Book 5, lines 261-281

[Previous: lines 245-260]

Hoping it will be punishment enough on its own to satisfy the Jews, Pilate has ordered Jesus flogged.

Iam largo undabat foedatum sanguine corpus,
perfusique artus tabo, liventia crura,
collaque brachiaque et detectae verbere costae
atque eiectabat crassum roseo ore cruorem.
Talem in conspectu populi statuere, cruentos                   [265]
nudum humeros, pectusque,ambasque a poplite plantas;
nam medium texto velabat carbasus albo.
Palluit aspectu coelum, conterrita fugit
cornibus obtusis sub terram argentea luna,
nimbosoque diu latitans evanuit ore:                                [270]
et pariter visa astra polo cecidisse sereno.
Non tamen hostiles explevit sanguine poenas
sed magis, atque magis crudescunt corda precando,
quae non ullae artes, quae vis non mitigat ulla,
immerito letum intendunt, extremaque poscunt                 [275]
supplicia infensi; resonant clamoribus alta
atria. Certatim se cuncti hortantur in iras.
Eumenides, missique inferna e nocte ministri
tartarei, tenues animae, sine corpore vitae
circumeunt, stimulosque acuunt ardentibus acres,            [280]
et lucem eripiunt miseris, agitantque furentes.

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Now blood flowed over his entire body
his limbs slick with gore and his legs contused.
His neck, his arms and his ribs were lash-marked
and he spat out blood from a reddened mouth.
They brought him out in full view of the crowd                 [265]
naked, blood on shoulders, chest, knees, soles of feet
with only white linen covering his midriff.
Heaven paled at the sight. Absenting itself,
the silver moon took its horns beneath the earth
and for a long time hid itself in clouds.                              [270]
Stars could be seen falling through the clear sky.
But his blood was not enough for this enemy:
rather their hearts grew ever crueller until
neither persuasion nor force could dissuade them.
Determined to kill an innocent man                                    [275]
they angrily insisted, the lofty halls
echoing their yells, egging one another on.
Furies and hellish agents broke forth that night
from below, tenuous ghosts lacking bodies—
circling round the mob, spurring them sharply on              [280]
sapping their minds, agitating their frenzy.

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Gardner thinks Vida’s reference to the fine linen loincloth, all that Jesus is wearing in line 267 (nam medium texto velabat carbasus albo) owes something to Vergil’s description of the river god Tiberinus appearing to Aeneas: eum tenuis glauco velabat amictu/carbasus’ ‘fine linen draped him in a mantle of blue’ [Aeneid 8:33-34] which seems a stretch to me. We’re on safer ground with line 272, Non tamen hostiles explevit sanguine poenas , which does rather look like a deliberate inversion of Vergil’s account of Hippolytus, torn to pieces by wild horses, who thus occiderit patriasque explerit sanguine poenas ‘satisfied his father’s vengeance with his blood’ [Aeneid 7:766].

Vida’s description of the flagellated Christ stands somewhere between the prettified visions of earlier medieval artists on the one hand, and the grislier, more upsetting Durer-style representations of the early Renaissance. Joseph Hewitt traces this change to the thirteenth-century, though we might want to peg it a little later than that, or rather to suggest that the earlier, prettified version of the passion persisted long after more violent visions entered the cultural mainstream:

Early crucifixions show the Saviour in no apparent pain, but often crowned and triumphant, not exactly hanging from his cross but rather standing in front of it. In the very earliest instances the cross is merely hinted at or is quite obscured. Some- where about the thirteenth century the emphasis changes. The figure writhes, the face shows agony, blood flows profusely. Together with this the method of inflicting death grows in crudity, if not in cruelty. The spear-wound, historically inflicted after death, is used to increase the impression of suffering. A horrible thorn-crown replaces the royal crown or the rope-like wisp of mild bramble. [Joseph William Hewitt, ‘The Use of Nails in the Crucifixion’, The Harvard Theological Review 25:1 (1932), 30]

At the head of this post, for instance, is Piero della Francesca's poised and elegant representation of the scene (1470)—rather too poised and elegant we might think. Flagellation, or scourging, was a usual Roman punishment, a typical prelude to crucifixion, and it was very horrible indeed:

Whips with small pieces of metal or bone at the tips were commonly used. Such a device could easily cause disfigurement and serious trauma, such as ripping pieces of flesh from the body or loss of an eye. In addition to causing severe pain, the victim would approach a state of hypovolemic shock due to loss of blood.

The Romans reserved this treatment for non-citizens, as stated in the lex Porcia and lex Sempronia, dating from 195 and 123 BC. The poet Horace refers to the horribile flagellum (horrible whip) in his Satires. Typically, the one to be punished was stripped naked and bound to a low pillar so that he could bend over it, or chained to an upright pillar so as to be stretched out. Two lictors (some reports indicate scourgings with four or six lictors) alternated blows from the bare shoulders down the body to the soles of the feet. There was no limit to the number of blows inflicted—this was left to the lictors to decide, though they were normally not supposed to kill the victim. Nonetheless, Livy, Suetonius and Josephus report cases of flagellation where victims died while still bound to the post. Flagellation was referred to as ‘half death’ by some authors, as many victims died shortly thereafter. Cicero reports in In Verrem, ‘pro mortuo sublatus brevi postea mortuus’ (‘taken away for a dead man, shortly thereafter he was dead’)

Nonetheless, artists continued with a tradition that downplayed the somatic trauma of scourging in favour of a kind of abstracted and rarified ‘essence of pain’. Here's Francesco Bacchiacca's representation of the scene, painted in the same decade in which the Christiad was published. Three depilated and toned nude masculine bodies in dance-like poses:

And here, from around 1720, is Nicolò Grassi's study in contrasting skin-tones: almost semi-abstract in its juxtaposition of the white purity of Jesus as against the dun and tanned imperfection of the violent humans who surround him.

It takes a particular artist to do what Matthias Grünewald did, working north of the Alps as Vida was scribbling away south of them.

It's easy to see, in context, how shocking this kind of representation of Jesus's body would be. Vida is not so mimsily purged of blood and nastiness as those images above, although he doesn't go down the full Grünewaldian route of physical disgust and distress either.

[Next: lines 282-299]