The Diocesan Museum of Genoa (Part 1)

Following up on some recent posts about the cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa and its museum (museum part 1; part 2; cathedral), here are some pictures from the diocesan museum. This first part will focus on paintings and altar frontals. Genoa is one of the most important ports in Italy, and during its time as an independent republic, was a major cloth importer; much of the material brought to the city was used for making vestments and other ecclesiastical decorations. We start, however, with two very nice paintings of the Virgin Mary, the better to celebrate the octave of the Assumption.    

The Madonna and Child with the Two Lazaruses, ca. 1520, by Pietro Francesco Sacchi, from the church of St Lazarus in Genoa, now demolished. The Lazarus on the left is the brother of Martha and Mary Magdalene, who according to a later medieval tradition, ended his days as the bishop of Marseilles; the other is the leper of the Gospel known as Dives and Lazarus, Luke 16, 19-31.

The Deposition from the Cross, also ca. 1520 by Sacchi; from the church of St Mary and Ss Nazarius and Celsus, the parish church of the Multedo neighborhood.

Two altar frontals.

An altar frontal for Lent and Passiontide, with a central Pietà, and Ss John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene to either side; Flemish workmanship of the later 16th or early 17th century.

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The Treasury Museum of Genoa Cathedral (Part 2)

Here is the second part of Nicola’s photos of the treasury museum of the cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa. We begin with several pictures of a silver ark for the Corpus Christi procession, made in the mid-16th to early 17th century; the base is decorated with images of the Lord’s Passion, from the Last Supper to the Burial, alternating with statues of the Apostles.

These two reliquaries were brought to the Republic of Genoa from its mercantile colony at Pera, just outside the walls of Constantinople: one of the 11th or 12th century, with the arm of St Anne...

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The Possibly Dubious Liturgical Legacy of Leonardo’s Last Supper

While I was kneeling in a church recently, I started to look more closely at its Gothic high altar, and noticed that the bas relief scene on the front of the altar just below the mensa reproduced, with a high degree of exactitude, the famous, possibly too famous, Last Supper painting by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the 500th anniversary of whose death has been celebrated throughout 2019.

Leonardo’s Last Supper and many others paintings like it — Ghirlandaio’s at San Marco and Andrea del Castagno’s at the convent of St Apollonia, both in Florence; Giovan Pietro da Cemmo’s in the convent of St Augustine in Crema, etc. — were painted for the refectories of religious houses; they were not intended as images for churches, much less for sanctuaries of churches. The open, longitudinal arrangement was designed to place Christ at the center, to make the action at the table clearly visible, and to separate Judas more evidently from the rest of the Apostles. The spiritual lesson of such refectory paintings was manifold: that one should see the figure of Christ in one’s religious superior at the head table; that one should decide to be among the good apostles by being a good and obedient religious, and not faithless like Judas; that one should remember how every meal shared with the brethren bears a likeness to this banquet of supreme charity, which explains why the refectory service is a little liturgy in its own right.

Regarding the Rule of St. Benedict, Dom Mark Kirby, OSB, comments:

The liturgy of the refectory is sacred; the rubrics that govern it safeguard its Eucharistic character so that the words of the Apostle may be rightly fulfilled in the monastery day after day: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatsoever else you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). All are to come to refectory without delay and in time for the verse and the prayer, and all, says Saint Benedict, are to sit down together at table. A Benedictine monk never “grabs a bite” or eats in an individualistic manner. He enters into the liturgical order of the refectory, before, during, and after the meal, taking care to conform to the corporate actions of the whole community. One who despises the liturgy of the common table will be separated from it and even deprived of his portion of wine — a terrible punishment for the Mediterranean man — in order to be brought to his senses.

Benedictines honour the liturgy of eating and drinking in the refectory, and see the refectory as a kind of mirror of the Oratory. Even the disposition is same as in the choir: the tables facing each other; the Prior’s table with the crucifix behind it; the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary; and the reader’s desk. Twice daily the refectory resounds with the chanting of psalms and prayers. Like the Oratory, the refectory is a place of silence. It is also a place of joy, according to what Saint Luke writes in the Book of Acts: “They took their share of food with gladness and simplicity of heart” (Acts 2:46).

Because Leonardo’s Last Supper was in a refectory, it was not really intended for “public consumption.” Therefore, the hypothesis I will float concerns not so much this great artist’s intentions for his piece as it does deleterious consequences of an overuse of replications of it in modern churches.

