You have both feet upon a little sphere
Whose other side Judecca occupies;
When it is morning here, there it is evening
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321): Inferno (canto XXXIV: 117)2
There’s a flag thing going on all across the bleak landscape of the balze – or ‘crags’ – around the ancient Italian hilltop city of Volterra. Every wayside bar, shop, campsite or farmhouse I pass has put up a display of flags of the world in a none-too-subtle attempt to entice in visitors from foreign lands with the promise of a warm welcome. Fair enough, I suppose, since modern Tuscany is now so heavily dependent on the tourist trade. The French, Germans and British seem a natural enough target, as do assorted citizens of other European Union countries within a day or two’s drive, hence their national symbols fluttering in the gentle breeze of a warm July morning. But how many Argentinians and Brazilians are they really expecting to happen by?
The flags continue unabated, and unabashed, once I dispense with my car and reach on foot the narrow, crowded pedestrian streets of Volterra itself, a maze of tall, thin, time-worn medieval buildings, perched behind defensive walls and gates 550 metres above sea level. A prosperous place as far back as Etruscan times in the seventh century BCE, despite being slightly out on a limb from the main trading and pilgrim routes through central Italy, it thrived then, as now, on the riches that lie beyond the walls and beneath the soil – copper, salt and, above all, alabaster. It was rare and accessible seams of this whitish, veined, chalky deposit, almost translucent and therefore prized for the skin-like quality it can give off when carved, that first elevated Volterra above its rivals. Etruscan craftsmen began to make alabaster funeral urns and caskets to accompany their own well-developed death rituals. In their hands, alabaster became the stone of the dead.
Today, Volterra flags itself up as ‘the City of Alabaster’, in another unsubtle effort to draw in more of the tourists who still seem to prefer nearby San Gimignano and Siena. And I’d be hard pressed to miss the message that Volterra’s prized local natural resource is now also available in every conceivable shape and size, from ornamental eggs and ashtrays (complete with wading birds dipping into the cigarette ends) to elaborate table lamps, fountains and even full-sized busts. Every shop window is stuffed with examples, while down alleyways white alabaster dust drifts out of the innumerable workshops that give the city – unlike those more visited Tuscan neighbours – the air of a place that still makes something to earn its living.
Volterra has its own fiercely independent spirit, a throwback to the days pre-1361 when this was a free commune, its citizens ruling themselves without outside interference, before the mighty Florence took it under its wing. The ancient Palazzo dei Priori in the main square, where I am heading, is said to be the oldest public meeting hall in the whole of Italy, but my final destination lies opposite it.
Behind its plain brick façade, the city’s Romanesque Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta once resounded with a message that is now all but inaudible to modern ears. In medieval times, though, it was trumpeted with little more finesse than the flags or the ‘buy-your-alabaster-here’ shop signs. And that message was all about Judas.
The must-see gem in the dimly lit, cool sanctuary of Volterra Cathedral is not a painting or a decorated altarpiece – the layered bluey-black and white of the nave’s walls was once considered sufficiently splendid not to require any more ornament – but instead the high and mighty pulpit, located in the third arch back from the altar on the left-hand side as I enter. Most of its component parts date back to the early part of the twelfth century, making them older by a few decades than this historic church itself, refashioned as it was in the middle part of that century after an earthquake. The pulpit sits proud on four tall, thin marble legs, with terrifying alabaster beasts (‘stilofori’, the explanatory plaque reads, one of those Italian words for which there is no simple alternative, but which means roughly ‘column-bearers’) that snap at the heels of any preacher who is so bold as to climb the steps to deliver a sermon. Some of the stone used in these stilofori is said to date back even further in time.
The twelfth to the fourteenth century saw a particular flourishing in and around Tuscany of the intricate art of decorating pulpits (and, on a bigger scale, church façades) with stone reliefs. It was led by a succession of acclaimed sculptors, notably Nicola Pisano, sometimes referred to as the founder of modern sculpture and responsible for two celebrated examples, in Siena’s Duomo and the Baptistery in Pisa. Among others was the Dominican, Fra Guglielmo Agnelli, a pupil of Pisano, and an earlier generation of masters including Gruamonte at Pistoia and Biduino at Lucca. What they shared was a naturalistic style, influenced by Classicism, which brought a sharp realism to their depictions of the human figure.
