Medieval Smile Discussed

The Facial Gesture (Mis)Reading Emotion in Gothic Art
Elina Gertsman
The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, Volume 36, Number
1, 2010, pp. 28-46 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/mrc.0.0003
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mrc/summary/v036/36.1.gertsman.html
Access Provided by University Of Chicago Libraries at 09/03/10 1:46AM GMT

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the facial gesture: (mis)reading
emotion in gothic art
Elina Gertsman
Southern Illinois University
In the ninth canto of Dante’s Paradiso , Folco of Marseilles speaks to the poet
about his former sins or, rather, about the needlessness of thinking of his
former sins in the blissful universe of paradise:

Non però qui si pente, ma si ride,

non della colpa, ch’a mente non torna,

ma del valor ch’ordinò e provide.

[Yet we repent not, but we smile,

not for the fault which returns not to mind,

but for the Power that ordained and foresaw.] 1

Folco’s smile without regret is simultaneously perplexing and encouraging:
it signifi es divine forgiveness and dismissal of one’s transgressions; it
appears a bit self-mocking but laced with pathos; it is a smile of a weak man
directed at an all-powerful God. 2 The complexity of Folco’s facial gesture
points to the importance of studying the body as the site of mediated and
elicited emotion expressed through somatic symptoms, in this case a smile.

In the past few years, the study of emotion in the religious, social, and
literary history of the Middle Ages has gained particular importance and
urgency under the sensitive scholarly guidance of Barbara Rosenwein. 3
Art historians, too, have addressed a variety of visual signs in their
quest to explore medieval emotion, although its sustained history is
yet to be written. 4 But can a dependable visual vocabulary of emotion
be identifi ed, especially one encoded in a gesture? Some psychologists
think so: Paul Ekman, one of the leading researchers in the fi eld of
nonverbal communication, argues that facial expressions are universal
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and can be recognized as markers of one of seven basic emotions — anger,
contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise — across cultural
(and, presumably, temporal) divides. 5 Historians often agree: writing about
pain, for instance, Esther Cohen points out that one would be hard-pressed
to misidentify particular visual gestures as expressions of particular
emotion, such as grief, for “the turned-down mouth, the drawn brows, the
cry, are common to all humans.” 6

Here, I will briefl y consider two issues. In Gothic art, does the
gestural/facial expression—a smile, for instance— consistently provide an
indication of the emotional state of the individual represented? Can we cor-
rectly recognize in it an imprint of emotion? And, in general, did medieval
viewers perceive this visual symptom as a reliable somatic expression with
a fi xed, predetermined meaning? In order to answer these questions we
must pay close attention to the contexts—social, bodily, and visual—in
which smiles are found, the contexts that offer intelligibility to what is
an essentially ambiguous facial gesture. In her groundbreaking work on
early medieval emotion, Rosenwein identifi es what she calls “emotional
communities,” circumscribing “the modes of emotional expression that
they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.” 7 In an attempt to estab-
lish such a community (here, a viewing community), I restrict this brief
study to thirteenth-century architectural sculpture placed on the exterior
of churches, marking a threshold between the sacred and secular realms. 8


The ambiguity of Folco’s smile as it is written by Dante offers a glimpse
of the varied meanings that can be excavated from Gothic smiling images
placed within religious contexts. 9 Yet attempting to read consistency in these
meanings is problematic. When Ekman and his colleagues argue for the
universal signal value of facial expressions, they suggest the immutability
of the connection between a specifi c facial pattern and a given emotion. 10
Although I do not intend to dispute the intricacies of their theory, I do
take issue with their underlying assumption that a facial expression is an
accurate snapshot of a particular mental state. Ekman’s team is especially
emphatic about linking the smile and the emotion of happiness and
joy; and for that connection they rely on visual evidence—in their case,
photographs, which, as Ekman and his colleague Wallace Friesen write in

Unmasking the Face , “show the facial blueprints of the major emotions.” 11
Even though the theory has been challenged by other psychologists,
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30
Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures
James Russell among them, 12 it remains a part of the canon to the extent
that the stock textbook on social psychology claims that for happiness, as
for the other fi ve basic emotions, “universality of facial expression has been
established by showing that members of cultures having no visual contact
can correctly recognize one another’s expressions.” 13 The implication here
is that these cultures can be isolated either geographically or temporally: a
smiling face—whether for an inhabitant of New Guinea, or for a medieval
layman, or for a modern Westerner—is always a happy face. In other
words, Ekman’s stance disallows any cultural differences inherent in
the interpretation of an image of a facial gesture (he does, after all, use
posed photographs in his key studies) and seeks emotion where one is not
necessarily to be found. 14

Art historians, conversely, would recognize a smiling image, as Paul

Binski terms it in his dazzling analysis of the Lincoln Angel Choir, to be
“an epiphenomenon of northern Gothic naturalism or humanism.” 15 For

