II.5. Love & Death: The Art of Devotion

Whereas worship defines the group, devotion characterizes the pious or even saintly individual. To judge, however, from the devotional imagery of the later Middle Ages, interiority required profuse outward expression. Devotional imagery was designed not simply to buttress, but also to shape the spectators devotional experience. Exemplar and experience were closely related: interiority was stamped in the mold of imaginative images which in turn responded to ever more elaborate devotional routines. No period in the history of Christianity proved so fecund when it came to the generation of new genres of imagery or so prolific simply in terms of the sheer volume of images produced. On the one hand, the late Middle Ages produced exquisite, highly personalized works of art. On the other, it witnessed the origins of modern mass production, and not simply in the realm of printing. The over-production of images provides an essential part of the background to the Protestant Reformation, which in turn led to the destruction of images on an unprecedented scale.

The lives of Christ, in particular his Passion (cat. nos. 117, 137, 151), and of his mother, the Virgin Mary, together with images of saints, dominated the devotional imagination. Hagiographic imagery, in particular, could inject elements of both epic and romance into religious themes. For example, in an Italian devotional book (cat. no. 136) comprised entirely of pictures, which were intended to serve as prompts to meditation independent of any text, a dashing St. George, the embodiment of equestrian valor, saves a praying princess (perhaps a figure with which the book’s owner could have identified) from a dragon with a sinuous neck identified by a later inscription as the “beast of the Apocalypse.” Images of Christ, it might be assumed, appealed to men, and those of Mary to women. The assignment of gender roles, however, was hardly so straightforward. In its vulnerability, Christ’s body was feminized; as the exemplary embodiment of devotion, Mary, in whose body Christ took on flesh, was characterized as a priest. Devotional imagery was not always narrative in character. Non-narrative images, such as the Man of Sorrows (cat. nos. 128, 133, 228), the Arma Christi (insignia of the Passion, especially the wounds of Christ) (cat. nos. 139, 140), the Holy Name (cat. no. 141), the Madonna of Humility (cat. no. 129), or Mary as an exemplar of devotion (cat. no. 103), provided focal points for prolonged meditation on the meaning and personal import of the history of salvation.

Late medieval devotional imagery can strike the modern viewer as baroque, even bizarre, in its obsessive focus on material, corporeal manifestations of piety, in particular, on the body of Christ. By virtue, however, of the Incarnation (the doctrine according to which God took on flesh in the person of the suffering Christ), the material provided a portal to the divine.