The 1507 South Wall Frescoes of Brand’s Parish Church (Vorarlberg)

Walk into the Parish church of Brand in Brandnertal, Vorarlberg, Austria, and you’ll notice several things.

The first is that the church is a curious mix of Gothic and modern, redesigned in modern times to adapt to the needs and size of a large and growing local congregation. The two sections are distinct, the warm wood tones of the modern addition from the 1960s contrasting with the largely white-plaster walls of the Gothic section, known to have been consecrated by the Auxiliary Bishop of Chur, Stephan Tschuggli in 1507 (Fragments, p. 4). 

Brand (Vorarlberg) Parish Church, Exterior

 

Second, as an active church, the Church of the Assumption of Mary (Mariä Himmelfahrt) houses an array of Catholic devotional items. Modern flowers and candles are paired with early modern statuary; two sets of rosary beads and a few polished pieces of pink quartz sit before another mother-and-child with not one but two apples. And, of course, fliers and announcements for upcoming programs are readily available near the entryway.

But to a medievalist, the most striking feature of the Brand church would definitely be its Swiss-influenced frescoes, rediscovered in 1942 by restorer and painter Toni Kirchmayr (Fragments, p. 8). Today’s post focuses on the South wall, where six maroon-framed images remind us that churches of the early sixteenth century were colorful, highly-illustrated places.

LEFT (3 Holy women plus Anna Selbdritt with donors)

Brand (Vorarlberg): Fresco featuring 3 Holy Virgins (above) and Anna as mother of Mary (below)

As the photo shows, the first pair of images of the South wall – the set to the left – focus on women. On top, the three Holy Virgins, St Margaretha with her cross (though her trampled dragon is now obscured by the centuries underneath plaster), as well as St Barbara and St Katharina appear.

Below, we find Anna as mother, coiffed in an oversized headdress and holding the young Mary. They are adored by two donors, identified with coats of arms. We catch the left-hand donor in a moment of prayerful contemplation, hands together and held at a 45-degree angle upwards with a rosary draped and dangling, a message of devotional intent from a mere decade before the reformation.

Brand (Vorarlberg): Donor with rosary and coat of arms

MIDDLE (Three Male Saints and the Immaculata)

The panel of women are matched in the middle pillar by an image of three male saints, this time with banderoles, though lamentably the text is not preserved and the saints have not heretofore been identified; I offer a tentative identification below. 

Brand (Vorarlberg) Fresco: Three male saints (above), and the Immaculata (below)

These three men are all bearded and haloed. Figure 1 holds something at waist height. It appears to be mechanical, since his thumb is pressing a lever and there is some kind of gear and screw configuration. This is likely the windlass of St Erasmus, a gruesome reminder of the torture he faced.

Brand (Vorarlberg): Erasmus with his windlass

If Erasmus is present, and grouped with both the Holy Virgins of the previous panel and male companions here, it seems likely that this complex is part of an elaborate depiction of the 14 Holy Helpers, the Nothelfer, whose veneration was widespread at the time. Using that framework, we can try to identify the other two men posed with Erasmus.

Figure 2 has two layers of cloth over head and shoulders and is wrapped in his cloak; he is more subdued in his movements; his arm seems to hang down, for it is lower than that of our putative Erasmus. He has a grey beard but with a darker mustache, perhaps to evoke his long-suffering life, showing both age and remembered strength. This could be St Eustace, often depicted as one of the more passive of the Nothelfer.

Figure 3 is bareheaded with abundant hair, and holds his left hand palm up with pointer and middle finger curled upwards. Given the gesture, this could well be St Cyriacus, who  was an exorcist.

At the bottom right-hand edge, a much smaller figure peeks up at the three saints, emerging from the frame. Given its size and location, this is likely a donor image.

Below these male saints appear in the panel above another image of Mary, identified as the Immaculata (Fragments, p. 6), though many of the details have been lost.  

Brand (Vorarlberg): Mary Immaculata

She is depicted as a young pregnant woman set against a sunburst of wavy rays, and she stands on something, though, like Margaretha, we can only guess at whether or not it was a crushed dragon. (It seems more likely that they are rocks.)

Like the donor of the previous set of images, Mary’s hands are waist-high and upright, raised in prayer, but unlike the donor, whose palms touched, Mary intentionally steeples her fingertips to create a triangular space above her swelling abdomen. The triangle can be read as an allusion to the Trinity, and we are invited to see Mary as the “Vas spirituale,” the spiritual vessel, bearer of Christ the redeemer. (I have written on Dominican prayer gestures in a previous post, though that discussion was more about posture than hand gesture.)

