Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts (Studies in Religion and the Arts, 20) 9004517464, 9789004517462

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Figures and Tables
Figures
Tables
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
1 The Drama of Christian Images: Art, Liturgy, Sacred Theatre
1 Art, a Sign of Salvation
2 Jesus and Art
3 The Sacraments as Images
4 Rite as Image
5 Liturgy as Theatre
6 Awaiting Transformation
2 A ‘Dramatic Turn’: The Revolution of Christian Representation
1 The Show: ‘Seeing from Afar’
2 The Dramatic Turn: Seeing Up Close
3 Conclusion: The Spectacula Christianorum between Memory and Mimesis
3 No Drama Please, We’re Greek: Sacred Plays from a Greek Orthodox Perspective
1 Hellenistic Jews and Antitheatrical Culture
2 Enter the Archbishop
3 The Service of the Furnace
4 Conclusion
4 Enacting Sacred Narrative: Biblical, Liturgical, and Sacramental Practices in the Latin West
1 The Notions of ‘Liturgical Drama’ and ‘Sacrament’
2 The Fleury Raising of Lazarus
5 Mary in the Scriptures as Container and Way: Henry Adams and the Virgin of Chartres
6 The Power of Images of Passion: Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ
7 Women as Performers of the Bible: Female Preaching in Premodern Europe
1 Introduction
2 Women and Preaching in Premodern Europe
3 Tommasina Fieschi (ca. 1448–1534) Preaching in Private
4 Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534)
5 María de Santo Domingo (1486–ca. 1524)
6 Stefana Quinzani (1457–1530)
7 Conclusion
8 Dramatic Action and the Participatory Spectator at the Sacro Monte di Varallo: Frozen Theatre
1 The Sacro Monte as Immersive Installation
2 Activation
3 Self-Referential Politics of Space
4 De-centering
5 Conclusion
9 The Paradox of the Saint Actress: Church and Commedia Dell’Arte during the Counter-Reformation
1 Church, Theatre, and Performance: A Complex Relationship
2 The Fascination of the Stage
3 Comedians’ Defensive Strategies
4 ‘Comic Knowledge’: Culture in Action
5 Theatrical Touring and Spiritual Pilgrimage
6 Mary Magdalene’s Conversion as the Redemption of the Actress
10 Performing Glory: The Misteri or Festa d’Elx on Contemporary Stages
1 Like a Wormhole
2 The Medieval Stage in Action
3 An Apocryphal Narrative
4 The Festa d’Elx: The Space and Its Structure
5 Effectus mirabilis: The Aerial Movement of the Misteri
6 Gestures and Stage Props
11 Performing the Bible: Christian Drama and the Arts
1 The Bible and Its Uses in Judaism and Christianity
2 What Does “Performing the Bible” Actually Mean?
2.1 Interpreting and Representing the Bible in Liturgy, Images, and Drama
2.2 Ambivalence and Fiction: The Point of View of the Spectators
Index

Citation preview

Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts

Studies in Religion and the Arts Editorial Board James Najarian (Boston College) Eric Ziolkowski (Lafayette College)

volume 20

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sart

Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts Edited by

Carla M. Bino and Corinna Ricasoli

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, turn of the 16th century. Polychrome wood and leather. Kraków, Klasztor Dominikanów. Photo credit: Kamil Kopania. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1877-3192 isbn 978-90-04-51746-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-52218-3 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Carla M. Bino and Corinna Ricasoli. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Preface vii List of Figures and Tables viii Notes on Contributors XII



Introduction 1 Carla M. Bino and Corinna Ricasoli

1

The Drama of Christian Images: Art, Liturgy, Sacred Theatre 13 Timothy Verdon

2

A ‘Dramatic Turn’: The Revolution of Christian Representation 32 Carla M. Bino

3

No Drama Please, We’re Greek: Sacred Plays from a Greek Orthodox Perspective 47 Andrew Walker White

4

Enacting Sacred Narrative: Biblical, Liturgical, and Sacramental Practices in the Latin West 58 Nils Holger Petersen

5

Mary in the Scriptures as Container and Way: Henry Adams and the Virgin of Chartres 74 Rachel Fulton Brown

6

The Power of Images of Passion: Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ and the Problem of Visualizing Suffering in Medieval Art 87 Kamil Kopania

7

Women as Performers of the Bible: Female Preaching in Premodern Europe 116 Carolyn Muessig

8

Dramatic Action and the Participatory Spectator at the Sacro Monte di Varallo: Frozen Theatre or Immersive Installation? 140 Allie Terry-Fritsch

vi

Contents

9

The Paradox of the Saint Actress: Church and Commedia Dell’Arte during the Counter-Reformation 173 Fabrizio Fiaschini

10

Performing Glory: The Misteri or Festa d’Elx on Contemporary Stages 196 Francesc Massip

11

Performing the Bible: Christian Drama and the Arts 217 Jean-Claude Schmitt



Index 235

Preface This collection of essays originates from the international conference, Performing the Bible: Christian Drama and the Arts, sponsored by Museum of the ­Bible and held in Washington, DC, March 22–23, 2018. The conference was an ­integral part of the Bible on Stage project, promoted by Museum of the Bible, which included the exhibition, Sacred Drama: Performing the Bible in Renaissance Florence (July 1–September 30, 2018).1 The editors would like to express their gratitude to all the scholars who took part in this event, creating a most stimulating and enriching debate and submitting their contributions for this book. They would also like to thank the museums and libraries for their permission to use their images. Carla Maria Bino and Corinna Ricasoli 1 See the exhibition catalog, Giorgio Bonsanti, Silvia Castelli, and Annamaria Testaverde, eds., Sacred Drama: Performing the Bible in Renaissance Florence (Washington, DC: Museum of the Bible, 2018).

Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 Antonio Pollaiuolo (design), Salome Presents the Head of St. John the Baptist to her Mother Herodias, c.1469–1480. Embroidered panel from a set of vestments made for the Baptistery of Florence. © Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Firenze 14 1.2 Workshop of Andrea Pisano, The Eucharist, c.1361. A relief in a series depicting the seven sacraments, made for the bell tower of Florence Cathedral. © Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Firenze 19 1.3 Donatello, Man of Sorrows, 1408. Relief carved on keystone of the Porta della Mandorla of Florence Cathedral. © Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Firenze 21 4.1 Anonymous, The Raising of Lazarus, late 12th century. Fresco. Jørlunde, Jørlunde Church. © Danish National Museum, Copenhagen 70 4.2 Anonymous, The Raising of Lazarus, 15th century. Fresco. Ejsing, Ejsing Church. © Danish National Museum, Copenhagen 70 5.1 Anonymous, Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière, 12th century. Stained glass. Chartres, Notre-Dame de Chartres. © Henri Alain de Feraudy 76 6.1 Westphalian artist active in Pomerania, The Passion of Christ, c.1480. ​Panel, 221 × 274 cm. T ​ oruń, Kościół świętego Jakuba. © Kamil Kopania 88​ 6.2 Master of the Saint Elisabeth Panels, The Passion of Christ, end of the 15th century. ​Panel, 95 × 185 cm. ​Pont-Saint-Esprit, Musée d’Art Sacré du Gard, Inv. M.N.R. 971. © Kamil Kopania 89​ 6.3 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, ca. 1350–1375. ​Polychrome wood. Chełmno, Kościół klasztoru Sióstr Miłosierdzia. © Kamil Kopania 92​ 6.4 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, ca. 1510. ​Polychrome wood.​Litovel, Kaple svatého Jiří. © Kamil Kopania 94 6.5 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, 13th century. ​Polychrome wood. Viseu, Museu Grão Vasco. © Kamil Kopania 96​ 6.6 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, 2nd quarter of the 14th century. ​ Mixed technique on wood.​Burgos, Cathedral. © Kamil Kopania 97 6.7 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, 1410. Mixed technique on wood.​ Palencia, Monasterio de Santa Clara. © Kamil Kopania 98 6.8 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, end of the 15th century. ​ Polychrome wood.​Valvasone, Private collection​. © Kamil Kopania 99 6.9 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the forearm), end of the 15th century. ​Polychrome wood.​Valvasone, Private collection. © Kamil Kopania 100

Figures and Tables 

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6.10 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the hips), end of the 15th century. ​Polychrome wood.​Valvasone, Private collection. © Kamil Kopania​ 100 6.11 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, c.1510. P ​ olychrome wood.​Döbeln, St. Nicolaikirche. © Kamil Kopania​ 102 6.12 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, turn of the 16th century. ​ Polychrome wood and leather.​Kraków, Klasztor Dominikanów​. © Kamil Kopania 103 6.13 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the torso), turn of the 16th century. ​Polychrome wood and leather.​Kraków, Klasztor Dominikanów​. © Kamil Kopania 104 6.14 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the shoulder), turn of the 16th century. ​Polychrome wood and leather.​Kraków, Klasztor Dominikanów​. © Kamil Kopania 105 6.15 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the hips), turn of the 16th century. ​Polychrome wood and leather.​Kraków, Klasztor Dominikanów​. © Kamil Kopania 105 6.16 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, first half of the 17th century. ​ Polychrome wood.​Krzeszów, Opactwo Benedyktynek. © Kamil Kopania 106​ 6.17 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, first half of the 17th century. ​ Polychrome wood.​Krzeszów, Opactwo Benedyktynek. © Kamil Kopania 106​ 6.18 Westphalian artist active in Pomerania, The Passion of Christ (detail of the Flagellation), c.1480. ​Panel, 221 × 274 cm. ​Toruń, Kościół świętego Jakuba​. © Kamil Kopania 110 6.19 Master of the Saint Elisabeth Panels, The Passion of Christ (detail of the Flagellation), end of the 15th century.​Panel, 95 × 185 cm. ​Pont-Saint-Esprit, Musée d’Art Sacré du Gard, Inv. M.N.R. 971. © Kamil Kopania 111​ 8.1 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Procession of the Magi, 1528. ​Polychrome terracotta, horsehair, metal, leather, plaster, stone, fresco. ​Varallo, Sacro Monte di Varallo. © Stefan Fritsch 141​ 8.2 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Procession of the Magi (view from the screened-off pilgrim space of the portico), 1528. ​Polychrome terracotta, horsehair, metal, leather, plaster, stone, fresco. ​Varallo, Sacro Monte di Varallo. © Stefan Fritsch 149 ​ 8.3 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Dead Christ, c.1514. ​Polychrome wood.​Varallo, Sacro Monte. © Stefan Fritsch 150​ 8.4 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Scenes from the Life of Christ, 1513. F​ resco. V ​ arallo, Santa Maria delle Grazie. © Public domain 153​ 8.5 Visitor entering the Holy Sepulcher. ​Varallo, Sacro Monte. © Stefan Fritsch 154​

x

Figures and Tables

8.6 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Crucifixion (Mount Calvary), 1528. ​Polychrome wood and terracotta, horsehair, metal, plaster, stone, fresco. ​Varallo, Sacro Monte. © Public domain 160​ 8.7 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Crucifixion (Mount Calvary) (oblique view from the right side of chapel), 1528. ​Polychrome wood and terracotta, horsehair, metal, plaster, stone, fresco. ​Varallo, Sacro Monte. © Stefan Fritsch 160​ 8.8 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Swooning Madonna (detail from Crucifixion), 1528. Polychrome wood and terracotta, horsehair, metal, plaster, stone, fresco. ​ Varallo, Sacro Monte. © Stephen J. Campbell 162​ 8.9 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Crucifixion (detail of Crucified Christ), 1528. ​Polychrome wood and terracotta, horsehair, metal, plaster, stone, fresco. ​Varallo, Sacro Monte. © Public domain 164​ 8.10 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Procession of the Magi (view of the exit door), 1528. ​ Polychrome terracotta, horsehair, metal, leather, plaster, stone, fresco. ​Varallo, Sacro Monte di Varallo. © Stefan Fritsch 166​ 8.11 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Nativity, after 1514. ​Polychrome terracotta. ​Varallo, Sacro Monte. © Stefan Fritsch 167​ 9.1 Raphael Sadeler, Portrait of Isabella Andreini, 1602. ​Engraving, 108 × 64 mm. ​ Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. RP-P-OB-7586. © Copyright Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 181​ 9.2 Giovan Battista Andreini, Il Penitente alla Santissima Vergine del Rosario (frontispiece) (Bologna: Ferroni, 1631). Print. Bologna: Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio, A.20. © Copyright Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna 186​ 9.3 Giovan Battista Andreini, Le cinque rose del giardino di Berico (frontispiece), (Vicenza: Eredi Amadio, 1633). Print. Vicenza, Biblioteca Civica Bertoniana, A– E12–F4. © Copyright Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana di Vicenza 187 9.4 Gaspare Grispoldi, S. Maria Magdalena, 1610. Print, in Giovan Battista Andreini, la Maddalena (Venezia: Somasco, 1610). Milano, Biblioteca Braidense inv. VV–07–0045/02. © Copyright Biblioteca Braidense di Milano 190 9.5 Domenico Fetti, Melancholia, c.1618. Oil on canvas, 170 × 140 cm. Venezia, Gallerie dell’Accademia, inv. 671. © Copyright Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, Archivio fotografico, Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo 192 10.1 Antonio Serrano Peral, Elevation of the Church of Elx and the Setting of the Mystery Play, 1941. ​Drawing. ​Arxiu del Patronat Nacional del Misteri d’Elx.​ At the top: the hoist on the flat roof, the canvas representing ‘heaven’ at the drum, and the flying pomegranate. ​At the bottom: the stage (cadafal) and the pathway (andador). © Arxiu del Patronat del Misteri d’Elx [APME] 198​ 10.2 Manuscript of the Festa (1709). ​Elx, Arxiu Històric Municipal, Ms. 1–24, p. 1. © Arxiu Històric Municipal d’Elx Ms. 1–24, p. 1 199

Figures and Tables 

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10.3 Church of Santa Maria of Elx during the staging of the Mystery Play. © Francesc Massip 200 10.4 The corridor leading through the nave to the platform in the transept. © Sixto Marco 201 10.5a View of the nave and the drum of the dome with the descending araceli. © Francesc Massip 202 10.5b View of the stage from the trap-door (porta del cel) during a rehearsal (prova de l’àngel). © Francesc Massip 203 10.6 Burial procession (1950s). © APME 204 10.7 (A–B) The linen cloth of Heaven & Cloud (pomegranate) of the Mystery of Elx. © Francesc Massip 205 ​ 10.8 The “Pomgranate” of Elx. © Sixto Marco 206 ​ 10.9 The araceli descending through the trap-door with Mary’soul. © Francesc Massip 208 10.10 The araceli ascending with Saint Mary of the Assumption. © Sixto Marco 209 10.11 Aerial machine of the Trinity. © Francesc Massip 211 10.12 (A–D) Coronation of Saint Mary of the Assumption. © Sixto Marco 212 10.13A Exterior relief at Notre Dame of Paris with Mary’s bier covered with the cut-off hands of the Jews. © Francesc Massip 213 10.13B The rabbi of Elx with his paralysed hands on the bier. © Francesc Massip 213

Tables 11.1

Evolution of the types of performances 222

Notes on Contributors Carla M. Bino Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History of Theatre in the Department of Communication and Performing Arts at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. Her research interests include the theory of representation and the culture of dramatic performance of the Christian Middle Ages, with particular attention to the staging of Christ’s Passion. She is the author of Il dramma e l’immagine. Teorie cristiane della rappresentazione (II–XI sec) (2015) and Dal trionfo al pianto. La fondazione del ‘teatro della misericordia’ nel Medioevo (V– XIII secolo) (2008). She co-authored with Roberto Tagliani Con le braccia in croce. La Regola e l’Officio della quaresima dei disciplini di Breno (2012), as well as co-edited with Manuele Gragnolati Il corpo glorioso (2006) and Il corpo passionato (2003). Rachel Fulton Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (2003), and Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought (2018), both published by Columbia University Press. Fabrizio Fiaschini is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performing Arts at the University of Pavia. He is the author of Margherita, Alberto e Isabella. Ingressi trionfali a Pavia nel 1599 (2012), L’«incessabil agitazione». Giovan Battista Andreini fra professione teatrale, cultura letteraria e religione (2007), and Controcampi. Estetiche e pratiche della performance negli spazi del sociale (2022). Kamil Kopania Ph.D., since 2009 works at the A. Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw. From 2009 till 2019, he was an assistant professor at the Institute of Art History of the University of Warsaw. He is interested in the relationship between art and theatre in the Middle Ages, the function and reception of works of art in the Middle Ages, the history of European puppet theatre, and selected aspects of contemporary art. Founder and chairman of Podlaskie Association of Fine Arts (2004–2016) – a society whose purpose was to develop and promote “Collection II” of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, one of the most important public collections of contemporary art in Poland.

Notes on Contributors 

xiii

Francesc Massip Ph.D. in Art History and Ph.D. in Catalan Philology, he is Full Professor of History of Drama at the Department of Catalan Studies of the University Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona). He is Coordinator of the consolidated Research Group LAiREM (Literature, Art and Performance in the Long Middle Ages) and has been General Secretary and President of the Société Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval. He has published around thirty books and hundreds of articles in the main languages of Europe and America, particularly on Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque theatre and dance, as well as on aspects linked to popular theatre and folkloric traditions. He has participated with papers and communications in more than a hundred international conferences, and has staged several performances from the medieval and Renaissance tradition. Carolyn Muessig holds the Chair of Christian Thought, Department of Classics and Religion, University of Calgary. She has published extensively on preaching in premodern Europe, monasticism, and Catherine of Siena. She has worked with Beverly Mayne Kienzle on several projects including a critical edition of Hildegard of Bingen’s sermons. For 17 years she was co-editor with Veronica O’Mara of the international journal, Medieval Sermon Studies. She co-edited with George Ferzoco Medieval Monastic Education, and with Ad Putter Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages. Her most recent monograph is Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (OuP, 2020). Nils Holger Petersen is Associate Professor emeritus of Church History, University of Copenhagen. He is also a composer. He holds a M.Sc. (in mathematics, 1969) and a Ph.D. in Church History (University of Copenhagen). Throughout his career, he has been involved in (as well as leading) international interdisciplinary research projects. His research focuses on medieval Latin liturgy, music (drama), and the cultural history of Christianity. He has published monographs, edited volumes, and numerous articles. He is Area Editor for Music for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter Verlag).  Jean-Claude Schmitt is Directeur d’études à l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Among other books, he published The Holy Greyhound. Guinefort, Healer of Children since the 13th Century, Cambridge U. P., 1983; Ghosts in the Middle Ages.

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The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, Chicago U. P., 1998; The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010 and recently Les rythmes au Moyen Âge, 2016 and Le cloître des ombres with the translation of the Richalm of Schöntal’s Book of Revelations (2021). Allie Terry-Fritsch is Professor and Chair of Art History at Bowling Green State University. Her research investigates the performative experience of Renaissance art and ­architecture, with a particular focus on fifteenth-century Florence. Author of Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459–1580 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and editor of Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Ashgate/ Routledge, 2012), Terry-Fritsch has published widely on Medici art patronage and the works of Fra Angelico, Donatello, Benozzo Gozzoli, and others. Her next book, Fra Angelico’s Public: Renaissance Art, Medici Politics, and the Public Library of San Marco, will be completed in 2022. Timothy Verdon Roman Catholic priest and art historian, did his Ph.D. at Yale University. He has been a Consultor to the Vatican Commission on Sacred Art and the Cultural Heritage of the Church, a Fellow of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, and instructor in the Stanford University program in Florence. At present he is the director of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence and of the Diocesan Office of Sacred Art. His publications include books on sacred art, on Fra Angelico, on the biblical sources of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, and - for the Vatican Museum and with a preface by Pope Francis - three small volumes on the iconography of Baptism, the Eucharist and the Liturgical Year. Expected from Brepols in 2023 is his Christian Mysteries in Renaissance Art, which examines the theological contents of important works of that period. Andrew Walker White received his Ph.D. in Theatre History, Theory and Criticism from the University of Maryland, College Park. His first book, with Cambridge University Press, explores the complex relationship between theatre and Orthodox ritual. A cultural historian with a background in the performing arts, he is a veteran of stage and screen and also serves as a performing arts critic for various online journals. An award-winning professor, online and offline, he currently teaches courses in Ancient Greek, Roman and Medieval (Byzantine) history for George Mason University’s Department of History and Art History.

Introduction Carla M. Bino and Corinna Ricasoli In recent years, international studies on medieval culture have been very ­concerned with the meaning of vision and of representation devices, going so far as to radically rethink the ontological status of Christian images. By applying an interdisciplinary approach to a renewed analysis of sources and documents, many scholars have produced new interpretations of ­Byzantine icons as well as of Western images.1 Likewise, they have ­investigated the ­relationship between images and spectators, the modes of vision, and the cognitive and emotional power wielded by icons and images through the centuries.2 One of the most exciting results of these new lines of enquiry is the realisation of the performative dimension of the Christian medieval image, which is in fact an ‘acting image’ that consequently requires a proper discipline of the body and an equally suitable vision mode. Thus, senses, gestures, and words are thoroughly involved in the perception of the imago which, in turn, enters into an extraordinarily physical ‘exchange of gazes’ with the viewer in a way that is very similar to what happens with the action in a theatre scene.3 Therefore, viewing an image, does not just entail seeing it with the eyes, but also entering 1 Suffice it to mention, among others, the works of Byzantine icons by Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: on the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and by Bissera Vladimirova Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, ­Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), or those on the images in the Christian West by Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le corps des images. ­Essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), and Jean-Marie Sansterre, Les images sacrées en occident au Moyen Âge: histoire, attitudes, croyances. Recherches sur le témoignage des textes (Madrid: Axal/Visum, 2020). 2 An international conference devoted to this topic and titled, “What Does Animation Mean in the Middle Ages? Theoretical and Historical Approaches”, was organised in Bialystok, Poland, in September 2021. Concerned with the agency and life of material objects, the conference intended to shed light on understudied aspects of medieval visual culture, focusing on the agency of images and material objects. In this respect, the conference investigated the cultural use of and interaction with images not as mere historically or culturally specific phenomena. Rather, it concerns the ontology of images, as they were embedded in social interaction. Therefore, animation is deeply constitutive of the production of meaning and is not only located in the mind of the beholder but in the epistemology, creation, interaction, and materiality of images. 3 For this concept, see Marie-José Mondzain, Le commerce des regards (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003), where the ‘exchange of looks’ is meant as a way of looking responsibly, actively, and © Carla M. Bino and Corinna Ricasoli, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004522183_002

2

Bino and Ricasoli

into a synesthetic contact with it and to ‘act’ it, or even better, to become part of a dynamic and relational sensitive scene. Seeing is a performance.4 Today, both the idea of an ‘acting image’ and that of a ‘performative gaze’ are crucial to the theoretical and historical studies about Christian medieval ­theatre. In this respect, one aspect more than others has been highlighted by scholarship: the deep and mutual connection that Christian theatre entertains with both the performative construction of mental and artistic images and with the rhetorical mechanisms of writing and reading, based on locational memory techniques commonly used for composing silent and daily prayers, meditations, and also public sermons.5 Nevertheless, scholars who intend to study the so-called ‘sacred theatre’ or ‘sacred drama’ have to deal with the modern definition of the words ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’, and with the interpretative categories of sources established by Chambers and Young at the ­beginning of the twentieth century and handed down from one generation to the next. To put it more eloquently, it seems that the binomial sacred theatre, or sacred drama, is still illogical and needs further explanation even today because its two terms are incompatible and conflicting. Indeed, the first refers to the semantic field of rite, service, and liturgy; on the other hand, the latter implies the classical (Platonic and Aristotelian) meaning of ‘representation’ as mimema or reproduction. As established by Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Christian theology conceives redemption as a ‘dramatic event’ that acquires significance through its happening—dromenon. This dramatic and experiential dimension of the event is crucial for the understanding of Christian performative culture, especially between the Middle Ages and the early modern age. Indeed, on the one hand, it entails an inevitable change in the ways of vision, in which the latter transitions from external and distant to internal and participatory (both physically and emotionally). On the other hand, it implies an idea of ‘antispectacular’—a non-simulative or fictional—representation, which takes on the ­memorial and relational characteristics illustrated by Hasso Hofmann:

based on reciprocity, the opposite of the ‘industry of visibilities’, which refers to a passive gaze where the viewer is a mere user and totally invaded by what is seen. 4 In this regard, the reader should refer to the essays collected in the volume by Hans ­Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine Skinnebach, eds., The ­Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages (Århus: Aarhus ­University Press, 2015). 5 See for example the work of Theodore Karl Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (New York: Palgrave, 2008), and that of Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the origins of medieval drama (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1992).

Introduction

3

representing always has to do with a presence that is now strengthened, now repeated, now replaced.6 As explained by Jeffery Hamburger, the traits of Christian visual culture can only be fully understood by referring to the solid epistemological foundations of theological thought. It is the theological and economic concept of eikon/ imago—a constitutive element of thought about both God and man—that determines every idea of material translation (representation) into an image. In light of this, it is not a question of seeking the possibility or legitimacy of an image in theology—be it a figurative, artistic, or scenic image—rather, it is a matter of seeking the very foundation of representation and perception and its devices. In short, what is central is not so much the meaning conveyed by images (what they mean), but the way the meaning of images is conveyed (how they mean) and what they tend to.7 Therefore, in order to fully understand the development of Christian performative and visual culture and its characteristics, it is necessary to bear in mind how the ways and forms of representation changed over the centuries in relation to different doctrinal indications, new spiritualities, and resulting cult changes. By doing so, it will be possible to both appreciate the specificity of a text, object, or image in the light of its particular performative use and to understand the variation of liturgical-ritual devices and the emergence of new dramatic devotions, be they individual or collective. The essays collected in this book try to shed light precisely on the performative peculiarity of Christian representation. From different perspectives, they make evident that in addition to being central to Christian theology, the idea 6 See Hasso Hofmann, Repräsentation. Studien zur Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1974). Given the term raepresentatio’s structural polysemy already since its Latin origins, the scholar identifies three main semantic fulcra: the first concerns the intensification/strengthening of the presence, typical of the ostension and the epiphany. In other words, it indicates the action of placing under the eyes—here and now—a physical, accessible, and concrete visible by those who “show by exhibiting.” The second semantic area is that of iteration, in which the prefix “re” is understood as iterum (again) and means, “making present anew.” Finally, the third refers to the logic of substitution and of the vicarious nature of the delegation/mandate and refers to the “staying in the place of” someone, namely taking his place. I have discussed it in Carla Bino, “Per un’indagine dei significati di repraesentare nel pensiero cristiano. Alcuni esempi tra retorica e liturgia (XI–XII secolo),” in Presenza-Assenza. Meccanismi dell’istituzionalità nella Societas Christiana (sec. IX–XIII), eds. Guido Cariboni, Nicolangelo D’Acunto, and E ­ lisabetta Filippini (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2021). 7 The reference is to Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The Place of Theology in Medieval Art History: ­Problems, Positions, Possibilites,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the ­Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton ­University Press, 2006).

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of performance became a device that informed the way people saw, prayed, preached, wrote, imagined, and officiated rites, celebrated cults, and practiced devotions from the Middle Ages until the early modern era. Consequently, for Christianity, performance is an attitude, a habitus. Performing the Bible does not just mean representing the Bible, but rather enacting it in the first person, in a tangible, visible, and involved way. Timothy Verdon’s paper opens the book as it provides a framework for the reading of the other essays. In it, he provides the theological foundations of the dramatic relationship linking art to liturgy, images to rites, rites to t­ heatre. He situates church art in the service of liturgy which, from the Middle Ages onwards, was conceived both as the supreme form of religious art and as ritual drama. The exquisitely cultural character of religious art is due to its being a mystery made visible. This is why in many ancient cultures, when artistic creativity—be it architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry, music, or choreography—was put to the service of cult, it was considered God’s gift. This is also true for the Judeo-Christian concept of art. In the Old Testament, the function of the arts was to be a visible sign of the alliance between God and his people. It was an extension of the partial revelation of the divine glory, a ­manifestation of the will of the people of Israel to create a ‘place near God’, the ark and the temple, whose architect was God himself, who bestowed the project and the ability to carry it out. Conversely, for Christianity, the temple was Jesus himself. In him, God’s word, the word that is God, became visible to ­everybody. Art acquired more importance, and its function became that of being the announcement of the embodied word. Such announcement was also an encounter: together with rites, images made the message of salvation present and visible. The experiential dimension of Christian images made it possible for rites and sacraments to be seen as images, as live representations of the participation in the mystery. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that a circular relationship between images, rites, and liturgy does indeed exist, and that there is a parallel between liturgy and theatre based on the dramatic dimension of the Christian message and on the performative dimension of the sacramental rites. By examining medieval and Renaissance images dealing with liturgical themes, Verdon relates the ‘noetic drama’ of rites—like the Reproaches of Christ—to popular iconographic categories such as the imago pietatis (Man of Sorrows). He thus finds references to theatrical staging in ­fifteenth- and sixteenth-century images, as well as a systematic defence of the function of images in the Catholic iconography of the Counter-Reformation and Baroque eras. The theological foundation of the concepts of representation and vision within Western Christian thought is the theme of Carla Maria Bino’s

Introduction

5

contribution. The scholar focuses on some of the writings of the Apologists and the Latin fathers of the church (from Tertullian to Augustine) against pagan plays to show how that criticism is based on the performative shift of Christian representation to the radical revolution of the representation process in theological Christian thought. Through the writings of the Apologists and the fathers of the church (from Tertullian to Augustine), she explains this revolution is based on the overturning of the point of view that moves from the spectator to the actor (ex parte spectantis ad partem agentis) and sets its origin ‘within’ the scene, turning the show into a drama. Indeed, if the spectacular vision requires what Tertullian calls ‘vision from a distance’ (de ­longinquo), then the dramatic vision implies a short vision, or better still, a vision from within (Tertullian specifies de proximo). The involvement of drama is the opposite of the distance of spectare, in the same manner as the gaze of a passive user is far from the participatory gaze of someone who actively responds to what he or she is seeing. The ‘dramatic turn’ of Christian representation makes the Classic (Greek and Hellenistic) idea of mimesis useless, and results in a new meaning of representation as ‘to re-present’ memory or ‘to present it once more’, which is intended as reenacting memory or making memory active: repraesentare vel agere memoriam. The denial of an imitative and fictional representation even in Eastern Christian thought is the theme of Andrew Walker White’s paper. His essay explores the roots of Orthodoxy’s aesthetic of ritual performance, which draws from both John Damascene’s theology of icons and the refined art of rhetoric. Orthodox objections to pagan theatre and, a few centuries later, to Western sacred drama are based on two principles: the first is an intellectual prejudice of the Greek elites who—from the Hellenistic age onwards—started favouring the word and shunning the performance, which they considered vulgar. As a result, scholastic education during the Hellenistic age consisted in the memorisation and performative reading or reciting of the poems of the classical period, including theatre texts. The second principle is the Judeo-Christian interpretation of scripture, especially of the book of Job and Second Maccabees, where the idea of the ‘hypocrite’ as being ‘dead in the heart’ and a ‘­simulator’— later widely used in the Gospel of Matthew—is laid out. The theatre is therefore rejected as it is an imitative and fictional art. These reasons also explain the Orthodox clergy’s rejection of medieval Italian Sacre Rappresentazioni, which were ‘innovative’ as they tended to move from eikonizein (translation into an icon) to substitutive representation, which indeed substituted icons with people and typological action with fictional action. On the contrary, in Byzantium the representation remained liturgical, as explained by White with the example of the Service of the Furnace, acted in the church of Hagia Sophia

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on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers in mid-December. Far from being ‘conservative’, there is evidence that hierarchs of the Eastern church continued to innovate this service and experiment with new modes of ritual observance. White’s essay should be read alongside Nils Holger Petersen’s, who analyses the compositional changes of the liturgical offices in the Western church between the tenth and twelfth centuries against the backdrop of the ­understanding of the sacraments and particularly of the Eucharist. Petersen argues that before the twelfth century, sacraments were considered sacred signs, and that they became real sacraments (especially baptism and the ­Eucharist) only later, and that in order to qualify as such, they had to be sanctified by a priest and were thus controlled by the church. Clearly this different understanding of the sacred sign had an impact on the ways and forms of liturgical enactments. Until the mid-twelfth century, dramatic ceremonies were written in liturgical books since they were part of the sacred signs (sacraments). They were long ‘sequences’ that connected two different parts of the liturgy and enhanced it. Later, they started being written outside of liturgy books—without any direct link to liturgy itself—and began to be enriched with extra-liturgical sources (such as the Bible, the Apocrypha, etc.). Often there were no precise indications regarding their enactment in liturgical rubrics, and they were performed with a catechetical, didactic, and devotional purpose. Petersen proves his point discussing the Versus de resuscitacione Lazari, a large, biblical, Latin music drama, probably composed during the twelfth century, and included in the famous Fleury Playbook, consisting of ten substantial Latin music dramas more or less explicitly connected to liturgical ceremonies. With Rachel Fulton’s essay we enter into the merits of individual ­Christian performative practices, starting with the dramatic nature of praying and of the images that prayer produces or that are linked to prayer itself. Fulton engages in a small performative trip to explore how Mary was seen by medieval ­Christians, challenging the reader to adopt the same performative gaze that allowed those Christians to have a vision of the mystery and to experience it. Through an analysis of the window of the Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres, and with the support of scripture and other texts used to pray to Mary (Psalms and the daily prayers of the Marian Hours), Fulton argues that Mary was seen as the connection between God and the world, the one who contained the creator of heaven and earth in her womb and through whom he entered into his creation. Mary, the perfect creature of God, is also the one who in her contemplation of the Lord, her son, reflected his glory and goodness. When medieval Christians saw Mary and her son’s images and meditated upon Mary in her earthly relationship with her child, they did not just see a tender woman and mother, but rather she who became

Introduction

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sedes sapientiae. By making God visible and accessible to humans, she was the necessary go-between for revelation and redemption. Kamil Kopania’s essay goes deeper into the performative relation a­ ccording to which images engaged both with texts and with devotional practices. He investigates the relationship between the visualisation processes of the passion of Jesus, the liturgy of the Easter triduum, paraliturgical representations, and the performative use of sculptures. Specifically, he focuses on animated sculptures of the crucified Christ made and used throughout medieval Europe (Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, Belgium, Czech R ­ epublic, Poland, France, and Slovakia), presenting their variations and ­paying particular attention to the most complicated exemplars. The vast majority of these animated sculptures possesses a mechanism allowing the arms to be folded down along the body, but there are some instances in which all the joints are hinged (legs, head, tongue, eyes), covered in properly treated and painted calfskin, and contain a receptacle for blood (connected to the wound in the side), which is placed in a hollow in the back and concealed with a flap. Present in church interiors throughout the liturgical year, they played a special part in the paschal triduum period, when they were used in theatricalised liturgical and paraliturgical ceremonies, as well as in mystery plays. They were also the object of pilgrimage, and their design and functions allowed for the creation of powerful images of the final stages of Jesus’s passion, thus influencing their reception on behalf of the faithful. Seeing images of Jesus’s body being taken down from the cross and put into the sepulchre could certainly awaken f­eelings of compassion. But the same feelings could be awoken even more directly and convincingly through the use of sculptures showing Jesus’s suffering, pain, and violent death. This physical and emotional participatory dynamic in the earthly events of Christ’s life is the focus of Carolyn Muessig’s paper, which addresses issues in the use of performance to convey stories, concepts, and ideas. Her essay concerns the strongly dramatic dimension of female preaching in the late medieval and early modern period and argues that this is the key to the understanding of the diverse methods of communication that women used to preach sermons. Francis of Assisi once preached to nuns about penance by sitting down on the floor, pouring ashes over his head, then suddenly leaving without saying a word; thus emphasizing action over words. In this way, he created a most powerful sermon, and just like him, nuns often employed performance to convey theological ideas. In particular, they relied on key New Testament narratives to articulate some of the most fundamental Christian beliefs, such as the resurrection and redemption through movement, gestures, mime, and sometimes even dance. Muessig’s analysis focuses on four women—the

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Italian Tommasina Fieschi (1448–1534) and Stefana Quinzani (1457–1530), and the Spanish María de Santo Domingo (ca. 1485–1524?) and Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534)—all of whom communicated New Testament narratives. They all belonged to the Observant reform movement that swept across Europe around the mid-fifteenth century. Through widespread preaching, this movement’s aim was to instil obedience with the aspiration of eradicating any disunity and corruption that had crept into religious practices. The male Observant movement has been studied more in depth than its female counterpart, but the latter reveals women’s important role in this respect, as they were not mere listeners but also active preachers. At this point, Allie Terry-Fritsch’s essay shows us how, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the idea of dramatic participation in the earthly events of Christ—already encouraged in the past by other devotional practices and by preaching—becomes an actual somatic and aesthetic experience. Indeed, her paper deals with images organised in three-dimensional scenes that required the viewer to literally enter into them, to be fully involved in their subject matter, and to eventually become part of their action. Her article examines pilgrims’ performances within sensuous, time-based, and immersive art installations of the passion erected at two virtual Holy Lands in Renaissance Italy: the Sacro Monte di Varallo, a late fifteenth-century simulation built on the mountains of northern Italy, and the Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo, an early sixteenth-century version of Jerusalem built in the forests of Tuscany. Unlike the real Holy City, these virtual reconstructions of the ‘New Jerusalem’ offered neither relics of Jesus’s life nor sites touched by his sacred body. Rather, they presented scenarios for pilgrim engagement with the biblical narrative through a devotional ‘immersion’ in multimedia art installations, called ‘holy places’. As she argues, the success of these pilgrimage sites in Italy was contingent on the Franciscan founders’ incorporation of ‘somaesthetics’ into the built environment. While neither Varallo nor San Vivaldo could ever offer the same intensity or duration of the physical and mental challenges of the journey to the actual Holy Land, they provided pilgrims with a means to inhabit its most sacred spaces through immersive and participatory practices that fostered body mindfulness and heightened sensory experiences. The sites replicated the spatial configuration of the primary sacred markers of the terra sancta so that pilgrims could pray in topomimetic relation to their Christian counterparts in Jerusalem. To further activate the prosthetic body and mind of pilgrims, viewing at Varallo and San Vivaldo was constructed as a participatory performance. Pilgrims were invited to enter the architectural environments scattered throughout the ‘sacred’ landscape and to engage their bodies and minds in the activation of the artistic program. Through full-bodied sensory

Introduction

9

exploration, the pilgrim viewer experienced the biblical narrative—or its ­contemporary veneration in Jerusalem—first hand. Remaining in the same historical period but starting from the thorny relationship between the Catholic Church and theatre during the CounterReformation, Fabrizio Fiaschini’s essay addresses the issue of the polysemic character of the concept of representation intended as ‘re-presenting’—that is, reactivating in the present—as well as ‘reproducing’ and ‘imitating’. The Commedia dell’Arte (the most important Italian and European phenomenon of modern professional theatre) is an important example of how this ambiguity was intended during the Renaissance, when the problematic relationship between the actors’ real lives and their artistic profession (which required them to pretend on stage) became of paramount importance for the rebirth of theatre and its reinvention in new forms. By highlighting the case of Giovan Battista Andreini, one of the most important actors and playwrights of this genre, Fiaschini’s paper focuses on the artistic strategies carried out by the Commedia dell’Arte in order for the Catholic Church to accept it from a moral and cultural standpoint. Fiaschini shows that the arguments used by actors to turn the accusations brought against them to their advantage were essentially three: the high cultural worth of their art, characterised by decorum and medietas; the burdensome commitment to an itinerant life, interpreted as a spiritual peregrination; and the celebration of the actress as a metaphor of the comic art, thus transforming any eroticism from carnal to spiritual, and by picking Mary Magdalene as her icon. The relationship between liturgical celebration and dramatic representation is the topic of Francesc Massip’s essay on the Misteri or Festa d’Elx (Alacant), which is an example of devotion analysed both in its historical dimension and in its contemporary one. Indeed, it is the only surviving late-medieval performance that has been continuously enacted, inside a church, since the fifteenth century and has preserved the main characteristics of medieval European drama. It recreates the death, assumption, and coronation of the Virgin Mary, a dogma commemorated by the Catholic Church on August 15. The play is sung using monodic medieval music in its oldest parts and Renaissance polyphony in its newer ones. The dialogues are in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ­Catalan in its Southern Valencian variant. The whole play is enacted by men, and the female roles (the Virgin Mary and her sisters) are played by young boys. The staging includes a horizontal (terrestrial) route from the gateway to the transept using a corridor (andador) that leads to a large scaffold located beneath the dome. The vertical (celestial) route is defined by the appearance of three aerial devices that are lowered from the dome. During the two days of the staging, the church of Elx is turned into a scene: on August 14, when Mary

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takes leave of the apostles and prepares to die, and on August 15, when the burial takes place, followed by Mary’s resurrection, assumption, and glorification. On the nights of August 14 and 15, the church remains open, hosting the bier of the Virgin that is visited by the citizens of Elx, who, in turns, participate in a procession through the streets of the town in homage to their patron. A final burial procession, with the figure of the deceased Virgin Mary carried by the apostles, is held on the morning of August 15. Urban religiosity, daily life, and representation merge into a devotional continuum that has been repeated annually for five centuries. The final paper by Jean-Claude Schmitt (keynote speaker at the conference) closes the book by bringing us back to the field of representation theory. He draws from two research fields and academic traditions: on the one side, the study of the Bible and of the history of its reception; on the other, the study of medieval drama. In the first part of his essay, Schmitt analyses the role of the Bible and its uses in Judaism and Christianity. Despite their common biblical ground, there were important differences between the two. The most evident is that there was practically no Jewish ‘theatre’ until the end of the Middle Ages, as opposed to Christian monastic performances which first developed out of the tropes for Easter (tenth century), only to become biblical dramas performed inside or outside churches (ca. 1160) and later in public urban spaces (fourteenth- to sixteenth-century passion plays and Mystères). In the second part of his paper, Schmitt explores what ‘performing the Bible’ actually meant to the performers as well as to the spectators: to what extent may we speak of performers’ ‘representation’, ‘imitation’, and ‘impersonation’? To what extent were the spectators ‘ambivalent’ about the plays and more generally about images and arts? Did they have a sense of the ‘fictitious’ nature of the play? These questions are especially important as far as Jewish roles in plays are concerned, but also with regards to the reactions of the spectators towards contemporary Jews. In conclusion, we can assert that the conference held in Washington, DC— of which these are the proceedings—has successfully intersected the research outcomes stemming from diverse traditions and subjects, which however, have often yielded converging results. Particularly, the common elements that emerge from the different contributions are two. First, the sources are taken into consideration by adopting a method that reads texts, works of art, preaching, as well as eucological, devotional, liturgical, and dramatic practices in a perspective that considers them ‘in action’, thus entering into the merits of the performative dynamics of which they are part. This allows for the best appreciation of the specific features of each object— namely the structure of a text, the form of an artifact, or the dramaturgy of

Introduction

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a rite or a devotion—without dwelling on exclusively philological or stylistic issues. What strongly emerges—and this is the second common element—is the link between form and function, already pointed out by Hans Belting in relation to the images of the passion and their relationship with the viewer. This becomes a main feature of Christian representation, which is not limited to the passive visio of the eyes, but rather implies the reciprocal and participatory dynamics typical of the actio. The essays collected in this volume showcase how performative dynamics change over the centuries in relation to different environments and according to historical, geographical, cultural, and religious contexts. It is a change that always brings about new or renewed performances (see the instance of liturgy, for example) while leaving the underlying dramatic principle intact, thus reaffirming its anti-spectacular, anti-mimetic, non-fictional nature. Conversely, it aims at the engagement and at the experiential and relational dimension. With their either theoretical or historical angle, the contributions collated here have answered many of the questions raised by the conference. At the same time, however, they brought up new issues and offer new research perspectives. Bibliography Barber, Charles. Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Bino, Carla. “Per un’indagine dei significati di repraesentare nel pensiero ­cristiano. Alcuni esempi tra retorica e liturgia (XI–XII secolo).” In Presenza-Assenza. ­Meccanismi dell’istituzionalità nella Societas Christiana (sec. IX–XIII), edited by Guido ­Cariboni, Nicolangelo D’Acunto, and Elisabetta Filippini, 29–42. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2021. Enders, Jody. Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama. Ithaca, London: Cornell ­University Press, 1992. Hamburger, Jeffrey F. “The Place of Theology in Medieval Art History: Problems, ­Positions, Possibilites.” In The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the ­Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché, 11–31. ­Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Hofmann, Hasso. Repräsentation. Studien zur Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1974. Jørgensen, Hans Henrik Lohfert, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine Skinnebach, eds. The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages. Århus: Aarhus University Press, 2015.

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Lerud, Theodore Karl. Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Pentcheva, Bissera Vladimirova. The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in ­Byzantium. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Sansterre, Jean-Marie. Les images sacrées en occident au Moyen Âge: histoire, attitudes, croyances. Recherches sur le témoignage des textes. Madrid: Axal/Visum, 2020. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Le corps des images. Essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge. Paris: Gallimard, 2002.

CHAPTER 1

The Drama of Christian Images: Art, Liturgy, Sacred Theatre Timothy Verdon Christian images are often dramatic in character, and, in the ecclesiastical contexts for which they were—and still are—normally made, may seem practically ‘theatrical’. This is true, moreover, not only of Baroque masterpieces like Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Transverberation of Saint Theresa, but of the early Christian mosaics of San Vitale, of Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, of Antonio Pollaiuolo’s embroideries for the Florence Baptistery vestments (Figure 1.1), and of Matthias Grünewald’s sixteenth-century altarpiece for the hospital chapel at Isenheim. The evident affinity with theatre arises not from style but from the liturgical function attributed to the images and from the inherently dramatic nature of ritual. Liturgy is the supreme form of religious art.1 Itself an art and a generator of art, liturgy is comprised of ritual actions combined with words, configuring spaces in which to perform the actions, and using images to illustrate the words. Temples and processions, choral music, paintings, statues, and sacred vessels in turn imply the collaboration of professionals in these several fields: of architects and choreographers, composers and musicians, singers, poets, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, and others still. In many ancient cultures, creative talent in the service of the liturgy was held to be a divine gift and art in all its forms—every capacity to ideate and create beautiful things—was conceived in relation to the sacred. In Old ­Testament Israel, for example, the very origin of the arts was unequivocally presented as having a cultic function, “Bezalel and Oholiab and every skillful one to whom the Lord has given skill and understanding to know how to do any work in the construction of the sanctuary” were guided by Moses himself

1 The present essay draws upon the first chapter of my collection of essays published some years ago. See Timothy Verdon, Vedere il mistero. Il genio artistico della liturgia cattolica (Milano: Mondadori, 2003). © Timothy Verdon, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004522183_003

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Figure 1.1 Antonio Pollaiuolo (design), Salome Presents the Head of St. John the Baptist to her Mother Herodias, c.1469–1480. Embroidered panel from a set of vestments made for the Baptistery of Florence © Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Firenze

to make everything “in accordance with all that the Lord has commanded just as the Lord had commanded,” Exodus 36:1 assures us.2

2 All English translations of the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version (henceforth, NRSV).

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15

Art, a Sign of Salvation

This passage from Exodus is perhaps the basis of the Judeo-Christian concept of art. In the biblical account of the chosen people’s flight from slavery in Egypt towards freedom in a promised land, the calling of the first artists and the building of the sanctuary are in fact conclusive acts in a series of events crucial for the history and identity of God’s people—events which it will be useful to briefly recall before we proceed. While Moses on the mountain received the tablets of the law with the Ten Commandments, at the mountain’s foot his people lost confidence, ­fashioning a golden calf and adoring it.3 When Moses came down, offended at the Israelites’ faithlessness, he shattered the tablets, obliging the people to choose between YHWH and their idol with the words, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me!”4 Praying, Moses obtained pardon for the people’s sin and a promise that the Lord would walk in their midst. When Moses asked the personal privilege of seeing God, however, YHWH told him: “But,” he said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”5 Yet God made a concession to his friend: “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”6 Moses then ascended the mountain again and beheld, in this partial way, YHWH, who, as he passed, identified himself as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). God then established an alliance with Israel and the Ten Commandments were rewritten on other tablets.7 It was at this point that, descending the mountain a second time, Moses persuaded the people to make a ‘voluntary contribution’ of all that was required for the liturgy and summoned the first of the artists, Bezalel, declaring that YHWH himself had “filled him with divine spirit, with skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft.”8 3 4 5 6 7 8

Exodus 32:1–6. Exodus 32:26. Exodus 33:20. Exodus 33:21–23. Exodus 34:1–28. Exodus 35:31–33.

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In this sequence of events, which opens with the golden calf and closes with the ornaments of the sanctuary, it is perfectly clear that art in the service of worship is related to sin and forgiveness, becoming indeed the sign of a radical choice made by the people and of God’s own promise to walk in their midst. The art made for the sanctuary prolonged the partial revelation of divine glory (God’s back seen by Moses) and manifested the Israelites’ willingness to contribute with their own means to realizing a ‘place near to God’ whose architect was God himself, who furnished the plan and endowed the artists with talent. The ‘voluntary contribution’ required was an earnest sign of the people’s repentance for the sin of idolatry, just as the resulting beauty of the sanctuary signalled the alliance offered by him who is “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin”9 As presented in the Old Testament, that is, art is a privileged sign of alliance between sinful man and the God who, pardoning sin, walks with his people; it is practically a ‘sacrament’ of the presence and salvation he offers. 2

Jesus and Art

These functions, which in ancient Israel were concentrated first in the movable sanctuary which Moses built and then in the Jerusalem temple, might seem destined to lose significance in the new alliance instituted by Jesus. Speaking to a woman of Samaria, he in fact stated that neither the Samaritans’ sacred mountain nor the Israelites’ temple was any longer necessary, because “the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will w ­ orship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit”, Jesus continued, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”10 In much the same vein, one day when he was preaching, hearing people speak “about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God”, Jesus said: “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”11 And on another occasion he used clearly provocative language to re-­dimension Israel’s liturgical-artistic faith, when—after expelling moneychangers and 9 10 11

Exodus 34:6–7. John 4:23–24. Luke 21:5–6.

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merchants from the outer courtyard—he justified his action by promising: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”12 The key to such passages is provided by the Evangelist John in the verses following this assertion. Noting the astonishment of Jesus’s listeners—“This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” they exclaim—John specifies that Jesus “was speaking of the temple of his body”, and that “after he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken”13 For Christian theology in fact, the new ‘­temple’—the ‘place near to God’ where believers contemplate the Father’s glory—is Jesus himself. In the New as in the Old Testament, man may not in fact see YHWH in ­person, and the fourth Gospel insists that “no one has ever seen God.”14 The Gospel adds, however, that the only-begotten Son who dwells in the Father’s bosom has revealed him.15 This assertion goes back to Jesus himself, who, when the apostle Philip asked to see God, answered: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”16 In the same spirit, a Pauline text asserts that Jesus “is the image [eikon - icon] of the invisible God.”17 But if Jesus is the incarnate ‘icon’ of the invisible Father—the radiance of that glory which Moses yearned to see and could not—it follows that the role of images in the new alliance is ultimately not less but more important than in the old! The most richly decorated area of the Jerusalem temple (as, ­earlier, of the “dwelling” or “tabernacle”’ fashioned by Bezalel) was the inner cell that hosted the ark in which God’s “ten words” were preserved on stone ­tablets: its walls of precious cedar carved with bunches of flowers alluded to the importance of God’s words.18 In Jesus Christ, however, not ‘ten words’ but the Word—the logos or Verbum—became flesh. He was not hidden in an ark in an inaccessible chamber but made manifest to all, as the First Letter of John insists: “what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

John 2:19. John 2:20–22. John 1:18. John 1:18. John 14:9. Colossians 1:15. Cf. 1 Kings 6:14–18.

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revealed to us—we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us.”19 In the new alliance, art in fact would become a form of proclamation, meant to engender communion, of “that which was from the beginning” and which some have now experienced in sensory fashion: have “seen”, “contemplated”, “heard”, and even “touched” the Word incarnate, eternal life which, becoming visible, elicits the joyful testimony of those who see it. In fact, the concluding phrase of the passage just cited is: “We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.”20 3

The Sacraments as Images

In the life of the church, the designated place for expressing joy—the ­typical context of witnessing and communion—is the liturgy (Figure 1.2). Images made in its service thus automatically become part of a proclamation that is also an encounter, in direct analogy with the sacraments, the signs of salvation and new life instituted by Jesus. It is in fact from the sacramental liturgy that sacred images draw their ‘power’, their ‘presence’, their ‘reality’. For Christian theologians of the early centuries, the sacraments were themselves considered ‘images’. For example, according to Basil, in baptism (which is participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus: cf. Romans 6), the water gives us an image of death, receiving the body as a tomb would do.21 And speaking of the Eucharist, Gaudentius of Brescia says, “the bread is properly considered an image of the body of Christ” since it is composed “of many grains of wheat” which, milled, mixed with water, and baked, become an overall sign of the communion of men and women baptised in water and in the Spirit’s fire—men and women who thus become the one mystical body of Jesus, the church.22 In these citations, the metaphorical aspect of the image/sacrament ­relationship dominates, but the church fathers also emphasised a specifically 19 20 21

22

1 John 1:1–3. 1 John 1:4, emphasis added. On the Holy Spirit, 15:35. Patrologiae cursus completus, series graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 161 vols. (Paris: Apud J.-P. Migne, 1857–1866) (= PG), 32:130–31. Cf. Basilius ­Magnus, Basil: Letters and Select Works, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1886), 8:165. Gaudentius Brixiensis, “Tractatus 2,” in Tractatus, ed. Ambrosius Glück, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum (Vienna: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1936), 68:30–32.

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Figure 1.2 Workshop of Andrea Pisano, The Eucharist, c.1361. A relief in a series depicting the seven sacraments, made for the bell tower of Florence Cathedral © Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Firenze

visual dimension. Leo the Great, for example, held that after Jesus’s return to the Father in the ascension, “all that was visible in our Redeemer passed over into the sacramental rites”, which reveal “a mysterious series of divine actions” on which “the whole existence of the Christian is founded.”23 If the believer’s 23

Second Discourse on the Ascension, 1: 4. Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 221 vols. (Paris: Apud J.-P. Migne, 1844–1891) (= PL), 54:397–99.

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whole existence depends on a visibility mediated by liturgical rites, however, it follows that the mosaics and paintings, stained glass and statues that are physically associated with the rites have singular dignity. Many works in fact suggest this relationship, sometimes in almost literal fashion: a fifteenth-century Florentine woodcut showing the elevation of the host at Mass celebrated before an altarpiece in which the faithful, kneeling before an altar, see themselves mirrored in the saints depicted and the host e­ levated by the celebrant is superimposed on the altarpiece’s central figure, presumably Mary with the Christ Child.24 In this Eucharistic context, two truths of faith are thus made explicit: the idea of the church as a ‘communion’ of saints from all historical periods which itself becomes the Saviour’s mystical body, and the belief in a ‘real presence’, in the bread and wine, of the same body of Jesus born of the Virgin Mary. Another striking example is a sixteenth-century altarpiece in Brescia, Saint Apollonius Giving Holy Communion by Girolamo Romanino, in the church of Santa Maria in Calchera, where s­ acramental communion is visually linked to the body of Jesus in the ‘painting within the painting’ shown behind the saint, a Pietà, and the act performed by the faithful in the foreground, of ‘receiving the body of Jesus’, becomes an extension in time of the historical action of Mary, John, and the holy women who—in the painting with-in the painting—similarly ‘receive’ Jesus’s body taken down from the cross. 4

Rite as Image

Legitimating similar mental associations is a New Testament text, the L­ etter to the Hebrews, which presents Jesus’s whole earthly activity in liturgical terms and in its opening phrases presents images as necessary, an indispensable means of communicating the message of salvation. “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son … He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being”25 Not words alone, therefore, but a visual experience (‘irradiation’) that is also tactile (‘imprint’) is the hallmark of the new alliance. The Son, moreover, is presented as ‘priest’—the definitive high priest whom the service of the ancient Levitical priesthood foreshadowed— and “the days of his flesh” are described as an uninterrupted sacrificial rite, the 24 25

A woodcut in Girolamo Savonarola, Tractato del sacramento & de mysterii della messa & regola utile composta da frate Hieronymo da Ferrara (Firenze: Antonio Miscomini, 1492), plate 1r. Hebrews 1:1–3.

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Figure 1.3 Donatello, Man of Sorrows, 1408. Relief carved on keystone of the Porta della Mandorla of Florence Cathedral © Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Firenze

incessant offering to God of “prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears.”26 This ‘liturgy’, co-extensive with the priest’s life, was not celebrated in an earthly sanctuary—not the tent with its decorations fashioned by Bezalel— but in the “the greater and perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation).”27 The place of sacrifice was in fact Jesus’s own physical body, where—as “high priest of the good things that have come … not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood”—he entered the sanctuary “once and for all … thus obtaining eternal redemption” (Figure 1.3).28 What is more, by penetrating to the heart of the ‘holy place’ (of himself, that is), Jesus inaugurated for all humankind “a new and living way … through the curtain” that formerly separated the Sancta sanctorum from the outer areas of the temple, and that ‘way’ (road, path, route) is his flesh.29 Offering his own life in place of the lives of ritual animals, Jesus opened for us a new pathway to God. 26 27 28 29

Hebrews 5:7. Hebrews 9:11. Hebrews 9:11–12. Cf. Hebrews 10:20.

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But if the ‘new pathway’ is the Saviour’s own flesh, it must be tied to his incarnation and thus also to his visibility. Indeed, according to Athanasius, Jesus “built himself a temple—his body, that is—in the Virgin, and, dwelling therein, made it an element in the process of his manifestation.”30 He became manifest in order to lead others along the same ‘pathway’ (all in fact enjoy the “confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh)”,31) and sacred images, in analogy with the sacraments that keep the memory of Jesus’s passion alive, serve as ‘road signs’ for those who would walk this path. Showing Jesus, Mary, and the saints in corporeal form, paintings and sculptures indicate the “new and living way”, which is the Saviour’s flesh present in the consecrated bread but also in the ‘mystical body’ which is the church. 5

Liturgy as Theatre

The Christian art most closely related to liturgy is theatre, as Osborne ­Bennett Hardison noted fifty years ago in his study of Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages.32 Hardison recalled the parallelism elaborated by a twelfth-century theologian, Honorius of Autun, who compared the Mass to classical drama, arguing that, like ancient actors who performed tragedies in theatres, representing with movements the actions of personages in conflict, so a priest saying Mass “in the theatre of the church represents Jesus’s struggle for Christian people, teaching them the victory of salvation.”33 Honorius, who was perhaps from Regensburg, may have borrowed this idea from the Carolingian writer Amalarius of Metz, who in the ninth century had explained the Mass as a drama illustrating salvation history, seeing the Introit as a chorus of Old Testament prophets predicting the Messiah, the Gloria as an announcement of Jesus’s birth, the elevation of the host as a gesture symbolizing his crucifixion, and its lowering again to the altar as a symbol of Jesus’s entombment.34 Similar allusions to ancient theatre in the writings of medieval liturgists are hard to evaluate, given the limited historical information available to their authors. More persuasive, because closer to the source, is a patristic reference: 30 31 32 33 34

Discourse on the Incarnation, 8–9, in PG, 25:110–11. Hebrews 10:19–20. Osborne Bennett Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 35–79. Ibid., 39–40. Ibid., 44–46.

