A Date with Death: How the Female Body and the Corpse Body Became Ciphers for Sin

and Objects of Abjection in the Art of Hans Baldung Grien

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

The Honors Tutorial College of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Bachelor of Arts in Art History

Shelly L. Lisle

May 2021

© 2021 Shelly L. Lisle. All Rights Reserved. 2

This thesis titled

A Date with Death: How the Female Body and the Corpse Body Became Ciphers for Sin

and Objects of Abjection in the Art of Hans Baldung Grien

by

SHELLY L. LISLE

has been approved for

the School of Art + Design

and the College of Fine Arts by

Charles S. Buchanan

Associate Professor of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts

Donal C. Skinner

Dean, Honors Tutorial College 3

Abstract

LISLE SHELLY L., B.A., May 2021, Art History

A Date with Death: How the Female Body and the Corpse Body Became Ciphers for Sin and Objects of Abjection in the Art of Hans Baldung Grien

Director of Thesis: Charles S. Buchanan

This thesis seeks to explore and rationalize the relationship between death and the maiden imagery during the time of the German Renaissance. For centuries artists and art historians have tried to find answers to this enigmatic pairing. Some trace the iconography back to the story of Persephone and Hades, while others see it as simply a representation of life’s transience. This thesis provides an explanation by applying Julia Kristeva’s notion of “the abject” to Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and the Maiden. Grien along with other male artists of this period used the female nude and the corpse body within their artwork to symbolize sin and the vices of men. This association contributed to the abject othering of both the female body and the dead body, as Kristeva views sin as ‘subjectified abjection’. This thesis analyzes the gender politics and burial practices of the Christian West during the Late Middle Ages and German Renaissance. Politics and cultural practices positioned the female body and the dead body with “the abject,” as they were seen as products of sin. Death and the Maiden were often paired together because both bodies in the iconography were “the abject,” through which the cultural practices and preachings of Christianity during the Late Middle Ages and Early German Renaissance framed themselves. The maiden represented the female sex, which threatened to corrupt the spiritual self and stain the soul, while death represented the corruption of the physical self and the eternal rot of the sinner’s body. These abject symbols of sin bridged death with the maiden, leading to an abundance of iconography related to the topic, which is still found in artwork today.

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Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to my advisor Charles Buchanan, who helped me through the elaborate and complicated process, as well as my close friends at Ohio University, without whom I would not have made it through such a tough year.

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Table of Contents

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Dedication ...... 4 List of Figures ...... 6 Introduction to Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and the Maiden ...... 7 Part 1 The Maiden: Abjection and the Female Sex during the German Renaissance ...... 16 Part 2 Death: Abjection and the Corpse Body during the German Renaissance ...... 33 Conclusion: Modern and Contemporary Revivals of Death and the Maiden ...... 52 References ...... 60

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List of Figures

Page

Figure 1: Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden, 1518-20, oil on panel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel ...... 7 Figure 2: Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, Death and the Maiden, 1517 ...... 9 Figure 3: Eve, the Serpent, and Death by Hans Baldung Grien,1510-12, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa ...... 16 Figure 4:Hans Baldung, Witches' Sabbath, 1510, chiaroscuro woodcut, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ...... 30 Figure 5: Adam and Eve, detail of Achille Jubinal’s reconstruction of the first pier at La Chaise-Dieu drawing originally published in Explication de la danse des morts de La Chaise-Dieu ...... 31 Figure 6: Death and the Widow (Left) Death and the Daughter (Right) watercolor copies by Albrecht Kauw of Niklaus Manuel’s Dance of Death cycle on the walls of the cemetery of the Dominican monastery in Bern,copy painted in 1649, original in 1517 .. 33 Figure 7: Pride, One of the Five Temptations of the Dying Man, Ars moriendi, Netherlands, c.1460 ...... 38 Figure 8: Death and the Prostitute, 1401-1500, Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale Ms. fr. 995 f.37v ...... 47 Figure 9: Hans Baldung Grien, Death with an Inverted Banner, 1506, pen and ink, Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum, Basel ...... 51 Figure 10: Edvard Munch, Death and the Maiden, 1894, private collection ...... 54 Figure 11: Edvard Munch, Harpy, 1899, Lithographic crayon, Munch-museet, Oslo ..... 56 Figure 12: Marina Abramovic, Self-Portrait with a Skeleton, 2003, Cibachrome print, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York ...... 57

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Introduction to Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and the Maiden

Painted on a panel by the German artist Hans Baldung Grien is a striking image of a nude woman being kissed by a corpse (Figure 1). Her deathly pale skin is contrasted to the tanned, mummified skin of the corpse who embraces her. As the skeletal figure roughly grabs at her side and pulls back her head by her hair, a tear streams down the woman’s face. It is clear the encounter is not consensual. The woman is shocked and unable to escape the corpse body that comes to life before her very eyes. What is gained from pairing together the notions of love and death, the ancient Greek personifications of eros and thanatos, respectively? Who would choose to paint such an image, let alone create several more?

Figure 1: Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden, 1518-20, oil on panel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel 8

From 1509-1517 Grien created several versions of this iconography: a female nude interacting with a personification of death.1 His Death and the Maiden paintings lack sufficient information on patronage, but the purpose of these works appears to have been personal. They are intimate and erotic. Whether the viewer is supposed to feel a sense of arousal, disgust, or both is unclear. What is certain is the sense of voyeurism present. Before Grien began to illustrate Death and the Maiden, he moved to Nuremberg and became a member of Albrecht Dürer’s workshop, where it is believed he acquired his nickname: Grien, believed to come from the artist’s use of the color green. He even took over as the head of Dürer’s shop while the German master went on a trip to Italy in

1506.2 Art historians have explained the close connection between the two artists in terms of economic and social benefits. All other major German artists of the period came from middle-class, artisanal families, whereas Grien was born into the professional class of university-trained lawyers, doctors, and bureaucrats. While Grien’s art improved with

Dürer’s professional instruction, his master benefited from his apprentice’s superior background and connections.3 It appears certain that this iconography was viewed by his fellow artists. There is a sense that the death and the maiden iconography was produced for this group of men to look at. Indeed, several artists within this workshop recreated the iconography in their works. For example, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (Figure 2) and Hans

1 James H. Morrow, and Alan Shestack, Hans Baldung Grien : Prints and Drawings, (Yale University Art Gallery, 1981) 9. 2 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996), 250. 3 Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, 250. 9

Sebald Beham used the motif of “Death and the Maiden” as inspiration.4 The etching by

Niklaus Manuel Deutsche shows us a scene similar to Grien’s piece except that his woman is clothed.

Figure 2: Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, Death and the Maiden, 1517

But a broader examination of Hans Baldung Grien’s oeuvre reveals that he depicted the female nude frequently and in different contexts. Whether it be as Venus,

Eve, a witch, or an allegorical figure, Grien had a fascination for depicting women in positions of sexual power and demise.5 As for the combination of the sexual prowess

4Helen Fronius, and Anna Linton, Women and Death : Representations of Female Victims and Perpetrators in German Culture 1500-2000 (Camden House, 2008), 10. 5Morrow and Shestack, Hans Baldung Grien, 31. 10 with the idea of memento mori, there lies grounds for further explanation and examination, to which I propose the notion of sin. What else could be both so tempting yet horrifying to the average heteronormative male living during the German

Renaissance? Through this fear of corruption from sin and the abjection of both the female and dead body, the Death and the Maiden iconography was born. Through

Grien’s process of artistic abjection, the female body and the corpse body become ciphers for sin and corruption.

“‘Abjection’ comes from the Latin abicere, which means ‘to throw away’ or ‘to cast off, away or out’. In English, the term ‘abject’ is listed as an adjective which has two similar meanings: (1) Extremely unpleasant and degrading: living in abject poverty. (2)

Completely without pride or dignity: an abject apology.”6 From these definitions one can conclude that “abject” and “abjection” are related, but different. “Abject” refers to a process or action to make abject, while “abjection” refers to a condition, to be abject.

