THE JOHANNESSCHÜSSEL AS ANDACHTSBILD: THE GAZE, THE MEDIUM AND THE SENSES
THE JOHANNESSCHÜSSEL AS ANDACHTSBILD: THE GAZE, THE MEDIUM AND THE SENSES

Summary/Abstract: The Johannesschüssel has a very particular relationship to the material culture of the isolated head in Western Europe. On the one hand, the artefact remained connected to its prototype, the skull relic; on the other, it grew into one of the most important devotional images of the Middle Ages in both sculpture and painting. In this way, the Johannesschüssel channelled the cult of the severed male head into the role of the gaze and empathy in the process of looking, the performative activities of processional images and relics, the archetype of the evil-averting visage, the involvement of the entire sensorium in spiritual experience, and, finally, into the role of medium in the transition from the middle ages to modernity. In this article, I propose to see the Johannesschüssel as the image at the threshold, at the gate. Metaphorically speaking, the Johannesschüssel relates to the archetypical idiom in which images were unmediated and the impact of figurative art was believed to be so great that it could kill (Medusa). But it also eagerly looks forward to the age in which images incarnated by a procreative God.

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