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As Excrement to Sacrament: The Dissimulated Pagan Idol of Ste-Marie d'Oloron

Brown, Peter. The Art Bulletin 87.4 (Dec 2005): 571-588,569.

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Abstract
In 2001, restoration of Ste-Marie d'Oloron uncovered a pagan sculpture hidden within the fabric of the French cathedral's Romanesque portal. A stone slab in the tympanum, displaying on its obverse a depiction of the Virgin Mary, the cathedral's patron saint, bears on its reverse an image of the ancient Roman god Mars. The rediscovery of the idol exposes pictorial relations and textual responses to the antique sculpture in the portal's visible decoration that implicate the pagan image in the cathedral's Christian dedication. This perhaps unprecedented use of spolia communicated its deep significance through performance of the liturgical rites themselves. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

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Full Text
For if pagans . . . dedicate temples and statues-more through excrements than through sacraments-to the demons who deceive them . . . should we not therefore take still more trouble to dedicate to God our Saviour the churches and altars of our religion? . . .-Walafrid Strabo, Libellus de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum1 In the study of ancient and medieval art, the fateful losses and gaps in the visual record often may be as significant as the art that chances to survive, which has made the speculative reconstruction of lost exemplars a traditionally important endeavor in these fields. The underlying assumption of this pursuit is that we are only accidentally prevented from seeing an ultimately knowable work of art that may be glimpsed indirectly in the formal attributes of related survivals. These missing links in art history take on a deeper cast in the case that prompts this study. How can art history respond to the challenge of a vanished object that is not lost but instead effaced, an act of "representation" whose significance does not depend on visible form but instead is predicated on intentional absence and concealment? This unsettling possibility partly undermines the conventional project of a history of art and complicates the unfolding of the discipline. Such an unsuspected erasure came to light recently at the site of the early-twelfth-century cathedral Ste-Marie d'Oloron, located in the foothills of the Pyrenees in extreme southwestern France (Pyrnes-Atlantiques).2 The scene in 2001 in the Barnais town of Oloron-Ste-Marie strangely recalled medieval images of the Resurrection, as a dead god arose with new life from his stone sepulchre to the wonder and surprise of the guardians of his tomb. Repairs undertaken to the structural masonry of Ste-Marie's portal (Fig. 1) resulted in this extraordinary discovery.3 Stabilization of the portal's tympanum, which depicts Christ's Deposition, necessitated the temporary removal of one of the vertical marble slabs that compose the sculpture (Fig. 2). The slab in

question depicts the Virgin Mary (Fig. 3), patron saint of the cathedral. On the reverse of this slab, hidden from view for the last nine hundred years, stands the depiction of a full-length Gallo-Roman nude (Figs. 4-6) framed by an arcade and identified by inscription as DEO MARTI, a votive "to the god, Mars."4 In this reused ancient stone, we encounter both a literal and a symbolic confrontation of pagan and Christian sacred images, of idols and icons, so to speak-each with its own potencies. The chaste Virgin stands opposed to the virile, nude, pagan god. Female counters male in this piece of antique spolia. Saint counters Christian demon. When the two are compared, it is quite evident that the image of Mary responds physically, figurally, and even iconographically to the Mars. Although the significant and exciting opposition of the pagan god and patron saint are apparent now to us as they must have been to those responsible for the stone's reuse, installation of the finished sculpture in the portal erased the evidence of the ancient reliefs very existence. Were the seemingly evident and meaningful relations between the figures not planned by the architects of this reuse? Or is it that the sculpture's secretive significance in the portal was not intended for a general audience of laymen, gawking pilgrims, and passersby? The exciting, perhaps even astonishing, discovery of the confronted images of Mary and Mars in the reused antique stela may offer evidence of a previously undocumented role of spolia in medieval art, a surprising instance of veiled syncretism by which the cathedral's architects sought to utilize or foil whatever power lay in the pagan image. The idol itself was rendered invisible and forced to undergo a kind of sex change and religious conversion, from Mars into Mary. In its role in the portal of Ste-Marie d'Oloron, the Mars relief is neither spolia in se (spolia as reuse) nor spolia in re (spolia as imitation), typologies of reuse elaborated by Richard Brilliant.0 It is perhaps an example of spolia in spe, a category in which Anthony Cutler places "things used in the anticipation that they will be seen to complete an object, or at least add to a new creation valences that are not communicated in their absence."6 While this explanation seems to run into the problem of communication and reception in the case of the concealed Mars sculpture, Cutler envisions scenarios in which it may not be intended that the hermeneutic implications of spolia in spe be available to later audiences. "Given that they are objects whose hopes, as it were, are pinned on the future even while they are derived from the past, their meanings depend first upon interpretations applied at the moment of the decision to employ them and thereafter whenever such decisions are investigated."7 Reconstruction of the meaning of the Mars sculpture at the moment of the decision to reuse it in this deliberate and unusual manner is the goal of this study, and a variety of kinds of evidence aid this investigation, including other examples of reuse in the Middle Ages, medieval attitudes toward pagan images, and apparent pictorial and epigraphic responses to the concealed idol in the visible decoration of Ste-Marie's portal itself. The cathedral's twelfthcentury sculptors appear to have selectively appropriated or responded to aspects of the Mars figure in the image of Mary and in other sculptures in the portal, but the deliberate act of hiding the relief conveys an anxiety about the pagan image and a deeper motive for the work's reuse. Reuse of Roman objects was not uncommon during the Middle Ages, although the discovery of ancient sculpture was usually a momentous event, and pagan images in

particular provoked fearful responses. Such works often underwent processes of Christianization that negotiated their pagan threat. However, overtly pagan images, images resistant to Christianization, were disposed of, either by destroying them or, as in the case at Oloron, by burying or hiding them.

The suggestive relations between the Mars idol and SteMarie's Christian sculptures yield to specific interpretation. An inscription above the cathedral's portal that has so far eluded explanation, PAVETE AD SANCTUARIUM MEUM-an excerpt from the scriptural prohibition of graven images and idolatry-now appears to depend on the presence of the concealed pagan idol, although prior to the Mars figure's rediscovery, such a possibility would have seemed scarcely imaginable. Exegetical context reveals the inscription's connection to the liturgy of dedication, especially to the rededication of churches profaned by pagans and heretics. Muslim invaders and migrating pagan tribes from northern Europe destroyed the cathedral and city of Oloron during the early Middle Ages. Ste-Marie, the Romanesque cathedral, was erected on ancient foundations, perhaps those of the profaned early Christian cathedral, beginning in the late eleventh century. It is at this moment and in this context, the destruction and rebuilding of the cathedral, the loss and recovery of its consecration, that the reuse of the Mars sculpture possesses meaning as a kind of spolia in spe. The cathedral's architects appropriated the idol as the basis for a dedicatory program in the portal of SteMarie that signifies through the act of reuse itself. Ste-Marie's bishops were preoccupied with the task of reviving the consecration of the profaned, ruined ancient cathedral, and the reuse of the Mars figure participated in an extraliturgical strategy for "undoing" the cathedral's loss of consecration. The Mars relief contains an inherent reference to the profaning agents of the cathedral's destruction. Its opposition to and conversion into the figure of Mary work to negate the threat of the "demonic" idol and perhaps convert its power to fuel the rites by which the cathedral's consecration was reaffirmed. The amuletic inscription, finally, reinforces the liturgical