The most prominent study published on the topic is Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror:

An Essay on Abjection, originally published in 1980. Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French post-structural author, philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, and feminist. Like many post-structuralists, Kristeva writes about language in a way that disregards pre- established, socially constructed ideas. While she does not directly label herself as a post-structuralist, but theories and writings follow the pattern of post-structuralism. When describing abjection she states: “There is a fear and fascination. The body (of the ego)

6 Rina Arya, Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature, (London, Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 3. 11 and the (sexual) object are completely absorbed in it. Abjection- at the crossroads of phobia, obsession, and perversion-shares in the same arrangement”. Within Death and the Maiden Hans Baldung Grien abjects the female body and the corpse body thus giving alterity to the subjects depicted. Kristeva makes clear her definition of the abject within the first few pages of her book, The Powers of Horror: “The abject has only one quality of the object-that of being opposed to I.”7 The abject is that which one sees as the opposite of oneself, that which horrifies and threatens one’s existence. Art can be a form of abjection. The canvas or page is a form of abjection: a destination for the abject thing that is threatening the identity of the author or artist. Abjection can be thought about in many different ways, but the three main categories are summarized in Abjection and

Representation by Rina Arya, “Elizabeth Grosz describes three broad categories of abjection in Powers of Horror: abjection towards food; towards waste (of the bodily kind); and towards sexual difference, where all of these occurrences involve segregating and determining the clean and proper boundaries of the body.”8 The two forms of abjection focused on in this essay will be the abjection of sexual difference and abjection towards waste, as they coincide with the two bodies represented: the female body and the corpse body. Death can be thought of as body waste. As for the maiden, she is the abjection of sexual difference. Hans Baldung Grien was a male artist, and the subject of the painting is female. Both woman and death threaten the identity of the artist and so he

7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of horror: An essay on abjection (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 8 Arya, Abjection and Representation, 11. 12 casts them away, but at the same time captures them in a way that confines them to the space of his canvas.

The fear of the feminine and the fear of death both became “the abject” due to

Christian theology of the Late Middle Ages and German Renaissance. The notion of sin became almost unanimous with “the abject”. Kristeva comments in her book: “One could say, in fact, that sin is subjectified abjection.”9 To better understand how the artist would have reached this representation, one needs more historical context, specifically about the subjects chosen by the artist.

Hans Baldung Grien was a disciple of Albrecht Dürer and a painter born in the village of Schwäbisch-Gmünd in southwest Germany. Apparently Baldung was first apprenticed to a Strasburg artist around 1499, then later worked under Dürer in his workshop in 1503 whence he made his way to Nuremberg.10 While he was working under Dürer at age twenty-six, Grien married Margaretha Herlin, with whom he had a single child: Margarethe Baldung. Despite his family, Grien moved around Europe frequently as was the nature of German artists during his time. He mainly traveled between Germany, France, and northern Italy.11 Grien was working during a time of political and religious turmoil. While the artist himself was characterized as “not a strongly religious man”, the Protestant Reformation swept through during his life. 12 He

9 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 128. 10Morrow and Shestack, Hans Baldung Grien, 6. 11 Thomas A, Brady "The Social Place of a German Renaissance Artist: Hans Baldung Grien (1484/85-1545) at Strasbourg”, (Central European History 8, 1975), 299. 12 Brady, "The Social Place of a German Renaissance Artist”, 308. 13 was not free from the reach of either the Catholic Church nor the newly founded

Protestant church.

Both the Catholic and Protestant Church are organized religions in which there are rules and regulations set in place to prevent “the abject”, or “sin,” from contaminating the church and would be “holy bodies.” Both organizations were primarily patriarchal in their regulation and characterization of women’s bodies. One example is the Malleus

Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), written in the sixteenth century by the Catholic clergyman, Heinrich Kramer. The text sought to demonstrate the potent interrelations between female sexuality, sin, and witchcraft.13 While this narrative was orchestrated and dramatized, its message greatly influenced the actions and beliefs of all who preached and read its contents. There were also rules and regulations about what was to be done with dead bodies to prevent the spirit and body from being contaminated. For example, when talking about Christian burial ritual in the fourteenth century, Paul Binski states: “The graveyard had to be consecrated by a bishop and required reconsecration in the event of pollution by the spilling of blood or semen.”14 The female body through its sexuality and association with sin threatened men with spiritual decay for their sexual transgressions. The corpse body stood in direct opposition to the notion of the holy body that does not decay after death. Both threatened one’s flesh with decay of the spirit.

“Corruption is its most common, most obvious appearance. That is the socialized

13 Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston, Beacon Press, 1989), 154. 14 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, (New York, Cornell University Press, 1996), 56. 14 appearance of the abject.”15 Death and the female body became the “subjectified abject” in the art and literature of the Christian West starting as early as the third century A.D.16

And that abjection was represented repeatedly in art created by men.

This thesis seeks to re-examine the role of women in the visual culture of death and how the female nude came to stand face to face with the corpse in the Late Middle

Ages and German Renaissance. The first chapter analyzes the abjection of the feminine and more specifically the female body within the patriarchal lenses of Catholic and

Protestant doctrine. The second chapter analyzes the abjection of the corpse body within

Christian burial practices and monastic artworks. Eventually, the corpse body came to represent the body of the sinner.

Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, remains the renowned treatise written on abjection, and her notion of sin as “subjectified abjection” is the inspiration of this analysis of Death and the Maiden. Her work is one of the primary sources for this research, alongside Joseph Leo Koerner’s The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, which provides a detailed account of Grien’s personal life, relationships, and artistic influences. The first chapter relies heavily on Margaret Miles’

Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West, which provides a rich history of how the female nude became synonymous with sin during the Late Middle Ages and German Renaissance. The second chapter relies largely upon the research of Philippe Aries’ The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of

15 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 16. 16 Miles, Carnal Knowing, 27. 15

Western Attitudes Toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years.17 This text provides a detailed survey of Western burial practices, artworks about death, and the sociology of the corpse body during the Late Middle Ages to the present. However, none of these texts explains Grien’s constant pairing of the female body with the corpse body. Through the post-structuralist and psycho-analytical theories of the abject as sin, this project seeks to explain why Grien along with other male artists produced so many works representing death and the maiden.

This project in addition re-examines the role women played in the visual culture of death, because these mythic narratives surrounding women, i.e., witchcraft and sexual promiscuity, historically have been faulty and mythologized. They were constructed by men to control women. Historians and artists need to deconstruct these narratives, to approach them in a way that not only examines the art itself, but how it might have come to be. In this way, these mythic narratives not only can be used to advance our understanding of human nature, but also can be repurposed for new art and modes of expression.

17 Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years, (New York, Vintage Books, 2008), 1. 16

Part 1 the Maiden: Abjection and the female sex during the German Renaissance

Hans Baldung Grien’s Eve, the Serpent, and Death (Figure 3) has both similarities and differences to the artist’s Death and the Maiden series. There exist parallels in the form and shape of the women. Both are nude, pale in complexion, and portrayed with long locks of golden hair. Despite the striking resemblances, this female is not just another maiden; she is Eve. Maidens are young, unmarried, virgin women. There is speculation about whether Adam and Eve were ever officially married in Paradise and therefore engaged in sexual activity before the Fall, but it is safe to assume that before her exile and curse of childbirth, Eve was the first maiden of her kind. How does this scene (Figure 3) characterize her?

Figure 3: Eve, the Serpent, and Death by Hans Baldung Grien,1510-12, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 17

Grien’s Eve appears to have power, to have agency. Her downcast eyes and subtle smirk give the implication that she knows what she is doing. She is engaging in a pact with Death, displayed as a corpse, through the devil, represented as the serpent. She is gently holding the serpent’s tail, as Death violently grips her arm, and the serpent bites into death. Each three components are visually tied together around the tree of knowledge. Both Eve and Death hold apples, Death prominently displaying his, while

Eve hides hers in secrecy because she knows her actions will unleash the curse of Death upon all humanity with one bite. Perhaps the most striking thing about this piece is that

Adam is nowhere to be found. Hans Baldung Grien’s approach to the story of the Fall puts all the blame on Eve. Here she becomes the sole culprit of sin and death. This depiction not only condemns Eve for her transgressions, it also establishes a hierarchy between men and women, where the latter are below men and are continually blamed for the actions of Eve. This hierarchy creates an otherness to women, who are cast off from men and are more susceptible to the whims of Satan and sin.

