This painting by the late Ukrainian artist Ostap Lozynsky portrays a handful of episodes from Passion Week: Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, the Last Supper, the Kiss of Judas, Christ before Pilate, the Flagellation, the Crowning with Thorns, Peter’s denial (represented emblematically by the rooster), Christ taking up his cross, Christ being nailed to the cross, the Crucifixion, and the Lamentation over the Dead Christ.
From liner notes of PRIMEMOVER by Joshua Stamper. Pinch to zoom, or if on a computer, right-click and open the image in a new tab to enlarge.
Joshua Stamper [previously] is “a transdisciplinary artist and composer whose work explores hiddenness, revelation, ephemera, and archive.” Commissioned by Resurrection Philadelphia, his “Stations: Is It I” composition collages spoken “words of prayer, cursing, praise, fury, hope, despair—from disciples, politicians, priests, crowds, soldiers, the curious,” all parties connected to Jesus’s final week. The texts are taken from scripture.
The cacophony is stressful. Maybe you turned off the recording before it finished, unable to bear it. I encourage you to stick with it for the full four minutes and twenty-one seconds, as a way of sitting with the discomfort and chaos of Christ’s passion, of entering into this story that’s at the center of the church’s proclamation.
Other than the second one, captioned with a copyright notice, all photos in this article are my own.
When visiting the Landesmuseum (State Museum) in Hanover, Germany, last fall, I was struck by a monumental medieval altarpiece depicting thirty-six scenes from the life of Christ. Scholars refer to it as the Goldene Tafel (Golden Panel) after the now-lost large gold repoussé plaque, originally designed (most likely) as an antependium in the twelfth century, that was once at the center of its inner display, depicting Christ seated in a mandorla flanked by the twelve apostles.
The “Goldene Tafel” (Golden Panel), made for the church of St. Michael’s monastery in Lüneburg, Germany, ca. 1420–30. Tempera and gold leaf on oak, each panel 231 × 184 cm (overall 231 × 736 cm). Landesmuseum Hannover, Germany, WM XXIII, 27. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
One of the most important northern German works in the International Gothic style, the altarpiece was created in the 1420s for the high altar of the newly built Benedictine monastery of St. Michael in Lüneburg. It was the work of carpenters, sculptors, and two painters, one from the circle of the Westphalian artist Conrad von Soest, and the other probably based in Cologne or even Lüneburg.
The Golden Panel altarpiece, in its original design, had two pairs of hinged wings that could be opened or closed over a fixed central shrine, offering three possible configurations. The shrine, irrecoverably robbed in 1644 and 1698, housed the monastery’s treasury, especially its reliquaries, displayed in a cabinet of twenty-two richly decorated rectangular compartments surrounding the eponymous, aforementioned “golden panel.” This main body of the altarpiece (called the corpus) was dismantled in 1792–94 and its remaining objects melted or sold. The predella (base) has also been lost.
However, the altarpiece’s two pairs of wings, replete with panel paintings and figural sculptures, have survived to the present day and, having been restored in 2016–19, are proudly displayed at the Landesmuseum Hannover for visitors to enjoy. When you enter the gallery, you are greeted with the full cycle of thirty-six painted scenes (nine per panel) from the life of Christ, read from left to right in long rows. Then you can walk behind to see the panels’ other sides, which would not have been simultaneously on view to the monks of St. Michael’s with the altarpiece’s original construction.
The scale model in the following photograph gives you a good sense of the three distinct viewing states that were originally possible.
View 1, the closed view, juxtaposes a scriptural type and antitype: the brazen serpent in the wilderness, raised on a pole for the life of the people, and the crucifixion of Christ.
Numbers 21:4–9 tells of how, wandering the desert after God delivered them from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites complained about how life was better before. As punishment for their ingratitude, God sent poisonous serpents into their camp, and fatalities ensued. The people realized their sin and repented, asking Moses to intercede with God for relief. God told Moses to craft a bronze serpent and lift it high on a pole, and to instruct the people that if they are bitten, to look on the sculpture and they will be spared.
In John 3:14–15, Jesus interpreted this story as foreshadowing his being raised on a cross to bring healing: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” he told Nicodemus, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
The anonymous artist shows the gleaming snake on a tau cross that mirrors the one Jesus hangs on in the opposite panel. The lower banderole reads, from the Vulgate, “Peccavimus quia locuti sumus contra Dominum et te ora ut tollat a nobis serpentes” (We have sinned, because we have spoken against the Lord and thee: pray that he may take away these serpents). I can’t make out the text on the upper banderole, other than aspexerit, “shall look,” but presumably it communicates God’s antidote to the snake bites.
And when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord. And Aaron and the children of Israel seeing the face of Moses horned, were afraid to come near. (Douay–Rheims)
Almost all English translations say instead that Moses’s face “shone” or “became radiant,” interpreting qaran as horned with rays of light. This artist splits the difference and shows, growing out from under Moses’s hat, two bony protrusions that are luminous!
The Crucifixion scene shows a Roman spearman piercing Jesus’s side to confirm his death, while Jesus’s mother, two other Marys, and the apostle John mourn under his right hand. A centurion in the crowd exclaims, “Vere Filius Dei erat iste” (Truly this man was the Son of God).
When these two outer panels were opened in their day, they would reveal view 2 of the altarpiece (pictured at top of article), or the first open view, displaying scenes from Jesus’s infancy, passion, and resurrection across four panels.
The Annunciation; The Visitation; The Nativity; The Raising of Lazarus; Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem; The Last Supper; Christ Carrying His Cross; Christ in Distress; The CrucifixionThe Annunciation to the Shepherds; The Circumcision of Christ; The Adoration of the Magi; Christ Washing His Disciples’ Feet; The Agony in the Garden (2); The Deposition; The Entombment; The Harrowing of HellThe Presentation in the Temple; The Massacre of the Innocents; The Flight to Egypt; The Arrest of Christ; Christ before Pilate; Christ before Herod; The Resurrection; The Holy Women at the Tomb; The AscensionChrist among the Doctors in the Temple; The Wedding at Cana; The Baptism of Christ; The Flagellation of Christ; Ecce Homo; The Mocking of Christ; The Descent of the Holy Spirit; The Death of the Virgin; The Coronation of the Virgin
I’ll share a few of my favorite scenes.
The Nativity features what I call the industrious Joseph motif [previously], as rather than sitting off to the side with his head in his hands, as he’s commonly shown, Jesus’s dad is hard at work trying to make his family comfortable. He pumps a bellows to supply air to the small fire he has going, either to warm his wife and child or, as he does in a handful of other medieval German Nativities, to cook a simple meal. Mary reclines with the infant Christ on a woven straw mattress while angels peek in from over a curtain to adore him.
The Last Supper I found especially charming because of how the apostle John shelters under Jesus’s cloak, relaxed, secure. The image of John resting on Jesus’s breast rose to popularity in fourteenth-century Germany, a commemoration of the two’s bosom friendship and a call to, like John, abide in Christ. It’s based on the description in John 13:23, which says that at Jesus’s last meal, at Passover time, “one of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining close to his heart.” This verse alludes to the typical eating posture assumed at ancient Greco-Roman banquets, at which men reclined with their heads near a low table and their feet pointing away from it. But in Christian interpretation it has come to signify, more than simply a seating arrangement, the proximity of John to the heart of Christ.
In the Golden Panel’s Last Supper, Jesus enfolds John much like a mother hen would her chick (cf. Matt. 23:37; Luke 13:34), his garment like a wing. Even in this moment before his greatest trial, when most would be inclined to turn inward, Jesus shows concern for those he loves—he covers, protects. And nourishes. He stretches his hand across the table, laid with dishes of lamb and fish, to feed Judas a morsel of bread that resembles a eucharistic wafer. He sups with the man he knows will betray him. He does not turn him away.
Further along in the narrative, the scene of Christ carrying his cross with the help of Simon of Cyrene stands out to me because of the man pulling Jesus’s hair as he walks. The cruel mocking and assault continue outside the courtroom and en route to Golgotha.
Called Christus im Elend (Christ in Distress) or Christus in der Rast (Christ at Rest), the subject depicted in the bottom center of the far left panel first started appearing in northern Germany in the second half of the fourteenth century. It shows Jesus sitting pensively, usually on a stone, waiting for his cross to be raised.
In the Golden Panel, Jesus, naked, bleeds all over while the soldiers roll dice and fight over who will get to keep his seamless tunic. The two men in the foreground, one with a flagrum tucked in his belt, tumble and tear at each other, pulling and biting, exemplifying the human penchant for violence that will culminate in the killing of God’s Son. (The basket of hammer and nails that has been procured for the task sits temporarily off to the side.) Combative and puerile, this is the humanity Christ has come to save.
