The Key to the Brescia Casket: Typology and the Early Christian Imagination (review)

Catherine Brown Tkacz learnedly propounds the claim that the designer of the Brescia casket chose and placed its Old and New Testament scenes with great deliberation and skill to demonstrate the unity of the testaments in predicting and narrating the Passion and Resurrection of Christ and its ongoing consequences for the faithful. The ivory panels are to be understood as a composition analogous to a sermon with a message analogously theological and hortatory urging proper faith in the God of victory over death and the devil. Both the defense of the typological approach (ch. 2) and the interpretation of the whole are founded on textual evidence.

The study has much to offer including useful summaries of previous scholarship claims, a Table of Identifications with scene by scene bibliographies, appro-priately documented typological interpretations of single scenes (chs. 3 and 6), and especially original contributions to the liturgical history of the CommendatioAnimae (ch. 4, which also contains the only iconographic comparisons: glassware and a bronze medallion with salvation paradigms). However, the work has not spanned the gap Tkacz notes between art historical and theological expec-tations of iconographic interpretation (60), and much material remains for future art historical analysis.

The first chapter provides Tkacz's identifications of the scenes, relates them to the scriptural passages dealing with the event, and describes their composition and their relationship to other scenes on the lid and the four sides. Descriptions are sensitive, only rarely somewhat forced in the direction of organized symmetries. However, an iconographic interpretation that relies on great deliberation in placing the scenes ought to analyze the current and documented states of the panels in order to establish what that placement was. Tkacz simply accepts the account of the restoration of 1928, when the box was reassembled from a display as flat panels in cross layout, a format which Tkacz has not understood (23: the corner verticals are four L-shaped pieces, not eight strips). Moreover, the roles of ivory carver, casket designer, patron or theological adviser must not be assumed (21) but treated as part of the question to which analysis of the casket itself can contribute. Tkacz seems to assume that the casket was made as a reliquary, but its function should also be a question to be addressed.

By treating the lid scenes (Christ in the Garden, Arrest, Denial of Peter, Christ before Anna and Caiaphas, Christ before Pilate) as primary, Tkacz determines that the major theme is the Passion. Scenes of Susannah, Jonah, Jacob, the Parable of the Good Shepherd, the Transfiguration, Moses and the Egyptian, and David and Goliath repeat or typologically continue events of the Passion and Resurrection. The center back panel of Ananias and Saphira and the Old Testament scenes of the left end show consequences of bad faith, while Miracles and the Moses scenes on the right end demonstrate the results of right faith. Tkacz identifies the disputed scene of seven figures in flames as a continuous narrative of the Three Hebrews (ch. 5) and interprets these figures (together with the scenes of Moses on the opposite end) as demonstrations of divine gloria and intelligent fire, a sub-theme of right faith (ch. 6).

The author's comments about a narrative continuity in the miracles from the front to the left side and her emphasis on the Old Testament recapitulation in Acts have implications worth pursuing. For example, the miracles on the right continue the narrative order after the Parable of the Good Shepherd in John, but this arrangement might suggest that the center scene is, indeed, that of Christ teaching rather than Christ among the elders. Such minor shifts in scene identifications may not vitiate the visual...