The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages. Mary Dzon

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Figure 10. The Celebration of the Nativity at Greccio, with an appearance of the baby Jesus to St. Francis. Fresco, Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi (ca. 1288–1297). By permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.

      While John of Greccio supposedly beheld a living child in the manger, the other bystanders probably saw a mere effigy. Perhaps Francis approached it spontaneously and embraced it, hoping that Jesus would respond to him through it, as he did through the crucifix at San Damiano (which, at least with its lips, came to life).¹⁹¹ Effigies of the Christ Child from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy have survived to the present day, the most famous of which is the Santo Bambino of Ara Coeli in Rome, supposedly carved by a Franciscan friar using wood from the Holy Land.¹⁹² Even though extant statues of the Christ Child, as far as I am aware, do not date as far back as the early thirteenth century, Francis probably made use of one such effigy at Greccio, perhaps one that had already been employed in a Christmas play or in a private devotional context. A passage from the Vita secunda already cited demonstrates that Francis himself was fond of such devotional statuettes. After telling the reader about the saint’s love of Christmas, Thomas of Celano notes that “he would lick the images of the baby’s limbs.”¹⁹³ Along similar lines, in the Book of Margery Kempe, while the English holy woman was in Italy she came across a woman, traveling with two Franciscans, who carried an effigy of Jesus in a chest. When this woman with the prized possession arrived in different cities, she would give other women the opportunity to lavish their affection on the statuette, which they did by putting clothes on it as if it were a real baby, kissing it “as thei it had ben [as if it were] God hymselfe.”¹⁹⁴ Along similar lines, the Revelations of Margaret Ebner (d. 1351), a Dominican nun of the Monastery of Maria Medingen, recount how she received “a lovely statue from Vienna—Jesus in the crib.” One night, Margaret was called to come to the statue in the choir. “Then great delight in the childhood of our Lord came over me,” she recalls, “and I took the statue of the Child and pressed it against my naked heart as strongly as I could. At that I felt the movement of His mouth on my naked heart.” Another sister later tells her of the dream she had of giving Margaret her statue: “it was a living child … and [you] wanted to suckle it.”¹⁹⁵ The dynamics among Margaret, the statue, and the other nun can be seen as analogous to the triangular relationship that pertains among Francis, the mysterious boy in the manger, and the observer John. While Margaret clearly relates to the Child as a mother, Francis wakes him up and then simply hugs him. Francis’s follower Anthony of Padua similarly embraced the child Jesus, according to the man who, when he happened to peer into the friar’s chamber, saw him doing so.¹⁹⁶ Perhaps at the celebration at Greccio, Francis embraced the infant Jesus to comfort him in a maternal way, considering Francis’s well-known compassion for the discomforts attending Jesus’ birth.¹⁹⁷ Caroline Walker Bynum’s remark that Francis “is described as cradling all creation—from a rabbit to the baby Jesus—in his arms as a mother” strikes me as somewhat of an exaggeration,¹⁹⁸ but it is nonetheless true that Francis’s personality may be regarded, in some ways, as maternal.

      In the Upper Church of San Francesco, the inscription underneath the fresco that depicts Francis’s encounter with the baby Jesus at Greccio provides evidence that an effigy was part of the manger scene that Francis had arranged. All the inscriptions accompanying the Life of St. Francis cycle in the Upper Church are based upon Bonaventure’s Legenda major, the text that became the official biography of Francis in 1266, around a generation prior to the execution of the cycle.¹⁹⁹ Although only some of the letters of the inscription for the Christmas fresco are still legible, the text has been reconstructed and reads, in translation, as follows: “How Blessed Francis, in memory of the birth of Christ, had a crib (praesepium) prepared, hay brought, an ox and ass led in, and preached concerning the birth of the poor king, and likewise, as the holy man was in prayer, a certain knight saw the child Jesus in the place of the one that the saint had brought.”²⁰⁰ These words are closely based on Bonaventure’s text, which repeats Thomas’s earlier description of the props almost verbatim. What is new here, though, is the statement that the Christ Child appeared in place of the boy whom the saint had brought; this implies that a statue was included in the manger scene and that it came to life or was, in some way, temporarily replaced by a living Christ Child. Regardless of whether Francis himself brought an effigy of the infant Jesus to the Christmas Eve Mass or told John to do so (when he instructed him to bring a praesepe), there seems to have been a statue of an infant placed in the manger at Greccio. Having a replica of the newborn Jesus before their “bodily eyes” would undoubtedly have helped the participants imagine the Nativity and, in addition, recognize the Child’s Eucharistic presence on the altar.

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