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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. 147–226; F. Bisogni, “Ex voto e Souvenirs (note 3), p. 7 and fig. 4, as a talismanic souvenir from the la scultura in cera nel tardo medioevo,” in Visions of Holiness: Art and shrine; but it is not clear how he knows it was used this way. Wallfahrt Devotion in Renaissance Italy, ed. A. Ladis and S. E. Zuraw (Athens: kennt keine Grenzen (note 3), pp. 39–40, asserts that prints were used University of Georgia, 2001), pp. 67–91; G. Didi-Huberman, Ex-voto: in this way but offers no examples earlier than the seventeenth century. Image, organe, temps (Paris: Bayard, 2006); F. Jacobs, “Rethinking the 7. R. Andree, Votive und Weihegaben des katholischen Volkes Divide: Cult Images and the Cult of Images,” in Renaissance Theory, in Süddeutschland (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1904), is replete with ed. J. Elkins and R. Williams (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), interesting and often overlooked material. The most sophisticated pp. 95–114; M. Holmes, “Ex votos: Materiality, Memory, and Cult,” in older literature on the ex voto emerged from the field of Volkskunde The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern or the study of popular culture: see W. Brückner, “Volkstümliche World, ed. M. W. Cole and R. E. Zorach (Ashgate, 2009), pp. 159–181; Denkstrukturen und hochschichtliches Weltbild im Votivwesen,” R. Maniura, “Ex Votos, Art and Pious Performance,” Oxford Art Journal Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 59 (1963):186–203, and L. 32 (2009):409–425. Kriss-Rettenbeck, Ex voto: Zeichen, Bild und Abbild im christlichen 8. Note that van der Velden (note 7, p. 248), says only that it is Votivbrauchtum (Zurich: Atlantis, 1972). Exhibitions and publications “possible” that wax votive gifts were melted down later for re-use. of collections have focused on the small painted panels which have There is little evidence, but then it stands to reason that this practice dominated the votive phenomenon since the sixteenth century: See, was not well documented. At any rate, wax was expensive. Maniura for example, Ex voto (Kunsthalle Bern, 1964); F. Faranda, Fides tua notes that the ten pounds of wax used to make a votive effigy of a te salvum fecit: i dipinti votivi nel Santuario di S. Maria del Monte a healed child were four times more expensive than the silver used to Cesena (Modena: Artioli, 1997); Per grazia ricevuta: Gli ex voto del coat the effigy (note 7, p. 418). The really expensive alternative was the museo di San Nicola a Tolentino (Tolentino, 2005). Until recently effigy or model fashioned entirely in silver. Wood: The votive scenario 209

The function of the wax body parts within the cycle of The printed image comments on its own similarity to entreaty and thanks is clear. Yet in the woodcut image, and difference from other objects simply by portraying and in the few other depictions we have of the practice, objects and the ways people attend to them. The woodcut the suspended hands and feet compel our attention. creates a gradient of values between itself and the objects They seem to exceed the role they play within the cycle. it pictures. In this way it theorizes itself. Many Christian They are super-representations, powerfully linked to subjects involve people looking at scenes, other people, their referents. Wax in its texture, translucence, and dull things, and images: the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, tone can uncannily resemble flesh. The medium of wax for instance, or the Crucifixion. Such images deliver the symbolizes both the flow of experience—the disease, all historical event and at the same time show how people the passions accompanying it—and the stilling of that responded to the event as spectacle. At such a scene, flow. With its responsiveness to pressure, wax carried a Christ’s body is already functioning as an image: static, strong connotation of fidelity to an original, a one-to-one cynosural, densely significant for those who know how to matching.9 Wax models of body parts, as far as we can look. A depiction of this scene is recursive in the sense tell, were life-sized or near life-sized. In the woodcut, that it encodes inside itself a set of guidelines for its own however, they loom large, like great pelts or trophies. beholders. Once you have arrived at that embedded They are the key to the image. “instruction manual,” you have to exit the picture and A printed or painted picture lacks the direct force of start all over again. Equipped with the principles retrieved a wax model, but it is more articulate, more voluble. from within the picture, you may now read the picture Some pilgrims offered painted pictures, wall paintings quite differently and discover new guiding principles that or panels portraying a saint, as votive gifts.10 For many you had misread the first time, before you had access to centuries such offerings were rare and impressive, the instruction manual. And so on. beyond the means of most of the faithful. In the late To go further with this print, and to displace it from fifteenth century ordinary worshippers began to deposit its customary art historical niche, let us compare it to a small painted panels as offerings, completing the votive later and very different kind of picture, but also a picture cycle and at the same time reporting on the nature of the that theorizes itself: an oil painting on canvas by the injury or the cure.11 The painted panel was in some ways Ferrarese court painter Dosso Dossi, a representation of less valuable to the clerics who managed the shrine an enchantress, probably the good sorceress Melissa, a than the wax body part, for they could do little with it character from Lodovico Ariosto’s modern epic Orlando other than put it on display as testimony to the efficacy Furioso (fig. 2).13 The work shows Melissa seated inside a of the system. It did have great value as a generator of magic circle and lighting a wax torch. She has consulted confidence in the systems, however. There is no record a tablet bearing cryptic writing and diagrams and is of anyone leaving a print or a drawing as an ex voto.12 about to perform a spell that will reconstitute some metamorphized soldiers, their beings miserably split between animal bodies and effigy-like souls suspended 9. On the impression in wax as a metaphor for apprehension, in the tree; thus undoing the evil spell of another memory, or possession, see K. Park, “Impressed Images: Reproducing enchantress. The painting dates from the late 1510s and Wonders,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. C. A. Jones and P. is a paradigm of a category of object relatively new at Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 254–271. On the symbolic that moment: a nearly self-sufficient image, prepared associations of wax, see S. Waldmann, Die lebensgrosse Wachsfigur (Munich: Tuduv, 1990), pp. 9–15. On the “interpretive potential” of the to go on generating meanings even if displaced from imprint, see B. M. Bedos-Rezak, “Replica: Images of Identity and the its original setting, the court of the duke Alfonso d’Este. Identity of Images in Prescholastic France,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and The painting comments poetically on the powers of the Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. J. F. Hamburger and witch, a nearly forgotten art, according to Ariosto, a A.-M. Bouché (Princeton: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 2006), pp. 51–55. 10. See H. Belting, Likeness and Presence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 82–88, on votive frescoes in sixth- and on canvas and paper; J. Cannon and A. Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona seventh-century Thessaloniki. and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in 11. Although the older and local literature on the votive Medieval Tuscany (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, phenomenon addresses these panels, interpretation of this material has 1999), p. 57, n. 15. really only just begun. For overviews see Kriss-Rettenberg (note 7), pp. 13. The comparison is possibly unexpected but not random. It 155–271, and Bacci (note 7), pp. 220–223. builds on an argument I published in these pages, “Countermagical 12. The Visitation record of 1629 associated with the canonization Combinations by Dosso Dossi,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics process of Margherita of Cortona speaks of offerings of images painted 49/50 (2006):151–170. 210 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

Figure 2. Dosso Dossi, Enchantress, ca. 1515–1520. Oil on canvas, 176 x 174 cm. Rome, Galleria Borghese. Photo: Scala / Ministero per I Beni e le Attività culturali /Art Resource, New York.

wisdom preserved only in the eastern homelands of the canvas, for they circulated in the world, from hand to enemies of the Frankish knights celebrated in his poem. hand, in and out of shops and homes. The painting, Dosso’s painting, a fictional image, compares itself to the unique, was buried deep inside a ducal residence. more efficacious technologies it pictures: The cryptogram And yet how similar the two works are, for both on the tablet, the torch that will write with smoke in Dosso’s painting and the woodcut with St. Anthony are the sky, and finally the Christian cult image, which is basically depictions of wizards able to deflect natural present only as a disguised intertext. For this painting is and possibly unnatural, but anyway invisible, forces. the “anagram” of a Madonna and Child, or a Rest of the Both represent seated figures surrounded by individuals Holy Family on the Flight to Egypt, a sacred narrative in distress. In the painting, the animals are men whose transfigured and transvalued. In its physical closure and bodies have been transformed not by disease but by boundedness, and in its confidence in its own semantic magic. They press close to the benevolent sorceress in fecundity, the painting is asking for nothing more than hopes of deliverance. Melissa, as she manipulates spell the privileges enjoyed by Ariosto’s poem. This was new and fire, casts a glance upward toward the souls of the for the art of painting. Painting here was asking to be men stored in the tree. Melissa and Anthony are not upgraded to the status of a poem. gods, but technicians. They heal or repair by controlling The woodcut representing St. Anthony and the oil the elements. Anthony’s technology is extra-ecclesiastical painting representing the magnificent sorceress are and theologically questionable, almost as much so as unlikely pendants. The woodcut together with all its Melissa’s. Both pictures are recursive: the beholder of perished siblings—the hundreds of sheets that once each picture is offered a target of attention, and at the made up the print run, identical except for their hand- same time sees attention modeled. Each picture theorizes applied coloring—were so much busier than Dosso’s itself through embedded analogons of itself. Wood: The votive scenario 211

