Boccaccio's Des Cleres Et Nobles Femmes: Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript (Monographs on the Fine Arts) (English and French Edition) [1 ed.] 9780295975207, 0295975202

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (page viii)
PREFACE (page 1)
I The Manuscript as Object (page 4)
Jacques Raponde, Merchant of Manuscripts (page 7)
The De mulieribus claris as a French Success (page 15)
II Images as Readers (page 25)
A Pictorial Gallery of Women (page 26)
System and Reality (page 54)
III Pictorial Elements as Meaning (page 60)
On Costumes, Bodies, and Gestures (page 60)
On Colors and Light (page 72)
On Spatial Inscriptions (page 82)
On Visualizing Time (page 93)
Appendix: Fifteenth-Century Des cleres et nobles femmes Manuscripts (page 100)
NOTES (page 102)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (page 127)
INDEX (page 135)
ILLUSTRATIONS (page 140)

Citation preview

— Boccaccio’s : Des cleres et nobles femmes

College Art Association

Monograph on the Fine Arts

Volume LuI

Editor, Robert S. Nelson

BRIGITTE BUETTNER

‘ ) Boccacc1os

Des cleres et nobles femmes Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript

Published by

ucatation with UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

Copyright © 1996 College Art Association, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in the United States of America University of Washington Press PO Box 50096

Seattle, Washington 98145 |

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Buettner, Brigitte. Boccaccio’s “Des cleres et nobles femmes”: systems of signification in an illuminated manuscript / Brigitte Buettner.

, p. cm. — (Monographs on the fine arts : 53) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-295-97520-2 (alk. paper)

1. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313-1375. De mulieribus claris— _

Illustrations. 2. Women in art. 3. Goddesses in art. 4. Symbolism in art. 5. Illumination of books and manuscripts, Gothic—France. 6. Illumination of books and manuscripts, French. 7. Bibliothéque nationale (France). Manuscript. Ms. 12420. I.Title. II. Series.

ND3399.B62B84 1996 |

745.6°7'0944—dc20 95-47407 CIP

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of

Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ,

There cannot be unity of different things without order

| and organization. But what is organization? and what is order?

| — JEAN GERSON

BLANK PAGE

Contents

PREFACE I [I The Manuscript as Object 4 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vill Jacques Raponde, Merchant of Manuscripts 7

The De mulieribus claris as a French Success IS |

II Images as Readers 25 A Pictorial Gallery of Women 26

System and Reality 54

III Pictorial Elements as Meaning 60

On Costumes, Bodies, and Gestures 60

On Colors and Light 72 On Spatial Inscriptions 82 On Visualizing Time 93 Appendix: Fifteenth-Century

-BIBLIOGRAPHY NOTES | 102 127

Des cleres et nobles femmes Manuscripts 100

INDEX 135 ILLUSTRATIONS 140

Illustrations COLOR PLATES 15 Queen Niobe’s grief over her dead Boccaccio, Des cleres et nobles femmes, progeny turns her into a statue

Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 12420 (fol. 24) (photos: Bibliothéque Nationale de 16 Hypsipyle saves her father and sons

, France, Paris) as she is pursued by the matriarchs I Minerva presides over her of Lemnos (fol. 25) inventions (fol. 13v) 17 Queen Medea escapes with Jason

II Nicaula’s embassy to King Solomon and has her brother killed (fol. 26v)

(fol. 67v) 18 Hanged Arachne at the loom

III Paulina seduced by the priest who (fol. 28)

pretends to be Anubis (fol. 136) 19 Orithya and Antiope jousting

IV Otto IV gives Engeldruda in against Hercules (fol. 29) marriage to Guido (fol. 158v) 20 Sibyl Erythraea at her desk (fol. 30) 21 Medusa approached by Perseus

FIGURES (fol. 31)

1 Boccaccio reads to his audience (fol. 3) 22 Hercules’ love for Iole and its

2 Boccaccio presents his work to consequences (fol. 32) Andrea Acciaiouli (fol. 4v) 23 Deianira abducted from Hercules by 3 Eve between good and evil (fol. 6v) Nessus (fol. 34v) 4 Queen Semiramis between her 24 The collective death of Jocasta and soldiers and her son Ninus (fol. 8) her family (fol. 35) 5 Worshiping of Opis (fol. tov) 25 Sibyl Amalthea at her desk (fol. 36) 6 Juno, the goddess of childbirth (fol. 11) 26 Nicostrata, the inventor of Latin

7 Ceres, the goddess of agriculture (fol. 37)

(fol. 12) 27 Procris accepts jewels from

8 Venerated Venus (fol. 15) Cephalus, and is then killed by g Isis arrives on the shores of Egypt him (fol. 39v)

(fol. 16) 28 Argia finds her husband Polynices’

10 Abduction of Europa (fol. 17v) dead body (fol. 41) 11 Worshiping of Queen Libya 29 Mantho foretells the future by

(fol. 18v) pyromancy and haruspication (fol.

12 The Amazonian queendom of 42v)

Martesia and Lampedo (fol. 18v) 30 The wives of the Minyans enter the 13. Thisbe stabs herself in front of dead prison disguised as men, allowing

Pyramus (fol. 20) their husbands to escape (fol. 43v)

14 Hypermnestra and Linus troubled 31 Queen Penthesilea’s cavalry unit

by Danaus (fol. 22) (fol. 46)

vill

32 Beheading of Polyxena at the tomb st Solitary Hippo drowns herself

of Achilles (fol. 46v) (fol. 82) ,

33 Queen Hecuba witnesses the 52 Megullia and her dowry awaited slaughtering of her family as Troy by the fiancé (fol. 83) burns in the background (fol. 47v) 53 Veturia’s peace embassy to

34 Beheading of Cassandra in front of Coriolanus (fol. 83v)

Agamemnon (fol. 48v) _ $4 Thamyris paints a panel of the Virgin 35 Clytaemnestra’s stratagem to have and Child (fol. 86)

49) Rhodians (fol. 87)

her husband Agamemnon killed (fol. $5 Queen Artemisia defeats the

36 Helen and Paris embrace, besieged 56 Verginius stabs his daughter Verginia

by the Greek fleet (fol. sov) (fol. go) 37. Circe transforms Ulysses’ 57 Irene paints a statue of the Virgin companions into animals (fol. 54) and Child (fol. g2v) 38 Queen Camilla, the hunter (fol. 56) 58 Leontium between books and other

39 Penelope at the loom rescued from pleasures (fol. 93) her suitors by Ulysses (fol. $8) $9 Queen Olympias prepares herself for 40 Ascanius returns Laurentium to its her execution (fol. 93v)

60v) (fol. 95)

legitimate ruler, Queen Lavinia (fol. 60 Claudia attacks her father’s assailant

41 Queen Dido’s suicide in the city of 61 Verginia’s expulsion from the

_ Carthage (fol. 61v) patrician temple (fol. 96)

42 Pamphile collects silkworms 62 Verginia worships in the temple of

(fol. 69) Plebeia Pudicitia (fol. 96)

43 Rhea Ilia awaits to be buried alive as 63 Flora welcomes two prostitutes and

her sons suckle the she-wolf their clients (fol. 98v)

(fol. 69v) 64 The unnamed Roman girl breast-

44 Queen Gaia Cyrilla’s weaving feeds her handcuffed mother |

workshop (fol. 71) (fol. 100)

45 Sappho reads to a male audience 65 Marcia paints her self-image

(fol. 71v) (fol. to1v) 46 Lucretia’s suicide in front of her 66 Sulpicia worships in the temple of husband and male relatives (fol. 73) Venus Verticordia (fol. t02v)

47 Queen Thamyris defeats Cyrus 67 Double murder of Harmonia and

(fol. 74v) her servant (fol. 103v)

48 Leaena, tortured, bites off her tongue 68 Busa helps the defeated Italian army

(fol. 76v) (fol. 104Vv)

49 Queen Athaliah’s expulsion from 69 Sophonisba drinks from a poisoned

Jerusalem as the heirs to the throne cup (fol. 106)

are killed (fol. 78) 70 Theoxena poisons herself and her

horseback (fol. 81) |

50 Cloelia crosses the Tiber on family (fol. 108)

1X

List of Illustrations

71 Queen Berenice pursues the 89 Agrippina lets herself starve to death

murderer of her sons (fol. 110) (fol. 134v) 72 The wife of Drigiagon offers the 90 Empress Agrippina killed at the head of her rapist to her husband order of her son Nero (fol. 137v)

(fol. 111) g1 Epicharis, tortured, strangles herself

73 Tertia Aemilia witnesses her (fol. 140v)

husband Scipio’s adultery (fol. 113) 92 Pompeia Paulina and Seneca bled to

74 Dripetrua waits on her father death (fol. 142) ,

Mithridates (fol. 114) 93 Empress Sabina Poppaea, on a 75 Sempronia and Equitius in front of transportation litter, points at the

a triumvir (fol. 114Vv) wound inflicted by her husband, 76 Claudia Quinta pulls the stranded Nero (fol. 143v) ship with the statue of Magna 94 ‘Triaria in full combat (fol. 146) Mater to the shores (fol. 116) 95 Poet Proba writes at a drawing 77 Hypsicratea takes up combat at her board (fol. 147) ~ husband Mithridates’ side (fol. 117) 96 Worship of deified Empress

78 Sempronia abandons her Faustina (fol. 148v) instruments for other pursuits 97 Empress Faustina as the object of

(fol. 119) love of a cutlery smith (fol. 148v)

79 The wives of the Cimbrians kill 98 Empress Semiamira presides over their children and hang themselves her senate (fol. 150)

(fol. 120v) 99 Zenobia as hunter and ruler (fol.

80 Julia swoons and dies upon seeing I52Vv) her husband’s bloody shirt (fol. 122) 100 Pope Joan gives birth during a

81 Portia swallows burning coals procession (fol. 155v)

(fol. 123) tor Empress Irene deposed by her son

x; 82 Disheveled Turia searches her Constantine (fol. 157)

husband (fol. 124) 102 Empress Constance forced to

83 Hortensia pleads against the become a nun (fol. 159v)

triumvirs’ intention to raise the 103 Empress Constance abandons her , taxes paid by women (fol. 125) monastic habit to marry Henry VI

84 Disguised Sulpicia follows her (fol. 159Vv)

husband into exile (fol. 126) 104. Roland marries Camiola, who pays

85 Poet Cornificia at her desk the ransom to free him from prison

(fol. 127) (fol. 161)

86 Beheading of Queen Mariamne 105 Homage to Joanna, queen of Sicily

(fol. 127v) and Jerusalem (fol. 165)

87 Death of Cleopatra and Anthony 106 Dine and Jacques (?) Raponde in

(fol. 129Vv) prayer, Legende du Saint Voult de

88 Widowed Antonia turns away from Luques, Rome, Bibl. Apostolica

her suitors (fol. 134) Vaticana COD. Pal. Lat. 1988, c. [Vv (Photo: Biblioteca Vaticana)

Preface

N New YEAR’S Day 1403, a relatively calm year in a Paris soon to be torn

( ) apart by the bloody internecine wars between the Armagnac and Burgundian parties, the sixty-one-year-old duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (1342-1404),

received a lavishly illuminated manuscript from the hands of one Jacques Raponde. Nestled in between regular black letters spread over crisp parchment leaves, a long sequence of small, brightly colored rectangles greeted the duke upon his opening the heavy volume. The lively images told tales of power and subjection, happiness and grief, heroic destinies and prosaic undertakings. But, surprisingly, they were all tales about women—told by a man, offered by a man, and now clasped by a man. What the duke

thought when closing the book, after his initial absorption of this secular and female epiphany, what he did with and said about this learned and beautiful gift will remain a matter of speculation, of silent dreaming at best. Philip the Bold’s Des cleres et nobles femmes (hereafter Cleres femmes) still can be

viewed in its completeness and fresh splendor—that is, if one is allowed to cross the entrance of the Departement des Manuscrits at the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris." It is there that I immersed myself, time and again, in the Cleres femmes and other manuscripts that were made for Philip the Bold and his Valois relatives. The initial impulse to write my dissertation about the Cleres femmes arose from a diffuse dissatisfaction with

the ways late medieval illuminated manuscripts tended to be studied.” The field was dominated by stylistic analysis; it is an aspect I have chosen to treat minimally. Untouched by structuralist modes of inquiries, miniatures were (and are) plucked from the manuscripts

and treated like independent images to be reorganized into temporal sequences that do not conserve the original togetherness of such images. In part, this happens because easel painting is the format that implicitly organizes most narratives in the history of art, and it goes hand in hand with what I would call the perspectival gaze, which privileges in-depth

analyses of some individual miniatures. But medieval miniatures are not independent leaves: welded to a text, each frame is linked to those that precede and follow it. The single-image approach explains why one finds miniatures of the Cleres femmes, such as those

of the three women painters, and especially of Marcia, reproduced over and over again while many others remain unpublished. My own understanding of the Cleres femmes has, in contrast, been guided by semiotically informed perspectives insofar as they posit that meanings can be generated, and in turn understood, only through relational models. For painting, like any other “language,” is inherently a dynamic, open-ended, polyvalent, even self-contradictory, and, above all, never finite process of conceptual systematization.? I

Preface

My reading, geared toward capturing the rhythms of signification articulated by the cycle as a whole, aims in the first place to make the entire pictorial cycle of one copy of the Cleres femmes available to the public. Yet there are obviously other intellectual purposes that guide my monographic study of this cycle. As I started to work on this manuscript, I quickly realized that the mere task of description offered an unforeseen, and by no means ancillary, conceptual challenge: simply put, how does one discuss more than one

hundred images? Unlike a Book of Hours or other texts divided into subcycles, Boccaccio’s | De mulieribus claris is a collection of biographies roughly assembled in chronological order,

;

with no other subdivisions than each of its chapters. Unlike romances or chronicles, the 109 miniatures of this manuscript offer no unified plot or linear temporal succession that one could take as a guiding principle. And yet, even a quick perusal convinces one that the miniatures of the Cleres

femmes are not a random collection of pictorial fragments. They articulate some sort of visual systematicity, whose lines of division and confluences my analysis will explore, for it is

through them that images establish patterns of meaning. That this process cannot be reduced to the production of textual meaning will be a central issue to pursue. I hope to demonstrate that images create intelligible visibilities that are only partially dependent on

words. But in order to do this one has to attend to the seemingly most insignificant details, because it is there that images often say what texts cannot express—that the dis-

cursive order finds its limits. Moreover, and because of their active role, I will pose the question of the ability of such images to reformat authorial intentions and narrative structures alike.'This will form the underlying subject of Chapter II, which is devoted to the iconography of the Cleres femmes. In it I will equally pay attention to the cycle’s proximity to or

distance from social practices, and how and where it enforces gender divisions. Here

, again the task is not an easy one, for the social history of women, though burgeoning, is still very inadequate for late medieval France, and in particular for Paris.4 After analyzing these iconographic strategies, I shall examine the pictorial devices that constitute the pictorial cycle as such—that is, the “language” of gestures, the colors, space and time. The unity of the individual miniatures will be somewhat dispersed by this syntagmatic reading; but then, it is one of my main working hypotheses that the texture of an illuminated manuscript is constituted by the repetition, contrast, and variance of a limited number of iconic elements, which can be grasped only when considered as discrete and differential signs throughout the entire cycle. Whereas considerations of spatial problems fill volumes of scholarly publications, other pictorial elements—such as colors—have received scant attention from a historically informed perspective. In Chapter III, devoted to the exploration of these aspects, I will therefore present uneven methodological densities and conclusions. Despite this, I would like to question two commonplaces held in regard to late medieval art. The first is that of its allegedly “contradictory” character, especially as evinced by its “representation” of space. The second, which affects the perception of medieval art in general, is that of the alleged “anachronism” that governs the depiction of historical settings and costumes. I have chosen this particular manuscript for a number of reasons. First, it is an

Preface

average product, if I may say so, among luxury secular manuscripts made for the Valois. , While of a high artistic quality, it is not as accomplished as the works of the Limbourg brothers or the Boucicaut Master, and consequently it is more representative of its period. Second, Philip the Bold’s Cleres femmes is a well-documented manuscript. Third, and most important, the fact that this book is entirely devoted to women could not be irrelevant anymore to me than it was to its audience around 1400. If interpretative choices and conclusions are ultimately a matter of personal inclination, the avenues one takes to reach them are so thankfully peopled that one’s journey is not entirely solitary. I would like to acknowledge the help and inspiration provided by Jean-Claude Schmitt, Jean-Claude Bonne, and Michel Pastoureau, who guided me through my dissertation. Equal thanks to Carla Bozzolo and the entire team of the Culture Ecrite du Moyen Age Tardif (CEMAT); to Vittore Branca; to Francois Avril, in particular for his generous help in securing the right to reproduce all of the Cleres femmes’s miniatures; to the staff of the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, and to the other libraries and archives that house Cleres femmes’s manuscripts and documents pertaining to the Rapondes;

to Smith College for research funds, and especially to Susan Bourque; to my research assistant, Melanie Hannon; to Virginia Wageman and Cherene Holland for making the publication process pleasantly smooth; to Michael Camille, Robert Nelson, Claire Richter Sherman, and especially Anne D. Hedeman, who read a draft of the second chapter; and to Michael Gorra for everything else.

,3

I

The Manuscript Objec pt as Object HE PERIOD BETWEEN circa 1380 and 1420, conventionally identified by the stylistic label of International Gothic, was certainly one of the most extraordinary periods of artistic creation in medieval France. Paradoxically, it coincided with one of the “most calamitous periods in French history,’ the reign of King Charles VI (1380 —1422).' Because there are numbers of recent studies dealing with the patronage of the first Valois rulers, and specifically with that of Philip the Bold, it will suffice here to reit-

erate briefly some general aspects of manuscript consumption and production in late medieval French court circles, so as to provide a sense of the historical circumstances that generated and gave meaning to a manuscript like the Cleres femmes.’ Despite ongoing internal dissensions and external warfare, the ruling Valois dynasty spent enormous sums and its subjects’ creative energies, time, and labor on the arts. Perhaps for the first time in medieval history the notion of a cultural policy can pertinently be applied to princely patronage. Refracted by texts and images, personal and public interests continuously blended into one another. Also, and despite the many differences and personal preferences that characterized the attitudes of Kings Charles V and Charles VI, and their brothers, sons, wives, and daughters, the Valois, taken as a whole, exhibit a remarkably consistent attitude toward artistic patronage. All were personally engaged in building campaigns, whether it be the reconstruction of the Louvre with the addition of the famous library tower by Charles V; or the seventy-one residences either restored or built by Jean de Berry (and severely damaged even during his lifetime by a populace revolting against his heavy taxation); or religious foundations, the most illustrious being the Charterhouse at Champmol, commissioned by Philip the Bold. What is perhaps even more intriguing is that the Valois were also fervent collectors of less immediately declamatory works, amassing, in recesses accessible only to a few, dazzling numbers of precious objects. The systematic character of the Valois’s enterprise in artistic matters stems from too complex an intersection of economic, political, and social reasons to be addressed here. It will be enough to underscore one aspect, namely, the exceptionally voluntaristic character of late medieval aristocratic patronage. Romanticized views tend to overemphasize these collectors’ disinterested, connoisseur-like passion for the arts or draw a picture of obses-

sive, narcissistic, and ultimately irrational consumers of luxury goods. On the contrary, ratio- , nality was the key to aristocratic accumulation, and Martin Warnke is right to stress that “a number of objective factors ... made all the expenditure on representation necessary. 3 Forcefully afirmed by the costliness of works of art, such expenditure was inevitably

4

The Manuscript as Object

contested by other social groups. Nobles were publicly and, at times, violently challenged by the exploited lower estates; they were assiduously imitated by members of the upper

bourgeoisie; and, finally, they were strenuously castigated by moralist commentators. , A very immediate sign of the Valois’s willfulness in matters of artistic patronage is the desire for a minute itemization of all objects composing their collections. Preserving the memory of incessant expenditures, household account books recorded all payments made for works of art, and they did so in French. Even more revealing of a class-specific mentalité in matters of cultural capital are the inventories established by specially appointed officers,4 a practice appropriated from professional libraries. Charles V had a catalogue of his books, and Jean de Berry, Louis II, duke of Anjou, and, possibly, Philip the Bold had

inventories of their collections drawn up during their lifetime, rather than upon their deaths, as testamentary inventories.° This is indeed a sign of a “new conception of the nature

of an inventory,” and, I would add, toward thesaurization. That the Valois rulers were more self-consciously styling themselves as art patrons is further discernible in such phenomena as the many portraits they commissioned, or the autograph signatures and heraldic devices that decorate their manuscripts.’

And then there is the sheer quantity of works produced at their command, whether pieces of sculpture, tapestries (especially favored at the Burgundian court), panel paintings, joyaux, or manuscripts. To limit myself to book collections, Charles V’s royal library, assembled in the newly equipped Tour de la Fauconnerie, contained about 910 books, augmented by roughly 200 new items under Charles VI.° The royal library was thus about half the size of the one at the Sorbonne, the largest library in the Western world.° To be sure, the royal library was exceptional, far more extensive than other private collections. About 300 manuscripts are listed in Jean de Berry’s inventories and 215 in those of Philip the Bold and his wife, Margaret of Flanders," while Charles VI’s brother, Louis of Orléans and his wife, Valentina Visconti, owned about 146 manuscripts.” Princely libraries were consequently considerably larger than the libraries belonging to members of other social groups, such as those of the clerks of the Parlement, studied by Francoise Autrand: with the exception of Nicolas de Baye, a greffier, who owned an unusual number of 198 books, and that of the royal advocate Robert Le Coq (76 books), 28 of the 38

libraries contained fewer than 10 books.” , If the Valois took over many technologies from the libraries at the Sorbonne and other religious establishments, does this mean that princely libraries and collections were only a reflection of existing libraries? It does not seem so, for the nature of books collected by the Valois was quite different from those found in professional milieus. To begin with, there were considerably more secular works in the Valois collections than in other libraries; the proportion between religious and secular texts was about the same, and Bibles and devotional literature largely outnumbered theological and patristic corpora, which

| formed the bulk of university libraries. The “wise” Charles V left the most personal imprimatur by commissioning a great many vernacular translations of canonical Latin , works;™ his library was particularly well supplied with legal, didactic, scientific, and historical

books, some of which appear in other collections as well. The high proportion of ver-

5

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

nacular texts is indeed the second major characteristic of libraries belonging to lay people,” to whom Latin had become by and large a foreign language. Jean de Berry’s and Philip the Bold’s libraries contained more poetry and romances, but it remains true for theirs as well

, as for all other princely libraries that books offered a working tool as much as a class-specific repository of knowledge. Books served many different functions, such as sustaining dynastic legitimacy and affirming national identity, offering guidance in the conduct of political and military affairs, devising a historical memory, and helping the practical administration of their territories; they allowed for the recitation of prayers and for nurturing spiritual exercises; and they also offered a space for diversion, where rulers could meet the heroes of their childhood tales and absorb more unequivocal moral lessons than reality was able to teach.”

Lastly, princely manuscripts were much more regularly and lavishly illustrated than those owned by other people; the humanists, for instance, favored sparse codices, devoid of images held to detract from the prestige of the text. Beautiful script, highquality parchment, costly bindings, and large illuminated cycles were indeed the sacralizing markers of aristocratic manuscripts, making them too costly for members of lower social classes. As far as illuminations are concerned, Jean de Berry had the most innovative and sumptuous manuscripts in his collection, while Louis of Anjou assembled a startling col-

lection of jewels and tapestries. Indeed, another important feature of lay, upper-class libraries is that they encompassed many more objects than just books. Manuscripts sided with joyaux, precious vessels, medals, other artistic artifacts, and all sorts of strange mirabilia.

The inventory of Jean de Berry, for instance, ecumenically embraces what modern times would split into “high” and “low” art: mechanical clocks, jewels, perfume flasks, ostrich eggs, boar and whale teeth, bear skins, relics of all kinds, and, finally, manuscripts and panel paintings. Since libraries were at the same time Wunderkammern and librarians carried the title of gardes des joyaux,® illaminated manuscripts must have been considered very literally to be marvelous objects, choses estranges."? I should stress, however, that works in precious metals, studded with stones and gems, were far more expensive than books—after all, they could more easily be converted into liquid assets.”° There also were specific ways in which the holdings of aristocratic libraries were enlarged. In addition to inheriting and receiving them as gifts, the Valois commissioned manuscripts and bought them on the book market. But nobles did not refrain from permanently borrowing books, expropriating them from deceased persons, or even stealing them.?" What is important to emphasize is that directly commissioned manuscripts were by no means the majority, even though this is what is generally meant by the notion of patronage.*? In the early fifteenth century, the climactic moment in the circulation of luxury goods happened during the ritualized exchange of gifts on New Year’s Day, the socalled étrennes.*3 The étrennes seem not to have been recorded by images. Instead, minia-

tures perpetuate the memory of a related ceremony, the presentation of a work by an author.*4 Presentation miniatures usually depict a kneeling author offering his or her work, thereby soliciting the patron’s approval and protection. The Cleres femmes contains such a presentation miniature (Fig. 2), in which a generic-looking Boccaccio tenders his book to an equally indeterminate female figure meant to represent Andrea Acciaiouli, to 6

The Manuscript as Object

whom the De mulieribus claris was dedicated some twenty-five years before this miniature was painted. Illustrating Boccaccio’s proem, this presentation miniature is purely fictional. It withholds rather than reveals the actual transaction whereby the Cleres femmes was transferred from Jacques Raponde’s to Philip the Bold’s hands—a gesture to which I will

now turn my attention.

Jacques Raponde, Merchant of Manuscripts To Jacques Raponde, merchant and citizen of Paris, to whom my Lord by special favor has given the sum of 300 francs as a recompensation for a book in French of several stories of women of good renown that he gave him on New Year’s Day, and also for the good services that he has performed every day and will hopefully continue to do so, as it is shown more clearly in the letters patent issued by my Lord in Paris on the 21st day of January in the year 1402. Issued with a receipt.”

Thus reads the payment notice for the Cleres femmes in Philip the Bold’s accounting books. Except for the name of the artist(s), the notice is very complete; it indicates the title

and price of the manuscript, the donor and recipient, and the date and place of the exchange. The manuscript was presented as an étrenne. For a gift, 300 francs seems a rather hefty price, but many items recorded in accounts as gifts were in fact disguised sales, a commercial transaction wrapped up as a more noble, ritually conducted form of free exchange. The Cleres femmes’s notice further specifies that the sum was meant to remunerate Raponde for the “good services that he has performed every day and will hopefully continue to do so”—a standard formula used to indicate a close working relationship with the duke.*° From the ducal document we learn that Jacques Raponde was a merchant and a citizen of Paris. His name, however, betrays Italian origins. Indeed, the Rapondes (Rapondi) came originally from the small but prosperous city of Lucca, at the forefront of international trade from the thirteenth century onward.*” They were among the most prominent families of the Lucchese oligarchy. Leon Mirot, in what remains the most complete study of Lucchese merchants established in Paris, has shown that the presence of this community of Italian bankers and merchants can be traced to the end of the thirteenth century, the very moment when international trade became more sedentary. Innovations in financial tools (bills of exchange that allowed for operations of credit) and in banking structures (the establishment of branches across Europe) enabled merchants to direct their far-flung activities from one main location instead of having to be constantly on the move. Because

of increasing competition in international trade, and the economic depression of the fourteenth century, merchants were forced to emigrate from smaller centers and to congregate in larger commercial capitals. Such economic, as well as political, reasons prompted the Rapondes to leave their native city and establish the center of their activities in the North, first in Bruges and later in Paris.”*

7

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes The Rapondes specialized in the lucrative commerce of luxury goods, and above all in the long-standing Lucchese specialty of silk textiles, such as damask, brocades, tafte-

ta, velvets, sendal, and golden and silver fabrics;?9 but they also traded in jewels, furs, spices, exotic produce, and other small-scale and high-profit-yielding wares—a diversity precisely reflected in the hodgepodge of princely collections. And, as was commonly the case with upper-scale merchant companies, they engaged in financial operations, in credit and exchange. The family company, headed since 1370 by the powerful Dine (Dino),?°

traded with and lent money to members of the Flemish nobility, especially Yolanda of Flanders, countess of Bar. Presumably it was she who introduced the Rapondes to Philip the Bold, who was to become the principal beneficiary and supporter of their commercial, financial, and diplomatic activities.** Dine’s rapid ascension to the status of a regular provider of luxury goods, then of main financial pillar, and, finally, of counselor to the duke of Burgundy, is indeed impressive. His career offers a compelling illustration of the forceful rise of the upper bourgeoisie in the late Middle Ages. Ironically, this rise was fostered by the nobles’ inflated demand for luxury goods, which in turn exacerbated the nobility’s more or less chronic insolvency, caused primarily by their expansionist politics and a

permanent state of warfare. While Dine was forging his economic, financial, and personal links to the duke of Burgundy, the other members of the family company seem to have continued to carry out more traditional commercial activities. At the end of the fourteenth century, Dine’s brothers André and Jacques and their nephew Jean supervised operations conducted from the mother-houses in Bruges and Paris and from the main branch in Avignon (where they served as bankers to Pope Clement VII). A third brother, Philippe, directed the counters in Lucca and Bruges and ended up later as a counselor in John the Fearless’s household. In 1385, the Rapondes obtained from Charles VI the right of citizenship in Paris, a priv-

ilege that granted them the same commercial and political rights as their French colleagues.34 It is not surprising that the Rapondes, who became one of the wealthiest families in Paris, were involved in politics as well.*5 Their close association with Philip the Bold and subsequently with John the Fearless inevitably sided them with the Burgundian party against the Armagnacs. In fact, some sources insinuate that Dine was directly implicated in the assassination of Louis of Orléans, which John the Fearless ordained in 1407.°° From that point onward, the Raponde company declined rapidly, as did so many things

in the French kingdom and its capital, torn apart by the escalating civil war. | It was in Paris that the Rapondes owned most of their landed properties, including two houses in the parish of St. Jacques-de-la-Boucherie on the Right Bank, the traditional commercial sector of the capital. Located on a street with the evocative name of Vieille-Monnaie, which abutted the still extant rue des Lombards—a veritable bastion of Lucchese merchant families—the main house occupied five lots and comprised “a well, a kitchen, cellars, stables, halls, rooms, galleries, a sewer, toilets, passage-ways, multiple entries and exits.’’3” The Rapondes’s was certainly one of the most sumptuous hotels of the Parisian bourgeoisie, for it is mentioned by Guillebert de Metz in his wonderful, but selective, description of Paris written in 1407.3° Guillebert discusses it along with the

8

The Manuscript as Object

residences of two other representatives of the Parisian financial jet-set, the Italian Guillaume

Sanguin and the French Bureau de Dampmartin. While the former was, with the Rapondes, one of the Burgundian dukes’ chief moneylenders, the latter, orfévre et changeur, ennobled in 1409 and named treasurer of France from I41I to 1413, was a regular provider

of luxury goods. And it was Bureau who did offer secours et provisions, hospitality and financial means, to Laurent de Premierfait and Antonio of Arezzo when they embarked on their translation of the Decameron in 1411.39 The most splendid bourgeois hotel in Guillebert’s eyes, the one that he lovingly details in his description, with its rooms studded with semiprecious stones, replete with paintings and filled with games and musical instruments, belonged to Jacques Duchié, who held under Charles VI an important position in the Chambre des Comptes, the royal record-keeping institution. What emerges from Guillebert’s account is that the difference between the dwellings of high civil servants and wealthy merchants, on the one hand, and those of nobles, on the other, was a matter of quantity and not quality. As we shall see shortly, the Rapondes’s main house, sole property of Jacques since 1400, has a more direct interest than just providing a measure of their wealth. We do not know much about Jacques’s life. He was born after 1350 and appears in documents for the first time in 1368, when he rented a house in Bruges. In 1396, he lent 3,000 florins to the Lucchese Signoria, a positive indication of his considerable wealth. From then on Jacques appears quite regularly in princely accounts, both as a moneylender and seller of jewels. Upon his older brother Dine’s death in 1415, he was the sole inheritor of all the family’s properties in the diocese of Paris, and he seems to have headed the family company from then on. In 1418, we hear that he is yearning for a quieter life.4° He died in 1432, designating as his main heir Henry VI, king of England and France, who then gave the entire bequest to another Lucchese merchant. Most of the evidence for Jacques’s involvement in the book trade derives from ducal inventories and accounts. Terse as these notes are, one does gain the impression that his participation in the diffusion of manuscripts was more direct and personal than the notion of intermediary implies. Certainly he was more than a simple agent, occasionally feeding Philip the Bold’s collection of manuscripts.*7 _ Indeed, the number of manuscripts that he sold to the duke is exceptionally high. While Dine is recorded in 1400 as having given, as an étrenne, a “tres bel” Tite-Live, “enlumine de lettres d’or et hystoires d’imaiges,’** thereafter his name is only connected to precious fabrics (some used to make shirts for books) and jewels.*3 Conversely, from 1400 onward manuscripts were evidently one of Jacques’s specialties, even though he too occasionally sold textiles and jew-

els. In all he sold seven manuscripts to Philip the Bold: in 1400, an unidentified Prench Bible, “tres bien historiee,” for 600 écus (circa 660-750 francs);44 the same year, in December, an unidentified Légende dorée, “hystorié de belles hystoires a chascun son hys-

toire,’ for 500 écus (circa 550-625 francs);45 in 1402, an “entirely new” copy of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s Livre des propriétés des choses, for 400 écus (circa 440—500 francs);*

in 1403, the Cleres femmes, for 300 francs; the same year, three copies of the Fleur des histoires de la terre d’ Orient, for 300 francs.*” To these, one must add a collection comprising

9

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

the Lancelot du Lac, sanc Greal, roy Arthus, “ystorié de pluiseurs belles ystores,” sold to John the Fearless in 1407 for 400 francs.4* Finally, Jean de Berry’s accounts of 1413 mention that Jean de la Cloche, treasurer of France, was reimbursed for the 350 livres tournois that he had lent to the duke to acquire from Jacques a book of unspecified content.‘? Judging from the high prices, recorded in gold currencies (francs or écus), all of these manuscripts must have been profusely iluminated.*° In the Burgundian accounts, the Rapondes’s manuscripts are the only ones to be always qualified as “tres bel livre,’ “tres bien hystorié,’ to have “belles hystoires,” and so on. Because of constant monetary fluctuations in early fifteenth-century

Paris, it is difficult to make price comparisons. But one can draw on other ducal expenditures. According to Nieuwenhuysen’s calculations, the income of Philip the Bold around 1400 was about $00,000 francs, with daily expenses ranging between 7,000 and 9,000 francs. A manuscript like the Cleres femmes would thus have represented about five percent to seven percent of a day’s budget. More concretely, it matches the cost of the most expensive kind of horse (about 300 francs), whereas a normal horse was worth only 15 to

roo francs.* |

That the Rapondes had a more personal interest in manuscripts can now be

proved thanks to a fortunate identification of a previously little known manuscript, published in 1984 by Isa Belli Barsali.°* This Legende du Saint Voult de Luques can firmly be ascribed to the Rapondes’s patronage since the frontispiece miniature displays their coatsof-arms (six pairs of corn ears) alongside that of Lucca (Fig. 106). An image of the Crucifix, carved by Nicodemus with the miraculous help of angels, the Volto Santo was, and still is, the most famous relic in the Cathedral of Lucca. In the Middle Ages, it was customary for

all “nations” of Lucchese established in foreign cities to found a chapel dedicated to the Volto Santo, such as the one in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, rue St. Denis, in Paris. In this almost-full-page miniature, the Volto Santo is placed upon an altar erected against an intense red background dotted with golden circles, which may reproduce the actual wall hanging of the chapel in Lucca.The altar is flanked by two praying men, heads of a portraitlike quality, bodies wrapped in fashionable fur-lined houppelandes. This image was painted by the Coronation Master, the chief illuminator of the Cleres femmes, and the frontispiece can be dated around 1402~—5.°3 The older man certainly represents Dine, about fifty at that time, while the younger could be Jacques.54 The verses beneath the miniature are cast in the singular, implying one patron for the manuscript, and read as follows: “To you who read this book / which contains many lessons / I beg you to pray for me / who has given it most devoutly.’* The manuscript was thus probably offered to the Parisian chapel of the Volto Santo, perhaps in exchange for prayers to be recited on behalf of Dine Raponde. The identification of this manuscript stands as a compelling testimony of the ability and desire of wealthy merchants occasionally to commission manuscripts for their own use.*° The only other comparable instance I know of is the Missal made by the Boucicaut workshop for Lorenzo Trenta. Like the Rapondes, Trenta was a merchant from

IO ,

Lucca established in Paris in the early fifteenth century.>” Lorenzo Trenta’s superb Missal—

of a quality that we tend to associate with aristocratic patronage—might have been des-

The Manuscript as Object

tined for the same chapel of the Volto Santo, the religious center of the Italian community. Like the Legende du Saint Voult, it was, however, executed by a quintessential Parisian artist. It is as if these emigrants wished visually to record their double cultural heritage—

an attitude that powerfully impregnates Jan van Eyck’s portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini, another Lucchese merchant whose career moved him to official positions at the court of Burgundy comparable to those entrusted to Dine Raponde some decades earlier. Arnolfini’s unforgettably pale wife, Giovanna Cenami, was in fact a descendant of a collateral branch of the Rapondes.**

The Legende du Saint Voult and indeed all identified manuscripts that Jacques Raponde sold to the dukes of Burgundy are carefully executed manuscripts, belonging to what scholars consider to be a progressive trend in the very early years of fifteenth-century Parisian book illumination. Most of the illuminators who executed these books were of Flemish, Netherlandish, or German (specifically Rhenish) origins.*° In fact, as suggested by Patrick de Winter, it is likely that the Rapondes played a role in encouraging the

steady influx of Northern artists to Paris, a role that their business connections would have greatly facilitated.°° The Coronation Master (as Millard Meiss has dubbed him) certainly came from these territories, as did his associates, although their anonymity and the stylistic melting pot of the International Style precludes greater specificity about their origins.” As it were, documents connect Jacques to several Northern illuminators, namely, Jacques Coene, Haincelin de Hagenau, and Ymbert Stanier, who illuminated a Bible in French and Latin for Philip the Bold, probably the same manuscript whose first ten quires had been painted by Jean and Paul Limbourg between 1402 and the duke’s death in 1404.” In fact, Jacques also knew the Limbourg brothers’ uncle, Philip the Bold’s court painter Jean Malouel, for in 1397 he was reimbursed for having furnished Malouel with six ounces of fine azure to be used for a heraldic decoration on the door of the chateau of Conflans.°3 As for Jacques Coene, we know that he was in relations with the Milanese

Giovanni Alcherio, a business partner of the Rapondes. It was Alcherio who was charged | by the commission overseeing the building of the Cathedral of Milan to hire some Northern experts, among whom he choose Coene.™ Alcherio must have known the painter rather well, since he also composed a technical treatise on colors following his recipes, which was copied some thirty years later by the French humanist Jean Lebégue,

who we will meet shortly.° |

In addition to the international mercantile scene, Jacques Raponde evidently had numerous contacts with the artistic and literary world of the capital. Although we entirely lack studies in this area, it seems that art and commerce were as closely intertwined in early fifteenth-century Paris as in the better-documented cases of Italian or Flemish cities. In fact, it is my belief that Jacques Raponde actively sought out and hired illuminators to create the manuscripts he would then sell to Philip the Bold. Some payment records indicate that his action was not limited to finding new artists for the duke. In some instances at least, Jacques Raponde supervised the production process in a more direct way. In November 1407, a week before the assassination of Louis of Orléans, John the Fearless gave him 10

II

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

écus for having mended a Guiron le Courtois, which implies that Jacques had access to the technical facilities to do so.°° The 1407 entry for the collection of Arthurian romances is even more explicit, for it affirms that the 400 écus were meant to cover the expenses that Jacques had incurred when “buying the parchment” and having the manuscript “illuminated, historiated, bound, covered, and closed.” It adds that the sum was also meant as an indemnity for the “trouble and occupation” required to do such a job.* Clearly, then, Jacques could act as the entrepreneur responsible for the entire production process, similar to a libraire farming out the various tasks to specialized artisans.°* And, just as Bureau de Dampmartin hosted the two translators of the Decameron, or Jacques Duchié availed himself of the services

of the carpenter who lived on his premises, it might be possible that Jacques Raponde installed a more or less permanent workshop in one of the properties in rue Vieille-Monnaie,

where illuminated manuscripts could be painted and bound.” It is well known by now that book production and trade were largely controlled by the University-approved libraires and stationaires of the capital.” Acting like both a modern publisher and an editor, they bought the parchment and then assigned the work to scribes, illuminators, rubricators, and binders.” At times these professions did overlap, and a libraire or an écrivain could at the same time be an illuminator.”? But this was rel-

atively uncommon, and it explains why illuminators are rarely mentioned in records, as

is the case with the still-anonymous artists of the Cleres femmes, subcontracted by Jacques , Raponde. Alongside this official book market there existed, however, a well-developed par-

allel circuit, operated by people not affiliated with the University. Richard and Mary Rouse have traced the existence of an alternate market back to the mid-thirteenth century, showing that its products were created in shops situated in rue Neuve, near NotreDame. This trade was specifically geared toward vernacular and luxury manuscripts.” In fact, a similar dual production model was operative for artists as well since, as peintres du roy or valets de chambre, they escaped the strict regulations imposed by the guilds.” But while the existence of the people who organized the production and distrib-

ution is well established, the impact of book entrepreneurs on the finished product is much more difficult to trace. It is thus worth asking if Jacques Raponde has left his imprimatur on the manuscripts that he sold. I have already mentioned the stylistic unity of the sroup of manuscripts attached to his name. Yet, there were a great many similar manuscripts being made in early fifteenth-century Paris, so it 1s impossible to conclude anything more than that he appreciated Northern artists and that he was particularly fond of the Coronation Master. All manuscripts sold to the dukes of Burgundy were copies of existing texts, both religious and secular literature. But, unlike the time-worn aristocratic best-seller Lancelot, other texts were more unusual, such as the Fleur des histoires de la terre d’ Orient, commissioned

to the Armenian prince Héthoun Haython by Pope Clement V in 1307. Certainly this work was not unrelated to the defeat of the Christian army at Nicopolis (1369), in which Philip the Bold’s son, the future John the Fearless, was made captive, to be liberated from the hands of sultan Bajazet thanks to a huge ransom, the gathering of which had been entrusted to Dine Raponde.” But the most exceptional text was precisely the Cleres femmes, for Raponde’s copy is the first surviving manuscript and was presumably the first 12

The Manuscript as Object

clean copy to have seen the light. Considering that Boccaccio was by 1400 barely known beyond the small circle of French humanists, and that he was a paradigmatic example of a merchant’s son’s foray into the cultural arena, it seems likely to me that Jacques Raponde was instrumental in supporting, if not initiating, the translation of the De mulieribus claris.

The example of the Decameron, translated with the financial support of Bureau de Dampmartin, has already shown that merchants participated, alongside patrons, humanists, literati, and artists, in the renewal of the cultural stock in early fifteenth-century Paris.” Whether the original impulse for translating the De mulieribus claris came from Jacques Raponde or from someone else matters little in the end. But the Cleres femmes does contain what seems to me an indisputable proof of Jacques’s active participation in the making of the manuscript. It is to be found in the biography of Pamphile, the Greek heroine who, according to Boccaccio, first collected silkworms and subsequently invented the art of weaving silk textiles—a trade carried out exclusively by women in late medieval Paris, who, it should

be added, were excluded from joining the guilds of large-scale international commerce. They were excluded, that is, from the Rapondes’s milieu.7* Pamphile’s is one of the shortest biographies in the collection, and Boccaccio tersely concedes that “she cannot be adorned with the greatest honors.’7? But the French translation, picking up Boccaccio’s suggestion that

she must have been worthy “in other respects,’ concludes with a concrete description of her merits in inventing the fabrication of silk cloth not found in the original: As reason and experience show us, we can see that thanks to her great ingenuity, the noble Pamphile did something of great benefit and honor to the world, for [people] in several lands do not have anything else than such fabrics to wear, and in several places God is thus honored and served and churches covered very honorably, and from it noble robes and royal cos-

| tumes are made.*°

| Elsewhere I have concluded that only Jacques could have mustered the audacity of adding this glowing praise, this sacralization of silk fabrics—a surreptitious yet bla-

tant self-advertisement for his commercial specialty—into the body of his product. But an alternative, though less attractive, explanation might be adduced. The addition to Pamphile’s biography could have been made by the translator as a way of rendering homage to the person enabling him or her to carry out the work and make it financially viable. Whatever the case may be, this textual interpolation provides the most conclusive evidence that Jacques Raponde had a say in the material preparation of the Cleres femmes. And this leads me to a final question: What was his possible role as adviser to the program of illumination? Before examining the iconographic program in more detail in Chapter II, let me briefly note here that one of the very innovative aspects of the Cleres femmes is its high number of miniatures depicting intellectual and manual activities. And certainly crafts such as Weaving or, even more so, the “banking transaction” being performed by the man seated next to Minerva would have resonated more deeply with Jacques Raponde than

13

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

with Philip the Bold (Color Plate I). The task of illuminating an entirely new text as the Cleres femmes was obviously much more challenging than that of Bibles and other common religious works for which illuminators could rely on established visual repertories. It is unlikely that the illuminators read the text and devised the program of decoration

by themselves. They were given verbal or written instructions by someone who knew the | text well. Because of the many new texts that appeared around 1400, this “disjunction” between conceptors and executors of illuminated cycles must have been the rule, not the exception. Equally improbable seems the intervention of the patron Philip the Bold, for he would have taken hold of this book only upon its completion. Hence, it is rea-

sonable to posit that the translator, helped presumably by Jacques Raponde (or the reverse), sketched out the content to be represented for each miniature.*3 For want of documents, scholars have been at pains to describe just how these learned advisers operated and how much control they had over the illuminators.*4 Quite a few medieval manuscripts bear traces of marginal notes, penned in to direct the illuminators in their task. No such notes are visible in the Cleres femmes; nor, for that matter, any marginal sketches, though the underdrawing of Iole’s lower body is apparent

under her pink gown (Fig. 22). In addition to such succinct indications, a few more extensive directives do survive. Gilbert Ouy discovered a program describing the layout and content of miniatures destined for Honoré Bouvet’s Somnium prioris de Sallono super materia scismatis and concluded that it was presumably authored by the chancellor of

the University, Jean Gerson.*° Even more impressive and fascinating is the minute , maquette written in 1417 by the humanist Jean Lebégue, royal secretary and greffier of the Chambre des Comptes, the same man who collected various technical treatises on paint-

ing, including the one by Alcherio and Coene. Conceived for Sallust’s Catiline and Jugurtha, the program has been preserved, and so has the fully illuminated manuscript made around 1420 under Lebégue’s supervision.®” Such an exceptionally detailed program, specifying both layout and content for each miniature, reflects Lebégue’s personal involvement in the process of production of the manuscript and cannot be considered a common practice. Jacques Raponde’s intervention was surely not as substantial. Taken globally, this evidence seems to point to the inevitable conclusion that uluminators worked within a tightly predetermined space, that they were mere mechanical translators of what was laid out for them.The “tyranny of the text” governing medieval imagery has been emphasized repeatedly, and there 1s no denying that medieval illuminators created within parameters set by physical and verbal directions.** Yet, as Donal Byrne reminds us in his discussion of Lebégue’s program, the written directions were as much

, “descriptive of existing images as prescriptive of new ones.”®? In other words, Lebégue’s verbalizations are saturated with echoes of the pictorial tradition: they are dependent on images, on the histoires,°° as much as the latter are inspired by his program. Exactly how these different registers of signification interrelate in the concrete case of the Cleres femmes will be examined next. One can conclude here that illuminators, by literally giving a body to words, necessarily restructured and reconceptualized the verbal sequences. Despite their reliance on written instructions for the iconography, illuminators had to elaborate

14

The Manuscript as Object

different signifying patterns through pictorial means, which are only partially subsumable

by words.” This issue does not concern the freedom of medieval artists in regard to patrons; it is of a semiological, rather than sociological, nature.

The De mulieribus claris as a French Success

A manuscript was not just a closed object to be made, passed around, then locked into a

cofter, hidden in a library tower. Meant at least to be held, to be opened and leafed

, through, if not read, an illuminated manuscript disclosed within its confines a daring semiotic juxtaposition of words and pictures. Before addressing the visual transformations of the text, I shall briefly examine the scope of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and the reasons that made the Cleres femmes appealing to a French audience in the early years of the fifteenth century. Boccaccio is familiar enough not to need a long introduction. The bemused and attentive bard of late medieval society, Giovanni, born in 1313 as the illegitimate son of a merchant, was at first destined for his father’s trade. In his youth, he worked in Naples for the Florentine company of the Bardi, yet his real inclinations laid elsewhere, for he took up the pen early on. Official recognition of his poetic talents came with the Decameron (1349—53), dedicated to “ladies,” and written to “dispel the melancholy” caused by the Black Death.®3 In 1350 Boccaccio met Petrarch, to whom he would be bound for his entire life by a friendship tinged with deep admiration. With the beatified Carthusian Pietro Petroni, Petrarch played a major role in pressing Boccaccio to reexamine the appropriateness of narrating frivolous stories, particularly in the vernacular. The “spiritual mutation” of his later years prompted Boccaccio, who may have taken minor orders, to revise the purpose of his literary endeavors. He retired to the small village of Certaldo—where he died in 1375— and composed works, primarily in Latin, in which his satiric verve yielded to the sometimes acrimonious tone of a moralist. As a devoted promoter of the humanist enterprise, Boccaccio

cultivated a purified Ciceronian Latin; he combed through Roman and Greek manuscripts, some of which he rediscovered himself, such as Martial’s Epigrams, Varro’s De lingua

latina, and several texts by Cicero, Ovid, and Seneca. Extracting and remodeling passages from classical and medieval authorities, Boccaccio authored such monumental encyclopedic works as the De genealogia deorum gentilium (the Yellow Pages of mythology, which also includes his famous defense of poetry in books x1v and xv), the De montibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis et paludibus et de nominibus maris (a reference work of geographical knowledge adorned with legendary material), the De casibus virorum illustrium (a collection of biographies of men and women whose fate is governed by blindfolded Fortuna, from Adam and Eve to the French king John the Good), and, finally, the De mulieribus claris, a catalogue of lives devoted entirely to women. While for us Boccaccio’s canonical status 1s based solely on the Decameron, it was the later, learned corpus that attracted the attention of the French audience, of translators, and of Jacques Raponde.

Boccaccio was introduced to the French public at the papal curia in Avignon, Ts

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

where he stayed during two diplomatic missions 1n 1354 and 1365, and where some of his

books could be found.%* In many ways, Avignon was the main switchboard between Italy and France, teeming with churchmen, clerics, intellectuals, and artists of both countries. Merchants were not lacking either, including the Rapondes, who, as mentioned earlier, ran a counter in the papal city headed by André, and where Dine joined Charles VI’s diplomatic mission of 1389 to Pope Clement VII to end the Schism. But the real ~ success of Boccaccio’s work came in Paris around 1400. Boccaccio’s actual reception by a larger audience necessarily coincided with the translation of his work into French.®5 In 1400 the humanist Laurent de Premierfait,% who had been employed in Avignon in the last decades of the fourteenth century, completed his first translation of the De casibus which in 1409 he revised into a much expanded version dedicated to Jean de Berry.°’ Barely known today, the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes proved to be Boccaccio’s most popular work in fifteenth-century France, surviving in as many as sixty-nine manuscripts.°* Between 1411 and 1414, Laurent also translated the Decameron; since his understanding of Italian was insufficient, he worked from a Latin version prepared by his colleague Antonio of Arezzo.°? As we saw, both were employed

by the merchant Bureau de Dampmartin, whose familier (member of the household) Laurent declared to be. But the work was again dedicated to Jean de Berry.’ Finally, three other works by Boccaccio were translated in the second half of the century: the Filostrato (1438—42 as the Roman de Troilus), the Teseida (ca. 1460), and two chapters of the Genealogia deorum by Jean Mieélot (ca. 1471).’* And there was, of course, the De mulieribus claris, which survives in fifteen French

manuscripts of the fifteenth century (plus a single leaf), some of which are severely mutilated (see Appendix)."°? Unlike Jean de Berry’s slightly later version, Philip the Bold’s copy contains a colophon: “Here ends of Jehan Boccace the book of the famous women, translated from Latin into French in the year of grace 1401, and finished the 12th day of September, in the time of the very noble and very powerful and redoubtable prince Charles VI, king of

France and duke of Normandy. Deo gracias.’'®3 Aside from corroborating the fact that Philip’s must have been the first published version, this colophon provides us with a firm date for the completion of the translation. Since Jacques Raponde presented the manuscript on New Year’s Day 1403, we know that the 167 folios and 109 miniatures were written and painted in fifteen months at the most. Unfortunately, the colophon does not mention the name

of the translator; nor is he or she known from any other document. This very absence speaks against Laurent de Premierfait’s authorship, for he introduced himself in both the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes and the Decameron and was even depicted in some presentation miniatures.'°** Indeed, compared to the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes, the Cleres femmes is of a fairly mediocre literary quality, its vocabulary poor and repetitive.*°> Customarily

Laurent’s translations expand the original with numerous amplifications, paraphrases, and explanations. He did not refrain from amending Boccaccio’s occasionally graphic vocabulary, subjecting it to what Glyn Norton has aptly called a “tonal transformation.’!°° By contrast, the Cleres femmes is a literal and somewhat uninspired translation. I have come across only a few discrepancies with the original, but these are sig16

The Manuscript as Object

nificant enough to betray the cultural shift entailed by any translation. Moreover, they allow us to gauge the position held by images in the process of translatio. First, there are sever-

, al misunderstandings of a Latin word. For instance, the gladiatores, Empress Faustina’s adulterous lovers, are transformed into less heroic “knife makers,” faiseurs de couteaux (fol. 149), which the corresponding miniature endows nonetheless with a compelling visual exis-

tence (Fig. 97). Furthermore, the enraptured lover is made to conform to a medieval craftsman, an icon that would have spoken more immediately to a fifteenth-century viewer than would an outlandish gladiator.’ Similarly, the quadrigae are converted into rather rustic transportation carts, charrettes, though they do not appear in Minerva’s image (Color Plate I). More surprisingly, the pyre (rogus) lit by Dido becomes a siege moult bel and moult haut, thus being conflated with the “highest part of the city”;"°° accordingly, the stake has disappeared from the miniature (Fig. 41). And, finally, the Cleres femmes transmutes Nessus from a centaur (as he is correctly defined at the beginning of Deianira’s biography) into a more homely man who “estoit a cheval,” which is how the image reproduces him (Fig. 23).%° All these terms refer to the realm of classical culture: the translator of the De mulieribus claris was apparently unfamiliar with them and invented a French equivalent more or less based on an etymological reading. The second type of alteration, or amplification, presents the reverse case: the translator here knows the word but believes it to be unfamiliar to a French audience and thus decides to explain it. In the painter Thamyris’s biography, the translator briefly defines the Olympiad and signals his intervention by preceding it with a conventional linguistic marker called exposicion.™' The biography of Rhea Ilia also contains an addition that informs us that the children of the vestal, Romulus and Remus, were “thrown into a forest where they were fed by a she-wolf,’™ Here the translator introduces the textual manipulation by a comme aucuns dient—a common enough formula throughout the manuscript to hide the fact that in this case it does not belong to the original.™3 The translator probably felt that the she-wolf episode was too well known to ignore, as Boccaccio had done. What is telling, however, about this semiclandestine intervention is that the miniature officializes it by having the she-wolf nursing the twins occupy the center stage (Fig. 43). In sum, these cases demonstrate that the miniatures were enlisted visually to confirm the work of the translator, to authorize the translatio studii that any translation is."+ Furthermore, the relationship

between these interpolations and their visualizations indicates that the translator must , have been involved in the establishment of the Cleres femmes’s iconographic program. The most substantial intervention of the translator, the celebratory addition to Pamphile’s biography, stands out as exceptional, for no sign, no exposicion or comme aucuns dient, advertises it as a textual expansion."® And even if in this case the miniature does not acknowledge the suggestion that silks adorn God, churches, and princes, the unusually detailed rendition of the loom can be viewed as a visual equivalent of the textual addition, an unmistakable praise of the implement that made the fortune of the Rapondes (Fig. 42). But what was it that made the De mulieribus claris so attractive to the translator, to Jacques Raponde, and to French nobles? And what made these stories about women so

enticing that they were translated even before the Decameron? In order to answer this

, 17

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

question, it will be useful to provide a brief summary of the content and intentions of the De mulieribus claris.

