The Frame Blog

Introduction

This is the second article on the minor but important category of framed sculptural domestic crucifixes and crucifixion scenes, which generated in Italy, for instance, powerfully affecting small altarpieces like the carved boxwood and walnut example featured in Part 1, and blossomed in an extraordinary diversity of crucifixes in every available medium from the 10^th century onwards.

Andrea di Piero Ferrucci (1465-1526), monumental white & red marble altarpiece (The Ferrucci Altarpiece) with Crucifixion scene and supporting saints and angels, c.1493-97,  365.8 x 274.3 cm., from San Girolamo in Fiesole, and detail; V & A Museum

Framed domestic crucifixes derive partly from the panels of large-scale sculptural altarpieces, like the one above – still the model even when a devotional object more fitted in size to personal use was in question.

Crucifixes by Donatello, c.1406-08, Santa Croce, photo: Sailko; Brunelleschi, 1410-15, Santa Maria Novello, photo: Sailko; Michelangelo, c.1492, Santo Spirito, photo: Gary Campbell-Hall; all Florence

They also unite the large wall-hung crucifixes of churches and public buildings, as in the three examples above, the early rood screen crucifix, small framed relief sculptures in marble and stucco, the painted domestic altarpiece, and the palm-sized carved ivory crucifixion panel for individual devotion (below).

The Pereire gem with the crucified Christ, jasper, late 2^nd-early 3^rd century, 3 x 2.5 x 0.6 cm., engraved, from the eastern Mediterranean, © The Trustees of the British Museum

The earliest surviving depiction of the crucified Christ seems to be the Pereire gem, an intaglio jasper jewel in the British Museum: a tiny oval stone, three centimetres high, carved with the figure of a bearded man hanging on a cross, and engraved with variations in Greek on Christ’s names, and with the words ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. This would probably have been mounted in a ring, after the Roman fashion – although the inscriptions are the right way round, so this could never have been intended for use as a seal, and was more likely to have been created for private (perhaps secret) devotion, or as a recognizance to other Christians – possibly in a dangerous time, such as Diocletian’s persecutions at the turn of the 3^rd century. What ‘frame’ it had, mounted in a putative ring, would probably have been very plain [1].

 

Early framed crucifixions

There was a gap in depictions of the crucifixion showing the body of Christ – the Corpus Christi – after the Synod of Elvira, c. 305 AD, when in accordance with the second commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image’, it was laid down that paintings should not be allowed in churches, so that the congregation would not begin to worship the image instead of God. This was restated in the Council of Hieria at Constantinople in 745 AD, but in this case because it was thought both impossible and blasphemous to depict the human Christ, God the Father or even the saints in any other way than through abstracted symbols. In 787 AD this rule was rescinded, and figurative images were again allowed in churches; but during the iconoclastic periods only the Cross (for example) was shown, without the body of Christ. This perhaps explains why there are few depictions of the crucifixion until the late 8^th or early 9^th centuries.

The first examples of smaller framed crucifixion scenes are personal in the sense that a wealthy and/or educated layman might possess – apart from a jewel or a seal – a bible in Latin or Jerome’s Vulgate, or, more commonly, a psalter or a breviary, or even passages from the Gospels bound together and annotated. These might be illustrated with painted scenes, and they could be bound in wooden or metal covers enriched with gemstones and devotional ivory plaques.

Irish school, Clonmacnoise Crucifixion plaque, late 10^th century, copper alloy sculpture, 8.4 x 7.3 cm., NG of Ireland. Photo: Sailko

The Clonmacnoise Crucifixion plaque is one of a number of similar surviving early mediaeval Irish depictions of the crucifixion, cast in bronze, framed, and made to be nailed via holes in the frame to a wooden object – a processional cross, a box altar, part of an altarpiece, or even the wooden cover of a metal-covered and gem-encrusted bible, such as the book shrine for the Stowe Missal,  which includes on its sides similar figural plaques in geometrically ornamented frames.

French school, Crucifixion panel from Metz, c.860-70, ivory, 21 x11.8 cm., V & A

This ivory panel – slightly earlier than the Irish plaque, but much more developed in its representation of anatomy and movement – might also have been part of a book binding, Metz being a centre for the production of manuscripts and ivories in the 9^th century (the holes were originally filled with gold studs, some of which remain in the tops of the little tombs level with Christ’s feet). The panel is crammed with tiers of figures, including personifications (like Ecclesia and Synagogue, flanking Christ, and the Sea and the Earth at the base), and these figures overlap the frame of  acanthus trefoils, which are carved in quite deep relief.

