Lament of the Hen

esus Christ, Son of God, assembling and protecting humanity through his Sacrifice on the Cross, by Frans Floris

Schutzmantelchristus/Christ in Limbo, by Lucas Cranach the Younger

Matthew 23:37–39; Luke 13:31–35

Commentaries by Torben Hanhart

Works of art by Frans Floris, Johann Sebastian Bach, Lucas Cranach the Younger and Peter Sellars

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Lost Chicks

Commentary by Torben Hanhart

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In 2010, stage director Peter Sellars and the Berlin Philharmonic enacted Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion (Berliner Philharmoniker 2010; McClary 2019: 163–191). This composition from the 1720s was written for the Lutheran Good Friday service. It interpolates Matthew’s gospel account with chorales, arias, and dialogic parts that reflect on the narrative (Berger 2007: 102–117).

In Bach’s work an alto voice, here sung by Magdalena Kožená, reacts to the Crucifixion. However, unable to come to terms with Jesus’s suffering, the music breaks off. In this moment of utter despair and confusion, the voice suddenly takes comfort in the sight of the crucified. In delight and with a long melisma, she exclaims: ‘Sehet’, ‘See, Jesus stretches out his hands to embrace us!’.

Sellars crafts a simple set for Bach’s composition. Everyone on stage is dressed in black. In the dimmed light of Hans Scharoun’s iconic concert hall, this puts particular emphasis on the hands and faces such that the singers’ gestures attain central attention. Combining their carefully arranged bodily movements with those of the instrumentalists, Sellars interweaves the words and music of Bach’s work with a nuanced visual account of the Passion.

Kožená, on the ‘Sehet’, spreads out her arms. In this gesture she merges a bodily expression of joy with the very cruciform posture she is urging everyone in the concert hall to behold. The choristers in front of her, however, cannot understand this exalted visual evocation of Jesus on the Cross. They remain crestfallen and only answer ‘whither?’ to Kožená’s calls to ‘seek redemption’ and ‘take mercy … in Jesus’s arms’.

In reaction, she calls the paralyzed choir a group of ‘abandoned chicks’. These words by librettist Picander build on Protestant preaching (Axmacher 1984: 79–82, 179–180; Marquard 2020: 92–97; Steiger 2002: 73–75, 155–58). Usually articulated quite softly by other singers, Kožená exploits the full vocative potential of the rising line in which Bach sets this verse. Thus enforced, her urges to reconsider the Crucifixion visually culminate in a pointed gesture: on the word ‘chicks’, she bumps the shoulder of one of the choristers (Berliner Philharmoniker 2013: 1:16:25) so as to open their eyes to the benevolent invitation of their mother hen on the cross.

References

Axmacher, Elke. 1984. ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heyland sterben’: Untersuchungen zum Wandel des Passionsverständnisses im frühen 18. Jahrhundert (Neuhausen: Hänssler)

Berger, Karol. 2007. Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press)

Berliner Philharmoniker. 2010. Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’ with Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars (https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/318).

______. 2013. Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’ with Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars (https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/16913)

Marquard, Reiner. 2020. ‘“Das gehet meiner Seele nah”: Biblisch-theologische Erschließung des Librettos’, in Johann Sebastian Bach Matthäus-Passion, ed. by Reiner Marquard and Walter Meinrad (Stuttgart: Carus-Verlag), pp. 55–104

McClary, Susan. 2019. The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press)

Steiger, Renate. 2002. Gnadengegenwart: Johann Sebastian Bach im Kontext lutherischer Orthodoxie und Frömmigkeit (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog)

Wings at Golgotha

Commentary by Torben Hanhart

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At the very left of this painting by the Flemish artist Frans Floris, Jesus and his disciples are shown reaching Jerusalem. Upon seeing their destination, Jesus addresses the city. The banderole in his hand reads: ‘QVOTIES VOLVI CONGREGARE FILIOS TVOS SICVT GALLINA’ (‘how often would I have gathered your children together, as a hen’).

