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The Neutralized versus the Embodied Changing Interpretations of the Crucifixion and its Worship in two Medieval Works at the MET
From the body: the Fieschi Morgan Staurotheke
The early medieval Fieschi Morgan Staurotheke is compositionally simple and legible: decisively 2-dimensional with its block colors and clear, gold outlines and no tonal variations indicating shadow. Textures are rendered simplistically, such as Jesus’ columbium (loincloth) which is rendered with straight and diagonal lines. The textual elements sit flush on the flat background, not attempting to be rendered in 3-dimensional space. Space is not created by overlapping or distinctions between foreground and background. Instead, the sections of the work are created by the metalwork of the staurotheke suggesting a non-space, a world where non-naturalistic elements separate sections rather than planes. To appropriate 3-dimensional language, Jesus, Mary, and John the Apostle inhabit the ‘inside’ of the metalwork while the other saints inhabit the ‘outside’, but the reality is a separation of same-plane flatness, non-spaces, not interior and exterior. The shapes of the work are geometrical and ordered, with a regular rhythm of saints encircling the scene like the numbers of a clockface and the central axis created by the crucifix. The organically-shaped plants disrupt this angularity and regularity, reminding us that this is a scene will be followed by life-creation as Jesus is reborn, but these plants still adhere to the strict symmetry and simplicity of the work. Generally, the flatness and compositional arrangement of the work lend themselves to a quiet, contained rhythm that encourages a tranquil viewing experience as well as a representation of an otherworldly, divine space devoid of concerns with earthly reality.
This tranquility is further represented by bodies in the staurotheke, which are neutralized of their individuality, expression, and gender. The grief of the two figures sub cruce, Mary and John the Apostle, is not expressed through their faces but through the hand gesture of mourning. Jesus, similarly, does not indicate emotion: he is straight-faced and stiff-bodied. This lack of emotion represents a stoic reading of the crucifixion, where Christ and Mary are comforted by his faith with the knowledge that he will be reborn. Each figure has similar simplified and stylized facial features: a slightly pointed ovular face, the curving line of the eyebrow and nose, a small flat mouth, and far apart black or blue eyes. Mary is not given many distinctly individual or feminine characteristics other than a headscarf and lack of facial hair, which John shares. Thus, each figure’s expression is rendered neutral and anonymous. Jesus’ torso is erased by the rectangular columbium, turning him into a pillar-like structure of the same thickness as the rest of the cross, making him seem more like an architectural element than a human—column-bium. Any bodily dynamism is neutralized by the grounding triangulation of his large feet using two nails and a platform while his arms jut out at right angles to his body, not pulled down by weight as if Christ is weightless and bodiless. This supernatural disregard for gravity communicates a preference for the representation of Jesus’ divinity over his humanity. The surrounding saints are even more bodiless, as they are only represented as heads and armless torsos. Thus, the staurotheke highlights the divine realm through stylistic neutralization of everything that is part of bodily experience: visually communicated emotion, gravity, individualized attributes, and an eradication of the entire body itself.
From the body: the Plaque with the Crucifixion
The plant life of the work further this sense of chaos and excitement, especially in their recollections of the body. The sky contains the intense and evocative juxtaposition of dark, cool blue with light, warm gold-yellow and white, a visceral indication of chaos in nature. The plants in the midground and foreground are far from the simplistic individually leafed plants in the Staurotheke; each plant emerges from a central point in thick swirling and bulging tendrils, invoking growth and dynamism. These shapes are arguably closer to human body parts—arms, fingers, phalluses—than they are to foliage. The plants, therefore, reinforce the theme of rebirth present in the Staurotheke, unnaturally colored in eye-catching dark blue and gold-yellow, in a way that emphasizes the embodiment of Christ’s (re)birth rather than the theoretical aspects. Furthering the manifestation of the body in non-living things, the grain of the wood on the crucifix contains repeating shapes made up of concentric pointed ovals surrounded by an undulating oval, recalling a vaginal opening and labia. This yonic wood grain similarly recalls (re)birth as embodiment in terms of Christ’s “humanation,” presence on earth as equally wholly human as he is God. Even in the non-living aspects of the work, the importance of a bodily reading of the narrative is clear.