dedication and perhaps issues a divine imperative to the converted idol: "Reverence my sanctuary." Ultimately, the two-sided sculpture, Christian and pagan, medieval and antique, is itself a symbolic type for the portal (janua) in which it stands, so called during antiquity and the Middle Ages for its relation to the two-faced god Janus.8 In this case, the liminal space of the portal is a threshold, and not merely a symbolic one, between the demonic and the sacred, between the potent images of the Virgin and Mars. Archaeology and History of Ste-Marie d'Oloron By the time the Mars relief came into the possession of the bishops of Oloron, the city and its diocese were already many centuries old. The see of Oloron had been established by the early sixth century, but the impact of the pagan tribal migrations and the Norman and Saracen invasions led to the abandonment of the city some time prior to the year 1000.9 The diocese of Oloron lapsed and was not reformed until 1056 at the Council of Toulouse by Pope Victor II.10 Construction on Ste-Marie began shortly thereafter.11 Work proceeded on the new cathedral more or less continuously over the next several centuries, as destructive fires in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries necessitated extensive reconstruction.12 The increasing dilapidation of the church in modern times prompted a comprehensive restoration between 1856 and the 1880s. The structure that stands in Oloron today is a patchwork of Romanesque, Gothic, and modern construction, of which the western portal and porch are the most significant surviving Romanesque features. Ste-Marie's richly decorated western portal dates from about 1115 to 1135, but its wellpreserved current appearance is misleading.13 The portal underwent extensive restoration during the nineteenth century.14 Fortunately, this work was fairly restrained and discrete, owing largely to the fact that the portal sculptures, protected from the elements by a large, square porch tower, were overall in good condition. Most or all of the damage to the sculptures had resulted from violence to heads and other fragile, projecting features during the French Revolution, and these are consequently among the most heavily restored elements of the portal today.15 In the first figured archivolt, which contains a number of intriguing depictions of peasant occupations, about half of the twenty-six voussoirs possess modern heads, arms, legs, or other features. At least some of the Elders of the Apocalypse in the second figured archivolt underwent similar restorations. The large, projecting figure of a lion swallowing a man, located to the left of the portal, was heavily restored and altered. The group originally depicted a lion astride a kneeling man. The two small lunettes or tympana above the doorways on either side of the trumeau are entirely modern, replacing originals on which the sculpture had been effaced.16 In addition, the damaged fragments of a Resurrection scene above the portal archivolte were removed during restoration.17 Some other restorations have since been undone during efforts to probe the extent of the largely undocumented restoration projects. For instance, modern noses were removed from the atlantes in the trumeau sculpture. The knight on horseback to the right of the portal lost his restored face and arms, and several of the Elders of the Apocalypse reverted to their prerestoration condition.

Many other sculptures in the portal apparently survived the Revolution and the restoration unscathed, including the large tympanum depicting the Deposition, which contains the twosided Mary/Mars slab. The atlantes in the trumeau socle, a number of the occupations depicted in the first archivolt, some of the Elders, and the two soldiers depicted in the spandrels on either side of the portal arch all survive intact and largely or entirely unrestored. The reasons for their preservation are not difficult to determine. The best-preserved works are uniformly the lowest in relief, the highest on the facade, and/or the most sheltered by neighboring architectural features. In particular, the Deposition in the tympanum is carved in extremely shallow bas-relief, while the two soldiers, though executed in high relief, are located high on the facade and are each protected on one side by the springing of the arches of the porch walls. Several nineteenth-century descriptions of the portal made before the beginning of the restoration at Ste-Marie indicate that these specific sculptures, the tympanum and spandrel sculptures, were in very good condition prior to restoration. Indeed, the portal as a whole largely retained its integrity, with the exception of the two small lunettes, the lion and equestrian groups, and the vanished Resurrection scene above the portal, all of which were noted as being heavily damaged.18 Prerestoration descriptions also indicate that the restoration had not altered the current arrangement of the sculptures in the portal and on the facade, and there is no evidence that the works left alone were moved or taken down during the course of restoration. In other words, if restorers discovered the existence of the Mars relief on the opposite face of the tympanum slab depicting Mary, they left no sign of it. The Deposition scene to which the slab belongs forms the focal point of the portal field, and the contrast between the scene's strikingly shallow relief and the high relief of the portal's other sculptures increases the impression of the Deposition's centrality. The Deposition is a relatively unusual subject in Romanesque portal sculpture. Its depiction in this space may be linked to the Depositio crucis liturgical drama, which evidence suggests often took place in the space of the western portal and porch.19 The Deposition in the tympanum is also linked iconographically to the Resurrection that once occupied the space immediately above the portal arcade, attested by its only remnants, two soldiers in the spandrels. In its general features, the iconography of the Oloron Deposition reflects a type that is common in Romanesque art (Fig. 2).20 Christ, at the center of the composition, has been partially detached from the cross. Joseph of Arimathea, depicted on the same large slab as Christ, supports the torso of the Crucified. Nicodemus, depicted on a separate panel to the right of the cross, removes the nail from Christ's left hand with a pair of pliers. The Virgin Mary, depicted on a slab to the left of the cross, holds Christ's freed right hand in her draped hands. To the right of this central group, Saint John is depicted on an independent slab, and to the left stands a second woman, one of the three Marys who are mentioned as being present at the Crucifixion: Mary, mother of James, Mary Salome, and Mary Magdalen.21 The number of Marys included in depictions of the Crucifixion and Deposition varies widely in medieval art, ranging from one (the Virgin Mary) to all four, as in the Deposition by Benedetto Antelami, for instance, in which all four are present and identified by inscriptions. The second

Mary at Ste-Marie may have been added simply to balance the composition, since her presence on a separate stone slab creates a symmetrical arrangement of figures and stone panels in the tympanum centered on the central slab bearing the image of Christ. On either side of the Deposition, smaller, undecorated slabs of stone fill the margins of the tympanum field in the irregular spaces created by the tympanum's subordinate arcades.

It is clear that the stone slabs in the composition were not obtained from the same source. The color and grain of the blocks differ considerably. The slabs depicting John and the second Mary are blue-gray in color and heavily veined, as are most of the stones in the wings of the composition. The panel depicting Christ is lighter and finer grained than these but still darker than the panels depicting Mary and Nicodemus. The stone of these two slabs is similar, but it is impossible to say whether they were obtained from the same source. Their dimensions differ, the Mary/Mars slab being noticeably wider. Following discovery of the Mars, the Nicodemus panel also was removed, but closer examination yielded no evidence that it is materially related to the Mars slab. The Mars relief itself, dated by one scholar to the fourth century, is probably a votive stela of a type quite common in Roman Gaul.22 mile Esprandieu's monumental census of Gallo-Roman antiquities includes many such stelae depicting individual figures enclosed within arcades surmounted by dedicatory inscriptions.23 The discovery of the Mars relief at Ste-Marie is in some respects not especially surprising. The reuse of antique materials in medieval architecture and the display of antique-even overtly pagan-sculpture were unexceptional in medieval Europe. Scholars have documented a wide range of uses of spolia in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, including the phenomena of both pragmatic, utilitarian reuse and reuse as symbolic gesture, as an evocation, for instance, of the triumph of Christianity over paganism or of the imperial legacy of ancient Rome.24 Generally speaking, the use of spolia was common wherever antique materials were widely available, as at Oloron, although lack of ready availability itself could sometimes create an impetus for reuse, as Charlemagne demonstrated by transporting Roman materials across the Alps to build the Palatine Chapel at Aachen, and Abbot Suger contemplated doing the same at St-Denis.25