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the fifth-century bishop Gaudentius of Brescia’s assertion that the Eucharist must be celebrated in every church in all the world until Jesus comes again, “so that all—clergy and laity alike—have before their eyes every day a living representation of the Lord’s Passion, touch it with their hands, receive it with their mouth, and in their heart, and indelibly conserve the memory of our redemption.”35 This seems to be one of the messages of a Flemish painting done a thousand years after Gaudentius, the triptych by Rogier Van der ­Weyden and assistants depicting the sacraments celebrated in various chapels of a gothic cathedral, with, in the main nave, where Mass is being said, a “living representation of the Lord’s Passion”: a realistic Calvary scene in the foreground that makes the dramatic content of the liturgical rite absolutely explicit. Gaudentius of Brescia’s characterisation of the Eucharist as a “living representation” of Jesus’s passion has a familiar ring, and in fact echoes the language of Paul’s rebuke to the Galatians, who had succumbed to heresy despite the clear picture of Jesus Christ crucified which the apostle had set before their eyes.36 The Greek verb Paul uses for ‘drawing a clear picture’, epigraphein, suggests he had described Jesus’s sufferings in a way so explicit as to incise them in listeners’ minds, and invites the conclusion that the bond between liturgy and theatre is rooted in the typically dramatic narrative style of Christian proclamation, and that the sacramental rites are ways of ‘performing the Bible’. Within this representational economy, images furnish ‘clear pictures’ of what in the sacramental rites remains invisible. In Van der Weyden’s ­painting, for example, the host elevated by the celebrant at the altar continues to look like mere bread, but what Catholics hold to be its true substance after the consecration, Jesus’s body and blood offered on Calvary, is made visible in the foreground crucifixion scene. If we add that this small triptych was in fact an altarpiece, and the realistic crucifixion scene was right in front of the priest saying Mass, it is evident the image sought also to surprise, tearing away the veil that normally conceals divine reality. The pictured priest, at the altar of the church shown in the triptych, does not see this revelation: his back is turned to the crucifixion. But every real priest who said Mass before the image did see it, and so too the faithful attending the service, who beheld as in a mirror the church in which they were praying, where women and men like themselves inside chapels receive the sacraments that punctuate Christian life.37 This noetic drama draws upon a specifically ‘theatrical’ feature of Christian liturgy: its character as mystic encounter. In theological terms, the true 35 Gaudentius Brixiensis, “Tractatus 2,” 30–32. 36 Galataians 3:1. 37 Verdon, Vedere il mistero, 49–50.

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celebrant of every Mass is not the priest who stands at the altar but Jesus Christ, “high priest of our future hope” who sacrificed his body and blood on the cross, as the painted back of a twelfth-century liturgical chair makes clear, showing the half nude Saviour at an altar, his wounded hands raised in the orans gesture used by priests when they say Mass.38 Above this ‘priest-Christ’, nude and wounded, the painted chair shows the Redeemer in glory, with a cross in his left hand and a circular white object in his right, which in this context we have to interpret, in relation to the altar below, as the Eucharistic bread—the host—on which appear the words pronounced by Jesus during the Last Supper: Ecce vici mundum, “But take courage; I have conquered the world!”39 The Mass rite is presented, that is, as the believer’s frontal encounter with the One who knowingly accepted death for him or her: an encounter made possible because Christ who died also rose to glory: an encounter actualised sacramentally in bread and wine that signify both his physical humiliation and his spiritual victory. The standard ‘script’ of this Eucharistic encounter with the Saviour evolved from patristic times through the Middle Ages. A fifth-century bishop of Ravenna, Peter Chrysologus, imagined a speech in which Jesus invites believers to recognise their own humanity in his tortured limbs: “You see in me your body, your limbs, your organs, your bones, your blood. If you are afraid of what belongs to God, why do you not love what is your own? If you run away from your Lord, why do you not run back to your kinsman?”40 Peter Chrysologus’s script reaches a psychological climax when Jesus reads the minds of those who contemplate him, saying, “Perhaps you are ashamed because of the greatness of the passion which you inflicted on me”, but then dissolves the tension with words of reassurance, “Do not be afraid. This cross is not mine; it is the sting of death. These nails do not pierce me with pain; they pierce me more deeply with love of you. These wounds do not draw groans from me; rather they draw you into my heart. The stretching out of my body does not increase my pain: it makes room for you in my heart. My blood is not lost to me, it is paid in advance for your ransom.”41 This liturgical encounter with Jesus would, with the passage of centuries, assume a plaintive tone. Focusing on the opening phrase of Peter Chrysologos’s 38 39 40 41

The late twelfth-century work, signed by Nicolaus Johannes Pictores, is in the Vatican Museum, inv. 40526. John 16:33. See Verdon, Vedere il mistero, 20–21. Sermon 108, PL 52:499–500. Ibid. Cf. The Divine Office. The Liturgy of the Hours According to the Roman Rite, as Renewed by Decree of the Second Vatican Council and Promulgated by the Authority of Pope Paul VI, 3 vols. (London: Collins, 2006), 2:561–562 (Tuesday, fourth week of Eastertide).

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climax: “Perhaps you are ashamed …” medieval liturgists enriched the Good Friday rites with a procession in which the pre-sanctified Eucharist was borne through the church by priests who sang a dialogic sequence, the Improperia, or ‘Reproaches’, in which the tortured Saviour contrasted his love with his people’s cruelty: Popule meus, quid feci tibi, aut in quod contristavi te? Responde mihi! As used in Parma cathedral in 1417, and printed in the 1523 edition of Castellano Castellani’s Liber sacerdotalis, the ‘Reproaches’ were heavily accusatory: “Why, when I freed you from Egypt, have you prepared a cross for your Saviour? What else could I have done for you that I did not do? I planted you to become a fair vine, and you have become bitter in my mouth, slaking my thirst with vinegar; with a lance you have pierced your Savior’s side … For you I gave Egypt to the lash, but you gave me up to be crucified; I gave you a royal scepter, but you repaid me with a crown of thorns.”42 Late medieval and Renaissance religious art is coloured by such rites, and popular iconographical formulae such as the Imago Pietatis take viewer-familiarity with the Improperia for granted.43 Some late medieval and Renaissance images openly allude to the staging of sacred drama, as if the artists wanted to enhance the emotional impact of their works by recalling intense theatrical experience. Donatello’s relief in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence, depicting the Ascension of St John the Evangelist, for example, situates the event on a ‘stage’ above spectators gazing up from the ‘pit’, and his Holy Women at the Tomb, in the so-called pulpit in the north aisle of San Lorenzo, shows actors physically moving through ‘scenery’ flats.44 In the same pulpit, the arrangement of three passion scenes on the front is punctuated by smaller houses very like the ‘mansions’ of Renaissance scenography.45 In the same spirit, Renaissance painting offers presumably intentional references to theatrical ‘special-effects’. In Fra Angelico’s Transfiguration, for example, the almond-shaped glory of light around Jesus has the same form as a stage machine described by a contemporary observer: a luminous capsule that lifted the actor playing Jesus heavenwards in an ascension play performed in the Carmelite church, whose elaborate mechanism was illustrated later in

42

Significant portions of the rubrics are reproduced in Karl Young, The Drama of the ­Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933), 1:125. 43 Timothy Verdon, “Imago Pietatis and Good Friday Liturgy,” in World Art. Themes of Unity in Diversity. Acts of the XXVIth International Congress of the History of Art (University Park & London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 629–32. 44 Timothy Verdon, “Donatello and the Theater: Stage Space and Projected Space in the San Lorenzo Pulpits,” Artibus et Historiae VII, no. 14 (1986). 45 Ibid.

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the fifteenth century by Buonaccorso Ghiberti.46 Or, again, the blue-and-azure striped sky above the angels in Filippo Lippi’s Coronation of the Virgin evokes the multicoloured cloth tenting that it was customary to mount in streets through which processions passed, as Pope Pius II describes in his account of the Corpus Domini celebrations in Perugia in 1462. The pope (the procession’s main ‘supporting actor’) recalls bearing the monstrance with the host to a pavilion where, “the sun being still high, rays of light penetrated the fabric walls and, like a rainbow that assumes different colours, gave the sanctuary the look of a heavenly hall, the residence of the high King. Indeed, when the singers, like angels, intoned their chant, it seemed nothing less than paradise. Lights, arranged with remarkable artifice, imitated heaven’s stars.”47 But it did not end there. Drawing upon the ‘realism’ of the sacraments, believed to concretely effect that which they signify, sacred theatre could become actual life. During a fifteenth-century Good Friday sermon on the steps of a church in Perugia, for example, as the preacher, a certain Fra Roberto da Lecce, brought tears to listeners’ eyes with his account of Jesus’s sufferings, from the open church door emerged a nude young man carrying the cross, crowned with thorns, his flesh livid with wounds, accompanied by armed soldiers. Everyone was deeply moved and, according to the chronicler, that morning six men became friars, one being the youth who had played Jesus, a barber named Eliseo de Cristofano. The chronicler notes that a few months later Eliseo left the friary and returned to his trade with the nickname Domenedio (Lord God), after which, getting married, he showed himself to be an even “bawdier rascal than before.”48 The heightened emotional climate of the mystery plays came to define the criterion of religious sincerity. After describing the spectacle of suffering the audience would see in a late fifteenth-century Italian passion mystery, the actor reciting the Prologue told each member of the audience: Si tu non piangi quando questo vedi, non so se a Yesu Cristo vero credi!—“If you do not weep seeing these things, I doubt you really believe in Jesus Christ!”49 Between exhortation and threat, this concept was then repeated at the Prologue’s conclusion, when the public was instructed to take active part in the crucifixion scene, raising their hands and bidding loud farewell to Jesus.50 And during the 46 47 48 49 50

Timothy Verdon, Beato Angelico (Milano: 24 Ore Cultura, 2015). Alessandro D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, 2 vols. (Roma: Bardi, 1971), 1:237. Ibid., 280–281. “La Passione del Nostro Signore,” in Fondo Ashburnham (Firenze: Biblioteca Medicea ­Laurenziana, 1465), fol. 1V. Ibid., fol. 2V.

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crucifixion scene itself, as the actors voiced the feelings of the personages they interpreted, ‘Mary’ addressed the public saying: “Men and women, do not be slow to join our lament, accompany me now … seeing your Creator here on the cross, let each of you weep and groan with pain.”51 This story of dramatic religious faith shaped by liturgy and served by the arts, among which is theatre, comes full circle between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as works of sculpture evoking sacred drama physically enter ritual contexts, translating the Rogier Van der Weyden triptych into reality. Niccolò dell’Arca and Guido Mazzoni, in Italy, like Tilman Riemanschneider and Veit Stoss in Germany, created larger-than-life multiple-figure tableaux in terracotta or wood on or near altars, obliging those who take part in Mass to see, beyond the rite, the drama as well.52 This use of sculpture evoking theatre to clarify liturgy is especially interesting in Mazzoni, whose repetition of the Lamentation theme across several decades let him develop character in stock personages in a way similar to what we find in contemporary mystery plays, moving from caricatural overstatement at the beginning of his career to ever more subtly nuanced feeling in later works.53 From the Emilian Mazzoni, then, and others, spring the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sacri Monti in ­Lombardy and Piedmont: mixed-media statuary groups in series, arranged in theatre-like chapels along a mountain path leading to a church where Mass was said.54 The realism of the ‘Holy Mountain’ style, which responded to the Council of Trent’s call for credibility in church art, in turn favoured the fin de siècle naturalism of masters like Caravaggio, in whose altar paintings the echo of sacred theatre is fully audible.55 In this Counter-Reformation period a further dramatic element emerges in Roman Catholic art, rooted in the doctrinal dialectics of the time. While Protestants removed paintings and statues from places of worship, Catholics polemically multiplied their number, as if to insist on the validity of these ­traditional visual aids.56 And where the Sacri Monti and Caravaggio would 51 52 53 54 55 56

Ibid., fol. 66V. Timothy Verdon, “‘Si tu non piangi quando questo vedi …’. Penitenza e spiritualità laica nel Quattrocento,” in Niccolò Dell’Arca. Atti del convegno 26–27 maggio 1987, ed. Grazia Agostini and Luisa Ciammitti (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1989). Timothy Verdon, The Art of Guido Mazzoni (New York: Garland, 1978), passim. Timothy Verdon, “Segno, cosmo, immagine. L’arte cristiana tra rito e natura,” in La salita a Cristo: arte del Sacro Monte ieri e oggi, ed. Filippo Rossi et al. (Novara: Interlinea Edizioni, 2008). Timothy Verdon, L’arte sacra in Italia. L’immaginazione religiosa dal paleocristiano al ­postmoderno (Milano: Mondadori, 2001), 279–284. Timothy Verdon, The Ecumenism of Beauty (Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2017), vii–xix.

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c­ reate all-embracing illusion, many images thrust into worship spaces insisted rather that the art is not an illusion of nature but simply art. In its CounterReformation setting, the altarpiece by Romanino discussed above, depicting an early Christian bishop giving communion to believers in front of an altar with a painted Pietà, functioned as a manifesto of Roman Catholic iconoduly. Made for an altar where a priest said Mass and believers received communion, the painting legitimated its own existence illustrating earlier tradition, making a ‘dramatic’ statement in that age divided over such questions. The most monumental declaration of this kind was the program of ­sculpture and painting realised in Florence Cathedral in the mid-sixteenth century.57 Begun during the early years of the Council of Trent and completed in 1579, the sculptures by Baccio Bandinelli and frescoes by Giorgio Vasari and ­Federico Zuccari illustrate the sense of the council’s decrees on the Eucharist, on Justification, and on Veneration of the Saints, Relics, and Images, with ­statues and paintings that are also recognizable as sophisticated works of art, creating a ‘Catholic’ experience of total immersion in which the art which acts as a vehicle for the message is also part of the message. A generation later, Baroque masters in Rome—Gianlorenzo Bernini, Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Padre Andrea Pozzo—would build on the Florentine example, presenting churches and chapels as theatres of faith, with, in Bernini’s case, the believing public also represented, profoundly moved as it looks on from what appear to be theatre boxes. 6

Awaiting Transformation

These Baroque examples remind us that in images tied to the liturgy believers are invited to seek something beyond that which they see, something perhaps not seen because it is still in the future or hidden—something which in any case radically alters the sense and aspect of things seen. In these cases, the image offers itself as both ‘epiphany’ and ‘apocalypse’—as manifestation and as revelation, as in a splendid Sienese diptych by Giovanni di Paolo, in which the left panel shows the humiliated Jesus bearing his cross, while the right one depicts him resurrected and triumphant as he judges the living and the dead,

57

Timothy Verdon, “Immagini della controriforma: l’iconografia dell’area liturgica di Santa Maria del Fiore,” in La cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore: storia, restauro, immagine, ed. Franco Gheri and Vanna Gelli (Firenze: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1997).

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showing his wounds as trophies.58 Between the Imago pietatis and the Imago gloriae—we see the Holy Spirit, worker of the transformations that lead to eternal life (including the Eucharistic one: the ‘change’ of bread and wine into the Saviour’s body and blood). The symbolic dove is located at the apex of the image, above the point where the priest invoked the Spirit at the consecration, and it is as if the third person of the Trinity were descending simultaneously on the suffering Jesus to raise him to glory and on the bread and wine to transubstantiate them. When Mass was still said before this altarpiece, the host and chalice elevated between the two representations of Jesus further conveyed that, just as Jesus rose in the Spirit and under the Spirit bread becomes his body, so too those who eat this bread are destined to be transformed. “As Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven …: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet … we will be changed.”59 In its sacramental theory and practice, from early Christian times onwards the church has taught believers to expect such a transformation and to see in it the fulfilment of God’s plan. Commenting on the ‘sign’ of water turned into wine at Cana, Faustus of Rietz said: “The water is suddenly transformed, and it will later transform men”; he moreover specified that “when one thing springs from another by an internal process, or when an inferior creature is, by a secret conversion, lifted to a higher state, we see a second birth.”60 This ‘second birth’ is in essence a new life, for—as Gregory of Nyssa teaches—“our very nature has undergone a change” such that we have “a different life and a different way of living.”61 In the same vein, Cyril of Alexandria says: “the Spirit transforms those in whom he dwells into another image, as it were”, and cites Paul, according to whom “and all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”62 My point is this: art associated with the liturgy illuminates a fundamental expectation of believers, announcing a longed-for spiritual transformation by its own transformation of matter. More importantly, sacred images mirror— in the personages and events they illustrate—that image in which believers 58 59 60 61 62

Giovanni di Paolo, Christ Suffering and Christ Triumphant, second quarter of the fifteenth century. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale. Illustrated in Verdon, Vedere il mistero, fig. 16. 1 Corinthians 15:49–52. Sermon 5 on the Epiphany, PL 3:560–562. Sermon on Christ’s Resurrection 1, PG 46:603–606. Commentary on the Gospel of John, 10, PG 74:434. Cf. 2 Corinthians 3:18.

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themselves hope to be transformed, and indeed, in this ‘specular’ logic, an artwork’s iconographical subject is not confined to the personage or event represented, but always includes those who contemplate their own lives in the image even as they await transformation. Such ‘intersubjectivity’ moreover regards both individuals and groups, the few worshippers present at daily Mass and the parish community fully assembled on Sundays and feasts. All are ‘edified’—inwardly built up—by images seen as they hear Mass, because in that situation the images are not merely ‘seen’ (just as the Mass is not merely ‘heard’), but rather taken part in and lived in ever new intersubjective configurations. It is in this sense that art renders explicit the drama of Christian liturgy, inviting all who participate to see themselves as ‘actors’ (in the fullest sense of that term) on the stage of cosmic history. Bibliography D’Ancona, Alessandro. Origini del teatro italiano. 2 vols. Roma: Bardi, 1971. Hardison, Osborne Bennett. Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages. ­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. The Divine Office. The Liturgy of the Hours According to the Roman Rite, as Renewed by Decree of the Second Vatican Council and Promulgated by the Authority of Pope Paul VI. 3 vols. London: Collins, 2006. Verdon, Timothy. The Art of Guido Mazzoni. New York: Garland, 1978. Verdon, Timothy. Beato Angelico (Milano: 24 Ore Cultura, 2015): 23–28. Verdon, Timothy. “Donatello and the Theater: Stage Space and Projected Space in the San Lorenzo Pulpits.” Artibus et Historiae VII, no. 14 (1986): 29–55. Verdon, Timothy. The Ecumenism of Beauty. Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2017. Verdon, Timothy. “Imago Pietatis and Good Friday Liturgy.” In World Art. Themes of Unity in Diversity. Acts of the XXVIth International Congress of the History of Art, 629–34. University Park & London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989. Verdon, Timothy. “Immagini della controriforma: l’iconografia dell’area liturgica di Santa Maria del Fiore.” In La cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore: storia, restauro, immagine, edited by Franco Gheri and Vanna Gelli, 193–205. Firenze: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1997. Verdon, Timothy. L’arte sacra in Italia. L’immaginazione religiosa dal paleocristiano al postmoderno. Milano: Mondadori, 2001. Verdon, Timothy. “Segno, cosmo, immagine. L’arte cristiana tra rito e natura.” In La salita a Cristo: arte del Sacro Monte ieri e oggi, edited by Filippo Rossi et al., 13–57. Novara: Interlinea Edizioni, 2008.

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Verdon, Timothy. “‘Si tu non piangi quando questo vedi …’. Penitenza e spiritualità laica nel Quattrocento.” In Niccolò Dell’Arca. Atti del Convegno 26–27 maggio 1987, edited by Grazia Agostini and Luisa Ciammitti, 151–66. Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1989. Verdon, Timothy. Vedere il mistero. Il genio artistico della liturgia cattolica. Milano: Mondadori, 2003. Young, Karl. The Drama of the Medieval Church. 2 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933.

CHAPTER 2

A ‘Dramatic Turn’: The Revolution of Christian Representation Carla M. Bino In his recent Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater, Michael Norton calls into question the expression ‘liturgical drama’. It is used by historians to refer to medieval rites and representations originally understood as distinct and unrelated. Norton argues this seems quite a meaningless label because it is affected by the way the words liturgy and drama were interpreted during the early modern era.1 When we evaluate how these rites and representations were understood at the time they were celebrated or performed, it is quite clear there is “a problem resulting from a defect in the notion ‘liturgical drama’ itself.”2 In The Second Birth of Theatre. Performances of Anglo-Saxon Monks, Miroslaw Kocur considers the practice of monastic life as a performance whose script is the monastic rule, and whose actions are the rites, ceremonies, and liturgies articulating the days, weeks, and years.3 Kocur explains this is a transformative performance because once the monk wears the habit, he is required to transform himself and his life. Thus, the monk is a performer who acts, and not an actor who impersonates a character and therefore pretends to be somebody else. This kind of ‘non-fictional’ performance sowed the seeds of a new theatre (in this respect, it is indeed a second birth of theatre) based on body, rite, action, and transformation. Both of these books argue the incompatibility between Christian and classical theatre. Particularly, they claim that their differences lie in their two distinct ways of understanding the concept of representation and, consequently, the meaning of words such as theatre, drama, actor, imitation, and spectator. Through some texts of the church fathers (Tertullian and Augustine, in particular), I will attempt to explain how Christian thought formulated an original theory of representation which is radically contrary to the Platonic-Aristotelian 1 Cf. Michael Lee Norton, Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater (­Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017). 2 Ibid., 6. 3 Cf. Miroslaw Kocur, The Second Birth of Theatre. Performances of Anglo-Saxon Monks (­Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017). © Carla M. Bino, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004522183_004

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one. This theory should not be confused with the development of a systematic theory of scenic and theatrical representation that makes direct reference to a practice. Rather, what is formulated at this juncture is a ‘dramatic’ thought which will form the premise for a ‘scene’ that will begin to develop only six centuries later, and only after having addressed two other major theological issues that deal with the problems of vision and representation. The first relates to the form and function of the material image of truth (the icon); the second concerns the truth of the ‘real presence’ of God in the world (the Eucharist). Thus, it is no coincidence the theory of Christian representation is centered around two fundamental principles: the first is the shift from the analogical idea of image as an imitative copy to the mnemonic idea of the image as a demonstrative form. The semantic field which Christian thought uses to describe images is no longer that of ‘mimesis’, but of ‘inscription’, or— more explicitly—of ‘impression’. I shall not address this topic as the reader may refer to the work of well-known scholars such as Charles Barber, MarieJosé Mondzain, and Bissera Pentcheva.4 My focus is the second principle: the rejection of the device for vision and representation, typical of the shows in antiquity.5 This was a ‘spectacular device’ deemed inadequate to grasp a revealed and dramatic truth like that of the Word-made-flesh who brings visible and invisible together and then acts within the world. I will attempt to demonstrate that in the opinion of the church fathers, this device corresponds to a ‘knowledge from a distance’ that, however, does not allow human beings to understand the truth because it is a posture and prospective mistake. The viewer, who is distant from the scene or from the object he is looking at, cannot properly view and discern what really is from what appears to be. This posture mistake is also intended as a ‘truth simulation mechanism’ related to the concept of ‘duplicate’ or ‘duplication’ conveyed by the Latin word duplicitas. In opposition to that perspective scheme, Christianity chooses a real revolution of sight and uses a device I like

4 Cf. Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: on the Limits of Representation in Byzantine I­ conoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Marie-José Mondzain, Image, icône, économie. Les sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain (Paris: Seuil, 1996); Bissera Vladimirova Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 5 Both Latin and Greek church fathers strongly criticise each and every form of imperial show, namely the ludi circenses, scaenici and gladiatori. For an in-depth analysis of each of these instances, the reader should refer to Il dramma e l’immagine. Teorie cristiane della rappresentazione (II–XI sec.) (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2015), chapter 1, “Le tre ‘macchine’ dello spettacolo pagano,” 20–36.

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to call ‘dramatic’ because it is founded on the drama of redemption.6 Human beings always take part in this drama as actors, never as spectators. Their point of view can no longer be set outside the scene, but inside. Their gaze is no longer from a distance, but up close. A new concept of show based on memory and imitation depends on this revolution.7 Thus, let us start from the show ‘far from the truth’. 1

The Show: ‘Seeing from Afar’

In the opening of his treatise, Tertullian explains that shows and the delight they give (spectaculorum voluptates) are earthly mistakes (saeculares errores) unrelated to faith, truth, and behaviour. This is something those who are trying to get close to God must cognoscere (‘be aware of’ or ‘be familiar with’), whereas those who are already close to God must recognoscere (‘recognise’) and then testify and acknowledge. Indeed, there is a risk that those who are not yet aware about this will make these earthly mistakes due to ignorance, while those who already know make mistakes due to dissimulation (dissimulatio, meaning ‘to hide’ the reality of things and ‘pretend’ they are something different). The power of delight makes the ignorant hesitate and takes advantage of them, seduces knowledge and turns it into dissimulation. What state of faith, what argument of truth, what rule of discipline, barreth, among other errors of the world, the pleasures also of the public shows, hear, ye servants of God, who are coming very nigh unto God; hear again, ye who have witnessed and professed that ye have already come unto Him, that none may sin either from real or pretended ignorance. For so great is the influence of pleasures, that it maketh ignorance linger to take advantage of it, and bribeth knowledge to dissemble itself.8 6 In his concept of Theo-Drama, theologian Von Balthasar underlines that unlike other ­religions or philosophies, Christian thought connects in drama both aesthetics—as the ­doctrine of perception form—and logic—as discourse on the truth. Cf. Hans Urs von ­Balthasar, T ­ heo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory, 5 vols. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988–1998), 1:22–23. 7 Show must not be intended as an event on stage, but as an attitude, and thus as ‘spectacularity’ (as in wanting to make an impression, or to show off). For the idea of ‘drama’ in Christian thought in relation to the concept of ‘image’, see Bino, Il dramma e l’immagine. On the ‘problem of shows’ in early Christianity, see Leonardo Lugaresi, Il teatro di Dio. Il problema degli spettacoli nel cristianesimo antico (II–IV secolo) (Brescia: Morcelliana editore, 2008). 8 All English translations of Tertullian’s texts are taken from Charles L. Dodgson, Tertullian. Apologetic and Practical Treatises, 14 vols. (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1842), 1:187–188. ­Tertullianus, De Spectaculis, I, 1–2: “Qui status fidei, quae ratio veritatis, quod praescriptum

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A little further, Tertullian better explains this relation between the knowledge of truth and shows: Because [heathens] know not God thoroughly, save by the law of Nature, not as being also of His household; beholding Him at a distance, not nigh; they must needs be ignorant in what manner, when He made His works, He commanded that they should be used; and also, what rival force from the other side acteth in corrupting the uses of the creatures of God: for thou canst not know either the will, or that which resisteth the will, of Him of Whom thou knowest nothing.9 He says there are two kinds of knowledge of God: the first proceeds according to the ius naturalis. It is neither in-depth (penitus) nor familiar, nor intimate, but it is ‘from afar’ (de longinquo). Because it is ‘from afar’, it is actually an unawareness of God and of the laws of the well-created world. Those who do not know God do not even understand that there is an emulating and competitor power (vis aemula) that has operated on God’s creation, adulterating not only its essence but also its goal, to the point of reducing it to its opposite (ex adverso). Human beings are included in this overturning action. If, ontologically, they are creatures (opus) and the image of God, they have nonetheless been separated (deicio) from integritas—the pristine and unitary perfection of creation—since the beginning of time. Human beings have been led to turn their back against their Maker and, lastly, have been put under the domain of perversitas. When the power of that corrupting and adverse angel in the beginning cast down from his innocency man himself, the work and the image of God, the lord of the whole world, he changed like himself, into perverseness against his Maker, the whole substance of man, made, like himself, for innocency: so in that very thing, which it had grieved him should be disciplinae, inter cetera saecularium errorum etiam spectaculorum voluptates adimat, dei servi, cognoscite, qui cum maxime ad deum acceditis, recognoscite, qui iam accessisse vos testificati et confessi estis, ne aut ignorando aut dissimulando quis peccet. Tanta est enim voluptatum vis, ut et ignorantiam protelet in occasionem et conscientiam corrumpat in ­dissimulationem.” 9 Ibid., 189–190. Tertullianus, De Spectaculis, 5: “Quia [ethnici] non penitus deum norunt nisi naturali iure, non etiam familiari, de longinquo, non de proximo, necesse est ignorent, qualiter administrari aut iubeat aut prohibeat quae instituit, simul quae vis sit aemula ex adverso adulterandis usibus divinae conditionis, quia neque voluntatem neque adversarium noveris eius quem minus noveris.”

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granted to man and not to himself, he might make man guilty before God, and establish his own dominion.10 The whole semantic field used by Tertullian to indicate this kind of knowledge is characterised by ‘a lack of knowledge’ (ignorare/non noscere), by dissimulation (dissimulare, demutare/corrumpere, corruptela), emulation (vis aemula/ aemulator, interpolator), then by ‘going against’ or ‘in reverse’ (adversaries, ­conversa, perversitas), and lastly, by distancing (de longinquo) or estranging oneself from the truth. The second kind of knowledge is that of the Christians who, having received a full revelation of God (institutore comperto—comperio referring to the ‘open knowledge’), have also known him ‘from up close’ (de proximo) and intimately. This has allowed them to see his rival (the aemulus) and therefore to discover (deprehendere, ‘to grasp’) who is the interpolator who has manipulated creation. Tertullian says “We therefore who, knowing God, have seen also His adversary, who having found out the Maker have found at the same time the corrupter likewise, ought not to wonder nor doubt in this matter.”11 Only if the will of God the Maker is evident will its opposite also be evident. Thus, it will be possible to tell the difference between the untouched order of creation and its adulteration, as well as the difference between the Maker and the falsifier. Says Tertullian: We must therefore consider not only by Whom all things were made, but from what they are turned away; For so will it be seen to what use they were, if it be seen to what they were not, made. There is much difference between a corrupt and an uncorrupt state of things, because there is much difference between the Maker and the corrupter.12 10

11 12

Ibid., 191. Tertullianus, De Spectaculis, II, 12: “Cum ipsum hominem, opus et imaginem dei, totius universitatis possessorem, illa vis interpolatoris et aemulatoris angeli ab initio de integritate deiecerit, universam substantiam eius pariter cum ipso integritati institutam pariter cum ipso in perversitatem demutavit adversus institutorem, ut, quam doluerat homini concessam, non sibi, in ea ipsa et hominem reum deo faceret et suam dominationem collocaret.” See also Tertullianus, II, 9: “Ipse homo … non tantum opus dei, verum etiam imago est; et tamen et corpore et spiritu desciit a suo institutore (Man himself … is not only the work, but also the image of God, and yet both in body and in spirit, he hath fallen away from his Maker. Ibid., 190). Here, the Latin verb descisco means both ‘to go away’ and ‘to turn against’. Ibid., 191. Tertullianus, De Spectaculis, II, 12: “Nos igitur, qui domino cognito etiam aemulum eius inspeximus, qui institutore comperto et interpolatorem una deprehendimus, nec mirari neque dubitare oportet.” Ibid., 190. Tertullianus, De Spectaculis, II, 6–7: “Non ergo hoc solum respiciendum est, a quo omnia sint instituta, sed a quo conversa. Ita enim apparebit, cui usui sint instituta,

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The semantic field indicating this second type of knowledge is characterised firstly by ‘a full and evident knowledge’ (cognoscere/recognoscere, noscere/ comperire, inspicere/ deprehendere), which is intimate and familiar (penitus et familiari), secondly by the integrity of creation (integritas, instituta/institutor), and lastly, by the closeness to the truth (de proximo). The shows are included in the first kind of knowledge in that they represent a corrupt, upside down, false world order. They also are a ‘from afar’ way of seeing, which makes human beings incapable of actually seeing because they have bad vision and are blind. For this reason, many Christian writers place shows in the ‘kingdom of darkness’, as does Cyprian in his opusculum Ad Donatum, in which he describes his own condition before his conversion.13 However, humans also cannot see because they have a wrong posture. In this regard, Lactantius uses the compelling poetic image of the man who renounces his nature of standing erect, as well as his own name, and who averts his eyes from the skies and turns them to earth, capsizing his own posture: ‘O souls bent down to the earth, and destitute of heavenly things!’ Rather look to the heaven, to the sight of which God your Creator raised you. He gave to you an elevated countenance; you bend it down to the earth; you depress to things below those lofty minds, which are raised together with their bodies to their parent, as though it repented you that you were not born quadrupeds.14 Augustine revives this image saying that the man bent to his toes (curvus) is far away from God because his eyes are entirely focused on visible things.15 si appareat, cui non. Multum interest inter corruptelam et integritatem, quia multum est inter institutorem et interpolatorem.” 13 Cyprianus, Ad Donatum, III: “Ego cum in tenebris atque in nocte caeca iacerem, cumque in salo iactantis saeculi nutabundus ac dubius vestigiis oberrantibus fluctuarem, vitae meae nescius, veritatis ac lucis alienus.” (While I was still lying in darkness and gloomy night, wavering hither and there, tossed about on the foam of this boastful age, and uncertain of my wandering steps, knowing nothing of my real life, and remote from truth and light). The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts et al., trans. Robert E. Wallis, 10 vols. (Buffalo: Christian literature Pub. Co., 1886), 5:275. 14 Ibid., 5:42. Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones, II, 2: “‘O curvae in terras animae, et coelestium inanes!’ Coelum potius intuemini, ad cuius spectaculum vos excitavit ille artifex vester Deus. Ille vobis sublimem vultum dedit; vos in terram curvamini: vos altas mentes, et ad parentem suum cum corporibus suis erectas, ad inferiora deprimitis, tamquam vos poeniteat non quadrupedes esse natos.” 15 Augustinus, Sermo 110/A, 6: “Si enim ‘cor sursum’ habes, curvus non es. Si terrena semper quaeris, si de terrenis felix esse desideras … curvus es: cor tuum non est cum Domino.”

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­However, In Epistolam Iohannis ad Parthos (2, 13), he explains that ‘to be focused on the visible things’ is curiositas, namely the eye’s desire, which includes the shows (“desiderium oculorum dicit omnem curiositatem …. Ipsa in spectaculis, in theatris … est curiositas”). In De vera religione, he further clarifies the concept. If spectacula are the eye’s desire, then they aspire to knowledge; but whenever spectacula are too much loved, they appear to be the original objects of which they are only phantasmata or, better still, imitamenta. Hence, they can immobilise and absorb the sight of man, keeping him away from the truth that spectacula conceal and replace. All curiosity with regard to spectacles aims at nothing else than the joy of knowing things …. But when we love such things we fall away from truth, and cannot discover what they imitate, and so we pant for them as if they were the prime objects of beauty. Getting further away from these primal objects we embrace our phantasms. When we return to seek truth, phantasms meet us in the way and will not allow us to pass on, attacking us like brigands, not indeed with violence but with angerous pitfalls, because we do not know how widely applicable is the saying: cavete a simulacris.16 Beware of simulacra, concludes Augustine, which clearly indicates he includes the visibilia spectacula among simulacra. But what exactly are simulacra? The word simulacrum comes from simulation (simulatio), namely a mode or form of representation which is radically different from imitation.17 Imitation is related to similitude and likeness (similitudo) and it means ‘to look like’ or ‘to be like’ something or someone. On the other hand, simulation is ‘pretending to be something/someone that one is not’, and it is related to falseness and (After all, if you have lifted up your heart, you aren’t bent double. If you’re always looking for earthly things, if you’re longing for earthly prosperity … then you are bent double; your heart is not with the Lord). The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, 16 vols. (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1997), 3/2:98. 16 John H. S. Burleigh, Augustine: Earlier Writings (Louisville: The Westminster Press, 1953), 273–274. Augustinus, De vera religione, 49, 94–95: “Iam vero cuncta spectacula, et omnis illa quae appellatur curiositas, quid aliud quaerit quam de rerum cognitione laetitiam? … Sed diligendo talia excidimus a vero, et non iam invenimus quarum rerum imitamenta sint, quibus tamquam primis pulchris inhiamus, et ab eis recedentes amplexamur nostra phantasmata. Nam redeuntibus nobis ad investigandam veritatem, ipsa in itinere occurrunt, et nos transire non sinunt, nullis viribus, sed magnis insidiis latrocinantia, non intellegentibus quam late pateat quod dictum est: Cavete a simulacris.” 17 Augustinus, Contra Faustum Manicheum, XX, 15: “Non a similitudine, sed a simulatione simulacrum vocari potest.”

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deception (Lactantius openly states “whatever is a simulation, that must of necessity be false”).18 It is noteworthy that the Latin church fathers created a connection between simulatio and hypocrisis. So much so that Augustine says they are precisely the same (“hypocrisis, id est simulatio”)19 and explains: It is manifest that hypocrites have not that in their heart also which they hold forth before the eyes of men. For hypocrites are pretenders, as it were setters forth of other characters, just as in the plays of the theatre. For he who acts the part of Agamemnon in tragedy, for example, or of any other person belonging to the history or legend which is acted, is not really the person himself, but personates him, and is called a hypocrite. In like manner … in any phase of human life whoever wishes to seem what he is not, is a hypocrite. For he pretends, but does not show himself, to be a righteous man; because he places the whole fruit [of his acting] in the praise of men, which even pretenders may receive, while they deceive those to whom they seem good, and are praised by them.20 Furthermore, through the hypocrisis, Augustine connects the notion of simulatio to that of ‘double’—the duplicitas—in that duplicity is considered duplication: “Simple against double, truth against falsehood, because simplicity [is] against duplicity. Be simple of heart; don’t be hypocrite, showing one thing openly, covering up another.”21 On the one hand, simulation is duplicity when it is ‘being something else’ than ‘what it appears to be’. But ‘pretending to be’ 18 Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones, II, 29: “Quidquid enim simulatur, id falsum sit necesse est.” 19 Augustinus, In psalmum VII enarratio, 9. 20 A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. First series, ed. Henry Wace and Philip Schaff, 14 vols. (New York: The Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1887), 6:35. Augustinus, De sermone Domini in Monte, II, 2, 5: “Manifestum est autem hypocritas non quod oculis praetendunt hominum, id etiam corde gestare. Sunt enim hypocritae simulatores tamquam pronuntiatores personarum alienarum sicut in theatricis fabulis. Non enim qui agit partes Agamemnonis in tragoedia, verbi gratia, sive alicuius alterius ad historiam vel fabulam quae agitur pertinentis, vere ipse est, sed simulat eum et hypocrita dicitur. Sic … in omni vita humana quisquis se vult videri quod non est, hypocrita est. Simulat enim iustum, non exhibet, quia totum fructum in laude hominum ponit quam possunt etiam simulantes percipere, dum fallunt eos quibus videntur boni ab eisque laudantur.” 21 Augustinus, Sermo 301/A, 2: “Simplum contra duplum, veritas contra falsitatem, quia ­simplicitas contra duplicitatem. Esto simplici corde: noli esse hypocrita, aliud ostentans, aliud tegens.” Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. John E. Rotelle, 16 vols. (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1997), 3/8:291. On the concept of simplicity see Bino, Il dramma e l’immagine, 92–95.

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and ‘doing as if’ imply the difference and the fracture between ‘what is’ and ‘what appears to be’ (deception). On the other hand, simulation is duplication when appearance is such a perfect copy of its original model that it takes its place (illusion). In order for the duplicate to be effective, reality has to be ­hidden or kept faraway because its visibility and proximity would unveil the falsehood of the ‘double’ and of the artfully made copy (the artifice).22 Therefore, being aware of simulacra means not allowing oneself to be deceived by dissemblers; it means being wary of appearances which simulate the truth; and lastly, it means refusing to look ‘from afar’, taking the spectacular attitude on, which blends ‘being’ with ‘appearing’. That is a perspective of vision that makes the viewer extraneous to the scene and unable to see what really happens. 2

The Dramatic Turn: Seeing Up Close

Christian writers opposed the ‘dramatic vision’ to the ‘spectacular vision’. The former was the only one able of grasping the truth concerning the world order revealed by the incarnation (i.e., the paradoxical union of visible with ­invisible)—the gaze is now overturned. As explained by Tertullian, before the incarnation, man could not see the order of the well-regulated universe because of the adulterating action of the aemulator, who had alienated man from God and had acted upon the appearance of creation, corrupting its unitary integrity. Yet, from the moment God manifested himself in the flesh, man could choose to go back and see the truth in its own integrity and fullness. Thus, the economic unity of God’s plan, which Tertullian calls administratio or dispensatio, is a dramatic unity that has only one time, one place, and one action, namely the time, place, and action of the drama (event) of redemption.23 In chapter 20 of his treatise, Tertullian designs the vision device capable of understanding the veritatis integritas or the plenitudo veritatis, that wholeness 22

23

In his De spectaculis, Tertullian often uses the words artificium or ars with the meaning of artifice, illusion, trick, machination. See for example De spectaculis, IX, 1; X, 9 and 11. See also Novatianus De spectaculis, III, 3. The Greek word mechanè—that stems from the Indo-European magh, related to the meaning of power—brings together artifice and machination and implies both the notion of pretense and illusion. Artifice means to create a convincing duplicate of reality that covers it up or replaces it, but always has reality as a postulate. On this concept, please refer to Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence. La mètis des Grecs (Paris: Flammarion, 1974). For the use of administratio and dispensatio in Augustine’s works, see Joseph Moingt, Théologie trinitaire de Tertullien, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1966–1969), 3:825–932.

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or unity of truth that is never lacking, ever and anywhere. He founds it on the one and only spectator, God. Would that God beheld none of the crimes of men, that we might all escape His judgments! But He beholdeth even robberies; He beholdeth also falsehoods, and adulteries, and deceits, and idolatries, and these very shows themselves! And, therefore, it is that we will not behold them, lest we be seen by Him, Who beholdeth all things. You distinguishest, O man, between the accused and the judge: the accused, who is accused because he is seen, the judge, who is the judge because he seeth …. We do err: in no place and at no time is that excused which God condemneth: in no place and at no time is that lawful, which is not lawful at all times and in all places. Herein is the perfectness of Truth, and hence the complete subordination, and the uniform reverence, and the constant obedience which is due to it, that it changeth not its opinion, nor varieth its j­udgment. That, which in real truth is either good or bad, cannot be otherwise. But all things are determined by the Truth of God.24 Tertullian says God has the superior gaze of the judge who can put on trial and assess precisely because he ‘sees’, whereas the offender ‘is seen’. By saying so, Tertullian is giving him the role of the unique spectator of the drama, who sees everything and everywhere. There are three implications arising from this. The first is human beings become the object of a universal, limitless gaze—God’s gaze. Consequently, human beings are always ‘on stage’ or ­better still, ‘on the scene’ of the ‘world theatre’, spending every single moment of their life performing their role and playing in a show for God’s eyes. Everything they do—­ including talking or looking—is an action. The second implication is human beings are denied the possibility of adopting the spectacular attitude, of choosing the disengagement of spectare and seeing the show ‘from afar’. They cannot consider themselves completely unrelated to what they are seeing, 24 Dodgson, Tertullian, 210. Tertullianus, De Spectaculis, XX, 2–6: “Utinam autem Deus nulla flagitia hominum spectaret, ut omnes iudicium evaderemus. Sed spectat et latrocinia, spectat et falsa et adulteria et fraudes et idololatrias et spectacula ipsa. Et idcirco ergo nos non spectabimus, ne videamur ab illo, qui spectat omnia. Comparas, homo, reum et iudicem, reum, qui, quia videtur, reus est, iudicem, qui, quia videt, iudex est … Erramus: nusquam et numquam excusatur quod deus damnat, nusquam et numquam licet quod semper et ubique non licet. Haec est veritatis integritas et, quae ei debetur, disciplinae plenitudo et aequalitas timoris et fides obsequii, non inmutare sententiam nec variare iudicium. Non potest aliud esse, quod vere quidem est bonum seu malum. Omnia autem penes veritatem dei fixa sunt.”

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nor different from whom they are looking at. On the contrary, they must look at the drama ‘from up close’, de proximo: they partake in what happens and always answer to and for what they see. ‘Looking at’ becomes an action ‘in response to’ or, in a word, responsible. The third and last implication is there is nothing ‘to be shown’ to a distant audience given the role of pure viewer is no longer there. Human beings have no other spectator aside from God, and they are forced to look at themselves while being aware of both their role in the drama and of the actions they are supposed to play. In other words, the idea of having a divine spectator watching requires human beings to shift their own point of view from the outside to the inside of the action (ex parte spectantis ad partem agentis). It also entails learning to look, from the inside, towards the world, other people, and themselves. This eye-gazing shift shreds the spectacular device and replaces it with the dramatic device. We are now moving from a ‘show for the eyes’ to a ‘drama made by actions’. But that is not all: God is not a spectator who stays out of the scene and far from the stage. Thanks to the incarnation, he has come into the world stage. In Sermo 51, Augustine explains how through his embodiment, God exposed himself for all to see, ‘hunting down’ the show in its entirety, including the spectators and the actors. Now what more marvellous, what more magnificent thing could our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, … grant to us, than the gathering into His fold not only of the spectators of these foolish shows, but even some of the actors in them; for He has combated unto salvation not only the ­lovers of the combats of men with beasts, but even the combatants themselves, for He also was made a spectacle Himself.25 The challenge to the show reaches its acme on Golgotha, when the naked body of the crucified Christ becomes the object of a public gaze and becomes a show per se. His naked body takes upon itself the dynamics of the show and reveals that what one sees depends on the way one looks. Therefore, if looked at with merciless eyes, the great spectaculum of the crucifixion is ludibrium, but it is mysterium if seen by merciful eyes. 25

Richard G. MacMullen, Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament, 2 vols. (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1854), 1: 2. Augustinus, Sermo 51, 2: “Quid autem potuit admirabilius nobis concedere Dominus Iesus Christus Filius Dei … quia et hoc esse dignatus est; quid potuit magnificentius, quam ut non solum spectatores nugacium munerum aggregaret ovili suo, sed etiam nonnullos qui illic spectari solent? Non enim tantum amatores venatorum, sed etiam ipsos venatores venatus est ad salutem: quia et ipse spectatus est.”

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A grand spectacle! But if it be impiety that is the onlooker, a grand laughing-stock; if piety, a grand mystery: if impiety be the onlooker, a grand demonstration of ignominy; if piety, a grand bulwark of faith: if it is impiety that looketh on, it laughs at the King bearing, in place of His kingly rod, the tree of His punishment; if it is piety, it sees the King bearing the tree for His own crucifixion, which He was yet to affix even on the foreheads of kings, exposed to the contemptuous glances of the impious in connection with that wherein the hearts of saints were thereafter to glory.26 What does using a merciful gaze mean? Augustine superimposes piety and wisdom, and says that Wisdom “took unto Himself the man and drew near the Man.”27 The meaning of ‘drawing near’ is not intended as coming close to man in terms of space, but of likeness: Therefore, the Lord is very nigh, in that the Lord was made very nigh unto us. What so far away, so remote, as God from men, the Immortal from mortals, the Just from the sinners? Not far in place, but in unlikeness …. Forasmuch then as the Immortal and Just one was far from us, as from mortals and sinners, that That Far One might be made very nigh unto us.28 Similarly, he who is approaching God aims at becoming like him: It is not by spatial intervals that we approach God or distance ourselves from him. By your unlikeness to God you have gone far from him; as you become like him, you draw very near.29 26

A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. First series, ed. Henry Wace and Philip Schaff, 14 vols. (New York: The Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1888), 7:429. Augustinus, In Iohannis Evangelium, 117, 3: “Grande spectaculum: sed si spectet impietas, grande ludibrium; si pietas, grande mysterium: si spectet ­impietas, grande ignominiae documentum; si pietas, grande fidei munimentum: si spectet ­impietas, ridet regem pro virga regni lignum sui portare supplicii; si pietas, videt regem baiulantem lignum ad semetipsum figendum, quod fixurus fuerat etiam in frontibus regum: in eo spernendus oculis impiorum, in quo erant gloriatura corda sanctorum.” 27 The English translation is my own. Augustinus, Sermo 299/D: “Suscepit hominem ­sapientia, et facta est homini proxima per id, quod erat proximum.” 28 MacMullen, Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament, 2:882. Augustinus, Sermo 171, 3: “Ergo Dominus in proximo est; quia Dominus nobis factus est in proximo. Quid tam longinquum, quid tam remotum, quam Deus ab hominibus, immortalis a mortalibus, ­iustus a peccatoribus? Non loco longe, sed dissimilitudine … Cum ergo longe a nobis esset immortalis et iustus, tamquam a mortalibus et peccatoribus, descendit ad nos, ut fieret nobis proximus ille longinquus.” 29 The Works of Saint Augustine, trans. Maria Boulding, 16 vols. (New York: New York City Press, 2003), III/19:16–17. Augustinus, In psalmum 99, 5: “Non enim locorum intervallis

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By binding itself to a likeness, nearness becomes neighbourliness, and it refers to a mutual relationship that does not exclude anybody. Augustine says the term “‘neighbour’ is a relative one, and no one can be neighbour except to a neighbour.”30 Neighbour is who is capable of recognizing the likeness and feel it. This mutual relationship is ‘proximity’ and it is founded on charity or mercy: Consider how the Lord wants us to come close to him and begins by making us like himself, so that we may … Learn to love your enemy, if you don’t want your enemy to be a threat to you. But as charity grows within you, making you more like God and recalling you to your likeness to him, it extends even to your enemies … The closer you come to his likeness, the more progress you make in charity.31 The merciful gaze mentioned by Augustine is the knowledge de proximo ­highlighted by Tertullian, namely the dramatic gaze of those who are close to the truth and on the world stage. Conversely, the merciless gaze is ‘from afar’, and typical of the spectators who are distant and cannot see or recognise the resemblance to God, for they are looking at the scene from outside. Any ­Christian scene is based on this eye-gazing overturn. 3 Conclusion: The Spectacula Christianorum between Memory and Mimesis Drama replaces the show, the actor replaces the spectator, and imitation replaces fiction when the far-vision device gives way to the near-vision device. Representing is no longer understood as reproducing or copying, but rather as ‘presenting again’, ‘acting again’ the order of divine truth here and now. The plenitudo veritatis unfolds itself in the history of redemption and, above all, it is embodied in Jesus, making itself face and life. Representing means

30 31

acceditur ad Deum, aut receditur a Deo: dissimilis factus, longe recessisti; similis factus, proxime accedes.” A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. First series, ed. Henry Wace and Philip Schaff, trans. John F. Shaw, 14 vols. (New York: The Christian ­Literature Publishing Company, 1886), 2:531. Augustinus, De doctrina christiana, I, 31. The Works of Saint Augustine, III/19:17. Augustinus, In psalmum 99, 5: “Vide quomodo nos vult accedere Dominus, faciens primo similes, ut accedamus … Disce diligere inimicum, si vis cavere inimicum. In quantum autem in te caritas crescit, efficiens te et revocans te ad similitudinem Dei, pertendit usque ad inimicos … Quantum accedis ad similitudinem, tantum proficis in caritate.”

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‘remembering God’, and constantly calling him back into the heart and making him always present here and now. It should be noted that many Christian authors often paraphrase the Latin verb repraesentare—widely used in reference to preaching and liturgy— through the expression agere memoriam, meaning both ‘to recall a memory within the man’s soul’ and ‘to make that memory active’.32 In other words, it means reactivating memories in order to see them and understand them, but also to live them and feel them in person in order to base actions on them. Finally, it may be concluded that Christian representation is characterised by both a memorative device and a mimetic intention. The memorative device is the way in which memory works, the processes used to recall and organise memories into paths or maps (and this modus operandi has already been thoroughly studied).33 The so-called machina memorialis is an architecture for thinking and corresponds to what Augustine calls the theatrum cordis—a mental or spiritual theatre with strong structures of time, space, and dramaturgy.34 This theatre does not have just one stage, but multiple and simultaneous scenes placed along a path. These are drawn so vividly as if they were made to be lived and felt like real and truly present events. The theatrum cordis is common to prayer, meditation, preaching, but also to liturgical exegesis, figurative representation and lastly, to rites, offices, and dramatic actions. The intention of memorative representation is always mimetic, but in this instance, mimesis does not imply reproduction. Rather, it aims at conformation. ‘Imitating’ is ‘acting again’ (not ‘duplicating’) the constitutive image of the human being, which is the Son (second person of the Trinity). ‘Imitating’ refers to the sequela Christi and it is a sympathetic, concrete, and participating transformation: it does not just mean ‘to follow’ but also ‘to shape oneself like’ someone in order to become alike.

32

The meaning of repraesentare as in memoriam agere, reducere, or revocare is attested by patristic sources from Augustine to Honorius of Autun. See Bino, Il dramma e l’immagine, 117–118 and 216. 33 On the memorative and rhetorical matrix of the Christian scene, see Carla Bino, Dal ­trionfo al pianto. La fondazione del ‘teatro della misericordia’ nel Medioevo (V–XIII secolo) (Milano: Vita e pensiero, 2008), 145–218. On loci and mansiones in medieval theatre, see Graham A. Runnalls, “‘Mansion’ and ‘Lieu’: Two Technical Terms in Medieval French ­Staging?,” French Studies XXXV, no. 4 (1981). 34 Augustinus, Sermo 343, 5; as “theatrum pectoris” in Sermo 315, 7 and Sermo 163/b, 5. See also Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7–16.

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Agere and not spectare, ‘imitating’ and not ‘simulating:’ these will be the peculiar features of the spectacula christianorum. To quote Augustine: “Do you want to watch the show? Then be the show!”35 Bibliography Barber, Charles. Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine ­Iconoclasm. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Bino, Carla. Dal trionfo al pianto. La fondazione del ‘teatro della misericordia’ nel ­Medioevo (V–XIII secolo). Milano: Vita e pensiero, 2008. Bino, Carla. Il dramma e l’immagine. Teorie cristiane della rappresentazione (II–XI sec.). Firenze: Le Lettere, 2015. Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Detienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Les ruses de l’intelligence. La mètis des Grecs. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. Dodgson, Charles L. Tertullian. Apologetic and Practical Treatises. 14 vols. Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1842. Kocur, Miroslaw. The Second Birth of Theatre. Performances of Anglo-Saxon Monks. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017. Lugaresi, Leonardo. Il teatro di Dio. Il problema degli spettacoli nel cristianesimo antico (II–IV secolo). Brescia: Morcelliana editore, 2008. MacMullen, Richard G. Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament. 2 vols. Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1854. Moingt, Joseph. Théologie trinitaire de Tertullien. 4 vols. Paris: Aubier, 1966–1969. Mondzain, Marie-José. Image, icône, économie. Les sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain. Paris: Seuil, 1996. Norton, Michael Lee. Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater. ­Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017. Pentcheva, Bissera Vladimirova. The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in ­Byzantium. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Runnalls, Graham A. “‘Mansion’ and ‘Lieu’: Two Technical Terms in Medieval French Staging?” French Studies 35, no. 4 (1981): 385–93. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory. 5 vols. San ­Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988–1998. 35

Augustinus, In psalmum 39, 9: “Spectare vis, esto spectaculum!”

CHAPTER 3

No Drama Please, We’re Greek: Sacred Plays from a Greek Orthodox Perspective Andrew Walker White In the West we tend to accept as a given that the staging or filming of ­biblical stories is perfectly compatible with church teaching. But not all Christians have seen it this way; there has always been, in the Greek East, an antitheatrical tradition that avoids the liturgical stage like the plague. This paper will seek to explain the key elements of the medieval Greek Orthodox performance ­aesthetic, beginning with its deep roots in the Hellenistic period and moving into the high culture of the Byzantine Empire, in the wake of the Iconoclastic struggle. Orthodox objections to sacred drama are theological, cultural, and material in nature, and speak to the long history of an antitheatrical ritual aesthetic. 1

Hellenistic Jews and Antitheatrical Culture

To understand the Byzantine Middle Ages, we must go back to the Hellenistic period and the creation of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Tanakh produced in the second century BC. Translating scripture presented bilingual Jewish scholars with a unique opportunity to critique the dominant Greek culture in Greek—the language of their colonial oppressor. The critique was subtle but telling; that the translation coincided with the Maccabean Revolt should indicate the work was more a matter of overcoming Greek cultural influence than assimilating with the dominant global empire of its time. Traditional Greek theatre, it turns out, was one of the institutions that came in for special criticism. At one key point in the book of Job, the translators deliberately altered the meaning of the Hebrew to insert a piece of theatrical vocabulary—hypocrites, ‘actor’ or ‘stage performer’. Ceslas Spicq indicates those who were anah—‘dead’ at heart—in the original Hebrew became ‘stage performers’ at heart.1 Rejection of the Greek imitative arts as a whole occurs 1 See Job 36:13–14, LXX; for analysis of changes in the meaning of hypokrites and h­ ypokrinomai during this period, see Ceslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, trans. James © Andrew Walker White, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004522183_005

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in Second Maccabees as well. Among the martyrs to the tyranny of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, there was an elder, Eleazar, who was urged to merely pretend to participate in a Greek sacrificial feast by smuggling kosher meat into the pagan event. The verb chosen to characterise this act of deceit is rooted in mimesthai, ‘to mimic’—a choice that subtly positions the Greek representational arts, the stage included, as blasphemy.2 This would render Jesus’s famous denunciation of the scribes and ­Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew a natural by-product of a centuries-long rejection of Greek arts among observant, Greek-speaking Jews.3 This attitude was adopted among early Christian writers, and the theatre became a special target of clerical invective, with some of the implied Jewish critique now made more explicit. By the sixth century, homilists like Bishop Jacob of Serugh could draw from both the Old and New Testaments to create a truly formidable, tripartite denunciation of the actor’s craft: we are created in God’s image, we were deemed worthy of Jesus’s assumption of human form, and—last but not least— we were deemed worthy of salvation through Jesus’s passion.4 To Jacob’s mind, squandering these three miraculous gifts in play and falsehood—actors are, by definition, professional liars—was inconceivable. Long after the t­ heatre’s association with the pagan gods had become moot, the rejection of stage-mimicry remained firm. What complicates this scenario is that, as boys, all of the church fathers— indeed, all elite Greek-speaking Christians—were educated in dramatic performance from a very tender age. The Greek grammar school system, developed in Hellenistic times, consisted primarily of memorizing and performing prominent genres of classic poetry, tragedy and comedy included. The church fathers, in other words, had all studied ancient drama not as ‘literature’, but as performing arts. In a first century treatise on grammar, Dionysius the Thracian lays out a curriculum calling for a specific mode of delivery for each poetic genre: “We recite tragedy heroically, comedy normally, elegy sweetly, epic D. Ernest, 3 vols. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), 3:406–413. Spicq points out that in the ­Septuagint, “hypokrinomai and its cognates become a sin.” Other passages in the Septuagint using theatrical language include: Job 15:34 and 34:30, as well as Sirach 35:15; 36:2. 2 For a recent analysis of 2 Maccabees, see Michael S. Moore, “2 Maccabees,” in The Apocrypha: Fortress Commentary on the Bible Study Edition, ed. Gale A. Yee et al. (Minneapolis: ­Fortress Press, 2016), 1065–1072. For an interesting theory on the authorship of 2 Maccabees. in particular, see Victor Parker, “The Date of the Material in II Maccabees: The Bureaucratic ­Evidence,” Hermes 141, no. 1 (2013). 3 Matthew 23:13–39. 4 See Charles Moss, “Jacob of Serugh’s Homilies on the Spectacles of the Theatre,” Le Muséon 48 (1935), 87–112.

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vigorously, lyric poetry tastefully, and lamentation in a subdued and plaintive tone.”5 As Dionysius makes clear, primary-school students learned how to perform what we today call ‘literature’; it would require centuries before silent reading and mere ‘appreciation’ of poetry became the pedagogical norm. And long after the Roman Empire’s conversion to Christianity, drama remained a central part of the core curriculum. So, on the one hand, Christians were taught that acting is evil, but on the other hand, the church fathers were given acting lessons as primary school students. And as the plethora and extent of Byzantine-era ­ ­ dramatic manuscripts testify—complete with performance prompts, or scholia, encircling them on the page—Greek pedagogy remained largely unchanged throughout the Orthodox world. Why? One practical answer is that once you had mastered the basics of those rudimentary arts you graduated to the study of rhetoric, the fine art of public speaking. And here’s where we discover a major cultural shift which occurred during the Hellenistic period, but which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves—live theatre, now the domain of professional actors, was dismissed as a primitive form of entertainment by elite citizens, who had created the drama in the first place. Banished from the stage and replaced there by the first international union of performers, the Artists of Dionysus, Greek ­intellectuals came to regard live theatre as crude and common. This is why Aristotle, in his Poetics, dismisses professional actors as rude mechanicals, banousoi, and rejects stage spectacle as vulgar. And although he is famous for claiming the role of tragedy is to excite pity and fear in the audience, he specifically discounts the need for spectacle to achieve this aim.6 Dramatic literature was honoured in the recitation but only if it were delivered in street clothes, and using only the posture, gesture, and facial expression of the citizen-amateur who performed it. In rhetoric school, the techniques associated with acting were repositioned as weapons in the arsenal of a budding public advocate, a future public intellectual and public servant. Having mastered the work of Greece’s great poets, students were now expected to create their own material, in prose and spontaneously, based on classical models. Towards the end of their study of rhetoric was an exercise known as ethopoieia, (characterisation), which required them to adopt a persona other than their own. Although rooted in 5 Dion. Thrac Tech. Gram 2, 629b16–21 (from the edition of Uhlig et al., 1965). 6 In Poetics 6, 1450b15–20, spectacle is rejected as the “most inartistic” (atechnotaton) element of tragedy and ibid., 14, 1453b1–6, where Aristotle instructs poets to construct the actions so that they excite pity and fear without having to actually see the action.

