The Bowman and the Bird on the Ruthwell Cross and Other Works: The Interpretation of Secular Themes in Early Mediaeval Religious Art

Abstract

In interpreting works of mediaeval religious art, the question often arises whether all figures represented in them are properly understood as religious in content. There is one class in particular that is uncertain in meaning: the animals and associated humans-the hunters, bowmen, and struggling figures engaged with beasts. For a student who is convinced that all in mediaeval art is symbolic or illustrates a religious theme, it is not hard to find a text that seems to justify a moral or spiritualistic interpretation of the hunter and the beasts. But there is also the famous letter of St. Bernard denouncing the fantastic sculptured capitals of the Cluniac cloisters as completely devoid of religious significance. This powerful, vehement statement of a great churchman, who was also a poet, confirms the view that Romanesque art includes much that was not designed as symbol or as illustration of a sacred text.' There are, nevertheless, examples to which Bernard's strictures might not apply and where our intuition about a possible religious content of the animal image leads us to inquire further into the criteria of interpretation. Sometimes we observe that the images of animals and hunters, whether in the main or marginal field, resemble neighboring themes which have an undoubted religious sense. But even this resemblance is not decisive, for the problematic theme may elaborate freely an extra-religious aspect of the religious representation as in images of violence from the Old Testament bordered by scenes of animal and human combat in the frame. Thus on one of the Meigle stones in Scotland, Daniel with the Lions is surrounded by hunters, hounds, a centaur with two axes, a man with a club, and a dragon fighting a horned beast.2 Centuries later, and no doubt independent of insular tradition, above a capital in the cloister of Moissac with the story of Daniel in the Lions' Den, is an impost carved with droll figures of little men fighting with birds, beasts, and monsters.8 On the twelfth century bronze doors of Augsburg, a man struggling with a lion is probably Samson, since on a nearby panel the same figure wields a jawbone against a crowd of smaller figures who can only be the Philistines. But there is also a scene of a bear at a tree