Saint-John-in-disco . Prolegomena to the History of a Man’s Head, in “Mitteilungen für...

A History of a Man’s Head.

The Johannesschüssel or the Image of the Mediator and the Pre-cursor

Barbara Baert,

In memoriam Audrey van Tuyckom During the Middle Ages, the head of St John the Baptist was widely venerated. According to legend, the saint had been beheaded by order of Herod’s step-daughter Salome and had been found later in Jerusalem. The legend and the discovery of the relic lie at the basis of an iconographic type in which the head of St John the Baptist is represented as an ‘object’ in itself. The phenomenon of this so-called Johannesschüssel is the subject of this contribution. The study of this theme draws on the history of art, religious history and cultural anthropol-ogy. The depiction and worship of the severed head is entrenched in intercultural sensitivities and interpretative patterns with regard to genealogy, the apotropaion and the bloody sacrifice. Traces of these notions were adopted and adapted by Christianity. This adaptation took place at different levels lying in-between official church doctrine and popular religion. Some aspects of these archetypes faded out while others took root in their connection with the Chris-tian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Eucharist. Embedded in these new as-sociations, the phenomenon of the Johannesschüssel, the head the Baptist on a platter, was able to flourish and grow into an extensive iconographic corpus, and became anchored in complex ways in the various areas of cultural history.1

1. Text-relic-image

Matthew 14:1-12 and Mark 6:14-29 tell of the death of John the Baptist. Herod had imprisoned John the Baptist because of John’s protest against the king’s marriage with Herodias, the former wife of Herod’s brother, claiming they were committing incest.2 At a banquet, Herodias’s daughter dances, and the king is so captivated by her charms that he promises to give her anything she wishes. On the instigation of her mother, she asks for the head of John the Baptist. The king orders her wish to be carried out and the girl offers the disembodied head, ‘in a charger’ (in disco), to her mother. John’s disciples soon learned what had hap-pened and buried his body. Luke 1:5-45 tells how John the Baptist was born to Elisabeth, who was con-sidered barren. Her husband Zacharias was the priest of Abia. The angel Gabriel

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appeared to him during a sacrifice of incense to announce the arrival of his son John. Already in the womb, he would be filled with the Holy Ghost, said the angel. He would be a prophet in the spirit of Elias. This is followed by the epi-sode of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary and Mary’s meeting with Elisa-beth. On this occasion, the child, John, leaped in Elisabeth’s womb, making her cry out to her cousin Mary: ‘Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb!’ (1:42). John the Baptist went before Christ. He baptised Jesus and recognised that he was the Messiah. When John’s disciples were angry at Jesus for baptising as well, John answered them: ‘Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him.’ (John 3:28). But ‘Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist’, says Christ himself about John in Matt. 11:11. On the basis of the Scriptures, the Patristics and the Apocrypha developed further reflections and interpretations (Dibelius, 1911; Daniélou, 1967; Lupieri, 1988; Ernst, 1989; Pape and Goodwin, 1991). John is the forerunner, the pro-domos, the precursor of the Saviour. Consequently, he is also the mediator. As a transitional figure, he is the bridge between the Old and the New Testament. He is the last of the prophets and the first of the martyrs (protomartyr). John be-longs both to the Old and the New. This pivotal position is important for the dynamic cult of John the Baptist and the meaning of the St John platter. The cult of John the Baptist was hatched out of his relic. The martyrologia of the 5th and 6th centuries complemented the biblical knowledge of his barbaric end. The belief took root that John’s body had been burned under the reign of Theodosius the Apostate (end of the 4th century) to put an end to the martyr cult. But monks had saved the ashes and taken them to Alexandria. According to the tradition, those ashes have been worshipped in Genova since 1098 (Innitzer, 1908, p. 397). John’s head is said to have been buried by Herodias and her daughter Salome3 in Jerusalem, where it was discovered by two monks. It was hidden in a house in Emesa. In 391, the head was supposed to have been brought from Emesa to Constantinople by Emperor Theodosius. In the Inventio capitis tradition, however, there is no mention of a dish. Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470-c. 550) says that the head was first kept in a hydria or water jar, and, after its redis-covery, in a silver urn. Marcus Aurelius Cassiodorus mentions, in his account of the translation of the head to Constantinople: thecam in qua caput Baptistae jacebat.4 From the 6th century onwards, the Roman lectionaries start to feature the feasts of his passion and decollation, on 29 and 30 August, respectively. The conception and birth of John the Baptist are celebrated on 24 September and 24 June, respectively (Michl, 1960, col. 1086). The head relic is mentioned in letters and registers from the 12th century onwards: Caput cum cappillis integrum et barba (…) in palatiis antiquis (Em-peror Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1157) (Riant II, 1878, p. 213 et. seq.). After the caesura of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, there was a surge of spurious St John’s skulls. By the end of the Middle Ages, they had multiplied to no fewer than a dozen (Réau, 1956, p. 431-463; Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 245). The best-known skull is the one that is kept in Amiens (ill. 1a-b). It attracted many pil-grims and is connected with a lengthy translatio legend (Rückert, 1957, p. 7 et.

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seq.). Wallon de Sarton found two skulls with a head relic bricked into the wall of the church of St George of Mangana in Constantinople. One belonged to St George, the other to John the Baptist.5 De Sarton took John’s skull with the crystal covering of the head, but sold the dish.6 On 17 December 1206, the relic was received in the church of Amiens by bishop Richard de Gerberoy. From Amiens, the devotion of John the Baptist soon spread. In Genoa, the devout worshipped the dish as well as the ashes (ill. 2) (Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 252-253). This dish was believed to be the original charger of Salome, which had been in contact with the saint. However, the dish of brown agate has been dated to the 13th century, and the gilt silver rim and ornamental holder on the back were added later, presumably around 1300. A cross with a medallion was filled with delicate vine branches, a symbol of the Eucharist, sacrifice and martyrdom (Joh. 15:5). The legend on the rim says: inter natos mulierum non surrexit maior johannis baptistae. These are the words spoken by Christ himself about John the Baptist according to Matt. 11:11. Around 1420, a small head of John the Baptist in gold enamel was added in the middle of the dish and attached to an aureole set with rubies.7 The martyrology of John the Baptist therefore revolves around the ashes, the skull and the dish. These are three different types of relic: the entropic relic or the radical relic, which remains irreversible; the head relic, which is the primary relict, pars pro toto; and finally, the contact relic, the secondary relic that has been touched by the deceased. In this case, the two latter relics belong together on the basis of the literary tradition. ‘In disco’ say the Scriptures. Head and dish are one. They should have stayed together, but the vicissitudes of history de-cided otherwise, for Wallon de Sarton sold the ‘original’ dish. The so-called ‘real’ dish of Genova would remain incomplete and yearn for what it was meant to bear. Fifteenth-century patrons would capitulate for the void and complete the dish with an artificial head. In the history of art, the ideal indivisibility of the two relics gave rise to the Johannesschüssel: in the artefact, head and dish are reunited.

2. Seal and simulacrum

The Johannesschüssel has always been assumed to be a late-medieval phenome-non, particular to the 15th century. Arndt and Kroos are to be credited with hav-ing shown that numerous examples of Johannesschüsseln date back to the 13th and 14th centuries (1969, p. 260-286). The media in which they were initially fashioned could not be more varied, ranging from sigillography, with the image small and stereotyped, pressed in the wax, to monumental sculpture in the round. From these early days, different media indicated different functions. The seals belonged to the Knights Hospitallers, also known as the Knights of St John of Jerusalem (Waas, 1960, col. 1107-1109). This military order pre-sumably started building hospitals in Amalfi from the 11th century onwards. In the 12th century, their presence in the Holy Land was structurally recognised as a military order, and the Hospitallers were financed by the rich religious and aris-tocratic elite in the West. The patron saint of the Hospitallers was St John the Baptist.


