Tributes to Paul Binski: Medieval Gothic: Art, Architecture & Ideas (Tributes, 11) 9781912554744, 1912554747

Citation preview

TRIBUTES TO

PAUL BINSKI MEDIEVAL GOTHIC: ART, ARCHITECTURE & IDEAS

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 1

09/07/2021 09:40

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 2

09/07/2021 09:40

TRIBUTES TO

PAUL BINSKI MEDIEVAL GOTHIC: ART, ARCHITECTURE & IDEAS

Edited by

JULIAN LUXFORD

harvey miller publishers

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 3

09/07/2021 09:40

harvey miller publishers An Imprint of Brepols Publishers London / Turnhout British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library First published 2021 isbn 978-1-912554-74-4 D/2021/0095/113 © 2021 The Authors 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 in writing from the publishers. Editorial direction: Harvey Miller Ltd Design and production: Blacker Design Printed and bound in the EU

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 4

09/07/2021 09:40

Contents

Preface 9 Introduction 11 Publications by Paul Binski

14

Part One: Gothic Architecture 1. Gabriel Byng

29

The ‘Great Rebuilding’ of the Late Middle Ages: Revising the longue durée History of the Gothic Parish Church 2. Meredith Cohen

38

‘The Forest through the Trees’: The Pier as a Seed Plan at the Lady Chapel of Saint-Germain des Prés 3. Emily Guerry

48

A Gothic Throne for the King of Kings: A Re-evaluation of the Design, Date, and Function of the Sainte-Chapelle Tribune 4. James Hillson

62

Linearity and the Gothic Style: Architectural Conception in England and France, 1200–1400 5. Ethan Matt Kavaler

76

Diamonds are Forever: Cell Vaults and the Beginnings of History

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 5

09/07/2021 09:40

6  | tr ibutes to paul bins ki

6. Tom Nickson

88

Describing Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Spain 7. Zoë Opačić

98

Cui bono? The Founding and Funding of Medieval Religious Institutions under Charles IV

Part Two: Gothic Sculpture and its Environment 8. Claudia Bolgia

110

The ‘Tabernacles’ War’ II, c.1400: New Light on the Competition between Icons and Relics in Late Medieval Rome 9. Jean-Marie Guillouët

124

Epigraphic One-Upmanship: Remarks about Text-Image Relationship in Fifteenth Century Monumental Sculpture 10. Justin E. A. Kroesen

136

Gotland Wonder: Unique High Medieval Interior Ensembles on a Baltic Island 11. Julian Luxford

150

John and Johanna Ormond’s Grave 12. Robert Mills

162

Wild Forms: The Art of East Anglian Wodewoses 13. John Munns

174

The Thirteenth-Century Pyx Cover at Wells Cathedral 14. Matthew M. Reeve

186

Fragments from Wisdom’s House: The Lady chapel Juxta Claustrum at Wells Cathedral 15. Laura Slater

198

Musical Wit and Courtly Connections at Cogges

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 6

09/07/2021 09:40

c o nt ents   |   7

16. Beth Williamson

210

The Kilcorban Madonna: Joy and Potential in an Irish Wooden Virgin and Child

Part Three: Gothic Painting, Manuscripts and Poetics 17. Jessica Berenbeim

220

Recapitulation: A Medieval Table of Contents 18. Spike Bucklow

224

The Economics of Blue and Gold 19. Marcia Kupfer

234

A Hill of Foreskins: Circumcision in the Alba Bible 20. Jean-Pascal Pouzet

248

Notes towards a Poetics of Western Medieval Manuscript Form – with an Application to Illuminated Manuscripts in Cambridge University Library 21. Miri Rubin

258

Ecclesia and Synagoga in Time 22. Kathryn M. Rudy

272

The Bolton/Blackburn Hours (York Minster Add. Ms. 2): A New Solution to its Text-Image Disjunctions using a Structural Model 23. Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras

286

If the Sea Were Made of Ink: A Word on Medieval Visual Poetry 24. Lucy Wrapson

300

A Royal Portrait? Uncovering the Identity of Saints on the Latemedieval Screen at North Tuddenham, Norfolk 25. Patrick Zutshi

312

The Veronica Images Painted by Matteo Giovannetti for Pope Urban V (1369)

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 7

09/07/2021 09:40

8   | tr ibu tes to pau l binsk i

Part Four: Gothic Art and Ideas 26. Mary Carruthers

324

Becoming Like an Angel: The Concept of Sublimis in Monastic Contemplation and in Alchemy 27. Jill Caskey

332

Treasure, Taxonomy, and Transformation in the Inventories of San Nicola, Bari 28. Lucy Donkin

346

Mining Mount Tabor: the Schauinsland Window at the Minster of Freiburg im Breisgau 29. Kate Heard

358

The Ecclesiastical Textiles of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester 30. Robert Maniura

366

Why Study Miraculous Images? 31. Alexander Marr

372

Working by Wit Alone: Aspects of Ingenuity in Dürer 32. M. A. Michael

386

Inventing Gothic Painting: Creating Fine Art 33. Conrad Rudolph

398

The Evidence of the Training of Tour Guides in the Middle Ages 34. Betsy Sears

412

Gothic Logic: Panofsky’s Unwritten Book on ‘The Gothic Style’ Index of Buildings, Manuscripts and Works of Art (by location)

425

Index of Ancient and Medieval Authors, Translators, Artists, Architects and Masons

432

Photographic Credits

435

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 8

09/07/2021 09:40

Preface

A

p rofound debt of grat i t ude is owed to Elly Miller for the interest she showed in this volume from the beginning and for her support at every step of its production until her death on 8 August 2020. Elly was one of those traditionally minded publishers who is good at their job because they care deeply about the work they are publishing and sympathize with its authors. She never cut corners, always listened carefully to her authors and never failed to read what she published. Her eye for excellent design was unrivalled: Elly was an artist in her own right. That Elly’s daughter, Tamar Wang, has adopted oversight of the volume from her mother is deeply gratifying. The editor also welcomes the chance to acknowledge here the input and equanimity of Johan Van der Beke and his team at Brepols, not least Mike Blacker of Blacker Design. Everyone who contributed an essay did so punctually and enthusiastically: it would be hard to convey how much this has done to oil the wheels of progress. Finally, and with genuine feeling, the editor wants to thank all who have expressed an interest in this volume over the four years it has taken to produce. He has in mind here particularly the uniform good nature displayed by those who might rationally have been included but were not, and those who were invited to contribute but found their schedules prohibitive.

[ 9]

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 9

09/07/2021 09:40

10 | tr ibutes to paul bins ki

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 10

09/07/2021 09:40

Introduction

T

h is book pays tribute to the scholarship, friendship, and example of Paul Binski, one of the moving spirits of recent medieval art history. As Festschriften will, it approaches its goal obliquely, vouching for the meaning and value of these things without getting to their heart. For, while bearing witness to a remarkable scholarly compass, the list of Paul’s publications given below hardly conveys the qualities of mind and the sparkling enthusiasm for art that animate his work and have made it so influential. And the thirtyfour essays that follow – there might easily have been double the number – express their affection for a friend and mentor in deliberate, footnoted terms rather than spontaneously. Perhaps the volume is best at communicating the example Paul sets, first as a scholar but also as a teacher and general good citizen to his chosen discipline. The influence of this example emerges in the handling of the essays, tempered as it is by the common feeling that one must wax as brightly as possible in Paul’s presence. It is there, too, in the fact that more than one third of the contributors are past students of Paul. And it is also reflected by the esteem which more senior colleagues show here through the willingness and thoughtfulness of their contributions. Paul was born in London in 1956. His aesthetic turn came early, sparked by attendance at the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Kensington. Here, in the depths of a neo-classical interior, he was captured by the play of lights before solemn icons, the aromatic redolence of incense, and the resonance of the choir, in which his father, a refugee from Poland, sang tenor. With hindsight, this immersion in a milieu that engaged all the senses may help to explain Paul’s preference for thoroughgoing, integrated approaches to medieval art as opposed to the specialization by medium that until recently was normal among art historians. It also helped to foster the passion for music, especially Baroque works for organ, which is an essential part of his character. Paul is a gifted organist himself, and perhaps never more content than when seated at the keyboards of some grand instrument abroad. Paul traces his interest in the middle ages to a screening of Sir Laurence Olivier’s Henry V at primary school. He became a boy medievalist, cycling on weekends into rural Middlesex to rub brasses. Happily, the enthusiasm stuck: it remained with him throughout the period of his secondary schooling at Harrow, where he went on a scholarship, and then at Cambridge, where he matriculated into Gonville and Caius College as an Open Scholarship holder in 1975. This was the beginning of an association with Caius that continues today. Paul read Part I of the History Tripos before switching to Art History for the Part II, which he studied under George Henderson. He took his undergraduate degree [ 11 ]

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 11

09/07/2021 09:40

12  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski

in 1979, was awarded an MA in 1982, and his PhD in 1984, for which he also worked under Henderson’s supervision and with the support of Christopher Brooke. The PhD thesis, a study of the lost murals in the Painted Chamber at the Palace of Westminster, was published as a monograph in 1986. Before taking his PhD, Paul was elected into a Research Fellowship at Caius College, which he held from 1983 to 1987. The latter year witnessed the Age of Chivalry exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, to this day the most important individual event in the study of English medieval art. Paul, at the age of 30, was at the centre of things, as joint-curator and joint-editor of an award-winning catalogue that remains singularly useful. His collaborator, Jonathan Alexander, invited him onto the project having read a typescript of his forthcoming book: Paul recognizes this today as his ‘big break’ in career terms. But cuts to higher education funding introduced at the beginning of Margaret Thatcher’s third term as Prime Minister made this an uncharitable time for the history of art in British universities. Intuitively mindful of the humanist dictum that to stay still is to vanish but to move on is to survive – immota labascunt, et quae perpetuo sunt agitata manent – Paul left for the United States, spending a year as a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Institute of Advanced Study (1987–8), and then three years at Yale University as Assistant Professor, in the department of the History of Art (1988–91). This exposure to intellectual life in the US was transformative and he acquired an enduring taste for it. At Princeton he shared ideas with Clifford Geertz and Kurt Weitzmann, and at Yale he was fully exposed to the European tradition of art history, which caused him to rethink approaches he had previously taken for granted. Cambridge suddenly seemed a bit provincial. Always philosophically minded, Paul took advantage of an intellectual freedom which simply did not exist in English art history at the time. This did not mean repudiating his empirical training, but rather, produced a distinctive transatlantic kind of art history in which critical engagement with ideas is inseparable from respect for the formal qualities of artworks and buildings. In fact, documentary research, close looking at art, and an informed grasp of the object domain are still central to Paul’s work. They sit, for example, at the heart of his involvement in the conservation and study of the Thornham Parva and Westminster retables, both collaborations with the Hamilton Kerr Institute (the conservation arm of the Fitzwilliam Museum), and in his work on the Cambridge Illuminations project of 2005, whose exhibitions committee Paul chaired and whose catalogue he co-edited. In scholarly terms, the most significant product of Paul’s empirical impulse is the great catalogue of Western illuminated manuscripts in Cambridge University Library which he produced with Patrick Zutshi (published 2011). This work involved the fullest survey of illuminated manuscripts undertaken in Cambridge since the Victorian period. In 1991, Paul was invited to apply for a lectureship in the department of Art History at the University of Manchester, which he accepted. In this period he wrote two books, one his signature monograph Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets (1995), which analysed the mythology of kingship in relation to art, the other Medieval Death (1996), a primer on the aesthetics of anxiety in medieval ritual and representation. Both books provided a shot in the arm for studies of the psychology of memoria, offering an alternative to the

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 12

09/07/2021 09:40

i nt ro d uc t i o n   |   13

trainspotting and freewheeling social history normal in studies of tombs, chantry chapels etc. at the time. After five years at Manchester, and at the age of 38, he was offered the Chair in Art History at the University of St Andrews left vacant by Martin Kemp’s departure for Oxford. Manchester made a counteroffer, but at the same time an opportunity to return to Cambridge arose and Paul took it, entering a University Lectureship in Art History there in January 1996. At the same time, he returned to Gonville and Caius College as a Fellow, and he has worked in Cambridge ever since, rising from Lecturer to Reader and then Professor. Paul found the return to Cambridge, with its vast resources and unique scholarly networks, highly energizing. He flourished intellectually, while also taking on a great deal of teaching and administrative work, including the role of head of department (which he has filled twice) and supervision of the first of several cohorts of PhD students. From 2002–4 he also found time to write and present a thirty-programme television series – Divine Designs – for Channel 5. His scholarly focus, though always more than English, now extended routinely into continental art, notably that of Bohemia, France, Germany, and Italy. Paul’s ideas in this period shifted significantly, away from anthropology and critical theory in favour of aesthetics. The turn can be charted in his monographs Becket’s Crown (2004), Gothic Wonder (2014), and Gothic Sculpture (2019), and well as in a raft of intervening papers. His interests, initially drawn to the ethical dimensions of medieval art and architecture, came increasingly to centre on the aesthetics of form. Gothic Wonder, a book with roots in the Slade Lectures Paul delivered at Oxford in 2006–7, is his major contribution to the history of artifice. The turn to aesthetics and form has entailed a close engagement with the relationship between language and objects, and a concomitant scepticism about the ability of cultural context to explain art. Increasingly, Paul turns to music as the aesthetic exemplification of the irreducibility of form to context. Paul was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007 and into a Corresponding Fellowship of the Medieval Academy of America the following year, honours that recognize both his scholarship and the subtler element of his contribution to art history. Although hard to encapsulate, this second element has a special value, as any of the former students represented in this volume would quickly agree. It lies as much in what Paul’s career has enabled and fostered as what it has produced: as such, it touches directly on people as well as art and scholarship. To acknowledge this is to approach the humane, generous, convivial side of Paul’s personality, something which, while conspicuous to many, is better known (to invoke Bertrand Russell’s distinction) by acquaintance than description. In recent years, Paul has expressed doubts about the validity of the higher educational ‘project’ as a whole, to the extent that he sees his work continuing outside the academy on retirement. At most, however, this will entail a step sideways rather than a retreat from an arena in which he has contended so vitally and to such general benefit. He will never be less than a good friend to rigorous, intelligent art history, no matter how or by whom it is practiced, and a firm believer in the virtues of the symposium as much as the seminar room.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 13

09/07/2021 09:40

Publications by Paul Binski to 2019

1980 ‘Chartham, Kent and the Court’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 13, 1980, pp. 73–9.

1985 ‘The Coronation of the Virgin on the Hastings Brass at Elsing, Norfolk’, Journal of the Church Monuments Society, 1, 1985, pp. 1–9.

1986 The Painted Chamber at Westminster, Society of Antiquaries Occasional Papers, ns 9, London. ‘A Ducciesque Episode at Ely: the Mural Decorations of Prior Crauden’s Chapel’, in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. M. W. Ormrod, Woodbridge, pp. 28–41 (with D. Park). ‘The Early Portrait: Verbal or Pictorial?’, in Europäische Kunst um 1300, ed. G. Schmidt and E. Liskar, Akten des XXV. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Wien, 4–10 September 1983 (Bd 6), Vienna, pp. 211–15.

1987 ed. J. J. G. Alexander and P. Binski, Age of Chivalry. Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400, London (exh. cat.). (Winner of the Minda de Gunzburg Prize, 1988.) Catalogue entries nos. 329–39, 681, in Age of Chivalry [see above]. ‘Monumental Brasses’, in Age of Chivalry [see above], pp. 171–3. P. Binski, E. C. Norton and D. Park, Dominican Painting in East Anglia: the Thornham Parva Retable and the Musée de Cluny Frontal, Woodbridge.

[ 14]

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 14

09/07/2021 09:40

publ i c at i o ns b y paul b i nski   |   15

St Michael’s Long Stanton, Cambridgeshire, London (booklet). ‘What was the Westminster Retable?’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 140, 1987, pp. 152–74. ‘The Stylistic Sequence of London Figure Brasses’, in The Earliest English Brasses: Patronage, Style and Workshops, ed. J. Coales, London, pp. 69–131.

1988 ‘The Earliest Photographs of the Westminster Retable’, Burlington Magazine, 130, 1988, pp. 128–32. ‘The Tomb of Edward I and Early London Brass Production’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 14, 1988, pp. 234–40 (with W. J. Blair).

1990 ‘The Cosmati at Westminster and the English Court Style’, Art Bulletin, 72, 1990, pp. 6–34. ‘Reflections on La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei: Hagiography and Kingship in Thirteenth-century England’, Journal of Medieval History, 16, 1990, pp. 333–50. review: C. Tracy, English Gothic Choir Stalls 1400–1540, (Woodbridge, 1990), Antiquaries Journal, 70, 1990, p. 496.

1991 Painters (British Museum Medieval Craftsmen series), Toronto and London; available in French, Spanish and Dutch edns. ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries and Matthew Paris’s Life of St Edward the Confessor’, Archaeologia, 109, 1991, pp. 85–100. review: D. Gillerman, ed., Gothic Sculpture in America I: the New England Museums (New York and London, 1989), Speculum, 66, 1991, pp. 158–9. review: S. Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Berkeley, 1987), Art Bulletin, 73, 1991, pp. 141–4. review: L. M. C. Randall et al., Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery 1: France 875–142 (Baltimore and London, 1989), Speculum, 66, 1991, pp. 678–9.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 15

09/07/2021 09:40

16 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski

1992 ‘The Murals in the Nave of St Albans Abbey’, in Church and City: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke, ed. D. Abulafia, M. Franklin and M. Rubin, Cambridge, pp. 249–78. review: M. Camille, The Gothic Idol (Cambridge, 1989), Burlington Magazine, 134, 1992, pp. 36–7. review: M. Camille, Image on the Edge (London, 1992), Times Higher Education, July 1992.

1993 editor, Art History, volumes 16/3 (1993) - 20/3 (1997). review: P. Z. Blum, Early Gothic Saint-Denis (Berkeley, 1992), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44, 1993, pp. 712–13. review: J. Gardner, The Tomb and the Tiara (Oxford, 1992), Antiquaries Journal, 73, 1993, pp. 218–9. review: The Church and the Arts, ed. D. Wood (Oxford, 1992), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44, 1993, pp. 697–9.

1994 ‘Charles Reginald Dodwell’ (obituary), The Caian, 1994, pp. 105–7. review: T. W. Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism (Cambridge 1992), Art History, 17, 1994, pp. 133–4. review: L. M. C. Randall et al., Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery 2: France 1420–1540 (Baltimore and London, 1992), Speculum, 69, 1994, pp. 1256–7. exh. review: ‘The Wilton Diptych and Court Art in the Reign of Richard II’ (National Gallery, London), Kunstchronik, 47, 1994, pp. 188–90.

1995 Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200– 1400, New Haven and London. (Winner of the Longmans-History Today Book Prize, 1996, and the Yale University Press Governor’s Award, 1997.) ‘The 13th-century English Altarpiece’ in Norwegian Medieval Altar Frontals and Related Materials, ed. M, Malmanger, L, Berczelly and S, Fuglesang, Acta Institutum Romanum Norvegiae 11, Rome, pp. 47–57.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 16

09/07/2021 09:40

pub l i c at i o ns by paul bi nski  |   17

‘The Technique of the Westminster Retable: a Preliminary Report with an Analysis of the Glass Components’, in Norwegian Medieval Altar Frontals and Related Materials [see above], pp. 59–71 (with I. Freestone). ‘Discoveries in the Painted Chamber’, British Museum Society Magazine, 23, pp. 2–3. ‘Two Ceiling Fragments from the Painted Chamber at Westminster Palace’, The Burlington Magazine, 137, 1995, pp. 491–501 (with M. Liversidge). ‘Two Panels from the Painted Chamber of Henry III’, National Art Collections Fund 1995 Review, p. 104 (no.  4178). ‘The English Decorated Style: Problems and Possibilities’, in Bilan et Perspectives des Etudes Médiévales en Europe, ed. J. Hamesse, Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales 3, Louvain-la-Neuve, pp. 313–28.

1996 Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, London, and Cornell University Press; revised edn in paperback, 2001. ‘Even more Scottish than English’, The Spectator, July 1996, pp. 11–13. ‘Gothic. IV. Painting’, ‘London IV. 2 (iii). Westminster Abbey: Painting’ and ‘Palace of Westminster’, ‘Muldenfaltenstil’, ‘C. A. Stothard’, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. J. Turner, 34 vols, London, vol. 13, pp. 126–57; vol. 19, pp. 606–8, 611–12; vol. 22, pp. 269–70; vol. 29, pp. 732–3. editor, Image: Music: Text (Art History special issue, 19/1, 1996) (with M. Pointon). review: Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, The Cathedral: the Social and Architectural Dynamics of Construction (Cambridge, 1994), Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55, 1996, pp. 208–10.

1997 ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile’, Art History, 20, 1997, pp. 350–74. ‘The Liber Regalis: its Date and European Context’, in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam, London, pp. 233–43. ‘A Survey of English Thirteenth-century Figurative Painting on Panel’, in Das Aschaffenburger Tafelbild. Studien zur Tafelmalerei des 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. E. Emmerling and C. Ringer. Arbeitshefte des Bayerischen Landesamtes für Denkmalpflege 89, Munich, pp. 325–34.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 17

09/07/2021 09:40

18  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski

editor, National Art Academies in Europe, 1860–1906: Educating, Training, Exhibiting (Art History special issue, 20/1, 1997) (with M. Pointon).

1998 ‘New Buildings, Alterations and Restorations’, in Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College, vol. 8, ed. F. Booth et al., Cambridge, pp. 946–63. review: C. Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–1550 (London and New York, 1997), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 49, 1998, p. 346. review: S. Murray, Notre Dame, Cathedral of Amiens: the Power of Change in Gothic (Cambridge, 1996), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 49, 1998, pp. 166–8. review: G. M. Radke, Viterbo: Profile of a Thirteenth-Century Papal Palace (Cambridge, 1996), Speculum, 73, 1998, pp. 885–7. review: K. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 2 vols (London, 1996), Times Literary Supplement, no. 4956, 1998, p. 30.

1999 ‘An Analysis of the Length of Plates used for English Monumental Brasses before 1350’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 16, 1999, pp. 229–38. ‘English Art at Assisi?’, The British Art Journal, 1, 1999, pp. 74–5. ‘The English Parish Church and its Art in the Later Middle Ages: A Review of the Problem’, Studies in Iconography, 20, 1999, pp. 1–25. ‘Art and Architecture’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, V, c.1198–c.1300, ed. D. Abulafia, Cambridge, pp. 84–104. ‘Hierarchies and Orders in English Royal Images of Power’, in Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. J. Denton, London, pp. 74–93. review: K. Corsepius, Notre-Dame-en-Vaux. Studien zur Baugeschichte des 12. Jahrhunderts in Châlons-sur-Marne (Stuttgart, 1997), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50, 1999, pp. 145–6. review: B. Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England (Woodbridge, 1998), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50, 1999, pp. 778–9.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 18

09/07/2021 09:40

pub l i c at i o ns by paul bi nski  |   19

review: Medieval Art: Recent Perspectives. A Memorial Tribute to C. R. Dodwell, ed. G. R. Owen-Crocker and T. Graham (Manchester, 1998), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50, 1999, p. 775.

2000 ‘A Note on the Hutton Conyers Charter and Related Fenland Manuscript Illumination’, Antiquaries Journal, 80, 2000, pp. 296–302. ‘Court Patronage and International Gothic’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, VI, c.1300–1415, ed. M. Jones, Cambridge, pp. 222–33. review: G. Duby, Art and Society in the Middle Ages (London, 1999), Times Literary Supplement, no. 5060, 2000, p. 27. review: D. Weiss, Art and the Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis. Cambridge 1998. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51, 2000, pp. 398–9.

2001 ed. P. Binski and W. Noel, New Offerings, Ancient Treasures. Essays on Medieval Art in Honour of George Henderson, Stroud. ‘How Northern was the Northern Master at Assisi?’, The British Academy Review, January-July 2001, pp. 12–15. ‘The Crucifixion and the Censorship of Art around 1300’, in The Medieval World, ed. P. Linehan and J. Nelson, London, pp. 342–60; 2nd edn, revised, ed. P. Linehan, J. Nelson and M. Costambeys, London, 2018, pp. 418–36. ‘Patronage’, in The Oxford Companion to Western Art, ed. H. Brigstocke, Oxford, pp. 345–6. ‘Le retable de Westminster et l’art francais à la fin du XIIIe siècle’, in 1300. L’art au temps de Philippe le Bel, ed. D. Gaborit Chopin and F. Avril, Rencontres de l’École du Louvre 16, Paris, pp. 231–8. review: A Vauchez and J Cannon, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti. Sienese Art and the Cult of the Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany (University Park, 1999), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52, 2001, pp. 365–6.

2002 ‘How Northern was the Northern Master at Assisi?’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 117, 2002, pp. 73–138.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 19

09/07/2021 09:40

20 | tr ibutes to paul binski

‘The Cosmati and romanitas in England: an Overview’, in Westminster Abbey. The Cosmati Pavements, ed. L. Grant and R. Mortimer, Courtauld Research Papers 3, Aldershot, pp. 116–34. review: A. M. Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries and England (University Park, 2000), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53, 2002, pp. 146–7. review: D. Pearsall, Gothic Europe, 1200–1450 (London 2001), English Historical Review, 117, 2002, pp. 685–6. review: D. Pincus, The Tombs of the Doges of Venice (Cambridge, 2000), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53, 2002, pp. 147–8.

2003 St Mary’s Church, Thornham Parva, Suffolk: A Guide to the Retable, Thornham Parva (booklet). ‘L’abbaye de Westminster, les Bénédictins et Rome: un épisode homérique de l’histoire de l’art gothique’, in Le monde des cathedrals, ed. R. Recht, Paris, pp. 83–116. ‘The Art of Death’, in Gothic. Art for England 1400–1547, ed. R. Marks and P. Williamson, London, pp. 436–8. ‘The Conservation of the Thornham Parva Retable and the Art-historical Implications’, in The Thornham Parva Retable. Technique, Conservation and Context of an English Medieval Painting, ed. A. Massing, London and Turnhout, pp. 10–14. ‘The Painted Nave Ceiling of Peterborough Abbey’, in The English Medieval Cathedral: Papers in Honour of Pamela Tudor-Craig, ed. J. Backhouse, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 10, Stamford, pp. 41–62. ‘A “Sign of Victory”: the Coronation Chair, its Manufacture, Setting and Symbolism’, in The Stone of Destiny: Artefact and Icon, ed. R. Welander, D. Breeze and T. O. Clancy, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland monograph ser. 22, Edinburgh, pp. 207–22. review: L. L. Gee, Women, Art and Patronage: From Henry III to Edward III (1216–1377) (Woodbridge, 2002), English Historical Review, 118, 2003, pp. 1046–7. review: C. F. O’Meara, Monarchy and Consent. The Coronation Book of Charles V of France (London and Turnhout, 2001), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 54, 2003, pp. 347–8. review: I. Rosario, Art and Propaganda. Charles IV of Bohemia, 1346–1378 (Woodbridge, 2000) Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 54, 2003, pp. 349–50.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 20

09/07/2021 09:40

publ i c at i o ns b y paul b i nski   |   21

review: N. Vincent, The Holy Blood. King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge, 2001), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 54, 2003, pp. 346–7.

2004 Becket’s Crown. Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300, New Haven and London; corrected online edn, 2020, at https://www.aaeportal.com/ publications/-19393/becket-s-crown--art-and-imagination-in-gothicengland-1170–1300. (Winner of the ACE / Mercers’ International Book Award, 2005, and the Historians of British Art Prize for a single-author book on a topic pre-1800, 2006; shortlisted for the William M. B. Berger Prize, 2005) ‘Ernst Kitzinger’ (obituary), The Caian, 2004, pp. 241–5. ‘Nicholas Broker’, ‘Walter of Durham’, ‘Gilbert Prince’, ‘Hugh of St Albans’, ‘William Torel’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols, Oxford, vol. 7, pp. 804–5; vol. 17, pp. 404–5; vol. 45, p. 390; vol. 48, p. 587; vol. 55, pp. 45–6. review: J. Higgitt, The Murthly Hours. Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West London, 2000), English Historical Review, 119, 2004, pp. 439–41. review: R. Jenkyns, Westminster Abbey (London, 2004), The Tablet, 31 July 2004, pp. 21–2. review: A. A. Jordan, Visualizing Kingship in the Windows of the Sainte-Chapelle (Turnhout, 2002), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 55, 2004, pp. 62–3. review: A. R. Meyer, Medieval Allegory and the Building of the New Jerusalem (Cambridge, 2003), English Historical Review, 119, 2004, pp. 1041–2.

2005 ed. P. Binski and S. Panayotova, The Cambridge Illuminations. Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West, London and Turnhout (exh. cat.). Catalogue entries nos. 28, 30, 35, 51, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 83, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 123, 133, 137, 146, 178, 179, in The Cambridge Illuminations [see above]. ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Illuminations [see above], pp. 9–16. ‘Private Devotion: Humility and Splendor’, in The Cambridge Illuminations [see above], pp. 163–9 (with N. J. Morgan). ‘History and Literature’, in The Cambridge Illuminations [see above], pp. 235–40 (with R. McKitterick).

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 21

09/07/2021 09:40

22  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski

The Westminster Retable. England’s Oldest Altarpiece, London (booklet). ‘The Cult of St Edward the Confessor’, History Today, 55/11, pp. 21–7. review: E. Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven and London, 2003), Material Religion, 1 (2005), pp. 145–6. review: L. Weigert, Weaving Sacred Stories. French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity (Ithaca, 2004), Speculum, 80, 2005, p. 1397.

2006 P. Binski and M. Bunker, Peterborough Cathedral 2001–2006: from Devastation to Restoration, London. ‘The Faces of Christ in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora’, in Tributes in Honour of James H. Marrow. Studies in Painting and Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance, ed. J. F. Hamburger and A. S. Korteweg, London and Turnhout, pp. 85–92. ‘John the Smith’s Grave’, in Tributes to Jonathan J. G. Alexander. The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts, Art and Architecture, ed. S. L’Engle and G. B. Guest, London and Turnhout, pp. 386–93. ‘Matthew Paris in Norway: the Faberg St Peter’, in Medieval Painting in Northern Europe: Techniques, Analysis, Art History. Studies in Commemoration of the 70th Birthday of Unn Plahter, ed. J. Nadolny and K. Kollandsrud, London, pp. 230–47 (with M. L. Sauerberg). review: P. Cowan, The Rose Window. Splendour and Symbol (London, 2006), Times Literary Supplement, no. 5404, 2006, pp. 9–10. review: J. A. Givens, Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art (Cambridge, 2005), Speculum, 81, 2006, pp. 1198–1200. review: L. Grant, Architecture and Society in Normandy, 1120–1270 (New Haven and London, 2005), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 57, 2006, pp. 575–6. review: Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, 2 vols, ed. S. Blick and R. Tekippe (Leiden and Boston, 2005), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 57, 2006, pp. 588–9. review: The Trinity Apocalypse, ed. D. McKitterick (London, 2005), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 57, 2006, pp. 582–3.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 22

09/07/2021 09:40

pub l i c at i o ns by paul bi nski  |   23

2007 ‘Liturgy and Local Knowledge: English Perspectives on Trondheim Cathedral’, in The Medieval Cathedral of Trondheim. Architectural and Ritual Considerations in their European Context, ed. M. S. Andås, Ø. Ekroll, A. Haug and N. H. Petersen, Turnhout, pp. 21–46. review: The Mind’s Eye. Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. J. F. Hamburger and A-M. Bouché (Princeton, 2006), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 58, 2007, pp. 528–30.

2008 Catalogue entries nos. 3, 40, 44, 76, 77, in The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand, ed. B. Stocks and N. J. Morgan, Melbourne. ‘Medieval History and Generic Expansiveness: Some Thoughts from near Stratford-onAvon’, in European Religious Cultures. Essays Offered to Christopher Brooke on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, ed. M. Rubin, London, pp. 17–33. ‘The Westminster Retable’ in The History of British Art 600–1600, ed. T. Ayers, London, pp. 74–5.

2009 ed. P. Binski and A. Massing, The Westminster Retable: History, Technique, Conservation, Turnhout. ‘Critical History’ in The Westminster Retable [see above], pp. 12–15. ‘Function, Date, Imagery, Style and Context’ in The Westminster Retable [see above], pp. 16–44. ‘The Patronage and Date of the Legend of St Francis in the Upper Church of S. Francesco at Assisi’, Burlington Magazine, 151, 2009, pp. 663–5. ‘Statues, Retables and Ciboria: The English Gothic Altar in Context, before 1350’, in The Altar and its Environment 1150–1400, ed. J. E. A. Kroesen and V. M. Schmidt, Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages 4, Turnhout, pp. 31–46. review: D. Jackson, Marvellous to Behold. Miracles in Medieval Manuscripts (London, 2007), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 60, 2009, p. 157. review: H. Stahl, Picturing Kingship. History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis (University Park, 2008), Catholic Historical Review, 95, 2009, pp. 807–8.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 23

09/07/2021 09:40

2 4 | tr ibutes to paul binski

review: Late Gothic England. Art and Display, ed. R. Marks (Donington, 2007), English Historical Review, 124, 2009, pp. 1156–7. review: The Year 1300 and the Creation of a New European Architecture, ed. A. Gajewski and Z. Opačić (Turnhout, 2007), Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 162, 2009, pp. 227–9.

2010 ‘Angels, Lost and Found, in the University Library, Cambridge’, in The Medieval Book. Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, ed. J. H. Marrow, R. A. Linenthal and W. Noel, ’t-Goy-Houten, pp. 38–44. ‘The Ante-Reliquary Chapel Paintings in Norwich Cathedral: The Holy Blood, St Richard, and All Saints’ in Tributes to Nigel Morgan: Contexts of Medieval Art: Images, Objects and Ideas, ed. J. M. Luxford and M. A. Michael, London and Turnhout, pp. 241–61. ‘Developments in the Study of Medieval Art since 1983’, in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England, C. M. Barron and C. Burgess, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 20, Donington, pp. 309–21. ‘Reflections on the “Wonderful Height and Size” of Gothic Great Churches and the Medieval Sublime’, in Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics, ed. C. S. Jaeger, New York, pp. 129–56. ‘Wall Paintings in the Chapter House’, in Westminster Abbey Chapter House. The History and Architecture of ‘A Chapter House beyond Compare’, ed. W. Rodwell and R. Mortimer, London, pp. 184–208 (with H. Howard). ‘“Working by Words Alone”: the Architect, Scholasticism and Rhetoric in Thirteenthcentury France’, in Rhetoric Beyond Words, Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. M. Carruthers, Cambridge, pp. 14–51. review: W. Chester Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century (Princeton, 2009), Catholic Historical Review, 96, 2010, pp. 795–7. review: C. Hourihane, Pontius Pilate, Anti-Semitism, and the Passion in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2009), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 61, 2010, p. 609. review: R. Recht, Believing and Seeing. The Art of Gothic Cathedrals. trans. M. Whittall (Chicago, 2008), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 61, 2010, pp. 371–2.

2011 P. Binski and P. Zutshi, Western Illuminated Manuscripts: a Catalogue of the Collection in Cambridge University Library, Cambridge.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 24

09/07/2021 09:40

pub l i c at i o ns by paul bi nski  |   25

‘The Painted Chamber at Westminster, the Fall of Tyrants and the English Literary Model of Governance’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 74, 2011, pp. 121–54. ‘Art-historical Reflections on the Fall of the Colonna, 1297’, in Rome Across Time and Space. Cultural Transmission and the Exchange of Ideas, c. 500–1400, ed. C. Bolgia, R. McKitterick and J. Osborne, Cambridge, pp. 278–90. ‘The Imagery of the High Altar Piscina of St-Urbain at Troyes’, in Architecture, Liturgy and Identity. Liber amicorum Paul Crossley, ed. Z. Opačić and A. Timmermann, Turnhout, pp. 263–73. exh. review: ‘Royal Manuscripts: the Genius of Illumination’ (The British Library), Times Higher Education, no. 2024, 2011, pp. 47–8. review: T. Tatton-Brown and J. Crook, Salisbury Cathedral. The Making of a Medieval Masterpiece (London, 2009), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62, 2011, pp. 378–9.

2012 ed. P. Binski and E. A. New, Patrons and Professionals in the Middle Ages, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 22, Donington. ‘London, Paris, Assisi, Rome around 1300: Questioning Art Hierarchies’, in From Major to Minor. The Minor Arts in Medieval Art History, ed. C. Hourihane, Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers 14, Princeton, pp. 3–21. ‘Villard de Honnecourt and Invention’, in Inventing a Path: Studies in Medieval Rhetoric in Honour of Mary Carruthers, ed. L. Iseppi De Filippis, Turnhout, pp. 63–76. review: M. P. Lillich, The Gothic Stained Glass of Reims Cathedral (University Park, 2011), The Art Newspaper, no. 240, November 2012, p. 70. review: Ely Bishops and Diocese 1109–2009, ed. P. Meadows (Woodbridge, 2010), Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63, 2012, pp. 376–7.

2013 ‘The Heroic Age of Gothic and the Metaphors of Modernism’, Gesta, 52, 2013, pp. 1–17. ‘Humfrey Lovell and the Gates of Gonville and Caius College: a Note on the Sources’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 166, 2013, pp. 176–85. ‘Lost in Translation? The Movement of Things and Ideas in the Gothic Era’, in Artistic Translations between the Fourteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Z. Sarnecka and A. Fedorowicz-Jackowska, Warsaw, pp. 9–19.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 25

09/07/2021 09:40

2 6 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski

review: R. Bork, The Geometry of Creation. Architectural Drawing and the Dynamics of Gothic Design (Farnham, 2011), Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 166, 2013, pp. 212–14.

2014 Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style 1290–1350, New Haven and London. (Winner of the Historians of British Art Prize for a single-author book on a topic pre1800, 2016; shortlisted for the William M. B. Berger Prize, 2015, and the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, 2016.) ‘The Illumination and Patronage of the Douce Apocalypse’, Antiquaries Journal, 94, 2014, pp. 1–8. ‘Notes on Artistic Invention in Gothic Europe’, Intellectual History Review (special issue: The Nature of Invention), 24, 2014, pp. 1–14. ‘The “Prentice’s Bracket” at Gloucester Cathedral’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 167, 2014, pp. 124–32. review: E. Howe et al., Wall Paintings of Eton (London, 2012), The Art Newspaper, no. 256, April 2014, p. 62. review: Speaking to the Eye: Sight and Insight Through Text and Image (1150–1650), ed. T. De Hemptinne, V. Fraeters and M. E. Góngora (Turnhout, 2013), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65, 2014, pp. 900–01. review: A. Kinch, Imago Mortis. Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture (Leiden and Boston, 2013), Speculum, 89, 2014, pp. 1173–5.

2015 ‘The Origin of the Term Chair Organ’, Journal of the British Institute of Organ Studies, 39, 2016, pp. 180–2. ‘Iconography and Influences’, in Conservation and Discovery. Peterborough Cathedral Nave Ceiling and Related Structures, ed. J. Hall and S. M. Wright, London, pp. 89–101. ‘Seats, Relics and the Rationale of Images in Westminster Abbey, Henry III to Edward I’, Westminster, 1. The Art, Architecture and Archaeology of the Royal Abbey, ed. W. Rodwell and T. Tatton-Brown, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, 39, Leeds, pp. 180–204 (with E. Guerry). review: M. Cohen, The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy (Cambridge, 2015), Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 168, 2015, pp. 254–5.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 26

09/07/2021 09:40

pub l i c at i o ns by paul bi nski  |   27

2016 ‘An Early Miniature Copy of the Choir Vault of Wells Cathedral at Irnham, Lincolnshire’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 169, pp. 1–12. exh. review: ‘Opus Anglicanum: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery’ (Victoria & Albert Museum), The Art Newspaper, no. 285, December 2016, pp. 12, 14. review: C. Beltrami, Building a Crossing Tower. A Design for Rouen Cathedral of 1516 (London, 2016), The Art Newspaper, no. 283, October 2016, p. 27. review: L. Freeman Sandler, Illuminators & Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England. The Psalter & Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family (London, 2014), English Historical Review, 131 (2016), pp. 1130–2.

2017 ‘La línea de la belleza en el gótico: motivos y estetica medieval’, Quintana, 16, 2017, pp. 53–80. ‘Medieval Invention and its Potencies’, British Art Studies, 6 (2017), article 1 (online at https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-6). ‘The Rhetorical Occasions of Gothic Sculpture’, Collegium Medievale, 30, 2017, pp. 7–31 (the Sophus Bugge Annual Lecture 2017). ‘An Afterword on Jean Bony and the Decorated Style’, in Decorated Revisited: English Architectural Style in Context, 1250–1400, ed. J. Munns, Turnhout, pp. 197–206. ‘Introduction’, in The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe, ed. S. Bucklow, R. Marks and L. Wrapson, Woodbridge, pp. 1–6. ‘Sir Oliver Ingham and the Ascetic Imagination’, in Tributes for Adelaide Bennett. Manuscripts, Iconography and the Late Medieval Viewer, ed. P. A. Patton and J. K. Golden, London and Turnhout, pp. 91–100. review: J. F. Hamburger, N. F. Palmer, with U. Bürger, The Prayer Book of Ursula Begerin, 2 vols (Dietikon-Zurich, 2015), Medium Aevum 86, 2017, pp. 153–4. review: A Reservoir of Ideas. Essays in Honour of Paul Williamson, ed. G. Davies and E. Townsend (London, 2017), The Art Newspaper, no. 295, November 2017, p. 26.

2018 ‘Charisma and Material Culture’, in Faces of Charisma: Text, Image, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West, ed. B-M. Bedos-Rezak and M. D. Rust, Leiden and Boston, pp. 128–54.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 27

09/07/2021 09:40

28 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski

‘Magnificentia in parvis: microarchitecture et esthétique médiévale’, in Microarchitectures médiévales: l’échelle à l’épreuve de la matière, ed. J-M. Guillouët and A. Vilain, Paris, pp. 13–24. review: C. Tracy and A. Budge, Medieval Episcopal Thrones. History, Archaeology and Conservation (Oxford and Philadelphia, 2015), Speculum, 93, 2018, pp. 1264–5.

2019 Gothic Sculpture, New Haven and London ‘Aesthetic Attitudes in Gothic Art: thoughts on Girona Cathedral’, Codex Aquilarensis, 35, 2019, pp. 179–200. ‘Affect et sculpture gothique: quelques questions de méthode’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 62, 2019, pp. 143–159. ‘A House of Kings: 1100–1307’, and ‘Plantagenet Tragedies to Tudor Triumphs’, in Westminster Abbey: A History, ed. D. Cannadine, New Haven and London, pp. 45–133 (with J. G. Clark). ‘La Chaise-Dieu and the English Connection in the Mid Fourteenth Century’, in La Chaise-Dieu. Communauté monastique et congrégation (XIe siècle – fin de l’Ancien Régime), ed. F-A. Costantini, D-O. Hurel and T. Pécout, Limoges, pp. 183–98. review: T. Nickson, Toledo Cathedral. Building Histories in Medieval Castile (University Park, 2015), Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 20, 2019, pp. 189–91. review: P. Williamson, The Wyvern Collection: Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture and Metalwork (London, 2018), The Art Newspaper, no. 309, February 2019, p. 13.

7132 00-00 Binski prelims new size v6.indd 28

09/07/2021 09:40

The ‘Great Rebuilding’ of the Late Middle Ages: Revising the longue durée History of the Gothic Parish Church Gabriel Byng

F

o r N o r m a n P o u n d s , the two centuries that followed the Black Death were ‘the great period of rebuilding’ for England’s parish churches. 1 His opinion is hardly controversial, indeed versions of it had been commonplace in synoptic histories of parochial architecture for a century and more. ‘Church building went on at an impressive pace right up to the Reformation’, wrote one scholar;2 it would ‘flourish without interruption’, claimed others.3 In the late middle ages, ‘parishioners came forward with benefactions as they never had done before’.4 As a result, ‘Perpendicular’, the architectural style of the late middle ages in England, ‘is the prevailing English style’,5 ‘parochial architecture is dominated by the style of that time’6 and ‘few churches do not exhibit some features belonging to the style’.7 John Harvey described it as an ‘almost overwhelming dominance of one style’.8 Scholars are more divided, however, over quite how many buildings this really meant. Richard Foster thought a third, E. R. Chamberlin a half, J. J. Scarisbrick, two-thirds, and G. H. Cook, a majority.9 F. E. Howard wrote that: ‘We have more fine buildings of the Perpendicular style than of all the other styles put together.’10 Perpendicular churches have, in fact, been described as ‘unquantifiable’ and ‘almost beyond reckoning’.11 The purpose of this essay is to challenge both claims, to argue 1

N. J. G. Pounds, A History of the English Parish, Cambridge, 2000, p. 383. This is surely a nod to W. G. Hoskin’s ‘Great Rebuilding’ in his 1953 article ‘The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640’. 2 G. Randall, The English Parish Church, London, 1988, p. 46. 3 J. C. Cox and C. B. Ford, The Parish Churches of England, 7th edn, London, 1954, p. 61. 4 A. Hamilton Thompson, The Historical Growth of the English Parish Church, Cambridge, 1911, p. 31. 5 E. Tyrrell Green, Parish Church Architecture, London, 1924, p. 197. 6 R. Foster, Discovering English Churches: A Beginner’s Guide to the Story of the Parish Church from before the Conquest to the Gothic Revival, London, 1981, p. 129. 7 Green, Parish Church, p. 198. 8 J. Harvey, The Perpendicular Style, 1330–1485, London, 1978, pp. 18–19, 160, 199. 9 Foster, Discovering English Churches, 159; E. R. Chamberlin, The English Parish Church, London, 1993, p. 36; J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, Oxford, 1984, 13; G. H Cook, The English Mediaeval Parish Church, London, 1954, p. 55. 10 F. E. Howard, The Mediæval Styles of the English Parish Church: A Survey of Their Development, Design and Features, New York, 1936, p. 80. 11 C. Burgess, ‘The Benefactions of Mortality: The Lay Response in the Later Medieval Urban Parish’, in Studies in Clergy and Ministry in Late Medieval England, ed. D. Smith, York, 1991, pp. 66–7 n. 2; C. Wilson, ‘“Excellent, New, and Uniforme”: Perpendicular Architecture c.1400– 1547’, in Gothic: Art for England 1400–1547, ed. R. Marks, P. Williamson and E. Townsend, London, 2003, p. 113.

[ 29]

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 29

09/07/2021 09:40

3 0  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

that Perpendicular building work is not unquantifiable and the late middle ages was not a period of unusually intensive (re)building in England. In fact, it was quite the opposite, a time of historically low rates of parish church construction. Quantifiable or not, since the 1990s, the parochial construction work of the late middle ages in England has acquired a new scholarly salience. It has been marshalled by revisionists to provide evocative material evidence for the flourishing of late-medieval Catholicism within parochial structures, an analogue of ales and guilds.12 Eamon Duffy, the scholar most associated with this argument, wrote, for example, that ‘at its most obvious this continuing and indeed growing commitment to corporate Christianity is witnessed by the extraordinary and lavish spate of investment by lay men and women in the fabric and furnishing of their parish church’.13 Clive Burgess similarly provided as evidence for the ‘vitality’ of parish life ‘the unequivocal, if unquantifiable, physical testimony of medieval church building’.14 An older tradition, exemplified by a 1939 essay by M. M. Postan, used church building as evidence for the liveliness of the late medieval economy.15 A major rebuilding could cost as much as £2,000 at a time when even a wealthy peasant might have had a net annual income of just a pound.16 Scholars have divided between those, like Christopher Dyer, who argue that much parish church construction was thus surely collectively financed and so surviving examples can be taken as evidence of ‘communal’ wealth, and those, like R. B. Dobson and Alan Dyer, who caution trepidation in the face of ignorance as to who actually paid.17 Indeed, expensive building projects at St Margaret, Westminster, and Swaffham, Norfolk, have been associated with periods of declining wealth by their historians.18 Following Postan, the debate has centred on the severity or nature of a late-medieval ‘slump’ expressed, at least in part, in architectural work, with scholars finding contradictory evidence for national trends in building during the middle decades of the fifteenth century. Richard Morris, at least, has pointed to a large number of famous large-scale parochial building projects that seem to have continued throughout the century.19 Explanatory models for the apparent intensity of Perpendicular church building can be roughly grouped into four families, all mutually compatible and often found together in a single text. The first claims that the improving economic position of much of the peasantry from the late fourteenth century meant that increasing numbers of households 12 E.g. R. Morris, Churches in the Landscape, London, 1989, p. 373; C. Harper-Bill, The Pre-Reformation Church in England 1400–1530, London, 1989, p. 72; C. Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire, Cambridge, 1975, p. 67. 13 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400 – c.1580, New Haven, 1992, pp. 131–2. 14 Burgess, ‘Benefactions of Mortality’, pp. 66–7 n. 2. 15 M. M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy, Cambridge, 1973, pp. 44–6. 16 G. Rosser, Medieval Westminster: 1200–1540, Oxford, 1989, pp. 263–71; C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c.1200–1520, Cambridge, 1989, p. 149. 17 C. Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520, New Haven, 2002, p. 300; R. B. Dobson, ‘Urban Decline in Late Medieval England’, in The English Medieval Town : A Reader in English Urban History, 1200–1540, ed. R. Holt and G. Rosser, London, 1990, p. 273; A. Dyer, Decline and Growth in English Towns 1400–1640, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 34–5; R. Morris, The Church in British Archaeology, London, 1983, p. 77; Morris, Landscape, pp. 350–51, 373. 18 Rosser, Medieval Westminster, p. 264; K. Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia, c.1470–1550, Woodbridge, 2001, p. 106; compare D. Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, vol. 1, Oxford, 1985, pp. 126–7; Morris, Landscape, p. 328. 19 Whether the mid-fifteenth century ‘slump’ affected building work has proved controversial. I have argued in favour of Postan’s claim that it did, Morris has argued forcefully against it, Postan, Essays, pp. 44–6; Morris, Landscape, chap. 9; G. Byng, Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge, 2017, pp. 36–45.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 30

09/07/2021 09:40

chap ter 1 | the ‘gr eat r ebui l d i ng’ o f t he l at e mi d d l e ages   |   3 1

were able to contribute increasingly generous sums to collective projects such as church construction, evidenced by the large collections recorded in some churchwardens’ accounts, most famously at Bodmin, Cornwall, in 1469–72, and the regularity with which ‘the community’, or a cognate term, is recognised as being the patron of the work in contracts or accounts.20 The second is that the repeated waves of plague that began in 1348 focussed the minds of parishioners on their own mortality and, thus, the need for penance and good works, evidenced not least by ‘austere’ late-medieval architectural forms and the predominance of iconographies associated with death and mortality in parochial artistic commissions.21 The third argues that the energy invested in parochial work has something to do with the contraction in great church building projects in the centuries after 1300, with the connection attributed to fashions in patronage, religious cultures or indulgences or to the inevitably opposed economic interests of tenants and lords.22 The fourth is that the parish was a religiously lively, administratively sophisticated and economically successful entity in which church building was a natural centrepiece, driven by civic pride, religious commitment and communal strength.23 By inference, although few would want to risk writing this down, not only does less medieval parochial work survive from earlier periods but less was built – the economic, cultural and social conditions that stimulated the high intensity of building work in the long fifteenth century were peculiar to that period. This essay interrogates the assumptions behind these claims, to ask how many churches underwent construction in the later middle ages, how this had changed and how much of the parochial economy they consumed. Its most extensive predecessor is by the Australian scholar John James, who collected data on some 1,200 early Gothic churches in the Paris basin and tested his results against numerous other variables, administrative, social, geographical and economic.24 English parish churches would seem, on the face of it, to offer an ideal opportunity for a similar kind of approach. Using the 1291 Taxatio, the 1535 Valor Ecclesiasticus and the work of Thomas Wilson and Gregory King, historians can estimate with some accuracy that there were around 9,000 medieval parish churches, and perhaps another 2,000 chapels of ease, many but not all of which are lost.25 The number 20 Pounds, English Parish, p. 383; Foster, Discovering English Churches, p. 164 (compare p. 159); Chamberlin, English Parish Church, p. 36; T. M. Nye, An Introduction to Parish Church Architecture: A.D. 600–1965, London, 1965, p. 59; Harvey, Perpendicular, pp. 160–61; an older version of this argument stressed the wealth of the wool trade: Cook, Parish Church, pp. 52–5; Thompson, Historical Growth, pp. 30–31; Green, Parish Church, pp. 156–7; Howard, Mediæval Styles, p. 79. 21 F. Bond, Gothic Architecture in England: An Analysis of the Origin & Development of English Church Architecture from the Norman Conquest to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, London, 1905, p. 499 (compare p. 136); Green, Parish Church, p. 156; Howard, Mediæval Styles, p. 80; Foster, Discovering English Churches, pp. 166–7; Morris, Landscape, p. 373; C. Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral: The Architecture of the Great Church, 1130–1530, London, 1990, p. 212; A. Brown, Church and Society in England, 1000–1500, Basingstoke, 2003, p. 131; compare ‘the English character’ in Harvey, Perpendicular, p. 159; also P. Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, London, 1996, pp. 123–63. 22 The suggestion is sometimes implicit: E. S. Prior, A History of Gothic Art in England, London, 1900, pp. 426–7; E. S. Prior, The Cathedral Builders in England, London, 1905, pp. 78, 82; Green, Parish Church, p. 156; Foster, Discovering English Churches, p. 159; Randall, Parish Church, p. 42. 23 See above, but note that versions of this argument long predates the 1990s; Foster, Discovering English Churches, pp. 158, 165; Morris, Landscape, p. 373; Cook, Parish Church, p. 55. 24 See especially J. James, ‘An Investigation into the Uneven Distribution of Early Gothic Churches in the Paris Basin, 1140–1240’, The Art Bulletin 66, 1984, pp. 15–46. See also the forthcoming work by Eltjo Buringh, Bruce Campbell, Auke Rijpma and Jan Luiten van Zanden. 25 E.g. A. Jones, A Thousand Years of the English Parish: Medieval Patterns & Modern Interpretations, Moreton-in-Marsh, 2000, 18–22.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 31

09/07/2021 09:40

3 2  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

is, of course, all but impossible for a single historian to visit, understand and meaningfully recall. Quantification, then, promises a corrective to a necessary reliance on extrapolation and accumulated wisdom but runs, quickly, into three sets of problems: that the object domain is intimidatingly large; difficult to date; and conceptually challenging to quantify. This essay cannot overcome all three problems, but it can show what might be possible if we take them seriously and attempt solutions, even problematic ones. To take the first problem first: this essay is not based on a new survey of medieval parish church buildings. Rather, it draws on a pre-existing work that did encompass an archaeological analysis of every medieval parish church in the country, albeit for quite different purposes and asking quite different questions from those a quantitative historian might wish: namely, the Buildings of England series.26 This leaves moot the second problem, for the data used in this essay is as ‘accurate’, in terms of dating, as the judgement of Nikolaus Pevsner and the series’ later editors. Mistakes or omissions they made are replicated here. Reflecting the form and degree of information they recorded, this essay has chosen to simplify all building work temporally, dating it by Thomas Rickman’s broad stylistic categories: Romanesque, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular, belonging, roughly, to the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the early fourteenth century, and the mid fourteenth to the mid sixteenth centuries respectively.27 This has the advantage of being very ‘accurate’ (the four are typically easy to tell apart) but opens up two further problems: first, that there was considerable temporal bleed between stylistic periods, and, secondly, that there was considerable variation in rates of building work within them. The former problem does not prevent some indication of general trends in patterns of building work across the middle ages from becoming clear but the latter will require the marshalling of other sources in order to develop a more sensitive chronology. This takes us to the third problem. I have listed elsewhere the large and sometimes eccentric range of units that architectural historians have used in attempting to quantify building work.28 Any quantitative schema applied to architectural work is inevitably problematic: area disregards volume, size disregards decorative richness, manhours disregards location, all are indirectly related to cost, and without knowledge of the value of money, even cost is misleading. The ‘solution’ employed in this essay is not really any such: namely to include all surviving building work, from a window to a nave, without attempting gradation or categorisation. The alternative, which may well be preferable although inevitably problematic in its own fashion, would be to introduce narrower periodization and finer gradations of size or cost. Such a project would require a major new standardised survey of church buildings; the ambition here is merely to outline the broadest contours of the story. A final, critical, problem is the impossibility of quantifying work lost through overbuilding or destruction during or after the middle ages. No survey would 26 This would have been impossible without Michael Good’s digitisation of the paper books:. A Compendium of Pevsner’s Buildings of England on Compact Disc, ed. M. Good, Oxford, 1995. A similar approach was used in, for example: R. Machin, ‘The Great Rebuilding: A Reassessment’, Past & Present, no. 77, 1977, pp. 33–56; see critiques in: M. H. Johnson, ‘Rethinking the Great Rebuilding’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 12, 1993, pp. 117–25; C. R. J. Currie, ‘Time and Chance: Modelling the Attrition of Old Houses’, Vernacular Architecture 19, 1988, pp. 1–9. 27 T. Rickman, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, London, 1817. 28 Byng, Church Building and Society, pp. 34–5.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 32

09/07/2021 09:40

chap ter 1 | th e ‘gr eat r ebui l d i ng’ o f t he l at e mi d d l e ages  |   3 3

Graph perstylistic stylisticperiod period GraphI:I:Total Totalbuilding building projects projects per 7000 7000 6000 6000 5000 5000 4000 4000 3000 3000 2000 2000 1000 1000 00 Romanesque Romanesque

Early English English Early

Decorated Decorated

Perpendicular Perpendicular

Graph number of of projects/duration projects/durationofofstylistic stylisticperiod) period GraphII: II:Rates Ratesof of building work (total number 80 80 70 70 60 60 50 50 40 40 30 30 20 20 10 10 00

Romanesque Romanesque

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 33

Early English Early English

Decorated Decorated

Perpendicular Perpendicular

09/07/2021 09:40

3 4 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

be able to correct for this, of course, but it is possible to affirm that losses are substantial and increase with time: most Perpendicular work, for example, represents some degree of replacement of earlier medieval fabric.29 Graph I shows the raw results of the dataset. As expected, Perpendicular projects exceed examples from the next most common stylistic periods, Decorated, Early English and Romanesque, by a large margin of about a third. The graph is misleading, however, insofar as the stylistic units on the x-axis describe periods of widely varying duration. It shows, in other words, absolute quantities of work in each style rather than its rate, that is, quantity relative to time. In fact, when the graph is revised to equalise temporal differences, its shape is radically different (Graph II). The duration of each stylistic period is, of course, highly approximate, but the rough shape of the graph remains relatively unchanged across a range of periodizations.30 The rate of Perpendicular building work is akin to that of the Romanesque and Early English periods, but only half that of Decorated.31 It is impossible accurately to incorporate architectural losses into these figures, but, given the large amount of overbuilding that evidently took place during the Perpendicular period, it is almost certain that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw a higher rate of construction than the fifteenth, albeit by an unknown margin. Indeed, this dataset suggests high levels of late-medieval losses: counties that have greater amounts of Perpendicular building work have lower amounts of Romanesque and Early English construction. The rough shape of Graph II is comparable to that of two other graphs, namely, Richard Morris’ graph of great church construction and those representing estimates of English demography.32 All show a rise from the time of Domesday, peaking around 1300 and falling towards the mid fifteenth century before recovering slightly. The correlation suggests a plausible explanatory model for the broadest contours of these patterns: a growing economy from the eleventh century provided ever greater resources for investing into church construction, both from ecclesiastical estates building great churches and from enlarged villages and towns, carrying out ever more intensive farming, building parish churches. By the late fourteenth century, with a national population that had perhaps halved and an economy that was considerably smaller, the rate of great and parish church construction dropped to an historic low. In support of this point, changes in the cost of labour and materials can be built into the model. Based on trends identified by other scholars in both labourers’ and craftsmen’s wages and in the prices of raw and finished materials, I have estimated elsewhere that the cost of like-for-like stone construction roughly doubled between the early fourteenth

29 Estimations of losses have been attempted, see, for example: R. Morris, ‘The Church in the Countryside: Two Lines in Inquiry’, in Medieval Villages, ed. D. Hooke, Oxford, 1985, p. 55; C. Foote Davidson, ‘Written in Stone: Architecture, Liturgy, and the Laity in English Parish Churches, c.1125 – c.1250’, PhD dissertation, University of London, 1998, p. 39. 30 The durations used in this graph are 120, 130, 70 and 180 years for Romanesque, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular respectively. 31 The ratio of projects per year between the four styles is approximately 32:34:70:36. By estimating average building periods, a speculative average number of building projects underway each year can be estimated: five years gives 160 in the Romanesque, 179 in the Early English, 350 in the Decorated and 180 in the Perpendicular periods. Of course, earlier periods are underrepresented since losses are greater. 32 R. Morris, Cathedrals and Abbeys of England and Wales: The Building Church, 600–1540, London, 1979, figs 7 and 8.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 34

09/07/2021 09:40

chap ter 1 | th e ‘gr eat r ebui l d i ng’ o f t he l at e mi d d l e ages   |   3 5

and early fifteenth centuries.33 Using a working assumption that the average parochial project varied little in terms of material and labour inputs between the Decorated and Perpendicular periods, this suggests that annual nominal investment in church building remained relatively static when averaged out across the late middle ages. In other words, it is not that parishioners across the long fifteenth century were collectively spending any less on church construction than in the early fourteenth, but rather that, because of high costs, more-or-less the same nominal expenditure purchased much less architecture. 34 The assumption of static inputs is impossible to assess with any accuracy – it is, in fact, undoubtedly wrong (although it is tellingly unclear in which direction it is wrong) and can be defended only as providing a rough-and-ready benchmark for conceptualising this broad sweep of architectural history.35 That annual building expenditure did not decline in line with the size of the economy is not wholly surprising. From the later fourteenth century, as wages rose, terms were renegotiated and the availability of land improved, many in the parish, especially middling and poorer peasants, that is, half-yardlanders, smallholders and wage-earners, experienced a considerable rise in net income and thus in their ability to contribute to collective projects.36 The potential for this broader-based participation provides, then, the context for large-scale collections such as that in Bodmin, noted above, observed in some latemedieval churchwardens’ accounts and countering, in part, the reduction in the size of the population. To show this, in a very speculative fashion, total expenditure on parish church building can be estimated relative to GDP. Since the population shrank faster than the economy, per capita GDP rose. Using the estimates of modern historians, we can fix a rough figure to this: the work of Broadberry et al., for example, would indicate an increase of roughly a third between the early fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries.37 In other words, a smaller pool of donors was collectively providing roughly the same absolute nominal investment, but this probably constituted a smaller rise in their individual burden as the distribution of wealth changed. A shrinking economy and static investment in building work also meant, of course, a relative increase in the latter as a proportion of the English economy. Broadberry et al.’s figures would suggest a rise of approximately thirty-three per cent relative to nominal and forty-six per cent relative to real GDP between 1300 and 1500.38 Nevertheless, when estimates for average building project costs are hazarded,

33 The problems with these estimates, especially regarding materials, and their high regional variation are well known and these figures should be treated as broad estimates only. Byng, Church Building and Society, pp. 30–32; note the popular argument that Perpendicular was cheaper and easier to produce for high-paid but low-skilled craftsmen: Harvey, Perpendicular, pp. 17–18; P. Lindley, ‘The Black Death and English Art’, in The Black Death in England, ed. W. M. Ormrod and P. Lindley, Stamford, 1996, 136–46. 34 Compare Postan, Essays, p. 46; Morris, Landscape, pp. 351–2. 35 See, however, Proudfoot’s study of floor plans, which discounts clerestories and towers, of course, but is essentially supportive of this point: L. J. Proudfoot, ‘The Extension of Parish Churches in Medieval Warwickshire’, Journal of Historical Geography, 9, 1983, pp. 231–46; links to demographic change have been much critiqued: N. Saul, Lordship and Faith: The English Gentry and the Parish Church in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 2017, pp. 143–6; Pounds, English Parish, p. 383. Importantly, nearly every parish had a stone church by 1200, and so subsequent generations were mostly adding or rebuilding as necessity or fashion required. 36 The literature on this topic is extensive but see my summary in Byng, Church Building and Society, Introduction. 37 S. N. Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth, 1270–1870, Cambridge, 2015, Tables 5.04 and 5.06. 38 Broadberry et al., Tables 5.04 and 5.06.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 35

09/07/2021 09:40

3 6 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

total expenditure invariably forms only a fraction of the English economy.39 This relies, however, not only on the same working assumption as the previous paragraph but also on comparing long-term average building rates to snapshots of GDP, glossing substantial fluctuations in both. This account, therefore, uses three variables to model the relationship between changes in the economy and the rate of church construction: (1) the size of the economy; (2) the cost of labour and materials; and (3) the distribution of wealth. After the Black Death, the first two of these variables worked against the rate of church construction and the third, in favour; before it, the situation was precisely reversed. Harder to build into this model is a fourth variable of paramount importance: the availability and value of coin.40 Building projects required large numbers of small transactions and considerable saving. The rise of a gold currency and contracting no doubt helped, but project managers must have struggled during periods of intense shortages. A fifth variable, building technology, was largely static in this period but could, of course, have had a profound effect on logistical and financial feasibility. Lastly, the sophisticated financial and managerial strategies used by medieval communities should be understood as providing if not another variable in the model then at least the essential conditions in which these five were effected.41 Money was not an insuperable exogenous force but rather a flexible resource that was limited as much by local confidence, communality and careful management as by trade or inflation.42 With saving, debt and delay there could be more money; with profligacy, anxiety or hoarding, less. Nevertheless, many of these conditions were themselves sensitive to economic change: growth can stimulate, and contraction restrict, confidence, credit and saving. This is an important caveat to the conclusions of this essay. Architecture was not a flimsy superstructure at the mercy of an omnipotent economic base, but an index as much of local social, political and cultural variables as of economic ones. This new longue durée story is very different from conventional histories of English Gothic parish church building. The Perpendicular period was relatively sluggish; the Romanesque remarkably dynamic; the Early English scarcely less so; and the Decorated, positively effervescent. Rates of parochial construction were probably broadly consistent with trends in great church building – a ‘W’ centred on 1300 with a larger sub-peak around 1100, or perhaps later, and a smaller one around 1500.43 By the fifteenth century, parochial building work was a more occasional event in the life of English parishes than it had been for centuries. Nevertheless, over the post-Black Death period, households probably did pay greater absolute quantities towards church building as the price of labour and materials 39 E.g. if the average Decorated project cost £5, total church building would have constituted c.0.007 percent of GDP c.1300; £10 projects in the Perpendicular period would come to 0.009 percent of GDP in c.1500. This suggests, at least, that claims building work adversely affected local economies are implausible in an English parochial context: Robert Branner, ‘Review’, The Art Bulletin 37, 1955, pp. 61–5; Byng, Church Building and Society, pp. 8–9. 40 Compare R. Gem, ‘A Recession in English Architecture during the Early Eleventh Century and Its Impact on the Development of the Romanesque Style’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series 38, 1975, pp. 28–49. 41 Byng, Church Building and Society, chap. 6. 42 Compare my arguments in the final section of: G. Byng, ‘The Chronology and Financing of the Perpendicular Work at Saffron Walden, Essex’, Essex Archaeology and History, 4th series 6, 2015, pp. 329–43. 43 Based on an admittedly small number of surviving contracts and wills, I have suggested elsewhere that great and parish church building shared common trends during the long fifteenth century, reducing during the mid-century ‘slump’ and increasing around 1500. A modest late-fourteenth-century recovery is thus also likely: Byng, Church Building and Society, Introduction.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 36

09/07/2021 09:40

chap ter 1 | the ‘gr eat r ebui l d i ng’ o f t he l at e mi d d l e ages  |   3 7

rose but many were now considerably richer than in 1300 and the pool of donors had probably not shrunk in line with the population.44 None of this refutes arguments that plague turned minds towards good works or that the vitality of parish life was expressed in architecture: after all, plenty of construction did take place in the two centuries after the Black Death alongside many other (typically lost) material embellishments, recorded not least in parochial inventories. Indeed, the most important conclusion is probably that a similar sense of parochial liveliness, administrative sophistication and economic activity should be attached to the twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries too. It does, however, nuance any straightforward relationship between peasant incomes and rates of church building and put out of court claims for a shift in architectural energy from the cathedral and monastery to the parish church and chapel by the late fourteenth century. This model also suggests the conditions that made possible, first, the fast spread of Decorated forms in such a short period after their first appearance in London in the 1290s and the rapid innovation that continued to take place during the early fourteenth century; and secondly, the comparatively gradual advance of the Perpendicular style during the later fourteenth century and the slow development of new forms that helped it to endure for two centuries and more.45 A causal relationship can be mooted, connecting pace to innovation: a style is born when an experiment is replicated, and both experimentation and replication are more feasible during periods of intensive building work. To generalise somewhat: innovations at Canterbury Trinity chapel in the late twelfth century and Gloucester presbytery in the early fourteenth took place during periods of high rates of construction and were followed by stylistic continuity during periods of relatively lower building rates. Thus, patterns in the rate of work on great and parish churches were not only consistent, based on the same underlying economics, but also mutually stimulating: innovation could be replicated in new ecclesiastical projects, big and small. Economic and stylistic change prove to be closely, but perhaps surprisingly, related.

Acknowledgements The research described in this essay was awarded a Dan David Prize Scholarship by Tel Aviv University in 2019. Earlier versions of this essay were given at the Cambridge Medieval Economic and Social History seminar series on 7 February 2018 and at the ‘Towards an Art History of the Parish Church’ conference at the Courtauld Institute on 2 June 2017. I am indebted to Dr Chris Briggs for his advice on a draft of this essay.

44 I have argued that this encouraged a more careful delineation of the type or size of donations in the fifteenth century: Byng, Church Building and Society. 45 Compare J. Bony, The English Decorated Style: Gothic Architecture Transformed, 1250–1350, Oxford, 1979, p. 61.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 37

09/07/2021 09:40

‘The Forest through the Trees’: The Pier as a Seed Plan at the Lady Chapel of Saint-Germain des Prés* Meredith Cohen

W

riters on art a n d a rc h i t e c t ure have long identified the natural world as the basis for the architecture produced in Europe, from the twelfth century onward that we normally call ‘Gothic’.1 Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s atmospheric engraving of such a church engulfed by an overgrown tree from 1810 illustrates the Romantic conception of this architecture as literally growing out of the lush forests of northern Europe (fig. 1). Goethe (d. 1832) likened Strasbourg cathedral to a ‘giant tree with thousands of branches, twigs, and leaves’.2 While Strasbourg’s interior appears from this side of history more architectonic than decorative, some architecture from the fifteenth century onward actually made the metaphoric leap from trees to buildings in rendering the piers and vaults as arboreal branchwork: an early example is the tower of Jean sans Peur in Paris, dated to around 1407 (fig. 2).3 While it took several hundred years before this architecture arrived at the point where art imitated nature, the analogy recognizes how the piers of these magnificent structures behave like trees insofar as they begin at the ground and ascend with branches moving outward in all directions, from the most plain to the most elaborate buildings. Yet scholars of this architecture today often overlook the piers, even though they are the primary structural component of these buildings. Instead, attention tends to be directed to vaults and flying buttresses. While those may be the most structurally innovative elements of this period, they are nevertheless secondary to the piers, which served as the foundation for the overall structural system fundamental to this architecture. Acknowledgment of the piers’ size, their existence within a plan, and their relation to other piers of the same form occupies much of the discourse on them. Ample discussion has taken place about whether building plans were set from pier edge to edge or from centre point to centre point, but the location of the centre point within the pier also remains unclear, and seems to change from * 1 2 3

I would like to thank Michael Davis for his valuable comments on this essay. Most recently, see M. Doquang, The Lithic Garden: Nature and the Transformation of the Medieval Church, Oxford, 2018. Ibid., p. 13 n. 28. See the recent discussions of this and late Gothic Astwork in ibid. as well as in E. M. Kavaler, Renaissance Gothic. Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe 1470–1540, New Haven, CT, 2012.

[ 38]

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 38

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 2   |  ‘t he f o r est t hro ugh t he t r ees’  |   39

building to building.4 In fact, relatively little is understood about the correlation between the pier and the plan of a building.5 This essay will shed light on these questions, aiming to extend our understanding of the role of the pier, in observing that some piers contained within them information needed for the larger plan and elevation of a building. In a period from which precious few complete scaled plans exist, and for which we know little about how such designs were actually arrived at within the chantier, the pier may have been one of the means of communicating the plan and its dimensions to the builders.6 Indeed, from the analysis presented below, I contend that the size and shape of the pier may have contained information about key elements of a building’s overall design, particularly in the straight bays, as is the case presented in this example. By understanding the pier section, masons practicing within a certain workshop would have had direct access to the general dimensions, proportions, and parameters of its associated straight bay, obviating the need for an elaborately drawn plan, until the buildings themselves became so complex as to require them. The example I will employ in this essay is the Lady chapel of Saint-Germain des Prés.7 The abbey was originally founded as a family necropolis by the Merovingian king Childebert, and the church rebuilt over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A period of reconstruction of the claustral buildings began in 1227 under Abbot Eudes (1224–35).8 Among other new structures, including a refectory initiated by Abbot Simon de Buci (1235–44), the Lady chapel was begun by Abbot Hugh d’Issy (1244–47) and was effectively complete by the time that the then ailing abbot, Thomas de Mauleon (1247–55), relinquished his duties and the community elected Gerard de Moret in 1255 within the chapel.9 However, like many of its contemporaries, the Lady chapel fared poorly after the French Revolution. The Republican decree of 2 November 1789 disenfranchised the monasteries and assigned all churches as government property. Without the financial means to maintain all the buildings, and lacking the will to do so, the fledgling government repurposed and 4

See, for example, the discussions in Ad Quadratum: The Practical Application of Geometry in Medieval Architecture, ed. N. Wu, Aldershot, 2002. 5 On this see V. Paul, ‘Les épures de la chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Bethléem à la cathédrale de Narbonne’, in La Grand Retable de Narbonne. Le décor sculpté de la chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Bethléem à la cathédrale et le retable en pierre du XIVe siècle en France et en Catalogne (Actes de 1er colloque d’histoire de l’art méridional au Moyen-Age, Narbonne-Palais des Archevêques 2–3 décembre 1988), Ville de Narbonne, 1990, pp. 71–6; S. Murray, Notre-Dame Cathedral of Amiens: The Power of Change in Gothic, Cambridge, 1997, as well as idem, ‘The Architectural Envelope of the Sainte‑Chapelle of Paris’, in Avista Forum. Journal of the Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, 10, 1996–7, pp. 21–5; revised and republished in Pierre, lumière, couleur. Etudes d’histoire de l’art du Moyen Âge en l’honneur d’Anne Prache, Cultures et Civilisations Médiévales 20, ed. F. Joubert and D. Sandron, Paris, 1999, pp. 223–30. 6 For a discussion of the history of plans, see R. Bork, The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Drawing and the Dynamics of Gothic Design, Farnham, 2011. 7 The primary documentary account of the abbey remains Dom Jacques Bouillart, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Germain des Préz, Paris, 1724. See also M. Shepard, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Stained Glass from the Parisian Abbey of Saint-Germain-desPrés,’ PhD dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1990; A. Prache, ‘Un architecte du treizième sièlce et son œuvre : Pierre de Montreuil’, Histoire et archéologie, 47, 1980, pp. 35–8 ; J. Moulin and P. Ponsot, ‘La chapelle de la Vièrge à l’abbaye de SaintGermain des Prés et Pierre de Montreuil’, Archéologia, 115, 1980, pp. 49–55; Helene Verlet, ‘Les batiments monastiques de SaintGermain des Prés’, in Fédération des Sociétés historiques et Archéologiques de Paris et de l’Ile de France, 9, 1957, pp. 9–68. See more recently also D. Leborgne, Saint-Germain des Prés et son faubourg, évolution d’un paysage urbain, Paris, 2005. 8 Bouillart, Histoire, p. 118. A list of the abbots is found on pp. 6–7. 9 Bouillart, Histoire, pp. 123–30. Bouillart (p. 126) states that the chapel was built after the refectory, suggesting the latter was begun under the prior abbot, Simon (1235–44). Pierre Bonfons, Antiquitez et singularitez de Paris, Paris, 1608, f. 38. Bonfons states that in 1247 Hugh was buried slightly above ground level in the chapel’s apse.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 39

09/07/2021 09:40

40  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

eventually sold many of them. This was the fate of the Lady chapel, which persisted for a few years after the Revolution as a saltpeter factory and storehouse, before being sold to a certain Doctor Salbrune, who razed it in 1802. Both the chapel and the refectory were built by the renowned thirteenth-century architect Pierre de Montreuil, to whom seventeenth-century antiquarians and historians of architecture, despite a lack of firm evidence, attributed many of the extant monuments of premodern Paris, including the western bays of the thirteenth-century nave of SaintDenis and the highly esteemed mid-thirteenth-century south transept facade of NotreDame cathedral, and even the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris.10 However, Pierre de Montreuil’s role as the primary maker of the Lady chapel appears to be confirmed by the fact that he was actually buried inside it (with his wife Agnès) and given a glowing epitaph.11 Both the Lady chapel’s author, Pierre de Montreuil, and the high quality of the architectural and sculptural fragments that remain, make this building one of the most intriguing monuments of mid-thirteenth century Paris, despite the fact that it is no longer extant. Given this, scholarly discussions concerning the chapel have mostly addressed questions concerning its design and style. Yet the remaining evidence is nevertheless incomplete and leaves much to the imagination. The discourse on the building has depended on unique interpretations of the chapel assembled in the mind’s eye or on the drawn page, and so it follows that there is little consensus.12 Without a better idea of the chapel’s actual design, however, there can be no clear understanding of its significance within medieval architecture as well as the place of its renowned maker within the richly built environment of thirteenth-century Paris. By unifying the diverse forms of lithic, graphic, and written evidence, a digital reconstruction of the chapel resolves a number of these questions in a coherent model that can be analyzed and studied objectively (fig. 3).13 While this is not the space to describe the process by which the digital model was created, it serves here as an object for deeper examination and analysis.14 The key element in the reconstruction was the identification of one-half of the engaged pier, still in situ, at no.  8 rue de l’Abbaye, in what is now an upscale furniture store. 10 For a discussion of Pierre de Montreuil’s possible presence at Saint-Denis, see also C. Bruzelius, The 13th-century Church at StDenis, New Haven, 1985, pp. 173–4 and R. Branner, ‘A Note on Pierre de Montreuil and Saint-Denis’, Art Bulletin, 45, 1963, pp. 355–7; concerning his presence at Notre-Dame, see: D. Kimpel and R. Suckale, L’architecture gothique en France, 1130–1270, trans. F. Neu, Paris, 1990, pp. 411–21; A. Prache, ‘Un architecte du treizième siècle’, p. 29. 11 Bouillart, Histoire, p. 126. The epitaph is cited in Bonfons, Antiquitez, ff. 38v and 40, as well as BNF, MS fr. 18866, f. 165. 12 See, for example, the differing opinions between Moulin and Ponsot, ‘La chapelle de la Vièrge’, pp. 49–55, Prache, ‘Pierre de Montreuil’, pp. 35–8, and Murray, ‘Architectural Envelope’, (Avista Forum), p. 23, concerning the size of the building, the hemicycle, and the form of the dado arcade. 13 The model was completed by myself and Kristine Tanton using Vectorworks between 2015 and 2018; a panel of the stained glass was reconstructed by Kexin Dai, the roof by Ian Webb, the vaults by Tori Schmitt and Kexin Dai, and other details were done by Haley DiPressi, Gabriella Chitwood, and others, then undergraduates at UCLA. A 2018 animation of the reconstructed digital Lady chapel, completed with the assistance of William Wharton, may be found, along with a list of the greater project team, on http://paris.cdh.ucla.edu/ (accessed 01 October 2019). We are especially grateful to Marie Monfort, then Conservatrice en chef at the Ville de Paris, Sous Direction du Patrimoine et de l’Histoire, Conservation des Oeuvres d’art Religieuses et Civiles and Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, Directrice of the Musée nationale du Moyen-Age-Thermes de Cluny, for making all the remaining evidence in their collections available to us, as well as to the insight from Dany Sandron whose thoughtful observations of our models helped us to arrive at our current version. 14 An article on this is currently in preparation by Dr Kristine Tanton and myself. All calculations here are the product of my own work, and all errors are entirely my own.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 40

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 2   |  ‘t he f o r est t hro ugh t he t r ees’   |   41

Photogrammetry digitally captured an accurate profile of the contour of this monolithic fragment, which I traced and then mirrored to create a complete cross section. The engaged pier of the Lady chapel comprised a total of nine shafts (fig. 4). Moving clockwise from the wall, first the concave space at the back of the pier close to the wall provided the setting for the en délit shaft of the dado arcade. The second shaft corresponded to the window frame, which descended all the way to the socle. The third shaft of the pier served as the formeret, which delimited the lateral arches of the vaults. The fourth shaft, which was slightly pointed, ascended to become the diagonal rib of the vault. The ribs issuing from the extant keystone of the Lady chapel match the shape and dimension of this fourth pier shaft. The central shaft extended into the transverse arch that spanned the nave. With all of the shafts branching out in different directions at the top of the building, one can see how masons themselves arrived at the tree metaphor which was then commented on by later authors. While the pier shafts indicated the main elements of the chapel’s elevation, the pier’s proportions relate to key elements in the building’s dimensions. The Lady chapel’s size was given by Dom Jacques Bouillart, a monk of Saint-Germain des Prés, who stated in 1724 that the chapel measured 100 feet in length, ‘around’ 29 feet in width, and 47 feet and 2.5 inches in height under the vault.15 An archaeological excavation reported in 1912 gave the distance between the pier foundations as 9.0 metres.16 These measurements, along with the fragments themselves, were essential in recreating the plan of the Lady chapel. While the model was made in corresponding metric conversions, applying the Ancien Régime’s units of measurement for this study illuminated numbers that are more consistently whole within the plan. Historians of architecture often employ the royal foot (32.48 centimetres, made of 12 inches of 2.7 centimetres each), often rounded to the nearest millimetre (32.5 centimetres).17 However, over larger distances this slight difference can lead to inaccuracies. By using the Ancien Régime’s toise of 1.949 metres (or precisely 6 royal feet), I was able to identify a series of whole numbers in the plan that were likely employed for its construction.18 Two basic practices seem to have guided medieval church planning in general, one arithmetical and one geometrical, as described by Abbot Suger himself in De Consecratione.19 Whole numbers were generally preferred when specific, unit measurements were required. At the same time, and in apparent contrast to the above practice, masons of the thirteenth century used simple geometry that also resulted in irrational numbers throughout their plans. This involved turning the diagonal of whole numbered squares to form rectangles; 15 As noted above, the primary historical account of the abbey is Bouillart, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Germain des Préz, where dimensions for the Lady chapel are given on p. 126. Bouillart did not indicate the points from which he measured the chapel. 16 Paris. Commission du Vieux Paris, Procès-verbaux / Commission municipale du Vieux Paris, Meeting on 22 June 1912, p. 124: La largeur intérieure de l’édifice immédiatement au-dessus de la masse des empattements n’était que de 9 mètres, en raison sans doute des bases ou soubassements qui diminuaient de 1 mètre la largeur de la nef relevée sur le plan de M. Desprez. 17 For the sake of clarity, the historical measurements given in this essay are not converted into imperial equivalents. 18 J. F. Saigey, ‘Système français’, Traité de métrologie ancienne et moderne: suivi d’un précis de chronologie et des signes numériques, Paris, 1834, p. 109. 19 E. Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, 2nd edn, Princeton, 1979, pp. 100–01: many thanks again to Michael Davis for this reference. I would also like to thank Eric Fernie for his illuminating discussions with me in the early 2000s on this subject.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 41

09/07/2021 09:40

42 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

this creates what we understand as and call root rectangles. Simple ‘dynamic geometry’ such as this appears to have been employed to generate plans at Amiens cathedral, SaintOuen, Rouen, and Saint-Urbain at Troyes.20 Two of the most commonly observed root rectangles are the root-2 rectangle and the golden section rectangle. The root-2 rectangle is made by using the diagonal of a square to form the long side of a new rectangle. The golden section rectangle is made by using the diagonal of half of the square to form the base of a new quadrilateral. This proportion occurs in nature, and effecting it in geometry on plans was widely practiced throughout many premodern cultures. Builders knew that this made a proportion of length to width of approximately but not exactly 3:5, or otherwise irrational and thus sacred numbers.21 Looking at the proportions of the Lady chapel’s engaged pier in relation to the dimensions of the reconstructed building itself, some striking correlations are observed (fig. 5). The width of half the engaged pier monolith was 49 centimetres, and thus the whole reconstructed engaged pier has a width of about 98 centimetres, just over 3 royal feet (97.44 cm, less than one per cent difference).22 The centre line of the pier lies therefore at 1.5 royal feet from its edges. The distance from the pier centre points along the length of the chapel is 6.42 metres, or 19.75 royal feet, almost but not exactly 20 royal feet. As mentioned above, across the width of the chapel, archaeologists recorded a distance between the pier foundations as 9 metres. This distance is very close to 9.01 metres, the long edge of a root-2 rectangle with the short side of the original square 6.42 metres in length, and 9.01 metres is equivalent to 27.75 royal feet (fig. 6). In the Ancien Régime’s system of measurement, 5 toises, or 30 royal feet, is exactly 9.745 metres, a measurement that lands just behind the transverse arch shaft on the circle delineating the core of the pier.23 The 5-toise width between the piers is significant. This number recalls the 3:5 golden section ratio used for many of the pointed transverse arches made in France between 1200 and 1300, such as at Notre-Dame, Chartres, and Bourges, for example.24 At the Lady chapel, the 5-toise span would have set up an easy number from which to construct this common arch type. The span of 5 toises (9.745 metres) makes a golden section arch with a height of 5.07 metres, just about one-third of the entire height of the building, given by Dom Bouillart as 15.3 metres. That number suggests that the transverse arches would been set at an elevation height of about 10.23 metres, or about 5.25 toises. However, if whole numbers were used throughout the chapel, and the arches sprang from 5 toises (9.745 metres) from the ground, the height of the transverse arch 20 Murray, Notre-Dame Cathedral of Amiens, pp. 39–43 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4e6tGKyeus (accessed 13 September 2019). See also M. T. Davis and L. Neagley, ‘Mechanics and Meaning: Plan Design at Saint-Urbain, Troyes and the Saint-Ouen in Rouen’, Gesta, 39, 2000, pp. 161–82. 21 The golden section is represented mathematically as 1 + √5 / 2. 22 That difference may be due to the fact that a few more millimetres were cut at the half mark when the monolith was severed in 1802. In the perpendicular direction, a distance of 3 royal feet from the tip of the pier falls at the middle of the wall behind the dado. 23 A similar practice of tracing the core of the pier and then adding the responds around it has been observed by J.-C. Bessac, as referenced in V. Paul, ‘Les épures’, p. 73. 24 The center points of the circles that intersect to form the arch lie at the intersection of toise 1 and 2 and 4 and 5, leaving three toises between them, creating a ratio of 3:5. Our team conducted a study led by Dominica Castillo (then an undergraduate), and found this to be type of arch used transversally at these cathedrals. One may check these distances and ratios by consulting the nave widths and arch heights displayed for these buildings on Mapping Gothic France (http://mappinggothic.org/).

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 42

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 2   |  ‘t he f o r est t hro ugh t he t r ees’   |   43

would have been 14.82 metres. The 48-centimetre difference between 14.82 metres and the 15.3 metres Bouillart gave corresponds very closely to the height of the extant keystone fragment (42 centimetres).25 In addition to the width between two piers, the vault diagonals were often planned and set in whole numbers.26 At the Lady chapel, 6 toises, or 11.69 metres fell very close to the point where the 5 toises of the transverse section stood (fig. 6). These measurements fall on a semi-circle whose radius is one royal foot from the plane of the dado wall, which lies at the base of the formeret shaft (fig. 5). At 1.5 royal feet from the wall, the semi-circle touches exactly the points of the ribs, while a semicircle with a radius of 2 royal feet reaches the point of the octagonal plinth. The other shaft measurements are also ratios of the royal foot. Considering the pier dimensions, there appears to be some correspondence between the width and depth of the pier and the numbers in the chapel’s overall plan. Again, the pier is 3 royal feet in width and 2 royal feet in depth. The addition of these two numbers equals five, the number of toises that define the width of the building; multiplied together equals six, the length of the rib diagonal in toises.27 This may just be a coincidence, but it also could have been a mnemonic device to aid the masons in laying their plan. These are numbers that have been identified a posteriori within the reconstructed chapel plan, itself based entirely on Bouillart’s measurements, archaeology, and the extant fragments. These numbers were not used a priori in constructing the digital model. They are remarkable in that they are whole or standard increments of a whole. This may be explained by the fact that the reconstructed model is much more regular than a standing building. Indeed, the digital model reflects a plan more consistent than the building may have actually been, an ideal plan. Only during construction would the regular, ideal plan have become irregular, given topographical inconsistencies, error, settling, and historical circumstance. In this example, the plan of the reconstructed digital model, the known dimensions, and the archaeology all match. These observations may also be extended to provide a basis from which to hypothesize parts of the chapel we do not know for lack of sources. One example may be seen in the golden section rectangle of thirty to 50 royal feet that may have existed between the pier centre points (5 toises of 6 royal feet equals 30 royal feet) and to the edges of the buttresses, which may have been 50 royal feet. This is a ratio seen in other locations between these two parts, such as at the Sainte-Chapelle.28 Another possibility is seen when the engaged pier fragment semicircles are mirrored into full circles; the other side of the circle might have delimited the exterior wall and articulation of the chapel.

25 The 9.01 metre distance was not employed on the vertical axis because that would issue a golden section rectangle of 14.578 metres or a √2 rectangle of 12.742 metres, which do not correspond to the height of the chapel keystone. 26 See M. Cohen, The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy: Royal Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Paris, Cambridge, 2015, p. 78, and S. van Liefferinge, ‘The Choir of Notre-Dame of Paris: An Inquiry into Twelfth-Century Mathematics and Early-Gothic Architecture’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2006, chapter 3. 27 It may be useful to compare these numbers to those given in 1516 by Lorenz Lechler to his son Moritz in L. Shelby and R. Mark, ‘Late Gothic Structural Design in the “Instructions” of Lorenz Lechler’, Architectura, 9, 1979, pp. 113–31. 28 Compare Murray, ‘Architectural Envelope’, (Avista Forum), p. 22.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 43

09/07/2021 09:40

44 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

In conclusion, there are several points that can be made from this brief analysis of the Lady chapel’s digitally reconstructed model. First, digital reconstructions such as this and others effected to a high archaeological and historical research standard offer real pedagogical and research value for premodern architectural history. Second, digitally recreating the Lady chapel in 3D shifts the discussion from one based in an individual’s mind to one based on an object that can be evaluated and analyzed. Third, the plan of the digitally reconstructed Lady chapel suggests that the pier contained vital information in an encapsulated and easily intuited form that may have guided the design of the building: some of the structure’s proportions, its design, and its elevation seem to have been closely related to the information held in the pier. At the Lady chapel, measurements were taken from the pier’s centre point, located neither on the pier edge or the actual centre of the pier, but on the semicircle whose radius aligned with the centre of the pier at 1 royal foot perpendicular to the wall. Just why such simple geometry has not been seen in other extant buildings may be explained by their greater size or lack of regularity as laid out on the ground, which makes it very difficult to identify the underlying measurements and principles that guided the planning of these structures. Moreover, the measurements contemporary scholars have used are rarely in toises and more often in rounded royal feet, which become less precise in large-sized buildings. This insight about the pier might further serve as a method by which to begin similar analysis of other buildings from this period.29 By now seeing ‘the forest through the trees’, perhaps this example has brought us one step closer to answering that most basic question one has when entering a great Gothic church, which is, how in the world was it built?

29 Preliminary examinations of Chartres and Reims appear to confirm this practice; this study is forthcoming.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 44

09/07/2021 09:40

Fig. 1. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gothic Church Hidden by a Tree, 1810, lithograph. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 2004 (2004.21) image in the public domain, license CC0.1

Fig. 2. Tower vault of Jean sans Peur, c.1407, detail. Photo: Mbzt, image in the public domain: Wikimedia commons (accessed 01 October 2019).

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 45

09/07/2021 09:40

46 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

Fig. 3. The Lady Chapel of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, reconstructed model, view of interior from west showing some of the photogrammetric details of fragments, PI M. Cohen (2018)

Fig. 4. Pier of reconstructed Lady Chapel (in Vectorworks), image by M. Cohen

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 46

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 2   |  ‘t he f o r est t hro ugh t he t r ees’   |   47

Fig. 5. The Lady Chapel of Saint-Germaindes-Prés, reconstructed model, pier section scaled with overlaid measurements, image by M. Cohen

Fig. 6. The Lady Chapel of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, reconstructed model, PI M. Cohen, plan by K. Tanton (2017), measurements M. Cohen

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 47

09/07/2021 09:40

A Gothic Throne for the King of Kings: A Re-evaluation of the Design, Date, and Function of the Sainte-Chapelle Tribune Emily Guerry

T

h e d e vo t i o na l h e a rt o f t h e Sa i n t e - C h a p e l l e o f Pa r i s was its extraordinary collection of relics related to the Passion of Christ. The Crown of Thorns, the True Cross, the Holy Lance, and other sacred items acquired by King Louis IX (1214–1270, canonized 1297) from Constantinopolitan churches between 1239 and 1248, were assembled together inside a monumental silver-gilt reliquary box, known as the grande châsse.1 In the magna recepta records for Ascension Day of 1248, there is payment for over 680 livres parisiensis worth of gold, silver, and precious stones used ‘for the relics of the chapel of Paris’ (pro reliquiis Capellae Parisiensis) to construct this magnificent reliquary.2 In both of the foundation letters for the Sainte-Chapelle, the first of which dates to January 1246, the king requires one of its five master chaplains to sleep near his relics to protect them every night.3 In the second foundation letter, written from Aigues-Mortes in August 1248 just before the king’s departure on crusade, there is an added portion of text that refers to a capsam sanctam reliquiarum before outlining the precise number of candles required for specific feast days, including the Susceptio Coronae (11 August), which honoured the translation of the Crown relic to Paris.4 Both the magna recepta and the second foundation letter therefore suggest that the grande châsse was inside the Sainte-Chapelle by the time of its consecration on 26 April 1248. 1 2 3

4

For an annotated list of the twenty-two relics acquired by King Louis IX from Constantinopolitan churches, see B. Flusin, ‘Les reliques de la Sainte-Chapelle et leur passé impérial à Constantinople’, Le Trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle, ed. J. Durand and M-P. Lafitte, Paris, 2001, pp. 20–33. Pro operibus auri, argenti et lapidibus, pro reliquiis Capellae Parisiensis … VI. C. IIII. XX. l. CXIII. s. IX. d.: see the Compotus praepositorum et ballivorum Franciae, de termino Ascensionis, anno Domini M.CC.XLVIII, in Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (hereafter RHGF), ed. M. Bouquet et al., 24 vols, Paris, 1738–1904, vol. 21, p. 284. Both foundation letters read: volumus insuper et ordinamus quod quilibet praedictorum quinque principalium capellanorum cum deserviet in ordine vicis suae, qualibet noctae dormiat cum matriculariis in capella praedicta [cum matriculariis, quos omnes in eadem capella jacere volumus omni nocte] ut circa sanctarum reliquiarum custodiam juges excubiae perseverant. The portion in brackets is from the second letter. The first letter is catalogued as Paris, Archives nationales AE/II/2406 (formally K 32/2); the second is Paris, Archives nationales K 30/17. For both letters, see S-J. Morand, Histoire de la Sainte-Chapelle Royale du Palais, Paris, 1790, (pièces justificatives) pp. 3–13. See also M. Cohen, The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy, Cambridge, 2014, 212–19 and 223–6. Praeter haec etiam volumus ut in omnibus annualibus festis, in missa, in matutinus, et vesperis, primis, et secundis, et omnibus diebus quibus de sacrosanctis reliquiis fiet missa solemnis, in missa ardeant duodecim cerei, quorum quilibet ponderabit duas libras, circa capsam sanctam reliquiarum sex videlicet ab uno latere, et sex ab alio. Morand, Histoire de la Sainte-Chapelle (pièces justificatives), p. 13. Cohen, Sainte-Chapelle, pp. 223–6

[ 48]

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 48

09/07/2021 09:40

chap t er 3   |  a go t hi c t hro ne f o r t he ki ng o f ki ngs   |   49

An elegant Gothic tribune, supported by a jubé and flanked by a pair of spiral staircases, lifted the grande châsse above the high altar in the east end of the upper chapel. Weaving together older archeological and stylistic observations, art historians have assumed that this ciborium was a slightly later insertion, constructed soon after the chapel’s dedication around the time of Louis IX’s return from his crusade in 1254. On 26 July 1630, a calamitous fire toppled the roof of the Sainte-Chapelle, requiring a four-year period of intensive restoration, including work on the grande châsse and its tribune.5 In the end, the iconoclasm of the Revolution led to the destruction of this royal reliquary and the dismantling of all of its surrounding furnishings in early 1791.6 The tribune was considered a vital part of the chapel’s design by the nineteenth-century restoration team, who oversaw its recreation in the 1840s.7 This chapter will reexamine the design, date, and function of the reliquary tribune in the Sainte-Chapelle. It will argue that it played a central role in the original, cohesive design of the upper chapel. In addition to providing a suitable and secure platform for veneration, this baldachin also embodied a bold, new devotional idea; it signified the throne prepared for the imminent return of the Son of Man, who would reclaim the tokens of his Passion (from the king’s chapel) to enact the Last Judgment.

Design Four extant images present a full view of the Gothic tribune in the Sainte-Chapelle before its destruction. The earliest depiction is found in an unfinished miniature of c.1415 from a Parisian missal with illuminations attributed to the Bedford Master (Paris, Bibliothèque de Mazarine MS. 406) (fig. 1), produced for the dauphin Louis de Guyenne (1397–1415).8 Given the importance of the cult of the Crown of Thorns to its royal patron, it seems fitting that the interior of the Sainte-Chapelle appears in the first illumination after the liturgical calendar.9 On folio 7r, a remarkable drawing left uncoloured presents a faint but detailed view of devotion in action. Candles line the western-facing precipice of the tribune in this image, surrounding the grande châsse with a ring of light. Behind the high altar is a careful study of the Gothic tribune, supported by its jubé. A decorated cornice surrounds the upper balustrade, which is supported by four thin piers. Each face of the square-shaped

5 6

7 8 9

See the reference to the fire in Paris, Archives nationales LL 602, ff. 90–2, and Morand, Histoire de la Sainte-Chapelle, p. 20; H. Stein, Le Palais de Justice et la Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, 1912, pp. 55–62; J-M. Leniaud and F. Perrot, La Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, 1991, p. 181. The delivery of the grande châsse to the mint occurred when the relics were removed from their reliquaries and taken to SaintDenis before 9 March 1791. An inventory taken on 25 February 1791 is the last known reference to the ‘châsse placée au dessus d’autel’: see A. Vidier, ‘Le Trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle’, Mémories de la Société d’histoire de Paris et l’Ile de France, 35, 1908, pp. 189–339 (at pp. 324–8). M. Cohen, ‘Restoration as Re-creation at the Sainte-Chapelle’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 48, 2005, pp. 135–154. F. Caroff, ‘Missel à l’usage de Paris (Missale secundum usum ecclesiae Parisiensis)’, in Trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle, p. 124; É. Lebailly, ‘Le dauphin Louis, Duc de Guyenne, les arts précieux (1409–1415)’, Bulletin Monumental, 163, 2005, pp. 357–74. The annual festival for the Susceptio Sanctae Coronae Domini is noted as a duplex feast (11 August) on f. 3v of the liturgical calendar and the corresponding office for De susceptione Sancte Corone, which opens with Gaudeamus omnes, appears near the end of the book, sprawling across one of the final (and unnumbered) leaves.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 49

09/07/2021 09:40

5 0 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

ciborium is lifted by a trefoil arch set into A-frame gables, all of which are punctured with a quatrefoil just underneath the apex, lined with crockets, and topped with a fleur-de-lis that overlaps the upper story. Above the reliquary platform, a pair of pinnacles, festooned with crockets and capped with a fleur-de-lis, surround a squat, central aedicule set atop yet another elevation. If the Bedford master’s draft is accurate, then the tribune was originally a three-tiered Rayonnant superstructure. The benedictional of John of Lancaster, first duke of Bedford (1389–1435), once contained a splendid historiated initial (‘D’) showing the east end of the upper chapel (fig. 2).10 Unfortunately, on 24 May 1871 a fire started during the Commune gutted the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, where this manuscript was kept. Thankfully, an artist with the initials ‘M. B.’ produced a copy of this c.1420s illumination in 1837, now preserved in the Musée du Cluny, that shows a clearer impression of the tribune and its surrounding environment, including the staircases fitted to its north and south sides. We also see a pair of angels appear in the spandrels of the tribune’s central facade. The glittering reliquaries are visible underneath a quadripartite vault, implying that the grande châsse was opened and turned to face the nave. A tinted, early eighteenth-century drawing in the Gaignières collection presents a symmetrical view of the tribune situated in the apse (fig. 3). The same composition appears in Ransonnette’s engraving of the ‘Sanctuaire’ in Sauveur-Jérome Morand’s 1790 monograph, which is a probably a copy of the Gaignières illustration. 11 In each image, the shrine seems to float above its base. The lions lay on an arcade pierced by quatrefoils set within double-trefoils; precisely the same architectonic pattern lines the dado walls of the upper chapel, where each of the quatrefoils frame wall paintings of violent martyrdom and sculpted angels emerge from the spandrels.12 The height of the ciborium is also noticeably diminished when compared with earlier examples that show the upper aedicule. Its absence might be explained by the restoration undertaken after the 1630 fire. The Gaignières illustration also includes the angels in the tribune spandrels, which are the structure’s only known figural motifs. An unpublished watercolour by Émile Boeswillwald (1815–96) showing medieval fragments of polychromy in the Sainte-Chapelle includes a meticulous état actuel of the angel salvaged from the left side of the tribune’s facade (fig. 4). Although only a few fragments are visible under the angel’s chin and in between the feathers of its wing, Boeswillwald’s record indicates that the background of the tribune spandrel was once filled with blue glass covered in painted gold decoration. Precisely the same ornamentation appears in the martyrdom murals and angel reliefs of the dado arcade. The same tribune angel is recorded by Félix Duban (1798–1870) in his Vue intérieure de la Sainte-Chapelle of 1847 as well as an even earlier, undated illustration

10 J. Durand, ‘Le duc de Bedford en prière devant la Grande Châsse ouverte’, in Le Trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle, p. 127. See also C. Reynolds, ‘The workshop of the Master of the Duke of Bedford: Definitions and Identities’, Patrons, Authors, and Workshops: Books and Book Production in Paris around 1400, ed. G. Croenen and P. F. Ainsworth, Leuven, 2006, pp. 437–72. 11 Morand, Histoire de la Sainte-Chapelle Royale du Palais, pl. 39; Durand, ‘La Grande Châsse aux reliques’, p. 107 in Le Trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle. 12 R. Branner, ‘The Painted Medallions in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 58, 1968, pp. 1–44.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 50

09/07/2021 09:40

chap ter 3   |  a go t hi c t hro ne f o r t he ki ng o f ki ngs   |   5 1

by Charles Percier (1764–1838).13 With almond-shaped eyes, curling tendrils of shoulderlength hair, broad-fold drapery, and the amorphous treatment of the undulating celestial envelope below, the tribune angel appears to be fashioned by the same craftsmen who made the angels in the c.1240s dado arcade. Despite his issue with the date of the tribune, which will be discussed in the next section, Louis Grodecki conceded that the tribune angels, albeit not as cheerful as their counterparts in the dado, were the ‘same as that of the angels on the wall-arcading of the nave; they are likely to be contemporaneous’.14 Many of the Sainte-Chapelle angels, especially those who crown the dying martyrs in the dado, smile with what Paul Binski has called a ‘special menace’ also seen in the expressions of the c.1250–60s angelic relief sculpture in the south transept at Westminster Abbey and the c.1256–80s choir of Lincoln Cathedral.15 The Anglo-Norman Douce Apocalypse (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 180), created c.1265–75, also contains similarly bemused angels.16 Binski intuited that the depiction of the heavenly throne prepared for the Son of Man on folio 3r of the Douce Apocalypse (fig. 5), showing ‘The Vision of Christ and the candlesticks’ (Revelation 1:12–14), was ‘derived from the reliquary platform canopy of the Sainte-Chapelle’.17 For Christopher Wilson, the ‘gablet over the central arch’ in the miniature is a ‘clearly recognizable version of the much larger gables of the ciborium over the grande châsse in the Sainte-Chapelle’.18 From its set of four, thin Rayonnant piers, to its trefoil arch and the A-frame gable lined with crockets with a single punctured quatrefoil, the celestial setting for the Son of Man in the Douce Apocalypse bears an uncanny resemblance to the royal ciborium in Paris. On feast days, when the grande châsse was surrounded by tapers, these similarities would be even more apparent. Binski has shown how various aesthetic features of the Sainte-Chapelle were ‘channeled’ into Henry III’s projects at Westminster as well as other aspects of English Gothic art.19 These contemporary coincidences reveal that the Gothic tribune was perhaps one of most memorable parts of the visual experience inside Louis IX’s Sainte-Chapelle. At the very least, its design was certainly conversant with and adaptable for the divine image of the heavenly throne.

13 Duban’s watercolour is preserved as Paris, Musée d’Orsay RF 1905 (a digital facsimile is available online at the museum’s website). For Percier’s image, see Bibliothèque de l’Institute de France MS 1012, f. 50r, reproduced in Leniaud and Perrot, La Sainte-Chapelle, p. 42 14 L. Grodecki, La Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, 1975, p. 60. 15 P. Binski, ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile’, Art History, 20, 1997, pp. 350–78; T. A. Heslop, ‘The Iconography of the Angel Choir at Lincoln’, Medieval Architecture and Its Intellectual Context: Studies in Honor of Peter Kidson, ed. E. Fernie and P. Crossley, London, 1990, pp. 151–8. 16 See N. Morgan, The Douce Apocalypse: Picturing the End of the World in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 2006, pp. 44–5. 17 B Binski, ‘Function, Date, and Context of the Westminster Retable’, The Westminster Retable: History, Technique, Conservation, ed. P. Binski and A. Massing, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 16–44 (at p. 31). See also C. Wilson, ‘The Architecture and Ornament of the Westminster Retable as Evidence of Its Dating and Origin’, in The Westminster Retable, pp. 76–96 (at p. 90). 18 Wilson, ‘Architecture and Ornament’, p. 90. Wilson also noticed that the scene of the Raising of Jarius’ Daughter on the Retable contained another similar type of baldachin (complete with a punctured quatrefoil) in the background (ibid., pp. 87–9). 19 P. Binski, Westminster and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400, New Haven, CT, 1995, pp. 154–8.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 51

09/07/2021 09:40

5 2  | tr ibutes to paul bins ki – part o ne

Date Today, visitors to the Sainte-Chapelle see the tribune designed in the 1840s, which is significantly larger, heavier, and higher than its medieval predecessor.20 Viollet-le-Duc confirmed in his Dictionnaire that all of the features of the tribune ‘sont aujourd’hui replacés’.21 In the apse of the lower chapel, there are two intrusive modern columns, both painted black, that support the weight of the mammoth nineteenth-century structure above.22 From the floor to the dais, the current tribune now measures about twenty-two feet in height, which is at least four feet taller than its Gothic incarnation.23 This oversized and overweight structure probably caused irreversible suppression of the dado arcade. For this reason, observations of the damage apparently caused by the insertion of the tribune should be treated with caution, as it is difficult to ascertain if this is the result of the original tribune. In 1867, Ferdinand de Guilhermy expressed his concern for the effacement of the apsidal martyrdom murals, lamenting that ‘la construction de la tribune en a causé la suppression’, and claimed that upper chapel had two design phases: The work overseen by Louis IX in the 1240s and that which was undertaken by Philippe IV (r. 1286–1314) after his grandfather’s canonization in 1297.24 François Gebelin also postdated the erection of tribune due to its apparent intrusion into the eastern wall as well as a set of stylistic differences, writing that the jubé’s more-pointed arcade profile contrasts with the appearance of the more ‘primitif ’ forms of the dado wall.25 Citing Gebelin, Branner wrote that the ‘tribune, with its screen and baldachino, were probably later additions’ because some of their features are ‘pointed rather than semicircular’.26 In summary, the grounds for attaching a later date to the construction of the Gothic tribune are rooted primarily in the ‘notches’ seen in the apsidal arcade and the pointed, ‘advanced’ style of the adjoining jubé arcade. The staircases do cut into the dado, obscuring portions of six of the painted medallions, N 20–N 22 and S 20–S 22.27 However, these signs of destruction appear to be entirely modern: all of the broken segments of the dado are covered in modern plaster and grey paint. Although an archaeological survey would elucidate the date and degree of damage, it seems likely that the destruction seen today is the result of nineteenth-century restoration. Moreover, the form of the tribune’s elevated canopy, with its A-frame gable, punctured quatrefoil, and the monumental, multimedia treatment of its angelic sculpture, do exhibit elements of a distinctly c.1240s Parisian style. While the angular shapes of the jubé screen might contrast with the smooth semicircular trefoils seen in the lateral parts of the dado’s north and south walls, they are similar to

20 For an overview of the nineteenth-century work at the Sainte-Chapelle, see J-M. Leniaud, Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–1857), ou le temps retrouvé des cathédrales, Geneva, 1980; M. Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-leDuc, 1814–1879, Farnham, 2014. 21 Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raissonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, 6 vols, Paris, 1854–68), vol. 2, p. 34. 22 F. de Guilhermy, Description de la Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, 1870, p. 33. 23 N-M. Troche, La Sainte-Chapelle de Paris, Paris, 1853, p. 17. 24 Guilhermy, Description de la Sainte-Chapelle, pp. 39, 46. 25 F. Gebelin, La Sainte-Chapelle et la Conciergerie, Paris, 1937, p. 57 26 Branner, ‘The Grande Châsse’, p. 14; see also idem, St Louis and the Court Style in Gothic Architecture, London, 1965, pp. 39, 101. 27 Branner, ‘The Grande Châsse’, p. 16. See also Branner, ‘Painted Medallions’, pp. 6, 31–2, 42; E. Guerry, ‘The Wall Paintings of the Sainte-Chapelle’, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2013, pp. 120–22.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 52

09/07/2021 09:40

chap t er 3   |  a go t hi c t hro ne f o r t he ki ng o f ki ngs   |   53

the sharper trefoils of the western wall and even more so in the eastern apsidal dado zone. Across the dado, tribune, and jubé, there are various experimentations in the width of the arcade profiles, based in part on the amount of available surface area. In terms of style, only Daniel H. Weiss offered a counter argument against earlier critiques. He claimed that there is ‘abundant evidence’ for a date in or around the 1240s for the tribune and jubé, citing the contemporary microarchitectural decoration seen in the Vie de Saint Denys (BnF MS n.a.f. 1098) as well as the architectural features of the chapel of the Virgin at Saint-Germain-des-Près.28 Since the twentieth century, most scholars agree that the tribune would have been installed in the Sainte-Chapelle before 25 March 1267, when Louis IX pledged his final crusade. In his Vie de Saint Louis, Jean de Joinville wrote that he was with the king in Paris when he ascended ‘l’éschafaut au reliques’ in ‘la chapelle le roy’ to lift his very own relic of the True Cross (‘aporter la vrai Croiz aval’), performing a deeply personal and symbolic promise to ‘take up the cross’.29 Gebelin was the first to assume that Jonville’s text implied the presence of the tribune.30 Despite his admission that many of the design features of the tribune are similar to the dado decoration (including the angelic sculpture), Louis Grodecki remained reluctant to attribute it to the first phase of its construction because of the damage to the apsidal walls.31 Branner echoed Grodecki’s appraisal and claimed that the tribune marked ‘a fundamental alteration of the first programme’; he then speculated that during the Dedicatio in 1248, the grande châsse was set on a table above the high altar, which was replaced by the tribune after Louis IX’s return from Acre in 1254. 32 If we return to the second foundation letter of the Sainte-Chapelle, the additional text, which clarifies the number of candles needs for certain ferial days circa capsam sanctam reliquiarum, it also specifies the number of candles placed ante maius altare.33 While the language is not clear enough to draw any certain conclusions, this differentiation between ante maius altare and circa capsam sanctam reliquiarum suggests that the location of the grande châsse and the high altar were conceived of two separate spaces as early as 1248.

Function The tribune served a number of practical, devotional, and symbolic functions in the Sainte-Chapelle. Like many ‘ciboires’ of its time, it provided an essential security system for the protection of the precious relics in the grande châsse, which, by 1790, required ten different keys to access.34 It also served as a surprisingly large staging ground for a more 28 Weiss, ‘Architectural Symbolism’, p. 310 n. 16. 29 See Mémoires de Jean sire de Joinville, ed. F. Michel, Paris, 1858, p. 234. 30 F. Gebelin, Le Sainte-Chapelle, p. 57. 31 Grodecki, La Sainte-Chapelle, p. 62. 32 Branner, ‘The Grande Châsse’, p. 14. 33 In festis novem lectionum ardeant in bacinnis argenteis ante maius altare, privatis diebus sex cerei ... in missa ardeant duodecim cerei, quorum quilibet ponderabit duas libras, circa capsam sanctam reliquiarum sex videlicet ab uno latere, et sex ab alio. Morand, Histoire de la Sainte-Chapelle (pièces justificatives), p. 11. 34 Morand, Histoire de la Sainte-Chapelle, p. 39.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 53

09/07/2021 09:40

5 4 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

privileged, intimate experience of worship. Long after completing his education in Paris, the elderly Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV of Bohemia (r.1346–1378) visited the SainteChapelle on 4 January 1378 and a detailed account of his encounter with the Passion relics is found in Les Grandes Chroniques de France.35 Because of Charles IV’s poor health, the text relates how the physically weak emperor was pulled up the tribune staircases by his arms and legs, which caused him great pain.36 After this arduous ascent, the emperor kissed the relics and offered his prayers before the king ‘turned’ (tourna) the châsse to face the chapel.37 Peter Kovác noted that the Chronique reveals that at least eight people had ascended the tribune with the emperor, which suggests that a spacious platform existed beneath the ciborium canopy.38 The Chronique also implies that the dais supporting the shrine had a revolving base. Branner believed that the grande châsse was placed on a ‘swivel’, which would explain the various depictions of its collection of reliquaries facing the nave (i.e. in the duke of Bedford’s benedictional) and the cavity of space between its base and its leonine supports.39 For Weiss, the presence of these lions is one part of a cohesive architectural iconography in which the Sainte-Chapelle tribune represents the new throne of Solomon, or, more specifically, a fusion of the porch of justice with the idea of the sedes sapientiae.40 He wrote that the Sainte-Chapelle ‘was nothing less than the Capetian equivalent of Solomon’s temple and palace’.41 According to Weiss, the Solomonic symbolism of the tribune was born out of a long-standing exegetical tradition that transmitted the power of the Old Testament king into the Capetian present through its potential as a throne. In light of the early evidence related to the creation of the royal cult of the Crown of Thorns in Paris, this idea of a throne could be taken in another direction. Soon after the royal adventus in August 1239, when Louis IX celebrated his acquisition of the Crown relic with pious processions through the cities of Sens and Paris, Archbishop Gauthier Cornut of Sens (d. 1241), who presided over these ceremonies, produced a text known today as the Historia Susceptionis Coronae Spineae.42 The Historia explains how the relic came to Paris, recollects the various celebrations staged for its arrival, and asserts that its translation revealed the Lord’s preference for the Capetian kingdom. Commissioned by 35 This portion of Les Grandes Chroniques de France is found in BNF MS fr. 138, 467, 2813, and 6465. See Chronique des régnes de Jean II et de Charles V, ed. R. Delachenal, 4 vols, Paris, 1910–20, vol. 2, particularly pp. 232–6 (for Charles’s encounter in the SainteChapelle); see also P. Kováč, ‘Notes on the Description of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris from 1378’, Court Chapels of the High and Late Middle Ages and their Artistic Decoration, ed. J. Fajt, Prague, 2003, pp. 413–18. 36 Et pour ce que l’Empereur voult en toutes manieres monter en hault, devant la dicte chasse, et veoir les saints reliques, et la montée soit greveuse et estroite, il n’y pot estre porté en sa chaiere, mais se fist tyrer par les braz et jambes contre mont la vix, et pareillement ravaler à tres grant paine, travail et grevance de son corps, pour la grant devocion qu’il acoit à veoir de près les dites saintes reliques (etc.): Chronique des régnes, ed. Delachenal, vol. 2, pp. 232–3. 37 Et après ce que les princes, qui avec lui estoient, orent baissié, le Roy tourna la dite chasse devers la chapelle, et laissa à garder ycelle les evesques de Beauvaiz et de Paris, revestus en pontifical de mitres et de crosses. Ibid., p. 233. 38 Kováč, ‘Notes on the Description, p. 414. 39 Branner, ‘The Grande Châsse’, p. 7. 40 Weiss, ‘Architectural Symbolism’, especially pp. 314–16. 41 Ibid, p. 318. 42 The Historia survives in two seventeenth-century manuscripts with a reliable medieval provenance: BNF MS lat. 3282, ff. 1–4v and BNF MS Dupuy XIII, pp. 135–47. After these copies entered the Bibliothèque du Roi, numerous erudits of the era published the text. For example, see the Historia Susceptionis Coronae Spineae in A. Duchesne, Historiae Francorum Scriptores, 5 vols, Paris: 1636–49, vol. 5, pp. 407–11, and the Sermo M. Gualterus Cornutus, in C. E. du Boulay, Historia Universitatis Parisiensis, 6 vols, Paris, 1601–78, vol. 3, pp. 170–74. Today, the most accessible versions of the Historia appear as Opusculum Galteri Cornuti, RHGF, vol. 23, pp. 26–31, and Gualterii Cornuti, in P. Riant, Exuviae Sacrae Constantinopolitinae, 2 vols, Geneva, 1877–8, vol. 1, pp. lxvii– lxxiv, 45–56.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 54

09/07/2021 09:40

chap t er 3   |  a go t hi c t hro ne f o r t he ki ng o f ki ngs   |   55

Louis IX to share the joyous news of the relic’s arrival, Cornut’s Historia, which combines the content of a sermon (possibly delivered by Cornut on the occasion of the first annual festival of the Susceptio Coronae) with a chronicle, circulated in the form of a libellus.43 One of the most striking ideas found in the Historia is the statement that Christ will wear his Crown of Thorns again during the Last Judgment. In his description of Louis IX’s exhilaration about the imminent arrival of his Crown relic, the text states that The king, prudently realizing that this had come about from the Lord, rejoiced in the fact that He who had worn this same Crown in order to induce shame for our behalf now wished that it be piously and reverently honored on earth by the faithful, until He comes in judgment and again puts it on His own head as a sign to all who are to be judged.44 After the translation, liturgical compilers adapted the content of Cornut’s Historia to create a new office for the annual festival of the Susceptio Coronae, observed on 11 August in the Gallic calendar. Portions of the Historia were copied verbatim and used as lections in the first versions of this office.45 The Historia also inspired the content of antiphons. In the hymn that follows a reading from Revelation 6: 2, a number of thirteenth-century breviaries with the Susceptio Coronae also express the idea of Christ returning to retrieve his Crown. The words of the fourth stanza of this hymn read: Nostra conservat regio [/] Tibi thesaurum inclitum [/] Imminente iudicio [/] Resumes hoc depositum. (‘Our region protects this illustrious treasure for you until you take back this deposit again during the imminent judgment.’)46 These sequences, which were originally composed in the c.1240s and chanted throughout the provinces of Sens and Paris, state explicitly that Christ will wear his Crown again during the Last Judgment. Inspired by a close reading of the Historia, the liturgical compilers of the Susceptio Coronae embraced this specific eschatological concept and, in addition to Cornut’s text, sacred music could have served as a nurturing channel for its transmission. The idea that Christ will wear his Crown at the end of time presents

43 Geoffrey de Beaulieu wrote that the history of the Crown’s translation could be read in a libellus: Geoffrey de Beaulieu, Vita S. Ludovici, in RHGF, Xvol. 20, pp. 1–26. Natalis de Wailly surmised that the libellus contained the Historia attributed to Cornut in his ‘Examen critique de la Vie de Saint Louis par Geoffroy de Beaulieu’, Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Inscriptions et BellesLettres de l’Institute de France, 15, 1845, pp. 403–37; idem, ‘Récit du trezième siècle sur les translations faites en 1239 et en 1241 des saintes reliques de la Passion’, Bibliothèque de l’école de Chartres, 39, 1878, pp. 401–15 (at pp. 406–7); see also Riant, Exuviae Sacrae, vol. 1, p. lxix. 44 Rex prudenter intelligens id a Domino fieri, gavisus est in hoc quod ille, qui Coronam eandem pro nobis gesserat in opprobrium, volebat eam a suis fidelibus pie et reverenter honorari in terris, donec ad iudicium veniens eam suo rursus imponeret capiti, iudicandis omnibus ostendendam. Gaudebat igitur quod, ad exhibendum honorem huiusmodi, suam Deus preelegerat Galliam, in qua per ipsius clementiam fides viget firmiter, et cultu devotissimo salutis nostre mysteria celebrantur. BNF MS lat. 3282, f. 3: see also RHGF, vol. 22, p. 29, and Riant, Exuviae Sacrae, vol. 1, p. 51. 45 This includes the readings in thirteenth-century manuscripts used in Sens (such as BNF MS lat. 1028, ff. 286–297v; Auxerre, Bibliothèque municipale MS 60, ff. 255–63), Paris (such as BNF MS lat. 15182, ff. 290v–297v; BNF MS lat. 14811, ff. 452–462), and nearby communities such as Meaux (e.g. BNF MS lat. 1266 ff. 211v–221v). On the compilation of this office, see B. Arnaud and A. Dennery, ‘L’Office de la Couronne d’épines à Sens’, Musicological Studies, 19, 2012, pp. 1–42; C. Mercuri, ‘“Stat inter spinas lilium”: Le Lys de France et la Couronne d’épines’, Le Moyen Âge, 90, 2004, pp. 479–512; J. Blezzard, S. Ryle, and J. Alexander, ‘New Perspectives on the Feast of the Crown of Thorns’, Journal of Plainsong and Medieval Music Society, 10, 1987, pp. 23–47. 46 This hymn appears in the thirteenth-century offices seen in BNF MS lat. 1028 f. 290v; Auxerre BM MS 60 f. 261; BNF MS lat. 15182, f. 297; BNF MS lat. 14811 f. 456; and BNF MS lat. 1266 f. 220v.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 55

09/07/2021 09:40

5 6 | tr ibutes to paul bins ki – part o ne

a novel, literal image of the description of Son of Man as a ‘king’ in Matthew 25: 31–46. The artists of the Douce Apocalypse certainly pictured the Son of Man sitting in a splendid Gothic throne that looked just like the Sainte-Chapelle tribune, where the relics of Christ’s Passion were surrounded with candlesticks on ferial days, including the Susceptio Coronae. The previously overlooked content of Cornut’s Historia and the liturgy it inspired suggests that the conception of the Son of Man collecting and then wearing the Crown of Thorns during the Last Judgment originated with Louis IX’s cult of the Crown relic. It seems possible that this eschatological idea first took form in the visual culture of the SainteChapelle before its transmission– through text, image, and liturgy– beyond the radius of the royal capital of the Capetian kingdom. The tribune in the Sainte-Chapelle is a central part of its complex and overwhelmingly beautiful decorative programme. It was probably an original feature of the chapel and it inspired other ideas and works of art in the Gothic imagination. By enveloping and elevating the grande châsse with this resplendent Rayonnant superstructure, the tribune offered the relics of Christ’s Passion protection, provided a worthy space for their devotion, and glorified the power of their presence in Paris. It also conveyed a rich, multi-layered symbolism, activated by the site-specific celebration of the royal relic cults in the SainteChapelle. While its architectural iconography might borrow from a host of meaningful archetypes, including the porch of Solomon, one aspect of its significance has been overlooked. It also could serve as a glorious throne prepared for Christ, who was manifest in the instruments of his Passion and who would return again at the end of time to reclaim his abject regalia and wear his Crown of Thorns as a sign of salvation. In this sacred space designed for medieval kings to honour the relics that revealed Christ’s celestial kingship, a monumental, micro-architectural throne still stands, awaiting the enactment of its final function.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 56

09/07/2021 09:40

chap t er 3   |  a go t hi c t hro ne f o r t he ki ng o f ki ngs   |   5 7

Fig. 1. The unfinished miniature by the Bedford Master that accompanies Domenica Prima adventus in the Missal of Louis de Guyenne, c.1415, Paris, Bibliothèque de Mazarine MS. 406, f. 7r. Reproduced with permission from the Bibliothèque de Mazarine.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 57

09/07/2021 09:40

5 8  | tr ibutes to paul bins ki – part o ne

Fig. 2. Copy in gouache of “D” initial from the c.1420s Benedictional of the 1st Duke of Bedford, 1837. Paris, Musée national du Moyen Âge, Cl. 22847, f. 083v. © La Bibliothèque Virtuelle des Manuscrits Médiévaux (BVMM).

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 58

09/07/2021 09:40

chap ter 3   |  a go t hi c t hro ne f o r t he ki ng o f ki ngs   |   5 9

Fig. 3. “Vue du Sanctuaire de la Sainte-Chapelle du Palais,” Collection Roger de Gaignières (1642–1715), no. 78, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes, Va 9, f. 54 bis. Reproduced with permission from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 59

09/07/2021 09:40

60  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

Fig. 4. Detail from Émile Boeswillwald, “Sainte-Chapelle haute, état actuel des peintures MDCCCXLV,” fragment no. 7, watercolour, 1845, Mediathèque d’architecture et du patrimoine (Saint-Cyr, unlabeled folio). Reproduced with permission from the Mediathèque d’architecture et du patrimoine.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 60

09/07/2021 09:40

chap ter 3   |  a go t hi c t hro ne f o r t he ki ng o f ki ngs   |   61

Fig. 5. Detail of the miniature showing “The Vision of Christ and the candlesticks,” The Douce Apocalypse, c.1265–75, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 180, f. 3r. Reproduced with permission from the Bodleian Library.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 61

09/07/2021 09:40

Linearity and the Gothic Style: Architectural Conception in England and France, 1200–1400 James Hillson

W

hen attempting t o de sc ri b e a n y e xa m p l e of the architecture we call Gothic, it is difficult not to resort to characterising its forms in linear terms. Built during the 1230s on the orders of King Louis IX of France, the royal chapel of Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the north of Paris sets a particularly emphatic example (fig. 1).1 Viewed from the exterior, its bays are flanked by vertical buttresses, its levels delineated by moulded horizontal coursings and its windows enclosed within rectangular frames partitioned by a lacelike array of stone arcs, circles and straight lines. This effect of compartmentalisation is further intensified on the interior, where each bay is subdivided by a similar grid of vertical and horizontal accents. Long continuous shafts connect the floor to the springing points of the vault; the sills and seats seem to pass behind them, defining the boundaries of a dado arcade of trefoil arches and the window zone behind. The result gives every appearance of having been conceived as a series of planar layers, each consisting of a textured network of linear forms realized in moulded extrusions of stone. Viewing buildings in linear terms has long been one of the fundamental descriptive and critical methodologies employed by architectural historians. Whether drawing out plans, studying preparatory sketches or attempting to articulate an edifice’s formal qualities through the language of line and contour, the experience of buildings as collapsed planes of linear tracings has proven vital to both internalising and analysing architectural style. Gothic architecture has been no exception to this, but there is a key difference in the kind of values which have been imposed on its lines. Whether treated as a defining criterion of stylistic distinction or the articulating principle of visual logic, linearity has repeatedly been identified as a constitutive aspect of Gothic stylistic identity, with buildings like SaintGermain-en-Laye not just being considered linear in appearance, but as actively conceived in linear terms, embodying a linear set of values and design principles.

1

C. Léon, Le Château de Saint-Germain-en-laye au Moyen-Âge: Historie et Évolution architecturale d’une Residence royale XIIe–XIVe Siècles, Paris, 2008, pp. 18–20, 192–3.

[ 62]

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 62

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 4  |  l i near i t y and t he go t hi c st yl e  |   63

This essay is an attempt to re-evaluate this viewpoint from a technical perspective. By studying some of the limited evidence for how Gothic buildings were being designed, it provides a critical reassessment of the relationships between the conception of their multiple linearities and their realisation in stone. Focusing on England and France during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this essay challenges received assumptions about the supposed inherent formal values of Gothic architecture by analysing the practical processes through which linear forms were devised (namely small-scale drawings on parchment, full-scale incised drawings on plaster or stone and wooden or canvas templates), proposing a more distributed and continuous model of architectural conception than has often been assumed.2 In the process, it invites a reassessment of the relationships between the reception and conception of architectural forms in the period, indicating new directions by which technical processes can inform our understanding of aesthetic experience. The earliest scholars to address Gothic linearity directly were not those working on buildings in France, but England. In his Attempt to discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England (1817), Thomas Rickman made linearity the principal distinguishing factor for his now canonical divisions into the Early English (1189 to 1307), Decorated (1307 to 1377) and Perpendicular (up to 1630) styles.3 Though the book listed the characteristic variations of numerous architectural features, only the sections on windows included a discussion of the principles underlying their classification, the Decorated and Perpendicular being defined by tracery that was ‘either flowing, where the lines branch out in the resemblance of leaves, arches, and other figures; or perpendicular, where the mullions are continued through in straight lines’.4 This distinction was further nuanced by Rickman’s contemporary Edmund Sharpe, who drew up an alternative, fourfold division of English Gothic into lancet (1190 to 1245), geometrical (1245 to 1315), curvilinear (1315 to 1360) and rectilinear (1360 to 1550) styles.5 Tracery again defined the latter three categories, for which the ‘leading lines’ were characterized as ‘circular’, ‘flowing’ and ‘straight’ respectively,6 establishing a linear vocabulary of stylistic expression which set the precedent for all subsequent discussions of English Gothic.7 Whereas Rickman and Sharpe characterized English architecture in terms of multiple, contrasting linear identities, contemporary scholars of French Gothic rarely engaged with the linearity of its forms explicitly and instead focused predominantly on its structural, 2

For a more extended discussion of this concept see J. James, The Contractors of Chartres, 2 vols, Dooralong, 1979–81; idem, The Template-Makers of the Paris Basin, Leura, 1989; S. Murray, Notre-Dame Cathedral of Amiens: The Power of Change in Gothic, Cambridge, 1996; A. Villes, La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Reims: chronologie et campagnes de travaux, Joué-lès-Tours, 2009; J. Hillson, ‘St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster: Architecture, Decoration and Politics in the Reigns of Henry III and the three Edwards (1227–1363)’, PhD dissertation, University of York, 2015; idem, St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster: Architecture and Politics under the Plantagenets, 1227–1363, Turnhout (forthcoming). 3 T. Rickman, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England from the Conquest to the Reformation, 3rd edn, London, 1826, pp. 44–5. 4 Rickman, Attempt, pp. 42, 44, 46, 73–5, 87, 90. 5 E. Sharpe, A Treatise on the Rise and Progress of Decorated Window Tracery in England, London, 1849, pp. 6–8; idem, The Seven Periods of English Architecture defined and illustrated, 3rd edn, London, 1888, pp. 3–8. 6 Sharpe, Treatise, p. 7. 7 E. A. Freeman, A History of Architecture, London, 1849, pp. 338–55, 360–403; F. Bond, Gothic Architecture in England: An Analysis of the Origin & Development of English Church Architecture from the Norman Conquest to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, London, 1906, pp. 80–96, 472–504; J. Evans, English Art 1307–1461, Oxford, 1949, pp. 25–37, 66–74; G. Webb, Architecture in Britain in the Middle Ages, Harmondsworth, 1956, pp. 113–52; N. Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art, London, 1956, pp. 90–156.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 63

09/07/2021 09:40

64 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

technical and spatial achievements.8 It was the architectural historian Jean Bony who was the first to propose that all forms of Gothic were a self-conscious expression of ‘linear values’, wherein the ‘linear accents’ were understood ‘to represent, and be conceived as representing, the very framework of the structure.’9 Whereas for French Gothic these ‘lines had an intellectual, almost scientific value’, acting as ‘instruments of analysis, separating out the various components of the architectural composition’, for English Decorated ‘linearity was instinctively perceived as an invitation to play on patterns’, the flexuous insinuations of its curvilinear lines and net-like vault surfaces creating ‘a previously unimagined freedom of linear fantasy’.10 Straight lines were associated with rationality, curved lines with irrationality, and the shift from Decorated to Perpendicular was consequently a triumph of ‘hardened and stiffened regularity’ over the fluid nonconformism of unbridled imagination.11 For Bony, all of these linear values were ultimately grounded in the practical processes of artistic creation. ‘Extreme linearization’ provided the means for the ‘extremes of systematization’ prevalent in French Gothic from the early decades of the thirteenth century, but only through the medium of technological innovation, specifically ‘an increased refinement in stone cutting and a new precision in architectural draughtsmanship.’12 This was an extension of Robert Branner’s concept that the ‘growing habit of linear expression’ in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had ‘called modern architectural drawing into being’, resulting in an architecture which ‘for the first time could be composed on parchment and then translated into stone.’13 Linearity was reconceived as the medium through which the form, structure, spaciousness and aesthetic impact of Gothic architecture was actively being conceived, its flatness, thinness and heightened linear expression developing as a function of composition through draughtsmanship. This reinterpretation of Gothic as an increasingly graphic style raises a number of questions regarding the technical procedures that were actually involved in its compositional process. Much of the recent study of Gothic architecture has been devoted to precisely this problem, subjecting the surviving corpus of architectural drawings from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries to intense scrutiny in order to reveal the geometric and modular systems from which they were ultimately derived.14 Yet as the technical aspects of Gothic design have become an increasingly specialized field, these observations have been increasingly abstracted by art historians considering their wider ramifications for

E-E. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, 10 vols, Paris, 1854–60; M. Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879, Farnham, 2014, pp. 165–87. 9 J. Bony, French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th centuries, Berkeley, CA, 1983, pp. 79–81, 88; idem, The English Decorated Style: Gothic Architecture Transformed 1250–1350, Ithaca, NY, 1979, p. 43. 10 Bony, English Decorated, pp. 43, 56. 11 Ibid., pp. 57–62. 12 Bony, French Gothic, pp. 379, 405. 13 R. Branner, ‘Villard de Honnecourt, Reims and the Origin of Gothic Architectural Drawing,’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 61, 1963, pp. 129–46. 14 For a concise historiographical survey of the geometrical analysis of Gothic architectural drawings see Bork, Geometry, pp. 11–20.

