Quid Est Sacramentum?: Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700 [1 ed.] 9789004408944, 9789004408937

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Quid est sacramentum?

Intersections Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture

General Editor Karl A.E. Enenkel (Chair of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster e-mail: kenen_01@uni_muenster.de) Editorial Board W. van Anrooij (University of Leiden) W. de Boer (Miami University) Chr. Göttler (University of Bern) J.L. de Jong (University of Groningen) W.S. Melion (Emory University) R. Seidel (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) P.J. Smith (University of Leiden) J. Thompson (Queen’s University Belfast) A. Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin) C. Zittel (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice / University of Stuttgart) C. Zwierlein (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg)

volume 65/1 – 2020

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/inte

Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700

Edited by

Walter S. Melion Elizabeth Carson Pastan Lee Palmer Wandel

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustrations: The foreground image of the Christ Child holding the sudarium is Fig. 16.7 of David Areford’s chapter: Christ Child with the Veronica Veil, German, c. 1475. Coloured woodcut, 129 × 79 mm. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Res. EA-5-BTE (9) © Bibliothèque nationale de France; the background image is Fig. 1.5 of the “Introduction”: Theodoor Galle, Emblem 11: “Speculum aenigmaticum” (Enigmatic Mirror), from Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610), 8vo. By courtesy of The Newberry Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Melion, Walter S., editor. | Pastan, Elizabeth Carson, editor.  | Wandel, Lee Palmer, editor. Title: Quid est sacramentum? : visual representation of sacred mysteries in early  modern Europe, 1400–1700 / edited by Walter S. Melion, Elizabeth Carson Pastan,  Lee Palmer Wandel. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: Intersections : interdisciplinary  studies in early modern culture, 1568–1181 ; volume 65 | Includes bibliographical  references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019024728 (print) | LCCN 2019024729 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004408937 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004408944 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sacraments in art. | Christian art and symbolism—Europe. | Art and  society—Europe—History. Classification: LCC N7831 .Q53 2019 (print) | LCC N7831 (ebook) |  DDC 704.9/482—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024728 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024729 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1568-1181 isbn 978-90-04-40893-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-40894-4 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Illustrations x Notes on the Editors xxiv Notes on the Contributors xxvi 1 Quid est sacramentum?: Introduction 1 Walter S. Melion

part 1 Representing the Sacraments 2 Counterfeiting the Eucharist in Late Medieval Life and Art 57 Aden Kumler 3 Vestments in the Mass 82 Lee Palmer Wandel 4 ‘In the Flesh a Mirror of Spiritual Blessings’: Calvin’s Defence of the Lord’s Supper as a Visual Accommodation 105 AnnMarie M. Bridges 5 ‘Mystery’ or ‘Sacrament’: Ephesians 5:32, the Sacrament of Marriage in Early Modern Biblical Scholarship, and Nicolas Poussin’s Visual Exegesis 125 Wim François 6 Hoc Est Corpus Meum: Whole-Body Catacomb Saints and Eucharistic Doctrine in Baroque Bavaria 154 Noria K. Litaker 7 Staging Sacramental Consolation in Vienna 184 Robert L. Kendrick

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part 2 Sacramental Modes of Representation 8 Seeing beyond Signs: Allegorical Explanations of the Mass in Medieval Dutch Literature 199 Anna Dlabačová 9 Representing Architecture in the Altarpiece: Fictions, Strategies, and Mysteries 227 Elizabeth Carson Pastan 10 Orchestrating Polyphony at the Altar: Passion Altarpieces in Late Medieval France 261 Donna L. Sadler 11 God’s Design: Painting and Piety in the Vida of Estefanía de la Encarnación (ca. 1597–1665) 292 Tanya J. Tiffany 12 Amber, Blood, and the Holy Face of Jesus: the Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Bruges 320 Elliott D. Wise and Matthew Havili 13 Anchoring the Appearance of the Sacred: the Abbot of Choisy & His Translation of the Imitatio Christi (1692) 354 Lars Cyril Nørgaard 14 Spiritual and Material Conversions: Federico Barocci’s Christ and Mary Magdalene 394 Bronwen Wilson

part 3 Representing Divine Presence and the Mysteries of Faith 15 The Fine Art of Dying: Envisioning Death in the Somme le Roi Tradition 431 Alexa Sand 16 Christ Child Creator 456 David S. Areford

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17 Lady Scripture’s Sacred Commitments: Dialogic Understanding in Dutch Religious Literature of the Late Fifteenth Century 494 Geert Warnar 18 C  oemeterium Schola: the Emblematic Imagery of Death in Jan David, S.J.’s Veridicus Christianus 533 Walter S. Melion 19 The Limits of ‘Mute Theology’: Charles Le Brun’s Lecture on Nicolas Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul Revisited 580 James Clifton 20 A Private Mystery: Looking at Philippe de Champaigne’s Annunciation for the Hôtel de Chavigny 606 Mette Birkedal Bruun Index Nominum 657

Acknowledgements The Corinth Endowment, established by Kay Corinth in honour of her fatherin-law, the painter Lovis Corinth, made possible the colloquium at which the papers revised for this volume were first delivered. In 2016, her sister, Mary Sargent, generously increased this endowment in her sister’s memory. The annual colloquium provides an interdisciplinary forum for the study of early modern northern art. The editors are grateful to Claire Sterk, President of Emory University, Michael Elliott, Dean of Emory College, Carla Freeman, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty, Lisa Tedesco, Dean of the Laney Graduate School, and Sarah McPhee, Chair of Art History, for their continuing support of the Corinth Colloquia. Richard Manly (‘Bo’) Adams, Jr., Director of the Pitts Theology Library, and Sarah Bogue, Head of Research and Access Services, made their fine collections available to the participants, as also did Rosemary Magee, Director Emerita of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and Courtney Chartier, Head of Research Services. Kim Collins, Art History and Classics Librarian and Research Engagement Services Reader provided crucial bibliographic support. Christopher Sawula, Visual Resources Librarian, and Becky Baldwin, Visual Resources Assistant Librarian, offered invaluable technical assistance. Linnea Harwell, Art History Academic Degree Programs Coordinator in Graduate Studies oversaw the complicated process of booking plane tickets, securing hotel reservations, finding conference rooms, and orchestrating the banquets. It was also she who designed the beautiful colloquium poster. She was ably aided and abetted by Annie McEwen, Lovis Corinth Graduate Assistant. The editors owe Ms. Harwell and Ms. McEwen a debt of gratitude that can never be adequately repaid. In addition, Ms. McEwen served as an indefatigable editorial assistant. Without her helping hand, this volume would never have seen the light of day.

Illustrations 1.1

1.2

1.3

1.4

1.5

1.6

1.7

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2.2

Joannes Bourghesius, S.J., Vitae passionis et mortis Jesu Christi Domini nostri mysteria, piis meditationibus et adspirationibus expressa per Boëtium à Bolswert (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1622), title-page. By courtesy of The Newberry Library 9 Boëtius à Bolswert, “The Boy Jesus Prays before the Arma Christi”, from Joannes Bourghesius, S.J., Vitae passionis et mortis Jesu Christi Domini nostri mysteria, piis meditationibus et adspirationibus expressa per Boëtium à Bolswert (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1622), Fig. 10. By courtesy of The Newberry Library 10 Boëtius à Bolswert, “The Boy Jesus Prays before the Arma Christi”, from Joannes Bourghesius, S.J., Vitae passionis et mortis Jesu Christi Domini nostri mysteria, piis meditationibus et adspirationibus expressa per Boëtium à Bolswert (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1622), Fig. 52. By courtesy of The Newberry Library 11 Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610), title-page. By courtesy of The Newberry Library 13 Theodoor Galle, Emblem 11: “Speculum aenigmaticum” (Enigmatic Mirror), from Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610), 8vo. By courtesy of The Newberry Library 21 Theodoor Galle, Emblem 12: “Speculum visionis beatificae” (Mirror of Beatific Vision), from Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610), 8vo. By courtesy of The Newberry Library 22 Theodoor Galle, Emblem 10: “Speculum exemplar” (Mirror of Example), from Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610), 8vo. By courtesy of The Newberry Library 28 The Lehrbüchermeister, miniature prefacing Compline in the Office of the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Siebenhirter Hours: Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS A 225, f. 158v (shortly before 1469 CE). Photo courtesy the National Library of Sweden 60 Miniature introducing the Penitential Psalms in a Venetian Book of Hours: New York, Morgan Library, MS M.1089, f. 118v (c. 1430 CE). Purchased on the Fellows Fund, with special assistance of Mrs. Alexandre P. Rosenberg and Mr. Henry Glazier, in memory of William S. Glazier, 1993. Photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 75

Illustrations 3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4

5.1

5.2

5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

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Rogier van der Weyden, Altar of the Seven Sacraments (before 1450). Oil on wood, 200 cm × 223 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY 82 Chasuble, cloth of gold with cut-pile Italian velvet, about 1480–1500, split, brick and satin stitches, with couched and applied work, orphrey probably embroidered in Cologne, about 1480–1500. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession no. 8704-1863. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 99 Chasuble (1400–1430), silk cloth woven in Italy, embroidered orphrey probably made in England. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession no. T.256 to B-1967. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 100 Chasuble, woven silk velvet ground, with orphrey of linen embroidered with silver, silver-gilt and silks (metal threads couched; silks in split stitch; glass). Accession no. 1375-1864. London, Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 101 Guilielmus Estius, Absolutissima in omnes beati Pauli et septem catholicas apostolorum epistolas commentaria, ed. Jacob Merlo Horstius (Cologne: Peter Henning, 1631). KU Leuven Libraries, Maurits Sabbe Library (GBIB), 279.334.2 ESTI 1631 134 Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria In Omnes Divi Pauli Epistolas [...] (Antwerp: Haeredes Martinus Nutius, & Ioannes Meursius, 1614). KU Leuven Libraries, Maurits Sabbe Library (GBIB), LEUVEN MU TH cII 37 9 137 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage I, 1637–1640. His Grace the Duke of Rutland, Belvoir Castle, & Bridgeman Images 141 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, 1647–48. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 143 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, central part 144 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, left part 145 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, right part 147 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, three compartments 148 Last Supper Altar (1771). Pfarrkirche Sankt Jakob, Hahnbach. Image © Noria Litaker 155 Body of Saint Felix, Last Supper Altarpiece (1771). Pfarrkirche Sankt Jakob, Hahnbach. Image © Noria Litaker 156 Blood ampule of Saint Felix, Last Supper Altarpiece (1771). Pfarrkirche Sankt Jakob, Hahnbach. Image © Noria Litaker 157 Holy Blood cult statue (1511–1520), chalice and blood (1680). Sankt Salvator pilgrimage church, Ecksberg. Image © Nadja Pentzlin 160 Blood ampule of Saint Victor with sunburst (1754). Kalvarienbergkirche, Bad Tölz. Image © Noria Litaker 168

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6.6 Johann Michael Söckler, Devotional Image of Saint Honoratius, Vilsbiburg (18th c.). Engraving, 15 cm × 11.5 cm. Image © Museum Dingolfing, Inv. Nr. 2566 169 6.7 Johann Michael Söckler, blood vase detail from Devotional Image of Saint Honoratius, Vilsbiburg (18th c.). Engraving, 4 cm × 4.5 cm. Image © Museum Dingolfing, Inv. Nr. 2566 170 6.8 “Model Chalices”, engraved illustration to Jakob Müller, Kirchen-Geschmuck […] (Munich, Adam Berg: 1591) 125. Engraving, 13 cm × 12 cm. Image © Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library 171 6.9 Blood vase of Saint Faustinus (1751). Lorettokapelle, Erbendorf. Image © Noria Litaker 172 6.10 Blood vase of Saint Desiderius (1770). Pfarrkirche Sankt Emmeram, Kollbach. Image © Uta Ludwig 173 6.11 Blood vase of Saint Munditia (1675). Old Saint Peter’s Church, Munich. Image © Uta Ludwig 174 6.12 Michael Wening, “Saint Geminus”, engraved illustration to Bittrich Voll Deß Himmlischen Manna […] (Munich, Johann Lucas Straub: 1721) 188. Detail, central part of engraving, 10 cm × 5 cm. Image © St. Bonaventure Friedsam Memorial Library, Special Collections 175 6.13 Christian Jorhan, Altar-tabernacle with Saint Felix (1752). Felixkapelle, Kloster Gars. Image © Noria Litaker 177 6.14 Ignaz Günther, Altar-tabernacle of Saints Marinus and Anianus (1764–1775). Kloster Rott, Rott am Inn. Image © Bernd Klemmer 178 6.15 Holy Cross of Heiligenstatt (18th c.). Engraving, 6.5 × 10.5 cm. Image © Stadtarchiv München, (HVGS-A-10-04) 179 6.16 Holy Cross Altar with Saint Pius in the Taufkapelle (1740). Kloster Oberalteich, Oberalteich. Image © Noria Litaker 180 6.17 Holy Cross Altar with Saint Mauritius (1728). Pfarrkirche Sankt Laurentius, Königsdorf. Image © Noria Litaker 181 8.1 Anonymous Master, “The Priest’s Preparation for Mass and the Annunciation”, woodcut illustrations to Gerrit van der Goude, Boexken van der missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: 1506), 8o. Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 227 G 28, fols 43v–44r. Photo courtesy of Early European Books online/ ProQuest LCC, http:// eeb.chadwyck.com 214 8.2 Anonymous Master, “The Elevation of the Host and the Raising of the Cross”, woodcut illustration to Gerrit van der Goude, Boexken van der missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: 1506), 8o. Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 227 G 28, fols 62v–63r. Photo courtesy of Early European Books online/ ProQuest LCC, http:// eeb.chadwyck.com 215 8.3 Anonymous Master, “The Priest ‘Empties’ the Chalice, and the Resurrection”, woodcut illustrations to Gerrit van der Goude, Boexken van der missen (Gouda,

Illustrations

8.4

8.5

8.6

9.1

9.2

9.3 9.4

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Collaciebroeders: 1506), 8o. Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 227 G 28, fols 73v–74r. Photo courtesy of Early European Books online/ ProQuest LCC, http:// eeb.chadwyck.com 216 Anonymous Master(s), “The Priest Approaches the Altar, and the Nativity”, woodcut in Verclaringe vander missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: [c. 1510?]), 8o. Mettingen, Draiflessen Collection, Liberna, W 788 A II, fols 2v–3r. 218 Anonymous Master(s), “The Priest Makes the Sign of the Cross over the Chalice, and Crucifixion Scene”, woodcut in Verclaringe vander missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: [c. 1510?]), 8o. Mettingen, Draiflessen Collection, Liberna, W 788 A II, fols 20v–21r 219 Rogier van der Weyden, central panel of The Seven Sacraments (1440 and 1455). Oil on panel, 97 cm × 220 cm. Antwerpen, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Copyright: Lukas – Art in Flanders VZW, foto Hugo Maertens 220 Master of Mary of Burgundy, “Mary at her Devotions”, in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, fol. 19 verso (before 1482). Colors and ink on parchment, 19.1 × 13.3 cm. Vienna Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek MS 1857. Wikimedia Commons: unknown – prometheus.uni-koeln 228 Rogier van der Weyden, Seven Sacraments Altarpiece (ca. 1445–1450). Oil on panel, 200 × 223 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Wikimedia Commons: public domain 229 Jan van Eyck, Madonna in the Church (ca. 1425–1440). Oil on panel, 31 × 14 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Wikimedia Commons 239 Ground plan after the church in Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church, from Panofsky E., Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (New York: 1971) I 434. Courtesy of Harvard University Press 240 Master of 1499, Diptych of Abbot Christian de Hondt (ca. 1499). Oil on panel, each panel approximately 37.1 × 20.4 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Wikimedia Commons 245 Attributed to Jan Gossaert, Doria-Pamphilj Diptych (ca. 1510–13). Oil on panel, each panel approximately 40 × 22 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome. Detail of the right wing showing Saint Anthony with a donor. Wikimedia Commons: Web Gallery of Art 246 Jan van Eyck, The Annunciation (ca. 1428–1436). Oil transferred from panel to canvas, 93 × 37 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Wikimedia Commons 247 Interior view across the transepts and into the choir of the church of SaintQuentin of Tournai (c. 1200). Wikimedia Commons: PMRMaeyvaert 249 Rogier van der Weyden, Columba Triptych (ca. 1455). Oil on panel, 138 × 70 cm., 138 × 153 cm., 138 × 70 cm., respectively. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Wikimedia Commons: Web Gallery of Art 253

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9.10 Pieter Saenredam, Nave and west window of the Mariakerk, Utrecht (1638). Oil on panel, 62.5 × 93.5 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg, inv. No. 412. Courtesy of bpkBildagentur 255 9.11 Hans Memling, Triptych of the Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1470–1472), Oil on panel, 95 × 271 cm., Prado Museum, Madrid Po1557. Wikimedia Commons 256 9.12 After Hans Memling, Roundel with the Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1500). Uncolored glass, vitreous paint and silver stain, 21.9 cm. The Cloisters Collection, 1983.235. Public Domain Dedication 258 9.13 Hans Memling, The Diptych of Martin Nieuwenhove (1487). Oil on panel, each wing 52 × 41.5 cm. Old Saint John’s Hospital, Bruges. Wikimedia Commons: Web Gallery of Art 259 10.1 Rumilly-les-Vaudes, Church of Saint-Martin, Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded stone (ca. 1533) 262 10.2 Rumilly-les-Vaudes, Church of Saint-Martin, Crucifixion from Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded stone (ca. 1533) 263 10.3 Rumilly-les-Vaudes, Church of Saint-Martin, Resurrection from Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded stone (ca. 1533) 264 10.4 Master of Saint Gilles, Mass of Saint Gilles (ca. 1490–1500). Oil on panel, 62 × 46 cm. National Gallery, London. Image: Erich Lessing 266 10.5 Maître de Sainte-Gudule, Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded wood (ca. 1470). Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (Inv. PE 156). Image: Jean Tholance 269 10.6 Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities (ca. 1690). Oil on canvas, 99 × 137 cm. Museo dell’ Opificio della Pietre Dure, Florence. Image: Scala/Art Resource 270 10.7 Géraudot, Church of Saints Pierre and Paul, Passion retable. Polychromed stone (ca. 1540) 272 10.8 Géraudot, Church of Saints Pierre and Paul, Way to Calvary from Passion retable. Polychromed stone (ca. 1540) 273 10.9 Géraudot, Church of Saints Pierre and Paul, Crucifixion from Passion retable/ Polychromed stone (ca. 1540) 275 10.10 Géraudot, Church of Saints Pierre and Paul, Resurrection from Passion retable. Polychromed stone (ca. 1540) 276 10.11 Figure of Christ in the guise of a priest. Polychromed stone (16th century). Musée Valuivuisant, Troyes 280 10.12 Ricey-Bas, Church of Saints-Pierre-ès-Liens, Les Riceys, Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded wood (ca. 1520–1525) 283 10.13 Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded wood (16th century). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon (Inv. 2028), Image: François Jay 286 10.14 Passion retable from Champagne. Limestone (ca. 1522). Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, Image: Jean Tholance 287

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10.15 Bad Thief from Passion retable from Champagne. Limestone (ca. 1522). Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, Image: Jean Tholance 288 11.1 Francisco López, Ipsi fecit nos et non ipsi nos, illustration to Vicente Carducho, Dialogos de la pintvra: sv defensa, origen, esse[n]cia, definicion, modos y diferencias (Madrid, Francisco Martinez: 1633). Engraving, 20 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image in the Public Domain; available courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 293 11.2 Anonymous, frontispiece to Estefanía de la Encarnación, La vida de Soror Estefanía de la Encarnación, monja profesa en el monasterio de religiosas franciscas de nuestra madre Santa Clara en esta villa de Lerma, 1631, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS 7459. Pen and ink drawing, 21 × 16 cm. Image reproduced by courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España 297 12.1 Unknown Artist, Medallion with the Face of Christ (ca. 1380–1400). Baltic amber with traces of paint, 8.2 × 3.3 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection (inv. no. 2011.503). By courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. 323 12.1a Unknown Artist, Medallion with the Face of Christ (ca. 1380–1400). Baltic amber with traces of paint, 8.2 × 3.3 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection (inv. no. 2011.503). By courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. 324 12.2 Unknown Artist, Head of Christ (pax) (late 14th century). Amber, silver, gold and enamel, 14.3 × 12.4 cm. London, The Wallace Collection (inv. no. W19). Image © The Wallace Collection, London / Bridgeman Images 325 12.3 Unknown Artist, Head of Christ, (ca. 1380–1400). Baltic amber, silver-gilt, basse-taille enamel, 8.3 × 5.1 × 2.5 cm. Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum (inv. no. MA2478). Image © Bayerisches Nationalmuseum München 326 12.4 Unknown Artist, Trinity with Evangelist Symbols, (ca. 1380–1400). Baltic amber, silver-gilt, basse-taille enamel, 8.3 × 5.1 × 2.5 cm. Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. Back of Head of Christ pendant (inv. no. MA2478). Image © Bayerisches Nationalmuseum München 328 12.5 Unknown Artist, Pelican Brooch (ca. 1420–1450). Gold, ruby, and diamond, 2.95 × 35.8 × 13.3 cm. London, British Museum (inv. no. AF.2767). Image © Trustees of the British Museum, London 330 12.6 Rogier van der Weyden, Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435–1438). Oil on panel, 204.5 × 261.5 cm. Madrid, Museo del Prado (inv. no. P002825). Image © Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, NY. 331 12.7 Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion (ca. 1455). Oil on panel, 323.5 × 192 cm. San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Detail of Christ’s head (inv. no. 10014602). Image © Patrimonio Nacional 332

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12.8 Rogier van der Weyden, Triptych of the Seven Sacraments (ca. 1440–1445). Oil on oak panels, 204 × 99 cm (centre panel), 122.8 × 65.7 cm (side panels). Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Detail of Christ’s feet (inv. no. 393– 395). Image © KMSKA. Photo Hugo Maerten 332 12.9 North Netherlandish Master, Christ Bearing the Cross (ca. 1470). Oil on wood, 107.6 × 82.2 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. no. 43.95). By courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 345 12.9a North Netherlandish Master, Christ Bearing the Cross (ca. 1470). Oil on wood, 107.6 × 82.2 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Detail of the ensign of the Confraternity of the Holy Blood (inv. no. 43.95). By courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 346 12.10 Martin Schongauer, Christ Bearing the Cross, (ca. 1480). Engraving, 16.2 × 11.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. no. RP-POB-1009). By courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 348 13.1 Anonymous, “Louis XIV Attending Mass”, vignette to François-Timoléon de Choisy’s “Epître” in De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692). © BnF Ms. D-16457, Unpag 357 13.2 Mariette, “The Cross”, frontispiece to De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692). © BnF Ms. D-16459, Unpag 358 13.3 [Mariette], “Saint Arsenius Fleeing Court”, frontispiece to Book I, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692). © BnF Ms. D-16457, Unpag 359 13.4 Mariette, “Mme de Maintenon in the Church of Saint-Cyr”, frontispiece to Book II, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692). © BnF Ms. D-16457, p. 70v 361 13.5 Mariette, “Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha”, frontispiece to Book III, in De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692). © BnF Ms. D-16457 (between p. 110 and p. 111) 362 13.6 Mariette, “Saint Louis Receiving the Last Rites”, frontispiece to Book IV, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692). © BnF Ms. D-16457 (between p. 272 and p. 273) 365 13.7 Le Pautre, “The Church Room at Saint-Cyr”, Heures, prières et offices à l’usage et devotion particulièrement des demoiselles de la Maison Royale de saint Louis à Saint-Cyr (Paris, Jacques Collombat: 1714) © Lars Cyril Nørgaard 382 13.8 Jouvenet, L’Annonciation, painted for the chapel of Saint-Cyr (1687), oil on canvas, 309 × 204 cm. © Photo courtesy of Patrick Buti, Conservator, Musées de Vendée 384

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13.9 Jouvenet, L’Annonciation, painted for the chapel of Saint-Cyr (1687), Oil on canvas, 309 × 204 cm. Detail. © Photo courtesy of Patrick Buti, Conservator, Musées de Vendée 387 14.1 Federico Barocci, Christ and Mary Magdalene (1590). Oil on canvas, 259 × 185 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen. Image © bpk Bildagentur, Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Art Resource, NY 395 14.2 Federico Barocci, Christ and Mary Magdalene (ca. 1600–1610). Oil on canvas, 122 × 91 cm. Florence, Uffizi. Image © Scala, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali, Art Resource, NY 397 14.3 Luca Ciamberlano, after Barocci, Noli me tangere Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene as a Gardener after the Resurrection (1609). Engraving, 39.6 × 27.0 cm. Published by Francesco Villamena. Image © British Museum, London 399 14.4 Federico Barocci, The Calling of St. Andrew (1583). Oil on canvas, 321 × 240 cm. Brussels, Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts. Image © Peter Horree, Alamy Stock Photo 400 14.5 Federico Barocci, Figure study for Noli me tangere. Drawing (Inv.: KdZ 20388) Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen. Image © bpk Bildagentur, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Jörg P. Anders, Art Resource, NY 402 14.6 Titian, Noli me tangere (ca. 1514). Oil on canvas, 110.5 × 91.9 cm. London, National Gallery. Image © National Gallery, London, Art Resource, NY 407 14.7 Correggio (Antonio Allegri), Noli me tangere. Christ Appears to Mary Magdalen after His Resurrection and Asks Her Not to Touch Him. Oil on canvas, originally on panel, 130 × 103 cm. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Image © Madrid, Museo del Prado, Erich Lessing, Art Resource, NY 408 14.8 Federico Barocci, Christ and Mary Magdalene (ca. 1600–1610). Oil on canvas, 122 × 91 cm. Florence, Uffizi. Detail, centre of painting. Image © Scala, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali, Art Resource, NY 410 14.9 Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen as a Gardener (Noli me tangere) (1507). Oil on oak, 54.5 × 38.8 cm. Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Museumslandschaft Hessen (Inv. GK 29). Image © Scala, Art Resource, NY 413 14.10 Fra Angelico, Noli me tangere (ca. 1440–1445). Fresco. Florence, Museo di S. Marco. Image © Scala, Art Resource, NY 417 14.11 Andrea del Sarto, Noli me tangere (1510). Oil on panel, 176 × 155 cm. Florence, Uffizi. Image © Scala, Art Resource, NY 418 14.12 Andrea del Sarto, Noli me tangere, (1510). Oil on panel, 176 × 155 cm. Florence, Uffizi. Detail, lower right of painting. Image © Scala, Art Resource, NY 419 14.13 Federico Barocci, Christ and Mary Magdalene (ca. 1600–1610). Oil on canvas, 122 × 91 cm. Florence, Uffizi. Detail, right side of painting. Image © Scala, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali, Art Resource, NY 420

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14.14 Terracotta Floor Tile, San Vincenzo al Volturno (ca. 800). Image © John Mitchell 421 14.15 Andrea Solario, Crucifixion, 1503. Oil on panel, 110 × 80.5 cm. Paris, Louvre. Image © Erich Lessing, Art Resource, NY 422 14.16 Andrea Solario, Crucifixion, 1503. Oil on panel, 110 × 80.5 cm. Paris, Louvre. Detail, upper right of painting. Image © Erich Lessing, Art Resource, NY 423 15.1 “Last Judgment”, from La Somme le Roi, Paris (1295). Manuscript illumination, 194 × 133 mm. Paris, Bibl. Mazarine, Ms. 870, fol. 44 verso. © Bibliothèque Mazarine 436 15.2 “Last Judgment”, from La Somme le roi, Picardy (1311). Manuscript illumination, 215 × 150 mm. Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal, Ms. 6329, fol. 54 verso. © BnF 438 15.3 Incipit, “Eloge de la vertu”, from La Somme le roi, Picardy (1311). Manuscript illumination, 215 × 150 mm. Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal, Ms. 6329, fol. 55 recto. © BnF 440 15.4 “Last Rites”, initial to chapter fifteen, Hugh of Saint-Victor, “De Sacrementis”, from Hugh of Saint-Victor, Opera, central France, possibly Vendôme (1140–1150). Manuscript illumination, 75x91 mm. Paris, Bibl. Mazarine, Ms. 729, fol. 180 recto or verso? © Bibliothèque Mazarine 442 15.5 “Extreme Unction”, initial for the office of the unction of the sick, Sens Pontifical, Paris (ca. 1350–1375). Manuscript illumination, 85x81 mm. Arras, Bibl. Mun., Ms. 986, fol. 109 recto. © Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes – CNRS 442 15.6 “The Temptation of Impatience”, title-page, The boke named the royall, trans. William Caxton (Fleet Street, London, Wynkyn de Worde – Richard Pynson: 1507). Woodcut, 102.5 × 102 mm. Photo by author, taken by permission of the Folger Library, Washington, D.C. 447 15.7 “The Good Death”, frontispiece to the “Eloge de la vertu”, in The boke named the royall (Fleet Street, London, Wynkyn de Worde – Richard Pynson: 1507). Woodcut, 100 × 100 mm. Photo by author, taken by permission of the Folger Library, Washington, D.C. 449 15.8 Frontispiece to The boke named the royall (Fleet Street, London, Wynkyn de Worde – Richard Pynson: 1507), with “Christ Teaching” (above), and “The Five Commandments of the Church” (below). Woodcut, 70 × 100 mm (above), 68 × 100 mm (below). Photo by author, taken by permission of the Folger Library, Washington, D.C. 451 16.1 The Virgin Nursing the Christ Child, German, c. 1450–1460. Colored woodcut, 203 × 140 mm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv.149–1. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY 457

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16.2 Mother of Sorrows with Christ Child, German, c. 1470. Colored woodcut, 383 × 264 mm. London, British Museum, 1872,0608.323. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY 459 16.3 Virgin Mary with Writing Christ Child, German, c. 1405. Sandstone sculpture, 110 × 52 cm. Mainz, Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum. Photo: Foto Marburg / Art Resource, NY 461 16.4 Christ Child with the Arma Christi, German, c. 1460. Colored woodcut, 191 × 133 mm. Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 118288. © Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München 463 16.5 Sleeping Christ Child, Italian, c. 1500. Colored woodcut, 89 × 138 mm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 890–301. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Art Resource, NY 464 16.6 Virgin and the Bleeding Christ Child, French, c. 1490–1500. Colored woodcut, 300 × 190 mm (trimmed). Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 117–1908. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Volker-H. Schneider / Art Resource, NY 466 16.7 Christ Child with the Veronica Veil, German, c. 1475. Colored woodcut, 129 × 79 mm. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Res. EA-5-BTE (9). © Bibliothèque nationale de France 468 16.8 Saint Veronica, German, c. 1440–1450. Colored woodcut, 290 × 184 mm. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Res. EA-5 (8) B.143. © Bibliothèque nationale de France 470 16.9 Virgin Mary in Ährenkleid, German, c. 1490. Colored woodcut, 134 × 89 mm. Weimar, Kunstsammlungen, Inv. DK112/87. Photo: Klassik Stiftung Weimar / Museums 471 16.10 The Nativity, German, c. 1450–1460. Colored woodcut, 260 × 375 mm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Rothschild Collection, 27LR recto. © RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Fuzeau / Art Resource, NY 473 16.11 Virgin and Child, Austrian school, c. 1410. Tempera on wood, 47 × 29 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF2047. © RMN-Grand Palais / Gérard Blot / Art Resource, NY 476 16.12 Master Bertram, Annunciation of the Passion, c. 1400–1410. Tempera on wood, right wing of Buxtehude Altarpiece. Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle. Photo: WikiCommons 479 16.13 Peter de Wale (?), Christ Child in the Sacred Heart, Netherlandish, c. 1480–1500. Colored woodcut, 250 × 167 mm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 670–2. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Volker-H. Schneider / Art Resource, NY 481 16.14 Christ Child in the Sacred Heart, German, 1472. Colored woodcut, 193 × 126 mm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 128–1. Photo: bpk

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Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY 482 16.15 Christ Child with the Orb of the World, German, c. 1490. Colored woodcut, 103 × 82 mm. Basel, Kunstmuseum, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. X.1867. Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler 484 16.16 Christ Child with Chalice, German, c. 1460. Colored woodcut, 275 × 190 mm. Basel, Kunstmuseum, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. 1930.148. Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel 485 16.17 Caspar (?), Christ in the Wine Press, south German, c. 1460–1470. Colored woodcut, image 384 × 242 mm, sheet 388 × 257 mm. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Rar. 327–1/4#1, front inner cover. Photo: Bayerische Staats­ bibliothek München 488 16.18 Hanns Schlaffer (?), The Holy Face on a Cloth (Veronica Veil), German (Ulm?), c. 1475–1500. Colored woodcut, image 257 × 194 mm, sheet 281 × 206 mm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1941, 41.47. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Image source: Art Resource, NY 491 17.1 Vanden seven sacramenten (Gouda, Leeu: 1484). Penance. On the right side of the woodcut the recurring image of two persons in dialogue (The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 30, fol.1r) 496 17.2 Tboeck vanden leven ons heren (Woodcut from the edition Gouda, Leeu: 1487 in a copy with only the woodcuts). Lady Scripture and Man (The Hague, Royal Library, 171 D 29, unfoliated) 502 17.3 Tboeck vanden leven ons heren (Delft, Snellaert: 1488). Lady Scripture and Man (The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 8, fol. A3v) 503 17.4 Tboeck vanden leven ons heren (Delft, Snellaert: 1488). Creation of Adam and Eve (The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 8, fol. A5v) 515 17.5 Tboeck vanden leven ons heren (Delft, Snellaert: 1488). Adam and Eve in paradise (The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 8, fol. B1v) 517 17.6 Opening Die spieghel des ewigen levens (The Hague, Royal Library, 169 G 52, fol. A2r) 521 17.7 Dieryck Volckertsz. Coornherts Wercken Vol. I (Amsterdam, Colom: 1630). Van wel bidden onderwijs (Amsterdam, University Library, Cat. Ned. Lett. UBA 195, fol. 199v) 527 18.1 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Title-Page to Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 534 18.2 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 81, “Coemeterii lectio; mundi despectio” (“The lesson of the cemetery is contempt for the world”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 540

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18.3 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 82, “Optima philosophia, mortis meditatio” (“The most excellent philosophy, to meditate death”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 541 18.4 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 83, “Praestantissimum hominis pignus, anima” (“Man’s most excellent gage, the soul”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 555 18.5 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 85, “Statutum est hominibus, semel mori. Hebr. 9” (“For men one thing is ordained, but once to die. Hebr. 9”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 556 18.6 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 88, “Mortem timet, quem terret conscientia” (“He whom conscience dismays, fears death”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 557 18.7 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 89, “Optat mori, cui mens est conscia recti” (“He whose heart knows righteousness, desires to die”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 560 18.8 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 90, “Qui in statu gratiae moritur, caelo asseritur” (“He who dies in a state of grace, is claimed by heaven”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 566 18.9 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 92, “Tria sunt asperrima verba” (“Three words are most bitter”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 567 18.10 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 93, “Quo plus acceperis, hoc maior reddenda ratio” (“The more you shall receive, the more you must render account”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 569 18.11 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 98, “Ne tardes converti ad Dominum” (“Lest you delay to turn toward the Lord”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 572 18.12 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 99, “Memorare novissima: nec peccabis” (“Remember the four last things: you shall not sin”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 574

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18.13 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 100, “Quatuor hominis novissima” (“Humanity’s four last things”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library 575 19.1 Nicolas Poussin, Ecstasy of Saint Paul, 1649–1650. Oil on canvas, 148 × 120 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 7288. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY 581 19.2 Nicolas Poussin, Ecstasy of Saint Paul, 1643. Oil on wood, 41.6 × 30.2 cm. Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, SN690 583 19.3 Domenichino, Ecstasy of Saint Paul, ca. 1606–1608. Oil on copper, 50 × 38 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 792. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY 585 19.4 Raphael, Vision of Ezekiel, 1518. Oil on wood, 40 × 30 cm. Galleria Palatina, Florence. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY 586 19.5 Gérard Audran after Charles Le Brun, Triumph of the New Testament over the Old Testament (Cupola of the Château de Sceaux), 1681. Etching and engraving, five plates, 56.8 × 84.4 cm total. Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ, GA 2012.01256-01260 592 19.6 Gérard Edelinck after Charles Le Brun, Qu’il s’elevoit en s’abaissant ainsy (Saint Louis in Prayer). Engraving, 55.1 × 40.9 cm. British Museum, London, 1917,1208.1334. © Trustees of the British Museum 594 19.7 Charles Le Brun, Crucifixion with Angels (ca. 1660, retouched 1686). Oil on canvas, 174 × 128 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 2886. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY 595 19.8 Charles Le Brun, Christ in the Desert, ca. 1653. Oil on canvas, 390 × 254 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 2882. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY 596 19.9 Charles Le Brun, The Sleep of the Infant Jesus (The Silence) (1655). Oil on canvas, 87 × 118 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 2880. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY 601 20.1 Robert Nanteuil, Léon Bouthillier, comte de Chavigny, ca. 1651. Engraving (Petitjean & Wickert), sheet: 31.6 × 24.8 cm. New York, the Metropolitan Museum, gift of Georgiana W. Sargent, in memory of John Osborne Sargent, 1924 608 20.2 Philippe de Champaigne, L’Annunciation, ca. 1639. Oil on wood, 260 × 210 cm. Notre-Dame-du-Port de Clermont-Ferrand. Photograph by Quentineo (2018). Wikimedia: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Annonciation_de_Philippe_ de_Champaigne.jpg (CC BY-SA 4.0 international license) 629 20.3 Philippe de Champaigne, L’Annunciation, ca. 1648. Oil on canvas, 334 × 214.5 cm. © The Wallace Collection, London 630

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20.4 Philippe de Champaigne, L’Annunciation, ca. 1643. Oil on canvas, 215 × 170 cm. The church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Montrésor. Photograph by Alain Crozemarie (2015). Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Annonciation-JC.jpg (CC BY-SA 4.0 international license) 631

Notes on the Editors Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has taught since 2004 and currently directs the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. He chaired the Art History Department in 2011–2014 and 2015–2017. He was previously Professor and Chair of Art History at The Johns Hopkins University. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artist Hendrick Goltzius. In addition to monographs on Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (2003–2007), and exhibition catalogues on scriptural illustration and on religious allegory in Dutch and Flemish prints of the 16th and 17th centuries (2009 & 2019), his books include Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s ‘Schilder-Boeck’ (1991) and The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625 (2009). He is co-editor of Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2008), Early Modern Eyes (2010), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self: Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture (2010), The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400– 1700 (2011), Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700 (2012), Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700 (2014), The Anthropomorphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism, and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts (2014), Image and Incarnation (2015), Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion (2016), Jesuit Image Theory (2016), Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1400–1700, and Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700. His articles number more than fifty. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. Between 2014 and 2015, he was Chaire Francqui at the Université Catholique de Louvain and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Melion has been the recipient of the 2016 Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Catholic Historical Association, and the 2019 Baker Award of the Michael C. Carlos Museum, and has been Scholar in Residence at The Newberry Library since 2017. He is series editor of Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History. Two books in progress are approaching completion: Imago veridica: The Form, Function, and Argument of Johannes David, S.J.’s Four Latin Emblem Books and Cubiculum cordis: Printed Images as Meditative Schemata in Customized Dutch and Flemish Manuscript Prayerbooks, 1550–1650. Melion recently became President of the Sixteenth Century Society.

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Elizabeth Carson Pastan is Professor of Art History at Emory University and President of the American Committee of the Corpus Vitrearum, the body of scholars devoted to the study of medieval stained glass. She is the author of Les vitraux du choeur de la cathédrale de Troyes (XIIIe siècle) (2006); The Bayeux Tapestry and its Contexts: A Reassessment (2014); and a co-editor of The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Art in honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness (2009). She has written numerous articles. She is currently editing an anthology on medieval stained glass, Investigations in Medieval Stained Glass: Medium, Methods, Expressions, with Dr. Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz of Switzerland, for Brill Publication’s Reading Medieval Sources series. Lee Palmer Wandel is WARF Michael Baxandall and Linda and Stanley Sher Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (1990, 2001, 2003); Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (1995, 1999); The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (2006); The Reformation: Towards a New History (2011), and Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion (2016). With Walter Melion, she has co-edited Early Modern Eyes and Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, both in the Brill series, Intersections. Currently she is working on a book, tentatively titled The Matter of the Liturgy, exploring the changing understanding of matter and its relationship to worship.

Notes on the Contributors David S. Areford is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of The Art of Empathy: The Mother of Sorrows in Northern Renaissance Art and Devotion (2013) and The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (2010). He is coauthor of Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public (2005); and coeditor of Excavating the Medieval Image: Manuscripts, Artists, Audiences (2004). He has published articles in Studies in Iconography and chapters in From Minor to Major: The Minor Arts in Medieval Art History (2012), The Woodcut in FifteenthCentury Europe (2009), and The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture (1998). His current book project is Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints. Mette Birkedal Bruun is Professor of Church History at the University of Copenhagen and Director of The Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (2017– 2023). She was PI of the collective research project SOLITUDES: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long Seventeenth Century (2013–2017) (ERC). Her research interests include early modern devotion, the monastic movement, representations of the history and topography of salvation. She is the author of The Unfamil­iar Familiar: Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) between Withdrawal and Engagement (Copenhagen: 2017) and Parables: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Mapping of Spiritual Topography (Leiden – Boston: 2007). She has edited, among other volumes, The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order (Cambridge: 2013), Commonplace Culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period I (with David Cowling) (Leuven: 2011), and Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages (with Stephanie Glaser) (Turnhout: 2008). AnnMarie M. Bridges is a doctoral candidate in the Study of Religion at Harvard University. She holds an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School and a B.A. from The University of Chicago. She specializes in Christian theological writings from late antiquity to early modernity. Her dissertation explores the intertwined roles of visual perception and reading in John Calvin’s 1559 Institutio christianae religionis against the backdrop of early modern European visual culture. In addition to her work in visual culture, her research interests include idolatry and iconoclasm, the history of the book and reading, and the role of language, imagination, and temporality in theological writing.

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James Clifton is Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and Curator in Renaissance and Baroque Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He has published essays on European art and culture from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. His curated and co-curated exhibitions include The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain, 1150–1800 (1997); A Portrait of the Artist, 1525–1825: Prints from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation (2005); The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500–1825, from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation (2009); Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century (2009); Elegance and Refinement: The Still-Life Paintings of Willem van Aelst (2012); and Pleasure and Piety: The Art of Joachim Wtewael (2015). He is co-editor of Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700 (2014) and A Golden Age of European Art: Celebrating Fifty Years of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation (2016). Anna Dlabačová is postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. Her research focuses on the role of vernacular texts and (illustrated) books in late medieval religious culture of the Low Countries. Previous publications include Literatuur en observantie. De Spieghel der volcomenheit van Hendrik Herp en de dynamiek van laatmiddeleeuwse tekstverspreiding (2014); the volumes Mobility of Ideas and Transmission of Texts. Religion, Learning, and Literature in the Rhineland and the Low Countries (ca. 1300–1550) (2015); and Piety in Practice and Print. Essays on the Late Medieval Religious Landscape (2016). Wim François is Research Professor of the Special Research Fund of the KU Leuven (Belgium) and a member of the Research Unit of History of Church and Theology. His field of research is the history of Church and theology in the Early Modern Era (1450−1650), the Council of Trent, and Tridentine Catholicism. He has published extensively on the place of vernacular Bible reading in the life of the faithful, and is currently working on Bible commentaries edited by the Louvain and Douai theologians during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Catholic biblical scholarship (1550−1650). Other research interests relate to the Bible and the visual arts, rhetoricians’ plays in the Low Countries, and other areas of early modern ‘biblical culture’. Matthew Havili graduated in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Brigham Young University and is currently a student at the J. Reuben Clark Law School. His primary

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research interests are in Roman and late medieval amber and the paintings of Anthony van Dyck. Robert L. Kendrick teaches music history and ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, working in early modern sacred repertories. His most recent book is Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week (2014). Aden Kumler is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England (2011). Her research interests center on how the material conditions of life, including artistic and artisanal works and practices, shape possibilities for thought, imagination, and action. Noria Litaker is an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A cultural historian, she specializes in early modern religious history and material culture with a focus on German-speaking lands. Litaker graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 and is currently revising her dissertation, Embodied Faith: Whole-Body Catacomb Saints in the Duchy of Bavaria, 1598–1803, for publication as a monograph. Lars Cyril Nørgaard is a church historian and currently holds a research grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark. He is affiliated to the Centre de Research du Château de Versailles and to the Centre for Privacy Studies, housed at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on spiritual direction in the early modern period and, specifically, on the direction of Louis XIV’s second wife, Madame de Maintenon. In broader terms, this research involves themes such as the tension between religious seclusion and societal engagement, the relationship between text and image, the ambiguous nature of pre-modern privacy and the complexities of representing sacred rulership in the late 17th century and first half of the 18th century. Donna L. Sadler received her BA from Boston University and her MA and PhD from Indiana University. She has spent most of her career teaching at Agnes Scott College and her research focuses on medieval sculpture ranging from Reims Cathedral

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to the art commissioned by Philip the Bold to late medieval sculptures of the Entombment of Christ, and most recently, carved retables. Her publications focus on issues of royal and ecclesiastical patronage, performative piety, dogs in tomb sculpture, ritual, and audience reception. Her books include Reading the Reverse Façade of Reims Cathedral: Royalty and Ritual in 13th-century France (Ashgate, 2012/ Routledge, 2018); Stone, Flesh, Spirit: The Entombment of Christ in late medieval Burgundy and Champagne (Brill, 2015); and Touching Heaven – Seeing the Late Medieval Altarpiece through the Eyes of Faith (Brill, 2018). Alexa Sand is Professor of Art History at Utah State University. Her research centers on the intersections of manuscript culture, gender, vernacular texts, and religiosity in late-medieval francophone Europe. Her book, Vision, Devotion, and SelfRepresentation in Late Medieval Art was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. Her work has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Gesta, Word & Image, Yale French Studies, Different Visions, and numerous volumes of collected essays. She is currently completing a book on the pictorial tradition of La Somme le Roi, material upon which she draws for her essay here. Tanya J. Tiffany is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her first book, Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville (2012), received an honourable mention for the Eleanor Tufts Book Award, which recognises outstanding Englishlanguage publications in Spanish and Portuguese art history. More recently, she co-edited (with Giles Knox) a collection of essays, Velázquez Re-Examined: Theory, History, Poetry, and Theatre (2017). Her current research focuses on the intersection between feminine devotion and visual culture in the early modern Spanish world. Geert Warnar (PhD 1995) is a senior lecturer (and former director of studies) of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. His published work mainly focuses on medieval Dutch literature in its religious, intellectual and international contexts. He led and coordinated research projects on ‘medieval Dutch literature and learning’ and on the ‘mobility of ideas and transmission of texts in the late medieval Low Countries and the Rhineland’. He is now conducting a research project on the ‘effectiveness of dialogue in forms of communication, past and present’.

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Bronwen Wilson teaches early modern art history at UCLA. She has published on print, cartography, costume, portraiture, and co-edited several volumes. She writes on the history of Venetian art, the subject of her book The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity, and she has published articles on European images of Ottoman Turks and Turkish costume. A recently-completed book, The Face of Uncertainty, turns to increasing doubt about the trustworthiness of the human face in Northern Italy. A third book, Inscription and the Horizon in Early Modern Mediterranean Travel Imagery, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. She is also co-editor of a book series, Early Modern Conversions: Religions, Cultures, and Transformations in Early Modern Europe and its Worlds. Elliott D. Wise is Assistant professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies at Brigham Young University. His research and publications focus on the devotional function of late medieval and early modern art. In particular, he is interested in art and liturgy, representations of the Eucharistic Christ and the Virgin Mary, and the visual culture of the great mendicant and monastic orders. He received a Ph.D. in Art History from Emory University, having spent a semester at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and a year in New York City as a fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

chapter 1

Quid est sacramentum?: Introduction Walter S. Melion 1

Exordium: How to Represent a Mystery1

This volume examines the implications of the question, ‘Quid est sacramentum’? – ‘What is a sacred mystery’? – for the visual arts. The essays, which were revised for the current publication, were first delivered as papers at Lovis Corinth Colloquium VII, the first of a pair of colloquia, convened at Emory University, on representational problems specific or, better, peculiar to the portrayal of mysteria (mysteries of the faith). Whereas this collection commemorates colloquium one, its companion volume, named after colloquium two, ‘Quid est secretum? Visual Representation of Mystery and Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700’, concerns the portrayal of secret knowledge, and its attendant complexities, along a spectrum of pictorial subjects extending from the sacred to the secular. Quid est sacramentum? asks how sacred mysteries (in Latin, sacramenta or mysteria) were represented in various visual media, including painting, sculpture, and architecture, and also on paper and parchment, in a wide range of illustrated religious literature, including catechisms, prayerbooks, meditative treatises, and emblem books, produced in France, Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries between ca. 1400 and ca. 1700. Put briefly, the essays inquire how and why the mysteries of faith and, in particular, sacramental mysteries were construed as amenable to processes of visual representation and figuration, and why the resultant images were thought capable of engaging mortal eyes, minds, and hearts, and affecting and reforming them. Mysteries by their very nature appeal fundamentally to the spirit, even while engaging sense and/or reason: this is because, almost by definition, they operate beyond the limits of the human faculties; and yet, the visual arts were seen in many traditions as legitimate vehicles for the dissemination of these mysteries and for prompting reflection upon them.2 How, then, does one visually 1  Part 3 of the Introduction, “Essays”, was co-authored by Walter Melion, Elizabeth Pastan, and Lee Palmer Wandel. 2  On the Thomist distinction between preambles and mysteries of faith, the former pertaining to facts about God, such as his existence and perfection, that can be proved by reason alone, the latter to facts about God – his triunity, for example – that must be believed on the basis of spiritual revelation, see Oppy G. – Trakakis N. N. (eds.), Medieval Philosophy of Religion, The

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_002

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represent a sacred mystery? How does one evoke the mysterious nature of the divine truths to be communicated, at the same time acknowledging that such truths can be intuited and partially discerned, wholeheartedly believed and embraced, but never fully known or grasped?3 The Latin term sacramentum (mystery, gospel revelation) appertains to Godgiven truths that transcend mere human intelligence.4 The primary source of such truths is scriptural, and as such, they may be approached exegetically, but only partially: conveyed by the Spirit, these sacramenta, to the extent they can be known, are discerned by faith and revealed rather than fully cognised. The same term, in an allied meaning, also refers to sacraments such as Baptism, Penance, and the Eucharist; in this sense, it denotes the sacred rites by which the faithful are made party to the mystery of salvation, efficent grace is vouchsafed, and the conferral of grace represented to spiritual eyes. The complementary term mysterium (divine mystery) was sometimes specifically applied to the celebration of the Eucharist, but more generally, it too signifies a divine History of Western Philosophy of Religion 2 (London – New York: 2009) 74. This distinction is roughly equivalent to that between knowledge based in demonstrative effort and knowledge based in revelation, on which see Summa Theologiae 1a.1.1 and Summa contra gentiles 1.5.3. On Thomas’s conviction that even the most sublime mysteries can be partially discerned by means of analogy with the things of this world, i.e., by way of images, see Flanagan V., O.P., “Faith and Reason in the Theology of St. Thomas”, Dominicana 15.1 (1930) 12–18, esp. 17. 3  Some of the issues raised here are addressed more broadly in Emison P., “Whittling Down the Istoria”, in Nagel A. – Pericolo L. (eds.), Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Farnham: 2010; reprint ed., Milton Park – New York: 2016) 71–86. Emison discusses the representation of the undecodable, identifying it as a crucial element of some narrative istorie. On the capacity of certain sacred images to represent how visionary experience reaches toward the limits of what is discernible, see Marie San Juan R., “Dizzying Visions: St. Teresa of Jesus and the Embodied Visual Image”, in Göttler C. – Neuber W. (eds.), Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture, Intersections 9 (Leiden – Boston: 2008) 245–267. On painting at the threshold between indexicality and figurability, see Pereda F., “The Veronica according to Zurbarán: Painting as Figura and Image as Vestigio”, in Dupré S. – Göttler C., Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, Visual Culture iin Early Modernity 60 (London – New York: 2017) 125–162. On the relation between material image and ineffable source, facsimile and archetype, as a representational problem in imagery of the Holy Face, see Kessler H., “Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face”, in idem, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: 2000) 64–87, 219–224. 4  On the term sacramentum, see Foster T. B., “‘Mysterium’ and ‘Sacramentum’ in the Vulgate and Old Latin Versions”, The American Journal of Theology 19 (1915) 402–415; and Ghellinck J. de – Backer E. de – Poukens J. – Lebacqz G., Pour l’histoire du mot “Sacramentum”. I. Les anténicéens, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 3 (Louvain – Paris: 1924). Also see the etymologies in Blaise A., Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs du moyen-age, Corpus Christianorum – Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout: 1975) 810–811; and Niermeyer J. E. – Kieft C. van de, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus – Lexique latin médiéval – Medieval Latin Dictionary – Mittellateinsiches Wörterbuch, ed. J. W. J. Burgers, 2 vols. (Leiden – Boston: 2002) II 1210.

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truth revealed by the Spirit and ultimately discernible by faith.5 Within the meditative tradition, codified in such treatises as the Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes vitae Christi and Ludolphus of Saxony’s Vita Christi, and later adapted by Ignatius of Loyola in the Exercitia spiritualia, the appellation mysteria further designates the chief biblical episodes from the life of Christ – mysteria vitae Christi – each of which is comprised by one of the greater mysteries of salvation – the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection. The Nativity, to cite one example, betokens the mystery of the Incarnation, just as the Carrying of the Cross is expressive of the Passion. Underlying this usage of sacramentum and mysterium is Augustine’s famous reading of mystery as image in De catechizandis rudibus (On Catechizing the Uninstructed): Under the sacramental sign of the flood, however, in which the righteous were rescued by the wood, there was also a fore-announcement of the Church which was to be, which Christ, its King and God, has raised on high; by the mystery of His cross, in safety from the submersion of this world.6 Noah’s ark, on this account, is a proleptic image of the Church; the flood a sacramental image of the world. The tertium comparationis is the wood of the ark/cross, and implicit in this analogy are the further comparisons of the saving body of Christ to the saving vessel of the ark, and of the floating of the ark upon the high waters to the raising of the cross on high. Visual analogy is a way of representing the salvific mystery of the cross, which exceeds the bounds of representability, but can be evoked by reference to things from the past – ark and flood – and to a bipartite event, the submersion of the world and elevation of the ark, that predicts the crucifixion. The mystery of the cross licenses this exegetical reading of the flood and the ark, even as the flood and ark allow us to visualise this mystery, not directly but indirectly, by means of sacramental signs that represent the otherwise invisible operations of the grace of Christ. Augustine puts this succinctly: the sacrament of the flood prefigures in an 5  Blaise, Dictionnaire latin-français 609–610; and Niermeyer – Kieft, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus 908. 6  Salmond S. D. F. (trans.) – Schaff P. (ed.), St. Augustine: On the Catechising of the Uninstructed, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church 3 (New York: 1905) 303. Cf. Augustine of Hippo, S. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis Episcopi liber De catechizandis rudibus, ed. W. Yorke Fausset (London: 1896; reprint ed., 1913): ‘Praenuntiabatur tamen etiam diluvii sacramento, quo per lignum justi liberati sunt, futura Ecclesia quam Rex ejus et Deus Christus mysterio suae crucis ab hujus saeculi submersione suspendit’.

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evocative image (‘praenuntiabatur […] diluvii sacramento’) the mystery of the cross, by which Christ saves the Church from drowning, causing it to be suspended above the diluvial world (‘quam […] Christus mysterio suae crucis ab ejus saeculi submersione suspendit’). Put another way, the sacramental image adumbrates the mystery by which it is symbolically comprised, but which it cannot fully describe. This is to say that the image implicitly alludes to the limits of representation. Even precisely worded conciliar statements, such as the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, would seem cognizant of the complex representational issues that sacramenta and mysteria present. Take the well-known “Decree on the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist”, which calls the sacrament a visible symbol of the unity and love of the Church conjoined in Christ as his mystical body (‘in ecclesia sua tanquam symbolum reliquit eius unitatis et charitatis’), but also states that the substantive presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine – which having become the Lord, true God and true man, are now the mere semblance of bread and wine – can be cognised by faith but is in all other respects inexpressible.7 In the first place, the holy council teaches and openly and without qualification professes that, after the consecration of the bread and the wine, our lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is truly, really and substantially contained in the propitious sacrament of the holy eucharist under the appearance of those things which are perceptible to the senses. Nor are the two assertions incompatible, that our Saviour is ever seated in heaven at the right hand of the Father in his natural mode of existing, and that he is nevertheless sacramentally present to us by his substance in many other places in a mode of existing which, though we can hardly express it in words, we can grasp with minds enlightened by faith as possible to God and must most firmly believe.8 7  On the Tridentine theology of the Eucharist and its theological antecedents, see Daly R. J., S.J., “The Council of Trent”, in Wandel L. P. (ed.), A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (Leiden – Boston: 2014) 159–179. On the aggregative nature of the Tridentine canons and decrees, and on the notion of orthodoxy they forged, see Wandel L. P., The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge – New York et al.: 2006) 208–241. 8  Tanner N.P., S.J. (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Volume Two, Trent to Vatican II (Washington, D.C.: 1990) 694: ‘Principio docet sancta synodus et aperte ac simpliciter profitetur in almo sanctae eucharistiae sacramento post panis et vini consecrationem dominum nostrum Iesum Christum, verum Deum atque hominem, vere, realiter ac substantialiter sub specie illarum rerum sensibilium contineri. Neque enim haec inter se pugnant, ut ipse Salvator noster semper ad dexteram Patris in coelis assideat iuxta modum existendi naturalem, et ut multis nihilominus aliis in locis sacramentaliter

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Even as the sacrament, in the register of liturgical enactment, signifies the oneness of the Church in Christ, it functions in another register that is at once representational and anti-representational: by evacuating bread and wine of their material substance, converting them purely into images (‘sub panis et vini specie’), the sacrament alludes to an absence – that of the represented objects, namely, the bread and wine per se; and this absence, signalled by the status of the images qua images, i.e., of the bread and wine transformed into the mere species panis et vini, alludes conversely to the sacramental presence of Christ, untranslatable into any representational image, knowable yet not discernible by sense, whose substance fully inhabits what merely looks like bread and wine.9 This is to say that the mimetic images of bread and wine, though they signify the Lord’s presence, cannot mimetically represent him: mimesis, in a curious paradox, calls attention to that which cannot be circumscribed mimetically. Put another way, in the form of a pseudo-chiasmus, the condition of representation, shorn of material substance, is made to signify the substance of Christ, unsusceptible of representation. This sacramental paradox speaks to the representational complexities that attach to the task of visualizing and cognizing sacramenta and mysteria. Chapter 3 of the decree on the Eucharist insists on its representational status: the sacrament is both a visible sign (‘symbolum’) and an image (‘forma’). However, its modus operandi is translative rather than mimetic, for the visible sign symbolises rather than describes a sacred reality (‘rei sacrae’), and the image gives visual form to the invisible action of grace (‘invisibilis gratiae formam’). Once again, these are intricate manoeuvres difficult or wellnigh impossible to parse, and yet presented as incontrovertibly evident. The language of the decree also reveals what makes this holiest of sacraments so elusive representationally: its sanctity derives not from the action of

praesens sua substantia nobis adsit, ea existendi ratione, quam etsi verbis exprimere vix possumus, possibilem tamen esse Deo, cogitatione per fidem illustrata assequi possumus et constantissime credere debemus’. 9  On the Eucharist as agent and symbol of affective unity, see Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Volume Two 693: ‘[…] the very sacrament which the Sviour left in his church as a symbol of its unity and love, whereby he wished all Christians to be mutually linked and united’. On the sacramental transformation of bread and wine into the species (images) thereof, see ibid. 694: ‘And it has at all times been the belief in the church of God that immediately after the consecration the true body of our Lord and his true blood exist along with his soul and divinity under the form of bread and wine. The body is present under the form of bread and the blood under the form of wine, by virtue of the words’. The phrase ‘under the form of bread and wine’ translates ‘sub panis et vini specie’; a complementary translation would be ‘under the image of bread and wine’.

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performing it, but from the substantive presence of Christ within it. This fact redounds upon the sacramental paradox we have just explored. There is indeed this which is common to the most holy eucharist along with the other sacraments: it is a sign of sacred reality and the visible form of invisible grace. But in it there is found the excelling and unique quality that, whereas the other sacraments first have the force of sanctifying at the moment when one uses them, in the eucharist the author of holiness himself is present before their use.10 A collateral difficulty, related to the problem of how to make invisible grace visible, concerns the threshold of discernibility or, better, indiscernibility that distinguishes kinds and degrees of sacramental reception. Chapter 8, “On the Use of this Wonderful Sacrament”, asks how these kinds are to be visualised, which is to say, represented to the mind’s eye. This issue turns on the difference amongst three kinds of communion: sacramental, spiritual, and sacramental and spiritual combined. With respect to the use, however, our fathers rightly and wisely distinguished three types of reception of this holy sacrament. For they taught that some, being sinners, receive it only sacramentally; others receive only spiritually, namely those who have the desire to eat the heavenly food that is set before them, and so experience its effect and benefit by a lively faith working through love; the third group, who receive both sacramentally and spiritually, are those who so test and train themselves beforehand that they approach this divine table clothed in a wedding garment.11

10  Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils 694–695: ‘Commune hoc quidem est sanctissimae eucharistiae cum caeteris sacramentis, symbolum esse rei sacrae et invisibilis gratiae formam visibilem; verum illud in ea excellens et singulare reperitur, quod reliqua sacramenta tum primum sanctificandi vim habent, cum quis illis utitur, at in eucharistia ipse sanctitatis auctor ante usum est’. 11  Ibid. 696–697: ‘Quoad usum autem recte et sapienter patres nostri tres rationes hoc sanctum sacramentum acccipiendi distinxerunt. Quosdam enim docuerunt sacramentaliter duntaxat id sumere, ut peccatores; alios tantum spiritualiter, illos nimirum, qui voto propositum illum coelestem panem edentes fide viva, quae per dilectionem operatur, fructum eius et utilitatem sentiunt; tertios porro sacramentaliter simul et spiritaliter, ii autem sunt, qui ita se prius probant et instruunt, ut vestem nuptialem induti ad divinam hanc mensam accedant’.

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The reference to a wedding garment, which comes from the parable of the marriage feast in Matthew 22:11–14, makes clear that the process of visual representation is being adduced. How is a parabolic image of that species of communion that partakes of sacramental and spiritual refection to be fashioned? Chapter 8, though it poses the question, ‘How would it look’?, formulates no definitive response, instead simply stating, in reference to 1 Corinthians 13:12, that whereas in heaven we shall ‘eat without veil the same bread of angels’, in this life we must ‘now eat beneath the sacred veils’.12 The images we utilise to partake of Christ are opaque, circuitous, and periphrastic, only incidentally related to the divine truths embodied by Christ the Lord, whom we shall not encounter facie ad faciem, fully unveiled, until the end of time, once we are risen and saved. Until then, the mystery of divine presence can be glimpsed only partially, with the help of symbola, formae, and other kinds of image, as if veiled. Framed in these terms, Quid est sacramentum? might be said to consist of essays that explore the representational strategies whereby access to the Lord was variously mediated, facilitated, but also in some sense frustrated in praesenti vita, by means of images that explicitly negotiate between the human and the divine, the corporeal and the incorporeal, mundana (mundane things) and sacramenta (sacred mysteries). Underlying early modern construals of mysteria and sacramenta are Paul’s statements on the testimony of Christ, as transmitted to the Church by his ministers, in 1 Corinthians 2–3 and Ephesians 3: ‘Howbeit we speak wisdom among the perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world […] but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery’.13 The resurgence of interest in patristic and conciliar readings of this crucial passage, especially the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, Origen, and John Chrysostom, provided the theological context for the interpretation of Paul’s allied conviction that ‘God hath revealed by his Spirit [what things he hath prepared for them that love him]’. Viewed through a Pauline lens, mysteria and sacramenta are the spiritual revelations that testify to the loving communion between Christ and his Church. For visual artists, these conceptions of sacramentum and mysterium posed questions as basic as they were pressing: how are gospel revelations and divine mysteries to be portrayed; more specifically, how is their transcendent character to be visualised, given the constraints of mimetic representation. It 12   Ibid. 697: ‘[…] quem modo sub sacris velaminibus edunt, absque ullo velamine manducaturi’. 13  Unless otherwise noted, biblical citations are taken from the Challoner edition of the Douay-Rheims Bible: The Holy Bible Translated from the Latin Vulgate, ed.-trans. R. Challoner (Baltimore: 1899; reprint ed., 1989).