The carvings on the Volterra pulpit belong to the century before Pisano and Guglielmo, and are simpler in their composition and execution than anything associated with these two masters. Some historians have attributed them to Biduino.3 On the blind sides (as far as the congregation is concerned) are the Annunciation, the Visitation and the Old Testament sacrifice by Abraham of his son, Isaac, but it is the front panel, showing the Last Supper, that looms unmissably over the pews where I now take a seat. This was the image that would have inscribed itself upon the imagination of a largely illiterate congregation 750 years ago as it gathered to hear the preacher reach for the oratorical heights in his sermon (though not from the incongruous golden eagle lectern that is a much later addition to the structure). Talk of the devil was standard in such sermons, and of the danger of falling into his traps. The carving of the Last Supper was designed to amplify the theme; to add to its arresting effect in projecting a clear Christian message, it would have been illuminated, then as today, by the natural spotlight of a shaft of bright sun from a window high up on the other side of the nave.
The Last Supper, with Judas, plus devilish pursuer under the tablecloth, from the pulpit in Volterra Cathedral.
The source is clearly John’s gospel – though, of course, he doesn’t use the words ‘Last Supper’. While Mark and Matthew have Judas as an equal participant in the first Eucharist, John describes Jesus handing Judas the sop of bread in order to identify him as the traitor with the words, ‘It is the one to whom I give the piece of bread I shall dip in the dish.’ At that instant, John reports, the devil takes possession of the betrayer.
This written account of the revelation of Judas as the traitor suggests that all twelve apostles were sitting around the same table as equals, but in this carving the artist has allowed himself considerable licence with the text, so as to make a wider point to those in the congregation whose eyes might wander onto the detail of the pulpit as the preacher took his time to develop his theme. Judas is here all but damned before the bread is even broken. Jesus sits on an elaborate throne at the head of the draped supper table, littered with fish and debris of the Passover meal. Only eleven of the twelve are accorded the honour of a seat behind the table. Some have beards, others don’t. All are square-jawed and chiselled in their stereotypically masculine features, recognisably human as is the style, but indistinguishable one from the other, and indeed from their leader.
Placement is all, though, and the eleven have been put on the right side of the table – the good side, the upper side, the heavenly side. Meanwhile underneath, peering up and out through the folds of the cloth, as if from the depths of hell, is Judas, half kneeling, half collapsed, his face by contrast curiously feminine, and his body in its odd, distorted proportions redolent of those other-worldly creatures believed to inhabit the domain of the damned. Naturalism and realism have here been jettisoned for ghoulish effect. It is not quite a caricature – such extremes would come later in the medieval age, especially when Judas was regularly conflated by artists with Jews in an effort to dehumanise both – but here Judas certainly looks peculiar, the sort of individual one might cross the road to avoid.
This was a time where the visual was so much stronger than the written, or even the spoken. So Judas’ evil had to be made very physical. In his twisted, androgynous body, he is wickedness incarnate for the viewer.
While directing his gaze unflinchingly at the eleven true apostles, including ‘John the Beloved’, as he is known in John’s gospel (and who, here, is doing that strange cuddling up to his master that only John reports), Jesus is simultaneously handing Judas the sop of bread under the tablecloth. Multi-tasking, we might call it now, since he does it without sparing the recipient so much as a cursory glance, rather as a dog-owner might feed its pet a titbit under the tablecloth while busy attending to his guests.
Judas’ vastly inferior status is unavoidable to any onlooker. Because he is under the table, it makes impossible another detail of John’s gospel. In the text, as Jesus gives Judas the sop, he says, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly.’ It could be read as evidence of a certain collusion between the two. In the carving, though, no nod is made whatsoever to these intriguing words. It would have been regarded as muddying the essential message – that Judas was the scapegoat for the sins, perversions and temptations of all of humankind.
This archetypal image of Judas as the representative of human evil was not unique to Volterra. It had been establishing itself in religious art over the preceding centuries. The earliest known depiction of the betraying apostle is found in a long, thin, sculpted relief on an ivory chest, or reliquary, from around 370 CE, designed to hold the bones and body parts of a saint and therefore the object of popular veneration and pilgrimage. The Brescia Casket – or Lipsanoteca di Brescia – is now housed in the church of Santa Giulia in Brescia, in the foothills of the Italian Alps. Along with various scenes from Jesus’ passion and death, as well as Old Testament episodes, Judas is shown down one side of the back panel, hanging by a noose from a tree. It is a haunting, unadorned representation.
The sixth-century Rossano Gospels, the earliest surviving depiction of Judas at the ‘Last Supper’.
In terms of images of Judas’ presence at the Last Supper, the sixth-century Rossano Gospels, named after a town in Calabria, southern Italy, are probably the earliest surviving example. An illuminated (illustrated) manuscript of Matthew’s account, and partly of Mark’s, it is one of the oldest documents of its type in the world, completed, it is thought, to celebrate the reconquest of Italy by the forces of the Christian emperor in Byzantium.4 It is also sometimes called the ‘Codex purpureus Rossanensis’ because of its reddy-purple hue, and features a series of miniature, almost matchstick illustrations from the life of Christ. At the Last Supper, as in the Volterra pulpit scene, Jesus sits to one side, but in the Rossano Gospels, all twelve apostles are accommodated around the table. Judas is still one of the group, not yet cast down. He is marked out, though, because he is stretching out his spindly arm greedily towards the dish in the centre of the table, while the others are content to sit calmly beholding their leader. If it is the sop of bread he is reaching for, then John’s account must also have influenced this unknown artist. And the same source may account for the devil’s unmistakeable presence – as a set of three outsized blackbirds decorating the tablecloth.
