Witness Images and Oath-Stones: On Law and Pictorial Culture in the Eleventh Century

The capital known as La Dispute in the Musée Sainte-Croix, Poitiers, is one of the earliest and most celebrated single works of Romanesque sculpture. It depicts a pair of men with women restraining them on either side, wielding billhooks, butting heads, and pulling each other’s beards. Efforts to clarify its meaning frequently cite the inscription beneath a second image of beard-pulling in the famed Beatus of Saint-Sever: Frontibus attritis barbas conscindere fas est, a text long regarded as mocking nonsense intended to gloss a ludicrous, profane subject. I argue that modern readers have simply failed to recognize the metaphoric significance of the expression “frontibus attritis,” identical in meaning to the modern English expression “bald-faced,” signifying “shameless.” The text and its visualizations preserve a proverb on false witness that held legal-sacramental significance in relation to aspects of legal feud and dispute: “The bald-faced may pluck beards,” meaning that the shameless might act in ways that honor forbids. This proverb clarifies depictions of bald-faced beard-pullers associated with other eleventh-century monuments of canonical importance, including in the basilica of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse and the pictorial vita of Saint Albinus from Saint-Aubin d’Angers. Together, these are archetypes of what I call “witness images,” a species of pictorial oath-helper that has yet to be described. In short, the images are ornaments of legal-sacramental speech and ritual as well as attributes of monuments that were conceived as sites of testimony and oath-taking and useful to the credibility of such oaths and witness.