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their grammar-school training in classical stage techniques, in practice, characterisation was only used sparingly, and even then, only as part of a broader ­argument that routinely incorporated a number of other rhetorical genres.7 For the church fathers, there were two fundamental reasons to reject the theatre: the first, on explicitly theological grounds, was rooted in a strict interpretation of Jewish and Christian scripture. The second, more implicit than explicit, was rooted in an age-old intellectual prejudice against professional actors coupled with an equally longstanding rejection of stage productions for their (reputedly) crude, inartistic display. Here, ironically, was room for common ground with their pagan contemporaries: for all their disagreements on matters theological, both sides shared a marked, class-based, antitheatrical prejudice and a strong preference for purely verbal display. This was the dominant cultural paradigm throughout the Greek-speaking East, and it prevailed in Greek Orthodox circles throughout Constantinople’s history as the imperial seat of the Roman Empire and the patriarchal seat of Orthodoxy. Another serious concern in Orthodox circles had to do with materiality in sacred art, or explicit materiality to be more precise. Long before the Reformation, the Orthodox world was rocked by a prolonged struggle over the use of sacred images. The Iconoclast struggle from the eighth to ninth century forced Orthodox theologians to develop a highly refined theory of the sacred image. To begin with, a bright line was drawn between an image and its prototype— the eternal, divine presence to which an image refers. Material objects—icons and mosaics, in particular—were worthy of honour because of their subject matter, but they were by no means worthy of veneration or worship, which was owed to God alone. As John of Damascus, one of the most eloquent defenders of sacred art, frames it, there is a renewed emphasis on the appropriate mode of reception in the eye and the mind of the beholder: “Through the senses, a certain imaginative image is constituted in the front part of the brain and thus conveyed to the faculty of discernment, and stored in the memory.”8 As John of Damascus explained, the contemplation of an icon isn’t idolatry because the material thing in front of you is just inert matter: its function is as a call to prayer, which is an inner spiritual experience, not an outward aesthetic one. And because in those pre-Gutenberg days the written word was designed 7 For a collection of rhetorical manuals from the early Christian era, see George A. Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Atlanta: Society of ­Biblical Literature, 2003). For an account of ethopoieia by Aphthonius, a contemporary and classmate of church father John Chrysostom, see ibid., 115–117. 8 John of Damascus, Apol. 1.11; translation from John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 26.

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primarily for oral recitation—that is, for performance—he equates the aural experience of scripture with the visual experience of the icon.9 The word, like the icon, is an image. And like scripture, the purpose of the icon is not to call attention to itself; rather, it is designed to inspire a subjective response within the heart and soul of the viewer—a spiritual response, not an aesthetic one. From the perspective of Greek Orthodox theology, any aesthetic response, whether to a reading from scripture or to a sacred image, was suspect. In John of Damascus’s eyes, an icon succeeded to the degree that it evaded or deflected aesthetic appreciation. Its function was to facilitate the inward contemplation of an eternal spiritual presence, not to draw attention to itself as a material site or event.10 2

Enter the Archbishop

In 1416 a Constantinopolitan monk, Symeon, was sent to Thessaloniki, the ­Byzantine Empire’s second largest city, to serve as its archbishop—a position he strenuously sought to avoid.11 By this time, Thessaloniki had become something of a political football, with the local population left reeling as authority was passed from Byzantine to Ottoman authorities and then back again. Having already endured years of Ottoman rule, the city had been returned to Orthodox secular and spiritual control. Within six years of Symeon’s arrival, however, another Ottoman siege of this major port city prompted Thessaloniki’s elite to force its Byzantine ruler into exile; they handed the city over to the Catholic Venetians in hopes they would mount a more vigorous defence of it.12 9

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“I say that everywhere we use our senses to produce an image of the Incarnate God ­ imself, and we sanctify the first of the senses (sight being the first of the senses), just h as by words hearing is sanctified … What the book does for those who understand letters, the image does for the illiterate; the word appeals to hearing, the image appeals to sight; it conveys understanding.” John of Damascus Apol. 1.17, in John of Damascus, Three ­Treatises, 31. As Gervase Mathew points out, “[John of Damascus] held that no veneration or honor should be paid to the image as an object, as an object it is simply a piece of matter; the honour is paid to the prototype it represents and even that honour must not be more than simply proskynesis, the same honor that is paid to relics, to consecrated things and to men worthy of respect.” Gervase Mathew, Byzantine Aesthetics (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 104. For an introduction to Symeon see David Balfour, “Saint Symeon of Thessalonike as a Historical Personality,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 28, no. 1 (1983). See Apostolos Euangelou Bakalopoulos, A History of Thessaloniki, trans. Thomas Francis (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1963), 53–55.

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True to form—the new authorities were descendants of those who had sacked Constantinople in 1204—the Venetians lacked any sense of tact and proceeded to run the city into the ground. Symeon was forced to negotiate with the Venetians just to preserve the Orthodox churches under his see.13 For the rest of his life, until his death in September 1429, Symeon defended the rights of his flock (or what was left of it) under increasingly authoritarian ­Catholic rule.14 It was probably during this period that the archbishop wrote his Dialogue in Christ, a long, detailed list of heresies past and present.15 One chapter in the Dialogue tackles the question of divine representations, and he openly attacks the Catholic Church for its tendency towards kainotomia (innovation)—keep in mind that in Symeon’s world, innovation was a very bad thing. And his special concern was the Catholic Church’s approval of non-iconic representations of divinity, especially on the stage. Symeon describes what to him is a truly abhorrent materialistic practice: using human beings to represent sacred figures hos en dramati (as if in a drama). As with the word “innovation”, to be perfectly clear, Symeon does not mean “drama” as a compliment. Here’s how he describes the Italian practice of his day: They set up men at crossroads and on platforms, iconizing things about the Annunciation of the Virgin and Mother of God, and the crucifixion of the Saviour, etc. One man typifies the Virgin, and they call that man Mary; another is called the angel, and another the Ancient of Days, and they put white hair on him for a beard …16 The choice of verbs is precise and heavily sarcastic: Symeon refers both to the production of icons (eikonizein) and the concept of iconic type and prototype. Symeon implies it’s absurd to think men could replace icons.

13

In addition to the Balfour article cited in n. 11 above, see Symeon Archishop of Thessalonica, Politico-Historical Works of Symeon, Archbishop of Thessalonica (1416/17 to 1429): Critical Greek Text with Introduction and Commentary, ed. David Balfour (Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1979), 164–68. 14 Bakalopoulos, A History of Thessaloniki, 65–70. 15 See Symeon, “Διάλογος ἐν Χριστῶ κατὰ πασῶν τῶν ἁιρέσεων καὶ περί τῆς μόνης πίστεως τοῦ Κυρίου καὶ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, τῶν ἱερῶν τελετῶν τε καὶ μυστηρίον πάντων τῆς Ἐκκλησίας (Dialogue in Christ Against All Heresies, and on the sole faith of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on sacred rites and all the mysteries of the Church),” in PG 155:33–174. 16 Ibid., 112c–d. Emphasis added.

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Note, too, that in his account, men played women. He wouldn’t hesitate to remind you that this is easy to do, if like a typical Italian you were already clean-shaven. Greek males had always grown beards, but by this time Orthodox theology had further valorised beards as symbolic of man being created in God’s image. Symeon describes shaving as “contrary to natural law”, an expression which implied clean-shaven men were effeminate, looking as they did like eunuchs or, worse, like women. Symeon regarded shaving as especially perverse for Catholic monks and clergy, who often performed in these plays, because they had supposedly renounced the care of their bodies when they became men of the cloth.17 Then you have the use of special effects to heighten the realism of the ­dramatic action. Symeon describes how Italians created the illusion of a bleeding, crucified Christ by taking one brute beast’s blood and pumping it through another brute beast’s bladder onto the body of a man pretending to be Jesus— this man is, let’s remember, also an androgynous, clean-shaven Jesus. To point up the absurdity of this spectacle, Symeon compares it to a traditional Orthodox icon: What, then, is that man being crucified? And what is the blood? Real, or an icon? And if it’s an icon, how on earth could it be a man and blood?18 For an icon is not a man. But if they are really man and blood, then it’s not an icon. So then, what is that man? And what is that blood? And whose is it supposed to be, the Savior’s? Or a commoner’s? Bless me, how bizarre!19 Issues of effeminacy aside, Symeon argues here that because of our gross materiality, no human being, and no brute animal’s blood, can serve as icons of Jesus’s passion. There are other, more serious theological matters lurking in the background here as well. Anna Pontani, Symeon’s Italian translator, pointed out in her own commentary on this Dialogue, dramatic representation places so much emphasis on Jesus’s earthly form that it wipes out the consensus, painstakingly established through centuries of church councils, that Jesus had two natures, both human and divine.20

17 18 19 20

Ibid., 112d. There is an ellipsis; the sentence reads literally, “And if [an] icon, how man and blood?” Ibid., 113b. Anna Pontani, “Firenze nelle fonti greche del Concilio,” in Firenze e il Concilio del 1439, ed. Paolo Viti (Firenze: Olschki, 1994), 792.

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The Service of the Furnace

Given our fondness in the West for religious drama, Archbishop Symeon might strike us at first as little more than a crabby ascetic; nothing could be further from the truth. Born and raised in the capital, Constantinople, Symeon had grown up witnessing and participating in the high, imperial liturgical performances of the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia. For decades, the cathedral had hosted a special service on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, in midDecember, a feast day dedicated to Old Testament figures. Among them were the three “Children of Israel”—Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael, also known as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. These three, as recorded in chapter 3 of the book of Daniel, were thrown into a fiery furnace by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar for refusing to worship a golden idol, but they were saved by an angel of the Lord. The service was unusual, in that it featured three choir boys singing from what Symeon calls a “typic furnace”—most likely the pulpit or ambo, which in the Byzantine tradition was located in the centre of the nave. There was also an icon—most likely of the Archangel Michael, in accordance with the iconographic tradition—which was hung under the dome of Hagia Sophia for the service, and which descended to hover over the boys at the moment (in the scriptural reading) an angel of the Lord comes to douse the flames and rescue them. Given the heat with which he lambastes Catholics for their androgynous actors and crude props, it is a little ironic to find Symeon defending his ­instructions for the Service of the Furnace: could it be that Orthodoxy is on shaky liturgical ground here? The archbishop, whose instructions for the ­Service are the longest and most intricately detailed extant, anticipates this question and has what he regards as a firm response: And if they should censure us for the furnace of the three children, yet they shall not rejoice completely. For we do not light up a furnace but lamps for lights, and we offer incense to God as is customary; and we represent [eikonizomen] an angel, we do not send down a man. And we only offer singing children, as pure as those three children, to sing the verses from their canticle according to tradition.21

21

PG 155:113d.

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Symeon’s initial focus on how the ‘furnace’ is prepared indicates his adversaries perceived it as a stage. He cites the details of traditional Orthodox ritual—the use of liturgical lamps, the purification of the area with incense, etc.—to reinforce his argument that the ambo-furnace retains its proper, liturgical identity throughout the performance. And because Symeon had personally witnessed the Latin obsession with scenic realism, he points out that a Catholic service would have featured a realistic kiln complete with flames reaching up to the skies, as the biblical story calls for.22 Symeon’s rejection of Western theatrical conventions, and of sacred drama, extends to using an icon instead of a human being to depict the angel, and having the choirboys sing the ‘three children’s’ canticles in a traditional, liturgical style as was done during Orthros or Matins—the boys were not expected to deliver lines like actors in a play.23 For Symeon, it is this liturgical mode of performance which distinguishes what we might call ‘iconic’ or ‘typic’ p ­ erformances from theatrical plays. As with sacred images, sacred performances were designed to deflect aesthetic appreciation in favour of generating a contemplative mode of prayer in the congregation. So, in accordance with the Byzantine tradition of liturgical exegesis, Symeon goes on to describe the ways in which each class of liturgical performer in the service represents a ­specific divine prototype: All of these baptised and holy children typify the Children. And because everyone is consecrated, each models for those of his rank. And while the Archbishop [typifies] the Lord, the bishops [typify] the first of the A ­ postles, since they also possess their grace, and the priests the ­Seventy; and the deacons the Levites; and the other sub-deacons the rank of the Prophets.24 All the service’s performers were designed to refer the mind of the observer to an ever-present divine reality—an effect which, to Symeon’s mind, would 22

23

24

For more on this eccentric version of the Orthodox ritual see Milos M. Velimirović, “Liturgical Drama in Byzantium and Russia,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 30, no. 16 (1962), and Marina Swoboda, “The Furnace Play and the Development of Liturgical Drama in Russia,” The Russian Review 61, no. 2 (2002). Velimirović understands ‘tradition’ to mean that the children sing in unison, not polyphonically as in the West. Velimirović, “Liturgical Drama,” 352. But a look at the MS tradition offers another possible interpretation: unlike a play where individuals consistently speak their own lines, the Office has the children, choir, and cantor share the ‘children’s’ canticles antiphonally; Symeon could be arguing that it is not a drama because the ‘­children’s’ verses are so thoroughly diffused. PG 155:113d–116a.

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not be possible if the performers were characters in a play, or if there were any effort to create illusionistic, realistic scenic detail. Still, instead of simply saying it’s a ritual, Symeon feels compelled to argue why his service should be seen as one. What to Symeon is a tightly controlled system of symbolic discourse appears to outsiders like theatrical mimesis—as if the line between ‘iconizing’ and ‘mimicry’ had been crossed—and his expression that the Latins should ‘not rejoice completely’ can be read as a sheepish acknowledgement of the service’s controversial mode of representation. 4 Conclusion Generations of scholars have fervently hoped for signs that at some point in its rich history, Orthodoxy embraced stage performances of sacred drama; but this was never meant to be. Theological objections, combined with a cultural bias against stage performances in general, rendered the prospect of Greek liturgical dramas so remote as to be inconceivable. Moreover, blessed with the cultural stability that came with being based in the eastern seat of the Roman Empire, the Orthodox Church maintained its ritual traditions largely intact— the Iconoclast struggle, while devastating, resulted mainly in the refinement of established practice. Representational and performance practices were finely tuned to minimise the intrusion of aesthetic distractions on what was supposed to be a purely inner, spiritual goal. Even as the fabric of Orthodoxy began to fray with the Latin and ­Ottoman conquests, the Eastern church’s response was to resist liturgical change as a means of preserving its identity. Symeon’s reading of Western sacred drama may seem unusually partisan but given the ongoing negotiations over re-­ unification of the churches at this time, sacred dramas were evidence to Orthodox officials that the Catholic Church had fallen into profound theological error and was therefore unworthy. Later attempts to propagandise the Orthodox through annunciation and ascension plays at the Conference of Union in Florence failed—not only was there explicit, pro-papal content in these plays, but the fact that churches had been converted to theatres for their performance would have offended the pope’s Orthodox guests profoundly.25

25

On the sacre rappresentazioni of the Council of Florence, see Nerida Newbigin, Feste d­ ’Oltrarno: Plays in Churches in Fifteenth-Century Florence, 2 vols. (Firenze: Olschki, 1996), particularly vol. 1.

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Although it is probable that enactments were designed to give uneducated laypersons a greater sense of emotional attachment to stories from the Bible, it was inconceivable to Symeon that these plays could invoke an appropriate spiritual response.26 Unwilling to ‘suspend his disbelief’, and clearly distracted by the materiality of the stage, Symeon offers a corrective to modern Western notions of the universal, symbiotic relationship between ritual and theatre. Bibliography Bakalopoulos, Apostolos Euangelou. A History of Thessaloniki. Translated by Thomas Francis. Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1963. Balfour, David. “Saint Symeon of Thessalonike as a Historical Personality.” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 28, no. 1 (1983): 55–72. Davidson, Clifford. “Sacred Blood and the Late Medieval Stage.” Comparative Drama 31, no. 3 (1997): 436–58. Kennedy, George A. Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003. Mathew, Gervase. Byzantine Aesthetics. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Moore, Michael S. “2 Maccabees.” In The Apocrypha: Fortress Commentary on the Bible Study Edition, edited by Gale A. Yee et al. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016. Moss, Charles. “Jacob of Serugh’s Homilies on the Spectacles of the Theatre.” Le Muséon 48 (1935): 87–112. Newbigin, Nerida. Feste d’Oltrarno: Plays in Churches in Fifteenth-Century Florence. 2 vols. Firenze: Olschki, 1996. Parker, Victor. “The Date of the Material in II Maccabees: The Bureaucratic Evidence.” Hermes 141, no. 1 (2013): 34–44. Pontani, Anna. “Firenze nelle fonti greche del Concilio.” In Firenze e il Concilio del 1439, edited by Paolo Viti, 753–812. Firenze: Olschki, 1994. Spicq, Ceslas. Theological Lexicon of the New Testament. Translated by James D. Ernest. 3 vols. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994. Swoboda, Marina. “The Furnace Play and the Development of Liturgical Drama in ­Russia.” The Russian Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 220–34. Velimirović, Milos M. “Liturgical Drama in Byzantium and Russia.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 30, no. 16 (1962): 363–77. 26

On emotional response to sacred drama, and to the fake blood Symeon takes so much exception to, see Clifford Davidson, “Sacred Blood and the Late Medieval Stage,” ­Comparative Drama 31, no. 3 (1997).

CHAPTER 4

Enacting Sacred Narrative: Biblical, Liturgical, and Sacramental Practices in the Latin West Nils Holger Petersen 1

The Notions of ‘Liturgical Drama’ and ‘Sacrament’

In the tenth century, we find the earliest records of biblical narratives being enacted as part of liturgical ceremonies in the Latin church.1 First Jesus’s resurrection and then the nativity were the subjects of such enactments which gradually also came to include other biblical episodes, and in some cases even extrabiblical sacred narratives, from around the twelfth century. Manuscripts recording such enactments, containing information about the actual performance (to a higher or lesser degree), led scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth century to consider these enactments as drama. In the mid-nineteenth century, the notion ‘liturgical drama’ was coined and became the standard term for all such sacred enactments in the medieval Latin church. It is, however, a notion not found in the sources, and from the beginning its use has given rise to criticism, increasingly so in the last forty years.2 In recent scholarship, the rise of such enacted sacred representations have been understood also in relation to contemporary controversies concerning the understanding of the Eucharist.3 More recently, I have discussed these enactments in the

1 C. Clifford Flanigan, “The Roman Rite and the Origins of the Liturgical Drama,” University of Toronto Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1974); Nils Holger Petersen, “Liturgical Enactment,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance, ed. Pamela M. King (London: Routledge, 2017). 2 Michael Lee Norton, Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater (­Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017); Nils Holger Petersen, “The Concept of Liturgical Drama: Charles-Edmond de Coussemaker and Charles Magnin,” in Lingua mea calamus scribae: Mélanges offerts à madame Marie-Noël Colette par ses collègues, étudiants et amis, ed. Daniel Saulnier et al. (Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 2009); Nils Holger Petersen, “The Concept of Liturgical Drama: Coussemaker and Modern Scholarship,” in Ars musica septentrionalis: De l’interprétation du patrimoine musical à l’historiographie, ed. Barbara Haggh and Frédéric Billiet (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011). 3 Michal Kobialka, This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). © Nils Holger Petersen, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004522183_006

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broader context of the evolving of a well-defined concept of sacrament during the twelfth century.4 In this brief article, which includes a brief summary of the most recent relevant scholarship, I shall proceed to present and discuss one larger sung Latin biblical enactment, probably composed during the twelfth century, part of the famous so-called Fleury Playbook containing ten large sung Latin biblical enactments, possibly, but more or less explicitly, connected to liturgical ceremonies.5 The Versus de resuscitacione Lazari, as it is denoted in the opening rubric of the manuscript, normally referred to simply as the Raising of Lazarus, is a rendering of the narrative from the Gospel of John (11:1–44), preceded, as a kind of prelude, by the narrative about the meal at the house of Simon the Pharisee and the sinful woman who anointed Jesus’s feet (Luke 7:36–49), identifying (as common during pre-modern times) this woman with Mary Magdalene. In this article, I shall focus especially on how the enactment presents the actual wonder of the resurrection (John 11:38–44), discussing the relationship between the biblical text and its representation. I shall also bring in other sung enacted representations of the same biblical episode in an attempt to approach an understanding of how this particular episode might have been understood and enacted. First, however, I shall briefly explain why and how changes in medieval understandings of the notion of a sacrament may form an important part of the background for what appears to be a change in the character of liturgical enactments in a number of cases, especially from the twelfth century onwards. Around this time, a number of such enactments exceed what seems to have been traditional limits of scope and narrative detail. In the first centuries since liturgical enactments began to appear, they unfolded short narratives which, within a liturgical ceremony, provided a link between a basic (short and straightforward) biblical episode and a liturgical praise into which the narration would lead. They were transmitted in liturgical books, normally placed 4 Nils Holger Petersen, “Biblical Reception, Representational Ritual, and the Question of ‘­Liturgical Drama’,” in Sapientia et Eloquentia: Meaning and Function in Liturgical Poetry, Music, Drama, and Biblical Commentary in the Middle Ages, ed. Gunilla Iversen and N ­ icolas Bell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); Petersen, “Liturgical Enactment”; Nils Holger Petersen, “Medieval Latin Performative Representation: Re-evaluating the State-of-the-Art,” European Medieval Drama (2019a). 5 According to Michel Huglo, “Analyse codicologique des drames liturgiques de Fleury,” in Calames et cahiers. Mélanges de codicologie et de paléographie offerts à Léon Gilissen, ed. Jacques Lemaire and Émile van Balberghe (Bruxelles: Centre d’Étude des Manuscrits, 1985), the manuscript dates from the twelfth century with a provenance in an intellectual milieu (see esp. pp. 66–67 and 77–78).

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as part of the sequence of liturgical songs and actions, indicating (with various degrees of information in rubrics) where, when, and how they were to be performed, just like other elements in the liturgical procedures. In the earliest preserved manuscripts containing records of Easter enactments (tenth to eleventh centuries, but similarly so in the majority of all liturgical enactments concerning Jesus’s resurrection during the long Middle Ages up to the eighteenth century), such an enactment would typically be carried out as a sung dialogue between clerics representing the women coming to Jesus’s grave on Easter morning as well as an angel (or two) at the grave announcing Jesus’s resurrection. After the brief exchange, this would lead into liturgical praises of the resurrection. Similar structures are found for enactments pertaining to the nativity of Jesus.6 But in the twelfth century, as also later, some manuscripts give records of enactments based on the same biblical episodes, now however also including much more biblical material, or based on other biblical (and even non-­biblical) narratives as in the case to be discussed later in this article. Such narratives, although devotional and with some relation to liturgical materials, seem selfcontained and are mostly transmitted not in liturgical manuscripts, where they were to be performed, but in manuscripts of a different character. So, it is not normally evident, for this new group of large enactments, when and in what (liturgical or non-liturgical) connection they were to be performed. This is so, not least, for the ten enactments in the mentioned Fleury Playbook. While all ten enactments include at least some liturgical material, it is not obvious whether they were actually meant to be performed at a specific liturgical time. Also, as pointed out many years ago by Clifford Flanigan, the fact that they were copied together without regard for their very different affiliations to liturgical seasons (belonging to the Christmas and Epiphany season, to Easter, dealing with St. Nicholas, and in other cases having less clearly defined liturgical ties) would seem to indicate that “at least one person living in France in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century appropriated a number of what had once been generically disparate works into the single all-encompassing c­ ategory of drama.”7 6 Nils Holger Petersen, “Representation in European Devotional Rituals: The Question of the Origin of Medieval Drama in Medieval Liturgy,” in The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, ed. Eric Csapo and Margaret Christina Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 7 C. Clifford Flanigan, “The Fleury Playbook, the Traditions of Medieval Latin Drama, and Modern Scholarship,” in The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies, ed. Thomas P. Campbell and Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985), 17, but also 4–7.

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In the first half of the twelfth century, there does not seem to have been a well-defined concept of sacraments as a specified group of objects or ceremonies used as means for salvation in the church. Over the centuries, the word sacramentum had been used in various meanings, in the Vulgate New Testament, for instance, as a translation of the Greek μυστήριον (alongside and indistinguishable from the Latin mysterium) pointing in general to God’s mysterious plans for human salvation in Jesus (see for instance Colossians 1:25‒27). In his De civitate Dei, Augustine used the word in a way that characterises a sacrament as a holy sign. Discussing obsolete Old Testament sacrifices, he characterised these sacrifices as holy signs for the Christian cult: “Sacrificium ergo visibile invisibilis sacrificii sacramentum. Id est sacrum signum est.”8 Earlier, in his De doctrina christiana, Augustine theorised holy signs (sacramenta) in an extremely influential way for the following centuries.9 He mainly applied the word in the context of baptism and the Eucharist but framing it in such a way that it was not limited to these main examples and could be used very broadly. Altogether, it seems that until Hugh of St. Victor took up the notion of sacrament in order to redefine it (in the early 1130s) in his De sacramentis christianae fidei, the notion of sacraments in the church did not point to a specified group of objects or ceremonies in the eyes of church men and theologians. The word sacrament in the title of Hugh’s De sacramentis is not to be understood as specific holy signs (as in Augustine’s understanding of the word), nor does it denote a specific class of objects or ceremonies, but—as in the New Testament—it indicates the mysteries of the Christian faith altogether. However, in part 9 of book 1, Hugh takes up the issue of specific sacraments as the church’s means for salvation, that is, in the narrower meaning of the word. He does so precisely at the point where he has come to discuss the r­estoration of the sinful humans in and through the church, unsurprisingly basing his ­teaching on the church fathers, but more surprisingly modifying their understanding, claiming their broad understanding of a sacrament as any sign of a holy thing to be insufficient. He specifies that a sacrament must have an instituted significance and also that it must be sanctified.10 Not least in view of 8 Augustinus, De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart et al., 2 vols., Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (CCSL 47–48) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), 1:277. “The visible sacrifice then is a sign for the invisible sacrifice. That is, it is a holy sign.” I have translated sacramentum as “sign” not as “sacrament” since the latter word in modern times gives associations to much later theological understandings of the notion. 9 Augustinus, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. Roger P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 10 Hugh formulates his definition as follows: “sacramentum est corporale. vel materiale ­elementum. foris sensibiliter propositum ex similitudine reprasentans. & ex institutione

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Hugh as a Victorine, an Augustinian Canon, it is reasonable to understand his revision of the church father’s notion of a sacrament in the broader context of the Gregorian reform movement, taking care to make sure the (specific) sacraments of the church are under the control of the church. A further step towards ecclesiastical control of the sacraments came just a few decades later when Peter Lombard introduced the seven (now well-known) sacraments of the New Testament in the fourth book of his famous Sentences. His definition and list of sacraments became generally accepted, not least also by Thomas Aquinas. It was also confirmed by various councils during the later Middle Ages, for example, at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, the Council of Florence in 1437, and again, forcefully, at the Council of Trent (1545–1563).11 For Bishop William Durand of Mende, the author of the famous ­Rationale divinorum officiorum from the end of the thirteenth century, Peter ­Lombard and Thomas Aquinas were great authorities, and Durand participated in the 1274 Council of Lyons in the service of the pope. However, although the new understanding of the sacraments of the church (or “sacraments of the New Testament” in the words of Peter Lombard, also used by Durand) had been established and recognised, the older and broader usage of sacramentum was not forgotten. In Book 4 of his Rationale (chapter 42, section 26), Durand discusses the notion of a sacrament, pointing out that there is a broader use of the term: “In the broad sense, everything that is a sign of something sacred, whether it is sacred or not, is called a ‘sacramental sign.’”12

11

12

significans. & ex sanctificatione continens aliquam invisibilem & spiritalem gratiam” (Hugo de Sancto Victore, De sacramentis Christiane fidei, ed. Rainer Berndt (Münster: Aschendorff, 2008), 209‒210; choosing the reading “ex institutione”, cf. the critical apparatus). English translation: “A sacrament is a corporeal or material element set before the senses outwardly, representing by similitude and signifying by institution and containing by sanctification some invisible and spiritual grace.” Hugo de Sancto Victore, On the sacraments of the Christian faith (De sacramentis), trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge: Mediaeval Academy of ­America, 1951), 155 (slightly modified). Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 498– 499; William A. van Roo, The Christian Sacrament (Roma: Ed. Pontificia Univ. Gregoriana, 1992), 45–67; Margot Elsbeth Fassler, Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 20112), 227–233; Nils Holger Petersen, “Ritual. Medieval Liturgy and the Senses: The Case of the Mandatum,” in The Saturated Sensorium ed. Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen et al. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015), 193–196; Nils Holger Petersen, “The Liturgical Use of the Gospel Book in the Middle Ages and Notions of Sacramentality,” in Materiality and Religious Practice in Medieval Denmark, ed. Sarah Croix and Mads Vedel Heilskov (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021). Guillaume Durand, Rationale, Book Four: on the Mass and Each Action Pertaining to It, trans. Timothy M. Thibodeau (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 376. “Large, secundum quod

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Altogether, my work on the so-called liturgical drama has been inspired to a high extent by Clifford Flanigan’s critical investigations several decades ago. Flanigan pointed out that the drama scholars had previously detected in the (early) records of these enactments only came into being through appropriation of what he saw as clear liturgical phenomena, which he interpreted using modern anthropological methods.13 Since the idea of a sacrament is tied to the question of how to represent the holy, Michal Kobialka’s work on socalled liturgical drama as connected to the disputes during the ninth to the thirteenth centuries about the nature of the Eucharist, and how both fields revolved around the question of how to represent the body of Jesus, sparked my interest in exploring the possible influence of the changes in sacramental understanding on later, more complex appropriations of early simple liturgical enactments.14 Some of the ceremonies I have studied in this context ­specifically substantiate Kobialka’s idea, exemplifying how liturgical enactments could function as sacred signs for the Eucharist.15 But, indeed, all the liturgical Easter enactments of the women’s visit to the grave on Easter morning were sacred signs of the most holy event in Christian tradition. That is, these were sacraments, as that word was used before around 1130, just as liturgical song would still be considered sacramental by Hugh of St. Victor.16 After around 1130, the development just sketched above came to make a sharp distinction between sacraments and sacred things that were not sacraments. Later, only the seven well-known sacraments were recognised as such and thus left the sacred biblical enactments outside the sacramental realm. As an important domain of the church, this domain was of primary interest for the theologians, whereas experimental ceremonies on the fringes of the main liturgical ceremony were very much less so and would mainly occupy ecclesiastical dignitaries when it came to questions of what could be considered appropriate in an ecclesiastical context, as for instance made clear in condemnations of what was understood to be inappropriate behaviour in connection with some such performances.17 Even so, as demonstrated by Durand’s omne signum rei sacre, sive sit sacrum sive non sacrum, dicitur sacramentum,” Guillaume Durand, Rationale divinorum officiorum, ed. Anselme Davril and Timothy Thibodeau (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 476. 13 See Petersen, “Ritual. Medieval Liturgy and the Senses.” 14 Kobialka, This Is My Body; Petersen, “Liturgical Enactment,” and Petersen, “Medieval Latin Performative Representation.” 15 Petersen, “Liturgical Enactment.” 16 Ibid. 17 Peter Meredith, “Latin Liturgical Drama,” in The Medieval European Stage, 500–1550, ed. William Tydeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 113–117; Nils Holger

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aforementioned remark, the older and broader notion of sacrament was not entirely forgotten. Thus, there was a possibility for a kind of a middle position, something sacred but not sacramental in the new theological teaching. It seems that it became possible to appropriate the tradition of liturgical enactments that, so to say, fell out of the notion of a sacrament and were also not part of a liturgical canon because of this new theological distinction. They could be appropriated in new ways staying near the liturgical realm in which they had grown as new liturgical experiments, as for instance in the ceremonies of the Fleury Playbook. However, they could also be appropriated in forms which, to a higher degree, contained elements of entertainment, although this would for centuries always occur within a devotional context, at least through the control of the church, as seen much later in the English mystery cycles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.18 I believe that looking at the traditions of medieval devotional enactments in the context of the history of the notion of a sacrament during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries provides a possible new understanding of an undeniable historical, diachronic connection (through appropriation) between medieval liturgy and early modern theatre. 2 The Fleury Raising of Lazarus The Versus de resuscitacione Lazari, the Raising of Lazarus, is uniquely preserved in the Fleury Playbook.19 It was edited already in 1860 with a transcription of its music by Charles-Edmond de Coussemaker (1805‒1876), one of the early pioneers of ‘liturgical drama’. The text has been edited also by Karl Young and, more recently, an edition with transcriptions of the music of the entire Fleury Playbook has been published, textually based on Karl Young’s editions; the Raising of Lazarus is edited in volume three.20 Its poetic and musical

18 19 20

Petersen, “The Notion of a Missionary Theatre: The ludus magnus of Henry of Livonia’s Chronicle,” in Crusading and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Baltic Frontier: A Companion to the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, ed. Marek Tamm et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) Petersen, «Medieval Latin Performative Representation.» Orléans, Bibliothèque municipal, ms. 201, 233‒43. For discussions on Coussemaker’s contributions to liturgical drama scholarship, conceptually as well as an editor, see Norton, Liturgical drama, chapter 1. See also Petersen, “The Concept of Liturgical Drama.” Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:199–208; The Fleury Playbook, ed. Wyndham Thomas, 3 vols. (Newton Abbot: Antico Ed, 1998–2005), 3:18–36, giving also an English translation by Margaret Hunt, xii–xvi.

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structure is very basic: except for the opening sequence (a choice between two is given) and the concluding Te deum, each person’s lines are fundamentally sung to the same melody, normally covering two stanzas of the poetic meter. Sometimes (for instance when a person uses only one stanza for his/her lines) the melody is given in a shorter version, but always having the same overall melodic outline beginning and ending exactly in the same way. Along the way minor, but as it seems significant, variations of the melody are found.21 In his short discussion, Karl Young commented, “the stanzaic regularity of the play is, no doubt, monotonous; but it must be admitted that the style achieves a sustained elevation and gravity worthy of the pathetic subject.”22 In recent scholarship, The Raising of Lazarus has not been much treated. However, some decades ago, Kathleen M. Ashley, gave a thorough literary and theological interpretation, taking her point of departure in R. W. Southern’s celebrated, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953).23 She points to his influential description of a literary shift during the twelfth century from epic to romance (the title of the last essay of the book), similarly also described as a shift from Romanesque to Gothic crucifixes, and from a theory of redemption based on a cosmic struggle between God and the Devil to Anselm’s more human redemption theory (in Cur deus homo), explaining how Jesus as both God and man was able to pay to God what he had no obligation to pay, whereas man, as a sinner, did have the obligation to pay but was unable to do so. Ashley makes the point that whereas Southern’s transition seems to be strictly chronological so that the ‘epic’ stage and the ‘romance’ stage do not co-exist, the Fleury Raising of Lazarus demonstrates how the transition was rather a gradual one and the two stages were able to co-exist in this text. Invoking along the way contemporary Cistercian exegesis and, not least, Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous sermon lamenting the death of his brother, Ashley convincingly points out that in the Raising of Lazarus, Jesus appears as a human figure able and willing to cry over Lazarus’s death (John 11:35), while the miracle of his raising Lazarus from death emphasises his divine nature (John 11:40‒44). Indeed, both sides are clearly emphasised in the poetic representation. As Jesus asks to be led to the grave of Lazarus, he continues singing, “iam me movet vestra miseria; iam me movent vestra suspiria, vestra cure” (“now your distress moves me, now your sighs, your sorrows move me”), while the rubric states that he does so “fremens et lacrimans in se” (“angry and tearful in himself”).24 A moment later, Jesus sings to Martha and the 21 The Fleury Playbook, 3:ii–iii. 22 Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2:210. 23 Cf. Kathleen M. Ashley, “The Fleury ‘Raising of Lazarus’ and Twelfth-Century Currents of Thought,” Comparative Drama 15, no. 2 (1981). 24 The Fleury Playbook, III: xv and 33.

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surrounding Jews, “Do not despair; you will see the glory of God the Father and the power of his son”, and immediately after, he raises his eyes to heaven and sings, “God, whose power and eternal son, not subject to time, I am believed to be, it is necessary that you should honour your child and glorify my name.”25 Young finds that the Fleury Lazarus “faithfully follows the narrative of the Gospel … Nothing significant is omitted, and nothing alien is introduced.”26 From that point of view, one might say the point Ashley makes is a simple consequence of the biblical faithfulness of the representation, although she points out that the biblical statements are more elaborated than in the biblical text.27 One might add, however, that when Jesus calls Lazarus out of the grave in the biblical account, Jesus only says, “Lazare, veni foras!” (John 11:43).28 By contrast, in the Fleury representation of the Lazarus story, Jesus adds a human element when he sings, “I now say to you for all to hear: come out and make the heart of your family rejoice. May you be a grief to those who lay plots and a convincing proof to those who doubt.”29 Young’s aforementioned statement may need some revision, as this textual (and musical) addition to the biblical text again takes up both the theme of Jesus’s love of mankind, explicitly pointing out the raising of Lazarus as a gift of love to his family, and naturally, the theme of the resurrection as a proof for those who doubt his divinity. I shall end this article with a brief discussion of how the rubrics, or stage directions, deal with the actual resurrection. Here, the biblical account gives a rather detailed description of how Lazarus comes out of the grave: “Haec cum dixisset voce magna clamavit Lazare veni foras. Et statim prodiit qui fuerat mortuus ligatus pedes et manus institis et facies illius sudario erat ligata dicit Iesus eis solvite eum et sinite abire” (John 11:43‒44). Far from adding anything to the biblical account, the rubrics here give no information whatsoever until after Lazarus has come out, and a rubric simply states, “Now, with Lazarus seated, let him [Jesus] say to the servants.”30 In other words, the representation avoids giving instructions about how Lazarus is to come out of the grave, although the biblical text appears to give precisely 25

“Ne desperes, videbitis gloriam Dei Patris atque potenciam sui nati,” ibid., xvi and 34. “Deus, cuius virtus et filius eternalis, non temporaneus, credor esse, tuum natum ut ­honorifices, atque meum nomen glorifices est necesse,” ibid. 26 Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, II: 209. 27 Ashley, “The Fleury ‘Raising of Lazarus,’” 143–144. 28 All biblical quotations here and in the following are given from the Vulgate Bible in Latin, and the Douay-Rheims Translation in English. 29 “Tibi dico iam voce publica: Exi foras atque letifica cor parentum. Tu sis dolor insidiantibus atque certum sis dubitantibus argumentum.” The Fleury Playbook, III: xvi and 34. 30 “Iam Lazaro sedente dicat Ministris.” Ibid., 34.

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such a possible instruction for the scene. In other situations, the representation does give instructions for the staging of the representation as for instance about Jesus’s emotions at Lazarus’s death and how he is supposed to raise his eyes towards heaven immediately before commanding Lazarus’s resurrection, and there are also many other more or less similar directions. In any case, the manuscript seems to leave any decisions concerning the staging at this point to those who were performing the representation. In this context it seems useful to draw on Erika Fischer-Lichte’s terminology concerning staging and performativity.31 She distinguishes between the ‘staged’ and the ‘performative’ in all kinds of performances, whether theatrical, liturgical, sportive, or political mass manifestations, or others. The ‘staging’ (Inszenierung) regards that which can be controlled and rehearsed, that which is planned. This includes features that can be studied historically in liturgy and liturgical enactments, not least through manuscript rubrics, but it may further include traditions, and also what has been determined (orally or without us having sources to tell us about it), by those who planned, organised, and/or instructed performers in the liturgical acts or enactments, something we know almost nothing about. The term ‘performative’, on the other hand, is used to describe those aspects of the performance which cannot be controlled or rehearsed to the same extent. This includes all that happens by momentary inspiration or as errors, or—the most important part of the ‘performative’—through the concrete embodiment in a given performance. This obviously depends on the actual people who fill out the various roles in the performances, each with their particular personality, the actual circumstances on the very day and time of the performance, including the architectural (or open) space where the performance was to take place, the weather in all its aspects, the mood of the performers on that very day, etc. Together, all such things make up what Fischer-Lichte calls the ‘atmosphere’ of the performance. Rubrics in liturgical manuscripts and manuscripts for liturgical enactments and medieval theatre have a kind of middle position. On the one hand, they are written directions for how to perform a particular act, movement, or song at a given moment, and thus belong to the staging. On the other hand, some are rather open, leaving quite some space for the person who will be performing the part in a given performance. To this comes the interesting question about what is taken up in the rubrics and what is left out. What was traditional (and

31

Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetische Erfahrung: das Semiotische und das Performative (­Tübingen: Francke, 2001), 291–309 and 23–43.

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thus still part of the staging), what was left to the individual person and individual performance circumstances? It is interesting to compare with the situation in other contemporary, more or less similar, enactments of the Lazarus narrative. The most obvious ­comparison is another twelfth-century enactment by the scholar Hilarius (a student of Abelard) whose Suscitacio Lazari, a sung Latin drama (with no music preserved) was indicated to be performed either at Matins or Vespers in its final rubric.32 Hilarius’s Lazarus also follows the biblical account, giving short rubrics about staging along the way. The rubrics and lines just around the resurrection are as follows: Then he will say to the dead man: O Lazarus, come forth; Enjoy the gift of vital breath; As a gift of the power of the Father, Come forth, and enjoy life! Then when Lazarus has arisen, Jesus will say: Behold, he lives! Now unbind him, And permit him to depart unfettered. Tunc dicet ad mortuum O Lazare, foras egredere; aurae dono vitalis utere; in Paternae virtutis munere, Exi foras, et vita fruere! Tunc pos[t]quam surrexerit Lazarus, dicet Jhesus: Ecce vivit! Nunc ipsum solvite, et solutum abire sinite.33 The same as in the Fleury Raising of Lazarus can be observed. There is no ­indication whatsoever concerning how Lazarus is coming out of the grave. The Ludus de passione, the greater Carmina Burana passion, includes, among other scenes, also a brief raising of Lazarus.34 Here, the actual raising is done during the singing of a chant (a communion antiphon from Lent) in 32 Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2:211–219; David Martin Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 155–163. 33 Bevington, Medieval Drama, 62. 34 Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 1:518–539; Nine Medieval Latin Plays, ed. and trans. Peter Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 189–237.

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which the person representing Jesus sings the line provided for Jesus in the antiphon (see below). In the Carmina Burana manuscript at this point only Jesus’s words are marked with neumes. The text indicated for the clerics and the neumes for Jesus’s words fit the known communion antiphon.35 Here the sung text (of the choir) gives the biblical statement of Lazarus’s coming out with his hands and feet bound, but no rubric specifies how it should be done: And so when they are silent, the clergy shall sing: The Lord, seeing Lazarus’s sisters weeping, shed tears at the monument in the presence of the Jews, and shouted: And Jesus shall sing: Lazarus, come out! And the clergy shall sing: And he came out, his hands and feet bound, he who had been four days dead. Et sic tacendo, clerus cantet: Videns dominus flentes sorores Lazari, ad monumentum lacrimatus est coram Iudeis, et clamabat: Et Iesus cantet: Lazare, veni foras! Et clerus cantet: Et prodiit ligatis m[anibus] et p[edibus], qui f [uerat] q[uadriduanus] m[ortuus].36 The last example also raises the question of whether what was sung can be taken to give an indication about the staging. Altogether, it is striking how the rubrics in all three examples do not in any way take up the biblical description of how Lazarus came out of the grave with his feet and hands bound with winding bands. In any given performance of any of these representations of the raising of Lazarus, some solution would have had to be found; the question is whether this would have been by tradition, following the biblical ‘script,’ or, as possibly indicated by the lack of instruction in the rubrics, in a protected way so Lazarus is not seen coming out of the grave, but only as resurrected, sitting for instance in a grave as he is represented 35 36

Thomas Binkley, “The Greater Passion Play from Carmina Burana: An Introduction,” in Alte Musik, Praxis und Reflexion, ed. Peter Reidemeister and Veronika Gutmann (­Winterthur: Amadeus, 1983), 148. Nine Medieval Latin Plays, 212.

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in two Danish murals depicting the raising of Lazarus, the earliest of which is roughly contemporary with the texts under consideration in this article (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). What reason could there have been for not following the biblical description? I would suggest as a possible reason that Lazarus’s resurrection was also seen as a typological sign of Jesus’s own resurrection, thus

Figure 4.1 Anonymous, The Raising of Lazarus, late 12th century. Fresco. Jørlunde, Jørlunde Church © Danish National Museum, Copenhagen

Figure 4.2 Anonymous, The Raising of Lazarus, 15th century. Fresco. Ejsing, Ejsing Church © Danish National Museum, Copenhagen

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a sacrament, in the old sacramental understanding, of Jesus’s resurrection.37 As a sacrament, it may have been felt that its mystery ought to be protected from the physical eyes of the beholders and the more theatrical appearance of Lazarus wound about with winding bands should be avoided. In view of the above suggested sketch of the development of liturgical enactments around the time where the theological understanding of sacraments changed, it is also possible to see the lack of instruction in the rubrics at the point of Lazarus’s resurrection as an indication that it was optional how to do this, that it was left out, so to say, of the written staging, to be decided upon depending on the performance circumstances, whether they were to be more focusing on the spectacular, the entertaining, or on the serious, sacramental (in the older understanding). Altogether, the Fleury Raising of Lazarus is a completely serious presentation of the biblical account (juxtaposed as mentioned with the episode of the sinful woman anointing Jesus’s feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee; see the beginning of this article). Nothing points towards a theatrical focus or to intentions of making the enactment particularly entertaining by adding spectacular details, as is done in some contemporary, and also devotional, enactments, as for instance the Danielis ludus.38 It begins with a sequence from the liturgy (although two options are provided, telling us a liturgical placement was not specified), and it concludes with the Te deum, the use of which also does not point very decisively towards a specific liturgical time of performance.39 The framing of the representation with liturgical chants, however, underlines what is characteristic all the way through this biblical enactment: its sacred and devotional atmosphere, and, as pointed out by Ashley, its clear theological aims in its interpretation of the biblical narrative. In all this, it seems that in its overall construction it was shaped out of the same basic attitude as in the early (and later) specifically liturgical enactments. It is thus, as far as I can see, most natural to interpret the lack of information in the rubrics around Lazarus’s resurrection as a protection of the ­mysteriousness and sacramental nature of the specific act of the resurrection. This, on the other hand, in no way precludes that the enactment also shows signs of the freer attitude towards biblical enactments, as sketched above, in its lack of ties to a specific liturgical time, making it available for performance in several liturgical contexts, and possibly even outside of a specific liturgical ceremony. This may also imply that performances could have appropriated

37 38

Ashley, “The Fleury ‘Raising of Lazarus,’” 140. See Nils Holger Petersen, “Danielis Ludus: Transforming Clerics in the Twelfth Century,” Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia 31 (2019b). 39 See The Fleury Playbook, 3. Flanigan, “The Fleury Playbook,” 5.

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the script as found in the manuscript in new ways, even while respecting the rubrics. However, how much such rubrics in general were respected in actual performances is a completely different question, one about which we know virtually nothing. Bibliography Ashley, Kathleen M. “The Fleury ‘Raising of Lazarus’ and Twelfth-Century Currents of Thought.” Comparative Drama 15, no. 2 (1981): 139–58. Bevington, David Martin. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Binkley, Thomas. “The Greater Passion Play from Carmina Burana: An Introduction.” In Alte Musik, Praxis und Reflexion, edited by Peter Reidemeister and Veronika ­Gutmann, 144–57. Winterthur: Amadeus, 1983. Fassler, Margot Elsbeth. Gothic Song Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetische Erfahrung: das Semiotische und das Performative. Tübingen: Francke, 2001. Flanigan, C. Clifford. “The Fleury Playbook, the Traditions of Medieval Latin Drama, and Modern Scholarship.” In The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies, edited by C. Clifford Flanigan et al., 1–25. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985. Flanigan, C. Clifford. “The Roman Rite and the Origins of the Liturgical Drama.” ­University of Toronto Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1974): 263–84. Huglo, Michel. “Analyse codicologique des drames liturgiques de Fleury.” In Calames et cahiers. Mélanges de codicologie et de paléographie offerts à Léon Gilissen, edited by Jacques Lemaire and Émile van Balberghe, 61–78. Bruxelles: Centre d’Étude des Manuscrits, 1985. Kobialka, Michal. This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the early Middle Ages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. McGrath, Alister E. Christian Theology: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Meredith, Peter. “Latin Liturgical Drama.” In The Medieval European Stage, 500–1550, edited by William Tydeman, 53–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Nine Medieval Latin Plays. Edited and Translated by Peter Dronke. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1994. Norton, Michael Lee. Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater. ­Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017. Petersen, Nils Holger. “Biblical Reception, Representational Ritual, and the Question of ‘Liturgical Drama.’” In Sapientia et Eloquentia: Meaning and Function in Liturgical

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Poetry, Music, Drama, and Biblical Commentary in the Middle Ages, edited by Gunilla Iversen and Nicolas Bell, 163–201. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. Petersen, Nils Holger. “The Concept of Liturgical Drama: Charles-Edmond de ­Coussemaker and Charles Magnin.” In Lingua mea calamus scribae: Mélanges offerts à madame Marie-Noël Colette par ses collègues, étudiants et amis, edited by Daniel Saulnier et al., 305–14. Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 2009. Petersen, Nils Holger. “The Concept of Liturgical Drama: Coussemaker and Modern Scholarship.” In Ars musica septentrionalis: De l’interprétation du patrimoine musical à l’historiographie, edited by Barbara Haggh and Frédéric Billiet, 59–73. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011. Petersen, Nils Holger. “Danielis Ludus: Transforming Clerics in the Twelfth Century.” Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia 31 (2019b): 197–209. Petersen, Nils Holger. “Liturgical Enactment.” In The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance, edited by Pamela M. King, 13–29. London: Routledge, 2017. Petersen, Nils Holger. “The Liturgical Use of the Gospel Book in the Middle Ages and Notions of Sacramentality.” In Materiality and Religious Practice in Medieval ­Denmark, edited by Sarah Croix and Mads Vedel Heilskov, n/a. Turnhout: Brepols, 2021. Petersen, Nils Holger. “Medieval Latin Performative Representation: Re-evaluating the State-of-the-Art.” European Medieval Drama (2019a). Petersen, Nils Holger. “The Notion of a Missionary Theatre: The ludus magnus of Henry of Livonia’s Chronicle.” In Crusading and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Baltic Frontier: A Companion to the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, edited by Marek Tamm et al., 229–43. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Petersen, Nils Holger. “Representation in European Devotional Rituals: The Question of the Origin of Medieval Drama in Medieval Liturgy.” In The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, edited by Eric Csapo and ­Margaret Christina Miller, 329–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Petersen, Nils Holger. “Ritual. Medieval Liturgy and the Senses: The Case of the ­Mandatum.” In The Saturated Sensorium edited by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen et al., 180–205. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015. Van Roo, William A. The Christian Sacrament. Roma: Ed. Pontificia Univ. Gregoriana, 1992. Victore, Hugo de Sancto. On the sacraments of the Christian faith (De sacramentis). Translated by Roy J. Deferrari. Cambridge: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1951. Young, Karl. The Drama of the Medieval Church. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932.

CHAPTER 5

Mary in the Scriptures as Container and Way: Henry Adams and the Virgin of Chartres Rachel Fulton Brown There are two things almost every modern Christian knows about the Virgin Mary: one, she was the mother of Jesus, whom Christians worship as the Lord; and two, the only place she appears in the Bible is the New Testament, and even there only rarely.1 Medieval Christians recognised her as the Mother of the Lord, but they had a rather different understanding of her place in scripture. As medieval Christians read them, Mary was everywhere in scripture, including the Old Testament, most particularly in the texts they said daily for her hours. This paper will explore the way in which medieval Christians served Mary through their recitation of the psalms and other texts of her daily liturgy, and how this daily service affected the way in which they saw her as a container of and way to God. The problem is how to get us there. One way is to encourage you to read my new book, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought.2 The other—more in the spirit of our performative conference theme—is to take you on a little journey. We will be following in the footsteps of one of the greatest ­American tourists of all time, Henry Adams (1838–1918), the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of President John Adams. Henry Adams was born in Boston in 1838. He graduated from Harvard University at twenty years of age. Thereafter he embarked on a career as an intellectual and tourist, spending the next several decades travelling in Europe and working intermittently as a journalist and historian.3 The year 1900 brought Adams to the Great Exposition in Paris, where one of his friends introduced him to the marvels of the electric dynamo. As Adams 1 For an extended version of this argument, see Rachel Fulton Brown, “Mary in the Scriptures: The Unexpurgated Tradition,” in Advancing Mariology: The Theotokos Lectures 2008–2017, ed. Jame Schaefer (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2018), 205–234. 2 Rachel Fulton Brown, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 3 On Adams as an historian, see Karl F. Morrison, “Henry Adams (1838–1918),” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil (New York: Garland, 1995), 1:115–130. © Rachel Fulton Brown, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004522183_007

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recounted in his memoir of the journey, for his friend, the machine “was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty-engine house carefully kept out of sight”, but for Adams, the steam-driven dynamo with its great murmuring wheel “revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed” became something else: “a symbol of infinity … a moral force.” “Before the end”, Adams confessed with awe, “one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.” And then Adams took a side trip to the cathedral of Notre Dame (“Our Lady”) of Chartres, and everything he thought he knew about power and force became as naught when, as he described it, he encountered the Virgin Mother of God for whom Chartres had been built. In his famous phrase: “All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.”4 Nothing in his previous education had prepared Adams for what he saw at Chartres. As an American growing up in Boston in the 1840s, religion had quietly disappeared from his intellectual life. He had gone to church “twice every Sunday.” He had been “taught to read his Bible; and he learned religious poetry by heart.” He had “believed in a mild deism; he [had] prayed; he [had gone] through all the forms.” But nothing stuck. Nothing of religion seemed real, either to Henry or to his brothers and sisters. As he recalled their ­education— or lack thereof: Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived … The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worthy knowing.5 The Virgin of Chartres changed all that. “Symbol or energy”, Adams opined after his visit to her great palace, “the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done.”6 4 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2009), 303, 09. For my reading of Adams in the context of the Marian Hours, see Fulton Brown, Mary and the Art of Prayer, 241–244. For a different take on Adams’s distress in encountering the Virgin as “force,” see Amy M. Hollywood, Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 2–43. 5 Adams, The Education, 28. 6 Ibid., 309–310.

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But how had the Virgin exerted such a force? What was her secret? Adams thought he discovered it in one of her windows (see Figure 5.1). As he put it his travelogue Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, privately published for his nieces or “those who are willing … to be nieces in wish” in 1904:

Figure 5.1 Anonymous, Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière, 12th century. Stained glass. Chartres, Notre-Dame de Chartres © Henri Alain de Feraudy

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The Empress Mother sits full-face, on a rich throne and dais, with the child in her lap … She wears her crown; her feet rest on a stool, and both stool, rug, robe and throne are as rich as color and decoration can make them. At last a dove appears, with the rays of the Holy Ghost. Imperial as the Virgin is … she holds no scepter; the Holy Ghost seems to give her support which she did not need before [in a different window, already described, but newer than this one, one of the oldest in the church] … Exquisite as the angels are who surround and bear up her throne, they assert no authority … The effect of the whole, in this angle which is almost always dark or filled with shadow, is deep and sad, as though the Empress felt her authority fail, and had come down from the western P ­ ortal to reproach us for neglect. The face is haunting. Perhaps, Adams hazarded, it is because the window is “very old” (albeit it has been often restored) that it has so much “personality, and there it stands alone.”7 And what did her twelfth-century pilgrims see in the Virgin, as seven (now eight) hundred years ago, they came to her church to pray? A Woman. A Mother. An Empress. A Queen. An artist who loved colour and light. Even a musician and a philosopher—but not one, Adams hastened to add, who had any use for logic or reason. In Adams’s account, like the pilgrims themselves who adored her for her piety and beauty but knew nothing of theology “in the metaphysical sense”, the Virgin of Chartres was moved solely by emotion in her response to her devotees. Nothing—or so Adams told his nieces—was here to detain them of dogma, theology, or priest-craft. The Virgin “had little taste for mysteries of any sort”, most particularly theological ones. “Indeed”, the onetime Unitarian Adams assured his fellow tourists, you might find much amusement here in searching the Cathedral for any distinct expression at all of the Trinity as a dogma recognized by Mary … The church is wholly given up to the Mother and the Son. The Father seldom appears; the Holy Ghost still more rarely. At least, this is the impression made on an ordinary visitor who has no motive to be orthodox; and it must have been the same with the thirteenth-century worshipper who came here with his mind absorbed in the perfections of Mary. Chartres represents, not the Trinity, but the identity of the Mother and Son. The Son represents the Trinity, which is thus absorbed in the Mother. The idea is not orthodox, but this is no affair of ours. The Church watches over its own.8 7 Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (New York: Penguin, 1986), 186. 8 Ibid., 99–100.

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In Adams’s reading of the window—as, indeed, of Chartres as a whole— the focus is on a particular feeling. He calls the Virgin’s face “haunting” and the effect of the window as a whole “deep and sad”, as if there were nothing that Mary could do to save the people praying at her feet. At the conclusion of his tour, he remarks that although the Virgin sits still in majesty as she did “when Saint Louis was born”, now she looks down only “from a deserted heaven, into an empty church, on a dead faith.”9 Again, in Adams’s reading of the window, the angels “assert no authority”, and the Holy Spirit “seems to give [Mary] support that she did not need before.” That she wears a crown and sits on a throne, that her robe, stool, rug, and throne are picked out in certain colours, that she is flanked by angels bearing thuribles and candles in golden candlesticks: none of these details strikes Adams as especially significant, except as decoration. For Adams, the purpose of the window—indeed, the whole of Chartres—is to create a certain atmosphere, which (consonant with his own age) is also what he imagines religion to be about. In describing the building and its art, he wants to evoke a certain experience for his nieces, an experience which, he was convinced, had nothing to do with theology, but only “a singular depth of feeling.” What Adams beheld at Chartres was “very childlike, very foolish, [and] very beautiful”, but true only “as art.” The experience, as he described it, was otherwise empty of intellectual or metaphysical, never mind theological, meaning. But was it? Our window, as Adams noted, is high up and somewhat d­ ifficult to see, so he may perhaps be forgiven for not attempting to read the verse inscribed in the book the Christ Child is holding. I hope you will not be surprised to learn it is a passage from scripture, more particularly from Luke 3:5, where John the Baptist is paraphrasing Isaiah 40:4–5: “Omnis vallis implebitur” (O[mn]IS/VA/LLI/S::I[M]pl/EB/IT/VR). As musicologist and liturgical historian Margot Fassler explains in her recent reading of this window, the inscription is the opening phrase of an antiphon or framing chant with which Mary’s medieval devotees would have been intimately familiar.10 The chant would have been sung at Chartres for the canticle at Lauds (Benedictus Dominus, Luke 1:68–79, the song of Zacharias) on Ember Saturday (third Saturday) in Advent. In full it promises something rather more than just the levelling of valleys:

9 10

Ibid., 186. Margot Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 217–221.

