If you are certain kind of medievalist, the painted wall of long ago holds a special allure. Not only can you Look At Pictures for credit, but you also have the fun of decoding the stories that are being told. When you have a whole church covered in paintings, so much the better.
And so dad and I found ourselves on a train, then a bus, to get to St George’s at Reichenau.
Anyhow, at the appointed time, we paid the tour guide and in we went. First there’s an extended discussion of the fragility of the frescoes, and of their origins and influence, and then you’re let into the church itself.
Wowser.
Whole walls. Multiple layers. Decoration and figural program. Text as guide…
To keep today on focus, let’s take Lazarus as a case in point.
In case that Latin there at the bottom of the picture is beyond you, it’s:
Lazare, perge foras, quarto iam sole sepulte!
Rumpe moras
mortis! Hoc dat imago Patris.
Lazarus, come forth, you who have now been buried for four days! Break death’s delay! Thus commands the image of the Father.
And there we have the scene: an observing crowd; Christ calling forth Lazarus at the request of the standing Martha reaching out in supplication, the prostrate figure of Lazarus’s sister Mary, who glances over her shoulder to see the miracle.
Plus, there is the embodied miracle: Lazarus in his grave-cloths, standing in his open sarcophagus. Two robed figures appear to hold their noses, a signal of the smells that would emerge from a tomb on the fourth day. And then a second crowd, many with neck cloths – a representation of prayer shawls (Boeckler and Jantzen p. 24), again observers to the miracle.
The story comes from John 11, and is the miracle that causes the priest Caiaphas to predict Christ’s death “that the whole nation perish not” – John 11: 50. But the miracle itself is the story in focus at St George’s. We have the assemblage of people, we have Martha, who met Christ afoot, and Mary who came to see him when summoned; we have the crowd, and we have the miracle:
And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. (KJV)
I like this scene because I think it captures a kind of optimistic, good-things-can-happen Christianity that is distinct from the more Passion-focused Christianity of my research period, some three centuries later. The needs of the congregants at Reichenau lay in the possibilities inherent in the possibilities of divine intervention. The images of St George’s encode these beliefs: demons could be expelled, sick bodies could be restored, storms could be quieted, and even, as here, death be interrupted. Kurt Martin has suggested that the eight great miracle scenes form a kind of crescendo, moving from Christ’s victory over the forces of darkness, through sickness and the dangers of the natural world, to victory over death. “Not the suffering of Christ is meant, not his humanity, but his public ministry, the demonstration of his supernatural power” (Martin, 22).
Whether or not every viewer followed the sequence so
systematically, its cumulative message is plain. Again and again,
these paintings show a world gone wrong and then set right. To me,
Lazarus is the climax of that promise: the tomb has opened, the dead
man stands, and the sisters’ grief has—in a moment that signals
the great events to come—been reversed.
That is what I
mean by an optimistic, or perhaps better, an affirmational
Christianity. It is not that Ottonian Christians ignored sin,
judgment, or the Cross. St George itself contains a Last Judgment,
and Ottonian Germany produced formidable images of the Crucifixion.
But the dominant register of this nave is the triumphant, efficacious
Christ. Colin Morris’s influential account of medieval religious
change describes a broad movement after 1050 from emphasis on
Christ’s cosmic victory and lordship toward a more human and
suffering Christ who invited the viewer’s emotional identification
(Morris, 139–44). St George stands on the earlier side of that
change. Unlike the 15th-century prayerbooks I’ve been immersed in,
its walls do not first ask viewers to share in Christ’s pain.
Rather, they ask the viewer to consider what divine power can do:
those storm might just fall silent, the sick may walk home, and
Lazarus can emerge from his grave.
Works Cited
- Boeckler, Albert, and Hans Jantzen. “Auferweckung des Lazarus.” In Ikonographische Studien zu den Wunderszenen in der ottonischen Malerei der Reichenau.Munich, 1961, 22ff. https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28646#0030
- Martin, Kurt. Die ottonischen Wandbilder der St. Georgskirche Reichenau-Oberzell. 2nd rev. and expanded ed. Sigmaringen, 1975.
- Morris, Colin. The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200. London, 1972/Toronto, 1987.
Interested in frescoes? I've also written on the frescoes of Brand, Vorarlberg (Austria) as a two-part post: Brand Pt 1 Brand Pt 2
