The Broken Head of Christ

A nearly life-size crucifix had hung for hundreds of years above the altar of the Basilica dell’Osservanza outside of Siena. Here, the famous Sienese Franciscan reformer and preacher St. Bernardino of Siena had preached and wept over his city, resisted accusations of heresy, and steadfastly refused church appointments to positions of power. The suffering Christ on the cross had been carved in the early fourteenth century before St. Bernardino’s day, before the construction of the basilica itself.

This wooden Jesus’ centuries-long witness to the mass celebrated by St. Bernardino’s heirs ended on January 23, 1944. Allied bombers attempted to strike the train station in Siena, where munitions routinely journeyed on their way to supply the soldiers of Mussolini’s fascist regime. But the Allies missed their target and hit the fifteenth-century basilica instead. Amidst the bodies of the brothers and smoldering art of the church, the fragments of the crucifix were discovered. Only the head of Christ remained somewhat intact.

Ninety-one years and two days later, I lingered long in front of this Christ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The special collections room overflowed with people in red, for the Met was celebrating the Lunar New Year, and it was nearly the last day of the Siena: The Rise of Painting special collection to which the broken head belonged.

Despite the crowd, the head looked lonely and odd divested of the body. Brown curls still clung to the sides of his polychrome, beautiful face. His eyes were shut, and it was hard to tell whether he was dead or alive. Most arresting of all was the dramatic, diagonal split through his countenance. As I gazed at Christ’s riven face, I swallowed down that feeling of almost-there tears. The sacred, shattered head stayed with me after I left the museum. I could cry looking at it again, even as I pull up the picture while I write these words.

***

My feelings were — and remain — a complex cocktail of bitter and sweet flavors. As a medievalist I know that tears were one particular intention behind the sculpture’s creation. The artist created this artwork within a particular framework: the late medieval church’s aim to elicit an affective response to visual and language art of the Passion. The sculptor of Christ’s wounded head would have been pleased with my emotional reaction. Pope Gregory the Great, in that strange period of time bridging classical and medieval, famously wrote of images as books for the illiterate. Teaching could be conveyed through representations of scripture. But doctrine was not the only thing — art could inspire devotion, too. St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) teaches that images should be used “to excite the feeling of devotion, which is more effectively excited by what it sees than by what is heard.”

Even the poetry of the later Middle Ages encouraged such “seeing” of the Passion within the imagination. One popular motif portrayed Jesus speaking directly to the reader or hearer of the poem. The reader pictured themselves as a passerby in the crowds, while Jesus speaks directly to them. “Abide,” Christ says, wait a moment, and witness to my love and pain in my body. Jesus continues in one anonymous fourteenth-century Middle English poem:

“Behald my heued, bi-hald my fete,
And of mysdedes luke thou lete;
Behald my grysely face…”

Behold my head, behold my feet,
And cease your sins;
Behold my grisly face…

This beholding prompts the viewer’s request for mercy. Christ’s body is the gate of grace. The crucifix revives my deadened (or suppressed) sense of need so that I might reach out in response to Christ’s open arms, like a child holding her arms up to her mother, to the Triune God.

The crucifix that the broken head belonged to, like all crucifixes of the age, was made to convict and console. The artist crafted it as a personal gift for a Sienese Dominican confraternity, a group of lay brothers partially living by the rule of St. Dominic in the early fourteenth century. In the eighteenth century, it was transferred to the Basilica just outside of Siena. For the members of the confraternity, or for the later worshipers at the Basilica, it might have stirred up profound gratitude and devotion for the extent of God’s love. Equally, it might have stirred up guilt and contrition, for the sins one had committed, for the ways one had fallen short of the glory of God.

As I beheld the Broken Head in the Met, all those centuries later, it was doing the same work for me that it had done for the long dead Sienese worshipers. I too felt a funny twinge of guilt. I felt a vague, cringey shame that an Allied bomb destroyed Christ’s Body. I found myself childishly wishing it had been a Nazi bomb instead (those were the bad guys, after all). I would like to keep my hands clean, or at least preserve the shabby fantasy that my hands are clean.