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Omnis vallis implebitur et omnis mons et collis humiliabitur et videbit omnis caro salutare dei.11 Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be brought low: and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.12 The antiphon is a pastiche of two verses: Luke 3:5 and Luke 3:6. It omits the ­second part of the first verse—“and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways plain”—to focus on the valleys and mountains and on the fact that with their levelling, “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” The mystery of the window Adams was trying to unlock has to do with more than just feelings. It has to do with seeing something about God. More to the point, it has to do with seeing something about God to which the Virgin was key. Look at the window again. The Virgin sits on a cushioned throne with a footstool at her feet. Her robe is a luminous blue, which cloud-like frames the child sitting in her lap. She is veiled and crowned, which shows she is a queen, while her son is dressed in purple and white. Her face glows with the light of the blue halo behind her head, while Christ’s cruciform halo glows green. The overall background is red, against which the dove of the Holy Spirit descends from a turreted city. In the original twelfth-century glass, two thuribles swing above Mary’s head, sending forth clouds of incense to surround her. The angels to either side of the central panel were made in the thirteenth century, most likely as replacements for those depicted in the twelfth-century panels lost in the fire of 1194. Fassler argues they are reliable witnesses to the original iconography. In addition to their thuribles, the angels in the upper and lower panels also hold golden bowls filled with something white—manna—while the angels in the middle panels hold candlesticks. Four smaller angels stand below the Virgin’s footstool holding it up with golden pillars. What does any of this imagery have to do with seeing God? Answer: ­Everything—if, that is, you know where to look. Here is the way one twelfthcentury monk from the diocese of Chartres put the mystery in his book on the praises of Mary: Behold [he enjoined his readers when looking on Mary] the tabernacle of God, having within it the Holy of Holies, the rod of the signs, the tablets 11 12

Corpus antiphonalium officii, ed. René-Jean Hesbert, 6 vols. Rerum Ecclesiasticarum ­Documenta, Series Maior, Fontes 7–12 (Roma: Herder, 1963–1979), #4156. Scripture citations according to the Holy Bible, Douay-Rheims Version (Charlotte: Saint Benedict Press, 2009).

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of the testament, the altar of incense, the twin cherubim gazing at each other, the manna, and the Mercy Seat fully exposed without the cloud. The shrine that is the Virgin contained these things in itself, not in figure, but in very truth, revealing law and discipline to the world, the sweet smell of zeal, the fragrance of chastity, the concord of the testaments, the bread of life, a food not completely consumable, sanctity, humility, and the sacrifice of obedience, the safe port of repentance for all the shipwrecked.13 Did you note what our author—his name was Arnold of Bonneval—said? “The shrine that is the Virgin contained these things in itself, not in figure but in very truth.” What kind of shrine is Arnold talking about? And what does it mean to say the Virgin “contained these things … not in figure but in very truth”? We can see some of the objects he names in our window: the incense, the twin angels gazing at each other, the manna, the Mercy Seat (the Virgin’s throne). Arnold says he is describing the tabernacle of God, but he is also describing another container for the holy, the place where God became present in his tabernacle, in the Holy of Holies. Do you recognise it? It is the ark of the covenant as described in Hebrews 9:2–5, as part of the furniture of the Holy of Holies of the first tabernacle into which the high priest entered once a year, carrying the sacrifices: For there [in the sanctuary made for the divine service] was a tabernacle … wherein were the candlesticks and the table and the setting forth of loaves, which is called the Holy. And after the second veil, the tabernacle which is called the Holy of Holies. Having a golden censer and the ark of the testament covered about on every part with gold, in which was a golden pot that had manna and the rod of Aaron that had blossomed and the tables of the testament. And over it were the cherubims of glory overshadowing the propitiatory [Mercy Seat]. What was it Indiana Jones’s rival archaeologist Belloq called the lost ark? “It’s a transmitter. It’s a radio for speaking to God!” Even better, as his colleague Marcus Brody put it, trying to get the government men to tell him and Indiana where the ark had been taken: “The ark is a source of unspeakable power and it has to be researched!”14 Perhaps Henry Adams was not so far off the mark 13 14

Arnaldus Bonnevallensis, De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis (PL 189:1729–1730). See also the translation by Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres, 231. Raiders of the Lost Ark, directed by Steven Spielberg (1981).

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when he compared the Virgin to the dynamo, likewise a source of unspeakable power inspiring one to pray. And yet, how far we still are from understanding what the Virgin in the Chartres window means! As I have argued in Mary and the Art of Prayer, the answer lies in the way in which medieval Christians prayed the psalms, particularly the psalms of the Marian Hours or “Little Office of the Virgin.” For example, Psalm 96 (­Septuagint/Vulgate numbering), sung in the wee hours of every morning as one of the nine psalms for Matins: The Lord hath reigned; let the earth rejoice; let many islands be glad! Clouds and darkness are round about him; justice and judgment are the establishment of his throne. A fire shall go before him, and shall burn his enemies round about. His lightnings have shone forth to the world: the earth saw and trembled. The mountains melted like wax, at the presence of the Lord: at the presence of the Lord of all the earth. The heavens declared his justice: and all people saw his glory. Let them be all confounded that adore graven things, and that glory in their idols. Adore him, all you angels: Zion heard and was glad. And the daughters of Juda rejoiced, because of thy judgments, O Lord. For thou art the most high Lord over all the earth: thou art exalted exceedingly above all gods. You that love the Lord, hate evil: the Lord preserveth the souls of his saints, he will deliver them out of the hand of the sinner. Light is risen to the just, and joy to the right of heart. Rejoice, ye just, in the Lord, and give praise to the remembrance of his holiness. Not quite the way you are accustomed to thinking about God? Who is this “most high Lord over all the earth” whose “lightnings have shone forth to the world”? And why is he surrounded by “clouds and darkness”? Mary’s medieval devotees thought they knew. Mary was the cloud, the throne, the fire, the lightning, and the glory upon which the Lord rode—and the most high Lord was her son. Remember the lightning that came forth from the ark in the movie? That Lord. Here she is as described by one of her most exuberant thirteenth-century devotees, Richard of Saint-Laurent (d. ca. 1249), penitentiary and canon

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of the cathedral of Rouen, in his De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis libri XII (­paraphrasing; the actual entry is much more involved): Mary is the cloud of which the prophet spoke: The Lord will ascend upon a swift cloud and will enter into Egypt (Isaiah 19:1). She is swift (levis) because the Holy Spirit lifted the weight of original sin from her at her sanctification and purified her from all trace of sin at the conception of her son. Descending into her at the Incarnation, the Lord assumed the flesh from her in which he appeared visible to the world. As the prophet put it (Baruch 3:38): Afterwards he was seen upon the earth who previously had been invisible in his divinity. Thus while previously he had been a hidden God (Isaiah 45:15), riding on Mary he ascended in the knowledge of men who previously had known little or nothing about him. As a cloud, Mary is white in her virginity and purity, whence it says: And I saw: and behold a white cloud and upon the cloud one sitting like to the Son of man, having on his head a crown of gold and in his hand a sharp sickle (Revelation 14:14). This was the Lord sitting on the cloud, his divinity crowned with eternal wisdom and holding in his hand the power of judgment. The cloud was suspended between heaven and earth because Mary is the mediatrix between God and sinners; it was watery with an abundance of graces and charisms, and with all the words of wisdom that Mary conserved in her heart. As a cloud, Mary was given these two offices (Psalm 104:39): to protect her servants from the heat of the sun of justice and to illumine them with her prayers and examples like fire, “because she is the light showing the light of virtue, and she protects us against the devil like a fiery wall, and against vices and sin.”15 Richard provides similarly detailed explanations for over a hundred such titles he found for Mary in the scriptures, including ark, throne, tabernacle, and temple, not to mention 33 trees, but everything we need to know about the way in which medieval Christians prayed to Mary is here in his description of her as cloud. Note again the prophecies that Richard invokes in his description:

15

Richard de Saint-Laurent, “De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis libri XII,” in B. Alberti Magni Ratisbonensis episcopi, ordinis Prædicatorum, Opera omnia, ex editione lugdunensi religiose castigata, ed. Auguste Borgnet and Ê mile Borgnet (Paris: Ludovicum Vivès, 1890), 397–399, as paraphrased in Fulton Brown, Mary and the Art of Prayer, 275.

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Behold the Lord will ascend upon a swift cloud, and will enter into Egypt, and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at his presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst thereof. — Isaiah 19:1 This is our God, and there shall no other be accounted of in comparison of him. He found out all the way of knowledge, and gave it to Jacob his servant, and to Israel his beloved. Afterwards he was seen upon earth, and conversed with men. — Baruch 3:36–38 Verily thou art a hidden God, the God of Israel the saviour. — Isaiah 45:15 And I saw: and behold a white cloud; and upon the cloud one sitting like to the Son of man, having on his head a crown of gold, and in his hand a sharp sickle. — Revelation 14:14 Picture in your imagination how Mary’s medieval devotees would have encountered her in her cathedral, the sun shining through her windows by day, the candles flickering on her altars at night. Surely Adams was right that the setting was intended to provoke a particular feeling or—as our medieval sources would put it—affect. His—and our—stumbling block is assuming that affective response is independent of understanding or intellect; that just because we are affected in certain ways by the “space, light, convenience, and color decoration” that Adams highlighted as the Virgin’s requirements for her palace, those who frequented the cathedral in its earlier centuries would have been affected in the same way. “To us”, Adams reassured his nieces, “[the cathedral] is a child’s fancy, a toy-house to please the Queen of Heaven—to please her so much that she would be happy in it—to charm her till she smiled … One sees her personal presence everywhere. Anyone can feel it who will only consent to feel like a child.”16 If the cathedral now seems gloomy or sad, that is not the way in which its designers intended it; rather, as Adams would have it, it is an accident of the way in which its childlike aspirations have failed. The effect is rather different if we read the experience not, as did Adams, through his childhood memories of the religious education he abandoned, but instead through the scriptures as they were understood by Mary’s medieval devotees. Then the experience, while still charged with colour and light, is somewhat less childlike and simple, more glorious—glamorous, you might 16 Adams, Mont Saint Michel, 88, 97, 169.

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say—promising glimpses of a reality otherwise hidden behind a veil, now made visible to the world through the birth of Mary’s son. Even the colours in our window, which Adams read simply as a response to Mary’s whim, have ­significance. Red, blue, white, and purple were the colours of the veil covering the entrance to the Holy of Holies in the temple, the great golden cube where the ark of the covenant was kept and on which the Lord was believed to appear as if seated on a throne. This was the Lord whom the prophet Ezekiel beheld seated upon his sapphire throne supported by the four living creatures with “the resemblance of fire shining round about, as the appearance of the rainbow when it is in a cloud on a rainy day” (Ezekiel 1:27–28). Mary, as her medieval devotees saw her, was the “high and exalted throne” upon which Isaiah saw the Lord sitting in a house “full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:1, LXX) as well as the “swift cloud” upon which he would be sitting when he entered into the world. “As a cloud”, she exulted in the words of Wisdom as recorded in Sirach 24:6–7, “I covered all the earth: I dwelt in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of cloud.” This same pillar of cloud would “descend and stand at the door of the tent” whenever the Lord came to speak to Moses (Exodus 33:9). King Solomon described the Lord as dwelling in a cloud, but he promised to build him a house “to be thy most firm throne for ever.” When the temple was finished and the ark of the covenant installed in the Holy of Holies underneath the cherubim carved on its walls, “a cloud filled the house of the Lord, and the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord” (1 Kings 8:10–13). This is not the way modern Christians, even modern Christians with a more robust religious education than Adams, tend to think about either Mary or her son. Since the nineteenth century, particularly among liberal Protestants, the tendency has been to study the scriptures for witnesses to the Jesus of history, not for glimpses of the Lord enthroned in his temple upon a cloud.17 Perhaps, if we may be theological for a moment, this is why so many modern Christians, not to mention their secular humanist brethren, find it so hard to see God in the person of Jesus—or so it would seem from the way that they talk about him in academia, perhaps others see him differently. To paraphrase Indiana Jones’s friend Sallah, they’ve been digging in the wrong place. There was a reason that the earliest Christians, including the author of Hebrews, described Jesus in terms of the temple. Jesus himself was remembered as prophesying that if the temple was torn down, he could rebuild it in three days (John 2:19). Early 17

On the modern quest for the historical Jesus, see Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (New York: Free Press, 1998).

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Orthodox and medieval Christians took this temple imagery very seriously.18 As I show in Mary and the Art of Prayer, it was the basis for their devotion to Mary as the mother of God; it was likewise the basis for their selection of texts to pray in her hours. If modern Christians—or semi-Christians—like Adams have difficulty reading the images that they made of her and the cathedrals they built in her honour, this is why. We have lost the key to reading them— and, therefore, to the experience these were intended to evoke. Look again at the window. As medieval Christians saw her, Mary was the one who made God visible to the world, the one who contained the creator of heaven and earth in her womb and through whom he entered into his creation bearing the sacrifice of his flesh. She was also the one who, in her contemplation of the Lord her son, reflected his glory and goodness most perfectly, like the cloud bearing the brightness of the sun (cf. Wisdom 7:26). She was not just his mother; she was, above all, Wisdom, his most perfect creature, there with him “in the beginning of his ways, before he made anything from the beginning”, dancing before him and delighting with him as he compassed the sea and balanced the foundations of the earth (Proverbs 8:22–31). Even as they meditated upon Mary in her earthly relationship with her child, medieval Christians were mindful of the way in which she pointed to his divinity, revealing him to the world as its creator, made manifest through her as once he shone in glory in his temple. She was the throne on which Wisdom took his seat, the place in which the Lord became present, containing him whom the heavens could not contain, framing him so he might be seen. As her devotees at Chartres looked up at her window, like Adams, they would see a mother and queen holding her son, but unlike Adams they knew she was more than just woman. She was the container of the creator and the way through which he entered into his creation that all flesh might see the salvation of God. Bibliography Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2009. Adams, Henry. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. New York: Penguin, 1986. Allen, Charlotte. The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus. New York: Free Press, 1998. Barker, Margaret. Temple Themes in Christian Worship. London: T&T Clark, 2007.

18

For an introduction to this imagery as the basis for Christian liturgy, see Margaret Barker, Temple Themes in Christian Worship (London: T&T Clark, 2007).

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Fassler, Margot. The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Fulton Brown, Rachel. Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Fulton Brown, Rachel. “Mary in the Scriptures: The Unexpurgated Tradition.” In Advancing Mariology: the Theotokos Lectures 2008–2017, edited by Jame Schaefer, 205–34. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2018. Hollywood, Amy M. Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Morrison, Karl F. “Henry Adams (1838–1918).” In Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, edited by Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil, 115–30. New York: Garland, 1995.

CHAPTER 6

The Power of Images of Passion: Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ and the Problem of Visualizing Suffering in Medieval Art Kamil Kopania In the church of St. James in Toruń, Poland, there is a 274 × 221 cm panel ­painting, probably carried out in the 1480s, showing the Passion of Christ in 22 scenes, all of which are happening simultaneously and are taking place within the broad landscape of Jerusalem and its outskirts (Figure 6.1).1 The narrative is composed of the following scenes: (1) Entry to Jerusalem, (2) The Last Supper, (3) Agony in the Garden, (4) Taking of Christ, (5) Christ before Annas, (6) Christ before Caiaphas, (7) Christ before Herod, (8) Flagellation, (9) Crowning with Thorns, (10) Judas Hangs Himself, (11) Pilate Washing His Hands, (12) Carrying of the Cross, (13) Crucifixion, (14) Soldiers Dividing Jesus’s Clothes (15) Entombment, (16) Harrowing of Hell, (17) Resurrection, (18) Noli me tangere, (19) Road to Emmaus, (20) Doubting Thomas, (21) Jesus Sends Out the Twelve Apostles, (22) Ascension. The architecture of Jerusalem occupies a significant area of the painting, and it is composed of simple, schematic, miniature buildings. Most of them recall typical late medieval urban houses from the areas of northern Europe, with somewhat more elaborate arcades and loggias. The city is entirely surrounded with walls, gates, and towers crowned with crenels.2 1 This article was possible thanks to the research grant “Passion Panoramas in the Culture of the Late Middle Ages” (2014/13/D/HS2/00999), sponsored by the National Science Centre (Poland). 2 Jerzy Domasłowski, “Obraz ‘Pasja’,” in Malarstwo gotyckie w Polsce: Katalog zabytków, ed. Adam S. Labuda and Krystyna Secomska (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2004); Julia Gerth, Wirklichkeit und Wahrnehmung: Hans Memlings Turiner Passion und die Bildgruppe der Passionspanoramen (Berlin: Mann, 2010); Monika Jakubek-Raczkowska and Juliusz Raczkowski, “Dominikanie. Obraz i kult. Średniowieczne elementy wystroju kościoła św. Mikołaja w Toruniu,” in Klasztor dominikanski w Toruniu: w 750 rocznice fundacji, ed. Piotr Olinski et al. (Torun: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikolaja Kopernika, 2013); Kamil Kopania, “Duchowa wędrówka po Jerozolimie: obraz pasyjny z kosciola sw. Jakuba w Toruniu,” Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, no. 1–2 (2008); Zygmunt Kruszelnicki, “Problem genealogii artystycznej Torunskiego obrazu Pasyjnego,” Teka Komisji Historii Sztuki, no. 1 (1959); Zygmunt ­Kruszelnicki, “Trzy symultaniczne panoramy: w Turynie, Monachium i Toruniu,” Teka Komisji Historii Sztuki, no. 4 (1968). © Kamil Kopania, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004522183_008

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Figure 6.1 Westphalian artist active in Pomerania, The Passion of Christ, c.1480. Panel, 221 × 274 cm. Toruń, Kościół świętego Jakuba © Kamil Kopania

The panel painting from Toruń belongs to the group of paintings known as late medieval passion panoramas, a small group of panel paintings created mainly in the fourth quarter of the fifteenth century, combining the manner of simultaneous and continuous passion iconography with a depiction of J­erusalem and its outskirts.3 Among them, the best known is The Passion of Christ by Hans Memling, dated around 1470, now in the collection of the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, which probably inspired the Westfalian artist who

3 Gerth, Wirklichkeit und Wahrnehmung; Mitzi Kirkland-Ives, In the Footsteps of Christ: Hans Memling’s Passion Narratives and the Devotional Imagination in the Early Modern ­Netherlands (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Kopania, “Duchowa wędrówka”; Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual ­Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011); Antoni Ziemba, Sztuka Burgundii i Niderlandów 1380–1500. Wspólnota rzeczy: sztuka niderlandzka i północnoeuropejska 1380–1520, 3 vols. (Warszawa: Wydaw. Uniwersytetu ­Warszawskiego, 2015), vol. 3.

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Figure 6.2 Master of the Saint Elisabeth Panels, The Passion of Christ, end of the 15th c­ entury. Panel, 95 × 185 cm. Pont-Saint-Esprit, Musée d’Art Sacré du Gard, Inv. M.N.R. 971 © Kamil Kopania

painted The Passion of Christ described above.4 Other paintings presenting the same features also belong to the same group.5 Both the Toruń and Turin passion panoramas should be put in close relation with the Passion of Christ from the collection of M-Museum in Leuven by an anonymous (Flemish?) artist in around 1470–1490; with the Passion of Christ from the Musée d’Art Sacré du Gard in Pont-Saint-Esprit, dated 1490–1500 and ascribed to the Master of St. Elizabeth (Figure 6.2); but also with The Passion of Christ from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, dated around 1480; and with the Passion of Christ from Museu Nacional do Azulejo in Lisbon, dated some time before 1517, and ascribed to an anonymous Flemish artist; and finally with The Passion of Christ from the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp.6 4 Barbara G. Lane, Hans Memling: Master Painter in Fifteenth-Century Bruges (London: H. Miller, 2009). It is worth noting, however, that the painter could have been inspired by the multiscenic Passion of Christ, a wall painting from the Dominican Church of St. Nicholas in Gdańsk, dated 1430–1440. While made much earlier than any passion panorama, it seems to be an important work in context of all passion panoramas, too. See: Jerzy Domasłowski, “Malarstwo ścienne,” in Malarstwo gotyckie na Pomorzu Wschodnim, ed. Alicja KarlowskaKamzowa and Adam S. Labuda (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1990). 5 Recently on the whole group: Kamil Kopania, “Panoramy pasyjne — misteria — literatura pielgrzymkowa. Uwagi o korespondencji sztuk w okresie późnego średniowiecza,” in Ars Inter Disciplinis. Korespondencja na styku sztuk, ed. Joanna Cieslik-Klauza and M ­ agdalena Gajl (Bialystok: Uniwersytet Muzyczny Fryderyka Chopina, Wydział Instrumentalno-­ Pedagogiczny w Białymstoku, 2018). 6 Daniël Christiaens, Museum Maagdenhuis: en selectie uit het kunstpartrimonium van het OCMW Antwerpen (Antwerpen: Maagdenhuis, 2002), 15.

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Apart from numerous studies focusing on alleged direct connections between passion panoramas and the mystery stage, scholars usually emphasise the function these panoramas had as a means for spiritual pilgrimage.7 Dozens of studies are devoted to this second, interesting issue, especially within the context of the idea of interactivity of medieval art and the popular theory of the agency of things.8 According to numerous scholars, panel paintings had to be perceived in an active way. This has been discussed extensively by ­Kathryn Rudy, whose studies are crucial to understand the connections between p ­ assion panoramas and various activities leading to the spiritual journeys to Jerusalem.9 If the viewer wished to gain spiritual benefits from the pious reflection on Jesus’s passion, the painting had to be analysed very carefully, and often with the aid of devotional literature, such as guides for mental pilgrimages to the Holy Land.10 On the other hand, more and more scholars have pointed out that there are relations between passion panoramas and medieval theatre. Older views on passion panoramas believed them to be derived directly from the mystery stage, meaning both composition and iconography were inspired by specific 7 Gerth, Wirklichkeit und Wahrnehmung; Kirkland-Ives, In the Footsteps of Christ; ­Kopania, “Duchowa wędrówka”; Michael O’Connell, “The Civic Theater of Suffering: Hans ­Memling’s ‘Passion’ and Late Medieval Drama,” in European Iconography East and West. Selected Papers of the Szeged International Conference June 9–12, 1993, ed. György Endre Szőnyi (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Martin Stevens, “The Intertextuality of Late Medieval Art and Drama,” New Literary History 22, no. 2 (1991). 8 Recently, an in-depth study on this subject was published by Ziemba, Sztuka Burgundii i Niderlandów. 9 Kathryn M. Rudy, “A Guide to Mental Pilgrimage: Paris, Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal Ms. 212,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, no. 63 (2000): 514–515; Kathryn M. Rudy, “A Pilgrim’s Book of Hours: Stockholm Royal Library A233,” Studies in iconography, no. 21 (2000); Kathryn M. Rudy, “‘Den aflaet der heiliger stat Jherusalem ende des berchs van Calvarien’: Indulgenced Prayers for Mental Holy Land Pilgrimage in Manuscripts from the St. Agnes Convent in Maaseik,” Ons geestelijk erf: driemaandelijksch tijdschrift gewijd aan de studie der Nederlandsche vroomheid van af de bekeering tot circa 1750 74, no. 3 (2000); Kathryn M. Rudy, “Fragments of a Mental Journey to a Passion Park,” in Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne S. Korteweg (London: Miller-Brepols, 2006); Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages. 10 See also the following studies: Matthew Botvinick, “The Painting as Pilgrimage: Traces of a Subtext in the Work of Campin and his Contemporaries,” Art History XV, no. 1 (1992); Vida J. Hull, “Spiritual Pilgrimage in the Paintings of Hans Memling,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Adam S. Labuda, “Modlitwa, widzenie i przedstawienie w póznogotyckim obrazie ‘Biczowania’ z kosciola Swietego Jana w Toruniu,” in Magistro et amico. Amici discipulique. Lechowi Kalinowskiemu w osiemdziesięciolecie urodzin, ed. Jerzy Gadomski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2002).

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stage practices and solutions, and these pay attention to wider and various theatrical contexts and activities which could influence viewers. As the viewers had a certain familiarity with theatrical experience, they could observe passion panoramas in a specific way, by visualizing a presented action and reliving it deeper in their minds.11 Late medieval passion panoramas gave the faithful the opportunity of visualizing the passion of Christ within the context of the Holy Land, to feel the passion in a deeper way, wholeheartedly, to awake pious emotions thanks to the imagination stimulated by the painted reality and texts which could accompany it. The viewer of such a painting could enliven the action in mind by making figures alive and active. Surely, such mental images could be powerful. But let us consider what happens when the works of art are really, to some extent, alive, when the faithful, being in direct contact with them, see them in action, animated, in motion. This aspect of medieval art still seems to be undervalued. What we take into consideration here are ‘animated sculptures’—a dense, homogeneous group of works produced in the High and Late Middle Ages as well as in the early modern period. Their main feature is their unusual construction and the various functions these fulfilled during the whole liturgical year. The most common and widely known are the animated sculptures of Jesus riding a donkey, of the crucified Christ (Figure 6.3), and of the resurrected Jesus. Less common are the figures of Mary used in the ceremony marking the assumption, those of the Christ Child, crèche figures, Pietà with a mobile, removable figure of the Saviour, sculptures of the Madonna and Child in which the head of the baby Jesus is movable, and Shrine Madonnas.12 Many, but definitely not all, of them carried strong theatrical connotations. These 11

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Jill Stevenson, Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Theodore Karl Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (New York: Palgrave, 2008). For passion panoramas: Kirkland-Ives, In the Footsteps of Christ; Heike Schlie, “Das Mnemotop Jerusalem in der Prozession, in Brügge und im Bild: die Turiner Passion von Hans Memling und ihre medialen Räume,” in Medialität der Prozession: Performanz ritueller Bewegung in Texten und Bildern der Vormoderne, ed. Katja Gvozdeva and Hans Rudolf Velten (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011); Mark Trowbridge, “Jerusalem Transposed a Fifteenth-Century Panel for the Bruges Market,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, no. 1.1 (2009), https://doi.org/10.5092 /jhna.2009.1.1.4. For bibliographical references to all type of listed sculptures, see: Kamil Kopania, “Puppetry in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period—New Perspectives,” in Dolls, Puppets, Sculptures and Living Images from the Middle Ages to the End of the 18th Century, ed. Kamil Kopania (Warsaw The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw—The Department of Puppetry Art in Białystok, Warsaw, 2017).

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Figure 6.3 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, ca. 1350–1375. Polychrome wood. Chełmno, Kościół klasztoru Sióstr Miłosierdzia © Kamil Kopania

were used during dramatic liturgical ceremonies or religious spectacles organised by various religious confraternities, for example. In this case, such sculptures fulfilled a specific function, not unlike that of an actor, appearing as the main protagonists of pious spectacles using dramatic or quasi-dramatic texts. Some were not theatrical in a self-evident sense, but still had much in common with activities related to theatre. Regardless of their function or way these were used, they all share a common feature: their construction made it possible to manipulate, activate, and animate them. Understandably, it is not possible to present the full panorama of animated sculptures used in medieval and early modern Europe in one, short article. I would therefore like to focus on animated sculptures of the crucified Christ. This seems quite a reasonable choice, seen that such figures were used not only in dramatized religious celebrations but also during the whole liturgical year; they fulfilled numerous different functions and were perceived by the faithful in various ways. These are also the most complicated in terms of their construction. Animated sculptures of the crucified Christ, equipped with mechanisms allowing movement of selected parts of the Saviour’s body—arms, legs, head, eyes, and mouth—can be regarded as one of the most interesting manifestations of the religious culture of the Latin Middle Ages. Rendering faithfully the features of the human body, which relate to its movement, these stand apart

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from other sculptural images of the crucified Christ in their exceptional degree of realism. Used throughout the liturgical year, these played a special part in the Paschal Triduum period, when these were used in theatricalised liturgical and paraliturgical ceremonies, as well as in mystery plays.13 Animated sculptures of the crucified Christ (Figure 6.4) were made and used throughout medieval Europe. Relics of this type have survived to this day in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Portugal, Belgium, Slovakia, France, and Poland, as well as many countries of Latin America. To the best of my knowledge, no sculptures of this type have survived in mostly-Protestant countries, such as Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, or in Anglican Great Britain, although they did exist, as is evident by written sources and, indirectly, by similar figures, like that of Jesus in the tomb or of the resurrected Jesus, which have survived to the present day. Animated sculptures of the crucified Christ cannot be attributed to any single specific style or period. This obviously stems from the fact these were created by representatives of various artistic milieux between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries throughout the broad territory of Europe and Latin America. Generally speaking, specific animated sculptures of the crucified Christ are closely related to their relatives—the ordinary crucifixes—in terms of both time and place. The largest number of early examples created before the mid-fourteenth century have survived in Italy. Many early surviving examples of animated sculptures of the crucified Christ are also found on the Iberian Peninsula. The oldest surviving sculpture is the so-called Cristo de los Gascones, with arms that are movable at both the shoulders and the elbows, dated to the twelfth century, 13

Cf. Kamil Kopania, Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ in the Religious Culture of the Latin Middle Ages (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2010). For newer studies, see Alessandra Acconci, “Arte per il Patrimonium Sancti Petri: il Cristo deposto di San Lorenzo in Campagna (Amaseno), relitto di un gruppo ligneo medievale,” in Un medioevo in lungo e in largo. Da Bisanzio all’Occidente (VI–XVI secolo). Studi per Valentino Pace, ed. Vittoria Camelliti and Alessia Trivellone (Pisa: Pacini, 2014); Kathrin Brandmair, Kruzifixe und Kreuzigungsgruppen aus dem Bereich der “Donauschule” (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2015); Sara Cavatorti, Giovanni Teutonico: scultura lignea tedesca nell’Italia del secondo Quattrocento (Passignano sul Trasimeno: Aguaplano, 2016); Alessia Frassani, “Teatro de la memoria. Los retablos de la iglesia de Santo Domingo Yanhuitlán, Oaxaca,” Boletín de Monumentos Históricos 29 (2013); Kamil Kopania, “Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ: Origins, Development and Impact,” Material Religion. The Journal of Objects Art and Belief 14, no. 4 (2018); Amy Knight Powell, Depositions. Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New York: Zone Books, 2012); Johannes Tripps, “The Joy of Automata and Cistercian Monasteries: from Boxley in Kent to San Galgano in Tuscany,” Sculpture Journal 25, no. 1 (2016).

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Figure 6.4 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, ca. 1510. Polychrome wood. Litovel, Kaple svatého Jiří © Kamil Kopania

from the San Justo church in Segovia. Its construction leaves no doubt as to the function it had. It was used during Holy Week and in the Good Friday Depositio ceremony. It also functioned in the broader context of the San Justo church as a focal element of its decoration, being the centre of a group of subjects related to Jesus’s passion.14 The form and stylistic features of the Cristo de los Gascones have allowed us to link it to another kind of popular sculpture at that time—the monumental deposition sculpture groups. In some monumental deposition sculpture groups to have survived from those times, the figure of the Saviour was transformed into an animated sculpture of the crucified Christ—see the works from Mig Aran (Val d’Aran, Sant Miguel de Viella, originally: Val d’Aran, Santa Maria) and Taüll (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, originally: 14

First and foremost, see Eduardo Carrero Santamaría, “El Santo Sepulcro: Imagen y funcionalidad espacial en la capilla de la iglesia de San Justo (Segovia),” Anuario de estudios medievales 27, no. 1 (1997); Daniel Rico Camps, “Un Quem queritis en Sahagún y la dramatización de la liturgia,” in Imágenes y promotores en el arte medieval, ed. Maria Luisa Melero Moneo et al. (Bellaterra: Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, 2001).

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Taüll, Santa Maria).15 It seems very likely these monumental deposition sculpture groups preceded the development of free-standing animated sculptures of the crucified Christ.16 Deposition sculpture groups were used by Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian religious confraternities, being more and more popular at that time and actively operating in the field of theatricalised religious ceremonies. Their members used to sing pious songs in front of figures portraying events of Jesus’s passion. In an indefinite time, the will of impersonating occurred as well as the will of enlivening the action. Members of religious confraternities became actors having more and more acting tasks, and the songs they sang started to evolve into dramatic pieces. The exact stages of this process are not clear yet. The same is seen in the process of transforming Jesus’s figures to animated ones. It seems probable that participants in the ceremonies had nothing against impersonating all protagonists except the main one, Jesus. The solution was to use the sculpture of Jesus which, however, somehow had to be transformed to show the deposition in a realistic way. The solution was to make the shoulders of Christ movable by using metal hinges, thus enabling the animation. It seems legitimate to argue this worked in the case of religious confraternities operating on the Iberian Peninsula. Their early practices are not very well known, but they certainly used monumental deposition sculptural groups in their theatricalised ceremonies. They were the first who devised the idea of transforming the motionless figures of the deposed Jesus into animated ones. As mentioned above, in the Iberian Peninsula we can find the oldest examples of figures transformed in such a way, as well as the oldest examples of independent animated sculptures of the crucified Christ. To sum up: religious brotherhoods operating there were probably the first whose members used animated sculptures of the crucified Christ. In the thirteenth century this custom spread to other parts of Europe, such as Italy and Southern France.17 What is worth stressing is that one of the oldest animated sculptures of the crucified Christ, as well as the most complicated ones, can be found in the 15

Xavier Dectot, “Christ de Mig Aran,” in Catalogne romane sculptures du Val de Boí, ed. Jordi Camps i Sória and Xavier Dectot (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004), 80. Jordi Camps i Sória, “Descente de Croix de Santa Maria de Taüll,” ibid., 92. 16 The most detailed study on such sculptures is La Deposizione lignea in Europa: l’immagine, il culto, la forma, eds. Giovanna Sapori and Bruno Toscano (Milano: Mondadori Electa, 2004). See also Francesca Flores D’Arcais, Il teatro delle statue. Gruppi lignei di Deposizione e Annunciazione tra XII e XIII secolo (Milano: Vita & Pensiero, 2005); Carla Bino, Dal ­trionfo al pianto. La fondazione del ‘teatro della misericordia’ nel Medioevo (V–XIII secolo) (Milano: Vita e pensiero, 2008). 17 Kopania, Animated Sculptures, 146–157.

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Figure 6.5 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, 13th century. Polychrome wood. Viseu, Museu Grão Vasco © Kamil Kopania

Iberian Peninsula. Let us now turn to the oldest artifact, the sculpture from Viseu (Figure 6.5). It is quite an extraordinary exemplar because it consists of two parts—the head, dated roughly to the twelfth century, whereas the rest of the body was sculpted about a century later. In addition to having movable arms, the Christ from Viseu also has movable elbows, forearms, hands, knees, and left hip. Its simple and visible mechanism operates on metal and wooden hinges.18

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Lúcia Maria Cardoso Rosas, “Cristo,” in Arte, poder e religião nos tempos medievais: a i­dentidade de Portugal em construção, ed. Maria de Fátima Eusébio (Viseu: Câmara Municipal, 2009).

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Figure 6.6 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, 2nd quarter of the 14th century. Mixed technique on wood. Burgos, Cathedral © Kamil Kopania

The Christ from Viseu initiates the history of the most elaborate animated sculptures used by religious brotherhoods in Holy Week ceremonies like the one described above. The total number is quite significant, although the ­simplest variant, that is animated sculptures of the crucified Christ with movable arms only, are the vast majority. Those produced between the thirteenth and sixteenth century, which are exceptional in terms of their construction, number in the dozens. Undoubtedly, one of the most elaborate and even stunning examples is the exemplar in Burgos, dated to the second quarter of the fourteenth century (Figure 6.6).19 This mystical crucifix (crucifixus dolorosus) is characterised by a high level of emphasis on the depiction of Jesus’s suffering. The sculpture is made of pine wood but was covered in painted calfskin. The dominant feature of the artwork are the streaks of blood profusely running down the Saviour’s body. Large wounds covering Jesus’s entire body were in turn made of sheepskin and fingernails, of pieces of animal horn shaped with the use of heat and individually affixed to the leather-less fingertips. The exceptional realism is evident also from other features like softness. This unique quality was achieved thanks to a woollen lining placed under the 19

María José Martínez Martínez, “El Santo Cristo de Burgos y los Cristos dolorosos articulados,” Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología 69/70 (2003/2004). But see also: Kopania, Animated Sculptures, and the bibliography therein.

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Figure 6.7 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, 1410. Mixed technique on wood. Palencia, Monasterio de Santa Clara © Kamil Kopania

leather. The layer of the sculpture imitates not only the texture, but also the colour and softness of the human body. It also conceals mechanisms enabling animation. The sculpture from Burgos has movable arms (shoulders, elbows, and wrists), as well as movable legs (knees). Also, the fingers and toes can be bent, and the head swivelled to the left and right. The mechanism consists of metal wires whose structure and method of execution are virtually unknown; unfortunately, these have never been precisely described in any study devoted to the sculpture, as it is still an object of devotion. It should be added that the figure has a wig of real hair and a receptacle for blood in correspondence to the wound in Jesus’s side. To some degree the features and appearance of the sculpture from B ­ urgos clarify the sculpture from Palencia, executed at the same time and much more accessible for direct examination (Figure 6.7). Displayed in a transparent glass coffin in the church of the Monastery of Santa Clara, it seems to be quite ­similar to that from Burgos. In the context of the most elaborate animated sculptures, it is worthwhile to discuss the sculpture of the crucified Christ from Valvasone, Italy (­Figures 6.8, 6.9, and 6.10).20 It features arms that are movable at the shoulders and elbows, as well as legs movable at the hips and knees. The attachment of the arms to the body was achieved through a ball mechanism while 20

Giovanni Pietro Brusca, Theatrum pietatis: Galleria d’arte Hippocratica (Pordenone: Tipografia Sartor, 2013), 10 (and bibliography therein).

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Figure 6.8 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, end of the 15th century. Polychrome wood. Valvasone, Private collection © Kamil Kopania

the elbow and knee joints have carefully crafted hinges. These hinges consist of two elements, each directly affixed to other elements of the sculpture. One was shaped like a peg and the other like a ball divided in half, so the peg could be placed inside. The two elements were then held together by a rod, which also acted as a guide. The sculpture, now in private hands, is dated to the 1480s. Even cursory examination leads us to conclude that its animation possibilities could be used in various ways. Keeping in mind that it acts like a contemporary

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Figure 6.9 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the forearm), end of the 15th century. Polychrome wood. Valvasone, Private collection © Kamil Kopania

Figure 6.10 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the hips), end of the 15th century. Polychrome wood. Valvasone, Private collection © Kamil Kopania

doll, so all its body parts can be animated and presented in motion, it is easy to hypothesise that the Christ from Valvasone was used in numerous passion scenes. This figure could be shown on the cross, taken down from it, put into

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Mary’s lap, on a bier, carried in a procession to the grave, and prepared to be buried in it. All in a very realistic manner. On the other hand, the sculptures made north of the Alps were usually not as complex in terms of construction. There are, however, differences in the use. In the Iberian Peninsula and in Italy, performances were organised mostly by religious brotherhoods, and these were crucial in the use of the animated sculptures of the crucified Christ. North of the Alps such ceremonies were not popular at all. However, another type of theatricalised activity—the Depositio ceremony, which was liturgical in character—is related to figures in which we are also interested.21 It should be emphasised though, that on the basis of various archival sources, among them hundreds of records of Depositio, there are hardly any descriptions or even traces of practices of the use of either the most complex or of the simplest animated sculptures of the crucified Christ. Among dozens of animated sculptures of the crucified Christ made in the territories north of the Alps, the most elaborate are particularly interesting. The majority were sculpted towards the end of the Middle Ages, or even much later. One such sculpture is the figure from Döbeln, dated to around 1510 (­Figure 6.11).22 As a result of its rich animation possibilities and its exceptional level of realism, it is often referred to in literature as the Mirakelmann aus Döbeln. The figure, sculpted in linden wood, owed its particular theatrical possibilities to a cylindrical metal receptacle for blood. This small vessel was inserted in a hollow in the back, concealed with a flap, and connected to the wound in the side. Mirakelmann featured movable hips, arms, shoulders, elbows, and wrists, as well as a movable head. The figure’s realism was reinforced by the now partially preserved natural hair and beard and loincloth made of canvas, parchment, and leather. Similar sculptures were produced even into early modern times. In this respect, let us turn, for example, to two interesting examples from the territory 21 Kopania, Animated Sculptures, 120–145. 22 First and foremost, see: Andreas Schulze, “Der sogenannte Mirakelmann aus Döbeln in Sachsen, eine bewegliche Christusfigur der Spätgotik,” in Polychrome Skulptur in Europa: Technologie, Konservierung, Restaurierung, ed. Ulrich Schießl and Renate Kühnen (­Dresden: Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, 1999); Annegret Michel and Andreas Schulze, “Konservierung und Restaurierung einer beweglichen Christusfigur der Spätgotik aus der Nicolaikirche zu Döbeln/Sachsen,” Die Denkmalpflege, no. 58 (2000); Johannes Tripps, Das handelnde Bildwerk in der Gotik: Forschungen zu den Bedeutungsschichten und der Funktion des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Hoch- und Spätgotik (­Berlin: Mann, 2000), 76, 82, 161, 237.

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Figure 6.11 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, c.1510. Polychrome wood. Döbeln, St. Nicolaikirche © Kamil Kopania

of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, recently found in Kraków and Krzeszów.23 The first one, dated to the turn of the seventeenth century, comes from the Dominican monastery in Kraków (Figures 6.12, 6.13, 6.14, and 6.15). It is a life-size animated sculpture of the crucified Christ whose constructions allow the figure to be animated in multiple ways. The figure owes its animating possibilities to movable arms and left elbow, and movable knees, and hips. We may assume that due to its size and weight, the figure must have been animated by more than one person. It could function in many ways. It could have been used as a typical crucifix but also put into the grave or on Mary’s lap in the scenes of deposition/burial and Pietà, respectively. The second sculpture of the two mentioned above, housed in the Benedictine Convent in Krzeszów, is much smaller (Figures 6.16 and 6.17). It is exhibited in a coffin upholstered with red fabric shot through with gold and silver threads; Jesus’s head lies on a richly decorated pillow. Restorers date the figure to the first half of the seventeenth century and assume the fabric on the pillow and inside the coffin are of a later date, probably around the beginning of the eighteenth century. Both the figure’s arms and knees are movable, as well as its head. Interestingly, the arms, head, and legs were sculpted separately and 23

Kamil Kopania, “Animating Christ in Late Medieval and Early Modern Poland,” P­ reternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 4, no. 1 (2015).

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Figure 6.12 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, turn of the 16th century. ​­Polychrome wood and leather.​Kraków, Klasztor Dominikanów © Kamil Kopania

joined to the torso by a leather cover imitating human skin and, at the same time, enabling animation. All the sculptures presented here were carried out in a way that enabled selected parts of the body of Jesus to move. Some of these were also intended to give the impression of a real human body, not only in terms of movement

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Figure 6.13 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the torso), turn of the 16th century. Polychrome wood and leather. Kraków, Klasztor Dominikanów © Kamil Kopania

but other features, like skin or blood flowing from the side. The main aim of these sculptures was to be used in theatrical religious ceremonies. They could and did function as stationary crucifixes, too. But there are some sculptures whose construction leads us to other spaces of religious behaviour and customs. Let us see, for example, the Rood of Grace from the Cistercian Abbey in

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Figure 6.14 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the shoulder), turn of the 16th century. Polychrome wood and leather. Kraków, ­Klasztor Dominikanów © Kamil Kopania

Figure 6.15 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ (detail of the hips), turn of the 16th century. Polychrome wood and leather. Kraków, Klasztor Dominikanów © Kamil Kopania

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Figure 6.16 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, first half of the 17th century. Polychrome wood. Krzeszów, Opactwo Benedyktynek © Kamil Kopania

Figure 6.17 Animated sculpture of the crucified Christ, first half of the 17th century. Polychrome wood. Krzeszów, Opactwo Benedyktynek © Kamil Kopania

Boxley, in the county of Kent—a sculpture destroyed during the R ­ eformation.24 Especially noteworthy among the numerous sources on this artwork is a l­ etter 24

Recently: Tripps, “The Joy of Automata.”

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dated 7 February 1538 from Geoffrey Chamber, liquidator of Boxley Abbey, to his friend and colleague Thomas Cromwell. Chamber’s letter, the direct account of a person involved in the discovery of the Rood of Grace, should be acknowledged as the most valuable source of information on the figure from Boxley. His words are authenticated by a letter written in Latin by John Hooker from Maidstone, an eyewitness to the events taking place at Boxley in early 1538. Following Chamber’s narrative, we may assume Jesus’s head, eyes, and mouth were movable thanks to mechanisms located inside the back of the sculpture. Unfortunately, the letter, just like other reports on the artifact, does not say any word on the possibility of the arms being folded. Moreover, Chamber does not say anything on the sculpture’s dimensions or the materials of which it was made. Probably due to the character of Chamber’s narrative, which is both quite emotional and poor in details, no scholar has attempted a meticulous analysis of the mechanisms allowing the animation of the sculpture. According to Chamber, those mechanisms consisted of wires and wooden elements which were already in poor technical condition and rotten. The works of Giovanni Tedesco, an artist working in Umbria in the second half of the fifteenth century, present evidence of the use of those same materials. Tedesco created sculptures of the crucified Christ which may be compared to the Rood of Grace. Among his works, we find exemplars made of a malleable mass composed of canvas, glue, and plaster cast in wooden moulds. The hollow sculptures, made of two sections which were sewn together with a rope, were supported from the inside by a framework of wooden boards. From among the works of Giovanni Tedesco, it is worth mentioning his sculptures in the Chiesa del Cristo in Pordenone and the Museo della Città in Rimini. In both works, it was possible to move the tongue by pulling a rope which was tied to a metal latch in the figure’s head. The sculptures are made of wood, and the one from Pordenone was finished with highly realistic polychromy. In terms of its construction, a sculpture from Norcia is worth mentioning, too. The figure, like the Rood of Grace, is hollow. The sculpture’s torso, along with its thighs, are made of linden wood, it is hollowed out in the back area and, as a result, it features a uniform rectangular cavity from the shoulder blades to the hips. The cavity is sealed-off by a cover attached to the torso with diagonal wooden pegs. Additionally, the head, which could be tilted thanks to a wooden element resembling a cradle, is hollowed out too and covered by a wooden wedge which, however, has not survived. The hollow in the sculpture enabled the installation of the mechanism, which allowed the figure’s tongue to be moved from left to right as well as up and down. We may also assume the cavity in Jesus’s head, along with the cradle inside it, made it possible for a fragrant smoke to be emitted from the mouth, symbolizing—for example—Jesus’s last breath. The

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sculpture’s movement was made possible by ropes attached to certain of its mechanisms and protruding from openings in the Saviour’s back. There are numerous indications and archival sources attesting that the Rood of Grace attracted many pilgrims to Boxley. According to the Reformers, it accepted the gifts or refused to take them—that was the main purpose of the mechanisms put in it. Sculptures like the one made by Giovanni Tedesco are the subject of ongoing research.25 There are only suppositions about what the aim of the mechanisms that enabled the movement of Jesus’s tongue was. Some scholars suggest such sculptures may have served as a particular type of aid to the preacher. Some say these could be used in Holy Week ceremonies to show the last moments of the life of Jesus. Others stress the possibility of these being used during the whole liturgical year as a powerful emotional stimulus for those who were praying in front of the crucifixes and saw God somehow talking to them or responding to their prayers. What we can say for sure is that all such sculptures were intended to be intimately accessible to the faithful. A good example of this is the famous figure by Donatello.26 None of the sources permit us to determine the exact original location of the sculpture in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, but it was most likely readily accessible, as demonstrated by sixteenth-century sources. As observed by John T. Paoletti, who studied the method of displaying near-life-size sculptures of the crucified Christ in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: They were originally not intended to be seen the way we see them today, that is over altars within chapels. This is not surprising since the large size of Renaissance altarpieces filled a good part of the wall space of chapels, leaving little useable space for a life-sized crucifix. The earliest reference to the Santa Croce Crucifix in the Libro di Antonio Billi (ca. 1530), describes it as being ‘a meza la chiesa.’ Shortly afterwards Vasari wrote that Taddeo Gaddi’s fresco of a miracle of St. Francis was on the rood screen which divided Santa Croce, and that it was painted ‘above the 25 Cavatorti, Giovanni Teutonico; Kamil Kopania, “‘The Idolle that Stode there in Myne ­Opynyon a Very Monstrous Sight’: on a Number of Late-Medieval Animated Figures of Crucified Christ,” in Material of Sculpture. Between Technique and Semantics, ed. ­Aleksandra Lipińska (Wrocław: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2009), 144–147; Zuzanna Sarnecka, “Monteripido and the Identity of Wooden Crucifixes in the Culture of Fifteenth-Century Umbria,” Arte medievale 4 (2014). 26 Michael Greenhalgh, Donatello and His Sources (London: Duckworth, 1982); Margrit Lisner, Holzkruzifixe in Florenz und in der Toskana von der Zeit um 1300 bis zum frühen Cinquecento (München: Bruckmann, 1970), 11, 12, 54–55, 64; Gosbert Schüßler, “Ein ­provozierendes Bildwerk der Passion: Donatellos Kruzifix von S. Croce,” in Streit um Bilder: von Byzanz bis Duchamp, ed. Karl Möseneder (1997), 49–72.

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crucifix of Donatello,’ implying that the wooden crucifix was in the middle of the church as Billi had written and also low to the ground.27 Donatello’s work was placed in the devotees’ line of sight: in the centre of the church, directly on the floor or just above it. Such a placement achieved the goal generally ascribed to sculptures of the crucified Christ, which was to stimulate piety, influence the emotions of those praying in front of them, and allow direct contact with the Saviour. Donatello’s work was even more extraordinary. We may assume the viewers facing it were stimulated by the fact the sculpture could have been animated and this feature must have determined the shape and course of prayer. The construction of the sculpture from the Santa Croce Basilica in Florence is characterised by a construction similar to that of the majority of the figures we focus on, the only difference residing in that it is impossible to completely fold Jesus’s arms along his body, and when removing the nails from the hands and lowering the arms, the resulting image resembles an Imago Pietatis.28 It is worth remembering that in the Middle Ages works of art were used in a very direct way. Due to the fact these were interactive, the nature was ‘more contemporary’ than we may assume. These required the viewer to fulfil their role and had inherent power to act; these acted by exerting over the viewer the power to arouse emotions and support devotion. The passion panoramas we discussed at the very beginning of the present paper constitute a good example of such works. In the case of these panels, we deal with two-dimensional images which were to become alive in the viewers’ minds. Drawing on various experiences connected with pilgrimages to Jerusalem, the reading of passion treatises, pilgrimage itineraries, and texts guiding a spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the viewer was to experience consecutive stages of Jesus’s passion in an active way. There are proofs that passion panoramas indeed enabled such active and engaging experience of the passion. The figures of the tormentors of Jesus depicted on the panoramas housed in the St. James church in Toruń (Figure 6.18) and at the Musée d’Art Sacré du Gard in Pont-Saint-Esprit (Figure 6.19) were scratched with a sharp tool. We are also dealing with a phenomenon occurring on a huge scale. The animated sculptures varied in form, scale, and construction, and are now preserved in vast numbers; sculptures of 27 28

John T. Paoletti, “Wooden sculpture in Italy as sacral presence,” Artibus et Historiae 13, no. 26 (1992): 88. Grazyna Jurkowlaniec, Chrystus umeczony. Ikonografia w Polsce od XIII do XVI wieku (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2001); Grazyna Jurkowlaniec, “The Rise and Early Development of the Man of Sorrows in Central and Northern Europe,” in New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows, ed. R. Puglisi Catherine and L. Barcham William (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2013).

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Figure 6.18 Westphalian artist active in Pomerania, The Passion of Christ (detail of the Flagellation), c.1480. Panel, 221 × 274 cm. Toruń, Kościół świętego Jakuba © Kamil Kopania

Figure 6.19 Master of the Saint Elisabeth Panels, The Passion of Christ (detail of the Flagellation), end of the 15th century. Panel, 95 × 185 cm. Pont-Saint-Esprit, Musée d’Art Sacré du Gard, Inv. M.N.R. 971 © Kamil Kopania

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this type were intended to be used and perceived in a very active, direct way, as these were figures subordinated to a wide range of aims and f­unctioning as a stimulus for many actions and emotions. Only in the case of the animated sculptures of the crucified Christ did the animation take place in the context of liturgy, religious ceremonies theatrical in nature, religious theatre, preaching, and individual prayer, or meditation, where mind and body were involved. Further research on the figures themselves, on the tools, ­materials, and efforts employed in the production, and on their use and perception will definitely shed new light on the religious culture and mentality of its active participants of the time. Bibliography Acconci, Alessandra. “Arte per il Patrimonium Sancti Petri: il Cristo deposto di San Lorenzo in Campagna (Amaseno), relitto di un gruppo ligneo medievale.” In Un ­medioevo in lungo e in largo. Da Bisanzio all’Occidente (VI–XVI secolo). Studi per ­Valentino Pace, edited by Vittoria Camelliti and Alessia Trivellone, 169–79. Pisa: Pacini, 2014. Bino, Carla. Dal trionfo al pianto. La fondazione del ‘teatro della misericordia’ nel ­Medioevo (V–XIII secolo). Milano: Vita e pensiero, 2008. Botvinick, Matthew. “The Painting as Pilgrimage: Traces of a Subtext in the Work of Campin and his Contemporaries.” Art History 15, no. 1 (1992): 1–18. Brandmair, Kathrin. Kruzifixe und Kreuzigungsgruppen aus dem Bereich der “­Donauschule.” Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2015. Brusca, Giovanni Pietro. Theatrum pietatis: Galleria d’arte Hippocratica. Pordenone: Tipografia Sartor, 2013. Camps i Sória, Jordi. “Descente de Croix de Santa Maria de Taüll.” In Catalogne romane sculptures du Val de Boí, edited by Jordi Camps i Sória and Xavier Dectot, 92. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004. Cardoso Rosas, Lúcia Maria. “Cristo.” In Arte, poder e religião nos tempos medievais: a identidade de Portugal em construção, edited by Maria de Fátima Eusébio, 198–201. Viseu: Câmara Municipal, 2009. Carrero Santamaría, Eduardo. “El Santo Sepulcro: Imagen y funcionalidad espacial en la capilla de la iglesia de San Justo (Segovia).” Anuario de estudios medievales 27, no. 1 (1997): 461–77. Cavatorti, Sara. Giovanni Teutonico: scultura lignea tedesca nell’Italia del secondo ­Quattrocento. Passignano sul Trasimeno: Aguaplano, 2016. Christiaens, Daniël. Museum Maagdenhuis: en selectie uit het kunstpartrimonium van het OCMW Antwerpen. Antwerpen: Maagdenhuis, 2002.

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Dectot, Xavier. “Christ de Mig Aran.” In Catalogne romane sculptures du Val de Boí, edited by Jordi Camps i Sória and Xavier Dectot, 80. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004. Domasłowski, Jerzy. “Malarstwo ścienne.” In Malarstwo gotyckie na Pomorzu Wschodnim, edited by Alicja Karlowska-Kamzowa and Adam S. Labuda, 10–58. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1990. Domasłowski, Jerzy. “Obraz ‘Pasja.’” In Malarstwo gotyckie w Polsce: Katalog zabytków, edited by Adam S. Labuda and Krystyna Secomska, 269–70. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2004. Flores D’Arcais, Francesca. Il teatro delle statue. Gruppi lignei di Deposizione e Annunciazione tra XII e XIII secolo. Milano: Vita & Pensiero, 2005. Frassani, Alessia. “Teatro de la memoria. Los retablos de la iglesia de Santo Domingo Yanhuitlán, Oaxaca.” Boletín de Monumentos Históricos 29 (2013): 37–51. Gerth, Julia. Wirklichkeit und Wahrnehmung: Hans Memlings Turiner Passion und die Bildgruppe der Passionspanoramen. Berlin: Mann, 2010. Greenhalgh, Michael. Donatello and His Sources. London: Duckworth, 1982. Hull, Vida J. “Spiritual Pilgrimage in the Paintings of Hans Memling.” In Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, edited by Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, 29–50. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Jakubek-Raczkowska, Monika, and Juliusz Raczkowski. “Dominikanie. Obraz i kult. Średniowieczne elementy wystroju kościoła św. Mikołaja w Toruniu.” In Klasztor dominikanski w Toruniu: w 750 rocznice fundacji, edited by Piotr Olinski et al., 107–12. Torun: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikolaja Kopernika, 2013. Jurkowlaniec, Grazyna. Chrystus umeczony. Ikonografia w Polsce od XIII do XVI wieku. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2001. Jurkowlaniec, Grazyna. “The Rise and Early Development of the Man of Sorrows in Central and Northern Europe.” In New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows, edited by R. Puglisi Catherine and L. Barcham William, 48–76. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2013. Kirkland-Ives, Mitzi. In the Footsteps of Christ: Hans Memling’s Passion Narratives and the Devotional Imagination in the Early Modern Netherlands. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Kopania, Kamil. Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ in the Religious Culture of the Latin Middle Ages. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2010. Kopania, Kamil. “Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ: Origins, Development and Impact.” Material Religion. The Journal of Objects Art and Belief 14, no. 4 (2018): 545–58. Kopania, Kamil. “Animating Christ in Late Medieval and Early Modern Poland.” ­Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 4, no. 1 (2015): 78–109. Kopania, Kamil. “Duchowa wędrówka po Jerozolimie: obraz pasyjny z kosciola sw. Jakuba w Toruniu.” Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 1–2 (2008): 91–112.

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Kopania, Kamil. “‘The Idolle that Stode there in Myne Opynyon a Very Monstrous Sight’: On a Number of Late-Medieval Animated Figures of Crucified Christ.” In Material of Sculpture. Between Technique and Semantics, edited by Aleksandra Lipińska, 131–48. Wrocław: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2009. Kopania, Kamil. “Panoramy pasyjne—misteria—literatura pielgrzymkowa. Uwagi o korespondencji sztuk w okresie późnego średniowiecza.” In Ars Inter Disciplinis. Korespondencja na styku sztuk, edited by Joanna Cieslik-Klauza and Magdalena Gajl, 313–29. Bialystok: Uniwersytet Muzyczny Fryderyka Chopina, Wydział Instrumentalno-Pedagogiczny w Białymstoku, 2018. Kopania, Kamil. “Puppetry in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period—New Perspectives.” In Dolls, Puppets, Sculptures and Living Images from the Middle Ages to the End of the 18th Century, edited by Kamil Kopania, 6–17. The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw—The Department of Puppetry Art in Białystok, Warsaw, 2017. Kruszelnicki, Zygmunt. “Problem genealogii artystycznej Torunskiego obrazu Pasyjnego.” Teka Komisji Historii Sztuki 1 (1959): 13–54. Kruszelnicki, Zygmunt. “Trzy symultaniczne panoramy: w Turynie, Monachium i Toruniu.” Teka Komisji Historii Sztuki 4 (1968): 87–152. La Deposizione lignea in Europa: l’immagine, il culto, la forma. Edited by Giovanna Sapori and Bruno Toscano. Milano: Mondadori Electa, 2004. Labuda, Adam S. “Modlitwa, widzenie i przedstawienie w póznogotyckim o­ brazie ‘Biczowania’ z kosciola Swietego Jana w Toruniu.” In Magistro et amico. Amici ­discipulique. Lechowi Kalinowskiemu w osiemdziesięciolecie urodzin, edited by Jerzy Gadomski, 541–66. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2002. Lane, Barbara G. Hans Memling: Master Painter in Fifteenth-Century Bruges. London: H. Miller, 2009. Lerud, Theodore Karl. Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Lisner, Margrit. Holzkruzifixe in Florenz und in der Toskana von der Zeit um 1300 bis zum frühen Cinquecento. München: Bruckmann, 1970. Martínez Martínez, María José. “El Santo Cristo de Burgos y los Cristos dolorosos articulados.” Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología 69/70 (2003/2004): 207–46. Michel, Annegret, and Andreas Schulze. “Konservierung und Restaurierung einer beweglichen Christusfigur der Spätgotik aus der Nicolaikirche zu Döbeln/Sachsen.” Die Denkmalpflege 58 (2000): 41–44. O’Connell, Michael. “The Civic Theater of Suffering: Hans Memling’s ‘Passion’ and Late Medieval Drama.” In European Iconography East and West. Selected Papers of the Szeged International Conference June 9–12, 1993, edited by György Endre Szőnyi, 22–34. Leiden: Brill, 1996.