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is surprising to discover that questions such as these were considered so significant that they regularly occur not just in art treatises but even at the level of catechetical instruction: the elementary quaestio, ‘What is a sacrament?’, was seen to raise issues (and concerns) about the nature of visual representation and interpretation. In the Opus catechisticum, sive De summa doctrinae Christianae of 1577, for instance, Petrus Canisius, S.J. responds to this very quaestio by recourse to image-theory; he first outlines what an image is and then affirms that such images can function to represent and even instrumentalise the mysteries of faith: [A sacrament] is the outward and visible sign of that divine and invisible grace instituted by Christ, through which each of us receives divine grace and is sanctified. […] They are signs for this reason: since by means of a certain external image and likeness, they convey and make manifest to us the things that God performs invisibly and spiritually through them. And they are certain, sacred, and efficiacious signs because they assuredly contain the grace they signify and bestow for the purpose of our sanctification. And they are mysteries in that they cannot exist apart from their proper virtue, and nor can divine majesty absent itself from these mysteries.14 In his commentary on the Canisian catechism, Petrus Busaeus Noviomagus goes so far as to claim, with reference to Augustine, that sacraments, by their very nature, must maintain a mimetic relation to the sacramenta (divine mysteries) of which they are sacramental indices: ‘If sacraments should fail to hold the certain likeness of those things [i.e., mysteries] of which they are

14  Canisius Petrus, S.J., Opus catechisticum, sive De summa doctrinae Christianae […]. Editio tertia, quae et Parisiensem multis partibus excellit, et prioribus omnibus est copiosior limatiorque, ut reipsa lector comperiet. (Cologne, Apud Gervinum Calenium, et haeredes Iohannis Quentelij: 1586) 171–172: ‘Est divinae et invisibilis gratiae externum et visibile signum a Christo institutum, ut per id quisque Dei gratiam accipiat, atque sanctificationem. […] Signa quidem idcirco, quoniam externa quadam specie et similitudine id nobis referunt et declarant, quod per ipsa Deus nobiscum invisibiliter atque spiritualiter agit. Certa vero, sacrosancta simul et efficacia signa, quoniam indubie quam gratiam significant, etiam continent, conferuntque ad nostram sanctificationem. Sacramenta enim, quantum in se est, sine propria esse virtute non possunt, nec ullo modo divina se absentat maiestas mysteriis’. On Canisius’s definition of sacramentum, as it relates to Luther’s catechisms and the Genevan and Heidelberg Catechisms, see Wandel L.P., Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion (Leiden – Boston: 2016) 229–275, esp. 240–247.

Quid est sacramentum ? : Introduction

figure 1.1 Joannes Bourghesius, S.J., Vitae passionis et mortis Jesu Christi Domini nostri mysteria, piis meditationibus et adspirationibus expressa per Boëtium à Bolswert (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1622), title-page By courtesy of The Newberry Library

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figure 1.2 Boëtius à Bolswert, “The Boy Jesus Prays before the Arma Christi”, from Joannes Bourghesius, S.J., Vitae passionis et mortis Jesu Christi Domini nostri mysteria, piis meditationibus et adspirationibus expressa per Boëtium à Bolswert (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1622), figure 10 By courtesy of The Newberry Library

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Quid est sacramentum ? : Introduction

figure 1.3 Boëtius à Bolswert, “The Boy Jesus Prays before the Arma Christi”, from Joannes Bourghesius, S.J., Vitae passionis et mortis Jesu Christi Domini nostri mysteria, piis meditationibus et adspirationibus expressa per Boëtium à Bolswert (Antwerp, Henricus Aertssius: 1622), figure 52 By courtesy of The Newberry Library

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sacraments, then they would hardly be sacraments’.15 This is to say that sacraments are images of the mysteries they evoke. There are countless examples of the many ingenious strategies artists deployed to represent sacramenta and mysteria. One favoured device was reflexive image-making. For example, in Joannes Bourghesius’s richly illustrated meditative treatise, Vitae passionis et mortis Jesu Christi Domini nostri mysteria of 1622, figure 10 depicts the boy Jesus kneeling with arms outstretched before an angel carrying the arma Christi, in a prefigurative allusion to figure 52, the Agony in the Garden [Figs. 1.1, 1.2, & 1.3]. Figures 10 and 52 are images of each other, and this reflexive relation serves to illustrate how Jesus ever dwelt meditatively on the mystery of the Passion, or, as Bourghesius puts it, ‘offered himself frequently to the celestial Father, praying ardently to effect the work of human salvation’.16 As such, the Passion can be seen to encompass the whole of his life: its sacramental power operates in a present of consciousness that in figure 10 extends from now into the future, in figure 52 extends from now into the past. The two images of Christ mutually and complementarily evoke the mystery of salvation, showing that the grace conferred through his suffering and death knows no temporal bounds. 2

Case Study: a Jesuit Treatise on Representing and Interpreting Mysteries

The last two chapters of Jan David, S.J.’s meditative treatise cum emblem book, Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Twelve Mirrors Assembled for the Person Desirous of One Day Seeing God), exhaustively consider the stakes involved in visualizing or, more accurately, picturing divine mysteries to oneself [Fig. 1.4].17 Published in 1610, the Duodecim specula 15  Busaeus Petrus, S.J., Authoritatum sacrae Scripturae et Sanctorum Patrum, quae in Summa doctrina Christianae Doctoris Petri Canisii theologi S.I. citantur, et nunc primum ex ipsis fontibus fideliter collectae, ipsis Catechismi verbis subscriptae sunt.. Pars secunda. De sacramentis Ecclesiae. (Venice, Ex Bibliotheca Aldina: 1571) 6: ‘1. C. Augustinus epistola vigesimateria ad Bonifacium: Si sacramenta quandam similitudinem earum rerum quarum sacramenta sunt non haberent, omnino saramenta non essent’. 16  Bourghesius Joannes, S.J., Vitae, Passionis et mortis Jesu Christi Domini nostri mysteria, piis meditationibus et adspirationibus exposita […]. Figuris aeneis expressa per Boetium a Bolswert. (Antwerp, Apud Henricum Aertssium: 1623), imago X: ‘2. Ad humanae redemptionis opus celesti Patri ardentissima prece frequenter sese offerebat’. 17  On the Duodecim specula, see Melion W. S., “Introduction: Scriptural Authority in Word and Image”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W. S., The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Intersections 20 (Leiden

Quid est sacramentum ? : Introduction

figure 1.4 Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610), title-page By courtesy of The Newberry Library

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consists of twelve mirror emblems designed to assist reader-viewers better to know themselves and to find common cause with Christ: the sequence begins with the Common Mirror that exposes the beholder’s hidden blemishes and initiates the process of purgation, and ends with the Mirror of Beatific Vision that provides a foretaste of the vision of God to be granted after this life. The book is a kind of mirror of princes adapted for the elite students and scholastics enrolled at Jesuit schools and colleges in the Low Countries and elsewhere. Each of the twelve chapters opens with a tripartite emblem comprising a titular motto (above), a picture, and an epigrammatic couplet (below); beneath the epigram, an alphabetised sequence of captions identifies the chief subjects encompassed by the picture and its topical motto. The Roman capitals – A., B., C., etc. – that sequentially order the captions reappear inside the picture, where they connect its component parts to the themes distilled by these short texts. The capitals appear once again as marginal annotations interspersed throughout the long commentaries that constitute the bulk of the book’s twelve chapters. The commentaries amplify upon the relation amongst the motto, picture, and epigram, and also expand upon the brief captions, turning them into disquisitions on the subjects they and the picture encapsulate. The disquisitions are dialogic, voiced by two protagonists: an advisor named Desiderius (Desirous), David’s alter-ego, whose desire for God he strives to communicate to his interlocutor, Anima (Soul), the reader-viewer’s alter-ego. Emblem 12, “Speculum visionis beatificae”, delves into the difficulty of achieving the beatific vision of God in this life [Fig. 1.6]. Figure 12 and its captions depict the ineffable character of this vision, which is occasionally granted to prophets such as Daniel (D., F., & G.), or to the Lord’s anointed, such as Solomon (H.), or to persons of great wisdom and discernment, such as the Queen of Sheba, who humbled herself before the glorious, God-given wisdom of Solomon (I.). But the pleasurable splendour of divine glory (‘A. Divinae gloriae splendor et fruitio’.), the beatitude of the fatherland where God is beheld (‘B. Beatitudo patriae, in visione Dei’.), and the inaccessible light-infused darkness (or alternatively, the splendid obscurity) wherein God dwells (‘C. Deus lucem inaccessibilem et caliginem inhabitat’.), are, in spite of exceptions such as these, the true prerogative of the saints in heaven (K.). The epigram thus

– Boston: 2011) 1–46, esp. 22–37; Imhof D., Jan Moretus and the Continuation of the Plantin Press: A Bibliography of the Works Published and Printed by Jan Moretus I in Antwerp (1589–1610), 2 vols. (Leiden: 2014) I 221–223; and Sors A.-K., Allegorische Andachtsbücher in Antwerpen: Jan Davids Texte und Theodoor Galles Illustrationen in den jesuitischen Buchprojekten der Plantiniana (Göttingen: 2015) 116–138, 141–144.

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admonishes: ‘Purify the mind’s eye, that you see divine splendor with the eye’s clear light, from [the vantage of] a heavenly throne’.18 How to achieve this point of view and rise to this level of visual discernment, is the central question David poses in chapter 12. Three answers are offered. First, one hones the mind’s eye through purgative humbling of the self before God, on the model of Daniel, who dared not look upon the Lord after hearing his voice (Daniel 10:9), but was then lifted up by an angel who opened his eyes to the ‘likeness of a son of man’ (Daniel 10:10 & 15–16): And I heard the voice of his word: and when I heard, I lay in a consternation, upon my face, and my face was close to the ground. And behold a hand touched me, and lifted me up upon my knees, and upon the joints of my hands. […] And when he was speaking such words to me, I cast down my countenance to the ground, and held my peace. And behold, as it were the likeness of a son of man touched my lips: then I opened my mouth, and spoke, and said to him that stood before me: O my Lord, at the sight of thee my joints are loosed, and no strength hath remained in me. Figure 12 portrays the difficulty of attaining this kind prophetic vision. Fearful of encountering God, Daniel falls face downward, his profile shadowed, his eyes earthbound (D. & F.); the beatific vision hovering above is cut off by a densely opaque band of clouds. The implication is that even with the angel’s help (G.), he shall partake not of the vision of God, but only of the mediated prophetic images God chooses to bestow. His terrified associates, racing away in full flight, their backs turned toward the angel, illustrate the failure, indeed unwillingness, to bear witness to the Lord. Second, like Solomon at the consecration of the newly built Temple (H.), one may sometimes be granted access to God through earnest prayers of supplication; but more often than not, God will make his presence known indirectly, as he did even then, appearing to Solomon enshrouded in a bright cloud (3 Kings 8:10–12): And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the sanctuary, that a cloud filled the house of the Lord,

18  It should be noted that David’s conception of the mind’s eye presumes a link between corporeal vision, as exercised before the speculum creaturarum, and spiritual vision.

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And the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord. Then Solomon said: The Lord said that he would dwell in a cloud. Third, the Lord sometimes betrays his presence by proxy, as he did to the Queen of Sheba, who beheld Solomon mantled in divine wisdom and splendour. If she discerns the presence of God, she does so at one remove, through the king’s person (3 Kings 10:4–9): And when the queen of Saba saw all the wisdom of Solomon, and the house which he had built, […] she had no longer any spirit in her, And she said to the king: The report is true, which I heard in my own country, Concerning thy words, and concerning thy wisdom. And I did not believe them that told me, till I came myself, and saw with my own eyes […]. Blessed be the Lord thy God, whom thou hast pleased, and who hath set thee upon the throne of Israel, because the Lord hath loved Israel for ever, and hath appointed thee king, to do judgment and justice. It should be noted that David’s conception of the mind’s eye, evident from the sequence of five chapters leading from the speculum creaturarum (mirror of created things) to the speculum visionis beatificae, is based in the contemplative tradition of speculatio (speculative vision), variously elucidated by Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, the Pseudo-Hugh, and Bonaventure, and widely disseminated by Rhenish mystical theologians such as Heinrich Suso, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In his fundamental study of speculation, Jeffrey Hamburger persuasively argues that it was the uniting or binding force that licensed the use of devotional images, grounding such imagery in devotional theory and practice, and conversely, making image-use central to the monastic culture of devotion.19 Rooted in exegesis of Romans 1:20 – ‘For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also and divinity: so that they are inexcusable’ – the term ‘speculation’ designates a procedure whereby corporeal and spiritual vision are seen as linked, and their respective objects 19  Hamburger J., “Speculations on Speculation: Vision and Perception in the Theory and Practice of Mystical Devotions”, in Haug W. – Schneider-Lastin W. (eds.), Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang: neu erschlossene Texte, neue methodische Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte, Kolloquium Kloster Fischingen 1998 (Tübingen: 2000) 353–408.

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are likewise held mutually and progressively to be implicated. ‘Empirical observation’, as Hamburger puts it, ‘is not alien to speculation; it forms its foundation’, since creatura (creation, i.e., the constituent elements of the created world) lead the observer to stepwise consideration of the Creator whose mirror the visible world is. Romans 1:20 was read in conjunction with two other key scriptural texts. It functioned as the lens through which 1 Corinthians 13:12 was viewed: ‘We see now through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known’. The ‘creatura mundi’ of Romans 1:20 thus came to be identified with the ‘specula in aenigmate’ (the enigmatic mirrors) adduced of 1 Corinthians 13:12, and accordingly, the created world and its ‘visibilia’ were closely associated with the mirror images that make the mysterious ‘invisibilia’ of God discernible, to the extent this is humanly possible, to the eyes of the body, mind, and spirit. With reference to Book 15 of Augustine’s De Trinitate, Romans 1:20 was also read together with Wisdom 13:1–5, which affirms that God can and must be known through his works: ‘But all men are vain, in whom there is not the knowledge of God: and who by these good things that are seen, could not understand him that is, neither by attending to the works have acknowledged who was the workman’. Hamburger asserts that whereas Augustine ultimately aims to proscribe images, warning against the idolatrous confusion of creatura with God, later theologians took Wisdom 13:1–5 for a defense of speculation as a route to knowing God through contemplative engagement with the self-images wherewith he populates the world.20 The greatest such speculum was Christ himself, the living image of God made humanly discernible through the mystery of the Incarnation. Hugh of St. Victor, amongst others, draws a parallel between persons who neglect to see that creaturae are the visible traces of the Creator, and illiterates who view figured images in a book but fail to apprehend their significance. Hugh thereby sanctioned the analogy between ‘creatura mundi’, ‘specula in aenigmate’, and visual images of the Godhead: ‘For the whole of the sensible world is like a certain book written by the finger of God, that is, created by divine virtue, and individual creatures are like certain figures invented not by human prescription, but rather, instituted by the divine will to manifest the wisdom of the invisible things of God’.21 20  Ibid. 363. 21  Hugonis de S. Victoire […] opera omnia, ed. J.-P. Migne, 3 vols. (Paris: 1854) 814: ‘Universus enim mundus iste sensibilis quasi quidam liber est scriptus digito Dei, hoc est virtute divina creatus, et singulae creaturae quasi figurae quaedam sunt non humano placito inventae, sed divino arbitrio institutae ad manifestandum invisibilium Dei sapientiam’. On this passage, see Rudolph C., The ‘Things of Greater Importance’: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia: 1990) 109; and Hamburger,

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David’s meditative Duodecim specula, in particular the sequence of chapters that take the votary from the mirror of nature to the mirror of Holy Scripture, then successively to the mirror of example, the enigmatic mirror, and the mirror of beatific vision, rehearses the speculative catena (chain of subjects or themes) codified by the Victorine school and popularized by the Dominicans within the context of contemplative devotion.22 The foundation of David’s emblematic spiritual exercises is speculation. This is surely why he argues in chapter 11 on enigmata, that there is no aenigma, howsoever occulted, that does not remain susceptible to visual interpretation, and cannot be deciphered by exegetical means. The three registers of visual discernment cited above demonstrate that in this life, God makes himself available in variously occlusive forms, withholding the full splendor of his glory and limiting entry to the beatific vision. Read in this light, the epigram, ‘Purga aciem mentis […]’, operates in two registers: it either alludes to the future, assuring us that seated on high amongst the elect, we shall see God with a clear eye, face to face, in the words of 1 Corinthians 13:12; or alternatively, it alludes to the present, urging us to imagine, by means of a meditative image, how it will be to see God as he is, without the medial veil of images. This latter spiritual exercise takes the form of a paradox: one must visualise as best one can, by means of an image, what imageless vision, experienced without intervening images, will be like. Paradoxa are rhetorical figures, and it is to figures and tropes that David refers the reader-viewer in considering how – to what extent – such mysteries as the beatific vision may be known now, before the Final Judgment. For indeed, we who are not yet in paradise, who have yet to ascend even to the third heaven, or to deserve to be enraptured, let us for a time venerate the mysteries of Christ, follow his example, [and] serve the faith; through tropes and parables, let us examine the secrets of heaven as if in a mirror. Nay rather, in order that it be given us to share in some measure

“Speculations on Speculation” 375. Hugh, as Hamburger notes in opposition to Rudolph’s reading of this passage, is comparing the visual perception of nature to the exegesis of Scripture, but Hugh’s use of figurae to refer to visibilia as an index of invisibilia could be applied, at least implicitly, to a wide range of visual images and tropes – not only natural but also textual and pictorial. 22  The Bonaventuran doctrine of godlikeness, on which see Reynolds P.L., “Bonaventure’s Theory of Resemblance”, Traditio 58 (2003) 219–255, probably underlies David’s conviction that godlike images are the chief means of obtaining knowledge of God.

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the prerogative of a bride, let us sit in the shadow of him whom we desire; and in expectation of blessed hope, in that [shadow] let us rest for now.23 The votary must rely on meditative images while s/he awaits contemplative access to God, for whereas meditation is exercised in and through images, which are periphrastic and circumlocutory devices, contemplation results when divinity makes itself known presently, without mediating filters.24 Yet this, whether it be to live or to sit in the shade, is to be shadowed: wherefore ‘through a glass, darkly’ [literally, ‘through a mirror by way of enigma’]. For it shall [one day] come to pass that the shadows fall away, the light increase; yes indeed, they shall inwardly part. And vision both clear and eternal shall steal in, and not only shall it be a sweetness in our throat, forecasting contemplation, but also a fullness in our belly, filling us with blessed pleasure unaccompanied by distaste; in the words of the Prophet [Psalm 16:15]: ‘Then shall I be satisfied when thy glory shall appear’.25 For David, then, to know God, at least for the present, is to engage with images: his twelve-part dialogic treatise on specula (mirrors) answers to this desideratum, since its component emblems exemplify different kinds and degrees of image-making. David underscores their representational status by embedding the mirrors within emblematic picturae, so that specular images are comprised by their pictorial counterparts. In figures 1–10, two viewers, a man and a woman, regularly appear in the foreground, modelling the kind of attention the various 23  David Jan, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannis Moretus: 1610) 159: ‘Nos etenim qui nondum in paradisum, nondum ad tertium ne ad primum quidem caelum ascendimus, vel rapi meruimus, Christi interim mysteria veneremur, sectemur exempla, fidem servemus; per tropos et parabolas, tamquam per speculum, caeli secreta rimemur: et profecto in eius umbra vivemus. Imo, ut et sponsae praerogativa aliquatenus uti nobis donetur; etiam in umbra eius, quem desideramus, sedebimus; et expectantes beatam spem, in ea tantisper quiescemus’. 24  Although David here distinguishes scrupulously between meditation and contemplation, he usually uses the term ‘contemplare’ more loosely, to refer to any spiritual exercise that dwells on a image, with the aim of cultivating the experience of God. In such contexts, ‘contemplare’ denotes close and attentive viewing. 25  Ibid. 159–160: ‘Verumtamen istud, in umbra seu vivere seu sedere, in umbra tamen est; quia per speculum in aenigmate. Erit enim cum declinaverint umbrae, crescente lumine, imo cum penitus disparuerint: et subintrabit sicut perspicua ita perpetua visio; et erit non modo suavitas gutturi nostro, gustum contemplationis significans, verumetiam satietas ventri, sine fastidio fruitionem beatam adimplens: iuxta illud Prophetae: Tunc satiabor, cum apparuerit gloria tua’.

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mirrors call forth; in figure 12 alone, the paired viewers are absent, replaced by the three visual exempla that defer or displace the vision of God, and thus redound upon the necessity of approaching the Godhead by the phased means of the previous eleven mirrors [Figs. 1.5 & 1.6]. Different in kind and degree, the specula gradually lead the viewer to consideration of the final mirror, the speculum visionis beatificae, whose presence, however, is evoked, deferred, but not seen in figure 12 [Fig. 1.6]. Staged as a sequence of specular encounters, the meditative itinerary thus culminates penultimately in chapter 11, “Speculum aenigmaticum” (“Enigmatic Mirror”), which brings the reader-viewer as close as s/he can get to apprehending the nature of Christ incarnate by means of images [Fig. 1.5]. Such apprehension is shadowy, lodged in the human faculties of sense and thought, states David in chapter 12, where he contrasts the enigmatic mirror with the mirror of beatific vision, arguing that the lineaments of the latter can be partially glimpsed or at least intuited from the former [Fig. 1.6]. But as we have seen, the mirror of final vision transcends the corporeal faculty of vision to such a degree that its workings cannot be pictured, for it relies on no images. The trope of a type of mirroring that eclipses the warrant for images derives, of course, from the Pauline notion, codified in 1 Corinthians 13:12, that the saved shall one day be reflexive of God, as transparent to him as he to them, for both shall ‘know even as they are known’. In a crucial passage of chapter 12, David has Anima declare that Paul’s dark mirror, in that it stands for our reliance on images to know God, such as we can, signifies our mimetic relation to divine virtue. We are licensed to imitate Christ, to draw nearer to his light, because Christ incarnate was God made man, and thus representable, imageable; whereas God under the Old Law was veiled, his presence distant and occluded, that presence, having been bodied forth in Christ, is now discernible to our eyes, minds, and hearts whenever we search for it ‘per speculum’, through a mirror, i.e., a specular image. To seek to know Christ through images is to become speculans, to be a person who speculates, attending closely to the various specula by which he may partially be known, and endeavouring to be transformed in his image. The passage in question is an exegesis of 2 Corinthians 3:15–16 & 18: ‘But even until this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart. But when they shall be converted to the Lord, the veil shall be taken away. […] But we all beholding the glory of the lord with open face, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord’. David reads Paul as a warrant for the imitatio Christi and for the mirror-like, mimetic images upon which such imitation is premised. I sense the truth of what Saint Augustine says, speaking of the mirror in which God is seen, for he states thus: ‘I know him to be an incorporeal

Quid est sacramentum ? : Introduction

figure 1.5 Theodoor Galle, Emblem 11: “Speculum aenigmaticum” (Enigmatic Mirror), from Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610), 8vo By courtesy of The Newberry Library

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figure 1.6 Theodoor Galle, Emblem 12: “Speculum visionis beatificae” (Mirror of Beatific Vision), from Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610), 8vo By courtesy of The Newberry Library

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substance, wisdom, light, in which are seen what carnal eyes cannot see. And yet’, says he, ‘that great and greatly spiritual man (namely, the apostle [Paul]) avers: “We see now through a mirror by way of enigma; but then, face to face”’. He adds that if we were to ask what sort of mirror this is, [the answer would be]: ‘that in which what appears is discernible only in the form of an image’. Therefore, this is what we have endeavoured to effect [in the Duodecim specula]: that through this image, we might see, as best we can, what we are, from him by whom we were made, as if in a mirror. This, too, that same apostle signifies in saying: ‘But we all beholding (‘speculantes’) the glory of the Lord with open face, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory as by the spirit of the Lord’. He said ‘speculantes’, seeing through a mirror, not looking from some great height (‘de specula aliqua prospicientes’).26 The wordplay on speculum (mirror) and specula (high place, watchtower) invites a distinction between the here and now of specular beholding and the heavenly vision of God to be enjoyed by the saved; but on an entirely different note, it also subtly calls attention to the discrepancy between speculating, which is to say, looking closely and observantly, and surveying from a distance, at some remove – physical, spiritual, and/or affective – from the object being viewed. At the present time, the person who wishes to draw close to God must make common cause with images, while remaining ever conscious that as the human spirit is changeable, so also is the act of beholding: our taste for these images and for the divine insights they convey is contingent on whichever desires of the spirit (‘variis ipsorum animae desiderijs’) are brought to bear in viewing them; in this respect, David compares the meditative speculans to a woman whose likes and dislikes, and attendant bodily cravings, fluctuate during pregnancy.27 This makes even more challenging the process of looking into 26  Ibid. 160–161: ‘Sentioque verum illud esse, quod D. Augustinus, agens de speculo, in quo Deus videtur, sic inquit: Incorporalem substantiam, scio esse sapientiam; et lumen esse, in quo videntur, quae oculis carnalibus non videntur. Et tamen, inquit, vir tantus tamque spiritualis (Apostolus, puta) dixit: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate; tunc autem facie ad faciem. Quale sit, inquit, hoc speculum, si quaeramus; profecto illud occurrit, quod in speculo nisi imago non cernitur. Hoc ergo conati facere sumus: ut per imaginem hanc, quod nos sumus, videremus utcumque, a quo facit sumus, tamquam per speculum. Hoc significat etiam illud, quod ait idem Apostolus: Nos autem revelata facie gloriam domini speculantes, in eamdem imaginem transformamur de gloria in gloriam, tamquam a Domini spiritu. Speculantes, dixit, per speculum videntes, non autem de specula aliqua prospicientes’. 27  David, Duodecim specula 160: ‘Utque verum fatear, sentio illud mihi evenire, quod Deo dilectis nonnumquam audivi accidere; ut scilicet in praesenti vita, gustus illis divinae

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the various mirrors marshalled by David for the express purpose of assisting his reader-viewers to reform themselves on the model of Christ. The chief aim of speculative sight lies in this, asserts David: Christ must be formed within us through the close viewing of specular images (‘assidua eorumdem contemplatione formetur in nobis Christus’), and the light of his face must thereby be sealed ever more perfectly upon us (‘perfectius perfectiusque signetur lumen vultus ipsius super nos’).28 ‘Wherefore it behooves us to make every effort to find the face of our beloved [Lord] clearly exhibited whenever we turn the mind’s eye inward’.29 That the greatest of image-makers, Christ himself, has shown how this may best be accomplished, is the argument of Emblem 11, “Speculum aenigmaticum”. By enshrouding sacred mysteries, not least the nature of his divinity, in riddling images such as enigmata and parables, he compels his votaries thoroughly to invest themselves in the task of descrying him and bringing his precepts fully to light. The process of discovery, precisely because it is so protracted and difficult, accentuates the value of what is discovered, firmly imprinting it upon the viewer’s consciousness. This is to say that the scrim of tropes, metaphors, similes, and analogies that veil the image of Christ, forcing us uncover it, intensify the clarity and adhesive properties of that hidden image, once it is found. As David takes pains to explain, here and in chapter 12, Christ makes himself known to us not as he is, facie ad faciem, but through the medium of images, all of which to some extent occult him. These veiled images, following David’s usage, are enigmata, and parables are a sub-species thereof: they might best be defined as narrativised enigmata. By contrast, only the saints, living exemplars of celestial perfection, are privileged to see, albeit fleetingly, the vision of God in this life, or, as in the case of Saint Stephen, at the threshold of martyrdom. I know, o my soul, that what we labour upon requires great effort and exertion, and is the activity of exeedingly spiritual souls. For if I confess truly, it is not much unlike what we read about the protomartyr St. Stephen: ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God’. Wherefore great virtue from on high must needs be donned (if this be possible), and one must be as if transformed

praesentiae varietur, pro variis ipsorum animae desideriis, non secus quam mulieri corporaliter, uterum gestanti’. 28  Cf. Canticle 8:6: ‘Put me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm’. 29  Ibid. 161: ‘Quocirca, ad hoc adnitendum est nobis; ut quandocumque introrsum oculos mentis convertimus, illic expressam dilecti nostri faciem inveniamus’.

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into a new creature, that he who sees us made party to the light of Christ, should see our face as it were the face of an angel.30 Figure 11, quite appropriately, is the most complex emblematic picture in the Duodecim specula: it features three viewers, an old man at center, a mature man at right, and a youth at left, each of whom intently gazes at paired roundels depicting a parable below (F., H., & K.), and the truth it enfolds above (G., I., & L.) [Fig. 1.5]. Lines of sight connect their eyes to three parabolic scenes: respectively, the father’s feast for his once prodigal, now chastened son (F.) (Luke 14:22–24 & 31–32), who has returned a new man; the five prudent virgins processing past their foolish counterparts, on their way to answer the bridegroom’s call (H.) (Matthew 25: 6–9); and the king’s marriage feast for his son, attended by guests from the thoroughfares (K.) (Matthew 22:2–10). Roundels F.-G., H.-I., and K.-L. grow from branches unfurling from a single trunk, since David reads them as parabolic figures of speech for the promise of salvation, which Christ himself encodes in these complementary festive images: as he puts it, ‘by the tractable means of [the enigmatic mirror], let us more inwardly transport the mind’s eye to the joy and splendor of the celestial Jerusalem’, the reward that ultimately awaits all true followers of Christ.31 Roundel G. depicts the soul of the prodigal son, who stands for every truly repentant sinner, lifted heavenward and welcomed by rejoicing angels, in illustration of Luke 15:10: ‘So I say to you, there shall be joy before the angels of God upon one sinner doing penance’. Roundel I conflates Matthew 25:6, the call to the virgins, and 25:31: ‘When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne’. Christ as Sponsus, enthroned upon a cloud, welcomes his queen, the Virgin Mary, who as Sponsa intercedes on behalf of the wise virgins, introducing them to their bridegroom. Roundel L. illustrates Matthew 22:11, ‘But when the king came in to look at the guests […]’, combined with the description of the Lord as steward of his feast in Luke 12:37: ‘Amen I say to you, that he will gird himself, and make them sit down to meat, and passing will minister unto them’. As will be evident from the paired lines of sight 30  Ibid. 162: ‘Scio, o mea anima, magnae istud est opis et operae, quod molimur in praesens; et non nisi valde spiritalium hic vigor est animarum. Nam, ut verum fatear, non multum absimile est ei quod de sancto protomartyre Stephano legimus: Ecce video caelos apertos; et Filium hominis stantem a dextris Dei. Quapropter etiam opus foret, tantam (si fieri possit) induere virtutem ab alto, et quasi in novam creaturam transformari: ut, qui nos luminis eius effectos participes cerneret, videret ille faciem nostram tamquam faciem Angeli’. 31  Ibid. 155: ‘[…] cuius obsequio penitius in felicitatem et splendorem caelestis Ierusalem mentis oculos inferamus’.

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that extend through roundels F., K., and H. and penetrate to roundels G., I., and L., the three beholders kneeling in the foreground of figure 11 see through the parables to the scriptural truths they encode. Arms outstretched, they express astonishment at the truths they uncover. These truths become discernible through the exegetical layering of the mutually relevant, paired scriptural passages. The viewers’ three ages imply that the decoding of parables is a spiritual exercise to be honed throughout one’s life, and the epigram asks the readerviewer further to consider this point: ‘How comes it about that the enigmatic mirror here brings forth to me certainties of sense beneath an obscure image’? The question distils the raison d’être of chapter 11. Above the paired roundels appears a register of rectangular panels illustrating three performative enigmata enacted by Christ for the benefit of his followers. The fact that these scenes, like the roundels, are comprised by the emblematic pictura, emphasises that the nine component images-in-theimage are mental images fashioned by the three scripturally literate votaries. Panel C. depicts John 20:14–17: the risen Christ appears to the Magdalene who takes him for a gardener; calling her by name, he reveals his true identity and instructs her to promulgate the mystery of the Resurrection. The image ingeniously narrates the whole of the encounter: it can be seen either as Mary’s questioning of the gardener, whom she entreats to say where the Lord’s body has been taken; or as Christ’s divulging of his identity to Mary, whose eyes of the spirit are being opened; or as his commanding her to spread the word of his Resurrection and imminent Ascension. The axis connecting scenes C., F., and G. implies that the youthful viewer, whose pose resembles the Magdalene’s just as Christ’s resembles the welcoming angel’s in G., discerns the correlation between these three images-in-the-image. As the father welcomes the prodigal son, and the angels welcome the penitent soul, so Christ greets the once prodigal, now penitent Magdalene. As the son asked to be succoured, so the Magdalene pleaded for succour, asking to be reunited with her deceased Lord. Panel D. depicts Luke 24:13–27: the risen Christ travels to Emmaus with Cleophas and his companion, discoursing on the prophecies of the Passion and the Resurrection. As they journey with him, inspired by his presence and words even before knowing who he is, so the prudent virgins journey toward their bridegroom, heeding his unanticipated call. Panel E depicts Matthew 17:1–6, Mark 9:2–7, and Luke 9:28–35: Christ is transfigured before Peter, James, and John who, when they hear the voice from the cloud saying, ‘This is my beloved son […]’, prostrate themselves fearfully. As the king gathers invited guests to a marriage feast, so Christ assembles Peter, James, and John on the mountain, and as the king ministers to his guests, so Christ ministers to his votaries: they are given to know him as the beloved and sovereign Son of the Father; and

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as God expresses his love of Christ, so too, the parable hinges on the father’s show of love for his newly married son and heir. All three episodes – Christ and Mary in the garden, Christ on the road to Emmaus, and the Transfiguration – concern the divinity and mercy of Christ: to the Magdalene, he reveals that newly risen and about to ascend to the Father, he can no longer be handled; to his travelling companions, he reveals that the Christ, having suffered in fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies, must now enter into his celestial glory; to Peter, James, and Paul, he reveals that he is the Son of God whom Moses and Elijah foresaw. Or rather, as David avows, Jesus stages a series of paradoxa, for the mystery of his divine nature is made apparent through its prior strategic concealment – from the Magdalene, from Cleophas and his friend, and from Peters, James, and John who were so nonplussed by the miracle, that they at first failed to comprehend it.32 That Christ enhances the revelation of divine mercy by first obscuring it, speaks to the importance of enigmata in the process of visualizing this and other mysteries of faith. Mary must be prompted to recognise Christ by seeing through his disguise; the two Emmaus-bound disciples, before they recognise Jesus amongst them, must first learn truly to recognise him as the Messiah; Peter, James, and John must first be dazzled by the glory of Christ, before recognising him as their Lord, the Son of God. The same holds true for the couching of mysteries in parabolic form: indeed, the coordination of the vertical rows of panels and roundels, each topped by an enigma from the vita Christi, followed by a pendant parable and its disclosed content, demonstrates that the parabolic strategy of concealment and disclosure recapitulates verbally and visually the enigmatic enactment of that same strategy by Christ himself at key moments of his life. In recognizing this crucial connection between enigmata and parabolae, the reader-viewer of David’s emblem discovers that s/he is like the Magdalene when s/he decodes the parable of the prodigal son, like Cleophas and his friend when s/he decodes the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, and like Peter, James, and John when s/he decodes the parable of the marriage feast. In all cases, engaging with the parabolic enigma allows for a fuller encounter with the image of Christ to be discerned through meditation on John 20:14–17, Luke 24:13–27, and Matthew 17:1–6, Mark 9:2–7, and Luke 9:28–35.

32  Cf. Matthew 17:9–13: failing to understand that Christ is the Son of man who shall be raised from the dead, the disciples ask, ‘Why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come’? Also cf. Mark 9:6 and Luke 9:33, which refer to Peter’s bafflement: ‘And as the men were parting from him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is well that we are here; let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah” – not knowing what he said’.

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figure 1.7 Theodoor Galle, Emblem 10: “Speculum exemplar” (Mirror of Example), from Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610), 8vo By courtesy of The Newberry Library

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Decoding parables, in other words, encodes an affirmation of Christ’s strategy of teaching the mysteries of faith by himself bodying them forth as enigmata. I have been making this case through a close reading of figure 11, but it behooves us to examine how David formulates these same thoughts in his commentary, which anatomises the process of elucidating mysteria-laden images, in particular enigmata and parabolae. How are such images legibly to be constituted and read? David begins by returning briefly to the subject of chapter 10, “Speculum exemplare” (“Mirror of Example”): contrary to the speculum aenigmaticum, the speculum exemplare is characterised by its pellucid imagery, its clarity of utterance [Fig. 1.7]. When viewing the exemplary images of Christ and the Virgin, and of their fervent imitators, the saints, we must consider how in kind and degree they lived in mirror-relation to God, and accordingly we must endeavour specularly to effect what they effected, by imitating their virtues. David cites “Sermo 12” of Leo the Great’s De ieiunio decimi mensis I: If in faith and wisdom, dearly beloved, we were to understand the fundament of our creation, we would find that man was formed in the image of God for this reason: that he might be an imitator of his author; and this is the dignity of our race: that the image of divinity should shine in us as in a mirror. Before which assuredly the grace of the Saviour renews us daily, whilst what fell in the first Adam, is raised up in the second. Therefore let us love God, since he was the first to love us. And so, God in loving us, renews us in his image: and in order that the form of his goodness be found in us, he gives us to effect what he has effected.33 The mirror of example thus urges viewers to convert themselves into mirror images of their objects of imitation, on the model of the male and female votaries in figure 10: he prays in imitation of Christ who is shown praying, making an offertory of his cross and his wounded right hand; similarly, the woman prays before the Virgin, who folds her hands in intercessory prayer before Christ. This imitative chain is fairly straightforward; more complex 33  David, Duodecim specula 131–132: ‘Si fideliter, dilectissimi, atque sapienter creationis nostrae intelligamus exordium; inveniemus, hominem ideo ad imaginem Dei conditum, ut imitator sui esset auctoris: et hanc esse nostri generis dignitatem, si in nobis, quasi in quodam speculo, divinitatis forma resplendeat. Ad quam quotidie nos utique reparat gratia Salvatoris: dum quod cecidit in Adam primo, erigitur in secundo. Nos ergo diligamus Deum, quoniam ipse prior dilexit nos. Diligendo itaque nos Deus, ad imaginem suam nos reparat: et ut in nobis formam suae bonitatis inveniat, dat, ut ipsi quoque quod operatur operemur’. Cf. Leonis Magni sermones, ed. Congregatio de Propaganda Fidei (Rome: 1899) 34–35.

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is this mirror’s perspectival optics. In any mirror, as David explains, one’s distance from the surface determines the size of one’s reflected image; the image of a distant person will be smaller than that of one nearer. In striving to imitate saintly virtue or, better, to approach it, one must keep in mind the great distance that separates humankind from the saints in heaven. Seen from this perspective, our self-image will appear small when compared to images of the saints, for they are as close to the mirror of Christ’s example as we, howsoever hard we try, are far. To reconcile this optical anomaly – the distortion in scale between the exemplary images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints on the one side, and our self-image on the other – requires an imaginative shift in vantage point: viewing the saints as if from their perspective, seeing their example writ large, compels us to see ourselves writ small, as if from a heavenly height, far distant from the terrestial world: ‘Wherefore on earth meditating the celestial abode, as if reborn in heaven, nay rather, in a certain manner residing there, we ought to make light of the earth and all worldly things, despising them: thus raised above ourselves in kind and works, in our own eyes also we ought to be contemptible, as if seen from on high’. David invokes Paul to exemplify this double perspective; writ large as a mirror of Christ, he is also writ small as a mirror of humility. David is referring to 1 Corinthians 4:6 & 4:16: ‘But these things, brethren, I have in a figure transferred to myself and to Apollo, for your sakes, that in us you may learn that one be not puffed up against the other for another, above that which is written. […] Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ’. If images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints are seen as mirrors, and one labours earnestly to bring one’s miniscule self-image into alignment with theirs, then by a kind of mimetic osmosis, their image and one’s own will gradually appear to coalesce. David cites the example of the empress Theodora, taken from the Triekontaphyllon of Johannes Curopolita: accused of iconophilia by Denderis, the emperor Theophilus’s court jester, the clever empress claimed that he had seen her and her ladies gazing at mirrors, and mistakenly taken the mirror-images for icons. David describes this falsehood as true in the sense that holy icons are specula exemplaria, and as such, to be construed aspirationally as mirrors of ourselves.34 And so they are, he concludes, averring that they can even increase the sanctity of saintly viewers, who are inspired to transform themselves in the image of the good example viewed. In figure 10, Saint Francis (F.) is adduced as one such exemplary mise en abyme: in giving his cloak to a 34  David, Duodecim specula 138: ‘[…] specula esse dixit, in quibus faciem ipsius et ancillarum Denderis conspicatus, imagines esse existimavit: et ita verum dicens, et Imperatoris elusit scrutinium, et Denderis delationem’.

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beggar, he follows the example of a sheep at its shearing (F. bis), its coat given for another’s benefit, and he thus becomes a mirror-image of Saint Martin of Tours (G.), who divided his mantle and gave half to a poor man. Francis, who mirrors the two types of shearing, becomes a mirror-image par excellence for the emblem’s reader-viewer.35 The clarity of the speculum exemplare’s mimetic chain of virtue establishes a fitting contrast to the speculum aenigmaticum of chapter 11, which opens by revisiting the mirror of example, viewing it through the obscure filter of an enigmatic lens. David invites the reader-viewer to convert the examples of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints into enigmata by finding their Old Testament types, and discerning how they implicity (and obscurely) nest therein as antitypes. Typology, on this account, is a way of ‘enigmatizing’ the specular exemplum, so that it is instead seen through a mirror, darkly: […] and so, the splendid examples of the men and women [of the New Testament] excel by a long interval the exempla [of the Old]. For how […] ought we worthily to describe or admire the splendour of extraordinary chastity in the virgin saints, both male and female, of the New Testament. Is that not indeed an immaculate mirror? Likewise, by what faculty of speech ought we to attain to the unvanquished fortitude of the holy martyrs?36 For a specific example of this usage, as applied to all Christian militants who fight under the banner of the Holy Name, David offers 1 Macchabees 6:30, ‘Now when the sun shone upon the shields of gold, and of brass, the mountains glittered therewith, and they shone like lamps of fire’, and Canticle 4:4, ‘Thy neck is 35  The anecdote about Francis and the sheep is a conflation of various passages from Thomas of Celano’s Life of St. Francis, especially 9:22, in which the saint follows Christ’s disciples in contenting himself with one tunic, and 28:77: ‘But among all kinds of animals he loved little lambs with a special love […] because the humility of our Lord Jesus Christ is, in Holy Scripture, most frequently and aptly illustrated by the simile of a lamb. So too especially he would embrace most fondly and behold most gladly all those things wherein he found some allegorical similitude of the Son of God’. See the online edition of Cameron M.L., The Inquiring Pilgrim’s Guide to Assisi, trans. A. G. Ferrers Howell (London: 1926), retrieved from www.indiana.edu/~dmdhist/francis.htm (17 February 2019). 36  David, Duodecim specula 144–145: ‘Iam autem, quemadmodum vetus illud novi Testamenti tantummodo umbra fuit: ita et virorum et mulierum praeclara specimina istius, longo intervallo prioris exempla exsuperant. Quonam enim modo […] candorem eximiae castitatis, in novi Testamenti sanctis utriusque sexus virginibus digne describamus, aut admiremur? Nonne speculum immaculatum est etiam illud? Qua item facultate dicendi fortitudinem illam invictam sanctorum Martyrum assequamur’?

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as the tower of David, which is built with bulwarks: a thousand bucklers hang upon it, all the armour of valiant men’. As many examples of virtue shine forth in the saints, as golden bucklers hung from the tower of David, and as saints follow the example of fellow saints, reflecting their radiance, so the mountains shone with the glancing lights reflected from the shields of King Antiochus’s army. The enigmatic relation between the Old and New Testaments turns on an analogy that itself hinges on the dual tertium comparationis of trophies and reflected light. The analogy enhances the metaphorical image of shining virtue by recuperating it from a prior image of light-reflective things indexically linked to militancy and warfare. Similarly, the enigma is a dark, riddling image that brings another image to light, once the relational riddle is solved. This mode of image-making takes the representational properties of the mirror and displaces them onto the obscurantism of the enigma, insisting that the latter likewise be read as an analogical image tethered to a discoverable referent. David’s succinct formulation states: But even if the two – the mirror and the enigma – are indeed different (for in a mirror, the similitude of the thing giving light is open and clear, as Saint Thomas points out, but in the enigma, [the similitude] is dark and obscure), still we here mutually conjoin those two and combine them into one, so that they constitute an enigmatic mirror (‘speculum aenigmaticum’); and what we arrive at by use [of such a mirror], let us call speculation and enigmatic vision.37 He then adds, with reference to 1 Corithians 13:12, that seeing speculatively, via enigmatic vision, is to glimpse essential qualities – above all, the divine essence – by means of created things and their images: And when the apostle [i.e., Paul] says tunc, namely, that we shall see face to face, he signifies by a metaphorical locution that we shall see that selfsame essence of God, which now we know only through created things, and through [their] likenesses, mirror image[s], and enigmata.

37  Ibid. 147: ‘Tametsi autem duo et quidem diversa sint, speculum et aenigma (quia in speculo similitudo relucentis est clara et aperta, quemadmodum D. Thomas distinguit, in aenigmate vero obscura et occulta) hic tamen illa duo ita sibi invicem coaptamus et in unum coniungimus, ut speculum aenigmaticum simul efficiant; quodque per illud ipso usu consequimur, speculationem ac visionem aenigmaticam appellemus’.

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For when we see someone with his own face, then we see him as he is in truth, whom formerly we discerned only through his similitude in a mirror.38 David states that in order properly to parse specular enigmata, one must use them as one would an astrolabe. He thereby concretises speculation itself, encapsulating it in the enigmatic image of a material instrument. Moreover, his description of how the astrolabe is used functions as an operative allegory of speculation and enigmatic vision: But now, yet another genus of mirror places itself before us: wherewith, by a certain method of speculation, if we have rightly used that mirror and held it fixed in the manner of an astrolabe, then the more arcane the matters we meditate, the more a thorough investigation [of them] shall assist us; for perspective avails much here.39 David is analogizing the enigma to an astrolabe’s mater, the base plate that must be fixed in position with its vertical edge pointed toward the target to be surveyed; the instrument’s moveable parts – the rete, rule, alidade, and embedded plates – are then aligned with the target, and the astrolabe’s scales consulted to measure time, declination, and altitude, amongst other coordinates. In this ingenious comparison, the mater anchors the process of speculation, its markings analogous to the images of created things; as the astronomer’s position relative to the heavens is gauged from the base plate, so the speculans’s relation to heavenly truth is ascertained from penetrative interpretation of the enigma. And as the astrolabe’s movable appendages, all hinged to the mater, are directed toward the sun, stars, and other celestial bodies, so the enigmatic images direct one’s thoughts toward the mysteria and arcana that these enigmata purport to represent. The tool’s intricacy, and the challenge of reading it correctly, stand for the exacting nature of speculative, enigmatic viewing.

38  Ibid.: ‘Cumque Apostolus dicit, tunc, hoc est, in patria caelesti, nos visuros facie ad faciem: significat metaphorica locutione, nos visuros ipsam Dei essentiam, quam iam solummodo per creaturas, simulacra, speculum, perque aenigmata cognoscimus. Sicut, quando aliquem in propria facie videmus; tunc videmus eum reipsa sicuti est, quem antea solum per ipsius similitudinem in speculo cernebamus’. 39  Ibid. 146: ‘Sed nunc aliud adhuc speculi genus se nobis obtendit: quo, certa quadam ratione speculandi, magis ad arcana quae quaerimus, rimando iuvabimur; si tamen illo rite fuerimus usi, fixumque illud, astrolabij more, tenuerimus: nam perspectiva hic multum valet’.

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Why did Christ sometimes deploy enigmatic specula – anfractuous images that mirror divine truths, not directly but circuitously, even tortuously – both to represent himself and to purvey crucial points of doctrine? David answers, with respect to the enigmata embodied by Christ and pictured in C., D., and E., that the brilliance and splendour of his divinity can be hinted at, but its full force must be shielded from human eyes, at least in this life: ‘In this mortal body, no sage, no saint, no prophet could or can see him as he is: but in his immortal body, he shall be considered worthy. And so, he is seen here: but as it pleases him to be seen, and not as he is’.40 In his Godhead, he is like the sun, which can be seen only by way of the things it illuminates – air, a mountain, a wall. Similarly, God appears to Jacob in Genesis 32:24, ‘[…] and behold a man wrestled with him till morning’, in the doubly mediated form of an angel who looks like a man; when Jacob declares, in Genesis 32:20, ‘I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved’, he responds to the Lord’s occulted presence by speaking enigmatically. His vision of God, states David, ‘is nothing if not imaginary’ (‘visio illa non fuit nisi imaginaria’), for it was the image of God that appeared to him (‘per imaginem […] in qua Deus ei apparebat’), in the ‘figure of the angel or, rather, of the man wrestling with him’ (‘per imaginem in angeli figura, seu potius hominis secum colluctantis’). Jacob is praising the excellence of visionary discernment when he claims to have seen God ‘facie ad faciem’, but he is not professing to have seen him in essence (‘per essentiam’), for to have made this latter claim would be a contravention of 1 John 3:2: ‘[…] and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know, that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him: because we shall see him as he is’.41 Characteristic of all specular enigmata is their complex modus operandi: they reveal and at the same time conceal, or, better, reveal by concealing. In the garden, Christ ‘wished not to be seen, and wished to be seen’ by the Magdalene, as a way of testing and sharpening her power of discernment: he thus appeared as he did, in the guise of an enigmatic mirror, to make evident the difference between sight and insight, and to reveal that his body having been raised, he could now be known in part but not wholly, for he was fully imbued with divinity. David points to the corollary pun on ‘tollere’ that distills the enigmatic usage of Christ. When the Magdalene inquires, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away’ (‘sustulisti’), the false image she conjures of Jesus’s purloined 40  Ibid. 148: ‘Non sapiens, non sanctus, non propheta, videre illum sicuti est, potest, aut potuit, in corpore hoc mortali: poterit autem in immortali, qui dignus habebitur. Itaque, videtur et hic: sed sicut videtur et placet ipsi; et non sicuti est’. David is citing “Sermo XXXI” of Saint Bernard’s In cantica canticorum; see Mabillon J. (ed.), Sancti Bernardi Abbatis Clarae-Vallensis opera omnia […] volumen primum (Paris: 1839) 2863. 41  David, Duodecim specula 148.

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body contains, unbeknownst to her, the true image of his Resurrection. This is because ‘tollere’ signifies both ‘to take up’ and ‘to take away’: ‘And truly, the Lord had spirited himself away when he rose from the tomb, and transported himself to the garden, and set and planted himself there where he now was: but all this was enigmatic to the Magdalene, until the word “Maria” having been adduced, and her heart touched inwardly by love of him, he wished to be known’.42 When the disciples realise, at the breaking of the bread, that their travelling companion on the road to Emmaus is the risen Christ, the person whom they think they recognise is, even at the moment of his disappearance, the mere image of Jesus. He retains the appearance of flesh, remains in this sense an enigmatic mirror, because his true nature cannot be divulged to mortal eyes: ‘Nor for them was that enigma solved, if not when they knew him in the breaking of the bread: for even then, they did not see him as he is, but as he appeared to these mortal men with whom he was speaking’.43 The identity of the enigmatic stranger with whom they have been conversing is now unveiled, but only partly, since the mystery of the Resurrection is beyond comprehension: if he whom inwardly they knew as a prophet, not as God, presented himself to them outwardly as a foreigner, an unknown traveller, this was because his true nature was truly beyond their ken; but having made them aware of their ignorance, and being now known for who he is – the Christ – he remains still a mere image, vestigially a speculum aenigmaticum – for no mortal eyes can truly see God.44 The incapacity of the three apostles who witnessed the Transfiguration, their abject fear, confusion, and incomprehension, causes them to see the majesty of the Lord’s glory only in part, ‘per modum speculi aenigmatici’, as if that glory were in some measure still shadowed.45 David compares this effect of shadowing to the bride’s call to her beloved in Canticle 1:6, where she entreats him to show himself: since the light of her heavenly bridegroom would be too 42  Ibid. 149: ‘Sustulerat eum vere quando de monumento surrexerat, seque in hortum transtulerat, ibique posuerat et statuerat, ubi iam tunc erat: sed erat Magdalenae totum hoc aenigmaticum; donec prolato Mariae vocabulo, tactoque corde eius amore intrinsecus, se agnosci volebat’. 43  Ibid.: ‘Neque aenigma illud ipsis solutum fuit, nisi quando illum in fractione panis agnoverunt: neque tunc tamen eum viderunt sicuti est, sed sicut in humanis apparuit illis, quibuscum fuerat conversatus’. 44  Ibid.: ‘Nonne similiter in aenigmate duobus discipulis euntibus in Emmaus apparuit; quando tamquam viatorem, externum, ac peregrinum viderunt foris, qui vere ipsis peregrinus erat intus’? 45  Ibid.: ‘[…] tamen ob speculatorum imbecillitatem, qui tantae visionis capaces non erant, aenigma illis per speculum hoc, tametsi praefulgidum, fuit exhibitum’.

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bright were he seen as he is and from close up, she visualises him from afar, in the form of a humble shepherd, asking that he pasture his flocks where she, a shepherdess of sorts, may eventually find them.46 Peter, James, and John are like the bride in that they behold their beloved, Christ, from a double vantage point: atop the mountain, they are close at hand, and yet they see him as if from afar, for in his humanity he stands beside them, but in his divinity is too distant to descry. The enigmatic image, as purveyed by Christ, partakes of a dual optical effect reminiscent of the speculum exemplare’s twofold view, but with this difference: whereas the exemplary mirror’s two views are somehow reconciled, the enigmatic mirror’s dual perspectives operate distinctly if simultaneously. The spatial metaphor of the two vantage points is David’s way of insisting on the speculum aenigmaticum’s peculiar optics: it puts forward a likeness of Christ, the status of which as image is foregrounded in order to drive home the point that howsoever close and clear that image seems, it in fact forestalls, in this sense keeps at a distance, the true vision of Christ that is the singular reward of the saved: ‘Inasmuch as the Word, the bridegroom, frequently appears to devout minds; but not in a single likeness. How so? Surely because he is not yet seen as he is. But as someone is more visible, the closer s/he is, so the closer someone is, the more s/he is set in a clear light’.47 What is visible, however, to the extent that it is recognizably a likeness of Christ – in the form of a gardener, a pilgrim, or a patriarch or prophet – will also be a dissimilitude of Christ (‘aliqua dissimilitudine’), unlike him in that it confounds his essential divinity with an imitative image. Likenesses that advert to Christ without truly representing him are enigmata: through them, in place of actually seeing him, one is enabled to see ‘with respect of him’ (‘de ipso vides, sed non ipsum’). David analogises the viewer of such likenesses to the blind man of Bethsaida, in Mark 8:22–26, whom he conflates with the man born blind, in John 9:32–33. The Markan protagonist regains his vision gradually and effortfully, only after training his eyes on unfamiliar sights, which he simultaneously registers as like yet unlike: And taking the blind man by the hand, he led him out of the town; and spitting upon his eyes, laying his hands on him, he asked him if he saw

46  David adapts Bernard’s exegesis of Canticle 1:6 in “Sermo XXXI” of In cantica canticorum; cf. Mabillon (ed.), Sancti Bernardi […] opera omnia 2862. 47  David, Duodecim specula 150: ‘Studiosis siquidem mentibus Verbum sponsus frequenter apparet; et non sub una specie. Quid ita? Profecto, quia nondum videtur sicuti est. Quo autem quis clarior, eo vicinior: et quo vicinior illi aliquis sit, eo magis illuminatur’.

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anything. And looking up, he said: I see men as it were trees, walking. After that again he laid his hands upon his eyes, and he began to see […]. Consciousness of one’s spiritual blindness, implies David, is the crucible from out of which the likeness of Christ is forged; since any image, by dint of its being an image, purports to visualize Christ but withholds from sight his true nature, it jointly operates as a similitude and a dissimilitude of him. On the model of the blind man, the votary, struggling meditatively to discern the Lord’s image, must recognize that any likeness of Christ will be both like and unlike him. It perforce represents him as if in the guise of something other than himself, obscuring his divine essence; the lineaments of that divinity will become clearer only by degrees, never wholly, and only after a considerable expenditure of meditative effort – the sort of effort required to read David’s emblem: And yet, to become known is to be most intelligible: at that time, in the fatherland, when to whosoever is present to him, to see him as he appears is no different from [seeing his] being unconfounded by any dissimilitude. But, that is for then. For now, this number and variety of images, these species of created things and various enigmas which he himself sets before our eyes (‘nobis ab ipso propositis’), what are they if not rays of deity, showing how things truly are, and from whom; and yet not defining straightway what he is. And so, you see with respect of him, not him himself: on no other condition, as I have said, than through a mirror by way of enigma (‘per speculum in aenigmate’).48 David construes these ray-like manifestations as self-images of Christ projected onto the speculum aenigmaticum; they are cast by him in the way the sun lights the surface of a mirror, ensuring the condition of visibility. These specular images bring his divine being to the threshold of consciousness, even while marking the point beyond which that being cannot be known. They make apparent both what Christ wishes to disclose about himself, and what he wishes to withhold, and accordingly, these images, since they are designed jointly to reveal and conceal, resist the full parsing of their enigmatic content. 48  Ibid. 150: ‘Esse autem clarissimum, pervenisse est: tuncque in patria, ei praesentibus, non aliud est videre sicuti est, quam esse sicuti est, et aliqua dissimilitudine non confundi. Sed, id tunc. Interim vero, tanta haec formarum varietas, atque numerositas, species in rebus conditis, et certis aenigmatis, nobis ab ipso propositis, quid nisi quidam sunt radij deitatis, monstrantes quidem, quod vere sit, a quo sunt; non tamen quid sit prorsus definientes? Itaque, de ipso vides, sed non ipsum: nisi, ut dixi, per speculum in aenigmate’.

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At this point, David changes tack: he turns from the images Christ performatively embodies, to the images he conveyed in parabolic form. Their primary function was to prompt reflection on the ‘desirable things of heaven’ and on ‘eternal benefits’ (‘caeli desiderabilia atque aeterna bona’), by occulting them just enough to invite investigation of what was being hidden (‘ut tamen ad investigandum occultanto invitet’).49 David compares the process of occultation to a loving mother’s efforts to stir a child’s appetite by wrapping the delicacies she proffers: by hinting at what is concealed, she prompts the child more readily to secure what must needs be uncovered. Christ is a loving practitioner of this art of inflaming his followers’ appetite for the doctrine and precepts he wishes them to consume (‘ad promtius agendum quod opus est, tali arte inflammet’).50 The term ‘arte’ emphasises that Christ is a master image-maker whose artistry in this regard is nonpareil. Parables are stimuli in the manner of Christ’s words to the woman of Samaria, in John 4:10–15: ‘If thou didst know the gift of God, and who he is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou perhaps wouldst have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water’. She then asks him whether the water he describes is greater than that from the well provided by Jacob for the benefit of himself, his children, and his cattle. In answer, Jesus takes up the imagery of Jacob’s well, adapting it parabolically, so that it becomes an allegory of the ‘fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting’. Inspired by these tantalizing images, the woman takes them up, though still at the literal level, and entreats, ‘Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come hither to draw’. For that reason, Jesus further draws her out, augmenting her sense of the lifegiving water he offers to bestow. In fact, David is citing the story of the Samarian woman as if it were a parable: he rehearses it to inculcate the verity that Christ, who leaves no one to languish in utter darkness, will assuredly assist anyone who endeavours earnestly to apprehend the truths he has so tantalizingly occulted. So that [Christ] never spoke to the crowds without parables. And even if he concealed pearls and celestial treasure from the unworthy beneath such a veil, he yet through clear explanation enlightened simple persons striving to show themselves worthy, and drawn by the gracious veil of parables to the salutary revelation of mysteries. And so, as if in a mirror, and in parabolic enigma, Jesus our Lord and master deigned agreeably, in a lovely and admirable manner, to make manifest the secrets of the 49  Ibid. 150–151. The phrase ‘aeterna bona’ connotes heavensent benefits and also heavenly goods, in the sense of the morally good things heaven gives us to possess and preserve. 50  Ibid. 151.

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heavenly kingdom which he promised to those living amongst terrestrial things.51 No enigma entirely resists unfolding, and it is Jesus himself who reveals the method by which the parabolic words and visual likenesses set before human eyes can be unveiled (‘talibus namque verborum ac similitudinum involucris ob oculos illus posuit’).52 To the question, what is this method, David demonstrates that the answer lies in visual analogy and in analogical iteration. Take the sequence of related parables on the theme of divine mercy, specifically, the joy felt by God’s servants, the angels in heaven, at the conversion of any penitent sinner (G.). In Luke 15:3–10, Christ compares the man who rejoices more in the one lost sheep he has found than in his other ninety-nine sheep, to the woman who rejoices more in the recovery of a single lost groat than in the ninety-nine she still possesses. Having analogised the two parables, he then supplies a third parabolic analogy that is clearer still (‘lucidius’). Its specular clarity rests in the more detailed and affective image it puts forth, as if in a spotless mirror, for the purpose of contemplative viewing (‘velut in speculo, contemplandum proponit’): ‘Since to such a degree he exposes to view the person of the father in place of and for an image of himself rejoicing, exulting, and transported by joy, and saying: Bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; because this my son was dead, and is come to life again, was lost, and is found’.53 The lucidity of the parable of the prodigal son lies in the potential richness of the tertium comparationis – the core analogy – that inspires and licenses a greater interpretative investment on the part of the parable’s audience. For instance, 51  Ibid.: ‘Adeo ut aliquando sine parabolis non loqueretur ad turbas. Et tametsi indignis eiusmodi velo margaritas thesaurumque caelestem occultabat: simpliciores tamen ac sese dignos exhibere conantes, ad salutarem mysteriorum revelationem tam gratioso velamento parabolarum allectos, dilucida explicatione illustrabat. Itaque, quasi per speculum, et in aenigmate parabolico, dignatus est Jesus, magister, ac dominus noster, Regni caelestis secreta, quae suis promisit, amabili et admirabili modo, terrena adhuc inhabitantibus congruo manifestare’. 52  Ibid. 152. David’s reading of Matthew 13:10–17 (cf. Mark 4:10–13 and Luke 8:9–10), in which Jesus explains that he speaks in parables to fulfill Isaiah 6:9, ‘lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted’, thus emphasizes that parables bear witness to the mercy of Christ: he goads the people into exercising their unpractised eyes, ears, and heart, and thereby assists them to be converted. 53  David, Duodecim specula 152: ‘Quando patris personam sic vice ac typo suimet inducit gaudentem, exultantem, ac prae laetitia gestientem, dicentemque: Adducite vitulum saginatum, et occidit: et manducemus, et epulemur: quia hic filius meus mortuus erat, et revixit; perierat, et inventus est’.

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citing “Liber septimus” of Saint Ambrose’s Expositio in Lucam, he propounds the collateral analogy between the father’s feast and God the Father’s food: the father banquets his son, because the salvation of sinners is the Father’s nourishment.54 And a further analogy nests in this one: the glad father embodies the truth that the redemption of sin is the Father’s joy. Analogical density is a desirable feature of the parabolic enigma, as David signals by layering a fourth parable onto the previous three, this time taken from Genesis 22:1–14, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, which is read inventively as a type for the parable of the prodigal son. Far more enigmatic than the other three parables, the story is not at first glance parabolic: its exegetical relation to Luke 15:11–32 is what identifies it as a parable staged by God himself, in anticipation of the story later to be voiced by Christ; but finding this relation requires time, energy, and interpretative skill. First, the sacrifice of Isaac must be designated, somewhat surprisingly, a parable; second, having identified it as such, the reader-viewer must work through the new-found enigma, asking how it anticipates the parable of the prodigal son. In what manner is the sacrifice of Isaac, famously a type for the sacrifice of Christ, also a type for the parable of the father’s merciful joy, which in turn is a simile of angelic joy? Having been construed parabolically, how does the earlier story function both in analogy to the later one, and and as an allegory of it – a parabolic allegory of a parabolic allegory, in other words? The analogical and allegorical doubling gives added weight and density to the process of enigmatic unravelling that this speculum aenigmaticum calls forth. Abraham is like the father of the prodigal son who was reunited with his father, because the partriarch’s sole son Isaac, pledged as a sacrifice, was instead returned to him by the Lord, in Genesis 22:12. The return of Isaac is a kind of conversio (turning round, inversion, alteration), and accordingly, it runs parallel to the conversion of the prodigal son in two senses – his penitential turn and his return to his father’s househould. The play on ‘conversio’ invites a deeper excavation of the analogical enigma, for it can be thought to ‘turn’ not just on the theme of return, but also on that of faith as a spiritual turn toward God. Seen in this light, Abraham becomes an enigma of the prodigal son, for as he turned away from worldy things and turned back to his father, so Abraham, obedient and faithful to the will of God, turned away from his father’s house and turned whither God directed, to Canaan; this occurs in Genesis 12:1, which provides the situational context for the events narrated in Genesis 22: ‘Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father’s house, and 54  Ibid. 152. Cf. Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis episcopi opera omnia, juxta editionem monachorum S. Benedicti. Tomus tertius (Paris: 1836) 81.

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come into the land which I shall shew thee’. Or, as Paul states in Hebrews 11:8: ‘By faith he that is called Abraham, obeyed to go out into a place which he was to receive for an inheritance, and he went out, not knowing whither he went’. The corollary theme of inheritance is another submerged link between the stories of Abraham and the prodigal son, and so, too, both protagonists are further united by the theme of wandering (implicit in the term ‘prodigal’), for both journeyed far from home. Moreover, as Abraham’s (more accurately, Abram’s) turn toward God, epitomised by his journey to Canaan, justified him in the Lord’s eyes, according to Genesis 15:6, ‘Abram believed God, and it was reputed to him unto justice’, so the prodigal son’s journey home justifies him in his father’s eyes, as Luke 15:25 asseverates, ‘Because this my son was dead, and is come to life again’. And finally, the parabolic enigma comprises a sacramental, indeed eucharistic analogy: in offering his son to attest his irrefragable faith, his boundless trust in God, Abraham is converted into the close image of the Father who offers his Son on behalf of all humankind. These concentric rings of analogy, in their mutual relation, call up the image of mutually reflective mirrors in which various kinds and degrees of image having to do with paternal joy, with ‘conversio’, and with sacrifice, are repeatedly refracted. That the play of analogy operates in and through images is made all the more apparent by David’s synoptic remark: ‘By means of this enigmatic mirror, we, existing on earth, see with the eyes of the mind (‘oculis mentis’) the joy and exultation of the angels in heaven: which serves us for a great consolation until we enter into the joy of the Lord’.55 Furthermore, he adds that the speculative beholding of these enigmata, and the interpretative effort they adjure, lead us to view such images in a new light – from a ‘spiritual perspective’ (‘spiritalis haec […] perspectiva’) – that propagates our ‘love of gazing at celestial things’.56 The parable of the wise and foolish virgins (H.), proves, in David’s parsing of its hidden meaning, to be an analogue of the process of speculation he is at pains to unfold throughout chapter 11. He compares the brides’ fervent desire lovingly to behold their bridegroom, and to be united with him, to the votary’s earnest desire to descry the presence of Christ in the parable, and, through penetration of the parable’s veiled allegory, to bask in a clear sense of his love and savour a joyful foretaste of it. The brides’ love is taken for an allegory of the 55  David, Duodecim specula 153: ‘Hoc igitur speculo aenigmatico mediante, videmus oculis mentis, existentes in terris, gaudium et exultationem angelorum in caelis: quod ingentis solatij loco nobis servit, donec et nos in gaudium domini introeamus’. 56  Ibid.: ‘Sed, ad aliam eiusmodi speculationem edisserendam accingere: nam spiritalis haec, quantum sentio, perspectiva, mirifice in amorem visendi caelestia nos inducit’.

