Sacred Humor beyond Edification

The iconographic trends in devotional and ecclesiastical images of St. Joseph may be explained not only with recourse to the functional roles of humor, play, and inversion. Their development and popularity had much to do with the nature of religious practices in the early modern period. Even the most public form of religious image, the altarpiece, was typically commissioned by a member of the laity, and decorated with respect to the laity's salvation and devotional concerns, despite the piece's liturgical function as a prop for the celebration of the Eucharist.1 Thus, even more secularized, comical iconography relevant to Joseph would not be out of place on an altarpiece, whether in a parish church or cathedral. But this fact is not even necessarily relevant to the explanation of humor on a functionally religious altarpiece. Once we accept that humor and play were in fact central to late medieval and early Renaissance religious life for both laity and clergy, and that jokes both obvious and subtle are present in an overwhelming number of religious depictions of St. Joseph, we can begin to see that play and humor are in fact present in many kinds of religious commissions. What we formerly might have considered an artist's weakness – for example, a rather diminutive dragon of unconvincing ferocity held prostrate by the foot of a St. Michael – becomes instead a comical display of the artist's wit in reducing a fearsome demon to an accessory.