Image and imagination of the religious self in late medieval and early modern Europe : Emory University, Lovis Corinth Colloquia 1. 9782503520681

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PROTEUS:

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN

IDENTITY FORMATION Editorial Board Karl Enenkel

Mark Meadow

RELIGIOUS

IMAGINATION

OF THE

SELF IN LATE MEDIEVAL

AND EARLY MODERN

EUROPE

Leiden University

Reindert Falkenburg Leiden University University of California, Santa Barbara / Leiden University

Klaus Krüger Freie Universität, Berlin Walter S. Melion Emory University Groningen

Edited by

Reindert Falkenburg, Walter 5. Melion,

Advisory Board

Bart Ramakers

IMAGE AND

University

and Todd M. Richardson Emory University, Lovis Corinth Colloquia I

W

---Ξ---

VOLUME

1

BREPOLS

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Lovis Corinth Colloquium (1st : 2003 : Emory University)

Image and imagination of the religious selfin late

medieval and early modern Europe. - (Proteus : studies in

early-modern identity formation ; 1)

1. Soul in art - Congresses 2. Art, Renaissance -

Congresses 3. Soul - Christianity - Congresses 4. Reformation and art - Congresses 5. Counter-Reformation in art - Congresses 6. Humanism - History - Congresses 1. Title IL. Falkenburg, Reindert Leonard III. Melion,

Walter S. IV. Richardson, Todd M. 704.9'482 ISBN-13: 9782503520681

© 2007, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout,

Belgium

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2007/0095/48 ISBN: 978-2-503-52068-1

Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper 2

ὄ

à

b

Ye

For Kay Corinth, in memoriam

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

List of Illustrations

xi

Foreword

XXIX

Introduction: Meditative Images and the Psychology of Soul WALTER

1

S. MELION

Authenticity and Fiction: On the Pictorial Construction

37

of Inner Presence in Early Modern Italy KLAUS

KRUGER

Shaping the Selfin the Image of Virtue:

71

Francesco da Barberino’s 1 Documenti d’Amore SHELLEY

MACLAREN

Black Holes in Bosch: Visual Typology in the

105

Garden of Earthly Delights REINDERT

L. FALKENBURG

Discernment and Animation, Leonardo to Lamazzo MICHAEL

Sleep of the Flesh: The Agony of the Visible at the Limits

of the Frame in the Iconography of the Prayer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane PIERRE-ANTOINE

A

n

ee

133

COLE

163

FABRE

Sle

The Body of Christ at Marburg, LEE PALMER

1529

195

WANDEL

Taverns and the Self at the Dawn of the Reformation CHRISTOPHER

215

OCKER

The Rule of Metaphor and the Play of the Viewer

237

in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy BRET

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ROTHSTEIN

To See Yourself Within

It: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s

277

Festival of Fools TODD

M. RICHARDSON

‘Planting Seeds of Righteousness’, Taming the Wilderness of the Soul: Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s St John the Baptist in the Wilderness JOHN

307

DECKER

sister Mary Sargent. At Emory University, Clark Poling, Professor Emeritus of

Monastic Hospitality: The Cloister as Heart in Early Netherlandish Painting HENRY

329

LUTTIKHUIZEN

Crafting Repose: Aesthetic and Cultural Aspects of the Hermitage Landscape by Jan Brueghel the Elder LEOPOLDINE

351

PROSPERETTI

The Meditative Function of Hendrick Goltzius’s

379

Life of the Virgin of 1593-94 WALTER

he Lovis Corinth Colloquia are made possible by the generous gift of Kay Corinth, in whose memory the co-editors wish to dedicate this volume. We are likewise grateful for the keen interest shown by her

S. MELION

Rubens’s ‘Ecce Homo’ and ‘Derision of Silenus’: Classical

Antiquity, Images of Devotion, and the Ostentation of Art CHRISTINE GOTTLER

427

Art History, provided the vision and practical experience that helped make the Lovis Corinth Endowment a reality. Jean Campbell, Associate Professor of Art History, was instrumental in organizing the first Corinth Colloquium; her acquisition of a Quadrangle Fund grant enabled the participation of John Decker, Shelley MacLaren, Leopoldine Prosperetti, and Todd Richardson. Larry Silver was chief respondent at the conference, and continued to offer advice and support throughout the editorial process. The administrative staff of Emory’s Art History Department — Carol Bridges, Angela Economy, and especially the indispensable Toni Rhodes — facilitated every aspect of conference organization. For their unfailing interest and advocacy a further debt of thanks is owed to the department’s faculty and graduate students, in particular to a succession of excellent chairs — Clark Poling, Gay Robins, Dorinda Evans, and Judith Rohrer.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Colour Plates

(pp. 97-104) Plate 1. Michele Tosini, Vision of the Madonna di Loreto with Saints, Prato, San Vincenzo. 1560-61. Reproduced courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence.

Plate 2. Giovanni Battista Crespi called Il Cerano, Virgin Mary with Saints Francis and Carlo Borromeo, Turin, Galleria Sabauda. c. 1610. Reproduced courtesy of the Department of Art History, Freie Universitat, Berlin. Plate 3. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Almenno, Parish Church. 1560s. Reproduced courtesy of the Department of Art History, Freie Universitat, Berlin. Plate 4. Benvenuto Tisi, Vision of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Florence, Church of San Marco. 1593. Reproduced courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence. Plate 5. Francesco Vanni, Vision of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Lucca, Church of San Romano. 1602. Reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza B.A. per le province di Lucca. Plate 6. Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. c. 1505-10. Reproduced courtesy of the Museo Nacional del Prado.

xii

Illustrations

Plate 7. Hieronymus

Bosch,

Garden

of Earthly Delights, Madrid,

Nacional del Prado. Detail of the left wing. Museo Nacional del Prado.

Reproduced

Museo

courtesy of the

Plate 8. The Descent of the Holy Ghost and Three Old Testament Scenes, Darmstadt, Hessische Universitats- und Landesbibliothek, HS. 2505,

Speculum humanae salvationis, Chapter

32. c. 1360. Reproduced

with

permission.

Plate 9. Peter Paul Rubens, Ecce Homo, Museum,

inv. no. GE-3778.

St Petersburg,

c. 1610-11.

Photo reproduced with permission.

the State Hermitage

Oil on panel,

125.7

x 96.5 cm.

Plate 10. Peter Paul Rubens, Drunken Silenus, private collection. 1610s. Oilon

panel, 122.7 x 97.5 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Plate

11.

Peter

Paul

Rubens,

Bacchic

Scene:

Dreaming

Silenus,

Vienna,

Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Kiinste, inv. no. 756. c. 161012. Oil on canvas, 158 x 217 cm. Photo reproduced with permission.

Plate 12. Peter Paul Rubens, Nymph and Satyr, Madrid, private collection. Oil

xiii

Illustrations

Figure 3, p. 25. Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, Instruction of the Young, London, British Library, from Afbeeldinghe van d'eerste eeuwe der Societeyt lesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

Figure 4, p. 28. Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, The Society Is Purified through Adversity, London, British Library, from Afbeeldinghe van d eerste

eeuwe der Societeyt Iesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British

Library.

Figure 5, p. 28. Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, Wages of Persecution, London, British Library, from Afbeeldinghe van d'eerste eeuwe der Societeyt lesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

Figure 6, p. 31. Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, The Society Is Perfected through Adversity, Atlanta,

Woodruff Library,

Emory

University,

from

Afbeeldinghe van d'eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Jesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with permission.

on canvas, laid down on masonite (originally on wood, transferred first to

canvas, and then laid down on masonite in 1981), 105 x 76 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Black-and-W hite Figures: Melion

Figure 1, p.22. Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, 4 Pure Heart Pictures God, London, British Library, from Afbeeldinghe van d’eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Jesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library. Figure 2, p. 25. Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, Workmen of the Society, London, British Library, from Afbeeldinghe van d’eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Jesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

Kriiger Figure 7, p. 38. Sorprendente Foto Apparizione, anonymous votive image. 1950s.

Figure 8, p. 38. Andrea di Bartolo, Saint Catherine of Alexandria Praying, Assisi, Church of San Francesco. c. 1370. Reproduced courtesy of the Sacro Convento Assisi, P. G. Ruf.

Figure 9, p. 41. Antoine Wiericx, imaginative vision (imaginaria visio), Brussels,

Cabinets des Estampes. After 1591. Reproduced courtesy of the Department

of Art History, Freie Universitat, Berlin.

Figure 10, p. 41. Vincenzo Foppa, Madonna and Child, Milan, Pinacoteca di Castello Sforzesco. c. 1460-70. Reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza P.S.A.E. per le province di Milano e Bergamo. Figure 11, p. 44. Andrea di Bartolo, Saint Catherine of Alexandria Praying,

Assisi, Church of San Francesco. c. 1370. Detail. Reproduced courtesy of the Sacro Convento Assisi, P. G. Ruf.

Illustrations

Figure 12, p. 44. Andrea di Bartolo, Saint Catherine of Alexandria Praying, Assisi, Church of San Francesco. c. 1370. Detail. Reproduced courtesy of the Sacro Convento Assisi, P. G. Ruf.

Figure 13, p. 46. Cult statue of the Madonna di Loreto, Loreto, Sacello della Santa Casa. Early fourteenth century. Reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza B.A.A. delle Marche, Ancona. Figure 14, p. 46. Sebastiano Sebastiani, Statue of the Madonna di Loreto, Montalto Marche, Convent of Santa Maria delle Clarisse. Early seventeenth century. Reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza B.A.A. delle Marche, Ancona.

Figure

15, p. 47. Madonna

di Loreto, anonymous

engraving.

1580s—90s.

Reproduced courtesy of the Department of Art History, Freie Universitat, Berlin.

Figure 16, p. 51. Lucio Massari, Vision of the Madonna di Loreto with Saints, Milan, Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. c. 1620-25. Reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza BB.AA.SS. di Modena e Reggio Emilia.

Illustrations

XV

Figure 23, p. 64. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Madonna with Saints, Gaverina, Church of San Vittore. 1576. Reproduced courtesy of the Department of Art History, Freie Universitat, Berlin. MacLaren

Figure 24, p. 76. Roccha amoris, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4077, fol. 1'. Reproduced with permission. Figure 25, p. 76. Docilitas, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4076, fol. 4, Reproduced with permission.

Figure 26, p. 77. Patientia, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4076, fol. 64°. Reproduced with permission. Figure 27, p. 77. Spes, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4077, fol. 66". Reproduced with permission. Figure 28, p. 78. Justitia, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4076, fol.

87’. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 17, p.51. Antonio Amorosi, Vision of the Madonna di Loreto with Saints and the Souls of Purgatory, Comunanza, Church of Santa Caterina. c. 1685. Reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza BB.AA.SS. di Modena e Reggio

Figure 29, p. 78. Etternitas, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4077, fol. 85°. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 18, p. 52. Annibale Fontana, Statue of the Madonna Assunta, Milan,

Figure 31, p. 79. Virtu in genere, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4076, fol. 6". Reproduced with permission.

Emilia.

Santa Maria presso San Celso. 1586. Reproduced courtesy of N. Riegel.

Figure 19, p. 56. Cult image of the Holy Virgin Mary, Milan, Santa Maria presso San Celso. Early fifteenth century. Reproduced courtesy of N. Riegel. Figure 20, p. 56. Altar of the Holy Virgin Mary, Milan, Santa Maria presso San Celso. 1580s. Reproduced courtesy of N. Riegel. Figure 21, p. 63. Francesco

Vanni, Saints with the Madonna

Figure 30, p. 79. Mors, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4076, fol. 15". Reproduced with permission.

Falkenburg

Figure 32, p. 129. Hieronymus Bosch, Haywain

Triptych, Madrid, Museo

Nacional del Prado. Reproduced with permission.

dei Mantellini,

Siena, Santa Maria del Carmine. 1595 and c. 1270. Reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza B.A.S. Siena.

Figure 22, p. 63. Giovanni di Pietro called Lo Spagna and Giovanni Tedesco, Statue of the Crucified Christ and painted figures of the Crucifixion, Terni, Pinacoteca Comunale. 1480s and early sixteenth century. Reproduced courtesy of the Department of Art History, Freie Universitat, Berlin.

Cole

Figure 33, p. 135. Orazio Gentileschi, St Francis andan Angel, private collection. c. 1600. Image from Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001).

Reproduced with permission.

Illustrations

Figure 34, p. 135. Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio, St Francis and an Angel, Hartford, Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art.c. 1594. Reproduced with the permission of Nimatallah / Art Resource, New York.

Figure 35, p. 136. Orazio Gentileschi, St Francis and an Angel, Madrid, Prado. c. 1607. Image from Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001). Reproduced with permission.

Figure 36, p. 136. Annibale Carracci, St Francis Consoled by an Angel, London, British Library. 1595. Image from Gabriel Finaldi and Michael Kitson, Discovering the Italian Baroque: The Denis Mahon Collection (London: National Gallery Publications, 1997). Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

Figure 37, p. 137. Paolo Veronese, Agony in the Garden, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera. 1583-84. Reproduced with the permission of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. Figure 38, p. 137. Filippino Lippi, Vision of St Bernard, Florence, Badia. 1480s. Reproduced with the permission of Scala / Art Resource, New York. Figure 39, p. 147. Federico Zuccaro, Taddeo Zuccaro Leaving Home, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. c. 1590. Reproduced with permission. Figure 40, p. 152. Michelangelo, Last Judgement, Vatican City, Sistine Chapel.

Illustrations Fabre Figure 44, p.

165. Giulio Campi, Orazione nell orto, Milan, Galleria Ambrosiana.

1588. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 45, p. 167. Antonio Campi, Résurrection avec scénes de la Passion, Paris, Musée du Louvre. 1569. Reproduced with the permission of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux,

Paris.

Figure 46, p. 172. Louis Richeome, La peinture spirituelle (Lyon, 1611), p. 463. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre. Reproduced with the permission of the Centre Sèvres, Paris.

Figure 47,p. 173.

Anonymous, Deposition, Pont-à-Mousson, Eglise Saint-Martin.

c. 1430. Reproduced with the permission of the d’anthropologie religieuse européenne, EHESS, Paris.

Fonds

du

Centre

Figure 48, p. 174. Anonymous, Saint Sépulcre, Freiburg im Breisgau, Freiburg Cathedral. c. 1330. Reproduced with the permission of the Fonds du Centre d’anthropologie religieuse européenne, EHESS, Paris.

Figure 49, p. 175. Anonymous, Saint Sépulcre, Freiburg im Breisgau, Freiburg Cathedral. c. 1330. Detail. Reproduced with the permission of the Fonds du Centre d’anthropologie religieuse européenne, EHESS, Paris. Figure 50, p. 177. Anonymous, Scénes de la Passion, Toulouse, Musée des Grands-

Reproduced with the permission of Scala / Art Resource, New

Augustins. Late fourteenth century. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre.

Figure 41, p. 153. Michelangelo, Last Judgement, Vatican City, Sistine Chapel.

Figure 51, p. 177. Anonymous, Scénes de la Passion, Paris, Musée de Cluny.

1534-41.

York.

1534-41.

Detail:

angel. Resource, New York.

Reproduced

with

the permission

of Scala / Art

Reproduced with the permission of the Musée des Grands-Augustins.

Twelfth century. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre. Reproduced with the permission of the Musée de Cluny.

Figure 42, p. 153. Michelangelo, Last Judgement, Vatican City, Sistine Chapel. 1534-41. Detail: demon. Reproduced with the permission of Scala / Art Resource, New York.

Figure 52, p. 178. Giovanni da Campione, Deposizione e Resurrezione, Florence,

Figure 43, p. 160. Domenichino, St Nilo Healing a Possessed Boy, Grottaferrata,

Figure 53, p. 178. Andrea della Robbia, Annunziazione, Florence, Museo

Abbazia. 1608-10. Image from Evelina Borea,

Domenichino (Milan: Edizioni

per il club del libro Florence, 1965). Reproduced with permission.

Museo del Bargello. 1340. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre. Reproduced with the permission of the Museo del Bargello. del

Bargello. Fifteenth century. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre. Reproduced with the permission of the Museo del Bargello.

Figure 54, p. 181. Albrecht Diirer, Agony in the Garden, Frankfurt, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut. 1521. Reproduced with permission.

Illustrations

xviii

Illustrations

xix

Figure 55, p. 182. Anonymous, Resurrection, Hrasvotlje (Slovenia). Thirteenth century. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre.

Figure 67, p. 190. Donatello, Agony in the Garden, Florence, Chiesa San Lorenzo. 1460-66. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre.

Figure 56, p. 182. Anonymous, Resurrection, Hrasvotlje (Slovenia). Thirteenth century. Detail. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre.

Figure 68, p. 191. Donatello, Resurrection, Florence, Chiesa San Lorenzo. 1460-66. Detail. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre.

Figure 57, p. 184. Hyeronimus Natalis, Evangelicae Historiae Imagines, Antwerp. 1593. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre. Reproduced with the

Figure 69, p. 191. Donatello, Resurrection, Florence, 1460-66. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre.

permission of the Centre Sèvres, Paris.

Figure 58, p. 184. Hyeronimus Natalis, Evangelicae Historiae Imagines, Antwerp. 1593. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre. Reproduced with the permission of the Centre Sèvres, Paris. Figure 59, p.

185. Hyeronimus Natalis, Evangelicae Historiae Imagines, Antwerp.

Figure 60, p.

185. Hyeronimus Natalis,

1593. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine permission of the Centre Sèvres, Paris. 1593.

Photo

Fabre. Reproduced

with

the

Evangelicae Historiae Imagines, Antwerp.

courtesy of Pierre-Antoine

permission of the Centre Sèvres, Paris.

Fabre. Reproduced

with

the

Figure 61, p. 186. Hyeronimus Natalis, Evangelicae Historiae Imagines, Antwerp. 1593. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre. Reproduced with the permission of the Centre Sèvres, Paris.

Figure 62, p. 187.

century. Reproduced with the permission of the d’anthropologie religieuse européenne, EHESS, Paris. Bargello.

Fifteenth

del Verrochio, Resurrezione,

century.

Photo

San

Lorenzo.

Figure 70, p. 193. Donatello, Resurrection, Florence, Chiesa 1460-66. Detail. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre.

San

Lorenzo.

Rothstein

Figure 71, p. 240. Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 14". c. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna. Figure 72, p. 241. Hours of Mary

of Burgundy,

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis

Vienna,

Osterreichische

1857, fol. 43". c. 1475. Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna. Figure

73,

p.

242.

Hours

Nationalbibliothek,

of Mary

Codex

of Burgundy,

Vindobonensis

Vienna,

Osterreichische

1857, fol. 2". c. 1475. Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Anonymous, Agony in the Garden, Rodez Cathedral. Fifteenth

Figure 63, p. 187. Andrea

Chiesa

courtesy

Fonds

Florence,

du

Centre

Museo

of Pierre-Antoine

del

Fabre.

Reproduced with permission. Figure 64, p. 188. Anonymous, Agony in the Garden, Codalet, Saint-Michel de

Cuxa Abbey. Photo courtesy of Pierre-Antoine Fabre.

Figure 65, p. 189. Anonymous, Prince of Death, Strasbourg Cathedral. Thirteenth century. Reproduced with the permission ofthe Fonds du Centre d'anthropologie religieuse européenne, EHESS, Paris. Figure 66, p. 189. Anonymous, Prince of Death, Strasbourg Cathedral. Thirteenth century. Reproduced with the permission ofthe Fonds du Centre d'anthropologie religieuse européenne, EHESS, Paris.

Figure 74, p. 243. Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 31°. c. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna. Figure

75,

p.

244.

Hours

Nationalbibliothek,

of Mary

Codex

of Burgundy,

Vindobonensis

Vienna,

Osterreichische

1857, fol. 31. c. 1475. Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Figure 76, p. 246. Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 61". c. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna. Figure 77, p. 247. Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis

Vienna,

Osterreichische

1857, fol. 175". c. 1475. Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

xx

Illustrations

Figure

78,

p.

248.

Hours

of Mary

of Burgundy,

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis

Vienna,

Osterreichische

1857, fol. 36’. c. 1475. Photo

of Burgundy,

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis

Vienna,

Osterreichische

1857, fol. 147". c. 1475. Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Figure 80, p. 250. Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, fol. 148", Codex Vindobonensis 1857. c. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna. Figure

81,

p.

251.

Hours

of Mary

of Burgundy,

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis

Vienna,

82,

p.

252.

Hours

of Mary

1857, fol. 134". c. 1475. Photo

of Burgundy,

Vienna,

Osterreichische

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 160". c. 1475. Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Figure

83,

p.

253.

Hours

of Mary

of Burgundy,

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis

Vienna,

84,

p.

256.

Hours

Nationalbibliothek,

of Mary

1857, fol. 135". c. 1475. Photo

Codex

of Burgundy,

Vindobonensis

1857,

Vienna,

Osterreichische

fol. 27". c. 1475.

Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna. Figure

85,

p.

257.

Hours

of Mary

of Burgundy,

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis

Vienna,

Osterreichische

1857, fol. 103". c. 1475. Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Figure 86, p. 260. Petrus Christus, Young Man at Prayer, London, National Gallery of Art. 1450s. 37.8 x 28.3 cm. Reproduced with permission. Figure

87,

p.

263.

Hours

of Mary

of Burgundy,

Vienna,

Osterreichische

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 138°. c. 1475. Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Figure

88,

p.

265.

Hours

of Mary

of Burgundy,

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis

Vienna,

Figure 90, p. 272. Hours of Mary

of Burgundy,

Vienna,

Osterreichische

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 75. c. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Figure 91, p. 274. Hours of Mary

of Burgundy,

Vienna,

Osterreichische

Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 141‘. c. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Osterreichische

1857, fol. 136". c. 1475. Photo

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Richardson

Figure 92, p. 278. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (after), Festival of Fools, Los Angeles County Museum. After 1570. Engraving, first state of three, 32.5 x 43.7 cm. Los Angeles County Fund © 2006 Museum Associates/LACMA. Figure 93, p. 283. Bruegel, Festival of Fools. Detail.

Osterreichische

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Figure

Figure 89, p. 271. Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 54", c. 1475. Photo

Osterreichische

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Figure

xxi

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Figure 79, p. 249. Hours of Mary

Illustrations

Figure 94, p. 283. Cornelius Bos, Triumph of Bacchus. Detail.

Figure 95, p.284. Cornelius Bos, Triumph of Bacchus, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet. 1543. Engraving, three plates; 31.3 x 25.9 cm (left), 31.4 x 30.2 cm

(central), 31.4 x 30.5 cm (right). Reproduced with permission.

Figure 96, p. 285. Cornelis Cort after Maarten van Heemskerck, Triumph of Pride, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. 1564. Engraving, 22.5 x 29.6 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 97, p. 286. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Everyman, London, British Library. 1558. Pen and brown ink, 20.8 x 24.1 cm. Reproduced with the permission

of the Trustees of the British Library.

Figure 98, p. 290. Bruegel, Festival of Fools. Detail.

Figure 99, p. 292. Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel, Spring, New York,

Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1570. Engraving, 22.8 x 28.7 cm. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926 (26.72.57) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Figure

100, p. 292. Philips Galle after Pieter Bruegel the Elder,

(Temperance),

Rotterdam, Museum

Temperantia

Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Engraving, 22.3 x 28.7 cm. Reproduced with permission.

c. 1560.

xxii

Illustrations

Illustrations

xxiii

Figure 101, p. 293. Gerard de Jode after Hans Vredeman de Vries, History of Daniel series, Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus, Thesaurus Biblicus. 1579.

Figure 112, p. 339. Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Burning of the Bones of Saint John the

Figure 102, p. 293. Phillips Galle after Frans Floris, Massacre of the Innocents, Leiden, Universiteit Leiden Prentenkabinet. Engraving, 33.1 x 41.6 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 113, p. 340. Master of Spes Nostra, Four Regular Canons Meditating with

Etching, 23.9 x 32.5 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 103, p. 294. Phillips Galle after Maarten van Chastity, Chatsworth, Devonshire Collection. 1565. Photo: Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute the permission of the Trustees of the Chatsworth Figure

104, p. 294. Maarten

van

Heemskerck,

Heemskerck, Triumph of Engraving, 19.4 x 26.5 cm. of Art. Reproduced with Settlement.

Vesta Temple,

Tivoli, Berlin,

Staatliche Museen PreuBischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett. Engraving. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 105, p. 296. Arena of Verona, Italy. Figure 106, p. 298. Anonymous, The Dean of Renaix, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert I, print room, 1557(?). Engraving, 28.3 x 40.6 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 107, p. 300. Thyl’s Uilenspiegel, London, British Library, c.57.c.23.(1),

b6r°. Illustration from the German version, Strasbourg. 1515. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

Baptist, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Altarpiece for the Haarlem Jansheren, exterior right wing. After 1484. Reproduced with permission.

Saints Jerome and Augustine beside an Open

Grave and a Scene of the

Visitation, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. c. 1500. Reproduced with permission.

Prosperetti Figure 114, p.353. Jan Brueghel the Elder, Hermit Reading among Ruins, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, inv. n. 75a. Oil on copper. Reproduced with the

permission of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

Figure 115, p. 354. Jan Brueghel the Elder, Hermitage Landscape with Cistern, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, inv. n. 75c. Oil on copper. Reproduced with the permission of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

Fig. 116, p.354: Jan Brueghel the Elder, Coastal Landscape with Praying Hermit, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, inv. n. 75f. Oil on copper. Reproduced

by

permission of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

Figure 117, p. 355. Jan Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with Scattered Hermitages,

Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, inv. n. 74d. Oil on copper. Reproduced by

permission of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

Figure 108, p. 300. Thyl’s Uilenspiegel, London, British Library, c.57.c.23.(1), Alr. Illustration from the title page of the German version. 1515. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

Figure 118, p. 355. Jan Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with Standing Hermit,

Figure 109, p. 304. Devil’s and the Angel’s Mirrors. 1500. German woodcut.

Figure 119, p. 364. Hieronymus Bosch, The Hermit Saints Triptych, Venice, Palazzo Ducale. c. 1493. Oilon panel. Reproduced with the permission of Art

permission of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

Resource, New York.

Decker

Figure 110, p. 309. Geertgen tot Sint Jans, St John the Baptist in the Wilderness, Berlin, Staatliche Museen. c. 1490. Reproduced with permission.

Luttikhuizen

Figure 111,

Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, inv. n. 74e. Oil on copper. Reproduced by

p. 336. Master of Alkmaar, Altarpiece of Seven Acts of Mercy, Amsterdam,

Rijksmuseum. 1504. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 120, p. 365. Joachim

Patinir, Triptych with the Penitence of St Jerome, New

York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fletcher Fund. c. 1518. Oilon panel. Reproduced with the permission of Art Resource, New York.

Figure 121, p. 365. Joachim Patinir, Triptych with Hermit Saints, Paris, private collection. c. 1520. Oil on panel. Reproduced with permission.

S.

xxiv

Illustrations

Figure 122, p. 372. Johannes and Raphael Sadeler after Maarten de Vos, The

Temptation of St Anthony, Cambridge, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Plate 2, from the series Solitudo sive Vitae Patrum Eremicolarum.

Reproduced with permission.

1588.

Figure 123, p. 372. Johannes and Raphael Sadeler after Maarten de Vos, Saint Paphnutius, Cambridge, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Plate 12, from the series Solitudo sive Vitae Patrum Eremicolarum. 1588. Reproduced with permission. Figure 124, p. 375. Cornelis van Dalem, Hermitage Landscape, Frankfurt,

Stadelsches Institute. 1561. Drawing. Reproduced with the permission of Ursula Edelmann.

Melion

Figure 125, p. 383. Hendrick Goltzius, Annunciation, from the Life of the Virgin, Baltimore Museum of Art, Garrett Collection. 1594. Engraving, 46.5 x 35 cm. Reproduced with permission. Figure 126, p. 384. Hendrick Goltzius, Visitation, from the Life of the Virgin, Baltimore Museum of Art, Garrett Collection. 1593. Engraving, 46 x 35.1 cm.

Reproduced with permission.

Figure 127, p. 385. Hendrick Goltzius, Nativity, from the Life of the Virgin, Baltimore Museum of Art, Garrett Collection. 1594. Engraving, 46.1 x 35 cm. Reproduced with permission. Figure 128, p. 386. Hendrick Goltzius, Circumcision, from the Life of the Virgin, Baltimore Museum of Art, Garrett Collection. 1595. Engraving, 46.5 x 35.1 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 129, p. 387. Hendrick Goltzius, Adoration of the Magi, from the Life of the Virgin, Baltimore Museum of Art, Garrett Collection. 1594. Engraving,

46.0 x 35 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 130, p.388. Hendrick Goltzius, Holy Family with the Infant St John, from the Life of the Virgin, Baltimore Museum of Art, Garrett Collection. 1593. Engraving, 46 x 35 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Illustrations

XXV

Figure 131, p. 389. Hendrick Goltzius, Last Supper, from the Passion, London,

Warburg Institute. 1598. Engraving, 19.6 x 13 cm. Reproduced courtesy of the Warburg Institute.

Figure 132, p. 392. Cornelis Cort after Maarten van Heemskerck,

The Deluge,

from the Story of Noah, London, British Library. c. 1559. Engraving, 20.2 x

25 cm. Reproduced courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library.

Figure 133, p. 392. Philips Galle after Adriaen de Weerdt, The Parting of Orpah

from Naomi and Ruth, from the Story of Ruth, London, British Library. c. 1579. Engraving, 21.4 x 27 cm. Reproduced courtesy of the Trustees of the

British Library.

Figure 134, p. 393. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Hans Vredeman de Vries, Daniel Brought before King Nebuchadnezzar, from the Story of Daniel, London, British Library. 1579. Engraving, 24.2 x 32.5 cm. Reproduced

courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library.

Figure

135, p. 393.

Hendrick

Goltzius, Exemplar

Virtutum,

Christi, London, Warburg Institute. 1578. Engraving, Reproduced courtesy of the Warburg Institute.

from 24

x

the

Vita

18.4

cm.

Figure 136, p. 400. Engelhard de Pee, Family Portrait of Wilhelm V and Renata

von Lothringen as the Presentation in the Temple, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen. c. 1575/85. Oil on canvas, (formerly c. 220 x 195 cm). Reproduced with permission.

205

x

190

cm

Figure 137, p. 412. Jacopo Bassano, The Nativity with Saints Victor and Corona

(II Presepe de San Giuseppe), Bassano del Grappa, Museo Civico. 1568. Oil on canvas, 240 x 151 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 138, p.412. Jacopo Bassano, The Nativity, Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore. 1592. Oil on canvas, 421 x 219 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 139, p. 413. Aegedius Sadeler after Jacopo Bassano, Annunciation to the Shepherds, London, British Museum. c. 1593. Engraving, 27.6 x 20.9 cm. Reproduced with permission. Figure 140, p. 414. Jan Sadeler after Jacopo Bassano, Annunciation to the Shepherds, Bassano del Grappa, Museo Civico. c. 1595. Engraving, 22 x 28.4 cm.

Reproduced with permission.

xxvi

Illustrations

Illustrations

xxvii

Figure 141, p. 416. Hieronymus Wierix after Maarten de Vos, In nocte natalis

Figure 149, p. 454. Anthony van Dyck, Studies of the Passion of Christ (after

University, from Jerome Nadal, Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (Antwerp, 1595). Engraving, 23 x 14.5 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Museum, Dept of Prints and Drawings, fol. 20’. Photo reproduced with

Domini: Nativitas Christi, Baltimore, John Work Garrett Library, Johns Hopkins

Figure 142, p. 417. Hieronymus Wierix after Bernardino Passeri, In aurora

natalis Domini: De pastoribus, Baltimore, John Work Garrett Library, Johns

Hopkins University, from Jerome Nadal, Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (Antwerp, 1595). Engraving, 23.2 x 14.5 cm. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 143, p.418. Albrecht Dürer, Circumcision, from the Life of the Virgin, London, Warburg Institute. c. 1505. Woodcut, 29.2 x 21 cm. Reproduced courtesy of the Warburg Institute.

Figure 144, p. 426. Boétius a Bolswert, The Soul Painting the Nativity upon his Heart, London, British Library, from Antonius Sucquet, Via vitae aeternae (Antwerp, 1625). Engraving, 13.7 x 9.8 cm. Reproduced courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library.

Giorgione

and

Titian),

from

‘Italian

Sketchbook’,

Figure 145, p. 434. Peter Paul Rubens, Centaur Tamed by Cupid, Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, inv. no. WRM/Z 5888. 1605-08. Black chalk, 48.1 x 37.1 cm. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Rheinisches Bildarchiv.

the

British

permission.

Figure 150, p. 455. Ludovico Cardi (‘il Cigoli’), Ecce Homo, Florence, Galleria Palatina di Palazzo Pitti, inv. no. 1912-90. 1607. Oil on canvas, 175 x 135 cm. Photo reproduced with the permission of Scala / Art Resource, New York.

Figure 151, p. 455. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Crowning with

Thorns, CariPrato, Cassa di Risparmio di Prato SpA. c. 1605. Oil on canvas, 178

x

125 cm.

Photo

reproduced

with

the permission

of Scala / Art

Resource, New York.

Figure 152, p. 456. Agostino Carracci, Ecce Homo (after Correggio), New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund (1953). 1587.

Engraving, 37.5 x 26.7 cm, first state. Photo reproduced with permission.

Figure

153, p. 462. Peter Paul Rubens, Drunken

Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek.

Gôttler

London,

Silenus, Munich, Bayerische c. 1618, addition c. 1625. Oil

on panel, 212 x 214.5 cm. Photo reproduced with permission.

Figure 154, p. 463. Peter Paul Rubens, Silenus Leaning Against a Tree Trunk, Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. no. 1716b. Black chalk, 39.5 x 26.5 cm.

Reproduced with permission.

Figure 155, p. 469. Peter Paul Rubens after Andrea Mantegna, Bacchanal with

Figure 146, p.440. Cornelis Galle I after Peter Paul Rubens, Ecce Homo, London, the British Museum, Dept of Prints and Drawings. c. 1620. Engraving, 37.3 x 28.5 cm. Photo reproduced with permission.

Silenus, Paris, Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 20178, recto.

Figure 147, p. 442. David Teniers the Younger, The Picture Gallery of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie im Neuen Schloss, Schleifheim, inv. no. 1819. Oilon canvas, 96 x 125

Figure 156, p.470. The Mocking of Christ; the Suffocation of Hur; the Derision

cm. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

Figure 148, p. 447. Titian, Ecce Homo, St Louis Art Museum, inv. no. 10:1936. c. 1570-76. Oil on canvas, 109.2 x 94.8 cm. Photo reproduced with permission.

Pen

and

brown

ink,

and

oil, 24.5

x

21.9

cm.

Photo

reproduced

with

permission. of Noe;

the Humiliation

of Samson,

from Speculum

humanae salvationis,

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Xyl. 37, Chapter 19, blockbook edition, Low Countries. c. 1468. Woodcuts. Photo reproduced with permission.

Figure 157, p. 473. Peter Paul Rubens, The Drunken Alcibiades Interrupting the Symposium, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Harold K. Hochschild, 1940, inv. no. 40.91.12. Lead pencil and pen and ink on brown

paper, 26.8 x 36.2 cm. Photo reproduced with permission.

xxviii

Illustrations

Figure 158, p. 474. Peter Paul Rubens, Hercules Mocked by Omphale, Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 854. c. 1606. Oil on canvas, 278 x 215 cm. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux (Jean-

Gilles Berizzi). Figure 159, p. 476. Peter Paul Rubens, The Tormenting of Christ, Grasse, Hôpital de Petit-Paris. c. 1601-02. Oil on panel, 224 x 180 cm. Photo reproduced with permission.

Figure 160, p. 479. Peter Paul Rubens (copy), Christ as Salvator Mundi, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, inv. no. 3696. Panel, 131.5 x 81.5 cm. Photo reproduced with permission.

Figure 161, p. 479. Peter Paul Rubens (copy), Christ Carrying the Cross, Mainz, Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum, inv. no. N. 1496. Panel, 102 x 88.5 cm. Photo reproduced with permission (Ursula Rudischer).

Antiquifiima queq; commentitia,

FOREWORD

O Proteus, Pellenian old man, with as many forms as an actor has roles, having now the body of a man (vir), now the body of a beast (fera), come, tell us, what motive turns you into all kinds of shapes, so that being so changeable, you have no fixed shape? I reveal the signs of antiquity (vetustas) and the primeval (primaevus) age, concerning which each man dreams (somnio) according to his whim.”!

his volume inaugurates a new book series offered by Brepols Publishers, PROTEUS: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation. The founding series editors, Professors Karl Enenkel, Reindert Falkenburg, and Mark

A. Meadow, chose this title to highlight the theme of the mutability of identity in the early modern period, the notion that selfis less a predefined entity than an Pellenæe fenex cui forma eft biftria +

ui modo

Qa

Proteu, ‘ uirt fers, modo membra frre. ,

membra

Dic age que fpeaes Yatio te uerhtm

omnes,

Nulla fit ut uario certs figura tibiè

Signa uetuflatis, prime ui € quo

De q

x quifq; fuo

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changing appearance of the actor as he adopts different roles, thereby linking protean mutability with the performance of identity. There is no stability to that

identity, that self, however. As we can observe in the image that accompanies the

preftro fecli,

epigram, Proteus is an incoherent mixture, the upper body of a man, the tail and

wings of a serpent, and the forelimbs ofa lion. Intriguingly, the myth underlying apprehending 8 the self as it elusively) and in to the difficulty PP the emblem speaks P

ἐμ; arbitrio.

Andreas Alciatus, Emblematum Libellus, Paris: Chrétien Wechel,

ongoing process. The present volume also represents the first collaboration between PROTEUS and the Emory University Lovis Corinth Colloquia. The text that accompanies Andreas Alciati’s emblem of Proteus appeared first in the 1542 Paris edition issued by Wechel, from which the illustration used here is taken. The verse compares the shape-shifting ancient sea deity to the constantly

1542.

! English translation from, Andreas Alciatus: The Latin Emblems, Indexes and Lists, ed. by Peter

M. Daly and Virginia W. Callahan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), emblem

183.

xxxii

Foreword

endlessly alters in form. This stands as a meaningful metaphor not only for the protean early modern self but also for the challenge facing modern historians who grapple with this problem. Recent scholarship in a variety of historical disciplines, including art history,

literary studies, history of religion and others, has indeed begun to reshape and

re-evaluate the concept of self and identity in the early modern period (1350-

1650). Rather than thinking of early modern identity, whether individual or collective, to be a discrete, static entity, we now understand it to be formed,

INTRODUCTION:

MEDITATIVE IMAGES

AND THE PSYCHOLOGY

OF SOUL

transformed, re-formed, even deformed, in an ongoing, dynamic process. In late

medieval and early modern meditative and contemplative practices, for example, the continuous (re-) modelling of the inner self, or soul, became a major objective per se. Personal and social identities were also constituted through communal rituals and performances (e.g., liturgies, Joyous Entries, weddings, etc.). The built

environment, the physical habitat — including church, city, theatre, Kunst and

Wunderkammern,

and market — was thus the locus for a set of social and

cultural practices by which the performance of outer identity was inseparably and

relationally bound to the construction of inner self. This series is devoted to contributions that address the mediality and instrumentality of text, image, ritual, and habitat as interconnected mechanisms of identity formation. In the response that Proteus offers to Alciati’s question, he charmingly — and

for both Alciati and the modern scholar self-reflexively — equates the challenges facing the historian with those of the actor, forever revisiting and revising the

past in order to constitute the constantly shifting needs of the present. In this

sense, we hope the PROTEUS series will provide a much-needed forum for scholars from a wide variety of disciplines currently exploring these issues. By bringing

together a diverse range of fields and methodologies, we hope to provide a stimulus to further innovative research in early modern studies. The volumes that appear in this series will themselves vary from one another, as we welcome

contributions in the form of monographs, sets of collected essays (as in the present volume), and critical editions of important early modern texts relating

to self and identity.

Walter S. Melion

ublished under the auspices of the series Proteus: Studies in Early Modern

Identity Formation, this collection consists of fourteen essays on the function of images as instruments of soul formation. The essays, now

extensively revised, originated as papers delivered at Emory University’s first Lovis Corinth Colloquium (3-6 April 2003), organized by Reindert Falkenburg and

myself, on the topic ‘Image and Imagination of the Religious Selfin Late Medieval

and Early Modern Europe’. Funded by a generous bequest to the Art History Department from Kay Corinth, daughter-in-law of the German painter Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), the triennial Lovis Corinth Colloquia address topics in northern art and architecture produced between 1400 and 1700. Bridging the early fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries, Image and

Imagination of the Religious Self asks how and why pious men and women manipulated, or better, cultivated their souls by means of religious images — verbal, visual, textual, pictorial, seen, or imagined —

that elicited affective responses

symptomatic of the soul’s powers of sensation, cognition, and transformation. How

did they use processes of visualization to engage the soul’s mediating function as

vinculum mundi, its pivotal position in the great chain of being between heaven

and earth, temporal and spiritual experience? In the pseudo-Aristotelian psychology underlying the moral and natural philosophy of the early modern period, knowledge

of the immaterial (and therefore indiscernible) soul was held to derive from its discernible operations — its sensitive faculties of motion, emotion, and sense

I wish to thank Todd Richardson for his close reading of this essay.

3

Walter S. Melion

(both external and internal) and its intellective faculties of reason, memory, and will.’ Within this system, images held a privileged place, since they were themselves appreciated as mediating vincula par excellence, that is, media that appealed

equally to man’s earthly and divine powers — his motive and perceptual faculties

on the one hand (associated with the sensitive soul), his rational faculties on the other (associated with the intellective soul). Images in other words activated the full spectrum of operations by which the soul might be not only experienced, but also monitored, measured, and ultimately, manipulated.

The human faculties were understood to receive and generate images hierarchically. Relayed to the five external senses, sight chief among them, the sense images — species — emitted by all perceptible objects stimulated sensations that translated these images into similitudes susceptible to processing by the five internal senses — memory, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and the common sense. (These categories derive from Gregor Reisch’s academic textbook, the

Margarita philosophica, as analysed by Katherine Park in her classic propaedeutic on Renaissance philosophy.’) Whereas the common sense discriminated among similitudes of the sensory species, comparing and contrasting these images (of images), and also discerning general qualities such as shape and size, estimation judged by a kind of intuition whether the images originating in external sense were worthy to be embraced or renounced. Imagination gathered the images deriving from

the common sense, storing them as a prelude to further manipulation by the active fantasy. In turn, fantasy produced phastasmata — new images composed from the parts of old images assembled by the imagination. Finally, memory housed all these images, whether old or new, along with the reactive judgements of estimation, viewing these externally derived images and internally devised phantasmata as constituents of prior experience, that is, of the temporal past. The soul’s action of

internal sense was thus seen to liberate images from mere sense perception, allowing

them to be adjusted, revised, and in effect invented, and further, preparing them for analysis and abstraction by the higher cognitive faculties of ratiocination (intellect), determination (will), and recollection (memory as thought rather than storage). The

soul, by exercising these facultative processes, could review its past operations, judge their relative merits, and aspire to improve itself, by means of engaging with the

! On the Aristotelian psychology, see Katherine Park, ‘The Concept of Psychology’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.455-63. All translations mine.

? Katherine Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, in Cambridge History, pp. 464-84, especially 465-73.

INTRODUCTION

3

images it received, stored, altered, improved, and eventually abstracted and even transcended. In spiritual terms, the movement from external to internal sense, and the larger movement from sensation to intellection, was conceived as the soul’s ascent from divinely created nature to its source in God, Creator of all things, an ascent secured by the soul’s climbing of its God-given faculties, most crucially the powers of image-reception, -production, and -cognition. Ifimages served in principle to gauge the soul’s progress toward (or distance from)

God, how did they function in practice? To answer this question, at least provisionally, and provide a prelude of sorts to the fourteen case studies that follow, I want to examine three examples of image-use — two textual and one emblematic:

the anonymous Grote evangelische Peerle (Great Evangelical Pearl, Antwerp, 1538; Latin edition, 1545), Ludolphus of Saxony’s Vita Christi (Life of Christ, numerous

editions from 1474 on), and the Afbeeldinge van d eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Jesu (Image of the First Century of the Society of Jesus, Antwerp, 1640; translated from

the Imago primi saeculi, compiled by Joannes Bollandus, and others). All three are meditative treatises intended to make the soul aware of its spiritual condition and desirous of conforming itself to God, by inspiring it to consider how the soul’s relation to Christ, the imago Dei, is like that of an image to its original, of a likeness to the thing itis like. These publications embrace Incarnation theology, arguing both implicitly and explicitly that we, being images of God made man in Christ, engage in the spiritual practice of imitatio Christi by visualizing his life and death, and then according body and soul to his words and deeds. More to the point, they include chapters on the soul’s imaging faculties: meditative prayer is tendered as the chief means by which the soul fashions (or better, refashions) itself in the image and likeness of God, using its ability to represent Christ as a mnemonic and restorative.

By dwelling on its power to bear witness to the mysteries of the vita Christi, the soul recalls that Christ as the image of God is also the perfected image of the soul; the soul may portray Christ to itself because it is the living image of Christ, and in executing this image, bringing it to life, the soul enlivens and renews itself.

First published by the Carthusian Dirk Loer of Cologne with a preface, dedicatory letter, and epilogue by his fellow Carthusian Gerard Kalckbrenner

(1535), the Peerle appeared in expanded form as Die grote evangelische Peerle in 1538. Nicolaas Van Esch of Diest, renowned as a spiritual adviser to the Beguines,

3 On the Peerle and its various editions, see Albertus Ampe, Den tempel onser sielen, door de

schrijfster der Evangelische peerle, Studién en tekstuitgaven van Ons geestelijk erf, 17 (Antwerp:

Ruusbroecgenootschap, 1968), pp. 20-30; and La perle évangélique, ed. and trans. by Daniel Vidal

(Grenoble: Millon, 1997), pp. 7-149.

4

Walter S. Melion

reissued the book in 1542 and 1545 (the latter edition in Latin), testifying to its great

success in his preface. The anonymous author, as Loer informs us on the basis of information supplied by Kalckbrenner, was a noblewoman well versed in the spiritual life (‘van ioncx op tot inder outheyt in dit geestelic leven wel geprobeert’), perhaps a lay sister intimately familiar with Carthusian spirituality. The epilogue of the Latin edition describes her as a friend of God illuminated by the Holy Spirit, from whom her spiritual exercises directly derive (‘praefata exercitia atque

materia ex spiritu sancto et propria experientia a quodam illuminato Dei amico’).* Kalckbrenner, having certified the book’s orthodoxy, dedicated it to those sister pilgrims who journey inwardly toward the source of living waters, longing to be united with Christ as vriendinnen (‘op dat wy dit inwendighe wegheken tot onsen oorspronck mochten wanderen, ende die aderen des levendyghen waters in ons mochten ghewaer worden’). As Albertus Ampe has noted in his edition of the

same authors Tempel onser sielen, Kalckbrenner may have dedicated the Grote evangelische Peerle to the same circle for whom two other spiritual pilgrimages — Ons liefs heeren pelgrimagie and Onser liever vrouwen pelgrimagie — were written; like the Peerle, both works were based on the popular Jesus-collacien of the socalled Deerne Gods (Handmaid of God).’ All these books are likely to have crossed lay and clerical lines, marking a devout community of pilgrim brothers and sisters whose souls were seen to be journeying toward the bridegroom Christ. The Grote evangelische peerle provides the lineaments of an image theory focusing on the image of Christ to be discerned by the internal faculties of sense, memory, reason, and will. Meditative prayer consists of spiritual exercises that help the soul discover its innate ability to fashion this image — an image made possible by Christ’s human semblance; such exercises require the soul to plumb the nature and extent of its likeness to Christ, by turning inward (‘insincken des geests’), summoning the faculties (‘vergaderinge alre crachten’), subduing the heart (‘nederbuyginge des herten’), and disciplining the body, especially the external senses (“gereetheyt des lichaems, ende dye gedwongenheyt der sinnen’).°

Margarita evangelica, incomparabilis thesaurus divinae sapientiae (Cologne: Melchior

Novesianus, 1545), fol. LL4‘.

2 Ampe, Den tempel, pp. 23-25.

6 Die grote evangelische peerle vol devoter gebeden, godlijcker oeffeninghen, ende geesteliker leeringhen, hoe wij dat hoochste goet (dat God is) in onser sielen sullen soecken ende ΕΙΠΕ ende wt alle onse crachten liefhebben, ende besitten (Antwerp: Peetersen, 1537), pt2, chap. 29: ‘Vander liefe

gods comende wt den ghelove ende hope’: ‘so verre alsmen altijt waket ende biddet, dat is dye

gront ende dat rechte fondament ende begin alre geestelicheit. Mer men macht menichsins

INTRODUCTION

The Peerle refrains from detailed description of this image; its rhetoric is relatively

plain and declarative, rather than pictorial. Each Christian soul is allowed the freedom to discover the manner and meaning of its mirroring in the visage of Christ to be summoned from within itself.” In Part 1, Chapter 27, ‘How we should

pray to God and imprint the image of Christ both externally and internally’, the

anonymous author enunciates her meditative program: she intends to activate a

prayerful

dynamic

that

negotiates

between

the poles

of image-bound

and

imageless worship of God. As she puts it, God is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit, rather than externally by means of the pleasureful senses (“ende niet inder

wtwendichz, noch inden sinnen, na lustlicker wijsen’); and yet, she refuses to

proscribe all images, for her true purpose is to imprint in us the image of Christ incarnate, that arrogates all other images, making them transparent to himself.

