[NB: All translations from the text are by the reviewers.]

As summarized on the book’s back cover, the authors, Pierre Colman, professor emeritus at the Université de Liège, member of the Classe des Beaux-Arts of the Belgian Acedémie royale d’archéologie, and honorary member of the Commission royale des monuments, sites et fouilles, and his wife, Berthe Lhoist-Colman, art historian, include texts from twenty years of research on the study of the beautiful metal font of Saint-Barthélemy, in Liège, Belgium, a masterpiece of medieval art and probably the best-known baptismal font in the world. The book gathers ten of their earlier papers, starting in 1984, reprinted here “with a few parsimonious touch-ups,” as well as a totally new essay on the subject. These eleven works form the main body of the volume and are complemented by a brief portrait (silhouette) of the authors, abundant illustrative material in black and white as well as in color, indexes to the illustrations, persons, and places, and a table of contents.

The back cover also bluntly states the book’s thesis: “This font did not see the light of day in the Mosan region between 1107 and 1118; it dates from ca. 1000 AD,” It is on the basis of this dating by the Colmans that their main argument rests, primarily: that the font was not made in Byzantium, as some previous scholarship has claimed; that it was not captured in Novara by armed liègois troops; rather; and that it was made under the orders of Emperor Otto III and raided thereafter by one of the successors to the imperial throne. It is further claimed that the authors have found added support for their argument in a fresh interpretation of the famous dozen Latin verses related to this font, more specifically of the verb fecit, as will be noted below. At the very outset the authors admit to the introduction of disturbing viewpoints (vues dérangeantes), and the subtitle of the book adds to the air of unsettledness by qualifying this magnificent font as both a unique masterpiece and a focus of controversies.

The first paper, written by the Colmans in 1984, had been a relational study of the ivory of Notger and the baptismal font at Saint-Barthélemy. The rectangular ivory, which decorates a Gospel Book dated to the first half of the tenth century, has a Majestas Domini in a mandorla, with the animal symbols of the four Evangelists on its four corners, occupying the upper two thirds of the surface, while a praying nimbed figure half-kneels in the lower third; the Latin inscription all around the outer border identifies the kneeling figure as Notger himself. The ivory is generally accepted to have been a gift of Notger, bishop of Liège from 972 to 1008, to the collegiate church of Sait-Jean l’Évangeliste, which had been founded by him ca. 982–983. The Colmans argue that the original figure was probably King David, altered in the seventeenth century when the inscription was also added to support the cause of the bishop’s canonization.

The Colmans then introduce the history of the attribution of the font to Renier de Huy, starting with the early documentary evidence of the twelve verses from the Chronisum rythmicum Leodiense that clearly describe the font and give the name of Hellin, abbot of Notre-Dame-aux-Fonts, and therefore imply a dating for the font between 1107 and 1118. Later on, the name of Lambart Patras, a beater (batteur) from Dinant, was associated with the font, but such association was decidedly argued against by the noted historian Godefroid Kurth (“Renier de Huy,” in Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques et de la Classes des Baux-Arts, Académie royale de Belgique (1903): 522–524), who found an alternative candidate of his own, a Reinerus aurifaber/aurifex, in a chart from 1125. The authors then offer a complete history of the arguments and personalities involved with the font, and pursue comparisons of design, treatment, etc., with the fonts at Tirlemont, Furnaux, Saint-Séverin-en-Condroz, Hanzinne, and Mousson. They proceed to follow up on the possible track of the font, first to Italy and then eastwards to Byzantium, and on stylistic elements of ornamentation, particularly on the artist’s treatment of the human hands that appear on the font’s baptismal scenes: Jesus blesses in the Latin West way, argue the Colmans, the thumb outwards, whereas the manus Dei that projects its rays on John the Baptist’s baptism of Craton is rendered in the classical manner of Byzantine art. Was Jesus’ hand a later alteration, then? The Colmans conclude that iconographic and stylistic analyses place the font squarely in the Macedonian Renaissance, a product of the imperial workshops in the mid-tenth century. The Latin—and not Greek—inscriptions are explained by stating that they were not imprinted on the original wax mould, but carved directly on the cast surface at the time of abbot Hellin in the twelfth century. The paper concludes that the ivory of Notger and the font are therefore contemporary.

