The Facial Gesture (Mis)Reading Emotion in Gothic Art

In the ninth canto of Dante's Paradiso, Folco of Marseilles speaks to the poet about his former sins or, rather, about the needlessness of thinking of his former sins in the blissful universe of paradise:

Non però qui si pente, ma si ride,non della colpa, ch'a mente non torna,ma del valor ch'ordinò e provide.

[Yet we repent not, but we smile,not for the fault which returns not to mind,but for the Power that ordained and foresaw.]¹

Folco's smile without regret is simultaneously perplexing and encouraging: it signifies divine forgiveness and dismissal of one's transgressions; it appears a bit self-mocking but laced with pathos; it is a smile of a weak man directed at an all-powerful God.² The complexity of Folco's facial gesture points to the importance of studying the body as the site of mediated and elicited emotion expressed through somatic symptoms, in this case a smile.

In the past few years, the study of emotion in the religious, social, and literary history of the Middle Ages has gained particular importance and urgency under the sensitive scholarly guidance of Barbara Rosenwein.³ Art historians, too, have addressed a variety of visual signs in their quest to explore medieval emotion, although its sustained history is yet to be written.⁴ But can a dependable visual vocabulary of emotion be identified, especially one encoded in a gesture? Some psychologists think so: Paul Ekman, one of the leading researchers in the field of nonverbal communication, argues that facial expressions are universal and can be recognized as markers of one of seven basic emotions—anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—across cultural (and, presumably, temporal) divides.⁵ Historians often agree: writing about pain, for instance, Esther Cohen points out that one would be hard-pressed to misidentify particular visual gestures as expressions of particular emotion, such as grief, for "the turned-down mouth, the drawn brows, the cry, are common to all humans."⁶

Here, I will briefly consider two issues. In Gothic art, does the gestural/facial expression—a smile, for instance—consistently provide an indication of the emotional state of the individual represented? Can we correctly recognize in it an imprint of emotion? And, in general, did medieval viewers perceive this visual symptom as a reliable somatic expression with a fixed, predetermined meaning? In order to answer these questions we must pay close attention to the contexts—social, bodily, and visual—in which smiles are found, the contexts that offer intelligibility to what is an essentially ambiguous facial gesture. In her groundbreaking work on early medieval emotion, Rosenwein identifies what she calls "emotional communities," circumscribing "the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore."⁷ In an attempt to establish such a community (here, a viewing community), I restrict this brief study to thirteenth-century architectural sculpture placed on the exterior of churches, marking a threshold between the sacred and secular realms.⁸

The ambiguity of Folco's smile as it is written by Dante offers a glimpse of the varied meanings that can be excavated from Gothic smiling images placed within religious contexts.⁹ Yet attempting to read consistency in these meanings is problematic. When Ekman and his colleagues argue for the universal signal value of facial expressions, they suggest the immutability of the connection between a specific facial pattern and a given emotion.¹⁰ Although I do not intend to dispute the intricacies of their theory, I do take issue with their underlying assumption that a facial expression is an accurate snapshot of a particular mental state. Ekman's team is especially emphatic about linking the smile and the emotion of happiness and joy; and for that connection they rely on visual evidence—in their case, photographs, which, as Ekman and his colleague Wallace Friesen write in Unmasking the Face, "show the facial blueprints of the major emotions."¹¹ Even though the theory has been challenged by other psychologists, James Russell among them,¹² it remains a part of the canon to the extent that the stock textbook on social psychology claims that for happiness, as for the other five basic emotions, "universality of facial expression has been established by showing that members of cultures having no visual contact can correctly recognize one another's expressions."¹³ The implication here is that these cultures can be isolated either geographically or temporally: a smiling face—whether for an inhabitant of New Guinea, or for a medieval layman, or for a modern Westerner—is always a happy face. In other words, Ekman's stance disallows any cultural differences inherent in the interpretation of an image of a facial gesture (he does, after all, use posed photographs in his key studies) and seeks emotion where one is not necessarily to be found.¹⁴

Art historians, conversely, would recognize a smiling image, as Paul Binski terms it in his dazzling analysis of the Lincoln Angel Choir, to be "an epiphenomenon of northern Gothic naturalism or humanism."¹⁵ For Binski, such a verisimilar aesthetic allows for the body to "become the unambiguous sign of the inner moral resources of the protagonists."¹⁶ A similar statement was made by Moshe Barasch vis-à-vis tears. Although he acknowledges the ambiguous valence of tears in medieval culture, Barasch does see consistency in their appearance in fifteenth-century Flemish painting, and reads them as a positive attribute: "Only figures of inherent sanctity," he suggests, "are allowed to shed tears."¹⁷

Can the same be said about the smile? I have no quarrel with the idea that the smile is implicated in the aesthetics of Gothic naturalism or even that it is intimately associated with the late medieval acknowledgment of the body's capacity for metaphysical expression. I do, however, question the notion that smiling images are meant to exteriorize plausibly and consistently the inclinations of the soul.