(‘Nyet en wil ic hier mede alle beelden verbieden, want ic wil een beelt in u

drucken.’) Since Christ is the mirror image of God, portrayed by the heavenly Father who fashioned him from his very essence, through him we have access to the imageless image of the Father’s divinity, of the Word of God itself:

Within yourselves you shall rise resolutely into the heart of the Father, and there grasp that imageless image (onverbeelde beelt), that eternal Word, that the heavenly Father bodied forth from his divine being in the manner of a mirror image (4 spiegelicker

wijsen), in order that it might penetrate and transfuse the powers of your soul. Whether

eating or drinking, going, sleeping or waking, never stray from this image, that comes from

the essence of our Lord Jesus Christ’s imageless divinity; toward it direct all your life and soul, both internally and externally.*

oeffenen so een yegelijck geest ende gront daer in beweghet wort, mer bysonder salmen altijt behouden dat in neygen ende insincken des geests, ende dye vergaderinge alre crachten, ende dye nederbuyginge des herten met oprechter meyninghe in allen wercken, ende dye gereetheyt des

lichaems, ende dye gedwongenheyt der sinnen.’

7 On the mirroring and the viewing of mirror images in the mystical tradition, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, ‘Speculations on Speculation: Vision and Perception in the Theory and Practice of Mystical Devotion’, in Deutsche Mystik im abendlandischen Zusammenhang. Neu erschlossene Texte, neue methodische Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte, ed. by Walter Haug and Wolfram

Schneider-Lastin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), pp. 353-408

3 Die grote evangelische peerle, pt 1, chap. 27: ‘Ghi sult u in dijnre inwendichz dick altemael

verheffen opwaert int vaderlike herte, ende daer suldy nemen dat woort, dat die hemelsche vader wtgebeelt heeft wt sinen godlijcken opdat, dat alle dijnre sielen crachten doordringhe ende doorgae. Eet ghi, of waect ghi, dit minlike beelde en lact unemmermeer afleyden

onverbeelde beelt, dat eewige afgront na spiegelicker wijsen, ghy, drinct ghi, gaet ghi, slaept van desen beelde, dz is vander

godhz ons Heeren Jesu Christi, in weseliker wijsen, ende niet in beeldeliker wijsen, ende na dat so recht al u leven, ende u wesen inwendich ende wtwendich.’

Walter S. Melion

The soul that imitates Christ is like a painter gazing closely at an image he wishes to copy, diligently transcribing it stroke for stroke upon his panel (‘Ende doet recht als een schilder dye een beeldt ontworpen wil na een ander, dye aensiet met

alder naersticheyt, alle streken des beeldts, ende scrijft daer na in zijn tafel’). The

soul is also the image so transcribed, that attaches through Christ to the pleasingly imageless image of his divine nature, eternally issuing from God’s being. If Christ is the mirror image of God, he is also the mirror of humankind, through whom we strive to glimpse our likeness to him. The author avers that she has supplied the spiritual exercises by which we may labour to dissolve our opaque self-image — that is, any image of ourselves diverging from that of Christ — until we are translated into his very image, becoming wholly transparent to it (‘ende de

wise ende oeffeninge volge alder meest, tot dz ghi dijns selfs ende alder creaturen ontbeeldet werdes ende inden godlijcken beelde boven allen beelden verslonden’).

This act of translation follows from sustained viewing of the loving image of

Christ's humanity that must be seen to inform all times and places:

Behold this dear image according to his humanity (na zijnder menscheyt), and observe

his measureless humility and gentleness. Where it pleases you, whether alone or accompanied, continuously or discretely, always hold your mirror up and turn toward it

all your heart’s strength. There direct your ways and speak all your words, as if you stood

before him.”

And so, concludes the author, whenever we address this mirror, let us think that

he stands before us and hears our words, that he meets our gaze, looking upon our face and into our intentions (‘so denct dat hi staet ende hoort u woorden, ende

dat hi is voor u aensichte, ende aensiet al u gelaet ende meyninge’). Any approach

to the formless image of divinity (‘dz ongebeelde formelosen beelt’) is solely by

way of this mirror of and in the soul. In Part

1, Chapter 48, ‘How

we must

abjure all variousness and curiosity’, the author resumes this train of thought, admonishing us that vaulting ambition seeks to regard heavenly things, to encompass

by investigating many

images, whereas

there is only one

that of Christ, which we must hold both within and without.

licit image,

The author examines the higher psychology of this process of mirroring in Part 2, Chapter 20, ‘How God dwells in us, and how we are made in God’s image’. ;

’ Die grote evangelische peerle, pt 1, chap. 27: ‘Aensiet ooc dit lieflijcke beelde na zijnder

menscheyt, ende neemt waer zijn ootmoedicheyt ende saechtmoedicheyt, ende dit niet met wijsen mer boven alle wijsen. Waer dattet u ghevalt in eenicheit, of in menichfuldichz, in steden, ende in tijden, neemtemmer dinen spieghel voor u, ende daer aen keert alle ws herten crachten. Rechtet uwe wegen, ende spreect alle uwe woorden, als oft ghi voor hem stont.’

INTRODUCTION

We gaze into the mirror of God by exercising our faculties of memory, reason, and will. With memory, we recall all that God has deigned to give us, reminding ourselves that he bestowed everything we possess (‘ende daer in verweende ic na dyen dat hi hem geweerdicht my te geven’). With reason, we understand God by reference to all that is visible or imaginable. Although he is incomprehensible in himself (for he commences without beginning and finishes without ending), we

can grasp this very notion of incomprehensibility only because we recognize that

as creatures made by God, we originate in him. Further, with respect to the angels who long perpetually to behold him, he is understood to be desirable; with respect to the saints who rejoice in beholding him, he is understood to be sufficient; with

respect to all creatures he has made, wisely judges, and mercifully orders, he is understood to be wondrous; and with respect to men, in each of whom he lives as in a temple, he is understood to be loving. With the will, we desire to love God

who spurns no one, having privileged humankind above all creatures by fashioning

men in his image and likeness (“Wi sullen hem minnen, want hy ons eerst heeft gemint, ende tot sinen beelde ende gelijckenisse gemaect dat hi anders geen creatueren en wilde geven’). The author views the soul’s operations — its acts of memory, thought, and affection — through the lens of its responses to the image of Christ engendered as a mirror image of itself. Christ is the image of God, and we the image of Christ; being like him, we share in his likeness to God, for the image of the image is like the likeness this image portrays: We are made in the image of God (totten beelde gods), that is, in the knowledge and understanding of God’s Son, in whom we recognize and have access to the Father. Great is the knowing between him and us. The Son is the image of God, after whom we whose likeness professes the same likeness are made (welcgelikenisse betuycht die selve gelijcheit), for not only are we made in his image but also in his likeness, and for this reason it is fitting that what is made after the image should agree with it, rather than idly bearing the

[mere] name of image.”

Meditative prayer brings these truths to consciousness, marshalling images to remind

us that Christ, whose presence we must strive to make

everywhere

apparent, is the living image of God and of ourselves, in whom we rejoice to be peaceably reconciled (‘Daer om laet ons tegenwoordich maken in ons sijn beelde

1° Die grote evangelische peerle, pt2, chap. 20: ‘Totten beelde gods zijn wi gemaect, dat is totter

verstandenisse ende totter bekennisse gods soon, by wijen wi bekennen den vader, ende hebben

den toeganc tot hem. Al te grote kennisse is tusscen hem ende ons. Die soon is dat beelde gods, ende wi zijn naden beelde gemaect, welc gelikenisse betuycht die selve gelijckeit, want niet alleen

tot sinen beelde mer ooc tot der gelijcheit zijn wigemaect, ende daerom behoort dat totten beelde is gemaect dattet met den beelde overeen draghe, ende den naem des beelts niet ydelic en hebbe.’

8

Walter S. Melion

in een lust des vreden’). To bear witness to Christ in this way, holding him in memory, bearing him in conscience, honouring and fearing him as present, is to

behold truth itself; our heart and soul are thereby made commensurate with the

image they discern, in whose likeness they participate (‘Onse gemoet oft siele is also veel als si des beeldts can begrijpen, ende also machse des beelds deelachtich wesen’). The author rehearses the Thomist commonplace that we become more like Divine Wisdom by exercising our Trinitarian faculties of memory, reason, and will to confirm that we are made in God’s image. This resemblance extends to embrace both the present and the future, the organic and the intellective soul, for our belief that he dwells in us who are so like him issues from the mind that is bound to the heart that inhabits the breast; secure in this belief, we await eternal salvation, when we will be granted to see face to face what we now view through

images.’' In Part 2, Chapter 29, ‘On divine love that issues from faith and hope’, the author adds that our likeness to Christ is further renewed by the theological

virtues; faith, hope, and charity transform the body, as well as the soul’s higher and lower faculties, which they conform to the example of Christ.'” As the mirror is the chief metaphor

for the soul’s image of Christ, so mirroring

is the chief analogy for the soul’s reflexive act of viewing its likeness to Christ. In Part 2, Chapter 38, ‘How we shall mirror ourselves evermore in the image of Christ’, the author addresses the topic of conformitas (spiritual conformity to God).

She construes conformitas (‘dye vereeninge Gods’) as the fullest expression of our

consciousness that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Our recognition of this fact, formerly occluded by sin and death, has been restored by the

Incarnation, for Christ’s perfected humanity, sacrificed as a redemption of sin, has reaffirmed the truth binding himself and humankind

—

namely, that God

inhabits the soul; dwelling within it, he may be sought and descried. Implicit in this doctrine is the notion, stated earlier in Part 1, Chapter 27, that God fully

encompasses man in Christ by making the Son’s sacred humanity a fully realized

INTRODUCTION

available as an image

to be seen by the eyes of the soul; impelled

by loving

devotion, and specifically by compassion for Christ’s sacrificial body, the soul strives to fashion and retain this image, in token of the divine compact between itself and Christ: W hosoever wishes to secure a perfected interior life holding before it in his wounded heart the mirror spiegel zijnder heyliger menscheyt). For otherwise, operate in the soul; and nor can it exercise the soul, than through this mirror that has obtained for us

must always conform his soul to God, of [Christ’s] sacred humanity (den Godliness can neither appear nor finding joy and freedom there, other the perfection of divine conformity,

formerly obscured in all men, none of whom could recognize how truly and nobly God

dwells in the soul, how nobly he had fashioned the soul in his image, sealed it with the sign

of the Holy Trinity, filled it with the light of the Holy Face, and conjoined it with the Spirit of Life as an eternal habitation.”

The author develops the mirror metaphor in the light of Incarnation doctrine. God became man, she avows, to sacrifice himself on our behalf, that our souls might be cleansed, their powers revived, and their inner connection to God

restored through the mirror of his sacred humanity. We had entirely lost the ability to see ourselves in God, or conversely, to see God in ourselves, until the

Incarnation renewed the soul’s mirroring properties. Just as glass becomes a mirror only after it has been coated with amalgam, so the amalgam of the Incarnation converted the Holy Trinity into a mirror — that is, Christ — in whom

the soul is reflected. In turn, the soul houses this reflection, which may be

found within it (‘Also en can haer dye siele niet te recht spiegelen noch bekennen, in dat spiegel der heyliger drievuldichz, anders dan tegen den hars zijnre heyliger

menschz daer dye heylige drievuldichz alder claerlicste in schijnt’). The black resinous amalgam reminds us that Christ’s noble yet humble humanity was made

darkly contemptible to human eyes in the Passion (‘die overmits menigerhande laster ende confusien [...] swert ende verworpen scheen wtwendich inder

semblance — a mirror image — of our own. This holy humanity makes him

!1 Die grote evangelische peerle, pt 2, chap. 20: ‘Niets niet en is also gelijc der overster wijsheyt als ons redelic gemoet want dat metter ghehoochnisse, verstandenisse, ende metten wille staet τὸ die

onsprekelike triniteit. Ende daer en mach

niet in staen, het en gedencke zijns, ende het en minne

hem, ende verstae hem, gedencken haers gods tot welcs beelde dat si gemaect is.[...] Inder waerheyt

is hi met ons. Mer dat is noch metter gheloven tot dat wi hem verdienen te sien in der gedaenten.|...] Dat gelove isinder gedachten. Dat gedacht is inder herten. Dat herte is inde borsten.’

2 l2 Die grote evangelische peerle, pt 2, chap. 29: ‘Hier wort de geest vernieut ende eensdeels mede formich den geest Jesu Christi [...] so wort ooc overmidts die mildicheit der minnen dat nederste

deel der sielen ende dz lichaem vernieut.’

1 Die grote evangelische peerle, pt2, chap. 38: So wye een volcomen inwendich leven begeert te vercrijghen, dye moet altijt in zijnder sielen bewaren dye vereeninge Gods. Ende voor zijnre

sielen in dye wonden des herten behouden den spiegel zijnder heyliger menscheyt. Want anders

en can die godheyt inder sielen nyet schijnen noch gewercken, noch ghebruycken, noch vruechde, noch vrijheyt, inder sielen hebben, dan door den spiegel zijnder heyligher menscheyt,

verdient heeft, dat die godlijcke vereeninge

die dat

in ons volbracht werde, die in allen menschen

verduistert was, so dat si niet en conden bekennen hoe eygentlijc, ende hoe edelijc god inder sielen woont. Ende al wast dat God dye siele so edel na hem gebeelt had, ende dye heylige drievuldichz zijn teeken daer in gedruct hadde,

ende

dat licht zijns aensichts in haer gestort, ende den geest des

levens daer in vereenicht, om daer eewelijc in te wonen.’

10

Walter δ. Melion

menschen oghen’); and just as the resin must be heated before it adheres to glass, so Christ’s human form, having been made supple by divine love, received the impress of the Holy Trinity, which henceforth became discernible in him (‘datden over claer spiegel der heyliger drievuldichz inden hars zijnre lieflijcker menscheyt gedruct ende geeenicht is’). So too, a mirror is hung upon a wall, as Christ’s sacrificial body was raised upon the Cross, that tainted by sin, we might gaze into this penitential mirror, be purified, and come to love God (‘op dat hem alle menschen daer in souden spiegelen ende reynigen van allen sonde, op dat si den oversten here mochten behagen’). The author contrasts this mirror with worldly

mirrors in which we see merely ourselves and our possessions, having lost sight of Christ incarnate, in whose suffering humanity the Trinity has wrought and rejoices in its finest work."* The image of Christ’s suffering body that mirrors our shared humanity, revealing what unites us with God, is also the image of a perfected humanity that mirrors our faults, exposing our failure to imitate Christ and rousing us to

transcend ourselves. As the author argues in Part 2, Chapter 39, “How the soul

shall always dwell in the mirror [of Christ] and reside between his divinity and noble humanity’, the soul’s eyes must remain fixed on this mirror image anchored in the heart; whenever the soul attends to outward things, it must consider what they have in common with Christ’s mortal body, and further, what that body

suffered to redeem the fallen world.'> In fact, we are encouraged to visualize

INTRODUCTION

11

mirror of divinity we see the pure, simple, constant, and loving God who deigned to be bound to us by means of the sacred humanity of Christ. Sweet affection inclining us toward God is the appropriate response to this sight, in which we may aspire to lose ourselves, loving God and desiring to do his will in poverty of spirit.'¢ In the mirror of humanity we see the life of Christ that shows us how to lead our own lives. Impelled by this sight to imitate Christ in body and soul, we will bear his image wherever we go, resembling him in expression and action, movement and stillness, silence and speech, sleeping and waking, etc.'” Our ability to accomplish these things hinges, as the author insists in closing, on the art of denying ourselves in favour of the image of ourselves in Christ that we find doubly mirrored on both sides (‘daer toe hoort een const, dat is een vernyeten ons selfs’).

The extraordinary conceit of facing mirrors that reflect Christ’s divinity in his humanity, his humanity in his divinity, and the doubled image of ourselves in both, underscores the importance of meditative imagery — imagined, fantasized, recollected, considered, and, perhaps most importantly, felt — in the Grote evangelische peerle. The immensely popular Vita Christi Domini Servatoris nostri, composed by Ludolphus of Saxony (also known as Ludolph the Carthusian) sometime before 1378, constitutes a summa evangelica comprising gospel history, patristic commentary, and moral, spiritual, and dogmatic instruction, all woven together into a meditative treatise on the life of Christ.'* First printed in 1474 (having first

ourselves standing still between two mirrors, in both of which we find ourselves

wanting, the one mirroring us in the image of Christ’s divinity, the other in the image of his humanity (“Aldus staen wij onbewegelijc stille tusschen dye godheyt ende dye menscheyt, ende spiegelen ons recht of wij stonden tusschen twee spiegelen daer wij ons in spiegelen wat ons gebreect’). That the two mirrors are counterpoised, implies that they reflect each other, as well as us; we thus find ourselves

positioned

between

mirror

images

of his

divine

humanity

and

16 Die grote evangelische peerle, pt 2, chap. 39: ‘Inder godhz sien we hoe pueren, simpelen,

onbewegelijcken, minlijcken, godlijcken wesen dattet is, daer wij wt zijn gevloten, ende dat hem

dat golijcke wesen met ons heeft vereenicht, ende is in ons nader godhz. Hier om sullen wij ons daer suetelijc in neygen ende blijven daer in, ende neygen ons daer nz wt, ende dat door dye verdienste zijnder heyliger menscheyt.|...] Hier om gelijc dat wij inde godheyt over, ende wt ons

selven zijn geneycht met minne inder godheyt, ende staen daer in bloter weselijcker armoeden des

humanized divinity. Their contents are therefore convergent, and likewise the images (of the images) of ourselves mutually reflected in the two mirrors. In the

geestes, als of wij ons in dat soete minlijcke wesen Gods verloren hadden, zijnde altijt bereyt, wat

l$ Die grote evangelische peerle, pt 2, chap. 38: ‘Dit spiegel is verheven ende befloten in dye camer der heyliger drievuldicheyz, daer hem dat opperste goet sonder onderlaet in siet ende

heylige lichaem ende siele. In gelaet, in seden, in gaen, in staen, in swijghen, in spreken, in liggen,

verblijt in hem selven met een wel behagende liefde. Ende looft hem selven in alle creatueren, van

al dat hi door zijn menschelijcke natuer gewracht heeft.’ eas i Die grote evangelische peerle, pt 2, chap. 39: ‘Desen spiegel sullen wij altijt voor oghen hebben

ende laten dat nemmermeer wt onser herten comen. Als wij ons wtwaert keeren, so keeren wij ons in zijn weerde edel menscheyt, ende mercken wat hi alvoor ons geleden heeft.’

God van ons gedaen of gelaten wil hebben, dat te volbrengen.’ 17 Die grote evangelische peerle, pt 2, chap. 39: ‘Inder menschz sullen wij ons spiegelen, ende aensien hoe hy geleeft heeft, ende hoe hy ons den wech voor gegaen heeft.[...] Also sullen wij van buyten zijn geneycht in zijn heylige menscheyt om onse siele ende ons lichaem to voegen na zijn in sitten, in slapen, in waken, in doen, in laten, in eten, in drincken. Ende dragen dat beelt Christi altijt voor onsen oghen, op dat wij ons daer na richten mogen.’ '8 On the Vita Christi, see Florent Broquin, Vita Christi. Nouvelle traduction intégrale, avec

préface et notes, 7 vols (Paris: Hurtrel, 1870-73), 1, pp. i-xxvii; Emmerich R. Von Frentz, ‘Ludolphe le chartreux et les Exercices de Saint Ignace de Loyolo’, Revue d ascétique et de mystique, 25 (1949), 375-88; Mary Immaculate Bodenstedt, The Vita Christi’of Ludolphus the Carthusian

12

Walter S. Melion

proliferated in manuscript), the text remained much consulted both before and

after Trent; it was endorsed by Ignatius of Loyola, among other proponents of spiritual exercises as a key component of Catholic reform, and magnificent editions, such as that published by Michael Sonnius in Paris in 1580, attest the book’s importance and currency. Like the author of the Grote evangelische peerle, Ludolphus endorses images, but his sense of their nature and function differs. For the most part, he eschews mirror imagery in favour of rhetorically generated images that aspire to the condition of vivid and colourful pictures. They are far more detailed, both with respect to narrative action and descriptive circumstance, and their evangelical origins and historical pedigree are much discussed. Christ himself is seen to exemplify the use of spectacula — publicly enacted tableaux featuring himself — that compel doctrinal and spiritual reflection on the mysteries of salvation recounted in the Gospels. In order to explain how and why Ludophus proffers images deriving from those enacted by Christ, I shall focus on Part 2, Chapter 62, ‘On the Third Hour of the Passion’, which considers the

outrages committed in the praetorium of Pilate, including the Ecce Homo, the judgement of Christ by the people, that leads directly to the Carrying of the Cross.

Symptomatic of Ludophus’s attempts to ground meditation in the viewing of compelling images is his careful attention to the colours of Jesus’s body, garments and

wounds.

The

account

of the Flagellation,

for example,

moves

from

ds

whiteness of his vestments (‘vestimenta alba’) and uncommonly fair body (‘caro

ila [...] mundissima & pulcherrima [...] corpus candidissimum’), to the rubrication of that same body, tinged black and blue by many bruises, tinted rosy red by the poi ech cea ee ee stripes, and gashes (repletur plagis, }

S

roseo rubricatur per totum’).'° Like strata of

pigment, wounds are layered on wounds, bruises on bruises, stripes on stripes,

blood on blood, until the tormentors tire, and with them the observers’ eyes.

(Washington, DC : Catholic University of America Press, 1944); Charles Abbott Conway, The Vita Christi of Ludolph ’ of Saxony and Late Medieval Devotion Centred on the Huadinattie 4 Descriptive Analysis, Analecta Cartusiana, 34 (Salzburg: Institut fiir englische Sprache und hasan Universitat Salzburg, 1976); and Walter Baier, Untersuchungen zu den Passionsbetrachtungen in der Vita Christi’des Ludolf von Sachsen: ein quellenkritischer Beitragzu Leben und Werk Ludolf und

zur Geschichte der Passionstheologie, Analecta Cartusiana, 44 (Salzburg: Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1977) | i MnVita Sn ἐν rs i Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, a R. P Ludolpho Saxone, Carthusiano, ante CCL. ann os ex sacrisis Evangeliis, E 7) veterumque patrum sententiis contexta, atque ita disposita, ed. by Johannes Dadraeus (Paris: Michael Sonnius, 1580), fol. 410" |

INTRODUCTION

d

(‘Superadditur, reiteratur & spissatur plaga super plagam, livor super livorem,

fractura super fracturam, sanguis super sanguinem, quousque tam tortoribus

quam inspectoribus fatigatis solvi iubetur a columna, cui fuit alligatus’).”° That Ludophus identifies Christ’s vestimenta as the likeness of radiant conversion woven from many threads (‘intelligitur candor sanctae conversationis, quae instar vestimenti multis [...] contexta villis’), and his nudity as the visibility of everything to God’s eyes (‘quia nuda & aperta sunt omnia oculis eius’), further makes clear that he is dealing in representative images.”' Likewise, he meticulously describes the garments in which Christ was dressed to be mocked — the purple tunic and scarlet mantle (‘tunica purpurea [...] chlamydem coccineam, id est, pallium sive mantellum’), the latter dyed a colour between red and purple (‘coccinei coloris, quiest inter rubeum & purpureum’), and fastened by a fibula, rather than stitched

(‘non consutum: sed fibula infrenatum’). He adds that no fuller could dye cloth

redder than Christ’s body reddened by blood (‘quantum fullo non potest facere super terram, intantum fuit sanguine rubricatum’).”* Similarly disfigured, his face must be contemplated diligently and lengthily (‘diligenter per longam moram &

spaciose’). The crown of thorns soaks his head in blood that streams down his

cheeks, mixing with the gory robes saturated with bloody sweat; tinted red from head to toe, he appears the very likeness of a leper, paradoxically embodying the image of the triumphant Messiah prophesied in Isaiah 63. 1: “Who is this that

comes from Edom, in crimsoned garments from Bozrah, he that is glorious in his

apparel, marching in the greatness of his strength?’ (“Et tunc sanguis per aculeos

coronae de capite extractus, & largiter fluens, tinxit caput & genas eius, ita ut

appareret quasi leprosus: quia sanguis & sputa apposita faciebant eum leproso

similem’).” The reference to Isaiah 63. 1, along with the qualifiers quasi leprosus and leproso similem,

insist on

the status of Christ as a sight seen, and

more

precisely, an image purveyed to represent both his present abjection and future

glory. Similarly, his resignation characterizes him as the likeness of a servant (‘quasi eorum servus’), his silence as the likeness of a mute (‘quasi mutus’).”* Ludolphus enhances these allusions to imagery in several ways. He often calls

upon the votary to look attentively at the events Christ has allowed to transpire,

Vita Christi’

Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 410".

Vita Christi’

Domini Servatoris nostri, fol.

Vita Christi’

Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 411".

Vita Christi’

Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 413".

Vita Christi’

Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 413".

410".

i

Walter $S. Melion

indeed staged for our benefit: in the scene of Mocking, for instance, enacted in an open place where the sad spectacle was visible to all (‘ut omnes interessent tali spectaculo [...] in loco patenti & coram multitudine’),”* he insists that we closely observe how Christ suffered himself to be struck by the reed sceptre, the blows

causing the thorny crown to pierce more deeply (‘et maxime cerne eum

[...]

acerbos ictus suscipit & patitur’).”°The image we see must be held in mind and

imitated (“haec in mente habe continue, & [...] Dominum videns contumeliam

patientem, & omnia ferentem silentio imitare’).*” We are expected to scrutinize the visible signs by which the likeness of adoration is exposed as an image of mockery (‘illusionem suam magis despectivam’): the salutations eliding into insults, the genuflections become molestations.® When Jesus is shown to the people, Ludolphus commands us to behold this spectacle orchestrated by Pilate to appeal to sense (‘ut sensibiliter viderent’) and move to compassion.” If Christ appears like a king, the discrepancy between his regal attire and painful abasement makes patently clear that his regal presence is a rhetorical image, advanced to produce a desired effect: Behold —

how lamentable a spectacle! (Ecce quam

lamentabile spectaculum.) He

advanced as ifin regal attire, yet was everywhere subject to contempt.|...] Whence [says]

Anselm: Attend, my soul, who this is, who enters in the image ofaking (habens imaginem

quasi regis), yet blushes like a lowly servant; he appears with a crown that torments him,

wounding his beautiful brow with a thousand pricks. Thus Anselm. And then, just as if speaking to deprecate or move to pity, Pilate said to them, ‘Ecce homo’: behold the man whom you believed to be desirous of kingship [...] if in something he acted badly, yet is he punished beyond deserving. And therefore should it suffice: see his head pierced, his

body lacerated, his face spat upon, and for God’s sake, have mercy, for he is your brother.

For Pilate wanted them to see with their eyes how [Jesus] had been punished and mocked,

that they might be moved to compassion; he put him on show with the intention of freeing him (animo liberandi eum fecit hanc ostensionem).

15

INTRODUCTION

In addition to Anselm, Ludolphus cites Chrysostom and Augustine, both of whom argue that Pilate manipulated the image of Christ to secure a specific response: whereas Chrysostom claims that Pilate showed Christ to subdue the peoples’ passions and purge their venom, Augustine avers that Pilate aimed not to subdue but to satiate these same passions, hoping that the pleasing sight of Christ’s injuries might quench the thirst for vengeance. Ludolphus dwells on the clerical, sacramental, and spiritual significance of this scene, which we see represented in the monk’s mortifying habit, tonsure, and staff, in the elevation of the host, and in ourselves when, having gladly accepted life’s humiliations, we are seen to imitate Christ the man that we may be deemed worthy by Christ the judge (‘quod nos debeamus cum eisdem insigniis mystice acceptis [...] ante conspectum Christi [...] in iudicio apparere’).’ Properly viewed, therefore, Pilate’s spectaculum

has the power to transform us into the living image of Christ the man. These resonant images draw additional strength from the framing admonition that the Passion requires us to bring Christ’s visible humanity into focus. Indeed, Ludolphus insists that we avert our eyes from his divinity, dwelling instead on the sufferings of the flesh, as we observe the human condition and actions of Christ: Observe well his affliction, how he trembles from cold, for it was winter. Attend diligently and consider in every action his state of mind, that inwardly you might feel compassion and at the same time be nourished. But avert your eyes a while from his divinity (averte autem parumper oculos a divinitate), and behold him purely as a man (eum purum hominem considera): you will see an elegant, most noble, innocent, and loving youth,

scourged all over, defiled by blood and bruises, nude and blushing from shame; as if the lowest of the low, forsaken by God, destitute ofall help, he gathers his scattered garments

and dresses himselfin front of those who continually mock him.”

loquendo, vel eos ad misericordiam provocando, dixit eis Pilatus, ecce homo: ecce de qualihomine

creditis quod vellet sibi regnum usurpare: & quasi diceret, & siin aliquo male egisset: tamen ultra condignum punitus est: & ideo sufficere vobis deberet: videte caput eius perforatum: totum

Vita Christi’

Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 411". Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 413", Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 413". Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 412".

Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 413.

30 Ving Christ Domini Servator i’ is nostri, fols 413". 14". ‘Ecce quam lamentabile spectaculum.

Incedebat quasi in habitu regali, sed patebat undique despectui.|...] Unde Anselmus: Attende anima mea quis est iste, qui ingreditur habens imaginem quasi regis, & nihilominus servi despectissimi confusione repletus est: coronatus incedit, sed ipsa eius corona cruciatu s est illi, & mille puncturis speciosum eius verticem divulnerat. Haec Anselmus. Et tunc quasi despective

sibi, quia frater vester est: volebat corpus laceratum: faciem consputam: & pro Deo compatiamini enim

Pilatus ut sensibiliter viderent qualiter fuisset punitus & illusus, ut sic moverentur ad

compassionem, qui animo

liberandi eum

fecit hanc ostensionem.

31 Vita Christi’

Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 414". 32 Vita Christi’? Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 411": ‘Attende diligenter, & considera statum eius in actibus singulis: ut intime compatiaris, ac simul pascaris: averte autem parumper oculosa divinitate, & eum purum hominem considera: & videbis iuvenem elegantem, nobilissimum, innocentissimum,

&

amantissimum,

totum

autem

flagellatum,

&

sanguine

livoribusque

respersum: pannos suos undique sparsim proiectos de terra recolligere, & cum quadam verecundia

& robore nudum coram illis semper ipsum deridentibus se revestire, ac si foret omnium infimus, a Deo derelictus, & omni auxilio destitutus.’

16

Walter S. Melion

When we then reflect upon his divinity, we must see it through the lens of his

humanity — as divinity incarnate, infusing the human actions we have just

witnessed:

Hereafter return to his divinity and consider that immense, eternal, incomprehensible,

INTRODUCTION

epitomize, his redemptive mission; the spectacle enacted on the porch of the praetorium demonstrates how Christ repays the debt (of sin) he had not incurred,

restoring the goods he had not plundered (‘Ecce quomodo innocentissimus agnus,

ut te a iudicio & lamento iustae & aeternae damnationis eriperet, iniuste propter

te iudicio damnari praeelegit: ecce quae non rapuit pro te solvit’).”” Like any mnemonic, this image is memorable, Ludolphus implies, because it juxtaposes opposite things — affliction and benefaction to the utmost degree. His repeated calls to behold this exemplum — to recollect the image the Jews wish to erase —

and imperial majesty incarnate, bending to the ground, humbly inclining itself, collecting its garments and putting them on, blushing with shame, as ifit were aman most base, nay rather, a slave bought and placed under the dominion of those [mockers], reproved and punished for some transgression. And now behold him earnestly, admire his humility, and as much as possible imitate him.”

Like the author of the Grote evangelische peerle, Ludolphus refers to the Incarnation

to underscore the potency and availability of the divinely human image God makes manifest in the Passion, but unlike the anonymous author who positions the votary between mirrors of perfected humanity and transcendent divinity, he invests all the votary’s resources in the act of viewing the humanly particular,

affecting, and imitable spectacle bodied forth by Christ.

According to Ludolphus, it is the image of Christ that the Jews most fear. Having

been enjoined to behold the man (‘Ecce homo’), they demand first that he be removed from view (‘Tolle, tolle’), and then that he be executed ignominiously (‘&

crucifige eum’).”* They react in this way, Ludolphus surmises, because they dread the persistence of memory, fearing that the image of Christ, having once been impressed, will perforce be recalled (‘formidantes ne aliqua eius post ipsum fiat memoria’); and so, finding the sight of him grievous and insupportable (‘gravis enim est nobis ad videndum, nec possumus eum videre’), they demand that he be despatched and then profaned by the iniquitous sign of the cross. Unbeknownst

to them, however, Christ, who exercises power over all visual signs, converts the Cross into a signum dignitatis to be worn like a royal girdle or miter (‘sicut [...] alii

baltheum, alii mitram portant’)? He submits to the influence of Pilate and the

Jews, choosing to be judged and unjustly condemned, in order to make visible, indeed

culminate in an appeal to the soul, which he urges to disburse the rich currency

of devotion, to refund the affective value of compassion, in imitation of Christ (‘nec devotionis solvis pinguedinem, nec compassionis refundis affectum’).”* The image has the power to stir such effects, since it demarcates us from the

Jews: in contradistinction to them, we fix upon the image of Jesus exposed nude to reproachful eyes and shunned, regarding him exhaustively with the analytical

intensity earlier expended on the Flagellation (‘adhuc nudo coram eo existenti [...] intuere

&

hic

Dominum,

secundum

considerationem

supra

de

flagellatione

positam’).*’ Internalized, these effects prompt us to fashion a corollary selfimage: we are encouraged to assemble an internal tribunal (“quod nos debemus tribunal in mente nostra constituere’), before which we will constantly stand to be judged, just as Christ stood before the judgement seat of Pilate; in

adversity, we will be seen to submit patiently to divine judgement, as did Christ

to human judgment, in whose likeness we endure (‘sicut Dominus noster pro nobis [...] subiens iudicium: nos quippe tempore adversitatis, quasi ante tribunal Dei sistimur’).*° Images such as the Mocking, Flagellation, or Ecce Homo have averidical force; they originate in the Gospels, their source licensing the attention paid to situation

and historical particulars. Ludophus enunciates this point in his account of the

Carrying of the Cross: having designated the four kinds of spectator who gathered

to observe Christ — executioners, Jews, friends and family, and curious onlookers,

who came merely to watch — he suggests that the Saviour’s inestimable patience, 33

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considera illam immensam aeternam & incomprehensibilem, & imperatoriam maiestatem, incarnatam, se flectentem, & humiliter ad terram inclinantem, pannos recolligentem, & se cum reverentia, rubore similiter revestientem: ac si esset homo vilissim us, imo quidam servus empticius, sub illorum dominio constitutus, & ab eis pro aliquo excessu correptus & castigatus. Intuere & nunc eum diligenter, ac humilitatem suam admirare, & pro posse imitare.’ 4 Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 415".

Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 415". ” Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 416".

though indescribable (indicibilis), can yet be inferred from his visible circumstances,

such as the crowds that surround him (#wrbae) and the thieves amidst whom he

Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 416. Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 416". ’ Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 416". Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 415".

18

Walter S. Melion

processes to Calvary.*’ In other words, his condition of being seen warrants our

attempts to fashion an image true to the nature and meaning of the Carrying of

the Cross. Chief among the circumstances embedding Christ, the thieves have

been supplied by the principes Iudaeorum to signify his criminal status and just

execution. As Christ let Pilate show him, so he lets himselfbe seen with thieves to reveal how he suffers on behalf of sinners; just as he transposes the Cross into a signum dignitatis, so now he transforms his criminal company into a signum compassionis."” Ludolphus quotes Bede to indicate the connection between the mystery of Incarnation and this pregnant image of Christ among sinners. The latter partially fulfils the redemptive purpose of the former, but more to the point, Christ the image of God made flesh displays a further image (forma) of the

sacrificial vocation he has come to fulfil:

But Christ permitted these things to be done in order to demonstrate that he wanted to

suffer for sinners.

W hence [says] Bede: He was counted among the iniquitous in death,

that he might justify sinners in resurrection; for being in the form of God (in forma Dei),

he became man for the sake of men (propter homines homo factus est), that he might give

men the power of becoming sons of God.‘

|

Ludolphus enhances the power of this image to elicit pity and love, by inviting us to imagine how Mary first encountered Christ burdened by the Cross. Here the Vita Christi diverges from the Gospels, entering the domain of apocryphal and pictorial tradition. Separated by the multitudes following Christ, he and Mary are finally reunited at the crossroads beyond the city walls, where she nearly dies upon

seeing him (‘cernes eum [...] quod ante non viderat, semimortua facta est’). No

words are exchanged (‘nec ei verbum dicere poterat’), this experience being mediated entirely by sight.’ By the same token, our sense of this meeting derives wholly from visual experience, for we not only visualize him and her together , but also see Jesus as she saw him, and conversely, as he was seen by her (and she by

him). The result of this layering of images is, in Anselm’s words, the fruit of loving

devotion (fructu pii amoris, literally, ‘the fruit of pious love’). Having cited

Anselm, Ludolphus now affirms that Christ will respond to the pious gaze of the 41

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s fi è Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 417' : Indicibilis est Domine patientia tua: hoc

ad litera m procur ; atum fuit fuit perper princip principes es Iudaeorum, ut Christu Chri s infamar inf: etur societate latronum: & avulgaribus geribus videretur videreturinin criminibu criminibusse eorum participas ici se, & sicic ipsi ips viderentur iuste mortem eius

INTRODUCTION

”

loving votary (that is, the votary who lovingly visualizes him); Christ will turn to face him and speak, as he did to the women of Jerusalem: ‘For the Lord, knowing

who are his, and having passed over the furious mob, turns his eyes and voice toward the fond women lamenting him (‘oculos et ora convertit’); he looks gladly

upon his own, whom he addresses (‘suos enim Dominus libenter respicit, & dixit eis’).

Self-conformation is the primary function of the images Ludolphus propagates,

both those that cleave close to historical fact and those that plausibly elaborate

upon it. After describing an image, parsing its details, and exploring its moral, spiritual, and doctrinal content, he invariably exhorts the votary to conform to this aspect (‘articulus’) of the Saviour’s life, made visible in and through meditative prayer (‘ad conformandum se huic articulo’).** Based in sensation,

memory, and imagination, the phantasmata harnessed to bring gospel history

to life become an ambient scenography within which the soul sees itself take centre stage. The soul now inhabits the images it has been harbouring, or more

accurately, sees the living image of itself amidst these spectacula; the soul’s relation to images alters, as it changes from engaged spectator to active participant, becoming transparent to the protagonists it envisions. In this respect, the extended

meditation on the Carrying of the Cross concludes typically: having recalled (rememoretur) how charitably Christ bore the heavy burden of the Cross, we are adjured per imaginem to contemplate (recolere) the Carrying of the Cross, just

as if we were bearing it with Jesus, either in the likeness of Simon of Cyrene or in whatever other guise pious devotion administers (“quasi ipse portet crucem post

Iesum: & cum Iesu instar Simonis Cyrenaei, vel alias prout devotio ministrabit’).*”

The term recolere has special force here, since it also means to inhabit anew; by

implication then, the self-image to be viewed dwells within the imago furnished by meditation. The conformitas of self-image and imago issues from an exercise of conformation

implemented throughout the Vita Christi. Ludolphus subjects all historical images to figurative elaboration, examining how they conform to the biblical figures — the adumbrative prophesies and typologies — whose forms they reify and bring to perfection. For example, he expounds at length the many Old Testament

figures completed (completur) by the Carrying of the Cross, making frequent use

procurasse. 42

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Vita Christi’

Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 417.

6 See, for example, Vita Christi’ *’

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Vita Christi’ Domini Servatoris nostri, fol. 418".

410° and 418".

20

Walter S. Melion

of the exegetical homilies of Augustine, Chrysostom, and Anselm. The wood carried obediently by Isaac anticipates the Cross on which Christ’s humanity is

sacrificed, like the ram offered by Abraham. This figurative commonplace leads Ludolphus

to consider the physical

reality of the Cross:

citing Anselm,

he

commands the soul to see how Christ, pressed and scorned on all sides, bends to

lift the heavy and ignominious weight (‘vide anima mea.|...] O spectaculum, vides

ne?’).** From this concrete image, further figures proliferate, as the play between

actual and figurative images escalates, and historical spectacle is conformed to its symbolic precedents and prolepses. Having interpreted the Cross as the sceptre

of justice borne by Christ the King, Ludolphus now traverses Jerome’s many figures for the Carrying of the Cross: Abel led into the field by Cain; the upright sheaf dreamt by Joseph; the brazen serpent raised by Moses; the branch witha

INTRODUCTION

s3

We have been examininghow Ludolphus and the author of the Grote evangelische peerle elucidate the soul’s reliance on sacred images — spectacula on the one hand,

specula on the other. The Afbeeldinghe van d'eerste eeuwe der Societeyt lesu poses

a different sort of question: in emblematic words and images, it focuses not so much on the nature and functions of the images conjured by the soul, but rather, asks how and why the imaging process transpires, comparing it to the artifice that begets pictorial images, along with other kinds of craft. Translated from the Imago primi saeculi by order of the German-Dutch Province, the book combines a prose chronicle of the order’s first hundred years, with emblems commenting on the

topics covered in the various chapters.” Cornelis Galle engraved the imagines (the

pictorial component of the emblems), which consist of illustrative escutcheons designed by Philips Fruytiers. The emblematic sequence doubles as a meditative

submerged axe-head floated. In addition, he amplifies Paul’s commendation of the

program on the Jesuit vocation. Although the image-theory implicit in the Afbeeldinghe is specific to the Jesuits, it is nonetheless symptomatic of the

carried forth to ensure that the bushel buries no lights. Like a candelanrum, but

poetic diction, the Dutch edition, composed by the emblematist Adriaen Poirters,

single cluster of grapes

brought

from

Canaan;

Eliseus’s

stick to which

the

Cross in Galatians 6. 14, by reference to Augustine’s analogy of the lampstand

also like a trophy brilliantly proclaiming Christ’s universal triumph, the Cross

Tridentine reaffirmation of pictures as devotional aids.** In its terminology and makes this embrace of the pictorial even more explicit than the Latin, as Ralph

raises high the light of doctrine.*? Ludophus’s similitudes originate in his conviction that the image of the Cross is a crucial measure of faith: whereas the impious experience this grande spectaculum as an humiliating reproach, the faithful recognize it as a great mystery that transforms obedience (Christ as Isaac)

Dekoninck notes in his fundamental study of the Jesuit culture of images.”

the fronts of kings, marking his followers with the signum crucis.® Therefore, the Cross epitomizes Christian conformitas, for it figures our adherence to Christ. His

in de spaanse Nederlanden en de Nieuwe Wereld, ed. by Johan Verberckmoes (Leuven: Peeters,

between this image and its figures, will conform himself accordingly. He shall

compagnia di Gest. Genesi e fotruna del libro, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae, 66 (Rome:

into sovereignty (Christ as king); affixed to the Cross, Christ will fix this sign on

true imitator, moved by the Carrying of the Cross, instructed by the affinities deny himself, bear the burden shouldered by Christ, share in his reproaches and

mortifications, until finally, the life of Christ having been made manifest in him, he becomes the living image of his Saviour (‘sic verus Christi imitator seipsum abneget, crucem suam tollendo [...] semperque mortificationem Iesu in corpore suo circunferat, ut & vita Iesu in corpore suo tandem manifestata fiat’).”’

5? On the Imago primi saeculi, see Karel Porteman, Exotisme en spektakel. De Antwerpse

jezuïetenfeesten van juli 1622’, in Vreemden vertoond. Opstellen over exotisme en spektakelcultuur 2002), pp. 114-15; W. Waterschoot, ‘Een moor in Indié. Exotica in de Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu en de Af-beeldinghe van d'eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Iesu’, in ibid., pp. 163-79; and Lydia Salviucci Insolera, L Imago primi saeculi (1640) e il significato dell’ immagine allegorica nella Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 2004), especially pp. 109-49.

33 On Jesuitimage-theory, seeJ. Loach, ‘The Influence of the Counter-Reformation Defence

of Images on the Contemporary Concept of Emblem: The Theoretical Foundations Laid by Théophile Raynaud’, in Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque Symbol Theory, 1500-1700, ed. by

Peter M. Daly and John Manning (New York: AMS, 1999), pp. 155-200;J. Loach, ‘Body and Soul: A Transfer of Theological Terminology into the Aesthetic Realm’, Emblematica, 12 (2002), 31-60; Walter S. Melion, ‘The Art of Vision in Jerome Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in

Evangelia’, in Jerome Nadal, Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels, ed. and trans. by Frederick A. Homann (Philadelphia: St Joseph’s University Press, 2003-05), 1: The Infancy

48

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Narratives (2003), pp. 1-96; and Walter S. Melion, ‘Mortis illius imagines ut vitae: The Image of

the Glorified Christ in Jerome Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia’, in ibid., pp. 1-32.

° Ralph Dekoninck, Ad imaginem: Statuts, fonctions et usage de l'image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du xvir siécle (Geneva: Droz, 2005), pp. 200-05, especially 201.

22

Walter 8. Melion

INTRODUCTION

23

This imagery both depicts and facilitates the process of contemplation. The

pure soul that mirrors God like a clear pool mirroring the sun, welcomes this heavenly image, whatsoever the pangs of divine love it suffers as a consequence. As the pool mirrors the rising sun, so the soul mirrors the advent of God, its beloved.

As eyes incapable of looking into the sun may yet regard its reflection, so the soul contemplates the image of God reflected within itself. These visual analogies further imply that the reflected image of nature may be seen as an image of God the Creator, in whom nature originates.”

A second emblem, ‘Purity without Stain’ (De suyverheyt sonder vlecke; in

Latin, Vapor rapit omne decus, ‘Breath steals all grace’) develops the mirror simile,

comparing the soul’s reflex of self-viewing to the act of regarding oneself in a mirror.” The image portrays a winged putto (the soul) gazing into a mirror; the rose

held in his left hand implies that love is at issue. He exhales rays of breath that

occlude the mirror’s surface, in contrast to the brilliant rays of sunlight illuminating

Fig. 1: Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, 4 Pure Heart Pictures God, London, British Library, from Afbeeldinghe van d eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Iesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

Several emblems attaching to Book I, ‘On the reasons why various orders arise in the Holy Church at various times, and the Society of Jesus in particular’, offer an account of the soul’s critical faculties. ‘A Pure Heart Pictures God’ (Een suyver hert verbeelt Godt; in Latin, Assimilat mens casta Deum) depicts a still pool of water that perfectly mirrors the rising sun (Fig. 1).7 The poem explains the relation between rubric and image: like water that mirrors its surroundings, the

contemplative soul must become still and transparent in order to discover in itself the mirror of divinity. This involves a double transformation: the soul visualizes itself as a still pool whose depths may be plumbed, and as a crystalline surface capable of mirroring the radiant presence of God.5f

55

: D Afbeeldinghe van d'eerste eeuwe der Societeyt lesu voor ooghen ghestelt door de Duyts-

Nederlantsche Provincie der selver Societeyt (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana Balthasaris Moreti,

him and his surroundings. The contrast between revealing light and obscuring breath introduces the opposed themes of external and internal sight, the former associated with a child fascinated by its mirror image, who foolishly clouds the surface he attempts to kiss, the latter redolent of the soul gazing wisely into the

heart. The poem advises the humble soul to observe itself, looking past surface appearances and refraining from the cloudy exhalations of self-love. Just as a mirror is mere matter, blown from glass, so worldly honour is transient, a temporal rather than spiritual thing. And so we must learn to observe ourselves

neither like a woman of fashion nor like a callow child, but instead with an eye to discerning clearly how the heart and soul may be beautified.” Since the mirroring soul meditates through images, utilizing them to visualize

itself, assess its condition, and draw closer to God, the Jesuit order takes advantage of images, indeed conceives of itself as a mirror, as it strives to save souls. Entitled

‘Workmen of the Society’ (Werck-lieden der Societeyt; in Latin, Omnibus omnia, ‘All things to all’), one of the emblems from Book ΠΙ, ‘On the Functioning Society and Its Labours’ (De werckende Societeyt, oft vande oeffeninghen der selver), depicts

°? Afbeeldinghe, p. 107: ‘Soo waer is een suyv’re siel | Die daer in gheen smetten viel, Schoon sy oock van liefde queelt, | Seght, dit is des Heeren beelt: | Want een suyver teer ghemoedt | Godt verbeelt, en g'lijck den vloedt | Toont aen die omtrent hem gaet, | Al wat in den hemel staet.’ 58 Afbeeldinghe, pp. 114--15.

1640), pp. 106-07.

56 Afbeeldinghe,p. 107:‘Maer ; het water was soo claer, | Of het cenen spieghel waer, | Of het

met den stillen val | Waer verandert in cristal: | Want de grondt, soo diep hy was, | Kond’ ick sien als door een glas.’

°° Afbeeldinghe, p. 115: ‘Den spieghel is maer stof, daer van is hy gheblaesen: | [...] | Sy zijn van

een beslagh den spiegel, en ueer, | En speelt met gheen van bey, o iongheyt, immermeer. Soo dan

wie dat ghy zijt, leert uwen spiegel vieren.’

23

24

Walter δ. Melion

INTRODUCTION

2

3

the order as a mirror viewed head on (Fig. 2). The poem advises the Jesuit who

cherishes the welfare of another person’s soul to adapt himself to that person’s character and state of mind. Like a mirror that reflects clearly whatever passes before it, the Jesuit must present himselfas the mirror image of the person whose soul he hopes to save. This protean counsel is as strategic as it is pragmatic: men incline toward what is like them, and the Jesuit, having converted himself into

their self-image, must then show them how to emend themselves.*! A complementary emblem, ‘Instruction of the Young’ (Onderwijsinghe vande iongheyt; in Latin, Donec formetur Christus in vobis, “Until Christ is formed in you’), portrays a sculptor in his workshop; he carves the statue of an athlete, while effigies of an orator and Christ Salvator Mundi stand just behind him (Fig. 3). The poem explains that an instructor shapes a student, as a sculptor, having discerned the new form to be carved, cuts, chops, and chisels a block. The carver, like the teacher, first applies reason, shaping the block with a view to releasing the implicit design; he then carefully works it with a steady hand.® Both instructor and sculptor require time and art (‘konst en tijdt’), if they are to transform hard wood into the likeness of tender limbs (‘uyt grof hout [...] teere leden’). As the skilful hand (‘fraey meesters handt’) masters roughhewn wood (‘botte staken’), so the teacher’s sweet art refines the student’s unformed character, seducing his sensitive

Fig. 2: Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, Workmen of the Society, London, British Library,

from Afbeeldinghe van d eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Iesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

senses (“De konst door soet beleydt den aerdt komt overwinnen’). Moreover, in the school, as in the workshop (‘winckel [...] school’), the masterwork results from improvements to the work of prior masters; the sculptor who carves in the clumsy manner of his predecessors (‘die brenght sijns ouders plompheyt’) will find his materials hard, tough, and altogether intractable. Such an artist will fail to fashion an upright statue (‘een volmaeckt beeldt wel op sijn koten staet’), just as a hidebound teacher will fail to coax upright virtue from his students (‘een’ oprechte deught’). Poirters ascribes these pedagogical truisms to Ignatius himself, in whom originate the allied notions that teachers deal in images, and that teaching is like the visual art of sculpture (“Dit is Loiolas werck, ’tzijn sijn vernufte vonden’). 60

Afbeeldinghe, pp. 258-59. pi Afbeeldinghe, p.259: Dit wordt in mijn ghelas verbeelt, | [ ...] | En siet, Godt gheve wie het waer, | ᾿ τ Glas vertoontse al even klaer. | [...] | Ick sie den spieghel is ghelijck | Aen een die ieder wel besint, | En ieders sielen heyl bemint; | Met wijse wijs, met slechte slecht, | [ ...] | Met ieder soo hy ons behoeft. 6 Afbeeldinghe, pp. 282-83.

