Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, The University of Chicago Press RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics

The votive scenario
Author(s): CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD

Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 59/60 (spring/autumn 2011), pp. 206-227
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology
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206 RES 59/60 SPRING/AUTUMN 2011
Figure 1. St. Anthony, south Germany, mid-fifteenth century. Hand-colored woodcut, 38.1 x 26.4 cm.
Photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, inv. no. 118224 D.
The votive scenario
CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD
Three sufferers, bodies convulsed, inflamed limbsthings.2 The votaries and supplicants bear or proffer
brandished, beg for the attention of the enthronedobjects:
healer the badges pinned to the hat, small crosses, a
fowl, a mannikin, wax models of bodies or extremities.
(fig. 1).The men at lower left and right, with crutches,
have traveled some distance: The purses at their waistsThe objects attest to states of mind and to successful
and the hat with upturned visor adorned with metal exchanges with entities outside ordinary experience—
badges, souvenirs of shrines visited, suggest as much. divinity
The itself, or a holy man who manages destructive
healer is remote, imperturbable. fire. At the pilgrimage site—so the picture suggests—th
Flanking his throne, thrusting gifts into his field pilgrims
of perform for one another. The pilgrim is an
object in the eyes of other pilgrims, no less so than
vision, are four healthy visitors, two wearing fur-lined
hats that imply affluence, another with the armor are and the displayed wax body parts. But above all the
sword of a well-born soldier. These four are completing a
pilgrims perform for the powerful saint, the third- and
cycle of entreaty and thanks. They or someone close to
fourth-century Egyptian hermit St. Anthony Abbot or S
them was delivered or spared from the fearsome Anthony the Great. In the eleventh century St. Anthon
affliction, the burning limbs, by virtue of prayer and relics
a surfaced in southeastern France, in the Dauphin
promise of future sacrifice, an expenditure of wealth, generating a shrine cult with wide fame. St. Anthony w
time, and mental energy. Once spared or healed, credited
the with the power to heal an array of diseases.
votary must fulfill his or her promise. Here the votaries The aim of this paper is to understand better how
crowd the throne of the thaumaturge, competing for people's
his experiences in the late middle ages were
attention; they want their gifts acknowledged. But "paced"
there is by objects. The wax body parts tendered by
pilgrims testified to ruptures in the body's experience
no real urgency, for their limbs are intact and the votive
cycle is complete. Life can resume at a normal pace. of itself. They transferred personal experience into the
For the supplicants at the foot of the throne, by spaces of representation, first the shrine itself, then
contrast, time has accelerated. The regular rhythmsimages such as this woodcut. The print is a portrait of
of calendar, labor, and family have been disrupted. a saint, but its borders are permeated by the rhythms
This is an "emergent occasion," to borrow from theof individual even if unnamed lives. These rhythms are
title of John Donne's collection of prose reflectionsimported
on by the wax offerings, which were in their ow
his own imminent death by disease.1 These devotees way portraits.
The precise role such a woodcut might have played
display none of Donne's stoicism, but rather try to strike
a deal with the saint who controls the disease. They inside the votive cycle it depicts is unclear. The image
are presumably making vows, hoping to return in due printed on paper was a novelty of the fifteenth century.
To make sense of the woodcut we might compare it t
course to take their places at the sides of the throne,
displaying gratitude. They are fearful of emergencethe objects pictured inside it. The badge worn by the
itself,
a reshaping of time that obscures origins. Emergentpilgrim at the lower left, for example, is testimony to
phenomena evade cause-and-effect relationships,pilgrimage
and so accomplished, a souvenir, or a trophy. Suc
sweep away the partitions that minds erect to makea sense
badge might also possess protective power by virtue
of the flow of experience. its provenance, its former proximity to or even contigu
This picture, a hand-colored woodcut printed
probably in Swabia in southern Germany around
1450, models a web of relations between people and
2. The woodcut is a unicum, that is, the sole surviving impressio
from the print run. Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, inv. n
118241D. W. L. Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte
XV. Jahrhunderts, 8 vols. (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1926-30) (= Schreibe
no. 1215. Die Frühzeit des Holzschnitts, exhibition catalogue (Mun
For advice and information I am grateful to Laura Fenelli, Milette
Gaifman, ). D. Connor, Larry Kanter, and Jacqueline Jung; and Staatliche
for a Graphische Sammlung, 1970), no. 26. Origins of Europe
Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public, ed. Pete
close and engaged reading of an earlier draft, Francesco Pellizzi.
1. J. Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Parshall
Donne's and Rainer Schoch. Exhibition catalogue, National Gallery o
text was modelled on the meditations composed by King Hezekiah Art and Germanisches Nationalmuseum (New Haven: Yale Universi
after his recovery from illness (Isaiah 38:9-20). Press, 2005), no. 93.
mysterious.about their workings. Mysterious was St.