8

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 64

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 4  |  l i near i t y and t he go t hi c st yl e   |   65

architectural development.15 This has the unintended effect of de-reifying the creative processes employed by medieval architects, establishing only theoretical relationships between architectural form and its conception by converting linearization into a generalized aesthetic phenomenon rather than a practical, operative reality. A logical starting point for redressing this oversight is drawing, specifically the largescale parchment drawings long associated with the preconception of Gothic edifices. Though the low survival rate of medieval architectural drawings has been greatly exaggerated, only a vanishingly small number can be attributed securely to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.16 Perhaps the earliest of these are two elevations executed for the west front of Strasbourg cathedral, Plan A (c.1250 to 1260) and Plan B (c.1270 to 1277) (fig. 2).17 Featuring a dense network of inked lines defining doors, gables, buttresses and interconnected tracery, these have been considered representative of a lost class of design drawing, their parchment surfaces allowing buildings to be entirely preconceived in two dimensions before they were ever built in stone. By far the most comprehensive attempt to analyse the compositional processes behind such graphic representations has been undertaken by Robert Bork, who has proposed that they were created through the repeated application of a small number of simple geometrical operations.18 After establishing a baseline and centreline, straight lines, arcs, circles and right angles were used to construct squares, triangles and other basic figures, which could in turn be rotated to produce octagons and hexagons. These starting figures provided a network of points from which new lines and figures could be created, the drawing developing in a process of ‘dynamic unfolding’ or, more precisely, iterative growth. The geometrical matrix of Strasbourg Plan B, as reconstructed by Bork, exemplifies this approach.19 Starting with two concentric octagonal figures, the draughtsman established a framework within which the principal vertical and horizontal axes of the facade’s tower could be drawn. Further figures were dropped down to define the base zone and rotational octagons were repeated vertically along the centreline, apparently providing a new set of starting points for further lines at each level of the facade. Redrawn digitally and superimposed on the thirteenthcentury original, these schemata allow Plan B to be presented as an integrated geometrical construction conceived according to a grid of linearly-defined forms. However, the imposition of geometrical matrices on Gothic drawings is to a certain extent illusory. Relatively few of the lines overlaid on Plan B by Bork and others were present on the drawing’s surface, indicating that these operations were largely sacrificial in

15 D. Kimpel and R. Suckale, Die gotische Architektur in Frankreich 1130–1270, Munich, 1985, pp. 223–9; J. Bugslag, ‘Architectural Drafting and the “Gothicization” of the Gothic Cathedral’, in Reading Gothic Architecture, ed. M. M. Reeve, Turnhout, 2008, pp. 57–74; P. Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style 1290–1350, New Haven, CT, 2014, pp. 49–79. 16 Over 620 Gothic drawings have been catalogued worldwide. See Hans Josef Böker et al., Architektur der Gotik: Bestandskatalog der weltgrössten Sammlung an gotischen Baurissen (Legat Franz Jäger) im Kupferstichkabinett der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Salzburg, 2005; Böker et al., Architektur der Gotik. Ulm und Donauraum, Salzburg, 2011; Böker et al., Architektur der Gotik. Rheinlande, Salzburg, 2013. 17 Bork, Geometry, pp. 56–60; Les Bâtisseurs des Cathedrales gothiques, ed. R. Recht, Strasbourg, 1989, pp. 381–2, 386–8; Böker, Rheinlande, pp. 159–62, 164–72. 18 Bork, Geometry, pp. 20–27, 33–4, 46–53, 76–81, 438. 19 Ibid., pp. 75–97.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 65

09/07/2021 09:40

66  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

nature.20 Furthermore, such matrices represent a modern rationalisation of the geometry behind Gothic creation, perhaps bearing only limited resemblance to the mechanical and intellectual processes by which buildings were conceived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Constructed using a compass, straight edge and square, these drawings were produced by physical actions which would have removed much of the necessity for the repeated redrafting of figures implied by geometrical overlays.21 Once the baseline, centreline and starting figures were established, straight lines would be sufficient to carry many of their proportions vertically, with the remaining horizontal divisions being transferred from the original figure using a compass or some other measuring tool. The only exception would be significant changes in ground plan, as demonstrated by the alterations to the upper parts of the spire in Plan B.22 Whilst these drawings were certainly being conceived in linear terms, it was not necessarily through a grid of geometrical figures, but instead the scored motions of compasses, straight edges and squares from which the defining lines of the composition might emerge. The illusion of rationality is further dispelled by the apparent arbitrariness with which these drawings’ constituent geometrical operations were applied. The concentric octagonal proportions of the starting figure are repeated along the central axis of Plan B, but without a consistent set of relationships between one level and the next, the same figures being reused freely and openly rather than in a uniform, rhythmic progression. The result appears to be less a systematized, integrated geometric whole and more an iterative and playful series of ad hoc decisions, not all of which relied on geometry. Many of the composition’s smaller details such as its gabled arches, cusped tracery and foliate protrusions were apparently articulated using some form of freehand, whether aided by compasses and straight edges or otherwise. Though linear in execution, such interventions were not strictly geometrical in conception and instead reflected a more flexible attitude towards formal development which permeated the entire design. Interpreting these drawings is further complicated by the observation that their relationship with realized architecture is far from clear. The common consensus is that these were predominantly presentation, not working, drawings, operating as display tools rather than blueprints for construction and placing an unsurprising emphasis on clarity, cleanliness and economy in their execution.23 Indeed, of all the architectural drawings to survive from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, not a single example was reproduced in its entirety in an actual building. Neither Plan A nor Plan B was implemented at Strasbourg cathedral, though a number of features from both these and other, later plans do appear to have found their way into the facade as it was constructed between 1277 and 1439.24 Instead, such drawings consisted more of an open-ended set of possibilities for further discussion than a prescribed set of predetermined forms, their lines serving as approximate 20 Ibid., pp. 23, 76–78, 83, 85. 21 For the drafting tools and techniques of medieval architectural practitioners see L. F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540: A Documentary History, Oxford, 1952, pp. 339–40, 342; L. R. Shelby, ‘Medieval Masons’ Tools: II. Compass and Square’, Technology and Culture, 6, 1965, pp. 236–48; N. Wu, ‘Hughes Libergier and his Instruments’, AVISTA FORUM, 11, 1999, pp. 7–13; P. Völker, ‘Die Zeichentechnik der Gotik: Materalien, Werkzeuge und Zeichenvorgang’, in Böker, Rheinlande, pp. 15–27. 22 Bork, Geometry, 76–79. 23 Ibid., p. 24 n. 48. 24 Ibid., pp. 89–94; P Frankl, Gothic Architecture, rev. P. Crossley, New Haven, CT, 2000, pp. 171–3, 337–8 n. 109–12A.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 66

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 4  |  l i near i t y and t he go t hi c st yl e   |   67

declarations of intent which could be reconsidered continuously over multiple iterative stages of development. The translation of these ideas into definitive artistic decisions was probably conducted predominantly on a 1:1 scale.25 The essential starting point for this process would have been setting out the ground plan, both for the foundations and the walls.26 Though the former would probably have been pegged out using ropes, the latter may well have been engraved or otherwise marked onto the newly flattened ground.27 It is difficult to assess whether this would have involved the scaling up of a detailed set of pre-existing drawings. The existence of small-scale ground plans from the early thirteenth century onwards is testified by the multiple examples appearing in the Villard de Honnecourt manuscript (c.1210 to 1240), some of which relate to extant churches (fig. 3).28 Focusing solely on the essential proportional and structural features of these buildings, these display only the wall thicknesses and the general disposition of supports, vaults and buttresses without any detailed relation of mouldings. By contrast, Plans A-E for the unexecuted west facade of Cologne cathedral (c.1260 to 1350) are far more detailed, including the intricate undulating contours of the moulding profiles for its supports, jambs, mullions and piers as well as the principal lines of its arches and vault ribs (fig. 4).29 Yet despite their apparent precision, such drawings may well have been no closer to the executed design of a building than their elevation counterparts. The wall widths, springing points and the locations of supports would have provided the key points from which the vertical and horizontal lines of the building could be drawn, establishing the framework within which the more detailed 1:1 designs of its mouldings, arches, windows and vaults could be arranged. The majority of these may well have been conducted through lines incised directly into stone or plaster surfaces.30 By the early fourteenth century some larger architectural projects apparently included ‘tracing houses’: large dedicated spaces with plaster floors on which designs could be worked out to scale.31 The earliest documented example can be found in the building accounts for St Stephen’s chapel at Westminster in 1324, when it was renovated and the floor replastered, and two mid-fourteenth-century examples are still extant over the north porch of Wells cathedral (after 1320) and above the chapter house vestibule at York Minster (after 1288), their plaster surfaces revealing a dense, layered network of linear forms.32 Particularly prominent at York is a design for window tracery which was actually executed in the Lady chapel aisles at the east end between c.1361 and

25 A. Pacey, Medieval Architectural Drawing: English Craftsmen’s Methods and their Later Persistence (c.1200–1700), Stroud, 2007, pp. 33–58. 26 Salzman, Building in England, pp. 82–97 27 See Ibid., pp. 16–17, 82; Pacey, Architectural Drawings, pp. 59–64; L. Donkin, ‘Sta. Maria Maggiore and the Depiction of Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy’, Gesta, 57, 2018, pp. 225–55. 28 Paris, BNF, MS fr. 19093, ff. 9v, 14v, 15, 17; C. F. Barnes, The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt, Farnham, 2009, pp. 70–72, 90–97, 106–07. 29 Böker, Rheinlande, pp. 335, 341–6; Böker, Wien, pp. 178–81; Bork, Geometry, pp. 97–110. 30 Pacey, Architectural Drawing, pp. 33–58. 31 Salzmann, Building in England, pp. 21–2. 32 Ibid., p. 21; Hillson, St Stephen’s (forthcoming). For the tracing houses at Wells and York see J. H. Harvey, ‘The Tracing Floor of York Minster’, Friends of York Minster Annual Report, 40, 1968, pp. 1–8; Pacey, Architectural Drawing, pp. 41–58, 65–8, 129–34, 220–23.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 67

09/07/2021 09:40

68  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

1371.33 The drawing consists of simple outlines, starting from a baseline and centreline and constructed using similar iterative and sacrificial geometrical steps to those exhibited by parchment drawings. Something comparable can be found in the roof terraces of the choir aisles at Clermont-Ferrand cathedral, where the outlines of three windows and two gabled portals (as well as designs for flying buttresses) are incised directly into the floor.34 Dated c.1260, these are similarly economical in their execution to those at York, the main difference being the presence of additional lines indicating divisions between individual stone pieces. It has been posited that such drawings were the final stage before construction, representing a full-scale rendition of designs already realized in small-scale drawings.35 Yet though one of the porch schemes at Clermont-Ferrand was apparently executed, none of the other designs which survive there were realized, suggesting that a more active and contemplative approach to architectural conception was being adopted even at this late stage.36 . Furthermore, it quickly becomes apparent that none of these incised drawings would have been sufficient to guide construction in isolation. Though both the Clermont-Ferrand and York designs for window tracery give effective outlines for cutting stones, only the former includes masonry divisions and there is no sign of the associated moulding profiles. That wooden or canvas templates were used to supply this part of the design during this period is well testified by both visual and documentary evidence,37 yet comparatively little attention has been directed towards how this organisational technology operated in linear terms. All of the linear elements of Gothic were conceived through a process of extrusion, transforming two-dimensional contours into string courses, shafts, mullions and the complex intersecting figures of tracery through projection along clear outlines. This imposed an intrinsic, mechanical linearity on Gothic at every stage of the design process, oriented primarily towards establishing rigid boundaries against which templates could be aligned. A further complication is provided by the manner in which the outlines of templates were transferred onto stone blocks. One general assumption is that this was done by tracing the template’s edges, but this was not the only option available.38 Separated from their original coursing by their extraction in c.1800, a surviving stone from the lower cornice of St Stephen’s chapel in Westminster retains a thin network of construction lines on its lateral faces (fig. 5).39 The majority of these relate to the diagonal hollows cut into the stone’s interior and backlighting its quatrefoil openings, but one horizontal

33 S. Brown, ‘Our Magnificent Fabrick’: York Minster: An Architectural History c.1220–1500, Swindon, 2003, pp. 138–41, 149; Pacey, Architectural Drawing, pp. 55–6. 34 M. T. Davis, ‘On the Drawing Board: Plans of the Clermont Ferrand Terrace’ in Ad Quadratum: The Practical Application of Geometry in Medieval Architecture, ed. N. Y. Wu, Aldershot, 2002, pp. 183–204. 35 Davis, ‘Drawing Board’, p. 185; Harvey, ‘Tracing House’, p. 2. 36 Davis, ‘Drawing Board’, pp. 191–3. 37 Salzman, Building in England, pp. 20–22, 123; L. R. Shelby, ‘Medieval Masons’ Templates’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 30, 1971, pp. 395–421; James, Template-Makers, pp. 2–3, 33–6. 38 See Bâtisseurs, ed. Recht, pp. 374–76. 39 Hillson, St Stephen’s (forthcoming) The stone in question can be found in the British Museum in London, accession no. 1814,0312.2.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 68

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 4  |  l i near i t y and t he go t hi c st yl e  |   69

line in particular connects instead to one of the bead mouldings on its outer edge. It is therefore probable that these stones were not being laid out by outlining templates alone, but through a set of linear guidelines reproduced directly on their surface. Similar methods were presumably used to delineate the quatrefoil openings, the general outline probably being incised into the stone as a preliminary stage of working, its deeply cut mouldings requiring a more freeform approach guided by continuous comparative measurements using callipers, compasses and other mechanical means of assessing depths and angles. Linearity was not simply a control mechanism imposed by parchment drawings – it was integral to every stage of the execution of medieval masonry, from the devising of the entire elevation of a facade down to the articulation of a single stone block. Thus far this essay has been focused predominantly on what has traditionally been considered the rational side of Gothic architecture, but what of its supposedly irrational side? Paul Binski has argued that the flexuous recurving ogees and provocative spatial projections of the English Decorated style were far from irrational, but instead were the result of highly rational processes of invention reflecting not logical but rhetorical principles of preconception, their mobile undulations indicating a conscious strategy for engaging the audience through aesthetic pleasure.40 Considered from a technical perspective, it is quite possible that a comparable relationship can be found in its linear design processes, the interaction between restrictive delineation and free play producing an architecture which was no more nor less rationally conceived than its rectilinear counterparts. A particular focal point for the aesthetic characterisation of English Decorated has been the nodding ogee, exemplified most emphatically by the curling, flexible points which surround the c.1321 to 1349 interior of Ely Lady chapel (fig. 6).41 Similar projections can be found across England from the first decades of the fourteenth century onwards, but closer inspection reveals considerable variety in their modes of conception. Ogees bent at right angles appear at the corners of several monuments, including the shrine of St Eadburga at Stanton Harcourt (c.1294 to 1317) or the pulpitum at Exeter cathedral (c.1318 to 1325), and another variation on the idea can be found in the sedilia of the Lady chapel at Wells (c.1323 to 1324) and the arcading of St Stephen’s chapel, Westminster (probably 1320s), where the ogee arch was pushed forward on two diagonally-angled springers.42 Yet whereas these two methods were conceived in terms of flat planes, each element arranged according to a polygonal ground plan, a nodding ogee recurved in both elevation and plan, requiring the resolution of two distinct curves into a single, complex three-dimensional solid. The resulting motif produces a strong impression of sculpturesque freedom, appearing more like something made in pliable wax or clay than inflexible stone. Yet in reality this effect was in part the product of rigid systems of linear control. In the arcading of Ely

40 Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 161–75, 205–09. 41 Ibid., pp. 187–217. 42 N. Coldstream, ‘English Decorated Shrine Bases’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 129, 1976, pp. 15–34 (at p. 19); J. Crook, English Mediaeval Shrines, Woodbridge, 2011, pp. 263–4; V. Sekules, ‘The Liturgical Furnishings of the Choir of Exeter Cathedral’ in Medieval Art and Architecture at Exeter Cathedral, ed. F. Kelly, London, 1991, pp. 172–9; Hillson, St Stephen’s (forthcoming).

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 69

09/07/2021 09:40

70  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

Lady chapel, the outer bounds of the arches are remarkably consistent in elevation and section, suggesting that each responded to a strict system of delineation enforced by the same system of 1:1 drawing and templates that was employed for the comparatively rectilinear panelling of the piers above. Yet equally, these nodding ogees appear to have stepped partially beyond the limits of control through templates and outlines. In the fine details of their undersides and internal faces their linear precision begins to break down, the carving of their recurving mouldings devolving into a more freehand process of optimisation comparable to the quatrefoil frieze in the cornice at St Stephen’s chapel. Something similar can be identified in the expansive, florid protrusions emerging from the outer curve of the ogee and the verdant foliage coating its spandrels, their forms representing a deliberate, strictly localized relaxation of linear strictures. Just as has been observed in the elevations and plans for Strasbourg and Cologne cathedrals, in the fine details the capacity of geometrical lines to express form rapidly broke down and was replaced by a more freehand attitude to planning and execution. This tension between freedom and restriction carries profound consequences for our understanding of the linearity of Gothic architecture. Throughout this essay I have argued consistently for a more evenly distributed model of architectural conception, one in which major creative decisions were made, unmade and remade at every stage of the design and erection of buildings. From initial smaller-scale elevations and plans to full scale ground plans to detailed 1:1 studies of specific parts to the realisation of individual stone pieces, lines acted as the essential tool by which the iterative stages of a structure’s conception were articulated, interrelated and integrated into a cohesive whole. Sometimes speculative, sometimes prescriptive, these linear networks were as often an opportunity for free play as for sharp definition, serving an open-ended means of refining, comparing and retaining architectural ideas. Simple geometrical operations certainly provided the foundations for the generation of architectural forms, but these were apparently largely sacrificial in nature and served predominantly as a means of creating starting points from which the straight lines, arcs, circles and freehand elaborations which constituted Gothic linearity could emerge on parchment, stone and plaster. Created through the ad hoc repetition of a shared body of techniques in an arbitrary yet cumulative manner, the lines of Gothic architecture apparently developed asystematically, functioning as exploratory rather than analytical tools for cognising, formulating and realising three-dimensional forms. Rather than representing a rationalized, scientific and rhythmic progression of inevitable creative steps, linear conception in all forms of Gothic was instead a highly flexible and dynamic process relying as much on free improvisation as methodical constraint. These observations invite a careful reassessment of our aesthetic valuations of Gothic linearity. Far from being intrinsic properties of the rational rectilinear and irrational curvilinear respectively, restriction and freedom were constant elements in all forms of Gothic design, reflected as much in the angular delineations of the Rayonnant and Perpendicular as the recurving forms of the Decorated. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there do not appear to have been multiple linearities in Gothic architecture, but multiple modes of the same linearity, the same practice of conceiving edifices through the extrusion of contours along two-dimensional networks of lines. Yet

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 70

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 4  |  l i near i t y and t he go t hi c st yl e   |   71

there was at least one exception to this: the nodding ogee. Though no more nor less rational than the rectilinear structures which surrounded it, the resolution of two independent curves into a single solid marked a no less radical change in the three-dimensional imaginative processes available to medieval architectural practitioners, striking a new balance between delineation and free play in formal conception. Whatever its intended aesthetic impact, the motif ’s apparent sculpturesque freedom was as much the product of a sudden expansion in technical possibilities as a departure from angular norms of artistic design, its seeming mobility reflecting the increased flexibility which it offered to medieval architectural practitioners. Linearity was not therefore a purely static concept during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but instead a cumulative set of approaches to conceptualising forms, continuously transformed by the ongoing counterpoint between technical means and aesthetic impetus.

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 71

09/07/2021 09:40

72  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

Fig. 1. Chapel of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, interior and exterior, before 1238 (photograph by author).

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 72

09/07/2021 09:40

c hapt er 4  |  l i near i t y and t he go t hi c st yl e   |   73

Fig. 2. Left: Strasbourg Plan B, c.1270 to 1277 (Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame, Strasbourg); Right: Geometric overlay (after Robert Bork, redrawn by author).

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 73

09/07/2021 09:41

74 | tr ibutes to paul bins ki – part o ne

Fig. 3. Villard de Honnecourt, Ground plan for Cambrai Cathedral, c.1210 to 1240 (redrawn by author from BnF MS Fr. 19093, fol. 14v).

Fig. 4. Cologne Plan A, c.1260 to 1350 (Kupferstichkabinett, Academy of Arts, Vienna).

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 74

09/07/2021 09:41

c hapt er 4  |  l i near i t y and t he go t hi c st yl e   |   75

Fig. 5. Reconstruction of crenelated cornice fragment, St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, c.1320 to 1348 (drawn by author).

Fig. 6. Nodding ogee, Ely Lady Chapel arcading, c.1321 to 1349 (photograph by author).

7132 01-04 Binski new size v6.indd 75

09/07/2021 09:41

Diamonds are Forever: Cell Vaults and the Beginnings of History* Ethan Matt Kavaler

O

n e o f t h e m o s t i n t r i g u i n g f e at u r e s of Late Gothic architecture is the ‘diamond vault’, a ribless vault often conforming to a complex geometrical pattern that fragments its surface into small cavities, called ‘diamonds’ or ‘cells’.1 Between 1470 and 1540, these vaults spread across much of central and eastern Europe; examples are found in present-day Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. This type of vault has been given different names in different regions of Europe, often corresponding to the local characteristics of the vaults. They are usually known as diamond or cell vaults (Zellengewölbe), but they have also been called folded vaults. The vaults of the south aisle of St Mary’s in Gdańsk, for instance, have been called ‘crystalline vaults’ in recognition of the almost innumerable cells into which they are divided. Usually plastered and unpainted, these structures form intricate patterns of light and shadow; they have been amusingly termed a type of architectural origami.2 For all intents and purposes, the vogue for diamond vaults begins around 1470 with the building of the Albrechtsburg overlooking Meissen, the palace of the Elector of Saxony.3 The architect, Arnold von Westfalen, designed a great number of variations on this unique type of vault throughout the palace (fig. 1). Although there are a few earlier examples in Spain and France, these seem unrelated to the sudden fashion for diamond vaults at the end of the fifteenth century.4 We might relate the complex geometric pattern of these structures to the general interest in geometrically intricate vaults at this time. Ribbed vaults * 1 2 3

4

I would like to thank Heba Mustafa for her generous help with this essay. For a consideration of diamond vaults in the context of Late Gothic architecture in Germany and wider Europe, see N. Nußbaum, German Gothic Church Architecture, trans. S. Kleager, New Haven, CT, 2000, pp. 189–92; E. M. Kavaler, Renaissance Gothic. Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe 1470–1540, New Haven, CT, 2012, pp. 149–51. Z. Opačić, Diamond Vaults. Innovation and Geometry in Medieval Architecture, London, 2005, p. 4. Die Albrechtsburg zu Meißen, ed. H. J. Mrusek, Leipzig, 1972; S. Hoppe, Die funktionale und räumliche Struktur des frühen Schloßbuas in Mitteldeutschland. Untersucht an Beispielen landesherrlicher Bauten der Zeit zwischen 1470 und 1570, Cologne, 1996, pp. 34–77; M. Donath, ‘Herzog Albrecht der Beherzte und die Bauten auf dem Meißner Burgberg. Spätgotische Baukunst im ausgehenden 15. Jahrhundert’, in Herzog Albrecht der Beherzte (1443–1500). Ein sächsischer Fürst im Reich und in Europa, Cologne, ed. A. Thieme, Weimar, 2002, pp. 233–81; M. Müller, Das Schloß als Bild des Fürsten. Herschaftliche Metaphorik in der Residenzarchitektur des Alten Reiches (1470–1618), Göttingen, 2003, pp. 42–66; S. Bürger, Meisterwerk Albrechtsburg. Von fürstlichen Ideen, faszinierenden Formen und flinken Händen, Dresden, 2012. M. and O. Rada, Das Buch von den Zellengewölben, Prague, 2001, pp. 16–18. The chief earlier example is the vault of the Capilla de los Reyes in Valencia, Spain, which was built between1437 and 1462. There seems to be little relation to the later diamond vaults of central Europe.

[ 76]

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 76

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 5   |  d i amo nd s ar e f o r ever  |   77

occur in a multitude of configurations in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.5 We find intricate star vaults, net vaults, and looping rib vaults throughout northern Europe and Iberia. We even find vaults with flying ribs – ribs disconnected from the webbing of the vault and suspended beneath this surface.6 The vault became a prime field for architectural invention. Of the nearly 500 Late Gothic drawings preserved in Vienna’s Akademie der bildenden Künste, nearly 40 per cent are designs for vaults. And some are so geometrically complex that it is questionable whether they could ever be constructed.7 Diamond vaults, however, are special, for they have no ribs and necessarily partake of a different aesthetic from that of the variously ribbed vaults of the time. Stephan Hoppe and others have suggested that the diamond ribs in the Albrechtsburg are a historically self-conscious phenomenon, looking back – in a particularly artful fashion – to the ribless vaults of Romanesque architecture and even further back to ancient Roman architecture of biblical times – at least as early modern audiences in northern Europe understood ancient Roman building.8 And yet there may be a further reference, a reference more directly to Jerusalem and the muqarnas vaults of Islamic architecture in the Holy Land, again, as these were received and artfully emulated by western designers. The spate of pilgrimages in the fifteenth century acquainted a new audience with the edifices of Jerusalem and the near east. It seems possible that these idiosyncratic diamond vaults, which appeared so suddenly in central Europe, were meant in part to evoke the distinctive architecture of Jerusalem, the principal site of the beginning of the modern era. Diamond vaults spread rapidly. By the 1490s they covered the naves and choirs of several churches in the present-day Czech Republic. The Franciscan church of the Assumption of the Virgin in Bechenyě is a prime example, dating from the beginning of this decade (fig. 2). Its extensive nave vault is subdivided into a great number of small cells, according to its geometrical configuration, which bears some relation to a ribless star vault.9 It is covered with white plaster and presents a surface filled with pockets of light and shadow. We find new variations of these forms in churches and cloisters throughout central Europe. Nevertheless, the diamond vault seems to have been introduced in a secular palace and not a church; the Albrechtsburg overlooking Meissen in Saxony. As Zoë Opačić has pointed out, several of the early designers of diamond vaults were prestigious architects with secure patronage and both the intellectual sophistication and professional liberty to introduce novel creations. Jakob Heilmann, the foreman of the famed Benedikt Ried at Prague, built some of the diamond vaults in Saxony. Heinrich Hetzel built the intricate ‘crystalline’

5 Bürger, Figurierte Gewölbe zwischen Saale und Neiße. Spätgotische Wölbkunst von 1400 bis 1600, 3 vols, Weimar, 2007. 6 Kavaler, Renaissance Gothic, pp. 151–4; Nußbaum, German Gothic Church Architecture, pp. 196–200; N. Nußbaum and S. Lepsky, Das Gotische Gewölbe. Eine Geschichte seiner Form und Konstruktion, Munich, 1999, pp. 267–70. 7 J. J. Böker, Architektur der Gotik/Gothic Architecture: Bestandskatalog der weltgrößten Sammlung an gotischen Baurissen der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Salzburg, 2006. 8 S. Hoppe, ‘Translating the Past. Local Romanesque Architectures in Germany and their Fifteenth-Century Reinterpretations’, in The Quest for an Appropriate Past, ed. K. Ottenheym and K. Enenkel, Leiden, 2019, pp. 511–85. See also Hoppe, ‘Romanik als Antike und die baulichen Folgen. Mutmassungen zu einem in Vergessenheit geratenen Diskurs’, in Wege zur Renaissance. Beobachtungen zu den Anfängen neuzeitlicher Kunstauffassung im Rheinland und den Nachbargebieten um 1500, ed. N. Nußbaum, C. Euskirchen, and S. Hoppe, Cologne, 2003, pp. 89–131. 9 Opačić, Diamond Vaults, pp. 23–6.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 77

09/07/2021 09:45

78 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

vaults in St Mary’s in Gdańsk.10 But the real innovator was Arnold von Westfalen, the principal architect of the Albrechtsburg. Here Arnold designed a great series of diamond vaults over the most varied spaces. The capacious entrance hall has an expansive folded covering that somewhat resembles ribless net vaults. Irregular and angular cavities form the inventive diamond vault over the main staircase. And deep triangular recesses hover above the private chamber or studiolo in the palace. Hoppe has argued that Arnold von Westfalen was aware of historical precedents and of competing structures elsewhere in Europe. The peculiar concave curtain arch that frames many of the windows of the Albrechtsburg, he maintains, is closely related to a window on the west front of Braunschweig cathedral, a Romanesque structure that was built around 1200.11 Hoppe further asserts that this German Romanesque could have been considered as a species of ancient Roman architecture – the final emanation of the architecture from the time of Christ. Hoppe has pointed to the setting of religious narratives within Romanesque architecture in the paintings of Jan van Eyck and his Flemish and German colleagues of the fifteenth century.12 He argues that this seemingly outmoded architecture did not merely refer to older esteemed buildings in the various regions. Rather, the painted Romanesque structures referred similarly to the Roman architecture of biblical times that continued essentially unbroken from the ancient Roman Empire until the twelfth century. Hoppe even adduces a religious painting of the late fifteenth century from Gdańsk that shelters the religious figures with a ribless vault.13 One famous later instance of this tradition is Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel (1564), today in Vienna. Although the circular shape of the tower and its incomplete termination strongly recall the ancient Colosseum in Rome, the detailed articulation of the structure mimics the local Romanesque. Clearly Bruegel intended to stress the connection between biblical antiquity and his own recent past. Simple ribless vaults had been revived in Germany in the years before the advent of diamond vaults in the Albrechtsburg. As Hermann Meuche noted, ribless groin vaults had appeared in the upper basement of the Albrechtsburg, itself, an apparent Romanesque revival that might be counted as a first step toward conceiving the diamond vaults in the floors above.14 Also preceding these diamond vaults at Meissen by a few years are the groin vaults of Dresden castle, the so called gotische Halle constructed in 1470–75.15 It is possible that this structure represents an earlier project by Arnold von Westfalen, but in any case, it suggests a conscious genesis of the complex diamond vaults from much simpler Romanesque precedents. Like Meuche, Milada Rada (Radová-Stiková) has argued that many of the innovative features at the Albrechtsburg stemmed from Romanesque and not from Gothic precedents. Milada and Oldrich Rada later suggested that certain dynamic Romanesque forms such as spiral columns had been a significant source of inspiration for Late Gothic designers. 10 Ibid., p. 8. 11 S. Hoppe, ‘Urbino, Meissen, Burghausen. Three 15th-Century Palaces and the New Search for Antique Grandeur’ (public lecture, 9 February 2016, University of Toronto). 12 Hoppe, ‘Romanik als Antike’, pp. 89–132. 13 Hoppe, ‘Urbino, Meissen, Burghausen’. 14 H. Meuche, ‘Zellengewölbe und die Albrechtsburg’, in Die Albrechtsburg zu Meißen, pp. 56 – 66; M. Radová-Stiková, ‘Über die Quellen des architektonischen Schaffens Arnold von Westfalen’, Acta Polytechnica 1, 1974, pp. 29–50. 15 Hoppe, ‘Translating the Past’, pp. 6–7.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 78

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 5   |  d i amo nd s ar e f o r ever  |   79

Late fifteenth-century Germany, particularly in the south, showed a general interest in Romanesque architecture, particularly in court circles. One example is the ground floor hall of the palace at Burghausen, a residence of the dukes of Bavaria-Landshut. The low, heavy vaults bear thick massive ribs (Bandrippen). The close resemblance to local Romanesque architecture prompted earlier scholars to date the hall to the thirteenth century, although it is now more convincingly dated to the years around 1480. There are many other instances of this intentional adoption and adaptation of an earlier architectural style. At the castle of Heidelberg, the court of the so-called Gläserne Saal, built after 1546, displays three stories of heavy round arches supported by thick pseudo-Romanesque columns. The west tower of the church of St Kilian in Heilbronn is a well-known example of this phenomenon. The tower, built by Hans Schweiner from 1513–29, conspicuously uses the round arches and decorative details drawn from the Romanesque in fashioning a specifically local variety of antique or ‘Renaissance’ architecture on German soil.16 Christopher Wood has discussed how this approach to the past encapsulated a complex understanding of time. A comprehension of history as composed of multiple temporalities helps explain how the erudite Conrad Celtis might consider as a Druid artifact what was evidently a Romanesque church portal. Scholars were charged with making sense both of what we would call documented history and what we would classify as myth. For Renaissance seekers, these two concepts relied on intellectual analysis and the imagination; since myth and ‘history’ bore similar narrative structures, they might be interpolated and conjoined. 17 Myth completed and gave life to the limited data of archeological investigation. As Wood and Alexander Nagel have further written, buildings might be linked with earlier structures though a process of substitution. That is to say, as an edifice was replaced over the centuries, either in whole or successively in parts, it still retained something of the identity of its first instantiation. The Romanesque churches of Cologne have nearly all been radically rebuilt since the end of World War II, for example, yet we still think of them as Romanesque structures. Romanesque buildings were actually seen as doubly ancient. On the one hand they manifested a style that was recognized as continuing unbroken since the Roman Empire. On the other, they were often thought of the last in an unbroken chain of physical structures going back to the same distant time. Hoppe, meanwhile, has placed the invention of diamond vault in the context of a broader culture of historical revival in Germany during the later fifteenth century. For Hoppe, the innovations at Meissen can be linked to the vogue for vegetal forms in architecture and sculpture at this time. The ribs of a vault at Eichstätt and an arch crossing a portal at Ulm are carved to resemble tree branches. The baldachins of so many wooden altarpieces follow the unruly patterns of natural growth and may even sprout leaves. Portals in the contemporary prints of Albrecht Dürer and his colleagues are likewise formed of Astwerk. A number of writers, Paul Crossley, Hubertus Günther and Hoppe among them, have related this phenomenon to a revived interest in Tacitus’s report of the early Germans and their habit of building their abodes directly from trees. For these authors, such vegetal 16 Hoppe, ‘Romanik als Antike’, pp. 105–08. 17 C. S. Wood, Forgery Replica Fiction. Temporalities of German Renaissance Art, Chicago, 2008, pp. 1–50.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 79

09/07/2021 09:45

8 0 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

imagery signaled both a new sense of national identity and historical consciousness.18 It was a response to intellectual inquiry about the past and related to the rise of humanist scholarship in northern Europe. Hoppe significantly includes in his catalogue of vegetal simulations the choir stalls in Ulm Minster, which bear the busts of Cicero, Ptolemy, and other learned figures from antiquity.19 But there may also be another type of parallel with biblical time and place – namely with Jerusalem and the architecture of the Middle East. One particularly intriguing monument is the Madrassa Al-Ashrafiyya on the Temple Mount (fig. 3). The vault of the porch of this structure, called a ‘folded fan vault’, strongly resembles aspects of diamond vaults, particularly the corrugated springers of these central European vaults that lead to their geometrically complex crowns. Although parts of the building are a century older, the folded fan vault of the Al-Ashrafiyya porch likely dates from around 1481–2. Its design comes from Cairo, however, where similar configurations can be found, and there may well have been earlier examples in Jerusalem and the Middle East.20 The later Jaffa Gate of 1538–9 also features a ribless vault.21 Although this gate likewise postdates the design of the Albrechtsburg, it indicates a tradition of building in Jerusalem. Similar structures exist elsewhere in the Islamic world. The great mosque and hospital of Divrigi in Anatolia of 1228–9 reveals many of the same features.22 The ultimate pocketed ceilings were the muqarnas vaults that spread throughout the Islamic world from the eleventh century onward. The similarity with diamond vaults is much closer to Middle Eastern muqarnas vaults than to those from Iberia.23 Intriguing parallels are found, for instance, with the vaults of the Friday Mosque in Isfahan, Iran.24 The vault of the south Iwan of this structure, built in the thirteenth century, is formed of large, deep, and slightly lobed cavities. There are many other such examples throughout this area.25 There are some basic similarities between muqarnas and European Late Gothic vaults. Both are designed through sequences of complex geometric operations. In her examination 18 P. Crossley, ‘The Return to the Forest: Natural Architecture and the German Past in the Age of Dürer’, in Künstlerischer Austausch. Artistic Exchange. Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin, 15–20 July 1992, ed. T. W. Gaehtgens, 3 vols, Berlin, 1993, vol. 3, pp. 71–80; H. Günther, ‘Das Astwerk und die Theorie der Renaissance von der Entstehung der Architecktur’, in Théorie des arts et creation artistique dans l’Europe du nord du XVIe au début du XVIIIe siècle, ed. M-C. Heck, F. Lemerle, and Y. Pauwels, Lille, 2001, pp. 13–32; S. Hoppe, ‘Stil als Dünne oder Dichte Beschreibung. Eine kunstuktivistische Perspective auf kunstbezogene Stilbeobachtungen unter Berücksightung der Bedeutungsdimension’, in Stil als Bedeutung in der nordalpinen Renaissance. Wiederentdeckung einer methodischen Nachbarschaft, ed. Hoppe, M. Müller, and Nußbaum, Regensburg, 2008, pp. 48–103 (at pp. 90–94). 19 Hoppe, ‘Translating the Past’, pp. 24–7. 20 M. H. Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study, London, 1987, pp. 589–94; M. Meinecke, Die Mamlukische Architektur in Ägypten und Syrien (648/1250 – bis 923/1517), 2 vols, Glückstadt, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 196–9; A. G. Walls, ‘Ottoman Restorations to the Sabil and to the Madrasa of Qaytbay in Jerusalem’, Muqarnas, 10, 1993, pp. 91–5; idem, Geometry and Architecture In Islamic Jerusalem: A Study of The Ashrafiyya, Buckhurst Hill, 1990, pp. 7–63. 21 https://archnet.org/sites/4297/media_contents/62094 (accessed 01 October 2019). 22 See D. Kuban, ‘The Mosque and Hospital at Divriği and the Origin of Anatolian-Turkish Architecture’, Anatolica, 2, 1968, pp. 122–9. 23 On muqarnas domes and the differences between those in Iberia and the Middle East, see J. C. Palacios Gonzalo, ‘Muqarnas Domes and Cornices in the Maghreb and Andalusia’, Nexus Network Journal, 20, 2018, pp. 95–123. On their development in the Middle East, see Y. Tabbaa, ‘The Muqarnas Dome: Its Origin and Meaning’, Muqarnas, 3, 1985, pp. 61–74. 24 https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/west-and-central-asia/a/the-great-mosque-or-masjid-e-jameh-ofisfahan (accessed 01 October 2019). 25 Milada and Oldřich Rada have shown that this tradition continued through the seventeenth century. See M. and O. Rada, Zellengewölben, pp. 136–9.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 80

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 5   |  d i amo nd s ar e f o r ever   |   81

of the Topkapi Scroll from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu, in fact, notes the relation between Byzantine geometric design and that of the Late Gothic.26 Many of the drawings in the scroll are of the girih genre, of which the muquarnas designs were a subset.27 The dense geometric patterns on folios 29–30 especially resemble in their manipulation of basic geometric forms Late Gothic vaults. And like certain exceedingly complex Late Gothic drawings, these Topkapi designs probably could not have been realized as standing architecture. There are similarities as well in the interpretations of these two classes of drawings. Necipoğlu suggests that the intense preoccupation with geometry in the Byzantine scrolls signals a learned interest in geometry and its philosophical connotations. Not all writers are in agreement with these assessments, and Necipoğlu has been criticized for over-intellectualizing what was essentially a craft practice, for seeing the values of higher mathematics in the activities of architects and masons.28 Hoppe has continued a similar discussion concerning the reception of Romanesque and vegetal forms among Late Gothic architects.29 He suggests that humanists guided architects and sculptors in the inclusion of these structures. This is a subject that needs further research, as many architects and masons seemed to have lacked such learned direction. One of the few Gothic architects to have written instructions on the design of architectural elements, Mathes Roriczer, also published a book on geometry and the derivation of geometric figures. This book is practical above all else: π is given as 1/7, which may be a workable approximation but does not suggest a sophisticated theoretical grasp of geometry.30 The architecture of ancient Rome and the Romanesque may have been perceived as the appropriate setting for biblical narratives. But even closer to the beginnings of history was the architecture of Jerusalem. The fifteenth century was a period of intense engagement between western Europe and Jerusalem. Pilgrimages to the holy land proliferated. In 1471 the Bruges merchant and diplomat Anselm Adornes begun the construction of a private chapel built in this city known as the Jerusalem chapel. Adornes had just returned from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and dedicated his building to the Holy Sepulchre. Two features of this structure, completed in 1483, are interesting in our case. First, the architects used Romanesque elements in the supports for the vaults. Second, the tower of the chapel bears the octagonal shape of the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.31 The Bruges painter Jan Provost who was associated with the Jerusalem chapel also embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In his Crucifixion triptych executed in 1505, he included one of the earliest reasonably accurate western portrayals of the Dome of the Rock.32 Knowledge of the holy city had increased to a point at which a city view of Jerusalem was included in the Nuremberg chronicle of 1493. 26 G. Necipoğlu, The Topkapi Scroll – Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture, Santa Monica, CA, 1995, p. ix. 27 Ibid., p. 12. 28 G. Saliba, ‘Artisans and Mathematicians in Medieval Islam: The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture by Gülru Necipoğlu’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 119, 1999, pp. 637–45. 29 Hoppe, ‘Translating the Past’, pp. 13–19; idem, ‘Stil als Dünne oder Dichte Beschreibung’, pp. 90–94. 30 W. Müller, Grundlagen gotischer Bautechnik: Ars sine scientia nihil, Munich, 1990, pp. 105–10. 31 Hoppe, ‘Translating the Past’, pp. 10–11. 32 R. Spronk, ‘The Reconstruction of a Triptych by Jan Provoost for the Jerusalem chapel in Bruges’, The Burlington Magazine, 146, 2005, pp. 109–111.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 81

09/07/2021 09:45

82 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

It is important to remember, however, that for late medieval people, history began in a sense with Genesis and arose anew with the birth of Christ. Chronicles commonly began their history with the creation of the world, with the birth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or directly with the birth of Jesus. This was true of the Nuremberg Chronicle and of most cosmographies produced in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. There was an insistent attempt to locate the origins of contemporary life mixed with appropriate myth, and this was true not only of the German lands. Fernando Marias has suggested that the Palace of the Infantado in Guadalajara, with its pronounced Islamic features, was very possibly intended to evoke King Priam’s palace in Troy.33 But Jerusalem and the burial place of Christ were far more frequent references. Copies of the Holy Sepulchre chapel in Jerusalem proliferated in western Europe. The earliest recorded imitation in western Europe was at the French church of Neuvy-Saint-Sépulcre from 1045 that consisted of a rotunda which recalled earlier architecture on the site. German emulations had begun by 822 at Fulda and by 1166 at Eichstätt.34 Around 1099 a new chapel was constructed in Jerusalem to enclose and celebrate the site of Christ’s Entombment and Resurrection.35 Later replicas took account of this more recent building in Jerusalem. The Knights Templar in London had erected such a structure by 1185. Still others were built in the fifteenth century, notably in Nuremberg in 1459. The most remarkable German example was that built in the Silesian city of Görlitz from around 1489 (fig. 4), a couple of decades after the beginning of the Albrechtsburg. The project was initiated by Georg Emmerich, scion of a prominent local family and later Burgomaster of the city, and the chapel still exists today. In 1465 Emmerich had made a pilgrimage to the holy land via Venice and Alexandra. He studied the church of the Holy Sepulchre and sought to replicate it in his native German city. Its recapitulation in Görlitz was a remarkably accurate though considerably smaller version of the structure in Jerusalem.36 Since the original was severely damaged by fire in 1555 and radically rebuilt in the early nineteenth century, the reproduction in Görlitz remains a key document in the history of the Jerusalem monument. Yet whatever Emmerich actually saw, his reconstruction was enormously aided by a woodcut of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Bernard von Breydenbach’s Perigrinatio in terram sanctam that was published in Mainz in 1486, just a few years before the inception of the Gorlitz structure (fig. 5).37 As Christopher Wood has written, prints forced monuments into ‘relationships of resemblance’; they established paradigms that cut across the vagaries of memory. Canon Berhard von Breydenbach was accompanied on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem by the Utrecht artist Erhard Reuwich, who produced the woodcut.38 As Wood notes, the architect of the Görlitz chapel followed the 33 F. Marías, ‘Las fábricas de la Reina Católica y los entresijos del imaginario arquitectónico de su tiempo’, in Los Reyes Católicos y Granada, ed. Rosario Martínez González and Lucía Vallejo Garay, Madrid, 2004, p. 217. 34 For German examples, see G. Dalman, Das Grab Christi in Deutschland, Leipzig, 1922. 35 M. Biddle, The Tomb of Christ, Phoenix Mill, 1999, pp. 54–81. 36 H. Wenzel, Heiliges Grab zu Görlitz, 1986; Görlitz, 2012, pp. 4–8. 37 K. B. Moore, ‘Textual Transmission and Pictorial Transformations: The Post-Crusade Image of the Dome of the Rock in Italy’, Muqarnas, 27, 2010, p. 51; R. Ousterhout, ‘Architecture as Relic and the Construction of Sanctity: The Stones of the Holy Sepulchre’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 62, 2003, pp. 4–13. 38 On the illustrations see E. Ross, ‘Picturing Knowledge and Experience in the Early Printed Book: Reuwich’s Illustrations for Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam (1486)’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2004.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 82

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 5   |  d i amo nd s ar e f o r ever   |   83

woodcut so closely that he misinterpreted the two ranges of balustrades on the front as boxes containing reliefs of urns.39 On the other hand, the spatial properties of the woodcut are unclear – it is not a one-point perspectival construction – forcing the Görlitz architect to compress its many features into a three-dimensional chapel. The Görlitz Holy Sepulchre chapel is constructed in a variety of historical styles. The apse is surrounded by Romanesque columns and round arches whereas pointed Gothic arches are seen in other places. More interestingly, the foundation of the dome to the cupola is lined with three successive rows of three-dimensional arches that clearly refer to muqarnas – an imitation of an Islamic feature that likely accompanied the structure in Jerusalem (fig. 6). Not surprisingly, this element is indicated on the woodcut in Breydenbach’s Perigrinatio as well. The device signals an awareness of and interest in one of the most distinctive forms of Islamic architecture – the ‘ribless’ muqarnas vault. The Silesian chapel does not stand alone, however. It is accompanied by the doublestoried Holy Cross chapel, which was designed most probably by the city architect Thomas Neukirch from Krems and understandably followed Austrian and Bavarian models. The lower, cramped Adam’s chapel is topped by the more capacious Golgotha chapel. This upper chapel seems to have been largely designed by Conrad Pflüger, the architect who was entrusted with the completion of the Albrechtsburg at Meissen after the death of Arnold von Westfalen. Pflüger was also asked to vault the Peterskirche at Görlitz before he left the city. His projects were then taken over by his Parlier (foreman) Blasius Börer.40 Pflüger carried over into the Golgotha chapel certain effects reminiscent of the Albrechtsburg. The bases of the shafts at the corners of the chapel are formed by crisscrossing lines that form diagonal pockets within the pier bases (fig. 7), recalling the cavities within the diamond vaults and bases that Pflüger had so recently seen at Meissen. The question is whether this was simply a variation on a formal device familiar from his last employment or whether both the cell vaults and the excavated bases referred to Roman(esque) conventions. And if this was so, whether an oblique reference to Jerusalem lay behind both works. Diamond vaults soon made their way to churches, cloisters, and other ecclesiastical spaces. They became an established genre, and the question of their original and complex historical references must have demanded ever less attention with their growing familiarity. These ribless wonders, configured according to the complex patterns of Late Gothic net vaults, star vaults, and cross vaults – but without their linear network that had formerly articulated the division of space – seem to have been in part an artful elaboration on Romanesque forms. Their innovative qualities were proper to a new breed of architects like Arnold von Westfalen, who were beginning to be valued for their imagination and invention, a central European prefiguration of the modern artist. Their knowing glance to the Romanesque implied a profound view of history – not only to their local past, but also to the perceived origins of the Romanesque in the ancient Roman Empire, which was also the time of the birth of Christ. 39 Wood, Forgery Replica Fiction, pp. 51–3. 40 Wenzel, Heiliges Grab zu Görlitz, pp. 3–4.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 83

09/07/2021 09:45

8 4 | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

And yet there may have also been a more direct reference this beginning of modern time, to the architecture of Jerusalem, increasingly a resonant topic of conversation due to the proliferation of pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The folded cross vaults and ultimately the muqarnas vaults of Jerusalem and the Near East may likewise lie behind the startling creations at Meissen, which seem to have channeled a vast web of notions about time and history into its formation.

Fig. 1. Meissen, Albrechtsburg, corridor vault, c.1471–80. Photo: E. M. Kavaler

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 84

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 5   |  d i amo nd s ar e f o r ever   |   85

Fig. 2. Bechenyě, Franciscan church of the Assumption of the Virgin, nave vault, c.1490. Photo: E. M. Kavaler

Fig. 3. Jerusalem, Madrasa Al-Ashrafiyya porch vault, 1481–82. Photo: Ariella Minden

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 85

09/07/2021 09:45

8 6  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

Fig. 4. Görlitz, Holy Sepulchre, after 1489. Photo: E. M. Kavaler

Fig. 5. Erhard Reuwich, woodcut of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in Bernard von Breydenbach, Perigrinatio in terram sanctam, Mainz, 1486

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 86

Fig. 6. Görlitz, Holy Sepulchre, cupola, after 1489. Photo: E. M. Kavaler

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 5   |  d i amo nd s ar e f o r ever   |   87

Fig. 7. Meissen, Albrechtsburg, great hall, pier base. Photo: E. M. Kavaler / Görlitz, Golgotha chapel, shaft base. Photo: E. M. Kavaler

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 87

09/07/2021 09:45

Describing Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Spain Tom Nickson

C

o n t e m p o r a ry c o m m e n ta r i e s o n t h i rt e e n t h - or fourteenth-century Gothic art and architecture in Castile and León are rare and have never properly been collected together.1 Although subject to particular rhetorical and literary traditions, they are much richer for the architecture of earlier periods, thanks to the extensive descriptions of building activity in early medieval chronicles, and especially in the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus and the Historia Compostelana.2 As one might expect, there are also numerous sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – several of the most important ones already collected by G. E. Street in Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain, published in 1865.3 In the kingdom of Navarre and the Crown of Aragon, vast and relatively untapped archives in Pamplona, Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza, Palma and elsewhere are still revealing a wealth of material on the practices and rhetoric of Gothic architecture.4 Best of all are the sources for contemporary architecture in al-Andalus, where scholars benefit from Ibn Sahib al-Salat’s detailed eye-witness accounts and commentaries on building in late twelfth-century Seville, and a substantial corpus of aesthetic theory that is expressed, in part, in the poetic inscriptions on the walls of the Alhambra in the late fourteenth century.5 In the Iberian peninsula, only Portugal suffers in 1

2

3 4

5

J. Yarza Luaces, M. Guardia Pons and T. Vicens, Arte medieval, Fuentes y documentos para la historia del arte, 2 vols, Barcelona, 1982, vol. 2, includes very little Castilian material. Compare (amongst others) the extraordinarily useful O. LehmannBrockhaus, Lateinische Schriftquellen zur Kunst in England, Wales und Schottland vom Jahre 901 bis zum Jahre 1307, 5 vols, Munich, 1955–60. See R. Collins, ‘Doubts and Certainties on the Churches of Early Medieval Spain’, in God and Man in Medieval Spain: Essays in honour of J. R. L. Highfield, ed. R. Highfield, D. W. Lomax and D. Mackenzie, Warminster, 1989, pp. 1–18; J. Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain, Pennsylvania, 1994; A. Vigo Trasancos, Fontes escritas para a historia da arquitectura e do urbanismo en Galicia: séculos XI–XX, Bibliofilia de Galicia 16, 2 vols, Santiago de Compostela, 2000. G. E. Street, Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain, London, 1865. See, amongst others, J. Martínez de Aguirre, Arte y monarquía en Navarra, 1328–1425, Pamplona, 1987; A. Rubió y Lluch, Documents per l’historia de la cultura catalana migeval 2 vols, Barcelona, 1908; E. Montero Tortajada, La transmisión del conocimiento en los oficios artísticos: Valencia 1370–1450, Arxius i documents 59, València, 2015; http://www.magistricataloniae. org/en/ (accessed 01 October 2019); and D. Bauer, M. À. Capellà Galmés and E. Paulino Montero, ed., Art in the Kingdom of Majorca: An Anthology of Sources, Palma (forthcoming). See especially F. Roldán Castro, ‘De nuevo sobre la mezquita aljama almohade de Sevilla: la versión del cronista cortesano Ibn Sahib al-Sala’, in Magna Hispalensis. Recuperación de la Aljama almohade, Seville, 2002, pp. 13–22; J. M. Puerta Vílchez, Aesthetics in Arabic Thought, from pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus, Turnhout, 2017; J. M. Puerta Vílchez, Reading the Alhambra: A Visual Guide to the Alhambra through its Inscriptions, Granada, 2011; O. Bush, Reframing the Alhambra: Architecture, Poetry, Textiles and Court Ceremonial, Edinburgh, 2018.

[ 88]

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 88

09/07/2021 09:45

chap ter 6  | descr ibing arc hi t ec t ur e i n t hi rt eent h- c ent ury spai n  |   89

the same way as Castile and León: for example, construction of the great Gothic churches at Alcobaça and Batalha may be relatively well-documented, but we have no evidence as to how contemporaries responded to them.6 To my knowledge only one writer from the thirteenth or fourteenth century left detailed commentaries on contemporary art and architecture in the kingdom of Castile and León: Lucas of Túy. We know very little about him, except that he described himself as a deacon, and was most likely a canon of San Isidoro in León until 1239, when he was elected bishop of Túy, where he remained until his death in 1249.7 Lucas’ De altera vita, written in 1235 or 1236, includes a well-known condemnation of heretical artistic innovations, including crucifixes with three nails, deformed images of the saints, images of beasts and demons in churches, paintings of the Virgin with one eye, or misrepresentations of the Trinity.8 Published already by G. G. Coulton in 1918, these have long attracted the attention of scholars in Spain, France and England, including Paul Binski.9 Though arguably ‘not a systematic thinker’, Lucas was certainly consistent in his preoccupations with heresy, Spain, St Isidore and the arts.10 This can be seen from comparison of De altera vita with Lucas’ Liber miraculorum beatissimi Isidori (begun between 1221 and 1224 and probably finished by 1239), and with his universal history, the Chronicon mundi (begun c.1230 and complete by 1242, if not earlier).11 De altera vita, already well-studied, and the Liber miraculorum, full of references to images but published only in a Spanish translation, do not concern us here.12 Instead, I will focus on the Chronicon mundi, which is written in the tradition of Eusebius, Paulus Orosius and especially St Isidore, and begins with Creation and finishes in 1236, the year of Fernando III’s conquest of Córdoba. Towards the end of his chronicle Lucas offers a striking celebration of the peace achieved during the reign of Fernando III (d. 1252), king of Castile from 1217 and also of León from 1230: Oh what blessed times are these, when the Catholic faith is exalted, the evils of heresy repressed, and Saracen cities and fortresses devastated by the 6

See M. J. Barroca, Epigrafia medieval portuguesa: 862–1422, 3 vols, Lisbon, 2000, especially vol. 2, part 1, pp. 245–48 (no. 97), 400–03 (no. 151), 711–17 (no. 289); vol. 2, part 2, pp. 1193–1200 (nos 462–6); S. A. N. Gomes, Fontes históricas e artísticas do Mosteiro e da vila da Batalha: séculos XIV a XVII, Documenta (Instituto Português do Património Arquitectónico), 2 vols, Lisbon, 2002. 7 P. Linehan, ‘Dates and Doubts about Don Lucas’, Cahiers de linguistique et de civilisation hispaniques médiévales, 24, 2001, pp. 201– 17 (at p. 211). 8 Lucas of Túy, De altera vita, Corpus Christianorum continuatio mediaevalis 74A, Turnhout, 2009. 9 G. G. Coulton, Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, Cambridge, 1918, pp. 474–6. See, amongst others, C. Gilbert, ‘A Statement of the Aesthetic Attitude around 1230’, Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts, 13, 1985, pp. 125–52; S. Moralejo, ‘D. Lucas de Tuy y la “actitud estética” en el arte medieval’, in Patrimonio artístico de Galicia y otros estudios: homenaje al prof. Dr. Serafín Moralejo Álvarez, ed. M. Á. Franco Mata and S. Moralejo, 3 vols, Santiago de Compostela, 2004, vol. 2, pp. 299–302; P. Henriet and J.-M. Sansterre, ‘De “l’inanimis imago” à “l’omagem mui bella”: méfiance à l’égard des images et essor de leur culte dans l’Espagne médiévale (VII–XIII siècle)’, Edad Media: revista de historia, 10, 2009, pp. 37–92 (at pp. 82–3); P. Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300, New Haven, CT, 2004, pp. 221–3. 10 P. Binski, ‘The Crucifixion and the Censorship of Art around 1300’, in The Medieval World, eds. J. L. Nelson and P. Linehan, London, 2001, pp. 342–60 (quotation at p. 348). 11 P. Henriet, ‘Sanctissima patria: points et thèmes communs aux trois oeuvres de Lucas de Tuy’, Cahiers d’études hispaniques médiévales, 24, 2001, pp. 249–78; Linehan, ‘Dates and Doubts’, pp. 209–12. 12 Patrick Henriet is currently working on a critical edition of the Liber miraculorum; the only published version is an updated Spanish translation of 1525: Lucas of Túy, Liber miraculorum beatissimi Isidori, ed. Juan de Robles and J. Pérez Llamazares, León, 1992.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 89

09/07/2021 09:45

9 0  | tr ibu tes to pau l binski – part o ne

swords of the faithful! The kings of Spain battle for the faith and everywhere triumph. Bishops, abbots and clergy build churches and monasteries, while the peasantry improves their fields without fear, feed their stock, and no one dispossesses them. At that time the very reverend prelate Rodrigo, archbishop of Toledo [r. 1209–47], built the church of Toledo through wondrous work (mirabili opere fabricauit). The very prudent Mauricio, bishop of Burgos [r. 1213–38], built the church of Burgos, with strength and beauty (fortiter et pulchre construxit). And the very wise Juan, chancellor of king Fernando, founded the church of Valladolid and endowed it gloriously with multiple possessions (fundauit et multis possessionibus gloriose dotauit). As time passed and he was made bishop of Osma [r. 1231–40], he then built the church of Osma with great work (opere magno construxit). Among other acts that he prudently undertook, the noble Nuño, bishop of Astorga [r. 1226–41], set himself to repair with strength and beauty (fortiter et pulchre studuit reparare) the walls of the city of Astorga, his episcopal palace and the cloister of his church. Lorenzo, master of law (regula iuris) and bishop of Orense [r. 1218–48], built Orense’s church and episcopal palace with cut stones (quadris lapidibus fabricauit) and founded a bridge over the river Miño next to that city. Also, the generous Esteban, bishop of Túy [r. 1218–39], finished the church of Túy with great stones (magnis lapidibus consumauit) and made it ready for consecration. Also, the pious and noble Martin, bishop of Zamora [r. c.1217–38], continuously and successfully applied himself to the construction of churches, restoration of monasteries and the building of bridges and hospitals. These and other blessed bishops and abbots toiled for these and other holy works, and their names are written in the book of life. With a very generous hand the great king Fernando and his very prudent mother Queen Berenguela supported these holy projects, adorning the churches of Christ with much gold, silver, precious stones and silk ornaments. In that time (they) built monasteries for the friars preachers and friars minor across Spain, and the word of God was preached everywhere and unceasingly.13 At face value Lucas thus offers an inventory of building projects in Castile and León in the reign of Fernando III, a celebration of the size, wonder, beauty, materials and strength of Gothic architecture, albeit without explicitly identifying a new architectural idiom. He ties the phenomenon to a resurgent Church, and to a broader national project, led by Fernando and his mother, Berenguela, to bind together the kingdoms of Castile and León, (re)united in 1230. Yet, as I will argue, although Lucas’ account has been cited again and again since the sixteenth century, architectural historians have overlooked the passage’s

13 Lucas of Túy, Chronicon mundi, ed. E. Falque Rey, Corpus Christianorum continuatio mediaevalis 74, Turnhout, 2003, IV.lxxxxv (p. 334).

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 90

09/07/2021 09:45

chap ter 6  | des cr ibin g arc hi t ec t ur e i n t hi rt eent h- c ent ury spai n   |   91

political, historiographical and rhetorical contexts, while historians have paid little heed to the visual and archaeological evidence that calls Lucas’ claims into doubt.14 Before probing this further we should consider two earlier passages in which Lucas praises first Fernando’s grandfather, Alfonso VIII of Castile, and then Fernando’s formidable mother (Alfonso VIII’s daughter), Queen Berenguela (d. 1246), who served as Queen regent during the minority of Enrique I (1214–17) and was also the patron of the Chronicon mundi. The description of Alfonso VIII’s reign follows an account of the peace that was finally achieved in 1197 after a dispute between Alfonso VIII and Berenguela’s first husband, Alfonso IX of León, a dispute whose cruelty was miraculously predicted by a bleeding statue of the Virgin and Child outside the walls of León:15 After this [Alfonso VIII] began to consider the health of his soul and built anew the noble monastery of Santa Maria de las Huelgas in the city of Burgos. He endowed this monastery with many sureties and decorated it with gold, silver, precious stones and silk curtains of wonderful beauty (mire pulcritudinis). Like another Solomon (Alter … Salomon) for our time, the same king built a royal palace next to the aforementioned house of God. Furthermore, not far from the same monastery, on the public way to Santiago, he also built a hospital of wonderful beauty, which he provided with so much income that all indigent pilgrims who passed by received daily victuals. The said monastery, his royal palace and even the hospital with its chapel were all built with stone or brick with mortar and painted with gold and varied colours (de lapidibus uel laterculis coctis et calce constructa sunt et auro ac uariis coloribus depictas).16 Two chapters later Alfonso’s daughter has her moment: Queen Berenguela built a royal palace in León with stones and mortar (hedicauit…ex lapidibus et calce) next to the monastery of St  Isidoro, and similarly she restored with stones and mortar the towers of León, which the barbarian king al-Mansur had once destroyed. This most serene queen sought to adorn the monastery of the blessed Isidoro, and the other principal churches of the kingdom with gold, silver, precious stone and silk vestments. In this time the catholic faith grew throughout Spain, and although many waged wars against the kingdom of León, the churches were nonetheless enriched with royal gifts, to such an extent that many old churches that had been built at great expense were destroyed, and new ones were founded 14 To my knowledge, the first author to cite this as historical evidence is A. de Morales, Los cinco libros postreros de la Coronica General de España, Córdoba, 1586, p. 209. It was first published in A. Schott, Hispaniae illustratæ, 4 vols, Frankfurt, 1603–8, vol. 4, pp. 1–112. For recent interpretations, see, for example, L. Torres Balbás, Arquitectura gótica, Ars Hispaniae 7, Madrid, 1952, p. 44; B. F. Reilly, ‘Bishop Lucas of Túy and the Latin Chronicle Tradition in Iberia’, The Catholic Historical Review, 93, 2007, pp. 767–88 (at pp. 776–7). 15 Henriet and Sansterre, ‘Méfiance’, p. 79. 16 Lucas of Túy, Chronicon mundi, IV.lxxxiii (pp. 323–5).

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 91

09/07/2021 09:45

92 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

throughout the kingdom of León, which were much more noble and beautiful (ut antique destruentur ecclesie, que magnis sumptibus fuerant fabricante, et multo nobiliores et pulcriores in toto regno Legionensi fundarentur). Then the reverend Mauricio (sic), bishop of León [r. 1181–1205], founded the church of the same see with great toil (fundauit opere magno), but did not bring it to completion. Then the church of the blessed James the Apostle was also founded, which was later gloriously consecrated by the very reverend father Pedro, archbishop of Santiago [r. 1207–24].17 The passages support the Isidorean notion that one of the chief duties of a ruler was to ensure prosperity and guarantee the orthodoxy of the Church.18 Indeed, the flourishing of the Church was a favourite topic of Lucas.19 But rulers were also duty-bound to promote church buildings and endow them richly, as Lucas makes clear in his account of the earlier kings of Asturias and León in Book IV of the Chronicon mundi.20 It is in fact these kings, and not Solomon, who act as true exemplars for the rulers of Lucas’ day.21 Lucas’ descriptions of their building activities – which partly derive from the older chronicles he drew on – anticipate his descriptive vocabulary of Gothic architecture.22 Thus Lucas records that Alfonso II established his capital in Oviedo pulchro et forti opere and decorated his palace picturiis uariis, that Alfonso III founded a church at Santiago de Compostela opere miro, that Alfonso V built the church of St John the Baptist (later San Isidoro) in León ex luto et latere, and that Fernando I embellished the same church plurime pulcritudinis auro et argento lapidibusque preciosis et cortinis sericis.23 The only epithets that Lucas reserves for the new Gothic churches of his day are those referring to the size and regularity of their stones, though he does also imply that the new churches built under Berenguela were of superior nobility and beauty. Lucas’ accounts of building under Berenguela and Fernando III differ from passages earlier in his chronicle in one significant respect, however. Earlier rulers, including Alfonso VIII, were the chief patrons of art and architecture: even if rulers sometimes laboured cum episcopis et abbatibus, Lucas never cites churchmen as architectural patrons in their own right.24 Under Berenguela and Fernando bishops and abbots take on a new protagonism, not so different from the group of bishops in early thirteenth-century England that Peter 17 Ibid., IV.lxxxv (p. 326). 18 G. Martin, ‘La part des femmes dans le développement d’une historiographie royale et d’une pensée politique léonaises aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles’, e-legal history review, Extra 27, 2018, pp. 1–21 (at p. 8). 19 Lucas of Túy, Chronicon mundi, IV.xxii (p. 247); lvii, p. 293; Lucas of Túy, Liber miraculorum, p. 6. 20 Lucas of Túy, Chronicon mundi, IV.viii (p. 229: Alfonso I); IV.xiv (pp. 232–3: Alfonso II); IV.xviii (pp. 239–41: Ramiro I); IV.xxii (pp. 247–9: Alfonso III); IV.xxvi (pp. 251–2: Ordoño II); IV.xxxii (pp. 260–61: Ramiro II); IV. xliii (p. 275: Alfonso V); IV.liv-lvii (pp. 289–93: Fernando I). 21 Lucas’ description of Solomon’s building activities is rather brief: ibid., I.xlvi (pp. 43–4). 22 For his sources, see Emma Falque’s introduction in ibid., pp. lxx-cv. For the Spanish tradition, see Collins, ‘Doubts and certainties’, and for the wider tradition, P. Gerson, ‘De qualitate aecclesiae: Architectural Description in the Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela’, in Santiago de Compostela: Pilgerarchitektur und bildliche Repräsentation in neuer Perspektive, ed. B. Nicolai and K. Rheidt, Oxford, 2015, pp. 31–41 (at pp. 31–7). For earlier sources, see, for example, the description of Alfonso III’s foundations in Oviedo in the Crónica de Alfonso III: Y. Bonnaz, Chroniques asturiennes (fin IXe siècle), Paris, 1987, pp. 50–51; Historia silense, ed. F. Santos Coco, Madrid, 1921, pp. 23–4. 23 Lucas of Túy, Chronicon mundi, IV.xiv (pp. 232–3); IV.xxii (p. 248); IV.xliii (p. 275); IV.lvii (p. 293). 24 Ibid., IV.xviii (pp. 239–40).

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 92

09/07/2021 09:45

chap ter 6  | des cr ibin g arc hi t ec t ur e i n t hi rt eent h- c ent ury spai n   |   93

Brieger associated with the so-called ‘Episcopal Style’.25 So how did Lucas come to know about these building activities, however vague his knowledge? His journey to Rome – probably in 1230 or 1231 – surely took him via Burgos, where he could have seen the new Gothic cathedral begun by the prudentissimus bishop Mauricio in 1221, its choir already complete by 1230.26 We also know he had been to Saint-Denis.27 But he probably had to learn about other building projects from visitors to León, including the exceedingly well-travelled papal legate, Juan de Abbeville, who was in León in August 1229 and may even have recruited Lucas.28 Lucas’ patron, Berenguela, could have also provided Lucas with information, and his connection with her suggests that he would have known other regulars at court, where new building projects must have been a topic of conversation. Those court regulars were closely connected to Lucas or to León in other ways too. They include the two other Latin chroniclers of the period: the reverentissimus archbishop Rodrigo, who sent an agent to San Isidoro in 1239 and would later make use of the Chronicon mundi in his own De rebus Hispaniae; and the sapientissimus Juan of Soria, chancellor from 1219, bishop of Osma from 1231, and probable author of the Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile, a chronicle known to Lucas.29 Indeed, Enrique Jérez has suggested that Lucas’ eager praise of Juan de Osma may relate to Juan’s election in April 1237 as bishop of León, sede vacante since October 1235 – an election rescinded in December 1238 at the request of Fernando III.30 It was instead another bishop on Lucas’ list, the pius … et nobilis Martín, who in November 1238 was promoted from Zamora to León, where he had previously been archdeacon.31 The reverentissimus Pedro Múñiz, archbishop of Santiago de Compostela, also had Leonese connections, having been bishop there from 1205 to 1207, and then of course there is Manrique de Lara, Pedro’s predecessor at León (r. 1181–1205), who allegedly founded the church but did not see it to completion. A simple copyist’s error probably explains why ‘Manricus’ was substituted for ‘Mauricius’ in surviving copies of the Chronicon mundi, but the underwhelming reverendus that Lucas conferred on Manrique may relate to the latter’s disputes with San Isidoro, as described in the Liber miraculorum.32 Reference to Manrique also raises questions as to the reliability of Lucas’ account. Since the late sixteenth century, scholars have struggled to square Lucas’ account of Manrique’s building activities with the emphatically Rayonnant idiom of León cathedral, which cannot date earlier than the 1250s; with archaeological evidence for a Romanesque church below the Gothic one; and with extensive documentary evidence that suggests that carpenters and painters were especially busy at the cathedral between 1222 and 1234, 25 P. Brieger, English Art, 1216–1307, Oxford, 1957, pp. 1–15. 26 Linehan, ‘Dates and Doubts’, p. 203; T. Witcombe, ‘Building Heaven on Earth: Bishop Maurice and the novam fabricam of Burgos cathedral’, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 42, 2017, pp. 46–60. 27 Linehan, ‘Dates and Doubts’, pp. 204–06, where Peter Linehan suggests that Lucas may not have been from León. 28 Ibid., p. 203. 29 Ibid., p. 212; Lucas of Túy, Chronicon mundi, p. xcvii. 30 E. Jérez Cabrero, ‘El Tudense en su siglo: transmisión y recepción del Chronicon mundi en el Doscientos’, in El relato historiográfico: textos y tradiciones en la España medieval, ed. F. Bautista, London, 2006, pp. 19–57 (at pp. 34–5). 31 G. Cavero Domínguez, ‘La mitra y el cabildo en la iglesia de León durante el siglo XIII’, in La catedral de León en la Edad Media, ed. J. Yarza Luaces, V. Herráez Ortega and G. Boto Varela, León, 2004, pp. 77–98 (at p. 80). 32 P. Ordas Díaz, ‘El claustro gótico en el reino de León: espacios, destinos e imágenes’, PhD dissertation, University of Santiago de Compostela, 2017, p. 52 n. 164; T. Martin, Queen as King: Politics and Architectural Propaganda in Twelfth-century Spain, Leiden, 2006, p. 173.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 93

09/07/2021 09:45

9 4 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

but that there was little activity under Manrique. At most, it now seems that Manrique may have begun work on the predecessor to the current cloister, not on the church.33 So can Lucas be trusted for other sites, as is almost always assumed? For Burgos and Toledo his comments are corroborated by other evidence that shows work began on both in the early 1220s.34 Alfonso VIII’s foundation of Las Huelgas and the consecration of Santiago de Compostela in 1211 are well-attested (though Lucas’ claim that the latter was ‘founded’ during Berenguela’s reign is nonsense).35 The generosus Esteban’s work on distant Túy cathedral is also clear from documentary and stylistic evidence, though Lucas might have been less enthusiastic had he known that the portico of Túy was the one place in the kingdom where his proscriptions about three-nailed crucifixes were ignored.36 Lucas’ other assertions are less reliable. Thanks to his account, construction at Burgo de Osma is confidently said to have begun in 1232, after Juan of Soria was made bishop. Yet stylistically the cathedral could be dated anywhere in the 1220s or 1230s, and the consecration of a chevet chapel in 1235 and record of maestro Lope there in 1236 offer only flimsy support for Juan’s protagonism.37 Nor is there any evidence of Juan’s interventions when abbot of Santa María la Mayor in Valladolid.38 For Orense, Lucas seems simply to be wrong, and nothing survives to support Lucas’ claims for Astorga.39 Berenguela’s interventions in León also seem to be overstated.40 And although is very likely that there was plenty of building activity in Zamora in the early thirteenth century, only the foundation of the Dominican convent soon after 1219 can be definitely connected to the scholarly bishop Martin Rodríguez (also known as Martín II).41 Lucas, then, is no Matthew Paris. His omissions are equally significant. Why does he not mention the new Gothic cathedral at Cuenca, begun in the 1190s and not completed until the 1250s?42 Or Sigüenza, where a papal bull of 1226 offered support in completing the Gothic cathedral, begun in the mid twelfth century?43 Or the cathedral of Ciudad

33 See especially Ordas Díaz, ‘El claustro gótico’, pp. 52–3; H. Karge, ‘La arquitectura de la catedral de León en el contexto del gótico europeo’, in La catedral de León en la Edad Media, ed. J. Yarza Luaces, V. Herráez Ortega and G. Boto Varela, León, 2004, pp. 113– 44. 34 H. Karge, La Catedral de Burgos y la arquitectura del siglo XIII en Francia y España, Valladolid, 1995, 39–40; T. Nickson, Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile, University Park, PA, 2015, pp. 59–60. 35 P. Abella Villar, ‘Nuevas pesquisas sobre los orígenes constructivos del monasterio de Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas de Burgos’, Codex aquilarensis: Cuadernos de investigación del Monasterio de Santa María la Real, 24, 2008, pp. 32–61; A. Suárez González, ‘Invocar, validar, perpetuar (un círculo de círculos)’, Revista de Poética Medieval, 27, 2013, pp. 60–99. 36 A. S. Moralejo, Escultura gótica en Galicia (1200–1350), Santiago de Compostela, 1975, p. 15; C. Manso Porto, ‘Reflexiones sobre la catedral románica y gótica de Santa María de Tui’, Abrente. Boletín de la Real Academia Gallega de Bellas Artes de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, 2012, pp. 75–125 (at p. 88); Moralejo, ‘D. Lucas de Tuy’, p. 302. 37 See E. Lambert, L’Art gothique en Espagne aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, Paris, 1931, pp. 259–61; J. M. Martínez Frías, El Gótico en Soria. Arquitectura y escultura monumental, Salamanca, 1980, pp. 76–85. 38 M. Mañueco Villalobos and J. Zurita Nieto, Documentos de la Iglesia Colegial de Santa Maria la Mayor (hoy Metropolitana) de Valladolid, 2 vols, Valladolid, 1917–20, vol. 2, pp. 74–5. 39 S. Moralejo, Iconografía gallega de David y Salomón, Santiago de Compostela, 2004, p. 15 n. 3; N. Conde Cid, ‘La Catedral de Ourense como imagen del Paraíso en la Edad Media: Arquitectura, cultura visual y espacio para la penitencia’, PhD dissertation, University of Santiago de Compostela, 2015, pp. 37–43; M. C. Cosmen Alonso, ‘Las catedrales románicas de Astorga’, in Enciclopedia del románico de Castilla y León. León, Aguilar del Campoo, 2002, pp. 439–45. 40 M. Shadis, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages, New York, 2009, pp. 75–6. 41 P. Linehan, The Ladies of Zamora, Manchester, 1997, p. 7. 42 G. Palomo Fernández, La catedral de Cuenca en el contexto de las grandes canterías catedralicias castellanas en la Baja Edad Media, 2 vols, Cuenca, 2002, especially vol. 1, p. 151. 43 D. Mansilla, La documentación pontificia de Honorio III (1216–1227), Madrid, 1965, p. 465 (no. 610); M. Muñoz Párraga, La Catedral de Sigüenza (las fábricas románica y gótica), Guadalajara, 1987.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 94

09/07/2021 09:45

chap ter 6  | descr ibing arc hi t ec t ur e i n t hi rt eent h- c ent ury spai n   |   95

Rodrigo, whose western and upper parts date to after 1230?44 What about the Franciscan church of Villafranca del Bierzo, roofed after 1234?45 Or the Cistercian abbeys of Moreruela and Matallana, where works continued in the 1230s, or Santa María de Huerta, whose magnificent refectory was finished in the 1220s?46 The omission of these sites from Lucas’ lists probably does not imply any architectural judgement on his part: for Lucas it was the people that counted, and with the possible exception of don Esteban at Túy, all those who made it into his chronicle could claim some political or intellectual distinction.47 The same could not be said for those overseeing building at these other sites in the 1230s. Lucas was nonetheless more attentive to contemporary architecture than were his fellow chroniclers and builder-bishops, Juan of Soria and archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo. That may have something to do with San Isidoro itself, and especially its inscriptions. Lucas must have been very familiar with the inscription that commemorated San Isidoro’s consecration in 1149 in the presence of no less than eleven bishops and archbishops, eight abbots, a host of royalty, and the prior of San Isidoro: like contemporary charters, this offered a vision of the king and his bishops that was not so different from Lucas’.48 But Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras has also noted that a number of epitaphs in San Isidoro’s royal pantheon were renewed in the thirteenth century and written in a ‘chronicle-style’, close to Lucas’ Chronicon mundi – especially his careful description of Alfonso VIII’s foundations in Burgos, de lapidibus uel laterculis coctis et calce constructa, or of Berenguela’s palace next to San Isidoro, built ex lapidibus et calce.49 These inscriptions were produced, Sánchez suggests, as part of a campaign to establish San Isidoro, not just as the pantheon of rulers of León, but of León and Castile. And a number of these epitaphs are unusually specific about building. Thus the epitaph of Alfonso V (d. 1028) records that fecit ecclesiam hanc de luto et latere, precisely the terms used by Lucas, and not inconsistent with local traditions of brick building.50 This church was then upgraded by Fernando I (d. 1065), who according to his epitaph, fecit ecclesiam hanc lapideam, quam olim fuerat lutea. This vaguely Suetonian phraseology follows a seemingly authentic inscription set up soon after Fernando’s death, which records HANC QUA[M] CERNIS AULAM SCI IOANNIS B[APTISTAE] OLIM FUIT LUT[E]A QUA[M] NUPER EXCELLENTISSIMUS FREDINANDUS (sic) REX ET SANCIA REGINA AEDIFICAVERUNT LAPID[E]A[M] …51 But as John Williams observed, the 44 Karge, Burgos, p. 176. 45 J. González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 3 vols, Córdoba, 1980–3, vol. 1, p. 32. 46 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 24–5; C. Abad Castro, ‘La panda del refectorio’, in Monjes y monasterios: el Cister en el medievo de Castilla y León: Monasterio de Santa María de Huerta, Soria, ed. I. G. Bango Torviso, Valladolid, 1998, pp. 237–54 (at p. 251). 47 See discussion in M. González Jiménez, Fernando III el Santo, Sevilla, 2006, pp. 118–19, 126–9. 48 V. García Lobo, ‘La escritura publicitaria de los documentos’, in De litteris, manuscriptis, inscriptionibus, Vienna, 2010, pp. 229–55 (at p. 238). 49 R. Sánchez Ameijeiras, ‘The Eventful Life of the Royal Tombs of San Isidoro in León’, in Church, State, Vellum and Stone: Essays in Honor of John Williams, ed. J. Harris and T. Martin, Leiden, 2005, pp. 479–520 (at pp. 493–500). See also A. Suárez González, ‘Del pergamino a la piedra? De la piedra al pergamino? (Entre diplomas, obituarios y epitafios medievales de San Isidoro de León)’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 33, 2003, pp. 365–415. Lucas of Túy, Chronicon mundi, IV.lxxxiii (p. 325); IV.lxxxv (p. 326). See also Lucas’ description of the cover to Isidore’s tomb in Seville, built ex latere et lapide (Lucas of Túy, Liber miraculorum, p. 29), a coupling with an impeccable Isidorean provenance: J.-M. Fritz, ‘Translatio studii et déluge. La légende des colonnes de marbre et de brique’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 47, 2004, pp. 127–51 (at p. 148). 50 Sánchez Ameijeiras, ‘San Isidoro’, pp. 497–8; Martin, Queen as King, pp. 47–8; Lucas of Túy, Chronicon mundi, IV.xliii (p. 275); P. Araguas, Brique et architecture dans l’Espagne médiévale: XIIe–XVe siècles, Madrid, 2003, pp. 131–3. The echo of the Israelites’ forced labour on buildings in luto et latere from Judith 5:10 was presumably unintentional. 51 Martin, Queen as King, p. 46.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 95

09/07/2021 09:45

96  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

upgrading of Alfonso’s church also echoes bishop Pelayo of Oviedo’s description of Alfonso II’s church in Santiago de Compostela, built ex lapidibus et luto opera parua, which was then replaced by Alfonso III’s church, ex calce quadratisque lapidibus marmoreisque columpnis sive basis construxit.52 Ultimately the source for all this is probably Isaiah’s prophecy, lateres ceciderunt sed quadris lapidibus aedificabimus (Isaiah 9, 10). This is not the place to enter into the fierce polemic regarding San Isidoro’s construction.53 Nor, beyond the lexical echoes described above, are there grounds for implicating Lucas in San Isidoro’s restructuring of history in the early thirteenth century. But these inscriptions do make one wonder what Lucas might have made of another undated but retrospective epitaph carved in the thirteenth century, this time in the church itself.54 This commemorates Petrus Deustamben and records that he superedificavit the church of San Isidoro and fundavit the bridge of Deustamben, that his character and miracles were widely recognized, and that he was buried in San Isidoro by Alfonso VII (d. 1157) and Queen Sancha.55 The term superedificavit has caused much puzzlement to scholars, and it has been taken to imply that Petrus was the master mason responsible for setting the church’s new stone vaults.56 Yet Lucas would surely have recognized what others have not: it instead refers to Paul’s much cited allegory of the Church (I Corinthians 3:10): ut sapiens architectus fundamentum posui alius autem superaedificat (‘as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon’). As architectus in this period usually refers to a patron, not a master mason, the allusion suggests that Petrus was a canon, and that he founded the bridge of Deustamben but merely oversaw construction of San Isidoro, founded by Alfonso V.57 But the citation also carries a veiled warning, for St Paul’s letter continues But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid; which is Christ Jesus. Now if any man build upon this foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble (si quis autem superaedificat supra fundamentum hoc aurum argentum lapides

52 J. Williams, ‘San Isidoro in León: Evidence for a New History’, Art Bulletin, 55, 1973, pp. 171–84 (at p. 178 n. 24, citing Sampiro, su crónica y la monarquía leonesa en el siglo X, ed. J. Pérez de Úrbel, Madrid, 1952, pp. 278, 355–6 n. 10). Compare R. Ximénez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie sive Historia gothica, ed. J. Fernández Valverde, Corpus Christianorum continuatio medievalis 72, Turnhout, 1987, IV.xv (p. 137). 53 See, amongst others, Martin, Queen as King; J. Williams, ‘San Isidoro Exposed: the Vicissitudes of Research in Romanesque Art’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 3, 2011, pp. 91–116; M. Utrero Agudo and J. I. Murillo Fragero, ‘San Isidoro de León. Construcción y reconstrucción de una basílica románica’, Arqueología de la arquitectura, 11, 2014, pp. 1–53. 54 Martin, Queen as King, pp. 26–7. 55 +HI : Q[U]IESCIT : SERV[US] : DEI : PETRVS : DEVS : TAM : BEN : Q[U]I : SVP[ER] EDI[FIC]AVIT : ECCLESIA[M] : HA[N]C // ISTE : FU[N]DAVIT : PON/ TEM Q[U]I : D[ICITU]R : DE : D[EU]S : TA[M]/ BEN : ET : Q[U]IA : ERAT/ [VI]R : MIRE : ABSTI/ [NENC]IE : ET : MVLTIS/ [FLOR]EBAT : MIRA/ [CULIS] : O[MNE]S : EV[M] : LAV/ DIB[US] : P[RE]DICABA[N]T : / SEPULT[US] : ES[T] : HIC : / AB : INP[ER]ATORE/ ADEFO[N]SO : ET/ SA[N]CIA : REGIN[A] : 56 Martin, Queen as King, p. 27; Utrero Agudo and Murillo Fragero, ‘San Isidoro’. 57 N. Pevsner, ‘The Term “Architect” in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 17, 1942, pp. 549–62 (especially pp. 550–51). Nor are there strong grounds for connecting Petrus with the bridge-builder named Petrus who is described in the Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela, though see The Pilgrim’s Guide: A Critical Edition, ed. A. Stones, A. Shaver-Crandell and P. Gerson, 2 vols, London, 1998, vol. 2, pp. 16, 155–6.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 96

09/07/2021 09:45

chap ter 6  | des cr ibin g arc hi t ec t ur e i n t hi rt eent h- c ent ury spai n   |   97

pretiosos ligna faenum stipulam): Every man’s work shall be manifest; for the day of the Lord shall declare it, because it shall be revealed in fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work, of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide, which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire (I Corinthians 3:10–15). This context perhaps explains the epitaph’s emphasis on Petrus’ virtues, and suggests that it offers discreet praise on those royal patrons who had rebuilt San Isidoro and lavished it with gifts – whatever the materials. The author of the twelfth-century Historia Compostelana similarly alluded to Paul’s letter when describing how in 1112 bishop Gelmírez utpote sapiens architectus […] fecit supereminens pulpitum at Santiago de Compostela.58 So too did Master Mateo when proclaiming that he built Compostela’s portals a fundamentis (‘from their foundations’) on the famous lintel inscription of 1188.59 But Lucas was not concerned with Mateo’s pretensions: his viewpoint was fundamentally Isidorean, and his Chronicon mundi names no builders, only patrons. Architecti autem caementarii sunt qui disponunt in fundamentis (the architecti are the builders [caementarii] who lay out the foundations), explained Isidore in the Etymologies.60 For Lucas, it was kings and churchmen who were the architects of the great new Gothic churches of thirteenth-century León and Castile. Kings or bishops, scholars or teachers, the wise architects lay the foundations, and others try to build upon them.

58 Historia compostelana, ed. E. Falque Rey, Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, 1994, p. 189. 59 F. Prado-Vilar, ‘Stupor et mirabilia: The Eschatological Imaginary of Master Matthew in the Portal of Glory’, in El románico y sus mundos imaginados, ed. P. L. Huerta Huerta, 2014, pp. 180–204 (at p. 202). 60 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, trans. and ed. S. A. Barney, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, Cambridge, 2006, XIX.viii (p. 377).

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 97

09/07/2021 09:45

Cui bono? The Founding and Funding of Medieval Religious Institutions under Charles IV Zoë Opačić

I

n h i s magnum opus o n t h e a rt a n d a rc h i t e c t u r e of fourteenth-century England, Paul Binski lamented the absence of a systematic study of the economy of building. While, he argued, the economic history in this crisis-prone era is well known, art historians ‘in their search of form and meaning have forgotten that things have to be paid for, ivory towers included’. 1 Focusing on one of the most original periods of English Gothic, for Binski the central question was not so much about the actual cost of a cathedral, a castle, a parish church – or an ivory tower – and its monetary source, but how and if the ‘shift in the landscape of invention’ was related to general economic trends. Binski’s terms of inquiry, which have inspired this essay, are characteristically ambitious and multi-layered. They encompass economic development in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the shifts in forms of architectural patronage from large-scale projects to church furniture (ornamenta); the small cluster of powerful men (‘oligopoly’) and creative clans of masons (‘companies’) who controlled new projects; and the growing participation of the upwardly mobile laity as a new, aspirational class of patrons.2 Clearly some of Binski’s pessimism about the state of scholarship is deliberately exaggerated. As he readily acknowledges, the notion that the ‘age of the Cathedrals’ was the product of an economic boom and an expression of societal cohesion has been exploded long ago. The medieval image of the carts miraculously pulled up precipitous hills, interpreted as a symbol of divinely sanctioned corporate harmony in Chartres and Laon, has been replaced by that of oppression and feudal strife which strained relations within cities.3 It should 1

2 3

P. Binski, Gothic Wonder. Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style 1290–1350, New Haven, CT, 2014, p. 81. This essay is dedicated to Paul in gratitude for many memorable conversations, his generosity and kindness in over two decades. My thanks also to Christina Lutter for the opportunity to present some of these ideas at the workshop ‘Urban Life and Lordship in Central Europe’ (Vienna, 2017); to Alexandra Gajewski for her valuable comments and to Julian Luxford for his excellent editorial support. Ibid., pp. 82–101. B. Abou-el-Haj, ‘The Urban Setting for Late Medieval Church Building: Reims and its Cathedral between 1210 and 1240’, Art History 11, 1988, pp. 17–41; eadem, ‘Artistic Integration Inside the Cathedral Precinct: Social Consensus Outside?’, in Artistic Integration in Gothic Buildings, ed. V. C. Raguin, K. Brush and P. Draper, Toronto, 1995, pp. 214–35; H. Kraus, Gold Was the Mortar: The Economics of Cathedral Building, London, 1979; J. W. Williams, Bread, Wine and Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral, Chicago, 1993. For a more balanced reading of urban-ecclesiastical relationships, see S. Murray, Notre Dame, Cathedral of Amiens: The Power of Change in Gothic, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 26–7.

[ 98]

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 98

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 7  |  c ui b o no ?  |   99

be no surprise that a medium as costly, disruptive and time-consuming as architecture on a colossal scale should lead to such catastrophic breakdowns, especially between civic and ecclesiastical institutions. However, as many subsequent scholars were eager to point out, the destructive power of medieval cathedrals on the local economy and communities that built them has been greatly overstated. This is best summed up by Paul Crossley, who, arguing for a more heterogeneous model, concluded that ‘cathedral-town relationships depended on very particular networks of local conditions and loyalties, peculiar to each city and each bishop’.4 In the case of Chartres, Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz reasonably suggests that neither its lack of economic muscle, nor civil unrest nor the absence of autonomous guilds would have prevented donations to the construction of the new cathedral. 5 Moreover, in the place of unilateral fiscal exploitation, Kurmann-Schwarz presents a more complex relationship where the chapter, who bore the financial burden and relied on their numerous prebends and parish churches for income, gladly accepted and courted all manner of donations – from the king and his barons to the local nobility and the trades. And while artistic control remained firmly in the hands of those who managed the project, the reward to donors came in the form of immortality both visualized in glass and effected at the Last Judgement. Christian Freigang’s methodical examination of building organisation and financing in the south of France has demonstrated that donations and alms alone (in the case of Rodez cathedral) were an insufficient and unreliable funding stream. Toulouse cathedral opted for individual contributions to specific parts of the building, and while the funds trickled in for the chapels and the lower sections of the choir, they dried up in the upper parts, leading to a change of plan and addition of more chapels. Narbonne chapter countered that uncertainty with a well-structured, stable if coercive regime which pooled the income from prebends, parishes, indulgences and wills into a single building fund controlled by the chapter with some oversight by the commune. Its figurehead, the archbishop, who injected a large sum of money at the outset as a start-up fund (Anschubfinanzierung), largely stayed out of the day-to-day organisation and decision making.6 A far more disinterested party in this equation was the French king who, despite commanding the largest revenue in the land, took a limited and selective approach to cathedral funding, even when such projects could be considered in some sense royal.7 Proportionately modest donations to the abbey of St-Denis and Chartres cathedral stood in sharp contrast to the French royal family’s lavish spending on monastic houses of choice. Long before Louis IX’s endowment of the Sainte-Chapelle, his father, Louis VIII, 4 5 6 7

P. Crossley, ‘Cathedrals and their Cities’, Slade Lecture delivered at University of Cambridge, 12 March, 2012 (unpublished). See also A. Erlande-Brandenburg, The Cathedral: The Social and Architectural Dynamics of Construction, Cambridge, 2009, p. 242. B. Kurmann-Schwarz,’ Récits, programme, commanditaires, concepteurs, donateurs : publications récentes sur l’iconographie des vitraux de la cathédrale de Chartres’, Bulletin Monumental, 154, 1996. pp. 55–71 (especially pp. 66–9). C. Freigang, Imitare ecclesias nobiles, Die Kathedralen von Narbonne, Toulouse und Rodez und die nordfranzösische Rayonnantgotik im Languedoc, Worms, 1992; C. Freigang, ‘Das Beispiel Narbonne: Bauorganisation in Südfrankreich im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert’, in Die Baukunst im Mittelalter, ed. R. Cassanelli, Dusseldorf, 2005, pp. 169–93. The general attitude of the French monarchy to cathedral building is summarized by Erlande-Brandenburg, The Cathedral, pp. 231–3. In the case of Chartres, Kurmann-Schwarz, Récits, programme, commanditaires, concepteurs, donateurs, p. 67 is rightly sceptical about the level of royal involvement. C. Bruzelius, The 13th-century Church at St-Denis, New Haven, CT, 1985, pp. 11–13, argues for Louis IX’s direct involvement in the rebuilding of St-Denis’ nave and choir despite a conspicuous lack of evidence. Moreover, earlier royal donations quoted by Bruzelius are – with the exception of Dagobert – exclusively concerned with liturgical objects, furnishings and relics.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 99

09/07/2021 09:45

100 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part o ne

made a death-bed pledge of his crown jewels for the foundation of a Victorine abbey. Blanche of Castile and her son sponsored together and individually the construction of three Cistercian houses (Royaumont, Maubisson and Le Lys), before Louis IX turned his devotion and funds to the mendicant orders following his return from crusade in 1254.8 During the same ‘boom period’ in England, episcopal and royal patrons invested prodigious sums in large-scale building projects.9 Bishops of Exeter, Ely, Winchester, chapters at Gloucester, Bristol, Tewkesbury and Wells, and many other ecclesiastical institutions, were prepared to dig deep to improve their churches. Henry III famously spent over £40,000 on the three-quarters completed Westminster Abbey (until his death in 1272) – well in excess of the crown’s annual income. This may not be surprising for a king deeply interested in art and who extolled royal largesse as one of the highest royal virtues, inscribing his bedchamber with the motto ‘spend and god shall send’.10 As a Benedictine abbey, Westminster fitted into the French royal pattern of favouring monastic institutions over episcopal, albeit exceeding them in ambition and costliness.11 His successors may have been less interested in sinking royal funds into interminable cathedral projects, but the spending on architecture continued unabated. The precise level of involvement of Edward I and Edward III in the extended construction of St Stephen’s chapel in Westminster will become clearer in the forthcoming publication of its accounts.12 However, Edward I’s campaign of castle building in Wales and Edward III’s colossal spending on his castle in Windsor (more than £50,000 between 1350 and 1377) showed the same extravagant and optimistic attitude to money, though to more self-serving and pragmatic ends.13 Nevertheless, as will be argued here, the economies of scale are significant. The sense of ‘real’ value is perhaps best exemplified by the respective sums spent by Louis IX on the construction of Sainte-Chapelle, the Grande Châsse (the altar and relic display platform) and on the relic of the Crown of Thorns.14 8

This relationship has been methodically analysed by A. Gajewski, ‘The Patronage Question under Review: Queen Blanche of Castile (1188–1252) and the Architecture of the Cistercian Abbeys at Royaumont, Maubuisson, and Le Lys’, in Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. T. Martin, 2 vols, Leiden, 2012, vol. 1, pp. 197–244, who concludes that architectural choices made in these ‘royal houses’ did not compromised the Cistercian requirements but satisfied all parties involved. For Blanche (and Louis) as architectural patrons see also L. Grant, Blanche of Castile. Queen of France, New Haven, CT, 2016, pp. 249–64. For Louis IX’s involvement with the Sainte-Chapelle, see recently M. Cohen, The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy: Royal Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Paris, New York, 2015, pp. 172–8. 9 Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 84–7. 10 P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets, New Haven, CT, 1995, pp. 1, 49–50; C. Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral. The Architecture of the Great Church 1130–1530, London 1992, p. 178. The calculations vary slightly: for the most detailed breakdown see R. A. Brown, H. Colvin and A. J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works, vol. 1: The Middle Ages, London, 1963, pp. 130–57. 11 W. C. Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century, Princeton, 2009. Edward I’s abandoned Cistercian abbey of Vale Royal should be added to this, which was to be funded by the revenues from the county of Chester: Brown, Colvin and Taylor, King’s Works, pp. 248–57. On the English royal ‘disinterest’ in cathedral projects see W. Vroom, Financing Cathedral Building in the Middle Ages: The Generosity of the Faithful, trans. E. Manton, Amsterdam, 2010, pp. 125, 128. 12 The Fabric Accounts of St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, 1292–1396, ed. T. Ayers, trans. M. Jurkowski, Woodbridge, 2020. 13 Colvin, The History of Kings Works, pp. 228–36, compared £100,000 spent on Welsh castles to an outlay ‘such as a modern government might devote to building a fleet of nuclear submarines’. According to Steven Brindle, the total cost of the Upper Ward came to around £44,000, the sum raised largely from the Scottish and especially French ransom money: S. Brindle et al., Windsor Castle: A Thousand Years of a Royal Palace, London, 2018, pp. 95–100. For the patchiness of royal involvement in the completion of Westminster Abbey see Binski, Westminster Abbey, p. 205. H. M. Colvin, ‘The “Court Style” in Medieval English Architecture: A Review’, in English Court Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherbourne, London, 1983, still provides a stimulating overview of royal architectural patronage and a reflection on the issues of taste. 14 Quoted by D. H. Weiss, ‘Architectural Symbolism and the Decoration of the Ste.-Chapelle’, Art Bulletin, 77, 1995, pp. 308–20 (at p. 308 n. 1), as being 40,000 livres for the chapel, 100,000 livres for the grande châsse and 135,000 livres for the Crown of Thorns.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 100

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 7  |  c ui bo no ?   |   101

The economy of cathedrals has undoubtedly received more persistent attention on the continent, where scholars have mined surviving building accounts for evidence on subjects as diverse as methods of finance, workshop practice, artistic innovation, integrity and compromise, as well as socio-economic relationships as they played out in Milan, Toledo, Bern, Utrecht and Regensburg, to name but a few well-known examples.15 In central Europe the imbalance has been admirably addressed by the current work on the accounts of St Stephen’s in Vienna and also by the volume edited by Roman Zaoral, which looks at the financial networks of courts, chapters and cathedral workshops in Germany, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary.16 Bohemian examples, which I will be focusing on for the remainder of this paper, display above all the patchiness of sources and related difficulties of interpretation. Thus for example, Jiři Spěváček’s condemnation of King John of Luxembourg’s ‘pathological profligacy and ignorance of the value of money’ ought to be judged in the circumstances of the enormous debts he inherited from his immediate predecessors and his expansion of Bohemian domains (into Upper Lusatia and Silesia) and those of the Luxembourg clan.17 John’s foreign absences and heavy-handed money collecting methods contributed to his posthumous reputation: it is not a coincidence that the Cistercian Zbraslav, one of the two monasteries most heavily burdened by royal taxes, produced a chronicle that was so explicitly damning of John’s reign.18 His death in 1346 left a long trail of domestic and foreign lenders whose debts had to be paid by Charles IV and Wenceslas IV well into 1370s. John, of course, also had great resources at his disposal – from the more conventional endowments of pension and land by the French king in exchange for military and political support, to the natural resources of Bohemia’s famously plentiful mines.19 Without the mines of Kutná Hora there might not have been a Gothic Prague cathedral, and possibly not even Peter Parler, and the entire course of late medieval architecture may have looked rather different. The start of the rebuilding campaign, which outlasted the Luxembourg dynasty, was inextricably linked with the donation of the tithe from the tax revenue by John of Luxembourg and Charles IV in 1344 for the decoration of the tombs of St Adalbert and St Wenceslas and for the construction work on the cathedral.20 In creative terms Charles IV has commonly been seen as one the co-authors of the cathedral

15 E. Welch, Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan, New Haven, CT, 1995; Vroom, Financing Cathedral Building; Beiträge über Baufürung und Baufinanzierung im Mittelalter, ed. G. Binding, Cologne, 1974; I. Schürch, ‘Der Berner Münsterbau. Das St. Vinzenzen-Schuldbuch von 1448 bietet Einblick in den finanziellen, wirtschaftlichen und konkret materiellen Alltag des Münsterbaus’, in Die mittelalterliche Stadt erforschen – Archäologie und Geschichte im Dialog, ed. A. Baeriswyl et al., Basel, 2009, pp. 173–80; W. Schöller, Die rechtliche Organisation des Kirchenbaues im Mittellater vornehmlich des Kathedralbaues, Cologne, 1989. 16 Money and Finance in Central Europe during the Later Middle Ages, ed. R. Zaoral, Basingstoke, 2016. 17 J. Spěváček, Jan Lucemburský a jeho doba, Prague, 1994, p. 384. See also Z. Žalud, ‘Financiers to the Blind King: Funding the Court of John the Blind (1310–1346)’, in Money and Finance, pp. 187–231. 18 The other being Sedlec abbey: Zbraslav Chronicle: Chronicon aulae regiae, in Fontes rerum Bohemicarum (hereafter FRB), ed. J. Elmer, 8 vols, Prague, 1873–1932, vol. IV, part 1, 1884, pp. 1–337. 19 The impression of his father’s financial ineptitude percolates through Charles IV’s autobiography: Karoli IV Imperatoris Romanorum vita ab eo ipso conscripta, ed. and transl. B. Nagy and F. Schaer, Budapest, 2001, pp. 56–7, 68–9. For Kutná Hora mining and coinage, see E. Leminger, Královská mincovna ve Kutné Hoře, Prague, 1912. 20 Regesta diplomatica nec non epistolaria Bohemiae et Moraviae, pars 4: 1333–1346, ed. J. Emler, Prague, 1892, p. 411 (no. 1029); M. Suchý, ‘St Vitus Building Accounts (1371–1378): The Economic Aspects of Building the Cathedral’, in Money and Finance, pp. 645–705; M. Suchý, Solutio Hebdomadaria Pro Structura Templi Pragensis. Stavba svatovítské katedrály v letech 1372–1378 (= Castrum Pragense, 5), Prague, 2003.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 101

09/07/2021 09:45

102 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part o ne

project, responsible for some of its most idiosyncratic and innovative aspects (fig. 1).21 This is certainly how he liked to be remembered. The chronicler and master of the cathedral fabric, Beneš of Krabice, describes in detail the ‘joyful ceremony’ of the arrival of the archbishop’s pallium and the elevation of bishop Arnošt of Pardubice to his new office, accompanied by the singing of the Te deum laudamus (clerics) and Kyrie eleison (subjects).22 Shortly after, king John of Luxembourg and his sons Charles and John entered the trench outside the Romanesque basilica and placed the first stone of the new cathedral, physically setting in motion the cathedral’s construction. The designated Kutná Hora income of the new cathedral, Beneš tells us, was recorded in an ‘open charter’, but that charter, as Milena Bartlová has perceptively pointed out,23mentions Charles only once among the members of the Luxembourg dynasty whose souls were to be commemorated by this act. By the time of the completion of the triforium, some 30 years later, the history had been rewritten. The heavily-restored and now illegible inscription above the emperor’s triforium bust states that he ‘founded the new Prague church with the sumptuous fabric that can be seen and built it at his own expense’. This and other inaccuracies in many of the recorded triforium inscriptions (including the wrong age of Charles’ death), may seem like a later (mis)interpretation of complex administrative arrangements; after all, much of the building was carried out in his lifetime. Peter Parler’s inscription credits Charles with bringing the young architect to Prague from Schwäbisch Gmünd and making him the master mason in 1356. Although there is little else to corroborate this, the information has a ring of truth and repeats the pattern already established with the cathedral’s first master mason, Matthew of Arras. Matthew’s still puzzling connection with Avignon – where he is absent from the building accounts – coincides with Charles IV’s close personal contact, including visits, with his former mentor Pope Clement VI, who was instrumental in the creation of the Prague see.24 It would be well within the tradition of royal patronage, bolstered by the model established by Louis IX and Henry III in the thirteenth century, to claim the ownership of the most significant building project in the realm as well as its spiritual benefits to the nation. There is much in the cathedral itself to affirm the close creative partnership. But the accounts tell a different story.25 As well as the tenth income from the mined silver, the essential building fund depended on the chapter’s income and, following Arnošt of Pardubice’s statutes of 1350, the archbishop, the canons and the chapter officials were 21 P. Crossley, ‘The Politics of Presentation: The Architecture of Charles IV of Bohemia’, in Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, ed. R. Minnis et al., York, 2000, pp. 99–172; B. Schock-Werner, ‘Die Bauhütte des Veitsdomes in Prag’, in Die Baukunst im Mittelalter, pp. 267–80. 22 On 21 November, 1344: Chronicle of Beneš of Weitmile: Chronicon ecclesiae Pragensis, FRB IV/3, p. 495. 23 M. Bartlová, ‘The Choir Triforium of Prague Cathedral Revisited: The Inscriptions and Beyond’, in Prague and Bohemia: Medieval Art, Architecture and Cultural Exchange on Central Europe, ed. Z. Opačić, Leeds, 2009, pp. 81–100. The article includes a transcription of all the triforium inscriptions. 24 Matthew of Arras’ Avignon provenance is declared in the inscription above his triforium bust: Bartlová, ‘Choir Triforium Revisited’, p. 95; For an imaginative reconstruction of Matthew of Arras’s career before Prague and essential bibliography on this mason see, C. Freigang, ‘Die frühe Lebensgeschichte des Matthias von Arras, Dombaumeister von Prag’, in Capriccio und Architektur: Das Spiel mit der Baukunst. Festschrift für Bruno Klein, ed. S. Bürger and L. Kallweit, Berlin, 2017, pp. xv–xix; For the description of Charles IV’s closeness to Clement VI (born Pierre Rosier) see Karoli IV Imperatoris Romanorum vita, p. 29. 25 Suchý, St Vitus’ Building Accounts, p. 689; Z. Hledíková, Arnošt z Pardubic. Arcibiskup, zakladatel, rádce, Prague, 2008, pp. 146–8; the only surviving accounts between 1372 and Charles IVs death are published by J. Neuwirth, Die Wochenrechnungen und der Betrieb des Prager Dombaues in den Jahren 1372–1378, Prague, 1890.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 102

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 7  |  c ui b o no ?   |   103

expected to contribute. In a regime close to Chartres and Narbonne, the chapter turned to all churches in the Prague diocese, requesting that they raise money towards the building costs. Donation boxes were placed in churches and repayment offered in the form of indulgences, a pattern of exchange that was to become very common during Prague’s architectural expansion. The accounts were concerned with the building alone and leave plenty out, which would have been supplemented by the additional accounts of the royal household. Charles was clearly kept in the loop as is evident from the payment to a messenger who travelled to the emperor in Mühlberg super certis negotiis fabrice in December 1372.26 Suchý must be right in concluding that the elite forms of patronage, the ones with most immediate forms of benefit, would have been reserved for the refined liturgical fittings of the chapels and not for the scaffolding or lead pipes. Charles IV’s donation of a Křivoklát forest for the erection of the high choir had an important spiritual benefit since the entire choir was a commemorative zone of the Luxembourgs. The burial arrangements of the Luxembourgs in the western choir could be replicated on a smaller-scale in the side chapels. Thus in 1356 one of Charles IV’s chief supporter and beneficiaries of the Golden Bull, Rudolph, Duke of Saxony, founded an altar in the chapel of St Adalbert and Dorothy and asked to be buried here (he was not).27 This chapel was immediately next to the hierarchically most important axial chapel of the Holy Trinity and the site of the tombs of the Přemyslid kings Otakar I and Otakar II, the latter commissioned from Peter Parler, but only in 1377. This was a segment of a more complex chain of exchange of political and devotional loyalties: a gift of an auspicious resting place (although at the time still a building site) in exchange for a lifetime of support from a strategically and economically important part of the empire. The construction work in Prague castle produced wider benefits of employment, in a pattern that could be replicated in other less-well documented projects in the city. The study of the accounts reveals not only the payments for a large workforce consisting of regular and occasional crafts, but also how the villages in Prague’s vicinity could be contracted in a busy season to provide stone carters outside the usual networks of the supplying quarries. Those who benefited could also express their gratitude by becoming benefactors, as in the case of Frana Terkler, a well-off town councilor and lime supplier, who donated two thirds of the year’s consumption of lime to the cathedral and also funded an altar in Týn church in Prague’s Old Town with a requiem Mass supported by annual rent of 15 sexagena groschen and a supply of rabbit from his New Town estate.28 This complex picture of funding and supply networks becomes even more entangled in the case of a disparate and largely undocumented founding of the New Town and its royal religious foundations (fig. 2). The New Town foundation charter issued by Charles IV on 8 March 1348 in Prague reveals its ambitious scale and meticulous planning.29 As well 26 Suchý, St Vitus’ Building Accounts, p. 693. 27 M. Bravermanová and P. Chotěbor, Katerdrála sv Víta a Karel IV, Prague, 2016, p. 20. 28 Sixty groschen equalled a counting unit of one sexagena or schock: Suchý, St Vitus’ Building Accounts, pp. 679, 691. On the Terkler clan and other lime makers of Prague see M. Suchý, ‘Vápno, katedrála sv. Víta a pražští vápeníci v pozdním středověku. Výpověd písemných pramenů’, Archaeologia historica, 39, 2014, pp. 349–63. 29 Codex iuris principalis regni Bohemiae, vol. 1: Privilegia civitatum pragensium, ed. J. Čelakovský, Prague, 1886, pp. 79–83. The translation here is taken from that of the full charter from my forthcoming book.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 103

09/07/2021 09:45

104 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part o ne

as setting out the rules of governance of the new district, the financial terms of house building are also outlined. In the first instance, no-one was to pay an advance to the crown ‘or to anyone else, unless, that is to say, it is the sum imposed from the start and taken as tax for the ground and plot’. Property speculation seems to have been on Charles’ mind since sub-leasing was prohibited for anything more than half of a property and lest ‘on account of the heavy burden of tax and income the edifices constructed with the greatest labour and expense become dilapidated, rendering this city ugly, and be neglected utterly’. The balance of the aesthetic and financial concerns was evident in the rule that all plots should be built on within a month of the allocation and completed and inhabited within eighteen months from the start of the building. The threat to ‘sanction the negligent to be punished with an arbitrary punishment of our judgement’ must have been carried out sporadically since much of the city remained undeveloped well into the sixteenth century. Jews, seen as a necessary source of income, were offered the right to settle in the New Town, providing they brought with them ‘all their goods that they currently hold and possess’, an offer that most seem to have wisely declined. The founding of the New Town, recorded by Beneš and Francis, took place on St Mark’s day, 25 April 1348, only four years after the cathedral and with a similar stone-laying ceremony but as a personal act of Charles IV, the newly-crowned Bohemian king and emperor-elect. According to the same royal chroniclers a flurry of activity followed. From 1348 Charles had the New Town fortified ‘with strong walls and gates and mighty towers from Vyšehrad to Poříč, and even Vyšehrad itself he fortified with strong walls and towers, and all this work was completed in two years’.30 The fortifications, clearly visible on seventeenth-century engravings of the city by Willenberg, Sadeler and Ouden-Allen, were presumably a considerable investment of funds and (possibly pressed) labour. Within the walls the principal streets were laid out and three squares which, judging by the positioning of the Carmelite church of Our Lady of the Snows and the Glagolitic Benedictines at St Jerome’s (now known as the Slavonic or Emmaus monastery) – both founded by Charles IV a year before the New Town charter – must have been in planning for some time.31 The six monasteries and two parish churches were the principal legacy of Charles IV to the New Town and their commemorative role as personal ex-votos of his life and reign have often been commented on.32 Three of the monasteries – the Slav Benedictines at St Jerome’s, the Ambrosian Benedictines at St Ambrose’s and the Florentine Servites at Our Lady on the Lawn – introduced hitherto unknown orders to Prague, using different forms of liturgy and language. St Charlemagne’s, founded personally by Charles IV in the year of the construction of the New Town walls, was a cult largely unknown to Prague. A century later, this religious plurality of the New Town prompted Nuremberg’s chronicler Sigismund Meisterlin to comment enthusiastically that Charles wished to have every order in existence represented in Prague, thus evincing the emperor’s belief that the nation’s 30 Chronicle of Beneš of Weitmile, p. 516. 31 K. Benešovská, ‘Karmelitáni a slovanští benediktini na Novém Městě pražském’, in Karel IV. a Emauzy. Liturgie, text, obraz, ed. K. Kubínová, Prague, 2017, pp. 111–27 32 Crossley, The Politics of Presentation; P. Crossley and Z. Opačic, ‘Prague as a New Capital’, in Prague, the Crown of Bohemia. Art and Culture under the Last Luxembourgs 1347–1437, ed. J. Fajt and B. Drake Boehm, New Haven, CT, 2005, pp. 59–73.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 104

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 7  |  c ui b o no ?   |   105

spiritual salvation needed the daily intercessions of the broadest religious assembly. But did it also leave an impossible financial burden? Architectural historians have commented on the simplicity and rationality of the ‘New Town style’ characterized by spacious, clearly legible interiors, amply illuminated with long windows, which probably never contained stained glass, and polygonal apses.33 The indebtedness of these churches to the older stylist trends in Bohemia may also be taken as evidence of the involvement of local masons in contrast to the international talent personally assembled by the emperor for the cathedral. Nevertheless, only three monasteries – St Jerome’s, St Katherine’s and St Charlemagne’s – were consecrated in Charles IV’s lifetime (and presence), although St Charlemagne’s complex triradial vault was only constructed in the fifteenth century. St Apollinaris’ was completed in circa 1390, at the time that coincided with the tenure of the dean Wenceslas of Radeč, a man with an extensive experience in supervising building projects as the principal clerk of works at Prague cathedral between 1385 and 1409. Our Lady of the Lawn’s tiny chapel took more than twenty years to complete but it had already burned down by 1420. The building campaigns of the two parishes, Sts Henry and Cunegunda and St Stephen’s, both part of the New Town’s 1348 initiatives, were still lumbering on into the fifteenth century, when their rights had already been handed over to the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star in the Old Town. Rare successes were the two churches that were there at the New Town’s inception. The church of Our Lady of the Snows endowed with the timber from the coronation platform of Charles IV and Blanche of Valois in 1347, the event commemorated with a relief attached to the church’s entrance, blossomed despite its mendicant status, chiefly because of its connection with Prague’s theological faculty. With the nave left incomplete even before the ravages of the Hussite revolt, the towering Sainte-Chapellian choir of Our Lady and its attendant monastic buildings were the home to some 200 hundred monks and sixty doctors of philosophy.34 St Jerome’s, consecrated in 1372, was by far the most successfully completed New Town monastery, which by then probably included an extensive cloister with a painted cycle of typologically-arranged biblical scenes (fig. 3).35 The survival of the monastery’s charters copied into the so-called Registrum Slavorum allows us a more in-depth view into the mechanisms of funding absent in the other New Town institutions.36 The register begins with the Charles IV’s letters to the pope requesting the permission for the introduction of the Slav Liturgy into Bohemia. They are followed by the instructions to the archbishop setting out the location near the old Romanesque church of St Cosmas and Damian in the Prague hamlet of Podskalí and the transfer of patronal rights to St Nicolas’ church nearby. 33 K. Benešovská, ‘Benediktinský klášter na Slovanech s kostelem Panny Marie a slovanských patronů. Pokus o revizi názorů na stavební vývoj ve 14. století’, Umění, 1996, pp 118–30; Z. Opačić, ‘Bohemia after 1300: Reduktionsgotik, the Hall Church and the Creation of a New Style’, in The Year 1300 and the Creation of a new European Architecture, ed. A. Gajewski and Z. Opačić, Turnhout, 2008, pp. 163–75. 34 D. Prix et al, Umělecké památky Prahy, vol. 2: Nové Město, Vyšehrad, Prague, 1998, pp. 144–51; Benešovská, Karmelitáni a slovanští benediktini, pp. 115–23. 35 K. Kubínová, Emauzský cyklus, Prague, 2012. 36 The Registrum Slavorum is published as Das vollständige Registrum Slavorum, ed. A. Horčička and L. Helmling, Prague, 1904.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 105

09/07/2021 09:45

106  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

Table 1: Origins of the revenues allocated to the building of the Slavonic Monastery between 1349–1352.37 Kourˇim

1349, 1350

Lhota and Milostyn

1349, 1350

Prague, Malá Strana

1349

Butchers’ shops in Prague, New Town

From 1349; the sum was greatly increased in 1359

wine sale in Prague, Old Town

1349

the vineyards in Petrˇin, Malá Strana

1350

from eight butcher shops in the Old Town and the villages Valov, Jenecˇ

1350

Dobrovic and Okruhel

1355

Morˇina

1352

The ensuing charters, which according to my research coincided with the fast-moving campaign on the church and the cloister, show an intricate network of funding streams – none of them personal – which were allocated from across Prague and well beyond. The donation of the Cyrillic-Glagolitic Gospel (Bibliothèque municipale de Reims, MS 255) to St Jerome’s seems to indicate that Charles IV’s personal interests lay chiefly with the monastery’s literary output. This is confirmed by the generous donation to its scribe, John, in 1352.38 Is that literary and cultural aspect of the Slavonic monastery and its resonance with Bohemia’s re-constructed religious past the reason for its continuous financial provision and expansion of its decorative programme? Is there something else that privileged St Jerome’s over its poorer peer foundations in the new district? One possible answer may be topographical: the Slavonic monastery was placed in a strategically important zone next to the Charles Square and along the principal route towards the royal castle of Vyšehrad, just beyond the New Town’s southern perimeter. This was the via triumphalis used in the processional eve-of-the-coronation pilgrimage to Sts Peter and Paul’s in Vyšehrad and also for the emperor’s elaborate funerary cortege which halted at St Jerome’s (the only New Town church where this occurred). Another essential aspect of St Jerome’s purpose was its proximity to the celebration of the feast of the Holy Lance and Nails.39 The event, instituted by Charles IV with papal approval in 1354, was marked annually in Charles Square with the display of the Passion relics and the imperial coronation insignia and followed by the generous indulgences of 37 F. M. Pelcel, Karl der Vierte König in Böhmen, vol. 2: Urkundenbuch, Prague, 1781, pp. 94–107; Registrum Slavorum, pp. 21–70. 38 Registrum Slavorum, p. 65 (no. 27). For the so-called Reims Gospel see, L. Leger, L’évangéliaire Slavon de Reims, Dit: Texte du Sacre, Reims, 1899. 39 Z. Opačić, ‘Sacred Topography of Medieval Prague’, in Sacred Sites and Holy Places: Exploring the Sacralisation of Landscape through Time and Space, ed. S. W. Nordeide and S. Brink, Turnhout, 2013, pp. 252–81.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 106

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 7  |  c ui b o no ?   |   107

three years and three quadragenae. With additional indulgences offered for visiting Prague’s churches and attending the Mass and the hours in Charles IV’s presence, the New Town became the principal vehicle for the economical and spiritual regeneration of Prague. The incomplete New Town churches offering relics of St Stephen or St Charlemagne, the biblical scenes in the cloister of St Jerome’s, exotic liturgy and outdoor worship of the arma Christi, attracted an unseen numbers of visitors to the city, raising its prices alongside its cultural kudos.40 The level of financial profit from the feast of the Holy Lance and Nails is not known but it was in all likelihood reaped by the cathedral chapter and the crown, rather than the New Town. For Charles IV, as for Louis IX before him, there was no doubt where the true profits lay. [W]e should ponder most reverently those sweet nails, with which the Saviour himself was affixed to the same cross … through whose salvific blows we have also received such sweetness of his divine grace that our hands are freed from the knots of sin and our feet from the snare of death. For what is more holy than this wound and these blows, what is more beneficial?41

40 Chronicle of Beneš of Weitmile, p. 538. 41 See Innocent IV’s bull ‘In redemptoris nostri’, in Monumenta Vaticana res gestas bohemicas illustrantia, vol. 2: Acta Innocentii VI (1352–1362), ed J. B. Novák, Prague, 1907, p. 90 (nos 210, 211). Once again, the translation here is taken from that of the full charter from my forthcoming book.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 107

09/07/2021 09:45

108 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part o ne

Fig. 1. Prague, St Vitus’ Cathedral, choir interior: Prague, Ústav dějin umění Akademie věd

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 108

09/07/2021 09:45

c hapt er 7  |  c ui bo no ?   |   109 Fig. 2. Plan of Prague’s New Town and its religious institutions (after V. Lorenc, Nové Město pražské, Prague, 1973): 1. Sts Henry and Kunegunda’s; 2. St Stephen’s; 3. Corpus Christi; 8. Our Lady of the Snows; 9. Slavonic Monastery; 10. St Ambrose’s; 11. St Katherine’s; 12. St Apollinaris’; 13. Our Lady on the Lawn; 14. St Charlemagne’s (Karlov). Photo: Zoë Opačić

Fig. 3. Prague, from Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik, Nuremberg, 1493. The earliest view of the Slavonic Monastery is on the far right; the unfinished cathedral can be seen on the upper left. Photo: Zoë Opačić

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 109

09/07/2021 09:45

The ‘Tabernacles’ War’ II, c.1400: New Light on the Competition between Icons and Relics in Late Medieval Rome Claudia Bolgia

T

h e d i s c ov e ry, i n t h e A rc h i v i o d i S tat o d i Ro m a , of the full text of a document from 1400, hitherto known only through a short unlocated excerpt, invites a revision of our current understanding of the competition between icons, and between icons and relics, which played an important part not only in the artistic but also in the socio-political dynamics of late-medieval Italy. An interdisciplinary approach is crucial to engage with the issues at stake. As Paul Binski’s research has always been characterized by such an approach (including a special attention to the altar and its surroundings, as well as Gothic ciboria), this small offering is presented in humble tribute to his inspiring scholarship.1 The study of the competition between images in late-medieval Italy is much indebted to the work of Hans Belting, Michele Bacci and Gerhard Wolf.2 In his overview of the state of research on the role of icons in medieval Rome, Wolf precisely identified the main obstacle to progress in this field as a lack of collaboration between disciplines, especially that between history and art history.3 Indeed, as he showed, even such an important collection as Roma medievale, edited by André Vauchez in 2001, is still traditionally arranged in discrete historical and art historical chapters, while icons find no place in any of them.4 We should add that subsequent publications, even those entirely dedicated to icons, such as the exhibition catalogue Tavole miracolose and the associated Corpus, have contributed little to the progress of research, being primarily focused on style, dating, and iconographical types, and have thus missed the opportunity to address issues of function and display, and 1 2

3 4

In the context of this contribution, P. Binski, ‘Statues, Retables and Ciboria: The English Gothic Altarpiece in Context, before 1350’, in The Altar and its Environment, 1150–1400, ed. J. E. A. Kroesen and V. M. Schmidt, Turnhout, 2009, pp. 31–46. H. Belting, Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, Munich, 1990: in English as Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago, 1994); G. Wolf, Salus Populi Romani. Die Geschichte römischer Kultbilder im Mittelalter, Weinheim, 1990; idem, ‘Icons and Sites: Cult Images of the Virgin in Mediaeval Rome’, in Images of the Mother of God, ed. M. Vassilaki, Aldershot, 2005, pp. 23–49. For the attribution of icons to St Luke, which played an important part in primacy claims, see M. Bacci, Il pennello dell’Evangelista. Storia delle immagini sacre attribuite a San Luca, Pisa, 1998. G. Wolf, ‘Per uno studio delle immagini devozionali a Roma tra Medioevo e Rinascimento’, Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria, 132, (2010), pp. 109–32. Roma medievale, ed. A. Vauchez, Rome, 2001.

[ 110]

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 110

09/07/2021 09:45

ch apt er 8   |  t he ‘tab er nac l es’ war ’ i i , c .1 40 0   |   111

to explore the actual role of images and the art ‘surrounding’ them within their sociopolitical contexts.5 In a recent publication, I adopted the metaphor of ‘tabernacles’ war’ to introduce some overlooked aspects in the discussion on the use of images in Trecento Rome.6 First, my study showed that relics were just as important as icons in the competition between different powers and socio-political groups. In other words, relics could be used exactly in the same way as images in this period, and indeed, through anthropomorphic reliquaries, they actually turned into icon-equivalents with analogous intercessory as well as representative power. By representative power I mean that they represented (or, better still, embodied) different authorities and identities, namely the papal and the civic identity. The latter is far too often neglected for medieval Rome given the dominant patronage of the pope and members of the Curia. Trecento Rome, however, is different as the papal transfer to Avignon determined a significant shift in patronage and agency – and thus, in the function and use of art – at a time of major political, social, juridical, and cultural changes.7 Secondly, I hope to have demonstrated convincingly that Gothic monumental tabernacles played a fundamental role as vehicles for the effective enactment of competitions between icons, and between icons and relics, contributing to their rapidly changing fortunes in the course of the ‘long’ Trecento. Indeed, it was precisely through the commissioning of monumental marble ciboria with an upper receptacle for either images or relics that the role of icons and relics, including their embodiment of differing powers, was visually expressed. The explanation as to why this simple, perhaps even trivial, point has been overlooked in previous scholarship is that all tabernacles (with a single exception: fig. 1) were dismantled, primarily during the Counter-Reformation. The reconstruction of the original appearance of the tabernacle of the Madonna in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, including the finding of many dispersed fragments, has formed the basis for further research on its patron and a broader contextualization of his patronage, leading in turn to a reassessment of some neglected episodes of the history of Trecento Rome.8 In this essay, I reconstruct a further episode of the history of the ‘tabernacles’ war’, attempting to understand developments, as well as changing attitudes, at the turn of the fifteenth century. The ‘tabernacles’ war’ I (c.1367–77) witnessed the opposition of the Madonna Advocata icon of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, the representative of the new Popular 5 6 7

8

Tavole miracolose: le icone medievali di Roma e del Lazio del Fondo Edifici di Culto (exhib. catalogue, Rome, Palazzo Venezia 13 Nov– 15 Dec 2012), ed. G. Leone, Rome, 2012; G. Leone, Icone di Roma e del Lazio, 2 vols, Rome, 2012. C. Bolgia, ‘The “Tabernacles’ War”, c. 1367–77: Civic versus Papal Authority in Popular-Regime Rome’, in Art and Experience in Trecento Italy, ed. H. Flora and S. Wilkins, Turnhout, 2018, pp. 171–88. Underpinning my forthcoming monograph The Long Trecento: Rome without the Popes, c. 1308–1420, for which I gratefully acknowledge support of a Samuel H. Kress Senior Research Fellowship at CASVA, Washington DC (2016–17), a Charles Montgomery Gray Fellowship at the Newberry Library, Chicago (2016–17), and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2017–18). C. Bolgia, ‘The Felici Icon Tabernacle (1372) at S. Maria in Aracoeli, Reconstructed: Lay Patronage, Sculpture, and Marian Devotion in Trecento Rome’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 68, 2005, pp. 27–72. I introduced icon tabernacles, highlighting the need for an integrated study with relic tabernacles, in C. Bolgia, ‘Icons “in the Air”: New Settings for the Sacred in Medieval Rome’, in Architecture and Pilgrimage, 1000–1500: Southern Europe and Beyond, ed. P. Davies, D. Howard and W. Pullan, Farnham, 2013, pp. 114–42 (Proceedings of the 2005 Conference). See also Wolf, Salus, pp. 223–7; M. Gianandrea, ‘Le lastre gotiche nel chiostro dell’ex convento dei Santi Bonifacio e Alessio all’Aventino: un’ipotesi per il perduto ciborio dell’immagine mariana e una riflessione sui cibori per icona nel tardo Medioevo romano’, Studi Romani, 57, 2009, pp. 164–81. On medieval Roman relic ciboria, P.C. Claussen, ‘Il tipo romano del ciborio con reliquie: questioni aperte sulla genesi e la funzione’, Mededelingen van het Nederlands Instituut te Rome (Historical Studies), 59, 2000, pp. 229–49.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 111

09/07/2021 09:45

112 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

Regime, to the relics of saints Peter and Paul as used by Pope Urban V (1362–70). He returned to Rome in October 1367, firmly determined, after a papal absence of over sixty years, permanently to re-establish the papal see in the Eternal City. His plan was ultimately short-lived and he moved back to Avignon in April 1370. In March 1368, when he was utterly determined to remain, he commissioned a majestic Gothic tabernacle for the high altar of St John Lateran, the cathedral of Rome, to house in its upper chamber, the relics of Peter and Paul, the patron saints of the Roman Church. 9 These were to be preserved in two precious half-length statue-like reliquaries, simultaneously commissioned from the renowned Sienese goldsmith Giovanni di Bartolo.10 Despite several restorations, the Lateran tabernacle survives in its original location and still performs its original function, namely to give unprecedented visibility to the remains of the apostles. The nineteenthcentury reliquaries currently on display replace the fourteenth-century originals, lost in 1799 but well-known through paintings and engravings (fig. 2). To dispel the Romans’ fear that the relics of the apostles had been lost in the fire of 1361, Urban V ‘rediscovered’ them in the Sancta Sanctorum and officially sanctioned their authenticity through a public display in March 1368.11 The double commission of reliquaries and tabernacle swiftly followed. The promotion of the cult of Peter and Paul was clearly intended to re-launch the Lateran as the re-established see of the Papacy and caput of Christendom. While the precious bust-reliquaries were designed to embody their sacred content, visually and physically expressing the power of the apostles, the tabernacle was, in turn, conceived to both protect and display the reliquaries, providing unparalleled centrality over the high altar. As the liturgical and devotional focus of the cathedral of Rome, the tabernacle was intended to play a pivotal part in repositioning the Lateran at the hearth of Western Christendom, with the Pope as its true leader. The sculptural programme reinforced the message of the centrality of Rome and its cathedral within the Christian Church. The relics of Peter and Paul were enshrined in the new reliquaries and publicly translated to the tabernacle on 16 April 1370, the day Urban V left Rome. It was almost as if they were installed to ‘lead’ the Lateran visually on his behalf.12 The tabernacle was only completed during the pontificate of his successor Gregory XI (1370–77).13 In January 1372 Gregory officially communicated his decision to return the papal see permanently to Rome and issued a bull proclaiming the primacy of the Lateran, praecipuam sedem nostram, over all other churches urbis et orbis, and invoking the outrage of the

9 10

11 12 13

A. Monferini, ‘Il ciborio lateranense e Giovanni di Stefano’, Commentari, 13, 1962, pp. 182–212; Bolgia, ‘“Tabernacles’ War”’, pp. 171–88. D. Mondini, ‘Reliquie incarnate. Le “sacre teste” di Pietro e Paolo a S. Giovanni in Laterano a Roma’, in Del visibile credere: pellegrinaggi, santuari, miracoli, reliquie, ed. by D. Scotto (Florence, 2011), pp. 265–96, with bibliography. On this type of reliquary, commonly termed ‘body-part reliquary’ or ‘redende Reliquiarie’ (but the terminology is inadequate), see the issue of Gesta (36, 1997) dedicated to the subject, and C. Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400-circa 1204, University Park, 2012, pp. 117–33. For their role behind the creation of half-length ‘portraits’ of living popes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see C. Bolgia, ‘In the Footsteps of St Peter: New Light on the Half-Length Images of Benedict XII by Paolo da Siena and Boniface VIII by Arnolfo di Cambio in Old St Peter’s’, in Pope Benedict XII (1334–1342): The Guardian of Orthodoxy, ed. I. Bueno, Amsterdam, 2018, pp. 131–65. Bolgia, ‘“Tabernacles’ War”’, pp. 181–3. Such an embodiment of presence is confirmed by inscriptions on similar reliquaries, for instance the lost head-reliquary of St Martin, reading ‘this head, like God, is judge and witness’, cited by Hahn, Strange Beauty, pp. 117–19. Bolgia, ‘“Tabernacles’ War”’, p. 183.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 112

09/07/2021 09:45

ch apt er 8   |  t he ‘taber nac l es’ war ’ i i , c .1 40 0   |   113

Lord and his apostles, Peter and Paul, should anyone contest such primacy.14 Francesco Millini, a canon of the Lateran, had the document, together with its bulla (the round lead seal with the Pope’s name and heads of Peter and Paul), incised in Gothic characters on a monumental marble slab and set on public display, a significant example of scrittura esposta, a powerful and efficient way of communicating official messages at this time.15 This was the clearest possible indication of Gregory’s determination to complete Urban V’s plan to re-establish the primacy of the Roman see. The year 1372 saw the construction of another marble tabernacle (fig. 3). This was erected to house and afford greater visibility to the eleventh-century icon of the Madonna Advocata in the Franciscan church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli (fig. 4) on the Capitoline Hill.16 The inscription running along the upper border of the surviving screen with the image of the donor in prayer (which originally served as the basement of the upper receptacle for the icon) records that ‘Francesco Felici ordered this work to be made in honour of the Glorious Virgin Mary in the year of the Lord 1372’. The tabernacle, remarkably similar in type, design and style to the Lateran one, was most probably commissioned from the same architect and sculptor in charge of the Lateran commission, the Sienese Giovanni di Stefano.17 The Aracoeli icon does not appear to have played any significant role in Rome until the mid-Trecento, the period of most prolonged papal absence. The earliest reference to it has as protagonist none other than Cola di Rienzo, a Roman of modest origins who, having overthrown the rule of the barons, established the buono stato, a government funded on peace, justice and care for the people.18 Following the battle against the Colonna at Porta S. Lorenzo in November 1347, Cola divested himself of his arma, symbols of his power as tribune of Rome, and offered them to the Aracoeli icon. The episode is recorded in two different sources, a letter of August 1350 from Cola himself to the archbishop of Prague, and a passage in the vernacular Cronica of the anonymous writer known as the Anonimo Romano, datable to the 1350s. While Cola states that he laid down the tribune’s silver crown, the iron sceptre, the globe of justice and all the tribune’s regalia on the altar of the Virgin Mary in a grand public ceremony at the Aracoeli, before the clergy and people of Rome and to the weeping and great astonishment of his fellow-citizens, the Anonimo Romano explicitly records the icon in his account: ‘and there [Santa Maria in Aracoeli] he handed over the iron sceptre and the crown of olive branches to the Virgin Mary. Before that venerable image (venerabile maine) he hung the rod and crown in the house of the friars minors.19 Since then he carried neither the rod, nor the crown, nor the gonfalone, above his head’.20 14 Super Universas Orbis Ecclesias (Avignon, 23 January 1372). Full text in Collectionis Bullarum Sacrosanctae Basilicae Vaticanae, 3 vols, Rome, 1747–52, vol. 2, pp. 20–21. 15 Bolgia, ‘“Tabernacles’ War”’, p. 185, and fig. 11. On ‘exhibited writing’ see, amongst others, A. Petrucci, ‘Potere, spazi urbani, scritture esposte: proposte ed esempi’, in Culture et idéologie dans la genèse de l’état moderne, Rome, 1985, pp. 85–97. 16 Bolgia, ‘Felici Icon Tabernacle’, passim. 17 Ibid., pp. 54–9. 18 Wolf, Salus, p. 229. On Cola di Rienzo, see notably, R. Musto, Apocalypse in Rome. Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age, Berkeley CA, 2003; A. Modigliani and A. Rehberg, Cola di Rienzo e il Comune di Roma, 2 vols, Rome, 2004. 19 K. Burdach and P. Piur, Briefwechsel des Cola di Rienzo, 5 vols, Berlin, 1912–29, vol. 3, p. 253. 20 Anonimo Romano, Cronica, ed. G. Porta, Milan, 1979, pp. 202–03.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 113

09/07/2021 09:45

114 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

Following this episode, the icon became the new palladium of the city, credited with ending the plague of 1348, while the monumental stairway still leading to the church today was built as a thanksgiving to the image for the miracle.21 As the custodian of the symbols of the tribunate, the Aracoeli icon became associated with the ‘good government’, albeit short-lived, established by Cola di Rienzo. What is most interesting is that this association was preserved when the tabernacle was erected in 1372: the symbols of Cola’s popular regime were indeed transferred to the new monument. They were still there in 1444, when the macellarius (cattle-raiser) Giuliano di Coluccio Marcuzi requested to be buried at the Aracoeli in the burial place before the image of the Virgin ‘in which place are the arma said to have belonged to the late Nicola, tribune of the city.’22 The transfer and prominent display of Cola di Rienzo’s arma in the icon tabernacle commissioned by Felici indicate that the latter was a sympathizer of Cola di Rienzo’s regime. Research on the identity and professional activity of Felici not only confirms this hypothesis but also reveals that he was a supporter of the new Popular Regime ruling Rome since 1358/59.23 In 1363 this regime promoted the revision of the civic statutes of Rome, and appointed Felici as one of the notaries in charge of reviewing, approving and promulgating them. It is significant that these statutes drew considerably on Cola di Rienzo’s legislation. Since its inception, the regime had gained in power and autonomy, and was hostile to any external interference in its rule, whether by emperor, king, papal vicar or indeed the pope himself. During his short-lived return to the city, Urban V had not only ‘interfered’ considerably, by imposing modifications to the statutes and through institutional reform, but also attempted to suppress the regime itself, albeit unsuccessfully.24 The news that Gregory XI intended to re-establish the papal seat in Rome represented a renewed and even more serious threat to the very existence of the regime. Felici’s commission of a majestic tabernacle to house the icon associated with Cola’s first popular regime – which may at first sight appear surprising – thus becomes more explicable, as does the similarity of the monument to that commissioned by the popes for the Lateran. The new Aracoeli tabernacle, significantly located in the ‘lay’ part of the church, to the west of the choir precinct, was designed to promote the cult of an icon that had become the embodiment of civic-religious identity, in opposition to the papal attempt to rekindle the cult of saints that embodied papal-religious identity. The two tabernacles were thus making competing claims of authority and leadership over the city. The increase in popularity of the Aracoeli icon was immediate. A description of the Lateran basilica and few other Roman churches (including the Aracoeli) from the 1370s contains the first attribution to St Luke (ymago quam depixit sanctus Lucas), together with the claim that the image ended the plague of the time of Gregory the Great in 590 (a miracle until then ascribed to the icon of Santa Maria Maggiore).25 We learn from later 21 Bolgia, ‘“Tabernacles’ War”’, pp. 171–2, esp. n. 1. 22 Ospedale del Santissimo Salvatore, Reg. 374, f. 174r, Bolgia, ‘Felici Icon Tabernacle’, p. 69. 23 Bolgia, Reclaiming the Roman Capitol: Santa Maria in Aracoeli from the Altar of Augustus to the Franciscans, c. 500–1450, London, 2017, pp. 350–60. On this regime, see amongst others, J-C. Maire Vigueur, L’altra Roma. Una storia dei Romani all’epoca dei Comuni, Turin, 2011, pp. 304–11. 24 Bolgia, Reclaiming the Roman Capitol, pp. 373–8. 25 Description published in P. Lauer, Le palais de Latran: étude historique et archéologique, Paris, 1911, pp. 408–9, at 409.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 114

09/07/2021 09:45

chapt er 8   |  t he ‘taber nac l es’ war ’ i i , c .1 40 0   |   115

sources that this information came from a marble tabula set up near the shrine to recount the icon’s deeds.26 Given the date of this first association with the evangelist, there is little doubt that the marble plaque was contemporary with the erection of the tabernacle, and part of the icon’s promotional programme. Although this first attribution to St Luke has been noticed by scholars, my reconstruction of the tabernacle and its implications is more recent, and clarifies the reasons for the claim.27 We can now therefore shed additional light on the history of attribution of Roman icons to St Luke, which should be framed in the broader context of tabernacle-installations and related cult-promotion programmes. Significantly, in a slightly later manuscript, the Memoriale de Mirabilibus et Indulgentiis quae in Urbe Romana existunt (c.1382–1390s), the attribution to the evangelist is combined with a specific reference to the new setting of the icon in the tabernacle, a reference very rare in this type of source: ‘it is honourably placed in a new ciborium entirely made of the whitest sculpted marbles at the entrance of the choir’.28 The success of the Aracoeli icon was, nevertheless, short-lived and soon eclipsed by the Marian image of Santa Maria del Popolo (fig. 5), just outside Porta Flaminia. Writing between 1447 and 1452 the English friar John Capgrave made a clear claim of greater venerability: ‘there are other portraits [of the Virgin] in Rome painted by St Luke, but this is much venerated’.29 Offering a detailed description of the image, ‘the fayrest iewel’ in the church, he underlined that it attracted many visitors, even when it was not on display. When displayed, it attracted even larger crowds.30 Nikolaus Muffel, in Rome in 1452 as a member of Emperor Frederick III’s entourage, presented the icon of Santa Maria del Popolo as ‘a venerated image of our Lady painted by St Luke, which must resemble Her’, and recorded the role of the icon in the history of the church. 31 Of the Aracoeli image, instead, he noted laconically (if not dismissively) that ‘it has a rather small face’.32 By the second half of the fifteenth century and well before Sixtus IV’s reconstruction of the church in 1472, the icon of Santa Maria del Popolo had supplanted the Aracoeli Madonna as palladium of the city, and had become the protagonist of grand processions, including that instigated in 1470 by Pope Paul II to ward off the imminent Turkish invasion.33 Whilst scholars have generally noted the success of the Madonna del Popolo in the fifteenth century, none have so far discussed the underlying motivations.34 Why, then, amongst the many icons of Rome, did this icon rise to such popularity? What spiritual and/ or political forces lay behind it? When, by whom, and through which artistic and visual channel (if any) was the cult of this image promoted? 26 Bolgia, Reclaiming the Roman Capitol, p. 363. For the text of the inscription, see Bolgia, ‘Felici Icon Tabernacle’, p. 70. 27 Wolf, Salus, p. 229; Bacci, Pennello, p. 265; Bolgia, ‘Felici Icon Tabernacle’, pp. 27–72. 28 A new edition of the Memoriale by M. Campanelli (based on the Montserrat manuscript) is available through the website Linking Evidence. A Digital Approach to Medieval and Renaissance Rome c. 1140–1430 (http://www.linkingevidence.it/memoriale-demirabilibus-et-indulgentiis-que-urbe-romana-existunt/text (accessed 01 October 2019) 29 J. Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrimes. A Description of Rome, circa 1450, ed. C. A. Mills, London, 1911, pp. 164–5. On this icon, see D. Sgherri, ‘La Madonna Odighitria di Santa Maria del Popolo’, in S. Romano, La Pittura medievale a Roma, 312–1431. Apogeo e fine del medioevo, 1288–1431, Milan, 2017, pp. 185–7. I am grateful to Serena Romano for lending me the image used here as fig. 6. 30 Ibid., p. 165. 31 N. Muffel, Descrizione della città di Roma nel 1452. Delle indulgenze e dei luoghi sacri di Roma (Der ablas und die heiligen stet zu Rom), ed. G. Wiedmann, Bologna, 1999, pp. 98–9. 32 Ibid., pp. 96–7. 33 S. Infessura, Diario della Città di Roma, ed. O. Tommasini, Rome, 1890, p. 72. 34 Wolf, ‘Per uno studio’, pp. 124–5; Bacci, Pennello, pp. 271–2.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 115

09/07/2021 09:45

116 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

The information according to which, in 1400, Pope Boniface IX granted an indulgence to all those who contributed to the construction of a tabernacle for the image, is particularly interesting in this context.35 This information is said to come from an Index of documents of Santa Maria del Popolo compiled in 1770 by the Augustinian Tommaso Verani.36 Scholars have subsequently suggested that a marble gable with a Coronation of the Virgin, datable on stylistic grounds to around 1400 and now immured above the door of the corridor leading to the sacristy (fig. 6), may have been part of that tabernacle.37 However, neither the original document nor Verani’s Index has survived, rendering it impossible to verify the information concerning the tabernacle, let alone address our questions. Whilst research in the Archivio Generale degli Agostiniani (where the Index was supposedly preserved, according to Bentivoglio and Valtieri) proved fruitless, investigation in the Archivio di Stato in Rome has led to the discovery of an anonymous nineteenth-century transcription of another work by Verani, not only recording the event but also including the full text of the 1400 document.38 This is especially important in confirming the association of an icon tabernacle with Boniface IX, whilst providing a wealth of detail on the background to its construction. The document in question, dated 30 August 1400, reports that Boniface IX had learnt that the nobiles and populares of the Campo Marzio district, together with a number of Christifideles, intended to erect a venerable and expensive marble tabernacle to house honourably the miracle-working image of the Virgin and restore the ruinous church. Eager to support them in such a laudable project, and ‘in order for such a tabernacle to be realized’, the Pope granted the same indulgence as that of the Porziuncola to all those who were to visit the church annually on the feast of the Virgin’s Nativity (8 September: the grant was thus timely) and to those who contributed to the building of the tabernacle and restoration of the church. The first and most significant detail is the reference to the nobiles et populares of the district as the promoters of the initiative.39 Both opposed to papal power, the two parties of the nobiles and the populares had alternated in their rule over Rome until the end of June 1398, when they resigned the plenum dominium into the hands of Boniface IX.40 The second significant detail is the Pope’s intention to support this initiative by granting a special plenary indulgence, equal to the Perdono of Assisi, signifying a complete remission of sins committed up to that date. Significantly, the bull also makes reference to the history of Santa Maria del Popolo, in particular, to its foundation during the pontificate of Paschal II (1099–1118), whilst underlining the importance of the icon for the Roman people, freed through its intercession from many pestilences and calamities. 35 E. Bentivoglio and S. Valtieri, Santa Maria del Popolo. Con un’appendice di documenti inediti sulla chiesa e su Roma, Rome, 1976, p. 195. 36 Ibid. 37 C. Strinati, ‘La scultura’, in Umanesimo e primo Rinascimento a S. Maria del Popolo, ed. R. Cannatà, A. Cavallaro and C. Strinati, Rome, 1981, pp. 29–51 (at p. 31); E. Parlato, ‘La scultura dal Tardo Medioevo alla fine del Cinquecento’, in Santa Maria del Popolo. Storia e restauri, ed. I. Miarelli Mariani and M. Richiello, 2 vols, Rome, 2009, vol. 1, pp. 147–77 (at pp. 152–3). 38 Rome, Archivio di Stato, Fondo Corporazioni Religiose, Sezione Conventi Soppressi, Agostiniani di Santa Maria del Popolo, busta 2: Notizie degli Archivi della Procura Generale di Roma di S. Maria del Popolo e degli Agostiniani in Velletri, 1200–1667, raccolte da Fra’ Tommaso Verani, 1776 (copy of 1880), ff. 80v–81v. For the full text of the document and preliminary discussion, C. Bolgia, ‘Strategie di riaffermazione dell’autorità papale: Bonifacio IX e il tabernacolo per l’icona di Santa Maria del Popolo’, in La Linea d’ombra. Roma 1378–1417, ed. S. Romano and W. Angelelli, Rome, 2019, pp. 311–40. 39 Ibid. 40 A. Esch, ‘Bonifacio IX’, in Enciclopedia dei Papi, 2 vols, Rome, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 570–80.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 116

09/07/2021 09:45

chapt er 8   |  t he ‘tab er nac l es’ war ’ i i , c .1 40 0   |   117

Here a number of clues lead us to understand why Boniface IX intended to promote the cult of this specific icon. According to a legend formerly displayed ‘on a parchment attached to a wooden plaque near the high altar’, Santa Maria del Popolo owed its name to the fact that it had been built by the Roman people in honour of the Virgin.41 It stood over the place where a tree inhabited by the demons guarding the body of the emperor Nero, who lay beneath it, had once grown. As the demons slaughtered all who passed through the nearby Porta Flaminia, the legend continues, Paschal II asked the Roman people to fast, and prayed God and the Virgin to free the Romans from such terrible persecution. Mary herself appeared to Paschal in a vision, instructing him to uproot the tree and build a church there in Her honour. Then, followed by a procession of people and clergy, Paschal uprooted the tree and installed an altar propriis manibus, endowing it with indulgences and relics.42 From the same account we learn that the icon – painted by St Luke – was subsequently brought to the church by Pope Gregory IX ‘in reverence to the Glorious Virgin, because of the said miracle [that of the time of Paschal II] offered to the Roman people, desirous that the same people should not appear ungrateful for such a great gift, and that the same people should address the Virgin with intense devotion’.43 This legend is also known from a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century version of the Liber Indulgentiarum, and, with some variants, from the accounts of Muffel, Capgrave, and William Brewyn (writing around 1470), all of whom probably read it themselves on the tabula near the altar.44 In the accounts of all these visitors the construction of the church by the people immediately follows Paschal’s installation of the altar, making the connection between the Pope’s action and the people’s enterprise even clearer. Boniface’s bull does not report the legend in full and, in an exceedingly long and perhaps deliberately convoluted sentence, operates a sort of conflation between the actual Virgin Mary who interceded for the eradication of demonic presences at the time of Paschal and the ‘image of the said Virgin preserved in the church and most worthy of the utmost veneration, through whose intercession it is said that the Roman people had been freed from many pestilences and calamities’. What is shared by this bull and the legend in all its minor fifteenth-century variants is a particular attention to the Roman people. In the legend, it is they who build the church; in the bull, it is they who intend to restore the church and construct a venerable and expensive marble tabernacle. In both cases the pope is instrumental in the realization of their aims. We may now understand why the promotion of the Madonna del Popolo was particularly appropriate for Boniface IX, whose pontificate began at a time of unrest, under attack from the two Roman parties, and who faced huge difficulties in suppressing the Libero Comune of Rome in 1398.45 Unsurprisingly, he is primarily known as a political sovereign, whose activity after 1398 was principally directed towards the re-establishment of the authority 41 The earliest known version of the legend can be dated between 1305–14 (when the granting of indulgences is recorded) and 1426, when its text was transcribed from a tabula lignea quadrata ac carta pergamenata iuxta altare maius by the canon and notary Sigfrido Costede. This 1426 document survives in an unpublished eighteenth-century transcript in Rome, Archivio Generale degli Agostiniani, Libro F, ff. 14A-14D (modern numbering), from which my citation comes. 42 Ibid., f. 14Bv. 43 Ibid., f. 14Bv (italics mine). 44 Bolgia, ‘Strategie di riaffermazione’, pp. 311–40. 45 A. Esch, Bonifaz IX. und der Kirchenstaat, Tübingen, 1969.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 117

09/07/2021 09:45

118 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

of the Roman Church and of himself as the ruler of Rome. Unlike the Aracoeli icon, the Madonna del Popolo was shorn of any civic connotation in terms of associations with popular governments; instead, its history was entirely papal, founded not only on the pope as intercessor for the Romans, but also on his collaboration with them (the pope installed the altar, the Romans built the church). The bull of 1400 was issued to support a somewhat analogous collaboration. The choice of the Madonna del Popolo had the advantage of focusing on the Campo Marzio, thus diverting the people’s devotion away from the Capitol, the traditional seat of Roman Communal governments. Furthermore, many similarities can be identified between the pontificates of Paschal II and Boniface IX: both began with a schism; both found Rome destabilized by violence and with limited financial resources; both had to re-establish control over the city after many years of absence; both initiated a policy of reconstruction of buildings and public monuments in an attempt to gain consensus from the citizens.46 The legend of Santa Maria del Popolo fits well into this context. Paschal secured the Virgin’s intercession to free the Romans from devilish presences and the related memory of a nefarious ruler such as Nero, whilst installing an altar around which the Romans built their church. Some three centuries later – according to the entirely papal narrative of a papal bull – those Romans who had fought until very recently against Boniface IX requested his support to promote the cult of an icon with such a special history of Romano-papal collaboration. In the case of Santa Maria del Popolo, it is difficult to discuss the artistic ‘vehicle’ of such promotion, namely the tabernacle which was actually built, since all that survives is a marble gable (fig. 6). Its original pertinence to the tabernacle is convincing, not only on formal and stylistic grounds (parallels have been made with the work of Florentine artists active in Rome at the turn of the century), but also iconographically – a Coronation being particularly appropriate to crown a monument intended to promote a Marian icon.47 In this case, the relationship between the shrine and the image – container and content – must have been very different from that of the Aracoeli, as the gable is smaller and the icon is larger. This does not mean that the tabernacle differed in overall structure from the other two we have discussed, and the difference in size can be easily explained by the fact that Santa Maria del Popolo was a far smaller church than the Lateran and the Aracoeli: some sources even call it ‘chapel’.48 This type of tabernacle had been particularly successful in Rome and its area of influence at least from the end of the twelfth century, as discussed elsewhere.49 More remains to be added to this picture, including a number of non-Roman examples, if we wish to achieve a better understanding of the use of images and relics, and the artistic patronage surrounding them, in the late medieval period. It seems clear, nevertheless, that around 1400 Boniface IX sponsored the construction of the tabernacle for the icon of Santa Maria del Popolo as part of his policy of re-establishing papal authority over the City and presenting himself as the supporter of the Roman people. 46 On Paschal II see G. M. Cantarella, ‘Pasquale II’, in Enciclopedia dei Papi, vol. 2, pp. 228–35, and idem, ‘Pasquale II, papa’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (vol. 81), Rome, 2014, pp. 558–64. On Boniface IX see Esch, Bonifaz IX., and idem, ‘Bonifacio IX’, pp. 570–80. 47 Strinati, ‘Scultura’, p. 31; Parlato, ‘Scultura’, pp. 152–3. 48 Muffel, Descrizione, p. 98. 49 Bolgia, ‘Icons’, pp. 114–42.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 118

09/07/2021 09:45

ch apt er 8   |  t he ‘taber nac l es’ war ’ i i , c .1 40 0   |   119

The Coronation of Santa Maria del Popolo differs from other fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Coronations of this type (i.e. those with crossed hands on the Virgin’s chest) for the rather authoritative – not humble – position of Mary. Instead of bending her head to receive the crown, she keeps her neck, and overall head, straight. It is impossible to say whether this was the choice of the sculptor, in order better to align Mary’s head to the triangular tympanum, or the result of discussion between the artist and a member of the papal entourage, who may have been charged with supervising the appropriate use of income from indulgences. It is in any event clear that the Virgin of this Coronation (who, as in every Coronation, is not only bride and mother but also and above all Ecclesia, and thus a personification of the Church) strongly conveys the idea of an authoritative and leading Roman Church which Boniface IX was determined to re-establish.