Nothing is better suited for an examination of the inherent complexity of such a smile than the images that seek to establish clear dichotomies between the blessed and the damned, such as the group of Wise and Foolish Virgins that stands at the north portal of the Magdeburg Cathedral. Originally created in 1250 (whether for the north or west portal is unclear), the group was repositioned on the enlarged north portal in the early fourteenth century. On the viewer's left, the Wise Virgins gather, their poised curvilinear bodies seemingly swaying in time to celestial music (Figure 1). On the other side of the portal, clutching their empty lamps, the Foolish Virgins weep (Figure 2).

The Magdeburg sculptures are based on a parable found in Matthew 25:1–13:

Fig. 1.

The Wise Virgins, Magdeburg.

Then shall the kingdom of heaven be like to ten virgins, who taking their lamps went out to meet the bridegroom and the bride. And five of them were foolish and five wise. But the five foolish, having taken their lamps, did not take oil with them: But the wise took oil in their vessels with the lamps. And the bridegroom tarrying, they all slumbered and slept. And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold the bridegroom cometh. Go ye forth to meet him. Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said

Fig. 2.

The Foolish Virgins, Magdeburg.

to the wise: Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out. The wise answered, saying: Lest perhaps there be not enough for us and for you, go ye rather to them that sell and buy for yourselves. Now whilst they went to buy the bridegroom came: and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage. And the door was shut. But at last came also the other virgins, saying: Lord, Lord, open to us. But he answering said: Amen, I say to you, I know you not. Watch ye therefore, because you know not the day nor the hour.¹⁸

The doors to the marriage feast hall are now locked; the foolish failed to come into the hall—and therefore into the kingdom of heaven. The Glossa Ordinaria, as well as other biblical commentaries, interprets the parable as a tale of warning: the five Wise Virgins are the five senses of the Christian soul, and their oil is the highest virtue of charity; the five Foolish Virgins stand for the five lusts that excite the body, and their lamps no longer burn with the love of God; the slumber of the women, as they wait for the bridegroom, is the slumber of death from which Christ will rouse humanity at the Second Coming.¹⁹ The placement of the Virgins on the porch of the church, across from the equally dichotomous representation of the Church and the Synagogue, is fitting: the very portal of the church, which demarcates the border between the holy and the profane, participates in the visualization of this parable of exclusion.²⁰

The emphatic gestures of the protagonists at Magdeburg set the two groups apart more than the entranceway itself: the elegantly expressive body language of the Wise Virgins, who appear to conduct a graceful dance, is contrasted with the movement of the Foolish women, their bodies constituted of sharp angles, who bring their hands to their faces, sometimes pulling their draperies upward. These extreme gestures have been seen as a typical medieval visualization of grief, "bodily displays of emotion … as demonstrative acts of public communication meant to highlight the seriousness of a situation."²¹ Such bodily display, ostensibly, is meant to involve the viewer in the lively spectacle of joy and sorrow; it has been argued that the Virgins' somatic disposition is not a demonstration of but, rather, a response to their place in the parable, meant to "exert [upon the beholders], through their bodily dynamism" a kind of a "psychological pressure."²²

Indeed, the Virgins may well be exhibiting emotional responses: one may say that the Wise ones are happy to be admitted into the feast hall, while the Foolish grieve; these are emotions fitting the parable's narrative. Yet the body language of the two groups points to an additional interpretation. The Foolish Virgins gesticulate, and their gesticulations, while certainly denoting the gravity of the situation, also indicate the body out of control—while their counterparts, collected and composed, do not gesticulate but gesture.²³ What is most remarkable in the Magdeburg sculptures, however, is the way that the gesture/gesticulation dichotomy is underscored through facial expression: the Wise Virgins offer up to the viewer serenely smiling faces, while the Foolish Virgins choke back invisible tears, wiping them dramatically off their contorted faces. Like the bodily gestures, the facial ones point to the difference in the status of the saved and the damned. The smile is used precisely as such a tool for differentiation: its presence demonstrates the inner goodness of the Wise Virgins and is equated with salvation, while its lack signals the moral weakness of their Foolish counterparts and is likened to damnation. The distinction, located within the bodily response and nowhere else—the women have similar physiognomies and body types and wear similar clothing—inscribes its meaning in the presence of the smile. Such structuring of the difference through bodily and facial gesture is not unique to Magdeburg: although considerably toned down, the body language of the Wise and Foolish Virgins on the exterior of St. Stephen's church in Nuremberg equally designates the Wise by the presence of a smile and the Foolish by the lack thereof. They embody the diametrically opposing tropes of vice and virtue; the moral and the immoral; and at Magdeburg, associated as they are with the Church and the Synagogue, the old and the new.

