Assistant Professor Elliott Wise (Comparative Arts and Letters) shares how “plague crosses” served as a beacon of hope for those suffering from sickness during the Renaissance.
The history of Western art is no stranger to devastating pandemics and plagues. Among the great works of art that have been created to memorialize and inspire faith during those dark times are a predominance of crucifixion scenes. The so-called “plague crosses” of late medieval Germany feature a devastatingly tortured body of Christ, who has, in the words of the Psalms, been “poured out like water,” having given everything—his body, his blood, his soul—to suffer with his afflicted people. Just recently, Pope Francis called upon the famous fifteenth-century plague cross of San Marcello to become the centerpiece of his great Urbi et Orbi blessing for a ceasing of the pandemic worldwide.
I’d like to talk for a second about one of the most powerful examples of a plague crucifixion scene: the great Isenhiem Altarpiece of the German Renaissance artist Matthias Grünewald. The altarpiece was originally intended for a monastic hospital run by Antonite monks to care for men and women suffering from a dreaded disease known as “St. Anthony’s fire,” today known as ergotism. Ergotism was contracted by eating infected grain, and it led to a quick but very painful death involving terrible muscle spasms, bleeding and oozing sores, painful gangrenous advancements in the arms and the legs, and often amputation. In a Renaissance hospital, there was very little that could be done for people suffering from ergotism except to provide them with a comfortable bed, kind people, the hope of the sacraments of the church, and faith in Jesus Christ.
And that was the purpose of this altarpiece, which the patients would gaze at as they suffered their last days. It is a disturbingly graphic image of Jesus suffering on Calvary—His heavy body weighing down the crossbeam of His cross, His skin yellow and green, His arms and legs twisted, His hands in horrible contorted positions, His body covered in weeping sores, a heavy crown of thorns upon His head, His lips black, blood coming from His nose, the tendons in His hands wrapped agonizingly around those brutal nails, and the same case in His feet. It is an image that, for many people, is very disturbing at first, until they realize that this is a painting of the Savior with all of the symptoms of St. Anthony’s fire. His green-yellow skin evokes gangrene; His twisted arms and legs, rigid in the onset of rigor mortis, evoke the painful muscle spasms; and His body, covered with weeping sores, evokes the devastating skin condition that advanced with the disease.
Like most Renaissance altarpieces, this one opens to reveal further scenes painted within. You can see the seam in the panel where the opening and closing takes place; and you can recognize, from that seam, that when the altarpiece is opened, Jesus’s right arm is amputated. This is, in short, a God who suffers viscerally with His people. And upon opening the altarpiece, what is presented to the minds of the dying men and women who are suffering and awaiting death marked with the sign of their faith in Christ is the great hope of the resurrection. On the right is one of the most fantastic resurrection scenes in the history of art. Imaginative in its swirling colors and glowing skin of Jesus, as triumphant and effulgent as the body of Christ was grotesque and pained on the exterior. This is the hope for those patients in their pandemic: that one day their bodies would glow with light; their weeping sores become like Jesus’s—effulgent, radiant rubies and badges of triumph.