with the tomb of a saint.3 Lead badges representing
Anthony's
St. Anthony were attached to the necks of livestock to ability to cure illnesses. The offering was a
protect them from disease.4 The woodcut may have had
straightforward sign, a token of gratitude. For visitors
a lot in common with such a badge, for there istoevidence
the shrine, including other votaries, the displayed
that prints, too, could transmit the powers stored offering in symbolized another person's good faith in
a tomb. The print could function as a contact-relic keeping the bargain struck with the saint by making
channeling healing or protective power from a saint's the trip to the shrine. The offering testified to the saint's
relics to an individual devout.5 Woodcuts not so different successful intervention and so glorified that saint;
from this were carried home from pilgrimage sites as the offerings ornamented the shrine and ratified the
trophies and talismans.6 authenticity of the relics. The mannikin represented the
The gift or offering, such as the wax mannikin held person's self or soul, dedicated to the saint in the hour
by the man at left or the hands and feet suspended from of need. The wax hand or foot represented the afflicted
the rail above, had no such powers.7 There was nothing limb, thus reporting on the disease's symptomatology.
The votive offerings also had real material value. A fowl
or a quantity of molded wax was useful to the clerics
3. D. Bruna, Enseignes de pèlerinage et enseignes profanes (Paris: who managed such a shrine, for the hen could lay eggs
Réunion des musées nationaux, 1996), pp. 16-18; B. Spencer, Pilgrim or be consumed, and the wax could be melted down to
Souvenirs and Secular Badges (London: Stationery Office, 1998), pp.
make candles.8 But above all the votive offering fulfilled
17-24. For examples of amulets, talismans, and badges associated with
a promise of expenditure, of wealth, time, and attention,
shrines, see the exhibition catalogue Wallfahrt kennt keine Crenzen
(Munich: Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, 1984), pp. 34-51. made by the votary to the thaumaturgie saint. The proof
4. E. Clementz, "Le culte de St. Antoine en Alsace," in Aufden of expenditure was the aspect of the offering addressed
Spuren des hi Antonius, Festschrift Adalbert Mischlewski (Memmingen: to St. Anthony himself. It was important that he take
Memminger Zeitung, 1994), p. 227. notice of the fulfillment of the vow.
5. Robert Maniura published a document recording the use in 1485
of a figura di charta, a "paper figure," to heal a sick woman. The image,
presumably a woodcut similar if not identical to a surviving fifteenth few art historians dealt with this material; see, however, E. Battisti,
century print reproducing the fourteenth-century fresco known as the "Fenomenología dell' ex voto," in Ex voto tra storia e antropología,
Madonna delle Carceri in Prato, was put in contact with the fresco ed. E. De Simoni (Rome: De Luca, 1968), pp. 35-48. Today we have
and then with the mouth and body of the woman. In 1490 Giuliano a wealth of analyses: P.-A. Sigal, "L'ex voto au moyen âge dans les
Guizzelmi spent sixteen soldi in Florence on paper reproductions of régions du nord-ouest de la Méditerranée (Xlle—XVe siècles)," Provence
the Madonna delle Carceri, Vergini Marie di charta. "The Images and Historique 33 (1983): 13-31; A. Reinle, Das stellvertretende Bildnis:
Miracles of Santa Maria delle Carceri," in The Miraculous Image in the Plastiken und Gemalde von derAntike bis ins / 9. Jahrhundert (Zurich:
Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. G. Wolf and E. Thuno (Rome: Artemis, 1984), pp. 10-30; D. Freedberg, The Power of Images
"I'Erma" di Bretschneider, 2004), pp. 86-87. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 136-160; El. van der
6. This is potentially a large class of objects, but it is hard to prove Velden, The Donor's Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of
that any particular woodcut was used as a talisman. In the Bodleian Charles the Bold (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); M. Bacci, "Pro remedio
Library there is a woodcut image of Flenry VI, a thaumaturgie king, animae": immagini sacre e pratiche devozionali in Italia centrale
surrounded by votaries and offerings, adduced by Spencer, Pilgrim (secoli XIII e XIV) (Pisa: ETS, 2000), pp. 147-226; F. Bisogni, "Ex voto e
Souvenirs (note 3), p. 7 and fig. 4, as a talismanic souvenir from the la scultura in cera nel tardo medioevo," in Visions of Holiness: Art and
shrine; but it is not clear how he knows it was used this way. Wallfahrt Devotion in Renaissance Italy, ed. A. Ladis and S. E. Zuraw (Athens:
kennt keine Crenzen (note 3), pp. 39-40, asserts that prints were used University of Georgia, 2001), pp. 67-91; G. Didi-Huberman, Ex-voto:
in this way but offers no examples earlier than the seventeenth century. Image, organe, temps (Paris: Bayard, 2006); F. Jacobs, "Rethinking the
7. R. Andree, Votive und Weihegaben des katholischen Volks Divide: Cult Images and the Cult of Images," in Renaissance Theory,
in Süddeutschland (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1904), is replete with ed. J. Elkins and R. Williams (New York and London: Routledge, 2008),
interesting and often overlooked material. The most sophisticated pp. 95-114; M. Holmes, "Ex votos: Materiality, Memory, and Cult," in
older literature on the ex voto emerged from the field of Volkskunde The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern
or the study of popular culture: see W. Brückner, "Volkstümliche World, ed. M. W. Cole and R. E. Zorach (Ashgate, 2009), pp. 159-181 ;
Denkstrukturen und hochschichtliches Weltbild im Votivwesen," R. Maniura, "Ex Votos, Art and Pious Performance," Oxford Art Journal
Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 59 (1963):186-203, and L. 32 (2009):409-425.
Kriss-Rettenbeck, fx voto: Zeichen, Bild und Abbild im christlichen 8. Note that van der Velden (note 7, p. 248), says only that it is
Votivbrauchtum (Zurich: Atlantis, 1972). Exhibitions and publications "possible" that wax votive gifts were melted down later for re-use.
of collections have focused on the small painted panels which have There is little evidence, but then it stands to reason that this practice
dominated the votive phenomenon since the sixteenth century: See, was not well documented. At any rate, wax was expensive. Maniura
for example, fx voto (Kunsthalle Bern, 1964); F. Faranda, Fides tua notes that the ten pounds of wax used to make a votive effigy of a
te salvum fecit: i dipinti votivi nel Santuario di S. Maria del Monte a healed child were four times more expensive than the silver used to
Cesena (Modena: Artioli, 1997); Per grazia ricevuta: CI i ex voto del coat the effigy (note 7, p. 418). The really expensive alternative was the
Museo di San Nicola a Tolentino (Tolentino, 2005). Until recently effigy or model fashioned entirely in silver.
Wood: The votive scenario 209
The function of the wax body parts within the cycle of The printed image comments on its own similarity to
entreaty and thanks is clear. Yet in the woodcut image, and difference from other objects simply by portraying
and in the few other depictions we have of the practice, objects and the ways people attend to them. The woodcut
the suspended hands and feet compel our attention. creates a gradient of values between itself and the objects
They seem to exceed the role they play within the cycle. it pictures. Many Christian subjects involve people
They are super-representations, powerfully linked to looking at scenes, other people, things, and images: the
their referents. Wax in its texture, translucence, and dull
Lamentation over the Dead Christ, for instance, or the
tone can uncannily resemble flesh. The medium of waxCrucifixion. Such images deliver the historical event and
symbolizes both the flow of experience—the disease, all
at the same time show how people responded to the
the passions accompanying it—and the stilling of that event as spectacle. At such a scene, Christ's body is
flow. With its responsiveness to pressure, wax carried a already functioning as an image: static, cynosural, densely
strong connotation of fidelity to an original, a one-to-one
significant for those who know how to look. A depiction
matching.9 Wax models of body parts, as far as we can of this scene is recursive in the sense that it encodes
tell, were life-sized or near life-sized. In the woodcut, inside itself a set of guidelines for its own beholders.
however, they loom large, like great pelts or trophies. Once you have arrived at that embedded "instruction
They are the key to the image. manual," you have to exit the picture and start all over
A printed or painted picture lacks the direct force of again. Equipped with the principles retrieved from within
a wax model, but it is more articulate, more voluble. the picture, you may now read the picture quite
Some pilgrims offered painted pictures, wall paintings differently and discover new guiding principles that you
or panels portraying a saint, as votive gifts.10 For many had misread the first time, before you had access to the
centuries such offerings were rare and impressive, instruction manual. And so on.
beyond the means of most of the faithful. In the late To go further with this print, and to displace it from
fifteenth century ordinary worshippers began to depositits customary art historical niche, let us compare it to a
small painted panels as offerings, completing the votivelater and very different kind of picture: an oil painting
on canvas by the Ferrarese court painter Dosso Dossi,
cycle and at the same time reporting on the nature of the
injury or the cure.11 The painted panel was in some waysa representation of an enchantress, probably the good
less valuable to the clerics who managed the shrine sorceress Melissa, a character from Lodovico Ariosto's
than the wax body part, for they could do little with it modern epic Orlando Furioso (fig. 2).13 The work shows
other than put it on display as testimony to the efficacyMelissa seated inside a magic circle and lighting a wax
of the system. It did have great value as a generator of torch. She has consulted a tablet bearing cryptic writing
confidence in the system, however. There is no record ofand diagrams and is about to perform a spell that will
anyone leaving a print or a drawing as an ex voto.12 reconstitute some metamorphized soldiers, their beings
miserably split between animal bodies and effigy-like
souls suspended in the tree; thus undoing the evil spell
9. On the impression in wax as a metaphor for apprehension, of another enchantress. The painting dates from the
memory, or possession, see K. Park, "Impressed Images: Reproducing late 151 Os and is a paradigm of a category of object
Wonders," in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. C. A. Jones and P. relatively new at that moment: a nearly self-sufficient
Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 254-271. On the symbolic
image, prepared to go on generating meanings even
associations of wax, see S. Waldmann, Die lebensgrosse Wachsfigur
(Munich: Tuduv, 1990), pp. 9-15. On the "interpretive potential" of the
if displaced from its original setting, the court of the
imprint, see B. M. Bedos-Rezak, "Replica: Images of Identity and the duke Alfonso d'Este. The painting comments poetically
Identity of Images in Prescholastic France," in The Mind's Eye: Art and on the powers of the witch, a nearly forgotten art,
Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. J. F. Hamburger and according to Ariosto, a wisdom preserved only in
A.-M. Bouché (Princeton: Department of Art and Archaeology,
Princeton University, 2006), pp. 51-55.
10. See H. Belting, Likeness and Presence (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 82-88, on votive frescoes in sixth- and on canvas and paper; ). Cannon and A. Vauchez, Margherita ofCortona
seventh-century Thessaloniki. and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman In
11. Although the older and local literature on the votive Medieval Tuscany (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
phenomenon addresses these panels, interpretation has really only just 1999), p. 57, n. 15.
begun. For overviews see Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), pp. 155-271, and 13. The comparison is possibly unexpected but not random. It
Bacci (note 7), pp. 220-223. builds on an argument I published in these pages, "Countermagical
12. The Visitation record of 1629 associated with the canonization Combinations by Dosso Dossi," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics
process of Margherita of Cortona speaks of offerings of images painted 49/50(2006):! 51-170.
Figure 2. Dosso Dossi, Enchantress, ca. 1515-1520. Oil on canvas, 176 x

174 cm. Rome, Gallería Borghese. Photo: Scala / Ministero per I Beni e le
Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York.
the eastern homelands of the enemies of the Frankish canvas, for they circulated in the world, fro
knights celebrated in his poem. Dosso's painting, a hand, in and out of shops and homes. The p
fictional image, compares itself to the more efficacious unique, was buried deep inside a ducal r
technologies it pictures: The cryptogram on the tablet, And yet how similar the two works are, for
the torch that will write with smoke in the sky, and Dosso's painting and the woodcut with St.
finally the Christian cult image, which is present only as basically depictions of wizards able to def
a disguised intertext. For this painting is the "anagram" and possibly unnatural, but anyway invisib
of a Madonna and Child, or a Rest of the Holy Family on Both represent seated figures surrounded
the Flight to Egypt, a sacred narrative transfigured and in distress. In the painting, the animals are
transvalued. In its physical closure and boundedness, bodies have been transformed not by dise
and in its confidence in its own semantic fecundity, the magic. They press close to the benevolent s
painting is asking for nothing more than the privileges hopes of deliverance. Melissa, as she manipu
enjoyed by Ariosto's poem. This was new for the art of and fire, casts a glance upward toward the s
painting. Painting here was asking to be upgraded to the men stored in the tree. Melissa and Antho
status of a poem. gods, but technicians. They heal or repair by controlling
The woodcut representing St. Anthony and the oil the elements. Anthony's technology is e
painting representing the magnificent sorceress are and theologically questionable, almost a
unlikely pendants. The woodcut together with all its Melissa's. Both pictures are recursive: t
perished siblings—the hundreds of sheets that once each picture is offered a target of attention,
made up the print run, identical except for their hand- same time sees attention modeled. Each p
applied coloring—were so much busier than Dosso's itself through embedded analogons of it
The painting by Dosso Dossi reveals that the homogeneous facture and the internal articulation of
apparently disenchanted image of the early sixteenth forms and colors—all the elements that together count
century, cut off from the ground of mimetic magic as the picture's style and that anchor the picture to its
that had guaranteed the cult image, developed a author—create an effect of closure and self-sufficiency
countermagic involving displacement of intertexts. The institution of the fictional artwork stabilizes the tim
The occluded cult image reappeared inside the new of the image. The painted fiction achieves this stabilit
image as the books, the diagrams, the torch and severing as much as possible its referential ties. Christ
brazier, and finally the combinatorially scrambled narratives and icons, profane portraits, symbolic and
Christian subject. The real theme of Dosso's work didactic images were all linked to their authenticating
was its own distance from its imagined predecessors, sources in remotest times by chains of images. Such
images that were "not yet" artworks—for example, images point to stable realities well beyond their ow
a simple woodcut representing St. Anthony and his bounds. Dosso Dossi's canvas, only loosely attached
votaries. Such an image, unlike the canvas by Dosso, to the past, and aligned with but not dependent for all
seems untroubled by competition from poems or from its impact on a poem, was prepared to venture into
important contemporary artists. Yet the woodcut, too, the world more or less on its own account (even if the
depicts its own imagined predecessor, a superior kind of picture, in fact, has been moved only very few times i
image, in the form of the wax body parts, which convey five centuries).
their meaning so unforgettably, and possibly in the The contrast with Dosso's painting allows us to hom
figure of St. Anthony, which may represent a painted or in on the nature of the woodcut. The printed image of
sculpted image of the sort that one might find at a shrine. St. Anthony is fundamentally a referential image, th
(Alternatively, this figure may stand in for the tomb portrait of a thaumaturgie saint, a historical personage
shrine, reminding us that nothing signifies an absent holy with a real effectiveness in the world that exceeded
person more effectively than a sample of his body— own lifespan. The authenticity of the portrait is secured
namely, relics—or it may not represent an image or place by substitutional chains linking it to other images of
at all, but simply the saint himself.) Anthony. More interestingly, the woodcut connects real
If art is a flow of attentiveness through minds and and modern people to the virtual reality of the picture
things, then the work of art is a thing specially designed through the attributes of the thaumaturgie saint. Votiv
to retard that flow, and then display it, making the flow offerings were among the conventional attributes tha
visible all at once. At the same time the work is a thing served to identify Anthony, t|ut so too were the devote
that might at any moment be hurled back into the real- Emergent time floods into the picture through the
time flow. Both works, the painting and the print, meet attributes. The depicted votaries signify in two directi
these criteria. First, they function as conventional labels, copied
The two pictures also differ in an important way. They from other pictures, securi
manage time differently. The relation between the time Anthony. This reference wa
represented in the picture and the time of the picture is value. Second, the votaries
in each case different. The painting by Dosso is to a high animation to real trials a
degree temporally unified. The painting points, via the by modern people. They ar
poem it illustrates, to a historical period remembered of shared experience, the bed
in legend, the struggles of the Frankish heroes in the emotions that preexists any
eighth and ninth centuries against the Muslims in Spain The woodcut depicts the r
and southern France. The Roland legend evokes against time—namely, submission t
the long-term project of the Crusades, initiated in the in doing so it also vividly d
eleventh century. The enchantress's arts evoke against phenomena (disease, fear, ho
ancient and medieval reports of magical practice, as cycle. By comparison, the
well as the contemporary phenomenon of witchcraft, the itself, and tranquil.
target of Dominican inquisitors. The painting depicts a Anthony is multiply identi
technical intervention designed to undo metamorphosis on a scroll affixed to the r
and so reverse time. But all these temporal gestures are staff, the tau on the robe,
tightly managed by the picture's author. That author, a his feet. The clerics of the
technician superior even to Melissa the enchantress, privilege of keeping pigs.
manipulates all the temporal vectors. The painting's papal bulls and poems men
the bells were transferred to Anthony's staff.14 The tau