The painting transplants the act of gathering that Jesus imagines in Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34 to the central Crucifixion scene, which dazzles with a rich array of both visual and textual references to Scripture. The most prominent is the wide pair of wings unfolding from Christ’s back. On a plateau in front of him, a group of chicks surround their mother. Through this vertical arrangement, the painting draws an analogy between the winged one and the mother hen. Those gathered around Christ appear to be ‘nestled beneath [him]’ (Wouk 2018: 381).

The intimate protection his wings grant them is countered by dangers outside. To the left, a bird of prey flies over Jerusalem. In the opposite corner, a man—identified by his garb as a pope—leads people astray into a land overshadowed by a flying devil. The group under the wings is formed by believers who are not confounded by this attack. With Christ at its centre, their community is presented as that of the true faithful.

In light of such uncommon imagery, many sources have been connected with this painting (Lombard-Jourdan 1981: 28–30; Bruyn 1988: 106–08; Berns 2000: 444–46; Wouk 2018: 381–415). Among them, a sermon published in Luther’s Kirchenpostille stands out. Its urge to seek protection ‘under the wings and shoulders of Christ’ against ‘all dangers … of wrong doctrine, attacks of the devils, … from both sides’ (Luther 1522: 282–83; Steiger 2018: 166–75) reads almost like a description of Floris’s painting. A Dutch translation of Luther’s text was printed and circulated in Antwerp, suggesting the possibility that it inspired this image of Christ’s benevolence (ibid. 169).

References

Berns, Jörg J. 2000. ‘Aquila Biceps’, in Seelenmaschinen. Gattungstraditionen, Funktionen und Leistungsgrenzen der Mnemotechniken vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Beginn der Moderne, ed. by Jörg J. Berns and Wolfgang Neuber (Wien: Böhlau), pp. 407–61

Bruyn, Josua. 1988. ‘Old and New Elements in 16th-Century Imagery’, Oud Holland, 102.2: 90–113

Lombard-Jourdan, Anne. 1981. ‘Le Christ ailé: un tableau inédit, au thème iconographique exceptionnel, monogrammé et daté 1562’, Gazette des beaux-arts, 98: 28–32

Luther, Martin. ed. 1910 [1522]. ‘Kirchenpostille. Das Evangelium an sanct Stephans tage. Matt.’, in Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 10.1.1 (Weimar: Böhlau), pp. 270–89

Steiger, Johann A. 2018. ‘Trinität, Gnadenstuhl und Henne. zu Intermedialität und bildtheologischer Konzeption eines Meisterwerkes von Frans Floris’, in Bibelauslegung durch Bilder: zur sakralen Intermedialität im 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Regensburg: Schnell + Steiner), pp. 155–75

Wouk, Eward H. 2018. Frans Floris (1519/20–1570): Imagining a Northern Renaissance (Leiden: Brill)

His Mother’s Cloak

Commentary by Torben Hanhart

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This drawing is attributed to Lucas Cranach the Younger. It dates from the period when he worked in his father’s Wittenberg workshop, which had close ties to Luther, yet also produced works for Catholic commissioners. The sheet shows a group of naked humans in awe of a radiant Christ. His torso emerges from the darkly washed folds of his mantle, which drape over those gathered around him.

This image recalls a prominent subject of Catholic piety: the Virgin of Mercy who with her mantle promised intercession and has been associated with the mother hen from Scripture. Here, in her stead, it is Christ himself who saves the faithful as he ‘spreads out his mercy … like a mantle’ (Luther 1544: 447; Steiger 2020: 42). This deprives the Virgin of her traditional role which according to Protestant assertions was baseless (Heal 2007: 54–56). The drawing has therefore been read as a Protestant appropriation and repurposing of Catholic imagery (Koerner 2004: 52–68).

Indeed, the drawing reinterprets Catholic visual culture in yet another way. Christ’s flagged staff evokes representations of his Descent into Hell. This scene was habitually depicted as the Saviour freeing those Righteous who had died before he did from the limbus patrum, hell’s outermost margin (Franceschini 2017: 60–72). In contrast to this medieval scholastic tradition, those saved in Cranach’s drawing are enfolded in clouds and angels. This detaches Christ’s victory and their redemption from the idea of limbo whose existence Lutheran theology rejected (ibid: 258–259).

