kingdom of england plantagenet
Cloisters Cross (Bury St Edmunds Cross)
Ivory altar cross (c.1150–1160 CE), probably made at Bury St Edmunds Abbey, England. Carved walrus ivory; one of the most complex and iconographically dense objects of the Romanesque period. Over 100 carved figures including Old and New Testament typological pairs, prophets, inscriptions, and narrative scenes. Currently at The Met Cloisters, New York.
Notes
- ·The cross bears over 100 individual carved figures on both faces, plus extensive Latin inscriptions.
- ·The iconographic programme is based on Old Testament/New Testament typology: Old Testament scenes ('types') prefigure New Testament events ('antitypes'). This typological method (also used in the Biblia pauperum tradition) is unusually elaborate here.
- ·Inscriptions identify many figures by name; some are anti-Semitic polemical texts directed against Jewish denials of Christ — reflecting the medieval Christian typological reading of the Hebrew Bible.
- ·Attribution to Bury St Edmunds is supported by style (related to the Bury Bible, c.1130–1140) and the sophistication of the intellectual programme (Bury was a major centre of biblical scholarship).
- ·A companion plaque depicting the Deposition from the Cross was recently (2001) identified in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow.
- ·The cross was probably a processional or altar cross; walrus ivory was the primary ivory source in 12th-century England before African elephant ivory became more available.