A Medieval Adoption: The Man of Sorrows and the Transmission of Ideas in the Middle Ages

The world of the medieval is a vast one, both geographically and temporally. It contains many traditions, many rulers, and many ways of life. One natural question that arises, then, is how much interplay was there between the various cultures of the Middle Ages? On the one hand, long-distance traveling was certainly not the norm, and local identities generally seem to have been strong and well preserved. Yet, one can also point to countless examples of cultural exchange. From pilgrimages to crusades to traveling scholars, many possible paths were open to allow for the diffusion of ideas. Thus, attempting to answer the question posed above quickly turns into a dizzying and overwhelming affair. Is there any way of getting a more visceral, even intuitive, feel for the extent and limitations of medieval cultural interplay? This exhibit seeks to do just this by employing one image, that of the Man of Sorrows, as an illustrative example of the geographic and temporal evolution of ideas in the Middle Ages. As a distinctly Christian image its spread is limited to Christian lands, but even so this exhibit will help us to gain a sense of what it takes to transmit an idea through different societies and through different centuries.

Beyond the limitation presented above, the Man of Sorrows image is particularly well-suited to this exhibit’s goal. It had a wide geographic spread, originating in the Byzantine world and reaching to the northern parts of Europe. Intriguingly, the mechanisms of the image’s transcultural movement can oftentimes be identified, partly because its unique depiction of Christ is not likely to have been independently created in different Christian regions. One problem with tracing many other unusual images is that they are limited in quantity (at least, in the quantity that has been preserved to the present day). However, the Man of Sorrows is found in abundance. Finally, it is a valuable image for this exhibit to focus on because it clearly demonstrates one central theme of medieval cultural diffusion: societies may have been willing to adopt “foreign” concepts, but they rarely did so without making such concepts their own. Hence, for instance, we can clearly differentiate Italian Man of Sorrows images from northern European equivalents from their material and iconographic natures.

This exhibit consists of three parts. First, it presents the origins of the Man of Sorrows image in the Byzantine Empire. Next, the exhibit moves to the Italian peninsula, where one can see a particularly interesting cultural interplay in the adoption of the Man of Sorrows. Finally, the exhibit ends in Germany and northern Europe, far away from the image’s beginnings but surprisingly faithful to many of its key attributes.