Fire, Work, and Remembrance: The Johanna Kiln at Saint John’s

“They’re firing up the big kiln while you’re on campus,” Jenn (Carnell, a regular co-author and friend) told me. “You should go!”

I’m so glad I did. The firing of the kiln is a regular formal ceremonial practice here at St John’s. The kiln itself is gigantic – built so that loading forks can drive into either end! – and it runs for ten days and ten nights at temperatures that could have converted that badly singed “Smelly Book” I mentioned in a previous post from book all the way to ash in mere moments. (I looked it up; temperatures inside the kiln will reach up to 2,500°F!)

It’s the largest wood-fired kiln in North America, and is called the “Johanna Kiln” after Sister Johanna Becker, OSB, whose work profoundly influenced the potters here on campus. And, by its size, the kiln certainly has the “wow” factor:

Kiln door

The work of loading the kiln, we were told, had taken 6 weeks, and the work of keeping the kiln lit goes to two groups of volunteers, one of whom keeps the wood stoked and ensures that the process is running smoothly, and another group to support the first group by preparing food. The collective group laughed about the excellent food, so much excellent food, and about the work day and night to ensure the fire’s regular feeding. We toasted the volunteer team with ceramic cups of Sake.

In all, several hundred people turned out for the kiln firing. There were people from as far away as Japan (!) – someone who’d been in residence at St John’s and came back for the ceremony – and from California. Not to mention Tennessee. (That would be me.) This photo shows about half the crowd in attendance – it’s from after the ceremony was over, and you can still see how many people had joined in!

About half the crowd...

As with many such events, there was opening chitchat, and a talk about the kiln’s founding in 1994/5 and its historical firings. There was recognition of those who’ve been in attendance – for 28 years, for 30 years, at every firing that has happened since they entered high school in 19xx. This is an event that has tradition at its back.

But it also has the spiritual ceremonial elements. It was not just the living who were recognized; the losses to the local art community were also recognized – and in two different ways. First, we heard their stories of connection to the campus, the abbey, and the kiln. (Hearkening back to all the mentions of preaching from the pulpit in the memoria endowments that I’ve been writing about-- recognition of the dead at a moment of importance to the community is a looooong-standing practice!)

And second, there were spirit boats created for each of the three of them, hosted on a table adjacent to the kiln wall, with incense and salt, flowers and fir cuttings and images. We remember people through the things we say, but we also remember them through the things we do. As the speaker said, the spirit ships mark the last time they will sail on the lake behind the kiln – a marker of their farewells to these surroundings and the people they loved. They plan to use a hot ceramic piece on October 25^th to ignite a candle, and then light candles in the boats honoring the three dedicatees. They’ll be carried by canoe to the center of the lake, and released as a final goodbye.

Spirit boats with salt, incense, photo, flowers, and fir offerings

The firing ceremony had two songs, an unaccompanied song newly created for the event, and another, with guitar, that is evidently a regular recurring part of the ceremony. The lyrics put us in the right frame of mind for the unfolding of events; I wish I’d recorded them somehow because the wording had slipped my mind by the time I got back to my dorm.

There was also a prayer, asking for blessings to come for the items in the kiln, the people who made them and tended them, and those of us who had gathered here in community to witness the start of the work.

And then it was time for the lighting itself. Only about the front three rows could see exactly what happened at the moment of ignition, but the firing – assisted by family members of those being remembered this year – includes a short prayer, a purification of the kiln area with rice, salt, and sake which took about two minutes and follows Japanese tradition, and ends with ignition of the two starting fires with a handmade torch. I at the back only had a chance to go into the kiln shed once the fire was lit, and even then, the sunlight was streaming HARD into my eyes (and the camera lens):

Within a few minutes of lighting

They’ll be stoking the fire for ten days; the wood stacks run floor to ceiling inside the kiln shed, and there are additional 4-foot poles stashed outside the shed and covered with tarps. Before the ceremony, someone was joking about all the tarps – “time to think about an additional structure just to keep the wood dry” was the sentiment, which got agreement and laughter from standers-by! You can see a wee portion of the VERY abundant wood in my photo here:

soooo muuuuuch firewood

And when I came back after my walk (and the sun had settled toward the horizon), I got to hear more about the work involved. They have to be careful to keep the downdrafts of cold air from flowing into the kiln, so you always move the sticks a bit before placing the new wood to ensure the fire’s heat is even. 

tending the fire evidently includes telling stories about it!

