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Religious Images Are Said to Possess Supernatural Powers

The Independent, UK
Nov. 21, 2005
Tom Lubbock
www.independent.co.uk

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Monday November 21, 2005

Miraculous Encounters ; An Exhibition in Oxford Features Religious Images From North-West Italy That Are Said to Possess Supernatural Powers. Tom Lubbock Can’t Believe His Eyes

Take family photographs. A grandmother, say, sits in her living- room, surrounded by framed photographs that are set up on tables, shelves and mantelpiece. They show the various members of her family, living and dead. What is the point of these images? They aren’t meant to be beautiful pictures, or deep psychological studies. And they’re not informing her of what these people look like, or reminding her of their existence. She may not even look at them much. Their role is to stand for the family members, make them present, bring them near. The living-room is a kind of shrine.

Family photos in the living-room, or placed on the office desk, or carried in the wallet, or used as a laptop screensaver, these images are doing something that images have always done. The technology may be modern, but the function is immemorial. It’s the same with the poster in the fan’s bedroom, or the hate-figure stuck on the dartboard. It’s magic. Like an effigy, the picture is a substitute. The effect is so everyday that we hardly notice it, and it would be strange to say that these images had supernatural power. Nevertheless, what they do for us overrides the laws of nature. They make the absent present.

All images are magic, but some have an extra level of more overt magic. Miraculously, they may have appeared, out of the blue, on a wall. Or have been known to weep or smile or speak. Or they’ve rescued people from certain death. Around the world, particular effigies of gods or saints have acquired a reputation for wonder- working. Appeal to them, and they’ll get you out of danger. Mess with them, and they’ll get you back.

This is the subject of a small exhibition at the Ashmolean, in Oxford. Entitled Spectacular Miracles: Images of Supernatural Power from North- west Italy, it concentrates on a very local but vigorous manifestation of this phenomenon, the cult of thaumaturgic images that flourishes on the Italian coast in and around Genoa.

It’s a Christian cult, of course, and mainly a cult of the Virgin Mary. There are some crucifixes, but the majority of these enshrined images are of the Madonna and Child. That’s as you might expect, since the Madonna is Christianity’s great embodiment of mercy. A Protestant will also want to stress that it’s specifically a Roman Catholic cult, and, in fact, a clear case of what Protestants think is wrong with Catholicism ” its tendency to idol-worship; the way it makes Mary into a kind of goddess in her own right. But then, the Catholic Church itself isn’t wild about such popular cults: anyone can say, ‘This is what the Madonna did for me’, and the activities of the Madonna tend to get out of hand.

Really, the phenomenon is universal, and Christianity just supplies the local cast of characters. You make your supplications to whatever is available. (One might be surprised to learn how many miracles are credited to pictures of Elvis or Diana, Princess of Wales…)

Spectacular Miracles is full of stories and personal testimonies that date from the 14th to the 20th century. The miracles often involve shipwrecks. The first exhibit is Our Lady of Good Fortune, the gilded wooden figurehead of a ship that once foundered off Genoa, which later became the sailors’ help.

There’s the Madonna of the Sacred Heart of Traggia, who, in the 1850s, ‘turned her eyes first to the right, then to the left, first up and then down’. There’s the Crucifix at Santa Maria di Castello, which once nodded its head in reply to a question. There’s Our Lady of the Graces in the Harbour, whose statue was attacked by some men, but they were turned into snakes, ‘and their shrieks and howls could be heard six miles away’. And there’s Our Lady of Succour, on whose chapel a bomb fell during the last world war but failed to explode.

Some of the miracles are spectacular, but the show itself is about the least spectacular I’ve ever seen. Its exhibits are not the objects themselves ” obviously not: they aren’t jet-setting international art objects; they have their jobs to do in situ. What you see instead is a series of small, not very well-shot photos of them, taken by the curators and shown illuminated, viewed through peepholes, so as to give them a shrine-like staging. Or that’s the idea, anyway, but it doesn’t really work. Altogether, it’s more like a hint for an exhibition than the actual thing.

The exhibition it hints at, a survey of the magic of images, would be enormous, worldwide and trans-historical in scope, encompassing every possible kind of exhibit. It would range from the earliest human artefacts to recent urban folklore about those paintings of a weeping boy that were (allegedly) often discovered unsinged in homes that had burnt down around them. One day, someone will do it. Meanwhile, even this hint is worth having.

The show makes three basic points. First, the power of the supernatural personage represented by the image actually becomes invested in the image itself. It’s not the saint or deity as such that does the miracle, but the particular effigy with its particular name. Our Lady of the Graces, Sori: ‘The priest then ran to get the image of the Virgin, and, holding it up for the distressed sailors to see, with the image gave them blessing. A few seconds later, the ship was shattered on the rocks, but the entire crew was saved.’

But, second, the power can be distributed through further images. It is transferred, without loss, from the image itself to any copies of that image, even small reproductions. Our Lady of the Graces, Megli: ‘One day, a huge cannon slipped out of control and ran over his head. All his companions cried, ‘He is dead!’ But by a miracle he was unhurt, and pulling the image of Mary out of his hat, he kissed it again and again.’ Yes, and you can put one in your hat, too, because the one nice touch in this show is that each image has a little holder next to it, loaded with reproductions for the visitor to take away.

And, third, the image-miracles are paid back in images. Ex-voto pictures that show, in nave styles, the accident from which someone was mercifully rescued are hung in the shrine in thanks. A corner of the show is devoted to them, including a lovely one of a man falling out of a building, with the image of Our Lady of the Mountain, Genoa, hovering above.

That picture is rare in the show, being (by chance) good to look at. For, obviously, we’re not talking about art here. The art-lover and the pious rarely find themselves standing in the same queue or jostling for the same view. The miraculous power of these images isn’t manifested in any visual distinction. Quite the opposite. They give nothing to the faithless eye, and if you visited these Genoese shrines in a spirit of culture-tourism, you would hardly give a glance to their dull icons and simpering statues.

All the same, they put art in a devastating perspective. They make you wonder, isn’t this what images are really for? Aren’t our fine aesthetic responses just an obscure and dilute version of the real magic? You don’t need art-appreciation classes when the statue down the road, or the postcard you carry in your wallet, can deliver you uninjured from under the wheels of a truck.

And it makes me think that, in putting on this show, the Ashmolean is running a bit of a risk ” or, at any rate, showing how little it believes in the image-power it finds so fascinating to contemplate. For might not some visitor carry away one of its reproductions of, say, Our Lady of Apparazione, who once diverted a bolt of lightning, or the Madonna of Lampedusa, who saved a man from wild animals and Turks, and, in consequence, receive a similar miraculous deliverance, and then spread the news about, so that more and more people started turning up, and the little gallery holding Spectacular Miracles became a centre of pilgrimage, which I guess is the last thing any modern, secular museum would wish to happen?

Then again, I can see a book in this, along the lines of those popular poetry anthologies, but this time the title really means it: ’101 Images That Could Save Your Life’.

Spectacular Miracles: Images of Supernatural Power from North- west Italy: Ashmolean, Oxford (01865 278000; www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk) to 29 January 2006