This interpretation of Mary's role as a vessel of grace is reinforced by other elements of the fresco. Mary’s gaze is drawn to a serpent, the representation of her purity a stark contrast with the evil of sin.

Likewise, in the upper left corner, we see an angel holding a chalice and a crown. The chalice is closer to Mary than is the crown. That is, this is not a depiction of the crown on offer but rather one in which the promise of a crown is glimpsed. Why? The pregnant Mary is only mid-way through her difficult journey, not yet serving as Regina Caeli (Queen of Heaven) but rather preparing herself to be the receptacle of grace.

The other corner may once have held a second angel but that image is, alas, effaced.

RIGHT (Harrowing of Hell and Four Men)

The panel on the right changes up the thematic content. This time, there are four male figures in the lower image, and above we see the Harrowing of Hell, with the released souls emerging from their graves. 

Brand (Vorarlberg): The Harrowing of Hell (above), and four male figures (below)

The bodies emerging from the graves in the upper panel are the holy dead; they have halos and are naked or, like the right-most figure, are in simple shifts. The central figure of the group, however, is in a dark fur-lined coat and is assisting the others over the tomb edge. Above, a majestic haloed figure stands. Banderoles, both for the heavenly figure(s) and for those emerging from the grave would have helped contemporaries interpret the story.

The four men in the lower image are less easily identified. Of the four, two wear hats (of different sorts) and two do not. At least three of the four men have beards; the right-most figure might be clean-shaven. One of the men looks at us and seems to be smiling; the other three look outside of our scene and have more serious expressions. None have halos, though the four do stand against a lighter bit of sky – a cloud, or the glow of sunrise both come to mind.

Could these be patrons, gazing (mostly) on the Immaculata of the previous panel? Or are they patriarchs, without halos? And why is there space running along the left-hand edge – are they by a shore, perhaps? Or was there meant to be a fifth figure? Why was the order inverted – why are these men not in the upper panel like the saints of the other sets? Was the artist ensuring that we read them as secular figures? The image leaves more questions than answers.

SUMMARY

On this Southern wall of the Brand church, we have two images of Mary – to whom the church is dedicated, of course – and one of Christ’s freeing of souls from limbo. We also have six saints –  three women and three men – plus an additional panel of four men. And we have the two adoring patrons of the first pair of images, actively pursuing devotional prayer as a model for the congregants who gathered in this space. 

Such images were meant to activate the church's space. They called the viewer to remember particular biblical stories, they reminded the viewer of the presence and support to be had from the saints, and they modeled the practices and postures of prayer, as we saw with the donor and rosary. They served, in other words, as a distinctive testament to pre-Reformation faith in the Walser areas of Alpine Vorarlberg.

To me, the south wall’s frescoes are a kind of devotional anchor for the parish – rooted, orderly, and densely populated with saints and familiar sacred moments. Our donor figures here are both observers and participants, integrated into the sacred story. It's almost as if they are inviting parishioners to imagine themselves there, too. 

I’m also struck by the sense of continuity that these images suggest. The saints act as intercessors, protectors, and models, and are placed alongside Marian devotion and Christological scenes in a way that feels almost liturgical.  

Eamon Duffy reminds us in The Stripping of the Altars that late medieval English parish churches were “full of presence,” filled with images, rites, and smells that made the divine tangible. The same clearly applies here in late medieval Vorarlberg. This wall’s carefully choreographed figures were likely central to local rhythms of prayer and memory – not just passive decoration, but a kind of visual litany embedded in the painted plaster that made the church so resplendent.

WORKS CITED:

[Anonymous]. Parish Church “Our Lady of the Assumption” Brand: Fragments from the Church History Chronicles of Brand / Vorarlberg. [Undated Church Pamphlet.] Cited as "Fragments."

Cyrus, Cynthia. "Dominican Prayer Gestures" [blog post], Silences and Sounds, 3/29/25 https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/03/dominican-prayer-gestures-32925.html.

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992/R2022.

Note: The photos – taken by the author in July 28, 2025 with an iPhone 12 (!) – have been adjusted to bring out image details. The author is happy to provide untouched originals if needed. Photos and text are CC BY-SA: You are free to share and adapt this material, provided appropriate credit is given; any derivative works must be distributed under the same license.

