As she writes in her foreword, the goal of Anne-Orange Poilpré’s new book on the Maiestas Domini is to analyze the origin and development of this iconographical theme from its emergence in Early Christian Rome and Ravenna until the reign of Charles the Bald (14). It is the most comprehensive work on the subject since Frederick van der Meer’s pioneering book of 1938, and is thus considerably broader in scope than other studies that have dealt with the Maiestas in the Carolingian and Romanesque periods.¹

Conspicuously displayed in church apses, sculpted Romanesque and Gothic tympana, as well as on book covers and the frontispieces of manuscripts, the Maiestas Domini is one of the most significant images in Christian iconography. Drawing on a variety of Biblical sources (Is. 6: 1–4; Ez. 1: 4–28; Rev. 4: 2–9), the image of Maiestas Domini usually consists of a frontal Christ surrounded by the four creatures of the Apocalypse, with or without the Gospels as their attributes. Aside from offering a vision of God at the end of time, the image fuses a variety of interrelated ideas regarding the Scriptures, the Church, and the Christian Cosmos, thus reflecting early biblical exegesis. Needless to say, this is a challenging topic that opens a host of issues depending on the method one chooses to apply.

Poilpré takes an iconographical approach to the material, using chronology to organize her narrative. Her ultimate aim in doing so is to “appréhender sous un angle nouveau les conditions historiques de son émergence et la nature des transformations qui l’affectent jusqu’à la fin de l’ère carolingienne” (“apprehend from a new angle the historical circumstances behind its emergence [the iconographical theme] and the nature of the transformations that influence it until the end of the Carolingian era”) (14; my translation). Although she does not elaborate on why, Poilpré limits her examples to the Early Medieval West and thus begins with the apse mosaic of S. Pudenziana—the earliest surviving appearance of Christ accompanied by the four creatures of the Apocalypse. From here she closely follows the principal extant or recorded depictions of the Maiestas Domini step by step until she reaches the late ninth-century Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, which features Charles the Bald on one of its frontispieces. Included among her examples are also images in which the Lamb or the Cross replace the figure of Christ.

Poilpré’s diachronic investigation leads her to conclude that despite iconographical changes prompted by specific historical contexts the meaning of the Maiestas Domini is highly stable. She does admit, for example, that the addition of Revelation’s Twenty-four Elders on the triumphal arch of S. Paul’s and the façade of S. Peter’s is related to the institutional and doctrinal disputes of the pontificate of Leo I (432–440), and that the isolation of Christ from the four Creatures combined with the insertion of the Fountain of Life in the Godescalc Evangeliary (781–783) grant visual form to the ecclesiastic reforms that were proposed or imposed under Charlemagne. All the same, and despite these variations, Poilpré insists that throughout history the Maiestas Domini remained a synthetic image of the Church—celestial and terrestrial—with Christ as its permanent foundation and cosmic center (273). Although this idea is not entirely new and has been proposed by both Schrade and Kaspersen who maintained that the Maiestas embodied the complex relationships between Empire and Church (regnum et sacerdotium) in the Middle Ages, Poilpré contributes a number of interesting nuances to the overall picture. Also worth noting is her discussion of the mosaics on the entrance wall of S. Sabina and those once on the façade of Old S. Peter’s, as she convincingly insists on a parallel between the physical structure and spiritual institution of the Church. She also successfully relates the depiction of Maiestas Domini on book covers to the texts therein, demonstrating how the image helps authorize the sanctity of the Word and its significance to the Church.

Overall, the book could have benefited from more methodological self-reflection. It remains unclear, for instance, why Poilpré begins with a lengthy discussion of the image of the throne in pagan and Christian imagery when she never makes use of that analysis in the succeeding chapters of the book. Inasmuch as she discusses the term Maiestas Domini from a philological and patristic viewpoint, she includes no critical discussion of the term’s function as an iconographic epithet. Likewise, she does not clarify her selection of examples, which amount to a very large number. Since the Maiestas, after all, is an iconographically stable image, one wonders if a more limited selection of examples would not have sufficed to elucidate Poilpré’s arguments. Had she concentrated on fewer images, she could have investigated the physical context and historical background of each one more thoroughly. As indicated above, however, the Maiestas Domini deserves to be treated as more than a reflection of historical events and patristic texts. Unfortunately, Poilpré makes no real attempt to investigate this image on its own terms by approaching it less from a historical angle and more from a conceptual, theoretical one while drawing inspiration from recent studies on, for instance, liturgy and art, issues of temporality, and on reception and visuality in the Middle Ages.

Since the book is essentially a chronological survey, the examples used in the course of its argument often receive no more than one or two pages of description and analysis. As a result, the discussion tends to be somewhat superficial and to contain insubstantial footnotes on specific works and their historical background. To cite two examples, one looks in vain for Paul Underwood’s seminal study in Poilpré’s discussion of the Fountain of Life frontispiece in the Godescalc Evangeliary, or for Hans Belting’s fundamental article (though included in the bibliography) in her analysis of the Leonine mosaics in the former Lateran Palace. Indeed the latter appears in a chapter in which the historical background comes largely from Richard Krautheimer’s brilliant, but quite general and no longer so recent, survey of the art and architecture of Medieval Rome. It is also disappointing that the author did not include Bianca Kühnel’s recent and important study on the Maiestas Domini.²

Poilpré’s decision to write the book as a historical survey has resulted in a rather redundant text in which one moves repeatedly from the description and analysis of one work of art to the next, a process further complicated by the lack of illustrations for more than the half the examples discussed. This conspicuous omission of illustrations is frustrating and a drawback in terms of the usefulness of the book. Yet, despite its methodological and editorial shortcomings, Poilpré’s coverage of the hitherto largest number of Maiestas Domini representations will become a very useful tool for future studies on this topic.