MITTEILUNGEN DES KUNSTHISTORISCHEN INSTITUTES LXI. BAND — 2019 IN FLORENZ HEFT 1 DES KUNSTHISTORISCHEN INSTITUTES IN FLORENZ MITTEILUNGEN 2019 LXI / 1 LXI. BAND — 2019 MITTEILUNGEN DES KUNSTHISTORISCHEN HEFT 1 INSTITUTES IN FLORENZ Inhalt | Contenuto Redaktionskomitee | Comitato di redazione Aufsätze Saggi Alessandro Nova, Gerhard Wolf, Samuel Vitali _ _ Redakteur | Redattore Samuel Vitali _ 3_ Daniela Bohde Editing und Herstellung | Editing e impaginazione Mary Magdalene at the Foot of the Cross. Iconography Ortensia Martinez Fucini and the Semantics of Place Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz Max-Planck-Institut Via G. Giusti 44, I-50121 Firenze Tel. 055.2491147, Fax 055.2491155 _ 45 _ Jonathan Foote [email protected] – [email protected] Tracing Michelangelo’s at San Lorenzo www.khi.fi.it/publikationen/mitteilungen modani Die Redaktion dankt den Peer Reviewers dieses Heftes für ihre Unterstützung | La redazione ringrazia i peer reviewers per la loro collaborazione a questo numero. _ 75 _ Teodoro De Giorgio L’invenzione dell’iconografia . Dai prodromi medievali Graphik | Progetto grafico in visceribus Christi RovaiWeber design, Firenze della devozione cordicolare alla rappresentazione moderna delle viscere di Cristo Produktion | Produzione Centro Di edizioni, Firenze Die erscheinen jährlich in drei Heften und könnenMitteilungen im Abonnement oder in Einzelheften bezogen _ 105 _ Margherita Tabanelli werden durch | Le escono con cadenza Echi normanni nel Palazzo Imperiale di Poznań. 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Adresse des Vereins | Indirizzo del Verein: c/o Schuhmann Rechtsanwälte Ludwigstraße 8 D-80539 München [email protected]; www.khi.fi.it/foerderverein Die alten Jahrgänge der sind für Subskribenten online abrufbar über JSTORMitteilungen (www.jstor.org ). Le precedenti annate delle sono accessibili online su JSTOR (www.jstor.org)Mitteilungen per gli abbonati al servizio. ____ 1 Giotto, Crucifixion, detail, 1304/05. Padua, Scrovegni Chapel MARY MAGDALENE AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS ICONOGRAPHY AND THE SEMANTICS OF PLACE Daniela Bohde Why is Mary Magdalene depicted so frequent- students must learn how to use. Christian iconography ly at the foot of the cross in Crucifixion scenes? The in particular is a field of research that has declined in sig- question hardly seems worth thinking about. Mary nificance, as it apparently no longer offers fertile ground Magdalene was one of Jesus’s closest followers, and she for innovative research queries. Only a few monographs is mentioned in the gospels as a witness to the Cruci- have appeared on the Passion of Christ over the past fixion. As the great mourner and penitent, she belongs decades, for example. What is it that makes Christian beneath the cross. So, actually, everything seems to be iconography seem so boring? Its results are probably too clear. However, a closer look shows that neither the predictable, in terms of how image and text are linked. gospels and the texts building on them, nor the ear- The text is seen as the source, the image as a kind of ly visual representations put her . Instead, she illustration. This seems to be inevitable when the main finds her way there by crooked subpaths. cruce A retracing of text is the most authoritative text in the Christian those paths also offers an opportunity to examine the world, the Bible. Yet how can we then deal with new iconographic method and raises questions about the iconographies? Do we have to explain them with other relationship between image and text. texts? This was the approach James Marrow adopted in Iconography today can no longer be considered an his important study influential and trendsetting art-historical method; it Passion Iconography in Northern, released Europe- seems that it has been demoted to a helpful tool which backan Art inof the1979, Late Middlethe heyday Ages and of Early iconographical Renaissance study.1 1 James Marrow, Kortrijk 1979. The book is based on the author’s doctoral Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle scriptive Narrative, thesis delivered at Columbia University, New York, in 1975. Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into De- | 3 other words, Marrow ultimately put the new iconogra- phies down to texts. In 1981, on the other hand, Hans Belting published his book Das Bild und sein Publikum, tak im- ingMittelalter: precisely Form the und path Funktion from früher iconography Bildtafeln der to Passion or visual studies, which led him first toBildwissen issues -of function.schaft 2 You could almost say that, after Belting, no one with respectable methodological ambitions dared to write a book about the iconography of the Passion anymore, although of course there are exceptions. One of these is Frank Büttner, who in 1983 published Imi- tatio Pietatis: .Motive3 Büttner’s der christlichen aim was Ikonographie to demonstrate als Modelle that zur motivesVerähnlichung related to the life of Christ and Mary, and es- pecially to the Passion, served as role models for devo- tees. Notably the shaping of the iconography of Saint Magdalene beneath the cross cannot be understood without considering its relation to the pious beholder. Another important exception is Anne Derbes’ Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy –from 1996.Narrative4 It Painting, is a book Francis that- showscan Ideologies, how andmany the arbitraryLevant factors went into shaping ____ the iconography of the Passion, which is far more than 2 Martin Schongauer, Crucifixion the visual translation of authoritative texts. (from the Passion of Christ series), ca. 1475. Munich, My intention is to continue that approach, because Staatliche Graphische Sammlung it is the discrepancies between text and image that ap- pear to be remarkable for the art-historical perspective. He succeeded in tracing Passion iconographies – en- It is precisely in those discrepancies that we can detect tirely unknown additional agonies of Christ, for exam- the interests and needs that shaped the imagery. Af- ple being trodden upon or tormented with the spike ter all, it would have taken a very strong motivation block – back to the so-called . The latter to depart from such an authoritative text as the Bible. consisted of fourteenth- and fifteenth-centurySecret Passion writings An iconographic analysis that takes the specifics of the that elaborated on the Passion as described in the Bi- image into account is still relevant, because there is ab- ble and very imaginatively concluded from the Psalms solutely no question that the content of the depiction – that Christ must have been tormented far more than is the motif – held the utmost significance for the client related by the gospels in their often very terse style. In and contemporary beholder of pre-modern art. 2 Hans Belting, 3 Frank O. Büttner, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter: Form und Funktion frü- Imitatio pietatis: Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelle , Berlin 1981. See also the English translation: , Berlin 1983. her Bildtafeln der Passion The Image zur Verähnlichung , 4 Anne Derbes, and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1990. , Cambridge 1996. Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant 4 | DANIELA BOHDE | While iconography is criticized as too text- oriented, it is quite conspicuous that other methodo- logical approaches clearly approve of taking the text as an orientation. When, for example, the relationship between an artwork and the art theory of its time is studied, the correspondence between image and text is frequently established with great satisfaction. For more than twenty-five years, for instance, we have tirelessly combed Renaissance art for whether it can be retraced to ancient rhetoric or contemporary art literature. When Vasari’s description fits a painting by Parmigianino like a glove, for example, and when we can justify everything Vasari does not explain by citing Alberti, Aretino or Ar- menini, then we consider ourselves especially good art historians and very knowledgeable about our sources. Yet we sometimes lose sight of the fact that, for the most part, the theories responded to art production and not the other way around. What is more, the wealth and sophistication of the art-theoretical writings sometimes mislead us to presuppose that their categories were shared by the majority of contemporary recipients and to assign too little significance to the meanings of the motifs depicted. So, in both methodological approaches, ____ what is not reflected in texts gives us trouble – but it is 3 Hans Baldung Grien, Crucifixion, 1514. especially worth that trouble. Washington, Naturally, the return to the motif proposed here National Gallery of Art does not mean a return to traditional iconography and a search for a given and immutable meaning, or in the case of Crucifixion depictions. In this paper, I to abandon all new questions about the body, space, will therefore focus on the placement of the figures visual media, and how people used images. We can no represented. My methodological concern is with the longer search for the corresponding text source and semantics of placements or, more generally, an ico- then, once we have found it, think we have the key nography of the place.