The history and archaeology of Oloron provide a rich context for the discovery of the Mars relief at Ste-Marie. Oloron, known as Iluro in ancient sources, was a walled city of some regional importance in antiquity. Ancient Iluro owed its prosperity in part to its economically and militarily strategic location at the entrance to the primary inland route through the Pyrenees between Spain and France, the Somport pass. The city is mentioned in the thirdcentury Itinerary of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius and a fifth-century gazetteer of the Roman provinces, Notitia provindarum, and references to it become increasingly frequent following the creation of the see of Oloron in the early sixth century.26 Oloron thus had existed for hundreds of years by the time the Vascon, Norman, and Saracen invasions brought about its decline and abandonment over the course of the eighth and ninth centuries. Substantial remains of antique Iluro survived intact into the late eleventh century, when the diocese of Oloron was reformed by Victor II and construction began on a new cathedral. Recent excavations of the area surrounding the cathedral in Oloron uncovered evidence of a large GalloRoman architectural complex, including an intact hypocaust.2' The cathedral itself stands on reused antique foundations, and the builders of the eleventh- to twelfth-century cathedral probably salvaged a good deal of rubble and shaped stone from the ancient city for use in the new church. The portal's original monolithic trumeau column (the current one is a nineteenth-century replacement) was quite possibly antique, since monolithic columns in medieval architecture are often if not usually antique spolia. Likewise, the large block of fine Arudy limestone from which the portal's trumeau sculpture is carved is probably spoliai The Arudy quarry, located southeast of Oloron, is not known to have been under exploitation during the twelfth century, and this block represents the only piece of Arudy limestone among Ste-Marie's medieval sculptures.29 Furthermore, the Mars relief is not the only work of GalloRoman sculpture to be found in the neighborhood of the cathedral. A mask or head is visible in the masonry of the north wall of Ste-Marie's thirteenth-century porch tower (Fig. 3), and fragments of two Early Christian sarcophagi are incorporated in the walls of houses neighboring the cathedral.30 Although this evidence is suggestive, very little work has been done to excavate the remains of Iluro. The discoveries described above are, like the Mars relief, chance finds unearthed in the course of modern construction and restoration work in the area surrounding the cathedral. Conceivably, much remains to be discovered about the shape of the ancient city and the specifics of its despoliation during the Middle Ages. Ste-Marie's architects probably obtained the Mars relief locally and perhaps even found the sculpture on the site of the new cathedral. Plausibly, the discovery of the Mars sculpture and/or other identifiably pagan and Early Christian objects influenced the choice of site for the new cathedral. The bishops of the reformed diocese in the eleventh century would have been eager to discover the site of the earlier cathedral, if they did not in fact already know its location. They almost certainly desired to rebuild on the site of the first cathedral or, at least, to promote an impression of continuity between the new structure and its predecessor. This desire reflects legal concerns over property rights, as well as a symbolic gesture and a response to requirements of a theological and liturgical nature. Profaned, disused, or ruined churches like Oloron's do not cease to exist from a theological perspective. They continue to

possess a sacred reality through their initial consecration.31 This consecration, compromised by desecration or the neglect and ruination of the physical church, had to be reaffirmed or redeemed through liturgical means. First, however, the remains of the ruined cathedral had to be identified. The architects of the new cathedral might well have taken the discovery in Oloron of ancient sacred images-even of pagan ones-as a sign of the location of the earlier cathedral. Medieval Christians frequently converted former pagan temples and captured Muslim mosques into churches. This practice was explicitly advocated by church authorities.32 Christians ascribed the same practices to pagans and the enemies of the church, although, not surprisingly, legends of such church-to-temple conversions were taken as proof of the inherent wickedness and evil of paganism.

The cathedral of Huesca in northern Spain, neighbor to Ste-Marie, provides an instructive analogy. Huesca, the seat of the cathedral diocese since the early Middle Ages, was part of the Moorish empire of al-Andalus until Pedro I, king of Aragon, wrested the city from Muslim control in 1096.33 According to contemporary Christian accounts of this event, Huesca's Muslim occupiers had deliberately profaned the city's ancient cathedral by converting it to use as a mosque, which the new Christian rulers of Huesca in turn converted back into a cathedral. It is a significant coincidence that Amatus, the second reformed bishop of Oloron and archbishop of Bordeaux, reconsecrated the Huesca mosque in 1097.34 Like that of the Huesca mosque/cathedral, the history of the Oloron cathedral embodies a Crusader topos of loss and recovery, of profanation and reconsecration. This is the context in which Ste-Marie's builders, including Amatus, found and reused the Mars idol, an emblem of the profaning destruction wrought by pagans during the early Middle Ages. Mar(ia) versus Mar(s) The deliberate opposition of Mary and Mars on the two faces of the antique stone offers direct evidence that reuse of the Mars sculpture had specific meaning for the cathedral's architects. The oppositions and confrontations that result from this unusual, perhaps unique, example of reuse are not limited merely to the essential Christian/pagan contrast of Mary and Mars. Several characteristics of the slab and its sculpture indicate the intentionality of the contrasts evoked by the two opposed figures. During the Middle Ages, antiquities often came to be

reused because of the high quality and ready availability of Roman materials, but the manner of the Mars slab's reuse posed inconveniences for Ste-Marie's sculptors that point to a stronger motive. The decision to employ the slab in the portal's tympanum imposed an absolute limit on relief depth in the carving of the Deposition group that occupies SteMarie's tympanum. The maximum thickness of the slab is only about 4 inches (10 centimeters), and significant areas are considerably thinner, including the inscription bed and the space surrounding the figure within the arcade (Fig. 4). Because of its relatively great vertical height and slight depth, the slab is fragile. By necessity, the figure of Mary that stands on the opposite face of the slab is carved in extremely shallow relief, and her elevation of mere millimeters set the depth of relief for the other panels in the Deposition group. Regardless of the other slabs' actual thicknesses, Ste-Marie's sculptors were obliged to harmonize the relief carving with that of the Mary/Mars panel. This fact explains the extremely unusual formal character of the Deposition sculpture.

In Romanesque sculpture, low-relief carving like that in the Oloron Deposition is most often reserved for small-scale and ornamental works, such as framing elements or metopes. Monumental figurai sculpture characteristically employs moderate to high relief. For this reason, there are relatively few formal parallels to the Oloron Deposition. The Moissac cloister reliefs provide one of the closest, and the low relief in these sculptures has also been attributed to reuse of Gallo-Roman materials that imposed strict limits on relief depth.30 With the exception of the Deposition and a few ornamental works, Ste-Marie's sculptures uniformly display moderate to high relief. It seems likely that even the original lunettes above the doorway exhibited relatively deep relief, since their sculptural decoration invited and yielded readily to the iconoclasm of the Revolutionaries. Finally, the formal conceptions of the sculptor of the Deposition indicate that this artist both understood volume and probably was used to working in high relief. The sculptor employed three-quarter profile and numerous drapery cascades, among other formal devices, to increase the appearance of figurai volume in the extremely flat sculpture (Fig. 5).36

Given the limitations on carving that the Mars relief imposed, it is surprising that the portal's architects chose the slab for the Deposition. It appears unlikely that it was selected simply because it was materially appealing, conveniently available, or adequately large. On the contrary, a second observation suggests that the figure itself and not the marble slab from which it is carved played a key role in the sculpture's reuse. In the reshaping and recutting of the slab, Ste-Marie's sculptors made a serious attempt to preserve both the figure of Mars and the reliefs identifying inscription (Fig. 6). The slab of the Mars relief, which was somewhat larger prior to its reuse in the tympanum, had to be reshaped in order to conform to the unusual arcading of Ste-Marie's tympanum. The bottom edge of the slab was cut to conform to the steep fall of the arcade on which it rests, while the top margin of the relief was fitted to the shallower rise of the arcade framing the tympanum. In addition, only one longitudinal half of the right columnar support in the arcade remains, indicating that a band of marble was also removed from the shorter lateral edge of the slab. The slab was somewhat larger than necessary for its ultimate purpose. Given its original size, the stone could have been resized in a variety of ways that might have resulted in incidental damage to the Mars figure or its inscription. Instead, the cathedral's sculptors preserved the upright orientation of the Mars figure and, most remarkably, placed Mary exactly opposite Mars. The two figures are the same size, and their heads are directly opposed. Whatever the intent, it appears that this was a deliberate confrontation of the two, engineered by the portal's Christian architects, since it could hardly have escaped their notice that Mary, mother of God, was essentially transposed on the nude pagan god of war. In the reused stela, Mary counters Mars not only physically but in a variety of formal and iconographie ways as well, at least some of which must have been apparent to and intended by those who determined the manner of the slab's reuse. For instance, it would have been plain to the medieval architects, just as it is in our current investigation, that Mary's Christianity counters the paganism of Mars. Likewise, Mary's femaleness serves as the foil to the idol's maleness. Mary as life giver, mother, and nurturer counters Mars as death dealer, warrior, and destroyer, as patron deity perhaps of the pagans responsible for the early medieval destruction of Oloron. Mary is salvific, Mars demonic. Mary is chaste and modestly clothed, while Mars is nude.

