Image and text: to the question of textual sources of typological parallelism in the Iconography of Western European Art of the XII century.

Abstract

One of the iconographic trends that became especially articulated in the XII century is the strengthening of the role of typological logic in the selection and organization of subjects within the iconographic program of monuments of decorative and applied art, book illumination and stained glass. Interest in this kind of visual exegesis, based on the symbolic parallelism of the Old and New Testaments, generates experiments in the field of iconographic programs, which leads to the appearance in the late XII – early XIII centuries a number of monuments in which detailed typological cycles are used (the Klosterneuburg altar, typological stained glass windows of French and English cathedrals). The subject of the research in this article is the connection of the described iconographic trend with texts of a theological, theosophical and liturgical nature. Despite the fact that some of the mentioned texts have already been involved by researchers of Christian iconography for the interpretation of pictorial programs, a special study of the sources of "typological iconography" in the XII century has not been implemented yet. Based on the analysis of a number of texts and iconographic analysis of fine art monuments, an attempt is made to identify a group of sources that could be familiar to the compilers of iconographic programs. Among the monuments of fine art, works created in the Rheno-mosan region (as well as derivatives of this tradition) are of particular interest in the XII century. In this group of works of art (including processional and altar crosses, phylacteries, portable altars, works of stained glass and book illumination), searches in the field of typological iconography are consistently realized.