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The seal from 1232 that belonged to the Hospitaller Konrad von Heimbach shows an isolated head (ill. 3). The eyes are closed; the head has a beard and long hair. The platter is suggested by lines surrounding the head. The border thus created is filled with the inscription of the seal. Text and picture are inti-mately joined, as the head and dish are intimately interwoven. The Knights of St John naturally chose to depict John the Baptist on their seals. The tectonic quality of the seal lent itself extremely well to the icono-graphic type of the Johannesschüssel. Secondly, the face lends itself to being abstracted into a round pictogram. The fusion of the seal and the wax imprint went through a series of gradations. In Konrad von Heimbach’s seal, it is con-substantial. The seal itself is the dish that bears the head. In other examples, the rim of the platter is duplicated: inside the edge of the seal, there is the rim of the platter, then the border of the aureole, and then the contours of the round face, as in the seal of the deanery of South Holland (1282), in which the referring system of the concentric circles is developed in extenso (ill. 4). It is not only the form and content that make the Johannesschüssel so well suited to being depicted on a seal, but also its function. The Baptist seal is joined to the deed and turns it into an official document. The seal proclaims the com-munity and the ideology within which the document finds its authentication. In form and content, the dish of St John fulfils this authenticating function better than any other image could (e.g. the baptising St John). That is because the dish intrinsically presents. The presentation of the head contains the presentation of the official letter. The Johannesschüssel as the deixis of legitimacy should not be separated from the pressure exerted with the seal itself. The action of the clenched fist makes the St John seal performative. Borrowing from linguistics, the performative image is the image that is performed simultaneously with the (visual) expression. ‘Behold, ecce’, says the St John seal, as John himself said about Christ: ecce agnus Dei (John 1:36). We will return to the presentational and legitimating action of the Johan-nesschüssel later in this essay from the perspective of the issue of the precursor and the mediator. With this prospect, I would like to seal up this seal for the time being and move on to the second group: the freestanding Johanness-chüsseln. The municipal museum of Göttingen has a painted wooden Johannesschüssel from the 13th century (ill. 5). A proportionally small head lies on a round dish. The eyes are closed. The head is a de facto reminder of the result of the brutal violence. In other words, the Johannesschüssel is not the narrativity of violence, but actually the frontality of the violence. This absolute directness demands more than the gaze; it demands the shock of the gaze. But the shocked gaze of the onlooker is not returned. The disembodied head is sunken in mortal oblivion, and therefore utterly unresponsive to the living gaze that is ours. In other words, our gaze is not satisfied by a returned look. The head of St John does something else: it absorbs the glance in its opposite, the lifeless pupil. The head on its dish is a closed, unresponsive image: le trou (the hole), says Georges Didi-Huberman (1985, p. 128; see also Didi-Huberman, 1992).


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(If the Johannesschüssel is an exclusively receptive image, then that captiv-ity is also sanctifying, ‘selfless’. The severed head demands nothing; it merely wishes to be there for me.) The three-dimensional Johannesschüssel emerged at the end of the 13th cen-tury. This period of art history is characterised by great formal and conceptual changes. It is the period of the introduction of an iconographic type that brings together various stylistic and thematic characteristics connected with the interac-tion between the addressor and the addressed image: the so-called Andachtsbild. The Andachtsbild absorbs the attention of the spectator and emphatically focuses him. The spectator is intensely involved in the image and is guided by the for-mal vocabulary of the visual medium – in particular by the frontal composition – to feel compassion with the subject. The Andachtsbild is indicative of a Kul-tischer Wandel and a Strukturwandel with regard to the image in the West (Belt-ing, 1981, p. 35).8 One of the most influential Andachtsbilder is the Man of Sorrows (ill. 6) (Panofsky, 1927; von der Osten, 1935). It depicts the suffering Christ, who is presented to the spectator in frontal pose. This iconographic type presumably originated in the Orthodox icon tradition, where it featured in the liturgy of the Passion (Ridderbos, 1998, p. 143-182). In the history of Western art, the Man of Sorrows became a subject of private devotion from the 14th cen-tury onwards. The interaction between the image and the spectator, driven by the emotion of compassion, was fed both by mystic literature and by the sermons of Modern Devotion. In the texts of Heinrich Suso (1295-1366), the suffering Christ ap-pears as an image of mercy and self-sacrificing love (Schiller, 1968, 2, p. 211). In his prayers, Ludolph of Saxony (c. 1300-1378) addresses the reader himself. He writes that meditating on the Passion must move the devout to tears, to inner contemplation, and even to physical expression, such as the compassionate ex-tending of one’s arms to (the image of) Christ. Ludolph even asks the reader: what would you do if you saw this suffering? Would you not throw yourself on the Lord? (Marrow 1986, p. 155)9: ‘Non te projicere?’ In the term projicere, Marrow recognises the double meaning of projection. The image is supposed to evoke empathic emotion, and thereby it projects the spectator’s innermost feel-ings. The Andachtsbild is reflection, a self-conscious effigy. The Johannesschüssel also qualifies as an Andachtsbild. But it occupies an idiosyncractic position in this devotional and artistic segment of ‘vicarious suf-fering’. The dead head is unresponsive. It commemorates the suffering that took place. It is the past perfect. In fact, it does not even show any suffering at all, in contrast to the agony of the Man of Sorrows. The head of St John is suffering completed. As an Andachtsbild, it therefore lacks the quality of reflection. In-stead, it is absorbent, like a black mirror. ‘Lose yourself in me, in continuum’, is what the Johannesschüssel seems to say. In the context of medieval devotion, that means a devotion divorced from the recoil of the gaze. With regard to the Andachtsbild, this results in a fascinating contradictio in terminis. The fact that the Johannesschüssel is generally represented in the round makes for even greater complexity. The third dimension is the dimension of transcending illusion. Consequently, the precarious border between devotion and idolatry that has meandered through


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Christian concepts of imagery as a perilous geological fault line certainly touched upon the Johannesschüssel (Freedberg, 1989).10 Idolatrous is the spec-tator who identifies the image with its subject, and therefore absorbs the referen-tial power of the artefact in the idolisation, and consequently ascribes the same powers to the artefact as those he would expect from the living. The clergy was careful with sculpture, because it realised that this medium contained the danger zone of idolatry that Christianity had unfortunately inherited from antique and proto-Christian customs. In 1230, the bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, writes that not only are Roman idols still being venerated by old women, ‘but there are also simple people who do still not make a distinction, in their prayers, between the images of saints and the saints themselves; and therefore they ad-dress their prayers not to the saints in the spirit, but to the statues themselves’ (Camille, 1989, p. 208). Polychrome statues, clothed statues and statues adorned with jewellery were even more likely to be ‘reanimated’, as if they were old idols with the ability to return from their underworld on the basis of their colour (Boldryck, 2002, p. 15). The Johannesschüssel, as in the example in Göttingen, is generally a poly-chrome simulacrum. It evokes the ‘real’ result of the severed head, organically accurate in situ, in disco. The head can be touched. It was even painted to make it more life-like, bringing death itself to life, as it were. The composite object is situated between the narrative and the relic, between the verity of the word and the reality of the object. The Johannesschüssel connects the world of representa-tion with the world of the mortal remains. The mediator position ascribed to the figure of John the Baptist is therefore also present in the artefact itself, in a pow-erful, condensed form. Perhaps that is also the reason why the depiction of the head of St John on a dish immediately aimed at the third dimension, and not at the second dimension. (Abstracting, for a moment, from the seal as ‘imprint’ and ‘performance’.). For the third dimension plays on the thin and sometimes almost invisible line between reality and representation. There, in that shadowy zone, is where the Johannesschüssel wants to abide. But can adoration, and in extremis, idolatry, lodge in an object that refers so brutally to death? In the history of mankind, we see a recurrent obsession with the dead head – as reale or as simulacrum – which man wants to appropriate in a cultic context. To what purpose this appropriation of death, and what is the im-age of the gruesome beheading meant to channel? On my way to the answers, I must dwell on a few semiotic qualities of the Johannesschüssel.

3. Between presence, presentation and representation

The term Johannesschüssel refers to a relic, a seal and a sculpture in the round. The skull relic of St John is his presentio or ‘presence’ (pars pro toto; present; opus; ‘himself’). The ‘tautological’ seal is his ‘presentation’ (behold, ecce; ren-dering present; operative). The three-dimensional head and dish is his represen-tation (St John is rendered present; he has operated; commemorative, exhausted, and ‘disinterested’).


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The three functions of the image are of course not completely separated from each other. A small exercise will illustrate that. Aspects of the opus can seep through in the experience of the three-dimensional head and dish, so close to the simulacrum, and therefore so inclined to ‘This-is-himself’. Moreover, some three-dimensional Johannesschüsseln contained relics of the saint.11 The ‘tauto-logical’ seal is the Johannesschüssel as a deictic, demonstrative gesture. But the pilgrim’s amulet of the relic was not just representation. It certainly also func-tioned as a magic, protective amulet (ill. 7). In this respect, I also want to men-tion the late-medieval pictorial Johannesschüsseln, which, in the second dimen-sion, are not only closer to the definition of representation, but also represent the narrativity, that is, the dish of St John in function, acting and operating itself (ill. 8). Finally, the presentation itself can be double: the dish of St John is some-times presented on a pedestal or a stand: the presentation squared, in a sense (ill. 9). In other words, the Johannesschüssel raises questions about how the image, in all its complexity and stratification, functioned in medieval and early modern times. I will now continue this reflection on the basis of what makes the Johan-nesschüssel into the Johannesschüssel, namely, its dish. The head of St John needs its dish, and vice versa. The relation head-dish is intrinsic. Without the charger, the support, the head is suspended and not ‘de-posited’. Presenting is what the charger does. The dish says: ‘look at this’. The dish is essentially an indicator, like a hand that opens to show what was hidden in its palm. The dish allows for placement. It assumes a position. Presentation and posi-tioning are its job. Someone carries the dish. The dish embodies service, and the host presents himself in service to the guest. The guest takes from the dish; for instance, food.12 Within these characteristics, the Johannesschüssel relates to the spectator as a ‘guest’. The dish is the redemption granted to the viewer. This line of reasoning raises two questions. First, is this redemption also related to the idea of ‘nourishment’? Is the Johannesschüssel the image to be consumed? And secondly, who proffers the dish? Who is the host or hostess who remains invisi-ble in the Johannesschüssel? In the last few decades, art historians have paid increasing attention to the medieval texts that connect the sense of sight with the sense of taste (Bynum, 1987; Falkenburg, 1994; Falkenburg, 2001, p. 2-17). Looking is taking in, di-gesting. The absorption of the image can be compared to the consumption of food. In form and content, Andachtsbilder heighten precisely that tension be-tween concentration and consummation with the senses. Whereas the Johan-nesschüssel as Andachtsbild fit rather awkwardly in the terminology of the com-passio, it is much easier to apply the terminology of the consummatio and the absorbere to it.13 But here too, the fact that the head is dead plays a subversive role. Does the Johannesschüssel then have to mean the service of the skull/head cult, of totemism? Let us further explore this extrapolation. Anthropological literature has defined the head cult as the channelling of energy flows for the benefit of the social community (Andree 1887; Arens, 1980; Reeves Sanday, 1986; Carneiro de Cunha 1991, p. 124).14 The headhunter distinguishes himself in his community for his courage in transforming the nega-