Boccaccio completed a first version of his book in 1361 in Certaldo, “away from the

crude multitudes and almost free of other concerns," and revised it several times, working until shortly before his death in 1375."7 The final version consists of 104 biographies,” from Eve to Queen Joanna I of Naples, and first dedicatee of the De mulieribus claris. The biographies are preceded by a proem and a prologue and followed by a brief conclusive chapter, the only one not illustrated. Boccaccio dedicated the final version of the De mulieribus claris to Andrea Acciaiouli, countess of Altavilla, and sister to the famous Niccold, Grand Seneschal at the court of Naples (son of a merchant and humanist in his own right, Niccolo

had invited his childhood friend Boccaccio back to Naples in 1362—63)."? The proem praises Andrea’s moral and intellectual qualities, which “far surpass the endowments of womankind,’ though Boccaccio is quick to add that this is because her name derives from andres.*° Despite his claims to address his libellum to friends rather than to the service of the state, as he did with other works, Boccaccio nevertheless ends his captatio benevolentia by ask-

ing Andrea to give the book a wider circulation than the private sphere of women.” In keeping with the customary practice of compendia, Boccaccio explains his intentio in the prologue.” He stakes out at once the intellectual legacy that legitimizes his present endeavor (the De viris illustribus tradition, especially as represented by his friend and master Petrarch), and stresses his departure from it. Despite the bold choice of adapting an overwhelmingly male-oriented literary genre for a female matiére, Boccaccio’s stance on the accomplishments and merits of women is in the end an ambivalent one. Views about women’s shortcomings abound, and antiphrastic statements such as “the world belongs to

women’ do little to redeem women’s reputedly negligible role in history and society. Nevertheless, Boccaccio maintains his promise to extol those women of the past noteworthy for their intellectual and moral ingenuity, and to record their memorable actions, be they positive or negative—an important departure from the few earlier “catalogs of women,’ predicated much more on essentialist assumptions about the nature of womanhood.”4 Boccaccio’s “pious work” is overtly humanist: it excludes female saints because, unlike pagan women, they are sufficiently memorialized in hagiography written by holy men, and are praised for their “virginity, purity, saintliness, and invincible firmness”’;'° that is, essentially for their unchanging values. — The choice of the adjective clarus is explained in the prologue as well. This word creates a new anthropological category by setting the De mulieribus claris apart from the corresponding male tradition generally categorized under the notion of “illustrious.” Boccaccio

takes claritas not in the restricted sense of virtus but as “renowned,” whether through famous or infamous deeds, in lives marked by fortune or misfortune.’° Characteristically the French translation renders claras with two adjectives: cleres et nobles, applicable to women who are congnues et renommees. This amplification explains that Boccaccio’s work was catalogued under at least three different titles: as the Livre des femmes nobles et renommees,'?7 more frequently as Des cleres et nobles femmes,’?* and, finally, as the Livre des femmes de bonne renommee,"”? the latter clearly in contradiction with Boccaccio’s nonrestrictive use

18

The Manuscript as Object

of claras. The semantic resonance of clere, which can be translated as both “famous” and “bright,” is particularly interesting since the word belonged to the painters’ vocabulary as well. In Jean Lebégue’s treatise, clare is the color that renders all others brilliant (reluisans), bright (clers), and resplendent (replendissans).°° In that sense, Boccaccio’s cleres femmes can be held to illuminate womankind in general—perhaps because they were traditionally deemed to be devoid of luster anyway. The women Boccaccio selected, from a long and varied historiographic background, are presented as exceptional. Encapsulated in vignettes arranged in chronological order, Boccaccio’s heroines derive from biblical history (Eve; Athaliah, queen of Jerusalem; Mariamne, wife of Herod; and Nicaula, better known as the Queen of Sheba), from classical mythology (Juno, Ceres, Minerva, Venus), and, above all, from Roman history. With the exception of Boccaccio’s two contemporaries, Andrea Acciaiouli and Queen Joanna, only five women are medieval (Pope Joan, the Byzantine empress Irene, a young Florentine woman named Engeldruda, Empress Constance of Sicily, and the widow Camiola).™ As is typically the case with medieval historical writings, the De mulieribus claris intimately meshes historical and didactic purposes, so much so as to make its classification as history or moral treatise problematical if not irrelevant.%? Contrary to Boccaccio’ assertion that both proper and improper behavior can offer instructive exempla, he does not in fact allow the narrative to speak for itself, and he profusely offers first-person moral commentaries. Tying his “pleasant stories” to a profitable end, Boccaccio’s commentaries, particularly on negative traits, are in the end keen on controlling the meaning of claritas."3 He chastises pride in otherwise engaging portraits (Arachne, Niobe), prodigality (Sempronia, Busa), and especially Iuxuria (Venus, Sempronia, Leontium). As chastity is the supreme female virtue, so Iuxuria is deemed to be the ultimate female sin, though Boccaccio does concede that it can be provoked by social dispositions rather than by women’s allegedly natural wanton inclinations. For instance, he redeems the prostitute Leaena because of her political courage and steadfast solidarity with her fellow conspirators, even in the throngs of torturers, or he refuses to subscribe to the opinion that cast doubt on Penelope’s virtuous behavior. Castigating excessive carnal desires that cause otherwise praiseworthy women to fall (Semiramis, Venus, Iole, Leontium, Flora), Boccaccio applauds with some monotony submissive but chaste women (Busa, Antonia). His narrative verve is heightened in the long biographies of Dido and Lucretia and those women who, either raped or abandoned, committed suicide. Subscribing to the ideology of chastity, he lavishes ample praise on women who embraced death to preserve “freedom and chastity” in the face of a conqueror (the wives of the Cimbrians, Theoxena). But then he seems duly impressed by the wife of Drigiagon, who had the courage to wreak vengeance upon and to decapitate her rapist, and is generally inclined to extol physical or moral courage (Argia, Amazonian queens). Boccaccio often intervenes on less spectacular issues, notably on the responsibility of society and the family in scripting women’s conduct.To him the education of young women should be neither too strict (Thisbe) nor too lenient (Europa, Sempronia, Leaena) so as to foster filial piety, one of the most sacred values (Hypsipyle). Women should not be confined to domestic tasks (Thamyris) or to procreation (Cornificia, Proba). And yet, if mar-

19

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

ried, they should support their husbands even in the most extreme circumstances, follow | them into death (Portia) or exile (Sulpicia) or condone their adultery (Tertia Aemiulia). Certainly the most innovative move is Boccaccio’s inclusion of women who earned praise primarily because of their intellectual (Proba, Sappho, Cornificia) or artistic (Thamyris, Irene, Marcia) talents, as well as for their decisive inventions (Ceres, Minerva, Juno, Nicostrata,

Pamphile)—professional achievements that are not given any consideration in the much more fatalist male epic of the De casibus. As one reads through the Cleres femmes, even a mod-

ern reader is struck by how many inventions Boccaccio attributes to women, such as agriculture (Ceres), military craft (Minerva), silk (Pamphile), or the Egyptian and Latin alphabets (Isis and Nicostrata).

, The question for an art historian remains, how much or how little of Boccaccio’s insistent authorial voice is refracted into the miniatures? for his moral digressions, on which literary historians tend to focus, can hardly be transposed into a visual format. At any rate, if women of the past are deemed worthy of rescue from oblivion, it is because they can still function as a reflecting mirror for the contemporary reader: Boccaccio often draws explicit comparisons between what he thinks are the lax moral standards of his own days and the exemplary behavior of people of times past (Camilla, Engeldruda). Eschewing allegorical interpretations and opting for a euhemerist vision of goddesses, Boccaccio affirms the power of historical exempla to provide as legitimate a source of moral lessons as do hagiographic collections."34 As noted earlier, all Valois libraries were well stocked with historical and didactic works, and the matiére ancienne, transmitted in the vernacular, undoubtedly constituted a particularly favored genre by lay audiences. Indulging perhaps in “‘hero-worship,’™> lay circles’ interest and curiosity in classical mirabilia certainly played a fundamental role in constituting for them a past distinct from the biblical past, which was by and large in the hands of the Church. Rescuing this other past must have been a major factor for the enthusiastic reception of collections like the Cleres femmes or the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes: by presenting an extensive and portable gallery of human behavior and social estates, they literally collected into one volume memorable cameos of women and men of ancient times. In this regard, it seems to me that the Cleres femmes had the power to cut across gender lines and address male recipients as urgently, albeit differently, as it did a female audience—a hope Boccaccio expresses in his own prologue as well as in several of his authorial comments. While the possibility that the Cleres femmes was ultimately destined for Philip the Bold’s or Jean de Berry’s wives and daughters cannot be entirely excluded, it cannot be assumed either. %° In fact all fifteenth-century copies of the Cleres femmes for which the name of the original possessor survives were commissioned by men.” Without denying that such a text was bound to confirm generally patronizing feelings toward women, one can follow Pamela Benson’s conclusion that Boccaccio’s lessons were also addressed to men expected to adjust their notion of women’s accomplishments in history.%* And one can conceive that the extensive sequence of actively portrayed women would have countered the usual expectations of seeing them in a subordinate and passive role, as objects rather than subjects of history.

The only real subject of her writing was of course Christine de Pizan, the first 20

The Manuscript as Object professional woman writer in medieval France, who in her Livre de la Cité des dames (1404-5)

wrote an immediate, systematic, and personal response to the Cleres femmes, which she often quotes verbatim. It is rather ironic that without Christine the De mulieribus claris would in all likelihood be moldering in our modern libraries; hardly known ten years ago, Boccaccio’s work has come under intense scrutiny thanks to the “rediscovery” of Christine de Pizan and other protofeminist literature.8° The revisions that Christine undertook can be briefly summarized as follows: she dissolved Boccaccio’s chronological arrangement and assembled the biographies into thematic clusters of related professions, actions, and behavior; she added contemporary women, including ones she knew personally, and closed the collection with an extensive third part dedicated uniquely to the lives of female saints."4° Following a well-established French literary tradition, Christine’s book is conceived as a dialogue between herself and three female allegorical figures—Raison, Droiture, and Justice—

so that the writing of the text, as well as the powerful framing allegory of the building of the city, becomes a process of self-definition."4* And, finally, Christine programmatically edited her principal source, expunging the Cleres femmes’s derogatory or ambivalent passages."

It is not my purpose here to engage in the debate evaluating the respective merits of Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan, whose two texts, it should be emphasized, were at times collected in one and the same manuscript. Let me just briefly say that while it is clear that the City of Ladies offers an entirely celebratory view of women’s achievements, Christine also produced writings—such as the sequel to the City, the Livre des trois vertus, written in 1405—that are more conservative on women’s public roles and societal hierarchies alike."4

And, while some scholars have tended to oppose an idealized feminist Christine to a monolithically patriarchal Boccaccio, others have perceived that Boccaccio’s position is more complex, for his assessment of women is often in flux. Glenda McLeod, for instance, notes that Boccaccio’s work “vacillates between polarities,’ and that his reactions to his heroines are at least as diverse and indeterminate as his “position with respect to women’s effect on society.’"45 Pamela Benson, to whom the De mulieribus claris is the “foundation text of Renaissance profeminism,” skillfully predicates her analysis on one of Boccaccio’s leading tropes, that of “intermixing,’™° She argues that Boccaccio—who wrote, one should add, the first Italian text in a feminine voice, the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta—oftters competing interpretations of women’s achievements: while he might embrace the virago para-

, digm, the “male soul in female body,’ he also favors an explanation that sees women as “naturally capable.’"™? And as the stories of cross-dressing (wives of the Minyans, Pope Joan), effemination (Hercules), or the virago model itself further show, Boccaccio’s understanding of sexual difference is not necessarily based on fixed polarities but can be influenced by cultural factors (Penthesilea). From a different angle, Karlheinz Stierle’s analysis of Boccaccio’s poetics shows that his writings enact a shift from the medieval exempla tradition to the plurivocal model of the casus, in which divergent judgments invite, rather than preclude, the reader to form his or her own opinion.™* Whatever the case may be, Christine’s rewriting of the Cleres femmes is a sign of its immediate impact, just as Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (1386—94) had been a

timely reaction to the original De mulieribus claris.° Since it is certain that Christine 21

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

worked from the French translation, perhaps even from Philip the Bold’s copy, we might ask whether the miniatures—whose tone is on the whole more monologically positive than the text—have left some traces in her writing. For it seems to me that images can play a role in the reception history of a text. Christine’s reply to Boccaccio should also be set into a larger context, which clarifies how such an unconventional matiére as women could be of interest to the Parisian public.*° In the early fifteenth century, the cultural atmosphere almost guaranteed a captive audience for the Cleres femmes. Indeed, the Parisian literary world was shaken by a sometimes virulent debate on poetic license, generated by opposing interpretations of Jean de Meung’s continuation of the Roman de la rose." Ignited by Christine de Pizan’s condemnation of such misogynist characters as the Old Woman, Genius, or the Lover, as well as by Jean de Meung’s use of sexually explicit language in the famous passage on the “relics” and “sanctuaries,” the debate over the Roman de la rose soon involved the most authoritative literary voices. Jean Gerson sided with Christine and was opposed by the humanists Jean de Montreuil and Pierre and Gontier Col, who defended Jean de Meung. After a series of more or less confidential exchanges of letters, Christine decided to give the querelle a broader public diffusion when in February 1402 she solicited the protection of Isabeau de Baviére and the provost of Paris Guillaume de Tignonville by sending them the dossier of the epistolary exchange.The debate was at its height during 1402, and it ended as abruptly as it had

begun. Christine, whom Jean de Montreuil did not hesitate to call a new Leontium, a “Greek whore,’ declared that she had enough of it, and her opponents withdrew, perhaps because Gerson had threatened excommunication.*} The publication of the Cleres femmes at the height of the debate suggests that it did not happen accidentally. This is reinforced if one considers Christine’s City of Ladies to represent the most articulate and forceful conclusion to the debate.*+ While the querelle dealt primarily with literary merits and authorial responsibility, it is interesting to note that Gerson extended its impact, for he referred to the Roman de la rose in vehement terms during three sermons delivered in December 1402. Perhaps it was his position as a preacher that prompted Gerson, unlike anyone else involved in the debate, to warn his audience not merely against written words but also against those images that “solicit, stimulate, and urge illicit love affairs more bitter than death.’ These are epithets that Gerson could very well have applied to some of the Cleres femmes’s images as well, especially in his role as first chaplain to Philip the Bold.

That the question feminine was not solely limited to literary diatribes is further demonstrated by a number of court rituals ostensibly instituted for the defense of women. Chivalric orders dedicated to ladies, with strict protocols and flashy paraphernalia, proliferated. The most famous of these was the order of the Dame blanche a l’écu vert, founded in 1399 by Christine’s friend Jean le Meingre, marshal of Boucicaut, the patron of the beautiful Book

of Hours that bears his name in the Musée Jacquemart-André. During the debate on the Roman de la rose, in February 1402, the men assembled in the Hotel d’Orléans for Valentina Visconti’s birthday pledged to join an Ordre de la rose, presided over by Christine.**° Somewhat different and more spectacular was the founding of the so-called Cour amoureuse de Charles VI in 1401. This “court,” instituted by the dukes of Bourbon and

22

The Manuscript as Object

Burgundy, and patronized by the king himself, aspired to reunite every Parisian of some social standing once a month and on special feast days in the Burgundian Hotel d’ Artois. Its membership included members of the royal family as well as other nobles, officers, and clerics, and even important representatives of the bourgeoisie. It is here, that among the 950 or so members tallied up to 1440, we find Dine Raponde reunited with Bureau de Dampmartin, the latter rewarded with a ranking position as ministre of the court.'” Like the Decameron, the Cour amoureuse’s founding charter aimed at providing its members with some relief from a new outbreak of the plague.® Once more, this soulaz took women as its object. Governed by “humility and fidelity,’ this pseudolegal arena was meant to offer a space where women could be praised and served in and through poetic contests. Aside from the fact that it probably never met in the ways laid down by its charter, and that its membership included a rapist, opponents of Christine de Pizan, and the sometimes unapologetically misogynist poet Alain Chartier (who in 1426 was “condemned,” his arms erased and covered with ash, for his Belle dame sans merci), the Cour amoureuse rapidly became

an overtly pro-Burgundian instrument in which new political alliances were forged and cemented. And to make its original purpose, not to mention its effect, even more doubtful, not a single woman was affiliated with this all-male gathering. Even as judges of the poetic contests in their honor, women are mentioned only once, and in passing. The absence of the queen is particularly puzzling, considering that at that time Isabeau was empowered, during the king’s seizures of madness, to sit on the council and act as an intermediary between the different dukes.'° The social and gender composition of the Cour amoureuse does closely parallel the textual community of the Cleres femmes. This, more than Christine de Pizan’s instant reaction, helps to explain the work’s immediate success. The mere fact that the Cleres femmes was issued in a lavishly illuminated manuscript attests to its favorable reception. Moreover, a year after Philip the Bold received his copy, Jean de Berry was presented with a new, almost identical version by his treasurer, Jean de la Barre, also an étrennes gift.’ What Jonathan Alexander recently termed the phenomena of “twin or multiple” copies is thus at once an index of the competitive behavior that characterized aristocratic collecting and of the appeal of a particular work." And yet, can we assume that the Valois readers lavished as much time and attention on the sumptuous manuscripts that captivated the humanists or Christine de Pizan, and that can absorb us for many years? How did Philip the Bold approach this manuscript once he had taken it from Jacques Raponde’s hands? We know that reading habits changed during the Middle Ages and that silent, personal reading was a relatively rare practice. The communal hearing of a text, recited by a particular person, was still the prevailing mode of textual performance in court circles. This was especially true for nondevotional literature, issued in large-format books—a feature of many secular luxury manuscripts, including the Cleres femmes, which does comprise, however, depictions of both modes of reading, even within the same image (Fig. 98). Froissart tells us that he used to read “every night after supper” from his Meliador to Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix.'® Similarly, Christine de Pizan praises Jean de Berry

23

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

for enjoying the company of sophisticated minds and for absorbing the lessons distilled by books on moral philosophy or Roman history. From Christine we also learn that Gilles Mallet, Charles V’s librarian, was in charge of reading texts. Interestingly, she considers the act of reading a rhetorical skill and commends Mallet for accomplishing his task with good diction, for he “knew the names” and was good at pointer."*4 Christine further indicates that reading sessions occurred especially during the winter: before dinner, Charles V would listen (se occupoit souvent a ouir lire) to stories from the Scriptures, ancient history, philosophy, and other sciences." The “pleasures and profits” provided by ancient history were consequently shared by a more inclusive audience than books read privately. Yet the question remains as to just how much time a noble, constantly on the move, administering vast territories, permanently occupied by battles, could devote to such cultural pur-

suits. To be sure, the number of books, especially new ones, was not very high in any given library, and it is quite possible that a Philip the Bold would have had the time to read them all. Yet he received the Cleres femmes some fifteen months before his death. Did he have time to have all the stories “punctuated” to him?

And what about the miniatures, the histoires that accompany and reelaborate Boccaccio’s histories of famous women? Images might have taken less time to be assimilated,*° but they could not have been read at a distance, through someone else’s eyes. Unfortunately, contemporary sources documenting how illuminated manuscripts were manipulated are exceedingly rare, so it is difficult for historians to reconstruct the historically specific act of spectatorship that this format required, so different from that of monumental arts. It is certain that if Philip the Bold wanted to enjoy and learn from the miniatures of the Cleres femmes, he would have to bow closely over them, perhaps turning the pages himself, thus adding to the movement of his eyes that of his hands, his entire body. A passage in an anonymous manuscript in the Mirror of Princes tradition entitled the Livre des secrez d’Aristote—the French translation of an alleged epistolary exchange between Aristotle and his pupil Alexander known as the Liber secretorum—contains an interesting, if involuntary, clue as to how reading and seeing might have been evaluated.’” In the chapter “How princes need to have ancient histories read to them,” after exposing the benefits that can be gained from the teachings of exemplary history, the author says: “Therefore you need to look /tu dois regarder] and have the chronicles and ancient histories read to you [lire devant toy].’’?°® Looking is here cast in an active tense, while reading remains in a passive

24 |

one. In an epoch deemed by Huizinga to be of “pre-eminently visual inspiration," and during which images were collected as never before, seeing was perhaps a more active, and certainly a more personal, undertaking than that of confronting a text. Moreover, whereas texts were copied as faithfully as possible from manuscript to manuscript, miniatures would vary with each new copy: the princely beholder would thus dispose of a visual treasury, of a muniature gallery, that was personal by being unique. Upon discovering the Cleres femmes, Philip

| the Bold might have been reminded of his Cour amoureuse, of the debate around the Roman de la rose; he might have associated the heroines of the distant past with women more familiar to him, and he might have meditated about famous and infamous episodes in his own life.

But I do not believe that he would have looked at them as I will now do.

I]

Images as Readers

OLLOWING MILLARD MEISS’S OBSERVATION of the considerable “enthusiasm’”’ engendered by Boccaccio north of the Alps, and considering the challenge that his works represented for illuminators who could not resort to a “representative tradition,”' I shall proceed to examine how the iconographic vocabulary is mobilized and organized to shape a coherent illuminated cycle. The purpose of this iconographic analysis is not to trace a diachronic chain of images that functioned as antecedents for the Cleres femmes (of which there are few anyway), but to understand the miniatures as a syntagmatic sequence based on the handling of visual objects that are only partially dependent on the text. Questions of origins will thus yield to the internal functioning of the pictorial cycle. In part, this choice is conditioned by the fact that medieval secular iconography has received very little attention in comparison to the vast literature that assists scholars who study religious themes. Marle’s broadly framed Iconographie de l’art profane aside, there exists no general reference tool that allows one to trace the tradition of a given image, to assess its visual continuities and changes. Another difficulty arises when one wants to embrace, with the same analytical density, all miniatures of a cycle instead of highlighting some at the expense of others. As said, the text does not provide any subdivisions other than that of the individual biographies; nor is it conceived as a linear narrative progression, like a romance or chronicle, in which images do unfold as linked events. Consequently, I am employing a different exegetical model, culled from a textual genre but adapted to the visual cycle of Cleres femmes. The analytical grid that seems most useful in handling a seemingly unconnected, compartmentalized juxtaposition of 109 miniatures is that provided by the so-called estate literature.” To be sure, the Cleres femmes is not a treatise on “the classes of society and their ‘defections.’”’3 Yet insofar as the miniatures interpret Boccaccio’s stories as actualized

exempla, their social texture is inevitably asserted over their historical one. In fact, the rubrics of all Cleres femmes’s manuscripts resort to this classification, so that many more women are defined as “wife of?’ “daughter of?’ or “queen of” rather than by their origins, as a Greek or Roman woman. Whether in didactic treatises or sermones ad status, estates offered a convenient conceptual tool with which to hierarchize and contain the proliferation of social groups in the later Middle Ages. As such, and even though late medieval classifications had vastly expanded the feudal tripartite model, this literature was as much descriptive as prescriptive. It was precisely this taxonomy that guided Christine de Pizan’s

revision of the Cleres femmes in her City of Ladies. And Christine also resorted to the 25

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

body-politic metaphor, divided into three estates or officia, to rewrite Valerius Maximus in her Livre du corps de policie. She used the estates again in her Livre des trois vertus (1405),

dedicated to Philip the Bold’s granddaughter Margaret of Burgundy, which is addressed to and concerns women alone.‘ The Livre des trois vertus adopts the traditional categorization of women according to their marital status: a common trope in estate literature, virgins, wives, and widows are made to correspond to three degrees of chastity.> But the work superimposes onto this con-

ventional organization another one, much more innovative in its wide social spectrum, which , includes queens, princesses, ladies, nuns, wives of merchants, wives of artisans, servants, prostitutes, wives of laborers, and poor women. In this regard, Christine’s treatise follows Boccaccio’s ground-breaking move in envisaging women from an extensive array of social and professional categories, which thirteenth-century sermones ad status or collections of exem-

pla had only adumbrated and treated in abstracted terms.° Indeed, far from merely being a supplemental “fourth estate,’ the women in the Cleres femmes appear in roles that social theory usually reserved for men. And yet, one should not underestimate the fact that the Cleres femmes, like any other example of didactic literature, construed, in the words of Carla Casagrande, a “sociology that was for the most part ideology; of a description that nearly always served a moral purpose; of a classification that was already a model.”

A Pictorial Gallery of Women

I shall follow the organization customary in estate literature and read the socioprofessional repartition in the Cleres femmes from top to bottom, starting with miniatures that deal with the estate of clergie and with the sacred. Considering Boccaccio’s exclusion of Christian heroines, it comes as a surprise that one of the most overdetermined attributes in the manuscript are haloes, summoned to identify some of the pagan deities. Haloes, always strictly parallel to the picture plane, consist of a golden, finely circumscribed disk like those of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture (Fig. 7); of Isis (Io), abducted by Jupiter and then elevated by the Egyptians, in appreciation of her civilizing effects, to the status of goddess (Fig. 9);° or of the statue of Magna Mater in the ship that the virgin Claudia Quinta is pulling toward the shore (Fig. 76). Only the halo of Juno, the “queen of heavens” and goddess of marriage and childbirth, emits golden rays (Fig. 6). This distinction marks her loftier status, which is additionally underscored by her unique position at the top of the picture plane. Juno hovers above a group of adoring worshipers complemented by an intriguing scene of a pregnant woman, who, helped by a midwife, is accelerating her labor by pulling on a white cloth affixed to a pole on a table.*° But the fact is that the composition reminds one of images of the Pentecost and that Juno’s position recalls the Ascension of the Christian God as she floats in the “airs” in front of a “cloud.” In the

26 | | :

, Epistre Othéa, Christine de Pizan explains to her readers—" neither clerics nor poets”—

the meaning of such a pictorial convention. She writes that “where the images are in clouds, it is to be understood that they are the figures of gods or goddesses . . . because deity

Images as Readers

is something spiritual and elevated from earth?’ On the surface, the danger of mistaking pagan figures for Christian ones is therefore avoided. As a partisan of a euhemeristic conception of ancient deities, Boccaccio considers goddesses such as Ceres, Juno, Minerva, or Isis to have been mortal beings who were deified after their death because of the “ignorance” or the “madness” of the ancients. But images cannot distinguish between reality and belief and error; consequently, the goddesses are nimbed.The gap between Boccaccio’s narrative and commentary is erased, and madness becomes a positive visual reality. Yet this process also paganizes haloes, for they

are stripped from their natural association with Christian saintly figures; or one could put it the other way around and say that pagan goddesses have been Christianized, endowed with the only, or at least with the least ambiguous, visual sign identifying a character as sacred.” In a manuscript with relatively few architectural constructions, another index of sacredness is the religious edifice. Temples, however, are introduced only to suggest the idea ofa cult, such as in the case of the Greek Opis (Cybele) (Fig. 5) or of

Queen Libya (Fig. 11), both worshiped by three men, or of the idol venerated in the temple of Plebeia Pudicitia (Fig. 62) founded by Verginia after having been expelled from the patrician temple (Fig. 61). I shall examine the nature of the simulacra featured in the Cleres femmes later on, but it is interesting to note here that the temple of Venus Verticordia

in Sulpicia’s miniature includes another quintessential Christian element, the prepared altar (Fig. 66). The assimilation of pagan rituals to a Christian mass is most pronounced in

the latter miniature, in which an open book and a chalice are posed on the altar that Sulpicia is incensing, while two female acolytes pray behind her.% The Christian priest (as he appears among Juno’s worshipers) has been replaced by a Roman matron—a double displacement of culture and gender that is consistently practiced throughout the cycle.

Because of the great conformity of supposedly pagan religious scenes to contemporary visual standards of Christian worship, the bed where the credulous Paulina will be seduced by the priest Mundus, who passes himself as the Egyptian god Anubis, appears inevitably as a strange, sarcastic incongruence (Color Plate III). This huge red bed, a conspicuous pictorial blot, thus suffices to transpose the tone of the De mulieribus claris’s most anticlerical story.’*, The Christianization of pagan subjects extends to a few char-

acters who are qualified in the text as “priests” and visually interpreted in terms of Christian religious orders. Such is the case, for instance, with Clytaemnestra’s lover Aegisthus, tonsured and wearing a habit, admittedly of a somewhat unusual pink color (Fig. 35),° and with a man (probably Ulysses) dressed as a pilgrim or friar, in a “pour et hum-

ble habit,” who is rescuing Penelope from her importunate suitors (Fig. 39). Finally, a more distinctive-looking monk assures the disheveled Turia that her proscribed husband Lucretius is not hidden in his temple (Fig. 82). Interestingly, nuns seem to be affiliated with a specific order. The Christian empress of Sicily, Constance (Figs. 102 and 103), put into a convent by her father William to prevent her getting married and begetting children (a strategy that will ultimately fail, as 1s indicated in the second frame), wears a Dominican habit, partially covered by her fur-lined, imperially purple cape. Similarly, the vestal Rhea _ Iba has become a Dominican sister (Fig. 43).

27

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

Pope Joan’s story offers an instance of a genuinely rather than just updated Christian theme (Fig. 100). This famous legendary figure of the early Middle Ages was reported to have passed herself off as a man in order to pursue her studies, and did it so well and became so famous that she was finally elected pope. Joan is one of the most striking prototypes of female transvestites, but her destiny poignantly enunciates the limits imposed by medieval society on women’s access to knowledge and power.” Despite, or rather because of, her ascension to the highest spiritual authority, her downfall was presented as inevitable, which is exactly what this image and all others I know of capture. Garbed in papal attire, crowned by a tiara, Joan is depicted delivering a child, a fullyformed little being who plunges, head on, from a bloody slit above the waistline, foreshadowing his mother’s own fall. Not an unheard of sight in the Middle Ages, birth could happen on the “public way.’'” Thus, Joan’s real gender identity is revealed and the spectacle of her “lustful” body made public as if by divine punishment. The miniature chooses to complement the plot with additional information, surrounding Joan with cardinals, a bishop, and a deacon not expressively mentioned by the text. Hence, by conforming it to contemporary icons of ecclesiastical ranks, the irony or violence implicit in this procession, headed by a childbearing woman, becomes all the more evident. What can be noted from this first group of miniatures 1s a strategy that permeates the entire manuscript. Clearly the miniatures, sometimes considerably set apart in the manuscript, organize thematic subcycles that catalog different facets pertaining to a particular status or activity.'® For the estas de clergie we have goddesses patronizing inventions, cultic ceremonies, the consecration of an altar, monks, nuns, and even a religious procession. These mini-cycles, largely independent from the textual source, overlay the manuscript with a visual interpretative framework. It bestows unity as well as varietas to the man-

uscript because no action, figure, or object is identical to another. In fact, the overall unity of the cycle is almost programmatically asserted in the miniatures that, properly speaking, open and close the cycle, those of Eve (Fig. 3) and Queen Joanna (Fig. 105)."° Eve, the primal mother and originary term that sustains the misogynist tradition, remains also the foundation stone of humanity in the De mulieribus claris. Her image constitutes the most strident introduction of a Christian scene into an otherwise essentially pagan humanitas. Neatly dressed in a contemporary flower-strewn gown, “cloaked in a splendor such as is not known to us,””° Eve is about to fall prey to a diminutive serpent-dragon that is opposed by a graciously combative angel. In fact, the text does not mention either serpent or angel so that their addition adapts the miniature to the common iconography of the Fall, even as it simultaneously departs significantly from that iconography by ejecting Adam from the Edenic garden and by having Eve fully clothed, even though the fatal bite has not yet been taken. Dressing Eve aligns her with all the other heroines, exemplary and thus fashionably garbed, seductive but not naked as she sits in her walled verger of amorous connotations. Moreover, by adding serpent and angel, and by erasing Adam, the miniature confronts us with an image of a woman caught in the midst of the struggle between good and evil, the theme that is negotiated throughout the Cleres femmes. Eve has not yet committed the irreparable sin; the struggle is still on,

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Images as Readers

and perfectly balanced, leaving it to the rest of the heroines to determine the outcome. If the last miniature of Queen Joanna is an indication, then the conclusion seems quite heartening. In a construction that stands as a deliberate typological antithesis to that of Eve, the enthroned Joanna, queen of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem, and the first intended recipient of the De mulieribus claris, now faces the viewer as if visually to put a final period to

the manuscript. The miniature summarizes one of the few entirely laudatory portraits drawn by Boccaccio, which must have pleased Philip the Bold, for his older brother Louis of Anjou had been nominated as heir by Joanna, so that in 1404 the kingdom was ruled by Philip’s nephew Louis II. The biography focuses on Joanna’s successful rulership, and the image resorts to the standard representation of homage to a suzerain.*' If the first image put the burden of fallen mankind exclusively on Eve’s shoulders, Joanna seems

to redeem that (not yet committed) sin, enthroned as she is like the Queen of Heaven. Moreover, the elimination of Adam from Eve’s side is refracted here by a novel, perhaps improbable reversal of gender roles, where the woman accepts the gifts of male subjects as a token of their vassalage.

With Joanna we have entered a new social category, that of queens and noblewomen. Almost half of the Cleres femmes’s heroines are crowned heads, certainly an appeal-

ing quality to Philip the Bold and to the other French aristocrats who owned these manuscripts.” But, enthronement aside, how is a royal figure of the distant past defined visually? All characters identified by the text as queens and empresses wear regal crowns, varied in the detail of their execution, but distinctively French with their fleur-de-lis fleurons. The one exception is Hypermnestra, who is immortalized in a love colloquy with her husband, Linus (Lynceus), whom she refuses to kill against the will of her perverse father, Danaus (Fig. 14). By merely replacing the crown with a bourrelet, the typical headgear worn by unmarried women, the illuminator recasts Hypermnestra’s plight into a scene of courtly love.*3 The father, also deprived of his crown, appears as a villainous

intruder; but, to keep the tone reasonably dignified, the slaughtered husbands of Hypermnestra’s sisters have been politely eliminated from our sight. Empresses are easily recognized by their hoop crowns, such as Nero’s wife, Sabina Poppaea (Fig. 93), Irene (Fig. tor), and Constance (Figs. 102 and 103), or Nero’s mother, Agrippina (Fig. 90), whose costume is further enhanced with a richly decorated, ceremonial

sash, also worn by Semiramis (Fig. 4). No ducal circlet appears, not even where one would expect it, as for Andrea Acciaiouli, countess of Altavilla (Fig. 2). In other words, we

are served a somewhat abstracted attributive language meant to individuate the noble status without approximating it too closely to actual aristocratic positions, for such a heraldic realism would defeat both the transhistorical and exemplary aim of the manuscript. And because this manuscript proposes a social theory, it need not encumber its images with the fine distinctions of rank, fortune, and merit, which were crucial to maintain distinctions in social reality. Yet there is one very bizarre regal headgear that assigns its wearer, Otto

IV, to a historically more defined position (Color Plate IV). After having tried to kiss and having been firmly rebuked by the chaste Ravennate girl Engeldruda, the Holy Roman Emperor decides to give her a legitimate husband in Guido. In the wedding 29

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

scene, the old emperor’s unmistakably exoticized cone-hat alerts us to his alien origin. In

reality, that hat stems from a visualization ad verbum of his “estrangeté barbarine de Germanie’” (fol. 159). This is a nice instance where the changing of a seemingly irrelevant detail becomes meaningful; it also attests to the fact that the iconographic adviser and/or

illuminator closely read the text so as to introduce a signifying difference within the general economy of visual signs.*4

The second regal attribute, the scepter, is used much more sparingly. Famed Semiramis, who ruled over the Assyrians after the death of her husband, is represented as coalescing in her persona military prowess (sword, soldiers, and temporarily discarded armor) and political might, signified by the scepter (Fig. 4). Significantly, Semiramis’s piti-

ful downfall, construed as a consequence of her incestuous relationship with her son Ninus, is not visualized. There may be an echo of her successful public career and unsuccessful private destiny in the miniature’s almost symmetrical composition, with the manly soldiers opposed to the adoring Ninus. If this is so, it is difficult, however, to perceive in this antithetical composition—with Semiramis’s body as the central and dividing axis— an equivalent of Boccaccio’s harshly derogatory comments on the inevitably fickle nature of women, the ineluctable cause of Semiramis’s downfall.?> One of the few Hebrew heroines of the De mulieribus claris is Queen Athaliah, a specialist in murdering family members who could more legitimately pretend to the throne of Israel than herself (Fig. 49). She is similarly represented between the exercise of her power, symbolized by the golden

scepter (massacre of all heirs to the throne), and her final downfall (expulsion from Jerusalem hastened by a stone-throwing populace, here reduced to two men).?° Artemisia, queen of Caria, is also caught in the full exercise of her power (Fig. 55). She was a valiant

ruler and warrior during her widowhood, famous for building a marvelous tomb for her husband, Mausolus, as well as for the defeat of the Rhodians, which is the moment captured by the miniature. Finally, in a scene clearly patterned on that of Salome presenting

the head of Saint John the Baptist to Herod, Drigiagon, king of the Galatians, holds a scepter as he receives the head of the centurion who raped his nameless but courageous wife (Fig. 72). In sum, scepters appear only when the image wants to stress the active and effective exercise of regal power. They are the symbol of a ruler’s temporal authority. Not surprisingly, then, the bucolic image of power transmission, in which Ascanius willingly abdicates the throne of Laurentium to its natural heiress, his stepmother Lavinia, is concisely signified by his presenting to her scepter and crown (Fig. 40). But despite its simplicity, this remains a very provocative image in terms of gender roles. It is interesting to compare the visual markers of queenship in the Cleres femmes with other contemporary sources describing the French regalia. For instance, we know that the queen’s scepter was smaller than her husband’s. In our manuscript, scepters are indeed

of this shorter type, except of course the one held by Drigiagon, whose knob is further ornamented by rows of pearls, which do not appear on any of the scepters held by women.” In the ideal portrait of a male ruler drawn by Pierre Salmon for Charles VI, the regalia are needed to form a “belle representacion.” And he thus explains the symbolism

of each element: the king, seated in a royal chair, needs to be dressed in purple or in 30

| Images as Readers another royal color, as a sign of his excellence; he must hold the scepter, the sign of rigor

, and justice (droiture), in his right hand, a requirement to which all heroines in the Cleres femmes conform; in his left, the king must hold the globe, which symbolizes his political and legal power.*® Since this last object is entirely missing from our manuscript, one can deduce that our queens are not the equivalents of actual rulers, a visual lack that keeps them

, at a safe distance from reality. Queens ruling independently from their husbands were indeed at utter variance with the medieval theory and practice of kingship, according to which, to quote Shulamith Shahar, “A woman had no share whatsoever in the government of the kingdom and of the society. A woman could not hold political office, or serve as a military commander, judge or lawyer.””? And, as we shall see, these were all functions that are performed by the Cleres femmes’s heroines. In France, independently ruling queens were even more at odds with historical reality because the Salic Law (as it came to be known later), promulgated in 1328, had barred women and matrilinear descendants from succeeding to the throne. According to Jacques Krynen, late medieval authors stress that the queen’s role, while indispensable, is only representational, and that she has no effective share in the exercise of power, though the obligation that she fit the necessary characteristics of an ideal ruler was no less stringent than for a king.3° This remains true even for Isabeau de Baviére, regardless of her being one of the few French queens to be officially appointed as the guardian of the royal children, to sit on the royal council, and to have her own treasury and accounts." The Cleres femmes’s vision of queens is literally rather than metaphorically representational. They are fictional, and of the distant, very distant past, when customs were certainly different, very different. And yet the recurrent imagery of these queens, ruling over male subjects, might have had quite a vivid impact on the viewer’s imagination, even

though it was without consequences on a social and political level. While neither Boccaccio’s text nor the images articulate a political theory of queenship as such, this regal subcycle displays a remarkable variety of roles, ceremonies, and actions proper to this particular status. These range from the inheritance of a throne (Lavinia) to the exercise of

power (Joanna, Athaliah), and even to a deposition, encapsulated in the miniature of Empress Irene (Fig. tor). The empress is literally grabbed from her throne by a man, perhaps her own son Constantine VI, who appears another time to the right, crowning him-

self. The latter, clearly imperial Constantine garbed in a blue, fur-lined houppelande decorated with a lavish sash, also displays an unusual piece of jewelry that needs closer attention. Its puzzling shape singularly reminds one of Louis of Orléans’s emblematic necklace

of a blunt stick, at least if one is to follow Millard Meiss’s identification of Louis with the youngest king in the Adoration of the Magi in the Boucicaut Hours.” In the absence of any other contemporary depiction of this necklace, the identification can only be advanced with caution. According to Meiss, Louis of Orléans adopted the blunt stick in 1403, an emblem to which John the Fearless would reply with his well-known and often depicted plane. In other words, Louis’s emblem postdates the completion of the Cleres femmes, so one would have to assume that it was added later, presumably when John the Fearless inherited the manuscript. It would be a fascinating, very powerful allusion to

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Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

contemporary political events, and, from the Burgundian point of view, an appropriate one:

Constantine is, after all, unambiguously portrayed as a usurper, lifting the crown from the head of the legitimate ruler, Irene.¥ In 1403 Louis of Orléans’s imperial aspirations were

at their height, fueled by Pope Benedict XIII, who Louis, unlike other rulers, continued to support. Construing Louis of Orléans as a potential usurper, obsessed by the desire to eliminate his brother Charles VI, was precisely the centerpiece of Burgundian propaganda during those years. The theory of tyrannicide would finally provide one of the major justifications for his assassination by John the Fearless in November 1407.*4 If the hypothesis of seeing in Constantine a “hidden portrait” of Louis of Orléans is accepted, we would hold quite a spectacular proof of how a manuscript like the Cleres femmes, certainly not a political manifesto per se, could be interpreted for a very present and pregnant reality, and how a male audience could project its desires and hatreds into a female space. Because images allow for fluctuating identifications, past can become present, women turn into men, and the representational order can assail both text and context. Closely linked to the ethos and prerogatives of medieval nobility was hunting, certainly the most distinctive leisure-time activity of that class, and an art in which Philip the Bold was recognized to be a meistre.*> Women were largely excluded from such displays of agonistic valor, with the genteel exception of falconry, pointedly absent from the Cleres femmes.** Instead, this manuscript introduces a very seductive if purely imaginary assembly of women hunters. An ideal ruler for her physical, moral, and intellectual qualities, Zenobia is placed against a relatively developed landscape, the natural locus of a hunter (Fig.

99). Appearing twice, she once abandons bow and arrow, while her standing nemesis takes up the sword, with which she will rule over the Palmyreans. Bow and arrow are used with fatal consequences by Cephalus, who mistakes his wife, Procris, for a “beste sauvage” (a deer is fleeing in the back) and shoots a deadly arrow at her (Fig. 27). Even though the arrow has already pierced Procris, Cephalus’s bow is still tense, a typical medieval device that discoordinates temporal intervals so as to juxtapose cause and consequence.?” Life and death and the passage from one to the other interweave, as one can also see in the martyr Polyxena’s bloody neck, even though she is only about to be beheaded (Fig. 32). And the logic of temporal discoordination explains why Nessus, already hit by Hercules’ poisoned arrow, is nevertheless erect and alive as he abducts Deianira (Fig. 23). The most unusual image of the hunt is that of a professional hunter, the solitary Camilla (Fig. 38). Boccaccio extols the queen of the Volscians both for her virginity and

her “disdain [of] all womanly work,’3® as well as for her ability to hunt wild animals with bow and arrows, with spears and a sling, the latter being foregrounded by the image so as to make clear the difference between her and occasional hunters. Like other contemporary examples, Camilla is shown hunting on foot, a depiction that prompted Marle to question the likelihood of'a hunter thus pursuing swift animals, such as stags and deer, or killing bears and boars, here neatly tugged behind the rocks.39 No matter how tenuous the reality content of this miniature might be, Camilla’s beautiful histoire adequately transposes Boccaccio’s praise. Yet rather than functioning as an exhortation to “young girls of our time” to imitate Camilla’s chastity and courage, the miniature insists much more

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Images as Readers

on hunting as a princely occupation. Since 1397 hunting had in fact become an exclusively upper-class privilege, for Charles VI limited it to members of the nobility, the clergy, and

the wealthy bourgeoisie.*° Indeed, Camilla materializes before our eyes not like an uncouth forest-dweller: the “despoilles et peaux des bestes mortes” have been tailored by the image into a hairy dress that duplicates the fashionable houppelandes, complete with a golden belt that accentuates her very civilized, perfectly upright courtly body." Very different is the meaning of a similar combination of wild and acculturated garments, the ones worn by the domesticated Hercules, who was guilty of having rescinded his manly nature because of his love for Iole (Fig. 22), a clearly misogynistic story based on the “women on top” topos.*” His slow transformation is ridiculed by Boccaccio and the image alike, the latter fusing Hercules’ masculine identity (lion-skin cape and club) and his effeminate being (distaff, ring, and a maiden’s crown). In contrast to Camilla, everything in Hercules points to his demeaning change of sexual identity: his improper pose as he sits on a grassy throne, his languorous gaze, and his handling of the quintessential

attribute of womanhood, the distaff. The paradigm of chivalric heroism becomes a travesty of a man, a spinster. It confirms what Vern Bullough has shown, that is, that male transvestism was much less tolerated than its female counterpart. Where it meant an elevation for women to become men, the reverse case inevitably entailed debasement. This is especially true for Hercules, insofar as the erotic charge associated in the Middle Ages with “wild

, men” is effectively and literally castrated by a woman’s constraining lustfulness.* Hercules is a quasi-wild man, unlike the real ones that witness the presentation of a balsam tree by Nicaula (better known as the biblical Queen of Sheba) to King Solomon (Color Plate II) in a miniature that echoes, in its composition, other scenes of gift-giving, such as the presentation image (Fig. 2). The hair of the most visible wild man is of a pale blue, whereas his semihidden companion’s face is gray—unfurry and unfleshly colors, as it were, that signal the conventional character of such figures and label their alien provenance.*4 But why such wild men? As with the unusual hat of Emperor Otto IV, these

figures are generated by another literalization of the text. While Boccaccio qualifies Nicaula’s people as barbaries and incultiores, the French translation adds another layer of meaning with the adjective bestiaux.* It is possible that the translator already had in mind the wild-man topos, which was immensely popular in literature, images, and social rituals at the end of the Middle Ages.*° In fact, Charles VI almost perished in 1393, when his wild-man costume caught fire during what came to be known as the Bal des Ardents; and, although it was an accident, Louis of Orléans was later charged by the Burgundians with having set the fire purposefully.*’

If hunting and feasting were major forms of entertainment and social interaction for medieval seigneurs, such imagery rarely graces the Cleres femmes, which remains more oriented toward professional activities. There is only one image of a banquet, which heads the biography of the unfortunate Dripetrua, etched into history mainly because of her double row of teeth (Fig. 74). The banquet scene is not really warranted by the text but must have resulted from a fusion of the idea of her dutiful submission to her father, Mithridates, with that of her ability to enjoy food despite her deformity, symbolized in the

33

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

image by a misshapen profile.** The table is sumptuously dressed with gleaming golden plates, drinking vessels, and a disproportionate nef, the sort of things abundantly included in the Valois’s collections, though no woman servant would have been allowed to

come so close to a princely table.*? ,

Indissolubly connected by medieval social theory and practice to the royal function was that of knighthood, of chevalerie. In theory at least, women were not allowed access to the order of knighthood, dismissed as they were since Aristotle for their physical weakness and lack of endurance. In practice, well before Joan of Arc, noblewomen had

defended their castles in the absence of their husbands; but they do remain isolated instances.°° On the whole, a woman warrior remained a perfect antinomy, so the sequence of the Cleres femmes’s valorous women knights must have seemed very startling or outrageous indeed. All female warriors are immediately recognizable by their hybrid military dresses, in which armor made of plate metal is largely hidden under long cottes. This artifice preserves their sexual identity by distinguishing them from men protected by armor and a short jacque. Logically though implausibly, a warrior queen will also harbor a crown over her helmet, as does the Scythian Thamyris (Fig. 47), famous for having vanquished Cyrus’s armies before beheading him, and even more famous for having displayed. his

severed head in a blood-filled bucket.*' By resorting to a heterogenous collage of different pieces of clothing, the miniatures express the virago-like nature of the women warriors, half men, half women. However, this strategy of figurative admixture is unavoidable, not only because there were no military dresses for women, but also because of a system of representation that heavily relies on costumes and attributes to create identities. Mithridates’ wife, Hypsicratea, offers a case in point (Fig. 77). Where Boccaccio details her transformation from an idle sybarite into a “veteran soldier,’ the miniature compresses the entire mutation into the single most dramatic act (according to Boccaccio), the cutting of Hypsicratea’s golden hair; but, significantly, it does not deprive her of a beautiful red dress

worn over her corselet. At the same time, the visual narrative expands into an almost cinematographic sequence of actions separated by a considerable time lapse in the text: Hypsicratea’s preparation for her military career (cutting of hair), the cavalcade, and the beginning of the combat with the two soldiers’ arms already lowered. The second incarnation of Zenobia (Fig. 99), who joined her husband in combat after having lived a virginal life in the woods, is contrived like Hypsicratea, dress over armor.5* Zenobia seizes sword and helmet, her knightly attributes. We are witnessing a shorthand version of a dubbing ceremony, for the missing golden spurs maintain, once more, a gap between

these images of mythic women and the actual ritual. While women warriors usually wield a sword, the quintessential attribute of a

34 |

medieval knight, many other weapons appear 1n the Cleres femmes. For instance, Triaria struggles at the side of her husband, Vitellius, with a rather menacing looking battle-ax and scimitar, dead soldiers already lying before them (Fig. 94).5+ For once, Boccaccio specifies that this woman used a sword (espee), so the choice of an archaic weapon seems pictorially to translate her “fierceness.’ Whether or not orientalizing, metal weapons are contrasted to those 1n wood, clubs and sticks brandished by common folk, torturers or peasants.

Images as Readers

Repelling a plebeian trying to pull her father from the triumphal chariot, the virgin Claudia uses a stick (Fig. 60), and the whole scene ends up looking rather like a conventional image culled from the misogynist repertoire, that of a “woman beating her husband.”’5s A similar construction appears in the miniature of Queen Berenice, who launches her modern, that is, four-wheeled, chariot in pursuit of the servant who murdered her sons at the behest of her brother Mithridates (Fig. 71). The servant barely escapes Berenice’s battle-ax, but he will succumb to the stone that she is hurling at him. In short, it is as if a low-class victim required a different visual death than a noble one, a stone instead of a metal weapon. “Known to the entire world as much for her lustfulness as for the long war which resulted from it,’5° Helen offers to the illuminator an occasion to depict a naval siege (Fig. 36), in which medieval-looking Greek soldiers armed with crossbows attack a chateaulike Troy, depleted of its inhabitants except for the loving couple Helen and Paris.‘’ No trace of the “cruelles batailles” remains, and the heroes are ostensibly undisturbed by the redoubtable projectiles about to hit them. I wonder how Philip the Bold would have reacted to such an edulcorated vision of an arduous enterprise that required the best of military strategists.5* Would he have been reminded of his own fortresses and port fortifications, many of which, like the famous one at Sluis, were financed by Dine Raponde?°? A few heroines are depicted as mounted knights, such as Hypsicratea and especially the foremost Amazonian queen, Penthesilea (Fig. 31). Although painted by the second, “weaker” illuminator, the image of Penthesilea, holding bow and quiver, and leading her entirely female army, complete with helmet-bearer, shield, standards, and possibly a spear (the tip is cut by the border), remains powerful. It is certain that in this case Philip the Bold would have been struck, for he could readily relate to such a cavalry unit,°° except, that is, for its gender since on his numerous military campaigns, the duke would see women primarily as food purveyors or prostitutes. One element curiously lacking from this as from other miniatures is heraldry, with which Philip the Bold’s armies would have been replete. True, Penthesilea’s shield bears an oblique chain of red circles on a golden field, and the cape of the dead king, presumably Xerxes, lying before Artemisia is emblazoned with reversed “S’’s (Fig. 55). But these are abstracted signs, without any specific heraldic meaning. This heraldic silence is all the more surprising in Penthesilea’s case. Having been promoted to be one of the nine preuses, she had been endowed with an Amazonian coatof-arms (heads of queens, usually in or on an azure field strewn with six golden bells) that appears, among many other instances, in Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othéa® or in the wonderful gallery of women worthies included in Thomas of Saluzzo’s Le chevalier errant.® The Nine Worthies (first established in Jacques de Longuyon’s Les voeux du paon, a verse romance composed around 1312) were extremely popular in late medieval monumental decoration of princely dwellings. Originally it consisted of a male sequence only, composed of three biblical, three ancient, and three medieval heroes. In the late fourteenth century, a female counterpart was added, which was entirely classic in origin and chivalric in meaning, for it comprised the warrior queens Delphile, Sinope (our Antiope), Hyppolita, Semiramis, Lampedo, Tomyris (our Thamyris), Menalippe, Teuta, and Penthesilea. This

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Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

addition can be seen as another symptom of the interest in the question feminine; 1t is especially interesting in our context, for, according to Horst Schroeder, who has most extensively studied the topos of the worthies, authors drew on the De mulieribus claris in order to compose the female sequence.° Reacting to contemporary experience, Penthesilea’s procession bears as little resemblance to an ancient military enterprise as any of the other images of Amazonian queens, be it the enthroned Martesia and Lampedo (Fig. 12), ruling over their female kingdom, or Orithya and Antiope (Fig. 19). Cast in an even more unmistakably medieval action, a knightly joust, this miniature ignores Boccaccio’ praise of their perpetual virginity and instead glamorizes their military valor.°* But why a joust? The translation states that Orithya excelled in the “‘art et discipline de chevalerie,’ which probably prompted the illuminator and/or iconographic adviser to visualize it in terms of the most valued display of knightly prowess. This joust is clearly borrowed from the popular iconography of chivalric romances, except that there women are invariably cast as spectators, the visual recipients of an essentially homosocial, if not homoerotic, spectacle.°> The reversal enacted in the Cleres femmes, whereby women become both actors and spectators, is remarkable,

especially because Orithya opposes a man (probably Hercules) in a perfectly balanced composition. True, her sister Antiope has already lowered her lance, so that two women seem to be fighting against one man, a fight whose noise seems to bounce off the beautifully wrought volutes of the background. As is the case with clergie, the subcycle of chevalerie also aims at a maximum of iconographic variety. So in addition to battles, sieges, and jousts we meet other, and perhaps less spectacular, aspects of medieval warfare; for instance, the peace embassy led by the intrepid Veturia into the camp of her son Coriolanus, where she tries to convince him not to attack the Romans (Fig. 53). As with the Amazons fighting Hercules, the symmetrical composition brings the unequal power struggle between unarmed women and armed men into an equilibrium.” The image strongly articulates Veturia’s mediating function, a theme

continuously called upon by Christine de Pizan for women. Conscious of the rapid deterioration of the political situation in France, Christine undoubtedly hoped that Queen

Isabeau would be allowed effectively to exert her role of arbitration among French princes, like a new Veturia of sorts. The less than stylish consequences of martial exploits are also explored in the Cleres femmes. Argia’s courageous despair has her braving all dangers and venturing onto the battlefield at night in order to recover the dead body of her husband, Polynices, and

honor him with an adequate burial (Fig. 28). Blood-tainted limbs cover the ground where she moves about, a sadly evocative vision even if it cannot convey the stench and putrefaction described by the text. The extinction of entire families is the theme of the

36 ,

| miniature of grief-stricken Hecuba, surrounded by her dead husband, Priam, and son Hector, while her daughter Cassandra and daughter-in-law Andromache are taken away as slaves by the Greeks (Fig. 33). Troy burns in the background, an anguishing, possibly cathartic image for a late medieval audience to whom such a vision constituted a quotidian reality—the fire, wars, and loss of relatives. Finally, a more quiet image. A secular figure of

Images as Readers

Charity, Busa stands as the exemplum of generosity in the De mulieribus claris (Fig. 68). During Hannibal’s invasion, she willingly took care of the Italian fugitives who were ‘weak, exhausted, needy, unarmed, naked, and covered with wounds.’®” The miniature

doctors the description, for no wounds or dirt enter the representation, but the poor and the widowed woman to whom Busa distributes her riches—grain, money, clothes, and even a pair of somewhat misplaced though superbly foreshortened horses—are powerful enough to conjure up the real defeats of armies. Perhaps Busa’s image was even capable

of evoking the suffering of the populace, who inevitably paid the highest price for the incessant wars initiated by Philip the Bold and his peers. To conclude the survey of miniatures from the military cycle, we might consider a related theme, an ontological rather than a social status; I mean death, be it by execution or suicide. Even if this will not strike a contemporary reader as an “estate,” it could be classified as such in the Middle Ages: to wit, a mid-fourteenth-century text entitled L’exemple du riche homme et du ladre, in which the clerical and noble ranks are followed, among others, by false witnesses, murderers, and warriors.°* As queens are numerically the single most important social group in the Cleres femmes, so violent death is the single most frequent action, as if that were a defining trait of the estas de femme. Instead of presenting a monotonous chain of pagan martyrology, dying here becomes an occasion to exhibit infinite artistic invention: death becomes a collectible item of sorts, dauntingly florid in its manifestations. Even if ordained by such a woman as Athaliah (Fig. 49), executions of whatever kind are performed by men—with the exception, that is, of Hypsipyle, who is pursued by the matriarchs of Lemnos while trying to save the male members of her family (Fig. 16). This certainly corresponds to a social given, yet at the same time it magnifies this reality as if to remind the viewer that physical violence is essentially a male prerogative and monopoly. Deemed a noble form of death, beheading—or more accurately the moment preceding the actual blow—takes place in rapid succession in the miniatures of Polyxena (Fig. 32) and Cassandra (Fig. 34). Polyxena, compelled to expiate the killing of Achilles insti-

gated by her mother, Hecuba, is frozen into an icon of a Christian martyr, praying at the tomb of Achilles, whose fierce-looking son Neoptolemus is about to decapitate her. Cassandra’s destiny was as tragic, her prophetic gifts a curse, for no one gave them credence,

not even Agamemnon, who refused to believe her warnings about Clytaemnestra: he will be killed in the next miniature (Fig. 35), while here Cassandra is decapitated by an ageressive torturer. Victim and torturer usually face each other, one to one, but when the victims are two, the torturers increase exponentially, as is exemplified in the image of Harmonia and the servant who tried to save her by disguising herself as her mistress (Fig. 67). It is not clear who is the real Harmonia in the image; but, in a way, it does not matter, for the drama remains as intense. Clytaemnestra’s miniature also deliberately plays on the opposition between high-

and low-class weaponry (Fig. 35). Having trapped Agamemnon in a cloak whose neck is sown together, she orders her lover, Aegisthus, to kill him. Aegisthus is given a club for his

treacherous act, whereas Orestes uses a sword for his visually instantaneous and just 37

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

vengeance of father and lineage. Bastons are used by the centurions appointed by Nero to kill his mother, Agrippina (Fig. 90). Although traumatic, this version is infinitely less problematic than later images of Agrippina in both the Cleres femmes and the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes, which capture the gory episode of Agrippina’s end, when Nero has her womb slit open, all the while commenting on the merits and flaws of his mother’s body as he drinks a cup of wine.® Agrippina’s unfaltering confrontation with death is praised by Boccaccio in very similar terms to that of the Macedonian queen Olympias, who approaches her executioners leaning on two servants, while the dead bodies for whom she is to blame lie around and prefigure her own fate (Fig. 59).7° Perhaps because it is of a more popular accent, one of the most troubling images in the Cleres femmes is that of the Roman freedwoman Epicharis (Fig. 91). In spite of having led a “shameful” life, she is in the end exalted by Boccaccio because of her heroism. Having joined a group of conspirators against Nero, Epicharis was captured and tortured so ruthlessly that she decided to strangle herself in order to preclude any possibility of her revealing the names of her fellow conspirators. The

miniature condenses the two crucial moments, her torture and suicide; but instead of being tied to a chair (celle), Epicharis, supine on a stone, is entirely exposed to the three men

ready to beat her to death. One should remember that husbands had the legal right to beat their wives.7' Also horizontal, and also because of Nero’s brutality, Sabina Poppaea is stretched across a lavishly decorated transportation litter (Fig. 93). Already dead, eyes closed, her finger points to her pregnant womb, branded by a horseshoe as if to tell us that this was the cause of her death. But according to Boccaccio, Nero “kicked” her to death (an extreme that was, in theory, severely punished by medieval law). The French’s correct translation reads “‘fust du pié ferue.’The only explanation I can think of for the presence of the horseshoe imprint is that the iconographic adviser and/or illuminator read “‘fer’’ (that is, “fer-a-cheval’’) in lieu of “ferue.’ This is one of the few mistakes, properly speaking, that I have noticed in the manuscript. Torturers, whom the text never describes, are among the most stereotypical class of figures in the Cleres femmes. Their physical traits are exaggerated and they tend to be larger than other characters. Their faces are deformed, with prominent chins, crooked noses,

uncombed beards, gray skin, and disproportionate, awkwardly gesturing limbs. And,

38 | whereas the peasants are covered by simple, short tunics, the torturers’ costumes are always

a corruption of a proper dress: in disorder, strangely shaped, or too colorful. Torturers are patterned after the long-standing medieval convention that equated moral with physical deformity, a tradition embodied most aggressively in the deprecatory imagery invented by the Christian West to depict Jews. In fact, one of the most hideous men about to kill a woman in this manuscript is the gigantic torturer of the Hebrew queen Mariamne, the beautiful wife of Herod, who hated her husband so thoroughly that she preferred death to his company (Fig. 86). Boccaccio writes that she accepted her fate as a “joyful tri-

umph,’”? and the image aptly transposes that feeling by depicting her in a gesture of prayer; but by doing so it also, and not innocently, assimilates Mariamne to a Christian fig-

ure tortured by the Jews.’The only exception to the stereotypical torturer is offered by Verginius, who kills his daughter Verginia in order to save her from the lustful judge

Images as Readers

Appius Claudius (Fig. $6). Resembling a wealthy merchant, he uses a butcher’s knife.”3 Since

a popular revolt was ignited by this unjust death, Boccaccio concludes the chapter with

an ardent indictment of wicked judges and contemptuous rulers, a passage explicitly addressed to a male audience. Still, a woman had to die at the hands of what one might consider an overly zealous father.

