The Pensive Christ

A short essay describing some background to the Pensive Christ image, with a video documenting the making process of a recent commission of the Pensive Christ.

The image of Christ seated on a stone awaiting Crucifixion is a very particular image born from the imagination of late medieval-piety of northern Europe. It appears as an adaption of a very ancient kind of pose.

Thousands of years ago, in a small home in Romania, hands grasped the clay from which we were created and started to create themselves. Thumb, finger and a crude tool formed the image of contemplation. To shape what is now known as The Thinker of Cernavoda, one of the oldest sculptures depicting human introspection. The mind and hand working in unison to express a fundamental reality.

Further images of this contemplative, melancholy type of work can be found elsewhere. One being the Spong Man, which sits on the lid of a burial urn that contained the cremated bones of a 5th century Anglo-Saxon inhabitant of East Anglia. The urn was found buried in a cemetery on Spong Hill, Norfolk. Right on the cusp of the Saxons accepting Christianity. He is the only three-dimensional human figure from this period found in England and one of only two found in Europe. It is a mystery who this is, yet it shows the sat, contemplating man. With a powerfully stark expression.

This is the kind of pose or symbol, that strikes incredibly deeply into our psyche and being. So to me, it seems as no surprise that it came to become a Christian image of Christ. It is an image that is outside of liturgical art, and enters into a folk tradition across Northern Europe. It came to be known in German as Christus im Elend – 'Christ in Distress' or Christus in der Rast - ‘Christ at Rest; In Polish: Chrystus Frasobliwy - ‘The Pensive Christ; Lithuanian: Rūpintojėlis - ‘Carer’. It is a depiction of an image that has been mostly known in sculpture rather than in painting. In Lithuania for instance, for some people the Rūpintojėlis has become a symbol of national character, a caretaker for the nation, for others it is just a figure carved crudely by some peasant craftsman.

Pensive Christ of Seeberg (around 1509)

Christus im Elend 1495-1505

Rūpintojėlis

The Gospels make no mention of Christ stopping in the sequence of events leading to the Crucifixion, but there was a tendency in medieval devotion to break up the Passion narrative into as many sections as possible to extend the amount of individual focuses for meditation. In the Pensive Christ imagery, Christ seems to have momentarily withdrawn from the narrative that leads to the fateful martyrdom so that we may come to contemplate the depth of his anguish. Émile Mâle, a French art historian from the 1920s drew attention to this character of the Pensive Christ, writing “The seated Christ summarises the entire Passion; he has exhausted the violence, the ignominy, the bestiality of man… Here is the abyss of suffering, and the extreme limit of art … The seated Christ thinks and suffers. Thus, art had to express the profoundest moral suffering imaginable and link it with the extreme of physical suffering.”

The head resting on the hand represents and recalls these ancient representations of melancholy and contemplation. It is a visualisation of the verses from Isiah of the ‘Song of the Suffering Servant’, and a verse from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, ‘O all ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow’ (Lamentations 1:12).

The sculpture elicits compassion for the viewer, to reflect on the Suffering God, to feel guilt and compassion for the love of Christ, by undergoing the Crucifixion on behalf of mankind.

Of course I couldn’t write about this pose without mentioning Rodin’s Thinker, which has captured the admiration of many, and is monumental in it’s popularity. If you were to ask most people about the Spong Man, I’m sure they wouldn’t have heard of it, but the Thinker, most definitely.

This highlights the capacity that this ancient pose has in our grasping of reality. It just so happens that the Rodin statue, in its Roman monumentality has spread most. It points towards Rodin’s rags to riches story as a canny businessman and an artist, his approach was industrial. He would sculpt in clay, get his team to make a cast in plaster, then buyers could place an order for a bronze. This method allowed for the spread of these works.

Originally created for the Gates of Hell, depicting the first section of Dante’s Inferno in the Divine Comedy. This was a commissioned work for a museum that never came to be in Paris, yet Rodin worked intermittently on it until his death. The Directorate asked for an inviting entrance to a planned Decorative Arts Museum, with the theme left to Rodin’s decision. So Rodin in his inviting Frenchness, thought of the Inferno by Dante. This commission sparked the trajectory of the ideas he was to have in his career.

The figure central to the tympanum was originally called the Poet, aptly representing Dante contemplating the inferno below, though it wasn’t much of a portrayal as Dante; a thin ascetical man in robes, but a body building brute of a man naked with a Florentine cap on (The hat came to be removed from all other renditions of the Thinker, to take away any slight notion to Dante). It came to be known as the Thinker 20 years after the creation, not by the artist, which is an important detail to me, the poet suggests creation, the thinker suggests brooding and plotting. The poet dreams of Edens beauty, can see it in glimpses and gives it expression. The thinker looks to reason to try build Eden apart from God. I shall use the wise words of St Porphyrios again, as it is very apt. “For a person to become a Christian, he must have a poetic soul.  He must become a poet.  Christ does not wish insensitive souls in his company.  Poetic hearts embrace love and sense it deeply.”

The gates are a remarkable work, it reminds me of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, there is passion and torment seeping out of every corner of the work. It is a shame that the Poet has become disconnected to it’s original context, being tweezered out of the inferno and copy and pasted across the globe, becoming this universal man.

It is interesting to note the association of this pose from early man, to the Pensive Christ and then to the Thinker, from poetry to reason. The early man is like a child in infancy awakening to suffering, Christ portrays the ultimate end to suffering, Life is freely given in the greatest loving act this earth has ever witnessed. In contrast to the Thinker, which implies this universal rational man, a man for all places, placing thinking as one of the highest heights of human life, using brains to overcome the suffering, monumentalised in dense verdigris bronze. Clearly this is fallible. History shows this time and time again. The thinker is a pursuit of gnosis rather than theosis.

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So there is a short background to this type of work. Here comes the adaption/creation of a new work. Firstly it was to be in relief, a change in composition as most of the examples are statues. This poses some difficulty on getting the physicality of the head resting on the hand correctly. When flat, it can look as if Christ is holding his hand to his face, (or in our modern age, holding a phone to his ear) rather than the weight of the head leaning on the palm. I tried to achieve this with an exaggeration of the bend in the stomach and the curve in neck, the angle emphasises the leaning downwards. I don’t usually do clay studies before a carving, preferring the direct approach. Yet I didn’t want to go gun ho into this and scratch my head whilst carving. Preparation is half the victory so they say…

A small video showing the process of the carving, it is carved in a piece of slate, usually slate is used for letter carving, as it holds the chisel marks particularly well, and holds a very definite finish. For relief carving the same applies, it holds the light in a very beautiful and refined manner.