The Museum recently purchased an intriguing, jewel-like painting of The Mass of Saint Gregory. A work by an unidentified artist active around 1500, it illustrates a story about Pope Gregory the Great (r. 590–604) recorded in biographies written several centuries after his death and also included in The Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century compilation of Christian texts and oral traditions. During mass, at the moment of the transformation of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood, an old lady smiled in disbelief, whereupon the bread changed into a bleeding finger. The story began to be illustrated around 1350, with Christ in the form of the recently devised devotional image of the Man of Sorrows in place of the finger. He bears the wounds of the Passion—including the mark of the lance made after his death—yet is alive, with open eyes. The Museum’s painting, like many examples of The Mass of Saint Gregory, includes the Instruments of the Passion. With close scrutiny, faces of executioners and witnesses can be identified in the cloud of light surrounding Christ.
\r\nThe painting was formerly in a private collection in Portugal. Devotional images of the Mass of Saint Gregory were popular in both Northern and Southern Europe, but its oak support suggests that it is Northern. The specialists consulted by the Museum favored Simon Marmion (Amiens, France; ca. 1425–1489) or an unidentified Flemish artist, working ca. 1530–45. Although there is no consensus yet on the place or date of execution, there is unanimity about the interest of the painting for a teaching museum.
\r\nThe Mass of Saint Gregory is a textbook example of an important iconographic theme that had not been hitherto represented among the Museum’s collections but that has been of heightened interest in recent decades. Traditionally, the popularity of this image was thought to be due to its rendering visible the Roman Catholic dogma of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. More recently, however, scholarly interest in the history of the body and in late-medieval devotional practices has brought about a reappraisal. According to the research of Caroline Bynum, professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, the sudden proliferation of images of the Vision of Saint Gregory accompanied the rise of the late-medieval cult of the Holy Blood. She points out that crucifixion is not a bloody death, yet late-medieval Crucifixions and Pietàs show rivers of blood or large amounts of coagulated blood. The Mass of Saint Gregory, with the blood from Christ’s wounds flowing into the Eucharistic chalice, meshed perfectly with popular devotion to the holy blood shed to redeem the sins of humankind.
\r\nBetsy Jean Rosasco Research Curator of European Painting and Sculpture
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