Fig. 3.

Equestrian monument of Cangrande della Scala.

Both groups at Magdeburg, presumably, are conceived as visual sites of temporal, human activity—the tranquil smiles of the blessed, the writhing bodies of the damned—which are in direct relationship with the somaticism of thirteenth and fourteenth-century spirituality that put great stock into the expressive performativity of the body.²⁴ This temporality, often inscribed in sculpted imaginings of real individuals—one readily thinks of the infectious grin of the equestrian statue of Cangrande della Scala of Verona (Figure 3) or of the congenial smile of Reglindis, who stands amid the founder statues at Naumburg Cathedral—implies animation and physicality, and physicality is of course transient and denies eternity.²⁵

Fig. 4.

The smiling angel of Annunciation at the portal of Reims Cathedral.

And yet, it is precisely this eternity that is implied in the facial gesture of the Magdeburg Wise Virgins, the gesture one finds in abundance in the angelic and saintly figures that greet the viewer on the exterior of certain Gothic churches—the Reims Cathedral, for instance (Figure 4)—and are meant to evoke the gaudium aeternum, the eternal joy of heaven.²⁶ For the medieval viewer, the church constituted the image of the city of God on earth, of heavenly Jerusalem.²⁷ John's Revelation 21:2–27, which tells of the holy city that descended from heaven "prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," found its embodiment in a Gothic church, with its multiple portals, gleaming windows, and high walls. The angels that John saw standing in the doorways (Rev. 2:12) were carved in stone and placed within the context of holy structures—heavenly ambassadors with unforgettable smiles of heavenly joy. Pseudo-Dionysius explicated this joy, described in Luke 15:7–10 as "a truly divine sense of well-being, the good and generous delight at the providence and salvation of those who are returned to God. They are," he concludes, "unspeakably happy."²⁸ These angels greet the viewer by way of greeting saints, and the contrast between the celestial and the terrestrial is underscored in facial gesture: at Reims, one such angelic salutation is directed at the melancholic Saint Denis, welcomed to Paradise; and another is reserved for the subdued Virgin Mary, welcomed by a grinning angel, as she is filled with grace.²⁹ The smile, here, is a sign of Pseudo-Dionysian eternal "divine joy caused by the finding of the lost."³⁰

This divine joy, the elated, thrilling bliss of rapture, is the very gaudium aeternum that Dante witnessed in Paradise through the smiling faces: "Faces I saw of charity persuasive/Embellished by His light and their own smile/And attitudes adorned with every grace."³¹ Peter Hawkins draws attention to smiling as Dante's "hallmark gesture":³² as Dante encounters more than a thousand jubilant angels, he sees "at their sports and at their songs/A beauty smiling, which the gladness was/Within the eyes of all the other saints."³³ Beatrice smiles the heavenly smile that recalls her past, terrestrial one; planets smile, and the universe laughs; God himself, the Eternal Light, says Dante, "lovest and smilest on Thyself."³⁴ The everlasting quality of these smiles is finally underscored in canto 31: there, Dante refers to himself as one who had come not only from the human to the divine realm but also "from time unto eternity."³⁵

Fig. 5.

The Wise and Foolish Virgins, Strasbourg.

The facial gesture at Magdeburg, then, is wrought with complex and at times contradictory connotations: the emotive smile of bliss, which becomes the site of collision between the transient and the eternal, is used as a somatic symptom that denotes and differentiates moral character—and therefore the ultimate fate of the soul. But in order to gauge the extent of this contradiction one only has to turn to the sculpted group of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins at the Strasbourg Cathedral (Figure 5), made just thirty years after the Magdeburg group (ca. 1280).³⁶ The facial features here are far less expressive than at Magdeburg (in fact, the majority of the figures, the Wise and Foolish alike, appear somewhat dejected, serious, and solemn), although a curious reversal in the meaning of facial gesture takes place here.

Fig. 6.

The Foolish Virgin and the Seducer, Strasbourg.

Fig. 7.

The Fall, Palazzo Ducale, Venice.

