This dissertation considers how a new approach to understanding historic collections will be able

184 Pages·2006·1.6 MB·English

ABSTRACT

Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENAL LIVES OF MOVABLE CHRIST
SCULPTURES

Tanya A. Jung, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006

Dissertation directed by: Professor Meredith Gill
Department of Art History and Archaeology

This dissertation deals with a fascinating and understudied group of free-standing
Christ sculptures that were moved in imitation of Christ during the dramatic observances
of late medieval Holy Week. They adhere to general iconographic formulas, but stand
apart from other depictions of Christ in one important respect—they were elaborately
kinetic. Congregations animated these images in a variety of ways, from basic manual
operation in processions and elevations to the manipulation of fitted joints, wheels, hand
cranks, and elevation apparatuses. Scholars who study movable Christ sculptures use
them as evidence for liturgical and para-liturgical observances recorded in written texts,
they approach them as aesthetic objects or as objects of folk tradition, and they discuss
their place in the development of medieval sculpture and architectural space. I argue,
however, that these images have more meanings to offer. Accordingly, these meanings
are available when we consider not only their material and symbolic forms and their
performative functions, but also their shifting cultural locations in medieval and modern
Europe. Movable Christ sculptures were edifying and sacred images, disconcerting
idols, homely folk objects, and works of art. My aim in this dissertation is to write a
cultural biography of the lives of these images—in other words, a history that can
account for the varied connotations of movable Christ sculptures in different instances of
practice, reception, and response.
It is my contention that these images, because of their performative function,
experiential qualities, mimetic form, relatively anonymity, and “thingness,” present an
ideal opportunity to exercise cultural biography from an art historical perspective. Such
an exercise elucidates the history of movable Christ sculptures after the moment of
production and artistic intent has passed. It describes how these images have remained
fixed in human imagination and in life regardless of changing cultural, social and
political circumstances, yet it also accounts for the ways in their meanings have changed
over time. In short, it provides a more complete account of the lives of these unique and
understudied objects and reveals the ways in which movable Christ sculptures create
transcendental moments and social realities.
THE PHENOMENAL LIVES OF MOVABLE CHRIST SCULPTURES

by

Tanya A. Jung

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2006

Advisory Committee:

Professor Meredith Gill, Chair
Professor Anthony Colantuono
Professor Marie Spiro
Professor Arthur Wheelock
Professor Richard Walker

The dissertation document that follows has had referenced material removed in respect
for the owner’s copyright. A complete version of this document, which includes said
referenced material, resides in the University of Maryland, College Park’s library
collection.
PREFACE

I first became aware of movable sculptures of Christ in a graduate seminar at the
University of Missouri-Columbia.1 Students were asked to choose an object from the
University museum and apply a particular art historical methodology. I selected a
fifteenth-century Austrian sculpture of Christ (fig. 1) and attempted to write a social
history of the figure. I was interested in the image as a material object, its place in the
cultural fabric of late medieval Europe, and what it meant in its original context. When I
encountered the wooden figure it was in a gallery sitting atop a white podium in front of a
white wall. Surrounded by the colorful canvases of Dutch and Italian masters, its grace,
beauty, and sweeping fragility were accentuated, but all indications of its original purpose
were lost. Aside from its stylistic and iconographic designations, I had no idea what the
image was. My first thought was that it must have come from a large wooden altarpiece.
Perhaps it stood in the spindly heights of one of the massive fifteenth-century German
retables (fig. 2). Or perhaps it was an Andachtsbild, one of the free-standing wooden
sculptures placed in homes or on side chapel altars in churches, providing focus for
private devotion (fig. 3). 2
When the conservator and curator agreed to take it down from the podium, a new
possibility presented itself. An assessment from this perspective revealed a large filled