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speculans’s burning desire both to enunciate and elucidate the enigmata with which s/he engages: ‘What wonder is it, o [my] soul, that those things which are taken from the fire that our bridegroom himself came from heaven to install on earth, nay rather, to ingraft into the very pith of our bones, miraculously inflame us’. The reference to fire is an allusion to the fiery mysteries that Christ laid bare en route to Emmaus, in Luke 24:32: ‘Was not our heart burning within us, whilst he spoke in the way, and opened to us the scriptures’. On this account, the fire that Jesus instills is the ‘love of gazing at celestial things’, of making sense of divine mysteries, which the speculum aenigmaticum stimulates. David layers analogy onto analogy: as the wise virgins rejoice in the arrival of the bridegroom, so the saved shall exult to share in the heavenly nuptials of Mary and Jesus; and as they exult, so the speculantes, meditating the parable’s imagery, shall rejoice to have solved the riddle the enigma ensconces. Solving the riddle, piercing the multilayered veil of analogy, and thereby clarifying the mirror’s enigmatic surface, is tantamount to visualizing oneself amongst the bridal elect, in the company of the heavenly hosts. Speculation, then, is both a cognitive and an affective exercise that enables the speculans to stand proxy for the parabolic protagonist: in unveiling the true nature of that protagonist, the speculans uncovers a true image of her/his relation to Christ. […] in which [parable], through the five prudent [virgins] who, coming to meet the approaching bridegroom with lamps, entered into marriage with him, one sees clearly (‘non obscure’), yet still in an enigmatic mirror, how great is the exultation of the citizens of heaven in seeing the virgin mother of god at the nuptials of the Lamb […]: and [in seeing] the chorus of prudent virgins and other saints, and the host of angels, partaking in the ineffable joy and holy companionship of all who rejoice. Is it not for you, o my soul, that the mind places this before the eyes, as if setting [itself] amidst such desirable joy, whensoever you either hear or reflect upon that joyful entry of the five virgins into heaven. Does this speculation not carry interior sight beyond the clouds, and do you not appear to yourself to be present with the choirs revelling in the celestial Jerusalem?57 57  Ibid.: ‘[…] in qua per quinque prudentes, quae venienti sponso cum lampadibus occurrentes, intraverunt cum eo ad nuptias; non obscure, quasi per speculum tamen et in aenigmate, videre est, quanta sit exultatio civium supernorum, dum in loco nuptiarum caelestium Agni, vident Deiparam virginem sponsam Agni, deliciis affluentem, innixam super dilectum suum: et chorum prudentium virginum, ceterorumque Sanctorum, et Angelorum exercitum, cum ineffabili iubilo, tam sancto ac latantium omnium contubernio assistentem. Nonne tibi, o anima mea, mens istud ob oculos ponit, et quasi in

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The same holds true for David’s reading of the parable of the marriage feast (K.): the king’s banquet is the nuptial celebration – the eucharistic meal – enjoyed by all faithful members of the Church militant (‘nuptiale convivium […] quo fideles in Ecclesia militante fruuntur’); as such, it is a sacramental image of the degree to which the kingdom of heaven can be experienced on earth (‘cum illa quoque sit regnum caelorum in terris’); and by the commonality of the mysteries of heaven and of the sacrament, it can be taken for an image, ‘as far as the likeness permits’, of that celestial joy to be experienced in heaven (‘speciali mysterij communicatione etiam parabolam hanc caelesti gaudio, quantum permittit similitudo, coaptamus’).58 The term ‘communicatio’ refers to a rhetorical figure of speech that allows the hearers to take part in the argument or inquiry. Here it applies to the capacity of speculation to generate an affective, participatory image of heavenly joy. The layers of analogy that come to light when the parable is properly parsed, and their many correspondences and points of intersection, have the power gradually to transport the mind’s eye from the Church on earth to the kingdom of heaven. David uses a second term, ‘obsequium’ (tractability), complementary to ‘communicatio’, to describe the synthetic movement from analogical image to analogical image: ‘[…] by the tractability of [contemplation of the parable and enigmatic mirror] let us convey the mind’s eye inwardly to the joy and splendor of the celestial Jerusalem’.59 The king’s visitation of the wedding banquet, in Luke 12:11, becomes an image of the way in which, through speculation, we come to discern, in this sense to be visited by, the image of Christ, Lord of the feast, whose presence causes our spirits to exult as if we ourselves were the guests invited to sit at the king’s table.60 David’s reference to Christ’s promise, in Luke 12:37, that the Lord shall minister to his guests, recalls how this same scriptural passage avows that it is the servants whom the Lord finds ‘watching for him’ who shall be thus served.61 medio tam desiderabilis gaudij statuit; quandocumque iucundum illum quinque virginum in caelos ingressum vel audis, vel tecum recogitas? Nonne interiorem obtutum trans nubes abripit isthaec speculatio, et choris exultantium in caelesti Ierusalem tibi interesse videris’? 58  Ibid. 155. 59  Ibid.: ‘[…] tertiam parabolam atque aenigmaticum speculum contemplemur: cuius obsequio penitius in felicitatem et splendorem caelestis Jerusalem mentis oculos inferamus’. 60  Ibid. 156: ‘Quinimo, quomodo non hic videamus, exultantibus animis, et fluentibus prae laetitia lacrymis ipsummet Regem, summa cum affectus testificatione, convivis nuptialibus ministrantem’? 61  Ibid.: ‘Sic enim se facturum promisit, quando in alia parabola dixit: Amen dico vobis; praecinget se dominus servorum fidelium, et faciet eos discumbere, et transiens ministrabit illis’.

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(As mentioned above, roundel L. conflates Luke 12:37 and Matthew 22:11.) This promise, and its connection to the parable of the marriage feast that David implies is an illustration of it, follow from the opening admonition, in Luke 12:3, that ‘whatsoever things you have spoken in darkness, shall be published in the light’. Together, these verses licensed David’s meta-discursive reading of the nuptial feasts in Matthew 22 and Luke 12 as linked allegories of speculation, for read in tandem, they imply that Christ shall visit those who, seeking to find him, attempt to cast light on the truths that lie enigmatically concealed in his parables. In closing, David asserts that speculation, defined as the parsing of parabolic enigmata, exemplifies what it means to look in a glass, darkly. But far from presuming that one shall be lost in darkness and succumb to specular obscurity, he interprets this passage as a justification of enigmatic images as instruments that empower discerning viewers, giving them access, partial not full, to divine mysteries. For good measure, he classifies speculative engagement as a species of good works, one of the methods vouchsafed by Christ whereby ‘we may be made proper viewers of [his] glory’.62 The speculans, in the words of 1 Corinthians 2:9, glimpses what the ‘eye has not seen, nor the ear heard, or has entered into the heart of man’, and by doing so, helps to ensure that the vision of God shall truly come to pass. David’s chapter on the speculum aenigmaticum is a remarkably sustained and thoughtful account, as well as a justification, of the complex task of representing mysteria in images. Its specific context is Jesuit image theory and emblematics, and it gives evidence of the close attention paid by the Society’s scholar-ministers to the potentialities of the image, and to the relation between visual and textual hermeneutics. However, the issues he raises, anchored as they are in Scripture and in patristic and scholastic exegesis and theology, would have been relatively familiar to his reader-viewers. His discourse on specular enigmata and proverbs can therefore be appreciated for the visual and verbal skill wherewith he answers the question, ‘Quid est sacramentum’? 3 Essays The essays that follow peruse a wide range of images and texts that purport to represent mysteria and sacramenta, mediating the reader-viewer’s experience 62  Ibid. 157: ‘Sicque hisce speculis uti concede, ut idonei aliquando efficiamur gloriae tuae speculatores’.

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of divine mysteries, and posing various answers to the question ‘Quid est sacramentum’? The essays have been organised under three broad subtopics. Part 1 focuses on the representation of the sacraments. Aden Kumler takes up the curious case of communion wafers that purported to be the corpus Christi, but were in fact unconsecrated hosts or ‘counterfeit’ Eucharists, a theme which recurs in manuals of pastoral instruction, scholastic texts, miracle collections, hagiographic vitae, and canon law. She focuses on the scene of communion in a miniature by the Lehrbüchermeister in the Siebenhirter Hours, dated shortly before 1469, one of eight images painted for the Office of Corpus Christi in the manuscript. Four of the eight images emphasize eucharistic misconduct, with the scene of communion on fol. 158v offering a particularly arresting example because the beholder is confronted by three different communicants who exemplify different modes of eucharistic reception. Kumler argues that the pictured interior states of the three taking communion invest the beholder of the miniature with a kind of moralspiritual x-ray vision; the difficulties attendant on the apperceptive dilemma of the viewer’s inability empirically to judge valid from invalid sacramental participation was a problem that artists, through their overt manipulation of appearances, were uniquely equipped to address. Lee Palmer Wandel reads vestments through the hermeneutics William Durand set forth in his Rationale divinorum officiorum. Durand held that architecture, the altar, textiles, vessels, as well as images are ‘full of signs of the divine and the sacred mysteries’ – that the place as well as all the made objects and sounds were media of divine revelation. Vestments manifested the virtues communicants were to cultivate to receive the sacrament of Communion. They also served as visual memories of biblical narratives which in turn brought scriptural and temporal depth to the movements of the priest in the celebration of the Mass. Vestments visualized the weaving of history and scripture in which the diligent observer discerned signs of divine revelation. One would not traditionally expect to find an article on John Calvin in a volume on sacrament and visual representation. AnnMarie Micikas Bridges, however, shows how critical the visibility and the tangibility of the bread and the wine were to Calvin’s understanding of the sacrament. Bridges places Calvin’s discussion of the Eucharist within his understanding of divine accommodation, that is, God’s choice to make himself both accessible and at least partially knowable through means that human beings can grasp. Bridges argues that Calvin rejected both Lutheran and Catholic doctrines, because both argued against trusting one’s sight to discern divine presence. Bridges thus opens a new reading of Calvin and the importance of the visual to his sacramental theology.

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Wim François draws on the early modern debates surrounding the translation of Ephesians 5:31–31, which Erasmus and other sixteenth-century humanists took to read, ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh’, both to sketch Christological connotations those exegetes accorded the sacrament of marriage and to explore as a mode of visual exegesis Nicolas Poussin’s two paintings of the sacrament of marriage. In applying scriptural exegetical texts to Poussin’s two images, François extends to the sacrament of marriage questions of representation, veiling, and unveiling most often asked in relationship to the sacrament of the Eucharist. So, too, he demonstrates that the second of the two paintings ‘is a theologically precise and spiritually evocative picture’ as well as a visual exploration of parallels between the sacraments and mysteries. Catacombs saints, a new type of whole-body relic whose visual presentation involved a labor-intensive process of crafting fragmented Roman relics into complete skeletons, including wooden replacement bones, custom support structures, visible wounds attesting to their sacrificial deaths, decoration with jewels, and attributes such as chalices of the saint’s own blood, laurel crowns and palm leaves, lie at the center of Noria Litaker’s contribution. Beginning in the 1660s, 398 saints exported from the catacombs were placed in glass shrines, as permanent fixtures either atop or within altars in churches across the duchy of Bavaria. Litaker argues that they were part of a concerted campaign to make the sacrificial nature of the Mass and the real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist visually apparent. The full-body format of presenting catacomb saints highlighted the element of bodily sacrifice, a concept integral to the Tridentine definition of the Mass, and described in graphic detail by preachers of the day. Robert Kendrick examines two oratorio-like musical compositions with libretti by the court poet Nicolo Minato, elaborately staged for the imperial family in Habsburg Vienna during Holy Week in 1670 and 1677, respectively. Known as sepolcri, this genre of oratorio was designed to characterise the complex or, better, mysterious relation between the presence of Christ in the host, reserved on the chapel altar, and the notional presence of his entombed body, housed in a reconstruction of the Holy Sepulchre adjacent to the altar. Whereas Giovanni Felice Sances’s Sette consolationi di Maria Vergine of 1670 views sacramental presence through the lens of the Virgin’s inconsolable grief, the anonymously composed L’Infinità impicciolita of 1677 explores the eleven ways in which the divine infinity of Christ was ‘made small’ during his life through the mystery of the Incarnation. Kendrick points out that both

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works are exceptional, given that sacred theatrical music of the Seicento rarely engaged with explicitly sacramental themes. Part 2 focuses on texts and images that prompt reflection on the representational means whereby Christ and the mysteries of faith were made present for the reader-viewer. The methods of transmission may themselves be characterised as sacramental, in that they were appreciated as instruments uniquely attuned to securing the votary’s intimate relation to Christ. Anna Dlabačková traces the history of incunabular and post-incunabular treatises on the Mass, written in Dutch and mainly published by the Antwerp printer Gerard Leeu. These texts, certain editions of which were illustrated, urge the reader to interpret the liturgy of the Eucharist – the priest’s words, ritual actions, and appurtenances – as allegories of key episodes from the life of Christ that primarily epitomise the mystery of the Passion, but also the collateral mysteries of the Incarnation and the Resurrection. The allegories, surprisingly, center not on the Eucharistic mystery of the praesentia realis, but rather, on the mysteries of the vita Christi discernible by ‘seeing beyond signs’: if properly internalised, the allegorised images of Christ’s life would stir the affective imagination, anchoring the meditative spiritual exercises of devotees, both literate and illiterate, whose awareness of the great Christological mysteries were thereby brought to a higher threshold of visual articulation. Dlabačková probes the sacramental effect of these early printed texts and images that made the mysteries of faith ostensibly apprehensible for the Dutch votary. Elizabeth Pastan examines the Gothic architectural settings that feature prominently in early Netherlandish pictorial art, offering quintessentially ‘churchy’ and transcendent environments that immediately establish a devotional context for the imagery. These painted representations of interiors further command the beholder’s attention because they often occur in multiwing altarpieces with strikingly discontinuous settings. Pastan draws on Saint Augustine’s exegesis of Psalm 41, in which he leads his reader from a building in this world to the hidden place of God’s house, to suggest that these architectural settings also provide a point of departure for the meditative engagement of the spiritually-invested devotee, and that their combination of fictive and found architectonic elements both ‘curates’ and advertises the picture’s meditative function. While Augustine’s commentary was the basis through which Christian monastic culture understood the psalm’s significance, this kind of locational imagination was developed throughout the later Middle Ages, in the Victorine use of heuristic devices such as Noah’s Ark, Franciscan spiritual works emphasizing heightened emotional identification such as the

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Meditationes Vitae Christi, and the Devotio moderna movement epitomized by the Spiritual Tabernacle of Jan Ruusbroec. Donna Sadler considers the altar as the singular space within the late medieval church, which was endowed with both its own sense of place and aura of sanctity. Developing her theme from anthropological theory, she uses late medieval carved retables of the early sixteenth century from the parish churches of Rumilly-les-Vaudes, Ricey-Bas in Les Riceys, and Géraudot in the regions of Burgundy and Champagne to make the point that the meaning of the imagery on the altarpieces is inseparable from the events that transpired at the altar. The vivid relief sculptures of the Passion, which may combine as many as sixty-five carved figures in an altarpiece, offer profuse anecdotal detail to spur the viewer’s visual imagination, which, when combined with the rituals of the Mass, stirred and concentrated all the devotee’s senses. Tanya Tiffany analyzes the crucial paradox around which the autobiographical Vida of the painter-nun Estefanía de la Encarnación, written in 1631, turns: her God-given talent is celebrated as a sacramental mystery, a charism of the Holy Spirit, that enabled her entry into the Lerma Convent of Poor Clares, but that same talent, in that her pictorial commissions claimed so much time and energy, and her artistic fame entangled her in worldly affairs, also threatened to impede her spiritual aspirations. How did Estenfanía’s painting become for her a species of good works that reconciled divine and human agency, artisanal labour and spiritual exercise? The answer lies, as Tiffany indicates, in Estefanía’s conviction that painting, if practised under the sign of recogomiento (recollection of the spirit), was fully consonant with the nuptial mystery of the Poor Clares’ conventual marriage to Christ. Elliott Wise and Matthew Havili describe the mysterious form and function of three fifteenth-century amber effigies of the Holy Face, likely produced in Bruges, the jointly material and spiritual properties of which they endeavour to characterise. By layering allusions to the Passion onto the sweetly loving visage of the mystical bridegroom from the Canticle, the vera icon ambers encouraged meditation on the nuptial mystery of the soul’s marriage to Christ, to be achieved through empathetic suffering. Fashioned in a medium which in substance and appearance seemed peculiarly like the sacrificial blood of Christ, these miniature effigies of the sancta facies were believed to have healing powers comparable to those of mimetic relics such as the sudarium and the mandylion. Amber’s ineffable translucence, as Wise and Havili observe, conveyed the illuminative power of the Holy Face indelibly to impress itself upon the human heart, as if by the permeative action of light. Lars Cyril Nørgaard explores the many-layered interplay of image and text in the Abbot of Choisy’s 1692 translation of the Imitatio Christi. He pursues

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intertwined themes of sacred kingship and intimate practices of Christian devotion, to delineate a parallel between the mystery of the king’s body which imitates the humility of Christ and the visual treatment of the Eucharist. Analyzing each of six images, Nørgaard at once charts the ways the king’s body manifests royal piety, marking how sacraments and sacred spaces occasion that manifestation, and discloses the steps, mirroring those in the Imitatio, through which Christ appears not only to, but also through the royal person. Bronwen Wilson parses two paintings by Federico Barocci of the meeting between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene, which represent the process whereby Jesus conceals then shows himself, at first withholding, then bodying forth the mysteries of his life and death; conversely, the Magdalene is seen to convert from her prior condition of unknowing, to a fuller knowledge of the nature of Christ. Barocci marshals various pictorial devices – proliferation of loci, rotation, material description and textural transformation – along with two rhetorical devices – epistrophe and metanoia – that allow him to portray how Mary Magdalene responds to the illuminative revelation of Christ. Part 3 focuses on the representation of other kinds and degrees of mysterial experience, in particular, the presence of Christ within the heart of the votary. Alexa Sand engages with imagery that portrays the art of dying across a span of nearly two centuries. She draws on exemplars of La Somme le roi from the late thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries, an ensemble of vernacular texts and imagery that offered spiritual instruction, and which contained a succinct tract, the Eloge de la vertu, on the art of dying well. The manuscript in this series from 1311 (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 6329), painted in the region of Picardy for Jeanne, Countess of Guînes and Eu, contains the earliest identified depiction of the sacrament of Last Unction, a small three-figure decorated initial. This allows Sand to highlight by contrast the fifteenth-century curriculum that placed death at the center of a new image-vocabulary, including the Ars Moriendi of the 1460s, which was directed to the laity, circulated in a series of block-books, and was translated into most European languages. As she effectively demonstrates, the linked themes of sickness, sin, and mortality encourage the reader to contemplate the torments that accrue to those who live and die in sin, while the insertion of sacramental imagery into the pictorial program of La Somme le roi connected the ritual experience of Last Rites with the iconography of last things, visualising the invisible action of the sacrament itself as it sanctifies the soul in preparation for death. David Areford poses the question, what did the young Jesus know about his divine origins and his earthly mission, and when exactly did he know it? He was far from a regular kid, as Areford demonstrates in examining several fifteenthcentury single-sheet, anonymous woodcuts of the Christ Child that include

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anachronistic references to the Passion, focusing primarily on a little-known exemplar of the Christ Child incongruously playing with the Veronica Veil or sudarium (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Res. EA-5-BET). In pursuing this theme, however, Areford observes that the framework of the Proleptic Passion can impede recognition of other possible meanings and motives because by definition, such “haunted” Infancies focus exclusively on the anticipation of future events. Areford proposes a different model for understanding the full valence of images of the Christ Child, one which like the liturgy itself, combines past, present, and future. In the woodcut of young Jesus with the sudarium, for example, the Christ Child is also an artist, and more specifically, a printmaker; in the implied scenario of the Veronica, Jesus has just pressed the cloth against his face, an action technically not unlike that required to make a woodcut. At the same time, the print offers a novel variation on the notion of Christ being ‘pressed’ as part of his torture and death, a medium-specific and self-referential quality typical of these prints that also deserves attention. Geert Warnar poses a question about the literary dialogue, the preferred format for the circulation of information about sacramental and other kinds of sacred mystery, in early Dutch printed texts issued before ca. 1540: how does one interrogate a mystery? Whereas in Vanden seven sacramenten (On the Seven Sacraments), the reader becomes a participatory witness to a conversation between Actoer (Author) and the theologian Hostiensis, in Tboeck vanden leven ons heren Jhesu Christi (Book on the Life of our Lord Jesus Christ) the conversationalists are Man, who proxies for the reader, and Lady Scripture, who both embodies the scriptural master text that enshrines the life of Christ, and exemplifies an allegorical reading of it. Both books give evidence of a burgeoning humanist approach to the mysteries of faith, based less in the scholastic canones and quaestiones and more in practices of judgment and interpretation that derive from philosophy and rhetoric. A third text, Spieghel des ewighen levens (Mirror of Eternal Life), underscores the affective dimensions of this hemeneutic project: through dialogue, the reader takes leave of melancholic ‘wandering within oneself’, and advances toward heartfelt engagment with the mysteries in Holy Writ. Walter Melion expounds the discourse of sacramental image-making woven into Jan David’s, S.J.’s ars moriendi, the most important such text published by the Society of Jesus before Robert Bellarmine, S.J.’s handbook De arte bene moriendi libri duo (On the Art of Dying Well) appeared in 1620. David’s emblematic treatise about the Christian forms, functions, and meaning of death, written as a book within a book, closes out his doctrinal magnum opus, the

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Veridicus Christianus (True Christian) of 1601. If deathly sin, which kills both the body and soul, and its relation to the life-giving sacraments of Baptism, the Eucharist, Penance, and Extreme Unction are his primary concern, his central argument is that sacred images and the meditative process by which they are fashioned, are the most effective means of combatting the impending dangers of spiritual death. They have the power to make fearsomely apparent sin’s appalling consequences, and conversely, to make virtually present the elivening mysteries bodied forth by Christ during his life, along with the sacramental mysteries instituted by him as antidotes to the death of sin. Melion considers the form and function, manner and meaning of the exemplary images of life and death propounded by David in his condensed summa mortis. How does one interpret Charles Le Brun’s claim that Nicolas Poussin was a painter of ‘théologie muette’ (mute theology), asks James Clifton in his study of Le Brun’s academy conférence on Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul. Framed in terms of Le Brun’s penchant for painting mystères and action mysterieuse, his reading of Poussin, as Clifton argues, might better be seen as an attempt to ascertain and apprehend the picture’s ‘partie toute mysterieuse’ (the most mysterious part), that part of the image which most eludes verbalisation – the presence of the three angels, not mentioned in the bible, and their plausible but not verifiable meaning[s]. That Le Brun attempts to pin down Poussin’s meaning, even while offering no convincing proof for his extravagantly specific explanation, is a hyptertrophic symptom of the visual presence of a mystery – detectable yet fundamentally opaque, both explanable yet inexplicable. Every mystery, Mette Birkedal Bruun argues, is experienced in a particular time and place. Her essay locates one particular ‘historical gaze’, that of Léon Bouthillier, Comte de Chavigny (1608–1652), on one particular object, the Annonciation painted around 1643 by Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674), through which he attempted to contemplate the mystery of the Annunciation. Bruun first provides contours to Chavigny, the person whose political ambitions and religious conversion torqued through many years of his life, but whose connection to Saint-Cyran ultimately led to his conversion to a deeper and more intimate piety. Bruun evokes the place, his new chapel in Hôtel de Chavigny, a new locus in the topography of his piety, before setting the painting in that particular personal and spatial dynamic, placing it in multiple visual traditions, and offering one hermeneutic, a text by one of Chavigny’s spiritual mentors, to suggest one particular gaze and the conversion that was inseparable from it.

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Bibliography Ambrose of Milan, Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis episcopi opera omnia, juxta editionem monachorum S. Benedicti. Tomus tertius (Paris: 1836). Augustine of Hippo, S. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis Episcopi liber De catechizandis rudibus, ed. W. Yorke Fausset (London: 1896; reprint ed., 1913). Bernard of Clairvaux, In cantica canticorum, in Mabillon J. (ed.), Sancti Bernardi Abbatis Clarae-Vallensis opera omnia […] volumen primum (Paris: 1839). Blaise A., Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs du moyen-age, Corpus Christianorum – Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout: 1975). Bourghesius Joannes, S.J., Vitae, Passionis et mortis Jesu Christi Domini nostri mysteria, piis meditationibus et adspirationibus exposita […]. Figuris aeneis expressa per Boetium a Bolswert. (Antwerp, Apud Henricum Aertssium: 1623). Busaeus Petrus, S.J., Authoritatum sacrae Scripturae et Sanctorum Patrum, quae in Summa doctrina Christianae Doctoris Petri Canisii theologi S.I. citantur, et nunc primum ex ipsis fontibus fideliter collectae, ipsis Catechismi verbis subscriptae sunt. Pars secunda. De sacramentis Ecclesiae. (Venice, Ex Bibliotheca Aldina: 1571). Cameron M.L., The Inquiring Pilgrim’s Guide to Assisi, trans. A. G. Ferrers Howell (London: 1926). Canisius Petrus, S.J., Opus catechisticum, sive De summa doctrinae Christianae […]. Editio tertia, quae et Parisiensem multis partibus excellit, et prioribus omnibus est copiosior limatiorque, ut reipsa lector comperiet. (Cologne, Apud Gervinum Calenium, et haeredes Iohannis Quentelij: 1586). Daly R. J., S.J., “The Council of Trent”, in Wandel L. P. (ed.), A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (Leiden – Boston: 2014) 159–179. David Jan, S. J., Duodecim specula Deum aliquando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, Joannes Moretus: 1610). Emison P., “Whittling Down the Istoria”, in Nagel A. – Pericolo L. (eds.), Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Farnham: 2010; reprint ed., Milton Park – New York: 2016) 71–86. Flanagan V., O.P., “Faith and Reason in the Theology of St. Thomas”, Dominicana 15.1 (1930) 12–18. Foster T. B., “‘Mysterium’ and ‘Sacramentum’ in the Vulgate and Old Latin Versions”, The American Journal of theology 19 (1915) 402–415. Ghellinck J. de – Backer E. de – Poukens J. – Lebacqz G., Pour l’histoire du mot “Sacramentum”. I. Les anténicéens, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 3 (Louvain – Paris: 1924). Hamburger J., “Speculations on Speculation: Vision and Perception in the Theory and Practice of Mystical Devotions”, in Haug W. – Schneider-Lastin W. (eds.), Deutsche

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Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang: neu erschlossene Texte, neue metho­ dische Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte, Kolloquium Kloster Fischingen 1998 (Tübingen: 2000). Holy Bible Translated from the Latin Vulgate, ed.-trans. R. Challoner (Baltimore: 1899; reprint ed., 1989). Hugonis de S. Victoire […] opera omnia, ed. J.-P. Migne, 3 vols. (Paris: 1854). Imhof D., Jan Moretus and the Continuation of the Plantin Press: A Bibliography of the Works Published and Printed by Jan Moretus I in Antwerp (1589–1610), 2 vols. (Leiden: 2014). Kessler H. L., “Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face”, in idem, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: 2000) 64–87, 219–224. Marie San Juan R., “Dizzying Visions: St. Teresa of Jesus and the Embodied Visual Image”, in Göttler C. – Neuber W. (eds.), Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture, Intersections 9 (Leiden – Boston: 2008) 245–267. Melion W. S., “Introduction: Scriptural Authority in Word and Image”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K. A. E. – Melion W. S., The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Intersections 20 (Leiden – Boston: 2011) 1–46. Niermeyer J. E. – Kieft C. van de, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus – Lexique latin médiéval – Medieval Latin Dictionary – Mittellateinsiches Wörterbuch, ed. J. W. J. Burgers, 2 vols. (Leiden – Boston: 2002). Oppy G. – Trakakis N. N. (eds.), Medieval Philosophy of Religion, The History of Western Philosophy of Religion 2 (London – New York: 2009). Pereda F., “The Veronica according to Zurbarán: Painting as Figura and Image as Vestigio”, in Dupré S. – Göttler C., Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, Visual Culture in Early Modernity 60 (London – New York: 2017) 125–162. Reynolds P. L., “Bonaventure’s Theory of Resemblance”, Traditio 58 (2003) 219–255. Rudolph C., The ‘Things of Greater Importance’: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia: 1990). Salmond S.D.F. (trans.) – Schaff P. (ed.), St. Augustine: On the Catechising of the Uninstructed, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church 3 (New York: 1905). Sors A.-K., Allegorische Andachtsbücher in Antwerpen: Jan Davids Texte und Theodoor Galles Illustrationen in den jesuitischen Buchprojekten der Plantiniana (Göttingen: 2015). Tanner N. P., S.J. (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Volume Two, Trent to Vatican II (Washington, D.C.: 1990).

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Thomas Aquinas, The ‘Summa contra gentiles’ of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: 1924–1929; reprint ed., Pittsboro, NC: 1992). Thomas Aquinas, The ‘Summa theologica’ of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (New York: 1947–1948; reprint ed., Westminster, MD: 1981). Wandel L. P., The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge – New York et al.: 2006) 208–241. Wandel L. P., Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion (Leiden – Boston: 2016).

part 1 Representing the Sacraments

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chapter 2

Counterfeiting the Eucharist in Late Medieval Life and Art Aden Kumler 1 Introduction In this essay I take up a curious eucharistic ‘special case’ well known in the late medieval and early modern periods: the communion wafer that purported to be the corpus Christi, but was actually nothing other than an unconsecrated round, white, wheaten disk. The case of the ‘counterfeit’ or simulated Eucharist offers an oblique, but revealing vantage on the perceptual challenge of the sacrament of the altar in medieval and early modern Europe and its potentially troubling implications for contemporary thinking about the testimony of the senses.1 As scholars medieval and modern have long recognized, the sacrament of the altar was an aesthetic miracle and an aesthetic state of exception because it defied ordinary protocols of aesthetic judgment, that is, of deriving knowledge of things from the testimony of the senses.2 As Thomas Brinton, bishop of Rochester (d. 1389) put it: ‘all senses are deceived in this sacrament, except for the sense of sound.’3 Precisely because Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist eluded sensory confirmation, the sacrament of altar

1  The characterization of an unconsecrated host substituted deliberately for a consecrated host as a ‘counterfeit’ Eucharist is my own; as I discuss below, medieval sources variously designate such a communion wafer as a ‘hostia simplex’, ‘hostia non consecrata’ and ‘panis benedictus’. 2  From a vast bibliography, see Bynum C., “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century”, in Hamburger J. – Bouché, A.-M. (eds.) The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton: 2006): 208–240; Rubin M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge; New York: 1991) 24–26, 30–35; Macy, G., Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament according to the Theologians c. 1080–c. 1220 (Oxford: 1984); and Burr D., “Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 74 (1984): 1–113. 3  ‘[O]mnes sensus in hoc sacramento deficiunt, excepto auditu,’ quoted and translated in Rubin M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge; New York: 1991) 215.

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involved Christian devotees in an exceedingly difficult aesthetic situation, even as it promised them salvation. Given the Eucharist’s status as a sacred and saving aesthetic aberration, questions of eucharistic authenticity – was the host received by the devotee Christ’s body and blood, or was it simply a round white wafer made of wheat and water? – preoccupied academic theologians, ecclesiastical authorities, and ‘ordinary’ Christians, variously, over the course of the medieval and early modern periods. Among the questions and concerns that surrounded the Eucharist, the accidental or deliberate substitution of an unconsecrated communion wafer for a consecrated host and, by extension, the inadvertent or premeditated reception of an unconsecrated host as if it were the Eucharist exercised medieval Christian theologians and parishioners, alike. The real possibility of fictive sacraments was recognized and discussed throughout the medieval period. As Marcia Colish has recently explored, patristic authorities put the problem of fictive baptism on the medieval theological agenda and, as a number of other scholars have discussed, the late medieval dramatic tradition made the simulated celebration of a number of sacraments, including the Eucharist, a spectacular, self-reflexive and sometimes deeply troubling part of late medieval paraliturgical and civic life.4 Consequently, as I will explore, the impossibility of adjudicating between an unconsecrated and a consecrated host by means of the senses entailed a further problem: how to distinguish confessed, absolved, and pious Christians from ‘hidden sinners’ when both the properly prepared and the unrepentant received the Eucharist? Although the ‘counterfeiting’ of the Eucharist, by which I mean the substitution of an unconsecrated host for the consecrated host and the appearance of pious communication that consuming the unconsecrated host created, has not garnered much attention from modern scholars, it was a topic repeatedly aired in the literatures of pastoral instruction, scholastic texts (particularly in 4  Colish M., Faith, Fiction, & Force in Medieval Baptismal Debates (Washington, D.C.: 2014). For a helpful orientation to medieval dramatic ‘stagings’ of the Mass see Muir L., “The Mass on the Medieval Stage”, Comparative Drama 23 (1989) 314–330. To the best of my knowledge, scholarly attention has yet to focus on pre-modern discussions of children ‘playing the Mass,’ although John Moschus (d. 619 or 634 CE) tells a story in the Pratum spirituale of three children simulating the Eucharist in a field “Cardinal Johannes Dominici” (d. 1419 CE) recommended that children be provided with miniature altars to encourage their mimicking of the liturgy, rather than secular past-times in his Regola del governo di aura familiare; for further discussion, in an essay focused primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century evidence, see Post P., “‘An Excellent Game …’: On Playing the Mass”, in Caspers C. – Lukken G. – Rouwhorst G. (eds.), Bread of Heaven: Customs and Practices Surrounding Holy Communion: Essays in the History of Liturgy and Culture (Kampen: 1995) 193–194.

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commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences), miracle collections, hagiographic vitae, and in canon law and its medieval commentary tradition.5 It was also a problem confronted by artists. To the apperceptual challenge posed both by the Eucharistic host and by act of taking communion – both in their ‘true’ and ‘counterfeit’ iterations – artists responded, exploring and addressing the sacrament’s perplexing, even disturbing aesthetic exceptionality with their own feats of aesthetic simulation. 2

Communions Good, Bad, and Ugly in the Siebenhirter Hours

A miniature painted by the Lehrbüchermeister to preface the hour of Compline in the Office of the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Siebenhirter Hours (Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS A 225, f. 158v; dated shortly before 1469 CE) stages an unusual eucharistic scene that searchingly examines the challenge of telling true from false, of distinguishing appearances from un-sensed realities, posed by the communion wafer and by Christian communicants, alike.6 [Fig. 2.1] The miniature is one of a series of eight full-page illuminations painted by the Lehrbüchermeister to accompany the Office of the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Siebenhirter Hours (ff. 153v–194r). Prefacing the hour of Compline in the manuscript, the miniature, like each of the illuminations provided for the Office of Corpus Christi in the manuscript, takes the sacrament of the altar as its theme, but exhibits considerable independence from the textual substance 5  Peter Browe, whose work on the Eucharist in the Middle Ages remains indispensable, is the notable exception to the general rule of scholarly inattention to the counterfeiting of the Eucharist. From Browe’s larger oeuvre the following works have directly informed this essay: Browe P., “Die eucharistischen Verwandlungswunder des Mittelalters”, Römische Quartalschrift, 37 (1929) 137–169; idem, Die eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters, Breslauer Studien zur historischen Theologie n. F. 4 (Breslau: 1938); idem, Die häufige Kommunion im Mittelalter (Münster: 1938); idem, Die Pflichtkommunion im Mittelalter (Münster: 1940); idem, “Liturgische Delikte und ihre Bestrafung im Mittelalter”, in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht, Vergessene Theologen 1 (Berlin: 2003) 353–360; idem, “Die Pflichtkommunion der Laien im Mittelalter”, in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter 39–50; and idem, “Die Sterbekommunion im Altertum und Mittlelater”, in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter 115–172. 6  On the Lehrbüchermeister and the Siebenhirter Hours, with citations of antecedent bibliography, see: Pfändtner K.-G., “Das Gebetbuch des Johann Siebenhirter in Stockholm: Geschichte, Ausstattung, Bedeutung”, Carinthia I 197 (2007) 107–156; Pfändtner K.-G., Die Handschriften des Lehrbüchermeisters, Codices manuscripti. Supplementum 4 (Purkersdorf: 2011) 14, 25–29, 168–170 (cat. no. 34). I am grateful to the Hill Medieval Monastic Library for making available a black and white digital surrogate (from microfilm) of the Siebenhirter Hours; unfortunately the opening of ff. 159v–160r was not included in the original microfilm.

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figure 2.1 The Lehrbüchermeister, miniature prefacing Compline in the Office of the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Siebenhirter Hours: Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS A 225, f. 158v (shortly before 1469 CE) Photo courtesy the National Library of Sweden

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of the hour it introduces.7 So too, the cycle of eight miniatures devised by the Lehrbüchermeister for the Office of Corpus Christi in this manuscript exhibits remarkable iconographic independence from established iconographic tradition. Only the cycle’s first image, depicting the Last Supper (f. 153v), and its third and last images, featuring the Mass of St Gregory (f. 173r) and two angels presenting the host in a monstrance (f. 189v), present iconographic subjects associated with the Office or festal Mass for Corpus Christi in other manuscripts.8 Other iconographic subjects associated with Corpus Christi – the elevation of the host in the Mass and Christ as Priest or as the Man of Sorrows – are conspicuously absent.9 Instead of rehearsing established and expected iconographic subjects, four of the eight images painted for the Office of Corpus Christi in the Siebenhirter Hours innovatively emphasize eucharistic misconduct: a grotesque fool manhandles a celebrant’s chasuble during the celebration of the Mass in the miniature prefacing Matins (f. 160v), in the painting prefacing Sext two male Jewish figures hammer at a host held in pincers upon an anvil by a third (f. 182v), in the image for the hour of Nones a young man graphically eviscerates a dead (or dying) man in order to gain access to the host he consumed as viaticum (f. 186v), and in the painting that is the focus of this essay, prefacing Compline,

7  The hour of Compline opens with Psalm 84:5, ‘Converte nos deus salutaris noster. Et averte iram tuam a nobis’ (‘Convert us, O God our saviour: and turn off thy anger from us’ in the Douay-Rheims translation), a verse that might be understood as broadly relevant to the facing image in which both valid sacramental participation and invalid, potentially damning sacramental participation are depicted (as I discuss below). The relation of text and image in this instance is, however, attenuated; as Pfändtner and Hamburger each note, this holds true throughout the Office of Corpus Christi in the manuscript: Hamburger J., “Bosch’s ‘Conjuror’: An Attack on Magic and Sacramental Heresy”, Simiolus 14 (1984) 13; and Pfändtner, “Das Gebetbuch des Johann Siebenhirter” 120. 8  For colour reproductions of these images, see Pfändtner, Die Handschriften 52–53, figs. 24, 27, 31. It should be noted that the Mass of St Gregory depicted in the Siebenhirter Hours follows the earliest version of this story, in which the eucharistic bread is changed into a bloody fragment of a little finger, rather than the visionary account that circulated widely in word and image in the later Middle Ages; for further discussion see Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond”; and Kumler, A., “Manufacturing the Sacred in the Middle Ages: The Eucharist and Other Medieval Works of Ars”, English Language Notes 53 (2015) 9–12. 9  The procession of the Eucharist, a favoured subject in illuminations associated with Feast of Corpus Christi, is invoked en passant as a circumstantial detail in the scene of the violent excision of a host from the body of a dead (or dying) man in the image painted for the hour of Nones (f. 186v); for a color reproduction of this image see Pfändtner, Die Handschriften 53, fig. 30. For discussion of the iconographic subjects associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Middle Ages, see Rubin, Corpus Christi 204–208.

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a hideous communicant receives an equally loathsome communion wafer (f. 158v).10 Although Pfändtner has plausibly suggested that the Lehrbücher­ meister likely drew upon the accounts of eucharistic miracles and abuses that proliferated in late medieval sermons, didactic literature, and by way of accusation and rumour, to date each of these disturbing paintings has defied iconographic source criticism.11 Such modern scholarly preoccupations with textual ‘sources’ are eclipsed by other, more insistent concerns as soon as we take a closer look at the arresting, enigmatic scene of communion – or rather of three differentiated communions – that prefaces the hour of Compline in the Siebenhirter Hours’s Office of Corpus Christi. [Fig. 2.1] Within a vaulted ecclesiastical interior pierced by a single window framing a leafless black tree on a verdant hill,12 a seated bishop, his gloved hands raised with fingertips touching, gazes at three kneeling men who receive hosts from three tonsured clerics vested in white dalmatics before the altar. Each of the three clerics also wears a stola, but none of them is vested in a chasuble. These vestiments are significant: they indicate that the three tonsured figures are not vested for the celebration of the Mass. So too, the altar painted within the miniature is not prepared for the celebration of the Eucharist. The chalice, filled with red liquid, is not accompanied by the paten, and although the illuminator has carefully rendered the white altar cloth draping the altar, the corporal – the square linen cloth employed in the Mass to envelop and protect hosts – is conspicuously absent. Rather, we find an abundant supply of white communion wafers in a golden casket with a hinged lid set upon the altar. Collectively, these deliberate and precise liturgical details indicate that the three male communicants kneel to receive the Eucharist outside of the Mass. One can hardly fault past commentators on this painting for overlooking this situational framing of the Siebenhirter Hours miniature.13 Understandably, it has been the figures of the three communicants and the communion wafers they receive that have captured scholarly attention. The communicant on the far left receives a round white host inhabited by the tiny figure of the Christ 10  For color reproductions of the images for Matins, Sext and Nones, see Pfändtner, Die Handschriften 52–53, figs. 26, 29, 30, 25. 11  Pfändtner, Die Handschriften 26–29. 12  The dry tree on the green hill, framed by the window, would seem to be a motivated element within the composition; its import continues to elude me. 13  As I will discuss below, this easily overlooked point matters a great deal. Pfändtner identifies the painting as ‘die Darstellung einer Messe’ and Hamburger describes it as a scene of ‘three priests who give the host to three participants’: Pfändtner, Die Handschriften 26; and Hamburger, “Bosch’s ‘Conjuror’” 13.

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Child. By contrast, the wafer received by the second communicant strongly resembles a modern bread plate, complete with a dinner roll. The volumetric brown loaf that appears against the flat white disk reveals that the second communicant is about to consume nothing more than daily bread. When we turn our attention to the third communicant the sacramental scene becomes distinctly loathsome. This figure’s head and neck are painted a livid red, modelled with a dull grey. Contrasting with his fair blonde hair, the figure’s face and neck appear all the more grotesque, unnatural, and disturbing. The communion wafer he receives is equally monstrous. The round white disk does not convey the haloed figure of Christ, or a morsel of mundane bread, but is instead inhabited by the dark grey, compact form of a toad or frog. As Jeffrey Hamburger first recognized, the miniature’s three communicants figure three modes of eucharistic reception first discussed by twelfth-century theologians and further elaborated upon in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.14 According to this tradition of sacramental theology, the faithful, well-prepared communicant receives both the sacramentum and the res sacramenti in the eucharistic species: that is, both the outwardly perceptible sacred signs of bread and wine and the veritas or sacred reality of Christ’s sacramental body that effects the devotee’s incorporation in the corpus mysticum of union with Christ and the church. The ill-prepared devotee, by contrast, received only the sacramentum; in such cases the perceptible sign of the wafer was ontologically and metaphysically decoupled from the res of Christ’s real presence and its effects.15 The communication of infidels, heretics, and Christians in a state of mortal sin is quite a different affair, according to medieval theological authorities. Such communicants eat and drink ‘judgment unto [themselves]’ in the language of 1 Corinthians 11, a locus classicus for medieval discussions of the Eucharist.16 Accordingly, both Jeffrey Hamburger and Karl-Georg Pfändnter have seen this miniature in the Siebenhirter Hours as a tableau staging ‘the progression from orthodoxy to heresy’.17 I think this may be too taxonomic and tidy a gloss for an image that artfully provokes more questions than it answers. In the conclusion of this essay I will

14  Hamburger, “Bosch’s ‘Conjuror’” 13. 15  For further discussion see Macy G., “Reception of the Eucharist According to the Theologians: A Case of Diversity in the 13th and 14th Centuries”, in Treasures From the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville: 1999) 36–58. 16  Robert of Melun went so far as to assert that to allow unworthy reception of the sacrament would be ‘tantamount to killing Christ himself’; quoted in Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist 120. 17  Hamburger, “Bosch’s ‘Conjuror’” 13.

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return to this painting in order to propose a different interpretation of what it is ‘about’; that is, what this painting does as a painting. To appreciate fully both the task taken up by the maker of this miniature and the prerogatives he claims for his work of art, will require delving into the problem of sacramental appearances that the painting itself confronts. More specifically, I suggest, it necessitates a confrontation with the ‘counterfeit’ Eucharist as it was practiced, tolerated, and decried in the late Middle Ages. 3

Counterfeiting the Eucharist

On December 19, 1519, the procurer of the Bishop of Paris called Martin Laventurier, the chaplain of the church of the Holy Spirit, to account for a great infraction against the Eucharist.18 Laventurier was accused first, that after he had caused an affront to a man, Laventurier had proceeded to celebrate Mass without confessing himself;19 and second, that when Laventurier performed the elevation of the host in that Mass he had elevated an unconsecrated host.20 According to the bishop’s procurer, the people attending this Mass were intensely scandalized by Laventurier’s actions. As Jean-Georges Vondrus-Reissner has observed, the plea brought against the priest by the episcopal procurer was motivated by concern for the parishioners who had been scandalized by his sacramental misconduct.21 Emphasizing that the priest had an obligation to remedy the disturbance he had caused his flock, the procurer pronounced that anyone who tolerated the chaplain’s infraction might well provoke God’s wrath.22 18  I rely upon the paraphrase and quotations from Paris, A.N., U 2186, f. 389r in VondrusReissner J.-G., “Présence réelle et juridiction ecclésiastique dans le diocese de Paris (fin XV ème – 1530)”, Histoire, Économie et Société 7 (1988) 47. 19   Vondrus-Reissner, “Présence réelle” 47. 20  ‘en célébrant la messe ayant une hostie, après qu’il a faict toutes les cérémonies jusques à l’Eslévation, il la laisse et en prent une autre non consacrée qu’il montre au peuple qui est fort scandaleux de ce …’: quotation from A.N. U 2186, f. 389r in Vondrus-Reissner, “Présence réelle” 47. 21  In Laventurier’s case, it seems very likely that the chaplain was not thought to have deliberately perpetrated a fraud against his parishioners: appearing before the archdiaconal officialité eighteen months later, he is designated as the chaplain of the church of SainteEglise. Clearly his inadvertent sacramental simulatio did not cost him his job: VondrusReissner, “Présence réelle” 47. 22  ‘parce qui souffreroit sans punition la fautte commise par partie [i.e., Laventurier] pourroient venir grands inconveniens unde ira Dei posset commoveri’: quotation from A.N. U 2189, f. 389r in Vondrus-Reissner, “Présence réelle” 47.

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The affaire Laventurier, and other similar documented allegations, reveal that the intense focus upon the Eucharist that took hold of the Christian imaginations in the thirteenth century, and continued in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had both legal and spiritual consequences.23 Although innumerable medieval authorities emphasized that the host did not change its appearance when it was consecrated and became the sacramental body and blood of Christ, nonetheless, attentive Mass-goers and assisting clergy could – and did – spot ritual slip-ups or sleights of hand, such as Laventurier’s substitution of a ‘mere’ wafer for the corpus Christi at the moment of the elevation.24 Formal complaints and other records of accusations lodged against late medieval and early modern priests reveal that so-called ‘ocular piety’ focused on the Eucharist sometimes manifested itself as a pious surveillance of the celebrant at the altar performed by lay people acutely alert to the possibility of receiving an unconsecrated host against their will. The late medieval ‘desire to see the host,’ in Éduoard Dumoutet’s influential formulation, was accompanied by an acute awareness of the impossibility of distinguishing a consecrated host from an unconsecrated host by the testimony of the senses alone.25 Denying the admissability of ordinary forms of sense-based judgment in relation to sacrament of the altar, eucharistic theology and piety framed the Eucharist as an aesthetic exception and, as I will explore below, laid the groundwork not only for ‘counterfeit’ hosts and communions, but also for works of art – like the miniature in the Siebenhirter Hours – that responded to the aesthetic challenge posed by the sacrament by simulative feats of picture-making.

23  In addition to Vondrus-Reissner see also Rubin, Corpus Christi 148–50, et passim; Browe, “Liturgische Delikte”; Vann Sprecher T. D., “The Marketplace of the Ministry: The Impact of Sacerdotal Piecework on the Care of Souls in Paris, 1483–1505”, Speculum 91 (2016) 149– 170; and eadem, Priest as Criminal: Community Regulation of Priests in the Archdeaconry of Paris, 1483–1505, Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Minnesota: 2013). 24  On this point, see also Kumler A., “‘The ‘Genealogy of Jean Le Blanc’: Accounting for the Materiality of the Medieval Eucharist”, in Anderson C. – Dunlop A. – Smith P. (eds.), The Matter of Art. Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750 (Manchester: 2014) 119–140; and eadem, “The Multiplication of the Species: Eucharistic Morphology in the Middle Ages”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (2011) 179–191. 25  Dumoutet E., Le désir de voir l’hostie et les origines de la dévotion au Saint-Sacrement (Paris: 1926).

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Why Counterfeit the Eucharist?

No doubt, unconsecrated hosts were sometimes inadvertently offered in place of consecrated hosts in the Middle Ages and early Modern periods. Other unconsecrated hosts were, however, deliberately given to communicants, with and without their knowledge. Starting in the twelfth century, ‘counterfeit’ Eucharists seem to have been distributed and discussed primarily in relation to three scenarios: a priest’s negligence or scruples, the communication of people deemed likely to vomit, and in cases of hidden grievous and unabsolved sin. To take the first scenario first: on the 16th of April 1496, Robert de Villenor clericus fabricus of the church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs came before the archdeaconry of Paris accused of administering the last rites, despite the fact that he was not a priest.26 Robert admitted that on the night of April 9th he had indeed performed the last rites for a certain Pierre Noneau. In his defence he explained that he had followed the instructions of the curate, Pierre Picard, who was compelled to attend to another parishioner dying of plague the same night. Accordingly, the priest had instructed Robert de Villenor to serve in his stead at Pierre Noneau’s deathbed, assuring Robert that he would provide him with an unconsecrated host and so there would be ‘no danger because [the host he took] was not [Christ’s] body’.27 Justifying his actions before the archdeaconry, the priest Pierre Picard insisted that he ‘did not believe he had done evil, but that he had done good, and if he had believed he was doing evil, he would not have gone [to the other parishioner].’28 According to canon law, synodal statutes, and pastoral norms, the curate Pierre Picard should have had a number of consecrated hosts carefully reserved for just such a situation.29 Clearly the curate either did not have a sufficient 26  I rely upon the paraphrase and quotations from Paris, Archives Nationales, Z1o 20, f. 129v, in Vann Sprecher, “The Marketplace of the Ministry” 163–164. As Vann Sprecher notes, Robert de Villenor’s given title (clericus fabricus) indicates that he was the clerk in charge of the churchwarden’s storeroom, but not a priest or deacon. 27  ‘Nya point de danger pius [sic?] que ce nest pas le corpus’ (translation mine): transcribed and discussed in Vann Sprecher, “The Marketplace of the Ministry” 164. As it turned out, Pierre Noneau did not expire the evening of April 9th but survived until the following day and the priest was thus able to administer the last rites to him again, this time with a consecrated host. As Vann Sprecher observes, it seems likely that it was this re-iteration of the last rites that revealed the well-intentioned ruse perpetrated by the priest and the clericus fabricus the night before. 28  ‘[…] nec credebat ipse malo sed bene facere et si credidisset malo facere non ivisset’: Vann Sprecher, “The Marketplace of the Ministry” 164 n. 69. 29  Izbicki T., The Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law (Cambridge: 2015) 178–181, 198–199, 202– 211, 214–220. For further discussion, see Freestone W., The Sacrament Reserved: A Survey of

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number or else was too scrupulous to entrust the Eucharist to Robert, who had not been ordained a priest.30 The archidiaconal register does not explain why Pierre Picard opted to send a ‘counterfeit’ viaticum to his parishioner. Given antecedent and contemporary discussions of how the Eucharist should be handled, administered, and received, several motivations are possible; not least among them, concerns about the state of the communicant. One such concern motivates the second recurring scenario involving ‘counterfeit’ hosts: the risk that a sick or dying person would vomit the Eucharist. The regurgitation of the consecrated host preoccupied pastoral theologians and parish priests alike in the period.31 Synodal statutes coped with this eventuality by prescribing that a vomited host should immediately be consumed by a priest or burned.32 Other sources, however, indicate that priests and some authorities opted to offer the sick and dying unconsecrated hosts, or else to invite them to communicate spiritually by visually gazing upon or engaging in non-ingestive physical contact with a consecrated host.33 Although pastoral authorities condemned the refusal of viaticum to a properly confessed person as a form of spiritual murder, the registers of the archdeaconry of Paris reveal that complaints were brought against priests precisely because they had given the Eucharist to people in extremis who were incapable of keeping it down.34 Priests tending to seriously ill or dying parishioners thus found themselves in a terrible double bind. What was better, to deprive the dying person of the viaticum or to risk the spiritual and social scandal of a profaned host? Even before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 formalized the expectation that Christians should communicate at least once a year, normative practice and regional ecclesiastical legislation dictated that Christians who did not receive the Eucharist annually were considered to be out of communion with

the Practice of Reserving the Eucharist, with Special Reference to the Communion of the Sick, during the First Twelve Centuries, Alcuin Club Collections 21 (London: 1917). 30  Further discussion and citations in Izbicki T., “Temeraria Manus: Custody of the Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law”, in Erdő P. – Szuromi S. (eds.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Series C – Subsidia 14 (Vatican City: 2010) 542–543. 31  A number of canonical and synodal sources treating vomiting are discussed in Izbicki, The Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law 156–157; and Rubin, Corpus Christi 81–82. 32  In some sources, provision is made for the careful custody of the ashes of an incinerated host: Izbicki, The Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law 217–218. 33  See, for example the synodal statutes of Cambrai and Liège, discussed in Izbicki, The Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law 217. 34  Rubin, Corpus Christi 82.

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the church.35 The pressure, both spiritual and social, to receive the Eucharist in at least one great festal Mass each year was considerable in the period.36 The pressure to communicate at least annually was driven, in part, by widely shared understandings of why a Christian might not communicate: devotees who remained in a state of grievous sin were, at least in theory, barred from physically ingesting the Eucharist. Following the lead of 1 Corinthians 11, medieval canon law, theological writing, sermons, and miracle stories repeatedly affirmed that consuming the Eucharist in a state of moral sin earned the sinful communicant damnation. In the late Middle Ages, the scandal of not receiving the Eucharist at least annually affected not only the Christian who did not communicate, but also – at least potentially – their fellow Christians who witnessed them abstaining from the Eucharist, and could thus infer that the person denied the sacrament was in a state of grevious sin. The concern to avoid ‘publishing’ unabsolved sins, and thereby to prevent the scandal that such an exposure would provoke, motivated pastoral thinking and practice in a third scenario involving the ‘counterfeit’ host: the case of hidden sin. Confronted with a Christian whose sins were not publically known, who had not confessed their sins and received absolution, but still sought to receive the Eucharist, what should a priest do? To publically refuse the sacrament to such would-be communicants would expose their secret sin to other Christians attending Mass. Stephen Langton emphasized precisely this point when he recommended that priests communicate the ‘hidden sinner’ in his commentary on the Sentences: ‘The Eucharist ought to be given to the hidden sinner urgently demanding (instanter exigenti) the body of Christ at an appointed time (tempore assignato) in the Church, lest, were he denied the sacrament, his sin would be published’.37 And yet, as both canon law and theological commentaries recognized, to give such sinners the consecrated host was to collaborate in their damnation. The mixture of reverence, danger, and surveillance that

35  Izbicki, The Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law 163–171; Browe, “Die Pflichtkommunion”; idem, Die Pflichtkommunion; and idem Die häufige Kommunion 22–44, 133–163. 36  Thus visitation records document lay people denouncing their fellow parishioners for not communicating, particularly on Easter: Izbicki, The Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law 170. For ecclesiastical monitoring and punishment of those who failed to take Communion on Easter see Browe, Die Pflichtkommunion 109–127. 37  ‘Occulto peccatori instanter exigenti corpus christi tempore assignato in ecclesia conferendum est corpus christi ne si forte negaretur sacramentum ita publicaretur eius peccatum.’ Notule super IIII libri sententiarum (Vatican City, BAV, Reg. lat. MS 411, f. 72v); quoted in Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist 208, n. 142.

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surrounded the Eucharist in the later medieval and early modern periods put priests in a very difficult pastoral position. Starting in the early twelfth century, a growing consensus deemed that the priest should not deny the Eucharist to secret sinners, even if their participation in the sacrament contributed to their damnation. This was the position enshrined in canon law: both the Decretum and the Decretals came down in favour of giving sinners consecrated hosts.38 Nonetheless, some theologians legitimated the substitution of an unconsecrated communion wafer for the consecrated host in extreme cases, most notably, in the case of a deathbed communion when the dying Christian refused to disclose a mortal sin in confession. In his influential Summa aurea, William of Auxerre (d. 1231 × 1237) approved the giving of a “simplex hostiam pro eucharistia” (a simple host in place of the Eucharist), but only in such a situation.39 Other theologians, including Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) tolerated such simulation of the Eucharist by means of an unconsecrated communion wafer if the mortal sinner explicitly asked for and knowingly received an unconsecrated host.40 The recurrence of theological discussions of this practice strongly suggests that the prospect that some priests would communicate secret sinners with communion wafers passing as consecrated hosts was tenacious, at least in theory, in the later Middle Ages. This practice – and concomitant theological dilemma – has not piqued modern scholarly interest, but it earned the attention of some of the leading lights of the high and later medieval intellectual and ecclesiastical landscape, including Paganus of Corbeil (fl. mid-twelfth century), John Beleth (fl. mid-twelfth century), Guibert of Nogent (d. c. 1125), Baldwin of Canterbury (d. 1190), Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), Peter of Poitiers 38  Izbicki, The Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law 176–77; and Browe, “Die Sterbekommu­ nion” 167. 39  Guillelmus Autissiodorensis, Summa aurea in quattuor libros sententiarum: a subtillissimo doctore Magistro Guillermo altissiodorensi edita (Paris: N. Vaultier et Durandi Gerlier, 1500) f. 261; discussed further in Starke, J., Die Sakramentenlehre des Wilhelm von Auxerre, Forschungen zur Christlichen Literatur- und Dogmengeschichte 13 (Paderborn, 1917) 144–145. 40  Browe, “Die Sterbekommunion” 166. Albertus Magnus stipulates that a “hostia non consecrata” should be given only rarely and only at the would-be communicant’s urging: ‘[…] dicendum quod nullo modo debet hoc sacerdos ex seipso facere, sicut probatum est: sed si rogatur, aliquando acquiescere potest, & non saepe, sicut diximus’. Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, ed. P. Jammy, 21 vols. (Lyon: Sumptibus Claudii Prost., 1651) vol. 16, 207 (IV Liber Sententiarum, IV d. 13 a. 20). Bonaventure (d. 1274) likewise does not condemn giving the hidden sinner ‘panem benedictam’ in lieu of the consecrated host (‘pro eucharistia’) in order to avoid scandal (‘vitare scandalum’): Bonaventure, Opera omnia, ed. PP. Collegii a S. Bonaventura, 11 vols (Quaracchi, 1887) vol. 3, 211–212 (Commentaria in IV Libros Sententiarum, III, d. 9, a. 2).

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(d. 1205), Peter of Blois (d. 1212), Stephen Langton (d. 1228), Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), Bernard Gui (d. 1331), and Jean Gerson (d. 1429).41 Although most theologians condemned the use of unconsecrated communion wafers in lieu of consecrated hosts, it seems that some priests and mass-goers opted to simulate sacramental participation rather than risk the publication of grievous sins and the consequent socially, morally, and spiritually damaging eruption of scandal. When a priest gave an unconsecrated communion wafer to a secret sinner, he was effectively administering an unconsecrated host as if it were the Eucharist in order to collaborate with a sinner in simulating the appearance of true or authentic communion. The giving and receiving of an unconsecrated host as if it were the sacrament involved the priest and the secret sinner in a pastoral pantomime that created an illusion of moral-spiritual fitness, of sacramental participation, and of social-spiritual integration in the church, whilst concealing the hidden, discordant reality of sin in the midst of the faithful. 5

The Sacrament of the Altar as Aesthetic State of Exception

The intentional substitution of an unconsecrated communion wafer for a consecrated, eucharistic host exploited the aesthetic state of exception and sacred mysterium that defined the sacrament of the altar, as it was generally theorized and received in the later Middle Ages.42 The Eucharist’s status as a sacred sign that effected what it signified, its metaphysical uncoupling of ontological subject and accidents, its phenomenological exceptionality (what was sensed in the consecrated communion wafer and wine was not what was received), effectively defined the sacrament of the altar as a divinely instituted, suspension 41  Browe, “Die Sterbekommunion” 166–167; and Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist 81–82, 121. 42  The nature, manner, and consequences of eucharistic change provoked intense discussion and debate in the late medieval period; for further discussion see Macy G., “The ‘Dogma of Transubstantiation’ in the Middle Ages”, in Treasures From the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville: 1999) 81–120; McCue J., “The Doctrine of Transubstantiation From Berengar Through Trent: The Point at Issue”, Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968) 385–430; Goering J., “The Invention of Transubstantiation”, Traditio 46 (1991) 147–170; Jorissen H., Die Entfaltung der Transsubstantiationslehre bis zum Beginn der Hochscholastik (Münster: 1965); Macy, “Reception of the Eucharist”; Adams M., Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford – New York: 2010); Burr, “Eucharistic Presence and Conversion”; and Megivern J., Concomitance and Communion: A Study in Eucharistic Doctrine and Practice (Fribourg – New York: 1963).

