Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T23:45:34.397Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Use of Nails in the Crucifixion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2011

Joseph William Hewitt
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University

Extract

These words in criticism of Fra Lippo's vivid and realistic painting of sacred subjects admirably typify the attitude of theology to art. In the ages when the masses were still unable to read, the church took advantage of the work of the painter to impart instruction in the Bible stories. But after all, mere enlightenment is comparatively useless, sometimes even dangerous. It is always inferior to devotion. As long as the masses could be inspired by art to perform more fully their religious duties, so long was art rendering to the church the services that were its due. If the actual facts, even as recorded in the Scriptures, stood in the way of the theological object, they had to be neglected, obscured, or denied. If by a false depiction religious feeling were aroused, there could be no doubt as to the value of such depiction.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1932

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 I do not recognize a crucifixion scene in the Alexamenos graffito of the Museo delle Terme. But this graffito shows no nails.

2 Maskell, Ivories, pp. 253 ff.

3 So on a Romanesque plaque of Belgian provenience in the Ashmolean Museum. It dates from the twelfth century. The same is true of an ivory in the Vatican collection. It depicts beneath the cross Romulus and Remus and the Roman wolf.

4 Stations of the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral. Fourfold ropes pass around the waist.

5 This piece seems to be as late as the sixteenth century, but it is very like an ivory from Berlin reproduced in the Ashmolean and dating from century XI–XII.

6 Raffaelino in San Spirito, Florence.

7 Follower of Jacopo di Cione, Jarves Collection.

8 I cannot tell where I have seen this detail.

9 In a Pesellino in the National Gallery in London (Room IV; 727) this is emphatically the case. See also a Daddi in the Fogg Museum at Harvard.

10 A crucifixion of the Antwerp School shows this (National Gallery, London, XIX; 1088), and perhaps even better a French fifteenth-century crucifixion in the Fogg Museum.

11 Window in Holy Trinity Church, Knaresborough, England.

12 Fourteenth-century missal (Harley MS. 2891), National Gallery, London; Jarves Collection at New Haven, from the shop of Guido of Siena.

13 One of the most striking is an El Greco in the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia. El Greco repeats this feature occasionally. A painting in the Jarves Collection ascribed to a follower of Duccio manifests the same peculiarity. It occurs perhaps as frequently in England as anywhere. I observed it in the east end of Durham Cathedral and in St. Oswald's church in the same city. In St. Alban's Abbey each square Norman pillar has a crucifixion scene of the same type with the left foot over, and so far over that the two feet make a letter X. On the reredos of the high altar of Salisbury Cathedral the left foot is over, though the feet are nailed separately. A short three miles distant, in George Herbert's little church at Bemerton, a window shows the left foot over. Cf. Bowness church on Windermere. On a woodcut, dated 1440–1460, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the left foot is over.

14 Antwerp Museum, No. 313, Rubens.

15 Antwerp Museum, No. 297, Rubens.

16 In a French painting, dating from the last half of the thirteenth century, in the Wallace Collection in London.

17 Gallery of Modern Art, Rome.

18 London, National Museum, Room XV, 2922, Master of Delft.

19 A faience of 1544, Museo Naz., Palermo.

20 I quote Veneto, Mus. Naz., Naples, 84011.

21 Modern window of the north transept of Liverpool Cathedral.

22 Maître de la Parenté de la Vierge, Royal Gallery, Brussels.

23 Dürer in British Museum.

24 Dürer in British Museum.

25 Unknown thirteenth-century artist, Pinacoteca Vannucci, Perugia.

26 This is done already in the eleventh-century Byzantine crucifixion in the church of Santa Maria Antiqua in the Roman Forum.

27 A Byzantine painting in the Opera del Duomo, Florence.

28 On a Grünewald altarpiece at Bath.

29 It does not appear in the eleventh-century Psaltery of Saint Michael in the Medicean Library.

30 Jarves Collection, Yale, Lorenzo di Nicolo (fourteenth century).