Numerous artworks from medieval Germany ground the salvific power of Christ’s Cross not in its carpentered cruciform but rather in its apocryphal material origins in the Tree of Paradise. Long before the True Cross relic arrived in Nuremburg in 1424, areas across the Holy Roman Empire had already possessed their own idiosyncratic writings, visual culture, and traditions that paid special tribute to the Legend of the Wood of the Cross—the subsection of the Holy Cross's hagiography in the Golden Legend devoted to its botanical source in the Garden of Eden. Born of a sprig from Paradise that an angel delivers to Adam’s son Seth on earth, the tree that ultimately yielded the wood used for Christ’s cross inspired new terms with which religious writers and artists expressed the apparent paradox of divinity in nature. Illustrated in books and monumental wall paintings alike, the Legend’s account of the cross’s heritage quite literally took root in the soil of northern Europe, coming alive in trees native to Germany and regions of Flanders. Localizing many of the Legend’s episodes and themes, including the marvelous finding of the trees and the intractability of their wood, a group of miracle-working crucifixes—and the accompanying texts that record their ancestries—bear witness to the desire to direct to more stable channels the enthusiasm for sculpture made from the wood of trees, which was becoming ever more popular at the very same moment.
https://princeton.zoom.us/j/98067765491?pwd=eEQ0UXBYZEpaVlRoemFxNjRBYTVkZz09