Yet, unlike the depictions of Christ’s victory over death that the Cranach workshop made for Protestant contexts, this drawing does not show Christ alone (ibid: 264–266). Even some typical inmates of limbo appear around him: Adam, to whom Christ reaches out, and behind him Eve, the only one smiling (Koepplin 2010: 64). These denominational ambiguities could explain why no painted version of this preparatory drawing is known. Perhaps, though reworked, it still resembled Catholic imagery too strongly.

References

Franceschini, Chiara. 2017. Storia del limbo (Milan: Feltrinelli)

Heal, Bridget. 2007. The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge: CUP)

Koepplin, Dieter 2010. ‘Höllenfahrten’, in Cranach und die Kunst der Renaissance unter den Hohenzollern (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag), pp. 59–71

Koerner, Joseph L. 2004. The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)

Luther, Martin. ed. 1915 [1544]. ‘Hauspotille. Am Eylfften Sontag nach der Trifeltigkeyt’, in Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 52 (Weimar: Böhlau), pp. 444–50

Steiger, Johann A. 2020. ‘“Nulla femina dir gleich”. Martin Luther und Maria: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Ikonographie des Schutzmantels’, in Maria in den Konfessionen und Medien der Frühen Neuzeit. ed. by Bernhard Jahn and Claudia Schindler (Berlin: De Gruyter), pp. 25–63

Johann Sebastian Bach; Peter Sellars :

The Saint Matthew Passion, 1727, 2010 , Concert performance

Frans Floris :

Jesus Christ, Son of God, assembling and protecting humanity through his Sacrifice on the Cross, 1562 , Oil on panel

Lucas Cranach the Younger :

Schutzmantelchristus/Christ in Limbo, c.1538 , Pen and ink with wash on paper

The Loveliest Image

Comparative commentary by Torben Hanhart

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In these verses from Luke and Matthew, Jesus, upon seeing Jerusalem, recalls God’s many approaches to the city and laments that they were met with nothing but ignorance and violence. Remembering their past unsuccessful attempts at unification, he likens himself to a mother hen, whose chicks have escaped her efforts to gather them under her wings, over and over again.

This comparison relates to various biblical images which ascribe protective wings to God (see Rowlands 2019: 126) and to verses that portray the relationship between God and humanity as that between a mother and her child (Mollenkott 1983: 92–96). Their fusion in Jesus’s mention of the mother hen sparked an imaginative theological discourse which harks back to the early centuries of biblical commentary.

Patristic writing appreciated the hen’s vigilance, generosity, and care for her brood (Charbonneau-Lassay 1940: 648–651; Ciccarese 2002: 424–433; Forstner 1991: 238), and associated her with the Church (Gerlach 1970: 240) and Christ on the Cross (see Forstner 1991: 238). These links persist in the elision of the mother hen with Christ in Frans Floris’s painting and Peter Sellars’s staging of the St Matthew Passion.

The mother hen experienced a subsequent heyday in the Reformation period (ibid: 238). Luther, in particular, frequently returned to this image (Koepplin 1983: 358; Stirm 1977: 112–113). To him it was indeed the ‘loveliest’ one in the whole of Scripture (Luther 1522: 280).

The visual sources displayed in this exhibition partake in a lively ongoing discussion unfolding from Matthew’s and Luke’s verses––from their direct inclusion in Floris’s painting, to their gestural reflection in Lucas Cranach the Younger’s drawing and Johann Sebastian Bach’s aria.

The New Testament’s image of the hen is primarily employed to demonstrate the failure of the gathering around God for which Christ longs. In the present exhibition, this resonates most with Magdalena Kožená’s performance which so actively seeks to remedy a rift. (In fact, some choristers smile as she frisks off the stage at the end of her aria. Maybe these lost chicks found some sort of rest in Christ after all—if only for the brief moment of her elated presence.)

Cranach and Floris, by contrast, go beyond the failure which Christ laments. They depict unambiguously consummated gatherings around Christ. Their pictorial devices—the wings and the mantle—were employed in contemporary piety to describe Christ’s benevolence. The two tropes could even be used in one breath, as when Luther encouraged a congregation to ‘crawl to Christ, under his mantle and wing’ (Luther 1537: 150; Steiger 2020: 42).

