Images and their uses

In the first half of the twelfth century, three men, all Benedictine monks, penned defences of Christian art. The first appears in a psalter dated c. 1120–39 and is a French paraphrase of a letter attributed to Pope Gregory the Great: It is one thing to worship a picture and another to learn from the story of a picture what is to be worshiped. For what writing conveys to those who can read, a picture shows to the ignorant…and for that very reason a picture is like a lesson for the people. This prayer book, known as the Saint Albans Psalter, was the first English manuscript in almost two hundred years to contain full-page painted scenes, and its scribe apparently felt that some justification for the lavish decoration was necessary. The second, by Rupert, abbot of Deutz (d. 1129), is a refutation of Jewish charges that Christian veneration of images amounted to idolatry. Rupert's response was to emphasise the emotional impact and devotional efficacy of images: ‘While we externally image forth [Christ's] death through the likeness of the cross, we [are kindled] inwardly to love of him…’ The third, an elaborate paean by Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis to the beauty and spiritual power of his newly rebuilt abbey church (c. 1144), implicitly counters those who saw art as a form of ‘distracting materialism’. Far from distracting us, Suger wrote, art draws our ‘dull minds’ to the sacred, ‘urging [them] upward from material things to the immaterial’.