Also, wearing good gloves is important – one volunteer got $175 brand new elk-hide gloves and was extremely proud of them. But on his first time stoking the fire, he reached in with them on, and by the time he pulled his arm out, the gloves were on fire. (Heat will do that!) So they buy cheap gloves – though what was cheap last time is rather more costly this time, what will all the tarriffs. (Wow, the crowd nodded at that! We ALL know about inflation these days!).

In all, it was a very moving ceremony. I was strongly reminded of the way in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary when the proper attitude is brought to bear. On the one hand, the idea of kiln-firing and the preparations and act of treating pottery is simply a part of the artistic process – a necessary step in the act of creation, but not one that signals “I’m a spiritual moment” on its own. It’s work, and rather hard work, what with the chopping of wood, the tending of fire, the need to ensure even heating, and so forth.

But this ceremony reminds us that work too can function as an offering up of our daily tasks as good that we do on behalf of the spirit. The act of firing here creates community; it’s a team effort; it reflects the connectedness even of the artistic work as part of broader human enterprise. The purification and dedications that were folded into the ceremony also connect that community to its chronological ancestry – through ritual, we make an unspoken argument about the continuity of human activity, both what has come before, and what promises to lie ahead of us. Will you be back in two years? The ceremony suggests that the answer is “yes,” whether you come in person or in the memories of others who attend. And it creates a ritual moment of centeredness, where the act of doing becomes a prayerful activity.

In the Benedictine mindset of “Ora et labora” – of prayer and labor – this is a moment that reminds us that the two are inextricably intertwined.

May it be so.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

• A Day In the Life of a Carpenter Fellow at HMML: What brought me to Collegeville in the first place? Manuscripts, microfilm, and questions about Franciscan sisters—with lakeside walks and time to follow an interesting question wherever it leads. https://
• Seven Times a Day: Prayer as Humane Practice: Stand, kneel, speak, repeat: medieval prayerbooks asked their readers to build devotion through repeated actions. This post explores how those small practices shaped time, attention, and daily religious life. https://
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Seeds, Sculptures, and the Art of Paying Attention

Attention is something people teach one another.

I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve hung about in Northern climes; I may be hard at it in my library research (as a HMML Carpenter Fellow; more on that in other posts), but my weekends are filled with new-to-me experiences.

To take an example (or two): I worked a prairie refurbishment day up by Poplar Grove IL at Kinnikinnick Creek Forest Preserve and Conservation area, Caledonia IL last weekend, and, oh, was it lovely! 

Often the tasks there are to cut back invasives, but here at the end of the season it was time to collect seed for next year’s new patches of rewilding lands. So a group of half-a-dozen volunteers went out on a Saturday for a supervised “pick” on the soon-to-be-closed-for-winter patch of prairie at the conservation area. When I say supervised, I speak as the novice; everyone else had definitely been out there before, and most of them were professional or quasi-professional preservationists of one type or another.

For our morning’s labor, we were collecting two major types of seeds -- pagoda plant (in three species: downy wood mint, hairy wood mint, and horse-mint bee-balm) and silky wild rye. Pagoda plant really does look a set of piled pagodas on a stalk. We started off just wandering the field up on the hillside, but once someone had actually found a plant, we grouped up for a mini-lesson in plant identification, and then each person took off on their own wander to play “I spy.”

Once we started finding the plants, an abundance mentality set in. They grow in patches, so if you find one set of seeds, you usually find between 20 and 50 sets of seeds. Of course, as good conservationists we took the top half so the rest could re-seed for next year. Caring for the local prairie patch is priority number one, leaving enough seed for new plants, but also for the animals that need to overwinter.

I actually did not-half-bad on the hunt-and-find for pagoda plant; I was mostly responsible for downy wood mint, but turned up a great deal of horse-mint bee-balm as a result. (Those seeds went in the other bucket so I didn’t get to count them as MY totals!) Still, every once in a while I would find a patch of the downy wood mint, enough so that I noticed that I had used my bending over muscles a good bit while out on the hillside!

The silky wild rye grew in a giant and quite obvious patch, as you may have noticed in the picture above. So harvesting there was a matter of pick a large handful, drop it in a bucket, pick another large handful, drop it in a bucket. Rinse and repeat. We had such abundance that we wound up having to combine buckets to make way for the seed bag, designed to hold about 40 lbs of animal feed. We got that bag more than half-way full, so it definitely felt like success!

By the end of that second picking, I understood the idea that one could put in an order for “75 lbs of such-and-so seed” and the main office wouldn’t actually blanch at the request. I also learned that every year, they obtain a selection of seeds, and those go into targeted refurbishments elsewhere. Every little bit helps.

