Re: Re: reordering and destruction of irish cathedrals – St Colmans Cathedral, Cobh
The final stop in tracing the history of the image of Christ in Majecty brings us to the Abbey of Cluny, founded in 909, which for the next 250 years would become a major religious, cultural and political centre in Western Europe. A short history of the movement can be had herehttp://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04073a.htm.
Linked to the reform movement had been the Ottonian dynasty and subsequently the Salian dynast which had established itself in Spire in 1027:http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/k/Konrad_II.shtml. Its political and religious interests lead to the investiture ccrisis and eventually to Canossa: http://www.ulrikejohnson.gmxhome.de/uli/Geschichte/Salier/Salier1.html. It was within both of these two major Western European religious, cultural and political movements that the figure of Christ in Majesty appears on a tympanum for the first time in Western art at the Priory of St. Fortunat in Charlieu in Burgundy
It draws directly on the tradition of iconic depiction that traces its origin to mosaic of 390 in Santa Pudentiana in Rome. While the tympanum of Charlieu represents the full transition of this image from metalwork and illuminated manuscript examples to stonework tympanum around the year 1090, this transition had alrady been underway since about 1020 when the image of Christ in Glory appears on the archatrave of the portal of the abbey of Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines in the Roussillon c. 1020:.
From here, to Charlieu and hence to the Royal Portal at Chartres and from there the image of Christ enthroned in his Majesty arrived to the tympanum of Cobh Cathedral in 1898:
