A Silent Rhetoric by Kim W. Woods

THIS 100-page volume (Features, May 3) expands on an earlier essay by Woods on medieval open-mouth sculptures originating primarily from the northern continent. With Donatello and Desiderio da Settignano, she ventured across the Alps, and she also found an extraordinary pre-Reformation survival at Tong, in Shropshire, depicting a priest preaching from the pulpit.

She sets out to show how the sculptor sought to represent the word in the same way that painters might include a banner or scroll with text.

Viewers in an ecclesial context (it includes secular statues) might be drawn into a conversation with, for example, the Announced Virgin and the Archangel or the mother of Christ mourning at the foot of the Cross. This could be to encourage participation in the liturgy or as a deliberate way of offering catechesis, encouraging the recitation of the Hail Mary, the Our Father and the Creed.

Statues and paintings of each of the apostles might receive a phrase from the Creed, as at Bamberg, and groups of apostles in conversation might have had a similar purpose, as she cites Havelberg (Germany), Évora (Portugal), and elsewhere. Much later, in the Spanish and Italian Counter-Reformation, this could have been the reason for the series of apostolades of Ribera and El Greco.

I’m happy to accept much of this, despite the lack of documentary evidence that this development was calculated. The scenes of the Annunciation and the Baptist preaching in the desert readily lend themselves to such an interpretation. I am less convinced of the figures of the Crucified. The agony of the Savior and the groaning on the cross cannot always foreshadow the last seven words and may simply be an attempt to emphasize the agony of the God-Man.

Regarding the west choir screen of Naumburg Cathedral (vs.1249), the author is surely right to comment on the way in which we see the servant denounce Saint Peter as one of the Galileans who had followed Jesus, and to draw attention to the bargaining of the 30 pieces of silver. But she remains silent on the other two panels – the Last Supper and the Betrayal in the Garden – perhaps because (surprisingly) none of the figures depicted seem to speak.

It would also have been good to think about the talking statue automatons that, the reformers claimed, the Church used to convince the gullible to believe in miracles.

Canon Nicholas Cranfield is the Vicar of All Saints, Blackheath, south London..

Talking Sculptures in Late Medieval Europe: A Silent Rhetoric
Kim W. Woods
Lund Humphries £60.00
(978-1-84822-673-9)
Church Times Bookstore £54.00