The short second paper, by Pierre alone, is an update of the first and addresses some of the same issues concerning the font: it rejects Kurth’s and M. Laurent’s (“La question des fonts de Saint-Barthélemy de Liège” in Bulletin monumental 83 (1924): 327–348) support for Renier de Huy’s authorship, arguing that the latter was a silver/goldsmith (orfèvre) and not a metal caster (fondeur); it also elaborates on the semantics of fontes fecit, interpreting fecit to mean dedit, therefore making Hellin the donor, not the commissioning patron. Colman uses Laurent’s judgment of the crudeness of execution of the Tirlemont font as proof that in Renier de Huy’s Liège the skill to produce a masterpiece like the font at Saint-Bathélemy could not be found. He also addresses issues related to the style of armament of the soldier represented on the font, and the probability that the font could have been raided from Milan or Novara; he then concludes with an endorsement of the Byzantine pedigree of the font.

The third paper responds to the rejection by the eminent Byzantinist Tania Velmans of the Colmans’ claim to the font’s Byzantine origins. Velman’s refutatio (reported in Joseph Philippe, “À propos de l’ivoire de Notger et des fonts baptismaux mosans XIIe siècle de Liège,” in Aachener Kunstblätter 53 (1985): 87) centered on her judgment that the representation of God the Father would have been unacceptable, even forbidden, in pre-fifteenth-century Byzantine art. Pierre identifies at least one such example in the ninth-century Sacra Parallela, and argues that, because the font had been made in Byzantium for a Latin West end-user, the prohibition on the representation of God the Father would not apply in this case. Pierre further argues that the Father is represented here in a “Christomorphic figuration” which he relates to John 10:30 (“I and my Father are one”) and 14:9 (“He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”), examples of which appeared in early Christian art (André Grabar, Le voies de la création en iconographie chrétienne, Paris: Flammarion, 1979: 108; Francois Boespflug, Dieu dans l’art, Paris: Le Cerf, 1984: 178–179).

In the fourth paper, Pierre discusses the rejections of their 1984 findings by Philippe (1985: 77–104; “Le bâpteme du Christ et la Trinité. Inflexions mosanes et byzantines aux Xie, XIIe et XIIIe siècles, in Studi in memoria di Giuseppe Bovini, Ravenna: Lapuccci, 1989, 495–510), Lemeunier (1985 [cited in Colman, 110]), J. Lafontaine-Dosogne (“Les fonts baptismaux de Saint-Barthélemy confrontés à la tradition byzantine,” Université de Liège, Faculté ouverte [F20], 1987; “La tradition byzantine des baptistères et de leur décor, et les fonts de Saint-Barthélemy à Liège”, in Cahiers archéologiques 37 (1989): 45–68), and a growing number of scholars; he even reports one case of virulent slander by a Brussels weekly! In the face of mounting opposition, Pierre reiterates his earlier theses, adding and revisiting details here and there, like his suggestion that abbot Hellin would have never known of a Greek philosopher like Craton, whereas Otto III’s court certainly would have; or that although the rendering of the armed soldier could definitely be Byzantine in source, carrying the sword sub axilla was a Germanic practice and therefore fitting on a font commissioned by a Holy Roman Emperor. Pierre rejects the possibility that the font might have been made by foreign (i.e., Byzantine) metal casters working in the Mosan region in the twelfth century, since there are no extant objects of similar craftsmanship, while the opponents of his theses argue that such evidence has been lost. Analyses of the alloys and isotopic varieties have provided inconclusive results, but the author announces the pursuit of further analyses of lead components in the near future.

