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Miraculous Crucifixes in Late Medieval Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Katherine L. Jansen
Katherine L. Jansen*
Affiliation:
Catholic University of America
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Extract

In the year 1206, as Saint Francis was walking near the church of San Damiano, just outside the walls of Assisi, he was suddenly overcome by an urge to enter the dilapidated sanctuary. Upon entering, in the words of his first hagiographer,

he fell down before the crucifix in devout and humble supplication; and smitten by unusual visitations, he found himself other than he had been when he entered. While he was thus affected, something unheard of before happened to him: the painted image of Christ crucified moved its lips and spoke. Calling him by name it said: ‘Francis, go repair my house, which as you see, is falling completely to ruin’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 41: Signs, Wonders, Miracles Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church , 2005 , pp. 203 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005

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References

1 Thomas of Celano, Vita secunda, transl. Placid Hermann, O.F.M., The Second Life of St Francis, in Marion A. Habig, ed., St Francis of Assisi, Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis (4th rev. edn, Chicago, IL, 1983), 359–543, ch. vi, par. 10, 370. The Latin text can be found in multiple editions; I have used S. Francisci Assisiensis vita et miracula additis opusculis liturgicis auctore fr. Thoma de Celano, ed. Édouard d’Alençon (Rome, 1906). For the other versions of the Life, see BHL 3095–3136.

2 Celano, , Vita secunda, 370.Google Scholar

3 Ibid.

4 For the addition of the new material, see Habig, ed., Omnibus, 186–9.

5 Legenda Maior, transl. Major Life of St. Francis, in Habig, ed., Omnibus, 627–787, ch. 2, 640, of which over four-hundred manuscripts survive; see Fleming, John, An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1977), 45.Google Scholar

6 For a discussion of the dating, see Stubblevine, James, Assisi and the Rise of Vernacular Art (New York, 1985), 16 and 39 Google Scholar, n. 2.

7 The fundamental work on painted crosses in Italy is still Evelyn Sandberg Vavalà, La croce dipinta italiana e l’iconografia della passione (Verona, 1929, repr. 1980).

8 André Vauchez has looked at the phenomenon of animated sacred images – not speaking crucifixes, however – in ‘Les Images saintes: représentations iconographiques et manifestations du sacré’, in idem, Saints, prophètes et visionnaires: le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Age (Paris, 1999), 79–91, Italian transl, as ‘Le immagini sante: rappresentazioni iconografiche e manifestazioni del sacro’, in Santi, profeti e visionari: il soprannaturale nel medioevo (Bologna, 2000), 81–94, for which reference I am grateful to Nicole Bériou. On this topic, particularly for the wonder-working image of the Madonna dell’lmpruneta, see Richard Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience: the Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1972), 7–41. For sculpted Umbrian miraculous crucifixes in particular, see Elvio Lunghi, La Passione degli Umbri: crocifissi di legno in Valle Umbra tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Foligno, 2000), for which I thank Joanna Cannon.

9 Jeffrey Hamburger makes a similar point in relation to visual devotional material; see ‘The Visual and the Visionary: the Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotion’, in idem, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998), 111–48.

10 I am grateful to the audience at the Ecclesiastical History Society conference, and particularly to Michael Goodich, who suggested a number of other miraculous crucifix narratives, which I shall consider more fully when I return to this topic at a later date.

11 BHL 4397–4406. For the tangled relationship between the earliest Vitae, see Raffaello Volpini, ‘Giovanni Gualberto’, Bibliotheca Sanctorum, 13 vols (Rome, 1961–70), 6: 1012–29. For editions of the Vitae, see the edition by F. Baethgen, MGH.S 30.2 (1934), 1076–1110. Atto’s opening paragraphs are interpolated into Baethgen’s edition of the Vita Iohannis Gualberti auctore abate Strumensi because the first few folio pages of Strumi’s Vita (contained in a unique exemplar) have been lost.