The representation of Mary seems intended to highlight some of these oppositions. Mars is naked except for a cape that billows out behind and to the right of the body (Fig. 7). The Virgin also wears a cape that likewise billows out extravagantly in the space to the right of the body. In the pagan image, the cape reveals the nudity of the idol. In the Christian image, Mary respectfully covers her hands in the cape in order to receive the freed hand of the crucified Christ. This is arguably the Deposition's most sacred and meaningful visual motif. The Deposition was a symbolic type for the Eucharist in medieval liturgy. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who detach and lower the body from the cross, were considered types for the priest and deacon in the Mass during the raising and lowering of the host.37 Mary, who receives the hand of Christ, symbolically receives the host and thereby the most important Christian sacrament, the Eucharist. Another aspect of Mary's dress appears to accentuate the contrast between her modesty and the nudity of Mars. In addition to her covered head and virtuously chaste costume, the Virgin wears a remarkable, elaborately knotted girdle. In Scripture and medieval cultural convention, girdles are closely connected to chastity. The girdle is also an attribute of the Virgin. Following her assumption, Mary is said to have passed down from heaven the girdle in which she was buried, in order to prove her corporeal assumption to the persistently doubting Thomas. In the tympanum at Ste-Marie, a cross is inscribed prominently on the tail of Mary's girdle, a detail anachronistic to the scene of the Deposition that seems to reinforce the sacramental and perhaps sacerdotal symbolism of the Descent from the Cross, since the cross-inscribed belt inspires an association with liturgical vestments. However, Joseph and Nicodemus, not Mary, are the sacerdotal types represented in the image. The small but conspicuous cross on the tail of Mary's girdle, seemingly out of place, requires some explanation. Intriguingly, the cross on the tail of the belt marks, on the front of the relief, the location of Mars's genitals on the reverse. Crosses were often inscribed on pagan images as a means of consecrating them or converting them to Christian use/8 The small inscribed cross on Mary's belt is also identical in appearance to the small crossshaped consecration marks that typically were inscribed on altar tables and anointed during the consecration ceremony. Portals, too, served as a primary focus of the liturgy of dedication and were anointed and lustrated during the consecration ritual. Medieval Christians also sometimes anointed pagan objects as a means of consecrating them.39 Perhaps the cross on the Virgin's belt is liturgically rather than iconographically motivated. Perhaps it played a role in the conversion of the pagan relief to safe Christian use. Finally, the close similarity of the names Mary and Mars is particularly noteworthy. The fact that Mars is named in the inscription on the ancient stela leaves no doubt that the builders at Ste-Marie understood his identity, and it could not have escaped them that the idol and the Virgin possess almost identical names. Is it pure coincidence that the cathedral was dedicated in Mary's name, that the reused pagan idol is located on the opposite face of the patron saint's own figuration, and that the names of the two opposed figures converge so closely? At Ste-Marie, Mary counters Mars with her very name, converting a kind of campus Martins, the ruined and profaned grounds of the first Oloron cathedral, into sacred ground, a

campus Mariae, as it were. It is perhaps impossible to ascertain what role the homonymy of the pagan idol and the patron saint may have had in the architect's decision to reuse the antique relief at Ste-Marie, but this correlation could well have determined the idol's placement in the portal and the subject of the image on its reverse. The emphasis on the preservation of the Mars figure and on its physical relation to the figure of the Virgin suggests the possibility of a more extensive formal relation between the GalloRoman sculpture and the twelfth-century portal sculptures. However, only two other sculptures in the entire portal, a pair of soldiers in the spandrels of the portal's triumphal arch, exhibit any debt to the formal conceptions of the Mars figure.

Whereas the image of Mary seems to respond in opposition to the image of Mars, the two soldiers (Figs. 8, 9) appropriate or adapt certain prominent features of the Mars figure. Not copies of the Mars, nor stylistically similar, they nonetheless mimic key figurai attributes of the pagan god. Mars stands in elegant contrapposto; his relaxed left arm hangs casually by his side. A cape is slung over his shoulders and billows out gently behind him. His right arm is slightly raised and his elbow is bent so that forearm and hand rise vertically to grip the shaft of a spear that is planted by his foot. Both of the soldiers on Ste-Marie's facade echo this pose and gesture. The soldiers bend the knee of one leg and place their weight squarely on the other in exaggerated, stylized, medieval mimicry of classical contrapposto. The two soldiers alone out of all Ste-Marie's sculptures adopt this visually striking pose, which, though disjointed, is reminiscent of the Mars figure's stance. In my view, decisive evidence of the soldiers' debt to the Mars relief is provided by the soldiers' raised arms. They raise one arm slightly and bend the arm at the elbow so that the forearm and hand rise vertically, in the words of a previous author, "as if to raise the pikes with which they mount their guard by the tomb of the Lord."40 As in the Mars relief, pikes or spears are depicted in very shallow relief immediately behind the upraised arms of the soldiers. The soldiers' hands provide a final proof of the figures' formal dependence on the Mars sculpture. The hands, especially of the soldier in the left spandrel (Fig. 8), closely copy the shape of the hand and disposition of the gently curled fingers of Mars as he grips the spear by his side.

The preceding observations raise several important questions. First, why did the workshop reuse the Mars relief if it so drastically limited the physical depth of the tympanum sculpture? second, why did the sculptors preserve the figure so carefully only to hide it? Third, why is the Gallo-Roman sculpture's formal influence not more evident in the portal sculptures? In

sum, what was the point of deliberately preserving, studying, and selectively appropriating from the sculpture only to conceal it in a manner that posed considerable inconvenience for the construction and decoration of the portal? The answers to these questions depend on evidence of different kinds-historical, cultural, liturgical, epigraphic, and pictorial. Antique sculptures were reused in a variety of ways during the Middle Ages, and admiration for classical art is evident in many examples of reuse, but anxiety and fear often prevailed in medieval encounters with pagan figurai art. Such anxiety frequently led medieval Christians to destroy or dispose of threatening pagan images, much as SteMarie's architects did in burying the Mars relief within the walls of their cathedral. These opposing attitudes converge in the reuse of the Mars sculpture at Oloron. Interest in the relief and anxiety about its subject inspired the unusual manner of the sculpture's reuse. Mary effaces Mars. The soldiers respond figurally to his appearance. The motive for the inscription above the portal depends on the presence of the interred idol. All these elements betray the architects' preoccupation with the idol and point to a significant if unusual role for the pagan sculpture in the cathedral's portal. Appropriation and Anxiety: Consumption of Antiquities in the Middle Ages As at Ste-Marie, antique structures often underlie medieval churches, either because the church builders desired to build on the stable foundations of a surviving structure or, as was also often the case, because a pagan temple or other Roman edifice had been converted into a church.41 In fact, the church officially encouraged the conversion of pagan temples to Christian use as part of its evangelical strategy.42 Medieval builders also frequently employed Roman structures as quarries, mining disused monuments for building materials and architectural elements, as well as antique statuary and sculpture. At St. Albans in the eleventh century, for instance, excavations of the nearby Roman city of Verulamium produced both sought-after building materials and pagan statuary; the monks promptly destroyed the latter.43 It is conceivable-probably likely-that the Oloron Mars itself was discovered on the cathedral's site or in the near vicinity during work on the new Romanesque structure. But if it is not surprising that Ste-Marie's architects discovered or possessed the idol, it is remarkable that they chose neither to destroy nor to display it but instead to dispose of it in such a deliberate and circuitous fashion. Despite the action of the zealous monks at St. Albans, Roman objects and even overtly pagan figurai works are found in a variety of contexts in the decoration of medieval churches.44 Pagan sarcophagi, for example, were sometimes used for the burial of saints and other important religious figures or pressed into service as altar supports or altar tables.45 Three exceptional ancient sarcophagi are preserved in this manner at the nearby sites Lucq-deBarn, Belloc-StClamens, and Aire-sur-l'Adour.46 Many other instances of reuse involving antique objectsaltars, urns, stelae, bas-reliefs, and more-can be found in the region surrounding Oloron.47 In some cases, obviously pagan works of figurai art or other objects of pre-Christian veneration underwent Christianization, either explicitly or implicitly.48 Popular legends sometimes arose to attribute religious significance to pagan objects preserved in Christian communities. Jean Adhmar notes, among other examples, a funerary relief at Les Baux in