Binski, such a verisimilar aesthetic allows for the body to “become the
unambiguous sign of the inner moral resources of the protagonists.” 16
A similar statement was made by Moshe Barasch vis-à-vis tears. Although
he acknowledges the ambiguous valence of tears in medieval culture,

Barasch does see consistency in their appearance in fi fteenth-century Flem-
ish painting, and reads them as a positive attribute: “Only fi gures of inher-
ent sanctity,” he suggests, “are allowed to shed tears.” 17
Can the same be said about the smile? I have no quarrel with the idea
that the smile is implicated in the aesthetics of Gothic naturalism or even
that it is intimately associated with the late medieval acknowledgment of
the body’s capacity for metaphysical expression. I do, however, question the
notion that smiling images are meant to exteriorize plausibly and consis-
tently the inclinations of the soul.

Nothing is better suited for an examination of the inherent complexity of
such a smile than the images that seek to establish clear dichotomies between
the blessed and the damned, such as the group of Wise and Foolish Virgins
that stands at the north portal of the Magdeburg Cathedral. Originally created
in 1250 (whether for the north or west portal is unclear), the group was repo-
sitioned on the enlarged north portal in the early fourteenth century. On the
viewer’s left, the Wise Virgins gather, their poised curvilinear bodies seemingly
swaying in time to celestial music (Figure 1). On the other side of the portal,
clutching their empty lamps, the Foolish Virgins weep (Figure 2).
The Magdeburg sculptures are based on a parable found in Matthew
25:1–13:
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fig. 1 The Wise Virgins, Magdeburg.

Then shall the kingdom of heaven be like to ten virgins, who taking
their lamps went out to meet the bridegroom and the bride. And
fi ve of them were foolish and fi ve wise. But the fi ve foolish, having
taken their lamps, did not take oil with them: But the wise took oil
in their vessels with the lamps. And the bridegroom tarrying, they
all slumbered and slept. And at midnight there was a cry made:
Behold the bridegroom cometh. Go ye forth to meet him. Then all
those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said
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Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures
fig. 2 The Foolish Virgins, Magdeburg.
to the wise: Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out. The wise
answered, saying: Lest perhaps there be not enough for us and for
you, go ye rather to them that sell and buy for yourselves. Now whilst
they went to buy the bridegroom came: and they that were ready went
in with him to the marriage. And the door was shut. But at last came
also the other virgins, saying: Lord, Lord, open to us. But he answering
said: Amen, I say to you, I know you not. Watch ye therefore, because
you know not the day nor the hour. 18
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The doors to the marriage feast hall are now locked; the foolish failed to
come into the hall—and therefore into the kingdom of heaven. The Glossa
Ordinaria , as well as other biblical commentaries, interprets the parable as
a tale of warning: the fi ve Wise Virgins are the fi ve senses of the Christian
soul, and their oil is the highest virtue of charity; the fi ve Foolish Virgins
stand for the fi ve lusts that excite the body, and their lamps no longer
burn with the love of God; the slumber of the women, as they wait for the
bridegroom, is the slumber of death from which Christ will rouse human-
ity at the Second Coming. 19 The placement of the Virgins on the porch
of the church, across from the equally dichotomous representation of the
Church and the Synagogue, is fi tting: the very portal of the church, which
demarcates the border between the holy and the profane, participates in the

visualization of this parable of exclusion. 20

The emphatic gestures of the protagonists at Magdeburg set the two
groups apart more than the entranceway itself: the elegantly expressive
body language of the Wise Virgins, who appear to conduct a graceful dance,
is contrasted with the movement of the Foolish women, their bodies con-
stituted of sharp angles, who bring their hands to their faces, sometimes
pulling their draperies upward. These extreme gestures have been seen as
a typical medieval visualization of grief, “bodily displays of emotion . . . as
demonstrative acts of public communication meant to highlight the seri-
ousness of a situation.” 21 Such bodily display, ostensibly, is meant to involve
the viewer in the lively spectacle of joy and sorrow; it has been argued that
the Virgins’ somatic disposition is not a demonstration of but, rather, a
response to their place in the parable, meant to “exert [upon the beholders],
through their bodily dynamism” a kind of a “psychological pressure.” 22