Dominican Prayer Gestures (3/29/25)

Medieval prayer was not just a matter of words – it was a full-bodied practice, shaped by movement, posture, and gesture. As Jean-Claude Schmitt observes, such “[g]estures do not derive their meaning from their form but from their social use, from the context in which they were carried out” (p. 133). That is, we understand the significance of certain ways of holding the body and arms from the space in which they occur, the person or persons carrying them out, and the framing activities in which they are embedded.

This post briefly explores three twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources that illuminate the role of gesture in Dominican prayer: Peter the Chanter’s reflections on movement in devotion, Humbert of Romans’ structured taxonomy of bows and prostrations, and the treatises on Saint Dominic’s own prayer postures.

Together, these perspectives reveal how physical expression was not only an outward sign of inner devotion but also a communicative act, shaping and reinforcing the experience of prayer for both the individual and the community.

Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) tells us that prayer is a continuous movement. Take, for instance, his praise of the French at the moment of transubstantiation in the mass: 

these god-fearing men, I say, not only bend their head and kidneys but also remove all their hoods and caps from their heads, [and] prostrate themselves and fall on their face during the making and taking of the flesh and blood of Christ.

Four verbs in one short description: prayer for Peter is both active and sequential. Because of this, he considers gesture to be foundational for the act of praying. The positionality of the body matters in appropriately signaling the state of mind and spirit with which the petitioner approaches prayer. Here, Richard Trexler reminds us, we have submission postures. But to gesture, Peter reminds us, is an action, not an attitude. From a modern perspective, it’s a revelation of energy expended as well as engagement with the moment. Even when held in stasis – as with extended kneeling – the petitioner is putting physical energy into the act of prayer to supplement the verbal energy of the spoken prayer itself. Movement matters.

Trexler rightly points to the inconsistencies among the depictions as well as inconsistencies in Peter’s construction of the biblical authenticity for the seven gestures he articulates. Nevertheless, these “devote postures” are crafted to provide models of action in prayer. As Trexler summarizes, 

Peter the Chanter knew that the most sophisticated reader would learn body motions more quickly through pictures, and he wanted clerks to then act out his seven modes of prayer in a fashion which would edify spectators. Depersonalized figures would teach clerks, whose ritual life would then be the "book of the simple" (Trexler, p. 110).

Humbert of Romans (1200-1277) agrees with Peter the Chanter, at least in part: gesture matters, and it is imitable. Humbert, however, is less taken with ideas of movement and more with its visual endpoints. He offers a gestural grammar that explore the patterns of bending bodies in the context of the liturgy. Humbert provides a six-fold matrix of bows (inclinationes), genuflections (genuflexiones), and prostrations (prostrationes):

In his assessment of Humbert’s discussion, scholar Dmitri Zakharine points out that prostrations were an extended form of genuflection – “an amplification of the genuflection in liturgical ceremony.” (Zakharine, p. 349). He notes, however, that all these gestures had communicative power: they meant something to the petitioner, and, equally, they meant something to those who viewed these gestures.

It’s not unlike the teenager, arms akimbo. There is an authority of attitude inherent in these gestures if we see them in their proper context. For that teen with attitude, we’re mere steps away from the eye roll and the snarky comment. For the prayer-giver, we are in an opposite space, one in which the attitude reinforces a petitioning stance in the adoratio of the liturgy.

And Saint Dominic (1170-1221) himself explored a variety of stances in his prayer, at least as recorded in the multiple copies of The Nine [Alt: Fourteen] Ways of Praying of St Dominic. As Schmitt explores in detail, the illustrations to the Dominican treatise give us a wide range of gestures that Dominic was thought to have modeled.

That passive voice is doing some important work, because while the treatises agree in their hagiographical intent, they disagree, at least in part, about which prayer gestures were important enough to include. As Schmitt puts it, “the saint’s gestures quickly escaped pre-established codification of the inclinations” (Schmitt, p. 133).

The discussions of Dominic’s prayer in the treatise make clear that the captured gestures illustrated in the treatise iconography are part of a broader gestural complex. Take Dominic’s act of reading “some book opened before him.” Schmitt quotes the treatise: “He venerated his book, inclined himself toward it, kissed it with love.” In other words, the saint responded emotively and acted out his impulses in a set of actions – kissing the book, but also covering his head with his hood, or turning away from the book as if overwhelmed by its content. (Schmitt, p. 133)

This is important, because, pace Schmitt, the images and texts “offered a type of practical manual, a guide where the images presented more accurately the description of the gestures and moreover, the movement to imitate” (Schmitt, p. 140). In other words, the wise viewer might use the image as a model, for there is an “imitability” between friar and saint, reinforced by the choice of the vernacular. 