Suicides do not occur less frequently than murders. But here the methods of dying are more varied and comply more closely with narrative details. Considered as noble, as virile a form of death as beheading, stabbing happens most often, both as a form of murder and of suicide.” Unlike the discoordinated temporal mode that characterizes beheading, stabbing is always shown in its actuality. This must have heightened the impact of such forms of death, no matter how courtly they might otherwise appear to us.”> Perhaps this explains why all the heroines who stab themselves are very illustrious ones: Thisbe, who thrusts the sword into her chest in front of her dead lover, Pyramus (Fig. 13);7° the stumbling Jocasta, flanked by Oedipus blinding himself, and by her sons Eteocles and Polynices dying simultaneously (Fig. 24); Dido’s public suicide scrutinized by Aeneas (Fig. 41);”” and, even more famous, the semipublic suicide of Lucretia, who stabs herself like a personification of Wrath in front of her male relatives and her rapist (Fig. 46) so as to preserve her chastity, which, Boccaccio thinks, “can never be sufficiently lauded.””* For Dido, Boccaccio’s laudatory version departs from the more common tradition based on Virgil, according to which Dido’s suicide was a direct consequence of Aeneas’s departure. This causal link is completely omitted by Boccaccio. Aeneas’s fate is settled in one sentence, and the main thrust of the biography lies in the foundation of Carthage, which is what the miniature highlights as well. By contrast, Lucretia’s treatment

sticks closely to the habitual narrative and iconographic tradition, her representation being the most conventional of the entire cycle. Lucretia’s frozen, authoritative persona does indeed cross all sorts of different manuscripts, always facing her male relatives alone.

The iconic quality of this scene is heightened by the very fact that the setting in which the action takes place is always minimal, even in manuscripts that otherwise resort to elab-

orate architectural backdrops and a “realistic” sky. But instead of seeing Lucretia’s immutability as a limitation, I would interpret this as a deliberate choice. It turns Lucretia into a visual quotation so as to bestow upon her a prestigious visibility and legibility that no other ancient heroine shares to the same degree. An all too common reality, especially acute during wartime, rape is not, properly speaking, represented in any of these examples. Instead we are presented with what Diane Wolfthal has explored as the sanitized and prettified “heroic” tradition of rape represen-

tation, which she illustrates with some early fifteenth-century French miniatures.”? I would suggest, however, that if these images may appear emotionally mannered to us, this is part and parcel of the entire economy of representation, not just of violent scenes directed at women. And how can one really be sure that a miniature like that of the wife of Drigiagon did not strike the contemporary viewer as genuinely violent (Fig. 72)? Is the woman's beheading of her rapist presented as a just response, or, on the contrary, is it undermined because the scene is so obviously molded on that of Salome’s beheading of

39

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes | Saint John? The question is whether we can apply our contemporary visual standards to gauge the degree of violence, of approval or criticism inherent in past imagery. What is certain is that miniatures of around 1400 do not revel in the depiction of the actual rape, nor do they turn Lucretia or Dido, as do many postmedieval paintings, into eroticized surfaces of self-immolation. The same reluctance to depict the actual rape is also evident in Europa’s image (Fig. 10). The case is somewhat different in that Europa is being “abducted” from the shores of Phoenicia, deceived by a procuress (maquerelle) and led into a ship whose flag harbors a white bull.*° It is significant, however, that the miniature chooses to illustrate this version

rather than the one which would later become canonical, where Jupiter, transformed into a bull, actually rapes Europa. Equally significant is the fact that in the miniature the man is a far cry from old, powerful Jupiter. Delicately grabbing his conquest, he and Europa look more like lovers about to embark on their honeymoon. But I would question whether this tonal transformation is merely a process of aesthetization. Eschewing the actual portrayal of rape can best be understood as a form of visual taboo; as such, it is bound up with cultural thresholds that established what was acceptable, or not, for representation. In early fifteenth-century Parisian art, that threshold did not extend to the explicit representation of rape: to quote Jacques Legrand, making fictions about “efforceurs de pucelles” is “chose moult laide.”®"

In order to avoid being raped by the pirates who hold her captive, Hippo commits suicide (Fig. 51). Oddly, the pirates have been eliminated from the miniature, leaving us with a solitary woman jumping from a large seagoing ship, accurately provided with one sail and oars.** Similar in construction and motive, the noblewoman Theoxena is

depicted extending a poisoned cup to her husband and sons, so that all will die just before their capture by the men of the conqueror Philip of Macedonia (Fig. 70). Poison was a culturally resonant form of death in the Middle Ages. But where in reality many women were accused of having perpetrated poisoning, the Cleres femmes’s heroines resort to poison only against themselves.*} Sophonisba (in the miniature immediately preceding that of Theoxena) voluntarily accepts the poisoned cup in order to avoid having intercourse with her conqueror and second husband, Masinissa (Fig. 69). The dramatic tension between sex and chastity, life and death, is heightened by the device of duplicating the very white queen of Numidia, one erect, the other tumbling backward. The pictorial convention of symbolizing poison by small serpents is maintained here. They are thus clearly opposed to the real, larger serpents, the asps that coil around Cleopatra’s arms and inject the mortal poison into her veins, while Anthony nobly stabs himself (Fig. 87)—a simultaneous visual death, even though we are told that a considerable time-lapse occurred between the two events. The wives of the Cimbrians also died to preserve their freedom and chastity (Fig. 79). After having killed their children, they hanged themselves. Compared to the text, however, the setting and action are considerably simplified, for instead of a “multitude,” we have only three mothers and three children. Dangling from trees, they appear to be standing in the air, hands more inert than those of the other hanged woman, Arachne, who

40

Images as Readers

is improbably toiling at her loom (Fig. 18). Actually, it seems that hanged women were a textual and pictorial fiction, since women were only burned at the stake or buried alive

like Rhea Ilia (Fig. 43). Historians have explained that these gender-specific disciplinary , provisions can be viewed as a reflection of the considerable anxiety caused by the sight of women’s naked bodies. Accordingly, the Cleres femmes dresses all hanged women." Boccaccio praises Sulpicia for having followed her husband, Lentulus, into exile (Fig. 84). Disguised as a slave wearing a black cotte with a red surcoat (a devalorized color combination, as we shall see), Sulpicia rejects an ermine-lined houppelande in an action that may not be clear without the help of the text. At any rate, Boccaccio lavishes even more praise on Pompeia Paulina, Julia, Portia, and Agrippina for perpetuating marital fidelity by voluntarily embracing death. One of the rare nude figures, Pompeia enters the tub where Seneca is being bled to death (Fig. 92); Julia, upon seeing a blood-covered garment of her husband, Pompey (and mistakenly believing him dead), swoons and dies at once (Fig. 80), while Portia, more actively, swallows burning coals to follow Brutus’s death (Fig. 81), an act that in Christine de Pizan’s opinion was the most unusual death ever experi-

enced;*° finally, Agrippina, imprisoned by Tiberius after the loss of her husband, Germanicus, lets herself starve to death, which the miniature signifies by having her refuse the food that the guards are bringing (Fig. 89). The dramatic gestures of Portia and Agrippina involve ingestion through the mouth, a most vulnerable spot of the body, the site of speech and nurturing. And indeed the self-inflicted mutilation of Leaena concerns the same corporeal region and issue (Fig. 48). Tortured to make her reveal the name of the murderers of the Macedonian king Amyntas, she decides, like Epicharis, to foreclose any failing by biting off her tongue. Barely visible in the image, her tongue is soaked in the blood that she is expectorating instead of words.*’ Johan Huizinga wrote that, in contrast to verbal expression, “plastic art does not lament.’** In view of the miniatures just examined, it is difficult to subscribe to such a tenet.

To be sure, the Cleres femmes presents idealized treatments of even extreme conditions of existence. Yet there is enough blood spilling from bodies and corpses—blood that Cennino Cennini wanted to be painted in an unadulterated, “straight” vermilion.*? And the torturers look sufficiently grim to remind any viewer, medieval or modern, of the face of violence. The illuminators, Jacques Raponde, Philip the Bold, and others who saw the manuscript would have been confronted with such a reality on a daily basis. Certain forms of violence, such as rape, are gender-specific; others, such as suicide for marital fidelity, respond to a gender-specific ideology. But wars, dismemberments, and other manifestations of violence cannot be said to have been inflicted on women in particular; and, in fact, unnatural deaths are much more of an obsessive leitmotif in the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes, in which blood and severed limbs literally drip from every frame.®°

Surely in the “depressed” later Middle Ages violent death loomed everywhere; but its symbolic transcription into endless sequences of physical punishment reaches beyond realistic intentions, for the stylized insistence of such a gallery of horrors could offer at least some respite by projecting it into a mythic space.

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish has shown that public torture and the

AI

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

“spectacle of the scaffold” played an essential role before the rise of regimes of surveillance , during the Classical Age, and that the practice of punitive, disciplinary imprisonment was of secondary import in judiciary systems before the eighteenth century. Accordingly, only a handful of miniatures in the Cleres femmes confronts us with the legal order. And, in stark contrast to contemporary written descriptions, prisons are envisioned here as tidy little buildings:*' on the margins of society, they have been reformed, so to speak, in order to be incorporated into the center of this “courtly” system of representation. Prisons are distinguished from other dwellings because their frontal openings are secured by metal bars. The subtlety of the signifying economy of the visual language can be gleaned once again from this minor and, on the face of it, purely imitative detail, which becomes even more apparent when one compares Agrippina’s prison (Fig. 89) or that from which Frederick II’s bastard son Roland 1s freed thanks to the ransom paid by Camiola (Fig. 104),° to the widely open charte from which the Minyans are escaping (Fig. 30). No bars prevent the three men, disguised as their wives, from walking out while their faithful wives take their place inside.?3 Curiously, in one case, imprisonment is signified by metonymy alone. The mother of the unnamed Roman girl sits merely handcuffed amid a bucolic landscape, a locus ameonus of sorts (Fig. 64).°t The tender scene, with the daughter breast-feeding her mother to save her from starvation, is an interesting deviation from the Caritas Romana theme, for it substitutes the more canonical elderly father with the mother.95 Praised by Boccaccio as a perfect example of filial devotion, this image is also, on a more literal level, a most sympathetic portrayal of same-sex carnal intimacy.

A particularly innovative sequence of miniatures that represents women exerting a particular profession or activity offers relief from battles, murders, suicides, and prisons. First, let me consider what can be termed the legal subcycle. Constrained to embrace the stranger Equitius, Sempronia is described as having nevertheless valiantly opposed

the pressures of the tribune and the Roman populace to accept him into her family. Oddly, the miniature transforms the coercive nature of the story into a rather harmonious-looking scene (Fig. 75). As was the case with Europa’s abduction or Helen’s siege or Hypermnestra’s love colloquy, the tone in the image is decidedly more courtly than in the text.°° Far more innovative is the miniature of Hortensia (Fig. 83). She successfully defended Roman women against the triumvirate’s intention to burden them with heavier taxes. Closely patterned on the short biography, the miniature faithfully represents the triumvirs as trois hommes installed in wooden benches, but it signifies Hortensia’s defense with the eminently pictorial gesture of argumentation. And the Roman people have been eliminated so that nobody, except for us, can marvel at her persuasive rhetorical skills. On the one hand, this image must have evoked familiar realities to Philip the Bold because of the custom of late medieval nobles to overtax their subjects;?”? on the other hand, and because women were categorically barred from public speeches, seeing a woman presenting such a wide-reaching public plea, engaging, as it were, in a political action, must have struck the duke as being utterly fantastic. This is not to say that women were absent from the political scene; they could even originate events, as had the Parisian greengro-

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Images as Readers

cer who was held to be the catalyzer of the popular uprising in 1382.°° The rift that matters here occurs between representation and imagined reality, which allowed no woman to occupy a position of real political power. Thus it is even wider in one of the last miniatures of the Cleres femmes, in Empress Semiamira’s chairing of a Roman “senate” assem-

bly (Fig. 98)—a favorite analogue for the French Parlement, though, of course, in its male version only.°® Boccaccio treats Semiamira in a dismissive way because of her past as a prostitute, and he ridicules the establishment of this senacle legislating on women’s issues,

mostly sumptuary laws. The disparaging tone is absent from the miniature, however, and everything, from the pleading women to the two clerks bent over their registers (one of whom, it should be noted, uses a magnifying glass), seems very professional.° The image is particularly striking if one considers that 1t could well have illustrated Semiamira’s

spectacularly repugnant end, her being killed and thrown into a sewer with her son Elagabalus. Evidently, the iconographic adviser and/or the illuminator wanted to memorialize Semiamira’s public role in a more positive, if socially purely imaginary, way. For once,

the “vocabulary of justice, power, culture and salvation” was conceived to be located within a female space.’ Similar attributes, such as wooden benches, lecterns, and books, identify both judges and writers and remind viewers of the social proximity of legal and intellectual professions, particularly close in late medieval France. The manuscript opens with an authorial “portrait” of Boccaccio (Fig. 1). Dressed in the long gown decorated with

lapels worn by the maitres des arts, he sits in a large wooden seat attached to a pulpit , provided, like Semiamira’s, with a roue a livres. He lectures to three students. A vision of estude,'°? this miniature illustrates the proem, whereas the subsequent presentation

scene, visualizing the circulation of books, adorns the prologue.’ An entirely male miniature therefore inaugurates Philip the Bold’s Cleres femmes, an unambiguous asser-

tion of male authorship and authority. This forceful gendering is further emphasized by Boccaccio’s all-male audience, which stands, by extension, for the intended audience of the real book. The opening miniature thus sustains Boccaccio’s claim that his work _ is addressed to men as much as to women. At the same time, it is as though male discursiveness were envisioned on absent women, whose very absence provides the matiére

for the text. Male authorship is reaffirmed in the next frame, in which the kneeling Boccaccio offers his libellum to Andrea Acciaiouli seated in a majestic vaulted wooden bench, surrounded by two ladies-in-waiting (Fig. 2). Yet if here the man inhabits the position of the solicitor, and the woman that of the recipient, her eagerness to accept the gift makes her as dependent on her “subject” as he is on her. The series of women writers featured in the Cleres femmes questions conventional gender roles in a more decisive manner. In fact, the powerful image of the Greek poet Sappho offers a subtle intertextual response to that of Boccaccio (Fig. 45). Also placed in an imposing wooden structure, the famous writer of Lesbos lectures to a captive audience of three men. The iconographic adviser must have realized that Boccaccio celebrates Sappho as the epitome of literary endeavors, for he puts her above anybody else, stating that “neither the crown of kings, the papal tiara, nor the conqueror’s laurel is more

43

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

splendid than her glory.’*°4 Of course Sappho’s fame also rested on her unfortunate love for a young man, but the miniature remains professional, so to speak, and does not express any intimate relationship between her and her rather mature pupils. It is the only woman

, that the chapter heading qualifies as clergeresse, thus authorizing her depiction as if she were a teaching cleric.’> Moreover, the translation is considerably more specific about her poetic talents, adding to the original text (which simply states that her writings were innovative) that “she knew not only how to assemble the letters and compose the syllables, spell the words, show the intention and the meaning, but also added new things.’ “Show the intention and the meaning” of words is certainly what any professor in the con-

text of the trivium would do. But while women could be schoolteachers in medieval Paris, they were categorically excluded from the ecclesiastic institution that was the University. They could neither carry the official title of clerc nor become a professional lawyer or doctor, let alone a theologian.’°” No Sappho would be seen at the Sorbonne. Even those literary historians who are inclined to read the De mulieribus claris as disturbingly tentative in its assessment of the heroines’ accomplishments consider the

inclusion of women writers a definite novelty. Paralleled by equally unconventional miniatures, the manuscript shows other, solitary writers such as the sibyls Erythraea (Fig. 20) and Amalthea (Fig. 25) and the Roman poets Cornificia (Fig. 85) and Proba (Fig. 95). This unprecedented gallery of women intellectuals appropriates an iconographic tradition hitherto overwhelmingly male.'®* The displacement is particularly forceful because many contemporary images of the Evangelists, the ultimate paradigm of authorship, are closely related in style and composition to the Cleres femmes’s depiction of writers. In

fact, only in the self-images of Christine de Pizan (who might very well have been inspired by these miniatures) will one find an equivalent series of images of a woman

author absorbed in her work.

All of the images provide interesting insights into a writer’s working environment, equipped with carefully detailed furniture, books, and various tools. The high chairs, most-

ly in wood, some finely decorated, are complemented by the writing surface, a drawing , board or scriptionale (Proba), a sloped pulpit cum bookcase (Erythraea), or, more often, a more

modern circular roue a livres, conveniently provided with several rotating tablets whose central spiral post functioned as a candleholder."°? In addition to pen and knife, there are ink holders, the magnifying glass used by Semiamira’s clerk, and, more unusually, a compass on Amalthea’s writing tablet, for which I cannot adduce a textual basis (Fig. 25). Naturally, all writers are manipulating books, either writing, reading, or offering them. But one woman leaves them aside for other pleasures, the Greek scholar Leontium (Fig. 58), who (the male author says) after a promising literary debut ended up as a courtesan and, finally, under Jean de Montreuil’s pen, as a derogatory analogy for Christine de Pizan. Except for the presentation copy in Andrea’s miniature, all books are open.”° Blackened with a pseudoscript, the books are turned outward so as to remind Philip the Bold, to remind the future viewer, that this is what they are holding as well. Appropriately, none of these scholarly books is decorated, by contrast to which the splendidly illuminated Cleres femmes stands out even more starkly as a princely object.

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Images as Readers

In spite of the gender reversal and the varied details in execution, the iconography of the women writers is fairly standard, and it fails to include the more personal events of the heroines’ biographies, which would have rendered them less interchangeable. They are close to stock imagery, conventional compositions that could be transposed into a variety of different types of manuscripts. Yet, even here, some minimal details personalize the images and express meaningful differences. For instance, the sibyl Erythraea, who predicted the Coming of Christ and wrote as authoritatively as the Gospels, is cast as a nun.™ Proba is the only writer to be supplied with two lecterns, a discrete but efhicient pictorial allusion to the act of compilation, the literary activity in which she excelled (in a project worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, Boccaccio describes her taking apart and recomposing Virgil’s work in such a way that it retold the Bible)."? Finally, Amalthea, the Cumaean sibyl who predicted Rome’s entire history in her legendary Sibylline Books, is supplied with a scroll, the common attribute of the Old Testament prophets’ oracular speech as well as a visual index of oral literacy. But there are other, more numinous scrolls in this codex. The statuesque Medea, queen of Colchis and able sorceress, is shown in a composite image (Fig. 17): an exoticized servant is about to dismember Medea’s brother, a stratagem meant to stop her pursuers from _ reaching her and Jason. The impassive queen stands next to the blood-covered boy, holding in her right hand a musical scroll and, in her left hand, a flower bouquet. Why these , attributes? Once more, they are the result of a literal, if embellished, transcription of the text. Medea is said to have known how to make poison thanks to her “grande cognaissance de la vertu des herbes,” hence the flower bouquet; and she was able to change the course of nature, calling for storms “par une chancon qu’elle chantoit,’ hence the musical scroll.” The rather virginal but ostensive attributes that visually qualify Medea’s witchcraft must, however, derive from another iconographic prototype, though I have not been able to locate a specific source. More unambiguously likened to a practitioner of “diabolic arts” by both text and image is Tiresias’s daughter Mantho, protected by her outdoor hat, a chapeau a bec (Fig. 29). Mantho gained fame among the Thebeans for her ability to foretell the future by pyromancy as well as by haruspication, the interpretation of the entrails of animals."4 But the “femme enchanteresse et empoisonneresse”’ Circe remains surely the most famous figure connected with magical arts (Fig. 37). As is well known, she had the threatening power of metamorphosing men into animals, here symbolized by a stag and a lion, both noble animals in the medieval imagination. Ulysses alone resisted her charms, so that he appears as the only man at the side of his already transformed companions. The composition owes much to a courtly scene of seduction, presided over by Circe, golden rays shining forth from her head as a reminder that her mother was the Sun. The image, in other words, does not demonize Circe and thus undermines to a certain degree the significance of this uncanny story, especially when addressed to a male audience." The fact remains that the skills of Circe, as those of Mantho and Medea, are examples of parallel sciences, which became increasingly and negatively associated with women.™ But let us turn to a last and most significant scroll: the one given by the Greek prophetess Nicostrata (Carmenta) to the Italians, still deprived of their own language

45

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes | (Fig. 26). In this fine story, Boccaccio celebrates the supremacy of Latin, and hence of Italy, over other “barbarian” nations. In a story that parallels Isis’s invention of Egyptian char-

acters (with wide-ranging civilizing consequences), he attributes the invention of the Latin alphabet and grammar to a woman. Compared to the other scrolls and books displayed in the Cleres femmes, Nicostrata’s is cunningly the only legible one: it displays seventeen letters, a deconstructed legibility of sorts; and yet, the very use of a speech-scroll bespeaks this image’s allegiance to a logocentric understanding of language. By including Nicostrata’s son Evander, the miniature further establishes an almost organic link between

human and intellectual generation, as though to remind the homage-paying adult men, the outlandish-looking Latins, that their body and mind would not be without women. As a distant progenitor of the translatio studii, Nicostrata’s story had an additional layer of meaning for the French audience, which was comparably defending the worth of its mother tongue against the hegemony of Latin, pace Boccaccio." Even more fascinating than the images of women authors and prophetesses, and indeed the most famous miniatures of the Cleres femmes, are the three histoires of women engaged in the art of painting—an art, Boccaccio hastens to add, that “‘is very much alien

to the mind of women” because talent “is usually very scarce” in them."? The miniatures of Thamyris (Fig. 54), Irene (Fig. $7) and Marcia (Fig. 65) have been reproduced over and over again, gracing the front covers of a wide variety of both scholarly and popular publications.’ If this is so, it is because they are among the first full-fledged images of painters. Documentary sources attest that there were women painters and illuminators in the Middle Ages, particularly in Paris, yet their presence in visual documents is indeed minimal. Like the other groups of activities I have examined so far, the three painters’ miniatures are remarkably varied in their execution, but they are only partially, if not tenuously, linked to the text. While the “studios,” with richly textured tiled floors, are similar in all three miniatures, the tools change quite a bit. The easel is either a fixed, rather heavy piece of furniture or a lighter folding support; there is a faldstool, a chair, and

a thronelike seat for Marcia; the palettes all have a handle, though their shapes vary as well.’ Brushes, carefully arranged in compartmentalized boxes, and shells or little pots con-

taining colors complete the professional tools of the painters, as does the mirror that enables Marcia to create her self-portrait, a mirror, it should be noted, devoid of the negative associations with which it was charged during the Middle Ages, as the apocalyptic attribute of the luxurious woman.” To the painters’ working environment, one should add Thamyris’s apprentice, who is grinding a blue pigment on a round marble surface, mixing it with water or a binding substance kept in a small jug. He has no textual basis but certainly corresponds to medieval workshop practices and to their division of labor. According to Boccaccio, all three women artists were painters, and Marcia was an equally able sculptor. In other words, there is no illuminator in the Cleres femmes; nor, for that matter, is there an architect.'*? While Thamyris and Marcia are finishing panel paintings, Irene colors a statue of the Virgin and Child, placed in front of a completed panel of

46 ,

the Holy Face. The illuminator has been careful here to make plain the distinction

between the finished and the unfinished parts: the bottom of the Virgin’s gown 1s of a paler

Images as Readers

shade, one not used elsewhere in the Cleres femmes. Not specified by the text, Irene’s activity is in tune with the common practice of late medieval ymagiers of executing a wide variety of painting tasks, some of which since then have been radically separated into

“high” and “low” arts, into painting and coloring.’ But what about the panels and statues painted by the three women? Leaving Marcia’s “self-portrait” aside for the moment, the two other miniatures substantially depart from the written description. Instead of the panel of Diana venerated by the Ephesians, Thamyris, who “scorned the duties of women,’ is painting a Virgin and Child, as her visual prototype Saint Luke would do.”° Irene’s statue of the Virgin and Child and the panel of the Holy Face similarly replace the portraits of young and old, gladiators and dancers, that made her famous among the Greeks.'?” Given the consistent choice of Christian sub-

jects, this gap cannot be attributed to an error. Nor would I interpret it as an example of | medieval artists’ inability to re-create ancient works. Mostly destroyed now, independent panel paintings were a novelty in fourteenth-century France, but by 1400 many had found their way into the Valois collections. Often painted on a monochrome background, most were devotional panels, the so-called Andachtsbilder.* Since our manuscript is globally actualized, it is not surprising that the works which rendered Boccaccio’s painters famous have also been updated into something that would conjure up the very concept of painting. Furthermore, by virtue of being literally evangelized, these paintings are clearly opposed

to the pagan idols that appear elsewhere in the Cleres femmes (Figs. 61 and 62) and that are still infused with the negative connotations they had carried since early Christian times. It is thus possible that the iconographic adviser and/or the illuminator (who might have created panel paintings as well) chose Christian themes in order to present an unequivocally celebratory view of Thamyris’s and Irene’s art. Such a transplant inevitably suppresses the specific, alien characteristics of ancient art, but at the same time it sanctifies the craft of painting within the very context of a secular object. The most famous miniature of the Cleres femmes is that of Marcia, the chaste artist who abstained from representing men because she would have had to draw them naked (Fig. 65). Marcia’s story problematizes something very different. Since she is shown finishing

what is generally held to be the first surviving self-portrait in the West, it is worth quoting the original text, according to which she painted “entre les aultres choses d’elle son ymage, lequel autant et si entierement par lignes et par couleurs bien ordonnees et par habit proporcionelment gardees, en une table se regardante en un miroir elle pourtraist, que nul homme de son temps qui l’eust veue se sa figure regardast soudainement que ce ne fust elle tournast en double.’”9 Significantly, the French translation adds to Boccaccio’s text “par habit proporcionelment gardees.” Indeed, the reproduced bust-length image is proportional to “real” Marcia, and so is the diminutive version in an otherwise blank mirror."° It is a particularly interesting addition in regard to one of Christine de Pizan’s theoretical tenets on the

arts. According to her, painting depends on geometry, and therefore on rational knowledge, precisely because it is predicated upon proportion and measure; she, who personally oversaw the illustration of her manuscripts, singles out artists, masons, and carpenters

47

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

among other craftsmen because they operate on the precepts of a science.’ And, as Sandra Hindman has shown, Christine clearly tried to establish a distinction between scientia and ars, between artists and artisans.“ In fact, Christine’s version of Irene plays exactly on this opposition, for where she is said to have been “supremely skilled in the science of painting,” her teacher, the painter Cratinus, was only “‘a consummate artisan.”'3 This seemingly small addition to the original text thus stands as one of the Cleres femmes’s most vigorous

proclamations of the power of painting. It is not surprising that it should happen in Marcia’s biography and epoch-making visualization. Finally, one can note that Marcia’s portrait and mirror-image have the same degree of reality as the actual painter, as if to say that the two simulacra result indeed from an act of duplication as the text has it—the narcissistic ideal of modern mimesis."4 But is Marcia really creating a self-portrait? First of all, it is more accurately described as an “image of a self-portrait,” since it is obviously not the self-portrait of the woman or man who painted it. Bearing in mind that portraits (but not self-portraits) of a recognizable person were gaining ascendancy precisely at that time, one can question further the relevance of the notion of portraiture. Marcia has no individual physical identity, formed as she is from the same mold as all the other heroines. Also, and because we are not in a perspectival space, her face does not appear as a reversed mirror-image, as we think it ought to be. Certainly we would do better, then, to call this a mimetic self-image of a figure who is, in the end, a pure illusion.

The statue of the Virgin and Child painted by Irene is the only three-dimensional work crafted by the Cleres femmes’s artists. Its texture is not any more different from Irene than the “self-portrait” is from Marcia, but in this case the difference between reality and representation is maintained by their different sizes. Idols are small as well, but their estrangeté appears immediately. Following a long-standing iconographic tradition, the two “idols of chastity” in Verginia’s miniature are located on top of a column and are entirely, though asexually, naked (Figs. 61 and 62).%5 Pagan idols are not gold-covered;

they are painted in yellow, which was, according to Michel Pastoureau, the “bad gold,’° apt to reinforce the negative connotations associated with idols. Yet responsive to Verginia’s

gesture of worship, the idols, head slightly bent, seem to be amenable to her prayers. There are other, less conventional representations of statues in the Cleres femmes, and as such they are more difficult to detect without the help of the text. Niobe, muted into stony silence by her grief for her dead progeny, is an exact replica of the living woman who stands behind her dead children and her husband, Amphion (Fig. 15), except that the statue, eyes wide open, is rooted onto the rock, with the lower part of bust and arms covered by grass. Of “divine beauty” and adulterous behavior, loved by the gladiator whom the French translation changes into a cutlery smith (Fig. 97), the empress Faustina is later elevated to the status of a goddess (Fig. 96).%7 While Boccaccio states

that her temple contained statues and was tended by the newly instituted order of Faustinian priestesses, the miniature conflates different things. Placed on the altar, Faustina is at the same time the “living empress” and the “statue of the goddess.’?3® Even more confounding is the sculpture of the Magna Mater seated in the strand-

48

Images as Readers

ed ship, which the chaste Claudia Quinta successfully pulls to shore with her girdle (Fig. 76). Without the text, it would be quite impossible to read the seated figure as a statue

instead of a “living” being. And is Cloelia a mounted woman or an equestrian statue (Fig. 50)? Nothing is shown of Cloelia’s companions’ escape from Porsenna’s camp, so her solitary, monumental icon could very well evoke the escape, the equestrian statue that the Romans placed in her honor on the Sacred Way, or both. As is well known, the proximity of animate and inanimate, the blurring of the boundaries meant to separate reality from representation, is a common theme in medieval legends about statues. Endowed with movement, imagines could speak, weep, bleed, or walk away.'3? The “‘living statues” of the Cleres femmes respond to a similar incarnational conception, particularly strong with three-dimensional works. Notwithstanding the difference

in media, it is a conception that is clearly in conflict with the mimetic model articulated by Marcia’s self-image. In Marcia’s case, representation and model, though identical, are

kept separate, whereas the statues that pass for living matter mask the differentiation. Could one go so far and argue that the tension between these two models of represen-

tation—incarnational and representational—marks the passage from medieval to Renaissance art? And that this shift is bound up with the theory of images as well, since where the incarnational model claimed for images the power to shape reality, the representational model will want images to have the power of imitating reality? Fascinating though these issues may be, they are too complex to be given proper consideration here; but it remains worth to note the metadiscursive dimension inherent in these, as in any other, representations of representation. Considered to be another mechanical ars, music is also included in the Cleres femmes. One of Minerva’s “children” is playing a flute (Color Plate I)—an instrument that the goddess invented but decided to cast down from heaven because it swelled her cheeks in an ungainly manner. Music is the main subject of Sempronia’s miniature (Fig. 78). This Roman woman was versed in literature, poetry, eloquence, and musical arts alike, but the miniature focuses on the latter aspect as on Sempronia’s ribauderie. ‘4° Boccaccio mentions her singing and dancing skills to the sound of a cithara or psalterion (psallere), so the miniature transposes the text quite considerably by displaying such a large array of different instruments, two lutes, a harp, and a psalterion, known as “low” instruments, and used only for chamber music. Considering that there were only few professional women engaged in musical and theatrical performances, mostly at courts, this image must have appeared quite unusual to a medieval viewer'4’—though Sempronia’s turning around to the apparently more melodious company of men does little to promote her credibility as a musician. Let me now turn to the actual trades that contribute to make the Cleres femmes such an innovative iconographic cycle. The greatest importance is given to the textile arts, and only minimally because of Boccaccio’s ideological association of women with Eve’s

labor. In constructing a much more expansive vision, the images heavily draw on social reality, which saw most women employed in the textile workshops.” Once more, the textile subcycle walks us through different activities linked to the production of woolen

49

~ Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

and silk cloth. The miniature of Gaia Cyrilla, the Roman queen who disdained idleness, summarizes different stages of “the art of working in wool” (Fig. 44). Three servants execute the low-skill tasks of sorting the wool, combing, carding, and then spinning it onto a distaff, the highly gendered attribute of medieval iconography—one also held, remember, by the effeminate, absent-minded-looking Hercules (Fig. 22). Appropriately reserving for herself the high-status activity, Queen Gaia Cyrilla directs her gynaeceum, weaving at a very carefully detailed horizontal loom, a type used for the industrial production of textiles. Since later copies of the Cleres femmes tend to simplify the depiction of the loom _ and deprive it of its heddles, weft, reed, and treadle,"? it 1s tempting to link this instrumental

realism to the presence of Jacques Raponde, the entrepreneur who owned such tools and employed women laboring for the accumulation of his wealth. I have already mentioned the considerable importance conferred on Pamphile’s biography, the discoverer of the silkworm and silk cloth. In the miniature (Fig. 42), the industrious woman grabs little white animals with long tails, a sort of fusion of cotton balls and mice; a heap of raw material, a distaff, and a horizontal loom as monumental as the one used by Gaia Cyrilla stand idle in the back. In fact, the positioning and size of the loom make it almost the main character of the scene.

As opposed to these horizontal, industrial looms, both Arachne (Fig. 18) and Penelope (Fig. 39) are provided with a vertical loom, of the kind chiefly used in private settings or for smaller pieces, especially woven tapestries. The choice of an upright loom is appropriate in both cases. In addition to nets, Arachne created tapestries that were so skillfully executed as to pass for paintings. Because of her talents, she made Athena jealous, who

punished her by metamorphosing her into a spider—a legend that Boccaccio esteems to be apocryphal and that the Cleres femmes’s miniatures do not illustrate either.“+ Penelope’s

famous stratagem for warding off unwanted suitors (about to be killed by Ulysses in this condensed image) consisted in weaving a cloth by day and undoing the work at night. The image is not really able to represent this process, though it is true that despite Penelope’s busy activity the loom is empty. But similarly empty looms appear in examples of the Virgin at the Loom, after which Penelope is clearly modeled.™ The Cleres femmes’s vision is not depreciative of such manual labor.™° This holds

true for the collective imagery of urban activities “patronized” by the earthbound Minerva, certainly one of the most engaging miniatures in the manuscript (Color Plate I).47 In the manner of the “children of planet” tradition, an all-male circle embodies her inventions: the flutist, transformed from a shepherd into a much more elegant, urban young man; the armorer, finishing a helmet too hot to be held without pincers, and who metonymically visualizes the military arts; the seated worker who combs wool to eliminate impurities, and who stands for the entire invention of the “art of weaving”’;"9 another workman who crushes small nuts with a wooden hammer from which oil will be extracted—a small-scale trade that was, in fact, often carried out by women;"° and finally, seated at a bench, the only opulent figure, who manipulates little heaps of golden coins, meant to visualize “les nombres et l’ordre et la maniere de compter.” Although the transposition of mathematics into banking activities is not unprecedented, this

SO ,

| Images as Readers instance must have triggered a wealth of very personal associations in Jacques Raponde’s mind. The originality of this resolutely urban depiction of Minerva becomes even more evident when considering that Boccaccio lingers on the goddess’s mythological paraphernalia, none of which is transcribed by the image. Agricultural activities, presided by the goddess Ceres, are presented in a similarly constructed miniature that precedes Minerva, almost as if to form a diptych (Fig. 7). As

Millard Meiss noted, Ceres is seated on the ground like a Virgin of Humility." And though a secular “queen of the harvest,’ Ceres is worshiped by a kneeling man (Triptolemus

of Eleusis), who by extension sacralizes agriculture as such. This is not accidental, for agriculture was still the major form of income for the nobility. In that sense, Ceres can also be read as an idle landed noble lady, dominating the commoners engaged in the agricultural cycle that unfolds around her, exactly as Minerva can be viewed as an entrepreneur overseeing her workers. The superb wheeled plow is represented with much detailing; it was after all Ceres’ invention and the most important agricultural tool in the Middle Ages.’ This precision, however, is in marked contrast to the two roughly depicted oxen, and to the improbability of its use, for nobody is guiding the plow. Moreover, the concatenation of events is contradictory because the peasant stands before the plow, thus spreading the seeds onto an unworked soil. Behind him, another laborer cuts the corn with a sickle; and in the background, at a spatial as well as temporal interval, a laborer threshes the corn with a flail, an activity that would take place in autumn.

While there is no apparent devaluation in the representation of the agricultural cycle that would correspond to the ardent contemptus mundi Boccaccio hurls against the

evils brought about the civilizing effects of agriculture—shift from nature to culture, caverns to towns, collectivism to private property, and general corruption of humankind**3—1it is important to note the pervasive visual conventions that command the representation of peasants. As overdetermined in their appearance as the torturers, the field workers gathered around Ceres, or the ones digging Rhea Ilia’s grave (Fig. 43), are much stockier in proportion, even smaller according to a hierarchic scale. Above all, the clothing that covers their bent, rugged bodies is disheveled, leaving parts of their limbs bare. As Jonathan Alexander has pertinently shown with the Calendar pages of Jean de Berry’s Trés Riches Heures, it would be naive to see these figures as neutrally realistic. They result

from a forceful, even contemptuous, semiotic code. Compared to the perfectly composed bodies of the nobles, people of low extraction—those who would never be able to see this imagery—are memorialized with bodies and poses that are all too visible in their unsightliness.'4 Medieval estate literature, especially when addressed to women, ends with what was deemed to be the lowest social category of all, that of the prostitutes, equaled with other professions that made commerce of their body, acrobats and the like. Yet the fact that writers and moralizers felt the need to include them at all attests to the currency of prostitution in medieval towns.*° Pointedly, in her famous passage on artists’ debauched mores, prude Christine de Pizan criticizes them for visiting taverns and brothels on more than an occasional basis. One should also remember that princely households included pros-

51

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes titutes well before Agnés Sorel.” Prostitution is the main theme of Flora’s story. According to Boccaccio, it is during the games performed annually in honor of Flora (who left her considerable wealth to the Roman populace) that naked prostitutes would perform lewd

pantomimes, thus condensing the stigma attached to different improper uses of one’s body. In the miniature, Flora is made to appear as the “abbess” of a brothel, welcoming two embracing couples (Fig. 63).* There are no “lewd pantomimes,” and the two prostitutes do not engage in excessive gesticulations.® Nevertheless, both ribaudes are tightly laced

to their clients and kiss them on the mouth, the cause of the first woman’s bold contrapposto stance. An ellipsis for sexual intercourse, this gesture bespeaks a somewhat transeressive (though not necessarily negative) physical proximity, repeated by Tertia Aemilia’s adulterous husband, Scipio, caught in “compagnie charnelle’’ with one of their servants (Fig. 73).'©° In addition to the embrace, Flora’s prostitutes are partially undressed. They are thus simultaneously linked and distinguished from other “low-class” people, the torturers and peasants who reveal parts of their limbs as well. Here, in a much more decisive ges-

ture, the first prostitute lifts her dress above her buttocks, while the transparent gauze exposes the other woman’s body, with stockings hanging loosely, lasciviously, as it were, on her calf. Her dress and white headgear seem to associate her more specifically with the prostitutes who worked in public bathhouses. Globally, however, Flora’s image offers a lenient equivalent to Boccaccio’s virulent indictment of prostitution—though Gerson might well have censured it as a scene that stimulates illicit carnal desires. We have already encountered two other prostitutes in similarly constructed miniatures: the musician Sempronia (Fig. 78) and the poet Leontium (Fig. 58). While Sempronia

eagerly welcomes the elegant young man into her arms, Leontium, on the contrary, is pulled away by a suitor. This action contradicts the text, for Boccaccio is merciless in condemning the bodily commerce of Leontium, the woman who threw philosophy into the “filthy sewers." Granted, the dresses of Leontium and of her suitor are somewhat too excessively fashionable, with their long, dagged sleeves. Hers is fastened by a row of metal

buttons, an accessory that did attract severe regulation. Along with pearls, metal belts, and expensive fur linings, prostitutes were often explicitly forbidden to wear buttons; similarly, they were equally often denied the right to wear headdresses, as is indeed the case

with Leontium’s elegant but discovered hairdo. If we are to trust contemporary representations such as this one, these regulations must not have been overly efficient. It is ironic that images had to resort precisely to what was proscribed in order to make the figure visually identifiable. As it were, Lebégue’s description of the femme gaillarde Sempronia in her “close-fitting dress” is one of the most detailed in his program.™® By comparison, Venus, famous only because of her beauty, is modestly garbed (Fig. 8). Yet, surrounded by her admirers, she becomes the object of a seemingly idolatrous

worship, not unlike Antonia, who, wooed by many suitors after the death of her husband, rejected them at once (Fig. 88). The seductive context and Antonia’s refusal are sig-

nified by her countenance and gestures alone, a flirtatious trumpet-sleeve hiding one hand, while the raised right hand and her turned body indicate her disapprobation. In both cases it is difficult to perceive any specifically unflattering tone. Certainly nothing in

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Images as Readers

Venus’s miniature is comparable to Boccaccio’s unequivocal condemnation of her “con-

tinuous fornication,’ her “instituting brothels and forcing women to enter them." Painted Venus remains as desirable, as gracieuse, as the French text qualifies her. If, in practice, prostitution was tolerated in medieval cities, on a theoretical and ideological level it was surely criticized as a form of intolerable illicit love. But the Cleres femmes also contains miniatures representing the other side of the love commerce, the supposedly chaste union sanctified by marriage." As I have already said, marital status was the foremost lens through which medieval prescriptive literature categorized women, thus rendering the change of marital status a most decisive step in a woman’ life. Three miniatures stage the ritual of wedding. Engeldruda and Camiola (Color Plate IV and Fig. 104), who we have already encountered, are captured in the very moment of being married, signified by the ritually consecrated gesture of uniting the spouses’ right hands, the dextrarum

junctio.*°° The influence of the actual ritual on the conception of the wedding of the imprisoned Roland and Camiola is very clear because it departs from the text: where Boccaccio, faithful to the Italian custom, says that “he married her by proxy with the pledging of a ring,’ the French ceremony was officially sealed by the union of the hands. Although the open architecture where Otto IV gives Engeldruda to Guido—where she is exchanged from one man to another—is meant to represent the church of Ravenna, neither of the two weddings takes place in front of a church. Nor do any priests celebrate the ceremony, though it is true that priestly benediction was not formally required and that the wedding could be approved, as here, by lay witnesses. The more comprehensive miniature of Megullia fuses various stages of the wedding ritual (Fig. 52). Eyes lowered as prescribed by manuals of good behavior, Megullia is accompanied by her male relatives to an eagerly awaiting fiancé. The scene is set some-

where between the public announcement of the betrothal and the wedding properly speaking, that is, between the promise of marriage sealed by pledging a gift (arrha sponsalicia)

and the definitive transfer of the woman and of her dowry into the new family. Two details deserve to be noted. First, Megullia wears an intense red coffe, a common color for brides; it is adorned by three diamond-shaped appliqués, which distinguish it from other dresses."°7 Although I have not been able to find a specific French custom to explain this accessory, it seems to exemplify Diane Owen Hughes’s conclusion that the sumptuary reg-

ulations for unwed women in late medieval and early modern Italian cities were less restrictive, especially in regard to jewelry, which they were allowed to wear more liberally, perhaps in order to catch the eye of a prospective husband.*** But even more intriguing is the object embodying the dowry that earned Megullia the nickname “Dotata” (Douee). Described by Boccaccio as the considerable sum of five hundred thousand bronze coins (pois d’airain), it is replaced by a mini-architecture painted in yellow, the color that mimics gold. The text does not mention houses, and though I have not been able to locate comparable visualizations of the concept of dowry, I am inclined to see it as a concrete allusion to the most precious of riches that a husband could hope to obtain through marriage, that

is, landed property." Having already considered the other miniatures broadly connected to the mari-

$3

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes | tal theme—the love colloquy between Hypermnestra and her husband, the woman in labor in Juno’s collective miniature, Pope Joan’s untimely delivery, and the unnamed breastfeeding young girl—I will conclude the tour of the gallery of cleres et nobles femmes with Medusa. Approached by Perseus mounted on his fabulous horse Pegasus, Medusa sits on the shore (Fig. 21). Of supernatural beauty and the only blue-eyed woman in the Cleres femmes, she wears a crown of an unusual design, with large red and blue stones that seem to reverberate the power of her petrifying eyes. But as there are no mythographic attributes, no trace of her kidnapping filters through. If to post-Freudian readers Medusa irresistibly evokes the castration complex, the medieval image seems to embrace the illusion

of seduction without reservation, thus keeping our eyes fastened on the precariously asserted claritas of this as other women.

System and Reality While the text-image relationship has greatly preoccupied manuscript scholars in recent years, most would agree that it is extremely problematic to generalize about such a complex semiotic phenomenon. Modes of visualization are as numerous as manuscripts, and

even within the same work there is a considerable spectrum of possibilities. But it is worth considering the issue more globally in the case of the Cleres femmes. An illuminated manuscript unites, by definition, text and image within one body.

The layout makes this communion visible, since the craft of the iluminator regularly alternates with that of the scribe. As is generally the case with late medieval manuscripts, the width of the miniatures in the Cleres femmes is determined by that of a textual column.'7° In fact, the duplication of miniatures in the stories of Verginia, Faustina, and

Constance is conditioned by the layout rather than by a narrative reason. Countering this control, the miniatures do always precede the biographies and rubrics. The visual cycle thus literally bridges the stories; but, at the same time, it constitutes an effraction into the order of discourse. Obviously this pulling apart does not take place solely on a material level. In the course of walking through the manuscript, I have noted specific instances where the miniatures depart from the text, where the pictorial cycle reworks the written material. In general, it can be said that images follow Boccaccio’s suggestion in representing the crux of a biography, the event or action that accounts for the particular claritas of a given heroine. When a biography contains few narrative elements, as with women writers, the image will summarize it into a generic, immediately decipherable effigy. A major departure from the text arises in those biographies in which Boccaccio’s commentaries take the upper hand. In such stories, with just one actual narrative passage, it is logical that this figurative passage will be depicted, that the “register of legibility” is made to collapse into the “register of visibility.’"7’ For instance, in Tertia Aemilia’s case the adulterous affair of her husband with the servant (the only event in her biography) is represented (Fig. 73).’” But Boccaccio’ reflections on adultery and marital fidelity are elided. Similarly, the pithy

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Images as Readers

condemnation of women’s Iuxuria is, if not erased, considerably altered by the miniature of Venus, for, as we have seen, no brothels or carnal commerce are included (Fig. 8). And there is only a faint trace of Faustina’s multiples adulteries (Fig. 97) or of Semiamira’s incestuous relationship (Fig. 4)—shortcomings that are heavily belabored in Boccaccio’s commentaries. By not figuring these moralizations, the Cleres femmes does not simply prettify the text. Rather, in a historically specific interpretation, it enacts the “tonal transformation” Glyn Norton speaks of in regard to Laurent de Premierfait’s translations of

Boccaccio." Whatever the case, the amount of textual development covered by the miniatures is never representative of the entire biography. Miniatures are illustrative only insofar as they select, that is, include or exclude, from their space of representation. And what is excluded, erased from visual existence, necessarily loses relief. Thus, while equalizing the biographies by compressing them into frames of the same dimension, the pictorial cycle of the Cleres femmes also accentuates certain parts of the text to the detriment of others. This process of semiotic differentiation is at its most pronounced when an image has to choose among textual variants, as happens with the depiction of Europa’s abduction over her rape (Fig. 10). Some specific workings of the visual language also transform the linear unfolding

of the narratives. We have seen quite a few examples where both cause and consequence are included in an image." This “discoordination of transitrvity’’’?>—for instance, arrows having hit their target while bowmen still hold fast to their weapons—is also an expression of the medieval visual logic thanks to which different statuses can be paradigmatically confronted. Contradicting the classical requirement of unity of time, such a paradigmatic juxtaposition explains why a character might be depicted twice in the same image.

Procris, Sophonisba, and Zenobia are captured at the juncture of switching from one status to another, from seduction to persecution, life to death, hunter to knight. By thus contracting and expanding the narrative flow, images have a powerful way with which to intervene in the textual diegesis. Since visual language is in a position actively to reinterpret the text’s ordering of the events, it can also respond to the more challenging task of establishing causal links or logical contrasts or transformations. For instance, the most painful images of Niobe (Fig. 15), Jocasta (Fig. 24), and Hecuba (Fig. 33) all condense into a simultaneous vision actions that have taken place successively. But precisely because of the figures’ spatial communion, the causal concatenation is made clear. In Thisbe’s diagonally composed miniature, an

animal and objects enact the temporal condensation: simply by being included, they establish the casual relationship between Thisbe’s and Pyramus’s death (Fig. 13). Indeed, the

lion is seen escaping in the background, while the bloodstained cloth (Pyramus mistakenly takes it as an indication of his beloved’s death) still lies next to him. Note also how cleverly the origin of the dramatic events is hinted at by having Babylon’s door open to a finely traced path connecting the city to the human drama.'”° Equally sophisticated, if not more so, is the narrative construction in Medea’s image (Fig. 17). Here the miniature castle in the background marks the origin of the fugitives’ travel.'””7 Their journey is

55

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

echoed by the diagonally placed chariot that links the castle to Jason. Separated from the main action by being placed on a different ground, Jason is nevertheless linked to Medea by being of equal size and gazing toward her. The sense of reading—back to front, left to right—1s maintained in Zenobia’s image (Fig. 99). Her new knightly persona is put to the

front, whereas her previous identity as a hunter is literally pushed toward the back. But the | sense of reading need not proceed according to this spatial pattern. In Procris’s image, which

provides an excellent example of how the differentiation of the ground plane can be used as a means to organize temporally separated moments, the unfolding of the narrative has to be read in reverse sequence (Fig. 27): Procris’s seduction is placed in front and to the left, while the subsequent moment of her accidental killing by Cephalus is pushed to the back and the right. Neatly, the escaping animal acts as a sort of arrow, signaling the correct reading order to the viewer. If the miniatures condense and expand the plots, they also distort and manipulate the text by the sheer conversion of all written referents, whether concrete or abstract, into embodied realities.'?* When the image shows us Medusa with blue eyes or Triaria wielding a battle-ax it already considerably transposes what the text defines as a “beautiful woman” or a “woman fierce in combat.” Abstract concepts have to be given a concrete shape; thus the notion of “power” is translated into gestures and objects that a late medieval prince would recognize as his own. Or, to take a specific example, Libya’s “fame” and the reverent naming of an African kingdom after her is resolved as a familiar scene of worship deriving from Christian iconography (Fig. 11). Upon reading, or listening to, Libya’s biography, Philip the Bold would thus recognize her as a visual exemplum as well. The “fictional factuality’’’”? of the text is perpetuated by the image, even though the latter activates its own, iconographic tradition to do so. In examining the function played by written inscriptions, Roland Barthes defined the linguistic message of advertisement photographs in terms of “anchorage” or “relay.”

