The works depicted on the left folio are centered around a particular category of objects, the vasa sacra, which form part of the material instruments of the Mass; this made them sites of mediating power. During the Mass the vasa sacra served symbolically to mark God’s presence in the church. Among these the chalice and paten were particularly significant for coming into direct contact with the sacramental body of Christ. As such, the vasa sacra stood at the threshold between the visible and invisible, the material and the immaterial. In the painting they key the multidirectional communication with God in which the reproduced artworks participate. That linking of sacrament with vasa sacra and other objects in the church developed essentially from medieval liturgical habits.
Similar ideas underlay the offertory procession, which, until the middle of the eleventh century, took place at the beginning of the Mass. During this procession, the congregation presented gifts to the altar. Subsequently, before the recitation of the Canon, which contained prayers specific to the host, the priest would perform the secreta, where he asked God to accept and sanctify the congregation’s offerings.68 Then, during the Canon, the celebrant would pray that the consecrated host be raised to heaven and blessed by God, thus ritually connecting the gifts to an act of transformation. Contemporary monastic preambles to donation records draw on this liturgical association between the offering and the Eucharist in order to explain that the effectiveness of a gift depended on its being transformed at the altar.69 By this process the object was converted from an earthly good to something accepted by God, giving proof of the donor’s merit. That potential for transformation and divine acceptance invested the offerings with the capacity to bridge the gap between earth and heaven. When such gifts were then employed in ecclesiastical rituals—whether because they were themselves liturgical objects, such as, for example, chalices, reliquaries, textiles, and certain types of books, or because they were to be added to a liturgical object, such as a gem placed on a reliquary—that power was amplified.70 By merging the representation of a dedicatory act with references to the Eucharistic ritual, the painting reinforces the place of objects at the nexus of Bernward’s communication with God.
A painting in the contemporary Uta Codex (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Codex Latinus Monacensis 13601) elaborates themes similar to the Bernward Gospels; it offers a useful comparison that clarifies what is at stake in the depiction of objects in the Bernward Gospels. Made for the nunnery of Niedermünster in the 1020s, the Uta Codex contains painted reproductions of objects from the treasury of a neighboring male monastery dedicated to Saint Emmeram.71 These appear in a bifolium showing, on the left, a symbolic crucifixion, and on the right, the bishop-saint Erhard celebrating the Mass (fols. 3v–4r; fig. 10). As Adam Cohen has analyzed this miniature extensively in his monograph on the Uta Codex, I will here only summarize those aspects of the painting most relevant to the dedication of the Bernward Gospels.72
First, the miniature in the Uta Codex portrays a liturgical act. Erhard wears the vestments of a priestly celebrant—in this case, the Jewish high priest of the Old Testament. Both bishops direct their gaze forward across an altar to the opposite folio. By raising the book in both hands, Bernward both offers the codex to the saints and raises the book before the altar as if to perform a ritual; Erhard is depicted frontally, in an orans posture, and the presence of the deacon beside him frames the scene primarily as a liturgical event.
Second, the altar stands at the center of Erhard’s ritual and intercessory actions directed toward Christ, who appears in a symbolic Crucifixion on the opposite folio. The paintings’ geometric structure and the architectural patterns in the inner border of each half of the opening link the pictures to each other. The gaze of both the deacon and Saint Erhard create a movement from right to left that directs attention to the Crucifixion. There, at the level of the altar on Erhard’s page, the personification of Synagoga moves away from Christ, contrasting sharply with the direction of Erhard and the deacon’s attention. Tituli in the opening address the targeted audience of the work, the nuns of Niedermünster, ordering them to learn and strive after the virtues represented by the paintings, presupposing the audience’s contemplation of the page and Erhard’s role as a mediator between them and Christ.73
The Erhard miniature also incorporates a group of golden objects that can be identified with works from the treasury of the monastery of Saint Emmeram in Regensburg. These were gifts from the ninth-century emperor Arnulf of Carinthia and they are described in a life of Saint Emmeram written within ten years of the Uta Codex.74 The most recognizable of the reproduced objects is a portable altar known as the Arnulf ciborium; it is the two-level structure surmounted by a crossing triangular roof that appears in the middle of the altar.75 Beside the painted ciborium is a book, drawn quite conventionally, perhaps a reference to the renowned Codex Aureus of Saint Emmeram (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000). A chalice and paten appear just before the ciborium and are also quite generic in their appearance—they correspond to donations cited in the slightly later text. A walled complex depicted below the altar probably represents Arnulf’s royal palace, one of the monastery’s properties, while the object that hangs above the altar may be Arnulf’s royal crown. In front of the altar is a Sassanian or Byzantine silk decorated with medallions that show facing winged horses. Although no such textile survives at Saint Emmeram today, the biographical text notes that Arnulf gave the community colored cloths and, as Cohen has pointed out, dotted medallions are a common ninth-century textile motif.76 Moreover, because precious patterned silks were frequently used for burial or to cover relics, they rarely survive intact to the present day.77
These objects bridge the space between the bishop-celebrant and God not only formally, because they appear between the bishop-celebrant and the Crucifixion, but also symbolically. Cohen argues that a complex pseudo-Dionysian process underlies the page’s design, in which the golden objects serve to transport the viewer anagogically from the material world to the immaterial contemplation of the divine.78 By doing so, the miniature positions the objects of the treasury on the threshold between the earthly and heavenly, and they thus become sites of communication and presence. Such a focus on material objects as mediating membranes duplicates the ideas developed in the Bernward Gospels dedication painting, which, however, draws on metaphors for the Incarnation and liturgical habits rather than on philosophical concepts in order to convey the objects’ power.
Further similarities include the fact that the painting reproduces known works of art to varying degrees of verisimilitude. Although the Arnulf ciborium is readily identifiable because of its shape and material, the chalice, paten, book, and crown are quite generic. In contrast, the silk by the altar is reproduced in large format as if to ensure that it would be recognized by its specific pattern, although the textual descriptions of Arnulf’s colored cloths offer no indication of the textiles’ decoration. Moreover, the artworks selected to be reproduced in both manuscripts played an active role in the shaping of communal memory, both individually and as a group. This has already been established for the dedicatory bifolium in the Bernward Gospels, and Cohen explains how the citation of these objects in Saint Emmeram’s slightly later biography served as part of that text’s larger project to resist the episcopal authority being exerted over the monastery by the local bishops.79 The careful attention paid to Arnulf’s gifts in this document suggest that they were particularly important carriers of memory in that project.
Why reproduce treasury objects from a neighboring male monastery in a book made for