Gregory C. Bryda’s The Trees of the Cross is an important contribution to the study of late medieval and early modern art, particularly of the German-speaking lands. Bryda’s book is about wood—the wood of the cross and the various associations and practices involving wood at the end of the Middle Ages. Among other things, it is a folkloristic study of the role of trees, vines, branches, and other forms of vegetal growth in the culture of the times—both urban and rural. As the author notes, folkloristic approaches have long been tainted by their association with national romanticism and racist ideologies. Blut und Boden (blood and soil) became a cri de coeur of National Socialism with its apotheosis of the peasant as an avatar of German identity. In the years after the Second World War, researchers shied away from anything that smacked of these values. But Bryda and others have sensibly reinserted folklore into discussion.
To a degree, village life centered about trees, which assumed an almost numinous quality. Wood was naturally essential to the construction of a variety of artifacts. But, as Bryda shows, it frequently retained its identity as the material of the cross—that chief instrument of Christ’s suffering and the salvation of humanity. Paintings and sculptures of the crucifixion would represent the cross, not as a delicately carpentered object but rather as a tree—occasionally as a live tree—with its round trunk supplying the upright. In several “forked crosses” (Gabelkreuzen) of the fourteenth century, the cross takes the form of branches, originally painted green and emitting small buds. In the monumental thirteenth-century cross in the Cistercian abbey at Bad Doberan, the cross is in full leaf.
The tree of the cross was easily associated with the Edenic tree of life. The Legend of the True Cross detailed the transference and transformation of the cross from its prehistory to the crucifixion and further to its status as a relic; splinters of the cross were avidly collected as relics throughout medieval and early modern Europe.
The Trees of the Cross focuses on wood artifacts, but it is a multimedia study, incorporating evidence from panel paintings and murals, illustrated manuscripts, stained glass, and goldwork. The first chapter deals with what Bryda calls the “vegetable saint” (21). Here he treats the correspondences between the cross and the tree of life, the greening of the cross. He discusses ritual processions that transported the crosses, bearing the marks of the tree from which they were cut, through various towns—rituals that in some cases are still enacted today. The chapter ends with a consideration of the confluence of genealogical, arboreal, and aquatic themes, the imbrication of Christian imagery with the forces of nature.
Chapter two addresses May festivities and the maypole. Preachers were tasked with converting what were essential pagan practices of growth and rebirth into a Christian frame. Stephan Fridolin’s Spiritual May did just that, associating spring rituals with humanity’s rebirth on the cross. The immensely popular preacher Johan Geiler von Kaysersberg advised listeners to “place in your hearts the greenery and maypole of seven green branches, upon which one can see Jesus” (59). The fourteenth-century Swabian mystic Heinrich Suso was particularly influential in harnessing vegetal images in service of Christian devotion. According to Suso, nature’s effects revealed the workings of the divine. Images of the fifteenth century could represent Christ crucified on the maypole. Nature’s rebirth was easily associated with the rebirth and regeneration that came through the sacrifice of Christ.
The tree became emblematic of this process. Especially large trees would be felled and erected in town squares. These maypoles would often be fitted with Christian symbols—the arma Christi. Indeed, the tree of life and the tree supplying the cross were easily conflated. Tree symbolism was everywhere. The lineage of the Prophet Jesse was an especially popular instance. From his “rod” (virga) sprang forth a vegetal tree-like emanation that carried with it Old Testament Kings and prophets, finally ending in the Virgin (virgo) and Jesus.
One of the most intriguing works discussed by Bryda is the Whipping Post in Chemnitz. This representation of the Flagellation of Christ situates Jesus and his tormentors around a sizeable tree trunk, adorned with twisting vines. Entirely carved from a single trunk, the work is a virtuoso performance. The tree itself is one of the principal actors in the drama as it links with the appreciable arboreal symbols of Christianity.
Chapter three focuses on Mathias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Here the salvific properties of Jesus’s body are linked with the medicinal properties of plants. Blood and tree resin become closely associated—the bleeding tree and the bleeding Christ. In Grünewald’s vision, Christ’s tortured body, abused and still carrying thorns from the flagellation, is likened to a tree itself, suffering comparable indignities.
Chapter four is centered on The Holy Blood Altarpiece in Rothenburg-ob-dem-Tauber, for which Tilman Riemenschneider famously carved the figures. The hero of this chapter is actually Erhard Harschner, the carpenter who fabricated the remarkably detailed and communicative case and crest of the altarpiece. Michael Baxandall had already mentioned that Harschner had been paid slightly more for the work than Riemenschneider, though his remarks were directed almost solely to the latter’s figural contribution. Harschner’s case casts its thin upright supports as vine-like emanations that interlace as they frame angels supporting a relic of holy blood and Christ as man of sorrows. The chapter offers Bryda a chance to discuss the relationship between Christ’s blood and wine—transformed in transubstantiation during the Mass but also lending themselves to a variety closely knit images and ideas. One of the most popular was the image of Christ in the winepress. Jesus’ body is literally compressed in this screw-like contraption, forcing his blood into the wine used for communion. Sometimes the cross itself crushes Christ’s body in the winepress. The author explores the rich associations between the culture of wine and wine production in the German lands and its relation to the Eucharist.
