ABSTRACT
In short, a lopped trunk was quite a conventional feature of living trees in late Anglo-Saxon art. The Tree of Death, the lignum scientiae, therefore became the Tree of Life in bearing Christ as its fruit at the Crucifixion when its barren timbers briefly burst into leaf and then died again. While elucidating the theology of the image as no apocryphal story can, the liturgical texts were not, of course, peculiar to England and the themes of the lignum crucis could be rendered in Crucifixion scenes without depicting a rough-hewn Cross. After the Crucifixion, the wood of the Cross is felled for the second time, buried, like Christ, and then raised up. Judith of Flanders’s gospel book shows the innovative tender gesture of Mary holding her robe to the side of Christ whose slumped body anticipates Gothic images of his suffering.
