The Widow of Nain

When little Pietro Testi died on 16 October 1888 at the age of ten, he left his mother Assunta Placci in tears—just like the woman of Nain. Having lost her husband the year before, she was still a mourning widow when she had to carry yet another family member to the Cimitero delle Porte Sante, the most prestigious cemetery of the city of Florence in Italy. Buried right beside the grave of his father, Pietro’s tombstone became the visual expression of her desperate grief and sorrow. Right above the inscription, which cites his name and describes the inconsolable pain of his mother, we can see a photographic portrait of the boy. Leaning against a stele, he looks at the beholder and is standing upright in front of a traditional photostudio setting which features an open landscape with trees.

As the signature by the feet of Pietro Testi tells us, this portrait was made by the Fratelli Bucciolini, one of the first companies to offer photoceramic portraits in Florence. After the invention of the technique in the 1850s, which allowed for the transfer of photographic images onto porcelain by using enamel pigments, they became increasingly fashionable in Italian cemeteries. Resisting time and weather without any difficulty, these portraits were almost unalterable and thus ideal for preserving a living memory of friends and family.

Engaging in intimate discussions or simply praying with the portraits of the deceased was considered a healthy practice and was recommended by Italian physiologists of the time. It was thought to help channel feelings of fear and desperation and was particularly advised for women, who were believed (and expected) to suffer from tragic losses more profoundly than men.

This perception of female grief was particularly strong in a Catholic country where the Virgin Mary was idealized as a role model: ‘a widowed mother for only sons’ (Ambrose, Exposition on Luke 5.92), she was considered a model of mourning, and it was suggested that the bereaved might address her directly in their prayers.

During the lifetime of Assunta Placci this divine model of female mourning was still exemplary and a photoceramic portrait of her son might have helped her to canalise her sorrow: Even though Pietro Testi never came back to life like the son of the widow of Nain, his portrait kept him present and assured him a place among the living.

References

Ambrose of Milan, Exposition on the Gospel of Luke. 1998. Trans. by T. Tomkinson, in Exposition of the Holy Gospel According to Saint Luke with Fragments on the Prophecy of Isias (Enta, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies)

Gioia, Rosaria. 2007. ‘Ritratto e memoria: l’impiego funerario della fotografia vetrificata’, in Memorie della grande guerra: le tombe dei caduti nel cimitero monumentale della Certosa di Bologna, ed. by Mirella Cavalli (Bologna: Minerva Edizioni), pp. 23–34

In this painting by Veit Thiem, a follower of Cranach, the son of the widow of Nain has just risen from the dead. Sitting upright on his bier, the young boy looks at Christ. Escorted by his disciples, Christ has raised his right hand in a gesture of blessing while his left hand touches the bier. In the background of this prominent scene we can see populous funeral processions which leave the gates of two medieval cities. Not yet aware of the miracle that has just happened, men and women are accompanying the boy to his last resting place outside the city walls.

Following the Reformation in 1517, depictions of the son of the widow of Nain received new attention in the Protestant regions of Germany. As explained in his writing Ob man vor dem sterben fliehen möge (1527) Martin Luther disdained funerals inside church buildings and was in favour of a strict separation between the living and the dead, who were supposed to be buried in cemeteries outside the crowded cities. In this regard the episode of the widow of Nain was of paramount interest to him, because it illustrated the biblical tradition to bury extra muros.

The painting by Veit Thiem, which features the text of Luke 7:11–17 prominently below the bier of the son of the widow of Nain, shows how Luther’s ideas about a renewed separation between the living and the dead were adapted by artists. Commissioned around 1546, the painting served as a memorial epitaph for the Lewe, a wealthy Protestant family of cloth merchants from Leipzig whose members are portrayed in the foreground of the painting, where they devoutly witness the raising of the boy.

In this regard it is worth noting that the city with the prominent gate and towers in the left background represents an idealized version of the medieval topography of Leipzig. Used as a recognizable cityscape for early modern Saxons, the biblical account was thus transformed from an age-old episode which took place in a country far away into a miracle which happened right in front of the people from Leipzig. In doing so, the artist illustrated a modern Lutheran burial outside the city walls and reminded the faithful of Christ’s role as a destroyer of death and corruption.

References

Lampe, Moritz. 2009. Zwischen Endzeiterwartung und Repräsentation. Das Epitaph des Heinrich Heideck (1570–1603) aus der Leipziger Universitätskirche St Pauli (Leipzig: Plöttner), pp. 65–70

In this painting by the Venetian painter Palma il Vecchio (1480–1528), Christ is surrounded by his disciples while raising his right hand in a gesture of teaching and looking at a pair of women to his right, who seem to look imploringly at the Saviour. The painting was traditionally thought to represent the encounter between Christ and the woman from Nain who lost her husband and thereafter her only son. Even though the biblical text does not suggest that she begged for a miracle, the scene was interpreted as showing the widow approaching Christ to ask for a resurrection—the resuscitation of her child.

But let’s have a closer look. Rather than directly gazing at a digital reproduction of the painting, what we see here is a historical photograph, which is in itself a work of art. Taken by the Italian photographer Carlo Naya (1816–1882), it was one of the first commercially available photographs to feature the isochromatic rendering of colours. Although still limited to black-and-white, this technique allowed for the authentic reproduction of pigments such as yellow, which up until then resulted in darkish tones on the photograph. It was thus possible to represent the photographed subject matter in a more accurate manner.

Around 1907 this photograph of Palma’s painting became part of the photographic collection of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, where it was made available to scholars who could study the photograph of Palma’s work alongside other representations of the same subject. Partly on account of this close comparative examination of photographic reproductions, contemporary art historians now identify its subject with another episode from the New Testament: the woman from Cana, who implored Christ to heal her demon-possessed daughter (Matthew 15:22–29).

This makes better sense of the imploring looks of the women in the painting, for the woman of Cana believed in the healing power of Jesus and asked him to intervene in favour of her daughter.

The widow of Nain, meanwhile, was given a miracle without having asked for it. As Cyril of Alexandria observes, in this event of radical grace: ‘Christ draws near without being invited. No one summoned him to restore the dead man to life, but he comes to do so of his own accord’ (Commentary on Luke, Homily 36).

References

Cyril of Alexandria. Commentary on the Gospel of St Luke.1983. Trans. by R. Payne Smith (Long Island: Studion Publishers)

Rylands, Philip. 1988. Palma il Vecchio, l’opera completa (Milan: Mondadori), p. 293