Recognitions: Theme and Metatheme in Hans Burgkmair the Elder`s

Transcription

Recognitions: Theme and Metatheme in Hans Burgkmair
the Elder’s Santa Croce in Gerusalemme of 1504
Mitchell B. Merback
And so that you might see yourself there
and gently look at it,
this pious mirror for your own good
we bring before your eyes,
in visible form, with characters.
—Arnoul Gr
eban, Le myste re de la Passion (mid-1400s)1
In Christianity’s preeminent narrative image, the Crucifixion, Jesus of Nazareth hangs dead on the Cross, there for all
to see. Ridiculed as the King of the Jews, victim of the most
abhorrent of punishments, focal point of mystery and wonder, he embodies in death a harrowing paradox. For at the
climax of the Passion drama, the epochal moment toward
which the Gospels point again and again, Jesus’s messianic
identity was still hanging in the balance. Miracles had testified to his nature as a “divine man [ueῖo& ἀnήr, theios anê r],”
and his own christological utterances had led many to ponder the peculiar nature of his identity.2 Some of those present on Golgotha watched and waited for divine power to
become manifest in events, and passersby scoffed out loud at
the claims made about him, challenging him to come down
from the Cross. While family and friends mourned, soldiers
gambled for his clothes; others simply mocked him (Mark
15:24–32).
Measured by the diverse responses among the crowd on
Golgotha, both those recorded in the Gospels and those
imagined for centuries, the spectacle of Christ crucified
counts as a radically bewildering event—“unto the Jews a
stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness,” as Paul
wrote in 1 Corinthians (1:23). Unlike its predecessor in
pagan tragedy, it is a spectacle of suffering and death that
brings to the fore the experience of incoherence. This incoherence, spinning out from the half-disclosed reality of
Jesus’s divine nature, exists both for the characters inside the
Gospel text, those present on Golgotha as witnesses, and for
participants outside, the Passion story’s readers and listeners,
for whom the role of “witness” must always be constituted
through an act of recollection or remembering. Each and every
participant in the story must find his or her own path toward
coherence; each one must, in a very fundamental way, put it
all together, make sense of what has happened—the core
imaginative demand that all narratives place on their readers.
For believers past and present, entering personally into the
Crucifixion image, there to recollect not only its terrors and
sufferings but also the claims and counterclaims made about
Jesus’s identity, has therefore meant standing at an existential crossroads, a place where opposing trajectories, both
objective and subjective, meet and collide.3 Confronted by
the image of Jesus crucified, Christian conscience faces a
demand that precedes the fundamental impulse toward imitation (imitatio Christi) and the desire for conversion and
union: the comprehension of a paradox uniting identity and
presence that, in itself, constitutes an ever-renewing challenge to faith—an “enduring predicament” brought about
by grace itself.4
From the mid-thirteenth century on, European artists projected this demand onto their depictions of protagonists and
antagonists, models and antimodels, within the narrative Passion image for the discernment of those outside it. Figures
who had once been mere agents, embodiments of a narrative
function, would henceforth be fleshed out as characters,
embodied moral types possessed of human idiosyncrasies
and passions, capable of a full range of situated responses—
from belief to incredulity, from faith to doubt, from compassion to cruelty—indicative of human will. Especially striking
in this regard, as we will see, is the interest altar painters
begin to show in the figure of the witness, developing in the
process three general, though not always distinguishable,
character types: 1) those who see the reality of divinity
through the twin veils of Incarnation and human death, recognizing Jesus as the Christ of prophecy and the Son of Man; 2)
those who, trapped in a mere “carnal seeing,” remain blind
to that divinity, failing to recognize Jesus as Christ; and 3) those
who appear suspended, as it were, between acceptance and
rejection of Jesus’s messianic identity, hovering at the threshold between blindness and seeing, between refusing and welcoming truth’s disclosure.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, masters at the forefront of religious realism in northern Europe, for example,
Dieric Bouts of Haarlem, in his Descent from the Cross triptych
in Granada, had made it de rigueur to endow certain witness
characters, even in complex multifigured compositions, with
minutely described signs of awareness and interiority
(Fig. 1).5 Such faces, captured in what appears to be the
dawning of comprehension, could become galvanizing
points of interest and subjective identification for beholders,
even, or especially, if they have stepped into the scene of witnessing as unbelievers. Watching this form of watching, we
are imbricated in narrative; we place ourselves, as Karl Morrison has put it, “into the position of looking over the shoulders of the people to whom the events happened as they put
together what had happened to them.”6 What may rightly be
counted as a normative condition of all visual narrative—the
beholder’s “putting together” of what has or had happened—is here intensified by the beholder’s need to take
the measure of his or her own response before the terrifying
spectacle of suffering that sin has brought about, and his or
her own worthiness to receive the gifts of that sacrifice, to
find coherence in the experience of inner transformation and
conversion to God. In this sense each and every Crucifixion
image poses a challenge to the Christian beholder, one that
is ever-renewing and also ever-haunted by failure. Conversion
H A N S B U R G K M A I R T H E E L D E R ’S S A N T A C R O C E I N G E R U S A L E M M E
can never be a fait accompli, discipleship never perfected,
not when their highest criterion is inner transformation.7
Any phenomenology of spiritual seeing we might wish to
reconstitute with the help of the Crucifixion must, I suggest,
take account of both the probationary nature of conversion
and the aspirational nature of its most powerful narrative
sign: recognition (a term whose specific meaning will be
unpacked shortly).
Rather than focusing on positive examples of conversion,
such as Bouts’s sensitively drawn witness to the Crucifixion, a
phenomenology of recognition will be developed here with
the help of an antimodel: a witness figure who embodies
“spiritual blindness” and thematizes the failure to overcome
it, in a characterization both outwardly derogatory and inherently reflexive. The figure in question was conjured up by
Hans Burgkmair the Elder (1473–1531) in a Crucifixion
scene painted for the Dominican nuns of St. Katherine’s in
Augsburg (Fig. 2), the city where the artist was born, where
his father, Thoman (1444–1523), trained him, and where he
ran his own workshop as a member of the guild of painters,
glaziers, and carvers from 1498 on.8 Striding in from stage
left onto the Golgotha Burgkmair composed for the convent’s chapter house (part of a series of six so-called Basilikabilder, to be discussed below), the strange figure—turbaned,
partly armored, dressed in robes of Levantine patterning,
and shown in profile—diverts the attention of the Good Centurion and another military officer. A cross fire of contemptuous glares isolates him against the painting’s right edge,
and a dispute of some sort seems to be under way (Fig. 3).
But it is not simply the adversarial role he is poised to play
that attracts the ire of those who encounter him; his very
appearance is antagonistic. From the dark countenance and
greasy hair that mats his face to the beady, bloodshot eyes,
cracked teeth, bulbous lips, and, above all, long, hooked
nose, this strange foreigner could hardly be mistaken for anyone, or anything, other than what Burgkmair paints him to
be: a monstrously ugly Jew. What is more unsettling, the artist
has depicted the creature confronted by his own mirror
reflection, glaring out at him from the centurion’s polished
epauliere. The dark-faced Jewish soldier, however, does not
see it; rather, it “sees” him—it recognizes him—and registers
what it sees with an unmistakable look of horror (Fig. 4).
Completed by Burgkmair in 1504, the large, arched composition with the Crucifixion at its center was the fourth in a
series of so-called Basilikabilder, painted “portraits” of the
seven basilican churches of Rome (the Sette Chiese), commissioned by the Dominican nuns of Augsburg’s Katharinenkloster (Fig. 24).9 It was Hans Holbein the Elder who, in 1499,
executed the inaugural panel, devoted to S. Maria Maggiore;
the second, third, and fourth panels, San Pietro, San Giovanni
Laterano, and Santa Croce respectively, were done by Burgkmair and his shop; an unknown Master L.F. brought together
imagery relating to S. Lorenzo and S. Sebastiano into a single
panel in 1502; and finally, in 1504, a sixth commission representing S. Paolo fuori le mura was executed by Holbein in a
command performance. Arrayed around the chapter house
of the Katharinenkloster and shaped to fit its vaulted bays,
the series has long been associated with a papal indulgence
granted to the nuns by Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), permitting them to earn a remission of sins equivalent to those
289
1 Dieric Bouts, witnessing soldier, detail from Crucifixion, left
wing of Descent from the Cross triptych, ca. 1455, oil on panel, 75¼
£ 57⅛ in. (191 £ 145 cm), each wing 75¼ £ 22⅞ in. (191 £
58 cm). Capilla Real, Granada (artwork in the public domain;
photograph by Eugenio Fernandez Ruiz, provided by Fondo
Grafico, Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Historico)
granted pilgrims visiting the Sette Chiese. Numerous scholars
have inferred from this that the Basilikabilder functioned
within a regimen of “virtual pilgrimage” for the recluses, but
it must be admitted that the evidence takes us only so far in
this direction. For reasons that will later become clear, I subscribe to a soft version of this thesis, one that sees the Basilikabilder as multifunctional images, geared to the penitential,
commemorative, and political dimensions of the nuns’ aspirations for self-regeneration and consolidation.
How should we approach this bizarre catoptric motif and
its embeddedness in a major cycle of paintings made for a
prestigious monastic institution—a multiyear project that
ultimately brought together three leading Augsburg painters
and five successive abbess-patrons, each from a wealthy patrician family with its own stakes in the cloister’s tradition of
prominence? At first sight, Burgkmair’s dark-faced character
is merely an inventive bit of Passion staffage with a noxious
ethnographic (or patently anti-Semitic) twist, thus not far
from the routine of countless late medieval and Renaissance
painters. He appears onstage as something of a nobody: both
soldier and passerby, the figure is not grouped among
290
ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3
2 Hans Burgkmair the Elder,
Crucifixion, apex section of Basilikabild
depicting S. Croce in Gerusalemme,
1504, oil on pine panel, 63 £ 43¼ in.
(160 £ 110 cm). Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie in
der Katharinenkirche, Augsburg, 5338
(artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by BPK, Berlin /
Art Resource, NY)
Golgotha’s henchmen and seems to have arrived on the
scene too late to have had a hand in the bloodshed. But the
reflected face in the polished armor—demonstrably gesturing to Eyckian catoptrics, as we will see—tells a different
story, and signals the ethical as well as pictorial ingenuity
behind the motif. Burgkmair’s specularized Jewish soldier
emblematizes a strong penitential theme running through
the Basilikabilder cycle, one that connected the humanist aspirations of the painter to the spiritual regimen favored by the
nuns: the theme of Christ’s “perpetual Passion.” At the risk
of overtaxing a single motif with big claims, I find that
Burgkmair’s embedded mirror motif in the Augsburg Crucifixion amounted to a kind of reflexive lens for compelling
Christian penitential conscience toward another form of recognition, one that likewise entailed the overcoming of blindness: recognition of the Self. What the doubled image of the
blind Jew and his seeing reflection figures forth, in other
words, is a “Judaizing” perversity within the Christian Self—
that part of the subject that perennially slides back into blindness and sin, fails the test of recognition, denies Christ, and
afflicts his suffering body again and again. Burgkmair’s halfhidden motif is directed against a narrative “nobody,” and,
given its marginal visibility, it practically addresses nobody,
too. Yet it is precisely for these reasons that, in the end,
it accuses everybody. It does so in its negative capacity as
double failure of recognition.
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3 Hans Burgkmair, detail of Fig. 2,
showing the Good Centurion, officer,
and soldier in confrontation (artwork in
the public domain; photograph
provided by BPK, Berlin / Art Resource,
NY)
Recognition and the Half-Blind Viewer
“Recognition” (ἀnagnώrisiB, anagnô risis), as poets since
Homer, dramatists since the Greek tragedians, and theorists
since Aristotle have known, functions poetically within storytelling to explode the boundedness of evidence, overcome
the resistance to truth, and signal the inner conversion of
the individual. An unusual word formed by a double privative, literally meaning “not not knowing,” anagnô risis is
typically translated as “recognition,” but sometimes as
“discovery,” or even “disclosure.” In the closest thing he gives
to a formal definition in the Poetics (chapter 11), Aristotle
calls it, simply, “a change from ignorance to knowledge.”10
Within his scheme for the tragic arts, recognition was one of
two key ingredients he claimed poets and playwrights must
deploy in crafting the best kind of plot, or mythos (the
other key ingredient being peripeteia, usually rendered as
“reversal”). In Sophocles’s Electra, for example, the twinned
moments in which identity unfolds between sister and
brother, wrenching trials of proof that bring a release of passionate joy when knowledge becomes certain, qualify as the
anagnô risis, while the attendant realization that Orestes will,
after all, take his revenge against Clytemnestra is the peripeteia. These narrative devices, as Aristotle explains earlier in
the book (chapter 6), represent the surest means by which
the poet discharges his essential duty of arousing the emotions of his audience. Complex plot may be achieved solely
292
4 Hans Burgkmair, detail of Fig. 2, showing the reflection of the
soldier’s face in the Good Centurion’s polished armor (artwork
in the public domain; photograph provided by BPK, Berlin / Art
Resource, NY)
through the use of anagnô risis or solely through peripeteia, but
the plots Aristotle prefers employ them both and derive both
from the action itself.
As a dynamic pivot of narrative, recognition pervades the
Western canon (as well as monuments of Islamic literary culture) and operates across the full spectrum of genres, from
scripture, tragedy, and comedy to epic, romance, and the
novel.11 Recent literary studies have highlighted the ways recognition doubles as a device for structuring action within
narrative and as a trope for the reader’s comprehension
outside it. Critics who have pursued the theme speak of a
broad-based “poetics of revelation” that enfolds aesthetic
concepts old and new—concepts such as “epiphany,”
“insight,” “luminous perception,” even the “experience of
coherence.”12 Art history, for its part, is well equipped with
models for analyzing visual narrative and its own methods for
characterizing the forms of attention that artists thematize
within their pictures,13 and we have grown ever more sophisticated in how we infer and describe that attentiveness. Despite
all of this, art historians have been slow to grasp recognition’s
signal importance as a trope of visual disclosure and reflexive
comprehension for the beholder.14 And it’s no wonder.
Recognition is freighted with far-reaching epistemological
problems and comes packed with the meanings its historically
shifting uses have engendered. The word feels both generic
and overdetermined. But the potential is there to make productive use of the concept alongside literary history’s “poetics
of disclosure.” To venture as much, while avoiding the pitfalls
of a rote methodological transfer from another discipline
into our own, is one of my goals. Setting aside the question
of Aristotle’s currency among late medieval dramatists (let
alone painters), it seems clear that the narrative function of
recognition and recognition tropes found an important place
in the poetic, visual, and dramatic arts long before the Elizabethan playwrights began consciously redeploying it.
Our interest here, of course, lies in recognition’s function
within a Christian narrative poetics, verbal and visual, where
it is often keyed as a conversion trope.15 To see this requires
first of all an understanding of the dramatic and structural
roles reserved for recognition in Christianity’s own charter
narratives. As Diana Culbertson has shown, the Gospels
employ recognition frequently. Across the gamut of scenes
from Infancy and Ministry to Passion and Resurrection, from
the Adoration of the Kings, say, to the Supper at Emmaus,
the disclosure of identity, together with the character transformations urged by new knowledge function as something
like the very “model of the subjective apprehension of revelation.”16 Recognition is strategically combined with plot
reversals, peripeteia, in several crucial instances, notably, the
Crucifixion, while it appears independent of any significant
plot shifts in others, for example, the Transfiguration or the
Noli me tangere. In all of these scenes, and for all the characters involved, the transforming knowledge at issue unfolds
around the challenge of christological presence: Jesus’s halfdisclosed divine nature, his messianic identity as the Son of
Man foretold in Daniel, the Christ of prophecy.
Exemplary as a moment of recognition is the conversion of
the Good Centurion, the Roman legionnaire who watched
Jesus expire at close range and, on hearing the final cry from
the Cross, pointed upward to declare, “Truly, this was the
Son of God” (Matt. 27:54; Mark 15:39; compare Luke
23:47).17 Once the scales of experience tip in favor of revelation and faith, the Good Centurion becomes a powerful foil
for those figures of lesser conviction surrounding him within
the narrative, characters to whom he is sometimes shown giving eloquent instruction. To those outside the narrative,
meanwhile, he often appears as a theatrical interlocutor, as
he does with breathtaking verve in Pordenone’s great scene
of 1521 in Cremona Cathedral; the Good Centurion may
even serve as a kind of “delegate,” to use Andrea Catellani’s
term, a figure who offers the beholder a running course in
spiritual self-observation from within the picture.18 His cleareyed confession holds up a mirror, an exhortation to the
inner conversion everyone must undergo on witnessing God
(as we will see, this role elevates the reflective armor the character often sports into something far more significant than
military wardrobe).19
Still, there is more to the character’s exemplarity than this.
As the Gospel story unfolds, the Centurion makes his confession on Calvary and then later testifies to Jesus’s death before
Pilate (Mark 15:45), making the reader aware that his proclamation of christological identity is, and has to be, twofold:
“Jesus was the Son of God” and “Jesus is dead.”20 Two otherwise incompatible affirmations are radically enfolded into a
single transformative knowledge: Christ’s death happened
for the sake of human salvation, for my sake (pro me) and
everyone else’s (pro nobis). And it is this enfolding that is paradigmatic for Christian subjecthood. Typological exegesis is
woven into the “complex plot” of the Gospels at nearly every
turn, producing a comprehensive set of demands for any
reader who aspires to proceed from knowledge to experience, from disclosure to discipleship, from flesh to spirit.
Prophecy has been fulfilled, and so must the comprehension
of the beholder, who, like the reader addressed by Mark,
watches not just a new story unfold but, along with it,
“the negation of one’s past self,” the self embedded in the
old story and the old text.21 The Centurion’s confession,
according to Werner Kelber, “turns the bystanders’ [carnal]
concept of seeing right side up. He ‘sees’ (kai idô n) the Son
of God revealed in the void of godforsakenness and death,
and thus becomes the [Markan narrative’s] first and only
true believer.”22 Abrogated in this nearly instantaneous passage from sense perception to the “putting together” of
understanding, from seeing to knowledge, is the very crisis of
experience Christ’s closest disciples endure until the story’s
closing episodes. Thomas’s nonrecognition of Jesus’s divine
nature, for example, is not overcome until sensuous proof,
in the form of touch, is vouchsafed him in John 20:29,
and even then it is proclaimed to be an inferior path to
knowledge.