or Greek T was a sign associated with magical powers;
according to the bull of 1297 the Antonites "call it
potentia.'n5 Healing played a major role in Anthony's
life story. But his fourth-century biographer Athanasius,
guided by Anthony's own words, insisted at every turn
that the Lord was performing the miracles ascribed
to the saint, and not the saint himself.16 Anthony
was essentially a hermit, not a healer. The saint was
transformed into a thaumaturge only in the twelfth
century, after the clerics attendant on his shrine at
St.-Antoine-l'Abbaye or St.-Antoine-en-Viennois in the
Dauphiné, gained a reputation for effective treatment
of a brutal disease, widespread in Europe for centuries,
involving inflammation of the extremities and ultimately
gangrene.17 The disease was in fact caused by a fungal
contamination of grain used in breadmaking, thus cutting
a wide swath through society. But until the seventeenth
century no one connected the disease to the bread.
Instead, the society personified the disease by attributing
its onset and abatement to St. Anthony, the one who
controls the fire, as the crude red flames at the base of
his throne indicate. Fire appears to add to the universe,
but it ends up subtracting. Fire is a principle of energy
and transformation, life-giving if handled properly,
otherwise destructive. The flames were added in the
late Middle Ages to the roster of symbols that one could
expect to find in an image of St. Anthony.
The earliest surviving example of an image of St.
Anthony accompanied by votaries is a panel in Fabriano
dated 1353 and attributed to the Master of the Fabriano
Figure 3. Master of Fabriano Altarpiece, St. Anthony, 1353.
Altarpiece, now identified as Puccio di Simone, or to
Tempera on panel, 195 x 105 cm. Fabriano, Pinacoteca Civica.
Allegretto Nuzi (fig. 3).18This painting represents the
Photo: Richard Offner, The Fourteenth Century: Bernardo
Daddi and His Circle, section III, vol. V, ed. Miklós Boskovits
14. L. Fenelli, II tau, il fuoco, il maiale: I canonici regolari dl (Florence: Giunti, 2001), pl. XXXVI.
sant'Antonio Abate tra assistenza e devozione (Spoleto: Fondazione
Centro italiano di studi sull' alto medioevo, 2006), p. 161; L. Fenelli,
"Sant'Antonio Abate: Parole, reliquie, immagini" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Bologna, 2007), p. 309. The two studies by Fenelli are the
most thorough treatments of the iconography of St. Anthony the healer
saint standing in a landscape, holding book and staff,
and its origins in real practices and institutions. with two pigs at his feet, and flanked by kneeling figures
15. ". . . habitu cum signo T quod potentia vocant. . ." (Fenelli, II from various social stations, seven men on the left and
tau, p. 65); Fenelli, "Sant' Antonio Abate," pp. 93, 302; see also p. 38. seven women plus a baby on the right. None of the
16. Athanasius, Life of St. Anthony, §§ 14, 38, 48, 56, 57, 84.
kneeling figures in the Fabriano panel is visibly ill or
17. On the disease and the Antonites' role in treating it, see A.
Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God's Medicine and the Painter's holding an offering. Nevertheless these figures, like
Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 13-52; the seven small figures in the woodcut, are attributes
Fenelli, Il tau (note 14), pp. 33-93; "Sant' Antonio Abate" (note 14), identifying the giant saint and reminding beholders why
pp. 87-100; and E. Clementz, Les Antonins d'lssenheim: Essor et dérive one might direct prayer toward him.
d'une vocation hospitalière à la lumière du temporel (Strasbourg:
Société Savante d'Alsace, 1998), pp. 27-143, esp. 66-88 on the
clerics' therapeutic and surgical activity.
18. R. Offner, The Fourteenth Century: Bernardo Daddi and His pp. 383-390, pl. XXXVI. An inscription on the lower edge is illegible
Circle, section III, vol. V, ed. M. Boskovits (Florence: Ciunti, 2001), except for the date.
Wax body parts and other offerings were left at the from the life and miracles of St. Anthony were painted on
tombs of many different saints. Our knowledge of this the walls of the church in the early 1370s by a Florentine
practice is based mostly on the reports and biographiesartist, probably Niccolo di Tommaso. At the right is an
altar inside a small shrine-like chapel, adorned by an
drawn up for canonization hearings, so there is a bias in
the evidence toward modern saints, personages of the apparently painted image of a standing St. Anthony. In
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.19 Not all of these front of the shrine is a box whose lid is held open by
saints were known in their own lifetimes principally as several onlookers. In the box is a jumble of what appear
healers. Votive offerings and votaries do not appear as to be wax hands and feet: a different way of storing
attributes in images of most of these saints. Only those the offerings than that depicted in most scenes of tomb
identified as thaumaturges are iconographically labeled worship.23
in this way: St. Anthony the Great, St. Anthony of Padua, Two images of the early sixteenth century give us
St. Nicholas ofTolentino.20 Shrine devotions, includingrare glimpses of collections of votive offerings, more
the display of wax models of limbs, are described in extensive and informative than the conventional
some hagiographical pictorial narratives, either in mural hagiographical scenes: the Vision of Prior Ottobon
cycles or in so-called Vita panels, that is, altarpieces by Vittorio Carpaccio (ca. 1515) and the woodcut
involving full-length portraits accompanied by scenes reporting on the pilgrimage to the Schône Maria of
Regensburg by Michael Ostendorfer (ca. 1520).24 In the
from the life. Examples are the images of devotions at the
tomb of St. Margaret of Antioch in her Vita panel in theCarpaccio, we see models of ships, vessels spared from
Vatican and at the tomb of St. Sebastian in a panel by shipwreck by prayer. In the Ostendorfer, we see tools
Joose Lieferinxe in Rome.21 Here we also see wax hearts and farm implements, perhaps actual objects involved
symbolizing devotion or mannikins symbolizing the soul in accidents, perhaps symbols of the abandonment of
or possibly representing a baby, as well as offerings of worldly concerns.25 In each scene, we see models of
crosses and other devotional tokens; also crutches andbody parts, but also many long slender objects, candle
manacles speaking eloquently of ordeals overcome. like lengths of wax in the true measures of healed
A rare representation of devotions at the tomb of St. children. People gave bundles of wax spun out in thread
Anthony is the scene of the Liberation of the Unjustly like lengths, known as trindles, long enough to encircle
Condemned Youths at the church of San Antonio Abate, the tomb or even the church.26 People gave money, food,
or the church of the Tau, in Pistoia.22 This image and and livestock. They gave entire buildings. They vowed to
others representing scenes from the Old Testament and restore or take care of existing images.27
Many categories of ex voto were rarely or never
represented in paintings or prints.28 We know from
19. Bisogni (note 7), pp. 68-79, reviews several major cases: St.
Francis, St. Anthony of Radua, St. Elizabeth, St. Louis of Toulouse,
Margherita of Cortona, Chiara da Montefalco, St. Nicholas of Tolentino,
and St. Catherine of Siena. 23. Bacci (note 7), p. 184, adduces another instance of wax
20. On late medieval thaumaturgie saints, see J. Huizinga, The offerings not suspended but stored in a box, the same box that held
Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, monetary offerings.
1996), pp. 198-200; A. Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers 24. The painting by Carpaccio is in the Accademia in Venice. On
siècles du Moyen Age (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1981 ), pp. the Ostendorfer, see Christopher S. Wood, "Ritual and the Virgin on the
544-548; and G. B. Bronzini, "Santi taumaturghi etaumaturgia delI' exColumn: The Cult of the Schone Maria in Regensburg," Journal of Ritual
voto," Lares 56(1990):504-507. Studies 6 (1992):87-101.
21. L. Gilbertson, "Imaging St. Margaret: Imitatio Christi and 25. Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), p. 45.
Imitatio Mariae in the Vanni Altarpiece," in Images, Relics, and 26. Sigaf(note 7), p. 18. Cannon andVauchez (note 12), pp.
Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. S. J. 57-59. Life-sized effigies were often made in the true weight of the
Cornelison and S. B. Montgomery (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval represented person, as were wax images of babies and children.
and Renaissance Studies, 2006), pp. 115-138. On the St. Sebastian See van der Velden (note 7), pp. 253-259, on weighted gifts. On
panel, see C. Sterling, "The 'Master of St. Sebastian' (Josse Lieferinxe?)," measurement relics generally, see C. Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6eme série, vol. 22 (1942):135—148. For (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 68-70.
reproductions of these and other such paintings, see Kriss-Rettenbeck 27. Bacci (note 7), p. 160.
(note 7), ills. 1-12. 28. The best accounts of the range of possible votive gifts are G.
22. E. Carli, Gli affreschi del Tau a Pistoia (Florence: Edam, 1977), Stahl, "Die Wallfahrt zur Schônen Maria in Regensburg," Beitràge zur
Tav. 66. R. Offner, "Niccolô di Tommaso and the Rinuccini Master," in Geschichte des Bistums Regensburg 2 (1968):35-282, here 158-174;
R. Offner, The Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting, ed. A. Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), pp. 19-53; Sigal (note 7); Bacci (note 7), pp.
Ladis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), pp. 147-226; and the systematic taxonomy in van der Velden (note 7), pp.
212-215. Fenelli, "Sant' Antonio Abate" (note 14), p. 245. 213-222.
documents, for example, that wealthy votaries deposited