The interior Crucifixion painting is fairly standard, but oh, isn’t it lovely? One notable feature is how Christ’s blood flows from his side, his final wound, down to his groin, where he received, at eight days old, his first wound, the cutting off of his foreskin in a ritual circumcision. Scholars such as Leo Steinberg have remarked how this diversion of the blood’s natural path (which would be to the right thigh) was an intentional device some painters used to connect these two sheddings of blood, and thus the incarnation and the atonement.
Moving two pictures down the line, the Entombment scene caught my eye because of the tender care shown to the dead Christ before he’s laid to rest. Nicodemus anoints Christ’s wounds with myrrh and aloes, applying them with a spatula, while Joseph of Arimathea, who has donated his tomb, prepares to enshroud the body.
In a quintessential Easter scene, three faithful women come to the burial site after the Sabbath to complete the anointing ritual, only to find a finely feathered angel perched atop the skewed lid of Christ’s now-empty sarcophagus. Mary Magdalene, holding a golden jar, points into the vacant space as if to ask, “Where’s my Lord?” To which the angel responds that he is risen!
View 3 (Partial): Sculptures of the Saints
View 3 of the Golden Panel altarpiece—the fully open view, saved for important feast days—cannot be replicated because the shrine that formed the corpus is lost. But flanking the shrine would have been two wings that have survived largely intact, displaying polychrome wood sculptures of twenty (mostly male) saints and, in the intermediate row, smaller statuettes of six female saints (the other six are missing).
The identities of the main figures are listed below. The ones I couldn’t confirm but for which I proffer my best guess are followed by a question mark.
Top left: John the Baptist, Thomas(?), Matthew, Simon(?), George
Top right: Mary Magdalene, Lawrence (deacon), Benedict, Cyriacus (deacon), Michael
Bottom left: Madonna and Child, Peter, Paul, James the Lesser(?), James the Greater
Bottom right: Bartholomew, John the Evangelist, Jude (Thaddeus)(?), Andrew, Philip
In the sculpture of the Madonna and Child, Mary holds an inkwell that Jesus dips his pen into as he writes on a scroll. How delightful! It’s a rare iconography but one that’s shared by the Tintenfassmadonna in Hildesheim Cathedral, sculpted around the same time.
The figure to the right of Mary is Peter. He holds a handle with a dowel hole on the underside; originally, a set of keys was attached to it and hung down.
The diminutive figure above Mary is Catherine of Alexandria, identifiable by the fragmented wheel she holds, a symbol of her martyrdom.
To learn more about the Golden Panel, see the book Die Goldene Tafel aus Lüneburg, edited by Antje-Fee Köllermann and Christine Unsinn (Michael Imhof, 2021), from the Niederdeutschen Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte (Low German Contributions to Art History) series. Only three of its twenty-five chapters are in English; the rest is in German. It’s highly technical, the product of an interdisciplinary research project carried out from 2012 to 2016. There’s not much in it about the actual content of the images. But it provides ample color illustrations, which I always appreciate, as well as stylistic comparisons, historical inventories, and more.
Holy Week starts this Sunday. Per usual, I’ll be publishing daily art and music pairings during that period (so, too, during the Easter Octave), but here is some additional art and music, and a theological reflection, for the occasion. You might also consider spending time with the Holy Week Playlist I curated on Spotify.
TENEBRAE SERVICE: Good Friday, April 2, 2021, Good Shepherd New York: Not all churches host a service on Good Friday, but for me, it is one of the most meaningful services of the year and helps make Easter all the more potent and celebratory. It wasn’t until 2011 that I attended my first Good Friday service—of the Tenebrae variety, Latin for “darkness,” meaning we started with multiple lit candles, and they were gradually extinguished throughout the evening, symbolizing the Light of the World dying out. If you’re curious about what such a service might look like, here’s a great example from 2021, from Good Shepherd New York. Filmed during the pandemic, it was a digital-only offering. As is typical, it combines song and scripture readings to tell the story of Christ’s death. Some Tenebrae services include a brief homily, but this one does not. I’ve included a list of time stamps to the songs below.
1:15: “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” by Isaac Watts and Lowell Mason
6:26: “I Need Thee Every Hour” by Annie Hawks and Robert Lowry
24:28: “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” by Stuart Townend
31:08: “Remember Me” by Paul Zach
35:50: “Were You There?,” African American spiritual (with a watercolor by Soyoung L Kim, inscribed with Isaiah 53:11a: “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied”)
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INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC FOR GOOD FRIDAY: The one Facebook group I belong to is Liturgy Fellowship; I joined when I was a worship planner and stick around because of the many great resources, especially musical ones and ideas for marking holy days as a congregation, that are shared by Christians across denominations. One post I made note of is from Andrew Kerhoulas, the associate pastor at Grace Mills River in Mills River, North Carolina. As a prelude for their 2023 Good Friday service, he said, Grace Mills River musicians played an excerpt from the fifth movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Here’s the full movement, performed by cellist Bingxia Lu and pianist Jackie Tu:
“The piece is avant-garde and not a little abrasive to those with pop music sensibilities,” Kerhoulas wrote to the group. “But once you know that it was written in 1941 by a French prisoner of war while in a German prison and first performed for fellow prisoners, it takes on depths of meaning. So too the cross: It is grotesque and horrific, but it becomes meaningful and even beautiful when you know the occasion—the deeper story—in which Jesus gave up his life.”
The church concluded its Good Friday service with a string quintet postlude, “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter, played to the dimming of lights. Again, the following performance is not from Grace Mills River, but rather by Louisa Fuller, Natalia Bonner, John Metcalfe, Chris Worsey, and Ian Burdge for the fifteenth anniversary edition of The Blue Notebooks album.
Some people think that music used in Christian worship as a focal piece (i.e., not in the background) needs to have words to be worshipful and productive. I strongly disagree. Instrumental music conveys beauty and sets a mood and, yes, even communicates—often that which is difficult to express verbally. I love Grace’s thoughtful inclusion of these two modern and contemporary pieces from the classical tradition in their community’s observance of Good Friday.
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ART COMPILATION: “Crucifixion: Armenian Illuminated Manuscripts” by Levon Ounanian: This compilation brings together thirty-one Armenian miniatures of Christ’s passion. (Miniatures are painted illustrations in a manuscript, so called not because they’re small, though they usually are, but because artists often sketched them using a red lead pigment called minium.) According to the author, of the 31,000 Armenian manuscripts currently listed around the world, about 6,000 of them contain miniatures, not to mention the many more that contain non-narrative decoration.
Mesrop of Khizan (Armenian, active in Persia, ca. 1560–ca. 1652), The Nailing on the Cross, from an Armenian Gospel book, 1609. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Arm. d.13, fol. 13v. Click to view the fully digitized manuscript.
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SONG: “Saare Paap” (सारे पाप) (All Sins), performed by James Bovas: In this video, James Bovas [previously] performs a Hindi version of a Malayam song about the Crucifixion. The Hindi lyrics and English translation were supplied to me by the Indian gospel media production company Sarah Creation.
सारे पाप और दाग ममटाकर, मुक्क्त देने के मलए मुक्क्त दाता ने बहाया, खून अपना क्रूस से खून के प्यासे भेडियों ने, आके घेरा यीशु को मारे कोिे टोकी कीले, धारे ननकली ज़ख्मों से मेरे मन तू याद कर ले, क्यों सहे दुुःख यीशु ने तेरा खानतर जान देकर, दी ररहाई यीशु ने श्राप सारे लेके मेरे, दे दी मुझको आमशषे यीशु के पावन लहू से, भाग्य मेरे खुल गए
To remove all the stains and sin, and to give salvation The Redeemer shed his blood on the cross Bloodthirsty wolves surrounded Jesus He was scourged, nailed, and a stream of blood issued forth from his wounds O my soul, never forget why Jesus suffered! He gave his life to set you free He took all my curses and gave me all the blessings By the holy blood of Jesus, my destiny changed forever
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ESSAY: “The Path from Death to Life” by Kurt Koch, Plough, March 30, 2024: A Catholic cardinal reflects on the dark side and the bright side of Holy Saturday. “As the day Jesus rested in the grave, Holy Saturday is the day of God’s concealment and silence in history,” Koch writes. “And yet, Holy Saturday also has a hopeful and joyful aspect. . . . [On this day] Jesus traveled to [Hades,] the place of greatest loneliness – a place completely bereft of any human relationships – and stirred the souls and limbs trapped by rigor mortis with the warming love of God. He transformed their grave into a place of new life.” This essay is anthologized in the revised and expanded edition of Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Plough, 2026).
