A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image, and: Byzanz, der Westen, und das "wahre" Kreuz (review)

Within the last two years two scholars, one Belgian, the other German-American, have published books on the True Cross, apparently without being aware of each other's work. Each views his or her subject from a different perspective. A joint, comparative review seems appropriate.

Barbara Baert is professor of art history at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. She comes to her subject exceedingly well prepared. The rich documentation provided throughout her book and the lengthy bibliography (pp. 455-503) indicate her familiarity with a vast body of both primary source material and secondary literature. Jan Willem Drijvers, himself author of Helena Augusta (Leiden, 1992), has given this book his enthusiastic endorsement in a foreword.

The introduction provides a digest of the body of the book: "The legend of the Cross . . . comprises three distinct traditions, each of which originated at a different time, which were fused into one in the high Middle Ages" (p. 1), and again: "A Heritage of Holy Wood presents the synthesis of one of the most important apocryphal beliefs of the Middle Ages" (p. 13). Upon having finished the book, readers might do well to return to this introduction for a second reading.

In Chapter One the author is concerned not with the inventio of the Cross itself, but rather with the hagiographic and iconographic tradition thereof (pp. 15, 23, and 37). In Chapter Two readers will find a detailed description and masterly interpretation of three illuminations found in three separate manuscripts of the eighth and early ninth century and of several pieces of art dating from the twelfth century and originating in the region of the Meuse and in the Rhineland: the famous Stavelot triptych in New York's Pierpont Morgan Library is one of them (pp. 80-97). Chapter Three describes the earliest depiction of the restitutio or exaltatio crucis in Western iconography, namely, in the Sacramentary of Mont Saint-Michel which dates from 1066 and is also in the Pierpont Morgan Library (pp. 144-149) and of two cycles of pictures, both dating from the middle of the thirteenth century.

In Chapter Four Baert observes that "in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the iconography of the Legend the Cross reached its quantitative peak." The chapter begins with an excellent account of three texts which facilitated this spread of the legend of the Cross in the late Middle Ages: the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, the anonymous legendary titled Der Heiligen Leben, and a miracle play known as the Augsburger Heiligkreuzspiel. The same chapter describes somewhat more summarily a number of fifteenth-century German works of art which further demonstrate the point.

In Chapter Five Baert gives an account of the "complex literary history" (p. 348) of the wood of the Cross. The legend of the wood of the Cross, we learn, evolves through different guises (p. 289) and occurs in many variants (p. 306), while the paths of transmission are unclear (p. 307). The subject of Chapter Six is the "iconographic assembly" of the legends of the Cross (the wood, the inventio, and the restitutio) in fifteenth-century painted cycles in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.

Baert has set specific geographic and chronological limits to her study. She realizes that "the start of the sixteenth century did not see an end to the iconographic interest in the figures of Constantine, Helena and Heraclius" (p. 449). Her final word to her readers: "How many Legends of the Cross are still waiting to be discovered?"

The strength of this book lies in its topical, chronological, and geographical scope and in its broadly interdisciplinary approach. Baert addresses questions of history, theology, liturgy, literature, and iconography; she...