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tive energy (of anger or war, for instance) in his act of beheading. In the presen-tation of the disembodied head – the totem – lies the deliverance of the whole community (Reeves Sanday, 1986, p. 216). The head totem must therefore be understood in function of service, beneficial influence and the averting of dan-ger. In the severed head, war, chaos and infertility are converted into peace, calm and prosperity. The head totem is the completion of the necessary inver-sions. In the totem, chaos is turned into order in the selflessness of the voiding image. The Johannesschüssel may rest on those same pillars, but where, in Christi-anity, lies the ‘necessary inversion’ (Nagy, 2000)? The fundamental Christian inversion of redemption is the historical turning point that marks the transition from the Old to the New Testament. The Precursor asks to be sacrificed for the salvation of what comes after him: the entire Christian community. The Johan-nesschüssel is situated on that fracture. It is the mediator. The Johannesschüssel has solidified in that incomprehensible zone. It represents the transition as such: the zone of the ‘no longer – already almost’. The second reflection on the servant bearing the dish is no less far-reaching. From a literary and narrative viewpoint, it is Salome who carries the platter. But the Johannesschüssel is no narrative image. It reveals the service of the invisible host. The Johannesschüssel has stepped immediately, without the host or host-ess, into the world of artistic visibility. It is this ‘immediacy’, this penetration without precedent, that makes the Johannesschüssel into a solitary image. It is still too early to situate the concept of a solitary image, but I will already sketch the wider context of the St John’s head and dish as ‘penetration without precedent’. The problem is to be understood against the background of medieval image theory, or still, of the legitimacy of the figurative image (Sansterre and Schmidt, 1999). Averse to the prohibition on representational art held by the two other monotheistic religions, Christianity made figurative art legitimate on the basis of a paradox: the picturing of invisibility (Mondzain, 1996; Kessler, 2000). The image may exist by virtue of its reference to what is invisible. Rendering the invisible visible is the essence of incarnation. God showed Himself in the Son, in flesh and blood. This ostensio of flesh is the figurative image. The image avails itself of the metaphors of the imprint and the veil (Kessler, 1990-1991, p. 32-33; Wolf, 2002). The visible shows through in the tangible world of the senses, but in the same operation, it veils what lies behind it: the invisible God. Man will behold His countenance only in life everlasting. The genetic manifestation in the Son is what the Byzantine iconophile visual theory calls the oikonomia: literally the law of the house, also translated as stew-ardship, or service for the benefit of the community. From the viewpoint of theological image theory, oikonomia means humiliation in the material world. In other words, the figurative image is humiliation and service in the service of redemption. It will later become clear how and why the Johannesschüssel is precisely that image of humiliation and service in Christian iconography, and why this image must be solitary.


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4. The head without a body. In search of similar concepts

For the time being, we have reached the point where the iconographic type of the Johannesschüssel interlocks with Christian visual theology, from where we can trace the common roots of service and the sublimated head cult. I would now like to explore these junctions. The south-facing outer wall of the west aisle of the Dom of Münster displays an enormous Johannesschüssel from the 13th century (ill. 10). It is composed of several pieces of sandstone. A hand emerges from the wall, carrying a dish, which, in turns, bears a head with a neck. The whole is set against the back-ground of a large rosette aureole.15 Here, the deictic essence of the dish is visualised in literal terms. The hand emerges from the stone wall, that is, from the church itself. The isolated hand evokes the Manu dei. The God who must/will not be depicted, deigns to show His hand. The hand is the body part of the epiphany and of visible invisibility. This Johannesschüssel, therefore, is exceptionally presented in its turn, namely, by the Invisible God. The head of John the Baptist has the typical hairstyle with its parting down the middle. Its most striking features are the rather long neck and its eyes, which are open, but have no real pupils, as of a corpse. The long neck is atypical for the iconography of the beheaded. In my view, the explanation is to be found primarily in the technical aspects. The sculptor wanted people standing on the ground below to have a good view of the head. If the head had lain neckless on the dish, that would not have been the case. The neck, in this instance, functions as a kind of organic stand. Like the hand and the dish, the neck, here, is the third presenter. In this sculpture, John sticks out his tongue. The extended tongue can be interpreted as a physical effect of beheading. It is also possible that the Münster head alludes to the Apocryphal book in which the mother, Herodias, is said to have pierced the Baptist’s tongue with a needle in malice.16 Nevertheless, this motif has remained rare in the iconographical corpus of the Johannesschüssel. Could there be an explanation that is not narrative, but symbolical? The tongue joins with the fire of God (Isaiah 30:27). The Holy Ghost de-scended on the apostles in ‘cloven tongues like as of fire’ (Acts 2:3). The tongue, just like the hand, is the revelation of God (Glazov, 2001). The tongue has the power of life and death (Proverbs 18:21). The tongue is ‘cleft’, indeed, again, mediator (Benthien, 2001, p. 110-13). The tongue is the organ of taste; hence, it distinguishes good and evil. Because the tongue speaks, it also has a judicial connotation. Tongue is speech. Thus, the tongue is also connected to the glossolalia of the orator and the prophet.17 The tongue is also considered as the equivalent of the head (Chevalier, 1996, p. 561-562). Again, this equivalence is clear in the totem context (Gastaut, 1972; Penrose, 1953). The tongue is often kept as a trophy of the killed enemy. It guarantees the transfer of the power of the other. The extended tongue is an apotropaion. The forces that repel evil preferably attach themselves to the head, in particular the face. The eyes and mouth maintain the power of protection. The idea of the totem and the apotropaion will help us bring the cluster of the ‘head-without-a-body’ into sharper focus.


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In the Christian visual tradition, John the Baptist is the only saint connected with the image typology of the ‘beheaded head as a distinct entity’. The mythical archetype of the severed head sticking out its tongue is Medusa (Stafford, 1972, p. 308-338; Huot, 1987, p. 865-877; Vandenbroeck, 2000, p. 128-141; Wilk, 2000; Karakostas, 2002) (ill. 11). Beyond the Greek waters roamed three terrible sisters, the Gorgons. One of these monsters, Medusa, who had snakes for hair, could turn living beings into stone with her gaze. Her coun-tenance was deadly. But Perseus used a trick. Athena gave him a reflecting shield (in other versions, he used his shadow). When Medusa turned her gaze upon the mirror/shadow, Perseus too the opportunity to chop off her head. Her blood came into contact with the salt water and turned to stone: this is the origin of the coral reefs. Julia Kristeva therefore calls the Medusa myth the archetype of adopting form and matter (1998, p. 40). In the Antique world, the dead face of Medusa was depicted on shields and amulets. The copies continued her power against the enemy. Her image was turned into an apotropaion. The Johannesschüssel also appears as apotropaic amulet. The shield and the dish are closely related (ill. 12). Of course, there is a difference in gender, but a male Medusa is no rarity. In Arabic astrology, the constellation of Perseus con-tains not a female Medusa, but the caput Algol, which is described as ‘the face of a man with a long beard and blood at his neck’ (Festugière, 1994, p. 165). Late-medieval lapidaries describe such bearded heads with bloody necks on amulets of amethyst (the so-called bloodstone). They were used as protective stones and believed to confer physical invulnerability.18 An Etruscan terracotta from Campania shows the apotropaic face incorporated into an omega scheme with the shell as background (ill. 13).19 The face on the Etruscan terracotta is bearded. Moreover, many depictions of Medusa show her sticking out her tongue (Wilk, 2000, p. 233) (ill. 14). St John’s flaring head of hair has also been connected with the tremendous-ness of Medusa’s head of snakes (ill. 15).20 This iconographic type is first found in Byzantine art (Sdrakas, 1943). The spiky hair also recurs in the medieval West. The head of St John in the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne has a half-open mouth, the knotted brows denoting pain, and fanning hair arranged concentri-cally around the head (early 16th century) (ill. 16). Is the Johannesschüssel – to phrase this carefully – the apotropaion that jumps from a ‘negative’ mythic pole to a positive redemptive history pole? The apotropaion devours, consumes and ‘voids’ evil. It is the only motion it has to perform. That suction force is, again, its selflessness.21 I will give another example. The 13th-century Johannesschüssel of Asseln consists of a round disc, like a cosmic circle, to which the neckless head is at-tached frontally (ill. 17).22 The strict hieratic structure makes this sculpture ‘con-frontational’; it holds the gaze, like the old apotropaic magic face circles, such as the Etruscan terracotta or the tongue Medusas. This dish is located in the public space. The function of the dish is aimed at the community and at protect-ing the community in its everyday activities. In the Middle Ages, these activities were suffused with a sacredness that drew its energy from Christian concepts. That is how cross-fertilisations took place with more deeply submerged archa-