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Paoletti, John T. “Wooden sculpture in Italy as sacral presence.” Artibus et Historiae 13, no. 26 (1992): 85–100. Powell, Amy Knight. Depositions. Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum. New York: Zone Books, 2012. Rico Camps, Daniel. “Un Quem queritis en Sahagún y la dramatización de la liturgia.” In Imágenes y promotores en el arte medieval, edited by Maria Luisa Melero Moneo et al., 179–89. Bellaterra: Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, 2001. Rudy, Kathryn M. “‘Den aflaet der heiliger stat Jherusalem ende des berchs van Calvarien’: Indulgenced Prayers for Mental Holy Land Pilgrimage in Manuscripts from the St. Agnes Convent in Maaseik.” Ons geestelijk erf: driemaandelijksch tijdschrift gewijd aan de studie der Nederlandsche vroomheid van af de bekeering tot circa 1750 74, no. 3 (2000): 211–54. Rudy, Kathryn M. “Fragments of a Mental Journey to a Passion Park.” In Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne S. Korteweg, 405–19. London: Miller-Brepols, 2006. Rudy, Kathryn M. “A Guide to Mental Pilgrimage: Paris, Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal Ms. 212.» Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, no. 63 (2000): 494–515. Rudy, Kathryn M. “A Pilgrim’s Book of Hours: Stockholm Royal Library A233.” Studies in Iconography 21 (2000): 237–79. Rudy, Kathryn M. Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Sarnecka, Zuzanna. “Monteripido and the Identity of Wooden Crucifixes in the C ­ ulture of Fifteenth-Century Umbria.” Arte medievale 4 (2014): 209–30. Schlie, Heike. “Das Mnemotop Jerusalem in der Prozession, in Brügge und im Bild: die Turiner Passion von Hans Memling und ihre medialen Räume.” In Medialität der Prozession: Performanz ritueller Bewegung in Texten und Bildern der Vormoderne, edited by Katja Gvozdeva and Hans Rudolf Velten, 141–75. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011. Schulze, Andreas. “Der sogenannte Mirakelmann aus Döbeln in Sachsen, eine bewegliche Christusfigur der Spätgotik.” In Polychrome Skulptur in Europa: Technologie, Konservierung, Restaurierung, edited by Ulrich Schießl and Renate Kühnen, 126–32. Dresden: Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, 1999. Schüßler, Gosbert. “Ein provozierendes Bildwerk der Passion: Donatellos Kruzifix von S. Croce.” In Streit um Bilder: von Byzanz bis Duchamp, edited by Karl Möseneder, 49–72, 1997. Stevens, Martin. “The Intertextuality of Late Medieval Art and Drama.” New Literary History 22, no. 2 (1991): 317–37. Stevenson, Jill. Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York. New York: Palgrave, 2010.

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Tripps, Johannes. Das handelnde Bildwerk in der Gotik: Forschungen zu den Bedeutungsschichten und der Funktion des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Hoch- und Spätgotik. Berlin: Mann, 2000. Tripps, Johannes. “The Joy of Automata and Cistercian Monasteries: from Boxley in Kent to San Galgano in Tuscany.” Sculpture Journal 25, no. 1 (2016): 7–28. Trowbridge, Mark. “Jerusalem Transposed a Fifteenth-Century Panel for the Bruges Market.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 1.1 (2009). Ziemba, Antoni. Sztuka Burgundii i Niderlandów 1380–1500. Wspólnota rzeczy: sztuka niderlandzka i północnoeuropejska 1380–1520. 3 vols. Warszawa: Wydaw. ­Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2015.

CHAPTER 7

Women as Performers of the Bible: Female Preaching in Premodern Europe Carolyn Muessig 1 Introduction Francis of Assisi once preached to nuns about penance by sitting down on the floor and pouring ashes over his head. After a long silence he recited, “Have mercy on me God”, and then departed abruptly.1 This exceptional example of male preaching proves the rule for female preaching—action over words often made the most powerful statement. This article will argue that the key to recognizing female participation in late medieval and early modern pastoral care is to understand the diverse methods of communication women used to present biblical messages. Several premodern women interpreted the Bible in performative ways. Like Francis, they often employed gestures—and even dance—to convey their interpretations. They also relied heavily on New Testament narration to articulate some of the most profound Christian beliefs, such as the incarnation and the resurrection. These women enacted their sermons through mime and verbal narration, recreating the iconic details of the life and death of Jesus. This study will look at four women who communicated New Testament narratives. Three were Dominicans, the nun Tommasina Fieschi and the tertiaries Stefana Quinzani and María de Santo Domingo.2 Our fourth

1 Tommaso da Celano, “Second Life of Saint Francis of Assisi,” in The Founder. Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York: New York Press, 2000), 379–380. “Have mercy on me” refers to Psalm 50:3. All biblical quotes come the Douay-Rheims version. 2 For the life and works of Tommasina, see Silvia Mostaccio, Osservanza vissuta, osservanza insegnata. La domenicana genovese Tommasina Fieschi e i suoi scritti 1448 ca.–1534 (Firenze: Olschki, 1999). For Stefana Quinzani, see Elena Bonora, “Quinzani, Stefana,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 86 (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana Treccani, 2016). For María de Santo Domingo, see Libro de la oración de sor María de Santo Domingo, ed. José Manuel Blecua (Madrid: Hauser y Menet, 1948), which contains her prayers and ecstasies that were recorded by her contemporaries; for a brief account of her life and for translations of her prayers and ecstasies see Mary E. Giles, The Book of Prayer of Sor María of Santo Domingo: A Study and Translation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). © Carolyn Muessig, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004522183_009

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example is the Abbess Juana de la Cruz, who was a Franciscan.3 Tommasina and Stefana were Italian and Juana and María were Spanish. All four women belonged to the Observant reform movement that swept across Europe. The Dominicans and Franciscans who pursued Observant reform believed they were adhering to their rules in the original way they were intended to be followed. The program of reform was introduced and embedded through widespread preaching. The overall aim of the Observant reform movement was to instil obedience with the aspiration of eradicating any disunity and corruption that had crept into religious practices.4 The male Observant movement has been studied more than the female branch.5 As research increases in relation to female Observant reformers, it is indicating that preaching was just as important for the women as it was for the men. This article demonstrates that some Observant women were not only supportive listeners of reforming sermons, but also active preachers.6 2

Women and Preaching in Premodern Europe

The place of women in the medieval church is often assumed to have been negligible. Indeed, the long tradition of Christian exegesis has persistently underlined the exclusion of women from religious teaching and preaching. Ambrose of Milan, commenting on Jesus’s directive to Mary Magdalene not to 3 She is also known as Juana Vásquez Gutiérrez. For an overview of her life, see Ronald E. Surtz, The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). For her sermons, see Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte: sermones de una mujer. La Santa Juana (1481–1534), ed. Inocente García de Andrés, 2 vols. (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1999), vol. 1. Some of her sermons have been translated into English. See Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481–1534: Visionary Sermons, ed. Jessica A. Boon and Ronald E. Surtz, trans. Ronald E. Surtz and Nora Weinerth (Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 2016). 4 Bert Roest, “Observant Reform in Religious Orders,” in Christianity in Western Europe c.1100– c.1500, ed. Miri Rubin and Walter Simons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5 For the classic work that has led the way for studies on male Observant reform, see Kaspar Elm, ed., Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989). 6 For recent studies of Observant female preachers see, Bert Roest, Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Carolyn Muessig, “Pedagogical Ideals of Late Medieval Dominican and Franciscan Observant Nuns,” in Theologie und Bildung im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Gemeinhardt and Tobias Georges (Munster: Aschendorff, 2015); and Carolyn Muessig, “The New World of Dominican Observant Preaching,” in Preaching of New Worlds: Sermons as Mirrors of Realms Near and Far, ed. Timothy J. Johnson, Katherine Wrisley Shelby, and John D. Young (London: Routledge, 2018).

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touch him in John 20:17, concluded that women were not permitted to speak in church (cf. 1 Corinthians 14:34–35).7 Medieval theologians like Henry of Ghent validated this discourse. He and other scholastics invoked 1 Timothy 2:12—“But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man; but to be in silence”—to show that the long arm of biblical authority pushed women off the pedagogical lecterns and pastoral pulpits of medieval Europe.8 Furthermore, scholastic theologians understood and defined preaching as a sacerdotal office that meant only those ordained to the priesthood could give sermons. This made female preachers an impossibility because women were not permitted to be ordained.9 These exegetical and scholastic commentaries reflected late medieval canon law. For example, the decretals of Raymond of Peñaforte and Bernard of Parma explicitly forbade women to preach.10 Despite these persistent pronouncements against female preaching, even a cursory investigation of women and pastoral leadership quickly turns up the nun Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard preached throughout Germany in monasteries and possibly in some cathedrals. Her pastoral themes, which directed priests to take care of their flocks and condemned the Cathars, dovetailed with the reforming aspirations and concerns of the German church.11 Although Hildegard’s high-profile preaching is notable, she was not the only female preacher in the Middle Ages. The existence of female preachers becomes more apparent if we consider the nuanced ways sermons could be delivered. For example, the Italian Dominican friar Silvestro Mazzolini, in his large handbook 7 Ambrosius, Expositio evangelium secundum Lucam, PL 15, col. 1845C–D. 8 For further discussion of Henry of Ghent’s views of women’s relation to theology, see Alastair J. Minnis, “The Accessus Extended: Henry of Ghent on the Transmission and Reception of Theology,” in Ad Litteram: Authoritative Texts and Their Medieval Readers, ed. Mark D. Jordan and Kent Emery (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). 9 For a discussion of the history of ordination and how it became associated with the sacerdotal order see Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10 See Francine Cardman, “The Medieval Question of Women and Orders,” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 42, no. 4 (1978): 595–596. Ida Raming, The Exclusion of Women from the Priesthood: Divine Law or Sex Discrimination? A Historical Investigation of the Juridical and Doctrinal Foundations of the Code of Canon Law, canon 968, 1 (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1976), 70–82. Bert Roest, “Female Preaching in the Late Medieval ­Franciscan Tradition,” Franciscan Studies 62 (2004): 119–121. 11 For a discussion of Hildegard’s preaching, see Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 1098–1179: A Visionary Life (London: Routledge, 1998), 130–135. For Hildegard of Bingen’s sermons, see Hildegard Bingensis, “Expositiones evangeliorum Sanctae Hildegardis,” in Hildegardis Bingensis Opera minora, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Carolyn Muessig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).

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on pastoral matters, the Summa Silvestrina, indicated preaching took place in a public place and was based on a biblical theme. He added, however, abbesses could exhort or encourage (adhortanur) because this was preaching in private (praedicare occulte).12 On the face of it, this statement appears traditional. Since the thirteenth century, scholastic theologians had encouraged women and laypeople “to exhort” one other to do good works and be virtuous. However, only priests were to preach, that is, to expound on the Bible and to teach doctrine publicly.13 Mazzolini, nevertheless, described nuns in their convents as preaching rather than simply exhorting. The four women under investigation, all in their unique ways, expounded on the Bible in an interactive manner. Tommasina Fieschi’s sermons involved her monastic sisters fully within the New Testament narrative in a private setting. Stefana Quinzani, María de Santo Domingo, and Juana de la Cruz engaged in performative and public forms of preaching that also engaged their audiences. The way these women performed stretches our understanding of how biblical and doctrinal teaching could be relayed both privately and publicly. Although not priests, these four women evoked a sacerdotal stature through their mannerisms that relayed a redemptive message. Their gestures recall the observations of the twelfth-century theologian Honorius Augustodunensis on the connection between liturgy and theatre: It is known that those who recited tragedies in the theatres represented to the people, by their gestures [gestibus], the actions of conflicting forces. Even so, our tragedian [the celebrant] represents to the Christian people in the theatre of the church, by his gestures [gestibus] the struggle of Christ, and impresses upon them the victory of his redemption.14

12 13

14

Silvestro Mazzolini, Summae Sylvestrinae, quae summa summarum merito nuncupatur. Pars secunda (Venezia: Girolamo & Niccolò Polo, 1602), 238v. For further discussion on the difference between exhortation and preaching in a medieval context and in relation to gendered identities, see Nicole Bériou, “The Right of Women to Give­­Religious Instruction in the Thirteenth Century,” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 138; and Roest, “Female Preaching,” 126–27. Honorius Augustodunensis, Gemma animae, PL 172, 570AC. Translation David ­Martin Bevington, Medieval drama (Boston Atlanta London: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 99. Jody Enders, “Of Miming and Signing: The Dramatic Rhetoric of Gesture,” in Gesture in ­Medieval Drama and Art, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute ­Publications, 2001).

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Tommasina Fieschi (ca. 1448–1534) Preaching in Private

Tommasina Fieschi was a well-educated noblewoman from Genoa. By her late 20s, already a widow and mother, she entered the Dominican order in 1477 to follow a life of strict enclosure. She produced a commentary on the Apocalypse, which unfortunately has not survived the ravages of time.15 Her extant writings include letters, sermons, and short treatises and are embroidered with biblical verses and liturgical phrases, images, and themes. Tommasina, as sacristan of the Observant Dominican convent of Saints James and Philip in Genoa, oversaw her sisters’ daily life of prayer. She also maintained the liturgical items used by the priests who tended to the nuns’ pastoral care.16 She, herself, however, was given the responsibility to preach to her sisters.17 In most of these sermons she refers clearly to her audience, the Venerable Mother (Venerabile Madre) and beloved sisters (dilete sorele) of the convent.18 She also makes it clear her preaching is an act of obedience, a key virtue in Observant reform: “Venerable Mother and beloved sisters in Christ, to satisfy sufficiently your devotion and to fulfil my obedience, in every way I consider myself and confess to be naked of virtues and of sufficient grace.”19 In another sermon for Maundy Thursday, she indicates she is preaching from election and through the virtue of holy obedience, and thus is obliged to do so.20 She often refers to her inability to address the stupendous miracles she is duty bound to discuss.21

15

Giacinto Parpera, Vita mirabile’ o sia varieta de successi spirituali osservata nella vita della B. Caterina di Genova Fiesca negl’Adorni (Genova: Antonio Casamara, 1682), 224: “Et hebbe Tomasa tanta luce nelle cose spirituali, e mistiche, che scrisse … sopra l’Apocalisse con altri divoti Trattati.” See also Raffaele Soprani, Vita della venerabile suor Tomasa Fiesca monaca dominicana (Genova: Benedetto Celle, 1667), 14–15. 16 Mostaccio, Osservanza vissuta, 90–91. 17 For examples of women teaching and preaching in public and private in the Middle Ages, see Women Preachers and Prophets through two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 18 The sermons are found in Genova, Biblioteca Civica Berio, Armadio C. F. 23, henceforth referred to as T2. For examples of these references see T2: “Venerabile madre e in Christo diletissimme sorele;” 52r and 54r: “Venerabile madre e in Christo dilete sorele.” 19 For example, see T2 fol. 71v: “Venerabile Madre e in Christo dilete sorele, a satisfar suficientementi alle vostre devotione e adimpir la mia obedientia da ogni parte me reputo e confeso esser nuda da le virtù e gratie suficiente.” 20 T2 fol. 9v: “De eletione e in la virtu de la santa obedientia da laqual io sun constreta.” 21 T2 fol. 54r: “lo mio debile inteleto persumisce de acostar alla inteligentia e narratione de questi stupendissima misterii.”

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Her nine extant sermons provide insight into the aspirations of how strictly enclosed nuns attempted to create a life of perfection and contemplation within the walls of their convents. These sermons address dramatic liturgical moments in the Christian calendar: three sermons are on the annunciation, two on the nativity, and four are dedicated to Maundy Thursday.22 The biblical themes of the sermons are presented in Latin, but the sermons are mainly in the vernacular, peppered with biblical quotes and liturgical references in Latin. The sermons demonstrate that Tommasina’s preaching was performative. For example, in Sermon 7, on the annunciation, she involves all her sisters in the meaning of the incarnation narrative. She tells them: “Gabriel goes on his way and in immense light he enters the room; both Mary and we are there.”23 Tommasina explains the incarnation through a dialogue between Gabriel and Jesus. She takes on the parts of the biblical characters: Gabriel: “Who are you my Lord? Tell me, your servant; and why did you come down, and for whom did you come down?”24 Christ: “I am the beginning and the end (Apocalypse 1:8), that is, I am the Creator and redeemer … Why I came down to earth, is not to reign, not to judge, not to demand the debt, not to wound or to mortify, but to bring together my little sheep, just as it is said by John in the Gospel (John 10:11): ‘I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd gives his life for his sheep.’”25 Tommasina’s sermons call upon her sisters to become emotionally involved with the life and death of Jesus on an interior and exterior level. This type of affective piety became increasingly widespread in the late Middle Ages as seen in the circulation of the book The Meditations on the Life of Christ, which was 22

23 24 25

The three Annunciation sermons are: T2, Sermon 2, fols. 43r–45r; Sermon 5, fols. 71v–74v; Sermon 7, fols. 95v–99r. The two Nativity sermons are: T2, Sermon 8, fols. 114r–117; ­Sermon 9, fols. 127v–129r. The four Maundy Thursday sermons are: T2, Sermon 1, fols. 9r–10v; ­Sermon 3, fols. 50r–52r; Sermon 4, fols. 54r–57v; Sermon 6, fols. 79v–80v. T2, Sermon 7, fols. 95v–99r, at fol. 96r: “Gabriel predi la via e cum immenso lume intra in caza e Maria e noi staremo li presente.” Emphasis is mine. T2, ibid., 96v: “Chi tu sei Segnor mio? Di a me, servo tuo; e perche descendi, anche a chi descendi.” Ibid., 96v: “Ego sun principium et finis (Apoc. 1:8) cioe io sun lo creator e redentor … Per la qual io descendo in terra: non per regnare, non per iudicare, non per demandar lo debito, non ferire ni per mortificare, ma per congregare le mie peccorele como fa lo bon pastore sì como disi per Ioanne in lo evangelo: Ego pastor bonus. Bonus pastor animam suam dat pro ovibus suis.”

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translated into a number of vernaculars.26 The author of The Meditations asked the reader to enter the emotional world of Jesus, and Tommasina invited her sisters to do the same. She assisted them by assuming at times the persona of Jesus in her sermons. For example, in her sermons for Maundy Thursday she frequently cited John 13:14–17 that depicts Jesus washing the feet of his apostles at the Last Supper.27 In sermon 3, Tommasina assumes the role of Jesus and says: “I am rising from the table in order to wash your feet to demonstrate how I have descended from the heavens above.”28 In her role as Jesus, ­Tommasina explains she has become enfleshed, “so that I may wash your dirt with my own blood.”29 In Sermon 4, she presents a moving dialogue of Jesus talking to his disciples, where she says to her sisters as if they were the disciples: “Washing you I cleanse you from sin, and kissing sweetly your feet I leave you my peace.”30 Tommasina then changes the mood of the sermon by inviting her nuns to place themselves both exteriorly and also interiorly in the midst of the passion and burial of Jesus. But before leading them into this interior, imaginative world, she quotes John 14:31: “‘Rise, up, let us go hither!’” And she adds: “But not to any exterior entertainment!”31 Tommasina urges her sisters to create their own ritual interiorly within the walls of the convent where they can travel with Jesus:

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For an English translation, see Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, Meditations on the Life of Christ. An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS. Ital. 115 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). There is abundant literature on affective piety. See, for example, Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). For further discussion of foot washing in the Middle Ages, see Thomas Schäfer, Die Fusswaschung im monastischen Brauchtum in der lateinischen Liturgie. Liturgiegeschichtliche Untersuchung (Beuron: Beuroner Kunstverlag, 1956). I am grateful to Dr Edward Sutcliffe for this reference. In female monasteries, the abbess and nuns were known to wash the hands and feet of the poor and each other on Maundy Thursday. See Anne Bagnall Yardley, Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 132–33. Sermon 3, fols. 50r–52r, at fol. 51v: “Levato de mensa per lavar li nostri pedi a demonstrar como io sun desenzo de la altitudine de li celi … circundato de la carne humana per lavar le vostre macule in lo mio proprio sangue.” Sermon 4, fol. 57r: “Io lavando te monde de la culpa e baxiando dolcementi li pedi te lasse la mia pace.” Ibid., fol. 57r: “Surgite eamus [h]inc [John 14:31], non a solaso exteriore.”

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But weeping and sighing with deep feeling from the heart, let us go to Calvary, with the Marys let us embrace the nailed feet, with the beloved Magdalene let us wonder at the pallid and exhausted face, with John the Evangelist let us adore the crown of thorns, let us kiss the wounded side, let us anoint the wounds of the hands.32 Tommasina’s sermons continually engage the community within the liturgical setting and its revelation of Christian history as lived in her convent. This is movingly portrayed in Sermon 8, on the nativity of Jesus. In this sermon, she alludes repeatedly to the baby Jesus as “this little baby boy” (questo picolino).33 The emphatic and repeated force of the expression “questo picolino” suggests that our preacher was likely referring to a doll of the infant Jesus that she used as a devotional object. Furthermore, Tommasina takes on a Marian persona as she praises the infant Jesus in the overall scheme of Christian history: “This tiny baby is magnificent, in every loftiness of that magnificence he has filled my soul so that I no longer know how to hold back my tongue and not say: (Luke 1:46) ‘My soul does magnify the Lord.’ / Magnificat anima mea dominum.”34 As the sermon progresses “this” baby becomes “our” baby. Tommasina asks her sisters to praise together “our tiny baby” (nostro picolino) and wonder, with Mary, “at our little son” (nostro figiolino).35 Their baby also is interiorised into their very selves: “today he was born in the crib of our heart.”36 Above all Tommasina most embodies a Jesus-like/sacerdotal persona in her preaching role. This occurs often in her sermons for Maundy Thursday, when she discusses Jesus’s desire to have his Last Supper with his disciples. In Sermon 3, she tells her sisters that because of love, Jesus goes to death, and he remains hidden in the form of bread. She then articulates the Eucharistic prayer said during the Mass: “Take and eat: this is my body, which will be given up to you / Accipite et manducate: hoc est corpus meum, quod pro vobis tradetur.”37 In the same sermon her protheme begins by citing Psalm 32

33 34 35 36 37

Ibid., fols. 57r–57v: “Surgite eamus [h]inc, non a solaso exteriore, ma a pianger e suspirar [57v] con intimo [corr. intomo] centimento de lo core andemo con lo affecto allo monte Calvario, con le Marie abraciemo li pedi inchiodati, con la dileta Madalena miremo la fasa palida e spuasata, con Iohanne evangelista adoremo lo capo spinato baxemo lo costato straciato, vngemo le piage de le mane.” Sermon 8, fols. 114r–117r. Ibid., fol. 114r: “Questo picolino he magnifico in ogni sublimitade de la qual magnificentia ha si rempito la mia anima che non so pui rentenir la mia lingua che non dica (Luke 1:46): Magnificat anima mea Dominum.” Ibid., fol. 116v. The scribe renders the spelling as ‘figiolino.’ Ibid., fol. 116v: “Lo qual ogi he nato a noi in lo prezepio de lo nostro corem.” Sermon 3: Lo sermone zobia sancta: 50r–52r at fol. 51r.

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115:13 to “her venerable mother and beloved sisters: I will take the chalice of ­salvation and I will call upon the name of the Lord / Calicem salutaris accipiam et nomen domini invocabo.”38 These are the words spoken in the Mass during the communion of the priest just before he drinks from the chalice. With these sacerdotal articulations associated with transubstantiation, Tommasina enacts the Last Supper and the Mass representing both Jesus and priest. 4

Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534)

Although Tommasina took on the persona of priest in some of her sermons, among the four women examined here, Juana de la Cruz was the most overtly priestly in her role as preacher. This Franciscan, mystic, stigmatic, and abbess, who came from a respectable but by no means aristocratic family, cut a remarkable figure at the medieval pulpit in Cubas, a Castilian village near Toledo where she preached publicly between 1509 and 1522.39 In part, her role as public preacher was achieved through the support she received from the Observant Dominican Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, who was cardinal, grand inquisitor, and regent of Castile.40 Cisneros looked to holy women as vessels of divine wisdom who could teach men.41 His reforming zeal facilitated her preaching publicly to varied audiences, including Emperor Charles V, Cisneros himself, bishops, and military leaders.42 Her authority was further validated when she described how in a vision Jesus impressed his wounds onto her. These visible marks were confirmed by eyewitnesses and then disappeared.43 This account 38 39

40 41 42 43

Ibid., fol. 50v. See Pablo Acosta-García, “Radical Succession: Hagiography, Reform, and Franciscan Identity in the Convent of the Abbess Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534)” Religions 12, no. 3 (2021), 223. I am grateful to Dr. Pablo Acosta-Garcia for bringing this article to my attention and for sharing his ideas and work related to Juana de la Cruz. Among other things, he is presently assessing the public/private aspects of Juana de la Cruz’s sermons. For a brief summary of Cisneros’s influential position see Surtz, The Guitar of God, 9 ­footnote 7. Ibid., 2. For an overview of Juana as preacher see, Jessica A. Boon, “Introduction,” in Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481–1534: Visionary Sermons, ed. Jessica A. Boon and Ronald E. Surtz (Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 2016); for Cisneros’s reforming program, see 8–14. Ibid., 26. The description of Juana becoming a stigmatic is found in Vida y fin de la bienabenturada virgen sancta Juana de la Cruz. Madrid, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio, El Escorial, K-III-13 fol. 39r, that dates to the first half of the sixteenth century.

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resonates with an established tradition of women holding religious authority after they were described as receiving visible or sometimes invisible stigmata. The occurrence functioned as a symbolic female ordination whereby women thereafter carried out priestly roles which sometimes included preaching, giving counsel, and peace making.44 Four years after Cisneros’s death, however, Juana stopped preaching publicly. Whether her retreat from the pulpit was a result of losing her strong backing from Cisneros or of the changing attitudes towards the role of visionary women like Juana is unclear and needs further investigation.45 Juana made it clear her voice was not her own, it was an instrument played by the divine that relayed visions, doctrine, and biblical interpretation from heaven to earth.46 Her convent sisters transcribed 72 sermons she delivered while in a trance with her eyes closed. Although she is thought to have sometimes been motionless or prone during these sermons, Juana’s preaching, like Tommasina’s, also had a highly performative quality.47 The preaching is often dialogic. In her sermon on the incarnation, Mary and Gabriel engage in conversation. The discussion is protracted. The Virgin resists and is anxious

44 45

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Carolyn Muessig, The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford ­ niversity Press, 2020), 106–15. U Boon argues, “Cisneros’s death in 1517 did not end her preaching, nor apparently, leave her particularly vulnerable to outside criticism concerning her preaching or the compilations of her teachings and sermons.” See Boon, “Introduction,” 13. On the other hand, Roest argues: “Not long after the death of Cardinal Cisneros (1517) the religious atmosphere in Spain hardened significantly, causing inquisitorial action against the (mainly Franciscan and tertiary) Alumbrados and other ‘spiritual’ currents. The first signs of these developments manifested themselves during Juana’s lifetime. She eventually had to give up public preaching.” See Roest, “Female Preaching,” 153. For Juana as instrument of God see Surtz, The Guitar of God, 63–85. For a discussion of her authority, Ronald E. Surtz, “La madre Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) y la cuestión de la autoridad religiosa femenina,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 33, no. 2 (1984) and Surtz, The Guitar of God, 15–35. There are examples of male preachers, too, who claimed their sermons were inspired by visions. The Dominican Alain de La Roche’s visions of Dominic guided him on what to preach about the use of the rosary. See Alain de la Roche, Il salterio di Gesu’ e di Maria. Genesi, storia e rivelazioni del Santissimo Rosario. Opere complete del Beato Alano della Rupe, ed. Gaspare Paola (Conegliano: Editrice Ancilla, 2006). Juana was supposed to have been prone during her very long sermons that sometimes lasted four or five hours. See Boon, “Introduction,” 1. See also the Vida y fin fol. 27 as cited in Boon, “Introduction,” 1 note 2, which describes Juana as being in a rapture like a dead person with closed eyes (el cuerpo como muerto y los ojos cerrados). For an edition of these 72 sermons, see Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte.

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because she is unsure how her purity will remain intact if she becomes pregnant: I cannot consent to conceiving and giving birth because I am consecrated to God. Ever since childhood I have followed a vow of virginity, and I intend never to know a man. How could Almighty God want me to break this vow now?48 Eventually Gabriel persuades Mary by stressing the redemptive force of her acceptance: You will always remain a virgin without any corruption, and whoever will be born to you will be holy and the Son of the Most High. For this reason, consent now and do not delay any further the redemption of humankind.49 Juana’s commentary on the incarnation is innovative and becomes even more liturgically intimate than Tommasina’s sermons. For example, when Mary accepts God’s request, Juana describes “the entire Trinity entering” the ­Virgin’s womb, where Jesus plays with angels and rules the world.50 In his mother’s womb, he finds his dwelling snug and warm and desires to stay as long as possible.51 Juana also includes controversial doctrinal matters. Her sermon confirms Mary was pure from conception as God chose her ab initio to be the mother of Jesus.52 The Franciscans were key supporters/defenders of the Immaculate Conception, a theological position that was still being widely debated in Catholic circles. Juana’s sermon, which was presented as God’s word, therefore, added gravitas to her order’s view on this teaching.53 48 49 50 51 52 53

Translation from Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 51; original in Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 242. Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 53. Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 243. Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 53; Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 244. Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 55; Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 245. Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 46; Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 237. At around the same time Juana was preaching, another Observant Franciscan nun, Chiara Bugni, a Venetian female preacher and stigmatic, also confirmed that Mary was indeed immaculately conceived and that preachers far and wide should spread this news. See Stefania Cavalli and Simone Rauch, “Vita [di una santa monaca] di Francesco Zorzi, tradotta dal pre’ Andrea Pillolini fiorentino,” in La Vita e i Sermoni di Chiara Bugni, clarissa veneziana (1471–1514), ed. Reinhold C. Mueller and Gabriella Zarri (Roma: Edizioni di ­storia e letteratura, 2011), 232.

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Juana’s sermons articulate the theological intricacies and implications of Jesus’s life and death. In her sermon on the nativity, the birth and death of Jesus are movingly intertwined. Like Tommasina’s nativity sermon, Juana’s preaching is full of rich images. For example, Juana paints a verbal picture of Jesus and the Virgin being gifted by the angels with cribs, flowers, golden crowns, and garments. The Virgin, overcome with joy, suckles the baby Jesus only to be shaken from her reverie by another group of angels who show her the instruments of her son’s passion. The Virgin then falls into a state of deep despair and pleads with God not to let her child die a cruel death. Her desperate mood is only broken by the sound of her baby laughing and cooing, which makes her joyous once again.54 The sermon takes the audience on an emotional journey, inviting feelings of intimacy and happiness as well as fear and desperation. Like Tommasina, who celebrated the “tiny baby” she and her sisters beheld, Juana describes each Christian taking the infant Jesus into his/her arms to commemorate the incarnation and nativity.55 The performativity of her preaching is apparent in her Good Friday sermon.56 Jesus’s passion was one of the most dramatic moments in the Christian calendar. In medieval devotion, emphasis was placed on the violence of the crucifixion and the sorrowful experience of the Virgin and her son. Juana’s sermon reflects this tradition in its graphic detail of the passion and in the vivid dialogues of key actors. Mary faints as she clings to the cross and is blinded by the blood from Jesus’s body that pours into her eyes. At the foot of the cross, John the Evangelist calls out to the Magdalene to help; Juana, as a promoter of the Immaculate Conception, manages to have John remind the audience of the Virgin’s sinlessness: Come here, my sister, help me remove the Virgin Mary from here. We are already losing the son, who is our God and our master; let us not also become orphans by losing the mother, since she is so sweet and free of sin.57 She also included anti-Jewish rhetoric that portrayed Jews as “rabid dogs” (­perros rabiosos) whose only aim was to torment and kill Jesus.58

54 55 56 57 58

Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 73–80; Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 262–268. Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 98; Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 286. Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 129–149; Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 663–682. Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 137; Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 671. Juana de la Cruz, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 132; Juana de la Cruz, El conhorte, 666.

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Juana’s sermon belonged to a larger tradition practiced by Franciscan Observant male preachers such as the Polish friar Ladislaus of Gielniow. Ladislaus was an effective preacher who used performative techniques to enliven his pastoral message. This Observant Franciscan died on 4 May 1505, a month after he fell gravely ill while giving an impassioned sermon on Good Friday.59 Like Juana, he gave sermons while in a trance, although the evidence indicates he was animated in his gestures and movements. His extraordinary Good Friday sermon aroused such great grief his audience wept.60 Ladislaus’s voice was described as powerful but sad as he portrayed the unfortunate events with grief-stricken gestures.61 When he recounted the flagellation of Jesus, his performance intensified with the help of graphic props that included a life-size nude doll of Jesus affixed to a column placed next to the instruments of torture.62 These signs of the passion made Ladislaus cry out with great emotion: “O Jesus, O Jesus, O Jesus, my love” (O Jesu, o Jesu, o Jesu mi dilecte)!63 His preaching encouraged belief in and compassion for Jesus. As with Juana, this nurturing of empathy, however, sometimes led to incitements of anti-Jewish sentiments in an attempt to strengthen Christian identity. For example, Ladislaus occasionally ended his preaching with a song  Jezussa Judas przedal (Judas Has Sold Jesus).64 His Good Friday sermon, as described by his hagiographer, was delivered in

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61 62

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Kamil Kantak, “Les données historiques sur les bienheureux Bernardins (observants) polonais du XVe siècle,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 22 (1929): 444–451. See also the entry, “Ladislaus de Gielniow,” in Franciscan Authors, 13th–18th Century: A Catalogue in Progress. Created and maintained by Bert Roest and Maarteen van den Heijden, http:// users.bart.nl/~roestb/franciscan/index.htm. Last accessed 27 February 2019. See Vincent Morawski, “De B. Ladislao Gielnovio Ordinis Fratrum Minorum de Observantia, Warsaviae in Mazovia Provincia Poloniae,” Acta Sanctorum (Antwerp: Michael Cnobarus, 1680), Maii I, col. 585F. For further discussion on Ladislaus’s sermon, see Carolyn Muessig, “Performance of the Passion: The Enactment of Devotion in the Later Middle Ages,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed. Elina Gertsman (London: Routledge, 2008). Morawski, “De B. Ladislao Gielnovio,” col. 585E–586A. Icons of Jesus with movable limbs and lifelike proportions were found in England, Spain, and Hungary and perhaps used to similar effect. For descriptions of such lifelike icons, see Rudolf Berliner, “A Relief of the Nativity and a Group from an Adoration of the Magi,” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 2 (1953): 146–147. And more recently, Kamil Kopania, Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ in the Religious Culture of the Latin Middle Ages (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2010). Morawski, “De B. Ladislao Gielnovio,” col. 586A–B. Jan of Komorowo, Tractatus cronice Fratrum Minorum observancie: a tempore Constanciensis Concilii et specialiter de provincia Polonie, ed. Heinrich von Zeissberg (Wien: Karl Gerold’s Sohn, 1873), 114.

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such a powerful ecstasy the preacher was lifted into the air and floated above the ambo.65 Regardless of the alleged miraculous details of his Good Friday sermon, male preachers like Ladislaus employed elements of theatre to intensify the efficacy of their message and, like their female counterparts, they were understood to be in an a trance or ecstasy when they preached.66 Reformers like the satirist and Calvinist Pierre Viret later criticised these forms of dramatic practices used by Catholic preachers. In 1546, Viret underlined that Good Friday preaching by the mendicants missed the whole point of Jesus’s redemptive act and instead focused on inciting hatred towards the Jews. Mendicant preachers, through the use of crucifixes and images, encouraged their audiences to weep not with devotion but with pathos, as if they were watching any wretched man being led to his death. They preached more about Mary’s dramatic lamentations than the death of her son. Viret, the Reformer, underlined that Mary’s histrionics were not supported by biblical authority.67 Although one must keep in mind the polemical context of these criticisms, such observations indicate the pastoral techniques and themes used by Ladislaus and female preachers like Juana were part of a widespread trend. 5

María de Santo Domingo (1486–ca. 1524)

The performative preaching found in the sermons of Tommasina, Juana, and Ladislaus demonstrate different ways preaching could be delivered. A contemporary of Juana, the Spanish Dominican tertiary María de Santo Domingo, ­presented her expressive interpretations of the Bible in public before priests 65 66

67

Luke Wadding, Annales minorum seu trium ordinum a S. Francisco institutorum (Quaracchi: Typographia Collegi S. Bonaventurae, 1933), 15:302 (anno 1505). Ladislaus likely preached a version of the Expositio passionis Iesu Christi also known as the Passio secundum legem debet mori, which was an emotive and highly dramatised sermon of the passion based on John 18:1–40–19:1–42. See Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17, and Lynette R. Muir, Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 124. Closer to Juana’s home, there were other male Franciscan preachers on the Iberian Peninsula who delivered their sermons in a trance, such as the friars Olmillos and Ocaña. See Geraldine McKendrick and Angus MacKay, “Visionaries and Affective Spirituality during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 94. Pierre Viret, Exposition familière faicte par dialogues sur le Symbole des apostres (Genève: Jean Girard, 1557), 114v–15. The first edition was published in Geneva by Jean Girard in 1546.

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and lay people. María came from a peasant farming family in the bishopric of Ávila. She joined a group of women known as the beatas, who dressed in religious habit but lived in the world, devoted to prayer and charitable works.68 She had a palpable sign of sanctity: she bore one visible bloody side wound, but it eventually closed and remained marked by a scar.69 As with Juana, the holy mark was interpreted as an indication of her union with Jesus.70 Though she had her detractors, María was held in high esteem by political and religious leaders and, like Juana, she had the support of Cisneros.71 María relayed her religious messages openly through dance, narration, and singing in which she portrayed her conversations with Jesus, the angels, and various biblical figures. Like Juana and Tommasina’s performative sermons, María’s performance of the Bible was tied to the liturgical calendar. On one Easter Sunday she fell into a rapture within the monastery of Santa Cruz of the Magdalena in Aldeanueva in front of an audience made up of lay people, including a judge and “a gentleman from Talavera”, monastics, and priests.72 While in ecstasy she presented a mise-en-scene of the resurrection, speaking the parts of each biblical character. During her Easter Sunday enactment, she described the moment when Jesus in John 20:17 told Mary Magdalene not to touch him (noli me tangere). María engages in conversation with the Magdalene telling her not to be upset by Jesus’s words: Do not fret, sister. Consider that our Beloved does not reject you. But now, draw near so you may awaken more fully by gazing on Him. Since you want all of yourself to be for Him, rejoice with Him in that He wants you to want Him in this way.73 María’s exegetical gloss on Noli me tangere is poignant since it rejects the usual patristic and scholastic interpretations of John 20:17, referred to above, that argue women were to keep silent in church. Furthermore, María’s performance, 68

Maria Laura Giordano, “Beatas, Spagna,” in Dizionario Storico dell’Inquisizione, ed. ­Adriano Prosperi, Vincenzo Lavenia, and John A. Tedeschi (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2010). 69 Giles, The Book of Prayer, 17. See also Muessig, Stigmata, 205–209. 70 Giles, The Book of Prayer, 123. For the original, see Libro de la oración, 1–2. 71 Jodi Bilinkoff, “Charisma and Controversy: The Case of Maria de Santo Domingo,” in Spanish Women in the Gold Age: Images and Realities, ed. Magdalena S. Sánchez and Alain SaintSaëns (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 23–35; Jodi Bilinkoff, “Establishing Authority: A Peasant Visionary and her Audience in Early Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Studia mystica 18 (1997): 36–59. 72 For a translation of her Easter Sunday rapture see Giles, The Book of Prayer, 147–168. 73 Ibid., 158. For the original see also Libro de la oración, 36–37.

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narrated in a church, subverted the elucidation of these authoritative texts. The biblical command was not a rejection, as María explained, but an invitation for the woman to gaze upon Jesus’s body and to savour their mutual desire. The Dominican Master General, Thomas Cajetan, hearing about María’s ecstatic dance, holy conversations, and side wound called for an investigation into the behaviour of this unusual holy woman.74 Consequently, she underwent a number of inquisitorial trials between 1509 and 1510.75 One of her main critics was a Dominican friar, Juan Hurtado de Mendoza. He had observed some of her ecstasies and was subsequently a witness at her trial. He testified he was doubtful that her visions were true; he believed rather that María said what she thought her supporters wanted to hear.76 However, his comments on her ecstatic dance and accompanying words indicated he was ambivalent about her performative devotion. While testifying, he said it sounded foolish when one heard reports María danced with Jesus and the angels, but when he himself saw her move, he admitted that he and those in attendance were brought to tears. Although he had been enraptured by her performance, ­Hurtado’s testimony showed him to be conflicted; he was both dubious of the genuineness of her actions, yet he saw a beauty in them.77 Whether Hurtado considered her performance a form of preaching is unclear. However, in 1509 he did give witness affirming María had appropriated priestly duties by hearing confessions and giving sermons. He indicated he witnessed her preaching once in Viloria and again at Piedrahita. He stressed, however, that while she may have preached, her sermons were not like a preacher’s (no como sermonadores) and testified she heard confessions, but they were not sacramental (no sacramentaliter).78 Despite María’s actions, Hurtado was unable to recognise her activities as truly pastoral, likely because she was not an ordained male. Fortunately, Cisneros, who believed María to be a prophetess, stigmatic, and an effective reformer, ensured she was not punished for her 74

Jodi Bilinkoff, “A Spanish Prophetess and Her Patrons: The Case of Maria de Santo Domingo,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 1 (1992): 21–34. 75 Tamar Herzig, “Genuine and Fraudulent Stigmatics in the Sixteenth Century,” in Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe, ed. Miryam Eliʾav-Feldon and Tamar Herzig (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 151. 76 Four Dominicans testified that her ecstasies were feigned. These were Juan de Azcona, Agustin de Funes, Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, and Damián de Avila. See Bilinkoff, “­Charisma and Controversy,” 25. 77 Giles, The Book of Prayer, 31. For the original, see Libro de la oración, Prólogo, 1. 78 His testimony is cited in Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, Historia de la reforma de la provincia de España (1450–1550) (Roma: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 1939), 113–114. See also Surtz, The Guitar of God, 12, note 31.

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demonstrative devotion that veered into sacerdotal territory.79 She did, however, spend the remainder of her life not in the world as she had before but in a convent in Aldeanueva as its abbess.80 6

Stefana Quinzani (1457–1530)

Our final example, Stefana Quinzani, was a Dominican tertiary from near Brescia in northern Italy. Like María and Juana, she was not of noble status. Orphaned at the age of 15, she worked as a domestic servant. She went on to establish a penitent house dedicated to Saints Paul and Catherine of Siena.81 Her mentor, the Dominican preacher and devotee of the passion, Matthew Carreri, predicted Stefana would become his heiress. Her vita clarified the meaning of this prediction by explaining she had inherited Matthew’s great devotion to Jesus’s suffering, but this devotion was not a passive devotion between herself and Jesus, as will be shown, it was manifested in public displays of worship.82 Stefana’s reputation as a holy woman was largely based upon her identification with Jesus, this included her bearing stigmata on her body like Juana and María did.83 Stefana associated herself so closely with him that on Fridays she frequently portrayed the passion in front of audiences, including highranking ecclesiastical and political officials.84 On 16 June 1499, in Mantua, in a noblewoman’s house, she portrayed the passion narrative using mime, narration, and drama. The audience included Mantuan Dominicans and matrons, an inquisitor, Stefana’s confessor, as well as the ruler of Mantua, Francesco II Gonzaga, and his wife, Isabella d’Este. The notary described the experience as the most divinely inspired thing that ever happened to the audience (nihil divinius nostro hoc unquam aevo).85 79 Giles, The Book of Prayer, 39–61. 80 Her relegation to the convent was ordered by Cajetan. Ibid., 2–3. 81 For an overview of her life see Bonora, “Quinzani, Stefana.” 82 Paolo Guerrini, “La prima ‘Legenda volgare’ de la beata Stefana Quinzani d’Orzinuovi, secondo il codice Vaticano-Urbinate latino 1755,” Memorie Storiche della Diocesi di Brescia, no. 1 (1930): 92. 83 Her wounds will be discussed below. 84 The performance of the passion by women in front of public audiences had been established since the thirteenth century. See Muessig, “Performance of the Passion.” 85 The notarised testimony is included in Stefana’s life as an appendix in Giuseppe Brunati, Leggendario, o Vite di santi bresciani con note istorico-critiche (Brescia: Gilberti, 1834), 153–155.

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An anonymous eyewitness provided details of another of Stefana’s passion enactments. This occurred two years earlier on Friday, 17 February 1497, in Crema, at the home of her master, Gian Francesco Verdello.86 Stefana started her ecstasy with a self-certifying discernment of spirits, putting to flight any claims that her actions were demonically inspired.87 She ventriloquised the devil’s accusations against her: “Many people want to see you. You want them to call you a saint.”88 Stefana firmly dismissed these accusations of pride by beating away the invisible demons with her arms and hands. This disclaimer of diabolical motivation established her authority flowed from God, not Satan. Forthwith, the drama began. Stefana presented the passion through distinct gestures and narration. She spoke and acted all the parts of the liturgical drama. At times, the audience interacted: Her hands are tied above her head with insoluble but invisible straps, and her feet are tied as well. She is like Christ when he was tied to the pillar. Her visible bodily movements make it clear that she is being invisibly flagellated. Her whole body moves for half an hour, but her hands and feet are immobile, just as if they were tied with real cord on the pillar. Many of those who were present made efforts to separate the hands, but they did not succeed, even though they used great force. They were amazed that it was not possible to move even a finger.89 After she violently mimed the crucifixion, the anonymous reporter noted that on the middle of her right foot a red mark like the size and shape of a coin appeared.90 Some of the twenty-one male witnesses of her passion ecstasy indicate her actions confirmed their faith.91 The witness Giovanni Sabbatini, a doctor whom 86 87

Ibid., 149–152. Brunati lists the signatures and comments of the 21 witnesses to this event. For two key studies on the discernment of spirits, see Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), and Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 88 Brunati, Leggendario, 146. 89 The English translation of Stefana’s ecstasy of the passion by Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner may be found in Dominican Penitent Women (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2005), 194. The original can be found in Brunati, Leggendario, 146. 90 Brunati, Leggendario, 147; Dominican Penitent Women, 196. 91 The signatories and their individual comments are found in Brunati, Leggendario, 149– 152. While only male witnesses signed the document, judging from the later account in Mantua, it is likely that women were also in attendance too, but their status may not have been considered as authoritative as those of the male audience and hence not recorded.

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Stefana had once worked for as a domestic servant, signed his name to validate all the things accounted for in the testimony. He added that when he saw Stefana in ecstasy he truly thought Jesus himself had made her a participant in his passion. He swore such wonders could not have been feigned and God alone was responsible.92 Seventeen of the witnesses swore they saw the stigma on her foot. One clarified the foot had been white before the moment of the crucifixion scene, but immediately after it had turned red.93 Three said they did not notice the mark but could attest to everything else. One witness said he did not see the mark on the foot, but he did see bruises and swelling on her hands caused by the invisible cords.94 The Dominican inquisitor Dominic of Gargnano confirmed he touched her hands, but they could not be loosened from the invisible straps that bound them. He tried to do the same when he believed her hands to be nailed to the invisible cross, but he again failed to move her hands. He had belief in every detail that Stefana embodied and spoke; he testified it demonstrated the omnipotence of God and edified the faithful.95 In addition to her enactment and narration of the passion, Stefana was also reported to have said a few words regarding the state of pastoral care in 1497. Stefana was a great supporter of the radical Observant Dominican reformer Girolamo Savonarola. At the time of her ecstasy in 1497, Pope Alexander VI had prohibited Savonarola’s prophetic preaching in public or private because of its tendency to stir up the Florentines, which led to civic upheavals and disturbances.96 At the end of the performance, Stefana lamented how some defamed the Dominicans. She predicted misfortune would descend upon these naysayers. She prayed all preachers would bear fruit in their pastoral undertakings. The anonymous scribe recorded a cryptic quote spoken by Stefana: “If they do not bear fruit with their sermons, the Lord will not rest in their hearts, but in those of the crowds of the unrepentant sinners.”97 Tamara Herzig has argued 92 93 94

95 96 97

Ibid., 151. See also Dominican Penitent Women, 294 note 9. The witness was called Hannibal de Vicomercato. Brunati, Leggendario, 152. The witness was Andreas Matinengus, a doctor of both canon and civil law, who indicated that he did not see, nor could he certify, the foot wound, but that it seemed to him that Stefana’s hands were swollen and bruised by the invisible ties, which he thought was the most notable of all the things that had happened. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 152. See for example Alexander VI’s letter (16 October 1495) to Savonarola forbidding him to preach. Anne Borelli et al., Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola: Religion and Politics, 1490–1498, ed. Donald Beebe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 278–279. The translation may be found in Dominican Penitent Women, 194–196. For original see Brunati, Leggendario, 148.

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Stefana’s short discourse on pastoral care may have been related to Alexander VI’s treatment of Savonarola. If so, Stefana’s criticisms were likely softened and rephrased to protect her from punishment, which may partly explain the lack of clarity of the direct quote from her passion ecstasy.98 What is clear is that Stefana spoke out that day about the state of religious reform associated with Dominican preaching before a distinguished audience. But were Stefana’s actions and words preaching? As some of the testimonials confirm, her overall performance moved her audience to think they were in the presence of God and to feel edified. These would have been goals of many medieval male preachers. As we saw at the beginning of this study, Francis sat silently covered with ashes and then said a prayer to the nuns, who waited patiently to hear a sermon. These actions amounted to preaching. Stefana, on the other hand, not only prayed, she acted, recited the parts of the passion, and spoke of contemporary woes. In all but name, she gave a sermon, but was not called a preacher. Stefana’s gender and perhaps her humble status hindered her dramatic enactment from being identified as a sermon. Rather, in her performance of the passion she was a surrogate for Jesus, and in her response to the troubled state of pastoral care in late medieval Italy, she was a surrogate for Savonarola, too, who was not permitted to speak. 7 Conclusion These four women appropriated biblical characters or interacted closely with them in their unique interpretations of the New Testament. Tommasina’s sermons suggest she took on the personas of Jesus, Mary, and Gabriel and that she used gestures to accompany her preaching. She did not invoke the power of stigmatisation to justify her pastoral role. The duty had been assigned to her within the context of a monastic organisation of strict enclosure. Juana, María, and Stefana, however, who were on public display, had their pastoral roles justified through their stigmatic status, which enabled them to express themselves in performative ways. They communed directly with the divine. Juana channelled Jesus’s words from heaven, but her actions were recognised and accepted as preaching. María’s gestures and words caused some to watch her in awe because they believed she was actually speaking to Jesus and the angels. Some accepted her wisdom, but others could not tolerate the idea that this woman was presenting divine learning worthy to be called a 98

Tamar Herzig, Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: ­ niversity of Chicago Press, 2008), 90. U

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sermon. Stefana’s ecstasy validated the preaching mission of the Dominicans; in this context she was a preacher’s preacher. These women used appropriate words and gestures to lead their audience to inner renewal. By so doing, like ­Honorius’s priests in the theatre of the church, Tommasina, Juana, María, and Stefana impressed upon their audiences the struggle of Jesus and the ­victory of his redemption. All of them used not only a sermon made up of words, but, like Francis of Assisi, they used a sermon made up of bodily movements and gestures to invoke the divine and strengthen the faith of their audiences. Bibliography Acosta-García, Pablo. “Radical Succession: Hagiography, Reform, and Franciscan Identity in the Convent of the Abbess Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534).” Religions 12, no. 3 (2021): 223. Bagnall Yardley, Anne. Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Beltrán de Heredia, Vicente. Historia de la reforma de la provincia de España (1450–1550). Roma: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 1939. Bériou, Nicole. “The Right of Women to Give Religious Instruction in the Thirteenth Century.” In Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker, 134–45. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Berliner, Rudolf. “A Relief of the Nativity and a Group from an Adoration of the Magi.” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 2 (1953): 145–49. Bestul, Thomas H. Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Bevington, David Martin. Medieval drama. Boston Atlanta London: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Bilinkoff, Jodi. “Charisma and Controversy: The Case of Maria de Santo Domingo.” In Spanish Women in the Gold Age: Images and Realities, edited by Magdalena S. Sánchez and Alain Saint-Saëns, 23–35. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. Bilinkoff, Jodi. “Establishing Authority: A Peasant Visionary and her Audience in Early Sixteenth-Century Spain.” Studia mystica 18 (1997): 36–59. Bilinkoff, Jodi. “A Spanish Prophetess and Her Patrons: The Case of Maria de Santo Domingo.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 1 (1992): 21–34. Bonora, Elena. “Quinzani, Stefana.” In Dizionario biografico degli Italiani. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana Treccani, 2016. http://www.treccani.it ­ /enciclopedia/stefana-quinzani_(Dizionario-Biografico).

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Boon, Jessica A. “Introduction.” Translated by Ronald E. Surtz and Nora Weinerth. In Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481–1534: Visionary Sermons, edited by Jessica A. Boon and Ronald E. Surtz, 1–33. Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 2016. Borelli, Anne, Maria Pastore Passaro, Alison Brown, and Giuseppe Mazzotta. Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola: Religion and Politics, 1490–1498. Edited by Donald Beebe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Brunati, Giuseppe. Leggendario, o Vite di santi bresciani con note istorico-critiche. Brescia: Gilberti, 1834. Caciola, Nancy. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Cardman, Francine. “The Medieval Question of Women and Orders.” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 42, no. 4 (1978): 582–99. Cavalli, Stefania, and Simone Rauch. “Vita [di una santa monaca] di Francesco Zorzi, tradotta dal pre’ Andrea Pillolini fiorentino.” In La Vita e i Sermoni di Chiara Bugni, clarissa veneziana (1471–1514), edited by Reinhold C. Mueller and Gabriella Zarri, 135–240. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2011. Derbes, Anne. Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies and the Levant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Dominican Penitent Women. Edited and Translated by Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2005. Elliott, Dyan. Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Enders, Jody. “Of Miming and Signing: The Dramatic Rhetoric of Gesture.” In Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art, edited by Clifford Davidson, 1–25. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001. Flanagan, Sabina. Hildegard of Bingen, 1098–1179: a Visionary Life. London: Routledge, 1998. Giles, Mary E. The Book of Prayer of Sor María of Santo Domingo: a Study and Translation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Giordano, Maria Laura. “Beatas, Spagna.” In Dizionario Storico dell’Inquisizione, edited by Adriano Prosperi, Vincenzo Lavenia and John A. Tedeschi, 161–65. Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2010. Guerrini, Paolo. “La prima ‘Legenda volgare’ de la beata Stefana Quinzani d’Orzinuovi, secondo il codice Vaticano-Urbinate latino 1755.” Memorie Storiche della Diocesi di Brescia, no. 1 (1930): 89–186. Herzig, Tamar. “Genuine and Fraudulent Stigmatics in the Sixteenth Century.” In Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe, edited by Miryam Eliʾav-Feldon and Tamar Herzig, 142–64. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Herzig, Tamar. Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

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Kantak, Kamil. “Les données historiques sur les bienheureux Bernardins (observants) polonais du XVe siècle.” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 22 (1929): 433–61. Kopania, Kamil. Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ in the Religious Culture of the Latin Middle Ages. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2010. Macy, Gary. The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Mazzolini, Silvestro. Summae Sylvestrinae, quae summa summarum merito nuncupatur. Pars secunda. Venezia: Girolamo & Niccolò Polo, 1602. McKendrick, Geraldine, and Angus MacKay. “Visionaries and Affective Spirituality during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century.” In Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, edited by Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, 93–101. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Minnis, Alastair J. “The Accessus Extended: Henry of Ghent on the Transmission and Reception of Theology.” In Ad Litteram: Authoritative Texts and their Medieval Readers, edited by Mark D. Jordan and Kent Emery, 275–326. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. Mostaccio, Silvia. Osservanza vissuta, osservanza insegnata. La domenicana genovese Tommasina Fieschi e i suoi scritti 1448 ca.–1534. Firenze: Olschki, 1999. Muessig, Carolyn. “The New World of Dominican Observant Preaching.” In Preaching of New Worlds: Sermons as Mirrors of Realms Near and Far, edited by Timothy J. Johnson, Katherine Wrisley Shelby and John D. Young, 120–34. London: Routledge, 2018. Muessig, Carolyn. “Pedagogical Ideals of Late Medieval Dominican and Franciscan Observant Nuns.” In Theologie und Bildung im Mittelalter, edited by Peter Gemeinhardt and Tobias Georges, 129–49. Munster: Aschendorff, 2015. Muessig, Carolyn. “Performance of the Passion: The Enactment of Devotion in the Later Middle Ages.” In Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, edited by Elina Gertsman, 129–42. London: Routledge, 2008. Muessig, Carolyn. The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Muir, Lynette R. Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ragusa, Isa, and Rosalie B. Green. Meditations on the Life of Christ. An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS. Ital. 115. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Raming, Ida. The Exclusion of Women from the Priesthood: Divine Law or Sex Discrimination? A Historical Investigation of the Juridical and Doctrinal Foundations of the Code of Canon Law, canon 968, 1. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1976. Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. Edited by Kaspar Elm. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989.

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Roest, Bert. “Female Preaching in the Late Medieval Franciscan Tradition.” Franciscan Studies LXII (2004): 119–54. Roest, Bert. “Observant Reform in Religious Orders.” In Christianity in Western Europe c.1100–c.1500, edited by Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, 446–57. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2009. Roest, Bert. Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform. ­Leiden: Brill, 2013. Ross, Ellen M. The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Schäfer, Thomas. Die Fusswaschung im monastischen Brauchtum in der lateinischen Liturgie. Liturgiegeschichtliche Untersuchung. Beuron: Beuroner Kunstverlag, 1956. Surtz, Ronald E. The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Surtz, Ronald E. “La madre Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) y la cuestión de la autoridad religiosa femenina.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 33, no. 2 (1984): 483–90. Taylor, Larissa. Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Early Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Women Preachers and Prophets through two Millennia of Christianity. Edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

CHAPTER 8

Dramatic Action and the Participatory Spectator at the Sacro Monte di Varallo: Frozen Theatre or Immersive Installation? Allie Terry-Fritsch Since at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when several English and American scholars and art critics ‘rediscovered’ the Sacro Monte di Varallo, located in the Val Sesia of northern Italy, writers have used language associated with the theatre to describe its innovative artistic program, which combined architecture, wall and ceiling paintings, and life-size polychromed statues to stage an encounter between religious pilgrims and simulated sites and events of the Holy Land (Figure 8.1).1 In his book-length investigation of the chapels  at Varallo, first published in 1888, Samuel Butler considered the many chapels arranged across the Franciscan pilgrimage site as “stages” and the sculptures contained therein as “the chief actors in the sacred dramas.”2 Butler claimed “their object, or the object of those who commissioned them, was to bring the scene with which they engaged home to the spectator in all its fullness, short of actual life and motion.”3 In the first years of the twentieth century, Edith ­Wharton similarly described the sculptures at Varallo as “actors 1 On nineteenth-century attitudes towards the sacri monti, see Diana Medina Lasansky, “Beyond the Guidebook: Edith Wharton’s Rediscovery of San Vivaldo,” in Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, ed. Meredith Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017); Diana Medina Lasansky, “The ‘Catholic Grotesque’ at the Sacro Monte of Varallo: The Protestant Aversion to a Graphic Space during the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” The Senses and Society 12, no. 3 (2017). 2 Samuel Butler, Ex Voto (London: J. Cape, 1928), 86. Butler first published his study on ­Varallo in 1888. See Samuel Butler, Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at ­Varallo-Sesia. With Some Notice of Tabachetti’s Remaining Work at the Sanctuary of Crea (­London: Trübner, 1888), with revised editions published in 1889 and 1894, and further ­revisions published posthumously. All references to Butler’s book in this essay are to the complete revised edition published in 1928. 3 Butler, Ex Voto, 82. In his introduction to the volume, Butler cites an article written by Alice Greene (The Queen, 21 April 1888, xxi) that similarly uses theatrical language: “On the Sacro Monte the tableaux are produced in perpetuity, only the figures are not living, they are terracotta statues painted and moulded in so life-like a way that you feel that, were a man of flesh and blood to get mixed up with the crowd behind the grating, you would have hard work to distinguish him from the figures that have never had life.” Ibid., xxi. © Allie Terry-Fritsch, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004522183_010

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Figure 8.1 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Procession of the Magi, 1528. Polychrome terracotta, horsehair, metal, leather, plaster, stone, fresco. Varallo, Sacro Monte di Varallo © Stefan Fritsch

in some m ­ iracle-play arrested at its crowning moment”, and William Denison McCracken argued the goal of the artistic program was “to enact picture plays in pantomime, to produce passion or miracle plays, or a species of tableaux in perpetuity, with the action of a great number of persons suddenly arrested.”4 This early response to the sculptural configurations was codified by mid-century, when Giovanni Testori described Gaudenzio Ferrari’s aim at the Sacro Monte as “the creation of a figure theatre” and later titled his seminal book on Varallo, Il gran teatro montano.5 Rudolf Wittkower echoed the connection in his influential study on the sacri monti when he remarked that “it is at once obvious that the realistic scenes [at Varallo] have deep roots in the miracle plays of 4 Edith Wharton’s Italian Backgrounds was first published in 1905; the edition cited here is Edith Wharton, Italian Backgrounds (New York: Ecco Press, 1989), 59. William Denison McCrackan, The Spell Italian Lakes Being the Record of Pilgrimages to Familiar and ­Unfamiliar Places of the “Lakes of Azure, Lakes of Leisure,” Together with a Description of their Quaint Towns and Villa Gardens and the Treasures of Their Art and History (Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1907), 113. 5 Giovanni Testori, “Gaudenzio e il Sacro Monte,” in Mostra di Gaudenzio Ferrari, ed. Anna Maria Brizio (Milano: Silvana, 1956), 26; Giovanni Testori, Il gran teatro montano. Saggi su Gaudenzio Ferrari (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1965).