In the first case, written discourse is said to contain the “floating chain” of meaning inherent in the polysemous visual message; in the second, especially important in film, word

and image coalesce into a more general system of signification.*° Both forms of intertextuality apply to illuminated manuscripts. But it is the anchorage function that I would like to emphasize. The ability to select and fix certain signifieds while discarding others is not a prerogative of verbal language. As we have seen, the Cleres femmes’s miniatures just play such a role as they impose their own interpretation onto what would be otherwise an infinitely disseminated process of textual signification. Not that these visual interpretations are univocal or preclude alternative understandings since these are in the end always in the hands of readers and viewers; but the miniatures certainly did (and do) inflect the reception process, so that each new copy of the Cleres femmes simultaneously reinforced the open-ended nature of this semiotic process and elaborated new ways in which to close the text.’ In the case of our manuscript, the thrust of this anchorage is bent on transforming the past into the present and, more important, individual destinies into a display of estates. In this sense, the miniatures complete the translatio of the textual matiere, thus mediating Boccaccio’s work for an audience whose expectations were 56

Images as Readers

circumscribed by the cultural horizon of early fifteenth-century France. But, in contrast to the translation, which is, at least ideally, aimed at rendering the original as faithfully as | possible, the miniatures continuously modulate their relationship to the text, sometimes “fitting” it closely, sometimes departing from it."*? Barthes called this the “degrees of amalgamation” between the two orders of signification." Among the factors that color the images’ response to the text, the iconographic tradition certainly plays a crucial role, for it consists of an entirely different order of referentiality. Although I will consider this aspect more fully at the end of Chapter III, especially in regard to the activation of Christian iconographic models, one can note here that the iconographic texture of this manuscript is far from uniform. Indeed, while some heroines, such as Venus or Lucretia, benefited from a virtually uninterrupted representa| tional tradition in the Middle Ages, many others were given a visual form for the very first time in the Cleres femmes. In fact, even in cases of truly famous heroines, the manuscript

devises a fairly autonomous interpretation linked both to the specifics of the text and to its intended exemplary function."** And this interplay between textual requirements and iconographic tradition allows for different “degrees of amalgamation” as well. Furthermore,

while some compositions have to be invented ex nihilo, many are borrowed from the commonly available repertoire of stock imagery. Barely disguised beneath the diegetic stratum, one easily recognizes a conventional model in Dripetrua’s banquet (Fig. 74). And this is as evident in scenes of hunting, weaving, or writing, whose generic compositional patterns do erase to some degree the particulars of the text. But this constitutes, precisely, another type of visual manipulation. For instance, Artemisia’s naval battle is converted into a generic battle scene, one that could be found in any number of biblical or chivalric manuscripts (Fig. 55). And yet, the fit between the underlying visual topos and the Cleres femmes’s version is not perfect, were it only for the fact that the army is here led by a woman. Similarly, the above-mentioned banquet of Dripetrua is adapted to this particular context by her being a woman and by her physical mutilation (Fig. 74). In other words, the somewhat mechanical notion of stock imagery or moduli’ fails to account for the logic that governs a complex pictorial cycle wherein the combination and variation

of elements are as crucial as their repetition. :

Literary historian Bernard Cerquiglini recently argued that the repetition and variation of a limited number of narrative units are at the core of medieval literary aesthetics, a principle he proposes to call variance."*° Indeed, we have seen that relatively few themes and even less realia run through this cycle. But themes and objects are continuously

altered so that each estate or action is finally shown from multiple points of view, while each object differs from the next one. Because of the variance of figurative elements, the visual cycle of the Cleres femmes coalesces into a representational system that runs parallel to the text, at times converging with it, at others, diverging. The loose concatenation of Boccaccio’s biographies, reorganized into thematic subcycles, is thus tightened, and the entire manuscript is visually woven together. I have insisted on the compositional echoes between the images of Eve (Fig. 3) and of Joanna of Sicily (Fig. 105). This is a crucial instance of variance, for it structures the entire dialectics of the Cleres femmes, that

S7

Boccaccio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

is, of women caught between good and evil, success and failure, nature and culture. And it is certainly not by chance that the initial image of (potential) unrest is resolved by a vision of social and sexual peace. The principle of self-referential articulation, based on the similarity, repetition, and contrast of pictorial signs, is not in contradiction with the capacity of the Cleres femmes’s miniatures to intersect with reality. Conversely, the late medieval images’ increased degree

of what we perceive as realism does not invalidate the semiotic logic of the pictorial cycle. If that were so, I could not have read the cycle as an example of estate literature, as a visualization of a social theory. The concept of cycle could not even be used, and the miniatures would make sense only as disconnected manifestations. But this is precisely the difference between reality and representation: the former has neither order nor inherent meaning, whereas the latter is only about that.

But it is the very notion of realism that needs to be qualified, if only for the fact that there are many different quotients of mimetic veracity in the Cleres femmes. Contrary to our modern expectations, human figures, and especially women, tend to be quite formulaic, whereas objects do contain a great deal more information about themselves. Objects exhibit what Millard Meiss has nicely called a “noisy naturalism,’!87 provided that we think of that in terms of what Germans call Detailrealismus; or, even better, that we consider these pockets of densely packed information as semiotic carriers of what Barthes analyzed as the “reality effect.”"** As an illustration, one can recall the carefully drawn oxen plow in the image of Ceres, one inserted, however, into an “unrealistic” causal sequence of actions (Fig. 7)."° Moreover, this, as any other, image is bound to convey the ideological perceptions of the dominant class, and we can sense it in Ceres’ upright stance, programmatically contrasted to the bent bodies of the peasants. But there are other ideological implications in this miniature. While Boccaccio details the various agricultural tasks mostly to exalt the finished product (bread), the image insists, on the contrary, on the production alone. In fact, this obsession with production permeates the entire manuscript, whether it be poets writing or reading, painters putting the final touches to their images, or the making of textiles, battles, death, and even love. A few

images do concentrate on the distribution of a product, such as the book in the presentation scene (Fig. 2), weapons and clothes with Busa (Fig. 69), or money with Camiola (Fig. 104). Yet neither the Tiés Riches Heures’s avoidance of depicting “lazy peasants,” as analyzed by Jonathan Alexander, nor the unremitting productivity of the Cleres femmes’s little figures can be taken for a neutral attitude toward reality.’°° In a time when peasant uprisings and urban riots (e.g., the combined revolts in 1382 of the maillotins in Paris and of the weavers, led by Philip van Artevelde, in Ghent and Bruges) stood as a constant threat to nobles and wealthy burghers, such an imagery reasserts the combined interests of the landowning prince and the wealthy merchant, that is, the people who, like an enthroned

Minerva, controlled the means of production.’ Would this corroborate Arnold Hauser’s view that the emergence of naturalism in Books of Hours commissioned by aristocratic patrons such as the duke of Berry or Philip the Bold was a “striking expression of the victory of the middle-class spirit over the spir-

58

Images as Readers

it of chivalry’’??”? Clearly, the role of Jacques Raponde might in part explain the insistence on production in the Cleres femmes’ pictorial cycle, as well as the manuscript’s focus on professional activities or its unusually detailed depictions of industrial looms. But Jacques belonged to the mercantile oligarchy, and the manuscript is not realistic beyond a fairly accurate rendition of instruments and tools.

By necessity, the imaginary vision of women constructed by the miniatures is equally ideological. Many occupations exerted by the Cleres femmes’s heroines had no, or little, counterpart in late medieval reality. Queens did not rule independently, women were not engaged in warfare, nor were they teaching clergeresses as Sappho. And yet, there

were women painters, poets, and weavers, or, for that matter, raped virgins. In other words, there are different “degrees of amalgamation” that operate between reality and image, exactly as between text and image. It is true that all heroines are abstracted from reality, presented as generic social types, personifications of sorts; in this sense, the cleres femmes can be viewed as perpetuating the courtly model of “women on a pedestal’ %3— a model with little bearing on women’s real situation. Yet, even if the imagery of the Cleres femmes was utterly without consequences for women’s social situation, one should allow for its symbolic impact to have some efficacy. Surely, the systematic gender dis-

placement that these images propose by appropriating iconographic models usually reserved for men would have had some effect on the illuminators who painted them, and on Philip the Bold and others who viewed them. In the end, one can say that the ideological anchorage of text and reality by images should not be grasped as a relationship of complementarity only, for what an illuminated manuscript makes legible and visible does not necessarily coincide. If there is mutual gloss between words and images, it does not happen without tension or distor-

tion. Images confirm the text as reality; but they also decompose and reassemble its stories, deepen or reduce its meaning. Similarly, they do not simply show reality but explain, expand, simplify, and classify its unending manifestations.

S9

II] Pictorial torial Elements Element

as Meaning On Costumes, Bodies, and Gestures FTER HAVING EXAMINED the iconography of the Cleres femmes in its relation

A to text and context, it is thus time to turn to the specific mechanisms by which images produce their interstitial structure of signification. Since it is the socioprofessional taxonomy that organizes the Cleres femmes’s visual universe, it is worth asking first how this categorization is enacted by pictorial elements. An even cursory glance at this, as at other medieval manuscripts, will reveal that costumes are the primary means of encoding the identity of the characters. Little space is provided for further physical or psychological determinations. Indeed, no attempt is made to personalize the Cleres femmes’s heroines in their physical traits, all having been stenciled from the same model, the same carton." While this strategy helps to unify the manuscript, it also homogenizes its denizens, coalescing them into a rather abstracted chain of female incarnations. Indeed, it is almost paradoxical that Boccaccio’s particularized heroines become in the illuminated cycle a long succession of interchangeable visual exemplars; for better or worse, this depersonalization does, however, enable the famous women to speak for womankind in general. The whitish and smooth flesh,” the small and round head with puffy cheeks, the gracious mouth and short nose, the tiny high-set breasts and swelling stomach suit young virgins and old matrons alike.’ In fact, the only exceptions to this parade of interchangeable matrixes of female bodies are offered by Medusa’s blue eyes (Fig. 21) and Dripetrua’s double row of teeth (Fig. 74). But where one is a sign of exceptional beauty, the other reminds us of the physical aberration that potentially threatens everyone, of the sauvagerie that looms beneath the civilized body as allegorized by Circe’s transmuting powers. The physical canon is so overbearing that the images negate the few physical descriptions offered by Boccaccio. For instance, Queen Zenobia of Palmyra is divested in the miniature not only of her oriental splendor and of her camels but also of her racial identity, the color of her skin, a “pou brun” (Fig. 99). Similarly, Queen Sophonisba of Numidia is as pale as any Greek, Roman, or medieval character (Fig. 69). That this need not always be the case is proven by manuscripts that are explicitly orientalizing in their outlook; and even 60

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

historical manuscripts could around 1400 very well accommodate racial distinctions. Jean Lebégue, for instance, required the illuminator of Sallust’s Jugurtha to paint the people of Africa “less white” and in “Saracen outfits.’* In the Cleres femmes a tightly controlled body

is the rule, the ideal expression of a socially disciplined flesh, with little or no space for departures from the desirable norm. Almost as if to confirm Cennino Cennini’s opinion, according to which a woman’s body can be disregarded because it “does not have any set proportions,’> men do benefit from a somewhat more extended physical typology in the Cleres femmes. It is true that the bodies of the bearded patriarchs and of the commoners are very similar, in either case square and robust under an ample dress loosely kept together by a belt around the hip. Only the vigorous difference in costumes secures their social differentiation. The juvenes’s body is, on the contrary, stereotypically slim. To gauge the consistency of this physical code for men, one can take a miniature that disregards the textual indications. Boccaccio describes Verginia’s cruel father as a plebeian, insisting that he was in a state of utmost dis-

array at the moment of the crime (Fig. 56). Although his heavy frame is not different from a torturer’s, the miniature dresses him with a lavish fur-lined costume and fancy

outdoor hat.Verginius looks like a wealthy merchant, conforming as he does to the type ,

of a bearded “mature man”—undoubtedly a safer association for a father. | The physical blandness of the Cleres femmes’s humanity is perceptible in the treatment of nude figures as well. Nudity appears only with negative associations—death in Pompeia Paulina and Seneca’s case (Fig. 92) or prostitution in Flora’s image (Fig. 63). These rounded bodies, while clearly sexualized, do, however, carefully elide the genital area. More revealing is the treatment of Eve, who, as we saw, is fully clothed even though she is depicted before she actually eats the fatal fruit (Fig. 3). Like racial or physical particularities, nudity would undermine the exemplary role called forth from female paragons because, as Michael Camille has suggestively remarked, a body without clothing was a

“body lost in the limbo of mere physicality and open to penetration.”® But where in thirteenth-century images the convention that bodies be clothed was meant to uphold notions of the sanctified body, in the later Middle Ages the same representational convention was induced by considerations of courtly decorum. Revealed but shielded, the erot-

ic appeal of our heroines is carefully mediated by their costumes. Yet this visual chastity—thematized by Marcia, who, remember, refused to draw men so as to avoid seeing them naked—was not gender-specific around 1400. There still was a certain balance between the display of the bodies of both sexes, a balance that would gradually tip during the fifteenth century toward an increased exposure of the female flesh.’ If bodies are on display in this courtly manuscript, it is indeed primarily through clothes, the foremost indicator of social and sexual division. It has been said that the Middle Ages was a “civilization of the cloth,”® in part because textile industries were a prime motor of economic development, a prominence confirmed by the Cleres femmes, which devotes five miniatures to activities linked to the fabrication of cloth. What could be called the representational function of costumes was especially promoted in late medieval courtly society—and Huizinga perceptively saw it as being liturgical in essence.°

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Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

Keeping “everyone, visually, where they belonged,’ as Margaret Scott put it,*° costumes were the most efficient outward means to distinguish social classes and thus proclaim order and hierarchy. Although aimed foremost at burgesses, sumptuary laws and prescriptive tracts on clothing habits expressed a general anxiety at the quickening pace at which new fashions were developed, rendering regulations obsolete as soon as they were promulgated." These regulatory texts insisted again and again on the necessity for each estate to discipline its external appearance: social cross-dressing threatened the God-given order, the bonne policie of the civic body.” Given the centrality of costumes not only as a status symbol but as an incontro-

vertible device with which to conceptualize the articulations and hierarchies of the social fabric, it is not surprising that late medieval images use clothes as the privileged medium for defining a figure’s identity. The miniatures of the Cleres femmes, whose figures’ wardrobes,

it should be emphasized, are not described by Boccaccio, consistently particularize oth- , erwise nondescript characters through costumes and accessories. As with the bodily canon, the logic of the system is demonstrated by some counterexamples, the few instances where Boccaccio lingers on some sartorial details. In each case, the miniatures eliminate those specifications, tailoring each heroine to visual norms congruent with Charles VI’s times. Take Semiramis. Boccaccio tells us that she so strongly resembled her son Ninus that she could easily pass herself off for him and thus reign over the Assyrians (Fig. 4). While it is true that the two faces are almost indistinguishable in the miniature, neither is notice-

ably different from any other woman or, for that matter, from a young, clean-shaven man. I suppose that it would be quite impossible to depict the chastity belt that she invented in order to prevent her ladies from seducing her incestuous lover Ninus. But certainly the illuminator could have given her a turban (paillot) as well as the veils that hid her arms and legs. Instead Semiramis wears a houppelande, which aligns her with the standard appearance of a queen. Aside from some generically exoticized figures, to which I will

return later, the Hebrew queen Mariamne is almost unique in being outfitted with a different attire (Fig. 86). Her costume—comprised of a blue cotte adorned with a gilt belt

worn under a widely opened blue surcoat lined with white trims—as well as the hair plaited together into side templets, would have brought Philip the Bold instantly back to the fashion of his youth, when his brother Charles V reigned. It was Queen Jeanne de

Bourbon’s favorite raiment. But by Charles VI’s times it was out of fashion, worn by | queens only on ceremonial occasions. As the most formal and outdated female attire in the Cleres femmes, it is hardly an accidental choice for one of the only Jewish heroines.” As with activities and professions, the social hierarchies constructed by costumes cling

closely to the model provided by the estate literature as well. Two basic outfits assign , women either to the noble status (including goddesses and queens) or to the bourgeois ranks. The latter’s costume consists of a cotte (inner garment) and a close-fitting surcoat (outer garment), usually ofa different color (Fig. 13). If made richer by fur lining and trailing sleeves (Fig. 11), it signals an elevation in social rank. But the noble attire par excellence 1s the elegant, loosely cut houppelande, provided with a high collar (known as carcaille). Fittingly, it is worn by the two prosperous Raponde men in the frontispiece of the Legende du Saint

62

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

Voult (Fig. 106). Unquestionably the hallmark of fashion in Charles VI’s times, the houppelande was immensely popular for both sexes (Fig. 37). Contemporary descriptions indulge

in the delight or opprobrium caused by the ways these costumes offered a constantly changing visual and aural spectacle." In the Cleres femmes, the fancier houppelandes are actually worn by men, with deeply cut armholes and ample “bombard” sleeves, often enhanced by golden jewels, embroideries, or plaques and little bells (Fig. 46). In fact, the simple addition of gold (and secondarily of fur) suffices visually to upgrade a simple dress into a rich one. Like the production of silk clothes, the making of threads, embroideries, and accessories in precious metals was usually entrusted to the hands of women workers.” These women would make, but not own, such flashy ornaments, for the wearing of gold was strictly regulated by sumptuary laws. Not only was precious metal exclusively reserved for nobles, but it was used to draw distinctions among nobles themselves; so that, for instance, gold was Philip the Bold’s monopoly, while John the Fearless had to be content with silver ornaments until his father’s death.’ There are numerous gold embroidered textiles in the manuscript: cloths of honor decorating thrones (Fig. 2), horse trappings (Fig. 19), belts (Fig. 72), and costumes (Fig. 100).'7 But in images the semiology of precious metal decorations is not as precise, and golden accents serve as more generic emblems of a noble product; in fact, the Cleres femmes’s costumes are much more restrained than the actual ones described in accounts and inventories, showered with gold and studded with pearls and precious stones. Still, the absence of decoration, the monochrome appearance of an outfit, defines women of lower ranks, such as Harmonia’s servant (Fig. 67). In addition to this social hierarchy, women are further categorized into different marital statuses, again in accordance with the estate literature. The young virgins’ hair is covered by a bourrelet (Fig. 14); if loose and uncovered, it is usually a sign of physical or moral

distress (Fig. 48). The status of nonnoble married women is signified by the characteristic hood known as a chaperon, notably worn by Roman matrons (Figs. 76 and 84). Finally, widows are recognizable by their wimples (Fig. $9), also an attribute of religious women (Fig. 20). 'Tertia Aemilia’s miniature offers a splendid example of how meaningful the handling of costumes and accessories can be (Fig. 73). Like their relationship to Scipio, the

headgear of the two women is exchanged so that the married woman, in an elegant orange-red surcoat, wears a bourrelet over a transparent kerchief, while the servant, the sleeves of her surcoat typically rolled up, has a matronly chaperon. The adultery here literally

perverts the correct use of attributes. While pictorial bodies had always been somewhat gendered in the Middle Ages,

, a considerable change in fashion, brought about in the second decade of the fourteenth century, imposed a major difference between male and female clothes and sexualized bodies to a degree never reached before. Amply visible in the Cleres femmes, many heroines wear fitting cottes and surcoats with perilously low décolletages, made possible because of improved sartorial techniques. Tightened by belts worn beneath the breasts—and by men at the waistline—these closely-fitting clothes silhouetted the bodies to a degree previously

unimaginable. Even more momentous was the adoption of the short male dress, which fleshed out bodies along clearly defined gender lines. Especially popular in court circles,

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Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

this “monstration of the sexuated body” was vehemently decried by contemporary moralists, who renewed the longstanding tradition of court criticism with their invectives against the fantastically long trains, sleeves, shoes, and hats, all considered to be properly devilish, corrupt protuberances. What disturbed these observers was that the courtiers’ fashionable body was sculpted into a sartorial spectacle; instead it should have been kept as natural and asexual as possible, though at a safe distance from the other extreme, the bestiality of the wild men.The Cleres femmes abound with “young elegant men,’ the ones a paternalistic Boccaccio holds as responsible for the propagation of lechery as women. Most wear long or half-length houppelandes, tailored in complex ways, with scalloped edges, gold accessories, and excessively pointed shoes, the poulaines (Fig. 58). Other men are garbed in a very short and tight doublet (Figs. 35, 88, and 99). This padded pourpoint attracted even

more heated reprimands because it appeared to leave the wearer “as naked as an animal.” By contrast, the patriarchal caste formed by kings (Color Plate II), clerics (Fig. 1, decorated with the lapels proper to the Masters of Arts), and the hommes de conseil, the judges, their heads covered by an aumusse (Fig. 83), are identified by the long dress, which was later to become a veritable uniform for men exerting professions known collectively as “gens de robe longue.” In images, bodies do not only establish social and gender communalities or dis-

tinctions. Bodies and their limbs move, and, as such, they are the main vector of the expressive and communicative links between different characters, the glue of visual action. It is to this physical grammar, to the contenance and the “language of gestures,’ that I will now turn. Meyer Schapiro’s pioneering study, Words and Pictures, made art historians aware that the positioning of figures on the pictorial field was bound up with symbolic and expressive potentialities. In medieval art, the frontal position usually was reserved for hierarchically superior figures. The divine position par excellence, Schapiro associated frontality with a “theme of state” and likened it to the linguistic mode of “T’ addressing the viewer as “you.’*° By contrast, Schapiro saw the more active profile position as equivalent to “he” or “she.” The question is if such a powerful semiotic distinction still operates

in late medieval art, moreover in a secular product devoid, one presumes, of absolute transcendent values. Indeed, there are no pure, immobile frontal positions in the Cleres femmes. Bodies and heads are always turned sideways, pulled toward the realm of human action. However, many heroines are cast in a near-frontal position, which is at once similar to and differ-

ent from the properly sacramental position. Not surprisingly, near-profiles are mostly associated with enthroned queens and goddesses, venerated Venus being the most frontal character of the manuscript (Fig. 8). Pure profiles, on the other hand, do occur with some frequency. Sometimes they are a means to reiterate, almost redundantly, the negativity of a torturer (Fig. 91), but more often than not they simply connote a subservient

04 |

role, like Boccaccio himself in front of Andrea Acciaiouli (Fig. 2). Given the predominance of three-quarter, near-frontal, or near-profile positions, the traditional opposition between frontal and profile, as explored by Schapiro, is partially attenuated. But it 1s not suspend-

ed. Profile and frontal views are naturalized into more varied positions, which are also

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

instrumental in detaching the figures from the background, and thus in enhancing their volumetric presence. In a structuralist move, Schapiro insisted that the meaning of gestures can only arise out of differential categories, as with the frontal and profile positions. Likewise, postures such as standing, sitting, or lying down have no intrinsic meaning when taken individually. But when combined as polar categories, even such seemingly natural positions can express ontological and hierarchic differences.*" For instance, the ritual combination of seated and kneeling formally individuates scenes of homage (Figs. 105).This is especially the case with goddesses (Figs. 5,7, and 11), so that Juno’s and Venus’s standing position reads as a meaningful departure from the norm (Figs. 6 and 8). In Juno’s case a purely formal consideration might have guided the illuminator, for it would be quite impossible to depict her enthroned in heaven in such a compressed environment. I see the same choice for Venus as more forceful because, already deprived of a halo, this standing position reinforces the idea that she 1s only a mortal woman, worshiped in purely human terms. Like the combination of sitting and kneeling, the juxtaposition of sitting and standing carries analogous hierarchic implications. This can be clearly seen in Busa’s case, where the recipients of her welfare are cast in codified poses of reverence, with the first man being the only one in this manuscript to touch his hat, a form of salute reserved for hierarchically superior per-

sons (Fig. 68). Also, while Thamyris is working in a chair, her assistant stands at the table to grind the colors (Fig. 54). In other words, what is on one level a natural configuration of poses is made more powerful because it fits a pattern of representation, the same that governs, for instance, the miniature of Engeldruda with the two seated patriarchs and two standing youths (Color Plate IV). In the Cleres femmes, recumbent figures are

always and only an indication of death,”} with one exception, the striking image of Epicharis (Fig. 91). Of course she is about to die, but the fact that she is the only living character to be presented in such a position, with no textual basis, makes the subjection of her

body to the torturers even more painful. In other miniatures, dead bodies might be scattered around, limbs dismembered as in Argia’s case (Fig. 28) or, on the contrary, neatly arranged in rows as with Niobe’s death progeny (Fig. 15). The disorderly scattered limbs of the first image are sufficient to express the violent death of a battleground. Indeed, unity and fragmentation are not simply a realistic effect. Medieval culture had always considered order and disorder to be an index of internal, moral values.*4 The manuscript still abundantly relies on this logic. Compared to the restrained curve of those who die for unjust reasons (Fig. 46), a negative character like Cleopatra is made to die out of balance, for the Gothic S-curve of her body line is distorted, as coiled as the serpents that are biting her arms (Fig. 87). Torturers are, not surprisingly, the most unstable characters. In opposition to the contained outline and linear fluidity of the “good” body, they twist their disharmonious limbs in different directions. In late medieval art disorder is not, however, always indicative of a moral deficiency, for it can arise from narrative circumstances alone.”> A tragic destiny can also settle into an unsteady countenance, as is admirably done with Sophonisba, once graciously erect, next dropping backward with widely spread-out arms (Fig. 69). 65

Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes , Jean-Claude Schmitt has recently shown that the Middle Ages elaborated a theory, as well as a praxis, of gestures. Conceptually the most fascinating and influential treatise, Hugh of Saint-Victor’s De Institutione novitiorum, written in the early twelfth century, classified all gestures according to a grid of six moral and aesthetic categories. According to Hugh, a good gestus always results from a dynamic compromise between two negative gesticulationes, one sinning by excess and one by defect, violent or soft, relaxed or impudent, slow or precipitate.?° Even though the pictorial figuratio of gestures in the Cleres

femmes cannot be interpreted as having a term-to-term correspondence with Hugh’s complex taxonomy, it is certain that positive gestures are here characterized by a moderate

detachment of the limbs from the body as well. A good gesture in our miniatures is indeed at the same time gracious (gratiousus) and severe.”” Order and disorder, and what lays in between, equally govern the entire economy of gestures, including what seem to be purely instrumental or practical gestures, as when

a figure 1s handling an object. Nor should it be surprising, at least if one is willing to accept the suggestion that practical gestures are both culturally determined and belong to what Marcel Mauss defined as “bodily techniques.’ The most immediate sign of a disorderly gesture—as opposed to a twisted pose—is the intensity with which it is performed. A telling example is offered by the two smiths, the professional craftsman in Minerva (Color Plate I) and the fashionable courtier compelled to fabricate knives only because of the mistranslation of gladiator in Faustina (Fig. 97). In addition to differences in costumes and deportment, their gestures are not of the same species: the effort of the craftsman, with his ample, intense gesture, is made more graphically real by having his hammer encroach on the border of the miniature, while the effortless mode of the second is expressed by his graceful deportment, limbs only barely detached from a body under control. And, in fact, where the first is absorbed by his work, the second is evidently more interested in contemplating his object of desire. Another infallible sign of excessive effort is conveyed by

the manner in which hands hold an object—a fist against a few fingers, as in the same examples, or two hands rather than just one. Thus, and despite their otherwise “courtly” tone, the firmly clasped hands around the daggers of Thisbe (Fig. 13), Dido (Fig. 41), or Lucretia (Fig. 46) make their self-inflicted deaths a labor-intensive drama.”* Instrumental gestures can be directed to one’s own or someone else’s body. They are relatively rare in the Cleres femmes, in part because of the absence of what Moshe Barasch has termed gestures of despair, mostly gestures of self-injury, a faint echo of which can be found in one of the startled witnesses of Dido’s suicide (Fig. 41). Similarly, very few characters touch one another, as if the mastery of their body language imposed a respectable distance. In fact, the only semantic realms that resort to physical contact are those of love and violence. And so it happens that the two most firmly enmeshed characters are the unnamed young Roman woman and her mother, whom she nurses (Fig. 64). Unlike the transgressive couples in the miniature of Flora that precedes them (Fig. 63), no spatial cleavage is left between mother and daughter, fused as they are into one compact, monumental figure of love. On the other side of the spectrum, all scenes of abductions or expulsions entail some bodily connection, a conventional formula invested with 66

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

varying degrees of intensity, from delicate (Fig. 10) to much more decisive grips (Figs. 49 and 61).?9 It is in scenes of torture that the instrumental gestures are at their most expressive. Thus, in a gestural chiasm, Leaena is pushing the aggressors that pull her away (Fig. 48).°

Finally, there is a domain of instrumental gestures that seems to be gender-specific since women’s physical movement can be expressed by a hand gesture alone: both desperately searching for their husbands, Turia (Fig. 82) and Argia (Fig. 28) merely lift their surcoats with

their left hands. In fact, such physical and emotional movement might be conveyed by an even more minimal hint, the tiny triangle of a shoe protruding under the dress, as 1s the case with Veturia, who thus responds to the more forceful motion of Coriolanus (Fig. 53), or with Megullia (Fig. 52) advancing toward her fiancé’s mobile immobility.” The majority of gestures in painting fulfill a communicative function. They dramatize the relationship between the characters, all the while defining for the viewer the nature of that relationship. Like most other paintings, from whatever period, the Cleres femmes imparts to the upper limbs the widest range of expressive and communicative

power. It 1s not my intention to map out an exhaustive catalogue of gestures—in the manner of Francois Garnier’s useful, if somewhat decontextualized, study—but I will single out some of the more notable regularities and exceptions that affect the historically specific figuratio of gestures.

A certain number of gestures can be said to be emblematic, their meaning stabilized by a long tradition. Such is the case of Christian prayer (Fig. 32, and one of Niobe’s dead daughters in Fig. 15), or of the Christian gesture of benediction, appropriately only performed by Pope Joan (Fig. 100).3” Other easily recognizable gestures include that of decla-

matio, where the pointed index indicates a formalized speech situation such as teaching (Fig. 45) or judging (Fig. 75); the gesture of disputatio, where the right fingers enumerate the points of an argument on the left palm (Fig. 83; and, very subtly, Coriolanus as he confronts his mother, Fig. 53). Being less codified by representational or ritual traditions, most gestures, however, are difficult to read unequivocally. One of the most frequent gestures, arms bent with hand and fingers straight and a detached thumb, is a generic gesture of “monstration,” and as such it is a spatial substitute for speech. It is a predicative gesture that links figures with figures or figures with objects.3+ For instance, one of Rhea Ilia’s sons in the foreground thus points toward the fatal pit (Fig. 43); or wise Solomon aims at the olive branch while

his right hand performs a gesture of declamatio (Color Plate II). When both arms and hands are bent in parallel fashion, the figure seems to be put on the receiving end. It indicates “acceptance” of a speech, action, or object, and can be seen with Opis (Fig. s). Another frequent gesture has the arm bent at a sharp angle, and the palm, turned toward us, is held against the upper body: it expresses “approval, support, acceptance,’ as is evident in Flora’s interaction with her “children” (Fig. 63) or in the choric response of Sulpicia’s servants (Fig. 84). When the arms are raised but detached from the body, the meaning is intense, but depending on the context, it can change from “admiration” (Fig. 39, the suitor to the right) to “fear or refusal” (Figs. 56 and 80).3° This gesture is at its paroxysm in Harmonia’s miniature (Fig. 67), further heightened because it is contrasted 67

Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

with the self-contained, interiorized grief of her servant, who clasps her hands together. Similarly clasped hands, but with lowered arms, change the meaning of the gesture toward expressing “submission” —a gesture stemming from the legal ritual of “bound hands” (Fig. 79).3” Finally, when arms and hands are folded over one’s chest, almost in a sign of the cross, a somewhat more formal notion of “submission” or “acceptance” is transmitted.%*

Typically, this gesture appears in secondary personages, who thus signify their compliance with hierarchically superior figures, as with Opis’s worshiper (Fig. 5) or with the wild man behind Nicaula (Color Plate II). But painted gestures do not function as isolated units. They are part of a rhetorical web in which each gesture is made to respond to another. It is worthwhile detailing at least one example, which should suffice to illustrate the illuminators’ astuteness when having to animate inanimate figures. In the miniature of Clytaemnestra, it is the positions and gestures, as well as the colors, that make the links between the four protagonists intelligible (Fig. 35). Placed on a grassy unifying ground (of the same hue as Agamemnon’s shirt), all figures stand so that no one stands out. Yet Agamemnon, in the foreground, is shown in a full profile, which distinguishes him, the victim, from the others. His spacecreating legs are wide open, as he moves toward the welcoming, if fateful, fur-lined cloak: he is in a position of stable instability, which is underscored by the strongly contrasted col-

ors of his white pourpoint, dark green shirt, and red and green mi-partis tights. Clytaemnestra’s gracious deportment visually redeems her, and her delicate hand gesture is sharply differentiated from the firm grips with which Aegisthus and Orestes wield , their weapons. Looming over his victim, Aegisthus, the bad murderer, is larger than the other figures and hence 1s assimilated to a torturer. “Young elegant” Orestes is separated

from the others by a greater spatial and temporal interval, although his sword points toward his father’s murderer. While I shall examine the contribution of colors to the understanding of a plot in the next section, one can take note of the meaningful chromatic relationship established between father and son, whose almond-green half-length houppelande echoes, in a more subdued tone, the dark green of Agamemnon’ sleeves. Besides, the position of their upper bodies is almost symmetrically reversed, as though attached, yet sev-

ered, from one another. Moreover, red appears in small patches on Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra, and Orestes, as if to insinuate that it is here that we find legitimate family ties. Clytaemnestra is kept apart, for she does not overlap any man and because of her unique blue color—a mark of her gender difference but perhaps also a way to figure her responsibility for this murderous chain of gestures and colors, as the club that menacingly hangs over her head seems to indicate as well. This sensitivity toward the connective and expressive potentials of gestures is of a purely pictorial nature. As such, it was not determined in any way by the iconographic adviser and even less by the text. Indeed, for all their precision, Lebégue’s instructions for the illustrations of Sallust give very few indications in this respect. With the exception of the precisely described gesture of disputatio, his notes enjoin the artist to paint figures that simulate (faire semblant) writing, talking, and so on—leaving it to the illuminators’ judg-

ment as to how this is to be done.*9

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In representational arts, gestural communication does not need to occur through a direct physical or visual contact (shaking hands, pointing at someone) as it does in reality. Visual language can rely on another, often overlooked mode of gestural interplay, that of a semiotic communication activated by the repetition, opposition, or superposition

: of gestures.*° For instance, the three wives of the Cimbrians are petrified into almost identical poses with their “bound hands” (Fig. 79). A purely realistic reading would miss

the fact that the uniform poses of the three women are a specifically representational means to establish the communality of their fate and, by extension, of all other Cimbrian wives. Paulina and the priest who seduces her are similarly brought together (Color Plate III); that is, not only through physical proximity but also by their spatially rhyming gestures of “monstrance,’ pointing in unison toward the bed. In addition to repeating the same gestural configuration, figures can be linked through their superposition on the plane, for overlaps and gaps are an important component of pictorial semiosis. It is once more Jean Lebégue who can guide our understanding. His instructions for the frontispiece miniature of Sallust contain this passage, which corroborates the effectiveness of overlaps as a narrative device:

Outside the building containing his chair will be his squire or servant mounted on a gray horse with a gilt harness, holding a lance and pennant in his left hand and with his other hand the squire will hold his master’s horse, which will also have a gilt harness. Only the front half of his horse will be visible, the rest being screened by the chair, signifying that the said writer has abandoned knighthood for study.” Clearly, Lebégue considers spatial superposition to be an almost self-evident pictorial translation of a temporal transformation, linking the two estates of estude and chevalerie. If the overlap between the two Sophonisbas (Fig. 69) is indicative of a similar causal link (here between life and death), such a conjunction can embody any mutual relationship. So a group of people will exist only insofar as figures overlap, as is beautifully done in the case of Venus where the group of admirers is related to her as to a central axis, the connector between the two symmetrically disposed pairs (Fig. 8). While holding her son (direct physical contact), Nicostrata is joined to the homage-paying Romans in another way, through the inclination of body and head, and through the scroll that leaps from her hand to the rock, from the rock to the kneeling men (Fig. 26). Even more impressive is the concatenation of the three figures in Tertia Aemilia’s deceptively simple miniature (Fig. 73), figures whose adulterous commerce of headgear has already alerted us to the power inherent in even minimal shifts of the representational economy. While the heroine is emphatically turned away from the illegitimate couple, her gown extends over one of her husband’s legs; his other limb in turn overlaps the maidservant’s dress. All figures are knotted together, but in extremis, and Tertia’s relationship is made subtly divergent from the physical embrace that takes place next to her. By the same token, the absence of overlaps is not so much a vector of physical dis-

69

| Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes tance, but of hierarchical or narrative gaps. Already distanced by her unique blue dress, Lucretia is further alienated from the bunched-together group of men, to which she is attached by a tenuous thread only, the tip of her dress (Fig. 46). This miniature also offers a good instance for the consideration of the expressive power of facial mimicry and gazes. As opposed to the fine-tuned social typology and gestural universe, the physiognomical range is very limited in the Cleres femmes, and in general in manuscripts of that time.*” One

has to look carefully—with a magnifying glass—to notice that Lucretia’s eyebrows frown into slightly more diagonal lines while her mouth curves downward. This holds true for other pain-stricken faces, for example, those of Thisbe (Fig. 13) or of the somewhat more expressive Hecuba painted by the second illuminator, whose arms stretch out like distressed pincers (Fig. 33). On the contrary, joy leaves no imprint on a face, so the ideal emotion seems to be that of an emotionless mask. _ The consequence of this is that the much belabored question of the gaze remains problematical for imagery whose expressive powers are not necessarily, or not even primarily, located in the human face. True, as “gates of the spirit,’ eyes were theoretically subjected to a particularly insistent disciplinary regime, especially in the case of women. Since passions and concupiscence were held to be inflamed through the eyes, the gaze was in a potentially permanent status of sin. In manuals of good conduct and other prescriptive literature, the injunction to women to cast their eyes downward returns with an obsessive quality. Boccaccio himself engages the topic in the biography of Medea, when he launches an impassioned warning against women’s “shameless” eyes, well aware that he is, in reality, considering men’s desires. Jason and Hercules offer examples of such an entrapment and prompt Boccaccio to conclude that the “ignorant eyes” of the flesh are lured by external beauty alone.*? Downward-cast eyes are unmistakably imposed onto the virgin Megullia (Pig. 52),44 who is thus guided and transacted to her fiancé, whose glance and those of her male relatives are, by contrast, alert and centered upon her. Seeing is witnessing, a case that could be made for the medieval gaze in general. But Megullia is an

exception (and meaningful because of that) since it is the proper irony of painting to , require that its characters need to look and see. This is almost programmatically expressed by Marcia, whose gaze is perhaps the most insistent of the entire manuscript as she finishes to paint the corners of her lips (Fig. 65), a gesture that restores pleasure to this critical part of the body, mutilated in other women.

The fact is that in our manuscript gazes remain largely unfocused, and so it is difficult to determine where exactly a glance is directed. The general inclination of the head and the body, as well as the orientation of gestures, works in terms that are assimilable to the idea of a gaze, but only partially.45 But this should not be surprising in a system of rep-

resentation that is not predicated on linear perspective with its attendant positioning of viewer and viewed.*° Millard Meiss noted that it was one of the important innovations of the Boucicaut Master to have sharpened and refined the perceptual apparatus of his figures. He also was one of the first Northern artists repeatedly to stage the very act of spectatorship in terms of a gaze, with people looking through architectural frames and openings.*” If in his art spectators tend to be men, the contention that the “male voyeuris70

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

tic gaze” equally pierces the ruined bodies of our Lucretia or Dido therefore needs some qualification.4*® While it is true that both heroines are surrounded by male spectators, these men stare at the women as much with their pointed hands as with their eyes: look at the enraptured animal-men gathered around Circe (Fig. 37). This sort of haptic dialogue is not gender-specific: men can be pointed at, and they can offer the spectacle of their tortured or erotic bodies as well, as is painfully or exuberantly evident when leafing through a copy of the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes.

It seems to me that the presence of men as spectators calls for other, and historically more specific, explanations. For once, the systematic transposition of the concept of “people’”—a male noun—into a group of three or four male figures explains, at least in part, the quite perplexing fact that in the Cleres femmes the proportion between female and male figures is about 2:3.The exceptional character of Boccaccio’s heroines is thus visually underscored by confronting them with a more numerous cohort of men; at the same time, women’s dependence on men for social definition is reafirmed with equal force. But the greater number of men would have an altogether different resonance in a time when the households of the nobility and the upper mercantile bourgeoisie comprised many more men than women.*? Although certainly addressed to women on special occasions (banquets, feasts, jousts, and the like), on a daily basis the “shameless gaze” must have been much more an affair between men. In the courtly display culture, women did not

form an ongoing spectacle, possibly causing both a heightened apprehension and curios- | ity in face of a largely absent female gaze.°°

More restrained than the display images of the Limbourg brothers, the Cleres femmes presents nonetheless a lavish fashion show, a staging of the extravagant attires that nobles accumulated despite the moralists’ objections. Like collecting manuscripts, excessive clothing expenditures and care of the body were means that set the class identity of

nobles apart from competing claims for social preeminence made by other classes.> Contemporary images clearly underwrite, and even encourage, this kind of attention intended for the “eyes of the flesh.’ A quintessential epitome of courtly values, the miniature of Venus exudes no apprehension of visual pleasures (Fig. 8).'The woman is passive but not lewd; neither are the dandies obscene. And I doubt that Philip the Bold would have

been exasperated by this image and that he would have concurred with the moralist Jacques Legrand according to whom “Venus has taken up her abode at the court of France.’>? At any rate, Venus seems quite welcome. Yet Venus and her suitors are regimented in their deportment and gestures. Despite a certain realism of bodies and gestures in the Cleres femmes and coeval art, their articu-

lation is governed by syntactic and ultimately ideological principles. Because of that, bodies and gestures help to define the external and internal identity of a figure, its social, sexual, and emotional makeup. Interestingly, gender distinctions are quite attenuated, for most gestures are performed as much by women as by men. Certainly, casting the eyes downward and lifting the dress are specific to women. But holding a scepter with two fingers is not a sign of effeminacy; it is a mark of social distinction, a bodily technique proper to the aristocracy. On the contrary, the sociological impact of gestures is much more

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Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

pronounced. It consistently singles out low-class, marginal, and unchaste figures as a convulsed humanity who cannot master drives or proper outfit. Panofsky already perceived this when he linked different degrees of realism to content, even to class distinctions. In Parisian products of the early fifteenth century, peasants are drawn coarsely, whereas nobles, with their elongated proportions, affected poses, and the excessiveness of dress and ornament, exhibit what Panofsky called the Manneristic tendencies of the International

Gothic Style. Indeed, if the gesture of a noble sways from the normative belle contenance, it becomes an index of a moral or narrative disorder; as opposed to peasants and tor-

turers, it is claimed not to be an ontological condition.

On Colors and Light In a field captive to the desire to read images, absorbed by iconographic and contextual investigations in which images are at times little more than glossy pre-texts, in a discipline accustomed to work with black-and-white reproductions, it is no surprise that colors are neglected territory. Color, the flesh of painting, rarely gets considered beyond technical, stylistic, or formalist aspects, and notations about the palette are at best poetical.*4 By

contrast, the medieval sensibility seems to have been thoroughly attentive to the expressive opacity of colors. It wanted the bare stone of churches and castles shrouded in ornate coats of blues and reds and golds; it reveled in scintillating works of precious metal and delighted in the language of stones; it invented stained glass and injected incandescent colors into its books. On a theoretical level, optics was regarded as a fundamental science at least from the thirteenth century onward, and its import was both physical and metaphysical.*5 In keeping with the Neoplatonic tradition, light was held to refract the divine effulgence into the earthly realm: along with consonantia and proportio, claritas (brightness) was for Thomas Aquinas and his followers one of the defining criteria of beauty.°° But what, and where, is the claritas of our cleres women? Artists agreed with theologians in considering a beautiful color a brilliant one, one at its maximum of saturation or intensity, as we would say. And as the Middle Ages devised theories and practices distinguishing licit from illicit bodily countenances, so it emphasized the meaningful differences between hues. Pleasing, bright, and good colors were opposed

to unpleasing, dull, and hence bad ones. People of modest condition were made visually different on this level as well, since they were rarely in a position to own colorful textiles. The good dyes needed to produce luminous clothes were much too expensive. And even if by the end of the Middle Ages peasants, craftsmen, and servants could be seen in costumes of hues previously reserved for the nobility, they still would be of a less intense

tone than those that enveloped aristocrats.5” This is true of both the field-workers in Ceres, garbed in discolored blue and unique gray tunics (Fig. 7), or of the attenuated spectrum of Sulpicia’s retinue (Fig. 84). The preference for pure colors had practical consequences for the craft of painting as well. Painters refrained from physically mixing colors on the palette, except when

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Pictorial Elements as Meaning

black and white were used to alter the value of a color, or to produce colors such as pink.** This is visible on the palettes held by our painters; they display closely-set amounts of blue, red, black, or white, with no space left on the board for mixing (Figs. 54, 57, and

65). As Daniel Thompson rightly pointed out, the complexity and difficulty of obtaining viable pigments in the Middle Ages also erected a symbolic barrier against mixing them.°° What we call local color, and tone-on-tone harmonies or chiaroscuro effects, were not sought after in a system that preferred, whenever possible, to proceed by clear tonal contrasts. Medieval art cherished, in sum, what Huizinga (and many others with him)

has stigmatized as the “naive contrasts of primary colours.” Instead of mixing, colors were applied either in layers or with a laying-in color covered by darker or lighter strokes

to create shade and highlight.” In fact, it might even be that workshop practices fostered a sequential application of colors, first one color for all the miniatures in a quire, then another, and so on.°? The inhibition toward mixing colors explains other properties in the Cleres fernmes

and most late medieval painted images. Each form is inhabited by one color alone, so that matter and color do coalesce into a materially substantial unit. In this regard, I find it interesting that crafts’ regulations obliged dyers to exert their trade only in one or two color ranges.“ The monochromatic principle is particularly evident on costumes, where every surface is of one and just one color; it is the combination of different pieces of clothing or the juxtaposition of decorations, such as the scallops on a sleeve or golden embroideries, that provides a polychrome accent. Compared to the Limbourg brothers’ exuberant use of such color combinations, the Coronation Master’s manuscript 1s much more refrained. It also lags behind the taste for profusely decorated costumes that composed the urban spectacle, thus confirming that color amalgamation imposed itself only slowly in late medieval painting. In the Cleres femmes, the only notable exception is Eve’s pink houppelande strewn with edenic flowers. Certainly, this distinguishing mark is meant to convey the idea that her dress was more beautiful than that of any other mortal (Fig. 3).°5 Elsewhere polychrome accents occur in charged contexts: the stripes of a soldier’s tunic

in Hecuba’s miniature (Fig. 33), or the stripe and circle ornament that decorates the sleeveless houppelande of an unusual golden yellow, worn by the grim torturer in Medea (Fig. 17).°° In these cases, the chromatic varietas clearly connotes professions associated with a sense of “noise.” Similarly, mi-partis color combinations are reserved for men’s tights, worn, for instance, by Cassandra’s torturer (Fig. 34; note that the right legging 1s loose)

or by Agamemnon (Fig. 35). The requirement for claritas must also have been an important criterion in distinguishing a good from a less successful painter. The Coronation Master is an accomplished colorist. His (or her?) range encompasses wonderfully vivid blues, reds, pinks, almond ereens, yellows, and mauves—colors that smile, as Dante nicely put it.°” They are luminous and brilliant, almost acid at times, rather like a Mannerist palette. The Coronation Master's miniatures are distinctive for their modeling, whereas his collaborators’ images appear more flat and dull (Figs. 23-31). And it should not be forgotten that the division of labor

in painters’ workshops was tied to another hierarchy that determined the handling of 73

- Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

colors. Apprentices were required to do the physical labor of grinding colors and mixing them with a binder (Fig. $4); as assistants, they could execute secondary tasks, such as painting the backgrounds and decorative elements of the page; finally, after many years of training, they were allowed to “master” the more difficult tasks, modeling architectures, objects, and human figures. Despite the different chromatic sensibilities of our illuminators, I would like to show that there is nevertheless a great unity in the chromatic syntax of the Cleres femmes. Before considering the syntax of colors, however, it is worthwhile briefly to appraise the vocabulary of colors. Certainly blue, which the medieval West had really discovered in the twelfth century, the color of the Virgin and of the French monarchy, became from the thirteenth century onward the archetypal color of royalty and aristocracy.°* Both ultramarine blue, extracted from lapis lazuli, and azurite blue, imported from Germany and Bohemia,

were the most expensive colors along with gold. The amount of both was often carefully determined by the patron, as is indeed the case with some Burgundian accounts that specify the amount of azure and its cost per ounce, as well as its destination for manuscripts.°? As mentioned before, our own Jacques Raponde traded in this luxury good.” Blue supplanted the position held in earlier times by red, and its variant, purple, of which there is one conspicuous remnant in the Cleres femmes, the cape of Empress Constance (Fig. 102), 1n addition to its use on the prestigious ornamental backgrounds. Significantly, blue predominates on women’s costumes, not as a gender-specific color but as a means to underscore their preeminence. In regal couples especially, a blue queen will be contrast-

ed to a red king, the color that is second only to blue (Color Plate II).7’ Dark against light, blue and red compose the most vivid contrast in terms of value. The fact that this color scheme is reversed in Irene’s image—with the empress’s red gown caught between the blue houppelande and the white pourpoint of the two Constantines—dramatically intensifies the gesture of usurpation (Fig. tor). It is an excellent example of how the inappropriateness of an action can be expressed by pictorial means that reverse the usual norms of figuration. Blue is the most stable color, less subjected to modal variations than others, except for white highlights. Red, on the contrary, covers a wide spectrum of shades, from a very dark, almost purple one (Niobe’s husband, Fig. 15), to a saturated red, and a bright, most frequently used orange-red. Of medium value and intensity, pink and green are next in importance after red and blue. Certainly, both were what we would call primary, or basic, hues in late medieval pictorial arts, both north and south of the Alps, used on objects, costumes, furniture, and even on buildings. No particular meaning is attached to them. Love scenes, for instance, do not employ more green than other images; in fact, the example of Megullia confirms that red was often the favorite color for weddings (Fig. 52).”7 While pink is modally stable (highlights are in white, shades in red), green comes in a wide variety of different tones. Most often it is an olive green, made darker with other greens and lighter through the admixture of yellow. Mauve, a weakened purple, is used by the Coronation Master alone, in various shades ranging from dark to a very light, desaturated tone. Taken as such, it is neither a val-

, 74

, Pictorial Elements as Meaning orized nor a devalorized color. The goddess Minerva, for instance, is garbed in a surcoat

of the same color as the ruffled tunic worn by the monumental torturer of Mariamne (Color Plate I and Fig. 86). It is the syntactic context that inflects the meaning in one way or the other. Where Minerva’s mauve is chromatically resolved in her pale almond-green throne and in the surrounding wreath of blue and red craftsmen, the entirely blue dress of Mariamne provides no relief to the torturer’s mauve, which here becomes a sort of dis-

| colored blue.73 Like mauve, bright yellow is a color used only sparingly on costumes, though it appears with some frequency on objects.” If the yellow coating of idols assimiulates them to an impoverished golden object, the more diluted yellow wooden objects, such as Sempronia’s musical instruments (Fig. 78), do not seem to carry any negative meaning. On costumes, however, especially when combined with red, the semantic import of yellow is decidedly pejorative. The late Middle Ages strongly disapproved of this association of hues, so much so that it became the emblematic color of Jews, Saracens, torturers, prostitutes, and other outcasts.7> Red and yellow appear only on one figure, the man who is about to behead the virgin Polyxena, garbed in a yellow tunic shaded with orange and wearing hood and tights of a same orangy red (Fig. 32). Finally, the palette includes peripheral colors, such as white, black, grays, browns, and ochres, which seem to be the most denotative and least pliable to expressive functions.7°

Veils, inner garments, and ermines are painted in white, and this rhythmical application of small patches of white, and to a lesser extent of black and of posc, the color of flesh, relieves the intensely colored visual field by introducing visual pauses that separate colors

from one another and prevent their optical blending. Very much in vogue at the Burgundian court a few years after the completion of the Cleres femmes, black is almost nonexistent, except on accessories and a few dresses.7” The choice of black for a major piece of clothing, especially when combined with pink, does, however, seem to be meaningful. Thus both Medea (Fig. 17) and the procuress who hands Europa to Jupiter (Fig. 10) wear pink and black outfits. This color combination also appears on Leontium’s fashionable suit-

or (Fig. 58), and of the three matrons who question Claudia Quinta’s chastity one is dressed in black, the other in pink (Fig. 76). Clearly, this color combination has a negative

slant, though I have not been able to find confirmation in social practices. On the contrary, we do know that the combination of black and red was associated with women of a low social status.7® Pertinently, the miniaturist shows us Sulpicia wearing an inner black gown under a surcoat of a dark red tinge, sleeves rolled up as is also often the case with lower-class women (Fig. 84). But to make it clear that this is just a temporary disguise, she is depicted casting aside an ermine-lined green houppelande. Cunningly, the realistic notation of red and black is used for a character who is only pretending to be a servant. It is

a wonderful example of how realism in representation can be summoned to sustain deception. This quick overview of the vocabulary of colors in the Cleres femmes already demonstrates that chromatic assonances and dissonances are the key element. Taken indi_ vidually, colors do not have much meaning, and the notion of a fixed color symbolism is altogether irrelevant here. To be sure, there were more formalized representational systems

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with a stable color code, such as heraldry, liturgy, and the liveries of a princely house (red, green, and white for Burgundy). But in painting, some colors, such as the “bad” yellow, have at best an emblematic value, associated with more or less specific cultural connotations.”?

