The Ruthwell Cross (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ruthwell Cross Zacharias P. Thundy The Ruthwell Cross. Edited by Brendan Cassidy. Princeton: Department of Art and Archaeology, 1992. Pp. xiv + 206; 66 black-and-white plates. $39.95. This book is a collection of papers prepared and presented by scholars who have extensively studied the Ruthwell Cross and the cross literature for a colloquium organized by Brendan Cassidy at Princeton University, on December 8, 1989. The Ruthwell Cross, the beautiful but fragmented monument of Anglo-Saxon artistic achievement, ironically located in a remote corner of Celtic Scotland and mutilated during the Reformation, has intrigued the intellectual curiosity of scholars since the seventeenth century. Interested readers will find here all available historical facts about and many speculations on the origin and the meaning of the cross's epigraphy and iconography. Brendan Cassidy's "The Later Life of the Ruthwell Cross" is a thoroughly researched and carefully documented historical essay. One important dimension of this essay is that it shows how "prejudiced" supposedly objective scholarship can be. Many English scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wanted and still want to look at the Ruthwell Cross as a unique example of seventh- or eighth-century Anglo-Saxon carving. On the contrary, "presumptuous" Italian, American, and German researchers give the cross a much later dating and attributed its sculpting to foreign artists—Italians, Gauls, Copts, and so on. Comparing the plant scrolls on the Ruthwell Cross and Bewcastle Cross, Bronsted concluded in 1924 that they were carved by an "Oriental colony of foreigners" (80). Baldwin Brown (1916) expressed the sentiments of the patriotic English when he argued that "The Anglo-saxon possessed an artistic capacity quite on a level with that of his continental contemporaries, . . . it is impossible to withdraw from native Anglian brains and fingers a large share of the responsibility for the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses" (27). Brown's cri-de-coeur was taken to heart by English historians and archaeologists who now think that they have proved beyond the reach of foreign criticism that the Ruthwell Cross is an English artist's creation from the late seventh century or early eighth century. On the basis of available circumstantial evidence and the authority of English archaeologists like Collingwood and Cramp, most scholars ascribe to an earlier dating of the Ruthwell Cross. Robert Farrell deconstructs the history of the cross and gives an interpretation of [End Page 363] how the cross was reconstructed in the nineteenth century. In his view, the cross on its location might "originally have served as a beacon for those arriving from Ireland" (35). He does not, however, indicate whether the cross was set up to act as a warning of doom or as a sign of welcome to the Irish. The reconstruction of the cross in the nineteenth century, we are told, has left us with several problems as to the state of the original cross, especially with regard to the figure with the lamb which "appears to be foreshortened . . . [and] the two confronted figures on the corresponding panel on the back of the cross appear elongated" (44). Farrell does not have an answer to this problem, nor does he attempt to offer one. His basic position on the cross literature is simply that "any credible assessment of its style, iconography and meaning must accept the sculpture as it exists at present, a much-battered, weathered, and worn partial record of a once magnificent monument. Early representations of the cross are no sure guide to its earlier appearance, and, indeed, may be positively inaccurate and misleading" (46). He may be right; however, this conservative position has not prevented scholars from offering clever conjectures. Because the cross is damaged, Paul Meyvaert argues in his perceptive article "A New Perspective on the Ruthwell Cross" that the present alignment of the panels on the cross is not the original one; therefore, he suggests the rearranging of the upper monolith in order to make the iconographical plan of the cross fit his theory that the artist designed the front of the cross to emphasize the Church (Ecclesia) and the back of the cross to portray the monastic ideal (vita monastica). This rearrangement is ingenious and erudite, but...