Julia Kristeva when writing on abjection and women mentions the story of the

Fall:

“Seen from a different viewpoint, the story of the fall sets up a diabolical

otherness in relation to the divine. Adam is no longer endowed with the

composed nature of paradisiac man, he is torn by the covetous desire:

desire for woman-sexual, covetousness since the serpent is its master, 18

consuming desire for food since the apple is its object. He must protect

himself from that sinful food that consumes him and that he craves.”18

Here Kristeva is comparing the temptation of the female sex on man to the temptation of the serpent on Eve. Not only is Adam corrupted by his want to bite into the apple of knowledge, but he is also conflicted by his desire for Eve. Both Eve and the apple become objects of sinful consumption which threaten to corrupt Adam, who becomes a symbol for mankind. Eve through her many carnal representations comes to represent and embody sin and this sin is a form of abjection. “One could say, in fact, that sin is subjectified abjection.”19 Through these images, women or “maidens” become inseparable from Eve and become figures of abjection for the male gaze within the religious societies of the Christian West during the German Renaissance. But this abjection of women was not born through Hans Baldung Grien, it was born through centuries of Christian doctrine, debate, and the concept of Original Sin.

Genesis, the first book of the Christian Old Testament, tells the reader about the creation of the world and the creation of the first humans by God: Adam and Eve. First

God created Adam, and then God created Eve from the rib of Adam.20 Within the first elements of the story women are othered through the need to be created from men. The rib cast out from Adam’s side by God is what creates the first woman, when, in reality, all humans are created through birth from a woman. However, the central focus of the story, which has been the subject of much debate, is the Fall. Eve, tempted by the devil in

18 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 127. 19 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 128. 20 Genesis 2:22-24 NIV 19 the form of a serpent, eats an apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Afterwards, she convinces Adam to partake, and as a result both are cast out of paradise.

Saint Ambrose, fourth-century bishop of Milan, prominent theologian, and Father of the Church, remained a deeply influential religious figure for centuries to come. He wrote on the topic of the Fall in his treatise, Paradise21.

“When they both ate, their eyes were opened and they realized that they

were naked, that is, the eyes of their mind were opened, and they realized

the shame of being naked. For that reason, when the woman ate of the

tree of knowledge of good and evil, she certainly sinned and realized that

she had sinned. On realizing this, she should not have invited her husband

to share in her sin. By enticing him and by giving him what she herself

had tasted, she did not nullify her sin; rather she repeated it.”22

Ambrose makes it clear that he blames the damnation of mankind solely on Eve and that when she sinned, she knew of her actions, therefore making her decision worse.

He was obsessed with original sin and woman’s place within the fallen world. Woman, who was the first to sin, must bear full responsibility for the fall of humans from paradise.

Ambrose was not the only prominent theologian to comment on the matter. Margaret

Miles discusses Eve and her reception within the Christian West by quoting Saint

Augustine of Hippo: “…Augustine says that ‘even before her sin, woman had been made to be ruled by her husband and to be submissive and subject to him.’ The former

21 Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, (Washington D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 1961), 11. 22 Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, 311. 20 condition was to have been maintained effortlessly and without resentment…Only because of sin does woman ‘deserve to have her husband for master’ and ‘if this order is not maintained,’ Augustine warns ominously, ‘nature will be corrupted still more, and sin will be increased.’”23 Augustine, like Ambrose, makes it clear that woman is less than man, and she must be ruled over by man to keep from further sinning and corrupting all that is pure and holy in humankind. There is no doubt that these two influential Fathers of the Church swayed the minds of those who listened to their preachings and shaped the reception of women throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The belief in the inherit sinful nature of women from the Middle Ages up until the mid-seventeenth century completely separated the female sex from the male and made the female sex inseparable from sin and abjection.

“Nevertheless, no matter what differences there may be among societies

where religious prohibitions, which are above all behavior prohibitions,

are supposed to afford protection from defilement, one sees everywhere

the importance, both social and symbolic of women, and particularly the

mother. In societies where it occurs, ritualization of defilement is

accompanied by a strong concern for separating the sexes, and this means

giving men rights over women.”24

Kristeva is explaining the need for religious societies to protect themselves from defilement because they believe that the female body holds the powers of corruption.

23 Miles, Carnal Knowing, 96. 24 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 70. 21

Therefore, the patriarchal theocracy of the Catholic Church used the story of the Fall to give men control over women and prevent further supposed spiritual corruption. But what of religious women who found comfort within these patriarchal structures? How did they view themselves in relation to Eve and the Fall?

Saint Hildegard, a twelfth-century abbess of the Benedictine monastery at Bingen in Germany, provided her own retelling of Genesis within the last decades of that century: “If Adam had sinned before Eve, that transgression would have been so grave and incorrigible, and man would have fallen into such great, unredeemable stubbornness, that he neither would nor could have been saved. Hence, because Eve transgressed first, the sin could more easily be undone, since she was weaker than the male.”25 Within her retelling, Hildegard does not necessarily blame Eve for her sin and views her more as a victim. Although she graces Eve with mercy in her attempts to excuse Eve’s sins, she still succumbs to the hierarchy within the Christian West that places woman below man due to her inherit “weakness”.

Furthermore, early Christian female martyrs often abjected their own sex to obtain spiritual perfection. When talking about rituals that prevent defilement and preserve the sacred Julia Kristeva writes, “Several structurations of abjection should be distinguished, each one determining a specific form of the sacred…It takes on the form of the exclusion of a substance (nutritive or linked to sexuality), the execution of which coincides with the sacred since it sets it up.”26 Asceticism is the self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of

25Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997), 72. 26 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 17. 22 indulgence for religious reasons. Fasting and abstinence are two forms of asceticism, a sacred ritual, which prevent the desecration of the spiritual self. Female martyrs were concerned with the asceticism of their own sex. Not only did they abstain from sexual practice, but some of them also ‘became male’ by rejecting their sexual identity to attain spiritual transcendence. When analyzing Christianity’s expectations of the female sex,

Beth Ann Bassein writes: “She [the average Christian woman] was even led to believe she must be like the male, and to do this, she should remain a virgin whenever possible, because to give birth was a vile thing in itself, and to engage in the sexual process was the way to pass on original sin.”27 Women were not allowed to embrace the parts of their sex that make them different than men.

Miles provides a detailed account of this in her chapter titled “Becoming Male”, where she examines The Martyrdom of Ss. Perpetua and Felicitas. This passion concerns

Saint Perpetua and her slave, Saint Felicity, who after refusing to renounce their Christian faith are sent to the public games in the amphitheater. The day before her martyrdom,

Perpetua has a vision of herself becoming male. In her vision she is led into an arena to fight a gladiator, and as she is stripped by her assistants, her body becomes that of a man.

Afterwards she defeats her opponent with her new body and walks in triumph towards

“the Gate of Life.”28 Perpetua’s first-person narration ends with her vision, after which she and Felicity are publicly beheaded. It is only when she transforms into a male that she has the strength to overcome her oppressors. “By renouncing sexual and reproductive

27 Beth Ann Bassein, Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature, (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1984), 20. 28 Miles, Carnal Knowing, 60. 23 activity, a woman could become the equal of a man, since it was precisely her sexual organs and reproductive functions that differentiated her from a man. For ascetic women as for women martyrs, transcending gender effectively meant that both sexuality and socialization were simultaneously rejected.”29 The abjection of their own sexual identity was the only way a female martyr could gain access to heaven and move past the stigma thrust upon them from the notion of Eve’s original sin. Margaret Miles cites Clement of

Alexandria, a prominent early Christian theologian and philosopher, who saw the potential of this form of female asceticism and commented on the matter in his treatise,

Stromateis:

“[To the true gnostic] his wife…is a sister…as being destined to become

a sister in reality after putting off the flesh, which separates and limits the

knowledge of those who are spiritual by the peculiar characteristics of the

sexes. Souls are neither male nor female when they no longer marry or

are given in marriage. And is not the woman translated into a man when

she becomes equally unfeminine, and manly and perfect?”30

The connotations of his words “unfeminine, manly and perfect” characterize spirituality as masculine, while femininity is characterized with an inherently carnal nature. There emerges this interesting duality to femininity in the Christian West, where it is so controlled and monitored that the more the female sex is perceived as sinful, the more attention is brought to it and it becomes a topic of much debate. Kristeva writes in

29 Ibid, 66. 30 Ibid. 24 her chapter “Approaching Abjection”: “Abjection persists as exclusion or taboo (dietary or other) in monotheistic religions…It finally encounters, with Christian sin, a dialectic elaboration, as it becomes integrated in the Christian Word as a threatening otherness-but always nameable, always totalizeable.”31 That nameable abjection is sin, and the female sex is synonymous with sin. This notion of sin was used to provide an otherness to women, which in turn provided more power to men. Women were not seen as the equal of men within Christian social and political structures and would not be for many centuries to come. While most of the sources viewed thus far are from Catholic doctrine,

Protestantism, which sought to challenge Catholicism and its preconceived notions, still failed to un-abject the female body and the women within the theocracy of the German

Renaissance.

