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CRUCIFIXION AND EUCHARIST :
a sermon praught by Richard Major
in the church of St Mark, Florence,
at the Sung Mass of Lent IV (Mothering Sunday)
2nd April, 2000. ©2000.
Pontormo's Deposition, in St Felicita ;
Prayer Book collect and lections: Galatians iv, 21; John vi, 1; English Hymnal propers 679.
Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat?
In the name of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost: Amen.
WHEN YOU COME OUT OF THE DOOR of this church into via Maggio, don't turn right or left, but go straight across the roads and down the alleyway opposite the front door -- an alley called via dei Vellutini, which I think means, (delightfully) Street of the Little Velvet-makers. At the end of it strike across a crowded sqaure of restuarants, then along another short street, past the mouth of Ponte Vecchio, and there you are. You'll find yourself standing in an elegant piazza, gazing at the creamy-brown façade of a church. This is the church of Santa Felicita, our parish church as it happens, and it's pretty much the oldest church in Florence. In the days when this side of the river was a remote suburb, merchants from Syria lived here, and, barely a hundred years after the first Easter, they built a discreet church for themselves. The present building isn't at all discreet: it's a fine piece of neo-Renaissance architecture, and, especially on the inside, it has a sort of ecstatic simplicity to it. It makes you want to pray.
However, what most people who visit it want to do is, not to pray necessarily, but to look at -- or into, since the grille stays locked -- a certain side-chapel, built by Brunelleschi, the same man who built the dome of our Duomo. And what they want to see most of all is the ten-foot high altar-piece of that chapel -- a painting painted on the spot, designed to be seen very close up so that it overwhelms you. It's one of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance. It is one of the most memorable pictures in all of Florence. And here is a not-very-good copy of it.
What's it a painting of? Well, it's a 'Deposition'. Deposition is a Latin word pretending to be English: depositionem is a taking-down. Nowadays we use the word fairly loosely, but it used to mean only one thing, one particular taking-down: the greatest and most dreadful of all takings-down: the taking-down of Jesus' dead and divine Body from the cross. For centuries, artists have been obsessed with this theme, this subject, this incident: the cleaning up of the Corpse from the site of exectuion; the winching down of the remains; the Deposition.
This Lent we are being artistic. I mean that over the five Sundays of Lent we are meditating intensely on a series of five great images of the mysteries of our redemption -- and thus approaching Easter not so much through our intellects or our emotions as through our imagination: through our deeply gazing eye. And of our five images, this is undoubtedly the most arty, the most painterly, the most inventive. For the Deposition as a subject is something the artists invented for us. It's hardly in the Biblical account at all. Of course, since Christ was impaled on a sort of frame, and was later entombed, there must have been a moment when He was prised off the horrible thing and lowered to earth: but the New Testament has nothing much to say about it. All we read is that about three thirty on that atrocious afternoon, Joseph of Arimathea, a distinguished man with influence and some sympathy with the young rabbi, plucked up courage at go back from Calvary, where Christ had just died, back into city-hall and badger Pilate (who was having a bad-tempered day) to let him take the Body away. This action of Joseph's took some nerve: dead criminals were usually flung down a nasty ravine just below the hill where they were executed. But Pilate, petulantly perhaps, said yes, and Joseph hurried out again. Ioseph autem mercatus sindonem, & deponens eum involvit sindone, & posuit eum in monumento, quod erat exisum de petra -- And he bought a linen cloth, and taking Him down, wound Him in the linen cloth, and laid Him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock -- Joseph's own tomb, as it happened. [1] That's all our writings say. It was Christian painters, not Christian gospel-writers or preachers, who, brooding deeply on the story of the Easter weekend, grasped the visual possibilties. Their imaginations fixed on that one phrase, taking Him down (kaqelwn, deponens), and it bloomed in their imaginations and became a favourite image of devotion.
In 1525, a Deposition was commissioned for the wonderful old church of Santa Felicita, and the artist that parish -- our parish! -- chose was a thirty-year old eccentric, not long out of training in a Florentine studio. His name was Jacopo Pontormo, a brooding, intense, devout, lyrical wunderkind -- well, you can see all this, because that ruddy, curly-headed figure at the far right of our picture, gazing back over his shoulder in awe, is a self-portrait. It's quite a face. After some time meditating on the Deposition in his odd little house (which had a trapdoor with a ladder he could pull up, to avoid the interruption of visitors), Pontormo locked himself in that chapel in Santa Felicita, and set to work on his image. Here it is.