Provence depicting a married couple and the goddess Juno Pronuba that was interpreted during the Middle Ages as a depiction of the three Marys.49 Menhirs and megaliths, venerated in the Druidic religion, were targeted by Early Christian missionaries in Gaul, especially Saint Martin.50 Christian attacks on the sacred stones resulted in a new breed of Christianized menhirs that were considered holy throughout the Middle Ages.51 Medieval communities also Christianized pagan artworks through recarving or additions such as inscribed crosses. Two such examples are found in the portal of St-P d'Ardet and in the chevet of Cazaril-Laspnes, located not far from Oloron.52 The figure in a reused Roman stela in the tympanum of St-Pierre de Varennes was transformed into Saint Peter through the recarving of an ampulla into the keys that are Peter's attribute.03 Anna Maria Romanini recently discovered a case in which a third-century pagan statuette was transformed into a thirteenth-century Madonna and Child through the addition of the infant Jesus.54 Despite such instances of the conversion of pagan artworks, it is important to remember that when recognized as such, pagan images aroused fear and anxiety during the Middle Ages. Christian polemic against idolatry and violence against pagan images continued past the period of early Christianity.55 Europe's conversion to Christianity was a long and slow process, and adoption of the new religion often took a superficial form. In northern Europe and England, active pagan religious culture survived well into the twelfth century. In southern Europe, Christian proximity to Jews and Muslims, who endorsed strict aniconism, encouraged Christian anxiety about idolatry and sacred images. This anxiety is reflected directly in Christian arguments defending sacred images against charges of idolatry and indirectly by slanders that attributed idolatrous practices to Jews and Muslims.56 All of these factors worked to preserve medieval Christianity's sense of the pagan idol's active threat, of its very real potency. Although the main Christian polemics against idolatry date from the Early Christian period, idols and idolatry were important points of reference throughout the Middle Ages, appearing in sermons, saints' lives, canon law, and other secular and religious writings. Seen to possess active, malevolent power in both the popular imagination and theology, images recognized as pagan were susceptible to destruction and burial.57 Hagiographie and exegetical texts explained idols as images dedicated not to gods but to demons and evil spirits, that is, as not mere figments of deluded imagination but very real and dangerous entities. Walafrid Strabo, the student of Hrabanus Maurus and influential ninth-century theologian, described the power of the idol in these terms: "pagans . . . dedicate . . . statues ... to the demons who deceive them, with the intention of binding themselves more closely to the gods they wish to please and of winning by this familiarity the demons' gracious protection.""8 Some authorities thought that these demons inhabited the idol itself. In the life of Saint Longinus, for instance, devils issue from the idols broken by the saint.59 The devil inside a statue of Diana actually speaks in the life of Saint Andrew, and as late as the fourteenth century, the Sienese attributed very real military setbacks to the malevolent power of a pagan statue.60

Even those individuals who were most sympathetic to classical art and culture could not escape impressions of the pagan image's power. Nor could they avoid using language invoking the supernatural in their comments on such images. Master Gregory, author of a well-known twelfth-century description of Rome, was deeply struck by a statue of Venus that he viewed there. Far from reviling the idol, Gregory found himself entranced by its beauty. And entranced is the right term for, in his own words, because of the statue's "wondrous beauty and some magical power of persuasion, I was three times constrained to go back to see [it] although it was two stadia distant from my hostelry."61 The Venus, he says, "was executed with such marvelous and inexplicable skill that it seems rather a living creature than a statue."62 Gregory's admiration for the work notwithstanding, his words leave no doubt as to the status of the classical image. He describes a simulacrum, a work whose inexplicable beauty and lifelikeness reflect not the skill of a human artist but the consequence of something supernatural.63 The statue exercises a "magical power of persuasion" on Gregory, and this force compels him to return to its presence. We must not take Gregory's words literally but instead read his talk of magic and of the statue's inexplicably lifelike aspect as descriptive hyperbole. Nevertheless, his language draws from the medieval Christian vocabulary available to describe the attractive power of the image, and many of his contemporaries would have recognized in Gregory's words the specter of idolatry. In an eleventh-century episode, Fulco, an important poet and bishop of Beauvais, described the head of an antique sculpture discovered in his diocese. The close attention to and evident interest in the head that the author displays reflect Fulco's liberal intellect. Adhmar even attributes to Fulco something like admiration for the sculpture. However, this is overstating Fulco's classical sympathies. Fulco's analysis of the head, which he determines, coincidentally, to be a depiction of Mars, focuses entirely on the terrible and threatening aspect of the sculpture's appearance. For Fulco, the head "does not resemble that of a human being." It is a "frightening" head, whose "ugliness suits it well," and it arouses fear, he says, when one gazes into its terrible eyes.64 The Idol in the Artist's Gaze The Oloron Mars figure could not be easily Christianized, owing to the inscription identifying the figure as a pagan god, but antique sculptures, even overtly pagan ones, were sometimes preserved for their value as models for contemporary sculptors.65 A significant artistic interest in antique sculpture is visible in twelfth-century sculpture, which displays a wide range of relations to classical forms, from subtle reinterpretation to slavish imitation.66 Interestingly, documentary evidence scarcely touches on the intimacy that many Romanesque sculptors had with classical artworks. In the two known twelfth-century treatises on artistic practice, discussion of pagan figurai art is taboo. Eradius on the Colours and Arts of the Romans provides an account of Roman artistic techniques that lauds the skill and intellect of the ancient Roman artists, yet it avoids any reference to figurai art.6 Likewise, as Charles Reginald Dodwell observes, Theophilus, author of the twelfth-century treatise On Diverse Arts, rejects all classical figurai art "not because it was unattractive . . . but because it was pagan."68

One must not assume that pagan sculptures preserved for their artistic value were considered innocuous or harmless. As we see in the story of Fulco and even of Gregory, there is no contradiction in the medieval ability to view pagan sculpture simultaneously with both great interest and fear or anxiety. In fact, classical sculpture's appeal and threat to its medieval audience often arose from the same source-its figurai realism.69 The lifelike appearance of classical sculpture at once attracted and alarmed, a fact that has broad relevance to the abstract tendencies for which medieval art is noted, as well as specific relevance to the case of the Oloron Mars sculpture. Avoidance of figurai realism, characteristic of medieval and especially of Romanesque art, was prompted, to some degree, by Christianity's troubled relation with images. The proscriptions of the second commandment and the Christian theological rationalizations of the use of sacred images resulted in a society that was, for much of the Middle Ages, more comfortable with deliberately abstracted forms than mimetic ones. As Dodwell notes, extraordinary realism in figurai artworks was often attributed to divine or magical intervention. This is the case of Tuotilo of St-Gall, who carved a statue of the Virgin so lifelike that it had to be described as the handiwork of the Virgin herself.70 Similarly, medieval descriptions of the famous Volto Santo of Lucca focus on the verisimilitude of Christ's face and eyes.71 Legend attributed Lucca's crucifix to Nicodemus, except for the "holy face," which was miraculously finished while Nicodemus, exhausted from his efforts to capture Christ's true aspect, lay fast asleep. Other tales current in the Middle Ages demonstrate a similar wariness of or imaginative preoccupation with figurai realism; several, rooted in classical legend, reveal a Pygmalionesque anxiety of animate pagan artworks.72 For instance, Daedalus, the legendary sculptor and inventor, was said to have carved statues so lifelike that they had to be chained at night to prevent them from walking away.73 In the Roman de la rose, Zeuxis's attempts to depict naturalistic figures are represented as "an impertinent and almost blasphemous challenge to God."74 The medieval artist's conflicted relation to classical sculpture is directly relevant to the reuse of the Oloron Mars figure. The Mars relief did not influence the styles of SteMarie's sculptors. The images of Mary and the two soldiers in the spandrels of the portal arch are the only works that reflect a strong awareness of the Mars sculpture, yet these sculptures exhibit only selective, calculated appropriations from and responses to the pagan relief. Whether or not Ste-Marie's artists were capable of imitating the antique style of the Mars relief, it does not appear that they were interested in or willing to do so. What, then, motivated the sculptors' appropriation of the Mars figure's stance and gesture in the images of the two soldiers? The Gallo-Roman Mars and the spandrel statues converge iconographically. The Romanesque sculptures, like the Gallo-Roman relief, depict soldiers, martial figures that prominently display the implements of their profession. Like Mars, the soldiers, who originally belonged to a Resurrection scene above the portal, are pagans. They are the Roman centurions assigned by Pontius Pilate to guard Christ's tomb. It appears, then, that the influence of the Mars relief on these two sculptures extended from the artists' determination that its form was appropriate to these figures. This suggests that the sculpture's pagan aspect impressed the

