Commandments. In the middle of the sixth century, the Emperor Justinian built a church and monastery. St. Catherine's is the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world.
In the apse of Justinian's church–fully visible only from the sacred space around the altar–is a magnificent mosaic, nearly a millennium and a half old, of the Transfiguration of Christ. Just as God had revealed himself to Moses in the Burning Bush and in the Law delivered on Mount Sinai, so divinity was revealed to the apostles Peter, James, and John on Mt. Tabor when Jesus was transfigured before their eyes. The Gospel of Matthew says: "His face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him."
Preserved within the walls of the Monastery of Mt. Sinai is an incomparable collection of religious art that has survived through centuries of political and religious turmoil. In the East, religious images—also known as icons—became the object of intense devotion. St. Catherine's monastery houses thousands of them. Icons have been carried in processions, served as objects of prayer, venerated with incense, touching, and kissing. They have, in return, been expected to work miracles, protect the faithful and the empire, and even defend themselves against attacks by non-believers. The remains of generations of monks are preserved as a testament to their enduring faith.
Among the most precious objects here are the icons painted in encaustic–a wax medium–on wooden panels. Preserved at St. Catherine's is one of the oldest icons in the world, a beautifully executed encaustic painting that shows Christ as the Pantokrator–the Ruler of the World. It is an image of Christ that for centuries–with variations ranging from benign omnipotence to frightening severity–dominated the vaults of churches–symbolic heavens–in the East and as far west as Florence, Italy.
Search for the Authentic Image
A suffering Christ, a ruler, a judge, a teacher, a shepherd, young, old–there was no single image of Christ. How could his true appearance be known?
Housed in the Laurentian Library in Florence is one of the earliest surviving illustrated Gospels. These rare 6th century images from the Rabbullah Gospels were painted in Syria on vellum, or sheep skin. This image depicts the Ascension–the last appearance Christ made to the Apostles after his resurrection when he was lifted up to heaven in a cloud.
In a climate of intense religious devotion, there arose a deep longing to see the authentic face of Christ. What remained to serve as a focus of devotion? Had Christ anticipated this spiritual need and left behind an image of himself? Could the faithful gaze upon his true countenance?
Around 500 years after his death, stories began circulating of miraculous portraits that had been made while Jesus still walked the earth. The most revered of these were images said to have come into being "miraculously"–not made by human hands. In one popular story, King Abgar, ruler of Edessa in Syria fell ill. He sent a messenger to bring the miracle-working Jesus to his kingdom to cure him. But Jesus could not go there. The messenger attempted to paint Christ's likeness but the glory streaming from his face prevented it. So Christ took a cloth and pressed it to his face. His countenance remained–in Greek, the cloth became known as a Mandylion. When King Abgar looked upon the desired image, he was healed and became a believer. Treasured as a relic, something Jesus had touched–the Mandylion was also valued as proof that Christ himself permitted the practice of image-making, that it was legitimate for artists to paint images of the deity–as they could not in the Jewish or Islamic faith. The Greeks brought the Mandylion to the imperial capital, Constantinople in the tenth century and housed it in a chapel in the imperial palace where it became the most revered relic for the next 250 years. In 1204 the Crusaders sacked and looted Constantinople, and the Mandylion disappeared forever. But copies of it, and copies of copies, abounded–each thought to carry some part of the original's supernatural power.
One early replica of the Mandylion, made in Constantinople, was donated to a monastery in the Italian city of Genoa in 1384. There it still resides. Protected by a silver frame, the ghostly image was understood to be a True Likeness of the Savior, and it affected representations of Christ throughout the Christian world.
Not every Christian was eager to see images of Christ. From early Christian times, voices were raised against making and venerating such images. In the Byzantine empire, between 726 and 843, images of Christ were outlawed. One faction within the Byzantine church banned all further use of icons on pain of death. All existing images had to be smashed, covered over or thrown onto the fire. Only certain symbolic images such as the cross were permitted. For over a hundred years, a civil war raged throughout the Byzantine empire. Iconoclasts–the destroyers of images, pitched against iconophiles–the friends of images.
The vehemence of the controversy can be detected from this manuscript illustration. A standard Eastern-style crucifixion shows Christ in a long robe being stabbed in the side by the spear of the Roman centurion, Longinus. This image is contrasted below with an iconoclast, a smasher-of-images, whitewashing over the painting of Christ. In other words, those who destroy his sacred image are as guilty as those who crucified him in the first place.
After the iconoclasm was defeated in 843, many of the destroyed or whitewashed images were restored. The Emperor Leo VI confirmed the veneration of sacred images. It is significant that among the first public portrayals of Christ after the ending of the iconoclasm was this mosaic in the entrance to what was then the greatest church in Christendom–Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. As Christ sits enthroned in glory, at his feet a penitent emperor kneels in submission, pleading for forgiveness. Above him, the Mother of God–the special protector of Constantinople–uses the same gesture to intercede on the emperor's behalf.
The Great Apse inside Santa Sophia had already been decorated with a new mosaic of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child on her lap, replacing the one that had been torn down during the iconoclasm. The inscription alongside says: "The images which the impostors had cast down, here, pious emperors have again set up."
In the West, making religious images was never as controversial as in the Byzantine Empire. The piety of the Middle Ages desired direct access to the Lord and his saints. Material objects that had been in contact with the body of Christ while he was here on earth were eagerly sought. In Rome, the Lateran Palace was the residence of the medieval popes. There they amassed one of the greatest collections of relics in the world. In 1277, Pope Nicholas III rebuilt the papal chapel, which had been destroyed by fire, and decorated it with paintings, precious stone revetments, and sumptuous mosaics.
The chapel was called the Sancta Sanctorum, the "Holy of Holies," because of its precious relics, which pilgrims still come to venerate. They climb the 28 steps of the Scala Sancta–the "holy stairs"–on their knees. Inside is the most famous icon in Rome. It is a full-length image of Christ, painted on canvas mounted on wood, now thought by scholars to date around 600 A.D. Covered since the thirteenth century with a silver casing, only its repainted face is now visible. This is a powerful image, haunting in its directness, and it was believed in the Middle Ages to be a miraculous one. The painting, it was said, was begun by the evangelist Luke but completed by an angel.
The most popular so-called "true likeness" in the West was preserved not far away at the Vatican, in St. Peter's. It became an object of intense devotion in the later Middle Ages. This was the sudarium, meaning literally "sweat cloth," also known as the Veil of Veronica, or simply the veronica. The story surrounding it tells of a woman who received from Christ a miraculous imprint of his face. It was said to have the power to cure people who looked upon it. This woman came to be called Veronica–her very name meaning "True Image." According to the most popular version of the story which emerged around 1300, Veronica wiped the face of Christ on his way to Calvary, out of compassion. His image remained imprinted on her cloth.
In 1216, Pope Innocent III introduced a special prayer addressed to the Holy Face, the first of many such prayers and hymns recited for centuries. Innocent and his successors granted spiritual benefits for those who said the prayer in front of the Veil. A miniature in a manuscript shows Pope Sixtus IV displaying the veronica to pilgrims in the Jubilee Year of 1475.
The fame of the veronica began to spread throughout the West. Pilgrims flocked to Rome to see this likeness of the face they hoped to gaze upon in heaven. Gazing on the image, the believer could have a face-to-face encounter with the Lord. Artists in the Western church, unlike those in the East, did not feel bound to copy an image, no matter how miraculous. They improvised and showed Jesus in many variations. The unknown German artist who painted this panel about 1400–called the Master of St. Veronica–showed the kneeling Veronica holding an oversized image of the triumphant Christ in ideal beauty. But the same artist painted this panel. Here the Christ on Veronica's veil is a man of sorrows, bearing the crown of thorns, beaten and bleeding, suffering for the sins of humanity.
The Suffering Christ
Scenes of Christ's suffering and death were rare in early Christian art. The cedar wood doors of Santa Sabina in Rome are an astonishing survival from the fifth century. The carved crucifixion scene shows, for the first time, Christ between two thieves. Strangely, the crosses have been omitted–only the figures with outstretched arms and nails in their hands can be seen. The bearded head of Christ defies death with open eyes.
During the later Middle Ages, Northern Europe was swept by a devotional fervor focused on the Passion of Jesus Christ–intent on re-experiencing the sufferings that culminated in his sacrificial death on the cross. Artists such as Hieronymous Bosch became preoccupied with representing the gruesome horror and psychic tragedy of this central event in the narrative of Christ's life. There were precedents in the art of the Byzantine East, but nothing approaching the veritable explosion of such images in Northern Europe. Between approximately 1300 and 1500, Jesus's humanity was made emphatically present to the viewer in the vivid depiction of his suffering and death. Many northern European sculptures and paintings of Christ's Passion are not easy for today's viewers to look at, let alone comprehend. Some are deeply disturbing.