As transformative experience, the reckoning of salvific identity in the person of Jesus recurs throughout the Gospel texts
and anchors several kinds of epistemological problems with
which the Evangelists were concerned. Commenting on the
reflexive function of christological recognition in Mark,
Culbertson writes:
The disciples in Mark’s chapter 10 are told what will happen and so are the readers, the primary hearers of this
announcement, but information is not enough because
the weight of the message goes beyond cognitive enlightenment. To comprehend the message in its fullness
requires an experience that the characters at this point in
the narrative do not have and, for that matter, the readers
may not have either. Mark’s Gospel is about the difficulty
of understanding, not the difficulty of getting the right
information. The message is frequently subjectively
incomprehensible at the time it is uttered. The fullness of
truth is present to characters in Mark’s narrative only as
promise. It is not difficult to wonder why the content of
such a message was not grasped: experience had not
caught up to the message.23
Readers and listeners outside the narrative, and participants
inside, burdened by the same liabilities, must make the same
difficult passage from knowledge to experience. Yet transformative experience often lags behind revelation; the pastanchored self resists the challenge of the new. Aware of this,
ancient dramatists, the Evangelists included, sought ways to
stagger the pace of these two passages—from disclosure to
knowledge, from knowledge to experience—within the same
diagesis. At the Passion story’s climax, however, at the
moment when the hero’s very death becomes disclosure,
the two are forced into sudden alignment. A gauntlet is
thrown down; subjectivity finds itself at a crossroads. Brought
to acknowledgment of events for which we are not prepared,
we face a dizzying incoherence and are compelled to test ourselves against those models and antimodels around us: not
only models of conversion like the Centurion but also antimodels of spiritual blindness and stubborn resistance
(the pagans and Jews), as well as models of unwillingness to
be prepared (Jesus’s disciples in Mark 8:31–32).24 Thus,
failure—the failure of discipleship so brutally evident
throughout Mark, the failure that haunted Augustine’s experience of conversion in the Confessions—remains an everpresent possibility, not least of all for the reader before the
text or the beholder before the image. Disclosure requires
eyes to see, but inner transformation requires a heart that
293
recognizes, “sees” spiritually, and knows. “The hidden metaphor of that text is not a closed room nor even an enigma,
but a half-blind reader.”25
This dynamic reflexivity in the experience of disclosure,
self-knowledge, and inner transformation is what assures recognition’s figurative reach beyond the objective happenings
of literary plot. A whole phenomenology of Christian devotional art, one suspects, might be organized around this
notion. More modestly, it can be used to test a visual motif
that is itself already a challenging metapicture, a reflection
motif that crystallizes the pressures and challenges of anagnô risis. Burgkmair’s conceit rises to this level not simply by
virtue of its metamorphic and reflexive potentials (attributable to nearly all mirroring motifs) but by dint of its functional context: through the situated intentions of its maker,
and with the tacit sympathies of its patron and its principal
audience. To see how our motif thematizes the challenge of
recognition, its opportunities and pitfalls, its powers and dangers, we must first get to know a group of Passion players who
have, by and large, flown under the radar of iconographers,
despite their noisy and ostentatious presence on Golgotha.
I’m referring to the colorful and critical mass of characters
arrayed at the base of the Cross, some of them directly in the
company of the Good Centurion.
Centurion and Soldier in South German Passion Tradition
For late medieval altar painters in northern Europe, the cast
of characters around the Good Centurion was a farrago of bit
players, loosely derived from the four Gospel accounts of the
Crucifixion,26 elements of local visual tradition, including
Passion plays,27 and the manuscript tradition that set “sacred
realism” on its brilliant course. As efforts to further augment
the mass of Fußvolk on Calvary intensified—Elisabeth Roth
dates the emergence of the true “volkreiche Kalvarienberg”
to the 1420s28—German and Austrian painters in particular,
seeing great opportunity in this “assembly of the wicked,”
transformed the biblical metaphor into a motley crew composed of Jewish priests, scribes, and officials mingling with
passersby, outcasts, vagabonds, and a soldiery of decidedly
multiethnic hue. Altar painters outfitted some of those military men as feudal knights, some as flamboyant mercenaries
or grunting knaves, still others as turbaned foreigners of
swarthy skin, kinky hair, and bad teeth, with exotic or exaggerated features both comical and monstrous (Fig. 5).29
Sometimes subtly, sometimes crassly, fifteenth-century altar
painters conjured up soldier figures with markedly “Jewish”
physical traits or other identifying signs. Perhaps they imagined them as Caiaphas’s henchmen, or members of Herod’s
palace guard, to distinguish them from Pilate’s Roman
forces.30 Pushed off to the margins or engulfed in a crush of
bodies and horses below the crosses, some hurl curses,
snicker, or snarl like dogs;31 others watch the execution with
silent expressions of contempt.
Contrary to what their marginal position might suggest,
however, these rabblers are hardly incidental to the dialectic
of witnessing around the Cross. In fact, these ruffians and
cutthroats could, in the hands of some painters, find their
way to the center of the action as individualized characters.
No scriptural, apocryphal, or dramatic source of which I am
aware gives them tradition-honored names of the kind
294
5 Calvary, Austrian or Franconian, ca. 1440–50, mixed
technique on spruce panel, 58⅝ £ 43¼ in. (149 £ 110 cm).
St€adelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, 1799 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph Ó St€adel Museum–Artothek)
bestowed on the sponge-bearer (Stephaton), the blind centurion (Longinus), or the Good and Bad Thieves (Dysmas and
Gestas, respectively); for all the colorful vulgarity German
Passion dramatists put in the mouths of the executioners
and the Good Centurion’s troop, the casting in the extant
playbooks I have examined is always generic (“first soldier
[Erst Kriegsman],” “second soldier [Ander Kriegsman],” and so
on).32 Nonetheless, as the following selective survey of
the south German tradition from which Burgkmair’s art
emerged makes clear, there were compelling precedents for
giving one of these soldiers, the one cast as the Centurion’s
primary interlocutor, a specific dramatic role.
Twenty-seven years before Burgkmair conjured up his grotesque, grinning soldier to fulfill that role, an Augsburg master of the preceding generation, working for the Cistercians
of Kloster Kaisheim near Donauw€
orth,33 depicted a ghostly
reflection in half-length, emerging from the dark translucent
depths of the Good Centurion’s polished breastplate
(Figs. 6, 7).34 Its fleshly counterpart, a flamboyantly dressed
soldier in a brocaded yellow and red robe, appears as a fulllength figure against the right edge of the panel (Randfigur).
From the waist down he is turned nearly to a dorsal position,
but the painter has rotated the upper body to a three-quarter
view, allowing the head to turn more or less convincingly
toward the Centurion in profile. Without the benefit of
banderoles and the Centurion’s telling pointing gesture, the
painter has left his interlocutors in nearly motionless confrontation, their expressionless gazes locked together, neither man attentive to the crucified figures above. By contrast,
the pair of turbaned “chief priests” in the foreground are
shown rushing to the scene and gesticulating as one of them,
mouth open in speech, looks up toward Jesus in angry confusion. Golgotha’s “sinister” dramatis personae are reduced to
these two representative pairs; only a single befuddled foot
soldier, who from his position near the panel’s right edge
looks up toward the Bad Thief with a grimace, is added as
staffage.
A second version of Calvary by the same painter, roughly
equal in size to the Kaisheim Crucifixion, is set against a
gold-ground sky (Fig. 8).35 To offset the gold’s flattening
effect the painter has pulled back the point of view for a
more organic integration of spatial zones, while also tempering the herky-jerky expressivity of the Thieves’ bodies. For
the Kaisheim panel’s sullen Randfigur, the painter has traded
a magistrate type, fashionably dressed and fully the Centurion’s equal in dignity and good looks. One hand signals
polite inquiry, while the other rests on an antique shield
adorned with a repouss
e head that seems to glare across the
foreground space toward the swooning Virgin. Turning
toward the man, the Centurion leans casually on his halberd
(Fig. 9).
We have little information about the origins or training of
the Swabian painter known as the Master of 1477, named
after the numerals he illusionistically “carved” into the bonestrewn turf of Golgotha in the second painting just described.
But the awareness of Westphalian, lower Rhenish, and north
Netherlandish modes and models he demonstrates across his
small oeuvre—which includes several drawings and book
illustrations—has been apparent to scholars since 1928,
when Ernst Buchner proposed a coherent group of works
around the dated Augsburg panel.36 Whether or not the master discovered his Netherlandish models on his own or found
them mediated in the works of south German painters who
had already assimilated the Rogierian and Boutsian raw material is not important for our present purposes. At issue is what
the combined Netherlandish, Rhenish, and Westphalian traditions had to teach an Augsburg painter of the generation
preceding Burgkmair’s about the Centurion-soldier motif,
its narrative meanings, and what could be accomplished by
situating metallic reflections within the zone of dramatic
repartee.
Two fourteenth-century Passion altarpieces, studied in tandem, take us deeper inside the iconographic tradition and
the Centurion-soldier pair’s meaning before 1400. The first
resides in the so-called Felsenkirche (“Crag Church”) rising
above the town of Idar-Oberstein (Rhineland Palatinate):
this Crucifixion, by an unknown Westphalian artist, possibly
from Mainz, surveys a riotous crowd of onlookers, a scene
enlivened further by the profusion of gilded haloes and
ostentatious headgear (Fig. 10).37 Despite the fact that the
Centurion’s pointing gesture is half hidden behind another
figure’s head, his confession is made visible by the banderole
unfurling on the opposite side of his ermine-lined hat. This
positioning gives his speech act a twofold aspect: in one
respect, a confession universally addressed, in another, a
295
7 Master of 1477, Calvary, 1477. Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie in der Katharinenkirche,
Augsburg, L.11 (artwork in the public domain; photograph
provided by BPK, Berlin / Art Resource, NY)
6 Master of 1477, Calvary, detail showing the Good Centurion
and soldier, 1477, oil on pine panel, 56⅛ £ 47¾ in. (142.7 £
121.2 cm). Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie
in der Katharinenkirche, Augsburg, L.11 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph provided by BPK, Berlin / Art Resource,
NY)
kind of argument aimed at the mounted figure facing him,
whom we see in profile (Fig. 11). Bearded and swarthy,
armored and richly turbaned, this figure must be counted
among the close ancestors of Burgkmair’s caricature in Augsburg. Dialogue between the men is strongly implied; in all
likelihood it was conceived as the kind of exchange Passion
playwrights used to expose the gap between the converted
and the hard of heart, which they often elaborated to comic
effect. Whatever recalcitrance may have been imputed to his
character, however, remains unspoken: no speech scroll is
afforded the soldier, only an uncomprehending stare.
What is merely implied by the Centurion-soldier confrontation at Idar-Oberstein is played out explicitly in the dueling
banderoles of a slightly earlier work, also of Westphalian origin, from the Church of St. Mary in Dortmund, a commemorative Passion altarpiece made for the Berswordt family
(Fig. 12).38 Here, the Centurion’s visible speech arcs gracefully from a pointing finger. Situated behind him is a fellow
military man, a helmeted knight dressed in fine chain mail,
who replies by casting an insouciant sidelong glance at him
while unfurling his own scroll with abbreviated Latin lines
from Matthew 27:40, SI FILI DESCE[N]DAT . . . DE[CRUCE] (“if thou
be the Son of God, come down from the cross”), referring to
the castigations and vain seeking for miracles of the unbelievers. This and the succeeding taunt in verse 42 reprised
the psalmist’s lament, “All they that saw me have laughed me
to scorn: they have spoken with the lips, and wagged the
head [saying], ‘He hoped in the Lord, let him deliver him:
296
8 Master of 1477, Calvary, ca. 1477, oil on fir panel, 59½ £
46½ in. (151 £ 118 cm). Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne,
751 (artwork in the public domain; photograph Ó Rheinisches
Bildarchiv)
let him save him. . . .’” (Ps. 21/22:9). Although there is nothing explicitly Jewish about the figure offering the taunt in
the Berswordt Altar (Fig. 13), his placement close by a figure
bearing a dark, dirty, and diabolical countenance similar to
that of Burgkmair’s soldier in Augsburg fixes his bloodguilt
by association, as it were. In fact, the Centurion is nearly
engulfed by Jewish denunciations of the christological
moment: below his upraised right arm, in a rare iconographic motif derived from John 19:21–22, two Jews dispute
with a seated Pilate who holds a quill and an inkpot to signify
his authorship of the titulus, still held in his lap. “Write not
king [of the Jews] [Noli scribere Rex (Iudaeorum)],” complain
the chief priests. Unfurling opposite theirs, Pilate’s speech
scroll supplies the retort, “What I have written, I have written
[Quod scripsi scripsi].”39
Indulging a fascination with the physiognomic signs of
spiritual and moral perversity, late medieval altar painters
seem to have relished the opportunity for creative mischief
in representing the biblical crowd [ochlos] that called for
Jesus’s crucifixion.40 Every artist knew how to supplement his
own inventiveness with borrowings, grafting, adaptations,
and downright thefts. A drawing now in London, once attributed on stylistic grounds to Holbein the Elder’s younger
brother Sigmund,41 assembles four character studies from
various Netherlandish and Westphalian sources: a scowling
Jew (upper left) taken from the Boutsian Arrest of Christ in
9 Master of 1477, detail of Fig. 8, showing the Good Centurion
and interlocutor (artwork in the public domain; photograph
Ó Rheinisches Bildarchiv)
the Alte Pinakothek, Munich;42 a half-bald man (lower left),
adapted from the Master of Sch€
oppingen’s Halderner Altar
in the Landesmuseum, M€
unster;43 a beardless man, perhaps
a beadle (lower right), similar to heads found in two drawings associated with Albert Bouts;44 and a turbaned “chief
priest” (upper right) whose source has not yet been identified but who reappears with different headdress in one of
two surviving apostle-martyrdom panels from a dismembered
altarpiece attributed to Sigmund Holbein, now in
R€
odelheim, near Frankfurt (Fig. 14).45 Each of these heads,
in all likelihood, came from other drawn intermediaries, not
the “source” paintings themselves. Of key interest in the present context is the head craning up from the lower left:
adorned with unruly eyebrows, forelock, and muttonchops,
he bares his teeth and snaps out a curse, inscribed on the
sheet: “Vach qui destruis demplum!” (Ah, you who destroyed
the temple). Adapted from the words of “they that passed by”
in Mark 15:29–30, “Vah, thou that destroyest the temple of
297
10 Crucifixion, central panel of the Passion Altarpiece from the
Felsenkirche, Idar-Oberstein, Westphalian (or Mainz?), late 14th
or early 15th century, pine panel, 51⅝ £ 51⅝ in. (131 £
132 cm). Felsenkirche, Idar-Oberstein (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by Erwin B€
ohm)
God, and in three days buildest it up again; Save thyself, coming down from the cross [Vah qui destruis templum Dei, et in
tribus diebus reaedificas: salvum fac temetipsum descendens de
cruce],” and from Matthew 27:40, the curse derides Jesus’s
claim that in dying and returning to everlasting life, he would
destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days (recall that
the psalmist foresaw these as blasphemies exclaimed by the
wicked while “wagging their heads”). That the man suffering
on the Cross cannot even save himself becomes “proof,” in
the blind eyes of the evildoers, that Jesus is no messiah. In
Matthew this is the first of two taunts from the crowd for Jesus
to come down from the Cross; the second of these, as we saw
earlier, uttered “in like manner also” by “the chief priests,
with the scribes and ancients” (27:42), formed the basis of
the soldier-interlocutor’s dramatic utterance in the Berswordt Altar (Fig. 13).
At Idar-Oberstein the same blasphemous utterance, visible
in a furling banderole, is “spoken” by a passerby on stage
right, next to the spear bearer wearing a peaked “Jewish” cap
(Fig. 10). With white hairs sprouting from under a black
hood and tongue a-wag, this comic miscreant is a close counterpart to the cursing scoundrel of the London model sheet.
He is also half bald, and shaved or bald heads, as Ruth
Mellinkoff has shown, are typically signs of evil.46 Suspended
between the monstrous and the burlesque, products of both
grotesque imagination and pictorial rummaging and reuse,
the tormentors and blasphemers late medieval artists littered
through the Calvary crowd were broadly evocative of that
primitive state of “godlessness” deplored in the opening
verses of Psalm 52/53:1–2: “The fool said in his heart: There
is no God. They are corrupted, and [have] become abominable in [their] iniquities.”
11 Crucifixion, detail of Fig. 10, showing the Good Centurion
and interlocutor (artwork in the public domain; photograph by
Erwin B€
ohm)
The Jew in the Mirror
Grotesque faces in “the crowd” were often interchangeably
generic; just as often they were interchangeably Jewish, and
caricatured as such. Devotional art, literature, and drama all
shared this preoccupation. Late medieval Passion tracts such
as John of Caulibus’s Meditations on the Life of Christ (ca.
1300), to take but one example, made it abundantly clear
that the mocking demands for “proof” of Jesus’s divinity
came from the mouths of impious Jews,47 and late medieval
panel painters were equally determined to populate their pictures with specifically Jewish jeers and sneers. Rising above
the farrago of gamblers, soldiers, and vagrants assembled
around the cross of the Bad Thief in the Kempten Master’s
boisterous Calvary of about 1460–70, now in Nuremberg, a
pair of Jewish officials sniff and snort behind the back of the
Centurion, whose bright-eyed glint of recognition is matched
only by the gleam of his armor and the jeweled brooch of his
headdress (Fig. 15).48 One of the deriders, cast in the visual
clich
es of a “chief priest,” enumerates proofs against Christ’s
kingship with his right hand, while a banderole held in his
left—the verbal supplement to his pointing gesture—speaks
the character’s impossible challenge from Matthew 27:42:
“Alios salvos fecit seipsu[m] no[n] potest salvu[m] facere:
Si rex Isr[ae]l est descendat [nunc de cruce, et credimus ei]”
(He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the king of
Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will
believe him). Meanwhile, a wart-faced toady, a minor official
flying a flag emblazoned with an “armorial” of Jewish authority,
a peaked red cap,49 listens with malevolent delight (Fig. 16).
298
12 Crucifixion, center panel of the
Berswordt Altarpiece (Passion
Altarpiece), Westphalian, ca. 1390.
