We have already seen that Vahram, the leading stone carver of the Haghpat monastery from the 1270s onward, perfected the “needle-carved” style of khachkars to such a degree that only a single step remained for his disciple Poghos to create the most perfect khachkar. Yet Vahram’s name in Armenian art history is tied even more strongly to another, more original innovation: figural khachkars, more precisely the khachkars of the Redeemer of All (Amenaprkitch).
The best-known example of this group stands in the Haghpat monastery, beside the northern entrance of the Church of the Holy Sign — near the corridor leading toward the lecture hall and the wine cellar, about which I recently wrote in connection with its “returned home” gate. Its defining feature is that the central cross of the khachkar, previously known only in its “life-giving” form framed by sprouting vegetal ornament, now also bears the corpus of Christ, surrounded by a number of additional figures.
Beneath the two arms of the cross, the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Evangelist stand on Christ’s right and left in mourning poses.
At the foot of the cross, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are kneeling. The latter is using a pair of pincers to pull a nail from one of Jesus’ feet. Beneath the crossbeam lies Adam’s miniature skull.
Above the two arms of the cross are the sun and the moon, and beside them the four evangelists: one standing each, and one each as if borne by a cherub. At the top of the cross is the inscription ԱՄԵՆԱՓՐԿԻՉ, Amenaprkch, meaning “Saviour of All,” beneath it the abbreviation of the name of Jesus Christ.
This combined scene of the Crucifixion and the Taking Down from the Cross is linked to yet another scene: the Ascension of Christ. In the separate horizontal register above the cross, two angels lift Jesus, surrounded by the radiant halo of heavenly glory. At the two ends of the scene stand Moses and Elijah, who, although figures of the Transfiguration, also frequently appear at the Ascension, where Christ once again assumes his heavenly form. The inscription on the upper cornice reads: Համբարձաւ Աստուած յաղաղակի փողի, Hambardzav Astvats yaghaghaki poghi, “God ascended with the joyful sound of the trumpet.” This is Psalm 47:5–6: “God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.” On the lower stone, beside the arms of the cross, stand two vertical rows of six apostles each, the witnesses of the Ascension. Thus the stone unites the darkest depth and the most radiant peak of redemption within a single khachkar frame.
This multi-figural representation is entirely unusual in medieval Armenian art, which, although not prohibiting the depiction of Christ’s body, nevertheless—due to its Monophysite/Miaphysite position—emphasised his divine essence and represented it through symbolic means. On Armenian crosses, for example, a corpus almost never hangs; instead, vegetal ornamentation that emphasises the divine work of salvation sprouts from and surrounds the cross.
Two questions arise. The first is why such a complex figural representation was adopted here. The second is what served as its model.
Let us begin with the second. In such an aniconic culture, the artist had nowhere to turn for a model of a figurative Crucifixion. Even on one of the most richly figurative works of Armenian art, the Church of the Holy Cross built in 916 at Akhtamar, there is—despite the dedication of the church—no Crucifixion scene on the exterior reliefs: such an image would have contradicted too strongly the Armenian theological emphasis on the glorious, salvific nature of the cross.
If an Orthodox iconographic model had been used, it would have looked something like this roughly contemporary Byzantine icon, now in the Ohrid Museum. Its extremely refined, monumental brushwork and early features of the Palaeologan Renaissance suggest that it was produced in a Constantinopolitan court workshop.
According to Orthodox theology, the Crucifixion is not the moment of defeat but of victory. The work of redemption has been accomplished; even in death, Christ hovers majestically before the cross. The S-curve of the body indicates the limpness of death, but not agony—rather a dignified, serene completion. The sorrow of Mary and John standing beneath the cross is likewise stylised. The icon presents suffering in accordance with the Byzantine tradition, in liturgical restraint and cosmic silence.
The next icon, from the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Sinai, is a so-called “cruciform icon,” painted by a Venetian master trained in the West but working in an Orthodox environment.
The composition follows Byzantine iconography, but Western influence is already visible in the details. In Italy, the figure of Christ on the cross was in this period transformed from Christus Triumphans into the Man of Sorrows, whose visible suffering invites the viewer’s compassion—compassio Christi—and allows identification with the clearly expressed grief of the witnesses, who are encouraged to follow it as a model of devotion. This major transformation, promoted primarily by the Franciscans, eventually contributed—through a long cultural chain—to the emergence of empathy and even psychology in Western culture. Its effect here is expressed in heightened emotionality. Christ’s dead body also hangs in an S-curve, but his face clearly shows the suffering endured. Mary raises her hand to her weeping face in the Classical and Gothic gesture of mourning, while the angels above the cross cover their eyes in grief. Minor iconographic details include Latin inscriptions, the two feet pierced by a single nail in the Western manner, and the blood and water flowing in two streams from Christ’s side, a Western Eucharistic reference.
The next image is already an Armenian miniature, from the Gospels of Gladzor created in 1323.
This image is a remarkable synthesis of Armenian and Western traditions. The latter is expressed in the gestures of suffering and in the multi-figural composition, which evokes the Passion plays known from Catholic contexts. The soldier carries a Western heraldic shield, but with a lion depicted on it, which in Armenian tradition symbolizes Christ as the one who overcomes death as a lion. The Armenian spirit is also reflected in the figure of Christ: his body, deliberately stylised and abstracted—since the human aspect is not the focus here—does not hang lifeless, but stands upright in triumph upon the cross, through which, as God, he has brought salvation.
The culmination of this Armenian–Western intertwining is the Haghpat khachkar. But before examining how this came about, we must first ask how so many intense Western influences reached distant Armenia.