Martin Luther was a sixteenth-century monk and theologian who initiated the

Protestant Reformation after he posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Schlosskirche in

Wittenberg.32 Initially, he gave the impression that women are the equal of men. In his

Lectures on Genesis he states: “‘If the woman had not been deceived by the serpent and had not sinned, she would have been the equal of Adam in all respects. For the punishment, that she is not subjected to the man, was imposed on her after sin and because of sin, just as the other hardships and dangers were: travail, pain, and countless other vexations.’”33 His attitude quickly changes, however, in the same lecture:

31 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 17. 32 Brady, "The Social Place of a German Renaissance Artist”, 306. 33 John A. Maxfield, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis and the Formation of Evangelical Identity (Kirksville, Truman State University Press, 2008), 41. 25

“‘Although Eve was a most extraordinary creature-similar to Adam so far as the image of

God is concerned, that is, in justice, wisdom, and happiness- she was nevertheless a woman. For as the sun is more excellent than the moon…so the woman, although she was a most beautiful work of God, nevertheless was not the equal of the male in glory and prestige.’”34 Perhaps Luther worried that his views on female equality were too liberal for his followers and revoked his earlier statements. Regardless, his opinion only reaffirmed the stereotypes that the Catholic Church had fabricated around women and their susceptibility to sinful nature. In an environment where every major religion in power still promoted animosity towards women for the sins of Eve, it is not hard to imagine how the female body became a representation of taboo and sin within artistic representation. Margaret Miles comments on the matter: “Eve more than any other scriptural woman, was represented as the prototypical woman; her personality traits and behavior were understood to be characteristic of all women and to be instructive about how men should regard and treat women.”35

There is one other major element worth noting that contributes not only to the othering of the female sex and body, but to the very persecution of women: witchcraft.

Belief in the practice of witchcraft in Europe can be traced back to classical antiquity. It continued into the Middle Ages and eventually culminated in the early witch hunts in the sixteenth century.36 One of the springboards for this was the Malleus Maleficarum,

34 Maxfield, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis, 41. 35 Miles, Carnal Knowing, 86. 36 Heinrich Kramer, Montague Summers, and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, (New York, Dover, 1970), xii. 26 translated as the Hammer of Witches. This best-known treatise on witchcraft was written by the Catholic clergyman and German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer and was first published in 1486.37 Kramer’s treatise concerns the nature of witchcraft and sorcery and elevates it to the criminal status of heresy. The Malleus Maleficarum prescribes that torture can effectively obtain confession and that the death penalty is the only certain remedy against the evils of witchcraft. The text led to the increasingly brutal prosecution of witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But what is witchcraft? And how does one identify a witch? Therein lies the issue with the criminal persecution of witches.

It comes as no surprise that most victims persecuted under the name of witchcraft were women. When explaining the reasoning behind this, Heinrich Kramer writes: “For some learned men propound this reason: that there are three things in nature, the Tongue, an Ecclesiastic, and a Woman, which know no moderation in goodness or vice; and when they exceed the bounds of their condition, they reach the greatest heights and the lowest of depths of goodness and vice.”38 He explains himself by arguing that women are more susceptible to influence. Whether that be good influence or bad influence, women are extreme in temperament, while men are moderate. Kramer goes on to say: “What else is a woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!”39 It is clear from his use of conflicting language such

37 Kramer et al. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, viii. 38 Kramer et al. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, 42. 39 Kramer et al. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, 43. 27 as “delectable detriment” that Heinrich Kramer was both aroused and repulsed by women. He had sexual desires which he knew he could not act on for fear of spiritual corruption, so to preserve himself and his own identity Kramer cast those desires onto women and blamed them. They became the bearers of sin and it is there in Kramer’s abjection of his own desires that witches were born. Here Kristeva is quoted but it appears to be Kramer, so you need to adjust: “One of them, the masculine, apparently victorious, confesses through its very relentlessness against the other, the feminine, that it is threatened by an asymmetrical, irrational wily, uncontrollable power…That other sex, the feminine, becomes synonymous with a radical evil that is to be suppressed.”40 Here

Kristeva is speaking about patriarchal societies and their need to vilify women in order to preserve their own masculine self-identity which directly connects to Kramer’s need to vilify women as witches in order to preserve his own spiritual identity and therefore social standing within the Catholic patriarchal theocracy.

The main reasoning behind the association of women and witchcraft was the centuries old stereotyping surrounding Eve, original sin, and a woman’s inherit carnal nature. This is revealed in that a majority of the spells in witchcraft that were believed to be practiced evolved around sex. According to Bassein, “Sex is nearly interchangeable with woman; it is in connection with the denial of sex (and by extension, life) that

Christianity is decidedly discriminatory toward woman and especially the one who wants to be a mother.”41 It was always the sexual nature of women that was prosecuted and

40 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 70. 41 Bassein, Women and Death, 28. 28 considered taboo, never the sexual nature and desires of men. Heinrich Kramer writes:

“The many lusts of men led them into one sin, but the one lust of women leads them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is avarice.”42 Emphasis is put on female sexual agency as the origin of all sin and greed. Anything that gives women control over their reproductive rights is considered witchcraft such as abortion and contraceptives.

“Now there are, as it is said in the Papal Bull, seven methods by which

they infect with witchcraft the venereal act and the conception of the

womb: First, by inclining the minds of men to inordinate passion; second,

by obstructing their generative force; third, by removing the members

accommodated to that act; fourth, by changing men into beasts by their

magic art; fifth, by destroying the generative force in women; sixth, by

procuring abortion; seventh, by offering children to devils, besides other

animals and fruits of the earth with which they work much harm.”43

The inability of men to have sex was even blamed on supposed female witches.

Why would men persecute women so harshly based on pretenses they could not even prove? Part of this was due to the characterization of Eve and the carnal nature of women within Catholic doctrine, but Bassein suggests another possible reason: “The

Christian perspective was one of blaming men in such a way as to create the Church/man polarity. Man, it was thought, then had to create the man/woman polarity to shift blame from himself. Always the woman was the one who destroyed man’s image in the eyes of

42 Kramer et al. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, 43. 43 Kramer et al. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, 47. 29 the Church.”44 These attitudes were only elevated through the popularity of the Malleus

Maleficarum, which had twenty different editions published between 1486 and 1520, not to mention another sixteen between 1574 and 1669.45

These false narratives supported by the church for centuries led to an abjection so severe it gave birth to not only the notion of woman as embodiment of sin, but woman as witch. There is no doubt that Hans Baldung Grien would have been directly influenced by these severe abjections of the female body. Not only do his depictions of Eve serve as proof, but Grien produced multiple drawings and etchings with witches and/or witchcraft as the subject matter during the same period the Malleus Maleficarum was written. The

Malleus Maleficarum was published for the first time in Strasbourg at the press of Johann

Prüss, the same city Hans Baldung Grien worked and produced art for most of his lifetime.46 “In Strasbourg, he would have had direct contact with recognized authorities on withcraft. Geiler von Kaysersberg, for example, who preached in the city during

Baldung’s youth…and then the great satirist and Franciscan friar Thomas Murner, [who] was active in the city during the first decades of the first century, published a copious account of how he had been crippled as a child by an old witch.”47

Upon taking a closer look at one of Hans Baldung Grien’s witch woodcuts made in 1510, Witches' Sabbath (Figure 4), one notices imagery that is repeated throughout his oeuvre.

