206 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011 FOR POSITION ONLY Figure 1. St. Anthony, south Germany, mid-fifteenth century. Hand-colored woodcut, 38.1 x 26.4 cm. Photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Inv. Nr. 118224 D. The votive scenario CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD Three sufferers, bodies convulsed, inflamed limbs things.2 The votaries and supplicants bear or proffer brandished, beg for the attention of the enthroned healer objects: the badges pinned to the hat, small crosses, a (fig. 1). The men at lower left and right, with crutches, fowl, a mannikin, wax models of bodies or extremities. have traveled some distance: The purses at their waists The objects attest to states of mind and to successful and the hat with upturned visor adorned with metal exchanges with entities outside ordinary experience— badges, souvenirs of shrines visited, suggest as much. The divinity itself, or a holy man who manages destructive healer is remote, imperturbable. fire. At the pilgrimage site—so the picture suggests—the Flanking his throne, thrusting gifts into his field of pilgrims perform for one another. The pilgrim is an vision, are four healthy visitors, two wearing fur-lined object in the eyes of other pilgrims, no less so than hats that imply affluence, another with the armor and are the displayed wax body parts. But above all the sword of a well-born soldier. These four are completing a pilgrims perform for the powerful saint, the third- and cycle of entreaty and thanks. They or someone close to fourth-century Egyptian hermit St. Anthony Abbot or St. them was delivered or spared from the fearsome Anthony the Great. In the eleventh century St. Anthony’s affliction, the burning limbs, by virtue of prayer and a relics surfaced in southeastern France, in the Dauphiné, promise of future sacrifice, an expenditure of wealth, generating a shrine cult with wide fame. St. Anthony was time, and mental energy. Once spared or healed, the credited with the power to heal an array of diseases. votary must fulfill his or her promise. Here the votaries The aim of this paper is to understand better how crowd the throne of the thaumaturge, competing for his people’s experiences in the late middle ages were attention; they want their gifts acknowledged. But there is “paced” by objects. The wax body parts tendered by no real urgency, for their limbs are intact and the votive pilgrims testified to ruptures in the body’s experience cycle is complete. Life can resume at a normal pace. of itself. They transferred personal experience into the For the supplicants at the foot of the throne, by spaces of representation, first the shrine itself, then contrast, time has accelerated. The regular rhythms images such as this woodcut. The print is a portrait of of calendar, labor, and family have been disrupted. a saint, but its borders are permeated by the rhythms This is an “emergent occasion,” to borrow from the of individual even if unnamed lives. These rhythms are title of John Donne’s collection of prose reflections on imported by the wax offerings, which were in their own his own imminent death by disease.1 These devotees way portraits. display none of Donne’s stoicism, but rather try to strike The precise role such a woodcut might have played a deal with the saint who controls the disease. They inside the votive cycle it depicts is unclear. The image are presumably making vows, hoping to return in due printed on paper was a novelty of the fifteenth century. course to take their places at the sides of the throne, To make sense of the woodcut we might compare it to displaying gratitude. They are fearful of emergence itself, the objects pictured inside it. The badge worn by the a reshaping of time that obscures origins. Emergent pilgrim at the lower left, for example, is testimony to a phenomena evade cause-and-effect relationships, and so pilgrimage accomplished, a souvenir, or a trophy. Such sweep away the partitions that minds erect to make sense a badge might also possess protective power by virtue of of the flow of experience. its provenance, its former proximity to or even contiguity This picture, a hand-colored woodcut printed probably in Swabia in southern Germany around 1450, models a web of relations between people and 2. The woodcut is a unicum, that is, the sole surviving impression from the print run. Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, inv. no. 118241. W. L. Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts, 8 vols. (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1926–30) (= Schreiber), For advice and information I am grateful to Laura Fenelli, Milette no. 1215. Die Frühzeit des Holzschnitts, exhibition catalogue (Munich: Gaifman, J. D. Connor, Larry Kanter, and Jacqueline Jung; and for a Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 1970), no. 26. Origins of European close and engaged reading of an earlier draft, Francesco Pellizzi. Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public, ed. Peter 1. J. Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Donne’s Parshall and Rainer Schoch. Exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of text was modelled on the meditations composed by King Hezekiah Art and Germanisches Nationalmuseum (New Haven: Yale University after his recovery from illness (Isaiah 38:9–20). Press, 2005), no. 93. 208 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011 with the tomb of a saint.3 Lead badges representing mysterious about their workings. Mysterious was St. St. Anthony were attached to the necks of livestock to Anthony’s ability to cure illnesses. The offering was a protect them from disease.4 The woodcut may have had straightforward sign, a token of gratitude. For visitors a lot in common with such a badge, for there is evidence to the shrine, including other votaries, the displayed that prints, too, could transmit the powers stored in offering symbolized another person’s good faith in a tomb. The print could function as a contact-relic keeping the bargain struck with the saint by making channeling healing or protective power from a saint’s the trip to the shrine. The offering testified to the saint’s relics to an individual devout.5 Woodcuts not so different successful intervention and so glorified that saint; from this were carried home from pilgrimage sites as the offerings ornamented the shrine and ratified the trophies and talismans.6 authenticity of the relics. The mannikin represented the The gift or offering, such as the wax mannikin held person’s self or soul, dedicated to the saint in the hour by the man at left or the hands and feet suspended from of need. The wax hand or foot represented the afflicted the rail above, had no such powers.7 There was nothing limb, thus reporting on the disease’s symptomatology. The votive offerings also had real material value. A fowl or a quantity of molded wax was useful to the clerics 3. D. Bruna, Enseignes de pèlerinage et enseignes profanes (Paris: who managed such a shrine, for the hen could lay eggs Réunion des musées nationaux, 1996), pp. 16–18; B. Spencer, Pilgrim or be consumed, and the wax could be melted down to Souvenirs and Secular Badges (London: Stationery Office, 1998), pp. make candles.8 But above all the votive offering fulfilled 17–24. For examples of amulets, talismans, and badges associated with shrines, see the exhibition catalogue Wallfahrt kennt keine Grenzen a promise of expenditure, of wealth, time, and attention, (Munich: Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, 1984), pp. 34–51. made by the votary to the thaumaturgic saint. The proof 4. E. Clementz, “Le culte de St. Antoine en Alsace,” in Auf den of expenditure was the aspect of the offering addressed Spuren des hl. Antonius, Festschrift Adalbert Mischlewski (Memmingen: to St Anthony himself. It was important that he take Memminger Zeitung, 1994), p. 227. notice of the fulfillment of the vow. 5. Robert Maniura published a document recording the use in 1485 of a figura di charta, a “paper figure,” to heal a sick woman. The image, presumably a woodcut similar if not identical to a surviving fifteenth- few art historians dealt with this material; see, however, E. Battisti, century print reproducing the fourteenth-century fresco known as the “Fenomenologia dell’ ex voto,” in Ex voto tra storia e antropologia, Madonna delle Carceri in Prato, was put in contact with the fresco ed. E. De Simoni (Rome: De Luca, 1968), pp. 35–48. Today we have and then with the mouth and body of the woman. In 1490 Giuliano a wealth of analyses: P.-A. Sigal, “L’ex voto au moyen age dans les Guizzelmi spent sixteen soldi in Florence on paper reproductions of régions du nord-ouest de la Mediterranée (XIIe–Xve siècles),” Provence the Madonna delle Carceri, Vergini Marie di charta. “The Images and Historique 33 (1983): 13–31; A. Reinle, Das stellvertretende Bildnis: Miracles of Santa Maria delle Carceri,” in The Miraculous Image in the Plastiken und Gemälde von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Zurich: Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. G. Wolf and E. Thuno (Rome: Artemis, 1984), pp. 10-30; D. Freedberg, The Power of Images “l’Erma” di Bretschneider, 2004), pp. 86-87. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 136–160; H. van de 6. This is potentially a large class of objects, but it is hard to prove Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of that any particular woodcut was used as a talisman. In the Bodleian Charles the Bold (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); M. Bacci, “Pro remedio Library there is a woodcut image of Henry VI, a thaumaturgic king, animae”: immagini sacre e pratiche devozionali in Italia centrale surrounded by votaries and offerings, adduced by Spencer, Pilgrim (secoli XIII e XIV) (Pisa: ETS, 2000), pp.