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Full of surprises: a routine cleaning of a 16th century
painting revealed this representation of Christ with breasts
Scraping away layers of paint from an old convent artwork,
the restorer could not believe his eyes. John Miller had a look for
himself
from The Bulletin December 21st 2000
Toward the end of the 16th century, a group of nuns
-Augustine sisters of charity -commissioned a painting of Christ. They loved
him, they told God and each other, because he gave the world life like a mother
gives her baby milk. And so they asked the artist to provide their Jesus with a
woman’s hips and breasts.
The painting, Lamentations around the body of
Christ, was hung in the nuns’ hospital-convent, Notre-Dame a la Rose
in Lessines, now a splendid museum 100 kilometres west of Brussels. But the
breasts, concealed under a further coat of paint in the 19th century, remained
a secret until 1993. Then the town of Lessines commissioned Ghent art restorer
Bart Verbeek to clean the hospital’s collection of paintings.
“Everything seemed normal at first,” says
Verbeek, 46, a practising Catholic who had done work for Ghent’s cathedral
and museums. “Jesus looked like an ordinary man until I removed the layer
of more recent paint. At first, I was afraid it was a hoax. But subsequent
tests confirmed that the painting was genuine.”
According to art and theology experts, theories about
Christ’s “womanliness” were relatively common during the Middle
Ages. The Lamentations, however, is a unique manifestation of this idea
in art.
The painting, by an unidentified artist, is one of many
interesting works at Notre-Dame a la Rose hospital, which is open to the public
in summer and by appointment during the rest of the year.
Since being saved by local activists after it closed as a
hospital in 1980, the museum has undergone an 85-million-BF facelift funded by
the Walloon Region and the town of Lessines.
It is one of the country’s oldest hospitals, having
existed in some form or another since 1242.
“We’ve kept art and artefacts from its entire
existence,” says caretaker Marc Vuidar, a former language teacher who
started volunteering three years ago and loved it so much he made it his
full-time job. “Unlike other places that were pillaged or burned, this
institution was never touched.”
The museum’s furniture, art, chalices and other
artefacts are worth hundreds of millions of BE But Notre-Dame’s real
interest is the insights it affords into the history of medicine: from healing
through God and the Church to modern treatments
The buildings, erected in the 16th and 17th centuries, have
the air of a large farmhouse. Gardens and grounds - built to give the nuns
self-sufficiency - are well-maintained. Inside, the rooms have been restored to
tell the hospital’s story.
In the 13th century, medicine was a pretty basic affair.
Half of all women died during childbirth. Anyone who was ill in body or mind
was sent to nuns and priests - only the rich could afford doctors. But a
succession of small epidemics in cities around 1200 motivated noblemen and
merchants to finance religious establishments for the poor and sick.
Noblewoman Alix de Rosoit founded the hotel-Dieu of
Lessines in 1242, with money inherited from her husband who died in battle. It
was built to “welcome those so poor and weak that they were not even able
to beg door to door”. And like most medieval hospitals, it was run by
Augustine sisters, who lived in the convent-hospital, preached charity and
cared for the sick.
Their patients had first to confess and take holy
communion. Then they’d be led to the sick room, faithfully reproduced at
Notre-Dame a la Rose. It is decorated with crucifixes, relic boxes and biblical
paintings. The ceiling is high because the experts associated sickness with air
that was hot, damp and stuffy, while a healthy atmosphere was cold, dry and
airy. So no heating either.
The patients were put two or three to a bunk - a luxury in
the days when entire families often shared one bed. The sheets were red to
obscure traces of blood. The nuns might burn eucalyptus leaves to neutralise
the smells and disinfect the air. Every day, two wide doors would open into the
chapel, where mass would be conducted for everyone. And so on until you were
cured.
Over the years, treatment methods came and went. Bleeding,
for example, was a popular cure until the beginning of the 19th century.
Illness, doctors believed, was caused by bad blood, and purges would generate
new, healthy blood. As well as bleeding knives, the hospital has an
intimidating collection of enemas which look like oversized syringes. The idea
was that illness was caused by bad “humours”, which had to be ejected
from the body.
Trepanning - drilling a hole in the skull to deflate blood
clots and congestion -was pioneered at Notre-Dame a la Rose. The hospital has a
set of drills for that. “This had an 85 percent success rate,” says
Vuidar, who adds that for all these practices, “they knew what they were
doing”.
If a wound was infected, the surgeon would saw off (eight
kinds of saw on display) the affected limb. There was naturally no anaesthetic.
“They would just give you as much alcohol to drink as possible,” says
Vuidar. In the 19th century, if you had a psychological, or “nervous”
disorder, the medic would use two nodes attached to electric wires and hooked
up to a pedal-powered electricity wheel, the patient was then treated with a
primitive form of electric shock therapy.
By the 19th century, modern ideas of hygiene meant that
each patient had his own bed. The French Revolution had eliminated religious
images from the sick room, and the nuns were referred to as
“citizens”. Welfare services took over funding from the church.
Around 1900, the hospital was turned into an old person’s home and
hospital, which it remained until 1980.
The most emblematic figure in the hospital’s history
has to be Sister Marie-Rose Carouy, for whom the institution was renamed after
her death in 1923. A tough businesswoman, she invented a “miracle”
healing cream called Helkiase, which was sold until 1945.
Sister Marie-Rose ran one of the world’s first modern
advertising campaigns, hanging signs for the product in railway stations,
streets and shops. Peddling Helkiase from India to the United States, she also
obtained highly-publicised endorsements from doctors. “It is a
disinfectant based on mercury salt,” says Vuidar. “We still
don’t know the exact composition.”
Vuidar saves the Lamentations around the body of
Christ for the last part of his guided tour. It hangs in a first-floor
“bishop’s guest room”, a lavishly-decorated bedroom. In the
painting, angels surround Jesus as his fingers close around his left nipple, as
if he were lactating. “For the nuns, it made Christ easier to identify
with,” says Vuidar. “This is an androgynous Christ who incarnates the
virtues of man and woman.”
To a layman, the work might appear heretical but, say
theologians, it’s not meant to be taken literally. Saint Paul, in his
letter to the Galatians, wrote, “There is neither male, nor female; for ye
are all one in Christ Jesus.” “There was much written in the Middle
Ages about Jesus’ womanly qualities,” says William Collinge, author
of The Dictionary of Catholicism. “There just aren’t many physical
manifestations of this.”
A nun in the Middle Ages was supposed to have two kinds of
relationships with Christ. She was to be his faithful (and chaste) bride, and
she was to imitate him, in all ways possible. There are even stories of nuns
wearing false beards and men’s clothes. In that light, an androgynous
Christ appears less surprising.
In this painting, Christ may have been depicted with
breasts, but many works, like a well-known Man of Sorrows, focussed on
his sexual vitality.
Still, it is reasonable to assume that medieval painters
and sculptors produced dozens of androgynous Christs that were later mutilated
or overpainted. Thanks to modern restoration techniques, the one in Lessines
survived.
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