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of the ordinary, evidentiary functioning of the senses. Although William of Auxerre asserted that ‘deception [simulatio] has no place where the truth of the body of Christ is concerned,’ other late medieval and early modern theologians and pastoral authorities devoted considerable intellectual energy to probing how Christ could be really present in the sacrament in a fashion that eluded aesthetic – that is, sensory – confirmation.43 The Franciscan (and future archbishop of Canterbury), John Peckham, deemed that the celebration of the Mass involved no fewer than fifty divinely worked miracles.44 Despite considerable debate among thirteenth- and fourteenth-century theologians over how precisely the Eucharist’s modes of being and effects should (or should not) be accounted for, it was well established in the period (and affirmed with few exceptions) that, out of consideration for humanity’s horror cruoris (the revulsion provoked by human blood and flesh), a divine dispensation ensured that Christ’s blood and his flesh could not be sensually perceived by communicants.45 This supernatural fact amounted to a welcome soteriological sleight of hand. When the Christ Child was seen in the consecrated host, when the host transformed into a body part or began to bleed, theologians variously argued that this was a further divine transformation, or else that such apparitions were divinely worked optical illusions.46 43  ‘[…] simulatio nullum habet locum, ubi veritas corporis Christi est’: William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, ed. J. Ribaillier (Rome: 1980) 173 (d. VII, cap. vii, q. 4); quoted in Denery D., “From Sacred Mystery to Divine Deception: Robert Holkot, John Wyclif and the Transformation of Fourteenth-Century Eucharistic Discourse”, Journal of Religious History 29 (2005) 130–131. 44  John Peckham, Quodlibeta quatuor, F. Delorme and G. J. Etzkorn (eds.) (Grottaferrata: 1989): 263 (quodlibet IV, q. 41); quoted in Denery “From Sacred Mystery to Divine Deception” 130. 45  Articulated by Ambrose of Milan in his De Sacramentis, this teaching was consistently upheld throughout the Middle Ages: Dutton M., “Eat, Drink and Be Merry: The Eucharistic Spirituality of the Cistercian Fathers”, in Sommerfeldt J. (ed.), Erudition at God’s Service, Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 11 (Kalamazoo, MI: 1987) 10. See also Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist 28–51, 72. As Caroline Bynum has explored, miracles in which Christian devotees did indeed taste or see blood in the host nonetheless abounded in the later Middle Ages: Bynum C., “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages”, Church History 71 (2002) 685–714; and Bynum C., Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: 2007). 46  Browe, Die eucharistischen Wunder 184–202. I cannot here address the diversity and complexity of late medieval and early modern theological debates concerning such Eucharistic transformation miracles. These debates merit greater attention from art historians, given the sophisticated discussions of optics, aesthetic experience, and the creation and reception of fundamentally truthful illusions that they involved. For further discussion, see Browe, “Die eucharistischen Verwandlungswunder”; idem, Die eucharistischen Wunder; Bynum, Wonderful Blood; Rubin, Corpus Christi 108–129; and Macy G., “Medieval

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Enabled by contemporary teaching concerning the Eucharist’s radical disjunction of sacred reality and sensual appearances, the ‘counterfeit’ host thus had an emulative relationship with the ‘true’ Eucharist. Like the consecrated sacramental species of bread and wine in the Mass, the deliberate giving and receiving of an unconsecrated host staged an outward appearance that concealed a quite different, imperceptible reality. Unlike the consecrated host, an unconsecrated ‘counterfeit’ host did not ‘cover’ or ‘conceal’ the sacred reality of the corpus Christi; it was only what it seemed to be.47 Because the senses could not ordinarily detect Christ’s real presence in the sacramental species, absent a miracle there was no way to discern Christ’s real absence in a ‘counterfeit’ host. Starting in the late twelfth century, reports of precisely this kind of miracle proliferated. The miraculous ability to discern a consecrated from an unconsecrated host features in the vitae of a number of late medieval saints and beati, both male and female.48 According to a widely circulated story, when Maurice de Sully (d. 1196), bishop of Paris, was dying and unable to eat at the abbey of Saint-Victor, the canons did not dare to bring him a consecrated host, but instead offered him an unconsecrated host.49 This he immediately rejected saying, ‘That is not my Lord. I want you to bring me the body of my Lord Jesus’. When the amazed canons returned with a consecrated host, he recognized it instantly and declaimed (in verse), ‘Hail saviour, my hope, my glory, oh Christ! Hail you who save whatever is saved in the world’, and died shortly thereafter.50 Theology of the Eucharist and the Chapel of the Miracle Corporal”, Vivens Homo: Revisita di teologia e scienze religiose 18 (2007) 59–77. On the Dominican Robert Holkot’s fascinating, but extreme argument that the Eucharist involved ‘perceptual error’ caused by ‘divine deception’, see Denery “From Sacred Mystery to Divine Deception” 137–141. 47  On the view that the accidents of bread and wine ‘cover’ or ‘veil’ Christ’s body, proposed by both Peter of Poitiers and Peter the Chanter, see Dumoutet E., “La théologie de l’eucharistie à la fin du XIIe siècle: Le témoinage de Pierre le Chantre d’après la Summa de sacramentis”, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen-âge 18 (1943) 216–217. 48   For further discussion see Browe, Die eucharistischen Wunder 36–40; idem, “Die Sterbekommunion” 164–65; and Bynum C., Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: 1987) 76–77, 91–92, 117, 128–129, 141, 172, 182–183, 228–229. 49  The story is also reported in Gerald of Wales’s Gemma ecclesiastica (I, c. 9), Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum (IX, c. 43), and Robert of Courson’s Summa; it was subsequently retold with Hugh of St Victor taking the place of Maurice de Sully; for further discussion, see Browe, “Die Sterbekommunion” 165; Rubin, Corpus Christi 119–120; and Macy, “Medieval Theology of the Eucharist and the Chapel” 63–64. 50  ‘Vnde cum iam valde senex in extremis laboraret et in domo sancti Victoris Parisiensis iaceret, peciit sibi afferri corpus Christi. Attendentes autem loci illius fratres quod iam per multos dies nichil prorsus recipere potuisset, non ausi sunt ei hostiam consecratam afferre, sed simplicem hostiam causa probacionis attulerunt eidem. Ipse vero statim ut vidit ait: “Iste non est Dominus meus. Volo, ut corpus Domini mei Jhesu Christi afferatis

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Absent such a miracle, however, how could Christian devotees see the truth of feigned sacramental appearances? Ample evidence suggests that works of art offered a compelling response to this question in the medieval and early modern periods. Precisely because of their simulative powers, works of art could present to the eyes not only the otherwise imperceptible truth of Christ’s real presence, but also the truth of the mere wafer hiding in plain sight, the ‘counterfeit’ host that concealed nothing and thus, in the case of hidden sinners, camouflaged sin and deceived the faithful. 6

Feigning Hard Truths

In the Siebenhirter Hours miniature, the Lehrbüchermeister confronts the beholder both with Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and his absence from certain communion wafers [Fig. 2.1]. The complex, difficult dynamics of the sacrament, its ordinarily imperceptible permutations, are neither denied or baldly asserted in the painting, so much as they are explored and adeptly thematized by means of artistic simulation. The hidden truth of Christ’s real, sacramental presence in the Eucharist is indeed dramatized by the illumination, but is not the only, nor even the most spectacular mysterium disclosed by the Lehrbüchermeister’s painting. Within the fictive space of the miniature, the illuminator gives us a penetrating view into homo interior – the otherwise imperceptible moral-spiritual state of each communicant. In this fashion, the fiction-making power of the painted image invests its beholder with extraordinarily acute powers of moral-spiritual discernment.51 michi.” Fratres autem admirantes et stupentes hostiam consecratam attulerunt. Qui eam adorando et osculando, cum non posset eam recipere, fertur in ipsa hora hos versus dixisse: “Salue saluator, mea spes, mea gloria, Christe! Salue qui saluas, quicquid saluatur in orbe!” Et non multum post emisit spiritum in manus Domini nostri Jhesu Christi qui viuit et regnat per omnia secula seculorum. Amen.’: Greven J., ed., Die Exempla aus den Sermones feriales et communes des Jakob von Vitry, Sammlung mittellateinischer Texte 9 (Heidelberg: 1914): 11–12. English translation mine. 51  A textual parallel is offered by the exemplum recounted in Robert Mannyng’s Handlying Synne of a priest, worried about giving the Eucharist at Easter to unworthy communicants, who asks God for help. The deity grants his request by working a miraculous transformation of the parishioners’ faces. The worthy appear to the priest with bright shining faces, but the faces of unworthy mass-goers are vividly and variously transformed so that they appear red, black, swollen, or ‘lyke foule maumetrye’; each disfigurement acting as a coded revelation of the character of their hidden sins: Robert Mannyng, Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne,’ A.D. 1303 with Those Parts of the Anglo-French Treaties on Which It Was Founded, William of Wadington’s ‘Manuel Des Pechiez’, ed. F. Furnivall, Early English Text Society. Original Series 119, 123, 2 vols (London: 1901) 317–319 (ll. 10159–10248).

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It is precisely in this connection that the visual cues provided by the illuminator to indicate that the communions he depicts take place outside of the Mass become salient. Unlike hyper-vigilant late medieval and early modern parishioners, the beholder of the painting does not witness the moment of the consecration or of the elevation of the host. In the illumination we have no possibility of detecting a sacerdotal slip or sleight of hand. What is more, the illuminator’s decision to depict three differentiated communicants and their respective communion wafers makes it plain that the hosts contained within the golden coffer upon the altar, like the host received by the first devotee, were indeed consecrated. The circumstances pictorially described by the illuminator are precise, and precisely motivated. In this miniature, the Lehrbüchermeister has painted a limit case in which the circumstantial guarantees provided by witnessing the performance of the Mass are withheld. In a systematic fashion, the illumination thus alerts its beholder to the impossibility of sensually perceiving sacramental validity under ordinary circumstances. But painting, the illumination mutely asserts, is – like the Eucharist itself – not subject to the dictates of ordinary circumstances and routine sense experience. With considerable artistic license, the Lehrbüchermeister virtuosically demonstrates how works of art can make visible and vivid truths that would otherwise be inaccessible to the eye. Through its simulative powers, the miniature allows us confidently to discern what would, ordinarily, be impossible to perceive: the first wafer is indeed Christ’s body, but the second and third wafers have been transformed further. Thanks to the inner states of their recipients, these hosts are no longer the Eucharist. The painting thus invests its beholders with a kind of moral-spiritual x-ray vision, allowing them to see the transformative effect of tepid piety upon the second communion wafer and the debasement worked by grievous sin, registered in the third communion wafer and in the repulsive appearance of its recipient. The three clerics standing at the altar remain placidly unaware of what the Lehrbüchermeister makes the beholder of the image see quite acutely: not only the hideous presence of a hidden sinner, but also how weak faith and unabsolved sin transform the transubstantiated bread of life into mere food, or else a poisonous morsel. The Siebenhirter Hours is not the only late medieval or early modern work of art to homoeopathically respond to the thorny problem of false appearances – in the sacrament of the altar, and in the human sinner, and, by implication, in ‘counterfeit’ Eucharists – with a powerful dose of simulation. To adduce but one more example, a miniature introducing the Penitential Psalms in a Venetian Book of Hours, produced ca. 1430 CE, in the collection of the Morgan Library (MS M.1089, f. 118v; henceforth MS M.1089), squarely confronts the possibility

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figure 2.2 Miniature introducing the Penitential Psalms in a Venetian Book of Hours: New York, Morgan Library, MS M.1089, f. 118v (c. 1430 CE). Purchased on the Fellows Fund, with special assistance of Mrs. Alexandre P. Rosenberg and Mr. Henry Glazier, in memory of William S. Glazier, 1993 Photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York

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of counterfeit piety and the inscrutability of the host with the resources of picture-making [Fig. 2.2].52 Dominated by the central figure of the crucified Christ bleeding into a chalice set upon the altar, the left and right sides of the image traffic in stark contrasts. The foreground of each side of the composition features a pair of sacramental scenes taking the form of a kneeling man making his confession to a seated priest and a standing tonsured figure in a white alb in the act of placing the eucharistic host in the mouth of a communicant. Disposed in a pointedly chiasmic composition, these two-part sacramental vignettes on the left and right sides of the image are a single artistic conceit that diagrams the very consequential differences between the good and the bad confession, the good and the bad communion. On Christ’s favoured right side (the left side of the composition as the beholder sees it), the making of a valid, complete confession and the priest’s gesture of absolution has broken a dark cord that encircles the penitent’s neck and floats against the blue background of the painting while a thwarted demon hovers above, holding a length of this broken bond in its hands. In the foreground, overlapping this scene of liberation, a kneeling communicant receives a host from a deacon. The minute form of a dove perched upon the wafer serves as a visible indication of the grace conveyed by the host. The ultimate consequences of these two acts of valid sacramental participation are figured above where two hovering angels hold in cloth-covered hands the decorous twinned forms of two naked souls in prayer, presumably the souls of the devotees. On Christ’s ‘sinister’ side (the right side of the composition) the illuminator again depicts the sacramental acts of confession and communion, crowned by a psychopompic vignette, but here the variable of impiety animates the pictorial equation and the result is terrifying. In the foreground depiction of confession, the kneeling man’s impenitence is made strikingly visible in the form of the long dark cord that passes through the scene of communion, as it is hauled diagonally upwards by a muscular demon. Penetrated by the dark cord of sin, the interaction of the deacon holding the host and communicant on the right side of the image completes the pictorial lesson in sham piety and its consequences. Looking closely, we can discern that the minute wafer the deacon offers to the kneeling male figure conveys a poisonous presence: the 52  On New York, Morgan Library, MS M.1089, see Wieck, R. (ed.), Illuminating Faith. The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art, exh. cat., The Morgan Library (New York: 2014) 35 (cat. no. 26) and the description in CORSAIR, the Morgan Library’s online catalogue: http:// corsair.themorgan.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=1&ti=1,1&Search%5FArg=M%2E1089& Search%5FCode=GKEY%5E&CNT=50&PID=f8SIJAonp9xoVIQytqWa3VVe1sS&SEQ=201 80821132345&SID=1.

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tiny black form of a scorpion.53 That this unworthy communicant eats unto his own damnation is pictorially confirmed in the upper reaches of this half of the composition where the figures of two demons, hellish foils to the angels on the left side of the painting, hold aloft in their grasping arms the agitated damned souls of the unrepentant figures of false piety below. The quasi-diagrammatic configuration of the miniature in MS M.1089 poses the problem of the counterfeiting of sacramental participation only to resolve it – pictorially – as a series of stark mimetic contrasts, symmetrically disposed in relation to an utterly unequivocal visual assertion of Christ’s real presence in the sacrament of the altar. The impossibility of discerning the ontological state of the communion wafer – including its de-sacralization in response to tepid faith and grievous sin – that was thematized and dramatized in the Siebenhirter Hours miniature is instead noted and dismissed by the painter of the illumination in MS M.1089. Although the communicants he depicts receive the host from deacons outside of the celebration of the Mass, as in the Siebenhirter Hours painting, through an insistently artful compositional structure, the illuminator of the Morgan miniature adjudicates the inscrutability of the communion wafer’s appearance a priori. It is rather the problem of sham Christians that preoccupies the painter of the miniature in MS M.1089 and provokes his confrontational painting, in which there is no middle ground, no place given to the figuration of tepid faith, but instead a spectacular staging of the high drama of redemption and damnation. Dealing in polar, two-term contrasts – dexter vs. sinister, valid vs. invalid, saved vs. damned – the illuminator of MS M.1089 deploys painting’s simulative resources to produce a stark representation of sacramental truth and consequences.

53  For further discussion of the scorpion’s association with sin and deceit in Patristic and medieval texts, see Rumsey L., “The Scorpion of Lechery and ‘Ancrene Wiss’”, Medium Ævum 61 (1992) 48–58; and Renaudet A., “Le scorpion symbolique dans l’art religieux”, Journal des Savants (1935) 171–175. For the scorpion as an anti-Jewish motif in late medieval and early Renaissance Italian art, see Capriotti G., Lo scorpione sul petto: iconografia antiebraica tra XV e XVI secolo alla periferia dello Stato Pontificio (Rome: 2014); Bulard M., Le scorpion, symbole du peuple juif dans l’art religieux des XIVe, XVe, XVIe siècles: à propos de quatre peintures murales de la chapelle Saint-Sébastien à Lanslevillard (Savoie), Annales de l’Est. Mémoires, 6 (Paris: 1935).

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7 Conclusion Despite their many points of affinity, the Morgan Library miniature and the Siebenhirter Hours painting take up the aesthetic and epistemological problem of the Eucharist and the challenge of empirically adjudicating valid from invalid sacramental participation from significantly different angles. What both paintings share is an animating conviction, put into practice, that the profound aesthetic challenge of the Eucharist – both the inscrutable stability of the communion wafer’s appearance, be it consecrated or unconsecrated, and the opportunity that disjunction of appearance and sacramental reality afforded to conceal sin with a pantomime of pious communication – was a problem that artists and their works were uniquely equipped to address, precisely through an overt manipulation of appearances, a patent counterfeiting worked by art. The ‘counterfeit’ Eucharist troubled medieval and early modern theologians and lay parishioners for good reason: it feigned the truth of Christ’s real presence in the sacramental species, it camouflaged the hidden sinner under the appearance of a worthy communicant, and it purposively exploited the inadmissibility of sense-experience in relation to the Eucharist in the cause of avoiding social, moral, and spiritual scandal. If many theologians argued that making a fiction of the Eucharist was never acceptable, it is clear that not only collaborating priests and sinners, but also artists and the beholders of works of art understood that such blanket prohibitions did not and would not suffice. As the Lehrbüchermeister and the illuminator of MS M.1089 recognized, to confront the aesthetically perplexing truth of the Eucharist and the troubling possibility of ‘counterfeited’ hosts required more, not less, simulation: it required works of art. Bibliography Adams M., Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford – New York: 2010). Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, ed. P. Jammy, 21 vols (Lyon: Sumptibus Claudii Prost., 1651). Bonaventure, Opera omnia, ed. PP. Collegii a S. Bonaventura, 11 vols (Quaracchi, 1887). Browe P., “Die eucharistischen Verwandlungswunder des Mittelalters”, Römische Quartalschrift, 37 (1929) 137–169. Browe P., Die häufige Kommunion im Mittelalter (Münster: 1938).

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Browe P., Die eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters, Breslauer Studien zur historischen Theologie n. F. 4 (Breslau: 1938). Browe P., “Die Pflichtkommunion der Laien im Mittelalter”, in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht, Vergessene Theologen 1 (Berlin: 2003) 39–50. Browe P., Die Pflichtkommunion im Mittelalter (Münster: 1940). Browe P., “Die Sterbekommunion im Altertum und Mittlelater”, in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht, Vergessene Theologen 1 (Berlin: 2003) 115–172. Browe P., “Liturgische Delikte und ihre Bestrafung im Mittelalter”, in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht, Vergessene Theologen 1 (Berlin: 2003) 353–360. Bulard M., Le scorpion, symbole du peuple juif dans l’art religieux des XIVe, XVe, XVIe siècles: à propos de quatre peintures murales de la chapelle Saint-Sébastien à Lanslevillard (Savoie), Annales de l’Est. Mémoires, 6 (Paris: 1935). Burr D., ‘Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought,’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 74 (1984): 1–113. Bynum C., “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages”, Church History 71 (2002) 685–714. Bynum C., Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: 1987). Bynum C., ‘Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century’, in Hamburger J. – Bouché, A.-M. (eds.) The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton: 2006): 208–240. Bynum C., Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: 2007). Capriotti G., Lo scorpione sul petto: iconografia antiebraica tra XV e XVI secolo alla periferia dello Stato Pontificio (Rome: 2014). Colish M., Faith, Fiction, & Force in Medieval Baptismal Debates (Washington, D.C.: 2014). Denery D., “From Sacred Mystery to Divine Deception: Robert Holkot, John Wyclif and the Transformation of Fourteenth-Century Eucharistic Discourse”, Journal of Religious History 29 (2005) 129–144. Dumoutet E., Le désir de voir l’hostie et les origines de la dévotion au Saint-Sacrement (Paris: 1926). Dumoutet E., “La théologie de l’eucharistie à la fin du XIIe siècle: Le témoinage de Pierre le Chantre d’après la Summa de sacramentis”, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen-âge 18 (1943) 181–261. Dutton M., “Eat, Drink and Be Merry: The Eucharistic Spirituality of the Cistercian Fathers”, in Sommerfeldt J. (ed.), Erudition at God’s Service, Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 11 (Kalamazoo, MI: 1987) 1–31.

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Freestone W., The Sacrament Reserved: A Survey of the Practice of Reserving the Eucharist, with Special Reference to the Communion of the Sick, during the First Twelve Centuries, Alcuin Club Collections 21 (London: 1917). Goering J., “The Invention of Transubstantiation”, Traditio 46 (1991) 147–170. Greven J., ed., Die Exempla aus den Sermones feriales et communes des Jakob von Vitry, Sammlung mittellateinischer Texte 9 (Heidelberg: 1914). Guillelmus Autissiodorensis, Summa aurea in quattuor libros sententiarum: a subtillissimo doctore Magistro Guillermo altissiodorensi edita (Paris: N. Vaultier et Durandi Gerlier, 1500). Hamburger J., “Bosch’s ‘Conjuror’: An Attack on Magic and Sacramental Heresy”, Simiolus 14 (1984) 5–23 Izbicki T., The Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law (Cambridge: 2015). Izbicki T., “Temeraria Manus: Custody of the Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law”, in Erdő P. – Szuromi S. (eds.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Series C – Subsidia 14 (Vatican City: 2010) 537–552. Jorissen H., Die Entfaltung der Transsubstantiationslehre bis zum Beginn der Hochscholastik (Münster: 1965). Kumler A., “The ‘Genealogy of Jean Le Blanc’: Accounting for the Materiality of the Medieval Eucharist”, in Anderson C. – Dunlop A. – Smith P. (eds.), The Matter of Art. Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750 (Manchester: 2014) 119–140. Kumler A., “Manufacturing the Sacred in the Middle Ages: The Eucharist and Other Medieval Works of Ars”, English Language Notes 53 (2015) 9–44. Kumler A., “The Multiplication of the Species: Eucharistic Morphology in the Middle Ages”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (2011) 179–191. Macy G., “The ‘Dogma of Transubstantiation’ in the Middle Ages”, in Treasures From the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville: 1999) 81–120. Macy G., “Medieval Theology of the Eucharist and the Chapel of the Miracle Corporal”, Vivens Homo: Revisita di teologia e scienze religiose 18 (2007) 59–77. Macy G., “Reception of the Eucharist According to the Theologians: A Case of Diversity in the 13th and 14th Centuries”, in Treasures From the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville: 1999) 36–58. Macy G., The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament According to the Theologians, c. 1080–c. 1220 (Oxford – New York: 1984). Mannyng R., Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne,’ A.D. 1303 with Those Parts of the Anglo-French Treaties on Which It Was Founded, William of Wadington’s ‘Manuel Des Pechiez’, ed. F. Furnivall, Early English Text Society. Original Series 119, 123, 2 vols (London: 1901). McCue J., “The Doctrine of Transubstantiation From Berengar Through Trent: The Point at Issue”, Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968) 385–430.

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Megivern J., Concomitance and Communion: A Study in Eucharistic Doctrine and Practice (Fribourg – New York: 1963). Muir L., “The Mass on the Medieval Stage”, Comparative Drama 23 (1989) 314–30. Peckham J., Quodlibeta quatuor, ed. F. Delorme – G. J. Etzkorn (Grottaferrata: 1989). Pfändtner K.-G., “Das Gebetbuch des Johann Siebenhirter in Stockholm: Geschichte, Ausstattung, Bedeutung”, Carinthia I 197 (2007) 107–156. Pfändtner K.-G., Die Handschriften des Lehrbüchermeisters, Codices manuscripti. Supplementum 4 (Purkersdorf: 2011). Post P., “‘An Excellent Game …’: On Playing the Mass”, in Caspers C. – Lukken G. – Rouwhorst G. (eds.), Bread of Heaven: Customs and Practices Surrounding Holy Communion: Essays in the History of Liturgy and Culture (Kampen: 1995) 183–214. Renaudet A., “Le scorpion symbolique dans l’art religieux”, Journal des Savants (1935) 171–175. Rubin M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge; New York: 1991). Rumsey L., “The Scorpion of Lechery and ‘Ancrene Wiss’”, Medium Ævum 61 (1992) 48–58. Starke, J., Die Sakramentenlehre des Wilhelm von Auxerre, Forschungen zur Christlichen Literatur- und Dogmengeschichte 13 (Paderborn, 1917). Vann Sprecher, T. D., “The Marketplace of the Ministry: The Impact of Sacerdotal Piecework on the Care of Souls in Paris, 1483–1505”, Speculum 91 (2016) 149–170. Vann Sprecher, T. D., Priest as Criminal: Community Regulation of Priests in the Archdeaconry of Paris, 1483–1505, Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Minnesota: 2013). Vondrus-Reissner J.-G., “Présence réelle et juridiction ecclésiastique dans le diocese de Paris (fin XV ème – 1530)”, Histoire, Économie et Société 7 (1988) 41–53. Wieck, R. (ed.), Illuminating Faith. The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art, exh. cat., The Morgan Library (New York: 2014). William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, ed. J. Ribaillier (Rome: 1980).

chapter 3

Vestments in the Mass Lee Palmer Wandel

figure 3.1 Rogier van der Weyden, Altar of the Seven Sacraments (before 1450). Oil on wood, 200 cm × 223 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_004

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On July 2, 1524, the Zurich Town Council authorised seventeen men to remove the ‘idols’ (‘Götzen’) from the town’s churches.1 Stone sculptures were to be smashed into cobblestones. Wooden panels and altarpieces were to be broken into firewood. Precious stones were to be separated from precious metals, which, in turn were to be melted down. Vestments were to be handed out to the poor. In each act, the matter of the object was made explicit: cobblestones, firewood, jewels, coin, and cloth. In all, as I am coming ever better to understand, the dense world of late medieval Christianity was torn asunder. One marker of the depth and scope of that erasure is that vestments have come to be construed as a thing and a thing apart from the person who wears them – as precisely that which could be used to clothe the bodies of lay poor as readily as the bodies of consecrated priests – a surface, albeit beautifully worked.2 In modern eyes, vestments might signal ordination or specific clerical orders, but they remain a symbol discrete from the person they clothed.3 And yet, in the world that iconoclastic violence tore asunder, vestments, in manifesting, representing, figuring, signifying – through their matter – themselves invited not only their beholders, but more particularly, each priest who was vested with them, to enter into contemplation of the mystery of divine Revelation. In their very play of seeming surface and materiality, they engaged directly with aporia of the Incarnation, and did so most fully in the context of the Mass and the celebration of the sacrament of Communion. William Durand (c. 1230–1296), ‘the best known and most widely read liturgical expositor of the late Middle Ages’,4 is our best guide to the world the iconoclasts tore apart. His Rationale divinorum officiorum, ‘the most comprehensive exposition of the Latin Christian liturgy produced by a medieval author’,5 was 1  This is drawn from Wandel L. P., Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (New York – Cambridge: 1995) 97. 2  Dyan Elliott, for example, speaks of the ‘accretion of clerical costume’; see “Dressing and Undressing the Clergy: Rites of Ordination and Degradation”, in Burns J. (ed.), Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings (New York: 2004) 57. For an exploration of the relationship between person and vestment, see Lachaud, F., “La critique du vêtement et du soin des apparances dans quelques œuvres religieuses, morales et politiques XIIe–XIV e siècles”, Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Societá Medievali 15 (2007) 61–85. 3  Cf. Elliott, “Dressing and Undressing the Clergy”, in Burns, Medieval Fabrications 57: ‘distinctive objects or articles of clothing through which [each grade of the clergy] could be identified’. For a particularly influential model for thinking about the relationship between person and garment, see Jones A. R. – Stallybrass P., Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: 2000). 4  Thibodeau T. M., “Western Christendom”, in Wainwright G. – Westerfield Tucker K. B. (eds.), The Oxford History of Christian Worship (Oxford: 2006) 230. 5  Thibodeau T. M., “Preface”, in William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments, trans. Thibodeau (Chicago: 2010) vii.

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also among the earliest and most published: ‘only the Bible, a missal, a psalter, and a Latin grammar of Donatus are known to have been printed prior to the Rationale’.6 The Rationale was the fifth book printed in Europe, on October 6, 1459, on Gutenberg’s press, albeit by his successors; at least forty-four editions were printed before 1501, and at least thirteen more editions were published in the sixteenth century.7 The Rationale is the most comprehensive compilation of all that had been written on the liturgy. Durand’s sources began with Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, and included Pseudo-Dionysius, one of the first to offer an allegorical interpretation of the liturgy,8 Alcuin, Amalar,9 and other authors through Pope Innocent III. He did not seek to reconcile or harmonise his sources, but offered a sense of the liturgy which comprehended all commentary without synthesising it. When I turn to the Rationale directly, then, and its treatment of vestments, I offer unusually lengthy quotations, to allow the reader to see more fully Durand’s complex sense of the relationship among vestments, the person of the priest, and divine Revelation. For Durand, as for all those whose works he culled for the Rationale, the liturgy was never mere words. The Rationale explicated not simply the Mass as word spoken and chanted and specific movements of the hands, the body, the head (Book 4), or the Divine Office (Book 5), or the temporal cycles of the liturgy, the Temporale (Book 6) and the Sanctorale (Book 7), as well as the computus and calendar (Book 8). Durand entered his consideration of the Mass and the Divine Office through explications of church building – the wood and stone of the structure – and altars (Book 1); clerical orders (Book 2); and vestments (Book 3). As Durand wrote in his opening of the Rationale: I. Quaecumque in ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis consistunt, diuinis plena sunt signis atque misteriis, ac singula celesti sunt dulcedine redundantia, si diligentem tamen habeant inspectorem qui norit mel de petra sugere, oleumque de durissimo saxo. Quis tamen nouit ordinem celi, et rationes ipsius ponet in terra? Scrutator quippe maiestatis opprimetur a gloria. Si quidem puteus altus est et in quo aquam hauriam non habeo, nisi porrigat ille qui dat omnibus affluenter et non improperat, ut inter 6  White, J. F., “Durandus and the Interpretation of Christian Worship”, in Shriver G. H. (ed.), Contemporary Reflections on the Medieval Christian Tradition: Essays in Honor of Ray C. Petry (Durham, N.C.: 1974) 49. 7  Ibidem 50. 8  Jungmann, J. A., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. F. A. Brunner (New York: 1951; reprint ed., Allen, TX: 1986) 87. 9  On Amalar, see Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite 87–91.

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medium montium transeuntem hauriam aquam in gaudio de fontibus saluatoris. Licet igitur non omnium que a maioribus tradita sunt ratio reddi possit, quia tamen quod in hiis ratione caret extirpandum est, idcirco ego Gulielmus sancte Mimatensis Ecclesie, sola Dei patientia dictus episcopus, pulsans pulsabo ad ostium, si forte clauis Dauid aperire dignetur, ut introducat me rex in cellam uinariam in qua michi supernum demonstretur exemplar quod Moysi fuit in monte monstratum; quatenus de singulis que in ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis consistunt, quid significent et figurent, eo ualeam reuelante clare et aperte disserere et rationes ponere, qui linguas infantium facit disertas, cuius spiritus ubi uult spirat, diuidens singulis prout uult, ad laudem et gloriam Trinitatis.10 Whatever belongs to the liturgical offices, objects, and furnishings of the Church is full of signs of the divine and the sacred mysteries, and each of them overflows with a celestial sweetness when it is encountered by a diligent observer who can extract honey from a rock and oil from the stoniest ground [Deut. 32:13]. Who knows the order of the heavens and can apply its rules to the earth [Job 38:33]? Certainly, he who would attempt to investigate the majesty of heaven would be overwhelmed by its glory. It is, in fact, a deep well from which I cannot drink [cf. Jn. 4:11], unless He who gives all things abundantly and does not reproach us [ Jas. 1:5] provides me with a vessel so that I can drink with joy from the fountains of the Savior [Isa. 12:3] which flow between the mountains [Ps. 103:10]. A reason cannot always be given for everything that has been handed down to us by our predecessors; and because that which lacks an explanation must be uprooted, I, William, bishop of the holy church of Mende, by the indulgence of God alone, knocking at the door, will continue to knock, until the key of David deigns to open it for me, so that the king might bring me into his cellar where he stores his wine [Song 2:4]. Here the celestial model that was shown to Moses on the mountaintop will 10  Durand William, Prohemivm, 1, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV, eds. A. Davril, O. S. B. – T. M. Thibodeau (Turnholt: 1995) 3–4. In the books of Durand’s Rationale I cite in this article, that is, the edition of the Latin text and the individual volumes of the translations of the Prologue and Book III, Thibodeau used different systems of numbering Durand’s division of the text. I have preserved those different systems in the notes, for the sake of precision of reference, which leads to inconsistencies of numbering – Roman or Arabic numerals – between the Latin edition and the English translations, which, in addition, were published by different presses and under differing titles. I have also provided the additional information of page number, as in this footnote.

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be revealed to me [cf. Ex 20], so that I can unveil and explain clearly and openly each object or ornament that belongs to the ecclesiastical ser­ vices, what each of these signifies or represents figuratively, and set forth their rationale, according to what has been revealed by Him who makes the tongues of infants speak eloquently [Wis 10:21], whose Spirit blows where it wishes [ Jn 3:8], and gives to each one as it deserves [I Cor 12:11], to the praise and glory of the Trinity.11 Vestments were not surface. Vestments demanded the same interpretive attention as all other media of divine Revelation. They, too, for Durand, were ‘full of the signs of the divine and the sacred mysteries’.12 In the Rationale, Durand brought to bear the same fourfold sense, ‘historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical’, as was being applied to Scripture to explicate all the things that had been made to be used in the Mass and the Divine Office.13 Church structures, altars, and vestments revealed in ways analogous to Scripture, participating in both its mystery and its Revelation. Durand shared with the theologians whom Marie-Dominique Chenu has studied the sense, ‘at stake is the discernment of the profound truth that lies hidden within the dense substance of things and is revealed by these means’.14 Vestments were very much a part of that dense substance of things. The very title of the whole was drawn, as Durand explained at the end of the Prologue, from one part of a priest’s vestments: 16. Sane liber iste Rationalis uocabulo describitur. Nam quemadmodum in rationali iudicii quod legalis pontifex ferebat in pectore scriptum erat manifestatio et ueritas, sic et hic rationes uarietatum in diuinis officiis et earum ueritas describuntur et manifestantur quas in scrinio pectoris sui ecclesiarum prelati et sacerdotes debent fideliter conseruare. Et sicut in illo erat lapis in cuius splendore filii Israel Deum sibi fore propitium agnoscebant […] Illud quoque quatuor coloribus auroque contextum erat et hic, ut premissum est, rationes uarietatum in ecclesiasticis rebus atque 11  Durand William, Prologue.1, The Rationale Divinorum Officiorum of William Durand of Mende, trans. T. M. Thibodeau (New York: 2007) 1. 12  Ibidem. 13  See, in particular, Thibodeau T. M., “Enigmata Figurarum: Biblical Exegesis and Liturgical Exposition in Durand’s ‘Rationale’”, The Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993) 65–79. As editor, Thibodeau has italicized Scriptural references and added their precise citation. The Latin edition reflects Durand’s practice of embedding Scriptural texts in his analysis. 14  Chenu M.-D. “The Symbolist Mentality”, in Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, trans. J. Taylor – L. Little (Chicago: 1968) 99.

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officiis quatuor sensibus, uidelicet ystorico, allegorico, tropologico et anagogico, fide media colorantur.15 The word Rationale is appropriately used as the title of this book, because just as ‘revelation and truth’ were written on the pectoral of judgment that the High Priest bore on his vestments, so too the Rationale contains the reasons for the variations in the Divine Offices, and their inner meaning is described and made manifest. The prelates and priests of the Church should faithfully keep these truths in the chamber of their heart. In the pectoral of judgment, moreover, there was a stone by whose splendor the sons of Israel could know that God’s favor was with them. […] The pectoral was embroidered with four colors and golden thread, and now, as I stated before, the reasons for the variety of ecclesiastical offices can be said to correspond to these four colors and are understood through the four senses: namely, the historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical, with faith [gold] at the center of all colors.16 Between Book Two, the orders of clergy – cantor, psalmist, doorkeeper, lector, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, priest, and bishop – and Book Four, the Mass, Durand placed his exposition of vestments, Book Three. Vestments came between the person of the celebrant and the rite in the structure of the Rationale and in the temporal sequence of preparation for the Mass. Durand opened Book Three by drawing a clear opposition between sacred and mundane worlds: III.1. In cotidiano usu non est uestibus sacris utendum, ad notandum quod sicut mutationem habitus secundum litteram facimus, ita et secundum spiritum agamus. Non ergo cum uestibus communis uite usu pollutis in sancta sanctorum ingrediamur, sed cum conscientia munda et uestibus mundis et sacris, dum sacramenta tractemus. […] Habet ergo, secundum Ieronymum: ‘Religio diuina alterum habitum in ecclesiasiticis officis, alium in communi usu’[…]17 Sacred vestments are not to be used for daily wear, to note that just as we change garments according to the letter, so too should we do this 15  Durand, Prohemivm, 16, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 10. 16  Durand, Prologue.16, The Rationale Divinorum Officiorum 6. 17  Durand, Liber III, Prohemivm, 1, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 177.

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according to the spirit. Therefore, we shall not enter into the Holy of Holies wearing everyday clothing, polluted as it is, with the use of everyday life, but enter with a clean conscience and with clean and sacred vestments while we are handling the sacraments. […] Therefore, according to Jerome, ‘Divine religion has one set of garments for the ecclesiastical service, and another for daily use’ […]18 The boundary that divided consecrated space from the everyday world also separated vestments from daily clothing; vestments belonged within and to the space the consecration of which Durand had already considered. In Book Three Durand took up each order’s vestments, treating first the vestments shared by the two orders, priests and bishops, who could officiate in the Mass. By the time Durand compiled the Rationale, vesting prayers, said as the priest put on the garments in preparation for the Mass, had become widespread.19 Durand’s choice of helmet, for instance, as an allegory of the amice might have been drawn from the vesting prayer, ‘Place upon my head, O Lord, the helmet of salvation to conquer and overcome diabolical errors and the fury of my persecuting enemies’.20 Joanne Pierce has noted the connection those prayers made, ‘between exterior washing of the body (hands) and both interior purification of the mind as well as growth in holiness’.21 Priests and bishops shared six vestments: ‘amictus, alba, zona seu cingulum, stola, manipulus, planeta’ (‘the amice, alb, belt, stole, maniple and chasuble’).22 Each had its own chapter in the Rationale. Durand began with the amice: […]Amictu quoque collum stringitur, per quod uocis castigatio intelligitur, quoniam per collum in quo uox est, usus loquendi exprimitur. Stringitur ergo collum, ne inde ad linguam mendacium transire possit.23 […] The amice is tied around the neck, through which we understand the chastisement of the spoken word, because through the neck, which is

18  Durand, Book 3.1.1, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 131. 19  Miller M. C., Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c. 800–1200 (Ithaca – London: 2014) 77–87. 20  Ibidem 81. 21  As quoted in ibidem 80. 22  Durand, Liber III, I, 18, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 184; Book 3.1.18, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 142. 23  Durand, Liber III, II, 2, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 185.

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where the voice is located, the ability to speak is represented. The neck is therefore tied lest some falsehood pass from there to the tongue.24 Next in order, as in vesting, was the alb. As with the amice, the alb was to demonstrate conduct the priest was to embody – ‘nothing superfluous or dissolute’ in his life or members. The fabric, both the plant, cotton, and the process, manifested: 1. Post amictum camisiam, siue albam, sacerdos induit, que membris corporis conuenienter aptata, nichil superfluum aut dissolutum in uita sacerdotis, aut in eius membris, esse debere demonstrat. Hec ob speciem candoris munditiam demonstrat, secundum quod legitur: Omne tempore uestiment tua sint candida; fit autem de bysso uel lino, propter quod scriptum est: Byssum sunt iustificationes sanctorum. 2. Est autem byssus linum egyptiacum. Sicut enim byssus, uel linum, candorem quem ex natura non habet multis tunisionibus attritum acquirit per artem; sic et hominis caro munditiam quam non optinet per naturam, per exercitia bonorum operum multis castigationibus macerata sortitur per gratiam.25 1. After the amice, the priest puts on the shirt or the alb, which snugly conforms to the members of the body, demonstrating that there ought to be nothing superfluous or dissolute in the life of the priest or in his members. It also demonstrates purity on account of the splendor of its dazzling brilliance, according to what we read: At all times, may your vestments be white [Eccl 9:8]; and it is made of cotton or linen, on account of what is written: Fine cloth is the just deeds of the saints [Rev 19:8]. 2. Cotton is an Egyptian fabric; and just as cotton or linen acquires a brightness that it does not have by nature, through much thrashing and handling by artisans, so it is with the flesh of man, who does not possess purity by nature but through practice of good works, after having been softened by many punishments and called by grace.26 Here, in using the term ‘sicut’, and elsewhere throughout his text, Durand sets person and fabric not as symbol and its bearer, but analogous, as one, then the other. Just as the working of cotton is visible in its brightness, so, too, good 24  Durand, Book 3.2.2, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 144. 25  Durand, Liber III, III, 1–2, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 186. 26  Durand, Book 3.3.1–2, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 147.

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works and grace are visible in the flesh of man. The fabric is not a surface, is not extraneous to person; like flesh, it manifests the work that has been done upon and with it. With each piece, Durand articulated multiple relations between it and the person of the priest. The girdle or belt: 1. Debet autem alba circa lumbos sacerdotis, seu pontificis, zona, seu cingulo, quod in lege et apud grecos baltheum dicebatur, precingi, ne delfuendo gressum impediat, ut castitas sacerdotis per album significata nullis incentiuorum stimulis dissoluatur. Cingulum namque continentiam significat, unde: Sint lumbi uestri precincti et lucerne ardentes in manibus uestris. […] 6. Cingulum ergo iustitiam significat, cuius duo sunt brachia sese constringentia, scilicet declinare a malo et operari bonum. Representat etiam flagellum quo Pylatus cecidit Iesum, Io. xix.27 1. The alb must be properly girded with a girdle [zona] or belt [cingulum] around the loins of the priest or pontiff, described in the Old Law and called a baltheum by the Greeks; and this is done lest the priest’s steps be impeded by the loose vestments falling, so that the chastity of the priest, signified by the alb, is not destroyed when struck by some outside stimulus. The belt also signifies continence, thus the text: Let your loins be girt, with burning lamps in your hands [Lk 12:35]. […] 6. The belt [cingulum] signifies justice, with which the two arms are themselves bound together, namely to turn aside from evil and to do good work. It also represents the whip with which Pilate beat Jesus, in John chapter 19 [cf. Jn 19:1].28 Each piece, following Durand, had direct scriptural references, not simply to objects named in the Old Testament, but to directions for conduct. Durand also accorded each piece multiple modes of visualising: the belt ‘significat’ continence and justice even as it ‘representat’ the whip Pilate used on Jesus’s body – preserving here the Latin, which, particularly in the case of ‘representat’ has valences that the English translations obscure. For Durand, these were 27  Durand, Liber III.IV.1 and 6, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 188, 190. 28  Durand, Book 3.4.1 and 6, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 151, 153.

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discrete relationships between the matter of the vestments and, in the one case, values that that matter pointed towards and, in the other, other matter which itself carried a history, acts in which that matter functioned to wound the person of God Incarnate. After the belt, according to Durand, the stole was vested next: 1. Post cingulum sacerdos orarium, siue stolam, que leue Domini iugum significat, siue que est iugum preceptorium Domini, super collum sibi imponit, ut iugum Domini se suscepisse demonstret. Quam cum osculo sibi imponit et deponit, ad notandum assensum et desiderium quo se subicit huic iugo; illa autem a collo per anteriora descendens, dextrum et sinistrum latus adornat, quia per arma iustitie a dextris et a sinistris, id es in prosperis et in aduersis, sacerdos debet esse munitus, quatenus nec aduersis fragantur nec prosperis eleuetur. Vnde et cum sacerdos in ordinatione stolam accipit, dicit illi episcopus: ‘Accipe iugum Dei, iugum enim eius suaue est, et onus eius leue’, suaue in prosperis, leue in aduersis.29 1. After the belt [cingulum], the priest puts on the orarium or stole, which represents the gentle yoke of the Lord, which is the yoke of the precepts of the Lord, which he puts on his neck, so that he can show that he has taken upon himself the Lord’s yoke. When he puts it on and removes it, he kisses the stole to denote the assent and desire to which he subjects himself with this yoke; and it hangs down from his neck towards his front, adorning his left and right side, because the priest ought to be armed with the weapons of justice on both the right and left [cf. 2 Cor. 6:7], that is, in times of prosperity and adversity, so that he is neither broken by adversity nor weakened by prosperity. Thus, when the priest receives the stole during his ordination, the bishop says to him: ‘Receive the yoke of the Lord, for His yoke is sweet, and His burden is light;’ it is sweet in prosperity and light in adversity.30 The stole, given at the sacrament of ordination, did not ‘symbolise’ the yoke, but – again to preserve the Latin – ‘significat’ and ‘demonstret’. It made visible the priest’s decision to place himself under the ‘yoke’ of God. Nor was it simply visible; as ‘yoke’, it had weight, an ‘onus’ that was at once ‘suaue’ and ‘leue’. It armed the priest – again an evocation of weight and substance – against both adversity and prosperity. 29  Durand, Liber III, V, 1, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 190. 30  Durand, Book 3.5.1, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 155.

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The relation between person and each individual vestment was, in the very process of vesting, itself layered. The amice was the means to understand the chastised voice, ‘per quod uocis castigatio intelligitur’ (‘through which we understand the chastisement of the spoken word’). The girdle manifested conduct the priest was to embody. The stole made present divine discipline. The maniple functioned again differently, and as complexly: 1. Quia uero mentibus bene compositis et diuino cultui mancipatis sepe subrepit acidia, que quodam torpore reddit animum dormientem, dicente Psalmista: Dormitauit anima pre tedio; ideo consequenter in sinistra manu quaedam apponitur manipula, in sinistra manu ministri ad altaris ministerium accedentis quedam apponitur mapula, que fanon, uel manipulus, uel sudarium appellatur, quatenus sudorem mentis abstergat et soporem cordis excutiat; ut bonis operibus inuigilet, depulso tedio uel torpore. Per mapulam enim bona opera uel uigilantia designantur, de qua Dominus ait: Vigilate quia nescitis qua hora filius hominis uenturus sit. Vnde sponsa dicit in Canticis: Ego dormio et cor meum uigilat. Per sudarium etiam penitentia designatur, qua labes cotidiani excessus et tedium mundane conuersationis extergitur […].31 1. Because a bitter thought often creeps into minds that are well composed and devoted to the divine liturgy, which, with a certain sluggishness, reduces the soul to sleepiness – with the Psalmist saying: My soul has slumbered through weariness [Ps 118:28] – therefore, a certain maniple [mapula] is laid over the left hand of the minister proceeding to the ministry of the altar, which is called a fanon, manipulus, or sudarium, since it wipes off the sweat of the soul and shakes off drowsiness of the heart, so that the minister can stay awake doing good works, pushing away sluggishness and sleepiness. The maniple designates good works or vigilance, about which the Lord said: Be watchful since you know not the hour in which the son of man will come [Mt 24:42]. And thus the bride says in Canticles: I sleep and my heart keeps vigil [Song 5:2]. Penance is designated by the sudarium, with which the aberration of daily lapses and the weariness of daily life in this world are washed away […].32 Each materially connected the person of the priest to the Passion. The stole, for example, ‘representat ligaturam qua Iesus ligatus fuit ad columpnam’, 31  Durand, Liber III, VI, 1, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 193. 32  Durand, Book 3.6.1, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 159.

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‘represents the ligature with which Jesus was bound to the column’,33 the maniple ‘representat funem quo Iesus comprehensus a Iudeis ligatus fuit’, ‘represents the rope with which Jesus was bound when he was seized by the Jews’,34 the chasuble ‘representat purpureum uestimentum quo milites circumdederunt Iesum, Io. xix’, ‘represents the purple vestment with which the soldiers cloaked Jesus, in John chapter 19 [c. Jn 19:2]’.35 The stole and the maniple ‘represent’ instruments of the Passion, the chasuble, cloth that had touched Jesus’s body, and, as it was vested, that representation was placed on the person of the priest – the chasuble, the cloth given to Christ, resting on all other layers. The chasuble was to be vested last, ‘Postremo super omnes uestes induitur casula’,36 ‘put over the top of all vestments’.37 The remaining vestments, treated in another ten chapters, pertained solely to a bishop (stockings and sandals, girdle and orale, tunic, dalmatic, gloves, mitre, ring, pastoral staff); to those who administer to the bishop (the sudarium); or to patriarchs, primates, and metropolitans (the pallium).38 While bishops, patriarchs, primates, and metropolitans all might celebrate a Mass, these vestments, following Durand, belonged not to the rite or the sacrament of communion, but to higher offices within the hierarchy of the Church. Alone among all the vestments, Durand accorded the chasuble movement: ‘casula, que quasi parua casa dicitur, et a grecis planeta uocatur a planon quod est error, quoniam errabundus eius limbus super brachia eleuatur’;39 […] ‘a “little house” [‘parva casa’], […] planeta in Greek, from the word planon, which is “something that wanders”, because its border is floating about, hanging over his arms’.40 The chasuble’s significance followed from its placement over all other vestments: 33  Durand, Liber III, V, 7, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 192; Durand, Book 3.5.7, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 158. 34  Durand, Liber III, VI, 5, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 194; Durand, Book 3. 6.5, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 161. 35  Durand, Liber III, VII, 5, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 196; Durand, Book 3. 7.5, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 165. 36  Durand, Liber III, VII, 1, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 195. 37  Durand, Book 3. 7.1, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 163. Elliott sees the layering of vestments as a ‘palimpsest’ of clerical orders; see “Dressing and Undressing the Clergy” 58. 38  Andrea Denny-Brown attends particularly to these vestments, although she maintains the same physical separation of vestment and person as Elliott; see Denny-Brown A., “Old Habits Die Hard: Vestimentary Change in William Durandus’s Rationale Divinorum Officiorum”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39 (2009) 545–570. 39  Durand, Liber III, VII, 1, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 195. 40  Durand, Book 3.7.1, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 163.

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[…] significans caritatem, sine qua sacerdos est sicut es sonans aut cymbalum tinniens. Sicut enim caritas operit multitudinem peccatorum et omnia legis et prophetarum mandata continet, dicente Apostolo: Plenitudo legis est caritas, sic et hec uestis cuncta planat et omnia alia indumenta intra se claudit et continet.41 This signifies charity, without which the priest is like a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal [cf. 1 Cor 13:1]. Just as charity covers a multitude of sins [1 Pet 4:8], and charity contains all the mandates of the Law and the Prophets, when the Apostle says: Charity is the fulfillment of the law [Rom 13:10], so this garment levels [planat] all of the vestments, and it closes up and contains within itself all the other garments.42 Thus the chasuble images charity at once materially and spatially – in covering all other vestments – and, in the sequence of the Mass, as that which moves as the arms are elevated at the consecration, in the gestural evocation of the Crucifixion, which, as we shall see, chasubles also represented. Durand explicated the different ways that the chasuble signified charity, which was not simply its first significance, but its major and fullest significance. ‘Per casulam’, ‘Through the chasuble’, Durand wrote, ‘quoque recte opera iustitie designatur, iuxta illud: Sacerdos tui induantur iustitiam’,43 ‘the works of righteous justice are designated, according to the text: May your priests be clothed with Justice [Ps. 131:9]’.44 In speaking of the form, Durand returned to the movement of the chasuble in the movement of the Mass, connecting tropologically the moment in the Mass when the priest’s hands were extended to the Passion as itself the moment that divided the Old Church from the New: 5. Quod autem casula unica et integra et undique clausa est, significat fidei unitatem et integritatem; uerumptamen in extensione manuum in anteriorem et posteriorem partem quodammodo diuiditur, designans et antiquam Ecclesiam que passionem Christi precessit; et nouam que passionem Christi subsequitur.45

41  Durand, Liber III, VII.1, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 195. 42  Durand, Book 3.7.1, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 163. 43  Durand, Liber III, VII.4, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 196. 44  Durand, Book 3.7.4, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 164–5. 45  Durand, Liber III, VII.5, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV 196.

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5. Because the chasuble is unique, whole and closed on all sides, it signifies the unity and integrity of the faith; nevertheless, in the extension of hands, it is, in a manner of speaking, divided into a front and a back part, designating the ancient Church, which came before Christ’s Passion, and the new one, which followed Christ’s Passion.46 The chasuble participated complexly in Christian time. It changed in the movements of the Mass, in those very shifts of light and colour, calling visual attention to the central act of the Mass, the moment of consecration when Christ’s body and blood became present on the altar. At the same time, its very form materialised the division of human time in relation to God: the time before Christ and the time after. The order of the vestments in the Rationale does not correspond to the order of vesting set forth in books of prayers for the act. While Durand placed the chasuble over all the other vestments, Maureen C. Miller has found ‘in most sets of vesting prayers, the final vestment to be put on was the maniple (mappula, manipulum, fano, sudarium)’.47 In ‘simple prayers to be said when putting on vestments’, Miller found ‘a more active appropriation of the concepts imparted’.48 The Rationale was intended for priests. The readings of each of the vestments were intended for those who were to place or have placed on their bodies each garment in sequence. The act of vesting was devotional and intended to be transformative: the garments were not merely to ‘signify’ the virtues of the priest – truthfulness, obedience, penance, purity, charity – the vestments were to manifest them, to show that which was beneath them in the person of the celebrant. As the cloth of each piece touched the body, the priest receiving that vestment was reciting prayers that echoed the senses the Rationale had named for each.49 Speaking and vesting, sound and touch, called forth simultaneously not only a haptic but also a spiritual connection between person and vestment – spirit and touch were not discrete from one another in the process of vesting, but interwoven, word and cloth, spiritual ideal spoken, spiritual ideal enacted, spiritual ideal represented. Speaking, vesting, and conduct evoked the mystery of Incarnation, the mystery of the connection of embodied spirit and the flesh that makes God visible even as it cloaks God’s divinity.

46  Durand, Book 3.7.5, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments 165. 47  Miller, Clothing the Clergy 85. 48  Miller, Clothing the Clergy 77. 49  Miller, Clothing the Clergy 77–87.

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Durand remarked the cotton – itself a fabric still rare in Europe – or linen of the alb, but neither the raw material nor cloth work of the chasuble, neither the production of the cloth, be it silk brocade or velvet, nor its embroidery. If the alb was to be consistently white, brilliant, to represent and to manifest purity of both cloth and person, the chasuble’s preeminent significance was charity, caritas. That significance was not represented by a particular kind of cloth – linen or cotton – or by a particular process of making the cloth. Chasubles represented in a different way entirely. As late as the fifteenth century at least, chasubles were not subsumed to the liturgical seasons; their colour, while perhaps shared by the altar cloth, dalmatics, stoles, or maniples, did not necessarily mark time in the annual cycle of Christ’s life. While liturgical colours were prescribed, ‘there was’, Nigel Morgan wrote, ‘a considerable freedom on the use of liturgical colours for certain feast days and the seasons of the Church year’.50 Red, for instance, was not restricted to martyrs as it ultimately would be, but used for vestments, the motif of which was the Virgin. ‘Many of the chasubles and copes with fully embroidered surfaces are essentially multi-coloured, with no single colour predominating, and therefore they could serve for any purpose, transcending specific colour requirements’.51 Far more chasubles survive in museum collections than other vestments, in part, in reference to amices, albs, stoles, and maniples, because their fabric was both heavier and more valuable; in part, in reference to mitres and gloves, because there were more priests than bishops; in part, in reference to dalmatics, perhaps because only the wealthiest churches could support luxurious dalmatics. Our sources, then, for medieval vestments are predominantly visual images. Of those, Rogier van der Weyden’s Altar of the Seven Sacraments offers one of the most eloquent visualisations of vestments.52 Like many other images, it provides detailed visualisation of the vestments in the celebration 50  M  organ N., “Embroidered Textiles in the Service of the Church”, in Browne C. – Davies G. – Michael M. A. (eds.), English Medieval Embroidery: Opus Anglicanum (New Haven – London: 2016) 26. 51  Morgan, “Embroidered Textiles” 27. 52  On Rogier van der Weyden’s Altar of the Seven Sacraments, see Panofsky E, “Two Roger Problems: The Donor of the Hague Lamentation and the Date of the Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments”, Art Bulletin 33 (1951) 33–40; Lane B. G., The Altar and the Altarpiece: Sacramental Themes in Early Netherlandish Painting (New York: 1984); Acres A., “Rogier van der Weyden’s Painted Texts”, Artibus et Historiae 21, 41 (2000) 75–109; Rothstein B., “Moveable Feasts of Reason: Description, Intelligence, and the Excitation of Sight”, in Göttler C. (ed.), Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture (Leiden: 2008) 47–70; Jacobs, L. F., Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted (University Park, PA: 2012) ch. 3.

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of the Eucharist; like few others, it also offers visualisation of the other sacraments and their vestments. As Rogier van der Weyden’s altarpiece shows, and Durand wrote, the chasuble was reserved to the celebration of the Mass53 [Fig. 3.1]. It was not to be worn for the other sacraments, unlike the alb or the stole. Perhaps most critically for understanding how the chasuble was to signify, unlike the other sacraments, the Eucharist had at its centre, from the time Durand was writing, a movement which was itself acquiring valences that did not accrue to those of the other sacraments, as Van der Weyden also suggests by the placement as well as the rendering each sacrament’s distinctive act. He renders not only that movement but its visual markers: the white sleeves of the alb exposed; and that movement of the chasuble to which Durand had, some 160 years earlier, so explicitly called attention. Without a single, unifying missal, the celebration of the Mass in medieval Europe differed from place to place, also in the movements, with at least one significant exception. As Joseph Jungmann writes: The desire of gazing upon the Lord’s body was the driving force which, since the twelfth century, brought about this intrusion of a very notable innovation into the canon which for ages had been regarded an inviolable sanctuary. The oblatory elevation before the words of consecration lost its importance, and the displaying of the Host after the words, instead became the new pivot and center of the Mass.54 In 1210, the Bishop of Paris ordered that priests were to hold the Host chesthigh before consecrating, then after the consecration, to lift it high so that all could see it.55 Such a movement then exposed the sleeves of the alb, which in turn offered contrast of texture, colour, and complexity to the chasuble. Putting the chasuble in movement makes visible not only the differing textures of cotton or linen on the one hand and silk and velvet on the other, but the different play of light on these different materials. Few chasubles survive

53  Cf. McNamee, M. B., S.J., Vested Angels: Eucharistic Allusions in Early Netherlandish Paintings (Leuven: 1998). 54  Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite II 208. 55  Ibidem 207. On the elevation of the Host, see also Dumoutet É., Le désir de voir l’hostie et les origines de la dévotion au Saint-Sacrement (Paris: 1926); Browe P., “Die Elevation in der Messe”, in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht (Münster: 2003) 475–508; Kennedy V. L., C.S.B., “The Moment of Consecration and the Elevation of the Host”, Mediaeval Studies 6 (1944) 121–50.

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from Durand’s time, and those that do survive are different in form from those that would have become prevalent by the sixteenth century, the two different forms quite possibly reflecting precisely the introduction of the elevation and its consequences for the chasuble’s shape and weight.56 Those chasubles that do survive certainly do materialize the value accorded the chasuble: beginning at least in the tenth century, centuries before Italians were producing silk brocades or velvets,57 central European churches were importing Byzantine silk brocades for chasubles, such as the Willigis Chasuble, now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum.58 Those to which I now turn all postdate Durand, by some two hundred years. They are not, then, the chasubles that Durand himself had in mind when writing the Rationale, but they may well be informed by the understanding of vestments he set forth. They are evidence not for our reading of Durand; he is a discrete source. But they may be evidence for the working of his thinking into the matter of the liturgy – in the extraordinarily richly worked brocades and velvets and in the detailed embroidery of the orphreys. One chasuble now in the Victoria and Albert Museum Textile Collection was made in the late fifteenth century of Italian cut-pile velvet, while the orphrey was stitched in Germany, probably Cologne [Fig. 3.2].59 Light plays differently on each of the different silk weaves, differentiated again between candlelight and the light of hanging oil lamps. Even fixed in display as they now are, late medieval chasubles present different plays of light – both on the surface of each and from one to the next Putting the chasuble in movement also changes the orphreys on the back [Figs. 3.3 & 3.4]: these are not stable or fixed images, as, for instance, altar cloths might be said to be, but themselves in movement as the priest moved through the actions of the Mass, kneeling, bowing, elevating.60 The image moves, and in ways distinct to the chasuble and its placement within the liturgy of the Mass. Insofar as the image is embroidered of gold thread, in silk velvet, with 56  On the changing form of the chasuble, see, inter alia, Braun J., Die priesterlichen Gewänder des Abendlandes (Freiburg i.B.: 1897) 162. 57  Herbert Norris notes a particular silk velvet, invented in Italy and first mentioned in 1277, which became increasingly popular in the later Middle Ages; see Norris H., Church Vestments: Their Origin and Development (Mineola, NY: 2002) 80–81. 58   Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Inv.-Nr. 11/170.1–2: http://www.bayerisches-national museum.de/webgos/bnm_online.php?seite=5&fld_0=00052999 Accessed 5 July 2018. 59   Victoria and Albert Museum Number 8704–1863. For further details, see http:// collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O353911/chasuble/. 60  Figure 3 is Victoria and Albert Museum Number T.256 to B-1967. For further details, see http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O84718/chasuble-unknown/.   Figure 4 is Victoria and Albert Museum Number 1375–1864. For further details, see http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O92392/chasuble-unknown/.

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figure 3.2 Chasuble, cloth of gold with cut-pile Italian velvet, about 1480–1500, split, brick and satin stitches, with couched and applied work, orphrey probably embroidered in Cologne, about 1480–1500. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession no. 8704-1863 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

pearls, the different textures differentiate the play of light, and reflect light differently as they move with the body. These three present the Crucifixion, and yet, each engages distinctly with the themes of Incarnation and sacrifice. They differ in scale – the relationship of Christ’s body on the cross to the priest’s body as well as the size of the cross on the priest’s body. They differ in the significance of the Crucifixion they render: Figure 3.2 presents Christ with eyes closed, as dead, while above his head is a chalice; in Figure 3.3, the crucified

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figure 3.3 Chasuble (1400–1430), silk cloth woven in Italy, embroidered orphrey probably made in England. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession no. T.256 to B-1967 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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figure 3.4 Chasuble, woven silk velvet ground, with orphrey of linen embroidered with silver, silver-gilt and silks (metal threads couched; silks in split stitch; glass). Accession no. 1375-1864. London, Victoria and Albert Museum © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Christ’s eyes are open even as Christ sits above the Crucifixion in judgment; in Figure 3.4, chalices are placed on either side of the crucified Christ’s body, while angels swing thuribles above his head. Each, as the priest raised his arms at the elevation, set the Crucifixion in motion, but each rendered that moment’s significance in different visual terms. Such as survive also suggest that each was unique, a unique combination of fabric and orphrey and the orphrey itself a singular image. No surviving chasuble was made of a single fabric; each was layered, embroidered, built from different fabrics, of different reflective qualities.61 Some, such as the Chichester-Constable Chasuble or the chasuble from Whalley Abbey, were worked in cloth and embroidered images shared by a stole and maniple or a dalmatic from the same collection,62 a practice that may have been more widespread than surviving textiles allow us to see. Another chasuble, also in the Victoria and Albert Museum textile collection, was made, probably 1400–1430, of brocaded silk lampas, woven in Italy, and embroidered in England with silk and silver-gilt threads [Fig. 3.3]. Yet another chasuble in the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose origin is unknown, was made of materials that could have been produced in German lands, Bohemia, Italy or Spain [Fig. 3.4]: the ground is woven silk velvet; the orphrey is linen, embroidered with silver threads, silver-gilt threads, silk threads, and glass. Chasubles could be made of different histories, as Miller has found. She adopts the term ‘reliquary vestments’ to point towards another practice in the making of vestments. It also suggests another dimension of the connection between person and cloth: ‘[…] instead of burying vestments associated with revered clerics, some clerical communities preserved the memory of deceased brothers by continuing to wear their liturgical garb. […] When they wore out, new vestments were made to hold the venerated pieces. These new vestments were, in effect, both liturgical garments and reliquaries’.63 Among Miller’s examples is a vestment called the chasuble of Saint Ulrich, who had been bishop of Augsburg 923–973. Beneath the eighteenth-century silk, conservators found fragments of various fabrics stitched onto a kapok and linen base. Most of the fragments were of a purple tenth- or eleventh-century, Islamic silk, some with pieces of a golden tapestry-woven border. Like so many puzzle 61  Cf. Kolin D., “Value-added Stuffs and Shifts in Meaning: An Overview and Case Study of Medieval Textile Paradigms”, in Koslin D. G. – Snyder J. (eds.), Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images (New York: 2002) 233–249. 62  Brown C. – Davies G. – Michael M. A. (eds.), English Medieval Embroidery: Opus Anglicanum 218–221, 249–250. 63  Miller, Clothing the Clergy 163–164.

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pieces, the fragments could be reconstructed to form the type of bellshaped chasuble typical of Saint Ulrich’s time.64 As Miller suggests, the person who wore the chasuble could well have known of the more intensely sacred fabric that was hidden beneath the silk of the surface, fabric that, in the composition of the chasuble, might be proximate, but in the layers of vestment, not touching the person wearing it. In turn, chasubles offer us a way of thinking about the project of the Rationale. Like it, chasubles were compilations. Durand, in the Rationale, accorded no one reading, no one hermeneutic normative status. Vestments, foremost the chasuble, brought together multiple textures, multiple forms of artisanal labour – brocade, silk velvet, embroidery, gold thread, itself a product of a particular process – though, as Durand pointed out, even the seemingly plain surface of linen or cotton represented, made present again, a complex process of thrashing to produce a brilliant surface. Vestments also materialised time, layering cloths from different places, persons, and times in something worn at Mass. For Durand, and for those who spoke the vesting prayers, vestments were not, as the iconoclastic distribution in Zurich sought to demonstrate, mere cloth to cover any body, a thing that one puts on. Vestments simultaneously signified virtues beneath the surface, called forth those virtues in the person who took on the fabrics, and as the wearer approached the altar and enacted those many movements in honouring the presence of God Incarnate, called attention, through the reflection of light and the sheer stunning artistry of the made object, to mysteries of the Incarnation, of seeing and revealing, invisibility and visibility. Selective Bibliography Braun J., Die priesterlichen Gewänder des Abendlandes (Freiburg i.B.: 1897). Browne C. – Davies G. – Michael M. A. (eds.), English Medieval Embroidery: Opus Anglicanum (New Haven – London: 2016). Chenu M.-D., Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, trans. J. Taylor – L. Little (Chicago: 1968). Durand William, Gvillelmi Dvranti Rationale Divinorvm Officiorvm I–IV, eds. A. Davril, O.S.B. – T. M. Thibodeau (Turnholt: 1995).

