Page - 17 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

VOYEURISTIC stimuli 17 tions as a social voyeur),39 and especially in the Franciscan Meditations on the Life of Christ.40 In the Meditations, the boundaries between the sacred history and quotidian world open to afford the ‘outsider’ believer a transient gaze at the objects of his spiritual desire; a gaze that rein- forces and satisfies his beliefs, while the sacred figures remain (albeit not always) unaware of being watched. In the Meditations the devo- tee is exhorted to recreate the religious events in his mind, to see them spiritually, while the narrator, identifying himself as the Franciscan author of the Meditations, guides the reader into making them palpable by supplying intimate details, personal style, and evocative suggestions. The reader is invited to visualize the sacred his- tory, to gaze at and identify with the objects of the devotional desire. Through his own vision- ary experience, the narrator of the Meditations attempts to translate the biblical narrative into vital and personal experience by means of con- crete and vivid description, offering a glimpse into the inner life of thoughts and feelings of the sacred figures, thus turning the reader into a voyeur. In discussing the Nativity, he depicts his own revelation saying: Having thus shown these things, the Lady disappeared and the angel remained to speak great praises, which he told me […]. Now you have seen the rise of the consecrated prince. You have seen likewise the delivery of the celestial queen, and in both cases you were able to consider the most dire poverty, for they were in need of many necessary things. The Lords found this the highest virtue […].41 And later in his endeavor to visualize sacred history in the readers’ spiritual seeing, he encourages them to experience it sen- sually with the aid of sight, sound, touch, and even smell, stressing the close relations and paral- lelism between ocular experience and piety: You too, who lingered so long, kneel and adore your Lord God […] Kiss the beautiful little feet of the infant Jesus who lies in the manger and beg His mother to offer to let you hold him a while. Pick him up and hold Him in your arms. Gaze on his face with devo- tion and reverently kiss Him and delight in Him.42 In the cited paragraphs, the Meditations pro- vide the devoted believer with detailed instruc- tions not only on what but also on how to see. While ‘what to see’ defined for the devotee the object of his spiritual desire (for example: Mary), the instructions regarding ‘how to see’ aimed at a dual goal: pointing out what were considered to be the important characteristics (Mary’s pov- erty) and the state of mind required to rightful seeing: visionary, as experienced by the narrator; intimate and almost sensually erotic, as offered to the reader. It then continued to a full vision- ary and active simulation of the event, with the reader’s participation. In his meditations on the Passion, the narrator exemplifies how the state of mind, the content of the vision, and the intensity of the sight, are bound together: Watch carefully, with strong sorrow, how the Lord of all things was so despised […].43 Such emotional and sensory sim- ulations as those regarding the Nativity and the Passion are a frequent topic in the Meditations. After Jesus is circumcised, for example, the nar- rator urges his reader: […] spiritual circumcision must occur in all the senses of our body; in seeing, hearing, tasting and touching we must exercise tem- perance, and especially in speaking too much. 44 The visual arts supplemented these simulations with concrete representations of whatever constituted a major enigma for the believer – a visual simu- 39 See A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur. Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives, Cambridge 1993, pp. 1–25. 40 Pseudo Bonaventure, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. I. Ragusa, Princeton 1961. 41 Ibidem, pp. 29–30. 42 Ibidem, pp. 38–39. 43 Ibidem, p. 298. 44 Ibidem, p. 45.