Even those who did come to acknowledge Jesus as ‘Christos’, the Anointed One of the Lord God, might flinch at staring the manner of his death full in the face. ‘Christians’, as they were called, were as wise to the connotations of crucifixion as anyone. ‘The mystery of the cross, which summons us to God, is something despised and dishonourable.’15 So wrote Justin, the foremost Christian apologist of his generation, a century and a half after the birth of Jesus. The torture of the Son of the Most High God was a horror simply too shocking to be portrayed in visual form. Scribes copying the gospels might on occasion draw above the Greek word for ‘cross’ delicate pictograms that hinted at the crucified Christ, but otherwise it was left to sorcerers or satirists to illustrate his execution. Yet this, to many across the Roman world, was not as deep a paradox as perhaps it might have seemed. So profound were some mysteries that mortals had no choice but to keep them veiled. The naked radiance of the gods was far too dazzling for the human eye. No one, by contrast, had been blinded by the spectacle of the Son of the Most High God being tortured to death; but Christians, although accustomed to make the sign of the cross as a gesture of piety, and to contemplate with wide-eyed reverence the gospel accounts of their Saviour’s sufferings, seem to have shrunk from seeing them represented in physical form.
Only centuries after the death of Jesus – by which time, astonishingly, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ – did his execution at last start to emerge as an acceptable theme for artists. By ad 400 the cross was ceasing to be viewed as something shameful. Banned as a punishment decades earlier by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, crucifixion had come to serve the Roman people as an emblem of triumph over sin and death. An artist, carving the scene out of ivory, might represent Jesus in the skimpy loincloth of an athlete, no less muscled than any of the ancient gods. Even as the western half of the empire began to slip away from the rule of the Caesars, and fall to barbarian invaders, so in the eastern half, where Roman power endured, the Cross provided assurance to an embattled people that victory would ultimately be theirs. In Christ’s agonies had been the index of his defeat of evil. This was why, triumphant even on the implement of his torture, he was never shown as suffering pain. His expression was one of serenity. It proclaimed him Lord of the Universe.
So it was, in an empire that – although today we call it Byzantine – never ceased to insist that it was Roman, a corpse came to serve as an icon of majesty. Byzantium, though, was not the only Christian realm. In the Latin-speaking West, a millennium and more after the birth of Christ, a fresh revolution was brewing. Increasingly, there were Christians who, rather than keeping the brute horror of crucifixion from their gaze, yearned instead to fix their eyes fully upon it. ‘Why, O my soul, did you fail to be there, to be stabbed by a sword of bitter grief, that you could not endure the piercing of your Saviour’s side by a spear? Why could you not bear to see the nails violate the hands and feet of your Creator?’16 This prayer, written some time around ad 1070, was not just to the God who reigned in glory on high, but to the condemned criminal he had been when he suffered his humiliating death. Its author, a brilliant scholar from northern Italy by the name of Anselm, was a man of noble birth: a correspondent of countesses, an associate of kings. Such it was to be a prince of the Church: the ecclesia or ‘assembly’ of the Christian people. Anselm was a man who combined birth, ability and a famous name. Nevertheless, even as he laboured to sway the destiny of Christendom, he could not help but find in his own eminence a cause of dread. So upset was he when appointed to lead the English Church that he promptly suffered a spectacular nosebleed. ‘The very name of private property was to him a thing of horror.’17 Seeing a cornered hare, he burst into tears, and bade the terrified animal be set free. No matter how high in the affairs of the world he rose, he never forgot that it was in lowliness, and nakedness, and persecution that his Saviour had redeemed him. In his prayer to the crucified Christ, copied as it was and read across the whole of the Latin West, Anselm articulated a new and momentous understanding of the Christian God: one in which the emphasis was laid not upon his triumph, but upon his suffering humanity.
‘With this lament, suddenly, shockingly, we are in the presence of rupture . . .’18 The Jesus portrayed by medieval artists, twisted, bloody, dying, was a victim of crucifixion such as his original executioners would have recognised: no longer serene and victorious, but racked by agony, just as any tortured slave would have been. The response to the spectacle, however, was far removed from the mingled revulsion and disdain that had typified that of the ancients to crucifixion. Men and women, when they looked upon an image of their Lord fixed to the cross, upon the nails smashed through the tendons and bone of his feet, upon the arms stretched so tightly as to appear torn from their sockets, upon the slump of his thorn-crowned head onto his chest, did not feel contempt, but rather compassion, and pity, and fear. There was certainly no lack of Christians, in medieval Europe, to identify with the sufferings of their God. Rich still trampled down poor. Gibbets stood on hills. The Church itself, thanks in large part to the exertions of men like Anselm, was able to lay claim to the ancient primacy of Rome – and uphold it, what was more. And yet, for all that, something fundamental had indeed changed. ‘Patience in tribulation, offering the other cheek, praying for one’s enemies, loving those who hate us’:19 such were the Christian virtues as defined by Anselm. All derived from the recorded sayings of Jesus himself. No Christians, then, not even the most callous or unheeding, could ignore them without some measure of reproof from their consciences. That the Son of God, born of a woman, and sentenced to the death of a slave, had perished unrecognised by his judges, was a reflection fit to give pause to even the haughtiest monarch. This awareness, enshrined as it was in the very heart of medieval Christianity, could not help but lodge in its consciousness a visceral and momentous suspicion: that God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. ‘So the last will be first, and the first last.’20
To the Roman aristocrats who, in the decades before the birth of Jesus, first began to colonise the Esquiline Hill with their marble fittings and their flower beds, such a sentiment would have seemed grotesque. And yet it had come to pass. Nowhere bore more spectacular witness to this than Rome itself. In 1601, in a church that had originally been built to exorcise the ghost of Nero, a particularly flamboyant and malignant Caesar, a painting was installed that paid homage to the outcast origins of the city’s Christian order. The artist, a young man from Milan by the name of Caravaggio, had been commissioned to paint a crucifixion: not of Christ himself, but of his leading disciple. Peter, a fisherman who, according to the gospels, had abandoned his boat and nets to follow Jesus, was said to have become the ‘overseer’ – the episcopos or ‘bishop’ – of the first Christians of Rome, before being put to death by Nero. Since Peter’s execution, more than two hundred men had held the bishopric, an office that brought with it a claim to primacy over the entire Church, and the honorary title of Pappas or ‘Father’ – ‘Pope’. Over the course of the fifteen centuries and more that had followed Peter’s death, the authority of the popes had waxed and waned; but it remained, in the lifetime of Caravaggio, a formidable thing. The artist, however, knew better than to celebrate its pomp, its splendour, its wealth. The earthly greatness of the papacy was turned literally on its head. Peter, the story went, had demanded to be crucified upside down, so as not to share in the fate of his Lord; and Caravaggio, choosing as his theme the very moment when the heavy cross was levered upwards, portrayed the first pope as he had authentically been – as a peasant. No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by representing him as Caravaggio represented Peter: tortured, humiliated, stripped almost bare. And yet, in the city of the Caesars, it was a man broken to such a fate who was honoured as the keeper of ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’.21 The last had indeed become first.