Still Life

~ Eric Potter Forty martyrs who followed Christ all the way to a cold grave, frozen in bas relief whose stillness still conveys their agony. Naked from the waist up, their muscled torsos contort against the cold, their arms are clenched across their chests or raised in supplication to Christ, enthroned, three angels on each side, their draperied bodies still bent in worship. Imagine how they must have trembled when immersed in icy water, spastic at first, their limbs numbing, their brown skin pale then blue, their blood withdrawn, and one by one their systems down, heart beat slow, slower, stopped. An indelicate death, so delicately carved. Forty martyrs who will follow Christ, their bodies rising on the last day, their bulging calves and sculpted pecs free from the still, cold clutch of ivory death. Based on “Berlin, Ivory with the Forty Martyrs of Sebast” [plate 1] in Kurt Weitzmann, The Icon: Holy Images—Sixth to Fourteenth Century. New York: George Braziller, 1978.