Forfeit and Gain

Sienese Master Simone Martini painted this wing of a small double-sided quadriptych, a private devotional work made for a member of the Orsini family. Now dismembered, it originally also comprised images of The Crucifixion, The Descent from the Cross, The Entombment, and The Annunciation.

Simone was influential in the development of the International Gothic style—this graceful and elegant style is evident here, typified by fine lines and a refined, colourful palette.

The number of densely packed figures incorporated in this small work is striking. The crowd includes Jesus (at centre), soldiers with spears, inhabitants of Jerusalem, and disciples—mostly women. They are all on the way to Calvary. We see the stern faces of those who want Jesus killed; the bewilderment of two frightened children; and the loyalty of those who have believed in him as the Messiah, Saviour, and king of Israel. These latter have stood by his side and will do so on Golgotha (and beyond, after the resurrection).

In other words, this crowd includes examples of both groups of whom Jesus speaks in the Gospels: those who were ashamed of Jesus and his words, of whom the Son of man will also be ashamed when he ‘comes in glory’, as well as those holy ones who would ‘not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power’ (Mark 9:1 NRSV).

Unlike many other depictions of Jesus and his disciples, the prominence of Jesus’s female disciples, including his mother Mary, is somewhat remarkable here. Most striking among these is the figure of Mary Magdalene in red who stands above the crowd with arms raised and a deeply pained expression. She is almost pinioned by the cross, the colour of her clothes echoing (even more vibrantly) the red of Jesus’s garment. The one who loved Jesus most, and who would be the first to witness his resurrection is not only in agony over her beloved friend’s and Saviour’s imminent death but symbolizes with her outstretched arms and open palms what Jesus had asked of his disciples: a readiness to take up the cross, and to follow him; a willingness to suffer for one’s faith in this Messiah, and the kingdom he promises.

One of the leading Abstract Expressionists, Barnett Newman (1905–70), an American of Jewish Polish–Russian descent, painted his Stations of the Cross between 1958 and 1966. It is a series of fourteen very large canvases in his typical minimalist style of expansive colour fields with vertical bands and lines. The canvases here are in white and black, interrupted by bands of different sizes spaced at varying intervals. In Western Art white has frequently connoted innocence, purity, and light, while black has been associated with darkness and death.

Newman wrote: ‘Lema Sabachtani—why? Why did you forsake me? Why forsake me? To what purpose? Why? This is the Passion. This outcry of Jesus. Not the terrible walk up the Via Dolorosa, but the question that has no answer’ (O’Neill 1992: 188).

It was not just Jesus’s outcry and suffering that Newman sought to capture in choosing the traditional format of The Stations but the agony of each single human being in this world. Newman regarded the human as ‘tragic’, a tragedy that essentially manifests itself, as he said, in the ‘metaphysical problem’ that each person is single, alone, yet belongs and is part of another (O’Neill 1992: 257–58).

It is remarkable that Newman, a Jew, should choose to paint over eight years—un-commissioned and of his own desire—this central Christian theme. The tradition of representing the Stations of the Cross goes back to the early Christian pilgrims who visited Jerusalem, walking in devotion and prayer along the path of Jesus to Calvary. Working in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and in the context of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, Newman’s focus in this set of works may have been not only Jesus but the whole human condition. Yet it is curious that he would engage with this most quintessentially Christian devotional subject—Christ the symbol of human suffering—to such an extent.

True to his own artistic style and true to the Jewish prohibition of religious imagery, Newman presents us with an ‘imageless image’, a non-figurative evocation of Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. The final work in the series, Station 14, traditionally represents Jesus laid in the tomb and in Newman’s conception is represented entirely in shades of white—possibly a concluding hint at the transcendence of Jesus’s and of all human suffering into resurrection and eternal life.

References

O’Neill, John P. (ed.). 1992. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 188, 257–58

Jan van Hemessen’s Christ Carrying the Cross focusses on the figure of Christ who fills the panel and is represented so near to the picture plane that he seems almost in the beholder’s space. His face is a study in innocent suffering, with its strong expression of tearful sorrow. His eyes look directly at the viewer—we are immediately drawn to them—yet at the same time the painting communicates the intense impression of his aloneness.

Christ’s face contrasts utterly with those of the gloating mob who press around him. The mocking figures on the right—reminiscent of Quinten Metsys’s grotesques—seem to have no compassion, no understanding whatsoever, of the person they are torturing through their ridicule, contempt, and cruelty. One of them ominously holds the end of a rope slung around Jesus’s neck; he is—literally—bound to die. These mockers seem to epitomize the shameful ‘adulterous and sinful generation’ of whom the Son, too, will be ashamed (Mark 8:38). On the left of Christ, just visible, are the swarthy soldiers whose spears add to the torment and violence of the scene. Jesus is surrounded by men of evil action.

The expressive portrayal of Jesus here is very much in the tradition of the Schmerzensmann (‘Man of Sorrows’), with Italian origins in the influential image-type known as the imago pietatis. Hemessen’s Schmerzensmann shares with this wider tradition an emphasis on how Jesus was ‘despised and rejected’ (Isaiah 53:3)—an emphasis taken to an extreme in Northern art forty years earlier in Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion panel for the Isenheim altarpiece (1512–16). In Grünewald’s stark rendering of Jesus’s horrific death, just as in Hemessen’s agonized Man of Sorrows, we are confronted by Jesus as he takes on the sin of the world for our redemption.

Yet, as co-sufferer, he is also one with whom we may identify in our own suffering and in this, perhaps, find comfort.