The Absent Image by Elina Gertsman

Author:Elina Gertsman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

FIGURE 112

Left: The wound of Christ as rhombus. England, fifteenth century. London, BL, Harley Roll T 11. Right: The rhombus as the wound. Thott Hours, France, ca. 1490–1500. Copenhagen, KB, Thott 541 4º.

The opening in Christ’s side as a passage of salvation was already articulated in John’s Gospel. It appears first in 10:9, where Christ fashions himself into a salvific gateway: “I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved: and he shall go in, and go out, and shall find pastures.” The notion is then reiterated in 14:6 and again in 19:34, where the soldier opens the crucified Christ’s wound, and it pours forth blood and water. The latter, in its Latin iteration—“sed unus militum lancea latus eius aperuit et continuo exivit sanguis et aqua”—was seized upon by Augustine, who focused his interpretation on the word aperuit: “A watchful word the Evangelist has used, when he says not ‘Pierced His side,’ or ‘Wounded,’ or anything else, but ‘Opened’: that there a gate of life might be opened, whence the sacraments of the Church have flowed forth, without which there is no entrance to the life that is truly life.”52 A development of this trope over the centuries finds a particularly arresting elaboration in the writings of Hugh of St. Victor, who, in De anima, stresses the perforation of Christ’s body as a point of ingress for revelation of inner secrets:

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