Helmut Stephan Diedrich (German, 1937–), Kreuzfall, 1964. Lithograph, edition 62/100.
You fall, sparrow-bone, God-eyed leaf, black hair of ox, kernel of wheat, gold blown from the stalk. You lift wood, trudge, and lurch, your back pulped. You would spit up the cup-dregs for relief—
but no, you want not; you believe your master’s dream. You toss your dreams like chaff to the breeze. You lift wood. You fall,
thin coin,
widow’s all,
copper seed into the mouth of the box. She brushed you a hundred times, so good to hold, but better to drop. Wood weights you, snapped bone, wind-flung leaf. You fall.
This poem was originally published in Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010) and is anthologized in Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature, ed. Jill Peláez Baumgaertner (Abilene Christian University Press, 2012). Used by permission of the poet.
Originating in the Middle Ages, the Stations of the Cross is a Christian devotional practice in which participants commemorate the journey Jesus took down the Via Dolorosa (Way of Sorrows) to his death—either on location in the Holy Land, physically following a demarcated route, or, more accessibly, in their imaginations, through the aid of images or meditative texts. Traditionally, there are fourteen stations, the third, seventh, and ninth of which are “Jesus falls.” At these stopping places, Christians reflect on the crushing weight of sin and wood, on Jesus’s intensifying exhaustion, and yet, too, on his perseverance to get up each time and, pushing through the debility, to continue his trek to its fatal, foreordained end.
In his poem “Sparrow Lament,” William Woolfitt alludes to Jesus’s three falls on his way to Golgotha: “You fall,” “You fall,” “You fall.” He uses a string of metaphors from the natural world for the falling Christ: He’s a sparrow bone (spat out by a predator?), a floating leaf, a shed bovine hair, a grain of wheat blown loose from its stalk. These are wistful images of solitariness, passage, decease—and yet the descriptor “God-eyed” indicates that the path Christ is on is governed by divine providence.
The sparrow reference, given further weight by its use in the poem’s title, evokes Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 10:28–31: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
The Father has willed the Son to drink the bitter cup of suffering and death, which, despite Jesus’s distressed plea less than twenty-four hours prior that the cup be removed, he downs in trust, casting off any dreams he had for living into old age. As he carries out his calling, he stumbles, he falls to the ground—but not apart from the will of his Father.
In the middle of the poem, the lineation—the arrangement of words using lines and line breaks—mimics a downward motion. Like the drop of the storied widow’s coin into the offering box (Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4). Most biblical interpreters assume that Mary, Jesus’s mother, was a widow by the time Jesus started his ministry, since Joseph is never mentioned in any of the Gospel accounts after the episode of Jesus disappearing in the temple at age twelve. Woolfitt refers to Jesus as “widow’s all”—Mary’s everything, her firstborn son, whom she sacrificially gives to the world, knowing God will bless her gift. She doesn’t hoard this dear treasure of hers. She surrenders him to God’s greater plan.
It wasn’t an easy choice to make. Mothers instinctively want to hold on to their children, and tight. Many intrusively fear dropping them as infants and would do anything to spare them pain. Well, Mary drops her son, on purpose. She relinquishes him, “copper seed,” whose death bears fruit, yields dividends.
William Woolfitt is a writer across the genres of poetry, fiction, and essay. His poetry collections are The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (Belle Point, 2024), Spring Up Everlasting (Mercer, 2020), Charles of the Desert (Paraclete, 2016), and Beauty Strip (Texas Review, 2014). He is an associate professor of creative writing at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and two children. He founded and edits Speaking of Marvels, a blog that features interviews with authors of chapbooks, novellas, and books of assorted lengths.
There are hundreds of creative works I could feature on the topic of Christ’s wounds. Here are just a few of note.
ARTICLE: “‘Your body is full of wounds’: references, social contexts and uses of the wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Europe” by Johanna Pollick, Emily Poore, Sophie Sexon, and Sara Stradal: In this three-part collaborative essay, I was most intrigued, in part because of its newness to me, by the first section, “The flowering wound: Christ’s heart in Princeton University, MS Taylor 17,” in which Dr. Johanna Pollick explores a small English illuminated devotional book, dating from around 1500, that portrays Christ’s wounds as wells. For help in interpreting these images, she turns to medieval literary traditions as well as to the Carthusian Miscellany.
Wounded Heart of Christ as the Well of Lyfe, England, ca. 1500. Princeton University Library, MS Taylor 17, fol. 10v.
Dr. Grace Hamman writes about MS Taylor 17’s extraordinary “well of lyfe” page in Jesus through Medieval Eyes (and for InterVarsity’s The Well), which is what brought me to this essay. The hand-colored image shows flowers—labeled “pyte” (pity), “loue” (love), and “charyte” (charity)—springing forth from the wounded heart of Jesus. The verse prayer at the top reads, “Well of lyfe that ever shall laste / My herte in thee make it stedfast.”
The same theme shows up in another late fifteenth-century English lyric in MS Arundel 286 at the British Library, which appears in modern compilations under the title “The Wounds, as Wells of Life” or “The Wells of Jesus’ Wounds”:
Ihesus woundes so wide Ben welles of lif to the goode, Namely the stronde of his syde That ran ful breme on the rode. Yif thee list to drinke To fle fro the fendes of helle, Bowe thu doun to the brinke And mekely taste of the welle.
Jesus’s wounds so wide Are wells of life to the good, Namely the stream from his side That ran fiercely on the rood. If thou list to drink, To flee from the fiends of hell, Bow thou down to the brink And meekly taste of the well.
Trans. Victoria Emily Jones
And in a late fifteenth-century gold ring, also from England, engraved with a Man of Sorrows image and hieroglyphs of Christ’s five wounds, labeled “The well of pitty, the well of merci, the well of confort, the well of gracy, the well of everlastingh lyffe”:
SONG: “Deep Were His Wounds” by William Johnson, 1953: This midcentury hymn is composed of three simple stanzas: The first half of each meditates on Jesus’s cruel death on the cross, whereas each second half (“But . . .”) celebrates the healing, freedom, and eternal life that death wrought.
>> Music by Leland B. Sateren, 1958: I like this tune, called MARLEE, but it’s difficult to sing congregationally. Here’s a soloist, Sarah Gulseth, singing it for her church’s 2011 Good Friday service, accompanied on organ by Luther Gulseth:
>> Music by Vito Aiuto, 2008: I was first introduced to “Deep Were His Wounds” through the Welcome Wagon’s debut album, Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, “a ramshackle singalong enterprise of a Presbyterian pastor (the Rev. Vito Aiuto) and his wife (Monique) wrestling out the influences of folk music, religion, popular culture, and church tradition.” Mood-wise, Aiuto’s tune wouldn’t work as well for Good Friday—even given the paradox of that day, it’s too bright, in my opinion, for that somber observance. But it’s great for throughout the year, especially for churches that favor a contemporary/folksy style of music.
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CANTATA CYCLE:“Membra Jesu Nostri” (The Limbs of Our Suffering Jesus) by Dieterich Buxtehude: Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637–1707) was a Danish German organist and composer of the mid-Baroque period. For Good Friday 1680, he composed a cycle of seven concerto-aria cantatas. The texts of the aria sections are taken from the medieval Latin hymn “Salve mundi salutare” (Hail, the World’s Salvation) by the Cistercian abbot Arnulf of Leuven (ca. 1200–1250), whereas the concerto section texts are Old Testament quotations. The following video is a 2004 performance from Payerne, Switzerland; see the YouTube video description for further credits. The video includes English subtitles, but you can also read the lyrics (with translation) here.
The cycle begins by paying homage to Christ’s wounded feet (“Ad Pedes” = “To the Feet”), and then progresses upward to his knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and finally, face/head. Traditionally, Christ’s wounds are enumerated as five: a hole in each foot, a hole in each hand, and a hole through his side/heart (from the centurion’s spear). But Arnulf meditates on seven distinct body parts of Christ’s that were injured on Good Friday.
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ARTWORKS:
>> The Five Wounds of Christ by Fernand Léger | Commentary by Albert Hengelaar: This visual meditation is about the architecture and interior decoration of the Sacré-Coeur in Audincourt, France, a product of the Art Sacré movement, a Catholic art renaissance spearheaded by the French Dominican Order from 1919 to the 1950s. The centerpiece of the church, sited above the high altar, is a stained glass window depicting the five wounds of Christ shining like suns—one of seventeen windows the artist Fernand Léger designed to encircle the space in a strip.
