A 16th Century Italo-Byzantine Cross

This cross, dated by its box to the sixteenth century, is a product of the blending of two cultures. Venice in the mid to late 1500s was a mixture of Italian culture, intermingled with a large Greek population, thanks to the Ottoman invasions which forced many Greeks to emigrate. The cross which forms the subject of this study contains a series of tiny figured panels, each one the size of a thirty-five millimetre slide. The imagery on these panels is fairly standard Christian iconography, but where we might expect the orthodox form, for example the Anastasis, which is the imagery of Christ breaking down the gates of Hell, we have instead the western imagery of the Resurrection showing a tomb and the sleeping soldiers. There are inscriptions on some of the panels, mostly in Latin, but sometimes lapsing into transcribed Greek. The purpose made box which protects the cross is made up of reused pages of a manuscript, a law text used in the schools of Venice. By tracing the use of this text we can arrive at a location and a date for the box and by extension for the cross. By comparison with other signed examples, we can identify the carver who made the cross and make some speculations about his life, and how he and the art works which he made are reflective of this hybrid culture. The type of cross seems to be one which is developed for personal, rather than liturgical use, and the most obvious explanation seems to be that it was intended for private meditation on the Passion Story.