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 119

09/07/2021 09:45

120 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

Fig. 1. Rome, St John Lateran, high altar, tabernacle for the relics of saints Peter and Paul. Giovanni di Stefano and workshop, c.1368–72. Photo: Alinari Archives

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 120

09/07/2021 09:45

ch apt er 8   |  t he ‘taber nac l es’ war ’ i i , c .1 40 0   |   121

Fig. 2. Lost reliquaries of Saints Peter and Paul at St John Lateran. Giovanni Di Bartolo, 1368–70 (from J.-B. Seroux d’Agincourt, L’Histoire de l’Art, 1823, sculpture, plate XXXVII)

Fig. 3. Reconstruction drawing of the dismembered icon tabernacle at S. Maria in Aracoeli. Giovanni di Stefano and workshop, 1372 (from Bolgia 2005)

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 121

09/07/2021 09:45

122 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

Fig. 4. Rome, Santa Maria in Aracoeli, high altar, Madonna Advocata icon. Tempera and gold leaf on beech panel (32 × 20 in.), late eleventh century (photo: Istituto Superiore per il Restauro by permission of the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della Città di Roma – MiBACT)

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 122

09/07/2021 09:45

ch apt er 8   |  t he ‘taber nac l es’ war ’ i i , c .1 40 0   |   123

Fig. 5. Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo, high altar, icon of the Madonna del Popolo. Tempera and gold leaf on walnut panel (44.5 × 37 in.), late thirteenth century (before the 2017–18 cleaning campaign) (Photo: Archivio “La pittura medievale a Roma, 312-1431. Corpus e Atlante”, courtesy of Serena Romano)

Fig. 6. Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo, corridor leading to the sacristy, marble gable, Coronation of the Virgin, c.1400 (photo: Vasari, Rome)

7132 05-08 Binski new size v6.indd 123

09/07/2021 09:45

Epigraphic One-Upmanship: Remarks about Text-Image Relationship in Fifteenth Century Monumental Sculpture Jean-Marie Guillouët

O

v e r t h e pa s t t h i rt y y e a r s , there has been a remarkable increase in the number of studies on the relationship between texts and images. With regard to the middle ages, this question has already been the subject of numerous and important works by European researchers. These studies have enriched our knowledge of medieval doctrines of the image and allow us to get a more precise vision of the role and place of the written word in medieval society. Three buildings from the second half of the fifteenth century illustrate the role of the monumental presence of the written word in the general figurative economy of the building. In the western portal of the cathedral of St Peter of Saintes (Charente-Maritime), in the five entrances of the cathedral St Peter of Nantes (Loire-Atlantique) and in the portal of the second northern bay of the nave of the collegiate church of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand in Poitiers (Vienne), one can find engraved and/or sculpted inscriptions that have been designed in close relationship with the sculpted decoration. But, the comparison of the epigraphic devices of these portals reveals not only similarities. A careful look shows how, by many aspects of their formulations, their dispositions or by their very nature, these inscriptions differ. And these differences make it possible to understand better the place assigned to monumental writing and its relationship with figurative sculpture at the end of middle ages. In Nantes cathedral (fig. 1), 154 scenes sculpted in relief form a long cycle of the Genesis circulating into the base of the façade, by the time one of the largest sculpted programmes of the fifteenth century in France. But more interestingly, each of these scenes was originally accompanied by an inscription in beautiful, engraved Gothic letters, painted in black. Although some of the exterior scenes have been destroyed, most of them are well preserved and still form an exceptional epigraphic ensemble, both in terms of scale or originality.1 To these inscriptions alongside each scene must be added those engraved on the volumina deployed by the seated figures adorning the base of the trumeau of the 1

The missing inscriptions were fortunately noted by Canon Rousteau and were published after his death by Abbé Abel Cahour (A. Cahour, ‘Iconographie et épigraphie de la cathédrale de Nantes par feu l’abbé Rousteau’, in Congrès archéologique de France. Nantes 53e session, Paris, 1886, pp. 207–43). By 1845 however, Baron de Guilhermy had delivered a first series of more accurate transcriptions: F. de Guilhermy, ‘Nantes’, in Annales archéologiques, ed. A. Didron, Paris, 1845, pp. 86–97.

[ 124]

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 124

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 9   |  epi gr aphi c o ne- upmanshi p  |   125

three western portals, in which one must recognize the Church fathers (fig. 2). In St Peter’s cathedral at Saintes, twelve long phylacteries carried by the prophets of the outer arch of the western portal receive inscriptions in low relief (fig. 3). They are in close proximity to other writings since thirty-six large inscriptions in broken tiny Gothic letters identify the sculpted figure of each voussoir. These inscriptions appear between the two edges of the hollowed-out external cord of the archivolts. Finally, at Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand of Poitiers, inscriptions are simply engraved on the semi-circular terraces supporting the figures of the archivolts of the portal that formerly occupied the second bay of the north long wall of the building (fig. 4). The figures of St Peter, St Robert of Molesme, St Martin and St Christopher are now scattered between the Musée Sainte-Croix and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as Paul Williamson has shown fifteen years ago.2 They can be identified by their names in French. The system is completed by other inscriptions, in the phylacteries hold by the figures and where the word EPIKEYA can still be deciphered. These three monuments are all located in the western and Atlantic part of the kingdom, in the so-called ‘France moyenne’ isolated by Henri Focillon and then by Louis Grodecki to highlight its historical and cultural coherence.3 Poitiers has been part of the crown since the last third of the thirteenth century and enjoyed the status of regional capital and royal city. Saintes, after having been the seat of a principality of Aquitaine given to the Black Prince by Edward III in 1362, was taken over by Charles V’s army. From then, it did not cease to belong to the French kingdom which the bishops or the executives of its administration stayed committed to.4 If Nantes served as the capital of the Duchy of Brittany, the city has been culturally shaped by constant exchanges with the nearby royal Loire Valley. The artistic staff of the St Peter’s cathedral construction site and its sponsors were moving incessantly between the Breton capital and Loire city centres such as Tours, in the cultural and political orbit of the king of France.5 In addition, these three building sites are partly contemporary and belong to the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Construction work on the façade of St Peter’s cathedral in Nantes began in mid-April 1434 and continued in the nave until the early years of the sixteenth century. On the basis of information provided by fragmentary archives and archaeological evidences of the building, the construction of the portals area can be placed in the years 1440–1465/70. The dating of the single portal of Saintes cathedral is based on the reconstructed chronology of the building’s campaigns of construction and on the formal analysis of the sculpture and its architectural setting. Markus Schlicht recently proposed to place the development of the portal around 1450/60 rather than around

2 3

4 5

P. Williamson, ‘The Flamboyant Portal of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand at Poitiers’, Sculpture Journal, 5, 2001, pp. 1–6. See also D. Galloy and J.-M. Guillouët, ‘Une nouvelle sculpture du portail nord de l’église collégiale Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand de Poitiers’, Bulletin Monumental, 171–4, 2013, pp. 416–420. Louis Grodecki, however, restricts the limits of this space to the Loire area (L. Grodecki, Le siècle de l’an mil, Paris, 1973, pp. 42–52); see also B. Phalip, ‘L’historien de l’art médiéviste face à la géographie des œuvres’, in L’historien en quête d’espace, ed. J.-L. Fray and C. Pérol, Clermont-Ferrand, 2004, pp. 55–68 (at p. 58); É. Vergnolle, ‘Les débuts de l’art roman dans le royaume Franc’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 170, 2000, pp. 161–94 (at p. 183). Histoire de Saintes, ed. A. Michaud, Toulouse, 1989. On the building of St Peter’s and its protagonists, see: J.-M. Guillouët, Les portails de la cathédrale de Nantes. Un grand programme sculpté et son public, Rennes, 2003.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 125

09/07/2021 09:46

12 6 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

1480 as previously advanced.6 Such a date is supported by the epigraphic analysis of the inscriptions which leads to a date closer to 1450 than 1500. Finally, in Poitiers, we have only few fragments of the portal that adorned the second bay of the northern long wall of the collegiate church of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand until its destruction in April 1873. A mention in a testament of the end of the century provides the name of the patron: Robert Poitevin, doctor of both Charles VII and Louis XI, executor of Agnès Sorel’s will and a prominent figure in the city, who was appointed treasurer of the abbey in 1449 and died in 1474. 7 Among these figures, the presence of Robert de Molesme, patron saint of Robert Poitevin, thus finds a logical explanation. The presence of epigraphic inscriptions is a common feature of these three monuments, and their chronology and geography allow us to relate them to one another. In Saintes and Poitiers, inscriptions with the names identifying the characters have been carved or engraved near the figures they designate. Located immediately outside the image, they have a simple identification function. They compensate for the absence of attributes and aim to avoid any confusion. These cases illustrate an elementary form of peritextual devices limited to a simple function of iconographic identification.8 At Poitiers, the names have been incised at the base of the semi-circular terraces on which the figures of the voussoirs rest. The engraved inscriptions designating St Robert and St Peter in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the inscription designating St Martin and, perhaps, St Catherine in the Musée Sainte-Croix in Poitiers can still be read without much difficulty. On the other hand, no inscription appears under the figure of St Christopher for which the terrace was replaced by the representation of the waves crossed by the saint, but this recognizable image should have presented less difficulty of identification for medieval spectators. The same pattern can be found at the portal of St Peter’s at Saintes. Among the fortyfour figures occupying the four arches, thirty-six are designated by their name appearing in the adjacent archivolts (fig. 3). However, several features distinguish these inscriptions from those of the Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand portal. First, the choice of language: while in Poitiers, the engraved names are in French, the sculpted inscriptions in Saintes are in Latin. Many factors could be mentioned here to explain this difference, such as the nature of the target audiences for which the meaning would have been more accessible. However, although they were written in French, the inscriptions of Poitiers (like those of the basement of St Peter at Nantes), were certainly not directly understandable by any lay person to whom the mediation of a scholar remained necessary. Incidentally, it is clear 6 7

8

With regard to sculpture, see the Markus Schlicht’s proposals: ‘Le portail occidental de la cathédrale de Saintes: architecture et sculpture’, in La cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Saintes, ed. Y. Blomme, Paris, 2012, pp. 127–52. About Robert Poitevin, see R. Favreau, ‘Robert Poitevin, professeur à Paris, médecin des princes, trésorier de Saint-Hilaire-leGrand (v. 1390–1400 à 1474)’, Bulletins de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 6, 1961, pp. 141–51, and, recently, L. Vallière, Répertoire prosopographique des évêques, dignitaires et chanoines de France de 1200 à 1500 – Diocèse de Poitiers, Turnhout, 2008, p. 358 (no. 614). This is the first of the nine categories listed by Christian Heck for short texts present in the image (in illumination and painting for his subject): C. Heck, ‘Un nouveau statut de la parole? L’image légendée entre énoncé, commentaire, et parole émise’, in Qu’est-ce que nommer? L’image légendée entre monde monastique et pensée scolastique, ed. C. Heck, Turnhout, 2010, pp. 7–28. I deliberately leave aside the validity of this ambiguous term titulus, whose use in the field of epigraphy Vincent Debiais has recently and rightly proposed to restrict (V. Debiais, ‘L’écriture dans l’image peinte romane: questions de méthode et perspectives’, Viator Multilingual, 41, 2010, pp. 95–126). In the following pages, it will be taken in its broadest sense and used for ease of writing.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 126

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 9   |  epi gr aphi c o ne- upmanshi p  |   127

that the examination of these different epigraphic situations requires consideration of the socio-historical modalities of medieval mediality to highlight the ‘networks of meaning, presence and exchanges formed by images and oral or written text’.9 The second and main difference between the tituli of Saintes and Poitiers lies in their formal provisions. While the names of the figures of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand were simply engraved in the voussoirs, those of Saintes are made up of letters in small broken Gothic letters, joining the two edges of the hollowed out outer cord of each voussoir (fig. 4). These letters interrupt, at more or less regular intervals, the rhythm created by the alternating orientation of the oak, pear, thistle or vine leaves, here and there enriched by some fruits, snails or birds. With a considerably more plastic and monumental effect than the names simply incised into the portal of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand, the inscriptions of Saintes are entirely detached from the surface of the monument. They constitute true pieces of sculpture that the patrons and/or the artists of the Saintonge enjoyed displaying to underline their virtuoso character. This manifest virtuosity, which is part of the phenomenon of hypertrophy that characterizes the technical regime of artistic and artisanal production of the late middle ages, gives great decorative value to these inscriptions and reinforces their visibility by bringing them out strongly in their midst of the monumental setting.10 A similar insistence on the presence of the written word in the monument is obtained in Nantes, but in this case, by the exaggerated multiplication of inscriptions: multiplication which responds to the scale of the sculpted programme (fig. 5). As noted earlier, each of the sculpted reliefs (originally 154 scenes) in the lower part of the five portals and of the first pillars of the building is accompanied by a long inscription elegantly engraved in lofty Gothic letters enhanced with black paint. The cycle originally used to begin with the Fall of the Rebel Angels (Comme les deables trebuchent de pradis en enfer) and ended at the north side gate with the story of Joseph. Each of these short French texts summarizes, assembles and combines several verses of the Genesis text to form the captions of the adjacent sculpted images.11 Thus, for example, the inscriptions Comme Dieu présete les bestes a Ada en pradis trestre, Comme Noe fait entrer dans son arche avec lui sa femme, ses enfans et puis les bestes or Comme vers la vespre Ysaac s’en va par un champ qui est en Bersabée por Dieu prier et por les estoiles contempler condense respectively the verses of Genesis 2:19–20, Genesis 7:6–16 and Genesis 24:62–3. Placed immediately next to the images, these texts serve primarily as captions, a function that brings them closer to the inscriptions of Poitiers and Saintes. However, they differ in their long and narrative wording, which borrows its formulations from the practices and systems of textual identification of the late middle ages.12 One could find similar formulas in the rubrics of literature in manuscripts. More precisely, the 154 epigraphic texts in Nantes are part of what historians of literature have called ‘descriptive 9

M. Lejbowicz, ‘Review of] Au-delà de l’illustration. Texte et image au Moyen Âge, approches méthodologiques et pratiques, ed. R. Wetzel and F. Flückiger’, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 24, 2009 (http://crm.revues.org/11631) (accessed 01 October 2019). 10 For some considerations about the technicality of Flamboyant architecture, see J-M. Guillouët, Flamboyant Architecture and Medieval Technicality: The Rise of Artistic Consciousness at the End of Middle Ages (ca 1400-ca 1530), Turnhout, Brepols, 2019. 11 Guilhermy, ‘Nantes’, p. 89. 12 In particular, those that have been gradually developed for vernacular literature (G. Hasenohr, Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, Paris, 1990, pp. 227–352).

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 127

09/07/2021 09:46

128 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

rubrics’, a form derived from the titulus.13 Their size, formulation, incipit and epideictic orientation correspond to the most widespread practices for these peritexts, such as the ‘Comme ...’ form that opens each of them.14 Between Poitiers, Saintes and Nantes, there are therefore various forms of monumental inscriptions intended to identify or designate a character or a scene. While restricted to this primary function in Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand at Poitiers and St Peter’s cathedral at Saintes, they seem to call for a more complex interpretation at Nantes, where they borrow their narrative and descriptive forms from contemporary writing practices, in an approach similar to that of the sections of literary texts. We can see now that, through different mechanisms, the Nantes and Saintes devices accentuate the monumental presence of the written word. This ‘epigraphic one-upmanship’ is obtained by insisting on the ornamental qualities of the text or by its multiplication on the building. This visual profusion of the written word has a particular significance, independent of its relationship with the figurative decoration within which it is inserted: it seems to have been one of the symbolic tools available to power in its processes of legitimization.15 With regard to Nantes, the political claims made by the Breton dukes, the first sponsors of a new cathedral worthy of their ambitions, help to explain such a profusion of writing, and back Roger Chartier’s analyses of the social practices of the writing and reading in the processes of building modern forms of the State.16 However, other types of inscriptions are present in these portals. The epigraphic sets of the portals of Saintes, Poitiers and Nantes also include texts engraved or sculpted in relief on banners held by characters. The status of these texts differs from those previously described. I deliberately use the general term banner because two types must be distinguished. St Martin, St Robert of Molesme and St Peter in Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand of Poitiers as well as the prophets of the outer arch of St Peter at Saintes wear phylacteries that are, on one hand, intended to make the word spoken visible and that do not refer to any tangible reality. On the other hand, in the basement of the Nantes trumeau, the Church fathers are leaning over their writing boards, busy writing on rolls of paper or parchment. Therefore, the inscriptions covering the rolls represent here real writings.17 What is the relationship between these specific inscriptions and the rest of the monumental decoration, both the sculpted decoration and the other inscriptions? The case of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand is perhaps both the simplest and the most mysterious. The

13 Keith Busby speaks of ‘descriptive rubric’: K. Busby, ‘Rubrics and the Reception of Romance’, French Studies, 53, 1999, pp. 129– 41 (at p. 134). On these different peritextes and the related bibliography, see H. Braet, ‘L’instruction, la titulus, la rubrique. Observation sur la nature des éléments péritextuels’, in ‘Als Ich Can’: Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers, ed. B. Cardon et al., Paris, 2002, pp. 203–12. 14 As Cedric Edward Pickford noted with regard to the Arthurian prose novel: C. E. Pickford, L’évolution du roman arthurien en prose vers la fin du Moyen Âge, d’après le manuscrit 112 du fonds français de la Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 1960, pp. 163–8. 15 On these questions, see first: J. Goody, Pouvoirs et savoirs de l’écrit, Paris, 2007. R. Chartier, É. Anheim and P. Chastang, ‘Les usages de l’écrit du Moyen Âge aux Temps modernes’, Médiévales, 56 2009 (http://medievales.revues.org/5564) (accessed 01 October 2019). 16 For more recent periods though: R. Chartier, ‘Construction de l’État moderne et formes culturelles’, in Culture et idéologie dans la genèse de l’État moderne, Rome, 1985, pp. 491–503 (especially p. 499). 17 I will not address here the complex question of the filiation between volumen and phylactery in the middle ages or the forms adopted by these different ways of displaying the inscription in the image. On this point see H. Rosenfeld, ‘Schriftband’, Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, 4, 1972, col. 125–6 and Heck, ‘Un nouveau statut de la parole?’, pp. 14–21.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 128

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 9   |  epi gr aphi c o ne- upmanshi p  |   129

phylacteries kept by St Peter, St Robert of Molesme and St Martin bear the inscription EPIKEYA. It is an uncommon theological term, derived from the Greek επιεíκεια (reasonable) which can be translated as ‘equity’ (in the interpretation of a law for example). Epikia has been the subject of many texts of moral theology since question 120 of the second secundae of the Summa Theologica, which discusses whether it can be considered as a virtue and, as such, if it can be part of the virtue of Justice.18 Until Francisco Suárez in the seventeenth century, St Thomas was an authority about the epikia, which was briefly mentioned by Henri of Hesse in the fourteenth century and then, more broadly, by Gerson and Saint Antonine of Florence in the fifteenth century.19 If this notion can find echoes in certain episodes of the lives of the characters represented in the vaults of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand (as well as the Charity of St Martin for instance), the legend of St Robert does not seem to include features that can be directly linked to it.20 The meaning of this inscription was, very likely, obscure to most medieval spectators, even if they spoke Latin. This inscription apparently enriches the network of meanings of the figurative decoration but we cannot narrow down its role in the overall iconographic program. As a complex exegetical project cannot be ruled out, it should be recalled that Poitiers was a cultural capital in the fifteenth century. The cathedral and Saint-Hilaire-leGrand were the main centres of the city’s intellectual activity but cultural life remained partly dependent on Paris and the major university centres such as Orléans and Angers (Robert Poitevin was educated in Montpellier).21 The eminent career of Poitevin, as well as his attendance at university and royal circles, could explain such a choice, but, in the absence of a truly in-depth analysis of local intellectual activity and its actors, one can only speculate here on the nature of these learned inscriptions.22 The texts carved in bas-relief on the phylacteries of the prophets of St  Peter’s at Saintes are easier to understand. Indeed, as Markus Schlicht points out, these inscriptions constitute a creed of the prophets: extracts from the books of the prophets considered since the central middle ages as the prefiguration of the articles of the Symbolum Apostolorum.23 Taking up the observation made in 1929 by Émilien Clénet, the author is able to correct the epigraphic transcriptions and to recognize a coherent cycle in which each prophet, identifiable by the words taken from his book of the sacred text, is put in relation with the apostle to whom the corresponding article of the apostle’s creed is attributed.24 Thus, for example, the inscription of the phylactery carried by Malachi in the third southern

18 On the notion see L. Godefroy, ‘Épikie’, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, ed. J-M. A. Vacant et al., 15 vols in 24, vol. 5.1, cols 358–61. 19 On this issue, see ‘Authors Subsequent to St. Thomas’, in L. J. Riley, The History, Nature and Use of epikeia in Moral Theology, Washington, 1948, pp. 52–67. 20 At least through the different textual traditions, Cistercian and non-Cistercian, compiled by Jean Levèvre: J. Lefèvre, ‘Saint Robert de Molesme in the Monastic Opinion of the 12th Century’, Analecta Bollandiana, 74, 1956, pp. 50–83. 21 Compare Favreau, ‘Robert Poitevin’; L. Moulinier, ‘Les médecins dans le Centre-Ouest au moyen âge (xiiie–xive siècles)’, in Scrivere il Medioevo. Lo spazio, il cibo, la santità. Un libro dedicato ad Odile Redon, ed. B. Laurioux and L. Moulinier-Brogi, Rome, 2001, pp. 405–29. 22 If we cannot find a better explanation in the contemporary intellectual atmosphere of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand, could we not imagine that these Latin inscriptions had also, or initially, a pedantic function of displaying knowledge by their very opacity? 23 Schlicht, ‘Le portail occidental de la cathédrale de Saintes’, p. 140. 24 E. Clénet, ‘Le credo au portail de la cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Saintes’, Recueil de la Commission des arts et monuments historiques de la Charente-Inférieure, 20, 1923–1931, pp. 230–33.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 129

09/07/2021 09:46

13 0  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

group (Deponet D[omi]n[u]s om[ne]s om[s]s iniquitates [nostras?]) is taken from the book of Micah (Micah 7:19) and corresponds to the article of the creed attributed to Simon which announces the remission of sins. This prophets’ creed is therefore closely linked to the sculpted figurative decoration of the façade, since these inscriptions make it possible to complete the iconography of the portal by restoring figures of apostles in the niches of the jambs and the inner faces of the buttresses. Thus, and I may stress this point, the inscriptions of the phylacteries carried by these prophets are less related to the sculpted figures themselves (already designated by the sculpted or engraved names) than to the iconographic network encompassing the entire façade, which they effectively introduce. An even narrower relationship of the text to the networks of meaning of decoration can be found on the façade of Nantes cathedral. If, in Saintes or Poitiers, the banners engraved with inscriptions are indeed phylacteries designed to materialize a word spoken, those found in the trumeaus of the portals of St Peter at Nantes are of a different nature and assume other function. These last sculptures represent seated figures, leaning over desks from which hang written scrolls that are no longer phylacteries but real volumina. On the north face of the trumeau of the central portal, the following sentence can be deciphered (with difficulty).25 Ad illum pertinuit propter nos nasci, ad nos pertine //at in illo[rena]sci qui venit in hunc mundum // peccatores salvos facere. This sentence is taken from chapter IV of a sermon on the nativity of Christ (De Nativitate Domini) from the Sermons dubii of St Augustine. With one change, however: instead of the simpler doxology ([...] qui venit et regnat in saecula saeculorum. Amen.), the inscription includes a quotation from the first Epistle of Timothy (I Timothy 1:15). Finally, on the other faces of the trumeau, the state of conservation of sculpture does not allow us to confirm the identification of the other characters proposed by Dr Ange Guépin in 1839, to St Jerome, St Gregory of Nazianus, and St Athanasius.26 The question here is the same as in Poitiers or Saintes: do the provisions of these inscriptions and the status they induce transform the nature of their relationship with the rest of the iconographic and epigraphic device of the façade? As in Saint-Hilairele-Grand, the theological, doctrinal or exegetical subtlety of the texts on these volumina excludes the idea that they were conceived with an immediate didactic purpose. In addition to participating in this multiplication of the monumental written word whose stakes we have highlighted above, the inscriptions seem to have a precise meaning by referring to the sermons of the bishop of Hippo. Indeed, it will be recalled that St Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram, composed at the beginning of the fifth century, forged the medieval doctrines of the literal exegesis of the Text as they are found in the much later works of Nicolas de Lyre or Jacques Legrand.27 The spirituality of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is indeed characterized by an almost general indifference towards the great mysteries of the faith and by an insistence on the literality of the narrative in which the faithful are required

25 With the kind help of Jean-Baptiste Lebigue of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes. 26 Identification that strangely involves four characters instead of three : see A. Guépin, Histoire de Nantes, Nantes, 1839, p. 154. 27 E. Beltran, ‘Notes sur un ouvrage inconnu de Jacques Legrand: “Traduction et exposition française de la Genèse”’, Revue des études augustiniennes, 27, 1981, pp. 141–54 (at p. 151).

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 130

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 9   |  epi gr aphi c o ne- upmanshi p  |   13 1

to believe without questioning it.28 In that sense, the many inscriptions on the facade at Nantes, which constitute only descriptive rubrics, shed light on the meaning of each of the scenes in Genesis primarily because the faithful are asked not to ‘make great inquisitions of such truths, but to believe them humbly’.29 However, the inscription of the trumeau of St Peter’s at Nantes shows a complexity and theological depth that is naturally inaccessible to the medieval public and seems to respond to contemporary injunctions and to reinforce the strictly didactic aim of the texts describing the scenes of the basement. In this sense, the text of this volumen is mainly a commentary on the other texts accompanying the images before being a commentary on the images themselves. It is likely that the study of other monuments could provide us with other cases of such epigraphic intertextuality. A careful look at the inscriptions of the portals we have studied, at their arrangements and the functions they assume, clearly indicates that the monumental presence of the written word cannot be reduced to the mere procedures of designation or intitulation of the figurative sculpture. This function is performed in Poitiers by the names of the characters engraved on the platforms of the voussoirs. In St Peter’s at Saintes, these names already have an additional meaning. They are no longer simply engraved but are sculpted with great dexterity in the archivolt’s cordon adjacent to the characters. The displayed virtuosity of this device is responsible for reinforcing its visibility. An equivalent role is played in Nantes by the multiplication of inscriptions. This ‘epigraphic one-upmanship’ appears to be a political and cultural instrument at the service of the patrons. The question of the relationship between text and image is therefore far from being summed up in the univocal causality initiated by Émile Mâle at a pioneering moment in the discipline.30 The Nantes case provides an additional issue since the inscription of the volumen does not refer so much to the images themselves or even to the iconographic networks of meanings they draw on, as to the value given to the inscriptions that accompany them. As such, it is here more the question of a text-text relationship than of a text-image relationship that allows us to understand the nature of the correlations between inscriptions and medieval sculptures.

28 On the cultural and social orientations of this late medieval devotional literature, see: G. Hasenhor-Esnos, Écrits moraux et lectures religieuses à la fin du Moyen Âge. Étude et édition de quelques textes en langue vernaculaire, habilitation dissertation, ParisSorbonne University (Paris-IV), 1985, pp. 121–2. 29 Vision de la Rose, Bibl. mun. Vendôme, MS 151, f. 178 (cited by Hasenhor-Esnos, Écrits moraux et lectures religieuses, p. 14). 30 Jean Wirth thus insists on the importance of foundational texts such as Mâle’s L’art religieux du xiiie siècle en France, but stresses that it is ‘no longer possible today to maintain this univocal relationship if we want to progress in the understanding of the medieval image’ : J. Wirth, ‘Au-delà de l’illustration. Réflexions sur le rapport texte/image dans l’art médiéval’, in Au-delà de l’illustration. Texte et image au Moyen Âge, approches méthodologiques et pratiques, ed. R. Wetzel and F. Flückiger, Zurich, 2009, pp. 19–39.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 131

09/07/2021 09:46

13 2 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

Fig. 1. Nantes, cathedral of St Peter. Low relief and inscription of the northern embrasure of the saint Paul portal: ‘Co[mm]e […]/ le Seigneur co[m]mande la circon/cision a A/braha[m] et luy p[ro]mest/ benedictio[n]/ p[er]durable’ (‘As the Lord commands Abraham to be circumcised and promises him everlasting blessing’) (Genesis 17:7–11). © Jean-Marie Guillouët

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 132

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 9   |  epi gr aphi c o ne- upmanshi p  |   13 3

Fig. 2. Nantes, cathedral of St Peter. Northern face of the trumeau of the north portal: St Augustine. © Jean-Marie Guillouët

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 133

09/07/2021 09:46

13 4 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

Fig. 3. Saintes, cathedral of St Peter. Third voussoir of the fourth south archivolt of the portal: the prophet Malachias. © Jean-Marie Guillouët

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 134

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 9   |  epi gr aphi c o ne- upmanshi p  |   13 5

Fig. 4. London, Victoria and Albert Museum. Fragment of the portal of Saint-Hilaire-leGrand: St Robert. © Jean-Marie Guillouët

Fig. 5. Nantes, cathedral of St Peter. Inscription close to a relief of the façade : ‘Co[mm]e sur la/ vespre Ysaac /se[n] va p[ar] ung/ champ q[ui] est en Bersabée po[r] Dieu p[ri] er/ et p[or] les estoil/es co[n]templer’ (Genesis 24:62–3) (‘As, in the evening, Isaac goes to a field in Bethsabee to pray God and to admire the stars’). © Jean-Marie Guillouët

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 135

09/07/2021 09:46

Gotland Wonder: Unique High Medieval Interior Ensembles on a Baltic Island Justin E. A. Kroesen

H

ardly any European landscape can boast of high medieval church interiors as well preserved as the Swedish island of Gotland.1 The ninety-one country churches on this largest island in the Baltic Sea possess an unparalleled wealth of medieval altars and altarpieces, roods, tabernacles, piscinas, benches, baptismal fonts, saints’ statues, organs, and other things: a ‘liturgical heritage’ without parallel throughout Europe (fig. 1).2 For this reason, a journey to Gotland is a must for any cultural historian who wonders what the interior of a medieval church originally looked like and how it was used for liturgical ritual. Nevertheless, generic publications on the medieval art and architecture of Gotland are very rare to date.3 It is the aim of this essay in honour of Paul Binski to present a concise overview of the medieval liturgical environment inside the country churches on this Baltic island – Gotland Wonder. The most important ensembles 1 2 3

Compare R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England, Stroud, 2004, p. 77: ‘A number of village churches in Denmark and Sweden, especially those on the island of Gotland, have some of the best-preserved medieval interiors in Europe’. Many thanks are due to Lucy Wrapson for her critical reading of a first draft of this article. In addition, in the capital Visby, besides the present-day cathedral, eleven medieval church ruins remain standing. All churches on the island are briefly described in E. Lagerlöf and G. Svahnström, Die Kirchen Gotlands, Kiel, 1991. To my knowledge, publications on this topic in English have not appeared since A. Heales, The Churches and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of the Island of Gottland (other than those of Wisby), London, 1888. In P. Tångeberg, ‘Retables and Winged Altarpieces from the Fourteenth Century: Swedish Altar Decorations in Their European Context’, in The Altar and its Environment 1150– 1400, ed. J. E. A. Kroesen and V. Schmidt, Turnhout, 2009, pp. 223–40, altarpieces from Gotland play a central role. Among publications in German the following titles should be mentioned: J. Roosval, Die Steinmeister Gotlands. Eine Geschichte der führenden Taufsteinwerkstätten des schwedischen Mittelalters, ihrer Voraussetzungen und Begleit-Erscheinungen, Stockholm, 1918; H. Ost, ‘Mittelalterliches Kunstschaffen auf Gotland’, in Gotland. Tausend Jahre Kultur- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte im Ostseeraum, ed. R. Bohn, Sigmaringen, 1988, pp. 65–84; B. Stolt, ‘Gottesdienst und Kirchenausstattung in den mittelalterlichen gotländischen Dorfkirchen’, in Die sakrale Backsteinarchitektur des südlichen Ostseeraums – der theologische Aspekt, ed. G. Eimer and E. Gierlich, Berlin, 2000, pp. 81–99; S. Lieb, ‘Gotische Sakramentsschränke, Nischen und Piscinae in den Landkirchen auf Gotland’, in Architektur, Struktur, Symbol. Streifzüge durch die Architekturgeschichte von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. M. Kozok, Petersberg, 2003, pp. 277–86; T. Kunz, ‘Romanische Landkirchen und ihre Ausstattung als Projekte gotländischer Stiftergemeinschaften’, in Dorfkirchen. Beiträge zu Architektur, Ausstattung und Denkmalpflege, ed. B. Janowski and D. Schumann, Berlin, 2004, pp. 412–38; P. Tångeberg, Retabel und Altarschreine des 14. Jahrhunderts. Schwedische Altarausstattungen in ihrem europäischen Kontext, Stockholm, 2005; J. Staecker, ‘Die Reformation auf Gotland – Innovation und Tradition im Kirchenraum’, in Archäologie der Reformation. Studien zu den Auswirkungen des Konfessionswechsels auf die materielle Kultur, ed. C. Jäggi and J. Staecker, Berlin, 2007, pp. 47–97; J. E. A. Kroesen, ‘Seitenaltäre im Mittelpunkt. Beispiele aus den mittelalterlichen Kirchen der Insel Gotland (Schweden)’, Das Münster. Zeitschrift für christliche Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, 63, 2010, pp. 282–94; J. E. A. Kroesen and P. Tångeberg, Die mittelalterliche Sakramentsnische auf Gotland (Schweden). Kunst und Liturgie, Petersberg, 2014; B. Stolt, Mittelalterliches Theater und gotländische Kirchenkunst, Berlin, 2014; J. Widmaier, ‘Hochaltar und Chor. Ausstattungsprogramme, Funktionsensembles und Stiftungstätigkeit in gotländischen Kirchenräumen’, in Aus der Nähe betrachtet. Bilder am Hochaltar und ihre Funktionen im Mittelalter, ed. J. Sander, S. Seeberg and F. Wolf, Frankfurt am Main, 2016, pp. 161–74.

[ 136 ]

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 136

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 10   |  go t l and wo nd er   |   13 7

are discussed in their spatial context, with special attention paid to those aspects in which the church art of Gotland is particularly distinctive. The medieval churches of Gotland are of great importance for the history of art in the whole of Europe, far beyond the island’s coasts. The German art historian Gerhard Lutz has summed up its exceptional significance: ‘The economic position of Gotland as a hub in the Baltic trade was characteristic for its artistic contacts too, which allows important conclusions to be drawn with regard to art in the rest of Europe. In view of the density of preserved objects, one can even say that the understanding of artistic relations on the whole remains incomplete if Sweden is not included’.4 This insight is particularly relevant regarding medieval church furnishings: in this age the liturgy and its material equipment were essentially the same throughout Europe. It is a stimulating thought that a Portuguese traveller, on visiting a church in Gotland during the fourteenth century, would have had no difficulty whatsoever understanding the purpose of the different liturgical fittings and vessels, and would have immediately recognized the message of the imagery on the altar, the baptismal font, walls and vaults, as well as in the stained-glass windows. Compared to other parts of Europe, the medieval church furnishings on Gotland are distinguished by their early origins and their often perplexing material, technical and artistic qualities. Both facts testify to the fact that the islanders, sailors and farmers (farmannabönder in Swedish), not only possessed the financial means to acquire them, but also had the connections and knowledge to import such objects and to adopt new stylistic developments.5 During the early middle ages Gotland became the hub of commercial networks around the Baltic Sea as the Vikings chose the island as a base for their raids and trade journeys.6 Western connections across the Atlantic and eastern ones through Byzantium into the Abassid Empire and central Asia were established. After the arrival of Christianity in the course of the eleventh century and the founding of the Hanseatic League in the twelfth, the capital Visby together with Lübeck and eastern Westphalia formed the axis of the Hanse.7 The growing prosperity led to a remarkable building activity, which resulted in a dense network of large and elaborate rural churches in the Romanesque and early Gothic styles, furnished with fittings of the highest quality according to the latest fashion.8 Subsequently, the conquest of the island in 1361 by the Danish King Valdemar IV (nicknamed ‘Atterdag’, i.e. ‘Everyday’; that is, roughly, ‘New Dawn’) suddenly brought its bloom to an end.9 It was precisely this decline that exterted a preserving effect on the existing church furnishings: during the late middle ages only few elements were replaced, so that the late Gothic style, which often dominates the aspect of medieval churches

4 5 6 7 8 9

G. Lutz, [review of] P. Tångeberg, Retabel und Altarschreine des 14. Jahrhunderts (Stockholm, 2005), Sehepunkte. Rezensionsjournal für die Geisteswissenschaften 7, 2007, no. 4. Kunz, ‘Romanische Landkirchen’, pp. 412–15, 435. About Gotland’s history in general, see B. Söderberg, Streifzüge durch die Geschichte Gotlands, Visby, 1975; W. Halfar, Gotland – Glück und Unglück einer Insel, Würzburg, 1966. K. Friedland, ‘Gotland. Handelszentrum – Hanseursprung’, in Gotland. Tausend Jahre, pp. 57–64. J. Roosval, Die Kirchen Gottlands, ein Beitrag zur mittelalterlichen Kunstgeschichte Schwedens, Leipzig, 1911; Ost, ‘Mittelalterliches Kunstschaffen’; Kunz, ‘Romanische Landkirchen’. G. Westholm, Visby 1361 invasionen, Stockholm, 2007.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 137

09/07/2021 09:46

138 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

elsewhere, is almost absent on Gotland. A second factor which contributed to the survival of medieval church interiors was a gradual and comparatively mild transition to Lutheran Protestantism during the sixteenth century.10 Thus the ‘preserving power of Lutheranism’, which has increasingly become acknowledged in German art historical research over the last decades, did its work in Gotland’s medieval churches through the continued use, reuse and non-use of medieval fittings and objects.11 Despite a modest ‘Baroquization’ of church interiors, especially with regard to altars, pulpits and benches, the basic medieval pattern has largely been preserved in many of Gotland’s churches.

In the Nave and on the Chancel Boundary Upon entering Gotland’s medieval churches, often one immediately finds the stone baptismal font (fig. 2). Most of the approximately eighty Romanesque and early Gothic specimens have preserved their original locations in the western part of the ​​ nave.12 In other Lutheran regions, including northern Germany and Denmark, this is now rather an exception. Here, most baptismal fonts were moved eastward during the Reformation or after, to the chancel boundary or into the chancel near the altar, with the aim of integrating the administration of baptism more closely into communal worship. It is only in the Anglican churches in some regions of Britain that one finds medieval baptismal fonts standing in situ in the western part of the nave as frequently as on Gotland.13 It should also be mentioned that many Gotland fonts still rest on their original platforms, which often feature important details. Not only did these suppedanea provide room for the priest and the godparents to stand on, but in many cases holes for the draining of water and/or other sacral fluids are also visible.14 In addition, the Gotland baptismal fonts are particularly important for our understanding of Romanesque figurative sculpture through their extraordinarily rich iconography. The fonts of Gotland, together with those in parts of England (Herefordshire, Gloucestershire) and Castile (especially the province of Palencia), carry an unparalleled wealth of imagery.15 Around the pedestals and under the cuppa many fonts feature monsters, lions, serpents and violent battle scenes that depict the struggle between Good and Evil, which played a

10 Staecker, ‘Die Reformation auf Gotland’. 11 Die bewahrende Kraft des Luthertums. Mittelalterliche Kunstwerke in evangelischen Kirchen, ed. J. M. Fritz, Regensburg, 1997. The threefold model of preservation through ‘Weiter-, Um- und Nichtnutzung’ was coined by F. Schmidt, ‘Die Fülle der erhaltenen Denkmäler. Ein kürzer Überblick’, in Die bewahrende Kraft des Luthertums, pp. 71–8. 12 For this topic, see F. Fåhreus, Dopfuntarna, deras tillbehör och placering på Gotland under medeltiden. En inventering, Stockholm, 1974. 13 A survey of Romanesque fonts in northern Europe, including Gotland, is provided by C. S. Drake, The Romanesque Fonts of Northern Europe and Scandinavia, Woodbridge, 2002. 14 For these aspects, see Fåhreus, Dopfuntarna; S. Schlegel, Mittelalterliche Taufgefässe. Funktion und Ausstattung, Cologne, 2012. 15 The website Baptisteria Sacra at the University of Toronto states with regard to Gotland: ‘Nowhere else in western Europe is there such a concentration of richly carved Romanesque fonts in such a reduced geographical area’ (http://bsi.library.utoronto.ca/ frames_research.html) (accessed 01 October 2019). The division into workshops proposed by Roosval, Die Steinmeister Gotlands, with fantastic masters named (Semi-)Byzantios, Majestatis and Egypticus, is still of influence.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 138

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 10   |  go t l and wo nd er   |   139

central role in the ritual of baptism.16 The richest combats are present on the fonts of the so-called Hegvaldr group, where monsters with bulging eyes and open mouths glare at the churchgoer, for example in Halla, Stånga, När, Etelhem and Vänge.17 Furthermore, the Gotland font sculpture is also characterized by a lively narrativity. Around the bowl, and even on the slanted undersides, various fonts are decorated with biblical scenes, most of which refer to the birth and childhood of Jesus as well as to his suffering and death.18 Another special feature of the Gotland fonts is the preservation of three Romanesque font covers crowned by miniature churches.19 The most elaborate of these covers is found in Endre, where it is shaped like a church model with four arms of equal length surrounding a massive crossing tower and four gates at the rim.20 Other font covers with architectural characteristics are found in Hejdeby and Bro. Decorated medieval font covers are extremely rare in Europe today. Only England possesses a considerable number, but these originated, without exception, in the late Gothic period and have openwork spires. Some of the English font covers rise a few metres upward and recall the shape of contemporary sacrament towers found in central Europe.21 In many baptismal fonts elsewhere in Europe iron pins and rings are the only reminders of now lost covers. Popular belief attributed magical forces to the water in the font, such as the healing of diseases or forcing a good harvest, which sometimes prompted theft. In some Gothic churches the walls of the nave are lined with stone benches that presumably provided seating for the elderly, sick and/or to women with small children. In Garde, the benches run along all three walls of the western nave surrounding the baptismal font.22 Similar features are also known from excavations in village churches on the Danish island of Sjaelland. In Vamlingbo, the central columns in the nave rest on strikingly high and deep bases, which probably also served as seats. Similar solutions are also found in several churches in England, including Sutton Bonington (Nottinghamshire). In some Gotland churches wooden benches with twisted columns in the Romanesque style survive.23 The benches in Eskelhem and Tofta provide space for two people, while the bench in Hejdeby is much longer.24 In many churches side altars are preserved before the east wall of the nave, on either side of the triumphal arch (fig. 3). The northern altar survives in about forty churches, and the southern in about twenty.25 Thus, Gotland possesses one of the largest concentrations

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

J. E. A. Kroesen and R. Steensma, The Interior of the Medieval Village Church, Leuven, 2012, pp. 319–20. About this group from the mid-twelfth century, see Drake, The Romanesque Fonts, pp. 131–4. For the iconography of several Gotland fonts, see F. Nordström, Mediaeval Baptismal Fonts: An Iconographical Study, Umeå, 1984. Kroesen and Steensma, Interior of the Medieval Village Church, p. 305. Lychgates of this type, locally called ‘Stigluckor’, are common on the island: in all, some sixty examples are preserved. See F. Bond, Fonts and Font Covers, London, 1908. Examples are found in Ufford (Suffolk) and Freiston (Lincolnshire). For sacrament towers, see A. Timmermann, Real Presence. Sacrament Houses and the Body of Christ, c. 1270–1600, Turnhout, 2009. Kroesen and Steensma, Interior of the Medieval Village Church, p. 264. Ibid., p. 263. The wooden benches that fill the naves of most Gotland churches today all date from the post-Reformation period, mostly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Kroesen, ‘Seitenaltäre im Mittelpunkt’; B. Stolt, ‘Medeltida korinredningar’, in Kyrkliga sällsyntheter på Gotland och annorstädes, ed. B. Stolt, Visby, 2001, pp. 43–65; Kunz, ‘Romanische Landkirchen’, pp. 426–34.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 139

09/07/2021 09:46

140 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

of medieval side altar blocks or mensae in Europe.26 In other Lutheran areas, and conspicuously on the Scandinavian mainland too, side altars were generally demolished during or after the Reformation, so that often only their vestiges remain. What is not known is the extent to which the altars were originally involved in liturgical ceremonies,27 but the altar blocks certainly served an important ‘secondary’ purpose as pedestals for saints’ sculptures. In total, on Gotland around one hundred enthroned figures from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are preserved, most of which depict the Virgin Mary and the holy King Olaf.28 Many of these sculptures would originally have been connected to the side altars. The earliest and most famous of these altar sculptures is the Romanesque Viklau Madonna from c.1160–70, now kept in the Historical Museum in Stockholm.29 Many sculptures will probably not have stood directly on the altar slab, but rather have been housed in a shrine-shaped receptacle. Only one such shrine is preserved on Gotland, dating from the late fifteenth century, in the church at Eke. In a number of churches, direct or indirect traces suggest how the side altars were provided with proper environments of their own.30 Clear traces of altar ciboria can be found in the church of the Holy Trinity in Visby, where the supporting arches have left their imprints in the walls, as well as in Vall and Lokrume, where consoles probably served as supports for now vanished canopies.31 In other churches wall niches served as backgrounds to altars. In Mästerby, a round-arched niche with a painted Romanesque depiction of the enthroned Mother of God with the Christ Child between angels is situated north of the triumphal arch.32 In Vamlingbo two narrow, high wall niches rise up above the side altars. Their semicircular shape may be regarded as a carry-over from Romanesque side apses. To the left of the southern niche an opening pierced through the wall which is accessible from the chancel over a staircase probably served as a pulpit. The fact that this is the only example of this central element among nave furnishings on the entire island suggests that this fixture was not yet customary during the island’s heyday, before 1350. Another element of medieval church furnishings which is generally found in the nave is the freestanding alms box, of which some date back to the late Romanesque period.33 The church of Bunge possesses an example from around 1250 carried out in limestone with reliefs on the sides and a runic inscription mentioning the manufacturer, a certain

26 About side altars in general, see J. E. A. Kroesen, Seitenaltäre in mittelalterlichen Kirchen. Standort-Raum-Liturgie, Regensburg, 2010. 27 Bengt Stolt has observed that many altar slabs on Gotland do not feature carved consecration crosses, which makes one wonder if they were ever used for the celebration of Masses. See Stolt, ‘Medeltida korinredningar’, p. 55. 28 C. Jacobsson, Höggotisk träskulptur i gamla Linköpings stift, Visby, 1992; J. von Fircks, Skulptur im südlichen Ostseeraum. Stile, Werkstätten und Auftraggeber im 13. Jahrhundert, Petersberg, 2012. 29 T. Kunz, Skulptur um 1200. Das Kölner Atelier der Viklau-Madonna auf Gotland und der ästhetische Wandel in der 2. Hälfte des 12. Jahrhunderts, Petersberg, 2007; H. Lindberg, ‘Some Notes Regarding the Conservation of the Viklau Madonna (Gotland, Sweden)’, in From Conservation to Interpretation. Studies of Religious Art (c. 1100-c. 1800) in Northern and Central Europe in Honour of Peter Tångeberg, ed. J. Kroesen, E. Nyborg and M. L. Sauerberg, Leuven, 2017, pp. 11–21. 30 Kroesen, ‘Seitenaltäre im Mittelpunkt’, pp. 287–90. 31 A. Nilsén, Focal Point of the Sacred Space. The Boundary between Chancel and Nave in Swedish Rural Churches: From Romanesque to Neo-Gothic, Uppsala 2003, p. 136; Kunz, ‘Romanische Landkirchen’, pp. 429–30. In Stenkyrka, towards the end of the fourteenth century, a canopy was painted on the east wall of the nave, serving as a frame for a sculpture placed on the southern side altar. 32 Kunz, ‘Romanische Landkirchen’, pp. 430–33. 33 Vgl. T. Svensson, ‘Gotlands medeltida offerstockar och krucifixpiedestaler’, Gotländskt arkiv, 63, 1992, pp. 69–106.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 140

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 10   |  go t l and wo nd er   |   1 41

Lafrans.34 Other decorated specimens are found in the churches at Bro, Bäl, Endre, Etelhem, Hejnum and Vallstena. The Gotlands Museum in Visby possesses several small wooden alms boxes equipped with handles and decorated with figurative reliefs that were used to collect offerings during Mass.35 The last element of medieval church furnishings that was probably also generally situated in the nave, is the organ.36 The Historical Museum in Stockholm houses an entirely painted organ case from around 1370 originating from Sundre. A second medieval organ from Gotland in the same museum originally belonged for the church in Norrlanda. This instrument, of which the front is missing, was created around 1400. Surviving medieval organs in village churches, especially from before 1450, are great exceptions throughout Europe.37 In many medieval churches throughout Europe, the nave and choir were separated by a partition in the form of a rail, a wall or a gallery. In Germany, about fifty medieval choir screens in the shape of screens and rood lofts are preserved.38 In England, the extant number of medieval screens and galleries – and the former in particular – is much higher.39 In this context, and in view of Gotland’s general wealth in medieval furnishings, it may come as a surprise that choir partitions, or the vestiges thereof, are not found in any of the island’s churches. Anna Nilsén therefore believes that these were unusual or even unknown on Gotland. She describes how the rood in some churches was of such proportions that, supported by a pedestal, it practically assumed the function of a choir partition.40 In the small church of Fide, the triumphal cross from the first half of the thirteenth century, which is surrounded by a ring, almost fills the entire chancel arch, so that the priest when entering the chancel even had to bow his head. Roods resting on reconstructed pedestals are found in the churches of Stånga and Rute.41 The twelfth and thirteenth-century roods in Gotland’s churches represent one of the greatest riches of the ecclesiastical art on the island. In a number of churches we still find a Romanesque crucifix, with the crucified Christ crowned as a king, hanging in the triumphal arch. Some of these crosses, among others in Endre (fig. 3), Hemse and Väte, must technically and artistically be counted among the best Romanesque carvings in Europe, on the same level as their contemporaries in the Rhine and Meuse regions and in Westphalia, and even better preserved.42 A special group of roods is formed by the twenty-six ring and disc crosses representing a type which is hardly found on the

34 35 36 37

Lagerlöf and Svahnström, Die Kirchen Gotlands, p. 105. Kroesen and Tångeberg, Die mittelalterliche Sakramentsnische, p. 105. B. Wester, Gotisk resning i Svenska orglar, Stockholm, 1936, pp. 131–90. J. E. A. Kroesen, ‘Middeleeuwse orgels in dorpskerken’, in Bach, het kerklied en het orgel. Studies uit de kerkelijke ‘achterhoek’ aangeboden aan dr. Jan R. Luth, ed. J. van der Knijff, J. Kroesen and J. Smelik, Steenwijk, 2016, pp. 133–44. 38 Particularly in Lutheran churches, see M. Schmelzer, Mittelalterliche Lettner im deutschsprachigen Raum. Typologie und Funktion, Petersberg, 2004. 39 See The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe: Making, Meaning, Preserving, ed. S. Bucklow, R. Marks and L. Wrapson, Woodbridge, 2017. 40 Nilsén, Focal Point, pp. 91–108, 157–83. 41 On the relationship between cross and choir partition in Scandinavian churches, see also E. Nyborg, ‘Choir Screens and Rood Lofts in Scandinavian Parish Churches Before 1300’, in Art and Science of the Church Screen, pp. 246–61. 42 See P. Tångeberg, Holzskulptur und Altarschrein. Studien zu Form, Material und Technik, Munich, 1989. The front of the cross at Hemse is almost entirely painted with lapus lazuli. The fact that this material was only mined in Afghanistan may serve as a further illustration of the astonishing connections of the Gotlanders in the twelfth and thirteenth century.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 141

09/07/2021 09:46

142 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

European mainland.43 In some cases, the quadrants between the crossbars are filled in with iconographic representations. The ring cross in the church of Öja was created during the second half of the thirteenth century (fig. 4). Inside the ring decorated with roses and angels are two mourning angels above the cross beam while below the Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise are represented. Together with the crucified Christ, they express the contrast between sin and reconciliation.

In the Chancel The high medieval chancel furnishings found in many of Gotland’s churches are largely preserved in their original state. In Lärbro, the altar, which carries a winged retable from around 1380, is surrounded by various wall niches and cupboards. In addition, a Romanesque wooden priest’s seat is preserved here, while the overall picture is completed by various wall paintings.44 In Gothem and Kräklingbo we find choir stalls for the liturgy and as seating for the prominent within the community.45 In most Gotland churches the original medieval altar block still occupies its original position in the centre of the chancel. In Källunge this can be clearly inferred from early Gothic paintings on the front, and in Halla, Barlingbo and Burs medieval piscinas are found inserted in the sides. In most churches the medieval chalice and paten continued to be used after the Reformation. The fact that today only eighteen medieval chalices survive on Gotland is probably caused by precisely their continued use: in the course of time, and with wear and tear, the need was felt to replace the medieval vessels.46 In the church of Öja, chalice and paten both date from around 1300. As in other parts of Europe, on Gotland too, the central role of the high altar in Christian worship was generally emphasized with a richly decorated altarpiece or retable. The medieval altar retables of Gotland stand out by their early origins. Of great importance is the fact that the earliest specimens, dating from the middle of the fourteenth century, were not equipped with movable wings. This is the case with the fully painted altarpiece from Ganthem, now in the Historical Museum in Stockholm, as well as the carved retables in Ardre, Lojsta, Sundre, Tofta, Träkumla, Vallstena, and Vamlingbo.47 Most of these altarpieces show a strongly architectural design and are crowned by soaring spires: the retable in Vallstena resembles a church façade with its raised central section and flanking towers (fig. 5). Peter Tångeberg has rightly emphasized that these altarpieces should be regarded as rare representatives of an early wingless retable type that must have been common all over Europe but of which the great majority has disappeared due to routine 43 J. Wolska, Ringkors från Gotlands medeltid. En ikonografisk och stilistisk studie, Stockholm, 1997. 44 Lagerlöf and Svahnström, Die Kirchen Gotlands, pp. 186–8. 45 The stall in Gothem from the first half of the fourteenth century carries paintings on the back panel depicting the Last Judgement, Kroesen and Steensma, Interior of the Medieval Village Church, pp. 164–5. 46 Staecker, ‘Die Reformation auf Gotland’, pp. 67–73. 47 Kroesen and Steensma, Interior of the Medieval Village Church, pp. 75–9; Tångeberg, ‘Retables and Winged Altarpieces’; Tångeberg, Retabel und Altarschreine, pp. 41–156.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 142

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 10   |  go t l and wo nd er   |   1 43

replacement or destruction. Thus the wingless Gotland retables provide a rare glimpse of the prehistory of the winged altarpiece that would become the classical form of the altarpiece in northern and central Europe.48 The retables in Anga and Endre (fig. 3) originated around 1360 and are among the earliest specimens of the winged retable in Europe.49 Their iconography shows a series of apostles on either side of a central Crucifixion scene. Since there is no trace of any presence of relics, these two altarpieces offer further evidence against the widespread view that wings were primarily added to retables in order to provide a safe storage for such sacred objects. Another aspect that has been repeatedly debated is whether the altarpieces of Gotland were locally produced or imported works. The tree from which the winged retable in the church at Gammelgarn (c.1370) was carved is known to have grown in the German Weserbergland, the retable in Fide (c.1420–30) was imported from Prussia, and the altar from Ala (c.1330) was probably made in Flanders or Westphalia.50 Such discussions on stylistic influences and places of origin only serve to illustrate how closely the medieval church art on Gotland was integrated into that of Europe at large, and that traditional ideas about such issues as centre and periphery can hardly be maintained. After each communion, the remaining hosts were safely deposited in a tabernacle. The most common form of tabernacle in northern and central Europe was the wall niche equipped with trellises and/or doors which in English is known as an aumbry.51 In about sixty of the ninety-one medieval country churches on Gotland, the tabernacle can still be clearly recognized.52 This is a surprisingly high survival rate, particularly since this fixture lost its function and meaning with the arrival of the Reformation. When considered in a European context, the sacrament niches of Gotland stand out once again by their early origins. The niche in Dalhem, which dates back to around 1150, is possibly the oldest of its kind in all of Europe.53 Most other niches show late Romanesque or early Gothic characteristics. In all, the Gotland sacrament niches form the largest group of early tabernacles found anywhere. Because of the many connections to other countries, these niches provide a unique impression of how we should imagine period tabernacles in countries including Germany and the Netherlands, where examples hardly survive. The sacrament niches in Gotland’s churches are distinguished by a remakable variety in form and size – from small, unadorned wall niches to large wall cabinets, including staircases and heavy frames. They also show that a location in the northern chancel wall may have been common but never a fixed rule. Some niches have painted interiors, as is hardly found outside of Gotland.54 In Hejdeby, a priest holding a chalice is painted on the inside of the door, and in Gothem a priest is depicted while he is carrying out the elevation 48 Tångeberg, Retabel und Altarschreine; Tångeberg, ‘Retables and Winged Altarpieces’. 49 Tångeberg, Retabel und Altarschreine, pp. 266–9 and 276–84. 50 See Tångeberg, Holzskulptur und Altarschrein; Tångeberg, Retabel und Altarschreine. 51 Kroesen and Steensma, Interior of the Medieval Village Church, pp. 107–24; Timmermann, Real Presence. 52 Kroesen and Tångeberg, Die mittelalterliche Sakramentsnische. In addition to the niches two preserved wooden towers should also be mentioned. These furnishings, which originated from Väte und St Mary’s church in Visby, are now in the Historical Museum in Stockholm and the Gotlands Museum in Visby, respectively. They date from the beginning of the fourteenth century and must be counted among the earliest of their kind in Europe. 53 It underwent a heavy restoration in the nineteenth century, see Kroesen and Tångeberg, Die mittelalterliche Sakramentsnische, p. 140. 54 Ibid., pp. 82–91.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 143

09/07/2021 09:46

144 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

of the host. In Ekeby, the back wall of the three compartments in the wall cupboard is painted with representations related to eucharistic devotion: above, where the host was exhibited, Christ in Majesty can be seen, while the middle one features the Crucifixion between saints Peter and Paul as representatives of the church, and below is the Adoration of the Three Kings. In Alskog, the insides of the doors show the Annunciation, the moment when, according to medieval theology, the Incarnation took place (fig. 6). Only when the doors are shut does Gabriel face the Virgin, and thus the Incarnation takes place in seclusion. Above, two angels in liturgical vestments hold candles towards the host that was exhibited there.55 Around several sacrament niches wall paintings were added, such as the Calvary scene in Lärbro and the Christ in Majesty in Väskinde, which serve as crownings.56 Here and there remnants of fabric coverings inside the niches – mostly red linen – may be seen, which are as fascinating as they are rare. This textile coating was meant to create a fitting environment around the reserved eucharist.57 In some niches, such as in Alva, coin slots have been preserved, probably as witnesses to eucharistic piety, a feature which is hardly found on the European mainland.58 In all, the sacrament niches of Gotland offer a unique impression of the design and iconography of the eucharistic repository during the first century after the fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Changes carried out to the niches in the course of the later middle ages illuminate the development of prevailing conceptions regarding the treatment of the eucharist. The insertion of iron lattices in the fronts and corresponding notches in the shelves, as can be seen in Roma, Ekeby, and Halla, show the advent of the monstrance, which gradually channelled eucharistic devotion.59 Another element found in the chancel was the piscina for the washing of the hands by the priest during Mass and the rinsing of the liturgical vessels afterwards.60 Piscinas built into the side walls of the altar have already been mentioned.61 The same fixture is also found in the form of a wall niche, either single or double, always with the drain(s) in the bottom, for example in the churches at Vänge and Burs. A piscina in the form of a free-standing column is preserved in Alskog. This variant, in which the water flowed down through a pipe in the centre, was especially common in England and France, as well as in Cistercian churches throughout Europe. In some other Gotland churches we find simple cavities in the chancel floor with a drain in the centre, for example in Lokrume and Hamra. Piscinas of different kinds can sometimes be found next to each other in one and the same church: in Burs there is a piscina niche next to the altar piscina, and in Fröjel a floor cavity is situated directly below the wall piscina. How such fixtures functioned in relation to one another in medieval liturgy is difficult to determine. 55 56 57 58 59

Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., pp. 98–101. Ibid., pp. 81–2. Ibid., pp. 104–07. Ibid., pp. 101–04. The use of the monstrance was abolished by Lutheranism. Only a single, damaged example was preserved, from Alskog, now in the Gotlands Museum in Visby. 60 See J. E. A. Kroesen, ‘Die liturgische Piscina und ihre Ausstattung im Mittelalter’, in … das Heilige Sichtbar machen. Domschätze in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft, ed. in U. Wendland, Regensburg, 2010, pp. 237–56. 61 Two loose piscina basins in Källunge illustrate how the water that was poured out flew through the gutter to the middle of the altar, to trickle down into its foundations, as a symbolic reinforcement of it.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 144

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 10   |  go t l and wo nd er   |   1 45

Conclusion The medieval interior ensembles found in the ninety-one country churches on Gotland together represent a unique artistic and liturgical heritage. Baptismal fonts, benches, side altars, alms boxes, roods, choir stalls, high altars, retables, tabernacles, piscinas, and other types of furnishings have been preserved largely in their original spatial environments. Most of the elements were created at a relatively early stage, roughly between 1150 and 1350. They are the silent witnesses to the prosperity of an affluent Baltic island that in spite of its location in the far north of Europe maintained close economic and cultural connections with many other parts of the continent (and even beyond). Thus, the high medieval church furnishings of Gotland afford unique insights into the liturgical furnishings of medieval churches tout court, which are largely lost in other countries. In view of these facts, it may be concluded that our understanding of high medieval church interiors in their spatial and functional coherence would remain incomplete if the wonders of Gotland are not included.

Fig. 1. Tofta, interior looking east with baptismal font (in the foreground, twelfth century), bench (probably thirteenth century), a side altar with St Olaf (fourteenth century), high altar with retable (c.1350) and several niches in the chancel walls. Photo: Justin Kroesen

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 145

09/07/2021 09:46

146 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

Fig. 2. Barlingbo, interior looking east with baptismal font (twelfth century), ring cross in the triumphal arch (c.1240), two medieval altars and several niches in the chancel walls. Photo: Justin Kroesen

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 146

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 10   |  go t l and wo nd er   |   1 47

Fig. 3. Endre, interior looking east with three medieval altars, triumphal cross (c.1200), altar retable (c.1360) and several niches in the chancel walls. Photo: Justin Kroesen

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 147

09/07/2021 09:46

148 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

Fig. 4. Öja, ‘disc cross’ as part of a Calvary group, c.1275. Photo: Justin Kroesen

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 148

09/07/2021 09:46

c hapt er 10   |  go t l and wo nd er   |   1 49

Fig. 5.Vallstena, altar retable, c.1350. Photo: Justin Kroesen, Regnerus Steensma

Fig. 6. Alskog, sacrament niche with painted shutters, c.1300. Photo: Justin Kroesen

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 149

09/07/2021 09:46

John and Johanna Ormond’s Grave Julian Luxford

W

h i l e o n e m ay d o g o o d wo r k p r ac t i c a l ly a n y w h e r e , the scholar who studies English medieval art from a base in the British Isles has a special advantage over his or her extramural peers. This is the opportunity to develop a deep-rooted connection to the object domain through frequent and sustained engagement with its historical and – as often as not – contemporary setting. Wherever it grows, the connection is basically but not conventionally sentimental. It is an individual response catalysed and deepened by the search for knowledge of buildings and their contents, and is in turn a cause of further inquiry (although it can also go astray and lead to poetry, travel writing, ghost stories etc.). One of its great practical benefits lies in sensitising the scholar to possibilities that present themselves in the library, archive or archaeological record; of rendering him or her susceptible to that fugitive but immersive contact with the past which Johan Huizinga called the ‘historical sensation’. 1 Experience of it also makes work, and thus life, more fulfilling. Trying to account for this connection in any depth is difficult and perhaps pointless. The copious evidence of it in the literature can be instanced by something heritage-conscious like the plate-selection for Pevsner’s Buildings of England series or W. G. Hoskins’s explanation of Leicestershire churches, but is impossible to typify due to the range of scholarly temperaments involved.2 One gets a better sense of it by talking to people and travelling with them to the great workbench of city, town and country. For present purposes, these thoughts about an active influence in medieval scholarship are supposed to lend context to a short investigation of a late medieval transi tomb in a parish church. This investigation is grounded in objects located in eastern Derbyshire and the National Archives at Kew, but dissolves into the topography of England and its art. Perhaps the thoughts will also help to justify for the reader both the choice of topic and the time and effort expended in digesting and packaging it up. Whatever one thinks of the results, the topic is not misplaced in this volume. It is sympathetic to three major and enduring strands of Paul Binski’s scholarship: archival research, the monumental brass and the visual culture of death. Brasses, at least, are so important to Paul that the volume would seem incomplete without a contribution about them: he was out in the English 1 2

See F. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford, CA, 2005, pp. 119–28. W. G. Hoskins, The Heritage of Leicestershire, Leicester, 1950, pp. 29–57.

[ 150]

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 150

09/07/2021 09:46

chap t er 11   |  j o hn and j o hanna o r mo nd ’s gr ave  |   15 1

countryside making rubbings of brasses at a young age, and they were the subject of some of his earliest publications, including the first.3 This, anyway, is an excuse for what follows, and I hope it compensates for the possibly dubious taste of writing about a tomb in a Festschrift. Here, as in so much else, I can at least claim to be following a distinguished example.4 Transi tombs, so called, have had more than their share of attention since 1973, when Kathleen Cohen published an important book about them.5 Altogether, about 175 surviving English examples of one description or another have been counted, to which a few documented but lost (or never realized) monuments can be added, along with various indents of robbed shroud, cadaver and skeleton brasses.6 This is a lot by European standards, and enough to confirm, in spite of unquantifiable but surely large losses, an attitude of reserve about reproducing the more grotesque aspects of bodily decay. For the English, as anyone interested in the subject knows, preferred images of clean skeletons and emaciated bodies to the putrefying ones familiar from continental art, and they were also shy about sculpting patently dead women.7 Perhaps they found the prophet’s association of vermin with unbelief a little too close to the bone: ‘He sent amongst them divers sores of flies, which devoured them, and frogs which destroyed them’.8 In any case, only two unambiguously vermin-infested effigies are reported, the brass to Ralph Hamsterley (d. 1518) in the chancel of Oddington church on Otmoor, just north of Oxford, and the sculpted image of a cleric at Tewkesbury abbey in Gloucestershire. This is a palpable disappointment to enthusiasts, although there is some compensation for them in two garish fifteenth-century drawings in BL, Add. MS 37049 (ff. 32v, 87), along with the enthralling appearance of the Hamsterley brass, with its bloated worms or serpents going hither and yon on the corpse and congregating at the grossly dilated navel, so that one thinks of St Paul’s warning to the Corinthians: ‘Meat for the belly, and the belly for the meats; but God shall destroy both it and them’ (figs 1, 2).9 The whole thing, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Mann, ‘is pervaded by the horrible haut goût of the grave’.10 As such it looks anomalous, and its extraordinary character has been explained as an instance of detailed patronal specification, although the realized design, which is artificial in a superior sense, is that of an ingenious artist.11 While Hamsterley will have asked for a vermin-infested image, any assumption of innovation on his part is destabilized by lack 3 4

P. Binski, ‘Chartham, Kent and the Court’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 13, 1980, pp. 73–9. P. Binski, ‘John the Smith’s Grave’, in Tributes to Jonathan J. G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts, Art and Architecture, ed. S. L’Engle and G. B. Guest, Turnhout, 2006, pp. 386–93. 5 K. Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Berkeley, CA, 1973. Two important contributions are P. Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, London, 1996, pp. 139–52; idem, Gothic Sculpture, New Haven, CT, 2019, pp. 227–33. 6 N. Saul, English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages: History and Representation, Oxford, 2009, p. 314. 7 Thus for example Cohen, Metamorphosis, p. 78 n. 102; Saul, English Church Monuments, p. 311 n. 2. The fullest review of the English evidence is S. Oosterwijk, ‘Food for Worms – Food for Thought: The Appearance and Interpretation of the “Verminous” Cadaver in Britain and Europe’, Church Monuments, 20, 2005, pp. 40–80. The only surviving three-dimensional cadaver effigies representing women are at Ewelme in Oxfordshire and Denston in Suffolk. 8 Psalm 77:45. This association is echoed variously and widely in medieval sermons: see e.g. Cohen, Metamorphosis, pp. 78–9 n. 103. 9 I Corinthians 6:13. The fullest discussion of the brass remains V. J. B. Torr, ‘The Oddington Shroud Brass and its Lost Fellows’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 7, 1938, pp. 225–35. 10 The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London, 1999, p. 248 (‘der scheußliche Hautgout des Grabes’ in the German). 11 Oosterwijk, ‘Food for Worms’, p. 56.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 151

09/07/2021 09:46

15 2 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

of evidence that patrons of art were involved in figure-design. Rarity per se does not imply patronal self-direction, either here or elsewhere in late medieval art. Patrons had money while artists had manual skill, experience and professional nous. The following discussion brings a little more evidence about this sort of imagery to the table. A recent account of transi tombs refers to ‘draft specifications’ for a monument to be made for John Ormond (d. 1503) and his wife Johanna (d. 1507), who were buried in the chancel of the church of St Martin at Alfreton, Derbyshire. But its author had not seen the draft, and this document has not entered the literature by other means.12 The draft in question, kept with the State Papers in the National Archives, is a paper indenture with untidy writing on both sides.13 The dorse has a Latin inscription which turns out to be an abbreviated version of the epitaph eventually displayed on the Ormond tomb. On the recto side, a conspectus of the essential particulars of this tomb apart from the epitaph is given in Middle English (fig. 3). This is legible enough to speak for itself: A lyeg[er] vij fote long iij fote brede chamforth þe on[e] halfe to lye by þe north end of þe ault[er] joyny[n]g to the wall a carkas of dethe w[i]t[h] wormes pyteosely wroght havyng þ[i]s script[ur]e que vtelitas in sang[u]ine meo &c14 \formed of speynysh laton vngylt/. And aboue þe ston[e] in þe wall a ston[e] iij fote high[e] & ij fote & di[midius] brode having in þe top þe fyg[ur]e of þe resurreccion say[i]ng these words Ego sum resurreccio[ne] & vita qui cred[i]t in me ecia[m] si mortuus fu[er]it viuet &c.15 And vnd[er] þ[i]s fig[ur]e ij p[er]sons a ma[n] and a woma[n] knelyng þe ma[n] sayng Credo quod rede[m]ptor me[us] viuit &c. And the woma[n] Et in carne mea videbo deu[m] saluatore[m] meu[m].16 And by twene them ther armes and þ[er] names. And vnd[er] ther feete a scripture conteyny[n]g what p[er]sons they be & whome they be heyr[s] to & when they dep[ar]ted. And vnd[er] þ[a]t scripture iij dought[er]es w[i]t[h] ther armes & ther husbands w[i]t[h] a script[ur]e vnd[er] ychon[e] of ther feete what the name of them & ther husbands is. And all þ[a]t is in þ[i]s ston[e] to be speynyshe laton & gylt. This gives one much of the information that would be expected of a tomb contract, and while it does not mention artists, costs or a timetable, the document’s indentation

12 Saul, English Church Monuments, p. 319. Like Saul (p. 319 n. 20), I thank Jon Bayliss for advice about the document, which he encountered long ago but never published. As will appear, I am not attempting here to account for the patronage or social history of the Ormond tomb in any detail. Somebody else can do that. 13 TNA, SP46/181/5. The dimensions are 6.3 x 9.1 in. 14 Psalm 29:10: Quae utilitas in sanguine meo, dum descendo in corruptionem? Numquid confitebitur tibi pulvis, aut annuntiabit veritatem tuam? (Translation below in the body of the essay.) 15 John 11:25–6: Ego sum resurrectio et vita: qui credit in me, etiam si mortuus fuerit, vivet: et omnis qui vivit et credit in me, non morietur in aeternum. (‘I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live. And every one that liveth, and believeth in me, shall not die for ever.’) 16 Respectively, Job 19:25 and 19:26: Credo quod redemptor meus vivit, et in novissimo die de terra surrecturus sum: et rursum circumdabor pelle mea, et in carne mea videbo deum meum. (‘For I believe that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth: and I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God.’)

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 152

09/07/2021 09:46

chapt er 11   |  j o hn and j o hanna o r mo nd ’s gr ave  |   153

implies some sort of legal status.17 Perhaps the best guess is that it was made as part of an arrangement with an agent of the patron (e.g. an executor) who had to see to both the monument’s procurement and installation.18 As such, it may have formed the basis of a contract proper which included the correct blazon (the Ormonds’ names, at least, are supplied by the draft epitaph). The specifications about imagery, inscriptions, materials and measurements are all things a designer would have needed to know. They are reflected in what survives of the monument.19 The chamfered ledger stone and its brass have vanished, but the wall-mounted component is partially intact (figs 4, 5). It includes a dark limestone panel with a surviving escutcheon (Ormond impaling Chaworth, the latter for Johanna’s ancestry) above a polished version of the epitaph.20 There are also indents for lost brasses of the Resurrection, man, woman, daughters, daughters’ arms, and inscription scrolls.21 The stone panel measures 38 x 29 in., which corresponds to the three by two and a half feet specified in the document. It is let into a slightly recessed tabernacle which amplifies the monument and makes the brasses more noticeable.22 As this frame is not accounted for in the document, and is made of local gritstone, it seems reasonable to think that it was produced by a separate, more-or-less local carver, while the brasses and limestone panel were supplied from further afield. One imagines both the ledger and the dark stone panel arriving at Alfreton with their brasses affixed and simply requiring installation. While matching up a document with a surviving monument has a certain intrinsic value, art historians will in this case be more interested in what is now invisible. Some of the lost components can be imagined readily enough by referring to surviving objects. The stiff little figures in contemporary dress, inscriptions from the book of Job, and vignette of Christ standing in or stepping from his sepulchre are all paralleled on late medieval tombs elsewhere.23 This goes for the overall form as well: the combination of a canopied mural tablet crowded with inscriptions, figures and shields with an effigy on a raised tomb chest is a familiar Tudor type. (That the ledger stone with its brass was mounted on a tomb-chest about four feet high is known by antiquarian description.)24 Less familiar are 17 See N. Saul, ‘The Contract for the Brass of Richard Willoughby (d. 1471) at Wollaton (Notts.)’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 50, 2006, pp. 166–93, and M. Norris, Monumental Brasses: The Craft, London, 1978, pp. 97–8, for contracts for English tombs with brasses of c.1466 and 1515. English tomb contracts of the period 1381–1421 are assembled and discussed in Monumental Industry: The Production of Tomb Monuments in England and Wales in the Long Fourteenth Century, ed. S. Badham and S. Oosterwijk, Donington, 2010, pp. 187–236. 18 Compare the fact that Isabella Despenser (d. 1439), a countess of Warwick, conveyed the imagery and size of her own cadaver monument ‘yn a lyst’ to one Thomas Porchalyn, who was involved in executing her will: P. M. King, ‘Contexts of the Cadaver Tomb in Fifteenth-Century England’, DPhil. dissertation, University of York, 1987, pp. 255–60. 19 What survives is no longer by the high altar, since the chancel of St Martin’s was extended by two bays in restorations of 1868–9 and 1900. 20 The shield has (dexter) a chief indented (for Ormond) impaling (sinister) 2 chevrons (for Chaworth). As the brass was gilded, and the charges are not hatched to receive enamel, the charges were evidently gold, which is correct for both families. The fields, which are hatched, were originally blue. 21 On the daughters, named Johanna, Elizabeth and Anna, see TNA, SP 46/181/51. 22 The section of foliate cresting above the tabernacle is either a misplaced component of the Ormond tomb or else completely extraneous. 23 See e.g. H. F. O. Evans, ‘The Resurrection on Brasses’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 11, 1970, pp. 88–101; J. E. Field, ‘The Resurrection, as Represented in Monumental Brasses’, Journal of the Oxford University Brass Rubbing Society, 1, 1898, pp. 130–36; N. Rogers, ‘“Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum”: Images and Texts relating to the Resurrection of the Dead and the Last Judgement on English Brasses and Incised Slabs’, in Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom, ed. N. Morgan, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 12, Donington, 2004, pp. 342–55. M. Norris, Monumental Brasses: The Memorials, 2 vols, London, 1977, vol. 1, p. 203, points out that the Resurrection was ‘frequently fixed at the back of high tombs used to house the Easter sepulchre’: the Ormond monument may be a case in point. 24 See J. C. Cox, Notes on the Churches of Derbyshire, 4 vols, Chesterfield, 1875–9, vol. 1, pp. 8–9.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 153

09/07/2021 09:46

15 4 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

the instructions about the material of the brass and the wormy, pathetic carcass. The inscription from Psalm 29 is also contextually distinctive and will come up again presently. With respect to the brasses, the request for ‘Spanish’ latten is unfamiliar in the context of tombs and apparently unusual in general, although Jon Bayliss has discovered two more references, including one of 1508 for hoops made of the same material to go around swans’ necks.25 But it is not clear on the surface of things why latten should be called ‘Spanish’, for while England traded large amounts of iron from Spain in the later middle ages, it does not seem to have imported bronze, brass or copper.26 The patron’s wish that gilding be applied to the mural brasses but not the cadaver effigy is also interesting, and graspable with reference to conventional symbolism. On the wall above, the use of gold suggested that everything was transfigured by the presence of the risen Christ, whereas the fallen body and its vermin below, products of earth and sin, were appropriately shown darker. The contrast was thus expressed in terms of light as well as elevation and iconography. The desire for a wormy cadaver is another matter, for, as suggested above, this example joins a select club. Presumably the Ormond effigy, like Ralph Hamsterley’s, was large enough to render its details conspicuous.27 Given the general brevity of the document, and its probable relation to a more detailed contract, one cannot take the terseness of ‘a carcase of death with worms, piteously wrought’ as an assumption that the tomb’s maker would be familiar with such imagery, and thus that this imagery was commoner than we know. On the other hand, it would be nonsense to suppose that the same idea was conceived independently for tombs in Derbyshire and Oxfordshire, that the Hamsterley brass, made later and in London, was somehow dependent on the Ormond one, or indeed that the original total of such brasses was two. The document opens a little window here. If Hamsterley, as a priest, rector and scholar, seems the sort of patron who might have commissioned an ambitious, unusual work of art, John and Johanna Ormond, as regional gentry, do not. This may do them an injustice, but the likelihood is that they were following a lead taken from elsewhere. The lead might have been a single monument which had impressed them (in which case one would have to ask where its patron got the idea) or else a minor fashion for which the evidence is lost. A drawing of an infested corpse in a London cartulary made in the mid-fifteenth century may be introduced here as further testimony to the circulation of verminous imagery (fig. 6). The scribe did not need to draw it, as the subject is unrelated to the document it prefaces.28 It is evidently a spontaneous product of scribal licence, selected, along with other drawings in the manuscript, from a mental store of images grounded in artistic convention. Threads of evidence like this become stronger when drawn together.29 25 J. E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England: From the Year After the Oxford Parliament (1259) to the Commencement of the Continental War (1793), 7 vols, Oxford, 1866–1902, vol. 3, p. 562. I also thank Jon Bayliss warmly for reading a draft of this essay. 26 Compare W. R. Childs, Anglo-Castilian Trade in the Later Middle Ages, Manchester, 1978. 27 The better to manifest its antithesis to the rituals and imagery of the altar. The Hamsterley effigy measures 29 x 6.75 in. 28 London, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Archives, SBHB/HC/2/1, f. 514. The document is about land granted to the hospital in 1273 by one Hamon Daly and Mathilda, his wife. 29 There is another hitherto unpublished wormy drawing in Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 202, f. 14v. It represents a fair-faced woman with a large worm or serpent coming out of her back to illustrate the familiar homiletic theme of the false beauty of the world (it is thus of the type known as Frau Welt). Here is another thread of evidence.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 154

09/07/2021 09:46

chapt er 11   |  j o hn and j o hanna o r mo nd ’s gr ave  |   155

One tends to think of Hamsterley’s brass as a representation of his own body, not least because the words coming from its mouth are expressed in the first person.30 However, at Alfreton, where one transi did for the tomb of two people, the question arises whether the image was intended to evoke some universal idea of death. Not death personified – there was evidently nothing spirited about the Ormond effigy – but rather the generic, lumpen human body, poisoned to death by original sin. While plausible enough, one suspects this may be too subtle in the context. It is hard, anyway, to think that viewers of the tomb did not associate its transi with the people commemorated on and buried under it. Any patronal ambition to elicit intercessory prayer would have been better served by this reflex. Of course, part of the point of the transi was to suggest that death comes to everyone, but it did so by exemplifying the fact with reference to individual people whose bodies lay at the viewer’s feet rather than encouragement to metaphysical speculation. Other one-transi monuments to two people naturally provoke the same question, although none sheds more light on it. These include the tombs to Richard Willoughby and his wife Anne at Wollaton in Nottinghamshire, made c.1466, and John (d. 1491) and Isabella Barton at Holme in the same county. Each has a sculpted transi that is apparently male, although the gender is not surprising in view of the general reluctance to display cadaverous women, let alone how odd the signification of a dead man by a female image would have been in the period. The phenomenon was differently presented by the flat tombstone that Jane Talbot (d. 1505) wanted over her grave in the church of the Minories in London. This was to display ‘the picture of a dede corse in hys wending shete’, plus the heraldry of her husband and herself and inscriptions soliciting prayers for both.31 The husband, Sir Humphrey Talbot, died in 1492 and was buried (as Jane’s will states) in the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. However, she evidently considered the monument in the Minories a double one, and the request for (as it appears) a transi gendered male is sensible in this light. In each of these cases, as at Alfreton, the juxtaposition of image to corpse(s), coupled with the personalized elements of the tomb (heraldry, epitaph, ‘lively’ figures), is likely to have exerted an influence on viewers quite different from that caused by reading non-personalized mortality lyrics of the sort discussed by Rosemary Woolf and Douglas Gray.32 To consolidate this point, one may turn to the Ormond tomb’s epitaph, which is arguably the single most telling component in terms of patronal attitude. There is a sense in which it set the tone for the whole monument. It is in Latin, but there is nothing doubtful or curious about its language, and a translation adequately conveys the thinking that determined its form and content.33 30 Vermibus hic donor et sic ostendere conor quod sicut hic ponor ponitor omnis honor. (‘Here I am, given to worms, and thus I try to show that just as I am cast aside here so is all honour cast down.’) Furthermore, it lies in the middle of the chancel, where rectors’ tombs were often located. 31 TNA, PROB 11/14/704, f. 302v. 32 R. Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1968, pp. 309–55; D. Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric, London, 1972, pp. 176–220. 33 Based on Cox, Churches of Derbyshire, vol. 1, p. 11. The Latin original never appears to have been printed: an occasionally inaccurate transcription is found in Derby, Local Studies Library, A726 (vol. 2), p. 6, with a careful drawing of the limestone slab and brass done in 1819 immediately following. (This document is a manuscript in three volumes, being Derbyshire church notes compiled by Richard Randall Rawlins c.1819–23.)

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 155

09/07/2021 09:46

15 6  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

Here lies John Ormond, esquire, and Johanna his wife, the daughter and heiress of Sir William Chaworth, knight, the son and heir of Thomas Chaworth, knight, the son and heir of William Chaworth, knight, and of Alice, his wife, daughter and heiress of John Caltofte, knight, a relative and heir of John Brett, knight, and the daughter of Katharine, a sister of the said John Brett[;] and the said William Chaworth, the son of Thomas, is also the son and heir of Isabella, the wife of the said Thomas, one of the daughters and heiresses of Thomas Aylisbury, knight, the son and heir of John Aylisbury, knight, the son and heir of Thomas Aylisbury, knight, and Johanna, his wife, one of the daughters and heiresses of Ralph, Lord of Bassett of Weldon[;] and the said Isabella is also the daughter of Katharine, the wife of the said Thomas Aylisbury, knight, son and heir of Laurence Pabenham, knight, and Elizabeth, his wife, one of the daughters and heiresses of John, lord of Engayne; which said John Ormond died the 5th day of the month of October, in the year of our Lord 1503, and in the 19th year of Henry VII, king of England; and the said Johanna died on the 29th day of the month of August, in the year of our Lord 1507. On whose souls may God have mercy Amen. This relentless inscription is more interesting than it may seem at first glance, particularly when considered in relation to the monument as a whole and its setting by the high altar. Its forensic tone reflects with particular clarity the general fact that the late medieval English gentry expected their tombs to function as evidence of secular entitlements which would benefit their heirs and impel those heirs to maintain ancestral honour (in part through displays of commemoration).34 The emphasis on Johanna’s pedigree, comprehensible given that John was a bastard, tidily corresponds to the fact that she – as so often with widows – was the effective patron of the tomb.35 (This is shown by the short version of the epitaph on the dorse of the indenture, which includes John’s death-date but not Johanna’s.) In effect, it renders the diagram of Johanna’s pedigree into purely verbal form, indicating in spite of itself why diagrams were usually preferred. It is a family tree. The stress on knightly inheritance explains why the transi was accompanied by the text of Psalm 29:10: ‘What profit is there in my blood whilst I go down to corruption? Shall dust confess thee, or declare thy truth?’ Partnered with the effigy, this sounded an appropriately solemn note, one that, while appearing to temper the golden confidence of the imagery above, and the worldliness of the epitaph, also constituted a gesture of conspicuous humility that reinforced the quality of the patrons and their heirs. In context, it indicated simultaneously both where personal and temporal honour finishes and the fact that, in the poet’s words, ‘it is from the Tree of Death the leaves of life grow’.36 The symbolism cut two ways: yes, the proud individuals died and were humbled by worms, but this was a necessary condition not only of personal salvation, which is the familiar concept discussed by Cohen and others, but also

34 Of the Ormond monument, it may be noted that neither the document nor the epitaph includes a request for prayers. 35 John’s father was John Butler, 6th earl of Ormond (d. 1476). 36 George Barker, ‘At Thurgarton Church’, in Collected Poems, ed. R. Fraser, London, 1987, p. 533.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 156

09/07/2021 09:46

chap t er 11   |  j o hn and j o hanna o r mo nd ’s gr ave  |   15 7

the temporal progress of their dynasty. The longer the posterity, the greater the honour to the humiliated dead people who had nourished it. Fortunately, the salient points argued here do not depend on the idea that the transi and its inscription were ever made. The document reveals the patrons’ intentions, and this is enough to justify most of what I have said. As it happens, it is reasonable to assume that everything the Ormonds wanted, they got. If their monument were mentioned only in a will, or if none of it survived, then some caution would be required in line with the legal principle of De non existentibus.37 As shown above, however, much does survive that corresponds to the written specification, and a tomb chest accompanying the mural components is recorded in old church notes, even if the transi brass is not. When the brass might have been lost is an open question. The mural brasses missing now were gone in the mid-eighteenth century, and, given their prayerful posture and inscriptions, may have been removed as early as the mid-sixteenth.38 If this is so then the transi probably went with them: it may indeed have had only a short life. * Topics like the one dealt with here sweat up all over the surface of England, and the scholar with an eye for them is enriched by their pursuit. He or she may not end up contributing much that is valuable to the current knowledge economy, but the labour will not be in vain for that, if only on the existentialist principle that the doing is the being. Happier, I think, to be an Esau – a hunter, of the field – than a Jacob abiding always in one’s tents. This is in fact just what a medieval art history done in situ encourages. The active living out of a discipline that arises from the land and returns there has proven, to me at least, an inestimable consolation. I owe the opportunities I have had to do it substantially to Paul.

37 ‘It is presumed that what does not appear does not exist.’ 38 See Cox, Churches of Derbyshire, vol. 1, pp. 8–9.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 157

09/07/2021 09:46

15 8 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 158

09/07/2021 09:46

chap t er 11   |  j o hn and j o hanna o r mo nd ’s gr ave  |   15 9

Fig. 2. Detail of the Hamsterley brass. Photo: Julian Luxford

left: Fig. 1. Oddington (Oxfordshire), parish church of St Andrew: brass to Ralph Hamsterley (d. 1518). Photo: Julian Luxford

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 159

09/07/2021 09:46

160 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

Fig. 3. TNA, SP46/181/5: indenture with specifications for the tomb of John and Johanna Ormond (made after 5 October 1503, before 29 August 1507). Reproduced by permission of The National Archives.

Fig. 4. Alfreton (Derbyshire), parish church of St Martin: mural component of the Ormond tomb. Photo: Julian Luxford

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 160

09/07/2021 09:47

Fig. 5. Detail of the Ormond tomb. Photo: Julian Luxford

Fig. 6. London, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Archives, SBHB/HC/2/1, f. 514 (detail): incidental drawing of a corpse in a vermin-riddled shroud. Photo: Julian Luxford, reproduced courtesy of Barts Health NHS Trust Archives and Museums

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 161

09/07/2021 09:47

Wild Forms: The Art of East Anglian Wodewoses Robert Mills

E

ast Anglian paris h c h urc h e s are shot through with late medieval imagery of wild folk.1 Carved figures of wodewoses – to use their Middle English moniker – adorn a number of ecclesiastical entrances in the region, as at St Mary’s, Cratfield (Suffolk), where a brilliantly preserved example appears in high relief to the left of the doorway, wielding a buckler and tree trunk against a wrinkly dragon thrusting its tongue menacingly in the opposite spandrel (fig. 1). They perch on pinnacles above porches, as at St Mary’s, Pulham (Norfolk), where a bearded, hirsute male sits directly above the church’s entrance, legs crossed and with a weapon resting on his shoulder (fig. 2). They embellish fonts, as at St Bartholomew’s, Orford (Suffolk) or St Mary’s, Happisburgh (Norfolk), where four upstanding wodewoses, alternating with four lions sejant, flank each corner of the octagonal stem (figs 3, 4); or St Peter’s Parmentergate, Norwich, where it is possible to catch a rare glimpse of a female of the species (fig. 5). And occasionally wodewoses appear on screens or in the roofs of church interiors; or they lurk beneath seats, as at St Andrew’s, Norton (Suffolk), where a misericord shows a wild man being attacked and seemingly devoured by a lion.2 As with their leafy cousins, the Green Men, wild folk have given rise to a wealth of hypotheses concerning their significance. Writing in 1952, Richard Bernheimer attributes the concept to a ‘persistent psychological urge’ to be liberated from the restrictions of 1

2

For a preliminary survey, see H. D. Ellis, ‘The Wodewose in East Anglian Church Decoration’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, 14, 1912, pp. 287–93. Passing reference is also made to the phenomenon in esoteric literature and in church and travel guides such as H. M. Cautley’s Suffolk Churches and Their Treasures, 5th edn, Woodbridge, 1982; D. P. Mortlock, The Guide to Suffolk Churches, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2009; and D. P. Mortlock and C. V. Roberts, The Guide to Norfolk Churches, 3rd edn, Cambridge, 2017. Perhaps surprisingly, however, these intriguing images have not been subjected to sustained study as a regional phenomenon. P. Hardwick, English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning, Woodbridge, 2011, p. 136 and fig. 30. Four misericords in Norwich cathedral also feature wild men, either fighting each other or subduing lions, on which see M. Rose, The Misericords of Norwich Cathedral, Dereham, 2003, pp. 15, 34–5, 71; St Nicholas’s, North Walsham (Norfolk) has another. Occasionally arm rests or bench ends were carved with figures of wild men wielding weapons against a wyvern on the opposite arm, as at St Peter and St Paul, East Harling (Norfolk). Spandrels above the tracery in rood screens also sometimes incorporated depictions of wodewoses creeping up on wyverns: examples in Norfolk include St Remigius, Dunston; St Margaret’s, Suffield; and All Saints, Mattishall. Similar carvings, presumably of medieval provenance, have also been incorporated into a modern choir stall at Mildenhall, St Mary (Suffolk), and the nineteenth-century pulpit at St Andrew’s, Felmingham (Norfolk). Wild men also appear in the roof of St Mary’s, Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk); in one of the twelve recently rediscovered posts representing demons and beasts seemingly overcoming the apostles in the roof of St Clement’s, Outwell (Norfolk); and on a roof boss in the cloister of Norwich cathedral.

[ 162]

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 162

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 12 | wild f o r ms: t he art o f east angl i an wo d ewo ses  |   163

civilized society, a negative ideal embodying ‘basic and primitive impulses’ that the wild men’s human counterparts have repressed in the battle for self-control.3 Drawing out the Freudian subtext in Bernheimer’s analysis, Hayden White goes a step further in his influential essay ‘The Forms of Wildness’, endowing wild folk with the status of symbolic and mythological archetypes representing the three great and abiding human problems, namely sustenance, sex and salvation, that civilization and society claim to solve. ‘I think it is no accident’, White surmises, ‘that the three most revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century – Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche – respectively take these themes as their special subject matter’.4 Here, too, I want to consider the significance of wildness, as embodied by East Anglian wodewoses, in the thought and actions of human audiences. But by ‘wild forms’ I have in mind a different concept than the interiorized archetypes that are the basis for Bernheimer’s and White’s respective surveys. Taking stock of Paul Binski’s sustained and ongoing effort to restore the category of the aesthetic to the understanding of medieval art, my interest is also in the particular visual forms that these hairy beasts inhabit.5 How did they create experiences for their audiences? What does their appearance tell us about the specific roles they played in social and religious life in this corner of late medieval England? How did the way they look contribute to their meanings, functions and effects? This essay attempts to answer these questions in the round. In order to throw into relief the distinctive character of East Anglian wild folk, I begin with some prefatory observations about the creatures’ defining features, and some of the various ancient, biblical and early Christian frameworks that influenced their reception. Then, focusing especially on the sculpted wodewoses adorning East Anglian parish churches, I highlight the significance of the images’ locations and their biblical (and especially apocalyptic) contexts in determining their role as agents of experience. A holistic survey of surviving examples brings into view the socioreligious functions that these sculptures, whether on doorway reliefs, roof pinnacles or fonts, were collectively designed to serve. Finally, returning to the issue of form, I briefly consider how the artistic qualities of these sculptures contributed to their role as agents, actively constructing and shaping the experiences of audiences, rather than simply functioning as passive symbols or decorative supplements. At the outset it is worth emphasizing that wild folk are multivalent creatures, whose expression and significance alter considerably in different times and places. While, as in introductory overviews such as White’s, the wild man tends to be treated as a folkloric or mythological archetype, he cannot easily be ascribed to one or another nuance or point of origin. Indeed, referring to ‘wild man’ in the singular is convenient shorthand for a phenomenon that is persistently labile.6 The fact that female wodewoses, very occasionally,

3 4

R. Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology, Cambridge, Mass., 1952, pp. 2–3. H. White, ‘The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea’, in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. E. Dudley and M. E. Novak, Pittsburgh, 1972, p. 35. 5 Notably Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300, New Haven, CT, 2004; Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350, New Haven, CT, 2014; and Gothic Sculpture, New Haven, CT, 2019. Binski briefly discusses wild men in the latter, at pp. 205–9, 216. 6 G. Forth, ‘Images of the Wildman Inside and Outside Europe’, Folklore, 118, 2007, pp. 261–81.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 163

09/07/2021 09:47

164 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

turn up on East Anglian fonts is a case in point (fig. 5).7 Likewise, the stem of the font in All Saints, Waldringfield (Suffolk), incorporates figures of four bearded males, wearing turbanlike hats, who clasp humanoid hands across their chests but whose crossed legs end in cloven hoofs. These hybrid creatures, interspersed with four enigmatically robed humans, present a marked contrast to the furry, stick-wielding but otherwise seemingly benevolent wild folk that decorate the stems of more than thirty fonts elsewhere in Norfolk and Suffolk.8 Presumably the Waldringfield design, described in the latest edition of Pevsner’s guide as ‘an unusual variation on the usual theme’,9 resurrects the classical category of the satyr, attributed in ancient times to excessive lewdness, which was conventionally portrayed with the goatish features of Pan, although the exotic headgear also suggests a conflation with Saracens. This seemingly foregrounds the odious and demonic character of these figures, whereas generally speaking, as will be argued below, East Anglian wodewoses express a wildness that has been tamed and reoriented towards socioreligious ends. From their earliest appearances in medieval culture, depictions of wild folk were persistently haunted by ambivalence and paradox. As well as representing a blend of several different literary and visual prototypes, ranging from ancient artworks showing the lionskin-clad Hercules wielding a club to biblical and early Christian accounts of longhaired anchorites and desert ascetics, imagery of wild folk was disseminated in distinctive genres and cultural milieu that generated a range of sometimes contradictory associations. Thus, ancient traditions of demi-human creatures or spirits such as centaurs, satyrs and nymphs, who were associated with harmful qualities or reflected a condition of degeneracy, combined in the middle ages with monastic and courtly models of escape to deserts, woods or forests in search of a provisional paradise or as a means of overcoming temporary bouts of madness.10 7

As well as the above-cited instance at St Peter Parmentergate’s, Norwich, there is a beardless but otherwise hair-covered figure wielding a hefty branch adorning the base of the font at St Catherine’s, Ludham (Norfolk), which is usually interpreted as representing a female wodewose. 8 The figures interspersed with the satyr-like wodewoses at Waldringfield are curious. Clothed in tunics with arm slits to either side, akin to the cappa clausa worn by English parish priests or scholars, they nonetheless appear to be wearing women’s wimples; the figures’ poses, hands clasped over their chests, echo those of the satyrs. In addition to examples already cited at Orford and Waldringfield, at least twenty-five other fonts in Suffolk feature wodewoses against their stems, the majority in the east of the county: St Mary’s, Barking-cum-Darmsden; St Mary Magdalene’s, Bildeston; St Mary’s, Chediston; St Andrew’s, Covehithe; St Michael’s, Framlingham; St Andrew’s, Hacheston; St Mary’s, Halesworth; St Mary’s, Harkstead; Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Haughley; St Clement’s, Ipswich; Holy Trinity, Middleton; St Martin’s, Nacton; St Mary’s, Newbourne; St Andrew’s, Norton; St Mary’s, Old Newton; St Andrew’s, Redlingfield; St John the Baptist’s, Saxmundham; St Peter’s, Sibton; St Margaret’s, Southolt; All Saints’, Stradbroke; St Peter’s, Theberton; St Andrew’s, Walberswick; St Mary’s, Walton; St Andrew’s, Wickham Skeith; and St Andrew’s, Wissett. In Norfolk, besides the aforementioned examples in Happisburgh, Ludham and Norwich, the following incorporate wild folk: St Edmund’s, Acle; All Saints’, Dickleburgh; St Martin’s, New Buckenham; and St Mary’s and St Thomas of Canterbury’s, Wymondham. The fonts at St Peter’s, Charlsfield (Suffolk) and St Peter and St Paul, Bergh Apton (Norfolk) also probably featured wodewoses against their stems, but the figures have been severely mutilated by iconoclasts. There are no such fonts in Cambridgeshire and Essex, but St James the Great’s, Staple (Kent) possesses a font of East Anglian design with wodewoses and lions on the stem. The vast majority, Perpendicular in style, date to the fifteenth century, though several show signs of having been partially recut in later centuries; based on its dedicatory inscription, Acle’s font (which retains traces of original polychromy) can be dated to 1410. It has sometimes been posited (e.g. Ellis, ‘Wodewose’) that Perpendicular fonts of this design were a result of cultural traffic between East Anglia and Flanders, while competing Ipswich and Norwich crafts are hypothesized in E. S. Prior and A. Gardner, An Account of Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England, Cambridge, 1912, pp. 429–40. 9 J. Bettley and N. Pevsner, Suffolk: East, New Haven, CT, 2015, p. 562. The wodewoses on the font at Nacton (possibly recut) similarly possess hoofs and turbans. 10 For a useful summary of these ancient and biblical precursors, see R. Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European Otherness, trans. C. T. Berrisford, Ann Arbor, MI, 1994, esp. pp. 9–84. On the dissemination of classical wild folk in medieval and renaissance thought, see also Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 93–120.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 164

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 12 | wild f o r ms: t he art o f east angl i an wo d ewo ses  |   165

Crucially, Judeo-Christian conceptions of the desert as a setting for divine anger, temptation, suffering and death were tempered with the notion that it was simultaneously a place where humanity could be redeemed. This notion of wilderness as a moral testing ground is exemplified especially in the character of Job: sent to the desert undeservedly, Job nonetheless discovers there human imperfection and divine omnipotence. Nebuchadnezzar is another biblical figure whose wild state leads to spiritual insight and salvation. After dreaming that he will be given a beast’s instead of a human’s heart, Nebuchadnezzar is subsequently banished from his kingdom, his hairs growing ‘like the feathers of eagles’ (Daniel 4:30); after seven years in this state, interpreted as a period of humiliating insanity, the king learns the lesson of God’s sovereignty, acknowledging the Lord’s ability to abase those who ‘walk in pride’ (Daniel 4:34). The anchoritic model of monasticism drew on these biblical antecedents as well as on figures such as John the Baptist, who according to the authors of the gospels is the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecy that a voice is crying out in the desert to prepare the way of the Lord (Isaiah 40:3). Christ himself retreated to the desert for forty days and forty nights, tempted by Satan and ‘with beasts’ but ministered by angels (Mark 1:13). The constellation of ideas associated with deserts and wilderness in the Bible formed a backdrop to ascetic and monastic movements interpreting the desert as a mental state, a metaphor for spiritual trial. Hermits and anchorites were, stereotypically, turned hairy through years of exposure to the elements, a trait visualized in later medieval representations of long-haired saints such as Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, Onuphrius and John Chrysostom, who wilfully escaped to the desert in search of redemption and spiritual fulfilment.11 Courtly romances in which heroes endure bouts of madness, during which they transform physically and behaviourally in ways that recall other varieties of wild folk, echo the anchoritic-ascetic paradigms in their structure, but the retreats are motivated by insanity – as with Nebuchadnezzar – rather than being self-imposed, penitential acts.12 Stories of Merlin in Arthurian cycles similarly transpose the Judeo-Christian notion of desert solace onto imagery of forests inhabited by the legendary soothsayer.13 These ideas contributed to the sense, in some quarters, that wild folk were degenerate lost souls who might in theory forsake their bestial ways and be reintegrated into human society, or at least be tamed. Wodewoses could potentially be rescued from their wild condition. The Christian rehabilitation of wild folk sat in tension with an enduring sense that they remained fundamentally outside society, set below and against God. In medieval romances recounting the life and conquests of Alexander the Great, for instance, the hero and his army encounter a creature explicitly named in the texts as an ‘home sauvaige’ or ‘wilde man’. At first Alexander wonders whether the creature, described in some texts as being ‘covered in bristles like a wild boar’, is actually human; but unmistakable evidence that he is not is supplied when a young damsel is brought in, stripped naked and set before him. 11 Bartra, Wild Men, pp. 53–62, drawing on C. A. Williams, ‘Oriental Affinities of the Legend of the Hairy Anchorite, Part I: PreChristian’, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 10, 1925, pp. 195–248, and ‘Oriental Affinities of the Legend of the Hairy Anchorite, Part II: Christian’, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 11, 1926, pp. 427–93. 12 D. Sprunger, ‘Wild Folk and Lunatics in Medieval Romance’, in The Medieval World of Nature: A Book of Essays, ed. J. E. Salisbury, New York, 1993, pp. 145–63. 13 Bartra, Wild Men, pp. 63–74.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 165

09/07/2021 09:47

166 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

The wild man responds by throwing himself passionately at the maiden and Alexander’s men have great difficulty separating the pair. Identified as unambiguously bestial – the conceit is that human beings would be able to control themselves in such a situation – the creature is tossed into a fire and burned to death.14 One frequently-reproduced illustration of the episode, in a deluxe copy of the French prosification of the Roman d’Alexandre, shows him covered in a thick carpet of fur, while another, dated twenty or so years later, depicts him as a bearded Saracen with a flowing turban.15 What determines the creature’s wildness in each instance is not simply his physical appearance, which each artist renders in distinctive ways. It is also the beast’s bodily comportment that betrays his character, as seen in renditions of him groping the girl. In the earlier of the two manuscripts, the wild man grabs the maiden from behind, presumably so he can mount her like a beast; a dangling strip of fur alludes to the huge phallus that some versions of the story describe him as possessing. The aforementioned Alexander manuscripts were produced in France in the first half of the fifteenth century. An example earlier in date but closer in provenance to the sculptures that are the subject of this essay is a marginal illustration in the Macclesfield Psalter, showing a maiden seemingly making a choice between a man on horseback and a bearded wodewose, who stands between a pair of stylized trees with a hunting dog at his feet. Commissioned in East Anglia around a century before the Alexander miniatures, the Psalter incorporates a depiction of the wild man that arguably betrays greater ambivalence concerning his significance. Both lady and horseman point towards the beast, who gestures in the direction of the forest as if to emphasize the attractions of wild living.16 The preceding examples provide a vantage from which to assess the distinctive properties of East Anglian wodewoses. First, it is worth noting that almost all surviving examples of wild folk sculptures in the region are located in ecclesiastical settings. A rare exception to this rule is the gateway to Moat House, Parham, a late medieval manor house belonging to the Willoughbys of Suffolk, whose coat of arms featured wodewoses. The late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century brick archway leading to the entrance to the east side of the moat incorporates two stone relief panels, set in large niches on either side, each featuring a shaggy, club-bearing wild man.17 It is likely, of course, that other examples of secular buildings incorporating wodewoses in their fabric have not survived; but the heraldic appropriation of wild men by members of the East Anglian nobility points to one significant motive for incorporating wild men into the exterior fabric of parish churches, namely their engagement as protective figures whose brutish strength was channelled in the direction of patrons, churchgoers and God. Significantly, the surviving freestanding wodewoses placed on pedestals above porches or buttresses are not explicitly represented as aggressors. They perch benignly, legs crossed or neatly arranged in front of them, as at St Mary’s, Pulham (fig. 2), at either side of the porch at St Mary’s, Mendlesham (Suffolk), 14 See further D. Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature, Oxford, 2000, pp. 156–9. 15 Le Livre et le vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre, France, c.1420 (BL, Royal MS B. 20. XX, f. 64), reproduced and discussed, e.g., in Sprunger, ‘Wild Folk’, p. 154; Talbot Shrewsbury Book, Rouen, 1444–45 (BL, Royal MS 15. E. VI, f. 18). 16 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 1–2005, f. 58, reproduced in The History of British Art 600–1600, ed. T. Ayers, London, 2008, p. 229. 17 Bettley and Pevsner, Suffolk: East, p. 456. On the wild man’s heraldic role, see Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 176–85.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 166

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 12 | wild f o r ms: t he art o f east angl i an wo d ewo ses  |   167

or on the tower of St Mary’s, Haverhill (Suffolk); or if they stand, their postures are upright and erect, as at St Peter and St Paul, Salle (Norfolk), where they face out directly from pedestals flanking the north porch to either side of a central griffin. In each instance the figures carry identifying clubs, either lifting the weapons across their shoulders, as at Salle, or resting them on the ground, as at Haverhill.18 But although armed, the wodewoses are not actively engaged in combat. This is indicative of their status as guardian figures, sentries whose role is to safeguard the building and its occupants, securing it from attack by dangerous, demonic forces. In so doing, wild folk fulfil a task also assigned to other mythical creatures populating East Anglian roofs and porches, including bears, monkeys and lions (as at Mendlesham, where lions serve as pinnacles to the other two corners of the porch), as well as holy figures such as Christ and the Virgin Mary.19 Intriguingly, the deployment of wodewoses as defensive figures above the entrances to parish churches echoes the depiction of these and related figures on a richly carved monastic gatehouse in the vicinity, at Ramsey abbey, Huntingdonshire (now Cambridgeshire), sections of which are thought to have been recycled in the sixteenth century to form the gateway to the convent-turned-manor house at Hinchingbrooke.20 Four giant columnsupported figures of wild men (two on each face) stand upright on the corbel shafts, bearing large vertical tree-trunks in mirrored poses. Again, these sculptures confirm the role of wodewoses as protective figures, attributed with bestial or Herculean strength, as well as echoing their appropriation – and domestication – in the context of late medieval heraldry. Turning to the spandrel reliefs featuring wild men that flank the entrances to various parish churches, a different attitude seemingly holds sway: the creatures in these locations are shown actively attacking monstrous adversaries. At Cratfield, the wodewose wields a weapon above his head and projects a buckler, one knee raised, in a pose clearly designed to communicate aggression (fig. 1). Another fine example of this arrangement, featuring intricately carved foliage, appears in the spandrels above the west door of St Agnes’s,

18 The pedestal figures are much less well documented than other East Anglian wodewoses, rarely being mentioned in Pevsner guides for instance. But for a thorough treatment of the Salle sculptures, see H. E. Lunnon, ‘Making an Entrance: Studies of Medieval Church Porches in Norfolk’, PhD dissertation, University of East Anglia, 2012, pp. 124–6. In addition to the examples already mentioned, freestanding wodewoses can be found in Suffolk at Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, and All Saint’s, Sudbury; detached and damaged specimens are also preserved at St Mary’s, Letheringham, and St Mary’s, Woolpit. In Norfolk, there are other examples above the nave at St Margaret’s, Cley-next-the-Sea, and on the tower at All Saints’, Winterton-on-Sea; a heavily damaged specimen has been placed in a niche at St Nicholas’s, Potter Heigham, though it is possible that the statue originally belonged to another church in the vicinity, while St Peter and St Paul at Brockdish possesses a detached wodewose head. In Cambridgeshire, two wild men – one a modern replacement – face one another across the porch, weapons held downwards, at St Mary’s, Burwell, while what appears to be a wodewose head is preserved on a windowsill in St Peter’s, Carlton. In Essex, at St John the Baptist’s, Thaxted, wild men wearing hats occupy niches to either side of the grand, fifteenth-century north porch. William Dowsing’s journal of his image-breaking activities in Suffolk in 1643 and 1644 includes references to the destruction of images of ‘Adam’ or ‘Adam and Eve’ at St Mary’s, Helmingham and St Mary’s, Worlingworth, which the journal’s modern editor interprets as references to wild men finials: see The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia During the English Civil War, ed. T. Cooper, Woodbridge, 2001, pp. 253, 313. 19 A particularly fine set of guardian creatures, including a seated wodewose, appears on the buttress pinnacles at St Mary’s, Bramford. 20 An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Huntingdonshire, London, 1926, pp. 152–6.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 167

09/07/2021 09:47

168 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

Cawston (Norfolk) (fig. 6).21 Yet the wodewoses depicted in relief on doorway arches align with their freestanding counterparts in defending the buildings and their inhabitants from evil. The carvings represent a distinct point in time, when the entrances – and the people passing through them – are potentially vulnerable to demonic attack; but they are effectively animated versions of the more static, sentinel-like wild folk and other protective creatures that are part of these churches’ defensive repertoire elsewhere in the region. Again, it is worth noting a connection with monastic gatehouses, which may indeed be the source for the imagery on parish churches. Ethelbert Gate in Norwich, rebuilt in the early fourteenth century after its twelfth-century predecessor was damaged in riots in 1272, featured spandrel carvings – today replaced by modern replicas – showing in relief the figure of a man defending himself with a sword and buckler against an opposing dragon. A case has been made in this instance for an allegorical and political interpretation, linked to conflict between townspeople and the priory to which the gateway served as entrance: the presence of a crested bird below the dragon and a lion below the man suggests a connection with Isaiah’s prophecies (14:29) about the overthrow of Babylon, thereby delivering a warning to the urban populace that the monks had supernatural defenders.22 But the visual resonances with reliefs in fifteenth-century parish church spandrels, especially pronounced in the Cawston and Cratfield examples, is very striking. The missing link may be discerned in another early fourteenth-century gatehouse, St Benet’s abbey at Holm (Norfolk), which appears to have been inspired by the Ethelbert Gate renovation. This features two hybrid figures, part lion part man, facing one another across the entrance arch. Again, the creatures in the spandrels at St Benet’s Holm assume a defensive role as protectors of the boundary between the abbey and the world outside. As Julian Luxford persuasively argues, their role ‘was not just inertly symbolic but actively apotropaic’, directed at deterring both human and demonic miscreants.23 The role of wodewoses in defeating evil on the entrances to churches – and that of other dragon-defeating entities such as Saints George, Margaret and the archangel Michael – is linked to the significance of these sites as arenas for ritual and socioreligious performance. Rites associated with baptism and marriage were commonly performed in front of or within the porch, while the west door would likely have been used as a processional entrance on special feast days such as Palm Sunday and Corpus Christi.24 These threshold spaces also played host to ceremonies pertaining to the exclusion and reconciliation of penitents, as well as other acts of judgement and possibly punishment. And occasionally, as at Yaxley, 21 A cruder version of the same theme can also be found on a relief within the church at Cawston on the spandrels of a piscina in the south transept. In Suffolk, see also the well-preserved example at St Michael’s, Peasenhall. Worn spandrel reliefs which seemingly represent wodewoses can also be found above the entrances at St Andrew’s, Alderton (described in Bettley and Pevsner, Suffolk: East, p. 87, as possibly representing St George and the dragon, but the branch-like weapon suggests otherwise); St John the Baptist’s, Badingham; St Mary’s, Sweffling; St Mary of the Assumption, Ufford; and St Mary’s, Yaxley. In Norfolk, see also the relief at All Saints, Hilborough, showing what appears to be a wild man holding a severed head on one hand and a ragged club in the other. 22 V. Sekules, ‘The Gothic Sculpture’, in Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996, ed. I. Atherton, E. Fernie, C. Harper-Bill and H. Smith, London, 1996, pp. 199–202. See also Binski, Gothic Wonder, p. 115. 23 J. Luxford, ‘Architecture and Environment: St Benet’s Holm and the Fashioning of the English Monastic Gatehouse’, Architectural History, 57, 2014, pp. 31–72 (at p. 57). 24 On the deployment of towers and west doors as processional entrances, see D. J. Summers, ‘Norfolk Church Towers of the Later Middle Ages’, PhD dissertation, University of East Anglia, 2011.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 168

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 12 | wild f o r ms: t he art o f east angl i an wo d ewo ses  |   169

they accommodated burials.25 Judgement and redemption are the common threads running through these various activities. Images of supernatural combat framed ritual acts taking place in sight of God as judge.26 Moving inside the church, to the fonts decorated with wodewoses on their stems, it is apparent that these too are motivated by defensive goals. As with some entrance portals, the context here is explicitly apocalyptic. With just a handful of exceptions, the octagonal bowls of the wodewose-supported fonts feature reliefs depicting emblems of the four evangelists, interspersed with angels bearing shields decorated with heraldry or religious symbols (notably the Trinity, Passion and Cross) or occasionally instead carrying musical instruments. Moreover, the chamfers are commonly adorned with projecting demifigures of winged angels (fig. 3). The seated lions often placed alongside wild folk have their counterparts in the protective lions affixed to pinnacles alongside wild men, as at Pulham and Mendlesham, or tapestries, misericords and other artworks depicting lions and wodewoses in scenes of combat.27 But in the context of baptismal fonts, their significance is also as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection, as recounted in medieval bestiaries, and the book of Revelation referring to the ‘lion of the Tribe of Judah’ (5:5) as a figure for Jesus.28 What is more, the lion’s connection with wild men recalls biblical and ancient precursors such as Samson and Hercules, famed for engaging in hand-to-hand combat with lions, and desert ascetics such as Mary of Egypt, whose sole companion was a guardian lion. Lions, angels, evangelists and wild folk effectively work in tandem to announce the Devil’s overthrow, the main theme of both Apocalypse and baptismal liturgy. The rituals preceding the immersion of infants at the font – which conceivably took place at the church entrance before the porch – centred on exorcism, invoking angels and addressing Satan. Priests were charged with preventing anyone except the child from having contact with the hallowed water, again suggesting a role for lions and wodewoses as protective guardians, actively engaged as much as passively symbolic figures. Linking directly with the evangelist emblems on the font bowl, the service ended with priests reading verses from Mark’s gospel describing the casting out of demons by Christ (9:16–26) and the prologue of John’s gospel emphasizing God’s sovereignty over ‘all things’.29 The foregoing discussion has emphasized the East Anglian wodewoses’ apotropaic character, as defensive agents enlisted in the fight against evil spirits. Even as they undoubtedly retained a measure of the menace or ambivalence associated with wild folk in other contexts, as registered explicitly in the Saracen-like satyrs on the font at Waldringfield, these hirsute manimals were ultimately domesticated and contained, recruited as beneficent actors in performances of ritual and other symbolic acts. Sculpted 25 In 1459 John Herberd requested burial in the porch at Yaxley. See J. Bettley and N. Pevsner, Suffolk: West, New Haven, CT, 2015, p. 574. 26 Lunnon, ‘Making an Entrance’, pp. 42–70. 27 As well as the misericord in Norton, there is a record in the 1397 inventory of goods belonging to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, in Pleshey Castle, Essex, of a tapestry representing the tale of ‘discomfiture’ between a wodewose and lion. See Viscount Dillon and W. H. St John Hope, ‘Inventory of the Goods and Chattels Belonging to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, and Seized in his Castle at Pleshy, Co. Essex, 21 Richard II. (1397)’, Archaeological Journal, 54, 1897, pp. 275–308 (at p. 276). 28 F. Bond, Fonts and Font Covers, London, 1985, pp. 181–3. 29 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580, 2nd edn, New Haven, 2005, pp. 280–81; Lunnon, ‘Making an Entrance’, pp. 50–52. See also Bond, Fonts, pp. 88–9.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 169

09/07/2021 09:47

170  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

wodewoses also helped mediate spiritual, spatial and psychological change. The fact that the stems of some contemporaneous East Anglian fonts feature monks instead of lions and wodewoses suggests a potential resonance between monastic seclusion and wilderness as a state of mind: believers necessarily pass through a wild place (as in the opening to Dante’s Inferno) in order to achieve union with the divine.30 And as has been demonstrated, they played an active role in shaping the experiences of late medieval parishioners. Finally, in conclusion, I want to touch on the aesthetic qualities that contributed to these sculptures’ roles as actors and agents in representing and mediating change. For it has not been highlighted enough, I think, that at least some of the artworks discussed are visually intriguing, not to say wondrous or even, at times, beautiful. They give us pleasure. East Anglian wodewose sculptures are obviously not in the same league as the exceptionally fine early fourteenth-century statue of Mary Magdalene from the church of Notre-Dame in Écouis, Normandy, that graces the cover of Binski’s latest book on Gothic sculpture. But as artefacts they too create experiences – and crucially affects – through the way they look. As Binski argues, female hair in the Magdalene image is an occasion for thought and reflection on the part of beholders, an exploration of ‘the limits of moral-aesthetic wandering to the point of near error, from which Mary, in exile, is retrieving herself ’.31 The saint’s luxuriant wavy hair exudes kinkiness, drawing viewers in even as they are simultaneously reproved for succumbing to its beguiling charms. The female wodewose on the font stem at St Peter’s Parmentergate, Norwich (fig. 4) similarly draws attention, if on a smaller scale, to the creature’s sensory appeal: the sculptor has represented her grasping her hair with one hand, in lieu of the usual club, while she places the other hand decorously across her genital region. This could be a pragmatic act of censure on the artist’s part, designed to save viewers from sinful thoughts. Or it might represent a playful, tongue-in-cheek parody of the moralizing ethos. Either way, the image attracts by virtue of its waves of neatly coiled hair, which convey the impression of a loosely disguised naked human body. Indeed, it is plausible that the Magdalene is deliberately being invoked here: the figure is arrestingly sensual, her fur disarmingly tactile as well as visually appealing. The sculpture’s surface insinuates and charms even as its function, namely as a defender and sentinel against malign forces, moves in the opposite direction, towards repulsion.32 Or consider the splendid reliefs at Cawston (fig. 6), where both wodewose and adversary are set within an abundance of lush vegetation that draws the eye upwards to the threshold between the outside world and the sanctuary within. The wild man’s beard, hair and furry skin are delightfully kempt, contributing to his status as a benignly protective figure whose superhuman strength is harnessed in the service of church and churchgoer. His is not the out-and-out bestiality attributed to the ill-fated wild man in the Alexander legends, but a disciplined and decorous variety of wildness. The imagery’s inventive artistry contributes to the viewer’s sense of the church, and the events taking place outside and within it, as powerful mediators of experience. The crafty effort expended on these carvings by their 30 For instance, the font at St Mary’s, Pakenham, has monks against the stem. 31 Binski, Gothic Sculpture, pp. 166–7. 32 On the immodesty customarily ascribed to wild women in medieval literature, and their connection with the figure of Luxuria in art, see Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 34–9.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 170

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 12 | wild f o r ms: t he art o f east angl i an wo d ewo ses  |   171

makers contributes to the buildings’ own eloquence as instigators and agents of change. The creatures’ wild forms activate and enliven the stones whose surfaces they embellish. The sculptures potentially stimulate thought and action in the people who encounter them. Their function is (quoting Binski on ornamented doorways) ‘to energise, to engage, to give pleasure, to steer and to create an occasion’.33

Fig. 1. Wodewose attacking dragon, fifteenth century. Spandrels of west entrance, St Mary’s church, Cratfield (Suffolk). Photo: author

Fig. 2. Seated wodewose, fifteenth century. Pinnacle above porch of St Mary’s church, Pulham (Norfolk). Photo: author

33 Binski, Gothic Sculpture, p. 27.

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 171

09/07/2021 09:47

172 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 172

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 12 | wild f o r ms: t he art o f east angl i an wo d ewo ses  |   173 opposite top: Fig. 3. Octagonal font with wild men and lions on stem, fifteenth century. St Bartholomew’s church, Orford (Suffolk). Photo: author

opposite below: Fig. 4. Wodewose and lions, fifteenth century. Font stem at St Mary’s church, Happisburgh (Norfolk). Photo: author

right: Fig. 5. Female wodewose, fifteenth century. Font stem at St Peter’s Parmentergate church, Norwich. Photo: author

below: Fig. 6. Wodewose attacking wyvern, first quarter of fifteenth century. Spandrels of west entrance, St Agnes’s church, Cawston (Norfolk). Photo: author

7132 09-12 Binski new size v6.indd 173

09/07/2021 09:47

The Thirteenth-Century Pyx Cover at Wells Cathedral John Munns

T

he limited survival of thirteenth-century English woodwork is such that every piece merits attention. The subject of this essay is by no means unknown, but it has received little treatment of any substance for more than a century. The object in question, a tall wooden cylinder comprising three registers of open traceried arcading with a coronet of fleurs-de-lys and metalwork attachments, dates in all probability from the last quarter of the thirteenth century and is currently suspended below the inner arch of the north-west tower of Wells cathedral, where it can easily be viewed from the west end of the nave (fig. 1). It is often mentioned in passing in guidebooks, but its most sustained treatment (and then amounting to just two pages) remains that recorded in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries for Thursday, 4 February 1897, by the then Assistant Secretary, W. H. St John Hope.1 Hope had the advantage of being able to examine the object closely, and provides a detailed description of its dimensions, materials, condition, and traces of polychromy. He acknowledges that the object’s purpose had been a source of debate. ‘It has been claimed’, he states, ‘as a lantern’, a theory that he attributes to a drawing of the cathedral treasury (the chapter house undercroft) by John Carter (1748–1817) in which the object is shown suspended lantern-style.2 Carter’s is, in fact, just one of several late eighteenth or earlynineteenth-century images of the object in that position. In those by John Coney (1786– 1833), and George Cattermole (1800–68), not only can the object clearly be seen, but so can

1

W. H. St John Hope, in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, 16, 1897, pp. 287–9. Besides those referred to elsewhere, examples of passing references to the object as a pyx cover include: J. C. Wall, An Old English Parish, London, 1907, p. 43; J. C. Cox and A. Harvey, English Church Furniture, London, 1908, p. 45; E. Foord, Wells, Glastonbury & Cleeve, London and Toronto, 1925, pp. 127–8; G. Randall, Church Furnishing and Decoration in England and Wales, London, 1980, p. 144; L. S. Colchester, Wells Cathedral, The New Bell’s Cathedral Guides, London, 1987, pp. 93–4. W. Rodwell, Wells Cathedral: Excavations and Structural Studies, 1978–93, 2 vols, London, 2001, vol. 1, p. 287; R. Dunning, R. Lewis, and M. Matthews, Wells Cathedral, London, 2005, p. 83; B. L. Harris, Harris’s Guide to Churches and Cathedrals, London, 2006, pp. 102, 391; G. Leighton, ‘Furniture in Wells Cathedral’, Somerset Archaeology and Natural History, 153, 2009, pp. 1–12, where it is called a ‘pyx cover or sacrament hoist’ (at p. 2). 2 Hope, Proceedings, p. 289.

