A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

intertextuality in hildegard’s works 161
above while six men and women look on. He appears to stand next to the
river Chobar.
The 12th-century illuminations of Ezekiel surveyed here provide signifijicant
contemporary witnesses to the themes of Hildegard’s exegesis and
the widespread interest in the prophet in her cultural milieu. The features
most commonly depicted in the Bibles are the opening word, Et, the four
creatures, the wheels, and the river Chobar. Hildegard leaves the Chobar
unmentioned, but the Bibles’ visual emphasis on the other three elements
of the prophet’s book reflects her exegetical concerns, as well as those of
her predecessors.
Furthermore, visual exegesis attests to the link that Hildegard establishes
between Ezekiel and John the Evangelist. The magistra’s contemporaries
depicted the visionary and typological connection between the two
prophetic and visionary fijigures. The frontispiece to the Gospel of John
in the Florefffe Bible depicts Ezekiel gesturing toward the tetramorph and
the “wheel in the midst of the wheel” (Ezek. 1:16). This mid-12th-century
Mosan manuscript, now in the British Library, was produced for the Premonstratensian
canons of Florefffe Abbey. The bottom zone of the frontispiece
to John’s Gospel (f. 199r) reads: In principio (Jn. 1:1); the middle
area depicts Ezekiel, John, Moses, and Job; and in the upper region, Christ
ascendant is flanked by the apostles. Ezekiel is situated to the lower left
of Christ. The inscriptions around the frame establish the typological
connection between Old and New Testaments, the book of Ezekiel and
the Book of Revelation, the prophet and the visionary evangelist. Moreover,
the two-page frontispiece to the entire Florefffe Bible depicts the
virtues.121 The illustrations of this Bible develop a visual exegesis that
parallels Hildegard’s written commentary. Both reflect the inspiration of
Gregory the Great on the typological parallels as well as on the role of the
virtues.
The importance of Johannine literature to Hildegard’s exegetical
endeavor extends to a broader identifijication with the Evangelist as
the prophetic author of the book of Revelation. The beloved disciple’s
121 Jefffrey F. Hamburger, St. John the Divine: The Deifijied Evangelist in Medieval Art and
Theology (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 86–87, identifijies a sequence attributed to Adam of St Victor
that associates the two fijigures: John perceived the truth of the wheels and revealed
the true nature of God. On the frontispiece to the Florefffe Bible, see Anne-Marie Bouché,
“The Spirit in the World: The Virtues of the Florefffe Bible Frontispiece: British Library,
Add. Ms. 17738, fff. 3v-4r.” in Virtue and Vice: The Personifijications in the Index of Christian
Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 2000), pp. 42–65; and Anne-Marie Bouché, “‘Vox
imaginis’: Anomaly and Enigma in Romanesque Art,” in The Mind’s Eye, pp. 306–35.