Evangelical Church of St. Mary,
Dortmund (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by R€
udiger Glahs)
13 Crucifixion, detail of Fig. 12, showing the soldier with speech
scroll and pointing gesture (artwork in the public domain;
photograph by R€
udiger Glahs)
Such derogatory characterizations could be endlessly multiplied, as the pioneering work of scholars such as Eric
Zafran, Moshe Lazar, Ruth Mellinkoff, Heinz Schreckenberg,
Deborah Strickland, and others has amply shown.50 Seen in
the light of this depressingly vast visual archive, Burgkmair’s
portrayal of the dark-faced soldier in the Augsburg Crucifixion, with its weird fusion of stereotypy and ethnography,
might appear as a radical final stage in the late medieval escalation of dehumanizing caricature.51 All that he seems to
lack are the ersatz Hebrew letters that branded his many relatives across the length and breadth of the pictorial Passion
narrative tradition. Arguably, Burgkmair had the stereotyped
features associated with “the Turk” in mind, or also in mind,
for Orientalizing traits and motifs played quite loosely across
late medieval stereotypes of Muslim and Jew, particularly in
the eclecticism of costume.52 He also shares in that mythologically evocative “monstrous” feature that so fascinated Italian
humanists, physicians, and artists later in the sixteenth century: hirsutism.53
These “alsos” illustrate the point: Burgkmair’s ugly soldier
enfolds a semiotic surplus. Given this surplus, I would argue
that we need not engage in motif hunting so as to arrive at a
better iconographic or folkloric pedigree for the figure; the
larger problematic it crystallizes does not, in other words,
require that we pin down the particular physiognomic codes
of Otherness the artist is deploying.54 Veritable galleries of
malevolently ugly and subhuman “Jewish” faces fill out the
multifigured Passion scenes by Burgkmair’s senior colleague
on the Augsburg painting scene, Hans Holbein the Elder
(ca. 1460–1524), in particular, the three great altarpiece projects Holbein and his shop completed between 1494 and 1502
(at least one of these projects, the altarpiece made for the
Kaisheim monastery and now in Munich, Burgkmair would
have had ample opportunity to study).55 Following this lead,
299
15 Kempten Master, Calvary, ca. 1460–70, oil on spruce panel,
65⅛ £ 55¼ in. (165.5 £ 140.5 cm). Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (artwork in the public domain)
14 Workshop of Hans Holbein the Elder, Model Sheet with Four
Heads, pen and ink and washes and white highlights on redtoned paper, 10¾ £ 7 in. (27.4 £ 17.8 cm). University College of
London Art Museum (artwork in the public domain; photograph Ó UCL Art Museum, University College London, U.K.,
provided by The Bridgeman Art Library)
Burgkmair has constructed his grotesque Jew from a collection of negative signifiers, producing a hypertrophied mask
of Otherness that borders on the comic. The perennial question of the artist’s social experience with living Jews is close
to moot in Burgkmair’s case, since not only his own but his
father’s generation as well came of age in a Christian community whose last enfranchised Jewish residents had been
expelled by its town council—in apparent defiance of the
German king—in 1439.56 This is not to say that Jews could
not have figured strongly in the collective memory of the
imperial city; one suspects that the absence of real Jewish
neighbors, and the lack of those close commercial ties that
were the norm in south German cities after the dislocations
of the plague years, catapulted “the Jew” into the Christian
cultural imaginary all the more intensely as a reification, a
figure of reprobacy compelling outer fascinations and introspective anxieties.57 Although neither of these issues can be
properly pursued here, there can be little doubt that the
protoethnographic perspective Burgkmair adopted for other
projects is also a factor: the ambitious, multisheet woodcut
16 Kempten Master, detail of Fig. 15, showing the Good
Centurion, Jewish scoffer, and toady on horseback (artwork in
the public domain)
project of 1508, Peoples of Africa and India (1508), for example, seems anticipated in the purposeful description of
“ethnic” traits the artist lavished on the dark face of the Augsburg Crucifixion’s blaspheming soldier.58
300
We have seen how, even when deprived of speaking parts,
the anonymous soldier figures that stand opposite the Good
Centurion in many late medieval images were understood to
be agents of blasphemy, pitting their will against God to
denounce Jesus’ messianic identity. In the Augsburg Crucifixion, that denuncuation is expressed in gesture (Fig. 3).
Degrading what the Centurion exalts, the ugly Jewish soldier
points downward with a mailed hand, joining those who
demand that Jesus demonstrate his divinity by coming down
from the Cross (Matt. 27:40, 42). What the character enacts
is a resistance to transformative knowledge, a rebellion
against God, a stubborn refusal to “see” anything beyond the
carnal immolation of the Cross, thus, an unwillingness to
join the Centurion in conversion.
Hardly content to make his figure the mere embodiment
of a narrative function, however, Burgkmair fleshes out the
soldier’s moral character, and this troubles any straightforward attribution to him of a demonic or subhuman enmity.
A closer look tells us that the stereotyped Jewish ugliness of
the figure is no mere mask of hatred (Fig. 4). As he addresses
the Centurion a perverse smile spreads over his face. Fawning
in the presence of his superiors, he seems intent on playing
the fool. For their part, the Centurion and his fellow officer
look on the display of obsequiousness with angry condescension, on the one hand, and something like bemused pity, on
the other. And there is more, as we have already noted:
another judging gaze, this one hurled back on the Jew by his
own image. This specular doppelg€anger appears to be visible
to no one within the scene, least of all its flesh-and-blood
counterpart, who looks right past while smirking at the Centurion. And far from miming the Jew’s oafish grin, as we have
already observed, this mirrored other, glinting out from the
shiny surface, mouth agape, seems to recoil in horror at the
spectacle before it.
What does the spectral Jew in this metamorphic reflection
see that the real Jew cannot, or will not? What does it mean
that the reversed visage offered up by the mirror, the “other”
of the Self, recognizes the truth about the Self while itself
being overlooked, unrecognized, by its other? Assuming that
Burgkmair adopted the reflection motif from the Master of
1477’s Calvary (Figs. 6, 7) and that he grasped its reflexive
potential as an image within an image, what compelled him to
develop the borrowed motif in this particular way? It is tempting to interpret the gesture as little more than a painterly
conceit or a quixotic antiquarian play on the grotesque
masks that used to decorate ancient arms and armor (Fig. 9),
the dead repouss
e Gorgon transformed, as it were, into an
animate specter that mocks the living. That Burgkmair might
have reached beyond his own milieu, finding inspiration for
the motif in the Netherlandish tradition of embedded reflections, “self-illuminating” oil colors, and pictorial plays on classical tropes,59 is also conceivable. Alternatively, one might
locate it within the late medieval and early modern iconography of folly, where buffoons and jesters are routinely mocked
by their doubles, some staring out from handheld mirrors,60
others depicted as grotesque animate heads sprouting from
phallic baubles, as in Heinrich Vogtherr the Younger’s
creepy Schalksnarr woodcut of 1540.61 But there is clearly
more to Burgkmair’s reflected soldier than a display of painterly prowess, an exercise in imagination or classical citation,
a critique of the “godless fool,” or anti-Semitic caricature,
and by ruling out these possibilities we are led to the following question: What would it have meant to the Christian
viewer to see his archetypal Other, the Jew, ridiculed in his
blindness by his specular Other, and this precisely at the
moment of the Savior’s death—at the scene of christological
recognition, conversion, and their “Jewish” opposites?
The answer to be developed here begins from an acknowledgment of the ethical importance late medieval Christian
culture placed on the subject’s penitential self-recognition as a
sinner, as a being burdened with death and the reprobate
carnality Adam’s disobedience brought upon the human
race. Drawing on a key figuration within patristic and medieval thought of Judaism’s inherent dangers, I argue that
Burgkmair’s moral target turns out to be that “Judaizing”
part of the Christian Self, the carnal enemy within who,
through its ceaseless sinning, betrays Christ to his enemies,
abandons him on the Cross, and meets his loving mercy with
ingratitude.62 Failed recognition of God and failed recognition of Self reflect one another and arouse the same anxiety.
By tracing the ever-present challenge of self-recognition back
into the Gospel story’s foundational challenge of christological
recognition, in other words, the artist situates the beholder
at the intersection of these two inescapable tests of Christian
identity.
Art historians have long understood mirror reflections to
be a special kind of image-within-an-image. Never neutral or
passive relays of reality, catoptric motifs are always, in one
sense or another, meta-images: that is, they are either transformative (metamorphic), coded (metaphoric), reflexive
(metapictorial), or some combination of these.63 Our perspective here must be limited to the century preceding
Burgkmair’s work at the Katharinenkloster. For the Netherlandish masters who exploited the translucence of oil painting to produce flawless visions of optical reality, and for
whom the convex mirror was a standard workshop tool, the
pictured mirror became, in Meyer Schapiro’s memorable
words, “a model of painting as a perfect image of the visible
world.”64 Numerous scholars since have shown how reflective
convex surfaces of all kinds, not just mirrors proper, could
function within paintings “to create a more complete and
substantial representation of space,” as Jan Bia»ostocki has
described the panoptic reach of Saint Michael’s cuirass in
Hans Memling’s Last Judgment altarpiece now in the National
Museum in Gda
nsk.65 Credit for the most far-reaching innovations in this arena is usually awarded to Jan van Eyck, who
famously used reflections to situate the moment of witnessing within the visual field as it crystallized in his gaze. In his
sparkling devotional epitaph of 1436, the Virgin with the
Canon George Van der Paele, van Eyck distributed multiple
images of the enthroned Queen of Heaven across the scalloped round ridges of the saint’s polished helmet, as well as
fixing his own presence, his own act of artisanal spectatorship, in the gleaming bronze of the epauliere.66 Recent scholarship attuned to medieval and early modern image theory
has elevated the embedded mirror reflection into something
like the preeminent meta-image, a supermotif that insistently
refers discourse to the problematic veracity of images, the
variability and fallibility of sight, the dangers and pleasures of
illusion—but also, ironically, the superiority of painting over
other arts.67 Scholarly interest has massed around Leon Battista Alberti’s original interpretation of the Narcissus myth in
book 2 of Della pittura (1435–36), where the pool’s reflective
image paints the young hunter as a primal desiring subject
and, simultaneously, as the first beholder of pictures. “What
is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?” asks Alberti in the famous passage, winking
to his humanist readers with a clever appropriation of Philostratus the Elder’s ekphrastic exercise in the Eikones.68
More germane for my interpretation of Burgkmair’s soldier motif in the Augsburg Crucifixion is the ethical thread
running through classical and postclassical interpretations,
verbal and visual, of the Narcissus myth: the mirror image’s
status as a trope of philosophical self-examination, its risks,
and its rewards. Ancient writers implicitly understood that
the mirror could serve the subject as an instrument of moral
betterment, for it provided, as Shadi Bartsch explains, “a tool
for the splitting of the viewer into viewing subject and viewed
object.”69 Ovid’s portrayal of Narcissus at the moment of his
self-recognition in the pool is the classic negative exemplum
of this self-splitting: “iste ego sum: sensi, nec mea fallit
imago” (I am he. I realize. My image/my reflection no longer
deceives me) (Metamorphoses 3.463). Yet the ethical challenge
wrought by the illusion’s fracture is one this particular subject fails, since, as H
erica Valladares points out, the experience “does not result in a corresponding critical distance
from his own reflection” but only an “awareness of the erotic
paradox in which he is caught and its attendant impossibility
of fulfillment.” The result, in Ovid’s telling of the tale, was “a
new kind of madness [novitasque furors]” (Met. 3.350).70 What
Narcissus failed to achieve every mirror image promises: a
therapeutic reversal of subject and object relations. When it
succeeds, the viewer, the owner of the gaze, simultaneously
becomes the viewed, the target of the gaze; the possibility of
self-knowledge flits into view. Yet the enterprise, like any
effort to transmute sense impression into understanding, was
always understood as inherently vexed. Commenting on the
ancient motto Nosce te ipsum (Know Thyself), inscribed alongside a Narcissus-like mirror-gazing figure in the decorative
program of his own villa outside Bologna, the physician and
naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) expresses the conventional wisdom, “Admiring one’s face is most easy. To
know one’s internal self has always been reputed to be
difficult.”71
Bartsch aptly terms the subject-object reversal that opens
the door to self-knowledge a “momentary dislocation of selfidentity” and distinguishes it from the self-splitting that leads
to Cartesian enlightenment—the familiar trope of the cogitating mind reflexively mirroring its own operations. In faceto-face societies the mirror’s disclosure of a newly objective
point of view for the subject is not that of the introspective mind becoming self-aware; nor is it necessarily a surrogate for the omnivoyance of God, whose surveillance elicits
shame and compels penitential self-correction.72 Rather, the
dislocated subject is caught enacting a second-order, social
role, learning to judge himself in light of commonly held values and norms. Momentarily divided into subject and object,
one sees oneself as others would, beyond appearances. And
it is here, at the scene of dawning self-knowledge, that the
mirror, despite its capacity to deceive, discloses a most
301
unsettling prospect onto truth, one that ancient and medieval authors alike comprehended: the potential to confront
the subject with the horror of the Self. In Christian thought
this was the Self mired in sin, corrupted by worldly attachments, deformed by self-seeking, forgetful of Last Things,
and alienated from God.73 Wishing only to escape from the
dissociating shock such a reflection produces, the penitential
subject finds the choice laid bare: either flee into the fantasy
of mere appearances and remain blind to his true self,
accepting sin and death as his lot, or use the mirror to convert, to “turn” away from sin and toward God. A rhymed
inscription encircling Death’s reflection in a fifteenth-century engraving, pasted into a Book of Hours in Dublin and
preserved today as a unicum, recommends just this: “In this
mirror, so may I learn, how from sin, I ought to turn [In desen
speigell, soe mach ik leren, hoe ik mij sal, van sonden keren].”74
The need for constant self-examination and vigilant reflection on death was a major theme in ancient ethics, particularly Stoicism, and in the long history of Christian
monasticism, where penitential exercises served as a method
for purifying the soul and making way for the birth of the
“new man.” In the Middle Ages this preoccupation stimulated a proliferation of didactic and pastoral works, reaching
far beyond the monastery, bearing the title Speculum.75 As
the idea of spiritual exercise was progressively retooled for
the needs of the laity, the broad-based ethos of self-observation gave birth to a whole new domain of Christian ethical
art, tied largely to the imperative to prepare for death: ars
moriendi, vanitas, memento mori, and related macabre and penitential themes. A whole regimen of spiritual therapy for the
laity was organized around their common logic. Eventually
disseminated in popular form by the printing press, the new
class of emblematic meditative images began as novelties
styled for elites. A two-page opening from a Book of Hours
made about 1500, probably in Bruges, for Joanna (“the
Mad”) of Castile marks the transition from the book’s calendar pages to its battery of meditative lists (Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Five Senses, Works of Mercy,
Virtues, Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and so on). It includes the
proleptic spectacle of a skull gazing out from inside a convex
crystal, encircled by the text’s putative title, “Speculum consciencie,” or “Mirror of Conscience.” Trompe l’oeil flower,
pod, and berry specimens, interspersed with two butterflies
and a snail, surround the inset word-image composite
(Fig. 17).76 By offering up to fleshly eyes a future vision of
the Self unclothed by flesh, reminding us of what we will
become and, in a sense, always were, the mirror, combining
mimesis and metamorphosis in a single figure, proves itself
the instrument par excellence of a penitential optics. Such
opportunities as mirrors afforded—to “see” what carnal
vision was too limited, and imagination too fear-struck, to
furnish—constituted something like a heavenly therapy. This
takes the form of competing parables in a roughly contemporary German broadsheet preserved in Stuttgart (Fig. 18).77
The mirror held up to the luxury-loving young couple on the
left appears empty, tempting them to peer closer; whatever
pleasing image comes to fill it will, the Devil holding it knows,
guarantee their souls to him (likewise if it remains empty).
What the angel’s mirror furnishes the prudent burghers on
the right, by contrast, is that painful shock of recognition
302
17 Master of the David Scenes (Bruges or Ghent), the beholder
reflected as Death, from “Speculum consciencie” (Mirror of
Conscience), in the Book of Hours of Joanna of Castile, 1496–
1506. The British Library, London, Add. MS 18852, fol. 15r
(artwork in the public domain; photograph Ó The British
Library Board)
that leads from ignorance to insight, and from there to penance. The horror of this “true image” will send them fleeing—fleeing from sin.
Narrative imagery, too, and Passion imagery in particular,
could serve as a kind of “mirror of conscience,” a site for prudent self-reflection, imitation of Christ, and spiritual therapy.
Consider the admonition set forth by Arnoul Gr
eban, the
mid-fifteenth-century dramatist and canon of the church of
Le Mans, in his great 35,000-verse vernacular play Le myste re
de la Passion (already quoted in part in our epigram):
Thus he moderates his pains
by looking into this mirror,
where every heart, to see its sorrow
ought to profoundly consider itself.
And so that you might see yourself there
and gently look at it,
this pious mirror for your own good
we bring before your eyes,
in visible form, with characters.
Look at yourself, if you are wise,
each of you sees his form there:
Anyone who really looks will really see himself.
May God grant that if we look at ourselves
18 Practica des b€
osen und des guten Engels, Leipzig: Konrad
Kachelofen, ca. 1498, xylographic woodcut broadsheet with
typographic text. W€
urttembergische Landesbibliothek,
Stuttgart, Inc. fol. 13312b (artwork in the public domain)
by looking we may perceive,
after this moral life,
the powerful immortal essence
that reigns inexhaustibly.78
Put into play here is a certain kind of sensual didacticism
that fosters proper (that is, spiritual) seeing and hearing
as ethical activities for the audience. Gr
eban deploys the mirror metaphor to privilege what is visible to human eyes
(“senssiblement”) and what is performed “with characters
[par parsonnaiges],” the whole enterprise of the play geared to
individualized opportunities for self-examination, imitation,
and ethical-spiritual improvement.
Turning back to Burgkmair’s Crucifixion in Augsburg, we
recall the character whose appearance onstage coincides
with the chance to see himself in the Passion’s mirror,
though he proves himself unable or unwilling to do so.
Imprisoned in his own subject position by a contumacious
will set on blasphemy, he is suspended before the possibility
of self-splitting and self-awareness. Only his specular doppelg€anger registers any kind of awareness, disclosing the
truth of a sinful reprobacy while going unheeded. Flashing
into view as an alien Other, the Jew’s horrified reflection
becomes, in other words, an ethical Other. Burgkmair’s obsequious soldier makes himself risible and contemptuous not
only to those surrounding him but to himself as well.
19 Hans Holbein the Younger, the fool mocked by his reflection, 1515, added in Erasmi Roterodami encomium moriae . . . ,
Basel: Johannes Froben, 1515, fol. E2v, pen and ink, quarto.
Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, 1662.166 (artwork in
the public domain; photograph by Martin P. B€
uhler, provided by
Kunstmuseum Basel)
Knowledge limps behind disclosure, and experience doesn’t
stand a chance. Paradoxically, the agency capable of recognition remains the exclusive possession of the being who is not
a person at all but a mere image: an illusory “subject” who
has nothing to gain, and nothing to lose, in possessing true
knowledge of the self.