12 Ibid., par. 2–3, 1080.

13 Ibid.

14 Visual representation of the nodding crucifix does not seem to have entered the iconography of Giovanni Gualberto until the fourteenth century, well after the scene was established for Saint Francis’s Vita cycles. According to recent research, the miraculous crucifix, translated in 1671 with great solemnity from San Miniato to the principal Vallombrosan church of the Santissima Trinità in Florence, turns out to be datable to no earlier than the thirteenth century; see Volpini, Raffaello and Cardinale, Antonietta, ‘Giovanni Gualberto, Iconography’, Bíbliotheca Sanctorum, 6: 1029–32 Google Scholar. For a description of the translation ceremony, see Lucchesi, Emiliano O.S.B., Il crocifìsso di S. Giovanni Gualberto e lo stendardo della Croce di S. Francesco di Sales (Florence, 1937), 31–2.Google Scholar

15 It should be noted that in the same period, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1154), an author noted for his affective piety, received a much more affectionate gesture from a crucifix beneath which he was praying. Although his first hagiographers do not mention the event, Conrad of Eberbach in his Exordium Magnum, written at the turn of the century, describes the moment when Bernard, rapt in prayer, was received into the arms of the crucifix, which had detached its arms from the cross in order to embrace the supplicant saint. Conrad of Eberbach, Exordium Magnum Cisterciense, ed. B. Griesser (Rome, 1961), ch. vi, 102–3: ‘De monacho spirituali qui vidit imaginem crucis sanctum patrem in oratione constitutum amplexantem’, cited by Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘La Culture de l’imago’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 1 (1996), 3–36. For a catalogue of forty wooden crucifixes which have detachable arms enabling the deposition of the Christ-figure for Good Friday lamentation scenes, see G. and T. Taubert, ‘Mittelalterliche Kruzifixe mit schwenkbaren Armen’, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für KunstuHssenschaft 23 (1969), 79–121.

16 Tellingly, in the chapter immediately preceding his visit to San Damiano, Thomas of Celano recounts that Francis had to fend off questions from his friends about whether he was ready to marry: see 1 Cel, Habig, ed., Omnibus, ch. iii, 7.

17 Vauchez, , ‘Le immagini sante’, 83–4.Google Scholar

18 BHL 5314. A critical edition, now superseding that in ActaSS, 3 February, 298–357, is Legenda de vita et miraculis Beatae Margaritae de Cortona, ed. Fortunato Iozelli, O.F.M. (Grottaferrata, 1997) [hereafter Legenda BMC].

19 Recent scholarly opinion attributes it to a thirteenth-century Spanish master. It now hangs in a nineteenth-century altar, in the Church of Santa Margherita in Cortona, dedicated to the saint. It was translated there on 14 December 1602, as a prelude to yet another attempt by the commune to have its local holy woman canonized, which finally succeeded in the year 1728. For the sources and recent scholarship on the crucifix, see Corti, Laura and Spinelli, Riccardo, eds, Margherita da Cortona: una storia emblematica di devozione narrata per testi e immagini (Milan, 1998)Google Scholar, and esp. Lunghi, La Passione degli Umbri, 65–90, for Margaret’s relationship to this crucifix. See also Paoletti, John, ‘Wooden Sculpture in Italy as a Sacral Presence’, Artibus et Historiae 26 (1992), 85–100 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with thanks again to Joanna Cannon. For the canonization, see Cannon, Joanna and Vauchez, André, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany (University Park, PA, 1999), 5.Google Scholar

20 Legenda BMC, I, 1a, 180. One post-medieval source (Pietro Strozzi) dates the event to the year 1267, an impossibility as Margaret had yet to arrive in Cortona by that year; see Corti and Spinelli, Margherita da Cortona, 197.

21 Legenda BMC, IV, 15, 231–2.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 ‘Like a Virgin: the Meaning of the Magdalen for Female Penitents of Later Medieval Italy’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 45 (2000), 131–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Legenda BMC, VII, 32,344.

26 Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona, 25.