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isms, such as the apotropaion of the ‘isolated head’, and Christian sacredness came into contact with magic and superstition. There is documentation on the popular use of Johannesschüsseln (Sartori, 1932, col. 704-741). They were thrown into the sea, because it was believed that they could trace and indicate drowned bodies. This points to a spontaneous symmetrical relationship between John the Baptist, his disembodied head, and the dangers of the sea (Medusa?). Johannesschüsseln ‘homoeopathically’ gave solace from complaints to do with the head, such as migraine in women and mental restlessness in men. On the Hohe Salve mountain in Tirol, people would carry a Johannesschüssel on their head and walk round the altar as a cure for fertility problems. The circular dish was connected with the circular motion of the ritual procession, but also to the circle of the cosmos and the regeneration of nature (Bloch, 1982).23 Thus, the Johannesschüssel also acquired the suggestion of the heavenly bodies. Remember the round disk of Asseln. The cosmic asso-ciation is also expressed in the artistically more spontaneous medium of the seal and the pilgrim’s amulet. On the seal of a priest called Heinrich that is kept in Copenhagen, the circu-lar face is flanked by a moon and a star, with the result that the dish positions itself as the sun (ill. 18). In another example, belonging to Gerhard von Wefer-lingen and kept in Wolfenbüttel, a human figure carried the dish with the head of the Baptist, in profile, turned upwards – following the examples of the three-dimensional sculptures? – toward the stars (ill. 19). The lower part of the man-dorla-shaped seal displays a moon. The round dish turned disc, turned disc with eyes and a mouth, is typical for the amulets. The winged disc symbolises the rising sun, and consequently, the Sublimation, Transfiguration and Resurrec-tion.24 The Johannesschüssel becomes the light source of the sun. In the hymns, for that matter, John the Baptist is called ‘the lantern’ (Marrow, 1968, p. 3-12). John the Baptist is celebrated on the solstices. Transition, inversion, and reversal are his essence. Augustine (354-430) recognised a symbolical reference to this in the last testimony of John the Baptist in John 3:30: “He (Christ) must increase, but I must decrease’. These words imply ‘waning’ for the sake of wax-ing, comparable to the solar cycle and the light of the day, and in particular the solstice. This brings us to the point where it becomes clear that John cannot be understood without reference to the figure of Christ.

5. In utroque. John and Christ

In this section, I will go in search of the specific embedment of the Johanness-chüssel in Christology. This is an examination of the mechanisms that helped the phenomenon of the ‘severed head’ to hold its ground in Christianity with adapted meanings. I see three major breeding grounds for this embedment: the ‘theo-aesthetics of martyrdom (crudelitas consummata)’, the ‘transformational revolution of God with the seed’ (incarnation) and the ‘redemptive-historical regeneration through the blood’ (Eucharist). These are the zones where John the Baptist became contaminated with Christ. Augustine said about the Passion of Christ that His ugliness is our beauty. In a theology where suffering means the redemptive sacrifice for humanity, the


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grimace of pain is connected to ‘beauty’. Christianity has elevated blood, suffer-ing and martyrdom to a theo-aesthetics (ill. 20). The devotional and artistic shifts of the Andachtsbild intensified the aesthetics of suffering until it became the empathy of sorrow. Mystic and visionary literature, where imagery is so prominent, focuses so much on the aesthetics of suffering that it almost seems an obsession. Adelheid of Breisach, from the Adelhausen convent (c. 1300) has a vision in which her blood, like that of Christ, is pressed from a winepress. She describes the immense liberation from sins through this suffering (König, 1880, p. 155). The disembodied head of John the Baptist also avails itself of the beauty of gruesome suffering. The 13th-century mystic Gertrud of Helfta says about John the Baptist: miro modo amabilis, flore vernantissimae iuventutis (…) quia senex et dispicabilis ubique depingeretur (Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 266).25 Christ and John find each other in the transition through sacrifice at a ‘hinge point’. The connection was developed during the High Middle Ages. Durandus of Saint-Pourçain (c. 1275-1334) writes: Vel de morte utriusque, Nam corpus christi exaltatum est in cruce: corpus Joannis capite minoratum (Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 301). Ludolph of Saxony also draws the comparison: iste minu-tus est in capite, ille crevit in cruce (Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 301). The re-demptive sacrifice of Christ was connected with the beheading of John the Bap-tist, so that the meaning of the latter was elevated; in utroque. Not a single other creature besides the Baptist was allowed to compete so openly with the suffering and death of Christ. This equation intrigues me. In the copper engraving of Carletti’s adoration of the relics of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome (1628), both the face of Christ, the vera icon, and the dish of St John are borne by angels (ill. 21) (Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 302). The heavenly glorification of the two heads is accompanied by the legend: In utroque consummata crudelitas. ‘In both cases, cruelty has been consummated’ (or consumed). The ‘consummation of crudelitas’ is the sacrifi-cial death that brought salvation for mankind. Iconographically, the analogy of the crudelitas consummata centres on the head, which we earlier recognised as an archetype of the head cult and the totem, and which functions, in this context, as the redemptive-historical inversion: that fascinating point zero between Old and New, between chaos and order. In Christ, the inversion involves the repre-sentation of the ‘true countenance’, in the Baptist, it is the dead head. In utroque therefore connects life and death (to which we will come back later). In utroque also connects cloth and dish. Both are ‘supports’ of wholesomeness. The trans-ference of blood, the bloody sacrifice for the benefit of mankind, uses the syntax of the presentation of the face (Veronica) and the transfer of the head (Sa-lome).26 I would like to linger a little longer on the subject of the vera icon. The vera icon is the imprint of Christ’s face on Veronica’s sudarium (von Dobschütz, 1998; Morello and Wolf, 2000; Baert, 2000). It is the Western answer to the Byzantine Mandylion, the imprint of Christ’s face on the cloth of the Syrian King Abgar, which, according to tradition, has been kept in Constantinople since the 10th century. The Western counterpart differs in the fact that the imprint – no less miraculous – concerns the face in sweat and blood, in physical bodily fluids.


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The true countenance of Christ was immediately incorporated in the Western theo-aesthetics of suffering (ill. 22). Moreover, the sudarium belonged to the woman who was identified, following the Apocrypha, with the haemorrhoissa, the ‘woman with the issue of blood’ who was healed by Christ when she touched the seam of his garment (ill. 23).27 The vera icon is an acheiropoieton, an image not fashioned by human hands (Koerner, 1993). It originated of its own accord, without needing any human intervention. The Syrian 6th-century Abgar legend explicitly mentions that the king had sent an artist to Palestine to paint the portrait of Christ, but the painter had been blinded by divine light and thus unable to paint the face of Christ (ill. 24). Taking pity, Christ pressed his own face into the cloth. This imprint only gradually assumed the physical features of Christ. On the way home, the dark blotches and marks gradually formed contours and finally became the mimesis of the face.28 In this legend, imprint, the manifestation of the divine nature of the Son in the world of matter, and Christ’s figurative and merciful service, are authentically interwoven into the ‘first true image’ of Christendom. Pressure and sealing have already been mentioned. Here, they reappear as the basis of what an image is: the performance of mercy and service. The miracu-lous imprint is the imagery of the miracle of the ‘incarnation’, and therefore of the New Testament: the God with a Son. Whereas the redemptive-historical inversion was already connected with the head cult, we can now also define ‘the imprint of the isolated head’ as the image of (masculine-phallic) procreation. The redemptive-historical inversion took place in the father who had a son. In a God who had no seed during the old covenant and neither possessed nor needed a ground of manifestation, there grew a desire for ‘renewal’, for procrea-tion, for visibility, for humiliation in flesh, for the ‘Word made flesh’ (John 1:14), for... adverbum. (Mondzain, 1996). In the adverbum, God wanted to be-come the word made flesh; he became Father. This procreation itself took place through an impregnation that did not harm virginity, in a woman, moreover, who was immaculate, exempt from all stain by original sin and therefore unaf-fected by the evil consequences of the Fall of Man (Parret, 2002, p. 63-91). In that woman, unblemished by original sin, renewal was implanted. The imprint, the vera icon, is therefore also the image of this implantation leading to the visi-bility of God in the Immaculata. Why does this process need the textile? (In view of the fact that the vera icon wants to be borne on a cloth?) The question is rather speculative, and therefore, presumably, the same will apply to the answers. Nevertheless, I would like to express the idea. Textile owes its bearing capacity to the warp and weft, to the knot, to the connection between horizontality and verticality. These characteris-tics make textile not only archetypically bearing, but also, essentially, ‘catching’ (Vandenbroeck, 2000). Textile therefore ‘carries’ in more than one sense, in-cluding that of being ‘impregnated’ and therefore ‘pregnant’ (Kessler and Wolf, 1998, p. 161). Images never lie on textile; they grow in textile. The image as ingrowth, as implantation, indeed, feels at home with an artefact for which hands have moved back and forth to capture the image in warp and woof, or in knots, as a pregnant growth (Vandenbroeck, 2000, p. 83-107). The association of the ‘captured’ image approaches precisely what incarnation does (as well as