The profound difficulty of seeing oneself for the sake
of spiritual or moral improvement preoccupied a broad
swath of sixteenth-century writers and artists who understood it to be an anthropological as well as ethical problem. On the heels of Sebastian Brant’s hugely popular
Narrenschiff (1494), but in an entirely different rhetorical
mode, Erasmus of Rotterdam placed the critique of foolish self-regard in the mouth of Dame Folly herself, asking, “is there any duty throughout life which you can
perform gracefully as regards yourself or others . . . unless
you have self-love at hand to help you?” In 1515 Hans
Holbein the Younger glossed this passage with a piquant
pen and ink miniature in Basel schoolmaster Oswald
Myconius’s personal copy of the Moriae encomium, depicting a fool, epitome of the false man, deflated by the
mockery of his own reflection (Fig. 19).79 Wisdom
requires, first and foremost, recognizing folly as the preexisting condition, so to speak, of both humanity and
the self. Tricksters and folk heros such as Till Eulenspiegel, whose name (meaning “owl’s mirror”) evidently
derives from the old saying, “One sees one’s own faults
no more clearly than an owl sees its own ugliness in a
looking glass,” made a career of wearing down the
defenses that keep discomfiting recognitions at bay.80 In
a far less humorous vein Sebastian Franck commented
in his Sprichw€
orter of 1541,
Man remains forever in his affairs and towards himself
blind and a fool. . . . Likewise if a monkey and an owl were
to be looking at themselves in a mirror, the nature of
303
20 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Elck, ca. 1558, pen and brown ink,
8¼ £ 11½ in. (20.9 £ 29.2 cm). The British Museum, London
(artwork in the public domain; photograph Ó The Trustees of
the British Museum, London)
21 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, detail of Fig. 20, showing Nobody
(Nymant) regarding himself in a mirror (artwork in the public
domain; photograph Ó The Trustees of the British Museum,
London)
animal or man is so blind that each creature, obsessed by
self-love, does not know himself, does not see himself, and
cannot do so.81
Midcentury contemporaries willing to think beyond the
bounded categories of confessional knowledge—Protestant
and Catholic—concurred. Pieter Bruegel’s drawing of about
1558 (now in the British Museum) known as Elck embeds a
tableau that likewise laments the hollow prospects for selfknowledge (Fig. 20). As a foil for the bespectacled Everyman
shown scrambling across a mound of detritus with a lamp,
searching for something he will never find, Bruegel offers a
paradoxical double, Nobody (Nymant), dressed in a fool’s
costume and regarding himself in a mirror. Posted on a placard of some sort on the wall (Fig. 21), this image within the
304
image carries the inscription, “Nymant en ekent sy selven”
(Nobody knows [or recognizes] himself).82
I have written elsewhere about the prominent role Nobody
acquired as a stock character in the European satirical tradition, and I invoke him here because something of the
Nobody paradox, it seems to me, finds berth in Burgkmair’s
Jewish soldier as he wanders in on the scene at Golgotha,
almost innocently, unprepared for the challenge of recognition.83 Neither a tormentor in the strict sense nor a
sympathetic witness, neither deicide nor convert, a target for
neither hostile ostracization nor empathetic identification,
the soldier-fool is invested with a strange form of “nobodyness,” a universalizing anonymity that turns the drama
of the subject’s failed self-recognition into an indictment,
not of Jewish reprobacy per se, but of Christian godlessness
generally. That is, what Burgkmair stages as a stereotypically
Jewish blindness stands here for the blindness of those Christians who refuse to look into the penitential mirror—that
reflective surface out of which their own image as ungrateful,
reprobate sinners stares back. It is a truthful vision of the
soul’s alienated relationship to God that the Jew, by his
nature, remains unable to overcome, while the Christian, distracted by the vanities of the world and immersed in his own
foolish self-regard, remains unwilling. Confronting one’s sinful self meant feeling the shock of recognizing the Jew
within, oblivious to one’s own guilt, ready to deny Christ
again and again. To see Burgkmair’s Nobody failing the test
of salvific recognition on Golgotha thus renders the image
emblematic: its verbal equivalent, once unraveled, is the
argument that nobody meets the challenge of self-recognition,
nobody properly sees himself. The indictment mounts a challenge to everybody, every Christian faithful who witnesses
Christ crucified.
Given his ambitions and humanist connections, the Burgkmair of about 1504 would no doubt have agreed with the
coming generation of moralists and reformers who railed
against a Christian society in which nobody recognizes himself. That the painter, later in his life, understood the twin
imperatives of facing the horror of the Self without false consolations and of regarding the mirror as a site of prudent
self-reflection—thus, proper self-recognition—comes across
in the imploring miens of Hans and his wife, Anna Allerlay,
portrayed by Burgkmair’s junior colleague in Augsburg,
Laux (Lucas) Furtenagel, in the remarkable panel now in
Vienna, dated 1529 (Fig. 22).84 Building on a tradition of
macabre portraiture stretching back to the early fourteenth
century—one that eventually came to include the subgenre
of mortifying marriage portraits85—the Vienna panel
presents us with a troubling double aspect: the couple as
they are (or once were), and the couple as they will be (or
always were). Folding time, it thus addresses a simultaneous
audience of present and future beholders, making it what
Joseph Koerner has called a “proleptic epitaph.” Above the
painter’s head begins the panel’s cascade of admonitory
inscriptions, with words set against the black recess: “Such
was our human form, but in the mirror nothing more than
this.”86 Above Anna’s head a banderole calls out the ages of
the sitters on the precise day (May 10, 1529) they were captured in mortal likenesses,87 while inside the crystalline orb
she holds, embryonic doppelg€angers float through a dark
ether (Fig. 23). Terrible in their fixation on the flesh-andblood others, the simian skull of Frau Burgkmair appears
amid a spray of red hair that mocks Anna’s thinning locks,
while a spectral Meister Hans, intent on chastising the
painter’s vanity, glares across the breadth of the panel,
mouth open, as if barking out a curse. Inscribed around the
mirror’s edge is the admonition to recognize our true selves:
ERKEN DICH SELBS.
This complex humanist conceit for a vanitas double portrait is almost certainly Burgkmair’s own.88 Whether or not
the portrait truly illustrates “the antithesis between sinful
and prudent self-reflection,” as James Marrow has argued,89
there is no doubt we are being called to witness an act of selfrecognition on the couple’s part and admonished to recognize ourselves in the process. The mirror conjures up a
glimpse of that which is blocked by the world of appearances
and earthly attachments—paradoxically, by the very body
whose material presence brings it into focus in the first place.
That the metamorphic motif of a specular Other horrified by
what it sees—an absent presence possessed of its own, terrifying agency—would reappear in Burgkmair’s oeuvre twentyfive years later, in a painting conceived as a visual testament
to the painter’s own Christian virtue, casts a retrospective
light on the importance of this visual trope of recognition in
the painter’s repertoire. Attentive to his chances for artistic
self-display and intellectual self-assertion within the bounds
of an important commission, Burgkmair projected into the
Augsburg Crucifixion’s reflection motif a moment of authorial self-recognition, stolen back as a form of Christian virtue
from a fleeting moment of narcissistic blindness.
Basilikabilder: Imaginative Pilgrimage and Perpetual Passion
What place, what role, what meaning did Burgkmair’s reflection motif assume within the larger cycle of paintings for
which the Crucifixion was designed, the six Basilikabilder
commissioned between 1499 and 1504? As noted earlier,
Burgkmair’s scene, with its frieze of monumental standing
figures and its Christ type adapted from his father’s allegorical Crucifixion in St. Maximilian,90 forms the upper twothirds of the center section of a tympanum-shaped painting,
measuring 7 feet 9¾ inches (2.38 meters) high and 11 feet
2½ inches (3.415 meters) wide along the bottom edge, dedicated to the Roman church of S. Croce in Gerusalemme
(Fig. 24). Occupying the lower tier of the center section is a
separate view of the church, freely rendered and perspectivally folded, it seems, to allow us to glimpse the eastern choir’s
exterior and at the same time something of the carved western portal. Whatever else might be seen of the portal, and
the painter’s coy invitation to peek inside, is half hidden by a
courtyard gate, on which Burgkmair signed the panel with an
ersatz antique inscription: HANNS ¢ BVRGKMAIR ¢ / ¢ M[ALER] : VO
[N] ¢ AVGSPVRG ¢ / ¢ ANNO 1504. Pilgrims identified by their
badges, hats, and traveler’s staves come and go: the main
group, led by a local guide, seems to be departing and passing advice along to a couple who are entering, accompanied
by their dog. Completing the tympanum ensemble are the
half lunettes (each 80½ by 45¼ inches, or 204.5 by 115 centimeters) bracketing the stacked central panels; together they
comprise a sumptuous panorama taken from the Life of
Saint Ursula, specifically, her martyrdom among the eleven
305
22 Laux (Lucas) Furtenagel, Hans Burgkmair at the Age of
Fifty-Six and Anna Burgkmair at the Age of Fifty-Two, 1529, oil on
limewood panel, 23⅝ £ 20½ in. (60 £ 52 cm). Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna, Gem€aldegalerie, 924 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by Art
Resource, NY)
thousand companions, a scene based principally on the
Golden Legend.91 High horizon lines allow Burgkmair to draw
the virgin-martyr armada into the upper zones of the tapered
panels. Above a beautiful riverscape, simulated shrinework
integrates the overall composition, rationalizing its considerable shifts in figure scale.92
Earlier, I pointed out that of the six Basilikabilder commissioned by the Dominican nuns, Burgkmair completed three,
Hans Holbein the Elder two, and a certain Master L.F., probably also from Augsburg, one.93 Designed for installation in
the convent’s newly renovated chapter house, each of the
ensembles, with notable variations, is set in a pointed-arch
tympanum and adheres to the basic scheme just described
for S. Croce: a Passion image placed above a “view” of one of
Rome’s basilican churches, complemented by hagiographic
vignettes or votive saints’ portraits, corresponding either to
the basilica’s eponymous patron or the saint venerated by
the panel’s donor. Both notable exceptions to this scheme
are from Holbein’s hand: the Santa Maria Maggiore of 1499,
which replaces Passion imagery with a Coronation of the Virgin in the apex, and the San Paolo fuori le mura of 1504, which
displaces architectural portraiture in the lower zone with a
complex staging of the apostle’s martyrdom. In only a few
places do we find donor portraits or family escutcheons. One
of the five documented donors, shown kneeling with a rosary
in a panel long ago detached from the San Paolo ensemble, is
Veronica Welser (d. 1531), daughter of the influential Augsburg merchant and banking family (Fig. 25).94 Then-prioress
23 Lucas (Laux) Furtenagel, detail of Fig. 22, showing mirror
reflections of Hans and Anna Burgkmair (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by Art
Resource, NY)
of the Katharinenkloster, Welser is identified in an eighteenth-century chronicle (which refers to an older lost
source) as the donor of both the S. Paolo and S. Croce panels, for which she paid the two painters, Holbein and Burgkmair, a total of 187 gulden.95 Whereas the former artist
portrayed her directly, the latter commemorated her patronage through the choice of martyrological legend (Welser’s
given name was Ursula96), on the one hand, and the inclusion of her family’s coat of arms (lower right corner), on the
other. Four other members of the order—Dorothea
Rehlinger, Anna Riedler, Helena Raphon, and Barbara Riedler—are recorded as project donors, along with the honoraria they paid the painters. Like Welser, each hailed from
one of Augsburg’s wealthiest and most influential patrician
and merchant families.
306
24 Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Basilikabild depicting S. Croce in Gerusalemme, 1504, oil on joined panels, combined 7 ft. 9¾ in. £
11 ft. 2½ in. (2.383 £ 3.415 m). Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie in der Katharinenkirche, Augsburg (artwork in the
public domain; photograph provided by BPK, Berlin / Art Resource, NY)
Singular in the history of convent arts, the Augsburg
Basilikabilder were conceived as touchstones of an ambitious campaign of communal self-regeneration and consolidation extending over several decades. This campaign
would eventually see, in 1498, much of the cloister refurbished by the Stadtbaumeister Burkhart Engelberg (1447–
1512) and later, between 1516 and 1517, the monastery
church rebuilt in the newly fashionable Renaissance
idiom by the Augsburg architect Hans Heber (d. 1522),
under Welser’s watchful eye. Of the city’s seven convents,
the Katharinenkloster was the richest, largest, and “most
emphatically civic”; its elite status was confirmed by a
series of papal and royal privileges, granted since its foundation in the thirteenth century.97
The privilege scholars have linked specifically to the Basilikabild project was an indulgence issued by Innocent VIII in
1487. Continuing a papal tradition of corporate dispensations begun in the early fourteenth century, it bestowed on
the nuns and other visitors to the convent the opportunity to
earn the same remission of sins granted those who journeyed
to the seven basilicas of Rome—without ever leaving the convent. These benefits could be fully earned by anyone willing
to visit “three stations in the cloister with special devotion [in
sonderhait andechtlich haymsucht drey stet in disem closter],” as
specified by the abbess reigning at the time (“durch ain
pryorin zu zeyten geordnet send”), and at each place pray
three Our Fathers and three Ave Marias (“an yeglicher der
drey stet drew pater noster und dreiw Aue maria”). Although
the original Latin bull has been lost, the German text
excerpted here was worked up for display around 1500 in the
form of triptych, an object meant, in all likelihood, to serve
as a commemorative plaque, or Gedenktafel, somewhere inside
the convent.98 This suggests an effort to promote the convent’s privilege, and its special relationship to Rome, within
the specific context of the Jubilee year of 1500.99
On the face of it, then, each of the painted basilican
“portraits” would seem to represent one station on a virtual
Roman pilgrimage to the Sette Chiese, contained within the
convent walls for the benefit of those traditionally forced to
make do with peregrinatio in stabilitate. Were the images
intended to serve as spaces for imaginative journeys and meditations, a set of visual prompts for the kind of pious visualizations scholars have long associated with late medieval
devotional images, Passion images in particular? Endorsed by
a number of scholars,100 this understanding of the images as
surrogates has also met with criticism. Christopher Wood, for
example, has emphasized that the text of the 1487 indulgence letter stipulates only that one must visit three different
“places” within the convent, as specified by the abbess, in
order to earn the grant, not that one must pray in specific
locations, let alone before specific objects, in some kind of
sequence.101 Needless to say, it would be unreasonable to
expect the document of 1487 to refer to paintings that had
not yet been commissioned; the “three places [drey stet]”102
in the cloister to which indulgence seekers were guided at
the time were almost certainly existing altars. A closely
related, and close by, instance of a plenary jubilee indulgence designed to provide the sick, the lame, or the cloistered similar access to the full “r€
omischen Gnaden” is the
1501 grant given to the Cistercians of nearby Kaisheim; fulfilling the terms of the grant in this instance entailed prayerful
pilgrimage to seven altars within the monastery.103
Even so, it is not necessary to assume such grants were
understood as either fixed or limited to the same stations
of prayer in perpetuity: the principle of commutatio, so
widely applied in medieval pilgrimage culture, continually
gave rise to new relations of surrogacy based on equivalent indulgences. For instance, just as pilgrims to the
seven Roman basilicas could earn the same remissions
granted to those traveling longer distances to worship
Christ at the loca sancta in Jerusalem—medieval guidebooks emphasized this advantage104—the possibility
existed to replace that intramural church-to-church itinerary with a visit to the seven main altars of St. Peter’s alone
or even with visits to designated surrogates (churches or
altars) in northern Europe. Some degree of flexibility in
how the terms of the grant might have been fulfilled at
the Katharinenkloster may therefore be assumed; it would
appear, furthermore, that such flexibility opened the
door to innovation, including the idea of a picture cycle.
By leaving the designation of the surrogate prayer sites
(Stellvertreterstatten)
€
within the convent to the discretion of
the ruling prioress, Innocent’s bull of 1487 tactfully anticipated a new configuration of liturgical stations, one
made possible by the very renovations it helped finance.
Even if a strict version of the virtual pilgrimage thesis cannot be sustained by the evidence at the Katharinenkloster
(let alone other monasteries in the city),105 it is hardly out of
the question to imagine the “prayer in three places” stipulation being satisfied by the paintings, especially if we regard
the six panels as three pairs, something their installation in
the chapter house recommends. Medieval chapter rooms—
distinct within European monastery complexes from the eleventh century on—were multifunctional spaces for business
and ritual. There the community might engage in commemorative prayer on behalf of the house’s dead benefactors,
especially the notables among its own members (some of
whom might find privileged burial in the chapter room
itself); participate in quasiliturgical rituals such as collations,
the reception of novices, or the weekly washing of feet (mandatum); or conduct institutional business of various kinds,
including daily community meetings, elections, and the
disciplining of errant brothers or sisters. All such ceremonies
were served by a long tradition of centralizing design that oriented participants toward a central bay of the room, typically
furnished with an altar.106
307
25 Hans Holbein the Elder, Veronica Welser with rosary,
ca. 1504, pine panel, 15¼ £ 9 in. (38.6 £ 23 cm), detached
from the Basilikabild depicting S. Paolo. Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie in der Katharinenkirche,
Augsburg, WAF 377 (artwork in the public domain; photograph
provided by BPK, Berlin / Art Resource, NY)
Still preserved, St. Katherine’s chapter room—completed,
along with the adjoining cloister (Kreuzgang), in 1499—is a
square space with a round center column and net vaults
divided into four equal bays; fenestration on the west wall left
space for only six tympanum-shaped panels, two on each of
the remaining walls. Working from the slight variations in
shape and size, Magdalena G€artner has resolved the discrepancies in previous attempts to reconstruct the hanging
arrangement of the six panels, with the following result: the
cycle began on the north wall, with Burgkmair’s San Pietro on
the left and Master L.F.’s combined San Lorenzo and San
Sebastiano on the right; it continued clockwise with, on the
east wall, Burgkmair’s San Giovanni (shaped to fit over
the doorway) and Holbein’s San Paolo next to it on the right;
the cycle concluded on the south wall with Burgkmair’s Santa
Croce and Holbein’s Santa Maria Maggiore (Fig. 26).107 To the
308
26 Schematic reconstruction of the
chapter room in the Katharinenkloster,
Augsburg, showing the original disposition of the Basilikabild panels,
ca. 1505, from G€artner, R€
omische
Basiliken, p. 38, fig. 10 (drawing Ó
Magdalene G€artner)
extent that this arrangement constituted a viewing order
based on the Passion sequence, it significantly lacks any correspondence with the order of the commissions (in fact, the
first painting completed and paid for, Holbein’s Santa Maria
Maggiore, occupies the “last” position in such a sequence).
Close by the central column, the nuns finally installed an
altar; consecrated in 1503, it was evidently adorned with
Holbein’s Saint Katherine Altarpiece of 1512, its now-lost shrine
housing a Marian cult figure.108
There can be little doubt that the lavish set of commissions, as Pia Cuneo has argued, marked an effort on the part
of this wealthy enclave of Dominican nuns to reassert their
place within a “tradition of powerful and holy women,”
pledge their allegiance to the Roman Church, and thereby
resist destabilizing reform efforts at a time of escalating
anticlericalism.109 However, female sanctity, patronage, and
community building do not tell the whole story, and too great
an emphasis on these factors leaves the prominence of Passion imagery in the overall project insufficiently explained. As
noted, five of the six panels feature Passion scenes in their
central panels’ upper fields, setting each at the apex of its
pointed-arch frame and aligning it with the architectural
“portrait” below.110 Two of these five, both products of the
Holbein workshop, originally featured images of their donors
kneeling in devotion before the scene of martyrdom: the
Santa Maria Maggiore of 1499, with Dorothea Rehlinger
embedded in Saint Dorothy’s beheading at the lower right,
and the San Paolo fuori le mura, to which the panel featuring
Veronica Welser with her rosaries (Fig. 25) was once attached,
also in the lower right position.