Back in Volterra, the pulpit’s Last Supper opts instead for a more menacing form for Satan, as chilling as the stone it is carved from. In John’s account, it states that, as the sop was handed to Judas, Satan ‘entered’ him. So behind the cowered, contorted Judas, and stretching out all along the floor for the rest of the length of the Last Supper table, is a slithering, snarling demon, propelled by a motion that carries ever forward a body that is part lion and part scaly snake, with a dragon’s knotted tail. It is as if one of the stilofori from the pulpit’s base has climbed up and into the Last Supper scene. Biting at Judas’ heels, just as in earlier literature Judas himself had been portrayed as a biter of the Christ child, this predatory lieutenant of the devil would have been immediately familiar to the medieval congregation as the fate that awaited them if, for a moment, they strayed from the church.
Judas becomes the paramount example – offered in this cathedral, in the most prominent place, where the eyes of the congregation might rest – of how not to be and not to act.
Half-digested
A great gulf existed in this era of mass illiteracy between the visual and the written, but bridging it, albeit to a limited extent, was Inferno, Dante Alighieri’s travelogue of hell, the first of the three books of his celebrated Divine Comedy. It was rare in being penned in the Italian vernacular, rather than in the exclusive language of church Latin. Inferno comes between 100 and 150 years after the Volterra pulpit, but serves a broadly similar purpose. Dante may be in the vanguard of the new ideas of the Renaissance, but his casting of Judas is decidedly of its time.
Inferno is set in the very core of the earth, where a series of nine layers constitute hell, with the degree of eternal privation suffered by each set of damned inhabitants increasing as the narrator – Dante himself – goes further down, layer by layer, always in the company of his guide, the Roman poet, Virgil (one mark of Renaissance thinking was a renewed respect for Classical civilisations). En route, he meets individuals whose vices have landed them there. In Upper Hell, nearest the earth’s surface, entered by a vestibule crowned with the doom-laden words, ‘Abandon every hope, all you who enter’, the population is largely non-Christian, virtuous men who are shut off from God’s redeeming light only by dint of never having heard his message. Their discomforts are mild.
As the descent continues, there are the lustful, the gluttonous, the spendthrifts, the angry and the slothful, roughly in line with the Seven Deadly Sins, first codified for the Christian world by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century. In their midst there are obvious places where Judas might be lurking – the eerie ‘Wood of Suicides’ in the layer of violence, for example, with ‘no green leaves, but rather black in colour/No smooth branches, but twisted and entangled/No fruit but thorns of poison bloomed instead’.5 It could almost be a description of that bleak Jerusalem hillside at Hakeldama, outside the monastery walls.
Instead, though, Dante saves Judas for the very last circle, the domain of traitors. It contains a whole area called the Judecca, or Giudecca, named after him, emphasising once again that easy link between Judas’ name and the Jews, since in the towns and cities of southern Italy and Sicily at this time the Giudecca was the Jewish ghetto. In this lowest layer of hell, ‘the vast kingdom of all grief’, the fate of the dead is a terrible one – to be ‘fixed under ice . . . like straws worked into glass’. The sight of it makes Dante tremble.
Presiding is the devil, in the shape of a three-headed Lucifer,6 his lower half encased in ice, tearfully chewing on three notorious sinners – Brutus and Cassius, co-conspirators against Julius Caesar, and Judas. The cold (as opposed to the more traditional flames), and the impotence rather than menace, represent Dante’s fresh take on his subject, radically different from that more standard medieval fare of a beast under the table. But it is the same Judas, here again the worst of the worst.
‘That soul up there who suffers most of all,’
my guide explained, ‘is Judas Iscariot:
the one with head inside and legs out kicking.’
Blood and fireworks
If I screw up my eyes, I can just about decipher above the Volterra Last Supper carving what the artist must have intended as a final touch, for that small proportion of the congregation able to read even a little. Decorating the top of the relief is a list of the names of the participants seated at the table. All the apostles from the gospels are included, but the roll of honour breaks off in the space that is high above Judas’ head. There is just a crossing out. Judas has been deleted forever.