[ 174]

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 174

09/07/2021 09:46

c hap ter 13 |the thirtee nt h- c ent ury pyx c over at w el l s c at hed r al   |   175

the extent of the damage it had suffered (fig. 2).3 Other examples include an engraving in Winkles’s Cathedrals of 1835, after an original by John Wykeham Archer (1808–64),4 and a misidentified oil sketch by Samuel Prout (1783–1852) in the collection of Lambeth Palace.5 In discussing the undercroft, or ‘crypt’, illustrated by Cattermole and engraved by John Le Keux (‘now merely a place for timber’), Britton mentions in passing that ‘suspended from one of the arches is a wooden lantern’.6 This functional identification is picked up by Pugin in his Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume of 1844, where the object is referenced under the entry for ‘lamps’ as an early example of ‘decidedly the most beautiful’ kind of frame in which an ecclesiastical lamp could be hung.7 Hope’s close observation of the object, however, proved the lantern theory to be unsatisfactory. The object shows no sign either of the former attachment of panels of parchment or glass to protect any flame, or, more conclusively perhaps, of any traces of the effects of candle smoke. There is ‘at least equal possibility’, Hope concluded, that the object ‘once formed the canopy within which was hung the pix [sic] with the Reserved Sacrament over the high altar’.8 Hope’s observations were picked up by Percy Dearmer the following year in his contribution to the series of cathedral guidebooks published by G. Bell and Sons. Dearmer, following Hope, notes that this ‘precious relic of medieval times … is generally called a lantern’, but that there is ‘no trace of its ever having been used as a lantern, and it is probably the wooden canopy of the pyx which hung before the high altar’.9 He goes on to cite Hope’s contribution to the Antiquaries’ Proceedings, and to quote him on the details of the remaining polychromy. Dearmer is clearer on the object’s use as a pyx cover than Hope appears to be and, in citing Hope, inadvertently gives us a clue as to Hope’s diffidence. A review of Dearmer’s guide to Wells in The Athenaeum in February 1900 takes Dearmer to task.10 The review is short and generally complimentary, but the reviewer cannot let Dearmer’s uncritical acceptance of Hope’s theory pass. He notes the existence at Wells of this ‘curious lantern-shaped object’ that was ‘lately brought to London and shown at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries’, at which ‘the rash opinion was hazarded that it was the canopy of the pyx’. The reviewer reveals that ‘this was disputed at the time, but the opinion, and not the correction, was printed … thereby laying a trap into which Mr Dearmer has fallen’. He goes on to inform us that, whilst the purpose of the Wells object is not settled, ‘the best authorities agree that the other two [supposed pyx covers mentioned, at Milton and Tewkesbury abbeys] are cases for chimes of bells’.11

3

W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. J. Caley, H. Ellis, and B. Bandinel, rev. edn, 6 vols in 8, London, 1817–30, vol. 2, before p. 275 (Coney); J. Britton, The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Wells, London, 1824, pl. XI (Cattermole). 4 B. Winkles et al., Winkles’s Architectural and Picturesque Illustrations of the Cathedral Church of England and Wales, 3 vols, London, 1836–42, vol. 1, pl. 38. 5 The painting by Prout was donated to Lambeth Palace as ‘the Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral’ in 1911; see London, Lambeth Palace, MS 3347, ff. 97–8. That it is clearly, however, of the Wells undercroft, is confirmed not only by the presence of the pyx cover but also by the style of the compound pier and ribs. The date is uncertain, but Prout visited Wells at least once: he also painted the west front (sold at auction by Gorringe’s, Lewes, East Sussex, 4 December 2013, lot 1746). 6 Britton, History and Antiquities, p. 104. 7 A. W. Pugin, Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume, complied from ancient authorities and examples, London, 1844, p. 151. 8 Hope, Proceedings, p. 289 9 P. Dearmer, The Cathedral Church of Wells: A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See, London, 1898, p. 63. 10 [Review of] ‘The Cathedral Church of Wells. By the Rev. Percy Dearmer’, The Athenaeum, 3772, 10 February 1900, p. 183. 11 Ibid.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 175

09/07/2021 09:46

176 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

The review was, in the tradition of Athenaeum reviews, published anonymously, but an index of annotated reviews and reviewers reveals that the author was one ‘Micklewaith’.12 This can only be John Thomas Micklethwaite, architect, surveyor of the fabric to Westminster Abbey, and soon-to-be vice-president of the Antiquaries. The objection to Hope’s conclusions at the 1897 meeting might well have been Micklethwaite’s own. He expends more column inches on exposing this example of ‘the harm which may come of an erroneous statement being allowed to stand uncorrected in a place of authority’ than he does on the whole of the rest of Dearmer’s treatment of Wells.13 The object stands approximately 4 feet tall and the widest point (at the base) has an external diameter of 17.5 inches. The internal diameter is approximately 14.5 inches. Constructed in oak, the object once suffered significant damage, as seen in a number of the early nineteenth-century images mentioned above (fig. 2). It was sensitively restored with deal additions at some point between the 1830s (the likely date of the latest drawing of it hanging in the undercroft) and its display in London in 1897. The whole is supported by iron reinforcements (both original and added during the restoration), and the remnants of an iron double hanging-loop and hook-and-ring, by which the object would originally have been suspended.14 Besides the details of the carved tracery and ornamentation, to which we will return, the most interesting aspect of the object is the significant evidence of polychromy, still visible on the original oak. Hope describes it thus: The whole of the body and its upper and lower rings have been painted red, with gold flowers or other devices upon the transverse bands. The slender dividing shafts seem to have been coloured blue. The leaves of the cresting have apparently been painted white, but the circular boss in the middle of each leaf was entirely red.15 It is clear, therefore, that in its full glory the object would have been bright and striking; intended to draw attention. The difficulty is that almost all the other evidence that we have for the nature of medieval pyx covers in the British Isles dates from a century or more later than the object at Wells. Other alleged examples at Milton Abbas and Tewkesbury have already been mentioned; both are fifteenth-century in date, and both are now mounted on the north wall of their respective church’s presbytery.16 The Tewkesbury example is fragmentary, but remarkably similar to the middle and upper sections of the complete example at Milton abbey. This can

12 Athenaeum: Index of Reviews and Reviewers, 1872–1900, available at: https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/001/250/318/RUG01– 001250318_2016_0001_AC.pdf (accessed 01 October 2019). 13 Athenaeum, 10 February 1900, p. 183. 14 Only the salient aspects of the object can be accounted for here. For a more detailed description see Hope, Proceedings, pp. 288–9, where it is noted that this hanging arrangement ‘exactly agrees’ with that described for the pyx canopy in the Rites of Durham (‘two irons fastened in the French Peere … that it could not move nor stir’). It should be admitted that in all other respects the description of the Durham canopy differs from that of the object at Wells. Rites of Durham, ed. J. T. Fowler, London, 1902, p. 7. 15 Hope, Proceedings, pp. 288–9. 16 The Tewkesbury example is described in the latest edition of Pevsner as an ‘oak pyx canopy, possibly of c. 1400’; D. Verey and A. Brooks, Gloucestershire 2: The Vale and the Forest of Dean, New Haven, CT, 2002, p. 726.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 176

09/07/2021 09:46

chap ter 13 |the thirtee nt h- c ent ury pyx c over at w el l s c at hed r al   |   177

be seen especially clearly in photographs of the Milton abbey object when dismantled.17 This latter, if it did enshrine the sacrament, might better be described as a hanging tabernacle than a pyx cover per se: it is not open at either end, and the presumption must be that the entire structure was raised and lowered as required.18 Another possible fragment has been put back into use at Dennington in Suffolk. There is little to prove that the Dennington finial was originally part of a hanging pyx ensemble (it might as easily be from a font cover, for example), but it was (re-)employed as such, with modern additions, in the 1920s. It too has similarities with the relevant section of the object at Milton abbey. Tewkesbury also has a modern, functioning hanging-pyx canopy designed by Stuart Birdsall in 1994 and based in part on the one at Wells. It gives a good sense of how the Wells cover might have worked. Manuscript images showing pyxes from England are scarce, if not entirely unknown. However, a number of continental examples exist, notably from Paris. The Psalter of Henry VI (BL, Cotton MS Domitian A. XVII), made in Paris c.1405–10, was in England by the 1430s. As in the vast majority of manuscript illustrations, the pyx is depicted here (f. 12v) as covered by a broad, circular, tent-like canopy. Another Parisian manuscript from the early 1400s shows, beneath this canopy, something strikingly reminiscent of the sacrament house at Milton abbey (fig. 3).19 It is unclear whether the tabernacle in the miniature is resting on the reredos or suspended beneath the cloth canopy, and it might be a combination of the two. Either way, it lends valuable support to any identification of the Milton abbey object with the reservation of the sacrament. A rather later manuscript in New York seems to depict an openwork, cylindrical pyx cover, this time more clearly suspended beneath the canopy. It is very different from the Wells example in its details, and the image of a much later date, but the essential nature of the object may be similar (fig. 4).20 The most frequently cited English manuscript illustration of a hanging pyx is that depicted in the mortuary roll of Abbot Islip, showing the high altar of Westminster Abbey.21 Like the pyx cover described in the Rites of Durham, the Islip roll dates to the eve of the Dissolution. The pyx cover shown in the Islip roll is in the form of a triple crown, beneath which hang the falls of the pyx cloth. This too has given rise to a number of more recent reproductions, and was the form favoured by Ninian Comper, the father of the late-Victorian hanging-pyx revival.22 The belief that the hanging pyx was the ordinary means of reserving the sacrament in England through much of the middle ages has become well established and finds support

17 See ‘Milton Abbas’, in An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Dorset, Volume 3: Central, London, 1970, pp. 182–200 (pl. 167). 18 It is referred to as a ‘tabernacle’ in Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset, 5, 1888, p. 97 (at which point it was mounted in the south transept), and a ‘pyx-shrine’ in the Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Dorset. 19 BL, Egerton MS 1070, f. 54v (Hours of René of Anjou). 20 New York, Morgan Library, MS M.632, f. 100v. This book of hours was also made in Paris, but c.1520. Although only the foot of the object can be seen beneath the canopy, an image of the Mass in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS A 417 (made in Paris c.1500), may show a hanging-pyx cover similar to that at Wells. Alternatively, it may be the foot of the pyx itself (f. 37v). The manuscript also contains an allegorical account, complete with miniature, of Noah’s Ark as a type of the church (f. 11v). 21 Westminster Abbey Muniments, Islip roll. See also M. Payne, ‘The Islip Roll Re-examined’, Antiquaries Journal, 97, 2017, pp. 231– 60 (at p. 251 and pls 6, 11). 22 Comper first re-introduced the hanging pyx in the Lady chapel of St Matthew’s Church, Westminster in 1892. Although most of Comper’s décor remains, the pyx does not. A surviving example, made in 1912 and based on that in the Islip roll, can be seen at the nearby Grosvenor chapel.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 177

09/07/2021 09:46

178 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

in the written record, as well as in survivals of the objects themselves (as opposed to their covers or canopies). The presence of a hanging pyx at Glastonbury abbey is attested to at the end of the eleventh century, when it narrowly avoided destruction in Abbot Thurstan’s notorious attack.23 Indeed, some authorities suggest that the later example at Wells came from Glastonbury, but without evidence. (Here it is wise to be cautious: there was a romantic fashion in the nineteenth century for attributing any remarkable or mysterious local antiquity to tragic Glastonbury, the Wells clock being a case in point.)24 A monk named Baldwin made a golden hanging pyx for St Albans at the end of the twelfth century.25 One Henry ‘de Cicestre’ donated a hanging pyx for use at the high altar of Exeter cathedral in 1277, making it roughly contemporary with the putative pyx cover at Wells.26 One thing that is striking about many of the later medieval examples of covers for these pyxes is their tripartite nature, and it is here that we can draw a link with the earlier object at Wells, comprised as it is of three registers of open tracery. Each level is distinct. The lowest level of each panel contains two slightly pointed trefoil-headed lights within the rectangular frame; the middle level contains two lancets beneath a central quatrefoil, all within a pointed arch; the upper level is the simplest, showing a pair of plain pointed lancets within each panel frame. These tracery patterns are all common enough, but it is nonetheless notable that they all appear on the cathedral’s great west front, finished around 1250. The middle-level panels in particular mirror the design of the cathedral’s central west portal. Two pairs of pointed lancets then flank the west window at triforium level, with pairs of trefoil-headed lights beyond. Paul Binski has cited the west front’s multitude of quatrefoils and trefoil niches as stylistic allusions to the see’s Anglo-Saxon past; conscious evocations of antiquity and authority.27 The west front itself, of course, divides into three main registers: the earthly level complete with Old and New Testament scenes (in quatrefoils); the broad middle band of saints, bishops, kings, and other worthies; and the celestial level top-and-centre showing Christ in Glory with the apostles and angels. Carolyn Malone has made the point that, amongst the many types of Christ and the Church in the west front’s quatrefoils, the most common is that of Noah.28 An unpublished paper by Patrick Mitchell picked up the significance more clearly, linking the scheme

23 D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of Its Development from the Times of St Dunstan to the fourth Lateran Council, 940–1216, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1963, p. 115. 24 Wall, Old English Parish, p. 43; Cox and Harvey, English Church Furniture, p. 45. The likelihood that Wells’ own pre-Reformation furnishings might remain there in storage is surely greater than that a pyx canopy from Glastonbury survived the dissolution and was moved to the cathedral. For the spurious identification of the Wells clock with that at Glastonbury, see G. Smeeton, ‘History of Clocks and Watches’, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, 11, 1828, p. 435. The myth persisted into the twentieth century. 25 Knowles, Monastic Order, p. 538. 26 R. W. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History, Cambridge, 2009, p. 394. 27 P. Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300, New Haven, CT, 2004, pp. 109–18. 28 C. M. Malone, Façade as Spectacle: Ritual and Ideology at Wells Cathedral, Leiden, 2004, p. 56.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 178

09/07/2021 09:46

chap ter 13 |the thirteent h- c ent ury pyx c over at w el l s c at hed r al   |   179

specifically to Hugh of St Victor’s treatise De arca Noe.29 Hugh is by no means the only exegete to draw on the fact that, in his instructions to Noah, God commanded that the ark be built of ‘lower, middle, and upper decks’ (Genesis 6:16). For Hugh, these ‘three storeys signify the three ranks of believers that are in the church, whereof the first have commerce with the world, albeit lawfully, the second are fleeing from it and forgetting it, and the third already have forgotten it, and they are near to God’, as well as the fact that ‘each of us has in himself three wills, whereof the first is carnal, the second natural, and the third spiritual’.30 Later they allude to the ‘three words’ and the ‘three trees’, of which ‘the first is that material tree which the Lord brought out of the earth at the beginning, [the second] is the Lord Jesus Christ … planted in the midst of his church … The third tree is the tree of life … namely the wisdom of God, the fruit whereof is the fruit of the blessed angels’.31 So, the three-storied ark is a ‘pillar’ and a ‘tree’, and ‘the figure of a spiritual building that corresponds to Christ’s whole person’: the one who sits on a throne ‘high and lifted up’.32 More straightforward trinitarian references, of course, are too obvious to labour. Several modern scholars have then traced the connections in medieval imagination between Noah’s ark and that other ark, also built of wood to specific divine instructions in the Old Testament, namely the Ark of the Covenant. The two are inexorably linked. Their ‘shapes and significance’ are, as Andreina Contessa has stated, interrelated in both the Bible and its ‘exegetical and visual interpretations’.33 Mary Carruthers has noted that ‘the double understanding of arca … as both the Ark of Noah and the Ark of the Covenant’ is clearly set out in art as early as the seventh century, citing an image of the flood in the Ashburnham Pentateuch.34 These linguistic connections were not limited in medieval England to those with access to Latin. In his fourteenth-century poem Cleanness – in which ‘the shadow of the Mass lies behind every exemplum’ – the Gawain Poet repeatedly uses the terms ‘kystes’ and ‘coferes’ to make ‘connections between the Temple vessels, Noah’s Ark, and containers for the Host’.35 Like Noah’s ark, the Temple home of the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem was to be tripartite – thrice over, in fact. First, the Temple was the innermost of three structures, surrounded first by the court of the Levites and then by the 29 P. Mitchell, ‘Wells West Front and Noah’s Ark: A Figure of the Church’ (unpublished manuscript in Wells cathedral library). See also M. Roberts, ‘Noah’s Ark’, Report of the Friends of Wells Cathedral (for 1973), pp. 10–14. Hugh’s influence in the scheme of the west front is also picked up by Malone, Façade as Spectacle (see p. 11); and his importance for thirteenth-century creators of art is explored by Binski, Becket’s Crown, pp. 60–65. See also, C. Rudolph, The Mystic Ark: Hugh of St Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge, 2014, especially on the dangers of overstating Hugh’s influence in relation to images of the ark (at pp. 80–85). 30 Hugh of St Victor, ‘Noah’s Ark: 1 (De Arca Noe Morali)’, in Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. a Religious of CSMV, intro. A. Squire, OP, Eugene, OR, 2009, 1:14, 1:17 (pp. 64, 70). 31 Hugh of St Victor, ‘Noah’s Ark’, 2:12 (p. 89). 32 Hugh of St Victor, ‘Noah’s Ark’, 1:7 (p. 52). Elsewhere, Hugh says that Christ has been placed ‘in the middle of the Church (in medio Ecclesiae)’, and that ‘just as ‘the ark leans on the central pillar’, so ‘the church leans on Christ’’: B. T. Coolman, The Theology of Hugh of St Victor: An Interpretation, Cambridge, 2010, p. 107. The quotations are from Hugh’s Libellus. The phrase in medio ecclesiae is often used by medieval authors to signify the place of the rood in a church building. 33 A. Contessa, ‘Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant in Spanish and Sephardic Medieval Manuscripts’, in Between Judaism and Christianity: Art Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel-Neher, ed. K. Kogman-Appel and M. Meyer, Leiden, 2009, pp. 171–89 (at p. 171). 34 M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge, 2008, p. 43. The Ashburnham Pentateuch is BNF, MS n.a.l. 2334. 35 E. Campbell, The Gawain Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition, Kalamazoo, MI, 2018, p. 130. The first quotation, cited by Campbell, belongs to Anna Baldwin, and is taken from ‘Sacramental Perfection in Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness’, in Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature: From the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century, ed. P. Boitani and A. Torti, Tubingen, 1988, pp. 125–40 (at p. 138).

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 179

09/07/2021 09:46

18 0  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

great court of the people. Secondly, the chambers built against the walls of the Temple were three stories high. Finally, within the Temple itself, it was necessary to pass first through the vestibule, and then the main room or holy place (heykal), before reaching the sancta sanctorum.36 Conrad Rudolph has sounded an important note of caution against overestimating the influence of Hugh of St Victor’s treatise specifically on artistic representations of Noah’s ark, and he is right to do so. Throughout the middle ages, a wide variety of iconographical models co-exist, sometimes within the same manuscript.37 The ark’s use by Hugh and others as a model of mnemonic construction is one reason: pedagogical utility is of more immediate importance there than literal fidelity to the biblical pattern. Ambiguity and occasional contradiction in biblical language is another, licencing varietas in interpretation. Medieval minds were more than capable of collapsing, extending, and complicating metaphors and images, without undermining their fundamental scriptural foundation. And so it is that Hugh of St Victor can make so much of the ark’s three-storied construction in parts of his treatise and discard it in others. Similarly, just because the ark was not depicted consistently by the makers of images, does not mean that individual depictions carried no particular meaning or resonance. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that depictions of either scriptural ark could display conscious fidelity to the biblical description in one aspect and depart from it, apparently deliberately, in another. God’s instructions for the construction of the Ark of the Covenant, the Temple, and the ark of Noah, all point to four-sided, rectangular creations. Before the thirteenth century, however, depictions of the main body of Noah’s ark as a cylindrical, three-storied, tower-like structure were common enough. A series of sculptural representations in the Sainte-Chapelle bear, perhaps predictably, more than a passing resemblance to the Anastasis in Jerusalem, and this ‘new Temple’ may indeed be the inspiration behind this style of ark more generally. An English version by William de Brailes of c.1250 can be seen in a manuscript now in the Walters Art Museum (fig. 5).38 In this example the three stories each consist of tall open arcades through which the ark’s inhabitants can be seen. Although very badly worn, enough remains of the depiction of the ark on the west front of Wells cathedral to make clear its striking similarity to that in the Walters manuscript (fig. 6). Three circular stories of open arcading offered a readily recognisable form of Noah’s ark in mid-thirteenth-century Wells.39 The Ark of the Covenant is more routinely depicted as a box-like structure in line with the biblical description, but not universally so. In a French manuscript from after 1246, the depiction may be more reminiscent of the form of Noah’s ark on Wells’ west front.40 It is 36 I Kings 6; II Chronicles 3–4. For one insightful exploration of the exegetical relationship of the three-part structure of Solomon’s Temple to the Church and Christian church buildings, see H. L. Kessler, ‘Sacred Light from Shadowy Things’, Codex Aquilarensis, 32, 2016, pp. 237–70 (especially pp. 250–52). Kessler also cites Thiofrid of Echternach (d. 1110), for whom ‘the Ark of the Covenant was mystically the Body of Christ’ (p. 249). 37 See Rudolph, Mystic Ark, pp. 80–85. 38 Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.106, f. 2. 39 Whilst it seems to be a popular thirteenth-century form, its history in England goes back much further. The depiction of Noah’s Ark in the Caedmon manuscript of c.1000 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, p. 66: from Christ Church, Canterbury), has been cited by a number of scholars in this regard. 40 New York, Morgan Library, MS M.730, f. 127 (Psalter-Hours of Guiluys de Boisleux).

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 180

09/07/2021 09:46

chap ter 13 |the thirteent h- c ent ury pyx c over at w el l s c at hed r al   |   181

unclear whether the object depicted is meant to be four- or six-sided (the placement of the carrying staves suggests it is probably the former, distorted by multiple perspective), but the initial impression is hexagonal. In any event, the ark consists of three stories of open tracery. In another image on the same page, depicting Absalom offering a sacrificial lamb (II Samuel 15:12), the lamb stands on a column within a three-sided arcaded tabernacle of trefoil-headed arches. Whilst by no means conclusive, the evidence presented here suggests that a wooden, columnar, three-storied shrine, raised ‘high and lifted up’, might have offered an especially suitable housing for Christ’s sacramental body in late thirteenth-century Wells. Its materials and design would have evoked a network of allusion to the divinely-designed arks of the old covenant: tabernacles of God’s presence, types of his Church, and storehouses of salvation. They might even have referenced a mnemonic of salvation history inscribed in images on the cathedral’s great west front. This seems sufficient at least to acquit St John Hope of the charge of rashness in his suggestion to the Antiquaries in 1897, and to rescue Mr Dearmer from his trap. Whilst the matter remains unsettled, and probably always will, the identification of the Wells object with a hanging pyx cover remains the most convincing available, and offers a further potential insight into the intellectual and conceptual sophistication of thirteenth-century ecclesiastical art. ‘Make him an ark of the covenant, make him an ark of the flood; no matter what you call it, it is all one house of God’.41

41 Hugh of St Victor, ‘Noah’s Ark’, 1:5 (p. 51).

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 181

09/07/2021 09:46

182 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

Fig. 1. Hanging pyx cover (?), Wells Cathedral, late thirteenth century. Credit: Beth Williamson

Fig. 2. Wells Cathedral crypt, engraved John le Keux after George Cattermole in J. Britton, The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Wells (London, 1824), plate XI. Credit: public domain

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 182

09/07/2021 09:46

c hap ter 13 |the thirtee nt h- c ent ury pyx c over at w el l s c at hed r al   |   183

Fig. 3. Book of Hours attrib. Egerton Master (BL, MS Egerton 1070, f. 54v), Paris, c.1410. Credit: © The British Library Board

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 183

09/07/2021 09:46

18 4 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 184

09/07/2021 09:46

opposite: Fig. 4. Book of Hours (Morgan Library, MS M.632, f. 100v), Paris, c.1520. Credit: © The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York

right: Fig. 5. Noah’s Ark by William de Brailes (Walters Art Museum, MS W.106, f. 2), Oxford, c.1250. Credit: The Walters Art Museum

Fig. 6. Noah’s Ark, West Front of Wells Cathedral; mid thirteenth century. Credit: Beth Williamson

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 185

09/07/2021 09:47

Fragments from Wisdom’s House: The Lady chapel Juxta Claustrum at Wells Cathedral Matthew M. Reeve

W

h e n I a r r i v e d at Ca m b r i d g e in 1998 as a graduate student I proposed to Paul Binski that I work on the early Gothic sculpture of Wells cathedral for my doctoral dissertation. Paul’s response was suitably enthusiastic: ‘that’s a great idea!’ he said, and it was. But new scholarship had just come out and the sculpture itself was far more disparate, damaged, and in many cases completely unstudied than I then knew, which posed serious challenges to a student aiming to complete a PhD in three brisk years, and so my doctoral work took a different path. This essay is offered to Paul with thanks for excellent advice that it took me some fifteen years to take. It focusses on the sculpture that quite certainly decorated the Lady chapel juxta claustrum at Wells. Built upon the site of a Saxo-Norman chapel just south of the cathedral in successive phases during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, it was destroyed and rebuilt in 1477 by Bishop Stillington (1465–91). From that time, the subjects of this paper – the twenty-four or so carved spandrels that decorated its eastern chancel – became disjecta membra and were used as infill beneath Stillington’s chapel and in the cathedral, while others were applied to buildings in the cathedral close and beyond.1 To complicate matters, Stillington’s chapel was, in turn, razed in 1552. But even in their fragmentary state, the spandrels are extraordinary survivals of thirteenth-century Gothic sculpture, and their range of imagery, from hagiography to foliage to Latin beast fables, draws from sources that are equally ‘high’ and ‘low’, sacred and ludic. New evidence has come to light in recent years, making a reconsideration of these important sculptures both timely and appropriate.

1

I am pleased to thank Prof. Rachel Fulton-Brown, Dr Stuart Harrison, Prof. Julian Luxford, Prof. Jill Mann, Dr Jerry Sampson, Prof. Kenneth Varty, and Prof. Paul Wackers for their help and advice with this ongoing project. The archaeological survey of the sculpture at Wookey on scaffolds was made possible by a generous grant from the Henry Moore Foundation. The author plans a more extended account of the Lady chapel sculpture in due course.

[ 186 ]

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 186

09/07/2021 09:47

ch apt er 1 4  |  f r agment s f ro m w i sd o m’s ho use  |   187

The evidence As noted above, following the destruction of the Lady chapel to make way for Bishop Stillington’s new chapel, some of the spandrels were reemployed as infill in the cathedral or beneath the chapel itself. Warwick Rodwell’s 1979 excavations unearthed spandrels featuring St Eustace and a seated angel (Fig. 1a). Others were clearly used in other contexts: J.T. Irvine discovered the fox, crane, and St George spandrels around 1870 in the area around the west cloister, and a cache of fragments from seven or eight spandrels was rediscovered in the cathedral lapidarium in 1984 (Fig. 1b, c).2 In 2014 two new fragments – featuring animals conducting the liturgy and Daniel in the Lion’s Den – were discovered walled-up within the west cloister during excavations, expanding the total corpus at the cathedral to fourteen spandrels (Fig 2a, b). They are published here for the first time. Ten further spandrels have been reset into the projecting porch of Mellifont abbey, an eighteenthcentury Gothic Revival mansion at Wookey (built c.1730–45) (Fig 3a, b). Mellifont is near to the cathedral and directly beside a former palace of the bishops of Bath and Wells built initially by Bishop Jocelyn (1206–42) around 1230.3 Mellifont includes substantial medieval fabric as spolia, and it has been suggested that it, as well as the spandrels, originated from the lost bishop’s palace next door..4 In light of a recent examination of the Wookey fragments on scaffolding in 2016, it now seems more likely that they originated along with the other fragments in the cathedral Lady chapel. Three points bear this out. The Wells and Wookey spandrels are precisely the same size (maximum dimensions of 41.7 ×  17.7 in.), and with analogous mouldings; they were all carved from the same fine-grained Doulting stone; and now that better photographs are available, it is clear that the Wookey and Wells spandrels are intimately related stylistically, thus suggesting that they were carved in the same campaign, were cut from the same templates, and originated from the same building. Fortunately, the broad outlines of the form and development of the Lady chapel have been established (Fig. 4a, b). Contemporary with the building of the cathedral in the 1180s and 1190s, the Saxo-Norman chapel was restored and joined to the new east cloister. It has been assumed – rightly, I believe – that the Wells spandrels (and those at Wookey, I suggest) belong to the three-bay chancel addition (internal measurements of 39.37 ×  19.68 ft) built eastward from the aisled Lady chapel during the thirteenth century. Locating the spandrels within this space is not difficult.5 Putting the current corpus of twenty-four Wells and Wookey fragments together gives us at least 83.46 linear feet, which fits easily into the 100 linear feet of the three walls of the chancel. This confirms, as we should expect, that the current corpus of spandrels is incomplete. The Wells chapel was one of a list of Lady chapels added to great churches in England over the course of the later twelfth and 2

W. Rodwell, Wells Cathedral: Excavations and Structural Studies, 1978–93, 2 vols, London, 2001, pp. 173–7. To date, the spandrel here identified as St George has been described as the conquest of Jerusalem. I will discuss its iconography in a forthcoming essay. 3 J. Hasler, ‘The Mystery of Mellifont Abbey’, Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries, 356, 2002, pp. 137–40. 4 In the 1990s Jerry Sampson suggested that, despite deriving from the same workshop as the Lady chapel spandrels, ‘there is nothing to indicate that the spandrels have come from Wells Cathedral’, and that their iconography suggested a ‘secular’ setting in the Wookey palace (Rodwell, Wells Cathedral, vol. 2, p. 437). 5 Rodwell, Wells Cathedral, vol. 1, p. 167.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 187

09/07/2021 09:47

188 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

thirteenth centuries.6 It stands in a sequence of distinct but attached, rectangular Marian chapels at Glastonbury (1184), Bristol (c.1220), Tewkesbury (c.1220), Peterborough (1280), St Albans (c.1300), and elsewhere.7 Richly carved spandrels forming continuous, low dados were a feature of many of these chapels, suggesting that they may have formed part of a broader typology. These chapels may well descend from the eleventh-or twelfth-century Lady chapel at Walsingham founded by Richeldis de Faverches, of which little is now known.8 But a particularly intimate connection with Wells can be made with the Elder Lady chapel at Bristol which bore an historiated dado of carved spandrels over an arcade that originally decorated two walls of the chapel, itself built by masons from Wells around 1220 (to which I return below) (fig. 5).9 The patronage of the chapel has been – rightly, I believe – ascribed to the Bytton family.10 Under Bishop William Bytton I (1248–64), his brother John (who served as provost), and his nephew William II (1267–74), the Lady chapel became a site for the burial of the Bytton family, making them the most likely patrons.11 Bytton’s episcopate was defined by lengthy and expensive wranglings in the Roman curia that halted building works on the body of the church, thus suggesting that the Lady chapel was paid for by the Bytton family rather than the chapter as a family chapel in all but name.12 But one difficulty with considering our spandrels as part of a single family commission is the heterogenous nature of style employed across them. Some of the spandrels employ the stiff-leaf foliage designs developed in the nave capitals and north porch and then refined in the work on the west facade, probably completed in the 1220s–1240s, while others employ a ‘naturalistic’ form of foliage more in keeping with the chapterhouse undercroft and staircase and the bishop’s chapel. Noting these seemingly ‘advanced’ motifs, Pamela Tudor-Craig suggested that the spandrels hailed from the c.1276 expansion of the aisles of the Lady chapel.13 While a second campaign is surely possible, against this conjecture is the common archaeology of the spandrels and a series of motifs that are found throughout. On top of this, there is a fact increasingly noted in discussions of sculpture and imagery at Wells and in West Country Gothic generally: namely, that style and motifs had an unexpected longevity within

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Despite much attention to the subject, a careful overview of Lady chapels in medieval England is now needed. Existing literature includes P. Draper, ‘“Seeing that it was Done in all the Noble Churches in England”’, in Medieval Architecture and Its Intellectual Context: Studies in Honour of Peter Kidson, ed. E. Fernie and P. Crossley, London, 1990, pp. 137–42; M. F. Hearn and L. Willis, ‘The Iconography of the Lady Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral’, Medieval Art and Architecture at Salisbury Cathedral, ed. L. Keen and T. Cocke, Leeds, 1996, pp. 40–5; Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII, ed. T. Tatton-Brown and R. Mortimer, Woodbridge, 2003; T. Hopkinson-Ball, ‘The Cultus of Our Lady at Glastonbury Abbey: 1184–1539’, Downside Review, 130, 2012, pp. 3–53; G. Sumpter, ‘Lady Chapels and the Manifestation of Devotion to Our Lady in Medieval England’, PhD dissertation, University of Leicester, 2008. M. Thurlby, ‘The Lady Chapel of Glastonbury’, Antiquaries Journal, 75, 1995, pp. 107–70; R. K. Morris, ‘The Gothic Church: Architectural History’, in Tewkesbury Abbey: History, Art and Architecture, ed. R. K. Morris and R. Shoewmith, Little Logaston, 2003, pp. 109–131 (at pp. 109–12). Hearn and Willis, ‘Iconography’. The east wall of the chapel was inserted in the late thirteenth century remodeling of the Lady chapel. The archaeology indicates that the east wall likely did not bear spandrels. My thanks to Jon Cannon for clarifying this point. With a provisional date of c.1250–55 offered by Rodwell and Sampson: see Rodwell, Wells Cathedral, vol. 1, p. 195. Ibid., p. 195. J. Sampson, Wells West Front: Construction, Sculpture, Conservation, Stroud, 1998, p. 57. P. Tudor-Craig, ‘Wells Sculpture’, in Wells Cathedral: A Celebration, ed. L. S. Colchester, Wells, 1982, pp. 102–31 (at p. 122).

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 188

09/07/2021 09:47

chapt er 1 4  |  f r agment s f ro m w i sd o m’s ho use  |   189

masonic traditions that stubbornly refuse to adhere to later teleologies of style.14 Rather than suggesting different dates for the sculpture, the evidence would seem to suggest that either multiple hands were employed (which can certainly be assumed), or perhaps that a range of different sources was employed. The closest analogues can be found at Salisbury cathedral in its two major commissions of the 1260s: the tomb of Giles de Bridport (after 1262) which has both stiff leaf and naturalistic foliage populating its figural spandrels, and in the Old Testament spandrels and foliate sculpture in the chapterhouse (complete by 1266), which likewise blends both stiff-leaf and naturalistic forms.15 As this suggests, there is every reason to privilege the archaeological evidence and put these together in a program in the Lady chapel c.1260. Turning to the imagery, the surviving fragments indicate that the imagery was deliberately miscellaneous – a mixture of hagiography, Latin beast fables, battling dragons, conjoined birds and beasts, running along the chapel dado. In this, it follows the earlier tradition of English Marian chapels, including those at Bristol and Worcester from the first half of the thirteenth century, which possess a similar range of seemingly disconnected motifs.16 Miscellaneous though it was, the imagery at Wells was not entirely without logic (a point I return to). It is far beyond the bounds of this paper to consider the imagery in its entirety, so I will instead focus on two specific examples that have been recently added to the Lady chapel corpus. Deriving from Wells and Wookey respectively, both represent one of the dominant types of imagery in the Lady chapel: satirical representations derived from the Latin beast fable, and the story of Reynard the Fox in particular, as represented in the Ysengrimus and the Roman de Reynard. Recently discovered at Wells is a fragmentary spandrel featuring, from left to right, a cow or perhaps a pig playing the bells within a micro-architectural setting and a larger bipedal animal with a sparge of holy water (fig. 2a). Even in its partial state, the spandrel manifestly represents a mock-liturgical ceremony enacted by animals in the tradition of the Latin beast fables. Such imagery had an important local context on the exterior north door of the Lady chapel at Glastonbury abbey around 1184.17 One possible reading of the Wells spandrel is suggested by the Ysengrimus which features a grand parody of liturgical music enacted by pigs that begins, as here, with the ringing of bells. Guided by the abbess sow Salaura, pig musicians are an apocalyptic sign of evil, and the liturgical mob are responsible not only for vulgar and excessive feasting (their bellies are presented as shrines), but vulgar and excessive musical celebration. As Wilifried Schouwink famously suggested, whenever pigs, be they human or animal, lay their cloven trotters on the liturgy of the church, the result can only be apocalyptic chaos.18 But the imagery can be most closely compared to the funeral of the fox from the Roman de Renart. To avoid a gambling debt, 14 M. Thurlby, ‘The Elder Lady Chapel at St Augustine’s Bristol, and Wells Cathedral’, in ‘Almost the Richest City’: Bristol in the Middle Ages, ed. L. Keen, Leeds, 1997, pp. 31–40 (at p. 37); M. M. Reeve, ‘The Capital Sculpture of Wells Cathedral: Patrons, Masons and the Margins of English Gothic Architecture’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 163, 2010, pp. 72–109. 15 M. E. Roberts, ‘The Tomb of Gilles de Bridport in Salisbury Cathedral’, Art Bulletin, 65, 1983, pp. 559–86 (at pp. 565–71); S. Brown, Sumptuous and Richly Adorn’d. The Decoration of Salisbury Cathedral, London: The Stationary Office, 1999, 181–6. 16 U. Engel, Worcester Cathedral: An Architectural History, trans. H. Heltay, Chichester, 2007, pp. 137–8. 17 My thanks to Jerry Sampson for discussing this with me. 18 W. Schouwink, ‘When Pigs Consecrate a Church: Parodies of Liturgical Music in the Ysengrimus and some Medieval Analogies,’ Reinardus, 5, 1992, pp. 171–81.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 189

09/07/2021 09:47

19 0 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

Reynard feigns death and an elaborate funeral procession is enacted by the other animals involving music and bell ringing, sparging, etc. Reynard comes to as he is lowered into the grave, just in time to jump out, steal the cock and run off. If this is the case, we might expect this imagery on the other side of the spandel now missing, or perhaps on a different spandrel altogether. An early analogue for the scene is provided by the sixteenth century etchings of the capital sculpture from Strasbourg.19 A more extensive account is found in the well-known bas-de-page marginalia of the office of the dead in Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS 102 (of c.1300), in which several pages play out the elaborate funeral of Reynard the Fox. If this is the correct identification, it would be the earliest example of this iconography in England.20 A second, and closely related example comes from Wookey. Although badly weathered, still readily visible from left to right is an animal wearing a mitre lying in bed with his head resting on a pillow. In the centre is another animal carrying a staff with a pack tied around his neck, and a third figure to the right. While the image can be superficially compared to the later iconography of the Fox Physician in the Smithfield Decretals of c.1340 (BL, Royal MS 10.E.IV, f. 54), the sick animal does not have a mitre and his attendant does not have a pack tied around his neck.21 I am not aware of any single source for the image in medieval art, but the image is very closely related to a scene in the Ysengrimus (Book IV). 22 Ysengrimus the wolf declares his intention to go on pilgrimage (in actuality the cunning wolf feigns his interest to join a bunch of pilgrims in order to eat them). Knowing this, the pilgrims invite him in and serve him a feast of wolf heads that so terrifies the wolf that he falls back unconscious. ‘Alas this bishop is pale! He has the colour of a sick man! I hope he’s not ill. He either has, or pretends to have, the chills of a five-day fever’ cries Reynard, knowing that they had bested the wolf.23 As a clerical satire, the wolf is called ‘the bishop’ or ‘abbot’ in the text, which explains why he bears a mitre. If this identification is convincing, we have before us the moment of comeuppance represented in stone. The spandrels represent some of the earliest images from the Ysengrimus or the Roman de Renart in English art. The Ysengrimus was clearly known at Wells from at least c.1200, when a scene was carved in one of the nave capitals just west of the crossing, suggesting that its clever, sardonic wisdom was au courant for the Wells canons.24 Whether the sculptures at Wells descend from a single illuminated Reynard (which is certainly possible) or from a different source altogether is not central to my point: the early thirteenth century saw the wisdom of the Latin beast fable penetrate various aspects of medieval culture from sermon exempla to the bestiary, and of course representational art. The wolf ’s funeral also featured in Odo of Cheriton’s Animal Fables, in which ‘on the death of some rich plunderer or usurer, an abbot or prior’ calls together an assembly of the beasts – i.e, of those who live bestially’; while Guillaume le Clerc’s c.1210 Bestiary description of the fox directly employs 19 K. Varty, Reynard, Renart, Reinaert and Other Foxes in Medieval England: The Iconographic Evidence, Amsterdam, 1999, pp. 159, 161 and fig. 150. 20 Ibid., pp. 139–48. 21 Ibid., pp. 182–8 and fig. 168. 22 Ysengrimus. Text with Translation, Commentary and Introduction, ed. and trans. J. Mann, Leiden, 1987, pp. 364–419. 23 Ibid., p. 382 (lines 360–4). 24 K. Varty, Reynard the Fox, Leicester, 1967, p. 37.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 190

09/07/2021 09:47

chapt er 1 4  |  f r agment s f ro m w i sd o m’s ho use  |   191

the example of Reynard the Fox rather than the conventional wisdom of foxes from the Physiologus or bestiary recensions.25 The teaching and learning of the bestiary and fable texts were of course the province of clerical culture. Aside their inherent allegorical and religious interest, fables served as exemplars for the study of especially Latin grammar and rhetoric within the school curriculum that raised many of Wells’ canons. Students not only practiced Latin word play through the study of fables, but they also wrote summaries i.e. prose translations (abbreviatio) and allegorical commentaries (amplificatio). Amplificatio allowed for active interpretation of texts and the creation of extended allegorical meanings for contemporary society.26 Emblematically, the intention of the twelfth century elegiac Romulus (which purports to be from the Roman emperor Romulus to his son, Tibernius) is ‘to increase your laughter and duly sharpen your character’.27 But the new place of the Latin beast fable in thirteenth-century art was not without its detractors. Conservatives such as Gauthier de Coincy (1177–1236) could bemoan how his audience prefers stories of Reynard besting Ysengrin over improving stories of the lives of saints (‘What pleases the ears are long fables and short sermons … I want to follow the prophet rather than the poet’), and in his Miracles de la Vierge (1233) he would critique churchmen for failing to decorate their altars with divine images but enlivening the walls of their homes with images of Ysengrimus. 28 In light of this, it is significant that such anti-clerical satires involving animals (and there are others among the spandrels) form the very earliest marginal imagery in medieval books, and they hailed from the elevated setting of the papal curia during Innocent III (c.1200), as Carl Nordenfalk pointed out long ago.29 Whimsical and clever though they might be, they, like the Latin beast fables to which they were associated, were the products of the Latin schools where the clerical viewers of Wells would have first encountered them.

Interpretation I have noted already that spandrels forming low dados such as those at Wells were a feature of English Marian chapels from the late twelfth century. These chapels extended an earlier tradition of historiated dados from the eleventh century – whether painted or carved – as a zone for allegorical imagery that commented on or ‘glossed’ imagery above or around it, or that commented upon the very functions of the space in which they are set.30 What 25 The Bestiary of Guillaume Le Clerc, trans. G. C. Druce, Ashford, 1936, pp. 42–3. N. Morgan, ‘Pictured Sermons in ThirteenthCentury England’, Tributes to Jonathan J. G. Alexander, ed. S. L’Engle and G. B. Guest, Turnhout, 2006, pp. 323–40. 26 E. Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers, Gainesville, FL, 2000, pp. 52, 77–8. 27 Ibid., p. 64. 28 J. Cerquiglini-Toulet, A New History of Medieval French Literature, trans. S. Preisig, Baltimore, 2011, pp. 78–9; C. Leniant, La Satire en France au Moyen Age, Paris, 1859, p. 141. See generally J. F. Flinn, ‘L’Iconographie du Roman du Reynart’, Aspects of the Medieval Animal Epic, ed. E. Rombouts, Leuven, 1975, pp. 257–64. 29 K. Nordenfalk, ‘Drolleries’, Burlington Magazine, 109, 1967, pp. 418, 420–1; and J. Wirth, Les Marges à Drôleries des Manuscrits Gothiques (1250–1350), Geneva, 2008. 30 J. Osborne, ‘The Dado Programme in Giotto’s Arena Chapel and its Italian Romanesque Antecedents’, Burlington Magazine, 145, 2003, pp. 361–5; idem, ‘The Dado as a Site of Meaning in Roman Mural Paintings ca. 1100’, in Roma e la Riforma gregoriana. Tradizioni e innovazioni artistiche (XI–XII secolo), ed. S. Romano and J. E. Julliard, Rome, 2007, pp. 275–88.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 191

09/07/2021 09:47

192 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

were these images commenting on, and what informed their miscellaneous character? While it would be hazardous to say much about a building whose key details are unknown (including its vaulting, wall painting and stained glass), we can reconstruct aspects of its function and liturgical topography from documentation. The main altar was naturally dedicated to the Virgin Mary whose image on the altar was surely the most prominent one in the chapel. Although we know nothing of this altar, it was certainly conceived in awareness of the famous miracle-working statue on the altar of the Lady chapel at nearby Glastonbury, apparently carved by Joseph of Arimathea at the insistence of the Archangel Gabriel.31 A life-sized head of the Virgin of c.1300 discovered during excavation has been associated with the Lady chapel, but this cannot now be confirmed.32 An altar to St Nicholas also existed in the chapel by 1301, and in the same years endowed Masses were performed for the souls of Edward I and Queen Margaret.33 And while we are not fortunate to have a written commentary on the Lady chapel juxta claustrum from the middle ages, an important local example is provided by two letters of c.1220 from Abbot David of St Augustine’s, Bristol, to the dean of Wells cathedral: ‘We most devoutly beg of your generosity for your servant L. to hew out the seven pillars for the house of Wisdom, that is to say, of the glorious Virgin, if it suits your convenience.’34 The subject of this letter is the Elder Lady chapel at Bristol, built or designed by a mason from Wells (possibly Adam Locke) (Fig. 5).35 Although generally cited to support the abundant stylistic connections between Bristol and Wells, this passage also provides an important clue in allegorizing the Lady chapel as the House of Wisdom from Proverbs 9:1: Sapientia aedificavit sibi domum, excidit columnas septem (‘Wisdom has built herself a house, she has hewn seven pillars’). Proverbs 9:1 of course had a long history in Christian exegesis. Understood to refer to Solomon in earlier exegesis or occasionally God the Father who built himself a virginal hall to house Christ (virginalem aulem), the image of Mary as the House of Wisdom became a commonplace of thinking on the Virgin Mary during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.36 According to Richard of St Victor and others, she is ‘the work of the wisdom of God or the Holy Spirit, who is the maker (artifex) of all things’. Richard goes on to put the following words in the mouth of the Virgin: ‘I will pour out doctrine as prophecy and will leave it to them who seek wisdom’.37 As the embodiment of Wisdom, the Virgin was the mistress of the Seven Liberal Arts in the medieval curriculum (the trivium and the quadrivium), which was allegorized as the Seven Virtues, and Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. This letter employed a trope that was readily understood by both men, and there is good reason to follow their lead in conceiving of these chapels in allegorical terms as houses of 31 Hopkinson-Ball, ‘Cultus of Our Lady’, pp. 14–21. 32 Rodwell, Wells Cathedral, vol. 1, p. 196; Tudor-Craig, ‘Wells Sculpture’, p. 122. 33 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Dean and Chapter of Wells, 2 vols, London, 1907–14, vol. 1, pp. 23, 165, 221, 379. 34 S. J. Boss, ‘Wisdom’s House: Abbot David’s Commissioning of the Elder Lady Chapel’, in The Medieval Art, Architecture and History of Bristol Cathedral: An Enigma Explored, ed. J. Cannon and B. Williamson, Woodbridge, 2011, pp. 61–9. 35 Thurlby, ‘The Elder Lady Chapel’. 36 Boss, ‘Wisdom’s House’, pp. 65–6. 37 R. Fulton Brown, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought, New York, 2018, pp. 257, 259, 288–9.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 192

09/07/2021 09:47

ch apt er 1 4  |  f r agment s f ro m w i sd o m’s ho use  |   193

Wisdom, architectural loci for, and even personifications of, the Virgin Mary.38 We glean something of the tradition of which our chapels are a part in a Parisian Bible moralisée (Paris, BNF, MS lat. 11560, f. 46) in which Wisdom directs the building of her house in the guise of an elite Gothic architect of the period (fig. 6).39 Mary’s command of the art of building, and its cognate disciplines in geometry and mathematics is referenced again in the late fifteenth-century Pynson ballad on the Lady chapel at Walsingham which suggests that the ‘artyfycers’ of the eleventh-or twelfth-century chapel knew neither ‘mesure ne mark’, nor ‘geometrye’ and so the chapel could not be built without divine intervention of the Virgin; she erected it herself overnight such that ‘eche parte conjoined sans fayle, Better than they coude conceive it in mynde’.40 At Thetford priory in the mid-thirteenth century, an artist was apparently visited by the Virgin three times, encouraging him to ask the Prior to erect a new Lady chapel on the north side of the church. Work began in timber, but at the artist’s urging (inspired by the Virgin), it was upgraded to stone. Seeking to endow the chapel with a Marian image, the miserly prior found an old wooden Madonna (doubtless a sedes sapientiae) which was then given to the painter to beautify with colour. In the process of colouring it, the painter discovered within the body of the statue a host of precious relics and a new and miraculous statue was made for the new Lady chapel.41 In architecture as in sculpture, the Virgin demands material upgrades from the pedestrian construction in wood to elaborate stone construction tricked out in vibrant colour. The Virgin Mary’s direct intervention in the construction of Marian architecture would have a long history, including the miraculous foundation of Sta Maria Maggiore in Rome, discussed recently by Lucy Donkin.42 But for my purposes, understanding the Wells chapel, and, perhaps other Lady chapels built before and after, as Houses of Wisdom, usefully glosses its extraordinarily miscellaneous imagery. To fully understand this, we must explore the imagery of Proverbs 9 evoked in the abbot’s letter. In it Wisdom prepares an elaborate meal with wine and sends her servants out to those in need of instruction to join her to dine and learn to leave their simple ways behind and walk in the path of wisdom (an obvious allegory of the Mass). Wisdom advises: ‘Whoever corrects a mocker invites insults / whoever rebukes the wicked incurs abuse. Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you / rebuke the wise and they will love you. Instruct the wise and they will be wiser still / teach the righteous and they will add to their learning.’ (Proverbs 9:7–9.) While Wisdom’s advice stands refreshingly abreast of contemporary moralities, it does offer a vital and supple gloss on the imagery the Lady chapel juxta claustrum. It was, to cite our dedicatee, a ‘cognitive fiction providing further inventive thought, for which the Virgin Mary frequently provided stimulus’.43 Blending exemplary images of the lives of the saints, anti-exemplary imagery 38 For other representations of the Temple of Wisdom in the history of architecture, see for example M. Fassler, ‘Allegorical Architecture in Scivias: Hildegard’s Setting for the Ordo Virtutum’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 67 (2014), pp. 317–78; T. Nickson, ‘Moral Edification at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge’, Architectural History, 48, 2005, pp. 49–68 (especially p. 63); A. Hertz, ‘Borromini, S. Ivo, Prudentius’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 48, 1989, pp. 150–7. 39 See P. Binski, ‘Working by Words Alone’: The Architect, Scholasticism and Rhetoric in Thirteenth-century France’, in Rhetoric Beyond Words, ed. M. Carruthers, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 14–52 (at p. 32). 40 For the text, see H. M. Gillett, Walsingham and Its Shrine, London, 1934, pp. 78–81. See most recently Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity, ed. D. Janes and G. Waller, Farnham, 2010. 41 T. Martin, The History and Town of Thetford, London, 1779, appendix 6. 42 L. Donkin, ‘Sta. Maria Maggiore and the Depiction of Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy’, Gesta, 57, 2018, pp. 225–55. 43 P. Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350, New Haven, CT, 2014, p. 196.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 193

09/07/2021 09:47

19 4 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

of animal musicians and liturgists behaving badly, comic but nevertheless moral imagery from the Latin beast fable, the imagery of the spandrels is readily interpreted as expressions of the Virgin’s wisdom in determining proper comportment, ethical conduct and behavior. Following the language of Proverbs 9, Mary/Wisdom – represented at the main altar, whose image must have stood above the level of the dado – presided over the meal in her House surrounded by metonymic images of her wisdom. Our imagery accords well with what E. R. Curtius and subsequently Mary Carruthers describe as the stylistic program of medieval artes, which, based on antique foundations, blended seria with ludus or ioca – i.e. serious things and things of duty (or sad things) with laughter and levity, or ‘play’.44 If I am correct in my speculations here, the Lady chapel juxta claustrum at Wells stood somewhere toward the end of this tradition of Lady chapels of which it and Bristol were a part. This tradition would change around 1300 when images derived from the life and miracles of the Virgin Mary replaced the allegorical representations I have discussed here. This occurs most extraordinarily in the Lady chapel at Ely (1321–49), where a grand (if miniature) series of spandrel figures recount the life and miracles of the Virgin. This new tradition of recounting the Virgin’s life and miracles in Marian chapels would continue in the patronage of wall paintings and inscriptions (1420–40) in the Lady chapel at St Albans abbey by Abbot John of Wheathampstede, and in the miracles of the Virgin in the Lady chapel at Winchester commissioned by Prior Thomas Silkstede (1498–1524), which were based in part upon the grisaille cycle of Marian images at Eton (Winchester and Eton were both based upon Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale).45 Paul Binski’s remarkable account of the Lady chapel at Ely revealed that the building was likewise built upon biblical prototypes, namely the House of Solomon in III Kings chapter 7, informed by the later medieval tradition of the Virgin inhabiting the throne of Solomon. It is a pleasure to offer here a brief account of what must have been an ancestor of the Ely Lady chapel, and to provide it with a new genealogy.

44 M. Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 2013, p. 141. 45 M. R. James, ‘The Sculptures of the Lady Chapel at Ely’, Archaeological Journal, 49, 1892, pp. 345–62; M. R. James and E. W. Tristram, ‘The Wall Paintings in Eton College Chapel and in The Lady Chapel of Winchester Cathedral’, Walpole Society, 17, 1928–9, pp. 1–44. M. Gill, ‘The Wall Paintings of Eton College Chapel: The Making of a Late Medieval Marian Cycle’, Making Medieval Art, ed. P. Lindley, Donington, 2003, pp. 173–201.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 194

09/07/2021 09:47

ch apt er 1 4  |  f r agment s f ro m w i sd o m’s ho use  |   195

1 b

1 a Fig. 1. Spandrels from Wells cathedral: 1a) St Eustace; 1b) fox and crane; 1c) St George

1 c

2 a

Fig. 2. Spandrels discovered in 2014: a) animals conducting the liturgy; b) Daniel in the Lions’ Den

2 b

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 195

09/07/2021 09:47

196 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

3 a

3 b

Fig. 3. 3a) spandrels reused as spolia on the eighteenth-century façade of Mellifont abbey, Wookey; 3b) animal pilgrimage

4 a

4 b

Fig. 4. 4a) Reconstruction of the Lady chapel juxta claustrum by Alan Rome; 4b) groundplan of the Lady chapel juxta claustrum (c.1260), from W. Rodwell, Wells Cathedral: Excavations and Structural Studies, 1978–93, 2 vols, London, 2001, vol. 1, figs 191b, 194

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 196

09/07/2021 09:47

chapt er 1 4  |  f r agment s f ro m w i sd o m’s ho use  |   197

Fig. 5. Interior of the Elder Lady chapel, Bristol cathedral. © The Francis Frith Collection

Fig. 6. BNF, MS lat. 11560, f. 46. Illustrating Proverbs 9:1: Wisdom directs her mason to hew out the Temple of Wisdom.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 197

09/07/2021 09:47

Musical Wit and Courtly Connections at Cogges Laura Slater

T

his paper explore s t h e c orb e l s carved with musicians found on the north side of the parish church of St  Mary at Cogges. The village of Cogges is today divided from the town of Witney in west Oxfordshire only by the floodplains of the river Windrush. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, St Mary’s performed a dual function, acting as a parochial church served by a secular priest and as a monastic church to a small alien priory. Cogges Priory was founded c.1103 as a dependent cell of the Benedictine abbey of Fécamp in Normandy. Making no pretensions to full conventual life, by the fourteenth century even its primary functions, as a centre for revenue collection and administration of Fécamp’s English estates, had long been transferred elsewhere.1 In 1324, the house contained only three monks.2 Formally suppressed in 1414, it was effectively abandoned in the final years of Edward III’s reign.3 Yet it was during this period of prolonged institutional decline that the most architecturally distinguished work on the church was completed. A lavishly decorated north chapel (fig. 1) was added to the church during the 1340s, probably a chantry chapel commemorating Lady Margaret Oddingsell. Its construction has been traditionally ascribed to her son, the courtier, soldier and major local landowner John, first Lord Grey of Rotherfield (d. 1359).4 Lady Margaret’s tomb, now displaced from

*

1 2 3 4

I owe Paul an incalculable intellectual debt, as someone who has guided me to think, write and above all look anew at medieval art and architecture. This essay, however, is offered in tribute to his kindness, good cheer, collegial support and enduring scholarly generosity. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant No. 669190), as part of the ‘Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures’ project. Cogges is the subject of an ongoing PhD dissertation by Nicola Lowe at Birkbeck College, University of London, and I am grateful to her for circulating an essay to be published in a volume of Courtauld Books Online (‘Monumental Marginalia: the Sculptured Frieze at Cogges’). Additional thanks are due to Dr Efthymios Rizos and Dr Sergey Minov for their photographic aid. J. Blair and J. M. Steane, ‘Investigations at Cogges, Oxfordshire, 1978–81: The Priory and Parish Church’, Oxoniensia, 47, 1982, pp. 37–125 (especially pp. 46, 51–2); ‘Alien Houses: The Priory of Cogges’, in A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 2, ed. William Page, London, 1907, pp. 161–2. Blair and Steane, ‘Cogges’, pp. 53–5. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., ‘Cogges’, pp. 91, 109. H. Summerson, ‘Grey, John, first Lord Grey of Rotherfield (1300–1359)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, online edn (accessed 01 October 2019). Nicola Lowe proposes an alternative patron for the chapel, but I will not anticipate her arguments here.

[ 198]

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 198

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 15 | mu sic al w i t and c o urt ly c o nnec t i o ns at c o gges  |   199

its original location, stands under the west bay of the chapel arcade.5 A recumbent female figure clad in the high-necked barbet and wimple associated with widows lies with her nowdamaged hands raised in prayer, flanked by angels and resting her feet on a lion. Her tomb chest is decorated with the symbols of the four evangelists, and blank shields set within cusped quatrefoils that hang from the necks of small grotesques. It is edged with small ballflowers. Ballflowers and quatrefoil flowers also decorate the internal soffits of the three traceried north windows of the chapel, one of which has now been filled in. Fragments of glass dating c.1325 to 1350 survive in the tracery of the east window, consisting of roundels painted with quatrefoil flowers and rosettes set against spiralling foliate designs.6 All the windows of the north chapel are noted in antiquarian records to have contained heraldic glass related to the ancestry and connections of the de Grey family, holders of the manor since 1245.7 The chapel walls were formerly decorated with now-lost paintings.8 A striking monumental frieze of beasts and monstrous hybrids (figs 1, 2, 3) runs continuously along the upper edge of the chapel walls, punctuated by corbels depicting men and animals playing musical instruments. The corbels extend into the north aisle, which was probably added to the church in the 1360s, as was its distinctive polygonal north-western corner tower.9 Both the liveliness of the sculpture and its pronounced musical element are paralleled elsewhere in contemporary Oxfordshire churches.10 John Blair and John M. Steane suggest the north aisle and tower were monastic work.11 While Cogges was a minor and impoverished house, the prior appointed in 1341, William Hamon, is a strong candidate to be credited with such an ambitious extension. An armorial shield of azure a chevron gules, a chief argent seems to have accompanied the inscription WILLELMUS HAMON MONACHUS DE FESCHAMPE ET PRIOR DE COGGES formerly in the east window of the chancel, perhaps glazed in collaboration with John de Grey’s widow Avice (née Marmion) in the 1360s.12 During this period, she held the manor of Cogges in dower.13 Indicative of enduring harmonious relations between the major lay patrons of Cogges and its last prominent monastic prior, I would first suggest that the elaborate c.1340 to 1360 Decorated work at Cogges can be placed in the context of shared connections at court. John de Grey was a career soldier, serving regularly in France and Scotland almost as soon as he came of age in 1321. He fought at Crécy in the king’s division in 1346. At the 1347 siege of Calais, he served in the retinue of Edward III’s close friend William Clinton, a soldier

5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

Blair and Steane, ‘Cogges’, pp. 94–5; E. R. Price, ‘Two Effigies in the Churches at Asthall and Cogges, Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensia, 3, 1938, pp. 103–10. P. A. Newton with J. Kerr, The County of Oxford: A Catalogue of Medieval Stained Glass, London, 1979, pp. 69–70. Blair and Steane, ‘Cogges’, pp. 108–10, Appendix C.  Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., pp. 95, 100. For a full discussion see J. Goodall, ‘A Study of the Grotesque Fourteenth-Century Sculpture at Adderbury, Bloxham and Hanwell in its Architectural Context’, Oxoniensia, 60, 1995, pp. 271–332; C. E. Keyser, ‘Sculptured Cornices in Churches near Banbury, and their Connexion with William of Wykeham’, Antiquaries Journal, 4, 1924, pp. 1–10. See also C. Shenton, ‘The English Court and the Restoration of Royal Prestige’, DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 1995, p. 210. Blair and Steane, ‘Cogges’, pp. 87, 103. Ibid., pp. 108, 110. TNA, C143/339/9.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 199

09/07/2021 09:47

200 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

and diplomat created earl of Huntingdon in 1337.14 A first cousin of John de Grey on his mother’s side, government records suggest a close working relationship and longstanding alliance between the two men.15 In 1348, de Grey was one of the founder members of the Order of the Garter and a knight of the king’s chamber. He was appointed steward of the royal household in 1349, an office he held until close to his death in 1359.16 Recorded gifts and favours consequent on his position at court include the keeping of the nearby manor of Minster Lovell, probably obtained through Edward III’s daughter, Eleanor of Woodstock.17 Throughout the 1340s, John de Grey would have come into regular contact with William Hamon, referred to in January 1347 as ‘the king’s surgeon’ when he was granted a yearly payment of £30. In August 1349, this was exchanged for a lifetime grant of 20 marks.18 In October 1349, he was issued with letters of denization.19 The shared experience of royal service may have played an important role in stimulating contacts and collaboration between these two successful courtiers and Oxfordshire neighbours. It is possible that the grants awarded to William Hamon in 1349 were a reward for activities connected with the outbreak of the Black Death in England. One of the palaces retreated to by the royal household at the height of the plague was Woodstock, returned to again during the second epidemic of 1361.20 Woodstock was a favoured residence of Edward III and his family. The birthplace of Edward the Black Prince (1330), Eleanor of Woodstock (1332) and Thomas of Woodstock (1355), it was used as a site for royal tournaments, weddings and seasonal courtly festivities.21 Located barely ten miles from Cogges, all of the house’s priors were thus well placed to cultivate contacts with the royal household. In 1338, Hamon’s immediate predecessor, Ralph le Frison, secured a pardon from Edward III for the payment due to the crown as a result of the priory’s alien status ‘in compassion for the poverty of the prior and his house, as well as for the glory of God and St George the martyr in whose honour the church of the priory was founded by his progenitors and at the request of queen Philippa’.22 This is the first and last mention I have come across of Cogges’ supposed status as a royal foundation dedicated to St George, but what may be a politic fiction suggests external attentiveness to the growing importance of the cult of St George in the court circle.23 Although no documentation survives regarding the endowment and administration of the chantry in the north chapel, the monks of Cogges may have been responsible for maintaining its liturgical services.24 Blair and Steane suggest that in the fourteenth century, the church may have been divided into two parts: the nave, south aisle and chancel may 14 Summerson, ‘Grey, John’; W. M. Ormrod, ‘Clinton, William, earl of Huntingdon (d. 1354)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, online edn (accessed 01 October 2019). 15 Calendar Patent Rolls Edward III 1338–1340, London, 1898, pp. 289, 327, 334, 355. 16 Summerson, ‘Grey, John’; Calendar Patent Rolls [hereafter CPR] Edward III 1348–1350, London, 1905, p. 499; CPR Edward III 1350–1354, London, 1907, pp. 16, 30, 319, 341, 513, 519; CPR Edward III 1354–1358, London, 1909, pp. 332, 451, 615; CPR Edward III 1358–1361, London, 1911, p. 274. 17 CPR 1348–1350, p. 499; TNA, E43/301; TNA C131/6/15 for a debt to Queen Philippa. 18 CPR Edward III 1345–1348, London, 1903, p. 447; CPR 1348–1350, p. 394. 19 CPR 1348–1350, p. 407. 20 W. M. Ormrod, Edward III, New Haven, CT, 2011, pp. 306, 473. 21 Ibid., pp. 88, 102, 130, 143, 268, 306, 431, 473. 22 CPR 1338–1340, p. 55. 23 Ormrod, Edward III, pp. 305–8, for the growth of the cult of St George. 24 Blair and Steane, ‘Cogges’, p. 103.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 200

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 15 | mus i c al w i t and c o urt ly c o nnec t i o ns at c o gges  |   201

have been accessible through the porch, while the north aisle, tower and north chapel were entered via the adjoining priory.25 Creating a spatial or liturgical division between the ‘monastic’ and the ‘parochial’, the incorporation of the de Grey north chapel into the ‘monastic’ area of the church also distinguished between a ‘courtly’ (or court-connected) arena of formally sumptuous, up-to-date building work ornamented with curvilinear tracery, sculpted decoration and extravagant heraldic display, in contrast to the potentially less elaborate c.1230–50 chancel and c.1180 south aisle.26 The north side of Cogges church also visually defined itself as an arena of strident music and discordant song. Today, four sculpted corbels of musical men or animals line the north wall of the north chapel, and a further four mark the upper level of the north aisle. Concurring with Nicola Lowe’s suggestion that the corbels now in the north aisle may have been removed from the south wall of the north chapel, I will consider them for the rest of this paper as a single element of the richly decorated interior of the north chapel.27 Still in situ on the north wall of the north chapel can be seen, from west to east, the following corbels: first, a male head (fig. 2), possibly wearing a coif cap that pushes his curling hair back behind his ears. Small pellet bells hang from his wrists. He is blowing into two duct flutes or reeded pipes. The second corbel depicts a bear playing a psaltery, both paws plucking the instrument and his lips parted slightly. The third corbel takes the form of a crouched monkey (fig. 3) playing confidently on an upright harp. Mouth forming a distinct ‘o’, he is evidently singing as he plays. The fourth and final corbel on the north wall depicts a sheep or goat with a richly curled coat, strumming on the citole held in its rather extraordinary ‘four-fingered’ pads, more akin to the paws of dogs than the cloven hooves of sheep or goats. Turning to the corbels displaced from the north chapel, one is installed in the south-east corner of the arcade of the north aisle, with a human face placed against the wall and an unfinished stone surface displayed outwards. The hooded male places a horn to his lips. The other three corbels are positioned on the north wall of the north aisle. Again reading from west to east, first there is a bear playing bagpipes, cheeks swelling and mouth attached firmly to the blowstick as he strives to create a loud, raucous sound. The second corbel depicts a ram with curled horns playing a fiddle or rebec. An element has broken off the corbel itself here, but a bow appears to have been placed over the body of the instrument, seemingly positioned on the ram’s shoulder or arm. Grinning widely at the viewer, the ram exposes both sets of teeth, again perhaps singing as he plays. Finally, a doe crouched down on slim, hooved legs performs on a pipe and tabor (fig. 4). The harping monkey in the centre of the north wall (fig. 3) forms an obvious caricature of the portrayal of King David with his harp that frequently introduced Psalm 1 in devotional manuscripts. Apes featured in medieval marginalia as degenerate human beings, particularly associated with female lust and sexual licence, amongst other functions and

25 Ibid., p. 103. 26 Ibid., p. 87. 27 Lowe, ‘Monumental Marginalia’, pp. 5–6.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 201

09/07/2021 09:47

202 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

meanings.28 If lining both sides of the north chapel, the Cogges corbels gleefully parody the celestial choirs staffed by angelic singers and musicians found in the upper reaches of many late medieval churches, often particularly associated with the Virgin Mary.29 Useful parallels can be drawn with the sculptures in the spandrels of the Angel Choir at Lincoln cathedral (built c.1256 to 1280), another church dedicated to the Virgin.30 The area east of the high altar depicts a celestial paradise inhabited by angels playing the lute, viol, harp, pipe, aulos and pipe and tabor.31 In the central spandrel of the south-eastern bay, a winged, harping King David is incorporated into the angelic orchestra.32 Paul Binski has linked the collective musical joy at Lincoln to the psalms of praise (i.e. 146 to 150) chanted each morning at Lauds, culminating in the triumphant acclamation of Psalm 150:3–5, ‘Praise him with sound of trumpet: praise him with psaltery and harp. Praise him with timbrel and choir: praise him with strings and organs. Praise him on high sounding cymbals: praise him on cymbals of joy’.33 Stringed or plucked instruments are found on the north side of the Angel Choir, and wind instruments on the south. When combined with the voices of the canons below performing the divine office, St Augustine’s three categories of sound, vox, flatus and pulsus would have come together in sacred harmony.34 At Cogges, by contrast, an unregenerate simian ‘David’ leads a far more discordant orchestra. Bas, soft-sounding instruments such as the harp or psaltery, used in sacred drama to praise God or evoke the heavenly paradise, appear alongside louder, haut instruments with much less elevated associations: the bagpipes associated with the devil, demons and beggars, and the horns, pipes and vielles played by wandering minstrels, shepherds, herdsmen and other uncouth rustics, especially at rural festivals.35 It is difficult to draw clear distinctions between sacred and secular sounds. Although the use of musical instruments during liturgical services was frequently stigmatized, minstrels did perform

28 M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, London, 1992, pp. 12–13, 24, 30, 39; A. Weir and J. Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches, London, 1986, p. 98; H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape-lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, London, 1952, pp. 163–74, 261–7; B. Rowland, Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism, London, 1974, pp. 8–14; R. Barber, Bestiary, Woodbridge, 1992, pp. 48–9. 29 A. Rose, ‘Angel Musicians in the Medieval Stained Glass of Norfolk Churches’, Early Music, 29, 2001, pp. 187–217; R. Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings in English and Welsh Churches, Woodbridge, 2008, p. 322; P. Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style 1290–1350, New Haven, CT, 2014, p. 264; M. Rimmer, The Angel Roofs of East Anglia: Unseen Masterpieces of the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 2015; J. Montagu and G. Montagu, Minstrels & Angels: Carvings of Musicians in Medieval English Churches, Berkeley, CA, 1998. 30 Oxfordshire was part of the vast medieval diocese of Lincoln. The Angel Choir may have been following the precedent set by the north transept of Westminster Abbey: P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets. Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1400, New Haven, CT, 1995, pp. 71–3. 31 T. A. Heslop, ‘The Iconography of the Angel Choir at Lincoln’ in Medieval Architecture and its Intellectual Context: Studies in Honour of Peter Kidson, ed. E. Fernie and P. Crossley, London, 1990, pp. 151–8 (at p. 153, table 1). 32 Heslop, ‘Iconography’, pp. 155–6; P. Binski, ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile’, Art History 20, 1997, pp. 350–74: see p. 363 for its allusion to II Samuel 14 (‘For even as an angel of God, so is my lord the king’). 33 Binski, ‘Angel Choir’, pp. 361–4; S. Boynton and D. J. Reilly, ‘Sound and Image in the Middle Ages: Reflections on a Conjunction’, in Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, ed. S. Boynton and D. J. Reilly, Turnhout, 2015, pp. 15–30 (at pp. 18–19). 34 P. Binski, Becket’s Crown. Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300, New Haven, CT, 2004, p. 278; Binski, ‘Angel Choir’, p. 361 n. 37. 35 E. A. Bowles, ‘The Role of Musical Instruments in Medieval Sacred Drama,’ The Musical Quarterly, 45, 1959, pp. 67–84 (at p. 74); Binski, Becket’s Crown, pp. 266–78; E. A. Bowles, ‘La hiérarchie des instruments de musique dans l’Europe féodale’, Revue de Musicologie, 42, 1958, pp. 155–69 (at pp. 162–4, 166–9). On f. 13 of the Holkham Bible Picture Book (c.1327 to 1340: BL, Add. MS 47682) the shepherds are depicted playing bagpipes.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 202

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 15 | mu sic al w i t and c o urt ly c o nnec t i o ns at c o gges  |   203

in churches, especially on festal occasions.36 Yet the performers at Cogges are notably earthy in their appetites and associations. Rams and goats could symbolise the unbridled desires associated with lust, avarice and luxuria.37 The bestiary described the male goat as ‘a stubborn, lascivious animal, always eager to mate, whose eyes are so full of lust that they look sideways’.38 Deer were apparently ‘entranced by the whistling of a pan-pipe’, making it possible that the piping doe at Cogges (fig. 4) is deeply absorbed in her own performance.39 Bears signified ‘the devil’ and ‘unjust rulers’.40 They also referred to lust and lewdness, especially in males.41 Carnal pleasures and profane vices appear to have come to the fore in the sacred space of the Cogges chantry chapel. Yet its images are widely paralleled elsewhere. As a veteran of the Anglo-Scottish wars, John de Grey is likely to have encountered the remarkable collection of secular musicians carved at Beverley Minster c.1325–49.42 We can also posit his familiarity with the monstrous, frequently musical marginalia found in contemporary psalters and books of hours, such as the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux (c.1324–8: New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, MS 54.1.2) and the Luttrell Psalter (c.1325–45: London, BL, Add. MS 42130). Emma Dillon has explored how such images might have provoked interior, devotional listening on the part of the manuscript’s users: staging and reminding viewers of the dual aural and visual threat of curiositas and distraction from prayer; recalling and visually representing the diverse sonic environment in which one’s devotions were made, and prompting or encouraging the viewer to voice the sacred words themselves, as they made their own ‘sounding performance of prayer’.43 All such interpretations can be usefully applied to the corbels at Cogges, especially in the context of its dual monastic and parochial functions. If the three monks of the priory sought regularly to observe the divine office in St Mary’s, their performance might have been a particularly enfeebled one, easily drowned out by the noises of parishioners and parochial services coming from the south side of the church. In 1394, Bishop Trefnant of Hereford denounced the coarse singing and crude chanting made by the clergy and laity at the parochial altar of Hereford cathedral, on the grounds that it was disrupting the performance of the Divine office in the choir.44 The ordinary laity using Cogges for their communal and personal devotions each day might well have been satirised as crude, carnally-minded and bestial English rustics by the alien monks of Fécamp. The monks may have been far more comfortable in the francophone world of the landed social 36 R. Rastall, ‘Minstrelsy, Church and Clergy in Medieval England’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 97, 1970–1, pp. 83–98 (at pp. 86–93). In 1634, John Aubrey noted: ‘I love the music of the tabor and pipe that is played especially on Sundays, holy days, christenings and feasts’: R. Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life, London, 2015, p. 24. 37 Weir and Jerman, Images of Lust, p. 76; Rowland, Animals with Human Faces, pp. 80–6, 135–6. 38 Barber, Bestiary, p. 83. 39 Ibid., p. 51. 40 Ibid., p. 60. 41 L. M. C. Randall, ‘An Elephant in the Litany: Further Thoughts on an English Book of Hours in the Walters Art Gallery (W.102)’, in Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy, ed. W. B. Clark and M. T. McMunn, Philadelphia, 1989, p. 115; Rowland, Animals with Human Faces, pp. 31–5. 42 N. Dawton, ‘Gothic Sculpture’ in Beverley Minster: An Illustrated History, ed. R. Horrox, Beverley, 2000, pp. 107–29. For discussion of its musical imagery see pp. 113–17, 122. 43 E. Dillon, The Sense of Sound. Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330, Oxford, 2012, pp. 174, 188, 190, 195, 199, 200–01, 226, 229, 236, 241 (quotation), 256, 283, 286. 44 D. Lepine, ‘And alle oure paresshens’: Secular Cathedrals and Parish Churches in Late Medieval England’, in The Parish in Late Medieval England, ed. C. Burgess and E. Duffy, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 14, Donington, 2006, pp. 29–53 (at p. 32.)

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 203

09/07/2021 09:47

204 | tr ibu tes to pau l bi nski – part t wo

elite, conversing more easily and readily with members of the de Grey family, than the neighbours of their daily life in Oxfordshire.45 Paul has stressed the social context of much marginal imagery, speaking often to the ‘small-group humour’ and ludic sensibilities of elite communities.46 In the context of the small, alien monastic community at Cogges, and the deliberately exclusive, overwhelmingly male world of the court familiar to both John de Grey and William Hamon, these observations have particular relevance. The corbels can also be considered in the context of the liturgies performed in the chantry for the souls of Lady Margaret and her kin. Music had an especially strong connection to funerary rites and practices.47 The psalms sung during the office for the dead contain numerous references to calling upon the Lord with the voice of prayer (Psalm 114, 129, 137), crying out to the Lord and being heard from the depths of tribulation (Psalm 119, 129) or confessing and singing to God (Psalm 137, 145). Selected versicles and responses (‘I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me’; ‘O Lord, hear my prayer / And let my cry come unto thee’) also emphasise vocal supplication to heaven.48 Singing or chanting these texts against a visual background of tumultuous vocal and instrumental noise would have strengthened the meaning and urgency of the devotional pleas made in the north chapel. This would especially be the case if the disorderly cacophony of sounds represented in the corbels and frieze accurately evoked the sonic environment experienced daily by those using the church. A backdrop of sonic and visual profanity would place the voice of liturgical prayer into sharper relief, heightening the contrast between fallen nature of the earthly world and the joyous heavenly kingdom to come. The matins service of the office for the dead contains nine lessons drawn from the book of Job. The chaotic music of the corbels might have deepened the devotional resonance of texts such as ‘I will let go my speech against myself, I will speak in the bitterness of my soul’ (Job 10:1, second lesson) or the desperate plea to God contained in the third lesson: ‘Call me, and I will answer thee: or else I will speak, and do thou answer me’ (Job 13:22). This is echoed in the sixth lesson: ‘Thou shalt call me, and I will answer thee’ (Job 14:15).49 The musical and choral ‘competition’ coming from the sculpted corbels might have been intended as a stimulus to the monks of Cogges, encouraging a full-voiced, whole-hearted performance of the liturgies enacted each day in the north chapel to aid Lady Margaret’s soul. While depicted as busily creating noise, the musical corbels of Cogges are silent to a viewer engaged only with their physical senses. The corbels prompt engagement of one’s inner, spiritual hearing. Yet in this context, they threaten to overwhelm as much as distract. What if God’s voice is obscured by the profane sounds of these marginal monsters? To a monastic viewer deeply familiar with the Bible, the visual array of different instruments 45 For lay devotions in the parish church see R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England, Stroud, 2004; for the use of French in England, D. A. Kibbee, For to speke Frenche trewely: the French language in England, 1000–1600: Its Status, Description, and Instruction, Amsterdam, 1991, pp. 34–8, 58–9; and the essays in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c. 1100–1500, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al., York, 2009 (especially M. Bennett, ‘France in England: Anglo-French Culture in the Reign of Edward III’, pp. 320–33). 46 Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 286, 300–03. 47 S. Schell, ‘The Office of the Dead in England: Image and Music in the Book of Hours and related texts, c.1250 – 1500’, PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2011, pp. 167–74. 48 The Office for the Dead: according to the Roman Breviary, Missal and Ritual. Containing the Office Entire, with all the Proper Masses, and the Order of Burial. In Latin and English, London, 1745, pp. 1–11. 49 Ibid., pp. 33–7, 47–52.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 204

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 15 | mus i c al w i t and c o urt ly c o nnec t i o ns at c o gges  |   205

might recall the signal to idolatrous worship described in Daniel 3:5, ‘in the hour that you shall hear the sound of the trumpet, and of the flute, and of the harp, of the sackbut, and of the psaltery, and of the symphony, and of all kind of music; ye fall down and adore the golden statue which King Nebuchadnezzar hath set up.’ The sight of cacophonous sound could embody a spiritual warning and admonishment against empty ritual performances of the liturgy. The corbels echo the famous declaration of St Paul: ‘If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal’ (I Corinthians 13:1). According to Boethius, the highest level of music (musica mundana) was the silent sound of the spheres turning in the cosmos.50 Yet in the north chapel, the silence of profound devotional listening is made especially difficult. Once again, the voice of prayer must be a heartfelt and committed one, sounding out as loudly and clearly as possible to reach God across all physical and spiritual barriers to salvation. None of these interpretative ‘resonances’ of the Cogges corbels detract from their overall humour and wit, and what may be perhaps their ultimate status as irreverent visual nonsense, expensive absurdities to be mentally and aurally discarded as one started to contemplate ‘things of greater importance’ (pace St Bernard of Clairvaux). A small piscina inserted into the respond of the eastern arcade of the chapel suggests that the present-day altar, located underneath the truncated main lights of the chapel’s east window, stands on or close to its original position. Atop the exterior of the east window (fig. 5) is a sculpted ‘head of Christ’, a motif seen elsewhere in Oxfordshire at St Mary’s Bloxham, St Giles’s Oxford and St Mary’s Kidlington.51 In general, the sculpture materializes longstanding notions of the Church as a spiritual body headed by Christ (Ephesians 1:22–3 and 2:20– 23). At Cogges, its proximity to the north chapel altar also emphasises the spiritual grace obtainable through consumption of Christ’s body in the eucharist. In the eighth lesson of the Office for the Dead, the voice of Job, to be conflated with the speech of the deceased in their grave, finally makes a more optimistic declaration: ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth […] in my flesh I will see my God.’52 In contrast to the musical clamour prompting worship of Nebuchadnezzar’s idolatrous statue, here at Cogges one could physically see the consecrated host as it was elevated daily at the north chapel altar. At the same time, one might contemplate the luminous image of Christ offered by the conflation of his body with the consecrated physical fabric of the chapel and its light-filled eastern window. Enhancing any Christological adornment of the altar, the east wall and window of the north chapel might have presented a redemptive spiritual vision of the Saviour to heighten the hope and comfort offered by one of the final versicles and responses of the Office for the Dead: ‘Eternal rest grant them, O Lord / And let perpetual light shine on them.’53

50 B. Williamson, ‘Sensory Experience in Medieval Devotion: Sound and Vision, Invisibility and Silence’, Speculum, 88, 2013, pp. 1–43 (at pp. 31–2): defined as such in Boethius’ De institutione musica. 51 Goodall, ‘A Study’, pp. 317–19 suggests a protective and apotropaic significance. At Cogges, the head of Christ is flanked by smaller human heads that Lowe, ‘Monumental Marginalia’, p. 4, persuasively suggests may have originally depicted the four evangelists. 52 Office for the Dead, pp. 64–6. 53 Ibid., p. 11.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 205

09/07/2021 09:47

206  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

Fig. 1. view of the c.1340 north chapel, St Mary’s, Cogges, Oxfordshire. Photo: author

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 206

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 15 | mus i c al w i t and c o urt ly c o nnec t i o ns at c o gges  |   207

Fig. 2. detail of c.1340 corbel depicting a man playing pipes and pellet bells, St Mary’s, Cogges, Oxfordshire. Photo: author

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 207

09/07/2021 09:47

208 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

Fig. 3. detail of c.1340 corbel depicting an ape playing a harp, St Mary’s, Cogges, Oxfordshire. Photo: author

Fig. 4. detail of c.1340 corbel depicting a doe playing a pipe and tabor, St Mary’s, Cogges, Oxfordshire. Photo: author

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 208

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 15 | mus i c al w i t and c o urt ly c o nnec t i o ns at c o gges  |   209

Fig. 5. detail of the exterior of the east window of the north chapel, St Mary’s, Cogges, Oxfordshire. Photo: author

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 209

09/07/2021 09:47

The Kilcorban Madonna: Joy and Potential in an Irish Wooden Virgin and Child Beth Williamson

P

aul Binski’s article concerning the ‘Poetics of the Gothic Smile’, especially its insights about expressivity, music, time and temporality, and what Paul later codified as the ‘theatre of paradise’, made a strong impression on me, and have informed many of my later research interests.1 When, a few years ago, I became critically aware of the Kilcorban Madonna (fig. 1), a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary now in the Clonfert Diocesan Museum in Loughrea, and I considered anew her gentle, serene smile, Paul’s article was the first thing I thought of. I had known about this statue for years. Loughrea is the town from which the Irish side of my family comes, and we have a home there. The Kilcorban Madonna is one of the most prized objects in the museum, as one of the earliest artefacts in the collection. What I had not realized about it until relatively recently is that it is probably the earliest surviving wooden sculpture in Ireland. The statue shows the Virgin Mary seated on a low throne with no back. The Virgin’s knees are spread quite widely and the Christ child sits between them, rather than perched on top of her lap. Both mother and child lean forward somewhat, though the child does so more emphatically. The Virgin’s right hand and forearm are missing from the elbow: presumably she once held an object or gestured towards the Christ child. The lines of a thick crown are visible around the top of the Virgin’s head, now damaged, and repaired (fig. 2). The eyes are large, with prominent, slightly upraised eyebrows. The whole statue is polychromed, with evidence of gold leaf, though it is not clear how much of the paint is original. The eyebrows are picked out in black paint. The eyes are touched in using white paint, with blue irises and black pupils. There is a hint of red in the cheeks, and the lips are very dark red. Though the polychromy on the Virgin’s clothing is damaged, it seems that the dress was once blue, with a gold collar. The child is dressed in a cream robe, with a collar that was once red. Both the feet of the Christ child are missing, as are his arms, but presumably he was once shown with his right hand raised in a gesture of blessing, and the left hand perhaps held an orb or a book. The Kilcorban Madonna conforms to the iconographical type known as the Sedes Sapientiae, or Throne of Wisdom. This image had a long history. The Virgin Mary had been likened to a throne for Christ from the early 1

P. Binski, ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile’, Art History, 20, 1997, pp. 350–74; idem, Becket’s Crown. Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300, New Haven, CT, 2004, p. 282.

[ 210]

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 210

09/07/2021 09:47

c hapt er 16   |  t he ki l c o r ban mad o nna  |   211

Christian period, with authors comparing her to the throne described in Isaiah’s vision of ‘the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up’ (Isaiah 6:1), and to the Throne of Solomon.2 The pre-seventeenth-century history of the Kilcorban Madonna is unknown, but it was mentioned at that date as being in the chapel at Kilcorban, about fifteen miles south east of Loughrea.3 This chapel had been taken over in the fifteenth century by Dominicans who came from the friary at Athenry.4 It is not known whether the statue was already there when the Dominicans took over the chapel, or whether they might have brought it with them from Athenry. In the early twentieth century it was kept at the parish church of St Lawrence at Tynagh, a few miles north of Kilcorban, before being transferred on loan to the National Museum in Dublin. Finally, it was restored to the parish, and then presented in 1957 to the Clonfert Diocesan Museum at Loughrea.5 Few publications have paid the Kilcorban Madonna much individual attention, though it has been mentioned in passing in many studies of Irish medieval art.6 The most detailed published studies, by Catriona MacLeod and Patrick K. Egan, date from the 1940s, though the statue has recently been dealt with in an unpublished PhD dissertation by Jennifer Cochran Anderson.7 MacLeod does not explicitly give the Kilcorban Madonna a date, but she compares it with twelfthcentury wooden statuary from France and Spain.8 Egan dated it to the twelfth or early thirteenth century.9 Anderson dates it to the early thirteenth century. MacLeod noted that the smile of the Christ child was unusual, and Cyril Barrett noted that the Virgin’s smile was ‘almost unique among Madonnas of this type’.10 However no further attention has been given to the relationship between the smile of the Kilcorban Madonna and the possible date of this statue.11 Paul noted that by 1300 the smiling image, especially on the Virgin Mary, had become ingrained in the visual culture of northern Europe, but that ‘Until around 1200 nothing could have been less expected than the breaking forth of a smile or the ringing out of a laugh in the religious art of northern Europe’.12 This makes the dating of the Kilcorban

2 3

I. H. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France, Princeton, NJ, 1972, pp. 24–9. C. Tait, ‘Art and the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Ireland, c. 1500 – 1600’, in Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland, ed. R. Moss et al., Dublin, 2006, p. 177. 4 C. MacLeod, ‘Mediaeval Figure Sculptures in Ireland, Mediaeval Madonnas in the West’, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 75, 1945, pp. 167–82 (at p. 169). 5 Kilcorban and Tynagh both lie in the diocese of Clonfert, now centred on the Celtic Revival cathedral of St Brendan at Loughrea. In the middle ages, however, the bishop’s seat was at Clonfert cathedral, chosen as the site of a bishopric in 1111 (it is now a Church of Ireland church). The core of the existing church at Clonfert may go back to the tenth century, but the history of Clonfert goes back beyond that date to a monastery founded there by St Brendan in the sixth century. On this, see R. Stalley, ‘St Brendan’s Cathedral, Clonfert, Co. Galway’, in Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume I – Medieval, c. 400 – c. 1600, ed. R. Moss, Dublin, 2015, pp. 161–2. 6 Including, most recently, Art and Architecture of Ireland, pp. 71, 281. 7 MacLeod, ‘Mediaeval Figure Sculptures in Ireland’, pp. 167–82; P. K. Egan, ‘Clonfert Museum and Its Collections’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 27, 1956–7, pp. 33–79; J. C. Anderson, ‘Wooden Devotional Sculpture in Ireland, 1100–1800’, PhD dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 2012. 8 MacLeod, ‘Mediaeval Figure Sculptures in Ireland’, pp. 172–3 and pl. 33. 9 Egan, ‘Clonfert Museum and Its Collections’, pp. 65–8. 10 MacLeod, ‘Mediaeval Figure Sculptures in Ireland’, p. 172; C. Barrett, ‘The Kilcorban Madonna’, The Furrow, 12 (June 1961), pp. 21–2. 11 MacLeod, Mediaeval Figure Sculptures in Ireland’, p. 172. Anderson does not mention the smiles of the Virgin or of the Christ child. 12 Binski, ‘Angel Choir at Lincoln’, p. 352; Binski, Becket’s Crown, p. 247.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 211

09/07/2021 09:47

212 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

Madonna an interesting question. It is hard to be certain here about an early thirteenthcentury, or even twelfth-century, date for the Kilcorban Madonna, because of the paucity of surviving comparative material. But if she is indeed a product even of the mid-thirteenth century, this makes her an early Irish companion for the smiling angels that were created at the cathedral of Reims between 1211 and c.1255,13 or the throng of smiling faces – angels and others – in the Angel Choir at Lincoln, being planned in the 1250s, that Paul placed at the centre of his ‘Gothic smile’ article.14 But my concern here is not to focus particularly on the precise date of the Kilcorban Madonna. I will first consider the Virgin’s smile, using the framework that Paul has developed in his work. I will then look at the significance of the statue’s material, considering some of the connotations of the wood from which it is carved. As Paul showed, the advent of the smile in Gothic images presaged a new interest in the body as a site of expressivity. The smiling figures in the Angel Choir at Lincoln all convey, as Paul demonstrated, joy at the idea of the Christian soul’s return to God.15 I suggest that we should understand the smile of the Kilcorban Madonna in a similar way. This image of the enthroned Virgin Mary expressed her identity as both the mother of God and of the human Christ, and is a clear statement of the reality of the Incarnation of Christ. The Incarnation was understood in teleological terms as the beginning of Christ’s salvific mission; his death was already present, theologically, in his birth and early life. The sacrifices embodied in Christ’s death on the cross, and in the sacrament of the eucharist, were both conveyed, at the same time, by the image of the virgin Mother and her divine Child. The joy that can be seen in Lincoln’s ‘theatre of paradise’ at the salvation of human souls can also be seen on the faces of the Kilcorban Virgin and Child. It has been suggested that Irish Marian imagery appears to have developed in parallel with the rest of Europe at this period.16 And yet, this smile sets the Kilcorban Madonna apart from her French comparators, at least. Just a few of the 110 examples catalogued illustrated by Ilene Forsyth in her study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century French Throne of Wisdom statues, for instance, offer anything like the smile that plays about the lips of the Kilcorban Madonna.17 The almost total destruction of English sculpture from before 1300, with a mere handful of wooden statues surviving, means that there is nothing to compare to the Kilcorban Madonna in English sculpture either.18 Only a single Virgin and Child statue from the thirteenth century survives. This polychromed oak image, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but supposedly originally from Langham church in Essex, can probably be dated around 1220–30.19 This Virgin and Child has moved away from the stiffly hieratic ‘Romanesque’ type of the Sedes Sapientiae statues catalogued by Forsyth. The figure of the 13 Binski, ‘Angel Choir at Lincoln’, p. 356 (pl. 5); Binski, Becket’s Crown, pp. 239–43 (figs 190, 196–8). 14 Binski, ‘Angel Choir at Lincoln’, p. 356 and passim; Binski, Becket’s Crown, pp. 268–82 15 Binski, ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln’, p. 361. 16 Art and Architecture of Ireland, p. 281. 17 Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, pp. 178–9, 191, 199–200, 201–02; figs 122, 164, 184, 187. 18 R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England, Stroud, 2004, p. 3. 19 London, Victoria and Albert Museum, accession no. A. 79–1925. P. Williamson, Gothic Sculpture, 1140–1300, New Haven, CT, 1995, p. 114 (fig. 174). In his entry on the sculpture in Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and P. Binski, London, 1987, p. 303 (no. 249), Williamson dated this image to 1200–20, but revised this to 1220– 30 in his Gothic Sculpture, p. 275 n. 55.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 212

09/07/2021 09:47

c hapt er 16   |  t he ki l c o r ban mad o nna  |   213

child is placed more off centre, and seated on the Virgin’s left knee, rather than positioned more or less centrally, as in the Kilcorban Virgin and Child. But the Virgin’s expression does not betray any hint of a smile. Surviving Scandinavian wooden sculptures, such as the Virgin and Child from Viklau, Gotland (dated c.1170–90), or the Virgin and Child from Hove, c.1230, each maintain an impassive facial expression.20 It is generally only with ‘mature’ Gothic sculpture, in the years after the mid-thirteenth century, that we see smiles that compare with that of the Kilcorban Madonna. By then the whole conception of the sculptures has changed, with a complete abandonment of the stiff composition of the Sedes Sapientiae, in favour of a more fluid style.21 Thus, the Kilcorban Madonna appears to be an intriguing early example, in Ireland, of the smiling figures that begin to appear in France and the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-thirteenth century. Like the French Romanesque Throne of Wisdom statues, the Kilcorban Madonna is carved from wood. Though a thorough scientific analysis of the wood has not yet been conducted, it is thought to be oak.22 Forsyth’s analysis of the functions of the French Throne of Wisdom statues, including the capacity to be carried in procession, suggests that wood would have been a suitable material from a functional point of view.23 Nonetheless, such practical capacities do not preclude the materiality of the wood being understood to have particular symbolic or otherwise significant characteristics. Among a recent concentration on materiality in the humanities, eco-critical studies in particular have foregrounded the special characteristics of naturally occurring materials such as wood and stone;24 art historical studies of medieval religious imagery with an eco-material inflection explore how these natural materials brought multiple layers of meaning to the objects that were crafted from them.25 Taking such methods as my starting point here I will examine how the ‘wooden-ness’ of the Kilcorban Madonna could have been understood by its beholders and users in medieval Ireland.26 A wooden statue emphatically announces the vitality of its material. Wood, cut and shaped into a statue, was understood as an excision from a tree. It has what Anne Harris calls ‘a blended ontology’, in which the material was understood as being at the same time ‘both wood and tree’.27 The materiality of the wood suggests the tree that it once was. The inherence of the identity of the tree within hewn wood was well known and capitalized

20 Williamson, Gothic Sculpture, pp. 116 (fig. 176), 117 (fig. 179) respectively. 21 For example, the Virgen Blanca from Toledo cathedral of c.1250–70 (see Ibid., p. 241 (fig. 359)), or the Virgin and Child in the spandrel of Lincoln cathedral’s Angel Choir, mentioned above (Binski, ‘Angel Choir at Lincoln’, fig. 9). 22 MacLeod, Mediaeval Figure Sculptures in Ireland’, p. 172; Egan, ‘Clonfert Museum’ (quoting MacLeod), p. 65. 23 Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, pp. 39–45. 24 J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC, 2010; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. J. J. Cohen, Washington DC, 2012; V. Nardizzi, ‘Medieval Ecocriticism’, postmedieval, 4, 2013, pp. 112–23; Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. J. J. Cohen, Minneapolis, 2013; J. J. Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, Minneapolis, 2015. 25 Among others see A. Harris, ‘Hewn’, in, Inhuman Nature, ed. J. J. Cohen, Washington DC, 2014, pp. 17–38; A. Harris, ‘Water and Wood: Ecomateriality and Sacred Objects at the Chapel of Saint-Fiacre, Le Faouët (Brittany)’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 44, 2014, pp. 585–615; B. Holsinger, ‘Of Pigs and Parchment: Medieval Studies and the Coming of the Animal’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 124, 2009, pp. 616–23; K. Overbey, ‘Seeing Through Stone: Materiality and Place in a Scottish Pendant Reliquary’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 65/66, 2014/2015, pp. 242–58; The Matter of Art. Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750, ed. C. Anderson, A. Dunlop, P. H. Smith, Manchester, 2015. 26 See also Paul’s own treatment of wooden sculpture in P. Binski, Gothic Sculpture, New Haven, CT, 2019, which was published after the submission of this essay. 27 Harris, ‘Hewn’, p. 20.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 213

09/07/2021 09:47

214 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

upon from early Christianity. A complex legend of the cross developed during the middle ages, and the version that had developed by the thirteenth century was recounted by Jacobus de Voragine around 1260 in the Golden Legend.28 According to this legend a branch was planted over Adam’s grave at Golgotha, where it grew to be a tree. The Queen of Sheba later recognized the hewn tree as the wood that would later become the cross of Christ: ‘she saw in spirit that the Savior of the world would one day hang upon this very same wood’. The wood was indeed later used to make the cross.29 At the Crucifixion the cross was placed on Golgotha. So the wood of the cross returned to its literal roots at the grave of Adam, where it had grown as a tree, and at the same time, at the place where Christ, the Second Adam, was crucified. Devotion to the wood of the cross, and the notion of the wood of the cross as still ontologically – as well as symbolically – connected with the tree from which it was hewn, was older still than this legend. The Old English poem The Dream of the Rood (probably eighth century) exemplifies the understanding of the cross as a tree, cut down, wounded, suffering and humiliated, sharing in the Passion and death of Christ.30 In this poem the cross compares itself to the Virgin Mary: ‘Behold, the world’s master, heaven’s protector, honoured me over the trees of the forest, just as Almighty God exalted his mother, Mary herself, over all woman-kind, for all men’.31 As the tree-cross is the bearer of the crucified body of Christ, the Virgin Mary is also the ‘god-bearer’, both the vessel and the throne for the Incarnate body of Christ. Thus, both the tree-cross and the Virgin partake in the Redemption. The notion of the Virgin Mary as playing a crucial part in the drama of human salvation goes back at least to the second century, to patristic texts that pair the Virgin with Eve. St Irenaeus of Lyon wrote: For it was fit and even necessary that in making a new headship for Adam in Christ, mortality should be swallowed up in immortality and renewing Eve in Mary that a virgin being intercessor for a virgin, the disobedience of the virgin should be destroyed and put away by the obedience of the Virgin and the transgression, which was by means of a tree, should be put away, by the tree of obedience.32 Later writers echo these webs of association between the Virgin Mary, Eve, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Tree of Life, and the tree-cross. These writers include, in

28 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W. G. Ryan, 2 vols, Princeton, 1993, vol. 1, pp. 277–84 (‘The Finding of the Holy Cross’); vol. 2, pp. 168–73 (‘The Exaltation of the Holy Cross’). For editions of the Latin texts see Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, ed. G. P. Maggioni, 2 vols, Sismel, 1998–9. 29 Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 278. 30 Old and Middle English: An Anthology, ed. and trans. E. Treharne, Oxford, 2000, pp. 108–15; The Dream of the Rood, ed. M. Swanton, Exeter, 1996. For an online version of the Anglo-Saxon text, alongside digital reproductions of the manuscript pages, see: http://vbd.humnet.unipi.it/beta2#doc=DOTR&page=VB_fol_104v (accessed 01 October 2019). 31 Dream of the Rood, pp. 98–9; A. Breeze, ‘The Virgin Mary and the Dream of the Rood’, Florilegium, 12, 1993, pp. 55–62. 32 Irenaeus, ‘The Proof of the Apostolic Preaching’, in Patrologia Orientalis, 49 vols, Paris, 1904–84, vol. 12, pp. 684–5; Swanton, Dream of the Rood, p. 129. See further B. Williamson, ‘The Virgin Lactans as Second Eve: Image of the Salvatrix’, Studies in Iconography, 19, 1998, pp. 105–38.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 214

09/07/2021 09:47

c hapt er 16   |  t he ki l c o r ban mad o nna  |   215

the Irish sphere, Cú Chuimne of Iona (d. 747), who composed the hymn Cantemus in omne die. In this hymn the writer declares: ‘By a woman and a tree the world first perished; by the virtue of a woman it returned to salvation’.33 Irish and Northumbrian art and ideas were close at this time, making it likely that the kinds of concepts that emerge in the Dream of the Rood might well have been in play in Irish culture.34 The identity of the cross as the Tree of Life worked in two directions: it was understood to have been the Tree of Life, grown from Adam’s grave, and that it would be the Tree of Life in the sense of giving life to humanity. The cross of Christ appears as the Tree of Life, in the form of a tree, or with visual references to a tree, in both painted and sculpted images. Perhaps the best known of these is the Ruthwell Cross. This probably dates from the eighth century.35 On this cross, as on other Northumbrian stone crosses, carved vine scroll decoration signifies the identity of the cross as the Tree of Life (as well as making reference to Christ as the True Vine).36 Further specific reference to the ‘wood of life’ is made on the Ruthwell Cross, with a section from The Dream of the Rood engraved in runes in the margins of the panels showing the vine scrolls. Beyond the Northumbrian context, and into the later middle ages, images of the Crucifixion continued to capitalize on the idea of the cross as the Tree of Life. Green crosses, signifying the link with the Tree of Life, are found in Crucifixion scenes from the eleventh century onwards.37 Crosses formed of rough timber beams or branches can be found in both painting and sculpture through to the end of the middle ages.38 The organic, vital, changing nature of wood, and the way in which the hewn wood of the cross still harked back, visibly, to the living thing whence it came, provided fertile ground for ideas about the wood of the cross, the instrument of Christ’s death. It is as always already the means by which eternal life is gained. These clusters of ideas are important here because of their implications for the reception of wooden statuary of the Virgin Mary, such as the Kilcorban Virgin. In this statue, as in others of the Sedes Sapientiae type, the Virgin Mary is represented as the Throne of Christ, the Logos, as we have seen. But the wood from which these statues were carved could have provided another level of signification, by virtue of the strong relationships that were understood between the wood of the Tree of Life and the cross of the Crucifixion, between Eve and Mary, and between the idea of sin and salvation both entering the world via a tree. An image of the Virgin Mary carved from wood, such as the Kilcorban Madonna, could

33 ‘Per mulierem et lignum mundus prius periit; per mulieris uirtutem ad salutem rediit’. Breeze, ‘The Virgin Mary’, p. 59. 34 M. Werner, ‘The Cross-Carpet Page in the Book of Durrow: The Cult of the True Cross, Adomnan and Iona’, Art Bulletin, 72, 1990, pp. 174–223; M. Werner, ‘On the Origin of the Form of the Irish High Cross’, Gesta, 29, 1990, pp. 998–110. 35 The Ruthwell Cross, ed. B. Cassidy, Princeton, NJ, 1992; É. Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition, London, 2005. 36 Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood, pp. 48–9; Werner, ‘The Cross-Carpet Page’, p. 192. For the Bewcastle Cross, still in the churchyard of St Cuthbert’s church at Bewcastle, see R. N. Bailey and R. Cramp, Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire North of the Sands, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture 11, Oxford, 1988, pp. 61–72 and figs 90–119; also Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood. 37 See e.g. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 12, f. 12 (the Peterborough Psalter: c.1220–25; Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. S. Panayotova, London, 2016, p. 354 (no. 109; see also nos 5, 64). 38 See e.g. Simone Martini, Christ on the Cross between the Virgin and Saint John (c.1340): New York, The Frick Collection. See also the jubé of the church of Saint-Fiacre in Brittany (fifteenth century): Harris, ‘Water and Wood’, pp. 595–6 (fig. 5). At ibid., p. 587, Harris explains how the surrounding forest at Le Faouët ‘both provided raw materials for the jubé and embodied symbolic meaning for the Holy wood of the cross placed at the center of the jubé.’

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 215

09/07/2021 09:47

216  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t wo

offer an opportunity to think of such a statue as partaking in the matter of the tree, upon which Christ’s sacrificial death will take place. By virtue of the sacred connotations of wood in the context of Christ’s Crucifixion, a wooden statue of the Virgin and Child could already materially embody the idea of his impending sacrifice on the tree-cross, and the eternal life to be gained via that wood. Such ideas did not depend upon an understanding that the statue was actually made from the wood of the True Cross itself. Similar transferences of ideas about materials took place with ivory statues of the Virgin. Because the Throne of Solomon had been reputed to have been made from ivory, a representation of the Virgin in ivory partook, at some symbolic level, in the essence of that throne, even without the statue being claimed to have been made of the actual ivory from which Solomon’s throne had been crafted.39 A wooden Virgin, then, as well as being paralleled to the tree, as in the Dream of the Rood, can also be seen in some senses as partaking in the woodiness of the Cross. In the Kilcorban Madonna the end of Christ’s life was already present, conceptually and theologically. But it was also in some senses present materially, by virtue of the proleptic freight of the wood. The idea of the possibility of Christ’s sacrificial death, from the moment of his Incarnation, and the Virgin’s intimation of his death, was an almost universal idea across medieval representations of the Virgin and Child. It is seen in the solemnity of the mother of God as represented in Byzantine icons, in the hieratic and serious representation of the Sedes Sapientiae in Throne of Wisdom statues, and in the sad wistfulness of the Virgin’s expression in Italian thirteenth and fourteenth-century panel paintings. But here, in the Kilcorban Madonna, as in the sculpture in the Angel Choir at Lincoln, the mood conveyed by the facial expressions is one not of suffering, but of joy. As the incarnate Christ comes into corporeal being as a child, he is already the sacrificial lamb. As the tree has the inherent and recognized potential, in the wood-of-the-cross legends, to become the cross of Christ, so the infant Christ has the inherent and recognized potential to become the crucified saviour. The organic, growing wood always recalled, even in the hewn timber of a carved statue, the transformation, the becoming, of the Word made flesh, and the divine made mortal. The Kilcorban Madonna seems to see the death already foretold as a source for joy, because it allows the return of the human soul to God. The Virgin’s smile seems to have some particular purchase in Ireland, at least in the area in which we find the Kilcorban Madonna – the diocese of Clonfert in east Galway. For there are two other medieval smiling Virgin Mary statues – both carved from wood – in this area. One, probably dating from the mid to late thirteenth century, is now preserved at the house of the Poor Clares in Galway city, but may originally have come from the Franciscan friary at Athlone (founded 1241), only some thirty miles from Kilcorban. 40 The other, probably dating from the fourteenth century, is preserved in the church of Our Lady of Clonfert at Killoran, Co. Galway, just seventeen miles from Kilcorban in one direction, and thirty miles from Athlone in the other direction. Though the smiles of these other statues are a subject for another study, it is notable that a joyful countenance can be found

39 B. Williamson, ‘Matter and Materiality in an Italian Reliquary Triptych’, Gesta, 57, 2018, pp. 23–42; S. Guérin, ‘Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine’, Art Bulletin, 95, 2013, pp. 55–77 (at p. 62); Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, pp. 24–5. 40 MacLeod, ‘Mediaeval Figure Sculptures in Ireland’, pp. 176–9.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 216

09/07/2021 09:47

c hapt er 16   |  t he ki l c o r ban mad o nna  |   217

in many other instances of medieval sculpture in the west of Ireland. We might cite the charming and cheerful St Michael the Archangel over the fifteenth-century west portal of the Augustinian abbey church at Clontuskert (fig. 3), or his less bombastic companion in the cloister there (fig. 4). Other figures at Clontuskert smile too, such as the figures of St John the Baptist, St Catherine and St Patrick, over the west portal.41 We might add to these the smiling angel in St Nicholas’s collegiate church (c.1320) in the city of Galway (fig. 5), and other similar figures such as the smiling St Dominic and St Patrick over the fifteenth-century doorway of the cathedral at Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly,42 the figure of St Francis at the Franciscan Friary at Ennis, Co. Clare,43 or the angels on the chancel arch at Clonfert cathedral.44 For some reason yet to be properly determined, a mode of representation that privileged the joyful seems to have been especially appealing, at least in some contexts, in Ireland in the later middle ages. In the case of the Kilcorban Madonna, the co-existence of the ideas of growing, becoming, living and dying in the image of the Virgin and Child, and in the wood from which the figures were carved, highlights a specific and potent poetics of the material that blends intriguingly with the meanings of the particular representation.

41 C. Hourihane, Gothic Art in Ireland, 1169–1550. Enduring Vitality, New Haven, CT, 2003, pls 97a, 97b. See also other angels at Clontuskert, illustrated in ibid., pls 99, 100. 42 Ibid., pls 102, 104. 43 Ibid., pl. 106. 44 Ibid., pls 112, 113.

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 217

09/07/2021 09:47

218 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t wo

left: Fig. 1. The Kilcorban Madonna, Loughrea, Clonfert Diocesan Museum, wood, height approximately 36 in., late twelfth/early thirteenth century. Photo: author above: Fig. 2. The Kilcorban Madonna, detail of hair and crown. Photo: author

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 218

09/07/2021 09:47

c hapt er 16   |  t he ki l c o r ban mad o nna  |   219

Fig. 3. St Michael the Archangel, Clontuskert Augustinian priory, west portal, fifteenth century. Photo: author

Fig. 4. Angel, Clontuskert Augustinian priory, cloister, fifteenth century. Photo: author

Fig. 5. Angel, Galway, St Nicholas’ collegiate church, c.1320 . Photo: author

7132 13-16 Binski new size v6.indd 219

09/07/2021 09:47

Recapitulation: A Medieval Table of Contents Jessica Berenbeim

‘The table of contents of this book undoubtedly makes it unnecessary for me to list these practices and discourses here …’ (Gérard Genette, Paratexts)

I

n the instance offe re d b y m y e p i gra p h , from the Introduction to Genette’s Paratexts, the reader must understand the nature of a kind of paratext through demonstration rather than explicit articulation.1 These words indeed beg the question of what work a table of contents does, even what it is.2 A table of contents would seem to be several things, and principally: a list and a device, as well as a paratext.3 Several further queries then follow from these characterizations: what relationship of terms does it represent? What does it help the reader to do? And finally, what is its ‘message’ – what does it express, as a representation? I would like to begin to answer these questions with an example from a critical epoch in the history of this form, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By 1300, tables of contents were common as additions to manuscripts; by 1400, as integrally planned elements.

1 2

3

G. Genette, Seuils, Paris, 1987: in English as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J. E. Lewin, Cambridge, 2009. On tables of contents, and the (related but distinct) history of chapter division, see: M. B. Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’ (1976), reprinted in Parkes, Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts, London, 1991, pp. 35–69, see especially pp. 51–5; Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, ed. H.-J. Martin and J. Vézin, Paris, 1990; M. A. Rouse and R. H. Rouse, ‘Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page’, and ‘The Development of Research Tools in the Thirteenth Century’, in Rouse and Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, Notre Dame, 1991, see especially pp. 240–46; G. R. Keiser, ‘Serving the Needs of Readers: Textual Division in Some Late-medieval English Texts’, in New Science out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. R. Beadle and A. J. Piper, Aldershot, 1995, pp. 207–26; J. Dionísio, ‘Tables of Contents in Portuguese Late-medieval Manuscripts’, in The Book as Artefact, Text, and Border, ed. by A. Hansen et al., Amsterdam, 2005, pp. 89–109; M.-H. Tesnière, ‘Les Décades de Tite-Live traduit par Pierre Bersuire et la politique éditoriale de Charles V’, in Quand la peinture était dans les livres. Mélanges en l’honneur de François Avril, ed. M. Hofmann and C. Zahl, Turnhout, 2007, pp. 344–51; W. Scase, ‘Rubrics, Opening Numbering, and the Vernon Table of Contents’, in The Making of the Vernon Manuscript: The Production and Contents of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1, ed. W. Scase, Turnhout, 2013, pp. 97–124; W. Scase, ‘“Looke this calender and then proced”: Tables of Contents in Medieval English Manuscripts’, in The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript: Text Collections from a European Perspective, ed. K. Pratt et al., Göttingen, 2017, pp. 287–306; A. da Costa, ‘“That ye mowe redely fynde … what ye desire”: Printed Tables of Contents and Indices, 1475–1550’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 81, 2018, pp. 291–313. Two forthcoming books have not appeared in time for me to consult them in preparing this essay: Book Parts, ed. D. Duncan and A. Smyth; N. Dames, The History of the Chapter in the West. J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 74–111 (‘What’s in a list?’); U. Eco, Vertigine della lista, 2nd edn, Milan, 2009: in English as The Infinity of Lists, trans. A. McEwen, London, 2012. Genette, Paratexts, and see recently also Smith, Renaissance Paratexts, ed. H. Smith and L. Wilson, Cambridge, 2011, with a number of illuminating essays; these, however, deal specifically with printed rather than manuscript books, my main subject matter here.

[ 220]

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 220

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 17 | r ec api t ul at i o n: a med i eval tabl e o f c o nt ent s  |   221

My example, Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 4. 32, is a composite manuscript of about the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The manuscript has three separate tables of contents, all of which relate to Part I of the book; in consequence what follows almost entirely concerns Part I (ff. 1–110). A collection of pastoral literature, the manuscript is known and notable in particular for its added gathering of diagrammatic images and its deployment of all three medieval English languages. The added quire of pastoral diagrams (ff. 11–15), from a group of related images often known collectively as the Turris sapiencie after one here absent, has a clear connection to the rest of the book’s contents in subject matter and audience.4 And in some respects, these diagrams do some of the work of the tables of contents in a different way. This gathering was the original draw of the manuscript for me, as a student under Paul Binski’s supervision; some years later, I have moved one quire over.5 It was in this context that he first directed me to the manuscript, to which I returned for another look while working with him and Patrick Zutshi on the catalogue of western illuminated manuscripts in Cambridge University Library.6 I return to the manuscript now again, in both homage and prolegomenon, as an illustrative example of the problem of the table of contents. All three tables of contents in MS Gg. 4. 32 together occupy what was originally a quire of ten folios at the beginning of the book. The contents of this quire are as follows: f. 1: functions as a guard page (ff. 1 and 10, the two halves of the outer bifolium, are of somewhat thicker, rougher parchment than the others) ff. 2–2v: the first table of contents (hereafter TOC1); rest of final verso blank ff. 3–4: TOC2; rest of final recto blank ff. 4v–5: TOC3 f. 5v: blank, unruled ff. 6–8: missing f. 9: blank, unruled f. 9v: blank, ruled along the same pattern as the tables of contents f. 10: blank, unruled f. 10v: diagram of the Instruments of the Passion, in French, in the form of a grid

4

5 6

See e.g.: L. F. Sandler, The Psalter of Robert de Lisle in the British Library, 2nd edn, London, 1999; The Medieval Craft of Memory, ed. M. Carruthers and J. M. Ziolkowski, Philadelphia, 2002; P. Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1350, New Haven, 2004, pp. 189–90; J. Berenbeim, Art of Documentation, Toronto, 2015, pp. 107–113; J. F. Hamburger, ‘A Seminar on Diagrams as Conversation and Consolation’, Common Knowledge, 24, 2018, pp. 356–65. For an M.Phil. dissertation called: ‘Aspects of English Pastoral Illustration and the Anglo-Norman Somme le roi’. (Paul: ‘Be sure to give it a boring title!’ Evidently I complied.) P. Binski, P. Zutshi, and S. Panayotova, Western Illuminated Manuscripts: A Catalogue of the Collection in Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, 2011. MS Gg. 4. 32 is no. 150. For an earlier catalogue entry, see A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, ed. C. Hardwick and H. R. Luard, Cambridge, 1856–67, no. 1531. All references to the manuscript below cite the current pencil foliation on the upper right-hand corners of rectos; in transcriptions, ‘tirronian et’ (here usually crossed) is represented by ‘&’, and abbreviations have been silently expanded.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 221

09/07/2021 09:47

222 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

TOC1 describes the contents of ff. 21–50v of the manuscript; it lists fifty-four items, the last of which, De elemosina, begins on f. 46v. Ff. 45–50v is a gathering of six, with ff. 47v–50v as unruled blanks. The contents described by TOC2 then begin on a new gathering, at f. 51 of the manuscript, and run to ninety-four items; the last, De visitacione infirmorum, corresponds to the text on ff. 74–76v. Ff. 75–80v is a gathering of six, of which ff. 77–80v is another text in a later hand. On f. 81, the texts covered by the thirty-six items of TOC3 begin; this section then ends in an even messier way: the last item can be found on ff. 102v– 104, however the rubric has been added by a later hand. Furthermore, the text continues after the point described in the table of contents. It extends for the rest of this folio and its verso, where the quire ends, and then for a further quire of six, ending on f. 110v. That is the end of Part I of the manuscript. So each table of contents and section is conceived as a codicologically and ordinally separate element, each of which is potentially expandable (even if not infinitely so). Both the book’s original creator and a subsequent reader-renovator have taken up this opportunity. Although Part I is written in one hand, there are at least two distinct phases of writing. Most of TOC1, like Part I itself, is written in a concentrated, dark brown ink. However some stretches are in a lighter, thinner ink, with a looser and marginally more current aspect: the last item in TOC1, the last four items in TOC2, and all of TOC3. The additional text on ff. 104–110v appears to be written in a similar way. For these folios, too, the rubrics have been added in a later hand, as have the initials, although the latter follow guide letters similar to those in the original portions of the manuscript. On f. 105v this later hand begins to write the text as well. Finally, there is another addition to the table of contents, as already noted by the catalogues: the inscription of the words Turris sapiencie above the first item in TOC1, after the addition of this quire to the volume.7 Although also in a lighter brown ink, this is not the same hand or script as the other additions, but rather the same small textualis as the Instruments of the Passion diagram on f. 10v. The tables represent the contents of the main text linguistically, a priority that directs some aspects of the tables’ design. All three tables have the same page design, in two columns: the left margin of each is delineated by a thin double-ruling, followed by a rubricated roman numeral; then a somewhat wider set of double rules enclosing the first letter of each item; then a text column, with the rest of each item title.8 After an interlinear column, the pattern repeats. One aspect of this design is not regular: the number of lines allotted to each item. Rather than a fixed template into which each title must fit, the design is flexible, with the ultimate appearance of the page responsive to the length of the item title. Although these headings correspond to the rubrics in the main text, they are not the same as the rubrics, and the changes reveal something of the conceptual difference between table and text rubric in their capacities as reading devices or technologies. There are many kinds of interesting changes, but the first two are perhaps especially straightforward (ff. 1, 21): 7 8

CMLUC, p. 177; Western Illuminated MSS, p. 143. The latter also notes Lynda Dennison’s identification of the main scribe as that of the Liber customarum. On the appropriateness of the word ‘title’ in this context, see Scase, ‘Vernon’, pp. 118–19, who notes the more expansive meaning of the Middle English word (beyond the now-usual ‘name of a book’).

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 222

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 17 | r ecapi t ul at i o n: a med i eval tab l e o f c o nt ent s  |   223

Table item

Text rubric

In primis oracio dominica in Anglicana lingua •

Hic incipit oratio dominica in anglica lingua

•ii• Salutacio beate uirginis in eadem lingua•

Hic incipit salutacio beate virginis in eadem lingua

The item headings in the table above are therefore descriptive, while the rubricated headings in the text are deictic. The table items are ordinally relational; that is, they express the relations among terms in the sequence. In fact, the words that describe the table itself explicitly spell this out: Series horum que continentur in isto uolumine. ‘Series’ (per the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, sense 2b) can indeed mean specifically the ‘content of a book or other written work in order’ – that is to say, a text’s subject matter in its particular capacity as a sequential artifact. More broadly, it means a sequence or series in the modern sense; it can also mean (sense 2d) a ‘narrative’. Here in a sense the paratext characterizes itself. Visually, the tables of contents represent the structure of the main text as fundamentally hierarchical; furthermore, they expand and complicate the hierarchy already expressed by the design of the main text. Here too, this process can most easily be seen in the relationship of rubrication systems. Within this main text, there are first-order and subsidiary rubrics; in the tables of contents, these first-order rubrics become item descriptions in regular brown ink. These themselves then become subsidiary in the tables to both second-order rubrics, written against the same ruled verticals as the item descriptions, and first-order rubrics, left-justified to the ruled vertical of the item numbers. For example, in TOC1, De •x• preceptis decalogi becomes subsidiary to the rubric De ecclesie precepta, itself subsidiary to the rubric De hiis que interrogari debent a penitentibus (f. 2). The table therefore doesn’t merely replicate, but reconfigures the work’s structure, integrating it into a more complex hierarchy of sections and sub-sections. Consequently – like the diagrams – the tables of contents express a set of complex intellectual relationships through a combination of order and design, position and spatial configuration. Many of these tables and diagrams are indeed alternate ways of representing the same relationships. The Lord’s Prayer in English, for example, with each petition accompanied by a rubricated Sin and Gift, effectively unspools the rota of petitions in the quire of diagrams (ff. 21, 12v). De superbia que mater est & radix omnium mortalium peccatorum deconstructs the Tree of Vices (ff. 34, 12). And of course, the same hand later added to both, by introducing the Turris sapiencie as a contents item as well as the diagrammatic Instruments of the Passion. In both forms of designed writing, meaning is located as much in the relations among terms as within the terms themselves – this is the principle behind what seems like compulsive diagramming, listing, and restructuring – all, fundamentally, the same intellectual operation. Within the main text, the impulse continues: many sections themselves include further lists, often expressed as simple bracket-diagrams; in the example above, Superbia est { Inobediencia, Iactancia, Presumpcio, and so forth. Per Eco’s ‘vertigo of lists’, the infinite drop here comes not so much at the end of the list – in the ‘etc.’ – but within it.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 223

09/07/2021 09:47

The Economics of Blue and Gold Spike Bucklow

M

y f i r s t j o b at t h e H a m i lt o n K e r r I n s t i t u t e (HKI), University of Cambridge, was to oversee the examination and treatment of the Thornham Parva Retable.1 My second was to oversee the examination and treatment of the Westminster Retable.2 Paul Binski had contributed to a book about the first and made a major contribution to scholarship on the second.3 Due to the retables’ importance, their conservation was guided by committees composed of interested parties; from representatives of funding bodies, through internationally recognized conservators and medieval art historians, to members of the clergy and rural Suffolk parishioners. Paul served on both. He was generous and engaged, willing to teach conservators but also to learn from them. Thus began an enduring and fruitful relationship with the HKI. Since the treatment of the retables, Paul has also collaborated with the HKI on a project that aims to safeguard the late-medieval rood screens in churches scattered across East Anglia.4 My involvement in that project forms the basis for this contribution to a celebration of Paul’s work. Late-medieval English rood screens were made by provincial craftspeople for parish churches, including many that served very small rural communities. They have been called ‘the most important single focus there has ever been for corporate artistic patronage and devotional investment in the local communities of England.’5Any survey of the surviving screens provides ample evidence of the highly systematic use of decorative colour. In 1930s for example, Aymer Vallance noted the combined use of black and white, a ‘blue, powdered with gold stars’ and a ‘counterchange in alternate panels of red and green’.6 These were popular colour combinations, but they appear to have been more common

1 2 3 4 5 6

The Thornham Parva Retable, ed. A. Massing, London and Turnhout, 2003. The Westminster Retable, ed. P. Binski and A. Massing, London and Turnhout, 2009. C. Norton, D. Park and P. Binski, Dominican Painting in East Anglia, Woodbridge, 1987. P. Binski, ‘Introduction’, in The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe, ed. S. Bucklow, R. Marks and L. Wrapson, Woodbridge, 2017, pp. 1–6. E. Duffy, ‘The Parish, Piety and Patronage in Late Medieval East Anglia: The Evidence of Rood Screens’, in The Parish in English Life, ed. K. L. French, G. G. Gibbs and B. A. Kümin, Manchester, 1997, p. 162. A. Vallance, English Church Screens, London, 1936, p. 57.

[ 224]

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 224

09/07/2021 09:47

chapt er 18   |  t he ec o no mi c s o f blue and go l d   |   225

and more explicit in church than in contemporary East-Anglian secular settings, where red and green were also used in combination but where earth pigments dominated.7 The same systematic use of colour is also found on relatively higher status objects such as the Thornham Parva Retable (red and green, as well as blue and gold) as well as on very high status objects such as the Westminster Retable (predominantly blue and gold). The colour combinations were repeated across many screens, along with other features, such as the use of asymmetry on otherwise symmetrical structures, that also appeared in the retables. In most cases, the asymmetries were relatively discreet so were only noticed after significant regular viewing. Their discovery could therefore be accompanied by surprise. In some cases, they were completely imperceptible at normal viewing distances. For example, the Westminster Retable has gilded foliate patterns on the blue glass panels that frame the medallions depicting scenes from the life of Christ. The foliate patterns are vine leaves on some, and oak leaves on others. The distribution of blue glass panels is symmetrical across the Retable but the choice of vine or oak leaves within each panel, whilst very strictly ordered, is asymmetrical. The scale of the gilded leaves is such that one cannot appreciate their asymmetric distribution whilst simultaneously appreciating the symmetric order of the blue panels.8 The consistency of such features across many different works of art makes them appear purposeful and, whatever their origin, their existence suggests conformity to a convention that was widely recognized and respected. In East Anglian parish churches, the colours in question are almost exclusively on the western face of rood screens and were paid for by the congregation, either collectively, individually or by a combination of the two. The rood screen’s painted west face formed a visual backdrop for events in the nave as well as filter for the congregation’s view of events in chancel. If one assumes that the colour combination was perceived as an integral part of the house of God, then it would be an appropriate subject for contemplation and speculation. Reviewing the same colour combinations in draperies – red and green, blue and gold – across a number of early Italian works in the 1980s, John Shearman, detected a possible symbolic meaning that he said ‘seems to be forgotten’.9 It may be possible to retrieve something of that lost symbolic meaning by reference to social anthropology. In 1998, Alfred Gell wrote of the ‘apotropaic use of pattern’, alluding to widespread traditions in which demons were captivated by fascinating puzzles, unable to pass until they had solved the conundrum. 10 As with many tales of passage, if a traveller could not successfully answer a riddle, their journey was terminated. Gell asserted that complex decorative linear patterns functioned as ‘demonic fly-paper’.11 Although these ideas arose in ethnographic domains, I would suggest that some surprising or apparently 7 8 9

Personal communication, Andrea Kirkham, September 2018. The leaves are each c.0.19 in. whereas the symmetric reflection of glass panels is over c.118 in. (9.84 ft.). Paintings include Deodato Orlandi, Maestà, c.1300 (Pisa); Pietro Lorenzetti, Maestà, 1315–20 (Cortona); Paolo Veneziano, Coronation, c.1340 (Venice); Duccio, Maestà, c.1310 (Siena); Lorenzo Monaco, Coronation, 1414 (London and Florence); Masolino, Madonna, c.1420 (Munich); Cosimo Tura, Roverella Polyptypch, c.1470 (London) and others. The pattern is also visible in the following works: Assumption window, 1405 (Duomo, Florence); Assumption window, c.1360 (Duomo, Siena); the twelfth century Mosaic façade, (San Frediano, Lucca); Deposition polychromed wood sculpture, 1228 (Duomo, Volterra). For the quotation, see J. Shearman, ‘Isochromatic Colour Compositions in the Italian Renaissance’, in Colour and Technique in Renaissance Painting, ed. M. B. Hall, New York, 1987, pp. 151–60. 10 A. Gell, Art and Agency, Oxford, 1998, pp. 83–90. 11 Gell, Agency, p. 84.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 225

09/07/2021 09:47

22 6  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

inconsistent features of medieval art – such as the mixture of symmetry and asymmetry – may be analogous. For example, ‘several apparent incongruities’ are associated with the placement of statues which ornament doorways. (These incongruities involve linear narrative sequences that do not correlate with the architectural structures in which they are embedded.) In the case of the twelfth-century capital frieze at Notre Dame at Étampes, Kathleen Nolan has concluded that ‘the apparent inconsistencies in the frieze are intentional’ and the effect was described as a ‘disruptive contradiction’.12 Although the original statues were probably polychrome, Nolan did not consider the use of colour. However, numerous much less ornate doorways were very often marked, or made, with opposite colours. For example, according to Ernst Tristram, Westminster Abbey’s voussoirs were ‘painted in alternate colours by 1250’.13 Rood screens act as doorways between the nave and chancel so their anomalous decoration might also be considered in the light of the Étampes frieze and Gell’s ‘demonic fly-paper’. In this respect, I would qualify Vallance’s assertion that ‘it cannot be too strongly emphasized that screens have no mystical nor didactic significance whatever, but they are primarily utilitarian, their purpose being to guard and fence an altar.’14 In fact, many rood screens are quite flimsy structures and I would suggest that some aspects of guarding and fencing altars are not utilitarian, but symbolic, so some element of ‘mystical or didactic significance’ should not be discounted. This follows Oleg Grabar, who described ornaments as intermediaries between object, viewer, patron and maker, to be considered as ‘filters through which signs … are transmitted, consciously or not, in order to be most effectively communicated.’15 The rood screens’ contrasting effects – obvious symmetric structures and perhaps surprising asymmetric colours – could therefore together constitute a sophisticated rhetorical device.16 The effectiveness of any such rhetorical device, however, would have to rest upon prosaic details such as the relative costs of artists’ materials. The effect of red could be achieved quite cheaply with a layer of either red earth, red lead or vermilion, and it could be enhanced with a thin layer of a more expensive material like red lake (of either madder, kermes, cochineal or lac-based type). Greens were also relatively inexpensive and were predominantly composed of verdigris, either in mixtures or as glazes.17 Given their relatively modest costs, combined with their relatively high saturation and visual impact, it is not too surprising that these two colours dominate rood screens. On the other hand, the pigments that provided blue and gold were very expensive. It is therefore not surprising that these two colours were generally used more sparingly. Henry III, for example, specifically precluded the use of azure (as well as gold) in less prestigious commissions, such as the 1250 retable in St Catherine’s Chapel, Guildford.18 So, simple everyday economics – based upon the relative costs of colours – evidently determined 12 K. Nolan, ‘Narrative in the Capital Frieze at Notre-Dame at Étampes’, Art Bulletin, 71, 1989, pp. 166–84 (at pp. 171–4). 13 E. W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting, the Thirteenth Century, Oxford, 1950, pp. 37–8. 14 Vallance, Screens, p. 32. 15 O. Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament, Princeton, NJ, 1992, p. 227. 16 A-M. Bouché, ‘Vox imaginis; Anomaly and Enigma in Romanesque Art’, in The Mind’s Eye, ed. J. F. Hamburger and A-M. Bouché, Princeton, NJ, 2006, pp. 306–35 (at p. 311). 17 All these materials have been identified in East Anglian rood screens. 18 L. F. Salzman, Building in England, Oxford, 1952, p. 166.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 226

09/07/2021 09:47

ch apt er 18   |  t he ec o no mi c s o f blue and go l d   |   227

whether or not blue and gold were incorporated into commissions and, if they were included, then their relative scales of use.19 Yet colours were not selected only on the basis of pigment cost. Black and white were both provided by cheap pigments (charcoal and lead white), yet their combined decorative use is not widespread in East Anglian rood screens. Blue and gold may have been very expensive but the etymology of ‘economy’ suggests that economy could also determine the particular way in which they were arranged when they were actually incorporated into commissions. Fifteenth-century use of the word meant the ‘order according to which things are administered or organized’ and ‘good use of a thing’, both deriving from the Ancient Greek for household management. In Hellenistic Greek, economy also meant the ‘orderly arrangement of material’.20 I would suggest that the ‘good use’ of blue and gold and ‘the order according to which’ they were ‘administered or organized’ conformed to a spiritual economy, and one that was connected to the possibly apotropaic use of red and green. First, a pattern for the use of blue and gold like that for the consistent asymmetric alternation of red and green needs to be established. However, given that blue and gold are less common, the type of broad statistical survey that established an organizing principle for the use of red and green is problematic. For the use of blue and gold in rood screens, an underlying organizing principle is most clearly illustrated by variations played on the theme of gold when not necessarily used in combination with blue. This is because the colouristic and textural effects of gold vary significantly according to application, offering painters ways of differentiating between areas of decoration using ostensibly the same colour scheme. The three ways of applying gold were; as burnished gold leaf on clay, as un-burnished gold leaf on oil or as powdered gold in a medium like gum arabic. (This last method may never have been used on rood screens: no significant evidence for it survives). In addition, the colouristic and textural effects of gold can be mimicked with a number of other materials, including yellow earths and orpiment (both natural minerals) as well as lead tin yellow and mosaic gold (both synthetic pigments). Surveys by Eddie Sinclair and Lucy Wrapson have shown that several different ways of achieving the visual effects of gold can be found in combination on the same rood screen.21 For example, when gold and orpiment are found together, the gold is towards the top and the orpiment is towards the bottom. If optical and perceptual effects were paramount in the organization of these materials, one might expect the opposite arrangement, with the expensive ‘real’ stuff closer to the eye and the cheaper ‘imitation’ further from the eye.22 Evidently, other factors outweigh any attempt to create consistent visual effects with the partial substitution of a cheaper material. The organization of gold-like materials could also be used to differentiate between areas of decorative and figurative paint. Here, however, questions about their use are complicated by the concept of ‘fictive’ gold. The transition from real to fictive gold is well documented. 19 In secular settings, blue (together with gold, orpiment, lead tin yellow or ochre) was also restricted to higher status interior decorative schemes. (Andrea Kirkham, personal communication, September 2018.) 20 Oxford English Dictionary, online version, www.oed.com (accessed 01 October 2019). 21 See L. Wrapson and E. Sinclair, ‘The Polychromy of Devon Screens’, in Art and Science of the Church Screen, pp. 150–75. 22 Modern Health and Safety might also favour this arrangement, with the friable and poisonous material (orpiment is an arsenic compound) being out of reach.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 227

09/07/2021 09:47

228 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

Thus, for example, by the mid-fifteenth century in Italy, Alberti suggested there was ‘more praise for the painter who imitates the rays of gold with colour [pigment]’.23 So, in the context of figurative painting, the use of yellow earths and lead tin yellow as substitutes for real gold could signify the adoption of changing conventions post-Alberti. Alternatively, the continued use of real gold in figurative painting could signify resistance to those changing conventions. Yet, even in later figurative paintings where all the gold is fictive and no real gold would be expected, we can still find differentiation between the pigments used to create the illusion of gold. For example, a large seventeenth-century still-life, The Paston Treasure, (a Norfolk painting that shows significant medieval influence), depicts numerous gold and gilded objects which, at first sight, would have looked quite consistent.24 Yet in fact there is a clear economy of pigment use with the more prestigious and centrally placed gold items primarily depicted in orpiment and the less important, peripheral, items primarily depicted in yellow earths (all were then modelled with lead tin yellow and yellow lakes).25 This differentiation in golden yellows, between central orpiment and peripheral earths, can also be found in some seventeenth-century flower paintings.26 In these cases, the privileging of orpiment probably reflects an enduring hierarchy of pigments on the painters’ palette. The earths were quite prosaic – they were not particularly expensive, they could have been sourced locally and their everyday associations were relatively lowly. On the other hand, orpiment (literally ‘gold pigment’) was associated with the supposed alchemical composition of gold as well as its processing.27 These cultural factors evidently outweighed purely visual factors since orpiment was known to be an unstable pigment which changed colour over time.28 Such hierarchical use of pigments is not reflected in the blues, since there were only two pigments capable of providing the colour required to complement gold.29 These were both expensive, but ultramarine cost up to ten times as much as azurite and has not yet been found on rood screens. To date, the rich blues identified on rood screens by scientific analysis have all been executed with azurite. If prepared skilfully, azurite and ultramarine could be practically indistinguishable and elsewhere, in easel paintings and in manuscripts, a differentiation in their use consistent with their relative costs can be discerned in artists’ practice. This differentiation is also echoed in the space devoted to the pigments in artists’ manuals.30 Everyday economic differences were reflected in the distribution of blue and gold with respect to red and green. When present, blue and gold usually feature in relatively small areas of rood screens, and usually in the upper parts, such as on vaulting. As noted, Vallance

23 L. B. Alberti, On Painting, trans. J. R. Spencer, New Haven, CT, 1966, p. 85. 24 S. Bucklow, The Anatomy of Riches, London, 2018, pp. 193–223. 25 S. Bucklow and J. David, ‘Making the Paston Treasure’, in The Paston Treasure; Microcosm of the Known World, ed. A. Moore, N. Flis and F. Vanke, New Haven, CT, 2018, pp. 76–87 (at p. 86). 26 See, for example, Jan de Heem, Flowers in a Glass Vase (c.1660: Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum). 27 In Jabirian alchemy, all metals were compounded of mercury, arsenic and sulphur, with gold being the perfect combination. Orpiment is a compound of arsenic and sulphur. 28 Theophilus, On Divers Arts, tr. J. G Hawthorne and C. S. Smith, New York, 1979, p. 119 (book I, ch. 14). 29 Indigo and a black-and-white optical blue were also used on rood screens, but their tonality and saturation are significantly inferior to those of azurite and ultramarine. 30 S. Bucklow, The Riddle of the Image, London, 2016, pp. 42–72.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 228

09/07/2021 09:47

chapt er 18   |  t he ec o no mi c s o f b lue and go l d   |   229

described the combination as ‘blue, powdered with gold stars’.31 This, accompanied by the fact that it was mainly seen on rood screens when looking upward, suggests that the colours could have been intended as a literal, if schematic, representation of the night sky.32 The night sky had a traditional relationship with heaven – it is when and where the planets and constellations become visible – and was a reminder of creation as an ordered theophany. That theophany was explicated within the Book of Nature, a book that, like any other, could be subject to a four-fold exegesis. It follows that the night sky’s literal aspect was accompanied by tropological, allegorical and anagogic aspects. Tropologically, allegorically and anagogically the visible heavens lie between us and the mind of God. They are a boundary to be crossed in order to achieve communion with the ranks of angels and, ultimately, union with God. This brings us back to ‘economy’, as the way in which colours could be ‘administered or organized’. The two colour pairs differ in the way they are organized on the carved wooden structures that are characterized by an equal number of panels on either side of a central door. Each of those panels is defined by their position between two vertical stanchions. The colours red and green are focused on the panels that lie between stanchions. Where present, blue and gold are focused on the vaults that spring from stanchions. Rood screen symmetry demanded an even number of panels and an odd number of stanchions, and even numbers were widely considered to be unlucky whilst odd numbers were lucky.33 As colour pairs, the red and green were therefore associated with unlucky numbers, whilst the blue and gold were associated with lucky numbers. This distribution reinforces the vertical distribution of colours with lucky, heavenly, associations for blue and gold at the screen’s heights, and unlucky, earthly, associations for red and green at its base. The etymological roots of economy are oikos, meaning ‘home’, and nomos, meaning ‘law’. Derrida further related nomos to nemein, meaning ‘distribution’ and moira, meaning ‘partition’ and ‘destiny’.34 I will briefly consider the distribution of colours and then consider rood screens’ decorations in terms of the economy of partition and destiny. Broadly speaking, like red and green, blue and gold can be described as opposite or complementary colours, although the term ‘complementary’ needs to be clarified. The modern idea of complementary colours depends upon the concept of three primary and three secondary colours. In subtractive mixing (the type of colour mixing that occurs with paint), the primaries are red, yellow and blue, whilst the secondaries are orange, (a mixture of red and yellow pigments), green (a mix of yellow and blue ones) and purple (blue and red). In modern terms, both pairings of colour on rood screens are complementary, being composed of a primary (red) and secondary (green), or a primary (blue) and secondary (orange, if gold is considered a cross between red and yellow).35 However, this understanding of complementary colours belongs to a modern, hue-based, colour system that was not in 31 Vallance, Screens, p.57. 32 The source of the artists’ most prestigious blue, lapis lazuli, was explicitly described in the same terms by Albertus Magnus in his thirteenth-century lapidary, Book of Stones, trans. D. Wyckoff, Oxford, 1967, p. 115 (book II:2, ch. 17). 33 V. F. Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism, Columbia, NY, 1938, p. 41. 34 J. Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf, Chicago, IL, 1992, p. 6. 35 Theophilus said that the best, Arabian, gold was red (Theophilus, Arts, p. 119 (book III, ch. 47)), whereas Petrus Bonus compared gold to the yellow of egg yolk: Petrus Bonus, The New Pearl of Great Price, ed. J. Lacinius, trans. A. E. Waite, London, 1963, p. 287.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 229

09/07/2021 09:47

23 0 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

circulation in the late middle ages and has been described as ‘lop-sided and idiosyncratic’.36 Even though that hue-based colour paradigm did not yet exist when the rood screens were painted, the paired colours could still be said to exhibit complementarity, albeit in terms of cultural associations rather than perceptual properties. They could, for example, be associated with gender.37 Red and green were primarily distributed across the base of rood screens and in an asymmetric manner that was at variance with their carved structure. As a paired combination, they introduce dissonance. On the other hand, blue and gold were primarily distributed across the top of rood screens in a symmetric manner that is in accord with the carved structure. As a paired combination, they maintain the overall architectural harmonies. The contrasting decorative use of the two colour combinations therefore reinforces the dual, or liminal, nature of the rood screen. Colouristically, they reinforce the understanding of screens as objects that mark the thresholds which simultaneously divide and join churches, separating nave from chancel whilst at the same time connecting nave to chancel. Building upon Vallance’s utilitarian understanding of rood screen function, in the spiritual economy, red and green could ‘protect’ the more sacred from the less sacred, like horizontal demonic fly-paper. On the other hand, the screens’ blue and gold could represent the vertical dimension that defines spiritual progress, from the less sacred to the more sacred space. The rhetoric of blue and gold would thus reinforce rood screens’ function in architectural ductus.38 And such rhetoric need not have been too obscure for lay viewers because it existed in secular sources. For example, the same colour combination, ‘gold and azure’, was found on the wall that surrounded the closed Garden of Pleasure in The Romance of the Rose. Also painted on that wall were personifications of Hate, Cruelty, Baseness, Covetousness, Avarice, Envy, Sorrow, Old Age, Religious Hypocrisy and Poverty.39 These were barred from the Garden of Pleasure, as sinners were from the congregation of the righteous. This finally brings us to the relationship between economy and moira, or partition and destiny. In the case of rood screens’ paint schemes, partition and destiny in the spiritual economy relate to the biblical use of gates as a location for judgement, and the statutes of the Lord written on doorposts.40 The rood screen can be seen as an architectural version of the ‘strait gate’.41 At that gate, partition takes place and it is the destiny of some to enter but others to be excluded. Those that were excluded were stuck on Gell’s red and green ‘demonic fly-paper’. Those that could enter moved from the worldly to the heavenly blue and gold. The excluded could merely ‘see’, and they were parted from the few who could

36 N. F. Barley, ‘Old English Colour Classifications: Where do Matters Stand?’, in Anglo-Saxon England, 3 (1974), pp. 15–28 (at p. 17). 37 J. Gage, Colour and Culture, London, 1993, pp. 142–3. 38 P. Crossley, ‘Ductus and Memoria: Chartres Cathedral and the Workings of Rhetoric’, in Rhetoric Beyond Words, ed. M. Carruthers, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 214–49. 39 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, ed. F. Horgan, Oxford, 1994, pp. 9 (line 462 ) and 5–9 (lines 139– 439). 40 Deuteronomy 6:9; II Samuel 15:2. For other examples, see F. Barry, ‘Disiecta Membra’, in San Marco, Byzantium and the Myths of Venice, ed. H. Maguire and R. S. Nelson, Washington, DC, 2010, pp. 7–62 (at p. 55). 41 Matthew 7:13–14.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 230

09/07/2021 09:47

ch apt er 18   |  t he ec o no mi c s o f blue and go l d   |   23 1

‘understand’, and for whom the rood screen was a passage, not a barrier.42 Symbolically, free passage (of either the eye, body or spirit) could be said to be granted to those who deciphered the patterns – transcending worldly binaries to move from opposition to complementarity, from division to unity, from nave to chancel and from darkness into the light.43 The rood screen’s decorative economy or the ‘order according to which [its colours] were administered or organized’ could, of course, never have a prescriptive meaning. Any ‘partition’ or ‘destiny’ that might be implied by the rood screen as a selective barrier (or passage) for souls is not as unequivocal as the trajectories of those homunculi that emerged from mouths upon death, to be drawn up by angels or dragged down by demons. However, as long as the Aristotelian colour scale held sway, the cultural use of colour could draw significance from, and find everyday parallels in, a teleological world. Well into the seventeenth century, the speculative possibilities afforded by the rood screen’s decorative economy could have perplexed or enlightened a significant minority of the congregation as they sat in the nave and contemplated the colours for which they, or their ancestors, had paid.