63 Afbeeldinghe, p.282: ‘Daer vind’ ick haest wat in, dat daer niet in en was. | [...] | En sny, en kap, en kerfin dese rouwe stijlen: | En als den groven block ghekapti s metverstandt, | Dan valick stracks aen’t werck en dat van langher handt.’

Fig. 3: Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, Instruction of the Young, London, British Library, from Afbeeldinghe van d'eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Iesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

26

Walter S. Melion

The emblem ‘Instruction of the Uncouth’ (Onderwijsinghe vande wilde; in

Latin, Η feros cultus hominum recentum voce formabunt, ‘Their words will refine the

barbarous customs of savage men’) applies these insights to the Jesuit missions.” The

imago portrays Apollo and Mercury chiseling the newly formed figures of putti that drop like ripe fruit from the branches of a massive tree. The poem explains how this illustrates the Jesuit vocation of educating the uncivilized: like skilled artisans who transfigure raw materials, Jesuits are image-makers whose insights

and understanding transform the persons in — their foreign charges — in a new manner chasers at the workbench, who with chisel, rough surfaces. The Jesuit missions engage

their care.” They fashion their images (‘met sijn aerdigh nieuw fatsoen’), like hatchet, and plane finish and smooth in this art of masterful carving that

sharpens the spirits of new converts (‘Haer vereert met al haer konst, | [...] | Door Godts wet besnijden souw’). Books I and ΠῚ concern the Jesuit self-image, helping the order’s members better

to embrace and understand their way of life by means of emblematic images. Book IV, ‘On the suffering Society and its misfortunes’, considers the various threats to this curriculum vitae, counselling that they be assimilated by way of further images, public and private. The emblem “The Society Slandered in Vain’ (De Societeyt te vergheefs ghelastert; in Latin, Sibi conscia recti, ‘Conscious of integrity’) construes slander in visual terms: it disfigures the image of truth by viewing it through a distorting lens, or reflecting it in the roily surface of turbulent water.“ Like flawed glass, it deceives the eyes, converting one into many, beauty into ugliness (“Wilt ghy de waerheyt sien, laet vaeren dit ghelas’). The imago illustrates a measuring rod perpendicular to the agitated body of water from which it projects, casting a long shadow. The poem advises members of the society to remain calm in adversity; they must keep their self-image unruffled and unbent (like the sun continuing to shine behind the clouds that hide it), even if in the world’s watery eyes they seem to cast a crooked, broken, or mutilated reflection (‘Sy houdt haer even recht, al

schijnt sy krom te staen; | Met onberoert ghemoedt hoort sy de snappers aen’).

The emblem pits the society’s image of itself against the countervailing images hurled against it; these false images will prove transient, the true image of the Jesuit vocation will pre-empt them, if the emblematic images proffered in Books 1 and ΠῚ

INTRODUCTION

27

will be seen to body forth this treasury of self- images, which shall justly come to circulate as the currency of public opinion. Among these positive images to be transferred from the private to the public sphere, the imagery of artisanal diligence and ingenuity predominates. The emblem, ‘The Society Is Purified through Adversity’ (De Societeyt wordt door teghenspoedt ghesuyvert; in Latin, Erit hoc purior, ‘From this it becomes purer’) depicts a furrier beating fleece (Fig. 4).°’ The poem contrasts him to the rough journeymen (‘rouwe gasten’) who besmirch the furs they work, leaving bloody handprints that make them look like pelts straight from the slaughterhouse (“Die’t ons brenghen soo beslijckt, | Dat het qualijck wol ghelijct’). By contrast, the Jesuits behave like artful furriers who thwack skins to raise the pile; in this way, souls are disciplined, not least their own (‘Doch mijn konst is al in stocken, | Daer

van komen witte vlocken’). They are purified by affliction, like parti-coloured furs beautified by smiting, So too, argues the emblem ‘Persecution adorns the Society’

(De vervolghinghe verciert de Societeyt; in Latin, Multo vulnere pulchrior, ‘More beautiful by many blows’), the soul allows the body to be martyred, like the clothmaker who pricks white satin sleeves, giving them greater luster by allowing the flesh they cover to peep through. This complex analogy portrays the body as a rich garment through which the soul’s flesh (that is, the embodied soul) may be soul, glimpsed; martyrdom, in other words, reveals, indeed ornaments, the bodying forth its virtuous beauty.”

in The emblem ‘Wages of Persecution’ (De verdiensten der vervolghinghe; on Latin, Dant pretium plagae, ‘Blows confer the value’) considers how representati enhances the presence of virtue (Fig. 5). The imago illustrates a minter who strikes coins with a punch. The poem

avers that minting makes the richest

materials yet richer: precious metals such as gold and silver, howsoever esteemed, increase in value once converted van? slaen (by striking) into coinage. Beautiful to the eyes (‘schoon in d’oogh’), coins such as the crown and the albertin derive their price from the hammer’s strike (‘den hamer moet het doen’), which of transforms metal into the image of value, in the same way that the blows a hammer martyrdom transform the Jesuit into the image of Christ. The tyrant is

wielded by God the minter, whose blows transfer the Lord’s likeness, converting

are firmly embraced. By their constancy and steadfastness, Poirters implies, the Jesuits °7 Afbeeldinghe, pp. 400-01. = Afbeeldinghe, pp. 404-05.

6: Afbeeldinghe, pp. 284-85. 65 Afbeeldinghe, p. 285: ‘Want daer was een meesters handt, verstandt, | Die hem onder handen nam.’

°° Afbeeldinghe, pp. 390-91.

| Met vernuft en kloeck

t | Dat dan door al de gaetkens ® Afbeeldinghe, p.405: ‘Nochtans het schoon roodt incarnae gheeft. luster den haer dat is Dat | , kijckt, | En de ghequetste stof verrijckt 7° Afbeeldinghe, pp. 406-07.

Walter δ. Melion

INTRODUCTION

29

the recipient into the coinage of affliction, the currency exchanged to purchase

heaven. On this account, martyrdom is a representational process confirming the

Jesuit in his imitation of Christ.”

Poirters fully develops the image of martyrdom as image-making for the public domain in the emblem “The Society Is Perfected through Adversity’ (De Societeyt wordt volmaeckt door teghenspoet; in Latin, Fingitque premendo, ‘He is moulded by constraint’).”* The imago shows a printer rolling an engraving plate through a printing press; new impressions hang drying behind him, while prints of the Crucifixion and the Virgin and Child are affixed to the press (Fig. 6). The Latin

proverb comes from the Aeneid, 6. 80, which describes how Apollo fashions to his will the sibyl consulted by Aeneas, who then confirms that the Trojans shall reach Lavinium. Like the sibyl possessed by Apollo, the Jesuit martyr is visited by the spirit of God, who moulds him through suffering into the perfect image of the sacrificial Christ. The poem praises the martyrs Stephen, Lawrence, and Sebastian,

Fig. 4: Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, The Society Is Purified through Adversity, London, British Library, from Afbeeldinghe van d'eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Iesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

whose bodies were impressed by martyrdom like the sheets of paper imprinted in a press (‘En al wat dat ghy siet dat komt alleen van drucken, | Het was eerst slecht papier, nu zijn’t de schoonste stucken’). The analogy between printing and martyrdom also extends to the circulation of the printed image: as Poirters declares, the power of martyrs to inspire is a function of the transmission of their deeds in prints: ‘And had my press, ink, and hand not done what you now see, not at all would it stand [before you]’ (‘En had mijn pers, en inckt, en had mijn’ jhandt ghedaen, | Van al dat ghy nu siet, sou ‘tminste hier niet staen’). If God is the

master printer, the imprinted body is the image wrought by this act of divine

image-making, a printed image, moreover, as desirable and valuable as the costliest

goldsmith’s work (‘Noyt heefter iuweelier de sijn’ soo dier verkocht’). Poirters has

in mind the incomparable plates of Dürer and the Wiericx’s, as well as those of contemporary masters (‘Mijn pers die is vermaert door al de fijnste plaeten | Die ons oft Albert Duer, oft Wiericks heeft ghelaeten, | Oft die noch heden ‘sdaeghs

een konstigh meester snijdt’). If God has imprinted pain, sorrow, and contestation upon the Company of Jesus, he has done so to turn it into a masterwork, a pleasing picture (‘aerdigh beelt’) whose art, like that of Diirer and his peers, transcends the passage of time (‘Want selden isser konst ghestorven met den tijdt’). Unlike

the imaging in which

Ludolphus

and the author of the Grote

fe Afbeeldinghe, p.407: ‘Als hy nu met u bloedt en met u leven speelt, | Weet dat hy in u slaet

Fig. 5: Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, Wages of Persecution, London, British Library,

from Afbeeldinghe van d’eerste eeuwe der Societeyt Iesu, ed. and trans. by A. Poirters (Antwerp,

1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Library.

des Heeren eyghen beeldt. | [...] | Dat wy door sulck een munt den naem van Iesus draeghen: | [...] | En al wat schaed’ wilt doen, dat maeckt ons tmeeste weerdt.’

2 Afbeeldinghe, pp. 398-99.

30

Walter S. Melion

31

INTRODUCTION Àà

evangelische peerle engage, this sort of image-making is explicitly pictorial in manner and meaning.

ne

.

τ’

The emblem ‘Ignatius uses Faber, alias Smith, to Convert Xavier’ (Ignatius

ghebruyckt Faber, alias Smidt, tot de bekeeringhe van Xaverius; in Latin, Solus non sufficit ignis, ‘Fire alone does not suffice’), part of Book V, ‘On the Society honoured, or the Glory with which after much suffering it was crowned’, applies the conceit of printmaking to the relation between the founder and his followers.” The one is like the printed image of the other, a work of high art (‘stuck van meerder konst’) fashioned in the image of its maker. (This notion plays upon the proverbial commonplace, Ogni dipintore dipinge se, Every painter paints himself, viz., the art of any master is made in that master’s self-image.) The imago portrays a smith at his forge, hammering a bar on his anvil. The poem asserts that Ignatius, having first heated Francis Xavier in the forge of divine love,

then conveyed him to Petrus Faber, whose dexterous hand and hammer bent him

to the founder’s will (‘Al was Xavier wat steegh, nu gloeyt hy vanden brandt, | Dus

gheeft hem over aen ‘sSmidts hamer, en ‘sSmidts handt’).

I have been endeavouring to set the scene for the essays that follow in the present volume: first, by summarizing the place of images within the early modern psychology (its natural history of the soul); second, by offering three case studies for the meditative use of images. These case studies focus on the propagation of images within three kinds of spiritual exercises —

ed. and trans. by A. Poirters

(Antwerp, 1640), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with permission.

speculative, spectacular, and

emblematic — that exemplify the full spectrum of image-based devotion available to pious men and women between about 1550 and 1650. In all three examples, images function as instruments of soul formation. In the Grote evangelische peerle, they are rendered in the abstract as mirrors of Christ’s humanity and divinity, in which the soul sees itself reflected and re-reflected. In the Vita Christi, they are

thetorically constructed to invite affective investment in historical truths to be witnessed and then figuratively elaborated by the soul desiring to be conformed to Christ. In the Afbeeldinghe, they are presented pictorially and emblematically to clarify the Jesuit vocation in terms of its investment in evangelical words and images. Whether mobilized as generic specula, historical spectacula, or artificial emblemata, these images support the imitatio Christi, claiming a lineage from Christ, the imago Dei, whom they implicitly posit as the source of all soulenhancing imagines. Let me turn now to the essays, briefly describing and aligning them.

73 Afbeeldinghe, pp. 508-09.

Fig. 6: Cornelis Galle after Philips Fruytiers, The Society Is Perfected through Adversity, Atlanta, W oodruff Library, Emory University, from Afbeeldinghe van deerste eeuwe der Societeyt lesu,

The sequence commences with Klaus Krüger’s study of the relation between pictorial fiction and visual imagination in the contemplative praxis of postTridentine Italy. Since it addresses questions of image-theory and examines the mediating functions of pictorial artifice in Marian devotion, Krüger’s essay can be seen to take up some of the issues raised in the present introduction, especially with regard to the Afbeeldinghe. Krüger asks how and why altarpieces such as Cerano’s Madonna with Saints Francis and Carlo Borromeo present Mary as the living vision of a cult image. In this painting, the embodied imaginaria visio of saintly contemplation appears in the clearly recognizable form of a sacred effigy — Annibale Fontana’s statue of the Virgin of the Assumption, commissioned by Carlo Borromeo for the Milanese church of 5. Maria presso 5. Celso. This statue, as Kriiger shows, associates Mary’s celestial transfiguration with the artistic transformation of intractable marble into a graceful, that is, beautiful and lifelike, image of the glorified yet merciful Virgin. Moreover, the statue Cerano imitates was venerated as a substitute for a miracle-working Marian icon famed for its intercessory powers. Cerano’s marblelike Virgin is at once imaginatively present

32

Walter S. Melion

as an image mediated by saintly devotion and concretely present as a work of art certifying the advocacy of Maria Mediatrix. Kriiger explores the pictorial discourse of the religious imaginary in altarpieces where the ontological status of the image qua image is made manifest. Shelley MacLaren and Reindert Falkenburg explain how self-formation (or better, self-reformation) was construed as a process of negotiation between image and imagination, pictorial and mental imagery, sensory spectacle and visual speculation. MacLaren focuses on the image-text apparatus in Francesco da Barberino’s J Documenti d'amore. Francesco invites the reader-viewer to transpose his novel personifications of civic virtues — embodied in pictures and glossed in poetry and prose — into ymaginationes collatas in mentem suam (internally assembled mental images). In order to facilitate this transposition, he devises new

iconographies whose novelty persuades the reader-viewer to engage in loving emulation, to transform himself into a living similitude of the virtues whose unfamiliar forms have stimulated memory, understanding, and ultimately, will.

MacLaren demonstrates the ethical basis of Francesco’s poetic fictions: the process of pictorial invention, by which the virtues were fashioned, comes to figure the requisite process of conforming oneselfto the rules of virtuous conduct, by which the movement from imago to ymaginatio is completed. Falkenburg provides a compelling analysis of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which turns on the Creation scene in the triptych’s interior left wing. Here God appears as the Son of Man, accompanied by Adam and the newly created Eve; that he stares deep into the viewer's eyes, inviting him to return the Saviour’s gaze, evokes

the notion that man, made in God’s image and likeness, is the mirror of divinity,

just as Christ, the imago Dei, is the mirror of perfected humanity. Falkenburg situates the painting within the tradition of literary specula, in which the divine gaze proves integral to the mirror relationship between the soul and Christ, as bride and bridegroom. Focusing on the theme of ‘figures of likeness’, he discerns certain patterns of similarity and variation that he connects to the Fountain of Life behind the Creation scene. The fountain, while sharing certain characteristics with the Creation scene in front of it, actually should be understood as its antipode, its counterimage. It is through the antithetical interaction of these two motifs that the painting’s typological structure unfolds, Falkenburg further identifies a number of ‘para-typological’ figures and motifs in the Paradise and Hell panels that repeat and echo the Fountain of Life in their formal and semantic makeup. In his view, the typological construct that emerges turns upside down the history of salvation as prophesied from the beginning of time.

INTRODUCTION

33

Michael Cole and Pierre-Antoine Fabre inquire how the soul’s crucial power of discernment — narrowly defined, its ability to distinguish between good and

evil —

was mobilized and represented. Cole assays the interface between

discernment as devotional exercise and discretion as pictorial practice: whereas

the former requires the votary to ascertain the angelic or demonic sources of human thought and action, the latter requires the artist to correlate the movements of the body with the animating motions of the soul. Having shown

that the discourses of inspiration and animation overlap, and identified Leonardo as the source of this imbrication, Cole utilizes art theoretical texts, especially Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Idea del Tempio della Pittura, to examine the problem Michelangelo posed for theoreticians who defined discrezione as knowledge of actions and their causes, and also as judicious moderation. Lomazzo responds to Giovanni Gilio’s critique of Michelangelo, in particular his implication that the artist, exploiting bodies to display his virtuosity, breaks the necessary link between

physical and spiritual motion. Fabre construes discernment more broadly as the

ability to meditate on the connections among sacred mysteries; he focuses on mutually determinative images of the Agony in the Garden and the Resurrection,

asking how the relation between the apostles, asleep as if dead, and Christ, confirmed in his divinely mandated humanity, figures the meditative relation between the votary’s eyes of body and mind, identified with the sleeping apostles, and his spiritual eyes, with which he becomes capable of discerning the image of the Resurrection. With reference to paintings such as Giulio Campi’s Agony in the Garden, the profile view of Christ is seen to adumbrate the movement from Passion to Resurrection, and also to suggest the liminal structure of the gospel narrative, which pivots between speech and silence, vigil and sleep, and images of Christ standing and prostrate. Fabre concludes with a discussion of Donatello S San Lorenzo pulpits, in which the anomalous profile view of the Risen Christ

underscores the association between the Agony and the Resurrection, while the figure illustrating James 4. 8 maps a sequence binding the Judgement of Pilate, Agony, Resurrection, and Holy Women at the Tomb.

Whereas the majority of essays in this volume concern Roman Catholic imageuse, Lee Palmer Wandel and Christopher Ocker elucidate the images projected by reformed Christians to visualize their sacramental participation in the corpus Christi and their espousal of the Lutheran doctrine of universal religious vocation.

Luther and Zwingli’s opposing conceptions of the body of Christ, Palmer Wandel argues, have bearing on their competing notions on Eucharistic presence —

Luther s Anwesenheit and Zwingli’s Gegenwart — and on their appreciation of images (for Luther they are adiaphora, for Zwingli, incitements to idolatry, but

Walter S. Melion

34

also instruments of historical imagination). Luther understands Christ’s body to be unbounded and materially present in the Eucharist, because governed by the divine will (‘non confundendo naturas nec dividendo personam’); Zwingli regards that same body as profoundly human, and therefore temporally and physically delimited — its presence in the Eucharist as viscerally representative. For his followers, bodily experience was constitutive of their experience of Christ in the Eucharist; by contrast, Luther analogizes not the human body and Christ’s, but the soul’s ubiquitous relation to the body it enlivens, and Christ’s ubiquitous presence as body in the Eucharist. Ocker investigates the populist self-imagery propagated in widely disseminated evangelical dialogue pamphlets. In publications such as the anonymous 4 Dialogue between a Christian and Jew [...] treating the topic, Christ the Cornerstone of 1524, the tavern is imagined as a place of religious inquiry freely pursued, its locals as readers of Scripture and teachers of dogma, its visiting travellers as potential converts and students of instructional images. Readers of these dialogues were offered an utopian vision of society, in which confessional differences lead to opinionated

exchange,

but not to civil discord,

and both

peasants and burghers prove capable of besting clergy in matters of doctrine. Bret Rothstein and Todd Richardson call attention to a different aspect of the religious manipulation of images — the play of visual wit as an instrument of selfknowledge and -reformation. The Hours of Mary of Burgundy, as Rothstein observes, contains numerous pictorial puns that invite the reader-viewer to think inventively about the nature and purpose of her investment in this book, in the technologies

of devotion

it offers

to

receptive

eyes,

heart,

and

mind.

Such

homonymous images — some foolish, others serious — allow her to gauge the foolishness and/or seriousness of her meditative engagement, as aided by this book she progresses from devotional infancy to spiritual maturity, like the child in its

walker pictured among the marginalia to the Penitential Psalms. Featured among the visual paronomasiae, the many images of books insistently draw parallels between reading and viewing, between books, and this book of hours in particular, and pictures. Rothstein finds ample support for his argument in Jean Gerson’s frequent recourse to puns — such as the pairing l'omme and l'ame — in the Mendicité spirituelle and other texts read at the Burgundian court. Richardson provides a richly textured analysis of Pieter Bruegel’s punning play on the term sottebollen in the print Festival of Fools. Like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, the print

turns on the paradox that self-knowledge and foolishness are twins, and that folly

so discerned is part and parcel of the true imitation of Christ. Various devices, such as the pairing of fool’s head and owl’s mirror, encourage

Festival of Fools as a speculative mirror of the soul.

us to view the

35

INTRODUCTION

John Decker, Henry Luttikhuizen, and Leopoldine Prosperetti expound paintings of hermit saints, anchorites, and other contemplatives, that offered spiritual templates for viewers keen on cultivating their souls in imitation for

these monastic paragons. Decker focuses on Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s St John the

Baptist in the Wilderness, which shows the saint seated in a wild, uninhabited glade that simultaneously represents the paradise garden into which his soul has been transformed through prayer. With reference to exegetical texts such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, Decker shows how Geertgen adapts the image of the soul as wilderness into the image of the soul as paradisiacal love garden, and concomitantly, how he tropes spiritual exercises as the act of clearing, planting, and taming the soul’s wilderness. Luttikhuizen reveals the corporate values implicit in Geertgen’s St John the Baptist in the Wilderness, as well as in other images of solitary contemplation. The imitation of Christ, he contends, was often defined as conformitas to Christ that reaffirmed one’s likeness to one’s monastic brothers (or sisters); similarly, in their effect, mystical union and Holy Communion were seen to be complementary. Geertgen’s Baptist, conforming to the crucified Christ in his attitude and proximity to the agnus Dei, embodies the notion that entry into monastic life constitutes a second baptism, and also that the contemptus mundi not only denies but also reconciles the world with God. So, too, paintings like the Master of Spes Nostre’s Visitation with Saints

Jerome, Augustine, and Four Regular Canons depict the cloister as the site of

contemplative interiority, but also of loving visitation and corporate identity. Prosperetti interprets a series of hermitage landscapes, collaboratively designed by Cardinal Federico Borromeo and Jan Brueghel the Elder, as meditative prompts painted within the humanist tradition of spiritual repose (otium), that involves

retiring into the solitary wilderness of the soul, there to purge it of temporal cares (vacatio) and restore its likeness to God. These paintings, as Prosperetti indicates, are latter-day re-creations of the early Christian Thebaid, that visualize tropes codified in Petrarch’s De vita solitaria and De otio religioso. Based on the

eremitical inventions of Hieronymus Bosch and Joachim Patinir, they allow the

soul to envision itself journeying from the world into the heart, where it hopes finally to be reunited with the Creator.

Christine Gottler and I deal with the meditative form and function of the self-

images promulgated

by Rubens

and Hendrick Goltzius. My essay examines

Goltzius’s Life of the Virgin , especially the Annunciation and Nativity, arguing first, that the series presents the Virgin Annunciate as a divine embodiment ofthe protean imitation here exemplified by Goltzius — that is, as a living epitome of his self-effacing practice of pictorial artifice — in terms borrowed from

36 Ludolphus’s

Walter S. Melion Vita Christi; second, that throughout

the series, Goltzius utilizes

Joseph to represent himself, avowing his Marian devotion, in terms derived from

Jesuit sources; and finally, that in the Nativity, again in Jesuit terms, he explores indeed portrays the experience of meditative time. Géttler studies the complex relation between Rubens’s early Silenus Mocked in Genoa and its virtual pendant, the Ecce Homo now in St Petersburg; with reference to Erasmus, whose Adagia codified the interpretation of Silenus as a metaphor for hermeneutic insight that uncovers hidden knowledge and concealed wisdom, she suggests that Silenus

AUTHENTICITY

INNER PRESENCE IN EARLY MODERN

displays his ability to solicit compassion, bring statuary to life, and portray both living flesh and the things of nature, alludes powerfully to the painter's

the painter's explicit allusion to his own art — Rubens’s transformation of the Centaur Mocked by Cupid into the Mocking of Christ.

OF

ITALY

Klaus Krüger

consummate skill, presenting it as an object worthy of contemplative admiration. That Erasmus viewed Christ the Man of Sorrows as the consummate Silenus

underwrites Gôttler’s Aretine reading of the Ecce Homo as an epitome of divine

FICTION:

ON THE PICTORIAL CONSTRUCTION

Mocked invites meditation on the meaning of Silenus’s flesh and suffering. Since Silenus was also a figure of artistic and poetic invention, Rubens’s painting, which

artifice, bodied forth in the mysteries of Incarnation and Passion, and signified by

AND

n conjunction with an Italian votive image from the 1950s (Fig. 7), a

practicable procedure promises to elicit visions, facilitating the veneration of a local saint, or santino, as one would say. The ‘grande visione del grande Santo’, as the inscription has it, can be expected to appear after the worshipper has

held his gaze steadily on the illustrated black-and-white negative for a full minute,

and then turned his eyes upward, toward the heavens. There, he will be greeted by the lifelike countenance

apparition.’

of Don

Bosco,

in the shape

of a radiant,

luminous

|

It remains to be determined whether such optically based instructions for

summoning ‘visions’ are to be regarded as the products of naive popular belief, or instead as instances of subtle irony. In any event, we can hardly fail to perceive the continuity of such practices within the Christian tradition, practices employing mystical images, which

stretches all the way back

to ancient times. That the

visible, material image is an instrument leading from the visible to the invisible

(per visibilia ad invisibilia), that it serves as a mere medium of transmission in an anagogical sense, as a gateway to a higher, imaginary actuality, one which alone, in its real dimensions, opens onto the inward faculty of the imagination and therefore remains ineffable in pictorial terms, is the familiar core idea of all theories dealing with mystical images. We encounter this theory in perpetually novel formulations from Augustine to Gregory the Great, from the Pseudo Dionysius

! Annamaria Rivera, 1 mago, il santo, la morte, la festa. Forme religiose nella cultura popolare (Bari: Edizioni Dedalo, 1988), p. 33. All translations mine unless noted otherwise.

Klaus Kriiger

39

AUTHENTICITY AND FICTION

all the way to Bernard of Clairvaux, from Bonaventura to Thomas Aquinas and

well beyond.”

This same idea is the basis for the descriptive topics of such visions, as found in hagiographical writings and devotional literature, visions in whose geneses

images play a decisive role. Already the Life of Pope Gregory VII, dating from the

late eleventh century, tells how St Peter appeared to him in a vision, and exactly in the form familiar to him from pictorial representations (‘ut in picturis videre solebat’).* And a legend from c. 1375 describes explicitly how Catherine of Siena, when raising her eyes heavenward (‘levando gli occhi verso il cielo’), saw often

apparitions of Sts Peter and Paul, Johannes and Dominic, who always assumed the same poses she had seen them taking earlier in painted pictures hanging in church:

Sorprendente Foto Apparizione Fissare

il puntino,,

che

si trova

‘in quella forma che veduta l’avea dipinto nella chiesa.* Something similar,

all'altezza del naso per un minuto, poi volgere o al Cielo,

dopo

vi apparira

questa

del

Santo

grande

Don Fig. 7: Sorprendente

gli occhi verso

according to legends handed down from the late medieval period, was experienced by Catherine of Alexandria, who was once given a painted panel by a hermit which depicted the Virgin with the infant Jesus. She surrendered to the image in

il muro

qualche

istante

grande visione

such a state of self-absorbed contemplation that on the same night, in the silent

BOSCO.

Foto Apparizione, anonymous

votive image.

1950s.

darkness of her chamber, she actually saw an apparition of the Holy Virgin, an

event which, as we know, culminated in her mystic marriage to Christ (Fig. 8).

Regularly recurring testimonials of this kind, which document the appearance of

visions preceded by the viewing of painted images, could be multiplied without

much difficulty, and the phenomenon they describe is by no means confined to

° Ernst Benz, ‘Christliche Mystik und christliche Kunst’, in Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift fir Literaturwissenschaft und Erfahrungsformen

und

Geistesgeschichte,

Bilderwelt

(Stuttgart:

12 (1934), Klett,

22-48;

1969),

pp.

Ernst 313ff;

Benz, Die Sixten

Vision.

Ringbom,

‘Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions: Notes on the Place of Art in Late Medieval Private Piety’, in Gazette des beaux-arts,73 (1969),

159-70,

especially pp. 162ff.; David Freedberg,

The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 161ff.

* Otto Lehmann-Brockhaus, Schrifiquellen zur Kunstgeschichte des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts

für Deutschland, Lothringen und Italien, 2 vols (Berlin: D eutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft,

1938), 1,724, no. 3049. * Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 105-06. =

=

=

ak

Fig. 8: Andrea di Bartolo, Saint Catherine of Alexandria Praying, Assisi, Church of San Francesco. c. 1370. Reproduced courtesy of the Sacro Convento Assisi, P. G. Ruf.

> Meiss, pp. 107ff; Klaus Krüger, ‘Bildandacht und Bergeinsamkeit. Der Eremit als Rollenspiel in der städtischen Gesellschaft’, in Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit. Die

Argumentation der Bilder, ed. by Hans Belting and Dieter Blume (Munich: Hirmer, 1989), pp. 187-200

(p. 190).

Klaus Kriiger

”

41

AUTHENTICITY AND FICTION

medieval times.‘ Just how contagious and how prevalent such conceptions remained into the early modern period is exemplified by an engraving from the late sixteenth century (Fig. 9) illustrating the religious praxis of the imaginaria visio.’ The image shows a Carmelite monk kneeling in an open landscape, his gaze raised heavenward in contemplative rapture. There, he beholds the radiant apparition of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus, and in the form, moreover, of a framed panel painting. It functions like an open window that leads his gaze upward and into the depths of the celestial beyond, visible through a corona of clouds. Here, the pious Carmelite actually sees ‘per visibilia ad invisibilia’, whereby the imaginary actuality of Mary as a vision virtually coincides with her pictorial reality as man-made image. Clearly, for the monk who is experiencing this imaginaria visio, the event is bound up with definite salvific expectations, all the more so since the mother of God figures here in her privileged role as ‘mediatrix’ and mediator of a celestial Paradise. Mary begins to appear in this role in the Medieval era, not just in her topically recurring characterizations as a ‘window to heaven’ (fenestra coeli) or as a ‘window of illumination’ (fenestra illuminationis), but also in a multitude of

correspondingly conceived pictorial representations in which she appears in a simulated window frame, located directly on the threshold separating the mundane sphere of the beholder from the divine realm beyond it.’ A painting created by

IMAGINARIA

VISIO.

Fig. 9: Antoine iericx, W imaginative vision ( imaginaria visio), Brussels, Cabinets des Estampes.

After 1591. Reproduced courtesy ofthe Department of Art History, Freie Universitat, Berlin.

Vincenzo Foppa c. 1460-70, may here serve as one example among many (Fig. 10).

° For the entire complex of questions about the exchange between images and visions with further examples, see Sixten Ringbom, ‘Devotional Images’, pp. 160f; Chiara Frugoni, ‘Le mistiche, le visioni

e l'iconografia: rapporti ed influssi’, in Temi e problemi nella mistica femminile trecentesca (Convegni del Centro di studi sulla spiritualit B medievale, Perugia 1979) (Todi: Accademia Tudertina, 1983), pp. 137-79; Chiara Frugoni, “Domine, in conspectu tuo omne desiderium meum:” visioni e immagini

in Chiara da Montefalco’, in $. Chiara da Montefalco e il suo tempo (Atti del quarto Convegno di studi storici ecclesiastici, Spoleto 1981), ed. by Claudio Leonardi and Enrico Menestd (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985), pp. 155-75; Freedberg, pp. 283ff; Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Ag of Spanish Art (London: Reaktion 1995), pp. 47#; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998). 7 Stoichita, p. 60. ὃ For the theological concept of Mary as fenestra coeli, see Yrjô Hirn, The Sacred Shrine: À

Study of Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 343ff.; Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-up in 15th-Century Devotional Painting (Abo: Abo Akademi, 1965), pp.42ff; Rona Goffen, ‘Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellini’s Half-Length Madonnas’, in Art Bulletin, 57 (1975), 487-518; Carla Gottlieb, The Window in

Art: From the Window of God to the Vanity of Man (New York: Abaris, 1981), pp. 69ff.; Hana Hlaväckovä and Hana Seifertova, ‘Mosteckä Madona — imitatio a symbol’ (The Madonna of Most — Imitation and Symbol), in Umeni, 33 (1985), 44-57

ES

Be

Sforzesco.c. Fig. 10: Vincenzo Foppa, Madonna and Child, Milan, Pinacoteca di Castello

1460Bergamo. e Milano di ce provin le per . P.S.A.E a 70. Reproduced courtesy of the Soprint endenz

”

Klaus Kriiger

Its iconographic content — Mary offering herselfto the eyes of the beholder as an image of hope and a gateway to Paradise — is expressly affirmed in an inscription on the painted frame: ‘Ave Sanctissima Maria Porta paradixi [ecc.]’.’

What finds expression in such testimonials and representations is essentially

the notion that the painted image functions in a specific manner as a medium of vision, and more precisely as a medium situated right in the intermediate zone

between concrete sensual experience and the trans-material imaginary. By taking

this in-between position, that is to say by performing between these polarities while also maintaining their capable of generating a specific type of experience, intricate manner between perceptions of similarity and

a continuous mediation dissociation, the image is one that oscillates in an those of difference.

It is precisely this function — or better: this particular ontological form,

manifested as a medium — to which the painted image owes its special ambivalence,

regarding both the degree of reality inhering in its representations, and its claims to possess revelatory and prophetic powers. On the one hand, it functions merely as a transitional locus, and is to a degree transparent in relation to a higher, imaginary actuality, one which alone, in its real dimensions, opens onto the inward faculty of the imagination. The scenes showing Catherine of Alexandria

make this quite clear when they repeatedly represent the saint excessu mentis, in

a state of inner rapture, that is to say: turning away from

the panel painting and

closing her eyes as she receives the heavenly revelation in an inner vision (Fig. 1 1).

On the other hand, however, the image acts simultaneously as a medium in which

precisely the higher reality to be viewed in the imagination assumes a pictorially

concretized and hence durable, visible, and more-or-less distinctly characterized

shape, one capable, in the end, of meeting the demands of authentic presence.

43

AUTHENTICITY AND FICTION

As we know, the powers of conviction and actualization that emerge from such graphic concretizations occasionally go so far that for the beholder, the painting in its material presence virtually ‘embodies’ the depicted persona. This aspect too is demonstrated vividly in the scenes of Catherine of Alexandria, that is, in the intimate tenderness wich: which she receives the Marian image from the hermit’s

hands and nestles up against it (Fig. 12). The importance often attained by the

material aspect of images in such devotional practices is confirmed by the diary of

the Florentine merchant Giovanni Morelli, dating from the early fifteenth

century, which often refers to intimate devotions before a panel painting of the ἠχίση: Giovanni kneels down before the image and addresses the individual Ομ

figures of Christ, Mary, and John directly and insistently, and in cases of illness, he and his son Alberto even implore the image for support and curing via bodily

contact. At one point, Giovanni writes, ‘I took hold of the panel with devotion

and kissed it in the same places where, during his illness, my son had sweetly kissed {Ὁ

sketched here in somewhat Accordingly, the image’s constitutive ambivalence ω abbreviated form — between materiality and transparency, between original and

reproductive existence, between similarity and difference, is intimately bound up with its affects on the beholder. More precisely, we encounter the question whether the potency of pictorial experience on the part of the observer/believer

leads either toward the fixation in the beholder’s mind of something he regards as concrete and objective, thereby reducing the scope available to the play of vee

or whether the by delivering the imprint of a complete and coherent illusion, image instead activates and liberates the imagination, facilitating the meen of individualized interior images. Needless to say, behind this question lies another of far-reaching complexity, namely that concerning the social oe religious effectiveness inhering in relations of authority and emancipation, an

? Fernanda Wittgens, Vincenzo Foppa (Milan: Pizzi, 1949), pp. 57-58 and 96; Maria Teresa

Fiorio and Mercedes Garberi, La Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco (Milan: Electa, 1987), p. 77

(with additional bibliography); Arte in Lombardia tra Gotico ὁ Rinascimento [exhibition catalogue,

Milan, 1988], ed. by Liana Castelfranchi Vegas (Milan: Fabbri, 1988),pp. 190-91 no. ,48; Maria

Grazia

Balzarini,

Vincenzo

Foppa

(Milan:

Jac,

1997),

p-

154,

cat.

13;

Vincenzo

Foppa.

Un

protagonista del Rinascimento, ed. by Giovanni Agosti, Mauro Natale, and Giovanni Romano

(Milan: Skira, 2002), p. 120, cat. 54. The inscription of the frame reads as follows: ‘AVE

SANCTISIM

[A ] MARIA

PORTA

PARADIXIDOMINA

MONDIPURA

SINGVLARISNE VIRGO SINGVLARIS

TVCONCEPISTIEIXU, The tradition and conceptual context of this iconography is fully discussed by Klaus Kriiger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtharen. Asthetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien (Munich: Fink, 2001), pp. 46ff. (English trans. publ. as Unveiling the Invisible: Image and Aesthetic IMlusion in Early Modern Italy (New York: Zone, 2008, in press))

basciandola, dove ne’ propri i luoghi i bascianc i e la tavola e ene 10 «[L]evatomi in pie, presi con divozion teens ἜΜ volte, moltissime [...] baciata infermita sua nella avea figliuolo mio il dolcemente

braccia la tavola, basciai il Crocifisso e la figura della sua Madre e dello Evangelista’: Οἷον ri i Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi, ed. by Vittore Branca (Florence: Le Monnier, 1956), ΡΡ' 1755 3 a

487 and 491). For this important source see Richard C. Trexler, Public Life if scenes (New York: Academic, 1980), pp. 176ff; Michele Bacci, Pro remedio apis ih ae

a :

pratiche devozionali in Italia centrale (secoli xur XIV) (Pisa: ETS, 2000). ΡΡ 1391 ρῶν 7 ’ ‘Bild und Bühne. Dispositive des imaginären Blicks’, in frangyormationen = ; nea

Performativitat und Textualitat im Geistlichen Spiel, ed. by Ingrid Kasten and Erika (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 218-48.

Fischer-Lic

44

Klaus Kriiger

45

AUTHENTICITY AND FICTION

not least of all questions concerning the criteria, exegetical competence, and norm-defining powers of pictorially generated authenticity."”

The illustration of the imaginaria visio (Fig. 9) already suggests the dimensions of this nexus of factors. The Carmelite monk appears within an expanded open landscape as a self-determined individual involved in the exercise of personal religious

devotion; he does not seem especially constrained either by collective norms or by any

particular institution, for example, his own religious order. Nevertheless, he has in fact been allotted a fixed position within a distinctly hierarchical structure

controlling the bestowal of celestial illuminations, which he now takes up in the role of the recipient who kneels in a posture of gratitude and humility. A slightly earlier painting from 1561 by Michele Tosini, which is situated in a chapel of the nunnery of San Vincenzo in Prato, yields a similar constellation (PL 1).2 The beholder assumes a position comparable

to that adopted by our

Carmelite, for he is confronted with a perspective arrangement organized into progressively receding and ascending stages in relation to which he is consigned

va

ΗΝ

11: Phares σον - LA

Documiton

amof”

Ft

i3

E

e

Fig. 28: Justitia, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4076, fol. 87”. Reproduced with permission.

with na, Barb. Lat. 4076, fol. 15". Reproduced Fig. 30: Mors, Biblioteca Apostolica Vatica permission.

Fig. 29: Etternitas, Biblioteca A postolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 4077, fol. 85°. Reproduced wich permission.

roduced a, Barb. Lat. 4076, fol. 6°. Rep Fig. 31: Virtu in genere, Biblioteca Apostolica Vatican with permission.

80

Shelley MacLaren

This last statement in particular has informed previous discussions of the role of the Documenti d’Amore’s images; they are understood to help communicate concepts where the vernacular Italian poetry is unclear.! The complementary role of the Documenti d’Amore’s images in relation to the accompanying texts is well established. Nonetheless, several questions remain to be explored. What might be the particular weight of the images themselves? How do they fulfil their didactic role? Does their place within a conduct book help account for their importance in some way?

i It is apparent that material images were accorded a crucial role in the Documenti d Amore. Beyond the references made to their importance for understanding

references are made to the physical presence of the figures on the page; ane pinta mostro in carte’.” In the commentary various features are explained in

such a way as to suggest an after-the-fact interpretation. This ‘after-the-fact’ tone is especially striking in those examples where the interpretation explains

that which cannot be seen in the image. Discussing the form given to Amor, Francesco comments that we cannot see the back of his head or wings in order to

signify his divinity, and that just as nothing comes between God and the just soul,

so nothing is represented between Amor and the horse.’ Particularly evident

is the emphatic presence of the virtues on the manuscript page. The bodies of

the virtues, in their boxed-in architectural spaces or architectonic thrones, directly address the viewer, an address emphasized by the subsequent introduction in the

poem, such as ‘This is Docilitas’, or ‘This lady is the one named Constantia’ The miniatures are centred on the page, in most cases spanning at least the width of the central column of poetry, and the space allotted to the Latin prose

: For a description of the ‘circular’ relationship ofimage and text in the treatise, where each medium refers to and explains the other, see Daniela Goldin’s “Testo e immagine μοὶ Documenti d Amore di Francesco da Barbe Quaderni rino’ d'italianistica, , | (1980), 125-38. She suggests that the images were to be equated with Latin in their effectiveness, both are Abuse to expression than the vernacular. See also Hans Belting, ‘Das Bild als Text: Wandmalerei und Literatur im Zeitalter Dantes’, in Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit (Munich: Hirmer, 1989)

23-64 (pp. 34-36).

i

I Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 17.

23 d’AAM τ I Documenti da ennarum

2076, de

exteriorum unde

4

νὰ

Egidi, 1,15: ‘Certa pars eius non videtur ut posteriora capitis nee.

si

ὟΝ

ee

.


> This page layout resembles that oflaw textboo g page

column, has parallels in the openin columns of text rather than being restricted to a single a relatively of Distinctiones, where

often allotted the image of Christ giving the laws was

large,

sen both commenton the resemblance of the centralized space above the text. Panzera and Jacob commentary to legal examples. : , a. SA À a ' : ial sphere. In both cases, the lines of 26 celest a is figure d secon the ntia, In the case of Prude be ‘ othe r subsections, and could more easily Italian poetry consist of fewer syllables chan in the poetry of column single a is here t written in two columns. Where more than two figures appear below.

em : ‘De secundo sic dicas quod et si non pictor 27 ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, ΠΙ,351 nemo cum ante inform gratia amoris m me fecit necessitas

designatorem tamen figurarum ipsaru

us me intel ligeret iusto modo.’ pictorum illarum partium ubi extitit liber fundat m fastidia non 1, 94: ‘ac licet nobilibus propter coloru 28 ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi,

videtur incongrua per n designandi nulli etiam principi videatur ars convenire pingendi, attame ndum novitates emergentes que ad divisa

intentiones suas facil ius porrigunt et speculantur.’ licet ΤῊΣ ee cto quamvis aliqui dixerint quod I Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 6 6: ‘Nec obmi ile possib Ρ im figurare vir tute em In figuris virtu vi t es in specie tamen in genere possibile ad ibile sitsi representare in figuris sed illorum um randam procedam non in content videbatur quin ad istam generalitatem figu um suor que orum serv honor em

quam pingentibus pertinent habilius 29

quandam

qualem

novitatis

effigiem

inducendam

in amoris

82

Shelley

MacLaren

he had previously had one of the Documenti’s personifications depicted elsewhere, Francesco is careful to describe where the image appeared and what it looked like.

The rediscovery of Francesco’s book of hours confirms many of his statements

about the prior history of his figures. The images of Spes, Mors, Laus, Misericordia, and the Hours appear there, just as described in the commentary to the Documenti d’Amore. Insistently claiming his invention of Spes, Francesco explains, “This indeed I say to you so that in nothing you might believe that I appropriate for myself a work that belongs to another person,’ after describing where the figure had previously appeared.” All of these statements draw attention to Francesco’s

deliberate invention of the figures, and emphatically claim them as his own. Many of Francesco’s images were developed by modifying existing iconography. In some cases Francesco refers to the source iconography in the commentary. He states that Virtu in genere (Fig. 31) sits upon a lion’s back and holds open its mouth in the manner in which Samson is commonly depicted.*' Gratitudo, who allows the worthy into the Court of Love while the unworthy are damned, is related visually, and in the commentary, to the Last Judgement.” Justitia (Fig. 28) is easily recognized, with her sword and instrument for measuring weight, despite the change of attribute to a steelyard from a balance, and the addition of encircling rays. Etternitas (Fig. 29) resembles a siren or mermaid.*?

Constantia

relates very

closely to the description of Giotto’s lost fresco of the Comune rubato, and to the related female personification of the threatened commune that appeared in the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua.** Francesco rendered the central personification

SHAPING THE SELF IN THE IMAGE OF VIRTUE

83

impervious through her averted gaze and the shield over her heart, and characterized the four surrounding figures as specific dangers with particular attributes.” Inarguably, the novel forms of the virtues have to do with Francesco’s particular subject matter.** Francesco's manipulation of the iconography of existing allegorical figures to conform to his new meaning most famously drew attention in Erwin Panofsky’s essay ‘Blind Cupid’. In this essay Panofsky traced the evolution of the figure of Amor, establishing that Francesco transformed a negatively charged figure of Love into a positively charged one, simply by removing the figure’s blindfold.*” However, in some cases it is evident that Francesco’s iconographic changes were made for other reasons than to more suitably represent new subject matter. Eva Frojmovié has argued that Francesco may have taken the iconography

of his figure of Justitia from the allegory of Justice depicted in the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua. While the attribute of a steelyard fits with the inscription

recorded as having been below the figure in the Palazzo della Ragione — ‘And I, the

mistress, temper the actions of men by means of reason | I stop crimes involving

weight

and

measure’

—

the attribute does not correspond

with

Francesco's

references in the commentary of the Documenti d’Amore to equality, better served with the attribute of a balance.** In combination with his other changes to Justitia,

such as the addition of encircling rays, Francesco’s use of the less-familiar attribute

of a steelyard was part of an overall strategy of reinvention and defamiliarization of his images, beyond the requirements of new conceptual content. τ These images appeared in various contexts, indicating that they were significant beyond their relation to specific accompanying texts. Francesco's rendition of Spes first appeared in his book of hours, was reused in the Documenti d’Amore, and

gaudium

aliquale.’

‘Petrarch

and

For

the

Story

a discussion of the

of the

Choice

novelty

of this image,

of Hercules’,

see Theodore

Journal of the

Warburg

and

Mommsen, Courtauld

appeared in the Reggimento e costumi di donna. Francesco reports that Baldo da Passignano was so impressed with the figure that he wanted to reuse ie in the beginning of his own treatise.”” Hope as a virtue could certainly be appropriate to all

Institutes, 16 (1953), 178-92. 30

I Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 111, 10: ‘hec quidem dico tibi ut in nullo crederes quod ,

>

ms

.

€

4

.

e

.

.

michi apropriem opera aliena.’ He makes similar statements with reference to Justitia and Laus.

See I Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, I, 287, and 11, 419. 31 NE -» I Documenti 2d'Amore, ed. by Egidi, τ, 74. “I Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1m, 340.

See Franca Petrucci Nardelli, ‘II. L’eternita Barberina. Dalla miniatura alla stampa, Miscellanea di studi in onore di Aurelio Roncaglia: a cinquant’anni dalla sua laurea (Modena: Mucchi, 1989), pp. 1005-14 (p. 1010). ** Eva Frojmovié, ‘Giotto’s Allegories of Justice and the Commune in the Palazzo della Ragione

of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 59 (1996), 24-47 in Padua: A Reconstruction’, Journal (pp. 31-33).

> One figure threatens Constantia with a sword, one offers a lapful of money, one flatters with a lute, and the figure of a child (a relative) pulls at her hem. virtues and 3 Valeria Nardi argues that Francesco’s ‘resemanticization’ of the concepts ofthe

Love is demonstrated in the allegorical figures; see Valeria Nardi, ‘Le illustrazioni dei Documenti d’Amore’, Ricerche di storia dell’arte, 49 (1993), 75-92 37 Erwin

(p. 78).

Panofsky, ‘Blind Cupid’, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic

Themes in the Art of the

Renaissance, Icon Editions (Boulder: Westview, 1972), pp. 95-128. i Frojmovié, ‘Giotto’s Allegories of Justice’, pp. 35-37. ubi Ὁ 1Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 111, 10: ‘ethec quidem dum essem in studio paduano : : ἘΣ P > Pasignano quem q cum moram traheret nobilissimus et morosus vir dominus comes Baldus de Pasign

84

Shelley MacLaren

of these contexts, and in each case her image was slightly adapted. Nonetheless, the repeat appearances of the figure, with and without explanatory text, imply a certain independence and malleability of the image in relation to context and content.