Listening, I though I'd notice wind and birdsong, and it was certainly there, but I found myself instead drawn to the people telling stories -- the community they'd built, their friendships, their stories of leadership and not wanting leadership on firelines, and restorative burns and the ways in which the newbies (me?!!!) interact, particularly in "those" moments, and motivations and the ways that people respond to nature. About the building where during winter months our seeds would be cleaned and further sorted and prepared for next use.

I wasn't listening to nature, I was listening to nature being managed. And that, for me, was pretty cool. The prairie’s abundance had people behind it, people with knowledge and friendships and stories worth hearing.

Of course, I mainly took pictures of flowers instead of the dead stalks of mint plants, so my flower pictures from that trip are better. Oh well.

Common Blue Wood Aster, Aromatic Aster, and Coreopsis

What the flower pictures indicate – what our labors show – what a morning of close inspection taught me – is that the nature of the prairie is in its abundance. That abundance is not to be measured just plants-per-foot, but in kinds of plants-per-foot. Of course there were grasses, and sedges, and little vines which seemed to want to trip you. But as Jessie, our leader, gave us our instructions, she taught us to use the shapes of things – to look for a pile of pagodas, or for the waving stalks of rye – to see one shape among many, so that its shape could go on to re-seed new plots of land with similar diversity when the time comes.

Isn’t that a sweet meta-lesson on how the earth should be?

And speaking of earth, the other thing we did was to attend E(ART)H, a “Land Art” show at Nature at the Confluence, South Beloit, IL. Nature at the Confluence used to be a dump, for decades, with just piles and piles of debris on top of once had been an important tribal meeting ground. (Says something about respect and its lack, eh?) The land has been reclaimed, and a community park made through extensive efforts. There are winding trails and an interpretive center with picnic areas.

The idea behind the show was for the artists to use found materials placed within the context of this reclaimed land to make statements about the connection we all have to the earth around us. It was really well attended; in the three hours we were there I counted more than 130 people, and it had been running all day (including while we were out doing our prairie refurbishment). The opening included live music and performance – including a movement choir – as well as remarks by the artists.

Each of the artists had chosen a different array of materials and a different array of techniques. They were linked by eco-awareness; positioning their work in the landscape was a choice, and the guided tour took us variously along stream-bank, into the shaded woods, and around the circle of mown land as it edged up against prairie grasses. Place is part of art’s perception, and each artist spoke to why this spot – the fallen log which landed in the crook of the tree; a favored spot where the murmur of water joined up with the mosaic flower image to create a fibonacian meditation; the shaded nook where creation seems to both spring up from the earth and come down from the trees above.

The other reality is that art can become a way of asking us to think about place in new ways. “Mother Bison” by Jenny Mathews, for instance, creates the image of a bison but is made out of things like willow branches and grapevine, with prairie grasses and gourds for eyes. It is held together by string. Jenny placed it so that it is emerging from the taller grasses, which seemed particularly symbolic given both the history of the landscape around it and the history of the bison and its reintroduction.

Fun aside: the bison is in part a meat animal, and bison ranching for food is integrally tied up with its successful management, yet ranchers and indigenous peoples have very different views of how the animal should be treated. “Bison”-branded meat in the store is good for the animal because ranching has maintained biodiversity among the herds; we are still at the point where more animals is better for the species.

And yet, “bison” then becomes a ladened term, associated more with what can be read as exploitative culture. “Buffalo,” though colloquially familiar to us in the USA, is technically not the right word for these animals, because, as wikipedia taught me, bison are yak relatives, genus Bos, and buffalo are in two genera, the African Syncerusand the Asiatic Bubalus. All kinds of species in this world, eh?

Anyhoo, we have tended to use the misnomer “buffalo” for these majestic animals (“Where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play…”), and so the label “bison” is doing some heavy lifting in the world these days. Enough so that when Jenny approached members of a local tribe, they at first shrugged her off, because she was using the technically correct term “bison” and they thought that stood in for a way of thinking about the animal. She now leads with the term “buffalo,” and has been much more successful at connecting with them out of shared philosophy of what these majestic creatures mean for us and our mutual – if not always amicable – history.

Jessie Crow Mermel, “Ecology of a Breath” uses the echo of dendritic patterns with their branching structures – in the hand, in the lungs, in the nerves, and in the river systems. She used images on cloth, but also incorporated moss lungs, since moss actually put out more O₂ than trees do! “Patterns,” she says “can serve as a mirror and remind us how deeply we are interwoven with the rest of the Earth.” Plus, I have a particular affection for Jessie’s work since she’d been the Person In Charge of the morning’s Prairie work. It brought a real sense of the nature (pun intended) of community.