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the late Gothic era. Each chapel may be likened to a scene from the sacre rappresentazioni frozen into permanence.”6 For these, and many other scholars, the verisimilitude of the artistic program provides the critical link to the theatre; the physiognomic fidelity of the sculptures to nature—heightened through painted flesh, horse hair wigs, and fabric clothing—and the illusionism of the painted environments of the chapels provided a means for the pilgrim to spectate like an audience member before a sacred drama that had frozen in time.7 Yet, as recent scholarship on the Sacro Monte has revealed, Renaissance ­pilgrims—particularly before the great architectural and decorative changes to the site beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century—were not ­passive spectators on the holy mountain.8 Rather, they were keenly engaged with the representations through mental exercises and physical interaction with them. As Alessandro Nova has discussed, The pilgrim was able to participate by physically entering into the scene and becoming part of it, since the sculptures interacted with the frescoed onlookers on the walls, and therefore the pilgrims who were placed between the simulacrum and the painting, thus becoming physically as well as emotionally part of the action. This performance engaged most of the viewers’ senses: not only sight, but also hearing, and touch.9 From the moment of their arrival at the holy site, pilgrims were guided by Franciscan friars into affective states of prayer organised around the represented 6 Rudolf Wittkower, Idea and Image: Studies in the Italian Renaissance (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 178. 7 On the role of verisimilitude to instigate empathy at the Sacro Monte di Varallo, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: ­University of Chicago Press, 1989), 192–245. The notion of ‘frozen theatre’ is also applied to the Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo, a Franciscan holy land simulation in Tuscany that was built shortly after Varallo and which uses polychrome terracotta sculpture as the primary artistic decoration of its chapels; for example, see Paola Ventrone, “I Sacri Monti: un esempio di teatro ‘pietrificato’?,” in La ‘Gerusalemme’ di San Vivaldo e i Sacri Monti in Europa, ed. Sergio Gensini (Ospedaletto Pisa: Pacini, 1989). 8 As described below, it is necessary to distinguish between the early artistic and devotional program first devised by Fra Bernardino Caimi and executed through the late 1520s by his ­followers, and the later, Counter-Reformation artistic and devotional program, which ­purposefully limited pilgrim interaction with the works. 9 Alessandro Nova, “‘Popular’ Art in Renaissance Italy: Early Response to the Holy Mountain at Varallo,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire J. Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 123. On smell, see David Karmon, “The Sacro Monte at Varallo and the Choreography of an Olfactory Landscape.”Anterior: ­Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism, 13 (Winter 2016), no. 2: 57–75.

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themes within each chapel and then encouraged to personalise their visit through sensorial exploration of the works with hands, lips, and perhaps even full body embraces.10 The experience offered to pilgrims exceeded the visual; it engaged the pilgrim’s entire body as a sensory conduit of information.11 Indeed, as John Sherman astutely claimed, the viewer was the connection that completed the work of art.12 In effort to reconcile the role of theatre at Varallo, this essay shifts attention away from the frozen sculpted and painted actors of the individual chapels and instead focuses on the dramatic roles played by the mobile, sentient Renaissance pilgrims who performed in their spaces. The artistic program at Varallo (and the other sacri monti that followed) activated the live body of the pilgrim and transformed him or her into a participant in the representations of the sacred mountain. Yet the drama that unfolded within the time-based experience of the chapels was not a fixed biblical role; the decoration of each site provided multiple points of view that allowed pilgrims to explore the identity positions of Mary, the saints, Jesus, his tormentors, and others. At the same time, pilgrims to Varallo were reminded continually of their own role as pilgrims to the Holy Land through devotional prayer practices, the physical touching of simulated relics, guided ambulation through the landscape, the (often illicit) collection of souvenirs, and the creation of graffiti on the walls of

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On the interaction of pilgrims with the works of art at holy lands, see especially William Hood, “The Sacro Monte of Varallo: Renaissance Art and Popular Religion,” in Monasticism and the Arts, ed. Timothy Verdon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984); David L­ eatherbarrow, “The Image and Its Setting: A Study of the Sacro Monte at Varallo,” Anthropology and Aesthetics 14 (1987); Nova, “‘Popular’ Art”; Diana Medina Lasansky, “Body ­Elision: Acting Out the Passion at the Italian ‘Sacri Monti,’” in The Body in Early Modern Italy, ed. Julia L. Hairston and Stephens Walter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Christine Göttler, “The Temptation of the Senses at the Sacro Monte di Varallo,” in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wietse de Boer and Christine ­Göttler (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Margaret F. Bell, “Image as Relic: Bodily Vision and the Reconstitution of Viewer/Image Relationships at the Sacro Monte di Varallo,” California Italian Studies 5, no. 1 (2015); Allie Terry-Fritsch, “Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind: Somaesthetic Style and Devotional Practice at the Sacro Monte di Varallo,” Open Arts Journal 4 (2015). For an in-depth analysis of the somaesthetic cultivation of pilgrims to the sacri monti, see Allie Terry-Fritsch, Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459–1580 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). John K. G. Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (­Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

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the chapel.13 Indeed, the earliest guidebook to Varallo, printed in 1514, encouraged pilgrims to emplace themselves in the present as well as the past; the tract self-consciously uses locative vocabulary that points to the here and now of the Sacro Monte’s built environment, and weaves description of biblical events with direct commands to look, weep, touch, and configure the body and mind so as to impress the lessons of the place into permanent form within the pilgrim’s memory.14 Thus, while the sculptural and pictorial decoration of the Sacro Monte may very well have drawn upon the visual vocabulary of popular theatrical practices such as tableaux vivants and sacre rappresentazioni, the manner in which pilgrims approached the artistic program surpassed these dramatic referents. As both the practice of art and the discipline of art history has expanded to accommodate new forms of material and spatial exploration in the late ­twentieth and early twenty-first century, scholars have begun to offer new terminology to describe the innovative combination of media at Varallo and their impression on the viewer. For example, Roberta Panzanelli has described Gaudenzio Ferrari’s chapel interiors as “total environments”, a useful phrase that reminds the reader that these places were filled with multimedia art forms and, more importantly, often were conceived and realised as completely immersive milieux.15 In her investigation of the architectural frames for devotional experience at Varallo and other sacri monti, such as the ­Tuscan Jerusalem at San Vivaldo, Medina Lasansky provocatively has suggested these environments might be best approached as “Renaissance installation art”, which frames “the performative experience of the body [of] the spectator/pilgrim” 13

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In Butler’s day, pilgrims would still stop to take chips of wood from the large ­crucifix placed in a fork in the road on the initial ascent up the mountain; Butler, Ex Voto, 130. On the s­ignificance of graffiti at holy sites like Varallo, see Diana Medina Lasansky, “Sacred Graffiti,” in The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated, ed. Diana Medina Lasansky (New York: Periscope, 2014); Marianne Ritsema van Eck, “Graffiti in Medieval and Early Modern Religious Spaces: Illicit or Accepted Practice?,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 131, no. 1 (2018). For a linguistic analysis of the 1514 guide, see Pier Giorgio Longo, “‘Hi Loco visitando’: temi e forme del pellegrinaggio ai Misteri del Monte de Varalle nella ‘Guida’ del 1514,” in Questi sono li misteri che sono sopra el Monte de Varalle, in una “Guida” poetica del 1514, ed. Stefania Stefani Perrone (Varallo: Società per la conservazione delle opere d’arte e dei monumenti in Valsesia, 1987). On the arrangement of the Sacro Monte at the time of the guidebook’s publication, see Anna Maria Brizio, “Configurazione del Sacro Monte di Varallo nel 1514,” Bollettino della Società Piemontese di Archeologia e Belle Arti 8, no. 11 (1954–1957). Roberta Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality: Images and Imagination in the Early Phase of the “New Jerusalem” at Varallo (1486–1530)” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2014), 239; Roberta Panzanelli, “It’s About Time: Gaudenzio’s bel composto at Varallo,” California Italian Studies 6, no. 2 (2016) (accessed 1/8/18).

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as an “early modern form of performance art.”16 This essay aims to build on these interpretive suggestions and flesh out the conceptual and aesthetic connections to immersive installation art practices as a means to reassess the role of theatre in the material and performative aspects of time-based pilgrimage to the holy mountain. Three aesthetic principles underscore the decoration of the early sixteenthcentury chapels at the Sacro Monte di Varallo: 1) activation, or engagement, of the spectator through embodied action; 2) self-referential politics of space; and 3) de-centring. Scholars have rightly connected these aesthetic principles to the aims of Franciscan preaching and devotion, which encouraged an active and engaged participation in Jesus’s life. This essay will focus on how they also constructed an experience of the Sacro Monte that resonates with contemporary installation art, particularly in the construction of a participatory role of the viewing subject. As an art-historical term, “installation art” only emerged in the 1960s, when it was used to describe site-specific artistic manufacture of entire spaces “treated as a single situation into which the viewer enters.”17 While these installations took many forms and were often ephemeral (i.e., most were dismantled after a defined period of exhibition), their insistence on the singular unity of the space and the primary role of the viewer as the activating force within them is akin to the innovative design of the chapels of the Sacro Monte, despite the anachronism. The formal language and theoretical questions that guide current scholarship on immersive installation, including the role of the work in fostering the engagement of the spectator through embodied experience, the self-referential politics of place, the use of de-centring designs, and multiple points of view to generate an emancipatory experience, are fruitful points of consideration for the sixteenth-century genre. Such inquiry not only helps to clarify the artistic patrimony of the Sacro Monte in its relation to theatre, but also provides the terminology and conceptual framework by which to recognise the limitations of theatrical referents to describe the myriad strategies that were once at play and on display at Varallo. Thus, looking forward in time, contemporary installation and its art-historical criticism may provide the theoretical scaffolding by which to recognise the strategies embedded into the early sixteenth-century decorative program; these strategies arguably have made it difficult to neatly enfold the artistic patrimony of Varallo into a linear history of Renaissance art from Giotto to the so-called High Renaissance style. While a full analysis of each of the chapels at Varallo is not possible here, the remainder of this essay focuses on key aspects of the early sixteenth-century 16 17

Lasansky, “Body Elision,” 249–72. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 10.

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artistic program in the spaces dedicated to the Grotto of Bethlehem and Mount Calvary, built and decorated by Gaudenzio Ferrari by 1528, to illustrate their performative potential. By providing a deep reading of the decoration in relation to the installation principles of activation, self-referential politics of space, and de-centring, the essay strives to clarify how theatricality and participatory performance impacted pilgrim experience. The immersive, multimedia installations at the Sacro Monte di Varallo provided the means for the active engagement of the audience, who co-produced the drama through embodied action in the decorated places. 1

The Sacro Monte as Immersive Installation

Built as a ‘true representation’ of the Holy Land, the Sacro Monte di Varallo claimed to offer Christian pilgrims a faithful experience of the holy sites of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.18 Fra Bernardino Caimi, a member of the Observant Franciscan order at the convent of S. Angelo in Milan who assumed the guardianship of the Custody of the Holy Land in 1478 and became Vicar for the Milanese province in 1482, founded the Franciscan pilgrimage site with permission from Pope Innocent VIII and land donated by the townspeople of Varallo.19 According to a late fifteenth-century inscription located on the earliest chapel erected on the Sacro Monte, Fra Caimi “devised the sacred places on this mountain so that he who could not travel might see this Jerusalem.”20 Already by 1493, Caimi oversaw the erection of the Convent of Santa Maria

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For a detailed site map of the Sacro Monte di Varallo, visit http://www.parks.it/riserva .sacro.monte.varallo/mapll.html. Although the scholarship on Varallo is too extensive to fully cite here, see the recent bibliographic compilation, I Sacri Monti: bibliografia italiana, ed. Pier Giorgio Longo and Danilo Zardin (Ponzano Monferrato: ATLAS, Centro di Documentazione dei Sacri Monti, Calvari e Complessi devozionali europei, 2010). Agostino M. Salsa, Biografia del beato Bernardino Caimi, fondatore del Sacro Monte di ­Varallo Sesia (Varallo Sesia: Unione Tipografica Valsesiana, 1928); Abele Calufetti, “I vicari provinciali dei Frati Minori della Regolare Osservanza di Milano dal 1428 al 1517,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 72 (1979). In 1482, Caimi received a mandate from Pope Sixtus IV to establish five new Franciscan foundations, one of which is theorised as Santa Maria delle Grazie in Varallo; in 1486, Pope Innocent VIII gave permission to receive a donation of land from the townspeople of Varallo. See Casimiro Debiaggi, “Sui cinque secoli del Sacro Monte. Genesi del centenario. Conferma dell’atto di Fondazione 1486,” Sacro Monte di Varallo Sesia. Quaderno di Studio 4 (1986). “Frater Bernardinus Caymus de Mediolano … Sacra huius Montis excogitavit loca ut hic Hierusalem videat qui peragrare nequit.”

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delle Grazie at the base of the mountain as well as three new chapels on top of the m ­ ountain.21 Twenty-five more chapels were included on the p ­ ilgrimage itinerary by 1514, the date of publication for the first printed guide to the site, although the ­construction and decoration of many of these places were completed only by the late 1520s.22 The chapels were arranged across the landscape of the mountain in topomimetic relation to the disposition of holy places in the real Holy Land, and many of the architectural and decorative features were constructed as imitations of the sacred markers of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.23 Guided by a Franciscan friar through winding paths that ascended and descended different parts of the mountain, pilgrims were led to each architectural site in a fixed sequence that corresponded to the pilgrimage experience in the terra sancta and engaged in devotional exercises just as their pilgrim c­ ounterparts in the east.24 The precise replication of pilgrim 21

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The 1493 document recording the official donation of the convent and chapels, as well as all of the other land and buildings on the mountain, is preserved only in a copy dating from 1641, which was transcribed by Pietro Galloni, Sacro Monte di Varallo (Varallo: ­Camaschella & Zanfa, 1909), 3–83. The chapels—representing the Holy Sepulchre, Ascension, and, most likely, the Anointment Stone (the document designates this space simply as “subtus crucem”)—were decorated with sculpture and wall paintings at a later date, perhaps after Caimi’s death in 1499; for a reconstruction of this earliest phase of the Sacro Monte, see Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” 119–123. These included the chapels representing the Virgin Resting on the Way to Calvary, Annunciation, Nativity, Manger (later called Adoration of the Shepherds), Arrival of the Magi, Circumcision, Last Supper, Christ Leaving Peter, John, and James Asleep in the Gethsemane, Seven Disciples Asleep in the Gethsemane, Prayer in the Garden, Arrest of Christ, Christ before Annas, Christ in front of Pilate, Christ Falling under the Cross, Christ Stripped of His Garments, Calvary (Crucifixion), Christ Appearing to His Mother, Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen, Christ Appears to His Disciples, Christ Teaching the Paternoster, Christ Teaching the Creed, Descent of the Holy Spirit, Announcement to the Virgin of Her Death, Sepulchre of the Virgin, and Sepulchres of Joachim and Anna, as well as a fountain in the Piazza del Tempio that represented the Resurrected Christ. On topomimesis as a strategy of virtual holy land pilgrimage, see Michele Bacci, “­Performed Topographies and Topomimetic Piety. Imaginative Sacred Spaces in Medieval Italy,” in Spatial Icons Performativity in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, ed. Aleksej Lidov (Moskva: Indrik, 2017). On Varallo as a sacred heterotopia, see Stephen J. Campbell, The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 104–110. As Anabel Wharton has examined, the pathways between the chapels were purposefully complex so as to imitate the confusing built environment of Jerusalem as it existed in the late fifteenth century; Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 130–131. Pilgrims to the real Holy Land could only visit the sacred sites with a Franciscan guide, who organised group tours according to the topographical layout of the city. On the experience of Holy Land pilgrimage, see Nine Robijntje Miedema, “Following in the Footsteps of Christ: ­Pilgrimage

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­ ovement through the landscape, coupled with the affective prayer practices m of the Franciscan guides, enacted a substitutive sacrality that endowed Varallo with the authenticity of the real place. Unlike pilgrims to the real Holy Land, however, the pilgrims to Varallo were able to see Jesus and the saints in bodily form through mediated ­representations within the chapels and were invited to not just look but to feel their c­ orporeal presence through touching, holding, and embracing. This full-­bodied experience of the sacred distinguished the Franciscan pilgrimage site as extraordinary. Indeed, as Girolamo Morone, the Milanese nobleman and later Grand Chancellor of the Duchy of Milan, exclaimed after his visit to Varallo in 1507, he could not “put an end to either my visit or my wonder.”25 He explained, I have never seen anything more religious, more pious, that more touched the hearts, which could compel one to abandon everything else and ­follow Christ alone. Let the so-called “Roman stations” stop, let the very trip to Jerusalem stop, this new and very pious work reproduces every detail, and the very simplicity of its construction, the structure without artifice, and the nature of the location are superior to any ancient monument.26 For Morone, and others who went to the site in great numbers, the Sacro Monte offered an experience of the Holy Land that allowed for deeply personalised, affective engagement that arguably was even better than the original. Although the Sacro Monte has changed dramatically in its aesthetic and conceptual design since Morone’s visit, several of the chapels completed during the first phase of the Franciscan campus (1486–late 1520s) still retain much of their original decorative programs.27 The best preserved chapels are

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and Passion Devotion,” in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. Alasdair A. MacDonald, Bernhard Ridderboas, and Rita M. Schlusemann (Groningen: Forsten, 1998); Francis E. Peters, Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of the Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Girolamo Morone’s letter, addressed to the poet Lancino Curzio and dated to the third day of the calends of October 1507, was first published by Giuseppe Müller and Domenico Promis, Lettere ed orazioni latine di Girolamo Morone, Miscellanea di Storia Italiana (Torino: Stamperia Reale, 1863), 148–149. For the full English translation, see Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” Appendix 1, 283–284. Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” 284. For an analysis of the changes to the pilgrimage itinerary during the Counter-­Reformation, see Rebecca Gill, “Galeazzo Alessi and the Redevelopment of the Sacro Monte di Varallo in Tridentine Italy,” in AID Monuments: conoscere progettare ricostruire. Galeazzo Alessi

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Figure 8.2 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Procession of the Magi (view from the screened-off pilgrim space of the portico), 1528. Polychrome terracotta, horsehair, metal, leather, plaster, stone, fresco. Varallo, Sacro Monte di Varallo © Stefan Fritsch

found in the architectural complex known as the Grotto of Bethlehem, which contains interconnected chapels representing the Procession of the Magi, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Circumcision of Jesus, the chapel of the Crucifixion on Mount Calvary, and the Holy Sepulchre. Although today physical access to the interiors of these chapels are blocked by wooden screens, which force pilgrims into fixed viewing positions outside of the rooms, in the early sixteenth century, pilgrims walked freely through the spaces and interacted with their sculptural and pictorial decoration (Figure 8.2).28 Pilgrims were ­encouraged to pick up the small, polychrome sculpture of the baby Jesus within the Nativity and the Adoration of the Shepherds, and to kneel at the base of the cross in the Crucifixion chapel so as to touch and rub Holy Land relics gathered by Caimi on his travels.29 In the Holy Sepulchre, pilgrims touched

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architetto-ingegnere, ed. Claudia Conforti and Vittorio Gusella (Roma: Aracne, 2013), 101–113. Nova, “‘Popular’ Art,” 121; Lasansky, “Body Elision,” 252–253. On these interactive features, see Hood, “The Sacro Monte of Varallo,” 306; Nova, “‘­Popular’ Art,” 117; Lasansky, “Body Elision,” 262; Terry-Fritsch, “Performing the Renaissance Body,”

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Figure 8.3 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Dead Christ, c.1514. Polychrome wood. Varallo, Sacro Monte © Stefan Fritsch

the wounds suffered by Jesus on the cross—materialised in the form of gaping holes in the hands of Gaudenzio Ferrari’s painted wooden sculpture of the Dead Christ—and kissed his divine face (Figure 8.3).30 In these moments of full-bodied contact with the divine, pilgrims performed their devotion in ways that exceeded the historical precedent; indeed, no bodily traces of Jesus remain in the Holy Land, thus the incarnational insistence of the decoration within the chapels of Varallo purposefully deviated from the original to instigate a new form of knowledge production about the past in relation to the present. The key to each of these devotional spaces was the pilgrim, who activated the artistic programs through their mental and somatic exploration.

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120; Allie Terry-Fritsch, “Franciscan Art and Somaesthetic Devotion in the Italian Renaissance Holy Lands: Simming and the Production of Empathy at Varallo and San Vivaldo,” in Aesthetic Theology in the Franciscan Tradition, ed. Xavier Seubert and Oleg Bychkov (New York: Routledge, 2020). Terry-Fritsch, “Performing the Renaissance Body,” 127–128.

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2 Activation In the introduction to her critical history of installation art, Claire Bishop argued that “installation art presupposes an embodied viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened as their sense of vision. This insistence on the literal presence of the viewer is arguably the key characteristic of installation art.”31 By approaching the artistic environment as a space to be explored by the live, sentient viewer, installation artists construct scenarios for viewer experience. Scenarios, according to the performance theorist Diana Taylor, are “simultaneously setup and action”; they are “formulaic structures that predispose certain outcomes and yet allow for reversal, parody, and change.”32 When a viewer enters into an installation, he or she is given a range of possibilities for action and behaviour, which ultimately structures the viewer’s experience of the work. The space of the environment—its physical construction as well as its mediated representations—places certain controls on the viewer’s body that, more or less, determine certain outcomes although they still are flexible enough to allow for non-prescribed actions and responses to it. In other words, the material elements of the installation offer what Michel de Certeau has called “strategies” to the viewer on how to navigate the space and, through “tactics”, or embodied, participatory actions and behaviours, the viewer practices the place either according to an idealised scenario or by some other means.33 As a literal presence incorporated into the work of art, the embodied viewer ultimately determines the installation’s meaning. The physical immersion of the viewer and the time-based exploration of space that occurs as a result is connected to the self-conscious activation of the viewer. Bishop explains that the experience of installation art is distinguished from the experience of viewing other forms of traditional art, such as painting and sculpture, since installations are contingent “on sensory immediacy, on physical participation (the viewer must walk into and around the work), and on a heightened awareness of other visitors who become part of the piece. Many artists and critics have argued that this need to move around and through the work in order to experience it activates the viewer, in contrast to art that simply requires optical contemplation.”34 Activation, in this sense, 31 Bishop, Installation Art, 6. 32 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 28, 31. 33 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: ­University of California Press, 1984), 115–117. 34 Bishop, Installation Art, 11.

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refers to the self-conscious manipulation of the viewer’s body and mind in relation to the work of art; such mindful actions encourage the formulation of deeply personalised knowledge of the self as a participant within the situation of the installation. At the Sacro Monte di Varallo, pilgrims were conditioned for deeply personalised knowledge production from the moment they arrived at the site. Before they ascended the path to the Holy Land at the top of the mountain, pilgrims first stopped at the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie at the base for spiritual purification.35 With the aid of Observant Franciscan friars, pilgrims performed devotional exercises before Gaudenzio Ferrari’s frescoed tramezzo (choir screen) that encouraged them to engage with their senses as a means of forming an embodied relationship to the biblical past (Figure 8.4).36 According to the printed guidebook of the site, pilgrims were to approach to the holy places on the mountain with a “devoted heart” (cor deuoto).37 This affective framing was iterated at each step of the journey across the pilgrimage landscape through the attendant narration of the Franciscan guides. Franciscan devotional ­practices—promoted by Saint Francis himself and developed by his followers from Bonaventure in the thirteenth century to the popular preachers, such as Fra Bernardino Caimi, of the fifteenth century—­encouraged the active physical and emotional participation of a believer in Jesus’s life and death.38 The desire to see and feel as Jesus once did inspired meditations on his sensuous history that included vivid reconstructions of settings and details from everyday life.39 The imaginative reconstruction of Jesus’s material experience allowed devotees to translate their own lived experiences onto his and become emplaced in the biblical narrative. The chapels of the Sacro Monte literalised these visual reconstructions in the form of multimedia, immersive installations. Pilgrims did not stand outside of the representations of the events of 35

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See the transcription from the original anonymous guide, published by Gottardo da Ponte in Milan in 1514, in Alberto Durio, “Il Santuario di Varallo secondo uno sconosciuto ­cimelio bibliografico del 1514,” in Questi sono li misteri che sono sopra el Monte de Varalle, in una “Guida” poetica del 1514, ed. Stefania Stefani Perrone (Varallo: Società per la conservazione delle opere d’arte e dei monumenti in Valsesia, 1987), 24; Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” 289. While the church was built contemporaneously with the first three chapels on the mountain, Gaudenzio Ferrari’s frescoed wall was completed in 1513. The date is recorded within the tondo painted on the lower left side of the wall: “1513. GAVDTIVS. FERRARVS. VALLIS. SICCIDE. PINXIT.” Durio, “Il Santuario di Varallo,” 24; Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” 289. Nova, “‘Popular’ Art,” 116–117. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, Meditations on the Life of Christ. An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS. Ital. 115 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

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Figure 8.4 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Scenes from the Life of Christ, 1513. Fresco. Varallo, Santa Maria delle Grazie © Public domain

Jesus’s life, but rather entered physically into them and became part of the scene. The firsthand exploration of the Holy Land sites—walking into and around the sacred spaces—activated the pilgrims as integral to their scenes. Beyond the devotional narration of the Franciscan guides, further affective prompts for pilgrims were embedded into each of the chapels’ decoration to encourage pilgrims to form empathetic responses through seeing and feeling material stuff.40 As will be discussed more fully below, the multimedia, immersive installations heightened pilgrims’ awareness of the space itself. The alternating scale of the chapels—some, like the Procession of the Magi and the Crucifixion, are monumental, while others, such as the Nativity, Adoration of the Shepherds, and Holy Sepulchre, are intimate—forced pilgrims to continually renegotiate their bodies within the internal logic of each program. In the monumental chapels, frescoes stretch from the highest point of the ceiling to the lowest sections of the curved walls, encompassing the pilgrim within dioramic scenes. Architectural confinement, as seen for example in the low-vaulted vestibule 40

Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality. An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011).

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Figure 8.5 Visitor entering the Holy Sepulcher. Varallo, Sacro Monte © Stefan Fritsch

and diminutive doorway of the Holy Sepulchre, forced pilgrims to explore the spaces with their hands and knees (Figure 8.5). These shifting spatial contexts provided different means for coming to know the sacred sites in relation to the pilgrim’s own body, which was mobile and open to sensory stimulation. In addition to daytime exploration of the Sacro Monte, pilgrims were brought into the chapels at night, which altered the phenomenological conditions of the experience in significant ways.41 As pilgrims made progress through the spaces of the chapels with hand-held torches, their bodily movements directly impacted their perception of the holy places. The flickering light cast across the faces and bodies of the sculpted and painted bodies of the rooms was ­contingent on human intervention; whether a Franciscan guide who used the light to highlight a particular feature or a pilgrim who wielded the torch as a means of discovery, the artistic programs only came alive through the agency of those living, breathing bodies who navigated the space. In these nighttime devotional exercises, the immersive installations heightened awareness of the self as a perceiving subject. As much as the sculptures and paintings were given realistic form, their stillness—their literal inability 41

Hood, “The Sacro Monte of Varallo,” 301–302; Nova, “‘Popular’ Art,” 115.

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to move—cast attention on the pilgrim’s own body as a breathing, moving, and perceiving subject that controlled the experience. 3

Self-Referential Politics of Space

Fra Caimi’s plan for the Sacro Monte was contingent on the transposition of the Holy Land and its sacred markers to Varallo through formal and spatial imitation. His selection of the location for the pilgrimage site was connected to a miraculous revelation: apparently, after having searched in vain for an ­appropriate site, Caimi finally approached Varallo, where “he had hardly got there before he felt himself rapt into an ecstasy, in the which he was drawn towards the Sacro Monte.”42 Once Caimi reached the top of the mountain, “at once its marvelous resemblance to Jerusalem” was revealed, and the friar “threw himself on the ground and thanked God in a transport of delight.”43 After work had begun on the first chapel on the mountain—the Holy ­Sepulchre—­workers uncovered a monolith that “in all ways [was] similar to the stone that covered the sepulcher of Jesus in Jerusalem.”44 Further miraculous interventions occurred to reveal the site’s suitability for the construction of a simulated Holy Land, including the discovery of a spring and the sudden splitting of the rock upon which Mount Calvary was designated, which made it similar to that in Jerusalem.45 These material revelations of the mountain’s connections to the real Holy Land endowed the landscape with a substitutive sacrality that assured pilgrims of its legitimacy; the repeated insistence of this doubling drew attention to the site-specificity of the installations arranged across the Franciscan campus. The works responded directly to the venue and could not be relocated without losing their meaning.46 Indeed, while the relational distance between each chapel was measured to ensure their fidelity to the Holy Land original, just as in other forms of virtual pilgrimage that developed in Europe during the

42 Butler, Ex Voto, 37–38. Several interconnected myth origins have developed around ­Caimi’s selection of the site, including a miraculous dream, the intervention of singing birds, and the ecstatic pull of the site; see Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” 110. 43 Butler, Ex Voto, 37–38. 44 On the use of these material findings to justify the selection of site, see Terry-Fritsch, “Performing the Renaissance Body,” 114. 45 Pier Giorgio Longo, “Fonti documentarie sui francescani a Varallo tra XV e XVI secolo,” Quaderno di Studio 5 (1987): 63. Apparently, Caimi had looked at, but rejected, other sites in the region because of their lack of water sources; Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in ­Hyperreality,” 110. 46 Bishop, Installation Art, 57.

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later Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Franciscan assertion of the divinity of the land itself elevated Varallo’s profile as a sacred site.47 Caimi’s selection of the site for the Sacro Monte, nestled in the centre of the Valsesia region and above the town of Varallo, held political purchase for both the Franciscans and the Duke of Milan at the end of the fifteenth century.48 Although the region was economically depressed for a variety of reasons— including volatile political struggles to control the area, poor farming soil, and a continual drain of the population to more prosperous cities—it was nonetheless located at an important crossroads between the eastern and western cities of the northern peninsula and the regions north of the Alps, which were accessible through passes through the mountains at Cremosina, Colma, and Crevacuore.49 Observant Franciscans from Milan were active in preaching missions and the establishment of new religious houses across the region during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and Caimi himself was sent to the Valsesia in 1482 on a preaching crusade for Pope Sixtus IV, which resulted in the collection of war funds that were ultimately turned over to the Duke of Milan in 1484.50 Caimi held close ties to the Sforza family both in his role as Vicar of Milan and, more personally, as the spiritual advisor and confessor of Ludovico Sforza’s wife, Beatrice d’Este, from the early 1480s until her death.51 Documentary evidence reveals that Caimi was in continual correspondence with the Sforza during his foundation of the Sacro Monte and their letters often refer to the Milanese desire to use the control of the Valsesia as a means to both ensure the security of the borders and maintain ducal authority.52 In this context, it is worth revisiting Morone’s claim that the location of the Sacro Monte di Varallo was ‘superior’ to any of the ancient places, since he himself was tied politically with the Duchy since birth.53 After the completion of his law degree in Pavia, Morone filled a number of administrative positions in the Sforza court, 47 48 49 50 51 52

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Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late ­Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). For an in-depth account of the region’s resources and political dimensions, see Federico Tonetti, Storia della Vallesesia e dell’Alto Novarese. Con note e documenti (Varallo: Fratelli Colleoni, 1875), 394–402. Ibid., 113. Paolo Maria Sevesi, “Il Bernardino Caimi da Milano predicatore della crociata,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum XIX (1926). Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” 106. For the letters, see Pier Giorgio Longo, “Alle origini del Sacro Monte di Varallo: la proposta religiosa di Bernardino Caimi,” Novarien, no. 14 (1984): 27; Emilio Motta, Il beato ­Bernardino Caimi fondatore del Sacro Monte di Varallo. Documenti e lettere inedite (Milano: Bortolotti dei Fratelli Rivata, 1891), 17–25. When Morone was born in 1470, his father was the ducal secretary.

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including fiscal lawyer to Ludovico Sforza, until the French assumed control of the city-state and he switched allegiances.54 By exclaiming that the Sacro Monte surpassed Rome, and even Jerusalem itself, Morone invested the site with legitimacy and importance. While fulfilling a ducal desire to establish a permanent ducal presence in the area, the Franciscan occupation of the Sacro Monte di Varallo was also advantageous for the friars themselves, who, although in command of the principle Christian sites of the Holy Land since 1327, suffered from the increased Ottoman authority throughout the terra sancta.55 By the end of the fifteenth century, pilgrimage to Jerusalem was known as a difficult, expensive, and dangerous endeavour.56 The construction of an alternate Holy Land at a location that could be reached in just two-days-time from Milan allowed for the expansion of the Franciscans’ authority and spiritual mission on a local level. By self-consciously mapping Jerusalem and Bethlehem onto ­Varallese soil, ­Franciscans used pilgrimage locomotion as the central strategy by which the site was authenticated as an authoritative substitute. After his visit in 1507, Morone described how “my guide told me that the distances between these chapels and the structures in which the events are reproduced correspond exactly to the originals.” 57 Through the guides’ iteration of the fidelity of the pathways and architectural plans to Holy Land originals, pilgrims were given access to the firsthand knowledge that Franciscans had in their role as ­custodians of the faith. Whereas certain chapels, such as the Holy Sepulchre and the Sepulchre of the Virgin, included inscriptions that attested to the similitude of the originals, the Grotto of Bethlehem expressed this through the imitation of the spatial praxis of the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.58 The architectural c­ omplex was set at a geographic distance from the holy places of Jerusalem at the top 54 55

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His travel to Varallo in 1507 was part of a diplomatic mission to Valsesia for King Louis XII. These included the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and from 1333, the Cenacle on Mount Sion, Chapel of the Holy Spirit, Chapel of Saint Thomas the Apostle, and the Holy Sepulchre. On the Franciscan custodianship of the holy sites, see Leonhard Lemmens, Die Franziskaner im Heiligen Lande. Die Franziskaner auf dem Sion (1336–1551) (Münster: Aschendorff). For an analysis of the political and economic impact of Ottoman occupation, see ­Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, 97–143. Müller and Promis, Lettere ed orazioni latine di Girolamo Morone, 150–152. The inscription placed within the vestibule of the Holy Sepulchre, above the small door leading into the burial chamber, reads “SIMILE E IL SANTO SEPOLCRO DE YESU XRISTO,” while the inscription within the Sepulchre of the Virgin proclaims, “QUESTO S.TO SEPOLCRO DELLA VERGINE È TUTTO SIMILE A QUELLO IN GEETHSEMA DI GIERUSALEMME COSI VIEN CERTIFICATIO DA MOLTI FEDELI CHE HANNO VISITATO QUELLI LUOGHI

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of the mountain to iterate its status as Bethlehem on the Franciscan landscape. Caimi and his followers that developed the Grotto of Bethlehem had first-hand knowledge of the original site and its attendant pilgrim traditions and thus used their religious authority to assure pilgrims of Varallo’s faithful reproduction.59 The claim was backed by the material manufacture of the space: the carved stone walls of the inner chamber that features the Nativity emulated the grotto in Bethlehem, and the interconnected spaces dedicated to the Procession of the Magi, the Manger, and Circumcision were arranged topomimetically to the original. Pilgrims who read the printed guidebook to Varallo were reminded clearly that the architectural complex, like the others arranged across the holy mountain, was similar to the one encountered by pilgrims to the real Holy Land. By practicing the place, pilgrims fulfilled their own Holy Land devotion; at the same time, however, their bodies, visualised in this practice and recorded in ex voto left on the altars and graffiti on the walls of the chapels, became the conduit by which others came to know the site and understand the Franciscans’ sacred authority. 4 De-centering Traditionally characterised by structural attributes of linear direction of vision, planar expression of form, closed composition, and absolute clarity of the s­ ubject, the High Renaissance style has become a touchstone for the philosophical consideration of a newly self-aware and reflexive viewer, who is given a privileged position at the centre of the image.60 In this teleological conception of style, most influentially expressed by Erwin Panofsky in the 1920s, the three-dimensional representation of bodies in space extends the real ­conditions of the viewer into the fictive world of the image as though it were a continuum of space, a window through which to view.61 Through

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SANTI.” On the fidelity of the Grotto of Bethlehem at Varallo with the original, see ­Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, 136–137. An Observant Franciscan friar designated as “frate Francesco, maestro di legname,” ­identified as Francesco da Merignano, assumed the artistic direction of the Sacro Monte after Caimi’s death. He, too, had firsthand knowledge of the Holy Land; Nova, “‘Popular’ Art,” 15; Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” 133–134. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 14–16. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991); originally published as “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form,’” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg IV (1924–1925): 258–330. For a critique of Panofsky’s conception of

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a fixed position outside the image, the viewer perceives the spatial logic of the representation through his or her ocular sensibilities and, in so doing, is emplaced within its subject. Yet, as recent scholarship has highlighted and this essay has emphasised, early sixteenth-century pilgrims to the Sacro Monte di Varallo were activated as literal presences within its spaces and used their full-sensorial capacities to explore and appreciate their artistic programs.62 To understand style at Varallo, one must view the installations from the inside out.63 The decoration was designed to construct an emphatically de-centred and destabilised viewing experience, which allowed for the formulation of first-hand, personalised memories.64 Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Crucifixion, often cited as his greatest achievement on the Sacro Monte, is presented regularly in art-historical photographs as a stable, centred composition organised on a frontal view of Jesus’s body on the cross (Figure 8.6). However, the decoration of the room—a monumental space featuring 36 life-size sculptures and frescoes that stretch across the curved walls and ceiling in 360 degrees—was not designed to be experienced from a distance nor from only one point of view (Figure 8.7). Rather, the installation anticipated mobile viewers who were expected to traverse the immersive space from its entrance on the far-right side of the room to the exit at the far left.65 Within the time-based experience of the chapel, a pilgrim was never

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the Raumkasten (space-box) in relation to the experience of the live beholder in space, see Christopher R. Lakey, “From Place to Space: ‘Raumkästen’ and the Moving Spectator in Medieval Italian Art,” in The Public in the Picture: Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine and Western Medieval and Renaissance Art, ed. Beate Fricke and Urte Krass (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2015). Indeed, one of the primary efforts of art-historical research in recent decades has been to reconcile Varallo’s artistic differences with canonical High Renaissance works by drawing attention to the influence of local tastes and the larger category of popular art, including theatre, on its design and forms. See Hood, “The Sacro Monte of Varallo,” 295; Nova, “‘­Popular’ Art,” 113–127; Lasansky, “Body Elision,” 249–272. As Julie Reiss has remarked, viewer participation “is so integral to Installation art that without having the experience of being in the piece, analysis of Installation is difficult”; Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), xiv. This is the central premise of my recently published book, Terry-Fritsch, Somaesthetic Experience, mentioned further above. As Bishop has argued, de-centring the viewer experience is one of the central components of installation art, which aimed to disrupt the traditional hierarchical relationship constructed between viewer and image in the Western tradition; see Bishop, Installation Art, 11–13. Nova, “‘Popular’ Art,” 121.

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Figure 8.6 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Crucifixion (Mount Calvary), 1528. Polychrome wood and terracotta, horsehair, metal, plaster, stone, fresco. Varallo, Sacro Monte © Public domain

Figure 8.7 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Crucifixion (Mount Calvary) (oblique view from the right side of chapel), 1528. Polychrome wood and terracotta, horsehair, metal, plaster, stone, fresco. Varallo, Sacro Monte © Stefan Fritsch

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afforded a complete view of the artistic program: the viewer had to physically move and shift perspectives in order to see the individual elements.66 The intricately carved and painted sculptures that populate the semicircular, rocky platform of the room, as well as the crowds of onlookers that press forward to the foreground of the walls on all sides, provided affective prompts for empathetic emplacement within the scene as the pilgrim moved freely through the space. Even though the decoration of the chapel was not complete when the 1514 guidebook was published, it still tells the pilgrim that “you will cry” (piangerai) to see Jesus on the cross; this exhortation to shed tears was made even more explicit after 1528 through the visual prompts of the decoration and the verbal prompts of Franciscan prayers.67 Through self-conscious ambulation and imaginative reconstruction, fostered by the Franciscan guides in the room, pilgrims gained shifting perspectives on the Crucifixion by accessing the mental and bodily positions of biblical witnesses. From the entrance, the pilgrim was aligned diagonally with Jesus’s crucified body, raised upon his wooden T-shaped cross between the two thieves and set to the left of the ­chapel.68 Situated within the curved left corner of the room, the three crucified bodies were given spatial context through the use of wall paintings that feature a continuous throng of witnesses on horseback and foot in the lower third and the dramatic juxtaposition of white clouds against a brilliant blue sky in the upper walls and ceiling. The wall behind Jesus begins to curve inwards and upwards just above his head, giving the illusion that the frescoed angels on the ceiling of the room actually hover above the scene. Likewise, the wall behind the body of the thief to the right of Jesus, at the far-left edge of the room, bends sharply to the left to visually suggest the sculpted bodies on display were part of a scene that extended into real space beyond, an illusion heightened in the original torch- and candlelit conditions of the room. Nearest to the entrance on the pilgrim’s immediate right, a sculptural group of the swooning Virgin Mother supported by two women provided a model of affective piety to approach the scene (Figure 8.8). With a furrowed brow and sorrow etched onto her face, Mary fixes her gaze on her dying son and stretches her arms outward from her body in emulation of Jesus’s splayed arms on the cross. On either side of her, the sculptures of the women echo the Virgin’s grief, which is expressed performatively through their red, tear-filled eyes. As Carla 66 67 68

Hood, “The Sacro Monte of Varallo,” 294. Durio, “Il Santuario di Varallo,” 29; Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” 294. Pierluigi De Vecchi, “Annotazioni sul Calvario del Sacro Monte di Varallo,” in Fra Rinascimento, manierismo e realtà: scritti di storia dell’arte in memoria di Anna Maria Brizio, ed. Pietro C. Marani (Firenze: Giunti Barbèra, 1984), 113.

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Figure 8.8 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Swooning Madonna (detail from Crucifixion), 1528. Polychrome wood and terracotta, horsehair, metal, plaster, stone, fresco. Varallo, Sacro Monte © Stephen J. Campbell

Bino has examined, “since the twelfth century, the tears of the mother were an unavoidable episode of the story and became an emotional cornerstone…. The weeping of Mary [is] the dramatic key which moves the perceptual scheme from ‘seeing’ to ‘feeling.’”69 Within the space of the chapel, the pilgrim both saw and felt the Virgin’s pain through first-hand emplacement in her shoes. The oblique view of the scene offered from Mary’s position on the far-right side of the room included the other figures gathered beneath the cross, as well as a mother who clutches a baby to her bosom and Roman sentries who crouch to play dice and divide Jesus’s garments. The maternal instinct to protect children from the harm inflicted by these unbelievers was repeated throughout the room in the form of painted women with children held close to their bodies.70 Indeed, behind Mary’s right shoulder is painted a mother with a chubby 69 70

Carla Bino, “‘I Feel You’: Using the Mother’s Gaze to see Beyond Otherness,” C ­ omunicazioni sociali 2 (2018): 236. The maternal gesture contrasts with the pointing gesture wielded by men in certain northern European paintings of the passion; see Mitchell B. Merback, “Torture and Teaching: The Reception of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Martyrdom of the Twelve Apostles in the Protestant Era,” Art Journal 57, no. 1 (1998).

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baby in her arms; the contrast with the Virgin Mother, who must let her own child die in order to achieve the salvation of all men, is explicit. While prayers in honour of Mary were recited throughout the pilgrim’s journey through the Sacro Monte, here, in the chapel of the Crucifixion, Franciscan guides narrated the Virgin’s anguish and heroic sacrifice, which could be used by pilgrims as a means of transformation. Francis and his followers asserted that Jesus’s passion (passio) was matched by Mary’s compassion (compassio); the wounds Jesus suffered to his body, she suffered to her heart.71 According to Bonaventure from Bagnoregio, Mary’s compassio under the cross “transformed [her] into the likeness of Christ”, since “the power of love transforms the lover into an image of the beloved.”72 Pietro di ­Giovanni Olivi, Bonaventure’s pupil, argued Mary was “crucified with Christ”, a ­doubling that became a frequent strategy in Franciscan affective devotional practices to explore the Virgin Mother’s critical role in the passion.73 Accessing the scene of Crucifixion through her “maternal affectus”, literally seeing the pain that Jesus suffered and that she echoed in her own mental and physical anguish with what Francis has called “bodily eyes”, pilgrims completed the scene according to her affective state with the goal of compassionate love that was felt in the body.74 Pilgrims who knelt at the base of the cross to touch the relics gathered there were placed in direct visual communication with Jesus’s battered body (­Figure 8.9). The bright red lash wounds that crisscross his arms, chest, and legs reminded pilgrims of his full-bodied suffering, offered for their salvation; 71

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On Mary as co-redeemer in Franciscan theology and art, see Otto G. von Simson, “­Compassio and Co-redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 1 (1953); Harvey E. Hamburgh, “The Problem of Lo Spasimo of the Virgin in Cinquecento Paintings of the Descent from the Cross,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 12, no. 4 (1981). For a Marian analysis of the Sacro Monte di Varallo and the Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo, see Terry-Fritsch, “Franciscan Art.” Bonaventura da Bagnoregio, Opera omnia, 10 vols. (Quaracchi: Typographia Collegi S. Bonaventurae, 1891), 5:695, quoted in von Simson, “Compassio and Co-redemptio,” 13. Hamburgh, “The Problem of Lo Spasimo of the Virgin in Cinquecento Paintings of the Descent from the Cross,” 55–56. I borrow the term “maternal affectus” from Carla Bino, who considers it a form of representation that touches the viewer and allows him to touch; Bino, “‘I Feel You,’” 235–245. According to Francis’s first biographer, Tommaso da Celano, Francis was inspired by his visit to the site of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem and desired “to enact the memory of that babe who was born in Bethlehem: to see as much as is possible with my own bodily eyes the discomfort of his infant needs, how he lay in a manger, and how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he rested on hay”; Tommaso da Celano, “The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi,” in The Saint. Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York: New York Press, 1999), 1:255.

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Figure 8.9 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Crucifixion (detail of Crucified Christ), 1528. Polychrome wood and terracotta, horsehair, metal, plaster, stone, fresco. Varallo, Sacro Monte © Public domain

this impression would have had even more dramatic impact in the candleand torchlight of night devotions, which would enhance the contrast between his pale painted flesh and bloody wounds. Whereas at the holy site of Mount Calvary in Jerusalem, pilgrims venerated the socket hole where the cross once stood—they would place their faces over the hole and explore it with their fingers and hands in return for an indulgence—at Varallo, they were literally

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emplaced within the scene.75 No longer just conjuring his suffering on the cross through imaginative meditation, but rather living through the ­experience of it, the pilgrim was placed into an ethical position in relation to the crowds of ­fictive witnesses gathered on all sides of the room as well as the Franciscan guide and other pilgrims in the room. Cast both as participants in the drama of the scene as well as models of contemporary devotional behaviour, pilgrims wept, knelt, processed, touched, and prayed to demonstrate their affective piety and feel passionately. Likewise, in the interconnected chapels of the Grotto of Bethlehem, the decoration was never intended to be seen from just one point of view, but rather was designed to accommodate the ambulatory movements of pilgrims, who were situated in a variety of affective relations to the scenes ­represented.76 A pilgrim accessed the grotto by a steep path that descended through the wooded landscape and entered into the chapel representing the Procession of the Magi (Figure 8.10). Completed in the late 1520s, the installation immersed pilgrims into a massive, dioramic space decorated with wall murals and life-size sculptures of the magi’s retinue. Arranged like the installation of the Crucifixion, with the pilgrim entrance on one side of the room and the exit on the other, the scene was composed for pilgrims to practice the place and thereby activate its subject. That is to say, the pilgrims were enfolded into the procession as literal presences; they did not stand outside the representation, but rather used their bodies to enact the procession the scene purports to visualise. Indeed, while the three magi and their attendants were suspended in motion, the pilgrims who moved through the space and exited the door into the grotto of the Nativity realised the installation’s full potential.77 When pilgrims walked through the small door at the far-right side of the room, they were positioned in the role of the first witnesses of Jesus in the Nativity (Figure 8.11). Set into a small niche within the stone wall directly opposite the entrance, painted terracotta sculptures of Mary and Joseph kneel 75 76

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In addition to the indulgences that were rewarded as a consequence, pilgrims claimed that a “sweet scent” issued forth from the hole and refreshed and healed them; see Felix Fabri, The Wanderings of Felix Fabri, 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1971), 1:365. While the building was included in the itinerary provided in 1514 in the first guidebook, work to expand and decorate the architectural complex extended through the late 1520s, when Gaudenzio Ferrari completed the chapel dedicated to the Procession of the Magi. Apparently, the original funding for the project was reallocated to Milan and thus caused the delay; see Panzanelli, “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality,” 196. Butler lamented the placement of the star in the grotto, not in the space of the Magi chapel itself, yet this is because he doesn’t acknowledge the mobile spectatorship of the pilgrims in space; Butler, Ex Voto, 150.

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Figure 8.10 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Procession of the Magi (view of the exit door), 1528. Polychrome terracotta, horsehair, metal, leather, plaster, stone, fresco. Varallo, Sacro Monte di Varallo © Stefan Fritsch

beside the manger and provide a devotional frame to Jesus’s infant body. As pilgrims approached the Holy Family with the embodied memory of the recent procession, they were brought into a performative relationship with the sculptures. Jesus’s small body, tangibly presented in the colours and form of life, was displayed on a slightly inclined board, with the soles of his small feet

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Figure 8.11 Gaudenzio Ferrari, Nativity, after 1514. Polychrome terracotta. Varallo, Sacro Monte © Stefan Fritsch

facing the viewer.78 Poised to kiss the foot of Jesus, the pilgrim enacted the scene of ­legitimisation that occurred when the magi arrived at the manger and acknowledged his authority.79 This identity position was reinforced through Franciscan prayers, which like Pseudo-Bonaventure, encouraged pilgrims to “kiss the beautiful feet of the infant Jesus who lies in the manger and beg His mother to offer to let you hold Him a while. Pick Him up and hold Him in your arms. Gaze on His face with devotion and reverently kiss Him and delight in Him.”80 Sensuous engagement—seeing and feeling Jesus in the Nativity— allowed pilgrims to enfold real time with sacred time. Their devotional performance in the grotto enacted a personalised biblical history that drew attention to the pilgrim’s body as the generative locus of devotion. By seeing Jesus on the cross through the Virgin’s eyes or walking in procession as one of the magi, pilgrims to Varallo enacted sacred history while 78 79 80

On polychromy and the “real”, see The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008). Richard C. Trexler, The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story (­Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Ragusa and Green, Meditations on the Life of Christ, 38.

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fulfilling Holy Land pilgrimage. Their ability to enter into the decorated spaces of the holy mountain and simultaneously inhabit the identity positions of biblical figures and pilgrims to the real Holy Land, as well as their own, promoted an experiential understanding of the divine that bound together past and present through performance. The shifting perspective of pilgrims within the immersive installations de-centred their experience and allowed for the construction of polyvalent memories of biblical events and geographic locations that were, in reality, distantly inaccessible. 5 Conclusion This essay has focused on pilgrim performance at the Sacro Monte di Varallo to elucidate the role of theatre in the artistic program of the early sixteenth century. While scholarship on Gaudenzio Ferrari’s decorated chapels has relied on terminology from the theatre to describe the sculptures as actors frozen in a moment of performance for a spectating audience, this essay has attempted to demonstrate the living quality of the decoration in relation to the process of viewing, which was marked by duration and contingent on the pilgrim’s participatory presence. The activation and de-centring of the pilgrim within the site-specific, multimedia, immersive installations fostered an embodied knowledge of Jesus and the saints, the Holy Land, and Varallo itself. In other words, it was the living pilgrim who performed the Bible and practiced the place, not the sculptures. Bibliography Bacci, Michele. “Performed Topographies and Topomimetic Piety. Imaginative Sacred Spaces in Medieval Italy.” In Spatial Icons Performativity in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, edited by Aleksej Lidov, 101–18. Moskva: Indrik, 2017. Bell, Margaret F. “Image as Relic: Bodily Vision and the Reconstitution of Viewer/Image Relationships at the Sacro Monte di Varallo.” California Italian Studies 5, no. 1 (2015): 303–31. Bino, Carla. “‘I Feel You’: Using the Mother’s Gaze to see Beyond Otherness.” Comunicazioni sociali 2 (2018): 235–45. Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critical History. New York: Routledge, 2005. Brizio, Anna Maria. “Configurazione del Sacro Monte di Varallo nel 1514.” Bollettino della Società Piemontese di Archeologia e Belle Arti 8, no. 11 (1954–1957): 7–11. Butler, Samuel. Ex Voto. London: J. Cape, 1928.

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Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality. An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2011. Calufetti, Abele. “I vicari provinciali dei Frati Minori della Regolare Osservanza di Milano dal 1428 al 1517.” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 72 (1979): 3–36. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. ­Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present. Edited by ­Roberta Panzanelli. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. De Vecchi, Pierluigi. “Annotazioni sul Calvario del Sacro Monte di Varallo.” In Fra Rinascimento, manierismo e realtà: scritti di storia dell’arte in memoria di Anna Maria Brizio, edited by Pietro C. Marani, 109–18. Firenze: Giunti Barbèra, 1984. Debiaggi, Casimiro. “Sui cinque secoli del Sacro Monte. Genesi del centenario. ­Conferma dell’atto di Fondazione 1486.” Sacro Monte di Varallo Sesia. Quaderno di Studio 4 (1986): 20–21. Durio, Alberto. “Il Santuario di Varallo secondo uno sconosciuto cimelio bibliografico del 1514.” In Questi sono li misteri che sono sopra el Monte de Varalle, in una “Guida” poetica del 1514, edited by Stefania Stefani Perrone, 7–43. Varallo: Società per la ­conservazione delle opere d’arte e dei monumenti in Valsesia, 1987. Fabri, Felix. The Wanderings of Felix Fabri. 2 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1971. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Galloni, Pietro. Sacro Monte di Varallo. Varallo: Camaschella & Zanfa, 1909. Gill, Rebecca. “Galeazzo Alessi and the Redevelopment of the Sacro Monte di Varallo in Tridentine Italy.” In AID Monuments: conoscere progettare ricostruire. Galeazzo Alessi architetto-ingegnere, edited by Claudia Conforti and Vittorio Gusella, 101–13. Roma: Aracne, 2013. Göttler, Christine. “The Temptation of the Senses at the Sacro Monte di Varallo.” In ­Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, edited by Wietse de Boer and ­Christine Göttler, 393–451. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Hamburgh, Harvey E. “The Problem of Lo Spasimo of the Virgin in Cinquecento Paintings of the Descent from the Cross.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 12, no. 4 (1981): 45–75. Hood, William. “The Sacro Monte of Varallo: Renaissance Art and Popular Religion.” In Monasticism and the arts, edited by Timothy Verdon, 291–311. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984. I Sacri Monti: bibliografia italiana. Edited by Pier Giorgio Longo and Danilo Zardin. Ponzano Monferrato: ATLAS, Centro di Documentazione dei Sacri Monti, Calvari e Complessi devozionali europei, 2010. Lakey, Christopher R. “From Place to Space: ‘Raumkästen’ and the Moving Spectator in Medieval Italian Art.” In The Public in the Picture: Involving the Beholder in Antique,

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Islamic, Byzantine and Western Medieval and Renaissance Art, edited by Beate Fricke and Urte Krass, 113–36. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2015. Lasansky, Diana Medina. “Beyond the Guidebook: Edith Wharton’s Rediscovery of San Vivaldo.” In Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, edited by Meredith Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando, 132–65. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. Lasansky, Diana Medina. “Body Elision: Acting Out the Passion at the Italian ‘Sacri Monti.’” In The Body in Early Modern Italy, edited by Julia L. Hairston and Stephens Walter, 249–73. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Lasansky, Diana Medina. “The ‘Catholic Grotesque’ at the Sacro Monte of Varallo: The Protestant Aversion to a Graphic Space during the Late 19th and Early 20th ­Centuries.” The Senses and Society 12, no. 3 (2017): 317–32. Lasansky, Diana Medina. “Sacred Graffiti.” In The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated, edited by Diana Medina Lasansky, 214–33. New York: Periscope, 2014. Leatherbarrow, David. “The Image and Its Setting: A Study of the Sacro Monte at ­Varallo.” Anthropology and Aesthetics 14 (1987): 107–22. Lemmens, Leonhard. Die Franziskaner im Heiligen Lande. Die Franziskaner auf dem Sion (1336–1551). Münster: Aschendorff. Longo, Pier Giorgio. “Alle origini del Sacro Monte di Varallo: la proposta religiosa di Bernardino Caimi.” Novarien 14 (1984): 19–98. Longo, Pier Giorgio. “Fonti documentarie sui francescani a Varallo tra XV e XVI secolo.” Quaderno di Studio 5 (1987): 29–108. Longo, Pier Giorgio. “‘Hic Loco visitando’: temi e forme del pellegrinaggio ai Misteri del Monte de Varalle nella ‘Guida’ del 1514.” In Questi sono li misteri che sono sopra el Monte de Varalle, in una “Guida” poetica del 1514, edited by Stefania Stefani Perrone, 110–20. Varallo: Società per la conservazione delle opere d’arte e dei monumenti in Valsesia, 1987. McCrackan, William Denison. The Spell Italian Lakes Being the Record of Pilgrimages to Familiar and Unfamiliar Places of the “Lakes of Azure, Lakes of Leisure,” Together with a Description of their Quaint Towns and Villa Gardens and the Treasures of their Art and History. Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1907. Merback, Mitchell B. “Torture and Teaching: The Reception of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Martyrdom of the Twelve Apostles in the Protestant Era.” Art Journal 57, no. 1 (1998): 14–23. Miedema, Nine Robijntje. “Following in the Footsteps of Christ: Pilgrimage and Passion Devotion.” In The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, edited by Alasdair A. MacDonald, Bernhard Ridderboas, and Rita M. Schlusemann, 73–92. Groningen: Forsten, 1998. Motta, Emilio. Il beato Bernardino Caimi fondatore del Sacro Monte di Varallo. ­Documenti e lettere inedite. Milano: Bortolotti dei Fratelli Rivata, 1891.

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Müller, Giuseppe, and Domenico Promis. Lettere ed orazioni latine di Girolamo Morone. Miscellanea di Storia Italiana. Torino: Stamperia Reale, 1863. Nova, Alessandro. “‘Popular’ Art in Renaissance Italy: Early Response to the Holy ­Mountain at Varallo.” In Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, edited by Claire J. Farago, 113–26. New Haven: Yale ­University Press, 1995. Panofsky, Erwin. “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form.’” Vorträge der Bibliothek W­arburg 4 (1924–1925): 258–354. Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Panzanelli, Roberta. “It’s About Time: Gaudenzio’s bel composto at Varallo.” California Italian Studies 6, no. 2 (2016). Panzanelli, Roberta. “Pilgrimage in Hyperreality: Images and Imagination in the Early Phase of the ‘New Jerusalem’ at Varallo (1486–1530).” PhD diss., University of ­California, Los Angeles, 2014. Peters, Francis E. Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of the Modern Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Ragusa, Isa, and Rosalie B. Green. Meditations on the Life of Christ. An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS. Ital. 115. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Reiss, Julie H. From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Ritsema van Eck, Marianne. “Graffiti in Medieval and Early Modern Religious Spaces: Illicit or Accepted Practice?” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 131, no. 1 (2018): 51–72. Rudy, Kathryn M. Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Salsa, Agostino M. Biografia del beato Bernardino Caimi, fondatore del Sacro Monte di Varallo Sesia. Varallo Sesia: Unione Tipografica Valsesiana, 1928. Sevesi, Paolo Maria. “Il Bernardino Caimi da Milano predicatore della crociata.” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 19 (1926): 297–300. Shearman, John K. G. Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Terry-Fritsch, Allie. “Franciscan Art and Somaesthetic Devotion in the Italian ­Renaissance Holy Lands: Simming and the Production of Empathy at Varallo and San Vivaldo.” In Aesthetic Theology in the Franciscan Tradition, edited by Xavier ­Seubert and Oleg Bychkov, 252–74. New York: Routledge, 2020.

