The Golden Christ of Cortona and the Man of Sorrows in Italy Part Two

Abstract

The image of the Cross-bearing Man of Sorrows would not at first appear to be an especially unusual one, yet it is perhaps the least common form in which Christ is shown in the late Middle Ages and the fifteenth century. With its penetrating exposition of the corporeal Christ, displaying and asserting his sacrifice, depicted in a miraculous state of living death, bearing the chief instrument of the Passion, the Corton a Christ is among the first of a series of such pietistic forms to appear in Italy. Outstanding among the early fifteenth-century Tuscan depictions of this subject is the altarpiece of Santa Lucia, San Giovanni Valdarno, attributed to Mariotto di Cristofano (1393–1457) (Fig. 20). Still earlier in date is the fresco from the late fourteenth-century church of Santa Maria Nuova in Viterbo (Fig. 21).81 This formula came to be especially closely allied with the Eucharist, and hence selected for depiction on the door to the altar sanctuary behind which the Host was stored, as seen in the tabernacle at San Martino, Ponte a Mensola, on the outskirts of Florence (Fig. 22).