One of the most celebrated images of Christ's Passion is in a monumental altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald, painted for a hospital dedicated to Saint Anthony of Egypt, in the Alsatian town of Isenheim. Grünewald's Altarpiece has the
Crucifixion as the centerpiece of a vast and complex composition, teeming with a multitude of strange images and figures. It was viewed by victims of a disease known as St. Anthony's Fire, which plagued the afflicted with raging sores on their body. Saint Anthony is tormented by demons that lift him up into the air, punching and kicking him, pulling his hair and beard.
But Grünewald reserved the most extreme suffering for Christ on the cross. A nineteenth-century visitor wrote: "Grünewald strikes you dumb with the fearsome nightmare of a Calvary. It is as if a typhoon of art had had been let loose and was sweeping you away and you need a few minutes to recover from the impact, to surmount the impression of awful horror made by the huge crucified Christ."
And following this terrible image comes the promise of Resurrection. In a flash of mystical power, the Son of God is transformed, cured, made whole–and so too would all who believed in him be healed. Christ is radiant in a starry sky; a beacon of hope for those left suffering on earth.
Artists in the fourteenth century began to represent the so-called "weapons"–the instruments of the Passion, known as the
arma Christi. Among them, the column against which Christ was tied; the flail and branches with which he was beaten; hands that had struck him; the crown of thorns; the hammer and nails that had fixed him to the cross; the lance that had pierced his side.
Many devotional works were very small, meant to be held, to be viewed from close by. Albrecht Dürer's
Man of Sorrows from 1511 was published with a devotional poem addressed to the viewer in Christ's voice. He begs for an end to the pain inflicted by the sins that stab him, the guilty acts that flog him, causing cruel torment.
This kind of devotional art was based on the premise that the humanity of Jesus in pain could be pictured artistically–and that such imagery could shift the ground of belief inward, toward moments experienced alone.
In Italy, the discovery of single-point perspective allowed for many new and original compositions. The startling foreshortening of this painting by the Padua, Andrea Mantegna, shows the dead Christ lying on a marble slab, wept over by his mother and Saint John. The wounds to his hands and feet have a particular prominence.
Even as images of the suffering Christ served highly personal devotions, they also supported Church teachings, among them the doctrine of the Real Presence–that the eucharistic bread and wine of the mass become Christ's body and blood. This doctrine was most effectively portrayed by the Mass of Saint Gregory. The bread miraculously turned into a figure of Christ himself, often shown pouring his blood into a chalice.
In the papal city of Rome, just before the outbreak of the Reformation that called into question much of the Church's teaching, the eucharistic wafer was made the center of one of the most extraordinary visualizations of belief–a fresco created in the library of Pope Julius II in the Vatican Palace where Raphael's paintings represent Philosophy, Poetry, Justice, and Theology. The Eucharist is the fulcrum in a marvelously complex composition of straight lines, arcs, triangles, and circles projected in three dimensions. Raphael places it at the intersection of the Church–represented by a horizontal arc of earthly figures of popes, theologians, Fathers and Doctors of the Church–and God–the vertical line of the Holy Trinity, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit–surrounded by saints in heaven. The resurrected Christ in heavenly glory, displays the wounds in his hands, but he is no suffering Man of Sorrows. His body and face are of surpassing beauty, befitting the divine.
In the fifteenth century a letter purporting to be an eyewitness description of Christ's appearance circulated widely in Europe. Probably a forgery of the Middle Ages, it was none the less taken seriously and is directly connected to a popular, often repeated, type of Christ:
His hair is the color of an unripe hazelnut, parted on top in the manner of the Nazarenes and falling straight to the ears but curling further below, darker and more shining, waving over his shoulders. He has a smooth and very serene brow with no wrinkles or marks on his face. His beard, of the color of his hair, is full but not long and parted in the middle. His glance shows simplicity adorned with maturity. His blue-grey eyes are clear and commanding…. So that it is rightly said, in the words of the prophet: "he is beautiful above the sons of men."
It is a type of Christ we will encounter again in Part Two of "The Face." We will follow the changing image of Christ as it spread worldwide from the Renaissance to the present.
Christians have tried to comprehend and touch the divine through their art for nearly two millennia. From the earliest depictions through the late Middle Ages, Jesus has appeared in many guises—shepherd, miracle worker, teacher, philosopher, ruler, sufferer . . . God . . . man. In this second part of "The Face," the story stretches to five continents and our own time.
The Beautiful Christ
Fourteenth-century Italy saw the beginning of what is called the Renaissance. Philosophers, writers, architects, and artists saw it as a rebirth of ancient culture, but Italy remained profoundly Christian.
Among the most celebrated images of Christ in western art are those in the Dominican Convent of San Marco, at the heart of the Italian city of Florence. In the mid-fifteenth century, the banker Cosimo de' Medici funded the extensive rebuilding of the Convent. One of the monks, Fra Angelico, and his assistants painted the walls with frescoes which were an integral part of the friars' daily lives.
One of the most moving images can be seen in the corner of the cloister. The cross of Christ is embraced by Saint Dominic, the founder of the Order. There are no other figures in the fresco, and the low horizon gives the impression of being at the world's edge. Originally, there was neither the marble frame nor the flanking figures we see today, and the effect must have been that of a window on infinity.
Fresco was the one artistic medium that allowed artists to express themselves quickly on a large scale. The masonry walls were covered with rough plaster. When it was dry, the artist sketched a guide outline and divided the design to determine which section would be worked on each day. Surface plaster was added to each section and painted while it was wet, with pigments that were then absorbed, becoming permanent as the fresco dried.
There are frescoes in each of the cells in which the individual friars slept, studied, and prayed. Divine light plays an active role in the depiction of the Transfiguration. So intense is this explosion of white energy at the core of a yellow background that the disciples cover their eyes: "His face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light."
The devotional focus on Christ's sufferings was as intense in Italy as in Northern Europe, but in Italy a different artistic tradition had arisen–part of the heritage of classical antiquity–in which physical beauty was paramount. In keeping with their exalted status, the characters of the Bible were to be made more beautiful than any single human could be. This idealization was especially crucial for Christ, whose beauty and gentleness–even in pain–were signs of the suffusion of his divinity in his humanity.
This calm, beatific Jesus sits at the center of one of the most famous Christian images in the world: Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper in a former Dominican refectory in the Italian city of Milan, painted at the end of the fifteenth century. Leonardo chose the moment of greatest psychological tension: "While they were eating, he said, ‘Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.' Deeply distressed at this, they began to say to him one after another, ‘Surely it is not I, Lord?'"
Leonardo accentuates the drama by grouping the twelve disciples into four groups of three–a brilliant mathematical solution. With their gestures Leonardo gave voice to his figures. And it is their animation that draws us to the eloquent silence of Christ.
Leonardo's experimental technique reduced the painting to a virtual ruin within a few decades of his lifetime. Nevertheless, it has been endlessly engraved, copied, and reproduced. It is Leonardo's Christ–gentle yet firm, human yet divinely beautiful, mournful yet accepting his destiny–that has dominated the popular imagination in the five hundred years since its creation.
As Leonardo was painting his Last Supper, a brash Florentine sculptor, only 23 years of age, promised to produce the most beautiful marble statue in all of Rome. Michelangelo's Pietà in the Basilica of St. Peter's in Rome, is now one of the most famous sculptures in the world. The completed work was immediately hailed as a miracle, a perfect work of art. Contemporaries pointed in particular to the body of Christ, the great beauty, grace, and harmony of its members, the realistic detail of muscles, veins, and nerves over the framework of bones.
As cultures before and after each discovered their ideal ways to make the divine accessible, so too Michelangelo and his culture were confident that through the excellence of their art they could approach the divine. For them, only a perfectly beautiful figure could begin to do justice to the God made human. Ancient pagan sculptures like this statue of Apollo at the Vatican were admired as the ideal of beauty. For several decades after his Roman Pietà, Michelangelo's Christ figures were beauty perfected, formed in the tradition of ancient pagan sculpture.
Heroic like an antique athlete or god, the Risen Christ is the subject of this statue for the Roman Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Michelangelo's Christ is both completely divine and completely human. For the artist, beauty was the manifestation of the divine on earth. Beauty was also the means through which humans could seek God. "My eyes, eager for beautiful things, and my soul no less for its salvation, have no other means by which they may ascend to heaven than to gaze on all such things."
Michelangelo's relentless pursuit of physical perfection reached its apogee in the great wall painting of the most famous chapel in the world: the private chapel of the Popes, the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican in Rome. Some 400 figures enact the drama of the Last Judgment, each one of them, saint or sinner, a hyper-muscular, pluperfect superhuman. At the center of the apocalyptic maelstrom is Christ, with the features of Apollo, the pagan Sun God, his hand raised enigmatically, far from the conventional double gesture of blessing and condemnation of earlier Last Judgments.