builders at Ste-Marie far more than did its artistic values. The Idol Interred The overtly pagan nature of the Oloron Mars calls into question the significance of the pagan idol for Ste-Marie's architects. How did they justify its reuse in the tympanum behind the image of the Virgin and adjacent to the depiction of the crucified Christ? The preservation and concealment of the Mars idol was not incidental to the slab's reuse. Regardless of the circumstances of its discovery, the manner of its reuse, or the means of its disposal, a pagan idol, once revealed, was never ignored in medieval Christian society. SteMarie's architects reused the Mars slab in order to dispose of the idol and eliminate its perceived threat. The widespread practice of burying or concealing pagan images supports this view. Christian communities did not always destroy pagan sculptures that resisted Christianization. Indeed, the earliest prescriptions of the church for the treatment of pagan idols merely involved removing the objects from their temples and consecrating the temple spaces to Christian use.75 Although destruction was undoubtedly common, the church frequently recommended that pagan objects be disposed of in a less violent manner that still ensured that they never be found again.76 Burial was a remarkably effective way to "lose" offending objects, negating their threat to Christian communities. In many cases, especially during the early Middle Ages, burial of pagan statuary appears to have been intended as much to preserve the objects from destruction; important Roman sculptures, among them the Venus de MiIo, the Poitiers Minerva, and the Capitoline Venus, were discovered in carefully prepared chambers or vaults.77 Adhmar goes so far as to propose that antique sculptures were commonly reused in city walls and other masonry as a means of disposing of them while preserving them, a practice that he compares to the Christian practice of burying damaged or outmoded sacred sculptures beneath church pavements rather than destroying them.78 The deliberate act of concealing the Mars figure satisfies both requirements; the pagan Mars will remain invisible as long as the church stands. Yet to date, the solution of the builders at Ste-Marie finds few close parallels. In part, this stems from the dictates of circumstance: the sculpture's discovery was purely accidental, and barring a campaign to check the nonvisible backs of all medieval architectural sculptures, it will take additional accidents to produce similar finds. Nevertheless, the Mars figure belongs to a limited context with other examples of burial and "anxious" reuse. Buried pagan images provide some of the most directly relevant analogies to the Oloron Mars relief. For instance, in the fourteenth century, the Sienese excavated and later reburied a pagan statue because of the belief that admiration for the sculpture had caused the city's military defeats. In the same century, Pope Urban V disposed of pagan statuary "in order to abolish the memory of idolatry."79 Pagan altars and other slabs bearing pagan inscriptions were often reemployed in church architecture upside down or on their sides as a way of negating the sense of the inscriptions, a practice connected to the decision to conceal the Mars sculpture by turning it to face the wall of the facade.80 Pagan objects and images frequently emerge from beneath church pavements. The circumstances under which these objects were buried are for the most part unknowable, and

the medieval tendency to build churches atop former temples or to convert temples to Christian usage means that many of these objects may have come accidentally to rest beneath the churches where they were found. Nevertheless, it seems that the burial of at least some of these objects was deliberate. Examples that tempt this conclusion abound. At Montgauch in the Couserans valley a short distance from Oloron, a vessel decorated with a Gorgon's head was found buried beneath the main altar.81 Just to the north of Oloron, at Lectoure, a large cache of taurobols, altars decorated with bull's heads and dedicated to the cult of the goddess Cybele, came to light in the fifteenth century during construction to enlarge the choir of the city's cathedral.82 Helen Saradi speculates that spolia, which she characterizes as " 'demonic' stones," on the south wall of the church of the Panaghia Gorgoepikoos at Athens might have been intentionally covered with plaster as a way of evoking some "hidden symbolism."83 Anthony Cutler envisions the mutilation and burial of a statue of Venus at Dermech I at Carthage as a meaningful act of reuse of an antique object in the early Middle Ages.84 The sculpture was buried on the axis of the nave in line with the altar and covered by a Christian mosaic in a manner at least typologically similar to the burial and effacement of the idol at Ste-Marie. The novelty of the Oloron Mars is that, in its perhaps unprecedented role in Ste-Marie's portal, the cathedral's architects designed this "burial" as synergistic reuse. The inclusion of the idol in the portal has meaning that is bound up almost entirely in the act of inclusion, which renders the sculpture thereafter invisible and its presence, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible. The meaningful act of inclusion of the Mars idol in Ste-Marie's portal reminds us that an object's significance may at times depend not on its reception but on its very existence, an attitude more natural to the medieval mind than the modern. Finally, this act and the preceding cases also remind us that the consecrated, divinely protected ground of the church is a logical place for burial of pagan images that, for their Christian audiences, presented an explicit threat. Detecting the Sacral: Ste-Marie, Mars, and the Politics of Consecration The centurions depicted on Ste-Marie's facade provide a useful starting point in reconstructing the significance of this act of reuse for those who planned and carried it out. These works evince awareness of the Mars, and their shared gestures and identity as pagan warriors imply a conscious response to the idol on the parts of the cathedral's architects and sculptors. The soldiers belong iconographically to the lost depiction of the Resurrection, whose damaged remains still existed, prior to the nineteenth-century restoration, immediately above the portal. In their capacity as the guardians at the tomb, the two centurions direct their attention and the viewer's to the space of the lost Resurrection, where the image of the tomb of Christ once appeared. In this same space, Justin Lallier noted, in his 1843 account of Ste-Marie, the presence of an inscription on a large square stone, almost certainly the same block containing the fragments of the Resurrection.85 The inscription, PAVETE AD SANCTVARIVM MEVM (reverence my sanctuary), an excerpt from Leviticus 26:2, has not received comment or explanation in previous studies, although it is frequently mentioned.86 Leviticus 26:1-2 repeats the commandment prohibiting idolatry and the production of idols

and graven images: 26:1 Ye shall make you no idols nor graven images; neither rear you up a standing image; neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land to bow down unto it: For I am the Lord your God. 26:2 Ye shall keep my Sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary: I am the Lord.87 Ste-Marie's architects thus inscribed a text concerning pagan idols just above their own reused, concealed Mars idol and in the space to which our attention is directed by the two sculptures (Christian depictions of pagans) that respond to the form of the antique image. Like the centurions, this inscrutable inscription responds to the inclusion of the buried idol. It supplies crucial evidence of the thinking behind the reuse of the Mars sculpture, but it does not appear to have been intended for the portal's later audience as a purposeful clue to the presence of the pagan sculpture. The act of including the idol completes the meaning of the inscription. It adds to the portal and inscription, to use Cutler's words, "valences that are not communicated" in the sculpture's absence, at least for those who decided on the reuse and determined the inscription.88 However, I do not imagine that the decision to inscribe this text was made with later audiences in mind. Nor does the inability of later audiences to comprehend these valences disrupt the inscription's connection to the idol. I would argue that the cathedral's architects expected the relation between the two to exist whether or not it was subsequently perceived to exist, like the sacral space of the church, which continues even in disuse or profanation. Once we have identified the allusion of this inscription, several problems require further clarification. If the inscription is connected to the presence of the Mars sculpture, then why did Ste-Marie's architects not select a more immediately relevant passage of text to inscribe, one that explicitly mentions idols or idolatry? What source suggested this particular text to the cathedral's architects, and what is its relevance to the Resurrection relief? In relation to the iconography of the Resurrection, the verse inscription seems to operate as a command to the centurions guarding the tomb of Christ. The verb paveo, usually translated as "to reverence" in the context of Leviticus 26:2, literally means to tremble with fear or to be scared. In the account of the Resurrection in Matthew 28:4, the guardians at the tomb "did shake, and become as dead men" out of fear at the sight of the angel of the Lord. In the Vulgate, the two verses employ different language, paveo in Leviticus 26:2, timeo and exterreo in Matthew 28:4, but the ideas of fear and trembling expressed are very much the same. Ste-Marie's inscription seems to apply both as a reference to the fearful trembling of the guardians in Scripture and as an imperative for their conversion, a command to reverence Christ's sanctuary. The "sanctuary" invoked in the inscription also has two applications in the context of the Resurrection scene at SteMarie. Its primary reference is to the tomb once visible in the relief, site of the holiest Christian sanctuary, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Its secondary reference, as I take it, is to the cathedral Ste-Marie itself, which by means of its liturgical dedication also became the sanctuary of the Lord. Despite the inscription's seeming relevance to the Resurrection, it is a perplexing choice of text to caption this image. I do not know of any other example, pictorial or otherwise, linking this verse and the Resurrection. In fact, the verse, for the most part, is remarkably obscure.

