Unburied Cross

A work of art is often a synopsis of its time. Versailles tells of 17th century French rationalism in its orderly facades and the geometry of its gardens. Michelangelo's sculpture reveals in its robust anatomy the renaissance of man's faith in himself. Yet few objects compact so much of a world into a microcosm as the Romanesque cross recently acquired by Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Met first heard of the cross eight years ago; it had been stashed away in a Swiss bank vault by an Austrian collector. It was carved from seven pieces of walrus tusk, a distinctly North European material; and from such traits of style as "damp folds"--garments that cling smoothly around the anatomy--Met Associate Curator of Medieval Art Thomas P. F. Hoving deduced that the cross was from late 12th century England.

Backwards Latin. Rippling across the ivory everywhere are images that summarize early theology. The tusks lend the cross an undulating vitality, repeated in the budding motif of the Garden of Eden's Tree of Life, then supposed to be the material of the original cross of Calvary. Taking these themes, the cross dramatically telescopes time, showing Adam and Eve, the primordial parents of man, at the base of the cross as they are at last raised from the dead by the Crucifixion. They seem to emerge from their eons-long sleep in a mood of joyous bewilderment as they clutch at the Tree of Life's roots, while Christ ascends above them, already halfway to heaven.

The next clue lay in the cross's 108 figures and more than 60 inscriptions in Latin and Greek, mostly serving an ugly propaganda purpose. Rather than celebrate Christ's ascension, hexameters such as "synagogue falls after vain and stupid effort," rail against Christ's "assassins." The Jews, shown in the conical caps that they wore in medieval times, jostle and mock Christ. The placard over the missing figure of Christ reads "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Confessors" instead of "Jews." And it is written in backwards Latin rather than properly in Hebrew, to emphasize rejection of Christ's origins.

Home Crusades. The anti-Jewish polemic was not uncommon to the militant and quite intolerant 12th century British church, which had already sent two crusades against infidels, and under Richard the Lionhearted was raising a third. Zealous Christians, certain that the Last Judgment was just around the corner, and eager to pay back the pagans, were just as ready to take revenge on the Jews of Britain as they were to recover Jerusalem from the Moslems.

One monastery in England particularly led outbreaks against the Jews. It was the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, the holy tomb of the royal martyr killed in 870 by pagan Danes when he refused to recant Christianity. Stylistic links between the cross and the richly illuminated Bury Bible, created during the 1130s, led Curator Hoving to the abbey.

An Hooly Monke. While medieval monasteries waxed rich in land holdings, Bury St. Edmunds had fallen deeply into debt to Jewish moneylenders at the end of the 12th century. Then a strong, stubborn monk, appropriately named Samson, became abbot shortly after a young boy was found murdered. The Jews were blamed. Eight years later 57 Jews were massacred in the town. Samson got the King to expel the Jews from Bury St. Edmunds, and shortly cleared the abbey's debt, wresting back the glory that the monastery once enjoyed.

The abbot was the embodiment of a militant monk. History records that he begged the King to go on a crusade. Hoving concludes that Samson might well have commissioned the cross. Perhaps he was the abbot whom Chaucer mocked in his Prioress's Tale for his false piety over a murder:

This abbot, which that was an hooly man,

As monkes been, or elles oghte be.

Concludes Hoving more mildly of Samson's cross: "It expresses what was in the wind throughout the entire Christian world during the late 12th century, for the cross is symbolic of the crusading spirit, both good and evil."

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