The acanthus was an ancient motif, together with the architectural running mouldings, scrolling ornaments, volutes, vine and bay leaves, fruit and flowers, which the Romans had inherited from the Greeks, adapted and left behind them to further adaptations by Byzantine, mediaeval and Renaissance carvers. Every European city which had formed part of the extensive Roman empire was left with a wealth of decorative motifs spilling from remaining buildings and ruins in various stages, and the acanthus was flexible enough to be copied as a standing crown round the capital of a column or as a border of cross-cut leaves, and as a flatter arrangement of scrolling branches which could make another sort of border, or fill an empty space or spandrel.

Crucifixion panel from Metz, detail

Although it might seem purely decorative in Roman hands, it was used by them as a symbol of resurrection and immortality, because of the powers of regeneration and regrowth of the acanthus plant [2]. In Christian work, although the spikiness of the acanthus leaf could also be associated symbolically with the crown of thorns forced upon Christ, it kept the significance of its classical past – a leaf used in funerary art but which also promised rebirth and eternal life. It is employed in this way for many of the borders of ivory panels which show Christian scenes, and in the V & A panel, above, its lush growth – which breaks free of overflowing figures along the top moulding, and points unambiguously upwards – helps to expand the meaning of this crucifixion scene. These uninterrupted acanthus leaves are growing in the region of heaven, where the angels reach down for Christ’s soul and the sun and the moon wait expectantly, and they promise His resurrection and immortality more clearly than anything else in the scene itself. The ability of a frame to expand like this on the meaning of a painted or sculptural scene is one of the major advantages of an accessory later so misunderstood and neglected.

Spanish school, panel with ivory crucifixion scene, late 11^th century, ivory panel: 7.3 x 6.8 cm., frame: silver-gilt, inset with glass gems and cloisonné enamel, 26.1 x 19 cm., Metropolitan Museum, New York

An example of an 11^th century Spanish book-binding shows how a carved ivory panel might be set into a wooden frame – and this is, in its structure, very much like a late 19^th-early 20^th century artist’s frame: wide, flat, with a plain bevel to the sight, and butt joints rather than mitres. The wooden frame has been covered with sheet silver, which is attached with very small nails or rivets, and the silver has been gilded – probably by burnishing and then heating leaf gold. The decoration (which is all of fine metal wire with a sort of rope pattern) consists of a contour ‘moulding’ at the outer and sight edges, and then an abstract vine overlay, which surrounds the settings for cabochon gems and tiny panels of coloured enamel as though they were flowers or fruits. There is no overt symbolism here; the object is to provide an opulent, splendid and majestic setting for Christ as King, in acknowledgement of His sacrifice.

Belgian school (Liège?), integral framed panel with Crucifixion scene, c.1100, walrus ivory, 11.5 x 10.1 cm., © The Trustees of the British Museum

This is an early and finely carved palm-sized crucifixion scene which was most probably a personal item of devotion, rather than part of a larger object (like a book-binding), and is made of a more homely walrus ivory, instead of the expensive and exotic elephant ivory. It’s only 11.5 centimetres or 4 ½ inches high, and has a reverse or bolection frame all round which is quite deeply undercut, allowing the figures to be carved in strong relief. The frame appears to be decorated all over with imbricated leaves in a fish scale pattern; however, they may actually be intended as feathers, indicating either a peacock or a phoenix as symbols of immortality or resurrection – a variant on the acanthus leaf. The frame also provides an undercutting of perspective (like the stained-glass panel, below): the Cross, Christ and the Hand of God are all behind the frame, but the vase at the base and the platform which supports Christ’s feet are both in front of the frame. The vase may be a case of metonymy – like St Peter’s keys, it is standing in for Mary Magdalene, since her attribute is a jar of ointment – and there is no room for her in the tiny symmetrical space of the panel.

As well as providing sufficient depth for the scene to be sunk backwards into the ivory, the flared frame acts as a dust guard, protecting the carving if it were to be kept vertically in a bedchamber or study (see the guardapolvos, below). It was probably also provided with its own case, so that it was completely portable – a tiny altarpiece, which could travel at all times with its owner.