44 Bassein, Women and Death, 22. 45 Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, 327. 46 Ibid, 327. 47 Ibid, 327. 30

Figure 4:Hans Baldung, Witches' Sabbath, 1510, chiaroscuro woodcut, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Grien’s depictions of witches are usually of older women, but a few young women can be seen in this woodcut as well. All the women Grien depicts are the same in that they are all represented as a nude with long free-flowing hair. Grien othered the female sex into his artwork as representations of witches, as maidens, and as Eve because he feared the female, her supposed powers over his sexual identity, and her powers over his potential carnal corruption. It is worth noting that Grien was not the first one to combine the themes of eroticism and death. Earlier artists would attest to the corruptive power of Eve by including the Fall within their cycle of the dance of death since Eve’s “Mors de la 31

Pomme” (The bite of death/ bite of the apple) gave birth to all human decay and death.48.

Achille Jubinal’s reconstruction of the first pier at La Chaise-Dieu is a recreation of a destroyed fresco from the walls of from La Chaise-Dieu. The dance of death cycle that was on its walls begins with a detail depicting the Fall (Figure 5). By starting the cycle with Eve, the wall mural immediately villainizes her as the harbinger of death in the world.

Figure 5: Adam and Eve, detail of Achille Jubinal’s reconstruction of the first pier at La Chaise-Dieu drawing originally published in Explication de la danse des morts de La Chaise-Dieu

As a German male artist living at the cusp of the Reformation, Grien othered the female sex to solidify his own identity, but there exists another body which threatens his

48 Elina Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance, (Chicago, Brepols, 2010), 131. 32 own: the corpse body. The posthuman body is the other entity Hans Baldung Grien represents repeatedly in his art alongside that of the female. Death, like the female, is a force to be reckoned with, a force to be feared. It is the abject that threatens and questions the character of the typical man living during the German Renaissance. This fear led to death’s abjection in artistic representation and its association with sin, just as it did with the female body.

33

Part 2 Death: Abjection and the Corpse Body during the German Renaissance

Death and the Daughter (Figure 6), originally painted by Niklaus Manuel in 1517 for the walls of cemetery of the Dominican monastery in Bern, is shown through a seventeenth-century watercolor copy by Albrecht Kauw. Instead of a maiden in this piece, a daughter is represented. She is different from Hans Baldung Grien’s maidens in that she is almost fully clothed, but she is not different in the way she interacts with death. The skeletal figure in the watercolor violently assaults the daughter and seeks to reveal her breast to the viewer. The daughter appears indifferent to the assault and looks directly at the audience with an enigmatic expression.

Figure 6: Death and the Widow (Left) Death and the Daughter (Right) watercolor copies by Albrecht Kauw of Niklaus Manuel’s Dance of Death cycle on the walls of the cemetery of the Dominican monastery in Bern,copy painted in 1649, original in 1517 34

His intentions are unclear especially since the original was destroyed and all we have left to examine is the recreation, but Manuel was intentionally referencing the death and the maiden trope. It would make sense as Niklaus Manuel and Hans Baldung Grien lived and died around the same period within the same social-historical background.

Manuel’s artwork shares a similar subject matter to Grien’s. However, there are several differences between this piece and Grien’s Death and the Maiden (Figure 1). Death seems more skeletal than Grien’s corpses, who are often represented with pieces of flesh and hair still clinging to their frames. The other Death personified in this scene alongside the widow more closely resembles Grien’s personified cadavers, but he lacks the same sexual perversion that is essential to Death and the Maiden. The previous chapter focused on the analysis of the abject female sex within Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and the Maiden series and how the maiden, through abjection, came to represent sin and corruption. This chapter focuses on the other half of the motif: death. Just like the female sex, the corpse body terrified Grien because it brought into question his own identity, mortality, and the potential corruption of his soul. In Julia Kristeva’s characterization of the abject, the corpse and the notion of rot are key signifiers, “Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identify that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death.”49 To better understand how Hans Baldung Grien might have perceived the post-human body, one must examine the years of socio-political and theological conditioning surrounding the nature of death in the Christian West. What “rituals of

49 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 71. 35 purification” did they use to avoid the abject corpse and how did it affect the art during the time? What did the visual culture of death look like during the late Middle Ages and how did it evolve into the German Renaissance?

It is important to note that a Christian death is not thought of as an end. There is a deeply rooted refusal to identify the end of existence with the dissolution of the physical body. “Ever since the risen Christ triumphed over death, the fact of being born into this world is the real death, and physical death is access to eternal life.”50 To the typical clergy member or devout Christian during the Late Middle Ages physical death was nothing to be afraid of because those who were pure of heart and followed God would eventually be resurrected and the state of their bodies would not matter. The real death, the real danger was sin. Philippe Aries comments on the matter and cites Balbulus

Notker, a tenth-century Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Saint Gall: “‘Media vita in morte sumus’ (In the midst of life, we are in death) and he goes on to say, ‘amarae morti ne tradas nos’ (Do not deliver us to bitter death), the bitter death is sin and not the physical death of the sinner.’”51 This statement merges death and sin into one. Since holy bodies are never represented in such a state of decomposition, the image of the rotting corpse came to be associated with the sinner. “The body was a sign, and in its broken glory the saintly body was a sign too of triumph; in its twisted fallen nature, the ordinary mortal body was a sign too of the postlapsarian [existing after the fall] human condition.”52 The attitude was that those who have sinned will have their bodies forsake

50 Aries, The Hour of Our Death13. 51 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 13. 52 Binski, Medieval Death, 18. 36 them in rot and leave them behind because their souls are stained with sin. The notions of sin and death become so intertwined that eventually one was thought to inherently accompany the other when it was one’s time to go. These notions were constantly reiterated with preaching’s about the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgement.

Scenes about the second coming of Christ and the ascension of the good souls to heaven were common, but it was not until the twelfth century that the subject matter of the final day of reckoning shifted from the venerable to the damned. 53

The Last Judgement can be found in all canonical gospels, particularly in the

Gospel of Matthew. It states that it will occur after the resurrection of the dead, when the mortal bodies will come to life again, and after which the souls will be weighed and judged.54 Those deemed pure of heart will ascend to heaven, while those who are found with sin will descend into hell. All sorts of terrible punishments will take place in hell, which certainly invaded the minds of artists, as many frescos portray their horrors for the audience to see. Images of the damned dying again and again, each death more painful than the last, naturally led to some anxieties amongst fearful citizens. To ease these anxieties individuals began to prepare more for their own deaths. This same association of sin and death, mixed with the fear induced by the Last Judgement, gave birth to a small theocratic subculture of death in the late Middle Ages. With the power of the printing press and the circulation of printed books, the Last Judgement was replaced in popularity during the late fifteenth century with the ars moriendi and the idea of good

53 T. S. R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgement, and Remembrance, (New York, McGraw- Hill Book Company, 1972), 19. 54 Boase, Death in the Middle Ages, 24. 37 death. What exactly is a good death and how does one die a good death? The answer is that one must be cleansed of sin at the hour of death or right before death. As the theology of sin, and the disciplines of confession and penance associated with it matured during the Middle Ages, the rituals concerned with the agony of the dying and their preparation in death for the afterlife matured in complexity. “In short, it became, if not an art, at least a craft: the craft of dying, or Ars moriendi.”55 The Ars moriendi (the Art of

Dying) was a late medieval text that grew in popularity around the fifteenth century particularly in Germany, often appearing as illustrated block-books, depicting a series of deathbed temptations of its central character: the dying man, moriens.56 Figure 7 shows an example of a Dutch Ars moriendi illustration focusing on the sin of pride. This striking imagery draws elements from the temptations of Jesus Christ himself and other prominent hermetic monks that followed in his footsteps. These temptations are to be fought alone yet reveal an important sociological shift about the attitudes towards the death of the individual as it elevates that death to the struggles of saints and holy venerated figures.