42 Mark 4:12. 43 I Corinthians, 13:12.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 231

09/07/2021 09:47

23 2 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

Fig. 1. Westminster Retable, detail, showing oak leaves. Chris Titmus, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. © The Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

Fig. 2. Westminster Retable, detail, showing vine leaves. Chris Titmus, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. © The Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

Fig. 3. Westminster Retable, English, c.1269, 10 ft 11 in by 3 ft 2 in. Chris Titmus, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. © The Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

Fig. 4. Westminster Retable, schematic distribution of oak (yellow) and vine (blue) leaves. Drawing by Spike Bucklow, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 232

09/07/2021 09:47

chapt er 18   |  t he ec o no mi c s o f blue and go l d   |   23 3

Fig. 5. Schematic of late-medieval East Anglian rood screen. Drawing by Lucy Wrapson, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 233

09/07/2021 09:47

A Hill of Foreskins: Circumcision in the Alba Bible Marcia Kupfer

T

he eponymous Bible in the collection of the ducal house of Alba (Madrid, Liria Palace) is one of the most extraordinary manuscripts of the late middle ages.1 The richly illuminated volume, completed 1430/1431, contains a Castilian translation of Hebrew scripture embedded in a comparative Jewish-Christian commentary.2 A three-way epistolary exchange, copied in the opening folios (2–12), relates the project’s origins in April 1422. Dissatisfied with then current vernacular bibles because their language did not pass literary muster (el su rromançe es muy corrupto), Don Luis de Guzmán, grand master of the military Order of Calatrava, sought a new, illustrated translation accompanied by gloss on ‘obscure passages’. He turned for the task to his vassal Rabbi Moses Arragel, ‘very erudite in the Law of the Jews’, who had recently come from Guadalajara to live in his domain at the village of Maqueda (province of Toledo).3 Handsome compensation would be forthcoming. The commission received enthusiastic support from Don Luis’s cousins Don Vasco de Guzmán, archdeacon of Toledo, and Friar Arias de Enzinas, superior of the city’s Franciscan convent; they would serve as ecclesiastical censors along with a Dominican scholar Juan de Zamora based in Salamanca. Arragel nonetheless respectfully declined the invitation. In a treatise-length reply, he not only confessed personal unworthiness and insufficient knowledge (the usual tropes

1

2

3

I am indebted to Luis Girón Negrón, Andrés Enrique Arias and Francisco Javier Pueyo Mena for sharing with me drafts of sections from their multi-volume critical edition of the Alba Bible, in preparation, which will be accompanied by a book-length introductory study. While awaiting publication of what will surely be a definitive and comprehensive resource, an extensive bibliography on the manuscript can be found in my entry, ‘Alba Bible’, in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Cultures, forthcoming. I am also grateful to Katrin Kogman-Appel for reading a draft of this essay. The date Friday 2 June 1430, recorded in the colophon on f. 513v, refers to the completion of the translation and commentary. Blanks were left in the front matter for filling in the exact date of the Bible’s formal presentation on Sunday [_] November 143[ ] (f. 20). It is further stated (f. 24v) that the examination of the manuscript began on Monday 6 November of the said year, and lasted until [_] June 143[_]. Based on the information provided, November 5 1430 would have to be the date of the presentation (Girón Negrón et al., annotated edition of the prologue of the Alba Bible, in preparation). Moshe Lazar conjectured that the review was finished in June 1431, ‘Moses Arragel as Translator and Commentator’, in La Biblia de Alba: An Illustrated Manuscript Bible in Castilian, ed. J. Schonfield, facsimile and companion volumes, Madrid, 1992, companion vol., pp. 157–200 (at p. 171). Other scholars have posited a date of 1433 for the completion of the work. For a thorough discussion of internal indications of dating, see G. Avenoza, Biblias castellanas medievales. San Millán de la Cogolla, 2011, pp. 199–254 (at pp. 213–16). The Castilian text is cited after the edition of A. Paz y Melia, Biblia (Antiguo Testamento) traducida del hebreo al castellano por rabi Mose Arragel de Guadalfajara (1422–1433?) y publicada por el duque de Berwick y de Alba, 2 vols, Madrid, 1920–22, vol. 1, pp. 1–2; English transl. of the letter in Lazar, ‘Moses Arragel as Translator and Commentator’, p. 161.

[ 234]

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 234

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 19 | a hill o f f o r eski ns: c i rc umc i si o n i n t he al ba b i bl e  |   23 5

of humility), but also elaborated substantive concerns. The rabbi asserted his firm belief in Maimonides’s thirteen articles of faith to which Jews subscribe and explained their conflict with Christian doctrines. As his gloss, like all rabbinic commentaries, must perforce be rooted in and informed by these thirteen articles, how could the grand master, a most faithful Christian, derive much benefit? His labor, he feared, would be for naught. St. Jerome’s Vulgate, which Christians revere, and the Hebrew original, which Jews hold to be flawless, differ greatly. Should his translation of the base text deviate from the Latin, would he not find himself subject to scorn? Finally, the demand for illustrations clinched his refusal. Although Arragel referred in passing to the Decalogue’s blanket prohibition against imagemaking, on which account Jews ‘avoid having any images put in their temples, books, homes, and histories’, his objection turned specifically on the pictorial representation of God in human form. Clearly familiar with Christian iconographic conventions for inserting figures of Jesus into Old Testament narrative, the rabbi felt that he could not participate in directing the illustration or supervising the painters.4 Don Luis then dispatched a second letter. Rejecting Arragel’s ‘long-winded’ apology, he commanded his vassal to proceed with the assignment. Arias de Enzinas, appointed the patron’s principal intermediary, addressed his own missive to Arragel. He chided the rabbi’s obstinate adherence to the faith of his forebears. Still, the friar concluded, the erudition that Arragel had displayed in the hope of excusing himself from the work only confirmed his qualifications for the mandated service. The letter outlined a plan for the Bible’s execution. The grand master wanted the gloss to comprise ‘modern’ rabbinic explication unknown to Nicholas of Lyra. Arias additionally stipulated that Jewish commentary should be offset by the exegesis of church doctors, which he would purvey in ‘registers’ (registros) as the work unfolded book by biblical book. Without the Latin Christian views, the rabbi would be free to supply his own glosses in full. As for images, Arias would himself designate the episodes to be illustrated; these would be executed by painters from Toledo to whom he would make available a Bible (unidentified) from the cathedral sacristy along with written instructions. Arragel need only leave blank spaces. The remark implies that Arragel’s responsibility would extend beyond authoring translation and commentary to a role in workshop procedures, perhaps overseeing page layout and scribal activity. Notwithstanding the arrangement devised for Arragel’s recusal from the illumination, he evidently did participate in the pictorial program to some extent. A significant number of the volume’s 324 miniatures reflect midrashic sources, which Arragel himself would have had to distill for the artists.5

4

5

Paz y Melia, Biblia, vol. 1, p. 11: Por donde, segund yo, figuras o ymagines non ende de pone o mandar lycençiado seria syn en mi ley peccar en lo a los pintores mandar, pues que yo non sse cosa en el ystoriar, remanesçeria le mandar, lo qual a mi syn cargo es my inpossyble. (f. 9v.) (‘Hence, I think, figures or images would not be possible [for me] to mandate for inclusion without sinning against my law in directing the painters, for though I know nothing about illustration, it would remain my charge, which would be impossible for me [to do] without fault.’ My translation.) C.-O. Nordström, The Duke of Alba’s Castilian Bible: A Study of the Rabbinical Features of the Miniatures, Uppsala, 1967; S Fellous, Histoire de la Bible de Moïse Arragel. Quand un rabbin interprète la Bible pour les chrétiens, Paris, 2001; a full listing of Fellous’s many articles on the manuscript is provided in Kupfer, ‘Alba Bible’ (forthcoming).

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 235

09/07/2021 09:47

23 6  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

The Alba Bible belongs to a corpus of eleven fifteenth-century manuscripts of scripture translated from the Hebrew, all executed for Christian patrons.6 Among these, one (Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, MS 87) points to the existence of what may have been a prior draft of Arragel’s translation.7 At the same time, Alba’s expository apparatus sets the manuscript apart. Alba alone of the group has the format of a glossed Bible in which marginal commentary wraps around a central pair of columns reserved for the scriptural text. Especially remarkable is the fact that Alba’s scribes, whether those responsible for the main text or the gloss, employed a distinctive practice unique to Iberian Hebrew manuscripts: the writing hangs suspended from, rather than sits on, the ruled lines.8 Alba is to date the only known manuscript in Latin characters where this feature appears.9 The relationship of writing to ruling strongly suggests the engagement of Jewish copyists, a hypothesis buttressed by additional technical details and the occasional appearance of Hebrew (in the gloss, in marginal notes, in burnished gold inscriptions within miniatures) from hands well-accustomed to writing the language.10 Remarkable, too, is the unparalleled exordial gateway meant to orient the Bible’s readership.11 Following Arragel’s praise of God (f. 1v) and the letters that establish the terms of the commission comes a lengthy methodological prolegomenon (ff. 12–19v). There the rabbi discusses how equivocal meaning in all languages, and in Hebrew in particular, makes translation difficult, and clarifies how he adjudicated disagreements between the base text and the Vulgate. Arragel further expounds the principles according to which he compiled the gloss so as to forestall any confusion on the part of readers.12 Crucially, he invokes an audience that, extending beyond the patron’s circle, includes his own coreligionists. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the gloss reflects consensus among Christian and Jewish commentators and can be accepted by adherents of both faiths. Where the two exegetical traditions diverge, he indicates the stances of each. He admits, however, that he may have inadvertently forgotten to identify whether a gloss represents Christian or Jewish opinion. The caveat at once affords him a disclaimer and allows the play of ambiguity to become a hermeneutic tool. Should a Christian encounter a gloss that contradicts his faith, let him take it as a Jewish opinion meant not to challenge but only to inform; similarly, should a Jew find himself in an analogous position, he should take the gloss not as a rabbinic opinion but as the view of the church derived from the registros of Arias de Enzinas and Juan de Zamora. Readers, the rabbi advises, should approach the

6 Avenoza, Biblias castellanas; R. M. Rodriguez Porto, ‘Forgotten Witnesses: The Illustrations of Escorial, MS I.I .3 and the Dispute over the Biblias Romanceadas.’ Medieval Encounters, 24, 2018, pp. 116–159 (at pp. 118–19). See also the Index of MSS on the Website: http://www.bibliamedieval.es/ (accessed 01 October 2019). 7 A. Enrique-Arias, ‘Sobre el parentesco entre la Biblia de Alba y la Biblia de la Real Academia de la Historia MS 87’, Romance Philology, 59, 2006, pp. 241–64; F. J. Pueyo Mena, ‘La Biblia de Alba de Mosé Arragel en las Bienandanzas e Fortunas de Lope García de Salazar’, in Judaísmo hispano: Estudios en memoria de José Luis Lacave Riaño, 2 vols, ed. E. Romero, Madrid, 2002, vol. 2, pp. 227–42. 8 A. Keller, ‘The Making of the Biblia de Alba’, in La Biblia de Alba, companion vol., pp. 147–56 (at pp. 152, 156). 9 Fellous, Histoire de la Bible de Moïse Arragel, p. 110. 10 Avenoza, Biblias castellanas pp. 232–5, and see note 24 below. 11 Fellous, Histoire de la Bible de Moïse Arragel, pp. 71–101; E. Gutwirth, ‘Rabbi Mose Arragel and the Art of the Prologue in Fifteenth-Century Castile’, Helmántica, 195, 2014, pp. 187–212. 12 A. Pym, ‘A Christian’s Rabbinic Bible’, in idem, Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History, Manchester, 2000, pp. 90–107.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 236

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 19 | a hill o f f o r eski ns: c i rc umc i si o n i n t he al ba b i bl e  |   23 7

commentary in accordance with the tenets of their own faith. ‘And as I did not but report or bring to mind [various interpretations], it leaves free anyone to believe, argue and defend his own law as much as he can.’13 Whatever the patron’s or the censors’ intentions for the Bible, a Jewish readership was mentally present to Arragel as he worked. The play of equivocal meaning is not restricted to the text. I have elsewhere described at length how it operates in the scene of Abraham circumcising himself (f. 37: fig. 2).14 I want here to revisit, and strengthen, my argument, by extending it to the scene of Joshua circumcising the Israelites at ‘the Hill of Foreskins’ (f. 167v: fig. 3). The Abraham and Joshua episodes, books apart in scripture, are closely linked in a nexus of midrashic and kabbalistic texts. Together the pair of scenes provides cover for a subversive polemics affirming the salvific power of the circumcision blood that seals God’s everlasting covenant with Israel.15 The front matter goes on to stage the manuscript’s presentation (ff. 20–25v). The text transcribes speeches, protracted and brief respectively, that Arragel and Arias each made on the occasion of the Bible’s formal delivery to examiners at San Francisco, Toledo. The preliminary section thus conjoins the record of an ex post facto event with pre-production negotiations and retrospection on an authorial process that would have evolved over many years. This rhetorically crafted telescoping of the work’s genesis, composition, and final submission helps to project an impression of coherence and consistency across a unified whole. But specialists have detected cracks in the façade. The militantly Christian nature of some of the gloss has been attributed to censors who intervened in Arragel’s draft.16 On a material level, the actual copy belies a fully controlled, smooth process of production. The manuscript’s peculiar codicological structure, the pricking and ruling of leaves that establish mise en page, and the inconsistent order of executing the textual, decorative and pictorial components point to complex routines with some discoordination among the many parties involved.17 The introduction culminates in a full-page miniature that reinforces the illusion of the commission’s internal unity (fig. 1).18 Don Luis sits enthroned in Solomonic guise beneath the golden dome of a scenae frons used elsewhere in the manuscript to frame the portrait of Israel’s wise king (f. 235) and to represent the Jerusalem Temple. The grand master presides over the Bible’s ceremonial offering as mediated left and right by a Dominican and 13 Lazar, ‘Moses Arragel as Translator and Commentator’, p. 165. 14 M. Kupfer, ‘Abraham Circumcises Himself: A Scene at the Endgame of Jewish Utility to Christian Art’, in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. by D. Nirenberg and H. L. Kessler, Philadelphia, 2011, pp. 143–82. 15 On the topic of circumcision blood: S. J. D. Cohen, ‘A Brief History of Jewish Circumcision Blood’, in The Covenant of Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite, ed. E. W. Mark, Hanover, NH, 2003, pp. 30–42; E. Baumgarten, ‘Marking the Flesh: Circumcision, Blood, and Inscribing Identity’, Micrologus, 13, 2005, pp. 313–50; D. Biale, Blood and Belief: the Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians, Berkeley, 2007, pp. 69–73, 95–100; E. Hollender, ‘The Ritualization of Circumcision in Medieval Judaism in Relation to Islam and Christianity: An Overview’, Religion, 42, 2012, pp. 233–46. 16 A. Sáenz-Badillos, ‘Luis de Guzmán’s Patronage and the Spanish Translation and Commentary of the Bible by Arragel’, in Patronage, Production, and Transmission of Texts in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Cultures, ed. E. Alfonso and J. P. Decter, Turnhout, 2014, pp. 361–83; idem, ‘Jewish and Christian Interpretations in Arragel’s Biblical Glosses’, in Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean, ed. R. Szpiech, New York, 2015, pp. 142–51. 17 Keller, ‘Making of the Biblia de Alba’, pp. 148–53; Avenoza Biblias castellanas, pp. 216–25. 18 C. Sainz de la Maza, ‘Poder político y poder doctrinal en la creación de la Biblia de Alba’, e-Spania. Revue interdisciplinaire d’études hispaniques médiévales et modernes, 3, 2007, http://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/116 (accessed 01 October 2019). Gutwirth, ‘Rabbi Mose Arragel’, pp. 203–06.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 237

09/07/2021 09:47

238 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

Franciscan. Between the pair of friars in a secondary narrative inset, diminutive figures perform the Seven Acts of Mercy. Below, Calatrava knights, their tunics marked by the order’s red cross, flank a kneeling Rabbi Moses, the red badge of the Jew pinned to his cloak. He bears up an open book inscribed with the incipit of Genesis quoted from the Vulgate. The image certifies that Arragel’s Castilian translation neither contradicts nor supplants Saint Jerome’s authorized Latin version. On the contrary, the rabbi’s linguistic bona fides serve literally to uphold, that is, attest, the church father’s own mastery of the Hebraica veritas. The presentation scene choreographs the asymmetric power relations at the heart of Don Luis’s project. Behind the depicted book, in which is mirrored the actual open volume, lies an inequitable mutual accommodation – Arragel to compulsory collaboration, the grand master and his Franciscan agent to the rabbi’s prima facie reservations. Ahead lies the romanced Bible in which Hebrew learning supports Christian goals. Jerome had advocated such an arrangement in his letter to Desiderius, the usual epistolary prologue to the Vulgate Pentateuch.19 While the lay patron intended Arragel’s rabbinic exegesis to improve on Nicholas of Lyra, ecclesiastical supervision guarantees that, despite the Jews’ ancient curatorship (and, according to Jerome, malicious redaction) of the Old Testament, Christian truth ultimately prevails. The prefatory miniature thus prepares the Bible’s readership for a uniformly dutiful implementation of a compact that subjugates Jewish vassal to Christian lord. So absolute is the pictorial rhetoric, and so taken for granted the social hierarchy it categorically endorses, no wonder that scholarship on the manuscript has largely failed to imagine the prospect of Jewish resistance to the Christian agenda. Ever since Américo Castro’s encounter with the Alba Bible led him to formulate his idea of convivencia, modern criticism has emphasized the interfaith accord embodied in the work.20 To cite only the most recent iteration, Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto entertains a vision of proto-humanist cooperation that – in Alba as well as in its later fifteenth-century cousins – has Christians and Jews striving for a shared literal reading of Hebrew Scripture.21 But this presumptive ecumenicism erases in advance the voice of a subject who we know was compelled to acquiesce to others’ instrumentalization of his knowledge. The appropriate rubric under which to consider the utilitarian ecclesiastical mining of rabbinic tradition on display in the Alba Bible is colonization, intellectual in form. The responsible critical path, it seems to me, is to look for what James C. Scott has famously called ‘hidden transcripts’, instances of covert defiance, however subtle or seemingly ineffectual, through which subalterns challenge their domination.22 As Scott also observes, wary hegemons expect subterfuge against which they field preemptive counter-measures. In the case at hand,

19 Saint Jerome, Desiderii mei desideratas. For the Latin text, see D. De Bruyne, Prefaces to the Latin Bible, reprinted with introductions by P-M. Bogaert and T. O’Loughlin, Turnhout, 2015, pp. 7–8; English translation by S. Rebenich, Jerome, London, 2002, pp. 102– 04. 20 A. Castro, ‘La biblia de la casa de Alba’, El Sol, January 26, 1923, reprinted in the author’s collected essays, De la España que aún no conocía, 2 vols, Barcelona, 1990, vol. 2, pp. 339–44; idem, España en su historia; cristianos, moros y judíos, Buenos Aires, 1948, pp. 500–02. For a historiographical review of the term convivencia, see A. Novikoff, ‘Between Tolerance and Intolerance in Medieval Spain: An Historiographic Enigma, Medieval Encounters, 11, 2005, pp. 7–36; for a critique of the concept, see M. Soifer, ‘Beyond convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 1, 2009, pp. 19–35. 21 Rodriguez Porto, ‘Forgotten Witnesses’, pp. 142–3. 22 J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, 1990.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 238

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 19 | a hill of f o r eski ns: c i rc umc i si o n i n t he al ba b i bl e  |   239

textual review and the program of illustration secured the Bible’s Christian character no matter the Jewish input. Following Scott’s model, cultural analysis should both aim to identify modes of resistance and acknowledge the limits that subalterns dare not transgress. The dynamic that Scott articulates helps to account for perplexing contradictions in the Alba Bible. On the one hand, the insinuation into the gloss of passages that Arragel most likely did not author has led to the suspicion that censors delegated a revised, final text to Christian copyists.23 On the other hand, Hebrew scribal practices not readily adoptable by professionals habituated to Latinate norms point to Jewish copyists. Might the scribes have been recent converts, say, in the aftermath of the Tortosa Disputation? Possibly, according to Gemma Avenoza, who notes the presence of converts working in monastic scriptoria in the late fifteenth century.24 The Bible’s own presentation miniature shows its patron to value the conversion of Jews, considered a form of charity on the spiritual plane: the thickly bearded recipients of Calatrava charity can only represent Jews on the path to baptism or already emerged from the waters. Equally plausible, though, is a scenario in which Arragel and scribes under his direction, Jewish or converso, had no choice but to accept the censorship imposed on certain passages. Indeed, an analogous scenario obtains with respect to the Bible’s illustration. The rabbi could in no way override the manifest supersessionist program trumpeted by repeated images of Jesus Christ as God. Yet the circumcision scenes at Genesis 17 and Joshua 5 exemplify how, within narrow parameters, opposition to the Christianization of Jews and their scripture could hide in plain sight, ready for decipherment by Arragel’s interpellated Jewish readership. The manuscript’s hierarchy of illumination allots to the two circumcision episodes the space of minor miniatures. Of equal size, they rank among the small vignettes embedded in a single text column. The decision to include scenes of Abraham circumcising himself and Joshua the Israelites after they crossed the Jordan surely emanated from Arias. Both episodes have an exclusively Christian iconographic background (i.e. they never occur in Jewish works). Their depiction is so very rare across the whole of western medieval art yet so concentrated in the picture cycles of illuminated bibles, all from the late twelfth to the early fifteenth centuries, as to confirm the friar’s claim that he would make such a model available to the Toledo painters.25 But if Arias chose what to illustrate, Arragel guided adjustment of the hypothetical model to bring the circumcision images into line with Jewish understanding of the events and their ongoing religious meaning. My previous analysis of the constants and variations across the iconographic record for the Abraham scene clarifies the ways in which Alba’s treatment Judaizes the representation.26 The miniature isolates the patriarch, dropping the always accompanying figure of Christ or 23 Sáenz-Badillos, ‘Luis de Guzmán’s Patronage’, p. 370. 24 G. Avenoza ‘Jews and the Copying of Books in the Iberian Peninsula in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Patronage, Production, and Transmission, p. 345. 25 For an inventory of all the examples of the Abraham scene that I have found, see Kupfer, ‘Abraham Circumcises Himself ’, p. 181 nn. 103, 104. The scene of Joshua circumcising the Israelites is even more rare; I know of only two examples apart from Alba. As Nordström noted (Duke of Alba’s Castilian Bible, p. 121), it occurs in the Padua Bible of c.1400 (BL, Add. MS 15277, f. 70r). An image with a distinctively anti-Jewish portrayal of Joshua appears in an English mid-thirteenth century work, the Bible of Robert de Bello, (BL, MS Burney 3, f. 90r), on which see P. Tartakoff, ‘From Conversion to Ritual Murder: Re-Contextualizing the Circumcision Charge’, Medieval Encounters, 24, 2018, pp. 361–89. 26 Kupfer, ‘Abraham Circumcises Himself ’, pp. 158, 168–73.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 239

09/07/2021 09:47

2 40 | tr ibu tes to pau l bi nski – part t hr ee

an angel shown to issue the commandment. At the same time, it dramatically enlarges the testicles and penis, sign of an exceeding fertility (Genesis 17:6), and massively increases the flow of blood. So, too, the Joshua scene exaggerates the graphic cutting of the male genitalia and the concomitant blood-letting. The pictorial excess that modern sensibilities may find grotesque is the very source of the scenes’ ambiguity. Visually arresting, both miniatures function on a primary level to render biblical history more vivid. Alba’s Christian readers could secondarily filter the scenes through the soteriological prism of Jesus’ blood, shed first at his circumcision and again at the Passion. Joshua’s scalloped gold nimbus, which he bears throughout the illustrative cycle, marks him as a Christological type. The images serve the ‘public transcript’ as a reminder that the Incarnation voided the old covenant and that baptism initiates the faithful into the new. Of course, deeply ingrained negative attitudes toward circumcision, a ritual practice derided in repulsive terms, may well have colored Christian response.27 Yet the same features that enliven the scenes on a narrative plane, and may have even elicited Christian ridicule, reflect Jewish exegesis. The gushing of blood from Abraham’s colossal, columnar phallus cues the depiction to a convergent midrashic and kabbalistic interpretation.28 The discussion of Abraham’s circumcision in the eighth-century Pirke de Rabbi Elieazer (chapter 29) collocates the event temporally with the Day of Atonement and spatially with the site of the Temple altar.29 The sight of the patriarch’s blood enduring on the ground moves God annually to forgive all the sins of Israel. The doubling of Abraham’s blood with the blood of sin-offerings from the Temple sacrifice echoes the twice-uttered call ‘In thy blood, live!’ (Ezekiel 16:6), which the Lord cried out to Jerusalem, personified as an abandoned newborn, in the scriptural allegory of Israel’s election. The midrash further insinuates the prophetic verse into the Passover story to prove the doubling of bloods on the lintels of the Israelites’ houses. Unable under Pharaoh to carry out the covenantal act, the Israelites did so on the eve of their departure, as deduced from Joshua 5:5, which notes that all who came out of Egypt were circumcised. The sight of their circumcision blood, along with that from the slaughter of the paschal lamb, aroused God’s compassion, and He ‘passed over’ the Israelites on the way to plague the Egyptians. As the children of Israel were delivered from Egypt by the merit of the two bloods, so, too, their ongoing adherence to the twofold covenants of circumcision and the Passover will bring redemption at ‘the end of the fourth kingdom’, rabbinic code for the collapse of Rome/Christianity.30 The commentary on Genesis 17 in the Zohar (1:92a–96b), compiled in thirteenthcentury Castile, transposes the redemptive value of circumcision blood prominent in the Pirke into a cosmogonic, theurgical register.31 The covenant effects the operation of the sefirot (divine hypostases). Abraham at the moment of his circumcision becomes identified

27 N. Salvador Miguel, Debate entre un cristiano y un judío: un texto del siglo XIII, Burgos, 2009. 28 For a fuller discussion of the Abraham scene than I can offer here, see Kupfer, ‘Abraham Circumcises Himself ’, pp. 160–67. 29 Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer (The chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great) according to the text of the manuscript belonging to Abraham Epstein of Vienna, ed. and trans., G. Friedlander, 2nd edn, New York, 1965, p. 204. 30 Ibid., p. 210. 31 The Zohar, trans. D. C. Matt, N. Wolski and J. Hecker, 12 vols, Stanford, 2004–18, vol. 2, pp. 79–115.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 240

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 19 | a hill o f f o r eski ns: c i rc umc i si o n i n t he al ba b i bl e  |   241

with the ninth sefirah Yesod (Foundation); with the divine name inscribed on the bared corona of his penis, the exemplary righteous sage supports the world made for his sake. The solitary figure of the miniature assumes the classic pose of an atlante figure (a disposition unique to Alba), his erect member a pillar between earth and heaven. Portrayed with visionary intensity, he gazes outwardly at the ‘sacred corona’ and inwardly at the Shekhina. The zoharic connection between Abraham’s circumcision and God’s self-revelation is underscored by the rubricated title to Genesis 18 announcing the theophany at Mamre (de commo aparecio dios a abram en somo de mamre & los angeles). The paradisiacal landscape with its springtime blossoms proclaims that Abraham’s blood, not Jesus’, repairs creation. Once the Israelites crossed the Jordan, Joshua circumcised all the males, offspring of those who had departed Egypt and perished in the desert (5:2–9). Then they offered the paschal sacrifice (5:10). Renewal of the covenant, upon which the commemoration of the Passover depended (compare Exodus 12:48), was the precondition for coming into the inheritance of the land. The scriptural contiguity of circumcision and the paschal sacrifice at the threshold to the promised land endowed the covenant with eschatological significance, a point to which I will return. The Alba scene depicts Joshua using a brown flintstone to excise one man’s foreskin while another man, standing out from the crowd, exposes his circumcised penis, its corona bared. The juxtaposition of the cutting action with the figure showing the completed result pertains to the ancient rabbinic distinction between milah (cut), the removal of the foreskin, and peri’ah (uncovering), removal of the remaining membrane around the tip of the penis. Without the latter, the former does not constitute a valid circumcision.32 The Pirke’s chapter on Abraham’s circumcision deploys the Joshua text to explain the tradition. Why did the Israelites need to be circumcised? Because, notes the midrash, the wandering constituted a hardship that forced suspension of the ritual. An alternative reason, homing in on why God commanded Joshua to perform a second circumcision (5:2), counters that, in the desert, They were circumcised but not according to its regulation. They had cut off the foreskin, but they had not uncovered the corona. Everyone who has been circumcised, but has not had the corona uncovered, is as though he had not been circumcised . . . When they came to the land (of Canaan), the Holy One, blessed be he, said to Joshua: ‘Joshua! Dost thou not know that the Israelites are not circumcised according to the proper regulation?’ He again circumcised them a second time …33 Arragel’s commentary elaborates on both arguments.34 The Israelites had to be ready to decamp and journey at God’s command; circumcising eight-day-old infants put them at danger of death during travel. Arragel supplements the argument of hardship with a

32 S. J. D. Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism, Berkeley, 2005, p. 24. 33 Pirke, p. 211 34 Paz y Melia, Biblia, vol. 1, pp. 581–2 (gloss nos. 32–4).

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 241

09/07/2021 09:47

2 42 | tr ibu tes to pau l bi nski – part t hr ee

meteorological rationale: the north wind, helpful for the healing of wounds and sores, including the wound from circumcision, could not reach the people surrounded as they were by the cloud of God’s glory. Finally, the rabbi expounds on the meaning of the word ‘second’ in relation to the rule concerning the exposure of the corona. He supplements this argument by explaining the principle behind the designation ‘second’ applied to the proper observance of a commandment after its usual appointed time, as, for example, in the feast called ‘second Passover’ (pesach sheni), celebrated thirty days after the first (compare Numbers 9:6–12). Abutting the figural vignette is a pile of blood-soaked foreskins, set into the column reserved for Arragel’s gloss. Whereas scripture merely states that the event occurred at the ‘Hill of Foreskins’, the Pirke explicates the toponym through narrative: ‘he [Joshua] gathered all the foreskins until he made them (as high) as a hill.’35 The caption above the figures (de commo se fizo un grand monton de los prepucios), in concert with the mound of foreskins, reflects the Pirke’s narrative discourse.36 The dark brown line surrounding the bloody heap shows what other action that, according to the midrash, went into making the hill: ‘The Israelites took the foreskin and the blood and covered them with the dust of the wilderness.’ The dust-covered foreskins and the exposed corona of the adjacent figure are mutual visual foils. The composite covered stack of the fleshly coverings mirrors the shape of a corona obstructed prior to but revealed through circumcision. The raison d’être for the midrashic expansion on the covering of the foreskins lies in the immediate follow-up, an exegesis that clinches the Pirke’s treatment of the collective circumcision: When Balaam came, he saw all the wilderness filled with the foreskins of the Israelites, he said: Who will be able to arise by the merit of the blood of the covenant of this circumcision, which is covered by the dust? As it is said, ‘Who can count the dust of Jacob?’ (Numbers 23:10). By virtue of the Israelites’ circumcision blood, God prevented Balaam the wicked from cursing His chosen people at the behest of the enemy ruler Balak. The oracle ended up, despite himself, ventriloquizing God’s restatement of the pledge to Jacob ‘Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth’ (Genesis 28:14). Balaam, in blessing Israel, prophesied the nation’s exaltation and its adversaries’ destruction. The Zohar folds an echo of this midrash into its commentary on Abraham’s circumcision: The Blessed Holy One said to Joshua, ‘Israel are obstructed – still covered, My covenant unrevealed – and you want to bring them into the land and subdue their enemies? Circumcise the Children of Israel again, a second time!’ Until they were uncovered – this covenant revealed – they did not enter the

35 Pirke, p. 212. 36 Nordström, Duke of Alba’s Castilian Bible, pp. 119–21 and, following his lead, Fellous, Histoire de la Bible de Moïse Arragel, p. 315, mention only this one detail in their discussion of the scene’s midrashic allusion.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 242

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 19 | a hill o f f o r eski ns: c i rc umc i si o n i n t he al ba b i bl e  |   243

land, nor were their enemies subdued. Similarly here: once Israel willingly offered themselves for this sign, their enemies were subdued and blessings restored to the world …37 The practice of circumcision in medieval Jewish communities entailed the ritual disposal of an infant’s bloody foreskin in earth or sand, symbolically activating the linkage between the covenant/corona revealed and God’s promise of fecundity, protection, and return to the land.38 The figural component of Alba’s Joshua miniature ties into Arragel’s commentary, which reports neutral, technical aspects of Jewish law and lore. For the Bible’s Christian readers, perhaps visually attending to Joshua in the guise of Jesus, the monton de los prepucios recedes into topographic background supportive of the narrative. For a readership familiar with Jewish sources and customs, however, the mound of foreskins and blood occupies a polemical foreground. The motif sufficed to trigger the polemical ‘punch line’ of the midrash, Israel’s privileged relationship with God and ultimate triumph over its oppressors, about which Arragel’s gloss says nothing. Read through the lens of the Pirke, the image puts Arragel’s unwitting ecclesiastical handlers in the position of the impotent seer Balaam, rabbinic archetype of the Gentile sorcerer.39 Note that the scribal hand responsible for the gloss adjusted his writing to the hill of foreskins, not only to its shape but also to the blood trails oozing into the parchment ground below. Thus, the miniature had been drawn and painted before the text of the gloss was copied.40 The scribe(s) writing the gloss would be the scene’s first reader(s). Might Arragel’s reference in his prologue to a Jewish readership in fact implicate the scribes?41 They would have grasped the scene’s allusion to messianic deliverance. If the copyists were conversos who could not have their infant sons circumcised in view of the mortal danger incurred (recall Arragel’s gloss on the argument of hardship), then an allusion to the redemptive value of the covenant’s belated fulfilment would have been relevant. Saturated with circumcision blood, Alba’s Abraham and Joshua miniatures crossreference an exegetical patrimony in which national redemption and personal salvation overlap. Commenting on Genesis 17:13, the Saragossan rabbi Bahya ben Asher (1255– 1340), for example, quotes the Pirke on the annual, collective forgiveness of Israel that Abraham’s blood elicits from God and refigures divine pardon with respect to the afterlife of the individual inducted into the covenantal community. To summarize Bahya’s relay of a 37 The Zohar, vol. 2, pp. 90–91. 38 Baumgarten, ‘Marking the Flesh’, p. 320. 39 J. Braverman, ‘Balaam in Rabbinic and Early Christian Traditions’, Joshua Finkel Festschrift, ed. S. B. Hoenig and L. D. Stitskin, New York, 1974, pp. 41–50; J. R. Baskin, Pharaoh’s Counsellors: Job, Jethro, and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition, Chico, CA, 1983, pp. 75–113; A. Grossman, ‘Rashi’s Position on Prophecy among the Nations and the Jewish-Christian Polemic’, in New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations: In Honor of David Berger, ed. E. Carlebach and J. J. Schachter, Leiden, 2012, pp. 397–417 (especially pp. 408–13). 40 Keller, ‘Making of the Biblia de Alba’, p. 154, notes that rubrics and glosses were executed last, after the copying of the biblical text, and after the miniatures had been painted. Fellous, Histoire de la Bible de Moïse Arragel, p. 123, adds that illuminated initial letters and miniatures were most often drawn before the text was copied and the paint applied only after the text was copied. The order of executing the textual, decorative, and illustrative components was not consistent throughout. For a summary of the complexities, see Avenoza, Biblias castellanas, pp. 242–6, who confirms instances in which the biblical text was copied first, the miniature painted, and finally, the gloss copied around the completed miniature. 41 Keller, ‘Making of the Biblia de Alba’, pp. 153–4, counts seventeen hands for the biblical text alone; other scribes wrote the gloss.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 243

09/07/2021 09:47

2 44 | tr ibu tes to pau l bi nski – part t hr ee

topos found in several midrashic collections, circumcision saves Jews from Gehenna and its fires.42 As one of the oldest has it, Abraham guards the door, blocking their passage.43 Other midrashim express the claim in positive terms, ‘All of Israel who are circumcised will enter [upon death] the Garden of Eden . . . Therefore when a Jew dies there is an appointed angel in the Garden of Eden who receives every circumcised Jew and brings him into the Garden of Eden.’44 The Zohar, too, incorporates this tradition: circumcised Jews do not descend to Hell (1:95b).45 Rather, the performance of the covenantal act by Abraham’s descendants allows their entrance into the world to come, for their circumcision blood, preserved before God, tempers divine judgment with mercy. Arragel himself reiterates Jewish belief in the salvific power of circumcision blood, attaching it to his gloss on Zechariah 9:11, ‘You, for your part, have released your prisoners from the dry pit, for the sake of the blood of your covenant’, a verse the Roman church, he notes, applies to Jesus Christ and his Passion (f. 368v).46 Circumcision acquired special significance in the Iberian Jewish context where the pogroms of 1391 had led to mass conversions.47 During the following decades, too, royal and papal policies that combined to pauperize and demoralize Jewish communities resulted in countless baptisms. The Bible’s presentation miniature portrays (prospective) converts who, according to the pictorial sequence, might come outwardly to appear Christian at the end of life. But did not the indelible seal of the covenant, covered over in modesty, join them still to the people of Israel? Some thinkers, like the forced convert Profayt Duran, regarded circumcision as the sign of an inward cleaving to the central Jewish belief in the oneness of God (in opposition to Trinitarian doctrine), the rite and dogma both associated with the patriarch Abraham. Writing in 1393, Duran prioritized circumcision above all other Torah commandments, for by its merits those compelled under duress to abandon Jewish practice might yet be counted among the seed of Abraham.48

42 Bahye ben Asher, Be’ur ‘al ha-Torah (in Hebrew), ed. C. D. Chavel, 3 vols, Jerusalem, 1981, vol. 1, p. 161; Midrash Rabbeinu Bachya, Torah Commentary by Rabbi Bachya ben Asher, trans. E. Munk, 2nd edn, 7 vols, Jerusalem, 2003, vol. 1, pp. 266–9. For a list of the midrashic sources, see E. Wolfson ‘Circumcision and the Divine Name: A Study in the Transmission of Esoteric Doctrine’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, new series 78, 1987, pp. 77–112 (especially p. 80 n. 6). 43 Bereshit Rabbah 48:8: Hebrew and English trans. online at https://www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_Rabbah.48?vhe=Midrash_ Rabbah_--_TE&lang=en (accessed 01 October 2019). 44 Tanhuma, Tsav 14: online at https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma%2C_Tzav.14?lang=en (accessed 01 October 2019); trans. quoted here from Wolfson, ‘Circumcision and the Divine Name’, p. 78. 45 The Zohar, vol. 2, p. 104; Wolfson, ‘Circumcision and the Divine Name’, pp. 79–80. 46 Paz y Melia, Biblia, vol. 2, p. 440 (gloss no. 49). 47 Of the extensive literature dealing with the social dynamics of mass conversion, I must limit myself to citing D. Nirenberg, ‘Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain’, Past and Present, 174, 2002, pp. 3–41, and more recently D. Graizbord, ‘The Fracturing of Jewish Identity in the Early Modern Jewish Diaspora: The Case of the Conversos’, in Paths to Modernity: A Tribute to Yosef Kaplan, ed. A. Bar-Levav, C. B. Stuczynski, and M. Heyd, Jerusalem 2018, pp. 85–109 (esp. pp. 96–107). For a study that attends to the question of circumcision in this context, see S. Regev, ‘The Attitude towards the Conversos in 15th–16th Century Thought’, Revue des Études juives, 156, 1997, pp. 117–34. More recently P. Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391, Philadelphia, 2012, pp. 15, 25–6, 119–20, 130, 138, notes instances in which Jews were charged with circumcising Christians, among whom were individuals considered Jewish according to rabbinic law. 48 M. Kozody, The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus: Profayt Duran and Jewish Identity in Late Medieval Iberia, Philadelphia, 2015, pp. 145–60; Y. Yisraeli, ‘Constructing and Undermining Converso Jewishness: Profiat Duran and Pablo de Santa María’, in Religious Conversion: History, Experience and Meaning, ed. I. Katznelson and M. Rubin, Farnham, 2014, pp. 185–215 (at pp. 189–93).

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 244

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 19 | a hill o f f o r eski ns: c i rc umc i si o n i n t he al ba bi b l e  |   245

How thirty years later Moses Arragel may have regarded recent conversos or approached rabbinic adjudication concerning their status we do not know.49 Perhaps his own experience of forced engagement in Don Luis’s project gave him insight into their plight and elicited his empathy. In any case, the Bible’s circumcision scenes had to have resonated first and foremost with the manuscript’s scribes, whether Jews or conversos, affirming for their benefit that God’s promise to redeem Israel perdures. The two groups may have inflected the affirmation differently – hold fast to the Torah through all the tribulations of exile, or meanwhile keep faith, repent, and return when possible to observance (especially circumcision), as the people did ‘a second time’ under Joshua. But both groups would have seen in the two images a call to resist the Christianizing agenda of the manuscript’s patron and censors.

49 The attitudes of still-practicing Iberian Jews to those who accepted baptism are a matter of scholarly debate. N. Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Madison, WI, 2002, emphasizes the rabbinic condemnation of apostasy, on which grounds he attacks (pp. 324–26) Regev’s article cited above. See however, Nirenberg, ‘Mass Conversion’, pp. 19–21, and Graizbord, ‘Fracturing of Identity’, pp. 97–8. For a view opposed to Roth, see M. D. Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in FifteenthCentury Spain, Princeton, 2004, who claims (pp. 184–5), that ‘The conversos became a focus for Jewish piety. Aiding the conversos was a positive act of faith and an affirmation of Jewish identity’ (cited also by Kozody, The Secret Faith, p. 158). Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew, p. 138, makes the same point.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 245

09/07/2021 09:47

2 46  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

Fig 1. Presentation scene, Alba Bible, 1422–1430 (Madrid, Liria Palaice), f. 25v

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 246

09/07/2021 09:47

chap ter 19 | a hill of f o r eski ns: c i rc umc i si o n i n t he al ba bi b l e  |   247 Fig. 2. Abraham Circumcises Himself, Alba Bible, f. 37, detail

Fig. 3. Joshua Circumcises the Israelites, Alba Bible, f. 167v, detail

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 247

09/07/2021 09:47

Notes towards a Poetics of Western Medieval Manuscript Form – with an Application to Illuminated Manuscripts in Cambridge University Library Jean-Pascal Pouzet

Tutte le parti costruite e disegnate […] nelle loro forme chiare…1

I The precarious survival of books in varied material forms is what any codicological approach of Western medieval manuscript culture habitually confronts. The original agencies that crafted extant volumes often look as if frozen in the shape of facts and details whose interrelations may now seem fractured, to the extent that manuscripts may defy the sort of desirably ‘thick description’ advanced in cultural anthropology since Clifford Geertz, even within the relative ‘unity’ of any single surviving object. However, a counteractive critical force stems from attempts to explore what must have been the most ubiquitous paradigms of conception and practice in book-producing circles. Over the last five decades, codicology has thus witnessed significant progress in grappling with the challenges posed by opaque archival documents. Various efforts at achieving any sort of ‘quantitative’ or ‘structural’ codicology have resulted in a greater awareness that manuscripts are both physical and intellectual objects and that, as such, their ‘complex machineries’ embody processes of genuine creativity on the part of the different craftsmen involved.2 Manuscript volumes are now more clearly seen as multi-dimensional ‘objects-of-space’ (structures organizing components) and ‘objects-of-time’ (time-related processes affecting these structures), perceivable at once as receptacles of transmitted traditions and reservoirs 1 2

‘All the parts constructed and designed […] within their clear forms…’: A. Giacometti, notebook dated 1924, in A. Giacometti, Écrits. Articles, notes et entretiens, Paris, 2013, p. 414. Unless otherwise stated, all translations into English are mine. Significant references include: C. Bozzolo, D. Coq, D. Muzerelle and E. Ornato, ‘Une machine au fonctionnement complexe: le livre médiéval’, in Le texte et son inscription, ed. R. Laufer, Paris, 1989, pp. 69–78; D. Muzerelle, Vocabulaire codicologique, online since 2002, now at http://codicologia.irht.cnrs.fr (accessed 01 December 2019); M. Maniaci, ‘Costruzione e gestione dello spazio scritto fra Oriente e Occidente: principi generali e soluzioni specifiche’, in Scrivere e leggere nell’alto medioevo, 2 vols, Spoleto, 2012, vol. 1, pp. 473–514; J.-P. Pouzet, ‘Réflexions sur la transmission de textes en anglo-français insulaire (XIIIe – XIVe s.) – prolégomènes à une étude codicologique’, in Actes de le 2e Journée d’études anglo-normandes, Académie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres, ed. A. Crépin and J. Leclant, Paris, 2012, pp. 35–97; P. Andrist, P. Canart and M. Maniaci, La syntaxe du codex. Essai de codicologie structurale, Turnhout, 2013. Also see the essays by J. P. Gumbert, referenced below, nn. 16 and 26.

[ 2 48]

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 248

09/07/2021 09:47

c h a pt e r 20 | notes towar ds a poe t i c s o f w est er n med i eval manusc r i pt f o r m  |   249

of innovative possibilities.3 The critical emphasis placed on their analysis may serve to heighten the perception of – quite literally – their relief, bringing them one step closer to the gestural roundness of Gothic sculpture such as most recently accounted for by Paul Binski.4 In offering to address some issues codicological research has left unexplored, this essay acknowledges the magisterial incentive of Paul’s multi-faceted approach to art history in many contexts and at many scales. In particular, there is much about his emphasis on a reconsideration of longue-durée rhetorical traditions as irrigating medieval inventio and dispositio of text and image that tallies with what is attempted here.5 More specifically relative to his engagement with the description of Western illuminated manuscripts in Cambridge University Library, a case study suggests possibilities of how further codicological analysis may be taken in direct relation to just that sort of rhetorical inspiration.6

II Central to this demonstration are two interlocking proposals. The first one is that the craft of Western medieval manuscript production corresponds globally to two rhetorical configurations: inventio relayed by what ancient Greek traditions called τάξισ, chiefly rendered in its Latin counterparts (notably with Cicero or Quintilian, later Geoffrey of Vinsauf) as dispositio. The latter figure – dispositio as an enactment of codicological inventio – is under focus here: it is taken to apply in particular to the functional arrangement of any block (corps de volume) of any manuscript at all levels of its expression sustained in extent and duration.7 In medieval sources there is only piecemeal evidence for explicit principles informing book-producing practice. Yet one equivalent of dispositio is collatio such as used, for instance, by the Franciscan friar William Herebert in London, BL, Add. MS 46919; this use reveals that more than just textual inscription or mise-en-page is at stake. In codicological terms, the global procedure of dispositio or collatio might be termed collection or mise en recueil: the sum total of procedures of assemblage of physical and intellectual components into book-blocks of any organised expanse, which the possible presence of signatures and catchwords highlights. It is noteworthy that in Herebert’s 3

4 5 6 7

On ‘object-of-space’ and ‘object-of-time’, see É. Glissant, La Cohée du Lamentin (Poétique V), Paris, 2005, p. 233, and J.-P. Pouzet, ‘Le Moyen Âge d’Édouard Glissant: codicologie, philologie et Relation’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 309, 2013, pp. 17–36 (at pp. 30–31). In her study of line ‘management’, É. Cottereau-Gabillet independently suggests textual inscription is an ‘insertion into a space-and-time system’: ‘Le travail des copistes: entre idéaux, contraintes et choix’, in Du scriptorium à l’atelier. Copistes et enlumineurs dans la conception du livre manuscrit au Moyen Âge, ed. J.-L. Deuffic, Turnhout, 2011, pp. 105–149 (at pp. 107–8). P. Binski, ‘Affect et sculpture gothique: questions de méthode’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 62, 2019, 143–60; idem, Gothic Sculpture, New Haven and London, 2019. C. van Eck articulates related concerns in her Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2007. P. Binski and P. Zutshi, Western Illuminated Manuscripts. A Catalogue of the Collection in Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, 2011. In my essay, ‘illuminated’ corresponds to the joint cataloguers’ sagely comprehensive sense of ‘contain[ing] illumination, illustration or notable decoration’ (p. ix). In critical literature ordinatio, in most cases, is an equivalent limited to the organisation of textual and text-signalling elements on the page: see notably M. B. Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, in Medieval Learning and Literature. Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson, Oxford, 1976, pp. 115–41.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 249

09/07/2021 09:47

25 0 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

choice of wording, the possibility of usus is clearly predicated on one component of the book’s quiring structure, an essential element of its collatio.8 Only few codicologists address the idea of scribal creativity beyond the level of mise-en-page or ‘line management’;9 hints at any larger scale are often still overlooked – or worse, dismissed.10 One may then strongly beg to differ that some ‘discontinuities’ in the form of a book might be deemed ‘less significant’ than others, as there is no clear way of discerning which should be sufficiently significant to modern critical accounts, and which should not.11 Conversely, it is proposed that any feature – even a ‘detail’ – of a manuscript is significant in itself as well as in communication with other features at all scales; the worthiest comparative figure here is Édouard Glissant’s joint ideas of ‘Relation’ and ’Tout-Monde’, a hopeful totality of the world in which all particulars at all levels are found mutually related. In this manner, any manuscript book can be envisioned as a locus communis – a ‘lieu-commun’, following Glissant’s poetic and ethical revitalisation of rhetorical tradition.12 In Herebert’s calculated words (just as, inferentially, anywhere else), the constraints and choices of manuscript assemblage are simultaneously technical and aesthetic – in sum, affective. The second proposal is that any mise en recueil, like any rhetorical configuration, inherently involves quite as much technique as aesthetics at all levels of conception and execution – of inventio and ornamental dispositio. Technique and aesthetics coalesce in a kind of procedural teaming which is like the ‘yoking’ effect, or equipoise, between reason and passion diagnosed by Paul Binski.13 This twofold dimension of manuscript production exactly matches two paired terms used by John Bromyard in his Summa Predicantium in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, pulchritudo and tractus, which Paul has also insightfully commented on.14 When applied to codicological situations tractus (‘treatment’) can be taken to denote the challenging technicalities of dispositio (for instance, with calculating the placement of starts and ends of items transcribed relative to the material expanse of fascicles and quires), while pulchritudo (‘beauty’) is expressive of an engagement with manuscript form as the result of aesthetics-driven exornatio (to do here with the

8

9

10

11 12 13 14

In London, BL, Add. MS 46919, f. 1v Herebert wrote (at the end of the table of contents): ‘ex collacione fratris Willelmi Herebert […]’; and on f. 205: ‘Istos hympnos et antiphonas […] transtulit in Anglicum […] et etiam manu sua scripsit frater Willelmus Herebert. Qui usum huius quaterni habuerit, oret pro anima dicti fratris.’ (pace H. Gneuss, ‘William Hereberts Übersetzungen’, Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, 78, 1960, 169–92 (at p. 174), who read ‘in’ instead of ‘etiam’). Exceptions include L. Gilissen’s acute codicological thinking: Prolégomènes á la codicologie: Recherches sur la construction des cahiers, Ghent, 1977; see also Ralph Hanna’s exemplary ‘Lambeth Palace Library MS 487: Some Problems of Early Thirteenthcentury Textual Transmission’, in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care. Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. C. Gunn and C. Innes-Parker, York, 2009, pp. 78–88. K. Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript, 2 vols, Amsterdam, 2002, pays little attention (see vol. 1, pp. 38–40) to the repertoire of codicological forms involved in mise en recueil and their incidence on literary creation. Elsewhere, when he notes that in Paris, BNF, ms fr. 25433 it is ‘difficile de parler de contexte codicologique quand il s’agit d’un “livret” d’un cahier qui ne contient qu’un seul texte’, he writes away the implications of a significant codicological situation: ‘Le contexte manuscrit du Songe d’Enfer de Raoul de Houdenc’, in Le recueil au Moyen Âge. Le Moyen Âge central, ed. O. Collet and Y. Foehr-Janssens, Turnhout, 2010, pp. 47–61 (at p. 49). Andrist, Canart and Maniaci, Syntaxe du codex, especially pp. 83–4. Fundamental critical work by É. Glissant includes Poétique de la Relation (Poétique III), Paris, 1990 (reprinted 2005); Traité du ToutMonde (Poétique IV), Paris, 1997; Une Nouvelle Région du Monde (Esthétique I), Paris, 2006; and Philosophie de la Relation. Poésie en étendue, Paris, 2009. See also the reference quoted n. 3 above. Binski, ‘Affect et sculpture gothique’, p. 151; idem, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350, New Haven and London, 2014; idem, Gothic Sculpture. P. Binski, ‘Notes on Artistic Invention in Gothic Europe’, Intellectual History Review, 24, 2014, pp. 287–300 (at p. 287 n. 1 and p. 297).

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 250

09/07/2021 09:47

c h a pt e r 20 | notes towar ds a poe t i c s o f w est er n med i eval manusc r i pt f o r m  |   25 1

concern about the affective consequences of a calculated placement of items over fascicles and quires: for instance, in terms of the incidence of mise en recueil on the choices of calibration of textual readability or/and iconographic legibility at all levels). Under its double process any manuscript is crafted to deliver what Paul has termed ‘the ethos of the object’ in the context of an ‘image’s affect’ – here to flesh out a regimen of affects, a selfspeaking, regulating persuasio that a book, as it discursively exists through its specific mise en recueil, has attained its accomplished form, suitable in all codicological particulars for the transmission and reception of texts or/and images – bringing into relief, for instance, certain classificatory principles of information retrieval, or certain forms of text-image interaction in pedagogic or pastoral contexts.15

III A brief case study probes into the general ‘stratigraphy’ of a manuscript, to assess how its form reveals something suggestive of technique and aesthetics as conjoined modes of intentional codicological dispositio.16 CUL, MS Kk. 4. 25 is an anthology of works in texts and images focusing on the mirabilia mundi in God’s wondrous reign – arguably one of this Library’s glories from the Gothic period in the visual arts.17 Its crafting must have followed a process of assemblage occurring within a relatively self-contained period of time when textual and artistic components were creatively juxtaposed.18 The volume’s overarching thematic idea is still perceptibly structured by a number of codicological facts which, it is argued, are answerable as much to technique as to aesthetics and lend a rhetorically articulated unity to the whole. We might have missed out on it all, however, given the codicological vicissitudes endured by Kk. 4. 25 in one period of its modern conservation in Cambridge. Not in question are the missing leaves and the two mutilated ones (ff.*52 and *76):19 they all predate the bibliophilic ownership by Richard Holdsworth who in 1649 arranged to bequeath his formidable book collection to the University Library.20 The post-medieval physical integrity of Kk. 4. 25 as a corps de volume is dimly inferred from its now detached leather covers datable from the first half of the seventeenth century, bearing a gilt centrepiece and two blind-tooled fillets forming a rectangular frame at the edges; and from its joint habitat with a printed book apparently until 1861, when Henry Bradshaw signed a note (dated 14 October) 15 P. Binski, Becket’s Crown. Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300, New Haven and London, 2004, p. 210. 16 The notion of ‘stratigraphy’ was first proposed by J. P. Gumbert, ‘Codicological Units: Towards a Terminology for the Stratigraphy of the Non-Homogeneous Codex’, Segno e Testo, 2, 2004, pp. 17–42 (at p. 18). 17 Full digital fac-simile on Cambridge Digital Library: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-KK-00004–00025 (accessed 01 December 2019). 18 The codicological ideas underlying the characterization and analysis of Kk. 4. 25 were first brought together in Pouzet, ‘Réflexions sur la transmission de textes’; they are being consolidated and refined in forthcoming work. 19 An asterisk from f. *26 onwards follows the current foliation which, customarily in CUL practice since Henry Bradshaw’s librarianship, includes leaves now no longer extant –the first such ‘phantom’ leaf here being f. *26 (undoubtedly a cancellation). 20 J.-P. Pouzet, The Manuscripts of Richard Holdsworth’s Library: Descriptive Catalogue and Study (in preparation).

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 251

09/07/2021 09:47

25 2 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

inside the rear cover of the manuscript notifying the new class-mark of the now separate sixteenth-century Hortus Sanitatis (CUL, N*. 8. 41).21 A later note there too records a repair made by Eyre & Spottiswoode between July and October 1911 in the British Library. This does not accord with Professor Henderson’s reminiscence that ‘its leaves, unexpectedly neglected and unbound, slithered into my lap’ in one of his ‘tricky moments’ of looking at illuminated manuscripts in Cambridge.22 In fact, this lamentable condition finds chilling confirmation in a file of unpublished materials gathered by Charles Edward Sayle, as part of his labours towards a revision of the nineteenth-century catalogue in the late 1910s and early 1920s. A customarily precise record of lines of action taken between November 1916 and August 1917 reveals that Kk. 4. 25 was ‘taken to pieces’ for its Bestiary images to be exhibited piecemeal between glass sheets, and that it is only owing to the preference of the Librarian (then Francis Jenkinson) for ‘double leaves between glass’ that the bifolia were spared – and not ‘cut into single leaves’, as notably recommended by M. R. James.23 The manuscript was restored to its volume-block integrity in a recent restoration campaign. The care with which the textual and iconographic distribution of items in their order and form of transmission was made to tally with fascicular or quasi-fascicular articulation is a fundamental feature of the architecture of Kk. 4. 25.24 Thus the Appendix presents a synoptic view of the codicological facts as they correspond to text and image components (‘items’). It includes comments on the structural boundaries cutting across the block, whether they match main codicological turning points (fascicular cæsuras), or whether they express a turning point within a fascicle or a quire (inner caesuras). Wherever possible, it attempts to distinguish between cancelled leaves (still inhering in the creative pattern of the book-block designed as crafted affect) and missing leaves (betraying accidental losses bearing no direct relationship to the design).

21 Hortus Sanitatis is still the last component of the book listed as no. 1 in the inventory of Richard Holdsworth’s ‘Libri Manuscripti’ of July 1664, upon official accession to Cambridge University Library (see Pouzet, Manuscripts of Richard Holdsworth, in preparation). 22 G. Henderson, ‘On Making Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts Accessible’, in The Cambridge Illuminations: The Conference Papers, ed. S. Panayotova, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 13–19 (at p. 14). 23 CUL, University Archives, notes by C. E. Sayle (bearing no classmark at the time of writing, but to be accessioned as UA ULIB 7/3/73): this comprises many documents written or gathered by him, among which is found a file of his notes on Kk. 4. 25 (including collation and quiring structure): ‘Kk. 4. 25 / 1916 Nov. 18. Taken to pieces by Mr Baldrey. / 1917 Jan. 24. Decided by the Librarian, with the approval of the Provost that the pictures should be put separately between glass. / July 25. The Provost + the Director of the Fitzwilliam recommend that it be cut into single leaves. The Librarian prefers double leaves between glass. / August 24. The Bestiary leaves, placed between glass, deposited in the Strong Room.’ Further documents reveal the provisioning of 46 ‘sheets of glass 18’’ x 13’’’ covering ‘73.9 square feet’ at ‘£2.9.10’, and a summary ‘Schedule of plates between glass’ dated ’11 October 1921.’ I am grateful to Dr J. Freeman for informing me of the rediscovery of this whole archive late in 2018; enabling the consultation of it, and of M. R. James’s description (referenced in n. 24 below); and early communication of their respective accession references (new or forthcoming). 24 This fundamental structure does not seem to have been brought into particular relief in existing descriptions: compare J. Glover and H. R. Luard, in Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, ed. H. R. Luard, 6 vols, Cambridge, 1856–67, vol. 3, pp. 670–73; CUL, Sayle’s notes (referenced in n. 23 above); CUL, UA ULIB 7/3/72, unpublished descriptions by M. R. James including (as part of item 54) 9-page notes on Kk. 4. 25 (his collation exactly repeats that in Sayle’s notes); J. Freeman, description accompanying Kk. 4. 25 on Cambridge Digital Library.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 252

09/07/2021 09:47

c h a pt e r 20 | notes towar ds a poe t i c s o f w est er n med i eval manusc r i pt f o r m  |   253

IV The codicological articulation of Kk. 4. 25 falls into what the Appendix presents as boundaries and cæsuras. A boundary operates – following a telling parallel with Paul Binski’s analysis of monumental architecture – like a threshold which is ‘a place of intensification and change’, thus exercising an equivalent of the rhetorical function of exordium; just like any monumental ‘physical doorway’ (typically, a church portal), a codicological boundary ‘makes such changes “objects” of perception’.25 Accordingly, a boundary may be qualified as relatively ‘neat’ or ‘fluid’, depending on whether the ingredients of change perceptibly prevail more (neatly) or less (fluidly) over the elements of continuity at any given turning point in the book-block. In this performative function a boundary displays a cæsura, at once its physical and figural materialization. A cæsura performs two things at a time: it articulates a turning point of some kind between two codicological elements of a block while it negotiates forms of continuity through it. In other words, a caesura draws attention to itself as a place and moment of mediation where something of the rhythmic structure of a manuscript becomes obvious at its seams – where the pulse of craft, as it were, can still be felt throbbing in the act and form of codicological dispositio, and where the interruptive effect of something finishing is relayed by the cohesive effect of something else continuing.26 The calculated, Janus-like poise of a caesura works like what Claude Lévi-Strauss termed ‘structural fittings’ (‘rapports d’emboîtement’) when he described interlocking dynamic structures, each of which ‘comprises an imbalance which may not be redressed unless an element borrowed from the adjacent structure is resorted to’.27 In a codicological context, such ‘imbalance’ may flesh out the material and intellectual contradictions between the potentiality of selfcontainedness of distinct components (for instance one fascicle; or one clearly demarcated textual/iconographic item, even if in the company of other items in one quire or fascicle) and the reality of their cohesive weaving all into the same corps de volume – one thinks, analogically, of the ‘modelling contradictions’ (‘contradictions plastiques’) perceived to be inherent in Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures.28 At all levels anywhere in a manuscript, such structural relief brought to the volumeblock lends it something of the tensed modelling in the fine arts. Indeed, most revealingly, caesural phenomena may not simply occur at predictable boundaries from fascicle to fascicle, but also within a fascicle. When a caesura operates at intra-fascicular level (for instance, any of the inner boundaries displaying textual or pictorial caesuras within fascicles 4 and 5 of Kk. 4. 25), it may be as neatly outlined and monumentally expressive of change as when it occurs between two fascicles, thereby marking that the forces in 25 Binski, ‘Affect et sculpture gothique’, p. 144 (quoted from Paul’s original English text). 26 My thinking about caesuras elaborates on J. P. Gumbert, ‘L’unité codicologique ou: à quoi bon les cahiers ?’, Gazette du livre médiéval, 14, 1989, pp. 4–8, and finds a counterpart in H. Azérad, ‘Poétique / politique de la césure dans la poésie d’Édouard Glissant’, L’Esprit Créateur 55, 2015, pp. 152–66. 27 C. Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques III. L’origine des manières de table, Paris, 1968, p. 294: ‘ces rapports d’emboîtement n’ont pas un caractère statique. Loin d’être isolée des autres, chaque structure recèle un déséquilibre qu’on ne peut compenser sans faire appel à un terme emprunté à la structure adjacente.’ 28 André Breton’s phrase, on which see Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti. Biographie d’une œuvre, Paris, 1991, p. 235.

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 253

09/07/2021 09:47

25 4 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

tension between virtual separateness and real continuity are brought at high expressive – technical and aesthetic – levels there as well. Such inner boundaries and caesuras are singled out by an intentionally ‘clear’ physical arrangement of the start or end of an item, so that either or both coincide with a ‘natural’ turning point within a fascicle: typically, a change of leaf across a full opening (from the verso of leaf n to the recto of leaf n+1), or a change of side of leaf (from recto to verso), or a new column. These moments of distinct dispositio may be called ‘fair-page’ starts (or ‘faircolumn’ starts) when they occur at the beginning of an item. The phrase is borrowed from an insightful note consigned by Paul Meyer as a general comment on the layout of CUL, MS Gg. 1. 1, in the course of one of his scholarly campaigns about ‘French’ manuscripts in Cambridge: ‘a notable specificity of this book is that the scribe [made] it a point to start fairly on a page (‘en belle page’), or at least at the top of a column, most of the works of some importance’. Tellingly, with few exceptions, the formidable Gg. 1. 1 was not designed in real fascicular sub-blocks; but Meyer’s aesthetic observation was attuned to the overall rhythmic effect produced by a reiterated attempt to plot the codicological dispositio of items following neat inner boundaries which seem to replicate just as clearly the caesural effect/ affect of fascicular articulation. In the case of Gg. 1. 1, Meyer was sensitive to an original replicative dispositio (rhetorically a reduplicatio) of fair starts designed as technically feasible and aesthetically pleasing.29 Equally, it is argued that the text-scribe and the artists thought textually and ‘pictorially’, in sum codicologically, when they put together the corps de volume forming Kk. 4. 25.30 There is good evidence of the rhythmic care with which, in fascicle 4, the Bestiary itself was partitioned into four clear sub-sections, each beginning with a ‘fair-page’ start, and with forty-two minor ‘fair’ starts (in page or column) reduplicated in quasi-fractal manner across the sub-sections; this even entailed twice the repetition of painted animal figures: ‘cerui’, three and four stags ff. *61v–62 (at the medial point of the perfectly preserved quire 8), and phoenix f. *82rv (depicted in two different attitudes across the fluid caesura of leaf turn-over). This is somehow matched by the triple reiteration of one phenomenon in fascicle 5: the heralding of Marbod’s Versus de lapidibus, Macer’s De viribus herbarum and Bernardus Sylvestris’s Cosmographia by portraits in three ink-drawn frontispieces on the adjacent preceding columns (respectively, King Evax f. *113vb, Macer f. *120vb, and Bernardus f. *126vb). Each of the three works thus starts with an artistic frontispiece whose affective value is discursively comparable to what rhetorical traditions identify as prolepsis, a common component of dispositio: here an iconographic harbinger of the textual item to begin immediately next across the full opening with a ‘fair-page’ start. The calculated codicological symmetry of this proleptic leitmotiv was apparently not caught by the redoubtable M. R. James who, however, in his unpublished description drawn up 29 P. Meyer, ‘Les manuscrits français de Cambridge II’, Romania, 15, 1886, pp. 283–340 (at p. 284): ‘Une particularité notable de ce livre est que le copiste, s’[est] attaché à commencer en belle page, ou au moins au haut d’une colonne, la plupart des ouvrages de quelque importance’; see also Pouzet, ‘Réflexions sur la transmission de textes’, p. 73. On replication, see B. M. Bedos-Rezak, ‘Replica: Images of Identity and the Identity of Images in Prescholastic France’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. J. F. Hamburger and A.-M. Bouché, Princeton, 2006, pp. 46–64; M. Wintroub, The Voyage of Thought. Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World, Cambridge, 2017, pp. 200–56. 30 On the felicitous phrase ‘thinking pictorially’, see P. Binski, ‘The “Prentice’s Bracket” at Gloucester Cathedral’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 167, 2014, pp. 124–32 (at p. 130).

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 254

09/07/2021 09:47

c h a pt e r 20 | notes towar ds a poet i c s o f w est er n med i eval manusc r i pt f o r m  |   255

sometime after 1928, thought the portrait on f.*120vb to be depicting Macer, not Marbod – the Versus de lapidibus having already been announced by the figure of King Evax.31 Finally, the intensity of decision that a component’s start was to be made to coincide with a new fascicle, freshly at a fascicular caesura, is nowhere neater than where the transcription of Item 3, Gesta Alexandri Magni regis Macedonum, was abortively left off after the last 11 lines on f. 25rb, to be copied again as the first 12 lines on f. *27ra. This may register as a silent piece of scribal drama within the regimen of the volume-block’s affects, resorting, so to speak, to ‘negative’ replication. Yet even so, such detailed evidence of ‘replicative thinking’ in manuscript production has, once more, rhetorical implications every inch as a/effective as in the visual arts.

V An awareness of the rhetorical efficacy underlying codicological craft may herald a poetics of manuscript form.32 Knowledge of the layout of any volume-block is more roundly achieved if one observes how physical-intellectual components represented by texts, decoration and images precisely map onto the fascicular and quaternal structures, and whether there are any concerted features, such as caesuras and ‘fair starts’, where form and content are mutually relayed at any scale. Through such observations only may one hope to assess something of the rhythmic poise between the technical imperatives of material dispositio and the potentially individuated, affective powers of exornatio. Insofar as the originally designed shape of any manuscript is apt to raise and regulate ‘soluzioni specifiche’ to problems and contradictions involved in the plastic art of mise en recueil, each volume-block certainly constitutes an ‘irreducible kernel of identity that maintains what is diverse, what is culturally specific’.33 All manuscripts are proposed to evince this poetic complexity, whether their extant shapes have more, or less, finely crafted corps de volume than those of Kk. 4. 25 or Gg. 1. 1. In the rich field of Cambridge University Library manuscripts, significantly more illuminated volumes than have been recognised still await and deserve an equally detailed perception of their technical and aesthetic dispositio – the vivid traces of ‘codicological thinking’, the ‘sensibile struttura’ of their mise en recueil.34 31 James, unpublished notes, p. 8 (referenced in n. 24 above). In identifying the figure at f.*120vb as Marbod, not Macer, Binski and Zutshi, Western Medieval Manuscripts, p. 89, do not follow James but rather N. J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts I. 1190–1250, London and Oxford, 1982, p. 101. 32 ‘Poetics’ also echoes Paul Binski’s graceful essay ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile’, Art History, 20, 1997, pp. 350–74. 33 In the words of P. Crowley, ‘Edouard Glissant: Resistance and Opacité’, Romance Studies, 24, 2006, pp. 105–15 (at p. 106). On ‘soluzioni specifiche’, see Maniaci, ‘Costruzione e gestione’ (referenced n. 2). 34 I.e. ‘sensitive structure’: see notebook dated 1963–1964 in Giacometti, Écrits, p. 589. I have identified more illuminated volumes from the Holdsworth bequest and other CUL collections, about which Paul Binski, Patrick Zutshi and myself have been in conversation. The following records a mere handful (limited to the two-letter classes) where fruitful codicological fieldwork of the kind advanced here awaits to be done: MSS Dd. 1. 21, Ff. 3. 1, Ff. 3. 11, Ff. 5. 28, Ff. 5. 34, Ff. 6. 19, Ii. 3. 26, Kk. 1. 5, Kk. 1. 10, Kk. 1. 16, Kk. 2. 6, Ll. 4. 15, Mm. 3. 30, Mm. 5. 21, Mm. 5. 30. For preliminary remarks on Dd.1.21, Ff.6.19 and Kk.1.16, see J.-P. Pouzet, ‘Une collection fondatrice et ses enjeux: les manuscrits du fonds Holdsworth à la Bibliothèque Universitaire de Cambridge’, Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 4, 2018, pp. 1593–1655 (at pp. 1642–45).

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 255

09/07/2021 09:47

25 6  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

Appendix: Codicological stratigraphy of CUL, MS Kk. 4. 25 Codicological facts affecting the block Fascicles

Constitutive quires (folios)

Fascicle 1 (medium-sized)

18 (ff. 1–8) + 210 (ff. 9–18)

Textual/artistic components of the block (precise nature + extent per side of leaf/column) Item 1 (text only, ff. 1ra–18rb): Pseudo-Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi

# Fluid boundary from fascicles 1 to 2 expressed by visual unity of the double opening – with pictorial cæsura 1: 12 hexameters + tinted drawing of Alexander in majestate (f. 18v) facing start of item 2 (f. 19) Fascicle 2 (small-sized)

38 (–viii cancelled) (ff. 19–*26) [not extant: f. *26]

Item 2 (1 frontispiece tinted drawing + text, ff. 18v–25rb): Epistola Alexandri... de mirabilibus Indiae

# Neat boundary from fascicles 2 to 3 expressed by textual replication (aborted copying) of the start of Item 3 (f. 25rb, ll. 22–32 = f. *27ra, ll. 1–12) + f. 25v blank and unruled – fascicular cæsura 1

8

Fascicle 3 (medium-sized)

4 (ff. *27–*34) + 58 (–viii missing) (ff. *35–*42) [not extant: f. *42]

Item 3 (text only, ff. *27ra–*38vb): Gesta Alexandri Magni regis Macedonum Item 4 (1 liminal ink drawing + 1 illuminated initial + acaudal text, ff. *39–*41vb, likely once as far as f. *42vb): Clement of Llanthony, Explanatio super alas cherubim et seraphim

# Neat inner boundary within fascicle 3, between Items 3 & 4, expressed at medial opening of 58 by clear end of Item 3 (f. *38vb) facing page-length reserve (with title; subsequently inhabited by ‘ink compass pattern’ which possibly serves as a minor pictorial caesura 2) at start of Item 4 (f. *39); text itself of Item 4 begins at a fluid boundary (‘fair-page’ start with ‘carryover effect’ overleaf, f. *39v) # Nature of boundary from fascicles 3 to 4 unknown owing to the missing last leaf (f. *42) of fascicle 3

68 (–i missing) (ff. *43–*50) + 78 (–iii, – iv ?cancelled; (ff. *51–*58) + 86 (ff. *59–*64) + potential loss? + 96 (–iv missing) (ff. *65–*70) + 106 (–ii missing) (ff. *71–*76) + 11–138 (ff. *77–*84, *85–*92, *93–*100) [not extant: ff. *43, *53, *54, *57, *68, *72] –vii cancelled)

Fascicle 4 (large-sized)

Item 5 (incomplete text + 1 illuminated initial + tinted/ink drawings, ff. *44–*51): anthology on properties of angels Item 6 (incomplete text + 1 illuminated initial + painted drawings, ff. *51va–*52vb – likely once as far as f. *54v): excerpt from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiæ Item 7 (text + 1 illuminated initial + painted drawings + 1 ink drawing, ff. *55ra–*100vb): thirdfamily Bestiary

# Neat & fluid inner boundaries within fascicle 4: 1) Item 5 has pictorial cæsuras 3 (f. *47), 4 (f. *47v), 5 (f. *48) & 6 (St Michael f. *50v, occurring at quire boundary); 2) Item 7 has four main sub-sections in ‘fair page’ starts at f. *55 (De natura animantium), f. *79 (aviary section, prefaced by ink drawing of eagle f. *78v = pictorial cæsura 7), f. *89 (De natura piscium) & f. *93 (reptiles); + 42 minor ‘fair-page’ starts/cæsuras # Fluid ‘minimal’ boundary from fascicles 4 to 5 operating at double opening as fascicular caesura 2

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 256

09/07/2021 09:47

c h a pt e r 20 | notes towar ds a poe t i c s o f w est er n med i eval manusc r i pt f o r m  |   25 7

Appendix: Continued

Fascicle 5 (medium-sized)

148 (–vii missing) (ff. *101–*108) + 15–178 (ff. *109– *116, *117–*124, *125–*132) + 18?2– (ff. *133–*134) [not extant: f. *107, all potential leaves after f. *134]

Item 8 (text + 1 tinted drawing, f. *101ra–*101va): De 7 mirabilibus mundi Item 9 (text only, ff. *101vb–*104vb): excerpt from Policraticus Item 10 (text only, ff. *105ra–*106rb + *106va–[…] *108rb): philosophical dialogues Item 11 (text only, ff. *108va–*110rb): De generibus arborum Item 12 (text only, ff. *110rb–*113va): De generibus lapidum Item 13 (text only, f. *113va): mnemotechnic verse on De septem artibus Item 14 (frontispiece ink drawing + text, ff. *113vb–*120va): Marbod, Versus de lapidibus Item 15 (frontispiece ink drawing + text, ff. *120vb–*126va): Macer, De viribus herbarum Item 16 (frontispiece ink drawing + 1 illuminated initial + acaudal text, ff. *126vb–*134vb […]): B. Sylvestris, Cosmographia

# Essentially fluid inner boundaries created by pictorial caesuras 8–10 from Items 13/14, 14 /15 & 15/16 # Nature of end (terminal boundary) of the block unknown owing to loss of anything after f. *134v

7132 17-20 Binski new size v6.indd 257

09/07/2021 09:47

Ecclesia and Synagoga in Time* Miri Rubin

E

n c o u n t e r s w i t h Pau l B i n s k i a r e n ev e r c a s ua l . Nor are they meant to be. Paul is unique in his intellectual style and in the consistent seriousness of his conversation, even when this is deceptively adorned with gossipy gems and mischievous laughter. Over the last few years, Paul has been thinking through some formative theoretical issues which arise from several of the ‘turns’ medievalists – along with others – have experienced: after the linguistic turn, epistemological and hermeneutic in its impact; the material turn; and the affective, or emotional turn. 1 These recent directions stem from a desire to ‘get closer’, to empathise with our subjects, often subjects to whom historians had condescended over the centuries: women, lay people, those with little formal education, and more. Paul suggests – and most eloquently in his so-impressive recent Gothic Sculpture – that the best way to show our respect, is not by working at an impossible intimacy across time, but rather at an informed understanding of the intentions and capacities – the craft of making, with ideas and in stone – of those whose works still stand tall across the European landscape.2 One way to do so, is to take seriously the use not only of materials – stone, wax, marble, ivory – but also of the rhetorical modes chosen to shape materials and thus realise the myriad possibilities inherent in them. Paul Binski readily acknowledges his debt to Mary Carruthers – a ‘rhetorical turn’ in her own right3 – as the scholar who has done so much to place rhetoric as the indispensable guide it should be to so much historical inquiry. He has further twisted this rhetorical turn by making it the key to understanding the making of buildings of stone and marble in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries in northwest Europe. My own current project, on the representations of Ecclesia and Synagoga, has benefited at crucial points from all things Binski. Hence it is a true pleasure to offer him some first-fruits with a contribution that ends in one of his favourite places, thirteenth-century Paris. * 1 2 3

I am grateful to Matthew Champion, Judah Galinsky, and Cecilia Gaposchkin, who read and commented, and to Emily Guerry, who provided me with useful bibliography on polychromy, Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, ed. G. M. Spiegel, London, 2005. P. Binski, Gothic Sculpture, New Haven, CT, 2019. See these books by M Carruthers: The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge, 2000; Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 2010; The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 2013.

[ 258]

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 258

09/07/2021 09:49

chapt er 21   |  ec c l esi a and synago ga i n t i me  |   25 9

* Around 860 at the altars of important Carolingian cathedrals – Metz, Verdun – appeared a new image in a familiar setting: Ecclesia and Synagoga at the richly symbolic Crucifixion (fig. 1).4 This symmetrical space had long accommodated pairs of opposites: life and death, sun and moon, land and ocean.5 Now two women, tucked into this space: Ecclesia and Synagoga. They are similarly attired, equal in size, though different in posture. A group of ivories, all made for the binding – decoration and safe-keeping – of liturgical books is our first set of witnesses.6 The biblical roots may lie in Lamentations 5:16 ‘The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned’ (cecidit corona capitis nostri vae nobis quia peccavimus). Another source may be the mid-fifth-century (after 438) Altercatio ecclesiae et synagogue. This text stages a trial between two matrons who present their claim to truth by citing biblical verses, prophecies and their fulfilment.7 The earliest surviving manuscript is from mid-ninth century Salzburg, just around the time our first visual representations of Ecclesia and Synagoga occur; though so far it has been impossible to demonstrate a link between the text and the image.8 The theological insights that underpinned these first visual attempts at showing Ecclesia and Synagoga are Augustinian: both characters are part of Christian history, still unfolding. The two also share a ‘family resemblance’: they are young and beautiful.9 Indeed, we may see them as sisters, as Origen (184–253) did in a homily on the Song of Songs: ‘Our Saviour is the son of our sister – that is, of the Synagogue; for Church and Synagogue are verily two sisters. The Saviour, therefore, is the son of sister Synagogue, as we have said: He, being the husband, the Bridegroom of the Church, is thus the nephew of His bride’.10 The pair was henceforth placed at various situations within liturgical books used at the altars of religious houses. The Uta Codex, made for the abbess of Niedermunster at Regensburg in 1025, is another example of how the pair was developed and understood. One of its fully decorated pages is the symbolic Crucifixion (fig. 2), that Adam Cohen has analysed with such insight.11 The Crucifixion is wrapped round by explanatory tituli, whose 4

On the group, see D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires du Moyen Âge, Fribourg, 1978, pp. 70–73, 86. S. Ferber, ‘Crucifixion Iconography in a Group of Carolingian Ivory Plaques’, Art Bulletin 48, 1966, pp. 323–33. On the ideas and images associated with the Crucifixion at this time and in this region, see C. Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era. Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 132–64. The ivory inserted into the pericopes of Henry II is another excellent example: see Chazelle, Crucified God, pp. 266–92 (especially pp. 267–9), and H. Schutz, The Carolingians in Central Europe, their History, Arts and Architecture. A Cultural History of Central Europe, 750–900, Leiden, 2004, pp. 288–90. 5 Chazelle, The Crucified God, pp. 271–82. 6 For an example from Liège, of c.1000, see Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires du Moyen Âge, p. 193 (no. 106); and from Metz, Rhein und Maas. Kunst und Kultur 800–1400, Cologne, 1972, p. 181 (C6); Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen II, ed. M. Brandt and A. Eggebrecht, Hildesheim, 1993, pp. 199–202 (no. IV-40). 7 Altercatio ecclesiae et synagogue, ed. J. N. Hillgarth, Corpus Christianorum series Latina 69A, Turnhout, 1999, pp. 4–8 (on dating). 8 Copied ‘during the episcopate of Archbishop Liuphram (836–859)’: ibid., p. 13. 9 P. Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, New York, 2008. 10 ‘Homily 2’, in Origen, The Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies, ed. and trans. R. P. Lawson, London, 1957, pp. 284–305 (at p. 287, commenting on Song of Songs 1: 13: ‘A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts’). E. Monroe, ‘“Fair and Friendly, Sweet and Beautiful”: Hopes for Jewish Conversion in Synagoga’s Song of Songs Imagery’, in Beyond the Yellow Badge. Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. M. Merback, Leiden, 2007, pp. 33–61 (at p. 38). 11 A. S. Cohen, The Uta Codex. Art, Philosophy and Reform in Eleventh-Century Germany, University Park, PA, 2000, especially chapter 4.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 259

09/07/2021 09:49

2 60 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

tone is Augustinian, looking forward to the conversion of Synagoga. The sisters, each in her lobe, are identical in size and attire, but one is blinded – not blind – by the obscuring frame across her eyes. The harmonies of Hrabanus Maurus on the cross, meet the theology of Augustine on the future role of Synagoga. This understanding persisted in the liturgical books of religious houses, into the next century, as in the Stammheim Missal of the 1170s, made at that great centre of iconographic innovation, St Michael’s at Hildesheim.12 At the full page Crucifixion (fig. 3), which faces the Christ in Majesty, Ecclesia and Synagoga are presented with their own tituli, and Synagoga sports the headgear which had but recently become associated with Jews, the conical Jewish hat.13 The pair was chosen to adorn the opening page of the gospel of John, as in two separate scenes under the Crucifixion which formed the upper part of the Initial I of In principio in a late-twelfth century Bible of the Cistercian house of Notre Dame of Bonport, near Rouen. Marcia Kupfer has noted well that the design imperative of the long and vertical initial I meant that Synagoga was placed under Ecclesia, rather than as member of a horizontal pair, as we have seen so far.14 By 1200 Ecclesia-Synagoga was a representation chosen for liturgical objects: portable altar, paten, cross.15 The figures were sometimes used as single, separate figures, considered in a mystical, apocalyptic manner, as by Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) in her Scivias.16 When Romanesque churches, that white mantle, came to adorn Europe soon after 1100, they offered new spaces for expressive relief carving. Ecclesia and Synagoga moved outdoors. One the west facade tympanum of the abbey church of St-Gilles-du-Gard in Languedoc, of c.1140–50, Synagoga was treated quite roughly: an angel casts her away.17 And where lofty architecture produced generous window space, contemporary exegesis informed the stained glass chosen for churches like that of St-Denis, c.1145.18 The anagogical window, inspired by Honorius Augustodunensis (1080–1151), includes a roundel depicting the unveiling of Synagoga, who may now see and convert, as may those who contemplated her. 19 The refiguring of the cathedrals of Northern Europe in the Gothic aesthetic – Paris, Reims, and their influences reaching out to Cologne, Strasbourg and Bamberg – worked its classicising magic on our demure pair, with its order of feminine beauty and bodily decorum. An order of majesty now framed them too, as Nina Rowe has shown, in spaces associated with rule and justice.20 These monumental portrayals reinforced in the public 12 E. C. Teviotdate, The Stammheim Missal, Los Angeles, CA, 2001, figs 46a-b (at pp. 62–3). On tituli, see N. Stratford, ‘Verse “Tituli” and Romanesque Art’, in Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, ed. C. Hourihane, University Park, PA, 2008, pp. 136–53. 13 S. Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography, New York, 2014, pp. 120–22. 14 M. Kupfer, ‘Eccelsia and Synagoga In principio. The Fourth Gospel as Resource for Anti-Jewish Visual Polemic’, in The Gospel of John and Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. A. Reinhartz, Lanham, MD, 2018, pp. 113–46 (especially pp. 118–23 and fig. 6.3). 15 La Salle aux trésors. Chef-d’oeuvre de l’art roman et mosan, Turnhout, 1999, pp. 24–7 (no. 2); R. Green, ‘Reading the Portable Altar of Stavelot’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, 72, 2003, pp. 3–10 (portable altar); Z. Świechowski, Romanesque Art in Poland, trans. A. Kozińska-Bałdyga and J. A. Bałdyga, Warsaw, 1983, pp. 77–8 (paten); on the imagery of the Scheldewindeke Cross see La Salle aux trésors, pp. 28–9 (no. 3). 16 B. Newman, Sister of Wisdom. St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, Berkeley, CA, 1987, pp. 204–211. 17 The tympanum has suffered much damage: see Joan Evans, Cluniac Art of the Romanesque Period, Cambridge, 1950, pp. 87–8 and fig. 153b. 18 L. Grodecki, Études sue les vitraux de Suger à Saint-Denis (XIIe siècle), Paris, pp. 69–75 and colour pl. 3. 19 J. Cohen, ‘“Synagoga Conversa”: Honorius Augustodunensis, The Song of Songs, and Christianity’s “Eschatological Jew”’, Speculum, 79, 2004, pp. 309–40. 20 N. Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City. Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge, 2011.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 260

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 21   |  ec c l esi a and synago ga i n t i me  |   261

sphere the tradition of Ecclesia and Synagoga as siblings, and of the future triumph of one sister over the other. Times past and future framed the present, as Ecclesia and Synagoga became well known in this now traditional mode. During this twelfth century, new techniques for engagement with the legacy of Judaism and with Jews were being developed across Europe. Disputation became the format par excellence for pedagogy in cathedral schools, and later universities; it was didactic, and it ended in victory. New discussions of Jews in theology and in canon law assumed this genre, like Gilbert Crispin’s disputation of 1093, or Odo of Torunai’s On Original Sin, and the Disputation with the Jew Leo, of c.1105, each with its Jewish interlocutor.21 Rulers sought to benefit from the presence of skilled and dependent Jews in their domains and to find ways of fitting the presence of Jews within the emergent ideology of Christian governance. No city in Europe saw so close a convergence of crown, church and schools as did Paris. And the debating rhythm of school dialectics matched the city’s abundant responsive liturgy, the intriguing cadences of the motets that were to be born in it, and the novel correspondences between Old and New Testament, created by Parisian makers of that elite Bible invented there the Bible moralisée.22 On the west facade of Notre Dame, begun around 1200 and completed by 1225, Ecclesia and Synagoga stood as sisters, in the tradition we have traced. Yet at the same time in Paris, new ways of thinking the kinship of Ecclesia and Synagoga were tested, first in exegesis, and then in preaching. Song of Songs 3:11 was seized by scholars as a fruitful prompt: ‘Go forth, ye daughters of Sion, and see King Solomon in the diadem, wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the joy of his heart’.23 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) distinguished between Christ’s kin and step-kin, with Synagoga as the latter.24 Building on Bernard of Clairvaux’s insight, theologian Peter Comestor (1100–78) explored the kinship of Ecclesia and Synagoga, the latter now as a stepmother: ‘For his stepmother crowned him, the mother crowned, his father crowned him; but the stepmother with a crown of misery, mother with a crown of justice, father with a crown of glory…. His stepmother is unbelieving Synagogue, who crowned him with a crown of thorns.’25 A sermon contained in a volume of sermons of c. 1240, one of six left by Robert de Sorbonne to his college, took this image of Synagoga as cruel stepmother forward: 21 See respectively The Works of Gilbert Crispin Abbot of Westminster, ed. A. S. Abulafia and G. R. Evans, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 8, London, 1986; On Original Sin and A Disputation with the Jew, Leo, Concerning the Advent of Christ, the Son of God: Two Theological Treatises, ed. and trans. I. M. Resnick, Philadelphia, 1994. 22 C. A. Bradley, Polyphony in Medieval Paris. The Art of Composing with Plainchant, Cambridge, 2018, especially chapters 4–5; S. Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée, Berkeley, CA, 1999; J. Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols, University Park, PA, 2000. 23 Egredimini et videte, filiae Sion, regem Salomonem in diademate quo coronavit illum mater sua in die desponsationis illius, et in die laetitiae cordis ejus. E. A. Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity, Philadelphia, 1990. I have greatly benefited in this section from the expert advice of Nicole Bériou, on the exegetical tradition and preaching in Paris. 24 Bernard of Clairvaux, Siquidem coronatus est et a noverca sua corona spinea, corona miseriae; coronandus a familia sua corona iustitiae, quando exibunt angeli, et tollent de regno eius omnia scandala, quando veniet ad iudicium cum senioribus populi. Patrologia cursus completus, series latina, ed. J.-P Migne, 221 vols, Paris, 1844–64, vol. 183, col. 148c; also in Sermo de diversis, ibid., vol. 183, col. 672c: Coronavit eum et noverca sua corona miseriae, et in hac contemptibilis. 25 Coronavit eum namque noverca, coronavit mater, coronavit pater; sed noverca, corona miseriae; mater, corona iustitiae; Pater, corona gloriae ... Eius noverca est infidelis Synagoga, quae eum spineo diademate coronavit, et intus et extra eum planxit [f. cinxit]. Extra, spina corporali, intrinsecus, spirituali. Extra, spina passionis, intus spina compassionis et compunctionis ... Siquidem coronavit eum noverca sua Synagoga, cum in caput angelis tremendum coronam spineam et ignominiosam tuli: Patrilogia Latina, vol. 171, cols 362b, 363a, 367c.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 261

09/07/2021 09:49

2 62 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

‘The synagogue, if indeed the mother of Christ according to the flesh, shows itself to be a cruel stepmother that has crowned the true Solomon with a crown of thorns.’26 This sermon was soon used as the eighth lection for the feast of the Crown of Thorns, as celebrated at the Sainte-Chapelle from 1248.27 The image of stepmother continued to gain currency, and was inserted by the once Parisian scholar, Dominican Stephen of Bourbon (1180–1261), into his influential handbook for preachers, the Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilibus.28 In his sermon for the Annunciation of c.1250–61, Stephen reflected on the Incarnation, and mothers: ‘On this day our king celebrates with us the marriage of human nature, true Salomon, by his mother crowned with a carnal crown, by his stepmother Synagogue, with a crown of thorns; by this one in the womb, by that one on the gallows of the cross.’29 If Ecclesia and Synagoga began as sisters and bore a family resemblance, that family relationship was now tested. Ecclesia and Synagoga were changing in other areas of the Parisian cultural sphere of the early-to-mid thirteenth century. Sara Lipton has shown that in the creative milieu of the Bible moralisée, particularly in its French version, female biblical figures were realized through Synagoga with their human failings: for example, the wife of Potiphar, a lascivious and deceitful seductress, and the daughter of Jephtah, so dazzled by earthly success and possessions.30 Deeana Klepper has traced the case of Hagar, she too a Synagoga of sorts, as a haughty servant to the lady, Sara.31 The pair are now characters in disparate dramas, no longer side by side.32 The Lewis Psalter (Philadelphia, Free Library, MS Lewis E. 185), made in Paris the 1230s, is famed for its full-page illuminations, but also contains little-known and intriguingly novel depictions of Ecclesia and Synagoga in two historiated initials (ff. 58v, 67), each

26 The sermon appears in BNF, MS lat. 15951, f. 123, on which see N. Bériou, L’avènement des maîtres de la Parole. La prédication à Paris au XIIIe siècle, 2 vols, Paris, 1998, vol. 1, pp. 96–7. This manuscript contains a collection of Parisian sermons by Odo of Chateauroux and William of Auvergne, both intellectual and ecclesiastical leaders in Paris in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. 27 Synagoga siquidem mater Christi secundum carnem, novercam se exhibens affectu crudelitatis et effectu nostrum salamonem spinea corona coronavit: Brussels, KBR MS IV 472, ff. 13v–14 (lection 8: In vigilia sacrosancte corone domini); Vexilla Regis Glorie: Relics and Liturgy at the Sainte Chapelle in the Thirteenth Century, ed. C. Gaposckin, Paris, 2021 (forthcoming): I am most grateful to Cecilia Gaposchkin for sharing her text with me before its publication. See also F. Morenzoni and A. Charansonnet, ‘Prêcher sur les reliques de la Passion à l’époque de saint Louis’, in La Sainte-Chapelle de Paris. Royaume de France ou Jérusalem céleste?, ed. C. Hediger, Turnhout, 2007, pp. 61–99. 28 Ranulphe de la Houblonierre used the stepmother image in a sermon delivered in Paris in 1273 : N. Bériou, La Prédication de Ranulphe de la Houblonierre. Sermons aux clercs et aux simples gens à Paris au XIIIe siècle, 2 vols, Paris, 1987, vol. 2, p. 122 (sermon 10). 29 Hoc die rex noster apud nos, nuptias humane nature celebrans, ueros Salomon, a matre sua corona carnea a nouerca sua synagoga corona spinea, ab illa in uterom ab ista in crucis patibulo coronatur’: Stephani de Borbone, Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilibus. Secunda pars: de dono pietatis, ed. J. Berlioz, Corpus Christianorum continuatio mediaevalis 124A, Turnhout, 2006, p. 198 (lines 202, 205). 30 S. Lipton, ‘The Temple is my Body: Gender, Carnality, and Synagoga in the “Bible Moralisée”’, in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. E. Frojmovic, Leiden, 2002, pp. 129–63. See also L. Drewer, ‘Jephthah and His Daughter in Medieval Art: Ambiguities of Heroism and Sacrifice’, in Insights and Interpretations. Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane, Princeton, NJ, 2002, pp. 35–59. 31 D. Klepper, ‘Historicizing Allegory: The Jew as Hagar in Medieval Christian Text and Image’, Church History, 84, 2015, pp. 308–44. 32 Such separation is also evident in other contexts, as in the Paris Bible (c.1250–1300), where the illuminated initial M (Multifariam) at the opening of the epistle of Paul to the Hebrews, has Paul address Ecclesia, in a variation on the paired Ecclesia-Synagoga pair: The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB 133 D 25, f. 346ra.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 262

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 21   |  ec c l esi a and synago ga i n t i me  |   263

accompanied by titles in rubric drawn from Peter Comestor.33 In these images, Ecclesia and Synagoga do not stand by the cross, but rather in the presence of Christ in heaven. The sisters are still dressed in similar clothing, though their colours – pink and blue – are reversed. In the initial B on f. 58v, Ecclesia holds a chalice up to Christ’s blessing, while he pushes Synagoga away, as if expelling her from the letter’s frame (fig. 4); as Synagoga’s crown falls from her head, and her staff is broken. While Parisian masters, exegetes, and illuminators were at work, so was a poet. The Disputoison entre eglise et synagogue is of 144 lines of rhymed alexandrines, and is not the translation of any Latin text we know. It survives in Paris, BNF MS fr. 837 (made c.1300), and its language suggests a mid-century composition.34 The poet is Clopin – the lame one? – who dreamt a dream: I am Clopin, a dreamer who dreamt a dream last night No mortal could dream a prettier sight.35 Clopin saw two women quarrelling: I dreamt that two women began a dispute One was Synagogue and the other Holy Church.36 He goes on to describe them: But rather I will tell you the appearance of each: Holy Church bright red, and Synagogue dark (or brown).37 Note that Clopin has given them different complexions.38 He moves on to their demeanour, and to the objects they carry. First Holy Church: She held a chalice, have no doubt of this, Where the red blood of Jesus Christ had dripped From the side where the sword was put and pressed. 33 On the Lewis Psalter see E. A. Peterson, ‘Iconography of the Historiated Psalm Initials in the Thirteenth-Century French Fully Illustrated Psalter Group’, PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1991, especially pp. 19–22; and the entry by W. G. Noel in Leaves of Gold: Manuscript Illumination from Philadelphia Collections, ed. J. R. Tanis and J. A. Thompson, Philadelphia, 2001, pp. 51–3 (no. 10). 34 I have followed the edition, in A. Serper, ‘Le débat entre Synagogue et Église au XIIIe siècle’, Revue des études juives, 123, 1964, pp. 307–33, alongside the digital version of the manuscript. For a full description of the contents, see H. Omont, Fabliaux dites et contes en vers français du XIIIe siècle. Facsimile du manuscrit français 837 de la Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1932 (reprint Geneva, 1973), pp. 1–13. I am grateful to Professor William Paden for advising me on the translation, and for discussing the poem and its dating with me. 35 Clopins sui, uns songiers qui sonjai un songe ier / Hom mortex ne porroit plus biau songe songier: Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 320 (lines 3–4). Other scholars have noticed the poem, e.g. R. B. Kosinki, in ‘Dramatic Troubles of Ecclesia: Gendered Performances of the Divided Church’, in Cultural Performances in Medieval France. Essays in Honor of Nancy Freeman Regalado, ed. E. Doss-Quinby, R. Krueger and E. J. Burns, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 181–94 (at p. 182); A. J. Novikoff, The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance, Philadelphia, 2013, pp. 213–14. 36 Je sonjai que deus dames ont contençon emprise / L’une ert la Synagogue et l’autre ert saint Yglise: Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 320 (lines 11–12) . 37 Mes ainçois vous dirai le senblant de chascune / Saint Yglise ert vermeille et Synagogue brune: Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 321 (lines 15–16). 38 S. Demailly, ‘L’étude de la polychromie de la facade occidentale’, Revue Monumental, 1, 2000, pp. 30–35. There is a group working on remains of colour, mostly the effect of gilt upon the lighting effect: P. Callet, S. Dumazet, C. Leclercq, and C. Politi, ‘Natural Lighting, Gilts and Polychromy of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral’, VAST 2010: 11th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Goslar, 2010: see https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f57f/4729e4996da4cf5d4cda8edf4275 be476682.pdf (accessed 01 October 2019).

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 263

09/07/2021 09:49

2 64 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

On the other side she had a sword and a white banner, There were three sharp nails, my dream teaches me. And a red cross, redder than a bleeding wound, In memory of that, it is fitting to cross oneself.39 While Synagogue: Next I shall tell you of the other, who was a standard-bearer For a very long time, but whose banner is now broken.40 When Moses was the leader (constable) of the Jews Synagogue was [their] lady, that is certainly true. But now her words no longer hold firm; Her banner is broken, her tablets [are smashed] too. Here royalty is lost and gained: Synagoga had once reigned in justice, but her rejection of the Messiah lost her that unction. The protagonists then move on to their quarrel, ‘rancune’: I heard the debate, the contest and their dispute. The villaine spoke, before the courtly lady.41 I left villaine there for you to savour its many meanings: unfree, servile, nasty, verging on the criminal. And so they begin, and Clopin moves to direct speech, as in a play: Synagogue gets up, and has the first word, And said to Holy Church: ‘Wench, hear my word! You must obey me, since you came out of my school!’ --‘Shut up’, says Holy Church, ‘[you] wanton old whore’!’ And when Synagogue heard herself called a whore, She paled with anger, became yellower than woad. --‘Shut up’, she said, ‘harlot! You are too bold in speech, Your God isn’t worth a basin full of hot water.’42 They move on to exchanging prophecies: ‘Silence’, said Holy Church, ‘[you] foolish old wrinkled thing, Don’t you know what Isaiah once told in his prophecy, As did the other prophets David and Jeremiah, By whom I am exalted, and you [are] harmed?’43 39 Un chalice tenoit, de ce point ne doutez / Ou li sans Jhesucrist vermaus ert degoutez Du costé ou li glaives fu mis et boutez. / D’autre part tint un glaive et une blanche enseigne / Trois clos aguz y ot, mon songe le m’enseigne / Et une croiz vermeille plusque plaie qui saingne / En mémoire de cela est droiz que l’en se saingne. Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 321 (lines 22–8). 40 Or vos dirai de l’autre qui fu gonfanoniere / Mult lonc tens, mes or est brisie sa (baniere): Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 322 (lines 35–6). 41 Des deus oï le plet, le content et la noise / La villaine parla ainçois que la courtoise: Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 322 (lines 43–4). 42 Synagogue se drece, qui premiere parole / Et dist a Sainte Yglise: ‘Garce ! entent ma parole! / Tu me dois obeir, tu issis de m’escole’. / – ‘Tait toi, dist Sainte Yglise, vielle ribaude fole!’. / Et (quant Synagogue) s’oi clamer ribaude / D’ire devint pale et plus jaune que gaude / – ‘Tais toi, dist elle, garce! trop es de parler baude! / Li tiens Diex ne vaut pas plain bacin d’eve chaude!’ Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 322 (lines 43–52). 43 – ‘Tais toi’, dist Sainte Yglise, ‘folle Vielle froncie! / Nes tu ce (qu’Isayes dit) ja sa prophecie / Et li autres prophète David et Jeremie / Dont je sui essaucie et tu desavancie?’ Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 323 (lines 53–6).

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 264

09/07/2021 09:49

chapt er 21   |  ec c l esi a and synago ga i n t i me  |   265

Holy Church sets a lively tone, and Synagogue gives as good as she gets: ‘Shut up, miserable fool’, Synagogue said, ‘Why are you acting so bold and so proud and so arrogant? For your God who is not worth the mast of an old cock-boat, Why have you presented this prologue about the prophets?’44 Holy Church describes Isaiah’s prophecy that from the root of Jesse a Virgin will be born, a flower: Then Synagogue, in whom falsehood resides, answers And said to Holy Church: ‘Be quiet, miserable thing! You do not understand rightly the gloss of this text: The branch was David, and Solomon the rose.’45 When the coming of Christ is extolled for its saving power, Synagogue retorts, if he were God: ‘Nor would he have let himself be tied to the stake And beaten with whips, or spat [in the] face. You have a very foolish thought, when you hold such a God dear! If he had been God, he would never have let himself be touched that way.’46 Sainte Eglise ends in a triumphant statement, just as Clopin wakes up. Clopin ends with his act of creation: ‘In the name of Holy Mary I put my dream in rhyme’, and wishes his audience a good and long life.47 * We witness in the Disputoison a version of Ecclesia and Synagoga, drastically different from the visual tradition. The two are as dissimilar as possible, by age, colour, and demeanour. In its graphic detail and its moral tone, the poem’s style is epideictic, that is, of the rhetorical branch of praise and blame, laudatio and vituperatio, which Paul Binski has put at centre stage, as the tools par excellence for the assertion of authority in this period.48 It offers detail, what Roland Barthes called the ‘reality effect’, to suggest moral difference. Epideisis prevailed in the thirteenth century in pastoral care, visual representation, and devotional writing. Unlike the classicizing harmonies of the Carolingian ivory or the Ottonian page, even of the Gothic façade, the Disputoison fills the mind’s eye with detail, just as Ad Herrenium taught: ‘praise has to be polished, perfected’; epideisis elaborates the 44 – ‘Tais toi, chetive fole’, se dist la Synagogue / ‘Por qoi te fez si baude et si fiere et si rogue? / Por ton Dieu qui ne vaut le maz d’une viez cogue / Por qui m’as des prophètes avant tret cest prologue.’ Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 323 (lines 57–60). 45 Lors respont Synagogue ou Faussetez repose / Et dist a Sainte Yglise ‘Tais toi, chetive chose! Tu n’entens pas a droit de ceste (teste) la glose / La verge fu David et Salomons la rose.’ Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 324 (lines 73–6). 46 ‘Ne ja ne se lessast a l’estache attachier / Ne batre de corgies ne’l visage crachier. / Trop as fole pensee quant to tel Dieu tiens chier! / Jà s’il fust Diex issi ne se lessast touchier.’ Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 325 (lines 97–100). 47 Ou non Saint Marie/ Mon songe mis en rime: Serper, ‘Le débat’, p. 328 (lines 142–3). 48 Binski, Gothic Sculpture, especially chapters 1 and 2.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 265

09/07/2021 09:49

2 66  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

‘external circumstances, physical attributes and qualities of character’.49 It is a style of representation that leaves little to the imagination because it saturates it so: with colour, tone, content, gesture. The Disputoison befits its Paris chronotope, its distinctive place/time, where reflection on Judaism and its claims was topical, even intense in the three interlocking milieus of court, church and university.50 University men recast Synagoga as stepmother in their sermons, sermons known and loved by their king, Louis IX.51 Of several European rulers, Louis IX alone responded to Pope Gregory IX’s call of 1239 to investigate the blasphemies of the Talmud. In this he was supported by university scholars like Odo of Chateauroux, William of Auvergne, and by the archbishops Paris and Sens, and the bishop of Senlis. The queen mother attended the ensuing debate, even shielding the Jewish protagonist Rabbi Yehiel from abuse, not unlike that hurled by Ecclesia in the Disputoison.52 Queen-mother Blanche may have had on her person the splendid psalter made for her by the 1220s, in which Synagoga was not old, or nasty, or wrinkled – just sad (fig. 5).53 And so she remained in most parts of Europe until around 1400, when patrons of visual representation and the artists they guided preferred to think of Ecclesia and Synagoga as radically different. This is a significant development which I shall turn to in future research.54 Artists distinguished the figures by age, gender and colour. In doing so, they were catching up with the Paris time and place of the thirteenth century, where the two had already been figured as different within that capital city’s disputatious rhythms and its distinctive raison d’état. No longer a sister, Synagoga became a series of possibilities spelling difference and danger, uncoupled from historic time and its redemptive promise.

49 potest esse rerum externarum, corporis, animi: Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. H. Caplan, Loeb Classical Library 403 Cambridge, MA,1954, p. 174 (3.6.10). 50 The Crown was occupied with the challenge of Christian ethics, regarding heretics, Jews, prostitutes and Muslims: see M. Dejoux, ‘Gouvernement et penitence. Les enquêtes de réparation des usures juives de Louis IX (1247–1270)’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 69, 2014, pp. 849–74, and as summarised by W. C. Jordan in The Apple of his Eye: Converts to Islam in the Reign of Louis IX, Princeton, NJ, 2019, pp. 1–20. 51 W. C. Jordan, ‘Louis IX: Preaching to Franciscan and Dominican Brothers and Nuns’, in Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life. Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming, ed. M. F. Cusato and G. Geltner, Leiden, 2009, pp. 219–35. 52 Judah D. Galinsky, ‘The Different Hebrew Versions of the “Talmud Trial” of 1240 in Paris’, in New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations in Honor of David Berger, ed. E. Carlebach and J. J. Schacter, Leiden, 2012, pp. 109–40. See also, Y. Schwartz, ‘Authority, Control, and Conflict in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Contextualizing the Talmud Trial’, in Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-Century France, ed. E. Baumgarten and J. D. Galinsky, New York, 2015, pp. 93–110. 53 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 1186, fo. 24. L. Grant, Blanche of Castile Queen of France, New Haven, CT, 2016, pp. 127–9. See also P. Stirnemann ‘A Family Affair: The Psalters of Ingeborg of Denmark and Blanche de Castille and the Noyon Psalter’, Revue Mabillon 29, 2018, pp. 101–30 (especially pp. 102–10). 54 For some preliminary findings, see M. Rubin, ‘Ecclesia and Synagoga: The Changing Meanings of a Powerful Pairing’, in Conflict and Religious Conversation in Latin Christendom: Studies in Honour of Ora Limor, ed. I. J. Yuval and R. Ben-Shalom, Turnhout, 2014, pp. 55–86 (at pp. 74–80).

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 266

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 21   |  ec c l esi a and synago ga i n t i me  |   267

Fig. 1. London. Victoria and Albert Museum. Ivory, Metz, c.860–70. Photograph in the public domain.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 267

09/07/2021 09:49

2 68 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

Fig. 2. Munich, Bavarian State Library, Clm. 13601 (Uta Codex), f. 3v: Regensburg, c.1025. Photograph in the public domain.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 268

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 21   |  ec c l esi a and synago ga i n t i me  |   269

Fig. 3. J. Paul Getty Museum MS 64 (97.MG.21) (Stammheim Missal), f. 86:Hildesheim, c.1170. Photograph in the public domain.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 269

09/07/2021 09:50

2 70 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

Fig. 4. Philadelphia, Free Library, MS E.185 (Lewis Psalter), f.58v: Paris, 1230s. Photograph reproduced by permission of the Free Library.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 270

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 21   |  ec c l esi a and synago ga i n t i me  |   271

Fig. 5. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 1186 (Psalter of Blanche of Castile), f. 24. Photo in the public domain.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 271

09/07/2021 09:50

The Bolton/Blackburn Hours (York Minster Add. Ms. 2): A New Solution to its Text-Image Disjunctions using a Structural Model Kathryn M. Rudy

T

he Bolton/Blackburn H ours, an English book of hours made for a denizen of York around 1415 (York Minster Library, Add. MS 2), contains an unusual cycle of images that have received considerable scholarly attention. The images include forty-seven full-page miniatures depicting standing saints with their attributes, which, as Kathleen Scott points out, is the greatest number of miniatures in any surviving English book of hours.1 These are distributed sporadically throughout the manuscript, with little obvious relationship to the texts they face.2 The manuscript also contains five smaller miniatures, sixteen historiated initials, and eleven full borders. Recent studies have productively contextualized its patronage, its didactic function, its ‘hypertext’, its relationship with local politics in York, with pilgrimage, and the meaning of a confessional prayer inscribed on its beginning and end leaves.3 In this essay, I take a structural approach in order to consider the book’s components and their internal relationships. To concretize this, I made a physical structural model.4 Doing so forced a reconsideration of the book’s function and yielded different interpretations from those proposed by other commentators.

1 2 3

4

K. L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 6, London, 1996, vol. 2, p. 120. K. L. Scott, ‘Design, Decoration and Illustration’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall, Cambridge, 1989, p. 56 n. 25. N. R. Ker et al., Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 5 vols, Oxford, 1969–2002, vol. 4, p. 786; Scott, ‘Design, Decoration and Illustration’; P. King, ‘Corpus Christi Plays and the “Bolton Hours”: Tastes in Lay Piety and Patronage in Fifteenth-Century York’, Medieval English Theatre 18, 1996, pp. 46–62; Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, pp. 119–21 (no. 33), dating Additional MS 2 between 1405 and 1415 based on style; P. Cullum and J. Goldberg, ‘How Margaret Blackburn Taught Her Daughters: Reading Devotional Instruction in a Book of Hours’, in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. J. Wogan-Browne and A. Diamond, Turnhout, 2000, pp. 217–36; R. J. A. Fletcher, The Bolton Hours: York Minster Library, Ms Add.2. Piety, Patronage and Civic Pride, Manchester, 2001; M. Twycross and P. King, ‘Doomsday as Hypertext: Contexts of Doomsday in Fifteenth-Century Northern Manuscripts’, in Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom, ed. N. Morgan, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 12, Donington, 2004, pp. 377–403 and pls 79–91; A. Barratt, ‘“Envoluped in Synne”: The Bolton Hours and Its Confessional Formula’, in Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A.G. Rigg, ed. R. F.  Green and L. R. Mooney, Toronto, 2004, pp. 3–14; S. R. Jones, ‘Richard Scrope, the Bolton Hours and the Church of St Martin in Micklegate: Reconstructing a Holy Neighbourhood in Later Medieval York’, in Richard Scrope: Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg, Donington, 2007, pp. 214–36 and pl. 1. The digital images made from the manuscript reproduced in this article were made by the York Minster Library; I do not advocate wearing cotton gloves when handling manuscripts. Similar approaches to modelling as a discovery tool are common in archaeology but not in the study of medieval manuscripts. See S. Hermon, ‘Reasoning in 3D: A Critical Appraisal of the Role of 3D modelling and Virtual Reconstructions in Archaeology’, in Beyond Illustration: 2D and 3D Technologies as Tools for Discovery in Archaeology, BAR International Series 1805, Oxford, 2008, pp. 36–45.

[ 2 72]

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 272

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 22   |  t he bo lt o n/b l ac kbur n ho ur s  |   273

The Bolton Hours takes its name from obits added to the calendar for John and Alice Bolton (ff. 30v–31). John Bolton (d. 1445) was a merchant in York.5 Sarah Rees Jones has lucidly discussed its connection with York, as it contains two miniatures depicting Richard Scrope, a martyred archbishop who led a rebellion against Henry IV in 1405. Locally beatified but never canonized, Scrope was venerated exclusively in York.6 Patricia Cullum and Jeremy Goldberg note that Alice Bolton was born Alice Blackburn, and they suggest that the manuscript was probably made for her mother, Margaret Blackburn, who was married to Nicholas Blackburn, a merchant and mayor of York from 1412.7 Given the manuscript was probably executed in the 1410s, Margaret seems the most likely owner. Cullum and Goldberg propose that Margaret commissioned it both as a devotional aid and to teach her daughters, Isabel, Alice, and Agnes, to read.8 As they point out, a fullpage miniature depicting St Sytha with the female patron kneeling at her feet attests to that patron’s presence in the manuscript (f. 40v), and female pronouns within the prayer texts confirm an intended female audience. Alexandra Barratt argues that the images suggest that the book was intended for a family rather than an individual, as the figures in modern dress clustered at the foot of the Trinity depict a couple with a son and daughter (f. 33).9 Her observation does not undermine a predominant female usership for the book. While these authors have convincingly explained the manuscript’s patrons, its date, and its connection to York, aspects of the original design and function of the book have not hitherto been examined, which I analyse here in light of its structure. Here a new solution to the book’s text–image disjunctions will be presented. I suggest that the books’ original users experienced and handled it in a much different form from the one we see today. Furthermore, reconstructing that early form can help us to understand not only the images but also the interests and intentions of its owners. In short, I aim to demonstrate that the volume in its present modern binding comprehends two complete manuscripts rather than one. One of these manuscripts was for children, the other for adults. Reconstructing the original form reveals a hitherto unattested book form – a children’s picture book and beginning reader – which in turn sheds light on how children were taught to read.

Background Cullum and Goldberg, Scott, Barratt, Twycross and other scholars have grappled with the unusual imagery in this manuscript, but we still lack a convincing explanation for its fortyseven full-page miniatures, their existence and placement. The images seem to have little to do with the texts, and the relationship among the images is inscrutable. Some subjects 5 6 7 8 9

Cullum and Goldberg, ‘How Margaret Blackburn Taught’, p. 221 n. 12. Jones, ‘Richard Scrope’. Cullum and Goldberg, ‘How Margaret Blackburn Taught’, pp. 222–3. Ibid., p. 225. Barratt, ‘“Envoluped in Synne”’, p. 3.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 273

09/07/2021 09:50

2 74 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

are repeated, most notably Richard Scrope, who appears in a column-wide miniature on f. 100v (fig. 1) and again in a full-page miniature on f. 202v. It is highly unusual for a book of hours to have two versions of the same subject: Scrope’s double presence requires further explanation. More globally, the design of the pages and of individual openings breaks the rules of the hierarchy of decoration. For example, the combined hours of the Virgin and Cross has a Passion cycle of images in the form of historiated initials (fig. 2). Folios with historiated initials receive painted and gilt border decoration on four sides, which emanates, as does all decoration, from the initial. Therefore, openings with a full-page illumination should have even more decoration than those with historiated initials, according to late medieval design principles. This, however, is not the case in this manuscript. For example, f. 186 has scant decoration, even though it accompanies a full-page picture of Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Spirit (f. 185v). According to the hierarchy of decoration, the miniature is an extension of the initial; the page of a text division grand enough to receive a full-page miniature should have a fully painted border. The manuscript also lacks the other standard text– image combinations at the other major texts, the Annunciation at the hours of the Virgin, or the Mass of the Dead before the vigil. Instead, it has an image of St Judas Thaddeus before the vigil (ff. 128v–129), which does not belong there. The fragmented publication of miniatures from the Bolton/Blackburn Hours has decontextualized them and made it difficult to understand their role in a manuscript whose contents and arrangement are highly irregular. Its text pages have not been published, nor have all of the images. (Given publication restraints, even the current article cannot reproduce all the images necessary to support its arguments.) And the text pages, their appearance and location in the book, also require explanation. For example, no convincing reason has been given for so much ‘front matter’ before the calendar. Whereas the calendar is usually the first text in a book of hours, here it begins only on f. 27. While many images of the miniatures appear, for example, on an educational CD-ROM, all of them are cropped (fig. 3).10 Seeing the images in this fragmentary form and isolated from their context has eclipsed their original function and placement. In fact, I argue, the manuscript’s contents have been reordered. For example, contra Twycross’s collation diagram and Ker’s collation description, the Last Judgment miniature forms half of a bifolium that is now in the centre of the quire. But I suggest that this ‘bifolium’ is not original. A twentieth-century binder wanting to keep loose sheets together has pieced two folios together. The binding, Ker notes, is ‘in [a] careful medieval style by John Henderson of York, c.1970’.11 That binding was part of a larger recreation of the book involving thread, Japanese paper, and adhesive. Ker, who began publishing his catalogues of manuscripts in British collections in 1969, studied this manuscript shortly after Henderson rebound it, not, apparently, in its pre-1970 state. Viewed with these artificial bifolia and imposed quires in mind, the book’s physical composition requires re-examination, as there is evidence of multiple moments of intervention or insertion. 10 Pilgrims and Pilgrimage: Journey, Spirituality and Daily Life through the Centuries, CD-ROM, ed. Dee Dyas, York, 2007. 11 Ker, vol. 4, p. 791.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 274

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 22   |  t he b o lt o n/bl ac kbur n ho ur s  |   275

This manuscript’s iconography, significance, placement and function of the full-page miniatures can be clarified if one concludes that neither the images nor the texts are in their original arrangement. Indeed, Sarah Rees Jones in 2007 suggested that the book may not be bound in its original order.12 Jones comes close to providing a structural overview of the manuscript, as she emphasizes that the manuscript contains packets of images, painted back to back, which are on separate quires. As suggested, a structural approach of this sort is key to understanding the true nature of this book, and particularly my hypothesis that the manuscript originally comprised two separate books. These two books apparently originated from the same studio and made use of the same scribes and illuminators and might well have had the same patrons, but they were distinct, and their purposes were different. The smaller, heavily illustrated portion was for the use of children, the other, larger, part for adults. Inspection of the pages reveals that within about fifty years of their construction, someone added a text (forms of confession) to the adults’ manuscript and altered its physical structure. At some later point the two books were bound together in such a way that most of the textual units of the adults’ manuscript remained approximately in their original order, but were interleaved with components from the children’s manuscript. Furthermore, quires I, II, and XXX (following Ker’s collation) were completely reorganized. This rearrangement may have occurred any time between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. When it reached Henderson’s bindery in 1970, it was probably falling apart and had enough loose pages to justify a whole new binding rather than only minor repairs. Henderson used Japanese paper to connect pieces of parchment, some of them in new arrangements. Thus, the Bolton/Blackburn Hours as we now have it is a new creation made from the reorganized parts of two separate manuscripts. Fortunately, modelling its parts makes it possible to approximate the structure and content of the proposed two original books. Reconstructing the children’s manuscript yields a hitherto unknown book form (a picture book-cum-easy reader), which in turn reveals a vehicle used in secular urban pedagogy. In short, the current entity, coupled with the way it has been photographed, has meant that the children’s picture book-cum-reader has been hiding in plain sight.

The Structure of the Bolton/Blackburn Hours and its Components All subsequent scholars, including the present author, have depended on Neil Ker’s valuable description. As I have suggested, however, it is not quite accurate. I have redeployed Ker’s description of the contents, folios, and quires in the first four columns of a diagram and have added a fifth column to indicate which sections belonged to the proposed children’s book and which to the adults’ (fig. 4). To understand better the structure of the manuscript(s), when I configured the diagram of the contents, I indicated the codicological units with 12 Jones, ‘Richard Scrope’, pp. 215–16 n. 8. Following Ker, she lists the full-page illuminations and groups them in pairs to indicate which images are painted on the recto and verso of the same parchment leaf.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 275

09/07/2021 09:50

2 76  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

the thick borders.13 Quires III and IV belonged to the children’s manuscript. The texts for indoctrinating young children therefore fill two discrete quires and end with an Amen (ff. 26v–27). The rest of the text quires in Additional MS 2 were associated with adult lay readers and formed part of what I am calling the adults’ manuscript. For example, quire V contains the calendar, which, because normally the first text in a book of hours, is here the first quire in the adults’ manuscript. According to this analysis, two quires of texts, the four quires of full-page miniatures, and the two singletons with full-page miniatures (fols. 185 and 208), all belonged to the children’s manuscript. While this diagram was revelatory, it was not nimble. Several scholars, including Henrike Lähnemann, John Lowden, and Karen Overbey, have made physical models based on printed-out digital files and applied them productively in their research. My goal here is to legitimate such models as a research tool and a path toward knowledge. I therefore constructed a full paper mock-up whose structure reflected that of the original manuscript. The mock-up enabled quires to be rearranged in a more logical fashion and to reveal more of the original construction. The model, comprising printed individual photographs of every opening, could be rearranged to separate the children’s manuscript from the adults’. In theory one could reorder digital images to reconstruct the whole, but in fact this is unwieldy. A modern paper-and-glue model behaves much like the original but can be manipulated. If two independent manuscripts are built in light of evidence of quire structure and use, then the order of each individual book becomes clearer. I hypothesize that the children’s manuscript began with the picture quires, followed by the text quires, marked in green in the diagram below. These text quires begin with the ABCs, followed by the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Credo, and the ‘grace before meals’ (fig. 5). Under this working hypothesis, the child would begin with a picture book, and then move on to letters, words, and sentences. The remaining quires comprise the adults’ manuscript: a logical and straightforward book of hours (fig. 6). It lacks full-page miniatures but has historiated initials, four column-wide miniatures, and gilt borders at the major text openings. The painted borders follow the hierarchy of decoration.

The Children’s Manuscript According to my model, the children’s manuscript began with several quires of full-page miniatures. However, I could not rearrange the bifolia in a way that might reflect their original disposition, or according to common medieval arrangements. Most obviously, the saints cannot be arranged in the order of the Litany, and they defy the order of the calendar: for example, St Peter Martyr (29 April) and St Mary Magdalene (22 July) are 13 Several scholars have helped in recognizing and describing composite manuscripts: P. R. Robinson, ‘The ‘Booklet’: A SelfContained Unit in Composite Manuscripts’, Codicologica: Towards a Science of Handwritten Books, 3, 1980, pp. 46–67; R. Hanna, ‘Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts: Further Considerations’, Studies in Bibliography, 39, 1986, pp. 101–12; E. Kwakkel, ‘Towards a Terminology for the Analysis of Composite Manuscripts’, Gazette du livre medieval, 41, 2002, pp. 12–19.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 276

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 22   |  t he bo lt o n/b l ac kbur n ho ur s  |   277

back-to-back on a single piece of parchment. They also defied alphabetical arrangement, perhaps as an extension of a spelling lesson.14 However, their resistance to any of these sequences may lie in the arrangement of the bifolia themselves: inspection revealed that most of them have been cut apart from their former bifolium mates, and are now paired with others. Furthermore, the set is probably incomplete, as key subjects such as the Crucifixion are absent. Most of the images are attached into bifolios and distributed into discrete quires, but there are two illuminated singletons that the binder did not join up. One of these is f. 185, the verso with an image of Mary holding the child Jesus on her lap; this has been inserted so that it faces the incipit of the hours of the Holy Spirit, perhaps because Jesus is overshadowed by a dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit (f. 185v). At the end of this quire, eight folios later between ff. 193v and 194, one finds a stub of Japanese paper. This suggests that the singleton was not designed as a singleton: when late medieval miniature painters created singletons, they made them on sheets wide enough to be folded vertically, so that the gutter could be stitched into the quire. When Henderson inserted this image of the Virgin and Child to preface the hours of the Holy Spirit, he inadvertently created a situation in which the St Dominic on the recto has no relationship to the text it faces (ff. 184v–185), i.e. the end of a suffrage to William of York. The children’s manuscript may have been dismantled early in its history. At that time, some of the image bifolios may have been cut apart and components lost. The modern binder turned the singletons back into bifolia by connecting them with Japanese paper, sometimes in new combinations. Although the exact order of the 47 full-page images cannot be determined, the picture booklet began with the Trinity-cum-family portrait. It is dirty and shiny from abrasion, as one would expect a frontispiece to be. When the two manuscripts were rebound and integrated, the binder kept this as the first of the full-page images, although placed it after the calendar from the adults’ part of the book. And the Last Judgment, the only image with a blank back, came last, which makes sense both theologically and structurally (it avoids leaving a blank page in the series of images). I contend that quires III, IV, VI, XV, XVIII, and XXVI originally formed a volume used to teach children to read and to instruct them about the saints and their deeds. The family who commissioned this booklet (possibly the Blackburns living in York at the beginning of the fifteenth century) also commissioned an adult book of hours from the same studio. Both books were heavily used. Shiny dark fingerprints have accumulated on parts of both volumes (for example, the Trinity image, probably the first folio of the children’s book, the Penitential Psalms in the adults’). The children’s volume also became the site for interactive lessons, as the inscriptions in the bottom margins of the images attest. These have been added in several campaigns, corresponding to different kinds of lessons: someone has inscribed the names of the saints in red, in Latin, in the lower margins of their images; a different hand has carefully inscribed, in English, descriptions of some of the narrative 14 A set of full-page images painted by the Master of the Morgan Infancy Cycle depicting saints and events from sacred history were inserted into a northern Netherlandish book of hours (Liège, ULiège Library, MS Wittert 35). The saints may have been arranged in alphabetical order to teach a child her letters. See K. Rudy, Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books, New Haven, CT, 2015, pp. 62–71.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 277

09/07/2021 09:50

2 78 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

events (such as ‘Last Judgment at domestdai’ on f. 208). Two kinds of inscriptions appear on facing folios, such as the ‘S Georgius’ and ‘His sermon on the mount – Matthew 5’ (ff. 33v–34), a further indication that these images did not originally face each other and that they were involved in different lessons. In the fifteenth century, someone (a confessor?) added the formula for confession in English, using available parchment gleaned from the empty pages of one of the volumes. This may have been for a child who had mastered rudiments of literacy and doxa and was preparing for a first confession, or these added components may have been destined for an adult. We cannot be certain. What is clear is that the adults’ manuscript had more blank parchment available that could be deployed for this new text. All of this use and interactivity may have damaged the books and their respective first bindings early on. At some point later, the two books were disbound, and their components were reorganized into a single book so that subsequent rebindings have masked the original structure of the book(s), and the didactic function and young audience of the full-page images. It is possible that an early user cut some of the bifolia apart and deployed the single images in lessons. That scenario would confirm that Henderson had received the manuscript in a bad state of repair, with many of the images arriving as singletons. This would have necessitated the large amount of Japanese paper to make a coherent object out of the pieces. If the parent/teacher were using groups of images for lessons with children, it would not be surprising that some went missing. Whereas the series of children’s images have few analogues, the children’s texts in the volume have been attested in many witnesses. ABCs were regularly copied into books given to children to help them to learn to read.15 Teaching children to read took place within the family, and was usually the mother’s job. She would first present the alphabet to the child and teach the letters and basic abbreviations, which are written at the end of the alphabet. This particular copy includes alternative forms for the letters ‘a’, ‘r’ and ‘s’, and concludes with the most common abbreviations, those for et and con. It presents the alphabet as a text that begins with a cross, perhaps a command for the reader to cross him- or herself, and ends with the particle est amen, as if the reader were to begin with a ritualized gesture and to treat the alphabet as a prayer. In some senses, it was a prayer, as it contained all of the elements in every prayer and every other text, including the psalms, the Bible, and the book in which the alphabet itself is copied. Learning the alphabet was essential to those who were brought up in a religion ‘of the book’. The mother would teach the child the three main prayers of Christianity, the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and the Credo. The Pater Noster has been copied in clear letters, with few ligatures and minimum abbreviations – in other words, in its most accessible form. One can compare the script of the Pater Noster with that of the text on the facing page (f. 12v), which probably came from the adults’ part of the book and was made separately. The adults’ text page is much more condensed and packed with abbreviations. In short, the alphabet 15 For books of hours designed in part to teach children, see K. A. Smith, ‘The Neville of Hornby Hours and the Design of Literate Devotion’, Art Bulletin, 81, 1999, pp. 72–92; eadem, Art, Identity, and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours, London, 2003; K. M. Rudy, ‘An Illustrated Mid-Fifteenth-Century Primer for a Flemish Girl: British Library, Harley Ms 3828’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 69,2006, pp. 51–94 (with further references).