An epilogue charts the progress of these themes during the early years of the Reformation with its suspicion of images, its reorganization of the sacraments, and its condemnation of pre-Christian rituals that had survived in the culture.
The Trees of the Cross is in several ways a rejoinder to Michael Baxandall’s ground-breaking study of German sculpture of 1980: The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. Part of Baxandall’s innovative methodology was its consideration of the material properties of limewood (from the linden tree) as partially form-determining. Baxandall examined the molecular structure of limewood and its affordances. Secondarily, the author chose to present the sculptures of Tilman Riemenschneider, Veit Stoss, Hans Leinberger and their contemporaries as Renaissance works of art—thus part of the economic and social world of early modern Germany. Both his emphasis on material and the Renaissance were polemical. German art historians had long relegated these works to their medievalists. When Baxandall’s book appeared in a German translation in 1984, the title omitted both terms and became the anodyne Die Kunst der Bildschnitzer: Tilman Riemenschneider, Veit Stoß und ihre Zeitgenossen (“The art of the carver, Tilman Riemenschneider, Veit Stoss, and their contemporaries”).
Bryda acknowledges his debt to Baxandall but expands Baxandall’s “lens” (8) by taking account of a broader visual culture and incorporating folkloric and agricultural practices along with scientific and devotional literature. Bryda’s new perspective effectively re-envisions many of the key works of the German Renaissance as well as others much less well-known. Critically, Bryda cites Baxandall’s pronouncement in his earlier book on the value of superior art: “Only very good works of art, the performances of exceptionally organized men, are complex and coordinated enough to register in their forms the kinds of cultural circumstances sought here: second-rate art will be little use to us” (8). This has always been a questionable assertion and Bryda is right to interrogate it. It could just as easily be said that inferior works illustrate more clearly certain cultural notions than their more complex and aesthetically satisfying counterparts. Bryda, for instance, gets much mileage out of examining the Kranenburg Crucifix and simple woodcuts that cannot pretend to the mastery of their material that a Tilman Riemenschneider or Veit Stoss can command. Yet in their relatively simple forms these basic works more clearly reference certain religious ideals than the intricate and multivalent artworks of famous artists. Baxandall’s Limewood Sculptors did receive some criticism from early reviewers. Eberhard König questioned Baxandall’s concentration on famous individuals, thereby ignoring a number of anonymous works of remarkable quality—his confusing “Masterwork with Master’s work.” And Henri Zerner questioned Baxandall’s exclusive focus on wood, since the stone works by Riemenschneider and Stoss could reveal similar formal principles. These critiques lightly bear on Bryda’s book as well. The so-called “Whipping Post” in Chemnitz by the Master H. W. (who may be Hans Witten) is a case in point. Is it really an inferior work? Or does it simply belong to an unrecognized category and has therefore escaped commentary? While it may not pretend to the aesthetic excellence of Riemenschnieder’s best efforts, it is nonetheless a sculpture of outstanding conception and quality. The same could be said about Erhard Harschner’s carving on the cabinets and crests of Riemenschnieder’s altarpieces at Rothenburg and Creglingen. Bryda deserves much credit for bringing both to the attention of the reader. Furthermore, Bryda may be unhelpfully selective in confining his discussion to sculptures of wood. Although this is indeed the subject of his book, there are certain works of stone that also exemplify the vegetal and arboreal cast of religious art. The Master H. W. once more comes into the picture. His Whipping Post in Chemnitz and Column with the Man of Sorrows in Braunschweig are of wood. But his most famous work is the limestone “Tulip Pulpit” in Freiberg Cathedral, which presents the stage for the Word as a giant, monstrous flower already in decay. A brief reference to the Master H. W.’s other works could have strengthened Bryda’s argument.
The Trees of the Cross significantly expands our understanding of religious art in the late Medieval and early modern German Lands. Gregory Bryda exploits a great many types of cultural evidence in asserting the importance of wood, wine, and nature in general for visual culture. His folkloristic approach of much of the book parallels the method of Paul Vandenbroeck, for example, who has adopted a similar tack in addressing the works of Hieronymus Bosch. [1] This perspective nicely complements Michael Baxandall’s Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, which after four and a half decades still commands attention.
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1. Utopia’s Doom. The Graal as Paradise of Lust, the Sect of the Free Spirit and Jheronimus Bosch’s so-called Garden of Delights, Leuven: Peeters, 2017.