Seite - 52 - in Europäische Bild- und Buchkultur im 13. Jahrhundert

52 michaEl a. michaEl would like to argue that both positions stem from a desire to let the work of art speak for itself, or as Jonathan Alexander recalled Otto Pächt as often saying: ‘the aim … is not to speak oneself in front of the work of art, but to listen with the eyes’ – a phrase not to be confused with the more widely held belief that art historians ‘see with their ears’ particularly when they are short of ideas. The Images A small group of images of the Crucifixion and Christ in Majesty produced in England in the first half of the thirteenth century will be discussed here (figs. 1–3, 7, 8, 10). These images were made for specific patrons who appear to have not only provided the means for their production, but were also complicit, through their approval of the strategies that the artists chose to take when making them, in cre- ating a special moment in the history of English and European art. The artists who produced these images succeeded in letting the unseen message of the work – its ideal nature ‘burst into the visible’ as Marion would have it. Thus, they are images that speak to us now not by ‘dominating the visible’, but by revealing the unseen through their presence. I believe these images to represent the highest form of what, for lack of a better term, is currently called Fine Art. In other words, I would like to distinguish the achievements of the artists who created these images from the art of most of their contemporaries in whatever medium they were working, while acknowledging that these images are found in illuminated manuscripts. These are artists whom Marion, rightly distinguishes from ‘the painters of “series”, “periods” or “manners,” (small or big it matters little, for if they only master they lose every- thing), the quaint artists of the pleasant [les artistes de agrément], of function and of design … in every case their gazes dominate; consequently, they produce and reproduce (themselves).’3 The first of the images to be discussed here is by an illuminator who worked on at least three psalters two of which were probably made for Robert de Lindesey Ab- bot of Peterborough about 1220–1222: London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 59 and its sister manuscript Cambridge, The Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 12 (figs. 1, 2). The third is a fragment depicting Christ in Majesty (London, The British Library, Cot- ton Vespasian, A I, fol. 1r, fig. 3).4 There is no reason to doubt the fourteenth-cen- tury inscription on one of the flyleaves of the Society of Antiquaries Psalter that names Robert de Lindesey (d. 1222) as the owner of the book, but the image of a kneeling abbot in the Fitzwilliam Psalter could also be interpreted as that of Abbot Alexander of Holderness his successor who died in 1226 (fol. 139v). The Crucifixion page of the Society of Antiquaries Lindesey Psalter (fol. 35v) epitomises the special quality of these images (fig. 1). Original sewing holes reveal that the silk covers once separated the image of Christ’s suffering on the cross from his triumph over death, 3 Marion, The Crossing of the Visible (cit. n. 1), p. 32. 4 Derek H. Turner: Early Gothic Illuminated Manuscripts. London 1969, pp. 10–11; Peter Brieger: English Art, 1216–1307. Oxford 1957, pp. 82–85; Nigel J. Morgan: Early Gothic Manuscripts I, 1190–1250. London 1982 (A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles IV.), nos. 45, 46 and 47, pp. 92–95.