While Leviticus 26:1 was straightforward in significance and widely discussed in medieval religious commentaries, Leviticus 26:2 was not. I am aware of only two exegetes who comment on the text.89 Also problematic is the verse's epigraphic singularity. I have not found any other epigraphic examples of the text, and truly unique inscriptions are rare in the Middle Ages. Medieval epigraphic forms tend instead to be repetitive and formulaic. However, in some respects, the inscription is typical of medieval epigraphy. Inscriptions on portals and facades commonly take the form of short scriptural excerpts that relate to the principal symbolic or liturgical functions of the portal, chief among them its roles in liturgical dedication, penitential practice, and the symbolic function of the portal as doorway to heaven.90 The limited role of Ste-Marie's inscription in exegetical tradition may actually make its significance for and availability to the architects of the cathedral easier to determine. The phrase attains real significance only in Walafrid Strabo's ninth-century Libellm de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiastids rerum, a widely read liturgical commentary of broad importance by one of the most influential authors of the Middle Ages.'" In the short ninth chapter of the Libellas, "On the Dedication of Temples and Altars," Strabo cites the text of Ste-Marie's inscription in an argument that contrasts pagan and Christian dedicatory practices. The rhetorical framework of his argument is adapted from Leviticus 26:1-2, which is based on a structured opposition of proscription and prescription (for example, "make you no idols," but rather "reverence my sanctuary"). Strabo employs the verse as evidence of the importance of properly consecrating altars and churches to their sacred purposes: For if pagans . . . dedicate temples and statues-more through excrements than through sacraments-to the demons who deceive them with the intention . . . of winning by this familiarity the demons' gracious protection (as for example Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, is read to have dedicated the statue which he had set up in the plain of Dura), should we not therefore take still more trouble to dedicate to God our Saviour the churches and altars of our religion with pure and true sacraments as evidence of our devotion, given that we hope to please the divine majesty with our liturgy and He in turn shall always deign to look after us and make in us a dwelling for Him who has said through the prophet: "Revere my sanctuary"?92 In this passage, Strabo opposes pagan dedicatory practice ("excrements") to Christian practice ("sacraments"), as Leviticus 26:1-2 opposes idolatry to proper worship. He invokes Leviticus 26:2 as proof of the importance and necessity of Christian dedicatory rites. His argument depends on that text's scriptural setting and on his commentary's involvement in the same structured opposition of proscription and prescription active in the verses from Leviticus. This passage from Strabo's Libellus offers the likely source and motive for the inscription on Ste-Marie's facade. Strabo reinforces the application of Leviticus 26:2 to idols and idolatry. In describing idols as objects precious to real demons, he uses language that would seem to describe perfectly the "anxious" manner of the Mars idol's reuse, "inverted" (that is, turned

around) and opposed by the cathedral's patron saint. Most important, he repositions our understanding of SteMarie's idol and inscription within the expected framework of dedication, arguably the dominant symbolic and liturgical context of the portal during the Middle Ages.93 As the public face of and means of access to the sacred space of the church, the portal was a prominent focus of a variety of liturgical practices tied to the dedication of the church. The portal served as a type for Christ, and sermons on the theme of dedication often refer to Christ as the door by which Christians must pass. Antiphons sung during the liturgy of dedication referenced the portal.94 Dedicatory rituals utilized it as a dramatic focus. In one of the most common medieval dedicatory rites, the Attolite portas, the portal functions as the central motif in a drama enacted by the bishop and deacon.95 The celebrant alluded to and manipulated the portal in other fashions as well, typically anointing the lintel and striking it with the episcopal crosier.96 The role of the portal in the liturgy of dedication deeply influenced medieval epigraphy, for the majority of medieval inscriptions in church portals relate to the portal's liturgical dedication. Going beyond common inscriptions that simply record the date of dedication and/or the names of patrons, these take their text from the language of the liturgy of dedication. This was the case in a second vanished inscription from Ste-Marie, DOMUS MEA DOMUS ORATiONis (my house will be a house of prayer), inscribed on the two lunettes above the doorways.9' This text, drawn from Scripture, was also an antiphon chanted during aspersion, usually of the walls and floor of the church, during the dedication ceremony.98 In fact, Leviticus 26:2 has a suggestive textual link to the dedicatory liturgy that perhaps reinforced the connection made by Strabo. The verb paveo in Leviticus 26:2 also introduces Genesis 28:17, which occupied a place of great importance in the medieval liturgy of dedication as the most common Introit antiphon of the dedication Mass: "Pavensque quam terribilis inquit est locus iste non est hic aliud nisi domus Dei et porta caeli" (And [Jacob] was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven).99 The textual and semantic similarities between the two verses, which evoke parallel ideas of religious awe and dread, are precisely the sort of concordances that fueled medieval exegesis. Genesis 28:17 also served as a common source for dedicatory inscriptions on church portals and facades. For instance, the Romanesque portal of St-Pierre-de-Genens (Gers), not far from Oloron, bears the inscription "Non est hic aliud nisi domus Dei et porta caeli." Strabo's essential contrast between pagan and Christian dedications is implied in the Mars sculpture's reuse, and we must assume that Ste-Marie's architects understood this when they chose to incorporate Strabo's "statue of Nebuchadnezzar" in their portal, so to speak. The idol's concealment and pictorial conversion into the sanctified figure of Mary evoked for them and their immediate audience the dedication of the cathedral "with pure and true sacraments." In addition to providing the source for the essential opposition of excrements and sacraments that is embodied in the Mary/Mars relief, Strabo's commentary indicates a second important link between idol, inscription, and the portal's dedicatory functiori, one with special relevance to the community at Oloron. After addressing the necessity of dedicating

churches and altars, Strabo, citing the example of Solomon's temple, demonstrates the importance of rededicating rebuilt or profaned churches: "In fact, it should be noted that the dedication of the temple was celebrated not only at its first construction but also at its second and third, after it had been destroyed or profaned by the gentiles because of the people's sins."100 Invading Muslim armies and migrating pagan tribes destroyed and profaned the early Christian cathedral in Oloron during the eighth and ninth centuries. The cathedral lay in ruins until the late eleventh century, when Pope Victor II reformed the diocese of Oloron and construction began on Ste-Marie on the foundations of Oloron's antique remains. The bishop's reoccupation of his seat entailed the rebuilding and, necessarily, the rededication of his cathedral, an obligation made all the more serious by this legacy of destruction and desecration. As Strabo observed, consecration, compromised by desecration or the neglect and ruination of the physical church, had to be reaffirmed or redeemed through liturgical means. Concerns about improperly consecrated or profaned churches loomed large in the medieval mind. Jacobus de Voragine, for instance, devotes special attention to concerns about profaned churches in a lengthy discussion of dedicatory rites in The Golden Legend, in the course of which he refers frequently to malevolent demons, devils, and idols that imperil the church's consecration.101 It appears from the Gallo-Roman architectural remains that underlie the cathedral that SteMarie's Romanesque architects may have known, or at least believed, that they were building on the site of Oloron's first, Early Christian cathedral. In principle, they desired to rebuild on the site of the former cathedral for symbolic, legal, and liturgical reasons, for which the temple of Solomon provides the very powerful biblical example. The cathedral of Huesca, as described earlier, presents an excellent local demonstration of the medieval preoccupation with issues of consecration and continuity. The important similarity between Huesca and Oloron resides in the acts of reuse, conversion, and consecrationreuse of the Huesca mosque and its conversion into the new cathedral, reuse of the pagan Mars relief and its conversion into a Christian sculpture. In the context of this preoccupation with reuse and reconsecration, the Gallo-Roman Mars idol at Ste-Marie contributes to an attempt to "undo" the Early Christian cathedral's loss of consecration. The reversal and burial of the sculpture amounts to a Christian conquest and subjugation of the idol and the demonic deity to which it was consecrated, subverting or perhaps converting its malevolent spiritual power. This action represents a kind of inversion-a reverse profanation. The cathedral's architects did more than dispose of the idol physically. By epigraphically evoking it in the rites by which they dedicated their cathedral, they interrupted its attachment-its dedication-to the demonic Mars. Strabo's commentary, with its structured rhetorical opposition of pagan and sacred rites, very likely suggested and reinforced this inversion. As excrements are to sacraments, so the idol's pagan dedication to Mars is to the cathedral's Christian one to Mary. The pagan idol is, in a theological and a very literal sense, the inverse or opposite of the Christian sacred image that opposes it in the cathedral's tympanum sculpture. This ritual abuse of the idol acted to promote the stability of the cathedral's own renewed consecration.