27 The first evidence of the appellation comes from Francis himself in a letter written to Lady jacoba of Settesoli (13 Ep. 1) as he lay dying at the Porziuncola. The salutation reads: ‘Dominae Iacobae, servae Altissimi, frater Franciscus, pauperculus Iesu Christi, salutem et societatem spiritus sancti in Domino Iesu Christo’: Concordantiae verbales opusculorum S. Francisci et S. Clarae Assisiensium, ed. I. Boccali (Assisi, 1976), 121.

28 See Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona, 2–3.

29 I cite from Thompson’s new and important book, which he has kindly shared with me in manuscript, Cities of God: the Religion of the Italian Communes, c.1125-c.1325, (University Park, PA, 1995).

30 BHL 8149–68.1 have learnt much about the cult of Saint Thomas from the work of Charlotte Allen, Ph.D. candidate at the Catholic University of America.

31 Colledge, Edmund O.S.A., ‘The Legend of St. Thomas Aquinas’, in St. Thomas Aquinas 1274–1974: Commemorative Studies foreword by Gilson, Etienne, 2 vols (Toronto, 1974), 1: 13–28, 18.Google Scholar

32 Ystoria sancti Thome de Aquino de Guillaume de Tocco (1323), ed. Brun-Gouanvic, Claire le (Toronto, 1996), 162 Google Scholar, n. 3.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., 161–2.

35 For the studia see Mulchahey, M. Michèle, ‘First the Bow is Bent in Study’: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto, 1998)Google Scholar. For Thomas’s iconography, see Kaftal, George, Iconography of the Saints, 4 vols (Florence, 1952-85), 1: Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting, 977–88; 2: Iconography of the Saints in Central and Southern Italy, 1088–96; 3: Iconography of the Saints in the Painting of North East Italy, 973–84; 4: Iconography of the Saints in the Painting of North West Italy, 640–2.Google Scholar

36 Thomas made his profession at San Domenico Maggiore in Naples sometime in the years between 1238–44. From 1252–6 he studied at Paris and during the period 1256–9 and again in 1269–72 he lectured there as regent master. In 1272–4 he returned to Naples where he finished the Summa.

37 For the condemnations, see John F. Wippel, ‘The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977), 169–201 and Roland Hissette, Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277 (Louvain and Paris, 1977).

38 Ystoria, ed. Le Brun-Gouanvic, ch. 52, 187–9. A later, early-modern tradition claims yet a third ‘bene scripsisti’ commendation for Thomas, this one occurring at Orvieto, where he is said to have written the office of Corpus Domini, on which see Colledge, ‘The Legend’, 24, who cites Giovanni Michele Pio, Delle vite degli uomini illustri di San Domenico (Bologna, 1607–13), 226–7. A mid fourteenth-century scene from the fresco cycle by Ugolino di Prete Ilario in the Cappella del Corporale in the Duomo at Orvieto also suggests an Orvieto miracle of this sort. Thomas is here represented in an act of prayer beneath a cross that hangs above an altar on which a chalice and the eucharistic wafer are prominently displayed. The scene is reproduced in Lunghi, La Passione degli Umbri, fig. 21.

39 BHL 6721–6. Among the earliest Vitae, based almost entirely on Innocent IV’s canonization bull, are those by Tommaso Agni da Lentini, of which I have used the fourteenth-century Italian edition, S. Pietro Martire da Verona Leggenda di Fra Tommaso Agni da Lentini nel volgare trecentesco, ed. Stefano Orlandi, O.P. (Florence, 1952) and Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend. For the most recent Latin critical edition, see Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, 2 vols (Florence, 1998), 1: 421–2. The standard English translation is The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, transl. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 1: 254–66. A. Dondaine, ‘Saint Pierre Martyre’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 23 (1953), 66–162, unravels the relationship between these and subsequent Vitae.