Similarly, Francesco's Hours, Justitia, Misericordia, Conscientia, and Mors appeared in multiple contexts, at both miniature and monumental scale.“ In each instance

their meaning was necessarily reinflected. Francesco’s images were made deliberately different and new, and used in various contexts. The novelty of these images must have carried particular value. Most simply, novelty was associated with delight. Francesco justifies his representation of the novel figure of Virtu in genere on the grounds that the image would allow for better understanding, but also because it would bring enjoyment to Love's servants.*' The connection of novelty to delight is well documented. In

his New Poetics (c. 1210), Geoffrey of Vinsauf urges the writer to have his choice

of word: ‘build a pleasing abode on another’s site; let it be there a novel guest and

give pleasure by reason of its novelty.” Francesco’s images were intended to give pleasure to the viewer, with or without iconographic explanation. Novelty was also associated with memory. Mnemonic images formed in the

mind were an important part of the arts of memory, and novelty was one of their key features. The art of memory was associated with the assimilation of ethical behaviour in the late Middle Ages. Memory was crucial to Prudence, and good judgement founded on memory.“ The Rhetorica ad Herrenium advises composing mental

SHAPING THE SELF IN THE IMAGE OF VIRTUE

images to aid recollection. To be effective these mnemonic

85

images must be

‘striking’ in some way, novel, engaged in action, distinguished by costume such as

‘crowns and purple cloaks’, beautiful or ugly, or even disfigured. The effective memory image is not a pre-existent, material image with fixed meanings for each attribute. Instead, each individual must fabricate his own associations and own

mental images.” In her seminal study of the arts of memory, Frances Yates first

observed the connection between the requirements for the effective imagines agentes of the arts

of memory and the novel allegorical images so prevalent in the

early fourteenth century. Though Yates emphasized the fact that the memory

image was an immaterial one, she also asserted that images formulated inwardly for the purposes of memory may have found their way into material expression, or vice versa.“ Francesco’s deliberate manipulation of his images, and his assertive ownership of these inventions, might in part be explained by the requirements for

effective memory images.’ Such a connection, however, provides only a partial

explanation of the role of the images in the Documenti d’Amore, and does not account for their emphatic material presence.

Novel treatment was also associated with ownership. Horace used legal language to describe the difficulty and the merit of treating common material in

a new way: ‘In ground open to all you will win private rights. Significantly, in

artificial memory from the category of rhetoric to the category of ethics, governed by Prudence, by Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and earlier scholars. Mary Carruthers argues fora ‘profoundly

memorial’ culture in the Middle Ages, where memory was ‘the essential foundation of prudence, hactenus apud Regem Ungarie sollicitudo et virtutes eius plurimum sublevarunt, et super multis

sapientia, ethical judgment’. Pointing to expanded needs for public oratory, she included notaries and students of law, like Francesco, amongst the circles in which artificial memory was popular; see Mary

preparatur pigritia tollitur et probitas imperatur sua curialitate cum librum ipsum librum spei

Carruthers,

novitatibus librum quendam ex proprio compilasset per cuius tenorem magna spes gentibus

vocaret hanc spem eodem modo in libri principio figurari mandavit. que licet forte ob defectum pictorum aliter in aliquibus picta extiterit tamen ipse hanc haberi voluit pro sic picta.’ 40 “+ è = Justitia appears inè Documenti a d’Amore, in4 Reggimento e costumi ; di : donna, in: Francesco s book of hours, and in a fresco cycle in the Bishop’s Palace in Treviso. Misericordia appears in his book of hours and in the fresco cycle in Treviso. Conscientia appears in the Trevisan fresco cycle, as wellas in the commentary to Documentid’Amore, in the section governed by Innocence. Mors

appears in the Documenti d’Amore, in the book of hours, and on the tomb of Bishop Antonio

d’Orso in Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence. 41 42

σα

ec

-

é

re «

‘The New

5 ΄ Poetics’, trans. by Jane Baltzell Kopp,

Press, 1954; repr. 1989), pp. 221.

Rhetorica ad Herrenium, pp.221 and 223. Yates suggests that this requirement encouraged invention and variety (p. 92). ‘6 Yates, pp. 75 and 81.

a ‘7 Also linking Francesco’s images to artificial memory, Frojmovié argues that Francesco 5 depiction ofthe virtues ‘in action’ derived from requirements for memory images as well as from an Aristotelian conception of virtue (Der Ilustrationzyklus, p. 193).

a . I Documenti . d'Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 66. See note 29, above.

Geoffrey of Vinsauf,

The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 153 and 176.

** Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

i Three Medieval

T

Rhetorical Arts, ed. by James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 61. 13 > a In Chapter ey 3 of a The i Art of o Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), Frances Yates discusses ‘the mediaeval transformation ofthe art of memory’; the transfer of discussions of

*8 Horace, ‘The Art of Poetry’, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H.R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (1929; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p.46 1. For ἀὐβουμίθῃ ofthis passage as used by Matthew of Vendôme and Geoffrey of Vinsauf with reference τὸ invention, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, Cambridge ee in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially Chapter 6.

86

Shelley MacLaren

the Documenti 5 commentary, in response to the question ‘why the painter is here

preferred to the writer’, Francesco responds, ‘because the picture draws to itself the panel.|...] For it would be ridiculous for a picture by Cimabue or Giotto to cede before the possession of a paltry panel.’ As Eric Jacobsen points out, this statement is a reshaping of a passage in the Corpus iuris civilis that debates the question of ownership, balancing the claims ofhe who had done the work versus he who owned the material, for instance when a crop was sown on someone else’s

land, or a work written on someone else’s parchment. While in the cases just cited

87

SHAPING THE SELF IN THE IMAGE OF VIRTUE

his new house, both to be specific to him, to belongto him. Most important in the end was the didactic value of the personification and the cueing of the proper response to the image of a virtue. The viewer is to absorb the abstract lesson and

embody it in their own behaviour.” Francesco’s

pictorial

personifications

were

to

prompt

a similar

response.

Moreover, these virtues were sent by Love. The reader is to learn to love the virtues and is repeatedly told that this is the proper way to conduct himself toward them.” Prudence, for instance, is sent to us to be honoured and loved.® This

the ownership would go to the owner of the land or of the parchment, the matter is different when it comes to images: ‘we think it better that the panel should cede to the picture: for it would be ridiculous for a picture by Apelles or Parrhasius to

prompting of the reader’s behaviour further helps to explain the material presence

considered his invented images to have some status as property. Francesco did not claim to be the author of the Documenti; that role is given to Amor, but he did

sense of sight so that they may more easily be loved.

cede to the possession of a paltry panel.” The passage implies that Francesco

of these personifications. In his extended discussion of love in the Prohemium, Francesco states that love is created when something pleasing is ‘seen, touched, or

heard’.** Love begins with the senses; these virtues are presented to the reader’s

Interpreting and judging signs, appearances and actions is a frequent theme in above, this first occurs with

the images. Seizing the

claim the role of giving Love’s teachings material form, as a scribe writing down

Documenti.

the design of the images. The novel forms of these personifications represented

even monumental, image of a personification. The attention to appearances, and

Love’s lessons. As described above, he also adamantly claimed responsibility for

Francesco's poetic achievement in writing the Documenti d’Amore. In them he gave common material new form.

The eighth story of the first day of the Decameron provides eloquent testimony regarding the import of novel didactic imagery. In the story, the notorious miser

As described

readers attention, each section of the conduct book opens with a striking, and

their interpretation, continues in the documenti proper, where it is no longer

applied to art, but rather to bodies in the world. Francesco admonishes his reader he to pay attention to the actions and appearances of those around him, so that and may control his own actions accordingly.” He is taught to judge the qualities

Messer Ermino de’Grimaldi asks the courtier Guiglielmo Borsiere whether he might be able to suggest ‘something never before seen’ that he could have painted

in the main hall of his new house. Guiglielmo responds that he cannot suggest a topic absolutely never seen before, except something trivial like a fit of sneezing. Instead he offers to propose a subject that Messer Ermino de’ Grimaldi himself

had obviously never seen, and suggests that the miser ‘[h]ave Generosity painted

there’. The implication is that had Messer Ermino ever seen such an image, he

would be acting accordingly. Shamed, the miser immediately changes his ways and

promises to have the virtue painted there so that no one would think that he had not seen and known her.” While in the story Boccaccio dismisses the value of

novelty, it still holds that Generosity was new for the miser. The story supports the association of novelty with ownership. Messer Ermino wanted a novel image for

theoretical models as >! Jean de Ghellinck discusses the imitation and expression of abstract, frequently appeared word The imitari. word Latin the of use and nding understa medieval of part n of that in association with the name of a virtue, and encompassed the subsequent expressio

), 151-59. virtue; see Jean de Ghellinck, ‘Imitari, imitatio’, Bulletin du Cange, 15 (1940-41 chio to scripto ? ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, II, 31: ‘et amare quelle | donne belle | di valor e potenza.’

| per chella sia honorata 53 ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, ΠΙ, 42: ‘Camor la cia mandata

| Amata ereverita | checi da stato in vita.’

visi tacti vel auditi 4] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 11: “Et dic quod amor ex alicuius

placiti

concurrente

consensu

duorum

invicem

vel

un o

incipiente

ac perserverante

et altero

postmodum concedente creatur.’ The passage also deals with then

‘

49

'

the lovers, but concludes with a repetition of ‘et dic semperex aliquo viso tacto vel audito placito.’

AE

de 1, 94, and Corpus iuris (1854), 1, 12. Both translations I Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi,

from Jacobsen, pt 1, p. 97. 50

=> : S Giovanni Boccaccio,

EI The Decameron, trans. by Mark

York: Norton, 1982), pp. 52-54.

Musa

and Peter Bondanella

(New

I Documentid’Amore, ed. by Egidi,1, 101, 102: ‘Dun grande et alto sire |che vada >» For example,

solo e tu dietro o davanti [τὸ monimenti alquanti | guarda sua gente elor gradi elor modi | Ancor te neltuo grado dimanda et odi | pero chogni paese a nuova usança |etallor costumanga | conforma

altuo pare.’

88

Shelley MacLaren

status of others by observing their manner, their expression, hands, and clothing” The reader is taught how to assess which people to avoid, including for instance ‘that one who, looking, often blinks his eyes’.”’ In the commentary, an explanation is given, ‘he who often moves the pupils of his eyes is revealed to be envious.”*

The reader must understand those around him in order to modify his own behaviour. Learning to control one’ s own appearance and actions is, after all, the

goal of reading a conduct book. Francesco teaches the reader how to behave in

various situations; in church, he is not to make a show of praying loudly.” He is taught how to behave in the street, at table, and when serving a superior. He is to keep his expression

clear, under whatever circumstances.

He

is to avoid the

eleven actions that will make him appear effeminate.*' Underlying these rules are precepts drawn from sources such as Augustine, Cicero, and Seneca: ‘exterior acts

are a sign of that which is inside the heart’; ‘the shameless eye is a messenger of the

shameless heart’; ‘discomposure of the body [...] indicates the quality of the mind’;

‘from contrariness of the body often follows contrariness of the soul’; ‘we call signs in bodies those gestures which indicate that which they are inside.’ These

89

SHAPING THE SELF IN THE IMAGE OF VIRTUE

Appearance and behaviour could be accurate indicators of interior qualities.

As the age, clothing and attributes of the virtues can be read to indicate an

essential quality or characteristic of that virtue, so too can the appearance of people in the world be read to indicate something essential about them. The connection between the forms of these virtues and the behaviour and appearance

of the reader is most explicitly made in the section governed by Justitia. In the second documentum, the virtue admonishes the reader that he must love Justice

so much as always to show her semblance.“ This statement is clearer in relation

to Francesco’s discussion of the definition of love, and his citation of various authorities on the subject. Francesco quotes Hugh of St Victor to the effect that one is transformed by love into the similitude of that which one loves: [of [JJust asa liquefied mass is poured through a tube into the mold and accepts the form beam of the mold], so the mind, softened by the fire of love, runs through the love, we are contemplation to the image of the divine likeness, indeed, whatever we transformed into its similitude by the very power of love.”

precepts were long-established commonplaces, and Francesco’s recital of them is

not surprising.®’

°° ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 83: ‘et vere quoniam gestus hominum et loquele cito indicabunt tibi qualitates ipsorum et status.[...] Sed raro continget si cautus fueris quod non possis

apredictis cognoscere quid agendum. Proba enim et videbis nam aut in modo aut in expressione

latitudinis vel longitudinis vel ex colore, vel ex manibus, vel ex pannis, vel similibus, cito cognosces eos. I Documenti d'Amore, ed. by Egidi, 111, 61: ‘quel che spesso batte | gliocchi guardando.

I Documenti d'Amore, ed. by Egidi, 111, 62: ‘iste enim qui frequenter agitat oculorum pupillas

invidus est repertus.’

°9 ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 144. “ ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 282 and 283. l ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 157--63. 62 [0 ΓΝ sit ocumenti d'Amore, ed. by Egidi, 11, 242 and 243: ‘Pero che gliatti di fuor segno sono, | chentel quor dentro sia,’ and ‘Impudicus oculus impudici cordis est nuntius’; IL, 51, ‘Incompositio enim corporis ut Augustinus ait qualitatem indicate mentis’; I, 286, ‘et diversitate corporum diversitas sepe sequitur animorum’;I, 182, ‘Signa etiam dicimus in homine gestus exteriores qualis sit interius indicante.’

°3 Dilwyn Knox describes the understanding of the relationship between interior and exterior expressed in such phrases as a ‘staple to medieval and Renaissance Christian doctrine’; see ‘Disciplina: The Monastic and Clerical Origins of Civility’, in Renaissance Culture and Society: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. RiceJr, ed. by John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto (New York: Italica, 1991), p. 109. See especially Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l'Occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard,

constitutions of Florence 1990). Such commonplaces also appeared in legal contexts. In the Episcopal opus imperfectum non s omnipoten noster dominus Cum wrote, of 1310, Bishop Antonio d’Orso

um, tales integri novit, et hominem in sabato sanum fecerit ad latitudinem divinorum obsequior indicat mentis, tem inequalita corporis vitiam huius nequeat dici quod ministri, r requiruntu corpore interdicimus hoc nostre constitutionis edicto beneficiorum adeptionem omnibus notabiliter

l in Florence and Fiesole, 1306-1518 (Citta del Vaticano: vitiatis’; see Richard Trexler, SyrodaLaw

e to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1971), p. 236. The decorum of an appearance appropriat

instance Edgar de Bruyne, person or the contents was also important to medieval aesthetics. See for

pp. 52 and The Esthetics of the Middle Ages, trans. by Eileen B. Hennessy (New York: Ungar, 1969), literature, book conduct between ip relationsh the discusses 175. In a related article, Laura Jacobus

as represented by Francesco’s Documenti d Amore behaviour depicted in Giotto’s narrative scenes of specifically as a model for the behaviour of the women Propriety in the Arena Chapel’, Renaissance Studies,

and the of 12

Reggimento e costumi di donna, and the Life of the Virgin in the Arena Chapel, the Scrovegni household. See her ‘Piety and (1998), 177-205. My own interests are in

reading images. the parallels between the interpretive activity of reading the world and

s semper diligere me in tantum, ut met 64 ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 11, 293: ‘Debeti exterius similitudinem hostendatis.’ ‘Item Hugo de sancto victore in libro de ne 5 ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 12, 13: a quidem sponse scis quia amor ignis est et ignis

fogmentum

querit ut ardeat ea vis est casit

per effectum coniungeris in ipsius talem te esse necesse sit quale illud est quod amas et cui

Et idem in libro de ignibus similitudinem ipsa quodammodo dilectionis sotietate transformaris.

accipit ita mens amoris igne sicut massa liquefacta per fistulam in mallum funditur et formam quicquid soluta per radium contemplationis usque ad ymaginem divine si militudinis currit immo diligimus ipsa vi dilectionis in eius similitudinem transformamur.

90

Shelley MacLaren

This is, of course, not to say that the reader will literally look like Justitia, but that this virtue should be legible in his actions and appearance. Similarly, Dante defined Love in the Convivio as that which ‘joins and unites the lover with the person loved’, and continues: Since things that are joined by nature have their qualities in common with one another, to the extent that one is at times completely transormed into the nature of the other, it follows that the passions of the person loved enter into the person who loves.

Dante, lover of Lady Philosophy, thus begins to love what she loves, and hate what she hates.* In the Documenti d’Amore the reader is admonished to love all of the virtues. He transforms himself according to their example so that these virtues can

be read in his face, body, and actions, just as they are read in the personifications

that open each section of the treatise. Francesco’s lessons quite directly informed his reader’s behaviour, but the figures of his personifications also may have done so, serving as figures to be read, like people in the world, and as figures to be assimilated. Part of Ethics, the fictions of poetry were understood to be of a piece with the world, and meaningful parallels were drawn between the world and the world of the poem. As Judson Boyce Allen has established, metaphoric connections were understood to be fundamentally meaningful, and to exist not only within the poem, but also between the poem and the world. Part of the activity of reading was to find such connections.”

The importance for the reader of conforming his behaviour to the virtues’

rules of conduct is made very clear. The reader’s actions are meaningful and will

be read and interpreted, just as Francesco reads the attributes of the virtues. As such, the material presence of these personifications, and the attention Francesco draws to their formation, may figure the process the reader is to follow in shaping

his own appearance and actions. Just as Francesco shapes these bodies and their attributes to be interpreted, so too his readers must shape their actions and appearances to be read and interpreted in the world. Judging and interpreting appearances, however, is not a simple process. The deliberate novelty of Francesco’s images in itself suggests that they were not intended

to be immediately legible, even if that novelty might make them appealing and

memorable for the viewer. The problems of judging and interpreting appearances also appear in the text of the Documenti d’Amore. One lesson begins by saying that

°° Dante’s ‘Il Convivio’ (The Banquet), trans. by Richard H. Lansing, Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 65, ser. B (New York: Garland, 1990), p. 148. 6

7 Allen, p. 248.

SHAPING THE SELE IN THE IMAGE OF VIRTUE

9]

some men, judged by appearances to be sinful, were actually ‘measured, orderly,

and learned”.5 In other cases, Francesco warns his reader about false appearances; for instance, he cautions the reader about those who make a show of having a heavy heart, in order that people might call them wise, and about hypocrites, who deceive with their appearance.®” On a more abstract level, Francesco teaches his reader to avoid those vices that, if not judged carefully, appear to be virtues. These include such things as when prodigality is mistaken for largesse, or when avarice

is taken to be good sense.” At one point in the commentary, he also discusses

mental images, ymagines. If these images draw us to villainous acts, or to anything contrary to God and to the teachings of the church, these visions are to be channed, while visions drawing us to good acts are to be embraced.”! The visions

may be difficult to judge in themselves. Instead they may be judged by the actions

to which they lead. In addition to the warnings embedded in the Documenti, the commentary also

includes stories that revolve around the problems posed by appearances. In one

example, related in the commentary under Justitia, Francesco tellsa story in which

a woman gives birth to a monstrous halflion, half-man. With the birth of the monster, her husband accuses her of adultery. In response, she charges that her

husband had gotten her drunk and taken her to the woods in order to murder her, and that the monster was conceived after he abandoned her there. The point of

the story has to do with the wisdom of the judge, and with the process necessary

to reaching the truth. He does not assume guilt based on the appearance of the monstrous creature, but waits to assign punishment until he has gathered enough evidence to know what actually occurred. In the end, a hunter is exposed as the

8 ] Documenti

rie credute | Che d'Amore, ed. by Egidi, IL, 58: ‘Che piu genti ovedute | per vista

son poi misurate | composte e insegnate.’ ° ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 243, and Ul, 69, 70, and 71. 7° ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 1, 53 and 56.

on αἷς ‘D: de nostram ” 1: τ, 46: P ‘Primo quod omne quod co tra fidem è re, ed. by Egidi, ' I Documenti d’Amo ia, mons ur villan dicit riter vulga od atis rusticit estqu quod id vel contra [ea] que mandat ecclesia et omne Ἰδὲ nota i

[...] etomnis vilitas et omnis offensio dei vel proximiest peccatum . unde hoc modico

trahentes πος a¢ quod quandocumque tentationes ymagin ationes visiones vel visibiles illusiones rium vide contra per hec nobis occurrunt, opera sunt inimici nostri et ideo evi [tan]da. Nunc visibilem vel m ione inat secundum. quandocumque desiderium nostrum per visionem, ymag| derium desi et tia atien appare [...] ad ea dirigitur que sunt [...] et omnis curialitas et omnis pat Ve au inspirationes placendi et serviendi deo et proximis hec su ntangelorum bonorum opera et Et ab hiis non expedit caveamus sed impleamus ea.

.

9)

Shelley MacLaren

rapist and confesses that he had committed the crime while disguised in a lion’s pelt, and the husband is forced to confess that he had indeed planned to murder his wife that day. Both are punished, while the woman goes free. In part, the moral of the story is that ‘nothing is hidden that might not be revealed’, so one must live accordingly. With time the careful judge discovers the truth behind the birth of the monstrous creature. At the end of the story, Francesco remarks that women

in conception or pregnancy accept impressions of striking images, whether they

are fearful or delightful ones, and so the prudent man should paint handsome images in the bedchamber. As a counter to the monstrous child, Francesco also cites Alexander the Great’s leonine hair as another example

of how pregnant

women accept impressions. In this case, the leonine features resulted from the mother’s delight in what she beheld, rather than fear.”

The story and Francesco’s commentary imply a couple of things about appearances and their interpretation and reception. First, the moral of the story of the

monstrous

birth

in

Persia

suggests

that

certain

audiences

will be

unthinkingly affected and impressed by images, while others are more capable of

judgement and can be more cautious in assessing appearances. Such a distinction between learned and an unlearned audience was undoubtedly acommonplace, but it is nonetheless an important one for understanding how Francesco’s images might have functioned didactically, and for whom.” Second, while in one instance

the leonine features are decidedly monstrous (the baby has two heads; one the

head of a human, one that of a lion), in other instances, leonine features can be

positive ones. Particular motifs can be understood to indicate either positive or negative connotations. This also seems to be the case with Francesco’s ‘monstrous

93

SHAPING THE SELF IN THE IMAGE OF VIRTUE

images. For the most part, Francesco adheres to pictorial decorum; the virtues to

be loved and emulated appear to the viewer in the form of women, imitating the

forms created by nature, while monstrous creatures have ‘unnatural’ forms just as they ought to, appearing in the form of composite and distorted bodies.’* This is most evident in the opposition between Virtu in genere (Fig. 31) and the manifold vices, where Virtu appears as a beautiful woman in a golden cloak, and the vices have bodies cobbled together out of birds, reptiles, bears, and so on. Like these vices, Mors (Fig. 30), too, appears as a monster. On the other hand, the virtue Etternitas (Fig. 29) with her siren’s body, and, most importantly, the claw-footed

figure of Amor himself (Fig. 24), present the viewer with more problems, and

some decisions to be made about how these seemingly monstrous creatures are to be understood.’> Was worldly Amor unmistakably converted to divine love for his fourteenth-century audience simply by the removal of the blindfold?’* To some

extent, Francesco’s claw-footed Amor remained monstrous and cannot be simply explained by reuse of an existing image to meet new ends. In light of the antention to judging appearances in the conduct book, and equivocal ones at chat, it seems possible that the difficulty was intentional, calling on the reader's ability to judge and to interpret the image in the appropriate way. More than the other figures

represented, Amor and Etternitas are incommensurable; Francesco explains that Etternitas’s face is hidden from us, as are the back of Amor’s head and wings, because we are unable to see these figures fully while we are in this world. The

‘unnaturalness’ of these two figures might therefore be a means of representing the

difficulty of fully understanding them. As Francesco's advice about sit:

matter o mental ymagines makes clear, proper understanding of the figures is a

good judgement, and a matter of the ends to which they are put. In the commentary on Hope, Francesco writes that ‘without the figures,

reading alone cannot understand this matter fully.[...] You may answer, that i

” ] Documenti d’Amore,ed. by Egidi, 111, 294-98. For the sake of brevity, I cite only the Latin of the relevant parts of Francesco’s conclusion: ‘Vivatis ergo cauti quoniam nil occultum quod non reveletur et nil commissum quod non puniatur.[...] Et nota quod Anatenebo quondam

egiptiorum rex adducit hec ad probandum licet verbis longissimis quod aut in conceptione aut in formatione quod videt mulier si delectatione vel pavore id inspicit, dat sui similitudinem concepto

aut formato. Inde videtur quod Alexander ad comam dei Amoris retinuit in conceptione in regina olim piades quod capillos habuit leoninos. Inde mulieres impressiones accipiunt ex picturis unde vir prudens in camera coniugali formosos viros pingi facit ex latere dextro lecti et spetiositas

mulieres ex sinistro ut quidam referunt,’ The dangers of women’s glances are perhaps also evident

in the husband’s motivation for attempting to kill his wife — he had seen her looking at two men

‘with evil intentions’ earlier that day.

7 Onthe commonplace, see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1971), pp. 51-62.

as ai true of beginners, but as for others, writing has the same function

for illiterates (ydiotes)’”* The final portion of this statement echoes Gregory the

74

; n icense “Lam thinking of Horace’s Ut pictura poesis, where he denies the poet the lic

things contrary to nature (p. 451).

to create

κὸν is one fish’, ugly and black a in below ends 75 In fact, a siren, ‘whatatthetopisalovelywoman of the specific examples cited by Horace as laughable (p. 451). 76 See Panofsky, ‘Blind Cupid’, p. 121. 77 ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 111, 387 and 388.

a

7

:

se

2.}.93:

* I Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, IL, pp. 6-7; trans. by Jacobsen, pt 2, p

94

Shelley MacLaren

Great’s famous dictum, ‘what writing presents to readers, this a picture represents to the unlearned who behold it [...]; in it the illiterate read.” This echo does not mean that the images are primarily for those who cannot read. Instead, Francesco

states that the images are useful for everyone; reading the accompanying text alone

is not enough. As has been previously observed, Francesco explicitly limits his ideal audience: [I]t is not nor ever was my intention that the proper intention of the figures themselves should be known to all Tuscans, but only to some friends [...] though amor directs these precepts to all Christians, [...] yet I never wanted, or want, the things here to be passed on

to barbarians and Germans and the like.*°

Francesco’s images and concepts were not intended to be easy to understand. Eva Frojmovié has argued that Francesco’s allegorical images were conceived as figurative language, requiring deciphering, and working only in conjunction with

the accompanying interpretive description.*' While these images certainly prompted deciphering, many of Francesco’s images appeared in various contexts, and though

they appeared with tituli naming the figure, they were not accompanied in other instances by descriptions and explanations. These emphatically material, novel images do not disappear into words. To some extent at least, they operated

independently from their explanations. Francesco’s ideal audience was certainly

a restricted one, one with the capacity for judgement and interpretation his images require, and capable of putting the images to good use without accompanying instructions. Francesco da Barberino’s memorable personifications appear in novel and delightful forms in order to be loved. To love these virtues is to emulate them, and

to reflect and express their qualities in one’s own actions and appearance. At the beginning of each section, the reader is introduced to one of the virtues and is led through the interpretation of her attributes. He is then taught the lessons that will allow him to understand the world and people around him, and that will allow

79 Gregory the Great, ‘Book ΙΧ, Epistle x’, Selected Epistles of Gregory the Great, Bishop of

Rome,

trans. by James

B. Barmby,

A Select Library

of Nicene

and

Post-Nicene

Fathers of the

Christian Church (New York: Christian Literature; Oxford: Parker, 1898), p. 53. 80 ] Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Egidi, 111, 403 and 404. As emphasized by Jacobsen (pt 2, p92); translation

his. See

Karma

Lochrie,

Covert

Operations:

The Medieval

Uses of Secrecy

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) on this posture of limitation of audience. δ᾽ Frojmovié, Der Illustrationzyklus, p. 8.

SHAPING THE SELF IN THE IMAGE OF VIRTUE

© 95

nt and him to shape his own behaviour to be interpreted in turn. Good judgeme

be appropriate interpretation, however, are not simple tasks, as appearances can

is put — deceiving. What matters most is the ends to which understanding of the images al allegoric The not. whether the viewer is guided to proper action or to learns reader Documenti d’Amore are essential to the process by which the so that in the end recognize and avoid vices, and to love and emulate the virtues, . he might enter the Court of Love and the Kingdom of Heaven

Pl. 1: Michele

Tosini,

Vision of the Madonna

di Loreto

with Saints,

Prato, San

1560-61. Reproduced courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florence.

Vincenzo.

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Detail of the left wing. Reproduced with permission.

Pl. 6: Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights,

Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. c. 1505-10. Reproduced with permission.

Nacional del Prado. PI. 7: Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, Madrid, Museo

Old Testament Scenes, Darmstadt, Hessische ΡΙ.8: The Descent ofthe Holy Ghost and three Pies Ne Chapter 32.c. salvationis, Ρ humanae ze salve Spec 2505, Speculum Q HS.5. 2505, ibli und Landesbibliothek, ita i Universitäts-

1360. Reproduced with permission.

PI.1. 9:9:

Peter Peter

! in Homo, St Petersburg, the State : P Hermitage Museum, Ecce Rubens, Paul

inv. no.

GE-3778. c. 1610-11. Oil on panel, 125.7 x 96.5 cm. Photo reproduced with permission.

collection. 16 10s. Oil on panel, 122.7 x PL. 10: Peter Paul Rubens, Drunken Silenus, private 97.5 cm. Reproduced with permission.

HOLES

BLACK

IN THE

IN BOSCH: VISUAL TYPOLOGY GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

Reindert L. Falkenburg

Institution and In terpretation D 11: R Peter SA Paul Rubens, Re Bacchic ERA Scene: Dreaming : v rs Vienna, Gemäldegalerie der PL. Silenus, Akademie der bildenden Kiinste, inv.no.756.c. 1610-12. Oilon canvas, 158 x 217 cm. Photo reproduced with permission.

ith the adage ‘Iconology must start with a study of institutions rather

than with a study of symbols’, coined by Ernst Gombrich some thirty

years

ago, an essential

methodological

insight for the study of

Renaissance painting was formulated.’ That this desideratum for the establishing

exemplified of a stable basis for interpretation cannot always be fulfilled, however, is

by the enigmatic

triptych of the Garden

of Earthly Delights, painted

by

number of Hieronymus Bosch probably shortly after 1500 (PI. 6) ? Despite a vast

I thank Todd Meadow

Edward

Grasman

and Louk Tilanus (Leiden University), Mark

of California

at Santa

Barbara;

Richardson,

(University

(U niversity of Pennsylvania)

University), and Larry Silver we have had over the subject ions for the stimulating conversat Leiden

from them during its matter of this contribution, and also for others forms of help I received th study on the book-leng ina further developed be will preparation. Itadvances an argument that

Garden of Earthly Delights that I am currently preparing. ! Ernst

H.

Gombrich,

Symbolic

Images:

Studies

in the Art

of the

Renaissance,

2nd

edn

(London: Phaidon, 1975), p. 21.

Style?’, in Jos Koldeweij, Paul ? Bernard Vermet, Ἡ ieronymus Bosch: Painter, Workshop,or

Vandenbroeck

Paintings and Drawings and Bernard Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete

88, 90-91, has Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001), pp. 84-99, especially of Earthly Delights is recently argued (in line with some of the older literature) th at the Garden Charles de Tolnay, to g an early work of Bosch, possibly dating from around 1480. Accordin from around 1500; dates triptych the Hieronymus Bosch (Basel: Holbein, 1937), p. 66, however, the painting after dates 72, p. 1943), Schroll, Ludwig von Baldass, Hieronymus Bosch (Vienna: estudio téchnico y copias, Bosco: El de delicias’ las de 1500. The exhibition catalogue El jardin (Rotterdam: Museum

Ì

PI.

12:

down

dorer : Peter

D-

a 7 Paul Rubens, Nymph

> ; and Satyr, Madrid,

$ private collection. Oil on canvas, laid

on masonite (originally on wood, transferred first to canvas, and then laid down on

' ΓΑ. in 1981), © masonite 105 Cy x 7 76 cm. Reproduced with permission.

106 publications

Reindert L. Falkenburg that have

been

devoted

to this painting over

the centuries,

no

communis opinio has emerged regarding the ‘institution’ — the ‘genre’, or artistic category — it represents.’ Even the simple observation that the painting is a triptych does not per se define its categorical identity. While the format points to the function of an altarpiece, the overt erotic iconography of the central panel, the ‘garden of earthly delights’ proper,” does not easily comply with an ecclesiastical

BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

107

setting or religious function.’ At the same time, the representation of the world created by God on the exterior and the scenes of Paradise and Hell that frame the ‘garden of earthly delight’ on the inside, suggest that the triptych has a coherent overall theme, and that this theme is religious in nature. Not surprisingly, then, the very notion of iconographic coherence and consistency, which art historians usually treat as another benchmark for interpretation, has been contested in this case. While some authors have argued that the Garden of Earthly Delights unifies exterior and interior in an eschatological continuum

from the Creation of the

restauracién (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2000), p. 34, mentions as possible date of

execution the time span 1500-10; according to Carmen Garrido and Roger Van Schoute, Bosch at the Museo del Prado (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2001), p. 189, the triptych shows ‘the specific characteristics of an original masterpiece that indicates a mature artist at the peak of his career’. > For an overview of the interpretive literature on the triptych see Roger H. Marijnissen and Peter Ruyffelaere, Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Works (Antwerp: Tabard, 1987), pp.84-102. Most important among the more recent publications on the painting are Paul Vandenbroeck,

‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” I’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1989),9-210; Paul Vandenbroeck, ‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde

“Tuin der Lusten” II: De graal ofhet valsche liefdesparadijs’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen

(1990), 9-192;

Paul Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch. De

Verlossing van de Wereld (Gent: Ludion, 2002), pp.78-86 and 269-73; Jean Wirth, Hieronymus Bosch. Der Garten der Lüste. Das Paradies als Utopie (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer-Taschenbuch, 2000); and Hans Belting, Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights (Munich: Prestel, 2002). While I disagree with Vandenbroeck on several issues on the (sub- and meta-) iconological level of interpretation, my contribution owes a great debt to many of his iconographic studies and insights. * In the following, I reserve the designation ‘garden of earthly delights’ for the central panel of the triptych, and Garden of Earthly Delights for the triptych as a whole. The designation as such is modern, of course: the earliest description, dating from 1517, that is, one year after Bosch’s death, lacks the ‘taxonomic’ quality of titles in modern art historical usage. It is found in the diary of Antonio de Beatis, secretary of Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona, who saw the painting in 1517 during a visit to the Brussels palace of count Hendrik III of Nassau (1483-1538): ‘Ce son poialcune tavole de diverse bizzerrie, dove se contrafanno mari, aeri, boschi, campagne et molte altre cose, tali che escono daunacozza marina, altriche cacano grue, donne et hominiet bianchi et negri de diversi acti et modi, ucelli, animali, de ogni sorte et con molta naturalita, cose tanto piacevole et fantastiche che

ad quelli che non ne hanno cognitione in nullo modo se il potriano ben descrivere’; cited after Jan K. Steppe, ‘Jheronimus Bosch. Bijdrage tot de historische en de ikonografische studie van zijn werk’,

in Jheronimus Bosch: Bijdragen bij gelegenheid van de herdenkingstentoonstelling te 5-Hertogen bosch

1967 (’s-Hertogenbosch: Noordbrabants Museum, 1967), p. 8. Ernst H. Gombrich, ‘The Earliest Description of Bosch’s Garden of Delight’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 30 (1967),404-06, gives as translation: ‘Then there are various panels with diverse fancies where there are represented seas, skies, woods and fields with many other things: some who come out of a seashell, others who defecate cranes, men and women, both white and black in various actions and positions, birds and animals of every kind and with much truth to nature, things so pleasing and

fantastic that it is quite impossible to describe them to those who have not seen them.’

3 According to Marijnissen and Ruyffelaere, p.91, the triptych format itselfis an indication that the painting ‘was conceived as an altarpiece’; Pater Gerlach, ‘De Tuin der lusten. Een proeve

van verklaring’, in Pater Gerlach, Jheronimus Bosch. Opstellen over leven en werk, ed. by P. M. le Blanc (The Hague: Vereniging Gerlach-Publikaties, 1988), pp. 187-214, states (p. 187) without further proof, that the triptych was painted as altarpiece (‘altaarretabel’) for the chapel of the Brussels’s palace of the Nassaus. Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch. De Verlossing, p. 306, on the other hand, has pointed out that triptychs with a profane subject matter, while being an exception, also existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (cf. also Dirk Bax, Beschrijving en poging tot verklaring van het ‘Tuin der Onkuisheid’-drieluik van Jeroen B osch. Gevolgd door kritiek op Fraenger, Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam. Afdeling Letteren, n.r. 63.2 (Amsterdam, 1956), pp. 131-34; and Walter Gibson, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch: The Iconography of the Central Panel’, in Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 24 (1973), 21). Paul Vandenbroeck, ‘High Stakes in Brussels, 1567: The Garden of Earthly Delights as the Crux of the Conflict Between William the Silent and the Duke of Alva’, in Hieronymus Bosch: New Insights into His Life and Work, ed. by Jos Koldeweij, Bernard Vermet, and Barbera van Kooij, trans. by Beth O’Brien and others

(Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001) p. 88, has suggested that the archival

record of the confiscation (in 1567) of the goods of William of Orange by Alva, stating that ‘[u]ng

grand tableau devant la cheminee de Jeronimus Bosch’ relates to the Garden of Earthly Delights.

Ifit is to be assumed, as most modern scholars do, that it was Hendrik III of Nassau (among other

things an ardent art collector) who commissioned the triptych for his Brussels palace, the profane

interests of this patron and the placement of the painting ‘in front of the fireplace’ indicate that

the original destination of the triptych was at least not of a strictly religious nature. For Hendrik ΠῚ as possible commissioner of the painting see Jan K. Steppe, ‘Jheronimus Bosch: Bijdrage tot

de historische en de ikonografische studie van zijn werk’, in Jheronimus Bosch bijdragen bij

gelegenheid van de herdenkingstentoonstelling te ’s-Hertogenbosch 1967 (Eindhoven: Stichting

Jeroen Bosch Expositie, 1967), pp. 11-12; Pater Gerlach, ‘De Nassauers van Breda en Jeroen Bosch’, and ‘De Tuin der lusten’, in Gerlach, Jheronimus Bosch, pp. 171-76; Pater Gerlach, “Hendrik III van Nassau. Heer van Breda, veldheer, diplomaat en mecenas’, in ibid., pp. 177-186, especially 184-185; and Frédéric Elsig, Jheronimus Bosch. La question de la chronologie (Geneva: Droz, 2004), pp. 83-92. See for Hendrik III’s position and role at the Burgundian-Habsburg court also Hans Cools, Mannen met macht. Edellieden en de Moderne Staat in de Bourgondisch-

Habsburgse landen (1475-1530) (Zutphen: Walburg, 2001), pp. 58, 65-66,76, and 272-73.

108

Reindert L. Falkenburg

World to the Damnation of mankind, others have proposed that the central scene is an utopian ‘Paradise of lust’ in which man’s imagination (including that of the artist) freely reigns, unhampered by religious and moral constraints, and, thus, basically should be seen in disjunction from the rest of the triptych.f Some have tried to ground their interpretation in the analogy between this painting and other triptychs by Bosch, in particular the Haywain Triptych, in which Paradise and Hell also frame a worldly scene. Some refer in this connection specifically to the theme of the Last Judgement.’

‘ Authors stressing the continuum of the pictorial narrative in the triptych are, among others, Gerd Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch. Die Rezeption seiner Kunst im frühen 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Mann, 1980),pp. 57-60, and Lynn F. Jacobs, ‘The Triptych Unhinged: Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights’, in Hieronymus Bosch, ed. by Koldeweij and others, pp. 65-75; cf. Lynn F. Jacobs, ‘The Triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 31 (2000), 1009-41. For the idea of the ‘garden of earthly delights’ as a self-contained utopian vision of human love, see Hans Belting, Hieronymus Bosch; cf. Jean Wirth, ‘Le Jardin des Délices de Jérôme Bosch’, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 50 (1988), 545-85; and Wirth, Hieronymus Bosch. In essence, Belting's book repeats an argument (reminiscent ofconvictions already formulated in the nineteenth century) about the emergence of artistic autonomy (‘Freiheit der Dichtung and ‘schôpferische Erfindung’) in early Netherlandish painting, which he already voiced in a book, coauthored with Christiane Kruse, Die Erfindung des Gemäldes. Das erste Jahrhundert der niederländischen Malerei (Munich:

Hirmer,

1994), 123-29.

7 Jacobs, ‘The Triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch’ and “The Triptych Unhinged’, emphasizes the connection between the Garden of Earthly Delights and other triptychs by Bosch; Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch. Der Verlossing, p. 306, however, dissociates the Garden, as well as the Haywain Triptych, from Bosch’s other triptychs on functional grounds because they are ‘allegories of sin’ rather than allegories ‘of faith and its triumph’; cf. Vandenbroeck, ‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” I’, pp. 9-11. Vandenbroeck, ‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” Τ᾽ and Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” II’, passim, interprets the Creation ofthe

World, Paradise, and Hell as a framing device that puts the ‘garden of earthly delights’ — a ‘false paradise of love’ portraying mankind governed by sexual and other ‘wild’ and ‘natural’ impulses — in the context of a (secularized) social ethics rather than eschatology per se. According to him, the

triptych was commissioned on the occasion of the first (1503) or second (1511) marriage of

Hendrik III of Nassau and served as a ‘mirror or marriage portraying the corruption of the divine concept of marital union and its consequences’ (Vandenbroeck, ‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” II’, p. 166) — see also below. Other authors relating the Garden to the iconography of the Last Judgement include Charles de Tolnay, Hieronymus Bosch (Baden-Baden:

Holle, 1965), p. 361; and Peter Glum, ‘Divine Judgment

in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights’,

Art Bulletin, 58 (1976), 45-54; cf. Eric De Bruyn, De vergeten beeldentaal van Jheronimus Bosch. De symboliek van de ‘Hooiwagen -triptiek en de Rotterdamse ‘Marskramer’-tondo verklaard vanuit

Middelnederlandse teksten (s-Hertogenbosch: Heinen, 2001), especially pp. 58—60, 90-95, 133f, 139ff., and 157-58.

BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

109

None of these efforts, however, have resulted in a stable framework for interpretation. It seems as if the triptych implies a certain generic kinship with other types of images but at the same time contradicts or counterfeits, so to speak, this association through formal and iconographic discrepancies and idiosyncrasies. Thus, by showing monstrous figures and inversions of the normal size relationship between humans, animals, and fruits (inversions reminiscent of the pictorial language of marginal illuminations in late medieval manuscripts), the central panel diverges from the hieratic formal structure and sacred subject matter that usually characterize early Netherlandish triptychs, resulting in a painting that turns ‘the world of the triptych upside down’ In fact, the painting literally contradicts itself, judging from the contrast between the inscription written across the top of the exterior and the representation of Creation. This inscription reads ‘Ipse dixit et facta sunt Ipse mandavit et creata sunt’ and is a citation of Psalm 33. 9 — in modern translation: ‘For He spoke, and it was; he commanded, and it stood firm.” While this ‘firmness’ is not brought out verbatim by the Latin text, it is referred to a few lines further down in Psalm 33. 11: ‘But the Lord’s own plans shall stand for ever, and his counsel endure for all generations.’ This stable

and immutable quality of God’s work has been emphasized time and again in

$ See Jacobs, ‘The Triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch’ and “The Triptych Unhinged’. On the relationship between Bosch’s imagery and contemporary marginal illumination see, among others, Keith Moxey, ‘Hieronymus Bosch and the “World Upside Down”: The Case of The Garden of

and Interpretations, ed. by Norman Bryson, M ichael Ann Earthly Delights’ ,in Visual Culture: Images

Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 104-40; Yona Pinson, ‘Hieronymus Bosch: Marginal Imagery Shifted into the Center and the Notion of Upside Down’, in The Metamorphosis of Marginal Images: From Antiquity to Present Time, ed. by N.

Kenaan-Kedar and others (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001), pp. 203-12; and Dirk Bax,

Hieronymus Bosch His Picture-Writing Deciphered (Rotterdam: Balkema, 1979), pp. 343-350, and further passim. ? Cited after The New English Bible with the Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Several authors have pointed out the similarity between Bosch’s depiction of God τὰς Father and the adjacent Psalm text, and a woodcut, designed by Michael Wolgemut, representing

God creating the World with the same text (referring to Psalm 32, in old numbering), in

Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum cum figuris et ymaginibusab inicio midi usqü nuc temporis (Augsburg: Schoensperger, 1497), fol. 2°; cf. Vandenbroeck, ‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde

“Tuin der Lusten” I’, p. 19 (and p.24, n. 100, for patristic comments on the ‘Ipse dixit … text); cf. Bo Lindberg, ‘The Fire Next Time’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 35 Εἰ (1972), 187-99 (pp. 195-99); and J. Yarza Luaces, ‘Reflexiones en torno al significado de

Jardin de las delicias’, in ‘El jardin de las delicias’ de El Bosco: copias, studio téchnico y restauracion [exhibition catalogue] (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Prado, 2000), pp. 51-52 (Figs 5 and 6).

110

Reindert L. Falkenburg

medieval commentaries, ever since Augustine defined the order of Creation as ΡΟΝ ; ai i based on ‘measure’, ‘number’, and weight: Mensura is interpreted in terms of ‘limit’ — to be acreated thing is to have a fixed, not an indefinite, range of possibilities. Numerus is form and harmony of proportion; to be created is to possess the potential for stability and equilibrium through time, to be capable

of adjusting stably to diverse circumstances. Pondus or ordo [...] is what pulls us toward appropriate goals, toward what we are made for.!°

Change is characteristic of life on earth (whereas God is immutable), but it strives

towards ever greater order and beauty.!! It seems clear that even when one does not agree with Baldass’s qualification ‘Blumen des Bésen’, with which he

characterized the strange vegetative growths in the foreground of Bosch’s world

globe (where earth and primeval waters meet), these forms do not represent this natural order of Creation.'* However, according to some interpreters, these strange forms are also ordained by God, prefiguring man’s Fall and the inevitable road to Hell (implying, if not a strange conception of Bosch’s imagery, a rather improbable notion of medieval theology). Others postulate that these forms are created by God but exemplify the unrestrained (‘wild’, ‘sexual’) creative force — the creatio continua — of Nature itself.'* The interior of the triptych — notice, for

example, the phantasmal bulbous fountains that mark the rivers of paradise in the

background of the ‘garden of earthly delights’ —manifests this force even more

strongly, resulting in hybrid structures that are partly inorganic, partly organic, and which are prone to instability, impermanence, and transmutation.'> While

one may embrace an empathic reading of these forms for aesthetic reasons, it is

10 See Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Allan D. Fitzgerald and others

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), s.v., ‘Creation’, pp. 251-54 (p. 252.)

111

BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

hard to believe that they represent the order of nature as created by God. One has

to conclude, therefore, that in the Garden of Earthly Delights conventional notions of artistic genius, genre, religious functionality, social ideology, iconographical traditions, as well as preconceived concepts of God, Creation, nature, mankind and

society,

good

and

evil,

etc.

all

falter

as

unchallenged

fixed-points

for

interpretation in the face of the self-contradiction and instability of Bosch’s

imagery.

a

Still, their may be one such fixed-point, offered by the painting itself, which, as far as I can establish, has gone unnoticed thus far. This is the image of God in the Creation scene on the interior left panel. The Image of God Many authors have pointed out that, quite different from the figure of God the

Father in the upper left corner of the exterior of the triptych, the Paradise scene

on the inside portrays the Creator in the form of the Son, standing between Adam and Eve (Pl. 7). While the general constellation of these figures suggests a representation of the creation of mankind, with Adam sitting and Eve kneeling onthe earth (poses that are reminiscent of Creation scenes in many contemporary

book illuminations), some features evoke more particularly the iconography of the of Marriage

Institution

in

Paradise,

although

in

this

respect,

Bosch 5

100,

representation departs from tradition.'* Instead of showing the figures of Adam and Eve standing on either side of God as he joins them by their hands (in accordance with the iconography of the dextrarum iunctio), Bosch depicts God

holding only Eve by her wrist, while his other arm is raised in blessing. There is no

direct physical contact between Adam and Eve. The only contact between God and Adam is through his feet, which just touch the right foot of the Creator at the lower border of his garment. The only unambiguous feature in this unusual mix

" Augustine through the Ages, pp- 251-54. Cf. Hier beghint eenen spieghel der liefhebbers deser werelt [...] doer D. Dionysius Cathuser [...] Noch een boecxken is hier bi ghestelt dwelck sinte

of Creation and marriage motifs is the figure of the Creator. Bosch has rendered

Carthusian [...], with another book added, made by Saint Thomas) (Utrecht: Berntsoen, 1535), s.p. (fol. 16’): ‘God is onverwandelic.[...] Ende hier om zijn zijn wercken die hi gemaect heeft

a matter

Thomas gemaect heeft (Here begins a mirror of the lovers of the world [...] by Dionysius the

onverwandelijc na desen wesen.’ (God is immutable.[...] And therefore the works he made are

the figure in the form of the God-man, i.e., with the facial features of Christ. As

of fact, these

countenance

features

in the so-called

exactly

‘Lentulus

follow

the description

letter’, a legendary

of Jesus 5

fabrication

of the

immutable according to this quality.)

12 See Baldass, pp. 43-53, 89; cf. De Tolnay, Hieronymus Bosch, p. 361. 13 See, for example, Unverfehrt, pp. 57-61, especially 59. 14 Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch. Der Verlossing, pp. 80-81. 15

; ; +. : i ; For the observation ofthe fundamental instability and impermanence of Bosch’s imagery, see Gombrich, “The Earliest Description’.

16 See Adelheid Heimann, ‘Die Hochzeit von Adam

und Eva im Paradies nebst einigen

anderen Hochzeitsbildern’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 37 (1975), 11-40; cf. Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” I’, pp. 27-30.

112

Reindert L. Falkenburg

thirteenth or fourteenth century which many people believed to be authentic.!”

This text speaks of Jesus’s hair as being ‘hazelnut coloured’, parted in the centre, and falling sleekly from the top of his head to his ears, but curly and slightly darker in tone from his ears to his shoulders; furthermore, of a fair forehead, with no

wrinkles or spots, a countenance of moderately ruddy complexion with an even

nose and mouth, a short youthful beard, the same colour as his hair and parted on

the chin, and a ‘fair and full glance with very bright eyes’.'* While many painters

from the period choose to represent the Creator of Adam and Eve in the shape of Christ (following the conviction of medieval theologians that the Son of God, as

part of the Trinity, was already ‘with God’ before the beginning of time), not many did so by rendering his facial features meticulously according to the Lentulus tradition, i.e., as a ‘portrait’ of Jesus.!”