Returning now to the altar sculpture: the figure of Christ dominated in the center, looking squarely out at me, with His disciples gathered round. Although I have seen this image a thousand times, I was suddenly struck by the impression that, placed front and center at the altar, this might look somewhat like a priest celebrating Mass versus populum:

In his superb overview of the history, form, and theology of the classical Roman rite (due to appear soon from Angelico Press), Michael Fiedrowicz offers a gentle critique of Leonardo:

Luther had already invoked the Last Supper practice of Jesus for his corresponding demand [that the Eucharist should be celebrated versus populum]. A new type of visual representation that began to be implemented during the thirteenth century must have been formative for his notion of the events of that time. This representation is familiar in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper: Jesus sitting on the rear side of a table in the middle of the Apostles, turned toward the observer of the scene. If Mass were made to correspond to this artistic presentation, the priest should stand at the altar across from the people and turn his gaze on them. This argument, however, is based on a misapprehension of ancient table manners as they would have been practiced at the Last Supper. There was at that time either a round or a semicircular table at whose open front side the food would be brought, while those partaking of the meal sat or reclined at the rear semicircle of the table. The place of honor was not in the middle, but rather on the right side. The one presiding over a meal never had another partaker across from his place. These original arrangements are shown in the oldest representations of the Last Supper until the Middle Ages. If this finding alone prevents the derivation of celebrating versus populum from Jesus’ practice at the Last Supper, a look at the historical beginnings of the Eucharistic celebration demonstrates yet more that the primitive Church’s congregation in no way repeated the Last Supper as such and did not consider the meal as the ritual original form of the Eucharist.

It is more than a little chilling to read the following words of Martin Luther and to reflect on the current situation of Roman Catholic worship: “But in the true Mass among genuine Christians, the altar would not have to remain so [sc. facing east], and the priest would always turn to the people, as without doubt Christ did at the Lord’s Supper. Well, that will be so in good time” (Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdienstes, 1526 [WA 19, 80]).

In his book No Trifling Matter: On the Inviolability of the Sacraments (Angelico, 2018), Msgr. Nicola Bux makes a similar point:

Not a few people hold that it was only in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages that the Churches of the East and the West began to prefer administering it directly in the mouth. But did Jesus give communion to the apostles on the hand or asking them to take it with their own hands? Visiting an exhibition of Tintoretto in Rome, I observed some “Last Suppers” in which Jesus gives communion to the apostles in the mouth. One could think that this has to do with an interpretation by the painter after the fact, a little like the posture of Jesus and the apostles at table, in the cenacle of Leonardo, which “updates” in the Western manner the Jewish custom, which was, instead, to be reclining at table. Reflecting further on this, the custom of giving communion to the faithful directly in the mouth can be considered not only as a Jewish tradition, and therefore apostolic, but also as going back to the Lord Jesus. The Jews and the peoples of the East in general had and today still have the custom of taking food with one’s hands and placing it directly in the mouth of the lover or the friend. In the West this is done between couples in love and by the mother toward her little one, who is still inexperienced. The text of John is understood in this way: “Jesus then answered him [John]: ‘It is he to whom I shall give a morsel of dipped bread.’ Then, having dipped a morsel of bread, he gave it to Judas, son of Simon Iscariot. And as soon as he had taken the mouthful Satan entered into him” (13:26–27). But what should be said about the invitation of Jesus: “Take and eat. . . . Take and drink”? Take (in Greek, labete; in Latin, accipite) also means receive. If the mouthful is dipped, it cannot be taken with the hands; rather it is received directly into the mouth. It is true that Jesus consecrated bread and wine separately. But if during the “mystic supper” (as the East calls it) or Last Supper, the two consecrating gestures happened, so it seems, in different phases of the Paschal supper, nevertheless after Pentecost the apostles, aided by Jewish priests who had converted (cf. Acts 6:7), and who were, as we would say, experts in religious worship, united the gestures within the great Eucharistic prayer. (94–95)

My experience has been that a lot of Catholic church altars — especially the less expensive ones in the United States that were trying to look “traditional,” from the late 19th century up to the middle of the 20th — feature exactly this image of Leonardo’s Last Supper carved into the front, where the priest and people would see it day after day after day. (Note, however, that according to older rubrics, such art should be visible only between the stripping of the altar on Maundy Thursday and the Easter Vigil; for the remaining 362/3 days of the year, it would be masked by the antependium. Alas, antependia tended to go the way of all flesh and are making a slow return at best.) Here is another example:

I wonder . . . Might this have something to do with slowly disposing everyone to reimagine the Mass as an imitation of the Last Supper, and not even as a Jewish meal, but as a banquet fictitiously depicted by Leonardo? Perhaps the near-ubiquity of the faux supper made it easier, when the time came, to justify the dismantling of a high altar that bore upon itself an image seemingly in contradiction with it, while at the same time installing a free-standing table that permitted the “presider” to imitate Leonardo’s Christ, and perhaps the concelebrating clergy to imitate Leonard’s apostles circled round the table.