When engaging in a syntactic analysis of the colors of past artifacts, terminolo gy, that is, the conceptualization of color categories, poses a serious challenge. Codified in the eighteenth century only, the modern distinction between primary (blue, red, yellow) and secondary (purple, orange, green) colors is anachronistic and misleading.*° Instead of the color wheel, the most widespread medieval model was patterned after the rainbow. Three, five, or seven basic colors were thus thought to proceed in a continuous line that included white and black. Although the concepts of contrast and complementarity did exist, they were not fixed as in modern color theory. And Eva Frodl-Kraft, whose innovative work on Gothic color configurations will guide my analysis, demonstrates that the fundamental building blocks of Gothic paintings consist of two polar colors forming “a harmony” (Gegenfarbenakkord or Zweiklang). And because each of these

two colors is linked to another color as well, the entire image is finally woven together , through these “‘double links” (Doppelbindungen).*' To simplify the language, I will limit myself to speaking of chromatic pairs and contrasts. Centered on panel paintings and stained glass, Frodl-Kraft’s analyses show that the most prestigious and frequent harmonies were, respectively, blue and red (blue-green and crimson) and green and red (bluish-green and purple). Compared to the blue and yellow combination, the preceding ones contain minimal differences in value, a factor that might have contributed to their favored status. The late medieval palette, including that of the Coronation Master, is more extensive and the main colors do not coincide with those individuated by Frodl-Kraft, who, in fact, leaves miniature painting aside. In the Cleres femmes, as in many other contemporary iluminations, the main chromatic pairs are blue and pink (cold), on the one hand, and red and green (warm), on the other. Consequently, blue and red and pink and green form the

main chromatic contrasts. But the particular ways one decides to compose the chromatic pairs and contrasts is not as important as the fact that it is always two hues, not one or three, that form a basic unit. When a character appears in an entirely monochromatic outfit, with no admixture of another color, it is a sign of a simple, too simple dress. By extension, it connotes some sort of narrative or emotional deficiency, as with suicidal Hippo’s red cotte (Fig. 51) or Harmonia’s maidservant’s blue-grayish dress dotted with blood dripping from the slits inflicted by the murderous knives (Fig. 67). And, as said, torturers tend to be chromatically loaded, with too many colors on their costumes. They are visually too loud. A truly refined analysis of a chromatic system would attend not only to variations in hue, value, and intensity but also to the quantitative and spatial distribution of colors—a topology of colors, as it were. But because there are so few color investigations of late medieval illuminations, I will simplify my task by using the abstracted concept of a color, that of genus (“blueness”). According to Michel Pastoureau’s valuable anthropologically-oriented investigations, this is how medieval people would have conceptual76

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ized colors. Notions of contrasts and intensity were more important in establishing distinct categories than the specific tonality of a given color.*? But let me turn to the color syntax at work in some concrete examples. In the miniature of Nicaula (Color Plate II), one can see that Solomon is accented through the language of colors as much as by his seated position. Solomon’s orange-red robe longue is the most luminous patch in the miniature, while the black and purple cloth on which he is seated is embroidered with gold, making it congruent with the dark yet luminescent diapered background. Each of the two main figures is conceived as a main chromatic pair (blue/pink and red/green); hence they are conjoined by the main chromatic contrast (blue/red). The main characters thus attract the more intense colors and hues, the ones with the most claritas. While both the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon are self-sufficient chromatic figures, the retainers in the back, who duplicate the main action, are incomplete when taken individually. They also form a basic chromatic contrast but need the main couple to be chromatically complete. Insofar as Nicaula and Solomon are associated by color repetition to the woman and the man in the background, respectively, gender distinctions are secured as well. Yet Nicaula’s pink dress is more saturated than her servant’s, so that the wild men’s desaturated furs provide a chromatic middle ground. The bluish wild man also builds a bridge between Nicaula and her servant, since his color both echoes the hue of the queen’s cape and the value of the servant’s pink dress. In other words, these figures are made to belong to the same group, the visitors from the “uncivilized” country. What is also evident is that, unlike the wild men, neither blue nor pink renders Nicaula and her embassy exotic. However, taken as syntactic “building blocks,’ colors efficiently interweave figures belonging to the same national, social, and gender categories. A similar pattern of colors can be discerned in Engeldruda’s linearly constructed miniature (Color Plate IV). Father and husband are composed of the exact same chromatic pair, a deep red and darkish olive green.*} But they are used in a chiastic arrangement between the inner and outer garments, which underscores both the proximity and difference of father and husband. Engeldruda is tied to both, since her costume takes up both red and green, albeit in small areas (red bourrelet and green undercoat, of which only the tip of the sleeve is visible). Emperor Otto’s blue cape and Engeldruda’s pink dress respond to each other as the other main chromatic pair, so neither is a chromatically complete entity. Otto and the father are opposed by the main contrast (blue and red), the two young people by the other one (green and pink). In sum, all figures are laced together by the use of only four colors, but each of their mutual relationship remains as individual as it is in the written plot. Another order of reading could emphasize the linear concatenation of the figures. Engeldruda’s pink is used on the emperor’s exoticized hat (where it veers toward purple), while green and red are made to alternate between the inner and outer garments of the father, the husband, and Engeldruda, making their bond more intimate. Otto’s separate status is further underscored by the fact that he lacks green, and that the dark tonality of his unique blue cloak is put into relief against the whitish cloth of honor. Engeldruda, by contrast, is the lightest colored patch, while husband and father, the secondary characters in the narration, represent the middle ground between dark

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and light. Finally, Engeldruda’s three colors all reappear on the men’s costumes, which one could read as an index of her dependence on them. After all, Engeldruda’s story exemplifies the notion that women’s social definition depends on men—be they suitors, protectors, husbands, or fathers eager to market their daughters. The decision to interpret color configurations in one way or another signals the limits of such an analysis. Colors establish links and distinctions; they order and classify. But in order to find a meaning to such operations,

one has to resort to the text, that is, to the order of discourse. I will take a last example, whose spatial construction is circular and whose narrative differs from the previous examples. Forming the middle axis, the goddess Minerva is set

apart from the other figures by being both higher on the picture plane and harboring a unique color combination (Color Plate I). Offset by the blue and golden background pattern, her light almond-green throne is covered with a red cloth, while her surcoat is of a pale, desaturated mauve, under which she wears an olive green cotte, also the color of her belt. Only this olive green is to be seen again on the men personifying her inventions: it traces a diagonal line, from the tunic of the smith, through Minerva’s body, to the houppelande of the banker.The other diagonal of this chromatic X is provided by a red thread that

connects the stockings of the oil producer, through Minerva’s body to the brighter orange-red of the flute player. The craftsmen are associated according to a different logic. A main chromatic pair is constituted by the two “lowest” workers in the front, chiastically crossing pink and blue; the flutist and banker in the back, of a more elevated social status,

are similarly intertwined by the association of red and green. The smith occupies an intermediate position, since his pink and green outfit participates in both groups. White, gray, black, and several browns appear throughout the surface; though reserved for peripheral spots, they link the figures on yet another plane, that of their tools. It is fascinating to

observe that the absence of direct communication through gestures and gazes is counterbalanced by this tight web of chromatic rhymes, which welds the characters into a unified chromatic mosaic. Such syntactic readings of color configurations could be multiplied. But I hope that these examples are sufficient to give an idea of how the “language” of colors works in other

than purely formal terms. Nevertheless, colors do resist verbalization insofar as they belong to a properly semiotic level of painting. And if they are not applied haphazardly, they do not work like a predictable code either. At the most, one can say, after Julia Kristeva’s apt characterization, that colors are “heavy with semantic latencies.’*4 Furthermore, we see that the principle of variance is at work here, for it is the combination and contrasts of a relatively small number of colors that crystallize each miniature into a specific “chromatic figure.”® Because of that, colors extend their power beyond the human figures across the entire surface of representation. Buildings and objects, grounds and backgrounds, are not

mere neutral decorative supplements; they actively participate in the general syntax of

, an image. To illustrate this point I will take another example, the miniature of Paulina (Color Plate III). The blue robes of the priest and of “Anubis” (one and the same person despite their different appearances) are appropriately refracted by the desaturated 78

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

blue of the cupola, and all are linked to the pale pink stone of the temple. Green Paulina— perhaps somewhat less fittingly—forms a main chromatic pair with the huge orange-

| red bed, to which the false god’s red halo responds like an echo. But consider how even the tiles of the floor have been carefully chosen: whereas they are only red and yellow in the antechamber, green tiles have been added in the other room, hence complementing the red bed, all the while drawing green Paulina irresistibly toward that den of iniquity. The colors used for architectures differ in terms of value and saturation, but the color range reiterates that of the costumes—pinks, mauves, yellows, grayish-blues, greens, basically “any color you wish” as proposed by Cennini.*° The liquid and less intense colors of the polychrome architectural landscape thus emerge from the greens, browns, and

ochres that are the natural colors of nature. With the exception of one type of bright orange background (for instance, Fig. 65), the ornamental backgrounds tend to be of a lower value than the rest of the miniature, especially when the ground is very light.*” The tiny alternating patches of gold, blue, red and purple of the backgrounds constitute, in fact, a third, distinct chromatic universe that is similar to the decorative elements on the pages, borders, rubrics, initials, and line-endings. This realm is the most heavily dependent on tradition, and backgrounds are a densely authoritative closure from which the more dar-

| ing chromatic experiments of the human world detach themselves. There is another interesting difference between the chromatic conception of the figures, backgrounds, and tiled ground planes, on the one hand, and the objects and natural grounds, on the other. The first group resorts to smooth and even textures that conceal individual brush strokes, save for areas of shade and highlight. By contrast, objects and natural elements are painted with a technique in which dark and individually perceptible brush strokes are applied over a lighter laying-in color. In other words, natural textures are created by subtracting from a color’s purity or claritas. Furthermore, a microscopic language preserves the identity of each pictorial body. The texture of stones, fur, water, wood, or grass are conveyed by brush strokes of varying density, shape, and direction: small vertical lines for natural grounds, scales and dots for architectures, elongated lines and

scales for furniture, long lines and fine grids for rocks. Except for wood with its characteristic linear and circular veins,** the mimetic import of these incisions is very tenuous, thus further qualifying our modern notions of realism. So far, I have omitted the question of light. In fact, what strikes the observer of medieval illuminations, at least up to the Boucicaut Master’s bold investigations of luminescent surfaces, is their homogenous brightness. Because there are no external, directed light sources, brilliance in medieval art is a quality inherent in objects rather than an external and transient manifestation. And yet, in the Cleres femmes’s miniatures, as in all late

, medieval painting, there are clearly differential values provided by the addition of darker or lighter strokes for shades and highlights.*? Darker tones are applied over a light laying-in color or, conversely, lighter tones over a darker ground tone, and this corresponds to what Italian treatises called incidere and matizare.°° Unlike earlier medieval modeling, these techniques, introduced by Italian painters, provide volumes with a definite three-

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dimensional relief. Yet the modalities of lighting and the distribution of highlights are not easy to understand. On costumes, the system is quite regular and specific. For the most part there are three values on a costume; often, but not always, it is the most protruding element, the one close to the picture plane, that will be the lightest in tone regardless of the figure’s spatial orientation, as is the case, for instance, with Minerva’s knees and breasts (Color Plate I). Highlighting is usually done with white, whereas shades are obtained by a darker value of the same hue, for example, red on orange-red as on Solomon’s cape (Color Plate II), or dark pink on a medium pink on Engeldruda’s dress (Color Plate IV). In a few cases of yellow costumes, the illuminators resort to another technique, known by the Italian term cangiantismo, whereby changes in values are indicated through a shift in hue, here red (the cloak of Sappho’s last student, Fig. 45). Ground planes systematically respond to another principle, known as “decreasing

luminosity.’°? According to this method, desaturated hues are kept close to the foreground and grow increasingly darker as we move toward the rear, where the groundplanes join the dense background surface (Color Plate I). In the case of rocks and hills, the sense of volume is obviously enough created by an alternation of highlighted and shaded areas; but even though each level’s value is different, globally they obey the principle of decreasing luminosity (Color Plate II, or Fig. 93, with an abrupt change of color midway across the ground). In fact, this is exactly what Cennini advised painters to do: “And the farther away you have to make the mountain look, the darker you make your colors;

and the nearer you are making them seem, the lighter you make the colors.’ This convention 1s opposite to aerial perspective, where an “increasing luminosity” commands that colors get lighter and thin out as we recede into depth. What is important to note is that in this system of representation, the decreasing luminosity works for tiled floors and landscapes alike, thus establishing an essential bond between the “interior” and the “‘exte-

rior’ —a question to be taken up with the study of space in the next section. The application of highlights to objects is again different. If we take as an example the studio of Thamyris, we see that the principle of decreasing luminosity invests all objects (Fig. 54).The tiled floor grows darker midway through, at the point of contact with the low table’s rear angle, as if this virtual connection was causing a real modification of the surrounding elements’ behavior. On the objects, however, light does not move from front to back. Instead the luminosity decreases depending on an object’s orientation, as on the table in front of the painter where the light moves from left to right. Again, light is not

conceived as an independent and homogeneous phenomenon but sticks to the object as its own luminescence. Although this might be hard to perceive in a reproduction, there are other principles at work.The corners of objects that are turned toward us are systematically highlighted with white strokes; and, seen from above, the narrow horizontal planes (on the easel, for instance) escape the principle of decreasing luminosity, for they remain of a constant value (this can be seen quite well on the judges’ stalls in Hortensia’s image, Fig. 83). By doing so, horizontal planes are kept from optically receding into depth; they remain diagonal, captive of the picture plane.®* Thanks to this method, objects can 80

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gain depth and volume, but they are prevented from moving away. They seem to oscillate—

a movement that seems paradoxical to a perspectival gaze—between a ground plane that , extends into depth and a bi-dimensional background. In the next section, I shall examine the spatial implications and effects of this double reference to depth and plane, but it is important to acknowledge it here because it proves that the illuminators did not apply

, light in an arbitrary way. In summary, here are the different rules that guide the miniatures’ complex distributive use of lighting: backgrounds are not modulated, though gold and white impart luminous accents; costumes resort to low, middle, and high values of a given hue to indicate reliefs and depressions; a decreasing luminosity determines the handling of ground planes; highlights follow objects’ orientations, except for their horizontal planes, in which a uniform luminosity is maintained. Suffused by brightly colored miniatures, the Cleres femmes, like medieval pictures in general, affirms an aesthetic and semantic preference for chromatic contrasts. Never formally theorized, this logic seems nevertheless to have been clearly perceived by contemporary observers. Jacques Legrand, for instance, wrote in his Archiloge Sophie: “And as we see the painter applying to an image several beautiful and ugly colors so that each shows up better by contrast to the other, so we can discuss (reciter) both the good and the evil in our doc-

trines: the good to authorize it and the evil to repudiate it, so that we can always better

demonstrate the truth.’95 This concordia discors 1s all the more appropriate in our context , because Legrand uses this reasoning to justify the study of pagan authors. His appreciation of the contrast between pleasing and ugly colors confirms that this was indeed the dominant trope through which the action of colors was understood around 1400.” As such, the chromatic language of the Cleres femmes does not function on a fundamentally different semantic level than its costumes and gestures. If colors do little to enforce sexual division, they nevertheless powerfully convey hierarchical and social differences. For instance, we have seen how the black and red combination or the attenuated degree of brightness and saturation on Ceres’ peasants’ tunics do establish intelligible distinctions. Both of these cases respond to social practices,®” but this is rare, for in painting internal considerations have a more important share in establishing patterns of meaning.

Colors enhance our understanding of the histoires, all the while absorbing us into the miniatures’ sensual surfaces of illusions. Colors help to individualize and typify, to associate

and dissociate human figures, and, finally, to reinforce the hierarchical divisions of the painted universe. In that sense, colors are an essential means by which to organize a system of representation that exudes the illusion of order. As in most late medieval paintings, the Cleres femmes’s pictorial world is divided into three distinct spheres: that of the figures, of the ground planes and objects, and, finally, of the backgrounds, each being equipped with

its own set of chromatic regulations and possibilities. Eva Frodl-Kraft proposed to interpret this chromatic partition as a reflection of a contemporary worldview. As humankind was considered to reign over reality, so painted figures were conjured up to preside chromatically over their environment, made visually subordinate by its less attractive, desaturated, and, as it were, more mimetic colors.% Yet the distinction between the three domains is by

no means absolute. First, the principle of variance holds true for all realms, so that cosSI

Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

tumes, objects, grounds, and backgrounds each carry only a restricted number of hues. Second, some characteristics circulate across all levels, even though every sphere maintains a distinctive identity provided by colors and lighting. For instance, the same blue that is

abundantly used for the backgrounds also appears, though of a lighter value, on cos- , tumes, and then, with even less intensity, on buildings. The light olive-green characteristic of textiles migrates toward trees, while a similar red colors both costumes and roofs. And it is this complicity of colors and complexity of the distribution of highlights and shades

that will be suspended when Renaissance art will require costumes and architectures and natural elements to be segregated by different color schemes, only to be unified by a unique but external source of light.

On Spatial Inscriptions Embodied for our eyes, the Cleres femmes’s figures do not hover over the colored surface, nor are they projected into a space that pierces the page with an illusion of limitless depth. We are neither in Gothic nor in Renaissance art, are neither confronted by a planar layering of surfaces nor by a fully developed three-dimensional environment, but are in between these two poles, these two historical constructs. Although the passage from one mode of symbolizing the world to the other did not proceed as an uninterrupted linear evolution, in hindsight it is difficult to deny the ineluctable nature of this change or simply ignore Brunelleschi’s and Alberti’s perspectiva artificialis, invented only a few years after

the completion of the Cleres femmes. One can eschew the determinism of teleological approaches, however, and can problematize those art-historical narratives that are prone to discuss late medieval images in terms of what it lacks, with epithets ranging from “archaic,” “composite,” “contradictory, “almost unified,’ or “quasi-perspectival” to “not

entirely scientific.”°? In order to account for the change from the medieval to the Renaissance representational space, it is as if art history had to posit not merely a median moment that partakes of both but also its adulterated nature. The following analysis of late medieval spatial problems, as articulated in the Cleres femmes, will rely on various earlier accounts, particularly on Panofsky’s influential and in many regards unmatched inquiries into the rendering of space in pictorial arts;'°° at the same time, I hope to be able to question the appropriateness of considering the late medieval space as an inherently contradictory “symbolic form.” But how does one even begin to describe the “space” of the miniatures, deprived as they are of a “unifying” principle, be that surface or space? And, in fact, is the notion of “‘space” appropriate for this type of art, as for medieval art in general? Since “space” for us is inextricably bound up with perspectival implications, it might be better to proceed

with a very literal reading, and to consider the ground planes and backgrounds and depth-creating devices separately before assuming that they constitute a space, let alone that it is an incomplete one. In fact, one should more radically reverse the usual approach and posit that the fundamental problem of representation is the historically variable mode 82

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of its figures’ inscription, with one polarity being the complete affirmation of the surface (emblematized, say, by Mondrian’s unremitting quest), the other, the attempt to negate it,

as exemplified by the window metaphor of Renaissance art. As is typical of late medieval painting, the ground planes in the Cleres femmes are

an extension of the narrow ground strips of Gothic art, and like them they provide a “collective ground plane” for the elements of representation.’ Although fairly deep, they do not vanish into the infinite, stretching only somewhat beyond the figures and objects, to which they are functionally and conceptually related. Since Pucelle’s translation of Tuscan landscape painting into the French pictorial tradition in the early fourteenth

century, painters have explored various possibilities for representing natural environments. Sometimes, as in the famous manuscript of the collected works of Guillaume Machaut,'} a grassy surface, graced with ponds and trees, covers the field of representation almost entirely. By the end of the fourteenth century, in the art of a Jacquemart de Hesdin, for instance, the natural grounds acquire more depth through greater modeling, and through the multiplication of virtual surfaces of inscriptions, such as small rocks overlapping one another. In the Boucicaut Master’s and the Limbourg brothers’ generation—a few years younger than that of the Cleres femmes’s illuminators—the ground planes reach both a considerable extension and a definite volumetric presence, opening onto vistas with clearly marked foregrounds, middle-grounds, and backgrounds. By contrast, the landscape of images made around 1400-1405 is relatively shallow, generally composed of a ground plane interspersed with natural elements.’ A few rounded, low hills aside (Fig. 64), the rock-platform ground plane is definitely the most frequent landscape indicator in the Cleres femmes. Of Italo-Byzantine origins, according to Miriam Bunim, rock-platforms rise over several levels, tangible and volumetric." As in Nicaula’s miniature, the vertical and horizontal planes of each level are painted in different colors so as to create a sense of volume (Color Plate I). Moreover, the rock-platform is clearly cut by the border of the miniature, which detaches it from the picture plane, thus acting as a repoussoir device for the figures. In fact, it is likely that our illuminators used the trick recommended by Cennino Cennini: he advised artists to copy

from nature a large, rugged, and dirty stone, which would consequently appear much

larger in proportion to the other elements, a practice still in favor in modern cinematography.'°° In addition to this traditional, relatively shallow, and self-contained natural foundation, the illuminators of the Cleres femmes resort to another conventional device by

adding rocks-as-mountains, sometimes vertically extended by trees. The Coronation Master prefers to push his rocks—conceived as isolated forms rather than overlapping planes—toward the background (Figs. 17 and 71). In fact, the second illuminator, the one we would consider weaker, is more adventurous in conceiving the deeply layered landscape of Procris, interspersed with rocks and trees that create the different planes that

frame the twofold narrative (Fig. 27 ). Sometimes improperly compared to theatrical coulisses,"°” such rocks are thus a powerful vector of narrative differentiation. A splendid example is provided by Sulpicia’s miniature, in which both the separation and the reunion of wife and husband are made palpable by the rock (Fig. 84). It physically disunites the two

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protagonists (no surface contact), while at the same time it allows them to bend toward each other. Similarly, the rock onto which the petrified Niobe grows introduces a spatial as much as a temporal (narrative) hiatus into the image (Fig. 15). And indeed, Jean Lebégue’s instructions confirm that a spatial subdivision of a histoire, its different quartiers de la place,

was meant to convey temporal articulations as well.’ With the exception of the tiny, distant castle of Medea’s image, no object can be posed upon these rocks-as-hills. Trees, either solitary or bunched together, are the only elements that can be planted upon a rock.’°? Although lush and of different varieties, those trees are invariably depicted in the manner described long ago by Bella Martens: a trunk

grows into two branches, each of which yields another two branches, and so forth (for instance, Fig. 81)."° However, trees are planted with a great deal of attention to their aesthetic and syntactic qualities. A single tree usually serves to balance off a lonely figure, even

swaying toward her or him, in the manner of a pointed index finger (Fig. 50). When posed in the middle, the tree clearly functions as a connective tissue between two figures, as in Hypermnestra’s miniature (Fig. 14). All the while compensating for the architectural mass to the right, the tree here unites the lovers soon to be separated. Furthermore, it also plays a symbolic role, since it qualifies the site of the lovers as a natural setting—a locus amoenus of sorts—and contrasts it to the man-made construction that expels the evil father.

The placement of multiple trees, not yet naturalized into forests, is not left to chance either. To take a single example, one can look at the image of Queen Zenobia (Fig. 99). The image is divided into two halves, which concur with the heroine’s duplication. To the right, the forest-dwelling Zenobia is seated in front of a rock-mountain thickly covered with trees. The central tree in the back demarcates this natural area from the realm where reigns the standing queen and military chief. This same miniature also contains a strange incongruity, for two of the trees have been cut so as not entirely to conceal animals in hiding. It might be nature at its most unnatural, but it was a popular device in early fifteenth-century art, as it appears at the bottom of Orithya’s and Antiope’s image as well (Fig. 19), and as it was to be especially exploited in the circle of the Boucicaut Master.™

Painting tree trunks is not a matter of spatial bricolage but should be understood as an effect of the hierarchization of the represented world. Like the divisions enacted by colors, cutting the trees reinforces the preeminence of living beings over the “space” that sur-

rounds them, which has to yield, to disappear, whenever it threatens to encroach on them. Living beings appear as visually fully present; too substantial overlaps would amputate part of their being in a very literal way. Put differently, this also means that there is no empty space between Zenobia’s tree and the stag, even if their silhouettes do not overlap

on the ground plane. In addition to rocks and trees, watercourses form an integral part of the natural vocabulary of the Cleres femmes. There are rivers, such as the one thriving with fish in Lavinia’s pastoral miniature (Fig. 40). I wonder whether the addition of this river, not mentioned by the text, was the illuminator’s conceit by which to allude to the main theme of the biography: that is, the voluntary partition of the kingdom of Laurentium by 84

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Ascanius. After all, in late medieval Europe national and regional boundaries did not exist as abstract cartographic lines but as tangible markers, trees, rivers, hills, crosses, and so on." Cloelia’s Tiber (Fig. 50), conceived as a semicircular basin seen in section, looks like Isis’s or Hippo’s Mediterranean (Figs. 9 and $1). But the same Mediterranean can transmute itself into a triangular shape, wedged in between the miniature’s border and the

reversed triangle that forms the shore. Such undifferentiation tends to be taken as an illustration of the schematic and conventional nature of medieval art. I prefer to see it as an example of variance whereby the same pictorial signifier “water” can be mobilized for a variety of different referents. That there is a logic to these permutations becomes clear

upon discovering that the triangular construction is only used in the case of islands, whether Europa’s Crete (Fig. 10), Hypsipyle’s Hesperides (Fig. 16), or Medusa’s Lemnos (Fig. 21). Water expanses are painted, as in all medieval art, very much like vertical planes: water does not yet extend into depth, nor does it exist on its own, as an open sea stretching toward the horizon. In fact, there is no horizon line, no infinite limit, in the domestic universe of the Cleres femmes. All examples above prove that the power of spatial qualification is carried on by conventional objects and sites: trees, rocks, water. Acting as building blocks or spatial ciphers, they can be juxtaposed and combined, but they do not create a homogeneous, infinite, and abstract extension. In fact, even costumes hold the power of spatial qualification, as do the outdoor capes worn only by Nicostrata (Fig. 26) and Nicaula (Color Plate II).

These garments make their exterior more exterior, specifically connecting it to the notion of travel. A little like late medieval theatrical props,™ the rocks’ and trees’ autonomy in defining an exterior is particularly evident in the case of the many indeterminate eround planes." Indeterminate grounds are always contiguous to the frame, except for one very beautiful case, where a repoussoir artifice suspends the indeterminacy of the eround plane (Fig. 44).The step at the bottom, handsomely decorated with moldings, and the stony bench at the rear of Gaia Cyrilla’s image transform the entire plane into a terrace where the queen and her maidservants are industriously fabricating cloth. Extending into depth and perfectly flat, indeterminate ground planes are, however, mostly pure pictorial sites, with no specific referential quality.The texture of these indeterminate ground planes may imitate grass or earth, but their use is polyvalent. They function as a unifying site for disparate loci, trees and rocks (Fig. 79), but also architectures (Figs. 61 or 104) or pieces of furniture (Color Plate I and Fig. 85)."5 And at times they do not hold anything, so that we are in a sort of no-man’s-land punctuated by a frieze of human figures (Figs. 8 and 100). Here again, undifferentiation is at the same time multivalence.

The last category of ground planes to consider is that formed by tiled floors. Supposed to define an interior space, they have largely been discussed in terms of their approximation, or not, to linear perspective. It is true that the orthogonal grid of tiled floors

is most efficient in generating a space according to projective geometry, where a vanishing point imaginarily propels the viewer inside the representational boundaries. But, in the absence of linear perspective, what do our illuminators create?-—the ground plane of a space? Let us examine first whether and how the tiled floors recede into depth. 85

Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes Certainly, the principle of decreasing luminosity is instrumental in creating a sense of recession, for it subdivides the floor plane into different zones. Strangely, the depth-creating function of degrees of luminosity is not discussed in linearist discourses on perspective, which focus exclusively on the design of the floor grid. As far as this is concerned,

two methods are used in the Cleres femmes, both of them typical for paintings made around 1400. In the first and most frequent case, the perpendiculars, while traced diagonally, remain equidistant from one another. This is very noticeable in Marcia’s miniature, in which the background grid (parallel to the picture plane) clashes with the diagonal tracing of the floor grid, thus explicitly contrasting two opposite modes of inscription (Fig. 65). The second mode of diagonalization can perhaps best be observed in Penelope’s image (Pig. 39). Although remaining equidistant here as well, the perpendiculars now converge toward a middle axis. In fact, the vanishing axis is made visible at the very bottom, where the first tile is not concealed under the platform on which Penelope is simultaneously attacked and defended. In his Perspective as Symbolic Form, Panofsky held the first manner of parallel construction to be irrelevant, for it does not generate any foreshortening. More popular in the North than in Italy, he treated it as a “completely primitive representation of

the ground plane.” For the vanishing-axis procedure (Fluchtachsenverfahren), which allegedly announces the epiphany of the perspectival vanishing point, Panofsky traced, on the contrary, a fairly detailed genealogy back to its originator, Duccio."” He also discussed the challenging task that painters faced in handling the central area where the converging orthogonals meet—a task often solved by what Panofsky nicely called a spatial “fig-leaf?’"* a figure or an object placed right upon this problematic area. Such is indeed the case with Penelope’s platform or with Boccaccio’s pulpit (Fig. 1). These two miniatures nevertheless present a capital difference with the vanishing-axis procedure as

analyzed by Panofsky: instead of converging upward and backward, the lines move downward and forward. It is clear that the orthogonals of the floor are made to follow the outline of the platforms, so that one can infer that floor and object respond to each other as juxtaposed but discontinuous entities."? This also amounts to saying that the perpendiculars “recede” toward us, as if they were pushed forward by the background. If anything, the viewer would be assigned to a position located in front of the image, that is, in front of the page that his or her hands are holding; the beholder is, as Gurevich put it, expelled by such pictures.'° According to Panofsky’s narrative, the miniatures of the Cleres femmes are doubly archaic. Not only are a majority of the tiled floors merely diagonalized, but the vanishingaxis procedure has not been superseded by the more “advanced” solution of the “vanishing area." One need not necessarily deny that at any given moment there are progressive and conservative pictorial propositions; the problem with a perspectivally informed reading of late medieval space is that it prevents one from beholding, in positive terms, the coexistence of a variety of them.”? Rather than envisaging advanced solutions as a prefiguration of the “right” solution to come," it is historically more accurate to say that some spatial procedures were ulteriorly retained, while others were abandoned. As the “history 86

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

finalized by the perspective of the perspective”™* has failed to do justice to the Romanesque

and Gothic layering of planes, so it has not been able to think of late medieval space,

working from and with the earlier tradition. Projecting backward a spatial norm, perspectivally ordained readings can only see a contradiction between the effective co-pres-

ence of the plane (background) and its negation (transparent ambience), instead ofa dynamic double affirmation, whose only contradiction is to have historically preceded the later and supposedly absolute model of a unified space. In fact, perspectivally informed readings can be deconstructed further. I have said that tiled floors are automatically associated with the notion of an interior. But is this association really so indisputable? While Bella Martens’s meticulous study of Meister Francke and his French predecessors still offers one of the finest approaches to spatial issues, her assumption

that the combination of a tiled floor and an ornamental background constitutes a , Raumquadrant (“space quadrant’) is clearly problematic.’ Taken over from the vocabulary of projective geometry, this notion, or variations thereof, has entered mainstream art-historical | accounts. Martens was actually careful to use quotation marks when referring to the “wall” in the background, but more recent studies have taken the analogy to a partial spatial cube more literally.?° The inevitable corollary of this conception is that the ornamental background is seen, implicitly or explicitly, as a “wall” or a “tapestry”; that is, as a mimetic figure. But the visual evidence clearly denies this, for landscapes would then be equally closed off by a wall, and moreover by a wall that does not look at all like a wall.’”” Panofsky’s reading of such “interiors” was both more complex and original. When discussing Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Annunciation in Early Netherlandish Painting, he elaborated

the formula of the “interior by implication” —‘‘a fundamentally important scheme of space construction” —which he defined thus: Without any indication of architecture the fact that the scene 1s laid indoors is made clear by the simple device of placing the figures upon a tiled pavement instead of rock or grass, whereby the very absence of lateral and supernal boundaries gives the impression of illimitedness.”* For French painting, he reconstructed the chain of this “interior by implication” as follows: introduced by Jean Bondol in the presentation scene of the Bible de Jean de Vaudetar (1375), it was taken up by the “Master of 1402” in Jean de Berry’s Sappho, and finally perfected by the Boucicaut Master in such images as Saint Jerome in his studio into a “clearly defined section of space.’ The problem is that Panofsky deliberately erased the tensions in such spatial constructs and minimized the importance of the aniconic tesselated background and, especially, of its effects. Moreover, all the examples he chose present a tiled

floor constructed according to the vanishing-area procedure. One understands why other tiled floors, whether purely diagonalized ones or those which are organized in relation to a vanishing axis, are not admitted into this teleological scenario. If orthogonals remain equidistant, they cannot give the illusion of illimitedness, at least not in the projective sense posited by linear perspective. 87

Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

With his usual conceptual rigor, Panofsky must have become aware that there also was some contradiction in postulating an “indoors” without any tangible limits, an interior of unlimited extension. In a later publication, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, he evoked the question of the “interior by implication” once again, but he slightly modified his earlier description:

Without any indication of architecture the fact that the scene is laid indoors is made clear by the simple device of placing the figures upon a tile pavement instead of rock or grass, and the very absence of boundaries on top and at the sides gives the illusion—denied to us by both the doll’s house scheme and the diaphragm device—of being actually in the same room with the persons depicted."”9 The “‘room” has ceased to be limitless. But, despite this change, Panofsky still “implicitly” assimilates the background to a mimetic closure (a wall) and the entire system to an incomplete spatial cube, a Raumquadrant. And besides, where would this “us” be in the absence of the vanishing point that projects the viewer into the boundaries of representation?

More important, our images provide sufficient evidence that tiled floors are a somewhat polyvalent element, not necessarily associated with an interior.*° To wit, the miniatures of Libya (Fig. 11) and Sulpicia (Fig. 66), which place little architectures upon a tiled floor, and where the inside of the first temple is even covered with an indeterminate, slightly earthy natural ground plane. While it is true that the spatialized interpreta-

tion will prevail a few years after these miniatures were made and dispose of such ‘“Gncongruences” by anchoring their meaning, the course of artistic choices could have gone otherwise and instead preserved the medieval mobility of pictorial signs. It is the prestige of Renaissance art and of the perspectival paradigm that retroactively reifies and naturalizes surfaces that are only planes and spaces that are only surfaces. In fact, perspectivally centered readings of late medieval space recoil even more from positively acknowledging the aniconic background, the ornamental supplement to the material support. Strongly opposed to the volumetric conception of figures and objects, resisting the naturalization of the color palette and its transformation into a mimetic wall or sky," the opaque presence of the background appears to such readings as a disturbing archaism. But effective and active ornamental backgrounds were the proper way to seal off a representation in early fifteenth-century art. I doubt that Jacques Raponde or Philip the Bold would have perceived the diapered backgrounds of the Cleres femmes as archaic relics

of Gothic art. Around 1400, there was even a specific term to designate ornamental backsrounds—the champaigne de l’histoire—which is all the more noticeable given an otherwise quite undifferentiated artistic vocabulary. Anastasie, the contemporary illuminator includ-

ed by Christine de Pizan in the City of Ladies, is said to have specialized in “vignettes | d’enlumineure” (borders) and “champaignes d’istoires.”"* And Jean Lebégue uses it in his instructions to Sallust’s frontispiece, specifying that it should be “graciously executed.”™ - Marie-Thérése Gousset’s research recently has shown that the vocabulary designating dif-

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Pictorial Elements as Meaning

ferent types of backgrounds could be extremely precise indeed. In the Cleres femmes, we find the following backgrounds: ouvré (monochrome background, dark grid of small squares, tiny decorative motives, usually in white; see Figs. 11 and 14); quadrillé (grid of small squares alternatively gold and blue or red; Color Plates II and IV) and the same with lozenges (losangé; Color Plate III); checkerboard grids (mosaiqué), or a pattern of volutes or rinceaux (Figs. 17

and 18). Not mentioned is another common type of background consisting of a monochrome surface enhanced by a large golden grid of interwoven lines and additional decorative motives in gold or colors (Color Plate I and Fig. 8)."4 In the Cleres femmes, each type undergoes variations depending on the dimension of its elements, on colors, and on the presence of small decorative motives—dots, crosses, and fleur-de-lys, usually in white so as to

augment the radiance of the background. So far as I am able to tell, no semantic value is attached to any of the background motives, so that the fleur-de-lys are not specifically associated with royal figures, though they do appear on the losangé backgrounds only. As with

, blue, these backgrounds are a generic emblem of a luxurious product. Even when reduced to a minimal extension by maximally extending the figures, the ornamental background is an incontrovertible presence (Fig. 96). The junction between the background and the ground plane, where the spatial system holds together, is particularly interesting. In theory, if the stage analogy (or Raumquadrant) were justified, then the background should stop where it meets the ground plane. But this is not what happens in all miniatures. First of all, ground planes are a self-contained surface delimited in the back by a black outline, as can best be seen in the image of Marcia, where some tiles, between the table and the easel, have been left unpainted (Fig. 65). At times, the bottom part of the

background grid remains visible under the lighter color of the floor (Fig. 85), which indicates that the two planes are, in fact, not conceived in terms of a geometrical junction at a right angle. In addition to the colors that repeat themselves across the entire page, the borders, while separating words from images, also establish transitions; as such, they need not indicate absolute divorce between two mutually exclusive orders of reality, but they are delimitations that create a specific topography on the page for both orders of representation. Borders are a means of weaving text and image together, further fastened by the spiky ivy leaves growing from the border and reaching out into the written realm. As links, the Cleres femmes’s borders can be quite porous. Some tips of architectures and weapons emerge here and there, while the more forceful trajectory of the hammer on Minerva’s smith ejects it, like a graph, onto the blank parchment (Color Plate I). The smith’s gesture

is decidedly too powerful, too uncourtly, to be contained within the border of representation. Oddly, the fine strips that compose the borders can at times break apart too, thus

exposing their limit of being an absolute limit. In the same miniature of Minerva, the internal blue strip stops all of a sudden where it meets the smith’s back on the left as well as the money handler’s bench on the right. As imperceptible as these discontinuities are, they reiterate the visual axiom that we have encountered earlier: as with Zenobia’s amputated trees, the border strip is absorbed by the smith and the bench because all elements rest on the same plane, no empty space in between them.

, 89

Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

The workings of the spatial inscriptions of late medieval figures are embedded even more spectacularly in the miniatures of the painter Irene (Fig. 57) and of Hortensia (Fig. 83). In both cases, the line that separates the background from the ground plane has van-

ished on the right side, so the backgrounds stretch all the way down. Whether or not this happened by accident is unimportant:%° what remains visible is of the order of a symptom, revealing what is normally concealed. But it is striking that the emptied area is

| not left blank: it is assimilated to the background, which, almost like an elastic surface, now fills all the space left vacant in between figures. This is tantamount to saying that the background is virtually present everywhere, turning the last, and most important, surface of inscription into the absolute limit of representation. In perspectival space, we know that the contrary is true, for there the horizontal ground plane cannot be penetrated. In the second miniature of Verginia, the one where she prays to the idol of Venus (Fig. 62), a similar unevenness helps us to understand the process further. One can see that

, the external perimeter of the architecture delimits the end of the ground plane to the right, even if this means that the interior extension of the temple, also determined by the wall, must now be considerably deeper than its exterior limit.” For the perspectival gaze, such a nonhomogeneous ground plane is plainly a mistake. Yet, in the absence of a geometrically preordained space, local variations responding to different spatial needs are not a contradiction but an affirmation of the preeminence of objects; thus the uneven ground of Verginia is not an accident but results from the logic of the representational sys~ tem itself: Such is even more the case in Camiola’s image (Fig. 104). The ground plane stops,

to the left, where the prison’s wall bends, so the back of the architecture has no ground plane on which to rest. The rear part of the building—the one we do not see, whose presence the perspectival system would imply—simply does not exist, because nothing in this system exists that is not actually turned toward our eyes."3° Finally, the miniatures incorporate architectures that simultaneously delimit an “indoors” and an “outdoors,” again a most common pictorial idiom in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century art. A few miniatures of the Cleres femmes invite us to contemplate thoroughly medieval-looking architectural complexes, too small for humans to dwell in (Figs. 13 and 33). But given that the illuminators refrain from including towns as just an element of the decor, Athaliah 1s expelled from a nonexistent Jerusalem (Fig. 49), and Pope Joan gives birth on a vacant surface rather than next to the Coliseum (Fig. 100). Helen’s Troy (Fig. 36) and Dido’s Carthage (Fig. 41) are acknowledged because they are a key element of the narrative. Cementing the courtly cast of the scene, Troy features a cas-

tle, conventionally represented as a central, open archway framed by two towers.” Carthage consists of a church, a few houses, a central donjon meant to evoke the fortress of Byrsa, a safely closed city gate, and an irregular wall. Both of these tiny and tidy visu-

al urban collages conform to the long-standing medieval tradition of circular urban topographies."4° Yet, they are quite exceptional for northern art of the period, and their inclusion (especially as a main motive) seems to respond to the same curiosity of things urban that underlies the emphasis on the estates and their activities. While they are not portraits of real towns, as one finds in the work of the Boucicaut Master or the Limbourg 90

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

brothers, Troy and Carthage do nevertheless have a portraitlike quality by virtue of being singular, distinct from each other.’ Once again, the principle of variance supports this sense of individuation. At the same time, both towns are planted onto the ground as if they

were pieces of furniture, completely contained within the field of representation. No part is cut by the border, and one can embrace the towns in their finite totality. In the case of Carthage, this is made explicit because of the strange, almost perfectly geometrical circle that surrounds the town, and that is put onto the landscape as if it were a flat surface. Of course, this circle is the enclosure made from the ox-hide strips, the stratagem that

allowed Dido to obtain for her people much land for little money. All buildings are down-sized according to the principle of a hierarchic scale. They are not “adjusted” to the size of humans but fit them like a glove, a fit that Alberti vigorously stigmatized: “Another thing I often see deserves to be censured, and that is men painted in a building as if they

were shut up in a box in which they can hardly fit sitting down and rolled up in a ball”? , Topped by brightly colored roofs, the buildings are seen from high above and from as many angles as there are different parts. Symbolically the center of the image and the action, the towers do, however, remain parallel to the picture plane, compelling us to confront Helen’s and Paris’s fatal embrace or Dido’s suicide frontally. The most prestigious vantage point is reserved for human beings. Equally turned toward the viewer are the more frequently represented single buildings, the ones Panofsky baptized (a bit surreally) a “doll’s house arrangement,” while Martens and others used the more restrained notion of a “spatial box,’ a Raumkasten."} At any rate, these diminutive dwellings are only included if they play a functional role, like prisons, temples, or the “brothel” in Flora (Fig. 63)."44 Their main body has a front opening that does not exist for the figures;'4> and it is usually complemented by an anteroom (Color Plate IIT) or a circular towerlike structure (Fig. 61), the latter a configuration that Martens held to be quintessentially French.“° Like its towns, the Cleres femmes’s buildings are all visible in their entirety; none is cut off by the border, asking our imagination to complete it.” Also, and following John White’s classification, all architectures belong to the

‘“foreshortened frontal” category, where the front opening is kept parallel to the picture } plane.**#® The temple that Sulpicia consecrates has a row of opaque glass windows in the back, configured like a semicircular apse (Fig. 66). Even though the lines are not drawn

“correctly” according to linear perspective, the building ingeniously shows its major characteristics—ribbed vaults, keystone (too low, but therefore visible rather than implied),

colonettes, moldings, windows. Seen from multiple points of view, floor from above, vault from below, it is as if we were experiencing the structure while walking through it, turning our heads around, down, and up. But Sulpicia’s sanctuary has little in common with

a Roman temple, and this kind of actualization was criticized by Alberti with as much vehemence as the principle of hierarchic scale. In his view, updated buildings could not provide a proper setting for an historia located in antiquity. But it is the ““medieval’’ Cennini

who offers a better way to understand what mattered in the depiction of architectures before the advent of “‘scientific” perspective. He broaches this topic in chapter Lxxxvul of

, the Libro dell’arte and concludes, on a note of undisguised relish, with the advice to QI

Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

“execute those little moldings with great pleasure and delight; and in the same way bases, columns, capitals, facades, fleurons, canopies, and the whole range of the mason’s craft.” "49 Instead of an archeological evocation of classical antiquity, Jacques Raponde and Philip the Bold would thus have appreciated the skill of the Coronation Master and his associates in translating into the painted medium every element that made up the mason’s craft, as indeed Sulpicia’s temple so emphatically exhibits. The power to create specific loci in which the narratives can unfold is finally delegated to pieces of furniture as well. Were it not for the incomplete lateral walls, some of the cubical canopies that contain a piece of furniture are in fact so close to real architectures that the distinction becomes almost irrelevant (Fig. 18)—Jean Lebégue speaks of a chair “bien edifié.’”5° Such monumental furniture, in stone or wood, is subjected to “frontal foreshortening” as well so that the front opening and back wall remain parallel to the picture plane. In a sense, the treatment of these objects is similar to that of humans, with their legs kept apart, stepping back while their upper bodies are seen from a frontal viewpoint. In general, it seems that the heavier pieces of furniture tend to remain frontal. Matching the symbolic connotations attached to the “transcendent” frontality of the figures, this

is particularly true for thrones (Color Plate I and Fig. 105). Lighter pieces, and small objects such as weapons, scepters, or quills, pivot around entirely. And yet, as can be seen in Pompeia Paulina and Seneca’s tub (Fig. 92) or in the stalls of Hortensia’s triumvirs (Fig. 83), they do not really recede into depth but remain diagonal to the picture plane, preserving its integrity. In the end, one can say that the spatial conception of the Cleres femmes and late medieval art in general aims at a positive affirmation of the coexistence, in one and the same system of representation, of a double system of inscription. On the one hand, the elements

of representation depend on the logic of a bi-dimensional background that impresses planar effects across the entire field;'*' on the other hand, they are positioned, with inter-

vals, on a ground plane of limited depth. Two poles, one absolute, transcendent, and unlimited,* the other immanent, relative, and limited, command this bifocal pictorial universe and explain some of the “distortions” that we have noticed in its spatial makeup.'3 For instance, the affirmation of this coexistence accounts for the multiplication of viewpoints, at times referred to the background, at others to a frontally positioned eye, more often to the objects themselves. It explains the principles that regulate the disposition of

light, which endows objects with volume without, however, removing them from the page. It enables hierarchic scale to be maintained, despite the staggering of elements on the ground plane. Indeed ground planes not only recede into depth but move upward on the plane; hence the preference for diagonalized tiled floors. So that when Jan van Eyck takes up the Italian suggestion of having the more distant planes placed lower on the picture plane, it indeed constitutes a major rejection of late medieval spatial structures.*4 In the Cleres femmes, the figures that are farthest away are usually, though not always, higher on the picture plane (Color Plates I and IV, and Plate II for a counterexample). And

as with most medieval art, this spatial superiority is an indication of symbolic dominance.*> Juno, the mother of the gods, is placed higher than anyone else in the manuscript

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(Fig. 6); by the same token, in the image of Minerva the lowest craftsmen are literally cast to the bottom of the image (Color Plate I). One might object at this point that the illuminators who worked on the Cleres femmes were not especially adventurous in exploring new spatial configurations, particularly when compared to artists such as Jacquemart de Hesdin or, later, the Boucicaut Master and the Limbourg brothers. Yet what I have called the affirmation of the double system of inscription is characteristic of all fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century art, albeit

with different densities. And I would now suggest that this system is bivalent but not ambiguous,**° and that this dynamic bivalence constitutes its very unity."7 Indeed, JeanClaude Bonne has argued that the late medieval system, caught in between a pragmatic conception (measurable space) and a symbolic one (backgrounds and ground planes as the continuous support of discontinuous places), was abandoned only when this bivalence came to be felt as an unacceptable ambiguity.** But there is no inherent contradiction in this

universe in which nothing is spatially implied and in which nothing extends laterally beyond the borders of the representation. Its elements do evolve into the back but, at the very same time, they are pushed toward the picture plane. In a seemingly strange movement of oscillation, late medieval spatial structures simultaneously develop out of the , picture plane and into its depth, kept from falling asunder by the parchment leaves that carry pictures and words alike.

On Visualizing Time As I approach the end of my inquiry into the Cleres femmes, it remains briefly to be seen how the pictorial cycle reconfigures the narrative provided by Boccaccio’s text and how it visually handles historical time. Given the oscillating juxtaposition that underlies the late medieval inscription of figures, it is not surprising to find a similar bivalence in the manuscript’s conception of time. True, many of the miniatures activate a sort of present infinite, so that the labors of the weavers or poets seem without beginning or end. As people do not grow old, trees do not lose their leaves, and our eternally young heroines’ bodies are impervious to the ravages of time. And yet, here and there, some signs do inject a sense of chronology. In Ceres’ agricultural image each of the peasants’ activities and cos~ tumes allude to a different season (Fig. 7). Spring has plowing and sowing, while summer is conveyed by the lightly covered men reaping and threshing, protected from an imaginary sun by outdoor hats. This rural scene is definitely time-bound, which is interesting because in the late Middle Ages the seasonally irregular pulsations of prayer time, which had defined earlier people’s sense of time, were being replaced by the regular scansion provided by public clocks; a shift toward what Jacques Le Goff has called the secularized and rationalized “time of the merchant,” the time with a price."° Similarly, the illuminators may, if important to the narrative, introduce some notion of the daily rhythm of time: Argia’s nocturnal search (Fig. 28) is symbolized by the dark coloristic pitch of the image as well as by her servant carrying a torch without actual illuminating power, a common

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Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

metonymy in medieval art."*' On the whole, however, time does not evolve; it unfurls, with slow-motions and accelerations, behaving like an extended Wheel of Fortune, with heights

and depths, ever occurring and recurring. But there is another and more complex temporal dimension that is articulated by the Cleres femmes and other historical manuscripts. It is the time of history, the conception of the distant, ancient past. As I have noted in passing, the generic past in which Boccaccio

situates his biographies is thoroughly updated by the miniatures. Thus Vestals become nuns, Anubis a Christological apparition, goddesses are nimbed, pagan martyrs evoke saints, and Zenobia’s camels are transmuted into stags. Rome, Greece, Egypt, and the “Orient,” the chronologically and geographically distant, blend together into one and the same early fifteenth-century vision.’ And yet are the images of the Cleres femmes really uniformly actualized, so devoid of any sense of differing historical textures? To begin with, broad generalizations about the supposedly anachronistic character of medieval art often prevent one from seeing that religious manuscripts, especially Bibles, were governed by a fairly distinct clothing code that consistently clads its figures in long tunics and capes; if male, they also have a “long forked beard,’ the grant barbe fourchue required by Jean

Lebégue for the frontispiece portrait of Sallust."* Insofar as secular manuscripts avoid such sweeping distanciations, a sharp visual distinction was drawn between what belonged to the biblical as opposed to the secular past, the latter being more substantially actualized

than the former. In the Cleres femmes, one male figure is in fact dressed like a biblical hero: the first witness of Verginia’s sacrifice, who seems to have been lifted from a religious manuscript (Fig. 56). I have also noted how the biblical Mariamne’s raiment was fashionable a generation before the Cleres femmes was made (Fig. 86) and that Constance’s imperial pur-

ple cape effectively propels her into a somewhat different past than empresses or queens devoid of such an archaeologically oriented costume (Fig. 102). As multifocal as its spatial constructions, the quotient of pastness is not uniform across the manuscript. Nor is it, for that matter, from one secular manuscript to another. Unlike the orientalizing manuscripts of John the Fearless’s Livre des merveilles or Philip the Bold’s Fleur des histoires, exoti-

cizing traits are rare in the exemplary histories of our heroines. There is certainly Otto’s “barbaric” hat (Color Plate IV) or the slightly odd ones worn by the “people from other nations” who receive Nicostrata’s civilizing alphabet (Fig. 26). And Saracen turbans are not

innocently put on heads of torturers (Fig. 17). But the women are of a much more domestic appearance (even when compared to female figures in other historical manuscripts), and they are, in fact, more consistently actualized than their male counterparts: no heroine wears pointed hats or turbans or dresses that would be the female equivalent of the biblical long tunics. Although personal stylistic inclinations might in part explain these differences, it is as if the cleres femmes, being summoned to occupy the place of persuasive models, had little right to inhabit different types, as if a departure from physical or sartorial norms would ruin their capability to stand as authoritative exemplars.

| More important, many compositions of the Cleres femmes can be said to appropriate, or even expropriate, models belonging to Christian iconography, starting with the explicitly biblical image of the struggle between good and evil with Eve (Fig. 3). 94

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

And Salome presenting the head of John the Baptist lies right underneath the wife of Drigiagon (Fig. 72); the Virgin of Humility speaks through Ceres (Fig. 7) and the Virgin at the Loom through Penelope (Fig. 39); Charity has become Busa (Fig. 68), while the Adoration of the Magi acts as a model for Nicostrata (Fig. 26) and other scenes of homage and gift-giving. The list could go on, but what needs to be emphasized is that these are not meaningless proximities.’°> Rather, they are another example of the creative power inherent in the principle of variance, of saying different things with minimal modifications, and cannot simply be understood in terms of a formal procedure or as a result of work-

shop practices.

The recycling of Christian motives by secular images has often been noted, and scholars have expressed puzzlement at such cross-references. Millard Meiss considered a bathhouse scene in a Decameron, clearly patterned after a Birth of the Virgin, to be a “racy” borrowing.'®° But while the similar might bring two compositions in close reso-

nance, it does not turn the bathhouse into Bethlehem, nor Penelope into the Virgin. Huizinga thought that the constant commingling of religious and profane was typical of the late medieval “mind,” as expressed in music, festivals, language, or art. He concluded that this interdependence entailed a double contamination: by pulling the sacred toward the mundane, the latter was necessarily sacralized.°” To some extent it is anachro-

nistic to draw a distinction between the religious and secular spheres at all. No doubt

| courtly, and even urban, values become endowed with a sacralizing aura by the images of the Cleres femmes and similar manuscripts. And yet it should not be forgotten that the proliferation of vernacular texts, of romances and pagan stories, did not go unopposed."°® Secular culture, nourished at the courts, could challenge the canonical body of knowledge

controlled by the Church, and, more generally, traditional cultural values. As we saw, Jacques Raponde’s involvement in the manuscript trade very literally took place outside the University’s jurisdiction. And, remember Gerson’s concerns about the “lecherous” language and images of the Roman de la rose?'©°

One wonders whether the Christian mold, so present underneath the images of the Cleres femmes, is not the result of a strategy of legitimation meant to lend them credibility, an especially crucial concern in a manuscript populated by female subjects. While we might take its stories for granted, in the early fifteenth century many of them were literally unheard of, and none of them had ever existed in a single, autonomous text. Moreover, this text was to some extent explicitly pitched against the Christian tradition because of Boccaccio’s emphatic, if apologetic, exclusion of Christian heroines.'7° The passage from religious to secular iconography can be said to parallel that from Latin to vernacular, a pressing issue in late medieval culture as is so admirably expressed by the biog-

raphy of Nicostrata, the provider of a mother tongue (Fig. 26). As poets struggled to make their vernacular worthy of Latin scripture, so artists were confronted with the rhetorical task of mastering the authoritative models established by the Christian tradition in order to produce new imagery. As is well known, creation in the Middle Ages meant in the first place the manipulation of auctoritates.'”’ Thus it is not surprising that the invention of the Cleres femmes’s cycle also results from visual intertextuality. Seen from this

95

Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes : angle, the process of actualization can be viewed almost as a visual transposition of the fundamental topos of the translatio studii. Just as clergie was said to have moved from Greece

to Rome to Paris, so our images proclaim that the past has been absorbed by Philip the Bold’s and his contemporaries’ visual culture. Christianization aside, the actualization of the past plays in and of itself a central role in the Cleres femmes, as it does in much medieval historiography. Given that this work intimately fuses historical and didactic intentions, telescoping past and present enabled its distant stories to become relevant to an early fifteenth-century audience. By actualizing settings and actors, these images endow the past with an immediate urgency that our modern archaeological perspective keeps, on the contrary, at bay. The difference between the medieval and Renaissance understanding of the classical past was at the center of scholarly debates in the first half of our century, especially among scholars in the

, Warburgian tradition. Cast in terms of the Fortleben or, on the contrary, the oblivion of antique forms, it is once more Panofsky who coined an influential formula: the famous “principle of disjunction,’ which he himself deemed of “fundamental importance.” In

Renaissance and Renascences he defined it as follows: Wherever in the high and later Middle Ages a work of art borrows its form from a classical model, this form is almost invariably invested with non-classical, normally Christian, significance; wherever in the high and later Middle Ages a work of art borrows its theme from classical poetry,

legend, history or mythology, this theme is quite invariably presented in , a non-classical, normally contemporary, form.‘ For Panofsky, the Renaissance “reintegration of the form and the content” put an end to the medieval urge to “compartmentalize” reality.‘73 Renaissance artists and thinkers achieved this reintegration because for them the classical past had become a “lost past” instead of a “passionate nostalgia.” Panofsky held that medieval culture was not capable of putting a measured distance between itself and the past; that was in turn corroborated by its spatial system’s inability to proceed by measurable intervals. In the absence of a perspectival point of view, he concluded that the Middle Ages was unable to make “historical” distinctions, and that its artistic products mixed past with present, here with there. There is no denying that the medieval conception of history was different from the modern one, but, as Michael Camille reminds us, it is reductive to equate the actualization of the pagan past with a sort of exterior wrapping.'” Past heros and heroines were not simply clad in medieval guises, for visualizing the past through Christian and medieval para-

meters meant that the meaning of the past was radically transformed. Thanks to this reformation, the matiére ancienne could tell its truths and fictions to medieval people. In fact,

this process is intrinsic (though in different guises) to any historical project meshed with didactic aims: as Emile Benveniste wrote, history can only become discourse if the past changes into a here and now, and “she” and “he” turn into “TI” and “‘you.?5 But the Cleres femmes’s emphasis on social categorization receives an added layer 96

Pictorial Elements as Meaning

of meaning, for it also effects a conversion of the past from a mere cultural repository into what Gabrielle Spiegel has defined as a “social patrimony.’'”° And Spiegel’s analysis of thirteenth-century French prose historiography further shows that the meaning of this conversion had clear ideological dimensions because it allowed the projection into the past of present realities perceived to be problematic. Certainly the changes in the social fabric in the late Middle Ages must have unsettled reality: the increasingly complex stratification of society in general and of aristocracy in particular, the pressures exerted by the bourgeois estates and its attendant redefinitions of the noble ranks, as well as more local phenomena (though decisive in our context), such as the question féminine galvanized by the debate on the Roman de la rose. As we saw, these factors contributed to the success of the Cleres femmes, whose visual cycle does indeed thrust the fractionalized and contested present into an orderly past-present. Despite its apparent interest in social realities, in the “ood and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, sense and folly,’'”’ it is order, production, and social decorum that permeate the entire outlook of the miniatures.'”* The cycle of images shapes reality and its violence into heroic myths, which in turn are made present through

the process of actualization. Indeed, if one admits with Bernard Guenée that in the

Middle Ages historical texts offered readers an “image of the present reflected a hun- , dred times by the mirrors of the past” and that this “past was always called upon to justify the present,’’”? then it is fair to say that the images of the Cleres femmes intimately participate in this dialectical oscillation, in which the present is seen as generated by a past that is at the same time the child of the present. Visualizing the past is then not simply a matter of apprehending it as an inert object but of capturing its lessons in an attitude of real efficacy rather than a safe perspectival distance. The past here has the intensity of a hyperbole, and, in more general terms, one could say that the Cleres femmes ofters an example of that “truly divine power” that Alberti thought painting was blessed with, the power to make the absent present, specifically to resurrect the dead. This cycle did rescue from total obscurity a great many dead women. But the creation of this visual reservoir of heroines was purchased at a price, for remembering is necessarily intertwined with forgetting. As with any other history, the one conveyed by the Cleres femmes was as intermittent as its vision of women was elliptic. And yet, as fragmentary and selective as these miniatures may be, they secured for Philip the Bold an incisive symbolic power—the power to clutch in his hands some organized knowledge of the past, of present social organization, and perhaps, he thought, of women themselves.

