ABSTRACT
The wounding of Christ’s side, described only in St John’s Gospel, is a pronounced feature of the particular Mediterranean iconographic type of the Crucifixion which the Durham Gospels image most resembles, but was not used as a means of emotively depicting the physical suffering and death of Christ. The Durham composition is stripped of the naturalistic landscape context and the figures of Mary, John, and the two thieves which the Mediterranean examples show. In the Durham Gospels the end of Matthew’s Gospel, written in insular majuscule, fills a whole page and is arranged within an interlaced cruciform frame on the recto of the Crucifixion image, with the explicit of Matthew written beneath the lower edge of the text’s frame. The Durham lateral and lower inscriptions evoke several scriptural passages, though none exactly, which may have been recollected in a hymn or other metrical text; the phrase sedet ad dexteram dei patris has creedal echoes.