Fernand Léger (French, 1881–1955), The Five Wounds of Christ, 1950–52. Stained glass window, Église du Sacré-Cœur (Church of the Sacred Heart), Audincourt, France.
>> The Great Wound, aka Go On, Wounded Healer by Jack Baumgartner | Commentary by Sam Kee: In this Substack post, Sam Kee unpacks a drawing by his friend Jack Baumgartner [previously], which shows that “there is life in His [Christ’s] wounds, and He pours His life into our wounds.” The drawing started with the roman numeral V, which stands for the five wounds of Christ. The circumference is one large wound that encompasses five smaller wounds, eye-like, each one weeping blood. Other symbols that Kee analyzes in the drawing are wheat, grapes, fig leaves, seashell, fire, heart, and womb. “Go on” is a refrain that Baumgartner uses often in his work, a mantra for persevering in the faith, for continuing on the path.
Jack Baumgartner (American, 1976–), The Great Wound, 2024. Drawing from the series The Diary of a Tree Standing on Its Head.
Kee concludes with an original ekphrastic poem.
You can purchase an archival reproduction of The Great Wound from Baumgartner’s online shop. I encourage you to explore his website as well. I admire how his work is somehow both mystical and earthy, rooted.
BOOK: The Art of Holy Week and Easter: Meditations on the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus by Sister Wendy Beckett (2021): Sister Wendy Beckett, a British Catholic nun and art enthusiast who died in 2018, is the one who first got me interested in art history. We watched clips from her BBC series Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting in my studio art class in high school, and I was so drawn to the way she looked at art and talked about it. Enthusiastic, warm, inquisitive, spiritually sensitive and theologically astute, and interested not just in the technical qualities of a work but also in its content—though I know I lack the same flair, my own voice and approach when it comes to art are indebted to hers.
So I was delighted to see that SPCK (and IVP in North America) has published two church calendar–based art devotionals by Sister Wendy: one for Lent, and one for Holy Week and Easter. I was disappointed with The Art of Lent: It has an admirable diversity of art selections, but Sister Wendy’s reflections are short and basic, and most don’t shine in the way I’ve come to expect from her; there were only two standouts for me. I also found it thematically confusing (for example, a section on “Confidence”?), unfocused, and redundant (especially in the “Silence” and “Contemplation” sections). I will grant that Lent is a more difficult season to structure for a project like this than Advent is, as I found the one year I published a daily Lent series; it can mean many things to many people.
Sister Wendy’s The Art of Holy Week and Easter, on the other hand, I did enjoy and recommend, even though I wish it had the same variety as the Lent book. (There’s only one modern/contemporary painting.) I care for only about half the featured artworks—two favorites are below—but even for the ones I was disinclined toward, her commentary helped me appreciate them.
Cristoforo de Predis (Italian, 1440–1486), “Saint Peter realizing he has thrice betrayed Jesus,” from the Leggendario Sforza-Savoia, 1476. Codice Varia 124, Biblioteca Reale (Royal Library), Turin, Italy.
About a medieval manuscript illumination of Peter weeping by Cristoforo de Predis, Sister Wendy writes:
This magical little picture presents an unforgettable image of grief. It is that most painful kind of grief, lamenting of our own folly. Here we see Peter with his shamed face covered, stumbling blindly forward from one closed door to the next. There are ways out behind him, but Peter is too lost in misery to look for them. This claustrophobic despair, this helpless anguish, this incapacitating sense of shame: these are the result of a sudden overturn of our own self-image.
Peter had honestly seen himself as one who loved and followed Jesus, priding himself, moreover, on how true his loyalty was in comparison with that of others. ‘Even if all should betray you, I will never betray you’ – it was a boast, but he had meant it. Now he sees, piercingly, that he is fraudulent. He has been unmasked to himself, he has lost his self-worth.
The crucial question is: What next? Will he hide his face forever, destroyed by self-pity? Will he lose all heart, perhaps even kill himself, as Judas did? But while Judas felt only remorse, Peter feels contrition, a healing sorrow that will lead to repentance and a change of heart. Now that he knows his true weakness, he will cling to Jesus as never before. He will cling in desperate need and not in false strength, and will in the end become truly Peter, the ‘rock’, on which the Church, likewise dependent on Christ, will be built. (26)
El Greco (Greek Spanish, 1541–1614), Christ Crucified with Toledo in the Background, 1604–14. Oil on canvas, 111 × 69 cm. Fundación Banco Santander, Madrid.
About El Greco’s Christ Crucified, she mentions how “Jesus . . . dies looking upwards, his determination set upon his Father’s will and its consummation. . . . His body spirals upwards like a white flame, radiating out as he spreads his arms to share the light with the defeated shadows” (38).
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HYMNS:
>> “O Love, How Deep, How Broad, How High”: I’ve enjoyed learning a few new-to-me hymns from the YouTube channel of Josh Bales. Attributed to the fifteenth-century German Dutch Catholic mystic Thomas à Kempis, this hymn text was translated from Latin into English by Benjamin Webb in 1871. It appears in the Episcopal hymnal with the tune EISENACH by Bartholomäus Gesius, as adapted by Johann Hermann Schein in 1628, which is what Bales sings. It’s rare among hymns for emphasizing that our salvation was won not just by Christ’s death but also by his life—his faithful obedience to the Father.
>> “I Stand Amazed (How Marvelous)”: A favorite from my childhood, this 1905 gospel hymn by Charles H. Gabriel is performed here by the Imani Milele Choir, made up of orphaned and/or vulnerable children and youth from Uganda.
>> “Come Let Me Love”: I recently learned of this shape-note hymn from a book I’m reading by J. R. Watson. Written by the late great Isaac Watts, the text was first published in the 1706 edition of Watts’s Horæ lyricæ with the title “Christ’s Amazing Love and My Amazing Coldness.” I especially love verses 4 and 5, reproduced below. The tune in the following video, LAVY, is actually a new one (from 1993) that sounds old, by John Bayer Jr.
Infinite grace! Almighty charms! Stand in amaze, ye rolling skies! Jesus, the God with naked arms, Hangs on a cross of love and dies.
Did pity ever stoop so low, Dress’d in divinity and blood? Was ever rebel courted so, In groans of an expiring God?
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VIDEO:“Christ by Eric Smith”: This is the first video in the (Catholic) Archdiocese of Brisbane’s four-part Art Aficionados series from 2022. In it, Archbishop Emeritus Mark Coleridge, theology professor Maeve Heaney, and Rev. Dr. Tom Elich of Liturgy Brisbane discuss the semiabstract Ecce homo painting Christ by the modern Australian artist Eric Smith—its pathos, calm, and double irony. This Christ is crushed yet composed, Coleridge says. Smith won the prestigious Blake Prize for Religious Art six times, including, in 1956, for a painting similar to this one (see second image in slideshow below). I’d love to see more dioceses releasing videos like this!—close looking at art.
Eric Smith (Australian, 1919–2017), Christ, 1956. Oil on Masonite, 138 × 95 cm. Collection of Holy Spirit Seminary (Queensland Provincial Seminary), Banyo, Brisbane, Australia. Photo courtesy of Tom Elich.
Eric Smith (Australian, 1919–2017), The Scourged Christ, 1956. Oil on Masonite, 116 × 85 cm. Penrith Regional Gallery, Emu Plains, Australia.
Eric Smith (Australian, 1919–2017), Head of Christ, 1954. Oil on wood, 47 × 39.4 cm. Collection of Newman College, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Eric Smith (Australian, 1919–2017), Head of Christ, 1954. Oil on Masonite, 40.5 × 32.6 cm. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
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ART SERIES: Via Crucis: La pasión de Cristo (Way of the Cross: The Passion of Christ) by Fernando Botero: Executed in 2010–11, Via Crucis is a series of twenty-seven oil paintings and thirty-four mixed-media drawings by Colombia’s most famous artist, Fernando Botero (1932–2023) [previously]. Botero said he turned to the subject of Christ’s passion not because he’s religious, but out of admiration for the great works of art on the subject; he approached it with “a spirit of great respect,” aiming to portray God as a tortured man. The artist donated the series to the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín for his eightieth birthday. I can’t find a compilation of the whole series (the museum has digital records of the Boteros in its collection, but not all the images are showing up for me)—but you can view fourteen of the paintings in this article, and here’s a quick little Facebook reel.
