Christ Crucified in the Gellone Sacramentary

Abstract

The image of Christ on the Cross, either as an element of a narrative scene (a Crucifixion) or as an isolated object of devotion (a Crucifix) is so common in the artistic and religious traditions of the last millennium of Western art, especially but not only in the Catholic tradition, that it is seldom recognized that such images are altogether absent during the first centuries of Christianity, and remain rare at least through the eighth century of the common era. One of the earliest surviving examples, from the closing years of that century and from the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne, is the largest figural miniature in a richly decorated manuscript of the Sacramentary, the collection of mass and other liturgies, long preserved in the monastery of Gellone in southern France.