course, many offerings were made to the Virgin Mary,
and she left no relics. Votive cults arose at sites where
life-sized effigies made of wax or even silver.29 Others
left painted panels or murals representing themselves she was known to have performed a miracle. At such
sites an altar and a fabricated image, sculpted or painted,
in prayer.30 Beginning in the late fifteenth century and
perhaps earlier, votaries offered small panel paintings
provided a focal point. The Virgin through her miracles
tended to take on local forms; she existed across a range
depicting their moment of need or the cure. The effigies
and small panels, however, seldom appeared inside of "avatars." The local sculpted or painted image of
other pictures.31 her was a way of naming that avatar. But the theology
A historian of religion would therefore be unwise was unambiguous: The fabricated image itself had no
to accept the woodcut portrait of St. Anthony, or any powers, nor could it listen to appeals.34 No prop or
portal or medium is necessary to communicate with the
of the scenes of shrine-centered cults depicted in Vita
panels, as straightforward evidence of real practices.Virgin or any saint. The prayer goes straight to the saint,
Most are highly conventional images, copied fromwherever it is enunciated. This principle is made clear by
picture to picture. They are also idealized images, a woodcut representing the pilgrimage site of Altôtting
offering a normative account of the votive exchange.in Bavaria, where pilgrims crowd an altar topped not by
Such paintings, for example, rarely depict the clericsan image but by a figuration of the Madonna, half-length
who managed the shrine.32 Nor do they ever showand surrounded by clouds (fig. 4).35 The figure of the
worshippers making offerings to painted or sculptedVirgin in the woodcut does not represent an apparition.
images. In principle, pilgrims came to shrines to be near it says that the Madonna herself is present and
Rather,
relics, not an image. In some cases, the documents thespeak
target of devotional attention, but that she is not
of votive offerings made to painted or sculpted imagesavailable to the senses.
not associated with tombs or relics.33 But the depictions Now we are in a better position to say something
of tomb cults rarely represented such practices. Of about the figure of St. Anthony in our woodcut (fig. 1).
At the shrine of St. Anthony in France, or in the many
Antonite churches throughout Europe, pilgrims were
29. A. M. Warburg, "The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine
Bourgeoisie" (1902), in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity
(Malibu, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 1999), pp. 185-221; J. von of Antioch to substitute for the tomb. The documents nearly always
Schlosser, "Geschichte der Portràtbildnerei in Wachs," Jahrbuch des speak of vows made to the saint or the Virgin herself, not to images. But
allerhôchsten Kaiserhauses 29 (1910-1911 ): 171-258; translated Giuliano Guizzelmi in 1487 vowed his nephew "to the Most Glorious
in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Large Crucifix of the pieve of Prato"; Maniura (note 7), p. 412. See
R. Ranzanelli (Malibu, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 2008), pp. Vauchez (note 20), pp. 524-529, on the displacement of the cults of
172-303. Schlosser mentions that Philip the Bold deposited a wax the saints from tombs to images.
effigy of his son at the tomb of St. Anthony in 1398; p. 227 in the 34. Maniura stresses this point in "The Images and Miracles of
English translation. See also Waldmann (note 9), pp. 15-30, as well Santa Maria delle Carceri" (note 5). Faranda (note 7), p. 122, notes
as the literature cited in note 7, esp. van derVelden, pp. 223-245. that the votive panels at Cesena never represent cult images: instead
Georges Didi-Huberman has written extensively on wax sculpture and they represent the Madonna herself. Some images seem to leave the
casts of the Renaissance and its repression in the historiography; La question open—for example, the prints by the German engraver known
ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité as E. S. associated with the pilgrimage to Einsiedeln. Are the pilgrims
de l'empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008) assembles his major examples and in these engravings addressing the Virgin or a handmade image of her?
arguments. One representation of a pilgrimage that does show pilgrims focusing on
30. On paintings and sculptures as gifts, see van derVelden (note an image, two images in fact, can be and was read as a critique of the
7), pp. 278-285. institution of pilgrimage: Ostendorfer's woodcut reporting on the cult of
31. See also the Greek votive reliefs discussed by M. Gaifman, the Schône Maria of Regensburg; see Wood (note 24).
"Visualized Rituals and Dedicatory Inscriptions on Votive Offerings to 35. Schreiber (note 2), no. 4271. The image is the frontispiece to a
the Nymphs," Opuscula 1 (2008):91 ; the deposit of pinakes or small catalogue of miracles performed by the Virgin of Altótting, published
painted panels at the shrine is not itself depicted in pinakes that depict in 1497. The text was published by R. Bauer, "Das Büchlein der
votive practices. Zuflucht zu Maria: Altôttinger Mirakelberichte von Jacobus Issickemer,"
32. The shrine scenes at the church of the Tau in Pistoia do involve in Ostbairische Crenzmarken: Passauer Jahrbuch fiir Geschichte,
clerics. So does the scene of the sick tended by clerics before the open Kunst und Volkskunde (1964-65), pp. 206-236. Wallfahrt kennt
tomb of St. Anthony in a fourteenth-century Catalan panel, in Fenelli, keine Grenzen, no. 363. A. M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of
"Sant' Antonio Abate" (note 14), pp. 244, 251. Woodcut (Boston: Floughton Mifflin, 1935), vol. 1, pp. 387-388, fig.
33. An example adduced by Bisogni (note 7), p. 76, is the 180. See also M. B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain
y imagines cere deposited before an ymagine of N ¡cholas of Tolentina and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
at Norcia; see also pp. 82-83 on the capacity of images of Margaret (London: Reaktion, 1999), p. 153, ill. 61.
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tier muter gottee in .llrcn 0oimjl&arum
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Mr s
Figure 4. Pilgrimage to the Virgin ofAltotting. Woodcut, Figure 5. Ludwig Maler, St. Christopher and St. Anthony
frontispiece to Jakob Issickemer, Das buchlein der zuflucht 1468. Fland-colored woodcut, 38.2 x 25.5 cm. Photo:
zu Maria der muter gottes in alten Oding (Nuremberg, 1497). Wiirttembergisches Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart. Sign.: X
Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Rar. 847. Inc. 15".
likely to have seen a painting or a sculpture portraying of saints, Christopher and Anthony, side by side (fig. 5).36
the saint in just this way, enthroned and remote. The St. Christopher, a giant, ferries an unknown child across
woodcut is not a representation of the image one might a river. His burden becomes ever heavier but with his
find at a shrine or church, however. It does not depict a great pole he bests the current. Christ reveals himself and
scene of worship in which people approach a fabricated explains that Christopher had been carrying the weight
portrait of the saint, painted or sculpted. Rather, it is a of the whole world—the orb in his hands. As proof of
paper version of such an image. The woodcut is a portrait his powers he makes the pole bear leaves and fruit. St.
in its own right. The depicted figure is simply an image Anthony is identified by book, bell, Tau staff, pig, and
of St. Anthony. The votaries address him, fulfill their vows flames. Both figures are upright and tightly wedged into
by giving him the promised gifts. Images of saints that their frames, resisting horizontal narrative extension.
are fundamentally portraits, like the painted and sculpted An earlier woodcut, datable to the second quarter of
images of Anthony or like our woodcut, tend to give the
attributes in condensed form, with little suggestion of a
scene or story. An example is a hand-colored woodcut, 36. Schreiber (note 2), no. 1379. Hind (note 35), p. 321. P.
exceptionally inscribed with a name, a place, and a Amelung, Der Frühdruck im deutschen Südwesten 1473-1500, vol. 1,
date, "Ludwig Maler ze Ulm [14]68," representing a pair Ulm (Stuttgart: Württembergische Landesbibliothek, 1979), no. 1.
Figure 6. St. Anthony, Germany, second quarter of the fifteenth century.

Hand-colored woodcut, 27 x 19.1 cm. Photo: Staatliche Graphische
Sammlung, Munich, Inv. Nr. 118241 D.
the fifteenth century, represents St. Anthony seated sufferers,

on a their hands pictured as flames, and a pair of
hoofed and clawed demons, one of them wielding a
triangular throne topped by a fanciful three-bay canopy.
club. Anthony was frequently depicted in the late mid
This is the only other woodcut besides ours to picture
ages suffering temptation at the hands of demons, as
him enthroned (fig. 6).37 Here he holds bell and staff
described in the Golden Legend. This is a rare, possibl
and is attended by a pig. He is beset by two kneeling
unique, conflation of two iconographies, placing the
suffering devotees in parallel with the harrassing demon
37. Schreiber (note 2), no. 1218. Die Frühzeit des Holzschnitts
thus rendering Anthony as victim and savior at once.
(note 2), no. 12. See also the miniature painting in a French Book of
Hours of the third quarter of the century, Morgan Library, M. 282, fol.
A later woodcut, dating from around 1500, possibly
French, represents a standing Anthony holding an
127v: Here Anthony is enthroned and attacked by demons on both
flanks; there are no votaries, however. ordinary Gothic crozier instead of theTau-staff (fig.
7).38 Three of the kneeling figures are well dressed and

healthy; they press their hands together in prayer; one
has a rosary at her waist. The fourth supplicant is a
ragged victim already missing at least one extremity. He
holds an unidentifiable object in his right hand (a bell?).
He has come directly to the shrine in hopes of relief. The
long bent pole above is decked with models of limbs,
swaddled babies, and pigs. Scrolls with Latin inscriptions
prompt the prayers of the print's beholders: "Pray for us,
blessed father Anthony; may we deserve to avoid the
morbid fire."
There are many such surviving images of St. Anthony
standing and surrounded by a collection of attributes that
includes votaries and offerings. A painted example is a
panel at the castle of Issogne in Savoy, a descendant of
the Fabriano image.39 Among the depicted ex votos are
three long candles, two feet, one hand, one forearm, and
one bone.40 A later descendant is the sixteenth-century
woodcut attributed to Sebald Beham representing
a relatively avuncular Anthony flanked by kneeling
votaries, one with a flaming hand. A collection of body
parts, mannikins, and candles is mounted on the exterior
of an Antonite chapel or shrine (fig. 8).41
Some works, like ours, show the saint enthroned,
creating an aura of remote authority and suggesting that
he is not merely an intercessor capable of making a case
to the Virgin or Christ on behalf of human sufferers, but
also a redoubtable source of power in his own right.Figure
The 7. St. Anthony, France (?), ca. 1500. Woodcut, 29.6 x
23.2 cm. Photo: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
image suggests that he is the only mediator capable of
38. Schreiber (note 2), no. *1217c. C. Dodgson, Woodcuts of