CONCLUSION

Given the differences in what they have to say, Peter, Humbert, and Dominic give us a rich view of medieval prayer gesture. For Peter the Chanter, the action is at the center of the gesture. These gestures reinforce the embodied nature of the petitioner, the life behind the words on the page or spoken into the air. For Humbert, the grammar of gesture is a central concern. He’s trying to think through the categories of meaningful acts, to give us the geometry of suitable self-abnegation, as the petitioner humbles him or herself before god. For Dominic, gesture is part of an almost theatrical construct, a staging in which bodily responses reinforce and make manifest the affective power of prayer.

Much like the implicit codes of modern body language, medieval prayer gestures carried with it meaningful information, shaping and being shaped by those who performed and witnessed them. Schmitt makes the point that prayer gestures were open to scrutiny by all – that one could see the forms of the prayer even if the words were only sub-vocal. Even in silence, the body spoke, making devotion visible to all who had eyes to see.

---

RESOURCES

Humbert of Romans. “Expositio super constitutiones fratrum praedicatorum.” In Opera Omnia, edited by Joachim Joseph Berthier, vol. 2: 160-167. Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1888-1889.

Schmitt, Jean-Claude. “Between Text and Image: the Prayer Gestures of Saint Dominic.” History and Anthropology 1 (1984): 127-162.

Trexler, Richard C. “Legitimating Prayer Gestures in the Twelfth Century. The De Penitentia of Peter the Chanter.” History and Anthropology, 1 (1984): 97-126.

Zakharine, Dmitri. “Medieval Perspectives in Europe: Oral Culture and Bodily Practices.” In Body - Language - Communication, Volume 1, edited by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, Sedinha Tessendorf, pp. 343-364. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 38,1. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.

The Seelengärtlein (Hortulus animae)

The title, Hortulus anime, with an elaborate first initial

The Little Garden of the Soul stands as one of the central prayerbooks of the 16th century, printed and reprinted, translated, and circulated not only in print but also in manuscript. It had first appeared in its Latin guise in 1498, and the German version emerged in 1501. We know it in its German form mostly by the title – Seelengärtlein – taken from a manuscript version (Cod. bibl. pal. Vindob. 2706), which Friedrich Dörnhöffer issued as one of the significant facsimiles of the 20th century. Published in 1911 as a 3-volume set, that facsimile is the standard “footnote me” work for early modern German prayer, famous for its art and for its extensive historical introduction.

But, alas, I did not happen to buy a 3-volume book printed more than 50 years before I was born. Neither, alack and alas, did my University library. And though the book is out of copyright, it’s not readily available in places I have looked.

What to do? Nerd out, of course! My goal as a practical person back in the day was to find a digital reproduction of one of the many early modern prints of the prayer collection. Finding relevant incunabula often has the added advantage of having woodcuts to help with navigation. And who doesn’t love a picture book?

FINDING PRINTS
For the world I inhabit – German language prints pre-1600 – working on such things means consulting the Verzeichnis der Drucke 16. Jahrhundert, also known as VD16 (Register of printed works of the 16th century) 
    http://www.gateway-bayern.de/index_vd16.html

Normally, I would have also gone to the ISTC (Incunabula Short Title Catalogue) – and I did, when I initially worked on this project. But ISTC is a British Library resource and thus was knocked out by the October 2023 cyber-attack. Still, it should come back some day:
    https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/

Then there’s the GW (Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke), the complete catalog of incunabula, but I find it much easier to go there with a printer, place, or year in mind.
    https://www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de/

To be honest, the format of the VD16 is the easiest for me to navigate, especially since its display supports clicking through to the full text of the items I’m most curious about.

SEARCHING CREATIVELY
If you search “Hortulus” on VD16, and then ask for the results in chronologically ascending order, you’ll see just how many editions there were!  (Of course, you have to weed out the Hortulus elegantiarum and the Hortulus Musices if you’re looking for editions of the prayer book.)

