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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
The Utrecht Psalter's image of Mary and the Trinity influenced the two-page illustration of the Gospel of John in the Anglo-Saxon Grimbald Gospels, probably made at Canterbury during the first quarter of the eleventh century [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 11, 12 OMITTED].(33) In the upper frame of the initial page of John's prologue, the Virgin and Child are enthroned in a common mandorla carried by angels, and opposite them on the facing verso are the three similar persons of the Trinity enthroned above the Evangelist John. These images illustrate the prologue (John 1:1-14), which, like the Apostolic Creed, states that the divine Word Christ had existed from the beginning with the Father and had assumed human flesh in the Incarnation. While the Utrecht Psalter shows a single multivalent figure of the Christ Child to make manifest that the preexistent divine Word and the incarnate Christ were one, the Grimbald Gospels juxtaposes the three divine persons of the eternal Trinity (Christ, with a cross nimbus, is in the center) and the incarnational group of the Virgin and Child to make the same point. Mary seated with Christ within his mandorla illustrates the prologue's description of Christ as the true light who came into the world and enlightened humankind (John 1:4-9). The Virgin and Child are not on earth, however, but are carried by angels in heaven, like the Trinity; thus, this incarnational group, no less than the one in the Utrecht Psalter, suggests the post-Resurrection exaltation of the human Christ in heaven, where he is enthroned with his divine self and the Father and the Spirit. In both illustrations, the allusions to the time after the Ascension are amplified by the figures filling the lower borders of the frames: the choirs of the saints, who currently dwell with Christ in heaven, the twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse,(34) who adore him as the perpetual Alpha and the Omega in the celestial court (Rev. 4-5), and the two angels, who take up souls "in the clouds to meet Christ" returning in judgment (I Thess. 4:16). Freely interpreting the Utrecht Psalter's creedal iconography, the Anglo-Saxon prologue imagery represents the divine and incarnate Christ's role throughout time, from the beginning with the Father, through the Incarnation, to the final judgment.
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The Utrecht Psalter and Grimbald Gospels pictures can be seen to be connected in different ways to virtually all of the early disappearing Christ images.(35) The depictions in the Missal of Robert of Jumieges, the Junius manuscript, and the Bury Psalter, for example, were probably all produced at Canterbury, where the Grimbald Gospels was very likely made and where the Utrecht Psalter was known to have been by the millennium. The picture of the disappearing Christ in the Odbert Gospels, in turn, although produced on the Continent, features a number of similarities to the illuminations in the Utrecht Psalter and the Grimbald Gospels. On the one hand, all of its New Testament scenes also occur in the Utrecht Psalter drawing (the Crucifixion, Women at the Tomb, Harrowing of Hell, and Ascension), albeit without a correspondence of specific details. On the other hand, the new Ascension type in the Odbert Gospels illustrates John's prologue, and, as in the Grimbald Gospels, the Virgin in a mandorla adorns the center of the upper border of the prologue's initial page. There can also be little doubt, given these various connections, that the Utrecht Psalter's drawing of the Creed and the related Johannine imagery in the Grimbald Gospels are important to the iconographical meaning of the disappearing Christ.
