A Multidisciplinary Perspective on an Enigmatic Ethiopian Processional Cross at the Bargello National Museum, Florence

This article brings a wide range of perspectives to bear on a fifteenth-century Ethiopian processional cross kept at the Bargello Museum in Florence, bridging the disciplinary divide among scientific, historical, philological, and art historical approaches to this type of artefact. Despite being the subject of several articles, the Bargello cross remains an enigmatic artefact. It has a complex stratigraphy, and it conveys tantalizing if vague information about the patronage of the emperors of Ethiopia and the devotion of local Christian communities within the territories they sought to control through various means. In visual terms, the cross displays different formulas for representing the human figure that can be taken as evidence of the movement of objects and visual ideas between Ethiopia and Europe at the time of its making. As an artefact that certainly reached Europe before the colonial period, the cross turns our attention to those moments in history when the exchange or gifting of objects between these territories could occur on more equitable grounds. From a material perspective, the features of the cross manifest dynamics of continuity and discontinuity with previous practices. For these and other reasons, the cross continues to elicit interest and to elude interpretation.