Pierced are the hands that healed us

An important feature of the Christ of Holy Saturday had to be the pierced Hands of Christ. I knew that people would touch them given the level at which I designed the relief and marble tomb base. I wanted to make these hands as accessible as possible to all visitors of the shrine.

Shown here in the plaster stage of the process, I began to get a sense of how important the tactile is in sculpture of this kind, of how all religions have some kind of ritual that includes our touching. Whether it is kissing the mazzuzah when we enter the door, touching the forehead with folded hands, kissing the floor in the masjid, we all agree and engage our bodies as a way to leave them

The Christ of Holy Saturday

So often in the life of a church artist, the liturgical calendar gets reversed, that is, we often find ourselves working on images of the passion during Advent and then painting a Nativity image during lent. And so it was with the first commission for the Saint Rita Shrine. The Christ of Holy Saturday, a Northern Italian image of the resurgent Christ yet in the tomb between between death and resurrection was modeled all through the fall and Advent of 1999.

There was a point in time when this image was more prevalent than the crucifix in Italian devotional art. It is believed that Saint Rita received her stigmata in front of this very image of Christ. So important was it in the Saint's life that we find it painted on her coffin lid.

The modeling was done from a single drawing I had done in charcoal on prepared paper. I considered the flatness of the image and decided to put no or as little perspective as possible in the relief. This was to suspend the moment as in the Eastern Orthodox icon on which the image finds its basis. Here it is shown while still in the clay stage of modeling before a mold was made. I then cast it in plaster for finishing before the mold for bronze was made.