Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Czȩstochowa (review)

Among the many pilgrimage destinations in the Catholic world, the monastery of the order of St. Paul the First Hermit on the summit of the Jasna Góra (Bright Mount) in Częstochowa in Poland contains one of the most famous images, viz., a painted panel of the Virgin Mary with an apparently scarred face holding the Christ child. Since the Middle Ages, pilgrims have come here; miracles have been associated with the image; and the site has become richly embedded in Poland's national memory, having withstood attacks by heretic Hussites in the fifteenth century and assaults by Swedish armies in the seventeenth, and—more recently—having survived the Nazis' efforts to destroy it in 1944.

In this well-documented study (based on an art history dissertation at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London), Robert Maniura carefully examines the legends associated with the picture and its site. He first provides a detailed analysis of the image as it is seen today, considering especially its history of preservation, reconstruction, and conservation, showing it to be not an icon in the Orthodox Christian tradition (and certainly not, as tradition has it, painted by St. Luke in the Holy Land) but rather a thirteenth-century western product, perhaps Italian, possibly based on an eastern model. Next he analyzes the texts of the legend of the picture's translation to its current site, ostensibly as the result of a donation in the late fourteenth century by Duke W-ladys-law (Ladislaus) of Opole, the founder of the monastery at Jasna Góra. A subsequent chapter examines the problem of how the distinctive scarring on the right side of the Virgin's face came about. Maniura rejects both the testimony of the historian John D-lugosz that they were the result of Poles attempting to discredit heretic and iconoclastic Hussites and the tradition that they were indeed the work of a Hussite attack, suggesting instead they reflect a conscious "motif deriving ultimately from Mt Athos"(p. 182; see also his discussion pp. 78-79).

Maniura's next five chapters bring him to the heart of his argument. They deal with pilgrimage—why individuals undertake them and what they expect from them; with miracles (in addition to his text, he edits and/or reproduces in four of his nine appendices collections of miracles connected with the image and the site); with the origins of the site as a pilgrimage goal and how this developed; with the shrine itself—how it was structured so that its spaces and the placement of the image facilitated a visual engagement with the holy; and then with the way the cult image at Jasna Góra was integrated into an extended continuum of images elsewhere. In these pages he shows how the miracle stories embody the pilgrim experience and what role the actual image plays in the experience of the believer. He thereby makes an important contribution not only to Polish cultural and religious history but also to the study of pilgrimage and of late medieval visual culture in general, in particular how historians and art historians ought to "read" the relationship between the verbal and the visual.

On some specific points, Maniura's conclusions are sure to be challenged by specialists:for example, the question of the origin of the image, the issue of its physical characteristics, or the details of when and how Częstochowa emerged as a pilgrimage site. But on the larger issues of understanding pilgrimage, the nature of the miracles associated with pilgrimage, and the way to understand visual culture, this book makes an important and stimulating contribution.