This folding devotional image is composed of four relatively thick panels of ivory held together with hinges, allowing them to close in an accordion fold to protect the high-relief figural imagery carved into the front. The carvings, which represent moments leading up to the death of Jesus on the cross, are organized into two registers. Each scene takes place underneath a lobed gothic arch, and a crocketed gable crowns each panel. The action begins on the bottom left with the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. The story continues from left to right with his trial before Pontius Pilate, the suicide of Judas accompanied by Pilate’s washing of his hands and finishing with Jesus’s torment by Roman soldiers. The narrative continues the upper left register with his flagellation on the column, the ascent to Mount Calvary, the nailing to the cross, and the deposition of the body of Jesus after his death. All the scenes take place upon a flat ground line except for the last, which uses the curved profile framed by a gothic arch below to suggest a hilly terrain. The panel presents some minor areas of damage, including darkened cracks. A small replacement to a foliage crocket is visible above the upper hinge of the leftmost panel, and there are ivory fills where the motion of the hinges damaged the panels. There are substantial traces of paint in the gables, crockets, spandrels, hair, and drapery.

Folding ivory devotional images representing scenes from the life of Jesus first became popular in France and Germany in the thirteenth century, encouraged by Scholastic philosophy and developments in Christian contemplative practices. Scholastic scholars called upon Gregory the Great’s dictum on the validity of images to argue that Christian devotional images perform three services for the Christian devotee, namely education, recollection, and emotion, a concept called the "triplex ratio." Put more specifically, images serve to instruct people in church doctrine, they impress spiritually important events onto the memory, and they arouse the emotions of those who see, helping worshipers feel a bond of empathy for those who suffered and feel contrition for their sins (Guérin, 215-216). For advanced devotees, especially in monastic settings, images served as the material for meditative exercises within Christian mystical practices whose ultimate goal was the continuous contemplation of God (Guérin, 217; Mary Carruthers, 2001). Sarah Guerin has argued that this latter, more sophisticated form of seeing informed the design and widespread adoption of ivory devotional images in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and that their complex imagery served to train the mind in contemplative practices and to call upon specific strains of Christian interpretation.

The current carving manifests these more complex modes of religious seeing. The iconography is highly distinctive, representing scenes such as the stripping of Jesus, his mockery, and the washing of Pilate’s hands, scenes that emphasize the suffering of Jesus at the hands of his captors and the indifference of those in power. The emphasis on suffering reaches an unsettling climax on the lower register of the proper left panel, where Jesus’s captors beat a blindfolded Jesus and then strip him under the gaze of a bald man rendered on a larger scale than the other figures. Such startling imagery would be useful for a Christian devotee hoping to focus on specific moments in the final days of Jesus as the subject of prayer or a meditation on the nature of God. Guérin also argues that the extraneous details that carvers inserted into the scenes allowed viewers to contemplate specific strains of theological debate. A Christian devotee could find a positive exemplum for contrition in Mary, for instance, whose pain at the death of her son is powerfully manifest as she wrings her hands and turns away from her son’s descending body. That said, these postures also serve as an opportunity for highly educated and well-versed contemplatives to consider the concepts of co-suffering and co-redemption, the notion that people can participate in the acts of holy people through empathic imagination that was itself a topic of current theological thought. This devotional image must thus be understood as a tool to aid a dense, multi-layered form of devotional seeing and thought.

Further Reading:

Sarah Guérin, "Tears of Compunction," French Gothic Ivories in Devotional Practice (PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2009).

Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Lars R. Jones, "Visio Divina? Donor Figures and Representations of Imagistic Devotion: The Copy of the ‘Virgin Bagnolo’ in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence," in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, Studies in the History of Art 61, ed. Victor M. Schmidt (National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2002.), pp. 31–55


Catalogue Entry by Scott Miller, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022.

Baron Albert Oppenheim, Cologne(sold 1906); J. Pierpont Morgan (American), London and New York (1906–1917)

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. "The Life of Christ: a loan exhibition of works of art illustrating episodes in the life of Christ," March 12–April 25, 1948.

Detroit Institute of Arts. "Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age," March 9–May 11, 1997.

Walters Art Museum. "Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age," June 22–August 31, 1997.

Catalogue officiel illustré de l'exposition retrospective de l'art français des origines à 1800. Exposition universelle de 1900. Paris: Lemercier & Cie., 1900. no. 112, p. 264.

Molinier, Emile. Collection du Baron Albert Oppenheim: Tableaux et objets d'art, catalogue précédé d'une introduction. Paris: Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts, 1904. no. 68, p. 30, pl. LI.

Kunz, George F. Ivory and the Elephant in Art, in Archaeology, and in Science. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1916. p. 50.

Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume I, Text. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 282, pp. 155,167,186,292.

Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume II, Catalogue. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 282, p. 125.

Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume III, Plates. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 282, pl. LXXIII.

The Life of Christ: A Loan Exhibition of Works of Art Illustrating Episodes in the Life of Christ. Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1948. no. 202, p. 34.

Randall Jr., Richard H. Masterpieces of Ivory from the Walters Art Gallery. Walters Art Gallery, 1985. p. 216.

Smith, Susan L. "The Bride Stripped Bare: A Rare Type of the Disrobing of Christ." Gesta 34, no. 2 (1995). pp. 131–32, fig. 7.

Barnet, Peter, ed. Images In Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997. p. 208.

Little, Charles T. "Gothic Ivory Carving in Germany." In Images In Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, edited by Peter Barnet. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997. pp. 88–89, fig. VI–13.

Petzel, Klara Katharina. Elfenbein-Diptychon mit Passions- und Erscheinungsszenen. Kolumba, Vol. 27. Cologne: Kolumba, 2007. p. 10, fig. 3.

Guerin, Sarah Margaret. "'Tears of Compunction': French Gothic Ivories in Devotional Practice." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2009. p. 291 n. 30, fig. 6–4.

Williamson, Paul, and Glyn Davies. Medieval Ivory Carvings, 1200–1550. Vol. 1. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2014. pp. 242, 254, 261.