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the acheiropoietos): it achieves manifestation without artificiality, hooking up so as to ‘attach’ itself, by way of expositio to mankind. In the Western vera icon, where more than the liquidity of fluids configures the image, the net certainly still plays a role, but there, the textile also presents itself in the additional connotation of the ‘stain’ (Sorkin, 2001, p. 77-80). The vera icon is an image that has stained the white veil of the woman with the issue of blood (im-maculata - maculata) and has been absorbed by it (the dried stain has lodged or implanted itself). At first glance, soiling the white of a woman with one’s own liquids seems less redemptive-historical that it is (even though it certainly is an imprint). But when one considers that Christ has left his counte-nance on the cloth of a woman, that means the ‘first-figurative’ image has wanted – at least in the West – to attach itself to the feminine. The veil as the extension of the intimate self of the woman is privileged to bear and expose the first true image (ill. 25).29 The vera icon/Veronica introduces the feminine in Christian visual theory as the antecedent, as she who precedes the imprint, as she who has lovingly received the imprint, and therefore, as she who makes figuration possible. In other words: the vera icon contains antenatal growth. I needed to make this excursion past the vera icon to prepare the distinction with regard to the head and dish of John the Baptist. For the Johannesschüssel is not an imprint, it is no textile, it is no incarnation. The Johannesschüssel has a preference for the third dimension. It honours death. It is suffering spent. And it has no woman behind it to lovingly bear the image. Those are important differ-ences within the in utroque of the bloody sacrifice that inverts redemptive his-tory. But it also brings us to what John the Baptist is, and Christ is not: mediator and precursor. From the viewpoint of iconographic theory, the Johannesschüssel must fulfil the functions of mediator and precursor. What was previously called the solitary image, the ‘penetration without precedent’, the immediate manifestation in the material world, has to do with coagulation in the transitional zone between the iconoclastic Old Testament – with an invisible God – and the New Testament – where God is visible. It has to do with the capture of what escapes almost every attempt to capture it: the state of emerging and not-yet-being. In Exodus 33:18-20, Moses asks God to show Himself, and God replies that no man can see his face and live. Does God’s countenance kill? Gregory of Nyssa (335-394) lifts the paradox: the sight of God kills the ‘desire’ to see Him. The representation of what made Him visible –His Son – is not just a grace, but also meets the ad infinitum desire to see God. The sustained desire to look be-hind the veil: that is the iconophile image. The archaic iconoclastic image is the impossible image, which is impossible because of its destructive impact: icono-clasm has no shading curtain, no softly woven shock absorber. It has no semiot-ics, no signifying power. The iconoclastic image is the paradox of the killing gaze. The myth of Medusa has explicitly preserved the archaic connotation of the fatal impact of the face. The Johannesschüssel, then, is what must bind without precedent, because he himself is the predecessor. The dead countenance can be seen as the image that has not yet finally reached the God of the semen and the procreative desire. The Johannesschüssel comes before the legitimacy of the figurative image that is


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based on the incarnation. It precedes the first, true, incarnated, living image of the vera icon. In other words, the Johannesschüssel is essentially pre-figurative. It cannot be borne by textile, because the game of veiling and unveiling between Father and Son has not yet been initiated. It belongs neither to the visual theory of aniconicity, nor to that of figuration. The head of St John is utter solitude. It could be considered as the image that is held hostage on the threshold of the gate between the two spaces. The Johannesschüssel is the gate that opens to the New. Not to advance him-self, but only to point the way (deictic) and then to disappear on/into the thresh-old itself. The head on its dish is therefore also the ‘bloody sacrifice’ of an iconoclastic monotheism, in order that the first iconophile image could be gen-erated. Ecce, behold. The transfer (dish) of the presentation (sudarium) is what intertwines the Johannesschüssel and the vera icon, but it cost the Baptist his head: exhausted, spent, waning, for the life of the Other (cf. John 3:30); the anthropological human sacrifice for God (Green, 2001, p. 171-176). Guercino’s drawing (from the mid-16th century) of the vera icon and the Johannesschüssel revolves around the secret of this intertwining and the human sacrifice (ill. 26) (Combs Stuebe, 1968-1969, fig. 10). In the centre, the vera icon is borne by two angels. On a table beside it lies the dish. But the Baptist’s head is in shadow.30 It is an almost black mark on the drawing. Where does this shadow come from? One may assume that the textile throws its shadow on the dish. The contrast between darkness and light is an iconographical topos in the contrast between the Old and the New Testament. But here, it also refers to a ‘pictorial’ waning, one man relieving another. With the clear sharpness of the pen in the vera icon versus the opaque black of the ink in the head of St John the Baptist, Guercino artistically supports the transfer to the incarnated, sharply focused image. Nonetheless, the artist has still suggested, using simple figurative means, a physiognomic resemblance between John and Christ (because is St John not pre-figurative and post-aniconic at the same time?) in the texture and length of the hair and beard. It is this resemblance between the two heads, even though one is made up of lines, and the other is a mark, that makes the drawing into in utroque.

6. From contamination to consanguinity

There have always been images that appeared, imprinted from above. In Antiq-uity, it was believed that the gods left the imprint of their countenance on stones and subsequently threw them to earth (Freedberg, 1989, p. 67-71). These were generally aniconic monoliths. The ostensio of the gods seems to fulfil itself au-thentically in the non-figurative image. Arnobius (end of the 3rd century-327) emphasises how a statue of Cybele was really a small meteorite. The meteorite was intrinsically Cybele, animated by the Magna Mater, but she had no face or limbs. Stone and imprint are archetypically connected with a religion that did not have to fight out an iconoclastic-iconophile debate within monotheism. The stone imprint is older than that. In County Cork in Ireland, a monolith was worshipped as the ‘true head’ of John the Baptist. This is, as it were, a John’s dish reduced to its radix or root. At


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the place of the acheiropoieton, cleansing festivities were held and the major agreements of the local community were concluded (Sartori, 1932, col. 741). This example – the only one of its kind that I know of – shows how the acheiro-poieton and litholatry were still passed on as a single cluster in the figure of St John the Baptist. It also says something about the power his image exuded and the lack of restraint with which proto-Christian customs converged on St John without any complex. Sometimes it seems as if the Johannesschüssel is charged with a part of the past of Christianity with which Christianity has never come to terms itself, is turned into a bottomless pit that selflessly wants to collect all those stirrings of cultural history. The fact that the stone in question appears in Ireland is typical. The Celtic past was very much focused on veneration of the head and skull (Lambrechts, 1954). Moreover, natural religion involving trees and stones survived in much stronger form in these regions. In her Dying for the Gods, Miranda Aldhouse Green explains the different aspects of the human sacrifice. The blood rite and skull totemism lived on during the Christian era in the form of legends and popular customs (2001, p. 95-110). Skulls were made into cups.

‘In the olden days long, long ago there was a law in this place that any-one who did anything wrong, that they had a cup that was made out of a dead person’s skull, and whoever had committed the transgression, if he wished to clear himself, all he had to do was to go and take a drink out of the cup. If he raised it upside-down and was not telling the truth, his mouth would turn to the back of his head, or his eyes would turn crooked in his head” (O’Duilearga, 1981, p. 276).