In the fifth paper “problems are raised . . . about the pedestal, which originally had twelve oxen, like the ‘brazen sea’ of king Solomon, but which nowadays has only ten left, with parts of legs quite severely damaged. Various improvements are being proposed” (139). The sixth paper is the Colmans’ response to Kupper’s critical comments in Feuillets de la cathédrale de Liège (nos. 16–17 [cited in Colman, 141]), and poses the question that the Saint-Barthélemy font may be the original one from San Giovanni in Laterano. The authors suggest that thermoluminiscence and other dating techniques may perhaps be used on the font. The seventh paper announces the move of the font to the renovated narthex of Saint-Barthélemy planned for 1998, and informs on the proposals for the renovation of the font base. Pierre includes a number of suggestions of his own on this subject. The eighth paper is a brief report of an inventory from December 6, 1797, in which the font in Notre-Dame-aux-Fonts is described as a stone tub with a wooden cover. The ninth gives an update on the vehement dispute surrounding this font and includes Pierre’s short lecture delivered to the Classe des Beaux-Arts on October 5, 2000, calling for fair play by all parties. In the tenth paper Pierre expands on his arguments against Renier de Huy’s authorship of the font.

The eleventh and last paper is the longest, amounting to about one third of the book. In it the Colmans revisit the whole history of the font, bringing in additional studies on the inscription, iconography, style, and its relation with ancient art. Pierre and Berthe reiterate their earlier conclusion that their iconographic and stylistic analyses link the font to Byzantium, not to the Mosan region, and they appropriate Émile Mâle’s (Rome et ses vieilles églises, Paris: Flammarion, 1942: 158) comment on the frescoes of San Sebastiano in Pallara to this font: “We know without a doubt what Roman art was like at the end of the tenth century: a mixture of ancient tradition and influences from the Orient” (279).

With regard to their thesis on how and why this font made its way from Rome to Liège, the Colmans stick to their earlier explanations and add that the transportation of such heavy and voluminous object by road, river, or sea would not have posed a logistical problem, an accurate estimation by the authors in light of current knowledge regarding the long-distance transportation of finished fonts from Gotland and Tournai, for instance. The laboratory analyses on whose results Colman had placed high hopes (cf., fourth paper above) turned out a cruelle déception: since no traces of clay were found inside the oxen of the base, C14, palynological, and thermoluminiscence tests could not be carried out on the font. All the leaden composition tests proved was that the lead contents of oxen no. 9 were different from those of the rest. A cruel disappointment indeed! The paper ends with an exhortation by the authors for continued study of the font by Belgian and international scholars, even in the face of those who, like the episcopal vicar Raphaël Collinet, argue that “the font is a liturgical object and must therefore not be the object of study” (178). The authors note that their offer to make copies of their papers available gratis at the church of Saint-Barthélemy has been repeatedly rejected. In the later papers there appears a hint that the Colmans’ theses, which refute the Mosan pedigree of this masterpiece, have stirred the baser instincts of Wallon nationalism and thereby created a much more widespread opposition, not all scholarly, to their ideas.

The range of arguments presented provides readers with a good synopsis of the problems scholars face when dating baptismal fonts, their inscriptions, and iconographical programs. Research has shown that even inscriptions on fonts are not reliable evidence for ascertaining precise dates, as these have often been later additions. As directors of the Baptisteria Sacra Index (www.library.utoronto.ca/bsi), a corpus of more than 12,000 baptismal fonts from the early Christian period to the seventeenth century, we can add that without doubt the early date assigned by the Colmans does not correspond with any known works in the Latin West. The date of ca. 1000 AD is at least one hundred years before any other font in the Latin West was ornamented with such a complex, figural program. Most figural motifs begin to appear on baptismal fonts in the mid-twelfth century, parallel to the representation of narrative mural painting on the interior of churches.

Whether or not one agrees with the Colmans’ suggestive and daring theses, however, this should not detract from the value of the book, and there is much that deserves praise in it. By itself, collation of all the scholarship is a great contribution to the knowledge and study of the font. The main problem of this book lies in its structure and composition, which because it brings together eleven papers originally issued to stand alone, now includes much repeated material, making the reading awkward. Far from helping the Colmans’ cause, the repetitions tend to irritate and annoy the reader.