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a gesture of blessing that places Bernward in the guise of a Magus at the Adoration, the prototypical medieval donor.³ Unusually, however, Bernward’s act of gift-giving is directed across an altar set with liturgical objects for the celebration of the Eucharist and he wears vestments for the Mass: the amice, alb, dalmatic, and stole.⁴ There exists no exact parallel for this in medieval donor imagery, although a number of Ottonian donation scenes use the format of a bifolium, and in the Middle Ages offerings for the saints were generally presented to their altars.⁵ A painting in an Ottonian manuscript produced in Reichenau that is now in the Walters Art Museum alludes to such a practice (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W7, fol. 9v; fig. 5). The picture portrays a church setting in which an abbot hands a codex to Saint Peter. The saint, in turn, opens a door (note the small hinges), revealing an altar. There, the book already appears with a new cover; from above, the hand of God gestures a blessing. Both details suggest that the abbot’s gift has been transformed at the altar, giving proof of the donor’s merit and signaling that his offering has been accepted by God.⁶

      Yet comparing the Reichenau dedication picture to the Bernward Gospels underscores the important differences between the two rather than their similarities. In the former, the donor stands before the recipient to offer the codex directly to the saint, as is usual in donation scenes.⁷ The altar appears on the other side of the saint and of a door; each adds to the distance between the donor and the altar. Furthermore, while the altar is covered in textiles, nothing appears on it other than the book. In the Bernward Gospels, however, the altar has been made ready for the Mass. It is covered with textiles, and in front of it are five candlesticks, while above are the chalice and paten, which stand on a portable altar. In these details, the painting draws on the iconography of the Mass. On the late tenth-century ivory panel now in the Liebieghaus Museum in Frankfurt-am-Main, the celebrant similarly stands inside the church, before an altar covered with textiles and set with a chalice, paten, two candlesticks, and two books, one open and one closed (fig. 6). He is garbed in sacerdotal vestments and holds both hands to his chest with palms facing outward. Five clerics stand in a semicircle behind him; they hold closed books. On the other side of the altar, five monks raise their arms in prayer and appear to be singing the Sanctus. The ivory offers an accurate evocation of the Mass. In comparison, the miniature in the Bernward Gospels is less specific; the scene does not correspond to any particular moment in the Mass.⁸ Nonetheless, by presenting Bernward in a pose of offering and before an altar prepared for the Eucharist, the painting suggests that both donor imagery and liturgical ideas inform the picture’s design.⁹

      The composition relates Bernward’s space to the setting of the saints in a way that draws further on liturgical ideas associated with gift-giving. The architecture on the left folio mimics that of the right. Both buildings consist of three arched bays. On the left, the depiction of Bernward’s church combines a view of the interior with one of the exterior, resulting in two levels. On the right is a more continuous space unified by the deep purple curtain in the background. Its patterning relates it both to the roof of Bernward’s edifice and to the altar covering there. An orange border patterned with white dots lines the edges of the curtain, delimiting the Virgin’s space. It echoes the pattern of the cornice line of Bernward’s church. On both pages appear gold and silver spiraling columns. One set frames the Virgin, while the other, on the left folio, appears at the clerestory level of the building. Together the curtain, orange bands, and columns relate the Virgin’s setting specifically to two areas of Bernward’s church: its exterior level and the ritual space of the altar. Such framing devices locate the Virgin outside the boundaries of Bernward’s church but link her to the altar, helping present the Virgin’s setting as a heavenly reformulation of the bishop’s earthly edifice.¹⁰

      Between the two depicted spaces, earthly and heavenly, stands the altar, which serves pictorially as the connection between Bernward and Mary. Taking up more than a quarter of the left folio and placed on an elevated platform accessed by two steps, the altar dominates the painting. It also crosses over the external edges of the building. By projecting beyond the structure, the altar stands ambiguously both inside and outside the church, moving toward the heavenly setting on the opposite page. On that folio the frame’s edge is an open door, one of the pair labeled “door of paradise.”¹¹ Whereas the door on the right is marked closed (clausa), the one facing the page’s inner margin, and thus Bernward’s altar, is open (patefacta), giving access to the saints.

      The painting’s careful rendering of the relationship between Bernward’s earthly church and the Virgin’s heavenly edifice resonates with Eucharistic theology. Mass commentaries of the early Middle Ages point to the concordance between the earthly and heavenly altars, the communion of the faithful and the heavenly communion of the angels. After all, no less an authority than Gregory the Great had proclaimed that at the consecration of the host the angels were present, the earthly was joined to the heavenly, and the visible and invisible became one.¹² The idea that the consecration of the Eucharist opened the heavens laid groundwork that would have particular importance for eleventh-century ideas about gift-giving, a point to which I shall return later in this chapter.

      A second set of inscriptions in the painting offers a series of metaphors for the Virgin that emphasize her role in Christ’s Incarnation, a theme not only appropriate for a portrait of the Virgin but one that also relates to the Mass, wherein the transformation of the bread and wine into Christ’s sacramental body is linked to Christ’s Incarnation.¹³ Painted above the dedicatory words on the upper corners of the picture frame appears the phrase “By this speech she conceived God and gave birth to him.”¹⁴ An inscription in the lower frame completes the verse: “Virgin Mother of God trustful of the words of Gabriel.”¹⁵ Additional tituli run over the three arches of the colonnaded arcade painted behind the Virgin; they record epithets for Mary cast in the formula of Gabriel’s greeting at the Annunciation.

      Hail Star of the Sea, shining through the grace of the Son

      Hail Temple unlocked by the Holy Spirit

      Hail Door of God closed after the birth through the ages¹⁶

      Two final inscriptions appear on the doors at each side of the frame. They repeat the metaphor that describes Mary as a door: “The door of Paradise closed through the first Eve, now is through Holy Mary thrown open to all.”

      The designations “star of the sea,” “temple,” and “door” refer to titles for Mary common in the West since at least the Carolingian period.¹⁷ However, a tenth-century poem by Hrotsvit, a nun at the convent of Gandersheim in the Hildesheim diocese, uses these metaphors in a way that clarifies their specific meaning for the Bernward Gospels.¹⁸ In her verse narrative of the Virgin’s life, Hrotsvit explained that Mary received her name because she was a bright star shining from Christ’s diadem.¹⁹ The painting provides a visual echo of this statement. The angels Gabriel and Michael seem to be crowning the Virgin; the way they hold her diadem results in their index fingers’ pointing to its central decorative element, the shining “star” of Hrotsvit’s text, although Mary rather than Christ wears the crown here.²⁰

      Labeling Mary “the temple” echoes an epithet Hrotsvit used to describe the Virgin in a later stanza of her poem, where she explains that the title stemmed from the fact that Mary had been weaving the purple curtain of the Jewish temple at the moment of the Annunciation.²¹ The miniature presents a similar relationship between Mary and the temple pictorially by locating the Virgin before an architectural structure that features a purple curtain as well as twisting columns, a further symbolic reference to Solomon’s temple.²²

      The

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