A full half century after he produced the most beautiful sculpture in Rome, Michelangelo, now an old man, returned to the subject of the Pietà with a sculptural group nearly seven and a half feet high. Intending it for his own tomb, he carved his own features into the standing figure of Nicodemus–one of the followers of Christ who helped prepare his body for burial. Michelangelo worked on the sculpture for eight years, but he was either unable or unwilling to finish it, and even attacked it with hammer and chisel, but it's not known why. A contemporary suggested that Michelangelo's ideas were simply too awesome to be expressed in earthly materials.
As Michelangelo struggled to depict the divine, the Protestant Reformation was changing the culture of Northern Europe. While Martin Luther accepted the role of images in churches and for religious education, many Reformation leaders, fearing idolatry and stressing the presence of God in the written and spoken word, rejected the use of religious images for worship.
The Dutch city of Amsterdam was a prosperous commercial center, whose official religion was Calvinism. But people of other faiths, including Catholics and Jews, were tolerated here more than anywhere else in Europe, and Christian art flourished. There, Rembrandt van Rijn became one of the greatest visual interpreters of the Bible.
In a series of small paintings of Christ's head done in the mid-1600s, he and his pupils created an image of great tenderness and humanity. Painted after live models, they may be a result of the artist's study of the Jews who lived around him. Rembrandt's development of a very personal image of Christ may also make him the first artist to take account of the Jewishness of Jesus.
Rembrandt also involved himself personally in the supreme moment of Christ's life. In the Raising of the Cross, he reduces the brutal scene to a minimum. Christ's meager body is heaved upright. At the fulcrum of the action Rembrandt portrays himself assisting in Christ's terrible death, as if in public confession of his own sinfulness. In the Descent from the Cross, Christ's body is lowered down. This time Rembrandt paints himself as the young man whose face presses against Christ's abdomen in a gesture of profound and familiar love.
One of Rembrandt's most famous etchings, on which he probably worked for much of the 1640s, depicts several episodes recounted in the nineteenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel. Jesus preaches in Judea, followed by the multitudes that he healed. A richly dressed man with his back to the viewer, stands at a distance, representing Christ's warning: "many who are first, will be last: and the last will be first." At the upper left are some Pharisees who tested him about divorce. The poor and the ill press closely to Christ. Christ welcomes the children his apostles tried to turn away. The seated figure with his head in his hand must be the young man who could not give up his riches to follow Jesus. At the center of the composition stands the figure of Jesus, mild and slight, gesturing calmly, captivating the audience with divine power emanating from a very human figure.
This gentle Christ, even small in scale, dominates Rembrandt's famous Supper at Emmaus with quiet authority. The risen Christ had joined two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus where he dined with them, but they did not recognize him until he revealed himself in the breaking of the bread. The radiant Christ looks up to his father as he calmly breaks the bread. One disciple leans forward slightly to peer intently at Christ, while the other raises his hands in prayerful worship. Where once he had represented revelation as a shock to the bodily system, the mature Rembrandt now shows us the inner workings of the spirit, guided by a tender, human Jesus.
The Worldwide Spread of the Image
Among the more remote of early Christian communities was that in Ethiopia. Already established in the fourth century, by the end of the fifth, it had adopted the monophysite doctrine declared heretical in Rome and Constantinople. Monophysites hold that Christ has only one divine nature. The Ethiopian Empire developed a strong national church that helped it resist the advance of Islam.
Some of the earliest surviving representations of the Gospel stories are illuminated manuscripts from the early fourteenth century. More elaborate portrayals in the early fifteenth century, as in this image of Christ's Baptism show strong links with Coptic imagery.
There is an emphasis on redemption and resurrection rather than on suffering and sacrifice. Many devotional images show Christ raising Adam and Eve from their graves. As the Apostle Paul's first letter to the Corinthians promises: "just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life." Images of the Holy Trinity are frequent, but the three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not differentiated, as was customary elsewhere, but shown as three identical paternal figures.
In the seventeenth century missionaries from Portugal brought new influences into Ethiopian devotional art as in this icon based on the Western Veronica image.
Christian art came to Central and South America in the sixteenth century with the arrival of Spaniards and Portuguese, who added large portions of this "New World" to their empires and sought to convert indigenous American populations to Christianity. Franciscans, Augustinians, Dominicans, and Jesuits created missions to the various native nations–what the Spanish called "Indian republics"–transforming them culturally, linguistically, and theologically.
In the refectory of a Franciscan Convent in the old Inca capital of Cuzco, Peru, there is a familiar image. The Last Supper, painted around 1700, demonstrates that the image of Christ as a European was transplanted to the New World. But the local delicacies of avocados and roast guinea pig that the disciples were about to eat make for an interesting innovation.
Many South American artists had been trained in Spain or by Spanish artists who had immigrated to the New World. The resulting paintings–in this instance the Adoration of the Magi by the Mexican Balthazar Echave Rioja–are highly European in style. New World artists also adapted traditional styles and materials to new, Christian subject matter. Mosaics made of countless fragments of the brilliant feathers of hummingbirds, parrots, and other exotic birds, were highly prized in Mexico and were often sent back to Europe as luxury gifts.
In the New World, Spanish Catholicism confronted native religions which were steeped in death and blood sacrifice of human victims, and whose art included many images of flayed gods and their ritual victims. Images of a tortured Christ found resonance with the old religious ways and, at the same time, were not offensive to the new religious leaders. A Bolivian processional painting has a conventional image of Christ crowned with thorns on the front. But it is also painted on the reverse, and shows his scourged back releasing a torrent of blood.
There are European antecedents for most of the Christian imagery in the New World, but they were developed in ways and spread to an extent unencountered in Europe.
The Holy Trinity was often expressed as three identical Christ-like triplets or as an image of Christ with three faces on one head. Opponents argued that the triple image was too easily mistaken for heathen gods such as the multi-headed deities found in India. The imagery was eventually suppressed and specifically condemned at the Latin American church council of 1774 at Santa Fe de Bogotá, in what is now Colombia, but "triplet trinities" continued to be painted into the twentieth century.
In the eighteenth century, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus became, and remains, extremely popular in Latin America. Surrounded by God the Father, saints, angels, Christ's disembodied heart–crowned with thorns and surmounted by a cross, and cut by a lance on one side–glows with the fire of love. The eucharistic wafer on the front of the heart is a reminder of Christ's perpetual sacrifice in the mass.
The most recognizable image of Christ in Latin America surmounts the summit of Corcovado, towering 2300 feet above the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is not so much a religious monument as a political one. Although it was not completed until 1931, Christ the Redeemer was intended to celebrate the centenary in 1922 of Brazil's independence from Portugal. It confirms the cultural dominance of the Christianity that the Portuguese had brought to Brazil centuries earlier, but perhaps also shows that Christ himself is now distinct from past political domination.
Immigrants, missionaries, crusaders, and traders brought illuminated bibles, icons, and crucifixes to the peoples of the East in the Middle Ages. But the greatest period of Christian imagery in Asia came in the wake of new explorations and conquests by the Portuguese and Spanish in the sixteenth century. Missionaries arrived in China, Japan, Southeast and Central Asia. They erected churches, brought pictures and statues of Christ, and even gave images to the Emperors and warlords. They also staged elaborate unveilings where large oil paintings of Christ the Savior or the Madonna and Child were revealed before thousands of onlookers who were said to have been moved to convert.
This silk hanging showing the Last Judgment was produced in Vietnam in the eighteenth century.
Painted in the late 1580s at the Mughal court in India is possibly the earliest Crucifixion in the Islamic tradition. The figures are dressed in European and Armenian clothing, painted from the artist's observation of the small local Jesuit mission at Fatehput Sikri. Of all overtly Christian images, the Crucifixion is possibly the most shocking to Muslims, but the Emperor Akbar was very interested in world religions.
Hindu craftsmen of Madras working for the Armenian community in the eighteenth century produced this painted cotton banner. Some painted him on silk or paper scrolls to be hung in the home in place of Buddhist and Daoist household deities. Others painted Christ in brilliant colors on wooden or copper panels and enclosed them in lacquer triptychs inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl designed to be carried on long journeys for private prayer.
These images became a vital part of Asian Christianity, helping people endure times of intolerance and persecution. In Japan, the power of these images was felt by Christians and their persecutors alike. In the 1620s, the government forced Christians to deny their faith by stamping on paintings and bronze plaques of Christ and the Madonna. Many preferred death to doing so. Christians preserved and secretly venerated such images for two-and-a-half centuries until policies toward Christianity were relaxed.
The Modern Era
Even as the Church was spreading its influence throughout the world, its hold on European society was weakening. Through the turmoil and change of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the institution of the Church and its traditional imagery were buffeted by tremendous change. As there were fewer and fewer commissions for works of art from the Church, the function of art also changed dramatically. No longer necessarily the expression of beliefs held in common, whether those of the Church or society at large, art became more overtly the personalized expression of the artist.