The painting by Dosso Dossi reveals that the homogeneous facture and the internal articulation of apparently disenchanted image of the early sixteenth forms and colors—all the elements that together count century, cut off from the ground of mimetic magic as the picture’s style and that anchor the picture to its that had guaranteed the cult image, developed a author—create an effect of closure and self-sufficiency. countermagic involving displacement of intertexts. The institution of the fictional artwork stabilizes the time The occluded cult image reappeared inside the new of the image. The painted fiction achieves this stability by image as the books, the diagrams, the torch and severing as much as possible its referential ties. Christian brazier, and finally the combinatorially scrambled narratives and icons, profane portraits, symbolic and Christian subject. The real theme of Dosso’s work didactic images were all linked to their authenticating was its own distance from its imagined predecessors, sources in remotest times by chains of images. Such images that were “not yet” artworks—for example, images point to stable realities well beyond their own a simple woodcut representing St. Anthony and his bounds. Dosso Dossi’s canvas, only loosely attached votaries. Such an image, unlike the canvas by Dosso, to the past, and aligned with but not dependent for all seems untroubled by competition from poems or from its impact on a poem, was prepared to venture into important contemporary artists. Yet the woodcut, too, the world more or less on its own account (even if the depicts its own imagined predecessor, a superior kind of picture, in fact, has been moved only very few times in image, in the form of the wax body parts, which convey five centuries). their meaning so unforgettably, and possibly in the The contrast with Dosso’s painting allows us to home figure of St. Anthony, which may represent a painted or in on the nature of the woodcut. The printed image of sculpted image of the sort that one might find at a shrine. St. Anthony is fundamentally a referential image, the (Alternatively, this figure may stand in for the tomb portrait of a thaumaturgic saint, a historical personage shrine, reminding us that nothing signifies an absent holy with a real effectiveness in the world that exceeded his person more effectively than a sample of his body— own lifespan. The authenticity of the portrait is secured namely, relics—or it may not represent an image or place by substitutional chains linking it to other images of St. at all, but simply the saint himself.) Anthony. More interestingly, the woodcut connects real If art is a flow of attentiveness through minds and and modern people to the virtual reality of the picture things, then the work of art is a thing specially designed through the attributes of the thaumaturgic saint. Votive to retard that flow, and then display it, making the flow offerings were among the conventional attributes that visible all at once. At the same time the work is a thing served to identify Anthony, but so too were the devotees. that might at any moment be hurled back into the real- Emergent time floods into the picture through the time flow. Both works, the painting and the print, meet attributes. The depicted votaries signify in two directions. these criteria. First, they function as conventional labels, copied The two pictures also differ in an important way. They from other pictures, securing the picture’s reference to manage time differently. The relation between the time Anthony. This reference was the basis of the picture’s represented in the picture and the time of the picture is value. Second, the votaries begin to refer through their in each case different. The painting by Dosso is to a high animation to real trials and uncertainties experienced degree temporally unified. The painting points, via the by modern people. They are portals onto the life-world poem it illustrates, to a historical period remembered in of shared experience, the bed of real sensations and legend, the struggles of the Frankish heroes in the eighth emotions that preexists any interpretation or depiction. and ninth centuries against the Muslims in Spain and The woodcut depicts the recipe for a stabilization of southern France. The Roland legend resonates against time—namely, submission to the votive cycle—but the long-term project of the Crusades, initiated in the in doing so it also vividly depicts the very emergent eleventh century. The enchantress’s arts resonate against phenomena (disease, fear, hope, resolve) that drive the ancient and medieval reports of magical practice, as cycle. By comparison, the painting by Dosso is closed on well as the contemporary phenomenon of witchcraft, the itself, and tranquil. target of Dominican inquisitors. The painting depicts a Anthony is multiply identified: by his name, written technical intervention designed to undo metamorphosis on a scroll affixed to the railing, by the tau-shaped and so reverse time. But all these temporal gestures are staff, the tau on the robe, the cap, and the belled pig at tightly managed by the picture’s author. That author, a his feet. The clerics of the Antonite order enjoyed the technician superior even to Melissa the enchantress, privilege of keeping pigs. Their pigs wore bells—even manipulates all the temporal vectors. The painting’s papal bulls and poems mentioned this—and in images 212 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

the bells were transferred to Anthony’s staff.14 The tau or Greek T was a sign associated with magical powers; according to the bull of 1297 the Antonites “call it potentia.”15 Healing played a major role in Anthony’s life story. But his fourth-century biographer Athanasius, guided by Anthony’s own words, insisted at every turn that the Lord was performing the miracles ascribed to the saint, and not the saint himself.16 Anthony was essentially a hermit, not a healer. The saint was transformed into a thaumaturge only in the twelfth century, after the clerics attendant on his shrine at St.-Antoine-l’Abbaye or St.- Antoine-en-Viennois in the Dauphiné, in southeastern France, gained a reputation for effective treatment of a brutal disease, widespread in Europe for centuries, involving inflammation of the extremities and ultimately gangrene.17 The disease was in fact caused by a fungal contamination of grain used in breadmaking, thus cutting a wide swath through society. But until the seventeenth century no one connected the disease to the bread. Instead, the society personified the disease by attributing its onset and abatement to St. Anthony, the one who controls the fire, as the crude red flames at the base of his throne indicate. Fire appears to add to the universe, but it ends up subtracting. Fire is a principle of energy and transformation, life giving if handled properly, otherwise destructive. The flames were added in the late Middle Ages to the roster of symbols that one could expect to find in an image of St. Anthony. The earliest surviving example of an image of St. Anthony accompanied by votaries is a panel in Fabriano dated 1353 and attributed to the Master of the Fabriano Altarpiece, now identified as Puccio di Simone, or to Figure 3. Master of Fabriano, St. Anthony, 1353. Tempera on Allegretto Nuzi (fig. 3).18 This painting represents the panel, 195 x 105 cm. Fabriano, Pinacoteca Civica. Photo: Richard Offner, in The Fourteenth Century: Bernardo Daddi and His Circle, section III, vol. V, ed. Miklós Boskovits 14. L. Fenelli, Il tau, il fuoco, il maiale: i canonici regolari di (Florence: Giunti, 2001), pl. XXXVI. sant’Antonio Abate tra assistenza e devozione (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’ alto medioevo, 2006), p. 161; L. Fenelli, “Sant’ Antonio Abate: Parole, reliquie, immagini” (Ph.D. diss., University of Bologna, 2007), p. 309. The two studies by Fenelli are the most thorough treatments of the iconography of St. Anthony the healer saint standing in a landscape, holding book and staff, and its origins in real practices and institutions. with two pigs at his feet, and flanked by kneeling figures 15. “. . . habitu cum signo T quod potentia vocant . . .” (Fenelli, Il from various social stations, seven men on the left and tau, p. 65); Fenelli, “Sant’ Antonio Abate,” pp. 93, 302; see also p. 38. seven women plus a baby on the right. None of the 16. Athanasius, Life of St. Anthony, §§ 14, 38, 48, 56, 57, 84. kneeling figures in the Fabriano panel is visibly ill or 17. On the disease and the Antonites role in treating it, see A. Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s holding an offering. Nevertheless these figures, like Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 13–52; the seven small figures in the woodcut, are attributes Fenelli, Il tau (note 14), pp. 33–93; “Sant’ Antonio Abate” (note 14), identifying the giant saint and reminding beholders why pp. 87–100; and E. Clementz, Les Antonins d’Issenheim: Essor et dérive one might direct prayer toward him. d’une vocation hospitalière à la lumière du temporel (Strasbourg: Société Savante d’Alsace, 1998), pp. 27–143, esp. 66–88 on the clerics’ therapeutic and surgical activity. 18. R. Offner, The Fourteenth Century: Bernardo Daddi and His pp. 383–390, pl. XXXVI. An inscription on the lower edge is illegible Circle, section III, vol. V, ed. M. Boskovits (Florence: Giunti, 2001), except for the date. Wood: The votive scenario 213