Mid-10^th century Byzantine icon, Crucifixion, ivory (possibly the central panel of a triptych?), 15.1 x 8.9 x 0.8 cm., Metropolitan Museum, New York

13^th century French School, Crucifixion, ivory plaque (possibly a fragment of a retable?), 1240-60, 11.8 x 9.6 cm., Musée du Louvre, Département des Objets d’art du Moyen Age, de la Renaissance et des temps modernes

Interestingly, these two crucifixion groups – three centuries apart but so similar in composition – both frame the scene within an architectural setting, related to aedicular painted retables (i.e. the Gothic altarpiece designed as the section through, first, a basilica church and then, a multi-storeyed cathedral with crypt, clerestory and finialled roof; and the Renaissance single-panel quadro with a classical temple-shaped frame). The 10^th century Byzantine Crucifixion takes place beneath a ciborium – the canopy raised over the altar of an Orthodox church, which is strikingly carved overall with delicately pierced decoration, and emphasizes the groups of figures around the Cross with its frame-within-a-frame. The motif of the ciborium also transforms the crucifixion into a symbolic altar – a sort of realization of the transubstantiation which takes place during the celebration of the Eucharist, when bread and wine are turned into the Body and Blood of Christ.

The later French ivory is sited in the chancel of a Western mediaeval church or cathedral, which manages to appear in the form both of the interior apse-like niche (suggesting, again, that Christ’s body is a metaphorical altar), and of the outside architectural elevation of clerestory windows, roof and towers. The slender columns and cusped arch likewise create their own frame.

 

14^th – 15^th century: personal Crucifixion scenes

 

Jorge Inglés, Retablo de los Gozos de Santa Maria, c.1455, o/panel, 497 x 463 cm., Museo del Prado

Frames for crucifixes may have arisen from the simple practicality of preserving a relatively small-scale sculpture from damage; also from dust, after the fashion of the Spanish guardapolvos – the decorated, inward-canted boards protecting three sides of altarpieces, as well as of the vast, wall-sized retables which fill the east ends of so many churches and cathedrals in Spain. Although these dust-guards were functional, since the altarpieces were much too large for regular dusting, the protection of much smaller carvings was important from another cause – secular domestic servants might well have baulked at dusting the image of the body of Christ. In the case of the 16^th-17^th century crucifixion scene which is the subject of Part 1 of these articles, the frame provides, in a straightforward development from the ivories above, a sheltering architectural niche for the carved figures.

14^th century Parisian School, diptych of the Madonna & Child and the Crucifixon, c.1340, ivory, 16.6 x 20.4cm. (open width), V & A Museum

Portable ivory or bone diptychs like this and the previous examples had no need of a functional jutting frame to protect a crucifixion or other sacred scene, since they could be closed like a book for travelling (and often incorporated a fastening), or came with their own pouch or box. Once again, the crucifixion and its pendant are framed by architectural elements which are themselves part of each scene, but also hold them within Gothic church arches. However, this church is not an earthly Orthodox or Western Catholic church; it is a vision of the Celestial Church, where the Virgin simultaneously holds the Christ Child and is crowned in heaven after her death, whilst she also stands beside the crucified Christ with His disciples. The arched roofs of this vision are thronged inside and out with angels.

Stefano Mossettaz (attrib., fl. 1420-50), Crucifixion, c.1418-20, gypsum alabaster with original polychromy, 71 x 32 x 10 cm., Museo Civico d’Arte Antica, Turin. Photo: Sailko

This Italian crucifixion scene, unusually tall and narrow, may  really be a fragment of a larger polyptych and therefore perhaps originally protected above with an entablature deeper than the lateral columns. It may otherwise be a single panel which was built into the wall of a house or courtyard, and therefore is a domestic, rather than part of an ecclesiastical, altarpiece. It comes from the valley of Aosta, where France and Switzerland abut north-west Italy, producing a confluence of influences including Flemish and French, as well as Italian, Roman and even English. The very slender columns indicate that the crucifixion is seen through a door or a high window, but the flat decorative ground is in tension with this: the blue suggests sky beyond the Cross, but the lattice of squares holding various rosettes and paterae has been influenced by knowledge or report of something like mediaeval floor tiles, or the coffered ceiling in the Roman Arch of Titus.

Embriachi workshop (14^th-15^th century), Triptych with the Crucifixion and Madonna & Child, c.1400, Venice, carved ivory & inlaid wood, 53.2 x 16 cm. (centre) & 7.8 cm. (each wing), Musée du Louvre, Département des Objets d’art du Moyen Age, de la Renaissance et des temps modernes

The Embriachi workshops – specializing in carved ivories and micro-inlay – seem to have been numerous, spreading from Genoa to Florence and then to Venice, taking their name (apparently) from their patron. Baldassare Embriaco belonged to a Genoese dynasty of government officials, aristocrats and ambassadors, who invested in businesses like this one, and in similar undertakings in Calabria, Turkey and Lebanon. The Embriachi decorative wood and ivory inlays seem to be connected to more complex intarsia objects made during the period of the Arab Nasrid rule of Spain , which may be due to Genoese trade with Spain, Embriaco’s connections with the Near East, or to the position of Venice as a trading hub between East and West.