The connection between the skull and love of truth naturally has to do with the association of the brain. But in more literally expressed forms of anthropo-phagy, there were rites in which parts of the brain itself were consumed. Ab-sorbing them ensured a translatio of the mental powers. The soft physical matter contained in the head shares this meaning with the primordial fluid of the body, blood. The blood of the head totem was perceived as the flowing force of the soul itself, as a metaphor for life (Green, 2001, p. 81). There must be no spilling of blood in the holy sacrifice. The fluidum is there to be received in the counterpart of the sacrificial body: the recipient. ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul’, says Leviticus (17:11). Dish versus skull, cup versus wound, chalice versus the body of Christ. It is known, and it has already been mentioned in this contribution, that the sacrament of the Eucharist preserves an important aspect of the former expiatory bloody sacrifice, which confirms the redemptive-historical inversion and therefore the possibility of participation in the cleansing of sins. The Johannesschüssel even participates in Christ’s alleged exclusiveness of the Eucharist, albeit at a less abstract level. A breviary from York says: Caput Johannis in disco: signat corpus Christi: quo passimur in sancto altari: Et quod ecclesie gentium tribuitur in salutem ac remedium animarum. The breviary text equates the head of John the Baptist with the eucharistic body of Christ. The analogy extends from head to body,


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from dish to altar. According to A.A. Barb, the association originated in the Celtic tradition, where the concepts of the skull and the blood still flourished in the myth of the Holy Grail (Burdach, 1938; Barb, 1956, p. 40-67). Their venera-tion as a symbol – a pre-figuration, as it were, of the eucharistic sacrifice – was acknowledged by the Roman Church; thus the bleeding Head on the Dish was taken from the unholy hands of Herodia’s daughter Salome (p. 46). This taking of the head and dish from the unworthy hands of Salome in the veracity of the Eucharist is the rehabilitation of the necessary and redemptive sacrifice. There is therefore more going on here than in utroque, and more than the analogy of the crudelitas consummata. Here, contamination has become con-sanguinity.31 The remark in the York breviary is not unique. The contamination spread. Until today, the Roman Missal refers to the feast of the decollation of St John. The eucharistic contamination also implies that the dish is brought into connection with the paten (ill. 27, ill. 9) (Aus, 1988, p. 62-65). The eucharistic relationship between Christ and the Johannesschüssel also has an iconographic expression. Johannesschüsseln from the late Middle Ages sometimes display the forked beard, a feature of Christ (ill. 28).32 From the 15th century onwards, the true face of Christ was also produced on a round panel, as though it were not borne by a cloth, but by a dish (ill. 29).33 In other words, the suffering of Christ grows closer to the dead head of the Baptist, which makes the vera icon tend towards a Johannesschüssel. For the vera icon, this cross-fertilisation meant the loss of the fabric screen; the true countenance floats in the painting. The dish, on the other hand, now let itself be incorporated in the sec-ond dimension (ill. 30). The painted Johannesschüssel is more of a representa-tion, and therefore mediated by the referential power of the iconophile image as visible invisibility. Thus, the Johannesschüssel also comes closer to the incar-nated image, and also becomes and (almost) ‘true countenance’. The phenomenon of the increasing resemblance between the two heads is found even earlier, in a rather unexpected place: the crown of the vault in the place of worship (Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 286-294). Sicard of Cremona says: Joannes fuit lapis angularis inter Vetus et Novum testamentum (Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 286). Durandus writes: Fuit enim ioannes quasi lapis angularis id est vetus et novum testamentum coniungens (p. 287). The Church Fathers interpret John the Baptist as the ‘keystone’, as the connection between old and new. The head is mediator and therefore wants to be the de facto keystone in the vaults of the Christian churches. The vera icon will accompany him. The tectonics of the crown stone demands a round shape (ill. 31). But it takes more than that. The face of John and Christ join the tectonics with symbolic content. It has already been emphasised that a Christian redemption history of completion and fulfilment must also involve dealing with the dividing line, the caesura in the history of redemption, the fracture. The Johannesschüssel guides the ‘trauma’ of the reversal between sub legem and sub gratia. As a model of victory and trophy, and therefore fulfilling the age-old function of the conserved and venerated head, the Johannesschüssel clings to the point where vaults must be kept together. Now, the dish looks on from above. This position even rein-forces its apotropaic and protective connotation.


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In the church of St John in Halberstadt, there must once have been a key-stone that is now lost. For there is a legend that tells us about the ‘bleeding St John’s stone’ (Kretzenbacher, 1962, p. 240). The mason was in the process of joining the keystone. The priest consecrated the stone with three hammer-strokes and asked the mason to provide for a hollow to hold the relic of St John. Once the relic was inserted and the keystone joined, the head appeared to come alive to the faithful. On the feast of St John the Baptist, 26 June, the canons noticed that the keystone had lost three drops of blood. The drops were carefully collected from the floor in a chalice and shown to the faithful. Sick people who touched the blood were healed in body and soul. Whenever the store of blood in the chalice was depleted by the many fingers that had touched it, the gold chal-ice was placed underneath the keystone once again, and each time, three fresh drops of blood fell down for the faithful. The legend is indicative for the devotion of the Johannesschüssel. The func-tion of the bloody sacrifice for the benefit of redemption is made explicit here in the three drops of blood. This explicitation found a fertile breeding ground at the end of the Middle Ages. The question of the numinous blood increasingly found cultic expression (Panofsky, 1929; Kolb, 1980; Pastoureau, 1990, p. 43-56; Kretzenbacher, 1997). Moreover, the custom of the so-called lay chalice had come into use. Pope Pius II condemned it in 1462. His bull prescribed that the clerics were to instruct the laity that partaking of the body of Christ (through the sacred host) implied an intrinsic partaking of his blood as well, because blood and body are inseparable. The ‘separate’ partaking of the blood was not meant for the laity, but was the sole privilege of the priest (Wadell, 1969, p. 31). Yet the layman continued to thirst for the power of the blood of his Saviour. The intense devotion to the holy blood of Christ thus spread to the blood of St John. What’s more, use of the chalice made the Baptist’s blood akin to the blood of the Eucharist. Perhaps John’s blood was the only blood that could be ‘touched’ (Sangue, 1983). No Christian would have dared to rub away any blood relic of Christ’s, which would then have to be renewed from a keystone.34 The fact that the bleeding John’s keystone of Halberstadt held a relic is not without meaning. This relic turned the representation into presentio, presence. The im-age fuses with the relic and renders the image present, opus, ‘himself’: alive.

7. Conclusion

As precursor and mediator, John the Baptist plays a lively role and occupies a unique position in devotion and in iconography. With its visual essence and its ideal indivisibility, the Johannesschüssel expresses this exclusiveness of the trailblazer and the go-between. But the history of the Johannesschüssel also shows how images can develop, shift, split off and even escape within the com-plex fabric of the story, the relic and the artefact. The wish to find an entry into this fabric was the first motivation behind this contribution and led me to trace the peregrinations of the Johannesschüssel in the proto-Christian and Christian preoccupation with the propitiation of chaos, the inversion of redemption, and the expiatory sacrifice for the terrifying and/or loving god.


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Characteristic of the Johannesschüssel is its borderline position. It is always and forever on this borderline, at many different levels of the history of ideas. I distinguish three basic concepts in this whole: the redemptive historicity, the theologised visual discourse, and the bloody sacrifice. From the viewpoint of biblical history, the figure of John the Baptist is a transitional figure: he is the last prophet and the first martyr. The idea of the ‘transition’ finds an expressive fulfilment in the Johannesschüssel. It is the radi-cal signifier of the mediator on the basis of two important archetypes that are found in cultural anthropology. The first archetype is that of the apotropaion of the severed head. The idea of the power to avert evil is connected with the proto-type of Medusa. In Christian terms, the Johannesschüssel offers protection via the impact of the decapitated gaze. The second archetype is the head cult. The presentation of the head refers to the transfer of redemption for the benefit of the community, of the generations. In Christian terms, that is the profound change from the Old Testament to the New Testament. The position of the Johannesschüssel at this climax of revolutions and inver-sions, historical as well as cosmological (solstice), has implications for icono-graphic theory. In this contribution, I have tried to also interpret the Johanness-chüssel as the solitary image on the threshold of the gate. No other image be-sides the head on the dish has been made to stand lonely on the threshold, frozen between the prohibited image and the legitimate image. The Johannesschüssel comes from a time when images were unmediated and the impact of figurative art was believed to be so great that it could kill. But it also looks forward eagerly to the age when images are the skin-bearers of a procreative God. It has not yet reached the countenance of the incarnation – visibility –, but is already removed from the all-destructive face, which is consequently forbidden by law – invisibil-ity. As a result, the Johannesschüssel can only exist in the dead gaze from both sides. The extinguished pupil is denuded of the fatal impact of the figurative and is, at the same time, not yet that first living gaze of the incarnated face. This point zero is where the Johannesschüssel rests. On account of this function and significance, the head of the Baptist can only exist in rigor mortis. As the one who leads the way, John is more than Christ, but he is nothing without Christ. John the Baptist and Christ are well matched. They are related of necessity, even down to the genes, as they are second cousins. In a religion based on a cleansing wound, on the red bodily fluid that installs redemption and renewal, John is invited into the theological and liturgical idiom of regeneration. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, this invitation led to a formal cross-fertilisation between the head and dish of St John and the vera icon. The suffer-ing head of the Baptist became the subject of the pictorial Andachtsbild, and the suffering vera icon was represented on a round panel. Now, the two autono-mised masculine heads of Christianity had formally grown closer together – in utroque – and thus, they certainly supported the belief in a joint concept of bloody and redemptive sacrifice. The growing devotion of St John elevated the Johannesschüssel to a level very close to Christ, where it even engaged in con-tamination with the doctrine of the Eucharist. To conclude, what else is there to say about the fact that the Johanness-chüssel preferably uses the third dimension? A part of the answer probably lies