Wax body parts and other offerings were left at the others representing scenes from the Old Testament and tombs of many different saints. Our knowledge of this from the life and miracles of St. Anthony were painted on practice is based mostly on the reports and biographies the walls of the church in the early 1370s by a Florentine drawn up for canonization hearings, so there is a bias in artist, probably Niccolò di Tommaso. At the right is an the evidence toward modern saints, personages of the altar inside a small shrine-like chapel, adorned by an thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.19 Not all of these apparently painted image of a standing St. Anthony. In saints were known in their own lifetimes principally as front of the shrine is a box whose lid is held open by healers. Votive offerings and votaries do not appear as several onlookers. In the box is a jumble of what appear attributes in images of most of these saints. Only those to be wax hands and feet: a different way of storing identified as thaumaturges are iconographically labeled the offerings than that depicted in most scenes of tomb in this way: St. Anthony the Great, St. Anthony of Padua, worship.23 St. Nicholas of Tolentino.20 Shrine devotions, including Two images of the early sixteenth century give us the display of wax models of limbs, are described in rare glimpses of collections of votive offerings, more some hagiographical pictorial narratives, either in mural extensive and informative than the conventional cycles or in so-called Vita panels, that is, altarpieces hagiographical scenes: the Vision of Prior Ottobon involving full-length portraits accompanied by scenes by Vittorio Carpaccio (ca. 1515) and the woodcut from the life. Examples are the images of devotions at the reporting on the pilgrimage to the Schöne Maria of tomb of St. Margaret of Antioch in her Vita panel in the Regensburg by Michael Ostendorfer (ca. 1520).24 In the Vatican and at the tomb of St. Sebastian in a panel by Carpaccio, we see models of ships, vessels spared from Joose Lieferinxe in Rome.21 Here we also see wax hearts shipwreck by prayer. In the Ostendorfer, we see tools symbolizing devotion or mannikins symbolizing the soul and farm implements, perhaps actual objects involved or possibly representing a baby, as well as offerings of in accidents, perhaps symbols of the abandonment of crosses and other devotional tokens; also crutches and worldly concerns.25 In each scene, we see models of manacles speaking eloquently of ordeals overcome. body parts, but also many long slender objects, candle- A rare representation of devotions at the tomb of St. like lengths of wax in the true measures of healed Anthony is the scene of the Liberation of the Unjustly children. People gave bundles of wax spun out in thread- Condemned Youths at the church of San Antonio Abate, like lengths, known as trindles, long enough to encircle or the church of the Tau, in Pistoia.22 This image and the tomb or even the church.26 People gave money, food, and livestock. They gave entire buildings. They vowed to 27 19. Bisogni (note 7), pp. 68–79, reviews several major cases: St. restore or take care of existing images. Francis, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Elizabeth, St. Louis of Toulouse, Many categories of ex voto were rarely or never Margherita of Cortona, Chiara da Montefalco, St. Nicholas of represented in paintings or prints.28 We know from Tolentino, and St. Catherine of Siena. The best accounts of the range of possible votive gifts are G. Stahl, “Die Wallfahrt zur Schönen Maria in Regensburg,” Beiträge zur Geschichte des Bistums Regensburg 2 R. Offner, The Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting, ed. A. (1968):35–282, here 158–174; Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), pp. 19–53; Ladis (University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), pp. Sigal (note 7); Bacci (note 7), pp. 147–226; and the systematic 212–215. Fenelli, “Sant’ Antonio Abate” (note 14), p. 245. taxonomy in van der Velden (note 7), pp. 213–222. 23. Bacci (note 7), p. 184, adduces another instance of wax 20. On late medieval thaumaturgic saints, see J. Huizinga, The offerings not suspended but stored in a box, the same box that held Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, monetary offerings. 1996), pp. 198–200; A. Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers 24. The painting by Carpaccio is in the Accademia in Venice. On siècles du Moyen Age (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1981), pp. the Ostendorfer, see Christopher S. Wood, “Ritual and the Virgin on the 544–548; and G. B. Bronzini, “Santi taumaturghi e taumaturgia dell’ ex Column: The Cult of the Schöne Maria in Regensburg,” Journal of Ritual voto,” Lares 56 (1990):504–507. Studies 6 (1992):87–101. 21. L. Gilbertson, “Imaging St. Margaret: Imitatio Christi and 25. Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), p. 45. Imitatio Mariae in the Vanni Altarpiece,” in Images, Relics, and 26. Sigal (note 7), p. 18. Cannon and Vauchez (note 12), pp. Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. S. J. 57–59. Life-sized effigies were often made in the true weight of the Cornelison and S. B. Montgomery (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval represented person, as were wax images of babies and children. and Renaissance Studies, 2006), pp. 115–138. On the St. Sebastian See van der Velden (note 7), pp. 253–259, on weighted gifts. On panel, see C. Sterling, “The ‘Master of St. Sebastian’ (Josse Lieferinxe?),” measurement relics generally, see C. Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6eme série, vol. 22 (1942):135–148. For (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 68–70. reproductions of these and other such paintings, see Kriss-Rettenbeck 27. Bacci (note 7), p. 160. (note 7), ills. 1–12. 28. The best accounts of the range of possible votive gifts are G. 22. E. Carli, Gli affreschi del Tau a Pistoia (Florence: Edam, 1977), Stahl, “Die Wallfahrt zur Schönen Maria in Regensburg,” Beiträge zur Tav. 66. R. Offner, “Niccolò di Tommaso and the Rinuccini Master,” in Geschichte des Bistums Regensburg 2 (1968):35–282, here 158–174; 214 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

documents, for example, that wealthy votaries deposited of tomb cults rarely represented such practices. Of life-sized effigies, made of wax or even silver.29 Others course, many offerings were made to the Virgin Mary, left painted panels or murals representing themselves and she left no relics. Votive cults arose at sites where in prayer.30 Beginning in the late fifteenth century and she was known to have performed a miracle. At such perhaps earlier, votaries offered small panel paintings sites an altar and a fabricated image, sculpted or painted, depicting their moment of need or the cure. The effigies provided a focal point. The Virgin through her miracles and small panels, however, seldom appeared inside tended to take on local forms; she existed across a range other pictures.31 of “avatars.” The local sculpted or painted image of A historian of religion would therefore be unwise her was a way of naming that avatar. But the theology to accept the woodcut portrait of St. Anthony, or any was unambiguous: The fabricated image itself had no of the scenes of shrine-centered cults depicted in Vita powers, nor could it listen to appeals.34 No prop or panels, as straightforward evidence of real practices. portal or medium is necessary to communicate with the Most are highly conventional images, copied from Virgin or any saint. The prayer goes straight to the saint, picture to picture. They are also idealized images, wherever it is enunciated. This principle is made clear by offering a normative account of the votive exchange. a woodcut representing the pilgrimage site of Altötting Such paintings, for example, rarely depict the clerics in Bavaria, where pilgrims crowd an altar topped not by who managed the shrine.32 Nor do they ever show an image but by a figuration of the Madonna, half-length worshippers making offerings to painted or sculpted and surrounded by clouds (fig. 4).35 The figure of the images. In principle, pilgrims came to shrines to be near Virgin in the woodcut does not represent an apparition. relics, not an image. In some cases, the documents speak Rather, it says that the Madonna herself is present and of votive offerings made to painted or sculpted images the target of devotional attention, but that she is not not associated with tombs or relics.33 But the depictions available to the senses. Now we are in a better position to say something Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), pp. 19–53; Sigal (note 7); Bacci (note 7), pp. about the figure of St. Anthony in our woodcut (fig. 1). 147–226; and the systematic taxonomy in van der Velden (note 7), pp. 213–222. 29. A. M. Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine of Antioch to substitute for the tomb. The documents nearly always Bourgeoisie” (1902), in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity speak of vows made to the saint or the Virgin herself, not to images. But (Malibu, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 1999), pp. 185–221; J. von Giuliano Guizzelmi in 1487 vowed his nephew “to the Most Glorious Schlosser, “Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs,” Jahrbuch des Large Crucifix of the pieve of Prato”; Maniura (note 7), p. 415. See allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 29 (1910–1911):171–258; translated Vauchez (note 20), pp. 524–529, on the displacement of the cults of in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. R. the saints from tombs to images. Panzanelli (Malibu: Getty Research Institute, 2008), pp. 172–303. 34. Maniura stresses this point in “The Images and Miracles of Schlosser mentions that Philip the Bold deposited a wax effigy of Santa Maria delle Carceri” (note 5). Faranda (note 7), p. 122, notes his son at the tomb of St. Anthony in 1398; p. 227 in the English that the votive panels at Cesena never represent cult images: instead translation. See also Waldmann (note 9), pp. 15–30, as well as the they represent the Madonna herself. Some images seem to leave the literature cited in note 7, esp. van de Velden, pp. 223–245. Georges question open—for example, the prints by the German engraver known Didi-Huberman has written extensively on wax sculpture and casts as E. S. associated with the pilgrimage to Einsiedeln. Are the pilgrims of the Renaissance and its repression in the historiography; La in these engravings addressing the Virgin or a handmade image of her? ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité One representation of a pilgrimage that does show pilgrims focusing on de l’empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008) assembles his major examples and an image, two images in fact, can be and was read as a critique of the arguments. institution of pilgrimage: Ostendorfer’s woodcut reporting on the cult of 30. On paintings and sculptures as gifts, see van der Velden (note the Schöne Maria of Regensburg; see Wood (note 24). 7), pp. 278–285. 35. Schreiber (note 2), no. 4271. The image is the frontispiece to a 31. See also the Greek votive reliefs discussed by M. Gaifman, catalogue of miracles performed by the Virgin of Altötting, pubished in “Visualized Rituals and Dedicatory Inscriptions on Votive Offerings to 1497. The text was published by R. Bauer, “Das Büchlein der Zuflucht the Nymphs,” Opuscula 1 (2008):91; the deposit of pinakes or small zu Maria: Altöttinger Mirakelberichte von Jacobus Issickemer,” in painted panels at the shrine is not itself depicted in pinakes that depict Ostbairische Grenzmarken: Passauer Jahrbuch für Geschichte, Kunst votive practices. und Volkskunde (1964–65), pp. 206–236. The illustration here is 32. The shrine scenes at the church of the Tau in Pistoia do involve reproduced from the copy in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clerics. So does the scene of the sick tended by clerics before the open Rar. 847. Wallfahrt kennt keine Grenzen, no. 363. A. M. Hind, An tomb of St. Anthony in a fourteenth-century Catalan panel, in Fenelli, Introduction to a History of Woodcut (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), “Sant’ Antonio Abate” (note 14), pp. 244, 251. vol. 1, pp. 387–388, fig. 180. See also M. B. Merback, The Thief, 33. An example adduced by Bisogni (note 7), p. 76, is the the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in yimagines cere deposited before an ymagine of Nicholas of Tolentina Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London: Reaktion, 1999), p. 153, at Norcia; see also pp. 82–83 on the capacity of images of Margaret ill. 61. Wood: The votive scenario 215