64  The chasuble belonged to the Cistercian abbey of Saint Urban in Lucerne; see ibidem 164–165.

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Durand, William, William Durand on the Clergy and Their Vestments, trans. T. M. Thibodeau (Chicago: 2010). Durian-Ress S., Meisterwerke mittelalterliche Textilkunst aus dem Bayerischen Nationalmuseum (Munich – Zurich: 1986). Jungmann J. A., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. F. A. Brunner, 2 vols. (New York: 1951; reprint ed. Allen, TX: 1986). Miller M. C., Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c. 800–1200 (Ithaca – London: 2014). Morgan N., “Embroidered Textiles in the Service of the Church”, in Browne C. – Davies G. – Michael M. A. (eds.), English Medieval Embroidery: Opus Anglicanum (New Haven – London: 2016) 24–39. Norris H., Church Vestments: Their Origin and Development (Mineola, NY: 2002). Thibodeau T. M., “Enigmata Figurarum: Biblical Exegesis and Liturgical Exposition in Durand’s ‘Rationale’”, The Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993) 65–79. Thibodeau T. M., “Western Christendom”, in Wainwright G. – Westerfield Tucker K. B. (eds.), The Oxford History of Christian Worship (Oxford: 2006) 216–253. Wandel L. P., Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (New York – Cambridge: 1995). White J. F., “Durandus and the Interpretation of Christian Worship”, in Shriver G. H. (ed.), Contemporary Reflections on the medieval Christian Tradition: Essays in honor of Ray C. Petry (Durham, N.C.: 1974) 41–52.

chapter 4

‘In the Flesh a Mirror of Spiritual Blessings’: Calvin’s Defence of the Lord’s Supper as a Visual Accommodation AnnMarie M. Bridges Despite a growing body of research to the contrary, it is still common to depict John Calvin as an enemy of the visual.1 This characterization of the reformer appears nowhere truer than in the discussion of the Lord’s Supper in his 1559 Institutio christianae religionis, or the Institutes, as it has come to be known in English. Calvin’s remarks are laced with accusations of visual deceit.2 He denounces liturgical spectacles designed ‘to draw the eyes of the common people to wonderment’, and contends that such ‘lifeless and theatrical trifles […] serve no other purpose than to deceive the sense of a people stupefied’.3 He accuses Lutherans of turning Christ into a phantasma (‘phantasm’)4 and a spectrum (‘specter’).5 He calls Catholic transubstantiation a ‘trumped-up illusion ( fictitiam illusionem) to which no eye on earth is witness’.6 1  As in C. M. N. Eire’s widely cited work, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, UK – New York: 1986). On the persistence of the idea that Calvin hates matter, see van den Hemel E., “Things that Matter: The Extra Calvinisticum, the Eucharist, and John Calvin’s Unstable Materiality”, in Houtman D. – Meyer B. (eds.), Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (New York: 2012) 67. For interpretations that contest this view, see Zachman R. C., Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame: 2007) and Wandel L. P., “Incarnation, Image, and Sign: John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion & Late Medieval Visual Culture”, in Melion W. S. – Wandel L. P. (eds.), Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, Intersections 39 (Leiden – Boston: 2015) 187–202. 2  On the evolution of the chapters on the sacraments across the editions from 1536 to 1559, see Wendel F., Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. P. Mairet (Durham: 1987) 330‒335. 3  Calvin John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles, ed. J. T. McNeill (London – Louisville: 2006). All citations in English are from this edition unless otherwise noted. Latin text from Institutio christianae religionis (Berlin: 1834) 4.17.43: ‘[…] qua id ratione, non video, nisi ut plebis oculos novo spectaculo in admirationem traheret […] in istis frigidis et histrionicis nugis, quae nullum alium usum afferunt, nisi ut stupentis populi sensum fallant’. 4  Ibidem 4.17.7. 5  Ibidem 4.17.14. 6  Ibidem 4.17.15: ‘[…] fictitiam eorum illusionem, cuius nullus in terra oculus testis est’.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_005

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If Calvin simply opposed all things visual in worship,7 this language would present no interpretive puzzle.8 However, in the very same chapters, Calvin also celebrates the Lord’s Supper for its visual presentation of spiritual goods. The sacraments, he argues, are among the clearest of God’s self-manifestations because they ‘represent [God’s promises] for us as painted in a picture from life’,9 setting them ‘before our eyes to be looked upon’.10 The fact that Calvin explicitly attributes the Supper’s effectiveness to its visual virtues indicates that it is not the ceremony’s visuality per se that disturbs him. What, then, is Calvin’s concern regarding the dynamics of vision in this sacrament? What threat is he naming when he associates not only Catholic but also Lutheran accounts of the Supper with visual deceit and illusion?11 Calvin’s accusations of visual untrustworthiness reflect a hitherto unrecognized but foundational concern of his sacramental theology. Setting aside the other differences between them, both Catholic and Lutheran teachings posit a visual discrepancy between what the bread appears to be and what is actually before the eyes. Not only does Calvin reject this disparity between appearance and reality, but his visual criticisms register a concern that teaching participants to credit such a discrepancy poses a direct threat to the Supper’s positive visual qualities. On Calvin’s view, these rival accounts of the sacrament undermine the divine self-manifestation on offer in the Supper by subverting participants’ ability to trust the evidence of their eyes – that is, to trust that what visually appears to be bread is actually, and only, bread.12 7  As in Michalski S., The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London – New York: 1993) 61‒63 and Eire, War 197‒202, 217. 8  On the practice of the Lord’s Supper at Geneva during Calvin’s tenure, see Grosse C., Les rituels de la cène: le culte eucharistique réformé à Genève (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Geneva: 2008). For a critical edition of Geneva’s Forme des prières et chants ecclésiastiques, see Bürki B., “La Sainte Cène selon l’ordre de Jean Calvin, 1542”, in Pahl I. (ed.), Coena Domini (Freiburg: 1983) 347–367. 9  Calvin, Institutes 4.14.5: ‘Sacramenta vero et promissiones afferunt clarissimas: et hoc habent prae verbo peculiare, quod eas veluti in tabula depictas nobis ad vivum repraesentant’. 10  Ibidem 4.14.12: ‘[…] ita spiritualiter per Sacramenta fidem alit, quorum unicum officium est, eius promissiones oculis nostris spectandas subiicere’. 11  Although Calvin groups the Lutherans with the Catholics on this issue, his full account of the Supper retains more similarities with that of Luther than it does with that of Zwingli; see Wendel, Calvin 329–330. Calvin registers his disagreement with Zwingli at 4.17.6, 4.17.11, and 4.17.19. On the dialogue between Geneva and Zurich, see Campi E., “Consensus Tigurinus: Werden, Wertung und Wirkung”, in E. Campi – R. Reich (eds.), Consensus Tigurinus (1549). Die Einigung zwischen Heinrich Bullinger und Johannes Calvin über das Abendmahl (Zurich: 2009) 9–41. 12  In isolating its visual dimensions, I leave aside many aspects of Calvin’s account, including the vexed question of how he can flatly deny that Christ’s flesh is materially present in the sacrament but nevertheless claim that we ‘truly’ receive the body of Christ (Calvin,

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The Supper as an ‘Accommodation’

Calvin’s concern for the Supper’s visual reliability emerges from his understanding of the sacrament as a preeminent instance of divine accommodation.13 In theological parlance, ‘accommodation’ typically names a hermeneutic tool which patristic authors employed to excuse anthropomorphic descriptions of God in Scripture. They explain such language as an ‘accommodation’ to human sensibilities.14 However, a growing body of research has demonstrated the myriad ways that Calvin’s ‘accommodation’ outstrips the relatively limited exegetical applications of the concept by earlier writers.15 For Calvin, the clarifying language of Scripture is one accommodation among many, which range from the visible splendour of the universe and God’s material self-presentation in Christ to God’s provision for distinctively human ritual and social needs in the form of the sacraments and civil government. In grouping these diverse avenues of divine care under the concept of accommodation, Calvin emphasizes that they all reflect a single strategy, a consistent method whereby God interacts with humans ‘in a manner informed by and adapted to their capacities’.16 Lee Palmer Wandel has persuasively argued that the largest project of the Institutes is to ‘teach the faithful how to read God’s marks and signs’. This includes the bread and wine of the Supper, which ‘belong to God’s effort to make himself perceptible to humanity’.17 Indeed, throughout the Institutes, Calvin uses vivid sensory language to underline the perceptibility of divine Institutes 4.17.32). On this issue, see Gerrish B. A., Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharist in John Calvin’s Theology (Minneapolis: 1993) 10‒12 and Wendel, Calvin 340‒344. The Supper’s visuality requires attention because if this indispensable aspect of the sacrament is subverted, subsequent questions about exactly how it helps recipients grow into the body of Christ are rendered moot. 13  The locus classicus for accommodation in the Institutes is 1.13.1. The most influential early treatment is F. L. Battles’ “God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity”, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 31.1 (1977) 19–38. For recent treatments, see Balserak J., Divinity Compromised: A Study of Divine Accommodation in the Thought of John Calvin (Dordrecht: 2006) and Huijgen A., Divine Accommodation in John Calvin’s Theology: Analysis and Assessment (Göttingen: 2011). 14  Huijgen, Divine Accommodation 89–92, 103–105. Calvin sometimes uses accommodare and attemperare, but also alludes to accommodation through references to the limited human capacity (captus) or measure (modulus) and the characteristics – sluggishness (hebetudo, socordia), numbness (torpor, stupor), and weakness (infirmitas, tenuitas, imbecillitas), among others – which occasion it. 15  Balserak, Divinity Compromised 20–32. 16  Ibidem 14. See also Balserak J., “The God of Love and Weakness: Calvin’s Understanding of God’s Accommodating Relationship with His People”, The Westminster Theological Journal 62.2 (2000) 179. 17  Wandel L. P., The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge, UK – New York: 2006) 159.

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self-disclosure. God’s manifestation is visible everywhere we look, a true theatre in the round: ‘wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks (scintillae) of his glory’.18 In creation, ‘voices of God […] resound in the air’,19 and similarly in Scripture God ‘opens his own most hallowed lips’.20 The sacraments portray God’s blessings as in a painting,21 and the incarnate Christ helps us ‘truly taste (vere gustarent)’ God’s mercy.22 This concerted program of divine manifestation is complicated, however, by the effects of sin, which Calvin describes using a language of perceptual impairment. Our ‘dullness (caligine)’ precludes perception of God in the original accommodation of creation.23 Surrounded by signs of God – many of them physically visible – fallen humans ‘struggle against their own senses (luctentur cum proprio sensu)’,24 and are ultimately ‘struck blind (coecutit)’.25 The result is that God’s many gestures of self-presentation ‘flow away without profiting us’.26 Against this backdrop, we can see Calvin’s concept of ‘accommodation’ as the major strategy whereby God makes Godself perceptible to not simply limited, but constitutively impaired human perceivers.27 Accommodation is thus the ‘how’ of God’s program of self-manifestation, the method whereby an infinite, incomprehensible God self-reveals in media that are perceptible – both in the sense of being noticeable, but often also in the sense of being literally visible – to blunted human perception.28 Accommodation’s perceptual effects 18  Calvin, Institutes 1.5.1: ‘Ac primum, quaquaversum oculos coniicias, nulla est mundi particula, in qua non scintillae saltem aliquae gloriae ipsius emicare cernantur’. 19  Ibidem 1.6.4: ‘[…] cani eius laudes in Sanctuario, quia ad omnes Dei voces, quae in aëre resonant, surdi sunt increduli’. 20  Ibidem 1.6.1: ‘Hoc igitur singulare donum est, ubi ad erudiendam ecclesiam non mutis duntaxat magistris Deus utitur, sed os quoque sacrosanctum reserat’. 21  Ibidem 4.14.5. 22  Ibidem 2.6.4. 23  Ibidem 1.6.1. 24  Ibidem 1.4.2. 25  Ibidem 1.5.8. On Calvin’s account of ‘blindness’, see Wandel L. P., “John Calvin and Michel de Montaigne on the Eye”, in Melion W. S. ‒ Wandel L. P. (eds.), Early Modern Eyes, Intersections 13 (Boston: 2010) 147–148. 26  Calvin, Institutes 1.5.11: ‘[…] qui tamen est noster stupor, ad tam perspicuas testificationes semper hebescimus, ut sine profectu effluant’. 27  Accommodation may function differently in Calvin’s other works; see Wright D. F., “Accommodation and Barbarity in John Calvin’s Old Testament Commentaries”, in Graeme A. A. (ed.), Understanding Poets and Prophets: Essays in Honour of George Wishart Anderson (Sheffield: 1993) 415‒416. 28  Willis E. D., “Rhetoric and Responsibility in Calvin’s Theology”, in McKelway A. J. – Willis E. D. (eds.), The Context of Contemporary Theology: Essays in Honor of Paul Lehmann (Atlanta: 1974) 58.

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are captured by the justly famous image of Scripture as ‘spectacles (specillis)’, which help fallen humans ‘read distinctly (distincte legere)’ what we could not otherwise make out.29 This metaphor casts accommodation as perceptually remedial: like a lens, it corrects, focuses, and enables our otherwise indistinct perception of God. To say that the Supper is an ‘accommodation’ is thus to describe this site of divine revelation qua perceptible and to emphasize the features that make it well tailored to humans’ distinctive perceptual needs. Next to the ‘dazzling theater (illustri theatro)’ of creation, whose status as a sensory manifestation of divine glory has long been recognized,30 this sacrament is one of the most importantly visual divine accommodations.31 In it, Calvin says, God so tempers himself to our capacity (se captui nostro pro immensa sua indulgentia attemperat) that, since we are creatures who always creep on the ground, cleave to the flesh, and do not think about or even conceive of anything spiritual, he condescends to lead us to himself even by these earthly elements, and to set before us in the flesh a mirror of spiritual blessings (bonorum spiritualium speculum).32 This passage speaks directly to the perceptual effects of accommodation as seen in the sacraments. The earthly elements of bread and wine are a ‘mirror’ of spiritual blessings because they are not spiritual but material. As such, they are tailored to our ‘fleshly’ nature. Comparing them to a mirror places special emphasis on their visual quality, on the way they provide a material site or basis for the recognition of God, thereby accommodating human perception. However, it is important to note that accommodations do more than simply reflect concepts about God – as Calvin says here, they are the means by which God ‘lead[s] us to himself’. In them, as Calvin says of another accommodation,

29  Calvin, Institutes 1.6.1. 30  Ibidem 1.5.8. Most famously, in Schreiner S. E., The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Grand Rapids: 1995). 31  Preaching is a distinct accommodation, but in the Supper, it works together with the visible elements, which amplify the Word’s effectiveness; see Calvin, Institutes 4.1.5, 4.14.3, 4.14.5. 32  Ibidem 4.14.3: ‘Atque ita quidem hic se captui nostro pro immensa sua indulgentia attemperat misericors Dominus, ut quando animales sumus, qui humi semper adrepentes, et in carne haerentes, nihil spirituale cogitamus, ac ne concipimus quidem, elementis etiam istis terrenis nos ad se deducere non gravetur, atque in ipsa carne proponere bonorum spiritualium speculum’. See also 4.14.6.

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God makes Godself intimately present, ‘renders himself near and familiar and in some manner communicates himself (se communicat)’.33 In what follows, I show how Calvin’s explicitly visual criticisms of Catholic and Lutheran accounts of the Supper are animated by the need to protect the integrity of the sacrament as an accommodation that functions visually. Exploring this concern helps us appreciate what is at stake in the complaints of visual discrepancy that Calvin directs against both sets of opponents. On his view, the Supper is effective because it is an accommodation. If its visual character is subverted, its accommodated character will be subverted, meaning that it will no longer function as a site of God’s accessible self-manifestation. That manifestation, as we will see, requires a credible visual experience in which the bread is no less and no more than meets the eye – bread. 2

The Threat of Visual Discrepancy in the Supper

In the Institutes’ chapters on the sacraments, Calvin accuses his Catholic and Lutheran opponents of subverting the Lord’s Supper in many ways. He accuses them of denying the truly human status of Christ’s incarnate body,34 of blurring the distinction between his human and divine natures,35 and of undermining hope in the resurrection of the body.36 He charges them with hermeneutical inconsistency37 and with positing a physical impossibility.38 In addition to this richly documented barrage of complaints, Calvin makes another urgent critique: he insists that his opponents’ accounts of the Supper falsely posit a visual discrepancy that threatens the accommodating function of the sacrament. This concern erupts in Calvin’s explicitly visual complaints about rival performances of the Supper, as in the passage cited above where he calls the Mass a ‘trumped-up illusion ( fictitiam illusionem), to which no eye on earth is witness’.39 Surprisingly, his criticisms do not target an overreliance on visual representation in church décor or liturgical performance. Rather, his language raises the threat that the reliability of visual experience might be undermined 33  Ibidem 1.5.9: ‘[…] sed ut illum in suis operibus contemplemur, quibus se propinquum nobis familiaremque reddit, ac quodammodo communicat’. 34  Ibidem 4.17.12, 4.17.19. 35  Ibidem 4.17.29‒30. 36  Ibidem 4.17.29. 37  Ibidem 4.17.20. 38  Ibidem 4.17.13. 39  Ibidem 4.17.15.

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by a posited or fabricated discrepancy between what appears to the eye, and what is actually there before it.40 When, for example, he ridicules the idea that Christ ‘lies hidden invisible on earth under innumerable crumbs of bread’,41 Calvin draws the reader’s attention to the fact that alternative views of the Supper postulate and depend on visual discrepancy. His sarcasm dramatizes the claim, entailed by both Catholic and Lutheran teachings, that the elements are not what they appear to be. Catholic transubstantiation asserts that the substance of the bread transforms into the body of Christ, so that the elements offer something completely different than the mere accidents that meet the eye.42 Lutheran consubstantiation affirms that the bread remains but claims that the flesh of Christ is provided along with it, so that the elements offer more than meets the eye.43 What these two views have in common is exactly what disturbs Calvin: they ask recipients to affirm that the elements are not what they appear to be. These complaints resonate ominously against an early modern backdrop of growing uncertainty regarding the reliability of sight. As Stuart Clark’s work has shown, in the period when Calvin is writing a constellation of factors – from the breakdown of the Aristotelian model of vision to heightened awareness of optical illusions – drew increasing attention to the tenuous relationship between appearances and reality.44 The Mass, with the invisible miracle of transubstantiation at its heart, became a flashpoint for accusations of illusion. Clark documents the development of a ‘language of visual deceit – an entire vocabulary of error, delusion, and imposture’ that cast transubstantiation and other Catholic miracles as false perceptions.45 It is striking that in his discussions of the Supper we see Calvin deploying such accusations against 40  Visual discrepancy in the Mass was already a source of debate in the late medieval period; see Duffy E., The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400‒c.1580 (London ‒ New Haven: 2005) 102‒107 and Kumler A., “The Multiplication of the Species: Eucharistic Morphology in the Middle Ages”, Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (2011) 179–191. 41  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.25: ‘Ex quo enim verbo sumpserunt, corpus Christi in coelo visibile esse, latere autem invisibile in terra sub innumeris panis frustulis?’ See also 4.17.33. 42  Ibidem 4.17.13. See also 4.17.14. 43  Ibidem 4.17.17. Calvin acknowledges diversity among Lutheran views at 4.17.20. 44  Clark S., Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford ‒ New York: 2007). For changing understandings of the mechanics of vision in late medieval and early modern periods, see, additionally, Lindberg D. C., Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: 1976); Tachau K., Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of Semantics, 1250‒1345 (Leiden ‒ New York: 1988); and Nelson R. S., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, UK – New York: 2000). 45  Clark, Vanities 173‒177, 183‒184.

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not only Catholic but also Lutheran accounts of the sacrament. In so doing, Calvin capitalizes on the credible threat of untrustworthy visual appearances, harnessing visual uncertainty to discredit rival views on optical grounds. Calvin’s language associates alternative performances of the Supper with three distinct but mutually implicated sources of visual uncertainty. His most overt accusations draw on the vocabulary of magical illusion, which he supplements by reference to demonic deception and imaginative delusion.46 Calvin raises the threat of visual illusion when he likens the consecration to a magica incantatio (‘magic incantation’)47 and draws an implicit comparison between the gesticulations of priests and praestigiatores (‘sleight-of-hand artists’),48 a label that exploits popular associations between priests and magicians.49 As Clark points out, visual illusion was at the heart of sixteenth-century magic, which means that a comparison between the Mass and the work of a magician attacks ‘not just the […] spurious claim to transform substance but the manipulation of appearances’.50 We can visualize the magical-deceptive connotations of Calvin’s complaints by reference to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Conjurer, produced around 1502. The painting depicts a magician standing behind a table with the wand, cups, and balls commonly employed by street entertainers. Jeffrey Hamburger has argued that the positioning of the magician behind the table and his hand gesture are reminiscent of a Mass, with the priest at the altar table holding the Host at the moment of consecration.51 Calvin’s reference to priestly legerdemain may 46  On the difficulties of defining and studying early modern ‘magic’, see Clark S., “Witchcraft and Magic in Early Modern Culture”, in Ankarloo B. ‒ Clark S. (eds.), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials (London ‒ Philadelphia: 2002) 105‒111. 47  Magical formulae were associated with not only witchcraft, but also the Mass, because most were taken from the liturgy. The term incantatio evokes the Scripture and prayers recited during the liturgy; see Jolly K., “Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices”, in Ankarloo B. ‒ Clark S. (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages (London ‒ Philadelphia: 2002) 36‒37. 48  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.15. 49  On the history of this critique, see Waite G. K., Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke ‒ New York: 2003) 17; Petreman C., “Host Desecration Narratives: Confirming Christ’s Physical Presence”, in Kirby T. ‒ Milner M. (eds.), Mediating Religious Cultures in Early Modern Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: 2013) 67‒68; Rubin M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK ‒ New York: 1991) 338, 341; and Parish H. L., Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church (London ‒ New York: 2005) 68. 50  Clark, Vanities 186. 51  Hamburger J., “Bosch’s ‘Conjurer’: An Attack on Magic and Sacramental Heresy”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 14.1 (1984) 8, 16‒17. Hamburger identifies the magician’s gesture as the iunctio digitis, the hand position prescribed for priests at

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conjure the ill-intentioned distractions of street performers – in the painting, one stupefied onlooker is having her purse stolen52 – but it also brings to mind widely circulating reports of actual sleight-of-hand performed in the Mass. In one iconic incident from the 1540s, a Surrey priest named Nicholas Germes pricked his own hand at the moment of consecration to simulate the vision of a bleeding Host.53 This story and similar reports of trickery, widely publicized by evangelical polemicists,54 reinforced the association between visual illusion and priestly deception. It also cast pious attendees at Catholic ceremonies as dupes at a magical performance.55 Calvin’s allusions to visual trickery dramatize the possibility that visual experience might be falsified by a misled mind. Soon after complaining about the optical indefensibility of the claim that ‘Christ lies hidden under the color of bread (sub illo panis colore lateat Christus)’, he launches into a long discussion of Moses’ rod-transforming contest with the Egyptian magicians.56 This incident from Exodus 7 was a common source text for early modern discussions of magic.57 It is an apt choice, because the contest allows Calvin to compare sideby-side transformations. Whereas the transformation of Moses’ rod was an illustre miraculum (‘glorious miracle’), Calvin argues that the transformation of the magicians’ rods was merely an illusionem (‘illusion’) in which ‘magicians by playing tricks (praestigiis luserant) persuaded the Egyptians that they were able […] to change the creatures’.58 The term Calvin uses to indicate this the moment of consecration. For a discussion that situates this painting in the light of broader issues of deception and illusion – painterly and otherwise – in Bosch’s work, see Koerner J. L., Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton – Oxford: 2016) 163–165. 52  Hamburger, “Bosch’s ‘Conjurer’” 6. 53  Parish, Monks 66. 54  Arguably the most famous such incident is the scandal surrounding the Boxley ‘Rood of Grace’; see Brownbill J., “Boxley Abbey and the Rood of Grace”, The Antiquary 7.40‒41 (1883) 162‒165, 210‒213. For a discussion of how the Boxley incident was mobilized in propaganda and turned to political purposes, see Marshall P., “The Rood of Boxley, the Blood of Hailes and the Defence of the Henrician Church”, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46.4 (1995) 692‒694. See also Clark, Vanities 174‒177. 55  Clark, Vanities 177. 56  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.13. Translation mine. 57  On the polemical use of the Egyptian magicians as well as the Witch of Endor and Simon Magus in evangelical writings, see Parish H. L., “‘Lying Histories Fayning False Miracles’: Magic, Miracles and Mediaeval History in Reformation Polemic”, Reformation & Renaissance Review 4.2 (2002) 230‒240. 58  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.15: ‘Praestigiis luserant magi, ut Aegyptiis persuasum esset, divina virtute ad inutandas creaturas supra naturae ordinem pollere’. In drawing this contrast, Calvin deftly evokes a venerable patristic distinction between mira, the ‘lying wonders’ performed by witches and demonic powers, and miracula, divinely powered miracles

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effect, praestigium, refers to a binding of the pupils that prevents the eyes from functioning properly.59 In drawing on this language, Calvin makes the same connection between ocular deception and transubstantiation that we also see in John Bale’s widely echoed complaint about ‘prestygyouse Papystes’.60 The rhetorical effect of introducing the comparison to the Egyptian contest is to recast the pious belief – and also, if it were to occur, the miraculous perception – that the bread is not what it looks like as an error attributable only to optical or mental manipulation. When Calvin says, ‘those sleight-of-hand artists (praestigiatores) had done nothing but blind the eyes of the spectators’ and concludes that the people’s ‘eyes were only deceived by the incantation of the magicians’,61 he is speaking simultaneously of Pharaoh’s magicians and of Catholic priests – both of whom, on his account, claim to perform a transformation, but only deceive people about what is really before their eyes. If there is any transformation, Calvin implies, it was not in the rods (which merely appeared transformed) – nor, certainly, is it in the bread (which does not) – but, in both cases, only in the minds of naïve onlookers. The threat of false transformations brings us to a second potential source of visual discrepancy, which Calvin raises through the language of demonic deception. On his telling, attendees at the Mass have been ‘foully deluded by Satan’s tricks (Satanae praestigiis tam foede […] delusi)’.62 The only reason they accept the Catholic account of the sacrament is because they have been ‘blinded by a spell from the devil (excoecavit diaboli incantatio)’.63 In the sixteenth century the devil’s reputation as the ultimate deceiver – recall that in 2 Thessalonians, he causes ‘powerful delusions’ – was increasingly linked to the idea that he deceived primarily through optical manipulation.64 In fact,

performed by legitimate representatives of the Church. On this trope, see Clark, Vanities 124‒125 and idem, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford ‒ New York: 1997) 165. 59  According to a widely cited etymology from Isidore of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX., ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: 1911), vol. i, bk. viii, ch. 9, sect. 33. See similar uses of this language at Calvin, Institutes 1.11.9, 2.4.1, 3.5.10, 3.20.46, 4.1.11, 4.14.25, 4.18.3. A performer of visually deceptive magic was called a praestigiatrix; see Alsted Johann Heinrich, Encyclopaedia (Herborn: 1630) 2269. 60  Bale John, The actes of Englysh votaryes (Wesel, S. Mierdman: 1546) fol. 48v. 61  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.15: ‘[…] quia praestigiatores illi nihil aliud quam tenebras spectantium oculis offuderant […] Incantatione quidem magorum oculos tantum fuisse deceptos certum est’. 62  Ibidem 4.17.15. 63  Ibidem 4.17.23. See also 4.18.1, 4.18.4, 4.19.8. 64  Clark, Vanities 123.

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the devil often hoodwinked his victims by means of fraudulent rather than substantial transformations. This means that one of the most insidious ways he deceived was by making people credit magical transformations where there were none.65 Calvin’s apparently casual references to the devil in connection with the Mass thus imply something more specific than religious deception in general: his language pointedly raises the possibility of hoax transformations. The third discourse Calvin employs, a language of imaginative delusion, resonates with and extends both magical and demonological vocabularies. Through accusations of fabricating,66 devising,67 and dreaming,68 Calvin makes oblique but repeated reference to the questionable products of the mind’s image-making faculty. The imagination’s ability to operate in the absence of sense objects created an opening for this potentially rogue faculty to trick the mind, making it think it has seen what it has merely imagined, thus turning waking life into a delusive dream.69 Suspicion of the imagination as a source of untrustworthy perceptions goes back to Aristotle’s oft-cited observation in De anima that ‘All sensations are true, but most imaginations (φαντασίαι) are false’.70 In the light of widespread early modern concerns about the potential for a misled mind to overtake the eyes, Calvin’s insistence that the miracle of bread becoming body is a mere imaginatio (‘imagination’),71 a pure figmentum (‘fiction’),72 does more than paint transubstantiation as a false belief with an untrustworthy provenance. The force of this language is to suggest that to credit a visual discrepancy between visible bread and invisible body is to allow the imagination to supplant the eyes as the arbiter of the real, and thus willingly to surrender the credibility of one’s own visual experience. Calvin’s mutually implicating references to visual discrepancies caused by magical, demonological, and imaginative illusions exploit an existing vulnerability in early modern visual culture at one of its most sensitive pressure points, the miracle or, better, mystery of the Mass. They target the visual discrepancy between the Host’s appearance as bread and its supposed substance

65  Waite, Heresy 130. 66  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.13‒14. 67  Ibidem 4.17.12, 4.17.14. 68  Ibidem 4.17.12. 69  See Carruthers M., The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge ‒ New York: 2008) 74 and Clark, Vanities 45‒49. 70  Aristotle, De anima, On the Soul, trans. W. S. Hett (London – Cambridge, MA: 1957) 428a 12‒13. 71  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.33. See also 4.17.14‒15. 72  Ibidem 4.17.14.

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as body.73 Calvin deftly wields these resonant discourses to argue that this discrepancy exists only in worshippers’ minds. By connecting the threat of untrustworthy appearances to accounts of the Supper that he rejects, Calvin implies that these accounts are themselves insidious sources of visual uncertainty. Ultimately, what emerges from his visual critique is that Catholic and Lutheran versions of the Supper are not dangerous merely because they posit optical impossibilities. They are dangerous because they enshrine, not only in doctrine but in sacramental ritual, the practice of disregarding – indeed, discrediting – one’s own visual experience. 3

Truly Bread: Protecting the Practice of Accommodation

By suggesting that Catholic worshippers have been duped by a feigned transformation, Calvin emphasizes that the doctrine of transubstantiation effectively disengages attendees from their own visual experience. But how does positing a visual discrepancy at the heart of the sacrament threaten Calvin’s positive account of the Supper’s visuality? Moreover, how does Calvin’s insistence on visual reliability – on the bread being what it appears to be – bear on the Lutheran view of consubstantiation, which preserves the material bread, but provides Christ’s flesh along with it? Against transubstantiation, Calvin argues that there must truly be bread, but against consubstantiation he contends that there must only be bread. Considering these two arguments in turn will help us see Calvin’s visual complaints as an attempt to defend both the practice and the strategy of the Supper as a visual accommodation. In practice, the suggestion of visual discrepancy threatens the act of visual recognition which the bread, as an accommodation, is designed to facilitate. In so doing, it takes the additional step of rejecting the bread’s status as an accommodation – in fact, of rejecting the divine strategy of perceptual tailoring it represents. Calvin thinks that any suggestion that the bread is not exactly what it appears to be disrupts an identity between appearance and reality that is indispensable to the Supper’s efficacy. Just before initiating his discussion of the Egyptian magicians, Calvin warns that the sacrament would be rendered ineffective ‘if only the appearance of bread (spectrum panis), and not rather the true nature

73  This discrepancy formed the basis of much evangelical criticism; see Parish, Monks 61, 65, 69.

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of bread, remained’.74 Likewise, he concludes the discussion by insisting, ‘the flesh of Christ is not truly and fittingly promised to us to be truly food unless the true substance of the outward symbol presents it (respondeat)’.75 At first blush, these remarks seem to express a concern about subverted signification. Indeed, Calvin stresses the agreement between the physical nourishment on offer in bread and the spiritual nourishment on offer in Christ’s flesh. He warns, in this connection, that ‘the nature of the sacrament is canceled, unless […] the earthly sign presents (respondeat) the heavenly thing’.76 However, Calvin places an even greater emphasis on the danger of subverted visual identification: Christ’s purpose was to witness by the outward symbol that the flesh is food; if he had put forward only the empty appearance of bread (inane duntaxat panis spectrum) and not true bread, where would be the analogy or comparison (analogia vel similitudo) needed to lead us from the visible thing to the invisible?77 Although the analogy between physical and spiritual nourishment has received much attention,78 the most striking thing about this passage is Calvin’s insistence that the mere appearance of bread is not sufficient to support the intended resemblance. This suggests that the participant’s visual identification of the bread as bread is more than a mere handmaiden to the element’s conceptual or symbolic significance – if that were the case, then arguably the

74  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.14: ‘[…] si spectrum panis duntaxat ac non potius naturalis veritas maneret’. 75  Ibidem 4.17.15: ‘Hoc igitur fixum maneat, non vere nec apte promitti nobis in Coena, carnem Christi vere esse in cibum, nisi vera externi symboli substantia respondeat’. I have deviated from Battles’ choice of ‘correspond’ (with its modern connotations of a ‘correspondence theory of truth’) for respondeat, which has the literal sense of promising, offering, or presenting a thing in return for something else. Respondeo has the sense of ‘meet’ or ‘correspond with’ only as one of its less common transferred meanings; see Lewis C. T. and Short C., A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: 1879). 76  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.14: ‘Evertitur ergo Sacramenti natura, nisi in modo significandi terrenum signum rei coelesti respondeat’. Translation modified as above. 77  Ibidem 4.17.14: ‘Voluit Christus externo symbolo testari, carem suam esse cibum. Si inane duntaxat panis spectrum, non panem verum proponeret, ubi analogia vel similitudo, quae deducere nos a re visibili ad invisibilem debet?’ 78  Zachman R. C., “Calvin as Analogical Theologian”, Scottish Journal of Theology 51, 2 (1998) 162‒164 and Rogge J., Virtus und Res: Um die Abendmahlswirklichkeit bei Calvin (Stuttgart: 1965) 39–42.

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visible impression of bread would be sufficient to suggest the connection.79 Instead, securing the relationship between the visible and the invisible requires first securing the relationship between the bread’s outward appearance and its true substance. Why is the relationship between visual appearance and underlying reality so important to Calvin? When Calvin celebrates the elements as accommodations, he does not simply praise their visibility – he praises their visual identifiability. If it were visibility as such that made the elements effective accommodations, they could be anything visible. In fact, what makes the bread and wine ‘excellently adapted (optime […] nos convenire)’,80 well-tailored ‘to our small capacity (ad modulum nostrum)’,81 is that they are easily recognized as sources of nourishment. The visual identification of bread as nourishment, which in turn supports the similitude between physical and spiritual nourishment, ‘penetrates into even the dullest minds’.82 Thus the bread is an accommodation only insofar as it facilitates an act of visual identification – one that is undermined by the suggestion that it is not actually the sustenance it appears to be.83 Calvin reiterates this requirement when he compares the Supper to the second of the two sacraments he acknowledges: If in baptism the figure of water were to deceive our eyes, we would have no sure pledge of our washing; indeed, that false show ( fallaci illo spectaculo) would give us occasion to hesitate […]. Since the supper is nothing but a visible witnessing of that promise (conspicua eius promissionis testificatio) […] visible bread must serve as an intermediary to represent that spiritual bread – unless we are willing to lose all the benefit.84 Thus, both sacraments turn on their visibility, but particularly on their visual

79  Calvin anticipates and rejects this objection in Institutes 4.17.14: ‘Nam ut omnia inter se conveniant, non longius se extendet significatio, quam nos specie carnis Christi pasci (For, to be perfectly consistent, the signification extends no farther than that we are fed by the form of Christ’s flesh)’. 80  Ibidem 4.17.3. 81  Ibidem 4.17.1. 82  Ibidem 4.17.1: ‘[…] in crassissimas quasque mentes […] penetrat’. 83  Ibidem 4.17.5. 84  Ibidem 4.17.14: ‘[…] si in Baptismo figura aquae oculos falleret, nobis certum non esset ablutionis nostrae pignus, imo fallaci illo spectaculo vacillandi nobis occasio daretur […] Quum Coena nihil aliud sit quam conspicua eius promissionis testificatio […] panem visibilem intercedere oportet quo spiritualis ille figuretur: nisi nobis perire volumus omnem fructum’. Emphases mine.

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reliability. The bread and the water must not only make us think of, but also be accurately identifiable as, the material substances that effect nourishment, in the Supper, and cleansing, in Baptism.85 In calling the Supper ‘nothing but a visible witnessing’, Calvin – far from being an enemy of the visual – actually gives precedence to its visual dynamics. For him, this ‘visible witnessing’ depends on identity and precludes discrepancy. The Supper operates through an act of trustworthy divine showing and an answering recognition on the part of human witnesses. Any teaching which suggests that the eye is not a reliable guide thus undermines God’s selfmanifestation in the sacrament. In teaching participants that the bread is either less (body, not bread) or more (bread, plus body) than it appears to be, Catholics and Lutherans alike subvert this accommodation. 4

Only Bread: Respecting the Strategy of Accommodation

Calvin’s rejection of visual discrepancy highlights the goal of accommodation, which is to render God easily recognizable through the use of media that fall within the range of human perceptual abilities. In subverting the testimony of the eyes, both Catholic transubstantiation and Lutheran consubstantiation endanger the Supper in practice. However, they also commit an additional offense: they deny the very strategy of divine self-manifestation through accommodated means. This problem emerges most clearly in Calvin’s remarks about why the bread must not only be true bread, but also remain only bread. Of God’s accommodation in the sacraments, Calvin says, ‘Because we are flesh, they are shown us under things of flesh’.86 The sacraments are effective accommodations because they are not spiritual and infinite, as God is, but material and visible, as we are. I have already compared the Supper to Baptism, but now consider how the Supper resembles a different kind of accommodation, the created universe. In describing creation as an accommodation, Calvin goes out of his way to say that creation is not God, but rather God’s selfcommunication in and through material realities.87 What is true about creation is also true of the Supper: in each case, the material means of divine

85  On Baptism, see Torrance T. F., “Calvins Lehre von der Taufe”, in Moltmann J. (ed.), Calvinstudien (Neukirchen: 1959) 95–129. 86  Calvin, Institutes 4.14.6: ‘[…] quia carnales sumus, sub rebus carnalibus exhibentur’. 87  Ibidem 1.5.9.

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revelation need undergo no transformation in order to manifest God and effect a spiritual transformation in their human beneficiary. Indeed, this is exactly what ‘accommodation’ means: accommodations are sites where God makes what is spiritual – God and all God’s benefits – recognizable and available for enjoyment in media that are, through and through, material.88 As accommodations, the bread and the wine remain earthly realities – no less, but also no more, than material nourishment. It is by God’s gracious accommodation – with the Holy Spirit facilitating89 – that bread and wine as such can be the vehicle by which ‘Christ truly grows into one with us’.90 This has critical implications for how we understand the role of vision in Calvin’s account of the Supper. It means that the sacramental elements need not be seen as anything other than they are. Eyes illumined by the Holy Spirit – ‘eyes of faith’ – do not prescind from or attempt to see beyond the evidence of the senses. Instead, they find God’s self-disclosure in what things already are, in exactly what they appear to be. If this is how God has designed the sacramental elements to function, then the problem with Catholic and Lutheran accounts is not merely that they teach people to disbelieve their eyes, though that is a serious fault. The second and more damning problem is that they contradict the divine strategy of accommodation. To undermine the visual reliability of the elements is to imply an alternative theory of sacramental efficacy, and in so doing, to reject the accommodating method of the sacrament. This is what Calvin is pointing to when he complains, Since it is God’s plan (as I often reiterate) to lift us to himself, by appropriate means (nos commodis vehiculis sursum ad se tollere), those who call us indeed to Christ, but to Christ hidden invisibly under bread, wickedly frustrate his plan by their obstinacy. For it is not possible for the human mind, leaping the infinite spaces, to reach beyond heaven itself to Christ. What nature denied to them they tried to correct by a more harmful remedy.91 Calvin’s reference to ‘God’s plan […] to lift us to himself, by 88  The elements do not merely represent, but also convey spiritual goods to recipients; see ibidem 4.17.10. 89  Although accommodation is the material means of this spiritual effect, it is enacted by the Holy Spirit; see ibidem 1.5.14, 4.17.5, 4.17.10, 4.17.12, 4.17.33. On this point, see Ganoczy A., Ecclesia Ministrans: dienende Kirche und kirchlicher Dienst bei Calvin (Freiburg: 1968) 75‒94. 90  Calvin, Institutes 4.7.10: ‘[…] nobiscum Christus vere in unum coalescat’. 91  Ibidem 4.17.15: ‘Adhaec quum Dei consilium sit, ut iam saepius inculco, nos commodis vehiculis sursum ad se tollere, illud impie sua pervicacia frustrantur, qui ad Christum

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appropriate means’ is an allusion to accommodation. What Calvin accuses his opponents of frustrating is precisely God’s chosen method of self-manifestation in earthly and thus easily perceptible forms. This criticism emerges even more clearly in the vertical language Calvin uses to capture the choreography of divine self-presentation in the Supper. Calvin frequently employs inverse images of lowering and lifting to describe the dynamics of accommodation: in condescending to manifest in lowly material realities, God lifts us up to spiritual realities.92 In the case of the bread and wine, God condescends to make these still-humble elements of human life vehicles whose very materiality ‘help[s] the otherwise weak mind of man so that it may rise up and look upon the height of spiritual mysteries’.93 Thus, when Calvin complains that his Lutheran interlocutors ‘think they only communicate with [Christ’s body] if it descends into bread; but they do not understand the manner of descent by which he lifts us up to himself’,94 Calvin is accusing them of misconstruing God’s method of accommodation in the sacrament. Specifically, he charges them with trying to pull Christ’s body down into bread rather than letting the bread and wine lift them up to God. At stake in the contrast between pulling Christ down and allowing bread and wine to lift us up is the division between human and divine labour in the sacrament. For Calvin, the teaching that the bread is supplemented with Christ’s body reflects both a lack of imagination and, more seriously, a presumptuous pre-emption of what is and ought to be an act of divine condescension. ‘To them’, Calvin grumbles, ‘Christ does not seem present unless he comes down to us. As though, if he should lift us to himself, we should not just quidum nos vocant, sed sub pane invisibiliter latentem. Neque enim fieri potest, ut mens hominum, a locorum immensitate se expediens, ad Christum usque supra coelos penetret. Quod illis negabat natura, magis noxio pharmaco corrigere tentarunt’. Emphases mine. 92  In a parallel discussion, Calvin defends the church’s ministry as an accommodation using the same language of lowering and lifting; see ibidem 4.1.5. See also 4.3.1. 93  Ibidem 4.17.36: ‘[…] mentem hominis infirmam alioqui adiuvare, ut ad percipiendam spiritualium mysteriorum altitudinem sursum assurgat’. For a discussion of this lifting as eucharistic ascent and union with Christ, see Kaiser C. B., “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: John Calvin and the Early Church on our Eucharistic Ascent to Heaven”, Scottish Journal of Theology 56.3 (2003) 247‒267. The Sursum Corda, which figured centrally in Genevan liturgies, also appears frequently in Calvin’s reflections on the sacrament; see Elwood C., The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (New York: 1999) 43–44, 64–65. 94  Calvin, Institutes 4.17.16: ‘[…] quia se cum eo communicare aliter non putant, quam si in panem descendat, modum vero descensus, quo nos ad se sursum evehit, non comprehendunt’.

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as much enjoy his presence!’95 Positing the physical presence of Christ in the bread is an attempt to bridge a divide, to solve a dilemma, that God has already resolved through accommodation. There is, as Calvin says, ‘no need (necesse non est)’ for Christ’s flesh to descend into the elements because God’s chosen method of self-manifestation employs the material as such as a vehicle for the spiritual.96 To say either that the bread is transformed into or supplemented with a spiritual entity is to nullify the spiritual nourishment already on offer in the accommodation of plain physical nourishment. In the process, it is to disregard and displace God’s chosen strategy of accommodation. 5

‘In the Flesh a Mirror of Spiritual Blessings’

Calvin’s insistence that the bread must actually, and only, be what it appears to be flows from his understanding of the visible elements as a site – and as a strategy – of divine accommodation. The optical complaints he levies against alternative accounts of the Supper do not reflect a hatred of the visual, but a precise and relevant fear about teachings that sever appearance from reality. The suggestion that the bread is not exactly what it appears to be undermines the Supper’s accommodation on two levels. At the perceptual level, it undermines the very sensory capacities humans must use to recognize God in sites of accommodation. If, as I have argued, the sacraments’ efficacy as accommodations depends on their visual identifiability, then the capacity to recognize them depends, in turn, on perceivers using – and trusting – their senses. Insofar as they ask participants to reject the evidence of the senses, Catholic and Lutheran performances of the Supper habituate attendees into the opposite perceptual instincts as those assumed and required by accommodation. At the conceptual level, transubstantiation and consubstantiation make a false claim about how God manifests. By insisting that the elements must be transformed or supplemented in order to confer spiritual benefits, these teachings imply that God does not work through media tailored to human perceptual capacities (like the bread), but through that which exceeds them (Christ’s body in place of or hidden under the bread). In this, they violate what Calvin calls ‘the surest rule of the sacraments: that we should see spiritual things in 95  Ibidem 4.17.31: ‘Christus praesens illis non videtur, nisi ad nos descendat. Quasi vero si ad se nos evehat, non aeque potiamur eius praesentia’. 96  Ibidem 4.17.31.

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physical as if set before our very eyes’.97 As in the created world, which manifests God without becoming anything other than material and earthly, God has made Godself available in nourishing bread as such. Let us linger, in closing, over Calvin’s favourite image for accommodation – the mirror. Calvin refers to accommodations of all kinds as ‘mirrors’.98 Of creation, he says, ‘this skillful ordering of the universe is for us a sort of mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible’.99 Similarly, Scripture is a ‘mirror in which [God’s] living likeness glows’.100 The mirror is a well-known though still underexplored figure of Calvin’s thought.101 This examination of Calvin’s visual concerns regarding the Supper further illuminates the subtle but elegant use Calvin makes of this imagery. In the Supper, Calvin says, ‘[God] condescends to lead us to himself even by these earthly elements, and to set before us in the flesh a mirror of spiritual blessings’.102 Consider how well suited the mirror is to capture the mode of God’s self-manifestation in the visible elements of bread and wine. A mirror images what it reflects without becoming anything other than what it is. It shows us what it is not, and it does so by being other than what it reflects.103 The elements can only be a ‘mirror of spiritual blessings’ by being other than spiritual – that is, by being fully material. As a ‘fleshly’ mirror given to fleshly recipients, the sacrament renders that which is other than it in an accommodated form. Paradoxically, the bread and the wine must remain exactly what they appear to be in order to be mirrors for what they are not.

97  Ibidem 4.15.14: ‘[…] certissima est sacramentorum regula: ut in rebus corporeis spirituales conspiciamus, perinde acsi coram oculis nostris subiectae forent’. Emphasis mine. 98  Ibidem 1.5.1, 1.14.1, 1.14.21, 2.7.7, 4.1.5, 4.8.5. 99  Ibidem 1.5.1: ‘[…] nobis vice speculi sit tam concinna mundi positio, in quo invisibilem alioqui Deum contemplari liceat’. 100  Ibidem 1.14.1: ‘[…] speculi loco nobis proponere, in quo viva eius effigies relucet’. 101  For possible sources of Calvin’s mirror imagery, see Zachman, Image and Word 9‒14. 102  Calvin, Institutes 4.14.3: ‘[…] elementis etiam istis terrenis nos ad se deducere non gravetur, atque in ipsa carne proponere bonorum spiritualium speculum’. 103  Calvin’s mirror imagery is a topic ripe for exploration. This essay’s reflection on the mirror as an emblem of accommodation raises the question of how this verbal image conjures what have been called the ‘two sides’ of the mirror tradition, the tension between its salience as an emblem of representational accuracy and its equally powerful connotations of illusion and deceit. On this dual legacy, see Bartsch S., The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (London ‒ Chicago: 2006) 55‒56, 112.

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Selective Bibliography Balserak J., Divinity Compromised: A Study of Divine Accommodation in the Thought of John Calvin, Studies in Early Modern Religious Reforms (Dordrecht: 2006). Battles F. L., “God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity”, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 31.1 (1977) 19–38. Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, eds. W. Baum – E. Cunitz – E. Reuss, 59 vols., Corpus Reformatorum 29–87. (Brunswick: 1863–1900). Calvin John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill, trans. F. L. Battles, 2 vols. (London – Louisville: 2006). Clark S., Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford ‒ New York: 2007). Gerrish B. A., Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharist in John Calvin’s Theology (Minneapolis: 1993). Grosse C., Les rituels de la cène: le culte eucharistique réformé à Genève (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Geneva: 2008). Hamburger J., “Bosch’s ‘Conjurer’: An Attack on Magic and Sacramental Heresy”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 14.1 (1984) 5‒23. Huijgen A., Divine Accommodation in John Calvin’s Theology: Analysis and Assessment (Göttingen: 2011). Nelson R. S., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, UK – New York: 2000). Rogge J., Virtus und Res: um die Abendmahlswirklichkeit bei Calvin (Stuttgart: 1965). Wandel L. P., The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge, UK – New York: 2006). Wandel L. P., “Incarnation, Image, and Sign: John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion & Late Medieval Visual Culture”, in Melion W. S. – Wandel L. P. (eds.), Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, Intersections 39 (Leiden – Boston: 2015) 187–202. Wandel L. P., “John Calvin and Michel de Montaigne on the Eye”, in Melion W. S. ‒ Wandel L. P. (eds.), Early Modern Eyes, Intersections 13 (Boston: 2010), 135–155. Wendel F., Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. P. Mairet (Durham: 1987). Zachman R. C., “Calvin as Analogical Theologian”, Scottish Journal of Theology 51.2 (1998) 162‒187. Zachman R. C., Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame: 2007).

chapter 5

‘Mystery’ or ‘Sacrament’: Ephesians 5:32, the Sacrament of Marriage in Early Modern Biblical Scholarship, and Nicolas Poussin’s Visual Exegesis Wim François 1 Introduction* The translation of Ephesians 5:31–32, especially the Greek word ‘mysterion’, was an important issue in the debate between humanists and more traditional-minded Catholic scholars in the early decades of the sixteenth century. Erasmus and other humanists took it to read, ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery (“mysterium hoc magnum est”), but I take it to mean Christ and the Church’ (comp. with King James Version). This translation of the Greek word ‘mysterion’ notably differs from the Vulgate’s ‘this is a great sacrament’ (‘sacramentum hoc magnum est’), thus offering a welcome scriptural basis to the sacrament of marriage. The question of translation, which was one of several issues faced by Catholic theologians in the first decades of the sixteenth century, will form the basis of the first part of this essay. Even after the Council of Trent had formulated the Catholic doctrine on marriage, however, the discussion continued, and in the second part of this essay I will focus on commentaries by two of the most influential Bible commentators of the early seventeenth century, viz., Guilielmus Estius and Cornelius a Lapide. They deal with the sacrament of marriage in their discussions of Ephesians 5:32. Finally, the last part of the paper will be devoted to the Sacrament of Marriage by Nicolas Poussin, from his second series of Sacraments painted between 1647 and 1648. In an important article published in 2014, the British art historian Timothy J. Clark argues that the painting is a sophisticated portrayal of Trent’s views regarding marriage, and in a slightly later essay, Nicolas Milovanovic, curator-in-chief of painting at the Louvre, favoured an approach whereby Poussin’s paintings be read against the backdrop of early seventeenth-century biblical exegesis. My essay will engage in that exact methodological endeavour. * Special thanks are due to Jeremy Hovda and Eliza Halling for carefully checking the English of this text. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_006

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Ephesians 5:32, Erasmus, and the Catholic Doctrine on the Sacrament of Marriage

The Church’s doctrine of the sacraments – the result of much medieval-scholastic reflection and debate – was brought to a synthesis in the famous Bull of Union with the Armenians, which Pope Eugene IV issued on 22 November 1439 in the wake of the Council of Florence. It states that the sacrament of marriage is ‘a sign of the union of Christ and the Church’, and invokes Ephesians 5:32 to justify this assertion. Taken together with 5:31 and the reference to Genesis 2:24 the verses include, the passage from Paul’s Letter reads: ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother: and shall cleave to his wife. And they shall be two in one flesh. This sacrament is a great one, but I speak in Christ and in the Church’ (comp. with Douai Rheims Version). As a matter of course, the verses are cited from the Latin Vulgate, which translates the original Greek word ‘mysterion’ as ‘sacramentum’. The Bull of Union with the Armenians further states, in accordance with the scholastic wording of the time, that the efficient cause of matrimony is usually ‘the mutual consent expressed in words about the present (de praesenti)’. It also summarizes Augustine’s doctrine concerning the threefold good attributed to matrimony: the procreation and bringing up of children (proles), the mutual fidelity of the spouses ( fides), and the indissolubility of marriage as a sign of the indivisible union of Christ and the Church (sacramentum).1 The Bull of Union failed to resolve several problems regarding the sacrament of marriage which had long exercised scholastic theologians and were still unresolved at the end of the Middle Ages. Since the doctrine of the Church held that sacraments confer sanctifying grace ex opere operato, the majority of scholastics had indeed accepted that sacramental grace changes man and woman from within, so that they are able to fulfil ‘the good of marriage’. Nevertheless, authoritative voices such as Peter Lombard and Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, amongst others, had difficulty seeing how sacramental grace was conferred in marriage, an institution that served at the most as a remedy against the allurements of the flesh.2 This problem related to another one: in the other six 1  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. N. P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London – Washington DC: 1990) I Nicaea I to Lateran V 550. For a discussion of this Bull and marriage, see Reynolds P. L., How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent (Cambridge: 2016) 723–724, 728–729, 794–798. For the reference to Augustine, see De bono coniugali 28.32, ed. I. Zycha, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 41 (Vienna: 1900) 227 l. 21–22. Further abbreviated as CSEL. 2  For this discussion and further references, see Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments 422 (Peter Lombard) and 663–665 (Durand).

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sacraments the intervention of a consecrated minister was considered a prerequisite for their valid administration, whereas in the sacrament of marriage the spouses seemed themselves to administer the sacrament to one another through the mutual expression of consent. This led, in turn, to a further issue: the widespread abuse known as clandestine marriage, in which a man and a woman exchanged vows without any witnesses being present, thus creating the risk that one of the parties, usually the man, could later deny that any consent had ever given, leaving the woman without further support. Since these problems had not been dealt with by the Bull of Union, they were open to further theological discussion and would only receive a more or less definitive answer at the Council of Trent. That said the sacrament of marriage seemed to have a comparative advantage over the other sacraments with regard to its scriptural basis, having as it does a clear foundation in the aforementioned text of Ephesians 5:32, which employed in the Vulgate version the term ‘sacrament’ itself. Only threequarters of a century after the Bull of Union with the Armenians, however, humanists cast aside this scriptural basis by substituting ‘mysterium’ for the Vulgate’s translation ‘sacramentum’, and arguing that this was a far more philologically correct translation of the Greek word ‘mysterion’. The translation was not new: various Church fathers use it, citing the Italian branch of the Old Latin translation; and it had been reintroduced by humanists such as Giannozzo Manetti and especially Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, without causing much of a stir. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1537) did the same in his LatinGreek New Testament from 1516 onwards, where he wrote ‘[…] Mysterium hoc magnum est, verum ego loquor de Christo et de ecclesia’.3 In his Annotations, in which he explains and comments on his textual choices, Erasmus devotes an extensive passage to Ephesians 5:32; he later continued to expand and refine his arguments as the criticism surrounding his interpretation grew more intensive. The process of amplification concluded with the fifth and last version of his New Testament in 1535.4 Erasmus’ insights and the resistance they provoked among supporters of the traditional reading and interpretation, have been discussed so fully by modern authors such as Émile V. Telle (1954), 3  For the text of the Novum Instrumentum (1516) or Novum Testamentum (1519ff.), see Erasmus, Novum Testamentum, ed. A. J. Brown, Opera Omnia VI-3 (Amsterdam et al.: 2004) 540–541. Erasmus’ Opera Omnia according to the ‘Amsterdam’ edition, are further referenced with the standardized abbreviation ASD. 4  See Erasmus, Annotationes in Eph. 5:32, ed. M. L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk, ASD VI-9 (Leiden – Boston: 2009) 254–259, with an English translation in Erasmus, Annotations on Galatians and Ephesians, ed. R. A. Faber, Collected Works of Erasmus 58 (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2017) 209–211. Further abbreviated as CWE.

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John B. Payne (1970), and Philip L. Reynolds (2016), amongst others;5 that a concise summary of the major issues will suffice here. Our short examination will consider the Annotations in their final version; ample information on earlier versions and subsequent additions can be found in the standard Latin and English editions. In order to clarify his substitution of ‘mysterium’ for ‘sacramentum’, Erasmus has some considerations ready for those ‘who use this passage to make matrimony one of the seven sacraments, according to the specific and precise meaning of this word’ (‘iuxta peculiarem et exactam huius vocis rationem’).6 Erasmus, who confirmed as early as 1514 in his Christiani hominis institutum that marriage was a sacrament, repeats in his Annotations that nobody should have doubts regarding this tradition, ‘because it has been handed down to us, probably from the Apostles, certainly from the sacred fathers’.7 Notwithstanding this avowal of his continuing belief in the sacramentality of marriage, Erasmus does not pass over in silence the many who held views to the contrary: ‘scholastic theologians of undisputable orthodoxy have raised doubts in this regard and […] even a conclusion, different from current doctrinal formulation, has been accepted’.8 Among the arguments the scholastics had put forward was the consideration that the Church fathers (Pseudo-)Dionysius, Jerome, and Augustine had not counted marriage when dealing with the sacraments of the Church.9 Even more surprising, Jovinian, who fiercely advocated that marriage was equal to celibacy in terms of dignity, never argued that marriage was a sacrament – just as consecrated virginity was not – although such an assertion might have augmented his argument about the dignity of marriage. As a conclusion to his treatment of the Church fathers’ silence on the sacramentality of marriage, Erasmus somewhat ironically remarks, ‘all these and comparable elements can be easily (dis-)solved by the learned’, whereby the ‘eruditi’ may be read as a reference to the scholastic theologians who were confronted

5  Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments 730–742, esp. 737–740; Payne J. B., Erasmus: His Theology of the Sacraments, Research in Theology (Richmond: 1970) 109–125, esp. 112–116; and Telle É. V., Érasme de Rotterdam et le septième sacrement: Étude d’Évangélisme matrimonial au XVIe siècle et contribution à la biographie intellectuelle d’Érasme (Geneva: 1954) 259–292, esp. 266–271. 6  Cf. Annotations, CWE 58, 209–210 and ASD VI-9, 254 l. 384–256 l. 385. 7  Annotations, ASD VI-9, 256 l. 386–387 (my translation); Cf. CWE 58, 209. 8  Annotations, ASD VI-9, 256 l. 388 (my translation); Cf. CWE 58, 209. 9  See, amongst others, (Ps.-)Dionysius, De ecclesiastica hierarchia, ed G. Heil – A. M. Ritter, Patristische Texte und Studien 67 (Berlin: 1991; revised ed., Berlin: 2012) 61–132; Hieronymus, Adversus Iovinianum 1, ed. J.-P. Migne, PL 23 (Paris: 1845) 221–296; and Augustinus, De bono coniugali 28.32, CSEL 41, 227 l. 21–22. Also see De nuptiis et concupiscentia 1.11.13 and 1.17.19, ed. C. F. Urba – I. Zycha, CSEL 42 (Vienna: 1892), 225 l. 25–26 and 231 l. 12–13.

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with this patristic silence and sought an escape. Erasmus, for his part, reaffirms that he ‘would not have said these things as though I were calling into doubt whether matrimony is a sacrament, whose high status I greatly favour […]’.10 In reaffirming, he not only brings symmetry to his argument, but rhetorically, in repeating, brings textual unity, thus strengthening the opening expression of this central idea at the start of his Annotations. In a similar vein, Erasmus denies that the sacramentality of marriage can be deduced in a clear and unambiguous way from the words of Ephesians 5:32, thus discarding the scriptural foundation of the sacrament of marriage. Not only does he substitute ‘mysterium’ for ‘sacramentum’, he also points to the adversative particle ‘but I’ in the last portion of Ephesians 5:32,11 ‘This is a great mystery, but I take it to mean Christ and the Church’, in order to demonstrate that the great mystery adduced by Paul is the bond between Christ and the Church, not the union between man and woman. And inversely, he finds it difficult to see how the (fleshly) union between man and woman described in Ephesians 5:31 can be considered ‘a great sacrament’ in the Christian sense, ‘since this was also customarily done among the pagans’. Erasmus observes that his scruples concerning the union of a man and a woman are confirmed in Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalm 98,12 but especially in De nuptiis et concupiscentia,13 where the Church father writes, ‘What, then, in Christ and in the Church is great, in the instances of each individual man and his spouse is but very small (“minimum”), but even then it is a sacrament of an inseparable union’.14 Erasmus devotes some concluding biblical-philological considerations to the meaning of the Greek word ‘mysterion’, which among the ‘ancients’ simply meant ‘mystery and secret’ (‘arcanum et secretum’) and was either translated in Latin as ‘mysterium’ or ‘sacramentum’. In any case, the term, as construed by Erasmus, has nothing to do with the (seven) sacraments and their nature as the Church understood them in his time. It is in the antique sense of ‘mystery and secret’, he continues, that ‘Paul uses this word often and about topics which are far removed from the nature of the sacraments’. The humanist refers, by way of supporting his argument, to the Pauline use of ‘mysterium’ in 2 Thessalonians 2:7 and 1 Corinthians 13:2, although the latter passage appears as ‘sacrament’ in 10  Annotations, CWE 58, 209; also ASD VI-9, 256 l. 401–402. 11  ‘Ego autem’ according to the Vulgate included in the Annotations, ASD VI-9, 258 l. 404; ‘verum ego’ according to the text of his Novum Testamentum, ASD VI-3, 540. 12  Augustinus, Enarrationes in Psalmos 98. Sermo 29.9, ed. E. Dekkers – I. Fraipont, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 40 (Turnhout: 1956) 1767 l. 30–32. Further abbreviated as CC SL. 13  Augustinus, De nuptiis et concupiscentia 1.21.23, CSEL 42, 236 l. 20–24. 14  Annotations, ASD VI-9, 258 l. 411–412 (my translation); CWE 58, 210.

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Augustine’s De gratia et libero arbitrio.15 Erasmus comments that the ‘ancients called an oath or a religious obligation a sacrament, because […] these were carried out with certain secret ceremonies’.16 Erasmus concludes his discussion by repeating his default position: ‘I do not deny that matrimony is a sacrament, but I want the question explored whether from the present passage it can be taught that it is a sacrament in the proper sense of the word, in the same way as baptism is called a sacrament’.17 Erasmus’ views on the dignity of marriage are, of course, much broader and far more complex than this sole treatment in the Annotations on Ephesians 5:32 may suggest. Reynolds, Payne, and Telle, but especially Hilmar Pabel (2002) and Guy Bedouelle (1998), have provided us with this broader picture.18 An interesting element for our discussion is that Erasmus, in his controversial ‘philogamic’ work Encomium matrimonii, first written in 1498–1499 but published in 1518, praises marriage as the sacrament that was the first to be instituted, viz., in Paradise, before the Fall, ‘ad consortium felicitatis’, whereas the other sacraments were instituted on earth as a help for man affected by sin.19 In his Paraphrases on John 2:1–11, on the wedding at Cana, Erasmus mentions that Christ honoured weddings and thus marriage by his presence, ‘foreseeing that there would some day be those who condemned them as filthy, though an honourable marriage and an unstained marriage bed is a thing most pleasing to God’.20 The latter words remind us of Erasmus’ insistence upon the marital state as equal (if not superior) in dignity to clerical celibacy and monastic virginity, a standpoint that was considered highly controversial, to say the least.21 The same should be said about the plea he makes in his Annotation to 1 Corinthians 7:39, amongst other texts, keeping open the possibility that those unhappily married could divorce (and afterwards remarry), since he 15  Chantraine G., “Le mustèrion paulinien selon les Annotations d’Érasme”, Recherches de Science Religieuse 58.3 (1970) 351–382, esp. 355–356. 16  Cf. Annotations, CWE 58, 210; also ASD VI-9, 258 l. 415–423. 17  Annotations, CWE 58, 210; also ASD VI-9, 258 l. 425–426. 18  Pabel H. M., “Exegesis and Marriage in Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament”, in Pabel – Vessey M. (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2002) 175–209, esp. 177–180; and Bedouelle G., “Introduction”, in Erasmus, Controversies: Apologia ad Fabrum, Appendix de scriptis Clithovei, Dilutio, Responsio ad disputationem de divortio, ed. Bedouelle, CWE 83 (Toronto et al.: 1996) xxxiii–xlv. 19  Erasmus, Encomium Matrimonii, ed. J.-C. Margolin, ASD I-5 (Amsterdam – Oxford: 1975) 388 l. 56–61. 20  Erasmus, Paraphrase on John, ed. J. E. Phillips, CWE 46 (Toronto et al.: 1991) 40. 21  Pabel, “Exegesis and Marriage” 182–192; and Bedouelle, “Introduction” xxxv–xxxviii. Also see Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments 731; Payne, Erasmus 109–112.

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considered conjugal love the ‘essence or sine qua non of marriage’.22 In any case, Erasmus’ positions did cause a stir throughout Europe, and Protestant Reformers eagerly employed them to undermine the sacramental character of matrimony, while Catholic polemicists including Edward Lee, Jacob Stunica, and Sanctius Caranza heavily criticized the Dutch humanist’s ambiguous positions.23 The Catholic biblical humanist and Dominican Cardinal Thomas de Vio Cajetan (1469–1534), however, took over Erasmus’ translation of ‘mysterium’ in his commentary on Ephesians 5:32, while dismissing the Vulgate’s version. Cajetan adds even more bluntly, ‘the prudent reader should not from this place deduce that Paul holds marriage for a sacrament’.24 Paul does not hold that matrimony is a great sacrament, but a great mystery, Cajetan continues, since it refers to the indissoluble bond between Christ and the Church. This should be considered the spiritual or mystical sense of the words in Genesis 2:24. And according to a Catholic tradition for the most part approved by biblical humanists such as Cajetan, doctrine could never be based upon the mystical sense of the Scriptures, only upon the literal sense.25 In any case, this discussion prompted Catholic theologians to look for a broader scriptural foundation for the sacrament of marriage, while at the same time encouraging them to take seriously the Church’s tradition of interpretation.