1. These images have been called by different names. Johannes Tripps uses the term “handelnde
Bildwerke” while Ulla Haastrup refers to them as liturgical props. I use the somewhat cumbersome term
“movable sculptures of Christ” to accommodate their general characteristics. Johannes Tripps, Das
handelnde Bildwerk Forschungen zu den Bedeutungsschichten und der Funktion des Kirchengebäudes und
seiner Ausstattung in der Hoch- und Spätgotik (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1996); Ulla Haastrup,
“Medieval Props in the Liturgical Drama.” In Hafnia: Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art 11
(Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1987), 133-170.
2. The issue of the Andachtsbilder, its definitions, and its functions are nicely summarized from
Panofsky to Marrow by Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in
Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Abo, Finland: Abo Akademi, 1965), 55-58.
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hole and an axe or hatchet mark on the top of the figure’s head (fig. 4). These aspects of
condition and further investigations into fifteenth-century image practice suggested a
surprising and unique history for the figure which I pursued in my Master’s thesis.3 A
chemical analysis and x-ray determined that the filled hole was at one time occupied by
an iron object. From my research into Ascension Day observances of the late middle
ages, I concluded that it was most likely occupied by an iron ring. The ring would have
been used to elevate the figure on either Easter Sunday, Ascension Day, or both. In this
capacity the figure acted as an instrument of religious instruction, a sacred image that
made the narrative of Christian redemption understandable and the divine visible.
The axe mark and the removal of the ring, however, implied that at one time the
image’s privileged place in Catholic worship was negated. While this damage could have
occurred in the most banal way at any point in the object’s history, I again linked these
aspects of the object’s condition to the figure’s function as a sacred image in late
medieval Ascension Day. As a mimetic and kinetic representation of Christ, the Missouri
figure carried dangerous idolatrous connotations for some sixteenth-century viewers.
Images central to Church observances, particularly three-dimensional sculptures, were
prime targets for iconoclastic actions during the Protestant Reformation. Images that
were deemed inappropriate or idolatrous were systematically removed and quietly

3. Tanya Jung, A Late Gothic Ascending Christ in Context. Master’s Thesis, University of
Missouri, 1995. Here image practice refers not only to the particulars of the movable Christ sculptures’
function in dramatic para-liturgical and liturgical performance i.e. how they were made, used, moved,
dressed, addressed, and performed; but also to the more general roles of religious images in late medieval
Europe. David Morgan discusses the multiple purposes of religious images in visual practice which
include the ordering of time and space, the imagining of communal identity, communication with the
divine, collaboration with other forms of representation, persuasive magic which influences thought and
behavior, and the displacement of rival images and ideologies. David Morgan, Visual Piety, A History and
Theory of Popular Religious Images (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), and The Sacred
Gaze, Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA:
2005).
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eliminated or violently “executed” in public spectacles. They were stored away in attics,
burned in household hearths or bonfires of the vanities, drawn and quartered, disfigured,
and decapitated. In this context, the extraction of the ring and the axe mark became the
possible remnants of an aniconic and Protestant past.
In constructing a history for the Missouri Ascending Christ, I was afforded
interpretations and insights that I did not expect when I first encountered the image in its
museum setting.4 Through this process I came to understand that original intent and
original meaning though compelling and credible pursuits were circumspect goals. The
reclamation of history and more specifically the history of an object were dependent on
my own situation and reading. I could never “purify” my conclusions of my own past or
“insistent present.”5 But while my own interpretations would always remain subjective,
they need not be naïve or solipsistic. They were themselves a part of the history of the
image. More important, I came to realize that the image’s meaning was not something
that remained fixed to original intention but, rather, it changed along with its cultural and
temporal locations. In varied circumstances and at different times, the Missouri
Ascending Christ had the potential to be a didactic image, a sacred icon, a sterile idol,
and an art object. The effort to describe, define, and reduce this image to an original
context revealed instead the richness and complexity of late medieval visual culture and
demonstrated just how fluid an image’s meaning can be. In the following pages, I will
extend my study of the Missouri Ascending Christ and consider all movable images of
Christ used in Holy Week, Easter, and Ascension Day observances in this way.