309
27 Attributed to Hans Holbein the
Elder, Epitaph for the Vetter Sisters, 1499,
oil on pine panel, 70¾ £ 107 in.
(179.7 £ 271.8 cm). Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie in
der Katharinenkirche, Augsburg, 4669
(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by BPK, Berlin / Art
Resource, NY)
Passion themes are also prominent in a number of tympanum epitaphs, closely similar in shape to the Basilikabilder
and of roughly equal dimensions, produced by the Holbein
workshop for display in the adjoining Kreuzgang. One of
these, completed in 1499 for the three cloistered daughters
of the Vetter family—Veronica (d. 1490), Christine (d. 1499),
and Walburga (d. 1500)—showcases the mysticism associated
with the rosary cult favored by the nuns (Fig. 27).111 Separated from the scenes they witness by slender trompe l’oeil
tracery, the sisters kneel together beneath a dedicatory plaquette: the Coronation of the Virgin in the apex, family
escutcheons on either side, six Passion scenes, and a vignette
portrait of Saint Veronica take their places on a multilevel
stage spotlighted against a deep black. A continuous span of
turf unites the space of the nuns with the three scenes on the
lower tier (Gethsemane, the Crucifixion, and the Carrying of
the Cross) and Veronica standing with her sudarium, while a
receding expanse of tiled floor does the same for the three
above (the Flagellation, the Crowning with Thorns, and Pilate
Washing His Hands). In order to reach the climax, the sixfigure Crucifixion in the lower tier, beholders must scan this
“out of order” sequence that apparently seeks to harmonize
John 19 (where the hand washing is omitted) and Matthew
27 (in which the Crowning follows Pilate’s declaration of his
own innocence). Just below Christ’s outstretched left arm in
that final scene, the Good Centurion makes his confession to
a man in a yellow tunic and flat-topped hat—the same figure
visible among the henchmen in the Flagellation and Hand
Washing scenes above. Striding into the frame from its margins, he likewise points upward toward Christ on the Cross as
if posing a question.
One additional detail in the Vetter epitaph deserves attention for what it tells us about the penitential mysticism of the
nuns. At the far left end of the second tier, continuous with
the artfully contrived stage space of the torture scenes, two of
the Passion’s instruments, the birch rod and the flagellum,
lie discarded on the floor; signlike in their isolation, they
uncannily point toward the nuns below, as if animated by the
wish to be wielded anew. Read as mute testimony that the
souls of the deceased have paid their debts of conscience—
even if that penitential task must be renewed among the living—they stand here as vivid symbols of a total spiritual program. Grounded in Passion mysticism, Eucharistic piety, and,
from the later fifteenth century on, the cult of the rosary as
well, the regimen fostered in south German convents such as
St. Katherine’s kept ascetic discipline enshrined in the
order’s history as a focal point of the cloistered life. Mystics
such as Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), who transformed
herself through flagellation into “an anvil for the blows of
God,” or Elspeth of Oye (from the Oetenbach cloister in Zurich), who allegedly spattered bystanders with blood from
the fury of her self-torment, or Christina Ebner of the Engelthal convent near Nuremberg were extolled in convent
chronicles and contemporary hagiographies as charismatic
penitents who attained holiness, ascetics who became
“earthly angels” through their mortifying efforts to conform
to Christ in suffering and love.112 Massively documented in a
still-growing scholarly literature, that tradition requires no
review here.113 But it should be remarked that one of the two
extant copies of the German translation of Catherine of
Siena’s vita to feature illustrations was transcribed, and dated
1466, by a nun of the Katharinenkloster, Elisabeth Warr€
ussin.114 Communal rites of penance, including ritual flagellation, likewise sustained these histories and brought them
into a living present. It is no coincidence that the performance of penitential discipline has been called—with special
reference to the Dominicans—“perhaps the most important
ceremony conducted in the chapter house.”115
To the extent that the Basilikabilder offered its beholders a
vehicle for sequential meditation on the Passion, the series
conjures it as a virtual participation in Rome’s Good Friday
liturgy. And because participation in the liturgies of Holy
Week condensed much of the spiritual fervor pilgrims to
Rome were invited to feel, it stands to reason that the
310
28 Master of the Riedener Altarpiece,
Passion Scenes and Roman Basilicas,
painted panel from a series of three,
ca. 1470–80, painted panel, 15 £
27½ in. (38 £ 70 cm). Kunstsammlung
des Herzoglichen Georgianums,
Munich, 382 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph provided by
Kunstsammlung des Herzoglichen
Georgianums, Munich)
pictures could indeed, in the right ritual setting, function as
surrogate stations on an inner pilgrimage. This, or some
other closely related, ritual imperative clearly guided their
arrangement within the chapter room and may have been the
determining factor.116 If we follow the apex imagery around
the room, we have: Gethsemane by Burgkmair (San Pietro),
Christ’ s Arrest by Master L.F. (San Lorenzo and San Sebastiano),
the Flagellation by Burgkmair (San Giovanni), the Crowning
with Thorns and Mocking of Christ by Holbein (San Paolo), the
Crucifixion by Burgkmair (Santa Croce), and the Coronation of
the Virgin by Holbein (Santa Maria Maggiore). Correspondences between these Passion scenes and particular Roman
churches, however, remain loose—just as they do in an interesting trio of devotional panels (ca. 1470–80) by the so-called
Master of the Riedener Altar, today preserved in Munich.
Figure 28 reproduces the third panel in the sequence, which
was originally painted for display in the Franciscan priory in
Kaufbeuren (founded 1315), possibly as part of a Stations of
the Cross installation (Kreuzweg).117 Shown schematically, the
full cycle, encompassing all three panels, presents the following pairings from left to right:
Upper scene
Christ Taking Leave of His Mother
San Giovanni Laterano
San Pietro
San Paolo
Santa Croce
San Lorenzo
Santa Maria Maggiore
San Sebastiano
Anna Selbdritt
Passion scene
Arrest and Beating of Christ
Christ before Pilate
Flagellation
Crowning with Thorns
Carrying of the Cross
Christ Awaiting Crucifixion
Deposition?
Entombment
Resurrection
Inasmuch as the Augsburg cycle facilitates contemplative
absorption in their individual schemes, Burgkmair’s Santa
Croce is perhaps the one panel most consistently dedicated
to the symbolic and ritual nexus connecting Passion, pilgrimage, and martyrdom. S. Croce was, after all, Rome’s Passion
relic headquarters since its consecration in 325, built on the
site of the Sessorian Palace, where Empress Helena allegedly
deposited her collection of holy antiquities. Later known as
the Roman Calvary, in part because its floor was packed with
Holy Earth brought from Jerusalem, S. Croce was also the
pope’s sanctuary for Good Friday masses, home to the famed
mosaic icon of the imago pietatis and numerous Passion
relics.118 Given these associations, it is conceivable that the
Augsburg cycle performed double duty for recluses or visitors
seeking simulated passages and spectacular indulgences: in
addition to the Roman basilican itinerary, the panels might
have facilitated surrogate Jerusalem pilgrimages as well.119
Conjectures such as this aside, what do the demonstrable
connections with Passion pilgrimage and devotion tell us
about the situated intention behind Burgkmair’s ugly soldier
in Augsburg? Informing the motif, I submit, is a theological
and homiletic theme that had far-reaching resonances in
northern Passion piety—a theme that effectively bridged
the elite mysticism practiced by the nuns and the practical
penitentialism at the heart of lay devotion before the Reformation. I refer to the notion scholars sometimes call the perpetual Passion: the characteristically late medieval idea that,
with every sin committed inside the community of believers,
with every new transgression, Christ is not only denied and
betrayed but tortured and crucified anew. Because sin persists in human affairs, the reasoning goes, the work of
redemption, the God-man’s rescue of humanity from the
clutches of death and the Devil—thus, his suffering—
remains ongoing. Among its emblematic images are the living Man of Sorrows, shown actively bleeding and suffering in
a perpetual present between Crucifixion and Resurrection,
and the so-called Sunday Christ (Feiertagschristus), depicting
Christ afflicted by the tools and implements of those who sin
by working on Sundays.120 On the ancient Cross of Golgotha,
Christ atoned for the offenses of humanity, suffering in every
part of his body, but in the present the sins of everyday life
and the workaday world rack his body just as mercilessly. In
his sermon cycle on the themes of Brant’s Narrenschiff,
Strasbourg’s great cathedral preacher Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg (1445–1510) argued the point, castigating those
“fool-blasphemers” who pierced and sliced up Christ’s body
every time they swore oaths on its members. More evil than
the Jews who crucified him on Golgotha—who at least spared
breaking his bones!—were those Christians who “pulled and
ripped apart the body of Christ with their devilish tongues
[zerzerren und zerreisen den leib Jesus Christi mit Iren t€
u ffelischen
zungen].”121 Unknowing sin is one thing, argued Geiler, but
Christians who blaspheme through sacrilegious oaths and
curses turn directly, and knowingly, against the living God—
staging the Passion anew.
Images of Christ’s ongoing suffering have their origins in
the Passion liturgy and the high medieval theology of intercession, in particular, the idea of a tribunal misericordiae
before the Heavenly Throne, where Christ and the Virgin
offer a confluence of perfect sacrificial substances—blood on
the one side, milk on the other—as proof of martyrological
merit in overcoming sin, a scene first visualized in early
manuscripts of the typological-devotional treatise Speculum
humanae salvationis (composed about 1310 in Dominican
circles).122 Whether it was due to the broad dissemination of
the Speculum itself in manuscript, block book, and numerous
incunable editions, or to the castigations of preachers like
Geiler, the perpetual Passion’s currency was widespread in
German piety, elite and vernacular, and in Christian
humanism in Burgkmair’s time: Albrecht D€
urer and the
Viennese abbot Benedict Chelidonius (ca. 1460–1521),
for example, drew strongly on the idea in their collaborations on the large and small woodcut Passion folios
between 1508 and 1511.123
A dubious orthodoxy shadows the idea of the perpetual
Passion.124 Nevertheless, its implications are profound, and
they reveal how incisively the notion could serve intra-Christian polemics and pastoral care. For what the perpetual Passion demands is that the penitent sinner glimpse the
violence of his own guilt every time he contemplates the Passion, every time he remembers Golgotha, every time he witnesses Christ’s enemies in their spiritual and physical
ugliness, their cruel exertions and bestial predations, their
hideous barks, curses, and blasphemies. Within this psychological dynamic where the Other reflects the Self, the compass of responsibility for the crisis of suffering widens;
suddenly, it would seem, Christianity’s doctrine of transhistorical Jewish bloodguilt (culpa Iudaeorum) has been supplanted by the universality of sin within the Church’ s
community of believers. A fifteenth-century hymn expressed
the horizontalization of guilt this way: “It is our great sin and
grievous misdeeds that nailed Jesus the true Son of God to
the Cross. For this reason we must not revile you, Poor Judah,
and the host of Jews. The guilt is indeed ours.”125 Nobody, in
short, is innocent of Christ’s blood. The usual mechanisms
of guilt displacement and projective inversion break down,
and each person is called to recognize that the historical
enemy is, and has always been, the “Judaizing” impulses
within. Something like this double displacement of guilt—
the pious beholder’s projection of guilt turned back on his
own conscience—informs Burgkmair’s specular Jew in the
Good Centurion’s epauliere and the look of horrified recognition etched on that face.
For the Dominican nuns of the Katharinenkloster, the
gravest threat to their distinctive form of discipleship, the
real “Judaizing” menace haunting their spiritual vocation,
was none other than their own bodies—at least according to
311
the guidance they received from their advisers. In a poem
known as the Allegory of the Spiritual Scourge, from a manuscript in Nuremberg, a figure of the flagellum whose ironstudded tips stand for Love of God, Brotherly Love, Humility,
Patience, Obedience, Generosity, Moderation, and Chastity
is accompanied by these verses:
O inhabitant of the cloister, take note / How you lead
your life / You have fled from the world and the devil /
So that you could come into the cloister / But you still
have your greatest enemy by you. / That, say I to you, is
your own body. / You should strike it with this scourge /
So that it does not overcome the soul. / You may well
make it suffer, / But you should not, however, kill it
completely.126
Gratitude for God’s loving mercy, dramatized to the emotional breaking point by the spectacle of Christ’s torments
on Golgotha, which the practices of meditative pilgrimage
enabled the nun to witness with her own spiritual vision, had
to be coupled with a vigilant awareness of her own responsibility for that suffering, a horrified comprehension of the carnal self, and, thus, a painful, ongoing confrontation with the
enemy within.
The Look of Recognition
Motifs of recognition function in narrative with a double
aspect that distinguishes them from simple devices of plot:
they serve both to represent the passage from ignorance (or
self-deception) to knowledge (or self-knowledge) intratextually, and to effect it extratextually—or, in the present case,
extrapictorially. Yet it is the nature of that passage to be slow
and often painful: as experience, it is strewn with pitfalls and
provisions; as aspiration, it is haunted by failure. However
well-informed readers and beholders outside the narrative
may be of the story’s outcomes, however sure of its necessity,
the most important disclosures of truth—those that demand
a radical “negation of one’s past self”—produce a temporal
gap, a period following the dawn, in which experience must
struggle to come to terms with knowledge. In religious narrative, recognition motifs therefore carry something of an
almost sacramental value: more than tokens of the individual’s inner transformation, they become agents of it. I have
presented here diverse material and carried out an extended
reading across three domains of analysis—semiotic, iconographic, contextual—of an embedded meta-image that,
despite its marginality in the situation provided for it, proves
uniquely adept at posing the challenge of recognition. Put in
different terms, I have been concerned with the motif’s effect
or work (Wirkung), seen as an integral expression of those
demands a given work (Werk) imposes on its beholders.127 It
performs this work negatively by locating a single, exemplary
breakdown of recognition at the crossroads of human history
itself—the Crucifixion, when all eyes were fixed on the paradoxical identity of the dead man said by some to be the Son
of God. And it performs this work reflexively, by conflating
the drama of the Self’s blindness to its own, true nature with
that paradigmatic failure of christological recognition. This
was a failure the painter, like generations of Christian theologians, polemicists, and moralists before him, saw embodied,
312
29 Ulrich Apt the Elder and workshop, Crucifixion Triptych (Rehlinger Altarpiece), 1517, center panel 65¼ £ 44⅛ in. (166 £ 112 cm),
each wing 66⅞ £ 20⅛ in. (170 £ 51 cm). Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie in der Katharinenkirche, Augsburg,
5349–51 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by BPK, Berlin / Art Resource, NY)
and carried forward into the new era sub gratia, not only by
the reprobate Jews but also by the “Judaizing” impulses of
Christian believers.
Hans Burgkmair thematized this double failure in the Crucifixion painted for the Katharinenkloster’s chapter room.
In the process of reinterpreting a catoptric motif he had
learned from Augsburg painters of the preceding generation, he struck on something of the dialectical entanglement
of salvific recognition and the self-recognition of the sinner
as an abject being tyrannized by carnality and cursed by
death. Intuitively, it seems, he sensed that the Good Centurion’s confession—which splices two otherwise contradictory testimonies, “Jesus was the Son of God” and “Jesus is
dead” into a double helix of salvific recognition—finds its
structural double in the Christian subject’s self-recognition.
The code embedded in that confession of identity we might
recover from the important credal formulation of 1 Corinthians 15:22, “And as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall
be made alive,” and render its twofold testimony this way: “I
am a sinner descended from Adam” and “I am rescued from
death by Christ’s death.”
Gazing out from the depths of the Vienna double portrait, dated two years before the painter’s own death, the
Burgkmair of 1529 is surely believable as the author of a
morally astringent admonition to self-recognition and a
devastating indictment of a corrupt world in which nobody
sees himself. At the risk of overtaxing the Augsburg motif, I
have proposed a personalized meaning for it as well, regarding it as emblematic of the artist’s authorial self-recognition.
Without doubt, the Burgkmair who eventually came to dominate the Basilikabilder project between 1501 and 1504—in
the end contributing three of the six panels, commanding
progressively higher fees with each new commission, and
having his panels prominently placed in the cycle’s clockwise pairings—was keenly on the lookout for ways to impress
his patrons, one-up his rivals, and register his presence in
the project. This happens emphatically in his final statement for the nuns, the Santa Croce panel, which he signed
and dated 1504 over the threshold gate. In the course of
seeking the best pictorial solution for harmonizing the shifts
in figure scale across its component scenes, Burgkmair
took time to study Holbein’s compositions for the flanking
half lunettes of the San Paolo tympanum, eventually recording them in meticulous line sketches.128 This attentiveness
to his rival’s contributions to the project is significant.
As Katharina Krause has shown, in the opening two decades
of the sixteenth century patrician taste and patronage in
Augsburg crystallized around the great “alternative” of
Holbein versus Burgkmair.129 Thirteen years separated the
two men, whose families had close ties stretching back
through the fifteenth century. From all indications the
younger Burgkmair challenged himself to claim the mantle
“Maler von Augsburg,” courting the new taste for Italianate
forms, Orientalizing splendor, crystalline realism, unexpected narrative twists, and psychologically rich character
portrayals.
Among these portrayals is the foolish, quasibestial soldier
entering stage left in the Santa Croce panel. No open-and-shut
case for the “Jewishness” of that visage has been made here,
nor, as I have argued, is one needed. That Burgkmair was
ready to label as “Jewish” the whole range of exotic attributes
and Orientalizing characteristics in his tormentor figures is
more than suggested by the pseudo-Hebrew lettering he
used on the soldier wearing a green tunic, shown wielding an
iron-spiked flagellum and eyeing his victim with a malicious
glint in the Flagellation scene that crowns the San Giovanni
panel, an ensemble he designed for prominent placement
over the door of St. Katherine’s chapter room. But his purpose, here and elsewhere, was not anti-Jewish invective. Drawing on his own inventiveness, and his own, growing resources
as a Christian-humanist ethnographer,130 the artist reached
for an oddly humanizing portrayal of “Jewish blindness” and
transformed it into an allegory of Christian conscience
poised for conversion yet stubbornly resistant to the new
story—the new text and the new self—disclosed on Golgotha.
In the Katharinenkloster’s telescoped Passion cycle, Christ is
set upon by his enemies and abandoned by his followers: the
three-panel Gethsemane in the apex of Burgkmair’s San Pietro
(the opening Passion image in the chapter room’s viewing
sequence) is precisely about this breakdown of discipleship
and the imminence of betrayal. As Christ prays for God to
remove the chalice of suffering, the apostles remain in fitful
sleep around him, while in the background Judas leads
Caiaphas’s police under a banner with the SPQR armorial:
“behold the Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of
sinners” (Mark 14:41).
