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The Mystic Ark: The title refers to one of the most remarkable scholarly achievements of the Middle Ages, an astonishing work that emerged from the intense environment of theological debate that marked Paris as the "intellectual capital" of twelfth-century Europe. Hugh of Saint Victor (ca. 1096–1141) can be credited as the author of this ambitious undertaking, though “author” does not quite reflect the true nature and full extent of Hugh’s work. Unlike his other major projects, such as the better-known De sacramentis christianae fidei, The Mystic Ark was not conceived as a written document, but instead a monumental painting and a series of lectures that were recorded in texts that offer an incomplete rrreflection of the lost original.
The purpose of the painting was to serve as the basis of a series of brilliant lectures undertaken by Hugh–who was considered to be the leading theologian of Europe during his life–from around 1125 to 1130 at Saint Victor, a Parisian abbey of Augustinian canons, whose school acted as a predecessor of the University of Paris. The purpose of the text was to enable others outside of Saint Victor–teachers, students, scholars, monks, canons–to undertake similar weeks-long discussions themselves by providing the information necessary to produce the image, an image that was meant to be repeated again and again, each new construction in a sense being an “original.”
One of Hugh’s students wrote the forty-two page description of Hugh's painting. The student’s description is a dull, matter-of-fact, non-literary text with “bare, utilitarian, even hurried description.” It is not an effectively organized, step-by-step set of instructions for duplicating the Mystic Ark and it does not contain any illuminations or drawings of any parts or aspects of the painting.
The purpose of the text was to enable others outside of Saint Victor–teachers, students, scholars, monks, and canons to undertake similar, week-Rudolph, The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century (2014)long discussions themselves by providing the information necessary to produce the image. The text of The Mystic Ark describes a painting so astonishingly complex that it would literally be impossible to give a full, in detail description of it, but very briefly put, the painting of The Mystic Ark portrays all time, space, matter, human history, and all spiritual striving. It does all of this through an image of the Lord embracing the entire cosmos formed by the traditional cosmic zones: earth, air, and ether (which are the cycles of the zodiac and the twelve months). In other words, it does this through an image of the Lord embracing the most complex neo-platonic macro/microcosm to date, but with a twist. In this highly visible element of the “new theology’s” intellectual arsenal, the six days of creation are depicted as if coming from the mouth of the Majesty, while an image of the Ark of Noah overlies the world map. To the east time begins, humankind is created, falls, and is propagated through one man, the First Adam. To the south, the Hebrews flee the spiritual desert of Egypt and wander to Jerusalem. To the north, the Jews are dragged off to exile in Babylon. And to the west, time ends when all humankind is judged. Down the center are inscribed the six ages of the history of humankind. At the center, one man, Christ, the Second Adam, in the form of the Lamb of God is the salvation of humankind and completes the typological relationship that began with fall of the First Adam. Ladders lead up each of the four corners, upon which sixty men and women ascend this three-stage Ark, striving toward the image of the Lamb in the central cubit: the center of history, the center of the cosmos.
What is more, there are actually four different Arks that are to be read in this single image–each with its own relatively comprehensive understanding, and each approaching the image of The Mystic Ark in a completely different manner: the Ark of Noah, the Ark of the Church, the Ark of Wisdom, and the Ark of Mother Grace. In each one these Arks, the same visual imagery is potentially interpreted in an entirely different way: sometimes literally, sometimes macrocosmically, and sometimes microcosmically. This is made more complex by the fact that the two-dimensional image is meant to be understood three-dimensionally, operating both horizontally and vertically.
When Conrad Rudolph, professor of art history at the University of California, Riverside, began exploring the complexities of the 12th century mural, "The Mystic Ark," he expected to finish his work in two or three years. Twenty years after he started, Rudolph has completed research that includes the digital reconstruction of a mural that is regarded as the "most complex" work of art from the Middle Ages. On the basis of this manuscript, Rudolph digitally reconstructed the painting using hundreds of individual images from a contemporary work of art; images that range from signs of the zodiac, celestial choirs and a map of the inhabited world to the biblical stories of the Exodus, the Ark of Noah, the arrival of Jesus Christ, and the Last Judgment. "The more I study this the more astonishing I find it," Rudolph said. As he began the digital restoration process, he searched through hundreds of prototypes so a digital artist in Cambridge could create images that are consistent stylistically with medieval art.