40 I wish to thank Donald Prudlo, Ph. D. candidate at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, who is currently writing a dissertation on the cult of Saint Peter Martyr, for sharing with me the text from Trèves, Bibliothèque de la Ville, MS 1168, fol. 134r-v. On this manuscript, see Dondaine, ‘Saint Pierre Martire’, 128–30, who calls this anonymous tract after Bérenger of Landore, the Master General of the order 1312–17, under whom the miracle collection was probably compiled. The crucifix itself is mentioned in Galvano Fiamma’s fourteenth-century chronicle of the Dominican Order as having been at the convent of Sant’Eustorgio in Milan at the 1229 chapter meeting: ‘in capitulo erat ymago crucifixi, que interdum locuta est sancto Petro martyri’ (Dondaine, ‘Saint Pierre Martire’, 160, n. 70). I have not yet been able to ascertain whether or not a crucifix associated with this miracle still survives at Sant’Eustorgio.

41 Perhaps because artists used Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend as source material which, as we have just seen, did not recount this episode, the scene does not appear in the iconography of the saint, who is nonetheless elsewhere readily identifiable by the knife plunged into his skull. For the iconography, see Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints, 1: 818–32; 2: 900–10; 3: 843–54;4: 548–53.

42 Antoninus, , Chronicae, 3 vols (Lyons, 1576), ‘de Beato Petro Martyre’, 3: 640.Google Scholar

43 Antonio Vivarini, in a mid fifteenth-century polyptych panel now in Berlin, illustrates the visitation by the holy virgins overheard by Dominican friars. The image is reproduced as fig. 1109 in Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints, 3: 846.

44 Ibid. In a furtum sacrum carried out in 1479, a Dominican friar spirited the crucifix away from Jesi to the convent of San Domenico in Chioggia where it is still venerated. An image of the crucifix, which is over four metres high and hangs over the high altar awaiting funds for restoration, can be seen on line at http://www.savevenice.org/site/pp.asp?Fc=9eIHKWMHF&b=6807, then click under current projects, then crucifix (consulted 27/12/04). For the ‘theft’, see Dondaine, ‘Saint Pierre Martire’, 160, n. 69.

45 For the Santa Sabina mission, see Mulchahey, , ‘First the Bow is Bent’, 278–306.Google Scholar

46 Lunghi cites the case of Giacomo da Bevagna, a thirteenth-century Dominican saint, whose Vita records the intervention of yet another miraculous crucifix who came to the aid of its supplicant. It seems that once when Giacomo was praying before the cross, he asked for a sign to confirm that he was among the elect. In response the crucifix replied: ‘Let this very blood be a sign and a certainty to you’, after which blood began to flow from the wound in the crucifix’s side, three drops of which spurted onto Giacomo’s lips. The Latin text is published in an appendix to E. Paoli, ‘La vita del beato Giacomo Bianconi scritta da Ventura da Bevagna: un testo ritrovato?’, Hagiographica 4 (1997), 253–99, cited in Lunghi, La Passione degli Umbri, 49, n. 6.

47 BHL 1702–9.

48 For Catherine’s apostolate in the world, see Karen Scott, ‘St Catherine of Siena, Apostola’, ChH 61 (1992), 34–46.

49 For Raymond’s Latin Vita, see ActaSS, 3 April, 853–978; I use (sometimes silently amended) the English translation of Raymond of Capua, The Life of St Catherine of Siena, transl. George Lamb (London, 1960) [hereafter, LCS].

50 ActaSS, Part I, ch. 5, par. 84 and 86, 874; LSC, ch. 9, 72–3.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 ActaSS, Part III, Ch. 7, par. 402, 952–3; LSC, Epilogue, 362–3.

54 Raymond reports that young women were considered marriageable at the age of twelve, ActaSS, Part I, ch. 2, par. 41, 863; LSC, ch. 4, 36.

55 ActaSS, Part I, ch. 2, par. 45, 864; LSC, ch. 4, 37–40.

56 ActaSS, Part I, ch. 3, par. 54, 866–7; LSC, ch. 5, 48.

57 There is a large literature on the theme of virginity in the lives of female saints; for a good example, see Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1997).

58 See Hamburger, , ‘The Visual and the Visionary’, 111–48.Google Scholar

59 Belting, Hans, The Image and its Public: Form and Function of Early Passion Paintings, transl. Bartusis, Mark and Meyer, Raymond (New Rochelle, NY, 1989), 302.Google Scholar