Figure 4. Pilgrimage to the Virgin of Altötting. Woodcut, Figure 5. Ludwig Maler, St. Christopher and St. Anthony, frontispiece to Jakob Issickemer, Das buchlein der zuflucht 1468. Hand-colored woodcut, 38.2 x 25.5 cm. Photo: zu Maria der muter gottes in alten Oding (Nuremberg, 1497). Württembergisches Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart. Sign.: Xyl. Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, H 10/930. Inc. 15’.

At the shrine of St. Anthony in France, or in the many exceptionally inscribed with a name, a place, and a date, Antonite churches throughout Europe, pilgrims were “Ludwig Maler ze Ulm [14]68,” representing a pair of likely to have seen a painting or a sculpture portraying saints, Christopher and Anthony, side by side (fig. 5).36 St. the saint in just this way, enthroned and remote. The Christopher, a giant, ferries an unknown child across a woodcut is not a representation of the image one might river. His burden becomes ever heavier but with his great find at a shrine or church, however. It does not depict a pole he bests the current. Christ reveals himself, and scene of worship in which people approach a fabricated explains that Christopher had been carrying the weight portrait of the saint, painted or sculpted. Rather, it is a of the whole world—the orb in his hands. As proof he paper version of such an image. The woodcut is a portrait makes the pole bear leaves and fruit. St. Anthony is in its own right. The depicted figure is simply an image identified by book, bell, Tau staff, pig, and flames. Both of St. Anthony. The votaries address him, fulfill their vows figures are upright and tightly wedged into their frames, by giving him the promised gifts. Images of saints that resisting horizontal narrative extension. An earlier are fundamentally portraits, like the painted and sculpted images of Anthony or like our woodcut, tend to give the 36. Schreiber (note 2), no. 1379. Hind (note 35), p. 321. P. attributes in condensed form, with little suggestion of a Amelung, Der Frühdruck im deutschen Südwesten 1473–1500, vol. 1, scene or story. An example is a hand-colored woodcut, Ulm (Stuttgart: Württembergische Landesbibliothek, 1979), no. 1. 216 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

FPO

Figure 6. St. Anthony, Germany, second quarter of the fifteenth century. Hand-colored woodcut, 27 x 19.1 cm. Photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Inv. Nr. 118241 D.

woodcut, datable to the second quarter of the fifteenth attended by a pig. He is beset by two kneeling sufferers, century, represents St. Anthony seated on a triangular their hands pictured as flames, and a pair of hoofed and throne topped by a fanciful three-bay canopy. This is clawed demons, one of them wielding a club. Anthony the only other woodcut besides ours to picture him was frequently depicted in the late middle ages suffering enthroned (fig. 6).37 Here he holds bell and staff and is temptation at the hands of demons, as described in the Golden Legend. This is a rare, possibly unique, conflation of two iconographies, placing the suffering 37. Schreiber (note 2), no. 1218. Die Frühzeit des Holzschnitts devotees in parallel with the harrassing demons, thus (note 2), no. 12. See also the miniature painting in a French Book of Hours of the third quarter of the century, Morgan Library, M. 282, fol. rendering Anthony as victim and savior at once. 127v: Here Anthony is enthroned and attacked by demons on both A later woodcut, dating from around 1500, possibly flanks; there are no votaries, however. French, represents a standing Anthony holding an Wood: The votive scenario 217

ordinary Gothic crozier instead of the Tau-staff (fig. 7).38 Three of the kneeling figures are well dressed and healthy; they press their hands together in prayer; one has a rosary at her waist. The fourth supplicant is a ragged victim already missing at least one extremity. He holds an unidentifiable object in his right hand (a bell?). He has come directly to the shrine in hopes of relief. The long bent pole above is decked with models of limbs, swaddled babies, and pigs. Scrolls with Latin inscriptions prompt the prayers of the print’s beholders: “Pray for us, blessed father Anthony; may we deserve to avoid the morbid fire.” There are many such surviving images of St. Anthony standing and surrounded by a collection of attributes that includes votaries and offerings. A painted example is a panel at the castle of Issogne in Savoy, a descendant of the Fabriano image.39 Among the depicted ex votos are three long candles, two feet, one hand, one forearm, and one bone.40 A later descendant is the sixteenth-century woodcut attributed to Sebald Beham representing a relatively avuncular Anthony flanked by kneeling votaries, one with a flaming hand. A collection of body parts, mannikins, and candles is mounted on the exterior of an Antonite chapel or shrine (fig. 8).41 Some works, like ours, show the saint enthroned, creating an aura of remote authority and suggesting that he is not merely an intercessor capable of making a case to the Virgin or Christ on behalf of human sufferers, but Figure 7. St. Anthony, France (?), ca. 1500. Woodcut, 296 x 232 also a redoubtable source of power in his own right. The mm. Photo: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

38. Schreiber (note 2), no. *1217c. C. Dodgson, Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Century in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford: image suggests that he is the only mediator capable of Clarendon Press, 1929), no. 28. On prints depicting St. Anthony, see managing the ravaging fire, symbol of a sacred chaos Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), p. 27, and S. Gross, Hans Wydyz: sein Œuvre und die oberrheinische Bildschnitzkunst (Hildesheim and New that precedes even the gods. Anthony was considered York: Georg Olms, 1997), p. 134, nn. 398–401. vengeful and ill-tempered. In the popular imagination 39. Panel, 133 x 118 cm. See Fenelli, “Sant’ Antonio Abate” (note the disease was understood as a punishment for insults 14), p. 246, with illustration. N. Gabrielli, Rappresentazioni sacre or neglect, for example reckless damage to an image of e profane nel Castello di Issogne e la pittura nella Valle d’Aosta alla the saint.42 The historical Anthony, by contrast, according fine del ’400 (Torino: Industria libraria tipografica editrice, 1959), pp. 171–172. to Athanasius, was a humble ascetic who wanted his 43 40. The objects are brown and might be meant to be understood tomb site hidden. as wooden. There is textual evidence that models of body parts offered at shrines in the earlier middle ages were made of wood: see Gregory of Tours, cited by Freedberg (note 7), p. 136. The tomb of 42. Fenelli, Il tau (note 14), pp. 126, 142–146. Erasmus in his St. Wolfgang depicted in an altar at Pipping near Munich, according Colloquies mocked this belief: “When [the saints] were alive . . . who to Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), p. 76, is the only late medieval image was more good natured than Anthony? . . . But what terrible diseases showing wooden ex votos. Many of the examples in Andree (note 7) they send now if they are not, as you have heard, venerated properly”; are wooden, but they are hard to date. cited by Huizinga (note 20), pp. 199–200. See Luther’s comment in 41. C. Dodgson, Catalogue of Early German and Flemish Woodcuts his Table Talk, cited by Fenelli, Il tau (note 14), p. 143, n. 116. See (London: British Museum, 1903), vol. 1, p. 465, no. 115. F. W. H. Clementz (note 17), pp. 51–54, on vindictive saints. Hollstein, German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, ca. 1400–1700 43. According to Athanasius (note 16), §§ 90–92, the saint insisted (Amsterdam: Hertzberger, n.d.), vol. 3, p. 202. M. Geisberg, The on being buried underground and made sure that only two brethren German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1500–1550 (New York: Hacker, 1974), knew the site. Athanasius reported that in his day no one any more no. 1504 (attributed to Hans Weiditz). The print is datable to about 1522. knew the location. 218 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

