Seeing through Sigebert: A Re-Examination of the Liturgical Portraits of Sigebert of Minden (1022–36)

Bishop Sigebert of Minden (1022–36) commissioned nine liturgical books that include three extraordinary portraits of their patron. Each has served as an example of its specific liturgical and visual contexts, but they have rarely been imagined alongside one another. Inspired by the unusual presentation of Sigebert’s portraits together in the exhibition Für Königtum und Himmelreich (Paderborn, 2009), I will argue that they are best understood as iterative aspects of a complete commission. Rather than repetitive, honorific re-presentations of a specific historical figure, the portraits should be seen as a series of thresholds through which Sigebert and his successors entered into the sacred space of the liturgy. Shaped by the development of liturgical iconographies of episcopal authority and heightened by changes in clerical education that emphasized the physical body as representative of inner virtue, the portraits will be shown to exemplify the process of becoming a good bishop. I will suggest that they worked as a series of pictorial rubrics, directing the attention of the bishop celebrant and his assistants as they enacted, uttered, and imagined the texts and rites of the liturgy. The bishop’s body carved in ivory and painted on vellum offered a pathway to the divine and a reiterative re-presentation of the relationship between the Church and the community.