Perhaps the most personal image of Jesus, from the end of the nineteenth century, is by the Belgian artist, James Ensor. His manipulation of New Testament iconography is anything but traditional and is clearly remote from conventional devotional imagery. In fact, Ensor identifies directly with Christ, boldly equating the misunderstanding of his art with the persecution of Christ. This theme culminates in a canvas of epic proportions, over eight feet high and fourteen feet long. It refers to the Palm Sunday story of Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem. This traditional subject is conflated, however, with the themes and images of the persecuted artist, with the grotesque masks and skulls of carnival, church processions, with political demonstration. In Ensor's theater of human life, the main theme is his bitter critique of the viciousness and stupidity that he feels characterizes human nature. It is the artist himself who identifies with the suffering and pain of Christ.
Emil Nolde, one of the foremost painters of German Expressionism, often explored Christian imagery. In 1911 and 1912 he executed a nine-part series of large canvases devoted to the life of Christ. The paintings are built with simple and direct forms, and are vividly alive with brilliant colors. Nolde's religious paintings are not so much accurate depictions or interpretations of biblical texts, as intensely personal expressions of deep emotion. Nolde said: "If I were tied to the letter of the Scriptures and rigid dogma, I believe I could not have painted these profoundly felt paintings. I had to be artistically free–not have God before me, like a steely Assyrian ruler, but God in me, hot and holy like Christ's love."
In 1938, five years after the National Socialists came to power in Germany and one year before war engulfed Europe, Marc Chagall, a Russian Jew, painted his White Crucifixion. The crucified Christ, bathed in a glowing white light emanating from above, wears a Jewish prayer shawl. At the foot of the cross glows the seven-armed menorah. Christ is an oasis of calm, his face gentle and pacific. All around are desecration, lamentation, and disaster. Chagall pushes the subject away from specific theology to an allegory of universal suffering that embraces all humankind, regardless of religion.
At the same time that avant-garde artists re-figured Jesus through the lens of a stylistic modernism that was often incomprehensible to many viewers, more traditional artists and illustrators defined their own image of Jesus for mass consumption. A young commercial artist in Chicago named Warner Sallman created what is perhaps the most widely distributed image of Jesus of all time. Painted in 1940, Sallman's Head of Christ was made instantly popular when the USO and many congregations gave it to millions of American servicemen during World War II. Carrying the image into war, young GI's could look to it as a spiritual guide, as a reminder of life back home, and even as a good luck piece. After the war, Sallman's portrait of Christ and several other pictures he painted during the 1940s and '50s were widely distributed among Christians of all denominations who used the imagery in classrooms and in the home.
But the physical appearance of the historical Jesus has not always, or even primarily, been artists' concern, and images of him are as varied as the artists that have made them. The South Carolinian William H. Johnson was trained in New York and spent a decade in Europe absorbing the art of the Expressionists. But after his return to New York in 1938, he and several other African-American artists began to produce Christian images that cast the participants as blacks. The effect–as with countless European, Asian, and African images of Christ–is to confirm Christ's humanity by a direct appeal to the viewer's own cultural context.
The emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s further challenged the dominant portrayal of Jesus as a Euro-American white man. Fred Carter, a lay Baptist preacher and commercial artist in California, has produced thousands of biblical images for use in African-American religious instructional materials. His 1987 image of Christ in Gethsemane began with Warner Sallman's well-known composition. But Carter may have found the Sallman image less than appropriately masculine, for he shows Christ with bulging muscles and hands gripped in a strenuous spiritual battle between his will to life and the will of his heavenly father.
As Carter was making Christ's Agony in the Garden meaningful to his viewers, Andy Warhol, in dozens of paintings, was recycling Leonardo's Last Supper–one of the most reproduced images in Christian art, one that is so familiar that it almost becomes invisible. With the jarring juxtaposition of famous image and corporate labels, Warhol makes the Last Supper visible again, and viewers become aware of how much they take it for granted. The elements of popular commercial culture become signifiers of sacred meaning and tools for recovering the lost significance of divine mysteries in the midst of everyday life: the dove of Dove soap becomes the Holy Spirit, General Electric the "light of the world."
The Lord of Light
"I am the light of the world," says Christ in John's Gospel, " Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of Life."
By the end of the nineteenth century one of the most widely known pictures of Christ was the work of British artist William Holman Hunt. The title of the painting–Light of the World–was taken from a verse in John's Gospel. The public response to this modern, unconventional representation of Christ with a lantern was, at first muted, even contemptuous. But it became the most popular and influential image of Christ in the English-speaking world.
Christ says of himself in the Book of Revelation, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me." Inspired by this, Holman Hunt shows a door which is the door to the human soul, choked with weeds and never opened. Christ is shown as a prophet, a priest and a king. The lantern he bears is a symbol for the word of God and the light of conscious. The light emanating from his halo is the light of peace and the hope of salvation.
A "theology of light" was pervasive in the Middle Ages that sought to connect the beautiful things made by hand to the source of all light and beauty. The twelfth-century Abbot Suger did so when he described the gilt doors of his abby church, saying "Bright is the noble work; but . . . the work should brighten the minds so that they may travel ...to the True Light where Christ is the true door."
Rising high above the medieval French city of Chartres is the Cathedral of Notre Dame, rebuilt on a superhuman scale after a fire in 1194. The architecture is other-worldly, awing and overwhelming the visitor. Gothic cathedrals were veritable cities of God . . . earthly temples representing the heavenly city of Jerusalem.
In the Great South Rose window, Christ appears surrounded by 24 elders. He is seated on a throne, in the midst of "a halo as brilliant as an emerald," in the words of the Book of Revelation. And "from the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings, and peals of thunder. Seven flaming torches burned in front of the throne which are the seven spirits of God. In front of the throne was something that resembled a sea of glass like crystal."
Innovations in building technology allowed for soaring vaulted naves undreamt of before. The walls were pierced with vast windows of radiant light that gleamed like the vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. Light flowing through the vibrant colors of stained glass windows gives to the figures of Christ and his followers, and to the episodes of his life and other stories from the Bible, the natural beauty of precious stones.
For Abbot Suger and his contemporaries the beauty of these glorious objects was not an end in itself. It placed the viewer on a plane above the ordinary and on a path to heaven. Suger wrote as his own contemplation of it, "I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world."
Beauty alone has never been the object of most of those who built, painted, sculpted, or carved, to make visible this Jesus who left behind no proven image or even description in words of his appearance. He appears in art in many ways–from king of kings and Lord of lords to gentle rabbi, compassionate friend, and suffering man of sorrows. He has been imagined in the guise of every civilization. It may seem, then, as if the Jesus whom artists and their cultures portray is entirely an ideal projection of themselves. Yet for him to be made visible in such a variety of images, when no one authentic image is possible, surely there is something more to this than our human needs. If Christ is, as he has been called, "the image of the invisible God"–of that God, in whose image humanity is said to be made–then is it any wonder that the faces given to Jesus Christ are as numerous as the peoples of the earth?
The film was constrained in its material for several reasons, and it may be useful to consider in greater detail some of the works or ideas in the film or even things not directly touched on in the film.
Search for the Authentic Image
The film does not describe the theological issues involved in the iconoclastic controversy. Both sides–the iconoclasts (destroyers of images) and the iconodules (venerators of images)–were in agreement in trinitarian and christological theology: that the Trinity consists of three distinct persons (hypostases); that Christ is of the same substance (ousia; that is, that he is homoousias = identical in essence) as God the Father and the Holy Spirit; that Christ, though con-substantial with the other two persons of the Trinity is, unlike them, himself of two different but indivisible natures–divine and human (and shares the divine nature with the other two persons of the Trinity); that Christ is the "image of the invisible God" (2 Corinthians 4:4); that God the Father is uncircumscribable.
Iconoclasts charged iconodules with two possible errors in making an image of Christ: either the artist has attempted to circumscribe God the Father (since Christ is of the same substance as God the Father), or he has divided the two, indivisible natures of Christ, depicting only the human nature. On a practical level, iconoclasts charged iconodules with worshiping idols, since the images were made of base, corruptible, "lifeless" matter.
Iconodules emphasized the Incarnation and the economy (as opposed to theology) of Christ; that is, Christ's appearance on earth, his suffering and death as a human in order to redeem humans, allowed his portrayal as a human. The controversy derived in part from a fundamental difference in views on images themselves and their relation to the imaged. Iconoclasts assumed that images were of the same substance as the imaged; in the words of the iconoclast emperor Constantine V, a true image was "identical in essence with that which it portrays" (using the term homoousias adopted from trinitarian theology); thus they accepted only the Eucharist as an image of Christ. Iconodules argued that the image was a symbol (or antetype) of the prototype, representing only the person depicted in the image, but not that person's substance; thus veneration or worship (latria) before an image passed through the image to the person represented (the prototype), and the charge of idolatry was avoided.