the Fifteenth Century in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford:managing the ravaging fire, symbol of a sacred chaos
Clarendon Press, 1929), no. 28. On prints depicting St. Anthony, see
that precedes even the gods. Anthony was considered
Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), p. 27, and S. Gross, Hans Wydyz: sein
Œuvre und die oberrheinische Bildschnitzkunst (Hildesheim andvengeful
New and ill-tempered. In the popular imagination
York: Georg Olms, 1997), p. 134, nn. 398-401. the disease was understood as a punishment for insults
or neglect, for example reckless damage to an image of
39. Panel, 133x118 cm. See Fenelli, "Sant' Antonio Abate" (note
14), p. 246, with illustration. N. Gabrielli, Rappresentazioni sacre the saint.42 The historical Anthony, by contrast, according
e profane nel Castello di issogne e la pittura nella Valle d'Aosta alia
to Athanasius, was a humble ascetic who wanted his
fine del '400 (Torino: Industria Libraría Tipográfica Editrice, 1959), pp.
tomb site hidden.43
171-172.
40. The objects are brown and might be meant to be understood

as wooden. There is textual evidence that models of body parts
offered at shrines in the earlier middle ages were made of wood: see
Gregory of Tours, cited by Freedberg (note 7), p. 136. The tomb of 42. Fenelli, II tau (note 14), pp. 126, 142-146. Erasmus in his
Colloquies mocked this belief: "When [the saints] were alive . . . w
St. Wolfgang depicted in an altar at Pipping near Munich, according
was more good natured than Anthony? . . . But what terrible diseas
to Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), p. 76, is the only late medieval image
showing wooden ex votos. Many of the examples in Andree (note they send
7) now if they are not, as you have heard, venerated properl
are wooden, but they are hard to date. cited by Huizinga (note 20), pp. 199-200. See Luther's comment in
his Table Talk, cited by Fenelli, Il tau (note 14), p. 143, n. 116. See
41. C. Dodgson, Catalogue of Early German and Flemish Woodcuts
(London: British Museum, 1903), vol. 1, p. 465, no. 115. F. W. Clementz
H. (note 17), pp. 51-54, on vindictive saints.
Hollstein, German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, ca. 1400-170043. According to Athanasius (note 16), §§ 90-92, the saint insist
(Amsterdam: Hertzberger, n.d.), vol. 3, p. 202. M. Geisberg, Theon being buried underground and made sure that only two brethren
German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1500-1550 (New York: Hacker, knew the site. Athanasius reported that in his day no one any more
1974),
knew the location.
no. 1504 (attributed to Hans Weiditz). The print is datable to about 1522.
banner on canvas by Spinello Aretino (ca. 1375), in

the Metropolitan Museum of Art;46 and the St. John
the Evangelist by Giovanni del Biondo (1380s) in the
Accademia.47 It is not clear what provoked or licensed
these moves, but they are the art historical context
for the promotion of Anthony to a throne. Anthony's
pictorial enthronement reinforced the saint's reputation
as a distant and godlike personage. There are several
enthroned Anthonys from the fourteenth century,
including a Florentine dossal in a private collection
attributed to the Master of 1343;48 a processional
banner by Barnaba da Modena at the Victoria and Albert
Museum (ca. 1370);49 a panel by Niccolo di Tommaso
in Naples, dated 1371 ;50 a panel by Spinello Aretino at
the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (ca. 1385);51
and a panel by Niccolo di Pietro Gerini at the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (ca. 1380) (fig. 9).
The black-robed saint in this last work is immense and
remote, his gaze fixed and forbidding. His roster of
attributes has been stripped down to a red book and a
staff; he is framed not by human votaries but by four
angels.
These panels are the ancestors of the fifteenth-century
enthroned Anthonys, such as the altarpiece by Priamo
del la Quercia (1445) at the Oratorio di S. Antonio in
Volterra,
Figure 8. Sebald Beham, St. Anthony, ca. 1522. Woodcut, 29.3 with fire below the robe and small laborers—
x 22.3 cm. ©Trustees of the British Museum. not victims of disease—hauling goods, apparently salt, as
an offering;52 and our own woodcut.
We also have fragments of a tradition of sculpted
enthroned Anthonys. The oldest is a French work in
Before the mid-fourteenth century, only a very few stone dated to the mid-fourteenth century that seems
holy personages were depicted seated on thrones. This independent of the Italian panels.53 Possibly derived
sign of monarchical, judicial, ecclesiastical, or academicfrom the Italian paintings, or from lost German panels
authority was reserved for God the Father, Christ, and
the Virgin, as well as saints whose iconography involved
enthronement: the doctor Thomas Aquinas, for example, 46. Metropolitan Museum of Art inv. no. 13.175. F. Zeri,
or bishop saints such as Peter, Martin, or Nicholas of Metropolitan Museum of Art: Italian Paintings, Florentine School
(Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1971), pp. 101-102.
Myra. Some Florentine altarpieces of the fourteenth
47. Gallería dell' Accademia, inv. no. 446. Marcucci, Gallerie
century ventured to promote saints to thrones in excess Nazionali di Firenze, inv. no. 79.
of their traditional iconographies. Examples are the St. 48. Fenelli, "Sant'Antonio Abate" (note 14), p. 331, with
Bartholomew by Jacopo del Casentino (1330s) in the illustration.
49. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 781.1894.
Accademia in Florence;44 the St. Lucy by Giovanni di
50. Naples, Museo di San Martino. Fenelli, Sant' Antonio Abate, p.
Bartolomeo Cristiani (ca. 1375) at the Yale University
305 with illustration. Offner, "Niccolô di Tommaso and the Rinuccini
Art Gallery;45 the Mary Magdalene, a processional Master" (note 22), pp. 224-225 and fig. 10.
51. Providence, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, inv. no.
16.243.
44. Florence, Gallería dell' Accademia, inv. no. 440. L. Marcucci, 52. Sumptuosa tabula picta: pittori a Lucca tra gotico e
Callerie Nazionali di Firenze, I dipinti toscarti del secolo XIV (Rome: rinascimento, exhibition catalogue, Lucca, Museo nazionale di Villa
Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1965), no. 27. Guinigi (Livorno: Sillabe, 1998), pp. 330-336. Fenelli, "Sant'Antoni
45. Yale University Art Gallery, inv. no. 1943.215. C. Seymour, Abate" (note 14), pp. 311-312.
Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven: 53. Brussels, Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, inv. no. 8783. T
Yale University Press, 1970), no. 42. work was first published by Gross (note 38), p. 136 and fig. 82.
mediating between the two traditions, are several

German wood sculptures of the fifteenth century.54 The
best-known is the enthroned St. Anthony by Nicholas
of Hagenau for the Antonites at Isenheim in Alsace (ca.
1490), now in Colmar, the central figure of the altarpiece
later completed with two sets of painted wings by
Matthias Grünewald.55 The intermediary links between
the Tuscan painted altarpieces (fig. 9), the German
sculptures, and the two German prints (figs. 1 and 6),
all representing St. Anthony enthroned, have vanished.
It is impossible to construct a coherent art historical
narrative.56
Enthronement opened the image of St. Anthony onto
the iconography of the Epiphany. His body rhymes with
the figure of the Madonna supporting her son on her
lap, target of the wondering gazes of the shepherds and
the gifts of the Magi. In our woodcut, too, the company
splits into two classes, low and high, ragged and empty
handed, well-dressed and gift-bearing. If the Dosso
Enchantress is an anagram or veiled transfiguration of
a Rest on the Flight into Egypt, then the St. Anthony
woodcut is an anagram of an Epiphany.
Now we have a sense of the family of images this
picture belongs to. The purpose of such images was
to deliver a true image of Anthony. When it came to
images of saints associated with disease or trouble,
the beholding of an image, accompanied by prayer,
was sometimes held to bring automatic, immediate
protection. This is explicit with many images of St.
Christopher. The early woodcut known as the "Buxheim"
St. Christopher bears an inscription affirming that
anyone who looks at him will not die unexpectedly on
that day.57 Images of St. Sebastian were also associated
54. Examples are at St. Justinus at Hoechst (near Frankfurt am

