The Conference of the Tongues by Hermans Theo

Author:Hermans, Theo.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317640202
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Uccello’s predella

Before we address these debates, here is a visual illustration of the late-medieval, pre-Reformation doctrine. It incorporates the notion of transubstantiation. Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) was a fifteenth-century Italian painter with a keen interest in perspective. Among his works is The Profanation of the Host, a large narrative painting in six panels, now in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, Italy. The painting is a predella, a long rectangular panel forming part of an altarpiece. Its six scenes tell the story of a miracle that is supposed to have happened in different parts of Europe in the later Middle Ages. The story, which appears designed to reinforce a point of Christian belief, is that of a malicious test. It typically involves a non-believer who steals a consecrated host, takes it home, stabs it with a knife to see if it really is the body and blood of Christ as the Christians claim, and is astonished to find real red blood flowing from it. The story usually ends with the sacrilege being discovered and the perpetrators duly punished.

The second of Uccello’s six panels is of particular interest (see Figure 6). It shows, on the right, soldiers battering down the door of a house from the outside while, inside the house, blood flows from what looks like a three-legged frying pan across the tiled floor of a room, squirting into the street through a crack in the wall. The source of the blood, the host, is an ordinary piece of bread which, however, when consecrated, becomes the body and blood of Christ. When enemies of Christianity desecrate such a host, the blood miraculously flowing from it constitutes visible proof that it really is Christ’s flesh and blood.

Figure 6: Paolo Uccello, The Profanation of the Host, second panel (Courtesy Soprintendenza per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico ed Etnoantropologico delle Marche, Urbino)

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