4. For a similar point see Freedberg, The Power of Images, Studies in the History and Theory of
Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 273.
5. Michael Baxandall, “The Language of Art History,” New Literary Criticism 10 (Spring, 1979):
453.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface…………………………………………………………………………………….ii
Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………….v
List of Figures………………………………………………………………………..…...iv

Introduction...……………………………………………………………………………...1
Method and Theory.……………………………………………………………….3
Art History and Cultural Biography………………………………………………8
The Scholarship………………………………………………………………….11
Sources, Forms, and Provenance…...……………………………………………14
Structure of the Dissertation……………………………………………………..17

Chapter One: Religious Images in Medieval Market, Thought, and Practice…………...21
Making and Market………………………………………………………………21
Sacred Icons and Image Theology……………………………………………….25
Visual Piety and the Holy Familiar………………………………………………33
Sacred and Profane...………………………………………………………….…41

Chapter Two: The Form and Function of Movable Christ Sculptures in Ritual Drama....44
Medieval Holy Week…………………………………………………………….45
Palm Sunday……………………………………………………………..47
Maundy Thursday………………………………………………………..53
The Triduum……………………………………………………………...57
Ascension Day…………………………………………………………………...68

Chapter Three: Sacred Bodies in Ritualized Spaces……………………………………..75
Movement and Narrativity…………………………………………………….....75
Mimesis and Corporeality……………………………………………..…………86
Materiality and Magic……………………………………………………………96

Chapter Four: Reformations and Continuations………………………………………..103
Catholic and Protestant…………………………………………………………105
Idols and Iconoclasms…………………………………………………………..112
Counter Reformations and Iconodules………………………………………….122

Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………...……127

Appendix………………………………………………………………………………..141

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………142

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1. Ascending Christ, Tyrol, beginning of the 16th cent. Lindenwood and polychrome.
Columbia, Missouri. University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology.

Fig. 2. Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece, Tilman Riemenschneider, c. 1505-1510.
Lindenwood. Creglingen.

Fig. 3. Man of Sorrows, Swabia, c. 1530. Lindenwood and polychrome. Hospital of the
Holy Cross, Groslar.

Fig. 4. Detail of the head of the Missouri Ascending Christ.

Fig. 5. Wir wssln kein Cruetz, Byld mer han, uff strass wir ausshin ganz (We want no
cross, image any longer, out on the street we go), Anonymous, 1525-27.
Woodcut. Scheurl-Bibliothek, Nuremberg.

Fig. 6. Palmesel. Lower Franconia, c.1470-80. Lindenwood and polychrome. The
Cloisters, New York.

Fig. 7. Crucifix. Saxony, c. 1500. Lindenwood and polychrome. Stadtmuseum, Döblin.

Fig. 8. Ascending Christ, Swabia, c. 1360. Lindenwood. Collection of Bernhard Fahr,
Fulda.

Fig. 9. Palmesel, Circle of Hans Multscher, Swabia, 1464. Lindenwood and
polychrome. Ulm, Stadtmuseum.

Fig. 10. Palmesel, Circle of Hans Multscher, Bavaria, c. 1450. Lindenwood and
polychrome. Wettenhausen, Augustinian Cloister.

Fig. 11. Palmesel, Circle of Hans Multscher, Bavaria, c. 1470/80. Lindenwood and
polychrome. Weilheim, Stadtmuseum.

Fig. 12. Christ Crucified, Oswald Bockstorfer aus Memmingen, 1481. Lindenwood and
polychrome. Bad Wimpfen am Berg, Lutheran Church.

Fig. 13. Christ at the Column, Jose Ortega, New Mexico, 1880. Pinewood and
polychrome. National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 14. Alemania, Willem Janszoon and Johannes Blaue, from the Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum (The Blaue Atlas), 1635. Print. UCLA, Berkley, CA.

Fig. 15. Albrecht Dürer, Three Lime-trees, c. 1490. Watercolor. Formerly Kunsthalle,
Bremen.
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