LITMIR.BIZ

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I am also grateful to the Medieval Academy of America, the International Center for Medieval Art, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their support at various stages.

      Over the years that I have been studying and researching Ottonian art, I have benefitted from contact with a wide range of colleagues. Unfortunately, space does not permit me to detail their individual contributions here, but they know who they are, and I thank them for their generous engagement with my work and for our fruitful discussions.

       I dedicate this work to my family.

INTRODUCTION

      An early eleventh-century painting assimilates Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim to John the Evangelist, Moses, and Jerome (DS 61, fol. 1r; fig. 1).¹ The miniature introduces the only known illustrated Bible made for an Ottonian patron and layers traditional motifs in ways that produce a startling image. A large golden cross dominates the painting; it is flanked by two individuals, a man on the left, and a woman on the right. The cross’s monumental size and the picture’s composition invite comparison with Crucifixion imagery and suggest that the two figures are to be identified as the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist. Yet the cross appears inside a church, and its form is that of a work of art, an elaborately wrought processional cross. The placement of the two figures, John on the left and Mary on the right, reverses the usual arrangement, while their pose draws on donation imagery. John presents a book into which he writes the opening words of Genesis: “in principio creavit Deus coelum et terram.” Mary stands behind a curtain and gestures her acceptance of that gift. These details suggest that John serves as a stand-in for the episcopal patron, Bernward, who offers his Bible to the saint, making the image a kind of donor portrait. The inscribed text adds a further complication. While the first two words of the inscription echo the beginning of John’s gospel, “in principio erat verbum,” the complete phrase assimilates John and the patron either to a strangely youthful Moses, the author of Genesis, or to Jerome, the translator of the Bible.²

      It is probable that a patron as well versed in the conventions of pictorial imagery as Bernward would have considered the male figure to represent his own image and all three models—John, Moses, and Jerome—simultaneously. There are many medieval precedents for comparing an individual patron to a series of exemplars of Christian virtue.³ What is unusual in this painting, however, is both the degree to which the miniature conflates multiple types of scenes and the specific combination of models it selects. These scenes (the Crucifixion and a donation) and these models (John, Moses, and Jerome) are not commonly associated in medieval culture. Such complicated layering typifies Bernward’s artistic commissions, from the manuscripts to the monumental works for which he is still best known: doors and a column that represent the most complex bronze-casting project since antiquity. Although these first gained fame as examples of the medieval response to classical art and of Bernward’s interest in ancient Rome (in connection with the notion of an Ottonian imperial renovatio focused on continuing the Roman Empire), more recent research has drawn attention to the theological ideas that inform Bernward’s choice of medium.⁴

      The painting’s content similarly underscores the extent to which the bishop’s artistic patronage engaged sophisticated theological questions; it also makes somewhat problematic the picture of Bernward as a prelate whose career primarily exemplifies the administrative, jurisdictional, or secular features of the early medieval episcopate.⁵ Certainly Bernward was the grandson of a count palatine in Saxony who began his service in the imperial chapel as a notary.⁶ Quickly winning favor at court, Bernward became tutor to the future Emperor Otto III before being awarded, in 993, what was in essence a family bishopric.⁷ He proved an able administrator, asserting episcopal control over both diocesan property and tithes, building defensive walls around the town, and exercising a rare privilege to mint coins.⁸

      Complicating the portrait of a bishop largely engaged by what we might term secular affairs, however, is evidence of Bernward’s interest in the monastic reforms that had been emanating from Gorze and Trier since the early tenth century.⁹ Bernward’s medieval biographers revise our image even further. In a text compiled in the twelfth century, they render the bishop as a man absorbed by the artes mechanicae, the “mechanical arts” of the medieval craftsman:

      And although he embraced ardently all liberal sciences with the fire of his vivacious genius, he also found time for the study of those less serious arts that are called mechanical. His handwriting was excellent, his painting accomplished. He excelled also in the art of casting metal and of setting precious stones, and in architecture, as afterward became evident in the many structures he built and adorned sumptuously.... Painting and sculpture and casting and goldsmith work and whatever fine craft he was able to think of, he never suffered to be neglected. His interest went so far that he did not let pass by unnoticed whatever rare and beautiful piece he could find among those vessels from overseas and from Scotland, which were being brought as gifts to the royal majesty.... He attracted gifted boys to him and to the court and spent much time with them urging them to acquire by practice whatever was most needful in any art.... He also taught himself the art of laying mosaic floors and how to make bricks and tiles.... ¹⁰

      Only the still more mythical stature of Abbot Suger of Saint Denis (1081–1151) rivals this image of a courtier bishop acting as a major patron, collector, and skilled artisan.¹¹

      Such varied pictures of Bernward illustrate the extent to which bishops of the early Middle Ages were pulled continuously in manifold directions.¹² Bernward’s painted portrait suggests, however, that even the broad range of activities and responsibilities presented by the textual record fails to capture the full extent of how individual prelates themselves constructed their roles in early medieval society, how they manifested their presence, expressed their authority, and depicted their person.¹³ By manipulating pictorial conventions of representation, the portrait in Bernward’s Bible aims at conveying something of the bishop as both an individual and an office.¹⁴ Its layering of highly varied personas—Moses, the prophet and leader who brought God’s Law to the people of Israel; Jerome, the ascetic scholar who translated the Bible; and John the Evangelist, the deified theologian venerated in the Middle Ages for his visionary insight—develops a striking image of Bernward as a leader, scholar, and theologian. The painting consequently raises critical questions about the image of the Ottonian episcopacy. How did the early medieval bishop frame his varied responsibilities and actions? How did he portray himself and his office to the court, to his peers, to his flock, to God? What are the implications of Bernward’s self-fashioning—by visual means—for our understanding of the early medieval episcopate?¹⁵

      Forming one of the most important networks for cultural production and exchange during the tenth and eleventh centuries, Ottonian prelates seem especially preoccupied with projecting themselves into contemporary visual culture.¹⁶ Bernward himself has left such a clear personal stamp on the (mainly) liturgical objects produced under his direction that these have been grouped under the term “Bernwardian art.”¹⁷ Among these celebrated works, one stands out in particular: the manuscript known to German scholars as the “most precious Gospels” of Bernward of Hildesheim (DS 18). Although the codex has been the subject of art-historical inquiry since the nineteenth century, many questions remain about its illustrations, including the meaning of its miniatures both individually and as parts of a program.¹⁸ This study argues that the Bernward Gospels pictorial cycle aimed to condition how contemporary and future viewers would understand the bishop’s role in Hildesheim. It thereby offers a unique witness to the self-presentation of this prominent representative of the Ottonian episcopacy.

      THE CODEX

      The Bernward Gospels measures approximately 280 × 200 mm and consists of 234 folios of vellum bound into thirty-three quires.¹⁹ Consistent peculiarities in the

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