Drawing Christ's blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the aesthetics of reform

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2006 by Una Roman D'Elia

Bernardino Ochino, the famous Capuchin preacher who would later convert to Protestantism and flee north, also had a complex view of the relationship between intellectual sophistication and a simple faith in Christ Crucified. Ochino was much admired in Italian reform circles before his apostasy. Vittoria Colonna followed him to hear him preach and saw him as a spiritual mentor. (35) Ochino used paradoxes to describe the role of the intellect in faith: "Neither with the sensual nor with material sight, but with a living faith informed by charity, and with your bodily eyes closed in order to contemplate better, enter into that holy haziness, that learned ignorance, and you will find that for Christ on the Cross nothing but the ardor of his charity moved him to suffer the bitter death in order to save your soul." (36) For Ochino, faith is not literally seeing Christ on the Cross (as it was for Vittoria Colonna), which would be merely material, but an internal understanding, learned in the sense that it seeks for causes, not mere emotions, but ignorant in its simplicity and lack of doctrinal complexity. Ochino writes in another sermon that it was not enough to consider the biblical stories as history, to think about Christ's birth and horrible torments on the Cross: "Instead you also need to break, tear, and crack those figures, those accidents, and those similes." (37) Ochino demands that the faithful perform exegetical violence on Scripture in order to reach a higher meaning than the merely dramatic. It is only by lacerating the flesh of a literal sensual understanding that the devout can move beyond the carnal. Ochino, like Colonna, emphasizes that faith in Christ Crucified is the only thing needed for Salvation. For Ochino, however, even Christ Crucified is like a symbol--from which the saved elite can decipher virtues and moral lessons--rather than Colonna's silencing dramatic vision. Images of the Passion, therefore, should not offer simple histories of suffering, the accidents of Christian history, but intellectualized visions of virtue. (38)

One of the most highly praised texts in reform circles was the Beneficio di Cristo, published anonymously in 1543. (39) A monk named Benedetto da Mantova (fl. 1534-41) wrote the Beneficio; Marcantonio Flaminio (1498-1550), a poet and friend of Vittoria Colonna, "polished" it. (40) The Beneficio di Cristo was later placed on the index of prohibited books, and the Inquisition interrogated intellectuals in Vittoria Colonna's circle about their attitudes toward it. (41) The Beneficio is typical of Italian reform ideas in its emphasis on faith in Christ Crucified (rather than works) as the key to Salvation. It is written in Italian and was published so that it could be distributed to a wide audience. The book consists of a series of meditations on various theological points. The narrator, though, stops himself to exclaim: "But why so many words? It should be enough for us to know that true Christians in their tribulations clothe themselves in the image of Christ Crucified." (42) Here, as for Vittoria Colonna, the image is simpler and more direct than the word.