Whatever its source, it was a striking and sought-after style, and the Embriachi craftsmen flourished for around forty years from c.1375. This small domestic triptych employs bands of wood inlaid with ivory to striking effect, the inlay binding the frames to the carved ivory scenes they hold, and the wooden ground providing a handsome foil. The triptych takes the form of a little Gothic chapel with two great doors opening onto the nave, where the Madonna and Child and the Crucifixion appear simultaneously. This central panel or ‘nave’ is framed with a spiral ribbon ornament, which could be seen as an unending coiling serpent, standing for eternity; it also decorates the two little finials, pointing to heaven.  Between them, the triangular pediment or roof of the ‘chapel’ has, instead of flame-shaped crockets, ivory acanthus leaves, so that the frame (as well as providing in its structure a tiny version of the Celestial Church) is full of motifs symbolizing eternity, rebirth and resurrection around the carving of Christ’s death on the Cross.

15^th – 16^th century: Crucifixions in various media

 

Anon., South German school, Crucifixion, c.1470, partly coloured engraving, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

There’s a 13^th century ivory diptych in the Louvre, which has three tiers of carved prophets in each wing, surmounted by lunettes holding a small  Nativity on the left and a tiny Crucifixion on the right, and flat frames which are inscribed all round in Greek. On the left, the inscription asks Christ how He was born of a human maiden, and hopes that the prophets depicted in the two wings will teach the patron of the whole work the answer; on the right, the inscription states that the prophets’ words are fulfilled through Christ’s death, and that He has abolished death for everyone else (‘Hail, true Body of the Lord…’). This is another beauty of the frame, that it can be used for quotations relevant to the painting or sculpture inside;  – and of course this feeds perfectly into the coming of the printed image, which provided affordable sacred images for all.

Dürer (1471-1528), Crucifixion, 1516, engraving, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques; illustration in Missel d’Eichstätt, pub. Hieronymus Höltzel, 1517

Dürer’s engraving includes inscription, figurative ‘wing’-like panels of angels at the sides, and decorative/ symbolic flowers and fruit across the base and up the lower sides. The inscription, which takes the place the predella would fill on a real altarpiece, is in Latin, which translates as:

‘And grant peace in our times; and protect your servant, our bishop, together with all those entrusted to his care, from every adversity.’

To have one of these in one’s home would be to feel the blessing of a small personal or family altarpiece for the humblest peasant or tradesman. As well as the crucified Christ, the Madonna and St John, Dürer has added a skull and bones at the bottom of the Cross, to signify Christ’s triumph over death, and God the Father in heaven with a phalanx of angels at the top. The various areas of the pictorial space are also ‘framed’ with long bare withies, which seem to be part of the vines from which grow the grapes of the Eucharist and the roses of the Madonna above the inscription. The complete printed missal for which this was produced would also be much more affordable for a middle-class merchant than a hand-written, illustrated, coloured and gilded Book of Hours.

16^th century French School, Crucifixion, woodcut from a Book of Hours, 1531, printed by Geoffroy Tory, 21.5 x 15.2 cm., Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

Here is a similar, slightly later illustration from a Book of Hours, once again all printed. This woodcut of the crucifixion takes the form of an altarpiece with an elaborate aedicular frame in Mannerist style, probably taken from the ‘frames’ used in illuminated MS. It has straight-sided pilasters strangely represented as the forward surface of large baluster-shaped columns, a predella panel with  scrolling ribbons and a cartouche for an inscription or crest, and an insubstantial swan’s neck pediment; and the illustrations and parts of a prayer which it holds are not assembled as a real polyptych would be. The conventions for different kinds of art could vary wildly in the realism of what they depicted, and evidently this was instinctively understood by their consumers.

Jean Pichore (fl.1501-20), Crucifixion, folio from a Book of Hours, c.1520, ink, paint, gold leaf, 17 x 11 cm., The Walters Art Museum

The painted altarpiece frames created to present sacred scenes in hand-made and illuminated Books of Hours were, as here, often quite close – or apparently quite close – to the carved giltwood frames which would have been familiar to all churchgoers, including the patrons and recipients of such precious books. The proportions of Jean Pichore’s frame are strangely elongated and the depth of the sill at the base extravagantly wide, whilst the pediment is squashed into a shallow space above the entablature, making its three scallops look even odder; but it is closer to a real wooden and gilded altarpiece frame than the woodcut or Dürer’s engraving. This is helped, of course, by the colours; but the frame has round columns, depth, and volume created by shading – just as the scene itself has depth, aerial perspective, and realistic figures. As in a three-dimensional altarpiece, the crucifixion is given focus, solemnity and majesty by its gilded aedicule; and the potential for this being undercut by the prayer for matins [3] is moderated by having this inscribed on an unscrolling banner at the base.

