Angels, Devils: The Supernatural and Its Visual Representation

Visual Images of the Supernatural in the Late Middle Ages, or, How to Make the Entities Recognizable that Are not Part of Our Natural World

VISUAL IMAGES OF THE SUPERNATURAL, OR, HOW TO MAKE THE ENTITIES RECOGNIZABLE THAT ARE NOT PART OF OUR NATURAL WORLD Gerhard Jaritz A cradle with a six-week-old baby in it fell from a bench onto another child so that both of them died. Their mother prayed to the Virgin of the Styrian pilgrimage, Mariazell. By the latter’s intervention both children became alive again (fig. 1).1 In the visual image of this miracle report, from about 1519, the accident is shown as well as the image of the mediating Virgin, whose representation was clearly recognizable for ‘everybody,’ as it followed a regular pattern (fig. 2).2 A descriptive caption strengthened the message.3 Thus, the text and its visual representation show that the supernatural and its power over specific problems of human life had become familiar and part of the natural world. Visual representations and their messages’ mediation to the beholders which they were meant for have to be seen as indispensably connected with a variety of contexts . On the one hand, images of the ‘supernatural’ had to be recognizable for their audience, that is, to become in some way (more) ‘natural’; but, on the other hand, they 1 Panel of the so-called “Großer Mariazeller Wunderaltar,” Master of the Brucker Martinstafel, c. 1519. Graz (Styria), Landesmuseum Joanneum. For the “Großer Mariazeller Wunderaltar” and its images see, for instance, Peter Krenn, “Der große Mariazeller Wunderaltar von 1519 und sein Meister,” Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Institutes der Universität Graz 2 (1966/67): 31-51; idem, “Der Mariazeller Kunstkreis des Spätmittelalters und König Ludwig I. von Ungarn,” in Ungarn in Mariazell – Mariazell in Ungarn. Geschichte und Erinnerung, ed. Péter Farbaky and Szabolcs Serfőző (Budapest: Historisches Museum der Stadt Budapest , 2004), 311-8; Walter Brunner (ed.)., „… da half Maria aus aller Not“. Der Große Mariazeller Wunderaltar aus der Zeit um 1520 (Graz: Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv, 2002); Gerhard Jaritz, “Der Große Mariazeller Wunderaltar. Oder: Zeichen der ‚Allmacht’ der Gottesmutter,” in Mariazell und Ungarn. 650 Jahre religiöse Gemeinsamkeit, ed. Walter Brunner et al. (Graz and Esztergom: Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv, 2003), 618 . 2 Panel of the so-called “Kleiner Mariazeller Wunderaltar,” 1512: Rescue from a punishment (detail: the Virgin of Mariazell). Graz (Styria), Landesmuseum Joanneum. 3 Ein kind vi wuchen alt mit der wiegen von einer panck auff ein ander kind gefallen, das peidi dot warn; die leidig moeter peide kind gen Zell verhies, do wurden si widerum gesunt. GERHARD JARITZ 18 should also not lose the ‘supernatural’ character of the message.4 They were supposed to mean proximity as well as distance for their beholders, explicability and inexplicability at the same time.5 Fig. 1: The supernatural power of the Virgin helps after two infants had a deadly accident 4 About the general medieval and early modern views on the relationship between natural, supernatural, and preternatural, mainly based on the teachings of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, see Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 95-100. 5 One still may think here of Peter Brown’s statement about the society of the eleventh and twelfth centuries : “The sacred, therefore, was intimately connected with the life of the group on every level. At the same time, however, it was operative because it was thought of as radically different from the human world into which it penetrated. It was all that the human community was not.” [Peter Brown, “Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change,” in: Witchcraft in the Ancient World and the Middle Ages, ed. Brian P. Levack (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992), 97-115; repr. from Daedalus 104 (1975): 133-51]. VISUAL IMAGES OF THE SUPERNATURAL 19 Fig. 2: The Virgin of Mariazell, recognizable to ‘everybody’ Moreover, it has to be emphasized that any kind of ‘supernatural’ entities and phenomena, as well as their visual representations, could not be seen as contra naturam, following Saint Augustine in his De civitate Dei: “For how can anything done by the will of God be contrary to nature, when the will of so great a Creator constitutes the nature of each created thing?”6 This is particularly evident for any kind of miracles and their late medieval and early modern visual representations. Miracle images, like miracle reports, regularly dealt with well-known severe problems of daily life that were solved by the...