The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture by Cooper Lisa H. Denny-Brown Ana

Author:Cooper, Lisa H.,Denny-Brown, Ana.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The Sepulcher, Sabbath’s Rest, and Resurrection

The last three stanzas in the series return the reader to the tripartite starting point of the entire series. The face of Jesus, upon which Jews spit in imagestanza 22, is once again the face of the veronica, with its power not only to express Christ’s pity for sinners, but also to awaken in them sentiments of compassion, pity, and compunction. The cross of Calvary on which Jesus hangs in stanza 23 seals the desire of the one who prays for contrition, penance, and reform. A Trinitarian symbol, the sign of the cross characteristically begins and ends every Christian prayer.80 Just as the painting on St. Veronica’s veil is depicted initially as enclosed in a thick, rectangular frame, so too the final stanza (number 24) meditates on the sepulcher, the tomb in which Christ’s “blyssyd bodye” was “hyd” (albeit temporarily) as the most precious “relic” of all (lines 139–140, Morris 191).81 Referring to Christ’s resurrection from the tomb, the reader begs for the grace to rise from his or her grave on the Day of Judgment and to join the Lord in the blissful company of his saints. From the beginning, the open tomb was the target or skopos of the compositional ductus, the “flow and movement” of the series as a whole.82 Fourteen lines in length, the stanza on the sepulcher balances exactly the fourteen lines of the stanza on the vernicle with which the meditative series began.

Nichols classifies the illustrations of this final stanza as belonging to one of the three groups: those showing (1) an empty tomb, (2) Jesus’ recumbent body within the sepulcher, and (3) the so-called Image of Pity, “a half-figure, arms crossed at the wrists, standing in the tomb.” She lists Additional 22029 as belonging to the “Image of Pity” group, but she admits that it does not, in fact, fit there. Christ is pictured from the waist up, standing in the sepulcher, and he shows his wounds, but his hands are not crossed (Figure 6.5). “Since he holds the vexilla and the sepulcher is inscribed ‘Christus Resurgens,’” she writes, “the image is more properly classified as a Resurrection.”83

Alone among the “O Vernicle” manuscripts, then, Additional 22029 depicts the risen Christ as emerging from a radiance that bursts the top of the rectangular tomb, his head haloed. Glorified, his body is nevertheless visibly wounded and still bleeding. Christ’s left hand is raised, as it were, in a greeting of peace—a gesture that exposes the flow of blood from the nail wound in his palm. With his left hand, he holds the decorated, cross-topped rod of a flowing banner of victory.

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