(?) Master of the Getty Epistles, 16^th century French School, Crucifixion, folio of a breviary, illuminated on vellum, 15.5 x 10.5 cm., Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

Not all the frames of this sort in illuminated MSS hover near to reality.  This crucifixion scene has a frame composed of trompe l’oeil interlacing bands and scrolls, which is convincing to the eye in the matter of depth, volume, light and shade but could never have been made in such a way for a real altarpiece. It is very distantly related to painted and stucco frames by the School of Fontainebleau, and – slightly more closely – to the realistic trompe l’oeil frame of Jacopo Bassano’s 1566 Portrait of Torquato Tasso, but is not really attempting to depict a contemporary sacred frame.  Like the prints of crucifixion scenes above, it illustrates more of the conventions which grew up around representations of this scene in different media, for different purposes or markets.

Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533), Crucifixion, engraving, diam. 28.5 cm., Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

Lucas van Leyden’s engraving (or etching) of the Crucifixion differs from those above in its shape and its slight mystery. Most of the collections which hold a copy of one of his nine images from the whole series, The Circular [or Round] Passion, date it to 1509 – apparently basing this on the date on the scroll in the top of the frame, although this says, quite clearly ‘1409’, a date long before Van Leyden could even have been thought of. However, he was very precocious, and had produced a comparably expert engraving – Mohammed & the monk Sergius – in 1508, when he would only have been 14 years old. The British Museum dates its copy of another of The Circular Passion series, The agony in the Garden, to ‘not long after the original… around 1520’, and Christie’s dates the paper on which three of the copies which passed through its salerooms were printed to 1515.

Only Christie’s and the Cleveland Museum of Art hint at or state that the frame, above, is

‘…a decorative border [which] was printed from a separate ring-shaped plate’,

which may perhaps explain the date in the scroll. Perhaps the round frame was an earlier plate made in whichever workshop he learned engraving, and was borrowed for the sake of its acanthus, symbolic flowers and putti.

The Art Institute of Chicago mentions two possible reasons for the shape of the series:

‘…While no similarly trimmed impressions of this print pasted on boxes are known, it is possible [that] it was used as a design for a stained-glass window.’

Examples of 15^th-16^th century prints in integral or separately-bought borders, as well as of coloured woodcuts inside French coffrets, have survived and are illustrated in ‘Print rooms, prints, and their printed borders‘. There is a 1530-40 stained-glass roundel of the Crucifixion in the Met Museum, NY, but without a border.

German panel with The Crucifixion, early 16th century, stained-glass, 69.85 x 62.56 cm., V & A Museum

A large number of surviving stained-glass panels do have integral borders, and these may be symbolic (like Van Leyden’s print – if it is indeed a design for stained-glass), inscribed, purely decorative, or – like the German panel illustrated here – architectural. Stained-glass has no need to insist on realizable simulacra of buildings as carved giltwood altarpiece frames do, but can employ handsome baluster columns supporting an arch, where the columns stand behind the Cross and the arch stretches in front of it, whilst the capitals support sculptures or possibly living creatures which morph from birds to grotesque leafy dragons. In a complete window, the scenes of Christ’s Passion held in these half-realistic, half-fantastic arches might have built into a polyptych as moving and beautiful as any altarpiece. On the other hand, a design like this could provide a single highlight in a domestic window – perhaps of a bedchamber, prie-dieu or private chapel.

Thus, during the 15^th and 16^th centuries, crucifixion scenes and crucifixes had reached a point where they could be made in practically any appropriate contemporary medium, for poor, middle-class and courtly use, in the home, on the person, or as a portable travelling companion.

English embroidered orphrey, with the Crucifixion and saints, late 15^th-early 16^th century, silks and metallic threads, 113 x 53.3 cm., later mounted on board covered with linen, Bonhams, Edinburgh, 2 May 2012, Lot 343

Their native place, as it were, was of course in a church, convent or monastery, but even here they might appear in practically any form: carved or painted in altarpieces, alone on rood screens, as stained-glass windows, or ‘framed’ on sacred silverware; even embroidered.