To conclude, the Cleres femmes should not, however, be seen as a straightforward expression of Philip the Bold’s views. Boccaccio, the anonymous translator, Jacques Raponde, and the illuminators all participated—to various degrees and on different levels—ain this creative enterprise, though the finished product was, to be sure, made to suit the patron’s taste and interest, thus smoothing out the tensions and contradictions that would have arisen between the socially diverse individuals involved in the making of a manuscript. Hidden

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Boccacio’s Des cleres et nobles femmes

under the seductive surface of representation, these layers of tensions are hard to uncover, for we do not know, for instance, what the illuminators thought of their finished product. But we have seen some of the translator’s manipulations of the text, especially the forceful addition to Pamphile’s biography. Like the innovative depiction of urban activities or the careful detailing of tools, this addition that sacralizes the invention and use of silk might indeed speak for Jacques Raponde, this unusual merchant who extended his commerce to include illuminated manuscripts. Consequently, around 1400, the trade in illuminated manuscripts and other works of art was complex enough to nourish the demands and desires of an intricate social mosaic: parchmenters, copyists, illuminators, binders, writers and translators, merchants and

princes. But works of art are not simply utilitarian objects; nor do they generate economic profit alone. In his stimulating introduction to Collectors and Curiosities, Krzysztof Pomian defines all objects that are devoid of usage value, including works of arts, as semiophores. These objects’ primary use consists in their meaning, their capacity to represent the invisible to the visible world—be that the sacred, the chronologically or geographically distant, or, I might add, the sexually different. Because they escape the economic circuit, Pomian adds that semiophores are indispensable tokens for asserting one’s power and prestige. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that throughout history many different people have competed to gain access or maintain their proximity to objects located at the strategic nexus of the signifying world. Precisely because they are endowed with meaning, the thrust of my analysis has tried to attend more carefully to the pictorial language, whose powers of signification tend to be somewhat forgotten in contextual studies. First of all, I have tried to argue that an illuminated cycle needs to be considered in its entirety. Only then does it fully reveal its different shades of meaning, the subtleties with which the painters’ craft organizes and classifies the infinite manifestations of reality, thus turning it into a historically intelligible representation. Taken as a culturally specific structure of signification, the pictorial cycle of the Cleres femmes, grounded on a systematic variation of its constitutive elements, is clearly bent on creating a narrative centered on human beings, specifically women.The production of meaning, none of which is entirely pliable to verbalization, does not, however, cease at this iconographic level but crosses all representational elements, no matter how minimal. For instance, while gestures organize the narrative, colors establish the relative position of the actors. And yet narrative primacy does not extend its laws everywhere. We have seen that the co-presence of paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures enables hierarchic contrasts between gestures to coexist with their discursive concatenation, that the chromatic system can be in part mimetic, in part not, and that the spatial system oscillates between the abstract and the concrete, the transcendent and the immanent. In a very similar way, Boccaccio’s text is caught in an oscillating movement, between history and discourse, fiction and moral lessons. The fundamental bivalence of late medieval spatial structures can therefore be seen as exemplary for other dimensions as well. The oscillating relationship defines the space inhabited by the concept of Woman as it does the space of history, for both Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and the illuminations of the Cleres femmes play on

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Pictorial Elements as Meaning

“intermixing.” As Boccaccio’s assessment of women’s achievement fluctuates, so the miniatures’ articulation of the estates or the density of the actualization of settings and cos-

tumes is not uniform.

What holds the entire cycle together is what I have tried to explain, after Bernard Cerquiglini, by the notion of variance, an important semiotic principle for pictorial cycles in general. Working horizontally across the entire manuscript, variance ensures both the unity and diversity of what the Cleres femmes makes visible. All levels of representation are sub-

jected to it, so while the iconography of the actions and professions or the costumes, gestures, colors, and spatial devices are relatively few, they are constantly modulated. The principle of variance also guides the creative attitude of the manuscript toward earlier models, its constant adoptions and adaptations of preceding, and especially religious, models. In this regard, I have tried to insist that even if the motivation of these borrowings is expediency, such a translatio from one visual context to another is always at the same time a signifying activity. If it were not, one would miss the most forceful conversion enacted by the Cleres femmes, that of visual models traditionally inhabited by men into female spaces of representation. The logic of repetition, contrast, and variation is a taxonomic device ultimately intent on stabilizing a protean reality, to master the chaos of raw experience. The Cleres femmes catalogs women into a manageable collection of behavior, destinies, actions, and poses. Made by and destined for men, the display of women is necessarily an ideological enterprise as well. Yet while the Cleres femmes anchored women into recognizable categories for Philip the Bold, it would also have generated, I believe, associations that were not familiar to him. If this were not so, these images, as any others, could only reflect what already exists in texts and reality; but they could not make what is invisible visible.

99 :

APPENDIX

Fifteenth-Century Des cleres et nobles femmes Manuscripts

1. Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS fr. 12420, ca. 1402

Sold by Jacques Raponde to Philip the Bold; 109 miniatures by the Coronation Master and associates

2. Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS fr. 598, ca. 1403 | Gift from Jean de la Barre to Jean de Berry; 107 miniatures by the Master of Berry’s Cleres femmes 3. London, Brit. Libr. MS Royal 16 G.V, ca. 1410 103 miniatures by an associate of the Master of Sir John Fastolf 4. London, Brit. Libr. MS Royal 20 C.V, ca. 1410 105 miniatures 5. Brussels, Bibl. Royale Albert Ier MS 9509, 1410-15

From the library of the dukes of Burgundy; 33 miniatures 6. Lisbon, C. Gulbenkian Foundation MS L.A. 143, 1410-15 48 surviving miniatures by the Boucicaut Master workshop 7. Philadelphia, Free Libr. MS T 15/490, 1420-25 Single leaf 8. Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek COD. 2555, 1462-72

Made for Tanguy du Chatel, chamberlain of Louis XI, and his , wite, Jeanne Raguenel de Malestroit 9. Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS fr. 1120, before 1467

Commissioned by Jean d’Angouléme |

10. New York, Public Libr. Spencer MS 33, ca. 1470

Commissioned by Jacques d’ Armagnac; 76 surviving miniatures by an artist associated with Maitre Francois

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Appendix

11. New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr. MS M 381, ca. 1475 (?)

AI miniatures (retouched) by the Chief Associate of the Bedford Master or the Dunois Master 12. Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS fr. 133, third quarter of the fifteenth century From the library of Louis of Bruges; 1 miniature 13. Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS fr. 599, third quarter of the fifteenth century Commissioned by Charles d’Angouléme and Louise de Savoie; 103 miniatures 14. Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS fr. 5037, fols. 223—305v, third quarter of the fif-

teenth century 15. Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 856, fols. 31—130v (rest of manuscript comprises Lives of women saints and the Livre de la Cité des dames), third quarter of the fifteenth century; 21 miniatures 16. Paris, Private Collection (Ex Phillipps 3648), fols. 1-82 (Livre de la Cité des dames, fols. 83-150), late fifteenth century Commissioned by Guillaume de La Marck (?); 105 miniatures First Printed Edition 1493, Paris, Antoine Vérard, Des cleres femmes

IOI

Notes

| Preface liographies published in the Medieval Feminist Newsletter. One of the most stimulating and challenging feminist texts

I. Ms fr. 12420. The manuscript was first studied by for art history remains Lisa Tickner, “Feminism, Art History, Durrieu, “Manuscrits de luxe,’ 167—68 and 178—79. For and Sexual Difference,” Genders, 3, 1988, 92-128. Thalia further discussion and bibliography, see Bozzolo, Manuscrits Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, “The Feminist des traductions, 23-25 and 96—98; Meiss, 1974, 287—90; de Critique of Art History,’ Art Bulletin, -x1x, no. 3, 1987, Winter, La bibliothéque, 206—7 (no. 9); Sterling, La peinture 326-57, offer a discussion of some topics raised by femimédiévale, 273-79; and the exhibition catalogue Boccace en nist art historians, as well as a complete bibliography. France, no. 94.

2. “Les deux premiers manuscrits des ‘Cleres femmes’

de Boccace (Paris, Bibl. Nat., Mss fr. 12420 et fr. 598). I Systémes de l’image dans un cycle profane destiné aux The Manuscript as Object princes,” Paris, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,

1988. In order to avoid redundancies I have decided not to 1. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue, xi. For Charles VI’s reign, consider Jean de Berry’s substantially similar copy here. see also the rich biography by Autrand, Charles VI.

However, I will signal noteworthy differences with this as 2. The best bibliographic tool is Lord, Royal French well as other Cleres femmes’s manuscripts, and refer the read- Patronage. For Philip the Bold, see, most recently, de Winter,

er to reproductions that are of an easy access. La bibliotheque, with extensive bibliography. A summary of 3. Roland Barthes’s S/Z (New York, 1974) has been a Philip the Bold’s patronage is provided by Vaughan, Philip the

crucial text for the framing of my own approach. In it, Bold, 188-207. Barthes notably wrote that “meanings .. . are established 3. Warnke, The Court Artist, 224.

not by ‘me’ or by others, but by their systematic mark: there 4. The best known of the Valois librarians is Gilles Mallet, | is no other proof of a reading than the quality and endurance appointed by Charles V in 1368 as his garde de la librairie and of its systematics” (p. 11). A good critical summary of struc- maitre d’hétel, both functions he was later to hold in Louis of

turalist semiotics and poststructuralism is provided by Terry Orleéans’s and Valentina Visconti’s households. See Delisle, | Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983, 91-150. For Recherches, t, 10-27, and Shultz, “The Artistic and Literary semiotic art-historical analyses, Meyer Schapiro’s “On Some Patronage,’ 291—94. Usually, it was a position of trust given Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle to a person of the inner familia, as was the case, for instance,

in Image-Signs,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 1-32, with Isabeau de Baviére, who appointed her lady-in-waitremains of fundamental importance. See also Damisch, “Huit ing and friend Catherine de Villiers. On the queen’s library, théses pour (ou contre?) une sémiologie de la peinture,” see Vallet de Viriville, “La bibliothéque d’Isabeau de Baviére.”

the argument of which is in part taken up in “Six Notes On the colorful Pierre de Verone, a former book dealer in the Margin of Meyer Schapiro’s ‘Words and Pictures, ” chosen to be Jean de Berry’s librarian, see Meiss, 1967, Social Research, 45, no. 1, 1978, I5—35, as well as in “Semiotics 63—67. On Richard Le Conte, barber, doctor, and valet de and Iconography,’ in The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics, chambre of Philip the Bold, see de Winter, La bibliothéque, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, Lisse, 1975, 27-36. Bonne, L’art roman 32-33.

de face et de profil, 14—22, offers an excellent demonstration 5. The first surviving Burgundian inventory dates from of a syntactic analysis. A useful summary and bibliography Philip the Bold’s death in 1404. Sources allude, however, to is provided by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics a “grand inventaire,’ which might have been compiled as and Art History,” Art Bulletin, Lxxi, no. 2, 1991, 174—208. early as 1385, when Philip the Bold established his testa4. For general feminist publications in medieval studies, ment. See de Winter, La bibliothéque, 33.

I found most helpful: Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful 6. Meiss and Off, “The Bookkeeping of Robinet Category of Historical Analysis,’ American Historical Review, d’Estampes,” 227, who demonstrate Robinet’s careful mode 91, 1986, 1053—75; the special issue of Speculum, April 1993, of establishing the lists by chronological order of accession.

edited by Nancy F Partner, and reprinted as Studying 7. For portraits of Charles V, see Sherman, The Portraits of Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism, Cambridge, Mass., Charles V of France; for Jean de Berry, see Meiss, 1967, 68-94; 1993; Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of and for Philip the Bold, see de Winter, La bibliothéque, figs.

Joan Kelly, Chicago, 1984; and the articles, debates, and bib- 1-8.

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Notes to Pages 5-7 8. The royal library, installed between 1367 and 1368 on 1300 and 1500. According to it, 67 percent were written

three stories in the Louvre tower, was furnished with the in the vernacular. She also found that 75 percent of the most up-to-date and comfortable library equipment. Discussed volumes possessed by the 242 laywomen known to have

in La librairie de Charles V, 45-54, with bibliography. owned books between 800 and 1500 were books of 9. At the death of Charles VI, only 823 books were left, piety. for many had been taken away by his relatives. Upon Charles 17. We know, for instance, what books Charles VI borV’s death, for instance, Louis of Anjou grabbed about forty rowed from the royal library for his private use: one month books, Jean de Berry, ten, and Philip the Bold secured half before his coronation he took a Livre du sacre; the same year, a dozen books for him and his wife. See de Winter, La bib- 1380, he borrowed the Grandes Chroniques de France and a

liothéque, 25. romance; in 1381, he had an Instruction des enfans nobles and 10. It is difficult to give exact figures for these libraries the Fais des romains; in subsequent years he is only known to

because the books were not kept in one place, and often have taken books of ancient history, romances, and, occathose that were part of the chapel, stored in trunks or dis- sionally, devotional literature. See Delisle, Le cabinet des manplayed on lecterns for ready use, might not be included in uscrits, 1, §O. the inventories. For Jean de Berry, see Guiftfrey, Inventaires, 18. Summarized in Guiffrey, Inventaires, introduction, and and Meiss, 1967, 28'7—318; for the dukes of Burgundy, see de Meiss, 1967, 36—67. Schlosser, Die Kunst- und WunderWinter, La bibliothéque, 31-46.The inventories of the library kammern, 22—32, concluded that Berry, a Janus-like figure,

of Louis of Anjou, second son of John the Good, have not was at the divide between modern and medieval collect-

been preserved. ing, animated both by an aesthetic pleasure in form and a 11. Shultz, “The Artistic and Literary Patronage,” 205. fascination with the material appearance of curiosa. One cari

12. Autrand, “Culture et mentalite.” question the pertinence of such an antithesis between the 13. The most successful theological work in princely beautiful and the strange, between form and matter, and libraries was Saint Augustine’s City of God, translated in not just for the Middle Ages. 1371-75 by Raoul de Presles. Equally popular were such 19. This expression is used by Jean de Berry in a letter of encyclopedias as Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s Livre des pro- 1408 to Pierre Salmon. Quoted by Champeaux, “Les relapriétes des choses (translated by Jean Corbechon in 1372), or tions du duc Jean de Berry,’ 411, and Meiss, 1967, 46.

, Vincent of Beauvais’s Miroir historial (translated by Jean de 20. Jean de Berry, for instance, would not refrain from

Vignay between 1333 and 1350). paying 30,000 écus for a single jewel. See Meiss, 1967, 70. 14. On this concept, see Sherman, “Representations of 21. A laconic note confirms that in 1406 Jean de Berry’s Charles V,’ and idem, Imaging Aristotle, 3-12, for the transla- agents broke into the residence of the Bishop of Le Puy tions made at Charles V’s behest. The king’s personal inter- and stole “a Bible, a Breviary, a silver belt, and a young girl” est in the library and in commissioning translations is (Meiss, 1974, 74). It is also known that the duke sequestered extolled by Christine de Pizan in her Le livre des fais et bonnes an eight-year-old girl to be given as a wife to Paul meurs, 11, 42—46. Unlike Charles V and Jean de Berry, Philip Limbourg. See Champeaux and Gauchery, Les travaux d’art,

. the Bold and Margaret of Flanders are not known to have 139-40, and Meiss, 1974, 69. commissioned new texts themselves, with the exception, 22. Diamond, “Manufacture and Market,” 106 n. 4, sugprecisely, of Christine’s official biography of Charles V. gests that, because they were not directly commissioned, 15. Charles V is said to have left 53 chronicles to his son; few manuscripts are mentioned in thirteenth- and early the duke of Berry had about 20 and Philip the Bold, 16. fourteenth-century royal payment accounts. They included the official Grandes Chroniques de France (see 23. Meiss, 1967, 48—50, has calculated that Jean de Berry Hedeman, The Royal Image) as well as regional chronicles. received 350 objects, of which almost 75 percent (177 joyThe matiére ancienne is more sparsely represented. It includ- aux and 80 manuscripts) were given at the étrennes. He is ed authors such as Livy (translated by Pierre Bersuire before recorded to have distributed only some 231 gifts, thus mak-

1356 for John the Good), Valerius Maximus (known as the ing a good deal. Fais des romains, translated in two stages, by Simon de Hesdin 24. See Sherman, The Portraits of Charles V of France,

for Charles V until chapter VII, and the rest by Nicolas 17-32. Exceptional is the famous presentation miniature Gonesse in 1404 for Jean de Berry), Sallust, Terence, painted by Jean Bondol for a Bible offered to Charles V by Suetonius, Vegetius, Orosius, Flavius Josephus, Virgil, and his valet de chambre, Jean de Vaudetar. It is signed by the illu-

Ovid. Finally, there were compilations, such as the Histoire minator, which is one of the rare instances where the artist ancienne jusqu’a César, and many historical romances, such as is present, albeit by virtue of an inscription rather than by an

the Roman de Tioie la Grant. For a survey of the translations image.

of classical literature, see Lucas, “Mediaeval French . 25. “A Jacques Raponde, marchant bourgeois de Paris, Translations,” and the works of Jacques Monfrin. For works auquel ondit Seigneur de grace especial a donné la somme on ancient history at the Burgundian court, see Doutrepont, de IIIc francs tant pour et en recompensacion d’un livre

La littérature francaise, 120—86. en francois de pluseurs histoires de femmes de bonne 16. Bell, “Medieval Book Owners,’ has made a similar renommee qu'il lui donna aux estraines du jour de I|’an tally for 186 collections belonging to laywomen between derrenierement passé, comme pour les bons services qu'il lui

103

Notes to Pages 7—9 a faiz chascun jour et espere que face ou temps a venir, si 32. At the death of her husband, Margaret of Flanders comme il appert plus a plain par les lettres patentes dudit waived half of her inheritance so as avoid the liabilities left Seigneur sur ces faictes, donnees a Paris le xxje jour de jan- by Philip the Bold. Dine Raponde got two houppelandes vier de l’an mil CCCC et deux. Cy rendu avec quittance | studded with pearls, four pieces of satin, and some other produite.” Dijon, Archives de la Cote d’Or, B 1532, fols. smaller objects for the 5,095 francs of debit (Nieuwen1§6—156v. The account was drawn by Jean Chousat. See huysen, Les finances du duc, 401). The case of the duke of Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” no. 49, and de Winter, La Berry is even more spectacular as his assets had to be sold at bibliothéque, 206—7, who also includes the descriptions of a cut rate in order to reimburse his creditors. In fact, Jacques the Burgundian inventories of 1420 and 1467.The date is in Raponde, his nephew Jean, the Cename, and other Lucchese ancien style, which means that the manuscript was given on merchants—who were his main creditors—prompted this

January I, 1403. | seizure of property. See Guiftrey, Inventaires, 1, 198-204, and 26. Philip the Bold’s inventories contain a great many Lehoux, “Le duc de Berri, les Juifs et les Lombards.”

similar payments to the Rapondes, either in kind or cash. 33. Their commercial operations reached far beyond,

27. Mirot, Etudes lucquoises, 79-169, from which I will including London, the Rhineland, Hungary, Venice, and the | take all information regarding the Rapondes, unless other- cities of the Levant. The Libro della comunita dei mercanti lucwise specified. See also Renouard, Les hommes d’ affaires, chesi registers the name, and sometimes the function, of the 168—70, and Vaughan, Philip the Bold, 220, who wrote that Lucchese merchants established in Bruges for the years 1362

“behind the political power of Philip the Bold was the to 1404. The Rapondes appear frequently. wealth of Dino Rapondi.” For a good overall discussion of 34. Transcribed in Le Roux de Lincy and Tisserand, Paris the financial and commercial evolution of the merchant et ses historiens, 336—37. Favier, De l’or et des épices, 137—55, dis-

class, see Favier, De l’or et des épices, esp. 189-215 and 265-89, cusses the problems of xenophobia and integration faced

and Le Goff, Marchands et banquiers. by foreign merchants. 28. On the tormented political history of Lucca in the 35. Favier, Les contribuables, 38, shows that in 1423 Jacques second half of the fourteenth century, and particularly on the Raponde, identified as a merchant, paid 100 francs, which civic strife that opposed the Forteguerra-R apondi and Guinigi was the highest contribution, paid by only 11 out of 502 factions, see Meek, Lucca, 1369-1400. Significantly, when the people. This was an imposed royal loan and did not include

Rapondes’s properties were confiscated in Lucca, Philip the the clergy and the members of the Parlement. Back in Bold successfully pressured the Lucchese community of Bruges Lucca, the Rapondi were, after the Guinigi, the second to restitute them. See Nieuwenhuysen, Les finances du duc, most prosperous family.

399, and the Libro della comunita dei mercanti, 220—22. 36. According to the chronicler Sercambi. But his was 29. Roover, “La communauté des marchands lucquois,” a partisan view, for he was enlisted in the Guinigi faction describes the particularities of Lucca silks, whose asym- (Mirot, Etudes lucquoises, 149-50). metrical patterns were influenced by Chinese textiles. It 37. Mirot, Etudes lucquoises, 226—35, and plate m for a

also appears that the Lucchesi introduced the fashion of map of the Raponde house. At the death of Jacques richly decorated fabrics, with animal, geometric, vegetal, Raponde, the house went to a related branch, the Cename or purely fantastic motives. Silk was not valued only for (Cenami). The execution of the wills of both Dine and garments, but was used for book bindings and for lining Jacques generated long legal battles between various inher-

the trunks in which they were kept. See also the exhibi- itors.

tion catalogue Mostra del costume. 38. See Le Roux de Lincy and Tisserand, Paris et ses his30. The genealogy of the various branches of the toriens, 126—220, and 336—37 for a discussion of the pas-

Rapondi is somewhat confusing, but Mirot thinks that the sage. Merchant houses in Lucca, including the Rapondes’,, | paterfamilias Guido had at least seven sons and three daugh- are studied by Paoli, Arte e committenza privata, 17-54.

ters. Barthelemi (Bartolomeo) and Pierre (Pietro) remained 39. Significantly, Guillebert de Metz briefly alludes to in Lucca. Guillaume (Guglielmo), the oldest brother, first this episode in his description. Laurent de Premierfait, moved to Bruges, followed by Dine, Jacques (Giacomo), who accepted his charge with a joieux visaige, praises André (Andrea), and Philippe. Philippe became the head Bureau in his prologue to the Decameron. The text is tranof the Bruges branch, André founded the branch in Avignon, scribed by Le Roux de Lincy and Tisserand, Paris et ses while Dine and Jacques and the nephew Jean directed the historiens, 423. mother-house in Paris. Compared to the largest Lucchese 40. Mirot and Lazzareschi, “Lettere di mercanti,’ 185.

company of the Guinigi, which comprised about twenty 41. Jean de Berry relied on an extensive network of members, the Rapondes’s was a medium-sized company, agents hired to feed his collections. See Meiss, 1967, 45-47, counting between six and eight members. See Meek, Lucca, who also briefly mentions Jacques Raponde but misses his

1369-1400, 42—43. function by limiting it to that of an “artistic adviser.” 31. The Rapondes appear with some frequency in the 42. All dates are given in modern style (n.s.). The changinventories of other Valois family members, especially in ing of the year in late medieval Paris depended on the date those of Charles VI. Summary in Mirot, Etudes lucquoises, of Easter.

IO4—I4. 43. Paid 500 francs. Durrieu, “Manuscrits de luxe,” 104

Notes to Pages 9-11 180—81, and after him Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” Voult de Luques (it is actually “du Saint Voult”’). The manuno. 37, and de Winter, La bibliothéque, 131-32, no. 35, iden- script is now Rome, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana COD. Pal. tify it with a manuscript that was reported as missing in the Lat. 1988. It contains twenty-eight miniatures. See also Paoli, inventory of 1420. It is interesting to note that as soon as Arte e committenza privata, 117, fig. 100.

1384 Dine was paid for having provided Philip the Bold 53. The other miniatures are of a different, earlier hand, with a ream of Lombard paper. See Prost and Prost, typical of the styles of Charles V’s reign. The frontispiece is Inventaires mobiliers, 1, no. 1083, who list fifty-eight entries for painted on an added leaf.

Dine, mostly for luxury textiles. After Dine’s death, Jacques 54. The only other possibility would be his nephew Jean, occasionally sold fabrics as well as jewels, for example, a since Mirot never mentions the existence of children—and, diamond in 1412 for 100 francs to John the Fearless. Laborde, for that matter, of wives—of Dine and Jacques. Indeed, no

Les ducs de Bourgogne, 1, no. 175. provisions for wives or children are made in their testa44. Durrieu, “Manuscrits de luxe,’ 102-3; Cockshaw, ments. That the Cleres femmes was created at the behest of “Mentions d’auteurs,” no. 38; de Winter, La bibliothéque, what appears to have been a lifelong bachelor is rather 130-31, no. 34, who gives the exaggerated conversion of intriguing. On the role of women in business and legal mat1,050 francs. While the écu was an existing coin, francs were ters within the Raponde and Cename families, see Carroll,

a money of account, equivalent to 1 livre tournois. It is “In the Name of God and Profit,” 99. often assumed that the rate of exchange was a fixed one, I 55. “Vous qui cestui livre lisiez / ou il a maint enseigneécu being worth 1 livre 2 sous 6 deniers tournois. The table ment / ie vous pri que pour moy priez / qui l’ay donné in Spufford, Handbook, 193, shows instead some fluctuation devotement” (fol. Vv). among these currencies in the early fifteenth century, the écu 56. There are of course more merchants who occasionbeing worth from about eleven-tenth to five-fourth of a ally sold manuscripts, such as the Lucchese Agustin Damasse,

livre. who in 1397 received 400 francs for a Bible sold to Louis of 45. Durrieu, “Manuscrits de luxe,” 181; Cockshaw, Orléans. See Shultz, “The Artistic and Literary Patronage,”

“Mentions d’auteurs,” no. 43; de Winter, La bibliothéque, 133, 184. Polica, “Le commerce et le prét,” studies a more unusu-

no. 38. al case, that of the Lucchese merchant Michele di Giovanni 46. Durrieu, “Manuscrits de luxe,’ 164—67, first identi- Guinigi, who created a sophisticated system to lend, rather fied this manuscript with Brussels, Bibl. Royale Ms 9094. than sell, his books. Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” no. 45; de Winter, La bib- 57. Lorenzo was married to Louise Raponde, a niece of liotheque, 195—97, who attributes the miniature on fol. 203, Dine and Jacques. For the manuscript, now Lucca, Bibl. fig. 184, illustrating the properties of water, in part to the Statale Ms 3122, see Meiss, 1968, 100-101, and especially Coronation Master. He believes that it might be his first Paoli, Arte e committenza privata, 113-18, who reproduces it

intervention on a Parisian manuscript. in color, figs. 81-99. The frontispiece miniature (fol. 7; Meiss, 47. Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” no. $5. Durrieu, fig. 356; Paoli, fig. 81) might represent members of the Trenta “Manuscrits de luxe,” 179-80, proposed to identify the only family at mass. Meiss dates the manuscript around 1415, known copy, now Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 12201, as the one whereas for Paoli it was made around 1410, that is, before of Philip the Bold. He is followed by de Winter, La biblio- Lorenzo Trenta commissioned Jacopo della Quercia to dectheque, 208—10, while Meiss, 1967, 315, thought that this orate his private chapel in the cathedral S. Frediano at Lucca.

notice referred to Jean de Berry’s copy. Philip the Bold Lorenzo Trenta and other members of his family appear offered the third copy to his nephew, Louis of Orléans. frequently in French princely inventories, primarily as pur48. To be identified perhaps with Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal veyors of jewelry and textiles. Lorenzo is also known to MS 3479-80, partially executed by the Coronation Master. have been a regular provider of costly jewels to Paolo Meiss, 1974, 373, and Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” no. Guinigi, ruler of Lucca from 1400 to 1430, as equally an 67. Jacques had to wait one year to get paid, since he had insatiable collector of joyaux as the duke of Berry.

delivered the book in February 1406. 58. This relationship is explored by Seidel, Jan van Eyck’s 49. Guiftrey, Inventaires, 11, 338. Arnolfini Portrait, 79-83 and 168—69. , 50. According to Spuftord, gold coins were in them- 59. Among many others, this assessment by Panofsky, selves a marker of social distinction, for “the vast majority of Early Netherlandish Painting, 52:““Decisive progress, howev-

men never used gold at all” (Spufford, Money and Its Use, er, depended once more upon a transfusion of Flemish 321). The coins depicted in the Cleres femmes’s miniatures, as blood; and the beginning of this process can be observed

in most images, are golden (Color Plate I, and Figs. 68 and in a group of Parisian manuscripts centered around two 104). According to Bozzolo and Ornato, Pour une histoire closely interrelated copies of a French translation of du livre, 28-43, the cost of a new but common book, with- Boccaccio’s Liber de claris mulieribus, both executed in the out decoration, amounted to about nine francs. One should same workshop and in the same year, 1402.” It is interesting

keep in mind that selling manuscripts represented only a to note that the arrival of a substantial number of foreign small fraction of the profits to be made by banking operations. artists in Paris coincides with the tightening of regulations

s1. Nieuwenhuysen, Les finances du duc, 385-403. concerning the import of works of art. The statutes of the 52. Belli-Barsali, “Le miniature della Legende de Saint Communauté des peintres et sculpteurs approved in 1391 by

IOS§

Notes to Pages 11-12 Charles VI contain a provision making it unlawful to “sell sible (though unlikely) identification with the Boucicaut anything in Paris made outside, in Germany or elsewhere, Master, a hypothesis first proposed by Paul Durrieu, Jacques

because these works are often faked or of a bad quality.” Coene. Meiss, 1968, 63—66, considers the connection Quoted from Guiftrey, “La communauté des peintres,” 147. between the Coronation Master and the Boucicaut Master 60. de Winter, La bibliothéque, 95—96, and 104-5, and particularly close in the Coronation of the Virgin of the idem, “Copistes, éditeurs et enlumineurs,’ 183—84.A simi- Légende dorée. The Boucicaut workshop also painted the lar well-documented case is offered by the Tuscan merchant now severely mutilated Gulbenkian copy of the Cleres femmes Francesco di Marco Datini, established in Avignon. He (Meiss, 1968, 88—91). Champeaux and Gauchery, Les travaux

imported and exported tapestries, jewels, enamels, Lucchese d’art, 121, thought that Coene worked in an illuminators’ embroideries, cassoni, and panel paintings (of which he sold workshop that Jacques Raponde “supervised” for Philip the one to Philippe Raponde in 1387). See Brun, “Notes sur Bold. Soldano, “La “Tabula de vocabulis sinonimis et equivle commerce,” 334. Also, for the role of the Augustinian ocis colorum, ” 140—50, does not mention Alcherio’s con-

abbot of Eeckhout, Lubert Hautschild, in providing the nections to the merchant world.

and 251. 258—321.

duke of Berry with Flemish manuscripts, see Meiss, 1967, 49 65. Edited by Merrifield, Original Treatises, 1, 1-39 and

61. Bella Martens, Meister Francke, 192—97 and 241 n. 66. “Pour avoir fait relloyer, nectoyer et mettre a point 221, first proposed the collective label of “Master of 1402,” ung livre d’icelui seigneur nommé le livre de Guion le which has since been split by Millard Meiss and others into Courtois” (Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” no. 70; various distinct workshops. See Meiss, 1967, 252—53, and Doutrepont, Inventaire, no. 69). idem, 1974, 383—84, and de Winter, La bibliotheque, 96-104. 67. “...ycelli Jaques, si comme il afferme, a paié pour par-

Meiss baptized him after the Coronation of the Virgin fron- chemin, enluminer, ystorier, relier, couvrir et fermer la tispiece in the Légende dorée (Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 242, fol. somme de IIIc escus d’or. Et aussi pour la paine et ocupi), reproduced in color in Sterling, La peinture médiévale, pacion qu’il a eue a faire ledit livre” (Cockshaw, “Mentions

279. Here is the rough stylistic breakdown of the Cleres d’auteurs,” no. 67; Prost, “Quelques acquisitions,” 349; femmes that I propose: Coronation Master: quires I-1v (fols. Peignot, Catalogue, 33). The exact same formula is used for

I—32v, except for Hypsipyle, fol. 25, fig. 16), quires viI-xx an actual bookseller, Martin Luillier. See Cockshaw, (fols. 49—-167v); painter B: quires v and vi (fols. 33—48v); “Mentions d’auteurs,’ no. 17.

painter C: Hypsipyle, fol. 25. A number of miniatures by 68. Durrieu, “Manuscrits de luxe,’ 163, already affirmed the Coronation Master look collaborative, such as those of that Jacques acted like an entrepreneur, supervising the exeMariamne (Fig. 85) or Antonia (Fig. 89). Painter B (not a ter- cution of manuscripts, an opinion reiterated by Doutrepont, ribly talented artist) seems to me to be of German or pos- La littérature frangaise, 13.

sibly Bohemian origins, for his figures wear clothes and 69. Bureau de Dampmartin has a somewhat comparaheadgear that one does not find in France or Flanders. See, ble social profile to Jacques Raponde. Besides his support for for instance, the headdress of Penthesilea (Fig. 31), known in | the translation of the Decameron, he also sold some manuGerman as Kruseler, or Mantho’s outdoor hat (Fig. 29). scripts to Jean de Berry, including a lot containing a Roman Similarly, the striated doublet of a soldier in Hecuba’s image de Geoffroy de Bouillon and several other unspecified books (Fig. 33), Agamemnon’s costume (Fig. 34), or the high col- sold for the considerable amount of 2,025 livres tournois

lar of Nicostrata’s cape (Fig. 26) are not to be found in in 1405. See Guiffrey, Inventaires, 1, nos. 912 and 953. The French images. Nor do the architectures in the images of the latter refers to an Ethique by Aristotle and specifies that it was

Minyans (Fig. 30) and of Hecuba (Fig. 33) or Polyxena’s made at the order of the duke, a phrasing that never appears stone sarcophagus (Fig. 32) resemble comparable Franco- in notices concerning Jacques Raponde. Bureau also appears

Flemish depictions. Durrieu, “Manuscrits de luxe,’ 178, as one of the members of the commission appointed to already thought of German or Bohemian artists for the supervise the inventory of the royal collection made upon manuscript and wondered whether the Alsatian Haincelin the death of Gilles Mallet, which was headed by Jean de Hagenau could have been among them. The hypothesis Lebégue. See Delisle, Recherches, 28. is attractive insofar as Haincelin lived in rue Quincampoix, 70. No documentary evidence has so far come to light to

just adjacent to rue Vieille-Monnaie. substantiate this claim. It is a tempting scenario, but the fact 62. Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” no. 66. This is a that the manuscripts were executed by different artists would

payment of 1407 meant to reimburse Jacques for the 60 rather speak against it. Nonetheless, Champeaux and francs that he had distributed among the three painters in Gauchery, Les travaux d’art, 151, affirmed that Jacques host1404. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this ed an illuminators’ workshop in his hotel, while Kirchhoff, Moralized Bible, especially regarding the existence of anoth- Die Handschriftenhandler, 99, went so far as to state that Jacques

er copy than Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 166. For a recent sum- owned a “formlichen Manuscriptenfabrik”—a “manuscript

mary, see de Winter, La bibliothéque, 264-71. factory” of a distinctively nineteenth-century flavor. The act 63. David, Philippe le Hardi, duc de Bourgogne et co-régent, 169. of relinquishment of the house by Dine on behalf of his

64. Meiss, 1968, 60-62 and 141, discusses documents brother does not contain any information in this regard. It is pertaining to Alcherio and Coene, as well as Coene’s pos- preserved in Paris, Archives Nationales, S* 14611, fol. 476v.

106

Notes to Pages 12—14 71. For an interesting contemporary account by Saint 77. David, Philippe le Hardi, duc de Bourgogne, 17, already Antoninus of Florence on the duties and frauds of the pro- wrote that Italian tradesmen helped the lettres antiques, and fessions involved in book production, see Rouse and Rouse, that Dine Raponde inaugurated in France what in his coun-

“St. Antoninus of Florence.” Richard and Mary Rouse have try was to be the quattrocento. The role of the merchant | repeatedly argued that the only distinction between the class in Italian humanism is of course far better known and libraire and stationaire consisted in the latter’s having the priv- documented than their cultural action in Northern coun-

ilege to own the exemplars that would be rented out to be tries. copied. Still valuable is the older survey by Delalain, Etude 78. See Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 191-96; Uitz, The sur le libraire. Hughes, “The Library,’ 168—69, provides a list Legend of Good Women, 51-54; and Howell, Women, of booksellers and merchants recorded in Philip the Bold’s Production, and Patriarchy, 124-26, and 137—52 for the excep-

inventories. tional involvement of women in import-export trades in 72. For a marginal note documenting the role of the Cologne. Most women were employed in textile industries well-known bookseller Regnault du Montet and the illu- and small-scale trades of luxury commodities, but often in minator Perrin Remiet, see Avril, “Trois manuscrits napoli- lesser skilled and thus lesser paid tasks. It should be noted that

tains,’ 303—5; and de Winter, “Copistes, éditeurs et women do appear with some regularity in the Valois princeenlumineurs,” 176 and 194—95, who also considers the role ly accounts, including as sellers of luxury goods. of Thévenin (Etienne) |’Angevin, a bookseller working for 79. Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guido A. Louis of Orléans. On this latter, see also Shultz, “The Artistic Guarino (hereafter Guarino), 9s.

and Literary Patronage,’ 295—305, and 305-8 for the role of 80. “Sy nous moustre raison et par experience poons the valet de chambre Godefroy Le Févre as an intermediary veoir comment la noble Pamphile par son grant engin fist between the duke and the professionals in the book trade. grant profit et grant honneur au monde, car en plusieurs ter73. This overlap of scribe and illuminator, a profession- res aultres draps n’ont pour eulx vestir, et en pluseurs lieux al trait that harkens back to the early Middle Ages, becomes Dieu en est honnouré et servy et les moustiers parez moult increasingly rare in the late Middle Ages with the growth of honnorablement, et si en fait l’en les nobles robes et les the division of labor. For a general view, see Alexander, royaulx vestemens” (fol. 69v; Baroin and Haffen, 150). Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods, 4-34. For examples Guarino, 95, and Zaccaria, 184—87, both translate “bomof libraires being at the same time illuminators, see Rouse and byx” as “cotton.” The addition is taken up and elaborated

Rouse, “The Commercial Production,’ 110. upon by Christine de Pizan, which is another proof that 74. Rouse and Rouse, “The Commercial Production.” she was using the French translation as a source for her City This was still the case around 1400, since the bookseller of Ladies (Moreau and Hicks, 111; Richards, 83). For comRobert Lescuyer’s shop, for instance, was located in rue parative material, I will refer to the most readily available

Neuve. See Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” no. 32. editions. 75. For an overall view on guilds in Paris and their 81. Buettner, “Jacques Raponde,”’ 29—30. monopolistic character, Geremek, Le salariat dans |’ artisanat 82. See Lawton, “The Illustration of Late Medieval

parisien, is particularly valuable. For a summary, see Secular Texts,” 45. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods, 30-32. 83. Authors and translators frequently acted as the advisAccording to Martindale, The Rise of the Artist, 46, only the ers for the iconographic program. Among many others, this first title entailed a position with a fixed salary, while it is not was the case of Jacques Coureau, treasurer and maitre d’hdentirely clear what privileges and obligations were attached tel of Jean de Berry, who in 1404 offered to his patron a to the position of valet de chambre. Francoise Robin, “Lartiste City of God containing a new cycle of illuminations exede cour en France: Le jeu des recommandations et des liens cuted by the Virgil Master, from whose atelier Coureau familiaux (XIVé—XVé6 siécles),” in Artistes, artisans et pro- ordered two further manuscripts. See Smith, “New Themes duction artistique, 1, $37—54, offers a more substantial discus- for the City of God,” 80—81. For Nicole Oresme, the transsion of the career patterns that were available to court artists, lator of Aristotle for Charles V, see Sherman, Imaging Aristotle,

as does Warnke in his analysis of the divergence between 23-33 and 180-83; for Jean Golein, the translator of the “civic and courtly attitudes to art,’ in The Court Artist, Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officioruam, who might have

3-23. been the adviser for Charles V’s Coronation Book, see idem,

76. As noted by Guenée, Histoire et culture historique, 290. “The Queen in Charles V’s “Coronation Book,’ 294-95. See Nieuwenhuysen, Les finances du duc, 340-44 and passim, For the well-documented case of Christine de Pizan, see for a discussion of Dine Raponde’s support in other impor- Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” 63—68, and de tant ducal transactions, such as the acquisition of the coun- Winter, “Christine de Pizan.”

ty of Flanders upon Philip the Bold’s marriage with the 84. Durrieu proposed the term “directeur de l’illustraheiress Margaret, or the considerable loan that he obtained tion” (Berger and Durrieu, “Les notes pour l’enlumineur,”

from the Milanese duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti to finance 19). It was taken up by Martin, “Les esquisses des miniaan English campaign that, in the end, never took place. On tures,’ 19, who surmised that this person might be the pagthe financial implications of the crusade to Nicopolis, see also inator, responsible for layout as well as for the iconographic

Vaughan, Philip the Bold, 59-78. program. For an interesting case of a bilingual adviser, see 107

Notes to Pages 14—16 Meiss, “The First Fully Illustrated Decameron.” Alexander, ed for Jean de Berry but completed only after the duke’s Medieval Iluminators and Their Methods, 52—71, ofters the death at the request of Bureau de Dampmartin. He also most recent summary for notes and sketches, with many composed a Latin panegyric of Boccaccio, which concludes

new examples. the 1409 translation of the De casibus virorum illustrium, as 85. There are, however, a number of marginal erasures well as other, highly prized Latin poems. See Gathercole, “A of what appear to be one-line indications as, for instance, on Frenchman’s Praise of Boccaccio,’ and Ouy,““Poémes retrouvés.’

| folio 136, next to Paulina’s biography. 97. The presentation copy is now in Geneva, Bibl. Publique 86. Ouy, “Une maquette.’ It is part of Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms et Universitaire Ms fr. 190, and is studied by Gagnebin, “Le lat. 14643, fols. 269—283v. In 1390, the same Bouvet offered Boccace du duc de Berry.’ It was given as an étrenne in 1411

to Philip the Bold “an illuminated book, a mule and a grey- by Martin Gouge, treasurer and counselor of the duke, and

hound” (Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” no. 23). bishop of Chartres. John the Fearless’s copy, made around 87. The program is now at Oxford, Bodleian Libr. ms 1410-15, is fully reproduced in Martin, Le Boccace de Jean sans D’ Orville 141, and the finished manuscript is at Geneva, Peur, to which I will refer for comparative images. Book I 1s Bibl. Publique et Universitaire Ms lat. 4. For both the writ- edited by Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas des nobles

ten program and the miniatures, see Porcher’s edition of hommes et femmes,” who studies in some detail Laurent’s interLebégue’s Les histoires que l’on peut raisonnablement faire. polations. See also Bozzolo, “La conception du pouvoir,’ for 88. For a sophisticated discussion of these questions, see the political views expressed in Laurent’s interpolations.

Camille, “The Book of Signs.” 98. Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions, 191. By compar89. Byrne, “An Early French Humanist and Sallust,” $7, ison, only fifteen copies of the Decameron survive. Despite who also convincingly establishes Lebégue’s direct partici- Boccaccio’s early success in France, more than half of the

pation in the realization of the Geneva manuscript. surviving manuscripts date from the third quarter of the 90. This is the usual designation of miniatures, whereas fifteenth century. enluminure refers to the decorative elements. See Durrieu, 99. On Laurent’s ambivalence about the ethical merits of

“Venlumineur et le miniaturiste.” the Decameron as expressed in his prologue, see Olson, g1. Lebégue’s program does pay some attention to formal Literature as Recreation, 223-32, who suggests that the trans-

configurations. But there remains ample room for person- lation might have resulted from an assignment rather than al interpretations. For instance, about Sallust’s costume in from Laurent’s own choice. Olson usefully links Laurent’s the frontispiece he says that it should be painted in “ver- position to the late medieval expansion of secular enter-

million, or another color” (Byrne, “An Early French tainments and the need to justify them as profitable. Norton, Humanist and Sallust,” 50). See also Alexander, Medieval “Laurent de Premierfait,’ has similarly emphasized the conIlluminators and Their Methods, 112—14, for a similar analysis tinuity in moral purposes that Premierfait saw between the

of an Arthurian cycle. De casibus and the Decameron.

92. Schapiro, “On the Relation of Patron and Artist,’ in 100. The first surviving fully iluminated copy, presumTheory and Philosophy of Art, 230, drew attention long ago to ably patterned on Jean de Berry’s exemplar, belonged to

the dangers of such reductionism. John the Fearless and is dated around 1415 (Rome, Bibl. . 93. For the theme of poetry as a therapeutic tool in Apostolica Vaticana COD. Pal. Lat. 1989). Edited with color plague times, see Olson, Literature as Recreation, esp. 164—204. reproductions by Konig, Boccaccio.

For Boccaccio, the fundamental work remains Branca, ror. All translations and manuscripts are studied by Boccaccio medievale. For works of art illustrating Boccaccio’s Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions. See also Mombello, “I

writings, see the list established by Branca, Watson, and manoscritti di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio in Francia,’ in Il Kirkham, “Boccaccio visualizzato,’ 121-88. A copiously Boccaccio nella cultura francese, 81-209. A good overview of . illustrated publication with the same title, edited by Vittore Boccaccio’s presence in France from the fifteenth to the

Branca, is forthcoming. nineteenth century is offered by the exhibition catalogue 94. Simone, “La présence de Boccace,’ 17-18, and idem, Boccace en France. It should also be noted that Griselda’s “Giovanni Boccaccio ‘fabbro’ della sua prima fortuna novella (Decameron, X, 10) circulated in Petrarch’s Latin transfrancese,” in Il Boccaccio nella cultura francese, esp. 63—80. lation and its French adaption made by Philippe de Méziéres

95. According to Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions, between 1384 and 1389. 39-45, almost 83 percent of the French manuscripts for 102. Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions, 23-25, 9I—100, which a fifteenth—century owner is known (ca. §2 percent) 149—55, and 180-83.

belonged to nobles. French humanists owned Boccaccio 103. “Icy fine de Jehan Bocace le livre des femmes manuscripts in both Latin and French. See Di Stefano, renommees, translaté de latin en francois en l’an de grace mil “Jacques Legrand”; Bozzolo, “Lhumaniste Gontier Col”; CCCC et un, accompli le XIIe jour de septembre, soubz le

and Ornato, “Per la fortuna di Boccaccio.” temps de tresnoble et trespuissant et redoubté prince Charles 96. On Laurent de Premierfait, see Famiglietti, “Laurent Vie, roy de France et duc de Normendie. Deo gracias” (fol. de Premierfait,’ with complete bibliography. In addition to 167v). On the different manuscript families of the Cleres Boccaccio, Premierfait translated Cicero’s De senectute (1405) femmes, see Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions, 23-25, and for Louis of Bourbon, and the De amicitia (1416), first intend- Baroin and Haffen, x—xi1.

108

Notes to Pages 16 —19 104. For instance, Meiss, 1967, figs. soo and $03. Laurent 119. Boccaccio first intended to dedicate the work to mentions only that he translated the De casibus in the pro- Joanna, queen of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem, who had logue to the Decameron, and this also speaks against attribut- employed Andrea Acciaiouli and hosted Boccaccio at her ing the Cleres femmes to him. See Norton, “Laurent de court, but he must have changed his mind upon receiving

Premierfait,’ 384. Niccolo’s invitation to Naples. Joanna’s biography concludes 105. Di Stefano, “Dal ‘Decameron’ di Giovanni the work in the final version. On this switch, see Benson, Boccaccio,’ shows, however, that the repetition of nouns The Invention, 12-13 and 28—30. and adjectives, known as “dittology,” was a common stylis- 120. Guarino, xxxiil.

tic trait of French poetics in the late Middle Ages. On the 121. This tension between private pleasure and public language of the Cleres femmes, see the brief comments in utility is analyzed by Benson, The Invention, 1o—14, as an

Baroin and Haffen, xiv—xvii. indication of Boccaccio’s own precarious civic confidence. 106. Norton, “Laurent de Premierfait,’ 378. Laurent’s However, I do not follow her argument that pleasure was moralizing additions to the Decameron are discussed by necessarily equated with femininity. See Olson, Literature

Cucchi, “The First French Decameron.” as Recreation, for the widespread use of the pleasure topos in 107. In Irene’s biography, a gladiator is also mentioned medieval literature. (Zaccaria, 244) and gets similarly transformed into a “faiseur 122. On Boccaccio’s ancient and some medieval sources,

de glaives et de couteaux” (fol. 92v). He is not included in see the introduction by Zaccaria to his edition of the De the miniature, displaced, as we shall see, by Christ and the mulieribus claris, as well as Guarino, xxix—xxxi.

Virgin. This phenomenon—the “feudalization” of the lex- 123. Guarino, 121. icon in French translations of Roman history—is considered 124. McLeod, Virtue and Venom, 68.The author traces

by Spiegel, Romancing the Past, esp. 191-92. women’s catalogues back to Greek and Roman sources. 108. Baroin and Haffen, 33. This is also how Christine Boccaccio’s is the first independent work on women of de Pizan defines them in the City of Ladies (Moreau and such a comprehensive scope. A similar point is made by

Hicks, 102; Richards, 74). Benson, The Invention, 16.

109. Guarino, 89. The Cas des nobles hommes et femmes 125. Guarino, xxxix. corrects this mistake, and, accordingly, in the miniature Dido 126. “...illas intelligere claras quas quocunque ex facistabs herself amid a fire ignited on top of a tower. Martin, nore orbi vulgato sermone notissimas novero” (Zaccaria,

Le Boccace de Jean sans Peur, pl. xxvit. 24; Guarino, xxxviii). See Cerbo, Ideologia e retorica, 34ff.,

110. Baroin and Haffen, 77. who limits her understanding of claritas to the rational and 111. Bumgardner, “Christine de Pizan,” 41-42, has first positive principle of human actions. For an interesting etypublished this amplification, noting that it was taken over by mological discussion of clarus, see McLeod, Virtue and Venom,

Christine de Pizan in the City of Ladies. 64-65. |

112. “Gettes en un bois et la les alaita et nourrit une 127. Such is the title of the oldest group of manuscripts.

louve” (Baroin and Haften, 151). However, it does not seem necessary to me to follow de : 113. The same point is made by Gathercole, Laurent de Winter in reverting to this “original” title, as the work is Premierfait’s “Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes,” 25. now generally known as the Des cleres et nobles femmes, which

114. Lusignan, Parler vulgairement, esp. 129—71, examines was the favorite fifteenth-century title anyway. See de fourteenth-century translations and translators’ prologues Winter, La bibliothéque, 206, where the Coronation Master as strategies meant to redefine cultural borders and to appro- becomes an impossibly long “Maitre du livre Des Femmes

priate clerical knowledge for the benefit of lay circles. nobles et renommées de Philippe le Hardi.” 115. A similar argument is made by Byrne, “Rex imago 128. Brussels, Bibl. Royale Ms 9509; Lisbon, C. Dei,” 100-101, insofar as Jean Corbechon’s interpolations Gulbenkian Foundation ms L.A. 143. to Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum are said 129. It is designated as such in the above-quoted payto mean that “the presence of Charles V is felt even in the ment record to Jacques Raponde.

body of the text.” 130. Merrifield, Original Treatises, 1, no. 308.This note was 116. Guarino, xxxiii. The French reads: “Devant hier, added by Lebégue to the original text by Coene and Alcherio. moy estant un petit abstrait et separé du simple et mains 131. By contrast, the De casibus contains many more chapexpert peuple commun, et bien pres despeschié de toutes ters on medieval characters and it eliminates all gods and

aultres cures” (Baroin and Haften, 8). goddesses. Certain heroines, such as Athaliah, Lucretia, Dido, 117. See the introduction to the critical edition and Verginia, or Pope Joan are included in both works, while Italian translation by Zaccaria, as well as idem, “Le fasi others, such as Arsinoe, Messalina, Rosemunde, or redazionali”; and Torretta, “Il ‘Liber de Claris Mulieribus., ”’ Brunehaut, appear only in the De casibus. For a list of subThe autograph manuscript is Florence, Bibl. Laurenziana jects, see Meiss, 1974, 284—87.

Cod. Pluteo XC sup. 981. 132. On the tradition of moralizing interpretations of 118. There are two are double biographies for the ancient mythology and history, see Seznec, The Survival, Amazon queens Martesia and Lampedo, and Orithya and 84-121.

Antiope. 133. An interesting parallel to the anxiety of mixing “good 10g

Notes to Pages 20 —23 and evil” (in this case referred to the teachings of Mohammed) in national consciousness, for it was argued that France was can be found in Gerson’s Tiaité contre le “Roman de la rose” the natural homeland of chivalric behavior.

(1402). Quoted after Baird and Kane, “La Querelle,” 82. 151. The entire dossier is published by Hicks, Le débat; 134. This is echoed by Guenée, Histoire et culture his- most texts are translated by Baird and Kane, “La Querelle’’; torique, 346—50, who affirms that the main mission of history Hill, The Medieval Debate, offers a summary of the “agenwas to prove, with the help of precedents, continuities. On das” of each participant. See also Dow, The Varying Attitude, the euhemerist tradition, see Seznec, The Survival, 11-36. 129-260, and Huizinga, The Waning, 115—19.

135. Huizinga, The Waning, 74. 152. Jean de Montreuil in the letter “Ut sunt mores,” 136. Inventories only rarely contain information about perhaps addressed to Laurent de Premierfait (Baird and the actual use of a manuscript, as is the case for the Arthurian Kane, “La Querelle,” 153, and Hicks, Le débat, 42).

collection sold by Jacques Raponde.The 1420 Burgundian 153. On Gerson’s and Christine’s censorial attitudes, see inventory states that it had been borrowed by Margaret of Delany, “‘Mothers to Think Back Through,’” 192—94. Bavaria, wife of John the Fearless. Quoted after Doutrepont, 154. In a letter addressed to Gontier Col in the fall of

La littérature francaise, 14. 1401, Christine wrote that his misogynist criticism did not 137. See Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions, 91-100 and bother her for she found “pour le reconfort de la noble 149—55.A few were made for couples, such as the late fif- memoire et continuelle experience de tres grant foison vail-

teenth-century copy that belonged to Charles d’Angouléme lans femmes avoir esté et estre tres dignes de louenge” and Louise de Savoie (Paris, Bibl. Nat. ms fr. $99). (Hicks, Le débat, 25; Baird and Kane, “La Querelle,” 63). It is

138. Benson, The Invention, 17-18. interesting to note that her terms are very similar to the 139. To wit, the first modern edition of the Des cleres et prologue of the Cleres femmes. nobles femmes is being prepared by Jeanne Baroin and Josiane 155. Baird and Kane, “La Querelle,” 145, and 73,77, 164.

Haffen as I write. For the original texts, see Hicks, Le débat, 162, and 63 (where 140. Quilligan, The Allegory, 189-245. Gerson speaks of images as painted “curieusement et riche141. McLeod, Virtue and Venom, 114-16; Quilligan, The ment’), 68, 183. Christine de Pizan, Le livre des fais et bonnes

Allegory, 11-68. meurs, 1, 84, praises Charles V for barring “dishonest” books 142. Jeanroy, “Boccace et Christine de Pisan,’ was first and talks from his court. Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, to examine the City of Ladies’s borrowings from the Cleres 167—78, discusses the querelle, and Gerson’s position in par-

femmes. Since then, Christine’s fundamental revision of her ticular, in light of the more general acceptance of or conmain source has been explored more thoroughly, as by cession to naturalist ideals around 1400.

Dulac, “Un mythe didactique,” Philippy, “Establishing 156. Hicks, Le débat, xli—xlvi. Christine celebrates this Authority,’ or Quilligan, The Allegory, which offers the most order in her Dit de la rose. sustained comparison of the two texts. For Christine’s use of 157. See Bozzolo and Loyau, La Cour amoureuse, for a the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes’s allegorical framework, complete edition of the armorial and the charter. Bureau is

see McLeod, Virtue and Venom, 116-17. listed as number 43 and Dine as 446. 143. As, for instance, in the Chantilly manuscript. See 158. Olson, Literature as Recreation, 194-96.

Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions, 99-100. 1§9. Bozzolo and Loyau, La Cour amoureuse, 40. This 144. Fora spirited critical stance against what she calls the occasion was the annual plenary session at Saint Valentine’s.