55 Binski, Medieval Death, 33. 56 Binski, Medieval Death, 40. 38

Figure 7: Pride, One of the Five Temptations of the Dying Man, Ars moriendi, Netherlands, c.1460

Sin at the hour of one’s death became something to overcome, and any good

Christian could accomplish this through bedside confession and a charitable last will.

Repentance and piousness became a way for followers of Christ to triumph over death and transcend the natural boundaries of life. Austra Reinis elaborates on the historical context of the Ars moriendi; “It developed as a response to the medieval Catholic notion that one’s salvation was decided at the moment of death…. While the Catholic art of dying stressed uncertainty and anxiety about salvation, focusing on the moment of death as the ultimate battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil, the new Protestant art of 39 dying sought to comfort the dying and reassure them of their salvation.”57 The key difference between the Catholic idea of the Last Judgement on the day of Resurrection and the Ars moriendi is that here the individual has more control over their death and thus the judgement of their soul. “One of its central preoccupations, the solitary character of death, and the role of everyman, moriens, in assuming choice and so responsibility, remind us that in this period there was a new attention to the notion of particular judgement, the judgement of the individual rather than mankind in general.”58 The Ars moriendi placed the judgement of the soul before resurrection, while many Catholics believed judgement would only happen after resurrection. This new emphasis on the individual death influenced how the common people viewed death and eased some of their anxieties about mortality, but at the same time it put sole responsibility for the salvation of their souls on themselves. “The last ordeal has replaced the Last Judgement.

It is a terrible game, and it is in terms of game and stakes that Savonarola speaks: ‘Man the devil plays chess with you, and he does his utmost to capture and checkmate you at this point [death]. Hold yourself in readiness, therefore, and think well on this point, because if you win here, you will win all the rest, but if you lose, all that you have done before will be worthless.’”59 Once one had overcome sin and death, there was still the question of what happens to the physical body after the soul has triumphed? The Ars morendi leaves behind more questions than it does answers and, much like the Last

57 Austra Reinis, Reforming the Art of Dying: The “Ars moriendi” in the German Reformation (1519-1528), (London, Routledge, 2016), 22. 58 Binski, Medieval Death, 41. 59 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 110. 40

Judgement, does not truly provide a clear explanation of what happens to the soul and the body after death. However, the iconography associated with it is crucial to the understanding of the visual culture of death circulating during the late Middle Ages and how it influenced Hans Baldung Grien’s perceptions of mortality, identity, and sin.

Another import aspect that needs to be addressed is the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body. During the time of late fourth-century Roman Emperor,

Theodosius, a heresy began to circulate that denied the resurrection of the dead. The legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus sought to counteract it.

“God causes seven martyrs to rise from the grave; in other words, he woke

them up…The emperor, the bishops, and the priests were informed of the

miracle and joined the throng around the burial cave to see and hear the

Seven Sleepers. One of the saints become inspired and explained the

reason for their resurrection…‘for we have really been raised from the

dead, and we are alive. For even as the child lives in his mother’s belly

without feeling any needs, so have we been living, resting, and sleeping,

without experiencing any sensations!’”60

Death within the lens of the Christian West involved a liminal slumber between this life and the next. With so much emphasis put on the notion of resurrection one can imagine all the protective regulations that formed around the care of dead bodies as well as burial practices. “He who goes unburied shall not rise from the dead. The fear of not rising from the dead was the Christian equivalent of the ancestral fear of dying without

60 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 24. 41 burial.”61 One of the most common and well-known rules of burial was that a dead man must be buried so that his head is to the east and his feet to the west.62 This was so that the head of the deceased faced towards Jerusalem, the holy city. It was also important for the body to be buried on consecrated ground.63 Corpses had to be ritually cleansed and covered in incense, ivy and laurel. Women were also not allowed to participate in the carrying of the funeral bier. The graveyard had to be consecrated by a bishop, and if pollution by blood or semen occurred reconsecration was required.64 However, none of these rules could reverse the effects of nature on the body and address the issue of decomposition. How would the movement of one’s corpse affect their body on the day of resurrection? What if parts of the body were lost from years and years of decay?

People were naturally worried about the state of their physical body during the day of resurrection. “Ecclesiastical writers who were more enlightened insisted that the power of God is just as capable of restoring bodies that have been destroyed as it is of creating them in the first place, but their efforts were in vain.”65

The Catholic Church sought to ease those worries by circulating texts about the state of the body after resurrection. La Lumière as Lais, was a thirteenth-century handbook for the laity. It stated that the blessed would enjoy all uses of the senses and “experience beauties of sight, hearing, smell, and touch. It explained that on the Day of resurrection

61 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 31. 62 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 14. 63 Boase, Death in the Middle Ages, 12. 64 Binski, Medieval Death, 56. 65 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 32. 42 the dead would be thirty-two years old regardless of the age at which they died because that is the same age as Christ at this death. 66

Regardless of this insistence on rebirth and the restoration of the body, people still had their anxieties, particularly about the inevitable decay that happens to the body after death. One way to ease this anxiety was to be buried on consecrated ground and more specifically near a saint’s relic (which were often the foundation of a church). This was due to the rich history of hagiography and the powers of saintly relics to heal the sick and perform miracles. There was an unstated relationship between the preservation of the body and the preservation of the soul, especially since the bodies of certain saints had been miraculously preserved. “As long as the bodies remained under the protection of the church, whatever changes might affect them were no longer of any importance”.67 This led to the practice of burial ad sanctos, that is near the tombs of martyrs and saints. Most churches during the Middle Ages were founded around holy relics, leading to large congregations of dead being buried around, in, and sometimes under churches. During the Middle Ages and through the German Renaissance, the churchyard and cemetery were one and the same and naturally a cemetery and/or churchyard only had so much space. With an abundance of bodies, especially during the black plague years of the mid- fourteenth century, which ravaged the population of Europe, churches often ran out of places to bury their dead.

66 Boase, Death in the Middle Ages, 21. 67 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 32. 43

“Around the fourteenth century it became common procedure to dig up the

dried-out bones in the older graves in order to make room for new ones

and to pile them in the attics of the galleries or above the arches, if any.

Sometimes the bones were concealed. In 1812, in Paris, on the site of the

present Collège de France, a large number of bones were discovered on

top of the arches of a deconsecrated church that was being torn down. But

generally speaking, the bones were visible.”

Notice how it was the bones, not the flesh, that was the most important aspect of the body after death. It was not the skeleton or the skull that horrified people during the Late Middle Ages and German Renaissance; they had seen plenty of them preserved for their saints and heroes.

“In the later Middle Ages, when it was necessary to transport the body, it

was no longer sewn into a leather bag. Instead, it was boiled in order to

separate flesh from bone. The bones were saved for the most desirable

burial place and the most impressive of the monuments, for the dry bones

were regarded as the noblest part of the body, no doubt because they were

the most durable.”68

What was truly horrifying was what happens to the flesh after death, how it bloats and then falls off the body. This is because a skeleton becomes a completely different thing in which a person cannot see their former self, while a corpse still bears an uncanny resemblance to a human one. Julia Kristeva describes the abject

68 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 262. 44 corpse as follows: “A decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is undistinguishable from the symbolic-the corpse represents fundamental pollution. A body without a soul, a non-body, disquieting matter, it is to be excluded from God’s territory as it is from his speech.”69 It was only the bones that had been cleaned that were displayed within the church. It was only the bones of those who belonged to the church that received such care after death.