The crucifix above is an orphrey, designed to be attached to or worn over a priest’s robes; it is embroidered in silk and gold thread on linen; and it is framed. The transverse beam of Christ’s Cross overlaps with the border of the transverse of the whole Crucifixion – a border which is the front edge of a rectangular opening, receding backwards into the space where the angels fly, and which supports a little chapel at the top of the Cross, holding the Holy Spirit between two side walls pierced by arched windows. Similar borders run down the rest of the upright of the Cross; they support the transverse beam, and then, after forming two walls pierced with four more windows beside Christ’s feet, they become plain walls for two church niches with apses and windows, which hold St Peter and St Catherine. Each niche is presented with spiral columns, little fan vaults and a tiled floor; St Catherine’s niche has a battlemented top.

English embroidered orphrey, detail. Photo: Period Oak Antiques

It is probable that each section of the upright beam – with the transverse beam and the crucifixion as one section – was made separately, so that each could be made by an individual worker, and copied innumerable times. Different saints could be added, depending on the church or monastery which had commissioned the orphrey, and then the whole thing was edged with a narrow contour of braid. This Cross was evidently longer when it was finished, as St Catherine is incomplete – in fact, both ends are unfinished – and there may have been a lunette at the very top for God the Father.  Here, therefore, is a sort of vertical altarpiece in the shape of a cross, containing a crucifix, and in an ultimately portable form which could also convey story, symbol, emotion, themes for meditation and spiritual guidance on the body of the priest himself.

15^th – 16^th century: domestic altarpieces in wood and stone

 

German school, Crucifixion triptych, 15^th century, pearwood, 12.6 x 15 cm. overall when open, Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum, New York

The carved wooden crucifixion scene continued to develop as a small domestic altarpiece throughout the 15^th and 16^th centuries. This one is particularly small – on the scale of the earlier ivory panels, or even smaller – and needing the particular hardness and fineness of pearwood to equal the qualities of ivory and enable the carver to render the detail of faces and hands; the face of Christ is movingly expressive.

German school, Crucifixion triptych, 15th century, detail

Like the carved ivories, each panel is framed within its outer protective border in integral Gothic architecture – here it is Flamboyant Gothic, with braided pillars, soaring finials and pitched roofs laden with large scrolling acanthus crockets; cusped arches threaded with tiny faces and grotesque gargoyles supporting them; backgrounds of writhing vine leaves and grapes, huge lily flowers, trefoils and cruciform leaves; medallions of the Evangelists’ attributes at each end of the Cross. Figures, architectural frame, background within and ‘behind’ the little church nave with its aisles – everything is subsumed in the jostling, dynamic patterns of the various ordered or wildly undulating leaves, so that the scene itself, and the Madonna and saints (holding up their horrified hands), acquire more animation from them, reflecting the twisted body of Christ.

London (Anglo-Norman) school, Crucifixion scene from The Queen Mary Psalter, 1310-20, f.256v, Royal MS 2 B VII, British Library 

The architecture and figures seem to derive to a great extent in style, arrangement and feeling, from earlier traditions current in European illuminated MSS – in the Gothic framework, the gestures, and perhaps especially in the figure of Christ.

Circle of Michel Colombe (1430-1513), Crucifixion scene, c.1500, limestone, 77 x 60 x 15 cm., © Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

In this later French crucifixion scene, the architectural frame and the realism of the figures are fully of the Renaissance, whilst the mixed scale (the kneeling donor family in the foreground, the saints and angel who intercede for them, and the dying Christ) still looks back to the hierarchies of a mediaeval work of art.  It is a small and personal scene, belonging in the private chapel or hall of a middle class household, where it would have been inset in a wall or niche, and must have lost its right-hand pilaster when it was levered out to be sold.

The crucifixion is taking place before a city which is both the native town of the donors and Jerusalem, and is framed by the city gate with its handsomely coffered inner arch and the delicate ornament on its pilasters. This ornament is extremely finely cut, in a series of foliated ellipses which scroll and intersect, rising through wreaths and rings from a winged cherub at the base to the capital, where two curving birds’ bodies replace the volutes of an Ionic order.

Circle of Michel Colombe, Crucifixion scene, back edge of pilaster, © Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

The catalogue entry notes of the pilaster that,

‘It is decorated on the front with a finely carved foliage and on the side, with funerary patterns: a shovel, a scythe and bones, crossed and held by a ribbon.’

This is a part of the programme of the relief, which points the family towards meditation on the death which Christ has undergone, and which is also signalled by the skull beneath the Cross (traditionally Adam’s skull); which we must all undergo, but from which Christ’s Passion will release humanity. The frame therefore provides added commentary on the crucifixion – in particular, as it affects the family who are present beneath the Cross at the same time that they would have been physically present in contemplation of the scene.

