This vaulted reception room, its walls and ceiling still showing traces of original red and black decoration, had two functions. First, it was the monastery’s parlour where necessary conversation, either between members of the community or with outside visitors, could take place. But its second function was as a funeral parlour, a room in which an open coffin would be placed for people to pay their respects to the dead before the formal funeral was conducted in the abbey. An appropriate place to put a Pietà, perhaps.
Why do I find this image so
moving? It is, after all, a far cry from the most famous Pietà of all,
Michaelangelo’s in St. Peter’s, Rome; you could fairly call this one folk art. Agreed, but this has an immediate intimacy
and appeal that the cold marble of Michaelangelo’s mother and son, protected
these days behind shatterproof glass, wholly lacks – for me, at any rate. And this
is not just because here at Hambye you can get close enough to see every mark
on the wood, those made by time and those made by chisel.
When I first put my head
around the door of the parlier and saw the Pietà facing me at the otherend of the room, I could not believe how supple looked the limp body of the
dead Jesus, sprawled across his mother’s lap like a rag doll: no trace of rigor
mortis yet. By contrast, Mary’s body was tense: her shoulders slightly
hunched as she leaned forward a little, allowing her hands to hold her son
under his left shoulder and left thigh, lest he should slip off her lap. And
next, close up, I could see the details of the carving: the way Mary’s wimple
envelops her chin which tilts forward, hiding her neck; the way the folds of
her blue shift were held tightly between her knees.
Was the corpse of Jesus carved separately, but designed to fit snugly against the body of Mary?
Other details, too, disclose the sculptor’s skill: Mary’s left hand points towards Christ’s left breast, while on the other side the gaping wound made by the soldier’s spear is all too evident. Below the ribs, the navel of Jesus is clearly shown; so too the neat folds of his loin cloth. His right knee is carefully carved but the left, alas, has been rather gruesomely hollowed out by time, weather and woodworm.
The head of Christ is
revealing and perhaps puzzling: it is carved in a manner so different from that
of Mary’s that one has to wonder, was it carved by the same person? The face is
flatter, almost receding as it were into the space between the shoulders. The
features are more vigorously – more crudely? – carved. Contrast the lips and
eyes of Mary with those of Jesus. Granted that her eyes are open and his are
closed, they have surely been treated in entirely different ways. Christ’s heavily
scored beard, too, accentuated by the strands of surviving white paint, raises
questions of style and intention. But here one must pause. You’d expect that
the sculptor might have included the crown of thorns and indeed, if you look at
Christ’s forehead, above his left eye you can just see that a fragment of two
twisted stems of briar has survived, the rest having disappeared. But hanging
down his cheek is a long and carefully carved braid of hair, suggesting that
Mary might already have begun to prepare her son’s body for laying out and burial.
This last point is
speculation, of course. What is hard to deny, though, is that the face of
Jesus, represented here, appears much older than the face of Mary, his mother. Seen
thus, he is both son and father, she both mother and daughter. A phrase uttered
by Bernard of Clairvaux in his Prayer to the Virgin, ‘Figlia del tuo Figlio’
from Dante’s Paradiso, (‘Daughter of your own son’), comes to my mind. I
first encountered these words, aged 16, in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets and
it is only now, sixty years later, standing in the parlier of a remote
Normandy abbey, that I begin properly to grasp their significance for the first
time.
Two further poems, each called
Pietà, speak poignantly of mother and child. In the first, by Rainer
Maria Rilke, the speaker is Mary. She speaks to her dead child who, she has just
acknowledged, had broken her heart long before he died on the Cross:
Now
you lie stretched across my womb,
yet can
I not give birth to you
a
second time.
R.S. Thomas is the author of the second poem. Recalling the
Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood, Thomas imagines the agony of the Cross itself
as it looks down at the dead Jesus lying on his mother’s lap:
The
tall Cross
Sombre,
untenanted,
Aches
for the Body
That
is back in the cradle
Of a
maid’s arms.
For Rilke’s Mary, no miraculous rebirth is possible. Thomas’s
poem, however, allows that the miraculous rebirth may already have occurred:
look again at those last three lines. Would these two poets, I wonder, have
written quite the same poems if they had seen the Hambye Pietà?
© Adrian Barlow 2016
Postscript:
While I was
still revising these reflections on my first encounter with the Pietà, I
discovered the following additional information about the sculpture. First, it
came originally from the medieval parish church of Gavray in the La Manche
district of Normandy; secondly both church and sculpture were desecrated during
the French Revolution, the Pieta being vandalised in 1794 by a local man,
Gasteclou dit Lacroix. In 1802, the sculpture was recovered and reassembled by
a craftsman named Marchand, and later attempts were made to restore it, but the
old church at Gavray was demolished and a new one built on a different site, where
(it appears) the Pietà failed to find a permanent home. Eventually, in 1956, it
was given into the safekeeping of the Beck family who lived at Hambye and were then
securing the walls of the ruined abbey (which had also been partly dismantled during the Revolution) and were beginning the restoration of the
monastic buildings. It is for this reason that I'm confident neither Rilke nor
Thomas would have seen this particular Pietà.
[Information
retrieved with the help of ChatGPT, based on searches of local records located
at Inventaire-patrimoine.normandie.fr]
Illustrations: (i) The Pietà at
Hambye (ii) detail of the Pietà. (photos © the author)
Poems: (a) Rainer Maria Rilke:
‘Pietà’ from Das Marien-Leben (1912). The lines as quoted are my translation
of these in the original version:
Jetzt
liegst du quer durch meinen Schooß,
jetzt
kann ich dich nicht
mehr
gebären.
(b) R.S.Thomas:
from ‘Pietà, the title poem from his fifth collection, Pietà (1967)
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