Keeping up my theme of art works from The Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně) – because who among us doesn’t have a backlog of photos from their phone – today’s post is on the badly charred torso of Christ from ca 1500.
This is an amazing piece, first because it survived at all. The middle portion of the sculpture looks more like what one sees when one rolls a log out of the campfire to start the process of tidying up the campsite for the night. The blackened, charcoal-black interior is exposed to the modern eye as a textural commentary on the substance of the object, carbon transmuted not to diamond but to dust.
 |
| Torso of Christ, Brno Moravian Gallery, detail |
And then the surprise. Move one's attention from the char to the head, and there is an eloquence to the sculpture that explains its ongoing presence on display. The rough-hewn nose, slightly flat on the top, and shaded from the smoke on its size reminds us of the carver’s art,while the moustached and bearded mouth shows the way that broad incisive lines can add character and heft to a face. The curls at the bottom of the beard seem artifact, not natural curl—made, not grown. This seems stylistically telling, a style “from” somewhere and sometime, the kind of over-the-top taste that makes the grandkids groan. Surely this is a detail that might help us localize the sculpture?
Likewise, the carved curls to the side of the face show the lions-mane hairstyle of a glamour boy. A bit Fabio-esque, am I right? Compare the sculpted image to the profiles of the 1980's mega-model bedecking romance novels from the Guardian retrospective of 2015:
 |
| "Fabio: a man of many book covers" from The Guardian |
Both have voluminous and abundant hair, with curled whisps providing shape. Those enviable tresses are slightly longer than shoulder-length. A heavier curve of especially dense locks right at cheek level then extends the gesture of the cheekbone out into airier, hairier space. Good hair is an attractive trait, in martyr or in model.
Fabio is fun, of course, but the Christ figure is also a man of sorrows, a vivid reminder of the passion story, so let us return our focus there.
The moustache, of course, adds a countervailing curve, turned up where the beard turns down, adding a bit of sinuous shaping; not so much an S- curve as a mini-recurve bow, adding interest to the downward droop of sorrow from the eye. You know that tears would catch there.
The statue’s worry lines are again a reminder that a simple wedge-shaped line can do a lot to tell a story, and the slit of the eye asks the viewer to imagine the loss of closure.
In all, it is a gripping statue, one that speaks volumes through its silence, the parted lips a final exhalation heard across the centuries.
RESOURCES
- Cynthia J. Cyrus "The 15thc Swabian Madonna of Brno" [blog post], Silences And Sounds, 18 Nov 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-15thc-swabian-madonna-of-brno.html, part of a series of posts on art works from The Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně)
- Hannah Marriott, “Fabio: confessions of the original male supermodel,” The Guardian, 15 Jul 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/jul/15/fabio-confessions-original-male-supermodel
No comments:
Post a Comment