With limited space churches made every effort to preserve the consecrated areas for those who had died in their good graces. “The bodies of the wicked defile the church and the cemetery, just as formerly, dead bodies in general defiled the land of the towns…The cemetery is the holy dormitory of the dead…where she rekindles the souls of those who are dead in body to restore them to eternal life, just as by baptism she revives the dead who are still in this world.”70 The dead bodies of sinners were not allowed burial in consecrated ground for fear their sin would corrupt the very soil of the earth. The dead bodies of social outcasts, the sickly, and unidentifiable were usually disposed of in unmarked pits or simply thrown out into the fields to rot. Jean-Baptiste de

La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, a French historian during the fourteenth century, records

Alain Chartier’s description of the place where the bodies of the outcasts are thrown: “It is a kind of false atrium, and there they throw the bodies of the damned. I saw more than

69 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 109. 70 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 42. 45 four of them, blackened, rotting, left to lie on the ground, without a grave.”71 This hellish dump often coincided with the gallows. It was also common practice that the bodies of those who had been executed not be taken down but remain exposed for months, even years.72 It is worth noting that the bodies of the outcast and the “sinner” were the only bodies so publicly displayed. It was these rotting corpses that shocked and confronted the average person of the Middle Ages.

Thus, people who lived during the Middle Ages were not strangers to death and reminders of mortality. The most popular motif surrounding mortality during the Middle

Ages was influenced by these overcrowded and overrun cemeteries. The dance of death, also known as the danse macabre, emerged as a pictorial and literary theme in Europe in the late-medieval era.73 Starting in France, the dance of death quickly spread through

England, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. The motif existed in both book form and fresco, but many of the wall paintings have been painted over or destroyed, leaving us with only their recreations and various replicas.74 Figure 6 is an example of a replicated watercolor copy of a cycle of wall paintings from a Dominican monastery cemetery at

Bern. Guy Marchant was the first to print a dance of death book with woodcuts, first published in 1485 and reprinted many times; this publication led to the wide circulation of the iconographic trope.75 The dance of death focuses on the universality of death. No matter one’s station in life, death will come for them. This usually entailed a series of

71 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 43. 72 Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 43. 73 Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages, 3. 74 Ibid, 8. 75 Ibid, 6. 46 drawings or scenes within an overall larger cycle of people from all social standings confronting death. The human was required to engage with death, sometimes through mirrored dialogue, sometimes through gesture alone. These didactic scenes often warned against the sins of avarice and vanity, for death cannot be bribed or persuaded away. A fifteenth-century French manuscript (Paris, Bib. Nationale, Ms. Fr. 995, folio 37v) shows an interaction between death and a prostitute (Figure 8). Death says to the prostitute:

“Worthless woman,

Living in carnal sin,

You have led a dissolute life

In every season, winter and summer.

Feel terror in your heart,

For you will be held tight.

One is tormented for doing bad things.

When one keeps doing it, sin is harmful.”76

76 Ann Tukey Harrison, The Danse Macabre of Women ms. fr. 995 of the Bibliothèque nationale, (Kent Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1994), 102. 47

Figure 8: Death and the Prostitute, 1401-1500, Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale Ms. fr. 995 f.37v

The very title of the motif danse macabre contains the act of dance and implies jovial movement, an interesting contrast to a dead corpse that is incapable of any movement. There also existed a strong link between death and dance within the folklore of the period that associated sin with secular dance. Demons from the Mystère de Sainte

Barbe were said to be discontent to dance alone so they had to involve men in their sinful 48 parade.77 Within Sebastain Brant’s Ship of Fools, Stultifera navis (1494), the poet conjoins dancing with Satan and sinful transgression.

‘But later than I called to mind

That dance and sin are one in kind,

That very easily ‘tis scented:

The dance by Satan was invented

And Satan dancing still doth use

To hatch out evil, to abuse.

It stirs up pride, immodesty,

And prompts men ever lewd to be.’”78

The most popular fable associated with the dance of death, the Kolbijk dance, was based on one of the earliest instances of what was known as ‘dance frenzies’. A fifteenth- century German sermon called “Was Schaden tanzen bringt” (The harm of dancing) incorporates the Legend of Kolbijk. Three women and fifteen men choose to dance in the churchyard instead of attend mass at the Church of St Magnus the Martyr: “The priest ordered them to stop and join the congregation, but they, possessed by the devil, did not heed his order. Exasperated, he excommunicated the dancers and commanded them to dance for a full year. The priest’s daughter was among the dancers, when he pulled her arm to tear her away from the damned, her arm broke off.”79 The story was so popular a version of it appears in the Chronicle of the World (Nuremberg Chronicles), published in

77 Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages, 60 78 Ibid, 60. 79 Ibid, 61. 49

1493.80 This legend directly links the Dance of Death with the Dance of the Damned.

Again, there is this association of sin and death closely linked through Christian doctrine, this time visually represented through dance. Undoubtedly Hans Baldung Grien saw some of these danse macabre publications, as well as wall frescos located in church cemeteries. The Dance of Death influenced his Death and the Maiden series and Grien’s

Death and the Maiden can be viewed as an isolated part of a danse macabre cycle. Hans

Baldung Grien plays up the sensual element of the dance of death; the encounter between his personifications of death and his maidens are more erotic than most extant dance of death scenes and in this manner contain more sinful connotations. Grien’s Death and the

Maiden series focuses on the sins of avarice and pride as most dance of death cycles do, but by isolating the maiden within his series he makes her the sole sinner and the corpse that taunts her becomes another reminder of her sin and foreboding doom.

Grien’s personal history reveals several interesting encounters with mortality. He was apprenticed to the Nuremberg master, Albrecht Dürer, between about 1503 and

1507.81 After Albrecht Dürer died his legacy and leadership of his shop passed onto Hans

Baldung Grien as did a physical piece of his body. “On the day following his burial in the churchyard of St John, a group of artists opened Dürer’s grave, exhumed his cadaver, and fashioned a plaster cast of his face and hands… Dürer’s deathmask, unfortunately, is lost, destroyed in the 1729 fire that consumed Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria’s

Kunstkammer, along with Dürer’s great Heller Altarpiece.”82 The death mask was not

80 Ibid, 61. 81 Morrow and Shestack, Hans Baldung Grien, 4. 82 Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, 249. 50 the only thing Dürer’s followers took from his cadaver. A lock of hair was cut from the artist’s body two days after his death, in 1528, and was gifted to Hans Baldung Grien. It is now preserved, behind glass, at the Vienna Academy of Art.83 It is unclear whether this personal hagiography of Dürer represents his general legacy or whether it foreshadows

Grien’s own obsession with death. Regardless, during the time he worked under Dürer,

Grien had already begun to produce artworks about the corpse body.

His drawing, Death with an Inverted Banner (Figure 9), shows death as a nude and animated transi, a dead body is shown in the process of rotting, holding a burial shroud as a banner.84 This banner is held upside down as it represents the body surrendering to the inevitable effects of death as time marches on. This piece aims to remind every human of their mortality. A few years later Grien began to pair his animated cadavers with female nudes. He never paired men with corpses as he did women and in such an erotic state. When faced with his own mortality, Grien chose to abject that mortality into a personification of death. He then paired that corpse with the carnal female, for in his mind the two make a perfect pair. He thought it was better to envision death through a female form foreign to his own identity, to distance himself from death and its ever-threatening presence. He therefore distanced himself from all the sin and corruption that he believed follows death and rides on the skirts of females.

83 Ibid, 250. 84 Ibid, 252. 51

Figure 9: Hans Baldung Grien, Death with an Inverted Banner, 1506, pen and ink, Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum, Basel

52

Conclusion: Modern and Contemporary Revivals of Death and the Maiden

After tracing the socio-political climate of Europe during the late Middle Ages and up to the German Renaissance, a wealth of resources reminds us that abjection of the female body and abjection of the dead body existed within Christian thought for centuries before Hans Baldung Grien. He was simply a product of his culture, and he only sought to combine the two ideas through his representations of death and the maiden. It comes as no surprise that he paired the female form and the dead body together as signifiers of sin for their likely male audience. While these artworks were not made for widespread circulation, they did not go unseen. Grien’s erotic twist on the dance of death had a profound impact on his peers. Several artists contemporary to Grien, such as Hans Sebald

Beham and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, produced artwork featuring death and the maiden.