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 278

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 22   |  t he bo lt o n/b l ac kbur n ho ur s  |   279

and Pater Noster, by their layout, script, and clarity, had the didactic function of teaching literacy in a Christian context. The ink of the Pater Noster has flaked off, possibly because the teacher/mother followed the text with her finger, thereby abrading it. Manuscripts made entirely for children, although rare, have been identified in The Netherlands and France. Like the children’s volume I am proposing, such manuscripts are often quite brief. For example, The Hague, Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum MS 10 D 34, consists of just two bifolia with the ABC and Pater Noster, etc.16 With literacy came the other key socialising rituals, for instance those around eating. To that end, the manuscript then presents the text for graces to be said before meals (item no. 3 in Ker’s list). Whereas the texts for the Pater Noster and other basic prayers lacked abbreviations, these graces have many. They represent a more advanced lesson in reading and also in how to participate in mealtimes in a polite, Christian manner. Isolating the components of the children’s manuscript and lining them up in the order proposed here, the booklet forms a series of graduated lessons, which begin with the fullpage images. These are vehicles for telling children about adversity, faith, and martyrdom of the saints, and for teaching them to recognize the saints from their attributes. Seeing the image quires as pedagogical tools for children makes sense in light of the short explanatory inscriptions that were added to the bottom margins of the images. Adults would have had less need of simple labels such as ‘S Georgius’ or ‘the Birth of Christe’, which perhaps formed part of the didactic apparatus, meant to draw the child into Christian literacy through simple texts and images. Textual components followed. The number of abbreviations grew over the course of the graduated reader. At the beginning his or her lessons, the young reader learned the saints, their attributes and their stories of martyrdom. Next the child encountered the alphabet with its alternative letterforms, and then the Pater Noster with no abbreviations yet. As he/she progressed toward literacy, the complexity of the orthography grew to reflect the reader’s developing ability. The book presents a graduated reader in its content as well, so that by the time the young student learns the grace before and after meals (ff. 20v–21), she/he is also learning abbreviations.

The Adults’ Manuscript The adults’ manuscript, it is proposed, consists of a book of hours with standard texts, beginning with a calendar. It contains all the texts that define a book of hours, plus suffrages to saints, extra rhyming prayers in English, and some indulgenced prayers (listed by Ker). Unlike the children’s manuscript, the adults’ is not heavily illuminated. It has a series of historiated initials (with Passion scenes) to mark the internal divisions within 16 R. S. Wieck, ‘Special Children’s Books of Hours in the Walters Art Museum’, in Als Ich Can: Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers, ed. B. Cardon et al., 2 vols, Leuven, 2002, vol. 2, pp. 1629–39; Smith, Art, Identity, and Devotion; R. S. Wieck, ‘The Primer of Claude de France and the Education of the Renaissance Child’, in The Cambridge Illuminations: The Conference Papers, ed. S. Panayotova, London, 2007, pp. 167–72.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 279

09/07/2021 09:50

280 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

the combined hours of the Virgin and Cross; a series of four-line miniatures depicting standing saints with their attributes to accompany the suffrages; and a larger (eleven-line) miniature depicting Richard Scrope with the patron. Within the section of indulgence-rich prayers, one finds a Veronica to preface the Salve Sancta Facies (ff. 173v–174); an orange heart with five decorative gashes to accompany the Salve plaga lateris (ff. 175v–176); and a ten-line miniature depicting the Arma Christi, which prefaces a rhyming prayer to those objects (ff. 180v–181). This manuscript was written and illuminated by the same copyist and illuminator who made the children’s manuscript. What becomes clear is that the makers put many large miniatures and few words into the children’s manuscript, and many words and smaller images into the adults’ manuscript. In this way they imply that people graduate from pictures to words. This proposal also explains why there are two images of St Richard Scrope: one was in the children’s portion of the manuscript (ff. 202v–203) and the other in the adults’ portion (f. 100v). Likewise, the miniaturist packaged the images differently for the two audiences. For the adult part, the painter shows the mater familias in devotion to the local saint, thereby demonstrating not only her piety but also her patriotism to York. For the children’s portion, he has shown the saint holding a miniature windmill; representing a saint’s attributes would accord with the intended pedagogical function of the large miniatures. Whereas the illuminator provided small, integral images for the adults’ portion of the book, the images for the child were as large as possible. By understanding the codicology and stratigraphy of the manuscript – its layers assembled over time from components made for different audiences – the two different approaches to representing Richard Scrope make sense.

Conclusions Two different kinds of conclusions may be drawn, one related to content, the other to method. I have argued that the volume currently called ‘Additional 2’ comprises two fifteenth-century manuscripts, not one. One of these was a children’s manuscript with full-page illuminations depicting saints, plus the ABC, Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo, and grace before meals. These components drew the young reader from pictures to letter shapes to words to texts to abbreviations, all the while indoctrinating the learner in the tenets of the dominant religion. The other manuscript, for adults, was personalized with local saints but otherwise not out-of-the-ordinary. While Ker had made a collation of this manuscript and had noticed that the images were on separate quires, a two-manuscript solution has not previously been proposed. This is probably because the images available were heavily trimmed, incomplete, and decontextualized. It is possible that members of the Bolton/Blackburn family themselves restructured this book, thus ensuring these components’ survival together into the twentieth century. Perhaps, when the children grew up, they took their tattered childhood primer and repurposed it by distributing it into the family book of hours, which had become an heirloom rather than a teaching tool.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 280

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 22   |  t he b o lt o n/bl ac kbur n ho ur s  |   281

The other set of conclusions relates to techniques for studying a given medieval manuscript as a whole unit. I have argued that one application of digital humanities can help us to comprehend a given manuscript as a whole constructed from parts. This has been made possible because digital images are relatively cheap, as are colour print-outs. Having all of the images from this manuscript at hand has allowed the question of Additional MS 2’s original structure to be examined with new rigor, for the images formerly available were cropped and fragmented. In sum, the kinds of images available partially determine what kinds of questions can be asked of the material. Images were essential because of another important point. The ideas presented here only developed slowly, in combination with seeing the book in the flesh, then working with the digital images, making lists and diagrams, and assembling a paper model that, it is proposed, reiterated the structure and size of the original. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist famous for his explanations of creativity, has argued, creativity rarely relies on fast flashes of insight.17 This article and other installments of assumption-challenging research are the result of a slow burn, whose requirements include digital images, access to the originals, graphic tools to aid in visualization, plus time to think, often over years. Now that the solution to the manuscript’s structure is on the table, it seems obvious. But it took about two years to develop. Part of those two years were taken up in just coming up with the right question to ask. There is also a physical component to thinking: handling the real object in York, noticing its patterns of wear, experiencing the disjunction between the images and their facing text pages, and also returning the digital images to a physical form (the paper mock-up), aided that research. Only in this physical form could the manuscript’s physical elements be tried out to offer an approximation of their original positions, and therefore present a hitherto unattested book form. Structural modelling is an affordable tool that may extend the scholar’s spatial thought. To understand fully which bifolios are organic and which are the binder’s may only be possible the next time the book is rebound, because the potentially clue-generating cut edges are currently under Japanese paper. The larger implication of these conclusions involves re-evaluating other image cycles to ask whether they, too, functioned as part of structures for teaching children to read. It is possible that the children’s images in the York Minster volume stem from a longer tradition of using images in this way. Such cycles are often said to be prefatory images to psalters, although this explanation may be incomplete or incorrect. Scholars should re-evaluate image cycles from the late middle ages, which have often defied explanation, and ask whether they may have functioned as didactic aids for children. In the beginning was the word, but in the beginning of a children’s book was the image. And at the beginning of structural understanding is an appropriate model and a different set of questions.

17 M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York, 2008.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 281

09/07/2021 09:50

282 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 282

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 22   |  t he b o lt o n/bl ac kbur n ho ur s  |   283

opposite top: Fig. 1. Opening with a rhyming prayer in Latin to Richard Scrope, prefaced by a column-wide miniature showing a female patron venerating Richard Scrope. York Minster Library, Add. MS 2, ff. 100v–101 opposite below: Fig. 2. Opening from the Hours of the Virgin at nones, with a historiated initial depicting Christ carrying his cross. Add. MS 2, ff. 66v–67.

Fig. 3. A selection of the figures from the CD ROM, showing how the Add. MS 2 has been selectively published, with miniatures cropped and decontextualised.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 283

09/07/2021 09:50

284 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

Item number (following Ker)

Content (following Ker)

Fills folios (following Ker)

Fills current quires (following Ker)

Originally part of children’s or adults’ manuscript (according to Rudy)

1r–12v

I, II

A

22

Form of confession in English (1r–4r, added in a later hand)

1

Prayer to the name of Jesus; prayers to Mary (4v–12v)

2

ABCs, Pater noster, Ave Maria, credo in Deum;

13r–16v

III

C

3

Blessings and graces to be said before and after meals;

17r–26v

IV

C

4

Calendar;

27r–32v

V

A

Pictures

33r–40v

VI

C

Hours of B.V.M. with Hours of the Cross worked in (fol. 41r–75v); Prayers, esp. to B.V.M. (75v–77v); Penitential psalms and litany (78r–96v);

41r–96v

VII–XIII

A

Prayers: incipits of penitential and first 12 gradual psalms; prayers (to Christ); prayer to Richard Scrope; prayer on 5 wounds; prayer to be said before the 7 psalms; prayers of the Nativity;

97r–104

XIV

A

Pictures

105–108

XV

C

Prayers: Ps 118 with only one prayer; added space fillers incl. prayer to virgin martyr;

109–122

XVI–XVII

A

Pictures

123–128

XVIII

C

129–184

XIX–XXV

A

5, 6, 7

8

9

10

Office of the dead (129r–165r);

11

Eight verses of St Bernard (165r–166v);

12

Prayers: as protection against dying in mortal sin; to the flesh of Christ with 3000 years’ indulgence; Bede’s 7 words; the B.V.M. and John the Evangelist; Stabat mater with an indulgence of 7 years; indulgenced prayer to B.V.M. (166v–173v);

13

Memoria of Five Joys (173v–174r);

14

indulgenced prayers to vernicle and side wound (174r–176r);

15

Prayer to Christ (176r–177r);

16

Prayer before a crucifix (177r);

17

Memoriae of Holy Spirit, Trinity, Cross, Michael, John Baptist, Peter and Paul, John Evangelist, Laurence, Nicholas, Katherine, Margaret, Mary Magdalene, peace (177v–181r);

18

Memoriae: the instruments of the passion (181r–183r); prayers to St Anne, Anthony, and William of York (183r–184v);

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 284

A

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 22   |  t he b o lt o n/bl ac kbur n ho ur s  |   285

Item number (following Ker)

Content (following Ker)

Pictures

Fills folios (following Ker)

Fills current quires (following Ker)

Originally part of children’s or adults’ manuscript (according to Rudy)

185

XXVI

C

19

Hours of the Holy Spirit;

186–193

XXVII

A

20

Sign of the cross; memoriae of Thomas of Canterbury, Andrew, Stephen, Blaise, Cuthbert, Apollonia, John of Beverley; guardian angel; B.V.M.; Jesus; God the Father;

194–201

XXVIII

A

Pictures

202–205

XXIX

C

English prayer to be said between Agnus Dei and levation; St John of Bridlington; prayer to God;

206–207v

XXX

A

21

Picture 22

208

Conclusion of form of confession added in mid-fifteenth century (209r–210v)

209–210

C XXX (cont’d)

A

Fig. 4. Collation diagram for the manuscript, corrected from Ker and colour-coded to reveal two separate manuscripts bound together.

Fig. 5. Paper facsimile of the proposed children’s manuscript.

Fig. 6. Paper facsimile of the proposed adults’ manuscript.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 285

09/07/2021 09:50

If the Sea Were Made of Ink: A Word on Medieval Visual Poetry* Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras If the starry sky were made of parchment and the immense sea of ink, and a learned man lived for ever writing, the greater part of Her virtues would remain untold.1

I

t was hardly an easy task for the artists responsible of the Códice de las Historias of Alfonso the Wise’s Cantigas de Santa Maria (1280–84), to translate into a visual language the last stanza of cantiga 110, a song of praise to the Virgin that plays with the notion of the ineffability of poetic expression (fig. 1).2 ‘Putting a face’ to this hyperbole and its complex metaphors was a difficult challenge. King Alfonso’s learned entourage drew on a profound knowledge of the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric, wherein tropes and metaphors were codified, while the painters had at their fingertips illuminated manuscripts where images based on tropes and figures were already rehearsed. All in all, it was a difficult challenge, but they found a solution whose beauty depends not only on its enigmatic and balanced composition, but also in the apparent simplicity that conceals an elaborate mise-en-page. Literary sources for this adynaton (or extreme hyperbole) are well known.3 Both in Arabic and Latin medieval apologetic literature there appears the topos of the impossibility of singing or praising the beloved’s beauty or God’s overwhelming power. But the painters had no models for inspiration, except for images related to the metaphor of the parchment of the sky, repeated in the Bible in prophetic and eschatological contexts. Isaiah 34:4 included it among the signs of the Last Judgement (‘All the stars in the sky will be dissolved and the heavens rolled up like a scroll’), and John the Evangelist would echo these words in his vision of the Last Judgement (Revelation 6:14: ‘The sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up’).

* 1 2 3

I want to express my gratitude to Julian Luxford for his generous hard work in editing this paper. The Galician text is in Las Cantigas de Santa Maria. Códice Rico, Ms T-I-1, Real Biblioteca del Manuscrito de la Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, ed. L. Fernández and J.C. Ruiz Souza, 2 vols, Madrid, 2011, vol. 1, p. 292. This contribution is an outcrop of chapter seven of my book, Los rostros de las palabras. Teoría literaria e imágenes en el Occidente Medieval, Madrid, 2014. For a different interpretation of the illustration of cantiga 110, see. F. Prado-Vilar, ‘The Parchment of the Sky: Poiesis of a Gothic Universe’, in Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, vol. 2, pp. 475–519. See R. Köhler, ‘Und wenn der Himmel wär Papier’, in Kleinere Schriften, ed. J. Bolte, 3 vols, Weimar, 1898–1900, vol. 3, pp. 293– 318; J. W. Marchand, ‘The Adynata in Alfonso’s Cantiga 110’, Bulletin of the Cantigueiros de Santa Maria, 1, 1988, pp. 83–90.

[ 286 ]

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 286

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 23   |  i f t he sea w er e mad e o f i nk  |   287

The literary image of the parchment of the sky rolling up to announce the end of the natural world is translated into images in Byzantine frescos representing the end of time, or in western ones that are deeply indebted to the Byzantine tradition. In the monumental mosaic of the Last Judgement in Torcello cathedral, a wobbly angel rolls up a white vellum riddled with stars on a diurnal sky, and at the Scrovegni chapel in Padua Giotto found a masterly solution, where a couple of angels dressed in armour roll up the parchment of the sky – while golden sun and moon shine brightly over a deep dark blue sky that envelops the arch of the chapel’s western wall. It is more than possible that the painters of the court of king Alfonso were familiar with this motif because they use Byzantine patterns in other compositions, but in this case the model was substantially altered.4 The parchment of the sky is not rolled up but unwinds, the endless starry blue sky is transformed into an endless parchment that gradually loses its color and becomes surface ready to be written on. The other cosmological metaphor related to transubstantiation, the sea made ink, finds its origin in suras 18 and 31 of the Qur’an, in a laudatory context. While Latin translations of the Qur’an were well known at Alfonso’s court, I have not been able to identify precedents or parallels for this particular visual trope. Alfonso’s team of painters did not use the standard formula for representing the tireless work of eternal mental activity either. Personifications of the sun and moon were commonly used in the illustration of psalters to represent the tireless effort of another learned man, the blessed man who, in Psalm 1, meditates, day and night, upon the law of the Lord. Nevertheless, Alfonso’s painters preferred to create a new visual metaphor totally divorced from the text. They set a group of cranes on the sandy banks of the sea. In medieval bestiaries and aviaries the crane embodied the virtue of the watchfulness, for it was supposed to be able to stay awake day and night thanks to a stone that it supported on its leg in order not to fall completely asleep.5 In doing so, the painters integrated visual hyperboles and metaphors in a composition that, paradoxically, draws on illusionistic language to convey the desire for something unobtainable. On the right, the sea gently loses its color on its surface, reflecting the transubstantiation of the sky, while the impossible author is seated in a richly decorated chair, turning his back to the viewer, holding his penknife with his left hand while extending his pen to reach the ink from the sea, which has become a huge inkwell. Meanwhile the allegorical wading birds wander along the seashore. This image of the ‘learned man who lives forever writing’ is the only medieval author portrait I know of that shows him turning his back to the viewer. In the Códice de las Historias, King Alfonso is represented as an author seated frontally and accompanied by his assistants. On f. 7v, Ildefonso, archbishop of Toledo, is seated in three-quarter profile writing his treatise on the virginity of Mary, and on folio 83 the Cistercian monk who composed a song for the Virgin is rendered in profile. All of them were, or were intended to be, historical writers, but the ‘learned man’ of cantiga 110 does not exist. He is made 4 5

On the use of Byzantine models, see A. Domínguez Rodriguez, ‘Iconografía evangélica en Las Cantigas de Santa María’, Reales Sitios, 80, 1984, pp. 37–44 (especially p. 54). For the crane in Hugh of Fouilly’s Aviarium, see Livro das Aves, ed. M. I. Rebelo Gonçalves, Lisbon, 1999, p. 128; for bestiaries, see D. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology, Cambridge, 1995, p. 123.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 287

09/07/2021 09:50

288 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

only with words and lives in a verse. Whoever decided to translate the cantiga into images must have remembered the rhetorical figures he knew (both visual and literary) and chose antithesis to convey the hyperbolic and impossible author. Envisioning oppositions and contrasts, the artist devised the artifice of seating the author, who was usually rendered frontally, with his back turned to the viewer. For that reason, we can only see the writer’s face in profile, his back almost hidden behind a richly decorated chair, while his hands play an essential role in synthesizing metaphors and allegories into a single hyperbolic scene. The rhetorical complexity of the visual versions of the cantigas echoes the skills that miniaturists acquired through the centuries as they grappled with the difficult task of translating the psalms into images. This should not be surprising. The cantigas are songs to Mary, while the psalms are highly emotional poems dedicated to Yahweh. Both cantigas and psalms operate within discourses of literary verse, where King Alfonso and King David, both simultaneously kings and poets, raise their anguished lamentations, their pleas and their praises to the divine. More precisely, the visual versions of the cantigas, visual poems in themselves, employ figurative strategies that are quite closely related to those of the illustrated psalters belonging to a peculiar family: the Utrecht Psalter and its English offspring.6 The system of illustration of the Utrecht Psalter cannot be understood without taking into consideration the christianization of the classical rhetorical system, for every visual version of the psalm offers a varied repertoire of visual tropes and figures. St Augustine, in his De doctrina christiana (book 2, chapter 29), reflecting on the allegorical meaning of the Word, defended the idea that rhetorical figures which the Greeks had codified were already found in the Bible. However, the definitive Christianization of the study of rhetorical figures as hermeneutical tools for the interpretation of the Word is due to Bede.7 In his De schematis et tropis sacrae scripturae, as the title itself indicates, he exemplifies every rhetorical device with several verses from the psalms. In so doing he created a comprehensive system in the form of a textbook based on Augustine’s more general statements.8 Bede’s writings were widely read in the Carolingian period, and they were used not only for the novices in the monastery, but also at court, for the scholarly curriculum of Carolingian princes.9 As Celia Chazelle has demonstrated, the Utrecht Psalter was a present from Archbishop Hincmar of Reims to Prince Charles the Bald, and as might be expected for a book intended for a Prince’s education, its system of illustration was conceived following the same procedures that Bede used in his rhetorical manual.10 If the Anglo-Saxon writer 6

The more comprehensive study on the manuscript continues to be The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David, ed. K van der Horst, W. Noel and W. C. M. Wüstefeld, Utrecht, 1997. 7 Sanctus Aurelius Augustinus, De Doctrina Christiana, Corpus Christianorum series latina 32, Turnhout, 1982, p. 123. On Augustine’s rhetorical statements, see M. Camargo, ‘“Non solum sibi sed aliis etiam.” Neplatonism and Rhetoric in Saint Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana’, Rhetorica, 16, 1998, pp. 393–404; reprinted in idem, Essays on Medieval Rhetoric, Farnham, 2012. 8 Patrologia cursus completus, series latina, ed. J.-P Migne, 221 vols, Paris, 1844–64, vol. 90, cols 175–86; Bedae Venerabilis Opera Didascalica, ed. C. B. Kendall, Corpus Christianorum series latina 23A, Turnhout, 1975, pp. 142–71. 9 Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, ed. C. D. Lanham, London, 2003. 10 C. Chazelle, ‘Archbishops Ebo and Hincmar of Reims and the Utrecht Psalter’, Speculum, 72, 1997, pp. 1055–77; eadem, ‘Violence and the Virtuous Ruler in the Utrecht Psalter’, in The Illuminated Psalter. Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of its Images, ed. F. O. Büttner, Turnhout, 2004, pp. 337–48. R. Deshman, ‘The Exalted Servant: The Ruler Theology of the Prayerbook of Charles the Bald’, Viator, 11, 1980, pp. 385–417 (at p. 412), had already argued that the manuscript would have been conceived as a speculum principis.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 288

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 23   |  i f t he sea w er e mad e o f i nk  |   289

chose certain verses from the psalms as examples of tropes and figures, the ‘composers’ of the figurative system of the Utrecht Psalter decided to translate verses or fragments of verses into visual tropes and figures, and to create new ones in order to facilitate the understanding of the deep meaning of the Word.11 For that reason, I suggest opening the codex and interpreting its images following Bede’s rhetorical manual (fig. 2). As it is well known, the figurative composition of the first illumination is related to Psalm 1, which reads: Blessed is the man who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, [2] but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. [3] That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither – whatever they do prospers. [4] Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind of the earth blows away. [5] Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. [6] For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction. With Bede’s De schematis in mind, the main subject of the composition is clearly perceived, i.e. the opposition between the allegories of the via iustorum and via peccatorum on the path where two figures are discussing which route to take. The path that connects the circular tempietto of the blessed man with the ‘chair of pestilence’ is a visual example of what Bede calls a moral allegory.12 Someone well trained in rhetoric could also recognize further figurae in the page. On the left side can be seen a specific type of simile (the parabole), which consists in comparing things of different genres.13 In Psalm 1, the blessed man alluded to in the first verse is compared, in the third one, with a ‘tree planted by streams of water’. The simile is made visible by setting the ‘tree planted by streams of water’ beneath the wise man, removing any connection between the terms of the comparison. It can be said, then, that, grammatically, the visual simile belongs to the realm of parataxis. But the painters enriched the simile with new rhetorical devices. For instance, a classical personification of a river, a male reclining figure, is represented pouring water from his jar. For Bede, personification was a specific type of metaphor, the most important trope, to

11 H. Meyer, ‘Metaphern des Psaltertextes in den Illustrationem des Stuttgarter Bilderpsalters’, in Text und Bild. Aspekte des Zusammenwirkens zweir Künste im Mittelalter and früher Neuzeit, ed. C. Meier and U. Ruberg, Weisbaden, 1980, pp. 175–204, had called attention to the metaphorical nature of the illustrations of the manuscript. More recent authors have done the same: e.g. F. Heinzer, Wörtliche Bilder. Zur Funktion der Literal-Illustration im Stuttgarter Psalter (um 830), Berlin, 2005, pp. 15–23; L. Bessette, ‘The Visualization of the Contents of the Psalms in the Early Middle Ages’, PhD disssertation, University of Michigan, 2005; K. van der Horst, ‘Picturing the Psalms of David’, in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art, pp. 23–84 (especially pp. 73–6); K. Corrigan, ‘Early Medieval Psalter Illustration in Byzantium and the West’, in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art, pp. 85–103 (especially pp. 97–9); Chazelle, ‘Ebo and Hincmar’; eadem, ‘Violence and the Virtuous Ruler’. 12 When discussing allegory Bede differentiates the moral one: Item allegoria facta, tropologicam, hoc est, moralem perfectionem designat. See De Schematis et Tropis Sacrae Scripturae (Patrologia Latina, vol. 90, cols 184–5). 13 ‘Parabolae est rerum genere dissimilium comparatio ut, Matth, XIII: simile est regnum caelorum grano sinapis; et Joan, III: sicut Moises exaltabit serpentem in deserto, ita exaltavi oportet Filium hominis’ (ibid., vol. 90, col. 186).

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 289

09/07/2021 09:50

29 0 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

represent something inanimate by means of an animate being.14 And the river is not the only one. Also derived from ancient visual repertoires are the personifications of the sun which shines on the rotunda of the wise man, of the wind of the face of earth symbolized by the head of a bearded man blowing, or the monstrous Hades at the bottom right of the page, who waits for the ungodly in order to crush them to death. Although antithesis was the main rhetoric device of the psalm, visual antithesis, embodied in the contrast between the figures displayed on the left or on the right of the page, is blurred by the illusionistic landscape in which they are set. Curiously enough, Bede did not include antithesis among the schemata and tropes, but he relegates it to the lower realm of metaplasms! As it is well known, the Utrecht Psalter left the continent at an early date and ended up in the priory and cathedral of Canterbury, where it inspired the illustration of three other psalters. I am interested in the last two ones, the Eadwine Psalter dated between 1160 and 1170, and the Anglo-Catalan, or Great Canterbury, Psalter (c.1180–1200). They show an important grammatical and philological preoccupation, for the folios are organized in three columns which gather up Jerome’s three versions of the biblical book – juxta Hebraicum, Gallicana and Romana – the Gallicana singled out by its central position on the page and the larger size of its letters.15 Both manuscripts have in marginal or interlinear Latin glosses (the parva glossatura), and Eadwine includes translations of the psalms into Old English and Anglo-Norman.16 And, as would be expected, glosses played an important role in the configuration of the images, for they are included in the very body of the page, and both the Eadwine and the Anglo-Catalan psalters reveal an extraordinary creativity and elasticity in their visual interpretation of the glosses. The comparison of the figurative versions of Psalm 1 in the Eadwine and Anglo-Catalan psalters makes it possible to track the increasing complexity of the composition of visual poems, and the radical rhetoric of contrast that rules them.17 In Eadwine, the strict geometry of the ideogram is stressed by the horizontal line which divides the ensemble, representing the path that determined one’s moral condition. In the middle of the path, the Beatus (as he is labelled) tries to steer the ungodly away from the wrong path, seizing the sleeve of his garment (fig. 3). The symmetrical disposition of characters following opposite paths is echoed in the opposition of the personifications of sun and moon, here evocating ancient models, bringing bright daylight to the realm of the blessed, while the darkened moon glows dimly in the realm of sinners. The rhetoric of opposition is also expanded to the buildings at each side. The domed building has become a towering Sancta Ecclesia, as it 14 Ibid., vol. 90, col. 179. 15 For this family of psalters, see C. R. Dodwell, ‘The Final Copy of the Utrecht Psalter and its Relationship with the Utrecht and Eadwine Psalters’, Scriptorium, 44, 1990, pp. 21–53; W. Noel, ‘The Utrecht Psalter in England: Continuity and Experiment’, in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art, pp. 120–65; L. F. Sandler, ‘The Images of the Words in English Gothic Psalters’, Studies in the Illustration of the Psalter, ed. B. Cassidy and R. M. Wright, Stamford, 2000, pp. 67 – 86; N. Morgan, ‘The Utrecht Psalter and its Copies’ in The Anglo-Catalan Psalter, ed. M. Miró Blanchard, Barcelona, 2006, pp. 17–28; T. A. Heslop, ‘The Utrecht Psalter in English Romanesque Art’, in Romanesque Art and Thought, ed. C. Hourihane, Princeton, NJ, 2008, pp. 267–89; P. Stirnemann, ‘Paris, BN, MS lat. 8846 and the Eadwine Psalter’, in The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury, ed. M. Gibson, T. A. Heslop and R. W. Pfaff, Philadelphia, 1992, pp. 186–92. 16 On the Eadwine Psalter glosses see M. Gibson, ‘The Latin Apparatus’, in The Eadwine Psalter, pp. 108–122. On the glosses of the Anglo-Catalan Psalter, see the study by Klaus Reinhardt in The Anglo-Catalan Psalter. 17 Heslop, ‘The Utrecht Psalter in English Romanesque Art’, pp. 286–7, offers an inspiring formal comparison of the two compositions.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 290

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 23   |  i f t he sea w er e mad e o f i nk  |   291

is labelled, where the blessed man, transformed into Christ, passes on the Law, in contrast to the crenelated castle where the crowned and enthroned king has been turned into the personification of the vice of Superbia (pride), as indicated by the word coming out of his mouth. In the wider frame of a poetics of antithesis, the visual composition echoes the selective structure of the glosses.18 The commentary on the psalms in the parva glossatura is based on the selection of terms and clauses, to which excerpts from the commentaries of Augustine and Cassiodorus are added in order to clarify the Christian interpretation of the Jewish text. This selection determines the size of the images and their disposition in the visual poem, and the commentaries prompt their own visual interpretations, creating new visual tropes and figures. So, following the exegetical commentaries, the beatus vir becomes a metaphorical prefiguration of Christ, and the king of the impious, the personification of Pride.19 But Eadwine and his team did not restrict themselves to translating the gloss literally, for they created new metaphors that riff on those in the Utrecht Psalter, for example by converting the tempietto into a church. The fragmentary character of the glosses also affected the visual composition in a different way. It drove apart the beautiful simile of the Utrecht Psalter which compared the blessed man with the tree planted by the streams of water. While the Eadwine Psalter retains the paratactic disposition of the visual rhetorical figure, the tree and the stream of water become separate entities, generating, eventually, new visual tropes. The lignum, a sort of pictogram, metamorphoses into the tree of life, which both Cassiodorus and Augustine associated with Christ.20 The leaves that form meandering arabesques are equated, following Augustine, with the word of the Lord, so that the leaves of the paradisiacal tree metaphorically evoke the folia of the book that Christ writes in. 21 Following the structural guidance provided by the glosses, to the right of the ensemble, the wind of the face of the earth increases its size and expressive force, symbolized by the bust of a bearded man with a terrifying face and tussled hair. The simile that equates the impious with the dust he exhales is once again conveyed by a paratactic disposition. The vertical lines and spots that suggest the blowing wind threaten a small group of soldiers who are gradually picked off by two tremendous devils, towards Hell, represented as a pit of fire. If in the Utrecht Psalter similes, metaphors and personifications flow gently over the surface of parchment, in the Eadwine Psalter, they are trapped by a geometrical pattern governed by the rules of the antithesis and scanned by a three-part rhythm that operates in two registers. Furthermore, some of the visual figures which also appeared in the Carolingian manuscript spawn new figures, born of the visual translation of the glosses, 18 On the aesthetics of contrast in Romanesque art, see the classic study of M. Schapiro, ‘On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art’, in Art and Thought: issued in Honour of A. K. Coomaraswamy on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, ed. K. B. Iyer, London, 1947, pp. 130–50. 19 Plena definitio beati viri. Haec omnia non omni beato viro, ser soli Christo conveniunt, and … sedit, cum in superbia confirmandus redire non pouit, nisi per istum liberatus (Glossa ordinaria, in Patrilogia Latina, vol. 113, col. 844). 20 … tamquam lignum, secundum similitudinem lignum vitae quod est in paradiso, unde obedientia homo comederet; ‘Lignum.’ In paradiso est lignum vitae, lignum ad vita, et lignum selectione boni et mali (ibid., vol. 113, cols 844–5). 21 Sicut folia fructus tegunt; ita verba Domini promisiones suas custodiunt (i.e. Aug.) (ibid., vol. 113, cols 844–5).

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 291

09/07/2021 09:50

292 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

and others derived from the creative mental processes that accompany the use of rhetoric as a hermeneutical tool. Illuminated two decades after Eadwine, the Anglo-Catalan Psalter shows, once again, radical innovations when compared it with its predecessors (fig. 4). The designers decided to change the format radically. They arrange the visual discourse in compartments, regular subdivisions delimited by vertical and horizonal lines, and occasionally endowed with architectonic frames; in other words, the conventional pattern used in contemporary visual narratives. At first glance, it might appear that the images were conceived to be read following a linear structure, beginning top left in the upper register and finishing bottom right in the lower one. Nevertheless, the compositions undermine this linear narrative, suggesting considerably more complex relationships, to the extent that they create a form of internal rhyme. Here, as in Eadwine, the beatus vir becomes Christ, and the ungodly a proud king governing his castle. But the central scene offers a thorough reworking of the model. Its expressive power and its dramatic tension captivates the viewer (fig. 5). As a visual metaphor of the ungodly’s inability to escape the way of sinners, he is twisted in a violent torsion, bounded up in his clothing. With his left hand he holds a sleeve of the tunic of Christ, who stands in front of him trying to redirect him, gently seizing his cloak. The sinner’s dilemma is made visible by the serpentine cloak shrouding his body, and by his unsteady gait, with his feet facing to the left and his right hand pointing to the right. His unsteady attitude embodies a profound and stressful feeling: doubt. The violent torsion conveys his emotional torment – it must be remembered that the word ‘torsion’ stems from tortio (torture, torment) – and his hidden face, his body turned back to the viewer, which only Christ is able to see, makes him the reader’s alter-ego, who also faces into the page and is expected to open the book and read it in order to direct his steps in the right direction. 22 Thus, a formal device, the twisting figure turning his back to the viewer, becomes a metaphor of the ungodly’s emotional and moral distress23. Other figures in the page confirm this (see Fig. 4). The hesitating ungodly of the upper register rhymes vertically with one of the damned in the lower one, who also turns his back to the viewer, entangling himself in his own cloak. The conventionally posed river god seen in earlier versions is also shown now from behind, limbs akimbo, with one arm slung over a branch of the tree, in a desperate effort not to fall into the stream of water that pours from the jar he holds. But we know that the effort is useless, for his attitude suggests his imminent fall. This image is a masterful solution to the challenge of translating into images, no longer the gloss, but a passage from Augustine’s commentary on the psalm, even though it was not copied into the volume: ‘Or, by the running streams of waters may be by the sins of the people, because first the waters are called peoples in the Apocalypse; and again, by running stream is not

22 I would like to thank Andrew Cheng for this inspiring suggestion about torsion/torment. 23 On the moral or metaphysical aspects of ‘torque’ see P. Binski, ‘La Línea de la Belleza en el Gótico: motivos y estética medieval’, Quintana, 16, 2017, pp. 51–78 (especially p. 56). He had already discussed the twisting figure as embodying methaphisical thought in ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile’, Art History 20, 1997, pp. 350–74 (at 367–9).

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 292

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 23   |  i f t he sea w er e mad e o f i nk  |   293

unreasonably understood fall, which has relation to sin.’24 The stream of water became a metaphor for the Fall of Man, and accordingly, the personification of the river is about to fall and water flows inexorably, encompassing the way of the ungodly of the upper register, towards the mouth of Hell into which the Eadwine Psalter’s pit of fire has been transformed. The selective repetition of the figure of the ‘fallen man’ along the illuminations of the volume insists in the moral and emotional connotations of the twisting figure with his back turned to the viewer. On f. 62 this formal schema was used to define the facientes iniquitates alluded to in Psalm 36, but the most eloquent example is to be found in the visual version of Psalm 39, on f. 70. At bottom left of the composition, twisting, fallen figures seeing from behind are but a literal translation of King David’s imprecation against his enemies on verse 15: ‘Let them be turned backward’ (convertantur retrorsum … qui volunt mihi mala).25 By using the twisting figure with his back turned to the viewer as an allegory of iniquity in the wider frame of a rhetoric of contrast, the composers of the Anglo-Catalan Psalter were rehearsing a new communicative visual system. At the same time that rhetoricians turned their attention once again to the classics (e.g. Mathew of Vendôme in his Ars Versificatoria, and, shortly after, Geoffrey of Vinsauf in his Poetria Nova), painters recovered an illusionistic language and an ancient formal repertoire which led to new ways of developing visual tropes. The singular voyage of the Anglo-Catalan Psalter, from Canterbury to Catalonia, where it was eventually completed, invites one to suppose that its new visual poetics were known in Seville when King Alfonso decided to make the sumptuous edition of his cantigas. As Rosa Alcoy has demonstrated, the luxurious Anglo-Norman codex may have arrived in the peninsula in around 1200 at the Aragonese royal court.26 King Alfonso felt a genuine passion for books. It is well known how many volumes he ‘borrowed’ from Castilian monasteries. He was married to an Aragonese Princess, Violante, and enjoyed a quite good relationship with his father in law, King Jaume II of Aragon. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the luxurious but unfinished Anglo-Catalan Psalter could have been, at least for some time, available to Alfonso’s team. This would explain why the complex figurative system of the Códice de las Historias is deeply indebted to the traditions opened up by the Utrecht Psalter. Vibrant visual poetic arrived in Castile with its latest avatar, and stimulated the imagination of mentors and artists who were able to draw on the expressive abilities of the visual antithesis, and particularly the figure giving his back to the viewer, to the extent of making use of it to convey the ineffability of poetic expression in the visual version of cantiga 110 (fig. 6). The violent torsion of the ungodly of the English manuscript, embodying his moral distress, yielded the seducing gentle movement of the non-existent author.

24 Augustinus, Ennarationes in Psalmos: Patrilogia Latina, vol. 36, col. 68. 25 See the images in https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10551125c (accessed 01 October 2019). 26 R. Alcoy i Pedrós, ‘El Salterio triple glosado anglo-catalán. Del siglo XII inglés a Ferrer Bassa’, Medieval, 7, 2005, pp. 46–57; and eadem, ‘Ferrer Bassa y el Salterio anglo-catalán’, in The Anglo-Catalan Psalter, pp. 57–120.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 293

09/07/2021 09:50

29 4 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

The English psalter would also have inspired Castilian mentors and artists in terms of poetic structures. If ‘Latin’ tropes and figures were careful arrayed in compartments there, in the Castilian Mariale this structure attained a new regularity, a pattern that made it possible to subject the images to a more regular rhyme, where figures of speech, such as parallelisms, repetitions and anaphors stress the vertical links of the ‘vernacular’ visual discourse, echoing the painted poems the strophic forms of the written songs. King Alfonso and his team declared themselves unable to sing all the virtues of Holy Mary in cantiga 110, but they were able to rhyme images for Holy Mary.

Fig. 1. Cantigas de Santa Maria. Madrid, BRME, MS T.I.1, f. 157v (detail). © Patrimonio Nacional de España

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 294

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 23   |  i f t he sea w er e mad e o f i nk  |   295

Fig.2: Utrecht Psalter. Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 32, f. 1v. © Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 295

09/07/2021 09:50

296  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

Fig. 3. Eadwine Psalter. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 17.I, f. 5v. © Trinity College Cambridge,

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 296

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 23   |  i f t he sea w er e mad e o f i nk  |   297

Fig. 4. Anglo-Catalan Psalter. Paris, BnF, MS lat. 8846, f. 5v. © Bibliothèque nationale de France

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 297

09/07/2021 09:50

298 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

Fig. 5. Anglo-Catalan Psalter. BnF, MS lat. 8846, f. 5v (detail). © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 298

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 23   |  i f t he sea w er e mad e o f i nk  |   299

Fig. 6 : Cantigas de Santa Maria. Madrid, BRME, Ms T.I.1, f. 157v. © Patrimonio Nacional de España.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 299

09/07/2021 09:50

A Royal Portrait? Uncovering the Identity of Saints on the Late-medieval Screen at North Tuddenham, Norfolk* Lucy Wrapson

North Tuddenham rood screen: changes in iconography The rood screen at North Tuddenham, Norfolk survives in a diminished state as a twelvepane dado with eight figure panels and no extant superstructure. Simon Cotton cites will bequests of 3s. 4d. by Margaret Gerrard from 1499 and 10 marks by John Vincent in 1504 to painting the ‘perke’, a word commonly used in Norfolk to describe the rood loft.1 As both bequests specify painting, necessarily after construction, this rood screen was likely built c.1495–9, and painted 1499–1506.2 It has, though, also been suggested that the screen was erected c.1520 during the incumbency of John Hawe, prior of Pentney who became rector of North Tuddenham in 1518.3 There can be substantial uncertainty over dating screen construction from wills as money was not always spent immediately: fundraising and building screens could take as long as forty years, as the evidence from Cawston, Norfolk demonstrates.4 The screen was therefore probably erected and decorated c.1495–1520. * 1 2

3

4

My thanks to Spike Bucklow, Christine Slottved Kimbriel, Julian Luxford, Pauline Plummer and Sven van Dorst. Above all, I would like to express my gratitude to Paul Binski, under whom I studied as an undergraduate and later as a PhD student, and without whom I would never have become an art historian, conservator or medievalist. S. A. Cotton, ‘Medieval Roodscreens in Norfolk: Their Construction and Painting Dates’, Norfolk Archaeology, 40, 1987, pp. 44–54. The screen at Stratton in Cornwall took its carvers over seven years: A. Vallance, English Church Screens, London, 1936, p. 65. The parish of Hackington in Kent commissioned carver Michael Bonversall of Hythe in October 1519, the work to be completed by 1523: E. Duffy, ‘The Parish, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval East Anglia: The Evidence of Screens’, in The Parish in English Life, 1400–1600, ed. K. French, G. Gibbs and B. Kümin, Manchester, 1997, pp. 133–62. At Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, the rood turret was complete in 1514: S. Sandars and E. Venables, Historical and Architectural Notes on Great St. Mary’s Church, Together with the Annals of the Church, Cambridge, 1869, p. 14. In 1520, a contract was made in respect of the same church, the carpentry finished by 1523. As well as the indenture, churchwardens’ accounts indicate that the painting took at least another two years: Churchwardens’ Accounts of St Mary the Great, Cambridge from 1504 to 1635, ed. J. E. Foster, Cambridge, 1905, pp. 15, 46–65, 88. W. W. Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk Rood-Screens and Pulpits’, Norfolk Archaeology, 31, 1957, pp. 299–346. The suggestion of John Hawe’s patronage comes from Williamson but derives from F. Blomefield and C. Parkin, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 11 vols, London, 1805–10, vol. 10, pp. 266–8. Blomefield and Parkin also give Hawe’s alias, John ‘Woodbriggs’ (i.e. Woodbridge), in their entry for Pentney priory (ibid., vol. 9, p. 41). It has been doubted whether Hawe and Woodbrigge were indeed the same man, but this seems unnecessary: see most recently The Heads of Religious Houses: England & Wales, III. 1377–1540, ed. D. M. Smith, Cambridge, 2008, p. 504; The Heads of Religious Houses England and Wales: Supplement, ed. D. M. Smith, Cluj-Napoca (Romania), 2019, p. 217. Hawe/Woodbrigge is known from visitations of his priory in 1492 and 1520, but Williamson’s source for Hawe’s politics are unknown. Pentney priory had an association with North Tuddenham as one of two patrons since at least the mid-fifteenth century: ssee Blomefield and Parkin, Norfolk, vol. 10, pp. 266, 268. Cotton, ‘Medieval Roodscreens’, p. 47.

[ 3 00]

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 300

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 2 4  |  a royal po rt r ai t ?   |   3 01

Four figural panels survive on the north side, and four to the south (fig. 1). The two endmost wall-side panels are blank, and entirely filled with replacement boards on the north. However, on the south side, part of the compartment of S5 contains original painted boards. There is no sign of either a figure or historic iconoclasm on this panel, indicating that it is probable that the eight figures presented on the dado were all that were originally painted. Some of the tracery has been replaced, as has the sill, probably due to historical problems with damp and xylophagous insect damage. None of the original panels had their backgrounds decorated with stencils. They were painted in situ, in common with the vast majority of painted East Anglian screens.5 Stylistic and technical coherence indicates they are the output of the same workshop, so wherever they fall in the period 1495–1520, they were likely painted in a fairly short time period.6 The saints are an eclectic bunch, with some debate over their identification, begging the question whether there is a still discernible pattern to what may be personal choices and even whether they can all be identified with certainty. From north to south they are N1: blank (replacement boards), N2: blank (replacement boards), N3: St Agnes, N4: archbishop Saint (W. W. Williamson and A. M. Baker say St Augustine, D. P. Mortlock and H. Munro Cautley opt for St Gregory), N5: St Dorothy, N6: St Jeron. S1: St Catherine of Alexandria, archer saint (Williamson, M. R. James and A. E. Nichols say St Sebastian, Cautley St Edmund), St Etheldreda, St Roch, S5: blank (part original, part replacement boards), S6: blank (replacement boards).7 Williamson describes the figures as ‘touched up’, but they are not extensively repainted, as Infrared photography testifies. Before exploring the saints as they appear now, it is worth noting that they do not all correspond with those depicted in the underdrawing, which is visible in places showing through paint passages that have become more transparent over time. Infrared photography has revealed three of the saints’ identities were changed between the underdrawing and final painting stages (figs 2 and 3).8 St Agnes was planned as St Margaret of Antioch, the archbishop saint (probably St Augustine) as St John the Evangelist and St Sebastian/Edmund as a warrior saint, probably St George (given the compositional closeness to St George on the screen at Elsing, Norfolk, who also holds both sword and lance). In addition, all the saints were drawn with empty banderoles behind them, intended to hold names, a detail omitted from the final painted versions. The other saints remained the same between their underdrawn and finished states, with minor changes such as St Dorothy’s originally more conical hat. What might account for the change of heart? One obvious pattern to the choice of saints is the alternation between males and females: the female saints are on red and the male saints green, distinct from screens such as Houghton St Giles, Elsing or Litcham where male and female saints represent the positions of the separated sexes in church. Beyond 5 6 7

8

Figures painted on paper are found of screens at Cawston, Aylsham and Lessingham (all Norfolk): see L. Wrapson, Patterns of Production: A Technical Art Historical Study of East Anglia’s Late Medieval Screens, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2014, pp. 456, 476. Unlike Cawston, where four workshops were involved. A. M. Baker, English Panel Paintings 1400–1558: A Survey of Figure Paintings on East Anglian Rood Screens, London, 2011, pp. 166– 67; D. P. Mortlock and C. V. Roberts, The Guide to Norfolk Churches, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 204–05; Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk Rood-Screens’, p. 341; H. M. Cautley, Norfolk Churches, Ipswich, 1949, p. 257. A. E. Nichols, Early Art of Norfolk: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art Including Items Relevant to Early Drama, Kalamazoo, MI, 2002, p. 227. Examined using an adapted Canon EOS30D camera.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 301

09/07/2021 09:50

3 02 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

this alternation of the genders, which is found on other East Anglian screens (for example, Binham, Filby), a straightforward pattern to the choices is lacking. There is no obvious mirroring, as at Somerleyton in Suffolk where Duffy has shown the saints pair axially.9 Here at North Tuddenham there are martyrs on both green and red.10 Furthermore female saints are placed on the red backgrounds associated with Mars, the men on the green of Venus.11 Instead the emphasis would appear to be on intercessory helper saints and/or personal name saints: what Duffy regards as ‘ample evidence of consumer choice at work’.12 It is furthermore tempting to think that Margaret Gerrard’s 3s. 4d. donation in 1499 was superseded by a larger contribution, prompting the change from St Margaret of Antioch, chosen as a name saint, to St Agnes. But then, this line of thinking is perhaps overridden by the conversion of St John the Evangelist into the archbishop saint, likely Augustine, given the substantial contribution of 10 marks made to the painting of the ‘perke’ by John Vincent in 1504.13 Nonetheless, there might be good reason for a change from St John to St Augustine, as John Hawe, prior of Pentney was an Augustinian canon. While it is speculative, his becoming rector in 1518 might have influenced the choice of saints on the screen; if, that is, this later date for the screen is correct, or indeed if Hawe had already associated with North Tuddenham through Pentney’s long-term patronage there. The alteration from St  George to a saint holding an arrow, either St  Edmund or St Sebastian is also intriguing. Baker, following Cautley’s identification, raises the possibility that the St Edmund is meant, but for want of a crown.14 If this ‘archer’ saint is identified as St Edmund, then there is perhaps an additional resonance here, as Edmund Tudor was the name of Henry VII’s father, and as this paper goes on to explore, the archer saint bears the face of Henry VII.15 Late medieval screen painters and their designers/patrons appear to have been fond of a rebus or visual pun. The parclose screen at Barton Turf (Norfolk) depicts several kings. St Olaf, or Holofius as he is monikered there, is reinforced in his depiction via his carrying a ‘whole loaf ’ of bread, a play on his name.16 This kind of rebus is demonstrated elsewhere on the North Tuddenham screen in the figure of St Jeron (i.e. St Hieron), evangelist of the Frisians, whose falcon symbol is a play on the Greek hierax (falcon).17 As patron saint of East Anglia, St Edmund is more common on East Anglian screens than St Sebastian. There is some variation in his appearance. At times he is old and bearded (Catfield, Norfolk), at others young and clean-shaven (Eye, Suffolk). Nonetheless, he is usually characterised by both crown and arrow(s). He often wears an ermine lined cloak 9 Duffy, ‘Parish, Piety, and Patronage’, p. 151. 10 J. Luxford, ‘Sacred Kingship, Genealogy and the Late Medieval Roodscreen: Catfield and Beyond’, in The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe: Making, Meaning, Preserving, ed. S. Bucklow, R. Marks and L. Wrapson, Woodbridge, 2017, pp. 100–22. 11 S. Bucklow, ‘Reflections and Translations’, in Paint and Piety. Collected Essays on Medieval Painting and Polychrome Sculpture, ed. N. Streeton and K. Kollandsrud, London, 2014, pp. 155–6. 12 Duffy, ‘Parish, Piety, and Patronage’, p. 151. 13 Cotton, ‘Medieval Roodscreens’, p. 52. 14 Cautley, Norfolk Churches, p. 257. Cautley suggests St Gregory for the archbishop saint. 15 S. Chrimes, Henry VII, London, 1972, p. 3. 16 Baker, Survey, p. 74. 17 Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk Rood-Screens’, p. 315; R. S. Oggins, The Kings and their Hawks: Falconry in Medieval England, New Haven, CT, 2004, p. 133.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 302

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 2 4  |  a royal po rt r ai t ?   |   3 03

and tippet. At Wellingham, St Sebastian appears in his martyred guise, naked and pierced with arrows, rendering identification straightforward. At Binham and Stalham, he is young and in armour. On the sixteenth-century screen at Belstead (Suffolk), paired with a crown and ermine tippet-wearing St Edmund, he is most closely comparable to North Tuddenham: a fashionable young man holding a bow with a feathered cap. M. R. James is probably correct in choosing St Sebastian over St Edmund for the North Tuddenham saint, as the traditional pair of St Roch.18 Whichever the identity, both were saints invoked for protection against plague, and St Etheldreda, also present on the screen, died of plague.19 Perhaps Prior Hawe advised the change from St George to St Sebastian, strengthening the efficacy of a screen with strong invocations to plague saints, as well perhaps as neatening the iconography (also effecting the change from St John the Evangelist to St Augustine). This might have happened once he assumed the role of rector in 1518, or earlier, in his capacity as prior of Pentney. North Tuddenham was in an area where bubonic plague was endemic in the early sixteenth century.20 There was a widespread and extremely serious epidemic in 1499– 1500.21 Further outbreaks followed in 1509–10, 1516–17 and 1523.22 With inexact dating, it is hard to know whether North Tuddenham’s will bequests of 1499 and 1504, and the plague saint iconography of the screen, are a response to the outbreak of 1499–1500, or whether the 1516/17 plague is referenced instead, with the incumbency of Hawe playing a part. Rood screens were funded by the living and (via their agents) the dead, and were objects of benefaction often associated with burial and memorialisation.23 The rood and its surrounding apparatus were symbols of eternal life and redemption.24 St Roch appears on five East Anglian screens.25 In one case, there is a direct relationship between a dated screen and the appearance of St Roch: the screen at Horsham St Faith is inscribed 1528, and was thus painted in the midst of a plague outbreak which lasted from 1527 until 1530.26 Williamson was the first to suggest that the North Tuddenham St Sebastian ‘was intended as a portrait of Henry VII’ (1485–1509), tying its date to John Hawe’s incumbency, whom he called a ‘great admirer of Henry VII’.27 The basis of this second point is unfortunately not referenced, and efforts to shed light on the life and political affiliations of Hawe have thus far proved fruitless. In any case, if his patronage of the screen is tied to the start of his incumbency, it would have come nine years after the Henry VII’s death. This is again supportive of Hawe and Pentney’s involvement c.1500–05 rather than 1518. 18 M. R. James, Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notes of their History and their Ancient Buildings, London, 1930, p. 184. 19 D. H. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, Oxford, 1978, pp. 138–9. 20 R. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-century England: The Medical Response and the Demographic Consequences, Leicester, 1978, map 2. 21 J. Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the British Isles, Cambridge, 1970, p. 159. 22 R. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, p. 156 (epidemic of 1509–10); R. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe, London, 1983, p. 156 (epidemic of 1516–17). Shrewsbury, History of Bubonic Plague, p. 163 (epidemic of 1523). 23 Association of burial with screen patronage can be determined at Ludham, Thornham, and St John Maddermarket, Norwich (all Norfolk) among others. 24 J. Luxford, ‘The Sparham Corpse Panels: Unique Revelations of Death from Late Fifteenth-century England’, The Antiquaries Journal, 90, 2010, pp. 299–340; Duffy, ‘Parish, Piety, and Patronage’, passim. 25 Baker, Survey, p. 237. Nichols, Early Art of Norfolk, pp. 226–7. 26 Gottfried, Black Death, p. 156.  27 Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk Rood-Screens’, p. 341.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 303

09/07/2021 09:50

3 0 4 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

The face of Henry VII: North Tuddenham and Rackheath North Tuddenham’s is not the only screen painting with a strong resemblance to portraits of Henry VII. Two panels depicting St  Stephen and St  Edmund now in Barton Turf church originated at All Saints, Rackheath (Norfolk), having been bought by the Rev. William C. Hall (fig. 4).28 Resemblance of the St Edmund panel to Henry VII has not, to my knowledge, been noted in the literature before and in this case, the likeness is more striking than at North Tuddenham. The screen panels likely came from the rood screen, given the presence of a squint. The underdrawing is characterised by its bold, simple and fluid outlines, indicating that the designer was painting something well-known or copied. Fading of red lake pigments shading the face has made its current appearance rather more indistinct than what was originally intended. St Edmund wears the closed imperial crown. No evidence from wills survives for these panels, but they have been subjected to dendrochronological analysis which suggests a terminus post quem of around 1497, with the screen being most likely to date form the early sixteenth century.29 It is intriguing that the face of Henry VII was used on these two depictions of archer saints. Connecting archery to King Henry VII lends another intriguing rebus or punning possibility. In 1503, Henry VII banned the possession of crossbows by Englishmen other than of lords and wealthy freeholders (those in possession of at least 200 marks).30 This ban, which favoured practice with the traditional longbow, would have likely affected the class of yeoman churchwarden, parishioner or screen painter typically involved in the making of screens.

The regal image of Henry VII: image transmission and portraiture As Paul Binski has demonstrated, kings from Henry III onwards enhanced their authority and legitimacy by linking themselves to the kingly and saintly authority of Edward the Confessor.31 Henry VII, a king whose legitimacy was questionable, was no exception. He made substantial changes to Westminster Abbey for his own chantry chapel, commencing building from 1503.32 This renewed, enlarged Lady chapel, located behind the shrine of Edward the Confessor, was intended to house a canonised Henry VI’s remains, as well as those of Henry VII and his family. As Kevin Sharpe suggests, even after twenty years on the throne, Henry sensed his presence in the Confessor’s shrine would lend legitimacy to

28 Baker, Survey, p. 120; see Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk Rood-Screens’, p. 320, for the Rev. Hall. 29 I. Tyers, Tree-ring analysis of parts of a screen at St Michael, Barton Turf, Norfolk, formerly from All Saints, Rackheath, Norfolk, unpublished dendrochronology report no. 593, 2013. 30 N. J. Johnson et al., Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy, New York, 2012, p. 104, cites a statute made in 1503–04. 31 P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1400, New Haven, CT, 1995, pp. 1–9. 32 P. Lindley, ‘Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey’, in Making Medieval Art, ed. P. Lindley, Donington, 2003, pp. 202–11.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 304

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 2 4  |  a royal po rt r ai t ?   |   3 05

his heirs.33 Henry’s desire was to link himself visually to his most worthy predecessors, Edward the Confessor, Henry V and Henry VI.34 If Henry VII wished to demonstrate his legitimacy and lineage on a grand scale, he also did so on a small scale, and one that was disseminated more broadly. He was the first monarch to use coin portraits with a genuine likeness, such as the silver testoon in October 1489, which shows the king in profile wearing a closed imperial crown.35 A description of the king from life (although published after his death) is known from Polydore Vergil’s Historia Anglia: ‘His body was slender but well-built and strong; his height above the average. His appearance was remarkably attractive and his face was cheerful, especially when speaking; his eyes were small and blue, his teeth few, poor and blackish; his hair was thin and white; his complexion sallow.’36 Henry VII has claims on being the first English monarch to coordinate his regal image with his actual likeness, or rather his likeness as mediated through his official portrait. Henry’s title to the throne was not universally acceptable, and magnificence at court, plus control of his image, were important aspects of his statecraft.37 It is well established that by the latter end of his reign, painted portraits were used to convey a striking and consistent image of the king and his family, a trend taken to new heights by succeeding Tudor monarchs. The prevailing view is that the standard portrait types originated late in the king’s reign, c.1503, with a portrait attributed to Meynnart Wewyck now belonging to the Society of Antiquaries being among the earliest surviving portraits of this official type, said to celebrate the 1501 marriage treaty between Katharine of Aragon and Prince Arthur, Henry’s heir (fig. 5).38 Frederick Hepburn, however, credibly pushes back the establishment of official portrait types, suggesting, on the basis of Spanish records, that a portrait painter was working for the English court in the late 1480s, travelling with the English embassy negotiating marriage between Arthur and Katharine.39 Hepburn also cites an illuminated manuscript by an unknown artist, BL Arundel MS 66, dated 30 June 1490, as further evidence. On f. 201 of this manuscript there is a miniature depicting Henry VII enthroned amid courtiers. Its proximity to the Society of Antiquaries portrait suggests a standardised and official royal portrait issued earlier than previously thought; one on which both the manuscript and the Antiquaries portrait are based. Holbein also appears to have used this lineage of official

33 K. Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy. Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century Tudor England, New Haven, CT, 2009, p. 63. 34 D. Hoak, ‘The Iconography of the Crown Imperial’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. D. Hoak, Cambridge, 1995, p. 71. 35 Chrimes, Henry VII, p. 224. A commission dated 28 March 1489 requests all coins to be changed to bear a closer likeness to the king: Hoak, ‘Iconography of the Crown Imperial’, pp. 65–70. 36 Polydore Vergil, Anglia historia, ed. D. Hay, Camden Society 74, Cambridge, 1950, pp. 145–7. 37 F. Hepburn, ‘“Pintor Ynglés”: The Earliest Evidence for Portraiture at the Court of Henry VII’, in Painting in Britain 1500–1630: Production, Influences and Patronage, ed. T. Cooper et al., Oxford, 2015, pp. 344–51. 38 Hepburn, ‘“Pintor Ynglés”’; J. Scott, ‘Painting from Life? Comments on the Date and Function of the Early Portraits of Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth of York in the Royal Collection’, in The Yorkist Age, ed. H. Kleineke and C. Steer, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 23, Donington, 2013, pp. 18–26; C. Bolland and A. Chen, ‘A Portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort by Meynnart Wewyck’, Burlington Magazine, 161, 2019, pp. 314–19. Dendrochronology by Ian Tyers has related five paintings on boards from the same Baltic oak tree. One depicts Henry VII and four Henry VIII. The collective felling date range is 1502–18, which suggests use between c.1503 and the 1520s. I am grateful to Christine Slottved Kimbriel for sharing this information. 39 Hepburn, ‘“Pintor Ynglés”’, p. 344.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 305

09/07/2021 09:50

3 0 6  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

portraits in his now-lost Whitehall mural.40 A further noteworthy visual motif appears in BL Arundel MS 66, the closed imperial crown seen both on the 1489 testoon (among other coins such as the gold sovereign and groat) and also on the head of St Edmund in the panel derived from Rackheath.41 Although the crown imperial (with its closed top and arches over the crown) had been used since the reign of Henry V, the open crown was depicted on coinage from 1279 until Henry VII began to use the imperial crown. Judging by its appearance on the St Edmund panel at Rackheath, the crown imperial was both an important part of Henry’s kingship, and of the image of him as a king disseminated among his subjects. It can therefore be established that there was a standard portrait type for Henry VII by 1500, and perhaps as early as 1490. This fits neatly with the projected usage date for the Rackheath panel of St Edmund (after c.1497). By either of the dates suggested for the North Tuddenham screen (c.1500 or c.1518) both the standard portrait type and coins depicting the closed imperial crown were available as guides. This begs further questions, for example, what other images of Henry VII survive, and in what contexts are they to be found? By when and by what means might images of Henry VII have been transmitted to and disseminated in Norfolk? Henry VII is perhaps best known in the modern public imagination from the portrait, formerly attributed to Michael Sittow, but now to an unknown Netherlandish painter (London, National Portrait Gallery, accession no. 416). Its inscription records that it was painted on 29 October 1505 by the order of Herman Rinck, agent for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. It was likely painted in relation to a proposed marriage between Henry and Maximilian’s daughter Margaret of Savoy. Yet portraits such as this (and, from the early sixteenth century onwards, an increasing proliferation of others based on official models), circulated only at elite levels. Other notable examples of Henry’s sculpted and painted portrait include the complex painting of The Family of Henry VII with George and the Dragon, dated 1503–09 (Windsor, Royal Collection, inventory no. 401228), the bust by Pietro Torrigiano now at the Victoria and Albert Museum (accession no. A.49–1935), his gilt bronze tomb effigy for which the bust may have been a model, and the death mask still housed at Westminster Abbey (which Stanley Chrimes thought much restored).42 Henry included himself as part of a royal portrait series in the great hall at Richmond palace by 1501, but this does not survive and it is not known whether it was originally painted or sculpted.43 All of these portraits came late in life and late in Henry VII’s reign. Again, all were undertaken by elite artists associated with the court. Images of Henry VII occur in other contexts and media, such as in stained glass at Great Malvern priory and at Christ’s College, Cambridge. At Great Malvern, the presence of Sir Thomas Lovell and Sir Reginald Bray suggest they were the donors, acting with the 40 The Holbein painting was destroyed by fire in Whitehall in 1698 but recorded in an oil painting made by Remigius van Leemput for Charles II. A fragment of a preparatory drawing representing Henry VII and Henry VIII survives: Gothic: Art for England, 1400–1547, ed. R. Marks and P. Williamson, London, 2003, p. 147 (no. 2). 41 Hepburn, ‘“Pintor Ynglés”’, p. 351. Also Hoak, ‘Iconography of the Crown Imperial’; P. Grierson, ‘The Origins of the English Sovereign and the Closed Imperial Crown’, British Numismatic Journal, 33, 1965, pp. 118–34. 42 Chrimes, Henry VII, pp. 333–7. 43 S. Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship, London, 1992, p. 115.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 306

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 2 4  |  a royal po rt r ai t ?   |   3 07

permission of the king. Christ’s College was founded by Lady Margaret Beaufort, the king’s mother.44 The existence of the king’s image in both these cases is explained by patronage, just as it is in the case of choir stall images of Edward, Prince of Wales (Henry VI’s son), Edward IV, Edward V and Henry VII undertaken at St George’s chapel at Windsor at the behest of the principal royal secretary Oliver King (d. 1503).45 King was secretary to all those depicted and the painted panels are thought to date from c.1492–5. Henry’s recorded, but not extant, presence in the lineage of painted kings on the pulpitum in the Benedictine abbey church at Chester is perhaps slightly different, a legitimisation of his rule in a type of decoration commonly associated with this part of English great churches.46 This selection of depictions all show Henry VII as himself, rather than as a likeness in the guise of a saint. The use of his face on saints is not, of course, an example of unmediated patronage but seems instead to demonstrate loyalty to the king in East Anglian communities. The most likely form of transmission of the king’s image would be by prints in the form of woodcuts and engravings. Henry VII’s publication of his papal dispensation for his marriage to Elizabeth of York has been described as an early and remarkable use of the printing press in England for the purposes of propaganda, and yet as Sharpe points out, one biographer states Henry VII did not immediately grasp the impact of the printing press as propaganda, appointing a king’s printer as late as 1504.47 Nonetheless, this date might be early enough for prints of the king to be circulating in Norfolk to influence the North Tuddenham and Rackheath screens. The impact of printed images on sixteenth-century screen painting is well-established. John Byam Shaw, E. F. Strange, Pauline Plummer and John Mitchell have all discovered examples of screen paintings derived from printed images by artists such as Lucas van Leyden and Israhel van Meckenem, among others.48 In the case of Worstead, the van Leyden apostle series of c.1510 looks likely to have been copied remarkably soon after publication, as the screen is inscribed with the date 1512.49 A culture of woodcut images of kings is suggested by the survival of a woodcut of Henry VI, standing in his chantry chapel at St George’s Windsor, invoked as a saint dated c.1490 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 277, f. 376v).50 John Rastell’s 1530 book Pastyme of People provides woodcuts of the kings of England, up to Richard III: this, too, is indicative of an appetite for imagery of this kind.51 A woodcut image of Henry VII himself, enthroned, crowned with the imperial crown and surrounded by six councillors survives on the title page of Leteltun teners newe correcte, 44 Chrimes, Henry VII, pp. 333–7. 45 Hoak, ‘Iconography of the Crown Imperial’, pp. 75–6. 46 L. Slater, ‘Visual Reflections on History and Kingship in the Medieval English Great Church’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 167, 2014, pp. 83–108; A. Vallance, Greater English Church Screens, London, 1947, p. 97; Luxford, ‘Sacred Kingship’. 47 S. Anglo, ‘The Foundation of the Tudor Dynasty: The Coronation and Marriage of Henry VII’, Guildhall Miscellany, 2, 1960, pp. 3–11 (printing press as propaganda); Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, p. 65; M. van Cleve Alexander, The First of the Tudors, Totawa, NJ, 1981, p. 171. 48 J. Mitchell, ‘Painting in East Anglia’: The Continental Connection’, in England and the Continent in the Middle Ages: Studies in Memory of Andrew Martindale, ed. J. Mitchell, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 8, Stamford, 2000, pp. 365–80; Baker, Survey, pp. 40–41 (Plummer), 46 (Byam Shaw); L. Wrapson, ‘A Medieval Context for the Artistic Production of Painted Surfaces in England: Evidence from East Anglia c.1400–1540’, in Painting in Britain 1500–1630, ed. Cooper et al., pp. 194–203. 49 Mitchell, ‘Painting in East Anglia’, p. 375. 50 C. Dodgson, ‘English Devotional Woodcuts of the Late Fifteenth Century’, Walpole Society, 17, 1928–9, pp. 95–108 (at pp. 104–08 and pl. 37); E. Ettlinger, ‘Notes on a Woodcut Depicting Henry VI being Invoked as a Aaint’, Folklore, 84, 1973, pp. 115–19. 51 John Rastell, Pastyme of People, London, 1530 (unfoliated): see www.archive.org/details/pastymeofpeoplec00rast/page/n121 (accessed 01 October 2019).

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 307

09/07/2021 09:50

3 0 8 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

the 1510 edition of Sir Thomas Littleton’s primer on the common law, but was apparently printed as early as 1496.52 The image is rather generic, but like the Rackheath St Edmund it shows the imperial crown. It raises an important point too about the appearance of Henry VI on screens. Henry VII was a key promoter of Henry VI’s cult, to the extent that he paired himself with his predecessor in the plans for his chantry at Westminster.53 It is notable that during the reign of Henry VII, Henry VI began to be shown wearing the imperial crown, so that a number of images of him resemble images of Henry VII (like the Rastell woodcut). A notable dated example of this is Ludham, Norfolk (1493), but it can be seen as far afield as Lanreath in Cornwall.54 In short, the manner of the underdrawing in the Rackheath St Edmund panel suggests that the painting was based on a woodcut. If so, then could this woodcut have been a medium by which a lost portrait of the official type was transmitted? After all, it is known that the painters of screens turned to print sources, but they can only be identified where both prints and screen survive. In support of these arguments, it is worth pointing out that portraits were being incorporated into religious art in the Low Countries during the same period. A triptych of the Adoration of the Magi attributed to the Master of Frankfurt now in the Phoebus Foundation clearly depicts two of the Magi with the faces of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and his deceased father, Frederick III. The Master of Frankfurt is thought to have been a Brussels painter, later based in Antwerp, active between 1490 and 1530.55 His workshop’s Adoration of the Magi was popular and a number of examples survive. The template for one of the imperial portraits was probably an independent image by Joos van Cleve (a portrait of Maximilian I survives in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna).56 In a way that draws parallels with Henry VII’s own position, the promotion of the Hapsburg image was controlled by Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, who wanted to legitimise Habsburg rule by promoting the family as a continuation of the Burgundian dukes they had usurped. Examples of the use of portraits of contemporary figures in the depiction of religious scenes can also be found in the work of Juan de Flandres, depicting Joanna of Castille as the Virgin, Charles V as the Christ child and Frederick III as one of the magi.57

52 Hoak, ‘Iconography of the Crown Imperial’, p. 76. 53 L. Craig, ‘Royalty, Virtue, and Adversity: The Cult of King Henry VI’. Albion, 35, 2003, pp. 187–209; Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship, pp. 61–73; Hoak, ‘Iconography of the Crown Imperial’, p. 72. 54 East Anglian screens depicting Henry VI that show the imperial crown tend to date from c.1490 onwards: see Baker, Survey, p. 235 and Wrapson, Patterns of Production, pp. 575–702 for dating. 55 Thanks to Sven van Dorst for sharing information about this subject and the painting now in the Phoebus Foundation collection. For the Master of Frankfurt, see S. H. Goddard, The Master of Frankfurt and his Shop, Brussels, 1984. 56 Inventory no. GG_972. 57 Van Cauteren, Politics as Painting, pp. 278–80.

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 308

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 2 4  |  a royal po rt r ai t ?   |   3 09

Conclusion This paper outlines new discoveries on the rood screen at North Tuddenham where Infrared photography has revealed changes between the planning and execution of the painting in the case of three saints: from St Margaret of Antioch to St Agnes, St John the Evangelist to St Augustine, and St George to an ‘archer’ saint, likely St Sebastian. The screen was constructed and painted in the date-range 1495–1520, and more probably before Henry VII’s death in 1509. In the course of the essay, I have suggested reasons for these changes, tying the iconographic choices to plague outbreaks and to a possible patron, John Hawe, prior of Pentney. A further observation was the unusual occurrence of the likeness of King Henry VII on the face of the archer saint, and the uncovering of another example, on a St Edmund originally from Rackheath, Norfolk. Henry VII is thought to be the first monarch to have official portraits of a set type. Recent scholarship puts the date for their inception back into the late 1480s. In any case, by c.1500, when these two screen paintings were probably made, standard and official portraits of the king existed, not least on coinage. This is not to suggest any direct control of the king’s image on two comparatively obscure Norfolk screens. Instead it seems likely that artists and patrons were able to access images of the king on which to base their work, just as they could access the latest engravings from the Low Countries such as those from the workshop of Lucas van Leyden. There is, however, a missing link, as no woodcuts of Henry VII’s official portrait are known to survive from this early date. However, the intention in these cases seems clear, and may be compared with the faces of Hapsburg rulers incorporated into continental altarpieces such as the Adoration of the Magi by the workshop of the Master of Frankfurt. This phenomenon provides a further indication of the impact that proximity to the Low Countries had on art in Norfolk at this time; an impact not limited to the use of continental prints, but extended to ideas of regal portraiture in religious paintings.

Fig. 1. Composite image of the north and south sides of the screen at North Tuddenham, Norfolk. Photographs © Lucy Wrapson, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 309

09/07/2021 09:50

3 10  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 310

09/07/2021 09:50

c hapt er 2 4  |  a royal po rt r ai t ?   |   3 11 opposite top: Fig. 2. St Agnes, St Augustine and St Sebastian, normal light composite image of screen figures from North Tuddenham, Norfolk. Photographs © Lucy Wrapson, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge opposite below: Fig. 3. St Agnes, St Augustine and St Sebastian, Infrared composite image of screen figures from North Tuddenham, Norfolk. Photographs © Lucy Wrapson, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge

above: Fig. 4. St Edmund, originally from All Saints, Rackheath, Norfolk (Now at St Michael and All Angels, Barton Turf, Norfolk). Normal light and Infrared photographs. Photographs © Lucy Wrapson, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge

Fig. 5. Attributed to Meynnart Wewyck, Henry VII, c.1501–9, Oil on oak panel, 46 × 33 cm, Society of Antiquaries of London (LDSAL 329)

7132 21-24 Binski new size v6.indd 311

09/07/2021 09:50

The Veronica Images Painted by Matteo Giovannetti for Pope Urban V (1369)* Patrick Zutshi

T

h e na m e o f M at t e o G i ova n n e t t i o f Vi t e r b o is inextricably associated with Palais des Papes in Avignon: he was the principal painter of the frescoes which remain one of the most conspicuous features of the palace, even though their state of preservation is variable.1 There is no reason to doubt that Viterbo was the place of his birth, but the career of Matteo Giovannetti before his arrival in Avignon is obscure. It is possible that he worked in Siena under the tutelage of Simone Martini, who moved to Avignon some years before Matteo.2 Yet it is generally accepted that, in his work at Avignon and elsewhere in France, Matteo achieved a style which is quite distinct from that of Simone.3 Matteo first appears at work in the Palais des Papes in 1343, and he is referred to as pictor pape from 1346 onwards.4 This title is indicative of his relatively high status among the artists of the Palais des Papes, for the painting of the Palais des Papes was now in the process of being organized centrally under Matteo’s supervision rather than through contracts with individual painters.5 The accounts of the apostolic chamber accordingly record payments to Matteo for both himself and for others. Already on 21 November 1345, for instance, he received payment for painting the walls of Grand Tinel in the papal palace tam pro se ipso quam pro aliis operariis.6 Matteo’s detailed accounts of work on the *

This essay represents a small return for a decade of collaboration, and rather more decades of friendship, with Paul Binski. I am most grateful to Barbara Bombi, Robert Gibbs, Peter Linehan and Daniel Williman for their assistance. I am indebted to JeanMarc Rosier for the photograph published as figs 1–2. 1 For the decoration of the Palais des Papes, see L.-H. Labande, Le Palais des Papes et les monuments d’Avignon au XIVe siècle, 2 vols, Marseille, 1925, vol. 2; R. André-Michel, ‘Le Palais des Papes d’Avignon: documents inédits’, Annales d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin, 5, 1917, pp. ix-xvi and 1–124; 6, 1918, pp. 3–42; idem, Avignon: les fresques du Palais des Papes. Le procès des Visconti, 2nd edn, Paris, 1926; S. Gagnière, Le Palais des Papes d’Avignon, Avignon, 1994; D. Vingtain, Avignon: le Palais des Papes, n.p., n.d. 2 See E. Anheim, ‘Simone Martini à Avignon: une histoire en négatif?’, in Images and Words in Exile: Avignon and Italy during the First Half of the 14th Century, ed. E. Brilli, L. Fenelli and G. Wolf, Florence, 2015, pp. 365–80. 3 The most comprehensive study of Matteo Giovannetti is by E. Castelnuovo. I cite the French translation by S. Darses and S. Girard: Un peintre italien à la cour d’Avignon: Matteo Giovannetti et la peinture en Provence au XIVe siècle, Paris, 1996. See also W. Angelelli, ‘Giovannetti, Matteo’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 55, Rome, 2000, pp. 506–10. 4 Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, 55. The title first appears in 1327: see E. Anheim, ‘L’artiste et l’office: financement et statut des producteurs culturels à la cour des papes au XIVe sècle’, in Offices, écrit et papauté (XIIIe–XVIIe siècle), ed. A. Jamme and O. Poncet, Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome 386, Rome, 2007, pp. 393–406 (at p. 398). 5 Anheim, ‘L’artiste et l’office’, p. 400. 6 F. Ehrle, Historia Bibliothecae Romanorum Pontificum tum Bonifatianae tum Avenionensis (vol. 1), Vatican City, 1890, p. 633. For comparable payments, see ibid., pp. 635, 637–8.

[ 3 12]

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 312

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 25 | the vero ni c a i mages pai nt ed by mat t eo gi ovannet t i   |   3 13

consistory, which cover the period from July to October 1347, show up to seventeen artists and workers at any one time under his direction.7 He was reimbursed for the purchase of paints, doubtless for the use of other artists as well as of himself.8 Matteo is frequently designated as magister, and he and the other magistri were paid more than the operarii. For work on the consistory, Matteo and two magistri were paid 8 solidi per day; the operarii were paid between 6 solidi and 2 solidi 6 denarii per day.9 The most famous of all the frescoes in the Palais des Papes are those in the Chambre du Cerf, which depict secular themes and date from the pontificate of Clement VI (1342–52). It is doubtful if Matteo Giovannetti was involved in these.10 On the other hand, he was the principal artist of the frescoes in the Chapelle de Saint-Martial,11 in the Chapelle de Saint-Jean,12 the Consistory,13 and the Grande Audience.14 Matteo’s work for Clement VI was not confined to the Palais des Papes: he was involved in the decoration of the palace at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon which Clement had occupied as a cardinal and which he retained as pope;15 and he provided both frescoes and panel paintings for the Benedictine abbey of La Chaise-Dieu, founded by Clement.16 The case of La Chaise-Dieu calls to mind that Matteo Giovannetti produced panel paintings in addition to wall paintings.17 For both La Chaise-Dieu and the Palais des Papes panel paintings were commissioned for the altars of the chapels.18 The earliest extant example of Matteo’s work in this medium is a triptych from 1346.19 Two further panel paintings are attributed to him.20 A later water-colour on parchment is a copy of a painting which was formerly above the door of the sacristy of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. It is generally thought to depict Clement VI presenting a diptych to the duke of Normandy (the future John the Good, king of France) and to be a copy of a lost work by Matteo.21 In 1349 Clement ordered two thrones from Matteo.22

7

Published by H. Denifle, ‘Ein Quaternus rationum des Malers Matteo Gianotti von Viterbo in Avignon’, Archiv für Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, 4, 1888, pp. 602–30. 8 E.g. Die Ausgaben der Apostolischen Kammer unter den Päpsten Urban V. und Gregor XI. (1362–1378), ed. K.-H. Schäfer, Vatikanische Quellen zur Geschichte der päpstlichen Hof- und Finanzverwaltung 6, Paderborn, 1937, p. 132; Ehrle, Historia, p. 627. 9 Denifle, ‘Ein Quaternus rationum’, p. 605. See also F. Piola Caselli, La costruzione del Palazzo dei Papi di Avignone (1316–1367), Milan, 1981, pp. 100–01. 10 See the recent study, with full bibliography, by E. Anheim, ‘La Chambre du Cerf: image, savoir et nature à Avignon au milieu du XIVe siècle’, Micrologus, 16, 2008, pp. 57–124 (at pp. 65–6). 11 Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, chapter 5. 12 André-Michel, Avignon: les fresques, pp. 43–56; Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, chapter 8. 13 Denifle, ‘Ein Quaternus rationum’; Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, pp. 115–16. 14 André-Michel, Avignon: les fresques, pp. 57–66; Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, chapter 9. 15 Piola Caselli, La costruzione del Palazzo dei Papi, pp. 32 n. 5, 77 n. 35. 16 Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, p. 130. 17 See especially M. Laclotte and D. Thiébaut, L’école d’Avignon, n.p., 1983, p. 44; L. Vertova, ‘Testimonianze frammentarie di Matteo da Viterbo’, in Festschrift Ulrich Middeldorf, ed. A. Kosegarten and P. Tigler, 2 vols, Berlin, 1968, vol. 1, pp. 45–51. 18 Ehrle, Historia, p. 638; E. Castelnuovo, ‘Matteo Giovannetti et le décor du Palais des Papes’, in Monument de l’histoire: construire, reconstruire le Palais des Papes, XIVe–XXe siècle, Avignon, 2002, pp. 71–6 (at p. 74). 19 Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, pp. 108–10. 20 Ibid., pp. 110–11. 21 Ibid., pp. 111–12; Monument de l’histoire, p. 202 (no. 16). Castelnuovo rejects Pächt’s suggestion of a date of 1360–64, and most likely within the pontificate of Urban V (elected 1362), and his attribution of the lost work to Jean Bandol (Jean de Bruges): O. Pächt, ‘The “Avignon Diptych” and its Eastern Ancestry’, in De artibus opuscula XL: essays in honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. M. Meiss, 2 vols, New York, 1961, vol. 1, pp. 402–21 (at pp. 403–4, 414–15). 22 Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, p. 129.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 313

09/07/2021 09:49

3 14 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

His employment continued under Clement VI’s successors. In 1354–6, during the pontificate of Innocent VI, there are records of his purchases of azure for frescoes.23 Matteo’s principal work for Innocent was the decoration of the charterhouse that the pope had founded at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.24 The pontificate of Urban V (1362–70) saw an increase in Matteo’s rate of pay, to 12 solidi per day.25 Urban ordered the construction of a new wing of the Palais des Papes, decorated under the direction of Matteo.26 It was called Roma after the subject of one of the paintings in it.27 The building was demolished in 1837.28 Urban V continued Clement VI’s practice of commissioning from Matteo work for establishments outside Avignon. Matteo produced, along with other artists under his supervision, fifty-six paintings on linen cloth depicting scenes from the life of St Benedict for Urban’s Benedictine foundation at Montpellier, which was dedicated to St Benedict and St Germanus.29 This commission involved the use of 1760 sheets of gold.30 Matteo was in Rome by 18 October 1367, taking part in the preparation of the Vatican palace for Urban V’s return to the city.31 Here he painted two chambers of the pope, the staircase leading to these chambers and the porticus superior next to the chambers.32 Matteo was in priest’s orders and was able to hold ecclesiastical benefices. Thus, a papal letter of 4 June 1369 describes him as archpriest of the church of Vercelli, as well as proctor of a certain Ottinus de Legnana.33 Matteo is generally thought to have died later in the summer of the same year. That he was still alive on 19 September 1369 is shown by an entry in a small series of papal accounts, all written on paper, from the years 1367–9.34 The section of the accounts which interests us here is a booklet consisting of ten folios, measuring 11.53 × 8.3 in., of which the last five are blank. It begins with entries concerning payments to certain mercenaries and the costs of housing the pope’s nephew, Raymundus de Montealto, lord of Grisac, at Montefiascone, while the pope was staying there.35 The entry concerning Matteo Giovannetti occurs on the next page, beside the heading Ornamenta. It records a payment made at Viterbo, where the papal court had moved from Montefiascone in August 1369. Matteo was not here in order to revisit the city of his birth but because he was travelling with the curia. The entry reads: 23 Die Inventare des päpstlichen Schatzes in Avignon 1314–1376, ed. H. Hoberg, Studi e Testi 111, Vatican City, 1944, pp. 320–21. Compare Ehrle, Historia, p. 627. 24 Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, chapter 10. 25 Labande, Le Palais des Papes, vol. 2, p. 12; Die Ausgaben, ed. Schäfer, p. 200. 26 Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, p. 156. 27 Piola Caselli, La costruzione del Palazzo dei Papi, pp. 89–90. 28 Castelnuovo, ‘Matteo Giovannetti et le décor du Palais des Papes’, p. 75. 29 André-Michel, ‘Le Palais des Papes’, Annales d’Avignon, 6, 1918, p. 30; Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, pp. 112, 157. For the transport of the paintings from Avignon to Montpellier, see Die Rückkehr der Päpste Urban V. und Gregor XI. von Avignon nach Rom: Auszüge aus den Kameralregistern des Vatikanischen Archivs, ed. J. P. Kirsch, Quellen und Forschungen aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte 6, Paderborn, 1898, pp. 77–8. For the foundation at Montpellier, see E. Müntz, ‘Le pape Urbain V: essai sur l’histoire des Arts à Avignon’, Revue Archéologique, Troisième Série 15, 1890, pp. 378–402 (at pp. 376–9). 30 Müntz, ‘Le pape Urbain V’, pp. 388–9. 31 Castelnuovo, Un peintre italien, p. 157. 32 Die Rückkehr, ed. Kirsch, pp. xxxviii, lix, 111, 116. 33 A.-M. Hayez et al., Urbain V (1362–1370): lettres communes, 12 vols, Paris, 1954–89, vol. 8, p. 67 (no. 23316). 34 Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Instrumenta Miscellanea (henceforth I.M.) 5269. 35 I.M. 5269, f. 1. Compare Die Rückkehr, ed. Kirsch, p. xiv. On this personage see L. Vones, Urban V.: Kirchenreform zwischen Kardinalkollegium, Kurie und Klientel, Päpste und Papsttum 28, Stuttgart, 1998, pp. 126–34.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 314

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 25 | the v eroni c a i mages pai nt ed b y mat t eo gi ovannet t i   |   3 15

Die xixa dicti mensis septembris soluti fuerunt ibidem de predicto mandato [scil. domini nostri pape] magistro Matheo Ianoti, presbitero de Viterbio, pictori, pro certis picturis fusteis per ipsum depictis in xv. veronicis, quarum una est munita de argento pro cameris dicti domini nostri pape, ad relationem domini Bernardi de Sancto Stephano, cubicularii et prothonotarii dicti domini nostri pape, magistro Iohanne Benedicti, scriptore dicti domini nostri pape, et Leocherio Iacobi, nepote predicti magistri Mathei, pro ipso manualiter recipient’ per manus prefati Iohannis Baroncelli – cx flor. ca[m]bii.36 No year is given, but the following entry provides one. This is dated three days later and concerns the wages (vadia ordinaria) of papal familiares and officials pro presenti anno pontificatus dicti domini nostri pape septimo. Urban’s seventh pontifical year ran from 6 November 1368 to 5 November 1369, which makes the year 1369. In Instrumenta Miscellanea 5269, the booklet described above is bound together with further accounts, which differ in format. The next two folios (ff. 11–12) record the expenditure of certain papal officials.37 The last folios (ff. 13–14) concern the transfer of the papal curia to Italy in 1367 and contain details of the expense facte per bullatores postquam recesserunt de Avinione eundo versus Viterbium.38 The vast series of Instrumenta Miscellanea in the Vatican Archives contains extensive documentation of the fourteenth century, much of it deriving from the apostolic chamber, including the accounts in Instrumenta Miscellanea 5296.39 They were not used in J. P. Kirsch’s edition of cameral sources concerning the return of Urban V and Gregory XI to Rome, nor in K. H. Schäfer’s edition of the accounts of expenditure under these popes; and they are not mentioned in Stefan Weiss’ more recent survey of the Rechnungswesen of the Avignon popes.40 In order to place Instrumenta Miscellanea 5296 in its administrative context, we should recall that, with the departure of Urban V for Italy, the apostolic chamber was divided in two: one section remained at Avignon, and the other travelled with the pope. The two sections produced distinct series of records. However, the survival of the main series of accounts, called by Weiss Hauptbücher, is erratic.41 In particular, there is no Hauptbuch of the itinerant curia for Urban’s seventh pontifical year.42 This means that the unpublished accounts in Instrumenta Miscellanea 5269 are of particular interest. The entry for 19 September 1369 reproduced above details the payment of the sum of 110 florins for fifteen images of the ‘Veronica’, or vernicle, that is, the image of Christ’s face miraculously impressed on the veil of St Veronica (the sudarium). The celebrated relic was

36 I.M. 5269, f. 1v. 37 Folio 11, consisting of two narrow strips of paper stuck together, measures 11.65 × 11.53 in., while f. 12 is a single narrow sheet measuring 11.81 × 4.37 in. 38 They measure 11.85 × 8.97 in. 39 See L. E. Boyle, A Survey of the Vatican Archives and of its Medieval Holdings, Toronto, 1972, p. 57. 40 Die Rückkehr, ed. Kirsch; Die Ausgaben, ed. Schäfer; S. Weiss, Rechnungswesen und Buchhaltung des Avignoneser Papsttums (1316– 1378), Hannover, 2003. It is perhaps worth mentioning that there are further accounts in the Archives départementales de Vaucluse, Avignon: e.g. 4 G 1 (no. 138), an account roll of the papal treasurer dating from May 1363. 41 Weiss, Rechnungswesen, pp. 159–66. 42 Weiss, Rechnungswesen, p. 236.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 315

09/07/2021 09:49

3 16  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part t hr ee

kept in St Peter’s basilica, Rome, in the chapel of S. Maria ad praesepe (also called the oratory of Pope John VII).43 It is unclear what was visible on the Veronica, and whether the image at some point was subject to a restoration or enhancement. For this reason, it is preferable to speak of the numerous vernicles in medieval art as images or representations of the Roman Veronica rather than as copies of it. Equally uncertain is the fate of the relic after its disappearance during the sack of Rome in 1527.44 The veneration of the Veronica was intertwined with that of another miraculous image of Christ, the Mandylion of Edessa.45 The date of the payment shows that Matteo Giovannetti completed his images before he reached Rome; in other words, he did not have access to the original. Matteo’s paintings were on wooden panels (the payment is pro certis picturis fusteis). The entry provides the names of a number of curialists who took part in the transaction. Although it was the pope who ordered the payment, Bernardus de Sancto Stephano was also involved in its authorisation (ad relationem domini Bernardi de Sancto Stephano). He is here designated as domestic chamberlain (cubicularius) and notary (prothonotarius) of the pope. Bernardus held other curial offices, secretary, honorary chaplain and then capellanus commensalis, and registrator litterarum apostolicarum.46 He was a close associate, possibly a relative, of the pope.47 He had his own accommodation in the papal palace at Avignon48 and in the Vatican palace.49 Urban V entrusted him with the task of acquiring property with which to endow the papal foundation at Montpellier.50 The accounts of the apostolic chamber record numerous other payments which Bernardus de Sancto Stephano authorized. These include payments for vestments, plate and works of art for the personal use of the pope.51 In the entry of 19 September 1369 printed above, and elsewhere, the Florentine Iohannes Baroncelli appears along with Bernardus de Sancto Stephano.52 It was he who made the actual payment of behalf of the apostolic chamber. Iohannes was a moneychanger (campsor camere apostolice) and a papal sergeant-at-arms (serviens armorum).53 He received funds and made payments for work on the Vatican palace and for purchases in Rome.54 Just one day after making the payment to Matteo Giovannetti, Iohannes, along with his brother Michael, was appointed to the office of papal moneyer in the city of

43 For the subsequent fate of the relic, see Pächt, ‘“Avignon Diptych”’, p. 405 and n. 19. 44 See H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott, Chicago, 1994, pp. 220–21. 45 On the relationship between the Veronica and the Mandylion, see especially I. Ragusa, ‘Mandylion – Sudarium: the “Translation” of a Byzantine Relic to Rome’, Arte Medievale, 5, 1991, pp. 97–106; Belting, Likeness and Presence, chapter 11. 46 Die Ausgaben, ed. Schäfer, pp. 27, 32–4, 53; Le souverain, l’office et le codex: gouvernement de la cour et techniques documentaires à travers les Libri officiariorum des papes d’Avignon, ed. A. Jamme, Sources et documents publiés par l’Ecole française de Rome 3, Rome, 2014, pp. 204, 300. 47 See Vones, Urban V., especially pp. 121–3. 48 Die Ausgaben, ed. Schäfer, pp. 294, 297, 302; Die Inventare, ed. Hoberg, p. 435. 49 Die Rückkehr, ed. Kirsch, pp. xxxix, 128–9, 142–4, 149–57, 161. 50 L. Guiraud, Les fondations du pape Urbain V à Montpellier: le monastère de Saint-Benoît, Montpellier, 1891, p. 23. 51 Die Rückkehr, ed. Kirsch, pp. 29, 41–2, 78, 102; Die Ausgaben, ed. Schäfer, passim. 52 Die Rückkehr, ed. Kirsch, pp. 41–2; Die Ausgaben, ed. Schäfer, pp. 198–9, 242, 344. 53 Müntz, ‘Le pape Urbain V’, pp. 390–92; Lettres secrètes et curiales du pape Urbain V se rapportant à la France, ed. P. Lecacheux and G. Mollat, Paris, 1902–55, pp. 509–10 (no. 2938). 54 Die Rückkehr, ed. Kirsch, pp. 97, 100, 104.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 316

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 25 | the v eroni c a i mages pai nt ed b y mat t eo gi ovannet t i   |   3 17

Avignon.55 Iohannes and two other Florentines were exempted from Urban V’s suspension of all Florentines from their curial offices, which took place on 8 November 1369.56 These are the two men, other than the pope, involved in making the payment to Matteo Giovannetti. In addition, the accounts name two men who received the sum on his behalf. One of them was a scribe of the papal chancery (scriptor pape), Iohannes Benedicti.57 He was a canon of the cathedrals of Langres and Vercelli.58 The nature of his relations with Matteo is unknown. The other recipient was Matteo’s nephew, Leocherius Iacobi. The patronym shows that Matteo had a brother called Iacobus. I have found no other reference to Leocherius, and it is unclear whether his connection with Matteo was artistic as well as familial and financial. As we shall see, no extant Veronica images can at present be identified with Matteo’s panels. However, the small image of the Veronica that he had painted over twenty years previously for the chapel of St Martial in the Palais des Papes (1344–6) may provide a clue as to their appearance (figs 1–2). It is found at the crossing of the vault of the chapel, where the cycle of frescoes depicting the life of St Martial begins, and it looks down on the chapel from this prominent position.59 Christ has a forked beard; his long hair curls out to the right and left of the beard. The design is reminiscent of certain other images from the second half of the fourteenth century, notably the so-called Veronica d’oro in Prague, which is understood to be roughly contemporaneous with the panel paintings of 1369.60 The record of payment to Matteo Giovannetti reveals only one patron: the pope.61 The artist was not fulfilling multiple orders or preparing images in order to sell them to different clients. Urban’s commission may reflect his own predilections. According to Ludwig Vones, his pontificate saw a heightened interest in the Veronica, among other relics;62 the accounts of papal expenditure record a payment in connection with Urban’s celebration of Mass in St Peter’s and the viewing of the Veronica;63 and the pope’s devotion to relics is well attested.64 In commissioning the panels, perhaps Urban had in mind the words of the Psalmist, Faciem tuam, Domine, requiram (Psalm 26:8). One of the panels was decorated in silver. This may well be a reference to an inner frame that outlined the bearded face of Christ in the manner of a cut-out. Such a frame can be seen on various copies of the Veronica, including the Veronica d’oro in Prague.65 55 Hayez et al., Urbain V: lettres communes, vol. 8, p. 417 (no. 24799) (Viterbo, 20 September 1369): officium magisterii cudendi et cudi faciendi monetam pape auream et argenteam in civ. Avinionen. 56 Die Ausgaben, ed. Schäfer, p. 33; D. Williman, Calendar of the Letters of Arnaud Aubert Camerarius Apostolicus 1361–1371, Subsidia Mediaevalia 20, Toronto, 1992, p. 38; Le souverain, l’office et le codex, ed. Jamme, p. 227. 57 See Lettres du pape Urbain V, ed. Lecacheux and Mollat, p. 483 (no. 2794). 58 Hayez et al., Urbain V: lettres communes, vol. 6, p. 202 (no. 19801). See also ibid., p. 223 (no. 19908). 59 See Vingtain, Avignon, pp. 296–7 and pl. 57; C. Di Fruscia, ‘Datum Avenioni [sic]: the Avignon papacy and the custody of the Veronica’, in The European Fortune of the Roman Veronica, ed. A. Murphy et al., Turnhout, 2017, pp. 219–28 (pl. 2). 60 See below at note 81. 61 For Urban’s patronage of the arts, see R. Gibbs, ‘Bologna and the Popes: Simone dei Crocefissi’s portraits of Urban V’, in A Wider Trecento: Studies in 13th- and 14th-century European Art presented to Julian Gardner, ed. L. Bourdua and R. Gibbs, Leiden, 2012, pp. 166–89. 62 Vones, Urban V., p. 483. Unfortunately, the reference given by Vones in n. 109 for this statement, ASV, AA. Arm. I–XVIII 5016, appears to be incorrect. See also Di Fruscia, ‘Datum Avenioni’, pp. 226–7. 63 Die Ausgaben, ed. Schäfer, p. 222: ... quando celebravit in basilica s. Petri Rome et vidit Veronicam. 64 See the accounts published in Die Ausgaben, ed. Schäfer, and the Liber de vita et miraculis beati Urbani pape quinti printed in Actes anciens et documents concernant le Bienheureux Urbain V pape (vol. 1), ed. J.-H. Albanès and U. Chevalier, Paris, 1897, pp. 375–480. 65 See below at note 81.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 317

09/07/2021 09:49

3 18 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

It is also found on the Mandylion at S. Bartolomeo degli Armeni, Genoa, which was given by the Byzantine emperor John V Paleologus to Leonardo Montaldo, captain general of the Genoese domains in Romania, and on the latter’s death in 1384 passed to the convent of S. Bartolomeo.66 Since the total cost of 110 florins seems to include the silver decoration, it is impossible to say how much Matteo received for each panel painting. There is an ambiguity in the wording of the record which means that it is unclear whether only this painting was destined for the pope’s own chambers or whether this applies to all the paintings. However, it is more likely that the remaining fourteen panels were for other recipients, and that Urban V intended to present them to individuals or ecclesiastical institutions that he wished to honour. If this is the case, one of the recipients may have been the emperor Charles IV. Charles’ interest in relics is well documented,67 and he assembled a large number of them. His collection was housed at the cathedral of St Vitus, Prague, and at his newly built castle of Karlstein, the collection at Karlstein being transferred to the cathedral by 1645.68 A petition from Charles to the pope, approved on 22 January 1354, lists relics that Charles acquired in Germany which included a portion of the sudarium (item de sudario domini).69 Charles commissioned panel paintings of the Veronica,70 and the Veronica was depicted twice at Karlstein, in the chapel of St Catherine (consecrated in 1357) and above the entrance to the chapel of the Holy Cross. It occurs in three different locations in the cathedral.71 The prominence given to the Veronica may reflect Charles IV’s personal devotion to it.72 Charles visited Rome in 1355 for his coronation as emperor. He entered Rome on 2 April (Maundy Thursday) as a pilgrim in order to visit Roman churches; these included St Peter’s, where the Veronica was displayed to the faithful on Thursdays or Fridays and on certain feast days.73 The account of Charles’ coronation by Iohannes Porta states that he stayed with the canons of St Peter’s on 2 April and ‘adored’ the Veronica that night. On Good Friday, when Charles was at the Lateran, the Veronica was displayed publicly.74 On 66 See C. Bertelli, ‘Storia e vicende dell’immagine edessena’, Paragone - Arte, n.s. 37, 1968, pp. 3–33, especially p. 7; C. Bozzo Dufour, ‘Il “Sacro Volto” di Genova: problemi e aggiornamenti’, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. H. L. Kessler and G. Wolf, Villa Spelman Colloquia 6, Bologna, 1998, pp. 55–67, and the exhibition catalogues Il volto di Cristo, ed. G. Morello and G. Wolf, Milan, 2000, pp. 91–2 (no. III.2), and Mandylion: intorno al Sacro Volto, da Bisanzio a Genova, ed. G. Wolf, C. Bozzo Dufour and A. R. Calderoni Masetti, Milan, 2004. 67 See O. Pujmanová, ‘Studi sul culto della Madonna di Aracoeli e della Veronica nella Boemia tardomedievale’, Arte Cristiana, 80, 1992, pp. 243–64 (at pp. 250–52); Karl IV. Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden: Kunst und Repräsentation des Hauses Luxemburg 1310–1437, Munich, 2006, ed. J. Fajt, especially the chapter by B. D. Boehm, ‘Der gläubige Herrscher’, pp. 137–47; Kunst als Herrschaftsinstrument: Böhmen und das Heilige Römische Reich unter den Luxemburgern im europäischen Kontext, ed. J. Fajt and A. Langer, Berlin, 2006. 68 Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, p. 183; G. Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance, Munich, 2002, pp. 122–4. Compare H. Kühne, Ostensio reliquiarum: Untersuchungen über Entstehung, Ausbreitung, Gestalt und Funktion der Heiltumsweisungen im römisch-deutschen Regnum, Berlin, 2000, p. 128. 69 Monumenta Vaticana res gestas Bohemicas illustrantia, ed. J. F. Novák et al., 5 vols in 7, Prague, 1903–54, vol. 2, pp. 83–4 (no. 196). 70 J. F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, New York, 1998, p. 373. 71 I. Kořán, ‘Gotické veraikony a svatolukášské madony v Pražské katedrále’, Umění, 39, 1991, pp. 286–312 (with German summary at pp. 312–16: at p. 314); Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel, p. 126. 72 Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, p. 181. 73 A. Paravicini Bagliani, Le chiave e la tiara, La corte dei papi 3, Rome, 1998, p. 19 (Thursday); G. Wolf, ‘“Or fu sí fatta la sembianza vostra?”: sguardi alla “vera icona” e alle sue copie artistiche’, in Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, pp. 103–114 (at p. 108) (Friday). 74 Iohannis Porta de Annoniaco Liber de coronatione Karoli IV. imperatoris, ed. R. Salomon, MGH Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum 35, Hannover, 1913, p. 78: ... in eadem basilica media quasi nocte sacrosanctam Christi Veronicam sibi per dictum dominum cardinalem ostensam devotissime rex ipse catholicus adoravit.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 318

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 25 | the v eroni c a i mages pai nt ed b y mat t eo gi ovannet t i   |   3 19

Easter Sunday (5 April) Charles left Rome at dawn in order to make his solemn entry into the city for his coronation.75 The emperor visited Rome again in 1368, on the occasion of the coronation of his wife, Elizabeth of Pomerania, as empress. He stayed for two months with the pope at the Vatican. At this time Urban gave him one of the veils used to cover the sudarium (in other words, a kind of contact relic).76 According to later sources, when he was in Rome for his coronation Charles wished to remove the relic itself from St Peter’s or actually succeeded in doing so.77 We must treat such stories with some scepticism. On the other hand, the inventories of Prague cathedral mention Pars de sudario Dni in tabula argentea et alia pars eiusdem sudarii corporali insuta, donated by Charles IV, and two further portions of the sudarium.78 A Latin manuscript in the chapter library at Prague, which dates from the late fourteenth or fifteenth century, records the ceremony of the display (ostensio) of relics to the faithful at Karlstein. Among them was a Veronica explicitly stated to have been given by Urban to the emperor. 79 Moreover, a Bohemian chronicle relates the display of a Veronica kept at Karlstein in 1437, which is described in the same terms. It is quite possible that the Veronica displayed was one of the panels painted by Matteo Giovannetti, although this cannot be proved. Charles left Rome in December 1368 and Italy in August 1369, in other words before the completion of the panels.80 Urban cannot therefore have presented the panel to him in person but, being aware of his devotion to the Veronica, he might subsequently have sent it to him. If Urban gave the panel to the emperor, the question arises of whether there is any subsequent trace of it. Unfortunately, the answer has to be in the negative. Three Veronica images are present today in Prague cathedral. The earliest of these is the Veronica d’oro (inv. K 317/235). Although it is thought to be of Italian workmanship and contemporaneous with Charles’ last visit to Rome, the Veronica d’oro is most unlikely to be one of the images by Matteo Giovannetti, for it was painted on paper which was subsequently stuck to an oak panel.81 The second example (inv. K 99/237) is known as the Veronica triste. It was likewise painted on paper, which was stuck to a piece of cloth and then fixed to a panel. It is regarded as Bohemian work of c.1370–90.82 It therefore disqualifies itself on various grounds from being one of Matteo’s panels. Only the third Veronica belonging to Prague cathedral (inv. V 302) is a panel painting, apparently in its original frame, but it is Bohemian

75 Iohannis Porta de Annoniaco Liber, ed. Salomon, p. 82. 76 Kořán, ‘Gotické veraikony’, p. 308 n. 6: ... et unum de vellis, quibus coopertum esse consuevit Sacratissimum Sudarium alias Veronica nuncupatum, quos propinquius ipsum Sudarium tangebat .... See also Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel, pp. 51, 123. The presence of the veils was observed already by Gerald of Wales: Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock and G. F. Warner, Rolls Series 21, 8 vols, London, 1861–91, vol. 4, p. 279; Wolf, ‘“Or fu sí fatta la sembianza vostra?”’, p. 105. On the veiling of sacred objects in Rome, see C. Bolgia, ‘Icons “In the Air”: New Settings for the Sacred in Medieval Rome’, in Architecture and Pilgrimage, 1000– 1500: Southern Europe and Beyond, ed. P. Davies, D. Howard and W. Pullan, Farnham, 2013, pp. 113–42 (at p. 126). 77 Kořán, ‘Gotické veraikony’, p. 312; Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, pp. 181–2; Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel, p. 123. 78 A. Podlaha and E. Šittler, Chrámový poklad u sv. Víta v Praze, Prague, 1903, p. xlix; Kořán, ‘Gotické veraikony’, p. 309 n. 30. 79 Pujmanová, ‘Studi sul culto’, 250–51; Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, p. 181. 80 Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter Kaiser Karl IV. 1346–1378, ed. A. Huber, J. F. Böhmer Regesta Imperii 8, Innsbruck, 1877, pp. 388, 397. 81 See Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, pp. 181–2 (no. IV.17), with illustration on p. 128. 82 See Kořán, ‘Gotické veraikony’, p. 315; Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, p. 182 (no. IV.18).

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 319

09/07/2021 09:49

3 20  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

work of the first half of the fifteenth century.83 It is worth adding that the format of the Veronica d’oro and more particularly of the Veronica triste calls to mind the relic itself, which Martin Luther later described as a small black board with a veil hanging from it.84 The style and date of the Veronica d’oro mean that Charles IV may have acquired or commissioned it in Italy, most likely on his second visit to Rome.85 If this is the case, its acquisition antedated any gift by Urban V of one of the panels painted by Matteo Giovannetti. The two other images in Prague may well derive from the images associated with Charles.86 An inventory of Prague cathedral of 1515 mentions two Veronica images, one made by order of Charles, the other, on wood, acquired by him.87 One or both of these images might derive from the emperor’s visit to Rome, and the second could be identical to a panel painting presented to the emperor by the pope.88 A comparable case is the three copies in Prague of the Madonna of Aracoeli, housed in the Franciscan church of the same name on the Capitoline hill.89 Even if all of them are Bohemian products, it is likely that they were inspired by a work or works that Charles IV commissioned in Rome.90 We must now leave consideration of the Bohemian implications of Matteo Giovannetti’s commission, implications which someone with an adequate knowledge of the Bohemian sources and the Czech language could be expected to pursue more fruitfully. Like two of the Prague images, the Veronica formerly at S. Silvestro in Capite, and now in the Lipsanoteca of the Palazzi Pontifici (Vatican City) is not a panel painting but was painted on cloth. It is thought to be an early work of Oriental provenance.91 It has been suggested that the Santo Rostro now in Jaén cathedral was copied in Rome from the Veronica of S. Silvestro in the fourteenth century.92 In the case of the Santo Rastro, it would be interesting to know what evidence, if any, supports the tradition that Urban V’s immediate successor Gregory XI gave it to Nicholas de Biedma, bishop of Jaén.93 While there is no extant Veronica of the 83 Kořán, ‘Gotické veraikony’, p. 315; Pujmanová, ‘Studi sul culto’, pp. 246–7 and fig. 6; Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, pp. 182–3 (no. IV.19); Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel, pp. 124–5 and Abb. 41; Prague: The Crown of Bohemia 1347–1437, ed. B. D. Boehm and J. Fajt , New Haven, 2005, p. 314 (no. 149); Karl IV., ed. Fajt, p. 617 (no. 228). The panel is also illustrated in Podlaha and Šittler, Chrámový poklad u sv. Víta v Praze, Tab. 1. 84 E. von Dobschütz, Christusbilder: Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legende, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, n.s. 3, Leipzig, 1899, p. 282 n. 5, quoting Luther’s Wider das Papsttum zu Rom, vom Teufel gestiftet of 1545: Gleichwie sie mit der Veroniken auch thun, geben für, es sei unsers Herrn Angesicht in ein Schweisstüchlin gedruck, und es ist nichts, denn ein schwarz Bretlin viereckt, da hänget ein Klaretlin [Schleier] für, darüber ein anders Klaretlin, welches sie aufziehen, wenn sie die Veronika weisen; .... Compare F. Lewis, ‘The Veronica: Image, Legend, and Viewer’, in England in the Thirteenth Century, ed. W. M. Ormrod, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 1, Woodbridge, 1985, pp. 100–06 (at p. 106). 85 See Kořán, ‘Gotické veraikony’, p. 315; Pujmanová, ‘Studi sul culto’, 249, 256; Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, p. 182. 86 Compare Wolf, ‘“Or fu sí fatta la sembianza vostra?”’, p. 109. 87 Pujmanová, ‘Studi sul culto’, p. 252; Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel, p. 123. 88 Compare Pujmanová, ‘Studi sul culto’, pp. 252–3. 89 Kořán, ‘Gotické veraikony’, pp. 313–14. On these copies see, in addition to Kořán’s article, Pujmanová, ‘Studi sul culto’; Karl IV., ed. Fajt, pp. 157–9 (no. 46). 90 Compare Karl IV., ed. Fajt, pp. 157–9 (no. 46). 91 See Bertelli, ‘Storia e vicende’; Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, pp. 91–2 (no. III.1). 92 Bertelli, ‘Storia e vicende’, p. 27 n. 25. On the interrelationship of the images of S. Silvestro, Jaén and Genoa, see especially Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, pp. 91–2 (nos III.1–2). 93 See e.g. Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, p. 91 (no. III.1). P. A. Galera Andreu, ‘La Verónica, “reliquia” objeto de peregrinación in España’, in Los caminos y el arte (VI Congreso Español de Historia del Arte), 3 vols, Santiago de Compostela, 1989, vol. 2 (El arte de los caminos), pp. 421–32 (at pp. 424–5), and M. Jódar Mena, ‘De la aljama a la primitiva construcción gótica: reflexiones a propósito de la catedral de Jaén en época bajomedieval’, in Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie VII: Historia del Arte, 1, 2013, pp. 169–98 (at p. 177), mention Nicholas de Biedma but not Gregory XI . I have not been able to consult M. López Pérez, Il Santo Rostro de Jaén, Córdoba, 1995. A possible link between Nicholas de Biedma and the papacy was Alfonso Pecha, who resided in Rome following his resignation as bishop of Jaén in 1368.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 320

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 25 | the v eroni c a i mages pai nt ed by mat t eo gi ovannet t i   |   3 21

fourteenth century which can at present be identified with Matteo’s work, it is striking that certain images from this period are associated in one way or another with Rome or the Roman curia. This even applies to the Byzantine Mandylion of Genoa, for according to Herbert L. Kessler, when it was given a new frame in the fourteenth century, its discarded inner frame was reused for the Veronica of S. Silvestro in Capite.94 There is no space to consider such questions further here. Instead I return briefly to the panel adorned with silver intended for the pope’s chambers. It doubtless moved in October 1369 with Urban from Viterbo to Rome, where the pope on 18 October received the solemn profession of faith of John V Paleologus, who had converted to Roman Catholicism.95 We can assume that the painting moved to Avignon, via Montefiascone and Viterbo, with the pope in 1370. One would not therefore expect to find it in the inventory of the Palais des Papes of 1369.96 The inventory of the same palace made at the beginning of the pontificate of Gregory XI (1371) mentions a picture of Christ, but the description is too vague to allow us to reach any conclusion.97 We owe to Matthew Paris some of the earliest surviving representations of the Veronica at St Peter’s basilica,98 and subsequently such representations became extremely common. The vernicle was indeed the most popular and widely revered of the Roman images of Christ which were cult objects.99 Legends concerning the miraculous creation of the relic, indulgences connected with it, and processions served to promote the cult.100 It is likely that interest in it increased as a result of the floods of pilgrims who visited Rome for the Jubilee of 1300; and the absence of the popes from Rome for most of the fourteenth century does not appear to have brought about a lessening of such interest. During the Jubilee of 1350, for instance, three Venetians offered a new frame, adorned with silver and rock

94 Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, pp. 91–2 (nos III.1–2). Compare Ragusa, ‘Mandylion - Sudarium’, p. 101. 95 O. Halecki, Un empereur de Byzance à Rome: vingt ans de travail pour l’union des églises et pour la défense de l’empire d’Orient 1355– 1375, Travaux Historiques de la Société des Sciences et des Lettres de Varsovie 8, Warsaw, 1930, chapter 8; A. Vasil’ev, ‘Il viaggio del Imperatore Giovanni V Paleologo in Italia (1369–1371) e l’Unione di Roma del 1369’, Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, 3, 1931, pp. 151–93. 96 Printed in Die Inventare, ed. Hoberg, pp. 401–64. 97 Die Inventare, ed. Hoberg, p. 515: item 1 tabula, in qua est ymago Christi. 98 See Lewis, ‘The Veronica’; S. Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora, Aldershot, 1987, pp. 126–31; P. Binski, ‘Faces of Christ in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora’, in Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow: Studies in Painting and Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. J. F. Hamburger and A. S. Korteweg, Turnhout, 2006, pp. 85–92; A. Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art, Cambridge, 2014, chapter 1; N. Morgan, ‘“Veronica” Images and the Office of the Holy Face in Thirteenth-century England’, in The European Fortune, ed. Murphy et al., pp. 85–98. For  arlier examples, see Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, pp. 381, 567 n. 153. 99 See G. Wolf, Salus populi Romani: die Geschichte römischer Kultbilder im Mittelalter, Weinheim, 1990, pp. 79–87; idem, ‘From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the “Disembodied” Face and Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West’, in The Holy Face, ed. Kessler and Wolf, pp. 153–79 (especially pp. 174, 176). 100 See Dobschütz, Christusbilder, pp. 197–262, 250*-335*; Pugmanová, ‘Studi sul culto’,pp. 247–8; B. M. Bolton, ‘Advertise the Message: Images in Rome at the Turn of the Twelfth Century’, in The Church and the Arts, ed. D. Wood, Studies in Church History 28, Oxford, 1995, pp. 117–130; Wolf, ‘From Mandylion to Veronica’, in The Holy Face, ed. Kessler and Wolf, pp. 153–79 (at pp. 168, 170–2); C. Egger, ‘Papst Innocenz III. und die Veronica: Geschichte, Theologie, Liturgie und Seelsorge’, in The Holy Face, ed. Kessler and Wolf, pp. 183–203; E. Fernández González, ‘Del santo Mandylion a la Verónica: sobre la vera icona de Cristo en la edad media’, in Imágenes y promotores en la arte medieval: miscelánea en homenaje a Joaquín Yarza Louaces, ed. M. L. Melero Moneo, F. Español Bertrán, A. Orriols i Alsina and D. Rico Camps, Bellaterra, 2001, pp. 353–71 (at pp. 360–61); A. L. Clark, ‘Venerating the Veronica: Varieties of Passion Piety in the Later Middle Ages’, Material Religion, 3, 2007, pp. 164–89; H. L. Kessler, ‘Paradigms of Movement in Medieval Art: Establishing Connections and Effecting Transition’, Codex Aquilarensis, 29, 2013, pp. 29–48 (at pp. 36–7); B. Windeatt, ‘Vera Icon? The Variable Veronica of Medieval England’, in The European Fortune, ed. Murphy et al., pp. 59–70; E. Doublier, ‘Sui pretiossisimi vultus Imago: Veronica e prassi indulgenziale nel XIII e all’inizio del XIV secolo’, ibid., pp. 181–92.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 321

09/07/2021 09:49

3 22 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part t hr ee

crystal, for the Veronica. The Avignon popes authorized the private display of the relic to favoured individuals.101 Another means which enhanced the fame of the Veronica was the proliferation of images of it. In the context of an indulgenced prayer that he attributes to Innocent III, Matthew Paris already mentions the production of images which increased devotion to the Veronica.102 In the fourteenth century, images were sold outside St Peter’s Basilica; the sudarium appears on pilgrims’ badges; and the gold ducats minted by the commune of Rome following the Jubilee of 1350 display a small image of the Veronica.103 Further evidence of mass-production comes from eight images of the Veronica which appear on a parchment roll and four images on a single sheet of parchment, although it has been argued that it was not intended to separate the images.104 The entry in the papal accounts for 19 September 1369 provides evidence of the mass-production of Veronica images which are different in character: here the creator was the principal painter of the papal court, Matteo Giovannetti, and the recipients of his work included the pope himself and, quite possibly, the emperor Charles IV.

Fig. 1. Detail of Veronica image. By kind permission of Jean-Marc Rosier (Gordes) opposite: Fig. 2. The vault of the chapel of St Martial, Palais des Papes, Avignon. By kind permission of Jean-Marc Rosier (Gordes)

101 Di Fruscia, ‘Datum Avenioni’; Bolgia, ‘Icons’, p. 132. 102 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 7 vols, Rolls Series 57, London, 1872–83, vol. 3, pp. 7–8; Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel, Abb. 23. 103 D. J. Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages, Woodbridge, 1998, pp. 78, 142–3, 179, 193–4; Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, pp. 317–18; Wolf, ‘From Mandylion to Veronica’, pp. 170–73; Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel, pp. 134–5, 137–40, 142; H. van Asperen, ‘“Où il y a une Veronique atachiée dedens”: Images of the Veronica in Religious Manuscripts with special attention for the Dukes of Burgundy and their Family’, in The European Fortune, ed. Murphy et al., pp. 233–48 (at pp. 234–9). For later massproduction by printing, see F. Eisermann, ‘Ablass und Buchdruck: neue Funde, neue Forschungen, neue Hilfsmittel’, in Ablasskampagnen des Spätmittelalters: Luthers Thesen von 1517 im Kontext, ed. A. Rehberg, Berlin, 2017, pp. 411–25 (at pp. 418–19). 104 See Pujmanová, ‘Studi sul culto’, pp. 248–9; Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, p. 323; Il volto di Cristo, ed. Morello and Wolf, p. 179 (no. IV.13), with illustration on p. 124.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 322

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 25 | the vero ni c a i mages pai nt ed by mat t eo gi ovannet t i   |   3 23

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 323

09/07/2021 09:49

Becoming Like an Angel: The Concept of Sublimis in Monastic Contemplation and in Alchemy Mary Carruthers

‘Sublimes, id est alta.’ John Scottus Eriugena, Annotationes in Marcianum (Martianum Capellam) 1

‘Sed quisquis ita contemplatione rapitur, ut per diuinam gratiam subleuatus, intentionem suam iam angelorum choris interserat, et fixus in sublimibus, ab omni se infima actione suspendat, non ei sufficit gloriam angelicae claritatis aspicere, nisi eum etiam qui est super angelos, ualeat uidere.’ Gregory I the Great, Moralia in Job, Bk. XXXI. xlviii 2

I

n the year 1144, according to the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, an English cleric named Robert of Chester, who was part of the large team working in Toledo to translate philosophical works from Arabic into Latin, translated an alchemical text now known simply as ‘Morenius’, which takes the form of a teaching dialogue between a Greek named (in Latin) Morenius and prince Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Mu’awiya, who seeks to learn from Morenius the work known as ‘the Great Work’, Opus Maius – what we call ‘alchemy’.3 In the course of their dialogue, Morenius gives instruction about the various processes involved in the production of the ever-elusive alchemical ‘elixir’. One of these is what we now call ‘sublimation’, but which at the time Robert translated had no Latin

1 ‘Sublimes, that is the heights’: John Scottus Eriugena, Annotationes in Marcianum (Martianum Capellam), ed. C. E. Lutz, Cambridge, MA, 1939, p. 194. 2 ‘But one who is so rapt in contemplation that he is raised up through divine grace, directly implants his attention within the chorus of angels, and fixated on the heights, suspends himself from all lesser activity; yet this is not sufficient for him to behold the glory of angelic brightness unless indeed He Who is above the angels empowers him to see’; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, lib. 31, par. 48; Corpus Christianorum, series latina (CCSL) 143B, ed. M. Adriaen, Turnhout, 1985, p. 1618, lines 22–26. Many thanks to my excellent NYU colleague, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, for her fruitful comments on an early draft of this paper. 3 Robert of Chester has sometimes been conflated with Robert of Ketton, a different individual altogether. See Charles Burnett, ‘Robert of Ketton’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Burnett makes a persuasive case that ‘R. of Ketton’ is a different person than ‘R. of Chester’, and that Robert of Chester translated ‘Morenius’ because its preface so identifies him; it is also dated, 11 February 1144. See note 25 below.

[ 3 24]

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 324

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 2 6   |  b ec o mi ng l i ke an angel   |   3 25

equivalent.4 Indeed ‘alchemy’ itself was a word that Robert knew would be unfamiliar to his audience. As a translator, he was breaking entirely new ground.5 The Arabic term used for the procedure was taṣʿīd, meaning ‘to make something rise’, from the root, ṣ-ʻ-d, ‘to rise’.6 To translate taṣʿīd, Robert chose as its equivalent the forms sublimare and sublimatio. The instructions call for putting the vessel containing the material into a furnace so that it ‘may be sublimated [sublimetur]’. ‘This sublimation procedure’ [hec sublimatio] is best done after the sun goes down, so the vessel will cool off before it is opened.7 The question I want to address in this essay is why an English cleric in the 1140s would have selected a Latin term which, in his time, referred to social standing and moral worth, and, especially when used in the plural, to ‘high places’ and ‘high subject matters’, that is, cosmic and heavenly things. It did not apply in Robert’s time to artistic and rhetorical style, nor to human aesthetic and psychological experiences. Could Robert have intended to extend what he knew as the ordinary meaning of sublim- to a cognitive experience anything like the spiritual ‘up-lifting’ that we now call ‘Sublime’? What were the semantic boundaries in the mid-twelfth century of words formed from the root sublim-? The process we now know as ‘sublimation’ is the chemical change of a metal to a vapour through application of heat, from something heavy and cold to something light and hot. The residue left inside the flask used to heat the initial material was called its ‘sublimate’, and this was scraped off and further heated, in some procedures, to form an ‘elixir’, the material in its greatest refined form. The metal most often used was mercury (quicksilver) and chemists still refer to the residue as ‘sublimate of mercury’.8 The physics used to explain what was going on is the standard ancient account, that all matter is mixed from four elements (earth, water, air, fire), and further characterized by four varying qualities (dry, moist, cold, and hot). The heaviest of these elements is earth (metals are mostly earth), the lightest is fire. Progression from one state to another is a question of

4

The complete Arabic text of ‘Morenius’ that Robert used no longer exists, and the partial version still available to scholarship does not include the specific passage that he was translating here. However, in a treatise ‘On alums and salts’ ascribed to al-Razi, the Arabic text of which does still exist, taṣʿīd is translated as sublimatio (by Gerard of Cremona) and, by a second translator, as exaltatio: see Das Buch der Alaune und Salze, ed. J. Ruska, Berlin, 1935, pp. 40, 56; also note 7, below. 5 See Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS), s.v. alchimia, a word directly transposed from an Arabic form probably derived in turn from Greek chēmia. (The earliest etymology of this late Hellenistic word is contested, and is of great interest – see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. alchemy.) The earliest Latin citation given is to Robert of Chester’s preface to his ‘Morenius’ translation, which has now also a proper (though editorial) Latin title, Liber de compositione alchemiae. Other early users of the Latin term include Daniel of Morley and Robert Grosseteste. One of the earliest uses of the English word ‘alchemy’ is in Chaucer’s ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ (end of the fourteenth century), by which time its popular reputation was distinctly sordid. See Charles Burnett, ‘Transmission of Islamic Scientific and Philosophical Works to Europe’, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam, Oxford Islamic Studies Online (accessed 01 October 2019). 6 I am most grateful to an email exchange with Profs. Julia Bray and Emilie Savage-Smith of the Oriental Institute, Oxford, and Prof. Regula Forster of the University of Zurich. Prof. Forster also points out that in Arabic the Christian feast of the Ascension is called ʻīd al-ṣuʻūd. 7 ‘[P]ostea vas predictum cum illis que in ipso sunt in fornace sublimetur. Et hec sublimatio post solis occasum fiat, et ibi dimittatur donec dies refrigescat’, A Testament of Alchemy, ed. L. Stavenhagen, Hanover, NH, 1974, p. 40. It is important to note that forms of sublim- were not the only ones used for alchemical taṣʿīd, for exaltatio was also regularly used: see DMLBS, s.v. exaltatio, 8a. At the end of the fifteenth century, the English canon-alchemist George Ripley regarded the two terms as synonyms: see DMLBS s.v. exaltare, 7a and 7b. Many thanks to Charles Burnett for his help in sorting out these lexical complexities. 8 I am indebted to the account of alchemy’s history in Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, Chicago, 2013. Like all modern accounts of alchemy, his descriptions are based mainly on writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But being himself a chemist, Principe describes his own efforts to duplicate the alchemists’ experiments – with some successes that he recounts in his book. See also the articles on ‘Alchemy’ and ‘Chemistry and Alchemy’ in The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam, Oxford Islamic Studies Online (accessed 01 October 2019).

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 325

09/07/2021 09:49

3 2 6  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

refinement and simultaneous weight loss. So fire is lighter than air, which is lighter than water, which is lighter than earth. And as something becomes ‘lighter’ it also ‘rises’. The earth is surrounded by three rings above its solid, motionless core – a ring of water, then air, and lastly fire. The cosmic spheres rise above the ring of fire upward to the angelic circles and thence to Divinity beyond. And there is another fundamental, though too often overlooked, feature of this cosmos – there are no vacuums in it. Causation in this model is always contiguous – one thing has to directly contact what it affects, and in turn that affects the next, and so on. A further physical principle: all change is motion, and thus all change is also time.9 Medieval rhetoric did not recognize a literary or aesthetic style called Sublime. Speech suitable to elevated and moving subject matters was known as magniloquens, ‘great speaking’, the High Style that Chaucer’s Host, Harry Bailey, identified as suitable when addressing kings, and that Ciceronian rhetoric identified as one of three stylistic ‘levels’ in oratory, the other two being ‘plain’ style and ‘middle’ style. Augustine associates it further with particular rhetorical aims – thus, ‘plain’ style is associated with directness and conversation, ‘middle’ style with teaching (and it is the wittiest of the three – we might think of it as a lecture style, answering the need to attract and continuously hold an audience’s attention), and the ‘high’ style with moving and persuading others to active, confident belief. They were also associated with vocal levels – ‘plain’ with a low, conversational tone, ‘middle’ with a moderate tone, and ‘high’ with a loud, stentorian vocal tone. A single speech would employ all three stylistic levels, depending on the orator’s various subject matters and aims. More so than Roman rhetoric (which assumed primarily an audience of peers, such as in the Senate and law courts), medieval rhetorical advice predicated a varied audience, that might include nobles, clerics, artisans, slaves, peasants – and women.10 In his writings, a century and more after Robert of Chester first attached the Latin root sublim- to an alchemical process, Thomas Aquinas distinguishes two meanings.11 The first is simply ‘raised up’, the meaning sublimis always had. Thomas also used the noun sublimatio as alchemists did, to refer to processes of distillation, his example being how acqua rosacea, rose-water, is distilled from roses (Arabic taṣ-id commonly can refer to both sublimation of metals and to what we distinguish now as distillation; thus, predominantly earthy rose petals are ‘raised’ by the heat of distillation to the higher state of liquid).12 But 9

The most accessible, fully imagined and described medieval account of this physics is Dante’s Paradiso. A succinct modern account of medieval views of motion, change, and dynamics (for there are several variations) is D. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, Chicago, 1992, pp. 290–304, part of his account of the medieval cosmos as a whole (pp. 245–315). More recent material and discussion, focussed particularly on medieval physics and cosmology, is available online through the Ordered Universe project (www.ordered-universe.com), led by Durham and Oxford Universities. 10 I distinguished medieval magniloquence and magnificence as stylistic and aesthetic values from later (post-eighteenth century) ideas of ‘The Sublime’, in M. Carruthers, ‘Terribilis, horribilis, and “the fear of God”, or, Why there is no Medieval Sublime’, in ‘Truthe is the beste’, ed. N. Jacobs and G. Morgan, Oxford, 2014, pp. 17–36. 11 See A Lexicon of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. R. J. Deferrari, M. I. Barry, and I. McGuiness, Washington, 1948, s.v. sublimatio. 12 I am grateful to Prof. Regula Forster for this information about the alchemical lexicon. Thomas mentions the distillation of rosewater from roses in a Quaestio in which he specifically distinguishes what happens in alchemical distillation from the plain water used for Baptism; see Summa theologica, ed. Leonensis, Rome, 1888–1906 (hereafter ST), III, Q. 66 a. 4, obj. and resp. 5 in particular. An insistence on the humilitas, the commonness, of the natural elements used in Sacraments is a continuing theme in later medieval Christian theology and preaching. Aden Kumler discusses an important example of it in the deliberately ‘common’ preparation of the Host for the eucharist, ‘The Multiplication of the Species: Eucharistic Morphology in the Middle Ages’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60, 2011, pp. 179–91.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 326

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 2 6   |  b ec o mi ng l i ke an angel   |   3 27

sublimatio for Thomas also meant ‘refined’, as the heavens are more rarified and luminous the closer they are to God, or as the highest visionary state is one refined of all earthly images and impediments, including language itself, a state of unmediated, and thus unspeakable illumination, such as St Paul experienced when he was carried up ‘into the third heaven’ (II Corinthians 12:2). And Thomas then refers to Augustine’s discussion of this Pauline episode in his Commentary on the literal text of Genesis.13 This is a particularly telling reference, as I will now argue, for it is in the cognitive process that Augustine assumes for his analysis of St Paul’s vision that we can discover a meaning for sublimis within natural human cognitive process, by which material data received in the brain from the body’s external sense organs are refined and ‘spiritualized’ into a ‘concept’ which the intellect can grasp in a general abstraction, ‘an idea’ (the intellect is entirely immaterial, and therefore cannot directly comprehend material stuff, such as sense-data).14 This is of course yet another version of philosophy’s perennial ‘mind-body analysis’, but it states the Augustinian solution to it in terms rather different from the Scholastic language to which many medievalists (including me) are more accustomed. A twelfth-century Neoplatonist account of how our human minds conceptualize and are able to conceive thoughts from our sense-derived material perceptions is found in a commentary on Boethius by Clarembald, Archdeacon of Arras (d. 1187). Clarembald names both Hugh of St. Victor and Thierry of Chartres, with both of whom he probably studied – his commentary quotes from Thierry at several points and also cites Hugh, as its most recent editor, N. M. Häring, has shown. There is nothing very new in Clarembald’s account of the neurophysics of human cognition, but it is more detailed than others. On his account, data from the various external senses are received into the brain in a material state composed of mixtures of the physical elements, especially the heavier ones, earth and moisture. The problem then is to transform this material into something which the intellect can understand and work with – that is, to ‘mentalize’, or as we more likely would say, to conceptualize it. The raw sense data which ‘affect’ the body set up bodily movements that are passed to the brain through channels or nervi containing ‘spirit’ or humour. These must be de-materialized – in Clarembald’s word, made subtilior, ‘subtler’, more refined and rarified – before the wholly immaterial intellect can know and understand what they convey. This happens by means of a refining and spiritualizing process which increases the proportion of air in the physical mixture of the material data as initially received in the body. Since Latin spiritus can mean ‘breath’ as well as ‘spirit’ in our modern sense, from a physical standpoint it makes sense that the process of spiritualizing would also be one of increasing aeration, any material stuff becoming lighter and rising up as it lost its weightier elements. Clarembald explains: ‘in the anterior part of the head, which is called ‘fantastica’, a great deal of air is included from the external humour, by which are imprinted the images that are cognized through the senses, and the mind uses this air 13 See ST I, Q. 68 a.4 in particular, in which Thomas discusses the various semantic contexts for the word caelum, ‘heaven’. Thomas concludes: in omnibus caelis invenitur communiter sublimitas et aliqua luminositas [‘All the heavens have in common sublimity (as both ‘height’ and ‘refinement’) and some degree of luminosity’]: ST I, Q. 68 a. 4, resp. 3. 14 This is because, being entirely immaterial, no movement can be communicated to the intellect – it has in itself no material stuff to be set in motion.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 327

09/07/2021 09:49

3 28 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

together with a bit of moisture as its instrument when imagining’.15 As a sense-derived perception is increasingly refined, so its cognition is increasingly mentalized, making it more fit for intellectual work, and in the middle brain chamber – which Clarembald calls ‘logistica’ – it is processed with the most refined, subtilissimus, air which ‘the physicists call lux etherea’.16 This middle chamber – which is thought of as in constant communication with fantastica, imagination – is also called rationalis, and like the other ‘parts’ of the brain, they are modelled as actions and powers – vis and virtus – not as separated anatomical organs. The Victorines notably held that imagination closely directed by reason was the way to arise in contemplation even into the highest of divine matters, the sublimes and sublimia of which texts like ‘On the Celestial Names’ were speaking.17 The class of truly refined, wholly spiritualized created beings is, of course, angels. And indeed a mind in contemplation was often said to rise towards the state of the angels. So, in his Moralia in Job, one of the most-read works of medieval contemplation, Gregory the Great wrote that: ‘a holy man, when he despises earthly things, suspends himself in higher matters in the manner of an eagle; and raised up through the spirit of contemplation looks toward the perennial glory of the angels, and, a stranger to this world, by desiring those matters which he gazes upon, is fixated directly in the heights.’ And, ‘one who is so rapt in contemplation, that he is raised up through divine grace, directly implants his attention within the chorus of angels, and fixated on the heights, suspends himself from all lesser activity; yet this is not sufficient for him to behold the glory of angelic brightness unless indeed He Who is above the angels empowers him to see.’18 It was a trope of long standing in monastic thought, both Eastern and Western: indeed it has its origin in the Greek gospel of Luke (20:36). Jesus is asked a question concerning whether the dead retain their marital status post-mortem in heaven, and replies that marriage is only for this world, but in heaven redeemed souls become isaggelos (‘isaggeloi 15 In parte quippe capitis anteriori, quae ‘phantasica’ dicitur, multus aer exiguo humore includitur cui eorum quae per sensus cognoscuntur figurae imprimuntur atque eo aere cum pauca humiditate in imaginando anima utitur pro instrumento: Tractatus super librum Boetii De Trinitate, II.6, Life and Works of Clarembald of Arras, ed. N. M. Häring, Toronto, 1965, p. 108. Clarembald’s description is based in Augustine’s account of human creation, both body and soul, by God out of the four basic elements of earth, water (humor in Augustine), air, and light: see De Genesi ad litteram, lib. VII, pars. 18–26, esp. pars. 24–25; ed. J. Zycha, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 28.1, 1894, pp. 223–4. Important in Neoplatonic accounts also is the idea that all created things ‘participate in’ their Creator, as the Many parts of a body are all organically One; see Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae III. metrum 9 – prosa 10, among many other sources. 16 Ibid., II.7: Siquidem in media capitis parte, quae « logistica » dicitur, aer subtilissimus qui a physicis « lux etherea » vocatur tenetur inclusus. The somewhat earlier account (from the 1140s) in William of Conches, Dragmaticon Philosophiae Bk VI, cap.18.3 is also worth consulting on the question of how material data is processed through the brain to form a concept that is retrievable for all intellectual work – it also stresses the humoral basis of sense-derived concepts. The Latin text is available through Brepols Online; it has also been translated into English, A dialogue on natural philosophy = Dragmaticon philosophiae, trans. I. Ronca and M. Curr, Notre Dame, IN, 1997. 17 The most complete treatments of this procedure are Richard of St Victor’s ‘On the Twelve Patriarchs’ (Benjamin minor), in which Richard depicts Imagination as necessary to thinking but in itself a constant chatterbox completely without discipline; it must work with Reason before it can be a trustworthy servant of meditation in search of truth. His longer treatise ‘De contemplatione’ (also called Benjamin major and ‘De arca mystica’) details the stages of contemplative ascent via imagining and reasoning to the final stage praeter rationem, ‘beyond reasoning’ of divine rapture, if God so wills. That last clause states the crucial condition, for raptus, ‘seizure’, as the word indicates, is never achieved through human control. Both works are translated in English by G. A. Zinn, Richard of St. Victor, New York, 1979. 18 Vir itaque sanctus, cum terrena despicit, more se aquilae ad altiora suspendit; et per contemplationis spiritum subleuatus perennem angelorum gloriam praestolatur, atque huic mundo hospes, illa appetendo quae aspicit, iam in sublimibus figitur. ... Sed quisquis ita contemplatione rapitur, ut per diuinam gratiam subleuatus, intentionem suam iam angelorum choris interserat, et fixus in sublimibus, ab omni se infima actione suspendat, non ei sufficit gloriam angelicae claritatis aspicere, nisi eum etiam qui est super angelos, ualeat uidere: Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, lib. 31, pars. 48–49, CCSL 143B, pp. 1618–19.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 328

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 2 6   |  b ec o mi ng l i ke an angel   |   3 29

gar eisin’), for whom human states such as marriage are meaningless. Exactly what isaggelos meant was a matter of some debate – was such a soul ‘equal to an angel’ or only ‘like an angel’, for both meanings are possible. In Latin the phrase was translated as ‘aequales ... angelis’ (‘aequales enim angelis sunt’ is the present Vulgate reading); a variant is ‘similes ... angelis’.19 The fourth-century monastic teacher, Evagrius of Pontus, used the word in his ‘Chapters on Prayer’ (or Praktikos), a work that was much translated, into Syriac as well as Latin, and read widely in monastic circles as a reliable guide for meditation and contemplative prayer. Evagrius counselled that ‘By true prayer [= contemplation] a monk becomes another angel [ίσάγγελος] for he ardently longs to see the face of the Father in heaven.’20 This contemplative ‘sublimation’, the idea that the earthly could be raised up however briefly to a spiritualized state, seems reflected in Robert of Chester’s choice of sublimis for the alchemical process. It is an idea from monastic and Neoplatonist cultures, not from alchemy per se. And, crucially, it is not a product of a crafted style, for it is not within words but outside language altogether. Christian style, in an Augustinian tradition, modelled itself as humilis. This is the subject of a famous essay by Erich Auerbach on the rhetoric of sermo humilis, which has been criticized since its first publication for being ‘misleading’ in suggesting that humilis style is the only style through which divine sublimities ‘can be brought within the reach of men’.21 And some of its claims are misleading. Roman rhetoric including Augustine’s own treatise, De doctrina christiana, counselled that orators should use several levels of style within the same composition, as the orator’s persuasive purposes, subject matters, and audiences might vary. Yet it is also a Christian Neoplatonist trope of long standing to praise how Jesus spoke of the most exalted subjects in common, vulgar speech. In a poem Scottus Eriugena marvelled, ‘what sort of mind, what power, what Wisdom created of the heavens, could explain the descent of Word into flesh and in a word of flesh make known the high ascents?’22 This fundamental paradox of Incarnation was at the essence of Christian thought, that God humbled Himself – descensus, the opposite of sublimatio-- to become fully human and obedient to his earthly parents, speaking not as Divinity but in the fleshly vocabulary of ordinary folk. That is the Christian value of sermo humilis, definitively

19 See s.v. Luke 20:36, as recorded in the ‘Vetus Latina Online’ database (Brepols Online). This is the only variant reading recorded. 20 Evagrius of Pontus, Chapters on Prayer, no. 113; trans. J. E. Bamberger, Kalamazoo, MI, 1981, p. 74. Note 52 on this page discusses the possible meaning of isaggelos. The translation by Sinkewicz is slightly different: ‘Through true prayer a monk becomes equal to the angels, in longing to see the face of the Father who is in heaven’ (Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. R. E. Sinkewicz, Oxford, 2003, p. 205). Sinkewicz notes (283 n. 73) that ‘The monk becomes equal to the angels in the sense that by renouncing the passions of the body and the soul, he lives then according to the mind, and “a predominance of mind” is characteristic of the angels’. Note also that, by a regular phonetic equivalence, Greek –gg- becomes –ng- in Latin, hence Greek aggelos is rendered as Latin angelus. 21 E. Auerbach, Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, London, 1965, reviewed by P. Dronke in The Classical Review, 16, 1966, pp. 362–4. This misleading aspect of Auerbach’s essay is also criticized strongly by C. S. Jaeger, in his Introduction to his edited collection of essays on Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics, New York, 2010, to which Paul Binski contributed an essay that in many ways provided the seed-corn for my own thoughts on the subject. 22 Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Carmina 1417, ‘Aulae sidereae’, lines 67–9 (my translation): Quae mens quae uirtus superum quae facta sophia / in carnem poterit descensum dicere uerbi / carnis et in uerbum sublimia bimata nosse (Carmina Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae, in the Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature database, Brepols (accessed 01 October 2019). I have removed modern punctuation.) For bimata see DMLBS s.v. bema, ‘platform, stage’, citing this verse.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 329

09/07/2021 09:49

3 3 0 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

expressed by St Paul in his letter to the Philippians,23 and though it does indeed involve a change of state (and status), it has naught to do with Cicero’s genera dicendi (or Edmund Burke’s, for that matter).24 It is time to bring these many threads together. My initial question was, Why would a mid- twelfth century English cleric, working with the translation team in Toledo, have rendered the Arabic term taṣʿīd, which signified a chemical process we now call ‘sublimation’, with the Latin forms sublimatur and sublimatio? At that time, the Latin meant simply ‘to be raised up’ in social rank or, when used as a plural noun, as the objective of contemplation, when the mind soars in ardent, aery thought like an eagle over the earth in the high mountains. But the Arabic word meant just ‘to be raised up’, without any religious connotation. Nor, certainly, in Arabic was it used for a particular verbal style. But nor did the Latin word at that time (1144) connote the procedure itself of mental contemplation, nor a style, nor a changed physical state – specifically, as in alchemy, the change from a substance predominantly of earth and water to one predominantly of air (spiritus) through the application of burning fire (which is what Latin ardor literally means). To translate taṣʿīd, Robert could have used the ordinary Latin word elevatus instead of sublimis – both mean ‘raised up’. But in a preface to his translation, Robert comments at length upon this wondrous (admirabile) new Arab science, al-chymia, called by a name unknown to your Latin (nondum vestra cognovit Latinitas). An unknown word needs a definition. Robert writes: ‘Alchymia is a bodily substance con-joining from one (body) by means of another into a more rarified composition through their mutual co-generation and creation, and at the same time naturally [naturaliter] converting from its normal mixture (of elements) into ones with more rarified qualities’ [my emphasis].25 His authority for this definition is ‘Hermes philosophus’, that is, Hermes Trismegistus.26 It seems unlikely that Robert would have known of a religious connotation in the Arabic word, even had there been one.27 In Robert’s Christian world, the closest parallel change of state achieved through a changing mixture of one’s normal bodily composition is the traditional monastic idea of becoming isaggelos, angel-like. And, as we know from Clarembald of Arras, there was a neuro-physical explanation available for how the human mind would become ‘raised up’ as its mental composition becomes less humid earth and more illuminated air. This rarification and raising of thought is achieved through ardent 23 As stated in the Vulgate, formam servi accipiens, in similitudinem hominum factus, et habitu inventus ut homo. Humiliavit semetipsum factus obediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis [‘taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross’] (Philippians 2:7–8). 24 The nineteenth-century Romantic ideal of ‘The Sublime’ and later of ‘Aestheticism’, owes much to sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury alchemical use of the term: see J. Cohn and T. H. Miles, ‘The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis’, Modern Philology 74, 1977, pp. 289–304. 25 Robert of Chester, ‘Praefatio cestrensis’, De Compositione Alchemiae, in Bibliotheca chemica curiosa, ed. J. J. Manget, 2 vols, Geneva 1702, vol. 1, 509; online at Hathi Trust Digital Library, (accessed 01 October 2019): alchymia est substantia corporea ex uno et per unum composita preciosiora ad invicem per cognationem et effectum conjungens et eadem naturali commixtione ingeniis melioribus naturaliter convertens. See also DMLBS s.v. alchimia, b. 26 Trismegistus is the traditional founder of alchemy, though ‘Hermes’ is actually a brief text in Arabic, not an ancient Egyptian god; see Principe, Secrets of Alchemy, pp. 30–33, 218 n. 8, 219 n. 16. In Islamic tradition, Hermes is identified with the prophet Idris (Enoch), and many works in Arabic, collected as ‘Hermetica’, are attributed to him: see K. van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes, Oxford, 2009. 27 In fact there appears not to have been one in Islam – see the articles cited in note 8, above.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 330

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 2 6   |  bec o mi ng l i ke an angel   |   3 3 1

fire, for air and fire are progessively warmer than earth and water. And the hot, fiery element mixing with air also produces light, in terms of weight and also illumination, lux. That is a standard Augustinian and Neoplatonist account of how the mind is raised up through flaming desire for the intellectual work of contemplating the higher things, sublimia. Such ‘seeing’ also confirms one’s belief, and believing is a matter of persuasion. Persuasion is a warming process as well as a rational one, a spiritual movement converting the soul’s feelings and thoughts into confident faith. As the early thirteenth-century rhetoric master Bene of Florence defined the process, your audience is led by persuasion into confident belief ‘as it grows warm from the movements of its minds’.28 To move minds, movere, is the final and grandest motive of an orator, and it is achieved by using a high style, elevatus, altus. At this innocent time, when the Berengar stage of the eucharist controversy was still fresh but appeared resolved, I doubt that Robert thought to signal anything heterodox, let alone heretical, by his translation of taṣʿīd.29 The eucharist and incarnation are of course the two essential doctrines of faith that involve changes of material state, changes that decidedly are not naturaliter. The condemnation that alchemy and its ‘subliming’ process engendered almost immediately in Europe is in part due to the claim that humans could truly achieve a creation that God alone can effect. Clerics concerned about the pastoral confusions such a claim could engender, both among academics and the general populace, quickly drew a firm line to delimit the ‘sublimation’ involved in alchemical process from all other sorts of doctrinal ‘heights’. It is also noteworthy, I think, that in medieval literature and preaching sublimis is overwhelmingly used in the plural to refer to divine matters, well into the fourteenth century. In his narrative of a heavenly journey, Anticlaudianus (ca.1180), Alan of Lille does not use words formed from that root at all, nor does Dante, even in Paradiso. The greatest material expression in the medieval centuries of a humanly crafted High Style is surely what we now call ‘the Gothic’ in architecture – rhetorical magniloquentia magnifacta in stone and glass that is designed to move, lift up, warm, and enlighten peoples’ spirits and minds to contemplate the sublimia of their faith. For this task, its complexity of styles is the instrument, the machine – hoist and engine – for lifting our souls, but it is not in itself Sublime.