Figure 9. Niccolô di Pietro Cerini, St. Anthony, ca. 1380.
Main); the Antonite church in Würzburg; and the Antonite abbey at
Tempera and gold on wood, 307.5 x 127.2 cm. © Isabella
Zahrensdorf-Tempzin (Mecklenburg). Ibid., pp. 122-125, 135-138. See
Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
also the southern Netherlandish or French sculpture in the Liebieghaus
in Frankfurt, inv. no. St. P. 382. It is believed but cannot be proven
that these works reflect a lost prototype at the main Antonite shrine at
St.-Antoine.
55. On the sculpted St. Anthony at Isenheim, see M. Seidel et al., with protection from harm.58 An early woodcut of
Mathis Gothart Nithart Grünewald: der Isenheimer Altar (Stuttgart: St. Valentine, a saint involved with the treatment of
Belser, 1973), pp. 203-206.
epileptics, bears an inscription asking Valentine to
56. Some of the works listed by C. Cozzi, Sant' Antonio Abbate 'il
Grande' (Mantua: Sometti, 2005), might be sculptures. Cozzi mentions
"Pray to God for us."59 No image of St. Anthony bears
many images of St. Anthony but reproduces few; Fenelli, "Sant' Antonio an inscription promising protection by virtue of a mere
Abate" (note 14), is more selective but more informative. sighting. Some bear inscriptions asking the saint to
57. Schreiber (note 2), no. 1349. Origins of European Printmaking
(note 2), no. 35. Many Christians were convinced that a sighting of the
image of St. Christopher on a given day would protect the beholder 58. See Origins of European Printmaking (note 2), nos. 5 and 36,
from harm or illness. H.-Fr. Rosenfeld, Der hi. Christophorus: Seine images of Sebastian inscribed with prayers for protection from plague.
Verehrung und seine Legende, Acta Academiae Aboensis-Humaniora 59. Schreiber (note 2), no. 1717b. Origins of European Printmaking
10, 1937) (Abo: Akademi, 1937), pp. 423^130. (note 2), no. 98; Dodgson (note 38), no. 24.
"pray for us," to intercede. But the woodcut we looked fifteenth century.66 One could also hope for contact with
at earlier that couples Anthony with Christopher (fig.relics of the thaumaturge in southern Germany because
5) gives the clue to the function of printed portraits Antonite
of clerics used to travel from town to town bearing
St. Anthony.60 The prophylactic power associated with relics and collecting alms.67 But few viewers of the
Christopher was extended by analogy to Anthony. This woodcut were likely to have seen anything like the scene
was surely one of the expectations from our image.61 it depicted. No doubt a contemporary would never
One imagines it mounted in a household like the have posed to himself the question of the historical or
woodcut of St. Christopher attached with red sealingtopographical siting of the scene. The question would
wax to the wall above the fireplace in the Brussels have made no sense. The image represents a state of
Annunciation by the Master of Flémalle, a panel painting
affairs outside of time: Anthony (or his relics) heals all
of the late 1420s.62 those who suffer, yesterday and today and tomorrow,
The historical life of our woodcut is obscure. In from St. Anthony's fire.
the nineteenth century it was transferred from the The woodcut is a portrait of Anthony that has started
Hofbibliothek in Munich to the print cabinet. Therefore, to look like a scene because the iconographie shorthand
like many other surviving woodcuts, it was very likely is beginning to open up into a typology of devotions,
found pasted inside a manuscript or printed book, each with its own temporality. The attributes do not
though the identity of that book was not recorded.63 sit still, as labels should—compare, for example, the
The St. Valentine print also mentions a place, Rufach, kneeling figures in the Fabriano panel of 1353 (fig.
whereas no image of St. Anthony does. Scholars have 3)—but have taken on a life of their own. They have
speculated about a possible association of our print been spurred into awareness and action, beseeching
with one or another Antonite hospital, but there is no the figure of the saint whom they serve to identify.
conclusive link.64 Anthony's tomb was in France, about The simple portrait of the saint has begun to resemble
three hundred miles to the southwest. St.-Antoine-en a plausible scene unfolding in space and time.
Viennois was a major pilgrimage site, a short detour This is the essence of the device developed in early
from one of the main routes to Compostela. The fifteenth-century Flemish painting known as "disguised
shrine is mentioned in literature, for example, in the symbolism."68 A "disguised" symbol is a conventional
fifteenth-century French prose collection Cent nouvelles attribute that the painter pretends to mask by motivating
nouvelles.65 Many German pilgrims made the trek in the it within a pictorial fiction—that is, giving it a legitimate
reason to exist in the fiction. A good example is the
60. See also a late fourteenth-century Florentine triptych that pairs panel representing St. Barbara by Jan van Eyck (Antwerp,
Anthony and Christopher on the exterior wings; F. Zeri, Italian Paintings Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1437)) where
in the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1976), no.
the saint, whose attribute is a tower, sits on the ground in
9. The inscription below St. Christopher on that triptych promises front of a full-size church tower under construction. The
protection from illness for anyone who looks at the image that day; St.
Anthony, however, is described not as a healer, but as a lamp of true device draws a distinction between a traditional picture
light, a teacher, a master, and a traveler. At Isenheim, Grünewald pairs that is content to enumerate attributes and a new-style
Anthony and Sebastian on the exterior wings; see Hayum (note 17), picture that describes a plausible scene that might map
pp. 17-20.
onto someone's experience of reality.
61. Kriss-Rettenbeck suggests that the main function of the St.
The unfolding of the attributes in the St. Anthony
Anthony woodcuts was propaganda for the order, a hint to us to
woodcut into a scene reinforces the work's recursive
exercise caution when assessing their purpose and use (note 7), pp.
25-27. character. The woodcut "mentions" states of the soul—
62. Brussels, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. no. 785. The Master of
the physiological and mental conditions of the depicted
Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt
votaries—in order to identify the seated saint. But those
and Berlin (Ostfildern: Ftatje'Cantz, 2008), no. 3.
63. On the provenances of the early woodcuts, see P. Schmidt,
Gedruckte Bilder in handgeschriebenen Büchern: zum Gebrauch von
Druckgraphik im 15. Jahrhundert (Kôln : Bôhlau, 2003). 66. Ibid., p. 120, nn. 40, 122.
64. Neither the two shields with crosses on either side of Anthony's
67. Fenelli (ibid.), p. 138, cites a text condemning the practice.
head nor the bird has ever been explained. For various reasons, The relic-driven alms campaign covered all of Germany by 1395.
plausible but not decisive, our print has been associated with Swabia,
See Clementz (note 17), pp. 147-172. Some rel ics of Anthony were
perhaps the town of Ulm; the watermark is shared by two other early
permanently transferred to Aries and to Milan, but the order fought
woodcuts, Schreiber (note 2), nos. 471 and 1000; see Origins of fiercely to limit the fragmentation.
European Printmaking (note 2), p. 297. 68. E. Ranofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, Mass.:
65. Fenelli, Il Tau (note 14), p. 125. Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 131-148.
mentions are also "uses" of the sufferer's condition, in and a panic-stricken journey. The middle register invokes
the sense that they represent the ordeals of real peoplea distant prayer—a performative entry into a contract—a
and so enter into possible overlap with the state of cure, and a journey. Suspended from the rail above the
mind and body of a person outside the picture, a person throne, finally, is the spellbinding display of offerings, an
looking at the picture and hoping not to fall ill. archive of past suffering that proves the efficacy of the
The Enchantress by Dosso Dossi is also recursive, but system. All these time-frames are bodily and experiential,
it does not invite its beholders to project themselves making no claims at all about what happens to the soul
directly into the fiction. There is no place held in the after death. The picture, as well as the cult of St. Anthony
picture for the beholder. There are no immediate that it describes, breaks with the salvational function of
existential stakes for the beholder—no interest, in the devotion. One was supposed to turn to the saints for
classical sense. Most people encountering that painting
help in securing the immortality of the soul. Votaries
in its original (or for that matter its current) setting of St. Anthony are more interested in the integrity of
understand how to approach it—namely, with no their bodies.
expectation that it help with an urgent practical problem,The picture heightens tension by contrasting the
but rather with a wondering, savoring, ruminating urgency of the sufferers with the saint's implacability.
delight. The painting represents various modes of culticThe enthronement is exploited as way of introducing
or magical interaction between mind and thing, but only drama. Now we are well beyond the rhetorical range
to stage a comparison with the different kind of of mere attributes, for the picture has been transformed
interaction it offered its own beholders. The beholder offrom a simple portrait, whose efficacy followed from its
the painting by Dosso dominates time. The beholder authenticity,
of into a commentary on interaction between
humans and the divine in general.
the woodcut, by contrast, is afraid that he or she will be
dominated by time. Contingency and emergent The woodcut of St. Anthony describes neither the
experience have been inducted into the picture through behavior of the first witnesses of Christ's Passion, remote
the referential elements, the attributes which are at thein time and space, nor the behavior of characters from
same time starting to resemble portraits. an epic poem based on legendary stories, as Dosso's
The convulsed, indecorous temporality of suffering painting does, but rather, the behavior of people one
was not alien to the pictorial tradition: Think only of the
might actually know. It is a scene that one might end
Crucifixion—the writhing of the thieves—or the myriad up joining one day. One prayed to St. Anthony at home,
Christian martyrdom scenes. Martyrs were placeholders, perhaps before a woodcut attached to the wall; one
role models, for ordinary beholders. But how hard begged to be spared or cured. The woodcut provided
it must have been for most Christians in practice to the focal point of prayer, and at the same time presented
imagine themselves before an imperial tribunal in the future as a tree of possibilities. One person fails to
seek the saint's grace and is punished with illness; he
third-century Rome, persevering in their faith in the face
of a gruesome ordeal. The effects of St. Anthony's fire must make his way on damaged limbs to the shrine to
were vivid and near. The woodcut hints at the power ofmake amends. One person seeks out the Antonites and
this disease and others, above all the plague, to upsetsubmits to an examination—the clerics were known for
not only lives but also social hierarchy. Money couldtheir diagnostic skill. Another asks for a cure in exchange
buy salvation but not health. The rhyme between the for proof of respect; he is cured and undertakes a
promised pilgrimage. Another dies, unaccountably
knight on the right and the crippled votary below him,
ignored by the healer. Another seeks relief from a local
between the sword and the crutch, brings out the image's
biopolitical dimension. medicine woman, an adept of herbal cures. Still another
tempts fate, does nothing, and survives. The theology
Portraits of donors keep a respectful distance from the
of the votive exchange insisted that the offering was a
targets of their devotion, revealing no state of mind other
than steady attentiveness. They hope for salvation. The good-faith fulfillment of a promise made after the saint
votaries of St. Anthony are interested in a less abstracthad performed the cure. After all, it was the votary
goal: not salvation but cure, the redemption not of the whose integrity was to be tested, not the saint's. But the
soul but of the body. They do not contemplate the saint documents suggest that plenty of believers made their
in tranquility, but press inward, wrapping their arms sacrifices before the cure, as propitiations or bribes.69
around the arms of his throne, daring to approach the
hem of his robe. Here there are three time-frames. The
lowest register of figures invokes the onset of a disease 69. Stahl (note 28).
There were many choices. Pilgrimage is voluntary, notproliferation of altars dedicated to St. Anthony. In 1445
obligatory.70 they persecuted a hermit who had set up a shrine to the
The woodcut is a scenario: a script outlining saint outside the sway of the Order. A compromise was
what might happen in the future. The scenario is reached: The hermit could keep his altar but had no right
a term of art developed by the Italian comedy, the to display an image of Anthony.74 The dissemination of
commedia dell'arte. It is a written sketch of the plot woodcuts or small panel paintings into private spaces
that allows for improvisation; it is not a forecast, nor was harder to control.
is it a prescription, nor does it ramify infinitely. It is a Grünewald's retable at the Antonite hospital at
bounded tree of possible outcomes that helps people Isenheim was a complex symbolic machine offering
deal with contingency by manipulating expectations a guide for a "total therapy" of the patient, body
of likelihood.71 The scenario contains several different and soul, health and salvation.75 But the allegorical
narratives of how things will unfold in the future. mediation of a retable is considerable. Grünewald's
The hypothetical narratives influence beliefs about iconographical inventions create complex parallels
likelihood. The key to the grip of the scenario on its among Christ, Anthony, and patient. The experience of
beholders is the compulsion to project the self into the the painted panels was supplemented by sermons; by
tree of contingencies. The votaries are placeholders the various participatory theologies of the late middle
for the real beholders. The possibility that you might ages encouraging an Imitatio Christi; and by lore, the
find yourself suspended in the subjunctive mood of the subliterary mesh of stories and plays that connected
scenario creates interest. Christian myth to everyday life. Paintings impose a
Hagiographical images show vivid scenes, as if filter of allegory and convention between myth and
quoted from a Crucifixion or a Lamentation. The tomb experience, not to mention their forbidding association
scene in the Vatican Vita panel of Margaret of Antioch with the altar. A woodcut like ours is suballegorical.
may represent a woman in childbirth.72 And yet such There were other printed images that invited
images are not scenarios, for until the image is set in projection, for example, the image of the bedridden
motion by the medium of print—until it is liberated from and dying man that often accompanied the text known
the altarpiece—the beholder will not enter into a direct, as the Ars moriendi, warning the beholder to settle the
one-to-one relationship with the scene.73 The woodcut state of his soul before death. What was the difference
is mobile, easily penetrating the domestic and bodily between this and the image of pilgrimage? The Ars
spheres. The image of the wax hand is now brought moriendi confronted the beholder with a simple, even if
right into people's hands. The medium of the print not easy, binary choice: Learn to die properly, or else. In
makes the connection. The Antonites tried to control the this way it is analogous to the image of the Temptation
of St. Anthony. The message of that scene is obvious:
You are supposed to resist temptation. A scenario, by
70. See V. and E. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture contrast, projects a more ambiguous and branching
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 3, on pilgrimage as plurality of plots.
a voluntary undertaking that crucially involves potentiality. See the The scenario is completely unlike a script for ritual
remarks by I. V. Small on the ex voto as a "contingent expression of behavior. Ritual tends to "intercept" all attempts at
belief," a "space of doubt" rather than credulity; "Believing in Art: The
reflexive communication, such as the recursivity or self
Votive Structures of Conceptual Art," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics
55/56 (2009):304. observation that complex works like our print invite.76
71. The concept of the scenario plays a role today in engineering, An individual cannot just barge into a ritual with all his
systems analysis, and corporate and public policy. Scenarios help
people grasp complex systems, or prepare publics to accept not
necessarily desirable outcomes of policies or situations. See, for 74. Ibid., p. 103.
example, I. Alexander and N. Maiden, Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases: 75. Hayum (note 17); Clementz (note 17), pp. 271-290; Fen
Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle (Chichester and "Sant' Antonio Abate (note 14), pp. 291-293. See also Merback
Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2004). 35), a study of painted Crucifixions and the culture of punishm
72. Gilbertson (note21), p. 137. in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Germany, as well as V. Groe
73. Note the engraving by Baccio Baldini possibly reproducing a Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Age
lost Vita panel of St. Anthony by Fra Angélico; Fenelli, "Sant' Antonio (New York: ZONE, 2004). The latter two books suggest that hist
Abate" (note 14), p. 210, nn. 67 and 251. The print does not have the beholders readily compared images of mythic suffering to thei
same effect as ours because the shrine scene, which shows pilgrims real local and personal experiences.
below a tomb erected on columns, is barely visible in the lower left 76. N. Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford Univers
corner.
Press, 1995), p. 452.
or her cares and fears on display. Individuals involvedand the dead, or the well and the sick. The rhetoric of
in rituals are not supposed to communicate with onethe photograph is so potent that a daguerrotype even of
another as individuals, "out of character." The ritual an unknown subject is more compelling than almost any
is immersive and participatory, whereas the scenario painted portrait, or let us say all but the most remarkable
involves shuttling back and forth between distance andpainted portraits. The wax ex voto exerts a similar pull
self-projection. The woodcut devirtualizes the scene and
at fascination by virtue of its indexicality: or rather,
its rhetoric oí indexicality, for the wax limb was not in
a shrine, which would still have been governed by ritual
and conventions. fact cast from a real limb. The medium of wax was the
At the shrine, one would approach relics encased preferred medium for the ex voto because it symbolized
within an altar or a reliquary. One would see others, the tight link to individual experience that no painting,
suffering or healed, making their pleas or fulfilling their poem, or ritual could ever have.
vows. One would see the display of gifts, in effect a The model of the body part, besides being a gift of
portrait gallery, a display of images matched one to valuable wax, introduces a further concept of sacrifice,
one with real individuals. At the shrine, the individual, one not covered by the votive system. The wax body
no matter how humble, portrays himself. The pilgrim's part may also suggest that the vengeful saint required
bodily presence alone is already a kind of self-portrait, from the victim, if he expected the fiery disease to
for in her devotions the pilgrim is making an image abate, a sacrifice of flesh. In that case, the wax model
of herself, for other pilgrims. The individuals remain must be understood as a representation not of a healed
anonymous, but nonetheless they perform for others, extremity, but of a diseased and disfigured or even
and they deposit, in the form of wax body parts, self amputated extremity, a hand or foot surrendered to the
portraits. The feet and hands refer to individuals even if thaumauturge as the price of the cure. Only then does
the content of the reference is lost. The wax body parts the story of suffering end.
lack any differentiating marks. They were not individually The possibility that the wax models represent not
commissioned but were mass produced by artisans, for healed but irreversibly damaged limbs, thus invoking
purchase "off the rack," probably from a shop located the most literal possible concept of self-sacrifice, is
near the shrine. But the context creates them as portraits. supported by evidence that at some shrines one might
The site and the display railing signify that this very have seen displays of real amputated hands and feet,
object has made its way out of the artisan's shop and into dried or mummified. Giovanni Francesco Pico del la
the hands of a votary. Simply by purchasing the object Mirándola reported in 1502 that at an Antonite cloister
and transferring it from shop to shrine, the votary makes he saw "scorched limbs and bones" "suspended from the
it his own. doorposts of the sanctuary."77 The body parts in Beham's
Some images representing appeals for saintly St. Anthony woodcut, which hang not at a tomb but
intercession include depictions of kneeling petitioners on an exterior wall, have different shapes from the wax
whose reference is ambiguous. In the St. Anthony panel models as well as a shriveled or sinewy character (fig.
by the Master of Fabriano, for example, the kneeling 8). Laura Fenelli wondered whether the shrine scene in
donors with their generic facial features might be generic the Antonite frescoes at the church of the Tau in Pistoia
votaries (fig. 3). But it is also possible that the figures in might depict a box full not of wax models but of real
that painting refer to real individuals, perhaps the very hands and feet, amputated limbs preserved as true relics
family who commissioned the picture. If so, then they of diseased but now cured bodies.78 In the woodcut
are portraits, despite the low degree of resemblance. The representing the Altôtting pilgrimage, the man with the
wax body parts at a shrine similarly occupy a middle crutch in the foreground, missing one foot, also holds
referential state. Their target of reference—the individual
whose limb was healed—is quickly forgotten. But the
77. Cited in Hayum (note 17), pp. 31-32. She also presents
medium of wax creates an effect of a direct connection
evidence of amputations at the Antonite hospitals.
to a person. Someone was here, the wax foot says. 78. Fenelli, "Sant' Antonio Abate" (note 14), p. 247. Elsewhere
To behold a display of wax hands and feet and organs Fenelli has collected examples suggesting that such offerings were
later misunderstood as minatory displays of the punished bodies of
is something like coming across a box of unlabelled
blasphemers again-st St. Anthony or other sacrilegious criminals; Dall'
nineteenth-century photographs. They are portraits eremo alla stalle; S. Antonio Abate tra testi e immagini (Rome and Bari:
even if we don't know the names of the portrayed. The Laterza, forthcoming). I am grateful to Laura Fenelli for sharing these
form of the portrait photograph, even if severed from its texts with me. On cults associated with the bodies and body parts of
content, suffices to create a contact between the living executed criminals, see Kriss-Rettenbeck (note 7), pp. 19-25.
your promise, thus closing the deal struck at the momen