22  Erasmus, Annotationes in I. Cor. 7:39, ed. M. L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk, ASD VI-8 (Amsterdam – Boston: 2003) 144–191. On Erasmus and divorce, see Pabel, “Exegesis and Marriage” 193–203; also Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments 731–732 (quotation) and 736–737; and Bedouelle, “Introduction” xl–xlii; Payne, Erasmus 121–125. Further, see Olsen V. N., The New Testament Logia on Divorce, Beiträge zur Geschichte der biblischen Exegese 10 (Tübingen: 1971) 15–27. 23  Rummel E., Erasmus and his Catholic Critics, 2 vols. (Nieuwkoop: 1989) I 59, 158–160; II 25–26, 39, 74–78; Olsen, New Testament Logia on Divorce 27–33; and Telle, Érasme de Rotterdam 271–291. 24  The first edition of Cajetan’s commentaries on the Epistles was published in Venice in 1531. I have used Cajetanus Thomas de Vio, Epistolae Pauli et aliorum apostolorum ad Graecam veritatem castigatae, et juxta sensum literalem enarratae. Quibus accesserunt actus apostolorum commentariis illustrati. Omnia accuratiori cura quam antea excusa […] (Paris, Jérôme de Marnef – Guillaume Cavellat: 1571) 278. On his biblical commentaries, also see O’Connor M., Cajetan’s Biblical Commentaries: Motive and Method, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Leiden – Boston: 2017) 215. 25  In his commentary to John 2:1–11, Cajetan argues that Jesus agreed to attend the wedding at Cana, and in so doing showed his approval of marriage and the celebrations that accompany it. See Cajetanus Thomas de Vio, In quatuor evangelia ad Graecorum codicum veritatem castigata, ad sensum quem vocant literalem commentarii (Paris, Nicolas Buffet – Oudin Petit: 1542) 344. The first edition was published in Venice in 1530.

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In Session 24 dated 11 November 1563, the Council of Trent built upon the Bull of Union with the Armenians, but tried to address the doctrinal questions that had been disputed in the controversies that placed Catholics against humanists and a priori Protestants.26 The Council does not affirm that marriage was instituted in Eden as a sacrament of the New Law, but only that ‘the forefather of the human race’ – pointing to Adam – ‘pronounced marriage to be a perpetual and indissoluble bond (“matrimonii perpetuum indissolubilemque nexum”) when he said: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh […] Therefore a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will become one flesh”’.27 The Council also affirms that Christ Himself underscored the lasting and indissoluble character of the marital bond. For, when the Lord alluded to the words that God had spoken about Adam and his wife Eve in Genesis 2:24, ‘So they are no longer two but one flesh’, He added the words, ‘What therefore God has joined together, let no one put asunder’.28 Trent’s reference is, of course, to Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:5–6 and Mark 10:8–9, and seems to be a reply to the attempts by humanists and Protestants to loosen the indissoluble bond of marriage, and to open the possibility of divorce. Importantly, Trent unequivocally situates the actual institution of the sacrament of marriage – along with other sacraments – in Christ, who is called ‘the instituter and perfecter of the most holy sacraments’. It is through his salutary Passion and death that He merited the grace ‘that would perfect natural love, strengthen the unbreakable unity of the spouses and sanctify them’. In fact, Trent emphatically avoids advancing Ephesians 5:25 as an unambiguous scriptural foundation for the sacrament of marriage; the decree states that Paul ‘gave an indication’ (‘innuit’) when he said ‘Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her’, while also adding the words of Ephesians 5:32: ‘This sacrament is a great one, but I speak in Christ and in the Church’.29 26  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. N. P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London – Washington DC: 1990) II Trent to Vatican II 753–759. For a discussion of marriage at the Council of Trent, see Bernhard J., “Section V. – Le marriage”, in Bernhard – Lefebvre Ch. – Rapp F., L’Époque de la réforme et du Concile de Trente, Histoire du Droit et des Institutions de l’Église en Occident 14 (Paris: 1989) 212–302; also see Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments 896–982; Zarri G., “Die tridentinische Ehe”, in Prodi P. – Reinhard W. (eds.), Das Konzil von Trient und die Moderne, Schriften des Italienisch-Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Trient 16 (Berlin: 2001) 343–376. 27  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils II 753. 28  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils II 754. 29  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils II 754.

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This short doctrinal explanation was followed by several anathemas against the so-called heretics who argued that marriage was not one of the seven sacraments and that it could be dissolved for various reasons, or that the marital state was to be preferred above virginity or celibacy.30 Furthermore, the Council issued several other canons concerning the reform of marriage. Most important are those canons that aimed at doing away with clandestine marriages, requiring that a marriage be contracted publically before the (parish) priest and two or three witnesses.31 Trent’s reforming decrees on marriage, which were introduced by the iconic initial word Tametsi, were among the most influential decisions made by the Council. 3

Guilielmus Estius, Cornelius a Lapide, and the Sacrament of Marriage according to Ephesians 5:32

We will now focus on how Guilielmus Estius and Cornelius a Lapide, two of the most influential post-Tridentine biblical commentators, dealt with the sacrament of marriage in their discussion of Ephesians 5:32. The first of the two, Willem Hessels van Est or Guilielmus Estius (1542–1613), was educated as a theologian and biblical scholar at the University of Louvain, but moved in 1582 to the University of Douai, where he occupied the chair in ‘controversialist theology’ and commented upon the Sentences of Peter Lombard; he eventually became professor of Sacred Scriptures, holding this position for the best part of his academic career. To commemorate his activity as a teacher, Estius’ Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul and on the Catholic Letters, were published posthumously in two volumes in Douai 1614 and 1616. [Fig. 5.1]32

30  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils II 754–755. 31  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils II 755–759. 32  I have consulted Estius Guilielmus, Absolutissima in omnes beati Pauli et septem catholicas apostolorum epistolas commentaria, ed. Jacob Merlo Horstius (Cologne, Peter Henning: 1631) 639–640; Henceforth referenced as Estius, In omnes Pauli epistolas commentaria. On Estius’ life, theology, and exegetical work, see in particular Leuridan T., Les théologiens de Douai, V Guillaume Estius (Amiens: 1895); Salembier L., “Estius”, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique 5 (1913) 871–878; Fleischmann A., Die Gnadenlehre des Wilhelm Estius und ihre Stellung zum Bajanismus. Eine dogmengeschichtliche Untersuchung zu den Gnadenstreitigkeiten des ausgehenden 16. Jahrhunderts (Kallmunz – Regensburg: 1940) 2–45; and François W., “Paul, Augustine, and Marital Sex in Guilielmus Estius’ Scriptural Commentaries”, in Kambaskovic D. (ed.), Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and Body from Plato to the Enlightenment, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind 15 (Dordrecht: 2014) 235–258.

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figure 5.1 Guilielmus Estius, Absolutissima in omnes beati Pauli et septem catholicas apostolorum epistolas commentaria, ed. Jacob Merlo Horstius (Cologne: Peter Henning, 1631) KU Leuven LIBRARIES, Maurits Sabbe Library (GBIB), 279.334.2 ESTI 1631

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In his commentary on Ephesians 5:32, Estius shows himself to be aware of the philological debate ignited by the biblical humanists, admitting that both terms, ‘sacramentum’ and ‘mysterium’, are equally valid translations of the Greek word ‘mysterion’. In Estius’ interpretation, Paul places emphasis on the greatness of the ‘sacramentum’ or ‘mysterium’, ‘signified’ (‘significatum’) in the preceding words of Ephesians 5:31. The scriptural words according to which man, after having left his parents, becomes one flesh with his wife and engages in an intimate relationship with her, signify in a mystical way (‘mystice’) a sacred and secret reality, which is the bond between Christ and the Church.33 By way of a further explanation of this mystical sense in the wake of the patristic tradition, Estius argues that the Son of God descended to earth from the bosom (‘e sinu’) of the Father – leaving as it were his Father, and also leaving his mother, viz., the Synagogue (Prosper of Aquitania)34 or the celestial Jerusalem (Jerome).35 By taking flesh through the Incarnation, Christ has become one body with the Church, and as such, He has linked Himself to her in an indissoluble bond of love. From this affirmation, avers Estius, not only the bond between the two first humans, but also, in an even fuller sense, the one between each man and woman from among their descendants, obviously was and is a sacrament, in the sense that it is a sign of a greater reality.36 Estius meaningfully refrains, in the first part of his commentary, from using the very word ‘matrimonium’. In contrast to Trent’s decree, which used this term to qualify the bond between the first man and woman and, by extension, between each man and woman among their posterity, Estius limits himself in the first part of his commentary to the terms ‘coniunctio’ or ‘coniugum’. In the second part of his discussion of Ephesians 5:32, Estius insists that the Church, rightly construes matrimony as one of the sacraments of the New Law, which scholastic tradition defines as efficacious signs of the grace they confer.37 33  Estius, In omnes Pauli epistolas commentaria 639. 34  The reference is to Prosperus Aquitanus, Liber sententiarum 330, ed. M. Gastaldo, CC SL 68A (Turnhout: 1972) 340 l. 5–8. 35  Hieronymus, Comm. in Ep. ad Ephesios 3, ed. J.-P. Migne, PL 26 (Paris: 1845) 535 l. 42–48. 36  Estius, In omnes Pauli epistolas commentaria 639–640: ‘[…] coniugium non solum duorum primorum hominum, sed etiam, ac pleniori ratione, posterorum […] esse sacramentum, id est, signum magnae cuiusdam rei sacrae’. 37  Estius, In omnes Pauli epistolas commentaria 640: ‘Sed neque dubitandum est quin iuxta Catholicae ecclesiae definitionem, matrimonium sit unum ex sacramentis novae legis, quae signa sunt eius gratiae, quam significant, efficacia’. On Estius’ sacramentology, see Bodem A., “Zur allgemeinen Sakramentenlehre des Wilhelm Estius: seine Stellungnahme zu innerkatholischen Fragen und seine Auseinandersetzung mit der reformatorischen Lehre”, in Bodem – Kothgasser A. M. (eds.), Theologie und Leben. Festgabe für Georg Söll zum 70. Geburtstag (Rome: 1983) 125–146, esp. 127.

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He significantly doubts, however, whether the sacramentality of matrimony can be taught on the basis of the biblical passage under consideration. He mentions that neither Cajetan nor the Church fathers cited the passage to argue this point; instead, the Fathers emphasize that the mere fact of Christ’s presence at the wedding in Cana ( John 2:1–11) constituted a spiritual blessing of the institution of matrimony and of persons entering into marriage. Without citing specific Church fathers, Estius mentions that this viewpoint was expressed at the Council of Ephesus, and that it afterward found its way into the tradition of the Church, although no passage in Scripture explicitly makes this case.38 In concluding, Estius strongly aligns himself with the view that matrimony cannot be considered as an efficacious sacrament of grace from the time of the Garden of Eden, but that matrimony was only instituted as such by Christ, the ‘author’ of the New Law.39 Our second author, the Jesuit Cornelius a Lapide (1567–1637), taught Scripture for about twenty years at the Jesuit study house in Louvain (1597– 1616). After this period, he continued his scholarly work for a comparably long period of time in Rome (1616–1637), where he was freed from any teaching obligations during his final years to ensure that he completed his commentaries. A Lapide, if not the single most influential biblical commentator of the post-Tridentine period, was certainly one of the most important. Towards the end of his stay in Louvain, in 1614, A Lapide published his first biblical work, Commentaries on All the Epistles of Paul – in the very same year that Estius’ commentaries were issued posthumously. [Fig. 5.2]40 As regards Ephesians 5:31–32, A Lapide opposes the view of Erasmus – and the Reformers Luther, Calvin, and Beza in his wake – by contending that the Latin article ‘hoc’ cannot relate to what follows; it can only relate to what 38  D  ecrees of the Ecumenical Councils I 58, which is taken from the final words of the “Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius”. 39  Estius, In omnes Pauli epistolas commentaria 640: ‘Nec tamen ab eo tempore caepit ma­ trimonium esse sacramentum efficax gratiae; sed tale demum est a Christo novae legis authore, institutum’. 40  A Lapide Cornelius, Commentaria In Omnes Divi Pauli Epistolas (Antwerp, Martinus Nutius: 1635) 535–537. I have used this edition primarily. Recent publications on A Lapide’s exegetical work include: François W., “Grace, Free Will, and Predestination in the Biblical Commentaries of Cornelius a Lapide”, Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 34.1 (2017) 175–197; Osculati R., Evangelismo cattolico (secoli XIV–XVII): Proposte di lettura (Bologna: 2013) 551–592; and Noll R., Die mariologischen Grundlinien im exegetischen Werk des Cornelius a Lapide (1567–1637) (Regensburg: 2003). Also see Murray L., Jesuit Biblical Studies after Trent: Franciscus Toletus & Cornelius A Lapide, PhD dissertation (Catholic University of Leuven – Ave Maria University, FL: 2016).

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figure 5.2 Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria In Omnes Divi Pauli Epistolas [...] (Antwerp: Haeredes Martinus Nutius, & Ioannes Meursius, 1614) KU Leuven LIBRARIES, Maurits Sabbe Library (GBIB), LEUVEN MU TH cII 37 9

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precedes, namely the phrase ‘Man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife’, that is, the words of Genesis 2:24. This leads A Lapide to the conclusion that the word ‘sacramentum’ refers primarily not to the sacred reality that is signified, but to the sign itself, namely the bond between Adam and Eve, which should be considered as the first institution of marriage, albeit not as a sacrament of marriage under the New Law.41 Before the advent of Christ, each marriage – first of Adam, then of his descendants – is to be seen as a great sacrament or mystery, in the sense that marriage is an allegory or type of a sacred reality, namely the union between Christ and the Church. With respect to this claim, A Lapide summarizes the position favoured by the Church fathers and the medieval masters: Christ leaves his Father God and his mother the Synagogue, to join with the Church his bride. For A Lapide as for his predecessors, this is a genuine and real union, which has come about through the mystery of the Incarnation, by which Christ, the Divine Word, has united himself with human nature, joining with humankind as in a marital bond. This is the basis for the martial union Christ has engaged Himself with the Church and her members.42 But A Lapide adds that conversely, the Church leaves her father with whom she had lived among the gentiles – namely, the Devil – and her mother – the community of infidels – to join Christ as her groom.43 On a secondary level, A Lapide thus continues, the article ‘hoc’ points to matrimony under the New Law. It was Christ who went back to the first institution of matrimony in Genesis, proscribed the practices of polygamy and repudiation that had crept in, and restored the original significance of marriage. Matrimony under the New Law was no mere restoration of the matrimony of Adam and Eve; rather, it was far better fit to signify the union between Christ and the Church. It is a sacrament in the proper sense, since it was instituted by Christ in his Church and confers grace upon the spouses, as well as mutual 41  A Lapide, Commentaria In Omnes Divi Pauli Epistolas 535: ‘Pronomem ergo hoc demonstrat coniunctionem illam Adae et Evae, sive primam matrimonii institutionem, non autem Sacramentum matrimonii in lege nova […] Haec prima matrimonii in Adamo & Eva institutio, omneque deinceps matrimonium, magnum est Sacramentum, id est, ut Graeca, mysterium […] allegoria, typus rei sacrae, scilicet coniunctionis Christi & Ecclesiae’. 42  Cf. A Lapide, Commentaria In Omnes Divi Pauli Epistolas 537: ‘Cùm Apostolus hîc loquitur & inculcat unionem Christi cum Ecclesia, primariò loquitur & intelligit unionem propriam & realem, quae facta est per incarnationem, qua Christus, id est Verbum divinum, naturam humanam, & consequenter homines hominumque Ecclesiam sibi univit & maritavit’. 43  A Lapide, Commentaria In Omnes Divi Pauli Epistolas 536.

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love, so that this genuine and perfect love may become a type or representation of the love between Christ and his Church.44 For this reason, A Lapide writes, Paul exhorts the spouses among the Ephesians and other Christian churches to kindle and increase mutual love, so that this sacrament they have received, proves to be neither mendacious nor untruthful (‘mendax & fallax’), and more importantly, so that they represent truly, in and through themselves, the loving union between Christ and his Church. Christian spouses should not be quarrelsome or discordant; they should live in harmony just as Christ is in perfect harmony with his Church.45 This kind of moral exhortation made the commentary a useful tool in the hands of priests and preachers when preparing their sermons.46 In sum, Estius was convinced on philological grounds that the sacrament or mystery of Ephesians 5:32 did not refer to the bond between Adam and Eve and, by extension, to the bond of particular men and women in their posterity – which he did not even call a ‘marriage’ – but to the intimate bond between Jesus and the Church. The philological argument aligns with his rigorist theology which not only refuses any reference to sacramental marriage but even to marriage tout court among those not (yet) saved by Christ. In Estius’ sacramentology, it is solely through Christ’s salutary life, death, and Resurrection that God’s efficacious grace has been granted and marriage made into a sacrament in the proper sense of the word. Such views, which point towards the later theological and spiritual current of Jansenism, diverged from the views of A Lapide (and other Jesuits) who did consider the bond of Adam and Eve before the Fall as the first institution of marriage in genere, which was then restored and perfected through Christ’s life, death, and Resurrection and through the grace these salutary events entail. 44  A Lapide, Commentaria In Omnes Divi Pauli Epistolas 536: ‘[…] matrimonium vero fidelium legis novae post Christum, qui moriens in cruce ex seipso formavit Ecclesiam sponsam suam, est Sacramentum, id est, signum perfectissimum eiusdem unionis iam factae, ideoque proprie dictum a Christo in Ecclesia Sacramentum est institutum, conferens con­iugibus gratiam & mutuum hunc amorem, idque ut hic amor verus & perfectus, sit typus amoris Christi & Ecclesiae’. 45  A Lapide, Commentaria In Omnes Divi Pauli Epistolas 536. 46  Also of interest is A Lapide’s commentary on John 2:1–11, where he writes that Jesus came to the marriage in Cana to give ‘His sanction to marriage, and sanctify it by His presence, and so condemn the Encratites, and the followers of Tatian, who were to arise in after times, and revile marriage as a filthy invention of the devil’. A Lapide also saw as an allegorical meaning that ‘this marriage represented the marriage union of Christ with human nature’. See A Lapide Cornelius, The Great Commentary of Cornelius a Lapide: S. John’s Gospel. – Chaps. I. to XI., trans. T. W. Mossman (London: 1887) 77–91, esp. 82 and 90.

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Nicolas Poussin, the Sacrament of Marriage, and Visual Exegesis

In the last part of this essay, I will focus on the Sacrament of Marriage painted by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) as the last of his second series of Sacraments, executed in 1647–1648. This painting has been discussed in only a few of the many publications devoted to the French painter. Tony Green accords it attention in his study on the two series of Seven Sacraments (2000).47 Most recently, the second Sacrament of Marriage has been the subject of an innovative article by T. J. Clark, published in 2014 in New Literary History.48 Clark, who identifies himself as an atheist, ventured into a theological interpretation of Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage. He argues, inter alia, that the decree of the Council of Trent regarding marriage is one of the keys to its interpretation, especially when it comes to explaining the changes Poussin made to his painting of 1647– 1648, in comparison to his earlier cycle of Sacraments (1637–1640). Only one year after Clark’s essay, in 2015, Nicolas Milovanovic and Mickaël Szanto published a ground-breaking book, Poussin et Dieu, in which Milovanovic devoted a chapter to the relationship between Poussin’s work and biblical exegesis. He demonstrated how interesting insights can be gained from a comparison of the painter’s religious work with early seventeenth-century Bible commentaries, explicitly mentioning A Lapide, thus echoing Green’s earlier references to the biblical scholar.49 When looking at the earlier painting of 1637–1640,50 which was part of the cycle destined for Cassiano del Pozzo (1588–1657) – who was himself secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, antiquary and patron of arts, especially

47  G  reen T., Nicolas Poussin Paints the Seven Sacraments Twice: An Interpretation of Figures, Symbols, and Hieroglyphs, Together with a Running Commentary on the Paintings, the Drawings, and the Artist’s Letters (Somerset: 2000), esp. 167–170 and 332–339. See also the older works by Brigstocke H. – Gendle N. – Macandrew H., Poussin: Sacraments and Bacchanals: Paintings and Drawings on Sacred and Profane Themes by Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665, exh. cat. National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh: 1981); Thompson C., Poussin’s Seven Sacraments in Edinburgh (Glasgow: 1980); and Von Löhneysen H. W., “Die ikono­ graphischen und geistesgeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen der ‘Sieben Sakamente’ des Nicolas Poussin”, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 4.2 (1952) 133–150. 48  Clark T. J., “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage. An Interpretation”, New Literary History 45.2 (2014) 221–252. 49  Milovanovic N., “Poussin et l’exégèse”, in Milovanovic – Szanto M. (eds.), Poussin et Dieu, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre (Paris: 2015) 56–65, esp. 58–59. Cf. Green, Nicolas Poussin passim. 50  See especially Green, Nicolas Poussin 167–170.

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figure 5.3 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage I, 1637–1640 His Grace the Duke of Rutland, Belvoir Castle, & Bridgeman Images

classicizing Roman art51 – we see that the sacrament is exemplified by the marriage of Mary and Joseph, as recounted in the Legenda Aurea. [Fig. 5.3]52 When Mary was in her fourteenth year, the high priest publicly announced that the maidens who were reared in the Temple and had come of age should return to their homes and be legally joined with their husbands. The other girls obeyed this edict. Only the Blessed Virgin Mary answered that she could not do so, both because her parents had dedicated her to the service of the Lord and because she herself had vowed her virginity to God […]. [When] the high priest went inside to consult the Lord […] a voice sounded from the Holies for all to hear. It said: ‘Each unmarried but marriageable man of the house of David is to bring a branch to the altar. One of these branches will bloom and the Holy Spirit in the form 51  Szanto M., “Poussin et ses amitiés chrétiennes”, in Milovanovic – Szanto (eds.), Poussin et Dieu [226–227]. 52  Cf. Green, Nicolas Poussin 248.

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of a dove will perch upon its tip, according to the prophecy of Isaiah. The man to whom this branch belongs is, beyond all doubt, the one who is to be the virgin’s spouse’. Joseph, of the house of David, was among the other men […] Joseph brought his branch forward, it flowered at once, and a dove came from heaven and perched upon it. So it was clear to all that Joseph was to be Mary’s husband.53 In the painting we see all the elements contained in the Legenda Aurea. Standing beside Mary is Joseph, holding the flowering rod, which is a reference to Isaiah 11:1 and a sign that Messianic times have dawned and the coming of the long awaited Saviour is near.54 Above Mary and Joseph, the presence of the dove – a reference to the Holy Spirit – situates the marriage within the mystery of the Incarnation, the coming of Christ in the flesh. Somewhat strikingly, the High Priest who blesses the marriage between Mary and Joseph wears the liturgical vestments of a (post-Tridentine) bishop. The audience present at the wedding also constitutes an interesting grouping: it includes on the lefthand side the parents of the Virgin, Anna and Joachim (dressed in yellow), as well as a full-breasted woman who reaches down toward a child. On the right-hand side we see a group of men, most probably the unsuccessful suitors of the Virgin. Although there was no tradition that considered the marriage of Mary and Joseph as the scriptural foundation of sacramental marriage, a long debate in the Middle Ages had resulted in a theological consensus that Mary and Joseph were indeed sacramentally married. The idea behind this was ‘that Christ and his Passion were already efficacious before Christ’s advent’, provided that there was ‘at least implicit faith in Christ-to-come’.55 T. J. Clark argues, significantly, that Paul Fréart de Chantelou (1609–1694) – a French military engineer working in the royal administration, the art patron and collector who commissioned the second series of sacraments – 56 must have asked for adaptations to the depiction of the sacrament of marriage to bring it more into line with the post-Tridentine theology of the sacrament of marriage.57 [Fig. 5.4] Clark’s approach is quite convincing on several points, but needs further elaboration and, in some places, correction. Although the scene preserves reminiscences of Mary’s and Joseph’s marriage according to 53  Voragine Jacobus de, The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, trans. W. G. Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton N.J.: 1993) II 153, nr. 131. 54  Cf. Blunt A., Nicolas Poussin: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1958 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: Text, Bollingen Series 35–7 (New York: 1967) 188. 55  Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments 825. 56  Szanto, “Poussin et ses amitiés chrétiennes” [226–227]. 57  Green, Nicolas Poussin 332–339.

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figure 5.4 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, 1647–48 National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

the Legenda Aurea, Clark points to a few important changes, which together distance the painting from the apocryphal tradition, bringing it closer to the doctrine reaffirmed at Trent and to its scriptural basis. The scene shows a kneeling Mary and Joseph, the latter holding the flowering rod, which announces that the Messianic times have dawned with the coming of Christ. The High Priest joins the hands of Mary and Joseph, as in the earlier version, so that the scene still contains a reference to the Legenda Aurea, but is also in line with the teaching of the Church that the husband and wife administer the sacrament of marriage to each other.58 This may be the reason why the High Priest is reduced in size in comparison to the first series and is now sitting on a chair and thus at the same level as the spouses. Remarkably, Poussin has also substituted antique robes for the liturgical-pontifical vestments, characteristic of his fundamental wish to situate the scene in an antique ‘historical’ setting.59 58  Clark, “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage” 239–240, also 221, where the author speaks about the betrothal of Mary – which may be true from a traditional Jewish point of view – although Poussin himself clearly construes the event as a marriage. 59  Von Löhneysen, “Die ikonographischen und geistesgeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen” 149.

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figure 5.5 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, central part

A second and far more significant change, one Clark was the first to point out, is that the marriage is concluded not under a dove, as was the case in the first cycle of 1637–1640, but instead upon the sign of the cross, visible in the motif of the floor tiles.60 [Fig. 5.5] The cross may even be seen as a kind of shadow, with its top forming a point of access to the painting and its bottom ending, so to speak, over Mary’s arm. The change is significant, since now Mary and Joseph are married upon the sign of the cross, although it is still hidden as a motif in the floor tiles or as a shadow cast forward by the salutary events of Jesus’ Passion, death, and Resurrection that will manifest itself fully in the future. According to traditional theology, reaffirmed at Trent, it is indeed from Jesus’ cross that sanctifying grace flows, which makes matrimony into a sacrament, as is also true of the other sacraments. Through this grace the mutual love of the spouses is perfected and their unity is indissolubly strengthened so that they can become a figure of the intimate and indissoluble union between Christ and his Church, which has been brought about at the Incarnation. This grace is also proleptically conferred on the marriage of Mary and Joseph, making it a sacramental marriage and, in a certain sense, an ideal marriage.61 The cross of Jesus, present in the floor tiles or as a shadow, is like a pathway drawing the eyes and the attention of the viewer towards the central scene of 60  Clark, “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage” 236–237. Christ’s intimate presence in the scene induces Clark to conclude that the topic of the painting is actually Mary’s mystic betrothal to Christ – a conclusion which I think lacks relevance (see also p. 239). 61  Ibidem 236.

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figure 5.6 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, left part

the painting. Apart from this vertical line, we notice a main horizontal line, going from left to right.62 Light pouring in from the window on the left-hand side draws the viewer’s eyes to that point and beyond. S/he first sees a mysterious woman, veiled and partly hidden behind the column, whom Clark calls, after Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s enthusiastic comment on the painting, the femmecolonne.63 With the woman, the viewer is confronted with a ‘mysterion’ that will, however, be unveiled if s/he looks further. Following Clark, the femmecolonne refers to a vague ‘shape of things to come’, but the viewer will be able to grasp the mystery more clearly if s/he goes further and reads the scenes that will follow.64 A recurrent motif in Poussin’s paintings, the mysterious woman personifies the ‘veiled and prophetic character of the Old Testament’ that eventually found fulfilment in the New. [Fig. 5.6]65 62  Ibidem 238: ‘There is […] a tug of war in the painting’s structure between strong symmetries – the Cross on the floor, whose lines lead off in strict perspective to a vanishing point just above Joseph’s head – and a left-to-right movement, a Fall, of light’. 63  Ibidem 229–230. 64  Ibidem 241–245 and 247 (quotation). See also the parallel that Clark draws between Poussin’s veiled femme-colonne and his emblem of Prophecy made for a Biblia Sacra in 1642. Cf. infra the veiled figure in Christ and the Woman of Samaria. 65  See Milovanovic, “Poussin et l’exégèse” 64: ‘le caractère voilé et prophétique de l’Ancien Testament’.

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Moving rightward from the femme-colonne, the viewer then encounters a group of people already present in Marriage I, but rearranged in Marriage II in an astonishing and somewhat confusing way. The man dressed in yellow and looking in the direction of the marriage scene has been brought forward. His partner from Marriage I, with whom he recognizably constituted the parental couple Joachim and Anna, has now been relegated to the background. Even more remarkably, the man in yellow seems now to form a (new) couple with the woman who reaches down toward the child; turning her head in harmony with the man, she has become far more prominent. The light that the eye follows makes the forward-facing pose of the woman’s chest even more pronounced, while the importunate child gazing at her would seem to be clamouring to be lifted up and be nourished at her breasts.66 Although modern scholars have been inclined to interpret Marriage II in light of Marriage I, we should note that seventeenth-century viewers did not see the two paintings together and were, moreover, invited to ‘read’ Marriage II as a symbolic unity in its own right. It is my conviction that Poussin has deliberately rearranged Marriage II in order to evoke the presence of the first human couple, Adam and Eve, as the prototype of every marriage. I am even inclined to think that Poussin redesigned the scene in order to depict the union of the flesh which Genesis 2:24 speaks of and which, according to Ephesians 5:32, should be seen as a sacrament in the broad sense of a prefiguration of the perfect bond between Christ and his Church.67 Subject to the lusts and burdens of marriage, man and woman are earnestly looking forward to and longing for that mystery whose full unveiling must await the coming of Christ incarnate, and which will become fully efficacious through his salutary work and Passion. Astonishingly, Clark complains that the right-hand section of the painting has often been neglected by its interpreters, but at the same time fails himself to give a satisfactory interpretation.68 [Fig. 5.7] This section of the painting is, however, equally important for the understanding of the sacrament of marriage depicted by Poussin. The figure dressed in blue, standing behind the priest, now holds a cup on a plate in his left hand, and in his right hand a jar or a ewer. The association of a nuptial feast with wine is evident. In a traditional Jewish wedding, two cups of wine are offered to the bride and the groom to

66  Most probably the ‘fleshly’ woman, voluptuous and motherly, represents Eve already in Marriage I, as a type of the ‘pure’ Mary – an important motif in biblical theology and the visual arts. 67  Clark, “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage” 245. 68  Ibidem 229.

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figure 5.7 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, right part

drink.69 The jar is most probably also a visual allusion to the wedding at Cana, with the chief steward playing a central role. From a biblical perspective, the wine at the wedding feast should be interpreted as a sign that the joyfulness of the long-awaited Messianic times are now imminent. The reference to the wedding at Cana may be reinforced by the presence of a young man leaning against the pillar, who is somewhat detached from the suitors of the Legenda Aurea. He is dressed in a red robe and his bare feet are more conspicuous than those of the other figures. The iconography is in accordance with that of the Evangelist John, the writer of the Fourth Gospel and narrator of the wedding at Cana, who was also Poussin’s favourite evangelist, especially in the artist’s later years.70 The wedding at Cana was considered one of the biblical foundations of the sacrament of marriage, as Estius had suggested in his commentary on Ephesians 5:32. The Evangelist John may even be seen as a kind of counterpart to Adam who appears in the form of a prophetical figure. 69  Cups of wine play a role at the Jewish wedding ceremony, which in the talmudic period was hold in two parts. The couple drink the first cup after the rabbi has recited the betrothal blessings. At the marriage proper, the rabbi recites the Seven Blessings (Sheva Berakhot) over a second cup of wine. The blessings and the cup ritual put the state of marriage into a dynamic relationship between the Garden of Eden and the expectation of the Messiah. In this sense the joy of the wine refers to Messianic times, much expected for. After the Seven Blessings, the bride and groom drink from the second cup of wine. See Posner R. et al., “Marriage”, Encyclopedia Judaica 13 (second edition 2007) 563–574, esp. 565–568. See there for further literature. 70  Milovanovic, “Poussin et l’exégèse” 62.

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figure 5.8 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Marriage II, three compartments

Considered this way, Nicolas Poussin’s painting can be divided into three major compartments or discrete ‘spaces’,71 a division that is reflected in, and is even given a subtle theological qualification by, the scenes visible through the three apertures, be they windows or doors. [Fig. 5.8] The left-hand side shows us the marriage in the flesh between Adam and Eve, man and wife, as described in Genesis 2:24. What is visible through the opening, a monument with a column and a sphere towering above it, cannot be interpreted in an unequivocal way. Clark characterizes it as a monumental Roman tomb that gives evidence of Poussin’s vivid interest in and study of classical architecture in Rome.72 In that case, the message would be that, notwithstanding the tomb’s beauty, it is a vessel of death and decay, and as such qualifies humankind, indeed all human institutions after the Fall, as subject to sin, suffering, and death.73 Green calls 71  Clark, “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage” 229 and 249–250. 72  Ibidem 249. 73  An additional argument here is that a grave is also to be found in Poussin’s Christ and the Woman of Samaria, a painting made for Chantelou, now lost, but recorded in an engraving by Jean Pesne. According to Anthony Blunt, Poussin ‘wished to point the contrast between the tomb and the scene in the foreground, between the death of the old dispensation and the life of the new’, Blunt, Nicolas Poussin 184–185; also Milovanovic, “Poussin et l’exégèse” 56–57. In addition to Blunt’s and Milovanovic’s arguments, I would like to point to the presence of a mysterious veiled figure at the entrance of the grave, whom

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attention to the ‘[…] large stone column with a stone sphere on the top’, which he identifies as one version of ‘a hieroglyph that Poussin liked to put in front of temples in his various paintings of sacred marriages […]’. Green offers as examples Poussin’s Rebecca at the Well and his lost Moses and the daughters of Jethro. In all three cases, the sphere and the column that supports it should be seen as ‘preliminaries to sacred marriages and so much allegorised as part of the promise of salvation to come in Christian thought’.74 What we see through the window in either case is a monument that alludes to the human condition under the Old Covenant, evoking the need for and promise of salvation to come. Mary and Joseph make up the central part of the painting, and their marriage should be considered as the first sacramental marriage under the New Law, a marriage in the service of the mystery of the Incarnation and of Christ’s coming into the world. At the same time the marriage was concluded upon the sign of the cross – the Incarnation includes from the beginning the perspective of Christ’s Passion and death. From Christ’s cross flows the grace that makes the sacraments, including marriage, efficacious. Through the second window, above the central scene, the viewer sees a young and rising tree – obviously a palm tree. Pushing this reading further, one might argue that the tree has taken the place of the column and the sphere and now towers above a monumental tomb that has fallen into ruin. The young green tree emphasises the newness implanted with the Incarnation of Christ, his Passion, and eventual Resurrection, which triumphs over the forces of death and decay that had held a humankind in thrall. The right-hand side of the painting includes the wine drunk at a nuptial feast, and most probably refers to the wedding at Cana from John 2:1–11, and thus evokes the joy of the Messianic times that have now fully dawned. This epoch is symbolized by the mature, full-grown (palm-)tree that is visible through the third opening; it signifies the abundance of grace made available in and through the Church. 5

Conclusion: Mystery or Sacrament?

In their discussion of Ephesians 5:32, which had become more immediately sensitive in light of Erasmus’ earlier commentary, Catholic biblical scholars emphasized that the bond (or even marriage) between Adam and Eve, man I take to personify the mysteries of the Old Covenant that are revealed and fulfilled in the New. 74  Green, Nicolas Poussin 338–339, and cf. 146–147.

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and woman, was a sacrament, in the sense of a prefiguration of a sacred and secret reality, viz., the bond between Jesus and his Church, which was revealed and became efficacious with the advent of Christ incarnate. These theological ideas are to be found in Poussin’s second version of the Sacrament of Marriage, in which the mysterious character of the Old Testament is personified by a veiled and partially hidden woman, who shows the way to a further unveiling or manifestation of a profound secret. The comparison of biblical scholarship with Poussin’s visual exegesis further shows the centrality of Christ’s cross for each ‘depiction’ of the sacrament, be it literary or visual: from the cross flows the grace that makes sacraments efficacious. Poussin also brings in the biblical motif of the wedding at Cana, where wine is doubly meaningful, for Christ honoured and blessed the marriage by his presence and miracle, giving the first public sign that the fullness of the Messianic time had dawned, as described by the Evangelist John. A careful ‘reading’ of Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage shows that it is more than a biblical-historical depiction of the sacrament and its foundations, inspired by the artist’s ‘very strong flavour of classicism’.75 It is a theologically precise and spiritually evocative picture, which may have been nourished by his own reading of Scripture, the Church fathers,76 and especially contemporary biblical commentators.77 The religious multivalence of the Sacrament of Marriage becomes even more apparent when compared with the first version’s reliance on the Legenda Aurea.78 To this should be added Poussin’s fascination for the parallels between the Christian sacraments and the mysteries of the ancient religions of Egypt and Greece (which also underlies Erasmus’ exegesis of Paul’s mysterion-concept) – a fascination not only exemplified by Poussin’s paintings and drawings, but also confirmed by the statements of his contemporaries, and demonstrated by modern art historical scholarship.79 In the final analysis, this article can thus be seen as a complement to and further unfolding of the ideas contained in Poussin et Dieu.80 Conversely, it takes a position different from that sketched by Jacques Thuillier in his influential essay “Poussin et Dieu”: he portrays the 75  Blunt, Nicolas Poussin 205. 76  See ibidem 354–355, on Poussin’s use of ‘delectation’ in an Augustinian sense. 77  Ibidem 207. 78   Brigstocke – Gendle – Macandrew, Poussin: Sacraments and Bacchanals 98: ‘Chantelou had already made it known that he regarded the Belvoir Marriage, with its symmetrical design and austere background, as the least successful of the earlier series of Sacraments’. 79  Blunt, Nicolas Poussin 187, 201, and 205–206; Milovanovic, “Poussin et l’exégèse” 62; and Green, Nicolas Poussin 146–147. Cf. Chantraine, “Le mustèrion paulinien selon les Annotations d’Érasme” 381. 80  Especially the introductory essay : Milovanovic N. – Szanto M., “Poussin et Dieu?”, in Milovanovic – Szanto, Poussin et Dieu 17–31.

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painter as highly sceptical in religious matters, stoic in philosophy, and a frequenter of libertine circles. His account culminates with the famous statement ‘[g]race, in the strictly religious meaning of the word, seems truly absent from his [Poussin’s] work’.81 Leaving aside discussion on the question of Poussin’s religious positions,82 I align myself with those scholars who hold that bringing biblical scholarship and visual exegesis into conversation leads to a new understanding.83 Selective Bibliography

Primary Sources

A Lapide Cornelius, Commentaria In Omnes Divi Pauli Epistolas (Antwerp, Martinus Nutius: 1635). A Lapide Cornelius, The Great Commentary of Cornelius a Lapide: S. John’s Gospel. – Chaps. I. to XI., trans. Th. W. Mossman (London: 1887). Cajetanus Thomas de Vio, Epistolae Pauli et aliorum apostolorum ad Graecam veritatem castigatae, et juxta sensum literalem enarratae. Quibus accesserunt actus apostolorum commentariis illustrati. Omnia accuratiori cura quam antea excusa […] (Paris, Jérôme de Marnef – Guillaume Cavellat: 1571). Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. N. P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London – Washington DC: 1990). Erasmus, Annotationes in Novum Testamentum (pars quarta): 1–2 Corinthios, ed. M. L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk, ASD VI-8 (Amsterdam – Boston: 2003) 144–191. Erasmus’ Opera Omnia according to the ‘Amsterdam’ edition, are referenced with the standardized abbreviation ASD. Erasmus, Annotationes in Novum Testamentum (pars quinta) ed. M. L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk, ASD VI-9 (Leiden – Boston: 2009).

81  Thuillier J., “Poussin et Dieu”, in Prat L. A. – Rosenberg P. (eds.), Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665 (Paris: 1994) 29–34, esp. 34: ‘La grâce, au sens strictement religieux, semble bien absente de son [Poussin] œuvre’; comp. with 30: ‘Son attention put être très tôt attirée sur le problème fondamental de la grâce, qui viendra se placer au centre même de son œuvre […] mais elle [la notion de grâce] peut être ramenée à son contenu fondamental, soit la grande interrogation de l’homme sur le destin, ou, comme écrit Poussin lui-même, sur la “Fortune”’. 82  For the full discussion, see the entire chapter 5 of Blunt, Nicolas Poussin 177–207. Also see Thuillier, “Poussin et Dieu” 29–34; and Green, Nicolas Poussin 51–52. 83  I also realise that the conclusions concerning Poussin’s second Sacrament of Marriage are open to further scrutiny on the basis of the painting’s preparatory drawings as well as the artist’s correspondence.

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Erasmus, Annotations on Galatians and Ephesians, ed. R. A. Faber, Collected Works of Erasmus 58 (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2017). Referenced with the standard abbreviation CWE. Erasmus, Encomium Matrimonii, ed. J.-C. Margolin, ASD I-5 (Amsterdam – Oxford: 1975). Erasmus, Novum Testamentum, ed. A. J. Brown, ASD VI-3 (Amsterdam et al.: 2004). Estius Guilielmus, Absolutissima in omnes beati Pauli et septem catholicas apostolorum epistolas commentaria, ed. Jacob Merlo Horstius (Cologne, Peter Henning: 1631). Voragine Jacobus de, The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, trans. W. G. Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton N.J.: 1993).

Studies

Bedouelle G., “Introduction”, in Erasmus, Controversies: Apologia ad Fabrum, Appendix de scriptis Clithovei, Dilutio, Responsio ad disputationem de divortio, ed. Bedouelle, CWE 83 (Toronto et al.: 1996) xxxiii–xlv. Bernhard J., “Section V. – Le marriage”, in Bernhard – Lefebvre C. – Rapp F., L’Époque de la réforme et du Concile de Trente, Histoire du Droit et des Institutions de l’Église en Occident 14 (Paris: 1989) 212–302. Blunt A., Nicolas Poussin: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1958 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: Text, Bollingen Series 35–7 (New York: 1967). Brigstocke H. – Gendle N. – Macandrew H., Poussin: Sacraments and Bacchanals: Paintings and Drawings on Sacred and Profane Themes by Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665, exh. cat. National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh: 1981). Chantraine G., “Le mustèrion paulinien selon les Annotations d’Érasme”, Recherches de Science Religieuse 58.3 (1970) 351–382. Clark T. J., “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage. An Interpretation”, New Literary History 45.2 (2014) 221–252. François W., “Paul, Augustine, and Marital Sex in Guilielmus Estius’ Scriptural Commentaries”, in Kambaskovic D. (ed.), Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and Body from Plato to the Enlightenment, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind 15 (Dordrecht: 2014) 235–258. Green T., Nicolas Poussin Paints the Seven Sacraments Twice: An Interpretation of Figures, Symbols, and Hieroglyphs, Together with a Running Commentary on the Paintings, the Drawings and the Artist’s Letters (Somerset: 2000). Milovanovic N. – Szanto M. (eds.), Poussin et Dieu, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre (Paris: 2015). O’Connor M., Cajetan’s Biblical Commentaries: Motive and Method, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Leiden – Boston: 2017). Olsen V. N., The New Testament Logia on Divorce, Beiträge zur Geschichte der biblischen Exegese 10 (Tübingen: 1971).

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Pabel H. M., “Exegesis and Marriage in Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament”, in Pabel – Vessey M. (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2002). Payne J. B., Erasmus: His Theology of the Sacraments, Research in Theology (Richmond: 1970). Reynolds P. L., How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent (Cambridge: 2016). Rummel E., Erasmus and his Catholic Critics, 2 vols. (Nieuwkoop: 1989). Telle É. V., Érasme de Rotterdam et le septième sacrement: Étude d’Évangélisme matrimonial au XVIe siècle et contribution à la biographie intellectuelle d’Érasme (Geneva: 1954). Thompson C., Poussin’s Seven Sacraments in Edinburgh (Glasgow: 1980). Thuillier J., “Poussin et Dieu”, in Prat L. A. – Rosenberg P. (eds.), Nicolas Poussin 1594– 1665 (Paris: 1994) 29–34. Von Löhneysen H. W., “Die ikonographischen und geistesgeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen der „Sieben Sakamente“ des Nicolas Poussin”, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 4.2 (1952) 133–150. Zarri G., “Die tridentinische Ehe”, in Prodi P. – Reinhard W. (eds.), Das Konzil von Trient und die Moderne, Schriften des Italienisch-Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Trient 16 (Berlin: 2001) 343–376.

chapter 6

Hoc Est Corpus Meum: Whole-Body Catacomb Saints and Eucharistic Doctrine in Baroque Bavaria Noria K. Litaker In 1771, the small parish church in the village of Hahnbach in the Upper Palatinate welcomed the ‘holy body’ of one Saint Felix [Fig. 6.1]. Saint Felix was not a local saint or a medieval missionary who had once lived and worked in the area. Rather, the new town patron hailed from the ancient Roman catacombs and was believed to be a martyr from the period of the early Christian Church. Almost 250 years later, Saint Felix’s body – dressed in the outfit of a Roman legionary and covered lavishly in glass jewels, pearls, and golden wire – still lies in a glass shrine on the Last Supper altar in Saint Jakob’s parish church [Fig. 6.2]. He wears a golden crown of laurels and holds a palm leaf in his right hand, symbols of his death as a martyr. In his other hand, Felix grasps a reliquary vase embedded in which is an ampule of the blood he shed in the name of Christ [Fig. 6.3]. Neither Saint Felix’s presence nor his striking visual presentation is unique. In fact, he is one of 398 ‘holy bodies’ that were shipped to the duchy of Bavaria from the ‘rediscovered’ Roman catacombs between 1590 and 1803.1 These relics, most of which arrived after 1648, were insistently called ‘heilige Leiber’ (holy bodies) by both the Catholic church officials who exported them and local recipients.2 Despite their label, the bones that arrived from Rome were usually a jumble of relic fragments rather than an intact skeleton. After the end of the Thirty Years’ War, local monastic and parish communities hired artists, carpenters, monks, nuns and professional relic decorators to undertake the expensive and labor-intensive process of crafting these fragmented Roman relics into what appeared to be complete skeletons. This was done using a complex combination of real bones, wooden replacement bones, and custom-built support structures. Once bodies such as Saint Felix’s were constructed, they were decorated, usually by nuns, with jewels, pearls, cloth, and gold and silver

1  Litaker N. K., Embodied Faith: Whole-Body Catacomb Saints in the Duchy of Bavaria, 1578–1803, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Pennsylvania: 2017) Appendix A. 2  Litaker, Embodied Faith 3.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_007

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figure 6.1 Last Supper Altar (1771). Pfarrkirche Sankt Jakob, Hahnbach Image © Noria Litaker

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figure 6.2 Body of Saint Felix, Last Supper Altarpiece (1771). Pfarrkirche Sankt Jakob, Hahnbach Image © Noria Litaker

wire using a technique known as ‘cloister work’.3 Once finished, the saints were placed in glass shrines either atop or within altars in churches across the duchy. This new type of whole-body relic presentation was unique to the early modern period and a radical break with the medieval practice of fragmenting the bodily remains of saints.4 Rather than pulling bodies apart, early modern Bavarians intentionally and painstakingly crafting seemingly whole bodies out of relic fragments. The form of the whole-body catacomb saint allowed early modern Bavarians to make certain abstract theological doctrines of the sacred mysteries central to the post-Tridentine Catholic church – namely the sacrifice of the Mass and 3  Schiedermair W., “Klosterarbeiten: Hinweise zu Begriff, Wesen, Herkunft, Verwendung und Herstellern”, in Ritz G. ­­– Schiedermair W. (eds.), Klosterarbeiten aus Schwaben (Gessertshausen: 1990) 9–32. 4  Angenendt A., Heilige und Reliquien. Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom frühen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: 1997); Angenendt A., “Zur Ehre der Altäre erhoben. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Reliquienteilung”, Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 89 (1994) 163–72; and Swinarski U., “Der ganze und der zerteilte Körper: zu zwei gegensätzlichen Vorstellungen im mittelalterlichen Reliquienkult,” in Bauer D. R. – Herbers K. (eds.), Hagiographie im Kontext (Stuttgart: 2000) 58–68.

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figure 6.3 Blood ampule of Saint Felix, Last Supper Altarpiece (1771). Pfarrkirche Sankt Jakob, Hahnbach Image © Noria Litaker

the transubstantiation of the Eucharist – visually comprehensible and concrete. Here on the altar, where Christ’s sacrifice was performed in the Mass, was a tangible, parallel presentation of a martyr’s body holding an ampule of his or her blood sacrificed in the name of Christ. Believers could see the body and the blood of a martyr in the same place where Christ’s ‘own body and blood’

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became present ‘under the form of bread and wine’.5 This was no Mass of Saint Gregory, where a vision of the suffering Christ appeared on the altar only to fade away. Instead, these sacrificial bodies were permanent fixtures upon the altar where Christ’s sacrifice was rehearsed daily in the liturgy of the Mass. By presenting catacomb saints as complete bodies, early modern Bavarians created an immediate, embodied illustration of ‘high mysteries hidden in [this sacrifice]’, utilizing or, better, materializing the saint’s body to allude to the whole of Christ’s body and blood made present in the Mass.6 The sacrificial nature of the Mass as well as Christ’s bodily presence in the bread and wine of the Eucharist were complicated theological issues that had been subject to debate and disagreement among clerics for centuries.7 When these very concepts became sites of religious rupture at the onset of the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century, it became increasingly urgent for the Catholic Church to define its positions on both transubstantiation and the nature of the Mass.8 Over the course of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the council convened to respond to Reformation challenges, the participants issued several decrees on the related issues of transubstantiation and the nature of the Mass. The Council first turned its attention to the subject of transubstantiation in 1551, declaring by the consecration of the bread and wine, there takes place the change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the whole substance of his blood. And the holy catholic church has suitable and properly called this change transubstantiation.9 By defending the concept of transubstantiation, the Catholic Church separated itself clearly from both the Lutheran and Reformed understandings of the Eucharistic sacrament, which rejected the notion that Christ’s flesh and blood replaced the substance of the bread and wine during the liturgy. The 5  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. N. P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London: 1990) II 695. 6  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils II 734. 7  For background on the development of Eucharistic theology during the medieval period, see Levy I. – Macy G. – Ausdall K. van (eds.), A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages (Brill: 2011); and Macy G., “The Medieval Inheritance”, in Wandel L. P. (ed.), A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (Leiden ­– Boston: 2013) 13–37. 8  For a detailed treatment of the different confessional interpretations of the Eucharist during the reformation, see Wandel L. P., The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge – New York: 2006). 9  Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils II 695.

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Council returned to the issue of the Eucharist once again in September 1562, this time addressing the sacrificial nature of the Mass. It asserted that according to Catholic doctrine, the Mass was a ‘true and unique sacrifice’ instituted by Christ at the Last Supper.10 The decree explained that in the ‘divine sacrifice which is performed in the mass, the very same Christ is contained and offered in bloodless manner who made a bloody sacrifice of himself once for all on the cross’.11 Thus, by 1562 the Roman Catholic Church had staked out its position on both the Mass and the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrament, declaring any other interpretations heretical. Although the Roman Church had now clarified its position on these issues, the sacred mystery of the Eucharistic wafer and wine’s transformation into the actual sacrificed body and blood of Christ during the Mass was not visually apparent to the observer. Because these concepts had become such critical confessional markers, early modern Catholics worked to make the reality of this miraculous transformation visible and comprehensible to worshippers who were not steeped in the intricacies of sacramental theology. In Bavaria, the ruling Wittelsbach family wholeheartedly embraced this task, stoutly defending the traditional understanding of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the sacrifice of Mass promulgated at the Council of Trent. The dukes and their agents strove to cultivate an increased reverence and veneration for the Eucharist in their domains.12 Beginning in the 1560s and 1570s, court preachers defended veneration of the Eucharist in sermons and, by 1616, the Bavarian legal code made the theft of a monstrance displaying the Host punishable by death.13 Besides defending the Eucharist in word and law, the ducal family also promoted devotion to the Holy Sacrament through their own actions. Most notably, the family directed and bankrolled the increasingly elaborate Corpus Christi processions in Munich, Landshut, and Wasserburg, and undertook public pilgrimages to bleeding Host shrines at Andechs, Bettbrunn, Deggendorf, and Neukirchen beim Heiligen Blut.14 10   Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils II 732. 11   Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils II 733. 12   Woeckel G. P., Pietas Bavarica: Wallfahrt, Prozession und Ex voto-Gabe im Hause Wittelsbach in Ettal, Wessobrunn, Altötting und der Landeshauptstadt München von der Gegenreformation bis zur Säkularisation und der Renovatio Ecclesiae (Weissenhorn: 1992). 13  For Bavarian theologians defending the Eucharist, see Johann Eck, De Sacrificio Missae Libri Tres (1526), eds. E. Iserloh – V. Pfnür – P. Fabisch (Münster: 1982); Walker R. E. (ed.), The Corpus Christi Sermons of Johannes Nas (1534–1590): An Edition with Notes and Commentary (Göppingen: 1988); and Johnson T., Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham – Burlington, VT: 2009) 209. 14  For more on the Corpus Christi procession in early modern Bavaria, see Mitterwieser A., Geschichte der Fronleichnamsprozession in Bayern (Munich: 1949); and Pentzlin N. I., The

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figure 6.4 Holy Blood cult statue (1511–1520), chalice and blood (1680). Sankt Salvator pilgrimage church, Ecksberg Image © Nadja Pentzlin

The Wittelsbachs also promoted other paraliturgical devotions to the Eucharist. In 1600, Duke Maximilian I invited the Capuchin order to establish a branch in Munich and the order helped revive at least sixty Corpus Christi confraternities between 1600 and 1700.15 Through these confraternities, the Capuchins as well as the Jesuits popularized the Forty-Hour prayer vigil, which had begun Cult of Corpus Christi in Early Modern Bavaria: Pilgrimages, Processions, and Confraternities between 1550 and 1750, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Saint Andrews: 2014). 15  Pentzlin, The Cult of Corpus Christi in Early Modern Bavaria 167.

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in late sixteenth-century Italy and entailed constant prayer before a Host displayed within a monstrance.16 Indeed, Bavaria offered many opportunities to encounter the body and blood of Christ, whether at yearly Corpus Christi events, Forty-Hour prayer vigils, or at pilgrimage sites dedicated to miraculous Hosts or cult images of Christ. All of these paraliturgical rituals and images, along with weekly attendance at Mass, served to familiarize the duchy’s inhabitants with the doctrines of transubstantiation and of the sacrificial nature of the Mass. These rituals often relied heavily on visual media to communicate the importance of the Host. Receptacles for reserving and displaying the consecrated host, such as monstrances and tabernacles, became ever more elaborate, and cult images were modified or enhanced to reinforce Eucharistic doctrines. Nadja Pentzlin has recently highlighted one such example at Saint Salvator Pilgrimage Church in Ecksberg [Fig. 6.4]. The church’s cult image of Christ, made between 1511 and 1520, shows the Saviour raising his wounded left hand in blessing while the other points to his side wound. The stream of blood, made of red wire, that juts out from Christ’s chest, as well as the chalice that catches the blood, however, are not original. They were added during the Barockisierung of the church in the 1680s.17 The addition of these extra sculptural elements made the blood of Christ and its Eucharistic function unmistakable: it was not wine but, rather, the blood of the Savior that filled the chalice during Mass. Whole-body catacomb saints were a part of this larger and concerted campaign to make the sacrificial nature of the Mass and the real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist visually apparent to onlookers in Bavaria. Yet in this case, the impetus originated in local communities rather than from the ruling family in Munich. After living through 100 years of confessionalisation around the Eucharist, in the 1660s early modern Bavarians began to acquire catacomb saint relics from Rome and forge them into complete holy bodies that expressed these same theological principles in a creative, material manner. By building intact bodies of martyrs and placing them on altars, early modern Bavarians materialized a connection between the sacrificed body of Christ, the bodies of His martyrs, and altars that dated back to early Christianity. The remains of early Christian martyrs were often buried in the graveyards that surrounded Roman cities.18 In these cemeteries, buildings called martyria were erected over the graves of the martyrs to create a space for feast-day 16  Pentzlin, The Cult of Corpus Christi in Early Modern Bavaria 189. 17  Pentzlin, The Cult of Corpus Christi in Early Modern Bavaria 90–91. 18  Brown P., The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: 1981) 165.

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commemoration. Not long after, permanent altars were built above the graves of the martyrs for celebration of the Eucharist, making the first concrete connection between the altar and the bodies of people killed for their devotion to Christ.19 This connection was then transferred from the graveyard to the altars of churches in towns and cities across Europe, beginning with Bishop Ambrose of Milan (ca. 340–397 CE). In 386 CE, Bishop Ambrose of Milan carried out the earliest known ‘inventio’ or ‘discovery’ and translation of saintly bodies in the West.20 After being alerted in a dream to the whereabouts of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius, Ambrose did not build a church above the bodies. Rather, he excavated the remains and shortly thereafter translated them into his new basilica in Milan burying them under the high altar. Ambrose’s rationale for the deposition of the remains of the two martyrs underneath the main altar of his basilica explicitly linked Christ’s sacrifice during Mass and the sacrifice of the martyrs; this interpretation became extremely influential across the Christian West. In a letter to his sister, Ambrose explained: ‘Let these triumphant victims be brought to the place where Christ is the victim. But He upon the altar, Who suffered for all; they beneath the altar’.21 Even in the early centuries of the church, theologians had begun to identify as parallel the sacrifices inherent in the bodies of martyrs and the Eucharist; as a result, they were brought into physical proximity with one another at the altar. The close material connection between the relics of martyrs and the altar continued throughout the medieval period. The Sixth Council of Carthage (401 CE) had required that altars contain relics of martyrs in order to be properly consecrated, a rule that was only strictly enforced in the Latin West beginning at the start of the ninth century by Carolingian rulers.22 Crucially, if no martyrs’ relics were available, particles of consecrated Eucharistic wafers could be used in place of a martyr’s remains in these consecration rites.23 During the ninth century, the consecrated Host worthy of the utmost respect was considered ‘a physical relic of Christ’.24 Though this practice waned after the thirteenth century as veneration for the Eucharist increased, the interchangeability of the relics of martyrs and the Eucharistic wafer suggests that both were believed to 19  S noek G. J. C., Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction (Leiden: 1995) 10. 20  The term inventio refers to the discovery or re-discovery of relics or holy bodies. 21  Ambrose of Milan, “Letter XXI”, in Schaff P. – Wace H. (eds.), A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: Second Series, Vol. 10 (Edinburgh ­– Grand Rapids, MI: 1988) 438. 22  Geary P. J., Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: 1978) 18, 37. 23  Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist 175–202. 24  Geary, Furta Sacra 23.

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be the actual bodies of those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their faith; the martyrs were seen to have suffered persecution, torture and death in imitation of Christ. The physical but previously invisible connection between the bones of martyrs and the altar itself was radically changed in baroque Bavaria with the placement of catacomb saint bodies upon and within altars behind large sheets of glass. The bodies of martyrs who had sacrificed themselves in the name of Christ were now visible on the altar. No longer were the bones of martyrs simply buried in the ‘tomb’ of the altar table. Early modern Bavarians could now use saints’ bodies to illustrate and embody key doctrines surrounding the Eucharist that had become important confessional markers in the wake of the Reformation – the sacrificial nature of the Mass and the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. The full-body format of presenting catacomb saints highlighted the element of bodily sacrifice, a concept integral to the Tridentine definition of the Mass. During the liturgy, when the priest spoke the words of consecration/ institution – ‘hoc est enim corpus meum’ (this is my body) – and held the Host aloft for worshippers to see, the sacrificial body of Christ was not immediately apparent in the transubstantiated bread or the wine. Yet, on altars with fullbody catacomb saints, a sacrificial body was very much present, and this was a body, moreover, with an early Christian pedigree. The presence of the entire body of a saint on the altar allowed clergymen to compare the body of the martyr to that of Christ and to reinforce the idea that the altar was the site of Christ’s sacramental, if imperceptible, bodily sacrifice. Establishing the similarity between both the sacrificial bodies and the attributes of Christ and his martyrs was a critical part of this process. When delivering a sermon at Arnstorf for the translation of Saint Victorinus to the Schloßkapelle in 1691, Ferdinand Orban told his audience that the holy skeleton ‘of a most steadfast hero […] reminds everyone of the model of Jesus Christ’.25 Here it is clear how the presentation and presence of the saint’s whole body on the altar enabled Orban to draw a direct connection between the body of the martyr and the body of Christ for his listeners in a way that would have been very difficult with a small fragmentary relic, especially one buried in the altar sepulchrum.

25  ‘[…] welchen allen der Standhafftigiste Held sich immer eines formal Christi JESU erinneret’. Orban Ferdinand, Das Guldene Zweig: Außgelegt in der hochfeyerlichen Einholung deß edlen Römers vnd heiligen Blutzeugen Christi. Victorini = Ramus Aureus (Landshut, Simon Golowitz: 1696) 22.

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The creation of whole-body saints also allowed preachers to highlight the martyrs’ sacrificial deaths. The bodies of the martyrs themselves bore testament to the violent deaths they had suffered. During translation ceremonies and in printed devotional books the visibility of a saint’s wounds was highlighted. At Geisenfeld, Stephan Malgaritta wrote, the ‘stroke of the sword’ could still be seen on Saint Dionysius’s ‘vertebrae’ where he was beheaded.26 At Inderdsorf, Saint Julius’s ‘especially broken skull’ was crushed with ‘a club and cudgel’. The sacrifice and wounds of these martyrs were readily apparent due to their staging as full bodies. These skeletons provided tangible and immediate material proof, which differed fundamentally from an artistic depiction of a saint’s torments or a preacher’s sermon on the saint’s life and suffering. Their bodies and the blows they had borne for love of Christ gave physical testimony to the death they had suffered for their beliefs. Onlookers were further reminded of the martyrs’ sacrifices through their attributes. Like Saint Felix at Hahnbach [Fig. 6.1], catacomb saints often carried a vase full of their own blood or the instruments of their martyrdom. They also bore the traditional iconographical symbols of martyrdom: a laurel crown and palm leaves. Staging the remains as complete bodies enabled the wounds of martyrs as well as their identifying attributes to be highlighted, making their status as martyrs perceptible in a way that would have been much more difficult had they been presented as fragmentary relics. In addition to the physical and visible signs of sacrifice written on the very bodies of the Roman martyrs themselves, the theme of sacrifice dominated translation sermons as preachers highlighted the saints’ desire to die for their beliefs, just as Christ had before them. At Raitenhaslach, Hyacinth Frants described how during the last moments of torture of saints Ausanius, Fortunata and Concordia, ‘they observed the blood-dripping Jesus on the Cross and desired nothing more than to follow in his holy footsteps’.27 Similarly, at Erding, .

26  ‘Dessen ist auch in sein h. Halßgrad und Gebein der Hib und Streich dato augenscheinlich zu spüren / daß demnach nur gar zu glaubwürdig erscheinet; er seye enthaubt worden’. Malgaritta Stephan, Jahrs- und kurtze Beschreibung etwelcher Denkwürdig- wundersamer Werk […] bey der 200 jährg. wundersamber Bildnuß S. Annae in Geisenfeld (Ingolstadt, Johann Ostermayr: 1674). This passage appears on the sixth page of the “Kurz und gründlich bestellter Bericht Uber den zu Rom erhebten und in hiesig: weit beriembten hochLöbl: Gotts=Hauß / und Jungkfraw Kloster deß ChurFürstl: Marckts Geisenfeldt den 30. Julij im 1673. Jahr beygesetzt / und ruehenden gantzen Heiligen Leib S. DIONYSII M”. 27  ‘Sie betrachteten den Blut-treiffenden Jesum an dem Creutz / und verlangten mehr nicht / als in seine heilige Fußstapffen einzutretten’. Weinberger Benedikt, Glorwürdiges Sechstes Jubel-Jahr, Oder Sechs-hundert-Jähriger Welt-Gang, Deß Heiligen und befreyten Cistercienser Ordens celebriert In dem Hochlöbl. Gotts-Hauß deß gemelten Ordens

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the preacher wrote dialogue for Saint Placidus, which allowed the saint to express his motivations for self-sacrifice. The martyr lamented: ‘Oh! That I only have one life and not a thousand! Oh, that I have so little blood in my veins and not an entire ocean? Oh, that I can only suffer one death and not a thousand before Christ!’28 Preachers also brought attention to these martyrs’ sacrifices by describing, often in graphic detail, the tortures their new patron saints had endured. Though little if anything was usually known about the lives of the newly arrived Roman catacomb saints, communities and clerics created hagiographies that highlighted their excruciating torments at the hands of pagan rulers, which were relayed to attendees at translation festivals. In the village of Sandizell, on the occasion of Saints Clemens’ and Maximus’s translation festivities, Maximilian Emanuel Kurz dramatically set the scene for his audience. ‘Today’, he began, ‘the ancient, world-conquering city of Rome will be the arena where [the audience] would pitch a blood-frothing stage’.29 He continued, theatrically to ‘pull back the curtain, open the theater, and proceed to the beginning. Watch!’ He then invited the audience metaphorically to enter the city with him. When the city gates were finally opened, he cried: Oh horrible sights! O blood-frothing theater! Oh Rome! Alas! Close your blood-boiling theater! Stop these horrible scenes! It’s not wild animals,

Raiten-Haßlach; So im Jahr 1698. den 17. Augusti, mit einer herrlichen Procession und Translation der Heiligen Römischen Martyrer und Blut-Zeugen Christi Ausanii, Concordiae und Fortunatae, Angefangen, und durch eine solemne Octav von einer Hoch- und WolEhrwürdigen Geistlichkeit aus allen benachbarten Ordens-Ständen bey einer Volckreichen Versamblung, mit außerlesenen Lob- und Ehren-Predigen herrlichist geziehret, und den 24. Augusti glücklich beschlossen (Salzburg, Johann Baptist Mayr: 1699) 34. 28  ‘Ach! Daß ich nur … ein Leben, und nicht tausend habe? ach, daß ich nur so wenig Blut in meinen Aderen und nicht ein gantzes Meer habe? ach! Daß ich nur einen einigen Tod, und nicht tausend vor Christo leyden kan?’ Wasserburg Jordan, Fluenta Jordanis: Das ist: Lob- und Ehr- Geist- und Lehrreich-fliessende Extraordinari-Concept, Oder: Ausser der Ordinari-Cantzel in verschidenen Gottes-Häuseren bey sonderbahren Festivitäten und Zuhöreren vernommene Predigen (Landshut, Remigius Schmidt: 1742) 401. 29  ‘Die alt Welt-sigende Stadt Rom solle heut seyn der Schau-Platz, auf welchem sie eine Blut=schaumende Bühne aufgeschalgen’. Kurz Maximilian Emanuel, Blutschaumendes Der Welt zur Nachfolge, dem Himmel zur Belohnung abgespieltes Spectacul, Das ist: Lobund Ehren-Predig, Von denen zwey heiligen Blut-Zeugen Christi Maximo und Clementi Da […] Deren zwey heiligen Leiber von […] Herrn Prälaten von Unterstorf […] in das Löbl. PfarrGottshauß zu Sandizell daselbst hochfeyerlich übersetzt wurden den 25. September 1768 (Augsburg, Johann Huggele: 1768) 9.

