ABSTRACT
The Cluny portable altar differs markedly from the other extant early Insular example, the tiny, silver-encased wooden altar of St Cuthbert. In the case of England the use of wood for portable altars ‘probably remained normal throughout the Saxon period’, despite continental reformers’ insistence on marble or other seemly stone for the mensa. Since it is common for Anglo-Saxon inscriptions to commence with a cross, the text probably begins with the right-hand edge, the only edge to start with a cross. The absence of other known late Anglo-Saxon portable altars in particular and the extreme scarcity of contemporary Insular silverwork in general means that comparisons with the iconography of the Cluny altar must be sought in works of other media or provenance. The victorious Christ awake on the Cross gradually began to yield to the image of the dead Christ in late tenth- and early eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon art.