28 Bene of Florence, Candelabrum, 8.58.3 (ed. G-C Alessio, Padua, 1983, p. 273): ut concilietur auditor et ad fidem persuasione ducatur, ut animorum motibus incalescat [that an audience may agree and be led to confident belief through persuasion, as it becomes warmed from the movements of minds]. These motus animorum are animated bodily ‘spirits’ channeled through the nervi of the brain, and are what we now call ‘feelings’ and emotions (from ex + motus) embedded in our sensory perceptions. Psychological occurrences had a corporeal dimension in medieval analyses that modern neuroscience is only beginning to re-emphasize. 29 There are many accounts of this eleventh century controversy about the nature of eucharistic change. One might begin with E. J. Kilmartin and R. J. Daly, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, Collegeville, MN, 1998, esp. pp. 97–102. An account stressing aesthetic aspects is A. Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2006).

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 331

09/07/2021 09:49

Treasure, Taxonomy, and Transformation in the Inventories of San Nicola, Bari* Jill Caskey

Item Vas quoddam argentum cum cohopertorio et pede et cum lapidibus pernis et smaltis de opere venetiarum pro reliquiis conservandis From the foundation charter for the capella regis in Bari, Italy, 12961

T

h i s s t r i n g o f wo r d s c o n s t i t u t e s the earliest textual reference to the reliquary of St Sebastian in the treasury of San Nicola in Bari (fig. 1). Although the object’s current name dates from the seventeenth century, when the tall glass cylinder and columnar silver straps were added to hold a fragment of Sebastian’s arm bone, the octagonal base and cover were made just before the charter was written, in the 1280s or early 1290s.2 The vas participates in many of the cultural and political dynamics that Paul Binski has helped discern and interpret, including the mobility of objects and appropriations of Capetian prestige outside the kingdom of France. But the vas, with its well-defined fields of filigree whose vine-like tendrils swirl around small gems, painted parchment, and rock crystal, looks very different from works associated with his heroic Decorated Style, despite their contemporaneity; so does its setting, the basilica constructed to house the remains of St Nicholas after their furta sacra from Myra in 1087. With its expansive crypt, massive round-arched arcades, sculpted portals, and marble furnishings, the church is paradigmatic of Norman architecture in southern Italy (fig. 2). However, the larger context of the vas – an ambitious effort to reshape as French the visual, material, administrative, and liturgical parameters of the venerable pilgrimage church – resounds with Pauline themes. This short essay, along with the larger project from which it derives, testifies to Paul’s mentorship at a formative phase of my studies. The vas is one of forty-five objects listed in the charter of 1296, objects that the Angevin king of Sicily Charles II gifted to San Nicola when he designated the church a capella regis subject to his authority. The king’s initiative did not involve major reconstruction of *

1 2

The research represented here was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Sincere thanks to Gerardo Cioffari, OP, Antonella de Marzo, and Linda Safran for their support in Bari, and to Fernanda Alves and Pedro Ferrão of the Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro for their assistance and expertise in Coimbra. This essay is for Paul, whose brilliance and infectious enthusiasm for medieval art made all the difference decades ago and continue to be inspiring. Bari, Archivio della Basilica di San Nicola (hereafter ABSN), Ang. C9; transcription in Codice Diplomatico Barese (hereafter CDB), vol. 13, Le pergamene di S. Nicola di Bari, Periodo angioino (1266–1309), ed. F. Nitti di Vito, Trani, 1936, pp. 100–01 (doc. 72). The base has seen the most damage and repair; gilt silver foil plaques date from the early modern transformation. Brief discussions in E. Scandale, Lo Scrigno del tesoro di San Nicola di Bari, Bari, 2009, pp. 78–87 (cat. 4); G. Boraccesi, Oreficeria sacra in Puglia tra Medievo e Rinascimento, pp. 30–31; G. Cioffari, Reliquie e reliquiari del Tesoro della Basilica di S. Nicola nella storia, Bari, 1999, p. 38.

[ 3 32]

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 332

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 27 |   t r easur e, taxo no my, and t r ansf o r mat i o n  |   3 3 3

the great church. Rather, the new capella was institutional, built around a collection of liturgical objects, books, lands, and privileges, as well as a governing body appointed by the king. Charles’s overt aims were to express his devotion to St Nicholas and to bolster the prestige of the church, which had languished during Hohenstaufen rule. Many of the gifts deployed his genealogy to enhance San Nicola’s prestige, such as the stole and maniple described as ornamented with gold fleurs-de-lis and castles, the heraldic devices of his uncle Louis IX and grandmother Blanche of Castile.3 Inventories of the Sainte-Chapelle describe vestments in very similar terms, suggesting the Parisian provenance of the textiles gifted to Bari on the eve of Louis’s canonization.4 Although they were presumably a generation old, the heraldic vestments would have injected a modern aesthetic and Capetian presence into the Norman environment and helped mark the liturgical performances they embellished as royal and French.5 Other evidence confirms the king’s abiding concern with liturgical display and performance. He required the observance of the Office of St Louis in 1300, for instance.6 And his francophilia was emphatic in his most detailed intervention into the administration of the chapter of San Nicola, the so-called Constitution of 1304, in which he mandated that the church observe Parisian liturgy.7 San Nicola retained Use of Paris for three hundred years. This study examines the relationship – often strained – between the vas as a subject of textual sources and the vas as a material object. It focuses on the charter’s language quoted above and its reverberations in two fourteenth-century inventories from San Nicola. Despite their impetus to record, these texts are not objective or disinterested; lists have power because they are ‘an abstraction, … a device and a practice, inextricably linked to the list-maker and her cognitive input’, as the literary scholar Eva von Contzen has argued.8 The charter’s terse string of words belies an unstable world teeming with drama. This essay uses the words to animate those dramas. The resulting biography of the vas reveals how the object experienced a veritable identity crisis during its youth. In probing that crisis and the implications of its resolution, my account of the vas also highlights the complexities of medieval taxonomy and the challenges they pose to art historians.

Pro reliquiis conservandis If lists are predicated on a process of evaluation, then it follows that they are ‘not neutral recorders of reality, but, rather, subtle tools and products of socio-political purpose’, as

3 4 5 6 7 8

Item 7, stolam et manipulum, cum liliis et castris de auro. CDB, vol. 13, p. 101 (doc. 72). Inventory B (late thirteenth century), item 19, and 1341 Inventory, item 127. A. Vidier, Le trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle. Inventaires et documents, Paris, 1911, p. 4 and p. 24. J. Caskey, ‘The Look of Liturgy: Identity and ars sacra in Southern Italy’, in Ritual and Space in Medieval Europe, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 21, ed. F. Andrews, Donington, 2011, pp. 108–29; and forthcoming book. CDB, vol. 13, pp. 139–40 (doc. 90). CDB, vol. 13, pp. 196–201 (doc. 133); G. Cioffari, ‘L’Epoca d’oro della Basilica di San Nicola. Carlo I e Carlo II d’Angiò, 1266– 1309’, Nicolaus, Rivista storico-teologia dei PP. Domenicani della Basilica di San Nicola, 1, 2015, pp. 9–142 (at pp. 57–61). E. von Contzen, ‘The Limits of Narration. Lists and Literary History’, Style, 50, 2016, pp. 241–60 (at p. 256).

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 333

09/07/2021 09:49

3 3 4 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

Christina Normore has posited for medieval inventories;9 they require contextualization and invite interpretation. The foundation charter of 1296 was penned at the epicentre of the Angevin court, Castel Nuovo in Naples. It was composed by the highest-ranking administrator in the kingdom, Bartolomeo de Capua, soon after he consolidated his position in the court. He was a member of the royal household and a distinguished jurist who served as lieutenant, chief notary, and other offices at the apex of the royal bureaucracy.10 Bartolomeo’s description of the vas as silver, with a cover and base, with stones, pearls, and enamels, highlights the object’s materiality. Although he selected a deeply generic term to classify the work – vas, or vessel – he took care to specify a more specific function. It was pro reliquiis conservandis, for preserving relics. But it was not yet a reliquary. The textual setting of this modifying phrase inflects its meaning. Bartolomeo’s charter celebrates, enumerates, and secures the donation of the king. Consequently, pro reliquiis conservandis is not a neutral description, but an imperative. The king wanted the vas for the capella because he wanted relics for the capella to enhance its prestige, and, in fact, the vas was the only object listed in the charter that came close to realizing that goal. After 1296, he continued to build the church’s collection by commissioning such sumptuous works as the Crown of Thorns reliquary and processional True Cross, both of which express Charles’s associations with Louis IX, the Grande Châsse, and the Sainte-Chapelle.11 Thus, the charter indicates that the vas must not become something else; it must not become a container for incense, jewelry, or any other holy or profane substance. It must not be melted down, its parts recycled. Significantly, indicating its identity as a reliquary-to-be mattered more than suggesting what relic might be deemed appropriate for it in its new home in Bari. That open-endedness removed some agency from the king and his court and delegated it to San Nicola. Petrus de Angeriacus, a member of the royal household whom the king named treasurer of San Nicola in the capella foundation charter, was now in charge of the object and of overseeing its completion.12 The phrase pro reliquiis conservandis merits additional attention for the three art historical anomalies it reveals. First, when Bartolomeo de Capua penned the charter, this work of art was finished, but incomplete. An essential component was required before it could assume its full identity and perform the role imagined for it at Bari. Such ‘stranded’ or liminal objects – ones that have moved out of workshops but have yet to be completed or used as imagined – rarely register as such in written sources, since medieval art generally was commissioned rather than created for an open market. And rarely are we able to reconstruct with confidence what such works might have looked like before their transformation into something else. Second, the liminal status of the vas complicates what we tend to see and discuss as art historians. Recent studies have emphasized that reliquaries define and legitimate the 9

C. Normore, ‘On the Archival Rhetoric of Inventories. Some Records of the Burgundian Court’, Journal of the History of Collections, 23, 2011, pp. 215–27 (at p. 216). 10 s.v. Bartolomeo de Capua, Dizionario biografico degli italiani (vol. 6), Rome, 1964, retrieved (01 October 2019) from http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bartolomeo-da-capua_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ 11 J. Caskey, ‘Look of Liturgy’, and Cioffari, Reliquie. 12 On Petrus, whose family hailed from Angers, see Cioffari, ‘L’Epoca d’oro’, pp. 68–74, and my forthcoming ‘(Re)Birth of a Seal: Power and Pretense at San Nicola, Bari, ca.1300’, Gesta, 60/1, 2021.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 334

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 27 |   t r easur e, taxo no my, and t r ansf o r mat i o n  |   3 3 5

holiness of the desiccated, mute body parts held within them. ‘The reliquary makes the relic’, as Cynthia Hahn as written; ‘Without the reliquary and “the reliquary effect” to establish value, presentation, and context, the relic could never succeed in capturing the attention required to launch a dynamic of meaning.’13 The incomplete Bari vessel suggests that Hahn’s model could be inverted and maintain much of its validity: the relic makes the reliquary. Without the relic and the ‘relic effect’ to establish value, presentation, and context, the reliquary could never succeed in capturing the attention required to launch a dynamic of meaning. The betwixt-and-between status of the vas in the charter, then, helps magnify the semiotic symbiosis that lies at the heart of Hahn’s compelling formulation. The third art historical anomaly found within the charter’s string of words concerns another aspect of production. Because reliquaries were generally commissioned, they were designed and manufactured by artists who were making key decisions to support and articulate the object’s sacred function and to facilitate veneration of it, whether they were starting from scratch (e.g. the shrine of St Gertrude at Nivelles) or working with spolia (e.g. the Stavelot triptych).14 For the Bari vas, a reliquary function probably did not inform its manufacture, yet nonetheless it ended up being perceived as worthy of the job. As an unmoored vessel, it still possessed qualities that, in Bartolomeo’s eyes, rendered it suitable for becoming a reliquary. Practical concerns and aesthetic judgements likely informed his decision. The vas’s hollow structure meant that it could contain some holy thing, to be sure, and its lid meant that it could be secured with minor adjustments; but the elaborateness and preciosity of that container and lid must have been perceived as beautiful enough for it to become a reliquary, to ‘launch a dynamic of meaning’ without significant reworking.15 Fourteenth-century inventories of San Nicola continue to wrestle with the ambiguous identity of this reliquary-to-be. The authors of the 1313 list, the notary Luca de Tommé and the treasurer Roystaynus de Cadole, Petrus de Angeriacus’s successor, still conceptualized the object as incomplete: the inventory describes it as pro reliquiis ponendis.16 But Luca and Roystaynus also moved from the generic vas classification to the more specific pissidem, or pyx. Derived from the Greek word for boxwood, ‘pyx’ has conveyed since Antiquity the idea of a lidded and often round container. Joseph Braun’s foundational sampler of textual sources demonstrates that pyxes could hold a range of holy substances, including incense, consecrated hosts, or relics; this array of practices prompted medieval writers to specify what a given pyx enclosed.17 Thus, descriptions of pyxes tend to include such modifying phrases as ad eucharstiam, pro sacramentum, and so on, with references to the host predominating in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council.18 By adding the phrase pro reliquiis ponendis to establish and assert the container’s future content, the authors of Bari’s 1313 inventory used the prose convention noted by Braun; however, the imagined contents of their pyx diverged from the eucharistic norm of the late middle ages. Local 13 C. Hahn, The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object, London, 2017, p. 11 and p. 6. 14 E.g. H. D. Bork, ‘Le contrat de la châsse: Texte et transcription’, in Un trésor gothique: La châsse de Nivelles, Paris, 1996, pp. 79–81. 15 Hahn, ‘What Do Reliquaries Do for Relics?’, Numen, 57, 2010, pp. 284–316 (at p. 311); also K. Overbey, ‘Seeing Through Stone: Materiality and Place in a Medieval Scottish Pendant Reliquary’, Res, 65/66, 2014–15, pp. 242–58. 16 Pissidem 1 cohopertam arg. ornatam smaltis et lapidibus pretiosis pro reliquiis ponendis. CDB, vol. 16, Trani, 1941, p. 44 (doc. 23); ABSN Ang. G1. 17 J. Braun, Das christliche Altargerät in seinem Sein und in seiner Entwicklung, Munich, 1932, p. 283. 18 Braun, Das christliche Altargerät, pp. 282–3.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 335

09/07/2021 09:49

3 3 6  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

practices may have informed this shift in taxonomy, as other pyx-reliquaries survive from this era in the region of Apulia.19 By the time the third treasurer of the capella, Guglielmus de Ferraria, authorized the inventory of 1326, the identification of the vas/pyx as a reliquary-to-be had disappeared. The object had not become a reliquary, however, but a tabernaculum.20 Like pyxes, medieval tabernacles contained various holy substances, including relics, thereby potentially fulfilling the initial desires of the now-deceased Bartolomeo.21 But Guglielmus did not mean pyx qua reliquary. His description of the vessel refers to an ymago angelica, the silver angel perched on the top of the lid who unfurls a scroll bearing the inscription HIC EST CORPUS DOMINI (see fig. 1). This striking figure makes its first appearance in Guglielmus’s inventory, suggesting that the figure was added to the vessel’s lid when the object was reconceptualized as a eucharistic tabernacle. By proclaiming the contents of this previously empty vessel and thus fixing its identity for the first time, the angel provides the figural and epigraphic equivalent to the modifying phrases found in Braun’s texts. Thus, Guglielmus’s attention to this feature not only clarifies the new function of the slippery object whose identity had been unstable for decades; it also helps establish an approximate date for a key alteration to the piece, the ymago angelica, which must have been added between 1313 and 1326. The reclassification of the object also shifts the vessel’s meaning. ‘Tabernacle’ is a hallowed Old Testament term, referring to the tent that held the Ark and the Tablets of the Law. Sarah Guérin has illuminated the distinct functional, eschatological, devotional, and ideological valences of the word and its nested containers of the holy.22 Guglielmus’s appropriation of it to classify this holder of a Christian sacred substance was not neutral. The enclosed hosts, equivalent to the body of Christ on Earth, were the new Law, an idea that in the minds of medieval Christians rendered Judaism obsolete. This rhetoric would have been highly charged in the kingdom of Sicily and at San Nicola. The early fourteenth century marks a significant shift in the multicultural dynamics of southern Italy. Linda Safran has established that in earlier centuries, the sustained intermingling of Jews and Christians in the region was facilitated by their proximity within cities and the ease of voluntary ‘boundary crossing.’23 By contrast, the reign of Charles II coincided with the suppression of Christianity’s rival monotheisms, as such royal initiatives as the violent purge of the Muslim colony of Lucera in 1300 and the Dominicans’ concerted attacks on heretics and Jews suggest.24 San Nicola was on the front lines of conversion efforts in 19 E.g. the round gilt copper pyx-reliquary in Lucera, likely dating from the Hohenstaufen period with Angevin modifications; or the twelfth-century round ivory box at San Giacomo, Barletta. G. Boraccesi, Oreficeria sacra in Puglia tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Foggia, 2005, pp. 21–2 and 18 respectively. 20 Tabernaculum unum ad modum coppe copertum de arg deaur … lapidibus et pernis in pede et circumcirca pomum et coperthum et desuper est ymago angelica. CDB, vol. 16, p. 128 (doc. 72); ABSN Ang. I20. 21 It is one of many words used to signal a holder of the host, including ciborium, capsa, and bustia, all of which also required specific language to pin down their contents: Braun, Das christliche Altargerät, p. 289. 22 S. M. Guérin, ‘Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine’, Art Bulletin, 95, 2013, pp. 53–77 (at p. 59); also Hahn, Reliquary Effect, pp. 58–60, 91–2, etc. 23 L. Safran, The Medieval Salento. Art and Identity in Southern Italy, Philadelphia, 2014, pp. 219–23. 24 A. Harper, ‘Patronage in the Re-Christianized Landscape of Angevin Apulia: The Rebuilding of Luceria Sarracenorum into Civitas Sanctae Mariae’, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2014, ch. 1; J. Starr, ‘The Mass Conversion of Jews in Southern Italy (1290–1293)’, Speculum, 21, 1946, pp. 203–211; J. Shatzmiller, ‘Les Angevins et les Juifs de leurs états: Anjou, Naples et Provence’, in L’État angevin. Pouvoir, culture et société entre XIIIe et XIVe siècle, Rome, 1998, pp. 289–300.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 336

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 27 |   t r easur e, taxo no my, and t r ansf o r mat i o n  |   3 3 7

the early fourteenth century; local sources record many gifts from Jewish converts to the church’s treasurers.25 The new identity of the Bari vas as tabernaculum must be read within that context of recent persecution, upheaval, and violence. The precise plan that Bartolomeo de Capua expressed for the Bari vas in 1296 had not been realized thirty years after it was gifted to San Nicola. But the object’s identity as a container of the holy was confirmed and then enhanced through highly charged references to Old Testament prototypes and the addition of the proclaiming angel. Viewed diachronically, the Bari lists illuminate the process of creating meaning: of how the authors of the texts worked with the possibilities offered by the object’s fluid identity; and how they altered the object’s form, shifted, and fixed that identity, thereby expanding its theological and ideological implications. In the course of thirty years, then, the empty vessel was filled. But not with the substance envisioned by Bartolomeo.

Opere Venetiarum The Bari vessel does not look like the Gothic tabernacles of ivory, stone, paint, glass, and metal examined by Sarah Guérin and, indeed, by Paul Binski: those monumental and portable works with detailed and inventive architectural motifs ranging from the rigorous to the riotous.26 Perhaps Guglielmus was conveying its deviation from the Gothic norm when he specified that the Bari tabernacle was ad modum coppe copertum.27 The absence of Gothic motifs on this object made during the heyday of elaborate Gothic tabernacles may be surprising, given that the object was deployed in the king’s ambitious and sustained program of ‘Frenchification’ at San Nicola. Nevertheless, the vas claimed a prestigious lineage, for Bartolomeo described it as Venetian Work. Although he used the Venetian moniker for the vas, two crystal candlesticks, and a mitre, the objects do not appear together as a group in the list. The document creates order and classifies by function, not provenance, technique, material, form, or style. The term Opus Venetiarum has been understood as pertaining to portable objects made in Venice that bear elaborate fields of filigree and granulation. Like most of the opus designations used during the later middle ages, then, Opus Venetiarum refers to a technique and its material basis and assumes the distribution of the work well beyond its place of manufacture. The first known appearance of the term is in Boniface VIII’s 1295 inventory of the papal treasury, composed just one year before the Bari foundation charter. 28 The precise chronology of the particular technique is difficult to pin down, however. It is well known that metalworking flourished in Venice with the influx of precious objects and 25 CDB, vol. 13, pp. 110–11 (doc. 79), 152–3 (doc. 103), 175–7 (doc. 116), etc. 26 Critiques in Italy of ‘Gothic’ forms, including Vasari’s apt maledizzione di tabernacolini, in P. Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350, London, 2014, pp. 344–5. 27 He did not add that phrase to distinguish it from other tabernacles in the treasury, for it is the only one in his inventory. CDB, vol. 16, p. 128 (doc. 72); ABSN Ang. I20. 28 D. Gaborit-Chopin, ‘Venetian Filigree’, in The Treasury of San Marco, New York, 1984, pp. 233–36; É. Molinier, ‘Inventaire du trésor du Saint-Siège sous Boniface VIII (1295)’, Bibliothèque des École des chartes, 43, 1882, pp. 277–310 and pp. 626–46; 45, 1884, pp. 31–57; 46, 1885, pp. 16–64; 47, 1886, pp. 646–67; 49, 1888, pp. 226–37.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 337

09/07/2021 09:49

3 38 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

materials after 1204. In the wake of crusading success, pieces of Byzantine booty were recontextualized with new settings featuring gold, silver, enamel, and other fine metalwork. These objects helped define a Venetian aesthetic that merged old and new, although the look preceded and outlasted the city’s crusader interlude.29 Emblematic of this high-quality workmanship are the gorgeous composite objects in the treasury of San Marco, several of which are enlivened with Opus Venetiarum filigree.30 The sardonyx cruet and the rock crystal vessel (Tesoro nos 81 and 99) are but a few that display intricate patterns of swirling gold filigree and inset materials. Similarities between the rock crystal vessel and Bari vessel are particularly strong, as seen in their use of coils to break complex surfaces into fields of filigree vine scrolls (figs 3 and 4). Such works confirm that the Opus Venetiarum designation for the vas is apt and underscore the intellectual processes behind list-making and taxonomy. Bartolomeo de Capua must have had access to specialized and up-to-date knowledge about artistic techniques and trends. He possessed what Erik Inglis has called ‘art historical imagination’, the ability of an author of an inventory-like text to identify salient technical and formal characteristics of a work of art and to render them in prose.31 In fact, Bartolomeo’s sensitivity to the vas as an object enabled the Bari gifts to play a prominent role in establishing the basic chronologies and morphologies of Opus Venetiarum.32

Lapidibus pernis et smaltis Other words in Bartolomeo’s terse description call into question his visual literacy. The charter describes the vessel as having stones, pearls, and enamels. Recent analyses of the incrustations have identified seventeen garnets, four emeralds, and thirteen sapphires, but no pearls.33 On the lid, however, white and red beads of chalcedony form cross-like shapes. Perhaps Bartolomeo misidentified the milky spheres of this quartz-like mineral.34 The limits of Bartolomeo’s visual literacy are clearer in his reference to enamels. Like the pearls, they, too, are absent from the vessel’s body and lid. He seems to have mistaken painted parchment for enamel: the roundels with bright blue birds on the lid and the lobes that alternate with fields of filigree on the base. The apparent discrepancy between object qua subject of a written text and object qua object causes methodological problems, to be sure, but it also creates opportunities. In this case, the details that eluded Bartolomeo’s eye can help widen our perspective on this class of objects and the scholarship on it. It 29 S. Gerevini, ‘The Grotto of the Virgin in San Marco: Artistic Reuse and Cultural Identity in Medieval Venice’, Gesta 53, 2014, pp. 197–220. 30 Salient studies of Venetian Work include H. R. Hahnloser, ‘Scola et artes cristellariorum de Venecii 1284–1319: Opus Veneticum ad filum’, in Venezia e l’Europa, Venice, 1956, pp. 157–65; D. Gaborit-Chopin, ‘Venetian Filigree.’ 31  E. Inglis, ‘Expertise, Artifacts, and Time in the 1534 Inventory of the St-Denis Treasury’, Art Bulletin, 98, 2016, pp. 14–42. 32 Gaborit-Chopin, ‘Venetian Filigree.’ 33 Scandale, Lo Scrigno, p. 80. 34 Although it is possible that pearls were removed when the vessel was transformed to hold Sebastian’s arm bone, or that the chalcedony spheres date from that later phase (they are on the heavily reworked seam between body and lid), it is telling that Roystaynus and Guglielmus did not mention pearls.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 338

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 27 |   t r easur e, taxo no my, and t r ansf o r mat i o n  |   3 39

is striking that Bartolomeo’s error (which Roystaynus repeated in 1313) anticipates the judgements of some early art historians, who considered the parchment on Venetian Work to be a cheap imitation of enamel, a ‘surrogate’, an effort to ‘reproduce as far as possible the impression of the costly Byzantine cloisonné’.35 In other words, the parchment did what it was supposed to do on the Bari vessel: it looked like enamel and tricked the highly educated and worldly Bartolomeo. Although the paintings on the vas do not evoke Byzantine cloisonné, the roundels with bright blue birds closely resemble such Western enamel designs as the hybrid beasts on the crosier of Bernard d’Angers, Bishop of Atri and Penne. This work of the early fourteenth century has been attributed to the French and Italian goldsmiths employed at Castel Nuovo in Naples, the same workshop established by Charles II that was busy making reliquaries for San Nicola after 1296 (fig. 5).36 Even if the pieces of painted parchment bear some resemblance to enamelwork, they are not merely a cheap alternative lacking their own agency, ideology, or capacity for expression. In medieval art, the imitative should not be denigrated, but evaluated on its own terms. The parchment pieces on the base of the Bari vessel, with their web of delicate gold foliage, seem to have been painted to resemble filigree. They play and contrast with the three-dimensional metalwork around them, and their painted petals match in colour, size, and distribution the gems set within the neighboring filigree. The parchment pieces take their cue, then, from the signature feature of Venetian Work. The rock crystal pieces placed on top of them play a role as well, for they magnify the painted fields while reflecting light.37 They also carry meaning, since rock crystal was understood as frozen water of the purest kind and thus bore theological associations that made it an ideal companion to the holy.38 The imitation enamel hypothesis, which seems to dismiss this use of painted parchment as if it were unfit for the sumptuous arts of Venice, could use revision. Other objects in this class attest that painted parchment under rock crystal is worthy of consorting with its more elite peers. The Bari vessel is one of the first examples of Opus Venetiarum to incorporate paintings on parchment. Early fourteenth-century examples vary in their size, complexity, and imagery.39 Some are large multimedia ensembles in which parchment pieces painted with figures and ornament contrast and converse with surrounding sculptures, metalwork, and gems (e.g. the triptych of Alba Fucens), while in others, paintings provide clear focal points (e.g. a processional cross likely from San Francesco, Pisa).40 An example of the latter is the two-sided processional cross of Queen Isabel of Portugal (d. 1336), the daughter of Peter III of Aragon and Costanza 35 W. F. Volbach, ‘Venetian-Byzantine Works of Art in Rome’, Art Bulletin, 29, 1947, pp. 86–94 (at p. 92). 36 Now in the Museo Capitolare in Atri. See Ori, argenti, gemme e smalti della Napoli angioina 1266–1381, ed. P. Leone de Castris, Naples, 2014, pp. 96–101. 37 E.g. G. Kornbluth, ‘Active Optics: Carolingian Rock Crystal on Medieval Reliquaries’, Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art, 4, 2014, pp. 1–36. 38 E.g. S. Gerevini, ‘Christus crystallus. Rock Crystal, Theology and Materiality in the Medieval West’, in Matter of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Study of Relics and Relic Veneration in the Medieval Period, ed. J. Robinson and L. de Beer with A. Harden, London, 2014, pp. 92–9. 39 A. Neff, ‘Miniatori e “arte dei cristallari” a Venezia nella seconda metà del Duecento’, Arte Veneta, 45, 1993, pp. 5–19; P. Toesca, ‘Quelques miniatures venitiennes du XIVe siècle’, Scriptorium, 1, 1946, pp. 70–74. 40 For Alba Fucens, see Toesca, ‘Quelques miniatures’; for Pisa, see S. Gerevini, ‘“Sicut crystallus quando est obiecta soli”: Rock Crystal, Transparency, and the Franciscan Order’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 56, 2015, pp. 255–84 (at p. 262); and Cimabue a Pisa. La pittura pisana del Duecento da Giunta a Giotto, ed. M. Burresi and A. Caleca, Pisa, 2005, pp. 224–5.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 339

09/07/2021 09:49

3 40 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

Hohenstaufen.41 It features paintings on parchment at the centre of a rock crystal cross – large pieces of animal skin displayed in the place of the body of Christ. One face of the cross depicts the Crucifixion, and the other, the Dormition of the Virgin (fig. 6). The paintings occupy the gilded intersection of four pieces of purity materialized, rock crystal, whose transformative qualities were seen as analogous to the Incarnation and whose transparency appealed to Franciscan ideals.42 The meanings of the materials thus reinforce the remarkable iconography, which pairs Jesus’s death with Mary’s and places her demise on the cross. These ideas must have suited Isabel’s attitudes about female devotion in the Clarissan convent she founded and joined in Coimbra. To some degree, the Coimbra cross supports the interpretation of Opus Venetiarum parchment paintings as imitative. The use of the twisted rope motif for the metal frame, gold leaf for the backgrounds, and rows of tiny pearls as contrasting framing devices suggest an intentional reference to Byzantine cloisonné. The enamels on the rim of the sardonyx chalice of the emperor Romanos in the treasury of San Marco, likely dating to circa 960, have similar compositions and coloristic effects. But to see the Coimbra paintings as merely imitative is to underestimate their complexity and to gloss over their material and theological meanings, exquisite narrative details, and liturgical overtones. For instance, on the Coimbra cross, the tiny brushstrokes that delineate red patterns on Christ’s pale loincloth draw attention to the adjacent wounds and spilling blood; similar red designs appear on the draped linens of Mary’s altar-like bed, which in turn supports the two red pillows on which she lies. These miniature representations of the son’s redemptive wounds and their echoes on his mother’s deathbed – where they create allusions to blood without bloodshed – are magnified by the rock crystal overlays, which help bind the two sides of the cross into a coherent material and iconographic whole. The Coimbra cross demonstrates that parchment paintings in Venetian Work have imitative qualities, but that the imitative should not be denigrated, dismissed, or seen as incompatible with Venice’s skillful and sumptuous portable arts. Although the objects in Bari and Coimbra look very different, both indicate the range of roles that painted parchment under rock crystal could play, from shaping and holding disparate materials together to creating ornamental and iconographical patterns that unify a complex and composite object – all while exploring and developing the unique capacities of paint. They also testify to the many forms of expertise in late thirteenth-century Venetian art and to careful collaboration and coordination within the city’s multimedia workshops. To conclude, I return to Bartolomeo’s string of words and their reverberations in the fourteenth century. Despite the importance Bartolomeo placed on classifying the Bari vas as Opus Venetiarum, the vessel’s distinguished lineage failed to register after 1296. The inventories of 1313 and 1326 do not mention its birthplace. Where it came from 41 She is also known as Elizabeth. Coimbra, Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro, no. 6040 (23 × 11.4 in): discussed in 100 anos 100 obras, ed. A. Alcoforado, Coimbra, 2013, p. 177; H. R. Hahnloser and S. Brugger-Koch, Corpus der Hartsteinschliffe des 12.–15. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1985, pp. 123–4 (cat. 133); A. M. S. A. Rodrigues, ‘The Treasures and Foundations of Isabel, Beatriz, Elisenda, and Leonor: The Art Patronage of Four Iberian Queens in the Fourteenth Century’, in Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. T. Martin, Leiden, 2012, vol. 2, pp. 903–35; also Gerevini, ‘Sicut crystallus’, p. 266. 42 Gerevini, ‘Christus crystallus’, and Gerevini, ‘Sicut crystallus.’

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 340

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 27 |   t r easur e, taxo no my, and t r ansf o r mat i o n  |   3 41

was no longer germane; what mattered was the role it played its new home. This shift in taxonomic priorities merits attention for two reasons. First, the disappearance of Opus Venetiarum indicates that the art forms associated with the moniker were no longer prized; thus, the inventories serve as a reminder that Venetian Work, like other late medieval Opus phenomena, was short-lived, predicated on demand, distribution, and recognizability across vast stretches of space – but, critically, not necessarily across vast stretches of time. Second, the fourteenth-century lists tend to move away from emphasizing place as the provenance of objects. Instead, the inventories increasingly highlight place as an attribute of people: whence came benefactors, devotees, and patrons.43 As gifts to the treasury multiplied after 1296, inventories of the collection highlighted how the objects materialized the geographical range of the faithful. In some ways, then, the vas’s status in the medieval lists and the taxonomic practices they divulge bring us full circle: from the famous but declining Norman pilgrimage centre to the ambitious foundation of the royal capella and back to an institution whose appeal depended not on the sumptuosity of Angevin benefaction, but on the presence of the charismatic St Nicholas, whose miracles continue to bring comfort and joy.

Fig. 1. Reliquary of St Sebastian, 1280s to early 1290s, with later additions, 19 × 6.7 in., Treasury of San Nicola, Bari. Photo: Beppe Gernone

43 My larger project, currently entitled Person, Place, Thing, probes these issues at Bari and competing pilgrimage sites in the kingdom of Sicily.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 341

09/07/2021 09:49

3 42 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

Fig. 2. Nave of San Nicola, Bari. Photo: author

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 342

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 27 |  t r easur e, taxo no my, and t r ansf o r mat i o n  |   3 43

Fig. 3. Detail of base, Reliquary of St Sebastian, 1280s to early 1290s, Treasury of San Nicola, Bari . Photo: author

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 343

09/07/2021 09:49

3 44 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

Fig. 4. Rock crystal vessel, tenth century and second half of the thirteenth century, 19.2 × 6.7 in., Treasury of San Marco, Venice. Photo: Scala/Art Resource

Fig. 5. Atri crozier, early fourteenth century, Museo Capitolare, Atri. Photo: Gino di Paolo

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 344

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 27 |   t r easur e, taxo no my, and t r ansf o r mat i o n  |   3 45

Fig. 6. Crucifixion and Dormition, Cross of Isabel of Portugal, Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro, Coimbra, early fourteenth century. Photo: author

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 345

09/07/2021 09:49

Mining Mount Tabor: the Schauinsland Window at the Minster of Freiburg im Breisgau Lucy Donkin

H

igh above the ground in the Minster of Freiburg im Breisgau is a window that brings the thoughts of the viewer back down to earth (fig. 1).1 The composition is dominated by three standing figures: Christ flanked by St John the Evangelist and St Peter. However, the particular appeal of the window lies beneath their feet, where three small figures of miners are shown at work.2 Each is depicted in an individual excavated space under one of the grassy mounds on which Christ and the apostles stand. The window provides a striking cross-section through the ground, differentiating between an inner layer of ore and the surrounding rock. Dated to the 1340s, it substantially predates other early subterranean cross-sections, which start to appear with more regularity in the sixteenth century in the context of illustrating aspects of the mining process. However, the focus of the present essay is not so much the visual access into subterranean space that the window affords as the relationship between Christ and the miners that is thereby visualized. Where the early modern examples show activities above and below ground in the same place, the Freiburg window offers a more complex combination of locations and moments in time. An inscription below the miners identifies the window as the gift of the managers of Schauinsland, a nearby silver mining mountain, while the main scene has been seen to show the Transfiguration. There is thus a sense in which Schauinsland is elided with Mount Tabor.3 More specifically, the window represents a spatial and temporal configuration articulated around the surface of the ground, in which the subterranean belongs to the present and the local, while the space above ground is biblical. My essay focuses on the position of the miners beneath Christ’s feet, asking what this meant for the figures of the miners and how it informed the scene above. It compares this to the proximity to the holy enjoyed by donors and artists in other windows, as well as that experienced by the bodies of the dead underneath the church pavement. It then relates the composition

1 2 3

R. Becksmann, Die mittelalterlichen Glasmalereien in Freiburg im Breisgau, 2 vols, Berlin, 2010, vol. 1, pp. 343–52. Work focusing on the presence of the miners includes R. Slotta and C. Bartels, Meisterwerke bergbaulicher Kunst vom 13. bis 19. Jahrhundert, Bochum, 1990, pp. 374–7. Noted in A. Volfing, ‘Du bist den Rin herabe geflossen: Topographical Metaphors and Interior Geography in the Sermons of Johannes Tauler’, in Schreiben und Lesen in der Stadt: Literaturbetrieb im spätmittelalterlichen Straßburg, ed. S. Mossman, N. F. Palmer and F. Heinzer, Berlin, 2012, pp. 17–28 (at p. 22).

[ 3 46 ]

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 346

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 28   |  mi ni ng mo unt tab o r   |   3 47

to conceptions of the ground trodden by Christ, before finally addressing the choice of biblical event. First, though, it is necessary to pause on the main subject of the window. As noted above, this is usually understood as the Transfiguration, when Christ went with Peter, John and James to a high mountain, identified as Mount Tabor during the middle ages. As he prayed, he was transfigured, his face shining like the sun and his garment as white as snow, and he was seen speaking with Moses and Elijah. The identification was suggested by Fritz Geiges, who reassembled the window in the early twentieth century, on the grounds that Christ’s light-coloured mantle and raised hands were typical of images of the Transfiguration.4 He was followed by Ingeborg Krummer-Schroth and by Rüdiger Becksmann in his Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi volume on the Minster glass.5 However, this reading is complicated by the fact that Christ is flanked by Peter and John, rather than by the conventional figures of Moses and Elijah. Moreover, the disciples are holding their attributes and James is omitted, which Geiges and Becksmann put down to the structure of the three-light window. They also noted a tradition of showing Christ flanked by his companions with the prophets as busts in the clouds and proposed that Moses and Elijah would have been depicted in the quatrefoils, for which no medieval glass survived. Becksmann pointed to a 1509 design for a stained-glass window from Strasbourg which might have been inspired by the window in Freiburg.6 However, earlier instances can be found in other media, suggesting a wider tradition that could have influenced both representations. For example, a historiated initial in a fourteenth-century bible historiale from St-Omer shows Christ on a mound, with the disciples at his feet and the heads of the prophets surrounded by clouds in the sky.7 Perhaps more pertinently still for the Schauinsland window, it was also possible to show the Transfiguration without including the prophets. This seems to have been more likely where the episode was not part of a straightforward narrative sequence of scenes from the life of Christ. In an early fourteenth-century manuscript of Jean de Vignay’s translation of the Speculum historiale by Vincent of Beauvais, which describes the Transfiguration before the disciples but does not mention Moses and Elijah, Christ hovers in mid-air, the disciples kneel below, and the prophets are not shown.8 Much the same arrangement of figures is found in an illustration of the mountain where Christ was transfigured in a late fourteenth-century manuscript of Mandeville’s Travels.9 Yet it was also possible for less conventional arrangements to feature in cycles following the biblical narrative. In the early-thirteenth-century prayer book known as the Cursus sanctae Mariae, which may have been produced in Bamberg, a series of scenes from the Old and New Testaments

4

F. Geiges, Der mittelalterliche Fensterschmuck des Freiburger Münsters, Schau-ins-Land, 56–60, 1931–3, pp. 257–63. The postmedieval history of the window is discussed in D. Parello, Von Helmle bis Geiges. Ein Jahrhundert historistischer Glasmalerei in Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2000, pp. 30, 68–9, 180 n. 111; I. Krummer-Schroth, Glasmalereien aus dem Freiburger Münster, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1967, p. 167 n. 64. 5 Krummer-Schroth, Glasmalereien, p. 121; Becksmann, Mittelalterlichen Glasmalereien, p. 346. 6 R. Becksmann, ‘Scheibenriss mit Verklärung Christi auf dem Berge Tabor’, in Hans Baldung Grien in Freiburg, ed. S. Durian-Ress and U. Söding, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2001, pp. 226–7; Becksmann, Mittelalterlichen Glasmalereien, p. 346 n. 356. 7 Paris, BNF, ms fr. 152, f. 407. 8 Paris, BNF, ms. fr. 316, f. 338 (1333–4). Vincent of Beauvais, Miroir historial, 8.25, trans. Jean de Vignay, Paris, 1531, f. 200. 9 Paris, BNF, ms. nouv. acq. fr. 4515, f. 34 (1371).

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 347

09/07/2021 09:49

3 48 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

includes the Transfiguration (‘he v[er]wandelte sich got vf dem berge’) (fig. 2).10 Christ is marked out by his central position, greater stature, rayed halo and blessing gesture, but the ground beneath him is only marginally raised and he is almost on a level with the four haloed figures beside him. Three are clean-shaven and one is bearded, presumably Peter, suggesting that all are apostles; certainly elsewhere in the manuscript Moses is shown with horns.11 There are also examples in which St Peter is shown with his attribute. A late fourteenth-century manuscript of the Miroir historial has Christ on a mound flanked by James and John, while Peter stands to one side holding a key (fig. 3).12 This degree of flexibility supports the premise that the window was intended to represent the Transfiguration and would have been recognisable as such to contemporaries. Moreover, while the window departs in several respects from the conventional configuration of Transfiguration scenes, it also acknowledges this iconographic tradition precisely through adapting it to include the mining elements. Flanking Christ with Peter and John leaves the space usually occupied by the disciples for the three miners. Of course, the disciples are above ground whereas the miners are beneath it. Nevertheless, where the former are shown kneeling or falling down in awe they can remain below the horizon line, lessening the distinction between figures in front of the mountain and those within it. Although the miners do not look up to witness the Transfiguration, the disciples themselves cast their eyes to the ground when God speaks. The fact that the position of the miners echoes that generally assigned to the disciples heightens the sense in which the former are present at the event. The spatial relationship between the miners and Christ, Peter and John is distinctive and unusual. It is close to, but not the same as, that in which donors or petitioners kneel at the feet of a saint. There the donors essentially occupy the same space as the saint but at a lower level, expressive of humility, reproducing an interaction that could be experienced in reality between people of differing statuses. In the Minster itself, this dynamic can be found in the near contemporary Tulenhaupt window (fig. 4), in which two donors kneel to either side of a saint identified as St Andrew or St Philip. Although they are far smaller in scale, their knees rest on the same surface as the feet of the saint, and while their bodies are largely confined by the uprights of the decorative frame, their hands holding scrolls cross over into the central space. In composition, the Schauinsland window is closer to an arrangement in which donors occupy a separate space directly beneath the main figures. Here, however, the proximity of the figures exists only within the framework of the representation and does not correspond to a disposition of people in real space, making the symbolic or spiritual nature of the association visually apparent. This is found, for example, in a window from Blumenstein in the canton of Bern from around 1300 in which the founder of the church is shown directly beneath St Margaret, who is herself standing on 10 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.739, f. 21v; M. Harrsen, Cursus Sanctae Mariae: A Thirteenth-Century Manuscript, now M. 739 in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1937. On the association with Bamberg see, M. Stolz, ‘Das Experiment einer volkssprachigen Bilderbibel im mitteleuropäischen Kontext der Zeit nach 1200. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 739’, in Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters in und über Böhmen II: Tagung in České Budĕjovice/Budweis 2002, ed. V. Bok and H.-J. Behr, Hamburg, 2004, pp. 9–45. 11 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.739, ff. 15–16. 12 Paris, BNF, ms. nouv. acq. fr. 15940, f. 47 (1370–80).

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 348

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 28   |  mi ni ng mo unt tab o r   |   3 49

a dragon.13 It is even clearer in a window of St Christopher illustrated by Geiges and dated by him to the end of the thirteenth century, where a donor is surrounded by an individual architectural frame beneath the feet of the saint.14 In the Schauinsland window, the miners occupy the same position, but their proximity to the figures above them corresponds with real space because they are shown below ground, and more specifically below the very ground on which Christ, Peter and John stand. In this respect they also differ from miners shown in the Tulenhaupt window, who are rendered similarly in terms of their immediate setting, and are also placed at the bottom of the window, but are shown in panels that do not relate spatially or thematically to the narrative scenes above them. The proximity to Christ and the saints enjoyed by the miners in the Schauinsland window is a result of their subterranean work and, in that sense, it is an exclusive relationship. However, it can be paralleled with a configuration of bodies found elsewhere in the church environment: the dead buried beneath the pavement and the living walking above them. This burial position might result from renouncing vertical prominence in the form of a raised tomb in exchange for horizontal proximity to the holiest places of the church. 15 However, it was also valued for its own sake: displaying praiseworthy humility, prompting commemoration, and achieving a vertical proximity to the sacred. Renate Kroos notes that German wills often employ the formula ‘über das Grab gehen’, citing a late thirteenthcentury request by a Strasbourg testator for a chaplain to walk over his grave: ‘zur wochen zeimmal uber min grab gange’.16 Similarly, in the early thirteenth century, a layman made a bequest to the chapter of Burgos cathedral on condition that a funerary Mass be said daily for himself and his wife, stipulating that the cleric should exit walking over his tomb.17 Some later English testators asked to be positioned directly under the celebration of the Eucharist. Indeed, Henry Burnell asked to be buried half under the altar of Sherborne abbey ‘so that the Mynesters of Crist that shall sey masses ther may stond upon my body whiles they shall mynester the blyssed sacrament of our Lordes body’.18 In the window the miners achieve this vertical chain of contact with the Lord’s body directly. If people were capable of imagining themselves below ground, beneath the feet of priests and others, after death, how much more so might miners, who experienced the subterranean in life, have visualized what was taking place on the surface, and even travelled in their imagination to other times and locations. Equally, the testamentary evidence also suggests a framework within which other viewers could identify with the miners in the window. This is supported by a broader correspondence drawn between miners’ descent into the ground and the experience of death. In a widespread miracle story a miner is trapped below ground for a year and thought to be dead. During this time he is sustained by the offerings made by his wife for the good of his soul, only suffering want briefly when she forgets. A version of the miracle is found in Peter the Venerable’s De miraculis, which 13 Geiges, Mittelalterliche Fensterschmuck, p. 93, fig. 263. 14 Ibid., p. 166, fig. 405. The author identifies the glass as belonging to the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. 15 P. Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, London, 1996. 16 R. Kroos, ‘Grabbräuche – Grabbilder’, in Memoria, Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, ed. K. Schmid and J. Wollasch, Munich, 1984, pp. 285–353 (at p. 326); A. Schulte, ed., Urkundenbuch der Stadt Strassburg, Bd 3: Privatrechtliche Urkunden und Amtslisten von 1266 bis 1332, Strasbourg, 1884, pp. 13–14 (no. 39). 17 J. M. Garrido Garrido, Documentación de la catedral de Burgos (1184–1222), Burgos, 1983, pp. 314–15 (doc. 496). 18 Somerset Medieval Wills (1383–1500), ed. F. W. Weaver, London, 1901, pp. 290–93.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 349

09/07/2021 09:49

3 50 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

places the episode in an iron mine near Grenoble.19 The dark space in which the miner is imprisoned is compared to a tomb and his situation described as a living death. His wife has a Mass said for him weekly and, together with offerings of candles and bread, this keeps the miner fed and his subterranean prison lit until he is rescued. The one week in which the wife forgets, the miner is tormented by hunger and the dark. In the thirteenth century, Caesarius of Heisterbach placed a similar event in a silver mine at Wanebach in the diocese of Trèves.20 In this case, the wife could not afford to pay for Masses, but burnt incense daily before the altar and the miner was sustained by a perfume. The point of the miracles is to illustrate the efficacy of prayers and offerings for the souls of the dead. Indeed, the novice in Caesarius’ Dialogue on Miracles notes: ‘If spiritual offices conferred on souls thus benefit bodies, I suppose they can do as much for those lying in punishment.’ Nevertheless, the result is to equate the subterranean spaces of mining with those of purgatory and the grave. The trapped miner is also found in later penitential literature, including William of Waddington’s late thirteenth-century Manuel de pechiez and the early fourteenth-century translation and adaptation by Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne.21 Here it comes in a series of exempla concerning the Eucharist and the miner’s wife offers bread and wine. It features alongside two exempla in which Masses release men from purgatory and another in which they release a man from prison, implying that Masses can assist both the dead and the living.22 These connections between the subterranean experience of the miner and souls in purgatory strengthen the possibility that the figures in the window resonated not only with those who spent time below ground in life. The position of the miners in the Schauinsland window should also be seen in the light of the associations of the ground trodden by Christ. The Holy Land was venerated as the land where Christ had walked, often in terms of Psalm 131: ‘We shall worship in the place where His feet have stood’. Pilgrims saw themselves as realising these words and the phrase is echoed in the early thirteenth-century Palästinalied of Walther von der Vogelweide, in which he rejoices in having ‘come to the place that God trod as a man’.23 Stones from places trodden by Christ and other biblical figures were treated as relics, and while relics of the site of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor were never as popular as those of Calvary or the Mount of Olives, they are attested in collections throughout the middle ages. Examples are listed among the relics of St Riquier in the eighth century, the Sancta Sanctorum in the twelfth century, and Glastonbury in the fourteenth.24 The

19 Peter the Venerable, De miraculis libri duo, ed. D. Bouthillier, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 83, Turnhout, 1988, pp. 100–02; G. Schreiber, Der Bergbau in Geschichte, Ethos und Sakralkultur, Cologne, 1962, pp. 295–7. 20 Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, 10.52, trans. H. von E. Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols, London, 1929, vol. 2, pp. 213–14. 21 William of Waddington, Manuel des pechizez, lines 7613–72, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng synne, A.D. 1303: with those parts of the Anglo-French treatise on which it was founded, William of Wadington’s Manuel des pechiez, 2 vols, Early English Text Society 123, London, 1901–03, vol. 2, pp. 333–4; Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, lines 10733–806, ed. I. Sullens, Robert Mannyng of Brunne: Handlyng Synne, Binghamton, NY, 1983, pp. 267–9. 22 J. Garrison, Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature, Columbus, 2017, p. 35 n. 48. 23 Walther von der Vogelweide, Sprüche, Lieder, der Leich, ed. and trans. P. Stapf, Berlin, 1963, pp. 464–7 (no. 171). 24 Angilbert, De ecclesia Centulensi libellus, 2, ed. G. Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica SS 15.1, Hannover, 1887, pp. 175–6; Descriptio Lateranensis ecclesiae, ed. R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Codice topografico della città di Roma, 4 vols, Rome, 1940–53, vol. 3, pp. 319–73 (at p. 358); J. P. Carley and M. Howley, ‘Relics at Glastonbury in the Fourteenth Century: an Annotated Edition of British Library Cotton Titus D.vii fols. 2r–13v’, Arthurian Literature, 16, 1998, pp. 83–129 (at p. 95).

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 350

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 28   |  mi ni ng mo unt tabo r   |   3 5 1

1482 inventory of the Guelph Treasure from Brunswick cathedral not only describes relics ‘broken from the rock on which the Lord Jesus appeared to his disciples on Mount Tabor’, but unusually credits the place with impressions of a hand and foot.25 The reference to a handprint suggests that the impressions were seen to reflect the presence of the disciples as much as Christ himself, since it is the former who fall to the ground. From one perspective, then, the ground within which the miners are shown is holy, and their proximity to the feet of Christ, Peter and John is also a proximity to the form of contact that made it so. That this was valued is also implied by a panel from a mid-twelfth-century window in which the artist Gerlachus is shown beneath a representation of Moses and the Burning Bush (fig. 5).26 The place where Moses was standing was identified by God as terra sancta and it too generated environmental relics. The artist is shown, painting the very window in which he is depicted, in an arched niche that cuts into the ground of the scene above. The inner border corresponds to that of the main scene, giving the two spaces a certain unity. Yet however significant the association with holy ground to the inclusion of the artist, he is not meant to be understood as standing within it; indeed the fact he is shown painting the window emphasizes the artifice of the conjunction of figures. The Schauinsland window, in contrast, presents the illusion that the miners are actually located within holy ground; the subterranean nature of their work is harnessed to provide an even closer engagement with terra sancta. At the same time, the fact that the miners are shown at work suggests a more complex spatial arrangement than simply the insertion of figures into a biblical landscape. Instead, there is a sense in which the biblical scene above ground merges with a local landscape below ground, eliding Mount Tabor with Schauinsland. Associations could be drawn between topographical features in the Holy Land and western Europe in various circumstances. Around the time the window was made, Ludolf von Sudheim compared Mount Tabor to a hill called Desenberg near Paderborn, part of a wider tendency for travellers to see unfamiliar places through the lens of previous experiences.27 Sites could also be linked for devotional and liturgical reasons, with local hills standing in for the Mount of Olives in Palm Sunday processions.28 In the case of the window, the connection could partly have been inspired by the importance given to the material properties of the two mountains. At the very least, the effect of the combination of scenes and places is to associate the ground of Mount Tabor, which could be taken away, venerated as a relic and placed in precious metal reliquaries, with the silver ore that the miners are shown excavating. While the latter ultimately paid for the window, it may also signal the spiritual preciousness of the substance of the Holy Land. Certainly ore would be used to represent holy ground, including Mount Tabor, later in the middle ages. A reliquary in Cardinal Albrecht’s collection at Halle in Saxony-Anhalt, 25 A. Boockmann, Die verlorenen Teile des ‘Welfenschatzes’: Eine Übersicht anhand des Reliquienverzeichnisses von 1482 der Stiftskirche St. Blasius in Braunschweig, Göttingen, 1997, p. 127. 26 Ornamenta ecclesiae: Kunst und Künstler der Romanik, 3 vols, Cologne, 1985, vol. 1, pp. 258–9. 27 A. Stewart, trans., Ludolph von Suchem’s Description of the Holy Land and of the Way Thither, Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society 12, London, 1895, pp. 125–6. 28 C. Wright, ‘The Palm Sunday Procession in Medieval Chartres’, in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, ed. M. E. Fassler and R. A. Baltzer, Oxford, 2000, pp. 344–71 (at p. 346).

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 351

09/07/2021 09:49

3 52 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

now lost, showed the Transfiguration, with Christ surrounded by rays of light between busts of Moses and Elijah and the apostles crouching at his feet (fig. 6). It is described in the printed Heiltumsbuch of 1520 as made of silver and silver ore, the latter evidently used for the rocky ground.29 The reliquary contained various environmental relics, including stones from the Mount of Olives, but not one of the Transfiguration itself, almost as if the un-worked ore stood in for this. It may also have depicted figures from beyond the Bible, since the illuminated manuscript of the Heiltumsbuch shows three men with pack animals ascending the mountain.30 However, while they might represent pilgrims or more generic figures, their camel places them clearly in the East. Closer to the window therefore are compositions known as Handsteine, miniature landscapes of metal ore that combined biblical scenes above with mining scenes on the slopes.31 As with environmental relics, Calvary and the Mount of Olives were particularly popular. The earliest to survive date from the mid-sixteenth century and they reflect a wider fascination with divine and human manipulation of material in the period. Nevertheless, together with the reliquary, they suggest that the miners beneath Christ’s feet in the Schauinsland window are not simply located within holy ground but also draw attention to its status. If this could apply to any place trodden by Christ, the choice of the Transfiguration was likely prompted by a particular resonance between this event and the experience of mining. One is dominated by illumination, with Matthew’s gospel comparing Christ’s clothing and face to light and its ultimate natural source, the sun. This aspect of the Transfiguration was explored in biblical commentaries and evoked though dialogue, costume and props in dramatic renditions.32 Mining, meanwhile, is and was characterized by an absence of sunlight and a paucity of light more generally. For example, Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortune, composed between 1354 and 1366, described gold miners as working ‘in the dark, without sky or sun’ and contrasted the ‘blessed light of heaven’ with the ‘black horror of the pit’.33 Already in the version of the mining miracle given by Peter the Venerable, the darkness in which the miner finds himself is stressed and the candles offered by his wife light the space. To include miners in a depiction of the Transfiguration was to involve them in an even more miraculous illumination and the event in Christ’s life that spoke most clearly to the conditions of their work. It was also to emphasize the force and supernatural quality of this moment of heavenly illumination, as well, perhaps, as the capacity of the light of Christ more generally to extend into subterranean space. It was particularly appropriate subject matter for a stained-glass window that was itself rendered visible by daylight. Although the miners have candles, this may further highlight the theme of illumination, since candles are absent from the mining scenes in the Tulenhaupt window.

29 Vortzeichnus und zceigung des hochlobwirdigen Heiligthumbs der Stifftkirchen der heiligen Sanct Moritz und Marien Magdalenen zu Halle, Halle, 1520, ff. 21v–22. 30 Aschaffenburg, Hofbibliothek, MS 14, f. 95v. 31 Slotta and Bartels, Meisterwerke, pp. 562–88. 32 L. R. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 117, 237 n. 28; A. Stevens, Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama: 1400–1642, Edinburgh, 2013, pp. 21–47. 33 Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortune, 1.54: De inventione aurifodine, ed. and trans. C. Carraud, Les remèdes aux deux fortunes. De remediis utriusque fortune. 1354–1366, 2 vols, Grenoble, 2002, vol. 1, pp. 266–8; Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul: A Modern English Translation of De remediis utriusque fortune, trans. C. H. Rawski, 5 vols, Bloomington, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 165–8.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 352

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 28   |  mi ni ng mo unt tabo r   |   3 53

The inclusion of the subterranean also reflects connections drawn between the Transfiguration and the Resurrection.34 Present in the Bible through Christ’s warning to the disciples not to mention what they had seen until he had risen from the dead, it was developed further in theological and devotional writing, and included the idea that those in hell were represented at the Transfiguration by Moses. This is found, for example, in the twelfth-century Glossa ordinaria, the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), and Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Jesu Christi of c.1370, which treats the Transfiguration at length. Here the light of the Transfiguration signifies the glory of the Resurrection, in which the faithful could also share, and when Christ talks with Moses and Elijah about what will happen in Jerusalem, he speaks of the Passion that will redeem humankind.35 In dramatic renditions of the Transfiguration, the subterranean realms of limbo and hell are characterized as places of darkness, which contrasts with the light of the Transfiguration but is also ultimately dispelled by it. In a thirteenth-century Perugian lauda, Moses speaks for the souls in hell, who are in a state of ‘dura scuritade’ waiting for Christ to illuminate them through his charity.36 Similarly, in the Passion of Jean Michel (1486), Moses describes the souls in limbo as dwelling in ‘lieux tenebreux’.37 In the York plays, moreover, an explicit connection is made between the Transfiguration and the Harrowing of Hell.38 In the Transfiguration play, Moses expresses the desire of those in hell to see this sight and identifies Christ as the one who shall draw them from ‘that dongeoun’.39 Subsequently, in the Harrowing, Christ’s approach is described in terms of light, which Moses identifies as that which he had experienced at the Transfiguration and takes as a sign that they will all soon be released from pain.40 That the light of the Transfiguration could be understood to extend ultimately to those in hell is of significance for the inclusion of the subterranean in the window, especially given the miracle tradition associating miners with souls in purgatory. It supports the idea that the Transfiguration offered consolation during life and hope for ultimate salvation to those who worked underground. In a similar manner, in the sixteenth century, a Lutheran pastor in the Saxon mining town of Eisleben would preach that descending miners could take comfort from Christ’s Harrowing of Hell, which had not only despatched death and the devil but also hallowed the lowest reaches of the earth.41 At the same time, these associations of the Transfiguration suggest a further way in which other viewers might perceive the miners in the window as experiencing what they themselves might expect and hope to encounter after death. In conclusion, through their position underfoot, the miners in the Schauinsland window are placed within holy ground as witnesses to a moment of divine illumination. Their presence works to enrich the meaning of the scene above by signalling the preciousness 34 E. Reiss, ‘The Tradition of Moses in the Underworld and the York Plays of the Transfiguration and Harrowing’, Mediaevalia: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 5, 1979, pp. 141–64. 35 Ludolph of Saxony, Vita Jesu Christi, ed. L. M. Rigollot, 4 vols, Paris, 1878, vol. 3, pp. 16–23. 36 Laude drammatiche e rappresentazioni sacre, ed. V. de Bartholomaeis, 3 vols, Florence, 1943, vol. 1, p. 122. 37 Jean Michel, Le mystère de la Passion (Angers 1486), ed. O. Jodogne, Gembloux, 1959, p. 127 (line 9438). 38 Reiss, ‘Tradition of Moses’; Stevens, Inventions, pp. 21–47. 39 The York Corpus Christi Plays, ed. C. Davidson, Kalamazoo, MI, 2011, pp. 158–9. 40 Ibid., p. 314. 41 Cyriakus Spangenberg, Theander Lutherus, Ursel, 1589, f. 338; S. R. Boettcher, ‘The Rhetoric of “Seelsorge” for Miners in the Sermons of Cyriakus Spangenberg’, in Frömmigkeit, Theologie, Frömmigkeitstheologie: Contributions to European Church History: Festschrift für Berndt Hamm zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. G. Litz, H. Munzert, and R. Liebenberg, Leiden, 2005, pp. 453–66.

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 353

09/07/2021 09:49

3 54 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

of that ground and the power of that illumination. Their pictured proximity to the Transfiguration bears a relationship to real space not enjoyed by donors and artists in other images. It equally transcends the experience of pilgrims to the Holy Land, who came into contact with the material setting of Christ’s life but were divorced from it in time. An imagined presence at the Transfiguration had particular significance for those who spent their working life in the dark. Yet other viewers too could have identified with the figures of the miners. Not only could a position beneath the sacred be desired more generally in death, but their capacity to stand for souls in purgatory suggests that they brought to mind the understanding that the Transfiguration anticipated Christ’s Harrowing of Hell and Resurrection, and thus the resurrection of all the dead.

Fig. 1. Schauinsland Window, nave clerestory, Freiburg in Breisgau Minster, 1340s. Photograph: Raphael Toussaint, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Deutschland

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 354

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 28   |  mi ni ng mo unt tabo r   |   3 55 Fig. 2. Transfiguration, Cursus sanctae Mariae, Bamberg or Bohemia/Moravia, thirteenth century. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.739, f. 21v. By kind permission of The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

Fig. 3. Transfiguration, Miroir historial, 1370–80. Paris, BNF, ms. nouv. acq. fr. 15940, f. 47. By kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 355

09/07/2021 09:49

3 56  | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

above: Fig. 4. Bottom part of the Tulenhaupt Window, nave, Freiburg in Breisgau Minster, c.1335. Photograph: Wolf Christian von der Muelbe, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Deutschland

left: Fig. 5. Moses and the Burning Bush, with artist Gerlachus, detail of a stained-glass window from the abbey of Arnstein, twelfth century. Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Inv. No. L-1002 LG. Photograph: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c005388

right: Fig. 6. Reliquary with scene of the Transfiguration, Hallesches Heiltumsbuch, c.1526. Aschaffenburg, Hofbibliothek, MS 14, f. 95v. By kind permission of the Hofbibliothek Aschaffenburg

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 356

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 28   |  mi ni ng mo unt tabo r   |   3 5 7

7132 25-28 Binski new size v6.indd 357

09/07/2021 09:49

The Ecclesiastical Textiles of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester* Kate Heard

F

or a figure so prom i n e n t in the life and politics of fifteenth-century Europe, surprisingly little evidence survives for the material world of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (fig. 1). The fourth son of Henry IV and Mary Bohun, and youngest brother of Henry V, Humphrey acted as protector of England during his nephew Henry VI’s minority. An attempt to establish himself in a position of power on the European mainland saw him contract a marriage with Jacqueline of Hainaut in 1422, a potentially bigamous union which was annulled in 1428. In England, Humphrey was involved in a protracted and heated dispute with his half-uncle Cardinal Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, which, as one contemporary noted, threatened to ‘putte this londe in aventure with a felde’.1 All these assertions of power, as protector, husband and rival, would surely require a visual statement of magnificence to reflect Humphrey’s status. But little evidence of such a display survives: his palace and hunting park ‘La Placentia’ at Greenwich have been replaced by the Royal Naval College, and his central London residence of Baynard’s Castle was largely destroyed by the Great Fire of London.2 Humphrey died in custody after being arrested in Bury St Edmunds in 1447 and, apparently, did not leave a will; no inventory of his goods appears to have been taken after his death.3 Indeed, the fate of his possessions is unclear – as late as 1455, a petition from his creditors in Parliament noted that those who had been given the responsibility of administering Humphrey’s goods had *

1 2

3

It is a pleasure to contribute to this volume as an expression of my thanks to Paul Binski for his help, guidance and encouragement as my PhD supervisor. I am enormously grateful to him for many thought-provoking conversations, which shaped my approach to the medieval world and to research more broadly. This essay considers a figure who lurked in the wings of my doctoral research, but never had a speaking part. It seemed appropriate finally to shine a spotlight on him in this collection which pays tribute to Paul’s role both as mentor and scholar. K. H. Vickers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. A Biography, London, 1907; see also G. L. Harriss, ‘Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The quotation is from The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley, London, 1938, p. 137. Humphrey’s residences are discussed in Vickers, Humphrey, pp. 444–5. For cloth found in excavations of Baynard’s Castle see E. Crowfoot, F. Pritchard and K. Staniland, Medieval Finds from Excavations in London 4: Textiles and Clothing 1150–1450, 2nd edn, Woodbridge, 2001. The majority of these, however, date from the late fourteenth century and none can be connected with Humphrey. For the contemporary dispute over the existence of a will, see Vickers, Humphrey, pp. 442–3. Archbishop Stafford’s register (D. Blair Foss, The Canterbury Architepiscopates of John Stafford (1443–52) and John Kemp (1452–54) with editions of their registers, PhD dissertation, University of London, 1986, no. 959) includes the commission to administer Humphrey’s goods, but Foss notes that, unlike a parallel case, no inventory was requested.

[ 3 58]

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 358

09/07/2021 09:48

c h a pt e r 29 | the eccles iastical t ext i l es o f humphr ey, d uke o f gl o uc est er   |   3 5 9

failed to act, and requested that they be compelled to do so.4 It seems that the manner of Humphrey’s death, either by its complications or the administrators’ lack of action, saw his estate left in limbo.5 Yet something can be gleaned from the scant surviving evidence. Studies of Humphrey’s library have shown the importance of his book collection, which was drawn from across Europe, and demonstrates the duke’s enthusiasm for humanist scholars and texts.6 Importantly, careful work to trace surviving books owned by Humphrey has discovered that these have been widely distributed, providing evidence for the unsystematic nature of the administration of his goods.7 We know a little, too, of Humphrey’s devotional life: papal grants of 1431–2 gave the duke and his second wife Eleanor Cobham permission to celebrate Mass before daybreak, have a portable altar, celebrate Mass privately in places under interdict and receive plenary remission of sins from a confessor.8 In 1446, just before his death, Humphrey’s chaplains were given permission to hold other benefices while serving him; the large size of his ecclesiastical household is recorded in this papal grant, which makes provision for twelve chaplains serving in his chapel, and eight others in his service.9 We know the names of some of these chaplains, who included Robert Nesewik, perpetual vicar of Reculver (who was granted permission to hold multiple benefices) John Ardingworth (imprisoned for adultery with a married woman in October 1429) and Piers Hoton (who sued one Thomas Hardewyn for damage to his property as priest of Belgrave in Lincolnshire).10 A month after Humphrey’s death, the Provost and Fellows of Eton College and King’s College Cambridge petitioned John Stafford, archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, claiming that as ‘newe growyne Colages’, they lacked ‘Bokes for divine service & for ye Libraries, Vestments, & other conveniences’, and asking for ‘ferste choise of such books, ornam[en]ts &c’ from Humphrey’s estate.11 Although, as ecclesiastical and educational institutions, it might be expected that books and ecclesiastical textiles would be of particular use to the colleges (and Oxford was also chasing Humphrey’s books), the appeal suggests 4

TNA, SC8/28/1389: see under ‘Henry VI: July 1455’, in British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/ parliament-rolls-medieval/july-1455 (appendix, no. 18) (accessed 21 September 2019). (Printed in Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. C. Given-Wilson, et al., Woodbridge, 2005.) 5 A study of the dispersal of Humphrey’s goods can be found in D. Rundle, ‘Habits of Manuscript-Collecting: The Dispersals of the Library of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester’ in Lost Libraries. The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity, ed. J. Raven, Basingstoke, 2004, pp. 106–24. Rundle notes that John Somerset, one of the administrators of Humphrey’s goods, may have been responsible for the ‘underhand activities’ which saw the duke’s library dispersed widely. In 1452, Somerset was thanked by the University of Oxford for a gift of silk and gold vestments: while it is tempting to wonder if these might have been from Humphrey’s vestry, there is no way of determining if this is the case and certainly Somserset made his own gifts to Oxford as well as being responsible for the administration of Humphrey’s estate: Epistolae Academicae Oxon, ed. H. Anstey, Oxford, 1898, p. 313 and passim. 6 R. Weiss, Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century, Oxford, 1941; Rundle, ‘Habits of Manuscript-Collecting’. 7 Rundle, ‘Habits of Manuscript-Collecting’. 8 See Calendar of Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Volume 8, 1427–1447, ed. J. A. Twemlow, London, 1909, pp. 353–66. Others granted this privilege at the same time included John Rochester ‘nobleman’ and his wife, Sir Thomas Strickland and his wife, Richard Jevecok of York and his wife and a number of clergymen. 9 Calendar of Papal Registers: Volume 9, 1431–1447, ed. J. A. Twemlow, London, 1912, pp. 557­–65. 10 Calendar of Papal Registers: Volume 9, pp. 557­–65. For Ardingworth see London Metropolitan Archives COL/CC/01/01/002/126; for Hoton, TNA C1/2/16. 11 BL Add. MS 4840, f. 75v (a later compilation of copies of contemporary documents relating to Eton). Humphrey died on 23 February 1447, the petition is dated 21 March of the same year. It is transcribed in G. Williams, ‘Ecclesiastical Vestments, Books, and Furniture, in the Collegiate Church of King’s College, Cambridge, in the Fifteenth Century’, Ecclesiologist, 20, 1859, pp. 304–15; 21, 1861, pp. 1–7. Williams’s valuable article discusses the request for Humphrey’s vestments (which he regards as the foundation of the college’s collection) and provides transcriptions of a number of the key documents and inventories.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 359

09/07/2021 09:48

3 60 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

that both Humphrey’s prized library and his vestments were considered of sufficient quality to be covetable. This essay, prompted by the 1447 petition, seeks to examine what evidence survives for Humphrey’s ecclesiastical textiles. The disparate and incomplete nature of the documentation means that the conclusions given here can only be tentative, but it is hoped that this initial assessment can offer a basis for further research. The best example of ecclesiastical textiles associated with Humphrey is provided by a list of his donations to St Albans abbey in 1436, which were recorded by John Whethamstede. St Albans was particularly favoured by Humphrey and the magnificence of his gift is demonstrated by the inclusion of a silver-gilt altarpiece, with an image of the Virgin and Child flanked by musical angels with various figures in the base and, at the top, enamelled figures of Mary and John the Evangelist with the Crucifixion. This was so sumptuous that at the dissolution of the abbey, it was ‘Reservyd for the Kynge’ rather than sold.12 The textiles which accompanied this altarpiece included both vestments and altar furnishings and are worth listing in full: a frontal and dossal of cloth of gold, embroidered with diverse images in opere plumario13 and decorated with pearls, with accompanying sets of Mass vestments, and a matching cope; another frontal, also of cloth of gold, embroidered (again in opere plumario and decorated with pearls) with the Holy Spirit and diverse other saints; a cope of cloth of gold embroidered with the baptism of Christ and other (again unspecified) saints; a set of Mass vestments with five matching copes, all of red velvet, the orphreys embroiderd in opere plumario, and the orphreys of the chasuble and tunicles sewn with pearls; a cope of gold damask; a set of Mass vestments with three copes and a corporal with a case of white satin sewn with a sun and roses in the centre and decorated with opere plumario; two lengths of red cloth of Cyprus gold woven with a pattern of roots and leaves, and scattered with golden falcons; six lengths of red cloth of Cyprus gold, again woven with roots and leaves and powdered with golden lions; and seven lengths of purple cloth of gold woven with a pattern of leopards and ducks. Although depleted, it is clear that some of these textiles (like the altarpiece) remained in the abbey at the dissolution, when sets of Mass vestments and copes in cloth of gold decorated with small pearls and ‘an alter [sic.] cloth of gold purple with a frynge to the same’, probably made from some of the lengths of such fabric donated by Humphrey, were ‘reserved for the kyng’s highnes’.14 Can anything be deduced about Humphrey from his gifts to St Albans? The images recorded on the frontals were probably chosen for their eucharistic significance rather than for any personal inclination and cannot be taken as indication of any devotional preferences. Instead, the textiles primarily advertise the duke’s status through the sumptuous nature of the materials: cloth of gold and damask, pearls, the use of labour12 Annales monasterii S. Albani, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series 28.5, 2 vols, London, 1870–71, vol. 2, p. 190 (Humphrey’s donation is listed on pp. 186–91). M. E. C. Walcott, ‘Inventory of the Abbey Church of St. Alban, Herts, Temp Henry VIII’, The Reliquary: Quarterly Archaeological Journal and Review, July 1873, pp. 21–7 (at p. 26, where it is described as ‘a fayre alter table of sylver gilte enamelld’). 13 The meaning of various embroidery terms used in medieval documents is difficult to determine, since so few textiles survive. For a discussion of the problem and a suggestion of some definitions see E. Coatsworth, ‘Opus What? The Textual History of Medieval Embroidery Terms and Their Relationship to the Surviving Embroideries c.800–1400’ in Textiles, Text, Intertext. Essays in Honour of Gale R. Owen-Crocker, ed. M. Clegg Hyer and J. Frederick, Woodbridge, 2016, pp. 43–68. Coatsworth suggests (p. 58) ‘at least tentatively that opus plumarium was used, or at some stage became used, to describe embroidery which uses shading in colours and contouring...to convey modelling or colour effects’. 14 Walcott, ‘Inventory’.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 360

09/07/2021 09:48

c h a pt e r 29 | the eccles iastical t ext i l es o f humphr ey, d uke o f gl o uc est er   |   3 61

intensive embroidery. The nature of Humphrey’s donations to St Albans may go further than a wish to broadcast magnificence, however. His great-uncle Thomas of Woodstock, the previous duke of Gloucester, who had been murdered in 1397, had also presented textiles to the abbey: a cloth of gold to carry before the feretory of St Alban in procession and lengths of red cloth of gold woven with swans in circles, which had been used to make four copes, with orphreys of blue velvet with angels of gold.15 It is tempting to wonder if Humphrey had been shown these sumptuous gifts on a visit to St Albans and had responded by making his own gift of cloth of gold vestments and fabrics. If so, his use of textiles here demonstrates his consciousness of his inheritance as duke of Gloucester, an awareness perhaps paralleled in his books, which were inscribed with an ex libris which echoed that used by (among others) Thomas of Woodstock.16 It is possible too that, like Thomas of Woodstock’s gift, Humphrey’s textiles bore a subtle personal association. Woodstock’s cloth of gold was decorated with swans, a badge by which he was commonly known.17 Humphrey’s donations bore leopards and ducks, lions and falcons. Some of these badges are found on other textiles commissioned by Humphrey which are recorded in a wardrobe account of September 1424 and August 1426.18 Although this document, a list of payments made by the keeper of the duke’s wardrobe, John Burdet, to the tailor Walter Wassher relates to secular clothing, it includes payments for pieces decorated with leopards and fleurs de lys, and with lions and fleurs de lys.19 The donation by Woodstock of cloth decorated with swans and by Humphrey of cloth decorated with leopards and lions may suggest that such fabrics, although imported from long distances and unlikely to be made to order, could be chosen for the heraldic associations of their woven decoration.20 The source of the cloth Humphrey donated to St Albans is unrecorded, but the views of the alien hosts taken in the early 1440s record that he paid the Venetian merchants Leonardo, Tommaso and Giulio Contarini and Geronimo Barbarigo £9 for ten lengths of double tartarin in 1440–41 and Lorenzo Marcanova, Giovanni Mannucci and Jacopo Trotti (also of Venice) £107 13s. 4d. for seventeen lengths of gold-embroidered brocade in 1441–2; he probably obtained the St Albans fabric by a similar route.21 15 Riley, Annales, vol. 2, p. 335, quoting an inventory of St Albans of the reign of Henry IV (processional cloth); p. 344 (copes made from Woodstock’s cloth of gold). The copes are described in the dissolution inventory as described as ‘ii Copes and Vestment with albes to the same and ij tunicles chequered with gold swannes garnysshed with ragge perls’ (Walcott, ‘Inventory’, p. 23). These copes were reserved for Henry VIII rather than sold. We know a great deal about the ecclesiastical textiles owned by Thomas of Woodstock, which were listed in a detailed inventory of Pleshy castle taken after his death, for which see Viscount Dillon and W. H. St John Hope, ‘Inventory of the Goods and Chattels belonging to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, and seized in his Castle at Pleshy, Co. Essex, 21 Richard 11 (1397)’, The Archaeological Journal, 54, 1897, pp. 275–308. These include a number of vestments decorated with swans. 16 Rundle, ‘Habits of Manuscript-Collecting’, p. 109. 17 A. Wagner, ‘The Swan Badge and the Swan Knight’, Archaeologia, 97, 1959, pp. 127–38. 18 TNA, E101/624/45; the document is badly rubbed and there are losses. An interesting episode, discussed by Matthew Davies, is Humphrey’s close connections to the guild of tailors: M. P. Davies, ‘The Tailors of London and their Guild, c. 1300–1500’, PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 1994; also L. Rhymer, ‘Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and the City of London’, in Rule, Redemption and Representations in Late Medieval England and France, ed. L. Clark, Woodbridge, 2008, pp. 47–58. 19 Humphrey’s heraldic badges see Vickers, Humphrey, pp. 452–5 and M. P. Siddons, Heraldic Badges in England and Wales, 3 vols, Woodbridge 2009, particularly vol. 2.1, p. 12. I am very grateful to Jenny Stratford for the latter reference and for her helpful comments on this paper. 20 Lisa Monnas provides an invaluable close analysis of the trade of such fabrics in ‘Silk Cloths Purchased for the Great Wardrobe of the Kings of England, 1325–1462’, in Ancient and Medieval Textiles. Studies in Honour of Donald King, ed. L. Monnas and H. Granger-Taylor, Textile History special issue, 20, 1987, pp. 285–307. 21 H. Bradley, The Views of the Hosts of Alien Merchants 1440–44, London Record Society, 2012, p. 12 (brocade) and p. 43 (tartarin). For a discussion of the terms used in description of fabrics see Monnas, ‘Silk Cloths Purchased for the Great Wardrobe’.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 361

09/07/2021 09:48

3 62 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

If Humphrey’s donations to St Albans featured his heraldic badges in the ground of the fabric another solitary record of a vestment shows a different approach. Among the legacies in his will of 1435, John Clitherowe, bishop of Bangor, left a set of Mass vestments and three copes made of red cloth of gold, and bearing the arms of the duke of Gloucester.22 Clitherowe’s relationship to Humphrey is unknown: he had studied at Oxford, and served as a Chancery clerk as well as attending the Church councils at Pisa, Constance and Basel.23 He therefore had a number of opportunities to encounter Humphrey, or may even have been an unrecorded member of Humphrey’s household establishment. The arms on Clitherowe’s vestments were undoubtedly embroidered rather than woven, and his testament may therefore provide evidence that Humphrey was commissioning vestments embroidered with his arms. The use of embroidered arms or badges on vestments was extremely common by the early fifteenth century; Humphrey’s brother John, duke of Bedford, had commissioned in excess of two thousand such motifs, to be applied to both ecclesiastical and secular textiles, while the inventory of Henry V’s goods taken after his death included 219 ‘garters with silk letters’, valued at 2d. each.24 Clitherowe’s will shows that he owned of a set of Mass vestments with Gloucester’s arms before Humphrey’s death and these were therefore not acquired by him as a result of any posthumous disposal of the duke’s goods. This may suggest such vestments were commissioned by Humphrey for use as gifts to members of his household staff or those of whom he was a patron, although no other instances have yet been traced. If this is the case, it is notable that such vestments were still made from the expensive cloth of gold used for the textiles that Humphrey donated to St Albans. What, then, of the ecclesiastical textiles for which King’s and Eton colleges petitioned the king in 1447? Although a number of inventories survive for the vestments at King’s and Eton before the Reformation, Humphrey is not identified as the source of individual items in any of these. This is unlikely to be a careless omission – where donors are listed, it is for textiles which it would otherwise not be possible to connect with a particular individual. So, a set of white and green vestments are noted as being ‘of the gyft of Busshop West’, since the colours alone would not denote these as being presented by Nicholas West, bishop of Ely and alumnus of both colleges.25 Where personal badges are used, it seems that the inventory compilers did not think it necessary to include the source of the vestments. At a distance of five hundred years, however, it is very difficult to identify Humphrey as a source of any of the items listed in the King’s and Eton inventories. As a member of the royal family, he used the same fleurs de lys, antelopes and lions as his father, brothers and nephew.26 And as royal foundations, King’s and Eton adopted these badges too. Two 22 The Register of Henry Chichele, 1414–43, ed. E. F. Jacob, 4 vols, Canterbury and York Society 42, 45–7, Oxford, 1937–47, vol. 2, p. 532. 23 A. B. Emden, Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to 1500, 3 vols, Oxford, 1957, vol. 1, p. 444. 24 J. Stratford, The Bedford Inventories: The Worldly Goods of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France (1389–1435), London, 1993, p. 83. For Henry V’s post-mortem inventory see under is ‘Henry VI: October 1423’, in British History Online http://www.british-history. ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rolls-medieval/october-1423 (accessed 01 October 2019). (Printed in Parliament Rolls, ed. GivenWilson et al.) 25 Kings College Archives KCA/687, f. 38. His donations of ecclesiastical textiles to Eton College (listed in Eton College, Coll. Inv. 8, f. 8v) are of the same colours. I am very grateful to Dr Patricia McGuire at King’s College Cambridge and Dr Lucy Gwynn and her colleagues at Eton College for their help in enabling me to consult the documents in their care. 26 Siddons Heraldic Badges, vol. 2.1, pp. 46–7.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 362

09/07/2021 09:48

c h a pt e r 29 | the eccles iastical t ext i l es o f humphr ey, d uke o f gl o uc est er   |   3 63

blue copes recorded at King’s in 1529 and described as decorated with ‘antlops and these wordes Diew et mon Droit and wt brome branches rychely ymbroyderd’, for example, were among those purchased by John Langton for the college, the imagery of Henry VI (who used the motto and two antelope supporters) clearly selected not to denote a royal donor for the copes, but to reflect the college’s status as Henry VI’s foundation.27 Apart from Lancastrian royal symbols, it is tempting to wonder if the vestments bearing clouds, hands and daisies found at King’s came from Humphrey’s household, since pots of daisies are found prominently on the duke’s tomb at St Albans and were apparently on his (lost) garter plate stall at St George’s Windsor.28 This connection, however, cannot be proved in any way, and the combination of the daisies with what seem to be badges of the hand of God cannot be paralleled in any of Humphrey’s recorded heraldic displays. One textile recorded at King’s College, however, seems to have Humphrey as its source. This is a canopy, described in the various inventories as ‘a cloth of estate to bere over the sacrament of reed clooth of gold with grehondes’ (1453), ‘the costly canapie of red cloth of bawdkyn wth greyhowndes and hyndes of golde’ (1529) and ‘a canabie of redde sylke bawdkyn embrotheryd wth grewndes & hartes’ (1554).29 This canopy bore both Humphrey’s supporters of the greyhound and the antelope, and was made from the red cloth of gold that he appears to have favoured.30 The 1554 inventory makes clear that the badges were embroidered rather than woven into the fabric. But was this cloth among the goods seized from Humphrey’s estate after his death or was it an earlier donation to the foundation that was so closely linked with the Lancastrian royal family? The latter seems just as likely as the former, and the presence of the canopy, although clearly connected to Humphrey, is no indication that the college’s petition for his church ornaments was granted. None of these tentative conclusions is surprising and yet they all provide a further way into Humphrey’s material and visual world. In closing, how does this compare to the textile acquisitions of his peers? Those of his older brother, John, duke of Bedford have been well-served by a study of the duke’s possessions, and provide an interesting comparison.31 Bedford’s impressive vestments, listed in the posthumous inventories of his possessions, were largely drawn from the French royal collection, of which he had taken control in his capacity as regent of France. Many of these had been owned by Charles V, and were therefore some decades old when acquired by Bedford. In appropriating the contents of the French royal vestries, Bedford equipped himself with ecclesiastical textiles which he could 27 King’s College Archives KCA/687, f. 40. The list of vestments purchased by Langton is Kings College Archives KCA/345. Antelopes were an established badge of the Lancastrian kings on vestments: both Henry IV and Henry V had donated copes embroidered with antelopes to Westminster Abbey: M. E. C. Walcott, ‘The Inventories of Westminster Abbey at the Dissolution’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 4, 1871, pp. 313–64 (at p. 329). 28 See, for example King’s College Archives, KCA/687 (transcription of inventory of 1529), f. 38. T. D. Kendrick suggested that the badges on the tomb are Gardens of Adonis, but comparison with contemporary manuscripts such as the Litlyngton Missal (of the mid-1380s; in which daisies appear throughout the borders) suggests that the traditional identification of the flowers as daisies is more convincing: see T. D. Kendrick, ‘Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and the Gardens of Adonis’, The Antiquaries Journal, 26, 1946, pp. 118–22; also Siddons Heraldic Badges, vol. 2.1, p. 117 29 Williams, ‘Ecclesiastical Vestments’, p. 313; King’s College Archives KCA/687 (transcription of inventory of 1529), f. 45; King’s College Archives KCA/687 (transcription of inventory of 1554), f. 84. 30 For Humphrey’s use of a greyhound supporter, see Siddons Heraldic Badges, vol. 2.1, p. 129, quoting BL MS Lansdowne 874, f. 113v. 31 Stratford, Bedford Inventories, passim and especially the material beginning on p. 73, on which the present paragraph is based.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 363

09/07/2021 09:48

3 64 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

use to reinforce his personal status and his position as regent. Although Bedford used his own badges on vestments, he was also content to acquire those with the heraldry of others: one set of red samite vestments in his inventory bore the arms of an unidentified bishop.32 Many of Bedford’s ecclesiastical textiles passed after his death to his half-uncle and executor, Cardinal Beaufort, although whether Beaufort held these temporarily in his capacity as an administrator of Bedford’s will or retained them for his own use is unclear.33 Indeed, only one set of vestments owned by Beaufort is noted in the cardinal’s will of 1446.34 These pieces, described by the cardinal as ‘my vestment embroidered, which I bought of Hugh Dyke’ were bequeathed to Winchester cathedral, for the sole use of the bishop of Winchester, or any other priest ‘who may officiate in the presence of the King, Queen, and King’s eldest son’.35 The Reformation inventory of Winchester describes the vestments as ‘One Cope of Needle-work, wrought with Gold and Pearls’ and ‘One Chysible, two Tymasyles [tunicles], and parel of the Albes of the same Work, of my Lord Cardinal Beauford’s Gift’.36 Although the information in the Winchester inventory is sparse, other entries specify the fabric of each vestment, and the ‘cope of needle-work’ and accompanying vestments (also described by Beaufort as ‘embroidered’) may have been sewn all over in or nue work of the kind that was being produced in the Low Countries at this time.37 If so, Dyke, a leading London embroiderer and mercer, may have been the vendor rather than the maker of this vestment.38 The well-travelled Beaufort, who had visited Flanders in 1427, may thus have asserted his status through a costly set of imported vestments, which he distinguished further by restricting their use to the bishop and those officiating before the immediate royal family. Humphrey’s focus, it seems, was not on limiting use like Beaufort, but on employing textiles to spread his influence: he made gifts of vestments and cloth to St Albans, and possibly also to private individuals (although only one example of such a vestment has so far been uncovered – is it a unique case?), and may also have donated a canopy with his supporters to King’s College in Cambridge, which was founded shortly before his death. His choice of gifts may have shown an awareness of those of the previous duke of Gloucester, Thomas of Woodstock, and the majority of his recorded ecclesiastical textiles are of cloth of gold. This is not in itself unusual, but it may be notable that the set of vestments owned by John Clitherowe, and presumably presented to him by the duke, were also of this expensive fabric. Some of Humphrey’s textiles were embroidered with his badges: it might be that these were used on pieces which were to be donated to other individuals or 32 Ibid., no. B10. 33 Ibid., pp. 47–8. 34 N. H. Nicholas, Testamenta Vetusta, being Illustrations from Wills of Manners, Customs, &c ... from the Reign of Henry the Second to the Accession of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols, London, 1826, vol. 1, p. 250. Two codicils to the will are dated April 1447. 35 ‘Vestment’ here refers to a set of vestments. 36 J. Stevens, The History of the Antient Abbeys, Monasteries, Hospitals, Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, being two additional volumes to Sir William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, London 1722, p. 223: ‘An Inventory of the Cathedral Church of St Swithin in Winchester, as it was given in by the Prior and Convent to Cromwell Secretary of State, and the King’s Vicar General over all Spiritual Men’. 37 The most famous surviving examples of such work are the vestments of the Order of the Golden Fleece made in the Netherlands and now in the Imperial Treasury, Vienna. 38 For Dyke see Stratford, Bedford Inventories, pp. 409­­–10, where the possibility that Dyke also supplied vestments to Bedford is discussed; A. F. Sutton, The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods and People, 1130–1578, Aldershot, 2005, pp. 204–05; G. L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort: A Study of Lancastrian Ascendancy and Decline, Oxford, 1988.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 364

09/07/2021 09:48

c h a pt e r 29 | the eccles iastical t ext i l es o f humphr ey, d uke o f gl o uc est er   |   3 65

institutions rather than used in his own private chapel – if so, any of his textiles awarded posthumously to King’s or Eton would not bear his arms and be even more difficult to identify. If Humphrey did not have the opportunity like Bedford and Beaufort (as Bedford’s executor), to acquire ecclesiastical textiles from an existing and particularly splendid collection, there is some indication that his significant ecclesiastical establishment was furnished with textiles of sufficient quality to make them as attractive as his fine library to those seeking to benefit after his death. If such glimpses of Humphrey’s material world are fleeting, they nonetheless speak of a magnificence of a man who sought to assert his role as son, brother and uncle of kings.

Fig. 1 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, at prayer, from his book of psalms, litanies and prayers. BL Royal MS 2. B. I, f. 8. © The British Library Board.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 365

09/07/2021 09:48

Why Study Miraculous Images? Robert Maniura

M

i r ac u l o u s i m ag e s h av e b e c o m e a n i n c r e a s i n g f o c u s of study in recent years.1 Yet already in 2004, André Vauchez, noting the contributions of Richard Trexler and David Freedberg, had mused that one might legitimately wonder if there were anything new left to say on the subject.2 What can be gained from this continued exploration? My work to date having concentrated on this very area, I am, perhaps, in a position to offer some observations on it. I suggest that images associated with miracles are invaluable disruptors which prompt us to reconsider the aims of our discipline. My exploration began with the study of the shrine of Our Lady of Częstochowa in Poland, and this site serves to raise a number of key issues. The focus of the cult is a panel painting bearing a very familiar motif: the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child in her arms depicted in half length (fig. 1). It is housed in a monastery of the order of St Paul the First Hermit, a little over two kilometres to the west of the medieval centre of the town of Częstochowa in south west Poland.3 The complex is commonly known by the name of the hill on which it stands: the Bright Mount, in Polish Jasna Góra. The Jasna Góra monastery is a major pilgrimage destination. People have flocked there for centuries. The monastery was founded in 1382.4 Quite when the picture of the Virgin and Child arrived at the site is not recorded, but the pilgrimage was already well-established by the third quarter of the fifteenth century from when we have surviving legislation designed to manage the influx of pilgrims.5 The picture has always been the centre of attention. An indulgence granted by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 summarized the appeal of the site: 1 2 3 4 5

See especially M. Holmes, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence, New Haven and London, 2013; J. Garnett and G. Rosser, Spectacular Miracles: Transforming Images in Italy, from the Renaissance to the Present, London, 2013; L. Pon, A Printed Icon in Early Modern Italy: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire, New York, 2015. In his introduction to the volume The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. E. Thunø and G. Wolf, Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, Supplementum 35, Rome, 2004, p. 9. For the early history of the Pauline order see Gregorius Gyöngyösi, Vitae fratrum eremitarum ordinis Sancti Pauli primi eremitae, ed. F. L. Hervay, Budapest, 1988. The key documents relating to the foundation are published in Zbiór dokumentów zakonu oo. Paulinów w Polsce. Zeszyt 1: 1328– 1464, ed. J. Fijałek, Cracow, 1938, pp. 22–30. For an analysis see L. Wojciechowski, ‘Najstarsze klasztory paulinów w Polsce. Fundacja-uposażenie-rozwój do około 1430 roku’, Studia Claromontana, 11, 1991, pp. 125–53. On 6 July 1462 King Casimir IV confirmed an ‘ancient custom’ giving traders the right to sell victuals close to the church of the monastery so that people congregating there ‘for the sake of devotion ... to obtain indulgences’ need not travel into the town to obtain food: Zbiór dokumentów, p. 304 (no. 151).

[ 3 66 ]

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 366

09/07/2021 09:48

chapt er 3 0   |  w hy st udy mi r ac ul o us i mages?   |   3 67

[A] multitude of the faithful of both sexes crowd together [there] from diverse and even infidel and heretical parts on account of the multitude of miracles which the Most High frequently works through the merits and intercession of the Virgin Mary whose image, depicted, as is piously believed, by St Luke, is devoutly preserved there, in order to see that image for the sake of devotion.6 The people came to see the image. Such images were the demonstrable object of mass visual attention. This visual attention was not exercised in a vacuum or a haphazard environment. The Częstochowa complex is today overwhelmingly Baroque in appearance, the result of a reworking after a fire in 1690. However, although its building history is not copiously documented, references to alms for building work in a sequence of episcopal indulgences issued between 1425 and 1463 indicate that the monastery church was constructed on its current substantial scale in the mid-fifteenth century.7 The complex, that is, was developed at a time when the appeal of the picture was becoming established. The display of the picture generated large-scale campaigns of visual embellishment including not only the architectural setting but also its enrichment through bequests of altarpieces, liturgical furnishings and the donation of varied votive offerings.8 Both of these features - the attraction of large numbers of viewers and the elaboration of the setting of the image - are significant social phenomena. Even before we begin to approach their allegedly supernatural powers, in a wholly non-mystical sense such images can be said to ‘make things happen’ in that they form the focus for salient social processes. What, though, is that focus? The 1493 indulgence quoted above has already revealed a basic claim: the picture is said to have been painted by St Luke the Evangelist. In this it is by no means alone. The motif of St Luke as a painter goes back at least to the period of Byzantine iconoclasm and was linked to large numbers of highly venerated images, especially those of the Virgin Mary and including a number in Rome.9 It can be seen as one of the standard presentations of highly venerated images of the Virgin Mary. The ubiquity of this legendary motif does not, however, drain it of significance: St Luke’s authorship articulates a claim to pictorial authority which became associated with a particular artistic tradition. This alleged origin implicitly makes the picture what we would call an icon, a panel painting in the Eastern Christian tradition. In the case of the Częstochowa picture this eastern association is particularly pronounced. The story of its origin, preserved in an extended text from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, insists that until its removal 6

7 8 9

... ad quam sicut accepimus propter multitudinem miraculorum, que meritis et intercessione eiusdem Virginis Marie, cuius imago a sancto Luca ut pie creditur depicta deuote conseruatur ibidem, altissimus crebro operatur, utriusque sexus fidelium confluit multitudo de diuersis etiam infidelium et hereticorum partibus deuotionis causa ad eandem imaginem videndam ... Indulgence of Pope Alexander VI, 16 April 1493, Częstochowa, Archive of Jasna Góra, 81 dypl. Transcription with kind permission of Prof Fr Janusz Zbudniewek, OSPPE. Published in R. Maniura, Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Częstochowa, Woodbridge, 2004, pp. 184–5. Zbiór dokumentów, pp. 161, 175, 263, 308 and 312 (nos 87, 96, 133, 153, 155). Only fragments of the late fifteenth-century setting now survive. Maniura, Pilgrimage, pp. 135–59. R. Cormack, Writing in Gold. Byzantine Society and its Icons, London, 1985, p. 126. For the Roman images see G. Wolf, Salus Populi Romani: Die Geschichte römischer Kultbilder im Mittelalter, Weinheim, 1990 ; H. Belting, Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago, 1994, pp. 63–73, 311–29. For the St Luke legend more generally see M. Bacci, Il pennello dell’Evangelista. Storia delle immagini sacre attribuite a san Luca, Pisa, 1998.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 367

09/07/2021 09:48

3 68 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

to Poland and its installation in the monastery at Jasna Góra it was consistently venerated in an Orthodox milieu.10 It is said to have been brought by the Emperor Constantine from Jerusalem to Constantinople, where it was already venerated as a miracle worker. There it was seen by a Ruthenian prince who persuaded the emperor to give it to him and he took it back to his own land.11 The story then leaps forward to the fourteenth century and the recurrent conflicts along the border between Poland and Lithuania, the latter then incorporating a large swathe of the old heartlands of East Slav orthodoxy in what is now Belarus and Ukraine.12 In one Polish campaign during the reign of King Louis (1370–82, also king of Hungary), Ladislaus, duke of Opole, the historical founder of the Jasna Góra monastery and a favourite of the king, is said to have discovered the picture hidden in a captured fortress. Subsequently besieged in the castle, the duke was delivered by the picture’s miraculous intervention. He transported it to Częstochowa and founded the monastery to house it. The narrative deftly inserts the picture into documentary history, exploiting the Polish state’s growing eastern preoccupations as a basis for its provenance.13 However, we also have the testimony of the picture itself. Its basic format and iconography are certainly icon-like. The half-length figures are a staple of icon painting and the iconography, with the Christ Child seated on the Virgin’s left arm whilst she gestures towards him with her right, is associated with one of the holiest icons of Constantinople, the so-called Hodegitria.14 However, both the half-length format and this iconography became very widely diffused in the West in the late middle ages. Indeed, the closest parallels for the structure of the panel, carved out over most of its surface so that the haloes of the two figures and a narrow framing band stand out in relief, can be found in Italian work of the thirteenth century.15 The style of the visible paint surface also has western associations: the face of the Virgin and the elegant undulations of the hem of her robe are close to Sienese work of the fourteenth century.16 The picture has been subjected to extensive technical analysis and it is clear that what can be seen today is the product of extensive reworking over generations. 17 An ultimately eastern provenance is not out of 10 The earliest detailed account is found in a text dated 1474 in the monastery archive. Częstochowa, Archive of Jasna Góra, sygn. II 19, ff. 216v–220. Published in Najstarsze historie o częstochowskim obrazie Panny Maryi XV i XVI wiek, ed. H. Kowalewicz, Warsaw, 1983, pp. 66–74; reproduced in Maniura, Pilgrimage, pp. 190–97. For the possible dating of the text’s composition see Maniura, Pilgrimage, pp. 121–6. 11 Ruthenia is the Latin term corresponding to the Slav term ‘Rus’ and did not have a well-defined geographical reference in the late middle ages. It is best understood as referring broadly to the Slav lands east of Poland. 12 For medieval Lithuania see S. C. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, Cambridge, 1994. 13 For a systematic study of the evidence relating to the late medieval part of the story see Wojciechowski, ‘Najstarsze klasztory’, pp. 90–115. Wojciechowski proposes that the independent evidence supports the idea of the panel’s Ruthenian provenance. My own reading of the sources he presents contests this (Maniura, Pilgrimage, pp. 50–56). 14 The original Hodegitria was lost in the fall of the city to the Ottomans in 1453, but its basic format is known due to the iconographic consistency of surviving icons whose inscriptions refer directly to it. For the Hodegon monastery see Raymond Janin, La Géographie Ecclésiastique de L’empire Byzantine. Première Partie. Le Siège de Constantinople et le Patriarcat Oecuménique. Tom III. Les Églises et les Monastères, Paris, 1969, pp. 200–06. 15 Notably two panels in the Museo Horne in Florence and the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa. E. B. Garrison, Italian Romanesque Panel Painting, Florence, 1949, section 5, nos 84 and 110. 16 E. Śnieżyńska-Stolot, ‘Geneza, styl i historia obrazu Matki Boskiej Częstochowskiej’, Folia Historiae Artium, 9, 1973, pp. 5–44; A. Różycka-Bryzek and J. Gadomski, ‘Obraz Matki Boskiej Częstochowskiej w świetle badań historii sztuki’, Studia Claromontana, 5, 1984, pp. 27–52; Anna Różycka-Bryzek, ‘Obraz Matki Boskiej Częstochowskiej. Pochodzenie i dzieje średniowieczne’, Folia Historiae Artium, 26, 1990, pp. 5–26. 17 For the fabric of the picture see S. Turczyński and J. Rutkowski, Konserwacja cudownego obrazu Matki Boskiej Częstochowskiej, Częstochowa, 1927; R. Kozłowski, ‘Historia obrazu jasnogórskiego w świetle badań technologicznych i artystyczno-formalnych’, Roczniki Humanistyczne, 20 ,1973, pp. 5–50; W. Kurpik, Częstochowska Hodegetria, Łódź - Pelplin, 2008, pp. 25–47.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 368

09/07/2021 09:48

c hapt er 3 0   |  w hy st udy mi r ac ul o us i mages?   |   3 69

the question, but the balance of the available evidence suggests that the painting may be an entirely western product. There is thus a striking tension between the claims made for this object in the context of its veneration and the results of art historical analysis. That tension highlights the challenge of this material. The discipline of art history privileges the making of art objects. It encourages wide-ranging contextual analyses and it accommodates varied approaches, but it has a strong tendency to explore objects in the context of the time of their original production.18 Images associated with miracles test this conventional focus. Let us take as a working proposal that the Częstochowa picture is a heavily reworked thirteenth-century Italian panel. We do not know with any precision where it was made, when it was made, by whom or for whom, where it was initially displayed or who constituted its initial audience. Given its evident reworking, we do not even have a very good idea of what it ‘originally’ looked like. It eludes all but the sort of detached formal analysis that the discipline no longer finds sufficient as an approach. In this sense, the picture’s neglect in art historical study is understandable: if one’s focus is late medieval Italian panel painting, it is not clear what a study of the Częstochowa panel can contribute. As an object with a recoverable history, it emerges in something like its current form in the fifteenth century in Poland, presented as a miracle worker painted by St Luke. As far as it is susceptible to study in a wider cultural context, it is precisely as part of this extraordinary presentation. Yet if one’s concern is the visual arts in fifteenthcentury Poland, the picture seems to point in the wrong direction: both its translation story and the evidence of its fabric look both backwards and elsewhere. It might be objected that the history of art has for some time not so exclusively confined its attention to the period of production. It has become much more common to study the long history of objects, sometimes called their afterlives. By definition, the artworks we study have come down to us through history and those histories impact upon the way we understand them. In that sense the afterlives of objects are unavoidable. However, a concentration on this longer history tends to be confined to works which are already judged to be canonical. One way of putting the challenge posed by images associated with miracles is that their cultural value emerges during their afterlives as manufactured objects rather than at their point of origin. They are notable for the status they were given long after they were made. They are repurposed images. For a discipline which often looks for subtle significance in a set of values and skills shared between artist, client and audience, this poses problems. Furthermore, the new status these images are granted apparently has little directly to do with visual experience: they allegedly ‘work miracles’. How do we make historical sense of this? It is important to point out that the association with miracle was not a matter of bland assertion, but, in many cases, of systematic documentation. At Częstochowa, for example, from an early date in the life of the cult, records were evidently kept of miracles associated with the shrine. The earliest surviving records, from the fifteenth century, are very fragmentary, but some of those were incorporated in an early sixteenth century publication and from the late sixteenth century there survives the first in a sequence of 18 As discussed, for example in K. Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History, Durham, NC, 2013, p. 3.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 369

09/07/2021 09:48

3 70 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

systematic registers.19 Among the earliest surviving records, claiming to date from 1435, are accounts of healing from blindness, kidney stones, fever, dropsy, deafness, salvation from drowning, the healing of a wound and release from captivity.20 What are these documents records of? A cautious approach might be to suggest no more than that they provide evidence of a mentalité - of a period ‘belief in miracles’. But we need to be careful about what such a belief might consist in. I am particularly sceptical of the idea, implicit in Richard Trexler’s foundational work on the Madonna of Impruneta, that such images were ever understood as miraculous instruments which, when manipulated in conventionally appropriate ways, reliably brought about the desired outcome.21 Miracle understood as a part of lived experience can never have been so secure an expectation. That would have led to inevitable disillusionment. Miracle cults are not passive responses to heavily-marketed holy objects but hard won and creative constructions.22 Hence my preference for the terminology of ‘images associated with miracle’ rather than ‘miraculous images’. My thinking on this has been influenced by Frank Graziano who has worked on miracle working shrines in present-day Mexico.23 He points out that miracles are never observable and suggests a disarmingly simple but powerful conclusion: ‘Miracles are not events; they are interpretations.’24 Claims of miracle amount to decisions to take the world in a certain way: they are re-descriptions of the world incorporating divine aid.25 In the case of image shrines, those decisions place works of art at the centre of devotional life. Images associated with miracle may not help us to write a history of art making, but it is of crucial importance that manufactured images have so often and in so many historical contexts been repurposed to become the chosen foci for devotional activity understood by the participants to be profoundly transformative. That these images are seldom ones which the history of art has chosen to study on its conventional criteria only reinforces the need for their continued reassessment. These images stand as critical examples of the what art objects can be made to do in human societies. There is much left to say about miraculous images.

19 The initial volume of the titular miracle book is dated 1591: Tomvs primvs miracvlorvm B V monasterii Cestochoviensis, Częstochowa, Archive of Jasna Góra, sygn. 2096. The first published collection can be found in Historia pulchra, et stupendis miraculis referta, imaginis Mariae quomodo et unde in Clarum montem Czastochovvie et Olsztyn advenerit, Cracow, 1524. Published in Najstarsze historie, pp. 168–204; reproduced in Maniura, Pilgrimage, pp. 209–18. 20 From a fragmentary document found in the binding of Cracow, Biblioteka Jagiellońska sygn. 2322. Published in M. Kowalczyk, ‘Cuda jasnogórskie spisane w roku 1435’, Analecta Cracoviensia, 15, 1983, pp. 319–29; reproduced in Maniura, Pilgrimage, pp. 206–08. 21 R. C. Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance, 19, 1972, pp. 7–41 (at pp. 14–15). 22 I have worked through these ideas in more detail in my research on the shrine of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato: R. Maniura, Art and Miracle in Renaissance Tuscany, Cambridge, 2018, pp. 164–81. 23 F. Graziano, Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico, Oxford, 2016. 24 Graziano, Miraculous Images, p. 128. 25 R. Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint: Image and Performance in Marian Devotion’, Critical Inquiry, 35, 2009, pp. 629–54 (at p. 654).

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 370

09/07/2021 09:48

chapt er 3 0   |  w hy st udy mi r ac ul o us i mages?   |   3 71

Fig. 1. Our Lady of Częstochowa, tempera on panel, 138 × 98 cm, monastery of Jasna Góra, Częstochowa. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 371

09/07/2021 09:48

Working by Wit Alone: Aspects of Ingenuity in Dürer Alexander Marr1

I

n ‘ Wo r k i n g b y Wo r d s A l o n e : The Architect, Scholasticism and Rhetoric in Thirteenth-Century France’, Paul Binski argues that the moral ambivalence of medieval architecture derived in part from anxieties about pride and excess. This concerned both the patron and the architect: the former censored for desiring sumptuous, ever-taller buildings, the latter for his perilously crafty cunning. Quoting Gervase of Canterbury’s account of William of Sens’s lethal fall from the scaffolding of his Gothic church in 1178, Binski suggests that ‘[p]erhaps Gervase had in mind the ‘ruinous skills’ of Daedalus, the universal model of high-born, high-flown ingenuity, come to grief in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’.2 At the root of the Daedalus myth and its post-classical reception is the essential tension of aesthetics: the taut relationship between freedom and restraint that is the hallmark of pre-Romantic art in the learned tradition.3 In what follows, I will explore some aspects of this relationship at the waning of the middle ages, in the work of an artist renowned for his ingenuity: Albrecht Dürer.4 We find an echo of Binski’s daedalian theme in Dürer’s so-called Engelmesse, or The Recording of the Thoughts of the Pious and the Wicked (c.1500–15) (fig. 1). The story on which Dürer’s drawing is based is that of a deacon who observes the devil recording the idle chatter of female congregants during the Mass. In some versions of the story, upon learning about this record of their sins the worshippers repent, the devil’s ink is erased and he disappears. 5 Dürer, elaborating on an established literary and visual tradition, has transformed the

1 2 3 4 5

An early version of this essay was presented at the colloquium ‘Ingenuity and Imagination in Early Modern Northern Art and Theory’, University of Cambridge, 21–22 January 2016. I thank the participants for their remarks. I am especially grateful to Shira Brisman for her insightful comments on a draft of this piece. P. Binski, ‘Working by Words Alone: The Architect, Scholasticism and Rhetoric in Thirteenth-Century France’, in Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. M. Carruthers, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 14–51 (at p. 15). For Daedalus as a figure of and word for ingenuity, see A. Marr, R. Garrod, J. R. Marcaída and R. J. Oosterhoff, Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe, Pittsburgh, 2019. See e.g. P.-K. Schuster, Melencolia I: Dürers Denkbild, 2 vols, Berlin, 1991; A. Marr, ‘Ingenuity in Nuremberg: Dürer and Stabius’s Instrument Prints’, Art Bulletin, 100 (2018), pp. 48–79. See S. Brisman, ‘The Image that Wants to be Read: An Invitation for Interpretation in a Drawing by Albrecht Dürer’, Word & Image, 29 (2013), pp. 273–303. Brisman’s highly persuasive account discusses Dürer’s sources, previous literature and the varying interpretations of this decidedly ambiguous image, proposing that it may have functioned as a gift to the artist’s friend, Lazarus Spengler. For the broader implications of this ‘mode of address’, see S. Brisman, Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address, Chicago, 2016.

[ 3 72]

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 372

09/07/2021 09:48

c hapt er 3 1   |  wo r ki ng by w i t al o ne  |   3 73

subject into a competition between angels and demons for the worshippers’ souls. While angels seek to guide the flock – turned now into a company of monks, clergymen and prelates – to virtue through images of the Passion and the Madonna and Child, clouds of monstrous demons and Grillen flap and buzz about, distracting and tempting them with the false riches of the seven cardinal sins. Pride is signalled by a group tempted by a demon who proffers a building – perhaps a church – under construction: the sumptuositas topos with which Binski begins his essay.6 Related themes – the perils of curositas and licence – are writ large in the drawing, indeed one of the ur-subjects of Christian theology underpins its iconography: free will, man’s moral capacity to choose between virtue and vice. This is emphasised boldly and in a highly unusual manner in the drawing’s foreground (fig. 2). There, a group of angels hold and discuss a large tabula rasa, on which the artist himself has inscribed the sentence Do schreibt h[e]rein, was I[h]r wollt: Here write what you wish.7 Underscoring the words is an extravagant pen flourish, a looping series of arabesques that veer between symmetry and asymmetry, switching from ordered design to idiosyncratic caprice in what appears to be a single, virtuosic sortie of the pen. With these labyrinthine forms Dürer not only asserts his daedalian capacity to invent ingeniously and ex nihilo, but also cunningly emphasises the drawing’s subject: the ambivalence of freedom, here expanded to embrace the artistic as well as the moral. The flourish in the Engelmesse is connected formally and thematically to the calligraphic penwork that Dürer added to his marginal drawings in the Prayer-book of Maximilian I (1515). The later reception of these figures places them squarely within the domains of ingenuity and freedom. In 1811, the artist Peter von Cornelius sent to Goethe some preliminary drawings of illustrations to Faust, on which he had been hard at work since 1809, eventually publishing them as engravings in 1816.8 Writing in reply, Goethe praised his friend for the ‘ingenious handling’ (geistreiche Behandlung) of the drawings, and especially for how Cornelius had been able imaginatively to inhabit the historical milieu in which the poem is set, despite knowing it ‘only through old illustrations.’ The art world of sixteenth-century Germany had, Goethe remarked, become ‘second nature’ to Cornelius, but this world should not be regarded as ‘perfect in itself ’, since (unlike the art of Italy) it had never fully achieved its aim. To ensure his work would be not only historically convincing, but also ‘broad and beautiful’, Goethe advised Cornelius to study the art of Renaissance Italy, and to consult in particular the lithographs after Dürer’s drawings for the Prayerbook, recently produced by Johann Strixner (fig. 3).9 Nowhere, Goethe enthused, had Dürer showed himself ‘so free, so ingenious, so great or so beautiful (so frey, so geistreich, groß und 6

See also P. Binski, ‘Reflections on the “Wonderful Height and Size” of Gothic Great Churches and the Medieval Sublime’, in Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics, ed. C. S. Jaeger, New York, 2010, pp. 129–56; idem., Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style 1290–1350, New Haven, CT, 2014. 7 In a contemporary copy of the drawing, sometimes attributed to Dürer’s assistant Hans Süss von Kulmbach, the tablet is empty. Old Master and British Drawings and Watercolours, Christie’s, London, 3 July 2019, lot. 109. Parshall notes that pen flourishes are ‘relatively rare’ in Dürer’s work, appearing only ‘in relation to subject matter where it appears they might have had some more special significance.’ P. Parshall, ‘Albrecht Dürer and the Axis of Meaning’, Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin, 50, 1997, pp. 4–31 (at p. 12). 8 See A. Kuhn, Die Faustillustrationen des Peter Cornelius in ihrer Beziehung zur Deutsche Nationalbewegung der Romantik, Berlin, 1916; Zeichnungen zu Goethes Faust: aus der Graphischen Sammlung in Städel, ed. M. Sonnabend, Frankfurt am Main, 1991. 9 See Verwandlung der Welt: Die romantische Arabeske, ed. W. Busch, P. Maisak and S. Weisheit-Possél, Petersberg, 2013. Ironically, Strixner printed only the marginal drawings, not the text, creating tabulae rasae framed by grotesques.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 373

09/07/2021 09:48

3 74 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

schön) as in these swiftly executed pages’.10 In a subtle deviation from the then-emerging consensus that identified in Dürer’s calligraphic flourishes the gothic ‘spirit’ of German art, Goethe implied that in these remarkable drawings Dürer transcended his culture.11 We should not be surprised that Goethe, writing in the early nineteenth century, should have praised works in which Dürer appeared frey and geistreich.12 Both are hallmarks of Romantic genius, which have their origins in the early modern culture of ingenuity, not least that culture’s valorisation of immediacy in execution.13 Yet by casting Dürer’s apparent ‘freedom’ in the Prayer-book drawings as an unambiguously praiseworthy quality, Goethe fundamentally misrepresented (or at least misunderstood) the ways in which Dürer engaged with the vexing challenge of imagination and its relationship to artistic ingenuity. For all the many interpretations of the Prayer-book that have come down to us since Goethe, it seems to me that we find at its core not simply a liberated expression of Dürer’s imaginative facility, but rather a sustained exploration of the relationship between freedom and restraint, conceived as a series of paragone that are played out graphically and iconographically with great verve.14 The Prayer-book lends itself well to these themes, in terms both of genre and of format. Traditionally a site of artistic experimentation, the book of hours was a type of object designed for private devotion and self-governance, which nevertheless accommodated playful caprice in its margins and heightened inventiveness in its imagery.15 Thus, inheriting long-standing medieval traditions and in a visual mode that toys sportively with the distinction between the eicastic and the fantastic, Dürer conjures in his drawings a series of figural scenes, grotesques and arabesques through which thematic couples dance in syncopation.16 These include vice and virtue, the real and the imagined, the sacred 10 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Peter von Cornelius, 8 May 1811, in J. Gage, Goethe on Art, Berkeley, CA, 1980, p. 235. The original reads: ‘Albrecht Dürer sich nirgends so frey, so geistreich, groß und schön bewiesen, als in diesen gleichsam extemporirten Blättern.’ See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Briefe, Band III: 1809–1812, ed. K. R. Madelkow and B. Morawe, Munich, 1965, p. 156. 11 On the reception of Dürer’s Prayer-book drawings from the early nineteenth-century on, see The Book of Hours of the Emperor Maximilian the First, ed. W. L. Strauss, New York, 1974, pp. 323–4; also J. Białostocki, Dürer and his Critics, 1500–1971, BadenBaden, 1986, p. 189 and passim. 12 However, see also Goethe’s sonnet on ‘Nature and Beauty’, in which he says that in poetry (as in all other human pursuits), ‘accepting limits will reveal the master, and nothing but the law can give us freedom’. See ‘The Use of Colour and its Effect: The How and the Why’, in The Essential Gombrich, ed. R. Woodfield, London, 1996, pp. 161–7, at p. 163. I am grateful to Anya Burgon for this reference. 13 On early modern ingenuity, see Marr et al., Logodaedalus. On immediacy in early modern art see e.g. N. Suthor, Bravura: Virtuosität und Mutwilligkeit in der Malerei der frühen Neuzeit, Munich, 2010. 14 This is implicit in Panofsky’s influential account, in which he cast Dürer’s marginal drawings as a synthesis of the northern and Italian modes of border decoration current at the time: ‘one playfully capricious – the other primly tectonic’: E. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 2 vols, London, 1945, vol. 1, p. 185. There is a substantial literature on Dürer’s illustrations for the Prayer-book. Recent studies include J. L. Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago, 1993, pp. 224–37 (see also bibliography in the notes, pp. 492–4); F. T. Bach, Struktur und Erscheinung: Untersuchungen zu Dürers graphischer Kunst, Berlin, 1996; idem, ‘Albrecht Dürer: Figures of the Marginal’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 36, 1999, pp. 79–99; Parshall, ‘Albrecht Dürer’; Brisman, ‘The Image’; Joost Keizer, ‘Dürer, Drawing and Allegory’, in The Aura of the Word in the Early Age of Print, ed. J. Buskirk and S. Mareel, Oxford, 2016, pp. 130–49. 15 For an early modern example, see R. Zorach, ‘“Sweet in the Mouth, Bitter in the Belly”: Seeing Double in an Eccentric French Renaissance Book of Hours’, Art History, 36, 2013, pp. 922–43. On margins and licence in the medieval period, see M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, London, 1992. 16 The dance-like quality of the images pertains equally to the effects of Dürer’s penmanship. As Panofsky observed: ‘Their craftsmanship is such that […] the beholder follows the swift and never-failing movement of the artist’s pen with a sensation comparable to the almost physical pleasure which we experience when observing a perfect dance, a perfect dive or a perfect jump on horseback.’ Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, vol. 1, p. 184. Parshall (‘Axis of Meaning’, p. 7) observes that the seeminglycontinuous lines are sometimes composed of multiple sorties of the pen.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 374

09/07/2021 09:48

c hapt er 3 1   |  wo r ki ng by w i t al o ne  |   3 75

and the profane, order and disorder, symmetry and asymmetry, deployed in a manner that seems at once spontaneously improvised and carefully orchestrated. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the pen-work that loops and swirls vigorously throughout the Prayer-book’s margins.17 Balancing precariously between abstraction and figuration, Dürer’s drolleries invoke the well-known topos of the ‘image made by chance’, since they seem to metamorphose – almost unbidden – from decorative line into recognisable figural forms such as faces and plants.18 Indeed, they have been aptly interpreted as an ‘exercise of imagination’, a form of mental and manual free play which ‘can only be explained by supposing some combination of calculation, reflex and intuition in the artist’s procedure’.19 As I have argued elsewhere, it is as though Dürer was testing the capacity of his imagination – in tandem with the ingenuity of his hand – to invent prodigiously, but also to curb and order his inventions through the power of reason and bodily discipline.20 The disciplining of imagination is a recurring theme in Dürer’s theoretical writings.21 In the so-called aesthetic excursus, he propounded the need for an artist to possess a Gemüt voller Bildnuss: a mind full of figures. This was not simply a natural trait – the prodigious capacity to invent familiar from later, Romantic notions of genius. Rather, it was an inclination that could only be brought out through work; the artist’s ingenium had to be aided by labor. In a 1512 draft of the excursus, Dürer describes learning as a process of filling the Gemüt (roughly translatable as ‘mind’). He asserts that Nature ‘pours in’ knowledge of the ‘truth of each thing’, but since ‘our weak Gemüt cannot contain the bounty of all arts, truth, and knowledge’ we must ‘sharpen our Vernunft (ingenuity) with learning’. The language of ingenuity is to the fore here, but it is coloured by religious context.22 A distinctively late medieval German theology made Gemüt more than the sum of intellectual operations: just as those ‘poor in spirit’ inherit the kingdom of heaven (according to Matthew 5:3), only those with abased selves (demütigen Gemüt) can welcome Christ within. One must strive to discipline one’s Gemüt, just as one must strive, through the will, to discipline art and produce beauty.23 Dürer conceived of this discipline as necessary owing to the post-Lapsarian mind’s fallibility, its tendency towards mala curiositas and error. Notably, he considered mere speculation (menschen wan) to be in error. As Parshall has argued, it is quite likely that for Dürer menschen wan represents ‘precisely the compromised status that phantasie implies, namely, errant wandering into the realm of idle fabulations’, and the corruptibility of imagination through the predations of the devil, which leads to sin.24 Certainly, demonic inspiration, literally the ‘breathing in’ of impure thoughts, is a recurring theme in Dürer’s 17 These designs seem to hover somewhere in-between the curvilinear aesthetic of Gothic art and the early modern valorisation of the linea serpentinata, which informed Hogarth’s theory of the ‘line of beauty’. See P. Binski, ‘The Gothic Line of Beauty: Motif and Medieval Aesthetics/La Línea de la Belleza en el Gótico: motivos y estética medieval’, Quintana, 16, 2017, pp. 53–80. 18 On fantasy and the ‘image made by chance’ see D. Zagoury, ‘The Autonomous Maker Within: “Fantasia” in Sixteenth-Century Italian Art Theory (1501–1568)’, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2019. 19 Parshall, ‘Axis of Meaning’, p. 8. 20 Marr, ‘Ingenuity in Nuremberg’. 21 See P. Parshall, ‘Graphic Knowledge: Albrecht Dürer and the Imagination’, Art Bulletin, 95, 2013, pp. 393–410. 22 On the semantics of Gemüt, see Marr et al., Logodaedalus, chapter 5. 23 For these quotations, from the drafts of Dürer’s theoretical writings, see J. Ashcroft, ‘Art in German: Artistic Statements by Albrecht Dürer’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48, 2012, pp. 377–88. 24 Parshall, ‘Graphic Knowledge’, p. 397.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 375

09/07/2021 09:48

3 76  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

work.25 In the Prayer-book, for example, a devil, wielding a pair of bellows, blows temptation into the ear of a hermit (sometimes taken to be St Anthony) whose asceticism is placed at risk by a comely young woman proffering a dish (fig. 4). It is very likely that Dürer connected this sort of imagery to the ambiguous status of the imagination, which had both a protean capacity to transform nature into art and a worrying tendency to err if improperly directed. This is undoubtedly one of the themes of The Temptation of the Idler, also known as The Dream of the Doctor (c.1495–9), in which a finely dressed man, lulled into idleness by the warmth of an elaborate stove, his read resting comfortably on a plump pillow, is infused with sinful imaginings by a demon.26 This demon’s monstrous, hybrid form is itself a product of the combinatory imagination, called by Dürer Traumwerk (dreamwork), of which he wrote: ‘everyone should be cautious not to make something that nature would not allow, unless it would be that someone wanted to make a dreamwork, in which case one may mix together every kind of creature.’27 Many examples of these hybrid creatures can be seen flitting amongst the grotesques of the Prayer-book drawings and in the fantastical Grillen of the Engelmesse.28 Yet Traumwerk – or at least a variant of it – may be found also in a less expected place: St Jerome’s study. Dürer’s Meisterstich engraving St  Jerome in his Study (1514) has traditionally been interpreted as a model of the Christian-humanist virtues of studiositas and devotion, the Saint engrossed in his writing (whether of a letter or translating the Vulgate is unclear) (fig. 5).29 In certain respects it is a counterpart to Jerome in the wilderness, a subject Dürer had treated several times previously, the productive comfort of the study a sharp contrast to the barren environment of his drypoint, St Jerome and the Pollard Willow (1512).30 (fig. 6) These subjects should, however, be viewed as complimentary rather than as opposites, since the cosy, almost self-congratulatory tenor of Jerome in his Study is undercut by multiple vanitas motifs familiar from the saint’s iconography – a crucifix, skull and penitential scourge – as well as by warnings against idleness.31 Pillows serve the latter function.32 Prominently arranged on the benches and chairs around the saint, several still bearing the imprint of his body, they are a comfort to be resisted. Jerome, hard at work, is pointedly 25 On the motif of bellows and its relationship to imagination and inspiration, see e.g. M. Cole, ‘The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium’, Art Bulletin, 84, 2002, pp. 621–40; R. Kanz, Die Kunst des Capriccio. Kreativen Eigensinn in Renaissance und Barock, Munich, 2002, pp. 166–70; M. C. Viljoen, ‘The Airs of Early Modern Ornament Prints’ Oxford Art Journal, 37, 2014, pp. 117–33. 26 See R. Schoch, ‘Die Versuchung des Müßiggängers (Der Traum des Doktors)’, in R. Schoch, M. Mende and A. Scherbaum, Dürer. Das druckgraphische Werk. Band 1: Kupferstiche, Eisenradierungen und Kaltnadelblätter, Munich, 2001, pp. 65–7; C. Makowski, Albrecht Dürer, Le Songe du Docteur et la Sorcière, Geneva, 1999, pp. 39–47. 27 Parshall, ‘Graphic Knowledge’, p. 295. 28 On Grillen (in Italian, grilli) see P. Vandenbroeck, ‘Zur Herkunft und Verwurzelung der ‘Grillen’. Vom Volksmythos zum kunstund literaturtheoretischen Begriff, 15.–17. Jahrhundert’, De zeventiende eeuw, 3, 1987, pp. 53–84; Kanz, Kunst des Capriccio. 29 There is a very large literature on this engraving. Important studies include A. Strümpell, ‘Hieronymus im Gehäuse’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 2, 1925/6, pp. 173–252; Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, pp. 154–6; O. Pächt, ‘Zur Entstehung des “Hieronymus im Gehäuse”’, Pantheon, 21, 1963, pp. 131–42; Brisman, Albrecht Dürer, chapter 4. 30 Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, p. 154. Most discussions of this image have focused on Dürer’s exploration of the possibilities afforded by the drypoint medium. See e.g. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, p. 149; R. Schoch, ‘Der heilige Hieronymus neben dem Weidenbaum’, in Schoch, Mende and Scherbaum, Dürer. Das druckgraphische Werk, pp. 158–60. 31 The vanitas elements are strikingly absent in the interpretation by Panofsky, who sought to present it as an unadulterated example of the vita contemplativa in contrast to the vita activa of Knight, Death and the Devil (Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, p. 155). See, by way of contrast, J. Białostocki, ‘Kunst und Vanitas. Pessimisum und Hedonismus der Antike’, in idem, Stil und Ikonographie: Studien zur Kunstwissenschaft, Dresden, 1966, pp. 187–230. 32 Makowski, Albrecht Dürer, pp. 39–47.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 376

09/07/2021 09:48

c hapt er 3 1   |  wo r ki ng b y w i t al o ne  |   3 77

perched on the bare wood at the edge of his bench, while tempting softness nudges up against him. Some have seen in Jerome’s pillows an anthropomorphism akin to Dürer’s early Self-portrait and Study Sheet of Six Pillows (c.1493), which contain within their folds ‘hidden’ faces: images made apparently by chance but which both Dürer (with his ‘mind full of figures’) and the viewer invents (fig. 7).33 As per the Latin invenire, we ‘come upon’ these faces, discovering and creating them in the same moment.34 Similar exercises in fantasy are at work elsewhere in the St Jerome. In features described by Matthias Mende as unheimlich, the wooden panel at the back of the room boasts a scroll and gouges that can be read as an ear and a pair of eyes, while the carefully described grain of the ceiling beams suggests the self-same organs: the wood seems to be sprouting eyes and ears.35 To the best of my knowledge, no attempt has as yet been made to explain this curious aspect of the engraving. I should like tentatively to essay an interpretation, in keeping with the themes we have been following and in relation specifically to the gourd that hangs pendulously from the ceiling of Jerome’s study, proximate to the knots of the ceiling beams. The first thing to note about this object is that it is, as Martin Kemp has observed, a masterful exercise in artistic virtuosity (fig. 8). Such is the artist’s care and the attention drawn to it that there is broad consensus Dürer must have intended some special significance for this plant.36 In complementary graphic and plastic configurations, the spiralling whorls that describe the gourd’s base are offset by corkscrew-like tendrils springing from the plant itself. The lowest of these, set flatly against the picture plane in contrast to the projected one above, forms a spiral akin to the geometrical constructions that dominate the first book of Dürer’s Underweysung der messung (1525). This configuration – of looseness and geometry, freedom and restraint – is akin to the arabesques of the Prayer-book drawings, on which Dürer was working coevally with the Jerome. Like those drawings, the gourd is an image at the margins. It is suspended at the very threshold of the study, thrusting forward (with its strange perspective) into an exterior space, by which the lion lies at guard.37 The gourd’s careful positioning, pushed out to the edge of the image, may support Parshall’s suggestion that it alludes to a ‘philological controversy which concerned Jerome for a decade’ in his work on the Vulgate, namely Jerome’s rejection of cucurbita (the Latin for gourd) in favour of hedera (ivy) as the translation of the Greek word kikayon, used for the plant in Jonah 4:6. In this passage, God causes a fast-growing plant to grow up rapidly above Jonah, to shade his head and deliver him from grief, but it withers away equally quickly that very night. As Parshall notes, this reading supports previous interpretations, in which the swift-growing gourd has been seen as a symbol of transience: a vanitas motif consistent

33 See C. P. Heuer, ‘Dürer’s Folds’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 59/60, 2011, pp. 249–65. 34 On pre-modern invention, see e.g. P. Binski, ‘Notes on Artistic Invention in Gothic Europe’, Intellectual History Review, 3 (The Nature of Invention, ed. A. Marr and V. Keller), 2014, pp. 1–14. 35 M. Mende, ‘Hieronymus im Gehäus’, in Schoch, Mende and Scherbaum, Dürer. Das druckgraphische Werk, pp. 174–8. 36 M. Kemp, ‘Graphic Demonstrations of Skill in Renaissance and Baroque Engravings’, in Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. J. Onians, London, 1994, pp. 221–44. 37 On the perspective of the St Jerome, see E. Schröder, Dürer. Kunst und Geometrie. Dürers kunsthistorisches Schaffen aus der sicht seiner Underweysung, Basel, 1980, pp. 53–63.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 377

09/07/2021 09:48

3 78 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

with the rest of the picture.38 It may seem strange that Jerome should be pictured with an object the name of which he explicitly rejected in his translation. But what if the gourd is a warning against error, a reminder of the ease with which the learned and pious mind may lapse? The gourd’s curiously liminal position and peculiar perspective – angled away from the saint, beyond the threshold of the study – implies incursion. It is at once pushed out of while encroaching upon the scholarly sanctum. Given the themes with which Dürer was preoccupied at this time, might it not allude to the perilous superabundance of the imagination and how to curb it? Read alongside the study’s ‘idle’ pillows and fantastical knots, and in conjunction with the capricious arabesques of the Prayer-book, the gourd pulses with Dürer’s anxiety about menschen wan: the error of mere speculation and the dangers of an errant imagination. Like a mind overinflated, literally ‘puffed up’ by devilish thoughts, the all-too-quickly growing gourd is grotesquely outsized. It takes up more space in the print than the skull, the hourglass, the crucifix, or even Jerome’s head. In light of the bodily temptations to which saint was subject, it seems far too fleshy. Of course, in the early modern period gourds were receptacles. Cut down and hollowed out, they were used as portable liquid-carriers. Just like the human mind, they could be filled up with a replenishing draught (water) or a malignant spirit (wine), the latter of which reduced even the most holy to idleness and sloth.39 Just as the unbridled imagination is provoked by and breeds demons, so our plant has a monstrous quality. Like so many of Dürer’s marginal grotesques, it is closer to the hybrid candelabrum (a studiolo object for which it surely stands in) of Dürer’s 1513 drawing than the imagines contrafactae of contemporary herbals (fig. 9). Rendered as a curiosity or wondrous growth, in its strange protrusions, twists and spikes, the gourd recalls the strange forms of Dürer’s Traumwerk devils. Appropriately for a liminal object, it plays tricks on the eyes, blurring the line between the mimetic and the fantastic. It is not difficult to discern, with the eyes of the mind, a monstrous foot, a tail, bulbous appendages and sharp, curving horns, hovering in and out of view like the anthropomorphic knots at its side. Here, Dürer’s ingenuity – his wit – is fully displayed. For while the gourd reads as a monstrous form, when studied up close it is in fact an artifice that has been constructed by tying together ‘organic’ and ‘wrought’ materials: the natural component is the stem – with its horn- , hoof- and tail-like offshoots; the ‘wrought’ is the worked rope with its twists, which clutches the stem of the gourd and suspends it.40 We might compare this assemblage formally to the devil who tempts the studious St Anthony with St Paul of Thebes in a drawing made just after

38 The gourd has been interpreted in various ways. See e.g. P. Parshall ‘Albrecht Dürer’s St. Jerome in his Study: A Philological Reference’, Art Bulletin 53, 1971, pp. 303–05; A. Weiss, ‘“Diese lächerliche Kürbisfrage…”: Christlicher Humanismus in Dürers Hieronymusbild’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 45, 1982, pp. 195–201. For a summary of the key points, including bibliography, see J. Hanho, ‘Meditatio mortis: Zur Ikonographie des heiligen Hieronymus mit dem Totenschädel unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Lissaboner Gemäldes von Albrecht Dürer’, PhD dissertation, Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität, 2005, pp. 114–18. 39 See, for example, the drawing of the Holy Family (1509; Basel, Kunstmuseum) attributed to Dürer or his shop, in which a drunken Joseph slumps on the table in front of a plump pillow, his head next to a flagon. 40 I am grateful to Shira Brisman for emphasizing this aspect of the gourd in our discussion of the engraving. Claudia Swan gives an excellent account of the relationship between the natural and the artificial in this kind of Traumwerk imagery in ‘Conceptions, Chimeras, Counterfeits: Early Modern Theories of the Imagination and the Work of Art’, in Vision and its Instruments, c. 1350–1750: The Art of Seeing and Seeing as an Art, ed. A. Payne, University Park, 2015, 216–37.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 378

09/07/2021 09:48

c hapt er 3 1   |  wo r ki ng b y w i t al o ne  |   3 79

Dürer completed his Jerome engraving; indeed, Dürer seems to have reserved long, curving, snout- or tusk-like forms for his Traumwerk inventions (fig. 10).41 Unlike Anthony, Jerome was not visited by demons in the wilderness, but Dürer insinuates through this monstrous fruit the constant risk of temptation, including the dangers of acedia, in pseudo-demonic form. Interpreted thus, the gourd stands for impia or mala curiositas, opposed to the docta pietas of the industrious saint.42 In the early modern period, curiositas was routinely personified as a figure clothed in a mantle of eyes and ears – the very forms peppering the woodwork of Jerome’s study (fig. 11). The signification is ambivalent, referring both to Curiosity’s attentiveness, but also to the idle gossip (recall the characters of the Engelmesse) and impudent prying to which she was prone. It is an iconography which draws on the popular European proverb, ‘The field has eyes, the forest has ears’, depicted by Hieronymous Bosch in an undated drawing (fig. 12). An inscription at the top of the sheet proclaims: ‘It is indeed the mark of a miserable ingenium always to use what has been invented and never feel compelled to invent.’43 In a manner comparable to Dürer’s inscription on the Englemesse drawing, Bosch asks his viewers to question what they will do with their own creative capacity, including whether they will be original inventers or merely slavish imitators – copyists with overly curious eyes. The ‘eyes and ears’ iconography appears earlier, in illuminations to a text Dürer may have known: Ulrich von Pottenstein’s German translation of Pseudo-Cyril’s Speculum Sapientiae, first published in an illustrated edition in 1490.44 There also, we find the popular fable of the gourd and the palm tree, used in the sixteenth century as an emblem of pride, vanity and transience. Comparably to the story in Jonah, in this fable a gourd plants itself next to a palm tree, grows rapidly, and quickly equals her in height. The gourd asks the palm its age, and upon discovering she is a hundred years old, pridefully thinks itself superior because of its rapid rise. The palm then explains that slow and mature growth will endure, while swift advancement is followed by equally fast decay. Such a gourd is the very opposite of the pollard willow we encountered earlier in Dürer’s drypoint. That gnarled old tree, sprouting new shoots, signifies not only the hope of resurrection in Christ, but also Jerome’s self-discipline. Just as the growth of the willow is controlled and directed through a punishing form of pruning, so Jerome grows and is strengthened intellectually and spiritually by a regime of self-denial and the curbing of fleshly desires. In contrast, the gourd of St Jerome in his Study is an overly ripe and empty vessel. However, it is also inescapabaly ingenious. A fabulous product of the artist’s imagination rendered with exacting skill, for all of its implied deficiencies the gourd pulses with aesthetic and intellectual vitality. In highlighting these tensions, it is comparable to Dürer’s portrait

41 Other features suggest an affinity between these two works, such as the unusual perspective they share (with a vanishing point at the extreme right of the image) and a chest with the same, butterfly-shaped lock. Eisler claims that the lock in the St Jerome engraving is in the form of a bat, thus connecting it to Melencolia I, a connection that should be approached with caution. See C. Eisler, Dürer’s Animals, Washington DC, 1991. 42 For medieval curiositas, see e.g. M. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Mediation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge, 1998. For its later fortunes, see N. Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany, Oxford, 2004; Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. R. J. W. Evans and A. Marr, Aldershot, 2006. 43 See M. Bass, Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt, Princeton, NJ, 2019, p. 189. 44 See G. Schleusener-Eichholz, Das Auge im Mittelalter, 2 vols, Munich, 1985, vol. 1, pp. 235–7.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 379

09/07/2021 09:48

38 0 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

of his best friend, Willibald Pirckheimer (1524), which memorably contrasts the enduring power of the intellect with the perishability of the flesh (fig. 13). The engraving bears a motto, probably provided by Pirckheimer himself, from the Pseudo-Virgilian Elegiae in Maecenatem: Vivitur ingenio caetera mortus erunt: we live by wit, the rest belongs to death.45 We could say that Dürer and Pirckheimer, the best of friends, worked by wit alone. Invoking the Christian doctrine of the eternal soul, the motto testifies to the intangible essence that bound the artist and sitter together in everlasting amicitia: the ingenious life of the mind.