Marlborough Gallery in New York offers a catalog of the series for $75, and Artika offers a much more expensive one (a gorgeous product, but $9,500!):
Here’s a news segment, in English, about the series’ exhibition at Lisbon’s Palacio de Ajuda in November 2012 (unfortunately, the video quality is low):
Fernando Botero (Colombian, 1932–2023), Crucifixión (Crucifixion), 2011, and Jesús y la multitud (Jesus and the Crowd), 2010. Oil on canvas. Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia.
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I have thematic playlists on Spotify for Lent and Holy Week—for the latter, don’t miss “From the Garden to the Tomb” by The Soil and The Seed Project, one of several recent additions.
But, by popular request, I also have a brand-new March 2026 playlist, a somewhat random assortment of songs I’ve been enjoying—some new releases, some not.
Natalya Rusetska (Ukrainian, 1984–), Nativity, 2016. Tempera on gessoed wood, 17.5 × 15.5 cm.
Gravity’s maker, spinner of spheres and spiraling matter, made into weight, to sweat. His own feet vulnerable, drawn flat and close against the punishing ground.
Star-strayed infant, wrapped in weight, heavy heaven. In the hollow of the years, long and narrow as a well, he waits suspended, bucket-drawn, clapper in a bell.
Ringing and ringing in the heatfolds of gravity, lines and lines of weight leaning us into each other, caught up, tumbled open-face roses in a blue bolt of thorn-pricked cloth.
God made known, fleshly God, Godlight bodied, bleeding out into wood, over stone. God from God, telluric God, shadowcast God, lightstricken God, bloodwritten. The pull
electric of low, deep center. God flesh, corpus God, Verbum corpse, light-riven. Inscribed, blooded, God-heft falling death- bitten into weighted rising, made and given; the miracle of leaven.
LeighAnna Schesser is a Catholic writer from south-central Kansas whose poetry collections include Struck Dumb with Singing (2020) and Heartland (2016).
This a continuation of yesterday’s article.In part 1 I shared three room highlights from my visit to Kolumba museum in Cologne, Germany, run by the city’s Catholic archdiocese; in this final part I will do the same for KMSKA in Antwerp, Belgium, whose Old Masters galleries received a “contemporary injection” in an exhibition that wrapped this week.All photos are my own.
[Content warning: This article contains female nudity: a controversial Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary, and three photographs of women who have just given birth.]
KMSKA, Antwerp
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, or KMSKA for short, is a world-famous museum whose collection spans seven centuries, from the Flemish Primitives to the Expressionists.
When I was there last month, the featured exhibition was Collected with Vision: Private Collections in Dialogue with the Old Masters, which ran from April 4 to October 12, 2025. Organized in conjunction with Geukens & De Vil Projects, it interwove postwar and contemporary works by internationally renowned artists from Belgian private collections with the existing museum collection, “expanding the transhistorical approach already in place. The exhibition offers a reflection on the history of art collecting and asks probing questions about social issues such as gender, power and identity. The role of museums and collectors is the focal point. Do the interventions create a harmonious dialogue with 700 years of art history, or do they give rise to challenging contrasts?” Featured artists included Cindy Sherman, Olafur Eliasson, David Claerbout, Francis Alys, Christian Boltanksi, Tracey Emin, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, and Louise Bourgeois.
The galleries of the exhibition were organized by theme: Holy, Impotence, Horizon, Image, Entertainment, Profusion, Lessons for Life, Fame, The Salon, Heroes, Evil, The Madonna, Suffering, Redemption, Prayer, Heavens, and Power.
I’ll spotlight what I consider the most successful and intriguing pairings.
First, the “Madonna” room, anchored by the famous Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim by the late medieval French court painter Jean Fouquet. It’s the right wing of a diptych that originally hung above an altar at the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame in Melun.
Jean Fouquet (French, 1410/30–1477/81), Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim, ca. 1450. Oil on panel, 92 × 83.5 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
The painting is historically significant—I first encountered it in a college art history course. Commissioned by Etienne Chevalier, treasurer to King Charles VII of France, it portrays the Virgin Mary as the Queen of Heaven, baring her breast ostensibly to nourish the Christ child with her milk. She was probably modeled after Agnès Sorel, the king’s recently deceased mistress and mother of three of his daughters, considered the ideal of feminine beauty at that time in western Europe: pale-skinned, with a high forehead, and fashionable in her ermine cloak.
Though I can appreciate the technical excellence of this painting and the intense reds and blues of the angels, I don’t really like it. Mary seems cold, not very maternal. There’s also an eroticization of her body—not because her breast is exposed, which was common in Marian art, but because it seems to be on display for the viewer; her son’s not interested in feeding—that’s wholly inappropriate for the subject. Why you’d want to memorialize your boss’s sex partner in such a way is beyond me. I’m no prude, but I much prefer Jan van Eyck’s Madonna at the Fountain, on display in the same room:
Jan van Eyck (Flemish, 1390/99–1441), Madonna at the Fountain, 1439. Oil on panel, 19 × 12 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
This small painting originally hung not in a church but in someone’s house. Though there’s still an air of formality, it has all the tenderness and connection that the other one lacks. Mother and son embrace in a garden of roses, irises, and lilies of the valley, he reaching round her neck and holding a string of prayer beads, she gazing adoringly at him. They stand beside a fountain, recalling Jesus’s discussion in John 4 about the “living water” he gives to those who thirst. The original wood frame bears the artist’s motto: “As well as I can.”
The deeply engrained portrait of motherhood embodied by the Virgin Mary is juxtaposed most potently with a series of three black-and-white portraits of new mothers by the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra.
Gallery 2.17 (“The Madonna”) from the KMSKA exhibition Collected with Vision: Private Collections in Dialogue with the Old Masters
The accompanying text read:
Jean Fouquet portrays motherhood as something sacred. Mary as a symbol of purity and devotion is richly dressed in cool colours. Rineke Dijkstra homes in on the vulnerable reality. Her mothers are scantily clad and marked by childbirth. Both works are innovative: Fouquet may have painted his Mary for the first time from a real person, and in its day the painting was regarded as ‘modern’. Dijkstra shows motherhood in all its rawness, a taboo usually withheld from view.
Julie wears hospital pads and mesh underwear, which women often do for several weeks after giving birth to manage postpartum bleeding and urinary incontinence. As for Tecla, blood is running down her leg. And Saskia bears a scar from her cesarean section. A linea nigra (dark line) zips down the abdomen of all three, a temporary pigmentation increase caused by increased hormone levels. I love this triptych that shows motherhood’s glorious, messy, alterative impact on the body—the real physicality of the vocation of bearing children into the world.
I wish there were more imagery of Mary like this, as it would, I think, deepen the wonder of the Incarnation and enhance women’s ability to identify with Mary and thus further enliven her story.
Also in the Madonna gallery was a unique “light poetry” installation by Nick Mattan and Angelo Tijssens—one of seventeen spread throughout the second floor, collectively titled Licht dat naar ons tast (Light that reaches for us). KMSKA had commissioned this couple to bring to life the short verses the museum’s late writer-in-residence Bernard Dewulf had written in response to the galleries’ stated themes.
“Inspired by the museum’s many reading and praying figures, as well as James Ensor’s expressive hand sketches, [Mattan and Tijssens] sought a subtle way to make [Dewulf’s] words tangible,” the museum writes. Their solution was to project them onto the gallery floors from brass cylinders suspended from the ceiling. The words shine like faint specks of light, becoming legible only when a visitor holds their hands, a sweater, or something else up to the light.
Here my husband “holds” a poem written in the voice of Mary:
Nick Mattan (Belgian, 1987–) and Angelo Tijssens (Belgian, 1986–), Licht dat naar ons tast (Light that reaches for us), 2023, featuring seventeen poems by Bernard Dewulf. Commissioned by and permanently installed at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
“Madonna” by Bernard Dewulf
Virgin, mother, wife – I have two breasts that stand for my three souls. I show you one of them, and whose it is is yours to choose.
Translated from the original Dutch by David Colmer
Kind of cheeky! Dewulf speaks of Mary’s three identities and lets us decide if the breast she bares in Fouquet’s painting represents her naked innocence, her nurturing impulse, or her desire to please her husband. (Traditionally in art, it has always stood for the second.)
The next gallery I entered was themed “Suffering.”
Gallery 2.19 (“Suffering”) from the KMSKA exhibition Collected with Vision: Private Collections in Dialogue with the Old Masters
As one would expect, it’s inhabited by several Old Master paintings of Christ’s passion, most notably a triptych by the Flemish Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens.
Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640), Epitaph of Jan Michielsen and His Wife Maria Maes (aka Christ on the Straw, Madonna, and Saint John), 1618. Oil on panel, 138 × 178 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
The central panel shows the dead Christ being laid out on a marble slab and wrapped in a shroud by Joseph of Arimathea, while his mother and Mary Magdalene (and the apostle John in the background) mourn him. The left wing shows Mary supporting the pudgy little baby Jesus as he takes some of his first steps, while the right wing shows John, whose symbol is the eagle, writing his Gospel that will place Jesus’s death in the context of the larger story of his life of ministry and his resurrection.
This painting, along with Anthony van Dyck’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ and The Holy Trinity by a follower of Rubens’s (which shows God the Father cradling the dead body of God the Son in an image type sometimes referred to as the Mystic Pietà), are juxtaposed with three photographs by Nan Goldin that show the impact of AIDS on her friend, the Parisian gallery owner Gilles Dusein, and his partner, the artist Gotscho.
Nan Goldin (American, 1953–), Gilles in Hospital, Gilles’ Arm, and Gotscho Kissing Gilles, 1993. C-prints. Private collection.
Dusein’s emaciated arm, resting weakly on a hospital sheet, recalls the limp arm of Christ in paintings of the Deposition and Entombment; and Gotscho’s kiss, the love and grief of Jesus’s mother and friends as they watched their loved one suffer and succumb to death.
By displaying these disparate artworks from vastly different contexts across from each other, we are encouraged to draw connections between the suffering of Christ and that of the LGBTQ+ community. While Christians in Rubens’s day would sit before images of Jesus in pain or sorrow or having died a torturous and untimely death, and deepen their empathy and love, so too might we do well to sit prayerfully, humbly, empathetically, with contemporary images of suffering, seeking to enter the stories they tell.
Antonello da Messina (Italian, 1430–1479), Calvary, 1475. Oil on panel, 52.5 × 42.5 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
Compare these figures to contemporary Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere’s Schmerzensmann (Man of Sorrows), on loan from the collection of David and Indré Roberts (see wide-view photo above). The piece consists of a wax and resin mold of a contorted human form, its skin stretched and broken, its legs wrapped around a tall rusty pole.
“Man of Sorrows” is also the title of an Early Netherlandish painting by Albrecht Bouts and a modern painting by James Ensor, which KMSKA displays side-by-side.
Albrecht Bouts (Flemish, 1451/55–1549), Man of Sorrows, 1500–1525. Oil on panel, diameter 29 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
The earlier one is an incredibly moving image of pathos. Christ wears a thick, twisted, mock crown whose thorns dig holes into his forehead and draw blood. His eyes are red with tears and sunken in, and his lips are turning blue with the pallor of death. I find it quite beautiful, insofar as an image of suffering can be beautiful. (That’s a topic for another day.)
James Ensor (Belgian, 1860–1949), Man of Sorrows, 1891. Oil on panel, 20 × 15.5 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
The Ensor painting, on the other hand, is decidedly not beautiful. In fact, I think it’s the ugliest image of Christ I’ve ever seen, with his crumpled face, scraggly hair, and bared teeth. There’s something very unsettling about his expression, and no wonder, as the curatorial text informs that Ensor drew inspiration from the masks of demon characters in Japanese theater. “His [Ensor’s] Jesus screams with rage about the injustice inflicted on him,” the label says. Is that what that expression is? To me he looks sinister. Like he’s growling at us. And I dislike his dinky crown that he wears like a headband; give me Bouts’s gnarly one instead.
I’m in favor of Christ images that show the rage he must have felt, but I don’t think Ensor is successful if that was his aim. To name a few modern artists who were: Guido Rocha (Tortured Christ, 1975) and David Mach (Die Harder, 2011), both of whom capture Jesus’s cry of dereliction on the cross.
The final themed gallery I’ll call out is “Heavens.”
Gallery 2.22 (“Heavens”) from the KMSKA exhibition Collected with Vision: Private Collections in Dialogue with the Old Masters
The dominant Old Master work is a set of three panels from the upper tier of a colossal altarpiece that Hans Memling painted for the church at the Benedictine Abbey of Santa Maria la Real in Najera in northern Spain. All the other panels are lost.
The museum titles the central panel God the Father with Singing Angels—but I think the figure is more properly God the Son, Jesus Christ, portrayed as Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World). In his left hand he holds a cross-surmounted crystal globe, signifying his dominion over the earth, and with the other hand he gestures blessing. He wears a tiara and a red cope decorated with gold-thread embroidery, pearls, and precious stones, and his collar bears the words Agyos Otheos (Holy God).
Hans Memling (German Flemish, ca. 1430–1494), God the Father with Singing Angels, 1483–94. Oil on panel, 164 × 212 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
Surrounding him is a musical band of angels, singing his praises from songbooks and, in the flanking panels, playing a variety of wind and string instruments: (from left to right) a psaltery, a tromba marina, a lute, a trumpet, a shawm, a straight trumpet, a looped trumpet, a portative organ, a harp, and a fiddle.
Hans Memling (German Flemish, ca. 1430–1494), Music-Making Angels (left), 1483–94. Oil on panel, 165 × 230 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).Hans Memling (German Flemish, ca. 1430–1494), Music-Making Angels (right), 1483–94. Oil on panel, 165 × 230 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).
This ensemble probably evokes for you a particular sound—something like Tallis or Palestrina—soaring polyphonic vocals, a gentle yet majestic accompaniment. But instead, a different soundtrack played, audibly, in the room: songs from the 1967 debut album of the American rock band the Velvet Underground, several of which use religious language to describe the experience of doing drugs. “Heroin” opens like this:
I don’t know just where I’m going But I’m gonna try for the kingdom, if I can ’Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man When I put a spike into my vein
And I’ll tell you things aren’t quite the same When I’m rushing on my run And I feel just like Jesus’ son
This aural element was complemented, on the gallery wall, by the guitar of Lou Reed, the band’s lead singer and songwriter. It’s signed by Andy Warhol, who produced and championed the Velvet Underground & Nico album and made its banana cover art, replicated on the instrument.
Lou Reed’s “Banana Guitar,” from a private collection
Adding to the mix, in the corner of the room was an installation by the Copenhagen-born and -based artist Olafur Eliasson, called Lighthouse Lamp. “Affixed to a tripod, a lamp situated within a Fresnel lens—a compact lens which was developed for lighthouses—emits a band of white light in 360 degrees,” the artist’s website explains. In this space, the beam takes on a triangular shape.
Olafur Eliasson (Icelandic Danish, 1967–), Lighthouse Lamp, 2004. Mixed media. Collection of Filiep and Mimi Libeert.
There was also an altarpiece of The Last Judgment and the Seven Acts of Mercy by Bernard van Orley, which references Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 25 about one’s entry into heaven being contingent on whether, in this life, you feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, visit the prisoner, and so on.
The “Heavens” gallery begs the question: How does one define “heaven”? Is it a physical place? A state of mind? An encounter? I think of related words like bliss, beatitude, communion, the sublime.
The celestial scene painted by Memling—and remember, it’s only partial, as the rest is missing—is beautifully rendered, but it also encapsulates what has become the popular cliché of heaven: angels on clouds, strumming harps, and a regal God swaying his scepter. Music-making, angelic beings, and the reign of God are all certainly a part of how the Bible describes heaven. But it’s also so much more. It’s a garden and a city. It’s healing and restoration. It’s the righting of wrongs. It’s all things made new. It’s jubilee. It’s a wedding—deep and lasting union between God and humanity. It’s an eternal interlocking of God’s space and ours (earth). It’s a global, transhistorical community of faith, gathered together around Christ their head, worshipping him in diverse languages, musical styles, dances, and other cultural expressions. It’s the culmination of the greatest story ever told.
Today, Memling’s vision of heaven probably fails to captivate most people, even Christians. So it’s an interesting experiment to compare it to how others conceive of the concept.
Eliasson’s Lighthouse Lamp wasn’t a commission on or explicit treatment of the theme, but the curator saw fit to place it beside Memling, because heaven is often conceived of as a light-filled space, and light can evoke the divine. For this reason, Memling painted his background gold. What’s more, the three-sidedness of Eliasson’s light beam may, for some, evoke the Trinity, the classical Christian doctrine of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost that Memling alludes to with the three precious stones on the fibula of Christ’s mantle.
Still, other folks experience what could be termed “heavenly” transcendence through the use of mind-altering substances, as did the members of the Velvet Underground, whose drug trips gave birth to their experimental music—which, in turn, has taken others to a transcendent place.
