Judas' Death: Some Remarks Concerning the Iconography of Suicide in the Middle Ages

Abstract

This essay analyses some medieval images representing the Biblical story of Judas'suicide. From a historian's point of view, those images must be seen in the context of a scholastic discourse on mortal sins and human responsibility. Miniatures and sculptures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries mark a high point in the developement of pictorial representations of that theme. They render Judas in the shape of an anti-image: with deformed physiognomic characteristics, vile gestures and the attributes of vices. A central aspect of my argument will focus on the hanging-tree. A number of pictures indicate a significant transformation of this motif The former tree is replaced by a representation of gallows. I will argue that this development reflects a corres ponding revaluation of Judas' death within the scholastic discourse. Since in early-medieval literature, death at the hanging-tree is recognised as a refer ence to a denigrating death, without mourning and the presence of relatives, that is, the absence of memoria, the motif of the hanging Judas at the gallows now underscored that hanging itself, the most shameful of acts, and was a sort of penance for Judas' betrayal. During the later Middle Ages, perhaps as a result of the canonisation of the iconography of the passion, the motif of suicide appeared to lose its popularity without the wide application of this rhetoric of denigration.