Day 356 - Medieval sculpture

 May 7, 2024

Gallery 520 is at the area behind the large choir screen in the Medieval Art galleries. (At Christmas, the front of that screen is the site of the "angel tree" and the Neapolitan creche, where I make an annual pilgrimage; the figures of peasants tending their flocks and coming to adore the Christ child never fail  to move me.)  The gallery contains tapesetries, a large coffer, and a 14th-century Italian column head showing Saint Veronica holding up her veil on which a rather ugly head of Christ appears. A display case holds a parchment from 1466-67, during the War of the Roses, that charts the genealogy of the kings of England.  Edward IV's claim to the throne is substantiated by the inclusion among his forebears of King David, Alexander the Great, King Arthur, and William the Conqueror.  

Most of the gallery, however, is devoted to sculpture.  Dating from about 1325 to 1550, the statuary comes from all over Western Europe (France, Germany, the Low Countries, Spain, and Italy). The works range in size, from statuettes  to just short of life size, and in medium, with examples carved from limestone, alabaster, and many kinds of wood. But they do not vary in their themes: All the subjects are religious. I'm struck, not for the first time, by the emotional expressiveness of many of the wood sculptures. In depictions of the Deposition, the grief of Jesus' mourners is palpable. I wonder if sculpture as a medium allowed for greater realism  and less idealization in its depictions of the human form than did painting.

Whatever the emotional realism of the statues,  the stories they tell, particularly those related to the lives of the saints, are sometimes just plain weird. Today's entry shows two works that strike me as especially odd. The smaller statue (perhaps 18 inches high) was carved of alabaster by an unknown  French sculptor around 1475. It depicts Saint Margaret of Antioch, who was ultimately martyred under Diocletian.  Before that, however, she was swallowed by the devil in the form of a dragon but managed to escape unscathed by making  the sign of the cross .Here she is shown bursting out of the dragon's back, rather reminiscent of Venus on the halfshell.  Margaret turns out to be quite a babe, with her high, full breasts, wasp waist, and long ringlets that make her look like the model in an ad for a shampoo for curly-headed women. 

A second sculpture, this one about four and a half feet high, was carved  of oak and made in the South Netherlands around 1500. The story it tells is a gruesome one: Saint Nicholas restoring life to  three young boys who were killed by a butcher and thrown into a pickling vat. Pickling brine - really? The saint sits on a chair, his right hand raised in blessing, his eyes apparently closed in prayer, while the three boys, whose scale is miniature compared with that of the saint, gaze upward in imploration either of God or of Nicholas himself. 

Did people in the Middle Ages believe that dragons actually existed? That Saint Nicholas could raise the dead, much less raise dead people who ohad been pickled? Yet these stories and myths make no more - or less - sense than those of other religions, including my own.