The Cloisters Cross
From The Red Pill
"This is the thing that it ignited it. It is one of the great works of art of the medieval era, but how such a beautiful work of art could carry such an embittered message, I still can't understand. It's as if Hitler and Michelangelo got together to make this thing... Goebbels would have loved it." - Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum
"A masterpiece of Romanesque art, this altar cross with some 92 figures and 98 inscriptions is the vehicle for a unique iconographic programme." - Official Plaque of the Cloisters Cross
The Metropolitan Museum outbid Britian to the tune of six-hundred thousand dollars to obtain this medieval piece known alternately as Bury Cross, after the Suffolk town Bury St Edmunds where it is thought to have been made, and the Cloisters Cross in reference to where it now resides in the Metropolitan Museum. It was acquired in 1963 by Thomas Hooving, a young curator from an eccentric and rather shady character named Ante Topic-Mimara, a Yugoslav art collector.
Several things are believed about the cross which had not seen since the middle-ages until it was produced by Ante Topic-Mimara. One being that it was taken by Richard the Lionheart on the Crusades or, that it had been part of the treasure paid to Germany by England when ransoming Richard who'd been captured on his return. Although Topic-Mimara never revealed how he acquired the cross, one source (Hungarian-American) claims to have seen it in a Cistercian monastery near Zirc in the Bakony mountains.
Hoving believes that the cross may have been used as a propaganda piece of sorts to incite the massacre on Palm Sunday in 1190 of fifty-seven members of Bury St Edmunds' Jewish population.
Contents |
Inscriptions
- "The Jews laugh at the pain of dying God."
- "The earth trembles, Death is conquered and bewails. From the opening grave, life surges forth and Synagogue collapses after vain and stupid effort."
- "Ye shall be sold unto your enemies.. Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee."
- "Thus saith the Lord unto his people, Thus have they loved to wander... Therefore the Lord doth not accept them; he will now remember their iniquity, and visit their sins. I will consume them by the sword, and by the famine, and by the pestilence."
Features
- fashioned out of ivory, walrus tusk
- made of interlocking pieces
- the crucified body of Christ is missing (interlocking piece)
- the inscription above where the missing Christ would hang reads, "King of the Confessors"
- 98 inscriptions in Latin, Greek and mock Hebrew carved into miniature scrolls
- 92 carved figures
External Links
- Cross of Shame
- King of the Confessors
- It is a holy relic and one of the greatest works of medieval art. But the man who found the long-lost Bury Cross believes it is an icon of anti-semitism that ignited a 12th-century slaughter. Julian Borger reports
- The Cloisters Cross with alternate view
- The Cloisters—described by Germain Bazin, former director of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, as "the crowning achievement of American museology"—is the branch of the Metropolitan Museum devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe.
