More St. John

Further investigations regarding the portrait of St. John in the last post suggest that it really is St. John and it really is the Gospel Book of Abbot Wedricus. Despite the confusion caused by all the variant spellings of the name of the good abbot. Despite the absence of anything about him - in so far as Bing and Google are concerned - apart from the fact that he commissioned this book. Or that it was done on his watch.

And there is, as often seems to be the case, considerable variation between the images on offer, with the left hand panel above being from reference 1 and the right hand panel being from reference 2, probably the same one as was used in the previous post, that is to say, reference 3.

Is the right hand panel a version which has been tidied up by Photoshop or some such? What you would have seen back in the 12th century? Is the left hand panel what you might see now if you made it to the museum in Avesnes-sur-Helpe, which owns the book in question.

Are we going to allow interesting discussions about whether the left hand path or the right hand path is the true path to push all consideration of the image itself out of mind? Has the image itself ceased to be of any interest in its own right, other than as a pawn in the culture wars of the late 20th century?

Reference 1: http://www.all-art.org/Architecture/10-7.htm. Offers the best art history gloss on the matter that I have been able to turn up.

Reference 2: http://artandfaithmatters.blogspot.com/2018/01/deuteronomy-1815-20-art-lectionary.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-power-of-word.html.