7 CE. M.L. Caron, ‘Aensien doet gedencken: de religieuze voorstellingswereld van de moderne devotie’, in Geert Grote en de Moderne Devotie (Utrecht: Rijksmuseum Het Catharijneconvent,

1984), pp. 25-42, and M. L. Caron, ‘Het beeld van Christus in de vrouwenkloosters en bij de zusters van het Gemene Leven’, Ons Geestelijk Erf 59 (1985), 457-69. In Bosch’s time, the text of

the Lentulus letter was known through Middle-Dutch adaptations of Ludolphus of Saxony’s wellknown Vita Christi, such as Dat booc vanden leven ons liefs heren Jesu Christi (Zwolle: Van Os, 1499) (University Library, Leiden, 1498 B 10). See also the following note.

À Dat booc vanden leven ons liefs heren Jesu Christi, fol. IT: ‘Dit is die rechte phisonomie figure of ghedaente ons lieves heren ihesu christi ghelijkerwijs als hi wanderende was op aertrijke. Sijn haar was ghelijck een rijpe haselnote by nae totten oren mer voert totten scolderen soe was die vergaderinghe dies haers wat bruynre ende midden op zijn hovet een sceydel nae dien ghewoenten der nazareen dats der heilighen des ouden testamentes. Sijn voerhoeft slecht ende oeck rustich zijn aensicht sonder rompen ende sonder vlecken mit matigher roetheyt gheciert. zijn

nase ende zijn mont te mael zijnde sonder begrijp. Eene ionghelicken baert hebbende den haer ghelijc van verwen niet lanck mer inden kinne ghedeelt. Een simpelick opsien hebbende ende rijpe mit helen claren oghen.’ The striking red colour of the Creator’s face in Bosch’s painting, which has caught the attention of several authors — Vandenbroeck, ‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde

“Tuin der Lusten” I’, p. 24, n. 100 (with further references) — can be related, it seems, to this

passage as well (i.e. the phrase ‘matigher roetheyt’). Bosch also seems to have taken the Lentulus

description as a point of departure for his representation of Jesus in his Christ Crowned with Thorns, in the National Gallery, London (Marijnissen and Ruyffelaere, pp. 352-59). Cf. The Image of Christ, ed. by Gabriele Finaldi (London: National Gallery, 2000), pp. 94-97. 1? The fact that the Christ-like figure of the Creator in the Paradise scene clearly differs from

that of God the Father on the exterior has called the attention of several scholars. According to

Vandenbroeck, ‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” I’, pp. 24-26, Bosch chose to represent the Creator in the shape of Christ in the Paradise scene because God is only visible to humans in the form of the Logos; Gerlach, Jheronimus Bosch, p. 191, saw in this manner of representation an expression of Franciscan theology, which stresses the primacy of Christ in

11 3

BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

The most obvious reason for Bosch to represent the Creator in this specific way lies in the biblical account of the creation of mankind itself. According to Genesis (1.26-29), on the sixth day of Creation, God said: “Let us make man in our image and likeness to rule the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all wild animals on earth, and all reptiles that crawl upon earth.” So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth

and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, and every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The key phrase, here, is ‘image and likeness’. God himselfis the image after which Adam and Eve were modelled, but since God

is Spirit the only, and actually most perfect, way to represent the similarity

between the Creator and mankind is to render him in the anthropomorphic

shape of his son, Jesus Christ, the exemplary imago Dei. Bosch seems to have

underscored the biblically defined identity of Adam and Eve in relation to, ie. in fundamental dependence on, their Creator not only by the centrality of the figure

of God/Christ and his relative large size but also in the particular way he is positioned in between them. d traditional from different quite other, each touch not do While Adam and Eve

scenes of the Creation and the Institution of Marriage, they are physically

interconnected through their Creator, albeit in an unusual manner. The ae striking feature in this constellation is the touching of Adam’s and Ged s feet. Several late medieval depictions of the creation of Eve from Adam s rib, for

example in the Bible moralisée and in the Speculum humanae salvationis, show this motif. While usually Adam is represented lying asleep, with (one of) his feet touching those of the Creator, Bosch departs from this tradition in erg

Adam in upright position, sitting on the ground as if he had been just awakene À

with both his legs stretched towards God, his feet crossed and just touching ἐς hem of God’s garment at his right foot. This particular constellation may be understood in the context of a long exegetical tradition in medieval theology

of the typological relationship of Adam and Jesus Christ, the ‘new Hoge : Originating in the Bible itself, the typological reading of figures and events from the Old Testament as prefigurations of persons and events in the New Testament,

: why the Creator/Christ i ist is the‘ st figurei n the triptych’. For other aspects of Creation, reason is the ‘largest figt ) see below, especially n. 51. Jesus’s ‘portrait’ (i.e. as an image associated with the vera icon tradition we 20 Bax, Beschrijving en poging, p. 20, traces this motifto a miniature ina ie

Bible

from

c. 1445 (British Library, Add. MS 15410, fol. 10), but gave no specific reading of it. Τ᾽" j ei I’, E p.29, points i thisis ou der Lusten” *! Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin

out.

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Reindert L. Falkenburg

especially of Christ, had already been fully developed with the Church Fathers.” Already Paul (Rom. 5. 14) mentions Adam foreshadowing ‘the Man who was to come’; in I Cor. 15. 22 he explicitly relates the death of all men in Adam to the resurrection of all in Christ. Augustine extended this typological relationship of Adam and Christ to Eve: according to him, the creation of Eve from the side of the sleeping Adam prefigures the birth of the Church from the side of the suffering Christ on the cross. Ambrosius explicated this relationship as a parallel between Eve, the bride of Adam, and the Church as sponsa of Christ. In later elaborations of this typological exegesis during the Middle Ages (again, for example, in the Bible moralisée), Adam’s sleep was interpreted as a visionary state in which he ‘saw’ his own bridal union with Eve as a prefiguration of that of Christ and the Church; in the visual arts, this Schau was visualized by showing Adam asleep with open eyes.” Further associations of Adam and the suffering Christ were tied to the widespread legend that Adam was created, and buried, on the same spot where later the Cross was erected. The Creation annex Marriage scene in Bosch’s painting seems to be based on this very typological imagery. The outstretched legs and crossed feet of Adam evoke the future sufferings of Christ on the lignum vitae, i.e. the posture of his legs as they are stretched and nailed to the Cross; Adam’s wide-open eyes already ‘see’ the future marriage of the heavenly Bridegroom and his bride. As a matter of fact, the way the Creator/Christ takes

Eve by her arm echoes the wedding ritual represented in Jan van Eyck’s wellknown Arnolfini-portrait — as if the new Adam, rather than the old, takes Eve as

his bride. The Creator in Bosch’s Paradise scene, thus, is the central figure of

a typological construct comprising both the Creation and the Salvation of mankind. Figured as, and prefiguring, Christ the God-man, the Creator is the ?? See, for example, Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, Archivum Romanicum, 22 (1938), 436-89, and Friedrich Ohly, Schriften zur mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung (Darmstadt: W GB, 1977), pp. 312-400. 23 Augustinus, Enarratio in Psalmum, 138,2, ΡῚ,37,1785; cf. Ernst Guldan, Eva und Maria.

Eine Antithese als Bildmotiv (Graz: Béhlau, 1966), pp. 32-33. Further references are in Erich Auerbach, Typologische Motive in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, 2nd edn (Krefeld: Scherpe, 1964), pp. 17ff, and Hans

Martin

von

Erffa, Ikonologie der Genesis, bk

1: Die christlichen

Bildthemen aus dem Alten Testament und ihre Quellen (Munich: Deutscher Kuntsverlag, 1989), pp. 194 ff. 24 A mbrosius, Expositio in Psalmum, 118, Sermo 1, 4; CSEL 62,7 — cf. Guldan, p. 33. ?5 See Herbert Schade, ‘Adam

und Eva’, in Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. by

Engelbert Kirschbaum and others, 8 vols (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1968-74), 1, cols 41-70, especially 43-44 and 51-52; cf. Heimann, pp. 13-15, and Von Erffa, pp. 145-48.

BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

115

pivot of a pictorial narrative relating the history of mankind from its very beginning to its destiny in a highly condensed manner typical of medieval typological imagery. It offers an epigrammatic rendering of the History of Salvation as preordained by God, capitalizing on a formal and semantic play on ᾿ the imago Dei and the mirror relationship of God and mankind. Now, while this interpretation may establish the unambiguous centrality of the figure of God in the Creation scene on the Paradise panel, it seems hardly to have any bearing on the triptych as a whole, especially in light of the marginal position of this scene as such and, what is more, the far from godlike behaviour of mankind on the central panel and the anything but salvific outcome of the course of its history on the right. Still, despite this apparent divergence, it can be shown that the Creation scene serves as the pivotal heuristic category (Gombrich 8 institution’) for the interpretation of the triptych as a whole through its place in a pattern of ‘figures of likeness’ that act as ἃ silver lining (of some dark sort) connecting the multifarious imagery in all three panels. Figures of Likeness

The point of departure for my effort to relate the Creation scene to other images in the Garden of Earthly Delights is the observation that among the enotmous certain pattern variety of the many figures and motifs throughout the triptych a of similarities and variations can be discerned and connected to the fountain behind the Creation scene, and through that motif to the very heart of its

that this pattern of ‘figures of typological makeup. What I would like to show is construct, likeness’ too is a typological construct, or rather a paratypological

which visually explicates the opposite course of human history that is foretold in iconographic the Creation scene. First, I will discuss some formal and of the centre the in ng well-spri the characteristics of the ‘Fountain of Life’, as sharing while Paradise panel often has been called. I will show that this fountain, certain characteristics with the Creation scene in front of it, actually should be one some figures and seen as its antipode, its counterimage. Next, I will point

motifs in the rest of the painting that repeat and echo the ‘Fountain of Life in their formal and semantic makeup (limiting myself only to the most striking and obvious examples of similarity due to limited space of this contribution). as a typological Res Subsequently, I will interpret the pattern that emerges

0 turning upside down the History of Salvation as prophesied in the beginning time.

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Reindert L. Falkenburg

Thanks to Paul Vandenbroeck’s elaborate study of the well-spring visually dominating the paradisiacal landscape on the left panel, it has become clear that this fountain is a composite structure resonating with, but not simply exemplifying, certain late medieval iconographic traditions.” It is an elegant structure, unclassifiable in any precise way, suggestive of both inorganic and organic substances. Its base is circular in shape, apparently rather flat and

resembling a disc; in its centre is a dark hole, in which an owl is perched.” The

upper part is suggestive of both organic and inorganic forms, with stylized leaves and pinnacles reminiscent of decorative tracery work in contemporary architectural designs and settings.** The whole structure is placed on what looks like a pile of dark rocks containing precious stones and other shiny objects, which have attracted birds of different kinds. The fountain as such is a common paradisiacal motif, inspired by the description of the Garden of Eden in Genesis (2. 6, 10-14) and occurs in many contemporary Creation scenes. But while this structure usually represents the ‘Fountain of Life’, the owl, in conjunction with the nearby birds that have been attracted by the gleaming environment, echoes

allegorical depictions of the temptation of the devil, which show an owl sitting on a branch of a (dry) tree and attracting the attention of other birds which are prone to be caught when they come too near? The black, or grey, owl carries several other negative connotations in late medieval iconography, including that of evil, darkness and blindness — the latter being particularly relevant in this context since it signals the blindness of the birds (i.e. mankind) to the way they are lured into captivity and death (i.e. sin and perdition). This motif thus, albeit inversely, resonates notably with the visionary aspect of the Creation scene, that is, with Adam’s foresight of mankind’s future redemption. The

Speculum

humanae

salvationis

—

a compendium

of typologically

informed theological and historical knowledge that was rather well known in the

Low Countries and neighbouring regions during the late Middle Ages — offers

26 See Vandenbroeck, ‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” I’, pp. 52-112.

’7 Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” I’, pp. 66ff. and 72ff. 28 Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” I’, pp. 54-57. 29 See Paul Vandenbroeck, ‘Bubo significans. Die Eule als Sinnbild von Schlechtigkeit und

Torheit, vor allem in der niederlandischen und deutschen Bilddarstellung und bei Jheronimus

Bosch’, Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1985), 19-135.

%0 SeeJ. Lutz and P. Perdrizet, Speculum humanae salvationis, Texte critique. Traduction inédite de Jean Mielot (1448). Les sources et l'influence iconographique principalement sur l'art alsacien du XIV siècle, 2 vols (Leipzig: Mulhouse, 1907-09); Edgar Breitenbach, Speculum Humanae

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BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

another iconographic frame of reference for Bosch’s fountain and the way it is related to the Creation scene in the foreground. Essential for understanding this relationship is the observation that there is a certain arboreous quality to the shape of Bosch’s fountain, consisting of branchlike protrusions oar bulbous fruit-germinations that extend from both sides of the circular body of the the fountain (the fact that several birds are posted on these protrusions enhances scene Creation the notion of a ‘tree’).°! In this way, the fountain corresponds with

Salvationis. Eine typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1930); Adrian and Hise Lancaster Wilson, À Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 1324-1500 (Ber = ey:

der University of California Press, 1984); Manuela Niesner, Das Speculum Lu ~~ aie un Stifibibliothek Kremsmiinster. Edition der mittelhochdeutschen Versiibersetzung die ε er Verhaltnis von Bild und Text (Cologne: Bohlau, 1995); Horst Appuhn, Heilsspiegel: fe Dares des mittelalterlichen Erbauungsbuches Speculum humanae salvationis Πα ὑόν poste middelnederlandse 1981); De Spieghel der menscheliker behoudenesse. De ‘Speculum Humanae Salvationis’ed. by L.M. Daniéls (Tielt: Lannoo, 1949); an

=

Manuscripts ofthe Speculum humanae salvationis’in the Southern Netherlands . 1 ve à

per

ee

κόμα A Contribution to the Study of the 15° Century Book Hlumination and of t : ee ce dir: PP: especially 1996), Peeters, (Leuven: Meaning of Historical Symbolism Myth i > ae for ofinspiration source major a was Speculum the have suggested that ike t Bx Bruyn, pp. 44, 93-94, 134, 141-42. The Speculum humanae salvationis (

ate

y πὰ pauperum) belongs to abroad genre of late medieval edifying and mystagogic oe orné sade go under the Latin or vernacular name of ‘mirror — see, for example,

ti? ‘Backgrounds of the title Speculum in Medieval Literature , Speculum, 29 ( ee we Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the se. ἰῷ μὲ a

oe English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) wet 4 d

German edition (Tübingen, 1973)); Ritamary Bradley, ‘The Speculum dis ΠΣ Papers Ù 195;8) sis Mystical Writers’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter od Read at Darlington Hall, July 1984, ed. by Marion Glasscoc ee 9-27; Petronella Bange, Spiegels der Christenen. Zelfreflectie en ideaalbee moralistisch-didactische traktaten (Nijmegen: Centrum voor sal in

Hendrik Herp O.F.M., Spiegel der volcomenheit opnieuw uiigegeven es

DS πέδον in ep pews et im predic

its pane

geen O.EM., 1 & II (Antwerp: Neerlandia, 1931); and Eleanor Simmons Voraussetzungen der Bilderreihe des Speculum virginum (Miinster: us 5

ne

*! Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der wes ate so te the treelike quality of the fountain in Bosch’s Paradise panel, but ἐξ mh Pr AP iconographically codified meaning expressed in this motif. In his ou se gue eee 8 sion” 61ff.), the association of fountain and tree rather bespeaks of fertility an sa ᾿ ae of nature, It will be clear that I fundamentally disagree with Vandenbroeck pep een

as it is on the assumption of the existence of a pre-iconographic, oil by the will or substratum of Bosch’s pictorial language (ic. a language thar scl ha sorrect altogether conscious consideration of the artist); I do not see how, if this μεν οσε + as (which I doubt), the realm of artistic expression codified in iconographic tra

would be

118

Reindert L. Falkenburg

since the latter, too, entails a reference to a tree, i.e. the prefiguration of the lignum vitae. Several manuscripts of the Speculum humanae salvationis and related texts offer diagrammatic representations of two opposite trees that may have served as a source of inspiration for Bosch to stage an opposition between the well-spring and the figure of Christ/the Creator in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Some of these manuscripts show an image of the Tree of Knowledge, or the Tree of Vices, consisting of a tree trunk rooted in a vessel-like base and carrying six ‘fruits of vices’ on its lateral branches and a seventh ‘fruit’ (Luxuria), combined with a figure of vetus Adam, on top. This image is contrasted with a similar

representation of the Tree of Life, or the Tree of Virtues, showing six ‘fruits of

virtues’ attached to its branches, and a seventh (Caritas), combined with a figure of novus Adam (Christ), on top.” In some cases a serpent is winding up the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge, signifying its association with evil, while its counterimage is associated with the lignum vitae of the Cross. While in Bosch’s painting the colour similarity between the well-spring and Christ/the Creator (of course, the true ‘Fountain of Life’), as well as their axial alignment in the composition already point to a certain reciprocal relationship, the opposition between the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life (i.e. the lignum vitae, the

undercut, denied, or made irrelevant by semiotic processes rooted in the sociobiological substratum of human history.

32 See a fifteenth-century (West German) manuscript of the Speculum humanae salvationis, in New York, Public Library, Spencer coll. MS 015 (illus.: dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/

scriptorium/ds_search?Image=300164).

Cf. Lina

Bolzoni,

The

Web

of Images:

Vernacular

Preaching from Its Origins to St Bernardino da Siena (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 60-61, and

Figs 2.4 and 2.5 (cf. Fig. 2.9); Biblia Pauperum. Armenbibel. Die Bilderhandschrift des Codex Palatinus latinus 871 im Besitz der Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, forward and commentary by

Christoph Wetzel, trans. by Heike Drechsler (Stuttgart: Belser, 1995), p. 23 (with an illustration of two opposing trees on fols 21” and 22'),and pp- 108-09. For the complex iconographic tradition of the arbor bona versus the arbor mala in its various manifestations, see, among others, Karl

Langosch, ‘Arbores virtutum et viciorum’, in Studien zur lateinischen Dichtung des Mittelalters,

Ehrengabe fiir K. Strecker, ed. by W. Stach and H. Walther (Dresden: [n. pub.], 1931), pp. 117-31; Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art: From Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century, 2nd edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. 63-68; Fritz Saxl, ‘A Spiritual Encyclopaedia of the Later Middle Ages’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), 107-15; Greenhill, pp- 78-99; Guldan, pp. 136-43; Von Erffa, pp. 119-128; Lynn Ransom, ‘Innovation and Identity: A Franciscan Program of Illumination in the

Verger de soulas (Paris, Bibliothéque nationale de France, MS fr. 9220), in Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-Fifih Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. by Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Princeton University, 2002), pp. 85-105, especially 86-87.

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BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

Cross ofRedemption) in the Speculum and similar compendia help to understand this relationship as a direct and fundamental antithesis. The well-spring is an arbor mala in disguise, a seductive phantasm of paradisiacal grace and ὦ which actually harbours a figure of darkness and evil temptation at its centre.” While in the Paradise wing formal and semantic dissimilitude and similitude vie with each other in the relationship between this “Well of Temptation’ and the Creation scene, resemblance and resonance define the relationship between this well-spring and a string of motifs in the rest of the painting. This principle is ot obviously at stake in the central fountain in the background of the ‘garden o earthly delights’, which, in conjunction with four surrounding streams that a to emerge from it, is a clear evocation of the Garden of Eden of Genesis an bas such, a variation, or even repetition, of the paradisiacal scenery of the left wing. Ξε The four semiorganic and semi-inorganic constructions marking these streams forms an (re)productive ‘organs’ generating trees, fruits, and other fantastic the re substances, but also ‘pleasure castles’ attracting birds and men (notice fountain, inclu climbingin, through, and on top of them) — echo this central

ing

is its central hole, in their own exuberant way. The general shape of this fountain medieval at the same time reminiscent of the crossed orb typically found in late seo a of representations of Christ as Salvator mundi. This association se a endorsed, albeit in a parodic manner, by two naked figures (possibly aman ee the encircling ridge woman) who are standing on their heads on a narrow the ‘globe’ of the structure — a motif reminiscent of late medieval Res ri 8 — ‘world turned upside down’.™ In a dark circular opening below = — panel left the on resembling the position of the owl in the ‘fountain of life’ points stands a naked woman, touched at her genitals by a male companion, who ‘unnatural love to another mate who has turned his butt to her: evidence of in ii and typical for the ‘world turned upside down’. Both in a formal a new shape sense it is as if the ‘Well of Temptation’ on the left wing has gained at Ingolstade: Structuralist and ne 33 Cf Ethan M. Kavaler, Nature and the Chapel Vaults

who points out that Ras Perspectives’, Art Bulletin, 87 (2005), 230-48, especially 243fF, just ἃς in sone vi ee ee s, Delight Earthly of imagery of the well-spring in the Garden

imprint Ξ ae architectural designs ‘evoke(s) a nature departing from God s initial

it was created by Go mensura, numerus and ordo that characterized the world as

see

and,

n weapochen 34 Cf. Hans-Joachin Raupp, Bauernsatiren. Entstehung und pares icklunging des 2 bäuerli a 30) i Lu zier: (Nieder 1570 1470Genres in der deutschen und niederlandischen Kunst ca. (Leuven: wereld op zijn kop, ed. by Jozef Janssens Ρ- 105 (Fig. 101). See also Uilenspiegel. De Davidsfonds, 1999), figures on p. 89 and 109.

:

120

Reindert L. Falkenburg

and new connotations in the central panel without losing, however, its original design and symbolism. Only now the spring has attracted men and women too, flocking around the orblike well-spring like their feathered companions and engaging in a variety of activities that all can be subsumed under the rubric of ‘worldly love’.

A very similar configuration, now repeating both the circular structure of the ‘Well of Temptation’ in the Paradise panel and its descendant in the ‘garden of earthly delights’, can be observed in front of this fountain, in the very centre of the triptych. Here, a group of men is visible (many of them with birds on their heads),

who are riding on animals of all (partly fantastic) sorts in a circular movement

around a pool in which naked women are bathing (they, too, carry birds and fruits on their heads). As several authors have observed, the wild and apparently uncontrolled movements of the men resemble contemporary depictions of a ‘morisk

dance’ (carrying associations of uncontrolled lust), while the riding on pigs, bears,

lions, etc. brings to mind allegorical representations of the seven deadly sins.** The whole configuration, not only because of its formal arrangement but also in its suggestion of seduction, evokes, again, the disclike body of the well-spring on the Paradise wing with the owl of temptation perched in its dark centre. It looks as if the shape and semantics of the first well-spring are transformed into a landscape layout, with pretty naked women now playing the role of the sinister owl. On a purely formal level, though transformed and segmented in individual shapes, these motifs reoccur in the foreground of the central panel: large, bulbous fruits, many of them with holes in which humans engage in all kinds of pleasurable activities; towerlike structures and other vegetal constructs with human figures inside them, suggestive (or rather, parodies) of courtly love scenes. Inverted relationships are abundant: many birds and fruits are larger than life; a man is picking flowers (a ruiker, ‘nosegay’, in Dutch parlance) from, or sticking them ° For a detailed (but as such rather one-dimensional)

reading of the various sexual

connotations embedded in the Garden of Earthly Delights, especially in the central panel, see Bax,

Beschrijving en poging.

36 Cf. Vandenbroeck, ‘Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde “Tuin der Lusten” II’, pp. 30-47,

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BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

a playful pun, pethaps, of into, the naked butt of a kneeling companion — d by additional scenes contemporary representations of bodily lust that are glowe devil.” Some scenes bring showing foul smells emerging from of the anus of the ly repeating a scene from to mind the iconography of the Fall without actual side of the ‘garden of earthly Paradise, such as the men and women on the right that are exactly like ie delights’ who are busy picking berries from trees left wing. As a matter of fact, t ; vegetation of the paradisiacal landscape on the fruits of all sorts of variasions Ἢ entire foreground is dominated by the eating of that, in accordance with the fact (phantasmal) shapes. While one could argue and Eve to eat from - tree (Genesis 2. 16-18 and 3.3) that God allowed Adam Bosch shows their por in the garden except for the Tree of Knowledge, _ picking of the fruit as taking precisely this liberty, the motif of the in a strain of scenes and motifs t : particularly the way this motifis embedded ’ of Genesis 3. 3 (notice the centr echo the ‘tree in the middle of the garden on the left wing), inescapably brings to san

location of the ‘Well of Temptation’

tes precisely with the one tree that the story of the Fall and, fatefully, resona

Go

vs

forbade the first man and woman to eat from.

as drastically transmuted and explicate Similar forms and motifs, now more the scene of Hell on the right panel. This time,

devilish shapes, can be found in ph his consumptive and qu symbiosis is with Lucifer, who through which is visible through a atk ho : ‘produces’ foul souls for the cesspit of Hell, 1 again, is reminiscent of the eae below him — a configuration which, i side of the triptych. This ci

the ‘Well of Temptation’ on the other y entourage of human souls ex enthroned figure is entertained by a courtl devilish games) and re ee” games (or rather, who are objects of Amongthese human igures β Fe beingtortured by their very instruments). ee Darkness’. She faces the vi who sits at the foot of the ‘King of μῆς er anoth on her chest, is embraced by demon and, marked by the toad of lust μὲ up in front of the mirror, her eyes are demon. Although the demon holds her i e a ae scenes in this Hell landscape involv downward. While several other εν pre

par excellence of pe play with the human arse as the locus of the devilan putrefaction, as well as the presence

i

behaviour, decay, and

especially 30-41, with further references. In addition to associations with /uxuria, the morisca-

dance, ‘Venus bath’ and other motifs from late medieval profane love garden iconography with which Bosch’s representation of the encircled women resonates according to Vandenbroeck, one should also mention representations of men dancing around ‘Frau Welt’ — cf. Thea Vignau Wilberg-Schuurman, Hoofse minne en burgerlijke liefde in de prentkunst rond 1500 (Leiden: Nijhoff, 1983), Figs 28-31; and Wolfgang Stammler, Frau Welt. Eine mittelalterliche Allegorie

(Fribourg: Freiburger Universitätsreden, 1959).

Literataa, vols 37 See Herman Pleij, Het gilde van de Blauwe Schuit.

eo Dre!

Me = ae erner 1979), pp. 56-62; ef. de late middeleeuwen (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, A Pr a? in des Mittelalters und Fastnachtsbrauch. Studien zum Fortleben 197-205. gone) (Konstanz: Universitatsverlag, 1991), pp. 170-81, and Nancy nestles > PP sity Press, Univer l : Cornel (Ithaca Ages Middle the in ion Possess ic and Demon

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Reindert L. Falkenburg

par tout, this scene in particular echoes and explicates the blindness of mankind to the temptations of the flesh and the underlying manipulations of the devil — all in accordance with the first signals of this blindness in the Paradise wing. The visually most striking of all these scenes that highlight the association of the lower and back-parts of the human body with the underworld is a looming creature, usually referred to as the “Tree-man’.** Its huge shell-like body resembles an egg, sign of new life, which is hollow and broken, pierced by its own prickly limbs bespeaking lifelessness and ossification. Its limbs partly have the form of legs, partly that of dilapidated tree trunks, the supportive function of which is undermined by their hollowness and unstable positioning in two tilting ships. Through an enormous hole (actually the arse) in the back part of the egglike body, its interior is visible. The dark space houses an inn where men ride on lust (see the person sitting on a large toad) and a devilish procuress is at their service. The head,

i.e. the mind, of the creature is like its body. The merry-go-round of human figures on a large disc on top of its head — souls, one assumes (since the location is Hell), who are led by procuress around an enormous bagpipe of evocative shape —

mirrors not only what goes on in its bowels, but also the merry-go-round of the

men riding animals in the centre of the ‘garden of earthly delights’, A last example of Hell scenes that reverberate with motifs and configurations in the paradisiacal parts of the triptych is of a slightly different kind and regards the strange vegetative growths and landscape mutations manifesting first on the exterior of the triptych and subsequently, and increasingly in a rampageous way, in the interior.” The bulbous, seed- and egg-shaped forms that first appear with 33, GE Bax, Beschrijving en poging, pp.

110-14, and Joseph L. Koerner, ‘Bosch’s Equipment,

in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. by Lorraine Daston (New York:

Zone, 2004), pp. 27-65, especially 46-53 (Koerner, p. 46, characterizes this motif quite aptly as ‘The Tree-Boat-Tavern-Goose-Anus-Devil-Man’).

°? I believe that Baldass’s qualification “Blumen des Bésen’ for the vegetative growths on the outer edge of the world, depicted on the exterior of the triptych (see n. 12, above), basically is correct. These growths are the first signals of the force that progressively transforms the world on the inside of the painting. These unclassifiable and mutative forms should be seen in the context of, and are, Ithink, the next stage of, the transformations which the Rebel Angels undergo when they are driven out of heaven, a process during which the angels acquire a ‘fallen’ body and transform into insectlike demonic figures — cf. Y. Pinson, ‘Fall of the Angels and Creation in Bosch’s Eden: Meaning and Iconographical Sources’, in Flanders in a European Perspective: Manuscript Illumination around 1400 in Flanders and Abroad; Proceedings of the International Colloquium Leuven, 7-10 December 1993,

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some clarity in the background landscape of the Paradise panel — finding an elegantly constrained expression also in the vegetative growths of the “Well of Temptation’ — occur more exuberantly and wildly in the four ‘pleasure castles’ marking the background of the central ‘garden of earthly delights’. In the Hell panel, they turn into violently erupting machines of death, spreading terror, war, and fire over the world, signalling the end of times. It is this chain of motifs in particular that endorses the general impression that, since we see the creation of mankind on the left panel and the Perdition of mankind on the right, we are witnessing the general course of human history ‘flowing’ from left to right, with the implication that from Paradise ‘follows’ the state of humanity depicted in the centre of the triptych, which in its turn ‘leads’ to and ‘produces’ the subjects populating Hell (this notion of ‘production’ being underscored by Lucifer who

devours and excretes human souls into the cesspit of Hell). Seen in the context of

this overall-impression of a ‘movement of time’ from left to right, the bulbousand seedlike forms, the first signs of which actually already occur on the outer edge of the world in the beginning of time (on the exterior the triptych), suggest a transformative force acting upon the Creation of God — mankind and the earth alike — which unfolds with the course of time, with increasing boldness, apparently steering the world and human

history inevitably to a disastrous

Apocalypse.“ This force, having many faces and manifestations throughout the triptych, also seems to underlie, and encapsulate, the chain of motifs expounded above, leading to the impression of an unfolding in the rest of the triptych of what in a nutshell (almost literally) is already present in the figuration of the ‘Well of Temptation’. Thus, the viewer is led to read this chain of figures (figurae/visual allegories) of formal and iconographical likeness as beginning with this well-spring and ending in the cesspit of Hell. This chain of ‘black holes’ — because these ‘holes’ (black in a formal and symbolic meaning of the word) is what these figurae essentially have in common — as it unfolds in space and time, I will now argue, is the skeleton of Bosch’s entire composition and is to be read as a form of to, typological imagery, which should be seen in conjunction with, and in contrast and Adam of creation the in encoded is typologically the History of Salvation as it Eve.

i

; LA NA RAS Bae entral 10 In this respect, therefore, despite che apparent static nature of the imagery of the centr

ed. by Maurits Smeyers and Bert Cardon (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), pp. 693-707; cf. De Bruyn, pp.

panel, the overall composition of the Garden of Earthly Delights is rather similar το chat οἱ DE

Middle Ages, that the Fall of the Rebel Angels preceded the Fall of Adam and Eve.

more dynamically with a haycart rolling towards Hell.

1336, for the notion that the Haywain

Triptych also visualizes the idea, widespread in the late

Haywain Triptych, which explicates the course of human history as it moves from Paradise to He

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Reindert L. Falkenburg

Visual Typology in the ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ In order to assess the hypothesis that typological imagery structures the entire

composition of the Garden of Earthly Delights, 1 will briefly highlight certain insights in late medieval typological, or figurative, thinking offered by modern scholarship. Typological relationships, in medieval thought, relate not only to historical persons, things, and events narrated in the Old and the New Testaments, which are interpreted in terms of figure and fulfilment, type and antitype, but also to the end of times, the Eschaton, when the salvific work of Christ, who is the pivotal persona in the History of Salvation, comes to full fruition.*’ In the course of this History, God’s redemptive work is increasingly revealed — from the

125

BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

It is, thus, a position comparable to this divine perspective — a ‘God’s eye view’, so to speak — which enables the viewer to observe and interpret in a typological manner similarities between figures, things, and events of the kind described above, i.e. to understand these figures, things, and events as a coherent phenomenon progressively unfolding the History of Salvation. While it is tempting to read the representations on the left, centre, and right panels of the Garden of Earthly Delights accordingly as, respectively, umbra, imago, and veritas revealing the History of Perdition, it implies on part of the viewer a familiarity with typological thinking and image making, as well as with a ‘God’s eyelike’ interpretive stance. I will briefly address both imperatives.

Bert Cardon has shown that the Speculum humanae salvationis was rather

‘shadow’ (umbra) of the times of the Old Testament to the ‘image’ (imago) of the New, which regards Christ and his workings (that continue into the here and

popular at the Burgundian court, ie. among the (same type of) audience for whom the triptych probably was intended.“ This text is as much a picture book

This framework, while operating along the lines of a progression in historical

mankind based on the Old and the New Testaments. The representations in this manual are grouped in sets of four images, one of which illustrates an event

now), and the ‘truth’ (veritas), the ultimate fulfilment of the type, in heaven.””

time, implies a divine perspective ‘outside’ the course of human history. Erich Auerbach writes: This type of interpretation [typology] obviously introduces an entirely new and alien element into the antique conception of history. For example, if an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ, so that in the former the latter is as it were announced and promised, and the latter ‘fulfils’ (the technical term is figuram implere) the former, then a connection is established between two events which

are linked neither temporally nor causally — a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension (if may be permitted to use this term for a temporal extension). It can be established only ifboth occurrences are vertically linked

to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding. The horizontal, that is the temporal and causal, connection of occurrences is dissolved; the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and which will be fulfilled in the future; and strictly, in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something omni-

temporal, something already consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event.‘

as it is a written discourse on the typological understanding of the history of

from

the

New

Testament,

the

other

three

showing

events

from

the

Old

Testament that were believed to foreshadow and (also in a literal sense) prefigure Christ, the protagonist of the New Testament scenes. These groupings show certain characteristics that mutatis mutandis also occur in Bosch’s compositional structure. The most obvious one is a string of scenes that show formal similarities signalling semantic correspondences. A fourteenth-century German manuscript of the of all Speculum (PI. 8) shows how formal congruence governs the representation four events, for example in a representation of the Descent of the Holy Ghost

which is combined and compared with Old Testament images of the Tower of Babel and the Dispersal of mankind over the earth, the Israelites receiving the Ten of oil. Commandments, and the Widow of Zarephat receiving an infinite supply respective lacking is Even in cases where the biblical story does not demand it or narrative details (ie. in the story of the Widow of Zarephat), the images stress with simple but compelling homologies the interconnectedness of these events of each seen from the perspective of the History of Salvation. The composition

Holy image is marked by a fan-shaped emanation of rays of divine gifts: rays of the

of Spirit descending on Mary and the apostles, banderols explicating differences

* See Ohly, especially 361-400; Joseph A. Galdon, Typology and Seventeenth-Century Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 19-69.

of oil human speech, banderols with the Ten Commandments, and outpourings

‘2 Ohly, p. 377; Galdon, p. 48. #3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by

William R. Trask, with a new introduction by Edward W. Said (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1st edn, 1953]), pp. 73-74.

ΠῚ of “ Cardon, Manuscripts of the Speculum humanae salvationis’, pp. 38-41; for Hendrik Nassau as possible commissioner of the Garden of Earthly Delights, see n. 5, above.

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Reindert L. Falkenburg

in a multitude of vessels.* The arrangement of the four scenes is another visual instrument to communicate the typological hermeneutics expected from the viewer. Speculum manuscripts often spread each series over two adjacent pages, leading the viewer to read the order of the images from left to right, beginning with the New Testament scene in the upper left corner. Because of their close vicinity and homological figuration, however, the viewer is also led to turn one’s mind and eyes to each scene at will, recognizing patterns of correspondence which do not become obvious if one restricts oneself to linear reading alone. Thus, taking the example given above, the viewer will discover patterns of similarity between the image of the Tower of Babel and the Ten Commandments, on the one hand, since both show an ‘emanation’ of words, and the Descent of the Holy Ghost and the Widow of Zarephat, on the other, since these scenes rather correspond in the centrifugal dispersal of rays of divine grace. The grouping as a whole, moreover, enables the viewer to understand the central jar in the latter scene, from which oil is poured into other vessels underneath it, as an ‘image in disguise’ of Christ, since this jar occupies the same position in the composition of this scene as an epigrammatic rendering of Christ in the other three scenes. By the same mechanism through which each scene, or even detail, can become the centre ofan ecliptic movement of visual discovery and contemplation, this image evinces how Christ in the other three scenes also is ‘like’ a vessel infusing humanity with divine goods. In this way, the semantic field of each individual image is enriched by a multitude of reciprocal references within the group as a whole, in accordance

with the principles of typological thinking which modern scholarship has identified in a variety of medieval texts. Bernd Mohnhaupt has made the observation that while such formal means of expressing typological thought — ‘visual typology’, in his words — were widely used in late medieval art, this phenomenon has hardly been studied by modern scholarship.“® Despite this lack of knowledge and the lack of modern studies concentrating on the semantic aspects of Bosch’s pictorial form, I would like to venture the hypothesis that the rhetoric of visual typology operative in Speculum humanae salvationis manuscripts also qualifies (and might even be a source for) the string of mutually resonating figurae in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Thus, the well-spring in the left panel not only acts as a forebode of the world turned upside down and the wild ride of men seduced by female sirens in the heart of the 45 See Appuhn, pp. 70-71 and 110-11.

‘° Bernd Mohnhaupt, Beziehungsgeflechte. Typologische Kunst des Mittelalters (Bern: Lang,

2000).

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127

composition, but also of the evincing of bodily lust as a subordination to the King of Darkness in the right panel. Treating this chain of motifs, and all the other interrelated motifs described above, in the manner of a typological construct comparable to pictorial arrangements of the Speculum and related texts implies that every semantic notion triggered by individual components of the chain resonates throughout the whole cycle. This results in a cacophony of mutually reinforcing demonic sense impressions, which is only the loudest in the scene of Hell (as it is actually visualized in the demonic ‘orchestra’ behind the enthroned Lucifer). Thus, the foul smell emerging from the human

arse and its demonic

equivalents is not refrained to the locale of the Kingdom of Darkness on the right panel, but is already encapsulated, i.e. hermeneutically equally ‘true’, in those scenes where the anus of a man only seems to produce sweet fragrances or is offered as an object of sexual pleasure (just visible in the dark cave that makes up

the entrance of the central fountain in the background of the ‘garden of earthly

delights’) and, thus, by association, also in the black hole forming the centre of the ‘Well of Temptation’.

Conclusion

The entire representation of the course of human history, as it unfolds throughout the triptych, indeed echoes the promise entailed in the Creation scene. Only it realizes the reverse of this very promise. The course of human history as itis depicted in the Garden of Earthly Delights does not take its point of departure in the figure

Tree of the Creator and the promise of the lignum vitae, but in its antipode, the of Knowledge and its fruit. If we take Bosch’s pictorial language in this triptych

as a whole to be a (parodic) form of visual typology, it is open toa far more extended voyage of hermeneutic discovery than I can expound on here in any detail. In particular the integration of the central figure of Christ/the Creator inte this interpretive framework, as well as the complex notion of ‘image and likeness’, and the discourse of ‘knowing good and evil’ embedded in the Creation story, opens up whole new dimensions of understanding the string of motifs discussed. : of A final note (anticipating, in a sense, further discussions on this discourse

nen ‘knowing good and evil’) regards what I have referred to above as the from the stance of a divine, or godlike perspective, which the triptych demands n . of Garde the of viewer if he or she engages in a typologically informed read ing ;

Earthly Delights. There are several ways to argue that the type of interpretation evoked by Bosch’s imagery, not only in this case but also in other paintings, be understood as responding to an appeal inherent in the image, to see the wor

128

Seven Deadly Sins in Madrid, which despite the doubt expressed by some

scholars still may be attributed to Hieronymus Bosch.“ At the centre of this image is a large circle which portrays the all-seeing ‘eye of God’, in the ‘pupil’ of which stands a Man of Sorrows. A Latin text directly below the central eye

confirms its divine nature: ‘cave, cave, dominus videt’ (beware, beware, God sees).

This scene is surrounded by a frieze of realistic genre scenes that offer the viewer a ‘mirror’ of the seven deadly sins. The addressee of this mirror image is the

viewer's inner, moral, eye, which is exhorted to see through the follies of the world — the circular shape evoking the globe as much as a mirror — and to return the gaze of his divine judge. The mirror quality of the face of Christ, its spiritual nature, and the viewer’sinner eye as the true addressee of the divine gaze, is also

thematized in Carrying of the Cross, in Ghent, traditionally attributed to Bosch.”

erp

is Koerner, ‘Hieronymus Bosch’s World Picture’, in Picturing Science, Producing Art,

ed. by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 297-323; Larry Silver, ‘God in the Details: Bosch and Judgment(s)’, Art Bulletin, 83 (2001), 626-50. ‘$ See De Bruyn, pp. 90-95, 157-58.

‘° See Walter 5. Gibson, “Hieronymus Bosch and the Mirror of Man: The Authorship and

Iconography of the Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins’, Oud Holland, 87 (1973-74), 205-26;

Marijnissen and Ruyffelaere, pp- 320-45; Garrido and Van Schoute , pp.77-94; Elsig, pp. 92-100. ° See Marijnissen and Ruyffelaere, pp. 378-87; Elsig, pp. 88-92.

Fig. 32: Hieronymus Bosch, Haywain

(and Bosch’s art) as ‘through the eyes of God’.*” One way is to draw a parallel with the Haywain Triptych and the interpretive stance this painting asks the viewer to take (Fig. 32). Framed by a scene of Paradise with the Creation, the Fall, and the Expulsion of man on the left, and a scene of Hell on the right, mankind rides towards perdition with a haycart that is topped by a couple playing music while another pair kisses in a bush. A praying angel on the left and a devil musician on the right echo the eschatological framing of Paradise and Hell below and endorse the correspondence of Bosch’s invention with contemporary representations of the ars moriendi and the Last Judgement. Here, a reference to the iconography of the Last Judgement is explicated by a small figure of a Man of Sorrows high up in the sky, who shows himself to mankind. No one except the angel pays attention to his revelation. Contrary to what is often alleged by modern commentators, Bosch’s Haywain Triptych does not simply paint an irrevocable sliding down of mankind towards perdition;* it appeals to the viewer’s own sense of judgement, putting him in a position comparable to the one God takes in (artistic representations of) the Last Judgement. A similar appeal to the viewer’s own ‘eye of judgement as it is put on par with God’s own view of the world is entailed in the panel with the

Triptych, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. Reproduced with permission.

Reindert L. Falkenburg

130

Reindert L. Falkenburg

While the centre shows an image of the suffering Christ with his eyes closed (quite in contrast to the surrounding tormentors who, despite their wide-open bulbous eyes, do not seem to recognize the true identity of their victim), the lower left corner of the composition shows an image of the vera icon, the cloth of Veronica, which, according to the legend, kept an imprint of Jesus’s countenance after she wiped his face during the carrying of the Cross. Jeffrey Hamburger, Klaus Kriiger, and others have argued that inherent in many late medieval representations of the vera icon is the appeal to the viewer to respond to Christ’s gaze with his mental eye, rather than taking the pictorial representation, i.e. the outward image of God, at face value.*' Bosch’s Carrying of the Cross, too, shows an awareness of the complex relationship between outward image and inward vision, since he depicts

Veronica with adverted head and closed eyes, clearly not to express a lack of empathy with Jesus but, on the contrary, to signal that in her inner heart she sees the Lord with ‘eyes of compassion’. The eyes of Christ on her cloth, while open and directed towards the viewer, remain shrouded (literally, not figuratively) as this marginal corner of the painting receives cumbersome lighting. The fact that this face is only partly visible, as it is cut offby the picture frame, underscores the appeal to the viewer not to take the visible image on the cloth as the vera icon but to respond with one’s inner eye to the invisible gaze of God. The Garden of Earthly Delights offers a similar marginal image of Christ’s own gaze, i.e. the Creator who, instead of focusing on the joining of Adam and Eve, has set his eyes on the viewer. While we are not dealing with a vera icon in the literal (iconographic) sense of the word, the emphatic christomorphic rendering of the Creator as true imago Dei gives his focus a similar charge. Given also the

correspondence with the compositional makeup of the Haywain Triptych and its

>! See Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and

the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late

Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998), especially Chapter 7, ‘Vision and Veronica’, pp.

317-82; K. Krüger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren. Asthetische Illusion in der Kunst der

frühen Neuzeit in Italien (Munich: Fink, 2001), pp: 80-94; Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel.

Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich: Fink, 2002); and Joseph L. Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), especially pp. 80-126. Cf. Thomas Lentes, ‘Inneres Auge, äusserer Blick und heilige Schau. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zur visuellen Praxis in Frommigkeit und Moraldidaxe des späten Mittelalters’, in Frômmigkeit im Mittelalter. Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, kôrperliche Ausdrucksformen, ed. by Klaus Schreiner (Munich: Fink, 2002), pp.

179-219; and Thomas Lentes, ‘Der mediale Status des Bildes. Bildlichkeit bei Heinrich Seuse — statt einer Einleitung’, in Asthetik des Unsichtbaren. Bildtheorie und Bildgebrauch in der Vormoderne, ed. by David Ganz and Thomas Lentes (Berlin: Reimer, 2004), pp. 13-73.

BLACK HOLES IN BOSCH

131

inherent appeal to view (and judge) the world ‘like’ God, the conclusion seems justified that the gaze of Christ/the Creator in the Garden of Earthly Delights,

too, appeals to the beholder to respond with his own ‘eye of judgement’ and to

measure every aspect of the course of human history against the anthropological factum of man’s original identity as ‘image and likeness’ of God and the salvific

promise prefigured in the creation of mankind. All of this is not to say, I would like to emphasize, that the Garden of Earthly Delights is a theological exposition, a moral, or even moralistic statement per se.

It capitalizes on a certain type of (visual) knowledge that must have been well

known among the audience for whom Bosch created this exceptional painting. The philosophical, witty, and self-referential aspects of the painting, especially Bosch’s play with the human imagination, have hardly been addressed in this contribution. But I think that this exposition on the typological construct of the Creation scene and the (para-)typological structure underlying the strange and phantasmal imagery of the rest of the triptych offers an interpretive framework for a better understanding of also these aspects of Bosch’s invention.

DISCERNMENT

AND ANIMATION,

LEONARDO TO LOMAZZO Michael Cole

razio Gentileschi’s (c. 1600) δὲ Francis (Fig. 33) represents the painter's

first of four engagements with a relatively new pictorial subject. Following a theme he would have known especially from Caravaggio’s painting of six years earlier (Fig. 34), Orazio shows Francis collapsed into the arms

of a spiritual visitor. Though the arrangement, like the others Orazio subsequently tried (Fig. 35), evokes both the commonly treated scene of the saint’s stigmatization

and the story, related in Celanus’s Vita secunda and depicted by Annibale Carracci

and others, of Francis’s angelic consolation (Fig. 36), the actual event that takes

place here cannot easily be matched to any specific episode in the standard

biographies of the saint. Rather, as Pamela Askew long ago demonstrated, the

in My initial thoughts for this paper took shape in a conversation with Walter Melion in Florence

the spring of 2001, so it was a particular pleasure to be able to present a first version of it at the remarkable conference he and Reindert Falkenburg organized at Emory University one year later, and here to contribute the following essay to this volume. I presented portions of the material included

at Northwestern University and at the University of California at Berkeley in 2004; lowe thanks to Claudia Swan and to Anne Wagner for the invitations, and to both audiences for their comments and questions. I also wish to thank Niklaus Largier and Christopher Ocker, both of whom helped

direct my reading on the history of discernment. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. pinpoint the 1 For Francis’s consolation, see Celanus, 2, 149. Just how difficult it is to Orazio narrative emerges in Alessandro Zuccari’s entries in the catalogue to the recent exhibition

the entry on and Artemisia Gentileschi (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001). In

the subject of Saint Orazio’s earliest version of the scene, Zuccari remarks that ‘Gentileschi treated

Francis consoled by an angel no less than four times’ (p. 52). The entry on the second version,

however, refers to the work as the ‘Stigmatization of St. Francis’ and suggests that ‘Gentileschi La Verna’ (p.53).On here shows the momentafter Saint Francis received the stigmata on Mount

Michael Cole

DISCERNMENT AND ANIMATION

1

Oo VA

134

painting, like those that share its pairing of characters, seems to adapt Roman Franciscan

types to follow changes in the depiction of Christ, especially those

related to the Pieta and to the Agony in the Garden (Fig. 37). The paintings

implicitly highlight Francis’s imitatio Christi, even as they move Franciscan

imagery into areas that texts do not control. Together, the novelty and the seriality of these paintings assimilate them to a genre of monumental pictorial imagery — that of the ecstatic visionary — that had been invigorated in Italy after the Council of Trent and that would only increase in popularity in the years that followed. And if we approach Orazio’s work as a generic image of this sort, rather than as a specifically Franciscan illustration ofan actual biographical episode, we might also ask what would have guided the painter in showing the saint’s interaction with God’s emissary. The exclusionary focus on two characters makes it easy enough to read the painting as a study of a particular phenomenon: an angel mediating between a visionary and a vision. Though

sixteenth-century writers debated whether angels allowed the visionary to see a form by ‘painting’ an image in the air or by transforming their own airy bodies into the thing seen, the canvas follows numerous precedents in illustrating that one

basic function of the angel was to bring seer and vision together (Fig. 38).

