Diptych with Scenes from the Passion of Christ

A Personal Devotion
The six compartments of this hinged ivory diptych (DIP-tik, meaning “folded in two”) show events of the last week of Jesus’s life—a sequence known as the Passion. The story reads left to right and top to bottom, beginning with a double scene of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and then entering Jerusalem, and ending with the Crucifixion. These intricately carved scenes served as a focus for prayer and contemplation in a time when popular Christian devotional texts encouraged personal identification with the life and sufferings of Jesus.
Private worship beginning in the 1200s Christians in Western Europe augmented group worship in church with a more personal approach to devotion, worshiping privately in the home with family or alone. The small size of this diptych reveals that it probably was set up on a table or on an altar in a household chapel. Ivory objects for personal devotion were typically owned by the clergy, wealthy town merchants, or members of the aristocracy.