ABSTRACT
Two paintings of the Mass of St. Gregory, one from Spain and the other from colonial Mexico, feature the Man of Sorrows with the arma Christi appearing to Pope Gregory the Great during the Elevation of the Host. According to Kristen van Ausdall, the Mass of St. Gregory offered to the faithful a visual form of communion, consistent with the late medieval emphasis on receiving the Eucharist by contemplating images of the Passion. In rural Franciscan monasteries, like San Francisco in Tepeapulco, Hidalgo and San Gabriel de Cholula, Puebla, large-scale murals depicted the Mass of St. Gregory with the arma Christi. Paintings in the Spanish royal collection such as Pietro Perugino's Christ, the Man of Sorrows, 1450–1453, Hans Memling's The Virgin Holding the Dead Christ, c. 1475, or Guillaume Vrelant's illustration of the Mass of St. Gregory in Isabella the Catholic's Book of Hours, served as models of "affective imitation".
