The Moravian Gallery in Brno
(Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně) is
the second largest art museum in the Czech Republic. It’s also free (freeee
freeeee freeee), and a nice destination for a stroll out of the city
center. It’s easy to find, since it’s adjacent to the equestrian
statue of Jobst of Moravia, created in 2015 by Jaroslav Róna. There’s also a little carousel on the
square. When I was there, they were just starting to set up for the
Christmas market.
The
gallery itself has a number of treasures, but I’m going talk today
about the wooden sculpture by an unknown Swabian sculptor, a Madonna
with Child on a crescent moon. Swabia, for those of you who've forgotten, is in southwestern Germany, and was generally centered on one of those stem Dutchies, linked by tribal identity and language (one of the Alemannic dialects).
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| Swabia, CC-BY Shaqspeare, Wikipedia |
The image of the Madonna and child is quite standard for the period; quite tall, relative to its width, suitable for fitting into a prescribed architectural niche. It's interest is generally in the waist-and-up region, with the crowned head of Mary as one distinct "top" and that of the babe as a second, creating an interesting tension between these two areas of activity. Unlike some other statues of the period, Mary looks out at the viewer, rather than at the infant in her arms. And the focus of the child is in a different place than that of Mary, which enlivens the sculpture in some interesting ways.
This
late fifteenth century Madonna has the classic fabric folds typical
of the period. What I like about this one is that she makes herself
into a kind of curved bench for the child, jutting out her right hip
to make a place-holder for the babe. Who among us when holding a
squirming infant hasn’t adopted that trick? The humanizing element
of that gesture quite caught my attention.
Then there’s the child. Here, the artist is perhaps a bit less
realistic; the close-to-round face and the receding hairline seem
less authentically child-like and more cartoonish than the more oval
face of his mother. Perhaps the artist was going for the chubby
innocence of a protected and indulged child, Mary’s care mapped
into healthy youth. But the artist also invites us to look beyond the
round cheeks and tend more closely to the story line. By depicting
the child’s direct gaze and introducing a slight droop of the
babe’s left lower eyelid, the unnamed artist evoke a sadness that
predicts where the story will go; it is an affective choice that
compresses the whole story into the single scene.
The
Madonna stands on the crescent moon, a reference to Mary as
the apocalyptic woman
of Revelation
12: “A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her
head a crown of twelve stars.”
The moon is here literally “under her feet,” in the position of
the defeated dragon of saints’ imagery – another element that
maps back to Revelations and the serpent/Satan’s defeat.
This "moon sickle" image is multi-valent. Depending on the interests of the devotee, the
symbol could be read in one of several ways.
Through
her dominion
over the moon,
Mary signals Christ’s upcoming mastery of the celestial order,
itself perhaps signaled by the crown-of-stars. (Might the stars have
been painted on the statue’s crown? Perhaps, but too much time and
too many wood-boring worms have had their way with the statue to be
sure.) At the same time, in German-speaking lands of the fifteenth
century, the moon’s crescent had become a convenient visual
shorthand for the Immaculata tradition. It marked Mary’s
exceptional purity, and the belief that she stands outside the stain
of earthly corruption. Some devotional writers also aligned the moon
with the Church itself; it reflects the sun’s light just as the
Church reflect’s Christ’s light. Mary’s stand, in other words,
is both the mother of Christ, and the mother of ecclesia.
(And
yes, I’ve read a LOT of Hildegard in the last two weeks!)
I’ve
thought about that moon shape; it’s a waxing
moon,
its mouth upward. The upward curve telegraphs growth and upward
momentum; not only does it lift her up, it is also an uplifting
object, one that represents light gaining on darkness. She is lifted
outside of the plane of human concerns (plague and marauders and
storms) and as such able to intercede from above. The moon places the
mother figure in the heavens, a salvific force for good. Likewise,
the waxing moon is the
moon of beginnings:
the start of the month and the start of the salvation story
simultaneously. And if we read the
moon as Mary herself,
she too is light, and grows in her role; she too is pure and “full
of grace,” the intercessor of intercessors.
Yet,
at the same time, this is a triumphalist
image.
Late medieval viewers recognized the moon as a symbol of mutability, its
phases shifting and unstable. If we read the image as conflictual,
Mary against the moon, we get another set of associations. Her
foot-grinding stance vis-a-vis the moon suggests her win over the
negative valences of change. Mary’s
constancy and care for the baby Jesus implicitly contrasts with the fickleness
of the moon with its variable phases and inconstancy. We can learn
from that: Mary is constant; the moon is not. She is light and truth
triumphant; it will wax and wane, fading into darkness. She is human,
embodied love; it is distant, abstract, untouchable.
No
wonder iconography of the period was full of the moon-sickle: it
offered artists a graceful compositional device to serve as imagistic
pedestal, and gave devotees a symbol dense with cosmic, theological,
and personal meanings. Much to muse on, eh?
Of
course, the lacy texture of the statue gives it much of its current
charm, but that’s an unintentional collaboration with various kinds
of woodworms.
The
small bore-holes suggest that this statue has been the focus of
Anobium
punctatum,
also known as the furniture woodworm, though there are a large array
of woodworms that could have been the culprites. The small 1-2mm
holes weaken the wood structurally, but leave behind the intricate
textured surface that we see. The statue was probably carved in a
soft wood like linden or pine, though I don’t know if the wood type
has been formally identified. The fluctuating humidity of churches
lends itself to wood-boring larvae, and the timeframe has granted
repeated generations the chance to chow down on some cellulose and
change the surface texture of the work before our eyes.
So,
Mary might be constant, but her evocation in wood is somewhat less
stable. Time and clime have created a textured surface, one that
bears the marks of centuries as much as the marks of devotion. Those
tiny tunnels and bore-holes are reminders that even sacred objects
are subject to earthly forces—decay, insects, and the slow passage
of time. And yet, those very imperfections give the statue a tactile
intimacy: you can almost feel the layered history of hands, prayers,
and centuries pressing into the wood alongside the tiny, patient work
of the worms.
In
the end, the Swabian Madonna of Brno is a study in contrasts: the
eternal and the temporal, constancy and change, human care and
nature’s stolid emphasis on
mutability. Standing on
her crescent moon, Mary
embodies celestial
triumph maternal
constancy. But she also
serves as a witness to the realities of our human existence, in which
even strength is inevitably shaped by the forces of nature and time.
There is, I think, beauty in such change; we can see back to the
symbol that was, while still loving the lacework that is its present
representation. In short,
the marks of woodworms
and the patina of centuries have ultimately become part of the
sculpture’s narrative, connecting us to both its creation and its
long life.
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