The Suffering Christ
The importance of visual imagery in devotions from the late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century is manifest in the plenitude of images which concretize a trend in devotional literature exhorting the devotee to imagine himself or herself as present at the great events of sacred history. Paintings of episodes from Christ's life were sometimes set in recognizable local places where the artist and viewers lived. The popular Meditations on the Life of Christ by Pseudo-Bonaventure, for example, includes numerous injunctions like: "observe everything well," "you must learn all the things said and done as though you were present," and "you go with them" (Pseudo-Bonaventure 1961, pp. 15, 16, 56, 60-61, 320, and passim). The author calls the reader to witness Christ's terrible beating:
The Lord is therefore stripped and bound to a column and scourged in various ways. He stands naked before them all, in youthful grace and shamefacedness, beautiful in form above the sons of men, and sustains the harsh and grievous scourges on His innocent, tender, pure, and lovely flesh. The Flower of all flesh and of all human nature is covered with bruises and cuts. The royal blood flows all about, from all parts of His body. Again and again, repeatedly, closer and closer, it is done, bruise upon bruise, and cut upon cut, until not only the torturers but also the spectators are tired; then He is ordered untied. Here, then, consider Him diligently for a long time; and if you do not feel compassion at this point, you may count yours a heart of stone. (Pseudo-Bonaventure 1961, pp. 328-29)
Devotional writers (and, with them, visual artists) increasingly dwelt on Christ's suffering, interpolating details into the laconic scriptural accounts, relying on non-canonical texts, other devotional writings and visions, prophetic scripture understood to refer to Christ, and even contemporary experience. Critical to the forlorn, abused, even ugly figure of Christ that appealed so directly to the viewer's empathy were passages in the Hebrew Bible, especially Psalm 121, Isaiah 1:6 ("From the sole of the foot unto the top of the head, there is no soundness therein: wounds and bruises and swelling sores"), and Isaiah 53:2-5:
There is no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him: Despised, and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with infirmity: and his look was as it were hidden and despised, whereupon we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows: and we have thought him as it were a leper, and as one struck by God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins: the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his bruises we are healed.
In the late Middle Ages, the most wide-spread non-narrative or symbolic image of the bleeding Christ was the Man of Sorrows, the
vir dolorum of Isaiah 53. It is an intentionally ahistorical subject: Christ usually wears the crown of thorns and displays the wounds suffered in his Passion, including the post-mortem lance wound; and he is somehow alive but not risen from the dead, lacking the glorious body of the Resurrection.
Needless to say, descriptions and representations of Christ's Passion readily transcend simple narrative significance. The devotion that such images facilitate may be based on both empathy for Christ's suffering and doctrinal issues related to that suffering. Whenever Christ's blood spurts or streams onto or into anything, even within the context of a narrative, it is departing from narrative to convey symbolic meaning. In scenes of the Crucifixion, angels often catch Christ's blood in chalices, signifying the direct connection between that blood and the wine of the Eucharist. When Christ's side was pierced by the centurion after his death on the cross, according to the Gospel of John 19:34, "immediately there came out blood and water." This dual stream was taken to be the source or signifier of all seven sacraments, but especially the two major sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism, as suggested by Thomas Aquinas:
By His Passion He inaugurated the Rites of the Christian Religion by offering "Himself–an oblation and a sacrifice to God" (Ephesians 5:2). Wherefore it is manifest that the sacraments of the Church derive their power specially from Christ's Passion, the virtue of which is in a manner united to us by our receiving the sacraments. It was in sign of this that from the side of Christ hanging on the Cross there flowed water and blood, the former of which belongs to Baptism, the latter to the Eucharist, which are the principal sacraments. (Saint Thomas Aquinas, 3a, 62, 5; Engl. trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, New York, 1947-48.)
Confirming a direct connection between Christ's body and the Eucharist, images in which his blood is caught in chalices are common both north and south of the Alps. There is a direct association between the cup held to the bleeding Christ by an angel (or, alternatively by a figure of Ecclesia, or simply positioned on an altar or the ground) and those which are used in the Mass. Also eucharistic is one of the most striking subjects in late medieval art: the figure of Christ in the Winepress, based on Isaiah 63:3: "I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the Gentiles there is not a man with me: I have trampled on them in my indignation, and have trodden them down in my wrath, and their blood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my apparel." From the late fourteenth century Christ was shown as thorn-crowned and bleeding, squeezed within the press, the beam of which was sometimes represented as a cross. Sometimes it is God the Father who turns the screw of the press, making explicit the Father's sacrifice of his Son.
An example of a Passion scene made theologically explicit is a print by Hendrick Goltzius from 1578 (rear cover), one of a series of religious allegories produced by Goltzius. Such allegories were particularly popular in Northern Europe in the sixteenth century, and often held an ambiguous position in the conflicts between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Entitled
Satisfactio Christi, the print stresses salvation and justification through faith in Christ's sacrifice. Blood pours from Christ's wounds into a cordiform bowl held by Faith, whence it continues to a chalice, outweighing the broken tablets of the law in a balance held by Justice. A distressed Satan looks on. Not surprisingly, the texts draw heavily on Paul emphasizing faith as an escape from sin and the judgment of the law. The lower central inscription is Romans 3:25-26:
Whom God hath proposed to be a propitiation, through faith in his blood, to the shewing of his justice, for the remission of former sins, Through the forbearance of God, for the shewing of his justice in this time; that he himself may be just, and the justifier of him, who is of the faith of Jesus Christ.
On the right side is Galatians 3:13: "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us." The combination of the imagery of the profuse bleeding of the crucified Christ and texts stressing redemption by faith in Christ's sacrifice recalls several earlier images by the Lutheran artist, Lucas Cranach. The Satisfactio Christi may be doctrinally Lutheran, if not necessarily exclusively so. Yet it also departs from standard Lutheran imagery in that there is a flow of blood from Christ to a chalice, which suggests the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Although Luther acknowledged the Real Presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements, and thus in theory might accept depictions of Christ's blood in a chalice, the image was not in the sixteenth-century Lutheran repertoire. Calvinists denied both transubstantiation and the Real Presence altogether and should not have found the image acceptable. A later change to the plate–cross-hatching obliterating the face of God the Father–was probably an attempt to make it more palatable to Calvinists, who seemed to have preferred the tetragrammaton to representations of God the Father as a human being.
The Beautiful Christ
Michelangelo's
Last Judgment was not universally admired when it was unveiled. Some years after its completion, repainting covered parts of nude figures, as they remain today. A letter from the writer Pietro Aretino to Michelangelo criticizes the work on several grounds. Aretino had long desired some drawings by Michelangelo, but his attempts to obtain them, both directly and through mutual acquaintances, had failed, and his letter is usually dismissed as the vengeful attempt at blackmail by a hypocritical pornographer. Nonetheless, Aretino's charges are thought-provoking. Acknowledging the "agreeable beauty of invention" in the fresco, he continues:
Meanwhile, as a baptized Christian, I blush before the license, so forbidden to man's intellect, which you have used in expressing ideas connected with the highest aims and final ends to which our faith aspires. So, then, that Michelangelo stupendous in his fame, that Michelangelo renowned for prudence, that Michelangelo whom all admire, has chosen to display to the whole world an impiety of irreligion only equalled by the perfection of his painting! Is it possible that you, who, since you are divine, do not condescend to consort with human beings, have done this in the greatest temple built to god, upon the highest altar raised to Christ, in the most sacred chapel upon the earth, where the mighty hinges of the Church, the venerable priests of our religion, the Vicar of Christ, with solemn ceremonies and holy prayers, confess, contemplate and adore his body, his blood, and his flesh? . . . .
The pagans when they made statues I do not say of Diana who is clothed, but of naked Venus, made them cover with their hand the parts which should not be seen. And here there comes a Christian who, because he rates art higher than faith, deems a royal spectacle martyrs and virgins in improper attitudes, men dragged down by their genitals, things in front of which brothels would shut their eyes in order not to see them. Your art would be at home in some voluptuous bagnio, certainly not in the highest chapel of the world. Less criminal were it if you were an infidel, than, being a believer, thus to sap the faith of others. Up to the present time the splendor of such audacious marvels has not gone unpunished; for their very superexcellence is the death of your good name. Restore it to good repute by turning the indecent parts of the damned to flames, and those of the blessed to sunbeams; or imitate the modesty of Florence who hides your David's shame beneath some gilded leaves. And yet that statue is exposed upon a public square, not in a consecrated chapel. (Klein/Zerner1989, pp. 122-23)
A theologian, G. A. Gilio, also censured Michelangelo, not only for the nudity in the painting, but also the use of pagan imagery (Charon conveying the dead across the river Styx to Hades, though he also noted that Dante–whom Michelangelo revered–had made use of the subject). He, too, charged that Michelangelo "has taken more delight in art, to show of what kind and how great it was, than in the truth of the subject."