a foot in his hand, as if he were offering a part of his
own body to appease the Virgin and stave off further of crisis, but in addition you recommend yourself to
the saint. The body part does not represent attention
punishment (fig. 4).79 The predella of an altarpiece by
Hans Fries in the Franziskanerkirche of Freiburg im or attendance. The body part, more purely an offering,
Üechtland (Switzerland) (1506) represents a devotee
closes the cycle once and for all.
at the shrine of St. Anthony of Padua carrying his own The double function of the votive effigy is made clear
amputated hand.80 The amputated limb is the most by a documented example of a silver effigy that was
powerfully signifying self-portrait, a physical sample melted
of down for the silver but replaced by a dummy.83
the self: a relic of a still-living body, in fact. It is anthis
"auto
way, the clerics could make use of the silver, but th
icon," to invoke Jeremy Bentham's term for his own votary could go on with his motionless virtual devotions
preserved and fully dressed body, still on display to indefinitely.
this
day at University College, London.81 The wax and silver full-body effigies are often
The wax model displaces the idea of self-sacrifice
compared to painted representations of kneeling donors,
on walls or panels. A celebrated example of the latter is
from the body itself to a mere object. This is the key
to the drama of the shrine scene. Depictions of tomb the Madonna of Canon George van der Paele by Jan van
shrines sustain this drama because they do not make Eyckit(Bruges, Groeningemuseum, 1436). Here the mortal
donor and the holy personages share the same pictorial
easy to distinguish—or can get away with not bothering
space and are portrayed in the same scale. Many lesser
to distinguish—between the severed, mummified foot
and the wax model that represents a spared foot. patrons and artists employed the same sensational
The wax body part is often treated in the scholarly device, for example, in a small panel by Hans Memling
(fig. 10).84 The unidentified man at the left kneels in
literature together with the life-sized wax or silver effigy.
The body part is understood as a less expensive and permanent attendance on the Virgin and the saints
elaborate version of the effigy. Many a votary mustsurrounding
have her: Catherine on the left, and on the right,
wished that she could afford to represent herself in with
true her tower, Barbara. The rhyme with the woodcut
proportions, either as a sculpture in precious materialrepresenting devotions to St. Anthony is obvious. The
or as a wax effigy outfitted with real clothes and hairenthroned figure is flanked by two figures on each
and with painted resemblant features, rather than asside.a The mortal man at the left finds an awkward
mere hand or foot. The effigy, like the humble body position
part,neither in nor out of the scene, symbolizing
fundamentally represents an expenditure fulfilling athe
vow.
ambiguity of his relation to the holy figures. The
But it does something else that the body part cannot:
sacred fire or chaos is now translated into drapery folds.
Churchgoers
By representing the votary in an attitude of devotion, it who paused before this altarpiece would
places her in permanent attendance on the shrine.know
The that someone with means had dedicated resources
votary deputizes the effigy to pray for her. The effigy
represents, to the saint and to pilgrims, what the votary
wishes she could do, namely, train her heart and mind
unceasingly on the divine.82 With an effigy you fulfill
and Schlosser thought so; Kriss-Rettenbeck, Brückner, and van der
Velden argue that the effigies were simply representations of a spiritual
process or attitude (see note 7 above). See also van der Velden (note
7), pp. 223-245, and "Medici Votive Images and the Scope and
79. Bauer (note 35), contends that the image represents one of Limits of Likeness," in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the
the stories recounted in the text, no. 24, in which a man facing an Renaissance, ed. N. Mann and L. Syson (London: British Museum
amputation prays for courage. The Virgin rewards him by replacing Publications, 1998), p. 133. Bacci (note 7), p. 194, sees the full-body
his diseased foot painlessly. It is not clear, however, why the woodcuteffigy not as a survival of ancient superstition—Warburg and Schlosser's
would represent this man as a beggar in rags. See Kriss-Rettenbeck argument—but a phenomenon of the late middle ages related to the
(note 7), pp. 25 and 33. increasing involvement of the individual in public religion. Bacci's
80. Hans Fries, 1460-1523: Ein Mater an der Zeitwende (Munich: view is supported by the fact that the custom of leaving models of body
Hirmer, 2001), cat. no. 9b, pp. 156-157. parts is historically continuous with pagan antiquity, whereas the effigy
81. R. Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion, 1991), pp. 123-125.
is not; see A. Rossi, "Tracce di continuité cultúrale fra paganesimo e
82. L. Bruhns, "Das Motiv der Ewigen Anbetung in der romischen cristianesimo: le offerte votive," in Ex voto tra storia e antropología
Grabplastik des 16., 17., und 18. Jhs.," Rômisches Jahrbuch für (note 7), pp. 29-34.
Kunstgeschichte 4 (1940):253^132; M. Denzler, "Ewige Anbetung," 83. Van der Velden (note 7), p. 175.
Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunst (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1937-), vol. 6, 84. D. de Vos, Hans Memling (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator Raribas,
col. 572-600; Reinle (note 7), pp. 31-65, 237-241. The question of 1994), no. 35, p. 166. The composition is based on Memling's own
whether this counts as magic or not has vexed the literature. Warburg larger altarpiece of 1479 made for the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges.
J1
Figure 10. Hans Memling, Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor, after 1479. Oil on
panel, 68.3 x 73.3 cm. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
to his relationship with the Virgin Mary, in worshipful to downplay the origins of the vow in suffering—in
respect for her person and in hopes that she might emergent time—and instead to strive for an image
intercede with her son on behalf of the mortal soul. of composure and stability. The effigy represented a
That visitor may not know who exactly is represented constancy of purpose untouched by time. Some effigies,
in the painting. Such portraits were not identified by it seems, did preserve a memory of the unsettled state
inscriptions, but at best by a coat of arms. Kneeling of body and soul that set the whole process in motion.
figures were recognizable as portraits by virtue of their In 1497 Giuliano Guizzelmi, on behalf of a votary, paid
compliance with conventions of posture and placement for a wax image of a kneeling man in camicia—that
and by a rhetoric of physiognomic realism. They read is, in his shirt—which he then placed at the Madonna
as portraits, indeed as self-portraits, in the sense that del le Carceri.85 It would be unthinkable, however, that a
the agency of the commissioning votary dominated the donor represent himself in a state of partial undress in a
agency of the fabricating artisan, unless the painting painting. And indeed most of the wax and silver effigies,
were done by a famous or autarchic painter. It was no as far as we can tell, represented their subjects not only
different at the shrine. intact but in states of dignity, composure, and worldly
The similarities between the painted donor portrait splendor, just as did painted portraits. The body part
and the wax or silver full-body effigy reveal the suggests by its incompleteness the anguish of uncertainty
difference between the effigy and the mere body part.
The votary who hopes to maintain a permanent virtual
presence at a shrine through an effigy may be tempted 85. Maniura (note 7), p. 420.
be anxiety. Devotional practice is designed to soothe

