Medieval Studies Program and Art History and Visual Culture Program Present
The Tree of the Cross
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Olin Humanities, Room 102
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Gregory Bryda
Assistant Professor, Art History,
Barnard College, Columbia University
Numerous artworks from medieval Germany ground the salvific power of Christ’s Cross not in its carpentered cruciform but rather in its apocryphal material origins in the Tree of Paradise. Long before the True Cross relic arrived in Nuremburg in 1424, areas across the Holy Roman Empire already possessed their own idiosyncratic writings, visual culture, and traditions that paid special tribute to the Legend of the Wood of the Cross. Born of a sprig from Paradise that an angel delivers to Adam’s son Seth on earth, the tree that ultimately yielded the wood used for Christ’s cross inspired new terms with which religious writers and artists expressed the apparent paradox of divinity in nature. Localizing many of the Legend’s episodes and themes, including the marvelous finding of trees native to Germany and Flanders and the intractability of their wood, a group of miracle-working crucifixes—and the accompanying texts that record their ancestries—bear witness to the desire to direct to more stable channels the enthusiasm for sculpture made from the wood of trees, which was becoming ever more popular at the very same moment.Assistant Professor, Art History,
Barnard College, Columbia University
For more information, call 845-758-7159, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102