Circle of Hans Wydutz I of Freiburg im Breisgau (c.1470-1520), Crucifixion group, 1490-1510, possibly centre panel of domestic altarpiece, limewood, 94 x 69.2 x 22.9 cm., Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum, New York

The Christ of the French limestone relief is a Renaissance Christ – presented frontally, with His head dropped to the right, rather than hanging lower on the Cross and twisted, with His legs drawn up to the side, as in many mediaeval depictions. In the domestic altarpiece in the Cloisters  (above) He is even closer to a 15^th century Italian model – influenced to a noticeable degree (directly or indirectly) by Brunelleschi’s 1410-15 crucifix in Santa Maria Novella (see top of article) – and the scale of the figures beneath the Cross is also more uniform. The good and bad thieves are smaller, as they are to be understood as being positioned someway behind Christ.

Circle of Hans Wydutz I, Crucifixion group, detail

The frame, however – or as much of it as remains – is still Germanically mediaeval: the inner wild fringes of two knotted and tangled vines, which are growing from the shaped bases of what should have been the supporting columns of an aedicule. The columns have gone back, as it were, to their roots, and rear up thick trunks, covered with the stubs of pruned-off twigs, which meet in a shallow arch and fill the spandrels with smaller branches, leaves and grapes. The symbolic vine of the Eucharist becomes the actual frame of this crucifixion scene, just at the moment when the centurion Longinus lifts his spear to pierce Christ in the side and release the blood which the Eucharist represents.

This is only part of the original altarpiece; the original outer frame, and possibly one or two wings to this central panel, have been lost. What remains is less than a metre high, or 37 inches; still perhaps quite large for a personal or domestic devotional work, and in the Netherlands at the same period a fashion for similar and related objects made on a very much smaller scale was getting under weigh.

North Netherlandish school, polyptych in the form of a double tiered triptych with scenes from the Life of Christ, first third 16^th century, boxwood microsculpture, 19.5 x 13.2 (open) or 6.9 (closed) cm., Musée du Louvre

About sixty of the world’s surviving group of 150 microsculptures (tiny altarpieces and even smaller ‘prayer nuts’ – walnut-shaped, geode-like boxes of sacred scenes), which were made in the north Netherlands during the first third of the 16^th century, have been identified as coming from the workshop of Adam Dircksx, or from a small group of studios working under his aegis; also possibly from the city of Delft [4]. This one, in the collection of the Louvre, is only a third as tall again as the German pearwood triptych (above), although  it has two tiers and a stand supported by the four attributes of the Evangelists. It is very close to the large-scale ecclestiastical carved altarpieces made in the Low Countries in the late 15^th and early 16^th century – just miniaturized to the size of a man’s hand.

Boxwood microsculpture, detail with inner borders

It has a connection with the previous Crucifixion group, in that it has an internal botanical frame, which encircles the main scene and both wings of the upper triptych, and provides a sort of valance along the top of the main scene in the lower one. Instead of vines, however, this plant is the Tree of Jesse, which grows literally and symbolically out of the body of the sleeping Jesse, in the predella beneath the Crucifixion. The iterations of the Tree in the lower Nativity scene and in the wings of the Crucifixion are empty scrolling branches and leaves; but in the Tree which grows right round the Crucifixion itself are the little figures of the various forebears of Christ (including King David), who explain his ancestry.

This inner frame is thus another example of an apparently decorative border which actually provides auxiliary information on the figurative scenes it surrounds. It occupies a neat band between the enclosing moulding of the outer frame, and a further inner area at the top of each upper scene, which holds microarchitectural elements – arches with pendant drops in the wings and a tower with finials in the centre. The scrolling branches at the top of the Nativity scene are hung from a trompe l’oeil trellis-like single moulding.

Case for the boxwood microsculpture, first third 16^th century, 23.5 x 11.8 x 8 cm., leather, Musée du Louvre

The little leather box, in which this extraordinary confection lived when stored or travelling, was made to measure for it, lined in red, and is decorated with another version of the Tree of Jesse – this time not neatly confined to a decorous border, but swooping and scrolling asymmetrically across the surface of the case from the figure of Jesse at the base. This is, so to speak, another frame, connected to the carved wooden one by its subject, and having the same functions of protection, decoration and explanation.