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Terry-Fritsch, Allie. “Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind: Somaesthetic Style and Devotional Practice at the Sacro Monte di Varallo.” Open Arts Journal 4 (2015): 111–32. Terry-Fritsch, Allie. Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459–1580. Amsterdam: Amsterdam ­University Press, 2020. Testori, Giovanni. “Gaudenzio e il Sacro Monte.” In Mostra di Gaudenzio Ferrari, edited by Anna Maria Brizio, 21–33. Milano: Silvana, 1956. Testori, Giovanni. Il gran teatro montano. Saggi su Gaudenzio Ferrari. Milano: ­Feltrinelli, 1965. Tonetti, Federico. Storia della Vallesesia e dell’Alto Novarese. Con note e documenti. ­Varallo: Fratelli Colleoni, 1875. Trexler, Richard C. The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Ventrone, Paola. “I Sacri Monti: un esempio di teatro ‘pietrificato’?” In La ‘Gerusalemme’ di San Vivaldo e i Sacri Monti in Europa, edited by Sergio Gensini, 145–62. Ospedaletto Pisa: Pacini, 1989. von Simson, Otto G. “Compassio and Co-redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross.” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 1 (1953): 9–16. Wharton, Annabel Jane. Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks. Chicago: ­University of Chicago Press, 2006. Wharton, Edith. Italian Backgrounds. New York: Ecco Press, 1989. Wittkower, Rudolf. Idea and Image: Studies in the Italian Renaissance. London: Thames & Hudson, 1978. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.

CHAPTER 9

The Paradox of the Saint Actress: Church and Commedia Dell’Arte during the Counter-Reformation Fabrizio Fiaschini 1

Church, Theatre, and Performance: A Complex Relationship

From the beginning, the relationship between church and theatre was affected by the ‘dramatic’ contrast between action and representation. If we consider the concept of action, in the Christian theatre of memory, theatrical practices took on fundamental importance as a device to re-enact the founding actions of Jesus without any trace of fiction or simulation, and in line with the Latin agere memoriam. If, however, we consider the concept of representation, the question becomes more difficult and problematic because, from a Christian standpoint, representation is considered the mimetic alteration of truth, namely, the manifestation of falsehood, and thus idolatry. However, a positive idea of theatre as an evangelical actio arose within the church, a Christi imitatio, which was not viewed in the fictional dimension of ‘as if’ but in the practical, concrete, and realistic one of ‘becoming as’. This idea saw the individual and collective body as an instrument of empathy (of sympatheia) toward the historical humanity of Jesus, without distinguishing between showing and looking at, and without separating art from life. Conversely, the concept of representation strengthened the negative idea of theatrical performances as a distortion of reality. They were seen as a tool of seduction, the occasion for a deceptive fiction that imitates the false and makes it appear as true through the body, thereby corrupting the senses of the audience and ­producing dissolute and immoral behaviour through empathy.1 This latter judgment reappeared and was further exacerbated in the second half of the sixteenth century, during the Counter-Reformation, in conjunction with the birth of the Commedia dell’Arte, the first expression of modern

1 Leonardo Lugaresi, Il teatro di Dio. Il problema degli spettacoli nel cristianesimo antico (II–IV secolo) (Brescia: Morcelliana editore, 2008); Carla Bino, Il dramma e l’immagine. Teorie ­cristiane della rappresentazione (II–XI sec.) (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2015). © Fabrizio Fiaschini, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004522183_011

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professional theatre, which was closely linked to the emergence of the acting profession and the entertainment market.2 The rapid emergence and apparent legitimacy of this new theatrical ­profession, and ‘itinerant invention’, was seen by the church as a glaring manifestation of the negative side of theatre. It was also clear proof of a profound crisis in society: a moral decline and corruption of souls that was sweeping over the two closely linked spheres of the public, collective life and the private, individual life. In the eyes of the church, the ostentatious spectacularisation of the body, of the gestures, the comic distortion of the action, the immorality of the erotic plot themes, and the appearance of women onstage, in particular, represented a disorderly and depraved image of man. It was the celebration of a libertine and dissolute attitude toward life, a vanitas that threatened the equilibrium of inner life and of family and civil ties. The Commedia dell’Arte was thus considered to be a devious and harmful presence for all of society, an ambiguous and dangerous deviation from truth and the models of social discipline. This context, typical of the Counter-Reformation, explains the spread of polemical writings echoing the old accusations of the church fathers against theatre. In their texts, they compared comedians to diabolical, worldly jesters and charlatans, guided by deceit and seduction, in that they were the manifestation of a perverse and depraved society. From this perspective, these accusations sought to disparage both the actors’ art and their lifestyle. In the opinion of these Catholic polemists, the overlapping of art and life, typical 2 Regarding the relationship between the church and Commedia dell’Arte during the Counter-Reformation, see Ferdinando Taviani, La Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca: la fascinazione del teatro, 2 vols. (Roma: Bulzoni, 1969), vol. 1; Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell’Arte. La memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XVIII secolo (Firenze: La casa Usher, 1986); Roberto Tessari, Commedia dell’Arte: la Maschera e l’Ombra (Milano: Mursia, 1989); Bernadette Majorana, “Finzioni, imitazioni, azioni: donne e teatro,” in Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo: studi e testi a stampa, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1996); Bernadette Majorana, “­Governo del corpo, governo dell’anima: attori e spettatori nel teatro italiano del XVII secolo,” in D ­ isciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Paolo Prodi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994); Bernadette Majorana, “Un ‘gemino valor’: mestiere e virtù dei comici dell’arte nel primo Seicento,” Medioevo e Rinascimento 3 (1992); Bernadette Majorana, “Commedia dell’Arte and the Church,” in Commedia dell’Arte in Context, ed. Christopher Balme, Piermario Vescovo, and Daniele Vianello (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Fabrizio Fiaschini, “Negotium diaboli. Approcci, valutazioni e ipotesi di ricerca intorno ai rapporti tra Chiesa post-tridentina e professionismo dello ­spettacolo,” Aprosiana 9 (2001); Fabrizio Fiaschini, “Ludus est necessarius: Pier Maria ­Cecchini e la ‘somma teologica’ dei comici dell’Arte,” in Studi di storia dello spettacolo: omaggio a Siro Ferrone, ed. Stefano Mazzoni (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2011).

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of acting families, corrupted the moral conduct of everyday life. The sensuality of theatre prevailed over modesty and moderation. Its falsehood distorted the authenticity of family relationships, introducing a mental and behavioural disorder into the lives of the comedians, which legitimised actions that corrupted the soul and the essential foundations of civil existence, starting with marriage. This state of sin was described by the Jesuit Hurtado da Mendoza as follows: These men and women engaged in the histrionic art expose themselves to the manifest danger of committing many sins, due to their promiscuous manner of cohabiting and living together …: the men are unbridled youths that think about love day and night and learn amorous poems by heart; the women are always, or almost always, shameless. Cohabitation is open, and women do not sleep in separate bedrooms, therefore the men frequently see them dress, undress and comb their hair; now in bed, now half naked, and always busy talking about lascivious matters with each other. Husbands are wimps, that wives do not respect nor lovers fear. Very often, women are prostitutes who ply their trade for money; and when on stage, they often meet the man who undresses and dresses the woman so that she may quickly perform different roles within the play …. In said theatre they hug, clasp hands, kiss and touch, and set a time and place for a secret meeting. Why shouldn’t they really do in a bedroom what they pretend to do on stage?3 Therefore, for the church, the link between life and theatre was the main cause of an indistinct, excessive combination of lust and impudence. It was 3 Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza, Scholasticæ, et morales disputationes. De tribus virtutibus theologicis (Salamanca: Iacinthum Taberniel, 1631) quoted in Taviani, La Commedia dell’Arte, 88: “Codesti uomini e codeste donne esercitando l’arte istrionica si espongono a manifesto ­pericolo di commettere molti peccati per il loro modo promiscuo di coabitare e convivere …: gli uomini sono dei giovani sfrenati, che pensano giorno e notte agli amori e imparano a memoria poesie amorose; le donne poi sono sempre, o quasi sempre, spudorate. La coabitazione è libera, senza che le donne stiano per conto loro in camere da letto separate; perciò gli uomini le vedono di frequente vestirsi, spogliarsi, pettinarsi; ora, a letto, ora mezze nude; e sempre intente a parlare tra loro di cose lascive. I mariti sono dei vili, che le mogli non rispettano e gli amanti non temono. Le donne assai spesso sono meretrici che fanno il mestiere a pagamento; e sulla scena spesso si incontrano e l’uomo spoglia la donna e la veste, perché ella, senza perdere tempo, possa assumere nella commedia ruoli diversi …; nel medesimo teatro si abbracciano, si stringono le mani, si baciano e si toccano, fissano il luogo e il tempo per un colloquio segreto. Costoro perché non dovranno fare sul serio in una stanza da letto ciò che a teatro fanno per ischerzo?” The English translation is mine.

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a monstrous, chaotic domestic economy that undermined the necessary hierarchies where husbands revealed themselves to be “wimps” and submissive to “shameless” wives, thus throwing the doors wide open to license and adultery. 2

The Fascination of the Stage

If added to the actors’ lifestyles, these sins were even more serious due to the number of people attending their public performances. To Counter-­ Reformation censors, such performances caused a corruption that tainted both the actors’ families from within, and subtly crept inside the spectators’ regular families by seducing them with the allure of a lifestyle ruled by pleasure and desire. This could happen through the plots and licentious content of the plays but especially through the effectiveness of the performances of the actors and actresses in particular. The expressive power of gestures, looks, and body movements, especially those of the actresses, was indeed so attractive and fascinating it eliminated the distance separating the audience from the fiction. In this way, the actresses aroused an inner turmoil in the spectators, which remained even after the play had ended, recurring as an obsession at every moment of daily life, as clearly stated by the Jesuit Paolo Segneri: You leave the theatre: and, behold, another action starts anew in your memory, which is bad for you the more intimate it is … The impure mottos that you hear, the quips, the formulas, the audacious gestures come to mind; and you become to yourself a portable, performing theatre, as well as a scene, a stage, a theme and whatever you wish.4 In this way, theatre created a vicious circle in which the intemperance of ‘comic life’—personified and revealed by the actors—was internalised by the spectators and subsequently re-enacted in everyday life. This resulted in the ­inevitable upheaval of morality, the effects of which were felt by the entire family. Therefore, this was the greatest fault of the actors, whose ­immoderate theatre lifestyle 4 Paolo Segneri, Il cristiano istruito nella sua legge. Ragionamenti morali (Firenze: S. A. R., 1686) quoted in Taviani, La Commedia dell’Arte, 298: “Ti parti via dal teatro: ed ecco che si ricomincia nella tua memoria un’altra azione, tanto per te peggiore quanto più intima … Ricorrono alla mente i motti impuri che udisti, le facezie, le formole, i gesti audaci; e tu a te stesso divieni e teatro portatile, e recitante, e scena, e palco, e spettatore, e soggetto, e ciò che tu vuoi.”

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undermine[s] public decency in cities and states, as with such frivolities they destroy Christian charity toward God, because they strip the youth of their virtue, and attract them to indecent loves and teach them to become absorbed with love, to fall in love with women, to disobey their parents, to ridicule the elderly and not respect them, and to despise everyone.5 Preachers also argued that such a dissoluteness was so perverse it often resulted in actual prostitution on behalf of the actresses themselves and supported by their own husbands for money. The Theatine monk Francesco Maria Del Monaco considered such theatrical prostitution even more despicable as the actors cloaked it as a harmless artistic practice based on fiction: Be the procurer, actor; prostitute yourself young girl, don’t just fake it; be the brothel you impersonate, o Theatre, because that is when married women will flee from you, young boys will fear you, the elderly will be horrified, and no one will come to you to learn what to put into practice immediately afterward.6 3

Comedians’ Defensive Strategies

Faced with such radical and one-sided attack by the church, what were the defensive strategies adopted by the comici dell’arte? Before we address the issue, a caveat is necessary. As mentioned above, the accusations of Catholic polemists were not so much aimed at the Commedia dell’Arte itself, but rather at the moralisation of social customs and behaviours and their strict control and discipline. Therefore, their invectives targeted mainly people’s behaviour and not theatre performances. Nevertheless, in this pedagogical exercise, comedians’ performances constituted the ideal target to fill the rhetorical kit 5 Francesco Maria Del Monaco, In actores et spectatores comoediarum nostri temporis parenaesis (Padova: Pasquati, 1621) quoted in Taviani, La Commedia dell’Arte, 209: “sovvertono i buoni costumi nelle città e negli stati, perché con queste frivolezze distruggono la carità cristiana verso Dio, perché spogliano i fanciulli della loro virtù, li attraggono ad amori disonesti e li istruiscono a occuparsi dell’amore, a innamorarsi delle donne, a non obbedire a i genitori, a deridere i vecchi senza rispettarli affatto, a disprezzare tutti.” 6 Taviani, La Commedia dell’Arte, 207: “Fa il mezzano, istrione; prostituisciti fanciulla, non fingerlo soltanto; sii il lupanare che imiti, o Teatro, perché allora ti fuggirebbero le matrone, ti temeranno i fanciulli, orrore avranno di te i vecchi, nessuno verrà da te a imparare cose da mettere in pratica subito dopo.”

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bag with examples useful for preaching, for they were viewed as a distorted mirror of life, and as an exemplary representation of corruption. To fully understand the ambivalent nature of this attitude, we must shift our attention from the accusations made in antagonistic pamphlets to the actual facts, where the relations between the church and the Commedia dell’Arte were much less hostile and oppositional than what the speeches of the preachers would lead us to believe. Indeed, it is known that several cardinals, such as Cardinal Peretti Montalto, Cardinal Capponi, or Cardinal Savelli, openly protected actors and actresses. It is also well known that the Commedia dell’Arte grew in popularity without excessive censorship, even in the most steadfast Counter-Reformatory cities in Italy like Bologna or Milan, where there were Cardinals Paleotti, and Carlo and Federico Borromeo, respectively.7 Moreover, it is worth noting that the licentious content of the plays and the problem of the erotic love theme should not be overstressed. In Counter-Reformation culture, this theme managed to survive and overcome censorship, especially when it was disguised by the erudite paradigms of formal experimentalism or when proposed in conciliating formulas such as Christian Neoplatonism, which was widely adopted by comedians. See, for example, the ‘philosophy of love’ centred on the topos of the coincidentia oppositorum, which, by combining the male and female principle, can achieve an armonia discors compatible with orthodoxy and capable of reconciling the opposing extremes of passion and spirituality in a ‘monstrous’ but beneficent hybridisation.8 Although the accusations in the pamphlets did not reflect reality, it was ­nevertheless true that the path to professional and moral legitimisation of the acting craft and comic art remained fraught with obstacles. This was in part due to the fact that apart from the preaching rhetoric, the distance between the most cultured and technically prepared comedians and the scurrilous and clownish world of town charlatans and prostitutes was a grey area within which the two categories often overlapped. Therefore, actors walked on a slippery slope and their defensive strategies were thus very prudent and sophisticated, especially when devised by the most illustrious comic families. Among them, the Andreini family stood out, particularly Isabella (who was the first actress to become a ‘diva’), Francesco 7 On this topic, see Fabrizio Fiaschini, L’incessabil agitazione. Giovan Battista Andreini tra ­professione teatrale, cultura letteraria e religione (Pisa: Giardini, 2007). 8 Sara Mamone, Dèi, semidei, uomini. Lo spettacolo a Firenze tra neoplatonismo e realtà borghese (XV–XVII secolo) (Roma: Bulzoni, 2003): Marco Lombardi, Processo al teatro. La tragicommedia barocca e i suoi mostri (Pisa: Pacini, 1995); Simona Morando, Il sogno di ­Chirone. ­Letteratura e potere nel primo Seicento (Lecce: Argo, 2012), 87–172.

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(the famous Capitan Spavento, Captain Fright), their son Giovan Battista (stage name, Lelio), and his wife, the actress Virginia Ramponi (stage name, Florinda).9 The main skill of these theatre professionals was knowing how to put a ­positive spin on the most inflammatory accusations from their detractors, especially as far as the role of the female actress was concerned, as women were the recurrent subject matter of moralist diatribes. Three examples of this self-promotional strategy will be presented below. 4

‘Comic Knowledge’: Culture in Action

In order to redeem comic art, the Andreini family sought to emphasise their cultural excellence through a serious and thorough training in the craft. In this way, they could draw attention to the value and originality of their acting styles as opposed to the vulgarity of the scurrilous and obscene behaviour of the charlatans and frauds. Thanks to their cultural background, comedians could show they possessed a dual competence that combined a vast and profound literary and poetic knowledge, as well as a gestural mimetic decorum that was never vulgar. Unlike charlatans and street actors, the art of theatre professionals was made of a noble and virtuous knowledge based on ‘moderate’ tones, typical of the honest comedy and the Neoplatonic principle of eutrapelìa. It was a harmonised comedy conveyed by a ‘comic body’ that, despite being seductive, knew how to control the excesses of passion in the equilibrium of the action.10

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For further reading on this topic, see at least Siro Ferrone, La Commedia dell’Arte. Attrici e attori italiani in Europa (XVI–XVIII secolo) (Torino: Einaudi, 2014); Anne MacNeil, Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 2003); Rosalind Kerr, The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Roberto Tessari, “Il testo postumo. Strategie promozionali e letterarie degli attori professionisti,” Culture Teatrali 10 (2004); Stefano Mazzoni, “La vita di Isabella,” ibid.; Isabella Andreini. Una letterata in scena, ed. Carlo Manfio (Padova: Il poligrafo, 2014); Silvia Carandini, “Donne in difesa della commedia. Isabella Andreini, Demoiselle de Beaulieu e la legittimazione della scena in Francia nel primo ’600,” in Granteatro omaggio a Franca Angelini, ed. Beatrice Alfonzetti, Daniela Quarta, and Mirella Saulini (Roma: Bulzoni, 2002); Donne e teatro, ed. Daria Perocco (Venezia: Università Ca’ Foscari, 2004), 19–40. Eutrapelia as a ‘moderate’ variation of risus, is highlighted by Giovanni Battista Andreini, Lo Specchio, composizione sacra e poetica, nella quale si rappresenta al vivo l’imagine della Comedia, quanto vaga e deforme sia, alhor che da comici virtuosi o viziosi rappresentata

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Of course, this skill did not apply only to male actors but to female ones as well. The latter were educated in a discipline of the word and gesture so rigorous as to turn them on stage into true ‘divine’ manifestations of an ideal, cultured, and refined beauty immune to any type of erotic compromise. Thanks to the mastery of a broad and versatile poetic competence and a rhetoric of the body governed by moderation, the presence of the actresses thus succeeded in transforming sensual fascination into an aesthetic contemplation so sublime as to incarnate the very principles of Petrarch’s ‘canons of beauties’.11 In this way, aided by the value of a rigorous apprenticeship and irreprehensible acting behaviour, the actress could then try, through the theatre, to free herself from traditional domestic roles. In this way she could move toward a profession that, however much it entailed public performances, did not detract from her respectability as a woman, wife, and mother, thus saving her from the consequences of being accused by the polemicists of being a prostitute. This represented an achievement Isabella Andreini claimed with pride in the posthumous dedication of the Lettere, edited and reviewed by her husband Francesco: Everyone who is born, is born with the desire for knowledge …, and this desire for knowledge resides in me more ardently than in many other women of our age, who, even though discovering that, through study, many have become famous and immortal, nonetheless wish only to dedicate themselves to the needle, distaff, and spinning wheel: being, as I said, born in me the fervent desire for knowledge, I have wanted to give all of me in nourishing this …, and although I have always been far removed from any kind of tranquility …, nevertheless, in order not to betray that talent which God and Nature have given me, and to ensure my life isn’t referred to as a continual slumber …, as soon as I could read (so to speak), I tried as best I could to compose my Mirtilla woodland fable …. After sweating from the toil of my Rhymes12 (Figure 9.1).

11 12

viene (Paris: N. Callemont, 1625) and recently analysed by Nevia Buommino, Lo Specchio nel teatro di Giovan Battista Andreini (Roma: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1999), 119. Fabrizio Fiaschini, “Il canone vivo: la bellezza delle attrici tra Cinque e Seicento,” in L’impero dei sensi. Da Euripide a Oshima, ed. Roberto Alonge (Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2009). Isabella Andreini, Lettere d’Isabella Andreini padovana, comica gelosa, et academica intenta, nominata l’Accesa (Venezia: Sebastiano Combi, 1612), 1–3 (“Ognuno che nasce, nasce con desiderio di sapere …, e essendo … questo desiderio di sapere nato in me più ardente, che in molte altre Donne dell’Età nostra, le quali come che scuoprano in virtù degli studi molte e molte esser divenute celebri e immortali, nondimeno vogliono solo attender … all’ago, alla conocchia e all’arcolaio: essendo, dico, in me nato ardentissimo il

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Figure 9.1 Raphael Sadeler, Portrait of Isabella Andreini, 1602. Engraving, 108 × 64 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. RP-P-OB-7586 © Copyright Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

desiderio di saper, ho voluto a tutta mia sostanza alimentarlo …, e benché sempre i’ sia stata lontanissima da ogni quiete …, tuttavia per non far torto a quel talento, che Iddio e la Natura mi diedero, e perché il viver mio non si potesse chiamar un continuo dormire …, a pena sapea leggere (per dir così) che io il meglio che mi seppi mi diedi a comporre

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In Isabella Andreini’s words, ‘comic knowledge’ is presented as a vocation that, although a substitute for “the needle, distaff and spinning wheel”, is pursued with the same humility and dedication, almost as if the theatre were also an instrument to discipline the body and soul, to divert the woman from the pernicious influences of idleness, in line with the thinking of that era. Not unlike the constant artisanal refinement of skills such as spinning and embroidery, Isabella’s acting training also envisaged the constant and strenuous assimilation of basic techniques. These specialist techniques combined the literary and theatrical culture, developing an artistic competence that resulted in the young actress composing a vast and versatile range of works (pastoral, rhymes, letters) of high literary poetic quality worthy of inclusion in a ‘Mount Parnassos’ also open to actors. Thanks to this rigorous and rigid theatre training, the actress could also feel free to appear publicly on stage without fear of tarnishing her reputation as a woman. In fact, the technical mastery of the word, gesture, and action allowed the actress to maintain equilibrium and moderation precisely during those moments in the performance when the heat of sentiment and passion, in the name of eros, became more incandescent. Therefore, a distance and performance counterpoint were created that could contain any excesses and guarantee the right balance between performance and control. This protected the spectators from the risk of being forced to participate erotically in sensorial mimetic processes. In a sort of estrangement process, the theatre thus could become a vehicle for moralizing, stimulating the public’s awareness of honest behaviour and the consequent rejection of sinful behaviour. For this reason, wrote Andreini, if you, as spectator, look to this actress and listen, that one, loving her, tries to steal the ­precious flower of her honesty, hearing her celebrate honour, detest dishonour, fulminate against a similar ignoble lover, you yourself become so horrified that libidinous desire is converted into virtuous desire.13

13

la mia Mirtilla favola boschereccia …. Dopo sudai nella fatica delle mie Rime …”). In ­reference to Isabella Andreini’s Letters (Venezia: Zaltieri, 1607), see Britta Brandt, Das Spiel mit Gattungen bei Isabella Canali Andreini, 2 vols. (Wilhelmsfeld: Gottfried Egert, 2002), vol. 2; Franco Vazzoler, “La saggezza di Isabella,” Culture Teatrali 10 (2004); Daria Perocco, “­Isabella Andreini ossia: il teatro non è ianua diaboli,” in Donne e teatro, ed. Daria Perocco (Venezia: Università Ca’ Foscari, 2004). Giovanni Battista Andreini, “La Ferza,” in La Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca: la professione del teatro, ed. Ferruccio Marotti and Giovanna Romei (Roma: Bulzoni, 1991): “questa recitatrice rimiri e …, udendo quella celebrar l’onore, detestare il disonore,

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In this sense, the performance by the comedic families was no longer that pestilent vehicle that infected the honest families; instead, it was transformed into a formidable instrument of training, with the dual effect of confirming in their virtue the strait-laced women and converting the sinners: When the honest woman, or the woman who little recognises honesty, will be unwittingly a spectator and hearer of such speeches, represented with energy and with admirable effect, will not this honest woman be further strengthened in her honesty and the dishonest woman led to a better life?14 It should also be noted that Isabella’s theatrical training had not only borne virtuous fruit in the comic art but also in the family domestic life. In fact, before becoming an instrument of professional excellence, her training had served the pedagogical function of disciplining the nobility of the actress’s behaviour and character, thereby favouring her virtuous maturation as a wife and mother. Giovan Battista Andreini explains this clearly in describing the typical day of the honest actress (with reference to his “studious mother”) in La Ferza. Ragionamento contro le accuse date alla commedia: Having just left the care of the domestic economy, eager for honour, disdainful of reprimands, and in her own interest not wishing to be scorned as ignorant and discredited in the public forum, she is seen retiring to her room, to do nothing other than educate herself with those wise discourses that she knows she will recite … in order to enrich herself with regard to that singular and famous part of the three-times-wise orator called action.15 In the unfolding of daily life, “the care of domestic economy” and the theatrical “self-educating” coexist simultaneously in the woman and the actress,

14 15

f­ ulminar contra … indegno amante … ti raccapricci [e] quella volontà libidinosa in virtuosa si converte.” Ibid.: “alhor che donna honesta, o dell’honestà poco riconoscitrice, spettatrice ascoltatrice per sua ventura sarà di simili discorsi rappresentati con energia, e affetto mirabile, oh non si rifermerà l’honesta nell’honestà, e l’inonestà a miglior vita ridurrassi?” Ibid., 505: “lasciata a pena la cura dell’economia, vaga d’honore, sprezzatrice di biasimi, e per lo proprio interesse di non essere ignorante schernita, e scornata entro foro pubblico, vedi che ’n un momento in retirata camera retirandosi, altro non fa, che dottrinar se stessa, con que’ savi discorsi che di recitar se le aspetta [… al fine di] arricchir se stessa in quella tanto singolare e preclara parte nell’oratore tre volte savio detta actio.”

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characterised by the same fatigue from moving from one room to another, in an exercise of constant mortification of the body and soul. 5

Theatrical Touring and Spiritual Pilgrimage

A second feature of the strategy of ennoblement of the Commedia dell’arte undertaken by the Andreinis, Giovan Battista in particular, was the positive re-­evaluation of the trips from one city to another during the tours of the ­companies. These constant movements turned the actor’s craft into an itinerant one: a ‘perpetual motion’ (as Flaminio Scala called it) that the moralist detractors of the comedy criticised as the nomadism of the vagabonds, robbers, and charlatans that kidnapped young people and maidens attracted by the perverse fascination of the theatre.16 To counter this negative stereotype, Giovan Battista Andreini developed the opposite symbolism, which transformed the profane ‘nomadism’ of the journeys of the actors into a sacrificial journey, even equating this with religious pilgrimage, thereby creating the spiritual metaphor of the saintly, devout, and penitent actor. To reinforce such a ‘sanctifying’ image, Andreini focused first on the virtuous re-evaluation of the strenuousness and risks entailed by the movements of the comedians, which particularly threatened the women. From this viewpoint, the dangers of the journeys provided the occasion for human and professional redemption linked to a morally unimpeachable craft, willing to endure the harshest sacrifices, even death, in the name of the noble and honest ‘comic art’. From this sacrificial perspective, Giovan Battista Andreini describes the theatre journeys as if they were a courageous struggle full of dangers and risks, especially for the women, who had to “cross rivers, expose themselves to dangerous water that flow rapidly, agitatedly, impetuously”, often “staring terror and death in the face.” They travelled non-stop in the heat and cold, “full of dust” or “amidst the deepest snow.” They had to journey night and day, exposing themselves to “robbery by raging thieves.”17 Their journeys were a Calvary that often led to the “near extermination of children, husbands, dearest friends”, sustained only by their dedication to work and a faith that was strengthened in suffering: so that “when they reach the cities they go to confession, and often take the holy communion, but in leaving to go to another city, once again they 16 17

Comici dell’Arte. Corrispondenze, ed. Claudia Burattelli, Domenica Landolfi, and Anna Zinanni, 2 vols. (Firenze: le Lettere, 1993), 2: 518, 529. Andreini, “La Ferza,” 506.

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go to confession and take again holy communion as protection against deadly accidents.”18 Therefore, this sacrificial itinerancy revealed a ‘mystic’ exaltation of the actress, which Andreini would conclude, not by chance, with the celebratory recounting of the death of his mother in Lyon, during the return trip from the glorious Parisian tour. In fact, the description of her agony is shrouded in an aura of holiness, so that the “Capuchin monks” who came to her bedside “instead of comforting her, were comforted by her, so that if any soul, by the passion of the heart, the vivacity of the spirit, could rise directly up to God, she was that person.”19 The idea of transforming the travelling theatre into a religious pilgrimage should be viewed in the same light. Giovan Battista Andreini does so by writing religious poems for each city the troupe stopped in, with a focus on celebrating the local devotions. In this way he associated the concept of the religious pilgrimage with the worldly idea of the tour, and the devout pilgrim with the professional actor.20 This is clearly illustrated in poems such as Tecla Vergine e Martire (1623), a hagiography in verses about the saint, dedicated especially to her cult, which was venerated in Milan.21 In fact, the poem is introduced by a long dedicatory letter in which the author is careful to provide a detailed description of the most important devotional liturgies of Carlo Borromeo’s Milan, further testimony of his direct participation, as a man and an actor, in the religious life of the city. Regarding Bologna, it is worth citing Andreini’s poem Il Penitente alla Santissima Vergine del Rosario (1631) (Figure 9.2), which not only paid tribute to the local Marian cult, promoted in those same years by Cardinal Paleotti, but also commemorated the recent end to the terrible plague in 1630, which the citizens of Bologna attributed, in fact, to the intercession of Our Lady of the Rosary.22 Vicenza witnessed the publication of Le Cinque Rose del Giardino di Berico in 1633. This was a poem about the miraculous apparition of Our Lady on 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid.: “alle città giunte e si confessano, e si communicano sovente: ma in partendo da quelle per trasmigrarsi ad altre, di nuove confessioni, e di nuove communioni contra gli accidenti mortali si prepararono.” Ibid., 508: “non che la confortavano, ma erano da lei confortati, che se anima alcuna era dirittamente per ardor di cuore, per vivacità di spirito salita a Dio, questa era quell’una.” Regarding this topic see Fiaschini, L’incessabil agitazione, 133–71. Giovanni Battista Andreini, La Tecla vergine, e martire, poema sacro (Venezia: Paulo ­Guerigli, 1623). Giovanni Battista Andreini, Il Penitente alla Santissima Vergine del Rosario (Bologna: ­Ferroni, 1631).

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Figure 9.2 Giovan Battista Andreini, Il Penitente alla Santissima Vergine del Rosario (frontispiece) (Bologna: Ferroni, 1631). Print. ­Bologna: Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio, A.20 © Copyright Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna

Mount Berico, to which Giovan Battista Andreini attributed the miraculous healing of his son Pietro Enrico, thus providing his own personal experience as an ­example of a devout profession which was wholly compatible with a religious context (Figure 9.3).23 Finally, Andreini published his poem titled Il conflitto: guerra tra bresciani e cremonesi con la conversione di Sant’Obicio, 23

Giovanni Battista Andreini, Le cinque rose del giardino di Berico (Vicenza: Amadio, 1633).

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Figure 9.3 Giovan Battista Andreini, Le cinque rose del giardino di Berico (frontispiece), (Vicenza: Eredi Amadio, 1633). Print. Vicenza, Biblioteca Civica Bertoniana, A–E12–F4 © Copyright Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana di Vicenza

nobile bresciano in 1630, in Brescia.24 This work celebrates the popular cult of a soldier who converted into an ascetic and a hermit, which Andreini clearly meant to be a metaphor of the penitent actor converted into a devout and holy actor: this metaphor obviously refers to his father, Francesco, who was able to transform and dignify his stage mask, Capitan Spavento, from the vulgar, grotesque figure of the uncouth and boastful soldier into that of the noble Christian knight fighting for justice and morality.

24

Giovanni Battista Andreini, Il conflitto, guerra tra bresciani e cremonesi, con la conversione di Sant’Obicio, nobile bresciano (Brescia: Bacchi, 1630).

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Mary Magdalene’s Conversion as the Redemption of the Actress

The last aspect that will be briefly analysed concerns the most innovative and ethically problematic issue of the new theatrical profession: the close link between the presence of the actress on stage and the erotic themes of the comedies. As we have seen, this relationship represented a diabolical short circuit for the church, a situation which became more dangerous the more the seductive potential of the body and the gaze of the actresses crept into the spectators’ memory, thereby corrupting their consciences and morals. From this perspective, it has also been pointed out that to counter such accusations the comedians had developed a theatrical pedagogy aiming at creating a virtuous image of the actress that would preserve her profile as both a caring mother and honest actress. In this vein, Giovan Battista Andreini went further, celebrating the actress as a metaphor of the process of conversion of comic art through the gradual metamorphosis of eros, from its most sensual and carnal origins to its mystic transfiguration. To achieve this objective, Andreini resorted to a comparison with one of the women in the Bible most implicated in the relationship with eros: Mary Magdalene. In fact, the story of the saint represents a paradigmatic example of the conversion of eros, as shown in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury iconography (from Tiziano to Rubens, Coccapani to Furini to Morazzone, even Artemisia Gentileschi). Thanks to her conversion, the sinner was able to transform the seductive and sensual energy of the flesh into an equally physical and bodily beauty, but one aimed at purity and spiritual love, in the context of a public life no longer dedicated to prostitution but to preaching and the conversion of sinners. In this respect, the similarities between the figure of the sinner and the profile of actresses (as depicted by the Catholic moralisers) was clear: like Mary Magdalene, actresses were also equated with prostitution; they also, as the new courtesans, used their beauty and arts of the body, as well as singing and dancing, to seduce their lovers; and they, too, publicly professed the cult of eros by performing on stage. Starting from these evident similarities, Andreini thus developed his own Magdalenian model of conversion of the theatre. According to this model, the actress is the mediator of the Christian vision of eros, which does not deny the body and beauty, nor pleasure, but turns them from sin to faith. This explains the abundance of poetic and theatrical works devoted to Mary Magdalene, written throughout Andreini’s long and prolific career: the 1610 poem titled La Maddalena di Gio. Battista Andreini fiorentino (Venice,

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Somasco), reprinted with revisions in 1612 (Florence, Marescotti), and republished in 1628 in La Maddalena. Composizione Sacra (Prague, Leva); the 1617 drama, La Maddalena. Sacra Rappresentazione (Mantova, Osanna), re-edited with changes in 1629 (La Maddalena. Composizione rappresentativa, Vienna, ­Casparis), and radically modified in 1652 (La Maddalena lasciva e penitente. Azzione drammatica e divota, Milan, Malatesta). These texts cross-reference one another, having in common the central role of the protagonist: her character continually alludes to that of the actress, especially in the descriptions of the beguiling qualities of the sinner, her beauty, and her courtesan attitudes. In the list of texts mentioned, we will briefly discuss La Maddalena. Sacra Rappresentazione, where the process of conversion of both eros and the theatre displays particularly original and effective ­nuances25 (Figure 9.4). The play starts in an unusual manner. When Mary Magdalene appears on stage, she is not presented in the usual arrogant and uninhibited guise of a woman devoted to the cult of love. Rather, she appears as a troubled and thoughtful melancholic woman, in line with the literary, philosophical topos of the taedium mentis, which may be found even in Dürer’s Melencolia I, ­characterised by an emotional and intellectual state of disquiet that is a ­prelude to change.26 In fact, upsetting the loving exuberance of the sinner was a premonitory dream from the previous night. In that dream a sun more resplendent than usual appeared to her, which dazzled her with a pleasure never ­experienced before: different from the erotic one but even more physically captivating. Mary Magdalene remembers immediately falling in love with that vision, until that wonderful sun had completely darkened, and water and blood had begun to rain down from the sky. At that point, the pleasure was turned into immense pain. Starting from this atypical situation, the entire plot develops around Mary Magdalene’s desire to interpret the dream, to discover who that sun was that had dazzled her with such an intense love, only to become transformed into an equally strong pain. Thus began for the sinner a true ascetic journey toward gradual knowledge of the true meaning of eros: a spiritual journey akin to a true process of conversion. 25 26

See Fabrizio Fiaschini, “Temi libertini ne La Maddalena mantovana di Giovan Battista Andreini,” in Maestranze, artisti e apparatori per la scena dei Gonzaga, ed. Simona B ­ runetti (Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2015). Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964).

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Figure 9.4 Gaspare Grispoldi, S. Maria Magdalena, 1610. Print, in Giovan Battista Andreini, la Maddalena (Venezia: Somasco, 1610). Milano, Biblioteca Braidense, inv. VV–07–0045/02 © Copyright Biblioteca Braidense di Milano

At first, still attracted by earthly love, she believed she had identified the image of the sun with one of her lovers: Angelo, the most sensitive and honest of them all. But this was an erroneous interpretation, resulting from a misunderstanding. Nevertheless, the identification with Angelo represented the first step forward for the sinner, since it separated her from the narcissism and self-referential dimension of courtesan love, which had characterised her previous life. Once she had stepped over that threshold, the melancholy way of spiritual ascension opened up for Mary Magdalene, which, through the topos of the

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‘amorous challenge’, would lead her to her meeting with Jesus in the temple, and therefore to repentance and faith. Only after completing this ascetic itinerary could she finally uncover the mystery of the dream; however, in keeping with the mystic dimension of the drama, this unveiling would not occur in a rational manner but through the mechanism of ecstasy. While concentrating on her penitential prayers, Mary Magdalene had a vision that clarified the misery of the dreamlike images which until then had been indecipherable: the bright sun represented Jesus, the rain the tears of conversion, and the blood the foreshadowing of the passion. What we are interested in highlighting from this scene, however, is the attention that Andreini attaches to the positive centrality of the body: unlike rational and intellectual mechanisms, the vision is in fact the result of physical involvement, of an altered state that ignites all the sensory faculties, even those related to the spiritual transfiguration of eros. At the height of the conversion, it is therefore still the eroticised body that drives Magdalene’s experience; but her power, rather than subjugated to pleasure, is now directed at sanctification. The central importance of eros and the redeemed body, together with the clear juxtaposition of the figure of Mary Magdalene and that of the actress, thus allows Andreini to construct in the feminine form the metaphor of a purified theatre, fully compatible with the dictates of Counter-Reformist orthodoxy. What is more, if we move from stage fiction to real life, we notice that this virtuous synthesis is strengthened by Andreini by identifying Magdalene’s profile with that of his wife, the actress Virginia Ramponi, who obviously played the part of the protagonist in the staging of the drama. To achieve this ulterior objective, Andreini availed himself, above all, of the persuasive power and strategic importance of pictorial imagery. In fact, as proven by Siro Ferrone, Virginia Ramponi’s charm and stage presence made her one of the preferred models of the painter Domenico Fetti, who chose this very actress to represent Mary Magdalene: this is shown by the drawing at the base of the engraving in the print of the homonymous poem composed by Andreini in 1610, but, above all, by the famous painting of the Melanconia made in 1618, just before publication of the sacred representation27 (­Figure 9.5). This latter coincidence is particularly emblematic given that the figurative pose of the saint, with a yellow ribbon that unravels down her back 27

Siro Ferrone, Attori, mercanti, corsari. La Commedia dell’Arte in Europa fra Cinque e ­Seicento (Torino: Einaudi, 1993), 243–247. The attribution to Virginia Ramponi of the female figure represented in the paintings is given by the resemblance to another Fetti’s painting, A ­ rianna a Nasso, whose model was certainly the actress.

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Figure 9.5 Domenico Fetti, Melancholia, c.1618. Oil on canvas, 170 × 140 cm. Venezia, Gallerie dell’Accademia, inv. 671 © Copyright Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, Archivio fotografico, Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo

(a symbol of the renunciation of sin), probably corresponds to the stage pose of the actress, creating a direct association of Virginia Ramponi with Mary Magdalene. In this sense, Virginia Ramponi had indissolubly linked her theatrical role, modelled after the figure of the saint, to the iconographic type set by

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Fetti’s brush, thus becoming a living metaphor of the holy actress and, as a result, of the sanctity of the Commedia dell’Arte. Confirming in a resounding way the spiritual primacy of the new direction of theatre is the last scene in the sacred representation, which revealed Andreini’s true meta-theatrical brilliance. After converting, Mary Magdalene gives the servants her trunk containing the luxurious clothes she had worn as a courtesan. However, under the wonderful and fashionable clothing, the women also find a coarse penitential dress, at the sight of which, astonished, they ended up converting as well. This represents a theatrical twist that also suggests a secret revelation: the trunk full of clothes is not, in fact, a stage object like the others; instead, it clearly represents the travelling trunk where the actresses kept their costumes. The scene of the trunk containing fashionable costumes and the penitent dress thus represented the definitive proof of a craft in which, under the peaceful sign of eros, apparently opposite elements such as theatre and faith could safely coexist. A coexistence not only possible but also useful, precisely because those same costumes, when they appear on stage, can produce a true conversion of the actors and spectators. Bibliography Bino, Carla. Il dramma e l’immagine. Teorie cristiane della rappresentazione (II–XI sec.). Firenze: Le Lettere, 2015. Brandt, Britta. Das Spiel mit Gattungen bei Isabella Canali Andreini. 2 vols. ­Wilhelmsfeld: Gottfried Egert, 2002. Buommino, Nevia. Lo Specchio nel teatro di Giovan Battista Andreini. Roma: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1999. Carandini, Silvia. “Donne in difesa della commedia. Isabella Andreini, Demoiselle de Beaulieu e la legittimazione della scena in Francia nel primo ’600.” In Granteatro omaggio a Franca Angelini, edited by Beatrice Alfonzetti, Daniela Quarta and ­Mirella Saulini, 81–92. Roma: Bulzoni, 2002. Comici dell’Arte. Corrispondenze. Edited by Claudia Burattelli, Domenica Landolfi and Anna Zinanni. 2 vols. Firenze: le Lettere, 1993. Donne e teatro. Edited by Daria Perocco. Venezia: Università Ca’ Foscari, 2004. Ferrone, Siro. Attori, mercanti, corsari. La Commedia dell’Arte in Europa fra Cinque e Seicento. Torino: Einaudi, 1993. Ferrone, Siro. La Commedia dell’Arte. Attrici e attori italiani in Europa (XVI–XVIII secolo). Torino: Einaudi, 2014.

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Fiaschini, Fabrizio. “Il canone vivo: la bellezza delle attrici tra Cinque e Seicento.” In L’impero dei sensi. Da Euripide a Oshima, edited by Roberto Alonge, 83–98. Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2009. Fiaschini, Fabrizio. L’incessabil agitazione. Giovan Battista Andreini tra professione ­teatrale, cultura letteraria e religione. Pisa: Giardini, 2007. Fiaschini, Fabrizio. “Ludus est necessarius: Pier Maria Cecchini e la ‘somma teologica’ dei comici dell’Arte.” In Studi di storia dello spettacolo: omaggio a Siro Ferrone, edited by Stefano Mazzoni, 115–36. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2011. Fiaschini, Fabrizio. “Negotium diaboli. Approcci, valutazioni e ipotesi di ricerca intorno ai rapporti tra Chiesa post-tridentina e professionismo dello spettacolo.” Aprosiana 9 (2001): 309–28. Fiaschini, Fabrizio. “Temi libertini ne La Maddalena mantovana di Giovan Battista Andreini.” In Maestranze, artisti e apparatori per la scena dei Gonzaga, edited by Simona Brunetti, 336–52. Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2015. Isabella Andreini. Una letterata in scena. Edited by Carlo Manfio. Padova: Il poligrafo, 2014. Kerr, Rosalind. The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art. London: Nelson, 1964. Lombardi, Marco. Processo al teatro. La tragicommedia barocca e i suoi mostri. Pisa: Pacini, 1995. Lugaresi, Leonardo. Il teatro di Dio. Il problema degli spettacoli nel cristianesimo antico (II–IV secolo). Brescia: Morcelliana editore, 2008. MacNeil, Anne. Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth ­Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Majorana, Bernadette. “Commedia dell’Arte and the Church.” In Commedia dell’Arte in Context, edited by Christopher Balme, Piermario Vescovo and Daniele Vianello, 133–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Majorana, Bernadette. “Finzioni, imitazioni, azioni: donne e teatro.” In Donna, ­disciplina, creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo: studi e testi a stampa, edited by Gabriella Zarri, 121–39. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1996. Majorana, Bernadette. “Governo del corpo, governo dell’anima: attori e spettatori nel teatro italiano del XVII secolo.” In Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, edited by Paolo Prodi, 437–90. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Majorana, Bernadette. “Un ‘gemino valor’: mestiere e virtù dei comici dell’arte nel primo Seicento.” Medioevo e Rinascimento 3 (1992): 173–93. Mamone, Sara. Dèi, semidei, uomini. Lo spettacolo a Firenze tra neoplatonismo e realtà borghese (XV–XVII secolo). Roma: Bulzoni, 2003.

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Mazzoni, Stefano. “La vita di Isabella.” Culture Teatrali 10 (2004): 85–106. Morando, Simona. Il sogno di Chirone. Letteratura e potere nel primo Seicento. Lecce: Argo, 2012. Perocco, Daria. “Isabella Andreini ossia: il teatro non è ianua diaboli.” In Donne e teatro, edited by Daria Perocco, 27–35. Venezia: Università Ca’ Foscari, 2004. Taviani, Ferdinando. La Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca: la fascinazione del ­teatro. 2 vols. Roma: Bulzoni, 1969. Taviani, Ferdinando, and Mirella Schino. Il segreto della Commedia dell’Arte. La memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XVIII secolo. Firenze: La casa Usher, 1986. Tessari, Roberto. Commedia dell’Arte: la Maschera e l’Ombra. Milano: Mursia, 1989. Tessari, Roberto. “Il testo postumo. Strategie promozionali e letterarie degli attori ­professionisti.” Culture Teatrali 10 (2004): 11–34. Vazzoler, Franco. “La saggezza di Isabella.” Culture Teatrali 10 (2004): 107–32.

CHAPTER 10

Performing Glory: The Misteri or Festa d’Elx on Contemporary Stages Francesc Massip 1

Like a Wormhole

Let’s imagine a marvellous time machine that allows us to witness, as if we were looking through a keyhole, a typically medieval staging.1 What we would see is something like the Festa d’Elx, which is the most genuine example in the world of that kind of theatre that derived from the fruitful symbiosis between Christian liturgy, the activities carried out by the youngest members of the cathedral choir, and the entertainment practice of the minstrels.2 The three elements that came together here were: first, the religious office with a great capacity to gather many people; second, the topics, the ornament and the singing, and third, the technical and histrionic skills. The Mystery, or Festa d’Elx (Alacant), supposes the continuity for more than five centuries of an authentic late-medieval performance that is being represented without interruption from the end of the fifteenth century to the present time. There is a striking resemblance between the miniature The Dormition of the Virgin from the Hours of Etienne Chevalier by Jean Fouquet (ca. 1452–1460) and the current representation.3 The Festa d’Elx represents the umbilical cord that allows us to get in touch with the origins of our theatre and with the golden age of our culture. Its great power of seduction is basically due to three factors: the scenic audacity, the musical entity, and its conservation.

1 Work carried out in the framework of the research project 2017 SGR 1514 de l’AGAUR (­Generalitat de Catalunya). Translated from Catalan by Lenke Kovács (Universitat de les Illes Balears), revised by Peter Cocozzella (Binghamton University). 2 Cf. Johann Drumbl, “Il dramma liturgico: aspetti filologici e storici,” in La scena assente. Realtà e leggenda sul teatro nel Medioevo, ed. Francesco Mosetti Casaretto (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2006), 127. 3 Cf. Germain Bazin, Jean Fouquet. Le livre d’heures d’Etienne Chevalier (Paris: Somogy, 1990), 43. © Francesc Massip, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004522183_012

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The Medieval Stage in Action

On the other hand, in this extraordinary representation (a real tunnel of time), we may directly witness the basic characteristics of medieval religious drama: (a) it is entirely sung ‘a capella’, that is, without any instrumental accompaniment (except for a single piece that we will comment on later), the music often uses melodies belonging to the repertoire of liturgical hymns or, in some case, the troubadour lyrics; (b) it uses an elaborate stage technique of classic origin that tries to visually attract the attention of the spectator; (c) it is interpreted exclusively by men, as it was common in the performances inside the churches and, moreover, all the sacred roles are played by ecclesiastics; (d) it includes the presence of the director on stage, coordinating the movements of the actors and helping those who do not remember their lines or the tune of the songs. This typical feature of medieval drama is preserved in Elx: the choir master (mestre de capella), disguised as an apostle, acts as a stage director. The play presents a stage arrangement that is common to most of the dramas enacted inside a church building. It uses the entire architectural space, from the main entrance to the presbytery, through the nave and the transept, making use of the scenic simultaneity which characterises medieval drama4 (Figure 10.1). 3

An Apocryphal Narrative

The content of the mystery play is the death, the assumption, and the coronation of the Virgin Mary, a dogma celebrated by Christianity on August 15 that is not found in any biblical text, but only in some of the early apocryphal sources. That is why the assumption as a dogma was not officially declared until 1951. The church of Elx turns into a stage during the two days of the performance: on August 14, when Mary takes leave of the apostles and is ready to die, and on August 15, when the burial, the resurrection, the assumption, and the glorification of Mary are enacted. Its creation can be dated at the end of the fifteenth century.5 However, the drama was extensively reworked throughout the sixteenth century, mainly with additions that affect the Renaissance polyphony. The text and the score were definitively fixed at the beginning of 4 Francesc Massip, La festa d’Elx i els misteris medievals europeus (Alacant: Instituto de Cultura “Juan-Gil Albert”-Ajuntament d’Elx, 1991), 141–179. 5 Josep Romeu i Figueras, Teatre català antic, ed. Francesc Massip and Pep Vila, 3 vols., Biblioteca de cultura catalana (Barcelona: Curial, 1994), vol. 2, 157–167.

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Figure 10.1 Antonio Serrano Peral, Elevation of the Church of Elx and the Setting of the Mystery Play, 1941. Drawing. Arxiu del Patronat Nacional del Misteri d’Elx. At the top: the hoist on the flat roof, the canvas representing ‘heaven’ at the drum, and the flying pomegranate. At the bottom: the stage (cadafal) and the pathway (andador) © Arxiu del Patronat del Misteri d’Elx [APME]

the seventeenth century, where the first known manuscripts date from (the earliest extant one goes back to 1709, but it is a copy of a manuscript written before 1600, as can be deduced from the musical annotation) (Figure 10.2).6 6 Consueta 1709. Edició crítica del text de la Festa d’Elx [Ms. 1709], ed. Francesc Massip (València: Generalitat Valenciana, 1986).

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Figure 10.2 Manuscript of the Festa (1709). Elx, Arxiu Històric Municipal, Ms. 1–24, p. 1 © Arxiu Històric Municipal d’Elx Ms. 1–24, p. 1

4 The Festa d’Elx: The Space and Its Structure One of the most important aspects of the Mystery of Elx is its staging, because it reproduces faithfully the most refined and complex type of medieval drama, while reminding us of a theatrical element that today is rather forgotten: to wit, the participation of the public in the performance.7 7 Francesc Massip, “The Staging of the Assumption in Europe,” in Iconographic and C ­ omparative Studies in Medieval Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson and John H. Stroupe (Kalamazoo: M ­ edieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1991), 21.

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Figure 10.3 Church of Santa Maria of Elx during the staging of the Mystery Play © Francesc Massip

Regarding the location of the theatrical setting, the Festa d’Elx shares with medieval drama the characteristic that there is not an exclusive scenic space. A theatrical building with specific dramatic functions was unknown in the ­Middle Ages. Instead, a space was used that served different purposes: in this case a church, hosting a civic ceremony, which is in fact what each theatre performance of that period can be regarded as (Figure 10.3). The parish church of Elx, as the space of the celebration, is transformed during the performance into a microcosm that contains the entire universe. In accordance with the symbolic orientation of the Christian church, the human characters arrive from the west (the main gate), while the east (the side of the altar) symbolises the sacred sphere.8 On earth, the horizonal scene is articulated along the nave through a corridor (symbolizing the path of human life). It forms a vertebral axis that starts from the western doorway where the ‘terrestrial’ performers enter. They are filled with sacredness when they pass in front of the garden of Gethsemane, Calvary, and the tomb of Jesus, the three holy places the Virgin Mary visits at the beginning of the play to recall the son she longs for and whom she wishes to meet in the afterlife. This corridor or gangway leads to a stage called cadafal, which is a large platform located at the 8 Élie Konigson, L’Espace théâtral médiéval (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975), 96.

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Figure 10.4 The corridor leading through the nave to the platform in the transept © Sixto Marco

transept of the church, under the dome, and which represents the house and the tomb of the Virgin Mary (Figure 10.4). On two days (August 14 and 15), the Festa tells the story of the last events of Mary’s life, her farewell to the world, the meeting with the apostles, her death and burial, and her subsequent resurrection, assumption, and coronation. Thus, the earthly world is in direct communication with paradise, located in the large dome that dominates the church. From this place the audacious aerial machines descend that carry the angelic or divine beings to the stage. Thus, a bold vertical scene is created, prepared to cross the 30 meters of height between heaven and earth and that scenically completes the cosmogony that takes place inside the church, symbolizing the universe (Figures 10.5a and 10.5b).9 What should not be forgotten, however, is the exterior of the church and the entire urban surroundings, which are used for the entrances and the exits of the performers of the hermitage of Saint Sebastian, the place where the actors used to rehearse and get dressed. (Nowadays, they use the neighbouring Casa de la Festa for the rehearsals and for putting on their costumes.) Above all, the 9 Francesc Massip, “Algunes notes sobre l’escena de la Festa o Misteri d’Elx,” in Història i crítica de la “festa d’Elx,” ed. Joan Castaño and Gabriel Sansano (Alacant: Universitat d’Alacant, 1998), 209–211.

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Figure 10.5a View of the nave and the drum of the dome with the ­descending araceli © Francesc Massip

surroundings are used for the two events that complete the celebration of the Festa: on the one hand, the burial procession, la Roà, on the night of August 14, when the church remains open, just like it happens on Maundy Thursday when the faithful visit the sepulchre of Jesus. The statue of the Virgin lying on a monumental bed is placed in the middle of the church and receives the

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Figure 10.5b View of the stage from the trap-door (porta del cel) during a rehearsal (prova de l’àngel) © Francesc Massip

visit of the citizens of Elx who, taking turns, honour her with candles that they carry through the main streets of the historical centre of the town in homage to their patron. On the other hand, the burial procession that takes place on the following day, on the morning of August 15, when the coffin is carried under the pallium through the streets of the town led by the interpreters of the

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Figure 10.6 Burial procession (1950s) © APME

mystery play in the guise of apostles and Jews (which will be miraculously converted to Christianity) and accompanied by the highest civil and ecclesiastical authorities in a procession that precedes the representation of the second and final part of the performance (Figure 10.6).10 In this way, the historical centre of Elx turns into the city of Jerusalem, where the events that are remembered are assumed to have taken place, and at the same time the town becomes the metonymy of the earthly world, where the faithful follow the Virgin Mary on her way to eternity. Urban religiosity, daily life, and representation are merged into a devotional continuum that has been repeated annually for the past five centuries.11 5

Effectus mirabilis: The Aerial Movement of the Misteri

The use of the aerial machinery is the most prominent aspect of the performance and, without doubt, one of the most attractive features of the mystery play. The archangel Gabriel descends to announce the imminent death of 10 11

Manuel Rodríguez i Macià, “El Misteri d’Elx: una mirada des de la litúrgia. Alguns ­elements litúrgics en el soterrament de la Mare de Déu,” in La festa i Elx, ed. Josep Lluís Sirera (Elx: Ajuntament d’Elx, 2004), 293. Hèctor Càmara i Sempere, “Festa i religiositat en el Misteri,” in La festa d’Elx, ed. Gabriel Sansano (Sant Vicent de Raspeig: Publicacions Universitat d’Alacant, 2016), 53–60.

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Figure 10.7 (A–B) The linen cloth of Heaven & Cloud (pomegranate) of the Mystery of Elx © Francesc Massip

Mary, in response to the desire that she has manifested to meet with her son.12 Jesus’s messenger is lowered in an extraordinary device: the machine of the cloud or pomegranate, which is spherical and passes closed through the doors of heaven. In the descent it opens into eight segments or wings and the angel drops a handkerchief worth of tinsel, representing a golden rain that falls down every time a heavenly character appears (Figure 10.7a and 10.7b).13 Heaven is represented by a circular cloth painted with clouds that covers the interior of the dome, where the mechanisms of traction of the aerial machinery are installed: the winch with the pulleys to hang the devices on the ropes that are used to lower them, and the manual hoist that moves them, and which is installed on the church’s terrace (Figure 10.8). If in late medieval drama all the scenic efforts were concentrated on the preparation of a sumptuous heaven with its inhabitants splendidly dressed, the Mystery of Elx, instead of showing paradise, concentrates all efforts on the scenic inventiveness in the mechanism

12 13

Hèctor Càmara i Sempere, “Àngel plaent e yluminós, un do en blanc al Misteri d’Elx,” in Estudios sobre teatro medieval, ed. Josep Lluís Sirera (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2008), 26–29. Clifford Davidson, The Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages (New York: AMS Press, 2005), 262–274.

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Figure 10.8 The “Pomegranate” of Elx © Sixto Marco

that transports the celestial beings to the terrestrial scene.14 The interior of the device of the cloud is completely covered with tinsel paper to indicate the 14

Francesc Massip, “A Note on Medieval Staging Techniques in the Catalan Lands and their Survival in the Mistery de Elx: Theatrical Illusions,” in Le Théâtre et la cité dans l’Europe médiévale, ed. Jean-Claude Aubailly (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz 1988), 555.

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luminous reverberation of the supernatural being that descends in it: a boy with a crystalline voice who extends his wings and sings without vertigo. A flying device, probably a simple oval-shaped form referred to as a cloud, is documented at the end of the fourteenth century in courtly celebrations like the coronation of Martin the Humane in Saragossa (1399).15 The outside of the cloud was painted blue with golden stripes, evoking the cloud’s nature of the device, but the name mangrana (pomegranate) became popular at the beginning of the Baroque period. In the restoration of 1906, the cloud was repainted crimson. The device of Elx, which underwent a remarkable development throughout the seventeenth century, has been imitated by more rudimentary devices that appear throughout the ancient kingdom of Valencia, such as the ‘artichokes’ of Silla, Torrent, Castellar, Alaquàs, Aldaia, and Capdet or the ‘orange’ of Morella; in Castilla the ‘pineapple’ of Hellín and the ‘balloon’ of Peñafiel. In Galicia, there is the ‘balloon’ of Muros, and in Aragón, the ‘pomegranate’ of Alcanyís. Undoubtedly, it is the most audacious flight engine used in the performance.16 Jesus in person, surrounded by four musical angels, descends to pick up the soul of his mother in a second, quite amazing, machine.17 It is the araceli, the altar of heaven, also covered with tinsel, which has a central mandorla and four side brackets where the four sublime singers and instrumentalists cling to: the two upper angels play the guitar and the harp (Figure 10.9). These instruments are indispensable to create the polyphony of the chant that is interpreted by the two boy sopranos together with a tenor and a bass during their acrobatic descent. A device with the same name (araceli) was already lowered in the nave of the cathedral of Barcelona in 1418, in a Christmas representation of The Sybil and the Emperor, where the prophetess of ancient ancestry predicted to Octavian the arrival of the Messiah, illustrated by the appearance of a celestial altar with a woman with a child in her arms, as a premonition of the nativity.18

15 16 17 18

Francesc Massip, “Representació, teatre i poder a l’Edat Mitjana,” in Cultura i poder, ed. Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré (Lleida: Pagès, 2002), 40. Francesc Massip, La ilusión de Ícaro, un desafío a los dioses. Máquinas de vuelo en el espectáculo de tradición medieval y sus pervivencias en España (Madrid: Centro de ­Estudios y Actividades Culturales, 1997), 93–116. Joan Castaño, Aproximacions a la festa d’Elx (Alacant: Instituto Alicantino de Cultura “Juan Gil-Albert,” 2002), 211–226. Francesc Massip, “L’Ara Coeli: leggenda sibillina e scenotecnia aerea,” in La scena materiale. Oggetti e pratiche della rappresentazione nel teatro medievale, ed. Tiziano Pachiarotti and Lenke Kovács (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2015), 196.