Blame Pontius Pilate and the officers of empire, blame the Jews, blame the madness of crowds, blame anyone but me and mine, please. In the later Middle Ages, plays depicting scripture were put on by guilds, and townsfolk and neighbors played Moses, Mary, Jesus, Judas. In the Passion plays at York, ordinary townspeople played the Roman soldiers pounding the nails into Christ’s hands and feet and raising the cross up in the air. They chatter about mundane things and swear over dropped nails as they kill an innocent man. What more convicting portrait of the truth that even in our best human intentions, to beat Fascists or liberate countries, to preserve the shallow peace of Empire, to resist threats to our faith, to do our jobs in ordinary lives, too often we destroy one another?

A deeper, more bitter conviction began to emerge in my facile edging away from the destruction. It had been a tumultuous week already: a new President of the United States had been inaugurated, anointed by many Christians as God’s answer for a broken country. Such assertions seemed driven more by a spirit of vengeful domination than a spirit of grace and humility. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the World was the end, and faith the means. I felt ashamed by my brothers and sisters in Christ. I had labelled them mentally as the bad ones, distancing myself as much as I could. Yet I cannot deny our kinship, in our shared confession. I wanted to, though.

Suddenly the broken head seemed nothing more than a depressing mirror. The Apostle Paul reminds the body of believers following Jesus that we are Christ’s body. The Body of Jesus, his church, feels alien as many who proclaim his name do things and say things that I cannot understand. This Body feels missing, like the body of the Head at the Met. The church better resembled that split head — muddled and broken, lacking a heart to love or limbs to feed and give, futile and miserable. Where is wholeness? Was this head/church nothing more than glorified rubble of a once unified body?

But Christ’s body is a book, as one popular medieval metaphor tells, and one must keep reading the bloody letters of his wounds. In his body we read the extent, depth, height, power of his love. Richard Rolle, a fourteenth-century English hermit living around the time the Sienese crucifix was carved, prays to be a continual student of this book of Christ’s body, to “learn by [Christ’s] example to love God as I should.” I needed to keep reading the wounded face.

One of the pieces of medieval art that I return to in writing and thought time and again is the Isenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald. Grunewald notoriously painted one of the most gruesome passion scenes in an era known for its drippingly excessive amounts of blood. The wounds on Grunewald’s Christ resemble virulent plague-sores more than they look like the effect of scourging. Out of context, this decision seems baffling or even disturbing. But the altarpiece was made for a hospital which cared for victims suffering from skin diseases. Grunewald painted a Jesus who truly and particularly suffers with the ill of the hospital. In his Passion, Christ takes on all individual human afflictions, all sin, all kinds of death into himself.

So the Broken Head is indeed a mirror, but it re-presents reality to us: I am with you in the division, in the fragmentation, in the despair and sadness and confusion and anxiety. This Head of Christ is for anyone who is broken, fractured, devastated. This is all still for us, and we are in him. The broken, war-torn Face is our face, yours and mine, the face of the immigrant, the other Christian with whom you radically disagree, the brokenhearted, confused, and lonely.

As Christians, we live in the twinned reality that you and I are both the bomber and the shattered holy head of the Lord, that the church is horribly broken but that Christ breaks with us, all the way to resurrection. If I cannot live and worship in this tension of conviction and consolation, contrition and gratitude, then I will miss the invitation to love and hard-won wholeness. I will be worshiping something other than the crucified God.

One night of May in 1373, a woman named Julian of Norwich, my favorite medieval writer, believed she was dying in the throes of a terrible illness. Readying herself for death, she looks upwards, towards heaven. But her priest comes and sets the crucifix before her. He tells her, “Look thereupon, and comfort thee therewith.” Julian would rather look straight into heaven, where she trusted to go by God’s mercy. But nevertheless, she sets her eyes upon Christ’s face on the crucifix as her sight begins to fail. To her surprise and joy, the face of Jesus begins to bleed in front of her eyes. Thus begins a series of visions on suffering, sin, and most of all, God’s unimaginable goodness that she would live through and then pray over and write about for decades.

