Wages of sin: infernal punishment for gluttony, from a woodcut of 1496 |
Before the Reformation stripped the decoration from English churches, the walls preached damnation as loud as any parish priest. The Seven Deadly Sins Pride, Envy, Anger, Avarice, Sadness (or Sloth), Gluttony, Lust were conveyed to a largely illiterate population through graphic wall paintings depicting sinful acts and their consequences.
Miriam Gill, a postgraduate at the University of Leicester, has set out to track down the surviving wall paintings in England and Wales, as part of her doctoral thesis. The project involves establishing a database of medieval paintings showing where the paintings are found and what they depict and a research website (address below).
Gill said: “The graphic images of the Sins were used for educating the masses. They are a kind of ‘mental technology’. People looked at the depiction of the Sins, and that caused them to think about their own behaviour.
“The pictures are exaggerated and explicit drunkards vomiting, misers counting their hoards, sluggards dozing. They are rather like a modern public information campaign, delivering a strong ‘spiritual health warning’. Visual stimulation of the conscience was a sophisticated way of teaching people what was right and wrong.”
The medieval church made a division between sins which were venial and could be forgiven without the need for the sacrament of Confession, and those which were capital and merited damnation. Capital or Deadly Sins were so called because they could have a fatal effect on an individual’s spiritual health. British wall paintings stressed the connection between committing the Deadly Sins and ending up in Hell.
Wall paintings of the Seven Deadly Sins, and their virtuous counterpart the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, were popular in British wall painting from the fourteenth century to the Reformation. They were among a group of ‘didactic’ or ‘morality’ images portrayed in familiar numbered sets, and thus readily memorised. Other contemporary ‘morality’ subjects included the Seven Sacraments and the Warnings to Gossips, Swearers and Sabbath Breakers.
While remaining faithful to the conventions of the ‘morality’ series, medieval painters had more freedom in the design (schema) within which the individual vices or virtues were portrayed. Gill has identified eight distinct ways in which the Seven Deadly Sins are depicted. In the Tree schema, for example, the Sins are represented as the branches of the Tree of Sin: in one version, the Whore of Babylon crouches at its root, and Adam and the Fruits of the Flesh ripen at the top. Other schema represent the Sins in the form of a wheel, as a series of didactic scenes, or round a naked male figure.
Gill added: “The Sins can be important in understanding literature such as the works of Chaucer and Dante, and have featured as major works of art in both the medieval and Renaissance periods.
“The database also serves the more general purpose of demonstrating how art was used to spread and popularise visual mnemonic techniques that is, remembering things through picturing them in the mind. Although many of the parish congregations which saw these images were illiterate, that does not mean they were stupid. These diverse murals suggest that they were skilled at using visual images to learn and recall information.
“It is not just what the pictures depict but how things are depicted. The paintings show social constructions of images of Vice and Virtue and the role of gender and status. For example, the sin of Pride can be male or female, but is associated with high status and often depicted as a monarch. One image shows Sloth sleeping with a church in the background he is too lazy to bother to get out bed to go to mass.”
In today’s secular world, the concept of ‘sin’ is unfashionable. Yet Gill insists on the psychological validity of the medieval moral universe: “People today are not so much offended by the abstract idea of sins themselves but they are still concerned by expression of them. For example, Lust is no longer a taboo, but some of the actions it motivates, such as paedophilia or rape, remain current issues in our society. For many generations the Seven Deadly Sins provided a way of analysing what motivates us to do wrong as well as condemning specific acts.”
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