Gilbert Márkus reflects on how to read a statue. Weekly blog.
To be honest, I’ve been walking around ignoring statues all my life, the only time I ever paid attention to these monuments of civic ideology was when someone did something daft like plonking a traffic cone on its head or climbing up it naked.
In the last few weeks though, I have been forced to think about statues, largely thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has recently drowned a statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston in the Bristol Docks, and which has brought down
various Confederate monuments in America.
But is there a specifically Catholic story to be told about statues and their place in the Western tradition. What are they for? What do they say?
In Ancient Rome and its neighbouring societies, the public statue was a statement of power. The emperor or the god who rules and protects this city. Or the great general who overthrows our enemies. At a more modest scale, celebrating the power of ‘our troops’ overthrowing our enemies, like this carving of a Roman cavalryman at Bridgeness (West Lothian), trampling defeated and naked British warriors. Power and submission.
The public statue celebrated power. And into this world comes Christianity with a different kind of statue. A statue (or carving) turning the whole genre upside down. It shows a powerless human body, a body subjected to judicial murder on a hill outside Jerusalem. It first appears around AD 400, carved on the door of the ancient church of Santa Sabina - certainly one of the first representations of the Crucified Christ in the west.
It is not a large piece. It doesn’t tower over the viewer, like the imperial statue on its plinth. It meets you at eye level. You can touch it. And the figure is stripped of all power – and most of his clothes – inviting not submission or admiration, but perhaps compassion; inviting the viewer to see the presence of God in powerlessness. It turns the ‘Great Man’ sculptural tradition upside down. The crucifix becomes the central and subversive idea in all our churches, and every Catholic home.
Here’s my office wall at home, and I write under this ‘statue’ every day
Of course, people continue to make statues of powerful people that celebrate power. The human temptation to admire power is one of the hardest to shake off, in spite of two thousand years of the preaching of the Gospel: ‘the greatest among you shall be the least’. We still do it with our Confederate generals, Herbert Colstons, Viscount Dundas, towering over us on their plinths. But perhaps unknowingly, the mobs that bring them down have inherited something of our Gospel tradition.
In the 1940s, Hungarian Nazis took thousands of Jews to the River Danube in Budapest, stole their possessions and shoes, and shot them, dropping their bodies into the river. At that spot is a different kind of sculpture: a row of shoes cast in bronze, fixed to the ground.
The sculpture has become a shrine, revealing the bodies of the murdered men, women and children, but revealing them as absent, their shoes marking where they once stood. People now come there to pray, lay flowers, remember. Not a celebration of power but a celebration of humanity in the face of power. A celebration of solidarity and compassion. It is in the same tradition as the crucifix that is the essential ‘statue’ which has guided the Catholic vision for so many generations.