In this connection, I offer one final observation concerning the soldiers in the spandrels of Ste-Marie's facade. These figures depicting pagan centurions appear to bear (and have been so characterized by previous scholars) looks of revelation.102 This is plausibly the case, at least in the figure to the left of the portal (Fig. 8). It is possible that the two depict Stephaton and Longinus, who are more commonly associated with the Crucifixion but occasionally appear in images of the Resurrection as witnesses to Christ's divinity. Regardless of their precise identity, they both evoke through their iconography and their formal dependence on the Mars figure the idea of Christianity's triumph over paganism, which is at the heart of the motives for the Mars sculpture's reuse. I am tempted to consider the soldiers' formal imitation of the Mars figure as a form of image magic, specifically of envotement, defined in the twelfth century by John of Salisbury as a practice by people "who, in order to affect the minds and bodies of others, make effigies in a softish material like wax or earth of those whom they wish to undo."103 Envotement is popularly familiar to us for its role in voodoo, but it was also practiced in medieval Christian society. In the later Middle Ages, allegations concerning the practice of envotement fueled the Inquisition and polemic against idolatry and witchcraft.104 At Ste-Marie, however, this image magic accomplishes the church's ends. The soldiers, as effigies of Mars, may force the idol to undergo the same conversion that they themselves experience, to reverence the sanctuary of Christ, as the inscription on the image of the Resurrection commanded. The figurai significance of the concealed Mars idol has fascinating performative implications. The liturgical, pictorial, and possibly magical negotiations in which the concealed Mars figure is involved occur in a different dimension from that of the visible sculptures that decorate SteMarie's portal and facade. In fact, unless one is aware of the presence of the concealed sculpture, these negotiations are indiscernible. Ste-Marie's dedicator)' program is thus not symbolic, or at least not in the way that historians of medieval art are accustomed to speak of the rich, synthetic iconographie programs that sometimes decorate Romanesque facades. The dedicatory program revolving around the Mars sculpture was meaningful in a sacramental, performative context, one that transcended temporality. At the moment of the portal's dedication and forevermore, the existential role of the "buried" Mars sculpture, with its multitude of crosscutting references in the facade, is to reinforce the resacralization of the portal and cathedral and its contents. Plausibly, the Mary/Mars panel in the tympanum was itself consecrated at some point during the dedicatory ritual. The cross carved in the tail of the belt worn by the Virgin, identical toj;he types of crosses inscribed on altars for use as the objects of lustration during liturgical consecration, reinforces this notion. The Mars relief could have been anointed on this equivocal spot during the cathedral's dedication. This speculation is encouraged by the medieval practice of baptizing or consecrating images and other objects of pagan veneration as a way of officially marking their conversion to Christian use.105 Furthermore, the baptism or consecration of Chrisdan figurai artworks was common or even specifically required, for altarpieces, for example.10'" Consecration made the images suitable for veneration. Broadly speaking, consecration "makes images efficacious," as David Freedberg has argued.107 The

image of the Virgin in Ste-Marie's tympanum had a particular need to be efficacious, since it was on this representation of the cathedral's patron saint that the conversion of the Mars idol ultimately depended. Finally, any interpretation of the meaning of the Mars idol's reuse at Ste-Marie must contend with the sculpture's invisibility in the portal. This difficult problem challenges the common assumption that meaning must be communicative in nature, that it depends on availability to the eye and mind of the observer. The submerged meaning of the Mars idol's reuse is neither obvious nor even directly visible in the evidence that I have employed to reconstruct the idol's role in the portal-in the imitative centurions and in the allusion of the lost inscription. The concealing of the idol stands counterintuitively as the significant "act of representation," to use Michael Camille's term. The reuse of the Oloron Mars, rendered invisible, is cousin to other acts of erasure in medieval art, also termed by Camille "acts of representation."108 That is, the subtractive act of removing a thing from view may be just as significant to our understanding of it as the opposite, additive act of presentation. Medieval illuminated manuscripts abound with images that have been subjected to various forms of deliberate erasure. A variety of types of images- of sexual acts, of idols, of demons, and similar dangers-are sometimes found to have been carefully excised, smudged, scratched out, or in some manner effaced. It is perhaps not mere coincidence that such acts of erasure often involve representations of idols. The deliberate attribution to the idol of a buried, invisible role in the portal's decoration can also be compared to the deposition of relics within an altar or reliquary. The relic's invisibility after deposition does not decrease its deep meaning to the visible repository. Reliquaries, for instance, often appropriate the shape of the relic that they house. A fragment of bone from an arm or a skull was often housed in an arm- or head-shaped reliquary. In a similar fashion, two of the visible sculptures at Ste-Marie appropriate the shape of the idol that is embedded within the portal. The example of the altar may be additionally relevant to the case of the Oloron Mars, inasmuch as the insertion of relics in an altar, like the placing of the idol within the portal, was ancillary to the rite of consecration.109 Outside of these suggestive contexts-indeed, outside of the immediate setting of the cathedral's dedication-the Mars statue may have had little or no apparent meaning for the cathedral's audience. It is scarcely possible to consider even the inscription above the portal as a purposeful clue to the programmatic relations that the sculpture's recent rediscovery has laid bare. The inscription would have been difficult even to see from the ground. Few during the Middle Ages would have understood it, fewer still could have identified its scriptural source, and only the most learned could conceivably have linked it offhand with Strabo's commentary. What, then, prompted the decision to inscribe the text? The inscription's importance, like that of the Mars itself, lies not in its visibility but in its presence. More precisely, it is the significant absence of the Mars and the otherwise inscrutable presence of the inscription-the opposition of negative and positive, of excrement and sacrament-that held importance for the architects of the cathedral. The inscription and the sculpture, in this sense, are comparable to the very sacrament of consecration, the efficacy of which they acted to

ensure. Liturgical performance briefly gives form to consecration, which implies the opposition of sacred and profane. At the conclusion of the visible rites, however, consecration depends on the faculty of faith and not sight. It is invisible and indwelling, like the concealed Mars. Sidebar In 2001, restoration of Ste-Marie d'Oloron uncovered a pagan sculpture hidden within the fabric of the French cathedral's Romanesque portal. A stone slab in the tympanum, displaying on its obverse a depiction of the Virgin Mary, the cathedral's patron saint, bears on its reverse an image of the ancient Roman god Mars. The rediscovery of the idol exposes pictorial relations and textual responses to the antique sculpture in the portal's visible decoration that implicate the pagan image in the cathedral's Christian dedication. This perhaps unprecedented use of spolia communicated its deep significance through performance of the liturgical rites themselves.

AuthorAffiliation Peter Scott Brown received his PhD in 2004 from Yale University and is assistant professor of art history at the University of North Florida. He is currently writing a book on the social roles of medieval art in nineteenth-century France [Department of Art and Design, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FIa. 32224, pe,ter.brown@aya. yale.edu].

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Paganism&animism; Christianity; Middle Ages; Church buildings; Art history; Religion As Excrement to Sacrament: The Dissimulated Pagan Idol of SteMarie d'Oloron Brown, Peter Scott The Art Bulletin 87 4 571-588,569 19 2005 Dec 2005 2005 New York College Art Association, Inc.

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