Still, the very idea that Orazio’s angel is something that we, with Francis, can

Fig. 33: Orazio Gentileschi, St Francis and an Angel, private collection. c. 1600. Image from Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001). Reproduced with permission.

see, raises questions about the condition of the image, its viewer, and the artist who made it. It can be tempting to think of Orazio as a ‘realist’ painter, one

whose pictures are transparent to the models who posed for them, one who painted what he saw before him —

the swan’s wing, for example, that he lent

to Caravaggio in 1603, presumably after having used it to paint his own angel.’

the 1607 painting, Zuccari writes that ‘Saint Francis is shown

in a swoon, after having received

the stigmata’ (p. 61) but observes that the format of the picture ‘relates it as Francesco Vanni [... that] shows the ecstatic Francis propped against a rocky bya music-making angel’ (p.62). The entry for Orazio’s final picture ofc. 1612 of ‘Orazio’s four surviving depictions of Saint Francis succored by an angel’

well to a print by cliff and consoled describes it as one (p. 110).

* Pamela Askew, ‘The Angelic Consolation ofSt Francis of Assisi in Post-Tridentine Italian Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32 (1969), 280-306 ἡ On spirits as ‘painters’, see Michael Cole, ‘The Demonic Arts and the O rigin ofthe Medium’, Art Bulletin, 84 (2002), 621-40, with further references. * Forthe loan of the wing, see Maryvelmo Smith O’Neil, Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation

in Baroque Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 353-54. On Orazio’s realism, see especially the important article by Elizabeth Cropper, ‘Michelangelo Cerquozzi’s Self-portrait: The Real Studio and the Suffering Model’, in Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift für Matthias Winner, ed. by Victoria von Flemming and Sebastian Schütze (Mainz: von Zabern, 1996), pp. 401-12.

Fig. 34: Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio, S¢ Francis and an Angel, Hartford, Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art. c. 1594. Reproduced with the permission of Nimatallah / Art Resource, New York.

Michael Cole

136

Fig. 35: Orazio Gentileschi,St Francis and an Angel, Madrid, Prado. c. 1607. Image from Keith and Artemisia Gentileschi (New York: Metropolitan Christiansen and Judith W. Mann, Orazio

Museum of Art, 2001). Reproduced with permission.

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137

DISCERNMENT AND ANIMATION

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Michael Cole

When one tries to position ἃ painting like this against the contemporary literature

of visions, however, the apparent certainty of the painted things it includes seems all the more curious.

Reflective writers in Orazio’s day, for one thing, regularly insisted that the

attributes we tend to associate with angels by no means constituted their actual features. Consider the comments of Ambrogio Catarino, the papal theologian and bishop who had been involved in the image debates at the Council of Trent and who subsequently raised the topic of angels when explaining why church painters

should be encouraged to depict things that they can not see:

[E]ven if a stupid and unskilled person should by chance perceive, say, God or an angel to be of human form, he will not grasp this so much from the painting [of those figures] as from the false, old opinions that attach to such things.

Catarino goes on to remark that when people see anthropomorphic apparitions of the divine, this happens not because God and his agents actually have human shapes, but because the human body is the most noble form that the viewer is

capable of seeing. Catarino concludes his thoughts on the painting of angels by imagining two audiences for such pictures:

[SJimple people need to be instructed about the truth of things; yet what can also be taken in, through pictures, and about the same God, by prudent men, using sound education and acquaintance, should not for this reason be overlooked.[...] As St

Dionysius elegantly teaches, the more dissimilar the similitudes that convey God so much less are they dangerous.”

to usare,

The ignorant, Catarino concedes, may be allowed to go along thinking that real

angels look like painted ones because it is useful for them to be assured simply that

angels really exist. Prudent and informed viewers, however, will know

that the

” Ambrosius Catharinus,De cultu & adoratione imaginum (Rome: Antonius Bladus, 1552),

p- 125: ‘Quod si quis forté hebes & imperitus aliter sentiat, uidelicet Deum aut Angelum esse humanae formae, non hoc tam ex pictura accipiet, quam ex priore falsa illi haerente existimatione: siquidem, ut Marcus Tullius ait, Quicunque Deum imaginatur siue uigilans siue per somnium dormiens, nullam aliam illi formam tribuere potest quam humanam, cum nullam nos uideamus spectabiliorem: & ob hanc causam Angeli in ea specie apparuerunt hominibus, & quasi homines

in scripturis describuntur: ut Beatissimus Pater Dionysius eleganter docet. Quin & Dominus

noster in parabolis Deum per hominem et patrem familias saepé designat. Quamobrem instruendi

sunt rudes de ueritate rei, non autem propter eos omittenda est quae potest de ipso Deo à cordatis

uiris etiam per picturas salubri recipi disciplina ac notitia. Qudd uerd Spiritus sanctus in figura

columbae depingitur, minus praestat ad errorem occasionem. Nam, ut B. Dionysius eleganter

docet, quanto sunt dissimiliores similitudines quae nobis referunt Deum, tanto minus periculosae sunt.’ Emphasis mine.

DISCERNMENT AND ANIMATION

angels in paintings do not show what angels really look like —

139

indeed, such

viewers will recognize that the dissimilarity of the figure and its object is central to every angelic representation. Angels, Catarino suggests, are like parables: the dissimilarity between appearance and essence is part of what makes it the duty of knowing viewers to instruct the uneducated about what it is they see, and think they see.° Other writers on the arts in and just after Catarino’s time, including those publishing in the vernacular and thus presumably for a wider audience, dwell on similar points. The Faetine cleric and Michelangelo-detractor Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano, for example, paraphrases St Paul as saying: If spoke with the tongues of men and angels, I wanted, with these words, to demonstrate that there is a difference between one and the other. Although man could not speak ifhe did not have a mouth, a tongue, teeth, a palate and a voice, the angel does not have any of these things and yet speaks.’

More explicitly still, the art theorist Gregorio Comanini, like Gilio, a priest, has one speaker in his dialogue I Figino remark: When angels appeared to men, they took human forms, with beautiful, young faces, as one reads in the holy pages of that angel that accompanied Tobias, which state that Gabriel composed himself of human members, and with an age between adolescence and childhood. Certainly it is true that painting an angel with wings isa fantastical imitation,

since it is not written anywhere that any angel in its apparition had winged shoulders. Yet

6 On dissemblance in medieval Christian imagery, see especially Geoges Didi-Hubermann,

Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 132 and 155-63; and Herbert Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God's Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

7 See Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano, Trattato [...] de la emulatione, che il Demonio ha fatta a Dio, ne Vadoratione, ne’ sacrificii, & ne le altre cose appartenenti alla diuinita (ψεπίες: Francesco de’ Franceschi, 1563), p. 113: ‘DICEVA paolo, se io parlaRi con le lingue de gli huomini, e de gli Angeli: uolendo per queste parole dimostrare, ch’é differenza tra Puno, e l’altro. Conciosia che l’huomo non potrebbe parlare, se non hauesse la bocca, la lingua, i denti, il palate: e la uoce. L’Angelo non ha nessuna de queste cose, e parla. ma in che modo parla? Alcuni dicono, che Angelo guardando ne la Diuina essenza, come in uno limpidifimo specchio, conosce pet

cognitione matutina la uolonta di Dio, laquale in se stesso riceuuta, in se stesso la riuela ἃ gli altri Angeliinferiori, e da quelli a gli huomini. Questa uolonta riuelata da Dio a l’Angelo, e Gal Angelo

a l’altro Angelo, si chiama lingua de gli Angeli: percioche meglio lo Angelo intende ποῖ essere de abe Ἶ τὸν l’altro Angelo la uolonta di Dio. che non fa l’huomo per mezzo de la uoce la via & Vergine, beata la a huomo. Ecco adunque il primo modo di parlare, che fa Iddio a gli Angeli, a tutti gli altri santi. Parla ancora iddio in sogno.

140

one should not for this reason say that a poet or painter, forming ἃ simulacrum angel and making him feathered, has imitated dissimilarly and thus committed an for however false it is [to assert] that any angel ever let itselfbe seen by men with on his back, the signification of those wings is nevertheless true: it being true that are agile and quick in their execution of divine commandments.’

141

DISCERNMENT AND ANIMATION

Michael Cole

The late Renaissance literature, in short, makes it possible to doubt that angels like the one in Orazio’s picture depict what Francis saw. And what exacerbates the situation still further is something else at which Comanini hints, particularly as he deals with angels and demons in the same breath. For as far as any actual sixteenth-century visionary, or any of the priests who dealt with such a person, was concerned, the difficulty with the image of the angel was not only that one

of an error, wings angels

Whereas Catarino had maintained that the human forms painters use to render angels underscored the necessary indirectness of divine manifestations, Comanini suggests that angelic appearances do involve a kind of likeness, but that that

might not, through familiarity with paintings or otherwise, recognize the angels

one came across. The larger danger was that a whole family of competing creatures was intent on making those who witnessed them believe that they were seeing angels when in fact they were not. The early modern literature on spirits takes as one of its standard points of departure the fact that If Corinthians 11. 14 has Lucifer appear as an ‘angel of light’; from this, readers concluded that, however an

likeness is essentially emblematic. His characters’ consideration of angels comes up within a discussion on the difference between ‘icastic’ and ‘fantastic’ imitation — categories Comanini borrows from Plato — and in part for this reason, the

author treads with particular caution.’ Since icastic imitation treats ‘things that

exist in nature’, by contrast to fantastic imitation, which takes as its subjects things ‘that have their being solely in the intellect’, the speakers must place angels in the former category: angels, after all, are ‘real beings of true and noble

angel might appear, a demon

could always look the same. When Johannes

Benedictis, surveying angelic encounters in his 1550 De visionibus, remarked that

‘as many good as bad angels take the figure of the body’, his view was succinctly put but entirely traditional!" It conveys the same uncertainty found throughout

substance’. Yet since angels, like demons, do not have bodies, ‘much less those

beautiful or ugly forms that poets and painters give them’, just what a naturalistic

imitation of them would be is hardly obvious. The dialogue ultimately takes no

insider accounts, the autobiographical writings of mystics: a familiar example here will be Teresa of Avila, whose autobiographical writings are plagued by

and angels are icastic, and not fantastic’ concedes that ‘it is certainly true that

visitations."’

paradox Comanini is treating, the same paradox that guided Catarino and others,

attempted to incorporate any ambiguity; we can expect, on the contrary, that this

doubt, haunted by the fear that the Devil might try to counterfeit her angelic

consistent position — the same character who opines that ‘imitations of demons

The problem with a painting like Orazio’s, in short, is not that the painter has

painting an angel with wings is a fantastical imitation’ — yet this only makes the more evident: that angels are real, even though an enlightened viewer, seeing a picture of one, will not conclude that the picture shows the way angels look.

... (Mainz: 10 Toannes Benedictus, De visionibus et revelationibus naturalibus et diuinis caeteri aspexit, solus uisionem um, Apostolor actis in Paulus Franciscus Behem, 1550), n.p.: ‘Et qui illi audierunt, non eius autem uocem uiderunt, quidem lumen enim, qui cum eo erant, est animae totaliter quod gloriosi, corporis & spirituum, potestate in est fortassis ita & , loquebatur Assumunt enim subiectum, ut à longe uel à prope, uisum in propria uel aliena effigie immutet. potius silendum fiat, hoc interdum figuram corporis tam boni quam mali angeli, quomodo autem

® Gregorio Com anini, I/ Figino overo del fine della Pittura (Mantua, 1591): ‘Sapendo adunque questo Poeta; che quando gli angeli sono appariti à gli huomini, humane forme hanno preso, belle,

& di giouanile aspetto, come si legge nelle sacre carte di quell’angelo, che accompagno Tobia, ha detto, che Gabriello sicompose humane membra, & che finse vna eta confine tra la giouanezza, & la fanciullezza. Ben è vero, che ’ dipinger l’angelo con l’ale è imitatione fantastica; non leggendosi che niun angelo nel l'apparition sua sia stato con gli homeri alati. Non percio si dee

dire, che

il poeta alcuno, o pittore formandone

similacro

&

quam disserendum, fidelis enim spiritus celas archana.’ of Avila’s Interior Castle, 1 See, for example, the first chapter of the fifth dwelling of St Teresa

whether there ‘Begins to deal with how the soulis united to God in prayer. Tells how one discerns 3 vols Rodriguez, Otilio and Kavanaugh Kieran by trans. Works, Collected The in is any illusion’,

facendoli pennati, habbia

dissimilmente imitato & quindi commesso errore: imperoche quantunque sia falso, che alcun angelo si sia lasciato veder da gli huomini

con l’ale à tergo; vero non dimeno

(Washington, DC:

e’ | significato di

Emphasis mine. Cf. G regorio Comanini,

*?

-

.

.

‘à

Ἢ

.

>

.

.

The Figino, or, On the Purpose of

"Γ΄"

ve

.

Painting: Art Theory in the Late Renaissance, trans. by Ann Doyle-Anderson and Giancarlo

Maiorino (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 32-33, translation here modified. 9

a

Ὕ

.

Cf. Plato, Sophist, cols 235d-236c, as well as Michael J. B. Allen, Zcastes: Marsilio Facino s Interpretation of Plato s Sophist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

1976-87), 11, 335-41. On

the broad topic here, see also Jeffrey F.

and the Authentication of Vision in Hamburger, ‘Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight

queste penne: essendo vero, che gli angeli sono agili, et presti, nell’essecutione de’ diuini comandamenti.’

ICS,

e

Zum Verhältnis von mentalen Late Medieval Artand Devotion’, in Imagination und Wirklichkeit:

and Alessandro Nova und realen Bildern in der Kunst der friihen Neuzeit, ed. by Klaus Krüger (Mainz:

von

Zabern, 2000), pp. 47-69, and Stuart Clark, “The

Reformation

of the Eyes:

Journal of Religious Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe’, History, 27 (2003), 143-60.

142

Michael Cole

would have been the furthest thing from his or his patrons’ interests. Rather it is that, for anyone who read or who spoke with church authorities about angels, or

who knew someone who had witnessed them, it would be possible to bring too much to the picture, to question what had to be secure. Orazio followed a set of established conventions for what angels should look like. But once contemporary texts were consulted for guidance in imagining how the Devil, encountered in person, was likely to appear, the answer could very well be a figure indistinguishable from the one Orazio placed behind his Francis. The late-sixteenth-century literature of art suggests that the ‘period eye’, with respect to pictures like Orazio’s, could be one shaped by a certain skepticism. The present essay consequently aims to explore how several fundamental problems raised in the sixteenth-century literature of visions bear on the painting from the same period. It will focus above all on two broad issues: first, how and where the problem of identifying angels (which was inseparable from the problem of distinguishing angels from demons) became a part of the theory and practice of sixteenth-century Italian painting, and second, how the difficulty, if not outright impossibility, that attended such identifications led painters to displace their own attention. What the essay will ultimately argue is that, rather than seeking ways to outfit the angel itself with indications of its veracity, painters shifted their focus, making the visionary, rather than the vision, the central topic of their paintings.

In the Treatise on Painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and widely circulated in the sixteenth century, the artist contemplates the various conditions that might govern corporeal movement:

DISCERNMENT AND ANIMATION

143

affetti, according to which emotions (what Leonardo calls ‘motions of the mind’) express themselves in the depicted body’s pose and countenance. Only in the

second of Leonardo’s categories, wherein a person’s gestures correspond to his

thoughts, is the animating spirit, mind, or soul clearly legible. In the first category — we might think here of a dreamer — the mind is in motion, but the body is not. In the third — we might think here ofan actor — both the mind and the body are active, though the body again does not reveal the mind. And then there is the fourth category, that in which, presumably, the body’s effects do not even correspond to the mind, let alone reveal it, since they derive from elsewhere. This fourth category is

particularly important in the present context, for it is this that would seem to comprise movements that originate from external celestial visitors to the soul, the

movements of furor, in all of its forms, which imply subjection to a spiritual force

outside the autonomous self. A writer to whom we will return, Serafino Aceti de’ Porti, imagined such motion this way: “When the soul is [...] transformed in God, it no longer operates as a soul; rather, God operates through it.© Among the late-sixteenth-century writers on the arts who took up this topic, the most important is arguably an author who, like Leonardo, was active in Milan,

the former painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo. In 1590, Lomazzo published a book

entitled the Idea of the Temple of Painting (Idea del Tempio

della Pittura).

Covering what he considered to be the five theoretical and two practical fields of his art, the Idea subdivided each of these fields into seven parts, with each part corresponding to a particular celestial governor and characterizing an individual sixteenth-century artist. The result was an astrologically inflected septipartite classification of Italian late Renaissance painting, the classification itself reflecting how its practitioners had approached problems like motion, colour, and light. As

[S]ome motions ofthe mind are not accompanied by motions of the body, and some are. The motions of the mind that have no corresponding motion of the body allow the arms, the hands, and all other parts that show themselves to be alive, to fall. The motions of the

a descriptive text, the Jdea includes apt and often subtle distinctions between, for example, paintings that employ chiaroscuro effects and those that lend venusta

limbs, ina movement appropriate to the motion of the mind, and on this subject, one can

‘intense’ illumination.

mind that do have corresponding motions of the body, however, hold the body, with its

say many things. There is also a third motion, which involves both of the two types previously mentioned, as well as a fourth, which is neither one nor the other. Motions of this last type are ‘insensate’, or, in truth, ‘dissensate’, and they are to be discussed in the

chapter on madness, or in the chapter on buffoons, and their morrises.'?

Leonardo’s >

manner

of framing animation .

.

.

as ἃ pictorial problem .

.

raises the .

question of the body’s transparency to the soul. This is no standard account of the

12 Leonardo da Vinci, RS: ee Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270), trans. and ed. by

Philip McMahon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956),p. 152, no.408 (Codex Urbinas, fol. 124".

to their flesh tones, or between those that incorporate ‘sweet’ as opposed to More

innovative,

however,

is the book’s

remarkable

relativism about the respective qualities that define different pictorial manners.

Insofar as both the artist’s character and the character of his art, for Lomazzo, were ultimately imbued by one of the seven planets, the artist was not, in the end, committed either to a regionally or to a historically determined artistic hierarchy. To become a

good

artist, his text suggests, the first problem

;

was not that of

7

13 Aceti, Trattato della discretione, in Opere bone (Venice: al Segno della Speranza, 1548), p.230:

‘Quando l’anima è per uera unione di charita trasformata in Dio gia non opera piu come anima, ma Dio opera per lei.’

:

144

Michael Cole

acknowledging who was objectively the best painter of the generation, but rather

145

DISCERNMENT AND ANIMATION

angels, spirits [and] demons, the places where they reside, [and] their dress and

that of trying to figure out what sort of artist one was oneself."* When he wrote the Jdea, Lomazzo had been blind for almost twenty years, and it is difficult to overlook this fact when reading his ideas. The content of his

colours, according to their office’. The same book — written during Lomazzo’s

treatise, for one thing, reminds us how much Lomazzo was relying, for his claims,

contends there, hinges not only on studying the right paintings, but also on seeing, and identifying, one’s own demon. In such passages, Lomazzo does not seem to be writing metaphorically; he remarks that the artist receives his genius ‘like a

on his memories. His protagonists —

Michelangelo, Polidoro da Caravaggio,

Leonardo, Raphael, Mantegna, Titian, and Lomazzo’s own teacher, Gaudenzio

Ferrari — were all dead at the time he compiled the book. Unlike other latesixteenth-century art writers, Lomazzo did not set out to promote one of his

contemporaries; in fact, the stylistics of painting that he presents seems in many ways outmoded, more representative of art from half a century earlier than it does

of painting in Lomazzo’s own day. What’s more, the ‘temple’ in Lomazzo’s title refers to the compartmentalized notional architecture his treatise would construct, each of its rooms containing one of the respective ‘parts’ of his various

pictorial categories. The temple, as Robert Klein and others have remarked, is an

blindness — includes a discussion of the ‘genius’, or tutelary deity, attached to each of his exemplary painters. Success in finding one’s own

natural style, he

body receives its spirit’.

The notion that an artist had a ‘genius’ was not unique to Lomazzo. As early

as the 1550s, Benvenuto Cellini was writing on the Invisibile that conducted him to

a vision of Christ, a vision that served as the basis for his final marble sculpture.” In

the 1570s, Santi di Tito had made apainting showing Salomon (probably a portrait

of Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici) receiving the plan for his temple from a winged being.” And still closer to Lomazzo was another artist and theorist with

Milanese connections, and one also writing in the 1590s, Federico Zuccaro. In

elaborate mnemonic device, the art theoretical equivalent to Giulio Camillo’s

famous theatre.'? The Idea as a whole would display Lomazzo’s prodigious

recollection of paintings he had not seen in decades. What does make the Jdea more of its moment, however — and here it is suggestive that the most influential treatment of the new Franciscan type,

Caravaggio’s, dates to just four years later, and comes from a Milanese artist — is the degree to which Lomazzo was interested in aspects of painting that depended, as contemporaries would have put it, on the eyes of the mind rather than those of

the body. Already in the mid-1560s, Lomazzo had written a book on dreams;

around the time he was composing the Jdea, he was also at work on a book about

the muses.'° The /dea itself, in its chapter on the ‘sciences’ necessary to the painter, recommends that the painter be able to read and write, that he know his historie sacre, and that he be versed enough in theology to be able correctly to depict ‘God,

17 “A bove all’, Lomazzo adds, ‘for exercises both general and particular, it is necessary that [the painter] be agood mathematician’, for mathematics includes astrology, and ‘through astrology the painter can arrive at a knowledge of the heavens, of the starsigns, of their ascendant faces and of their meanings. For, knowing the nature of their bodies, through the celestial images and their influences, he will understand that he has to represent martial things cruelly, venereal ones and is left pleasantly, and so forth, without which, one can truly say, painting is worth nothing

without spirit.’ See Lomazzo, I, 272-73: ‘Non had’esser ignorante delle istorie sacre e delle cose

appartenenti alla teologia, apparandole almeno per via di frequente conversazione con teologi;

dove accioché sappi come si debba rappresentare Iddio, gli angioli, l'anime, i demoni, i luochi

e divoteistorie, nel piu stanno, iloro abitie colori, secondo gli ufficij,e generalmente tutte le sante

particulare, degno et eccellente modo che possa essere. Masopra tutto, per essercitazione generale e over dottrinabile che dire vuol non altro che matematico, buon sia egli che bisogno fa

de icieli, de i segni e delle disciplinabile, affin che con l’astrologia possa pervenire alla cognizione

faccie ascendenti e significazioni loro. Percioché, conosciuta la natura de i corpi, per le imagini

il venereo piacevole, celesti et iloro influssi, intendera che ha da rappresentare il marzial crudele,

14 See Martin Kemp, “Equal Excellences”: Lomazzo and the Explanation of Individual Style in the Visual Arts’, Renaissance Studies, 1 (1987), 1-26.

15

Pi ines

:

ὟΝ

;

i

e

Robert Klein, “Les sept gouverneurs de l’art,” selon Lomazzo’, in La forme et l'intelligible, ed. by André Chastel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 174-92.

16 Roberto Paolo Ciardi dates Lomazzo’s early Gli sogni e raggionamenti to c. 1563, and the more complete Libro del sogni to c. 1565; see Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, ed. by Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols (Florence: Marchi & Bertolli, 1973), 1, pp. lvi and Ixxxii. The

dedication date of Lomazzo’s Della forma delle muse cavata da gli antichi autori greci e latiniis 27 August 1591. See Lomazzo, II, 594.

e sia e cosi gli altri con simili ragioni. Senza che si pud veramente dire, che la pittura nulla vaglia, senza spirito.

a gusto, per 18 Lomazzo, I, 251 (chap. 2): ‘a certo tempo riuscendoli per accidente una cosa

che riceve il suo esser conforme al suo particolare genio, subito si sono resentiti, come corpo spirito, rischiarando l’intelletto.’ UTET, 1980), pp. g Opere di Benvenuto Cellini, ed. by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Turin: 348-49.

Idea ?0 See Zygmunt Wazbinski, L academia medicea del disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento:

e istituzione, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki,

1987), 1, 141-53.

Michael Cole

146

DISCERNMENT AND ANIMATION

147

1593, three years after the publication of Lomazzo’s Idea, Zuccaro made a series of drawings depicting his brother’s course of study; the series includes a scene in which winged guides lead the artist along his path, and another in which a figure labeled ‘Spirito’ takes the artist by the hand when he arrives at the gates of Rome (Fig. 39).2 The episodes evoke angelic encounters familiar to all from the Bible, modelling their vision of the artist’s education on, for example, the story of Tobias (a story Zuccaro himself painted elsewhere, and one, significantly, whose theme is the restoration of sight). Whereas Zuccaro’s own verbal account of the artist’s interaction with the divine focused on disegno, however — touching on such topics as Plato’s discussion of the ideas in God, and St Augustine’s doctrine of angelic design — Lomazzo framed things differently. As Robert Klein noted in a still fundamental 1959 article, Lomazzo had originally intended to give his Idea del Tempio a quite different title — he had thought to call it his Libro della Discrezione.” His increasing emphasis on memory helps explain why he ultimately changed his mind, but the original plan still merits

attention.

The Italian discrezione, like the English discretion, derives from the Latin

discretus, the past participle of discernere, ‘to discern’. Depending on context, the Italian can be translated either as ‘discretion’ or as ‘discernment’, and there is much to recommend the latter choice in Lomazzo’s case. If Lomazzo’s temple ultimately constitutes a mnemonic scheme, its construction nevertheless depends

on a series of divisions, a mental separation of aggregate pictorial qualities. Discernment, discrezione, was the skill that allowed this. Though Lomazzo, no less than Zuccaro, was invested in the painter’s engagement with supernatural phenomena, his discussion would put much less emphasis on how it is that one becomes chosen or inspired, and much more on the artist’s discriminating perception. Inasmuch as Lomazzo would have the painter direct his discernment

to spirits and their effects, moreover, his painter would engage in an activity very much like one that had long interested church writers. For the ‘discernment of spirits’ was, in the late sixteenth century, a well-known, and, if anything, increasingly

popular devotional exercise.

Fig. 39: Federico Zuccaro, Taddeo Zuccaro Leaving Home, Los Angeles,J. Paul Getty Museum. c. 1590. Reproduced with permission.

Writers on discernment typically traced the practice back to St Paul, who, in 1 Cor. 12. 10, had referred to discretio (Greek diakrisis) as the charism, the divine grace or gift, that allowed one to know good from bad. Although a somewhat independent

tradition, apparently dating to Cassian, later began

to associate

discretio more specifically with measure and rule, the idea that the faculty of discretion was the basic instrument employed in the making of spiritual distinctions persisted, and, from the late Middle Ages on, became a central theological topic.” Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermo 23 de diversis included a commentary De discretione spirituum; it distinguished seven different spirits that had appeared in the Bible, outlining their effects. More importantly for the later tradition, a fourteenthcentury German Augustinian named Heinrich von Friemar, in his book De quatrum instinctibus, elaborated on what he took to be the four varieties of inspiration (divine, angelic, diabolic, and natural) responsible for particular forms

of behaviour. Friemar’s treatment of the problem, as recent students of his writings have shown, became extraordinarily popular: more than one hundred and *! Onthe drawings, see, most recently, Kristina Herrmann Fiore, ‘Gli angeli nella teoria e nella pittura di Federico Zuccari’, in Federico Zuccari: Le idee, gli scritti, ed. by Bonita Cleri (Milan: Electa, 1997), pp. 89-110, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico Zuccari: Fratelli pittori del Cinquecento, 2 vols (Milan: Sapi, 1998-99), 1, 9-23, both with further references. 22 See Klein.

ment 23 See the excellent overview by Gustave Bardy, Jacques Guillet, and others, ‘Discerne e, Beauchesn (Paris: vols 16 des esprits’, Dictionnaire de la spiritualité ascétique et mystique, n’, in ibid., 1, 1311-30. 1936-94), 111, 1222-91; also, generally, André Cabassut, ‘Discrétio

Michael Cole

143

fifty manuscripts of his text survive, published editions appeared in 1498, 1513, and 1514, and its basic interests were amplified by writers from around Europe,

including Denys the Carthusian, Jean Gerson, Bernardino da Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, and Francis de Sales.” In northern Italy in the sixteenth century, the most important contributor to the tradition seems to have been the aforementioned

Serafino Aceti, who, after taking a degree in medicine at the University of Padua,

became a canon regular, and spent the rest of his short career as a preacher and

writer. Aceti travelled through the Papal States in the early 1520s; by 1526,

however, he had made Milan his base, associating himself with Antonio Zaccaria and the Angeliche, an order Zaccaria had founded there.” Lomazzo would have been only two years old when Aceti died, prematurely, in 1540. He could certainly have known Aceti’s major writings, however, which

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DISCERNMENT AND ANIMATION

than the fervour is more moderated: ‘frequently the furioso carries out greater things

Aceti also fervente, as he frequently enters into the most ardent of movements.”* two such suggests that, while rules cannot guide one in distinguishing between trying events, states, you will know the difference when you see it, since, during [...] for you ance disturb ‘you will remain with a tranquil mind, and without any

own will be certain that everything proceeds from divine dispensation for your

s intellectual act, well-being.” Aceti associates discrezione not just with a judiciou

l state. but with a particular physical, psychological, and ultimately spiritua had once All of this is useful when approaching the treatise Lomazzo of both aware was too, thought to call his Libro della discrezione. Lomazzo, description of the senses of discrezione, and of their interrelationship. From his close to Aceti’s: faculty, in fact, Lomazzo’s understanding of it sounds very

were published in the vernacular in 1548, 1556, 1562, and 1569, and in Latin in

reserved, and wise, as are discrezione, he comments, ‘makes one’s acts gentle,

1570 and 1580. What suggests this most strongly is the fact that, had Lomazzo stayed with his original title for the /dea, the central topic of his book would have

book on the bad’? And while there is no real precedent for directing a whole

the good from the those of people who discern the true from the false, and

sounded very much like that handled in a pair of works Aceti had written in the

1530s. In the tradition of Cassian, Aceti’s main subject in the two Trattati was that of measure; as he put it early on in the first book, the use of the ‘eye of the intellect’, which “discerns between the more and the less’, allows testraitied behaviour. The two treatises include chapters on hope and fear, on holding one’s tongue, on the sacraments, and on the temptations of the Devil. At moments,

though, it also becomes apparent not only that Aceti was deeply interested in the more specialized variety of discernment

that older writers like Friemar had

investigated — Aceti himself wrote a small book On the Discernment of Spirits that was published together with the Trattati in all of the editions mentioned above — but also that these topics were closely interconnected. In the first treatise’s chapter ‘On True and False Fervour’, to give one example, Aceti asked how one knows the difference between divine inspiration and its demonic double. What he concludes is that, while ‘it is impossible to know perfectly the difference between

furor and fervour, since they produce the same effects’, one can infer generally that

. "’ See Der Traktat Heinrichs von Friemar über die Unterscheidung der Geister, ed. by Robert G. Warnock and Adolar Zumkeller (Würzburg: Augustinus, 1977). |

?5 See Gabriele Feyles, Serafino da Fermo, Canonico Regolare Lateranense (1496-1540): La vita, le Pere la dottrina spirituale (Turin: Scuola tipografica salesiana, 1942); as well as R. Manselli, ‘Aceti de Porti, Serafino’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 65 vols (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960—

), 1, 138-39; and Giorgio Caravale, L'orazione proibita: Censura ecclesiastica e

letteratura devozionale nella prima eta moderna (Florence: Olschki, 2003), especially pp. 38-40.

che’l feruente, come spesso uiene 26 Aceti, p.207: ‘molte uolte il furioso adopera maggior cose in mouimento ardentissimo.’ os . . ia A a © 27 se tal uirtu possedi in te stesso, prima “’ Aceti, p. 194: ‘Nondimeno a questi segni t accorgerai partito di pigliare la piu espediente nelle cose dubiose presto ti sara fatto conoscer il miglior mente tranquilla, & senza disturbatione, prouisione, poi nelle occorrentie contrarie starai con la 26

.


Bekenntnis, p.438: ‘Ich habe nicht gewust | Das Oecolampad so gar ein boeser armer Logicus odder Dialecticus were | das er auch quod pro qualiter neme und ab accidente ad substantiam syligisirte.’ All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. I discuss Luther's understanding of the Eucharist more fully in The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For the history of Luther's position on the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, see Friedrich Graebke, Die Konstruktion der Abendmahlslebre Luthers in ihrer Entwicklung dargestellt (Leipzig: Deichert, 1908); Ralph W. Quere, Melanchthon’s Christum Cognoscere: Christs Efficacious Presence in the Eucharistic Theology of Melanchthon (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1977), especially Chapter 2. $ For the fullest discussion of the developments

leading up to the Marburg Colloquy,

including the articulation of positions through pamphlets directed at various other formulations

of the Eucharist, see Walther Kéhler’s magnificent Zwingli und Luther: Ihr Streit über das Abendmabl nach seinem politischen und religiisen Beziehungen, 2 vols (Leipzig: Eger & Sievers,

1924).

7 Kohler, Rekonstruktion, p. 37.

Origins of ® Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the European and 1982), Press, University Cambridge (Cambridge: Comparative Ethnology University Yale Haven: (New Romanticism to Renaissance From World: New the Encounters with Press, 1993); and Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

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Eucharist itself” For Zwingli and Oecolampadius, matter had its own agency, which also had all sorts of consequences for ritual, for images, and for the Eucharist.

At Marburg, Luther and Zwingli’s different understandings of matter itself were revealed within the context of the discussion of what it meant for Christ to have a body. We begin with Zwingli’s understanding. As Zwingli said to Luther, according to witnesses who were there: ‘It is wonderfully consoling to me, each time I think of it: Christ had flesh like I do.” For Zwingli and Occolampadius both, ‘my body’ was the body that each and every human being had. Christ’s body was bounded just as our bodies are bounded: finite in space and time. As Oecolampadius said, ‘each body can only be in one place, bounded [umgrenzt].""’ As Zwingli said, ‘Holy Scripture shows us Christ always in a single, specific place, such as in the manger, in the temple, in the desert,

on the Cross, in the grave, at the right [hand] of the Father.”

For Zwingli and Oecolampadius, therefore, ‘is’ had to be read within the knowledge of the boundedness of the body. Christ’s body is, as they said, at the right hand of the Father. It could not, therefore, be physically, corporally, materially present in the bread. And they were among the earliest to discern in Luther's position the theological problem of ubiquity, that Christ’s body could be everywhere at the same time that Communion was being offered. Christ’s presence in the Eucharist could not be his body: it was physically impossible. For them, Christ was ‘sacramentally present’ at the Eucharist, to which we shall return. For Luther, the question of Christ’s body was subsumed under the text, ‘this is my body." The text, according to Luther, precluded exactly that bounded body

? Cf. Theodor Knolle, ‘Luthers Deutsche Messe und die Rechtfertigungslehre’, Luther Jahrbuch, 10 (1928), 170-203. TE : ii re > Kohler, Rekonstruktion, p. 14: ‘Es ist mirΞ wundersam trôstlich, so oft ich’s bedenke: Christus hat Fleisch wie ich — das tréstet wundersam,’ 11 + Kohler, [ΚΕ Kôhler, Orr, als in der Darum meine

s è . Rekonstruktio- n, p. 26: ‘ Jeder Kérper kann nur an einem Orte sein, umgrenzt. ’ i ate tie : À Rekonstruktion, p.30: ‘Die h. Schrift zeiget uns Christum allweg an einem sondern Krippen, im Tempel, in der Wiiste, am Kreuz, im Grab, zur Rechten des Vaters. ich, er müsse allweg an einem sondern Ort sein.’ Kôhler, Rekonstruktion, p.29.

‘For the connections between medieval and Luther’s conceptions of the body of Christ, see Hartmut Hilgenfeld, Mittelalterlich-traditionelle Elemente in Luthers Abendmahlsschriften (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1971).

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Zwingli and Oecolampadius proposed. Whatever sort of body Christ had during his time among humankind had to conform to Luther’s assertions about that text: the ‘this’ must of necessity be everywhere that the Eucharist was being celebrated. Christ’s body, therefore, must be at one and the same time, in heaven and in the Eucharist.’? Or, in the parallels to miracles — not rational, but wondrous examples — Luther drew in his sermon on the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood of 1526: The first is the soul, which is a single creature and nonetheless is throughout the whole

body.|...] The second is the grain in the field: how can the blade grow out of one grain

and carry so many kernels? The third example: I have but two eyes and yet fasten my eyes on all hay [heubte] at once, indeed I can do it as well with one eye as with two. [The fourth example]: my small voice can go into a hundred or a thousand ears, and yet each one grasps the whole or full voice, the voice is in no wise broken up." Luther allowed, Christ’s body could be ‘similar’ to ours in ‘form’, but not in ‘power’. Unlike ours, it was neither bounded in time nor in space — it could not

be, if it were to be corporeally present in the Eucharist. Christ’s body could not be substantially the same as human bodies. The nature, the substance, the materiality of Christ’s body were all governed by that text: it determined the

character of Christ’s materiality. For Luther, Zwingli’s insistence on a constant

materiality from one body to the next, from human bodies to Christ’s body, was

' See, for example, Kohler, Rekonstruktion, p.25; Bekenntnis, passim, and particularly at pp. 376-87.

16 Sermon fon dem Sacrament des Leibes und Bluts Christi wider die Schwarmgesiter, 1536, quoted in Kohler, Zwingli und Luther, p.385: Die erste ist die Seele — “wilchs ein einige creatur ist und ist doch ynn gantzen leib zugleich, auch ynn der kleinisten zehe, das, wenn ich das kleiniste gelid am leibe Imit einer nadel steche, so treffe ich die gantze seele, das der gantze mensch zappelt.

Kan nu eine seele zugleich ynn allen geliederen sein, wilchs ich nicht weis, wie es zugehet, solt denn Christus das nicht vermiigen, das er zugleich an allen orten ym Sacrament were?” Meine Seele kann zugleich denken, reden, héren, fühlen, verdauen; das halt niemand füein Wunder, weil wir es traglich sehen. Das zweite Beispiel ist das Korn auf dem Felde: wie kann aus einem Korn

der Halm emporwachsen und so viele Kôrnlein tragen? Das dritte Beispiel: “ich habe nur zwei

augen und fasse doch alle heubte ynn meine augen aufeinmal,ja, ich kan’s gleich so wol mit einem auge thun als mit beiden.” Die vierte Parallele bietet das Wort und die Stimme: meine kleine

Stimme kann in hundert oder tausend Ohren eingehen, “noch fasset ein iglich or die gantze oder volkomene stim”, nicht etwa wird die Stimme stückweise zerbrochen.’ 17 Kôhler, Rekonstruktion, p.29: ‘Die Stelle kann bestenfalls nur beweisen, daf die Gestalt unseres Leibes den Leib Christi ahnlich sein wird, es folgt aber daraus nicht notwendig, daf wir der Macht nach seinem Leibe ahnlich sein werden, es müfte denn Gott in besonderem Ratschluf so bestimmen wollen,’

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to place God under the rule of ‘mathematics’. No, for Luther, God’s omnipotence was foremost: if Christ said that his body was present in each and every piece of eucharistic bread, then so it was. As Luther said, ‘God can make it, that Christ’s body is not in one place and that he is in one place.’!* For Luther, Christ’s human nature did not determine that Christ had a human body. Quite the contrary, as Luther wrote in the Confession: [W Je mix [mengen] the two different natures in one person, and say, God is man and

man is God.[...] Therefore we hold our Christ for God and man in one person, zon

confundendo naturas nec dividendo personam, neither mixing [mengen] the natures nor dividing the person.”

For Luther, Christ’s body was not simply inseparable from his divine nature, but governed by it. Christ’s body was governed by God and by the text, ‘this is my body.’ For Luther, Christ’s body had to be materially present in the Eucharist, in his words, ‘the body is sheathed in the bread like the sword in the scabbard’ or ‘like the kernel in its shell? That materiality, in other words, was itself governed by sacramental needs and divine will: Christ’s body was not essentially the same as human bodies, its materiality operated differently than the materiality of human bodies. Luther’s reaction to Zwingli and Oecolampadius reveals more of his own thinking about matter. Luther rejected their argument as ‘spiritualist’. In their hermeneutic of the text, ‘this is my body’, Zwingli and Oecolampadius took up the text of John 6. For them, this was the key to unlock the conundrum of a bounded body and Jesus’s words at the Seder. As each would quote to Luther, in

growing frustration, ‘the flesh profits nothing’ (the flesh is of no avail, RSV)! 18

ὡς

è ‘ ea $ . . Kohler, Rekonstruktion, p- 30: ‘Gott kann machen, daf Christi LeibP nicht an einem Ortist, und da er an einem Ort ist.’

15 Bekenntnis, p-393: Sondern wir mengen die zwo unterschiedliche natur | ynn einige person | und sagen | Gott ist mensch | und mensch ist Gott.[...] Denn wo die werck zuteilet und gesondert werden | Denn die person ists | die alles thut und leidet | eins nach dieser natur | das ander nach ihener natur | wie das alles die gelerten wol wissen | Darumb halten wir unsern Herrn Christum also fur Gott und mensch ynn einer person | non confundendo naturas | nec diuidendo personam | das wir die naturn nicht mengen | un die person auch nicht trennen,’ ’° Kohler, Rekonstruktion, pp- 28, 30, respectively: ‘Der Leib ist im Brot, wie das Schwert in der Scheide.’ ‘Es ist wie beim Kern ‘und der Schal.’ On Luther’s formulation of the theological doctrine of real presence, see Albrecht Peters, Realprasenz: Luthers Zeugnis von Christi Gegenwart

im Abendmabl, Arbeiten zur Geschichte und Theologie des Luthertums, 5 (Berlin: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1960).

21 Kohler, Rekonstruktion, Ρ. 20: ‘das Fleisch ist nichts niitze.’

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Even Melanchthon, as Zwingli pointed out in his explication of that same passage,

concluded, ‘in faith in the Word is Christ eaten, not in fleshly eating, not in visible appearance, not in sign.” Christ’s body was given to eat, Zwingli said, ‘not to gnaw or to bite’, but ‘to eat’, to eat spiritually.” It was, in other words, for

Zwingli, possible to eat spiritually. Luther accused Zwingli and Oecolampadius of ‘emptying’ the Eucharist. Luther characterized Zwingli’s notion of sacramental presence in these terms, i.e. spiritualist, because, let me suggest, Luther’s own understanding of materiality made unintelligible Zwingli’s argument in its own categories and relations. For Luther, divinity’s government of materiality meant that materiality was contingent upon divine will. Christ’s body was subsumed under his divinity: it served on the Cross, it had a historic presence in a particular moment in time, but that materiality served the purposes of God, without any constraints of ‘mathematics’ or physics, any internal laws of its own. Zwingli’s argument — that the body had its own integrity which God would not alter, that its very materiality was itself theologically significant — that argument, for Luther, was heretical. It was to divide the two natures, as we have heard. Far more urgently, however, he insisted, to deny Christ’s corporeal presence in the Eucharist was to make that ‘presence’ ‘spiritual’, which, for Luther was therefore, necessarily, not material. Either the

body was there or it was not. If it was there, then it was taken in the teeth, bitten,

chewed. If Christ’s body was not there, then the Eucharist was an empty husk.

For Luther, it was inconceivable for God to have taken on a human body, in

other words, precisely because that body was bounded, materially finite. Equally, Luther asserted, Christ’s body had to be materially present in the Eucharist. Let me pause here and underline, because this, it seems to me, is the first layer of that

mutual incomprehensibility. For Luther, Christ’s body had to be there in the bread for the Eucharist to be materially received. And that body could not be governed by what Luther called ‘mathematics’, what we might today call physics. Christ’s body was not the same as the human body. God took on a body which

looked like a human body, but was different, materially different. Physics might apply to human bodies, but not to Christ’s.

22 Kohler, Rekonstruktion, p. 20: ‘Melanchthon sagt in seiner Auslegung des Johannesevangeliums,

im Glauben an das Wort wird Christus gegessen, nicht in fleischlichen Essen, nicht in sichtbarer Erscheinung, nicht im Zeichen,’

#Kôhler, Rekonstruktion, p. 20: ‘Zu essen, nicht zu zerkauen oder zerbeifen, go di D dienet ganz zur geistlichen NieBung.’

à

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Zwingli and Oecolampadius brought forward Augustine and ‘the Church Fathers’ both in support of Christ’s human body and to counter Luther’s argument for ubiquity: Augustine, too, had found definitive that Christ’s person was to be found in a specific time and place.”* They found Luther’s conceptualization of Christ’s body both troubling, precisely because it denied Christ’s body those attributes that made it human and physical by any known standard or experience, and puzzling, because it separated the very word body from its physical referent, the human person. For Zwingli, moreover, it was fundamental to his theology and his anthropology that Christ took on a human body. As we have seen, that bounded physicality was important to Zwingli, ‘a wondrous consolation’, the bridge between the experience of being a human being and God. The humanity of Christ’s body formed a central connection for Zwingli between Christ and each human being, a means of identification through the very experience of the human body. Or, to put it differently, it was precisely the boundedness of Christ’s physicality — that like every human being, he was in one place at one time — that offered human beings access to Christ’s person, allowing them to see his divinity. The absence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist, moreover, did not mean that

the Eucharist was without somatic dimension for Zwingli. As Zwingli said to Luther, ‘we speak also of a “sacramental” presence [Gegenwart] of Christ’s body, and mean with it, that the body of Christ is “representative” in the Supper.” Luther responded to this statement, ‘You would like thus to speak of an enduring presence [Anwesenheit] of the body of Christ, but you take the substance of the body from the bread and leave us only a husk and an empty chaff, where Christ's

words run quite otherwise: “This is my body.” Zwingli used the term Gegenwart to speak of sacramental presence: a word that carries a connotation of immediacy, physicality, a thereness — even as he denied that Christ’s own body could be in the bread, could be anywhere other than at the right hand of the Father. In direct response to Zwingli, Luther took up the term Anwesenheit, which has

2:

a

:

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very different connotations for presence: it speaks to a philosophical, almost metaphysical sense of being. Perhaps the greatest distortion Luther’s polemic perpetrated was to Zwingli’s understanding of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Zwingli could not find the words to make his understanding intelligible to Luther and, for his part, found

Luther’s formulation viscerally horrifying — the discussions at Marburg resonate very much like the ‘encounters’ between Bartolomeo Diaz and Mochtezuma. For Zwingli, Christ could indeed be present at the Eucharist, without his body being present. To understand what Zwingli meant, it is necessary to bring together a number of threads of his thought. Zwingli’s understanding of presence was grounded in his training as a humanist, his feel for language and the ways in which words and experience interact, the ways in which the human mind is connected to the physical world. Zwingli’s ‘mathematics’, as Luther called it, his physics, was neither the Aristotelian physics of the scholastics, nor Luther’s mystical physics, but a physics grounded in a fundamentally different arrangement of the relationships among

matter, human

cognition, and divine agency. Calvin would

take up a

number of these relationships, perhaps foremost Zwingli’s concerns about the interplay of matter and the human mind. For Zwingli, Christ's ‘representative’ presence in the Eucharist was visceral — even as it was not that body Luther held necessary. Beneath the division at Marburg over ‘is’ were deep differences in how Zwingli and Luther each viewed the relationship between mind and matter. Zwingli’s discussion of Christ’s body reveals much of what Zwingli understood it to mean for ahuman being to have a body. Coupled with that sense of the human body was a conceptualization of what we might call human psychology and what Zwingli called human nature. At core for Zwingli, in each human being was combined, usually uncomfortably, spirit and matter. These two were, as Zwingli said to Luther at Marburg, ‘opposites’, ‘Gegensatze’.”” Unlike Luther, who saw Christians as ‘simultaneously sinner and justified’ (simul peccator et iustus), and who conceived of human sinfulness as willful resistance against God,”* Zwingli held the physicality of

A

* Kôhler, Rekonstruktion, passim.

25

τε

i a “ Kôhler, Rekonstruktion, p. 30:‘WirA reden auch von einer “sacramentalen » Gegenwart des Leibes Christi, und bedeuten damit, daR der Leib Christi “repraesentativ” im Nachtmahl sei.’

26 Kohler, Rekonstruktion, p. 30: ‘Ihr méchtet von einer dauernden Anwesenheit des Leibes Christi so reden, da Ihr die Substanz des Leibes dem Brote nehmt und nur die Schalen und leere

Spreu uns lasset, wo doch Christi Worte ganz anders lauten: “Das ist mein Leib.””

’7 Kohler, Rekonstruktion, p. 14: ‘Fleisch und Geist sind Gegensatze.’ 28 On Luther’s anthropology, I follow Heiko Oberman,

Devil, trans. by Eileen Walliser-Schwartzbart (New especially p. 184.

Luther: Man Between God and the

Haven: Yale University Press, 1989),

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human beings as constituent of their nature. As he wrote in his Answer to Valentin Compar of 1525: [F ]or man, by his nature, falls on the thing that is placed before his senses. Otherwise, why should it be so important whether a man has a representation in which he has honoured [God]? Thus for us the images and visible things increase more and more, becoming ever greater and greater, until at last man holds them to be themselves holy and begins to seek from them what should be sought from God alone. For this reason has he forbidden the images of God.”

