The Decorum of Grief:
Notes on the Representation of Mary at the Cross in Late Medieval Netherlandish Literature and Painting

'How often did she [Mary] embrace and kiss that Cross with sad longing, especially where the blessed blood of Jesus flowed down along the Cross. And she kissed the earth there on which the blood of Xpi [Christ] feil, and she licked that blood from the earth with such longing that her face was full of blood. Oh, how sad Mary was.'

For many modern readers this quotation from an early 16th-century book about Christ's Passion would seem to go far beyond the realms of sensibility. Even for a researcher specialized in the world of religious experience of the late medieval Netherlands and used to heartrending descriptions of Christ's Passion and Mary's compassion, this evocation of Mary's suffering is unusually crude. Historians, art historians and literary historians generally reach for the term 'realistic' to describe late medieval texts which employ dramatic anecdotal digressions to raise the sympathy quotient in a Passion story which appeared rather short and unemotional in the Bible. It is clear, especially since the publication of Marrow's book on late medieval Passion iconography, that this kind of anecdotal embellishment of the Passion story is not so much the product of the 'natural' prophesy of the Dutch towards a often extravagant realism. It is more the late, or perhaps overripe, product of a long exegetic tradition harking back  through the Middle Ages in which the Bible principally, but also the Church Fathers and all manner of theological writings were minutely examined for passages and motifs that might be interpreted as metaphorical indications of specific events in the life of Jesus about which the Gospels said nothing. In late medieval devotional literature these motifs - selected not for their theological profundity but more for the graphic portrayals of the suffering - crystallized to become part of the 'historical' narrative of the Passion itself. The motivation behind this search for and use of non-Gospel Passion motifs is the need to provide believers with a story of suffering to stimulate their compassion with Jesus and Mary. This need is rooted in the idea that the believer's ability to empathize and identify with the Virgin and her Son in the present is a guarantee of their intercession at the Last Judgment and a ticket to everlasting life. In the Middle Ages meditation on the various events of the Passion became, not  least for lay persons, one of the principal ways in which to obtain this salutary empathetic condition of the soul. The compassion, the deep inner emotion, with which Mary accompanied the suffering of her son is presented to the believer as the great example.'' 

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COPYRIGHT 1995 Prof. dr. R. L. Falkenburg , All rights reserved.
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