Thelife of Christ as a narrative cycle inChristian art comprises a number of different subjects showing events from the life ofJesus on Earth. They are distinguished from the many other subjects in art showing the eternal life of Christ, such asChrist in Majesty, and also many types of portrait or devotional subjects without a narrative element.
They are often grouped in series or cycles of works in a variety of media, from book illustrations to large cycles of wall paintings, and most of the subjects forming the narrative cycles have also been the subjects of individual works, though with greatly varying frequency. By around 1000, the choice of scenes for the remainder of theMiddle Ages became largely settled in the Western and Eastern churches, and was mainly based on the major feasts celebrated in the church calendars.
The most common subjects were grouped around the birth and childhood of Jesus, and thePassion of Christ, leading to hisCrucifixion andResurrection. Many cycles covered only one of these groups, and others combined theLife of the Virgin with that of Jesus. Subjects showing the life of Jesus during his active life as a teacher, before the days of the Passion, were relatively few in medieval art, for a number of reasons.[1] From the Renaissance, and inProtestant art, the number of subjects increased considerably, but cycles in painting became rarer, though they remained common inprints and especially book illustrations.
The main scenes found in art during the Middle Ages are:[2]
These scenes also could form part of cycles of theLife of the Virgin:
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InByzantine art a fixed group of twelve scenes were often depicted as a set. These are sometimes described as the "Twelve Great Feasts", although three of them are different from the twelve modernGreat feasts in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Neither group includes Easter/the Resurrection, which had a unique higher status. The group in art are: Annunciation, Nativity, Presentation, Baptism,Raising of Lazarus, Transfiguration, Entry into Jerusalem, Crucifixion of Jesus, Harrowing of Hell, Ascension, Pentecost,Dormition of the Theotokos (Death of the Virgin).[3]
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After the Early Christian period, the selection of scenes to illustrate was led by the occasions celebrated asFeasts of the Church, and those mentioned in theNicene Creed, both of which were given prominence by the devotional writers on whose works many cycles appear to be based. Of these, theVita Christi ("Life of Christ") byLudolph of Saxony and theMeditations on the Life of Christ were two of the most popular from the 14th century onwards. Another influence, especially in smaller churches, wasliturgical drama, and no doubt also those scenes which lent themselves to a readily identifiable image tended to be preferred. Devotional practices such as theStations of the Cross also influenced selection.
Themiracles of Christ did not score well on any of these counts.[4] InByzantine art written names or titles were commonly included in the background of scenes in art; this was much less often done in the Early Medieval West, probably not least because few laymen would have been able to read them and understand the Latin. The difficulties this could cause are shown in the 12 small narrative scenes from the Gospel of Luke in the 6th-centurySt. Augustine Gospels; about a century after the book was created captions were added to these images by a monk, which may already misidentify one scene.[5] It was around this time that miracle scenes, which had often been prominent inEarly Christian art, became much more rare in the art of the Western Church.
However, some miracles commonly used as paradigms for Christian doctrines continued to be represented, especially theWedding at Cana andRaising of Lazarus, which were both easy to recognise as images, with Lazarus normally shown tightly wrapped in a white shroud, but standing up. Paintings in hospitals were more likely to show scenes of the miraculous cures. An exception isSt Mark's Basilica inVenice where a 12th-century cycle ofmosaics originally had 29 scenes of the miracles (now 27), probably derived from a Greekgospel book.[6]
The scenes originating in theapocryphal Gospels that remain a feature of the depiction ofLife of the Virgin have fewer equivalents in theLife of Christ, although some minor details, like the boys climbing trees in theEntry to Jerusalem, are tolerated. TheHarrowing of Hell was not an episode witnessed or mentioned by any of theFour Evangelists but was approved by the Church, and theLamentation of Christ, though not specifically described in the Gospels, was thought to be implied by the accounts there of the episodes before and after. Vernacular art was less policed by the clergy, and works such as some medieval tiles fromTring can show fanciful apocryphal legends that either hardly ever appeared in church art, or were destroyed at some later date.[7]
By theGothic period the selection of scenes was at its most standardized.Emile Mâle's famous study of 13th-century French cathedral art analyses many cycles, and discusses the lack of emphasis on the "public life [which] is dismissed in four scenes, the Baptism, the Marriage at Cana, the Temptation and the Transfiguration, which moreover it is rare to find all together".[8]
Early Christian art contains a number of narrative scenes collected onsarcophagi and in paintings in theCatacombs of Rome. Miracles are very often shown, but the Crucifixion is absent until the 5th century, when it originated inPalestine, soon followed by the Nativity in much the form still seen in Orthodox icons today. TheAdoration of the Magi and theBaptism are both often found earlier, but the choice of scenes is very variable.
