Pain in Representations of Intimacy with the Crucified Christ in Lutgard of Tongeren and Catherine of Siena as Impulse to Innovative Iconographies

Abstract

Pain was also in the late Middles Ages a vehicle of transcendental experience and of mystical enactment in particular. It appears to have been a current topic in the figurative and imaginative world of religious orders, among their members and in several orders' representational practices. The severity of physical pain is in these cases continuously combined with their emotional meaning and is instrumental to the enactment of emotional pain, thus relating the one with the other. Two female saints are particularly representative for their accounts of physical pain experiences and this can be considered for a paradigmatic interpretation of pain in a devotional context as being valid even beyond the narrow frame of "Western" art: Catherine of Siena and Lutgard von Tongeren. Figurative representations of both saints show how they indulged in their own bodily pain and became paradigms for castigatory practices in general. But they have to be seen in parallel to the literary accounts of the castigation practices they followed. The early modern resumption of contents related to such scenes, therefore, showed the strength of a longue durée tradition across Christian art way beyond the late Middle Ages.