45 On this engraving, its meaning, sources and secondary literature, see G. Satzinger, ‘Dürers Bildnisse von Willibald Pirckheimer’, in Autorbilder. Zur Medialität literarischer Kommunikation in Mittelaltur und Früher Neuzeit, ed. G. Kapfhammer, W-D. Löhr and B. Nitsche, Munich, 2007, pp. 229–43 (esp. 241). For the later fortunes of this motto, see A. Marr, ‘Ingenuity and Discernment in The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest (1628)’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 69, 2019, pp. 109–46.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 380

09/07/2021 09:48

c hapt er 3 1   |  wo r ki ng by w i t al o ne  |   381

left: Fig. 1. Albrecht Dürer, Engelmesse, or The Recording of the Thoughts of the Pious and the Wicked, c.1500–15. Pen and ink with wash and bodycolour on paper. Rennes, Musée des Beaux Arts. above; Fig. 2. Detail of Fig. 1.

Fig. 3. Johann Strixner, Dürer’s Christlich-Mythologische Handzeichnungen, Munich, 1808, plate 12. Lithograph. Source: Getty Research Institute (public domain)

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 381

09/07/2021 09:48

382 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

Fig. 4. Albrecht Dürer, St Anthony Tempted by a Devil, detail of a marginal drawing in the prayerbook of Maximilian I, 1515. Pen and ink on paper. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, 2 L.Impr. membr.64.

Fig. 5. Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome in his Study, 1514. Copperplate engraving. Source: Rijksmuseum (public domain)

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 382

09/07/2021 09:49

c hapt er 3 1   |  wo r ki ng by w i t al o ne  |   383

Fig. 6. Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome and the Pollard Willow, 1512. Drypoint. Source: Rijksmuseum (public domain)

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 383

09/07/2021 09:49

Fig. 7. Albrecht Dürer, Six Pillows, c.1493. Pen and ink on paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985.1.862.

Fig. 8. Detail of Fig. 5.

right: Fig. 12. Hieronymus Bosch, The Field has Eyes, the Forest has Ears, c.1500. Pen and ink on paper. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen.

Fig. 9. Albrecht Dürer, Candelabrum, 1513. Pen and ink on paper. Vienna, Kunsthistorischesmuseum, Ambraser Kunstbuch W 709.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 384

far right: Fig. 13. Albrecht Dürer, Willibald Pirckheimer, 1524. Copperplate engraving. Source: Rijksmuseum (public domain)

09/07/2021 09:49

Fig. 10. Albrecht Dürer, St Anthony and St Paul of Thebes Tempted by the Devil, 1515. Pen and ink on paper. Albertina, Vienna. 3143 D 116.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 385

Fig. 11. Curiosita in Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1625. Woodcut. Source: Getty Research Institute (public domain)

09/07/2021 09:49

Inventing Gothic Painting: Creating Fine Art M. A. Michael

Catalytic effect and change In his essay ‘Working by Words Alone’ Paul Binski set the scene for an understanding of art in the middle ages which is in some ways familiar to us from critical writing about what is generally called Fine Art.1 He states that: ‘within a generation of the 1240s, it was possible to deploy an analogy from the creative arts to show how in them, as in theology, an author (art-maker or architect) was the primary efficient cause of a thing, and the mere mechanic or artisan the instrumental efficient cause’.2 This could be a description of the art practice of many artists today: the act of making a work of art is often secondary to its meaning or message, although there can be no denying that a process has taken place.3 In such arguments there is an essentially Aristotelian sequence of logic also utilised by St Thomas Aquinas of predicate, attribute and accident which seeks an ontological resolution.4 Beyond the basic logic leading to a theological message of the existence of God, however, there remains the question of the role of the author as artist in relation to creativity which could be said to lie outside the realm of such proofs. This is the problem that Hegel confronts in his lectures delivered before his death in 1831 which have come down to us as the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetikon usually translated as the Philosophy of Fine Art.5 When discussing poetry, Hegel outlines a method of thinking about the artist’s relationship to creativity that still has resonance today: [C]olour and tone in their immediacy are not the colour and tone of a painter or a musician. We may in a general way describe the distinction by stating that it is not the idea as such, but the imagination of the artist which creates a poetical content, under conditions, that is, in which the imagination 1 2 3 4 5

L. Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, Chicago, 2003, pp. 12–16. P. Binski, ‘Working by Words Alone: The Architect, Scholasticism and Rhetoric in Thirteenth-Century France’, in Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. M. Carruthers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 14–51 (at p. 22). K. Grant, All About Process: The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labo[u]r, University Park, PA, 2017, pp. 6–8 n. 12. N. Smart, ‘The Twelfth Article: Whether Affirmative Propositions can be Formed about God’, Historical Selections in the Philosophy of Religion, London, 1962, p. 74. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1975.

[ 386 ]

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 386

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 32 | invent i ng go t hi c pai nt i ng: c r eat i ng

f i n e a r t   |   387

grasps the same content in such a way that it is itself therewith associated in language… just as in the other arts we find it present in the architectural form; the plastic of sculpture, that adapted to painting or musical tones and harmony.6 Perhaps surprisingly, Cennino Cennini, writing in his Libro dell’arte in the later fourteenth century, would have understood Hegel’s point. He promotes the idea of the painter as an artist who held a place only one step below what he called scienza along with poesia: E con merita metterla a sedere in secondo grado alla scienza, e coronala di poesia.7 The marriage of art and poetry through nature is, of course, a topos which can be seen in the constructed selfimage of artists as soon as they begin to create their own biographies.8 The word Scienza, often rendered in this sentence as either ‘science’ or ‘theory’ in modern translations, should, however, be given its full epistemological meaning of ‘knowledge’.9 For Cennino it is freedom that gives purpose to his activity: e libero di poter comporre e legare insieme si e no come gli piace, secondo sua volontà.10 The consequence of this is that the painter, acting as a primary efficient cause, becomes a precursor in a process of change through the self-awareness that freedom and knowledge impart. The conceptual changes that led to Cennino’s self-confidence concerning these matters are linked to his careful description of his artistic roots back to Giotto himself. It can be argued that the catalytic effect caused by Giotto’s work is amplified by the artists who came after him leading to a process of change.11 The consequences of Giotto’s work are therefore discernible to us through the works of art of a great number of other, later, artists because his work acts on many different generations of artists.12 Historians often treat works of art as object(s) acted on by their own subject by confusing a literal reading of their function as evidence while ignoring their potential as text.13 The role of artists in the making of works of art in the middle ages has also been understood primarily in relation to their status in society and their esteem among patrons.14 In a coffeetable book edited by Joan Evans in the mid-1960s called The Flowering of the Middle Ages, Andrew Martindale coined the phrase the ‘The Rise of the Artist’ in an attempt to bridge the gap between the historian’s concept of what constitutes evidence and how one might interpret the role of the artist within society in the middle ages and early Renaissance.15 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston, 4 vols, London, 1916–20, vol. 4, p. 11. Cennino Cennini. Il libro dell’arte, eds G. and C. Milanesi, Florence, 1859, p. 2. P. Barolsky, The Faun in the Garden: Michelangelo and the Poetic Origins of Italian Renaissance Art, University Park, PA, 1994, pp. 16–18. The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini, trans. C. J. Herringham, London, 1899, p. 4; The Craftsman’s Handbook: Il libro dell’arte, trans. D. V. Thompson, Jr., New York, 1960, pp. 1–2. Cennino Cennini. Il libro dell’arte, ed. Milanese, p. 2. The terms ‘precursor’ and ‘catalytic effect’ have been borrowed here from the expressions used by scientists to describe two effects: in the former, something that can precipitate a reaction; in the latter, a change or speeding up of a process while the original ingredient remains unchanged and can have similar effects over and over again. M. Ferretti, ‘Funzione ed expressione nella pittura su tavola del trecento bolognese’, in Giotto e Bologna, ed. M. Medica, Milan, 2010, pp. 51–77. J. Emerling, ‘To Betray Art History’, Journal of Art Historiography, 15, 2016, pp. 1–6 (at p. 6). J. Caskey ‘Medieval Patronage and Its Potentialities’, in Patronage, Power, and Agency in Medieval Art, Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers 15, ed. C. Hourihane, Princeton, 2013, pp. 3–31. A. Martindale, ‘The Rise of the Artist’, in The Flowering of the Middle Ages, ed. J. Evans, London, 1966, pp. 281–314.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 387

09/07/2021 09:49

388 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

A key aspect of his argument was that artists formed a professional group.16 It is when artists such as André Beauneveu and Jacquemart d’Hesdin, Ghiberti and Brunelleschi or Raphael and Michelangelo reveal the extent of their interest in each other’s innovations that their specialised interests can be imagined and examined. Evidence of this can be found in the documents that have survived of reports of the theft of model books or illicit previews of each other’s work.17 This level of exchange, which often excludes the patron, can be said to conform to what might seem to an outsider to be a formalist interpretation of art.18 It can be argued, however, that artists asserted their authorship by communicating with each other in ways that may not have been fully comprehended by the patron or viewer. The level of excellence in the craft (in the sense of the making) and basic monetary value of the ingredients (particularly expensive colours and metals) were certainly the most important interests of patrons earlier on in the middle ages, but this was to change rapidly during and immediately after the thirteenth century. In thirteenth-century England records show that particular artists such as Master Walter of Colchester at St Albans and the embroiderer Mabel of Bury St Edmunds at Westminster appear to have had their work appreciated for more than just their individual skill and the value of the materials they handled, and in Italy both Cimabue and Giotto become famous for reasons that go beyond the mere competence of their work.19

Style as a bearer of meaning The arrival at a metaphorical concept based on an idea formed out of a process that alters the outward appearance of a finished work of art can be documented by art historians. This can be done because they are able to situate change at a particular time through a dialectical process of comparison and, through this, form a typology of style(s).20 In the case of drapery and the depiction of the figure, the outward, mundane realism of what is depicted carries with it in its style a meaning that can be interpreted in ways other than its functional attributes. In this way the style of figures, and in particular their drapery, can carry metaphorical meanings that can bear interpretation on a psychological and even a metaphysical level.21 The conceptual shift that occurs in thirteenth-century painting can be explored using these techniques. But are such changes due to the imagination of the artist, or is it the case that artists just respond to their social and cultural environment, 16 A. Martindale, The Rise of the Artist, London, 1972, p. 21. 17 M. Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Late Fourteenth Century, London, 1968, pp. 226–7; R. Krautheimer and T. Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton, 1970, pp. 194–6; R. Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, New Haven, CT, 2004, p. 220. 18 T. McLaughlin, ‘Clive Bell’s Aesthetic: Tradition and Significant Form’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35, 1977, pp. 433–43. 19 W. T. Page, ‘The St Albans School of Painting (Mural and Miniature): Part I, Mural Painting’, Archaeologia, 58, 1902, pp. 1–18 (at p. 6); M. A. Michael, The Wall Paintings of St Albans, London, 2019; R. K. Lancaster, ‘Artists, Suppliers and Clerks: The Human Factors in the Art Patronage of King Henry III’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 38, 1972, pp. 82–164 (at pp. 83–4). 20 Aristotle. Poetics, Longinus: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style, Loeb Classical Library, 199, trans. S. Halliwell, Harvard, 2015, 1457b (at pp. 104–05); S. R. Levin, ‘Aristotle’s Theory of Metaphor’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 15, 1982, pp. 24–46. 21 N. Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca, 2001, pp. 24–42.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 388

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 32 | in vent i ng go t hi c pai nt i ng: c r eat i ng

f i n e a r t   |   389

providing us with what becomes a record of their activity? It seems unacceptable that artists somehow create new concepts without knowing it. Cennino Cennini would certainly have protested at this assertion. There is plenty of evidence of works of art, particularly illuminated manuscripts and embroideries, maintaining and enhancing their value subsequent to their original cost of manufacture (as opposed to jewels and gold-work which always had a scrap value).22 But the exchange of knowledge goes beyond Christopher Gregory’s definition of the difference between social and economic commodification.23 Artists, by communicating with each other as an informed professional group, subvert the original outward function of their work not by exchanging it as such, but by communicating with each other something that cannot be seen because of their knowledge of the process of manufacture. This becomes their gift to each other. Thus, they are in a state of ‘reciprocal dependence’ when they communicate with other artists. In other words, their professional dialogue exists outside the process of consumption because they are gifting information to each other (even if they do not want to do this before the work has been completed) in order to impress each other in a spirit of competition. Even after the work is removed from their hands by a patron, it is the experience of making it and the dialogue that it creates with other professionals that forms its lasting effect and cannot be alienated.24 In seeking to define a point where change occurs in society, the artist and his concerns are often subsumed into a convenient pre- and post-Renaissance concept of progress in a cyclical, developmental model which has existed at least since the writings of Vasari and his co-authors.25 As Martindale points out, the key point at which change occurs may not have been as a consequence of the development of humanistic ideas to which artists responded.26 The practical insights offered by medieval and early Renaissance artists such as Cennino Cennini and later Lorenzo Ghiberti, suggest that the idea promulgated by Ernst Gombrich in his essay of 1979, ‘The Logic of Vanity Fair’, that rivalry among artists was a major driver of change should be taken seriously, but it does not explain the less negative effects of sharing and co-operation which may also act as drivers for change between, for instance, artist and apprentice.27 It can be argued that humanist writers in the early Renaissance became the equivalent of our modern-day art historians and critics. They offer ways of interpreting works of art and architecture that seek to find meaning beyond the functionality of the art work while speaking to an audience of presumed intellectuals and, sometimes, artists. Few would argue that Alberti’s theory of painting was actually based on his own artistic practice as such despite the claims of his Della Pittura of 1434–5.28 He certainly reveals a critical 22 J. Gardner, ‘Opus Anglicanum and Its Medieval Patrons’, in English Medieval Embroidery: Opus Anglicanum, ed. C. Browne, G. Davies and M. A. Michael, New Haven, CT, 2016, pp. 49–60; J. Stratford, The Bedford Inventories. The Worldly Goods of John Duke of Bedford, Regent of France (1389–1435), London 1993, pp. 187 (B 21), 275 (B 21.1), 224 (C 72), 350 (C 72.1). 23 C. A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities, London, 1982, p. 12. 24 Ibid., p. 24. 25 C. Hope, ‘Can you Trust Vasari?’, New York Review of Books, 5 October 1995, pp. 10–13. 26 A. Martindale, Rise of the Artist, pp. 97–106. 27 Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. L. Bartoli, Florence, 1998, p. 93; E. H. Gombrich, Ideals and Idols, Essays in Values in History and in Art, London, 1979, pp. 60–93. 28 Leon Battista Alberti, Della Pittura, trans. J. R. Spencer, New Haven, CT, 1956.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 389

09/07/2021 09:49

39 0 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

interest in art and shapes ideas in order to share them, particularly in the Latin version of his book (c.1439–41), probably to demonstrate his own humanistic credentials.29 But despite Alberti’s pride in his rhetorical skills, similar concerns could be ascribed to Adémar de Chabannes or Villard de Honnecourt whose model- and note-books are in many ways examples of pretention rather than content.30 Nevertheless Alberti states: ma noi dipintori, i quali vogliamo co’i movimenti della membra mostrare i movementi dell’animo solo riferiamo di qual movimento si fa mutando el luogo.31 (‘But we painters, those who wish through showing the movement of the body, to depict that of the mind alone refer to that which changes the position [of the body]’). This indicates that he understood that the depiction of the body could indicate psychological states of mind. It is argued here, however, that it was an achievement of medieval painting and sculpture that both the body and its drapery were imagined as bearers of these, often metaphorical, meanings.

Henchement and Dehenchement The change in the way drapery is depicted in France can be seen in early thirteenth-century sculpture, particularly on the central tympanum of the west front of Notre Dame, Paris (c.1220–30) and subsequently in the Apostle figures of the interior of the Sainte-Chapelle (c.1243–8) and elsewhere in French sculpture.32 Similarly, the moment of the change in the way the figure is used dynamically and expressively in painting, while abandoning the almost antique Muldenfaltenstil (troughed or wet fold style), developed and made popular by twelfth-century Mosan artists, can be seen in the arcade paintings of the Sainte-Chapelle, the so-called Psalter of St Louis in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the final volume of the evangeliary associated with the Sainte-Chapelle.33 The interplay between the arts of painting and sculpture between c.1240–60 can also be seen in the tympanum of the south transept of Notre Dame c.1260–65 where the figures in the stoning and arrest of St Stephen (c.1258–63) show a full awareness of the possibilities that contrapposto held for story-telling.34 In parts of the Rhineland, Saxony and Austria drapery takes on a particular angularity in the years c.1220–60 which has been called the Zackenstil. It appears to be a direct 29 R. Sinisgalli, On Painting. A New Translation and Critical Edition. Cambridge, 2011; Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450, Oxford, 1971, p. 129. 30 R. W. Scheller, Exemplum: Model-book Drawings and the Practice of Artistic Transmission in the Middle Ages (ca. 900-ca. 1470), Amsterdam, 1995, pp. 109–11; C. F. Barnes, The Portfolio of Vilars de Honnecourt, a New Critical Edition and Color Facsimile, Farnham, 2009, pp. xxii-xxv. 31 A. Bonucci, Opere volgare di Leon Batt. Alberti per la più parte inedite e tratte dagli autografi annotate e illustrate, 5 vols, Florence, 1843–9, vol. 4, p. 62. 32 W. Sauerländer, Gothic Sculpture in France 1140–1270, London, 1972, p. 456. 33 H. R. Hahnloser, ‘La technique et style du retable de Klosterneuburg’, in L’Art Mosan, ed. P. Francastel, Paris, 1953, pp. 187–93 (Muldenfaltenstil); Paris, BNF MS Lat 10525; L’art au temps des rois maudits: Philippe le Bel et ses fils 1285–1328, ed. D. GaboritChopin et al., Paris, 1998, pp. 298–9; Paris, BNF, MS lat. 17326 and London, BL, Add. MS 17341; M. Kauffmann, ‘The SainteChapelle Lectionaries and the Illustration of the Parables in the Middle Ages’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 67, 2004, pp. 1–22. 34 K. A. Morrow, ‘Disputation in Stone: Jews Imagined on the St Stephen Portal of Paris Carthedral’, in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. M. B. Merback, Leiden, 2007, pp. 63–86.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 390

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 32 | invent i ng go t hi c pai nt i ng: c r eat i ng

f i n e a r t   |   391

response by artists to the drapery forms found in Byzantine art, but this is quite a shortlived episode. Hans Belting sees the ‘German’ Zackenstil as leading to a final generation of Saxon artists that represent an ‘Alternativ-Gotik’.35 Attractive as this may seem, it is the abandonment of these jagged fold structures in favour of the elegant dehenchement and broad folds made fashionable by French artists after c.1260 that needs to be explained because of its pervasiveness and longevity across Europe. Beyond the experiments of c.1220–60 in the appearance of drapery, a change occurs in the way that figures are conceived by artists after c.1260. The description of the Vierge à l’Enfant de la Sainte-Chapelle offered by Marie-Cécile Bardoz outlines the key changes with particular reference to what is perceived to be a ‘Gothic’ feminine ideal of beauty: … un léger hanchement, un corps souple et élancé, un fin visage triangulaire entouré de cheveux ondulés, des yeux étirés vers les tempes, une bouche petite à l’expression rieuse complètent le tableau d’une beauté idéale de la période gothique’36 Leaving aside the feminisation of these characteristics in this interpretation, the ivory Sainte-Chapelle Virgin and Child (c.1265–79) and that from St Denis (perhaps c.1260), have often been placed at the forefront of stylistic developments in Gothic figurative arts because of their henchement.37 Unfortunately this has also led to the misguided notion that the henchement, and subsequent contrapposto of the dehenchement seen in thirteenthcentury French painting and sculpture, is caused by the use of the natural shape of elephant ivory tusks (fig. 1).38 This ascribes the decision making for these expressive movements to the material itself – something that even Semper in his most didactic arguments would not have suggested.39 In fact, as Danielle Gaborit-Chopin points out, it is the movement en spirale which distinguishes the Sainte-Chapelle Virgin as much as its contrapposto.40 Nevertheless, the origins of this change almost certainly lie in a dialogue between the plastic arts and painting in the middle of the thirteenth century in the Île-de-France.

The Westminster Retable, again? The exact moment at which the ‘hip-shot’ henchement, of the Virgin becomes something more, and turns into the characteristic dehenchement with the full ‘S’ curve of the standing St Peter on the left-hand side of the Westminster Retable, is a matter of debate. 35 H. Belting, ‘Zwischen Gotik und Byzanz. Gedanken zur Geschichte der sächsischen Buchmalerei im 13. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 41, 1978, pp. 217–57. 36 M-C. Bardoz, ‘Vierge à l’Enfant de la Sainte-Chapelle’, www.louvre.fr/oeuvre-notices/vierge-lenfant-de-la-sainte-chapelle (accessed 01 October 2019). 37 R. H. Randall, Jr., The Golden Age of Ivory: Ivory Carving in North American Collections, New York, 1993, pp. 34–5 (no. 3). 38 P. Williamson, An Introduction to Medieval Ivory Carvings, London, 1982, p. 19. 39 G. Semper, ‘Four Categories of Raw Materials’, in Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. H. F. Mallgrave, Santa Monica, CA, 2004, p. 109. 40 D. Gaborit-Chopin, Musée du Louvre département des objets d’art, catalogue: Ivoires médiévaux Ve–XVe siècle, Paris, 2006, pp. 293–7 (no. 100).

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 391

09/07/2021 09:49

392 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

For dendrochronological and stylistic reasons the Westminster Retable can now be said to have been executed probably before the death of Henry III in 1272, if not quite as early as some authors have suggested (figs 2, 3).41 The retrospection that modern art-historical analysis allows us suggests that the dehenchement displayed by the St Peter stands at the very moment at which ‘Gothic’ painting can be said to become the dominant international language for the depiction of the human body in European art. The French works of art traditionally compared with the Westminster Retable for stylistic reasons, as opposed to those English works that appear to have been the result of contact with the artist of the Retable or his work, are those associated with the elusive (if relatively well-documented) Parisian illuminator Maître Honoré, and more recently with the French psalter preserved in the Biblioteca del Seminario in Padua.42 All the documented works associated with the name Honoré (whether illuminator or stationer), such as La Somme le Roi (after 1279), the last volumes of the lectionary of the Sainte-Chapelle (recently re-dated after 1285), and the Breviary of Philippe le Bel (before 1296) post-date the Westminster Retable (fig. 4).43 Manuscripts which are associated with these books such as the Murthly Hours and the Burdett Psalter appear to have had a final English destination or can be related to English scribal practice.44 The finest of these, the Nuremburg Hours, may have even been made for a prospective marriage between Edward II and a half-sister of Philip the Fair of France c.1293–4.45 A key aspect of these works is their use of modelling through what has described as the three-tone system.46 The introduction of white into the body colour of blue garments in particular adds an illusionistic weight to the garments worn by figures.47 How and why illuminators between c.1260–80 came to want to do this is a matter for discussion. The sequence of the execution of three important apocalypse manuscripts studied by Nigel Morgan, the Lambeth, Abingdon and Gulbenkian apocalypses, suggests that this new type of modelling was first introduced in manuscript illumination in England c.1265–75 (fig. 5).48 There can be little doubt that exposure to a monumental painting utilising wet41 C. Wilson, ‘The Architecture and Ornament of the Westminster Retable as Evidence of Dating and Origin’, in The Westminster Retable: History, Technique, Conservation, ed. P. Binski and A. Massing, Turnhout, 2009, pp. 79–96 (at pp. 95–6). 42 Padua, Biblioteca del Seminario, MS 353; S. Zonno, ‘Un témoin exceptionnel de l’art parisien du temps de saint Louis: le Psautier de la Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Padoue’, Art de l’enluminure, 44, 2013, pp. 2–57. 43 M. Kauffmann ‘Sainte-Chapelle Lectionaries’; London, BL, Add. MS 54180 and Paris, BNF, MS Latin 1023; E. G. Millar, The Faber Library of Illuminated Manuscripts: The Parisian miniaturist Honoré, London, 1959, pp. 5–15; Ellen Kosmer, ‘Master Honoré: A Reconsideration of the Documents’, Gesta, 14, 1975, pp. 63–8; L’art au temps des rois maudits, pp. 276–7; R. H. Rouse and M. A. Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200–1500, 2 vols, Turnhout, 2000, vol. 1, pp. 146–9; D’Or et d’ivoire: Paris, Pise, Florence, Sienne 1250–1320 ed. X. Dectot and M-L. Marguerite, Lens, 2015, p. 183 (no. 59). 44 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 21000; J. Higgitt, The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West, London, 2000; Sotheby’s Sale 28th June 1998, Lot 50; J. Backhouse, ‘A Very Old Book: the Burdett PsalterHours Made for a Thirteenth-century Hospitaller’, in Studies in the Illustration of the Psalter, ed. B. Cassidy and R. Muir Wright, Stamford, 2000, pp. 55–66. 45 Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, MS Solger 4.4o; E. Simmons, Les Heures de Nuremberg, Paris, 1994, pp. 39–44. 46 N. J. Morgan, ‘Aspects of Colour in English and French Manuscript Painting of the late Thirteenth Century’, Akten des XXV Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Wien, 4–10. September 1983. Bd.6: Sektion 6, Europäische Kunst um 1300, Vienna, 1986, pp. 111–16. 47 S. Panayotova, L. Pereira-Pardo and P. Ricciardi, ‘Illuminators’ Materials and Techniques in Fourteenth-century English Manuscripts’, in Manuscripts in the Making - Art and Science, 2 vols, ed. S. Panayotova and P. Ricciardi, Turnhout, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 49–66. 48 London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 209; London, BL, Add. MS 42555 and Lisbon, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, MS L. A. 139; N. J. Morgan, A Survey of Manuscript illuminated in the British Isles 4: Early Gothic Manuscripts, 2 vols, London, 1982–8, vol. 2, pp. 101–10 (nos 126–8).

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 392

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 32 | invent i ng go t hi c pai nt i ng: c r eat i ng

f i n e a r t   |   393

on-wet oil painting techniques such as the Westminster Retable may have caused this change of technique. Oil media were known and used in northern European panel painting from the earliest times. However, the contrast between the use of wet-on-wet oil painting on the ceiling panels of the painted chamber of Henry III (after1263) and the way the medium is exploited in combination with a new vision of how the figure could be used expressively through the utilisation of dehenchement on the Westminster Retable is quite marked.49 The artist of one of the surviving panels from the ceiling may be identified with that of the Douce Apocalypse, and it appears to be his exposure to the work of the artist of the Retable that alters his approach to the design of architectural surrounds and the drawing of figures (particularly the expressive use of hands), so much so that Paul Binski has even postulated that the artist of the retable himself may be responsible for both.50 There is a mismatch between the use of the term ‘Gothic’ by architectural historians to label most architecture produced after the re-building of the abbey of St Denis by Abbot Suger in the middle of the twelfth-century and the major conceptual shift that occurs in the depiction of the body which is also characterised as ‘Gothic’ after c.1250–60. Citing Ernst Gombrich, Stephen Murray states ‘Gothic involves periodisation and categorisation: the definition of a common set of characteristics found in a group of art[e]facts from a given period of time located in a given geographical area’.51 There is nothing wrong in principle with this methodology, but it can lead to a misunderstanding of the essentially rhetorical term ‘Gothic’. It appears to have created some fanciful and often misleading pseudo-connoisseurial stylistic observations in order to place twelfth century artists into the orbit of what is essentially a rhetorical term designed to be used of architecture. The creation of the so-called ‘Master of the Gothic Majesty’ by Walter Oakeshott in his 1945 publication of the Winchester Bible, is one instance of this and the concept of the ‘transitional style’, promulgated during the Year 1200 Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1970, is another.52 Adleheid Heimann’s apology in the conference papers to the exhibition admitting, ‘the label “transitional” is, perhaps, not very felicitous’ when referring to manuscript illumination, is somehow negated by Kenneth Setton’s observations.53 He states that: ‘Every era is transitional, either to something better or something worse, and man has mostly lived in an atmosphere of crisis… Attempts at precise periodisation always get the historian into trouble’.54 The concept of inevitable confusion in a period defined as confusing, fits in with Wilhelm Worringer’s view of the world where the ‘Gothic line’ is created ‘because the harmonious motion of the organic is not sufficiently expressive … The inner disharmony and unclarity of these peoples [northern Europeans], [is] situated 49 P. Binski, ‘A Survey of English Thirteenth-century Figurative Painting on Panel’, in Das Aschaffenburger Tafelbild, Studien zur Tafelmalerei des 13. Jahrhunerts, ed. E. Emmerling and C. Ringer, Arbeitschefte des Bayerischen Landsamtes für Denkmalpflege 89, Munich, 1997, pp. 325–34. 50 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 180; M. A. Michael, ‘Two Painted Panels from Westminster Palace’, in English Medieval Embroidery, p. 142 (no. 20); N. J. Morgan, The Douce Apocalypse. Picturing the End of the World in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 2005; P. Binski, ‘Function, Date, Imagery, Style and Context’, in The Westminster Retable, p. 31. 51 S. Murray, Plotting Gothic, Chicago, 2014, p. 3; E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, London, 1966, pp. 81–3. 52 W. Oakeshott, The Artists of the Winchester Bible, London, 1945, p. 7; D. H. Turner, ‘Manuscript Illumination’, in The Year 1200: A Background Survey, Published in Conjunction with the Centennial Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 12 through May 10, 1970, ed. F. Deuchler, New York, 1970, pp. 133–68 (at p. 133). 53 A. Heimann ‘The Last Copy of the Utrecht Psalter’, in The Year 1200. A Symposium, Dublin, 1975, pp. 313–38 (at p. 323). 54 K. M. Setton, ‘The Fourth Crusade’, in The Year 1200. A Symposium, New York, 1975, p. 33.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 393

09/07/2021 09:49

39 4 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

far before knowledge and living, in a harsh and repellent nature …’.55 This leads to the idea that Gothic forms somehow become abstract entities driven by psychological responses to ‘inorganic’ matter: The way in which that rhythmic dominant we call Gothic line which is really decisive only for the ponderation of the whole, but which, in its rhythm and in the verticalism of its proportions, still clung initially to the heightened and over-loud life of the previous epoch-worked its way out of the crinkled, angular, brittle drapery style of the early period; the way in which this Gothic line then slowly became calmer as it grew more organic and assumed an ever more rhythmic swing, until it attained perfect equipoise between horizontal and vertical tendencies; the way in which this rhythm, in a slow evolution, assimilated into itself the whole disorder of folds.56 By subscribing to the view that a prototypischer Stiltransformationen in westlichen Kunstzentren is seen in the work of the so-called Master of the Gothic Majesty of the Winchester Bible, even Hans Belting appears to be promulgating this essentially rhetorical construct. 57 However, far from being an unconscious, psychological response, the conceptual shift that occurs in thirteenth-century painting involves the emancipation of real people who were given time and money to express their creativity. This has profound consequences for the development of European culture. Worringer, like most authors who confuse the rhetorical construct of Gothic architecture with that of Gothic painting and sculpture, misses the moment of the invention of what has come to be called the ‘broad-fold style’ and the depiction of the figure in contrapposto that forms the characteristic dehenchement of so-called Gothic painting and sculpture.

A work of Fine Art The Westminster Retable is recognisably a work of Fine Art (figs 1, 2). With its humanistic vision of Christ at the centre, its extraordinary bravado in painting and cross-cultural affinities, it transcends its use value or functional meaning. There is little doubt now that the artist was probably trained in France and there is no surprise that he was probably painting towards the end of the reign of Henry III at Westminster.58 From the point of view of wet-on-wet oil painting technique alone it sets a precedent for all subsequent discussion of the development of painting in Europe, but it is also iconographically innovatory as well as being a masterpiece of trompe-l’oeil design.59 The relationship between the almost 55 56 57 58 59

W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. M. Bullock, Chicago, 1997, p. 77. Ibid., p.119; for the afterlife of the ‘Gothic Line’ see P. Montebello, Deleuze: la passion de la pensée, Paris, 2008, pp. 186–9. Belting, ‘Zwischen Gotik und Byzanz’, p. 231. C. Wilson, ‘Architecture and Ornament’, pp. 79–96. M. A. Michael, ‘The Bible moralisée, the Golden Legend and the Salvator Mundi: Observations on the Iconography of the Westminster Retable’, Antiquaries Journal, 94, 2014, pp. 93–125.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 394

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 32 | invent i ng go t hi c pai nt i ng: c r eat i ng

f i n e a r t   |   395

ironical use of paste jewels and imitation ivories and enamels on the frame of the Retable and the play between painted architectural features and gilded wooden and glass microarchitecture create difference between the various imitations in the framing and their apparently ‘real’ generalities: their metal, enamel, stone and glass counterparts. Difference through style and medium is present in the way the physical substance of the paint is manipulated to give humanity and presence to figures playing their parts on a twodimensional surface.60 There is an inclusiveness to the repetition of forms which are derived from antique, Islamic and other more local cross-cultural sources which also creates difference and produces a work of art that is innovatory. A purely dialectical comparison of the individual sources of each element that makes up the Retable could be regarded as a method of segregation leading to the alienation of one part from another based on its perceived origins. Understanding how it creates difference and how it welcomes repetition helps us to place it properly in the history of art as one of the most important monuments of Fine Art to have survived from the middle ages.

Fig. 1. Ivory Virgin and Child from the Sainte-Chapelle, h. 41 cm, c.1265–79, Paris, Musée du Louvre, département des objets d’art: Moyen Age inv. no. OA 57

60 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, London, 2004, pp. 1–3.

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 395

09/07/2021 09:49

396 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

Fig. 2. The Westminster Retable, general view: Christ as Salvator Mundi in the centre flanked by the Virgin and St John the Evangelist, three surviving miracle scenes and St Peter standing on the left. 0.959 × 3.3 m. Westminster Abbey Museum. Dean and Chapter of Westminster

Fig. 3. The Westminster Retable, detail, St Peter. Westminster Abbey Museum. Dean and Chapter of Westminster

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 396

09/07/2021 09:49

chap ter 32 | invent i ng go t hi c pai nt i ng: c r eat i ng

f i n e a r t   |   397

Fig. 4. La Somme le Roi, BL, Add. MS 54180, f. 107. Friendship and Hatred, David and Jonathan, Saul and David. By permission of the British Library Board

Fig. 5. The Abingdon Apocalypse, London, BL, Add. MS 42555, f. 13v. The third seal: the rider on the black horse. By permission of the British Library Board

7132 29-32 Binski new size v6.indd 397

09/07/2021 09:49

The Evidence of the Training of Tour Guides in the Middle Ages Conrad Rudolph

Introduction In his meticulous entry on Thomas of Elmham’s Speculum Augustinianum in The Cambridge Illuminations, Paul Binski masterfully presents the accompanying plan of the east end of Saint Augustine’s abbey (fig. 1), perceptively associating it with the Canterbury Plan, noting the rareness of such ecclesiastical plans and implicitly raising the question of why the Saint Augustine’s Plan was made in the first place.1 Was the purpose simply and straightforwardly antiquarian in intent or was it this and, perhaps, something more? In this short essay, dedicated to Paul with long-held thanks for his intellectual integrity, unfailing eye, and deeply appreciated support, I would like to make the case that the Saint Augustine’s Plan is even rarer than previously thought (as, I believe, is the Canterbury Plan), doing so not as a focused study of this image alone but rather in the broader context of, as I see it, at least part of its original purpose. In a recent article, I argued that the historical evidence is overwhelming that there was a widespread practice of having ‘tour guides’ – or, perhaps better, simply ‘guides’ – at religious, especially pilgrimage, places during the middle ages, there being innumerable references to these guides in the sources and with their presence nowhere being considered unusual.2 While the practice of having on-site guides continued well-established preChristian usage, guide culture was affected by the same changes that came to affect the rest of society with the rise of Christianity. With Christianity, guide culture had largely, though not entirely, become a subset of pilgrimage culture, the fundamental premise of which was the localization of the holy, the belief that the holy could at times be found or experienced more immediately at one place than it might at another. At the same time, there was a popular equation between excessive art and holiness, that is, there was a popular perception that an increased level of art was indicative of an increased level of the presence of the holy. As part of this interaction of pilgrimage and artistic cultures, art 1 2

The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West, ed. P. Binski and S. Panayotova, London, 2005, pp. 254–5 (cat. 115). On the Canterbury Plan (often called the ‘waterworks plan’), Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.17.1, ff. 284v–285, see Tessa Webber’s entry in Cambridge Illuminations, pp. 90–92 (cat. 25). C. Rudolph, ‘The Tour Guide in the Middle Ages: Guide Culture and the Mediation of Public Art’, Art Bulletin, 100, 2018, pp. 36–67, partially summarized in this and the following paragraphs.

[ 398]

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 398

09/07/2021 10:06

chap ter 33 | the t r ai ni ng o f t o ur gui d es i n t he mi d d l e ages  |   399

came to be used to evoke the presence of the holy at the holy place, in this way meeting the expectations of some great experience on the part of the visiting pilgrims, many of whom came to see relics but subconsciously expected art. While the vast majority of these pilgrims were illiterate, having no or only very little formal education, the costly art programs – the cost being a sign of the degree of social commitment – that were created principally for them, practically speaking, were often quite complex. In this seemingly contradictory situation of complex art programs and illiterate audiences, on-site guides representing the elite institutions that were responsible for the programs often mediated between these works of art and/or architecture and their generally non-elite audiences. In this earlier article, I also showed how this mediation was part of a larger guide culture, one whose theoretical justification lay in the obligation of bishops and priests to instruct the faithful and of monks to receive visitors as stipulated in the Benedictine Rule. To take the example of a hypothetical monastery, when pilgrims arrived, they were received according to their social status, invited to pray and hear a sermon, and then guided to the church, this general shepherding and the obligation to instruct naturally lending itself to the dynamic of a tour, which was in any event a common part of cultural practice.3 At the great pilgrimage place of the monastic cathedral of Christ Church at Canterbury, once inside the church, the basic guide infrastructure consisted of nine main shrines, at least eight of which had what amounts to full-time shrine-keepers, with sometimes as many as four keepers at a single shrine, in which case two of these were clerks, that is, literate laymen, who were to ‘always and in all circumstances assemble, speak in a friendly manner with, and answer [the questions of] pilgrims with all gentleness, courtesy, and care’ (compare fig. 2).4 The same church was also required, according to its own written statutes, ‘to show the buildings to those who wish to see them, taking care that the community is not then sitting in cloister’ – that is, it was required to give a general tour of the monastery to all pilgrims and visitors, of which I believe the Canterbury Plan is a vestige.5 There was, however, no standard method of operation with regard to guide practice. On-site guides ranged in social status and educational levels from high to low, from ecclesiastical to lay, from official to unofficial, and, in the Middle East, from Christian to Muslim. All types of art were addressed (typological, narrative, non-narrative, architecture) – typically within the context of a broader presentation of the place, including its history and often architectural history – with elite guides for elite audiences and non-elite guides for non-elite audiences. And the evidence suggests that on-site guides at times employed ‘guide aids’, that is publicly displayed texts (tabulae), texts for individual reading by literate visitors, and visual aids (for example, the Canterbury Plan, the now lost brass plaque at Glastonbury that marked the site of an earlier church building, the Guthlac Roll, the Vie de Saint Denys, and so on). 3

In general, see B. Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England, Woodbridge, 1998; J. Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of the Saints in the Early Christian West, c. 300–1200, Oxford, 2000; J. Kerr, Monastic Hospitality: The Benedictines in England, c. 1070–1250, Rochester, 2007. 4 The quote, from the Customary of the Shrine of Saint Thomas, refers to the clerks, as cited by Nilson, Cathedral Shrines, pp. 132–3; translation mine. 5 Lanfranc, Constitutions 90, ed. and trans. D. Knowles, rev. edn C. N. L. Brooke, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, Oxford, 2002, pp. 130–32. I have retained much of the language of Knowles’ translation. For my views on the Canterbury Plan, see Rudolph, ‘The Tour Guide in the Middle Ages’, pp. 47–50.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 399

09/07/2021 10:06

40 0 | tr ibu tes to pau l bi nski – part f o ur

But, given that guide culture was such a fixed part of pilgrimage culture (and given that many of the art programs of the holy places could be quite complex), surely these guides, like virtually all other people in all other occupations, must have been trained to one degree or another. And so, in this essay, I would like to take up a question that I did not address in my previous study of guide culture, namely, has any evidence survived for the training (or preparation in one way or another) of these guides?

The evidence of a guide culture in the middle ages as it relates to art: guide training Evidence has, it seems, survived for the training of on-site guides but, in trying to come to terms with this evidence, a number of points have to be recognized. First, it has to be realized that most training was no doubt straightforward oral training (common enough today but presumably much more so in the middle ages before the great increase in literacy and inexpensive printed texts) and so has left no record. Furthermore, it must be assumed that guide training would have varied widely from place to place and probably over time, as the pilgrimage grew and as the expectations of a gradually better educated audience increased. And it appears that much of the evidence that has survived – for example, tabulae, local histories, architectural descriptions, and inventory-like writings – has traditionally been seen as strictly limited to what the basic genres of the documents imply in the narrow sense, while in all likelihood these texts may also have served the additional function of guide training. That is, these texts seem to have served more than a single purpose, in the same way that so many writings do today (for example, today, a guide at a great church like Canterbury might read an accessible book about the church that was not specifically written for guide training). Finally, because of the nature of the surviving evidence – being sparse and written or involving writing – we can get no more than a brief glimpse at guide training and then only of the literate guide, for much of the middle ages a monk or clerk. One of the most common if previously unrecognized vestiges of general guide training seems to have been tabulae, of which two English examples survive, the York tabula and the Glastonbury tabula, both from the fourteenth century (fig. 3). Tabulae were unique, large-scale, publicly displayed texts, characteristically in Latin, that presented a variety of information about the institution in which they were set up: typically a history of the church, perhaps integrated into a larger history of salvation and so indicating the place of the institution in that history, and including references to relics, indulgences, privileges of the church, artistic patronage, works of art, architecture, and even architectural histories.6 Hung on the walls and pillars of the churches and clearly designed in part for public display, these tabulae were nevertheless intellectually inaccessible to the majority of the 6 On tabulae in general, J. Krochalis, ‘Magna Tabula: The Glastonbury Tablets’, in Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition, ed. J. P. Carley, Rochester, NY, 2001, pp. 435–567.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 400

09/07/2021 10:06

chap ter 33 | the t r ai ni ng o f t o ur gui d es i n t he mi d d l e ages  |   401

visitors, the non-elite illiterate public, because the tabulae were both written and in Latin. At the same time, these tabulae were unlikely to have been primarily intended for the minority of the visitors, the elite literate visitors, because of their great length (the Glastonbury tabula has been said to be around sixty pages in ‘ordinary exercise book size’ 7). Rather, their use is suggested by the known role of the York tabula in the training of the vicars choral (priests who were hired to perform certain liturgical and other duties of the higher status cathedral canons) of York Minster, these vicars choral being required to learn the information contained in the York tabula by the end of their first year of service as part of their duties, which apparently included guide duties. It seems to be no coincidence that the information given in the tabulae is exactly the same type of information given in a ‘belt book’ of around 1265 from Glastonbury abbey, this belt book being what today might be called a ‘crib sheet’ or ‘cheat sheet’, a guide aid that was designed to hang from the belt for ready reference by the user; apparently an on-site guide-in-training (fig. 4).8 Tabulae, acting as a basic source of information that the institution expected to be conveyed by its officials to the public, seem not only in their main themes to have acted as sources from which the guide chose select bodies of information in preparation for a presentation, but also in their general breadth to have served as reference sources to which the guide might turn in answering questions (as explicitly required in the Canterbury injunction to guides quoted above) while on duty. That is, these tabulae – which seem to have been primarily used as aids for on-site guides and only secondarily for the literate public – were apparently also used for guide training, tour preparation, and on-site reference. Variations on the practice at York all but certainly applied to the many other places that no doubt also had tabulae. However, it was not the fact that the York tabula was publicly displayed that caused it to be required to be learned by the vicars choral but rather the particular information it contained. And this is the same information found in certain texts intended for individual reading by literate visitors that were provided by the host institutions, such as Le roman du Mont Saint-Michel, written in the vernacular in the mid twelfth century by Guillaume de Saint-Pair, a monk of Mont-Saint-Michel – recounting the foundation, relics, miracles, privileges, and so on of the great monastery – because, as he expressly states, visitors were being given incorrect information.9 The implication here is that if this text was written because visitors were being given incorrect information, then the text must also have been meant for the lay staff of the monastery and Guillaume’s fellow monks who were giving the incorrect information to the public in the first place. That is, it seems that this text for individual reading almost certainly served a dual purpose: like the tabulae, it was primarily there for anyone to read who could, but it also apparently acted as an information source for the lay staff and monks (providing the same type of information found in the Glastonbury belt book) in the training of guides. It appears that specific elements of the wide-ranging body of information found in tabulae and similar writings could be found in more developed forms in other texts for 7 8 9

J. A. Bennett, ‘A Glastonbury Relic’, Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 34, 1888, pp. 117–22 (at p. 119). A. G. Watson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 435–1600 in Oxford Libraries, Oxford, 1984, cat. 633, figure 118. Krochalis, ‘Magna Tabula’, p. 437, suggests that this may have been used by guides. Guillaume de Saint-Pair, Le Roman du Mont Saint-Michel (XIIe siècle), ed. and trans. C. Bougy, Caen, 2009, p. 115.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 401

09/07/2021 10:06

402 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

individual reading, texts that certainly have a strong air of local history per se about them but on closer inspection seem also to have been used for the same purpose of guide training as the more general writings just mentioned. One example that pertains to architecture and the architectural history of a place is, I believe, Gervase of Canterbury’s De combustione et reparatione Cantuariensis ecclesiae.10 De combustione gives, by medieval standards, an unusually detailed account of what would become the greatest work of architecture in England at that time: the reconstruction, at enormous expense, of the eastern extension of the monastic cathedral of Christ Church from 1174 to 1184. Gervase was a historian and his history of the reconstruction, like many histories, has an underlying dichotomy of claim and reality. The claim is the self-conscious assertion by him that his intention is ‘not to make a record of an arrangement of stones’ but rather to list the burial places of the ‘saints’; this claim clearly being something that is important to him as a justification for the writing of his account.11 The reality is the most systematic and informed medieval architectural presentation of which I am aware, one that goes far beyond other written sources in the level of structural understanding of and aesthetic insight into the church building as a work of architecture. To begin with, Gervase gives as complete an architectural history of Christ Church from its foundation to his own day as he could produce, using every resource available to him, including citing at length an earlier written description by Eadmer, another monk and historian of Canterbury. Gervase’s account relates a year by year reconstruction of the new church, more or less culminating in a striking proto-art historical comparison between the Romanesque style of the old church and the Gothic of the new, as well as an explicit explanation of the effect of the earlier architectural arrangement on the current structure. At the same time, his narrative is one that solidly engages in the tradition of written guide accounts of the middle ages in its occasional enumeration of columns, windows, steps, jewels, candles, and so on (I am not referring here to Gervase’s recounting of the chronological progression of the construction of the new church section by section), as well as fairly extensive discussion of the chief saint of the place, Becket, including miraculous aspects.12 It is only during the course of all this that he summarily lists the burial places of the ‘saints’, also a traditional part of written guide accounts. Gervase, however, was not only a historian but also, by at least 1193, the sacrist of Christ Church, the person responsible for a complex guide infrastructure that at one time consisted of at least fifty-one lay personnel along with a number of monks, an infrastructure that included the individual shrines mentioned above that had as many as four officials each, two of which were lay clerks.13 And so while he repeatedly states that he has written his account ‘lest the memory be lost’ of his given subject14 -- that is, the account is a proper history – he also repeatedly urges his reader to go and see for himself the architectural work 10 Gervase of Canterbury, Tractatus de combustione et reparatione Cantuariensis Ecclesiae, ed. W. Stubbs, The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, 2 vols, Rolls Series 73, London, 1879–80, vol. 1, pp. 3–29. 11 Ibid., pp. 12, 27–8. 12 Ibid., pp. 12–19. 13 Gervase, Chronica, ed. Stubbs, Historical Works, vol. 1, p. 84 to vol. 2, p. 324 (at vol. 1, p. 521); W. Urry, Canterbury under the Angevin Kings, London, 1967, p. 157; D. H. Turner, ‘The Customary of the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket’, The Canterbury Chronicle, 70, 1976, pp. 16–22 (at pp. 17–20). 14 Gervase, De combustione, pp. 11, 12, 25 (twice).

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 402

09/07/2021 10:06

chap ter 33 | the t r ai ni ng o f t o ur gui d es i n t he mi d d l e ages  |   403

that is the main subject of his narrative,15 something whose assumption of the proximity of this presumed reader to the architecture implies that Gervase expected not only that his text was for internal consumption as a literary effort but that it would also be read by those who might need to have a firsthand knowledge of the actual details of the subject. This raises the question of who might have needed to have such a firsthand knowledge of the architectural details of the cathedral. While this account, recently shown to have been written originally as an independent text, may have been in part meant for monks who had general interests in the history of Christ Church, its lengthy and highly specialized character – so unusual for the time – suggests that it was primarily intended for those monks and especially clerks who served as shrine-keepers or as on-site guides, under the oversight of the sacrist.16 Otherwise, why would Gervase have essentially defined the word ‘aisle’ (ala) at one point, a word that every monk, old or young, most certainly knew but which, in its Latin form, widely found in the historical texts used in liberal arts education in its more common meaning of the ‘wing’ of an armed force, may not have been immediately clear to clerics of the sort who might act as clerks-in-training at the high altar shrine?17 Indeed, at the end of his remarkable discourse on the old and the new, the Romanesque and the Gothic, one of the places where he advises his reader to go and observe the work for himself firsthand, Gervase adds that all of what he has said will be more clearly seen by the eyes than ‘taught by words, whether spoken or written’ (dictis vel scriptis edoceri).18 Gervase had a reason for specifying ‘by words, whether spoken or written’. Although his main purpose in this passage is to declare the principle that for those seeking a good understanding of the architecture of Christ Church a firsthand observation is more effective than a secondhand discourse, it also refers to the practice of ‘teaching’ by both oral and written means. To take Gervase’s own example, in his effort to write a systematic architectural history of Christ Church, he not only took advantage of previously written texts such as that of Eadmer’s in the creation of his own, De combustione, but he also borrowed from the oral transmission of knowledge that was no doubt by far the most common practice in guide training at Canterbury and elsewhere, as this same text shows. For, in it, he describes the crossing tower of Lanfranc’s church as ‘placed in the middle of the church . . . as if the center in the middle of a circle’ (Turris ergo in medio ecclesiae . . . posita est, sicut in medio circumferentiae centrum).19 Yet Lanfranc’s crossing tower was nowhere near being placed ‘in the middle of the church . . . as if the center in the middle of a circle’. Or perhaps I should say that it was nowhere near being placed in the middle or center of the church at the time of Gervase’s writing. But it had been very much the geometric center of the church as it existed in the years before the great fire of 1174, given that the center point of a circle inscribed with its western circumference at the intersection of the east-west axis of the church and an imaginary 15 Ibid., pp. 12, 27, 28. 16 De combustione was only later placed at the head of a body of historical texts by Gervase, of which his Chronica is the best known; C. D. Cragoe, ‘Reading and Rereading Gervase of Canterbury’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 154, 2001, pp. 40–53. 17 Gervase, De combustione, p. 13. 18 Ibid., p. 28. For a different translation, R. Willis, The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral, London, 1845, p. 61. 19 Gervase, De combustione, p. 9.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 403

09/07/2021 10:06

40 4 | tr ibu tes to pau l bi nski – part f o ur

north-south line marking the westernmost extent of the façade buttresses (Lanfranc’s church, begun 1070) on the one hand, and its eastern circumference at the intersection of the same east-west axis and the innermost wall of the ambulatory of the choir (part of an extension by Prior Conrad, main construction completed around 111020) on the other hand, is identical with the center point of the crossing of Lanfranc’s church. However, the architectural manifestation of the eastern circumference of this circle that gave logic to Gervase’s expression had been destroyed ten to thirty-six years previous to the time of his writing De combustione (written sometime after the 1184 completion of the Gothic extension and before his death around 1210).21 Since the agreement of Gervase’s statement with the geometric concurrences just discussed is unlikely to be accidental and since the eastern part of Christ Church had a different extent at the time of his writing, it would seem that the statement, given twice by him,22 represents a vestige of earlier guide practice passed on by oral transmission, presumably from the time that the architect of Prior Conrad’s choir discussed his plans with and had them approved by the community of Christ Church (i.e., long before Gervase entered Canterbury as a young monk in 1163). And so it seems that De combustione, like the tabulae and other related writings, is a dual purpose text, one that Gervase, in his own dual function as both a historian and sacrist (if the text were written while he was sacrist), conceived of both to contribute to the general history and claims of Christ Church and to serve in the instruction of on-site guides, teaching them not just the history proper but also the architecture and architectural history of the place, its idiosyncrasies, and its various points of note as part of a continuing local guide culture. In regard to figural and liturgical art and their understanding, two later texts from the great pilgrimage church of Saint Albans, De altaribus, monumentis, et locis sepulcrorum and De picturis et imaginibus (c.1428), exemplify how sometimes large compilations of local art historical lore written for individual reading might act not just for inventory or commemorative purposes but in effect might also form a body of potential guide material from which some guide-in-training might extract whatever seemed to be most useful. Listing scores of works of art in the usual monastic contexts of location, burials, and sometimes patrons, these texts also often make reference to material, craftsmanship, the guide infrastructure of sacrist and shrine-keepers, and even public interaction with some of the works of art. This public interaction is undoubtedly the reason why one of these two texts, De picturis, begins with Gregory the Great’s venerable justification of the use of art – made, however, specifically in reference to the visiting public, not the monks of the monastery themselves – thus providing both a theological justification of the use of art in the Church in general and providing a social justification of guide culture in its artistic

20 F. Woodman, The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral, Boston, 1981, pp. 28, 45. 21 The historiography of and evidence for the dating of De combustione is thoroughly reviewed in Cragoe, ‘Reading and Rereading Gervase of Canterbury’, pp. 47–51. She suggests that De combustione was not begun before the 1190s and that it was probably written in 1199 for a visitation by papal arbitrators. However, since, as I believe, the unique characteristics of this text are much more readily explained by the purposes suggested in this study than to an arbitration process, the dating remains an open question. Nor is there any supporting evidence for the date that I myself think is most logical, from 1193 to 1197, given the likelihood that the text was written by Gervase as part of his efforts as sacrist, an office he held during those years. 22 See also Gervase, De combustione, p. 12.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 404

09/07/2021 10:06

chap ter 33 | the t r ai ni ng o f t o ur gui d es i n t he mi d d l e ages  |   405

aspect at the monastery of Saint Albans in particular.23 But De picturis goes even further in the actual engagement of the visiting public with the art program of Saint Albans in its concern for the training or preparation of the on-site guide in his duties in that it also (similarly to Gervase though in a completely different direction) goes beyond the information that a guide might convey as typically found in tabulae and certain texts for individual reading. More specifically, it provides an exegetical interpretation of some of the works of art at Saint Albans in what can only be the written vestige of an actual on-site mediation of these works of art, a complex, unique, and idiosyncratic reading (i.e., not directly based on the Fathers), one that is too involved to take up here.24 For the purposes of this essay, the significant point about this text is that it provides a ready-made reading of a number of works of art that apparently were considered to be some of the most important in the church so that a guide-in-training who had as yet only a limited understanding of ‘the meaning of the paintings and mysteries’ at the abbey church might then present this understanding to the public himself. One of the most striking survivals of medieval guide culture is the Canterbury Roll (early fourteenth century), a text strictly for individual guide use that acted as a source for a systematic body of works of art of a place, that is, not merely a few as were addressed in the Saint Albans text (fig. 5). The Canterbury Roll records the inscriptions of a series of exegetical stained glass windows at Christ Church known as the typological windows – the most complex of five different series of windows there (largely destroyed by Parliamentarians in 1643) – written in roll format.25 It was all but certainly used by the two clerks assigned to the shrine of the high altar of the cathedral, the place where Becket’s body lay overnight in the immediate aftermath of his killing, the second most lucrative shrine of the cathedral,26 and the area in which the series of the typological windows was located. While the roll appears to have served the clerks as a reference source for these inscriptions, many of which would have been difficult to read from ground level, it was itself too long to read in its entirety to any public, literate or illiterate. Instead, it seems that, in his preparation, the clerk/guide – especially the clerk/guide-in-training, since the experienced guide would gradually come to know his material thoroughly – would have selected the inscriptions of whatever windows or panels seemed best to him as the basis of his presentation, whether he carried the Canterbury Roll in hand during the tour or not. Finally, with regard to the general layout of the holy place, another example still of a text primarily meant for internal consumption but that also seems to have lent itself in a very general way to guide training is Thomas of Elmham’s Speculum Augustinianum (c.1410 to 1413), from Saint Augustine’s abbey, Canterbury. Like some of the other texts mentioned, it 23 De picturis et imaginibus, juxta altare Sanctae Crucis, in ecclesia monasterii Sancti Albani, in Annales monasterii S. Albani, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols, Rolls Series 28, London, 1870–71, vol. 1, pp. 418–30 (at pp. 418–19). 24 De picturis, p. 419. For a full discussion of this passage, Rudolph, ‘The Tour Guide in the Middle Ages’, pp. 54–5. 25 For more on this aspect of the Canterbury Roll, including bibliography, C. Rudolph, ‘The Parabolic Discourse Window and the Canterbury Roll: Social Change and the Assertion of Elite Status at Canterbury Cathedral’, Oxford Art Journal, 38, 2015, pp. 1–19 (at pp. 13–19). See also the unpublished thesis by my former graduate student E. Ramirez, ‘The Canterbury Roll: A Viewer’s Guide of the Twelve Typological Windows at Canterbury Cathedral’, MA dissertation, University of California, Riverside, 2014. On the typological windows, M. H. Caviness, The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury, London, 1981, pp. 77–156. 26 C. E. Woodruff, ‘The Financial Aspect of the Cult of St Thomas of Canterbury’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 44, 1932, pp. 13–32 (at p. 16).

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 405

09/07/2021 10:06

40 6  | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

too is a compilation of history, antiquities, and documents supporting institutional claims. But, along with the usual material, the Speculum also contains a very exceptional item: not just a written description but now a plan of the layout of the east end of a great church, in this case a carefully drawn, full-page plan of the east end of the abbey church of Saint Augustine’s, mentioned at the beginning of this essay (fig. 1).27 Depicted as if the viewer were looking into the east end, the plan clearly lays out the goal of any person – local monk or visiting pilgrim – approaching this part of the church, the high altar and the three radial chapels beyond. Like most of the texts discussed here, the plan makes reference to the altars, relics, tombs, and most important artefacts of the place, including (almost certainly) the illuminated Gospels of Saint Augustine, as well as the building history of the abbey, stating under which abbot the current church was begun and under which it was brought to completion.28 Like the Christ Church Plan also mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the Saint Augustine’s drawing is laid out in plan but rendered in elevation for maximum clarity, admirably designed to give a topographical overview of this relatively complex holy site while at the same time identifying all of its principal features. And, like the Canterbury Plan, the Saint Augustine’s Plan is without any direct connection to the texts of the rest of the manuscript in which it is embedded.29 While the plan was certainly primarily intended as part of the basic historical and antiquarian purpose of the text, we have seen that such texts themselves could serve more than one purpose. And this may be the reason that, on either side of the high altar as depicted in the plan, the outermost doors carry inscriptions indicating that they are the doors on the north and south sides of the church that lead ‘to the bodies of the saints’, tombs that are quite clearly identified by their own inscriptions only a very short distance away. More than merely orienting the viewer, these doors and their inscriptions address the flow of visitors, indicating a visitororiented conception as a factor in the overall dynamic of the plan, as opposed to a plan whose purpose is to serve as a straightforward record of the location of altars and relics alone.30 As with the texts for both public and private reading in this study, it seems that this plan also served a dual purpose, being available for both the general historical aims of the text which it accompanied as well as playing a role in guide training at Saint Augustine’s.

27 For inscriptions and discussion, see W. Urry, ‘Canterbury, Kent, Late 14th Century x 1414’, ed. R. A. Skelton, Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England, Oxford, 1986, pp. 107–17. 28 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 286; Cambridge Illuminations, pp. 46–7 (cat. 1), and see pp. 254–5 (cat. 115). 29 This is the opinion of the historian of Canterbury, Urry, ‘Canterbury, Kent’, p. 110 n. 3. 30 For brass plaques that carried generally similar information, though displayed within the church itself, Erasmus, Peregrinatio religionis ergo, ed. L.-E. Halkin et al., Colloqvia, in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, Amsterdam, 1972, pp. 470–94 (ord. 1:3) (at p. 477, lines 239–40); and J. A. Robinson, Two Glastonbury Legends: King Arthur and St Joseph of Arimathea, Cambridge, 1926, pp. 42–4, 56–8 and pl. V.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 406

09/07/2021 10:06

chap ter 33 | the t r ai ni ng o f t o ur gui d es i n t he mi d d l e ages  |   407

Concluding remarks Very generally speaking, the greatest manifestation of medieval popular spirituality was the pilgrimage, whose basis, the localization of the holy, engendered expectations of some great experience on the part of a typically illiterate public. In order to address these expectations, recognition of the popular perception that increased levels of art indicated the presence of the holy often led elite institutions in control of the holy places to establish lavish and complex art programs, programs whose complexity was then commonly mediated for the illiterate pilgrims by on-site guides representing the institutions. This practice not only gave these elite institutions the opportunity to engage with the non-elite public in the pilgrimage as an expression of popular spirituality (as well as taking part in the lucrative sacred economy of the pilgrimage), it also allowed them to shape their identities and claims as institutions to this vast audience through art in a highly controlled way. Specifically with regard to the training of guides, while it would be only natural to assume that they would receive some type of training, like those in any other occupation at the time, the vast majority of guide training was presumably oral and so has left no trace. In the few written vestiges of guide culture discussed in this essay – some for public display and some for individual reading, some general and some more specialized – we have evidence from the vicars choral of York and Guillaume de Saint-Pair that explicitly indicates that the knowledge expected of an on-site guide was not something that was simply absorbed in the course of daily life at one of these institutions but was expected to be acquired through some sort of additional learning provided in one way or another by the institutions themselves. And, from the vicars choral, we have further evidence that this learning – this training – could be both formal and required, and that at least some of it might come from texts of undeniably dual purpose, such as the York tabula. Using these few vestiges of guide training to suggest the likely if hypothetical training of such a guide, this person would have been expected to be well versed in the history of the place (prefoundation to the present), its claims and assertions of privilege, its relics, its significant burials, its art – the literal subject matter of presumably all works of art and sometimes even the elite content (the exegetical meaning) of at least some, possibly even in the context of larger artistic programs – its architecture, its architectural history, and the location and certain specifics of all this, apparently sometimes as part of a larger tour of the institution (for example, the extended tour of the cloister of Christ Church) and sometimes as a more focused presentation (e.g., the typological windows as conveyed by the clerk of the high altar shrine of Christ Church). Ultimately, the on-site guide was part of a complex infrastructure and his mediation was part of the natural way of experiencing works of art – part of the object-viewer dynamic – for many in the middle ages. Ephemeral by nature, medieval on-site guide culture has been completely forgotten and evidence of it almost completely lost. But it can still be reconstructed, in however limited a way, from these vestiges and, by recognizing its unique role, contribute to a better understanding of medieval artistic culture.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 407

09/07/2021 10:06

40 8 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

Fig. 1. The Saint Augustine’s Plan, Cambridge, Trinity Hall, MS 1, f. 77

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 408

09/07/2021 10:06

chap ter 33 | the t r ai ni ng o f t o ur gui d es i n t he mi d d l e ages  |   409

Fig. 2. Miraculous cure of Roger of Valognes (?): the two figures on the right apparently depict two clerks assigned to the tomb of Becket before the construction of the Trinity chapel. Panel 42 in window N III in the Trinity chapel, Canterbury cathedral

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 409

09/07/2021 10:06

410 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

Fig. 3. The Glastonbury Tabula, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS lat. hist. a.2

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 410

09/07/2021 10:06

chap ter 33 | the t r ai ni ng o f t o ur gui d es i n t he mi d d l e ages  |   411

Fig. 4. Glastonbury belt book (disassembled and remounted in an album-like format), Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc.750

Fig. 5. The Canterbury Roll, Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library, MS C 246

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 411

09/07/2021 10:06

Gothic Logic: Panofsky’s Unwritten Book on ‘The Gothic Style’ Elizabeth Sears

I

f things had gone a bit differently, Erwin Panofsky – in 1943 or 1944 – would have published a volume entitled The Gothic Style with the Princeton University Press. 1 Plans were well along. Like most of his monographs in English, this one was to have been based on talks given in a named series. In May 1942, on three successive evenings, he had delivered the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, thirty-first in a line of distinguished scholars to do so. It had been stipulated at the outset, written into the letter of invitation, that the lectures would be published.2 Despite good intentions, and fairly extensive negotiations among three parties – Atcheson L. Hench (Professor of English and Chairman of the Public Occasions Committee at the University of Virginia), Datus C. Smith, Jr. (Director of the Princeton University Press), and Panofsky himself, the text remained unpublished, never finished. Yet primary documents survive in some quantity, divided among a number of archives, that allow partial recuperation of the project. These include: caches of correspondence which did not find their way into Dieter Wuttke’s masterful edition of Panofsky’s Korrespondenz, handwritten working drafts of all three lectures, the book proposal submitted to the Press, and a typescript of the first hundred or so pages of the proposed volume. Here recovered, the project emerges as a missing piece, significant for throwing light on Panofsky’s scholarly trajectory in the 1940s and early 1950s – the decade that saw the publication of a series of field-shaping classics in the medieval domain: Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Treasures (1946), Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), and Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Character and Origins (1953). Work on ‘the Gothic style’ seems to have furnished an impetus and even a ground plan for what came after. In 1941 the champion of content-exegesis – the man who in 1939, with his Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, had modelled the investigation 1

2

I warmly thank the staff at the archives in question for making the following materials available: Princeton University Press Records, Boxes 14, 15 (Princeton University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections) (hereafter PUP); Panofsky Papers, Box 15 (Archives of American Art, Washington, DC; reel 2127) (hereafter AAA); Correspondence of the Public Occasions Committee, 1916–1943 (University of Virginia Library, Special Collections, MSS 1033, Box 2) (hereafter UVA); files labeled ‘University of Virginia, 1942’ and ‘The Gothic Style’ (Erwin Panofsky Collection, AR25440, Leo Baeck Institute, New York) (hereafter LBI), not yet available to the public. I am grateful to Frank Mecklenburg at the LBI, and, very especially, to Gerda Panofsky for her invaluable advice and support. Hench to Panofsky, 10 February 1941 (UVA).

[ 412]

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 412

09/07/2021 10:06

c hapt er 3 4  |  go t hi c l o gi c   |   413

of ‘the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form’ – can be seen focusing emphatically on form. Naturally he drew upon earlier work, and the recovered texts may give us a further means of considering the relation between the German and American phases of Panofsky’s career – before 1933, when he was dismissed from his professorship at the University of Hamburg as a ‘non-Aryan’, and after 1935 when he had settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Over time, it becomes clear, Panofsky frequently had recourse to ‘the Gothic’ as he developed method and pondered its applications.

1. The invitation Panofsky accepted the invitation to deliver the Page-Barbour Lectures without hesitation, almost by return of post. He later confirmed what he had suspected, that Fiske Kimball, director of the Philadelphia Art Museum, had backed the invitation with a strong ‘push’. Yet, Kimball indicated, the initial recommendation had come from two younger faculty members who had studied in Hamburg: Henry Cummings in International Studies and William S. Weedon in Philosophy.3 Weedon would later claim that he had learned more of what he regarded as philosophy from Panofsky’s lectures than he had from anyone else except, possibly, Ernst Cassirer.4 Observing that he was the first art historian to deliver the lectures, and seeking to strike a balance between the specialized and the popular, Panofsky immediately provided Hench, as organizer, with three possible topics. I. The Gothic Style 1) Character and Origin of the Gothic Style 2) The Principal Phases of the Gothic Style 3) Survivals and Revivals of the Gothic Style II. Baroque Art in Italy 1) Renaissance, Mannerism, and Baroque 2) The Plastic Arts 3) Architecture III. The International Style of about 1400 1) General Characteristics 2) Stylistic and Iconographic Innovations 3) The Role of the Low Countries 3 4

Panofsky–Kimball exchange, 14–15 February 1941; ed. E. Panofsky, Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968: eine kommentierte Auswahl, ed. D. Wuttke, 5 vols in 6, Wiesbaden, 2001–14, vol. 2, nos 814–15. (References to the Korrespondenz are hereafter cited as ‘ed. Wuttke’). Weedon to Panofsky, 9 and 15 December 1955 (AAA).

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 413

09/07/2021 10:06

414 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

Given leave to select from among them, he chose the ‘The Gothic Style’, believing it ‘might be the most attractive from the point of view of giving an impression of a great movement in European art and of art-historical method in general’.5 A bit later he supported the choice saying: ‘it has a somewhat wider scope and would permit me to touch upon some aspects of the International Style in addition’.6 It was on the latter topic, he indicated, that he had the most new research to deliver, and his hosts were enthusiastic, as this would make for a more significant publication.7 Come April 1942, the lectures – to be delivered May 5, 6, and 7 at 8:00 pm – were announced. By this point Panofsky had settled on an unequivocally chronological scheme. The Gothic Style from its Beginnings through the 13th Century The 14th Century and the International Style of About 1400 The Efflorescence of Modern Naturalism and the Last Phases of the Gothic Style Two weeks before the event, too late for the announcement, he forwarded a revised set of titles, which he would again slightly modify, the final set becoming:8 The Formation of Gothic Architecture in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries The Gothic Style in Sculpture and Painting up to about 1300, and its Parallels in Architecture The Efflorescence of Flemish Naturalism, the Late-Gothic Style and the International Style ± 1400 On the announcement card a brief text called attention to the speaker’s distinctiveness: ‘Professor Panofsky relates the ideas of the time to the art of the time. He is distinguished for his ability to show the philosophy, science, religious ideas, or folk-lore that lie behind a painting or other work of art.’

5 6 7 8

Panofsky to Hench, 14 February 1941 (UVA). Hench­–Panofsky exchange, 16–17 February 1941 (AAA). Panofsky asked whether he might give four 60-minute talks rather than three for 75 minutes; Hench felt this would not best satisfy the mixed (academic and popular) audience. Hench­–Panofsky exchange, 7–10 April 1941 (AAA). Panofsky to Hench, 22 April 1942 (UVA).

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 414

09/07/2021 10:06

c hapt er 3 4  |  go t hi c l o gi c   |   415

2. The lectures – 1942 The lecture texts, housed in the Leo Baeck Institute, survive as some 100 sheets of a handwritten draft, much worked over. Like any writer, Panofsky deleted, inserted, and shifted text, and when thinking quickly wrote in rapid scribbles. His particular practice was to amend his text by writing out newer versions of sentences or paragraphs on separate sheets, clipping and then pasting them atop the superseded text; drops and streaks of glue now leach through on many pages. The lectures are smoothly continuous – Panofsky numbered the pages – with only a few gaps: Lecture 1 comprises forty pages, two missing (7, 8); Lecture 2, thirty-seven pages, four missing (8, 24–26); and Lecture 3, eighteen pages, ending defectively – the original length uncertain. That the texts were prepared for oral delivery is clear: circles in the margins signal slide changes, and spoken locutions (e.g. ‘here on the screen’) are sprinkled throughout. Panofsky may well have had the texts typed up before he headed to Charlottesville; cleaner versions do not seem to survive. What remains is substantive and merits publication in an appropriate form. Panofsky’s purpose was to penetrate ‘Gothic logic’. He imposed a strict discipline on himself, focusing on the factual art historical, so as to define the governing principle of the Gothic style and to demarcate its phases and variants, always starting with architecture and then proceeding to the media of sculpture and painting. Iconographical considerations are given a secondary place. His approach to stylistic analysis is comparative, reliant on antithesis. He rooted his analyses in the fundamental elements of architecture, ‘mass’ and ‘structure’, and opened with a sketch extending from the caves and huts of our ‘savage ancestors’ through Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman architecture. The task of the middle ages, he suggested, was to integrate mass and structure. His characterization of the Gothic hinged especially on contrast with the Romanesque. In the earlier style, by his reckoning, the principle of articulation was applied to the mass itself, leading to an internal contradiction: ‘Mass is by definition continuous and articulation presupposes and creates parts.’ In Gothic the solution to the conflict was found: ‘So pervasive is the tendency to combine complete articulation with perfect continuity that it accounts for the smallest detail in Gothic architecture.’ Panofsky’s core premise is that the Gothic was a new style. There was, strictly speaking, no transition to it: neither do parents constitute a ‘transition’ to the child – even if, to be sure, there are postnatal transitions, age to age, in the individual life. Tracing the ‘postnatal’ development of Gothic, Panofsky arrived at five phases: very early Gothic, or proto-Gothic (±1135/40 to ±1180), mature early Gothic (± 1180 – ± 1210/15), early High Gothic (± 1210 to ± 1230/5), mature High Gothic, or classic Gothic (1230/5 – ± 1270), and late High Gothic (1270 – about 1350). The system of periodization, he acknowledged, applied only to the circle of 120 miles drawn around Paris; this was the zone in which standardization took place: ‘the Gothic system, the Gothic capital, the Gothic program of decoration’ – which meant both perfection and, to a degree, impoverishment. The lost church of St. Nicaise in Reims, known only through engravings – designed by a professional architect, Hugues Libergier – is for Panofsky the culmination, the ‘Parthenon of the Gothic’, the ‘perfect fulfillment of the Gothic ideal’, ‘radically structural’.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 415

09/07/2021 10:06

416 | tr ibutes to paul binski – part f o ur

The task in the second lecture was to coordinate stylistic development across media, beginning with architectural sculpture. If Panofsky opened his treatment of the Gothic façade with iconographic considerations, he quickly turned to form: ‘In what sense’, he asked, ‘can the name “Gothic” – originally, after all, an architectural term – be applied to the plastic arts?’ He pursued fundamentals, showing the impact of the establishment of the principle of ‘axiality’ – the nucleus for increase in volume and movement – and analyzing sculpture in the light of architectural concepts including continuity and articulation. When he moved on to Gothic painting, assessed through the handling of volume and space, he found that it developed on a different absolute timeline, first behind, then synchronized with, then ahead of sculpture. Briefly then he returned to architecture, reveling in Late Gothic variants across Europe, when the Gothic style was pervasive and the Isle-de-France had become provincial. This provided a transition to the final lecture on the ‘effloresence of naturalism’. Here Panofsky’s device was to posit a fictive character, living around 1400, witnessing profound stylistic changes. He treated first Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, and, merging analysis of form and content, he defined ‘pictorial’ as opposed to ‘block’ space and pointed to disguised symbolism in naturalistically rendered objects (candle, dog, shoes, etc.). If this painting cannot be considered ‘Gothic’, late Gothic did persist across the media, and Panofsky found it characterized by ‘an optically unified space, disturbed by unruly forces interacting therein’. He anticipated the strategy pursued in Early Netherlandish Painting by then doubling back to 1370/80 and proceeding forward, via the International Style, to the great Flemings, 1420/30. In the last pages of the defective manuscript of the third lecture, he began to realize the potentials of his efforts at periodization: ‘Let me conclude this last talk with a brief series of human faces. For, the interpretation of the human face is always a surer index of what is called the “spirit” of a period than anything else …’ Here he made an effort to correlate style with developing ideas around soul and body. Perhaps he went further. Possibly he moved on to what would become the core of Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. In 1948, when he accepted the invitation to deliver the Wimmer Lecture before the Benedictine community at St Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania on precisely this theme, he admitted a concern: ‘The only difficulty is that I have undertaken to write a little book on the Gothic style in general which will, however, not appear until two or three years hence. In this book I should have to repeat, more or less, the contents of the proposed lecture.’9

9

Panofsky to Rt. Rev. Alfred Koch, 11 June 1948; ed. Wuttke, vol. 2, no. 1226. On this much cherished visit, see Panofsky to Vöge, to Hermann Giesau, 26, 27 January 1949; ed. Wuttke, vol. 2, nos 1282, 1283.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 416

09/07/2021 10:06

c hapt er 3 4  |  go t hi c l o gi c   |   417

3. The Book Proposal – 1943 The Page-Barbour Committee at the University of Virginia retained proprietary rights over the lectures but preferred to outsource their publication. Tentative efforts to find a publisher began early in 1942, Panofsky suggesting the Princeton University Press as his top choice on the basis of his favorable experience as he finished Albrecht Dürer (1943); Datus Smith, too, was broadly amenable.10 After delivering the lectures, Panofsky, with permission, held onto his manuscript, so as to improve it.11 Months passed. In November 1942, Hench gave Panofsky a nudge, saying that despite the war, they should pursue the question of publication. An apologetic Panofsky, confessing that he was wholly taken up with Dürer, suggested that he still might complete The Gothic Style within half a year – but he was leery of working in vacuo, without a publisher and publishing guidelines in place.12 In February 1943, it was Panofsky’s turn to give the nudge, and Hench now recommended that Panofsky reopen discussions with Princeton.13 The Press remained keen, and Panofsky provided a letter confirming intent, to which he appended the following proposal.14 THE GOTHIC STYLE (The Page-Barbour Lectures, Delivered at the University of Virginia in 1942) In accordance with the character of the above lectures the book will not be a detailed study which may be of interest to scholars only but a presentation of such basic characteristics, morphological and otherwise, as seem significant to the author and may be of interest to any educated reader. A certain amount of ‘original research’ will naturally be incorporated wherever certain special problems have been studied, or are being studied, for the purpose of more technical publications, but the author will, on the whole, try to present a coherent interpretation rather than submit specific ‘results’. Yet it is hoped that the little book may fill a certain gap in the English literature on the subject. As it happens, it may serve as a kind of supplement to the remarkable recent book by Mr. Morey (Mediaeval Art, New York, W. W. Norton, 1942). For, while dealing with the Gothic Style in a manner hard to approach and impossible to surpass within the framework defined by

10 Hench–Panofsky exchange, 2–3 January 1942; Hench–Smith exchange, 2 February-4 March 1942 (UVA). Said Smith: ‘it is my firm conviction that Mr Panofsky is one of the few really great and humane scholars of the modern world’. 11 Hench to Smith, 3 March 1943 (PUP, UVA). 12 Hench–Panofsky exchange 24, 29 November 1942 (UVA). 13 Hench to Panofsky, 1 February 1943 (UVA). 14 Panofsky to Smith, 5 February 1943 (PUP). Neither Panofsky nor Smith were happy with conditions for publishing the lectures. The Page-Barbour Committee, while anticipating royalties, proved uneager to provide subsidy to allow more copious illustrations or to help Panofsky with out-of-pocket photographic expense. Smith argued that the author should have rights over the book manuscript (as opposed to the lecture texts), which in this case was to involve ‘a tremendous amount of work’. Ultimately UVA asked only that prominent notice be given to the book’s origins, to which the Press readily agreed. Hench– Smith–Panofsky exchange, 5 February-12 June 1943 (UVA, PUP).

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 417

09/07/2021 10:06

418 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

Mr. Morey, his book yet leaves room for a discussion of precisely those aspects in which this writer is especially interested.15 As planned at present and outlined in the writer’s lecture notes, the book will comprise the following chapters: Introduction I. The Formation of Gothic Architecture and Its Development up to the Death of St. Louis. II. The Formation of Gothic Sculpture and Painting and Their Development up to the Death of St. Louis III. The Gothic Style from about 1270 to about 1380. IV. The ‘International Style of around 1400’; the Efflorescence of Naturalism; ‘Late Gothic’ and ‘Posthumous Gothic’ Conclusion The size of the book could be kept down to 150–180 pages of about 450 words each, the number of illustrations (preferably half-tones) to about 70 on 48 plates. In addition, there would be about ten or twelve line-cuts for ground plans, sections and diagrams. The manuscript could be submitted on July 1, 1943. * The table of contents shows that Panofsky retained the strict chronological sequence, dividing the material now into four parts, rather than three, and adding an introduction and conclusion. In a second copy of the proposal, this one preserved with the lecture texts in the Leo Baeck Institute, he inserted, by hand, a new first chapter: ‘The Antecedents of the Gothic Style’, and he shifted the date for submission from July to December 1943.

15 It may surprise that Panofsky defined The Gothic Style in relation to Charles Rufus Morey’s now eclipsed survey. Yet in 1942 Mediaeval Art, a culminating synthesis, was welcomed with a certain reverence: see e.g. D. M. Robb, American Journal of Archaeology, 49, 1945, pp. 116–17; K. J. Conant, Speculum, 19, 1944, pp. 365–6. For Morey, High Gothic was the era of ‘The Scholastic Synthesis’ and the Gothic cathedral was its ‘architectural counterpart’. In the first footnote to Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, a loyal Panofsky directed readers to the ‘beautiful pages’ in Morey’s book.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 418

09/07/2021 10:06

c hapt er 3 4  |  go t hi c l o gi c   |   419

4. The Book Fragment What survives of The Gothic Style is a typescript of the opening sections of the book, also housed in the Leo Baeck Institute.16 The text is corrected and annotated; there are neat paste-ins and extensions, some pages over-length and folded. Paper re-used for the pasteins, in a few instances, preserves on the reverse an antepenultimate version of the text – showing that Panofsky was revising as he worked along. The fragment is witness to the shift from oral speech to written prose, the wordings more eloquent. Panofsky develops themes lightly touched upon in the first Page-Barbour lecture. ‘Not until fairly recently’, he begins, ‘did the phenomena which we call “styles” receive their names from active sympathizers or impartial archaeologists.’ He embarks on a history of derogatory stylistic appellations, focusing in on Vasari: ‘when we divest Vasari’s statements of their disparaging accent, his invectives give a better account of Gothic characteristics (and, in a way, take Gothic more seriously) than the romantic eulogies of many later admirers’. He re-states an idea about the significance of the Gothic that surfaced in his lectures: it was the ‘first major style to break away from the lingering traditions of classical Antiquity and to sever, even more unequivocally, all stylistic relations with the Orient’, and he uses this to develop a theme he broached in the talks, namely the insight of Flemish painters – the brothers van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden – who reserved the Romanesque for reference to all that was Jewish or scenes set in Jerusalem and who used a contrast with the Gothic style to distinguish the Old Covenant from the New. This is a visual argument – an iconographical reading of style itself – that he would develop at length in Early Netherlandish Painting.17 Panofsky described his intent of seeking ‘an underlying principle’ in the various manifestations of the Gothic style and he offered a synthetic formulation, that Gothic ‘can neither be defined by the accumulation nor by the elimination of single criteria’, that is, lists of features prove inconclusive. Before he ceased writing, Panofsky had embarked on his first chapter, ‘The Antecedents of the Gothic Style’, opening again with a consideration of ‘mass’ and ‘structure’, moving from ‘the most primitive dwellings contrived by human hands’ to Egypt, proceeding to ‘The Classical Styles’, and making his way into the Romanesque, across media, before stopping abruptly.

5. Panofsky on Method In April 1941, not long after accepting the invitation to deliver the Page-Barbour lectures, Panofsky prepared a ‘Report on the Activities of the Institute for Advanced Study in the History of Art’.18 In it he included the information that he was then absorbed in problems around the ‘so-called International Style’, collaborating with the German medievalist and manuscript specialist Hanns Swarzenski, a fellow émigré from Nazi Germany and long16 Erwin Panofsky Collection, AR25440: ‘The Gothic Style’ (LBI). 17 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, Cambridge, MA, 1953, ch. 5. 18 Panofsky to Frank Aydelotte, 15 April 1941; ed. Wuttke, vol. 2, nos 823, 823 B.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 419

09/07/2021 10:06

420 | tr ibu tes to pau l bi nski – part f o ur

term visiting fellow at the IAS. This style, important for ‘marking the transition from the Middle Ages to the fifteenth century’, remained a ‘blank spot’ on the map of art history, Panofsky said, crucial for grasping the ‘efflorescence of modern realism as exemplified by Jan van Eyck, the Master of Flémalle, and their contemporaries’. Another passage in the 1941 report may bring us even closer to his motivations for undertaking an analytical study of the entire course of the Gothic style. The writer is among those who have tried to bring about a reintegration of formal analysis and iconography, with a certain amount of connoisseurship as an indispensable prerequisite. The history of art is, by definition, an historical pursuit the objects of which demand to be interpreted as aesthetic phenomena and, therefore, as unities. They will reveal their meaning only if interpreted as integral unities of technique, form, and subject matter (the identification of the latter presupposing a familiarity with as many pertinent literary sources as possible), and if set out against the religious, philosophical, and social background of their times. For Panofsky, the effort to show ‘the relationship between stylistic analysis and iconographical interpretation’ was a standing goal;19 demonstrating the ‘postulated unity of so-called form and so-called content’ was the endgame.20 Methodological continuities with the ideas synthesized in Studies in Iconology are worth pursuing. In his famed tripartite scheme of the interpretation of content, even ‘pre-iconographical’ description of artworks required awareness of the history of style, and ‘iconographical analysis in the narrower sense’ demanded knowledge of the history of ‘types’ –­ conventional forms expressing thematic content. Yet it was on the third level, ‘iconographical interpretation in the deeper sense’, later renamed ‘iconological’, where ‘synthetic intuition’ came into play, that significant convergences should be sought. Through analysis of Gothic stylistic development across media, time–space entities were demarcated. In Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Panofsky opened with the statement: ‘The historian cannot help dividing his material into periods’ and he went on to set out his core conclusion: … there exists between Gothic architecture and Scholasticism a palpable and hardly accidental concurrence in the purely factual domain of time and place – a concurrence so inescapable that the historians of mediaeval philosophy, uninfluenced by ulterior considerations, have been led to periodize their material in precisely the same way as do the art historians theirs.21 Panofsky had labored to periodize Gothic as a means to move beyond the mere positing of period ‘parallels’ so as to explore the functioning of ‘mental habits’.

19 Brief report to the American Philosophical Association on Early Netherlandish Painting, 1951 (AAA). 20 Panofsky to Vöge, 4 November 1950; ed. Wuttke, vol. 3, no. 1407. 21 E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Latrobe, 1951, pp. 2–3.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 420

09/07/2021 10:06

c hapt er 3 4  |  go t hi c l o gi c   |   4 21

6. Panofsky as a Student of Gothic The Gothic had its place in Panofsky’s art historical training, when, at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich, he pursued the study of philosophy and art history – Roman to Rococo.22 In 1913/14 in Berlin he participated in Adolph Goldschmidt’s seminar ‘History of German Art in the Gothic Era’; and in 1914 he was in Freiburg when Wilhelm Vöge taught ‘The Gothic, its relation to the Romanesque schools, its nature and its development in France (with slides)’ and ‘The Cathedrals of Strassburg and Freiburg and their Sculpture (with excursions)’. Panofsky submitted his dissertation, a revision of his prize-winning essay on ‘Dürer’s Art Theory’, at Freiburg, Vöge becoming his Doktorvater. Decades later, after Vöge’s death in 1952, Panofsky composed a foreword to his collected writings on medieval sculptors, and his enumerations of Vöge’s chief insights, as discovered in Die Anfänge des monumentalen Stiles im Mittelalter (1894), may prove revealing. Crucial, said Panofsky, was the recognition that the sculpture at Chartres represented not the end of Romanesque but the beginning of Gothic, a new style, with new principles. Panofsky, too, called attention to Vöge’s tactic of isolating the innovations of individual sculptors, and his conviction that this was not in conflict with an assumption of organic artistic development, for ‘it is precisely in the greatest minds that the evolution presents itself ’.23 Problems of style had absorbed Panofsky from the outset of his career, as seen in his critical assessments of Wölfflin’s and Riegl’s methods, and also in the Probevorlesung he delivered as he ‘habilitated’ at Hamburg in 1921, focusing therein on ‘the development of theories of proportion as a reflection of stylistic development’, distinguishing systems and outlooks so as to periodize, proceeding from ancient Egypt to Dürer, and including a disquisition on Gothic geometries.24 It was at this juncture, in the early 1920s, that Panofsky’s ‘horizon’ (Gesichtskreis) expanded as he began to work in the library created by Aby Warburg to foster study of the afterlife of antiquity. The library’s program, as Panofsky put it in 1922, was the ‘interaction of the histories of art, philosophy, and religion’. Here ‘everything was ready to hand to understand a historical phenomenon in its entirety’, and indeed the danger became that of moving too far from the art historical into the cultural historical.25 Medieval sculpture, especially German, generated significant amounts of scholarship in the interwar years, and Panofsky entered into the fray. His survey volume Deutsche Plastik vom 11. bis 13. Jahrhundert of 1924, shows him firming up a developmental narrative and forging analytical concepts he would redeploy in 1942. Other significant statements are his 1924/25 review of Erwin Rosenthal’s Giotto in der mittelalterlichen Geistesentwicklung, where he assessed an effort to bring art and contemporaneous cultural phenomena into

22 For Panofsky’s schooling: G. Panofsky, Erwin Panofsky von Zehn bis Dreißig und seine jüdischen Wurzeln, Passau, 2017, passim. 23 Panofsky, ‘Wilhelm Vöge’, in Bildhauer des Mittelalters: Gesammelte Schriften von Wilhelm Vöge, Berlin, 1958, pp. ix–xxii; trans. E. C. Hassold as ‘Wilhelm Vöge: A Biographical Memoir’, in Art Journal, 28, 1968, pp. 27–37 (at p. 30). 24 Panofsky’s early articles on medieval art are gathered in Erwin Panofsky, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, ed. K. Michels and M. Warnke, 2 vols, Berlin, 1998, vol. 1, pp. 3–243. For later pieces see E. Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, ed. I. Lavin, Cambridge, MA, 1995. 25 Panofsky to Kurt Badt, 22 February 1922; ed. Wuttke, vol. 1, no. 89.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 421

09/07/2021 10:06

422 | tr ibu tes to pau l bin ski – part f o ur

higher-order connection through Parallelisierung (a practice Panofsky traced back to Hegel); in this case the author had gone too far, to the neglect of the factual art historical.26 In his own ‘Über die Reihenfolge der vier Meister von Reims’ of 1927, Panofsky focused on chronology, architectural and sculptural, seeking to sort out the sequential contributions of the four named master architects of the cathedral through intense visual analysis.27 The multiplicity of contemporaneous stylistic threads at Reims, older and newer, led him to broach the urgent problem of ‘historical time’. Cultural ‘time’ and ‘space’, he posited, conjoin as meaningful units in self-sufficient relational systems (Bezugsysteme) of finite duration; when these are linked with natural time – through secondary documents including archival – they can be brought into larger systems of interconnection. In the context of style-critical work this results in concepts like ‘influence and reception’, ‘stimulus and response’. Not yet did he link style with synchronous evidence of mental habits. In 1930, in his essay on the first page of Giorgio Vasari’s Libro, the historical perception of periods surfaced as an issue.28 Here the fact that Vasari placed a drawing attributed to Cimabue in a paper frame with Gothicizing forms à la Arnolfo di Cambio is taken as evidence of a growing awareness that the disparaged Gothic was a ‘great and serious style’; Panofsky drew the inference that the Italian Renaissance could measure antique art (‘alien in time but related in style’) against medieval (‘related in time but alien in style’), and henceforth ‘periods of civilization and art could be understood as individualities and totalities’.29

7. American Gothic After the move to Princeton, throughout the 1940s, the ‘totality’ of the Gothic would become one nexus of Panofsky’s research and his teaching. In the public sphere he returned repeatedly to themes he had broached in the Page-Barbour Lectures. At Vassar College, he gave three separate lectures relevant to The Gothic Style: What does the Term Gothic Mean as Applied to Painting and Sculpture’ (12 October 1943) Symbolism in Naturalistic Fifteenth Century Painting (28 October 1943) Scholasticism and Gothic (6 December 1944).30

26 27 28 29 30

Panofsky, in Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, ed. Michels and Warnke, vol. 1, pp. 178–85. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 100–40. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 827–91. The essay is translated in E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, Garden City, NY, 1955, pp. 169–235. Ibid., p. 189. I owe this information, culled from the Vassar Chronicle and Vassar Miscellany News, to M. Nesbit.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 422

09/07/2021 10:06

c hapt er 3 4  |  go t hi c l o gi c   |   4 23

At the Pierpont Morgan Library he delivered a three-part lecture series in the winter of 1944 under the title ‘The Gothic Style’, now abandoning the strictly chronological framework:31 What do we mean when applying the term ‘Gothic’ to Sculpture and Painting? (19 February 1944) Variations of Gothic according to Period and Environment (26 February 1944) Gothic Art and Scholasticism (4 March 1944). In 1943 he gave a lecture at New York University that led to the article ‘Renaissance and Renascences’ (1944);32 in 1947/48 he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard and spent the next five years completing Early Netherlandish Painting (1953); in 1949, it was the Wimmer Lecture, yielding Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism’ (1951). These endeavors ultimately put paid to The Gothic Style.

8. The End of The Gothic Style Normally it worked: the requirement to publish lectures after delivery propelled numerous of Panofsky’s English-language books into existence. Precisely in May 1942, he reflected somewhat ruefully on the advantages to Fritz Saxl, his one-time collaborator in Hamburg, now directing the transplanted Warburg library in London. The custom, he said, had led to his Dürer as well as his ‘old Iconology’, and it would ‘also give rise to a still worse little book on the Gothic Style (as a whole, if you please!) in the not too distant future’.33 But distractions mounted. In March 1944 Datus Smith wrote cordially: I have no thought of pressing you for the manuscript of the Gothic Style, but I did want you to know that we should be glad to have it whenever you are able to give it to us – and that you should not hold back under the impression that an incoming manuscript would cause us dismay at the present time.34 Just two months later Smith agreed to publish Abbot Suger. In May 1944 Panofsky submitted a book proposal, with it writing: I am touched that you wish to give consideration to my Suger project although I fell down on the Gothic job thus far. But since Suger’s Saint-Denis

31 32 33 34

Invitation card (LBI). Kenyon Review, 6, 1944, pp. 201–36. Panofsky to Saxl, 9 May 1942; ed. Wuttke, vol. 2, no. 861. Smith to Panofsky, 6 March 1944 (PUP).

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 423

09/07/2021 10:06

424 | tr ibu tes to pau l bi nski – part f o ur

is rightly considered the parent monument of the Gothic style I could not help going into this matter a little more thoroughly and thereby fell in love with the great little man and his writings.35 It seems fair to say that without the work toward his ‘Büchlein über Gotik’,36 the ensuing classics would either not have been written or not taken quite the shape they did.

35 Panofsky to Smith, 10 May 1944 (PUP). 36 Panofsky to Stechow, 17 May 1944; ed. Wuttke, vol. 2, no. 940.

7132 33-34 Binski new size v6.indd 424

09/07/2021 10:06

Index of Buildings, Manuscripts and Works of Art (by location) Page-numbers in italics have illustrations of the designated work. Descriptive information is minimal. Prints that survive in multiple copies are not included; muniments are not included among the manuscripts. Regional distinctions (e.g. by county, département, Land etc.) are added where the editor thinks they might be helpful; countries are sometimes identified. Spellings are usually those preferred by the authors of the essays.

Acle (Norfolk): font 164 n.8 Ala (Gotland): altarpiece 143 Alba Fucens (Abruzzo): triptych 339 Alcobaça (Portugal): monastery church 89 Alfreton (Derbyshire): tomb 150–7, 160, 161 Alskog (Gotland): sacrament niche, piscina 144, 149 Alva (Gotland): sacrament niche 144 Anga (Gotland): altarpiece 143 Ardre (Gotland): altarpiece 142 Aschaffenburg (Bavaria): Hofbibliothek, MS 14 (Hallesches Heiltumsbuch) 352, 357 Astorga (León): palace, city walls, cloister 90 Athenry (Galway): priory 211 Athlone (Galway): friary 216 Atri (Abruzzo), Museo Capitolare: crozier 339, 344 Avignon: Palais des Papes, wall paintings 312–22, 322, 323 Bäl (Gotland): alms box 141 Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, MS W.102 (horae) 190; MS W.106 (Bible pictures) 180, 185 Bamberg: cathedral 260

Bari: basilica and treasury 332–41, 341, 342 Barking-cum-Darmsden (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Barlingbo (Gotland): parish church, piscina 142, 146 Barton Turf (Norfolk): roodscreen 302, 304 Batalha (Portugal), monastery church 89 Bechenyĕ (Czech Rep.): friary 77, 85 Belstead (Suffolk): roodscreen 303 Bergen: Historisk Museum, sculpture from Hove 213 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett: Bosch drawing (The Fields have Eyes etc.) 379, 385 Bern: cathedral 101 Beverley: minster, sculpture 203 Bildeston (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Binham (Norfolk): roodscreen 302, 303 Bloxham (Oxfordshire): sculpture 205 Blumenstein (Switzerland): stained glass 348–9 Blythburgh (Suffolk): sculpture 167 n.18 Bodmin (Cornwall): parish church 31, 35 Bourges: cathedral 42 Bramford (Suffolk): sculpture 167 n.18 Braunschweig: cathedral 78, 351 [ 4 25 ]

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 425

09/07/2021 09:48

426  | index of buildings , manusc r i pt s and wo r ks o f art ( by l o c at i o n )

Bristol: abbey, Elder Lady chapel 100, 188, 197 Bro (Gotland): alms box, font cover 139, 141 Brockdish (Norfolk): sculpture 167 n.18 Bruges: Jerusalem chapel 81 Bunge (Gotland): alms box 140 Burgh Apton (Norfolk): font 164 n.8 Burghausen (Bavaria): palace 79 Burgos: cathedral, monastery, palace, hospital 90, 91, 93, 349 Burs (Gotland): piscina 142, 144 Burwell (Cambridgeshire): sculpture 167 n.18 Cambridge: Christs College, stained glass 306–07 — Corpus Christi College, MS 286 (St Augustine Gospels) 406 — Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 12 (Peterborough psalter) 215 n.37; MS 1–2005 (Macclesfield psalter) 166 — King’s College, vestments etc. 359, 362–3 — Trinity College, MS R.7.1 (Eadwine psalter) 290–4, 296 — Trinity Hall, MS 1 (Thomas of Elmham) 398, 408 — University Library, MS Gg.1.1 (mixed contents) 254–5; MS Gg.4.2 (mixed contents) 220–3; Kk.4.25 (mixed contents) 251–7. Canterbury: cathedral, stained glass 37, 399–406, 409 — Cathedral Archives and Library, MS C246 (Canterbury roll) 411 — St Augustine’s abbey 398–9, 405–06, 408 Carlton (Cambridgeshire): sculpture 167 n.18 Catfield (Norfolk): roodscreen 302 Cawston (Norfolk): parish church, sculpture 167–8, 170–1, 173, 300

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 426

Charsfield (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Chartres: cathedral 42, 99, 103 Chediston (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Chester: pulpitum 307 Ciudad Rodrigo (Salamanca): cathedral 94–5 Clermont-Ferrand: cathedral 68 Cley-next-the-Sea (Norfolk): sculpture 167 n.18 Clonfert (Galway): cathedral 211 n.5, 217 Clonmacnoise (Offaly): sculpture 217 Clontuskert (Galway): sculpture 217, 219 Cogges (Oxfordshire): sculpture 198–205, 206–09 Coimbra (Portugal): Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro, processional cross 339–40, 345 Cologne: cathedral 67, 74 Constantinople: see Istanbul Covehithe (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Cratfield (Suffolk): sculpture 162, 167, 171 Cuenca: cathedral 94 Dalhem (Gotland): niche 143 Dammarie-lès-Lys (Seine-et-Marne): abbey 100 Dennington (Suffolk): finial 177 Dickleburgh (Norfolk): font 164 n.8 Divriǧi (Anatolia): mosque 80 Dresden: castle 78 Durham: pyx cover (lost) 177 Écouis (Eure): sculpture 170 Edessa (now Turkey): mandylion image 316 Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, MS 21000 (Murthly hours) 392 Eichstätt: vault, holy sepulchre chapel 79, 82 Eke (Gotland): tabernacle 140 Ekeby (Gotland): cupboard 144 Elsing (Norfolk): roodscreen 301

09/07/2021 09:48

index of bu ilding s, manusc r i pt s and wo r ks o f art ( by l o c at i o n)   |   4 27

Ely: cathedral, Lady chapel 69–70, 75, 100, 194 Endre (Gotland): church, alms box, sculpture, altarpiece 141, 143, 147 Ennis (Clare): sculpture 217 Eskelhem (Gotland): benches 139 Étampes (Essone): sculpture 226 Etelhem (Gotland): font, alms box 139, 141 Eton College: chapel wall paintings, vestments etc. 194, 359, 362–3 Exeter: cathedral, pyx (lost) 69, 100, 178 Eye (Suffolk): roodscreen 302 Fécamp: abbey church 198, 203 Fide (Gotland): sculpture, altarpiece 141, 143 Filby (Norfolk): roodscreen 302 Framlingham (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Freiburg im Breisgau: stained glass 346– 54, 354, 356 Fröjel (Gotland): piscina (traces of) 144 Fulda: holy sepulchre church 82 Galway (city): sculpture 217, 219 Gammelgarn (Gotland): altarpiece 143 Ganthem (Gotland): see Stockholm Garde (Gotland): benches 139 Gdańsk: parish church 76, 77–8 Genoa: church of S. Bartolomeo, mandylion 318, 321 Glastonbury: Lady chapel, pyx (lost), tabula etc. 178, 188, 189, 191, 350, 399, 400–01, 410, 411 Gloucester: abbey church 37, 100 Görlitz (Saxony): holy sepulchre chapel 82–3, 86, 87 Gothem (Gotland): choir stalls 142 Granada: Alhambra palace 88 Great Malvern (Worcestershire): stained glass 306–07 Greenwich: palace, hunting park 358 Guadalajara: palace 82

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 427

Guildford (Surrey): altarpiece 226 Hacheston (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Halesworth (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Halla (Gotland): font, piscina, niche 139, 142, 144 Halle (Saxony-Anhalt): reliquary (lost) 351–2, 357 Hamra (Gotland): piscina (traces of) 144 Happisburgh (Norfolk): font 162, 172 Harkstead (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Haughley (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Haverhill (Suffolk): church tower 167 Heidelberg: castle 79 Heilbronn (Baden-Württemberg): church tower 79 Hejdeby (Gotland): font cover, niche, benches 139, 143 Hejnum (Gotland): alms box 141 Helmingham (Suffolk): sculpture (lost) 167 n.18 Hemse (Gotland): sculpture 141 Hereford: cathedral 203 Holme (Nottinghamshire): tomb 155 Horsham St Faith (Norfolk): roodscreen 303 Houghton St Giles (Norfolk): roodscreen 301 Hove (Norway): see Bergen Ipswich (Suffolk): font (St Clement) 164 n.8 Isfahan: Friday mosque 80 Istanbul (Constantinople): Topkapi scroll, image 81, 368 Jersey: Phoebus Foundation, painting (Adoration of the Magi) 308 Jerusalem: religious buildings 54, 80, 81, 82, 85, 179–80, 237; image of 81 Källunge (Gotland): altar 142 Karlstein (Czech Rep.): 318, 319

09/07/2021 09:48

428 | index of buildings , manusc r i pt s and wo r ks o f art ( by l o c at i o n )

Kidlington (Oxfordshire): sculpture 205 Kilcorban (Galway): chapel 211; sculpture (see Loughrea) Killoran (Galway): sculpture 216 Kräklingbo (Gotland): choir stalls 142 La Chaise Dieu (Haute-Loire): abbey 313 Lanreath (Cornwall): roodscreen 308 Langham (Essex): see London, V&A Museum Lärbro (Gotland): altar, niche 142, 144 Le Lys: see Dammarie-lès-Lys León: religious buildings, city walls, bridge, sculpture 91, 92, 93–4, 95 Letheringham (Suffolk): sculpture 167 n.18 Lincoln: cathedral, sculpture 51, 202, 212, 216 Lisbon: Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, MS L.A.139 (Apocalypse) 392 Litcham (Norfolk): roodscreen 301 Lojsta (Gotland): altarpiece 142 Lokrume (Gotland): ciborium, piscina (remains) 140, 144 London: Baynard’s Castle 358 — British Library, MS Add. 15277 (Padua Bible) 239 n.25; MS Add. 37049 (Carthusian miscellany) 151; MS Add. 42130 (Luttrell psalter) 203; MS Add. 42555 (Abingdon Apocalypse) 392, 397; MS Add. 46919 (miscellany) 249; MS Add. 54180 (Somme le Roi) 392, 397; MS Arundel 66 (astronomy texts) 305–06; MS Burney 3 (Bible) 239 n.25; MS Cotton Domitian A. XVII (Psalter Henry VI) 177; MS Egerton 1070 (horae) 177, 183; Harley Roll Y.6 (Guthlac roll) 399; MS Royal 2.B.I (psalter) 365; MS Royal 10.E.IV (Smithfield Decretals) 190; MS Royal 15.E.VI (Talbot-Shrewsbury book) 166 n.15

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 428

— Lambeth Palace Library, MS 209 (Apocalypse) 392 — Minories (Franciscan nuns), tomb 155 — National Portrait Gallery, portrait Henry VII 306 — St Bartholomew’s Hospital archives, SBHB/HC/2/1 (Cok’s cartulary) 154, 161 — Society of Antiquaries, portrait Henry VII 305, 311 — Temple church 82 — V&A Museum, sculpture from Langham 212; Metz ivory 267; bust Henry VII 306 — Westminster, see separate entries under W Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, MS 64 (Stammheim missal) 260, 269 Loughrea: Clonfert Diocesan Museum, sculpture from Kilcorban 210–17, 218 Ludham (Norfolk): font, roodscreen 164 n.7, 308 Madrid: Liria Palace, Alba Bible 234–45, 246, 247 — Real Academia de la Historia, MS 87 (Bible) 236 — Real Biblioteca de Escorial, MS T.I.1 (Marian Cantigas) 293, 294, 299 Mästerby (Gotland): niche 140 Matallana: see Villalba de los Alcores Maubuisson (Val-d’Oise): abbey 100 Meissen (Saxony): Albrechtsberg palace 76, 79, 80, 83, 84, 84, 87 Metz: cathedral 259 Middleton (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Milan: cathedral 101 Milton Abbas (Dorset): pyx cover 175, 176–7 Montpellier: monastery 314 Moreruela (Zamora): abbey 95 Mount Sinai monastery: burial 155

09/07/2021 09:48

index of buildings , manusc r i pt s and wo r ks o f art ( by l o c at i o n)   |   4 29

Munich: Bavarian State Library, Clm 13601 (Uta codex) 259–60, 268; MS 2 L.imp (Prayer book Maximilian I) 373–5, 382 Nacton (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Nantes: sculpture (cathedral) 125–31, 132, 133, 135 Naples: Castel Nuovo 334 När (Gotland): font 139 Narbonne: cathedral 99, 103 Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre (Indre): holy sepulchre church 82 New Buckenham (Norfolk): font 164 n.8 New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Cloisters), Dürer drawing, Six pillows 377, 384; MS 54.1.2 (Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux) 203 — Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.632 (horae) 177, 184; MS M.739 (horae) 355; Stavelot triptych 355 Newbourne (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Nivelles: shrine (mostly lost) 315 Norrlanda (Gotland): see Stockholm North Tuddenham (Norfolk): roodscreen 300–09, 309, 310 Norton (Suffolk): font, misericord 162, 164 n.8, 169 Norwich: Ethelbert gate 168; font (St Peter Parmentergate) 162, 170, 173 Notre-Dame de Bonport (Eure): abbey (Bible from) 260 Nuremberg chronicle: 81, 82, 109 Oddington (Oxfordshire): brass 151–2, 154–5, 158, 159 Öja (Gotland): sculpture, plate 142, 148 Old Newton (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Orense: cathedral, palace, bridge 90 Orford (Suffolk): font 162, 172 Osma (Soria): church 90 Oviedo: palace 92

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 429

Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 277 (Bible) 307; MS Douce 180 (Apocalypse) 51, 61, 393; MS Laud misc. 750 (miscellany) 401, 411 — St Giles’s church, sculpture 205 Padua: Biblioteca del Seminario, MS 353 (psalter) 392 n.42 — Scrovegni chapel 287 Parham (Suffolk): manor house 166 Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms 1186 (psalter of Blanche of Castile) 271 — Bibliothèque de Mazarine, ms 406 (missal of Louis de Guyenne) 49, 57 — Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms fr. 837 (fables etc.) 263; ms lat. 8846 (Anglo-Catalan psalter) 263, 297, 298; ms lat. 11560 (Bible moralisée) 193, 197; ms nouv. acq. fr. 152 (Bible historiale) 347; ms nouv. acq. fr. 316 (Miror historial) 347; ms nouv. acq. fr. 4515 (Mandeville) 347; ms nouv. acq. fr. 15940 (Miroir historial,) 355; ms nouv. acq. lat. 2334 (Ashburnham Pentateuch) 179 — cathedral: 40, 42, 260–2 — Saint-Germain-des-Prés, abbey, Lady chapel 38–44, 46, 47, 53 — Sainte-Chapelle, architecture, furnishings, sculpture, sacred objects etc. 40, 43, 48–56, 57–60, 99, 100, 180, 262, 313, 333, 334, 391, 392, 395 — tower of Jean sans Peur 38, 45 Pentney (Norfolk): priory 300, 302, 303, 309 Peterborough: Lady chapel (abbey) 188 Philadelphia: Free Library, MS E.185 (psalter) 262–3, 270 Pisa: processional cross (possibly from San Francesco) 339 Podskalí (Czech Rep.): church 105 Poitiers: sculpture (St-Hilaire-le-Grand) 125–31, 135

09/07/2021 09:48

43 0 | index of buildings , manusc r i pt s and wo r ks o f art ( b y l o c at i o n)

Potter Heigham (Norfolk): sculpture 167 n.18 Prague: castle 103 — cathedral, architecture, tombs, images 101–03, 108, 317–19 — New Town, fortifications, churches etc. 103–07, 109 — Týn church 103 Pulham (Norfolk): sculpture 162, 166, 169, 171 Rackheath (Norfolk): roodscreen 304, 309, 311 Ramsey abbey: sculpture 167 Redlingfield (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Regensburg: cathedral 101 Rennes: Musée des Beaux Arts (Dürer drawing, Engelmesse) 372, 373, 376, 379, 380, 381 Reims: Bibliothèque municipale Carnegie, ms 255 (Reims Gospel) 106 — cathedral 260 — church of St Nicaise 415 Roma (Gotland): niche 144 Rome: Colosseum 78 — St John Lateran, images, sacred objects etc. 112, 120, 121, 318 — Sta Maria in Aracoeli, images etc. 111, 113–19, 120–22, 320 — Sta Maria Maggiore 193 — Sta Maria del Popolo, image 116–19, 123 — St Peter’s basilica, Vernicle relic 316, 318 — San Silvestro in Capite 320, 321 Royaumont abbey (Val-d’Oise): 100 Rute (Gotland): sculpture 141 Ruthwell (Dumfries and Galloway): cross 215 St Albans: abbey, Lady chapel, pyx, vestments etc. 178, 188, 194, 360–2, 364, 404–05

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 430

St Benet’s Holm (Norfolk): sculpture 168 Saint-Denis: abbey, architecture, stained glass etc. 40, 93, 99, 260, 393, 423–4 Saint-Germain-des-Prés: see Paris Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Yvelines): chapel 62, 72 Saint-Gilles-du-Gard (Gard): sculpture (abbey) 260 Saint-Riquier (Somme): relic 350 Saintes (Charente-Maritime): sculpture (cathedral) 124–31, 134 Salisbury: cathedral, tomb 189 Salle (Norfolk): sculpture 167 Santa María de Huerta (Soria): refectory 95 Santiago de Compostela: cathedral 92, 96, 97 Saxmundham (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Sherborne (Dorset): abbey, burial 349 Sibton (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Sigüenza: cathedral 94 Somerleyton (Suffolk): roodscreen 302 Stalham (Norfolk): roodscreen 303 Stånga (Gotland): font, sculpture 139, 141 Stanton Harcourt (Oxfordshire): shrinebase 69 Staple (Kent): font 164 n.8 Stockholm: Historical Museum, altarpiece from Ganthem 142; organ cases from Norrlanda, Sundre 141; sculpture from Viklau 140, 213 Sudbury (Suffolk): sculpture (All Saints) 167 n.18 Sundre (Gotland): altarpiece 142 (see also Stockholm) Sutton Bonington (Northamptonshire): benches 139 Swaffham (Norfolk): parish church 30 Tewkesbury (Gloucestershire): abbey, Lady chapel, pyx cover, tomb 100, 151, 175, 176–7, 188 Thaxted (Essex): sculpture 167 n.18 Theberton (Suffolk): font 164 n.8

09/07/2021 09:48

index of buildings , manusc r i pt s and wo r ks o f art ( b y l o c at i o n)   |   43 1

Thetford (Norfolk): Lady chapel 193 Thornham Parva (Suffolk): altarpiece 224–5 Tofta (Gotland): church, altarpiece, benches 139, 142, 145 Toledo: cathedral, sculpture 90, 101, 213 n.21 Toulouse: cathedral 99 Träkumla (Gotland): altarpiece 142 Troy: Priam’s palace 82 Túy: cathedral 90, 94 Tynagh (Galway): parish church 211 Ulm: minster, choirstalls 79, 80 Utrecht: cathedral 101 — Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 32 (Utrecht Psalter) 288–93, 295 Valladolid: cathedral 90 Vall (Gotland): altar 140 Vamlingbo (Gotland): church, niches, altarpiece 139, 140, 142 Vänge (Gotland): font, piscina 139, 144 Väskinde (Gotland): niche 144 Väte (Gotland): sculpture 141 Vatican City: Palazzi Pontifici, Lipsanoteca, Veronica painting 320 Venice: reliquary (San Marco) 338, 344 Vienna: Albertina, Dürer drawing (Temptation of St Anthony etc.) 376, 385 — cathedral, 101 — Kunsthistorisches Museum, Bruegel painting (Tower of Babel) 78; Dürer drawing (Candelabrum) 378, 384; Joos van Cleve painting (Maximilian I) 308 Verdun: cathedral 259 Vallstena (Gotland): church, alms box, altarpiece 141, 142, 149 Villafranca del Bierzo (León): friary 95 Villeneuve-lès-Avignon: charterhouse 314 Viklau (Gotland): see Stockholm Villalba de los Alcores (Valladolid): abbey (Matallana) 95

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 431

Visby (Gotland): ciborium 140 Vyšehrad (Czech Rep.): fort, church 106 Walberswick (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Waldringfield (Suffolk): font 164 Walsingham (Norfolk): Lady chapel 188, 193 Walton (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Wellingham (Norfolk): roodscreen 303 Wells: cathedral, Lady Chapel juxta claustrum, pyx cover etc. 67, 69, 100, 174–81, 182, 185, 186–94, 195, 196 Westminster: abbey church, altarpiece (Westminster Retable), tomb etc. 51, 100, 224–5, 226, 232, 304–05, 306, 391–5, 396 — Abbey Library, Islip roll 177 — parish church 30 — St Stephen’s chapel 67, 68–70, 75, 100 Wickham Skeith (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Winchester: cathedral, paintings, vestments etc. 100, 194, 364 Windsor: castle, chapel, stalls etc. 100, 307, 363 — Royal Collection, anon. painting (Family of Henry VII etc.) 306 Winterton-on-Sea (Norfolk): sculpture 167 n.18 Wissett (Suffolk): font 164 n.8 Wollaton (Nottinghamshire): tomb 155 Woolpit (Suffolk): sculpture 167 n.18 Worcester: Lady chapel (cathedral) 189 Worlingworth (Suffolk): sculpture (lost) 167 n.18 Worsted (Norfolk): roodscreen 307 Wymondham (Norfolk): font 164 n.8 Yaxley (Suffolk): sculpture 168–9 York: cathedral, architecture, tabula 67–8, 401 — Minster Library, MS Add. 2 (Bolton/ Blackburn hours) 272–81, 282–5

09/07/2021 09:48

Index of Ancient and Medieval Authors, Translators, Artists, Architects and Masons For the sake of consistency all names are listed alphabetically by first name. Authors and translators are listed by name only. Artists, architects and masons are identified as such, even where the designation is obvious; extra information is given where a name is potentially obscure. Spellings are those preferred by the authors of the essays.

Adam Locke (mason) 192 Adémar de Chabannes (artist) 390 Albrecht Dürer (artist) 79, 372–80, 380–5 Aemilius Macer 254–5 André Beauneveu (artist) 388 Arnold von Westfalen (architect) 76, 78, 83 Arnolfo di Cambio (artist) 422 Augustine of Hippo 130, 288

Daedalus (architect, artist) 372 Dante Alighieri 170

Bahya ben Asher 243–4 Baldwin (English monk-artist) 178 Bede 288–90 Benedikt Ried (architect) 77 Beneš of Krabice 102 Bernard von Breydenbach 82–3, 86 Bernard of Claivaux 261 Bernardus Sylvestris 254 Blasius Börer (mason) 83

Gabriel Muffel 117 Gauthier de Coincy 191 Gauthier Cornut 54–6 Geoffrey Chaucer 326 Gervase of Canterbury 372, 402–04 Gilbert Crispin 261 Giorgio Vasari 337 n. 26, 389, 419, 422 Giotto (artist) 287, 387, 388 Giovanni di Bartolo (artist) 112, 121 Giovanni di Stefano (architect, artist) 113, 120, 121 Gregory I, the Great 324, 328, 404 Guillaume le Clerc 190 Guillaume de Saint-Pair 401, 407

Caesarius of Heisterbach 350 Cennino Cennini 387, 389 Cicero 80, 249, 265–6, 330 Cimabue (artist) 388, 422 Clarembald of Arras 327–8, 330 Claudius Ptolemy 80 Conrad Celtis 79 Conrad Pflüger (architect) 83 Cù Chuimne (of Iona) 215

Eadmer of Canterbury 402 Erhard Reuwich (artist) 82, 86 Eusebius of Caesarea 89 Evagrius of Pontus 329 Filippo Brunelleschi (architect) 388

Hans Holbein (the Younger; artist) 305– 06 Hans Schweiner (architect) 79 Heinrich Hetzel (architect) 77–8

[ 432]

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 432

09/07/2021 09:48

index of au thor s, tr ansl at o r s, art i st s, arc hi t ec t s and maso ns   |   43 3

Hermes Trismegistus 330 Hieronymus Bosch (artist) 379, 385 Honorius Augustodunensis 260 Hugh Dyke (artist) 364 Hugh of St-Victor 179–81, 327 Hugues Libergier (architect) 415 Ibn Sahib al-Salat 88 Irenaeus of Lyon 214 Isidore of Seville 89, 95 n. 49, 97, 256 Israhel van Meckenem (artist) 307 Jacob Heilmann (mason) 77 Jacobus de Voragine 214 Jacquemart d’Hesdin (artist) 388 Jacques Legrand 130 Jan van Eyck (artist) 78, 416, 419, 420 Jan Provost (artist) 81 Jean de Vignay 347 Jerome: 235, 238 John Bromyard 250 John Capgrave 117 John Rastell 307 John Scottus Eriugena 324, 329 Joos van Cleve (artist) 308 Juan of Soria 93, 95 Lafrans (Gotlandic artist) 140–1 Leon Battista Alberti 228, 389–90 Lorenzo Ghiberti (artist) 388, 389 Lucas van Leyden (artist) 307, 309 Lucas of Túy 89–97 Ludolph of Saxony 353 Ludolph von Sudheim 351 Luke (Evangelist; as putative artist) 117, 367, 369 Mabel of Bury St Edmunds (artist) 388 Maître Honore (artist) 392 Marbod of Rennes 254–5 Marcus Fabius Quintilianus 249 Martin Luther 320 Master of Flémalle (artist) 420

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 433

Master of Frankfurt (artist) 308 Mateo (architect, artist; worked at Compostela) 97 Mathes Roriczer (architect) 81 Matteo Giovannetti (artist) 312–22, 322, 323 Matthew of Arras (architect) 102 Matthew Paris (cited as artist and author) 94, 321, 322 Meynnart Wewyck (artist) 305, 311 Michael Sittow (artist) 306 Michelangelo Buonarroti (artist) 388 Moses Arragel 234–45 Nicholas of Lyra 130, 235 Odo of Cheriton 190 Odo of Tournai 261 Origen 259 Ovid 372 Paulus Orosius 89 Peter Comestor 261 Peter Parler (architect) 101–03 Peter the Venerable 349 Petrarch 352 Pierre de Montreuil (architect) 40 Pieter Bruegel (the Elder; artist) 78 Pietro Torrigiano (artist) 306 Polydore Vergil 305 Profayt Duran 242 Pseudo-Cyril 379 Ptolemy (see Claudius) Quintilian (see Marcus) Raphael Sanzio (artist) 388 Robert of Chester 324–31 Robert Mannyng 350 Robert de Sorbonne 261 Rodrigo of Toledo 95 Rogier van der Weyden (artist) 419 Sigismund Meisterlin 104

09/07/2021 09:48

43 4 | index of au thor s, tr ansl at o r s, art i st s, arc hi t ec t s and maso ns

Stephen of Bourbon 262 Suger (abbot of St-Denis) 41, 393, 423

Villard de Honnecourt (artist) 67, 74, 390 Vincent of Beauvais 194, 347

Tacitus 79 Theophilus Presbyter 229 n.35 Thomas Aquinas 326–7, 353, 386 Thomas of Elmham 398, 405, 408 Thomas Neukirch (architect) 83 Thierry of Chartres 327

Walter of Colchester (artist) 388 Walter van der Vogelweide 350 William de Brailes (artist) 180, 185 William Brewyn 117 William Herebert 249 Willam of Sens (architect) 372 William of Waddington 350 Willibald Pirckheimer (artist) 380

Ulrich von Pottenstein 379

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 434

09/07/2021 09:48

Photographic Credits References given here are to the number of the essay in this volume followed by the figure number.

Aschaffenburg Hofbibliothek 28/ fig. 6

Gillingham Francis Frith Collection 14/ fig. 5

Baltimore Walters Art Museum 13/ fig. 5

London Barts Health NHS Trust Archives and Museums 11/ fig. 6 British Library 13/ fig. 3; 29/ fig. 1; 32/ figs  4, 5 Dean and Chapter of Westminster 18/ figs  1–3; 32/ figs  2, 3 National Archives 11/ fig. 3 Society of Antiquaries 24/ fig. 6 V&A Museum 21/ fig. 1

Berlin Kupferstichkabinett der Staalichen Museen 31/ fig. 12 Cambridge Trinity College 23/ fig. 3 Trinity Hall 33/ fig. 1 Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library 33/ fig. 5 Cologne Rheinisches Bildarchiv 28/ fig. 5

Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Museum 21/ fig. 3 Madrid Liria Palace 19/ figs  1–3 Patrimonio Nacional de España 23/ figs  1, 5

Florence Alinari Archives 8/ fig. 1 Scala/Art Resource 27/ fig. 4

Munich Bavarian State Library 19/ fig. 2; 31/ fig. 4

Freiburg im Breisgau/Potsdam Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (Deutschland) 28/ figs   1, 4

New York Metropolitan Museum of Art 2/ fig. 1; 31/ fig. 7

[ 43 5 ]

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 435

09/07/2021 09:48

43 6  | p hotogr ap hic cr edi t s

Morgan Library & Museum 13/ fig. 4; 28/ fig. 2 Oxford Bodleian Library 3/ fig. 5; 33/ figs  3, 4 Paris Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 21/ fig. 5 Bibliothèque de Mazarine 3/ fig. 1 Bibliothèque nationale de France 3/ fig. 3; 14/ fig. 6; 23/ figs  4, 5; 28/ fig. 3 Mediathèque d’architecture et du patrimoine 3/ fig. 4 Musée du Cluny 3/ fig. 2 Musée du Louvre 32/ fig. 1 Philadelphia Free Library 21/ fig. 4

Personal credits (non-author) Ariella Minden 5/ fig. 3 Beppe Gernone 27/ fig. 1 Beth Williamson 13/ figs  1, 6 Chris Titmus 18/ figs  1–3 Gino di Paolo 27/ fig. 5 Jean-Marc Rosier 25/ figs  1, 2 Serena Romano 8/ fig. 5 The following authors have supplied personal drawings, tables or images Beth Williamson; Bob Mills; Gabriel Byng; James Hillson; Jean-Marie Guillouët; Jean-Pascal Pouzet; Julian Luxford; Justin Krosen; Kathryn Rudy; Laura Slater; Lucy Wrapson; Matt Kavaler; Matthew Reeve; Meredith Cohen; Spike Bucklow

Prague Ústav dějin umění Akademie věd 7/ fig. 1 Rennes Musée des Beaux Arts 31/ figs  1, 2 Rome Foto Vasari 8/ fig. 6 Istituto Superiore per il Restauro 8/ fig. 4 Strasbourg Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame 4/ fig. 2 Utrecht Universiteitsbibliotheek 23/ fig. 2 Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum 31/ fig. 9 Kupferstichkabinett, Academy of Arts 4/ fig. 4 York Minster Library 22/ figs  1, 2

7132 35 Binski Indexes new size v4.indd 436

09/07/2021 09:48