Art and devotion

A Meditation on the Passion of Christ

Caroline Farey on a painting by Guido da Siena from the 1270s

The very wood of the cross is speaking in the following quotation from the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood (‘rood’ meaning ‘cross’): ‘Then I saw mankind’s Lord Hasten with great zeal, as though he wanted to climb upon me.’

Written in the 10th century, this poem is one of the earliest instances of the theme of Christ climbing or ‘ascending’ the cross, a theme that can be found in several early medieval devotional texts and images and from several parts of Europe through to the 15th century.

The Dream of the Rood is part of a manuscript in Old English found in the library of the cathedral of Vercelli in North-West Italy, which is therefore called the Codex Vercellensis, or Vercelli book (codex). One commentator proposes that the book may have been taken to Italy by one of the numerous Anglo-Saxon pilgrims on the way to Rome.

This theme of Christ climbing the cross – seen in our painting - is obviously not scriptural yet it portrays profound divine truth, the truth of the Son of God’s irrepressible desire to save us. Another manuscript, from the fifteenth century, imagines the same scene in this way:

…the clamouring crowd leads Christ to the place of Calvary, and then, with all of them watching there, He is stripped of His garments… O what great sorrow it was to you, most Holy Mother, when you beheld that sight. Then, when the cross had been prepared, they cry: "Ascend, Jesus, ascend." O how freely He ascends, with what great love for us He bore everything, with what patience, what gentleness! . . . Thus, entirely nude, He is raised and extended on the cross. But his most loving mother, full of anguish, placed her veil, which had been on her head, around Him, and covered His shame… (Pseudo-Bede, De Meditationes Passione Christi)

You will notice that the artist has deliberately made the loincloth around Jesus the same colour as the dress of his Blessed Mother (though maybe not her actual veil here) and her cloak of dark blue, as well as her arm, also wraps around her son. These all indicate the intense unity of mission and purpose of mother and son in these final moments of Jesus’ earthly life.

St John Henry Cardinal Newman also imagines Christ climbing a ladder, but this time tentatively, on to the cross:

Yes, they set up the Cross on high, and they placed a ladder against it, and, having stripped Him of His garments, made Him mount. With His hands feebly grasping its sides and cross-woods, and His feet slowly, uncertainly, with much effort, with many slips, mounting up, … When He reached the projection where His sacred feet were to be, He turned round with sweet modesty and gentleness towards the fierce rabble, stretching out His arms, as if He would embrace them. Then He lovingly placed the backs of His hands close against the transverse beam, waiting for the executioners to come with their sharp nails and heavy hammers to dig into the palms of His hands, and to fasten them securely to the wood. (Taken from www.newmanreader.org, meditations on the stations of the cross, 11th station).

Similarly, here, we see Jesus reaching forward to mount the ladder with the help of the boy in red perched on the transverse beam. Standing next to Jesus is Mary, the mother of Jesus, the most animated and extraordinary figure in the painting. The Gospel of John speaks of her standing at the foot of the cross (Jn 19:25) but here the artist is depicting more: the great strength of her soul, the passion of her heart and her total unity with her son’s desire for the salvation of mankind. Mary even holds back, by the throat, one of the crowd, who seems to have a stone in his raised hand, to ensure that nobody holds back the salvation she and her son are longing for and which is about to be accomplished. ‘Virgin most powerful, Virgin most merciful, Virgin most faithful’ are stanzas from the Litany of Loretto of the 16th century but they are already being depicted here.

There are two identifiable groups of people also in the painting: the Roman soldiers with their metal helmets and the Jews with the floppy pointed hats in which the medieval world typically painted those Jews antagonistic towards Jesus. Notice that almost all the faces have been deliberately attacked and scratched at some point in time, except for those of Jesus and Mary. There is also one bare-headed man who looks up at the cross from the back of the scene on the left. He is possibly the beloved disciple, or Joseph of Arimathea (Mk 15:43).

The composition is full of drama and detail. The naked man, one of the thieves, is being made ready for one of the other crosses. A man hammers stakes into the ground at the foot of Christ’s cross, presumably to steady it, and a prominent Jew points to his heavy mallet as the better instrument for hammering in the nails held aloft by another.

The ladder has seven rungs which have, in other paintings of this kind, been clearly meant to indicate the ladder of virtue of 2 Peter 1:5-7. The list of virtues begins with Faith and culminates with love. Christ has the fullness of them all, but the indication is that in meditating on such texts and images of Christ’s passion we too will mount the ladder of virtue with Christ.

Factfile

Guido da Siena, tempera, part of a wooden polyptych from the 1270s. The twelve panels of the polyptych have been divided and dispersed, with this one now housed in the museum of the Catherijneconvent, Utrecht.

I am indebted to the research of Anna Eorsi for many of the details in this article: https://tinyurl.com/2s42fduj