From devotion to emblem
The devotion to the five wounds, with its prayers and masses, has its own history. This article is about the picture side: how the wounds were drawn, carved, worn and carried, and what they were meant to say. In an era when many people could not read, an image like this did a great deal of work in very little space.
What the symbol said
The wounds communicated two ideas at once. The first was suffering: Christ’s pain was real and bodily, and the wounds were evidence of it. The second was redemption: the wounds remained visible after the resurrection, a detail drawn from the Gospel of John, where the risen Christ shows his hands and side. The marks therefore stood for the cost of sin and also for the means of forgiveness.
Medieval preachers and writers liked to say that the wounds were open doors, or fountains, through which mercy flowed. The blood and water from the side were read as images of the sacraments. This kind of layered meaning is typical of allegory and symbolism in medieval art, where a single shape can hold several levels of interpretation.
How the wounds were shown
Artists had several ways of presenting the wounds.
- On the body of Christ. Crucifixion scenes and images of the risen Christ displayed the marks directly. In the later Middle Ages these images often became more graphic, stressing bleeding and exhaustion as a way of inspiring compassion, a change linked to the broader development of emotion in art.
- Isolated hands, feet and heart. In some designs the five wounds appear alone, as a hand, a foot or a pierced heart, arranged in a cross pattern with a central wound. This compact diagram was easy to copy in a book margin or on a small object.
- The Arma Christi. The “arms” or weapons of Christ were the instruments of the passion, such as the cross, nails, spear, crown of thorns and scourging pillar, gathered into a single picture. The wounds often appear in or near these compositions, which functioned as a kind of heraldry of the passion.
- The Man of Sorrows. This popular image shows Christ standing or seated with his wounds displayed. It spread widely in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in painting, woodcuts and sculpture.
Badges, banners and portable objects
The symbol also traveled. Lead pilgrim badges and small tokens sold at shrines sometimes carried religious emblems, and people also wore devotional medals, rings and amulet-like objects. Because the surviving evidence is fragmentary and not every item is securely dated, historians are cautious about how common any particular design was. Many such objects were inexpensive, which suggests broad accessibility.
Banners and standards are a better documented case. Religious banners were carried in processions and on campaign, and the wounds were among the images used. A well-known later example is the banner of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern English rising of 1536, which displayed the five wounds. That falls at the very end of the medieval period and shows how the emblem could express a political cause as well as personal piety.
Heraldry also used religious imagery. Medieval heraldry could adopt crosses and other sacred charges, and the idea of using the passion as a badge fits with this culture of emblems, though one should not assume that all five-pointed or cross-shaped arms were meant to refer to the wounds.
Prayers and texts
Words and images worked together. Prayer books sometimes included illustrations beside texts addressed to each wound, in the style of illuminated manuscripts. Short rhymes, charms and prayers for protection circulated in manuscripts and later in printed sheets. The text told the reader how to meditate while the picture provided a focus. Claims that a prayer would protect from sudden death or from harm were part of the popular culture around such texts, though church leaders were uneasy about some of them.
Reading the symbol in context
It is easy to treat the wounds only as grim. The medieval viewer would have seen both the suffering and its meaning. A person looking at a wounded Christ in a parish church was invited to feel gratitude and sorrow, and to connect their own troubles to something greater. The wounds also tied the viewer to the sacramental life of the Church, since the Eucharist was thought to make Christ’s sacrifice present on the altar.
Images of the passion also had a social function. Guilds, confraternities and parishes commissioned altarpieces and banners to express shared identity, and the image of the wounds gave them a common emblem.
Limits of the evidence
Much of what survives is in churches, books and museum collections, and these represent the wealthier and more durable end of medieval material culture. Humble cloth banners, wooden carvings and household objects mostly disappeared. Reformation-era destruction of religious images in some regions also removed many examples. As a result, we can describe the symbol with confidence, but we cannot measure precisely how widely each form was used.