Whether in special exhibitions or displays of their permanent collections, I want to see more of this in museums: bringing old and new artworks into conversation with one another around universal themes, in the same room. (In some museums, the labels sometimes cross-reference works in other galleries, but that’s not the same.) Although there are benefits to the traditional approach of laying out art chronologically to give you discrete pictures of different historical eras and allow you to progress by time period, a thematic approach that compiles works from across time also has its benefits.
I’ve found cross-temporal art displays to be especially vitalizing, because instead of trying to tell history, they more naturally invite personal reflection and tend to be less academic in tone. Such an approach makes the art accessible to a larger number of people, especially those who don’t frequent museums. It helps us see the relevance of the Old Masters (or whatever the museum’s collection focus) for today—how the subjects they depicted often address topics or questions we still ask or wonder about or that reflect aspects of the common human experience, such as joy, suffering, family, death, betrayal, or festivity. Creating relationships between works made centuries apart, highlighting similarities and differences, can give us a broader perspective.
And for this museumgoer (pointing at myself) who is attracted to medieval and early Renaissance art and sometimes bypasses the contemporary galleries, the integrative approach is more engaging. Giving contemporary works a point of connection with the works I’m already inclined to like helps me enter into them more easily and fruitfully, and I’m more likely to spend time with them than if they were segregated.
New and old don’t have to be equally represented—Kolumba skews heavily contemporary, whereas KMSKA lets its strengths shine with the Old Masters, and yet the occasional unexpected intervention from years past or future always caused me to pause and be curious. Over the last several years I’ve been noticing other museums engaging in similar playful exchange—plopping a contemporary work into the medieval section, or vice versa, in a way that provides some kind of illumination.
This was my first and only visit to KMSKA, and as I understand, there’s not the same degree of intermixing of old and new year-round; this was a special exhibition that brought in contemporary works from outside, as the institution itself owns very few. But they did do something similar last year with the exhibition What’s the Story?, and the dangling light poems by Bernard Dewulf are a permanent fixture in the Old Masters galleries.
Have you been to a museum where works from different time periods were displayed side-by-side to create a discourse, and if so, did that choice enhance your engagement, insight, or appreciation? I’d love to hear what other museums are doing this!
This article took me some forty hours to write and to select and edit photos for. If you appreciate learning about my museum experiences and having access to high-resolution, downloadable art images, would you please consider adding to my “tip jar” (PayPal), or sponsoring a book from my Amazon wish list? Thank you!
One of the delightful surprises of my recent trip to Germany and Belgium was to find, in two of the museums I visited, an integration of the old and new in the curated galleries. Typically, art museums choose to arrange their collections chronologically, grouping together artworks from a particular era, and within each era, like styles. But in Kolumba museum in Cologne and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA) in Antwerp, medieval art from each museum’s collection (and in the case of KMSKA, Renaissance and Baroque art too) is displayed alongside contemporary pieces, creating a vibrant dialogue.
With the exception of the exterior shot of Kolumba, all photos in this post are my own.
Kolumba Kunstmuseum, Cologne
Originally called the Diözesanmuseum (Diocesan Museum), Kolumba was founded in 1853 by the fledgling Christlicher Kunstverein für das Erzbisthum Köln (Christian Art Association for the Archbishopric of Cologne), making it the city’s second oldest museum after the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. Its collection focus for the majority of its history was late medieval art from Cologne and the Lower Rhine.
Kolumba’s first permanent home, just south of Cologne Cathedral, was a former sugar factory, but the building was destroyed in World War II, though much of the art had been safely evacuated beforehand. After the war, Kolumba relocated its art to a grammar school, then to rented rooms in the Gereonstraße, then to the Curia building at Roncalliplatz 2. But the limited space was an issue.
In 1989, ownership of the museum was transferred to the Archdiocese of Cologne, who decided to expand the collection to include modern and contemporary art, not only by German artists but by international artists as well. The museum shifted its approach from displaying traditional sacred works only, to placing those works in juxtaposition with newer ones by artists who aren’t necessarily Christian but whose works can converse fruitfully with their core collection. They also secured funding to construct a new permanent building.
In 2004, the museum’s name was changed to Kolumba in honor of the history of the site on which the new (and current) building would stand: atop the ruins of the medieval St. Kolumba church, destroyed in an air raid in 1943. St. Columba of Sens was a third-century virgin martyr who was born in Spain but lived mostly in France. The church dedicated to her in Cologne once housed Rogier van der Weyden’s St. Columba Altarpiece (now at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich), a triptych with scenes of the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Presentation in the Temple.
Kolumba museum, Cologne. Photo: HP Schaefer / Wikimedia Commons.
Kolumba museum’s permanent home opened in 2007 at Kolumbastraße 4. Designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor (view more architectural photos here), the building encapsulates the bombed-out Gothic ruins of St. Kolumba with forty-foot-high, porous concrete walls, above which sit the floors of the museum.
The ruins of St. Kolumba church, which dates back to the tenth century (with subsequent expansions and a Gothic-style rebuilding), are integrated into the architecture of Kolumba museum.Exterior of the “Madonna in the Ruins” chapel, dedicated 1950, underneath Kolumba museum in Cologne, with stained glass designed by Ludwig Gies (1887–1966), installed 1954.
The postwar chapel is not accessible from inside the museum; it has its own separate entrance, which, as I found out after I had already left, is on the south side of the building, along Brückenstraße.
But I did cross over the excavation site of St. Kolumba to which the written museum guide directs visitors (it’s labeled “room 3”), and through which a walkway has been constructed. As I took in the war-wrought devastation, I wondered about the sounds I was hearing from an audio system. Turns out it was a sound installation called Pigeon Soundings by the American artist Bill Fontana. In 1994, he made a series of eight-channel sound map recordings of the pigeons that were inhabiting the St. Kolumba ruins at the time, particularly the rafters of the temporary wooden roof that had been erected. The recordings picked up not just the birds’ cooing and flapping, but also the ambient sounds outside.
Above this darkened space, Kolumba has sixteen exhibition rooms. The museum reinstalls its collection annually, each fall opening a new exhibition. I was there for the first day of “make the secrets productive!” Art in Times of Unreason, which runs from September 15, 2025, to August 14, 2026. The lack of art signage throughout is deliberate, to promote a more meditative experience; instead, visitors are given a (German-language) booklet, organized by room, that identifies the pieces on display and provides commentary for some.
Room 8 features a fifteenth-century sculpture of Christ at Rest—“at rest” not in the sense of being at peace in mind or spirit (he is visibly troubled), but rather in a bodily state of motionlessness or inactivity. Sometimes also called Christ in Distress, Christ on the Cold Stone, or Pensive Christ, the iconography shows an interior moment during Christ’s passion in which, having just been flogged, he sits awaiting his final torture: crucifixion.
Christus in der Rast (Christ at Rest), Upper Rhine, ca. 1480. Linden wood with visible primer and remnants of colored paint. Kolumba museum, Cologne.
Though the Gospels don’t mention a moment of seated pause in the narrative, artists were influenced by the figure of Job, an innocent sufferer who in that way prefigured Christ, and in particular the description in Job 2:8 of him sitting on a dung heap. The image of Jesus preparing to meet his death was meant to inspire feelings of pity. Isolated from the action and from all the other characters, the lone figure invites viewers to enter empathetically into the emotional anguish he suffered on his way to the cross.
At Kolumba, this sculpture is surrounded by large-scale, black-and-white photographs from the Transzendentaler Konstruktivismus (Transcendental Constructivism) series by the collaborative duo of German neo-dadaist artists Anna and Bernhard Blume. In the series the couple is threatened by white geometric objects that are unleashed on them in a blur of motion.
Foreground: Christ at Rest, Upper Rhine, ca. 1480. Background: Anna Blume (1936–2020) and Bernhard Blume (1937–2011), photograph from the Transcendental Constructivism series, 1992–94.
One of the other resonant pairings at Kolumba is in room 21, which stages a fifteenth-century Ecce homo sculpture across from a colored chalk drawing on a three-paneled blackboard.
The title Ecce homo, Latin for “Behold the man,” comes from John 19:5, where the Roman governor Pilate presents a scourged, thorn-crowned Jesus to a mob that demands his execution. Like Christ on the Cold Stone, this too is a devotional image intended to stir the affections of the viewer, who is called, like the crowds on that fateful day, to gaze upon the wounded God-man. His hands are bound in front of him, evoking a sacrificial sheep tied up for slaughter. What have we done?
Ecce Homo, Cologne, ca. 1460–1500. Linden wood. Kolumba museum, Cologne.
While I instantly recognized this subject, the drawing was more of a mystery.