banner on canvas by Spinello Aretino (ca. 1375), in the Metropolitan Museum of Art;46 and the St. John the Evangelist by Giovanni del Biondo (1380s) in the Accademia.47 It is not clear what provoked or licensed these moves, but they are the art historical context for the promotion of Anthony to a throne. Anthony’s pictorial enthronement reinforced the saint’s reputation as a distant and godlike personage. There are several enthroned Anthonys from the fourteenth century, including a Florentine dossal in a private collection attributed to the Master of 1343;48 a processional banner by Barnaba da Modena at the Victoria and Albert Museum (ca. 1370);49 a panel by Niccolò di Tommaso in Naples, dated 1371;50 a panel by Spinello Aretino at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (ca. 1385);51 and a panel by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (ca. 1380) (fig. 9). The black-robed saint in this last work is immense and remote, his gaze fixed and forbidding. His roster of attributes has been stripped down to a red book and a staff; he is framed not by human votaries but by four angels. These panels are the ancestors of the fifteenth-century enthroned Anthonys, such as the altarpiece by Priamo della Quercia (1445) at the Oratorio di S. Antonio in Figure 8. Sebald Beham, St. Anthony, ca. 1522. Woodcut, 29.3 Volterra, with fire below the robe and small laborers— x 22.3 cm. © Trustees of the British Museum. not victims of disease—hauling goods, apparently salt, as an offering;52 and our own woodcut. We also have fragments of a tradition of sculpted enthroned Anthonys. The oldest is a French work in Before the mid-fourteenth century, only a very few stone dated to the mid-fourteenth century that seems holy personages were depicted seated on thrones. This independent of the Italian panels.53 Possibly derived sign of monarchical, judicial, ecclesiastical, or academic from the Italian paintings, or from lost German panels authority was reserved for God the Father, Christ, and the Virgin, as well as saints whose iconography involved enthronement: the doctor Thomas Aquinas, for example, 46. Metropolitan Museum of Art 13.175. F. Zeri, Metropolitan or bishop saints such as Peter, Martin, or Nicholas of Museum of Art: Italian Paintings, Florentine School (Greenwich, Conn.: Myra. Some Florentine altarpieces of the fourteenth New York Graphic Society, 1971), pp. 101–102. 47. Galleria dell’ Accademia, inv. no. 446. Marcucci, Gallerie century ventured to promote saints to thrones in excess Nazionalie di Firenze, no. 79. of their traditional iconographies. Examples are the St. 48. Fenelli, “Sant’ Antonio Abate” (note 14), p. 331, with Bartholomew by Jacopo del Casentino (1330s) in the illustration. Accademia in Florence;44 the St. Lucy by Giovanni di 49. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 781.1894. Bartolomeo Cristiani (ca. 1375) at the Yale University 50. Naples, Museo di San Martino. Fenelli, Sant’ Antonio Abate, p. 45 305 with illustration. Offner, “Niccolò di Tommaso and the Rinuccini Art Gallery; the Mary Magdalene, a processional Master” (note 22), pp. 224–225 and fig. 10. 51. Providence, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, inv. no. 16.243. 44. Florence, Galleria dell’ Accademia, inv. no. 440. L. Marcucci, 52. Sumptuosa tabula picta: pittori a Lucca tra gotico e Gallerie Nazionalie di Firenze, I dipinti toscani del secolo XIV (Rome: rinascimento, exhibition catalogue, Lucca, Museo nazionale di Villa Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1965), no. 27. Guinigi (Livorno: Sillabe, 1998), pp. 330–336. Fenelli, “Sant’ Antonio 45. Yale University Art Gallery, inv. no. 1943.215. C. Seymour, Abate” (note 14), pp. 311–312. Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven: 53. Brussels, Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, inv. no. 8783. The Yale University Press, 1970), no. 42. work was first published by Gross (note 38), p. 136 and fig. 82. Wood: The votive scenario 219

mediating between the two traditions, are several German wood sculptures of the fifteenth century.54 The best-known is the enthroned St. Anthony by Nicholas of Hagenau for the Antonites at Isenheim in Alsace (ca. 1490), now in Colmar, the central figure of the altarpiece later completed with two sets of painted wings by Matthias Grünewald.55 The intermediary links between the Tuscan painted altarpieces (fig. 9), the German sculptures, and the two German prints (figs. 1 and 6), all representing St. Anthony enthroned, have vanished. It is impossible to construct a coherent art historical narrative.56 Enthronement opened the image of St. Anthony onto the iconography of the Epiphany. His body rhymes with the figure of Madonna supporting her son on her lap, target of the wondering gazes of the shepherds and the gifts of the Magi. In our woodcut, too, the company splits into two classes, low and high, ragged and empty- handed, well-dressed and gift-bearing. If the Dosso Enchantress is an anagram or veiled transfiguration of a Rest on the Flight into Egypt, then the St. Anthony woodcut is an anagram of an Epiphany. Now we have a sense of the family of images this picture belongs to. The purpose of such images was to deliver a true image of Anthony. When it came to images of saints associated with disease or trouble, the beholding of an image, accompanied by prayer, was sometimes held to bring automatic, immediate protection. This is explicit with many images of St. Christopher. The early woodcut known as the “Buxheim” St. Christopher bears an inscription affirming that anyone who looks at him will not die unexpectedly on that day.57 Images of St. Sebastian were also associated

54. Examples are at St. Justinus at Hoechst (near Frankfurt am Figure 9. Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, St. Anthony, ca. 1380. Main); the Antonite church in Würzburg; and the Antonite abbey at Tempera and gold on wood, 307.5 x 127.2 cm. © Isabella Zahrensdorf-Tempzin (Mecklenburg). Ibid., pp. 122–125, 135–138. See also the southern Netherlandish or French sculpture in the Liebieghaus Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. in Frankfurt, inv. no. St. P. 382. It is believed but cannot be proven that these works reflect a lost prototype at the main Antonite shrine at St.-Antoine. 55. On the sculpted St. Anthony at Isenheim, see M. Seidel et al., with protection from harm.58 An early woodcut of Mathis Gothart Nithart Grünewald: der Isenheimer Altar (Stuttgart: St. Valentine, a saint involved with the treatment of Belser, 1973), pp. 203–206. epileptics, bears an inscription asking Valentine to 56. Some of the works listed by G. Gozzi, Sant’ Antonio Abbate ‘il 59 Grande’ (Mantua: Sometti, 2005), might be sculptures. Gozzi mentions “Pray to God for us.” No image of St. Anthony bears many images of St Anthony but reproduces few; Fenelli, “Sant’ Antonio an inscription promising protection by virtue of a mere Abate” (note 14), is more selective but more informative. sighting. Some bear inscriptions asking the saint to 57. Schreiber (note 2), no. 1349. Origins of European Printmaking (note 2), no. 35. Many Christians were convinced that a sighting of the image of St. Christopher on a given day would protect the beholder 58. See Origins of European Printmaking (note 2), nos. 5 and 36, from harm or illness. H.-Fr. Rosenfeld, Der hl. Christophorus: Seine images of Sebastian inscribed with prayers for protection from plague. Verehrung und seine Legende, Acta Academiae Aboensis–Humaniora 59. Schreiber (note 2), no. 1717b. Origins of European Printmaking 10, 1937) (Åbo: Akademi, 1037), pp. 423–430. (note 2), no. 98; Dodgson (note 38), no. 24. 220 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

