Christ on the Cross

Artist Unknown, Christus Triumphans (Christ Triumphant upon the Cross), late 12th century

How, why, & when did images of Jesus change?

Christ on the Cross

Artist Unknown, Christus Triumphans (Christ Triumphant upon the Cross), late 12th century

How, why, & when did images of Jesus change?

Christ on the Cross

Coppo di Marcovaldo, Christus Patiens (Christ Suffering on the Cross), c. 1250-55

Crucifix, ca. 1292

Book of Hours , 1405-08

Crucifix, ca. 1150-1200

Crucifixion, 1457-59

Crucifixion, ca. 1515

Art Bleeds: Christ on the Cross

To compare the Christus Triumphus [top] that St Francis saw with Coppo di Marcovaldo’s deeply emotional Christus Patiens [bottom] of some fifty years later is to measure the gap between the religious sensibilities of one era and another--to see the difference between the art before and after Francis. The bland, calm, complacently all-powerful Christ of the earlier painting has given way to another, more disturbing and engaging figure. Coppo’s Christ is racked by pain and sorrow, his arms awkwardly outstretched, his tendons straining against his own weight, his body sagging and twisted to the left. His beard is flecked with sweat and his dark eyes are filled with an appalling pain. This was the face of the new art.

Renaissance (1999) by Andrew Graham-Dixon

Flesh & Stone: Changes in Sculpture

Nicola Pisano, Adoration of the Magi, detail from the pulpit, Bapistery, Pisa, 1259-60

Flesh & Stone: Late Medieval SculptureFrancis’s emphasis on the body penitential, the body bleeding and in pain, had just as powerful an effect on sculpture as on painting, and it led artists in thirteenth-century Italy to look at the art of the past with a different eye. Roman sculpture acquired a new significance for the sculptors of the thirteenth century . . . Looking at the relics of antiquity, artists saw a world of possibilities for their own work: bodies sensual, bodies beautiful, bodies writhing, all ripe for transposition into the stories of the Christian faith.

Early in the second half of the thirteenth century Nicola Pisano carved an elaborate marble pulpit for the Bapistery in Pisa. It is the first and most compact example of what has been called thirteenth-century classicism--a composite work of sculpture in which figures clearly modeled on those in ancient Roman art enact scenes from biblical legend.

Renaissance (1999) by Andrew Graham-Dixon

Flesh & Stone: Late Medieval Sculpture

Giovanni Pisano, The Nativity, detail from the pulpit, Pisa Cathedral, 1302-10

Giovanni looked not only to Rome for inspiration, but also to recent developments in Northern art, which had undergone its own naturalistic revolutions in the thirteenth century . . . He must also have been influenced by the agonized physiques in thirteenth-century paintings of the Crucifixion.

Renaissance (1999)

Flesh & Stone: Late Medieval Sculpture

Lorenzo Maitani, The Last Judgement (details), façade, Orvieto Cathedral, c. 1310-30

Another of the most memorable reflections of the new religious and artistic sensibility during the century after Francis’s death was Lorenzo Maitani’s series of marble reliefs which decorate the pilasters on the façade of Orvieto Cathedral. Begun around 1310 . . .and completed in 1330, the reliefs represent stories from the Old and New Testaments. Like his Pisan predecessors Maitani was fruitfully aware of the example of ancient Roman art . . . The most memorable scene at Orvieto is that of hell in the relief depicting The Last Judgement. Amidst much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, the damned writhe and strain against the demons and snakes that have come to torture them; one of them has been part-swallowed by a dragon-like creature. The scene impressed Michelangelo deeply . . . Excerpt from Renaissance (1999)

Giotto & Empathy: Late Medieval Painting

Nicola and Giovanni Pisano had a great influence not just on Italian sculptors but also on Italian painters, and especially on Giotto, who is often regarded as one of the founders of Western painting. Giotto’s finest surviving works, a series of early fourteenth-century frescos in the Arena Chapel, in Padua, brought Italian narrative painting to a new pitch of expression . . .

The walls are painted with scenes from The Life of the Virgin, scenes from The Life of Christ and The Last Judgement. Giotto’s narrative and pictorial sense was strongly influenced by the miracle plays of his time, which were themselves strongly influenced by the Franciscan approach to the communication of scripture . . .

Giotto simplified and reduced the elements of art in order to get to the centre of the emotions and meanings of the stories which he was given to depict . . .

While Giotto’s sense of drama was nourished by the sacred theatre and the sermons of his time, his sense of form was influenced by contemporary sculpture . . . The figures in Giotto’s art are full of life but they have been conceived as if they have a sculptural mass . . . [30-32]

Renaissance (1999) by Andrew Graham-Dixon