North Netherlandish school, prayer bead with the Adoration of the Magi and the Crucifixion, early 16^th century, boxwood, 11.2 x 8.1 x 2.7 cm. (open), 5.8 x 5.5 x 5.6 cm. (closed), Metropolitan Museum, New York

Prayer nuts or beads are even tinier than such small altarpieces; they are balls of minutely-carved boxwood, like a round fruit in the hand – a medium-sized tomato, say – which opens to disclose nested scenes from the gospels, with additional wings which fold out to show more of the story. The hemisphere at the top of this bead is crowded – like a stage set on steeply slanted ground – with the Adoration of the Magi; it is flanked by the Nativity on the left-hand wing, and the Presentation of Christ in the Temple on the right. Below is a minuscule Crucifixion scene, again sloping steeply from back to front to allow space for officials and soldiers, six horses, Longinus with his spear in the centre, the Madonna at the left with St John and the women, and Mary Magdalen at the foot of the Cross. There’s even a little man with a wheelbarrow on the right, level with the crosses, and even smaller characters behind them, in the far background.

North Netherlandish school, prayer bead with the Adoration of the Magi and the Crucifixion, closed

These scenes are framed by their enclosure in the spherical shell of pierced Gothic tracery which protects them, and when they are open they are bordered, at the top by the inscription which is associated with the Magi, and at the bottom by the edge of the crown of thorns which girdles the whole work. The Crucifixion also has an inner border with an arcade of little cusped and trefoiled arches, as though it is taking place under the dome of a church.

Prayer beads from this group of micro sculptures are simultaneously things which might be used daily for contemplation and prayer; held and opened and dwelt over as objects which brought the gospels literally very close; and also works of art of such fineness and wonder as to bring the divine closer by their own manufacture, and to be treated even more carefully as sacred treasures of a high order.

Spanish school, rosary bead with the Crucifixion and Resurrection, c.1500-25, ivory, polychromy, and silver-gilt mount, 11.2 x 13.7 x 3.3 cm. (overall, open); 11.2 x 7 x 5.7 cm. (overall, closed), Metropolitan Museum, New York

Although of exactly the same period and scale as the boxwood prayer nut, this Spanish bead may seem clumsy and lacking in refinement beside it. Both scenes, however – the Crucifixion and Resurrection – are carved expressively from ivory, and coloured to bring out the details of costume and armour. Both halves are set in ivory scallop shells and bound with simple cable mouldings, as though in a treasure chest secured with silver ropes; these also border the Crucifixion when the bead is open. The silver was originally gilded, including the acanthus leaf clasp at the top, making the whole seem colourful and precious in comparison with northern carvings.

Circle of Guiot de Beaugrant (c.1500-49), portable altarpiece with scenes of Christ’s Passion, mid-16^th century, carved wood, parcel-gilding and polychromy, 61.6 x 39.4 cm., and detail, Christie’s, 6 December 2012, Lot 91

A slightly larger domestic altarpiece – also almost certainly Spanish – unites a Netherlandish style in the central crucifixion and its frame with painted shutters and panels of estofado decoration. The crucifixion is doubly framed, in the Mannerist polished wooden aedicule with its niches and baluster columns which fills the main compartment, and in the gilded cupboard-like container which holds it and adds the two painted wings. Christ hangs against a mistily coloured landscape from which all the jostling figures of the micro sculptures have departed, and even the Madonna and St John (both on a much smaller scale than Christ) have been relegated to the lateral niches. The busts of two more saints set in Mannerist cartouches fill the pedestals of these niches, and individualized cherubs decorate the predella, the panels above the niches, and the spandrels above the Cross. In the pediment, a dynamic God the Father breaks forward from the pitched roof of the aedicule, as if to descend to rescue His Son.

The fact that the smaller carved altarpiece can be shut away in its own golden box mysteriously intensifies the significance and sense of divine sacrifice; the crucifix is highlighted, as though spotlit, against the symmetry of the few figures who gaze at it. And it is that single figure of the crucified Christ which would become the most powerful domestic symbol of devotion in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

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[1] See also the 3^rd-4^th century Constanţa gem, also in the British Museum, which retains an old setting

[2] Giulia Caneva et al., ‘Big messages in small details: Nature in Roman archaeology’, Economic botany, vol. 68, no 1, 2014, pp.109-15

[3] ‘Domini[e] labia mea aperies Et os meum annunciabit laudem tuam’/’Thou, O Lord, shalt open my lips, and my mouth shall declare thy praise’; ‘Office of the Blessed Virgin,’ at Matins

[4] Frits Scholten, ed., Small wonders; late Gothic boxwood microcarvings from the Low Countries, exh. cat., 2016, pub. Rijksmuseum, p.31