“pray for us,” to intercede. But the woodcut we looked fifteenth century.66 One could also hope for contact with at earlier that couples Anthony with Christopher (fig. relics of the thaumaturge in southern Germany because 5) gives the clue to the function of printed portraits of Antonite clerics used to travel from town to town bearing St. Anthony.60 The prophylactic power associated with relics and collecting alms.67 But few viewers of the Christopher was extended by analogy to Anthony. This woodcut were likely to have seen anything like the scene was surely one of the expectations from our image.61 it depicted. No doubt a contemporary would never One imagines it mounted in a household like the have posed to himself the question of the historical or woodcut of St. Christopher attached with red sealing topographical siting of the scene. The question would wax to the wall above the fireplace in the Brussels have made no sense. The image represents a state of Annunciation by the Master of Flémalle, a panel painting affairs outside of time: Anthony (or his relics) heals all of the late 1420s.62 those who suffer, yesterday and today and tomorrow, The historical life of our woodcut is obscure. In from St. Anthony’s fire. the nineteenth century it was transferred from the The woodcut is a portrait of Anthony that has started Hofbibliothek in Munich to the print cabinet. Therefore, to look like a scene because the iconographic shorthand like many other surviving woodcuts, it was very likely is beginning to open up into a typology of devotions, found pasted inside a manuscript or printed book, each with its own temporality. The attributes do not sit though the identity of that book was not recorded.63 still, as labels should—compare for example the kneeling The St. Valentine print also mentions a place, Rufach, figures in the Fabriano panel of 1353 (fig. 3)—but have whereas no image of St. Anthony does. Scholars have taken on a life of their own. They have been spurred into speculated about a possible association of our print awareness and action, beseeching the figure of the saint with one or another Antonite hospital, but there is no whom they serve to identify. The simple portrait of the conclusive link.64 Anthony’s tomb was in France, about saint has begun to resemble a plausible scene unfolding three hundred miles to the southwest. St.-Antoine-en- in space and time. This is the essence of the device Viennois was a major pilgrimage site, a short detour developed in early fifteenth-century Flemish painting from one of the main routes to Compostela. The known as “disguised symbolism.”68 A “disguised” shrine is mentioned in literature, for example in the symbol is a conventional attribute that the painter fifteenth-century French prose collection Cent nouvelles pretends to mask by motivating it within a pictorial nouvelles.65 Many German pilgrims made the trek in the fiction—that is, giving it a legitimate reason to exist in the fiction. A good example is the panel representing St. 60. See also a late fourteenth-century Florentine triptych that pairs Barbara by Jan van Eyck (Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum Anthony and Christopher on the exterior wings; F. Zeri, Italian Paintings voor Schone Kunsten, 1437), where the saint, whose in the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1976), no. attribute is a tower, sits on the ground in front of a 9. The inscription below St. Christopher on that triptych promises full-size church tower under construction. The device protection from illness for anyone who looks at the image that day; St. Anthony, however, is described not as a healer, but as a lamp of true draws a distinction between a traditional picture that is light, a teacher, a master, and a traveler. At Isenheim, Grünewald pairs content to enumerate attributes and a new-style picture Anthony and Sebastian on the exterior wings; see Hayum (note 17), that describes a plausible scene that might map onto pp. 17–20. someone’s experience of reality. 61. Kriss-Rettenbeck suggests that the main function of the St. The unfolding of the attributes in the St. Anthony Anthony woodcuts was propaganda for the order, a hint to us to exercise caution when assessing their purpose and use (note 7), pp. woodcut into a scene reinforces the work’s recursive 25–27. character. The woodcut “mentions” states of the soul— 62. Brussels, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. no. 785. The Master of the physiological and mental conditions of the depicted Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt votaries—in order to identify the seated saint. But those and Berlin (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), no. 3. mentions are also “uses” of the depictions, in the sense 63. On the provenances of the early woodcuts, see P. Schmidt, Gedruckte Bilder in handgeschriebenen Büchern: zum Gebrauch von Druckgraphik im 15. Jahrhundert (Köln : Böhlau, 2003). 66. Ibid., p. 120, nn. 40, 122. 64. Neither the two shields with crosses on either side of Anthony’s 67. Fenelli (ibid.), p. 138, is citing a text condemning the practice. head nor the bird have ever been explained. For various reasons, The relic-driven alms campaign covered all of Germany by 1395. plausible but not decisive, our print has been associated with Swabia, See Clementz (note 17), pp. 147–172. Some relics of Anthony were perhaps the town of Ulm; the watermark is shared by two other early permanently transferred to Arles and to Milan, but the order fought woodcuts, Schreiber (note 2), nos. 471 and 1000; see Origins of fiercely to limit the fragmentation. European Printmaking (note 2), p. 297. 68. E. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: 65. Fenelli, Il Tau (note 14), p. 125. Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 131–148. Wood: The votive scenario 221

that they represent the ordeals of real people and so a distant prayer—a performative entry into a contract—a enter into possible overlap with the state of mind and cure, and a journey. Suspended from the rail above the body of a person outside the picture, a person looking at throne, finally, is the spellbinding display of offerings, an the picture and hoping not to fall ill. archive of past suffering that proves the efficacy of the The Enchantress by Dosso Dossi is also recursive, but system. All these time-frames are bodily and experiential, it does not invite its beholders to project themselves making no claims at all about what happens to the soul directly into the fiction. There is no place held in the after death. The picture, as well as the cult of St. Anthony picture for the beholder. There are no immediate that it describes, breaks with the salvational function of existential stakes for the beholder—no interest, in the devotion. One was supposed to turn to the saints for classical sense. Most people encountering that painting help in securing the immortality of the soul. Votaries in its original (or for that matter its current) setting of St. Anthony are more interested in the integrity of understand how to approach it—namely, with the mind, their bodies. with no expectation that it help with an urgent practical The picture heightens tension by contrasting the problem, but rather that it is a wondering, savoring, urgency of the sufferers with the saint’s implacability. ruminating delight. The painting represents various The enthronement is exploited as way of introducing modes of cultic or magical interaction between mind drama. Now we are well beyond the rhetorical range and thing, but only to stage a comparison with the of mere attributes, for the picture has been transformed different kind of interaction it offered its own beholders. from a simple portrait, whose efficacy followed from its The beholder of the painting by Dosso dominates time. authenticity, into a commentary on interaction between The beholder of the woodcut, by contrast, is afraid that humans and the divine in general. he or she will be dominated by time. Contingency and The woodcut of St. Anthony describes neither the emergent experience have been inducted into the picture behavior of the first witnesses of Christ’s Passion, remote through the referential elements, the attributes which are in time and space, nor the behavior of characters from at the same time starting to resemble portraits. an epic poem based on legendary stories, as Dosso’s The convulsed, indecorous temporality of suffering painting does, but rather, the behavior of people one was not alien to the pictorial tradition: Think only of the might actually know. It is a scene that one might end Crucifixion—the writhing of the thieves—or the myriad up joining one day. One prayed to St. Anthony at home, Christian martyrdom scenes. Martyrs were placeholders, perhaps before a woodcut attached to the wall; one role models, for ordinary beholders. But how hard begged to be spared or cured. The woodcut provided it must have been for most Christians in practice to the focal point of prayer, and at the same time presented imagine themselves before an imperial tribunal in the future as a tree of possibilities. One person fails to third-century Rome, persevering in their faith in the face seek the saint’s grace and is punished with illness; he of a gruesome ordeal. The effects of St. Anthony’s fire must make his way on damaged limbs to the shrine to were vivid and near. The woodcut hints at the power of make amends. One person seeks out the Antonites and this disease and others, above all the plague, to upset submits to an examination—the clerics were known for not only lives but also social hierarchy. Money could their diagnostic skill. Another asks for a cure in exchange buy salvation but not health. The rhyme between the for proof of respect; he is cured and undertakes a knight on the right and the crippled votary below him, promised pilgrimage. Another seeks relief from a local between the sword and the crutch, brings out the image’s medicine woman, an adept of herbal cures. Still another biopolitical dimension. dies, unaccountably ignored by the healer. Another Portraits of donors keep a respectful distance from the tempts fate, does nothing, and survives. The theology targets of their devotion, revealing no state of mind other of the votive exchange insisted that the offering was a than steady attentiveness. They hope for salvation. The good-faith fulfillment of a promise made after the saint votaries of St. Anthony are interested in a less abstract had performed the cure. After all, it was the votary goal: not salvation but cure, the redemption not of the whose integrity was to be tested, not the saint’s. But the soul but of the body. They do not contemplate the saint documents suggest that plenty of believers made their in tranquility, but press inward, wrapping their arms sacrifices before the cure, as propitiations or bribes.69 around the arms of his throne, daring to approach the hem of his robe. Here there are three time-frames. The 69. G. Stahl, “Die Wallfahrt zur Schönen Maria in Regensburg,” lowest register of figures invokes the onset of a disease Beiträge zur Geschichte des Bistums Regensburg 2 (1968):35–282, and a panic-stricken journey. The middle register invokes here 158–174. Bacci (note 7), pp. 149–152, stresses the ambiguity 222 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

There were many choices. Pilgrimage is voluntary, not makes the connection. The Antonites tried to control the obligatory.70 proliferation of altars dedicated to St. Anthony. In 1445 The woodcut is a scenario: a script outlining they persecuted a hermit who had set up a shrine to the what might happen in the future. The scenario is saint outside the sway of the Order. A compromise was a term of art developed by the Italian comedy, the reached: The hermit could keep his altar but had no right commedia dell’arte. It is a written sketch of the plot to display an image of Anthony.74 The dissemination of that allows for improvisation; it is not a forecast, nor woodcuts or small panel paintings into private spaces is it a prescription, nor does it ramify infinitely. It is a was harder to control. bounded tree of possible outcomes that helps people Grünewald’s retable at the Antonite hospital at deal with contingency by manipulating expectations Isenheim was a complex symbolic machine offering of likelihood.71 The scenario contains several different a guide for a “total therapy” of the patient, body narratives of how things will unfold in the future. and soul, health and salvation.75 But the allegorical The hypothetical narratives influence beliefs about mediation of a retable is considerable. Grünewald’s likelihood. The key to the grip of the scenario on its iconographical inventions create complex parallels beholders is the compulsion to project the self into the among Christ, Anthony, and patient. The experience of tree of contingencies. The votaries are placeholders the painted panels was supplemented by sermons; by for the real beholders. The possibility that you might the various participatory theologies of the late middle find yourself suspended in the subjunctive mood of the ages encouraging an Imitatio Christi; and by lore, the scenario creates interest. subliterary mesh of stories and plays that connected Hagiographical images show vivid scenes, as if Christian myth to everyday life. Paintings impose a quoted from a Crucifixion or a Lamentation. The tomb filter of allegory and convention between myth and scene in the Vatican Vita panel of Margaret of Antioch experience, not to mention their forbidding association may represent a woman in childbirth.72 And yet such with the altar. A woodcut like ours is suballegorical. images are not scenarios, for until the image is set in There were other printed images that invited motion by the medium of print—until it is liberated from projection, for example the image of the bedridden and the altarpiece—the beholder will not enter into a direct, dying man that often accompanied the text known as one-to-one relationship with the scene.73 The woodcut the Ars moriendi, warning the beholder to settle the is mobile, easily penetrating the domestic and bodily state of his soul before death. What was the difference spheres. The image of the wax hand is now brought between this and the image of pilgrimage? The Ars right into people’s hands. The medium of the print moriendi confronted the beholder with a simple, even if not easy, binary choice: Learn to die properly, or else. In this way it is analogous to the image of the Temptation about whether the offering was a propitiation, the homage of a devoted of St. Anthony. The message of that scene is obvious: vassal, or an ex post facto demonstration of gratitude. 70. See V. and E. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture You are supposed to resist temptation. A scenario, by (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 3, on pilgrimage as contrast, projects a more ambiguous and branching a voluntary undertaking that crucially involves potentiality. See the plurality of plots. remarks by I. V. Small on the ex voto as a “contingent expression of The scenario is completely unlike a script for ritual belief,” a “space of doubt” rather than credulity; “Believing in Art: The behavior. Ritual tends to “intercept” all attempts at Votive Structures of Conceptual Art,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 55/56 (2009):304. reflexive communication, such as the recursivity or self- 76 71. The concept of the scenario plays a role today in engineering, observation that complex works like our print invite. systems analysis, and corporate and public policy. Scenarios help people grasp complex systems, or prepare publics to accept not necessarily desirable outcomes of policies or situations. See, for 74. Ibid., p. 103. example, I. Alexander and N. Maiden, Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases: 75. Hayum (note 17); Clementz (note 17), pp. 271–290; Fenelli, Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle (Chichester and “Sant’ Antonio Abate (note 14), pp. 291–293. See also Merback (note Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2004). 35), a study of painted Crucifixions and the culture of punishment 72. Gilbertson (note 21), p. 137. in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Germany, as well as V. Groebner, 73. Note the engraving by Baccio Baldini possibly reproducing a Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages lost Vita panel of St. Anthony by Fra Angelico; Fenelli, “Sant’ Antonio (New York: ZONE, 2004). The latter two books suggest that historical Abate” (note 14), p. 210, nn. 67 and 251. The print does not have the beholders readily compared images of mythic suffering to their own same effect as ours because the shrine scene, which shows pilgrims real local and personal experiences. below a tomb erected on columns, is barely visible in the lower left 76. N. Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University corner. Press, 1995), p. 452. Wood: The votive scenario 223