Perhaps this is why the figure of the Jewish witness on Calvary, the one who finally opens his eyes to see spiritually and
truthfully—something we encounter in Dieric Bouts’s evocative Randfigur in the Granada triptych’s left panel, his headpiece adorned with ersatz Hebrew (Fig. 1)—could be
imbued with such poignancy.131 Perhaps this also is the reason why the “look” of recognition, to the extent we can identify it, became such a highly valued attribute of patrician
virtue, indeed, a commodified form of distinction, in commercial cities like Augsburg, where painters excelled in flattering the piety of their patrons. Across the rich panorama of
modish costumes, gleaming armor, and bristling weaponry
313
painted for the Rehlingers by Ulrich Apt the Elder (1460–
1532) and his workshop, we have a frieze of portrait heads
with expressions ranging from sorrowful absorption to awestruck wonder, from sober comprehension to electrifying
recognition (Fig. 29).132 When it was installed (about 1517),
the altarpiece, designed for the newly founded family chapel
in the Dominican church of Mary Magdalene, took its place
in a stream of high-profile patrician donations equipped
with keenly observed portrait likenesses, a body of works that
eventually included Leonhard Beck’s Adoration of the Magi of
around 1520, the epitaphs made for the Vetter, Walther, and
Schwarz families in the Katharinenkloster (ca. 1499, 1502,
and 1508 respectively), and the Basilikabild panels themselves. Through the looking glass conjured by the painter’s
skill, these pious Augsburgers invite us into an ennobling fiction—the fiction that each and every one of their own recognitions of Christ as Savior, as the living God hanging dead on
the Cross, stands as a fait accompli. By implication, they tell
us that their self-recognition as sinners—penitent, grateful,
and worthy of the fruits of Christ’s sacrifice, as well as the
prayers of the living—is likewise exemplary, praiseworthy to
all who witness their act of turning to God.
Mitchell B. Merback is professor at the Johns Hopkins University. A
specialist in late medieval and northern Renaissance art, he is the
author, most recently, of Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence,
Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of
Germany and Austria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2013) [Department of the History of Art, Gilman Hall, 3400 North
Charles Street, Baltimore, Md., 21218, [email protected]].
Notes
Preliminary versions of this essay were presented at the Renaissance Society of
America in April 2010, in the History of Art Department, University of Michigan, in 2011, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 2012. For
their generous suggestions and critical comments, I am grateful to Lisa Pon,
Kenneth Stow, Achim Timmermann, Megan Holmes, Alex Potts, Pat Simons,
Pablo Schneider, H
erica Valladares, and the two anonymous reviewers for
The Art Bulletin. Special recognition and thanks to Lory Frankel for peerless
editing. Biblical verses in English are from the Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible
(online resource at http://www.drbo.org); unless otherwise noted, all other
translations are my own.
1. Arnoul Gr
eban, Le ‘ Myste re de la Passion’ d’ Amoul Gre ban, ed. Omer
Jodogne, 2 vols. (Brussels: Palais des Acad
emies / Paleis der Academi€
en,
1965–83), lines 19948–64 (prologue to day three), trans. Steven Rendell,
in The Ambivalences of Medieval Drama, by Rainer Warning (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 181; see also below.
2. See Theodore J. Wheeden, “The Cross as Power in Weakness,” in The
Passion in Mark: Studies on Mark 14–16, ed. Werner H. Kelber (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 115–34, who emphasizes the struggle
between competing christologies—“suffering Son of Man” versus “divine
man”—within the Markan narrative.
3. For further aspects of the Crucifixion image as an “existential crossroads,” see Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain
and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 221–22.
4. I borrow the phrase “enduring predicament” from Karl F. Morrison’s
interpretation of Augustine’s Confessions in his Conversion and Text: The
Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 3, further discussed below.
On the dialectical unity of christological identity and presence, see Hans
W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), esp. 4–25.
5. See Catherine P
erier-D’Ieteren, Dieric Bouts: The Complete Works, trans.
Mark Carlson et al. (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2006); and P
erier-
314
D’Ieteren and Annick Born, “Le triptyche de la Descente de Croix de
Grenade et sa copie conservee a Valence,” in Bouts Studies: Proceedings of
the International Colloquium, ed. Bert Cardon et al. (Louvain: Uitgeverij
Peeters, 2001), 33–55. Doubts persist about the autograph character of
this work, but those issues need not be addressed here.
6. Morrison, Conversion and Text, 2.
7. Morrison, ibid., xi, suggestively traces this awareness of the probationary
nature of conversion back to monasticism, where conversion was understood “as a way of life rather than as a specific peripety, or crisis.” He
explains, “For centuries the experience of human frailty had ingrained
into ascetic literature the proposition that taking monastic vows was but
the ‘beginning of conversion.’ Conversion remained to be advanced,
perfected, and, after death, consummated. Until the last, each day and
hour brought risks of failure.”
8. Tilman Falk, Hans Burgkmair: Studien zu Leben und Werk des Augsburger
Malers (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1968), 9–12 on Thoman and Hans’s
early biography, 27–34 on the Basilikabild works (further references
below). Prospects for a resurgence of interest in Burgkmair have
remained dim for decades, though specialized studies such as Stephanie
Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print
Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Ashley West,
“Between Artistry and Documentation: A Passage to India and the Problem of Representing New Global Encounters,” in Subject as Aporia in Early
Modern Art, ed. Lorenzo Pericolo and Alexander Nagel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 87–114, offer isolated bright spots. Foundational studies on
the artist include Falk, Hans Burgkmair: Studien; and Tilman Falk et al.,
Hans Burgkmair: Das Graphische Werk, exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Graphische
Sammlung Staatsgalerie, 1973).
9. Complete references for the cycle, its patrons, and the cloistered community are given in n. 93 below.
10. Aristotle, Poetics, chap. 11. Modern commentaries on the Poetics are too
numerous to survey here. Fundamental works are Gerald F. Else, Aristotle’ s “Poetics” : The Argument (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1957); Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’ s Poetics (London: Duckworth,
1986); Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1988); and Barry B. Adams, Coming-to-Know: Recognition and the
Complex Plot in Shakespeare (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).
11. See especially Philip F. Kennedy and Marilyn Lawrence, eds., introduction to Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative (New York: Peter Lang, 2009),
1–12. For the use of anagnô risis in Homer and the Greek tragedians, see
Diana Culbertson, The Poetics of Revelation: Recognition and the Narrative
Tradition (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1989), 33–54.
12. Adams, Coming-to-Know, 15.
13. Any selective sampling would include Alois Riegl’s analysis of subordination and attentiveness in Dutch portraiture, in The Group Portraiture of
Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty
Museum, 1999); Michael Fried’s opposed modalities of absorption and
theatricality, in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age
of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and the essays in
Wolfgang Kemp, ed., Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsasthetik
€
(Berlin: D. Reimer, 1992).
14. Promising paths have been pursued by Eckbert Albers, Erkenntnismomente
und Erkenntnisprozesse bei Rembrandt (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005); Lorenzo
Pericolo, who invokes the term in his analysis of the oscillations between
Christ’s visibility and invisibility in Caravaggio, in “Visualizing Appearance and Disappearance: On Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus,” Art
Bulletin 89, no. 3 (September 2007): 519–39; and Martin B€
uchsel, “Das
Schacher-Fragment
€
des Meisters von Flemalle: Reue und Erkenntnis; Ein
Beispiel emotionaler Selbstkontrolle,” in Habitus: Norm und Transgression
in Bild und Text; Festgabe f€
u r Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch, ed. Tobias Frese and
Annette Hoffmann (Berlin: Akademie, 2011), 93–115. Kindest thanks to
Jacqueline Jung for alerting me to this last example. Two studies that
came to my notice after this article went to press also deserve mention: Valeska von Rosen, “Painterly Eloquence in El Greco’s El
Espolio,” in El Greco: The First Twenty Years in Spain; Proceedings of the
International Symposium, Rethymno, Crete, 22–24 October 1999, ed. Nicos
Hadjinicolao (Rethymo: University of Crete, 2005), 53–67; and Margit
Kern, “A Question of Conscience: El Greco’s Martyrdom of St. Maurice
and the Theban Legion,” in ibid., 95–122. Felipe Pereda helpfully
brought them to my attention.
15. In posing the problem in terms of a Christian narrative poetics operating
through visual media, I differentiate my approach to conversion tropes
from the discourse of Christian aesthetics and the strong commitment to
medieval image theology it entails; the keenest articulation of the latter
is David Nirenberg’s important essay “The Judaism of Christian Art,” in
Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. Herbert Kessler and Nirenberg (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 387–427. For points of convergence between
these two approaches, especially where figurations of Judaism and
“Judaizing” are seen to structure the response to images, see below.
16. Culbertson, Poetics of Revelation, 1–2.
17. In what follows, I refer to this figure generically as the “Good Centurion”
despite the crisscrossing traditions that, from about the twelfth century,
would conflate the two soldiers whose actions John 19 describes sequentially in verses 34 (the spear thrust) and 35 (the confession); see, for
example, Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine,
trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1987),
181. John of Caulibus, by contrast, keeps the two figures separate: the
anonymous centurion who confesses (meditation for Sext and None)
and the spear-wielding Longinus (Vespers), in Meditations on the Life of
Christ, trans. Francis X. Taney Sr., Anne Miller O.S.F., and C. Mary Stallings-Taney (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus, 2000), 256, 258; so, too, does the
typological program of the Biblia pauperum (late fifteenth century). On
the Longinus tradition, see Knut Berg, “Une iconographie peu connue
du Crucifiement,” Cahiers Arche ologique 9 (1957): 319–28; Elisabeth Roth,
Der Volkreiche Kalvarienberg in Literatur und Kunst des Spatmittelalters
€
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1958), 50, 56; J. R. Hale, Artists and Warfare in the
Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 229–33; and Nigel
Morgen, “Longinus and the Wounded Heart,” in Beitrage
€ zur mittelalterlichen Kunst: Festschrift f€
u r Gerhard Schmidt, 2 vols. (Vienna: B€
ohlau, 1993–
94), special issue of Wiener Jahrbuch f€
u r Kunstgeschichte 46–47, vol. 2, 507–
18, 817–20. Overwhelmingly, the northern European tradition of the
multifigured Calvary distinguishes the two figures, with “Longinus” typically characterized as a bearded elder gesturing toward his blind eyes
(cf. again the Legenda aurea), positioned stage right under the Cross.
This Longinus is indeed a figure of conversion, with his own paradigmatic narrative, but he is not, in my view, a figure of recognition, a divergence I will develop in a forthcoming study.
18. On “delegate” figures as “models of the observer,” see Andrea Catellani,
“Before the Preludes: Some Semiotic Observations on Vision, Meditation, and the ‘Fifth Space’ in Early Jesuit Spiritual Illustrated Literature,” in Ut Pictura Meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–
1700, ed. Walter S. Melion, Ralph Dekoninck, and Agn
es GuiderdoniBrusl
e (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 157–202, esp. 194–202.
19. See below.
20. Culbertson, Poetics of Revelation, 153.
21. Robert C. Tannehill, “The Disciples in Mark: The Function of a Narrative Role,” Journal of Religion 57 (1977): 386–405, at 395.
22. Werner H. Kelber, “Conclusion: From Passion Narrative to Gospel,” in
Kelber, The Passion in Mark, 153–80, at 166.
23. Culbertson, Poetics of Revelation, 144. A related failure is the apostolic
miscomprehension of metaphor and allegory, as in Matthew’s story of
Jesus’s warning to them concerning the “leaven of the Pharisees and
Sadducees” before their arrival at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:5–12); discussed in Nirenberg, “The Judaism of Christian Art,” 395–96.
24. I take my notion of models and antimodels from Maria Corti, “Models
and Anti-Models in Medieval Culture,” New Literary History 10, no. 2
(Winter 1979): 339–66.
25. Culbertson, Poetics of Revelation, 150.
26. Mark 15 places passersby, “chief priests,” and the Good Centurion (39)
near the expiring Jesus but does not describe any soldiers; Matthew 27
refers to “the centurion and they that were with him watching Jesus”
(54); Luke 23 offers: “Now the centurion, seeing what was done, glorified God, saying: Indeed this was a just man. And all the multitude of
them that were come together to that sight, and saw the things that were
done, returned striking their breasts” (47–48). John, who places the
chief priests and gambling soldiers on Golgotha before Jesus’s death
(19:21–35), merely invokes a soldier who witnesses the lance thrust and
then gives testimony (19:35), making no mention of others around him.
27. The many vexed efforts to establish the relation between dramatic and
pictorial representations of the Passion will not be discussed here, nor
the vast literature sampled. Essential for the multifigured Calvary image
in particular, however, are Emile
Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Late
Middle Ages; A Study of Medieval Iconography and Its Sources, trans. Marthiel
Matthews, ed. Harry Bober (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986); Roth, Volkreiche Kalvarienberg, 124–29; Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, 2 vols. (Greenwich, Conn.:
New York Graphic Society, 1971), vol. 2, 151–58; Merback, Thief, the Cross
and the Wheel; and Robert Suckale, Die Erneuerung der Malkunst vor D€
u rer,
2 vols. (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2009), vol. 1, 13–101.
28. Roth, Volkreiche Kalvarienberg, 68–70, 117, points in particular to the
tympanum-shaped panel painting set into the choir enclosure (Chorschranke) of the Predigerkirche (Dominican Church) in Erfurt. On the
Erfurt ensemble, see Jacqueline E. Jung, The Gothic Screen: Sculpture,
Space, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–
1400 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 23–24, 54, 74.
29. See Alfred Stange, Deutsche Malerei der Gotik, 11 vols. (Munich: Deutscher
Kunstverlag, 1936–61; reprint, Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1969), vol. 4, 74;
Roth, Volkreiche Kalvarienberg, 89, who notes the relative dearth of
multifigured Calvaries surviving from Franconia; and Bodo Brinkmann
and Stephan Kemperdick, Deutsche Gemalde
€ im Stadel
€ 1300–1500 (Mainz:
Philipp von Zabern, 2002), 162–75.
30. Whereas northern painters tended to collapse the distinction to foster
an “imaginative link with the present,” Italian artists, observes Hale
(Artists and Warfare, 227–47, at 239), perhaps out of regard for the
ancient tradition of the Roman citizen-warrior, were more apt to
uphold it.
31. On defamatory canine tropes, see the classic article by James H. Marrow,
“Circumdederunt me Canes Multi: Christ’s Tormentors in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance,” Art Bulletin 59
(June 1977): 167–81; and, in a different vein, Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs:
An Image and Its Interpreters; Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
32. For example, in act 4, scene 5 of the Villinger Passion’s second day of
action (ca. 1600); see Antje Knorr, ed., Villinger Passion: Literarhistorische
€
Einordnung und erstmalige Herasugabe des Urtextes und der Uberarbeitungen
(G€
oppingen: Alfred K€
ummerle, 1976), 404–7.
33. Founded, according to its charter, on September 21, 1135, Kaisheim bei
Donauw€
orth was dedicated by the bishop of Augsburg in 1183 and, after
a thirteenth-century rebuilding and reconsecration, granted the rights
of an imperial monastery (Reichsstift) by Karl IV in 1346. It is located
about 31 miles (50 kilometers) north of Augsburg.
34. See Theodor Musper, Altdeutsche Malerei (Cologne: DuMont, 1970), 128,
cat. no. 36; Gisela Goldberg et al., Staatsgalerie Augsburg, Stadtische
€
Kunstsammlungen, vol. 1, Altdeutsche Gemalde
€ Katalog, dritte Auflage mit erganzen€
dem Anhang (Munich: Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen M€
unchen,
1988), 92–93; Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern
European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), fig. III.36; Merback, Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 91–
€
92, fig. 33; Katharina Krause, Hans Holbein der Altere
(Munich: Deutscher
Kunstverlag, 2002), 51–54; and Martin Schawe, Staatsgalerie Augsburg: Altdeutsche Malerei in der Katharinenkirche (Augsburg: Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, n.d.), 87.
35. See Irmgard Hiller and Horst Vey, Katalog der deutschen und niederland€
ischen Gemalde
€ bis 1550 (mit Ausnahme der K€
olner Malerei) im WallrafRichartz-Museum und im Kunstgewerbemuseum der Stadt K€
oln (Cologne:
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1969), 94–95; Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 2,
fig. IX:27; and Merback, Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 92–95, fig. 34.
36. Ernst Buchner, “Die Augsburger Tafelmalerei der Sp€atgotik,” in Augsburger Kunst der Spatgotik
€
und Renaissance, ed. Buchner and Karl Feuchtmayr, Beitr€age zur Geschichte der deutschen Kunst, 2 (Augsburg:
Benno Filser, 1928), 1–96, at 37–54; also discussed in Roth, Volkreiche
€
Kalvarienberg, 91; and Krause, Hans Holbein der Altere,
51–53.
37. Stange, Deutsche Malerei, vol. 3, 165; Herbert Beck, Wolfgang Beeh, and
Horst Bredekamp, eds., Kunst um 1400 am Mittelrhein: Ein Teil der Wirklichkeit, exh. cat. (Frankfurt: Liebighaus, 1975), 124; Mellinkoff, Outcasts,
vol. 2, fig. III.41; and Petra Schwaerzel, “Gotische Retabel der Felsenkirche in Oberstein: Untersuchung zu Maltechnik und Bestand,”
Zeitschrift f€
u r Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung 14, no. 2 (2000):
351–77.
38. Paul Pieper, ed., Westfalische
€
Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts, exh. cat.,
(M€
unster: Landesmuseum M€
unster, 1964), 63–67; Schiller, Iconography
of Christian Art, vol. 2, 157; Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 2, fig. III.42; Bridget
Corley, Conrad von Soest: Painter among Merchant Princes (London: Harvey
Miller, 1996), cat. no. 9; and Andrea Zupancic, “Der Berswordt-Altar in
der Dortmunder Marienkirche,” in Der Berswordt-Meister und die Dortmunder Malerei um 1400: Stadtkultur im Spatmittelalter,
€
ed. Zupancic and
Thomas Schilp (Bielefeld: Verlag f€
ur Regionalgeschichte, 2002), 69–
133, who dates the altar to about 1386 (132).
39. Westfalische
€
Malerei, 64; Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 2, 157
(who misinterprets the speech scroll held by the soldier as referring to
Mark 15:30); Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 1, 71; and Zupancic, “Der Berswordt-Altar,” 81, whose claim that the Berswordt Master aligns Pilate
with the two other converted pagans who recognize Christ, Longinus
and the Good Centurion, is problematic in light of the Johannine
account, where the dispute pivots on shifting attributions of Jesus’s
messianic identity. The rare motif recurs in Westphalian painting in the
Warendorf Passion Altar of about 1420 (Pfarrkirche St. Laurentius);
see Corley, Conrad von Soest, cat. no. 10. For Pilate’s changing roles in
medieval Passion iconography, see Colum Hourihane, Pontius Pilate,
Anti-Semitism, and the Passion in Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009).
