The Mass of St Gregory, the Man of Sorrows, and Prayers for the Arma Christi

chapter 5 The Mass of St Gregory, the Man of Sorrows, and Prayers for the Arma Christi The Life of St Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), recorded Gregorian Mass a full man. In fact, the representations by Paul the Deacon around 880 and subsequently tran- of the Mass of St Gregory cannot really be said to depict scribed in the Golden Legend that was assembled by the Voragine’s textual narrative at all. Dominican Jacobus de Voragine (1230–1298), describes Hundreds, or even thousands, of images of the Mass of a miraculous event that took place during a mass that St Gregory survive from the fifteenth century. These narra- Gregory was performing. According to the version retold tive images drew upon—but severely altered—the story by Jacobus de Voragine: as told by Paul the Deacon and Jacobus de Voragine. They share some properties but differ significantly in what they A certain woman used to bring altar breads to Grego- depict and how they depict it. They all contain Gregory, ry every Sunday morning, and one Sunday, when the an altar, and a suffering Christ, but otherwise vary widely. time came for receiving communion and he held out In this chapter I discuss selected examples from this con- the Body of the Lord to her, saying: ‘May the body of stellation of images in the light of the rubric, prayer, and our Lord Jesus Christ benefit you unto life everlast- indulgence with which they became closely associated. ing’, she laughed as if at a joke. He immediately drew The rubric appeared in at least as many versions as the back his hand from her mouth and laid the conse- image and was in fact intertwined with it. The construc- crated Host on the altar, and then, before the whole tion, appeal, and promulgation of the ‘Mass of St Gregory’ assembly, asked her why she had dared to laugh. was bound up with a mosaic cult image, which became Her answer: ‘Because you called this bread, which a tool that Carthusians in Rome leveraged in order to at- I made with my own hands, the Body of the Lord’. tract attention and pilgrims. Among the unexpected con- Then Gregory, faced with the woman’s lack of belief, sequences of the Carthusians’ public relations campaign prostrated himself in prayer, and when he rose, he was a pan-European mania for the indulgences associated found the particle of bread changed into flesh in the with the story they initially promulgated. According to my shape of a finger. Seeing this, the woman recovered analysis, images of the Mass of St Gregory respond to and her faith. Then he prayed again, saw the flesh return are in dialogue with the rubrics. Indulgences, rubrics, and to the form of bread, and gave communion to the images mutually feed each other, growing richer and more woman.1 elaborate over the half-century before the Reformation. That, however, is not what appears in the hundreds of surviving images that depict the Mass of St Gregory, a From Man of Sorrows to Gregorian Mass modern term to describe a constellation of images that medieval people called the Vision of St Gregory. In nearly At the centre of this media event was a Byzantine min- all the images, the story is about Gregory and his visionary iature mosaic depicting the suffering Christ, but which experience at the altar, often with witnesses, but the wom- became a tourist attraction in the Basilica di Sta Croce an from the original story is almost never present.2 Even in Gerusalemme in Rome.3 This mosaic depicts the torso more strikingly, the finger from the story had expanded of the post-Passion Christ. Gregory, who was the pope into an entire body. A single disembodied digit pointing in the final fourteen years of his life, was said to have at the fleshiness of the host had become in nearly every commissioned—or somehow engendered—the mosaic, a Byzantine icon of an existing type called Akra Tapeino- sis (Utmost Humiliation), known in the West as Man of 1 Voragine trans. and ed. Ryan 1993, vol. i, pp. 179–180. Sorrows (fig. 62). Measuring only 13 × 19 cm, the central 2 Virginia Reinburg argues that the female donor kneeling at a prie- icon contains several thousand stone tiles, each one small- dieu at the Mass of St Gregory in Boston Public Library Ms. q. med. er than a square millimetre. Even up close, the myriad 81, fol. 143r represents or stands in for the doubting woman. I do not think this is the case, first because there was no tradition of de- tiles combine to form an overall painterly effect (fig. 63). picting the doubter at the Mass of St Gregory, and second because donors would want to present themselves as believers not doubters. 3 Bertelli 1967; Evans 2004, cat. 131, pp. 221–222, with further bibliogra- The figure wears fifteenth-century garb. Reinburg 2012, p. 119. phy; Bagnoli 2010, cat. 116, p. 202. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6965_007 102 Chapter 5 What is unusual about this particular icon is that there are other words, it wore miraculous stories by proxy. But one no miracles associated with it. Rather than engendering can see how the medieval audience would have neverthe- miracles itself, this icon developed a story based on Greg- less considered the image miraculous, as the technique ory’s miracle, that it concretized his miraculous vision. In required the mosaicist to lay thousands of infinitesimal coloured tiles into a substrate. The resulting image depicts the saviour teetering between life and death, nearly alive but literally made of stone. Hans Belting pointed out that the image’s immediacy explains how viewers could have considered it a preservation, or a trace, of the vision, and not an object of artistic construction.4 What better way to represent a miraculous event than with a technique so painstaking that it seemed inconceivable that human hands had made it? In a brilliant piece of research, Carlo Bertelli told the story of the central icon. Its genesis and transformation are revelatory. An inscription added to the frame indicates that the miniature mosaic records Gregory’s vision (in the sixth century); however, the mosaic was not made until around 1300, probably at the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai. A military leader named Raimondello Orsini del Balzo, the count of Lecce, probably took the mosaic icon from St Catherine’s and brought it to Rome in 1380, after Figure 62 Mosaic icon with the Akra Tapeinosis (Utmost Humilia- which he placed it in a silver frame bearing his coat of tion), or Man of Sorrows, in a series of frames. Mosaic icon, Byzantine, late 13th–early 14th century. arms and presented it to the Basilica di Sta Croce in 1385 or Basilica di Sta Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome. 1386. Its shrine—in which it is currently preserved—with hundreds of tiny cubicles was made at this time. Each cu- bicle houses a relic with an authentique (a small medieval label written on parchment). This physical reframing ac- companied a conceptual reframing, as the frame made the icon grow physically in stature. The army of saints, their disembodied fragments lined up in rank and file, for- tified the image’s power. Sta Croce in Gerusalemme, where the micro-mosaic was housed, was a Carthusian establishment. It was built upon relics from Christ’s Passion, a piece of the True Cross, a nail from the Cross, several thorns from the crown, and, most importantly, actual dirt from the Holy Land that was bathed in Christ’s blood. This substance, which was both earth and relic, lay under the floor slabs. Technically, at least, the church stood on hallowed ground.5 The Car- thusians played up all of these stories to maximize the draw to the items in their collection. Using their relics to drive their public relations—which was of course what all churches with relics endeavoured to do—continued in the fifteenth century. Their status received a boost in 1492, when the Carthusians announced the discovery a piece of the inri titulus in a vault embedded in one of the church 4 Belting 1981, p. 18. 5 Donkin 2016 (forthcoming). I thank Dr Donkin for sharing this essay Figure 63 Detail of the Mosaic icon from fig. 62. with me before its publication..

Load more