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Another look at the disappearing Christ: corporeal and spiritual vision in early medieval images
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 1997 by Robert Deshman
Though we have progressed in our comprehension of the complex religious significance of the disappearing Christ, we have by no means reached an adequate explanation of the iconography's most essential feature - the masking of Christ's upper body in cloud. There can be little doubt that, had they wished, Anglo-Saxon artists could have visualized the theological meanings we have discovered without making such a radical departure from tradition. To show that the cloud did not support Christ, they need only have located it above his feet, as in the Ascension scene in the ninth-century Drogo Sacramentary from Metz [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED].(67) Since this Carolingian image depicts Christ's feet on the ground and his head in cloud, it seems also to represent him simultaneously on earth and in heaven. Alternatively, Anglo-Saxon artists could have illustrated this concept with a band of cloud covering part of Christ's torso but not his head and feet.(68) By veiling the upper part of Christ in cloud, they were clearly representing him from the Apostles' viewpoint, as Schapiro long ago argued; their conception allowed the beholders of the image to reexperience the event in the role of the disciples watching their Lord vanish into heaven. What is unclear, however, is precisely why the Anglo-Saxon artists did this.
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The earliest scholars to interpret the disappearing Christ believed the iconography to have been a Gothic invention whose optical realism resulted from late medieval secular attitudes that supplanted traditional religious values. Ernest T DeWald attributed the "realism" of the disappearing Christ to the general humanizing tendencies of Gothic art.(69) Though Charles Rufus Morey knew of the related iconography of Enoch's Translation in the Junius manuscript, he still regarded the disappearing Christ in terms of Gothic realism: "primitive" English artists played an important part "in breaking up the hieratic traditions of mediaeval Christian art; it was their quaint but firm grasp of reality that first rehumanized art, and made possible the Gothic prelude to the rise of modern painting."(70) Helena Gutberlet, who also was aware of the iconography's early medieval origin, still considered it a "Gothic" type stemming from a general late medieval trend toward individualism and subjectivism.(71) According to this view, the disappearing Christ, instead of representing sacred and objective content, such as the revelation of Christ's divinity or the elevation of his humanity, emphasized the psychological experience and human emotions of the Virgin, the Apostles, and those reexperiencing the Ascension.
This older scholarship colored Schapiro's interpretation, for he, too, considered the disappearing Christ to be a form of daring realism that precociously expressed the humanizing, "subjective, individual side of religious feeling." Schapiro, however, was well aware that these attitudes, though customary in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were surprising at the millennium, so he shifted the argument somewhat. The late medieval values were now anticipated in the "advanced conditions" and" progressive character" of late tenth-century English culture, which favored "the popular, the individual, the contemporary, and the local, as against the stabilized institutional forms."(72) For Schapiro, the large body of AngloSaxon vernacular literature indicated the extensive penetration of secular life into Anglo-Latin ecclesiastic culture; in analogous fashion, Anglo-Saxon artists sought to humanize and personalize the Ascension and other religious themes by adding concrete, realistic details drawn from their own empirical observations of the material world.