“overestimation” of Christine de Pizan, see Delany, A few moments after explaining that poets will be pun“Mothers to Think Back Through’” On Christine’s con- ished should they disgrace women, the charter states that servative political views, see also the brief remarks in a similar treatment will be inflicted upon those guilty of

Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower, 92-93. defaming princes, prelates, and nobles in general. Green, 145. McLeod, Virtue and Venom, 78. “The Familia Regis,” 96—98, sees the absence of women as

146. Benson, The Invention, 8. a major difference with twelfth-century courts of love. 147. Ibid., 22. One could also point out that in the De 160. Famighietti, Royal Intrigue, 23-29. Even if it is true that casibus virorum illustrium, Boccaccio refrains from putting Isabeau was never appointed as the sole regent, the question

the blame of the Fall on Eve alone. of women’s roles was implicitly present in these debates 148. Stierle, “L’Histoire comme Exemple, |’Exemple and dispositions. Hedeman, The Royal Image, 172—73, notes

comme Histoire,’ 187. that in the Grandes Chroniques, executed shortly before 1407 149. Chaucer wrote his book to amend himself for hav- by the Cité des Dames Master (Paris, Bibl. Mazarine Ms ing translated the Roman de la rose, which is not without 2028), there is an unusual emphasis on the role of the queen. analogy to Boccaccio, whose De mulieribus claris can be seen 161. Meiss, 1974, 287-90. No Boccaccio manuscript was as a belated response to his rather vicious antifeminist tract, included in the royal library at that time. the Corbaccio. See McLeod, Virtue and Venom, 81-109. 162. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods, 150. Hill, The Medieval Debate, 81-82, makes an inter- 138. Perhaps the most spectacular case of multiple copies esting, though unsubstantiated, claim that “the interest in are the three examples of Haython’s Fleur des histoires de la the status of women” was one of the defining characteris- terre d’ Orient sold by Jacques Raponde to Philip the Bold. tics of early humanism in France and responded to the rise 163. Chyroniques, 1, 26. Quoted from Olson, Literature as

TIO

Notes to Pages 24-27 Recreation, 84. This, like other statements, qualifies Paul tic literature and social reality is briefly considered by Saenger’s assumption that aristocratic audiences of the late Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower, 103; Shahar, The Fourth Middle Ages read texts silently and in private. See his oth- Estate, 197. For the connection of family position and labor erwise seminal essay, “Silent Reading,’ esp. 408 and 411. status, see Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 87 and 164. Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs, 1, 63. Christine con- 178—83.

tinues her eulogy of Mallet by telling her readers that his 6. A possible source of inspiration might have been devotion to his master was so absolute that on the day he - Francesco di Barberino’s Reggimento e costumi di donna, writ-

accidentally lost one of his young sons he fulfilled his duties ten around 1307-15. Summarized, along with a wealth of

as if nothing had happened. According to Godefroy, other didactic texts from Tertullian to the sixteenth centuDictionnaire de Vancienne langue francaise, “ponter’ derives from ry, by Hentsch, De la littérature didactique, 104—19.A selection

‘pointer,’ meaning “to punctuate, observe with attention.” of thirteenth—century ad status literature on women has | 165. Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs, 1, 47 and $7. been assembled by Casagrande in Prediche alle donne. 166. The prologue to the translation of Bartholomaeus According to her, it was Humbert of Romans who first Anglicus’s Livre des propriétés des choses hints at such a dif- categorized women according to their socioprofessional ference when explaining that Charlemagne had the seven status in his De eruditione praedicatorum, written between liberal arts painted in his palace so that he could “see them 1266 and 1277. in painting” when he did not have “time to see them in 7. See Casagrande in Klapisch—Zuber, A History of Women,

book.” Quoted from Byrne, “Rex imago Dei,’ 108. 7475. In the same volume, see also Claudia Opitz, “Life 167. Camille, “Seeing and Reading,” 43, rightly under- in the Late Middle Ages,” 267-317, for a good summary of scores that “medieval pictures cannot be separated from the personal and social conditions of women in this period.

what is a total experience of communication involving Corti, “Models and Antimodels,” 343-44, shows how sight, sound, action and physical expression.” women did not fit, or fit only uneasily, the new social cat168. Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 562, fol. 23r. I have not been egories that were elaborated in the thirteenth century. able to locate a modern edition of this French translation. 8. Boccaccio gives two versions of the story of Isis. The

169. Huizinga, The Waning, 294. first (ascribed to poets) has it that Isis was transformed into a heifer after her rape by Jupiter. The second (offered by historians, and preferred by Boccaccio) affirms that she fled

IT to Egypt on a ship that harbored a cow as an emblem. While Images as Readers this latter version is usually depicted, the manuscript by the Boucicaut workshop opts for the preceding one. Discussed 1. Meiss, 1967, 14. In Italy, Boccaccio’s work did not gen- and reproduced in Meiss, 1968, 48 and fig. 367. Christine

erate a sizable visual tradition in manuscripts. de Pizan ascribes to Isis the invention of gardening 2. Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 1-10, emphasizes that (Richards, 76-77). women are almost always categorized apart, and according 9. In Jean de Berry’s copy (fols. 11 and 13), Ceres and to their marital status first,a concept that is never applied to Minerva have red halos. Meiss, 1968, 48, noted that the men. The picture of women through the lenses of the “estate Boucicaut manuscript eliminates all haloes.

literature” is carefully analyzed by Carla Casagrande in her 10. Same for the Brussels manuscript (fol. 12v), partial chapter “The Protected Woman” in Klapisch—Zuber, A color reproduction in Boccaccio, Decameron, 1, $86. Millard History of Women, 70-104. On the estate literature, the fun- Meiss caught this unusual detail. Placed more convincingdamental work remains that of Mohl, The Three Estates. See ly in a bedroom, the same scene is depicted in a miniature also Le Goff, “Trades and Professions as Represented in of the Terence des Ducs (Paris, Bibl. de Arsenal Ms lat. 664, Medieval Confessors’ Manuals,’ in Time, Work, and Culture, fol. 137v, reproduced in Meiss, 1974, 49, and fig. 199). I have 107-21, and esp. 116 for the substitution of the ordines by the not been able to find a historical explanation for this prac-

estates. tice. For instance, it is not mentioned in the description of

3. This is the definition by Mohl, The Three Estates, 5. It medieval childbirth techniques by Alexandre-Bidon and could be argued that one of the novelties of Boccaccio’s Closson, L’enfant a Vombre, 35—62. Daniele Alexandre-Bidon, De mulieribus claris, as well as of his De casibus virorum illus- who has kindly answered my query on this subject, has no trium, is the individualization of the characters’ fate and the definite explanation either, though she has discovered other ensuing problematization of fixed moral typologies. This is visual examples. analyzed in reference to the Decameron by Stierle, “L’Histoire 11. Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” 75—76,

comme Exemple, l’Exemple comme Histoire,” 186—g0. and Bumgardner, “Christine de Pizan,’ 46. 4. As shown by Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre 12. In a few cases, Berry’s manuscript differs in the choice Othéa,” 91, the estates also organize this other work of hers. of representing a character as a goddess or not. This 1s usu-

And they inflect Laurent de Premierfait’s exegesis of the ally done in accordance with the rubric and chapter headDecameron. See Norton, “Laurent de Premierfait,’ 386. ing. “Tres belle” Venus, for instance, is not depicted as 5. Marital status is a defining factor in the De mulieribus a goddess in either manuscript, in marked contrast to claris as well. The disjunction of the image offered by didac- Boccaccio’s story.

III

Notes to Pages 27 —32 13. Berry’s copy (fol. rorv) places a statue/living person John the Fearless takes Athaliah as a prime example of just of Venus on the altar. The Lisbon manuscript shows the tyrannicide. Quoted by Huizinga, The Waning, 228. Her consecration of the statue of Venus, a small figurine on top popularity is further attested by the fact that in the Cas des of a column, by an assembly of women of all estates. See nobles hommes et femmes the depiction of her clamorous Meiss, 1968, fig. 375. On the evolution of praying postures downfall is extended over two miniatures. See Martin, Le

and gestures, see Schmitt, La raison, 295—97. Boccace de Jean sans Peur, pls. xxv and xxv. 14. The bed is also red in the Brussels manuscript (fol. 27. See Sherman, “The Queen in Charles V’s ‘Coronation 137), partially reproduced in Boccaccio, Decameron, 1, 254. Book,” esp. 278—83, for a discussion of Jeanne de Bourbon’s

Paulina’s is a reworking of the story of Lisabetta fooled by regalia. brother Alberto disguised as the archangel Gabriel in the 28. Quoted in Krynen, Idéal du prince, 132-33. Decameron (Iv, 2). Commented on by Guarino, xvii—xx, and 29. Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 11.

reproduced in K6nig, Boccaccio, 103. 30. Krynen, Idéal du prince, 139-41. See, however, 15. One is reminded of Geremek’s statement in The Sherman, “The Queen in Charles V’s ‘Coronation Book, ” Margins, 120, that “the false tonsure was the characteristic sign 258—60, for a different assessment.

of belonging to the criminal milieu.” 31. As mentioned, the role of Isabeau de Baviére as 16. For a full account of the legend of Pope Joan and its co—regent was constantly being redefined. Discussed by reception up to modern times, see Boureau, La papesse Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” 133-36, and Jeanne, and, esp. 226—34, for Boccaccio’s treatment. It is he Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, 161—64.

who apparently feminized her name from Jean (Johannes) 32. Meiss, 1968, 10—11, figs. 33 and 46—48. He discusses into Jeanne (Johanna). Davis, “Women on Top,” 134, right- ~ the close links between Boucicaut and Louis. The identifily stresses that in Boccaccio’s recounting, Joan’s story does cation is accepted by Autrand, Charles VI (plates between not lead to a critique of established gender hierarchies. pages $76 and $577). For Louis of Orléans’s other heraldic 17. Alexandre-Bidon and Closson, L’enfant a l’ombre, collar of the Order of the Porcupine, see Hindman, Christine $3—62, mention cases of women giving birth in an upright de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” 44—s51.A similar necklace is worn

position. by the man at the far left behind Penelope (Fig. 39), perhaps 18. Mohl, The Three Estates, 6, argued that ordering, clas- Ulysses’ son Telemacus, who, a bit incongruously, is striking sifying, and cataloging are what make the estate literature toward the frame. Although he is a “just” avenger, the fact is similar in aim to such works as encyclopedias, bestiaries, or that on a literal level it is he and his companions who look

lapidaries, all of which were abundantly represented in the like murderers.

Valois libraries. 33. The gesture is the same for the much more exoti19. Benson, The Invention, 29, briefly notes the antithet- cized emperor in the Brussels manuscript (fol. 155), reproical linkage of Eve and Joanna. See also Hedeman, The Royal duced in Boccaccio, Decameron, 1, 416. The text is more Image, 124 and 155, for a similar analysis of frontispieces intricate since Irene and Constantine are mutually usurping

visually linking the beginning to the end of a manuscript. the throne, and the story ultimately addresses problems of

20. Guarino, 2. inheritance and royal legitimacy, issues that were of para21. Fora color reproduction, see Boccace en France, 28. mount importance for the young, and contested, Valois

22. Hentsch, De la littérature didactique, 6—7, noted that the dynasty. It ends with two different versions: according to majority of educational treatises were destined for noble- the first, Irene, once having seized power, ended up killing women, even when claiming to encompass all estates. Constantine; according to the other, their discord provoked 23. In fact, Berry’s manuscript (fol. 22v) interprets the the revolt of the Romans, who decided to bestow the impescene in the opposite way by having Hypermnestra and rial crown upon Charlemagne (Guarino, 234-36). Linus crowned; they are standing, already separated by 34. This event is now fully treated by Guenée, Un meurtre,

Danaus. une société, including an analysis of Petit’s Justification 24. In Berry’s copy (fol. 153v) the difference is erased (189—201) and of Gerson’s efforts to condemn it (232—56).

and Otto’s imperial crown restored. See also Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue, 34-35 and 67-68. 25. This is undoubtedly the biography that has provoked 35. As qualifies him Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix, in his the most discussion among scholars assessing Boccaccio’s dedication of the Livre de la chasse. After Vaughan, Philip the

work. See Dulac, “Un mythe didactique.” Quilligan, The Bold, 200. Allegory, 74-85, who sees Ninus’s emasculation in London, 36. Marle, Iconographie, 1, 26-34, considers the falcon, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 20 C.V, fig. 12, as an example of the along with the dog, to be the most characteristic attribute terrifying power that Semiramis holds for a male author, of a noble. Perhaps the most famous image of a falconry while Benson, The Invention, 27, reads her story in terms hunt is the August page in the Trés Riches Heures (fig. 226; and of an opposition of positive public achievements against Meiss, 1974, fig. 546).

II2 |

private sin. McLeod, Virtue and Venom, 66, insists on 37. In London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 20 C.V, fol. 42, Semiramis’s divided gender identity (exemplified by her wounded Procris is so alive that she can turn around and

hairdo). spot the cause of her imminent death. Color reproduction 26. Jean Petit’s Justification of Louis of Orléans’s murder by in Boccaccio, Decameron, 11, 811. Lavin, “Cephalus and

Notes to Pages 32 —36 Procris,” traces the written and pictorial tradition of this si. This is usually how Thamyris is represented, with the Ovidian story, including Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan. head of Cyrus lying in a blood-filled bucket. See Quilligan,

38. Guarino, 79. The Allegory, fig. 15, reproducing the scene from Christine de 39. Marle, Iconographie, 1, 197-239. He adds that hunt- Pizan’s Mutacion de fortune, or Martin, Le Boccace de Jean sans

ing with arrows was very much in favor in the fifteenth Peur, pl. XXXVI. century, at least if one is to trust the evidence provided by 52. Wayne, “Zenobia in Medieval and Renaissance

images. Literature,” who reproduces the similarly conceived minia40. Verdon, Les loisirs, 54. ture of London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 16 G.V.

41. Jean de Berry’s copy (fol. 56) opts for a wilder solu- $3. On dubbing iconography, see Marle, Iconographie, 1, tion in that Camilla, dwelling in a landscape that opens 34-36; on gestures, see Schmitt, La raison, 208-10. toward a village under the sky, is covered only by hair grow- 54. Ibid., 304~—7, considers foot battles less popular a ing directly from her body, as if she were a wild woman or motive than mounted battles.

some sort of Mary the Egyptian. Reproduced in KGnig, 55. See Alexandre-Bidon and Closson, “L’amour a Boccaccio, 17. London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 16 C.V, fol. 44r, Pépreuve du temps,” with illustrations. The authors note

resorts to yet another solution, where a naked Camilla is that these images might contain a critique insofar as men

barely concealed under a cloak. wielding clubs carried negative connotations. 42. Smith, The Power of Women, fully explores this topos. 56. Guarino, 73. Similar stories of male effemination are castigated more fre- $7. One might note the absence in this siege, as in any quently in De casibus virorum illustrium. For an interesting other miniature, of artillery, which was becoming of a more and somewhat parallel image, see that of the bejeweled spin- standard use in this period according to Contamine, War ning Sardanapalus in Martin, Le Boccace de Jean sans Peur, in the Middle Ages, 137-50, and 192—207. The courtly tonal-

pl. xxviu, as well as pl. xv for a related example. ity of a manuscript such as the Cleres femmes clearly shies 43. Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, 121-75. away from including what were perceived to be unchivalSee also Christine de Pizan, Le livre du corps de policie, 1, ric, even devilish, arms. chap. 30 (Porhan, 52—53), for the corrupting indulgence in 58. According to Marle, Iconographie, 1, 343-50, naval

food, wine, and women. battles, properly speaking, were rarely represented. He also | 44. The slightly later Brussels manuscript (fol. 66v) depicts quotes the Songe du vergier’s evocation of all manners of bat-

these men naked. tles decorating the halls in Charles V’s times so as to offer 45. Zaccaria, 182; Baroin and Haffen, 147. visual delectation “en batailles imaginatives.” The well46. Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, and Marle, known episode of John of Gaunt asking the duke of Berry Iconographie, 1, 183-87. In the Middle Ages, it was believed to remove tapestries representing ancient battles from the hall that wild men actually existed in the East. John the Fearless’s where an armistice treatise was negotiated is briefly menbeautiful Livre des merveilles by the Boucicaut Master con- tioned in Huizinga, The Waning, 245. See also Christine de tains a miniature with a wild man observing Marco Polo Pizan, Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs, 1, 229 —39, for a detailed and his travel companion, an addition that was the illumi- description of the complexities of sieges.

nator’s own contribution (Friedman, The Monstrous Races, 59. Dine was also entrusted with supervising the actual

154). construction. See Nieuwenhuysen, Les finances du duc,

47. Autrand, Charles VI, 299-303. Four of Charles’s com- 436—41; Mirot, Etudes lucquoises, 129 -33;Vaughan, Philip the

panions died in an atrocious manner with their entrails and Bold, 170-71.

sexual organs dropping across the floor. Autrand rightly 60. It is worth mentioning that the miniature maincomments that people were shocked not just because of tains the ratio of mounted archer to men-at-arms estithat, but also because the king risked death as a beste, that is, mated by Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, 129, to be in a sacrilegious state. Charles VI apparently also liked to 1:2. After Agincourt the proportion was reversed. See also

Intrigue, 14. infantry.

dress up as a Bohemian or a German. See Famiglietti, Royal ibid., 132-37, for the predominance of cavalry over 48. Berry’s manuscript (fol. 113v) more emphatically dis- 61. Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” 113-14,

torts Dripetrua into a double, Janus-like human being. figs. 20 and 21. The author discusses the mixing of actual 49. See de Winter, La bibliothéque, fig. 208, for a more and fictional heraldry. See also Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine expansive banquet painted by the Coronation Master in Worthies, 250-56 and table 292—99, for a description of the

the Fleur des histoires. somewhat fluctuating coat-of-arms given to the nine 50. For some contemporary examples, see Lehmann, Le women worthies.

role de la femme, 479—90, and Verdon, Les frangaises, 211-16, and 62. Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 12559. Reproduced, along with

, 113

idem, “La vie quotidienne de la femme,’ 359—60, who the male series, in Meiss, 1974, figs. 47 and 48; Sterling, La rightly adds, however, that women were more often than peinture médiévale, fig. 194. The text was completed in 1395, not the victims of war. Also Contamine, War in the Middle and the manuscript dates from around 1404. Ages, 241-42, and 119-72 for an overview of wars, armies, 63. Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine Worthies, 179—80, and

and weaponry in the late Middle Ages. 185 for a list of three tapestries on the subject that belonged

Notes to Pages 36—41 ! to Philip the Bold. Huizinga, The Waning, 72-73, inter- a rapist could be blinded, castrated, or killed. See Shahar,

| preted the addition of the nine women as a consequence of The Fourth Estate, 16-17. But on the currency of rape in the medieval “craving for symmetry.” medieval towns, especially gang rapes, see Rossiaud, Medieval 64. For an analysis of contemporary literary descriptions Prostitution, 19-30. | of jousts, see Blanc, “Les stratégies de la parure.” Also Marle, 80. According to Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, 30, Iconographie, 1, 143—-56.A delightful late thirteenth-century procuration was a “specifically female activity.’ On the social

interpretation of lustful Hercules as a wild man combating reprobation of procuresses, see Geremek, The Margins, an Amazon queen in the margins of a manuscript of poems 234-39. The black cotte and chaperon intensify the negative by Robert of Blois is reproduced by Bernheimer, Wild Men associations.

in the Middle Ages, fig. 27. 81. Di Stefano, “Jacques Legrand,” 260. This notation, 65. Solterer, “Figures of Female Militancy,’ subtly ana- attributed to Boccaccio, comes from the chapter on poetlyzes an unusual thirteenth-century text, Li tournoiement as ics in Legrand’s rhetorical treatise Archeologesophia.

dames, that stages contemporary women engaged in tour- 82. For the Gulbenkian manuscript, see Meiss, 1968, 49,

naments. and fig. 376, in which both the pirates and the Erythreans 66. For a similar rendition in the Brussels manuscript who find her dead body on the shore are included. This

(fol. 83), see Boccaccio, Decameron, 1, 308. expansion of narrative elements led Meiss to conclude that

67. Guarino, 150. the Boucicaut manuscript “illustrates the text more fully 68. Quoted from Mohl, The Three Estates, 68—69. and clearly than the earlier cycles.” I would rather see it in 69. See Quilligan, The Allegory, 162—64, fig. 25, and terms of a shift from a chiefly exemplary to a narrative con-

Martin, Le Boccace de Jean sans Peur, pl. cvu. ception. 70. Almost unchanged in the Brussels manuscript (fol. 83. See Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, 91—100, for a dis94), reproduced in Boccaccio, Decameron, m, 842. Olympias cussion of crimes by veneno vel gladio, especially as perpetrated

epitomizes courageous death in the Cas des nobles hommes et by nobles. femmes as well. See Martin, Le Boccace de Jean sans Peur, pl. 84. Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 19—20.The first record we

LXVIII. have of a woman being executed at the gallows in Paris 71. Men were tried only if they injured the woman too dates from 1449. Hanging was, however, a common form of seriously or killed her, both of which must have been quite suicide. In the late fifteenth-century Spencer manuscript it

~common. See Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 89-—90.Verdon, Les becomes possible to have a naked woman (Mariamne) dying

francaises, 112-17, rightly points out that male violence at the stake (Friedman, “Il codice Spencer 33,” 13). against women cut across all classes. The image does remind 85. According to Basing, Trades and Crafts, 116, the incione of the character Jaloux beating his wife in the Roman de sion for bloodletting was usually made just above the elbow,

la rose. Meiss, 1967, fig. 624, reproduces the scene from a which is indeed the case here. In his description of the Jean de Berry manuscript (Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 380, fol. Spencer manuscript, Friedman, “Il codice Spencer 33,” 14,

62Vv). makes the excellent observation that this scene foreshad72. Guarino, I9I. | ows Jacques-Louis David’s Marat.

73. The Brussels copy (fol. gov) maintains the same inter- 86. City of Ladies (Richards, 135). Quilligan, The Allegory, pretation (color reproduction in Boccaccio, Decameron, U1, I§I, underscores the association of this peculiar suicide with 480), as does the image in the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes a culturally marked part of the female body.

(Martin, Le Boccace de Jean sans Peur, pl. xxix). 87. On divergent interpretation of this self-silencing, see 74. On stabbing, and for a good summary of conflict- Quilligan, The Allegory, 168—69; Jordan, “Boccaccio’s Ining visualizations of heroic and erotic nudes, see Hults, Famous Women,” 32—33; Benson, The Invention, 26, to

“Diirer’s Lucretia.” whom this voluntary act of mutilation actively counters

75. Raynaud, “Le language de la violence,’ analyzes sim- the traditional silence expected from women. The artist of ilar instances and reaches the conclusion that “violence in the Spencer manuscript gives an even more intense inter-

act” was only very reluctantly represented. pretation in that Leaena’s tongue flies into one of her tor76. See Meiss, 1968, 49 and fig. 374, for the Lisbon copy. turers’ face, and in that the scene takes place in a torture 77. Quilligan, The Allegory, 171-73, fig. 26, shows Dido’s chamber (Friedman, “Il codice Spencer 33,” 9).

| suicide in London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 20 C.V. 88. The Waning, 242. 78. Guarino, 103. In her City of Ladies (Richards, 160-64), 89. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, 9s. | Christine de Pizan uses Lucretia and other raped women to 90. On the whole absent from the Cleres femmes’s iconogreject forcefully the male assumption that women like being raphy, dismemberment and blinding are recurrent forms of raped. For the tension between private virtues and public physical assault in the imagery of the Cas des nobles hommes heroism as thematized in later prints of Dido and Lucretia, et femmes. Blinding’s obvious link to the fear of castration

see Eva/Ave, 29-52. makes it the male equivalent of the punishment of women’s 79. Wolfthal, “‘A Hue and a Cry’: Medieval Rape mouth. That this is not a modern psychoanalytical aftabuImagery,” with extensive bibliography. In theory at least, lation can be gleaned, for instance, in the story of William III, rapes were quite severely punished in medieval France, and King of Sicily, simultaneously deprived of eyes and geni-

II4

Notes to Pages 42—45 tals. See Martin, Le Boccace de Jean sans Peur, pl. cxu1, and for Baroin and Haffen, 8 and 12). London, Brit. Libr. Mss Royal

examples of blinding, pls. tv1, Lx, CKxxlI and CXXXVII. 16 G.V and Royal 20 G.V (reproduced in Boccaccio,

g1. Geremek, The Margins, 16-18. Decameron, 11, 831) have a quadripartite frontispiece with the 92. The biography goes on in interesting ways since following sequence of scenes: Boccaccio as author, presenRoland, once liberated, refuses to consume the marriage, tation of the book, a knight presenting a book to women which prompts Camiola to sue him before an ecclesiastical soldiers, and women playing music. The last two vignettes judge. On a more literal level, the image reminds one of might possibly visualize the edification and delight that the the obligation of prisoners to pay themselves for their stay reading of the Cleres femmes should procure. in the gaol, as shown by Geremek, The Margins, 17—18.See 104. Guarino, 99.The Latin reads: “Quo splendore pro-

Boccaccio, Decameron, 1, 915, for a color reproduction of fecto, non clariora sunt regum dyademata, non pontificum | London, Brit. Libr. ms Royal 20 C.V, fol. 161v. infule, nec etiam triunphantium lauree” (Zaccaria, 192). 93. See Meiss, 1968, fig. 377, for the Lisbon copy, which Note the use of clarus. Christine de Pizan quotes this passage

depicts a nicely animated urban square but makes the sense verbatim in the City of Ladies (Moreau and Hicks, 96;

of the narrative less clear. Richards, 68) and, in the Le livre du corps de policie, 178—79, 94. London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 20 C.V is reproduced in she maintains that Plato was cultivated because he owned Quilligan, The Allegory, fig. 22, who discusses the difference Sappho’s poetry.

with the version given by Christine de Pizan. 105. For an opposition between teaching as an example 95. Meiss, 1967, 128, fig. 61, which reproduces the minia- of active life and reading as one of contemplative life in a ture from Berry’s copy, as does Panofsky, Early Netherlandish roughly contemporary City of God, see Smith, “New Painting, 53, fig. 56. Symptomatically, Panofsky reinstates the Themes,” 73—74. More generally on images of university Father as his reading is influenced by the Renaissance motif teaching (as opposed to schoolmasters), see Marle, Iconoof Pero. One might point out that a few pages earlier (31), graphie, 1, 356-61.

, Panofsky gives a similar misreading, for he sees in the Initial 106. “Et ne savoit pas tant seulement les lettres assembler D of the Annunciation page in Pucelle’s Hours of Jeanne et les sillabes composer, les mos espeler, l’entencion et la d’ Evreux a praying “king” instead of the well-known fig- signifiance moustrer, mais elle .. . bien sceut adjouster et

ure of the queen. choses nouvelles trouver” (Baroin and Hatten, 156). For the

96. Berry’s manuscript (fol. 114) corrects this mistake original text, “non contenta solum literas iungere novisse,” and has Sempronia turning away from Equitius, hands raised see Zaccaria, 192. in a gesture of refusal. The Brussels version (fol. 115v) follows 107. While clergeresse could designate either an intellec-

our manuscript (see Boccaccio, Decameron, m1, 833). tual or a nun, the text and miniature locate Sappho clearly 97. Christine de Pizan, Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs, I, in the realm of the university, in which clerics took the 69, praisingly writes of Charles V that he did not finance minor orders, just as Boccaccio had done. On female teachhis military campaigns by overtaxing his subjects or taking ers in Paris, see Uitz, The Legend, 71.

the ladies’ jewelry. 108. Symptomatically, a manuscript of the Ovide moralisé 98. Mollat and Wolff, The Popular Revolutions, 170. illustrates the concept of “contemplative life” not by Pallas, 99. Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,” 56—57. Lebégue as required by the text, but by a male scholar (Lord, “Three also repeatedly compares tribunes to the prevost des marchands. Manuscripts,’ 166). For more general considerations of scrib-

See, for instance, Les histoires que l’on peut raisonnablement al imagery and its relation to technologies of writing and

: faire, “Igitur Jugurtha contra.” reading, see Saenger, “Silent Reading,” 403-5.

100. In Berry’s copy (fol. 146), four men sit on 109. For this, as for other terms describing medieval Semiamira’s tribunal, while a young man presents a sealed library furnishings, see Genest, “Le mobilier des biblioletter to her. The Brussels manuscript (fol. 149) presents a théques d’aprés les inventaires médiévaux,” in Vocabulaire

somewhat simpler interpretation (see Boccaccio, Decameron, du livre et de V’écriture, 136—$4. ,

II, 421). 110. See Buettner, “Profane Illuminations, Secular Illusions,” 101. The quote is from Casagrande in Klapisch-Zuber, 78, for further comments on opened and closed books.

A History of Women, 99, an excellent discussion of the III. Boccaccio does not mention the famous vision of “impregnable wall of rules and prohibitions” imposed on the Ara Coeli. On the importance of the orally based tra-

women’s words. dition exemplified by sibyls and prophetesses for Christine 102. Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,” 50-53, offers de Pizan, see Quilligan, The Allegory, 108-17, who emphaa useful discussion of the meaning of estude and chevalerie sizes, by contrast, the bookish frame in which Boccaccio’s in relation to Lebégue’s advice for Sallust’s frontispiece sibyls (but not prophetesses) are cast. Quilligan reproduces

miniature. Amalthea and Erythraea from London, Brit. Lib. Ms Royal 103. The sequence of miniatures is reversed in Jean de 20 C.V, figs. 20 and 21. Berry’s manuscript, where the presentation scene (fol. 3) 112. Quilligan, The Allegory, 97, notes the proximity of precedes the portrait of a solitary Boccaccio dressed as a Proba and Boccaccio, though I do not follow her conclufriar (fol. 4v).The discrepancy can be explained by the fact sion that the task of compilation was necessarily an expres-

that the two chapter headings are almost identical (see sion of men’s anxiety about women’s creative potential. The

IIs

Notes to Pages 45—47 much later manuscript of Paris, Bibl. Nat. ms fr. 599, fol. et vie professionnelle” in Artistes, artisans et production artistique,

83, has a wonderful image of Proba as an astronomer. Ul, §57—75. 113. Baroin and Haften, 60. In the Brussels manuscript 122. The association of mirror/luxuria is strangely restored (fol. 27), Medea’s scroll is empty and she has no flowers in London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 16 G.V, fol. 80, for Marcia (partial color reproduction in Boccaccio, Decameron, 1, 222). combs her hair as she looks into the mirror! Seidel, Jan van 114. Compare to the Virgilian sorceresses lighting the Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, 168, proposes the interesting hypothfire on an altar, reproduced in Meiss, 1974, figs. 241 and 242, esis that the famous mirror that hangs on the back wall of and to the Lisbon manuscript (Meiss, 1968, fig. 371), which * the Arnolfini chamber might contain a reference to Marcia’s

adds the episode of Mantho’s son Ocnus building the city mirror, which van Eyck could have known, for Philip the

of Mantua over her tomb. Bold’s Cleres femmes was available to him in the library of his 115. Appropriately paired with witches, Circe is included patron Philip the Good.

in the “power of women” chapter of Eva/Ave, 147-75 and 123. Both manuscript painting—via the famous

no. 106. Anastasie—and architecture are included in the City of 116. See Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” Ladies. Architecture constitutes the framing allegory and 117—18, fig. 34, for a superb miniature that explicitly contrasts adorns the beautiful frontispieces of that text (Meiss, 1974,

official, male medicine with Circe’s dubious operation of figs. 35—45).

collecting frogs. 124. One of the best-known cases of professional poly117. The text speaks of sixteen letters only (Baroin and valence is that of André Beauneveu, a sculptor at Berry’s Haffen, 84). Color reproduction of the central detail of the court, who also painted the sequence of prophets and evanBrussels copy (fol. 37) in Boccaccio, Decameron, 111, title gelists opening the Psalter of Jean de Berry (Paris, Bibl. Nat.

page. In the Gulbenkian manuscript, Nicostrata presents MS fr. 13091; see Meiss, 1967, 135-40). On Melchior two scrolls, one inscribed with “a,b,c,d,” the other with Broederlam and Jan van Eyck creating ephemeral artifacts

“vers.” for their patrons, see Huizinga, The Waning, 246-48. One 118. There is an additional twist to this image when con- finds further confirmation of this nondifferentiation between

sidering that French was not the mother tongue of the illu- “high” and “low” arts in the most important contempo-

minator who painted it. In other manuscripts, the rary manual on the arts, Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’arte, Coronation Master and the illuminator of Berry’s Cleres which had been completed by 1398. While most of his work femmes signal to the viewer their foreign origin by having concerns monumental painting, his last chapters (nos. 157 to their figures display scrolls written in German. See de Winter, 189) deal with what has in modern times been categorized

La bibliotheque, 104. as minor or decorative arts. It is a fascinating list, carrying the 119. Guarino, 131. Commented on by Pollock, “Vision, reader from illumination to textiles, cassoni, interior decoVoice, and Power,’ 42. For the most up-to-date discussion of ration, masks, medals, and lead figurines.

the history of self-referential images of scribes and illumi- 125. Guarino, 122. nators, see Alexander, Medieval Iluminators and Their Methods, 126. This proximity is briefly considered by Schweikhart, 4—34.The older studies by Miner, Anastaise and Her Sisters, “Boccaccios De mulieribus claris,” 115, who also gives an

and Egbert, The Mediaeval Artist at Work, remain useful as interesting account of the reception of Boccaccio’s virgo

well. Marcia by sixteenth-century female artists, in particular

120. Their “mythical” status is evinced, for instance, by the Sophonisba Anguissola. fact that Millard Meiss begins his monumental study, French 127. In London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 16 G.V, Thamyris Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry, 1967, 4—5, with a dis- (fol. 68v) paints a naked woman (Diana?), while Irene (fol. cussion of these miniatures. He notes the discrepancies 73v) finishes a wall painting of a man cloaked in a green between them and Boccaccio’s text, without any further cape. Some ten years after the first copies of the Cleres femmes explanation. And the myth is further replicated in the anec- were made, the concept of painting could thus be exemdote according to which Panofsky, on his deathbed, would plified by secular subjects. contemplate the image of Marcia (seen as one of the first 128. For examples of contemporary panel paintings, see self-portraits) as reproduced by Meiss. According to Sterling, La peinture médiévale, figs. 152, 184, 209, 217, and

Heckscher, “Erwin Panofsky,’ 8, Panofsky quoted with 236. “flawless precision the particulars of the manuscript in 129. Paris, Bibl. Nat. ms fr 12420, fol. 102. Guarino’s trans-

the Bibliothéque Nationale.” lation of the original text (Zaccaria, 266) reads: “Remarkable 121. Egbert, The Mediaeval Artist, 82, stated that Marcia’s examples of her art lasted for many a year, among others miniature included the first representation of a palette that her portrait which she painted on a tablet with the aid ofa she had found, an opinion repeated by Gage, Color and mirror, preserving the colors and features (lignes) and the Culture, 177. But for an example of around 1300, see now expression of the face so completely that none of her conAlexander, Medieval Iluminators and Their Methods, fig. 35. temporaries doubted that is was just like her” (Guarino, The typology of tools as depicted in our manuscript 1s dis- 144-45). cussed by Daniéle Alexandre-Bidon and Monique Closson, 130. Color reproduction in Boccace en France, 28. In Berry’s “Scénes de la vie d’artiste au Moyen Age: Outils de travail manuscript (fol. toov), the mirror is affixed to the work-

116

Notes to Pages 48-51 bench, next to the painted panel. It is completely blank and included payments to “menestriéres” and “chanteresses” (de

does not reflect Marcia’s head. Here the mirror seems almost Winter, La bibliothéque, 27). | to be an attribute rather than an actual reflecting surface. 142. Marle, Iconographie, 1, 156-60, mentioned, without 131. Christine de Pizan, Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs, 01, reproducing them, the Cleres femmes miniatures, and con33-37. It is true that Christine’s aim is to present Charles V sidered embroidering and spinning essentially as a feminine as the “true artist” by virtue of being a patron. Quoting the hobby. It is significant that in a beautiful frontispiece to an authority of Thomas Aquinas’; commentary on Aristotle’s early fourteenth-century copy of Brunetto Latini’s Livre du Metaphysics, she draws a tripartite hierarchy, with the man- tresor, which contains twenty-one activities referring to both ual executor at the bottom, the “assembler” in the middle, intellectual and manual artes, the only woman to be includand the person who understands the cause of what is being ed is a weaver. This miniature comprises other “‘personifidone at the top. For another fascinating parallel between cations” also present in the Cleres femmes, such as a painter,

rules of proportion and the craft of painting as related to writer, money changer, smith, and peasant. See Evans, the body politic metaphor, see Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, “Allegorical Women and Practical Men,’ who shows how

214-16 and figs. 60-62. rare such depictions of mechanical arts were, and how they 132. See Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” tended to be embodied by male figures.

61~—77. There are many other instances where such a 143. See Basing, Tiades and Crafts, fig. 45, for London, distinction is drawn. Pierre Salmon, for instance, writing Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 16 G.V, fol. 56, and her discussion of the

to Jean de Berry about Italian artists, speaks of “ouvriers various stages involved in the fabrication of cloth. souverains et parfais en leur art et science” (Champeaux, 144. The miniature in the Lisbon manuscript, concen-

“Les relations du duc Jean de Berry,” 410). trating on Athena’s punishment of Arachne, does not include 133. City of Ladies (Richards, 84).This point is also noted that detail either. Here Arachne works at a beautiful horiby Schweikhart, “Boccaccios De mulieribus claris,” 115. zontal loom as an assistant spins the wool onto a wheel 134. See the useful discussion by Hindman, Christine de (Meiss, 1968, fig. 370). Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” 68—77, of the “art as ape” paradigm, 145. See, for instance, Meiss, 1968, fig. 51. London, Brit. revived by Boccaccio for poetry and by Christine for paint- Libr. Ms Royal 20 C.V, is published in Quilligan, The Allegory,

ing. Boccaccio’s position is summarized in Prandi, “Giovanni fig. 30, who righly reads the aggressive group of suitors as a |

Boccaccio e l’arte figurativa,’ 117—20. direct visual menace to Penelope’s body. 135. For the connection between idols and lascivious- 146. For the change in attitude toward manual labors, ness, see Camille, The Gothic Idol, 87—101. Interestingly, the see Le Goff, “Trades and Professions as Represented in Lisbon manuscript places a diminutive female figure on top Medieval Confessors’ Manuals,” in Time, Work, and Culture, of the golden column of Sulpicia’s temple. See Meiss, 1968, 107-21. 49 and fig. 375, who notes that the statue “is scarcely dis- 147. Basing, Tiades and Crafts, fig. 35, reproduces Minerva

tinguishable from a living person.” in London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 16 G.V, fol. 11. Instead of the 136. Pastoureau, “Les couleurs médiévales: Systémes de worker cleaning wool, we have here two armorers: one finvaleurs et modes de sensibilité,” in Figures et couleurs, esp. ishes a helmet, the other, a chain-mail armor. The author

41-42, where he traces the devaluation of yellow from notices that the hammer is held the wrong way, which

antiquity onward. denotes, as does the improbable tidiness, the selective real137. The worship of Faustina, although a later episode, is ism of these images. placed before Faustina’s amorous adventures, at the bottom 148. For this tradition in contemporary manuscripts, see

of the first column. Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” 77—89. For 138. A similar conflation happens with the statue of Minerva’s exclusively military focus, see ibid., 106 —13, with Venus Verticordia, erected by Sulpicia, in the Lisbon copy an analysis of the political allusions carried on by her chil(Meiss, 1968, fig. 375). Venus, depicted as a “real” person, is, dren’s heraldry. however, of a diminutive scale and seated atop a column. 149. In Berry’s manuscript (fol. 13), this is expanded into 139. The literature that is available on this topic is too a more complex weaving scene, with a man working at a vast to include here. For a recent discussion of lifelike images, horizontal loom and a woman carding the wool. see Preedberg, The Power of Images, 283-316. Also very use- 150. Uitz, The Legend, 57.The olives mentioned by the ful is Régnier-Bohler, “Le simulacre ambigu,” for she traces text look indeed more like nuts, the fruit from which oil the distancing devices of two-dimensional images that appear would be produced in Northern countries. in medieval romances, such as mirrors, fountains, shields, 151. Meiss, 1968, 47-48 and figs. 366 and 368. The version

or, indeed, paintings. by the Boucicaut Master, in which Ceres is crowned by gold140. An inkwell and knife are posed on the low table as en wheat, is even closer to a harvest ritual figure. Meiss notes a reference to Sempronia’s poetic vocation. The same is true the “productive” aspect of these miniatures. See also Boccaccio, for the Brussels version (fol. 120) and for London, Brit. Libr. Decameron, 11, 761, for London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 20 C.V,

MS Royal 20 C.V (fol. 121). Reproduced in Boccaccio, fol. 13. For an expansive vision of agricultural pursuits as an

Decameron, 1, $11, and 11, 796. embodiment of the notion of Good Democracy, see Sherman, 141. Uitz, The Legend, 100. Philip the Bold’s accounts Imaging Aristotle, 240-52 and figs. 70-71.

117

Notes to Pages 51-54 1§2. Camille, “Labouring for the Lord,” esp. 426-30, typically more lenient toward adultery committed by a man offers the best account on the social, economic, and symbolic than by a woman. See Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 106-13.

import of the plowman and his tools in medieval images. For 161. Guarino, 132. See Boccaccio, Decameron, U1, 605, for comparative visual material, see Basing, Tiades and Crafts, London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 20 C.V, fol. 96v.

20-26, and Marle, Iconographie, 1, 373-450. On agrarian 162. Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, 57, and Geremek,

feasts, see Verdon, Les francaises, 194-96. The Margins, 222—25 and esp. n. 75. 153. This passage has provoked much commentary, espe- 163. Les histoires que l’on peut raisonnablement faire, Vé his-

cially because it (and its negative implication on women’s toire. Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,” 55, elaborates

: achievements) is thoroughly revised by Christine de Pizan. on the contrast set up between Sempronia’s and the matron See McLeod, Virtue and Venom, 127, and Quilligan, The Fulvia’s modest outfits. According to Hughes, “Sumptuary

Allegory, 100—101. Law and Social Relations,” 42, the “difference between mere154. Alexander, “Labeur and Paresse,” esp. 439, and trix and matrona stands at the heart of sumptuary distinction.”

Warburg, “Arbeitende Bauern.” On the medieval tendency 164. Guarino, 17. to collapse moral with social criteria, see Gurevich, Categories 165. Unlike the Decameron, this manuscript contains no of Medieval Culture, 172£f. A different view is expressed by scenes of intercourse. Paulina’s huge red bed is allusive,

Laurent de Premierfait in his long prologue to the first though quite explicitly so. On the iconography of love and translation of the De casibus, in which he strongly criticizes sexuality, see Marle, Iconographie, 1, 451-525...

the nobility and the clergy for their mistreatment of the 166. Molin and Mutembe, Le rituel du mariage, esp. peasantry. This prologue was excised from the second trans- 77-102. Some ordines studied by the authors imply that cov-

lation dedicated to Jean de Berry and survives only in a ered and uncovered hands referred, respectively, to virgins few manuscripts. See Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des and widows. Note the forceful way in which Megullia, a

cas des nobles hommes et femmes,” 75—87. virgin, buries her (left) arm under the folds of her dress. 155. Le Goff, “Licit and Illicit Trades in the Medieval For other late medieval miniatures, see Closson, “Cour West,” in Time, Work, and Culture, s8—70. In her City of d’amour et célébration du mariage,” and esp. Hall, The Ladies, Christine de Pizan systematically expunges any allu- Arnolfini Betrothal, 13-94, with a summary of wedding and

sion to prostitution. betrothal practices. The best study of actual nuptial cere156. Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, esp. 86-103, for the monies (with attention to pictorial renderings) remains years around 1400, which, according to the author, saw Klapisch-Zuber, “Zacharias, or the Ousted Father: Nuptial prostitution justified by some mainstream theologians as a Rites in Tuscany between Giotto and the Council of Trent,” corrective to demographic and social problems. See also in Women, Family, and Ritual, 178-212. Geremek, The Margins, 211-41, and Verdon, Les frangaises, 167. Color reproduction in Boccace en France, 28.'The

228-38. three stitched-on decorations appear also on Megullia’s red

157. Le livre du corps de policie, 197—98. Discussed by Meiss, dress in Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 598, fol. 83, and fol. 153v

1967, 3, and Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” (Engeldruda), and in the wedding of Philip the Bold and 71. On prostitutes at court, see Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, Margaret of Flanders of the circa 1415 Grandes Chroniques

66—68. (London, Brit. Libr. Ms Cotton Nero E II, fol. 217; de Winter, 158. Held, “Flora, Goddess and Courtesan,” 208—11, La bibliotheque, fig. 6). Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 299 and observed that the Cleres femmes’s emphasis on Flora’s fol- n. 13, discusses the same decoration on a dress of a bride in lowers “failed to establish a clear iconographic pattern of a manuscript of Aristotle’s Yconomique, and gives further Flora meretrix.”” The two manuscripts in London, however, examples. The understanding of such details would be great-

show a naked couple in front of the enthroned Flora, a ly facilitated if there were any reliable dictionaries of secumusician at her side. London, Brit. Libr. Ms Royal 20 C.V, lar iconography. For the symbolism of colors in wedding fol. 101, is reproduced in Boccaccio, Decameron, m, 709.The dresses, see Kiihnel, Bildwérterbuch, 37.

Spencer manuscript pushes this interpretation further in 168. Hughes, “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations,” 93. that the Floral Games are represented by a group of naked 169. Berry’s copy (fol. 83) represents the dowry in simgirls dancing in front of male spectators, while Flora is busy ilar fashion, though the miniature-house is simpler in out-

with a client (Friedman, “II codice Spencer 33,” 11). On line. That there was considerable space here for the women’s lustfulness considered to climax in May (Flora’s Uluminator to interpret what would symbolize a dowry is

month), see Davis, “Women on Top,” 141. corroborated by the two Cleres femmes copies in London: ms 159. Compare the “lewd” public in contemporary Royal 16 G.V, fol. 66, presents it as an oblong, football-like Roman theatrical representations, as in the manuscripts of object, while Ms Royal 20 C.V, fol. 86, chooses a more easTerence (Meiss, 1974, figs. 208—10). On medieval com- ily understandable golden plate. All objects seem to belong mentaries and classifications of the gestures of prostitutes to the domestic space. On the actual dowry system in late

and histriones, see Schmitt, La raison, 261-73. medieval Florence, see Klapisch-Zuber, “The Griselda 160. The varied semantics of kisses in medieval images are Complex: Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento,” discussed by Camille, “Gothic Signs and the Surplus.” See in Women, Family, and Ritual, 213-46. also Marle, Iconographie, 1, 474—79. Medieval society was 170. The dimensions of the miniatures are ca. 75 X 65

118

Notes to Pages 54—61 mm; that of the text justification, ca. 207 X 145 mm; and tres de manuscrits enluminés aux environs de 1300” in that of the page, ca. 355 X 240 mm. See Byrne, “Manuscript Artistes, artisans et production artistique, U1, 321-49:

Ruling,” for the use of vertical and horizontal rulings by 186. Cerquiglini, Eloge de la variante, esp. 60—61, where he

illuminators. qualifies it as an “esthetics of the return.” Huizinga, The

171. I take these terms from Damisch, “Huit théses pour Waning, 317, noted that “multiplicity” was a characteristic

(ou contre?),” 23. trait of fifteenth-century art. As is often the case, he describes , 172. See Sherman, “The Queen in Charles V’s “Coro- a phenomenon with much acuity but then interprets it nation Book, ” 286, for another example of illustrations that negatively, in this case as a lack of harmony and unity.

“function as exempla in particular of the general instruc- 187. Meiss, 1967, 250.

tions furnished by the rubrics.” 188. “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, 173. See also Prandi, “Giovanni Boccaccio e l’arte figu- 141-48, and ibid., 139 (“The Discourse of History’).

rativa,’ 144—45, for a similar point. 189. A similar observation is made by Camille, 174. Schapiro, Words and Pictures, 15, argues that because “Labouring for the Lord,” 430, in which he contrasts the artists are interested in the “immediate efficient cause” of accuracy in the depiction of the implements to an otherwise an action (rather than in formal or final causes), they have highly conventional image.

to supply the details of such a causation. 190. Alexander, “Labeur and Paresse;’ 444-45. 175. This expression is from Bonne, L’art roman de face 191. Mollat and Wolff, The Popular Revolutions, 165-78; et de profil, 145-146. According to him, the temporal inter- also Vaughan, Philip the Bold, 4off. Philip the Bold is known val in Romanesque art is qualitative and intensive, where- to have been merciless in suppressing these revolts (which,

as in later art it becomes quantitative and extensive. it should be noted, gave rise to violent persecutions of Jews). 176. In the Lisbon manuscript, this same connecting In Paris, the revolt centered in the parish of St. Jacques-defunction is played by hills and trees. See Meiss, 1968, fig. 374. la~Boucherie, Jacques Raponde’s neighborhood.

177. See Frugoni, A Distant City, 14ff., for the city as a 192. Hauser, The Social History of Art, 263. “memento of the place where an action occurred” and as 193. Camille, The Gothic Idol, 298-316.

‘linked to the idea of voyage.” 194. Camille, “The Book of Signs,’ 138, speaks of “‘a rela178. By doing so, images add new planes of referential- tionship built on a disruptive difference.” ity. For a careful analysis of how this is achieved in a particular cycle, see Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, passim.

179. The expression is taken from Spiegel, Romancing the TI Past, 62. Pictorial Elements as Meaning 180. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music,

Text, 32-51. 1. It is well known that illuminators availed themselves of 181. While some later manuscripts closely reiterate the various visual aids that would also speed up the painting original visual cycle, other reinvent it almost entirely. The process. Besides pattern books, “cartons” and carta lucida Lisbon copy, for instance, considerably expands the narrative (used for tracing) were commonly used. Extensive examples elements, and so does the beautiful late fifteenth-century in Scheller, A Survey of Medieval Model Books.

| Spencer manuscript. Yet, another late fifteenth-century copy 2. The color of the flesh, with its different gradation, is (Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 599) contracts the stories into bust- often handled as a separate category in treatises on painting. length figures, disengaged from any narrative. In other words, It is also one of the few that required a delicate mix of colthere is no linear development in the general conception of ors. See, for instance, Lebégue’s collection in Merrifield,

each Cleres femmes cycle. Original Treatises, 1, NOS. 317, 344, and 346, in which he des| 182. This variable “fit” between text, written instruc- ignates one such color for the painting of flesh as pose. tion, visual tradition, and final images is explored by Byrne, 3. See Scott, Late Gothic Europe, 39-45, for written and

“An Early French Humanist,” 57-60. visual descriptions of the female ideal. 183. Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, 4. Les histoires que l’on peut raisonnablement faire, “Igitur

Music, Text, 26. rex.” The Livre des merveilles does contain black people: as 184. Many of the Cleres femmes’s figures reappear in the ethnic curiosa they could be incorporated (Paris, Bibl. Nat. miniatures of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othéa of circa Ms fr. 2810; Meiss, 1968, fig. 87). In the late fifteenth-century 1405, though aside from some, such as Thisbe, Procris, and Spencer manuscript, Zenobia and some secondary figures are Penthesilea, they have been reconfigured considerably in also black (Friedman, “Il codice Spencer 33,’ 15). Christine accordance with the text. See Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s de Pizan gives an interesting eyewitness account of a “cheva“Epistre Othéa,” esp. 77-99, who maps out the differences. lier sarrazin richement et estrangement vestus” that she saw

| 185. See Alexander, Medieval Iuminators and Their Methods, as a child (Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs, 11, 85). 111—20, for other interesting examples.The notion of mod- 5. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, 48.

uli is taken over from Alison Stones. See her “Secular 6. Camille, The Gothic Idol, 101. Manuscript Illumination in France,” 96, as well as her 7. Later copies of the Cleres femmes do indeed contain a “Indications écrites et modeéles picturaux, guides aux pein- greater number of naked figures. I have briefly explored

LIQ

Notes to Pages 61-67 the fifteenth-century advent of the nude in “Dressing and increasingly tight regulations of décolletages in Italian cities Undressing Bodies.” See also the excellent article by of the fifteenth century, which she sees as a by-product of a Régnier-Bohler, “Le corps mis a nu.’ A striking instance more exclusive focus on women and their clothes by sumpof the exposure of a naked woman to a male gaze is offered tuary laws. This new showing of the flesh was noted by Post,

by the story of King Candaules, who is showing his “La naissance du vétement,’ 34, who saw it as a phenomeundressed and sleeping wife to a friend of his. Reproduced non that contributed to the rise of artistic realism.

in Martin, Le Boccace de Jean sans Peur, pl. xxv. 19. Scott, Late Gothic Europe, 78 and 89, for new tailoring 8. Pastoureau, “Couleurs, décors, emblémes,” in Figures et techniques. In the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs, 1, 82, Christine

couleurs, $2. de Pizan affirms that CharlesV did not tolerate men garbed 9. Huizinga, The Waning, ss. in this manner at his court.

10. Scott, Late Gothic Europe, 63.The author reminds us 20. Schapiro, Words and Pictures, 38-39. that painters would occasionally design dresses, especially 21. See Garnier, Le langage de l’image, 1, 111-19. the fancy ones. Lebégue’s instructions for the Sallust minia- 22. Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, §54—62, discusses rittures are attentive to contrasts set up by clothes, especially in uals of salutation as they befit each estate. their ability to express what we would call now different 23. Garnier, Le langage de l’image, 1, 116—19, studies other

lifestyles. See Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,’ 55. For semantic possibilities associated with the lying position. : a powerful example of the equation between social, physi- 24. See Ordre et désordres, special issue of Médiévales. Also

cal and moral superiority and inferiority, see Sherman, Garnier, Le langage de l’image, 1, 120-23.

Imaging Aristotle, 60—71 and figs. 11-14. 25. Compared to earlier medieval art, in which 11. Even if centered on Italy, Brundage, “Sumptuary immutably good and demonic figures are pitched against Laws,” offers a good overall discussion of the real and sym- each other’s diametrically opposed gestural universe. For a bolic intended effects of these regulatory systems. See also fine analysis of gestures in Romanesque art, see Bonne, L’art Diane Owen Hughes, “Regulating Women’s Fashion,” in roman de face et de profil, 225—31 and 257-80.

Klapisch-Zuber, A History of Women, esp. 138-40. 26. Schmitt, La raison, 174-200. The definition of ges12. See, for instance, Christine de Pizan, Le livre des trois tus is a complex one, which includes the notion of “figuvertus, 183—88 (Treasure of the City of Ladies, 149-56), who ration”: “Gestus est motus et figuratio membrorum corporis,

criticizes the wives of merchants wanting to “dress above ad omnem agendi et habendi modum” (177). It is significant their station.” Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, 46—70, under- that an early fifteenth-century French translation adds to scores that the grammmaire du parattre was an affair of morals this passage that the manner and figuration of the limbs is

and politics. adapted “a son estat,” which Schmitt sees as an indication of 13. Berry’s copy (fol. 127) dresses her in a lavish houp- the restriction of Hugh’s universal definition along more pelande, but the manuscript resorts to the “Jeanne de Bourbon rigidly defined social divisions. According to Matoré, Le

style” for Joanna of Sicily, another appropriate choice. vocabulaire, 120, the notion of geste did not gain wide cur14. Scott, Late Gothic Europe, 83, who quotes Christine de rency before the sixteenth century. Pizan’s Dit de la pastoure: “escharpes qui bel et gent / leur 27. Schmitt, La raison, 183, for a tabulation of Hugh’s catestoient avenans, dont les cliquetes sonnans / Tout le boys egories.

retentissoient pour les sons qui en yssoient.” See also 28. Barasch, Gestures of Despair, 1-12.

Huizinga, The Waning, 270. 29. Barasch, Giotto and the Language, 145—54; Garnier, 15. Uitz, The Legend, 56; Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 192. Le langage de l’image, 1, 199-201, where holding the wrist or 16. David, Philippe le Hardi, duc de Bourgogne et co-régent, arm of another person is interpreted as a means of taking

77, and 74-103 and 159-64, for a good overview of possession of that person. Burgundian costumes and household items. See also 30. Garnier, Le langage de l’image, 11, 85, qualifies this as a Vaughan, Philip the Bold, 87-88, for other examples of hier- typical gesture of torturers.

archical grading of the wardrobe. 31. The visibility of the “beaux petits souliers” consti17. Some gold-embroidered costumes are possibly infused tutes one of the characteristic features of an alluring woman with exoticizing connotations. See, for instance, the tor- according to the Roman de la rose. Quoted by Schmitt, La rai-

turer in Medea (Fig. 17), or Triaria (Fig. 94), provided with son, 227-28. the orientalizing battle-ax. For a typology of ornamental 32. Barasch, Giotto and the Language, 15-39 and 56-71. motives in French paintings of the early fifteenth century, see In Giotto the blessing gesture, deriving from the ancient Martens, Meister Francke, 178—84. Jean Lebégue’s instruc- gesture of adlocutio, is stmilar to that of the “speaking hand,’ tion for the Sallust frontispiece asks the illuminator to use gilt which is not the case in our manuscript. Pope Joan’s gesture accessories, specifically on horse trappings (Byrne, “An Early is indeed an unambiguous benedictio latina.

