ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENAL LIVES OF MOVABLE CHRIST SCULPTURES Tanya A. Jung, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Meredith Gill Department of Art History and Archaeology This dissertation deals with a fascinating and understudied group of free-standing Christ sculptures that were moved in imitation of Christ during the dramatic observances of late medieval Holy Week. They adhere to general iconographic formulas, but stand apart from other depictions of Christ in one important respect—they were elaborately kinetic. Congregations animated these images in a variety of ways, from basic manual operation in processions and elevations to the manipulation of fitted joints, wheels, hand cranks, and elevation apparatuses. Scholars who study movable Christ sculptures use them as evidence for liturgical and para-liturgical observances recorded in written texts, they approach them as aesthetic objects or as objects of folk tradition, and they discuss their place in the development of medieval sculpture and architectural space. I argue, however, that these images have more meanings to offer. Accordingly, these meanings are available when we consider not only their material and symbolic forms and their performative functions, but also their shifting cultural locations in medieval and modern Europe. Movable Christ sculptures were edifying and sacred images, disconcerting idols, homely folk objects, and works of art. My aim in this dissertation is to write a cultural biography of the lives of these images—in other words, a history that can account for the varied connotations of movable Christ sculptures in different instances of practice, reception, and response. It is my contention that these images, because of their performative function, experiential qualities, mimetic form, relatively anonymity, and “thingness,” present an ideal opportunity to exercise cultural biography from an art historical perspective. Such an exercise elucidates the history of movable Christ sculptures after the moment of production and artistic intent has passed. It describes how these images have remained fixed in human imagination and in life regardless of changing cultural, social and political circumstances, yet it also accounts for the ways in their meanings have changed over time. In short, it provides a more complete account of the lives of these unique and understudied objects and reveals the ways in which movable Christ sculptures create transcendental moments and social realities. THE PHENOMENAL LIVES OF MOVABLE CHRIST SCULPTURES by Tanya A. Jung Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2006 Advisory Committee: Professor Meredith Gill, Chair Professor Anthony Colantuono Professor Marie Spiro Professor Arthur Wheelock Professor Richard Walker The dissertation document that follows has had referenced material removed in respect for the owner’s copyright. A complete version of this document, which includes said referenced material, resides in the University of Maryland, College Park’s library collection. PREFACE I first became aware of movable sculptures of Christ in a graduate seminar at the University of Missouri-Columbia.1 Students were asked to choose an object from the University museum and apply a particular art historical methodology. I selected a fifteenth-century Austrian sculpture of Christ (fig. 1) and attempted to write a social history of the figure. I was interested in the image as a material object, its place in the cultural fabric of late medieval Europe, and what it meant in its original context. When I encountered the wooden figure it was in a gallery sitting atop a white podium in front of a white wall. Surrounded by the colorful canvases of Dutch and Italian masters, its grace, beauty, and sweeping fragility were accentuated, but all indications of its original purpose were lost. Aside from its stylistic and iconographic designations, I had no idea what the image was. My first thought was that it must have come from a large wooden altarpiece. Perhaps it stood in the spindly heights of one of the massive fifteenth-century German retables (fig. 2). Or perhaps it was an Andachtsbild, one of the free-standing wooden sculptures placed in homes or on side chapel altars in churches, providing focus for private devotion (fig. 3). 2 When the conservator and curator agreed to take it down from the podium, a new possibility presented itself. An assessment from this perspective revealed a large filled 1. These images have been called by different names. Johannes Tripps uses the term “handelnde Bildwerke” while Ulla Haastrup refers to them as liturgical props. I use the somewhat cumbersome term “movable sculptures of Christ” to accommodate their general characteristics. Johannes Tripps, Das handelnde Bildwerk Forschungen zu den Bedeutungsschichten und der Funktion des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Hoch- und Spätgotik (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1996); Ulla Haastrup, “Medieval Props in the Liturgical Drama.” In Hafnia: Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art 11 (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1987), 133-170. 2. The issue of the Andachtsbilder, its definitions, and its functions are nicely summarized from Panofsky to Marrow by Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Abo, Finland: Abo Akademi, 1965), 55-58. ii hole and an axe or hatchet mark on the top of the figure’s head (fig. 4). These aspects of condition and further investigations into fifteenth-century image practice suggested a surprising and unique history for the figure which I pursued in my Master’s thesis.3 A chemical analysis and x-ray determined that the filled hole was at one time occupied by an iron object. From my research into Ascension Day observances of the late middle ages, I concluded that it was most likely occupied by an iron ring. The ring would have been used to elevate the figure on either Easter Sunday, Ascension Day, or both. In this capacity the figure acted as an instrument of religious instruction, a sacred image that made the narrative of Christian redemption understandable and the divine visible. The axe mark and the removal of the ring, however, implied that at one time the image’s privileged place in Catholic worship was negated. While this damage could have occurred in the most banal way at any point in the object’s history, I again linked these aspects of the object’s condition to the figure’s function as a sacred image in late medieval Ascension Day. As a mimetic and kinetic representation of Christ, the Missouri figure carried dangerous idolatrous connotations for some sixteenth-century viewers. Images central to Church observances, particularly three-dimensional sculptures, were prime targets for iconoclastic actions during the Protestant Reformation. Images that were deemed inappropriate or idolatrous were systematically removed and quietly 3. Tanya Jung, A Late Gothic Ascending Christ in Context. Master’s Thesis, University of Missouri, 1995. Here image practice refers not only to the particulars of the movable Christ sculptures’ function in dramatic para-liturgical and liturgical performance i.e. how they were made, used, moved, dressed, addressed, and performed; but also to the more general roles of religious images in late medieval Europe. David Morgan discusses the multiple purposes of religious images in visual practice which include the ordering of time and space, the imagining of communal identity, communication with the divine, collaboration with other forms of representation, persuasive magic which influences thought and behavior, and the displacement of rival images and ideologies. David Morgan, Visual Piety, A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), and The Sacred Gaze, Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA: 2005). iii eliminated or violently “executed” in public spectacles. They were stored away in attics, burned in household hearths or bonfires of the vanities, drawn and quartered, disfigured, and decapitated. In this context, the extraction of the ring and the axe mark became the possible remnants of an aniconic and Protestant past. In constructing a history for the Missouri Ascending Christ, I was afforded interpretations and insights that I did not expect when I first encountered the image in its museum setting.4 Through this process I came to understand that original intent and original meaning though compelling and credible pursuits were circumspect goals. The reclamation of history and more specifically the history of an object were dependent on my own situation and reading. I could never “purify” my conclusions of my own past or “insistent present.”5 But while my own interpretations would always remain subjective, they need not be naïve or solipsistic. They were themselves a part of the history of the image. More important, I came to realize that the image’s meaning was not something that remained fixed to original intention but, rather, it changed along with its cultural and temporal locations. In varied circumstances and at different times, the Missouri Ascending Christ had the potential to be a didactic image, a sacred icon, a sterile idol, and an art object. The effort to describe, define, and reduce this image to an original context revealed