“Here Comes Everybody” at a Corpus Christi Procession
Adolph Von Menzel’s “Corpus Christi in Hofgastein”
Corpus Christi Procession in Hofgestein, Adolph Von Menzel, 1880, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (Wikimedia Commons)
In Adolph Von Menzel’s Procession painting, communal piety meets secular apathy in a small Austrian Mountain town. Although Von Menzel was not known to be religious himself, he seems to be drawn to the piety of the poor who participate in this Corpus Christi procession.
A pioneer of the German Realist movement, Von Menzel often depicted real-life scenes and was the first to paint the inside of a factory. Perhaps because of his height—he was only 4 foot seven—he was drawn to paint outsiders and the poor with a compassionate realism. It is said he was always sketching.
Despite the fact that Von Menzel painted this scene in the late 1800s, much about the mood seems familiar today. Secularism had already begun to take hold in Germany after Otto Von Bismarck initiated “Kulturkampf,” a scheme to limit the influence of the Church in Germany. Processions like this one were starting to become a relic of another world.
Although the procession is the focal point of the painting, it is not as if everyone is engaged in the procession. In the painting, two worlds meet— the world of the Church and the secular world. The Body of Christ is taken into a village where many have moved on from religious pieties. This collision of worlds reminds a Catholic of how heaven and earth collide in an Eucharistic procession.
In this procession, the religious and the secular come together in a rare moment when faith is made public in all its pomp and splendor. Men wave flags triumphantly, the priest wears his most splendid gold vestments, and altar boys stand out in vibrant red.
There is so much to look. The diagonal line, or the processional route, organizes the painting, which is full of diverse personalities and persons. In a sea of browns, blacks, and grays, the red of the baldacchino canopy catches our eye. The priest stands under the baldacchino in a glittering gold cope, holding the Monstrance with the Eucharist, the Body of Christ, inside.
The painterly details and the assortment of figures recall impressionist scenes by Manet and Renoir. Sunlight dazzles on the red fabrics and the white building.
Looking at this painting has all the fun of people-watching. The different types of people that surround and participate in the procession—pious children, uninterested socialites, poor beggars, earnest altar boys, distracted mothers— remind us of the “here comes everybody” reality of the Church.
Our eyes wander among all the people, but the Eucharist is the organizing principle of this painting. We are prompted to ask how people react to it. Are they attentive, distracted, aloof, or pious? For a religious viewer, these are the questions the painting begs us to ask about our own attitude towards the great gift of the Blessed Sacrament, God with us.
In the front of the painting, a young boy in tattered clothes kneels on the hard rocks. We see the dirty soles of his feet as he kneels because he is presumably too poor to own shoes. In front of him, another boy in similar clothes kneels next to a crippled older man. Despite the elderly man's feeble appearance, he also kneels holding his cane.
In the bottom left, a woman dressed more nicely than the men in front of her looks away from the procession and toward her baby, attempting to soothe the infant. Her young daughter watches attentively.
The men wave banners heralding the coming of the King of Kings. Close to them, on the right side of the painting, a man in plain brown clothes stands piously. Below him on the hill, another woman kneels, and a man wearing a brown suit takes off his hat in seeming reverence.
One mustached man looks toward the procession with an aloof air that contrasts with the reverent posture of the children beside him. Next to the children, a man spreads his arms out and leans against the wall leisurely, boasting a slightly defiant air. Some well-dressed women with fancy hats chat in the bottom right corner.
Still, Von Menzel seems to judge the crowd's indifferent gazes or at least recognize that the pious poor have something valuable that they do not.
Processions remind us that we are pilgrims. We can’t take the things of this world with us into the next, only our love and our character. The juxtaposition between the reverence of the little children and the poor and the indifference of the more wealthy people in the painting heightens this truth. We are reminded of the beatitude—“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20).
Most of those who kneel are the poor, the elderly, and the children—the people who are often excluded from the fasting obligations and such—reminding us that we often make poor excuses for why we can not attend to God.
Maria Vonn Trapp gives insight into who is in a Corpus Christi procession in her book Around the Year with the Von Trapps:
Behind the Blessed Sacrament follows the church choir, then a detachment of firemen, the war veterans in uniforms and the rest of the community. At the very end of the procession comes the brass band playing hymns while everyone joins in on the singing.
You can almost hear the brass band coming while looking at this painting. The fullness of it all reminds us why we still need processions and other joyful acts of communal piety.
What do you notice about the painting?
The theme that a miracle is happening and some are amazed while others don’t notice reminds me of Auden’s poem ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’