Moshe Barasch

Gestures express moods, all of which are both ancient and immediate. The author explores what appear to be imbedded layers among us by tracing their appearance in Art. While history knows that Archetypal patterns school across periods, little has been done to trace specific motifs. Barasch focuses on a tight group of gestures--despair and fear--mainly consisting of "raising the hands to the head".

Barasch bears witness to the transformation of gestures of despair between the early and late Middle Ages--"a deep modification" leaving an impact across all the arts, and in religious, cultural and emotional life. "In painting, the new wave of emotionalism" crystalized in great Themes such as "Man of Sorrows" or "Madonna of Humility".

The 58 illustrative plates are plainly described to illustrate his points. We read the bodies. Art exposes the fact that emotions run deep, but the shifts in the archetypes of their expression reveals that they are dictated by socio-cultural reality. Our suffering is real, but our behavior is but a mirror.

The history of certain Themes exposes the emergence of violent gestures of fear and mourning in Italian art. One wonders why anyone would pay an artist or carver to do ugly or fear-some art! By the 13th century, they appear and by the 14th the articulation is "frequent". [124]

Barasch notes that a parallel shift is in their meaning. No longer confined to the figures of sinners and damned, figures central to religion appear in the same agonies. A gesture performed by a sinner (Ira in the Arena Chapel), is performed by an angel in the "Crucifixion". The laceration of the face is performed by both the damned in the Last judgement, and by the holy mourners of Christ. The gesture-motifs have migrated, across an iconographic context. [125]

The contradictory and interconnected Art (and literature) of the 13th and 14th century "were probably an important source of Renaissance art" in the 15th century. Leonardo's notes reveal that he drew upon images of the damned in representing the Virgin lamenting her Son. He concludes with a quote from the Notebooks:

"...Others were not content with shutting their eyes, but laid their hands one over the other to cover them the closer that they might not see the cruel slaughter of the human race by the wrath of God....Ah! how many mothers wept over their drowned sones, holding them upon their knees, with arms raised spread out towards heaven and with words and various gestures, upbraiding the wrath of the gods. Others with clasped hands and fingers clenched gnawed them and devoured them until they bled, crouching with their breast down on their knees in their intense and unbearable anguish."… (más)