13 - The Cross on the Book: Diagram, Ornament, Materiality

Summary

In the art of late Antiquity and the early medieval period, the figure of Christ often appears in the form of ‘God with the book’ (Fig. 1). The literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius was one of the first to emphasize the particularity of this pictorial formula, identifying the significant difference between it and depictions of divinities from pagan Antiquity. Given the central role of Christ’s image in the visual culture of pre-modern Christianity, and in particular in Christian debates about the status of religious images, this observation is crucial. Yet somewhat surprisingly, the book has never played a major role in art-historical discussion of the depiction of Christ. The focus has been on the depiction of Christ in terms of his bodily appearance, with the result that the intimate symbiosis between Christ and the book has been left out of the equation. Since Christ himself was conceived as incarnate Logos or verbum, the book’s relation to him is neither metonymical nor metaphorical but ‘mediological’: body and book were both media of the Christian God. To put it more pointedly, it could be said that in such images, the changing countenance of the book formed the counterpart to the changing countenance of Christ’s body.

Initially still in scroll format, the book soon assumed codex form, affording new possibilities to distinguish between the closed and open book, between exterior and interior. Where an open book was shown, its interior provided a space in which to incorporate text. The writing allowed the book to speak and, through the book, gave a voice to Christ. In contrast, rather different features appear as hallmarks of the closed book’s exterior. Instead of scripture, geometric patterns predominate: the quincunx, the St Andrew’s cross and the orthogonal cross. The graphic schemata on the closed book are deployed as the Other of writing, in precisely the sense suggested by the conception of ‘graphicacy’ in this volume. This raises two questions: how is this design of the exterior of the codex, its cover, related to the idea of Christ as being ‘God with the book’?; and how do the book covers in such depictions relate to the actual bindings of medieval books? I would like to address these two questions by examining the genre of liturgical books with treasure bindings.