Abstract

Featuring scenes of John the Evangelist’s trial on Ephesus and his later visions of the Apocalypse on Patmos, the Kleiner Johannes Altar by Hans Fries is his most intensely juridical work. The altar reveals his particular attunement to the investigative mode of truth-seeking refined by the judicial inquisitio, or inquiry, which further established the standards of evidence required to prove the miraculous and visionary. Fries conforms his representation of visionary experience to new concepts of the sacred redefined in the judicial sphere; his innovative pictorial and material strategies strongly elicit a judicial investigation of the image itself, thus allowing him to make distinctive claims about the visual certitude of his work. Fries’ own participation as an expert witness in an inquisitional trial, tasked with investigating a purported miracle, suggests that the altar’s claims of certitude were based not only on the increasing acknowledgement in this period of the epistemic value of the artisan’s craft, but also on the shared rhetoric between artisanal and judicial modes of inquiry.