Now, if we look at churches with much older altars, or Liturgical Movement altars, we will see a far greater variety of iconographical images carved into the fronts of altars: the Lamb, especially; wreaths, palms, and other arborial designs; angels; cosmatesque patterns; etc. It seems much more appropriate for an altar to have such symbolic designs or to be dressed in cloth altar frontals in liturgical colors than to bear the by-now overdone Leonardo spin-off. It just goes to show how a work of artistic but ahistorical genius can intersect with commercial demand to flood the market with well-intentioned but conceptually harmful kitsch.

I am not an art historian but simply someone keenly interested in the fine arts and in ecclesiastical art in particular. I would therefore be grateful if any readers have more thoughts or information pertinent to this theory of a possible relationship between the introduction of versus populum and the emblazoning of modern church altars with decontextualized Last Suppers.

One can find images of Christ standing at the other side of the altar (over against the viewer) in Byzantine iconography as well, but this depiction does not, to my eye, suggest versus populum as a manner of celebrating, if only because the cross and book seem set up for ad orientem worship; certainly the iconographic style makes it easier to see such an image rather as the expression of a mysterious present reality, the Lord coming into our midst through the liturgy we offer to Him and He offers through us, than of an historical event, a Jewish Passover meal, in dramatic reenactment, as the Leonardo so strongly (but misleadingly) conveys.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Newman, Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen, Roguet, Croegaert), his SoundCloud page for lectures and interviews, and his YouTube channel for talks and sacred music.

Treasures of the Musée de Cluny in Paris

Before going off with the Schola Sainte-Cécile on the pilgrimage to England, I spent a few days in Paris, and among other things, visited the medieval collection at the Musée de Cluny. This museum, which is housed in a building that was once the Parisian residence of the abbot of Cluny, is best known as the home of a famous set of six tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn, but also possesses a large number of very beautiful liturgical objects; here is a selection of photos.

A retable of gilded copper and enamel from the abbey of Stavelot, 1160-70, showing Christ sending the Holy Spirit on the Twelve Apostles at Pentecost.

A gilded frontal from either Bamberg or Fulda Abbey, ca. 1000-33, later in the treasury of the cathedral of Basle, Switzerland. In the arcades, Christ is shown in the middle, with the Emperor St Henry and his wife St Cunegond, the founders of both the see and cathedral of Bamberg, at His feet; on the right, Ss Gabriel and Raphael, on the left, Ss Michael and Benedict. The inscription above and below is in hexameters: “Quis sicut El, fortis, medicus, Soter, benedictus? Prospice terrigenas, clemens, mediator usias. – Who is like God, the mighty, the healer, the savior, the blessed? Look favorably on those who are on earth, o merciful one, mediator of (our) nature.”

A cover for a Gospel book made in Trier in the early 13th century, incorporating an ivory plaque made in Constantinople in the 10th century.

The only surviving reliquary from the original treasury of the Sainte Chapelle, made of gilded silver, and engraved with images of Ss Lucian, Maxian (also known by the more common form ‘Maximian’) and Julian, martyrs at Beauvais in the late 3rd century, whose relics were given to St Louis IX. The Saints are shown holding their own decapitated heads, as recounted in their legend. (Parisian, 1261-62.)

The oldest surviving golden rose, made by Minucchio da Siena in 1330 for Pope John XXII; the original recipient, the Count of Neuchatel, added his own arms and a filigree knot of the 13th century to the base.

A small reliquary decorated with an image of the Crucifixion and the instruments of the Passion; gilded silver, enamel, gems and colored glass, made in the middle of the 15th century, perhaps in Paris.

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The History, Development and Symbolism of the Antependium, Altar Frontal, or “Pallium Altaris” (Reprint)

This article by Shawn Tribe was originally published in October of 2008, and republished in 2013. He and I recently noticed that all of the photographs, which were originally linked from an external source, have disappeared, so I thought it might be nice to repair it and reprint it again. It is listed here under my name, but still entirely Shawn’s work.

Occasionally we get requests -- inspired by our series and descriptions upon different elements of liturgical vesture and ornament -- to discuss particular ornaments in greater detail. One such request was a discussion of the altar frontal, otherwise known as the antependium or pallium altaris.

Early Origins

The Catholic Encyclopedia suggests that the origin of the antipendium might be “traced to the curtains or veils of silk, or of other precious material, which hung over the open space [NLM note: or “confessio”] under the altar, to preserve the shrines of the saints usually deposited there” which later developed into the altar frontal we now know.

