The Last Return 4

[Splitting this day into two, this part focusing on Bamberg’s great cathedral. Two photos above are of the Prince’s Portal: the statue of Synagogue/Judaism on the right with the demon and anti-Semitic figure below her; the Portal detail shows the Last Judgement and the interesting facial expressions mentioned on both saved and damned. The two photos at the end are of St. Peter, Adam and Eve on another portal and an inside view looking east.]

Tuesday 30 April

Early morning, B. is resting, still slightly jet-lagged and a little stunned by this sudden return to her old hometown. It is a blue-sky, beautiful spring day. I set out to explore some churches. My first goal is the famous main cathedral, the Dom, set on a prominent hill looking out over the town and wider landscape.

At the cathedral a man dressed up in medieval colours is gesticulating and theatrically telling a story to a group of primary school children sitting before him on some steps. From what I can catch, it is a legend about building the cathedral. He talks about the sudden appearance of a terrible figure, the devil, who, I imagine because of the breaking of some previous contract he had entered into with a young builder, proceeds to take the latter away to hell and damnation. It seems primitive ‘heaven-and-hell Catholicism’ is still quite traditionally inculcated in young minds here: the premodern lives on within the postmodern.

The cathedral, among Germany’s most famous religious buildings, is indeed stunning in an unpretentious way, like Bamberg itself. I read that it has gone through many historical processes of change over its thousand years and thus embodies forms of changing sensibility from Romanesque and Gothic through Baroque, neo-Romanesque-Romantic to Modern. The first Romanesque version was constructed on the orders of king Heinrich II and consecrated in 1012 (he and his still popular queen Kunigunde are buried here in a 1513 tomb by Tilman Riemenschneider). This first church,  burnt down in 1081, was rebuilt and then burnt down again in 1185. Then the present late Romanesque-early Gothic version was started in 1203 and consecrated in 1237. Like most other south-German churches, it received a Baroque ‘facelift’ in the seventeenth century, but the Baroque furnishings were removed again in the Romantic period of 1828-37 to be replaced with the neo-Romanesque interior largely visible today. So the cathedral’s apparent rock-solid permanence is another mirage: this impressive building actually embodies all the transient layerings of history, conflict and shifting tastes.

I am drawn to three features in particular: the immediate visceral sensation of sheer verticality and Gothic space, the stunningly ‘modern’ thirteenth century sculptures and friezes, and the only gradually revealed subterranean layer of the premodern-pagan. It seems the premodern, pre-Christian three worlds of Heaven, Earth and Underworld known throughout the world at least since shamanism are so clearly manifest in this cathedral.

As soon as you enter, your eyes are drawn upward, heavenwards. A tall forest in stone. The sky a webbed shell. The atemporal vertical dimension usually missing in the tough temporal horizontality of everyday life in the peasant hut or modern cramped apartment. Everything is centred, harmonious, symmetrical, both as the dual and as the triune. A place to become aware of ex- and internal spaciousness, of stillness, to breathe out. The stillness is hard to hear, however: the din of renovation work intrudes. (But thankfully the tourist group tours arrive just as I leave).

The sculptures and external friezes, created by French craftsmen who disseminate the new Gothic style originating in north-east France, are a standout feature of the cathedral. The duality of personified Ecclesia (the Church) and Synagogue (Judaism), two maidens, the former crowned and originally with goblet and cross, the latter with broken rod, ten commandment slabs falling from her hands, her eyes blindfolded since she is blind to the new ‘truth’ of the Christian gospel, yet still exuding a strong dignity and in her very ‘brokenness’ somehow much more interesting than the more conventional Ecclesia figure. As in the best Classical art, the body structure shows through the folds of the drapery, and the latter thus expresses tension, movement and individuality.

The originals are now inside to protect them from erosion, while two copies stand outside in their original position on either side of the magnificent Prince’s Portal. The rounded tympanum of the latter, symmetrically flanked below by two sets of six apostles (perhaps mediating on behalf of the devout viewer looking up?), depicts the Last Judgement, Christ in the middle of the hemisphere, with the saved off to heaven of course on Christ’s right, the damned off to hell on his left.  Under the Synagogue figure, of course also on Christ’s ‘damned’ left, there is an inverted devil figure pushing down vertically onto what seems to be a man wearing a strange, long hat as Jews were forced to wear. If so, one wonders what the Jews of Bamberg might have felt about this anti-Semitic depiction of the damned throughout the ages.

Both the saved and the damned have some charmingly comic expressions to the postmodern eye: cutely smiling under Christ’s beneficence or else contorted faces that also seem to be smiling rather than expressing anguish (artistic incapacity or ironic comment?); a dynamic devil figure is hauling off a collection of sinners that, in a nice touch by socially critical masons, includes cardinal and king. No doubt these images were at least as, if not more, powerful as any verbal story or sermon at inculcating the Christian message in preliterate people. I wonder if they can mean anything at all to us secular postmoderns moving into an image-saturated post-literate age?

At the portal on the other side of the church, an equally impressive set of six sculptures also telling a static narrative of representation and authority: three secular and three sacred figures on either side linked above by the curving tympanum. On the left side the church’s founding King Heinrich and Queen Kunigunde with attending counsellor, on the right St Peter, Adam and Eve. The striking figures are those of the latter two and the counsellor, all three strangely ‘modern’ in overall style. Adam and Eve are stark naked but for the obligatory pubic fig leaves, both innocently pubescent in body and faces, both having very similar, almost de-gendered, body shapes but for Eve’s small thrusting breasts. The counsellor standing next to the Queen is the only figure not frozen into dignified expressionlessness: like the saved and damned on the Prince’s Portal, to our contemporary eye his face seems to be smiling in some sort of comic amusement as he holds out some sort of stone or document.  

Perhaps the most famous of the Dom sculptures is the Bamberger Reiter (Horseman) inside the cathedral, created around 1235. Apparently, it is the only known example of a sculpture of a rider within a church anywhere. Part of its allure is its size, raised positioning, equine massiveness, youthful and regal expressivity and unknown intended meaning. Is it honouring some real historical personage? Is it a young prince or knight who has brashly ridden, unarmed, into the church sanctuary and now stands there looking out towards the main altar? Is it, like the structure of the cathedral itself, a symbolic three-tiered representation of the Medieval world view with man in the middle world, below him underworld, plants and animals, above him the celestial realms? (If so, man here achieves a Renaissance-like centrality). The intended meaning is as unknown as the masons who created it, masons not yet seeing themselves as a special category of human called ‘artists’ making ‘art’. The whole sculpture conveys a pleasing tension between strength and gentility, between the colossal horse so powerful and smooth mounted by the gentle knight with the long wavy hair and in his finely detailed drapery so lithe, relaxed, elegant, and yet in complete control. 

Also inside, underground, darker elements of pagan and Christian magic thinking literally ground the soaring vertical space of Romanesque-Gothic aspiration and the light, proto-Classical clarity of the sculptures. There is a subterranean well, still used as a baptismal fount, perhaps the site of the original pagan sacred site, a place of holy water and power, upon which Christian conversion erected its first church; two crypts, one containing the skulls of cathedral founders king Heinrich and queen Kunigunde, the other the reliquary bone of some bishop or saint; off to one side, and signposted as a special place of silent contemplation and not mere viewing or photo-taking, a Chapel of the Nail containing another reliquary, a supposedly original nail from the cross of Christ’s crucifixion. (Being alone there, I take photos).

~ by Peter Lach-Newinsky on July 2, 2021.