An individual cannot just barge into a ritual with all his content, suffices to create a contact between the living or her cares and fears on display. Individuals involved and the dead, or the well and the sick. The rhetoric of in rituals are not supposed to communicate with one the photograph is so potent that a daguerrotype even of another as individuals, “out of character.” The ritual an unknown subject is more compelling than almost any is immersive and participatory, whereas the scenario painted portrait, or let us say all but the most remarkable involves shuttling back and forth between distance and painted portraits. The wax ex voto exerts a similar pull self-projection. The woodcut devirtualizes the scene at and fascination by virtue of its indexicality: or rather, a shrine, which would still have been governed by ritual its rhetoric of indexicality, for the wax limb was not in and conventions. fact cast from a real limb. The medium of wax was the At the shrine, one would approach relics encased preferred medium for the ex voto, because it symbolized within an altar or a reliquary. One would see others, the tight link to individual experience that no painting, suffering or healed, making their pleas or fulfilling their no poem, and no ritual could ever have. vows. One would see the display of gifts, in effect a The model of the body part, besides being a gift of portrait gallery, a display of images matched one to valuable wax, introduces a further concept of sacrifice, one with real individuals. At the shrine, the individual, one not covered by the votive system. The wax body no matter how humble, portrays himself. The pilgrim’s part may also suggest that the vengeful saint required bodily presence alone is already a kind of self-portrait, from the victim, if he expected the fiery disease to for in her devotions the pilgrim is making an image abate, a sacrifice of flesh. In that case, the wax model of herself, for other pilgrims. The individuals remain must be understood as a representation not of a healed anonymous, but nonetheless they perform for others, extremity, but of a diseased and disfigured or even and they deposit, in the form of wax body parts, self- amputated extremity, a hand or foot surrendered to the portraits. The feet and hands refer to individuals even if thaumauturge as the price of the cure. Only then does the content of the reference is lost. The wax body parts the story of suffering end. lack any differentiating marks. They were not individually The possibility that the wax models represent not commissioned but were mass produced by artisans, for healed but irreversibly damaged limbs, thus invoking purchase “off the rack,” probably from a shop located the most literal possible concept of self-sacrifice, is near the shrine. But the context creates them as portraits. supported by evidence that at some shrines one might The site and the display railing signify that this very have seen displays of real amputated hands and feet, object has made its way out of the artisan’s shop and into dried or mummified. Giovanni Francesco Pico della the hands of a votary. Simply by purchasing the object Mirandola reported in 1502 that at an Antonite cloister and transferring it from shop to shrine, the votary makes he saw “scorched limbs and bones” “suspended from the it his own. doorposts of the sanctuary.”77 The body parts in Beham’s Some images representing appeals for saintly St. Anthony woodcut, which hang not at a tomb but intercession include depictions of kneeling petitioners on an exterior wall, have different shapes from the wax whose reference is ambiguous. In the St. Anthony panel models as well as a shriveled or sinewy character (fig. by the Master of Fabriano, for example, the kneeling 8). Laura Fenelli wondered whether the shrine scene in donors with their generic facial features might be generic the Antonite frescoes at the church of the Tau in Pistoia votaries (fig. 3). But it is also possible that the figures in might depict a box full not of wax models but of real that painting refer to real individuals, perhaps the very hands and feet, amputated limbs preserved as true relics family who commissioned the picture. If so, then they of diseased but now cured bodies.78 In the woodcut are portraits, despite the low degree of resemblance. The representing the Altötting pilgrimage, the man with the wax body parts at a shrine similarly occupy a middle referential state. Their target of reference—the individual 77. Cited in Hayum (note 17), pp. 31–32. She also presents whose limb was healed—is quickly forgotten. But the evidence of amputations at the Antonite hospitals. medium of wax creates an effect of a direct connection 78. Fenelli, “Sant’ Antonio Abate” (note 14), p. 247. Elsewhere to a person. Someone was here, the wax foot says. Fenelli has collected examples suggesting that such offerings were To behold a display of wax hands and feet and organs later misunderstood as minatory displays of the punished bodies of is something like coming across a box of unlabelled blasphemers against St. Anthony or other sacrilegous criminals; Dall’ eremo alla stalle; S. Antonio Abate tra testi e immagini (Rome and Bari: nineteenth-century photographs. They are portraits Laterza, forthcoming). I am grateful to Laura Fenelli for sharing these even if we don’t know the names of the portrayed. The texts with me. On cults associated with the bodies and body parts of form of the portrait photograph, even if severed from its executed criminals, see Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), pp. 19–25. 224 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