Midway through these visions, which Julian calls showings, Christ’s pain grows in his passion as she watches. Julian wants to look away again, up to heaven, away from the suffering which she shares with Jesus. She hears a whisper of temptation to look up. But Julian refuses to look away, saying to Christ, “For thou art my heaven.” She would rather be in that pain with Jesus till Judgment Day than come to heaven any other way that avoids the way of the cross.

Julian’s temptation is our temptation. It may seem strange to say that we today in the church share anything with a fourteenth-century mystic who witnessed a crucifix bleed, but we both bear the temptation to look away from the broken body on the wood, to avert our eyes from the terrible brokenness that surrounds us. Our abiding temptation as the church is to look up to heaven and skip the pain for the triumph. This desire — for victory without struggling, for love without sacrifice — infects us. The only medicine for the affliction is to keep our eyes trained upon the cross. And then know that we too are invited to bear it ourselves.

***

The story of the broken Head of Christ takes an unusual turn after the destruction of the body in World War II. The fissure opened by the bomb was a clean split. The artist had carved the head from two pieces of wood then put together. Concealed within that hollow head and in the knee were two pieces of parchment. For many centuries, no one had known who had crafted the beautiful crucifix of the basilica. In this violence, other eyes glimpsed secret words for the first time.

Lando di Pietro, a goldsmith and master architect of fourteenth-century Siena, acknowledged he was the maker of the great crucifix. He had crafted it as a “true likeness” of Christ, he said, made for love and devotion. Inside Christ’s head, the master craftsman had left a fervent, hidden prayer: May all the Saints pray to Jesus Christ, son of God, to have mercy on Lando and his family and save them from the hands of the enemy of God. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on all human beings.

It is hard to read Lando’s prayer without feeling moved. Though time and place constrain our vision, we are not alone in the Body. Hidden prayers have long been uttered and carved and painted for us. Even when we cannot see it, the church is there, bigger than us, unconfined to time and space in Christ’s Body. But more so, Lando di Pietro extends an invitation to us.

Medieval artists like Lando di Pietro believed art of the crucifixion did more than stir up feelings. Gazing upon representations of the Passion, in art, writing, or even in the imagination could transform the observer. Peter of Limoges (c. 1240–1306), a scholar and physician writing a treatise on the eye, vision, and morality, urges, “Let each and every person enter the house of his conscience and consider Christ’s wounds with the eye of his mind, so that in some small measure he might conform himself to Christ.” So at last, I move beyond feelings and identification with the Broken Head to wonder with Peter and Lando how we might also begin to conform to Christ within our present fragmentation.

Consider Lando di Pietro’s preserved, renewed prayer for mercy. If I witness the sign of my own brokenness in the split Head as well as the incarnational love and presence of Jesus, I can in utter trust throw myself upon the resurrective mercy of God. If in this mercy I can begin to conform to Christ, then I must also work and pray for the mercy upon my brothers and sisters. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, mercy. When I consider the Broken Head in my mind’s eye, as Peter of Limoges urges, where, in the transformative mercy of God, can I conform to the heart of Jesus in my own home, in the twenty-first century suburb of Denver where I live, in my part of the world and moment in time?

And mercy gives us one answer. Mercy is not a feeling. It is active, a habit or way of being in the world. The church has long associated mercy with the works of mercy named by Jesus himself in chapter twenty-five of the gospel of Matthew: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick, visiting the prisoner, and the last, added later, burying the dead. If we are having trouble seeing Jesus, assuredly we will meet him if we follow him into these seven works. He promises us he is there: that was me that you fed, clothed, comforted. In mercy, the Body re-limbs, the heart pumps blood into cold flesh, tissues connect as wounds begin to scab over and heal.

Lando di Pietro’s Broken Head of Christ says: recognize reality. Look at my brokenness; look at your own. What mercies are being uncovered right before you? I am.

Grace Hamman is an independent scholar of medieval literature, as well as author of two books, Jesus through Medieval Eyes: Beholding Christ with the Artists, Mystics, and Theologians of the Middle Ages; and the forthcoming Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life. She also writes at gracehamman.substack.com and has a podcast on literature and faith, Old Books with Grace.