In his work, The Christian Altar, the Anglican Cyril Pocknee notes that “even in the primitive period not only was the altar covered with a linen cloth or pall for the celebration of the Eucharist; but also the Lord’s Table was vested with silk cloths... Palladius writing about 421 mentions some Roman ladies, who renouncing the world, bequeathed their silks to make coverings for the altar... The Liber Pontificalis testifies that during the eighth and ninth centuries coverings for the altar made of gold thread and decorated with jewels and pearls and embroidered with figures of our Lord, the B.V. Mary and the Apostles were given to the great Roman basilicas by succeeding Popes.”

Pocknee speaks to the development of the form as follows:

While the altar remained cubical in form, the ‘throw-over’ type of pall continued in use... this linen cloth, known as the Palla corporalis, was thrown over the altar, much as an ordinary table-cloth is spread today, by the deacons, and it fell down around all sides of the table. But in the Gothic period, when the altar tended to be lengthened, two things happened: (a) the linen pall became divided into two parts, one part being a long strip which covered the top of the altar and fell down over each end of the mensa, while the other part became the ‘corporal’ which covered the elements; (b) the silk pall becomes the antependium or frontal covering the front elevation of the altar only when it stood close to a wall or screen. But it should be noted that where the longer type of altar was free-standing a ‘frontal’ was provided for both back and front.

Both Cyril Pocknee (The Christian Altar) and J.B. O’Connell (Church Building and Furnishing) comment that the earliest frontals were “often made in purple and gold and ornamented with jewels, or with beautiful embroideries.” (O’Connell). The following image from the Benedictional of St. Ethelwold shows this, as well as what Pocknee describes in terms of the fuller, more “table-cloth” like form of the early altar covering:

O’Connell continues by noting that in the 8th or 9th centuries, some frontals were also made of precious metals such as silver or gold. A classic example of this would be the altar of the Basilica of St. Ambrose in Milan:

It was during the middle ages that we begin to see the vesting of the altar match the colour of the vestments of the day.

Symbolism

Speaking to the symbolism attributed to the frontal, Geoffrey Webb in The Liturgical Altar calls it “a covering of honour for the body of the altar which... represents Christ Himself...” He quotes Bishop J.F. Van der Stappen in his work, Sacra Liturgia as saying: “For the altar is Christ, therefore, on account of its dignity, it is clothed in precious vestments, as the Pontifical says in the ordination of sub-deacons.” Webb continues speaking of the colour that the frontal brings to the altar: “Our Lord, as represented by His consecrated altar, puts on robes of majesty... and when the Robes of Majesty are all removed on Holy Thursday, more is indicated than the removal of His garments. His faithful, His costly garments, His disciples, are all stripped from Him; and His desolation is made all the more evident by this complete annihilation of colour.” The use of colour is “part of the splendour of the liturgy” but “the instinct to provide colour seems less vigorous today than in most other centuries, and one doubts whether its place is sufficiently realized as one instrument of a concerted orchestra, in whose harmony its omission forms a gap.” Finally Webb suggests that “the frontal serves to give to the altar that architectural prominence which its central position in the liturgy requires.”

O’Connell notes similarly:

“...at the ordination of a subdeacon, the bishop in his charge to the candidate says ‘the cloths and corporals of the altar [which represent Christ] are the members of Christ, God’s faithful people, with whom, as with costly garments, the Lord is clad, according to the Psalmist: The Lord reigns as king, robed in majesty.’ The clothed altar with its beauty and changing colours is a symbol of the Mystical Body... it translates this doctrine into the language of colour and form. In addition to its symbolical value, the frontal -- with its sequence of colours and its changing form and decoration -- lends variety and new beauty to the altar, and helps to mark the degrees of festivity in the Church’s liturgy. In presenting an unbroken coloured surface it also draws attention to the altar, as the focal point of the church, giving it architectural prominence.”

A visual comparison of the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, unvested and vested, might serve to illustrate the visual and liturgical difference a frontal can make.

An NLM Appeal for the Revival of the Altar Frontal
The NLM has often appealed to clergy to consider re-instituting the use of altar frontals in their parishes and apostolates. It is to be hoped that these descriptions of the history and symbolic and liturgical value of the frontal will serve as further inspiration.

Now this said it must be stated that, as with any sacred arts, not all frontals are created equal. In my experience, the finest frontals are characterized by neatness, not hanging too loosely (being either stretched onto a frame or at very least of heavy fabric and generally weighted), thereby drawing attention to the form and substantiality of the altar itself; they cover the entirety of the front of the altar, and they are characterized either by a verticality in ornamentation, or a fullness of ornamentation. (What I mean by this will become more evident shortly.)

Examples of Unsuccessful Frontals

Let us consider a few examples of what I would deem unsuccessful attempts at altar frontals.

There are a few problems here. First, the use of a single colour without other ornamentation or orphreys. But worse is the use of pleating which takes away from the altar itself and approximates not so much paraments for the altar as curtains before it.

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