In Das Bild und sein Publikum published 1981, Hans Belting declared the iconic image of the dead Christ—an iconography called the Man of Sorrows—“to be understood, above all, as the visible expression of a ritual function.” This succinct statement would prove both to presage and encapsulate the predominate understanding of the medieval image in Art History since the anthropological turn. With Belting’s thesis as my point of departure, this presentation aims to show how the ritual function of a given image is likewise communicated in its medium. Case in point is the work of art at the focus of my dissertation: a miniature Byzantine mosaic icon of the Man of Sorrows enshrined since ca. 1400 at the Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome. I reconsider the meaning of the Man of Sorrows in the syncretistic late medieval Mediterranean, and demonstrate how allegorical features implicit in the Santa Croce icon’s medium (fracture, fragmentation, the juxtaposition of part and whole) made it an object ideally suited for the dynamic ritual context in which it appeared.

John Lansdowne is the Marian and Andrew Heiskell/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.