The onlyLate Antique monumental cycles to have survived are inmosaic:Santa Maria Maggiore inRome has a cycle from 432 to 430 on the birth and infancy of Christ together with other scenes from theLife of the Virgin, the dedicatee of the church.[9]Sant'Appollinare Nuovo inRavenna has cycles on opposite walls of theWorks andPassion of Christ from the early 6th century. ThePassion is notable for still not containing, among its thirteen scenes, a Crucifixion, and theWorks contains eight miracles in its thirteen scenes. Neither of these features was to be typical of later art, but they are comparable to features of cycles in smaller objects of the period such as carved caskets and a gold pendant medallion of the late 6th century.[10]
For the rest of the early medieval periodilluminated manuscripts contain the only painted scenes to have survived in quantity, though many scenes have survived from the applied arts, especially ivories, and some in cast bronze. The period of Christ'sWorks still seems relatively prominent compared to theHigh Middle Ages.[11]
Although this was the period when theGospel book was the main type of manuscript to receive lavish illumination in this period, the emphasis was on depictingEvangelist portraits, and relatively few contained narrative cycles; these are in fact more common inpsalters and other types of book, especially from theRomanesque period. Where there were cycles of illustrations in illuminated manuscripts, these were normally collected together at the start of the book, or of the Gospels, rather than appearing throughout the text at the relevant places, something hardly found in Western manuscripts at all, and slow to develop in printed bibles. In the East this was more common; the 6th-century ByzantineSinope Gospels has an unframed miniature at the bottom of every surviving page, and this style of illustrating the Gospels continued to be found in later Greek Gospel books, compelling the artist to devote more pictures to theWorks. Scenes with miracles were more often found in cycles of thelife ofSaint Peter and other apostles, fromlate antiquesarcophagi[12] to theRaphael Cartoons.
In painting, theLife was often shown on one side of a church, paired withOld Testament scenes on the other, the latter usually chosen for pre-figuring theNew Testament scene according to the theory oftypology. Such schemes were later called thePoor Man's Bible (and in book form theBiblia Pauperum) by art historians, and were very common, though most have now vanished. Afterstained-glass became important inGothic art, this medium was also used, usually with a small medallion for each scene, requiring a very compressed composition. Thefrescos on the walls of theSistine Chapel showing the Lives of Christ and Moses are an unusual variant.[13]
From the 15th centuryprints had first scenes, then whole cycles, which were also one of the most common subjects forblockbooks.Albrecht Dürer produced a total of three print cycles of thePassion of Christ: large (7 scenes before 1500, with a further 5 in 1510) and small (36 scenes in 1510) cycles inwoodcut,[14] and one inengraving (16 scenes, 1507–1512).[15] These were distributed all over Europe, and often used as patterns by less ambitious painters.Hans Memling'sScenes from the Passion of Christ andAdvent and Triumph of Christ are examples of a large number of scenes, in these case over twenty, shown in a singlebird's eye view image of Jerusalem; another is illustrated here.
In Protestant areas production of paintings of theLife stopped very soon after theReformation, but prints and book illustrations were acceptable, as free from the suspicion ofidolatry. Nonetheless, there were surprisingly few cycles of theLife.Lucas Cranach the Elder made a famous propaganda set of thePassion of Christ and Antichrist (1521), where 13 matched pairs of woodcuts contrasted a scene from theLife with an anti-Catholic scene. But otherwise scenes from theOld Testament andparables were more often seen.
Of the thirty or soparables of Jesus in thecanonical Gospels, four were shown in medieval art almost to the exclusion of the others, but not normally mixed in with the narrative scenes of theLife, though the page from theEadwine Psalter (Canterbury, mid 12th century) illustrated here provides an exception to this. These were: theWise and Foolish Virgins,Dives and Lazarus, theProdigal Son and theGood Samaritan.[16] TheLabourers in the Vineyard also appear in early medieval works.
From the Renaissance the numbers shown widened slightly, and the three main scenes of the Prodigal Son – the high living, herding the pigs, and the return – became the clear favourites.Albrecht Dürer made a famousengraving of the Prodigal Son amongst the pigs (1496), a popular subject in theNorthern Renaissance, andRembrandt depicted the story several times, although in at least one of his works,The Prodigal Son in the Tavern, a portrait of himself "as" the Son, revelling with his wife, is like many artists' depictions, a way of dignifying a genremerry company or tavern scene.[17] His lateReturn of the Prodigal Son (1662,Hermitage Museum,St Petersburg[18]) is one of his most popular works.
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