The artistic statement used to advertise the exhibit seemed in keeping with the spirit of the weekend: “Our collective goal is to spark wonder, acknowledge eco-anxiety, and inspire new connections.” “Spark wonder” is a phrase I might ordinarily pass over in an exhibit announcement. This time, though, I’d spent the morning discovering how much there really was to find in a patch of prairie, and the afternoon discovering how many ways artists could ask us to look at reclaimed ground. Wonder had acquired both very particular and very memorable shapes.

It had also come with something to do. Learn a plant, gather seed, leave enough behind for an envisioned future. Listen to an artist explain why a piece belongs beside this stream or among these grasses. I can’t claim that a Saturday settled my eco-anxiety, but it did give me a few useful places to put my attention—and, for part of the day, my hands. My bending-over muscles have registered their opinion too.

NOTES

The E(ART)H Land Art exhibit is installed through 17 Oct. 2026 in South Beloit, Illinois; more details are available at https://natureattheconfluence.com/event/earth-a-land-art-exhibit/

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Soundscape compositions, Chicago style: What happens when art invites us to experience a familiar place differently? Two Chicago installations—including a composition heard among the ferns of Lincoln Park Conservatory—explore how sound, surroundings, and our own movements shape what we notice.

Listening to the Birds: Bird calls can tell us what is happening around us, if we learn to hear their differences. Jon Young’s What the Robin Knows offers ways to develop that attention, from recognizing alarm calls to noticing how our own passage changes the sounds of the woods.

The silence of the woods is full of noise: Streams burble, crickets chirp, and small animals rustle through the leaves—so why do we remember the woods as silent? This reflection explores how identifying unfamiliar sounds can turn apparent quiet into a comforting sense of the life around us.

A bookish saint from Brno

Time to explore another fine example of medieval art from the Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně), this time a bookish saint.

The “Female Saint with Book” by an anonymous Moravian carver stems from around 1500. The wooden sculpture is tall and narrow, suitable for a niche or other tight space. She is crowned, and there appear to be jewels carved into that crown. There may be a veil over her hair, though its waist-length tresses seem to be otherwise unbound, for one strand has snuck over her shoulder and nestles against the crook of her arm. 

This youthful figure gazes out at us directly, her high forehead a sign of beauty, her straightforward gaze a signal of honesty, her rounded cheek a suggestion of affluence, her closed mouth with a hint of lift at the edge a gesture of inner repose.

Her robe boasts a modest scoop neck, and is cinched by a thin belt; yet below the waist, it flairs open in a dramatic upside-down V of imagined drapery to reveal her underkirtle. This is clearly secular garb, and may have had brocade with an elaborately textured surface, but with the insect damage we cannot tell for sure.

The right arm is lowered and has lost its hand – we have only the sleeve – but was bent at a 120-degree angle (pointing down but sort of aiming at the viewer).

The left hand is what interests me most. At that point where the outer garment flares, our figure holds a book. The position of that book is rather curious – she holds it sideways. The book’s back seems to be down; we see the top edge of the book, and if we were taller might see the front leaves as well. Moreover, the book is attached – perhaps by a bit of chain? –  to her belt since she neither needs to cradle the book nor press it hard against her side. The book floats, in other words, and she merely rests her hand lightly upon it. The book may be wrapped – is that a hint of gauzy fabric at the top? That would be characteristic of the day. It is clearly a beloved possession as well as an attribute of her sainthood.

And then, following our trajectory downward, we come to her feet, tucked in behind the folds of cloth. She stands on a rounded cushion or low dome rather than directly on the floor or rocks, as many other saints are depicted. In late-medieval sculpture, this kind of grounding signals nobility or spiritual elevation. It gives a lift to the figure – both to align her with our sight and to move her figuratively above the ordinary world – emphasizing her courtly bearing and inner refinement. Combined with her crown, her serene expression, and the cherished book in her hand, the cushion suggests that this is a saint whose sanctity is tied less to dramatic martyrdom or miracles and more to elevated learning, piety, and noble grace.

These details give us clues, but they also leave us guessing about her identity. Saints we might consider as candidates, given the statue's Moravian origins, include the intellectual Catherine of Alexandria, the tower-bound Barbara, or community-activist Elizabeth, all of whom were imagined in late-Gothic Central Europe as dignified, courtly women of faith.