Paul Thek (American, 1933–1988), Plumed Serpent, 1969. Colored chalk on blackboard, 110 × 358 cm. Kolumba museum, Cologne.
Not having any wall text to clue me in, I had to simply observe and intuit. I saw a winding chute, rainbow-colored, with a few white feathers sticking out of it. And is that water in the background?
I noticed, too, that it’s a triptych, a common format for altarpieces.
Water, birds, rainbows—those all play into the story of Noah’s flood, in which the rainbow signifies God’s promise to never again destroy the earth and all its inhabitants. It’s a symbol of grace and reconciliation.
There are also two prophetic texts in scripture that associate the rainbow with Christ and his glory: Ezekiel’s and John’s recorded visions of the divine throne (Ezek. 1:28; Rev. 4:3).
The curator has positioned Jesus facing the rainbow road, across a fairly large gap. Since, as the museum states, the artworks are arranged to interpret each other, at least in part, then it’s possible this room conveys Jesus following the path of promise, even as it takes dark turns. Or choosing to endure the judgment of the cross to secure a glorious inheritance for his beloveds.
After these ruminations, I looked up the work in the booklet: Plumed Serpent by Paul Thek.
Hmm. In the Christian tradition serpents are often associated with the devil. However, in Numbers 21:1–9, Moses lifts one up on his staff in the wilderness and it becomes an agent of healing and even a symbol of Christ himself, lifted up on the cross for the salvation of the world (John 3:14–15).
The description in the booklet informed me that “plumed serpent” is the English translation of the Nahuatl name Quetzalcoatl, an Aztec creator-god. I don’t know much about pre-Columbian mythologies, so I looked him up when I got home. Apparently he represents the union of earth (reptile) and sky (feathers), and he is also known as the god of the morning star. (Jesus also calls himself the bright morning star!) Although he was initially portrayed as a large snake covered in quetzal feathers, from 1200 onward, he often appeared in human form, wearing shell jewelry and a conical hat. What I find most striking about his story is that he gave new life to humankind by gathering their bones from the land of the dead, grinding them down, and mixing them with his own blood from self-inflicted wounds.
I also did some research on the artist, of whose work Kolumba has the most comprehensive holdings. Paul Thek was a devout Catholic, an identity complicated by the fact that he was also gay. He rose to fame in the 1960s with his “Technological Reliquaries,” hyperrealistic wax sculptures depicting severed body parts and chunks of flesh in vitrines, inspired by his visit to the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo. Much of his art deals with death and rebirth, divinity and decay, mystical transformation.
Feathers feature in another piece of his from the same year as Plumed Serpent: Feathered Cross. (See it against the wall in a photo from the 2021 exhibition Paul Thek: Interior/Landscape at the Watermill Center in Water Mill, New York.) The feathers’ softness, their weightlessness, seem to contradict the reality of crucifixion. But I think it’s Thek’s way of conveying the transcendent meaning of that act of self-giving. I also think of how down feathers fill pillows on which we rest. “Come to me, all you who are weary,” Christ says (Matt. 11:28); we can rest on his finished work.
But back to Plumed Serpent. Chalk is its material—its ephemerality must be a nightmare for conservators, and indeed it seems like some of the drawing has partially rubbed away. But this choice of material plays into the artist’s interest in the enduring versus the perishable, and the transitory dimensions of death.
On the right side of room 21, against the wall, are three identical offset-printed artist’s books by Bernhard Cella titled Ein Jahrhundert der verletzten Männer (A Century of Injured Men). Published in 2022, the 152-page book contains photographs of convalescent men over the course of the twentieth century, questioning heroic images of masculinity. I’m assuming many of the injuries were caused by the two world wars.
Vulnerability, injury, sacrifice, healing, the transmutation of pain, new life—these are the themes I gathered from this room.
The current Kolumba exhibition features much more contemporary art than medieval—there are some 175 contemporary works on display, compared to six from the Middle Ages—and I suspect that is now their modus operandi. So, the cross-temporal dialogue isn’t happening in every room, at least not explicitly.
I appreciate the uniqueness of this ecclesiastically run museum, acquiring and showing contemporary works by artists from a range of backgrounds while not shunning its own history as collectors and preservers of medieval German religious art.
As a Christian, I found myself latching on to the imagery that was familiar to me, like Jesus as the Man of Sorrows, and interpreting the surrounding works in light of that. But it seems to me the interpretive process could also move in the other direction, and I wonder how a visitor who doesn’t share my Christian vantage point would respond to the two rooms I’ve highlighted.
For two additional artworks I photographed at Kolumba, an ivory crucifix and an installation with coat, hat, and oil lamp, see my Instagram shares here and here.
Part 2, my reflections on my KMSKA visit, will be published tomorrow.
This month I traveled to parts of Germany and Belgium to experience some of the art of those countries, with a focus on medieval religious art. In Brussels, besides exploring the famous Oldmasters Museum (part of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium), I visited the lesser-known Art and History Museum, whose collection includes not just western European art from prehistoric times through the nineteenth century, but also art from Asia (China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Nepal, Turkey, Iran, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma), Oceania, the pre-Columbian Americas, and ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
I spent the most time with the medieval European art on the ground floor—wooden statuettes, ivory and alabaster carvings, stained glass, paintings, metalworks, and tapestries. With the Google Translate app open, I hovered my phone over the Dutch and French descriptive labels to read them in English.
My favorite tapestry I saw, from fifteenth-century Tournai, portrays three scenes from the passion of Christ: Christ Carrying the Cross, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. The museum gallery it’s displayed in also houses a large medieval loom, which is what’s protruding at the bottom right corner of the following photo.
Scenes from the Passion, Tournai, ca. 1445–55. Tapestry of wool and silk, 424 × 911 cm. Art and History Museum, Brussels, Belgium, Inv. 3644. All photos by Victoria Emily Jones.
Tapestries made in the Flemish city of Tournai were among the most sought after in the fifteenth century. These large-scale wall hangings were bought by royalty, nobles, and high-ranking clergy to decorate their palaces. This one, nearly thirty feet long, is the second of a two-part hanging whose first part (portraying Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, and the Arrest of Christ) is in the collection of the Vatican.
Below are some detail shots.
First, Christ carries his cross. A soldier pulls him forward by a rope tied to his wrists, while tauntingly standing on the vertical wood beam and hitting him with a baton. On a less serious note, those are some spiffy face-shaped shoulder scales on the right.
Christ crucified:
A group of four women mourn—the Virgin Mary up front in the blue mantle, backed by three other Marys—alongside a curly-haired apostle John in green.
On Christ’s right (the viewer’s left), the penitent thief, with his last breaths, says, Memento mei, Domine, dum ven[eris in regnum tuum] (Remember me, Lord, when you come into your kingdom) (Luke 23:42).
The pointing man below the cross to Christ’s left, our right, is the Roman centurion (officer in command of one hundred soldiers) who, when Jesus died, proclaimed, Vere filius Dei erat iste (Truly this man was the Son of God!) (Matt. 27:54; Mark 15:39; cf. Luke 23:47).
On the other side of the cross, a Roman spearman, to whom tradition gives the name Longinus, points to his eyes. That’s because according to a medieval legend, Longinus was blind, but when he pierced Jesus’s side to verify his death, some of the blood from the open wound fell into Longinus’s eyes and restored his sight, after which he confessed allegiance to Christ.
Despite these three stories—two biblical, one apocryphal—of Christian conversion at the cross, Christ’s death did not move all the hearts of those present. At the base of the cross, two men fight with knives over Christ’s garment, their greed and aggression a foil to Christ’s selflessness and gentleness, and an example of the sin he came to redeem us from.
And again, pacifist though I am, I can’t help but remark on the fine-looking armor in the crowd:
The right-most third of the tapestry portrays vignettes of the Resurrection.
At the bottom, Christ emerges triumphant from his tomb, holding a banner in one hand and bestowing blessing with the other.
In the middle ground, the three Marys arrive at the empty tomb, ointments in hand, where they meet an angel who informs them that Christ has risen from the dead. Mary Magdalene is the one with her hair uncovered.
The risen Christ appears again at the top right, harrowing hell, a realm that is represented as a turreted fortress from whose windows fiery red demons glower and smirk. Christ has come to break down the doors and release the Old Testament saints being held captive—that is, those who died trusting in Yahweh and who were awaiting Christ’s redemption in the netherworld.
Let’s zoom in closer, shall we?
This is just one of the many artistic treasures, woven and otherwise, at Brussels’ Art and History Museum. I highly recommend a visit! I easily spent several hours there.
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Art & Theology 