crutch in the foreground, missing one foot, also holds your promise, thus closing the deal struck at the moment a foot in his hand, as if he were offering a part of his of crisis, but in addition you recommend yourself to own body to appease the Virgin and stave off further the saint. The body part does not represent attention punishment (fig. 4).79 The predella of an altarpiece by or attendance. The body part, more purely an offering, Hans Fries in the Franziskanerkirche of Freibourg im closes the cycle once and for all. Üechtland (Switzerland) (1506) represents a devotee The double function of the votive effigy is made clear at the shrine of St. Anthony of Padua carrying his own by a documented example of a silver effigy that was amputated hand.80 The amputated limb is the most melted down for the silver but replaced by a dummy.83 In powerfully signifying self-portrait, a physical sample of this way, the clerics could make use of the silver, but the the self: a relic of a still-living body, in fact. It is an “auto- votary could go on with his motionless virtual devotions icon,” to invoke Jeremy Bentham’s term for his own indefinitely. preserved and fully dressed body, still on display to this The wax and silver full-body effigies are often day at University College, London.81 compared to painted representations of kneeling donors, The wax model displaces the idea of self-sacrifice on walls or panels. A celebrated example of the latter is from the body itself to a mere object. This is the key the Madonna of Canon George van der Paele by Jan van to the drama of the shrine scene. Depictions of tomb Eyck (Bruges, Groeningemuseum, 1436). Here the mortal shrines sustain this drama because they do not make it donor and the holy personages share the same pictorial easy to distinguish—or can get away with not bothering space and are portrayed in the same scale. Many lesser to distinguish—between the severed, mummified foot patrons and artists employed the same sensational and the wax model that represents a spared foot. device, for example in a small panel by Hans Memling The wax body part is often treated in the scholarly (fig. 10).84 The unidentified man at the left kneels in literature together with the life-sized wax or silver effigy. permanent attendance on the Virgin and the saints The body part is understood as a less expensive and surrounding her: Catherine on the left, and on the right, elaborate version of the effigy. Many a votary must have with her tower, Barbara. The rhyme with the woodcut wished that she could afford to represent herself in true representing devotions to St. Anthony is obvious. The proportions, either as a sculpture in precious material enthroned figure is flanked by two figures on each or as a wax effigy outfitted with real clothes and hair side. The mortal man at the left finds an awkward and with painted resemblant features, rather than as a position neither in nor out of the scene, symbolizing mere hand or foot. The effigy, like the humble body part, the ambiguity of his relation to the holy figures. The fundamentally represents an expenditure fulfilling a vow. sacred fire or chaos is now translated into drapery folds. But it does something else that the body part cannot: Churchgoers who paused before this altarpiece would By representing the votary in an attitude of devotion, it know that someone with means had dedicated resources places her in permanent attendance on the shrine. The votary deputizes the effigy to pray for her. The effigy represents, to the saint and to pilgrims, what the votary whether this counts as magic or not has vexed the literature. Warburg wishes she could do, namely, train her heart and mind and Schlosser thought so; Kriss-Rettenbeck, Brückner, and van der unceasingly on the divine.82 With an effigy you fulfill Velden argue that the effigies were simply representations of a spiritual process or attitude (see note 7 above). See also van der Velden (note 7), pp. 223–245, and “Medici Votive Images and the Scope and Limits of Likeness,” in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the 79. Bauer (note 35), believes that the image represents one of Renaissance, ed. N. Mann and L. Syson (London: British Museum the stories recounted in the text, no. 24, in which a man facing an Publications, 1998), p. 133. Bacci (note 7), p. 194, sees the full-body amputation prays for courage. The Virgin rewards him by replacing effigy not as a survival of ancient superstition—Warburg and Schlosser’s his diseased foot with a healthy one. It is not clear, however, why the argument—but a phenomenon of the late middle ages related to the woodcut would represent this man as a beggar in rags and missing one increasing involvement of the individual in public religion. Bacci’s foot. See Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), pp. 25 and 33. view is supported by the fact that the custom of leaving models of body 80. Hans Fries, 1460–1523: Ein Maler an der Zeitwende (Munich: parts is historically continuous with pagan antiquity, whereas the effigy Hirmer, 2001), cat. no. 9b, pp. 156–157. is not; see A. Rossi, “Tracce di continuità culturale fra paganesimo e 81. R. Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion, 1991), pp. 123–125. cristianesimo: le offerte votive,” in Ex voto tra storia e antropologia 82. L. Bruhns, “Das Motiv der Ewigen Anbetung in der römischen (note 7), pp. 29–34. Grabplastik des 16., 17., und 18. Jhs.,” Römisches Jahrbuch für 83. Van der Velden (note 7), p. 175. Kunstgeschichte 4 (1940):253–432; M. Denzler, “Ewige Anbetung,” 84. D. de Vos, Hans Memling (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator Paribas, Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunst (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1937-), vol. 6, 1994), no. 35, p. 166. The composition is based on Memling’s own col. 572–600; Reinle (note 7), pp. 31–65, 237–241. The question of larger altarpiece of 1479 made for the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges. Wood: The votive scenario 225

Figure 10. Hans Memling, Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor, after 1479. Oil on panel, 68.3 x 73.3 cm. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

to his relationship with the Virgin Mary, in worshipful to downplay the origins of the vow in suffering—in respect for her person and in hopes that she might emergent time—and instead to strive for an image intercede with her son on behalf of the mortal soul. of composure and stability. The effigy represented a That visitor may not know who exactly is represented constancy of purpose untouched by time. Some effigies, in the painting. Such portraits were not identified by it seems, did preserve a memory of the unsettled state inscriptions, but at best by a coat of arms. Kneeling of body and soul that set the whole process in motion. figures were recognizable as portraits by virtue of their In 1497 Giuliano Guizzelmi, on behalf of a votary, paid compliance with conventions of posture and placement for a wax image of a kneeling man in camicia—that and by a rhetoric of physiognomic realism. They read is, in his shirt—which he then placed at the Madonna as portraits, indeed as self-portraits, in the sense that delle Carceri.85 It would be unthinkable, however, that a the agency of the commissioning votary dominated the donor represent himself in a state of partial undress in a agency of the fabricating artisan, unless the painting painting. And indeed most of the wax and silver effigies, were done by a famous or autarchic painter. It was no as far as we can tell, represented their subjects not only different at the shrine. intact but in states of dignity, composure, and worldly The similarities between the painted donor portrait splendor, just as did painted portraits. The body part and the wax or silver full-body effigy reveal the suggests by its incompleteness the anguish of uncertainty difference between the effigy and the mere body part. The votary who hopes to maintain a permanent virtual presence at a shrine through an effigy may be tempted 85. Maniura (note 7), p. 420. 226 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011

that is the matrix of devotional resolution. The painted be anxiety. Devotional practice is designed to soothe donor portrait or the wax effigy with hands clasped this anxiety. The composed features and limbs of the and expressionless features, by contrast, announces the kneeling painted devout are attempts to bring into being intention to overcome contingency altogether.86 There is an equilibrium of the soul. The donor is represented in a no reference to any specific occasion.87 state of spiritual “health.” The effigy in camicia and the body part, as well The wax body parts were never the focal point of as chains and manacles and other relics of a crisis, anybody’s devotions. No divine power flowed through preserved the sense of the “emergent occasion” that them. They were just tokens of expenditure, and a simple set the devotional cycle in motion. Every artifact is spelling out of the nature of the disaster. And yet they “occasioned.” It is the product of unique circumstances were the densest points in the whole scene, whether and actions. An artifact that strives to transcend its own the real scene at the shrine or the depicted scene in the occasion—most any cult image, for example—will try woodcut. The body parts are dense because they are to efface the traces of its own historical production. The places within the representation (the scene at the shrine, votive offering does just the opposite. Its entire meaning the woodcut) less subject to representational codes. They is its preservation of a unique experience of suffering. map onto people’s lives. They are “living images” in the The moment of origin is not allowed to vanish in the sense developed in a recent book by Fredrika Jacobs.89 representation. Whereas most representations—portraits It is the same in the fictional painting by Dosso Dossi: of saints, histories, symbolic images—derived their the densest and most compelling point in the scene—the authority by pointing back beyond their own mere enchantress is looking straight at it—is the cluster of fabrication to a prestigious origin in the remotest past, mannikins suspended in the tree, weird materializations the votive offering pointed a more recent event in the life of the souls of the transformed soldiers. of an individual: a new origin. The ex voto registers an The woodcut image that not only shows the autobiographical impulse. The individual, encouraged scene but also puts it in your hands is a flattened to imitate Christ, performs his or her story in public. pictorial field with unexpected depths. It compares All these tendencies were only augmented in the small conventionalized ritual behavior to the surging, stalling painted panels that would proliferate from the sixteenth flow of everyday consciousness, summoned by the century to the present.88 wax limbs. The print appears homogeneous but is in The votive scenario seems true to life because it fact an unsettled house of many compartments. The describes a passage from health to illness to health that print reduces the four-dimensional experience at the we have all experienced. It is not difficult to imagine the shrine to two dimensions. And yet the experience of body in a state of steady well-being: we call that good the woodcut is in important ways like the experience health. The painting or effigy that represents the donor at the shrine. It “belongs” to its beholder in the same in permanent attendance on the shrine, by contrast, way that a pilgrim’s perceptions “belong” to her. is not interested in health but in the soul. The work For unlike the expensive painting mounted on an helps the donor achieve for his soul what he knows altar with an embedded portrait, the woodcut was his body is capable of: equilibrium, ease, security. But not commissioned. The woodcut did not in any way the soul is never at rest; as long as the soul can foresee testify to any other individual’s experience and will. the inevitability of the unforeseen, there will always The scene at the shrine, the collective performance involving self and strangers and objects, was a form of publication. The print amplified that publication in 86. Votive body parts apparently did not represent the limbs in their the sense that it delivered the scene into the hands and diseased state. Holmes, however, mentions silver ex votos with marks homes of strangers. It preserved the essential features of the plague (note 7, p. 163). See also Andree (note 7), pp. 114–115. In most cases it would seem that the severed status was enough to of the publication, displaying votive offerings that were represent trauma. instantly legible as rudimentary self-portraits and thus as 87. Bacci (note 7), pp. 218–219, makes the same point: In the placeholders for the beholder. It was a script indicating votive panel—the small-scale image that has dominated votive different points of entry into the votive system. Within exchanges since the sixteenth century—the accent is on the accident or illness or on the concession of grace, whereas effigies or painted self-portraits are about commendatio and the securing of a privileged relation to the sacred in the future. 89. F. H. Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: 88. Battisti (note 7), p. 45. Cambridge University Press, 2005). Wood: The votive scenario 227

the scene at the shrine, in the presence of the saint, the votive offering restored order. But within the scenario, the script of the many possible scenes, the offering took on a new meaning. The distance provided by the modern medium of print brought this second meaning to the surface. It opened a window onto a hidden depth of other people’s experiences that was both the basis for the working of the scenario—one superimposes oneself on the ex voto—and the introduction of a wild temporality that most pictures were not equipped to handle. The votive scenario, a story that invited projection, anticipated symbolic forms developed only much later, not pictures at all but texts: the first-person confessional or conversion narrative encouraged by the Protestant Reformation, or even the bourgeois novel of the eighteenth century, especially when it took the form of an astonishing but finally believable first- person narrative.