Armenia may have been far from the West, but the West was by no means so far from Armenia at this time. The Frankish crusader principalities and kingdoms were established in the Levant, in the vicinity of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, which, as I have noted, entered into union with the Catholic Church in 1197. This initiated the influx of Western iconography into Armenian manuscript painting, whose centre at that time was in Hromkla in Cilicia, and manuscripts produced there quickly reached monasteries in northern and eastern Armenia.
A miniature from 1266 by Toros Roslin, the greatest master of Hromkla manuscript illumination: Crossing of the Red Sea.
Another route of Western influence was even more unusual. In 1236 the Mongol army occupied Armenia, which offered little resistance and became a vassal of the Mongols. The local lords were allowed to retain their power in exchange for tribute and military service: they had to fight as auxiliary troops of the Mongols against the Seljuks, which they presumably did not find too burdensome.
At the same time, the Mongols and Western crusaders began to take a mutual interest in one another, since they shared a common enemy in the Seljuks, and many of the khans’ wives were Nestorian Christians. This was the period when the papal court saw in the Mongol khan a potential “Prester John,” and seriously considered the possibility of his conversion. Öljeitü Khan, the builder of the UNESCO-listed mausoleum at Soltaniyeh, had been baptized as a Catholic in childhood under the name Nicholas, only later converting to Islam along with the Persian Mongols. Catholic missionaries, especially Franciscans and Dominicans, were present in large numbers at the Mongol court in Tabriz and from there evangelised the surrounding regions, including the Caucasus. Western iconography could also have reached Armenian lands through the portable religious objects they carried, especially since Armenian provincial lords were regularly required to appear in Tabriz for court audiences.
The Mongol court of Tabriz in a 1330 miniature of the Mongol Shahnameh (Louvre)
One such provincial lord was the head of the Artsruni family, Sadun, whose grandfather Kurd, as we have seen, was the patron of the monasteries of Haghpat and Sanahin. He too submitted to the Mongols, and during one of his visits to Tabriz in 1258, in the presence of the Great Khan Hülegü, grandson of Genghis Khan, he won a prestigious wrestling tournament, defeating the strongest competitors of the Mongol Empire. The khan was so impressed that he granted him the title of tarkhan, which conferred tax exemption and high status within the Mongol elite. Sadun then accompanied Hülegü on his Syrian campaign and distinguished himself at the siege of Aleppo. As a result, Hülegü granted him the province of Sasun, southwest of Lake Van, and appointed him commander-in-chief (amirspasalar) and governor (atabeg) of the Georgian kingdom, which had also submitted. King Demetre II of Georgia even gave him his sister in marriage. Later he became chief minister to the next Persian Mongol khan, Abaqa, thus acting as a bridge between the Mongols—and the Catholic missionaries active at their court—and the Christian kingdoms of the Caucasus.
According to its inscription, the Haghpat Savior khachkar was erected precisely as a “intercessor” (barekhavs) by Sadun’s son, Khutlu-Buga, during his father’s lifetime and at the height of his success, in 1273. This connection explains the khachkar’s western orientation. The cosmopolitan Artsrunis—equally versed in Armenian, Georgian, Mongol, and Catholic cultures—adopted the newest iconographic trend, that of Western Catholic art, which at the time also represented the elite artistic language of both the Cilician Armenian royal court and the Mongol khan’s court, in an era when the conversion of the Mongols to Catholicism was still on the agenda. The abbot of Haghpat, Hovhannes—whose name also appears on the cross—tolerated this just as the abbot of Sanahin, Grigor, tolerated his princely patrons moving back and forth between Georgian Orthodoxy and Armenian Gregorian Christianity. Only after the death of Khutlu-Buga, who had inherited his father’s titles, in 1293, did the conservative monks of Haghpat put an end to the production of figurative khachkars. Thus, together with the Haghpat example, only four such monuments survive, all carved in this region between 1273 and 1285, including at least one more by Master Vahram himself.
Where can Western influence be seen in the Haghpat Savior khachkar?
Christ’s body—according to Armenian tradition—is shown dead, yet not collapsed: instead, it stands upright with a stylized form, as one who, even in human death, remains sovereign and divine. The “living cross” tendrils of Armenian tradition are still present, but only as a background ornament. The witnesses of the Crucifixion, however, clearly display signs of grief. At the foot of the cross, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea pull the nail from Christ’s foot, just as in the contemporary Catholic Good Friday evening ritual of the deposition from the cross, which has survived in parts of Italy to this day, and which must have been widespread throughout the Catholic world at the time, even in the Mongol court.
The Ascension formula is exactly like those found in contemporary Romanesque carvings, for example on the 1020 tympanum of Saint-Génis-des-Fontaines in the Pyrenees. And the twelve apostles are arranged on both sides of the cross just like figures set into medieval portal jambs.
And that the Haghpat khachkar was truly a luxury commission is also confirmed by its still-brilliant red coloration. This pigment was made using Armenian cochineal, which at the time was more valuable than gold.
The basis of the vordan karmir, or “worm red,” pigment is the Ararat cochineal insect, Porphyrophora hamelii, which lives exclusively in the saline, alkaline fields of the Ararat plain and the valley of the Araxes River. The insect spends most of its life underground. Only once a year, during its reproductive period at the turn of September and October, do the females emerge to the surface in the early morning hours. Locals have only a few weeks to collect them by hand from the grass in the morning dew. The dried and powdered insects were used to extract the crimson pigment, Armenia’s most valuable export, used to dye the garments of rulers. Textiles, carpets, and paintings colored with it have preserved their vivid hue for centuries.
In the Middle Ages, the dye was also used as a medicine. It is therefore no coincidence that all four surviving Savior khachkars were revered as healing objects and for centuries served as pilgrimage destinations.
With the decline of the Artsruni family, the fashion for figurative khachkars also faded, but in the following century it would be reborn in a new form in the hands of Master Momik of Noravank. That will be the subject of a future post.
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