The Peter Schöffer d.J. edition of 1513 confirms the German name, though with a suitably creative period spelling:

Hortulus anime.|| Zů teütsch genant der || selen g#[ae]rtlin.||

Hortulus animae. In German, known as the “Selen Gärtlin.”

But a remarkable number of the editions are either listed solely by the Latin title (and may in fact be the Latin edition, of course) or just give the Latin title and then say “in German.” But, using the spelling that Schöffer used, “Selen” (for modern-German “Seelen,” Souls), up pop a number of other versions – though the Seelengärtlein, our “Little Garden,” is not to be confused with the Selen Wurzgarten (The soul’s herb-garden), a book which starts with a dramatic picture of a hell-mouth with the devils descending thither:

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- 2 P.lat. 1766  Der Seelen Wurzgarten Augsburg
1504, VD16 S 5276

It’s dramatic, but it isn’t prayers; the Wurzgarten is narrative, and features an awful lot of devils.

Our prayerbook version – the regular garden, not the herb one – can be found in a German translation by Brant, published in Straßburg in 1501 by Johann Wähinger (VD16 H 5078) and again in 1502 (VD16 ZV 8229). In that 1501 version, Brant stakes a strong claim to authorship:
 

Ortulus anĩe. Der selen gärtlin wurd ich genent ... || Zu Straßburg in sym vatterlant || Hat mich Sebastianus Brant || Besehen vnd vast corrigiert || Zum tütschem ouch vil transferiert

[H]Ortulus anime. I was called the selen gärtlin ... || In Strasbourg in his fatherland || Sebastianus Brant || Inspected me and corrected me a lot || Also transferred to the German.

Brant inspected and corrected – extensively, he claims! – and “transferred” it into German. It’s a big project, so perhaps his over-the-top claims are warranted.

And from there, as we have seen, the prints spread and spread. There are a lot of them, and one could spend years comparing them all. But that isn’t my particular rabbit hole.

ACCESSING THE PRAYERS OF THE SEELENGÄRTLEIN
Because I was interested in accessing the prayer-texts themselves, and not just the digitized version, I worked through the list of editions on VD16 for one that had an OCR version as well as an online visual representation. During pandemic times (back in 2020), I settled on Johannes Knoblouch’s edition of the Seelengärtlein (Hortulus animae) from Straßburg, 1507 [VD16 H 5082]. That version was available in two ways:

1) directly from the BSB: urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00009026-0 – use the URN resolver: https://nbn-resolving.org/gui/urn to navigate there
2) from Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=AdhCMsIz-jkC.

With both copies in hand, and time hanging heavy on my hands, I indexed the volume. The index was built starting from the volume’s Register (found on fols. 243v-247v), and adopts the foliation conventions from the BSB copy. Since Knoblouch himself used a combination of signature (Sig) and folio (fol) in the register in order to show location within the gathering structure of the volume, I preserve them in columns 2 and 3 of the index.

Overall, I decided that the subsections of prayers – sections which might spin out and be transmitted independently or might migrate into another prayer complex – needed to be included, but I greyed out all but the first section, so one can readily see which is the starting prayer (white) and which the subsections (grey) in a multi-partite prayer.

A sample from the index -- the rubric is in red, the first segment is white, and the subsequent sections are greyed out

To round out my work, I gave brief descriptions of the 73 woodcuts from the perspective of navigating the volume. Thus, I list St Gertrude, but not her cats -- or are those the mice that she banished? None of the animals made my description, for it is St Gertrude herself who is the navigational marker, setting the reader up for the next prayer "Seyest gegrůßt heilige iungfraw sant Gerdrut die du geboren bist von königlichem stammen..." [Hail, holy virgin Saint Gertrude, born of royal descent].

For those who are intrigued, I have made the index available through google sheets:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14UgeWOq9iPZ88uQiWw6a0PnPCrADabp5YqrGazk6Tuk/edit?usp=sharing

You too can play with the index by sorting columns this way and that way, and use it to navigate within the digital covers of the book itself.

AND IN CONCLUSION:
The Seelengärtlein may have begun as a 16th-century prayerbook, but its history is one of persistence, adaptation, and circulation across languages, formats, and centuries. My deep dive into its editions—navigating catalogs, parsing digital copies, and building an index—reflects the same impulse that shaped its transmission: the desire to make these prayers accessible, ordered, and usable. Whether in manuscript, print, or digital form, the Seelengärtlein continues to grow, much like the metaphorical garden it evokes.