40. On the progressive enlargement of the “crowd” (ochlos) in the Synoptists, and then its transformation into “the Jews” in John (18:31, 36, 38,
19:7), see John Dominic Crossan, “Jewish Crowd and Roman Governor,”
in Mel Gibson’ s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and “ The Passion of the
Christ,” ed. Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006), 59–67. The great throng artists imagined as
315
trailing the judicial procession through the city gates and then encamping on Calvary has no warrant in the Gospels.
41. University College of London Art Museum, inv. no. 1223 Gore. Originally proposed by Ernst Buchner (“The Master of the Martyrdom of the
Apostles,” Old Master Drawings, March 1930: 69–71), the attribution was
€ Die
taken up by Christian Beutler and Gunther Thiem, Hans Holbein d. A:
spatgotische
€
Altar- und Glasmalerei (Augsburg: H. R€
osler, 1960), 83–84; see
€
also Hans Holbein der Altere
und die Kunst der Spatgotik,
€
exh. cat. (Augsburg: J. P. Himmer, 1965), 159–60, cat. no. 186; and Elsbeth Wiemann,
€ Die Graue Passion in ihrer Zeit, exh. cat. (Ostfildern:
Hans Holbein d. A.:
Hatje Cantz, 2010), 296–99, cat. no. 65. The drawing’s reverse is
inscribed with the nicknames of Holbein the Elder’s two artist sons,
“hensly” (Hans the Younger) and “brosy” (Ambrosius); Krause, Holbein
€
der Altere,
194, adduces (correctly, in my view) this as further evidence
against Sigmund’s authorship.
42. Arrest of Christ, oak panel, 41½ by 27 in. (105.5 by 68.5 cm), Bayerische
Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, Munich, inv. no. 990. See Annette Scherer,
“Der Meister der M€
unchener Gefangennahme: Werk und Wirkung,” in
Bouts Studies: Proceedings of the International Colloquium (Leuven, 26–28
November 1998), ed. Bert Cardon et al. (Louvain: Uitgeverij Peeters,
2001), 57–70; and Martin Schawe, Alte Pinakothek: Altdeutsche und altniederlandische
€
Malerei (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 302–3.
43. Landesmuseum, M€
unster, inv. no. 1038. Nearly obscured by Christ’s
Cross, in the triangular space below the thrusting lance, is a bald mocking figure with a banderole reading: “Vach qui destruit templum dei et
in triduo” (Vah, thou that destroyest the temple of God, and in three
days [dost rebuild it]) (adapted from Matthew 27:40, not Mark 15:29);
see Paul Pieper, ed., Die deutschen, niederlandischen
€
und italienischen Tafelbilder bis um 1530 (M€
unster: Aschendorff, 1986), 102–36, figure at 120.
€
Cf. Krause, Holbein der Altere,
378 n. 16, who notes the rarity of a blaspheming figure placed stage left in a Calvary; also Roth, Volkreiche
Kalvarienberg, 104.
€
44. See Krause, Holbein der Altere,
215, 378 n. 17. One of these, the head of a
man in a study drawing for an Adoration of the Kings (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, inv. no. 1150), bears only a superficial
resemblance to his counterpart on the London sheet; see Wolfgang
Sch€
one, Dieric Bouts und seine Schule (Berlin: Verlag f€
ur Kunstwissenschaft, 1938), 171, cat. no. 56, pl. 72d.
45. Katholisches Pfarrkirche, R€
odelheim bei Frankfurt; oil on fir panels,
each about 47¼ by 29½ in. (120 by 75 cm). See Beutler and Thiem,
€
Hans Holbein d. A., 76–79, figs. 24, 25, with the figure in question appearing near the right edge of the Martyrdom of Judas Thaddeus. Apostle-martyrdom cycles for altarpieces are discussed in Mitchell B. Merback,
“Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Martyrdom of the Twelve Apostles: Punishment,
Penal Themes, and Spectacle in His Early Graphic Art” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1995), 85–92.
46. Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 1, 184–94.
47. John of Caulibus, Meditations, 254 (no. 78, meditations for Sext and
None). See also James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk, Belg.: Van
Ghemmert, 1979), 40–41.
48. Stange, Deutsche Malerei, vol. 8, 120; Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 1, 46, 105,
166–67, 213, vol. 2, fig. II:26; and Merback, Thief, the Cross and the Wheel,
118–19.
49. Clearly derogatory in this context, the Judenhut was used by local Jewish
councils in the Middle Ages as an official insignia, sometimes combined
with imperial symbols, as in Augsburg, where the city’s double-headed
eagle (Doppeladler) was used in combination with the hat by the Jewish
council of elders; Israel Schwierz, Steinerne Zeugnisse j€
u dischen Lebens in
Bayern: Eine Dokumentation, 2nd ed. (Munich: Bayerische Landeszentrale
f€
ur politische Bildungsarbeit, 1992), 244. Kempten bei Allg€au was home
to a Jewish community until 1938.
50. Eric M. Zafran, The Iconography of Antisemitism: A Study of the Representation
of the Jews in the Visual Arts of Europe 1400–1600 (Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms, 1973); Moshe Lazar, “The Lamb and the Scapegoat: The
Dehumanization of the Jews in Medieval Propaganda Imagery,” in Antisemitism in Times of Crisis, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz (New
York: New York University Press, 1991), 38–80; Mellinkoff, Outcasts;
Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History,
trans. John Bowden (New York: Continuum, 1996); and Debra Higgs
Strickland, Saracens, Demons, & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
51. Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 2, figs. VIII.24, IX.5, overlooked this ugly fellow,
yet precursors and comparanda can be found in sufficient numbers
there that any argument one might like to make here about his place in
our archives of historicized hatreds would be an empty exercise.
52. See Strickland, Saracens, Demons, & Jews, esp. 137–40, 173–82; and Liesolette E. Saurma-Jeltsch, “Muslime im Bild des Sp€atmittelalters: Unterschiedliche Blicke auf die ‘Anderen,’” in Wechselseitige Wahrnehmung der
316
Religionen im Spatmittelalter
€
und in der Fr€
u hen Neuzeit, vol. 2, Kulturelle
Konkretionen (Literatur, Mythographie, Wissenschaft und Kunst), ed. Ludger
Grenzmann et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 209–45, esp. 219–
26. On Orientalizing military garb, see Hale, Artists and Warfare, 235–43.
53. As in the 1583 encounter between the Bolognese physician and naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) and the hirsute Gonzalez family, then
residing at the Gonzaga court in Parma, or Lavinia Fontana’s portraits of
Tognina Gonzalez, cases illuminated in Frederika H. Jacobs, The Living
Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
136–46.
54. On this problematic within the “iconography of antisemitism,” see my
introduction to Mitchell B. Merback, ed., Beyond the Yellow Badge:
Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture
(Leiden: Brill, 2007), 1–29.
55. In particular: a) the twelve surviving panels of the Gray Passion now in
Stuttgart (original provenance unknown, dated on stylistic evidence to
the years after Holbein’s return from Ulm to Augsburg in 1494); b) the
seven surviving large panels and the multiscene predella from an altar
made for Frankfurt’s Dominican church (completed 1501), now in the
St€adelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt; and c) the Kaisheim altarpiece
(signed and dated 1502 on the exterior of the wings). For all three proj€
ects, see Krause, Holbein der Altere,
115–89. In the Gray Passion’s scene of
the Arrest of Christ, Jesus is accosted by a leonine Judas with a mopey
expression, a profile that bears comparison with Burgkmair’s ugly soldier in Augsburg—though Holbein’s caricature is itself based on established stereotypes; see Willfried Franzen, Die Karlsruher Passion und das
“Erzahlen
€
in Bildern” : Studien zur s€
u ddeutschen Tafelmalerei des 15. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Lukas, 2002), fig. 101, with useful discussion on 239–50;
€
and Wiemann, Hans Holbein d. A.
56. Markus J. Wenninger, Man bedarf keiner Juden mehr: Ursachen und Hintergrunde ihrer Vertreibung aus den deutschen Reichsstadten
€
im 15. Jahrhundert
(Vienna: B€
ohlaus, 1981), 115–34, with the complex question of King
Albrecht II (1397–1439) of Hapsburg’s consent in the expulsion settled
in the negative; see also Schwierz, Steinerne Zeugnisse, 244–49.
57. On the analytic difficulties of separating historical realities of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish behavior from their figurations within Christian
thought, see David Nirenberg, “Figures of Thought and Figures of Flesh:
‘Jews’ and ‘Judaism’ in Late Medieval Spanish Poetry and Politics,” Speculum 81 (2006): 398–426.
58. On the Peoples woodcuts, see esp. Jean Michel Massing, “Hans Burgkmair’s Depiction of Native Africans,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 27
(Spring 1995): 39–51; Stephanie Leitch, “Burgkmair’s Peoples of Africa
and India (1508) and the Origins of Ethnography in Print,” Art Bulletin
91, no. 2 (June 2009): 134–59; idem, Mapping Ethnography; and West,
“Between Artistry and Documentation.”
59. As brilliantly conjectured in Rudolf Preimesberger, “Zu Jan van Eycks
Diptychon der Sammlung Thyssen-Bornemisza,” Zeitschrift f€
u r Kunstgeschichte 54, no. 4 (1991): 459–89. For more on this question, see below.
60. Most compellingly, as seen in Holbein the Younger’s marginal pen and
ink drawing for Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Praise of Folly (Fig. 19), discussed below.
61. Heinrich Vogtherr the Younger, Schalksnarr, exemplar preserved in
Gotha (Schloßmuseum / Museen der Stadt Gotha, inv. no. 40,18, A.K.
Nr. xyl. II, 50); see Der deutsche Holzschnitt der Reformationszeit aus dem
Besitz Schloßmuseums / Museen der Stadt Gotha, exh. cat. (Salzgitter: Appelhaus, 1997), cat. no. 39.
62. I am giving the term “Judaizing” a larger compass than most medieval
authorities would have recognized. Among Christian writers it is found
first in Paul (Gal. 2:14), who uses it to denounce the imposition of Jewish ceremonial law on Gentiles (the context is the dispute with Peter).
Adapting Paul’s use of the Greek verb, the Latin “judaizare” came to
denote any type of Christian scriptural exegesis that was overly literal or
legalistic (that is, “carnal”), but gradually evolved into a kind of catchall
term for any and all heretical tendencies that seemed to give priority to
the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic writings, interest in Jewish holidays or
ceremonial customs, dissenting views on theological definitions (positions resembling those held by Jews or ascribed to them), even usurious
money lending. See R
obert Dan, “‘Judaizare’—the Career of a Term,” in
Antitrinitarianism in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, ed. R
obert Dan
and Antal Pirnat (Budapest: Akademiai Kiad
o; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982),
25–34; Nirenberg, “The Judaism of Christian Art,” 395–96; and more
recently, the comprehensive treatment by David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), esp. 87–134,
which appeared after this essay was completed and could not be fully
consulted.
63. A clear-sighted introduction to the transformative and coded nature of
mirror imagery is Rabun Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). In my view anamorphic
reflections belong in the domain of metamorphic catoptrism and do
not require their own category; thus, I respectfully disagree with the
anonymous reader for the Art Bulletin who suggested that Burgkmair’s
specular soldier could be understood anamorphically.
64. Meyer Schapiro, “‘Muscipula Diaboli’: The Symbolism of the M
erode
Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin 27, no. 3 (September 1945): 182–87, at 187.
65. Jan Bia»ostocki, “Man and Mirror in Painting: Reality and Transience,”
in The Message of Images: Studies in the History of Art (Vienna: Irsa, 1988),
93–107; also Preimesberger, “Zu Jan van Eycks Diptychon”; and Hans
Belting and Christiane Kruse, Die Erfindung des Gemaldes:
€
Das erste Jahrhundert der niederlandischen
€
Malerei (Munich: Hirmer, 1994), 75, who cite
Bartolomeo Fazio’s praise of Jan van Eyck’s painted mirror (in the lost
Woman at Her Toilet) for its all-embracing perspective (“tanquam in vero
speculo prospicias”).
66. See David G. Carter, “Reflections in Armor in the Canon Van de Paele
Madonna,” Art Bulletin 36, no. 1 (March 1954): 60–62; and Preimesberger, “Zu Jan van Eycks Diptychon,” 473, 483–84, who considers the
multiplying metallic reflections here and elsewhere in van Eyck’s oeuvre
a response to a topos found in Seneca and Pliny (472–73). A later example from Antwerp, more relevant to our theme, is the Ecce Homo by
Quinten Massys (ca. 1515, Museo del Prado, Madrid), in which the polished helmet of one tormentor on the proscenium near Christ stands in
for the Eyckian convex mirror.
67. See especially Belting and Kruse, Erfindung des Gemaldes,
€
74–79, in whose
account the mirror expresses the very “Bildprinzip des Gem€aldes” (pictorial principle of painting) (78). For the metaphor in medieval theology and art, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Speculations on Speculation:
Vision and Perception in the Theory and Practice of Mystical Devotion,”
in Deutsche Mystik im abendlandischen
€
Zusammenhang: Neu erschlossene Texte,
neue methodische Ansatze,
€ neue theoretische Konzepte, ed. Walter Haug and
Wolfram Schneider-Lastin (T€
ubingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000), 353–408;
and Herbert L. Kessler, “Speculum,” Speculum 86 (2011): 1–41.
68. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1970), bk. 2, though the translation I use here is
from Cristelle Baskins, “Echoing Narcissus in Alberti’s Della Pittura,”
Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 1 (1993): 25–33, at 25. See also Gerhard Wolf,
“The Origins of Painting,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (Autumn
1999): 60–78; idem, Schleier und Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes und
die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), 201–72;
Jacobs, Living Image, 146–53; and David Summers, Vision, Reflection, and
Desire in Western Painting (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2007), 142–54. On the allure of the Narcissus myth as a metapictorial theme in Roman art, see H
erica Valladares, “Fallax Imago: Narcissus
and the Seduction of Mimesis in Roman Wall Painting,” Word & Image
27, no. 4 (October–December 2011): 378–95. On the motif in ancient
art generally, see Lilian Balensiefen, Die Bedeutung des Spiegelbildes als
ikonographisches Motive in der Antiken Kunst (T€
ubingen: E. Wasmuth,
1990), 130–63; and Taylor, Moral Mirror.
69. Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze
in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),
23. See also Taylor, Moral Mirror, 56–64.
70. Valladares, “Fallax Imago,” 380, from which also comes the preceding
translation of Met. 3.463 (“I am he. . . . ”).
71. Ulisse Aldrovandi, quoted and discussed in Jacobs, Living Image, 151.
72. As in the logo attached to the all-seeing divine eye at the center of Hieronymus Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins “tabletop” (ca. 1475) in Madrid: “Cave
Cave Deus Videt” (Beware, Beware, God Sees). See Walter S. Gibson,
“Hieronymus Bosch and the Mirror of Man: The Authorship and Iconography of the Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins,” Oud-Holland 87 (1973):
205–26; Barbara Lane, “Bosch’s Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins and
the Cordiale Quattuor Novissimorum,” in Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip, Art
Historian and Detective, ed. William W. Clark et al. (New York: Abaris,
1985), 88–94; and Joseph Leo Koerner, “Bosch’s Enmity,” in Tributes in
Honor of James H. Marrow: Studies in Painting and Manuscript Illumination
of the Late Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger
and Anne S. Korteweg (Turnhout: Harvey Miller [Brepols], 2006), 285–
300.
73. Christine G€
ottler has brilliantly demonstrated the role of mirror imagery
in Counter-Reformation programs to “interiorize eschatological ideas,”
which were likewise aimed at penitential self-examination, in Last
Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2010), 157–215, at 161.
74. Book of Hours, Trinity College, MS 103, fol. 167v, with engraving,
diameter 2⅝ in. (66 mm), inserted below the closing prayers of the
Office of the Dead; showcased in James H. Marrow, “‘In desen
speigell’: A New Form of the ‘Memento Mori’ in Fifteenth-Century
Netherlandish Art,” in Essays in Northern European Art Presented to Egbert
Haverkamp-Begemann on His Sixtieth Birthday (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1983),
154–63, esp. fig. 1, 155–56.
75. See Ritamary Bradley, “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Mediaeval
Literature,” Speculum 29, no. 1 (January 1954): 100–115; James I. Wimsatt,
Allegory and Mirror: Tradition and Structure in Middle English Literature
(New York: Pegasus, 1970); Herbert Grabes, Speculum, Mirror und Looking
Glass: Kontinuitat
€ und Originalit€
at der Spiegelmetapher in den Buchtiteln des Mittelalters und der englischen Literatur des 13. bis 17. Jahrhunderts (T€
ubingen: M.
Niemeyer, 1973); also discussed in G€
ottler, Last Things, 168–69.
76. Folio 15r is preceded by a full-page miniature (fol. 14v) depicting the
Fall and Expulsion from Paradise; see Otto P€acht, “Rene d’Anjou—
Studien I,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Kunstsammlungen Wien 69
(1973): 85–126, at 89–90; Marrow, “‘In desen speigell,’” 156–57, fig. 2;
and idem, Pictorial Invention in Netherlandish Manuscript Illumination of the
Late Middle Ages: The Play of Illusion and Meaning, ed. Brigitte Dekeyzer
and Jan van der Stock (Paris: Uitgeverij Peeters, 2005), 27–28, figs. 68,
69, where the artist is identified as the Master of the David Scenes of
the Grimani Breviary. See also Belting and Kruse, Erfindung des Gemaldes,
€
75–76.
77. Paul Heitz, Primitive Holzschnitte: Einzelbilder des XV. Jahrhunderts (Strassburg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1913), pl. 51; and Marrow, “‘In desen speigell,’” 160,
fig. 7.
78. Gr
eban, Myste re de la Passion, in Warning, Ambivalences of Medieval Drama,
181–82.
79. This is among the eighty-two drawings made by Hans (79) and his
brother Ambrosius (3) for Myconius’s book; see Erika Michael, The
Drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger for Erasmus’ “ Praise of Folly” (New
York: Garland, 1986), pl. XIII, discussed as “drawing 13” (71–73, at 73),
and for a fundamental discussion of Erasmus’s and Holbein’s sources,
189–249.
80. See Todd M. Richardson, “To See Yourself within It: Pieter Bruegel the
Elder’s Festival of Fools,” in Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in
Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Reindert Falkenburg, Walter S.
Melion, and Richardson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 277–305, at 299,
with further references, and 288–89 on wisdom’s imperative of recognizing folly. Compilation of the Eulenspiegel tales appears to date to
1483, while the first printed editions were produced in Strasbourg by
Johannes Gr€
uninger in 1510–11 and 1515; see Till Eulenspiegel: His
Adventures, trans. and ed. Paul Oppenheimer (New York: Routledge,
2001), xxi–lxxxiii.
