History of Art

Research award of €250,000 for joint project between History of Art and the School of English

24 Jun 2009

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A joint project between the Department of the History of Art and the School of English received an award of nearly €250,000 under an IRCHSS Project Grant in Theology and Religious Studies.  Led by Dr Juliet Mullins (English), and with Dr Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh (History of Art) and Dr Richard Hawtree (English) as post-doctoral scholars on the research team, the project is entitled ‘Christ on the cross: textual and material representations of the Passion in medieval Ireland, ca.800–1200 AD’.  It aims to examine the diverse ways in which Christ’s passion was treated across both the literary and visual arts, at a time when Ireland's contribution to the development of European culture was at its height, and was demonstrable through engagement with significant Christian theological controversies.  The project team is currently organising an international conference entitled ‘Croch saithir: envisioning the Passion of Christ in the early medieval West’, to be held in UCC in March 2010.

While the high crosses of Ireland are well known to all—indeed,  as much to the general public as to historians, art historians and archaeologists—the visual splendour of their carving and the massiveness of their construction have sometimes overshadowed their often complex depictions of the Crucifixion itself.  Moreover, the visibility of these crosses, and their frequent preservation in at least the rough geographical position in which they were originally erected, serves to disconnect them from other less sculptural depictions, or from artistic works in other media, which are now behind glass in the cases of museums, or indeed, within manuscript collections.  One of the goals of the project is to reintegrate these disparate images; to assess their affective immediacy both to the medieval viewer, and to the modern audience.

Crucially, however, the interdisciplinary nature of the project opens possibilities of reading and interpretation across the visual and literary boundaries—and how else is it possible to deal with an image such as the eleventh-century graveslab of Anmchad from Inis Úasal, Lough Currane, Co. Kerry?  Here, symbolic representations of Christ in the form of the IHS, α and ω, and ΧΡ are all shown inscribed upon the body of the cross.  Such multivalent and deliberately suggestive images cannot be corralled into the disciplinary brackets of twenty-first-century academic classifications—and it is for this reason that the Department of the History of Art is delighted to be involved in the ‘Christ on the Cross’ project.

For further details see http://www.christonthecross.org/

Attached Documents:
'Christ on the Cross in Early Ireland' CACSSS Research Journal

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