Dear Patricia,
I am coming late to this discussion because of a computer crash and an
absence from Berlin, but maybe I can still offer some belated comments:
>My second question concerns the allegorical configuration of Christ leading
>the chariot of the Church followed by the 4 evangelists or Church Fathers
>in the 11oos up through 1210. I have been told about one such image in
>Dante with Christ as a griffin, pulling the church as chariot followed by
>the 4 Fathers, but it is too late for my purposes.
In Dante the chariot is accompanied by personifications of all the books of
the Bible, among which the four animals/beings (Ez 1,5ss., Apc 4,6ss.)
representing the four Gospels, whereas the four Fathers of the Church have
no part in this procession. The Griffin pulling the chariot very probably
represents Christ and his two natures, although Peter Armour has challenged
this interpretation (see his _Dante's Griffin and the History of the
World_, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, for a recent critical discussion see
the relevant pages in John Scott, _Dante's Political Purgatory_,
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). Dante's chariot and
procession have been compared with various liturgical, literary and
iconographic precedents (among which also the chariot in Alan of Lille's
_Anticlaudianus_, already mentioned by Christopher Crockett), but from my
occasional and superficial readings of these discussions I did not get the
impression that any precise model or closely matching tradition has been
presented so far.
Lubac cites a passage
>from Hugh Metel (1140) along these lines: "Read, reread, and consider, with
>a recollected memory , the writings of the four evangelists, that is to
>say, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory. Mount this four-horse chariot,
>which bears you on high and which will show you the highest pinnacles of
>knowledge." (v.1; p.16).
Now this is quite dissimilar to Dante's chariot of the Church (in Dante the
chariot has only two wheels and is pulled only by one animal, the binatured
Griffin). The passage in Hugh (which I have not looked up myself) rather
seems to adopt the topos of the "quadriga(e) domini", in its special
variant where the four Fathers of the Church take the place of the four
Evangelists. Normally Christ is imagined as being the "auriga" guiding the
chariot, whereas the Evangelists (or Fathers) are pulling the chariot (and
may also be the wheels).
This topos has a long and somewhat complicated history to which the
exegesis of the tetramorph (Ez 1,5ss.) and of the chariot of Aminadab (Ct
6,11, cf. Nah 2,4 and 2,13) have contributed. In its relation to the
Evangelists, this topos was quite popular under the influence of Augustine
(e.g., _De consensu evangelistarum, I, 7, CSEL 43, p.10: "Has domini
quadrigas, quibus per orbem uectus subigit populos leni suo iugo et
sarcinae leui" etc.), but I cannot say at the moment at which time it came
to be transferred also to the four Fathers of the Church. Useful
discussions and source references can be found in, for instance, Sibylle
Ma"hl, _Quadriga virtutum: Die Kardinaltugenden in der Geistesgeschichte
der Karolingerzeit_, Ko"ln / Wien: Bo"hlau, 1969 (= Beihefte zum Archiv
fu"r Kulturgeschichte, 9), or more recently in Michael Jacoff, _The Horses
of San Marco and the Quadriga of the Lord_, Princeton UP, 1994.
Does anyone know about earlier cases, especially
>with Christ in front and the 4 evangelists/Fathers mounted on horses behind
>the chariot?
A representation of the four Evangelists or Fathers on horseback would
strike me as very uncommon, and I don't think that I have ever encountered
anything of this kind. Nor do I know of interpretations (or illustrations)
associating the four apocalyptic horsemen (Apc 6,2ss., cf. 19,11) with the
Evangelists/Fathers of the Church. The interpretation of the first
apocalyptic horseman as a figure of Christ, suggested by the parallel in
Apc 19,11, was common at least since the time of Victorinus of Pettau (not
in the wake of Beatus of Liebana, as stated in your second message), but in
this tradition, which came to be a standard for the middle ages, the three
following horses/horsemen were usually interpreted "in malo", as
representing the wars, famines and plagues predicted by his evangelium, or
the "populus sinister", the "falsi fratres" and the "haeretici qui se
catholicos palliant" (Bede), or various moral vices opposed to the 'white'
innocence of Christ (Hugh of St. Victor). Here the three following horsemen
and horses are often said to ride "against" and not only after the first.
When from the 11th/12th century on the apocalyptic seals were associated
with a chronological sequence of "status ecclesiae", the traditional moral
distinction between the first and the three following horsemen was
maintained by referring the latter to the persecutors of the Church and not
to the Church itself.
I don't have Beatus' commentary at hand, yet a detailled interpretation "in
bono" -- evolved probably from less specific remarks in Jerome,
_Commentaria in Esaiam_, XVIII, PL 24,670 (cf. CCSL 73, see also
Cassiodore, _Complexiones Apocalypsis sancti Joannis_, PL 70,1409) -- can
be found in Berengaudus (8th or 9th cent.), _Expositio super septem
visiones libri Apocalypsis_, III, 6, PL 17,813ss.: here all four horsemen
represent Christ, and their horses represent the saints of the time before
the flood (white horse), before the law (red horse), under the law (black
horse), and the prophets of the OT (e.g., David, Elias, Elisaeus)
predicting Christ (fallow horse). It seems not that this interpretation "in
bono" had much success in the following centuries, and it would anyway not
help you to establish a link of identification between the four horsemen
and the Evangelists or Fathers of the Church.
Otfried
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