Michelangelo had a career-long obsession with Christ's body. As both divine and human, Christ, to Michelangelo's way of thinking, must have possessed the most perfect of bodies, and it posed a challenge, both professionally and devotionally, for him to approach the divine through his art. Michelangelo's notion of his art was that his task was to release a figure pre-existent in the stone:
The best of artists never has a concept
A single marble block does not contain
Inside its husk, but to it may attain
Only if hand follows the intellect.
(Michelangelo/Gilbert 1980, p. 100)
In some of his unfinished works, the figures seem to rise up out of the stone as if from a quagmire.
Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo's friend and biographer, said that the sculptor's concepts were so awesome that they couldn't be expressed by the hand. But Michelangelo's idea of his inability was more theological. The rock encasing the sculpture was like the mortal body hiding the soul, which Michelangelo called on a friend to discover:
Just as we put, O Lady, by subtraction,
Into the rough, hard stone
A living figure, grown
Largest wherever rock has grown most small,
Just so, sometimes, good actions
For the still trembling soul
Are hidden by its own body's surplus,
And the husk that is raw and hard and coarse,
Which you alone can pull
From off my outer surface;
In me there is for me no will or force.
(Michelangelo/Gilbert 1980, p. 101)
In a series of drawings of the Crucifixion late in his career, he seemed to struggle with his task of representing the divine, constantly reworking the forms, obliterating passages, trying variations without arriving at a definitive result. With the late Pietà in Florence, it is as if he can no longer find the perfect figure–can no longer find the divine–in the stone. As he peels away the husks, there is nothing left inside. It would seem that the young artist's confidence in creating a perfect sculpture, a perfect image of Christ and His Mother, has faltered. In his poetry as well, Michelangelo questions the ability of his art to approach the divine. As he began work on the Florentine Pietà, Michelangelo accused himself of idolizing his own art (almost echoing Gilio's and Aretino's criticism of him that "he rates art higher than faith") and despaired that art could lift one to the divine:
My course of life already has attained,
Through stormy seas, and in a flimsy vessel,
The common port, at which we land to tell
All conduct's cause and warrant, good or bad,
So that the passionate fantasy, which made
Of art a monarch for me and an idol,
Was laden down with sin, now I know well,
Like what all men against their will desired.
What will become, now, of my amorous thoughts,
Once gay and vain, as toward two deaths I move,
One known for sure, the other ominous?
There's no painting or sculpture now that quiets
The soul that's pointed toward that holy Love
That on the cross opened Its arms to take us.
(Michelangelo/Gilbert 1980, p. 159)
Michelangelo returned to the subject of the Pietà one final time. It was to be his last sculpture and although he continued to carve it until a few days before his death at the age of 88, it remained unfinished (the
Rondanini Pietà, marble, Castello Sforzesco, Milan). His confidence had vanished and so did the figures as he continued, obsessed to find them hidden in the stone, hidden in earthly matter.
Although the film deals with the iconoclastic controversy in the Byzantine Empire in the eighth and ninth centuries, it only touches briefly on European iconoclasm of the Reformation, which played a role in the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century. Reformation iconoclasm was never as completely destructive as Byzantine iconoclasm, and, for the most part, it rehearses similar theological issues (perhaps with less nuance), but it ultimately had a more notable effect on religious art in much of Europe and North America. Reformers differed in their attitudes toward religious images (Martin Luther was among the least restrictive), but in general images in churches were discouraged or not allowed while illustrations of biblical stories for the home were accepted. Iconoclasm in the Netherlands, in 1566-1567, was perhaps the most destructive in Europe, but religious art for private consumption flourished there in the seventeenth century.
In response to the Reformation attack on the use of religious images, the Catholic Church issued a decree on the subject at the last session of the Council of Trent, in December 1563. The decree ("On the invocation, veneration, and relics of saints, and on sacred images") links religious art with the cult of saints, which had also come under attack by Protestants. The decree confirms the centuries-old tradition of the use of religious images, formulated by Saint Gregory, Byzantine orthodoxy, and others. The bishops are instructed to teach the faithful:
that the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints are to be placed and retained especially in the churches, and that due honor and veneration is to be given them; not, however, that any divinity or virtue is believed to be in them by reason of which they are to be venerated, or that something is to be asked of them, or that trust is to be placed in images, as was done of old by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols; but because the honor which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which they represent, so that by means of the images which we kiss and before which we uncover the head and prostrate ourselves, we adore Christ and venerate the saints whose likeness they bear. . . .
Moreover, let the bishops diligently teach that by means of the stories of the mysteries of our redemption portrayed in paintings and other representations the people are instructed and confirmed in the articles of faith, which ought to be borne in mind and constantly reflected upon; also that great profit is derived from all holy images, not only because the people are thereby reminded of the benefits and gifts bestowed on them by Christ, but also because through the saints the miracles of God and salutary examples are set before the eyes of the faithful, so that they may give God thanks for those things, may fashion their own life and conduct in imitation of the saints and be moved to adore and love God and cultivate piety. . . . If any abuses shall have found their way into these holy and salutary observances, the holy council desires earnestly that they be completely removed, so that no representation of false doctrines an such as might be the occasion of grave error to the uneducated be exhibited. And if at times it happens, when this is beneficial to the illiterate, that the stories and narratives of the Holy Scriptures are portrayed and exhibited, the people should be instructed that not for that reason is the divinity represented in picture as if it can be seen with bodily eyes or expressed in colors or figures. Furthermore, in the invocation of the saints, the veneration of relics, and the sacred use of images, all superstition shall be removed, all filthy quest for gain eliminated, and all lasciviousness avoided, so that images shall not be painted and adorned with a seductive charm, or the celebration of saints and the visitation of relics be perverted by the people into boisterous festivities and drunkenness, as if the festivals in honor of the saints are to be celebrated with revelry and with no sense of decency. Finally, such zeal and care should be exhibited by the bishops with regard to these things that nothing may appear that is disorderly or unbecoming and confusedly arranged, nothing that is profane, nothing disrespectful, since holiness becometh the house of God. (Canons/Schroeder 1978, pp. 215-17)
There has been considerable debate among scholars about the extent to which the Tridentine decree affected the history of art, particularly in Italy, whether or not it led to greater clarity, purity, and devotional effectiveness.
Many artists from the fifteenth century on included portraits of themselves and others in biblical scenes, including subjects from Christ's life. In the
Raising of the Cross, Rembrandt portrays himself at the center of the composition. Rembrandt was an obsessive self-portraitist, and he had often included his own likeness in history paintings, as had many artists before him. But here he is no casual bystander or one of the friends and comforters of Christ, like Michelangelo's self-portrait as Nicodemus supporting Christ's body. Here he is the most prominent of Christ's executioners, and we get the sense that he is acknowledging his own sinfulness, his own responsibility for Christ's death. There is a strand in devotional literature–alluded to in the film in reference to Albrecht Dürer's
Man of Sorrows from 1511 which was published with a devotional poem in which Christ begs for an end to the pain inflicted by the sins that torment him–that suggests that we as individuals share in the collective guilt for the Passion of Christ, that each of us is responsible for his torment and death. On the most fundamental level of Christian theology, it is asserted that Christ died for our sakes, and thus we are, whether intentionally or not, the cause of his death. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, for example, writes "the Lord is going to His passion on account of my sins" (
Spiritual Exercises, p. 91; see also pp. 92, 93). But some writers went further in accusing sinners–that is, all of us. Thus Ludolf of Saxony's fourteenth-century
Vita Christi could charge that "He who frequents theatres, places of amusement, or taverns, more than churches, drives iron nails into the feet of Christ." Blaise Pascal carried with him until his death a heart-felt accusation on a piece of parchment: "I have cut myself off from him, shunned him, denied him, crucified him. Let me never be cut off from him!" A contemporary of Rembrandt (Jacob Revius) put it most pointedly:
I am the one, O Lord, who brought you there,
I am the heavy cross you had to bear,
I am the rope that bound you to the tree,
The whip, the nail, the hammer, and the spear,
The blood-stained crown of thorns you had to wear:
It was my sin, alas, it was for me.