It is most likely that Hans Baldung Grien produced his death and the maiden series with the intention of showing it to his workshop and peers. Upon viewing death and the maiden, these men quite likely were both disgusted and aroused, but more than anything amused at this portrayal of women and their vanity. It was almost never the man who was objectified and juxtaposed with death, and if they were, the relationship was not sexual. The reason for this was that a heteronormative male voyeur during this time would have probably taken no pleasure in viewing another man, presented nude, as he is defiled by death. The ego of artist uses the ‘other’ to define itself, it then reproduces the

‘other’ in images to protect its own image of the unified self. The naked female form alongside the dead body became objects of abjection after they came to be portrayed in

German Renaissance art. They threatened to corrupt the sacred patriarchy of the Christian 53

West and were thus largely a didactic warning of the dangers of sin, although at the same time they were alluring. Death and femininity became two central mysteries within

Western discourse. They were both used by male artists to represent what they deemed inexpressible, could not face directly, but at the same time had to control by either a moral or social law.

The idea of death and the maiden did not vanish with German Renaissance at the end of the sixteenth century. Women continued to be represented alongside death in

Western art for centuries to come, some of which would remain faithful to Grien’s blueprint, while others evolved. Western male Expressionist painters at the turn of the twentieth century, inspired by death and the maiden, used the motif to express their personal history and romantic relationships with women. Death transformed into the artist, and the maiden into the muse.

Edvard Munch, the Norwegian early expressionist painter, presents his version of death and the maiden (Figure 10). The scene here is much more sensual than Grien’s death and the maiden. The relationship between the two bodies here feels more consensual. The maiden eagerly kisses death, and while Hans Baldung Grien’s painting feels like death overcoming life, Munch’s drawing is the opposite. Here life and love triumph over death. As the maiden kisses him, she dominates the piece. Edvard Munch wrote in his text titled Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil about how he viewed women, the muses of his subject matter, as a direct link between life and death: “Your face encompasses all of the earth’s beauty/ your lips crimson like ripening fruit separate as though in pain/ the smile of a corpse/ now life offers death its hand/ the chain has been 54 linked which connects/ the millennium of generations that are deceased/ to the millennium of generations that are to come.”85

Figure 10: Edvard Munch, Death and the Maiden, 1894, private collection

Munch’s oeuvre reveals his fascination with forming connections between life and death and between carnality and spirituality. Edvard Munch continued producing artwork linking eroticism and death, but he was anything but fair with the way he portrayed women. Within his oeuvre all his women fit into two categories: the femme

85 Munch, Edvard, Paloma Alarcó, Patricia G. Berman, and Jon-Ove Steihaug, Edvard Munch: Archetypes, (Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2015), 38. 55 fragile, a young virgin, or the femme fatale, nude and seductive with her arms lifted behind her head. It is important to remember that Munch’s generation was rich with gender anxiety. Patricia G. Berman gives some historical context to this: “The ‘Woman

Question’ was one of the most urgently debated issues across Europe in the 1890s, the decade of remarkable gains for women: their right to higher education, transformation in inheritance laws and their unprecedented flow into the workforce among these successes.”86 Virtually every aspect of life was affected by the entrance of women into it.

In response men became more insecure about their social standing pertaining to both their work and person life. This led to unfair stereotypes and portrayals of women by men during this time. Munch created images of extraordinary violence toward women, who are nearly always portrayed as demonic. He even went so far to cast them as traditional monsters such as the Harpy (Figure 11). Munch chose to revive traditional motifs that are used to other and abject women. Just like Hans Baldung Grien, Edvard Munch associates the female as a cipher for sinfulness and destruction. This time the artist does so to ease his own personal insecurities about his purpose on this earth because he fears female equality. This was due to the constant social pressure exuded onto Munch by his friend group. “Yet many of Munch’s femmes fatales may have been created by Munch’s ciceroni- the writers who gave public words to Munch’s visual inventions-rather than by

Munch himself”87 Munch and his peers wanted to characterize women as destructive

86 Munch et al. Edvard Munch, 87. 87 Munch et al. Edvard Munch, 88. 56 forces who needed to be controlled, in order to secure their own social standing so they revived misogynistic iconographic tropes like death and the maiden to serve their means.

Figure 11: Edvard Munch, Harpy, 1899, Lithographic crayon, Munch-museet, Oslo

Death and the Maiden continued to thrive into the modern era in many forms of media. “Ninteteenth-century Americans wrote poems, told stories, sang songs, crafted dolls, and even made a dessert in honor of Frozen Charlotte, a vain and strong-willed maiden who insisted on going to dance against her mother’s advice and met her death on a frigid Maine night.”88 Edgar Allen Poe was also known for his obsession with dead maidens, offering up Lenore, Annabel Lee, Zante, and various others within his poetry.

Both authors and artists from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries found interest in

88 Judith Bennett, “Death and the Maiden”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no.2 (2012): 270. 57 death and the maiden, but all of them were male. How did female artists perceive the motif? Were there ever any women that took interest in it?

Figure 12: Marina Abramovic, Self-Portrait with a Skeleton, 2003, Cibachrome print, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Marina Abramovic is a Serbian performance artist, writer and filmmaker. Her body of work mainly deals with the body, and feminist principles.89 Her Self-Portrait with a Skeleton is linked to her trilogy of performances titled: Cleaning the Mirror I, II, and III. For the first installment Abramovic cleaned a model of a skeleton for a duration of three hours with a brush and soapy water. In the second installment she lay down with the skeleton on top of her naked body for ninety minutes with a look of intense concentration on her face as the skeleton rose and fell with her breathing.90 James

89 James Westcott, When Marina Abramovic Dies: a biography, (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2014), 4. 90 Westcott, When Marina Abramovic Dies, 243. 58

Westcott provides some reasoning and possible inspiration behind the series in his book

When Marina Abramovic Dies:

“Marina had read With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, written in 1931 by

Alexander David-Neel, who spent her life traveling in India, Tibet, China,

and Japan studying spiritual practices. David-Neel recounts methods

apparently used by Tibetan monks to get familiar with death: in the ritual a

monk would be locked in a room with a corpse for several days and

attempt to reanimate it by lying on it and breathing mouth to mouth.”91

The author reasons that Abramovic was inspired by these Tibetan death rituals, which in part she was, but at the same time she appropriated the death and the maiden trope for her own personal confrontation with death. “Abrambovic’s communion with death was symbolic and meditative, but her intentions were similar: she wanted to embody her mortality, to get physically intimate with it, and to project it out into the world.

Abramovic became a memento mori herself.”92 Here death is on display for the viewer to see while the nude female is hidden behind it. Death, the skeleton, and the maiden, who is

Marina Abramovic in this instance, lie close together. The skeleton gently rests its cheek against the artist’s, as their hands and feet softly touch. The viewer becomes conflicted as to who is supposed to be the primary subject of the piece. Once again there is a sense of agency, as both the skeleton and Abramovic look directly at the viewer confronting and questioning the gaze, but here is no connotations of sin nor women as evil. Within her

91 Ibid, 243. 92 Ibid, 243. 59 performance work, Marina Abramovic creates actions that take the form of “purification rituals” as she searches for a “liberated state of being”.93 The artist wanted to take the death and the maiden trope and twist it by adding her own personal reflection on death.

As a result, she freed herself from the constant objectification and abjection of the female body that often has occurred in artwork centered on women and death. Her piece Self-

Portrait with a Skeleton not only attests to the relevance of death and the maiden to contemporary art but proves that misogynistic and mythologized death imagery of women can still be reused and repurposed for artistic growth.

After analyzing the socio-historical origins of death and the maiden within Hans

Baldung Grien’s deeply misogynistic portrayals of women alongside death as ciphers of sin, one can see how the motif can be appropriated by the very bodies it objectifies.

Grien used death and the maiden to portray the female body, through association with death, as a symbol of corruption and folly for mankind. Centuries later male

Expressionist painters used the motif to paint their own personal relationships, but they still ‘othered’ and objectified the women portrayed and contributed to the abjection of the female body. More recently female artists have taken the misogynistic motif and appropriated it for themselves. The motif is no longer a mode of abjection, but self- reflection on how the female nude has been treated over time. Death and the maiden can evolve further into a symbol of power, a symbol of female agency and triumph, not only over death, but over the male gaze.

93 Ibid, 4. 60

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