Ecce Homo

Richly Painted and Gilded Wood Sculptures

Already two centuries old in France and Italy, Gothic art reached eastern Europe much later. The most beautiful examples are to be found in Czechoslovakia; the richly painted and gilded wood sculptures of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ were made (as the Romanesque sculptures had been several hundred years before) by anonymous craftsmen, telling the simple people who could neither read nor write the basic stories of the New Testament. The most humble peasants could relate what they saw - birth, suffering, death - to their own life in their village, while the color and richness of the robes and diadems, more splendid than anything they were used to, served to impress the Gospel story on their mind. Too often today our notion of Gothic art and architecture is one of static forms and pale, neutral colors. Such restrained qualities, however, are due to the bleaching of age and the deliberate Puritan `toning down' of original colors to suit post-Reformation tastes. In their day Romanesque and Gothic churches and cathedrals were ablaze with color, closer to the scintillation of Byzantine churches and Moslem temples than to the piously whitewashed northern church interiors we know today. The statuary was painted in gaudy and lifelike color, and was carried in processions down aisles and out into the streets, draped in finery and flickering in the light of candles. Church ritual and pageantry had the immediacy and drama then that movies have for modern audiences. This film shows rare statues which have retained their original colors, and restores to them something of their processional drama and mystery through the control of camera-angle and cinematic technique. Anthony Roland considers it to be one of the jewels of his collection. There is no narration.

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.