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but rather Christians among the wild animals who are bleeding and must fight to the death.30 With this dramatic rhetoric, Kurz drew the audiences directly into the brutal persecution of Roman Christians, recounting how Sandizell’s martyrs Maximus and Clemens, like Jesus, had made the ultimate sacrifice for their faith. The parallels between Christ’s body and those of the martyrs’ resting on altars across the duchy were further amplified by adopting titles and iconographical tropes typically used to refer to Christ to describe the martyrs. In translation sermons, the martyrs were repeatedly referred to as ‘innocent lambs’ being led to slaughter or ‘sacrifices’ (Opfer, Schlacht-Opfer). The epithet ‘lamb of God’ refers to Christ and the sacrificial death he endured for the salvation of mankind. It originated in the Gospel of John and became a common iconographical motif to represent Christ and his sacrifice after the fourth century.31 At the translation for Saint Munditia in 1675 to the parish church of Saint Peter Munich, officials had decorated the nave of the church with sixteen emblems, all of which alluded to certain aspects of Munditia’s character and martyrdom. One emblem bore an image of a lamb being led to slaughter. The explanation appended beneath the lamb explained its significance: ‘God blesses you more, Lady martyr / because you were led, like a lamb, completely willing and tame to your death’.32 Munditia’s willingness to sacrifice herself like a patient and gentle lamb is a direct allusion to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. In another case, at the Cistercian monastery at Raitenhaslach, Adam Plaichshirn compared the three martyrs to pelicans, ‘because they had spilled their blood for love of God and true belief like the pelican that feeds its young from its own breast’.33 During the medieval period, the pelican became a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice and the Eucharist. It was believed that the mother pelican in times of scarcity would feed her young by wounding her own breast and feeding the chicks with her own flesh and blood.34 In both these cases, common epithets 30  ‘Ich ziehe dann den Vorhang; eröfne das Theater, und schreitte zu dem Anfang. Spectate!’ Kurz, Blutschaumendes Der Welt zur Nachfolge 14. 31  New Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 vols. (Detroit – Washington, D.C.: 2003) VIII 302. 32  ‘Dich Martyrin frew / mehr Gott benedey / Daß du als ein Lamb gantz willig und zamb / Wirst gführet zum Todt’. Prototypon Munditiae emblematico-morali penicillo delineatum in S. et glor. martyre Munditia (Munich, Johann Jäcklin: 1677) 9. 33  ‘[…] indem sie ihr Blut auß Liebe gegen Gott / und dem wahren Glauben vergossen / als wie der Pelican auß Liebe gegen seinen Jungen’. Weinberger, Glorwürdiges Sechstes JubelJahr 59–60. 34  Kirschenbaum E. – Braunfels W. (eds.), Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, 8 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: 1968) III 390–392; and New Catholic Encyclopedia XI 63–64.

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for Christ that highlighted his self-sacrifice were borrowed and applied to the bodies of catacomb saints. The use of iconographical symbols traditionally reserved for Christ were a final method used by early modern Bavarians to convey the similarities between the martyred saints and Christ. The monks at Aldersbach designed a tableau vivant for a portable stage carried during the translation procession for Saint Valerius in 1746. In the scene, the allegorical character of the Church offers the catacomb saint a golden crown of thorns rather than the traditional martyrs’ crown made of laurels.35 Similar imagery was used on a flag carried at the translation of Saint Beninus at Steingaden. The martyr was shown wearing a crown of thorns and carrying a chalice in his hand, tying him iconographically to Christ’s Passion and sacrifice as well as to the consecrated wine of the Eucharist.36 At both Aldersbach and Steingaden, catacomb saints were given iconographic symbols typically used only for depictions of Christ himself. The use of such exclusive iconographical symbols and titles demonstrates the degree to which the catacomb saints had assumed Christ-like qualities and become associated with his sacrifice. Though Christ’s sacrifice was not immediately visible in the form of the consecrated host, the bodies and blood of these early Christian martyrs – so much like Christ that they had begun to take on his attributes and epithets – ably served to remind the worshipper of his sacrifice. In addition to the sacrifice of the Mass, the bodies of catacomb saints, along with the blood they carried, visualized another critical piece of post-Tridentine doctrine: the two elements of the transubstantiated Eucharist. According to the decrees of the Council, the substance of the Eucharistic wafer and wine changed into Christ’s actual body and blood at the moment of consecration, however, their external forms remained the same. Catacomb saints, by contrast presented the viewer directly with a sacrificial body and a blood on the same altar where the Mass occurred; this effectively made an abstract theological concept visually concrete by providing a physical manifestation of the substances present, but not perceptible, in the Eucharist. Furthermore, the artistic and architectural housing of the body and blood of Bavarian catacomb saints mimicked the tabernacles and chalices used to house the Eucharistic 35  Mannstorff Michael von, Epitome Chronicorum Alderspacensium. Oder Kurtzer Auszug Aus denen Geschichts-Büchern Des nunmehro 600. Jahr beständig unter dem Heil und befreyten Cisterzer-Orden stehenden Closters Alderspach (Stadt-am Hof nächst Regensburg, Johann Gastl: 1746) 56. 36  Bonenmayr Augustinus, S. Beninus Martyrer, So zu Steingaden in der Regulirten Premonstratenser Chorherren Gottshauß mit Triumphirlicher Solennitet ist eingebracht worden: Den 10. August-Monats Im Jahr 1664 (Munich, Straub: 1664) 32.

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figure 6.5 Blood ampule of Saint Victor with sunburst (1754). Kalvarienbergkirche, Bad Tölz Image © Noria Litaker

sacraments, reinforcing the connection between the catacomb saints’ body and blood and the two elements of the Eucharist. In most cases, catacomb saint shrines in the duchy of Bavaria included vessels containing the blood purportedly spilled during the martyrs’ passion.37 In many cases, the martyr held the vessel in one hand, though the blood ampule could also be hung from the top of the shrine or affixed to its rear wall. These vessels’ shapes and framing show marked similarities to monstrances and chalices used to hold the consecrated Host and wine respectively. As noted previously, in the period after the Reformation, display of the consecrated host for adoration became a hallmark of post-Tridentine devotion to the Eucharist. This led to the development of increasingly elaborate monstrances for the display of the Host. One of the most popular monstrance forms during this period

37  Later it was discovered that the substance in the glass was not blood, but perfume; see Herklotz I., “Antonio Bosio und Carlo Bascapè: Reliquiensuche und Katakombenforschung im 17. Jahrhundert”, in Bruer S. – Rößler D. (eds.), Festschrift für Max Kunze: der Blick auf die antike Kunst von der Renaissance bis heute (Ruhpolding – Mainz: 2011) 93.

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figure 6.6 Johann Michael Söckler, Devotional Image of Saint Honoratius, Vilsbiburg (18th c.). Engraving, 15 cm × 11.5 cm Image © Museum Dingolfing, Inv. Nr. 2566

was the sunburst monstrance in which the Host was displayed within a glass disc surrounded by gilded or silvered rays of light.38 Similar containers were used to present the blood of catacomb saints at the pilgrimage church of Heilig Kreuz Bad Tölz [Fig. 6.5]. The blood of Saint Victor, who was transferred to the church in 1754, is affixed to the back wall of the shrine in a glass cylinder. The cylinder is surrounded by gilded sunbeams and sits on a small pedestal base. A very similar presentation is also visible in an Andachtsbild engraving of the shrine of Saint Honoratius in the parish church at Vilsbiburg [Figs. 6.6 & 6.7]. The saint’s blood ampule is placed in a glass container surrounded by sunbursts. Modeling the containers for catacomb saints’ blood on those used to hold the Eucharistic wafer underscored the connection between the body of Christ and that of the Roman martyrs. This visual citation was even more explicit when containers inspired by the Eucharistic chalice were also used to hold the blood ampules arriving from 38  Braun J., Die Reliquiare des christlichen Kultes und ihre Entwicklung (Freiburg im Breisgau: 1971) 490.

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figure 6.7 Johann Michael Söckler, blood vase detail from Devotional Image of Saint Honoratius, Vilsbiburg (18th c.). Engraving, 4 cm × 4.5 cm Image © Museum Dingolfing, Inv. Nr. 2566

Rome with the catacomb saints. In 1591, Jakob Müller, vicar of the diocese of Regensburg, published a book entitled Kirchen-Geschmuck, which included a description and illustration of what model Eucharistic chalices should look like in his Bavarian diocese.39 Müller’s book hewed closely to the influential post-Tridentine handbook on church furnishings written by Charles Borromeo, often considered the model of a Catholic bishop in the wake of the Council of Trent. Many containers created to hold the blood of catacomb saints resembled the prototypes in Müller’s guide, with a cup on top and a small knob in the stem and pedestal base [Fig. 6.8]. In Erbendorf, Saint Faustinus holds a blood vase which looks very much like Müller’s model [Fig. 6.9]. Several others from Kollbach and Saint Peter’s in Munich are quite similar in form, though made of glass for maximum visibility [Fig. 6.10 & 6.11]. Saint Desiderius’s 39  Müller Jakob, Kirchen-Geschmuck Das ist: Kurtzer Begriff der fürnembsten Dingen, damit ein jede recht und wol zugerichte Kirchen, geziert vnd auffgebutzt seyn solle Allen Prelaten vnd Pfarrherren durch das ganze Bistumb Regenspurg sehr notwendig (Munich, Adam Berg: 1591) 123–125.

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figure 6.8 “Model Chalices”, engraved illustration to Jakob Müller, Kirchen-Geschmuck […] (Munich, Adam Berg: 1591) 125. Engraving, 13 cm × 12 cm Image © Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

chalice has also helpfully been painted red on the inside to reinforce the idea that it contains the saint’s blood. These containers, however, do not appear antique. This is because if a saint did not arrive in Rome with a blood ampule, one was often created to highlight visually his or her death as a martyr and to echo the elements of the Eucharist. The form of the sunburst monstrance and the chalice could also be combined to hold a saint’s blood. An engraving from a chronicle of the Pütrich cloister in Munich shows such hybrid vessels held by Saint Geminus [Fig. 6.12]. At first glance, the saint holds a chalice with what appears to be a Eucharistic wafer encircled by sunbeams floating above it, a common early modern motif for depicting the two elements of the Eucharist.40 Upon closer inspection, however, the word ‘sanguis’ (blood) becomes legible on the disc above, identifying the chalice’s contents as the blood of the saint. The close resemblance between Geminus’s reliquary vase and the well-known iconography of the 40  Hamm J., Barocke Altartabernakel in Süddeutschland (Petersberg: 2010) 284–286.

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figure 6.9 Blood vase of Saint Faustinus (1751). Lorettokapelle, Erbendorf Image © Noria Litaker

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Blood vase of Saint Desiderius (1770). Pfarrkirche Sankt Emmeram, Kollbach Image © Uta Ludwig

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Blood vase of Saint Munditia (1675). Old Saint Peter’s Church, Munich Image © Uta Ludwig

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Michael Wening, “Saint Geminus”, engraved illustration to Bittrich Voll Deß Himmlischen Manna […] (Munich, Johann Lucas Straub: 1721) 188. Detail, central part of engraving, 10 cm × 5 cm Image © St. Bonaventure Friedsam Memorial Library, Special Collections

Eucharistic chalice and wafer indicates the degree to which early modern beholders associated the blood of Roman martyrs with that of Christ. These repeated visual allusions to containers that generally housed the consecrated Host and wine were echoed in sermons given at translation ceremonies. Preachers repeatedly drew their audiences’ attention to the presence of the martyrs’ blood and its similarity to that of Christ, present though not readily perceptible in the consecrated Eucharistic elements. At Steingaden, Franciscus Josephus Münchner went so far as to tell his listeners that when they faced the common travails of life – crop failure, drought, hunger – they should take the ‘hard morsel and dunk it in the blood-dripping wounds of your savior Jesus Christ and in the blood of the martyr Beninus displayed here and spilled in the name of Christ’.41 Here, the implication is that the blood of Christ and his martyrs functions similarly as a source of comfort and grace. The connection between the body of Christ and the bodies of catacomb saints was also reinforced by the way in which they were housed and described by contemporary observers. Cistercian Bertrandus Leffelleuthner, in a translation sermon at Raitenhaslach in 1698, stated that the cloister would become ‘a more comfortable Mount Tabor for those three holy martyrs, where, I understand that three most beautiful tabernacles and luxurious altars were built

41  ‘Duncke dise harte / rauhe Bißl in die Blut-tröffende heilige Wunden deines Erlösers Christi JESU unnd in das hier vorgestellte / umb Christi Namen willen / vergossene Blut deß H. Martyrers Benini’. Bonenmayr, S. Beninus Martyrer 17.

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and raised for them’.42 The use of the word tabernacle – an ‘ornamented receptacle for liturgical vessels containing consecrated bread reserved for the Communion of the sick, for communion services, and for adoration’ – to describe the shrines in which the catacomb saints were housed, is especially significant in the post-Tridentine context.43 Leffelleuthner used the same term to describe the containers that hold the saints’ bodies and the vessel used to store the consecrated Eucharist, underlining the connection between the body of the saint and the body of Christ in the Host. Before the sixteenth century, tabernacles were separate from the main altar. This changed after Trent as the defense of the Eucharist and transubstantiation took center stage in Catholic regions. Local ordinances began to require the reservation of the consecrated host on the main altar in tabernacles visible from all parts of the church, which made the Host constantly available for veneration. In the section of Müller’s handbook on tabernacles, he states that in his diocese these containers should be decorated with ‘beautiful etched or painted holy images that place the bitter pain and death of our Lord Jesus Christ or the most holy sacramental mystery before the eyes’.44 In some cases, the bodies of catacomb saints were used to accomplish the task rather than images, as artists sometimes appropriated the form of the altar tabernacle to house the bodies of catacomb saints. In doing so, they made the connection among the saint’s body, the Eucharist, and the altar even more concrete than Leffelleuthner had in his sermon at Raitenhaslach. At Gars am Inn, sculptor Christian Jorhan created an altar-tabernacle to house relics of Saint Felix in 1752 [Fig. 6.13]. The gilded shrine, which still sits upon the Felix altar, is carved in the shape of an elaborate façade. At the bottom of the shrine is a small door incised with an image of the Eucharist above a chalice used for the reservation of the Host. Directly above the door, behind a large pane of glass, sits the decorated body of Saint Felix who gazes out at the viewer while holding a martyr’s palm in one hand. Here, Felix has replaced the monstrance or an image of Christ that would have usually appeared in the same space, something that becomes clear when this tabernacle-altar is compared to similar contemporary tabernacles from the high altars at the cloisters at Rott am Inn and Weyarn [Fig. 6.14]. In the case of Felix’s tabernacle-altar, the sacred 42  ‘Ist ja diß ein bequemmer Berg Thabor, denen Heiligen drey Martyren / allwo ihnen drey schönste Tabernackel / verstehe kostbare Altär seynd erbaut und aufgerichtet worden’. Weinberger, Glorwürdiges Sechstes Jubel-Jahr 102. 43  New Catholic Encyclopedia 13 726. 44  ‘[…] schönen außgegrabnen oder jedoch gemahlten heiligen Bildern / welche das bitter Leiden und Sterben Jesu Christi unsers Herrn / odern auch dises so hochheiligen Sacrament Geheimnussen für Augen stellen’. Müller, Kirchen-Geschmuck 17.

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Christian Jorhan, Altar-Tabernacle with Saint Felix (1752). Felixkapelle, Kloster Gars Image © Noria Litaker

mystery of the Eucharist and its miraculous transubstantiation are ‘placed before the eyes’ and made manifest in the body of a martyred catacomb saint. The body itself has become the visual embodiment of and proxy for Christ’s sacrificial body contained under the species of the bread and wine. A similar placement of a catacomb saint’s body in the position often occupied by a Eucharistic Host occurred on altars dedicated to the Holy Cross. At the summit of these altars, a crucified Christ hangs on a large cross, crowned with thorns and bleeding from his wounds. At the base of the cross stands Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows (Schmerzensmutter, Mater Dolorosa), with a

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Ignaz Günther, Altar-tabernacle of Saints Marinus and Anianus (1764–1775). Kloster Rott, Rott am Inn Image © Bernd Klemmer

sword protruding from her chest, a reference to her suffering with Christ.45 Underneath the sculptures of Mary, these altars typically feature a niche in which the Host or a cult image of Christ was displayed. One such altar takes pride of place at the pilgrimage church of Heiligenstatt in Tußling outside Altötting [Fig. 6.15], the site of a late medieval Host miracle.46 Like the altar in Heiligenstatt, the Holy Cross altars at the cloister of Oberalteich and the parish church of Saint Laurentius in Königsdorf both present vertical axes of sacrifice [Fig. 6.16 & 6.17]. These altarpieces are almost 45  K  irschenbaum E. – Braunfels W. (eds.), Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie IV 86–87. The iconography of the Mater Dolorosa is based on a Bible verse from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 2:35). When Mary and Joseph present Jesus in the Temple, the seer Simeon tells Mary: ‘This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too’. The reference to the sword piercing Mary’s soul alludes to her son’s future Crucifixion and Mary’s empathetic suffering with him. 46  Pentzlin, The Cult of Corpus Christi in Early Modern Bavaria 59.

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Holy Cross of Heiligenstatt (18th c.). Engraving, 6.5 × 10.5 cm Image © Stadtarchiv München, (HVGS-A-10-04)

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Holy Cross Altar with Saint Pius in the Taufkapelle (1740). Kloster Oberalteich, Oberalteich Image © Noria Litaker

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figure 6.17 Holy Cross Altar with Saint Mauritius (1728). Pfarrkirche Sankt Laurentius, Königsdorf Image © Noria Litaker

identical to those discussed above except for one major difference: the tabernacle for the consecrated Host has been replaced by the body of a catacomb saint. The Cross on these altars physically connects the crucified body of Christ and that of the martyr, emphasizing visually the connection between their sacrificial deaths, a link that, as we have seen, Plaichshirn emphasized at the Raitenhaslach translation ceremony for the martyrs Ausanius, Fortunata, and Concordia. He told the assembled crowd that the martyrs died ‘at the base of the Cross, suffering and finally ending their lives in martyrdom with the spilling of their precious blood’.47 Kurz at Sandizell also highlighted the connection of Saints Maximus and Clemens to the Cross: 47  ‘[…] an dem Stammen deß Cretuzes gestorben ist / gelitten haben / und endlich ihr Leben in der Marter / mit Vergiessung ihres kostbaren Bluts’. Weinberger, Glorwürdiges Sechstes Jubel-Jahr 67.

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Maximus and Clemens through heavenly advice recognized that eternal life grew from none other than the tree of the cross, and Jesus hangs on this cross. Therefore, they must also hang as branches from this tree.48 The seeming interchangeability of the two ‘bodies’ in these Holy Cross altars as well as their housing in tabernacle-altars indicate that early modern Bavarians connected the sacrificial body of a martyr with the body and blood of Christ contained in the Host. When visitors entered the church, they could sit and contemplate the body of a martyr just as they would if they had come to observe a Forty-Hour devotion. The whole-body presentation of a catacomb saint within tabernacle-like altars evoked the body and blood contained in the host in a concrete manner. Rather than a small piece of bread or a single small bone, Christ’s sacrifice was embodied in the life-like skeleton of a Roman martyr. The creation and presentation of whole-body Roman catacomb saints such as Maximus and Clemens atop altars across the duchy of Bavaria was the visual culmination of a relationship between the Eucharist and the bodies of martyrs that stretched back to the earliest days of the church. With the church under fire from Protestants who challenged the nature of the Mass and the presence of Christ in the sacrament, Catholic apologists were forced to defend and promote their doctrine, using a wide variety of media. Beginning in the 1660s, local communities across early modern Bavaria made the theological concepts of transubstantiation and sacrifice of the Mass concrete in a groundbreaking manner: by creating whole-body catacomb saints. These bodies, a new form of baroque material culture, made manifest the two elements present in the Eucharist at the moment of transubstantiation. Translation sermons along with the artistic framing of the bodies and blood ampules further reinforced the connection between the sacrifice of the catacomb saint and that of Christ. By choosing to present whole bodies rather than smaller fragments in this manner, early modern Bavarians attempted to body forth the sacred mystery of the Eucharist.

48  ‘Maximus und Clemens haben von sich selbst schon durch himmlische Einrathung erkannt, daß das ewige Leben auf keinem andern, als auf dem Kreuz=Baum gewachsen, und Jesus hanget an diesem Kreuz=Baum: so müßten auch die Zweig von diesem Baum abhangen’. Kurz, Blutschaumendes Der Welt zur Nachfolge, 23–24.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources



Secondary Sources

Bonenmayr Augustinus, S. Beninus Martyrer, So zu Steingaden in der Regulirten Premonstratenser Chorherren Gottshauß mit Triumphirlicher Solennitet ist eingebracht worden: Den 10. August–Monats Im Jahr 1664 (Munich, Straub: 1664). Kurz Maximilian Emanuel, Blutschaumendes Der Welt zur Nachfolge, dem Himmel zur Belohnung abgespieltes Spectacul, Das ist: Lob- und Ehren-Predig, Von denen zwey heiligen Blut-Zeugen Christi Maximo und Clementi Da […] Deren zwey heiligen Leiber von […] Herrn Prälaten von Unterstorf […]. in das Löbl. Pfarr-Gottshauß zu Sandizell daselbst hochfeyerlich übersetzt wurden den 25. September 1768 (Augsburg, Johann Huggele: 1768). Müller Jakob, Kirchen-Geschmuck Das ist: Kurtzer Begriff der fürnembsten Dingen, damit ein jede recht und wol zugerichte Kirchen, geziert vnd auffgebutzt seyn solle Allen Prelaten vnd Pfarrherren durch das ganze Bistumb Regenspurg sehr notwendig (Munich, Adam Berg: 1591). Orban Ferdinand, Das Guldene Zweig: Außgelegt in der hochfeyerlichen Einholung deß edlen Römers vnd heiligen Blutzeugen Christi. Victorini = Ramus Aureus (Landshut, Simon Golowitz: 1696). Weinberger Benedikt, Glorwürdiges Sechstes Jubel-Jahr, Oder Sechs-hundert-Jähriger Welt-Gang, Deß Heiligen und befreyten Cistercienser Ordens celebriert In dem Hochlöbl. Gotts-Hauß deß gemelten Ordens Raiten-Haßlach; So im Jahr 1698. den 17. Augusti, mit einer herrlichen Procession und Translation der Heiligen Römischen Martyrer und Blut-Zeugen Christi Ausanii, Concordiae und Fortunatae, Angefangen, und durch eine solemne Octav von einer Hoch- und Wol-Ehrwürdigen Geistlichkeit aus allen benachbarten Ordens-Ständen bey einer Volckreichen Versamblung, mit außerlesenen Lob- und Ehren-Predigen herrlichist geziehret, und den 24. Augusti glücklich beschlossen (Salzburg, Johann Baptist Mayr: 1699).

Angenendt A., Heilige und Reliquien. Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom frühen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: 1997). Brown P., The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: 1981). Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. N. P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London: 1990). Geary P. J., Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: 1978). Snoek G. J. C., Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction. (Leiden: 1995).

chapter 7

Staging Sacramental Consolation in Vienna Robert L. Kendrick There were a variety of sounds around the seventeenth-century Catholic Eucharist, not only at the Elevation of the Mass but also in its social presence during Holy Week, other expositions, and Corpus Christi. Most audible were the church bells at the Consecration, a mark of Catholic belief according to the standard treatise of Angelo Rocca, De campanis compendium (Rome, 1612).1 Rocca dated the practice back to the reign of Gregory IX in 1238. Since his discussion focused on the external bells, normally in a tower, he thus addressed the extramural sound of the Eucharist as a kind of sonic projection of the sacrament. The use of the smaller altar bells at the Sanctus or at the Elevation evidently varied locally, even after Trent, and there is no mention of them in Pius V’s standardizing Roman Missal of 1570. Beyond bells, the occasions for complex music included two sections from the Mass Ordinary, often heard in polyphony on major feast-days, both with reference to the Consecration and distribution of the Host: the Benedictus of the Sanctus if coincident with the Elevation, and the Agnus Dei, normally quite short, before Communion. Indeed, one anonymous two-voice setting of the Benedictus in the music archive of the Roman basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, a piece from the later Seicento, explicitly states ‘per l’Elevazione’.2 Nonetheless, this moment of the Elevation was also marked by other music vocal and instrumental. In much of Catholic Europe, the former could be a motet, i.e. a short (increasingly longer) vocal piece on a Latin text often concentrating on Christ’s sweetness. Over the century, the growing personalization of the motet texts, focusing on Christ’s dulcedo and individual sensibility thereto, marked their function as Eucharistic preparation for the individual communicant, or, on the many occasions that Communion was not taken by a congregation, a simple reminder of the inherent sweetness of Jesus’ Body.

1  Rocca, ‘De Campanis in sacrificio Missae pulsandis’, 115–17. 2  This is listed in Simi Bonini, E., Catalogo del fondo musicale di Santa Maria in Trastevere (Rome, 2000), with the call no. 648,7.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_008

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Instrumental music included keyboard toccatas, also normally marked for the Elevation, as well as ensemble pieces.3 How the sometimes surprising switches in pitch center or timbral texture present in these instrumental works might relate to Transubstantiation, or to the affective changes in congregants caused by the Consecration is outside of the scope of this paper. Beyond the Mass, the suitability of instrumental music for encouraging Eucharistic sentiment at Forty Hours’ functions was remarked as late as the mid-eighteenthcentury Bolognese musical polymath Giambattista Martini (1706–84), looking back on his Emilian predecessors of the previous century. Martini recalled that the ensemble pieces of such late Seicento composers as Tommaso Antonio Vitali were evidently played effectively – and tearfully – in producing congregational devotion to the sacrament.4 For all that there has been a recent surge in scholarly literature on the early modern Eucharist, a good deal of the work has focused on the corporeal and confessional aspects of the sixteenth-century debates.5 Eucharistic theology and practice in the Seicento, the framework for the pieces discussed in this essay, is less well-known. But one ongoing trope in the scholarly literature is that of the sacrament’s theatricality, something evident not only in Europe, but in colonial situations as well. Certainly the panoply of visual effects around various kinds of Expositions (including the Forty Hours’ devotion) would seem to reinforce that idea that in early modern Europe, the Eucharist moved from memoria to theatrum sacrum. The polyphonic settings of the little-known Eucharistic litanies – nominally banned from public recitation or musical performance by Clement VIII back in 1601 – embody something of this kind of spectacle.6 They were associated, 3  The most famed of these are the Elevation toccatas by Girolamo Frescobaldi (e.g. ‘Toccata quinta per l’Elevazione’ from Book II of the Toccatas), and those of his student J. J. Froberger. 4  Martini’s remarks are in his ‘Scrittori di musica’, Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, H. 63, cited by Schnoebelen A., ‘The Concerted Mass at San Petronio in Bologna, ca. 1660–1730’, Ph. D. diss. Univ. of Illinois, 1966, 34; also cited by Barnett, G., Bolognese Instrumental Music, 1660–1710: Spiritual Comfort, Courtly Delight, and Commercial Triumph (Aldershot, 2008), 210. 5  A good deal of the English-language scholarship concentrates on poetry and polemics in the British Isles; for one social history see Van Amberg, J.: A Real Presence: Religious and Social Dynamics of the Eucharistic Conflicts in Early Modern Augsburg, 1520–1530 (Leiden, 2012). 6  The litany texts seem to have been associated both with Forty Hours’ expositions as well as with Corpus Christi festivities in Catholic central Europe and in Iberia. Despite the Roman injunctions, such texts were ‘performed’ across a good deal of the continent and the Americas. Already in the seventeenth century, these Litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento were set to complex music in Catholic Austria and Germany, even before the better-known, later examples such as Mozart’s K. 125 and K. 243 written in the 1770s for Salzburg Cathedral.

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not with the Mass, but with other kinds of Eucharistic veneration. In 1649, the music copyist of the Viennese Habsburg court, Georg Moser, had dedicated Eucharistic pieces, including a six-voice setting of the sacramental Litany, to Emperor Ferdinand III on his birthday that year.7 Despite Seicento theatricality, the repertory of sacred musical theater – largely the genre known as the oratorio in Italy and Italophile Catholic regions – strikingly lacks sacramental thematics. This genre, in Latin or Italian, often involved some kind of narrator (‘Testo’) of a Biblical or sanctoral story, along with solo characters historical or allegorical, vocal choruses, and an instrumental ensemble that could range from minimal accompaniment to large princely orchestras (such as those for cardinals’ or ducal households in the later Seicento). Although its topics would come to encompass far more than the Scriptural or sanctoral historiae as which the genre began in Rome around 1635, the dramatic representation of Eucharistic mysteries is likely confined to two pieces for the Jesuits of Palermo in the later Seicento.8 On occasion, Biblical-themed oratorios were performed around Forty Hours’ rituals, but their narratives did not take up Gospel accounts of the sacrament in direct ways. On a European scale, this is also striking, given the importance, both semiotic and thematic, of the Eucharist and of music in the vast repertory of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s (and others’) autos sacramentales. It certainly makes the Italo-Austrian examples discussed presently seem unusual. During Holy Week between 1660 and 1711, coincident with the reigns of the Habsburg Emperors Leopold I and Joseph I, the Viennese court annually staged one or two oratorio-like pieces to be performed in the royal chapels, in front of a decorated and newly constructed Tomb of Christ. Each work lasted roughly an hour, on Holy Thursday and on Good Friday afternoons or evenings.9 The former Day witnessed a piece in the dowager Empress’s (Eleonora Gonzaga), chapel, while the Friday works took place in Leopold’s Hofburgkapelle. Still, the whole royal family was normally present for both pieces. The texts, like almost all the court music theater sacred or secular, were largely in Italian, and focused on differing approaches to mourning the Buried Christ, while their musical style was roughly ‘modern’ as found in 7  Vienna, Austrian National Library, Musiksammlung, Mus. Hs. 19424; the composer is unknown. 8  Eucharistica divini solis statio obediente Deo voci hominis solari statione contra Gabaon expressa (Palermo: O. Anglese, 1702; rpt. 1705); L’eucharistiche lautezze compartite al peccatore in persona del prodigo penitente. Dialogo posto in musica dal signor D. Antonio Benitti (Palermo: Pietro dell’Isola, 1682). 9  The overall repertory is addressed in Kendrick, R. L. Fruits of the Cross: Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna (Berkeley, 2019).

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northern Italy around 1660. The presence of the constructed Tomb in the chapels’ sanctuaries – a phenomenon discussed recently by Amy Powell in Bavarian contexts – gave the musical genre its modern name, ‘sepolcro’/pl. ‘sepolcri’, and indeed many of the texts are set in meditative time after the Entombment of Christ, whether the music was originally performed on Holy Thursday or on Good Friday.10 The liturgical link between Sacrament and Tomb was, of course, the Reposition of the Host on the altar of repose during the Holy Thursday rites, in which it was ‘entombed’ until the Easter Vigil. The thematics of this Viennese repertory of sepolcri encompass a broad range of issues, but they foreground the events of the Passion, the Entombment, the mechanisms of redemption, and personal penance. From about 1670 onwards, each performance normally featured a single stage set above and in addition to the annual constructed Tomb, one whose design was not necessarily related to the immediate topic of the piece, but which sometimes included an image of the Eucharist (‘il Santissimo’). Unlike the surviving Tomb decorations in parish churches across of Catholic Germany and Austria as studied by Ursula Brosette, these sets – like the texts and music themselves – were created anew each year by the court stage designer Ludovico Burnacini, partially on the basis of emblems or printed Biblical illustration books in the Imperial collections, but probably in general conformity to their description printed at the opening of the libretti. By way of comparison, the work of Ciğden Özel has recently drawn attention to Burnacini’s various wash drawings for such sets, a few for sepolcri performances but more for Forty Hours, and she has convincingly shown the origin of some disegni in prints available in the Imperial collections, such as the 1679 Icones Biblicae of Melchior Kügel, an important illustrator with ties to the Habsburg court.11 From 1670 onwards to 1697, most of the texts of the genre were written by the court poet Nicolo Minato, and the music composed by Leopold’s Italian chapelmasters/opera composers, for our purposes Giovanni Felice Sances (in the job c. 1669-c. 1677) or Antonio Draghi (first working for Eleonora Gonzaga, 1669–1680, and then for Leopold 1681–1700). Passages in two of the roughly 70 texts in this repertory thematize the Eucharist, and thus the destination of both these works, discussed presently, for Good Friday immediately raised the 10  Powell, A., ‘A Machine for Souls: Allegory before and after Trent’, in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. M. B. Hall/T. E. Cooper, (Cambridge, 2013), 273–293. 11  Özel, Ç.: ‘Ephemere Ausstattungen für die Eucharistieverehrung unter Kaiser Leopold I.’ (Master’s Thesis, Univ. of Vienna, 2015); – ‘Inszenierte Eucharistiefrömmigkeit unter Kaiser Leopold I.’, in Sommer-Mathis, A. et al. (eds.), Spettacolo barocco, 143–150. My thanks to Walter S. Melion for his ideas on Kügel.

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relationship of the sacrament to Christ’s Burial, a connection that today may not seem immediately obvious. The first of these was a 1670 piece written by Minato (recently arrived in Vienna from his previous career as an opera librettist in Venice) with music by Sances, on a unique devotional topic: the ‘Seven Consolations’ for Mary as she grieves over the Dead Christ – a kind of parallel to the famed Seven Sorrows devotion, but one with no evident pre-history before this work. This piece, Sette consolationi di Maria Vergine, also had immediate court use in mourning, inasfar as Empress Margherita Teresa had just experienced, in February 1670, her second birth of a male infant heir who died almost immediately, again leaving the dynasty without male succession. The libretto begins after the Entombment, with a mourning Virgin alone at the Tomb. Her attempts at one last look on Christ’s Body awaken the sleeping guards (here cast as Jewish, in one of the all-too-frequent anti-Jewish swipes in the repertory). She is then chased away by them in a stage fight. Throughout the piece, her grief remains essentially inconsolable, despite a panoply of seven consoling aspects of Christ’s sacrifice for the faithful on earth, all shown her by various characters. These consolations – better said, attempts at consolation – of the Virgin come in pairs, the first being Divine attributes presented to her by God the Father and by Divine Justice, and the second pair having to do with human redemption. With Consolations five and six we move to material instantiations of Christ, first His face on Veronica’s Veil, explained by the saint herself in the libretto, and then followed by the Eucharist as described by San Pietro and San Giovanni, the only characters of the entire eleven-voice ensemble who had been present at the Last Supper. This placement of the Sacrament as the penultimate consolation of the seven is noteworthy. First, the apostles’ fifty-four lines in the libretto describing the Sacrament and its institution are longer than explanations of the other Consolations. The entire section is set in the narrative and dialogic poetic meters of versi sciolti (alternating seven- and eleven-syllable lines), and in recitational musical style, as opposed to Veronica’s preceding entrance aria describing her Veil, and the aria following the Eucharistic discussion, scored for two angels bringing the last Consolation, the Cross. The surrounding arias are thus lyrical moments, as opposed to the recitational and descriptive tone of the two apostles adumbrating the sacrament as solace – for Mary, and presumably for the royals as well. One reason for this emphasis on recitation, and thus clear textual projection, lay also in the fairly technical nature of the sacrament’s explanation. After Mary kisses the Veil as her response to her Son’s indirect presence on it at the

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end of Consolation 5, Peter begins with an Immaculatist salutation of her, followed by a prediction of Christ’s future glory. Ex. 1 gives the two apostles’ following lines; John paraphrases 1 Cor 11:23, as he describes both the Last Supper and the Consecration in the Canon of the Mass. After Peter’s standard ‘o felix culpa’ reference to Adam and Eve’s sin, the next two statements of the apostles bring us into more complex territory, having to do with the ‘speech-act’ power of the words of Institution. Example 1. Minato/Sances, Sette consolationi (1670)12 San Giovanni: On the night on which He was betrayed by the perfidious Judas, He took bread and wine into His hands, and truly substantiated them into His true Blood and Body. He gave of Himself to us (and how oblivious is anyone who does not languish for His love!) His Body in food and His Blood in drink. San Pietro: One could almost say, ‘O happy sin of the first human [Adam]!’, while you [Mary; i.e. as the God-bearer] are the reason that humanity, redeemed from eternal oblivion, can have God as food and drink. San Giovanni: The power of sacred words converts the entire substance of the bread and wine into the complete substance of Christ; only the accidents [thereof] remain abstracted and alone; and Christ, the Eternal Word [Verbo] of the omnipotent Father, accomplishes this with powerful words [parole]; and Nature obeys God’s will. San Pietro: The Body of Christ, with its real and entitative parts, is present in the accidents in a real and quantitative way, and even if the sacred species are divided or separated, Christ is not divided into the various parts; without multiplying Himself, Christ Himself is totally in all [the species]. Thus God, with no fixed place, is everywhere; not multiplied and not separated, He is in every vast space and in every point. Maria: Beloved disciples of my Jesus, you have told a high mystery; I see the world’s benefit, but in the meantime – alas, how can I suffer the pain! – in the meantime, Christ has died crucified. [A cloud opens, and

12  This is taken from the edition of Minato’s ‘collected sacred works’, Tutte le rappresentazioni sacre (Vienna, 1700), 20–22, available at: http://archiv.onb.ac.at:1801/view/action/ nmets.do?DOCCHOICE=5008095.xml&dvs=1525349811188~597&locale=en_US&search_ terms=&adjacency=&VIEWER_URL=/view/action/nmets.do?&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=1& divType=&usePid1=true&usePid2=true (accessed 15 March 2018). The passage begins: ‘Si, si ne la notte in cui tradito / fu dal perfido Giuda’ up to ‘Sacra madre di Giesù’. In both examples, the original is in Italian.

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there appears a Cross held by two singers who represent two angels]. Angel 2: Holy mother of Jesus, behold the wood on which He died … The apostles’ explanation of the Eucharist emphasizes two things: first, the power of Christ’s words in instituting it, and second, the distinction between accidents and substance, using the Thomistic metaphor of nature obeying God in allowing the bread and wine to be converted. Peter then reiterates the indivisibility of Christ, even if the species are separated. This explication would seem to make orthodox sense, given both the Catholic norm of single-species Communion and the role of Leopold’s own grandfather Emperor Ferdinand II in producing the 1621 Imperial ban which finally prohibited Communion under both kinds in the Empire. Still, some later texts in this repertory, which emphasize Christ’s thirst and the role of His blood in satisfying spiritual thirst, suggest that Eucharistic devotion was not that simple at court, and that there might have been continuing Habsburg desires for the partaking of Communion wine, two generations after the undoing of the Bohemian Utraquists. Perhaps most remarkable is Minato’s ability to turn all this into workable poesia per musica. Even more striking in the 1670 piece is Mary’s reaction to the description of the sacrament, or rather her lack thereof. Her acknowledgement lasts a brief four lines, as she immediately returns to her obsession, iterated throughout the entire libretto, with Christ’s death. Only at the very end of the whole piece does she give any sign of limited consolation, not brought about by the Eucharist, and the work ends in sorrow and solitude, as her last words reiterate her Son’s death, and the characters quietly leave the stage in different directions.13 If the Empress Margherita Teresa was indeed the primary audience of this piece in 1670, the insistence on the Virgin’s grief, mirroring the Spanish princess’s own, is also no surprise. But Mary’s brushing off the Sacrament must have been striking to the royal public, given that the Empress had listened as a young girl at the Madrid court to Calderón’s autos and their conceptualist glorification of the Eucharist. The issue of sacramental indivisibility, mentioned in the 1670 piece, generated the next lengthy discussion in the repertory, this time a work of 1677 for which we have no musical score but only Minato’s text, L’Infinità impicciolita (i.e., ‘Infinity Made Small’). Rather than a consolation piece, this is a didactic iteration of eleven ways in which Christ’s infinity was contained or lessened over the course of His life. Here the Eucharist is the crowning proof of the 13  ‘Si nasconde l’Eterno Padre nel suo Lume; … la B. Vergine va piangendo … restando il S.mo Sepolcro’.

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limitations, coming even after the expected ‘confinement’ of His Body in the Sepulchre. Thus the poetic conceit here is almost mathematical. Burnacini’s set design for the piece is described in Minato’s libretto (there is no surviving drawing) as representing the garden in which the Holy Sepulchre was traditionally located, a further underscoring of the ‘confinement’ of Christ and a kind of dialectical opposite to the Garden of Eden. The pedagogical nature of the work is evident from the role of one of its seven allegorical figures, La Resipiscenza (‘Resipiscence’), who explains each case of Christ’s being confined, doing so in dialogue with a protagonist, the figure of Sinful Humanity (‘Humanita peccatrice’) cast as a naïve female penitent. Here the explanation of the last example of confinement concentrates on the Real Presence even in the smallest particles of bread and wine, and this presupposes a wider discussion on physics and materiality that must have happened at some time in court, possibly in the literary academies that Leopold and his stepmother Eleonora both sponsored. Other such ‘scientific’ topoi would recur in other years’ sepolcri during this decade. Ex. 2 gives this passage, much shorter than the 1670 discussion. Example 2. L’Infinità impicciolita (1677)14 Remorse (to Humanity): Turn to this stone, where your God lies buried, and see if He has not made Himself small for you … Respicienza: Would you more? Look at the gift He made you the same night He was betrayed [i.e. indexing the Canon of the Mass]. He enclosed, in the species of sacred bread and wine, His body and His blood. In each minute particle, there your God, infinite and immense, is restricted. He makes the bread and wine transubstantiated into the real Body and Blood of Christ, and annihilates the substance of the bread and wine. This admixture of pedagogical theology and music drama is typical of the entire repertory. But in the wider context of science and Eucharistic theology, the question of atomism also seems implicit here. For all that the explanation is typically Thomistic, the problems of atomic theory had come up in Galileo’s Roman trial two generations before, especially in terms of its Eucharistic implications.15 14  Minato, Tutte le rappresentazioni sacre, 206–207, from ‘Volgiti a questo Sasso …’ to ‘e che di vino, e pane / la sostanza s’annienti’. 15  The issues of appearances, substances, and qualities, as they arose in the Roman trial disputes, are laid out in a clear but slightly course-grained way by Redondi, P.: Galileo

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The problems of sacramental quantity and quality had been reframed in early modern terms by Francisco Suárez, followed by Cardinal Juan de Lugo y de Quiroga, and it is striking how closely Minato’s texts follow these formulations, without an explicit citation in the libretto to such auctoritates. It seems to have been the norm for Minato to have had access to the holdings of the court library, most of whose volumes are preserved today in the Austrian National Library collections. Thus the congruity of musical libretto with standard theology had a material basis. In terms of the Viennese theatrical corpus as a whole, Epicurus’ supposed efforts to teach atomic theory in classical Athens formed the starting-point for a 1672 opera for Leopold’s birthday (text by Minato), Gl’atomi d’Epicuro. Here, however, atomism is simply a subsidiary plot-line until the very end, at which point the philosopher uses it as a ‘democratic’ justification (‘We are all just atoms covered in gold’) for the marriage of two socially unequal characters.16 Where this leaves the question of Eucharistic ‘atoms’ in the Viennese sacred repertory is thus unclear. In the 1677 work, after the explanation of the Real Presence in the particles, the allegorical character of Remorse (‘Il Rimorso’) asks rhetorically if Christ could have lessened Himself any more than this. Strikingly, it is this question that moves Humanity to her first enactment of penance via tears. Although the metaphysical details of Transubstantiation are less present here than in the 1670 piece, the dramatic weight of the sacrament and its direct link to Holy Week penance are correspondingly greater. Despite the lack of a score, this closing section on the Eucharist is clearly in versi sciolti, like the 1670 example, and was probably also set in recitational musical style. What might have been the devotional, as opposed to the theological, background for these pieces’ audiences? Although it is not clear precisely which sermons were preached in the Hofburgkapelle in Holy Week of 1670 or 1677, at least some treatises on the Eucharist held in the court library survive, and these can give some sense of sacramental understanding at court. One of the most striking of these is the 1616 Discorsi e considerationi sopra il Sacratissimo Sacramento dell’altare of the Venetian primicerio Giovanni Tiepolo (no direct relation to the painterly family), later made Patriarch of Venice in 1619.17 Heretic (Princeton, 1987), 221–26. The Viennese library of course held Suárez’s writings but evidently not those of Lugo. 16  Epicuro: ‘Neghi a Focide Euleria, / perche inegual la credi? / … / mira meglio i mortali; / nascono tutti nudi, e tutti eguali / … / atomi siam, benche coperti d’oro’. Minato, Gli atomi d’Epicuro, Act III, sc. 12 (Vienna, 1672), 53. 17  Tiepolo, G.: Discorsi e considerationi sopra il santissimo sacramento dell’altare (Venice, 1616; I cite from the 1618 Venetian edition).

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Tiepolo’s two-volume tome exists in some twenty-two copies in Italy today as well as in the Imperial collections now in the Austrian National Library; the Habsburgs also owned five other devotional works by the cleric. Minato could also have seen this treatise before ever leaving Venice in 1669, as it was printed there and exists even today in two copies in Venetian collections. Tiepolo’s encyclopediac treatise ranges from orthodox explications of the Eucharist to oddly materialist ideas of its effects; he postulated, for instance, that Peter’s denial of Christ to the woman servant who questioned him in the high priest’s palace was possible only because the apostle had already digested the bread/Eucharist from the Last Supper and no longer had it in his body.18 In Book IX, Tiepolo did not specifically mention the Sacrament as consolation, but did point to its combining of the Incarnation with the Passion, a central point of the Viennese repertory. In a move closer to L’Infinità impicciolita, a meditation from Book XIX of Tiepolo’s tome queried not only how Divine Infinity could be circumscribed in the Host, but also how human intelligence could grasp such Infinity.19 Just previously, his advice to the believer about to receive Communion emphasized how the communicant should become a worthy ‘Tomb’, a sensitive being (unlike the rock), before partaking of the Sacrament.20 Whether or not Minato had read Tiepolo’s volumes, the intertextuality speaks to the poet’s ability to turn standard devotional discourse into a workable libretto. Both these Viennese pieces link the Eucharist to the aftermath of the Passion, reflected in both its consolatory nature as in the 1670 piece and in its relation to the ‘multi-media’ penance that the royals enacted every Holy Week. In addition, the visual representation of the Host in the stage set, when it occurred, marks a contrast with the ‘hidden’, sepulchral nature of the reserved Hosts that had been consumed earlier on Good Friday during the Adoration of the Cross ceremony. They provided a music-dramatic way of incorporating the three great mysteries of the Incarnation, Eucharist, and Passion into a single performance, whose sacramental references were Penance and the Eucharist. Eventually, the theme would wane in the repertory. The last explicit reference to the Eucharist, without the theological niceties, comes as an act of recollection in the 1689 sepolcro L’Esclamare a gran voce, a piece which revolves around Christ’s cries from the Cross. This work features a stage set of 18  Discorsi, vol. 1, bk. IV, 251. 19  Book XIX, ch. 15, vol. 2, pp. 822ff.: ‘O Dio mio, che sei cosi grande, che non hai luoco, che ti capsica, ne termine, che ti ristringa, ne mente, che ti comprenda, e che porrò io hora dire …?’ 20  Ibid., vol. 2, 781–783.

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the Cenacle, and Mary’s return to it after the Entombment. Here, after an opening duet of grief, St. John narrates the Last Supper and its institution of the Eucharist, but then moves on to a discussion of Christ’s ‘vocality’ on the Cross, a final recall of Giambattista Marino’s Dicerie sacre from the century’s beginning.21 For reasons having to do with changing Passion devotion, the Eucharist moved from being a memoria Passionis, to theater, and finally to only a memory. Bibliography Barnett, G., Bolognese Instrumental Music, 1660–1710: Spiritual Comfort, Courtly Delight, and Commercial Triumph (Aldershot, 2008). Brossette, U., Die Inszenierung des Sakralen: das theatralische Ausstattungsprogramm suddeutscher Barockkirchen in seinem liturgischen und zeremoniellen Kontext. (Weimar, 2002). Eucharistica divini solis statio obediente Deo voci hominis solari statione contra Gabaon expressa (Palermo: O. Anglese, 1702; rpt. 1705). Kendrick, R. L., Fruits of the Cross: Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna (Berkeley, 2019). L’eucharistiche lautezze compartite al peccatore in persona del prodigo penitente. Dialogo posto in musica dal signor D. Antonio Benitti (Palermo: Pietro dell’Isola, 1682). Minato, Nicolo, Gli atomi d’Epicuro (Vienna, 1672). Minato, Nicolo, Tutte le rappresentazioni sacre (Vienna, 1700), available at: http://archiv.onb.ac.at:1801/view/action/nmets.do?DOCCHOICE=5008095.xml&dvs=15253 49811188~597&locale=en_US&search_terms=&adjacency=&VIEWER_URL=/view/ action/nmets.do?&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=1&divType=&usePid1=true&usePid2=tr ue (accessed 15 March 2018). Özel, Ç., ‘Ephemere Ausstattungen für die Eucharistieverehrung unter Kaiser Leopold I.’ (Master’s Thesis, Univ. of Vienna, 2015). Özel, Ç., ’Inszenierte Eucharistiefrömmigkeit unter Kaiser Leopold I.’, in SommerMathis, A. et al. (eds.), Spettacolo barocco: Triumph des Theaters (Vienna, 2016), 143–150. Powell, A., ‘A Machine for Souls: Allegory before and after Trent’, in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. M. B. Hall/T. E. Cooper (Cambridge, 2013), 273–293. Redondi, P., Galileo Heretic (Princeton, 1987). 21  Giovanni: ‘Qui ne l’estrema Cena / transustantiò il suo Corpo, e il suo Sangue’ …; Minato, Tutte le rappresentazioni, 752–53. This passage is almost unique in its mention of the upcoming Resurrection, a topic normally strictly avoided in the repertory.

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Rocca, A., De campanis compendium (Rome, 1612). Schnoebelen A., ‘The Concerted Mass at San Petronio in Bologna, ca. 1660–1730’, Ph. D. diss. Univ. of Illinois, 1966. Simi Bonini, E., Catalogo del fondo musicale di Santa Maria in Trastevere (Rome, 2000). Tiepolo, G., Discorsi e considerationi sopra il santissimo sacramento dell’altare (Venice, 1616). Van Amberg, J., A Real Presence: Religious and Social Dynamics of the Eucharistic Conflicts in Early Modern Augsburg, 1520–1530 (Leiden, 2012).

part 2 Sacramental Modes of Representation

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chapter 8

Seeing beyond Signs: Allegorical Explanations of the Mass in Medieval Dutch Literature Anna Dlabačová The year 1477 marks the start of the career of one of the most productive and original printers in the fifteenth-century Low Countries – Gerard Leeu († 1492).*, 1 On August 6 of that year he published the first edition of Die vier uterste (The Four Last Things), a Dutch translation of the Cordiale [siue] de quattuor novissimis by Gerard van Vliederhoven († 1402).2 The text considers Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven, and according to the prologue, everyone who wishes to be united eternally with God must possess this book and contemplate its contents.3 The preliminary page closes with a statement that introduces the reader to an entirely different yet equally important text: Oec so staet int eynde van desen selven boec ghescreven die virtute, die doghet ende die bedudenisse vander missen, dat oec een yghelic mensche van node is te weten.4 Also, at the end of this same book the efficacy, virtue and significance of the Mass are discussed, which is likewise necessary for everyone to know. At the close of Die vier uterste, the reader does indeed find a text that sums up the main parts of the Mass and links the priest’s actions to the history of * I wish to thank Charles Caspers, Rijcklof Hofman and Geert Warnar for critical readings of earlier versions of this text. 1  On Leeu, see Hellinga W. Gs. – Hellinga-Querido L., The Fifteenth-Century Printing Types of the Low Countries (Amsterdam: 1966) 36–38, 69–73; and Goudriaan K., Een drukker zoekt pu­ bliek: Gheraert Leeu te Gouda 1477–1484 (Delft: 1993). 2  Die vier uterste. Add: Bedudenisse der missen (Gouda, G[erard] L[eeu]: 6 August 1477), ISTC no. ic00902000. Consulted copy: Washington, Library of Congress, Rosenwald 462. Digital reproduction: https://www.loc.gov/item/65058917/. On the author, see Byrn R., “Gerard van Vliederhoven”, in Stammler W., Langosch K., Ruh K., Illing K., Stöllinger-Löser Ch. (eds.), Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserslexicon, Bd. 2 (Berlin – New York: 1980) 1217–1221. 3  Washington, LC, Rosenwald 464, fol. Ir: ‘Ende hem minnende ghebruken inder ewicheit. Welke boeken een yghelijc mensche van node is te hebben, ende dicwijl over te dencken’. 4  Washington, LC, Rosenwald 462, fol. Ir.

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salvation and to Christ’s Passion in particular. This text, which also survives in manuscript form, is allegorical: it explains the Mass symbolically and also interprets it as a remembrance of Christ’s life and death.5 The Introit is said to express the desire of the fathers of the Old Testament (Moses, David, Isaiah) to see the human nature of Christ.6 Other readings can be found later in the text. The author observes, for instance, that the priest consecrates the sacrament with five powerful words, which Jesus spoke to his disciples when he gave them his holy body during the Last Supper (the words themselves – ‘hoc est enim corpus meum’ – are not mentioned in the text); furthermore, he asserts that the priest elevates the sacrament in order for the congregants to see it. This latter action signifies the elevation of Christ on the cross to which he was nailed. And after the cross had been raised up, the soldiers roughly dropped the cross into the hole where it was to stand. As a result, the Lord’s veins were ruptured. At that moment, all the bystanders could see him hanging on the cross, just as all parishioners can now see the host.7 At this point the text not only provides a symbolic interpretation of the ritual action of elevation during Mass by linking it to the Passion, but also resolutely guides the readers’ thoughts, stating: ‘Dat selmen dencken als die priester op heft dat heylighe sacrament’ (‘This one should think when the priest elevates the host’).8 Although this instruction is quite brief, I nevertheless believe that in its directive mode of address, it exemplifies one of the crucial characteristics of the allegorical interpretations of the Mass, as these would develop in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. At the very end of the text, Leeu printed the dictum of ‘a teacher’, which reveals his primary motivation for publishing this text: Een leraer beschrijft: Het tis den mensche saligher ende god liever dat hi devotelic misse hoert dan of hi al soe veel lants om gode gave den armen als hi binnen dier tijt dat hi misse hoerde soude moghen overgaen ende betreden.9 5  London, British Library, Harley 2444, fols 7r–18r: ‘Dit is dat beduytnisse vander heylger missen’. The manuscript dates to the 2nd or 3rd quarter of the 15th century; see the online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/welcome .htm); and Cologne, Historisches Archiv, GB Oct. 69, fols 51r–64r, see http://historisches archivkoeln.de:8080/actaproweb/archive.xhtml?id=Vz++++++90003410PPLS#Vz______9000 3410PPLS. On the text as printed by Leeu, see Goudriaan K., “Een kerkelijk catechese-offensief? Misverklaringen op de drukpers rond 1500”, in Abels P. H. A. M. – Jacobs J. – Veen M. van (eds.), Terug naar Gouda. Religieus leven in de maalstroom van de tijd (Zoetermeer: 2014) 73–95, esp. 85 and 89. 6  Washington, LC, Rosenwald 462, fol. lixv–lxr. 7  Ibidem, fol. lxiiir–v. 8  Ibidem, fol. lxiiiv. 9  Ibidem, fol. lxvir.

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A teacher pronounces: It is more profitable for an individual and preferable to God that he hear Mass devoutly than that he give as much land to the poor as he might walk across during the time that he heard Mass. This text therefore invites readers to understand what happens during Mass – to access the spiritual meaning embedded in the ritual. More importantly, however, it was designed to offer a set of spiritual guidelines, helping congregants to take part in the ritual of the Mass in such a way that their devotion was stimulated and their consciousness of the significance of ritual made more acute and responsive. One of the five known copies of Leeu’s 1477 edition provides evidence that the text did indeed reach lay readers. The copy belonged to a lay noble woman, Catharina van Oppendorp, married to the knight Jan van Bulloys; we may assume that she used the book for her own spiritual growth and to deepen her devotional life. In 1513, she converted her Louvain dwelling into a community of Rich Clares, to whom she ultimately bequeathed her copy of the book.10 During the later Middle Ages, attending Mass was one of the key ways for lay people to participate in religious ritual and to partake of the divine mystery. Not surprisingly, the short text published by Leeu in 1477 was neither the first nor the last of its kind. This essay aims to provide a first exploration of this kind of allegorical explanation of Mass ritual in Middle Dutch.11 These vernacular texts were widely disseminated; the largely lay audiences they addressed consulted them to gain access to the spiritual meaning of the Mass. Hitherto, however, they have been little studied. How did such texts offer material that could stimulate readers to respond to what they heard and saw, and to see beyond surface ritual, beyond signs and symbols? In other words, how did these explanations of the Mass – at first purely textual, but later supplemented with 10  Washington, LC, Rosenwald 462, front fly-leaf verso: ‘Desen boeck heeft toe ghehoert der edelre vrouwen my vrou van bloys saligher ghedachten ons alder eerweerdichste ende liefste moeder ende sy heeffen ons [sinte claren tot loeven] beset in haer testament dat wien niet wech gheven en moeghen noch vercopen’. 11  The standard work on Eucharistic devotion in the Low Countries is Caspers C. M. A., De Eucharistische vroomheid en het feest van sacramentsdag in de Nederlanden tijdens de late middeleeuwen (Leuven: 1992). Chapter three contains an important, if concise, general overview of sermons and other devotional literature concerning the Eucharist. On the Mass as a series of ritual acts, see Lukken G., Rituals in Abundance. Critical Reflections on the Place, Form, and Identity of Christian Ritual in our Culture (Leuven: 2005), passim. For the German equivalent of the Middle Dutch allegorical explanations of the Mass discussed in the present article, see the chapters by K. Illing, in Stammler W. – Langosch K. – Ruh K. – Illing K. – Stöllinger-Löser Ch. (eds.), Die Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, Bd. 6 (Berlin – New York: 1987) 443–451.

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images – seek to shape the understanding and experience of Eucharistic ritual in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries? The texts discussed in this essay are vernacular versions of a way of thinking that goes back to a Latin tradition codified in the ninth century by Amalarius of Metz († 853).12 Amalarius developed the so-called allegorical-rememorative interpretation of the liturgy of the Mass, in which its every part is seen allegorically to evoke biblical history.13 This tradition culminated in the Rationale divinorum officiorum by William Durand of Mende († 1296), completed in 1286.14 The Rationale remained popular throughout the late medieval period and may have been one of the most frequently printed incunabula and post-incunabula.15 From the early fourteenth century onwards, the tradition was elaborated and disseminated in the Dutch vernacular. These allegorical explanations familiarized lay people with a form of hermeneutics that was intended to shape not only their understanding and experience of the Mass, but also their perception of ritual and art in general, and to heighten their sensitivity to complex structures of meaning. With regard to the material presented here, in addition to the fundamental question, ‘Quid est sacramentum?’, the corollary questions are: ‘How were devotees informed about the sacrament of the Eucharist?’, and ‘How did the allegorical-rememorative structures employed in these texts influence their mentalité, their manner of thought, in ways that proved generative for subsequent developments in the history of religion and culture?’

12  By far the most important study on the impact of allegorical, analogical, typological, and historical interpretation of the Bible and theology in the Middle Ages and beyond still is Lubac H. de, Exégèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’écriture, T. I.1–2; II.1–2 (Paris, 1959–1964), esp. T. II.2. The application of these four senses to the Mass is discussed in Jungmann J. A., Missarum sollemnia. Eine genetische Erklärung der römischen Messe. Bd. 1, Messe im Wandel der Jahrhunderte, Messe und krichliche Gemeinschaft, Vormesse (Wien: 1962) 137–168. 13   Faupel-Drevs K., Vom rechten Gebrauch der Bilder im liturgischen Raum. Mittelalterliche Funktionsbestimmungen bildender Kunst im Rationale Divinorum Officiorum des Durandus von Mende (1230/1–1296) (Leiden – Boston – Köln: 2000) 40–45. The term ‘rememorative’ was coined by A. Franz in Die Messe im deutschen Mittelalter. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Liturgie und des religiösen Volkslebens (Freiburg im Breisgau: 1902; reprint ed., 1963). 14   Faupel-Drevs, Vom rechten Gebrauch, esp. 59. Also see Holmes S. M., “Reading the Church: William Durandus and a New Approach to the History of Ecclesiology”, Ecclesiology 7 (2011) 29–49, esp. 35–39. 15  On the printing history of Durand, see White, J. F., “Durandus and the Interpretation of Christian Worship”, in Shriver G. H. (ed.), Contemporary Reflections on the medieval Christian Tradition: Essays in honor of Ray C. Petry (Durham, N.C.: 1974) 41–52. Holmes, ‘Reading the Church’ 37; and Faupel-Drevs, Vom rechten Gebrauch 23, 36–37. Also see the chapter by Lee Palmer Wandel in this volume.

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Before Leeu’s ‘Appendix’ to Die vier uterste

The diffusion of allegorical explanations of the Mass amongst the laity in the Low Countries starts with Der leken spieghel (The Layman’s Mirror), a text written by the Antwerp clerk Jan van Boendale († 1350) in the 1320s. In the second book of his extensive didactic poem – which is also strongly catechetical – Boendale includes one chapter on the interpretation of the church building, the priest’s vestments, and the liturgical paraments.16 The cross on top of the church tower symbolizes the key to Heaven (Christ’s death), and the glass windows through which the sun illuminates the church interior signify the enlightenment of the mind through Scripture.17 The priest-celebrant signifies Christ’s presence at the cross (‘Die priester oec die den dienst doet / Bediedt christum die ant cruce stoet’), his amice the cloth with which Christ was blindfolded (Lk 22:64, Mt 26:68), and the maniple on his left arm the rope that bound Christ’s hands.18 The chalice stands for Christ’s grave, and the paten for the large stone with which the grave was closed.19 As Boenadale put it: ‘Thus as you see here /the Mass is nothing else / than a remembrance and teaching / of the holy Passion of Our Lord’ (‘Aldus als ghi hier siet / En es die messe anders niet / Dan ghedinken ende leren / Vander heilegher passien ons heren’).20 A second chapter discusses the ritual of the Mass.21 Boendale manages to discuss the entire ritual of the Mass in 136 lines by attending only to the major prayers and ritual actions, and by restricting himself to what he sees as the bare necessities a layman needs to know in order to attend Mass in a profitable way.22 In addition to practical instructions,23 Boendale also expounds the priest’s movements. The fact that he turns around five times during Mass,

16  Boendale Jan van, Der leken spieghel, ed. J. J. Mak – H. A. C. Lambermont, in Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie (samenstelling en redactie), Cd-rom Middelnederlands (Den Haag – Antwerpen: 1998) fols. 92vb–93vb. 17  Boendale, Der leken spieghel, fol. 93ra, lines 49–52 and 69–94. 18  Ibidem, fol. 93rb, lines 89–92, fol. 97–102 and 127–132. 19  Ibidem, fol. 93va, lines 143–154. 20  Ibidem, fol. 93vb, lines 173–176. 21  Ibidem, fols. 93vb-94va. On the relationship between these two chapters and Durand’s Rationale, see Mak J. J., “Boendale-studies”, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 75 (1957) 241–290, esp. 241–257. His conclusion is that Boendale must have used a sloppy and incomplete excerpt (in lecture notes) from the Rationale. In passing, he also provides a comparison with the Bediedenisse van der missen, discussed below. 22  Mak, “Boendale-studies” 251, calls this a ‘model of superficiality’ (‘toonbeeld van oppervlakkigheid’) because many elements of the Mass are missing. 23  Boendale, Der leken Spieghel, fols. 93vb-94ra, lines 9–42; 49–53; 59–62; 94rb, lines 63–78.