We are on the hill of Calvary, and Christ's Mother, the other women, and His disciples are bearing His Body down from the cross, down from the top towards burial at the bottom. But the ground is intangible, the hill itself is invisible; the sky is invisible; even the cross is invisible -- and that's part of what makes the work so fresh, for (such is human perversity) we are so used to carved crucifixes and painted Crucifixions that they seem almost invisible, and form next week, when Passiontide begins, all crosses are covered up to remind us how amazing they are -- to make them again fresh sights. Pontormo's taking-down painting shows us, not the cross, but a swirling downward motion of Christ's Body, spinning round and round like water going down a plug. It's as if the disciple band has been broken by the death of their Lord, and are all reeling, tottering, whirling down the hill, clinging to His Body as It disappears forever. That Body Itself floats rather than being carried -- St John barely touches Its bulk, the crouching figure seems without strain to hold up the whole cloud of figures, and all are tumbling, swooning, descending, turning downwards in a vortex. The luminous pale pink of the draperies fades into the luminous sheen of flesh; the luminous pale blue of the Virgin melts into the background. This is a real corpse -- there's no doubt about that: Christ's lips are black, His Body, although still beautiful, is throroughly drained and flaccid, absolutely dead. And yet it isn't any mere tomb towards which this Deposition descends; the whole strange pink-blue rotating mass of believers are spiralling down towards -- towards what? [2]
Well, that's the prolem. It's slightly off the edge of any reproduction. I talk about looking at the painting, whereas in fact we can't look at it. It's only four minutes away, but we can't see it here, and Iit's not really satisfactory to gaze at a reproduction out of context. After all, Christian art doesn't mean pretty paintings and sculptures waiting to go into an art gallery. Christian art is meant to do something in church. It is part of the church's furniture, like the pews and the kneelers and the silverware. When I wander round art galleries, I'm sometimes disturbed to think of all this splendour taken (almost always stolen or looted) from the place it was designed for. An altarpiece in the Uffizzi is very beautiful, no doubt: but something is missing: the essential context. It's the same with butterflies pinned onto corkboard: their colours are still lovely and their shapes still delightful, but something is missing and something has been lost, or discarded, by putting them here.
The wonderful thing about Pontormo's Deposition is that Napoleon and the other thugs of history haven't filched it: it's where it was meant to be, in church: and you can still see the work it was meant to do. When you go to Santa Felicita you are almost overwhelemed by the context: for you can see what this painting is getting at. You see then what you can't see in a reproduction: the altar beneath the altarpiece. That's the work this iamge does: it shows you the Body of Christ, real but weightless, floating down out of the painting and about to come to rest on the stone top of the altar table. This is a Deposition into the Eucharist. That terrible downward fall is not simply a disaster: it is the sacrifice by which we eat God's Son. We are watching the Body of Christ being deposited, not on that flimsy linen shroud at bottom of the painting, but on the linen shroud that covers the altar. We are startled at the vividness of Pontormo's idea: for here is the Body portrayed, drained of blood, the colour and smoothness of wheaten bread amidst all those bright thin colours; and there is the Body itself, the Body we know in the Eucharist, waiting to be eaten.
THIS HAS BEEN, I think, a comparatively sunny sermon, given that it is Lent. But then Pontormo is a sunny painter, refined and amiable and lyrical, all gentle elongation and luminous charm. And today is the sunniest Sunday of Lent -- the fourth Sunday, the midway point, when a note of rejoicing breaks up the sobriety of the season, when the readings and prayers emphasise the reliable kindnes of God to us, when even the purple of Lent is moderated into a restful rose colour. So we have Pontormo, a great painter of pinkness, on this pink Sunday.
And yet there is something so tremendous about what Pontormo's painting shows us that I almost shy away from the immensity of the theme. Here's the idea: that when we turn up in church, Sunday morning by Sunday morning, we taste the death of Christ. He descends to us to be eaten: He endured the terrible humility of being man, and then down from that to being a condemned man, and then, once dead, down even further: for His Body endured the final descent, the Deposition, the helpless, wallowing tumble off His scaffold and down into the cave. All that seems like an intolerable plunge. And yet it is what is presumed by the action of the Eucharist. The bread is broken and dropped into the ciborium. The wine is poured down into the chalice, like dribbling blood. This Eucharist of ours acts out every week the Deposition of Christ, His astonishing falling down into our hands.
Whence shall we buy bread, that all these may eat? Christ asks Philip in this morning's Gospel, with that almost-appalling wit He sometimes used on His befuddled disciples. Where's the bread going to come from, then? Who's going to pay for it? Well, Christ is going to pay for it; we pay nothing at all; and amidst all our other concerns, it's worth recalling that dreadful and excellent moment when the price became apparent: when Christ was winched or tugged off the gallows and lowered to the ground, broken and drained -- when Christ was lowered onto our altars.
Draw near and receive
the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
which was given for you,
and His Blood, which was shed for you.
Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for you;
and be thankful.
NOTES
[1] Mark xv, 46. The Greek word (aorist ptc. of kaqairew, to take down, pull down, overthrow) has violent connotations: it's what Demetrius the silversmith says the Christians want to do to Artemis of the Ephesians (Acts xix, 27). See O.E.D. for the gradual diffusion of the English word deposition.
Matthew trims Mark's account down, and Luke, following Matthew, cuts even more, ending his Passion on note of particular bleakness. John, on the contrary, elaborates, introduces Nicodemus, than Johannine character of estoeric knowledge, and lavishly particularises the Jewish burial technique, I suppose to soften the horror of the burial of the Word, the apparent silencing of the story.
[2] John H Beck, Italian Renaissance Painting (Koln, 1999), pages 468-477. It's odd to reflect that the greenish sheet at the bottom of the canvas -- the stalk out of which the whole bush of figures seems to go -- is the sindon (a word in Greek and Latin, and for many centuries an English word also for Christ's shroud), the shroud of Turin. I mean, of course, that it's not; but that relic has been venerated the seven centuries since it was fabricated so as if it were what received the divine Body: the very lowest point, as it were, in Christ's self-sacrificing plummet. It's a pity that modern interest has been bogus and vulgar, a sniffling at the Shroud for 'evidence' of resurrection, rather than a veneration of it as a sign of the totality of incarnational death.