The Worldwide Spread of the Image
The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus arose in the High Middle Ages and was extended dramatically in the seventeenth century, stimulated especially by the visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) of Christ offering her his heart, locus of both his love and his suffering. Her confessor was a Jesuit, and it was this order that was primarily responsible for the spread of the cult (Saint Ignatius of Loyola, pointing to a text reading "Ad maiorem Dei gloriam") is the figure just to the left of the heart in Morlete Ruiz's painting in the film). A mass and office for the Sacred Heart were established by Clement XIII in 1765. In the eighteenth century it became, and remains, extremely popular in Latin America. At least thirteen books, pamphlets, and sermons on the subject were published in Mexico in the eighteenth century, five of them identifiable as the work of Jesuits. A particularly venerated image of the Sacred Heart in the church of St. Philip Neri in Puebla gave rise in 1760 to an engraving by José Eligio Morales that promised forty days indulgence for saying a Creed before the print. The most extraordinary manifestation of the New Spanish devotion to the Sacred Heart is a painted Passion cycle from 1773 by Francisco Báez in the Sanctuary of Jesus the Nazarene at Atotonilco, in which the place of Jesus is taken by an enormous heart: crowned with thorns, held up before the people, nailed to the cross, and so on. Devotional images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus were sometimes paired with images of the Sacred Heart of Mary (as in the case of Morlete Ruiz's painting), confirming the importance of her own suffering, her
compassio with Christ.
In European images of the mid-eighteenth century, Christ generally reveals a glowing Sacred Heart by opening his tunic, while in New Spain (Latin America) the Sacred Heart is usually, as in Morlete Ruiz's painting, utterly disembodied and levitating. Morlete Ruiz follows tradition and Saint Margaret Mary's visions in showing the radiant heart crowned with thorns, surmounted by a cross, and cut by the lance on one side (other images are often also accompanied by symbols of the Passion), reinforcing the theme of the self-sacrifice of the Passion as central to this cult of Christ's supreme love. The heart is also typically inflamed, as a symbol of love, and surrounded by bodiless angels. His composition draws on Crucifixion imagery in that it shows Saint John the Evangelist, the Virgin Mary (her own heart visible, pierced with a sword), and Mary Magdalene mourning, as if at the foot of the cross.
The Lord of Light
When Abbot Suger (1081-1151) speaks of being transported from an inferior to a higher world, he is drawing on a millennium-long tradition of neo-Platonic philosophy, which strongly differentiated between material and spiritual realms. But while terrestrial matter was deprecated in Plato's philosophy as changeable, corruptible, impermanent, and therefore inferior and unreal relative to the true forms of things, strands of neo-Platonism saw material objects as useful bridges to higher realms. In describing the rebuilding of the Abbey of St.-Denis, Suger was particularly influenced by the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius (or Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite), which were wrongly thought to have come from the Areopagite mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (17:34)–and the titular saint of the abbey, which housed his relics–but were probably composed in Syria around 500. In "The Celestial Hierarchy," for example, Pseudo-Dionysius writes: "For it is quite impossible that we humans should, in any immaterial way, rise up to imitate and to contemplate the heavenly hierarchies without the aid of those material means capable of guiding us as our nature requires" (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 146); and: "forms, even those drawn from the lowliest matter, can be used, no unfittingly, with regard to heavenly beings. Matter, after all, owes its subsistence to absolute beauty and keeps, throughout its earthly ranks, some echo of intelligible beauty. Using matter, one may be lifted up to the immaterial archetypes" (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 152). Suger echoes Pseudo-Dionysius when, in contemplating "out of sheer affection for the church our mother, these different ornaments both new and old," including the gems on a cross, he writes:
when–out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God–the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner. (Panofsky 1979, 63, 65)
Suger was, of course, not alone in prizing the decoration of churches. For example, in a treatise on art techniques, probably from the tenth century, a Benedictine monk writing under the pseudonym Theophilus adduces the Psalms (first 26:8 [Vulgate 25:8], then 51:10 [Vulgate 50:12]):
The greatest of the Prophets, David . . . uttered, among others, these words: "Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy house."
Whether a man of such authority and capacious understanding meant by this house the habitation of the celestial court in which God presides with inestimable brightness over the singing choirs of angels . . . or whether he meant the refuge of a devout breast and a most pure heart . . . nevertheless it is certain that he avidly desired the embellishment of the material house of God, where is the place of prayer. (Theophilus 1979, 77)
Theophilus goes on to recall Solomon's use of rich materials in the construction of the temple and addresses the pious craftsman: "Therefore, most beloved son, you should not doubt but should believe in full faith that the Spirit of God has filled your heart when you have embellished His house with such great beauty and variety of workmanship" (Theophilus 1979, 78).
There were, however, dissenting voices, most notably that of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), who was highly critical of Suger and St.-Denis and whose antagonism toward decoration played an important role in the austerity of his own Cistercian order. In a famous letter to Bishop William of St.-Thierry ("Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem"), Bernard grudgingly accepts the argument from Psalms for embellishing God's house:
I will overlook the immense heights of the places of prayer, their immoderate lengths, their superfluous widths, the costly refinements, and painstaking representations which deflect the attention while they are in them of those who pray and thus hinder their devotion. . . . But so be it, let these things be made for the honor of God. (Rudolph 1990, 279)
But he also introduces one of his main complaints, that decoration is distracting from spiritual contemplation. Bernard wonders at the purpose of the strange sculptures on the capitals of columns in Romanesque cloisters, which he describes with a clever pair of inverted oxymorons: "an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity" (deformis formositas ac formosa deformitas; Rudolph 1990, 283). Art seems to him a distraction rather than a spiritual aid: "In short, everywhere so plentiful and astonishing a variety of contradictory forms is seen that one would rather read in the marble than in books, and spend the whole day wondering at every single one of them than in meditating on the law of God. Good God! If one is not ashamed of the absurdity, why is one not at least troubled at the expense?" (Rudolph 1990, 283)
Bernard reluctantly acknowledges that the laity may require such decoration but asserts that the religious should not:
However, as a monk, I put to monks the same question that a pagan used to criticize other pagans: "Tell me, priests," he said, "what is gold doing in the holy place?" I, however, say, "Tell me, poor men"–for I am not concerned with the verse, but with the sense–I say, "Tell me, poor men, if indeed you are poor men, what is gold doing in the holy place?" For certainly bishops have one kind of business, and monks another. We know that since they are responsible for both the wise and the foolish, they stimulate the devotion of a carnal people with material ornaments because they cannot do so with spiritual ones. But we who have withdrawn from the people, we who have left behind all that is precious and beautiful in this world for the sake of Christ, we who regard as dung all things shining in beauty, soothing in sound, agreeable in fragrance, sweet in taste, pleasant in touch–in short, all material pleasures–in order that we may win Christ, whose devotion, I ask, do we strive to excite in all this? What interest do we seek from these things: the astonishment of fools or the offerings of the simple? (Rudolph 1990, 279, 281)
Bernard is concerned with the financial aspects of the decoration, expressing dismay (crying out in the words of Ecclesiastes 1:2: "vanity of vanities") that the work appeals to base human desires and that it diverts funds from the poor:
But so that I might speak plainly, does not avarice, which is the service of idols, cause all this, and do we seek not the interest, but the principal? If you ask, "In what way?" I say, "In an amazing way." Money is sown with such skill that it may be multiplied. It is expended so that it may be increased, and pouring it out produces abundance. The reason is that the very sight of these costly but wonderful illusions inflames men more to give than to pray. In this way wealth is derived from wealth, in this way money attracts money, because by I know not what law, wherever the more riches are seen, there the more willingly are offerings made. Eyes are fixed on relics covered with gold and purses are opened. The thoroughly beautiful image of some male or female saint is exhibited and that saint is believed to be the more holy the more highly colored the image is. People rush to kiss it, they are invited to donate, and they admire the beautiful more than they venerate the sacred. Then jewelled, not crowns, but wheels are placed in the church, encircled with lights, but shining no less brightly with mounted precious stones. And instead of candlesticks we see set up what might be called trees, devised with a great amount of bronze in an extraordinary achievement of craftsmanship, and which gleam no more through their lights on top than through their gems. What do you think is being sought in all this? The compunction of penitents, or the astonishment of those who gaze at it? O vanity of vanities, but no more vain than insane! The Church is radiant in its walls and destitute in its poor. It dresses its stones in gold and it abandons its children naked. It serves the eyes of the rich at the expense of the poor. The curious find that which may delight them, but those in need do not find that which should sustain them. (Rudolph 1990, 281, 283)
In your personal experience, what has been the effect of religious images? Have you had a particular experience with a work of art that has been important to your spiritual development?
Do you notice the images in churches you visit or where you are a parishioner? Why are they there? How does the amount of imagery in your church compare to that in other churches, especially in other countries?
Have the images you have noted been both didactic and inspirational?
The Church has been responsible for the creation of some of the world's greatest works of art, including many of those shown in the film. To what extent is the Church's artistic legacy important to you as a Catholic? To what extent is the quality or art historical importance of a religious image important for its didactic or devotional purpose?
How do you visualize God, Jesus, Mary, and the saints? What visual characteristics must they always have? Where did you get these visual images?
This section of the film was included to make sure that the viewers knew the story of Christ's life. Is it important to know Christ's story in order to appreciate depictions of it?