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Figure 10.9 The araceli descending through the trap-door with Mary’soul © Francesc Massip

At the same time, a similar machine was lowered from the dome of Valencia in the Mystery of the Assumption (ca. 1416–1420), although at that time they did not dare to bring down people and used images instead.19 19

Francesc Massip, El misteri de l’Assumpció de la catedral de València, estudi, edició crítica i adaptació dramàtica, ed. Francesc Massip (València: Universitat de València, 2013), 25–26.

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Figure 10.10 The araceli ascending with Saint Mary of the Assumption © Sixto Marco

The araceli descends again, after the death and burial of Mary, on the ­second day of the drama, to collect the image of the Virgin revived in body and soul. A second trip in which the machine enters the tomb, situated in the ­middle of the platform, to hide the exchange of the central character for the venerated statue, carried out by those who remain unseen under the platform (Figure 10.10). Since it is supposed to be Jesus who restores the soul of his mother, and for this reason this role is played by a priest, his identity is not made explicit.

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Otherwise, it would be strange to explain why he does not take part in the assumption together with Mary, but remains on the ground, hidden under the platform. It is obvious the two characters would not fit together into the machine.20 We observe, again, the extraordinary similarity of the araceli in Elx with a miniature of Jean Fouquet that represents the assumption (Hours of Etienne Chevalier).21 While the spectacular assumption takes place, a third flying apparatus oscillates in the air, preceded by a new rain of tinsel, to summon the Trinity, who is installed in a triple throne formed by a central chair flanked by two side sockets (Figure 10.11). The eternal Father, who is carrying a crown tied to a silk rope, lowers it slowly until it reaches the head of the Virgin and the angels of the araceli help to crown her.22 It is the culminating moment of the representation and of the celebrations of Elx. In the coronation a true collective catharsis takes place that may touch even the most sceptical (Figures 10.12a, 10.12b, 10.12c, 10.12d). It serves as a sign of identity of a town that understands the Festa as one of its unmistakable symbols, its touchstone of memory and its main element of self-recognition. Thus, every summer the singers of Elx re-enact the acrobatics of the Virgin Mary with the same techniques and splendour as their ancestors did five centuries ago. 6

Gestures and Stage Props

The interpretation of the Festa d’Elx maintains the link with the ceremonial and the cult that characterised medieval sacred theatre, where the movements and attitudes of the actors are closely related to liturgical gestures. This liturgical gesture, based on practical and spontaneous movements, but isolated in a ritual context, acquires a formal and symbolic codification. The interpretative style is in the antipodes of the imitative aesthetics of reality, far from the identification and credibility of modern drama. The only convulsive moment that contrasts with the ritual gesture arrives with the irruption of the Jews who 20

Francesc Massip, “L’immaginario aereo nella scena medioevale. Tecnica e tipologie del volo scenico,” in European Medieval Drama, ed. Sydney Higgins and Fiorella Paino (­Camerino: Università degli studi di Camerino, Centro linguistico di Ateneo, 1996). 21 Bazin, Jean Fouquet, 47. 22 Luis Quirante Santacruz, “Notas sobre la escenografía del Misteri d’Elx: La Coronación,” in Atti del IV colloquio della Société Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval. Processo in paradiso e in inferno, dramma biblico, tecnologia dell’allestimento scenico, ed. Maria Chiabò, Federico Doglio, and Marina Maymone (Viterbo: Centro studi sul teatro medioevale e rinascimentale, 1984), 488.

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Figure 10.11 Aerial machine of the Trinity © Francesc Massip

try to interrupt the burial of Mary and fight with the apostles, but they are miraculously paralyzed when they touch the coffin and only recover mobility when they finally convert and are christened (Figures 10.13a and 10.13b).23 23

Francesc Massip, “L’histrió, el frare i el burgès. L’ahir i l’ara de la ‘interpretació’ medieval,” in Del actor medieval a nuestros días, ed. Josep Lluís Sirera (Elx: Institut Municipal de Cultura, 2001), 190–203.

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Figure 10.12 (A–D) Coronation of Saint Mary of the Assumption © Sixto Marco

There are significant stage props, such as the aureoles that identify the Marys: Mary Salome, “Maria Iacobes,” and the anagram of Maria Mater on her crown decorated with a star. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the halos also identified the apostles, until the actors decided not to carry them any longer because they found them annoying. Some signs of identification of the apostles have been maintained, such as the book for John, the keys for Peter, the pilgrim’s staff for James, or the sword for Paul; as well as the palm of paradise the angel gives to Mary and that she hands over to John. Likewise, there are the pillows carried by Mary’s entourage which they use when they

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Figure 10.13a Exterior relief at Notre Dame of Paris with Mary’s bier covered with the cut-off hands of the Jews © Francesc Massip

Figure 10.13b The rabbi of Elx with his paralysed hands on the bier © Francesc Massip

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kneel in front of the three stations that Mary visits before she arrives at the platform which is the main stage.24 Due to its festive dimension, the mystery play is not a type of entertainment in the contemporary sense of theatre, but rather it has more in common with the community type of celebration which characterises medieval dramatic practice. This might be the most important lesson that contemporary drama may learn from the mystery play, precisely because it aims at recovering the intense communication with the public that those medieval performances always achieved. This is the reason why the Festa d’Elx not only represents the most genuine survival of the festive performances that were common in the Middle Ages, but it is also an essential reference point both for the ones who are studying drama history and for those who are involved in the staging of contemporary drama.25 Bibliography Bazin, Germain. Jean Fouquet. Le livre d’heures d’Etienne Chevalier. Paris: Somogy, 1990. Càmara i Sempere, Hèctor. “Àngel plaent e yluminós, un do en blanc al Misteri d’Elx.” In Estudios sobre teatro medieval, edited by Josep Lluís Sirera, 25–39. Valencia: ­Universitat de València, 2008. Càmara i Sempere, Hèctor. “Festa i religiositat en el Misteri.” In La festa d’Elx, edited by Gabriel Sansano, 53–60. Sant Vicent de Raspeig: Publicacions Universitat d’Alacant, 2016. Castaño, Joan. Aproximacions a la festa d’Elx. Alacant: Instituto Alicantino de Cultura “Juan Gil-Albert,” 2002. Consueta 1709. Edició crítica del text de la Festa d’Elx [Ms. 1709]. Edited by Francesc ­Massip. València: Generalitat Valenciana, 1986. Davidson, Clifford. The Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages. New York: AMS Press, 2005. Drumbl, Johann. “Il dramma liturgico: aspetti filologici e storici.” In La scena assente. Realtà e leggenda sul teatro nel Medioevo, edited by Francesco Mosetti Casaretto, 123–42. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2006.

24 Massip, La festa d’Elx, 253–258. 25 Francesc Massip and Lenke Kovács, La teatralitat medieval i la seva pervivència (­Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona Institut del Teatre, 2017), 412. For a summary of the Misteri d’Elx, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch‌?v=1ObRtw3bsww. Accessed June 2020.

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Konigson, Élie. L’Espace théâtral médiéval. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975. Massip, Francesc. “Algunes notes sobre l’escena de la Festa o Misteri d’Elx.” In Història i crítica de la “festa d’Elx,” edited by Joan Castaño and Gabriel Sansano, 213–24. ­Alacant: Universitat d’Alacant, 1998. Massip, Francesc. El misteri de l’Assumpció de la catedral de València, estudi, edició crítica i adaptació dramàtica. Edited by Francesc Massip. València: Universitat de València, 2013. Massip, Francesc. “L’histrió, el frare i el burgès. L’ahir i l’ara de la ‘interpretació’ medieval.” In Del actor medieval a nuestros días, edited by Josep Lluís Sirera, 177–206. Elx: Institut Municipal de Cultura, 2001. Massip, Francesc. “L’immaginario aereo nella scena medioevale. Tecnica e tipologie del volo scenico.” In European Medieval Drama, edited by Sydney Higgins and Fiorella Paino, 61–82. Camerino: Università degli studi di Camerino, Centro linguistico di Ateneo, 1996. Massip, Francesc. “L’Ara Coeli: leggenda sibillina e scenotecnia aerea.” In La scena materiale. Oggetti e pratiche della rappresentazione nel teatro medievale, edited by Tiziano Pachiarotti and Lenke Kovács, 195–219. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2015. Massip, Francesc. La festa d’Elx i els misteris medievals europeus. Alacant: Instituto de Cultura “Juan-Gil Albert”-Ajuntament, 1991. Massip, Francesc. La ilusión de Ícaro, un desafío a los dioses. Máquinas de vuelo en el espectáculo de tradición medieval y sus pervivencias en España. Madrid: Centro de Estudios y Actividades Culturales, 1997. Massip, Francesc. “A Note on Medieval Staging Techniques in the Catalan Lands and their Survival in the Mistery de Elx: Theatrical Illusions.” In Le Théâtre et la cité dans l’Europe médiévale, edited by Jean-Claude Aubailly, 555–66. Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz 1988. Massip, Francesc. “Representació, teatre i poder a l’Edat Mitjana.” In Cultura i poder, edited by Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré, 31–52. Lleida: Pagès, 2002. Massip, Francesc. “The Staging of the Assumption in Europe.” In Iconographic and Comparative Studies in Medieval Drama, edited by Clifford Davidson and John H. Stroupe, 17–28. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan ­University, 1991. Massip, Francesc, and Lenke Kovács. La teatralitat medieval i la seva pervivència. ­Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona Institut del Teatre, 2017. Quirante Santacruz, Luis. “Notas sobre la escenografía del Misteri d’Elx: La Coronación.” In Atti del IV colloquio della Société Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval. Processo in paradiso e in inferno, dramma biblico, tecnologia dell’allestimento scenico, edited by Maria Chiabò, Federico Doglio, and Marina Maymone, 479–93. Viterbo: Centro studi sul teatro medioevale e rinascimenatale, 1984.

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Rodríguez i Macià, Manuel. “El Misteri d’Elx: una mirada des de la litúrgia. Alguns elements litúrgics en el soterrament de la Mare de Déu.” In La festa i Elx, edited by Josep Lluís Sirera, 291–301. Elx: Ajuntament d’Elx, 2004. Romeu i Figueras, Josep. Teatre català antic. Biblioteca de cultura catalana. Edited by Francesc Massip and Pep Vila. 3 vols. Barcelona: Curial, 1994.

CHAPTER 11

Performing the Bible: Christian Drama and the Arts Jean-Claude Schmitt The title of our collection shows clearly we have to cope simultaneously with two different and huge fields of research and academic traditions: on the one hand, the study of the Bible and its historical reception; on the other, the ­history of medieval theatre. We ought to stand at the point where these two sets of problems overlap. The task is not easy. To try to achieve it, I shall proceed in two stages: first, I shall sketch out the evolution of Christian biblical drama. Second, I shall question what “performing the Bible” means. 1

The Bible and Its Uses in Judaism and Christianity

Two of the three main monotheisms—Judaism and Christianity—argued that the Bible, or at least its core, has been revealed and therefore that what it says is true. It is the warrant of the covenant between God and his people, Israel, or, according to Christians, Ecclesia, the church. However, they considered the Bible differently. For Jews, the Bible (Tanakh) consists of 24 books, among them the five first and holiest books that form the Pentateuch, called the Torah. For Christians, the Bible consists of the two “testaments”: the New Testament, concerning Jesus Christ’s life and legacy, is thought of as the achievement of the “Old” one, the Hebrew Bible: Adam, Moses, David, Jonah are figurae—figures—of the forthcoming Christ. In Jewish and Christian traditions, the Bible could not be separated from the “biblical culture” surrounding the book. The biblical text was omnipresent and continuously quoted in everyday prayers in synagogues as well as in churches at the offices of the “hours” (with the recitation of all the 150 psalms within one week), in canticles, in liturgy, especially during the mass (with two ­readings, one from the Gospel, another one from the Epistles or from the Old Testament), and in the canon of the Mass, which reproduces Jesus Christ’s words during the Last Supper. The written text had to be interpreted and explained to the faithful. It ­supposes the literate mediation of rabbis or clerics, whose essential duty was to preach and instruct the people about the scriptures. The Bible did not inform © Jean-Claude Schmitt, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004522183_013

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only about the faith, the other world, and eschatology, but delivered all kinds of knowledge about nature, society, law, ethics, politics. In addition to the Bible’s canons, we must also keep apocryphal texts in ­consideration as they were usually given the same authority, prestige, and influence upon culture and arts. This was the case, for instance, of the ­Christian apocryphal Nicodemus’s Gospel and Saint James’ Gospel, which added information about Jesus’s childhood and the Virgin Mary. There were also historical legends that continued the biblical narrative, for instance the so-called Lord’s Vengeance (Vengeance Nostre Seigneur), that told the story of Emperor Vespasian’s illness, miraculous recovery, and conversion, which prompted him to revenge Jesus’s killing by the Jews. Such apocryphal texts and legends influenced many medieval dramas, although some authors said they wanted to avoid them and based their plays only on the Bible: Around 1450, Arnoul Gréban wrote his huge play of Christ’s Passion, arguing he was “poursuyvans sans prolixité / L’évangile a nostre sçavoir, / Sans apocriphe recevoir” (continuing without verbosity / the Gospel we know / without any addition from the apocryphal).1 Actually, Arnoul Gréban admitted that this was usually not the case, as the apocryphal was received as well as the authentic parts of the Bible. Despite the common ground of Jewish and Christian attitudes toward the Bible, important differences between them must be underlined concerning the representation of the Bible either in image or performance. On the Jewish side, there was practically no Jewish ‘theatre’ until the end of the Middle Ages. However, performance of a liturgical character occurred within the synagogue: the crowning of the Torah each Sabbath, the use of rattles at Purim, the sounding of the ram’s horn for the New Year, the parading of the Torah at Simchat Torah. Outside the synagogue, at home, the Passover Seder (illustrated haggadah) and the lighting of Hanukkah candles are truly scripted performances.2 The first mention of the Yiddish Purim-Spiel, performed in the evening of the Purim festival, on the fourteenth of Adar, one month before Pesah, was not earlier than the sixteenth century. The topic was taken from the book of Esther, and it recalled how the queen prevented the extermination of the ­Jewish people by Haman. The influence of Christian popular carnival (Fastnachtspiel) upon Jewish Purim-Spiel may be possible. Later on, from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, various plays inspired by the Jewish Bible as well as by Italian vernacular pastorals were written in Classical Hebrew by Moses Zacuto 1 Edina Bozoky, “Les apocryphes bibliques,” in Le Moyen âge et la Bible, ed. Pierre Riché and Guy Lobrichon (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 439. 2 I am grateful to Dr. Paul Saenger for his remarks and suggestions on this topic.

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(about the story of Abraham) and Moses Hayyim Luzzato of Padova. The new plays written and performed in the eighteenth century within the context of Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment,” were very different from the Yiddish Purim-plays. According to Israel Abrahams: “Nothing marks the continuity of Jewish life more clearly than the survival of Purim-plays into modern times. On the other hand, the dramas written in Hebrew are interesting for an opposite reason. They, to a certain extent, mark the coming closing of the Jewish Middle Ages, or at all events they are signals of the approaching emancipation. The jargon plays for Purim show us the conservative side of Jewish life, the dramas in Classical Hebrew show us Jewish life in its adaptability to changing circumstances. For, to put the same point differently, the jargon play is a product of the ghetto, while the Hebrew drama was only possible when the ghetto walls were tottering to their fall. The composition of dramas in Hebrew always synchronised with a new participation of the Jews in the national life of the European states in which they lived.”3 The contrast with Christian ‘theatrical’ tradition is most striking. From the tenth to the sixteenth century, biblical performances and their transformations are well documented. Up to the third part of the twelfth century, the link between them and the church liturgy was largely dominant. Around 1160, the French Adam’s Play or Ordo repraesentationis Adae or Jeu d’Adam, was the first example of a new form of religious drama less dependent on liturgy. The Old Testament inspired Adam’s Play, which consisted of 590 French verses and 13 lines of Latin stage direction (didascalies). Compared with the original verses of Genesis 2:7, the dramatic amplification is striking: the drama was 15 times longer than the biblical text. Its dramatic efficiency was produced by the amplification of dialogues. Far from being a mere translation of the Bible, it adapted scripture to the necessities of the dramatic play. Another play inspired by the Old Testament was the Ludus Danielis of ­Beauvais from the turn of the thirteenth century. It was inspired by the book of Daniel and possessed, according to the manuscript of the British Library Egerton 2615, numerous musical pieces, hymns, and processions. Since the Christian calendar did not contain any feast for the celebration of the Prophet Daniel, the play was linked to the feast of circumcision on January 1 and was thought of as the prediction King Darius was given by the Prophet Daniel. However, the large majority of plays were inspired by the New Testament. According to Karl Young, about half of medieval plays were related to Christ’s passion and resurrection. The four Gospels were the most influential: their 3 Gershon Shaked, “Drama, Hebrew,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 6:263. I am grateful to Prof. Maurice Kriegel for his help and information.

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dialogues, as opposed to their narratives, were not just reproduced word for word, their volume was augmented twice or three times. The first religious drama, known as Quem quaeritis? (“Whom do you look for?” a question the three Marys visiting the empty sepulchre of Christ were asked by the angel according to John 20:15), developed from a chanted trope of Easter Mass. This trope had been composed by Tutilio of Sankt-Gallen around 915 and is still preserved today in a manuscript of the abbey church, Ms 485, fol. 111 (tenth century).4 Out of this liturgical play, performed at least since the end of the tenth century, one may also mention the Peregrinus, about the meeting of Christ and the pilgrims of Emmaus, just after the resurrection, which explains why it was performed at vesper on Easter Monday (Ordo ad Peregrinum in Secunda Feria Pasche ad Vesperas). According to Otto Pächt, the Saint-Albans Psalter’s iconography of the meeting of Christ and the pilgrims was influenced by the religious drama performed inside the abbey church.5 The fourteenth century saw a quick development of the passion plays, ­performed outside the churches and within the urban public space: one may mention the Passion of Frankfurt, performed in 1350 on the Römer, the main square of the city; the Passion of Arras, composed by Eustache Marcadé in 1420; in 1437, the Jeu de la Passion (Play of the Passion) of Metz; in 1444, the Passion Play of Aix, in the Provence; around 1450, the most celebrated ­Passion c­ omposed by Arnoul Gréban, followed in 1470 by the Passion of Rouen; the ­Passion of Angers written in 1486 by Jean Michel; in 1501 the Four Days of the Passion of Mons (with no less than 50,000 verses); in 1547 the Mystère de la ­Passion (Mystery of the Passion) of Valenciennes.6 The next year, 1548, the Parliament of Paris prohibited the religious dramas and dissolved the Confraternity of the Passion (Confrérie de la Passion) that was in charge of the Passions and Mystères within the city. But the performances continued in distant regions in or out of the kingdom. Thus, the Passion of Luzern was mentioned in 1545, 1571, 1583, 1597, and still in 1616.

4 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon press, 1933), 2:chap. 7, quoted by Osborne Bennett Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1, 18. 5 Otto Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 33–34. Charles Reginald Dodwell, Otto Pächt, and Francis Wormald, The St. Albans Psalter (Albani Psalter) (London: University of London Warburg institute, 1960). ­Jean-Claude Schmitt, La Raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval, Bibliothèque des ­histoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 276–278. 6 Élie Konigson, L’Espace théâtral médiéval (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975).

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A minority of plays were related to the nativity of Jesus and performed during the liturgical period of Christmas. The Star Play (Officium Stellae) of Fleury was dated ca. 1155, as the monks were commemorating the shepherd following the star until they reached the crib in Bethlehem. Some dramas were inspired from other parts of the Bible. The Sponsus or play of the “Seven Wise and Seven Mad Women”, in Latin and Occitan verses alternatively, derived from the Gospel of Matthew 25:1–13. Around 1160 or later, the Ludus de Antichristo may have attributed to Friedrich Barbarossa (+ 1190) the apocalyptic expectations of the “Emperor of the Last Day”, who would fight against the antichrist and eventually leave his weapons upon the altar of the Holy Sepulchre before the last judgment. The textual background of such a play consisted of John’s Revelation, enriched by the later speculations of Pseudo-Methodus (seventh to eighth century for the Latin translation), Adso of Montier-en-Der (ca. 954), and Gerhoh of Reichersberg (1163). Some years later, around 1202, the Courtois d’Arras developed the dialogue between the “prodigal son” and his father according to the Gospel of Luke, 15:21–22. Biblical themes were largely dominant within the repertory of the e­ leventh to thirteenth century religious dramas: from 53 religious plays listed by Thierry Revol, only five had a non-biblical plot.7 There were other religious plays related to the cult of saints, such as Jean Bodel’s Play of Saint Nicholas (Jeu de Saint Nicolas) around 1200, or Rutebeuf’s Miracle of Theophilus (Miracle de ­Theophile) in 1265. Or much later the Mystère of Sainte Apolline, made famous by a miniature of Jean Fouquet in the Hours of Etienne Chevalier (1460). There were also some profane plays, such as Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la Feuillée in 1276 or the Farce de Maître Pathelin in 1464. We do not have to consider here all these plays since they do not belong to the biblical context. From the middle of the sixteenth century, religious theatre was criticised everywhere by the civil and religious authorities, in Protestant countries as well as in Catholic ones. Classical theatre was much inspired by ancient history or other traditions than the Bible. One may mention, nevertheless, some exceptions, like the two biblical tragedies Jean Racine wrote for Madame de Maintenon and the “Demoiselles” of Saint-Cyr, Esther in 1689 and Athalie in 1691, the last one inspired by the book of 2 Kings 11: as Queen Athaliah’s son, Ahaziah, king of Judah, died, Athaliah ordered the death of all the royal family and to re-establish the cult of Baal. But the young boy Joash survived, was proclaimed king in the temple of Jerusalem, and defeated Athaliah. The

7 Thierry Revol, Représentations du sacré dans les textes dramatiques des XIe–XIIIe siècles en France (Paris: Champion, 1999), 64.

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contemporary theological debate on faith and predestination was at stake in such a “biblical tragedy.”8 In order to summarise the long evolution of biblical drama and its connection with other forms of performances, we have to think both in terms of continuity and of polarity. In terms of continuity, because there was no strong separation between the various performances, since in the Middle Ages all forms of social relationships were strongly ritualised: performance was everywhere. As Paul Zumthor pointed out, “most literary productions of the time and in fact the whole medieval society built up upon a background of dramaturgy” that linked together oral expression, gestures, and publicity.9 In terms of polarity, because more than five centuries of evolution showed a switch from church to urban public space, from clerical status to professional specialists of theatre, from Latin to vernacular language. All these changing features may be summarised in a single table: at one end, we would find the Mass and the Eucharistic ritual. At the opposite end, the early modern theatre, on which the influence of the Bible had become exceptional. From one end to the other, we would find successively the religious drama of the tenth to twelfth century, then, especially from the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Mystères and Passions. All these forms of performances were never isolated but functioned together with other rituals—processions, royal entries, banquet interludes, tournaments, carnivals, public executions, etc.—that escaped largely from the supervision of the church and clearly from the biblical culture. Table 11.1  Evolution of the types of performances

Mass eucharist

Religious dramas

Liturgy Processions Inside or in front of the church Priest

Monks and clerics

Latin

Latin /Vernacular

Mystères passions

Modern theatre

Royal entries, etc. Public places and Special building streets “Theatre” Members of Professional confraternities actors Vernacular

8 Charles Mazouer, Théâtre et christianisme. Études sur l’ancien théâtre français (Paris: Honoré Champion éditeur, 2015). Anne Piéjus, Le théâtre des Demoiselles: tragédie et musique à SaintCyr la fin du Grand Siècle (Paris: Société française de musicologie, 2000). 9 Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 429–449.

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What Does “Performing the Bible” Actually Mean?

Performing the Bible in religious drama, as well as in images, implies a double cognitive relationship, on one side between the performer and the character he would represent on stage, on the other side, between the spectator and the performers he is looking at. Hence the two questions I want to ask: the first around the notions of ‘representation’ and ‘imitation’ and their application to the specificity of biblical drama; the second about the ‘response’ of the viewers to the performers and the play. 2.1  Interpreting and Representing the Bible in Liturgy, Images, and Drama Coming back to the attitudes of medieval Jews and Christian towards the biblical heritage, we see their ways of interpreting and representing the Bible, either in images or in dramatic performances, were deeply different. On the Jewish side, the Talmud and, later, the responsa of the rabbis discussed the meaning of each biblical word; they always privileged the text, according to God’s prohibition of images, although iconography was not completely banished: mosaics in the Dura Europos synagogue (243 CE), later illustrated Haggadah manuscripts used for the Pesah domestic festival, and even profane mappah/mappot embroideries founded in numerous genizot, show that the interdict was never completely respected.10 The Christian interpretation of the Bible was on its side characterised by the necessarily dialectical articulation of the two testaments.11 In the Middle Ages, such an understanding consisted of what Erich Auerbach called “real figuration” (Realfiguration), according to which the persons and actions of the Old Testament shared the same historical reality as those of the New Testament. The Prophet Jonah or King David were neither simple symbols nor allegories of Jesus, but the latter’s historical forerunners, sharing with him the same history of salvation. Exegetes and commentators of liturgy, starting with bishop Amalarius of Metz in the eighth century, called these real figures of the Old Testament “types”, and “antitypes” those of the New Testament, first of all Jesus.12 He, the new Adam, entered human history and assumed human flesh and blood in order to redeem humankind from original sin. 10

Héritage inespéré. Objets cachés au coeur des synagogues, ed. Claire Decomps (Strasbourg: Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, 2016). 11 Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964). 12 Hardison, Christian Rite, 35–79.

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Thus, the belief in the incarnation of Jesus changed radically the way of interpreting the Bible. It changed also the understanding of ritual, the a­ ttitudes towards the notion of representation, the acceptance of images and drama. Since the Son of God had become human, the prohibition of any kind of ­representation expressed by the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 4:15–18; 5:8–9) was deeply challenged, and it became legitimate not just to carve and paint images and perform plays but to give iconic and dramatic representation of the divinity itself. Long before images and drama developed in Christian culture, the liturgy of the church was the first and most important religious performance directly linked to the biblical heritage. As opposed to drama, liturgy was the exclusive field of ‘reality’. During the Mass, and especially during the canon of the Mass, the priest, who has been consecrated as sacerdos, re-enacted Jesus’s gestures and words during the Last Supper, as Jesus shared bread and wine among his disciples while telling them: “This is my flesh …, this is my blood …. Do this in my memory.” After long and violent debates about the question whether Jesus’s words were to be interpreted symbolically or realistically, Pope Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) proclaimed the “real presence” of Jesus in the consecrated species, as bread was transmuted into flesh and wine into blood. The faithful, therefore, would have to worship the host and the chalice as Jesus’s body itself, as they gazed at the priest raising twice the sacrament above his shoulders during the rite of elevatio. The priest, sacerdos, was not an actor playing the role of Jesus, but the real figura—in Erich Auerbach’s terms—of the continuous presence and agency of Jesus in human history. From the tenth century onwards, drama became another kind of performance, distinct from liturgy, but linked to it. Although we speak of medieval liturgy, we must remember that before the sixteenth century the rites of the church were not yet called ‘liturgy’ but ordo or officium, the same words that were used to speak of religious drama. The lexical similitude shows the proximity of both kinds of performance and even the generative link between them, despite differences we also want to stress. The continuity between liturgical performance and drama was well perceived, as far as both kinds of texts were often preserved in the same manuscripts, like the famous Ms 201 of Orléans: it came from the monastery of Fleury (Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire) and contains 10 different religious dramas of Easter and Christmas besides other pieces belonging to the liturgy stricto sensu. Dramas and liturgy did not share just the same biblical themes, like Jesus’s passion and resurrection, but the same liturgical timing (the Visitation Play or the Herod’s Play were performed respectively in the liturgical times of Easter and Christmas).13 13

Ibid., 86–87.

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Both kinds of texts were entirely sung, but around 1160 the Play of Adam was the first drama evidencing an alternation of musical and non-musical parts, according to the very structure of the later Mystères.14 Liturgy and dramas were accompanied by Gregorian chant, and the Te Deum was sung at the end of each performance. “Music was acting as a powerful link permitting to get from rite to dramatic staging … It was thought of as a necessity for the theatrical language issued from liturgy.”15 Ritual and drama had also in common that women— with the exception of female monasteries like abbess Hildegard of Bingen’s Rupertsberg—were excluded from the performance. Material images were used both in liturgy and religious drama: in Gernrode monastery (Saxony), the monks performed in the twelfth to thirteenth century the Visitation Play while entering a sepulchre (Heiliger Grab) built in the nave of their church and containing life-size stone statues of the holy women, the angel, and Jesus; they put the consecrated host in the side wound of Jesus’s body, where it remained for three days until the resurrection Mass of Easter.16 In order to characterise the performers of medieval religious drama, Karl Young and later scholars proposed the notion of ‘impersonation’: the performers, who were first monks or clerics, would temporarily ‘impersonate’ God, Adam or Eve, or the prophets or the Sibyl in the Play of Adam. In the Visitatio Sepulchri or Quem quaeritis? “three deacons among the canons acted like the three women” of the Gospel (tres dyaconi canonici ad similitudinem mulierum). In the Play of Daniel, in Beauvais (thirteenth century), clerics acted sub personna of the prophet and the king. From the middle of the fourteenth century, the urban and vernacular Mystères and Passions (passion plays), were no longer performed within an ecclesiastic context, but on a stage constructed on the public place. However, there was not yet a strict spatial separation between actors and public and the devil used to run between the spectators: diabolus discursum fecit per populum.17 The performers were now members of confraternities or even professional actors, no longer monks nor clerics. For instance, the Parisian Confraternity of the Passion (Confrérie de la Passion) was founded in 1409 at the Hospital of the Holy Trinity; it performed the passion plays in the 14

The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies, ed. C. Clifford Flanigan, Thomas P. Campbell, and Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985). Revol, Représentations du sacré, 67. 15 Revol, Représentations du sacré, 65: “La musique agit comme un lien puissant pour passer du rite à la mise en scène dramatique.” Elle “a été sentie comme une nécessité pour ce langage théâtral issu de la liturgie.” 16 Hans K. Schulze, Das Stift Gernrode unter Verwendung eines Manuskripts von Reinhold Specht Mit einem kunstgeschichtlichen Beitrag über die Stiftskirche (Köln: Grazn Böhlau Verlag, 1965). 17 Revol, Représentations du sacré, 99.

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city until it was abolished in 1548 by the parliament. Although the members of the confraternity had no clerical status, they had to identify to biblical characters such as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or King Herod. However, for these lay people, ‘impersonation’ could no longer have the same significance as for monks and clerics performing biblical drama in the eleventh or twelfth century. It was substituted by a secularised, or even a kind of professional, role. In the long evolution from the tenth to the sixteenth century, we observe important changes in regard to the ‘real figuration’ of the priest during the Mass. The priest was never just “playing” the role of Jesus. He was ‘really’ incarnating his historical presence. This realisation could no longer be recognised in the impersonation of Jesus by occasional or professional actors of fifteenthand sixteenth-century Mystères. 2.2 Ambivalence and Fiction: The Point of View of the Spectators The anthropologist Jack Goody was right in speaking of the deep “ambivalence” of religious representations, comprising ritual or liturgy, as well as images or theatre. The Christian tradition would not escape such a judgment.18 Despite the positive factor of Jesus’s incarnation in the legitimation of images and theatre in Christian culture, the early Middle Ages proved to be often reluctant to them. Images and drama would imitate the reality, they were not the reality. Hence the suspicion that they were mere illusion, that they were just lying. That was already the critical issue in Plato’s Republic.19 In a religious and monotheistic context, the risk was all the more critical, since the visible image of God or any other celestial figure could be worshipped instead of God; it could easily be treated as an idol or simulacrum (as in the biblical episode of the golden calf worshipped by the Hebrews). For Jews and Christians, paganism and idolatry were synonymous, and they both condemned pagan theatre as well as the cult of the statue of the Roman emperor. Such a reluctance tended to extend to later Christian representations.20

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Jack Goody, Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fictions, Relics and Sexuality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Véronique Dominguez, La scène et la croix. Le jeu de l’acteur dans les Passions dramatiques françaises (XIVe–XVIe siècles) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 66–67, about ‘imitation’ in t­ heatre plays, according to Plato, Republic, 395 b, and about ‘illusion’, the allegory of the cave, 514 a. Jean-Claude Schmitt, La conversion d’Hermann le Juif. Autobiographie, histoire et fiction (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003). For the English translation, see: Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Conversion of Herman the Jew. Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

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Iconophobia was rampant and iconoclasm raged in Byzantium at the turn of the eighth century. Despite of the efforts of Pope Hadrian, it inspired much dislike towards religious images in the Carolingian court, as witnessed by the Libri Carolini. Three-dimensional images of Jesus on the cross (as in Pavia, Vercelli, or Cologne), of the Virgin Mary (as in Clermont and Essen), and of the saints (as Saint Foy of Conques) did not spread before the end of the ninth century. Liturgical drama was first mentioned in the same years as Bishop Ethelwold of Winchester’s Regularis Concordia described in 987 the performance of the monks of Fleury (in the Loire Valley): at Easter, three monks played the role of the three Marys (the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Mary Salome), as they discovered that Jesus’s tomb was empty and were informed of the resurrection by the angel, who was represented by another monk. In the play, the monks informed the choir of the resurrection, held up the shroud as a proof of it, and placed it upon the altar.21 In Christian culture, ambivalence characterised notably the image of God the Father.22 As opposed to his son, God did not assume human flesh. In the Old Testament, Moses heard God speaking to him out of the burning bush but was not authorised to see his face. Christians, who felt allowed to depict the Son of God as a human being, were hesitant to give the Father the same appearance. On some medieval images of the Trinity, God’s face was hidden by a quatrefoil symbolizing the quaternitas divina, the infinite power of God. In religious dramas, God the Father never showed up except in the Play of Adam, around 1160.23 At the very beginning of this play, the creator is speaking to Adam and Eve in paradise. The opening stage direction describes the construction of paradise and the entrance of God, who is first named Salvator, then labelled as Figura: “Then comes the Saviour bearing a dalmatic and Adam and Eve stand in front of him. Adam is dressed in a red tunic, Eve with a white female dress and a white gown made of silk. They stand in front of Figura. Adam’s face is quite composed, Eva’s one a little bit lowered.”24 After they were tempted by the devil, who is named Diabolus, Figura, who has substituted the 21 22 23 24

Armand Strubel, Le théâtre au Moyen Âge. Naissance d’une littérature dramatique (Paris: Bréal, 2014), 39 (usum quarumdam religiosorum imitabilem ad fidem indocti vulgi ac ­neofitorum corrobandam). Alphonse Dupront, L’image de religion dans l’Occident chrétien, Bibliothèque illustrée des histoires (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 293–344. Véronique Dominguez, Le jeu d’Adam (Paris: Champion, 2012). Carl J. Odenkirchen, The Play of Adam (Ordo Representationis Ade). The Original Text reviewed, with Introduction, notes, and an English Translation (Brookline: Classical Folia Editions, 1976), 66: “Tunc veniat Salvator indutus dalmatica et statuantur choram eo Adam, Eva. Adam indutus sit tunica rubea, Eva vero muliebri vestimento albo, peplo

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dalmatic of a deacon for the stole of a priest (stolam habens), enters the stage for the last time, in order to curse Adam and Eve and expel them from paradise. Then he goes back to the church and never appears again.25 I am wondering why the stage direction calls God the Father Figura and not Deus like Adam, Eve, or Diabolus. The right answer may be that God was not a character of the play like the others. Unlike his son, the human characters, and even the devil, he was not supposed to become visible on earth. Therefore, it was difficult to depict him or represent him on stage. The name Figura may express the incongruity of his appearance in the Play of Adam, an exception among all medieval religious dramas. Generally speaking, the ambivalence of religious drama was related to its ­fictional dimension. I am following here Laura Weigert’s recent suggestions.26 As religious drama progressively emancipated from its liturgical cradle, its fictional dimension became more conscious. Stage directions inform, for instance, that masks were only worn on the stage by the devil and the demons. The scaffolding (in late medieval French échaufaudage or hourdement) that characterised the Passions and Mystères of the fourteenth and fifteenth ­centuries imposed a clearer distinction between the social reality of the spectators and the fictional world of the stage. The tapestries and painted backcloths that hung above the scaffolding (as those preserved in Reims, Musée des Beaux Arts, for the Vengeance play of ca. 1500–1530) gave the spectators a depicted guideline into this world of fiction.27 But it seems to me that the fictional representation of the Bible found its climax at the end of the fifteenth century out of the stage and in the three-dimensional and life-size sculptures of the Sacro Monte of Varallo (Piemonte), where the faithful were faced with a petrified biblical drama representing the main stages of the history of salvation, from Adam’s fall to Jesus’s nativity, passion, and resurrection. Such an architectural and iconographical complex, as well as the late medieval passion play, was not so much linked to the liturgy and to the Mass, unlike biblical dramas of the tenth to the twelfth century, but to the predication of the friars proposing new forms of personal devotion and religious imagination. Actually, a Franciscan friar, Bernardino Caimi, took the initiative of the cycle after he

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serico albo. Et stent coram Figura, Adam tamen proprius, vultu composito, Eva vero parum demissiori.” Ibid.: “Quo finite, Figura regredietur ad ecclesiam.” Laura Weigert, French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Ibid., 161–173.

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returned from the Holy Land and ordered the construction and depiction by Gaudenzio Ferrari of 45 chapels.28 However, it happened sometimes that the fiction suddenly came back to reality: in 1549, as a Judith Drama was performed for the entry of King Philip II of Spain into the town of Tournai, a criminal condemned to death was ­disguised as King Holofernes and executed.29 Actually, despite the fictional dimension of biblical drama, the surrounding social reality never failed to impose its mark upon the plays. Since I started this short survey while comparing Jewish and Christian hermeneutical traditions, I want to question the attitudes towards Judaism and the Jews in Christian biblical performances. Gilbert Dahan showed that the usual polemical discourse against the Jews and their alleged blindness towards the messianic nature of Jesus was prolonged in the religious dramas. As in the “Dispute between a Jew and a Christian” genre, like the ones written by Gilbert Crispin or Peter Alphonsi, some performances displayed the conventional typological argument according to which the function of the Old Testament was to predict the New. In order to fit the genre of the drama and to be accessible to the audience of the Mystères, the typological argumentation was simplified, as opposed to the more subtle levels of interpretation within the sermons.30 In the Play of Adam, the story of the fall was prolonged by the prophecies of ten Old Testament prophets predicting the coming of Jesus: Abraham, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, Balaam, Daniel, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah deliver their prophecies, until the last one, Isaiah, announces that a “virgin will conceive in her womb and bring forth a son and he will be named Emmanuel.”31 Then a group of Jews (quidam de synagoga) comes aggressively out of the synagogue in order to dispute with the prophet and contradict him; they accuse him of lying and he must defend himself: “I did not invent my prophecy”, he says, “I saw it!” Then he repeats the very words of his prediction and defeats his contradictors. The same mixture of derision and hostility was present in other plays, like the Ordo prophetarum of Limoges, performed at Christmas in the cathedral of Laon (thirteenth century), or the Ordo of Isaac and Rebecca, where Esau

28

David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (­Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 29 Strubel, Le théâtre au Moyen Âge, 196. 30 Gilbert Dahan, “L’interprétation de l’Ancien Testament dans les drames religieux (XIe–XIIIe siècle),” Romania 100, no. 397 (1) (1979). About these disputes, but without mentioning the contemporary dramas, see: Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the twelfth century Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1995). 31 Ecce virgo concipiet in utero et pariet filium et vocabitur nomen ejus Emmanuel.

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represents the synagogue and Jacob the church.32 According to Gustave Cohen and later scholars, the Passions and Mystères would have increased the violence against Jews in the context of the prosecutions following the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century. But according to Laura Weigert, there is no evidence that any actual dramatic performance ever prompted directly physical violence against the local Jewish communities.33 She pointed out that G. Cohen’s argument was founded on the 1510 printed version of the Vengeance, or “revenge for the death of Jesus that Vespasian and Titus exacted on the Jews of Jerusalem and elsewhere”, and not on the earlier and less aggressive manuscripts of the performance itself. The fact that authorities were cautious enough to ban the Jews from their town (as did the pope in Rome) before a performance would indicate their will to prevent all forms of violence, without proving that plays were followed by massacres. Moreover, Weigert challenged Cohen’s central idea that the audience made no difference between the contemporary medieval Jews on one side, Judas and his biblical accomplices on the other side: as if the former ones were still responsible for the death of Jesus and had to be punished for it. We know that such an argument was used as a legitimation of medieval pogroms. But it may have been different in the case of a performance in more peaceful circumstances. The audience, according to Weigert, was very well aware of the fictional nature of the performance: the Jews of the past were not the Jews of today. Such views were confirmed by an observation of Miri Rubin in her study of the “Gentile Tales” about host desecration, a theme that was not stricto sensu biblical, but was nevertheless related to Jesus’s human nature. Only three dramas staged that story at the turn of the sixteenth century, all of them “composed and perhaps enacted in cultural spheres which did not give rise to regular host desecration accusations”: the English Croxton Play of the Sacrament of ca. 1461, the French Mistere de la saincte hostie, and the sixteenthcentury Italian drama Un miraculo del Corpo di Christo. “Strangely”, she added, “no version has survived in a German dialect, from any of the regions which so often repeated host desecration and violence.” Such observations persuade us to avoid overestimating the factual effect of the performance, its social “agency” or “performativity.”

32 Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 125s, 259–260. 33 Gustave Cohen, Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux français du moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 1926), 269. Among more recent publications: Jody Enders, “Theater Makes History: Ritual Murder by Proxy in the ‘Mistere de la Sainte Hostie,’” Speculum 79, no. 4 (2004). Weigert, French Visual Culture, 173–177.

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To be the spectator of a violent play did not induce necessarily to a violent behaviour. But we should not underestimate either the long tradition of verbal or visual violence of the plays, not just at the end of the Middle Ages, but still later. In 1633 in Oberammergau (Bavaria) was composed the famous Passionspiel that was conceived as a response to the plague; the staging did not hesitate, with unprecedented verbal violence, to make the Jews responsible for the sufferings of Jesus and for the present ordeal. The play was later performed every ten years and it diffused into other places. On August 23, 1893, a theatre troupe coming from Luxemburg performed the Oberammergau Passionspiel in the Alsatian town of Ribeauvillé (Rappoltsweier). Strangely enough, a copy of the printed program of the play, written in German, was found recently in the genizah of the nearby synagogue of Bergheim, where it has been hidden and preserved for decades with a large amount of Yiddish and Hebrew writings mentioning the name of God.34 Paradoxically enough, the local Jews had remained loyal to the written word, including even a biblical drama program that was explicitly directed against them! But they had their reasons for that, since the name of God, the very core of the Bible, the point of departure of all interpretations and performances, was written down on that torn sheet of paper. Bibliography Bozoky, Edina. “Les apocryphes bibliques.” In Le Moyen âge et la Bible, edited by Pierre Riché and Guy Lobrichon, 429–48. Paris: Beauchesne, 1984. Cohen, Gustave. Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux français du moyen âge. Paris: Champion, 1926. Dahan, Gilbert. “L’interprétation de l’Ancien Testament dans les drames religieux (XIe–XIIIe siècle).” Romania 100, no. 397 (1979): 71–103. Decomps, Claire. “Carte des genizot ashkénazes.” In Héritage inespéré. Objets cachés au coeur des synagogues, edited by Claire Decomps, 178. Strasbourg: Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, 2016. Dodwell, Charles Reginald, Otto Pächt, and Francis Wormald. The St. Albans Psalter (Albani Psalter). London: University of London Warburg institute, 1960. Dominguez, Véronique. La scène et la croix. Le jeu de l’acteur dans les Passions dramatiques françaises (XIVe–XVIe siècles). Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Dominguez, Véronique. Le jeu d’Adam. Paris: Champion, 2012. 34

Claire Decomps, “Carte des genizot ashkénazes,” in Héritage inespéré. Objets cachés au coeur des synagogues, ed. Claire Decomps (Strasbourg: Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, 2016), 178, n. 80.

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Dupront, Alphonse. L’image de religion dans l’Occident chrétien. Bibliothèque illustrée des histoires. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. Enders, Jody. “Theater Makes History: Ritual Murder by Proxy in the ‘Mistere de la Sainte Hostie.’” Speculum 79, no. 4 (2004): 991–1016. The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies. Edited by C. Clifford Flanigan, Thomas P. Campbell and Clifford Davidson. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Goody, Jack. Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fictions, Relics and Sexuality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Hardison, Osborne Bennett. Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages. ­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. Héritage inespéré. Objets cachés au coeur des synagogues. Edited by Claire Decomps. Strasbourg: Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, 2016. Konigson, Élie. L’Espace théâtral médiéval. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975. Mazouer, Charles. Théâtre et christianisme. Études sur l’ancien théâtre français. Paris: Honoré Champion éditeur, 2015. Odenkirchen, Carl J. The Play of Adam (Ordo Representationis Ade). The Original Text reviewed, with Introduction, notes, and an English Translation. Brookline: Classical Folia Editions, 1976. Pächt, Otto. The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England. Oxford: ­Clarendon Press, 1962. Piéjus, Anne. Le théâtre des Demoiselles: tragédie et musique à Saint-Cyr la fin du Grand Siècle. Paris: Société française de musicologie, 2000. Revol, Thierry. Représentations du sacré dans les textes dramatiques des XIe–XIIIe siècles en France. Paris: Champion, 1999. Sapir Abulafia, Anna. Christians and Jews in the Twelfth Century Renaissance. New York: Routledge, 1995. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. The Conversion of Herman the Jew. Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. La conversion d’Hermann le Juif. Autobiographie, histoire et ­fiction. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. La Raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval. Bibliothèque des histoires. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Schulze, Hans K. Das Stift Gernrode unter Verwendung eines Manuskripts von Reinhold Specht Mit einem kunstgeschichtlichen Beitrag über die Stiftskirche. Köln: Grazn Böhlau Verlag, 1965.

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Smalley, Beryl. The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964. Strubel, Armand. Le théâtre au Moyen Âge. Naissance d’une littérature dramatique. Paris: Bréal, 2014. Weigert, Laura. French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theatre Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Young, Karl. The Drama of the Medieval Church. 2 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933. Zumthor, Paul. Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972.

Index Notes are not included in the index. Abelard, Peter 68 Abrahams, Israel 219 Adam de la Halle 221 Alain de La Roche 125 Adams, Henry 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 85, 85. Adams, John Quincy, President 74 Adams, John, President 74 Adso of Montier-en-Der 221 Aix-en-Provence 220 Alacant (Alicante) 9, 196 Alaquàs (Alacuás) 207 Alcanyís (Alcañiz) 207 Aldaia (Aldaya) 207 Aldeanueva 132 Santa Cruz of the Magdalena monastery 130 Alexander VI, Pope 134, 135 Alphonsi, Peter 229 Amalarius of Metz 22, 223 Ambrose of Milan 117 Andreini, Giovanni Battista 179, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193 Andreini, Isabella 180, 181, 182 Andreini, Pietro Enrico 186 Angelico, Fra 25 Angers 220 Antiochus IV Epiphanes 48 Antwerp Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten 89 Aquinas, Thomas 62 Aragón 207 Aristotle 49 Arnold of Bonneval 80 Ashley, Kathleen M. 65, 66, 71 Auerbach, Erich 223, 224 Augustine of Hippo 5, 32, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 61, Austria 7, 93 Baciccio, see Gaulli, Giovanni Battista Baltimore

Walters Art Museum 89 Bandinelli, Baccio 28 Barber, Charles 33 Barcelona Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya 94 Catedral de la Santa Cruz y Santa Eulalia 207 Basil the Great 18 Bavaria 231 Beato Angelico, see Angelico, Fra Beauvais 219, 225 Belgium 7, 93 Belting, Hans 11 Bergheim 231 Bernard of Clairvaux 65 Bernard of Parma 118 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 13, 28 Bethlehem 146, 147, 149, 157, 158, 165, 221 Church of the Nativity 157 Billi, Antonio 108–109 Bino, Carla Maria 4, 162 Bishop, Claire 151 Bodel, Jean 221 Bologna 178, 185 Bonaventure from Bagnoregio 152, 163 Borromeo, Carlo, Cardinal 178, 185 Borromeo, Federico, Cardinal 178 Boxley 107, 108 Cistercian Abbey 104–106 Brescia 6, 18, 20, 23, 132,187 Santa Maria in Calchera 20 Burgos 97, 98, Butler, Samuel 140, Byzantium, see Constantinopole Caimi, Bernardino 146, 149, 152, 155, 156, 158, 228 Capponi, Luigi, Cardinal 178 Caracciolo, Roberto (from Lecce) 26 Caravaggio, see Merisi, Michelangelo Carreri, Matteo 132 Castellani, Castellano 25 Castellar 207

236 Castile (Castilla) 124, 207 Capdet (Caudete) 207 Chamber, Geoffrey 107 Chambers, Edmund K. 2 Charles V, Emperor 124 Chartres 79 Cathédrale of Notre-Dame 6, 75, 76, 77, 78, 85 Clermont 227 Coccapani, Sigismondo 188 Cohen, Gustave 230 Colma 156 Cologne 227 Conques Abbey Church of Saint Foy 227 Constantinople 5, 50, 52, 54, 227 Hagia Sophia 5, 54 Crema 133 Cremosina 156 Crevacuore 156 Crispin, Gilbert 229 Cromwell, Thomas 107 Croxton 230 Cubas 124 Cyprian of Carthage 37 Cyril of Alexandria 29 Czech Republic 7, 93 d’Aubigné Françoise 221 d’Este, Beatrice 156 d’Este, Isabella 132 Dahan, Gilbert 229 Damasceni Peretti di Montalto, Alessandro, Cardinal 178 de Certeau, Michel 151 de Coussemaker, Charles-Edmond 64 de Cristofano, Eliseo 26 de Maintenon, Madame, see d’Aubigné Françoise Del Monaco, Francesco Maria 177 dell’Arca, Niccolò 27 Denmark 93 di Paolo, Giovanni 28 Dionysius the Thracian 48, 49 Döbeln 101, 102 Dominic of Gargnano 134 Donatello 21, 25, 108, 109 Dura Europos 223 Durand of Mende, William, Bishop 62 Dürer, Albrecht 189

Index Egypt 15, 83, Eleazar 48 Elx (Elche) 9, 10, 197, 198, 199, 200, 204, 204, 205, 207, 210, 213 Erich Auerbach 223, 224 Essen 227 Ethelwold of Winchester, Bishop 227 Europe 7, 8, 74, 87, 92, 93, 95, 116, 117, 118, 156 Fassler, Margot 78, 79 Faustus of Rietz 29 Ferrari, Gaudenzio 141, 146, 149, 150, 153, 160, 162, 164, 166, 167, 229 Ferrone, Siro 191 Fetti, Domenico 191, 192 Fiaschini, Fabrizio 9 Fieschi, Tommasina 8, 116, 120–124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 135, 136 Finland 93 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 67 Flanigan, Clifford 60, 63 Fleury, see Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Abbaye de Saint Benoît de Fleury Florence 56, 62 Baptistery 13, 14 Basilica di Santa Croce 108, 109 Basilica di San Lorenzo, Old Sacristy 25 Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, 19, 21, 28 Fouquet, Jean 196, 210, 221 France 7, 60, 93, 95 Francesco II Gonzaga, Duke 132 Francis of Assisi 7, 108, 116, 135, 136, 152, 163 Frankfurt Römer 220 Friedrich Barbarossa, Emperor 221 Fulton Brown, Rachel 6 Furini, Francesco 188 Gaddi, Taddeo 108 Galicia 207 Gaudentius of Brescia 18, 23, Gaulli, Giovanni Battista 28 Genoa Convent of Saints James and Philip 120 Gentileschi, Artemisia 188 Gerhoh of Reichersberg 221 Germany 7, 27, 93, 118 Gernrode Abbey of Saint Cyriakus 225

237

Index Ghiberti, Buonaccorso 26 Giotto 13, 145 Goody, Jack 226 Great Britain 93 Gréban, Arnoul 218, 220 Gregory of Nyssa 29 Grünewald, Matthias 13 Hadrian I, Pope 227 Hamburger, Jeffrey 3 Hellín 207 Henry of Ghent 118 Herzig, Tamara 134 Hilarius (student of Abelard) 68 Hildegard of Bingen 118, 225 Hofmann, Hasso 2 Honorius of Autun (Honorius Augustodunensis) 22, 119, 136 Hooker, John 107 Hugh of St. Victor 61, 62, 63 Hurtado de Mendoza, Pedro 175 Hurtado de Mendoza, Juan 131

Ladislaus of Gielniow 128, 129 Laon Cathédrale Notre-Dame 229 Lasansky, Medina 144 Latin America 93 Leo the Great, Pope 19 Leuven M-Museum 89 Limoges 229 Lippi, Filippo 26 Lisbon Museu Nacional do Azulejo 89 Loire Valley 227 Lombardy 27 London British Library 219 Luxemburg 231 Luzern 220 Luzzato, Moses Chaim 219 Lyon 185

Kent 106 Kobialka, Michal 63 Kocur, Miroslaw 32 Kopania, Kamil 7, Kraków Dominican monastery 102, 103, 104, 105 Krzeszów Benedictine convent 102, 106

Maidstone 107 Mantua 132 Marcadé, Eustache 220 María de Santo Domingo 8, 116, 119, 129–132, 135, 136 Martin the Humane 207 Massip, Francesc 9 Mazzolini, Silvestro 118, 119 Mazzoni, Guido 27 Mazzucchelli, Pier Francesco 188 McCracken, William Denison 141 Memling, Hans 88 Merisi, Michelangelo 27 Metz 220 Michel, Jean 220 Milan 148, 156, 157, 178, 185, 190 Convent of Sant’Angelo 146 Mondzain, Marie-José 33 Mons 220 Morazzone, see Mazzucchelli, Pier Francesco Morella 207 Morone, Girolamo 148, 156, 157 Mount Berico 186 Muessig, Carolyn 7 Muros 207

Lactantius, Lucius Caecilius Firmianus 37, 39

Norcia 107 Norton, Michael 32

Iberian Peninsula 93, 95, 96, 101 Innocent III, Pope 224 Innocent VIII, Pope 146 Isenheim 13 Italy 7, 8, 27, 93, 95, 98, 101, 108, 132, 135, 140, 178 Jacob of Serugh, Bishop 48 Jerusalem 8, 9, 16, 17, 87, 88, 90, 109, 146, 147, 148, 155, 157, 158, 164, 204, 221, 230 Jiménez de Cisneros, Francisco 124 John of Damascus 5, 50, 51 Juana de la Cruz 8, 117, 119, 124–129, 130, 132, 135, 136

238 Nova, Alessandro 142 Oberammergau 231 Orléans 224 Pächt, Otto 220 Padova 219 Scrovegni Chapel 13 Palencia Monastery of Santa Clara 98 Paleotti, Gabriele, Cardinal 178, 185 Panofsky, Erwin 158, Panzanelli, Roberta 144 Paoletti, John T. 108 Paris 74, 220 Hôpital de la Trinité 225 Parma Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta 25 Pavia 157, 227 Peñafiel 207 Pentcheva, Bissera 33 Peretti Montalto, Alessandro, see Damasceni Peretti di Montalto, Alessandro Perugia 26 Peter Chrysologus 24 Peter Lombard 62 Petersen, Nils Holger 6 Petrarca, Francesco 180 Philip II of Spain, King 229 Piedmont 27, 228 Piedrahita 131 Pietro di Giovanni Olivi 163 Pius II, Pope 26 Plato 226 Poland 7, 87, 93 Pollaiuolo, Antonio 13, 14 Pontani, Anna 53 Pont-Saint-Esprit Musée d’Art Sacré du Gard 89 Pordenone Chiesa del Cristo 107 Portugal 7, 93 Pozzo, Andrea 28 Pseudo-Bonaventure 167 Pseudo-Methodus 221 Quinzani, Stefana 8, 116, 117, 119, 132–135, 136 Racine, Jean 221 Ramponi, Virginia 179, 191, 192,

Index Ravenna Basilica di San Vitale 13 Raymond of Peñaforte 118 Reims Musée des Beaux-Arts 228 Revol, Thierry 221 Ribeauvillé (Rappoltsweier) 231 Richard of Saint-Laurent 81 Riemanschneider, Tilman 27 Rimini Museo della Città 107 Romanino, Girolamo 20, 28 Rome 157, 230 Rouen Cathédrale Notre-Dame de l’Assomption 220 Rubens, Pieter Paul 188 Rubin, Miri 230 Rudy, Kathryn 90 Rutebeuf 221 Sabbatini, Giovanni 133 Saint Albans 220 Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire Abbaye de Saint Benoît de Fleury 58–72, 224, 227 Saint-Cyr 221 Samaria 16 San Vivaldo Nuova Gerusalemme 8, 144 Savelli, Giacomo, Cardinal 178 Savonarola, Girolamo 134, 135, Saxony 225 Scala, Flaminio 184 Schmitt, Jean-Claude 10 Segneri, Paolo 176 Segovia Iglesia de San Justo 94 Sforza family 156 Sforza, Ludovico, Duke 157 Sherman, John 143 Silla 207 Sixtus IV, Pope 156 Slovakia 7, 93 Soncino Monastery of Saint Paul and Saint Catherine of Siena 132 Southern, Richard William 65 Spain 7, 93 Spicq, Ceslas 47

239

Index Stoss, Veit 27 Sweden 93 Switzerland 7, 93 Symeon of Thessalonika, Archbishop 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57 Talavera 130 Taüll Church of Santa Maria 94–95, Taylor, Diana 151 Tedesco, Giovanni 107, 108 Terry-Fritsch, Allie 8 Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus) 5, 32, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41, 44 Testori, Giovanni 141 The Netherlands 93 Titus, Emperor 230 Tiziano, see Vecellio, Tiziano Toledo 124 Torrent (Torrente) 207 Toruń Church of St. James 87, 88, 89, 109, 110 Tournai 229 Turin Galleria Sabauda 88, 89 Tuscany 8 Tutilio of Sankt-Gallen 220

Valsesia 156 Valvasone 98, 99, 100 Van der Weyden, Rogier 23, 27 Varallo Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie 152 Sacro Monte 8, 140–168 Vasari, Giorgio 28, 108 Vecellio, Tiziano 188 Vercelli 227 Verdello, Gian Francesco 133 Verdon, Timothy 4, Vespasian, Emperor 218, 230 Vicenza 185 Viella y Medio Arán Church of Sant Miguel de Viella 94 Church of Santa Maria 94 Viloria 131 Viret, Pierre 129 Viseu 96, 97 Von Balthasar, Hans Urs 2 Washington, DC Museum of the Bible 7 Weigert, Laura 228, 230 Wharton, Edith 140 White, Andrew Walker 5, 6 Wittkower, Rudolf 141

Umbria 107

Young, Karl 2, 64, 65, 66, 216, 225

Val d’Aran 94 Valencia 207, 208 Valenciennes 220

Zacuto, Moses Ben Mordecai 218 Zuccari, Federico 28 Zumthor, Paul 222