When spectators in the Middle Ages examined images of Christ's crucifixion on Mount Calvary, did they ever consider them as representations of capital punishment? This work argues that they did, and traces connections between religious devotion, physical pain, criminal justice and judicial spectatorship, to explain why. The author's focus is not on the crucified Christ as he was represented in altar pieces during the late-medieval and Renaissance eras, but on his criminal counterparts, the Two Thieves of the gospels. Artists in Germany and elsewhere were constrained by church doctrine as to how they could represent Christ's Passion, but were free to explore the most abject of cruelties when they turned to the Thieves. The frequently shocking images of torture and death they depicted - notably the horrific process of breaking on the wheel - were the preferred means of executing contemporary malefactors. Insisting that pain as spectacle was central to the European experience, the author warns of its contemporary re-emergence in the public sphere.

Piety And The Merchant Patron: A Case Study Of Merchant Patronage In Early Sixteenth-Century Burgos

The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066-1550

Panofsky (Erwin). Early Netherlandish Painting. Its Origins and Character.

In a famous essay on the tenacity of the Burckhardtian conception of the Renaissance, Johan Huizinga wrote that '[A]t the sound of the word ‘Renaissance’ the dreamer of past beauty sees purple and gold.' After reading Carole Collier Frick’s engrossing, multi-layered book, Huizinga’s romantic dreamers will have to become far more nuanced in their visual imaginings of the past. Purple, it turns out, might be the colour pavonazzo, but there is no consensus in the primary sources, and peacock blue, peahen brown, red violet, blue violet, and a colour 'between blue and black', are all equal contenders for the name.(p. 170) Indeed, whether it is possible to recapture precisely what people wore in this period is thrown open to question in this book when, in the absence of substantial material remains, all we are left with are literary and visual sources, both of which are deficient and often misleading, intentionally or otherwise.

Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing

Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West

http://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/17181/1/Kelley%2c%20Emily.pdf

The drama of the medieval church

Gives concise accounts of the lives, cults, and artistic associations of about 1,100 saints who lived or died or have been venerated in Great Britain and Ireland, or who lived in the English-speaking world. The new edition contains more early martyrs, more Eastern (Greek and Russian) saints, and some saints recently canonized.

Piety And The Merchant Patron: A Case Study Of Merchant Patronage In Early Sixteenth-Century Burgos

Citations

The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066-1550

Panofsky (Erwin). Early Netherlandish Painting. Its Origins and Character.

Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing

Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West

References

The drama of the medieval church

The Oxford Dictionary of Saints

The mass as a social institution 1200‐1700

The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France