For Zwingli, human beings are, by their ‘nature’, drawn to what they can see, hear, smell, touch, taste. By their zature, they are drawn, in other words, to matter. The reason, as he suggests here, is not some simple Manichaeism, again a caricature

that seems to have stuck, but a sense of the material world’s accessibility. The material world is accessible through the body, and, as Zwingli suggests, therefore, readily, easily accessible. But there is more to Zwingli’s position here. That accessibility is the beginning of a process in which ‘images and visible things’ acquire greater cognitive value, greater meaning, such that ‘man holds them to be themselves holy’, and ultimately, comes to ‘seek from them what should be sought from God alone’. Zwingli does not argue that images either are understood to replace or are mistaken for God. As he describes here, their materiality draws human attention, then devotion, then ‘what should be sought from God alone’: holiness, divine power. The ease of access of matter is only the first step, in which the mind then moves to accord attributes to matter that rightfully belong to God. While it is their very materiality that captures human attention, not all things engender the same response from the human viewer. Again, from the Answer to Valentin Compar: Thus God forbids the source of it all. Whoever honours the idols, before and after holds them in his heart as god, thatis, as father or helper. For this reason they are idols. For who

honours the stone ape in the fish market or the golden hen on the small tower? Who

? Ein Antwurt Huldrychen Zwinglis Valentino Compar alten Landt/schrybern zuo Ure ggeben, reprinted as ‘Eine Antwort Valentin Compar gegeben’, in Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke (hereafter cited as Z), IV, ed. by Emil Egli, Georg Finsler, Walther Kôhler, and Oskar Farner,

Corpus Reformatorum, 91 (Leipzig: Nachfolger, 1927), p.92: ‘dann der mensch vallt von natur an die ding, die imm in die empfindnussen gestellt werdend. Sust was solt daran gelegen sin, ob man glych ein bildnuss gehebt, darinn man inn vereret hette? So aber die bilder und sichtbaren ding by uns für und für zuonemend und ye grôsser und grôsser werdend, biss dass man zuoletst

sy fiir heilig hatt und by inen anhebt suochen, das man allein by dem waren gott suochen sol, so hatt er die bildnussen gottes verbotten.’

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burns candles before them? No one. For what reason? For the reason that man perceives divine help in no ape or hen.”

It is not their materiality per se that makes of images idols. Indeed, Zwingli argues that there can be images — of creatures human beings do not value, for instance — whose content does not lend itselfto honour. In the end, human beings make an image into an idol. The source of idolatry is not matter itself, but human evaluation, human psychology: Understand, though, dear Valentin, what we call idols: an image [bildnus] ofa helper or consolation [trosthuffens], or that to which honour is done; we call images [bilder], however, likenesses of anything which is visible, but which is not made into any misleading hope or honoured.!

There was for Zwingli, a complex interplay between matter and mind. It was not matter itself that was idolized, but specific representations, likenesses, of specific persons or things. Nor does Zwingli cast the relationship in terms of seduction. Human beings are not seduced by matter — matter itself does not do the misleading — but drawn to it by its perceptibility, its accessibility to the senses. Human beings — Zwingli’s word here is ‘make’ — attribute values to the image or likeness that do not inhere in the image or likeness itself. The transformation of an image into an idol operates not at the perceptual or rational level, but at the psychological and emotional. As Zwingli wrote in Article 20 of the Sixty-Seven Theses, published in 1523, human beings ‘put their trust in images’, that is, ‘that

they entrust something to the images’.”” If we pause for a moment and take up that interplay in reference to the Eucharist, we can glimpse perhaps a little more clearly how Zwingli understood 30 “Fine Antwort Valentin Compar gegeben’, p. 106: ‘Also verüt gott durch das nachvolgend

das ursprünglich darumb, das gewiiss ist, das welche den gôtzen eer antuond, vor und ee die imm

hertzen für gott, das ist: vatter oder helffer, habind, dero die gétzen sind. Denn wer eeret den steininen affen uffden Fischmerckt oder den guldinen hanen uff den kleinen türnlin? Werbrennt vorinen kertzen? Nieman. Uss was ursach? Darumb, das man sich zuo gheinem affen oder hanen hilff als zuo eim gott vesicht.’ 31 «Pine Antwort Valentin Compar gegeben’, p.96: ‘Verstand aber eigenlich, lieber Valentin, das wir einen gétzen heissen: ein bildnus eines helffers oder trosthuffens, oder dero eer wirt

angethon; bilder nennend wir aber glychnussen eines yeden dings, das da sichtbar ist, aber zuo

gheiner abfuertigen hoffnung nit gemacht, ouch nit vereret wirt.’

°? Huldrych Zwingli Schriften, ed. by Thomas Brunnschweiler and Samuel Lutz, 4 vols

(Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1995), 11, 255-56 (hereafter cited as HZS):‘Nein, denn es ist und

bleibt Abgôtterei, wenn sie ihr Vertrauen in sie setzen. Daf sie überhaupt sagen “Das ist ein gnadenreiches Bild’, zeigt, daf sie den Bildern etwas zutrauen.

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Christ’s ‘representative’ presence. While only the bread was substantially present

— no corporeal presence of Christ — that bread, nonetheless, was both itself

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they name

God

according to life, the power, the wisdom, the help, and the

perfection, then they will teach, that he is alone God, who gives all life, makes all possible,

visible and tangible, accessible to the human body, and also, through the operation

knows all, alleviates all want, who is a perfect treasure house of all good and who can

following Zwingli’s sense of human psychology, be connected in the mind to the

Zwingli did not cast idolatry in terms of an opposition between God and Mammon, spirit and matter. For Zwingli, human beings are neither fully one nor

of human

nature, something that could be accorded value or trust. It could,

body of Christ, and that connection was not simply ‘spiritual’ or even, in the modern language, psychological, but visceral. Zwingli did not argue that it is human nature to put trust in matter — there was nothing necessary about this move. It was easy; human beings had a propensity,

because matter was sensible. But the relationship between matter and cognition

was not determined, neither by matter nor by some specific characteristic of the human mind.

The images that human beings made into idols were not all the same. Idolatry, for Zwingli, was personal and individual. Human beings put trust in representations of what each person him- or herself valued, held as ‘good’. Again, from Article 20: Finally, we should learn here, that everything in which man places his trust is for him God, to which he brings trust and honour. For the designation ‘God’ means that good, that is the most reliable refuge and help and the source of good.{...] Therefore did Paul call greed an idolatry [Col. 3.5], because the greedy set their trust in money. That means, then: whatever a person sets his trust on, that is his god.”

restore all that is missing. Therefore should only he, the one God, be called.”

the other. Idolatry was, for Zwingli, a question of orientation: Instead we should put our confidence in God alone, that is, pray only to God alone. Praying, namely, means fundamentally, to turn one’s confidence and trust towards 35 someone [entgegenzubringen]

Idolatry was to accord to matter attributes that belonged solely to God. That attribution was caused

neither by matter nor by God,

but arose within

each

human being.

For these reasons Zwingli attended very closely to matter." In Zürich, when

Zwingli and the other evangelicals instituted the Supper, they quite literally reformed the liturgy.*’ In all the churches in Zürich, the walls were white-washed, the ancient murals obliterated in white, the medieval stone altars were smashed

up, the carved and painted images were all destroyed — those of stone smashed into cobblestones, those of wood given to the poor as fuel.” The interiors of the spaces of worship were ‘cleansed’ of representations that had been the focus of

The placement of value in this or that image or likeness, in this or that form of matter, resided in the human being. The value did not exist independently in the thing itself: where one put one’s trust, there was one’s own understanding of what is good. Matter, for Zwingli, was accessible to human beings, attracted them for that reason, but it did not itself have value. The bread, to return to our example,

wooden table, on which rested a simple cup and bread. No other representations

as Luther said; but for those who saw through it to God, the bread was more than mere matter. It was a site, a material site, of connection to Christ’s body, through a complex cognitive process. Absolute and objective good, as distinct from subjective good, Zwingli located quite specifically, in the same passage, solely in God:

4 HZS, i, 257: ‘Wenn sie jedoch Gott nach dem Leben, der Kraft, der Weisheit, der Hilfe und Vollkommenheit benennen, wollen sie lehren, da der allein Gott ist, der allem das Leben gibt, alles vermag, alles weif, alle Mangel behebt, der ein vollkommener Schatz alles Guten ist und alles, was fehlt, ersetzen kann. Darum soll auch nur er, der einzige Gott, angerufen werden.’

devotion, of prayer, of those hopes and honour. In their place was a simple were to be found within that space: no banners, no stained-glass windows,

as matter would be in the eyes of those who saw it simply as matter, mere bread,

35 HZS, 11,259: ‘Stets sollen wir unsere Zuversicht allein auf Gott setzen, d.h. nur Gottallein anbeten.

Anbeten

entgegenzubringen.’ 36 : On

33 HZS,u, 256: ‘Als letztes sollen wir hier lernen, da& alles, dem man vertraut, ein Gott ist für den, der ihm Vertrauen und Verehrung entgegenbringt. Denn die Bezeichnung ‘Gott’ bedeutet das Gut, das die verlalichste Zuflucht und Hilfe und die Quelle des Guten ist. Darum nennt

Paulus die Habsucht eine Abgôtterei [vgl. Kol. 3:5], weil die Habgierigen ihr Vertrauen auf das Geld gesetzt haben. Das heift also: Auf was der Mensch sein Vertrauen setzt, das ist sein Gott.’

bedeutet

nämlich

hauptsächlich,

a

jemandem

this, there are close parallels between Zwingli and John

Zuversicht

und

Vertrauen

ae

Calvin.

* On the Zwinglian liturgy, see my ‘Envisioning God: Image and Liturgy in Reformation

Zürich”, SCJ, 24 (1993), 21-40, and Gottfried Locher, Die Zwinglische Reformation in Rahmen

der europäischen Geschichte (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979). 38 See my Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Ziirich, Strasbourg, and Basel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Chapter 1.

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nothing. There would be no images or objects that might themselves be falsely honoured. The space offered the eyes only such matter, table and simple vessel, that was explicitly and expressly linked to the act of worship Christ himself had instituted. Along with the painted and carved images, the people of Ziirich also got rid of priests’ vestments. No longer would the celebrant of communion himself signal sacred rank. The pastors in Zürich administered the Eucharist in their black doctoral robes, signalling their intimate knowledge of Scripture and the particular status that knowledge held within evangelical communities. These men did not seek in their dress to invoke Christ’s priestly role, nor to link themselves to Christ’s person through vows of celibacy or poverty. The ritual they enacted would not have visual or gestural associations of clerical caste, or divisions within the body of faithful. Perhaps most important, the reformed liturgy in Ziirich eliminated the gestures that the priest had performed in the medieval Mass.” Gone was the particular drama of the medieval Mass. Gone was the enactment of sacrifice, specifically the elevation of the Host. Gone was the highly developed and formalized, ritualized movements of the member of a distinct and sacred caste. There would be no visual associations of sacrifice, human agency in that act of worship, no ‘images’ to invoke older connotations. In the place of those formalized and ritualized movements was a ‘simple’ ‘Supper’. The pastors of Ziirich offered the Supper from a plain wooden table. They stood at it — they did not sit as Jesus had done — but they blessed the bread, broke it, and offered it, as Jesus had done, gave thanks for the wine and offered it, as Jesus had done. They enacted the ‘do this’ as closely to the biblical text as they could. So, too, the people of Ziirich received the ‘this’ — the bread and the wine — in forms closely adhering to the biblical description: simple bread, simple wine in simple cups. In Zürich, Zwingli and the other evangelical pastors sought to perform as closely to the historic Supper as their contemporary setting and their flawed knowledge of Jewish practice allowed them. They sought, in other words, to

invoke in object — table, cup, bread — and through the narrative of the biblical text a specific time, in which Jesus was indeed present. Jesus was no longer present in body. But the ways in which human minds were attentive to matter just might

THE BODY OF CHRIST

209

be brought to serve: to link through hearing, seeing ‘likenesses’ of that original bread, of that original cup, of that original table, and through touch. Zwingli’s particular understanding of human psychology posed the possibility that from the material that was there, the faithful might indeed ‘remember me’, Christ, not

simply in spirit, but through their own bodies. The connection was material and visceral, and Christ’s body was the link, though it did not need to be corporeally present in the bread to be viscerally present for the congregation.

In contrast, Luther found all matter unimportant. As he wrote at the end of the Confession: ‘Images, bells, liturgical vestments, church decorations, ancient lights and the like — all this I hold free. Whoever wishes may leave it.” For him, images were things unimportant. For Luther, images, objects, the material world in general did not operate, was not connected to human nature, not in the ways in which Zwingli understood them to be connected, not at all. Matter had none of the cognitive force for Luther that it had for Zwingli, and none of the theological significance. He opposed the iconoclasts in Wittenberg, their violence and their civil disobedience, because, for him, images posed no danger, no potentiality whatsoever to affect faith. Quite the contrary, faith and faith alone operated to link Christians to their God.*' For Luther, man and God were not linked through the same sort of body. There was no physical link between the body God took on and Luther’s own body. Indeed, the ubiquity of Christ’s body in the Eucharist for Luther provided

a model for thinking about how the soul can be found throughout the human body: [The soul], which is a single creature and is nonetheless in the whole body at the same time, even in the smallest toe, so that, when I stick the smallest member of the body with aneedle, I meet the entire soul, so that the entire human being is hooked [zappelt]. Ifone

so be able soul can be in all members, and I do not know, how it works, should not Christ to be in all places where the Sacrament is?”

allter liecht und ‘° Bekenntnis, p. 514: ‘Bilder | glocken | Messegewand | kirchenschmueck |

der schrifft und von der gleichen | halt ich frey | Wer da wil | der mags lassen | Wie wol bilder aus ichs mit den Denn | guten Historien ich fast nuetzlich | doch frey und wilkoerig halte bildestuermen nicht halte.” 41 C£ Knolle.

Zwingli set out his liturgy most fully in Action oder Bruch des Nachtmals, published by Christoph Froschauer in Zürich, April 1525, and reproduced as ‘Aktion oder Brauch des

Nachtmahls’, in Z, Iv, 1-24; see also, ‘Ordnung der christlichen Kirche zu Zürich’, in ibid., p.692.

1536, #2 Sermon fon dem Sacrament des Leibes und Bluts Christi wider die Schwarmgesiter, ist und ist creatur einige ein quoted in Kohler, Zwingli und Luther, p. 385: ‘(Die Seele] wilchs gelid am doch ynn gantzen leib zugleich, auch ynn der kleinisten zehe, das, wenn ich das kleiniste

mensch zappelt. Kan nu leibe Imit einer nadel steche, so treffe ich die gantze seele, das der gantze

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Lee Palmer Wandel

The Lutheran Eucharist reflected that sense of matter. Luther left it to individual churches whether they would preserve the medieval images and altars.* Indeed,

as he wrote in the Deutsche Messe, congregations could leave all the liturgical

vestments and vessels.** Many churches did remove images, but others did not. There was not a consistent policy with regard to images or more generally to the material context of the liturgy. In Nuremberg,

for instance, where

Andreas

Osiander saw through the institution of a Lutheran liturgy, many images remain

in

the

churches

to

this

day.

Even

though

Luther

rejected

the

medieval

understanding of the Mass as a sacrifice, so little did the material culture signify for him, that the very materializations of that meaning — the sepulchral altars, the bleeding crucifixes — were allowed to remain intact in churches that ‘went over’ to the Lutheran liturgy. So, too, Luther found indifferent altarcloths, themselves

designed to honour that sepulchral altar, as well as banners and stained glass. No object or colour or texture held for Luther the potential to touch the soul.

As he would write in the German Mass and in the Large Catechism of 1529, and

as he word wine, is his

preached in so many different contexts: the Word, — in some ways itself without materiality — made the body and blood of Christ.* ‘As soon as Christ body there through the Word and the power of the

Word is not there, then it is mere [schlecht] bread.”

the spoken and written of the plain bread and says, this is my body, so Holy Spirit. When the

In its performance, in its objects, even in its cadences, the Lutheran liturgy left in place much of the medieval Mass. Like the evangelicals in Zürich, the Lutheran eine seele zugleich ynn allen geliederen sein, wilchs ich nicht weis, wie es zugehet, solt denn Christus das nicht vermiigen, das er zugleich an allen orten ym Sacrament were?’ 3

.

è Fr e » * On the medieval continuities in the Lutheran liturgy, see Hans Bernhard Meyer, Luther und die Messe. Eine liturgiewissenschafiliche Untersuchung über das Verhältnis Luthers zum

Mefwesen des späten Mittelalters (Paderborn: Bonifacius-Druckerei, 1965)

** Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdiensts’, in Martin Luther, Liturigische Schriften (Munich: Raiser, 1950), p.35: Da lassen wir die MeRgewänder, Altar, Lichter noch bleiben, bis sie alle werden oder uns gefallt zu ändern. Wer aber hie anders verfahren will, lassen wir

} 211

THE BODY OF CHRIST

pastors wore the black robes of biblical scholars to administer the Eucharist: they, too, rejected the particular status of the priesthood. Unlike Zürich, they did not seek to re-enact the original supper, either in gesture or in matter. Lutheran liturgies turned the minister(s) to face the congregation, and not the altar, but

altered little else of the medieval performance of the Mass, preserving, surprisingly, medieval practices such as the elevation of the Host.” The matter of the human bodies of the pastors, of the vessels, of the altar did not, in Luther’s thinking or in Lutheran Church Ordinances, link the Eucharist to Christ or that first Supper. Indeed, Luther preserved much in the medieval liturgy that Zwingli and then Calvin argued explicitly separated it from the original supper: the chant, the sepulchral altar, the elevation. Perhaps most striking, he designated as ‘things indifferent’ so much that had contributed to the meaning of the medieval Mass and had so provoked evangelicals both clerical and lay throughout the sixteenth century: images, stained-glass windows, liturgical vessels. These things, and gestures, did not participate in the meaning of Communion for Luther. They could not serve to link individual Christians to Christ. As Luther stated emphatically at Marburg, Christ’s body was there in the bread, to be taken into the mouth. ‘Communion’, for Luther, might best be understood to exist in that moment: when each individual Christian took the bread into his or her mouth.** For the faithful, as Luther said, would know themselves to be taking Christ’s body into their mouths, precisely because of that faith. For those who lacked faith, the Eucharist would be empty. For Zwingli, Christ’s presence was utterly different. He never agreed with Luther’s characterization that Christ was absent from the liturgy in Zürich, but he could never explain to Luther in a way that bridged the gap just how Christ was present. That presence was also known somatically, in the ways I have tried to suggest, and in one way with which I would like to close.

è

Throughout his brief career in Zürich, Zwingli returned again and again to Paul’s words, where God is, there is love; where love is, there we may not fail. Christ’s body was not in the bread. But in the conduct of his life, Christ had

provided all faithful with a model, a visceral and somatic model, not of asceticism,

geschehen. Aber in der rechten Messe unter eitel Christen müfte der Altar nicht so bleiben und

der Priester sich immer zum Volk kehren, wie ohn Zweifel Christus im Abendmahl getan hat. Nun das erharre seiner Zeit.’ 45

«

è ù Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdiensts’, p. 47:

Luthers Werke, especially pp. 89-99.

”

à

>

e

‘Das grosse Katechismus’, in

# Quoted in Kohler, Zwingl und Luther, i p.388: ‘Sobald Christus spricht: das ist mein Leib, so ist sein Leib da durchs Wort und Kraft des heiligen Geists. Wenn das Wort nicht da ist, so ist es schlecht Brot.’

‘7 Deutsche Messe und O rdnung des Gottesdiensts’, p.47. See Hans Bernhard Meyer, ‘Die für Kirchengeschicte und Theologie, Elevation im deutschen Mittelalter und bei Luther’, Zeitschrift 85 (1963),

162-217.

% Luther, however, opposed private communion: communion was acom munal ritual, even as it was experienced intimately. See Knolle in particular, and also, Ortfried Jordhahn, Marcin

Luthers Kritik an der Messliturgie seiner Zeit’, Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft, 26 (1984), 1-17.

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Lee Palmer Wandel

not of celibacy, but of love, the outward expression, the literal manifestation, of putting one’s trust in God: Briefly: where Christian hearts and the fear of God are, there one will take on all things honourably, piously, and correctly; for love can do all things and fails no one; for God is love. Where love is, there is God. Where God is, there one may not fail. What is begun with God, no one may break.”

The movement of the pastor, the physicality of the vessels, the texture of the bread — all these brought the Supper to the human body, precisely because they were sensory. The eyes linked the pastor, the vessels, the elements to the individual Christians. The bounded body linked pastor, congregant, and Christ, such that when the bread was taken into the mouth, it was received not only by the body, but in the complexity of the human being, spirit and matter, soul and body. And it was received within the knowledge of the historic supper, that knowledge providing the cognitive context for the bread. Unlike the StraRburger, Zwingli never explicitly linked idolatry to the Mass. Indeed, his understanding of idolatry would not lead him to that judgement. Nor was there any danger of idolatry in the Eucharist, because, for the faithful, putting their trust in the matter of the Eucharist was to orient themselves toward precisely that place and time when God had a body and offered it for all humankind. At Marburg, the evangelicals divided.” They divided over the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. They divided viscerally over what it meant to have a body — both what it meant for Christ to have a body and what it meant for each faithful Christian to have a body. They divided over the nature of ritual. At Marburg two different conceptualizations of matter and its relationship to divinity were disclosed. For Luther, materiality of all kinds — images, the human body, ritual — was subordinate to God’s will. Faith alone, that spiritual gift from

God, made possible the experience of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist: through faith and the Word was Christ’s body present, materially present. For Luther, the human body was merely a vessel, an empty husk to be filled. For Zwingli, the ‘spiritualist’, the human body was theologically important. It was an instrument

# “Welche Ursach gebind ze ufruren’, originally published by Christoph Froschauer in Zürich, 1524, reprinted under the title ‘Wer Ursach gebe zu Aufruhr usw.’, in Z, 111 (CR 92), ed. by Egli and others (1914), 458: ‘Kurtz: Wo christenliche hertzen und gotzforcht sind, da wirt

man alle ding erberrlich, frommkilch unnd formklich ansehen; dann die liebe kan’s alles und valet nienen; denn gottist die liebe. Wo die liebe ist, da ist gott. Wo gott ist, da mag man nit välen. Was

mit gott wirt angehebt, wirt nienman môgen brechen.’ 50 Kohler, Rekonstruktion, p.37.

THE BODY OF CHRIST

213

for divine love, the means by which that love was manifested in the world, whether through the person of Christ or in the conduct of the humblest Christian towards his neighbour. For Zwingli, that bounded body was also a divine creation, and it was integral to Christ’s presence in the world. At Marburg, Christ’s body divided: for some, it was knowable only through faith; for some, it materially linked God and humanity; for some, that body marked the limits of human cognition; for some, that body altered for all time the relationship between the material world and God, in its very materiality linking the world of humanity to the love of God.

TAVERNS AND THE SELF AT THE DAWN

OF THE REFORMATION

Christopher Ocker

here once was an Observant Franciscan named Heinrich von Kettenbach who lived in the imperial free city of Ulm. Like many of the preachers who introduced evangelical doctrine to German towns, he belonged to a religious order, and sometime about or after Luther’s condemnation by pope and emperor in 1520/1, he became both convinced of the new doctrine and began to teach it.’ One day in 1523, in a sermon that he published, he said the word of God can be heard anywhere (many examples from the Bible and the lives of saints followed). In Ulm, he noted, the sermons are better in taverns and burgher houses than in churches. What they teach from the pulpits is heresy, anyway, and he

offered forty-eight articles with brief expositions of the errors of the papal church, a slightly redundant summary of his criticisms improbably dressed as the case against a pontifical plaintiff’ Taverns and burgher houses: both were supporting 1 Heinrich von Kettenbach, ‘Ein Sermon

zu der lôblichen Stadt Ulm

zu einem Valete’

Clemen, 4 vols (1523), in Flugschriften aus den ersten Jahren der Reformation, ed. by Otto

Reformation, see (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1967), 11, 107. For the role of preachers in the early und Adel in der ertum Stadtbiirg in , Robert W. Scribner, ‘The Reformation as a Social Movement nd, ed. by Deutschla und England in on Reformati der Reformation. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte

and Karl Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), pp. 49-79; Bernd Moeller und eck Vandenho n: (Géttinge on Reformati der Frühzeit der in Predigt Stackmann, Stadtische of Emergence the and Culture, Political Religion, Schilling, Heinz 206-08; Ruprecht, 1996), pp. (Leiden: Burnett Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History, trans. by Stephen Brill, 1992), pp. 135-201. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise.

mphlets: the Mass, prayer before - Topics follow a standard repertoire of evangelical sermon-pa

church/human tradition, (allegedly to) images, veneration ofsaints, aural confession, monasticism, n, pp. 311-15. Stackman and Moeller benefices. and priests, the papacy, bishops, parish

216

Christopher Ocker

tropes in the figural arsenal he used to publish the anticlerical image of the true Christian layman. They were places of greater truth telling than churches. Kettenbach must have had heresy trials on his mind. It seems he wrote the sermon from hiding, after he was barred from the Franciscan pulpit. He smuggled the text into the city by a student, who then saw it to press.’ The path to exile had been paved ahead of him by Johann Eberlin von Giinzburg, who was thrown out of the same cloister and city two years before (July 1521). Eberlin made Wittenberg his refuge, and from there sent salvo after pamphlet-salvo against the mendicant orders and other traditional clergy of Ulm.’ Soon Martin Idelhauser, the preacher of the imperial free city’s minster began to teach the new doctrine. Idelhauser was the city preacher (the town council named candidates to that office), Ulm’s most prominent clergyman. The Dominicans accused him of heresy. And Idelhauser, far from following Eberlin to a Saxon refuge, offered a public recantation on 2 July 1522. When Kettenbach began to preach the new doctrine, the evangelical movement was hardly a movement at all, neither in Ulm nor elsewhere. It was more like a commotion occurring around pulpits, although it was happening in cities throughout Germany. Idelhauser recanted, and Kettenbach, by the end of 1523, disappeared from the historical record, as suddenly as he had entered it. It took three more years before Ulm’s city council introduced the first reform decrees, but this was still not an evangelical triumph. The council established a German baptismal liturgy, limited the number of cloister occupants, prohibited begging by friars and the reception of new recruits, and appointed a city custodian of cloisters.f The prohibition of the mass and complete exclusion of Catholic clergy from town did not follow until after formation of the League of Schmalkalden in 1531. Then, Ulm closed the city’s cloisters altogether after an iconoclastic riot, and the council adapted church orders written by the Basel and Strasbourg reformers, Johannes Oecolampadius and Martin Bucer. These deeds rendered Ulm one of the most evangelically uniform cities of the empire.

TAVERNS AND THE SELF

217

Kettenbach, who vanished, gave nothing more than an early shove to the wagon of evangelical sentiment. He did not become a great preacher or pamphleteer, a longdistance runner like Eberlin or Sachs or Luther, and as was typical of many in the first wave of evangelical preachers in most places, he lacked a reliable base of support in government. The threat of isolation, always potential when not real, required the new preachers to aim all the more at a broader public, and that had to encourage many before the Peasants’ Revolt to refigure profane places as theatres of religious interaction. Kettenbach was a pamphleteer who used Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to argue that, when the clergy fail, everyone equally is obliged to set religious affairs aright.’ The tavern was a place of religious exchange, a theatre of conversion. Taverns and inns were the principal venues of commercial hospitality, and having proliferated throughtout Germany since the eleventh century, nearly every village could claim at least one by the end of the Middle Ages They were protected shelters for foreign guests and travellers and public venues for business and merrymaking, gathering places, and occassionally the point of departure for

urban revolts, in the Reformation as well as before it.’ Pamphilus Gengenbach, the

Basel printer and author of The Devourers of the Dead (Die Totenfresser), a

withering attack on church profiteering from the dead and bereaved, was imprisoned in 1522 for ridiculing the emperor, the pope, and the king of France one evening at the pub in the furrier’s guild house.'° The southwest city of Esslingen tried, in 1524, to control the controversy that followed evangelical preachers by prohibiting debate in taverns and fields." At the high point of popular controversy over the new teaching near Germany’s northern extreme, in

7 Ninna Jorgensen, Bauer, Narr und Pfaffe. Prototypische Figuren und ihre Funktion in der

Reformationsliterature (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. 135-50.

® Hans Conrad Peyer, Gastfreundschaft und kommerzielle Gastlichkeit im Mittelalter (Munich: Stiftung Historisches Kolleg, 1983), pp. 7-8, 18-19. From the fourteenth century, taverns were

increasingly distinct from inns (ibid., p. 23). 3 Flugschriften, τι, 107. * Moeller and Stackmann, p.61.

° Geoffrey Dipple, Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Giinzburand g the Campaign against the Friars (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996) includes a comparison of Eberlin’s and Kettenbach’s pamphlets, pp. 163-82. 6 Ehmer Brecht, δ Sidwestdeutsche Reformationsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1984), pp. 168-70.

° Hans Conrad Peyer, Von der Gastfreundschaft zum Gasthaus. Studien zur Gastlichkeit im Mittelalter (Hannover: Han, 1987), pp. 220-64. 1 Pamphilius Gengenbach, Die Totenfresser, in Das Drama der Reformationszeit, ed. by Richard Froning (Stuttgart, 1894; repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche,

1964), pp. xvii, 1-10.

!! Esslingen 1524 tried to control the new incendiary teachings by prohibiting meetings in taverns and fields. Brecht, pp. 73-75. Was control of controversy behind the W ittenberg council’s inclusion of taverns with brothels in the articles of December 1521? See Hermann Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, 2 vols (Leipzig: Brandstetter, 1905), 1, 352.

218

Christopher Ocker

Hamburg in 1525, we learn of tavern debates.'* The tavern was both a place of sanctuary and a source of instability, but ideally a safe zone free of hostility and violence for honourable people.” It has been recently noted, on the example of Augsburg, that although tavern brawls were common, they had rules and social purposes. Brawls had to do with more than distemper. They answered transgressions of honour, followed conventions, and helped adjudicate disturbances of equilibrium between and among social ranks. Taverns were theatres of ordered public interaction, not anarchy zones."* Taverns and inns may also have benefited from traditional religious assumptions about hospitality and its environments (Conrad Peyer grouped these assumptions under the archaic forms of European hospitality, with their personal guarantees of safety), a transference to places of commercial hospitality of the religious feelings associated with the care of pilgrims in hostels and monasteries or associated with the sanctuary offered by religious buildings — a sanctified place. Dialogue pamphlets of the early Reformation sometimes give us what must have been read as highly plausible scripts for religious conversations in public houses. They are represented as places of free exchange, soul searching, and conversion. A negative tavern-trope could easily have been constructed: as the meeting place of drunk priests or whoring monks, such as appear in other contexts. But taverns were represented neither as a clerical domain nor necessarily as a morally questionable one. They need not be juxtaposed with the disciplines of court culture or later internalized regimes of impulse control.'> Allusions to

12 Rainer Postel, Die Reformation in Hamburg, 1517-1528 (Giitersloh: Mohn, 1986), p.217. 13 In addition to Peyer, Von der Gastfreundschaft, pp. 7-8, 236-46, Eberhard Isenmann, Die deutsche Stadt im Spatmittelalter, 1250-1500 (Stuttgart: Ulmer, 1988), pp. 101-02. For the

tavern’s social roles consider also Knut Schulz, ‘Gesellentrinkstuben und Gesellenherbergen im

14./15. und 16. Jahrhundert’, in Gastfreudnschaft, Taverne und Gasthaus im Mittelalter, ed. by

Hans Conrad Peyer (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983), pp. 221-42.

4B Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), pp- 128-29, 132, 162-67. I don’t mean to

deny the nonecclesial norms governing tavern hospitality. For example, the Schwabenspiegel

declared that intercourse with a hostess did not constitute adultery, apparently borrowing the exemption from Roman law. Peyer, Gastfreundschaft, p. 19. Schwabenspiegel, Landrecht 368, Urschwabenspiegel, ed. by Karl August Eckhardt, Bibliotheca rerum historicarum, Studia 4, lus suevicum 1 (Aalen: Scientia, 1975), p. 546.

Norbert Elias, Uber den Prozef der Zivilisation, 2 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 1,

366-76, 11, 23-407, and passim. Norbert Schindler, Widerspenstige Leute. Studien zur Volkskultur in der frithen Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992), pp. 232-36. For tropes of drunken priests and

219

TAVERNS AND THE SELF

drinking etiquette project the sanctuary of the place. Stock characters talk openly. Laymen preach ad hoc sermons, and the pamphlets try to project the spontaneity of the exchange (‘O herr, almechtiger, barmhertziger, ewyger, guettiger und auch gerechter got’; how can things have gotten so bad?) and the fatherly, even pastoral demeanor of evangelical protagonists (‘my dear peasant ).'° Characters foreground the terms of debate around Reformation themes,'’ frequently juxtaposing one or more statuses of laymen (artisan, peasant, knight) with one or more kinds of clergy (bishop, parish priest, or mendicant friar).'* Dialogue pamphlets often involve travelling characters, and taverns and inns serve, together with roadways and fields, as places of contact for pilgrims.'’ The stream of religious associations,

wanton monks, see Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp- 44-45, 66. 16 These exam ples are from Ein Gespräch zwischen vier Personen, wie sie ein Gezänk haben von der Wallfahrt im Grimmental, was für Unrat oder Büberei daraus entstanden sei (1523 or 1524),

ed. by Otto Clemen, in Flugschriften, 1, 131-64.

7 A nice example is Dialogus von der Zwietrachtung des heiligen christenlichen Glaubens neulich entstanden (n.p: n. pub., n.d.), Flugschriften des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Fiche 612, no. 1577, which has as its cast a layman and a priest, with cameo appearances by Christ, David, Paul, Moses, and St John. For a survey of themes, characters, and formal characteristics of Reformation pamphlets,

see Franz-Heinrich

Beyer, Eigenart und

Wirkung

des reformatorisch-polemischen

Flugblatts im Zusammenhang der Publizistik der Reformationszeit (Basel: Lang, 1994), pp. 130-62. !8 Asin the pamphlet of n. 16, above, an Erfurt pamphlet whose characters are an artisan (the protagonist), a peasant (an object of conversion), a parish priest and a Dominican friar, interlocutors. In some instances, cultural distinctions are overtly associated with particular characters, as in the anonymous Eyn Dialogus berürende den handel zwischen dem Bischoff der pfaffheyt Rade und Gemeynde der Stat Wormbs (n.p.: n. pub., n.d.), Flugschriften des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Fiche 254, no. 711; Fiche 261, no. 730. Here an imperial knight or servant, identified as a good poetand a philosopher, named Weltklug, confronts a travelling clown named Class from Mainz. Weltklug defends clerical immunities, in verse, against the recent attack upon them by the city of Worms. Fora dialogue in a field, see Flugschriften (n. 1, above), 11, 197-218. For examples of

dialogues on the road, see Eyn Dialogus (n. 18, above), and Wie der hailig vater Bapst Adrianus ein geritten ist τὴ Rom auff den xxviii. Tag des Monasts Augusti im jar M.D.XXII. Darbey ain gesprech von dreyen personen, Flugschriften des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Fiche 264, no. 745. For dialogues in taverns, in addition to the three treated below, see: (Ein) schôner Dialogus und Strafred von dem Schultheif von Geifdorf mit seinem Schiiler wider den Pfarrer daselbst (n.p.: n.

pub., n.d.), Fiche 264, no. 744, Fiche 622, no. 1609 (this, with a woodcut of a crowded pub); (Ein) schôner Dialogus von zweien guten Gesellen, genant Hans Tholl und Claus Lamp (n.p.: n. pub.,n.d.), Fiche 264, no. 946; Hanns Staygmayer, din schéner Dialogus oder Gesprech von aynem Miinch und Becken, welcher die Oster ayer Samlen wollt (n.p.: n. pub., n.d.), Fiche 4, no. 17 (the

title page has the same woodcut as the Sachs pamphlet in n. 22, below).

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which we may presuppose for the minds of readers of tavern dialogues, goes from pilgrimage to penance and conversion. But it is difficult to characterize taverndialogue pamphlets narrowly. The setting makes friends of strangers and permits an uncommonly open conversation, less predictable than can be found in other polemical literature of Reformation Germany, even while the authors steer their characters to their predetermined conclusions.” Let us consider three examples closely. Hans Sachs, the Nürnberg master shoemaker-turned-poet, promoted Luther’s teachings in seven dialogues, at a time when the council of his city, first reluctant to reform churches, debated and eventually implemented an outright confiscation of monastic properties and a relatively direct administration of ecclesiastical affairs.”’ Sachs’s Dialogue on the Phantom Works of the Clergy and Their Vows, whereby They, to the Insult of the Blood of Christ, Mean to Become Blessed is a typical hodgepodge. It deploys standard anti-Franciscan polemical themes (their poverty is fraudulent), a Lutheran view of Christian vocation (baptism constrains all to the same religious life), a polemical use of justification by faith (traditional pious actions are mostly useless), and an insistence on the value of physical labour (able-bodied Christians don’t beg).” These things had become common sermon topics in Nürnberg since a riot erupted during a sermon by a Dominican named Gallus Korn a day after the Feast of the Assumption in 1523.” A year later, the ?° This intimacy is especially noticeable in a Basel pamphlet, apparently of the early 1520s, that presumably reflects the fruit of new preaching. Anonymous, Ain giitter grober dyalogus Teütsch, zwyschen zwayen giten gesellen, mit namen Hans Schepfer, Peter Schabenhit, bayd von Basel die auh nit neettiger gschæfft sunst auffzürichten haben angericht von aim wirt (no p.: no pub., n.d.), Flugschriften des fr. 16. Jahrhunderts, Fiche 264, no. 743. Evangelical reform coalesced in Basel in a guild rebellion. Hans R. Guggisberg, Baselin the Sixteenth Century (St Louis: Center for Reformation

Research,

1982), pp:

19-35.

Paul Roth, Durchbruch

und Festsetzung der

Reformation in Basel (Basel: Helbing und Lichtenhah, 1942), pp. 36-79 and passim.

71 Paul A. Russell, Lay Theology in the Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 169-80 emphasizes his doctrinal continuity with Luther. For Niirnberg’s conversion, see Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung. Land und Konfession, 1500-1650, ed. by Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler, 7 vols (Miinster: Aschendorf,

1991-96), 1, 37, and Gunter Zimmermann, Prediger der Freiheit. Andreas Osiander und der

Niirnberger Rat, 1522-1548 (Mannheim: Palatium, 1999), pp. 146-47.

?? Hanns Sachs, Ein gesprech vonn den Scheinwerckenn der Geystlichen, unnd iren geliübten, damit sy züuerlesterung des blüts Christi vermeynen seligzà werden (n.p:n. pub.,n.d.), Flugschriften des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Fiche 210, no. 595.

23 Gallus Korn, Eyn handlung wie es eynem Prediger Munch czu Nurmberg mit seynem Ordensbrudern von wegen der Euangelischen warheyt gangen ist(n.p.:n. pub., 1522), Flugschriften

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Nürnberg magistrates began to support evangelical chaplains, which was soon followed by the surrender of Augustinian, Benedictine, and Carmelite cloisters to the city council (this came with the first impositions of citizenship upon clergy, spring and summer 1525, which, the preacher Andreas Osiander pointed out, merely followed the example set by the magistrates of Mainz, Cologne, Speyer, Worms, Stra$burg, Regensburg, Erfurt, Bamberg, and Wiirzburg).” The council installed preachers in the remaining cloisters, and they formed a commission of theologians who met and debated their obligations to God, in response to those Dominicans, Franciscans, and women’s religious houses who resisted the end of monasticism (in spite of the fact that it was explained by evangelical preachers who were forcefully placed in the cloisters). Osiander insisted on the council’s divine obligation to simply close all cloisters down and throw the recalcitrant Franciscans out of town. But even the moderate Dominicus Schleupner (who must have remembered his An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation) agreed with

Osiander that monasticism was a sect that destroyed the common good.” Hans Sachs’s dialogues helped shape the sensibilities that precipitated these events, with their image of the alien character of monastic communities, but how alien, how intolerable? Sachs’s Dialogue on the Phantom Works really begins not with the text but with a woodcut title page. It shows a chamber in a tavern with a single window and two men seated at table. There is a tankard, a cup, two knives, and some food. The men gesture at two Franciscans who wander through a doorway at the right. One has a full basket, and his right hand is extended, palm open. Upon this gesture, the dialogue begins: ‘peace be with you, dear brothers, give your holy alms for God’s

des frithen 16. Jahrhunderts, Fiche 50, no. 141 (another edition with the same date may be found in Fiche 279, no. 797). His conventional

Protestant argument

against monastic

rules, but

applied only to the mendicant orders, is also expressed with equal clarity by Johann Eberlin von Ginzburg, Wider die falsch scheynende gaystlichen under dem Christlichen hauffen, genant Barfisser oder Franciscaner orden sonderlich vom titel Reformacio oder Obseruacio (n.p.: n. pub., 1524), Flugschriften des frithen 16. Jahrhunderts, Fiche no. 49, Flugschrift no. 136. ** Andreas Osiander, Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Gerhard Müller and others, 8 vols [to date] (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1975- ), 11, 112-26. He could have added Esslingen. Hans-Christoph Rublack, ‘Reformatorische Bewegung und stadtische Kirchenpolitik in Esslingen’, in Städtische

Gesellschaft und Reformation, ed. by Ingrid Batori (Stuttgart: Klett, 1980), p. 208.

# Osiander, Gesamtausgabe, τι, 148-60. The point was pushed by Osiander, too, a year ago

(ibid., 1, 350-51). Schleupner suggested consolidating all religious into two cloisters ‘da sie auch

mit dem gotlichen wort wurden versehen und unterhallten werden’, which was earlier suggested by Martin Luther in his famous 1521 treatise, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation.

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sake to the Franciscan brothers for a candle by which we sing and read liturgy.” Peter, one of the laymen, refuses to give money to ‘such a strong beggar’, against biblical precept (Deuteronomy 15. 4, ‘there should be no beggars among you’); ‘Td rather give my candle to homeless peasants who will work by its light’, Peter says. The friar answers, ‘I perceive you are Lutheran’ (Ich hér wol, ir seyt Lutherisch), and Peter corrects him: no, evangelical. So one should do what the

Gospel teaches and give alms, says the friar. Peters companion, Hans, jests, ‘Brother Heinrich has already beat you with Scripture!’ and Peter concedes, ‘I confess, I give in, come here dear Brother Heinrich, take a penny for God’s sake and buy yourselves a candle as you wish.” Brother Heinrich shrinks back, ‘Ay, God protect me! I can’t take money. It’s against my Order." ‘Who made your Order?’ asks Hans. ‘Our holy father Francis’, replies the monk. ‘Is Francis your father, then? Christ says in Matthew 23. 9, “no one should be called father on earth, for only one is your father, who is in heaven.” ‘Ugh. We know that, of course’, says the Franciscan, ‘but he’s taught us like a devout father teaches his child.’ ‘So, he is your master’, Hans complains, ‘as Christ says in the same chapter’, and he argues that the Franciscan rule does not come from the Gospel, argues against the Franciscan view of evangelical poverty (Christ and the apostles handled money), dismisses the arrangements that Observant friars make to keep the law (lay procurators have not prevented the princely wealth of their cloisters), argues for the necessity of work (part of a common association of friars with the dishonourable poor),” and so on. The religious duel that Sachs portrayed resonates

2. Sachs, Ein gesprech, fol. 2": ‘Der fryd sey mit euch ir liebenn brûder, gebt ewer heiligs almusen

umb gottes willen, den armen brüdern zun Barfussen, die liecht, darbey wir singen und lesen.’

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with the clanging of Bible verses (his deployment of well-known late medieval rebuttals of Franciscan exegesis is technically interesting, but not especially entertaining).

In all of this, Hans, one of the two laymen, is a little aggressive, edges toward the foul-line of etiquette, and keeps those two friars on the defensive, until the friar finally protests, ‘don’t think badly of me. You and your type don’t give us much, rather great lords and rich burghers do, and merchants from their surplus.’ Yeah, Peter says in so many words, where does he think they get it from? From people like Peter and Hans. Hans is a clinging evangelical; when the friars want to leave and find better prospects, he detains them with a delicate question. ‘Dear Brother Heinrich, tell me one thing more. Monk: what is it? Hans: do you keep perpetual chastity, like you vowed?” Friar Heinrich is a little testy: “Yes! What of it! If we didn’t know how to keep it, we wouldn’t have promised it!’ By now the pamphlet’s reader has weathered six pages of technical and intensely boring Bible debate, and one hopes things might get nastier, and it could: there is lots of antifraternal polemic and imagery of clergy sex scandal to be found in other pamphlets. Sachs isn’t interested. He lunges with Matthew 19. 10-12 and paries with Colossians 2. He implies, that’s all, that friars in cloister may be driven to beat the flesh in ways the apostle Paul did not mean. He piles on Lutheranly sound New Testament answers to each of a monk’s three vows — chastity, poverty, and obedience. Eventually Sachs moves to close his argument by inviting the friars to leave the cloister and get real jobs.” Heinrich protests, and all of them quickly digress to name-calling. In two last folios of invective, the dialogue withers to its end. That is Sachs’s view of a tavern debate. Even in his edgy world, the framework is neighbourly. The characters knew each other. The evangelical bearing Sachs’s

* Sachs, Ein gesprech, fol. 2': ‘Hans: Brüder Heinrich hat dich schon uberwunden mit schrifft. Peter: Ich bekenns, ich kan nit weyter, kumpt her lieber brûder Heinrich, sehthyn ein pfennig umb gotsswillen, und kaufft euch selber ein liecht nach ewrem synn.’ ?5 Sachs, Ein gesprech, fol. 2°: “Miinch. Ey behüt mich got, ich darff kein gelt nemen, es helts mein orden nicht innen. Hans: Wer hat ewern orden gemacht? Miinch: Unnser heyliger vatter Franciscus. Hans: Ist dann franciscus ewr vater? spricht doch Christus Math. xxiij. Nyemant soll

30 Gespraech von den Scheinwerken, fol. 3': ‘Miinch: Habt mir nicht in ubel, ir unnd ewers gleichen gebtuns nit vil, sonder grosse herren, und reiche Burger, und kauff lewt nôren uns von

wir wol, er hat uns aber gelert, wie ein frummer vater sein kindt. Hans: So ist er ewer meyster, spricht doch Christus an gemeltem capitel. Jr solt euch nit lassenn meyster nennen, dann einer ist ewer meyster Christus.’

mochten.’

sich vatter heissen auff erden, dann einer ist ewer vater, der im hymmel ist. Miinch: Ey das wissen

” Christopher Ocker, “Rechte Arme” und “Bettler Orden”: eine neue Sicht der Armut und die Deligitimierung der Bettelménche’, in Kulturelle Reformation. Sinnformationen im Umbruch,

ed. by Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky, Verôffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für

Geschichte, 145 (Géttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), pp. 123-51.

irem uberflüss. Peter: Ist gut, wo nemen es dieselbigen, allein bey unns, wir die eylff tausent mertrer mussens zalen, da sy uns betriegen, ubernôten, dringen, zwingen, das offt das blut hernach

mécht gan, da speysen sy dar nach euch heylosen vatter (heilige vatter soll ich sagen) mit, die starck und faul seind, und selber wol arbeiten, und andere arme krancke Christen mit jnen erneren 31 Gespraech von den Scheinwerken, fol. 4‘: ‘Münch: Behüt euch got, wir verlieren die zeyt

unniitzlich da bey euch, wir mussen weyter gan, da man uns etwas gibt. Hans: Lieber brüder Heinrich, sagt mir noch ein wort. Münch: Was istez? Hans: Haltent ir ewige keuscheit, wie ir

dann gelobt habt? Münch: Ja, warumb nit, wüsten wirs nit zühalten, wir gelobtens nic.’ °? Gespraech von den Scheinwerken, fol. 7°”.

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own Christian name, Hans, compromised principle and offered the friar a handout. When he approached the topic of mendicant sexuality, he avoided direct insult and focused on biblical argument. Sachs’s reader could assume the mutual familiarity of these characters, something between acquaintance and friendship, and the boundaries of their relationship were tried within the confines of a public room. Other pamphlets emphasize the civility of their characters. Such is portrayed in an anonymous pamphlet of 1524 called A Dialogue between a Christian and Jew, also an Innkeeper Together with His Servant, Treating the Topic, Christ the Cornerstone The title page includes a woodcut recalling Numbers 21. 8-9, where the Israelites are healed from an attack of vipers by looking at a brazen image of a serpent that God ordered Moses to erect upon a staff. We see a clearing within or at the edge of a wood outside a town, with Moses standing beside a pole and a serpent wound over it, two men, one in a pose of veneration, looking at it, and three men to the left of these debating.** The scene is discussed in the dialogue. So, too, is another image that the author claims to have included in the publication, although it is not found in the only known copy of this pamphlet — a Reformation woodblock print that the Jew is said to have purchased in a village near Meissen in Electoral Saxony.” The dialogue discusses its interpretation at length. It makes for a rather densely figured narrative, a dialogue representing the interaction of evangelical Christianity with Judaism, which in turn includes discussion

of the

Christian

interpretation

of biblical

figures,

much

of this

discussed in connection with the interpretation of a piece of Reformation visual propaganda, the title page including yet another image. The story goes like this: A traveller comes from Bologna to Nürnberg. He arrives outside the city gate at dusk. The gate is closed. He sees a man coming and asks him where he’s headed. To the next village, he says, to an inn. The first man detects a Jewish accent, and the Jew concedes that he’s coming from Italy on his way to Constantinople, hoping to return quickly to Venice to pick up a copy of the Talmud newly printed there; he will deliver it to Prague. They exchange names, and the Christian assures

the Jew that he intends him no harm. The Jew tells him his name is Vivus,

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presumably for the Hebrew Chaim (life), but the Jew asks to go clandestinely under the name Conrad when they are in the company of others. They come to the inn and quickly order dinner. The Christian will take sausages. It’s Lent, the innkeeper protests. He can give some cold beans and roasted herring, a good wine. ‘I thought you eat meat and were a good Lutheran’, the guest responds.** “Why should I care about Luther’, the innkeeper says. In the hope of a meat dinner, the guest delivers a little discourse on evangelical freedom. This suffices to convince the innkeeper (he'll take ‘ein güttliche spruch’ over all the books and laws of the pope, he says). The Jew orders, ‘I'll stick with eggs’, in

accordance with Mosaic law.” The Christian turns to his companion. Does the Jew keep all the laws of Moses, he asks (he knew there were very many)? ‘My dear Christian’, answers the Jew, ‘by the name of Adonay, we keep them just as Moses had commanded them for us. No way! says the Christian.” Show him a commandment that Jews don’t observe, the Jew responds. Easily, if there were enough time, says the Christian. ‘But you've got the whole night’, the innkeeper interjects. ‘I’ve got a lamp — I'll fetch it — and a closetful of wine, for I love to hear about stuff.* Off goes the innkeeper to fetch the wine, and the debate begins. The Christian immediately launches into a prophetic interpretation of Mosaic law, accuses Jews of blindness in their failure to believe in Christ, then appeals to Luther’s That Christ Was Born a Jew, and finally takes up a polemical theme familiar in anti-Jewish polemics by friars, which had been promoted in Germany in the published sermons of the Dominican Peter Schwarz (they were delivered at Regensburg in the 1470s)*! and adapted by Luther, namely that rabbinical tradition has encumbered Jews with superstition and prevented them from understanding prophecy in the true, that is Christian, fashion. So has it been for

one thousand five hundred and twenty-four years, our protagonist concludes, ‘what do you say to that?’ (was sagt yr dartzii). The Jew simply answers, he does

ré Flugschriften, 1, 393: ‘Christ: Ich meynet, yr esset fleysch und weret gut Lutterisch. Wyrt:

Was gehet mich Lutther an?’ 7 Flugschriften, 1, 394: Jude: Ich halts mit den eyern.’

