Groh Christ Crucifixion
Hello everyone! Today, I would like to introduce the oak carving "Gro Christ Crucifixion" collected in cologne cathedral in Germany, which was created around 975-1000 AD.
This is the human-sized Crucifixion of Christ, custom-made by Archbishop Groh, whose miserable appearance of Jesus transcends the great ideals of other religions.
Christ hung on the cross, his exhausted and weak arms, his head hanging to the right with an expression of extreme pain, his knees twisting his body to the left, his feet suggesting that he was no longer able to bear the weight of his body, which was gradually exhausted by his own vitality.
This humble, humiliating, and painful new conception of humanoid deities peculiar to Christianity is also the earliest work of the portrait of Christ that expresses extreme suffering.
The portrait, devoid of idealization, later became the dominant religious symbol of Christianity in Western Europe, and its seriousness had a great influence over the next two centuries. Around 1020, Christian theologians supported the feasibility of this image with further arguments, saying that no other illustration was more suitable for the church than the image of Christ on the cross.
The ascetics of western European self-descarination also happened to exaggerate the greatness of the "crucifixion", performing rituals of flogging their bodies in public so that onlookers "wept as if they had witnessed the suffering of the Savior with their own eyes".
Thus, the lifelike Passion of Christ was a major target for medieval Western European artists, and its imagination far exceeded that of the works of art of the Byzantine Empire.
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