Between the embodied eye and living world: Clonmacnoise’s Cross of the Scriptures

Synonymous with Irish culture, over 200 monumental crosses survive from early medieval Ireland. Art historians have cast them either as romantic survivals from an exotic, pagan past or as scientific specimens requiring classification and categorization by an objective, detached observer. Focusing upon the complex iconographic program of the tenth-century Cross of the Scriptures and drawing from phenomenological methodologies, this article resituates the cross within a living, dynamic world examining how changing perspectives, audiences, times of day, seasons, weathers, viewing pathways, and proximity to the beholder elicit a series of encounters with a polymorphic, performative object.