The statue is a sculpture that seems always to have been part of the treasury of the cathedral, whose main altar was dedicated to Mary. In 1840 Johann Michael Kratz wrote that the figures were “mit Heiligtümern angefüllt” (filled with holy things), and during a restoration in the 1950s, conservators opened the large cavity closed by a wooden panel in the statue’s back to find small bits of wood there.37 The nineteenth-century description together with the hidden opening and wooden pieces raised the possibility that the statue functioned as a reliquary and was perhaps designed as such.38 Since no contemporary records pertaining to Bernward’s golden statue exist, the object’s exact use in Hildesheim remains difficult to reconstruct. Yet it can partly be extrapolated from liturgical conventions attested to at other Ottonian churches. By the eleventh century, statues of the Virgin and Child actuated the presence of the saints during the rites and processions of high feast days dedicated particularly to Mary, such as the Assumption, and on certain feasts of the Christmas and Easter seasons.39 As an image of the patron saint of the cathedral, the Hildesheim sculpture might also have been processed through Hildesheim to commemorate important anniversaries in diocesan history, such as the cathedral’s dedication. A sixteenth-century source records that just such a reliquary procession was the custom in the later Middle Ages; the extent to which this reflects earlier practices is, however, difficult to ascertain.40
What Bernward may have anticipated the statue would mean to the Benedictine community dedicated to Saint Michael that he founded (and for which he constructed a walled complex just outside the town limits) is even less certain. However, the altar of the monastic church’s crypt was dedicated primarily to Mary, and late medieval sources indicate a stational processional took place on Palm Sunday and included Saint Michael’s.41 Regardless of whether Bernward’s sculpture was ever carried to Saint Michael’s on these occasions, the monks may also have had occasion to see it displayed in the cathedral on high feast days.42
A sense of the significance such statues had for medieval communities can be derived from Bernard of Angers’ tenth-century chronicle of the miracles of Sainte Foy in Conques. It offers a window into contemporary ideas about statues of saints, which were becoming increasingly popular in the tenth and eleventh centuries: “For it is a deeply rooted practice and firmly established custom that, if land given to Saint Foy is unjustly appropriated by an usurper for any reason, the reliquary of the holy Virgin is carried out to that land as a witness in regaining the right to her property.”43 In other passages, Bernard describes such statues holding councils and appearing in visions.44 Bernard’s account reveals the extent to which these objects served to authorize, support, and advocate for communities’ spiritual and legal claims, thus acting not only as liturgical objects but also, potentially, as public carriers of memory.45 The painting of the Virgin and Child thus reproduces a type of object that the patron and recipients of the codex would have understood to bear a high degree of symbolic power in rituals of a liturgical as well as a commemorative nature. It also, significantly, represents a contemporary work of art associated with Bishop Bernward.46
Related observations can be made about other objects depicted in the dedicatory bifolium. As mentioned above, the two rectangles depicted to each side of the saints on the right folio are topped by roundels containing portraits of Mary and Eve; these painted doors present a typological relationship between the two women. The verses together with the portraits echo the iconography of monumental bronze doors commissioned by Bernward for Saint Michael’s Abbey that were completed by 1015, contemporary with the Bernward Gospels.47 These depict, on one panel, narratives from Genesis centered on Eve, and on the other, corresponding moments in the life of Mary and Christ. Both the painting and bronze door present Eve as responsible for closing the doors of Paradise when she gave in to the serpent’s temptation, and they make Mary’s acceptance of God’s message the reason for the gates’ reopening. Both also interpret Mary as the new Eve, arguing that salvation is made possible by Christ’s and Mary’s reversal of Adam’s and Eve’s actions.48 The doors are now displayed in the cathedral but were probably designed for Saint Michael’s.49
Although the reconstitution of their original location remains somewhat disputed, as doors, the bronze panels operated as thresholds between spaces and in that way served as liminal zones in a manner similar to Bernward’s golden statue, which mediated the presence of the saints for the faithful. The miniature argues through pictorial means that the painted doors function as much as portals as their bronze referent. As already described, an inscription proclaims that the door on the Virgin’s left, the one bearing Eve’s portrait, is clausa (closed), and it is pictorially highlighted as such by the prominence of the hinges which jut into the adjacent column. In contrast, the door on Bernward’s side is marked “cunctis patefacta” (thrown open to all), and its location at the edge of the picture frame presents it as a passageway to the saints.
Like the Marian statue, the bronze doors may have played a public role in constructing the memory of a specific moment or event at Hildesheim. In a study of the doors, Adam Cohen and Anne Derbes suggest that the panels depict Eve as a sexually provocative woman as part of a project to identify a local nun (and sister to the emperor), Sophia of Gandersheim, as malevolent and dissolute. In historical texts produced in Hildesheim, Sophia was held responsible for prompting the efforts of the archbishop of Mainz to lay claim to the wealthy nunnery of Gandersheim that the bishops of Hildesheim considered to be under their aegis.50 By offering a polemical argument against the dangers posed by seductive and insolent women, the doors may have served to assert Bernward’s legal and spiritual claim to this nunnery. Completed shortly after the initial settlement of the dispute in Bernward’s favor, the doors thus potentially directed the diocese’s memory of a specific conflict in a public statement of Bernward’s authority. The memorial association between the doors and the patron is especially significant; within the inscription on the panels appears the phrase B[ernwardus] ep[iscopus] dive mem[oriae] (Bishop Bernward, blessed of memory). Reproduced in the dedicatory painting, the depiction of the doors may help reiterate and extend that commemorative message.51
In the painting, a white cross appears within the blue opening of the left door, marking the passage as the way of Christ. It consists of two parts: a crucifix and a long handle that extends to the bottom frame of the picture. The latter detail indicates that the object is a processional cross. The representation here is particularly generic. Nevertheless, processional crosses were important objects for the liturgy and Bernward did commission several in Hildesheim. For example, a gilded silver cross now in the diocese’s museum dates to the eleventh century.52 It bears the inscription “Bishop Bernward made this” (meaning “had this made”) on its verso, together with a list of saints, including Dionysius, whose relics were purportedly presented to the bishop by the king of France in 1007.53 This cross was at Saint Michael’s until the nineteenth century and, like the golden statue and bronze doors, served to commemorate both the bishop and the community, as it bears the patron’s name on its back together with a list of relics to which the monks would add in the later Middle Ages.54
An important ritual object, the cross would not only have been carried in processions but also, detached from its base, would have stood at the altar to represent the presence of Christ during the Eucharistic celebration. Thus like both the statue and doors it played the role of a mediator between man and God, earth and heaven, which the picture in the Bernward Gospels underscores by the cross’s placement in the passageway to Paradise. A parallel in the Bible Bernward gave to Saint Michael’s emphasizes this point. As discussed in the introduction,