Virtue crucifixion
Under virtue crucifixion is in Christian iconography the Crucifixion by four or more personalized virtues understood. Examples are created around 1340 altarpiece in Doberan Minster and the approximately simultaneous Lübeck Warendorp altar.
The allegory goes back to an Easter sermon by Bernhard von Clairvaux , the defining figure of the Cistercian order :
"The cross becomes the sign of victory through the virtues of obedience, patience, humility and love that Christ demonstrated on the cross."
The meaning is thus: Christ dies through his good qualities, through his virtues, which are not recognized in the world and which bring him to the cross. According to the Christian understanding, the death of Jesus for the redemption and forgiveness of guilt enables a new, virtuous life according to the example of Jesus, socially the beginning of the kingdom of God .
Only 25 depictions of Christ's crucifixion through virtues are known worldwide. Five of them are in Cistercian monasteries, u. a. as glass paintings or as carvings in the choir stalls.
Web links
- Altar of virtue (approx. 1330) in the Doberan Minster (13th photo)
- Warendorp Altar (around 1340, painting around 1400)
- 'Corpus Christi' in Liturgy and Art of the Cistercians in the Middle Ages (2003)
- Sermon (DOC file; 76 kB) to the window picture (around 1335) in the Cistercian monastery Wienhausen (near Celle / Lower Saxony)
literature
- Heike Kraft: The image allegory of the crucifixion of Christ through the virtues. 1976 (Berlin, Free University, dissertation, 1972).
- Jeffrey Hamburger: The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions. In: Viator. Vol. 20, 1989, ISSN 0083-5897 , pp. 161-182, doi : 10.1484 / J.VIATOR.2.301353 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Johannes Voss: The Minster of Bad Doberan. Great DKV art guide. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-422-02048-1 , pp. 52–54.