The bodies in the flanking crucifixions are the most contorted and complex, exactly opposite to the stillness and neutralization of the figures in the Staurotheke. To Christ’s left is the Unrepentant Thief who looks down, refusing the heavenly realm with his body and foreshadowing his damnation to hell, while to Christ’s right is the Good Thief who looks up. The looking up to heaven or down to hell represent a significant religious choice enacted through the body. The Good Thief’s head, flung back dramatically with mouth open, indicates a step further than conscious theoretical choice: religious ecstasy manifest in the body. There is a clear bodily representation of physical sensation in the thieves’ poses as they writhe in pain which verges on erotic: the Unrepentant Thief’s bent leg revealing a carefully rendered round buttock and the Good Thief’s loincloth tied centrally and decorated more simply than the other crucified figures to bring attention to a bulge on his groin. Both figures are covered in red, ovular wounds, which could either be mouth-like, mirroring the red lips found on the figures underneath them, or yonic. Both readings indicate an emphasis on bodily elements—the yonic one restating the theme of embodiment and rebirth.
Similarly, focus is placed on Christ’s body. Unlike the Staurotheke, both of Christ’s slim feet are held with one nail without a platform so he is more dynamically suspended. Rather than the grounded, upwards-pointing triangle of the Staurotheke Christ’s feet, this Christ’s feet are triangulated downwards which is more precarious and dynamic. An inverted triangle is created by Jesus’ arms as he hangs downward and leans forward to reflect the bodily reality of gravity and the sensation of being pulled down, opposite to the Staurotheke’s orthogonal shapes. Perhaps the most obvious comparison is that this Christ is almost entirely disrobed in comparison to the completely covered earlier Christ. Close attention is paid to the rendering of his musculature and ribs, making the viewer very aware of his body. His body shape is dynamic, undulating dramatically in at his stomach and then out at his hips, very different from the column-like Staurotheke Christ. This waist-hip ratio is indicative of femininity, suggesting a feminization of Christ. This femininization resonates with Assaf Pinkus’ assertion “Gender metamorphosis is paradigmatic for martyrdom narratives”[1]. The depiction of the side wound and Christ’s blood is new compared to the earlier work and both are bodily and sexually charged. The wound mirrors the thieves’ wounds in that it recalls lips or the vaginal opening, standing out as bright red against the pale white of his skin. Walker highlights how the yonic wound of Christ motif is common, as “reference to the feminine side of Jesus, the one that ‘gives life’.”[2] The phallic pole held up to the wound furthers this genital imagery, as “the side wound become[s] far more sexually charged [through] the prodding, or fondling, of the wound”[3]. The existence of the blood is also very charged with sexuality and femininity, because blood and breastmilk were considered “two permutations of the same bodily fluid”[4] and “breast milk [was] considered akin to Christ’s blood and semen”[5]. The direction of the stream of blood is sensual as it flows into his loincloth, presumably over his genitals, and onto his inner thigh. The concern with both female and male genitalia viscerally indicates (re)birth, in terms of Christ’s enfleshment and his position, to appropriate a phrase used to describe Pharaoh Akhenaten, as the “mother and father of mankind”[6]. Thus, this work reads the crucifixion as a story of Christ’s humanation.
Despite the normalization of depictions of Mary Magdalene at the cross, Daniela Bohde highlights “neither the gospels and the texts building on them, nor the early visual representations put her sub cruce”[7]. Her conscious addition here is clearly significant, especially in comparison to her absence in the Staurotheke. Mary Magdalene is generally viewed “because of her corrupted sexual nature [as] an archetype of the ‘fallen woman’ and a paradigm of penitence”[8]. The way she desperately embraces the crucifix is a physical, bodily manifestation of her grief and penitence in a way that can only be done by a Biblical woman impossible to uncouple from her sexuality and body. Her open mouth and half-lidded eyes point towards the yonic wood grain, suggesting an erotic embracement of the lifegiving, bodily elements of Christ, about sexuality but also consuming, engorging. Her inherent sexuality is a clear distillation of the bodily concerns of the work as she represents religious and emotional intensity manifest in the body.
[1] Assaf Pinkus, “Eroticized and Sexualized Bodies,” in Visual Aggression: Images of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Germany (Penn State University Press, 2021), 82.
[2] Heather D. Walker, “The Goddess Jesus,” 10.
[3] Ibid
[4] Claire Phillips-Thoryn, The Sacred Breast: Early Christian Experiences of the Physical and the Divine, (Swarthmore College Publishing, 1999), 3.
[5] Assaf Pinkus, “Eroticized and Sexualized Bodies,” 86.
[6] Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten and Nefertiti (The Brooklyn Museum, 1973), 54.
[7] Daniela Bodhe, “Mary Magdalene at the Foot of the Cross: Iconography and the Semantics of Place,” Mitteilungen Des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 61, no. 1 (2019): 3.
[8] Charlene Villaseñor Black, “Mary Magdalene and the Erotics of Devotion,” in Transforming Saints: From Spain to New Spain (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022), 221.