δὲ Elugschriften, 1, 394: Jude: Meyn lieber Christ, bey dem Adonay, wir halten sie, wie sie unns Mose gebotten unther uns.’

Ein Gespräch zwischen einem Christen und Juden, auch einem Wirte, samt seinem Hausknecht, den Eckstein Christum betreffend, ed. by Walter Haupt, in Flugschriften, |, 373-422. Also, Flugschriften des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Fiche 621, no. 1608. 3 Flugschriften, 1, 387. 33 Flugschrifien, 1, 399.

° Flugschriften, τ, 394: ‘Christ: Verware, yr hallt sie nicht alle!” W Flugschriften, 1, 394: ‘Yhr habt doch ein gantz nacht vor euch, szo hab ich liecht, wil ich

züuort schencken und ein stübgen weyns; dann ich here von dingen gern.’ ‘1 Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (13.-20 Jh.) (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1994), pp. 544-47.

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not believe their Messiah, and Jews can wait, for ἃ long time or ἃ short time. Besides,

Christians

have

been

superstitious

for

as long.

Yes,

the

Christian

concedes, it was the Antichrist’s doing, as Jesus prophesied 1492 years ago. Thank God, he says, Christians now see it and recognize all the Antichrist’s adherents.

‘The inkeeper’s asleep’ (Der wyrdt schlefft), the Jew observes.’ He awakens with a cough (‘Christ: Herr wyrt, herr wyrt! Wirdt: Hosche, hosche’), excusing

himself for his sleep deficit from the night before. They check the time, worry over the reliability of the clock and hour (is it three in the morning?), pour another round, joke a little about German drink and tempers,*’ and continue the religious debate. Now the Jew carefully shows his picture (‘bindt seuberlich auff, das ir sie nicht zu reyst’, he cautions), not a very good picture, and a complicated one. From the various references that follow, we learn that it has within a circle at its centre an image of the crucifix. In the circle to the left of the crucifix stands the Dominican Johannes Tetzel, famous for preaching the indulgence that prompted Luther’s 95 theses. He is identified as a preacher of the Antichrist. To the right stands an evangelical preacher. Surrounding the circle is a square, surrounding the square another roughly quadraform arrangement, with figures on the corners of the square and the outer arrangement.“ On the corners of the outer arrangement are placed Moses, Job, David, and Isaiah, to represent the Old Testament. On the corners of the square are the four evangelists, to represent the New Testament. Between the square and the outer arrangement, on the left, appear three prophets of the Antichrist: David in the Lion’s den, John the Evangelist, and the apostle

Paul bearing a sword (an allusion to Ephesians 6. 17). On the right side between the quadrants appear three witnesses to the true Christ: John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, and Peter with his keys. The ensemble’s various fields are numbered. The dialogue tells us that to the left, under the numbers 5 and 3 there is a crowd. Popes, bishops, and priests intermingle with the crowd. There also appears, at the bottom of the picture, a closed door, an open door beneath the number 7, and a beast of hell marked 11. The image is built on a fundamental contrast between Antichrist and Christ, the door to salvation being opened by the preachers of the latter and not the former for whose followers hell is reserved. The pamphlet tells us it is an image of ‘Christ the cornerstone, rejected by the builders’,

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referring to Psalm 118. 22, a passage that Christ in the Gospels uses to identify himself as the fulfilment of Messianic prophecy.’ Robert Scribner identified the exact block print to which the pamphlet refers and offered an exposition of it, pointing out that this dialogue shows how we should imagine such cheaply produced pictures to have been used, namely in informal public display to a semiliterate audience.** In the pamphlet, the Jew and the innkeeper select figures that interest them, and the protagonist interprets them as illustrations of some aspect of Lutheran doctrine. The dialogue’s interpretation of this image will therefore disappoint the art historian. It is piecemeal and opportunistic. The identification of the picture with Psalm 118. 22 tells us that it is about the relationship of the Old and New Testaments, in the Lutheran view, that Hebrew scripture understood correctly is a prophetic recitation of the gospel that contrasts with the traditions and practices of the Roman Church. This serves the protagonist’s and the author’s missionizing purpose, however polite the protagonist may be. The dialogue suggests an unexpected context for the teaching of dogma, for the use of ‘instructional’ images,” namely one of free inquiry in a protected place. It does this by anecdotal closeups. The innkeeper says he heard a sermon on this at Nirnberg.** The protagonist summarizes the Lutheran concept of Gospel (he uses a Luther name for it, ‘frôlich botschafft’), explaining the doctrine of justification by faith from Old Testament passages, then asks the Innkeeper, ‘do you get that, Mr. Innkeeper’ (das verstehet yhr woel, herr wyrd)? ‘I really can’ (jch mercks wol), he answers, and

the protagonist turns to the Jew: ‘what do you say about that?” “What can I say’, the Jew answers, graven images are forbidden him. What about Numbers 21. 8,

the Christian asks, when Moses erected a veneration-snake in the wilderness, and

those who looked upon it were healed of their bodily affliction? ‘Isn’t it now

within God’s power, since false doctrine has arisen among you and among us alike,

which mixed true teaching with tradition, that the Spirit of God might tear away such things with an external sign through the circle of Holy Scripture, as I take this figure to mean?’ A Lutheran could only imagine him pointing to the circle * Mt 21. 42, Mk 12. 10, Lk 20. 17, Acts 4. 11, Eph 2. 20,1 Pt 2.7. +° Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, pp. 211-16. ‘7 For the genre, see Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, pp. 190-228.

© Flugschriften, 1, 398. ‘3 Flugschrifien, 1, 399. ™ The evidence is summarized by the editor, Flugschriften, 1, 383-85.

fe Flugschriften, 1, 400. bis Flugschrifien, 1, 401: ‘Christ: Was sagt yr datzü? Jude: Was soll ich sagen? wey8 wol und sage, das unns juden im andern buch Mose am 20. capi. (v. 4) verpotten kein bildenis als geschnitzt oder gegossen zà haben.’

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with the crucifix, the sum total of all Scripture to Luther. The picture is supposed to answer the errors of Judaism and the Roman Church equally. ‘One may not pray to it, for true worshippers pray to the Father in the truth (John 4 [verse 24]).”°° He tells the Jew that ‘you’ are pictured with the crowd destined for perdition: ‘How do you like that? That's why you’re pictured with others according to the explanation of Holy Scripture, on the left side under the numbers 5 and 3, because you remain hardened. God convert you!”*! The Jew observes that Jews are not even depicted in the picture, ‘I only see your pope, bishops, priests, monks, the sects in their habits’ (so sehe ich doch nühr ewer bepst, bischoff, pfaffen, meenich, der secten in yrer kleydung). Well, the Christian responds, they are standing behind them, because they were the first to persecute and kill Christ, and the other people, one hopes, will be the last. And so the pamphlet’s improvisation continues. As dawn approaches, the Christian tries to clinch his argument, or two arguments, one in favour of Jewish

conversion and the other against the papacy and religious orders, but the Jew must be on his way. The Christian covers the bill, and the conversation continues with the innkeeper in the Jew’s absence. What’s new in Niirnberg, the Christian asks? A meeting between Friedrich of Saxony and the Count Palatine. The innkeeper notices that the picture was left behind, and they turn back again to its interpretation, rehearsing the conflict between Luther and Tetzel; the final judgement; the corruption of the clergy; some brief polemic against Eck, Emser, Murner, and Cochlaeus, the four evangelists of Satan’; arguments against papal, patristic, and conciliar authority; justification by faith; and a summary of the books of the Bible that Luther is translating. The dialogue finally ends with the innkeeper checking that his literate servant has gotten the whole thing down, who volunteers to bring it to Nürnberg for proofreading and publication. The pamphlet concludes with itself: it is a real dialogue in an everyday place between some everyday people, we are meant to believe, with a simple account of a plain picture about the plain message of Scripture.

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The author of this pamphlet had enough sympathy for his characters to conjure up a plausible conversation, without having them digress into namecalling, like Hans Sachs. The Jew and the Christian discuss religion as travelling

acquaintances, and they part as friends. There were others who had more sympathy for doctrine than for their characters, among whom I would number Wenzelaus Link, an Augustinian friar and friend of Martin Luther who promoted the Reformation at Niirnberg.”* As the evangelical party there campaigned among the city council to close Niirnberg’s monasteries, Link published a dialogue with a movie-trailer title page: ‘Dialogue of the Runaway Monk. Here you see 1) whether the runaway or the remaining members of religious orders are the real apostates, 2) how dangerous and unchristian cloister-life and vows are, 3) on what they base their vows and life, 4) why cloisters and foundations were established, 5) what kind of work vows are, 6) what is apostate or schismatic, 7) whether

chastity can be achieved with prayers, fasts, and other exercises. With explanations of many sayings of Scripture, to boot.’ Link did not trouble himself with scenery, beyond the greeting that launches the debate.” An evangelical comes to a papist

and greets him (‘cum ea qua decet reuerentia’) and addresses him with titles of

high respect (‘Darauff dann der selbigen laruenheyligen thun am meysten stehet”). As Christ said, the narrator explains, they want to receive the praise of human beings — Mt 23, Mk 11 — and he warned good Christians to beware of them, as they would before ‘the most dangerous enemies of the Christian life, who rob widows of house and home on the pretense of lengthy prayers and elaborate worship services’ (als fur den schedlichsten feynden Christenlichs lebens, die der armen Wittiben heuszer und gutter vertzeren unterm scheyn langes gebets und grossen gotszdiensts). To such a man came an ‘evangelical’ layman, saying deferentially, ‘honourable, respectable, learned, reverend sir and father in God’, and

so forth. ‘I, a poor man, would like to have a little talk with your honourableness,

°3 For Linck as Augustinian prior and reformer at Nürnberg, consider Franz Posset, The

Front-Runner of the Catholic Reformation: The Life and Works of Johann von Staupitz (Aldershot:

° Flugschriften, 1, 402: ‘Were es denn ytzundt nicht noch in Gottis macht, die wey] falsche

lerer unter euch und uns auff gestanden, die die recht schrifft vermischt mit ehrer, das der geyst

Gottis solche mit eynem euferlichen zeychenn durch den Cyrckel der heiligen schrifft ab rise von der falschen lere, wie ich dann dieRe figur do für halte? man darff sie darumb nit anbeten, dann die rechten anbetter beten den vater in der warheyt an (Joannis am 4 capi. [y. 24]).’

s Flugschriften, 1, 403: ‘darumb stehet ir gemalet mit andern noch erklerung heiliger schrifft uff der lincken seyten unter der zall 5 unnd 3, die weyl yhr verstockt bleybt. Got bekere euch!’ °? Flugschriften, τ, 410.

Ashgate, 2003), pp. 215 and 371.

° Wenzeslaus Link, Dyalogus der auszgelauffen Miinch. Hie sihestu. 1 Ob die auszgetretenen oder bleibenden Ordenszpersonen billicher Apostaten sein, 2 Wie schedlich und unchristenlich Clôster

leben und gelübdt sein 3 Warauffmannsollich geluäbdt und leben gruindet: 4 Warczu Cloister und Stiffie angerichtet 5 Was geloben fur ein werck sey. 6 Was Apostata / oder Schismaticus sey. 7 0b man mit beten / fasten unnd anderer usibunge keuscheit erlangen muge. Mit erklerunge viler sprüche der schrift so darauffgehen. Wentzeslaus Linck Ecclesiastes zu Aldenburgk (Altenburg: Kantz, 1525), Flugschriften des frithen 16. Jahrhunderts, Fiche 132, no. 354.

°5 Link, fols 2'-3',

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Christopher Ocker

if you'll allow and take no displeasure.’ ‘Go on, dear man, what is it?”** Well, the

‘evangelical’ says, the priests are preaching many things against the monks who

have abandoned their cloisters, even the good priests, and he'd like to challenge that, in spite of his interlocutor’s accusation of heresy. And so he does, in a prolonged argument over all seven themes of the pamphlet’s subtitle. It is pure argument, twenty-eight pages long, between the Bible and the traditional church, a chapbook of Niirnberg Protestant argument contra monasteries, hurriedly packaged as a conversation. We could study the same ideas in the sermons and polemical writings of Andreas Osiander more conveniently. Such a dialogue,

desacralizing as much of traditional monasticism as it can, tells us nothing directly about the sanctification of profane places. But some kind of resacralization did

occur. Here is a final example of a dialogue that sacralizes profane places. It is anonymous and called 4 Dialogue between Four People, How They Squabble about the Pilgrimage Shrine at Grimmental, What for Ridiculousness or Stupidity Has Arisen from It.” Beside its title page is a woodblock print of a four-windowed room. In the room are two tonsured men playing backgammon at a table and a burgher seated at a second table, while a traveller carrying ἃ staff and a purse enters through a door at the right and tips his hat, and they all exchange greetings. This place will become the venue of the traveller’s conversion. There are tankards, one

in the hand of the burgher and two on the tables together with some nondescript

food and a knife. The dialogue begins: Most people know that the fair takes place at Frankfurt after mid-Lent. Since it ended, I betook myself homeward and came to a village. There I entered a tavern and drank a

little wine. There sata Dominican monk anda

priest, playing each other at a board game

(that’s the priests’ and monks’ field of research, their Bible reading!). As I satand relaxed, a peasant came in. I invited him for a drink, the peasant declined. He said he’s only drinking water until he returns home. He’s going on a pilgrimage.”

It turns out that the peasant is on his way to Grimmental, a newly built pilgrimage site near Meiningen

in southern Thuringia, where

the traffic of pilgrims has

declined precipitously, thanks to Luther, that heretic. The insult to the Virgin is

TAVERNS AND THE SELF

231

testified by a miracle there, an image of Mary that sheds real tears. The peasant heard about it from his neighbour, who saw it himself. The priest chimes in, he had a dream about it, too, and the monk smuggly adds, he’s long thought the Blessed Virgin’s tolerance of injury would end.” The artisan, returning from the Frankfurt fair, knows better. He alleges that

a water chamber was attached to the image and the eye pricked to create the tears, verified by the Count of Henneberg, who sent his servant up a ladder to check it out. ‘For that reason, dear peasant’, the artisan says, ‘forget your pilgrimage, stay home with your wife and children, do your work, keep God before your eyes: he is a true helper. “° The priest objects, ‘why are you disuading him from his resolution? If you were my parishioner, I would put you under ban.’ The artisan, we are told, doesn’t put much stock in that, admits he’s read a little Luther and has found lots of good doctrine there, not heresy, but scriptural doctrine, which

is to say he doesn’t consider himself excommunicable in any biblical sense. The

Dominicans, by contrast, are the heretics: look what happened in Bern. The Dominican doesn’t know about this, although he admits people often refer him

to it. So the artisan summarizes the lengthy pamphlet he has read about the socalled Jetzer affair.® “Would to God that everyone knew about it. There you can see how saints are made and pilgrimages set up.** He tells the story, how the

Dominicans staged an apparition of the Virgin before an impressionable tailor’s apprentice seeking admission to an order. A Dominican dressed as the Virgin told him flatly that she was conceived in original sin, according to the Dominican

°? Flugschrifien, 1, 141-42. °° Flugschriften, |, 143: ‘darumb, liebes beurlein, laf furbas dein wallen unterwegen, bleyb do heym, bey deim weyb und kindern und wardt deyner arbeyt, hab got vor augen, der ist der recht helffer.’

*! Flugschriften, 1, 143:Warumb macht jhr den bawren abwendig von seynem furnemen? wen jhr meyn pfarrkind weret, ich wolt euch in bann thun.’ “2 See R. Steck, Der Berner Jetzerprozess (1507-1509) in neuer Beleuchtung (Bern: Schmid and Francke, 1902); Frank Hieronymus, Basler Buchillustration 1500-1545. Universitatsbibliothek

Basel 31. Marz bis 30. Juni 1984 (Basel: Universitatsbibliothek, 1984), pp. 33-37 (my thanks to >° Link, fol. 3": “Erwirdiger, Achtparer, hochgelarter, andechtiger lieber herr und vater in Got,” etc. “Ich armer Mann het ein kleines mit ewer achtparkeit und erwuürden zereden, so yhrs

Manfred Vischer for bringing this to my attention), and for its background, see Georg Eduard Steitz, Der Streit über die unbefleckte Empfangnis der Maria zu Frankfurt a.M.im Jahre 1500 und sein Nachspiel in Bern 1509’, Archiv für Frankfurts Geschichte und Kunst, n.f. 6 (1877), 1-35.

“Rede her lieber Mann, Was ists?”’

heyligen macht und walfart auffricht.’ Kettenbach also referred to the Jetzer affair in his Ein

guütlich annemen, unnd mir armen thoren nit verargen woltet.” Antwortet der geistlich Papist. °7 Ein Gespräch zwischen vier Personen, in Flugschriften (see n. 16, above), 1, 131-67. 55 Flugschriften, 1, 141.

83 Flugschriften, 1, 144: ‘wolt Got, das yederman wist, da wurdt man wol erfaren, wie man

Gesprach mit einem frommen Altmiitterlein von Ulm (1523), Flugschrifien aus den ersten Jahren

der Reformation, τι, 70.

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Christopher Ocker

doctrine, in direct contradiction of the Franciscan teaching that she was conceived without the transmission of original sin. Then they drugged the boy and marked him with stigmata, the Dominicans publishing both pretended feats, the vision and the stigmata, from their pulpits. People came in droves to the next Dedication Feast at the Dominican Church. Things went really well for them, for

a while, living like gods on the fat of the land surrounded by pretty women

(‘lieSen den armen brüder herrgot sein und lebten sie im sau8 mit hubschen

weybern’). They thought, this boy should really die, so he can finally be canonized. That, the artisan notes, would have produced a huge pilgrimage site. But God, he says, had other plans. The young novice became suspicious, and when a potion was brought to him, he fed it to a young wolf they kept in their cloister, and the wolf promptly keeled over and died. They tried to feed the boy poison in the Eucharist, but that didn’t work either. The novice fled, and the matter came to light. Subsequently, the prior, subprior, preacher, and custodian were burned at the stake upon their confessions, and the rest of the convent was thrown in jail. The peasant, shocked by this tale, wonders if this is what the other Order did to St Francis. Our author, an evangelical partisan for sure, tries to be fair: That, I don’t know, but God knows everything. For which reason, my dear peasant, as I said before, and I say it again, turn around, take the money that you've tied up, give to poor sick people who can’t work, for God’s sake. If you are poor, so that you need the money yourself, use it yourselfin your house and let pilgrimages be pilgrimages, there isn’t much good that comes from them.”

What about the pilgrimage shrine to Mary at Regensburg, the peasant asks? The artisan doesn’t really know, but he compares it to the story about the Silesian man who was condemned to be quartered. A Jew arranged to buy the man’s heart from the executioner. The executioner grew suspicious after making the deal, so he delivered a pig’s heart instead. The Jew buried the heart along a path. Soon pigs from all over gathered at the spot, ‘a considerable hoard’ (eyn merklich summa). ‘A person might think about this: dye gelertten, dye verkerten, learned people are

‘ Flugschrifien, 1, 146.

© Flugschriften, 1, 146: ‘Das wey

TAVERNS AND THE SELF

233

twisted. Who knows what a man will do? So don’t let this business contaminate

you!”

This is all very disturbing. The peasant, it turns out, has a twelve-year-old son taking lessons from his parish priest. He hoped to send the son to university, marking him for the priesthood. He paid dearly for his lessons, in the hope that his boy won’t have to work as hard as he. What are you going to do, the artisan says, when you have no money left. Well, the peasant replies, he and the wife and their five other children will move in with the son in holy orders. These guys playing board games here have tricked the peasant out of his money, the artisan says. The conversation turns to the priesthood and what is wrong with it, then to prayer for the dead, purgatory, aural confession, dedication feasts, fasts, tithes, celebacy, mendicant friars, their collection of cheese offerings, their preaching, indulgences. The conversation establishes, in the manner of Martin Luther in the early 1520s, three sacraments — baptism, the Eucharist, and penance — and argues against each of the other four. With these many bits of everyday religion so enthusiastically tossed upon the floor, as it were, the peasant finally decides to forget his pilgrimage. The Dominican decides to give up his habit and get a job. The priest threatens to initiate heresy proceedings against the artisan. With this, the story ends. We have looked at three pamphlets that rehearse an utterly commonplace array of early Protestant teachings used to 1) establish the validity of the rebellion of Luther’s followers, 2) deny priestly authority and traditional sacramental power, 3) disprove the validity of other religious providers, like monks, and 4) condemn priestly and monastic services, like the memorialization of the dead, which could be acquired upon giving a gift of one kind or another that would fit any budget. The pamphlets assume, as most pamphlets of the early Reformation do, that the Bible, the Gospel, and the Word of God are synonymous. The synonymy insinuated religious, anthropological, and political things: the Old and New Testaments teach a single message that stands at the centre of the new preaching, transforms individuals who believe the message, allows them to ignore

66 Flugschrifien,1, 147:‘do bey man weytters gedencken mag: dye gelertten, dye verkerten. wer

ich nit, got weyst alle ding wol. dar umb, meyn lybes

Bewerleyn, wye ich vor gesag hab, sag ich noch, ker wider umb, nym das gelt, das du vertzert hest,

gybs armenn krancken leutten, dye nit arbeyten kundenn umb gotz willen. bistu aber arm, das du sein selbst bedarffest, so nutz sel in deim hau und laf wallen wallen seyn, es kumpt nit vil guts dar auf.’

weyss, was jeder man kan? dar von las dich dye sach auch nit anfechten!’ This satirizes medieval

tales of Jewish host desecration. See Christopher Ocker, ‘Ritual Murder and the Subjectivity of Christ: A Choice in Medieval Christianity’, Harvard Theological Review, 91 (1998), 154-56, and the literature noted there, together with Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late

Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), passim.

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Christopher Ocker

church courts, and represents the living voice of God in human society.” Whether

God speaks through the new preachers was, of course, a debatable point. But the dialogue pamphlets meant to do more than argue doctrines. The dialogues meant to project an image of a world where scriptural knowledge is widely accessible, where people disagree without breaking things, and where simple peasants and shrewd burghers calmly overcome the expertise of priests. For all we know, this was the real world for many people, the silent majority that never bashed the nose off a statue or shouted down preachers in church, but carried their opinions along when they went out for a drink. How much should we make of this? Such pamphlets suggest a migration of holiness and a sacralization of the world.® Now, the real theatre of de- and re-sacralization was plainly material. It began alongside the earliest Protestant encroachments on church property, if we can call the evangelical agitations of the early 1520s ‘Protestant’ at all: for not only is the name anachronistic before the 1529 Imperial Diet at Speyer (there Luther’s sympathizers made the protests after which the movement was named), but Lutheran reforms had hardly moved past pulpit oratory. Before 1525, where were the desacralizers? When Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt centralized endowments for masses in January 1522, Martin Luther opposed him. Then a year later Luther advocated attempts to implement a version of Karlstadt’s church order in the city of Leisnig and its villages, before the electoral prince of Saxony and in opposition

to Leisnig’s city council (Friedrich the Wise, who reversed Karlstadt’s Wittenberg

program in early 1522 upon Luther and Melanchthon’s advice, refused to get

involved). Luther promoted similar plans in Zerbst and Plauen, and by 1525 in

87 Moeller and Stackmann, p. 312. For the theology, see also Christopher Ocker, Biblical

Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 184-213, and the literature noted there.

°° Asin John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 153-71. Two protests: the on religion of the recess to Archduke Ferdinand princes. The Lutheran

first protest of 19 April 1529 was against a decision to suspend the article of the 1526 Diet of Speyer. The second, broader protest was presented of Austria on 20 April bya delegation of counselors of the five Protestant princes also declared themselves in agreement with prohibitions of

anabaptism and of all defamatory literature. See Armin (Giitersloh: Gütersloher, 2001), pp: 369 and 374.

Kohnle, Reichstag und Reformation

° Karl Trüdinger, Luthers Briefe und Gutachten an weltliche Obrigkeiten zur Durchführung der Reformation (Münster: Aschendorff, 1975), pp.60-67.D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Briefwechsel, 18 vols (Weimar:

especially p. 505; and Iv, 133-34, no. 1052.

Nachfolger,

1930-85), 111, 594-96, no. 937,

235

TAVERNS AND THE SELF

Electoral Saxony overall, pointing the new electoral prince, Johann the Constant, to the monasteries of his realm and the endowments of churches as the wells from which to draw the stipends of evangelical preachers, should the Prince hesitate to make gifts out of his own property (that would have amounted to the mere continuation of over a century’s expansion of princely patronage rights, but now in evangelical preacherships).’’ He seemed to aim secular power directly against the church’s immunities, its exemptions as a clerical society from secular interference. But when the campaign for church property heated up, after the Peasants’ War of 1524/5 and especially in and around the League of Schmalkalden (1531-47),

the theologians of Wittenberg, Strasbourg, Marburg,

and others

taught their princes and magistrates to be the antirevolutionary vanguard for the preservation of true religion, the preservers of the church.” Princes took over the property of monasteries and collegiate chapters, cities took over buildings, tithes, and treasuries of local churches and some cloisters — when and where they could — as though these were religious deeds. Perhaps they were religious reforms. If princes meant to desacralize, they hardly were able or willing to admit it. The public face of secularization meant to be holy. But tavern dialogues were not about power and property. They were about souls caught between traditional religious beliefs and behaviours and the new evangelical claims, caught between competing

versions of sacred things. Often

has it been said that historians in the twentieth century confused or too hastily linked the political secularizations of the sixteenth century with ‘mental’ and intellectual secularizations of modernity, which if nothing else assumes for sixteenth-century Europe a distinction between the sacred and the profane that is simply anachronistic, even Hegelian in its view of history.’* Something else is at play in the dialogue pamphlets of the early evangelical movement. The pamphlets mean to reflect and shape a world in which peasants and burghers, somewhat respectfully, rebut the arguments of priests. True, the dialogues advocated

a Jorg Sieglerschmidt, Territorialstaat und Kirchenregiment. Studien zur Rechtsdogmatik des

Kirchenpatronatsrechts im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Bôhlau, 1987), pp. 223-54. 72 Christopher Ocker, Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525- 1547 (Leiden: 2006), pp. 104-257.

Brill,

73 Martin Heckel, “Das Problem der Säkularisation” in der Reformation’, in Zur Säkularisation geistlicher Institutionen im 16. und im 18./19. Jahrhundert, ed. by Irene Crusius (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996), p. 34. Alois Hahn, ‘Religion, Säkularisierung und Kultur’,

in Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europe, ed. by Hartmut Lehmann (Géttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997), pp. 17-31.

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Christopher Ocker

at least in part che kind of wordly spirituality that German scholars once taught us to admire as the origins of the civic morality of a modern German state, cobbled together from a Lutheran view of universal religious vocation and the sanctity of labour as consequences of the Gospel and the ethics of neighbourly love.”* At the beginning of the Reformation the context of conversion was thankfully more intimate and far less bombast. In a pamphlet with a homespun title, 4 Dialogue with a Little Old Mother, the apostate Observant Franciscan Heinrich von Kettenbach observed, it is better to give a poor man a drink than a vigil to the dead.” Souls should receive lay ministrations, but they should be tended nonetheless. Pub etiquette is elevated to Christian vocation. Such is the tenacity of holiness.

THE RULE OF METAPHOR AND THE PLAY OF THE VIEWERIN THE HOURS

OF

MARY

OF BURGUNDY Bret Rothstein

ark Twain once suggested that you cannot depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus. And while he may not have been thinking specifically of the power of imaginatio, his declaration nonetheless seems apropos. Much has been written about a preoccupation with the eye in northern Renaissance art, most notably with respect to meticulous pictorial illusionism and complexities of allegory. Yet, relatively little has been said about the state of the early Netherlandish imagination — this despite the fact that for fifteenth-century viewers no less than for nineteenth-century wags, one could not depend on the eyes if the imagination was out of focus. Indeed, such was the potential unruliness of the sensorium, including the inward wits, that early modern writers on the subject of devotion even suggested that those possessing feebler mental constitutions should employ a chaperon when choosing a visual programme for the pursuit of holiness.’ I learned much from my fellow participants in Atlanta. Particular thanks are due to Reindert ‘ These two things figured prominently in sermon pamphlets; see Moeller and Stackmann, pp. 311-12. For the modern German state, Iam thinking of Karl Holl, ‘Die Kulturbedeutung der Reformation’ (1918), in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, 3 vols (Tübingen: Mohr,

1928-32), 1, 468-543, especially pp. 508-18.

5 Ein Gespräch mit einem frommen Altmiitterlein von Ulm, in Flugschrifien aus den ersten Jahren der Reformation, 1, 63: ‘Altmiterlein. Soll man dann nit bitten für die lieben seelen?

Brüder Hainrich.Ja, aber du solt kain dieb und rauber an den erben werden, wie obgemelt. bit got vor fiir die seelen und gib aynem armen menschen etwann ain haller, pfenning, drunck ete. Ist besser dann das vigilgen und mürmeln in dem chor. da ist kain andacht.’

Falkenburg and Walter Melion, whose suggestions concerning ornament and interpretive skill

redeemed this essay. Larry Silver and Christine Géttler taught me much about the art of seeing well, while Niklaus Largier reminded me that some people preferred a more hands-on approach to cognition. Passages concerning visual agility were presented at the 2004 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Toronto, where Jeffrey Chipps Smith (among others) asked difficult questions about the availability of such agility as well as the education that would help breed it. I still have no adequate answers. ! Geert Grote provides the most familiar example. See Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, ed. by John van Engen (New York: Paulist, 1988), pp. 103 and 108.

238

Bret Rothstein

So numerous are the contemporaneous writers who fret about concupiscence of the eyes that one could be forgiven for thinking of the fifteenth-century Low

Countries as a region populated entirely by dunces.’ Yet the student of early Netherlandish visual culture faces a wealth of extraordinarily sophisticated

imagery. Van Eyck’s paradoxical and self-referential reflections, for instance, like Van der Weyden’s deeply reflexive narratives, evince a formidable acumen that is both visual and intellectual. But we spill so much scholarly ink over developing authorial self-consciousness that we risk missing the fact that such details presume the attention of a similarly clever audience. (The game is not worth playing that offers no opponent.) Moreover, most such sophistication seems dedicated to close and largely unsupervised observation.

Take, for instance, the Hours of Mary

of Burgundy

(c. 1475).

Likely

commissioned on the occasion either of Mary of Burgundy’s marriage or of the birth of Margaret of Austria, this manuscript raises important questions about intellectual and visual skill in the Northern Renaissance.’ It is relatively large (22.5 x 26.3 cm); its ornamentation is quite lavish and, as we shall note, manifests remarkable thematic consistency; and it is in extremely good condition.’

? For more on concupiscentia oculorum in medieval and early modern northern Europe, see

most recently Jeffrey Hamburger, ‘Idol curiosity’, in Curiositas. Welterfahrung und ästhetische Neugierde in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. by Klaus Krüger (Gôttingen: Wallstein, 2002), pp. 19-58; Conrad Rudolph, ‘The Things of Greater Importance’: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Mediev Attitude toward alArt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 110-15; Meyer Schapiro, ‘On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art’, in Art and Thought: Issued in Honour of Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, ed. by

K. Bharatha lyer (London: Luzac, 1947), pp. 134-35; and Christopher Wood, “Curious Pictures” and the Art of Description’, Word & Image, 11 (1995), 336-43. ὁ Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857. * See, for instance, Eric Inglis, ‘Commentary’, in The Hours of Mary of Burgundy:

Codex

Vindobonensis 1857, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey M iller, 1995),

pp. 14-16. Andrea Pearson has suggested to me that the book may have been εἰπε to coincide

239

THE RULE OF METAPHOR

All of these traits suggest the manuscript was something of a calculated

showpiece — hardly surprising in the Burgundian courtly milieu. Yet note the

genre

of object

used:

a book

of hours.

It has long been

recognized

that

manuscripts of this type were status symbols. But the hours also comprised one of the most important devotional technologies among the literate classes of the fifteenth century. Moreover, that technology was directly and necessarily associated with private, potentially idiosyncratic, and relatively independent

religious experience. One might therefore wonder if its spiritual utility also comprised part of the display in question. That is, might the original owner of this book have been expected to demonstrate a refinement that pertained not only to

material riches or eyebrow-raising expense, but also to matters of mind and of soul? After all, the Hours of Mary of Burgundy was designed to embody all that a devotional book can be. It follows that the intended reader would herself have

been subject to a concomitant expectation of embodying all that devotion itself can be.

Most accounts of this book emphasize folios 14° and 43° (Figs 71 and 72),

particularly their repetitions and variations of compositional structure, spatial logic,

and of course technologies of devotion (in the depictions of reading, parallel manuscripts, and the rosary, among other things). Interest in these two pages, though justified, tends to obscure the fact that visual repetition and variation characterize the ornamentation of the manuscript as a whole. In some cases, repetition occurs within the confines of a given folio. The bas-de-page for each month in the calendar

pages, for instance, plays with as well as against the seasonal activities and astrological signs depicted above. Repeated tankards resonate in January (Fig. 73), while in February fish turn out to be edible as well as emblematic. In other cases,

ornament repeats across multiple pages. A series of harps, for instance, provide loose

visual and thematic correspondences among fols 31", 59°, 128", and 139". In still

other cases, visual resonance derives from variation. This is the case between 31‘ and 31", for instance, where spinning yields to music as the marginal activity of choice, though the actors in question betray only modest visible alteration (Figs 74 and 75).

with the conception or birth of Margaret of Austria. For more on this, see Pearson, Envisioning

Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350-1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance (Aldershot:

Ashgate, 2006), p. 56.

|

$ [came upon Anne H. van Buren, ‘A Window on Two Duchesses of Burgundy’, in Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow: Studies in Painting and Manuscript Mlumination of the Late Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne S. Korteweg

(London: Harvey Miller, 2006), pp. 505-20, only as this essay was in the final stages of production. I therefore have not been able to respond to Van Buren’s meticulous account of the division of labour that produced this manuscript. [can only note that her argument both bolsters

the idea that Cod. 1857 was expected to have a high degree of thematic unity and complicates it, since she demonstrates that the themes in question seem to have changed over time. ‘ For a wonderful account of related issues, see Brigitte Buettner, ‘Past Presents: New Year's Gifts at the Valois Courts, ca. 1400’, Art Bulletin, 83 (2001), 598-625, and Brigitte Buettner, ‘Profane Illuminations, Secular Illusions: Manuscripts in Late Medieval Courtly Society’, Art Bulletin, 74 (1992), 75-90.

5

240

Fig. 71:

Bret Rothstein

Hours

of Mary

of Burgundy,

Vienna,

Osterreichische

Nationalbibliothek,

Codex

Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 14°. c. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

THE RULE OF METAPHOR

Fig. 72: Hours

of Mary of Burgundy,

Vindobonensis

1857, fol. 43".ε. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission ofthe Bildarchiv

ONB,

Vienna.

Vienna, Osterreichische

Nationalbibliothek,

Codex

THE RULE OF

METAPHOR

Wi

Bret Rothstein

Ue

wot Ly

abs Nice IR

+]

Fig. 73: Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 2". ε. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission ofthe Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

Fig. 74: Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex à Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 31‘.c. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

|

|

| |

|

Bret Rothstein

ji

Ra

ἰδ

they involve the Examples such as this last one are especially interesting because reveal their differences sequential display of seemingly identical pictorial subjects that pointed since the only on closer examination. This strategy seems all the more imagery on recto align to primary illuminator of this manuscript often takes pains on any given folio.’ and verso in order to minimize the appearance of errant traces angel on 61‘, whose the of Think word. Visual interplay also involves the written man who harvests gesture leads our eye toward the text above, or of the young

CE.

με beal

Res side nvedubue hevodts note Wee)

CCE Mat ab OLEH ee να Acco fon tant duré. OD

/1

|.

| UE qui HHL dE αὖ LOCO à @ OW u cuire αι ἀπ CUS T OMA CO Dene

CU AUdTATS uT

Ad

245

THE RULE OF METAPHOR

€

Ped το TULLE C

strawberries sprouting from the word Dominus on 175° (Figs76 and

77). Text returns

ornamented that the favour, most notably in the cadelles. Elsewhere, script is so richly

the Hours it threatens to cease functioningas a verbal structure (Fig. 78). Throughout

leaves, blossom of Mary of Burgundy, in fact, flourishes proliferate, intertwine, sprout from which faces into delicate flowers, bear fruit, or trail off into animal and human of the manuscript extend further elaborations. Consequently, the textual component part. counter pictorial is brought into close conceptual proximity to its and 148, for The resulting relationship is fraught, even competitive. On 147’ what we might term oral fixation links marginal figures blowing instance, a motofif

zes this horns with cadelles sprouting flourishes (Figs 79 and 80). In fact, 148" emphasi the pose and orientation of its musical angel with the form relationship by paralleling

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rival) of the grotesque above. Details such as these highlight the analogous (if us understand capabilities of two representational systems. Recognizing this helps

(Fig. 81 ). spicier examples, such as a monkey on 134°, which exposes itselfto a cadelle

y to endow his This interaction is particularly frisky, for the scribe has a tendenc this particular anthropomorphic flourishes with elaborate tongues — atheme chat, in l counterpart. variation, implies that script will perform analingus on its margina his cudgel wields man Elsewhere, the contest grows violent: on 160" a bearded wild

less against a small, distinctly unattractive grotesque (Fig. 82). Playfulness nonethe

gin the remains an undercurrent. Take 135", for instance, where marginalia goes beggin

the face of text (Fig. 83). Such jocular animosity provides a reflexive meditation on image more relationship of text and illumination — and, by extension, word and ntally fundame a s provoke y generally. Consequently, the Hours of Mary of Burgund

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7 Foran example ofa manuscript cultivating such anticipatory viewing, see James H. Marrow,

Fig. 75: Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 31°.c. 1475. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Bildarchiv ONB, Vienna.

ing the ‘Art and Experience in Dutch Manuscript Illumination around 1400: Transcend of discussion his also See 101-17. (1996), 54 Gallery, Art Walters the of Boundaries’, Journal Invention Pictorial on, illuminati t manuscrip dish Netherlan early in playfulness and naturalism 2005). in Netherlandish Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages (Leuven: Peeters,

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It is tempting to ascribe the lavishness and diversity of marginalia in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy to a courtly taste for luxury and to the pleasure of money well spent. The manuscript is, after all, an embarrassment of pictorial riches, some of which are strikingly witty. But that embarrassment also provides considerable intellectual as well as aesthetic rewards for the attentive viewer. Fortunately, such a viewer need not choose between instruction and delight here. Ample precedent exists for the coexistence of the two. Think of the rhetorical concept of ductus, the use of ornament both to relieve fatigue and to guide the reader or viewer toward some fundamental idea. Though sometimes treated as an obscure relic of the monastic tradition, the basic idea seems to enjoy a broader applicability. Insofar as marginalia, script, and even illuminations repeatedly encourage us to work from marginalia to illumination, illumination to text, text back to marginalia, recto to verso, verso to recto, and so forth, it exemplifies that same organizational principle, applied here to a courtly manuscript. Comparative reading of the sort noted above, for instance, both affords the viewer a bit of amusement and attracts her attention repeatedly to various portions of the manuscript. Of course, there are limits to the applicability of the concept. Not least among these is the potential to regard ornamentation as peripheral, the agglomeration of minor details meant to send one on her way. Indeed, ornament in the Hours of

Mary of Burgundy does not simply refresh the reader or propel her from point to

point. It continually begs to be made intelligible, to be endowed with interpretive

substance. (That is, after all, what visual motifs do: suggest content through the

emphasis provided by repetition.) In other words, visual interplay and reflexivity in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy do not merely cultivate attentive or comparative viewing of something else. They also define the book as an aesthetic whole dedicated to the task of devout reading. This definition stems, interestingly enough, from a reflexive pictorial game — the first, in fact, of the entire manuscript. The game begins with that inaugural image on 14" of a young woman, seated and reading in her oratory. Coming hot on the heels of the calendar, this illumination sets the tone of the book as a whole. Most importantly, it does so by echoing the behaviour of the viewer: As does the

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254

first and foremost spiritual — this despite the aspects of courtly display we noted at the outset. Repetition of and variation on this visual theme subsequently confirms the ethics of devout reading. For instance, the next depicted manuscript (19°) accompanies the Annunciation, in which Mary learns of the impending fruit of her evident (and literate) devotion. The resulting parallelism treats the religious manuscript as a cornerstone of private spiritual practice.

The play of the depicted book becomes decidedly mystical in the illuminations

preceding the Gospel lessons. In the portrayal of St John on Patmos (27°), for

example, the utility of the written word expands to include not only its devotional applications but also its status as a manifestation of the divine — a fact reiterated in the text below: ‘In principio erat verbum’ (Fig. 84). This manifestation is confirmed in another variation on the theme of the book: a bas-de-page depiction of Moses bearing the Law on 103° (Fig. 85). (It is worth noting, too, that the

Virgin appears opposite him on 102" as the new bearer of that Word.) The book as a whole now functions as a kind of pure liminality, both engaging and framing the concept of an omniscient, omnipresent God. Hence, one might suspect that the dynamic viewing cultivated by the rivalry of word and image in this manuscript would have returned the contemporaneous viewer's attention repeatedly to the

aims and means of visualization. Insofar as two representational systems vie for

primacy, and insofar as both are at the service of privileged, devout reading, they are inextricable from the business of cloaking the imperceptible in visible form. Hence, too, we might suggest that pictorial ornamentation does more than simply guide us from textual passage to textual passage. Visualization is, of course, a basic element of devotional experience. To read is not only to assimilate pictures of words (sc., text) but also to generate mental pictures in response to those words. This cognitive model is perhaps most familiar from the writing of Sts Augustine and Jerome, but its roots lie in the work of Aristotle, whose model of mind denied the possibility of thought itself in the absence of pictures.” However, thought is not a purely optical experience. As the Philosopher tells us, it is partly a matter of internal sight and partly a matter of judgement."°

depicted woman, so does the viewer interact with a luxurious religious manuscript.

The spiritual utility of these paralleled books (depicted and actual) is confirmed by the holy audience in the background, which tags the experience of reading as ? Fora

fuller discussion of the matter, see Charles H. Kahn, ‘Aristotle on Thinking’, Essays

on Aristotle's De anima’, ed. by Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 359-79. ὃ See Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp- 77-81, passim.

See Stephen Everson, Aristotle on Perception (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 166. See also Kahn.

256

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of Burgundy,

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258

Bret Rothstein

The theologian Jean Gerson acknowledges as much in his suggestion that the purpose of the image — whether material or mental — is ‘to help us transcend with our minds from these visible things to the invisible, from the corporeal to the spiritual’.'' It would seem that just as there are degrees of devotional accomplishment — a spectrum of sorts, ranging from those who depend heavily on the image to those who are relatively free of its demands — so must there also be degrees of imaginative accomplishment — in this case, gauged by one’s abilities both to visualize and, perhaps more important, to do so with a high degree of agility.’* The term agility seems particularly fitting because of the mental faculty involved here: imaginatio. Located at the rear of the anterior chamber of the brain, this power not only stores the imagery provided to it by sensus communis, but also makes that imagery available for further consideration." In addition, it links things already seen in order to form new, previously unseen things. (The

most familiar medieval examples are those of an emerald mountain or a flying man.)'* We should note that the agility in question is not simply that of rapid recall or a quasi-painterly response to things read." It is instead a knack for association, the ability to recognize points of contact among disparate visual stimuli, to strengthen those points, and thus to bring both the stimuli and their

!1 Quoted and translated in Sixten Ringbom, ‘Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions:

Notes on the Place of Art in Late Medieval Private Piety’, Gazette des beaux-arts, ser. 6, 73,

(1969), 165.

12 Needless to say, my conclusions have less to do with what Bob Scribner has termed the ‘popular’ devotional tradition than with (at least proclaimed association with) its ‘high cultural’ counterpart. See Robert Scribner, ‘Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late-Medieval and Reformation

Germany’, Journal of Religious History, 15 (1989), 448-69.

13 Medieval and early Renaissance authorities frequently identify imaginatio with phantasia. And while this formulation is hardly universal, it is sufficiently common in northern Europe to

justify the modell employ here. See, for instance, E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological

Theory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975). Also worth consulting are Martin Bauer, Die Erkenntnislehre und der Conceptus entis nach vier Spatschriften des Johannes Gerson (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1973), p- 430; O. Weijers, ‘Le pouvoir d'imagination chez les philosophes néerlandais du XV° siècle’, in Phantasia-imaginatio. Ve Colloquio internazionale. Roma 9-11 gennaio 1986, ed. by M. Fattori and M. Bianchi (Rome: Ateneo, 1988), pp. 205-20, especially pp. 205-10. 14 See, for instance, Harvey, p. 45. 15 See, among others, Carruthers, pp. 133-42.

THE RULE OF METAPHOR

259

referents into contact.'® (The phenomenon is akin to an affinity for punning and

other sorts of wordplay.) One who is able to juggle mental imagery in this way

might therefore be said to possess a quick visual wit. Early Netherlandish painting seems to have relied in two main ways on precisely that sort of wit. For one thing, as noted above, the visual density of many up-market pictures suggests an expectation that viewers would have the ability to read such density well.” For another thing, many such paintings treat that skill explicitly as part of their subject matter. Most important, perhaps, these two phenomena seem closely intertwined. Take, for instance, Petrus Christus’s London portrait of a young man at prayer from the 1450s (Fig. 86). Expressionless, lips parted slightly, the young man’s visage signals the inwardness of meditation. Marking a passage, his hand defines the book as a visual spur to private devotion. The direction of the man’s gaze away from the manuscript and toward things of greater importance indicates that the real work of meditation lies less in challenges of reading than in the ruminative work that follows it. We find a somewhat different account of that work in Hans Memling’s portrait of Maarten van Nieuwenhove, wherein the physical dynamism of the depicted book speaks not only to the point of devotional origin but also to the textual dynamism of exegesis. (Christus, by contrast, establishes a narrative of more specific cross-referencing:

having previously turned to one passage and now pausing to meditate on another, the young man enacts one particular exegetical act.) For these sitters, as for the young woman in the foreground of folio 14° of the Hours of Mary of Burgundy (and, of course, the viewer looking at 43”), literacy and its attendant mental habits are merely part of a larger and more profound skill: that of devotion, which builds on mental, and thus visual, agility. Tellingly, Christus’s portrait subtly calls that agility into question by aligning two depicted images vertically: the manufactured Holy Face hangs above the

young man’s manuscript and is directed toward us. (The Hours of Mary of Burgundy employs a similar strategy on 43", where the background Crucifixion and the depiction of it in the foreground manuscript embed parallel ostentations within a third — the illumination itself— all of which are directed at the viewer.)

16 See Aristotle, On Memory, ed. and trans. by Richard Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1972), pp- 29-30, wherein we read that recollection constitutes a mental chain such that enables the mind

to ‘go quickly from one thing to another, e.g. from milk to white, from white to air, and from this to fluid, from which one remembers autumn.’ Sorabji, pp. 41-48, discusses this at length. 17 See, for instance, Bret L. Rothstein, Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 138-88.

Bret Rothstein

261

THE RULE OF METAPHOR

The

relationship

in Christus’s painting is more

than simply

a comparison

of

devotional technologies; it is a comparison of devotional experiences that derives from the alignment of that Holy Face with depicted sculptural ornamentation at the left. Issues of mediation aside, parallelisms of this sort align the mental and spiritual activities of viewer and sitter.'* Each is presented with a visual aid to

devotion; in fact, we are presented with at least two, the second (the depicted zon manufactum) having been embedded within the first (the painting). The situation is complicated by a third such visual aid: the sculptural ornamentation

in the

upper corner, which comprises three unpainted figurines plus a fourth, empty position. Most likely depicting a sibyl, a prophet from Jewish Scripture, and possibly St John the Baptist, the trio invites an allegorical response.” Yet, the painting explicitly omits one important ingredient for the making of meaning. Most likely it does so not to subvert interpretation but to enhance it. The missing fourth figurine is an opportunity to fill in the blank, to puzzle out the nature of the allegory and complete it. But to complete it imaginatio must provide one with the appropriate image, which is really another way of saying that the viewer of this painting must exercise visual wit. Like the young man, we are presented with religious imagery. Like him, we are thus assigned the task of seeing, rather than

merely looking. Like him, we must make a mental (and spiritual) effort to do so.

The result is a comparison of devotional skills, which here are identified in part with the ability to visualize well.

The same sort of endeavour marks the relationship between 14° and 43" in the

Hours of Mary of Burgundy. Aligned by means of compositional repetition and variation, the two images invite

a comparison

of approaches to religious texts: as

is the young woman on 14" to her book, so is the viewer to the Hours of Mary Burgundy — a situation made unambiguous on 43", where the depicted manuscript recapitulates the orientation and thus accessibility of the actual book. Insofar as the intended contemporaneous viewer of this manuscript was likely the same woman depicted on 14", the comparison becomes something of an admonition, a moment of reflexive viewing that both privileges devotional accomplishment and promotes its refinement.”” Ornamentation confirms the resulting hierarchy

18 ; o