Gunhild’s Cross: Seeing a Romanesque Masterwork through Denmark

The development of Christian art in Denmark began c.960 under royal patronage and developed gradually over the following century, adopting and adapting ideas from other parts of western Europe. The canonisation of King Cnut (died 1086) provided a national saint. Around 1100, his sister Gunhild commissioned an ivory cross which may have been donated to Odense, where Cnut was martyred. The ideology of the imagery and the inscriptions echo the rhetoric around Cnut's sanctity.