CYNTHIA HAHN Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century - Book Review

His starting point, as he tells us in the preface, is a fascinating image added about 1400 to a 13th-century liturgical psalter, now in Freiburg. It represents a standing figure holding a medallion, beneath which is depicted a second medallion. The visual type of the figure is persuasively related by Hamburger to Christ as Logos creating the cosmos that he holds in his hand, but also to common images of John the Baptist holding a medallion in which the Lamb of God is displayed. It has formal and iconographic links with other images but is fundamentally unique, as are virtually all the images Hamburger studies. He interprets them with and against many texts, texts scriptural, liturgical, theological, and devotional. Fundamental for the theological understanding of the imagery, in his view, is the homily Vox spiritualis aquilae by the remarkable 9th-century author John the Scot (whom he consistently calls simply Eriugena, which helps to distinguish him readily from his namesake the Evangelist). Eriugena wrote: "John passes beyond every created heaven and every created paradise, that is, every human and angelic nature" (p. 17). In contrast to some other works of Eriugena's that were not widely known, this preface to John's Gospel survives in sixty-four manuscripts (albeit commonly attributed to Origen, another great intellect whose works were often condemned) and was used in Spain and parts of France as a reading for Christmas. It is fascinating that the text was translated into Middle High German and included in a 15th-century Dominican collection that circulated as a libellus, a varied collection of texts devoted to John the Evangelist, providing at least some direct evidence for the connection posited. John the Evangelist thus becomes the perfect type of the mystic, and also the perfect mystagogue, teacher of the mystical path. The mystical connections of the Johannine iconography, especially in the late medieval period, elicit from Hamburger his most compelling discussion.

Hamburger dedicates chapters to the imagery of John as Christ Logos, treating in particular the important relationship visually underscored in so many Bibles between the opening words of John's Gospel and those of the Book of Genesis, In principio, "in the beginning." Then follows a chapter primarily investigating author portraits of John, set before either his Gospel or his Revelation, the Apocalypse, especially from the Carolingian period to the 12th century, emphasizing and including several that single out John from the other sacred authors and present him enthroned in Majesty. With the next chapter the focus shifts to typology and the close connection between John the Evangelist and John the Baptist. Hamburger uses a 13th-century visionary text by Mechthild of Magdeburg to illuminate the "reciprocal relationships between real and imagined images in the pictorial piety of late medieval visionaries" (p. 75). After a second short typological chapter on the pairing of John with the Old Testament visionary Ezekiel, especially in the remarkable frontispiece to John's Gospel in the 12th-century Mosan Floreffe Bible (London, British Library, cod. Add. 17737-17738, fol. 199r), Hamburger produces what is in many respects the central section of his book, on the cult of John, especially in the upper Rhineland. Here the key works are the extraordinarily dense, varied, and remarkable images set to various texts (and music) in the Gradual of St. Katharinenthal, a manuscript dated 1312. The next chapter considers imagery featuring John as Mary's adopted son after the Crucifixion and as the "high priest of the Sacrament." The final chapter addresses the theological problem of images, beginning with Athanasius of Alexandria's repeated connection between Christ as the imago dei ("image of god") and pictorial likenesses, and moving through Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of S. Victor, and Bonaventure to Meister Eckehart, adding to this classical corpus of sources a fascinating discussion of a meditation on the Passion by William of St. Thierry.