Q J Med 2004; 97: 315
QJM vol. 97 no. 6 © Association of Physicians 2004; all rights reserved.
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Amiens Cathedral west front
This enchanting piece of sculpture is from the west front of Amiens Cathedral, and was carved in the 1220s. It is one of a series of two layers of quatrefoils, which run as a band right across the west front, below the column figures that flank the three great portals, and around the buttresses that divide the portals one from another. This layer—architectural historians refer to it as the socle—is at eye-level; and here, as at many other gothic cathedrals, the clergy commissioned (and sculptors carved) some of the most immediate and eye-catching art in the entire building. The central portal carries images of the virtues and vices, of which the vices are, predictably, the more amusing: a knight, representing cowardice, drops his sword and flees from a rabbit popping out of a hole; a man and his wife, representing discord, throw pots and pans at each other. The north portal socles are decorated with signs of the zodiac and labours of the months.
The quatrefoil seen here, from the north buttress, is part of a series below the column figures of the Old Testament Prophets, illustrating verses from their writings. It underlies one of the more obscure prophets, Zephaniah, and illustrates Zephaniah chapter 2, verses 13 and 14, prophesying the End of Time, which the glorious prose of the King James Bible renders:
‘And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness.
And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her, all the beasts of the nations: both the cormorant and the bitten shall lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds: for he shall uncover the cedar work.’
The image then, shows the city of Nineveh reduced to desolation at the end of the world, and abandoned to wind beasts. As in the King James Bible, a bird sits on the lintel of the gate into the city, and a caged bird sings at a wide open window. What the King James Bible does not prepare us for, is the hedgehog snuffling in the doorway. The hedgehog has an honoured place in the medieval Bestiary, as caring devotedly for its young: it was thought to knock grapes off the vine, then to roll in them so that it speared several grapes on its spines, which it would thus take home to feed its offspring. But Nineveh is ‘dry like a wilderness‘; there are no grapes here.
In fact, the hedgehog in the sculpture is the result of mistranslation. The meaning of the original Hebrew words for the beasts in the ruined city remains obscure, though recent scholarship accords with the translators of King James’ Bible in taking them for birds, perhaps owls. The Vulgate Bible, the Bible in use in the middle ages, however, specifies the beasts of all the nations thus:
‘et onocrotalus et ericius in liminibus eius morabuntur; vox cantantis in fenestra, corvus in superliminari.’
‘And the pelican (sometimes translated as a bitten) and the hedgehog shall linger on the thresholds; the voice of a singer in the window, the crow in the upper lintels.’ And that, apart from the onocrotalus, is exactly what the sculptor has carved for us.
It is a marvellously direct and literal interpretation of a couple of verses in the Old Testament. And it was but one building block in a great sculptural programme spread across the three west portals of the cathedral of Amiens, which tells of the End of the World, the Last Judgement, and Second Coming, when God the Great Healer shall, in the sonorous words of Revelations from the King James Bible, ‘wipe away all tears ... and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.’
You can see more photographs, drawn from the extensive archive at the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute, to put this single stone in perspective at www.artandarchitecture.org.uk.
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