“Beautiful on the Cross, Beautiful in His Torments”: The Place of the Body in the Thought of Paschasius Radbertus

Abstract

In his literary portrait of Abbot Adalhard, written soon after the abbot's death in 826, Paschasius Radbertus of Corbie compared his subject's moral and spiritual progress to the method of the ancient painter Zeuxis as this had been described in Cicero'sDe inventione.According to Cicero, the people of Cortona commissioned Zeuxis to decorate a temple with the image of Helen, who was reputed to be the most beautiful of mortal women. Because nature withheld overall perfection from any individual, Zeuxis studied several handsome models and combined the best features of each in an image that was more perfect than the form of any actual maiden. Adalhard too was an artist who sought to realize a work that somehow went beyond nature, but in his case the objective was a reformation of the image of God in himself. To achieve this, Adalhard too used models, in his case the lives and deeds of the saints, whose examples of virtue he discerned with the mind's eye and assimilated in an effort to resemble the transcendent archetype.