Christ’s unction and the material realization of a stone in Jerusalem *

The Stone of Unction in Jerusalem came to be associated with the object upon which Christ’s body was laid and anointed after he was taken down from the cross and prior to his entombment. By 1335, the stone was being shown to pilgrims at the entrance hall of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. As fourteenth-century pilgrims’ accounts suggest, it was a flat slab of porphyry or marble at floor height, framed by a black-and-white checkered pattern. An illustration that accompanied the account of Niccolò of Poggibonsi, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1347, gives a basic notion of what the stone looked like (Figure 13.1). ¹ The green stone, la pietra verde as Poggibonsi termed it, is depicted from above surrounded by a schematic checkered frame. A woodcut taken from the sixteenth-century Viaggio da Venetia, often attributed to Noè Bianchi, ² provides more detail, showing the checkered pattern, arranged as an alternating set of black and white squares (Figure 13.2).