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in what was already formulated in the beginning of this contribution: the ideal indivisibility of the artefact, of dish and head. For the roots of the Johanness-chüssel lie in the relic. The head and dish of St John function as an evocation of an original object/relic situation. This evocation is more satisfactory and more substitutional in the round. But there is more. The third dimension does without that extra mental mediation of the re-presentative second dimension. It is pri-mary and tactile, released into space. That is why the third dimension was al-ways considered a precarious medium. Its directness and its simulacrum value made it into a possible germ of idolatry, that is, the confusion of the represented with the representation. The exercise of the consequences for visual theory may perhaps bring clarity here. A first reflection: the Johannesschüssel is precisely the ‘averted’ danger of the impact of the gaze in death. Is the confusion of the represented with the representation still possible in death, and if so, is it still detrimental? A second reflection: if the Johannesschüssel was to embody the threshold between a-figurative and figurative, between iconoclasm and icono-philia, between fear and ecstasy, does it not then do that more pertinently in the extreme limits of that fear and ecstasy: the third dimension? Here too, the Jo-hannesschüssel is maior. … Maior homine, because it was his fate to decrease. Maior homine, because he was only the precursor. Maior homine, because he entered Christian redemption history as the head totem. Maior homine, superior to, more than man, equal to angels (par angelis). And also ‘the centre of the entire Trinity’. And ‘such a great man is given to an incestuous woman, caught at adultery, to a dancing girl’! These epetitheta of John the Baptist were written in dismay at the end of the 4th century by the Greek Church Father St John Chrysostom (Ryan, 1993, p.125).


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1 The contribution by Hella Arndt and Renate Kroos in the Aachener Kunstblätter of 1969 (p. 243-328) was a pioneering article in the reconstruction of the iconographic corpus. Julia Kristeva’s exhibition visions capitales at the Louvre in 1998 placed the Johannesschüssel in a psycho-analytical context (p. 71-80). Isabelle Combs Stuebe gives a creditable survey of the iconography until the 19th century (Marsyas. Studies in the History of Art, 14, 1968-1969, p. 1-16). 2 John was probably referring to Leviticus 20: 21: ‘And if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ 3 The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (c. 37-after 100) is the first to mention her name (Michl, 1960, col. 1084-1089). 4 See Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470-c. 550), De inventione capitis Joannis Baptistae, PL 57, col. 421-443; Marcus Aurelius Cassiodorus (c. 560), Historia tripartita, PL 59, col. 1159. 5 The Wallon skull relic had a cut above the right eyebrow. This wound is the origin of the legend that tells how Herodias planted a knife into the dead head of John the Baptist in her rage (Combs Stuebe, 1968-1969, p. 5). 6 The platter and a gold mask that had been made for the relic in the 14th century were lost during the French Revolution (Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 246-247). 7 In medieval lapidaries, the agate is connected with the sea. It was believed to attract pearls when submerged in the water. In the same way, John the Baptist indicates the spiritual pearl for mankind. The red ruby, the stone among stones, was compared to Christ as the divine light, but of course also with the blood of the Passion. In the context of John the Baptist, the ruby refers to the blood of his martyrdom (Arndt and Kroos, 1969, p. 253-260). The aristocracy collected precious Salome dishes. The Duke of Berry owned an exceptionally costly example made of gold, agate and gems, including sap-phires, emeralds and rubies (p. 255). 8 This is a complex adaptation and modification of visual functions that were already known in the East and in Byzantine art. 9 Quid ergo tu faceres si haec videres? Numquid non te projiceres super ispum Dominum (…)? (Ludolph of Saxony, 1863, p. 623). 10 For that reason, the three-dimensional Johannesschüssel would be avoided in the post-Tridentine climate. It was suspected of having become an ‘idol’ (Barb, 1956, p. 46). 11 The question into the relationship between relics and the cult of three-dimensional sculptures is very much like an aporia. It was André Grabar who claimed that the cult of relics was the direct origin of the Christian cult of images from the 6th century onwards (which resulted in the crisis of iconoclasm) (1972, p. 343-352). According to Grabar, this was due to the fact that it is precisely the relic that makes the magical power of a ‘dead’ image ‘operative’. The inherent magic of the relic overflows into the image and renders it magic too. Where a sculpture becomes the casing – the human form – of the relic is where an idol acceptable to Christians has risen like a phoenix from its ashes. The ac-ceptability of the worship of images was therefore based on the acceptability of the relics of the martyr. Ut memoriam reverende martyris simulacrum is a frequently used expres-sion in connection with sculptures of this type (Stock, 1983, p. 70).


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12 Only the relic escapes from the relationship between giving and taking. The relic pre-sents itself. The skull of John the Baptist is therefore pure ostensio, suspended, or borne by heavenly angels. 13 The act of looking and the consummatio find their most intimate encounter in the Eucharist. The ostensio of the sacred host prefigurates the consummation of the body of Christ. The ostensio, which was incorporated in the rite as a fixed element at the Lateran Council in 1215, is essential to the experience of the body of Christ. Originally, the host was not kept in a monstrance specifically intended for that purpose, but often in the altar itself (Rubin, 1991, p. 319 et. seq.). But the cult expanded so much that the customs and the place of safekeeping had to be strictly regulated. It became necessary to keep the host sub clave (1311, Clemens V); so fervent was the wish to ‘see’ the ‘body’ of Christ (Braun, 1932, p. 348-411). Especially in female communities, the cult of the sacred host led to mystical experiences verging on excesses. In fact, it was a woman, Juliana of Cornillon (+1258), prioress of the convent of Mont Cornillon near Liège, who encour-aged the veneration of the Corpus Christi already in the first half of the 13th century, after receiving a vision (Vandenbroeck, 1994, p. 81). Nuns who received the Eucharist would faint. The chronicles of Schönensteinbach tell how Margreth Slaffigin (14th century) had a passionate desire to see the consecrated wafer, touch it, and taste it (Hamburger, 1998, p. 83). She followed the priest when he put away the host in the monstrance, prayed, and fasted all day, so that the prioress finally allowed her to drink the water with which the priest had washed his fingers that had touched the sacrament. Other nuns believed to see the Christ child himself during the elevatio, or claimed to have miraculously beheld the sacred host behind closed doors (Hamburger, 1998, p. 93). 14 Here, I am abstracting from the head cult in anthropophagy, i.e., cannibalism. 15 In the south wall of the east aisle, there was an altar dedicated to John the Baptist. This space is still called the St John’s choir. 16 This legend is believed to date back to the 4th century (Combs Stuebe, 1968-1969, p. 5). The motif was a favourite subject in religious drama (Thulin, 1930). 17 (1 Cor. 14). Who speaks in an unknown tongue may speak to God, but his speech is unintelligible. Whoever speaks in an unknown tongue must also ask God for the gift of interpretation. The tongue is the spirit. 18 Caput hominis cum longa barba ac parum sanguinis circa collum, si in Adamante [bloedsteen, hematiet] reperiatur imago sculpta, scis ad victoriam as audaciam conferre et corpus ab illaesionibus praeservare, valetque ad impetrandam gratiam a regibus ac princibus; C. Leonardus, Speculum lapidum (Venice, 1502), p. 181. 19 The Babylonian mother goddess Nintu lives in the mountain and embodies fertility and regeneration. Her face is represented by the abstract symbol of the female genitalia: an arc, ending in a curl at the bottom, similar to the Greek letter Omega. Apparently, this shape also appears as a symbol of the Egyptian mother goddess Hathor (Klingbeil, 1935). As a hieroglyph, the symbol means ‘protection’. There are archaeological finds that suggest assimilation between Medusa and Hathor (Nintu) (Barb, 1953, p. 193-238). This brings the ideogram of the omega and – in a later stage – the separated head, close to the image of the diva matrix: the primeval womb. Berber women describe this prime-val womb as the concentric black spasmatic mark in their weaves (Vandenbroeck, 2000). 20 Paul Vandenbroeck developed the adoption of the figurative form against the back-ground of the conquest of masculine thinking over feminine. The shift to anthropomor-phisation can be understood from the viewpoint of the victory of patriarchy. The repres-