that is the matrix of devotional resolution. The painted
donor portrait or the wax effigy with hands claspedthis anxiety. The composed features and limbs of the
and expressionless features, by contrast, announces the painted devout are attempts to bring into being
kneeling
intention to overcome contingency altogether.86 Therean equilibrium
is of the soul. The donor is represented in a
no reference to any specific occasion.87 state of spiritual "health."
The effigy in camicia and the body part, as well The wax body parts were never the focal point of
as chains and manacles and other relics of a crisis,anybody's devotions. No divine power flowed through
preserved the sense of the "emergent occasion" that them. They were just tokens of expenditure, and a simple
set the devotional cycle in motion. Every artifact is spelling out of the nature of the disaster. And yet they
"occasioned." It is the product of unique circumstances
were the densest points in the whole scene, whether
and actions. An artifact that strives to transcend its own
the real scene at the shrine or the depicted scene in the
occasion—most any cult image, for example—will woodcut.
try The body parts are dense because they are
to efface the traces of its own historical production.places
The within the representation (the scene at the shrine,
the woodcut) less subject to representational codes. They
votive offering does just the opposite. Its entire meaning
map onto people's lives. They are "living images" in the
is its preservation of a unique experience of suffering.
The moment of origin is not allowed to vanish in thesense developed in a recent book by Fredrika Jacobs.89
representation. Whereas most representations—portraitsIt is the same in the fictional painting by Dosso Dossi:
of saints, histories, symbolic images—derived their the densest and most compelling point in the scene—the
authority by pointing back beyond their own mere enchantress is looking straight at it—is the cluster of
mannikins suspended in the tree, weird materializations
fabrication to a prestigious origin in the remotest past,
the votive offering pointed to a more recent event in of the
the souls of the transformed soldiers.
life of an individual: a new origin. The ex voto registers The woodcut image that not only shows the
an autobiographical impulse. The individual, encouraged scene but also puts it in your hands is a flattened
to imitate Christ, performs his or her story in public.pictorial field with unexpected depths. It compares
All these tendencies were only augmented in the small conventionalized ritual behavior to the surging, stalling
painted panels that would proliferate from the sixteenth flow of everyday consciousness, summoned by the
century to the present.88 wax limbs. The print appears homogeneous but is in
The votive scenario seems true to life because it fact an unsettled house of many compartments. The
describes a passage from health to illness to health that print reduces the four-dimensional experience at the
we have all experienced. It is not difficult to imagine the shrine to two dimensions. And yet the experience of
body in a state of steady well-being: we call that good the woodcut is in important ways like the experience
health. The painting or effigy that represents the donor at the shrine. It "belongs" to its beholder in the same
in permanent attendance on the shrine, by contrast, way that a pilgrim's perceptions "belong" to her.
is not interested in health but in the soul. The work For unlike the expensive painting mounted on an
helps the donor achieve for his soul what he knows altar with an embedded portrait, the woodcut was
his body is capable of: equilibrium, ease, security. But not commissioned. The woodcut did not in any way
the soul is never at rest; as long as the soul can foresee testify to any other individual's experience and will.
the inevitability of the unforeseen, there will always The scene at the shrine, the collective performance
involving self and strangers and objects, was a form
of publication. The print amplified that publication in
86. Votive body parts apparently did not represent the limbs in their the sense that it delivered the scene into the hands and
diseased state. Holmes, however, mentions silver ex votos with marks
homes of strangers. It preserved the essential features
of the plague (note 7, p. 163). See also Andree (note 7), pp. 114-115.
In most cases it would seem that the severed status was enough to of the publication, displaying votive offerings that were
represent trauma. instantly legible as rudimentary self-portraits and thus as
87. Bacci (note 7), pp. 218-219, makes the same point: In the placeholders for the beholder. It was a script indicating
votive panel—the small-scale image that has dominated votive
different points of entry into the votive system. Within
exchanges since the sixteenth century—the accent is on the accident
or illness or on the concession of grace, whereas effigies or painted
self-portraits are about commendatio and the securing of a privileged
relation to the sacred in the future.
89. F. H. Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge:
88. Battisti (note 7), p. 45. Cambridge University Press, 2005).
the scene at the shrine, in the presence of the saint, the

votive offering restored order. But within the scenario,
the script of the many possible scenes, the offering
took on a new meaning. The distance provided by the
modern medium of print brought this second meaning
to the surface. It opened a window onto a hidden depth
of other people's experiences that was both the basis
for the working of the scenario—one superimposes
oneself on the ex voto—and the introduction of a wild
temporality that most pictures were not equipped
to handle. The votive scenario, a story that invited
projection, anticipated symbolic forms developed only
much later, not pictures at all but texts: the first-person
confessional or conversion narrative encouraged by the
Protestant Reformation, or even the bourgeois novel of
the eighteenth century, especially when it took the
form of an astonishing but finally believable first
person narrative.

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The votive scenario

Author(s): CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD

mysterious.about their workings. Mysterious was St.

Figure 2. Dosso Dossi, Enchantress, ca. 1515-1520. Oil on canvas, 176 x

the bells were transferred to Anthony's staff.14 The tau

documents, for example, that wealthy votaries deposited

2? vie bitcbleto t»cr jtiflucbf 511 dbaru

Figure 6. St. Anthony, Germany, second quarter of the fifteenth century.

the fifteenth century, represents St. Anthony seated sufferers,

7).38 Three of the kneeling figures are well dressed and

38. Schreiber (note 2), no. *1217c. C. Dodgson, Woodcuts of

40. The objects are brown and might be meant to be understood

banner on canvas by Spinello Aretino (ca. 1375), in

mediating between the two traditions, are several

54. Examples are at St. Justinus at Hoechst (near Frankfurt am

your promise, thus closing the deal struck at the momen

be anxiety. Devotional practice is designed to soothe

the scene at the shrine, in the presence of the saint, the

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