Of course, the other saintly attributes for these women would be the “tell.” If this is Catherine, where is her wheel or sword? Neither seems to fit the dimensions of the space, so even if the hand had survived, the statue would be thrown out of kilter if such “regular attribute” were added. Barbara is perhaps more plausible; imagine the missing right hand holding a tower, and we could imagine her replete and identifiable. But for this statue to work, that tower would need to be curiously small; otherwise it would obscure her face. Though I suppose one that was shoulder height would work. If it were Elizabeth, we would expect some sign of her charity such as loaves, roses, or a small figure of the poor, but none appear here. The sculptor seems to have focused instead on the figure’s nobility and inner devotion, giving us a serene, book-holding figure rather than a tableau of her famous acts. In other words, we can read her sanctity through posture, gaze, crown, and that treasured book, but the overt symbols that would let us give her name are no more.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew more about who she is, or about who did the carving? Some artwork tells us stories, and indeed we could talk here about insect damage and the ravages of time, or about the wonderful luck of preservation. But artwork unmoored from its origins also poses questions that the attentive viewer might consider. Who was this lass, and what did she represent to the community that commissioned her, or to the artist who carved her? We cannot know, but we can appreciate the combination of artistry and effort that went into creating this beauty.

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Other posts on Brno art

• Cynthia Cyrus, "The 15thc Swabian Madonna of Brno" [blog post], Silences and Sounds, 15 Nov 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-15thc-swabian-madonna-of-brno.html
• Cynthia Cyrus, "Brno’s Torso of Christ" [blog post], Silences and Sounds, 19 Nov 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/11/brnos-torso-of-christ.html
• Cynthia Cyrus, "Carving the Nativity in 1520" [blog post], Silences and Sounds, 21 Nov 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/11/carving-nativity-in-1520.html 

Carving the Nativity in 1520

The anonymous carving of the Nativity of Jesus that is found in the Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně) dates from around 1520 and is sculpted from linden wood. According to the museum sign, it’s from Southern Bohemia or Lower Austria. It’s a busy image:

To the left, Joseph enters from an arched doorway, while the ox and ass peak in. The woven basket is an interesting detail, and Joseph’s beard has a more exaggerated set of curlicues compared with the torso of Christ dating from around 1500.  Clearly, there’s a style.

Mary is observing as a group of children appear to have Christ in a blanket – reminds me of the childhood game with a parachute, but with a baby, not a ball. There might be some safety concerns here.

Standing up behind is the hillside, with flocks, while we peak into a scene with a cradle on one level and a store-room on another. I’m not sure what the round basket-like object is, or the bags (?) on top of it; to my eye the thing on top looks like a lap desk, but then, I like a good lap desk.

In other words, it is a scene of abundance.

Joseph’s square bib with its edging seems very 16^th century to my eye, while the keffiyeh (square headcloth) with brown agal (the rope to hold it in place) is the one gesture to the middle eastern origins that came to my attention

The oversized baby comes with oversized hair for a newborn, but the gestures of the “support staff” that tend to him are visually more interesting. The one at the bottom right is particularly interesting, the turn of her shoulder showing the work she is putting in, and the sweep of the skirt contrasting with the horizontal band of her blouse. I’m pretty sure those are wings on the worker who faces her, the angelic and the human working together in the story.

The flocks deserve a close look, along with the hilltop habitations; the middle one with its miniature walls suggest that all was not always peaceful in these imagined times.

And then there’s the Mary, not, evidently, in “Virgin Mary Blue” but rather a acreamy color. She’s still got the nicely decorated collar line and flowing fabric. Her hair is loose and very, very long – down to her calves, at a minimum

Her chin has a bit of a dimple, and she has the high forehead that was a signal of beauty:

Her headband is more ornate than Joseph’s, a twisting comination of patterned and smoothed side replicated by the sculptor. And, we can see that her hair was likely blond, with all that yellow tinting surviving to the present day.

In short, lots to look at. There’s no single focal point here; instead, everything participates in the story. That shared participation is what gives the carving its warmth. It leaves you with the sense that holiness and humanness are woven together in every inch of the scene.

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OTHER BRNO MORAVIAN GALLERY ARTWORKS: 

• Brno's Torso of Christ
• The Swabian Madonna of Brno

Brno’s Torso of Christ

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.

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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

The 15thc Swabian Madonna of Brno

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).

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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RESOURCES

• https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/explore-brno/go-to-brnos-museums-and-galleries/
• https://equestrianstatue.org/jobst-of-moravia/