81. Translation from Gerta Calmann, “The Picture of Nobody,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, nos. 1–2 (January–June 1960): 60–
104, at 92. Such examples could be multiplied; cf. Andreas Alciati’s
epigram of 1549 (designed to illustrate the figure of the misguided
youth), which claims blindness as the consequence of self-love: “It is a
flaw and lack of judgment to love oneself. Such love has driven
many men to blindness, because, abandoning the ancient ways, they
only desire to follow their fantasies”; quoted and discussed in
Jacobs, Living Image, 149.
82. Calmann, “Picture of Nobody”; Irving L. Zupnick, “The Meaning of
Bruegel’s ‘Nobody’ and ‘Everyman,’” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 67 (May–June
1966): 258–70; Hannes Fricke, “ Niemand wird lesen, was ich hier schreibe” :
€ den Niemand in der Literatur (G€
Uber
ottingen: Wallstein, 1998), 93–96;
J€
urgen M€
uller, Das Paradox als Bildform: Studien zur Ikonologie Pieter Brue€ (Munich: Wilhlem Fink, 1999), 56–76; Bret Rothstein, “The
gels d. A.
Problem with Looking at Pieter Bruegel’s Elck,” Art History 26, no. 2
(April 2003): 143–73; Richardson, “To See Yourself,” 287; and Mitchell
B. Merback, “Nobody Dares: Freedom, Dissent, Self-Knowing and Other
Possibilities in Sebald Beham’s Impossible,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 4
(Winter 2010): 1037–1105, esp. 1058–66.
83. The circumstantial connection with the myth of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, is tantalizing here, and M€
uller, Paradox als Bildform, has suggested connections between the Ahasuerus myth and the Nobody trope.
Almost all later depictions of Ahasuerus, however, depict him with a
traveler’s stave, and none presents him as a soldier; for examples, see
Schreckenberg, Jews in Christian Art, 291–96.
84. D€
u rer—Cranach—Holbein: Die Entdeckung des Menschen; Das deutsche
Portrat
€ um 1500, ed. Sabine Haag et al., exh. cat. (Munich: Hirmer,
2011), no. 210; and see n. 88 below for further references.
85. See P€acht, “Rene d’Anjou”; and Marrow, “‘In desen speigell,’” 160–61.
Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance
Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 270, illustrates the twosided panel Macabre Wedding Portrait, by the Master of the Aachen Life of
the Virgin, ca. 1480–85 (Bad Godesberg, College of Alosius) as fig. 138;
see also Eduard Syndicus, “Hochzeit und Tod—ein wiederentdecktes
Bild,” Zeitschrift f€
u r Kunstwissenschaft 6 (1952): 47–56, figs. 1, 2; and Ernst
Buchner, Das deutsche Bildnis der Sp€
atgotik und der fr€
u hen D€
u rerzeit (Berlin:
Deutscher Verein f€
ur Kunstwissenschaft, 1953), 173–75, cat. no. 197,
where the painter is called the “Meister der Aachener Schrankt€
uren.” See
also the Macabre Marriage Portrait by the Ulm Master, ca. 1460–70, divided
between Cleveland and Strasbourg; Buchner, 170–73, cat. no. 196.
86. [SOLL]CHE GESTALT VNSER BAIDER VVAS. IM SPIEGEL ABER NIX DAN DAS. See
Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 268, who translates the inscription:
“In the mirror the form of us both was nothing but this.”
87.
317
IOANN BURGKMAIR M[ALLER] LVI IAR ALT ANNA ALLERLAIIN GE[MAH]L LII IAR ALT
MDXXVII[II] MAI X TAG.
88. Until the 1933 discovery of the signature in the upper-right corner, the
work was regarded as a self-portrait; since then scholarly opinion has
leaned toward an authorial role for Burgkmair while attributing the
painterly execution to Furtenagel. See especially Berthold Hinz,
“Studien zur Geschichte des Ehepaarbildnisses,” Marburger Jahrbuch f€
ur
Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1974): 139–218, at 167–71; and Alexander von
Reitzenstein, “Zum Burgkmairschen Doppelbildnis von 1529,” Pantheon
33 (1975): 106–10.
89. Marrow, Pictorial Invention, 28, fig. 73.
90. The latter observed already by Buchner, “Die Augsburger Tafelmalerei,”
85–87.
91. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 627–31. Falk, Hans Burgkmair, 34,
calls attention to unusual elements of the Ursula legend, which Burgkmair drew instead from Elizabeth of Sch€
onau’s Liber revelationum,
undoubtedly at the behest of his patron.
€
92. Cf. Krause, Holbein der Altere,
296.
93. For the entire cycle, see Goldberg et al., Altdeutsche Gemalde
€ Katalog,
129–58; Gisela Goldberg, “Zum Zyklus der Augsburger Basilikabilder
und zur Existenz von Stellvertreterst€atten r€
omische Hauptkirchen,”
Bayerisches Jahrbuch f€
u r Volkskunde, 1986–87, 65–75; Pia Cuneo, “The
Basilica Cycle of Saint Katherine’s Convent: Art and Female Community in Early-Renaissance Augsburg,” Woman’ s Art Journal 19,
no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1998): 21–25; Martin Schawe, Rom in Augsburg: Die Basilikabilder aus dem Katharinenkloster (Augsburg: Bayerische Staatsgem€aldesammlungen, n.d.); and especially Magdalene
G€artner, R€
omische Basiliken in Augsburg: Nonnenfr€
ommigkeit und Malerei
um 1500 (Augsburg: Wissner, 2002).
94. This panel was detached from the San Paolo panel at an undetermined
time before 1828, when it was relocated to Augsburg from the Oettingen-Wallerstein collection; Goldberg et al., Altdeutsche Gemalde
€ Katalog,
157–58; G€artner, R€
omische Basiliken, fig. V/5; and Schawe, Staatsgalerie
Augsburg, 84–85. Her banderole reads: “sancte . . . mise[r]ico[r]dia[m]
dei p[ro] me i p . . . ”
€ 297, points out the dramatic increase in fees com95. Krause, Holbein d. A.,
pared to those paid for earlier commissions in the series, the byproduct,
she argues, of an artistic competition in which Burgkmair led the way.
96. Cuneo, “The Basilica Cycle,” 22.
97. Ibid., 23, with relevant historical literature on the convent. For the convent’s successful resistance to evangelical reform from the 1530s
onward, see Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 206–51, from which the
phrase “most emphatically civic” comes (209); also Reinhard H. Seitz,
“Zur Geschichte des Dominikanerinnenklosters Sankt Katharina in
Augsburg,” in Das Dominikanerinnenkloster zu Bad W€
orishofen, ed. Werner
Schiedermair (Weißenhorn: Anton H. Konrad, 1998), 63–72.
98. Wood panels covered with parchment, height 34¼ in. (87 cm),
Maximilianmuseum, Augsburg, inv. no. 3839; partial transcription
in G€artner, R€
omische Basiliken, 202–3, discussed on 17–20 and
illustrated as figs. 2–3. A later German translation appears in the
Chronik des Klosters St. Katharina zu Augsburg (1752–53), fols. 24v–28r;
transcription in G€artner, R€
omische Basiliken, 197–202. Cf. Goldberg,
“Zum Zyklus,” 66.
99. Goldberg, “Zym Zyklus,” 65, who notes that Burgkmair’s San Pietro
panel, completed shortly after 1500, makes several direct references to
€ 290, with older
this most recent anno santo; see also Krause, Holbein d. A.,
literature cited on 390 n. 15.
100. In particular, Goldberg, “Zum Zyklus”; Cuneo, “The Basilica Cycle”;
Schawe, Rom in Augsburg; G€artner, R€
omische Basiliken; and Walter Cahn,
“Margaret of York’s Guide to the Pilgrimage Churches of Rome,” in
Margaret of York, Simon Marmion, and the Visions of Tondal, ed. Thomas
Kren (Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992), 89–98. My thanks to
Alisa Gross for the latter reference.
101. Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German
Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 339.
102. In the New High German of the Chronik (1752–53), this phrase is rendered “trey Orth.”
103. G€artner, R€
omische Basiliken, 21, with references.
104. Nine Miedema, “Following in the Footsteps of Christ: Pilgrimage and
Passion Devotion,” in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late Medieval
Culture, ed. A. A. MacDonald, H. N. B. Ridderbos, and R. M. Schlusemann (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), 73–92, at 81; see also idem,
“Rom in Halle: Sieben Alt€are der Stiftkirche Kardinal Albrecht von
Brandenburg als Stellvertreter f€
ur die Hauptkirchen Roms?” in “ Ich
€
armer sundiger mensch” : Heiligen- und Reliquienkult am Ubergang
zum konfessionellen Zeitalter, ed. Andreas Tacke (G€
ottingen: Wallstein, 2006),
271–86.
318
105. For example, the Holy Land fresco painted by Gumpolt Gitlinger in
1495 for the refectory of Sts. Ulrich and Afra, which reportedly included
€
a view of Jerusalem and other sites in Palestine; see Krause, Holbein d. A.,
37; and G€artner, R€
omische Basiliken, 22, both with references.
106. For centrally planned Gothic chapter houses as sites of commemorative,
liturgical, and disciplinary rituals, see Sheila Bonde and Clark
Maines, “Monastic Struggle and Ritual Resolution: Centrality and
Community in the Gothic Chapter Room,” in Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in
Soissons: Approaches to Its Architecture, Archaeology and History (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 262–302; for late medieval convents specifically, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Petra Marx, and Susan Marti, “The
Time of the Orders, 1200–1500: An Introduction,” in Crown and Veil:
Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, trans. Dietlinde Hamburger, ed. Hamburger and Marti (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008), 41–75, at 61–64.
107. This confirms the arrangement first proposed by Falk, Hans Burgkmair,
27–28; see G€artner, R€
omische Basiliken, 37–38, fig. 10; also discussed in
€ 290, who bases her reconstruction directly on Falk
Krause, Holbein d. A.,
(Krause’s and G€artner’s books were both published in 2002).
108. Only two of the original, double-sided wing panels, each of them since
sawn apart for a total of four paintings, survive today in Augsburg
(Staatsgalerie Altdeutsche Malerie in der Katharinenkirche, inv. nos.
5296, 5297, 5364, 5365); see Norbert Lieb and Alfred Stange, Hans Hol€
bein der Altere
(n.p.: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1960), cat. no. 31, figs. 102–
5; Goldberg et al., Altdeutsche Gemalde
€ Katalog, 82–83; Krause, Holbein
€ 290, 237ff., 154–56; and Schawe, Staatsgalerie Augsburg, 85.
d. A.,
109. Cuneo, “The Basilica Cycle,” 24.
110. San Pietro D Gethsemane / San Lorenzo and Sebastiano D Arrest / San
Giovanni D Flagellation / San Paolo D Crowning and Mocking / Santa
Croce D Crucifixion. The exception is Holbein’s Santa Maria Maggiore,
which features the Coronation of the Virgin in the apex.
111. Lieb and Stange, Hans Holbein, no. 14; Goldberg et al., Altdeutsche
€ 140–
Gemalde
€ Katalog, 69–71 (with older literature); Krause, Holbein d. A.,
€
41; Schawe, Staatsgalerie Augsburg, 83; and Wiemann, Hans Holbein d. A.,
260–63, cat. no. 52. Preserved in Basel (Kunstmuseum, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. no. U.I.17) is a pen, ink, and wash drawing prepared sometime
after 1500, preumably to document the commission; see Wiemann,
€ 300, cat. no. 66.
Hans Holbein d. A.,
112. My examples are drawn from Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, trans. Graham Harman (New York: Zone Books,
2007), 35–71.
113. Any sampling must include Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: FourteenthCentury Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 89–121; idem, “Major Currents in Late Medieval
Devotion,” in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed.
Jill Raitt, Bernard McGinn, and John Meyendorff (New York: Crossroad,
1987), 75–108; Kent Emery Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow, eds., Christ among
the Medieval Dominicans (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press,
1998); and Michael Camille, “Mimetic Identification and Passion Devotion in the Later Middle Ages: A Double-Sided Panel by Meister
Francke,” in MacDonald, Ridderbos, and Schluseman, The Broken Body,
183–210. Focus on the imperial cities is provided by Barbara Steinke,
Paradiesgarten oder Gefangnis?
€
Das N€
u rnberger Katharinenkloster zwischen
Klosterreform und Reformation (T€
ubingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 2006), with the
most comprehensive account.
114. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1998), 460.
115. Hamburger, Marx, and Marti, “The Time of the Orders,” 62.
€ 290.
116. Krause, Holbein d. A.,
117. See Rainer Kaczynski, “Die Coena-Domini-Kirche,” in Kirche, Kunstsammlung und Bibliothek des Herzoglichen Georgianums (Regensburg: Schnell
und Steiner, 1994), 8–38, esp. 30–37, and 85–86, cat. nos. 380–82; and
G€artner, R€
omische Basilika, 24–26.
118. On S. Croce’s relics, see among others Joseph N. Tylenda, The Pilgrim’ s
Guide to Rome’ s Principal Churches (Collegeville, Minn., 1993), 69–72; and
Anton Legner, Reliquien in Kunst und Kult zwischen Antike und Aufklarung
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 81–82. On the historical imago pietatis, begin with Carlo Bertelli, “The Image of Pity in Santa
Croce in Gerusalemme,” in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolph
Wittkower, ed. Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine (London: Phaidon, 1967), 40–55; see also references in n. 120 below.
119. A possibility suggested by Cahn, “Margaret of York’s Guide,” 96.
120. The literature on the imago pietatis and the Man of Sorrows is massive.
See especially Erwin Panofsky, “‘Imago Pietatis’: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des ‘Schmerzensmanns’ und der ‘Maria Mediatrix,’” in Festschrift fu€r Max J. Friedlander
€
zum 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann,
1927), 261–308; Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages:
Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and
Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Aristotle D. Caratzas, 1990); and
for recent contributions, see Catherine Puglisi and William Barcham,
eds., New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute
Publications / Western Michigan University Press, 2013). For the Sunday Christ, see Peter-Klaus Schuster, “Niemand folgt Christus nach,”
Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 1981: 28–43, who regards the
Nobody allegory as a secularized version of the perpetual Passion (see
esp. 29–31); and Dominique Rigaux, Le Christ du dimanche: Histoire d’ une
image me die vale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), esp. 48–50 on the perpetual
Passion.
121. Geiler’s sermons on the Narrenschiff were first published in Latin in
1511, and then in German translation in 1520; they are quoted and discussed in Gerd Schwerhoff, “Christus zerst€
uckeln: Das Schw€
oren bei den
Gliedern Gottes und die sp€atmittelalterliche Passionsfr€
ommigkeit,” in
Fr€
ommigkeit im Mittelalter: Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, k€
orperliche
Ausdrucksformen, ed. Klaus Schreiner (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002),
499–527, at 509.
122. Chapter 39 depicts the intercesssion of Christ and Mary in divided
scenes in the early manuscripts, each with its own prefiguration; see Panofsky, “‘Imago Pietatis,’” 285–88; E. Breitenbach and Th. Hillmann,
“Die Sternbacher Pieta: Ein Beitrag zur Ikonographie des Vesperbildes
und des Schmerzensmannes,” Die christliche Kunst: Monatsschrift f€
u r alle
Gebiete der christlichen Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft 33 (1937): 268–74, at
273; and Dieter Koepplin, “Interzession: Maria und Christi vor
Gottvater,” in
Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum, vol. 2
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1970), cols. 346–52.
123. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 30 (Spring 2002): 3–36, at 29–31;
Mitchell B. Merback, “Reverberations of Guilt and Violence, Resonances
of Peace: A Comment on Caroline Walker Bynum’s Lecture,” ibid.,
37–50, at 40; and Franz Posset, Renaissance Monks: Monastic Humanism in
Six Biographical Sketches (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 63–92.
124. The idea is unorthodox, first for its inference that the blood atonement
on Calvary was insufficiently paid, and second for the impossible image
it introduces of Christ suffering humanly after the Resurrection
(the glorified body in heaven is, by definition, immutable and beyond
suffering); see Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 97, 111.
125. Quoted in Walter Gibson, “Imitatio Christi: The Passion Scenes of Hieronymus Bosch,” Simiolus 6, no. 2 (1972): 83–93, at 83, with my emphases.
See also Peter Parshall, “The Art of Memory and the Passion,” Art Bulletin 81, no. 3 (September 1999): 456–72, at 465.
126. Stadtbibliothek N€
urnberg, Nuremberg, MS Cent. VI, 43e, fol. 198v;
trans. Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary, 462; also discussed in Thomas
Lentes, “‘Andacht’ und ‘Geb€arde’: Das religi€
ose Ausdrucksverhalten,” in
Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch 1400–1600, ed. Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky (G€
ottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1999), 29–67, at 61; and Steinke, Paradiesgarten oder Gefa€ngnis, 111ff.,
fig. on 113.
127. A distinction analyzed, among others, by Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an
Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982), 14–15.
128. Burgkmair, studies after Holbein, each 12¼ by 8¼ in. (31 by 21.1 cm),
Universit€atsbibliothek, W€
urzburg, Delin. VII, B, 48 and 49; see Fritz
€
Koreny, “Hans Burgkmair d. A.—
Unbekannte Zeichnungen:
€
Uberlegungen zu einem verlorenen Werk altniederl€andischer Malerei,”
Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 78, n.s., 42 (1982): 35–
€ 297, figs. 219, 220.
68; see also Krause, Holbein d. A.,
€ und Hans Burgkmair—Alterna129. Katharina Krause, “Hans Holbein d. A.
tiven in der Augsburger Malerei um 1500,” Zeitschrift f€
u r Schweizerische
Archaologie
€
und Kunstgeschichte 55 (1998): 111–22.
130. Massing, “Burgkmair’s Depiction,” sketches the expanding network of
associates from whom Burgkmair received ethnographic information,
drawings, and even artifacts associated with the non-European peoples
he would portray in woodcut; see also Leitch, Mapping Ethnography. However, everything we can document about these activities postdates the
commissions at the Katharinenkloster.
131. For documentation on Bouts’s Descent from the Cross altarpiece, see n. 5
above. The symbolic importance of the “Jewish witness” figure, which
emerges as an identifiable type in the twelfth century, is expertly traced
and historicized in Sara Lipton, “Unfeigned Witness: Jews, Matter, and
Vision in Twelfth-Century Christian Art,” in Kessler and Nirenberg, Judaism and Christian Art, 45–73.
132. See Goldberg et al., Altdeutsche Gemalde
€ Katalog, 14–17; Schawe, Staatsgalerie Augsburg, 31–36, 76–77; also Wolfgang Pilz, Das Triptychon als Kompositions- und Erzahlsform
€
(Munich: Fink, 1970), 211–13.
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Recognitions: Theme and Metatheme in Hans Burgkmair the Elder`s

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