French Humanist,” $1). 33. For the gestures of declamatio and disputatio, which 18. Blanc, ““Vétement féminin, vétement masculin,’ 243, he does not label as such, see Garnier, Le langage de l’image,

which remains the best recent summary on the gendering I, 209—12. He, like many others, builds on the pioneering and eroticization of the late medieval dressed body. Hughes, study by Amira, “Die Handgebiarden” (170-202, for the “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations,’ 82—84, traces the “Redegebiarde”). This specific gesture is also described by

I20

Notes to Pages 67 —73 Lebégue in his instructions for the miniature of Cicero’s 50. Simons, “Women in Frames,” esp. 8—9. assembly, in which a man “‘fera semblant de parler ... en sz. Among many others, Marle, Iconographie, 1, 20, deemed metant ses doiz d’une main sur l'autre comme ont accous- that one finds in French miniatures of the time “un étalage tumé gens qui plaident.” Lebégue, Les histoires que on peut vraiment excessif des modes extravagantes de l’€poque,”

raisonnablement faire, xvieme histoire. clearly a judgment from the age of the bourgeoisie. 34. Garnier, Le langage de Pimage, 1, 171-73. 52. Quoted by Boucher, 20,000 Years, 194. The same pas-

35. Ibid., 1, 174-77. sage is interpreted by Guenée, Un meurtre, une société, 171-75,

36. Ibid., 1, 223-25. in light of the accusations of concupiscence leveled against 37. Barasch, Giotto and the Language, 45—50; Garnier, Le Queen Isabeau. langage de l'image, 1, 198-201, where the gesture is associated 53. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 160-61, and to a dramatic situation, to incapacitation or extreme pain. Early Netherlandish Painting, 71.To my knowledge, this is 38. Barasch, Giotto and the Language, 72—87; Garnier, Le the only instance in his oeuvre where Panofsky embraces a

langage de l’image, 1, 185-86. “sociological point of view.” Panofsky’s analysis is taken on 39. Les histoires que l’on peut raisonnablement faire, premiére and critically elaborated by Alexander, “Labeur and Paresse.”

histoire; viéme histoire. 54. See Gage, “Color in Western Art,’ for a good sum40. Although Garnier, Le langage de l’image, 1, 50—56, mary. See also Reilly, “Writing Out Color in Renaissance looks at the issue of repetition and imitation of gestures, Theory,’ for the anxious superposition of colors with the

he considers it only from a semantic point of view. female body, cosmetics, and prostitution by Renaissance Al. Les histoires que lon peut raisonnablement faire, premiere writers.

histoire. Translation by Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,” 55. “One of the more significant events in the history 50. His observation (n. 72) that this is a “minor symbolic of late medieval optics was the incorporation of optical detail” seems mistaken to me. The question here is not of studies in the university curriculum.” Lindberg, Theories of

symbolism but of syntax. Vision, 120.

42. In religious panel paintings of the same time, the 56. For a good summary of theological discussions of emphatic function of facial expressions is much more the property of light and colors, see Hills, The Light, 11-16, exploited, so that one cannot posit a unitarian gestural code and Gage, Color and Culture, 58-61 and 69-71. for a given period. For a fine analysis of “differential qual- 57. Nixdorff and Miiller, Weisse Westen—Rote Roben, 29, ities” in late twelfth-century physiognomic renditions and explain how after the middle of the fourteenth century the their psychological and political implications, see Clausberg, luminosity of a color became a more important criterion for

“Konventionelle und individuelle Physiognomik.” social distinction than individual colors. See also Schéne,

43. Guarino, 36—37. Uber das Licht, 62, for equivalences between the intensity 44. Boccaccio uses the verb demergere (to plunge) to and nobility of light. describe this particular gaze (Zaccaria, 88). Discussed by 58. Mixing in the production of colors presents a dif-

Simons, “Women in Frames,” 20-21. ferent case; green, for instance, would often be obtained by 45. In that sense Schapiro, Words and Pictures, 39, is right blending indigo and orpiment. See Merrifield, Original to say that “we are inclined to see whatever faces us as look- Treatises, 1, NOS. 295, 299, 304. Cage, Color and Culture, 30-32,

ing at us ... even though the eyes are unmarked.” quotes Plutarch’s idea that the blending of colors is a 46. No gaze pierces the pictorial plane, as opposed to “deflowering.” the slightly later copy of Jean de Berry, in which several 59. The spacing on the palette is taken as visual evidence

women intently stare at us. for mixing or absence thereof by Gage, Color and Culture, 47. See, for instance, the powerful image of the martyr- 177. dom of Saint Pancreas in the Boucicaut Hours (Meiss, 1968, 60. Thompson, The Materials and Techniques, 174.

fig. 14, and 18-19). Or the multiple onlookers in what is 61. Huizinga, The Waning, 273. See also Ackerman, “On perhaps the most paradigmatic representation of a court Early Renaissance Color Theory and Practice,” for a somespectacle, the famous frontispiece to Pierre Salmon’s Réponses what teleological account of Leonardo’s invention of a more a Charles VI (Paris, Bibl. Nat. ms fr. 23279, fol. 53; Meiss, “harmonious” treatment of colors. Alberti, On Painting (u, 48),

1968, fig. 67, 124-25). Note that all the characters in this 9I—93, insists that color contrasts is what procures gratia.

public space are male. 62. Hills, The Light, 16-25.

48. Among others, see Quilligan, The Allegory, 160-61, 63. Alexander, Medieval Iluminators and Their Methods, 41.

who elaborates on Laura Mulvey’s work. 64. Pastoureau, Couleurs, Images, Symboles, 26.The extreme 49. According to Green, “The Familia Regis,’ 98, only specialization of the cloth industry could even entail divi31 of the 375 members of the English royal household in sions of labor according to various raw materials.

1368 were women. The accounts of 1409 of Isabeau de 65. On the positive perception of strewn patterns, see Bavieére list 36 women in her service (see Verdon, “La vie Pastoureau, L’étoffe du diable, 39-40. For the impact of quotidienne de la femme,’ 360). In general terms, it seems patterned textiles on Sienese painters, see Hills, The Light, that men outnumbered women in the late Middle Ages. Q5—IIA.

See Contamine, La vie quotidienne, 185—86. 66. Pastoureau, L’étoffe du diable, esp. 9-47, shows how

I2]I

Notes to Pages 73 —80 stripes were held in low esteem in the Middle Ages. And Ackerman, “On Early Renaissance Color Theory and in fact the only figure in which a semblance of a stripe Practice,’ 13. appears is the torturer to the right of Leaena (Fig. 48), his 78. Beaulieu and Bayle, Le costume en Bourgogne, 88. dull red tunic fastened by two small black belts that look 79. For a good discussion, see Gage, Color and Culture,

like stripes. Also, the color partition of his stockings and a 79-91.

| considerable quantity of black set him definitely on the 80. Ibid., 34-36 and 153-76. See also Frodl-Kraft, “Die

negative side. Farbsprache,” 106—9. In his otherwise fine formal analysis, 67. Quoted in Gage, Color and Culture, 77. Ganz, Das Wesen der franzésischen Kunst, 30, turned Marcia’s 68. Pastoureau, “Et puis vint le bleu,” in Figures et couleurs, pink dress into a red one because he relied on the modern I§—22, and Couleurs, Images, Symboles, 22-25. Chemical and color wheel.

tinctorial innovations allowed for the fabrication of a bet- 81. Frodl-Kraft, “Die Farbsprache,’ 113-21 and 137. ter-quality blue cloth from the thirteenth century onward. 82. Pastoureau, “Les couleurs médiévales: Systémes de Thompson, The Materials and Techniques, 12°77—-128, briefly valeurs et modes de sensibilité,” in Figures et couleurs, 35—43.

alludes to the official control the production of blue cloth Frodl-Kraft, “Die Farbsprache,” 110—11, argues that our con- , was subjected to in the Middle Ages, as purple was in the cept of a “pure” color would not make sense to a medieval

Byzantine Empire. observer, to whom a yellowish green was the same as a 69. See Cockshaw, “Mentions d’auteurs,” nos. 48 and 56. bluish green. Gage, Color and Culture, 12 and 61, similarly Jean de Berry’s inventory refers to two bags of azure, which observes that in antiquity and the Middle Ages green and the duke must have kept like any other manufactured lux- yellow were thought to be of the same genus, as was the

ury good. See Guiftrey, Inventaires, 11, 35, no. 210. Christine case with purple and red. | de Pizan, Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs, 11, 76—79, narrates 83. When red is used instead of an orange red, the green the story of how an alchemist, who “faisoit artificielement tends to get darker as well, so as to match the lower value.

moult bel azur,”’ fraudulently sold his secret. In this case, the choice of red was perhaps prompted for

70. See note 63 in Chapter I. | reasons of social distinction, since the emperor needs to be 71. On red as a royal color, see Nixdorff and Miiller, made distinct from nonnoble characters. Weisse Westen—Rote Roben, 14-15. According to Louisa 84. Kristeva, “Giotto’s Joy.’ Although problematic from a Dunlop, “Pigments and Painting Materials in Fourteenth- historical point of view, her psychoanalytic and structural-

and Early Fifteenth-Century Parisian Manuscript ist approach to Giotto’s use of colors in the Arena Chapel is | Illumination,” in Artistes, artisans et production artistique, II, full of stimulating suggestions, including her insight that a 271—86, vermilion is ubiquitous in manuscripts made around chromatic arrangement can be “both conflictual and serial” 1400 because of its greater availability. I prefer to use the (38). On the question of a semiotic level in the “pictorial texdescriptive terms “red” and “orange red” because vermilion tuality,’ see Damisch, “Huit théses pour (ou contre?),” 22-23.

was a tinctorial substance that could yield many different 85. See Frodl-Kraft, “Die Farbsprache,” 146, for the def- |

shades. } inition of Farbfigur. ,

72. Ktihnel, Bildwoérterbuch, L111 and 37. See also Gage, 86. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, 56-57. Color and Culture, 26, according to whom this was already the 87. Ackerman, “On Early Renaissance Color Theory

case in antiquity. and Practice,” 18, notes the quattrocento’s preference for a 73. Fora similar example, see the color reproduction of “patchwork of intense colors” set against a more subdued

Hypermnestra in Boccace en France, 28. | background. He interprets it merely as a perceptual device 74. Dunlop, “Pigments and Painting Materials” (as in meant to separate people from their surroundings, which Nn. 71), 285, states that a new, bright yellow (perhaps a lead- the cinquecento will endeavor to discard.

thin yellow) emerges in Parisian manuscripts of the late 88. On the fundamental importance held by wood in fourteenth century. On yellow’s mimetic use, see Frodl- medieval real and symbolic practices, see Pastoureau,

Kraft, “Die Farbsprache’ 132. “Introduction a la symbolique médiévale du bois.” 75. Yellow is abundantly used in this pejorative way in 89. Schéne, Uber das Licht, 11-19 and 82-106, characterJean de Berry’s copy, in which it appears especially on tor- izes late medieval painting as the moment of shift from the turers. See Pastoureau, “Formes et couleurs du désordre: Le medieval aesthetics of Eigenlicht (inherent light) to the jaune avec le vert,” in Figures et couleurs, 23-34, and “Les Renaissance one of Beleuchtungslicht (external light source).

| couleurs médiévales: Systémes de valeurs et modes de sen- 90. Discussed by Hills, The Light, 19-20. sibilité,” in ibid., 41-42, where the devalorization of yel- 91. Hall, Color and Meaning, 20-22. It was Giotto who low is seen as a consequence of the increased use of gold. first introduced such hue shifts. 76. In Agamemnon’ case (Fig. 35), whose outfit is white 92. Martens, Meister Francke, 85-106, speaks of Farbstufung

, plus green and red, there may be a specific historical allusion, when quoting Cennini. Also Bunim, Space in Medieval

for they were the colors of Burgundy. Painting, 160n. 99, who understands the “shading of the 77. Black is used neither for shadows nor for toning ground plane toward the rear contour” as a means to down the value of'a color. On the reluctance of quattrocento enhance the three-dimensional feeling. Hills, The Light, painters to use black shadows against Alberti’s advice, see 68—69, quotes Pecham and others who justify this princi-

T22

Notes to Pages 80—86

nous rays. 301-2. ,

ple in terms of optical theories on the propagation of lumi- 209. See also Sokolova, Le paysage dans la miniature francaise,

93. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, 56. 105. Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting, 137. The most

94. This principle persists in miniatures of the Boucicaut careful analysis of landscapes in early fifteenth-century art is Master and the Limbourg brothers, despite their greater to be found in Martens, Meister Francke, 71-82, who points

interest in rendering local luminescence. out that rounded hills will increasingly supersede rock-plat95. “Et comme nous voions que le paintre met a une forms. ymage pluseurs couleurs belles et laides a celle fin qu’elles 106. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, $7. se puissent mieulx monstrer l’une encontre l’autre, ainsi a 107. Martens, Meister Francke, 73ff., introduces and disnoz doctrines nous pouvons le bien et le mal reciter: le bien cusses the analogy in detail. It is improper insofar as medieval

pour il auctoriser, et le mal pour le repudier, pour veritez theater did not use coulisses. tousjours mieulx demonstrez.” (quoted from Lusignan, Parler 108. Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,’ 60. Lapostolle, vulgairement, 176). For other examples associating light and “Temps, lieux et espaces,” 106-20, analyzes other instances moral qualities, see Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 98-100. See and modes of spatiotemporal configurations in similar also Gage, Color and Culture, 15, for a similar rhetorical con- images. trast by Plutarch, where the terms, however, are provided 109. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 15, wrote that in late by color and line-drawing, and Friedman, The Monstrous medieval stage design and processions different scenic eleRaces, 185, for a justification of the existence of monsters. ments such as trees, rocks, fountains, pavilions, and the like,

96. Ackerman, “On Early Renaissance Color Theory were superimposed instead of being simply juxtaposed. and Practice,” 22—25, finds the quattrocento high-value 110. Martens, Meister Francke, 168—73. color system “emotionally naive” because of its lack of 111. Many examples in Meiss, 1968, as, for instance, figs. “dramatic gravity.” To him, colors are modern insofar as 2, 3,9, and 13.

they convey psychological affects. 112. Contamine, La vie quotidienne, 14. 97. Huizinga, The Waning, 54:“Through all the ranks of 113. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 15, who qualifies them

society a severe hierarchy of material and colour kept class- as “emblematic devices” or “miniature symbols of reality.” | es apart, and gave to each estate or rank an outward dis- 114. I prefer “indeterminate” to “neutral.” For a critique tinction, which preserved and exalted the feeling of dignity,” of the alleged neutral nature of medieval backgrounds, see See also ibid., 270-73, for a symbolic interpretation of dif- Bonne, L’art roman de face et de profil, 141.

ferent colors. — 115. For the distinction between medieval locus and 98. Frodl-Kraft, “Die Farbsprache,’ 133-35. Renaissance situs, see ibid., 145. 99. Among many other instances, Durrieu, ‘“Manuscrits 116. Panofsky, Perspective, 126 n. 50. Martens, Meister de luxe,” 178, wrote that “La perspective, encore si mal con- Francke, 66, also assesses Francke’s and his French models’

nue a cette époque, n’est cependant pas trop ridicule.’ The modernity in terms of a departure from the “Parallelperredeeming qualities are gone in more recent accounts, such spektive,” that is, the purely diagonalized construction. as in White, The Birth and Rebirth, 123,in which Renaissance 117. Panofsky, Perspective, 39-40 and 54-59. Although space is seen as an “emancipation” from the “tyranny” of Duccio’s art is “merely a beginning,’ and, Panofsky thinks, medieval conceptions of pictorial space. Compare by con- it is fraught with shortcomings, he is modern insofar as he trast the little-known study by Horb, Das Innenraumbild, combined the vanishing axis with the “center of vanishesp. 74—75, where he insists that readings which project the ing-points.” This analysis is repeated in Renaissance and Renaissance abstract and geometrical conception of space Renascences, 137, and in Early Netherlandish Painting, 18-19,

into late medieval art are anachronistic. in which the tone, however, has hardened, for the spatial 100. The best critical interpretation of Panofsky’s work rendering in Duccio’s Last Supper is now said to be “lamon perspective is offered by Damisch, The Origin of entably incorrect.” Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting, 135ff.,

Perspective, 3-20 and passim. gives a more neutral account of the “foreshortening”’ of the tor. For these ideas I am much indebted to Jean-Claude floor plane. Bonne. See, for instance, his L’art roman de face et de profil, esp. 118. Panofsky, Perspective, 40.

137—49, as well as “Fond, Surfaces, Support.” 119. Ibid., 123 n. 47, sees the pregnancy of objects in late 102. Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting, 112. medieval space as an indication that their vantage point 103. Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 1584. Reproduced in Avril, does not coincide with that of the ground plane. I believe

Manuscript Painting, pls. 29 and 30. that this is not a question of “perspectives,” however, but 104. Again, one has to be wary of generalizations, for of mutually interacting levels of inscription. the same painter could handle spatial problems quite dif- 120. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 88; see ibid., ferently at the same moment in his or her career. For an 67 and 89, for a discussion of the “interpenetration” of space

example of a much more extensive landscape by the and humans. Coronation Master than those found in the Cleres femmes, see 121. An example of this would be the miniature of his lands of the Tartars in the Fleur des histoires, reproduced Sappho in Jean de Berry’s copy (fol. 71v), in which the in Meiss, 1967, fig. 438, and de Winter, La bibliothéque, fig. orthogonals meet, in a symbolically powerful way, around the

123

Notes to Pages 86-91 book held open by the poet (reproduced in Panofsky, Early ing issue of the coexistence of ornamental and natural back-

Netherlandish Painting, fig. 55). grounds in fifteenth-century art. 122. Panofsky is certainly well aware of the diversity of 132. Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre Othéa,” 69. models in the late Middle Ages, but he still implicitly cate- 133. Les histoires que l’on peut raisonnablement faire, pregorizes them according to the “right” model. For a critique miére histoire (Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,’ 50-51). of the unitarian conception of style, including in a same Following Henry Martin, Meiss, 1967, 362 n. 3, interpreted work of art, see Schapiro, “Style,’ in Theory and Philosophy of (I think mistakenly) champaigne d’ystoire as referring to a Art, 51-102. As an illustration of “variation within a style,” landscape.

he cites Western paintings of the fifteenth century where 134. Perhaps this corresponds to réticulé. The terminolo“realistic figures and landscapes are set against a gold back- gy is taken from Patricia Stirnemann and Marie-Thérése ground, which in the Middle Ages had a spiritualistic sense” Gousset, “Marques, mots, pratiques: Leur signification et

(61). leurs liens dans le travail des enlumineurs,” in Vocabulaire du

123. Of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Annunciation (1344), livre et de Vécriture au moyen age, 45—49. See also Stirnemann, Panofsky, Perspective, 57, wrote that the orthogonals are ori- “Réflexions sur des instructions non iconographiques dans ented toward a single point, “undoubtedly with full math- les manuscrits gothiques,” in Artistes, artisans, et production ematical consciousness.” For a different reading, see Damisch, artistique, I, 351-54. Some manuscripts preserve traces of The Origin of Perspective, 80-81, who, however, also qualifies abbreviated words, simple geometric figures, or both, that Lorenzetti’s Annunciation as an “eminently contradictory guided the illuminator in the type of background to paint. structure” because of its combination of a tiled floor and a This system also helped to preserve an alternation of back-

golden background. ground designs. See also the older study by Rau, “Die orna124. Bonne, “Fond, Surfaces, Support,’ 120. mentalen Hintergriinde,”’ and, for the stages of execution 125. Martens, Meister Francke, 59 and 65—66.The author of backgrounds, Lehmann-Haupt, The Gottingen Model Book. spoke of a perspectival Kunstwollen, manifesting itself when 135. Meiss drew attention to this. For example, 1967, 203—4,

tiled floors, the overlapping of natural “coulisses” and the for the Brussels Hours, or 1968, 12—14, in the Boucicaut diminution of scale were adopted by early fifteenth-century Master’s work.

artists. 136. What might have happened is that the person who 126. For instance, Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting, 156, drew the preparatory sketch forgot to trace the line all across

in which the “stage space” is viewed as a major step toward the miniature, so the assistant responsible for the backthe development of the three-dimensional conception of grounds painted it all the way down. In a sense, then, the

space in the North. “mistake” was made twice.

127. Dvorak, Idealism and Naturalism, 62, argued the point 137. This is the case with some of the thrones, posed on forcefully by writing that the ornamental background “sig- tiled or indeterminate grounds, in the sequence of prophets nifies hardly anything other than it actually is, namely an and apostles painted around 1386 by André Beauneveu in the ornamentally embellished surface before which the figures Psalter of the Duc of Berry (Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 13091; stand.” Although stressing the importance of backgrounds as Meliss, 1967, figs. 5I—74). See also Martens, Meister Francke,

a “material working surface,” Panofsky also saw them as 62, for a similar analysis of architectural elements whose mimetic closures. See, for instance, Renaissance and dimensions vary “incongruously” so as to create space for Renascences, 133. Also, Meiss, 1968, 63, in which the tiled other elements. floor of Saint Mark’s image in Berry’s Bible Historiale paint- 138. This further problematizes Panofsky’s notion of an ed by the Coronation Master “alone measures the distance “anterior by implication.” There is no spatial implication

and serves to evoke a chamber.” before linear perspective, something that Panofsky in fact 128. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 19. pointed out himself when stating that the marginal orthog129. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 144—45. This onals in trecento paintings do not converge toward a vanbook is based on lectures given in 1952, that is, when Early ishing point. As he puts it in Renaissance and Renascences, Netherlandish Painting was in press (first published in 1953). 140, “The abstract mathematical idea of a plane, it seems, In fact, the lectures reiterate some of the same material as was at this stage not powerful enough to prevail against the earlier publications by Panofsky. The slight change in defi- visual difference between ‘picture-transcendent’ and ‘picnition is thus all the more significant. Rau, “Die ornamen- ture-immanent’ vanishing lines.” talen Hintergriinde,” 160n. 187, catches the contradiction 139. See Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 76—85.

without doing more with it. His study, however, has the 140. Frugoni, A Distant City, 6, speaks of an “ideogram.”

merit of not subscribing to the mimetic conception of the 141. Dvorak, Idealism and Naturalism, 107. It is what he .

diapered backgrounds. calls the Portrathafte.

130. Meiss, 1968, 18, briefly notes the same phenome- 142. Alberti, On Painting (1, 39), 77. It is interesting to

non for the Boucicaut Hours. recall that Cennini, The Crafisman’s Handbook, 17, advises 131. In Jean de Berry’s copy, three miniatures show a sky painters to generate all measurements from the human face,

instead of a diapered background (Camilla, Artemisia, Dido). which serves as a “standard for the whole figure, for the | It would require a separate study to deal with the fascinat- buildings, and from one figure to another.” Obviously, this

I24

Notes to Pages 91—95 is a radically different approach than the one advocated by ed that this plateau composition was “perhaps the greatest

Alberti predicated on “objective” spatial distances. compositional invention of the fifteenth century.” 143. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 53, and 155. This principle is operative for Lebégue as well. See

Martens, Meister Francke, 59-65. While Horb, Das Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,” 61. Innenraumbild, 55, takes up the homely simile and speaks of 156. Kristeva, “Giotto’s Joy,’ 45, provides an apt and a Puppenbiihne, Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting, 153, refers dynamic definition of Giotto’s space as “both antagonistic to them as “open-front” houses—an exception to the oth- and harmonized.” See also Dvorak, Idealism and Naturalism, erwise condescending vocabulary. Compare this to a passage 135—36, for his more conventionally Hegelian discussion of

in an eighth-century text in which the protective feeling of the art of the late fourteenth century as a moment of unrea cloak is likened to a small house because it “covers a man solved contradiction between naturalist and idealistic ten-

all over” (quoted from Frugoni, A Distant City, 5). dencies. 144. The architecture of Flora is the most houselike in the 157. It is very tempting to see this as a “symbolic form” manuscript and is not explicitly mentioned by Boccaccio. of a period torn apart by social, political, and religious Certainly the illuminator was referring to the small hous- upheavals and schisms.

es that lined the streets given over to Parisian prostitutes. 158. Bonne, L’art roman de face et de profil, 146—47.And for | See Geremek, The Margins, 216. a different formulation, see Gurevich, Categories of Medieval 145. Rohlfs von Wittich, “Das Innenraumbild,” called Culture, 90. the front opening a Schauoffnung. She linked it to Thomas 159. A similar point was made by Ganz, Das Wesen der

| Aquinas’s theory of vision, so that the closed architectures franzésischen Kunst, 45. But he reified it into an unchanging would be a metaphor of the finite world, where beings characteristic of French rationalism.

can only see rationally (e.g., through the small lateral open- 160. Le Goff, “Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in , ings), while the spectator is assimilated to a transcendent the Middle Ages,” in Time, Work, and Culture, 29-42, in gaze, seeing, as it were, through walls. See also Horb, Das which the topic of the control over social time is broached. Innenraumbild, 71—78, for the discussion of the principle of Also useful is Gurevich’s chapter “What Is Time?” in Cate-

the simultaneous vision of interiors and exteriors. gories of Medieval Culture, 94-151.

146. Martens, Meister Francke, 61-64. 161. Other miniatures do not follow the text in situating 147. Ibid., 76—78, takes up the question of lateral infinite a story during the night, as with Thisbe’s suicide or Cloelia’s

extension conveyed by the device of having borders “cut” escape.

part of the visible elements. 162. Boccaccio always gives a temporal indication—in 148. White, The Birth and Rebirth, 27-28, is right in stat- Jerusalem at the time of King Solomon, in Rome during ing that these constructions “stress the representational sur- Augustus’s reign—but his spatiotemporal framework remains, face.” See also ibid., 108, as well as Bunim, Space in Medieval in fact, as uniform and actualized as that of the miniatures. Painting, 138, for a discussion of the procedure as described In that sense the assertion that the illuminators of the Cleres

by Cennini. femmes “lacked also his [Boccaccio’s] sense of history, and 149. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, $7. they conceived of all the great worthies of the past as inhab-

150. Les histoires que l’on peut raisonnablement faire, pre- itants of nearby hétels or chateaux” needs qualification (Meiss, miére histoire (Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,’ 50-51). 1968, 48). The same can be said of Panofsky’s discussion of Horb, Das Innenraumbild, 67, thinks that these architectur- the “barons” and “damsels” of the Trojan cycle (Panofsky,

al cubicles derived from tabernacles or ciboria. Renaissance and Renascences, 85—86). 151. Significant in this regard is Lebégue’s spatial vocab- 163. Haussherr, Convenevolezza, discusses the difterent ulary, clearly referred to a picture plane instead of space. degrees of actualization in medieval imagery. See also the See Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,” 61, whose per- interesting comments in Meiss, 1967, 43, about the chrono-

spectival conclusion, however, I do not share. logical and geographic categories of Robinet d’Estampes, 152. Bonne, L’art roman de face et de profil, 143, has this who uses ancien to refer to objects from the Romanesque striking formula: “The background figures (in the metaphor- and Gothic periods. ic sense) by its non-figurativity (in the iconic sense) what is 164. Les histoires que l’on peut raisonnablement faire, pre-

un-figurable (in the transcendental sense)... . In represen- miére histoire (Byrne, “An Early French Humanist,” tation, the background thus becomes the representative of 50-51), sees it specifically as an attribute of an ancient an enunciating and monstrating instance that presents itself “worthy.” Huizinga, The Waning, 327, mentions that the

as the origin of sovereign authority.” My translation. duke of Lorraine at the funeral of his enemy Charles the 153. A similar conclusion, based on different premises, Bold had a long golden beard and was dressed in “antique

was reached by Otto Pacht in his “Gestaltungsprinzipien style.” der westlichen Malerei,’ 18—29. He spoke of a double set of 165. The proximity is so confounding that some have rules, but based his analysis on the compositional patterns of been led to read Christian subjects in these miniatures. For

the picture plane rather than on the material surface of instance, Rau, “Die ornamentalen Hintergriinde,’ 71, mis-

inscription. took the deified Faustina for the Virgin. In a number of 154. Meiss, “‘Highlands’ in the Lowlands,” 47, conclud- cases, the reuse of the same models by the Coronation

125

Notes to Pages 95-97 Master can be documented precisely. As a representative example, one can refer to the parallel compositions between

Saint John on Patmos from a Bible that belonged to Jean de : Berry (Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 159, fol. 531; reproduced in de Winter, La bibliothéque, fig. 186) and our soothsayer Mantho

(Fig. 29). The setting and position of the figures are almost identical, but a woman has taken the place of a man, and the revelation of the Divine Word has been displaced in favor of a more fragile oracular revelation. 166. Meiss, 1967, 15—17, with other examples. For further

examples, see, for instance, Lord, “Three Manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé”; Stones, “Sacred and Profane Art’; and | Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 95—101, for a personification of ,

Justice patterned after the Virgin of Mercy. | 167. Huizinga, The Waning, 157ff. In musical composi- | tions, the same melody could be used indifferently for reli-

gious or profane lyrics. Warburg, “Arbeitende Bauern,” 228, | spoke of a “primitive compatibility” between clerical and mundane interests in the arts.

du prince, 100. , 168. Philippe de Méziéres, for instance, thought of roman-

ces in terms of “bourdes” (fibs, nonsense), which lead the reader to “folie, vanité et pechié.” Quoted from Krynen, Idéal

169. Huizinga, The Waning, 161, mentions that Gerson also complained about obscene paintings that were sold, even in churches, tanquam idola Belphegor.

of impiety.” 170. Boccaccio’s edifying explanations of pagan myths, especially in the Genealogia deorum, are viewed along these

lines by Seznec, The Survival, 224, as a prudent move to

safeguard “himself against criticism or reproach on the score I71. See, most recently, Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods, 72—73 and passim. 172. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 84. A similar

idea, though taken more broadly, was already expressed by

Huizinga, The Waning, 335, where he wrote that “the new |

form and the new spirit do not yet coincide.” 173. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 106. Seznec,

The Survival, enshrines this conception, for his chapter

“Metamorphoses of the Gods” is followed by “The Re174. Camille, The Gothic Idol, to1-14. |

integration of the Gods.”

175. Benveniste, “The Correlation of Tense,” 209. 176. Spiegel, Romancing the Past, 101-7, offers a sustained

critique of the charges that medieval historiography was anachronistic.

177. Prologue to the Grandes Chroniques quoted in Hedeman, The Royal Image, 153.

178. On Boccaccio’s recourse to ordo and symetria, as well as to figurae that structure his descriptions, see Prandi, “Giovanni Boccaccio e l’arte figurativa,’ 121-33. 179. Guenée, Histoire et culture historique, 350.

126

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134

Index Acciaiouli, Andrea, countess of Altavilla, 6, 18, 19, 29, 43, Cas des nobles hommes et femmes, 16, 21, 38, 41, 71

44, 63, 64, [09gn. I19 De genealogia deorum gentilium, 15, 16, 126n. 170 Acciaiouli, Niccolo, 18 De montibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis et paludibus et de

Adam, 15, 28—29 nominibus maris, 15

Agamemnon, 37, 68, 73, 106n. 61, 122n. 76 De mulieribus claris, 2,7, 13, 15-19, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36,

Agrippina (mother of Nero), 29; 38 37, 44, 47, 93, 98, IOON. 124, LION. 149, IIIN. 3 Agrippina (wife of Germanicus), 41, 42 Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, 21 Alberti, Leon Battista, 82, 91, 97, 122n. 77, 124n. 142 Filostrato (Roman de Troilus), 16

Alcherio, Giovanni, II, 14 Teseida, 16 Alexander, Jonathan, 23, $1, 58 body, 33-34, 38, SI, $2, 58, 60—61, 94, II3nn. 41, 44, II4n. Amalthea, 44, 45 84, 118n. 158, 119n. 2, I2In. $4 Amazonian queens. See under specific names Bondol, Jean, 87

Anastasie, 88, I16n. 123 Bonne, Jean-Claude, 93, 123nn. IOI, I14, IIS, 12§n. 152 Antiope. See under Orithya book trade and production, 11-15, 73—74, 97, I19n. I,

Antonia, 19, $2, 64, 106n. 61 124nN. 134, 136

Antonio of Arezzo, 9, 16 Borges, Jorge Luis, 45

Aquinas, Thomas, 72, II7n. 131, 125n. 145 Boucicaut Hours, 22, 31, 41, §9, I21n. 47, 124n. 130

Arachne, 19, 40-41, 50, 89, 92 Boucicaut Master and workshop, 3, 10, 70, 79, 83, 87, 90, Argia (and Polynices), 19, 36, 65, 67, 93 93, IIIn. 9, I14n. 82, 123n. 94, 124n. 135

Aristotle, 24, 34, I17n. 131 Bouvet, Honoré, 14, 108n. 86

Armagnac party, I, 8 Bruges, 7, 8, 9, 1o4nn. 28, 33

Arnolfini, Giovanni, II, 116n. 122 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 82

35,57 Bunim, Miriam, 83

Artemisia, queen of Caria (and Mausolus and Xerxes), 30, Bullough, Vern, 33

Artevelde, Philip van, 58 Bureau de Dampmartin, 9, 12, 13, 16, 23, 104n. 39, 106n. Athaliah, queen of Jerusalem, 19, 30, 31, 37, 67, 90 69, 108n. 96

Autrand, Francoise, § Burgundian party, I, 8, 23, 32, 33

Avignon, 8, 1s—16, 106n. 60 Busa, 19, 37, $8, 65, 95, I0Sn. §0 Byrne, Donal, 14 Babylon, $5 Bajazet, sultan, 12

Bal des Ardents, 33 Camilla, queen of the Volscians, 20, 32-33

Barasch, Moshe, 66 Camille, Michael, 61, 96, I111n. 167, I19nn. 189, 194 | Barthes, Roland, $6, $7, 58, 102n. 3 Camiola (and Roland), 19, 42, 53, 58, 85, 90, Iosn. 50 Belli Barsali, Isa, 10 : Carthage, 39, 90-91 Benedict XIII, pope, 32 Casagrande, Carla, 26, 115n. 101 Benson, Pamela, 20, 21 Cassandra, 36, 37, 73 Benveniste, Emile, 96 Catiline (Sallust). See under Lebégue, Jean

Berenice, queen of Cappadocia, 35, 83 Charles V, king of France, 4—5, 24, 62, I02n. 4, 103nn. 14, Bible de Jean de Vaudetar (Jean Bondol), 87, 103n. 24 15, 1O7N. 83, LION. 1§5, I1§n. 97, II7N. 131 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 2, 6, 13, I5—I9, 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 33, 34, Charles VI, king of France, 4—5, 7, 8, 16, 23, 30, 32, 33,

36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 103N. 17, 105n. $9 55, 57, 58, 60, OI, 62, 64, 70, 71, 86, 93, 95, 97, I10n. Chartier, Alain, 23 161, II2n. 37, II§nn. 103, 107, 117N. 134, 12§n. 162 Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, 21 Decameron, 9, 12, 13, 15-16, 17, 23, 95, 104n. 39, 108nn. Le chevalier errant (Thomas of Saluzzo), 35

98, IOI, IIIN. 4, 112n. 14, 118n. 165 Christine de Pizan, 21-24, 25—26, 36, 41, 44, 47—48, $1, 88, De casibus virorum illustrium, 15-16, 20, I08n. 96, 10gn. IION. 154, II2N. 37, II7N. 134, 118n. 153, I19n. 4,

131, I10N. 147, III. 3, 118n. 154 120n. 14

135

Index Epistre Othéa, 26, 35, 116n. 116, 119n. 184 Lexemple du riche homme et du ladre, 37 Livre de la Cité des dames (City of Ladies), 21-22, 25, Eyck, Jan van, 11, 92, I116nn. 122, 124

II§n. 104, I116n. 123, I118n. 155 | 107n. 80, 109n. 108, Iogn. III, IIIn. 8, 114n. 78,

Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles VY 103n. Faustina Augusta, 17, 48, 54, 55, 66, 89, 125n. 165 14, LION. 155, I1§N. 97, II6N. 131, 120N. 19, 122n. 69 Fleur des histoires de la terre d’ Orient (Héthoun Haython), 9,

Livre des trois vertus, 21, 26, 120n. 12 12, 94, 105N. 47, I10N. 162, I13n. 49, 123n. 104 Livre du corps de policie, 26, 113n. 43, 115n. 104, II7N. 131 Flora, 19, 52, 61, 66, 67, 91, 125n. 144

Cenami, Giovanna, 11; Cenami family, ro4nn. 32, 37 Foucault, Michel, 41-42 Cennini, Cennino, 41, 61, 79, 80, 83, 9I—92, 116n. 124, Frodl-Kraft, Eva, 76, 81

124n. 142, 125n. 148 Froissart, Jean, 23

Ceres, 19, 20, 26—27, $1, $8, 65, 72, 93, 95

Cerquiglini, Bernard, 57, 99

Cicero, 15; De senectute and De amicitia, 108n. 96 Gaia Cyrilla, 50, 85

Cimbrians (wives of the), 19, 40, 68, 69, 85 Garnier, Francois, 67

Circe, 45, 63, 71 Gerson, Jean, 14, 22, $2, 95, 109n. 133, II2n. 34, 126n. 169

Claudia, 35 gestures and postures, 2, 40, §2,64—72, 89, 98, 118n. 166 Claudia Quinta, 26, 49, 63, 75 of disputatio, 42, 67, 68

Clement V, pope, 12 of prayer, 10, 38, 48, 67

Clement VII, pope, 8, 16 gifts, 6, 7, 23, 33, 29, 43, 95, 103n. 23, 108n. 97 Cleopatra (and Anthony), 40, 65 Gousset, Marie-Theérése, 88

Cloelia, 49, 85, 125n. 161 Guenée, Bernard, 97, I10n. 134

Clytaemnestra (and Aegisthus and Orestes), 27, 37, 67, 68 Guillaume de Tignonville (provost of Paris), 22

Coene, Jacques, II, 14, 106n. 64 Guillebert de Metz, 8—9, 104n. 39 Col, Gontier and Pierre, 22, 110n. 154. Guinigi company, 1o4nn. 28, 30, 35, 36, 1osnn. $6, $7 Constance, empress of the Romans and queen of Sicily, Guiron le Courtois, 12

19, 27, 29, $4, 74, 94 Gurevich, Aaron, 86

color, 2, 31, 41, 68, 72—82, 89, 98 azure, 11, 74, 89, 122n. 69

gold, 48, 53, 63, 74, 75, 10sn. 50, 122n. 75 Haincelin de Hagenau, I1, 106n. 61

Cornificia (poet), 36, 82 Harmonia, 37, 63, 67—68, 76

Coronation Master, I0, II, 12, 73, 74, 76, 83, 92, losnn. 46, Hauser, Arnold, 58 48, 106nn. 61, 64, 10gn. 127, I13n. 49, I16n. 118, Hecuba, 36, 37, 55, 70, 73, 90, 106n. 61

123n. IO4, 124n. 127, 12§n. 165 Helen (and Paris), 35, 42, 90-91 costumes, 10, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 38, 41, 43, SI, 52, $3, Henry VI, king of England and France, 9 60—64, 68, 71, 73, 80, 85, 94, 98, 106n. 61, 108n. OI heraldry, 5, 10, IT, 29, 35, 76, I17n. 148

Cour amoureuse de Charles VI, 22-23, 24 Hercules, 21, 32, 33, 36, 50, 70, I14n. 64 Hindman, Sandra, 48 Hippo, 40, 76, 85

Dante, 73 Hortensia, 42, 64, 67, 80, 90, 92 Deianira, 17, 32 Hugh of Saint-Victor, 66 De lingua latina (Varro), 15 Hughes, Diane Owen, 53

Dido (and Aeneas), 17, 19, 39 —40, 66, 71, 90-91 Huizinga, Johan, 24, 41, 61, 73, 95, 113n. 63, 119n. 186,

Drigiagon (wife of Drigiagon, king of the Galatians), 19, 123n. 97, 126n. 172

30, 39, 63, 95 Hypermnestra (and Linus and Danaus), 29, 42, 54, 63, Dripetrua, 33, $7, 60 84, 89 Duccio, 86, 123n. 117 Hypsicratea, 34, 35

Duchié, Jacques, 9, 12 Hypsipyle, 19, 37, 85, 106n. 61

Engeldruda (and Guido), 19, 20, 29, 53, 65, 77-78, 89, 92 iconographic adviser, 13-14, I7, 30, 36, 38, 43, 47, I07n. 83

Epicharis, 38, 41, 64, 65 iconographic subjects:

Epigrams (Martial), 15 agriculture and peasants, 34—35, 38, 51, 58, 72, 93

Erythraea (sibyl), 44, 45, 63 artistic occupations, 46—48, 58 estate literature, 25—26, 37, SI cross-dressing, 28, 33, 42, 62 Europa, 19, 40, 42, 55, 67, 75, 85 feasting, 33-34, 57 Eve, 18, 19, 28—29, 49, 57, 61, 73, 94, I10N. 147 hunting, 32—33, 57

136

Index

judicial activities, 42—43 Jacquemart de Hesdin, 83, 93 literary occupations and teaching, 43-46, $7, 58, 59 Jean, duc de Berry, 4—6, 10, 16, 20, 23, 24, 102n. 4, 103nn. love (licit and illicit), 29, 35, 40, 43, 45, 49, SI-54, 55S, 9, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 104nn. 32, 41, 105n. 47,

58, 63, 66, 69, 74, 84, I2In. $4, 125n. 144 106n. 69, 108n. 96, I13n. $8, 116n. 124, II7n. 132,

magical arts, 45 I18n. 154, 122n. 69

manual crafts, 13, 17, 48, SO—SI, 78, II7n. 142 Jean de la Barre (treasurer of Jean de Berry), 23

military activities, 30, 34-37, 57, 58, 59 Jean de la Cloche (treasurer of France), 10

motherhood, 26, 28, 42, 54 Jean de Meung, 22

music, 49, 50 Jean de Montreuil, 22, 44

Nine Worthies, 35—36 Jean le Meingre, marshal of Boucicaut, 22 presentation miniatures, 6, 16, 58, 87, 1o3n. 24 Jeanne de Bourbon, queen of France, 62, I112n. 27

queenship, 29 —32, 37, 59 Joan (pope), 19, 21, 28, 54, 63, 67, 85, 90

rape, 39—41, $9, 66 Joan of Arc, 34

statues and idols, 26, 27, 46-49 Joanna I, queen of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem, 18, 19,

suicide and murder, 30, 37—41 28—29, 31, $7, 65, 92, 1O9N. II9 textiles (fabrication of), 13, 17, 41, 49—50, $7, 58, 59, 61, Jocasta (and Oedipus), 39, $5

104Nn. 29, I2In. 64 John II the Good, king of France, 15, 103n. 15 wild people, 33, 64, 77 John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, 8, 10, 11, 12, 31-32, iconographic subjects, religious, 26 —29, 48, 53 63,94, 1OSn. 43, 108n. 97, I12n. 26

Adoration of the Magi, 31, 95 Jugurtha (Sallust). See under Lebégue, Jean Ascension, 26 Julia, 41, 67 Birth of the Virgin, 95 Juno, 19, 20, 26-27, 54, 65, 92

Caritas Romana, 42 Jupiter, 26, 40, 75

Charity, 37, 95 Fall, 28

Holy Face, 46-47 Kristeva, Julia, 78

Mary the Egyptian, 113n. 41 Krynen, Jacques, 31 Pentecost, 26 Saint John on Patmos, 126n. 165

Salome presents the head of Saint John the Baptist, 30, Lampedo. See under Martesia

39-40, 95 Lancelot du Lac, sanc Greal, roy Arthus, 10, 12, 105n. 48,

Virgin and Child, 46, 47, 48 IION. 136 Virgin at the Loom, $0, 95 Laurent de Premierfait, 9, 16, §5, 104n. 39, 108n. 96, IIIn. Virgin of Humility, 51, 95 4, 118n. 154 images: cycle of, I—2, 25, 28, $4, $7, 99 Lavinia (and Ascanius), 30, 31, 84—85 and actualization, 2, 27, 35, 36, 47, 91, 93-97 Leaena, I9, 41, 63, 67, 122n. 66 and authorial intention, 2, 20, $4—$5 Lebégue, Jean, I1, 14, 19, $2, 60, 68, 69, 84, 88, 92, 94, 106n. and gender division, 2, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 43, 57, 69, I1Sn. 102, IIgn. 2, I20nN. IO, 17, 33, 125n. ISI, 155 59, 60—61, 63—64, 71, 80, 94, 98, 105n. $4, II2n. 25, Le Cog, Robert, 5

II§n. 108, 1I7N. 142, 121N. 47, 125n. 165 Légende dorée, 9 and realism, 29, 41, SI, $8—59, 65, 69, 7I—72, 75, 79, Legende du Saint Voult de Luques, 10, 62—63

II7N. 147, 120n. 18 Le Goff, Jacques, 91

and social practices, 13, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, Legrand, Jacques, 40, 71, 81

41,42, 43,44, 45, 49, 50, SI, 53, 58-59, 75, 80, 85, Leontium, 19, 22, 44, 52, 64, 75

I1sn. 92 libraries, 4, 5—6, 20, 24, 102n. 4, 103nn. 8, 9, 10, 16, II2n. 18

and spectatorship, 1, 24, 36, $3, 70-71, 125n. 145 Libya, 27, 56, 62, 65, 88, 89

and stock imagery, 14, 36, 45, 57 Limbourg brothers, 3, 11, 71, 73, 83, 90, 93, 103n. 21, 123n. 94 and text, 2, 14-15, 24, 27, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, Livre des merveilles, 94, 113n. 46, I1Qn. 4 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54-57, 59, 62, 71, 125n. 144 Livre des propriétés des choses (Bartholomaeus Anglicus), 9,

and variance, 2, 28, §7—58, 78, 81—82, 85, 91, 95, 99 103Nn. 13, 10Qn. IIS, IIIn. 166

Tole, 14, 19, 33 Livre des secrez d’Aristote, 24

Irene, empress of Byzantium (and Constantine), 19, 29, Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 87, 124n. 123

31-32, 74 Louis, duke of Orléans, $5, 8, I1, 3I—32, 33, 102n. 4, IoSnn.

Irene (artist), 20, 46—48, 73, 90, Iogn. 107 47, 56, 1O7N. 72, I12n. 26 Isabeau de Baviére, queen of France, 22, 23, 31, 36, 102n. 4, Louis I, duke of Anjou, 29, 103nn. 9, 10

I2Inn. 49, §2 Louis II, duke of Anjou, 5, 6, 29

Isis, 20, 26-27, 46, 85 Louis I, duke of Bourbon, 22, 108n. 96

| 137

Index Lucca, 7—10 passim, Io4nn. 28, 29, 35; 105n. 56 Marcia (painter), 1, 20, 46—48, 49, 61, 70, 73, 79, 86, 89,

Lucretia, 19, 39-40, $7, 63, 65, 66, 70-71 116n. 120, I22n. 80 Margaret of Burgundy, 26 Margaret of Flanders, duchess of Burgundy, 5, 103nn. 9, 14,

McLeod, Glenda, 21 IOAN. 32, 107n. 76, 118n. 167

Machaut, Guillaume, 83 Mariamne (and Herod), 19, 38, 62, 75, 94, 106n. 61 Mallet, Gilles, 24, Io2n. 4, 106n. 69, IIIn. 164 Marle, Raimond van, 25, 32

Malouel, Jean, 11 Martens, Bella, 84, 87, 91, 106n. 61, 123nn. 105, 107, 116 Mantho, 45, 106n. 61, I26n. 165 Martesia and Lampedo, Amazonian queens, 36

manuscripts: Mauss, Marcel, 66

— Brussels, Bibl. Royale Albert Ier Ms 9094 (Livre des Medea, queen of Colchis (and Jason), 45, $5—56, 70, 73, 75, propriétés des choses), 9, 105n. 46; MS 9509 (Des cleres 83, 84, 89, 94, 120n. 17 et nobles femmes), 111n. 10, I112nn. 14, 33, 113N. 44, Medusa (and Perseus), $4, 56, 60, 85 I14nn. 66, 70, 73, 115nn. 96, 100, 116nn. 113, II7, Megullia, $3, 67, 70, 74

II7n. 140 Meiss, Millard, 25, 31, 51, 58, 70, 95, I04N. 41, I06n. 61, ITIn. — Chantilly, Musée Condé ms 65 (see under Ties 10, 114n. 82, I16n. 120, 124n. 127, 125nn. 154, 162

Riches Heures) merchants, 7—I1, 13, 15, 16, 18, 23, 39, SI, $8—59, 61, 71, 98, — Geneva, Bibl. Publique et Universitaire ms fr. 190 To4nn. 32, 34, 10$n. §6, IO7NN. 71, 77, I1sn. 99 (Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes of Jean de Miélot, Jean (translator), 16 Berry), 108n. 97; Ms lat. 54 (see under Lebégue, Jean) Milan, 11 — Lisbon, C. Gulbenkian Foundation ms L.A. 143 Minerva, 13, I7, 19, 20, 27, 49, 5O—SI, 58, 65, 75, 78, 80, 85,

(Des cleres et nobles femmes), 114n. 82, I15n. 93, 89, 92—93, IOSn. §0

176, 181 Mirot, Léon, 7

116nn. 14, 117, 117nn. 135, 138, 144, ISI, 119nn. Minyans (wives of the), 21, 42, 106n. 61 — London, British Libr. Ms Royal 16 G.V (Des cleres Mithridates, 33, 34, 35 et nobles femmes), 113n. §2, I1§n. 103, 116nn. 122, 127, Mondrian, Piet, 83 II7NN. 143, 147, 118nn. 158, 169; 20 C.V. (Des cleres

et nobles femmes), 112n. 37, 114n. 77, IIsnn. 92, 94, | 103, III, I117NN. 140, 145, ISI, 118nn. 158, 161, 169 Nero, 29, 38

— Lucca, Bibl. Statale Ms 3122 (Missal of Lorenzo Nessus (centaur), 17, 32

Trenta), 10-11, 105n. $7 a New Year’s Day, 1, 6—7, 16 — Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal Ms 3479-80 (see under Nicaula, the Queen of Sheba (and Solomon), 19, 33, 64, Lancelot du Lac, sanc Greal, roy Arthus); Ms 5193 (Des 67, 68, 74, 77, 80, 83, 85, 89, 92 cas des nobles hommes et femmes), 108n. 97, 109n. 109, Nicolas de Baye, 5

112n. 26, II3n. 42, I14nn. 69, 70, 73, 90, 120n. 7 Nicopolis, 12 — Paris, Bibl. Nat. Ms fr. 159 (Bible Historiale of Jean de Nicostrata, 20, 45—46, 69, 85, 94, 95, 106n. 61 Berry), 126n. 165; Ms fr. 166 (Moralized Bible), 106n. Nieuwenhuysen, A. van, 10 61; MS fr. 380 (Roman de la rose), 114. 71; MS fr. $62 Niobe, 19, 48, 55, 65, 67, 74, 84 (see under Livre des secrez d’Aristote); MS fr. 98 (Des Norton, Glyn, 16, $5 cleres et nobles femmes of Jean de Berry), 87, 102n. 2, IlInn. 9, 12, 112nNn. 13, 23, 24, I13nn. 41, 48, I1snn.

95,96, 100, 103, I116nn. 118, 130, II7N. 149, 118nn. Olympias, queen of Macedonia, 38, 63 | 167, 169, 120Nn. 13, I2In. 46, 122n. 75, 123n. 121, I24n. Opis, 27, 65, 67, 68 131; MS fr. $99 (Des cleres et nobles femmes), 116n. 112, Orithya and Antiope, Amazonian queens, 35—36, 63, 84 I1gn. 181; Ms fr. 2810 (see under Livre des merveilles); Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 29, 33, 53, 77, 94 MS fr. 12201 (see under Fleur des histoires); Ms fr. 12559 Ouy, Gilbert, 14

(see under Le chevalier errant); Ms fr. 13091 (Psalter of Ovid, 15 | Jean de Berry), 116n. 124, 124n. 137

— Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André Ms 2 (see under

Boucicaut Hours) Pamphile, 13, 17, 20, $0, 92

— NewYork, Public Libr., Spencer ms 33 (Des cleres et Panofsky, Erwin, 72, 82, 86—88, 91, 96, 1osn. $9, I15n. 95,

181, 4 Pastoureau, Michel, 48, 76 |

nobles femmes), t14nn. 84, 85, 87, 118n. 158, 119nn. 116n. 120, 124nn. 127, 138, 12§n. 162

— Rome, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana COD. Pal. Lat. patronage, 4—7, IO—II, 20, 97

1988 (see under Legende du Saint Voult de Luques); Paulina (and Mundus/Anubis), 27, 69, 78—79, 89, 91, 94,

COD. Pal. Lat. 1989 (Decameron of John the 1O8n. 85

Fearless), 108n. 100 Penelope, 19, 27, 50, 67, 86, 95, I12n. 32 138

Index

Petrarch, 15, 108n. IOI 65, 69 | De viris illustribus, 18 Sorel, Agnés, 52

Penthesilea, 21, 35-36, 106n. 61, I19n. 184 Sophonisba, queen of Numidia (and Masinissa), 40, $5, 60,

Petroni, Pietro, 15 space (and settings and architectures), 2, 27, 32, 39, 42, 48, Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, 1, 3, 4—12 passim, 14, 53, 56, 70, 79, 80-81, 82—93, 96, 98 . 16, 20, 22—23, 24, 26, 29, 32, 35, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44, Spiegel, Gabrielle, 97

56, 58, 59, 62, 63, 71, 88, 92, 94, 96—99 passim, Stanier, Ymbert, 11 102nN. 4, 5, 103nn. 9, 14, 15, 104n. 28, 10S5nn. 43, 47, Stierle, Karlheinz, 21

106n. 64, 107n. 76, 108n. 86, I13n. 63, II7N. 141, Sulpicia (and Lentulus), 20, 41, 63, 67, 72, 75, 83-84

118n. 167, I19n. I9I Sulpicia (wife of Fulvius), 27, 91-92, II17n. 138 Phoebus, Gaston, count of Foix, 23, I12n. 35 Polyxena, 32, 37, 67, 75, 106n. 61

Pomian, Krzysztof, 98 Tertia Aemilia (and Scipio), 20, 52, $4, 63, 69 Pompeia Paulina, 41, 61, 92 Thamyris (artist), 17, 20, 46-47, 65, 73, 74, 80

Portia, 20, 41 Thamyris, queen of the Scythians (and Cyrus), 34, 35

portraiture, 5, 10, 47—48 Theoxena, I9, 40

Proba, 20, 44 Thisbe (and Pyramus), 19, 39, 55, 62, 66, 70, 90, I19n. 184, Procris (and Cephalus), 32, 55, $6, 83, I19n. 184 12§n. I61

Pucelle, Jean, 83, 115n. 95 Thompson, Daniel, 73 time, 2, 32, 37, 39, 40, 51, 5-56, 93-97 Tite-Live (translated by Pierre Bersuire), 9, 103n. 15 Raponde (Rapondi) family, 7—10, 16, 17, 62, Io4nn. 26, 27, translation, 5—6, 9, 13, 14, 16-17, 44, 46, 47, 56-57, 95-96,

30, 33 98, 103nn. 13, 14, 15

André (Andrea), 8, 16 Trenta, Lorenzo, 10, 10§n. 57 Dine (Dino), 8—10, 12, 16, 23, 35, lO4nn. 32, 37, 10Snn. Ties Riches Heures de Jean de Berry, 51, 58, 112n. 36

43, 54, 106n. 70, 107NN. 76, 77 . Triaria (and Vitellius), 34, $6, 120n. 17 Jacques (Giacomo), I, 6-14, IS, 16, 17, 23, 41, $0, $9, Troy, 35, 36, 90-91 74, 88, 92, 95,97, 1o4nn. 32, 35, 37, 41, losnn. 43, 48, Turia (and Lucretius), 27, 67 106nn. 64, 69, I19n. I9I Jean (Giovanni), 8, I04n. 32, Iosn. 54

Louise, 105n. $7 Ulysses, 27, 45, 50

Philippe (Filippo), 8, 106n. 60 Rhea Ilia, 17, 27, 41, $I, 67

Roman de la rose, debate of, 22, 24, 97 Valerius Maximus, 25

Roman girl (unnamed), 42, 66, 83 Fais des romains, 103nn. 15, 17 Romulus and Remus, 17 Venus, 19, 52-53, 55, 57, 64, 65, 69, 71, 85, 89, IIIn. 12,

Rouse, Richard and Mary, 12 II2n. 13, II7n. 138

Verginia (and Verginius), 38, 61, 67, 94 Verginia (wife of Lucius Volupinus), 27, $4, 67, 85, 90, 91

Sabina Poppaea (wife of Nero), 29, 38, 80 Veturia (and Coriolanus), 36, 67 Salmon, Pierre, 30, 103n. 19, II7N. 132, I2In. 47 Virgil, 39, 45

Sanguin, Guillaume, 9 Visconti, Valentina, 5, 22, I02n. 4 Sappho, 20, 43-44, $9, 67, 80, 87, 123n. 121 Les voeux du paon (Jacques de Longuyon), 35

Schapiro, Meyer, 64-65, I19n. 174, I24n. 122 Volto Santo, 10 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 66 Schroeder, Horst, 36

Scott, Margaret, 62 Warnke, Martin, 4 | Semiamira, 43, 44, 55 White, John, 91

Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians (and Ninus), 19, 29, 30, Winter, Patrick M. de, II, t09n. 127

35, 62 Wolfthal, Diane, 39

Sempronia (and Equitius), 42, 67

Sempronia (musician), 19, 49, 52,75 Yolanda of Flanders, countess of Bar, 8

Seneca, 15, 41, 61, 92 Shahar, Shulamith, 31

Sibyls. See under specific names Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, 32, 34, 55, 56, 60, 63, 84, 89, 94 Sluis, 35

139

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