Indeed, the Virgins may well be exhibiting emotional responses: one may
say that the Wise ones are happy to be admitted into the feast hall, while
the Foolish grieve; these are emotions fi tting the parable’s narrative. Yet
the body language of the two groups points to an additional interpretation.
The Foolish Virgins gesticulate, and their gesticulations, while certainly
denoting the gravity of the situation, also indicate the body out of control—
while their counterparts, collected and composed, do not gesticulate but
gesture. 23 What is most remarkable in the Magdeburg sculptures, however,
is the way that the gesture/gesticulation dichotomy is underscored through
facial expression: the Wise Virgins offer up to the viewer serenely smiling
faces, while the Foolish Virgins choke back invisible tears, wiping them
dramatically off their contorted faces. Like the bodily gestures, the facial
ones point to the difference in the status of the saved and the damned.
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Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures
The smile is used precisely as such a tool for differentiation: its presence
demonstrates the inner goodness of the Wise Virgins and is equated
with salvation, while its lack signals the moral weakness of their Foolish
counterparts and is likened to damnation. The distinction, located
within the bodily response and nowhere else—the women have similar
physiognomies and body types and wear similar clothing—inscribes its
meaning in the presence of the smile. Such structuring of the difference
through bodily and facial gesture is not unique to Magdeburg: although
considerably toned down, the body language of the Wise and Foolish Virgins
on the exterior of St. Stephen’s church in Nuremberg equally designates the
Wise by the presence of a smile and the Foolish by the lack thereof. They
embody the diametrically opposing tropes of vice and virtue; the moral and
the immoral; and at Magdeburg, associated as they are with the Church and
the Synagogue, the old and the new.

Both groups at Magdeburg, presumably, are conceived as visual sites
of temporal, human activity — the tranquil smiles of the blessed, the
writhing bodies of the damned —which are in direct relationship with the
somaticism of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century spirituality that put great
stock into the expressive performativity of the body. 24 This temporality,
often inscribed in sculpted imaginings of real individuals — one readily
thinks of the infectious grin of the equestrian statue of Cangrande della
Scala of Verona (Figure 3) or of the congenial smile of Reglindis, who stands
fig. 3 Equestrian
monument
of Cangrande della Scala.
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amid the founder statues at Naumburg Cathedral— implies animation
and physicality, and physicality is of course transient and denies eternity. 25

And yet, it is precisely this eternity that is implied in the facial gesture
of the Magdeburg Wise Virgins, the gesture one fi nds in abundance in the
angelic and saintly fi gures that greet the viewer on the exterior of certain
Gothic churches — the Reims Cathedral, for instance (Figure 4)— and are
meant to evoke the gaudium aeternum , the eternal joy of heaven. 26 For the
medieval viewer, the church constituted the image of the city of God on
earth, of heavenly Jerusalem. 27 John’s Revelation 21:2 –27, which tells of
the holy city that descended from heaven “prepared as a bride adorned
for her husband,” found its embodiment in a Gothic church, with its
multiple portals, gleaming windows, and high walls. The angels that
John saw standing in the doorways (Rev. 2:12) were carved in stone and
placed within the context of holy structures —heavenly ambassadors with
unforgettable smiles of heavenly joy. Pseudo-Dionysius explicated this joy,
described in Luke 15:7–10 as “a truly divine sense of well-being, the good
and generous delight at the providence and salvation of those who are
returned to God. They are,” he concludes, “unspeakably happy.” 28 These
angels greet the viewer by way of greeting saints, and the contrast between
the celestial and the terrestrial is underscored in facial gesture: at Reims,
one such angelic salutation is directed at the melancholic Saint Denis,
fig. 4 The smiling angel of
Annunciation at the portal
of Reims Cathedral.
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Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures
welcomed to Paradise; and another is reserved for the subdued Virgin
Mary, welcomed by a grinning angel, as she is fi lled with grace. 29 The
smile, here, is a sign of Pseudo-Dionysian eternal “divine joy caused by
the fi nding of the lost.” 30

This divine joy, the elated, thrilling bliss of rapture, is the very gaudium
aeternum that Dante witnessed in Paradise through the smiling faces: “Faces
I saw of charity persuasive/Embellished by His light and their own smile/
And attitudes adorned with every grace.” 31 Peter Hawkins draws attention
to smiling as Dante’s “hallmark gesture”: 32 as Dante encounters more than
a thousand jubilant angels, he sees “at their sports and at their songs/
A beauty smiling, which the gladness was/Within the eyes of all the other
saints.” 33 Beatrice smiles the heavenly smile that recalls her past, terrestrial
one; planets smile, and the universe laughs; God himself, the Eternal Light,
says Dante, “lovest and smilest on Thyself.” 34 The everlasting quality of
these smiles is fi nally underscored in canto 31: there, Dante refers to him-
self as one who had come not only from the human to the divine realm but
also “from time unto eternity.” 35

The facial gesture at Magdeburg, then, is wrought with complex and
at times contradictory connotations: the emotive smile of bliss, which
becomes the site of collision between the transient and the eternal, is used
as a somatic symptom that denotes and differentiates moral character—
and therefore the ultimate fate of the soul. But in order to gauge the extent
of this contradiction one only has to turn to the sculpted group of the Wise
and the Foolish Virgins at the Strasbourg Cathedral (Figure 5), made just
fig. 5 The Wise and Foolish Virgins, Strasbourg.
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