The Foolish Virgins are accompanied by the handsome and deceitful Satan, the tightly smiling Seducer, the Prince of Rot, covered with snakes and toads crawling on his hidden, decomposing back. The Foolish Virgin who stands closest to the Prince grins radiantly, fixated on the apple he proffers (Figure 6).³⁷ Although the original order of the statues has been disturbed, this pair quite likely stands in its original place, and the Foolish Virgin with her joyful smile is cast in the role of the second Eve tempted again by the ill-fated apple. We see precisely such compositional configuration, for instance, in the sculpted group at the Venetian Palazzo Ducale (Figure 7), where Eve accepts the apple from the serpent, her gesture uncannily similar to that of the Strasbourg Virgin. The smile that curves the Foolish Virgin's lips is unquestionably inscribed with the lechery of seduction. It is the same smile, too, that we find on the faces of the Foolish Virgins at the former abbey church of St-Saveur in Charroux, France, carved around the same time as the Magdeburg group, circa 1250 (Figure 8).

The attempt to account for the apparent flexibility of the meaning of this facial gesture by distinguishing between the smile and laughter is problematic: the facial expressions of the Strasbourg Foolish Virgin, desirous and eager, pulled toward the apple held in Satan's hand, and of the St-Saveur Virgins grinning blissfully, as if unaware of their fate, are virtually indistinguishable from those of the Magdeburg Wise Virgins, which mark moral strength in anticipation of heavenly reward, or from the beatific smiles of the Reims angels.³⁸ What are we to do, then, with the contention that Gothic art, for all its naturalism and humanism, "was premised on the notion of the body as a sign of the soul, or the lack of it"?³⁹ What kind of a soul does a smile signify? Can a somatic sign really be unambiguous? When confronted with images at Strasbourg and Magdeburg, or, better yet, with the grinning protagonists of the Last Judgment portal at Bamberg Cathedral, one senses that the insistence on the dichotomy between "the neat-lipped smiles of angels" and the toothy "grimaces of the damned" in which a mouth "cracks wide open, exposing the teeth" underscores the artificiality of such clear-cut distinctions.⁴⁰

Fig. 8.

The Foolish Virgins (detail), Charroux, France. © Colum Hourihane.

At Bamberg, on the Porch of Princes, on either side of the Man of Sorrows and interceding Mary and John, appear the resurrected souls (ca. 1233–35, Figure 9).⁴¹ On Christ's right, the blessed smile delightedly, ecstatically: they have been saved (Figure 10). These are surely the angelic, joyful smiles one sees at Reims—the smiles of rapturous, divine elation—albeit the elegant, courtly French smiles here burst into open grins.⁴²

Fig. 9.

The Porch of Princes, Bamberg. Photo by the author.

The three blessed souls on the far left gather together, hands folded in prayer: their bulbous noses and sly, smug smirks dominate their scrunched-up faces. On the opposite side, the damned appear, of all ranks and levels of society—and they, too, are smiling (Figure 11). Their smiles, however, are accompanied by uncontrolled gesticulations, much like those of the Magdeburg Foolish Virgins—flailing arms, contorted bodies, squinting eyes, raised eyebrows—meant, to remind the viewer of the unholy aspect of the smile, the smile of sin, lechery, and damnation, of hopeless hysteria, and the panicked frenzy of madness before the gates of hell. But the smiles of some of those gathered on Christ's left side are often just as subdued as the angelic smiles, nearly identical to those of the blessed, and only their plaintively raised eyebrows indicate their place among the damned. Indeed, some of the damned open their mouths, to show teeth: but it suffices merely to glance below the tympanum to see the very same toothy grin with parted lips on the faces of the Bamberg angels and saints (Figure 12).⁴³ The Porch of the Princes showcases, within a single sculptural ensemble, the contradictory implications of the Gothic smile, simultaneously temporal and eternal: on one hand, the effusion of joy and salvation; on the other, the agony of sorrow and damnation.

Fig. 10.

The saved, Bamberg.

Fig. 11.

The damned, Bamberg. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Fig. 12.

St. Stephen, Bamberg.

It is only fitting that the viewer, poised at the liminal space of the church portal, is greeted by a facial gesture invariably charged with ambiguity—a gesture that can be read as a sign of foolishness and an expression of wisdom; as an indication of erotic desire and of gaudium aeternum; as a new aesthetic of Gothic naturalism and as a feature of vernacular expressivity; as a metaphysical sign and as an articulation of the body's physicality; as a denotation of a variety of emotions or as a contradictory outward sign of the soul. The complexity of its meaning, therefore, seems to call for a break in the so-called universal anthropological equation between gesture and emotion, and for a divorce between the gesture and the "inner passion of the soul." Like the changing faces that Dante sees through the polished but distorting glass in Paradiso, the Gothic smile, recast in different visual contexts, constantly transforms, becoming one of the most versatile and ambiguous gestures in medieval visual language.