Michael Camille, author of The Gothic Idol (1989), wrote, “The history of medieval art in the West is that of a struggle to transform into meaningful spectacle the spiritual impoverishment of visible things that had been delegated to a “second order” of signification.” This struggle, in other words, was preoccupied with the challenge of presenting divine objects as divine objects, because they were increasingly difficult to delineate from the non-divine, especially considering many preserved relics were unassuming shards of wood, scraps of cloth, and fragments of bone.

This challenge particularly consumed thirteenth-century France and French religious officials. Visitors to churches and other holy places needed cues and direction in order to worship these vestiges adequately: not too passionately, or else the visitor risks being idolatrous, but with enough passion to appropriately honor God and the history of the Bible. In the end, a triumvirate of cues was required to inspire suitable adoration of the divine—a fitting parallel to the triumvirate of divinity that was to be the true subject of adoration.

In a compelling essay, Sarah Guérin summarises this challenge and poses the question “how can sacred objects be presented to distinguish them from the mundane ones of the everyday world?” She was first concerned with Gothic objects featuring ivory, and the definition of what ‘Gothic’ referred to outside the realm of architecture.

Gothic architecture is famously characterised by elements such as flying buttresses and raised vaults. But how do decorative arts such as statuettes or devotional panels earn the same stylistic label? Guérin proposes that the answer lies in shifting our perception of ornament; rather than viewing it as purely decorative or detached from function, she suggests that we see ornament as infused with metaphor. She writes:

Seeing ornament as exclusively for pleasure and divorced from function has plunged ornament into the moralistic debates that preoccupied the field in the twentieth century. Looking at Gothic ivories from a different perspective reveals that a governing metaphor has shaped their configuration, determining their format, composition, and iconography, and indeed incorporating the materiality of ivory itself.

In thirteenth-century France, the ivory of choice was sourced from elephant tusks, previously rare in Europe but increasingly provided by new trade routes circumnavigating the Mediterranean. Still expensive but now available in greater quantities, ivory became an appropriate material for conveying both the elevation and accessibility of divinity.

She then poses the question that would frame the rest of her article: “How can sacred objects be presented to distinguish them from the mundane ones of the everyday world?”, particularly in recognition of the immateriality of Christ and his significations in contrast to the tangible objects that evidence his physical time on Earth. Clearly, these sentiments are worth depicting through art and sculpture—but why ivory? As noted, elephant ivory entered European markets more reliably from the 1230s onwards, thanks to expanding trade around the Mediterranean basin.

In the section entitled "Microarchitecture and Meaning", Guérin presses further into the “Gothic” label of objects other than architecture, classifying “microarchitecture” as a method of introducing bursts of Gothic architectural influence into intricately detailed religious works and reliquaries. She also references Marvin Trachtenberg’s theory of the Gothic style, which characterised it as a deliberate rupture: rounded Romanesque arches were “broken,” classical columns were “imprisoned” within clustered shafts, and solid walls “exploded” into networks of flying buttresses. Guérin acknowledges the provocation of this theory, cautioning that it may not reflect the actual intentions of thirteenth-century builders and artists.

In the next section, "Tabernacles of Ivory", Guérin traces a recurring pattern in the treatment of relics and religious objects. She describes how sacred objects were commonly encased in a triple-layered structure: the relic itself (evoking the Tablets of the Law), placed within an ornate container (analogous to the Ark of the Covenant), which was in turn housed in a larger protective shrine (symbolising the Tabernacle). She writes:

The threefold, nesting structure of Tabernacle, Ark, and Tablets established a symbolic semantic unit for properly staging the sacred in Christian visual culture. Tabernacle/architecture and Ark/vessel, the outer and middle terms, denoted the importance of the item contained, equating this object with the concretized Word of God … It is this tripartite schema that is the ruling metaphor for explaining the presence of architectural forms on Gothic ivories.

The covering representing the Tabernacle is typically accentuated with ivory carvings and may even incorporate ivory into the fabric or material itself. Ivory was clearly seen to be worthy enough of a material to cover a holy relic, but why?

In “Material Matters: Ivory as Chastity”, Guérin addresses this question directly: why was ivory considered so particularly apt for these tabernacula? Biblical commentators, she writes, regarded ivory as uniquely appropriate for sacred representation due to its cool, smooth surface. These were qualities that lent themselves to the depiction of purity and chastity, particularly Mary’s virginal flesh. Ivory’s symbolic pedigree extended to Solomon’s throne, which tradition held must be chaste for him to accept it. Like the Tabernacle-Ark-Tablets schema, ivory itself became a metaphor for purity, sacredness, and divine presentation. Guérin also notes the more radical interpretation offered by Hugh of St. Cher, a Dominican theologian at the University of Paris, who claimed “the ivory of the Hermitage diptych is, metaphorically, the carved, scraped, perforated, and hewn immaculate flesh that sealed the new covenant.”

The penultimate section, “Meaningful Spectacles”, examines the three levels of veneration that can be awarded to objects and images of divine figures. Thomas Aquinas is a major figure in this section, as he, in his Summa theologica (summarised by Guérin), distinguished “three types of attitudes: Latria, or adoration, is the highest form of devotion due to God alone … Dulia, simple veneration, is to Aquinas an honoring of a being’s excellence … [and] Hyperdulia, the last mode Aquinas defines, is an augmented form of dulia reserved exclusively for the Virgin Mary.”

By carefully delineating each of these “attitudes” and indicating them to the viewer through certain deliberate cues, the artist could instruct the audience on how to appreciate the objects without becoming idolatrous or sacrilegious (which were, according to both Aquinas and Guérin, “two equally egregious errors”). Guérin concludes this section by summarising what she has argued so far: the triumvirate structure of microarchitecture’s distinction (the Tabernacle-Ark-Tablets trifecta), the role of ivory in indicating the value and divinity of relics, and the sanctity of “the utmost quality of attention a human can muster: worship, or latria.”

Finally, Guérin shines light on the lives of the artists, carvers, and craftspeople who first carved Gothic ivories. She is interested in understanding whether they were aware of the theological debate surrounding much of their work, and how involved they were in the conception of the pieces. While documentation is sparse, evidence suggests a shift in artistic production during this period from ecclesiastical patronage to a more secular, market-oriented model. Yet the artisans who crafted Gothic ivories were not unthinking labourers. Guérin concludes:

Although it is admittedly thin, the evidence from across the English Channel suggests that the ivory carvers who first united ivory and architecture were educated individuals, intellectually capable of engaging in the theological discourses of the day and positioned socially to communicate with other members of the “creative class” employed at court.

In doing so, she affirms that these objects, loaded with visual, material, and symbolic meaning, were produced by minds as thoughtful as the theologians whose ideas they mirrored. Creating a Gothic ivory object was not just the pursuit of carving beauty into bone, it sought to materialise and metaphorise the divine itself.

References

Camille, Michael. 1989. The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guérin, Sarah M. 2013. “Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine.” The Art Bulletin 95 (1): 53-77.