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sion of matriarchy is accompanied by the masculine ‘fear’ of the indefinable black, the matrix. This fear is controlled by defining and indicating the matrix. In the process of definition, the zoomorphic form appears first, and then the anthropomorphic form. Me-dusa belongs to the final stage of this process. To Freud, the gorgon is the image of the seductive, phallic, dangerous mother. The Johannesschüssel corresponds to this icono-graphic type (Vandenbroeck, 2000, p. 129). 21 This selflessness is also expressed in numerous epithets. He is maior homine, but also lantern, mark of moderation, guide in life, mirror of virginity, etc. (Ryan, 1993, p. 134). The virginity refers to the belief that John the Baptist also had an immaculate conception. Because the contact between Elisabeth and Zacharias was devoid of libido, his concep-tion was thought to have escaped original sin (Beda Venerabilis, + 735). This belief is a folk corruption of the immaculate conception of the Virgin by Anna, who was also un-tainted by original sin on account of her chaste lovemaking as the wife in another elderly couple believed to be barren. 22 The head, and in particular the skull, is pars pro toto for the firmament (Chevalier, 1996, 307-308). 23 All over the world, human sacrifice seems to be closely linked with the mystery of food production (Merrifield, 1987, p. 23; Green, 2001, p. 165-168). 24 Le disque ailé, très fréquent dans la symbolique, représente le soleil en mouvement et, par extensions successives, l’envol, la sublimation, la transfiguration (Chevalier, 1996, p. 358). 25 Revelationes Gertrudianae ac Mechtildianae, I. Sanctae Gertrudis legatus divinae pietatis, Paris, 1875, p. 418. 26 Decapitation by woman is a well-known image of castration (or fear of castration) (Schneider, 1976). 27 Whereas Christ painfully sheds blood from the hands, feet, and His wound in the side, woman sheds blood intrinsically and cyclically from that single ‘wound’. That means menstruation, but also giving birth: infertile versus fertile. Veronica was the patron saint of washerwomen and seamstresses, and her aid was invoked to help with fertility prob-lems. Celibate nuns also used fertility symbols and the image of flowing blood. Woman’s healing femininity brings her closer to the assimilation with His suffering that is her aim (Buckley and Gottlieb, 1988, p. 77; Kuryluk, 1991; Vandenbroeck, 1994, p. 55-59). 28 See note 20. This line of thought puts us on the track of the problem of the masculine genus of the figurative, and consequently of the male supremacy of representation in the history of art in Western Europe (Azetta, 2000, p. 141 and passim). 29 Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) argued that the flesh of Christ is ‘woman’, seeing that He became man through the Virgin Mary. ‘Truly the flesh, immaculate and un-touched like a virgin, comes from Mary’s womb.’ To Hildegard, the divine nature of Christ is male, whereas the nature of mankind is female. Eve who was created from flesh (Adam’s rib) is the figure for the incarnation itself and for the felix culpa. Mechtild of Hackeborn saw how Christ placed His hands on hers and caused an imprint like a seal in wax. His skin stands to hers as convex to concave. Mechtild of Magdeburg (1207-1282) went even further: the Virgin Mary is a pre-existent human nature, like Logos is for His Divine nature. And Marguerite d’Oingt (+1310) considers Mary to be the tunica humani-tatis in which Christ is cloaked; consequently, His body is Ecclesia, the bride. The ex-perience of Christ’s body as ‘female’ has led to the feminisation of the incarnation.


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Women saw themselves, in the cosmic dichotomy of divine nature versus human nature, as the symbol of the flesh. With Juliana of Norwich (1343-1443), this feminisation of the incarnation led to an influential mystic theology of ‘Christ as mother’. Juliana says that Christ is ‘mother’: the ground of creation, our flesh. Mary is also a mother, but the shadow of a truer mother: Christ. The Son of Man carries us inside Him, like a mother carries a foetus. Christ is He and She. In His human nature, He is one with us like the child growing in the womb (Bynum, 1987, p. 261-265). 30 The shadow as the origin of the image, in this case, the initiation of the incarnation, demands further study. The shadow is the alternative of the mirror in the Perseus-Medusa myth. In the Apocryphal story of the life of Mary (the Proto-Gospel of James), the impregnation of Mary is symbolised by God who leaves His shadow on her body. Pliny recounts how the daughter of the potter Boutades wistfully drew the shadow her lover had left on the wall after his departure. Her father filled the shadow mark with clay, and thus fashioned the ‘first’ three-dimensional image (Kris and Kurz, 1979, p. 60-90). 31 To the extent that the legendary eyebrow wound was seen as the counterpart to Christ’s wound in the side. The position is similar. The right side of the face/body is the positive side. In the Easter hymns, the wound is praised as vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro, alleluia, et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista salvi facti sunt et dicent: alleluia alleluia, paraphrasing the vision in Ezekiel 47:1-12. The river of the temple is on the right. In Joh. 2:19, Christ compared himself to the temple. Conse-quently, in the vision, the side wound is located a latere dextro (Gurewich, 1957, p. 358-362; Barb, 1971, p. 320-321; Areford, 1998, p. 210-238). 32 In this context, I must mention the tradition of the Letter of Lentulus, a 13th-century apocryphal document from Constantinople that claims to go back to a letter from Pilate to Lentulus, in which the judge describes Christ’s face. Amongst other things, it explic-itly mentions that Christ’s hair was parted in the middle. This source standardised the face of Christ in iconography. The Letter of Lentulus also influenced the appearance of the vera icon (Dobschütz, 1899, p. 308-329). 33 There are earlier examples of Christus in the clipeus, in the Byzantine type of the Theotokos clipeata (the Virgin Mary carrying the face of Christ on a round shield). In the 13th-century mural in Sint-Truiden, it is Mary Magdalene who carries the clipeus (Berg-mans, 1994, p. 265-270). 34 Bleeding statues appear in Christ legends, but they generally refer to crucifixes defiled by Jews. These legends originated in an anti-Semitic apologetic climate (Bunte, 1989).

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Illustrations

Ill. 1.- Relic of the scull of St. John, before 1206.- Amiens, kathedral; after an engraving in Acta sanctorum, XXV, p. 644.


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Ill. 2.- Plate of Salome, agate, 13th century, head of ca 1420.- Genova, Cathedral


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Ill. 3.- Seal of St. John for Konrad von Heimbach, 1232.- Marburg


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Ill. 4.- Seal of St. John of South-Holland, 1282.- The Hague


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Ill. 5.- Wooden Johannesschüssel, 13th century.- Göttingen, Städtliches Museum

Ill. 6.- Imago pietatis, icon, 12th century.- Kastoria


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Ill. 7.- Pilgrim’s amulet of Amiens, 15th century.- In: Plombs historiés, II, p. 90.


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Ill. 8.- Retable of St. John with veneration of Johannesschüssel (detail), Erhard Altdorfer, 1511.- Gutenstetten


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Ill. 9.- Johannesschüssel as reliquary, ca 1500.- Zürich, Landesmuseum


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Ill. 10.- Johannesschüssel, 13th century.- Münster, Cathedral


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Ill. 11.- Medusa, studio of Giacinto Calandrucci (1646-1707).- Paris, Louvre

Ill. 12.- Munt van Malta, 1557-1568.- New York, American Numismatic Society


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Ill. 13.- Terracotta with Medusa, Etruscan, ca 500 before Christ, Campania.- In: A.A. Barb, 1953, nr. 33a.


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Ill. 14.- Medusa with protruding tongue, mask of the collection of Humbert de Superville (1770-1849).- Amsterdam, Koninklijke Nederlandse Bibliotheek, ms. CCXVII, fol. 37.


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Ill. 15.- Johannesschüssel on a round panel, Giovanni Bellini (1430?-1516).- Pesaro, Musei Civici


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Ill. 16.- Johannesschüssel, early 16th century.- Cologne, Schnütgen-Museum


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Ill. 17.- Johannesschüssel as cosmic circle, 13the century.- Asseln (now last, after a photograph of 1902)


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Ill. 18.- Seal of St. John of so-called Heinrich.- Kopenhagen


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Il


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l. 19.- Seal of St. John of Gerhard von Weferlingen.- Wolfenbüttel

Ill. 20.- Man of Sorrows showing hos wounds (Intercessio), Petrus Christus, ca 1450.- Birmingham, Art Gallery


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Ill. 21.- Carletti, copper engraving, relics of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome.- Title page of I. Giachetti, Iconologia Salvatoris et Karilogiae Praecursoris, Rome, 1628.


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Ill. 22.- Veronica and sudarium, Master of Veronica, ca 1420. London, National Gallery of Art


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Ill. 23.- Veronica and sudarium, Master of Veronica, ca 1420. London, National Gallery of Art


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Ill. 24.- Abgar and the mandylion, Constantinople, panel, after 944. Sinaï, Cloister of St. Catherine


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Ill. 25.- Leather vera icon from Wienhausen, 15th century

Ill. 26.- Veronica and Johannesschüssel, Guercino (1591-1666).- Princeton Uni-versity, Art Museum


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Ill. 27.- Johannesschüssel, Andrea Solario (1460-1524).- Paris, Louvre


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Ill. 28.- Johannesschüssel, 14th century.- Haguenau, Musée de la Ville


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Ill. 29.- Face of Christ on round panel, Albrecht Bouts, ca 1500. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten


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Ill. 30.- Johannesschüssel, painted, environment of Dirk Bouts Bouts, late 15th century.- Warschau, Muzeum Narodowe


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Ill. 31.- Keystone with Johannesschüssel, 14th century.- Rothenburg, Johan-niterkirche

Saint-John-in-disco . Prolegomena to the History of a Man’s Head, in “Mitteilungen für...

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Transcript of Saint-John-in-disco . Prolegomena to the History of a Man’s Head, in “Mitteilungen für...