Those with time during a sermon to take in such details would then have been almost assaulted by the force of Judas’ bad example, as presented here; not that it causes much more than a curious glance from my fellow visitors, who come along, take a quick photo of the pulpit, as their guides tell them they should, and then move on. There are much more obvious sights for modern, secular eyes elsewhere in the cathedral, all added after this pulpit, including a colourful, wooden, three-dimensional, thirteenth-century rendering of Christ’s Deposition from the Cross. It sits in a side chapel near the altar and draws the crowds.
By contrast, the pulpit’s message has been dulled by the passage of time. Religion no longer has that ability to command attention and loyalty, to control and terrify. Neither does it seek it. Sermons are now all about a God of love. In ancient churches, the preacher usually eschews the elaborate pulpit for a modest stand on the altar, and offers a gentle reflection of hope and encouragement. Not that such a switch necessarily draws much of a congregation any longer each Sunday. This cathedral is typical of many, in seeming as much a museum as a place of worship, the piped Benedictine chant making the whole place seem utterly benign.
Once, though, this pitiful picture of Judas would have reeled onlookers in and terrified them. And it was hard to avoid once inside the cathedral. All the other paintings and decorations that today grace the nave walls, including those behind and opposite the pulpit, only came along later in the sixteenth century. Prior to that, for the congregation sitting where I am, there would have been no ready distraction from the stark lesson in stone that met their eyes as they looked up at the preacher.
And Judas was just as central when, in medieval times, the gospels were carried out of the precincts of cathedrals and onto piazzas, as part of well-established religious processions and public rituals that became landmarks in local calendars. Whether Volterra had one is nowhere recorded, but variations on the theme of a ‘Judas Day’ were common all over Catholic and Orthodox Europe, as the betrayer took to the streets to face the public’s wrath.
Czech and German towns, for instance, had their own traditions, where a wooden or straw effigy of Judas would be burnt on bonfires on Easter Saturday.7 It was something separate from the liturgical cycle, and even from the church-organised passion plays that developed in this same period to give a more controlled dramatic expression to the gospels. Judas-burning, by contrast, represented a slightly anarchic escape valve, a mixture of high spirits and a letting-off of steam from the stifling atmosphere of fear created by so much concentration within the churches on the threat of the devil, and the danger of following in Judas’ footsteps.
Judas Day usually took place on the Saturday – between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It was a void, when the churches themselves were silent, and the altars draped in black. And so the space was filled by a mixture of religious procession and carnival. As the Judas figure was set ablaze, those watching could be casting off his shadow from their own lives or, briefly, liberating themselves from the heavy hand of the church. And then, having witnessed his death, most were ready to return to the pews the next day to welcome the risen Christ.
There were many variations in different cultures on this colourful scapegoating ritual. Some would stuff the effigy with a pig’s bladder filled with blood, or blood-coloured liquid, so that Judas could first be hanged and then have his innards caused to burst asunder in imitation of the version in Acts. In other places the local butcher would supply meat to represent Judas’ entrails. Often, before being set alight, his ‘corpse’ would be dragged through the streets – shaming the traitor, in the same way criminals might be paraded on their way to the stocks or the gallows. In Spanish towns (and later in Latin America on ‘La Guema de Judas’, adopting and modifying the rituals of the Spanish conquistadors) the Judas doll would be stuffed with fireworks that exploded to capture the violence of his death – and to entertain the crowds.8
The practice survives in some places to this very day. On the south coast of Crete an effigy of Judas, in black hat and with a grotesque face, goes up in flames after children have pelted it with stones. In Cyprus, something similar is known as Lambratzia, and has become a tourist attraction, as has another ritual burning in the Philippines town of Baclayon. Elsewhere, it has evolved into a more general riotous farewell to Lent and its fasting – La Quema del Año Viejo, as it is known in Mexico: ‘the burning of the old year’. That in turn has sometimes spilled into more political protests, with the Judas figure given the face of hated local politicians, bureaucrats or even drugs barons.9
Occasionally other interpretations of Judas’ story were brought in to the festivities – with disastrous consequences. Because of that close association that grew up in medieval times between ‘Judas the Jew’ and the Jews in general, ‘Judas Day’ also became known as ‘Burning of the Jew’ in some cultures. As late as 1850, the British government indulged in some brutal gunboat diplomacy with recently independent Greece when a British subject, Don Pacifico, who lived in Athens and was Jewish, claimed he had been burnt out of house and home by a mob on ‘Judas Day’, their enthusiasm for setting light to the traitorous apostle then leading them to torch his house as the residence of a well-known Jew. Compensation was duly paid before a shot was fired in anger.10
But that is to race ahead. The chapter of Judas’ life revealed so powerfully in medieval Volterra by its cathedral pulpit was about to give way to another, where his trademark became not so much the demonic stilofori that snapped at his heels, but rather his money-bag, strapped to his waist, containing the thirty pieces of silver.