14 - Graphic Glosses and Argumentative Ornament

Summary

The meanings of even seemingly conventional medieval figurations are articulated by graphic elements that engage the basic principles revealed by the diverse essays in this volume. A frontispiece in the Benedictional made for Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester from 963 to 984, for example, seems at first glance to be entirely banal (London, BL, MS Add. 49598, fol. 70r; Fig. 1). The Lord enthroned within a double mandorla blessing with his right hand and proffering a book with the left is a commonplace of Carolingian and Ottonian manuscript illumination, invented as a way to imagine the Saviour’s dual nature; but it is hardly an adequate representation of the Triune God, the most complex of all Christian concepts, that the titulus, TRINITAS, claims for the Benedictional pictures. By complementing, contradicting, articulating, and obfuscating the figure, graphic elements compensate for the theological inadequacy by asserting God’s essential ineffability. The portrait generates what Ildar Garipzanov has called a ‘popup effect’; it anchors the reader’s gaze while, at the same time, revealing the image’s very incapacity to render the fundamental mystery of the ‘verus Deus’ who is, at one time, unus and trinus. Words, nomina sacra, a diagram, scale and hierarchy, materials, colour, and ornament not only prolong the experience of looking at the central figure of Christ in ways parallel to those which Benjamin Tilghman identifies in the Book of Kells, but also engender a rumination on God-made-man that simulates theological speculation on the complex understanding of the relationship of the Only Begotten Son to the Godhead. Operating like John the Evangelist’s metaphor of the caelum sicut liber involutus (Revelation 6:14), the illumination in Æthelwold’s Benedictional is thus the perfect paradigm for a concluding meditation on the essential issues comprehended by this collection of brilliant and important studies; it also introduces other matters that the authors do not discuss, or only touch on, and takes those matters beyond this book towards future application.

Nothing in the Benedictional’s singular Trinity composition is, in fact, single, and the very familiarity and repetition condition the reading of the miniature within the manuscript. Christ enthroned in a double mandorla, the lower orb enclosing his lap and legs and the one above it his upper torso, is derived from a Carolingian invention designed to deploy graphic means to convey the Saviour’s human and divine natures.