The Rev. Xavier Seubert, left, of the Friary of St. Francis of Assisi in Manhattan explores the interior of an intricately carved prayer bead using a VR headset, guided by Joseph Ellsworth of the Canadian Film Center, on April 3, 2017. The exhibit “Small Wonders: The VR Experience” at The Met Cloisters Museum in New York City is an immersive experience that takes museum patrons inside a miniature, wooden prayer bead using micro-CT imaging technology and a VR headset. RNS photo by Steve Remich
NEW YORK (RNS) It’s an artistic rendering of the Last Judgment, with all the trimmings.
At the top of one of the hardwood sculptures currently on view at The Met Cloisters in Manhattan stands Jesus, flanked by saints and angels, two of whom are blowing the final trumpets. Beneath them, carved in deep relief, are souls in purgatory, prodded by demons, moaning as their fate is decided. At the sculpture’s base is the gaping maw of hell consuming someone.
Even if this were a normal-size work of art, the detailed, perfectly balanced presentation of its 50-plus figures would be remarkable.
But it’s all carved inside a 2-inch-high sphere.
This is a story about a mysterious artist, his glorious art, a failed royal marriage and virtual-reality goggles. And, oh yes, faith preserved 500 years in a wooden ball the size of a peach.
Rosary beads with a secret
The stars of “Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures” (at the Cloisters until May 21) are 40 of those balls. Their putative function was as the final prayer beads in large rosaries; but in fact they were much more.
Each opens on diminutive hinges to reveal fantastically meticulous scenes of subjects such as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the saints and Bible stories. The beads, carved from the fine-grained wood of a small evergreen called the boxwood, have a near-magical depth.
“It seems as though you almost tumble into them,” said Barbara Drake Boehm, senior curator at The Cloisters. “They’re these hidden worlds — the grown-up evolution of the sugar Easter eggs with the peephole and the tiny rabbits and chicks inside.”
The show is something of a celebration: After years of frustration, scholars can finally explain how the beads’ anonymous creator achieved some of the effects that make them one of history’s great combinations of piety, ingenuity and outrageous luxury.
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Netherlandish Prayer Bead with the Adoration of the Magi and the Crucifixion, early 16th century, boxwood. Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The carvings, which date to the years 1500 to 1530, mimic huge altarpieces being produced at the time in the southern Netherlands — but on a Lilliputian scale and with a virtuoso’s restless touch. (For instance: Out of the 130 beads that have survived to the present, 30 portray Jesus carrying his cross — but no two are exactly alike.)
The beads were once the ultimate luxury item: a bit like a gold-plated Lamborghini, but to take you to heaven rather than the latest hot club. Their most famous, over-the-top example is all 10 beads of a short rosary that was a wedding gift to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon in 1509.
But the beads’ eventual 21st-century distribution in small collections across Europe and North America made comparative study difficult, and no one could figure out how they were made. Too small to snake an endoscopic camera into, they also foiled standard X-rays, which came out oddly blotchy.
They remained well-known in their respective locales.
Never before seen
Then, in 2014, modern technology caught up with medieval sleight of hand. Employing a micro-CT scan more commonly used by the military, curators from the Art Gallery of Ontario noninvasively captured up to 3,000 digital “slices” of each bead’s interior.
Some clarity resulted. Instead of one or even two overlapping layers of shallowly carved wood, the beads contained up to five, stacked like flats in a stage set, which explained why simple X-rays failed. Despite these wafers’ impossible thinness, many were carved in three-quarter-inch relief, and even in the round.
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Source: Religion News