In Our Sight

At first glance, this illumination from the Golden Gospels of Echternach (Codex Aureus of Echternach), depicting the healing of the ten lepers, charms in its simplicity. One reads the action from left to right, just as one would read a Latin manuscript text. But aside from a few terse labels and captions, there is very little text visible here, or for that matter visible in images anywhere else in this sumptuously illuminated Gospel book. On the left, the scene takes place in an architectural interior. Covered with sores, the ten lepers, massed in a group, are all but indistinguishable from each other, like a many-headed monster of disease. An antiseptic empty space separates them from Jesus. His right hand extends in blessing; in his left he holds a scroll. Behind him, a follower hangs back, likely horrified at the possibility of both bodily and ritual infection. The action is frozen at the moment of healing. But look to the right. Like Luke, the artist seems less interested in the healing miracle than in the shattering social upheaval it creates. The Samaritan leper who returns to thank his healer was a double outcast, untouchable not only in his suppurating sores, but also as a despised outsider, a ‘foreigner’. Scandalously, it is the outsider, the excluded one, who turns out to be the most faithful. The artist gets it. We are now in the open air. The retreating nine lepers, though cured and clothed, still move in a clump. The cropped image emphasizes their headlong exit. The Samaritan occupies the centre of the scene, the very emblem of grace and inclusion. The follower who stood behind Jesus reappears, again hovering behind, perhaps now less disgusted than he is scandalized. Jesus no longer holds a scroll in his left hand, as he does in several other images on this folio page, as well as throughout the Gospel book. Perhaps the scroll has vanished because, as he proclaimed earlier in this Gospel (Luke 4:21), Jesus has fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy of liberation not just in our hearing but in our sight: [I]f the gospel gains faith in the hearing, just as worthy of honour are the pictures which visually bring home to us the same teaching…Painting, indeed, excels verbal teaching in speed, and sight is better than hearing to achieve the persuasion leading to faith…Painting thus becomes Gospel. (Nicephorus of Constantinople, 817) References Metz, Peter. 1957. The Golden Gospels of Echternach, trans by. Ilse Schreier and Peter Gorge (London: Thames and Hudson), Plate 54 Loerke, William C. 1958. ‘Review of Peter Metz, The Golden Gospels of Echternach: Codex Aureus Epternocensis’, College Art Journal, 18(1): 86–88 Kahnitz, Rainer, Ursula Mende, and Elizabeth Rücker. 1982. Das Goldene Evangelienbuch von Echternach: Einer Prunkhandschrift des 11. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag) Cite & Share