This section also introduces theological concepts fundamental to the Christian faith, namely, the Incarnation, the sacrificial death on the cross, and the victory over death in the Resurrection. How effectively is theology conveyed by images?
Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel frescoes were chosen for the film both because of their art historical importance and for the clarity and forcefulness of their images. The works are realistic in their depiction of human emotion but not necessarily in visual terms. Would the images be more effective if they were "photographically" realistic?
There are many series of images of episodes from Christ's life since the early Middle Ages, in every imaginable medium, from Gospel illustrations to wall paintings, but there was no standard of which episodes to depict. How might the selection of episodes affect the viewer's perception of Christ's life? Are there some episodes that are essential? Why?
The earliest Christian images were funerary. Were they intended for the deceased or for the living who gathered in the catacombs? What might their effect have been?
How would you depict Jesus as both divine and human?
How did the image of Christ change when Christianity became more public and widespread? Are the different types of images of Christ an index of how personal the religion is?
Is there an urge to depict Christ? If so, what causes it?
What reasons might there be for avoiding images of Christ? (Draw for this question also on the section, "The Beginnings," with its remarks about Early Christian authorities rejecting the adoration of idols.)
What symbols for Christ are still (or again) in common use? What meaning do they convey? Byzantine iconoclasts allowed Christian symbols but not figural depictions; is the difference significant and still valid for some?
It has been argued that the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy was essentially political, and the religious issues were a pretext for conflict on other grounds. Is religion still used in this way? This is not to say that the theological arguments in the iconoclastic controversy were not taken very seriously. Is it important to understand the theological ramifications of using, venerating, or even worshiping images? Are religious images misused now?
Is there a proper place for relics in today's Church? To what extent should we venerate relics and images reputed to work miracles? The story of Veronica's veil was very popular in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, and it was even alluded to in the movie, "Forrest Gump." It is now understood to be a medieval fabrication; does this understanding affect the devotional potential of images of Veronica's Veil? Can prayers before images of the Veronica be as efficacious as they were thought to be in the Middle Ages? Does it matter what image is used as a focal point for prayer?
Do images of a suffering Christ still have the capacity to move us? Do we become inured to them by their redundancy? Are we inured to them by the ubiquity of images of violence in our culture in general?
Do images of the suffering Christ make God seem more relevant to us as humans? Or do they seem distasteful, something that a cultured person would scarcely want to acknowledge, let alone dwell upon? Some literary descriptions from the late Middle Ages match Grünewald's Crucifixion and similar images in the force of their representation of the violence done to Christ. Even if they are realistic (which was not necessarily a primary concern of the writers and artists), can they be excessive? Which is more effective devotionally, Grünewald's crucified Christ or Raphael's Christ displaying his wounds?
Can images of the suffering Christ provoke both devotion and theological understanding? If the theology of an image is explicit, does it detract from its affective potential?
The frescoes in the cells of the friars at San Marco, Florence, are very large and comprised virtually the only decoration of their living spaces. How effective do you think such works would be? Do you engage the same religious images daily? Are they effective?
The Dominican friary at San Marco, Florence, is now a public museum. How does the museum setting of works affect us differently than their original context?
Late in life, Michelangelo despaired that art was failing to provide access to the divine. What are the devotional limits of art, or of any material objects?
According to the Council of Trent's decree on images, what are the purposes of art in churches? What is to be avoided? In the decree itself (as in most pronouncements on art by theologians), is artistic quality a consideration? Are these issues still relevant?
Do you find Protestant churches to have a different ambience because of the difference in decoration?
How does Rembrandt's Christ in the Summer at Emmaus compare to Michelangelo's Risen Christ? What different qualities of Christ do they convey?
Both Michelangelo and Rembrandt, like many other artists, included a self-portrait in depictions of Christ's Passion and death. What could be the purpose of these self-portraits? Can the viewer also project her- or himself into such scenes? Is the self-accusation of Rembrandt's painting and some devotional literature in keeping with today's Church?
In some ways, Rembrandt was an apparently difficult person, his personal religious affiliation is unclear, and his relationship with the dominant church (Calvinist) in Amsterdam was sometimes an uneasy one. How important is the personal piety of an artist for the effectiveness of his or her art? Aretino mentions Michelangelo's "impiety of irreligion only equalled by the perfection of his painting" (although Michelangelo was, in fact, deeply religious). Are the two irreconcilable?
Rembrandt's etching Christ Preaching is commonly known as The Hundred-Guilder Print because Rembrandt was said to have paid that exorbitant price for it himself at an auction in an attempt to drive up the prices of his works. Indeed, the works of some printmakers, especially Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt, were avidly collected from very early on, regardless of the subject matter of the works. Collectors of art have often been attracted to the beauty or rarity of an object without personal concern for its religious subject matter, and it has been suggested that some artists made religious art to appeal to collectors' aesthetic rather than devotional interests. Are the two necessarily mutually exclusive? To what extent can aesthetic appeal heighten the devotional effectiveness of an image? Can the subject matter of a work detract from its aesthetic appeal?
The theology of the Ethiopian church differs in some significant respects from that of the Catholic Church, as does that of Protestant denominations, but much of the imagery is the same or very similar in its content. Can or should art be an ecumenical tool?
Gregory the Great's famous letter of 600 describing the didactic function of Christian art was written in response to a bishop in France (Serenus) who had denied the use of images to recent converts because he thought it might encourage them to relapse into paganism. Gregory advocated the adaptation, to some extent, of Christian worship to local customs, including the use of images. How do the non-European images in the film reveal an adaptation to local interests? What issues of adaptation to local customs does the Church face today?
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is much more prevalent in Latin American culture than elsewhere. Are specific cults within the Church signs of devotional imbalance or useful focal points for devotion? Does the cultural specificity of some fragment the universal church?
When Christians were persecuted in Japan, many retained, at risk to themselves, Christian images for private devotion; images were also used in forced abjuring ceremonies. How is the importance of images thus revealed? Are religious images as important to Christians now?
In a way that marks it as very different from earlier societies, our society is glutted with visual imagery. How might the ubiquity of visual images, most of which are secular, affect our use or appreciation of religious images? Do religious images need to conform to secular images in style in order to be noticed or appreciated?
Like much modern art, Emil Nolde's painting was classified by Nazis as "degenerate." His expressionist style may not seem as shocking to us now as it did early in the twentieth century, but can we still find the style an artist uses for religious images to be disturbing? How can we tell if a work is sacrilegious? Are we more comfortable with Warner Sallman's Christ than with Nolde's?
What meaning can a Christian image painted by a non-Christian, such as Marc Chagall, have? In using the crucifixion as "an allegory of universal suffering that embraces all humankind, regardless of religion," as the film suggests, does Chagall denude it of its significance as a redemptive sacrifice? Are uses of Christian imagery that are not specifically Christian valid? Can different viewers take different meanings from such an image?
Are the works of William H. Johnson and Fred Carver limited in their appeal only to African-Americans? Is Sallman's Christ type any less limiting? Does the use of racially specific images of Christ, including those in Asian works, undermine the notion of the universal Church?
Can an image become so common that it "disappears?" Is Andy Warhol's reworking of Leonardo's Last Supper useful in making us see it with fresh eyes? Does he treat Leonardo's painting as a religious image or a cultural icon? Can a work be both?
In equating beauty with the divine, is there a place for horrendous images of Christ like those in the film (Grünewald, Nolde)? Can there be beauty in the ugliness?
Are Abbot Suger's comments on the devotional efficacy of a church's decoration still valid, even in churches other than richly ornamented Gothic ones? Do the architecture and decoration of a church affect your religious experience in it?
Are Saint Bernard's criticisms of lavish decoration still valid? Why has his point of view seemed not to prevail in the Church?
Is there a possible compromise between the views of Suger and Bernard?
Since there are no known reliable descriptions of Jesus's physical appearance, and the Bible is generally sparing in descriptive details, artists have often relied on their imagination or conventions for their depictions. Would our faith be helped if there were authentic, accurate descriptions and portraits of Christ's physical appearance? To what extent is historical accuracy important in religious images?
Is an image of Jesus more or less effective if it is a plausible depiction of a person in his historical circumstances, of his ethnicity? Of your own ethnicity? Of some other ethnicity?
Think back on all the different types of Christ in the film. Which do you find most appealing? Why? Is there one image that comes closest to capturing all that is Christ?
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About the Author
James Clifton has been Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Painting of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, since 1994. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1987, he taught art history at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Princeton, Tulane University, and Rhodes College in Memphis, where he was chair of the Department of Art. He was the curator of the exhibition The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain, 1150-1800 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1997-1998, and was chief writer for the documentary The Face: Jesus in Art, which has aired on public and commercial television since 2001. He has written and lectured widely on Renaissance and Baroque Art in Italy and Northern Europe.
Hendrick Goltzius, Satisfactio Christi, 1578. Engraving. (Private collection.)