Le sang et le lait dans l’imaginaire médiéval

Abstract

Blood and Milk in Medieval ImageryThe wall painting Plague Image (also named the Image of Scourge, Mater omnium, The Virgin of Mercy, Our Lady of Protection, Mary the Mediatrix, Double Intercession, Combined Intercession, Our Lady’s Intercession etc.) in the Church of St. Primus in #rna near Kamnik in Slovenia, executed in 1504, at the end of the Middle Ages and at the dawn of the Renaissance in Central Europe, reflects well the passage between the two worlds of imagination and their visual representation. The triangular composition – with God the Father, the universal entity, at its apex, and lower with Christ exposing his wounds (Man of Sorrows, Imago pietatis) on the left, and Virgin Mary on the right, with her bosom bare – determines the believer’s perception. The scene combines the notions of birth, symbolized by the charity of Mary offering her milk, and death, symbolized by the cruelty of blood shed by Christ and the menacing sword of God the Father. At the time of their realization, the figures of Christ and Mary were meant to be spiritual, imaging the mysteries of the Eucharist and the Incarnation. The present text examines the question as to what extent the believers of the past connected, in their imagination, Christ’s nakedness and Mary’s bosom with parts of the body of a common human. The masked eroticism of the two figures put a stamp on this suggestive image which in the course of history provoced various reactions...