chapter 12 Amber, Blood, and the Holy Face of Jesus: the Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Bruges Elliott D. Wise and Matthew Havili The ‘precious blood of Christ’ is at the core of sacramental mystery.*,1 St. Paul defends its privileged status throughout his epistles, declaring that ‘almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission’.2 He emphasizes that the blood sacrifices once required by the Mosaic Law find their antitype in Christ’s Passion and the ‘propitiation through faith in his blood’.3 In the liturgy, there are few substances bodied forth with more consistency and variety than this atoning blood. The newly baptized figuratively ‘was[h] their robes […] white in the blood of the Lamb’, and in the Eucharistic ‘cup [of] the new testament in [his] blood’ the sanguis Christi is adored under the accidentals of bread and wine.4 St. Thomas Aquinas (1225−1274) declared that ‘by His Passion [Christ] inaugurated the Rites of the Christian Religion’, ‘that the sacraments of the Church derive their power spe- cially from Christ’s Passion’, and ‘[i]t was in sign of this that from the side of Christ hanging on the Cross there flowed water and blood’.5 Late medieval and early modern art represents those twin rivers from Christ’s side – the ‘headwa- ters’ of salvation – under a variety of forms and media. This essay will consider the material of amber as a particularly potent signifier for Christ’s historical and sacramental blood. The physical and spiritual qualities of amber would * N. B. We would like to express appreciation for feedback and suggestions from colleagues attending the 2018 Sixteenth Century Society Conference, as well as from colleagues and students at Brigham Young University. 1 1 Peter 1:19. 2 Hebrews 9:22 See also Kaiser E., “The Devotion to the Precious Blood”, The Ecclesiastical Review 83, 1 (July 1930) 1−14. 3 Romans 3:25. 4 Revelation 7:14, 1 Corinthians 11:25. 5 3.62.5, in Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. J.-P. Migne, 4 vols. (Paris: 1859) vol. 4, 568: ‘per suam passionem initiavit ritum christianae religionis […] quod sacramenta Ecclesiae specialiter habent virtutem ex passione Christi […] in cujus signum de latere Christi pen- dentis in cruce fluxerunt aqua et sanguis’. The translation comes from the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trans.), The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, 22 vols. (London − Manchester − Birmingham − Glasgow: 1916–1937), part 3, 39. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_013 the Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Bruges 321 have also facilitated meditation on the reformation of the votaries’ innermost souls, in which ‘the blood of Christ […] purge[s] [the] conscience’ in mystical communion with God.6 The mythical origins of amber derive from the tale of Phaethon, son of the god Helios, who once obtained permission to borrow his father’s fiery chariot and drive the sun across the sky. Woefully unprepared for the task, Phaethon steered the celestial horses too close to earth, and Jupiter hurled a thunder- bolt at him to prevent a conflagration of the world. Helios’s daughters bitterly mourned the death of their brother and stood so resolutely beside his tomb that they put down roots and transformed into trees. Dripping from their bark like sap, the sisters’ tears crystalised in the sun and became precious drops of amber.7 Amber was prized in the ancient world for its light weight and soft aroma, its natural warmth, and rich hue ranging from gold to vibrant orange-red. In medicine, it was administered to counteract stomach pains and weak eyesight, to ensure healthy pregnancies, and to staunch blood.8 Roman patricians and emperors – especially the Julio-Claudians – imported enormous quantities of amber from the Baltic coast, and Pliny the Elder wrote that even a small amber figurine was worth more than the price of several humans.9 Like other ancient scholars and naturalists, Pliny correctly identified amber as fossilized resin. Sometimes imprisoning prehistoric insects, this translucent ‘tree blood’ maintains the swirling and rippling appearance of viscous liquid, even in its petrified state.10 In his thirteenth-century De mineralibus (On Minerals), St. Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280) aptly refers to drops of amber as ‘“tears” dis- tilled from trees’.11 6 Hebrews 9:14. 7 37.11.31, in Pliny, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eichholz, Loeb Classical Library 6 (Cambridge: 2014) 187; 2.31, in Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. F. J. Miller, Loeb Classical Library 42 (Cambridge: 1916) 63. It is generally agreed that in ancient and medieval texts, the terms Lyngurium (Lyncurium), electron, and succinum all refer to amber. See Duffin C., “Fossils as Drugs: Pharmaceutical Palaeontology”, Ferrantia 54 (2008) 44. Lyngurium is a particularly fraught term. See Walton A., “Theophrastus on Lyngurium: Medieval and Early Modern Lore from the Classical Lapidary Tradition”, Annals of Science 58, 4 (2001) 357–379, esp. 365–366, 366–372. 8 See Riddle J. M., “Amber in Ancient Pharmacy: The Transmission of Information About a Single Drug: A Case Study”, Pharmacy in History 15 (1973) 9. 9 37.12.49, in Pliny, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eichholz, 201. 10 37.11.42–46, in ibidem. 195, 197, 199. 11 2.2.17, in Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. D. Wyckoff (Oxford: 1967) 121. See also 16.8.6–8, in Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. S. A. Barney – W. J. Lewis – J. A. Beach (Cambridge: 2006) 323–24; 16.24.1–2, in ibidem. 333..