Visually, these artworks extend Christ’s gaze and embrace to a living community. In doing so, Cranach and Floris endow their depictions with a heightened intimacy that in contemporary culture was predominantly associated with the Virgin Mary. The transfer of this imagery to Christ thus does more than denounce the Catholic belief in intercession via the saints. It also shows him caring like a mother.

Luther interpreted Jesus’s words in Matthew 23:39 and Luke 13:35 as directed towards Jews who had not converted to Christianity (Schmidt 2018: 476–79), echoing Augustine: ‘Jerusalem did not want that; we do’ (Ciccarese 2002: 430). Jesus’s longing for Jerusalem is interpreted as having its deferred consummation in a union of hen and chicks in the context of the Church.

The presence of Jerusalem in the background of Floris’s painting is evocative of this anti-Judaic notion. However, the three visual sources discussed here primarily address a different denominational rift. For they each combat reasons why a Christian of their own time might stray from God. Again, these warnings echo key aspects of Lutheran belief: the chicks of Bach’s aria are lost because they only see horror in the Cross. Their remorse hinders them from entering the redeeming embrace (highlighted in Kožená’s performance) it offers them. The pope in Floris’s painting leads people under the auspices of a flying devil. His garment is embroidered with an image of Moses holding the Decalogue. This indicates that following the Law—and by extension the prescriptions of ecclesiastical authority—cannot earn redemption. Cranach’s drawing asserts that one would err by seeking a saint’s intercession. It is Christ who saves the believer, not the Virgin whose imagery shimmers through the drawing’s compositions.

To Protestant audiences, the evocation of Christ’s benevolence in these three visual sources would have provided the consolatory vision that their faith allowed them to join those beneath the maternal protection of Christ. (Although sinners they remained nonetheless; and they could yet be confounded when faced with Christ’s suffering.)

Supportively, the sources seek to reaffirm the very union they envision. As is present in the alto’s exultant ‘Sehet’, as well as St John the Baptist’s ‘Ecce’ before Floris’s winged crucified Christ, they encourage one to behold anew Christ’s sacrifice and realize the gift it encompasses: the Saviour’s merciful embrace.

References

Charbonneau-Lassay, L. 1980 [1940]. Le bestiaire du Christ: la mystérieuse emblématique de Jésus-Christ (Milan: Archè)

Ciccarese, Maria P. 2002. Animali simbolici: alle origini del bestiario cristiano, vol. 1 Agnello–gufo (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane)

Forstner, Dorothea and Renate Becker. 1991. Neues Lexikon christlicher Symbole (Innsbruck: Tyrolia-Verlag)

Koepplin, Dieter. 1983. ‘Lutherische Glaubensbilder’, in Martin Luther und die Reformation in Deutschland, ed. by Gerhard Bott (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag), pp. 352–63

Gerlach, Peter. 1970. ‘Henne’, in Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, vol. 2, ed. by Engelbert Kirschbaum (Freiburg: Herder), pp. 240–41

Luther, Martin. ed. 1910 [1522]. ‘Kirchenpostille. Das Evangelium an sanct Stephans tage. Matt.’, in Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 10.1.1 (Weimar: Böhlau), pp. 270–89

______. ed. 1911 [1537]. ‘Predigt am 18. Sonntag nach Trinitatis’, in Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 45 (Weimar: Böhlau), pp. 145–56

Mollenkott, Virginia. R. 1983. The Divine Feminine (New York: Crossroad)

Rowlands, Jonathan. 2019. ‘Jesus and the Wings of Yhwh: Bird Imagery in the Lament over Jerusalem (Matt. 23:37–39; Luke 13:34–35)’, Novum Testamentum, 61: 115–36

Stirm, Margarete. 1977. Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation (Gütersloh: Mohn)

Schmidt, Johann. M. 2018. Die Matthäuspassion von Johann Sebastian Bach: zur Geschichte ihrer religiösen und politischen Wahrnehmung und Wirkung (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt)

Next exhibition: Matthew 24:1-36 Next exhibition: Luke 15:1-7