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for example, signifies that Christ was seen five times on Easter Sunday;24 the Offertory symbolizes Christ’s sacrifice on the cross on Good Friday;25 and in the elevation of the Host we should bear witness to the Ascension.26 Boendale underscores his pragmatic approach at the end of this chapter: ¶ Men vint vele meer leringhen Van desen seluen dinghen Dan ic hebbe ghenoemt nu Doch hebbic gheseeght v Dbeste ende dprincipale Daer vte altemale Dese vorseide dinghen ruren Alsment vint inder scrifturen ¶ Men vint leringhen menegherhande Die deen ende dander achter lande Op dese dinghen vinden Soudemen dat al ontbinden Men mocht cume ouerliden Ic wille tandren dinghen tiden27 Regarding these matters, many more instructions could be adduced than I have given; however, I have stated in full the principal and most important ones. The aforementioned things are reported as they are to be found in written texts. One finds manifold instructions about what everyone everywhere thinks about these matters; were one to expound it all, one would barely move forward. I wish now to turn to other subjects. The emphasis on ‘scrifture’ may point to Boendale’s preference for codified interpretations; he did not want to rely on oral traditions in his treatise.28 In any case, Boendale’s words provide valuable evidence for the apparently wide availability of allegorical interpretations of the Mass in the first half of the fourteenth century.

24  Ibidem, fol. 94rb, lines 79–84. 25  Ibidem, fol. 94rb, lines 85–90. 26  Ibidem, fols. 94rb–94va, lines 91–103. 27  Ibidem, fol. 94va, lines 123–136. 28  Mak, “Boendale-studies” 254.

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A more detailed account, the Bediedenisse van der missen (Explanation of Mass), was written by an anonymous priest (a ‘pape’) at the request of a laywoman around the middle of the fourteenth century.29 A manuscript copied by the layman Romment van den Riele in 1461 contains a prose adaption of the first 150 lines, which confirms reception amongst the laity.30 The ‘pape’ wishes to enlighten lay people about the virtues and meaning of the Mass, as hardly any people realize why it is important to attend the sacred rite, and nor do they dwell on its true meaning: Ic woude elc mensche wiste, Of liete hem wisen met liste, Wat ghenaden, welke salicheit Ane die heileghe misse leit. Ic wane sise dan dicke sochten, Dat sise hoerden alsi mochten; Want wi moghen weten ghewisse, Dat alsoe vele ane die misse Ghenaden ende salicheiden leit, Als in die sonne stoues geit. Want menech luttel weet, Waer omme hi te missen geet, Ende in sijn herte niet en dreghet, wat ane die heileghe misse leghet, Soe willic, bider helpen ons Heren, .I. deelken den menschen leren, Alsoe verre als ane die dude, Gheweten moghen leke lude.31 29  Leiden, University Library, LTK 191, fols 95r–103v. Edition: Die bediedenisse van der missen, met ophelderende aanteekeningen voorzien en van wege de Maatschappij van Nederlandsche Letterkunde uitgegeven, ed. A. C. Oudemans (Leiden: 1852) 53, lines 1272– 1276: ‘Ghi heren, vrouwen ende cnapen, / Bidt vor den ermen pape, / Die desen boec in rimen vant, / In .i. wel bekent lant, / Doer ere goeder vrouwen bede.’ (You, men, women and youngsters, / Pray for the poor priest, / Who wrote this book in verse, / In a wellknown country / At the request of a good woman). Also see Warnar G., “Biecht, gebod en zonde. Middelnederlandse moraaltheologie voor de wereldlijke leek”, in Mertens Th. a.o. (eds.), Boeken voor de eeuwigheid. Middelnederlands geestelijk proza (Amsterdam: 1993) 36–51, 372–380, esp. 46–47. The text is probably based on Berthold of Regensburg, on which, see Daniëls L. M., ‘“Die bediedenisse van der missen’ in de middeleeuwen”, Studia catholica 18 (1942) 257–291. 30  The Hague, Royal Library, KA 35, fols 94r–95v. 31  Die bediedenisse van der missen 11–12, lines 11–28.

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I would wish that everyone knew or agreed to be taught competently how much grace and salvation are comprised by the Holy Mass. I am sure that they would then attend it often, that they would do so whenever they could; for we can know for certain that there is as much grace and salvation contained in Mass as there are dust motes in sunshine. For few people are aware of why they go to Mass, and nor do they truly realize what Mass is all about; so, with the help of Our Lord, I want partly to teach the people about it – as far as lay people are capable of such interpretation. Compared with Boendale, the most striking characteristic of the Bediedenisse, apart from its completeness, is the provision of multiple interpretations that lend the ritual a certain polysemy and allow the laity to discern various layers of meaning. For example, one can understand the amice as the cloth used by the soldiers to blindfold Christ, but it also signifies Christ’s meekness in covering his godly nature with a human body.32 The stole signifies Jesus’ grief on earth (‘bediet Jhesus verdriet, dat hi in ertelike [erterike] liet’), but it is at the same time the rope with which Christ was bound to the column.33 The elevatio calls to mind the raising of the cross, but simultaneously it refers to the Last Judgment.34 Other texts provide different allegorical readings: the priest’s fascia or sash is often seen as Pilate’s whip, but it can also be the whip with which Christ drove the moneychangers from the temple, as one of the passages in a fragmentary manuscript (c. 1450) at Leiden University Library attests.35 In his encyclopaedic Tafel van den kersten ghelove (c. 1404), written in prose, the Dominican theologian Dirc van Delft († 1404) likewise explains allegorically the priest’s vestments and other objects connected to the Mass: ‘The garb of the priest is derived from the clothing of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and it signifies many godly virtues’ (‘Die ghewade des priesters sijn ghenomen uut der cledinghe vander passien ons Heren Ihesu Chrisi ende beteykent vele godliker duechden’).36 He clearly distinguishes between 32  Ibidem 16, lines 161–178. 33  Ibidem 17, lines 193–208. 34  Ibidem 38, lines 820–839. 35  The fragments seem to contain two different texts: Leiden, University Library, LTK 307 III, fol. 7v, ‘Dat gordel bediet die geesel daer hi mede dreef uten tempel allen die daer in comenscap hadden’; and fol. 8v, ‘Die gordel bedietet die geesele daer Pylatus onsen heer met geeselde’. 36  Delf Dirc van, Tafel van den kersten ghelove. Dl. 3A en 3B Somerstuc, ed. L. M.Fr. Daniëls (Antwerpen – Utrecht: 1938) 455–457, quoted 455, 131–456, 133. The editor notes that Dirc may have derived his considerations on the paraments from the Rationale divinorum officiorum. Also see Caspers, De Eucharistische vroomheid 202.

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the allegorical-rememorative and tropological meaning (which relates to morals): the amice is the cloth that was bound before Christ’s eyes; this signifies (‘beteykent’) the belief that adorns our head.37 His wording even seems to point to his understanding of the allegorical-rememorative meaning of the priest’s garb as a discrete mode of understanding. After his detailed account of the priest’s garb, Dirc summarily enumerates the parts of the Mass; only the burning of incense during the Offertory receives somewhat fuller treatment. According to Charles Caspers, his readings of the Mass largely derive from Hugo Ripelin of Strasbourg’s (c. 1205–1270) Compendium totius theologicae veritatis.38 The absence of descriptions of priestly ritual often shifts the interpretative focus to the tropological, moral meaning: the Introit, for example, is seen exclusively to signify the commencement of a good life or good works.39 While the authors of the texts discussed so far limit themselves to enumerating and interpreting the objects, acts, and/or words of the Mass ritual, in the course of time, and especially in the fifteenth century, the focus seems to shift toward guiding believers’ visualization, and as such, to stimulating meditation and exploiting the emotional potential of the scenes one was to see mentally during Mass.40 A manuscript that originated in a Franciscan milieu around 1470–1480 contains a text having as its incipit ‘Hier beghint die bedudenisse vander heiligher missen’ (‘Here begins the explanation of Holy Mass’). At the start the reader is presented with an allegorical explanation of the priest’s garb in nine points, in the order in which the priest dresses himself as he prepares for Mass, but the text quickly turns into an elaborate allegorical explanation of the Mass itself, with instructions for meditation.41 The text states, for instance, that after the priest has read the Confiteor, he kisses the altar, which signifies (‘beteykent’) the crucified Christ. The symbolism is further elaborated by the statement that the priest truly touches Christ’s wounds with his lips in this manner. In imitation of this, anyone attending Mass should kiss the crucifix in his prayer book and make a cross in his hand, kiss it (‘ende maken een cruus in sijn hant ende cussent’), and contemplate the cross together with the priest.42 37  Van Delf, Tafel 456, lines 133–136: ‘Die amicte is dat cleet dat onse Heer voor die oghen ghebonden was. […] Ende beteykent dat ghelove daer ons hooft mede gheciert wert’. 38  Ibidem 458–460. Caspers, De Eucharistische vroomheid 202. 39  Ibidem 202. 40  Cf. Newman B., “ ‘What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture”, Speculum 80 (2005) 1–43, esp. 15. 41  Leiden, University Library, LTK 340, fols. 93v–116v. On the manuscript and its historical context, see Dlabačová A., Literatuur en observantie. De Spieghel der volcomenheit van Hendrik Herp en de dynamiek van laatmiddeleeuwse tekstverspreiding (Hilversum: 2014) 136–144. 42  Leiden, University Library, LTK 340, fol 95r–v.

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Before the elevation, the bells are rung in order that believers may prepare themselves to engage in fervent prayer.43 The other directions given in this text can also be taken as spiritual guidelines stimulating private devotional experience within the collective setting of the Mass. During the consecration of the chalice, for instance, the priest makes the sign of the cross. When seeing this, the believer should meditate on Christ carrying his cross and on his disrobing. The devotee should imagine the stations of Christ’s Passion: how he fell due to the weight of the cross, how he dragged it behind him while being mocked by the crowd, how he was undressed before everyone and stood there before so many people, bleeding for their sins. The section concludes with the remark, ‘Every good Christian shall give thought to this [allegorical meaning] when the chalice is raised’ (‘Dit sal een yghelijc guet kersten mensche overdencken alsmen die kelc opheft’).44 Similarly, at the start of Mass, during the Introit, the reader was to imagine Christ being born after nightfall, ponder the tears that he wept on our behalf, and consider how Mary wrapped him in poor swaddling and laid him to rest in the cold manger.45 Elsewhere, the reader should observe with the eyes of his heart Jesus crying miserably. He is admonished not to look away from his weeping, but rather, to direct his gaze at Christ’s face in order to intensify empathetic devotion.46 2

Manuscript and Print

In the opening paragraphs of this essay, I focused attention on the ‘appendix’ to Die vier uterste. This text marks the gradual transition of allegorical explanations of the Mass in Dutch from manuscript to print and the start of an important and dynamic tradition of publishing such texts in print. With the exception of the ‘appendix’, the printed texts were generally speaking not the ones that already circulated in manuscript. In a fine and stimulating overview, the historian Koen Goudriaan rightly stresses that the introduction of the

43  Ibidem, fol. 109v. 44  Ibidem, fol. 110r–v. 45  Ibidem, fols. 95v–97r. 46  Ibidem, fol. 103v: ‘Aenmerke dan mitten oghen dijns herten Ihesum screyende ende en keer niet dijn aensicht van sinen suchten, mer sich in sijn aensicht ende ghi selt devocie crighen is dat ghi mit vlijt aenmerct die tranen die hi storte voer di.’

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printing press in the Low Countries had a significant impact on the dissemination of this kind of text, and that it led to a radical renewal of the genre.47 Approximately two years after the publication of Die vier uterste and its ‘appendix’, on 20 July 1479, Leeu published a second explanatory text on the Mass, initially anonymously: the Boecxken van der officie ofte dienst der missen (Booklet on the Office or Service of Mass).48 In later editions by Leeu the text is published together with a prologue, which mentions Simon van Venlo as the author (about whom we know little more than that he studied in Cologne from the late 1420s until the middle of the fifteenth century). From 1488 onwards, yet other editions of the text were sandwiched between a treatise on confession and penance (Spiegel der volcomenheit, not to be confused with the mystical manual by Hendrik Herp († 1477)), and a dialogue in which Christ teaches the soul how to prepare for Communion.49 At least three manuscript copies of the Boecxken survive, testifying to its popularity.50 As in the previous texts, the author is more preoccupied with the life of Christ than with a detailed exposition of Mass ritual, or the mystery of presentia realis in the Host and wine.51 In order to hear Mass devoutly, the reader must set aside all worldly worries, and all external thoughts and fantasies,52 and to 47  Goudriaan, “Een kerkelijk catechese-offensief?” 90. On the same page, he claims that few Mass explanations, whether allegorical or not, have survived in manuscript form; in the light of what I have listed so far, this claim should be modified. 48  Venlo Simon van, Boecxken van der officie ofte dienst der missen (Gouda, Gerard Leeu: 20 July 1479). 4°, ISTC no. is00529000. The only extant copy, Washington, Library of Congress, Rosenwald 467, is bound together with a copy of the Spiegel des eeuwigen levens (Delft, [Jacob Jacobszoen van der Meer]: 30 October 1480). The text has been edited on the basis of the second edition of 1481, a reprint of Leeu’s edition; see Venlo Simon van, Boexken van der officien ofte dienst der missen. Naar de druk van Mathias van der Goes verschenen te Antwerpen in 1481 en bewaard in de Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek te Darmstadt (Inc. II 801), ed. Ludo Simons – intr. Jos Andriessen et al. (Antwerpen: 1982). 49  Goudriaan, “Een kerkelijk catechese-offensief?” 85–86. For an elaborate treatment of Simon van Venlo, the complex printing history of his Boexken, parallels in Latin sources and an overview of the contents see Smits van Waeberghe M., “De misverklaring van meester Simon van Venlo”, Ons Geestelijk Erf 15 (1941) 228–261; 285–327; 16 (1942) 85–129. 50  Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 131 H 29 (Hoorn, female tertiaries, St Clara, 1487); Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 131 H 19, fols 57r–129v (Leiden, tertiaries, St Barbara / Bethanië, c. 1500); Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent, BMH 96, fols 3r–57r (15th century). The first manuscript was copied from an early printed edition (Dlabačová, Literatuur en observantie 147–148). In view of the date of confection of the other manuscripts, they may well have been copied from an early printed edition as well. 51  Van Venlo, Boexken van der officien 69: ‘Want die passie Cristi bider missen beteykent is’. 52  Van Venlo, Boexken van der officien 78: ‘van u setten selt ende algeheel u ontcommeren selt van allen vremden gedachten ende fantasien ende uutwendige ende tijttelike sorgen’.

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convince himself that Jesus is present as perfectly in the holy sacrament as he was when lying in his crib, hanging on the cross on Calvary, and as he now sits at his Father’s right hand.53 Only when we sincerely believe what our corporeal eyes do not see nor our reason fully comprehends, will we receive the rewards of true faith, for in that which can be seen with bodily eyes, or understood with human reason, there is neither belief nor profit: Want in dat gheen dat wi mitten oghen sien ende mitten verstande mo­ ghen begripen, daer en is noch ghelove noch verdienste in gheleghen.54 For in that which we see with our [physical] eyes and understand intellectually, in those things lies neither faith nor merit. Indeed, in the dialogic text appended to the treatise by Leeu in his 1488 edition, Christ confirms this point when he reassures the soul that she should simply honour his sacrament. For ‘what you cannot understand nor comprehend with your senses, that you should simply believe’ (‘wat ghij niet verstaen en moecht, noch metten sinnen niet begripen en moecht, dat suldi simpelijck gheloven’).55 When the priest kisses the altar after the Confiteor, the believer should consider that the grace of inspiration he receives must be experienced as if it were the kiss of Christ touching the lips of our soul (a direct reference to the affective mysticism inspired by the Cantica canticorum).56 During the Canon of the Mass, the devotee should imagine that he stands with Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, and he should observe all the events happening there with a compassionate heart.57 When the sacrament is elevated, he should fall to his knees, and think about Christ shown to the crowd by Pilate.58 Furthermore, during the consecration of the chalice he should identify himself with the suffering of Christ being crucified. The elevation is described as follows: 53  Van Venlo, Boexken van der officien 76–77. 54  Van Venlo, Boexken van der officien 85. Cf. Bynum C. W., “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century”, in J. F. Hamburger – A.-M. Bouché (eds.), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: 2006) 212, note 30, with a reference to Alger of Liège’s De sacramentis. 55  Venlo Simon van, Die spieghel der volcomenheit (Antwerp: Gerard Leeu, 1488), copy used: Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1084 D 4, fol. l3r: ‘dat ghi niet curioselic ondersoecken en sult mijn heymelike verholentheyden maer simpelijc mijn heylighe sacrament eeren sult, ende wat ghij niet verstaen en moecht, noch metten sinnen niet begripen en moecht, dat suldi simpelijck gheloven’. 56  Van Venlo, Boexken van der officien 88 57  Ibidem 106. 58  Ibidem 113.

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Ende als die pryester den kelc mitten bloede aenbedet ende op heft, soe seldi u laten duncken dat men hem mitten cruce op boert ende neder schiet inden berch, dat sijn wonden op scoerden ende bloeden als springh­ende fonteynen. Ende dan bidt aldus: O goedertieren hemelsche vader, siet aen dat bloet uwes liefs soens […]. Dit seldi met alsulker devocien doen ende dencken als of ghi opten berch van calvarien voer sinen heilighen cruce lacht, want niet min hier en ghesciet.59 And when the priest venerates and elevates the chalice full of blood, you should imagine that Christ is elevated upon the cross, and that the cross is slammed down into the mountain, and that his wounds are torn open and bleed like fountains. And then pray as follows: O, merciful, heavenly father, observe the blood of your dear Son. […] This you should do and imagine with such devotion, as if you were lying there on Mount Calvary before his holy cross, for nothing less should happen here. We here witness an allegorical and at the same time very visual interpretation of the Mass – not by means of an appeal to the intellect, but to spiritually motivated affective imagination. If this is what you see with your inner eyes, states Van Venlo, you will no longer be able to doubt the presence of Chris in the Eucharist. At the end of the Boexcken, the author stresses that guiding the faculty of visual meditation during the Mass is indeed his main concern: through practice, the devotee shall eventually come to experience Mass as if the Passion were taking place right before his eyes. Only then will he fully appreciate the sweetness of the Mass.60 In another fifteenth-century text, transmitted in manuscript only, Christ himself addresses the reader directly, instructing her or him what s/he should see during each moment of the Mass. During the Consecration, for example, he tells the believer, ‘See me here, omnipotent and almighty, during the very moment when I died on the Cross for your sins’ (‘Siet mi hier, almachtich ende moghende als ic starf anden cruce om uwen sonden’).61 Through the increasing inclusion of meditative material, these late fifteenthcentury expositions moved closer to the genre of meditative Lives of Christ in the tradition of the fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ. Early 59  Ibidem 115. 60  Ibidem 125. 61  Leiden, University Library, LTK 219, fols 127v–129v, esp. fol. 128v (1476). A longer version of this text is transmitted in Bruges, Grootseminarie, 72/175 (c. 1400–1415), on which, see Gheldere K. de (ed.), Dietsce rime: geestelijke gedichten uit de XIIIe, XIVe en XVe eeuw naar een hs. van het einde der XV e eeuw (Bruges: 1896) 42–43.

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printed editions of these latter texts proved very popular.62 ‘Scripted visions’ similar to the ones contained in these meditative Lives of Christ came increasingly to be incorporated into the explanations of the Mass, inviting lay believers to meditate Christ’s life during the Mass, which they were encouraged to attend daily.63 In this way, the rituals enacted by the priest and the texts he recited began to structure the spiritual exercises of lay people.64 3

Gerrit van der Goude’s Boexken

The Boexken vander missen, published in 1506 by the Gouda Collaciebroeders and written by the Franciscan Observant Gerrit van der Goude, is for the Dutch vernacular tradition what William Durand’s Rationale divinorum offciorum is for the Latin one: both its highpoint and endpoint, as regards execution (the text is richly illustrated) and widespread circulation.65 More than twenty editions had been published by 1529, and the text was translated into Latin (Precatiuncule), French (L’interpretation et signification de la messe), and English (The interpretacyon, and sygnyfycacyon of the Masse).66 This is also one

62  See, for example, Goudriaan K., “Middle Dutch Meditative Lives of Jesus on the Early Printing Press”, in Goudriaan K., Piety in Practice and Print. Essays on the Late Medieval Religious Landscape, eds. A. Dlabačová – A. Tervoort (Hilversum: 2016) 219–239. 63  For the term ‘scripted visions’, see Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?”. Cf. Smits van Waeberghe, “De misverklaring van meester Simon van Venlo” (1942) 117, who already ascertained a progressive focus on Christ’s life in explanations of the Mass. 64  Henkel M., Deutsche Messübersetzungen des Spätmittelalters. Untersuchungen auf der Grundlage ausgewählter Handschriften und vorreformatorischer Drucke (Wiesbaden: 2010) 228, uses the term ‘Taktung’. 65  Goude Gerrit van der, Boexken van der missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: 1506). I consulted the copy in Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 227 G 28. On the Boexken and the Collaciebroeders, see Goudriaan K., “Apostolate and Printing: The Collaciebroeders of Gouda and their Press”, in Hascher-Burger U. – Hollander A. den – Janse W. (eds.), Between Lay Piety and Academic Theology. Studies presented to Christoph Burger on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Leiden – Boston: 2010) 433–452; and Roest B., Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction before the Council of Trent (Leiden – Boston: 2004) 369–370. An English translation of the central section with a reproduction of the woodcuts was published in 1903; see Goude Gerrit van der, Dat boexken vander Missen = “The Booklet of the Mass”, trans. P. Dreamer (London et al.: 1903). 66  Troeyer B. de, Bio-bibliographia franciscana neerlandica saeculi XVI. Pars biographica, de auteurs van de uitgegeven werken (Nieuwkoop: 1969) 7–13; and Pars bibliographica, de edities (Nieuwkoop: 1970) 105–115 (nos. 173–193). On the Latin edition, see Goudriaan K., “Een Latijnse misverklaring met houtsneden uit 1512”, Kunstlicht 23.1–2 (2002) 53–59.

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of the first illustrated allegorical explanations of the Mass.67 Due to the development of this genre of guidebook, in which the allegorical explanation of the Mass goes hand in hand with calls visually to analogize the Mass and Christ’s Passion, the insertion of images that could further assist the reader in his meditative spiritual exercises was the logical next step. But Gerrit’s book is more than a visual aid to be used during Mass. It could also substitute for actual participation in the Eucharist for those who were sick, or otherwise unable to attend Mass. The book thus offered a kind of Mass on demand, an extreme form of ‘domestication of the sacred’.68 Just like the final versions of the book ascribed to Simon van Venlo (see above), the Boexken contains three sections. In the second, central section Gerrit divided the Mass into thirty-three ‘articles’ or ‘scenes’, reflecting the age of Christ during his Passion. The thirty-three articles are organized into three sections: from the Annunciation to Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem; from the Washing of the feet to the Entombment; and from the Resurrection to the Ascension [Figs. 8.1–8.3]. Each article is illustrated on the left side of the opening with an analogous ritual taken from the Mass (this is what the reader literally sees if he attends Mass, or, in case he is absent, should see). Beneath each image a brief explanation of the portrayed ritual actions has been added followed by the allegorical ‘rememoratio’. The significance of each of the scenes is developed on the right side of the opening: visually, in a woodcut with the corresponding scene from Christ’s life, and textually in the form of a meditative prayer.69 This second section of Gerrit’s book thus consists of a dual kind of script in word and image that seeks to help readers visualize what actually happens during Mass and, at the same time, what they should envision mentally. This double visualization could be useful as well for churchgoers whose position in the pew made it difficult to see what was transpiring at the altar. Apparently, believers could conceive of the Mass as a sequence of picturae that would trigger mental images of, and meditative exercises on, Christ’s life.70 67  The Verclaringe (see n. 74) also contains a full set of woodcuts, but in comparison to the Boexken their design and execution is ‘primitive’; see Goudriaan, “Een kerkelijk catecheseoffensief?” 87. 68  Cf. Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?” 33. 69  According to De Troeyer, there is a certain degree of dependence between Gerrit’s prayers and the meditative treatises of Ludolf of Saxony and Jordan of Quedlinburg; see De Troeyer, Bio-bibliographia franciscana neerlandica saeculi XVI. Pars biographica, 8. 70  Cf. Goudriaan, “Een kerkelijk catechese-offensief?” 93, who notes a strong emphasis on the visible ritual. Other fifteenth-century texts work the other way round: their point of departure is Christ’s life, thirty episodes from which – codified in the form of mental images familiar to readers – are then linked to representations of the Mass; see, for example, Leiden, University Library, LTK 222, fols. 144r–149r: ‘Hier beghinnen XXX principael

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figure 8.1 Anonymous Master, “The Priest’s Preparation for Mass and the Annunciation”, woodcut illustrations to Gerrit van der Goude, Boexken van der missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: 1506), 8o. Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 227 G 28, fols 43v–44r Photo courtesy of Early European Books online/ ProQuest LCC, http://eeb.chadwyck.com

Van der Goude offered illiterate believers an alternative option also: it suffices for them to ‘ponder devoutly’ (‘devoteliken overdencken’) Christ’s life and to pray a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria in response to each of the thirty-three ‘articles’ depicted in the images of his Boexken.71 In addition, illiterate believers punten der werken die Ihesus Christus gebenedijt gedaen heeft op dese werelt beteykent inder missen mit vollen diensten’. Cf. Van Venlo, Boexken van der officien 76–77, who describes Christ’s life as a Mass. 71  Van der Goude, Boexken, fol. 2v: ‘Ofte en can hi niet lesen, so mach hi devoteliken overdencken dat leven ons heren ende lesen op elcken artikel een Pater Noster ende Ave Maria ende dan so hevet die mensche gelesen so menigen Pater Noster als onse lieve here iaer hevet geleeft opter aerden in dancberheit van alle sijn swaren arbeyt in waken, in vasten, in bidden, in preken, in sijn passie ende pyn die hi geleden hevet voer ons arme sondige menschen’.

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figure 8.2 Anonymous Master, “The Elevation of the Host and the Raising of the Cross”, woodcut illustration to Gerrit van der Goude, Boexken van der missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: 1506), 8o. Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 227 G 28, fols 62v–63r Photo courtesy of Early European Books online/ ProQuest LCC, http://eeb.chadwyck.com

could be made familiar with the allegorical meaning of the priest’s vestments, and liturgical objects. Gerrit explains this in a separate chapter preceding the thirty-three articles: Ten eersten dien outaer daer die priester aen staet betekent dat cruce ons heren. Item dye priester aenden outaer betekent onsen lieven here aen den cruce. […] Item dat cruis dat daer staet opten casuffel op dye schoeren vanden priester ende achter neder ter aerden betekent dat swaer cruis ons heren […] Item die crune vanden priester boven op sijn hoeft betekent die doernen crone ons here […]. Item dat broot datter consacreert wart betekent ende es warachteliken dat gebenedide lichaem ons heren aenden cruce. Ende dye wijn nader consecracien betekent dat duerbaer bloet ons heren overvloedeliken uutghestort inden cruice.

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figure 8.3 Anonymous Master, “The Priest ‘Empties’ the Chalice, and the Resurrection”, woodcut illustrations to Gerrit van der Goude, Boexken van der missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: 1506), 8o. Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 227 G 28, fols 73v–74r Photo courtesy of Early European Books online/ ProQuest LCC, http://eeb.chadwyck.com

Dit mach een simpel mensche die niet lesen en can aldus overdencken onder der missen ende alsoe hem becommeren mitter passien ons heren Ihesu Christi.72 First, the altar at which the priest stands signifies the cross of Our Lord. The priest at the altar signifies Our dear Lord on the cross. […] The cross depicted on the chasuble on the shoulders of the priest and hanging earthward signifies the heavy cross of Our Lord. […] The tonsure on the priest’s head signifies the crown of thorns of Our Lord. […] The consecrated bread signifies and truly is the blessed body of Our Lord on the cross. And the wine after consecration signifies the precious blood of Our Lord, which he shed abundantly on the cross. 72  Ibidem, fols. 38r–39r.

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A simple person who cannot read may consider this during Mass, and in this manner he may occupy himself with the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Based on what they saw with their physical eyes (either in church or in the book), illiterate believers could thus visualize scenes from the narrative that is taken to be common knowledge – the Passion of Christ. The meditative, interiorized experience of Mass is thus more important than an actual understanding of the celebration of the Eucharist, let alone of the sacramental mystery of real presence. Gerrit deems this meditative experience superior to reading. Some people bring large bags full of books with them to church, he writes, as if they were planning to stay there all day and read during the whole of the Mass. They do not observe properly what they read, nor are they cognizant of how they read. Instead, it is preferable to read short prayers only, but with the greatest possible devotion.73 Around the same time (c. 1510?) the Gouda Collaciebroeders published a booklet that contains a sequence of thirty images of the Mass, mirrored by scenes from Christ’s life. A few explanatory lines clarify the relation between each pair of images, but they almost seem superfluous. Such picture-booklets would have been an ideal tool for (illiterate) believers to follow Mass in the way Gerrit recommended [Figs. 8.4–8.5].74 The following quotation aptly summarizes the proper attitude of believers and parishioners during Mass, which Gerrit intended to teach and bring about with his book, and which, incidentally, ultimately was the effect which all of his fellow authors had in mind when writing their manuals:

73  Ibidem, fol. 29r: ‘Ende daer om sal een mensche arbeiden nyet om seer veel te lesen gheliken als sommige menschen doen die hebben grote boecsacken vol boeken ende grote lange Pater Nosters al souden si alle den dach inder kercken wesen, nochtans willen sijt al over lesen binnen eender missen ende en sien niet aen hoe ofte wat si lesen. Mer een mensche sal aensien uut wat harten dat hi biddet ofte leset, want dat ghebet sal syn vuerich, devoet ende cort van woerden [...]’. 74  On the edition and date, see Kronenberg M. E., “Een verzamelband met enige onbekende Noord-Nederlandse Postincunabelen”, in Huldeboek pater dr Bonaventura Kruitwagen O.F.M. (The Hague: 1949) 237–245; Mees L., “De datering van een nieuw-ontdekte “Misseverclaringhe” uit het begin der 16e eeuw”, Franciscana 5 (1950) 27–31; and Nijhoff W. – Kronenberg M. E., Nederlandsche bibliographie van 1500 tot 1540, III,1 (The Hague: 1951) no. 4287. Cf. Goudriaan, “Een kerkelijk catechese-offensief?” 86–87. The worn state of the woodblocks suggests that there were previous editions, although the scenes from the life of Christ may have been taken from an existing series of woodcuts.

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figure 8.4 Anonymous Master(s), “The Priest Approaches the Altar, and the Nativity”, woodcut in Verclaringe vander missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: [c. 1510?]), 8o Mettingen, Draiflessen Collection, Liberna, W 788 A II, fols 2 v–3 r

Alle dat gene dat inder missen wert gedaen hevet een sonderlinge misterium ofte devocie in hem. Also dat die priester en leset niet een woert ofte en roert niet een hant inder missen het en betekent wat van dat leven ons heren. […] Hier om sal een mensche devoteliken mit vueriger harten misse horen ende mit groter eerwaerdicheit hem daer hebben geliken ofte hi stont opten berch van calvarien ende saech aldaer onsen heren hangen aen den cruce. Och, mit wat groter devocien souden wi staen inder missen ende overdencken dat gebenedide bitter liden ons heren dat welc voer ons inder missen wert gepresenteert ende ghetoent.75

75  Van der Goude, Boexken, fols. 23v–24v.

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figure 8.5 Anonymous Master(s), “The Priest Makes the Sign of the Cross over the Chalice, and Crucifixion Scene”, woodcut in Verclaringe vander missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: [c. 1510?]), 8o Mettingen, Draiflessen Collection, Liberna, W 788 A II, fols 20 v–21 r

All that is done during Mass has a special mystery or devotion in it, in such wise that the priest does not read a word or does not move his hand without signifying some event from the life of Our Lord. […] Therefore one must hear Mass devoutly with a fervent heart and act with great reverence, as if one were standing on Mount Calvary, and there saw Our Lord hanging on the Cross. Oh, with what great devotion should we behave during Mass, and ponder the blessed bitter Passion of Our Lord, which is presented during Mass and shown to us. 4 Public Celebration – Private Devotion – Cultural History The central panel of the Seven Sacraments altarpiece attributed to Rogier van der Weyden († 1464) and his workshop, painted between 1440 and 1455,

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figure 8.6 Rogier van der Weyden, central panel of The Seven Sacraments (1440 and 1455). Oil on panel, 97 cm × 220 cm. Antwerpen, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten copyright: lukas – art in flanders vzw, foto hugo maertens

Dlabačová

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visualizes beautifully how believers were supposed to interiorize spiritual exercises complementary to celebration of the Mass [Fig. 8.6].76 Mount Calvary is transferred to a late medieval church or, better, a church transforms into Mount Calvary as a direct reflection on the celebration of the Eucharist: Christ on the cross mirrors the priest at the altar, the cross on his chasuble, and his tonsure (which signifies the crown of thorns); most importantly, the Crucifixion is compared to the elevated host, which not only signifies, but is the body of Our Lord. Just like Gerrit van der Goude’s ‘diptychs in image and text’, the painting simultaneously shows what is directly visible to the congregants and what they should see mentally. At the same time the viewer is also asked to take stock of how he must respond inwardly: the emotions he should experience are exemplified by the brightly dressed figures beneath the cross. The importance of the process of visualization is further emphasized by the size of Calvary; and the group of mourners tacitly invites the viewer to join them, to attend Mass as if he stood with them on Calvary, witnessing Christ hanging on the cross. Rogier’s painting therefore conveys the same message as the explanations of the Mass, construing congregants as bystanders and inviting them spiritually to relive Christ’s Passion while the priest celebrates Mass. The painting is not an illustration for Eucharistic doctrine; rather, in line with the allegoricalrememorative explanations of the Mass, it is an invitation to see beyond, to see in and through ritual to the spiritual significance of what the priest does at the altar.77 Seeing through the material components of the Mass and accessing their spiritual significance stimulate a devout, interiorized, meditative religious experience, allowing the audience more fully to participate in salvation history by enhancing their awareness of the redemptive significance of ‘ritual repetition’. The allegorical explanations I have been examining do not try to convince the reader of the truth of real presence through elaborate theological arguments and reasoning; they instead encourage him to engage in spiritual exegesis. Readers are invited to access the spiritual meaning of the Mass and meditatively to reflect on the events of Christ’s life as signified by ritual words 76  On the altarpiece, see Vos Dirk de, Rogier van der Weyden. Het volledige oeuvre (Antwerpen: 1999) 217–225 (cat. no. 11). The bibliography on the Seven Sacraments Altarpiece is extensive; for a summary account of its form, function, and iconographical argument, see Koslow S. J., The Chevrot Altarpiece: Its Sources, Meaning and Significance. PhD thesis (New York: 1972). Also see the chapters by Lee Palmer Wandel and Elizabeth Carson Pastan in this volume. 77  Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond” 208–240, esp. 215–216, 227–228 and 231–232, argues against interpreting the image of the Mass of Saint Gregory as an illustration of Eucharistic doctrine. Cf. De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden 220.

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and deeds of the priest-celebrant, and the ritual objects he handles. This cultivates a more emotional, and thus more deeply felt experience, which, as we have seen, was considered the most important condition for fruitful attendance at Mass. The hermeneutics that underlie these allegorical explanations seem crucial for a correct understanding of other expressions of late medieval culture, and of art in particular. The layout of Gerrit van der Goude’s thirtythree articles epitomizes the underlying hermeneutic paradigm, which is transferred from Biblical exegesis to the liturgy. In composition, the woodcuts are especially close to the Speculum humanae salvationis blockbooks: a close examination shows that every image in Gerrit’s Boexken is framed by a pillar (in various architectural styles) which is fully visible either on the left of the image (in the case of the scenes from Mass) or on the right (in the case of scenes from the life of Christ). On the other side of each image (right for the scenes from Mass; left for those from Christ’s life) we see another pillar, but here the pillar is only partially visible, sometimes even barely noticeable. It thus seems as though the ‘middle pillar’ between the two images was cut in half, almost as if one woodblock has been split into two. By placing two scenes side by side in a single architectural frame, (the structure of) the images already invites a typological reading [Figs. 8.1–8.3]. The very fact that these manuals, which invited believers, even illiterate ones, to see beyond outer signs, and to participate intensively in the celebration of the Mass, proliferated so widely and so variously, indicates that the way of thinking they sought to propagate became familiar to large sectors of the population. We may assume that people became ever more accustomed to this way of interpreting what they saw, i.e., of seeing past what was literally shown, and of descrying complex layers of allegorical meaning. 5

Final Remarks

In conclusion, I propose to speculate briefly on the possible importance of these texts, and the practice to which they testify for the interpretation and understanding of art. In his analysis of the Bladelin Triptych (1445), Bret Rothstein has argued that the pictorial narrative establishes ‘paired hierarchies of showing and seeing’.78 Through a series of revelations or visions, the painting casts the mystery of the Incarnation as a kind of ‘earthly showing’ to which ‘seeing’ is central. This seeing in turn implies an intellectual 78  Rothstein B., “Vision, Cognition, and Self-Reflection in Rogier van der Weyden’s Bladelin Triptych”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 64 (2001) 37–55, esp. 37.

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operation: ‘the Magi, Augustus and the sibyl, the shepherds and the figures gathered around the Nativity all recognize more than they view, yet what they view leads to that recognition’ (my emphasis).79 Corporeal sight is the beginning of thought and leads to a second stage, a visionary experience, and eventually to spiritual understanding and redemption. It may well be that mystical and philosophical treatises, available in the vernacular but less widespread than the texts discussed above, may help to explain this deeper dimension of ‘seeing’,80 but I would nevertheless suggest that the explanations of the Mass present us with a similar way of understanding how sight was mobilized initially to apprehend and ultimately to understand the sacrament – not primarily through the power of reason, but through vision, visualization, and emotive meditation. This path to ‘understanding’ leads to redemption. Allegorical explanations of the Mass in Dutch offer insights into the manner in which the laity was invited to experience the Mass. Although the descriptions of the priest-celebrant’s actions would sometimes have triggered a bodily response (e.g., kissing, kneeling), the main concern of the texts is to shape the believer’s thoughts and inner experience. Due to the sometimes polysemic nature of the suggested possible meanings of the ritual signs, any one particular action, object, gesture, and/or textual fragment could have been diversely interpreted. This diversity of possible meanings makes it difficult to imagine a truly uniform communal experience shared by all attendants. A more personal, varied, and individualized reception of the ritual of the Mass was the more likely response. An emphasis on individual, meditative experience is also in keeping with the many warnings against chatting and walking around during the celebration of the Eucharist, coming late, or leaving the Mass early, which must have been a frequent problem and would have disturbed the personal devotions of fellow congregants.81 Moreover, the manifold prayers meant to be recited at various moments during Mass, which have come down to us in large quantities in both manuscript and printed source material, would also have been available to devotees, sometimes in combination with an allegorical interpretation.82 Nevertheless, it is safe to presume that the experience of roughly similar meditations and more or less parallel emotions may well

79  Ibidem 40. 80  In his analysis, Rothstein, ibidem 42ff., refers to Ruusbroec amongst others. 81  Van der Goude, Boexken, fols. 29r–30r. Other examples can be found in Der sielen troest, on which, see Schmitt M., Der grosse Seelentrost. Ein niederdeutsches Erbauungsbuch des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (Köln – Graz: 1959) 95ff. 82  On Eucharistic prayers, see Caspers, De Eucharistische vroomheid 187–191.

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have created a (temporary) emotional or affective community.83 While the priest was celebrating Mass, a multitude of parallel meditative acts took place amongst those present in the church, and possibly even amongst those who were unable to attend and who partook from home, using a guide such as the one written by Gerrit van der Goude.84 Biographies of female adherents to the Modern Devotion testify to the fact that many sisters shed tears during Mass; about the Modern Devout Hendrik Mande († 1431/1432) it is said that he wept so much during Mass that he had to bring a face cloth – and even then a puddle would form beneath his seat.85 Whether the allegorical explanations sparked similarly vehement reactions is difficult to say. It is interesting to observe, however, that these texts often include meditative material intended to direct the imagination of readers; they were clearly designed to assist them in their efforts to meditate the Mass in an affective yet disciplined fashion.86 The explanations created a ‘discipline of seeing beyond signs’, of ‘trained allegorical imagination’, which helped their readers to see the sacred encompassed in the present world, and thus made visionary experiences accessible to almost everyone, even to the illiterate.87 True faith and fruitful attendance resulted not mainly from a mastery of theological argument; rather, they arose from a truly interiorized and vividly visualized engagement with the ritual of the Mass. The collective celebration of Mass became an increasingly interiorized form of private devotion, thanks to the allegorical explanations of the Mass, paradoxically achieved most effectively through the mass medium of the printing press. The majority of the authors of these allegorical manuals were members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy (Boendale is a notable exception), who in the later period happily collaborated with commercial printers. This implies that the Church supported their message. On the other hand, these texts demonstrate 83  R  osenwein B., “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions”, Passions in Context 1 (2010) 1–32. On the creation of temporary affective communities in early modern Dutch theatre, see Steenbergh K., “Compassion and the Creation of an Affective Community in the Theatre: Vondel’s Mary Stuart, or Martyred Majesty (1646)”, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 129 (2014) 90–112. 84  See Henkel, Deutsche Messübersetzungen 213–239. 85  Examples in Hanselaer A. – Deploige J., ‘“Van groeter bannicheit hoers herten’. De conditionering van de alledaagse gevoelswereld in vrouwelijke gemeenschappen uit de laatmiddeleeuwse Moderne Devotie”, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 126 (2014) 480–499; and Busch J., Des Augustinerpropstes Iohannes Busch Chronicon Windeshemense und Liber de reformatione monasteriorum, Vol. 1, ed. K. L. Grube, Historische Commission der Provinz Sachsen (Halle: 1886) 123–124. I owe this reference to Thom Mertens. 86  Cf. Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?” esp. 15–16. 87  Cf. Ibidem 16 and 23.

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that realms of private devotion (whether in the private or public sphere) were affected by and interacted with the liturgy.88 This interplay between individual and collective life, private and public experience, and between the processes of mass production and of personalization was a key element of devotion in the late Middle Ages. Bibliography I

Primary Sources

[Anon.], Die bediedenisse van der missen, met ophelderende aanteekeningen voorzien en van wege de Maatschappij van Nederlandsche Letterkunde uitgegeven, ed. A. C. Oudemans (Leiden: 1852). [Anon.], Bedudenisse der missen (Gouda, G[erard] L[eeu]: 6 August 1477). [Anon.], Spiegel des eeuwigen levens (Delft, [Jacob Jacobszoen van der Meer]: 30 October 1480). [Anon.], Verclaringe vander missen ([Gouda, Collaciebroeders: c. 1510?]). Boendale, Jan van, Der leken spieghel, ed. J. J. Mak – H. A. C. Lambermont, Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie (samenstelling en redactie), Cd-rom Middelnederlands (The Hague – Antwerp: 1998). Delf, Dirc van, Tafel van den kersten ghelove. Dl. 3A en 3B. Somerstuc, ed. L. M.Fr. Daniëls (Antwerp – Utrecht: 1938). Goude, Gerrit van der, Boexken van der missen (Gouda, Collaciebroeders: 1506). Goude, Gerrit van der, Dat boexken vander Missen = “The booklet of the Mass”, trans. P. Dreamer (London et al.: 1903). Venlo, Simon van, Boecxken van der officie ofte dienst der missen (Gouda, Gerard Leeu: 20 July 1479). Venlo Simon van, Boexken van der officien ofte dienst der missen. Naar de druk van Mathias van der Goes verschenen te Antwerpen in 1481 en bewaard in de Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek te Darmstadt (Inc. II 801), ed. L. Simons – intr. Jos. Andriessen et al. (Antwerp: 1982). Venlo Simon van, Die spieghel der volcomenheit (Antwerp, Gerard Leeu: 1488). Vliederhoven, Gerardus de, Die vier uterste, (Gouda: G[erard] L[eeu]: 6 August 1477).

88  On the notion of the ‘liturgization’ of privacy, see Lentes Th., “As Far as the Eye can See […]: Rituals of Gazing in the Late Middle Ages”, in Hamburger J. F. –Bouché A.-M. (eds.), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton: 2006) 366–370.

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Secondary Literature

Bynum C. W., “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century”, in Hamburger J. F. – Bouché A.-M. (eds.), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton: 2006). Caspers C. M. A., De Eucharistische vroomheid en het feest van sacramentsdag in de Nederlanden tijdens de late middeleeuwen (Leuven: 1992). Dlabačová A., Literatuur en observantie. De Spieghel der volcomenheit van Hendrik Herp en de dynamiek van laatmiddeleeuwse tekstverspreiding (Hilversum: 2014). Faupel-Drevs K., Vom rechten Gebrauch der Bilder im liturgischen Raum. Mittelalterliche Funktionsbestimmungen bildender Kunst im Rationale Divinorum Officiorum des Durandus von Mende (1230/1–1296) (Leiden – Boston – Köln: 2000). Goudriaan K., “Een kerkelijk catechese-offensief? Misverklaringen op de drukpers rond 1500”, in Abels P. H. A. M. – Jacobs J. – Veen M. van (eds.), Terug naar Gouda. Religieus leven in de maalstroom van de tijd (Zoetermeer: 2014). Hellinga W. Gs. – Hellinga-Querido L., The Fifteenth-Century Printing Types of the Low Countries (Amsterdam: 1966). Henkel M., Deutsche Messübersetzungen des Spätmittelalters. Untersuchungen auf der Grundlage ausgewählter Handschriften und vorreformatorischer Drucke (Wiesbaden: 2010). Holmes S. M., “Reading the Church: William Durandus and a New Approach to the History of Ecclesiology”, Ecclesiology 7 (2011) 29–49. Kronenberg M. E., “Een verzamelband met enige onbekende Noord-Nederlandse Postincunabelen”, in Huldeboek pater dr Bonaventura Kruitwagen O.F.M. (The Hague: 1949) 237–245. Mak J. J., “Boendale-studies”, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 75 (1957) 241–290. Mees L., “De datering van een nieuw-ontdekte “Misse-verclaringhe” uit het begin der 16e eeuw”, Franciscana 5 (1950) 27–31. Newman B., “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture”, Speculum 80 (2005) 1–43. Nijhoff W. – Kronenberg M.E., Nederlandsche bibliographie van 1500 tot 1540, III,1 (The Hague: 1951). Rothstein B., “Vision, Cognition, and Self-Reflection in Rogier van der Weyden’s Bladelin Triptych”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 64 (2001) 37–55. Smits van Waeberghe M., “De misverklaring van meester Simon van Venlo”, Ons Geestelijk Erf 15 (1941) 228–261, 285–327; 16 (1942) 85–129. Vos Dirk de, Rogier van der Weyden. Het volledige oeuvre (Antwerp: 1999).

chapter 9

Representing Architecture in the Altarpiece: Fictions, Strategies, and Mysteries Elizabeth Carson Pastan Gothic architectural settings feature prominently in early Netherlandish pictorial art, in such well-known fifteenth-century examples as the full-page miniature of the devotee at her prayers in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy and in Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments Altarpiece [Figs. 9.1 & 9.2]. Tall, three-story interior elevations adorn illumination and altarpiece alike, their distinctive cross-ribbed vaults straining at the upper limits of each pictorial evocation. With their height, dramatic fibrous elevations, and large gravitydefying windows, these structures offer quintessentially ‘churchy’ and transcendent environments that immediately establish a devotional context for the imagery. As I will argue, these architectural settings also provide a point of departure for the meditative engagement of the spiritually-invested devotee. For such a beholder, the painted architecture both ‘curates’ and advertises the picture’s meditative function. Paradoxically the presence of Gothic church interiors on painted altarpieces occurs at a time when contemporary building in the Low Countries was beginning to move in different directions,1 and devotional scenes were increasingly set in domestic interiors.2 Reasons for the continuing prominence of Gothic architecture include: a desire to insist upon the ecclesiastical setting for the celebration of the Mass,3 the evocation of an esteemed prototype or particular site of pilgrimage,4 and the facilitating of a spiritual pilgrimage by 1  See Ottenheym K. – De Jonge K., The Low Countries at the Crossroads: Netherlandish Architecture as an Export Product in Early Modern Europe (1480–1680), Architectura Moderna 8 (Turnhout: 2013). 2  Birkmeyer K. M., “The Arch Motif in Netherlandish Painting of the Fifteenth Century: A Study in Changing Religious Imagery: Part Two”, The Art Bulletin 43.2 (1961) 99–112. 3  Rubin M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge – New York: 1991) esp. 83–163. 4  Krautheimer, R., “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture’” reprint in idem, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art (1942; New York: 1969) 115–150; and see the unusual case presented in Labrecque C., “A Case Study of the Relationship between Painting and Flamboyant Architecture: The St.-Esprit Chapel at Rue, in Picardy”, in Blick S. –

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figure 9.1 Master of Mary of Burgundy, “Mary at her Devotions”, in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, fol. 19 verso (before 1482). Colors and ink on parchment, 19.1 × 13.3 cm Vienna Osterreichische National­ bibliothek MS 1857. Wikimedia Commons: unknown – prometheus.uni-koeln

means of the imagery.5 In this study, I will expand on the notion of a spiritual pilgrimage by examining how the distinctive Gothic architectural representaTekippe R. (eds.), Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, 2 vols. (Leiden – Boston: 2005) I 77–95. 5  Botvinick M., “The Painting as Pilgrimage: Traces of a Subtext in the Works of Campin and his Contemporaries”, Art History 15.1 (1992) 1–18; Falkenburg R., “Hans Memling’s Van Nieuwenhove Diptych: The Place of Prayer in Early Netherlandish Devotional Painting”, in Hand J. O. – Spronk R. (eds.), Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (Cambridge, MA: 2006) 92–109; Hull V. J., “Spiritual Pilgrimage in the Paintings of Hans Memling”, in Blick – Tekippe (eds.), Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage I 29–50;

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figure 9.2 Rogier van der Weyden, Seven Sacraments Altarpiece (ca. 1445–1450). Oil on panel, 200 × 223 cm Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Wikimedia Commons: public domain

tions of fifteenth-century Netherlandish altarpieces both invite and encourage the beholder’s meditative engagement. Many pictorial representations of Gothic architecture offer settings that, at least on a first level of viewing, were easily grasped by any fifteenth-century contemporary. Given the clear functional and spatial hierarchies within the sacred topography of a church, a different symbolism for the Virgin is suggested by the setting alone through her appearance in a choir [Fig. 9.1], as opposed to her presentation within a nave [Fig. 9.3]. But beyond these kinds of locational associations, it is the argument of this study that the architectural settings could invite the willing beholder to engage in a higher mode of seeing. and Rudy K. M., Virtual pilgrimages in the convent: imagining Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages (Turnhout: 2011).

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Recent scholarship has contributed to a heightened awareness of architectural representation, in recognizing boldly anachronistic elements,6 and in drawing attention to devices which routinely ‘haunt’ the settings of religious scenes.7 Such elements lead the beholder to think beyond the appearance of the setting, however compellingly rendered.8 Yet the potential of the built environment to serve in a meditative context remains largely unexplored.9 Indeed, traditional ways of thinking about architectural representation, which focus on determining whether a given setting is real or imagined, have remained strongly entrenched, particularly when a potentially identifiable church interior is at stake.10 6  N  agel A. – Wood C. S. “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism”, The Art Bulletin 87.3 (2005) 403–415; and idem, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: 2010) esp. 147–158. 7  Acres A., Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy (Turnhout: 2013) esp. 5–12, 24–27, and 230–238. One of Acres’ key examples is the Proleptic Passion, but he finds many other intriguingly disruptive elements, including demons, wasps’ nests, bestiary creatures, and sleeping figures that evoke death. The cobwebs found in the vaults of Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church [Fig. 9.3], noted by Harbison C., Jan van Eyck: The Play of Realism (London: 1991) 232, are yet another example of this phenomenon; as is the dilapidated wooden ceiling in Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation [Fig. 9.7], discussed in tandem by Gifford E. M., “Van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation: Technical Evidence for Iconographic Development”, The Art Bulletin 81.1 (1999) 108–116 at 111–112, and Purtle C. J., “Van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation: Narrative Time and Metaphoric Tradition”, ibidem 117–125 at 117–118. Also see the astute comments on the haunted Infancy by David Areford in this volume. 8  Both Acres, Renaissance Invention 223–30 and Hamburger J., “Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion”, in Nova A. – Krüger K. (eds.), Imagination und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bilder in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Alessandro Nova & Klaus Krüger (Mainz: 2000) 47–70 at 48–55 discuss the fact that the modern viewer’s appreciation for the naturalistic rendering of fifteenth-century works of art may contribute to a mistaken conception of the intentions behind this artistry. Acres, Renaissance Invention esp. 227, 231 and 237 instead uses descriptive terms such as ‘fullness’, ‘experiential unity’, and ‘realized settings’, to evoke the accomplished pictorial language of these works in terms that encompass what he views as their ‘interactive ambitions’. 9  Hamburger, “Seeing and Believing” uses a selection of different works by Jan van Eyck in order to focus on mimetic strategies within his figural imagery. For stimulating thinking about the architectural setting in meditative terms – albeit within a seemingly domestic interior – see Falkenburg R., “The Household of the Soul: Conformity in the Merode Triptych”, in Ainsworth M. (ed.), Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads (New York: 2001) 2–17. 10  See the overview in Pastan E. C., “Building Stories: The Representation of Architecture in the Bayeux Embroidery”, Anglo-Norman Studies 33 (2011) 150–185. This kind of binary approach to architectural representation also informs Birkmeyer K. M., “The Arch Motif in Netherlandish Painting of the Fifteenth Century: A Study in Changing Religious Imagery: Part One”, The Art Bulletin 43.1 (1961) 1–20. For the treatment of the well-known architectural vistas in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 [Hartmut Schedel, Registrum huius operis

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In this contribution, I seek to offer an interpretive framework that sets aside this binary and to offer instead an approach that focuses on these painted interiors through the notion of their artistic curation, which as we shall see, involves recognizing the artist’s creative combination of found and factitious elements, a combination that I will argue encourages the beholder to think with and past the forms depicted. In this sense, then, the architectural setting can lead to the apprehension of the sacred mysteries; the complex relation between actual and virtual functions in my reading as prompt for representing and meditating upon the mysteries of faith. “Curation” in the sense that I will be using it here encompasses the thoughtful and self-conscious artistic choices that combine real and imagined modes of viewing. It is a realm that Saint Augustine (354–430) himself was highly aware of, as we shall see, when he addressed the reader of one of his exegetical works directly, and remarked, you are gazing on a building in this world – how is it that you have now come to the hidden place of God’s house?11 After identifying several different ways that the setting alone encourages further engagement in select and well-known depictions of Gothic architectural interiors, I will then turn to the question of how architectural depictions function within multi-paneled winged altarpieces. In concluding, I will focus on a key element of a Gothic aesthetic – the rose window – to show how its mode of presentation may reflect the meditative role I identify within the settings of these altarpieces. 1

Representing Architecture in Augustine and Albertus

Instructive parallels for the specificity of the Gothic architectural settings of early Netherlandish altarpieces are found in monastic rhetoric, where awareness of one’s surroundings constitutes the first stage of meditation, and spatial and directional metaphors play an essential role.12 The commentary of Saint Libri cronicarum cu[m] figuris et ijmagibus ab inicio mu[n]di (Nuremberg, Anton Koberger: 1493) see Rücker E., Die Schedelsche Weltchronik: Das gr.sste Buchunternehman der Dürer-Zeit, Bibliothek des Germanischen Nationalmuseums Nürnberg zur deutschen Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte, 33 (Munich: 1973) 85–124 for a catalogue of the ‘authentic’ views, and 126–129 for the ‘fantasy’ views.. There is now an English translation of the Chronicle, available online through Beloit University: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/ cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=nur;cc=nur;view=toc;idno=nur.001.0004 Accessed 14 November 2017]. 11  Carruthers M., The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400– 1200 (Cambridge: 1998) 252, and see further discussion infra at n. 90. 12  Ibidem 221–276. Also see Ehrstine G., “Framing the Passion: Mansion Staging as Visual Mnemonic”, in Gertsman E. (ed.), Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives,

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Augustine on Psalm 41 offers an exemplary demonstration of the kind of meditative guide the beholder might employ in visually engaging with the representation of architecture in a work of art.13 Augustine focuses upon the tabernacle mentioned in verse 5 of the psalm, Haec recordatus sum, et effudi in me animam meam, quoniam transibo in locum tabernaculi admirabilis, usque ad domum Dei […] These things I remembered, and poured out my soul in me: for I shall go over into the place of the wonderful tabernacle, even to the house of God […]14 Developing this reference to a tabernacle, Augustine imagines wandering about a building, gazing on those things that compel him, and following the sound of music he hears, even as he leaves the noise of the world. Tabernaculum is a term that can refer to a temporary dwelling such as a tent, to a shrine, or to a house of worship. Augustine elaborates on the third of these, a house of worship, as the actual physical setting of the space is underscored by the concrete sensory language he employs in word choices such as ingredior, errare, ambulare, admirare, audire, and spectare.15 Yet Augustine recalibrates these things he experiences corporeally; he characterises the tabernacle as a place one enters, but also as a metaphor for the faithful men of God on earth, as the disciplined quest of the soul seeking God, and as an inner sanctuary. One can see why Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 41 was understood to be ‘about’ devotional meditation, because it uses the trope of movement through Histories, Contexts (Aldershot: 2008) 266–277, esp. 269, where the author notes that although Carruthers largely focuses on the art of memory before 1200, her identification of a strategy of moving through both physical and mental loci has broader applicability. 13  Carruthers, Craft of Thought 80, 251–254. For Augustine’s full text see Sancti Aurelii Augustini, Enarrationes in Psalmos I-L, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956) 459–474; The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Part III, Vol. 16: Expositions of the Psalms, 30–50, trans. M. Boulding (Hyde Park, New York: 1999) 239–264. Also useful are the facing Latin and French translations in Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 59/A: Les Commentaires des Psaumes, Ennarrationes in Psalmos, Ps 37–44 (Paris: 2017) 366–421; this volume includes a helpful historiographic orientation, 355–365, emphasizing that Augustine’s interpretation of the psalm was a departure from earlier exegesis, which had focused on the sacrament of baptism. 14  All biblical citations are from the Douay-Rheims translation. See The Vulgate Bible: DouayRheims Translation, eds. S. Edgar and A. M. Kinney, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 2010–2013). 15  ‘To enter’, ‘To wander’, ‘to walk’, ‘to admire’, ‘to hear’, and ‘to view’; Carruthers, Craft of Thought 253.

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a structure as a means to convey the beholder’s progression from external eye to inner harmony with God.16 Ultimately, by proceeding through the ever more interiorised stages Augustine describes, the devotee will leave the corporeal world altogether, with the visual serving as both a focus and as a kind of hinge towards another way of seeing.17 While Augustine’s commentary was the basis through which Christian monastic culture understood the psalm’s significance, this kind of locational imagination was developed more broadly throughout the later Middle Ages. In his discussion of memory, for example, Albertus Magnus (ca. 1220–1280), made the point that ‘place’ is required for the mental task of recollection, and may entail likenesses of existing things, though they themselves are not real.18 This kind of memory training, which portrays ‘place’ as ‘that which the soul makes for storing-up images’,19 and promotes thinking ‘per similitudinem et translationem et metaphoram’ (‘through likeness and transference and metaphor’), informs the way that the attuned beholder approaches the architectural settings portrayed in devotional works.20 It encourages a nimbleness of thinking with – and through – the places depicted. Other representative examples of the broad application of monastic rhetorical strategies include the teaching of the Victorines and their use of heuristic devices such as Noah’s Ark,21 Franciscan spiritual works emphasizing 16  Ibidem 251–253; Stock B., Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (London: 1998) 1–18 and 113–116; and Biernoff S., Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: 2002) 133–164, esp. her chapter 6, entitled “Ocular Communion”. 17  A point developed in Hamburger, “Seeing and Believing”, esp. his concluding remarks 60– 61; and Falkenburg R. “Hieronymus Bosch’s Mass of St. Gregory and ‘sacramental vision’”, in Gormans A. – Lentes T. (eds.), Das Bild der Erscheinung. Die Gregorsmesse im Mittelalter (Berlin: 2007) 179–206. 18  Carruthers, Craft of Thought 13, citing her own translation of Albertus Magnus, De bono, Tractatus IV, Quaestio II “De Partibus Prudentia”, in eadem, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge – New York: 2008) Appendix B, 267–280 at 277. For the full Latin text see Albertus Magnus, Opera omnia ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum edenda, apparatu critico, notis, prolegomenis, vol. 28: De Bono, “Tractatus Quartus. De Prudentia”, ed. B. Geyer (Cologne, 1951) 245–258. 19  ‘[…] quem sibi facit anima ad reservationem imagines’. Albertus Magnus, Opera omnia 28 250; Carruthers, Craft of Thought 14; eadem, Book of Memory 277. In this passage, Albertus gives as examples the way joy could be associated with a meadow, or feebleness with an infirmary. 20  Albertus Magnus, Opera omnia 28 250; Carruthers, Craft of Thought 14; eadem, Book of Memory 277. 21  For Hugh of Saint Victor’s teaching aid known as the Mystic Ark of ca. 1125–30, see Rudolph C., The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century (New York: 2014).

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heightened emotional identification such as the Meditationes Vitae Christi,22 and the Devotio moderna movement in the Low Countries.23 An example from the Devotio moderna is the Spiritual Tabernacle of Jan Ruusbroec (ca. 1293/94–1381), which expounds on the theme of a spiritual journey that may begin with an architectonic reference but quickly moves on. Ruusbroec lays emphasis on the how ‘the meditative Holy of Holies constructed within the believer’s heart differs from the historic tabernacle [of Psalm 41] in that it has become a profoundly Christological shrine for the “mutual indwelling” of the incarnate God’.24 2

Exemplary Structures: the Hours of Mary of Burgundy & the Seven Sacraments Altarpiece

Returning to the Hours of Mary of Burgundy [Fig. 9.1], we can see that the setting of the illumination is so persuasively rendered that it might reasonably be viewed as an actual church interior.25 But closer inspection reveals that the image selectively combines aspects of a church environment. Despite the realistic detail surrounding the Duchess of Burgundy (1477–1482) in the foreground, including her book of hours, lap dog, and the bull’s eye window 22  See Flora H., The Devout Belief of the Imagination: the Paris Meditationes Vitae Christi and Female Franciscan Spirituality in Trecento Italy (Turnhout: 2009), with further bibliography. 23  John Ruusbroec: The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, trans. J. A. Wiseman (New York: 1985) 146, where he enjoins his reader seeking meditative guidance, ‘See’. I acknowledge with gratitude Geert Warnar’s helpful comments at the colloquium. See his foundational publication, Ruusbroec: Literature and Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century, trans. D. Webb, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 150 (Leiden – Boston: 2007). 24  Wise E., “Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Ruusbroec: Reading, Rending, and ReFashioning the ‘Twice-Dyed’ Veil of Blood in the Escorial Crucifixion”, in Melion W. S. – Clifton J. – Weemans M. (eds.), Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700 (Leiden – Boston: 2014) 387–422 at 399. 25  On this work, see the facsimile volume with commentary by Inglis E., The Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Ganzlichter der Buchkunst 3 (London: 1993), and further works cited in his Annotated Bibliography, 72–75; and Rothstein B., “The Rule of Metaphor and the Play of the Viewer in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy”, in Falkenburg R. L. – Melion W. S. – Richardson T. M. (eds.), Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Lovis Corinth Colloquium 1 (Turnhout: 2007) 37–69. The complexities of this fullpage illumination are further underscored by the facing page of text, which does not relate to the imagery in a straightforward way. The text offers a discursive account of how Thomas of Canterbury came to write the hymn of praise to the Virgin, ‘Gaude flore virginali’ (‘Rejoice in the Flower of Virginity’), one of three prayers that follows in this book of hours before the office of the Virgin begins.

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panes of the shutters immediately behind her,26 there is no known architectural equivalent for the window seat-type space before a church choir that the Duchess occupies.27 In contrast, any fifteenth-century Christian beholder of this image could deduce that the background scene presenting the Virgin and child takes place in a church chancel – the sanctuary within the choir – enclosed on four sides by the choir screen, which is shown here most prominently in the horizontal architectonic elements to the left side of the altar.28 Noteworthy, however, is the fact that the front elevation of choir screen, which is characteristically the western side of the enclosure that would run parallel to the picture plane and would face the Duchess of Burgundy and the viewer, is missing. This strategic omission permits a better view of the scene within the choir, which evokes a Mass through elements including the presentation of the body of Christ before the altar, a deacon censing, and lighted candles. The analogies between the way Mary of Burgundy holds her book in a rich green cloth and the way the Virgin Mary holds the infant Jesus on a white cloth that recalls the corporal invite the beholder to move back and forth between the foreground and background of the image.29 The book of hours in which the image appears provides a context for the beholder’s engagement; as Eric Inglis has observed, ‘Mary of Burgundy’s book, which she might have used in a church, suggested to her that the Eucharistic liturgy was an important avenue to the divine contact she desired’.30 The image of Mary of Burgundy at her prayers offers a resonant juxtaposition of devotee and divine service precisely because it ignores architectural norms and ritual boundaries such as the choir screen.31 Ultimately, the cura26  Panofsky E., Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols. (New York: 1971) I 27, only discusses this illumination once in his text, when he refers to the elements with the foreground that offer ‘a charming collection of what was considered de rigueur for a lady’. 27  Inglis, Hours of Mary of Burgundy 22. 28  On choir screens generally, see Jung J. E., The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–1400 (Cambridge: 2012) 93–103, and 199–207 discussing their frequent removal following the Council of Trent. 29  For a contemporaneous image of Mary of Burgundy in a different mode of presentation, see the stained-glass window of her from the Chapel of the Holy Blood in Bruges, ca. 1496, in Williamson P., Medieval and Renaissance Stained Glass in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: 2003) 144–145, cat. no. 57, with color plate. 30  Inglis, Hours of Mary of Burgundy 22. 31  A parallel for the bypassing of boundaries is the text of the fifteenth-century English mystic Margery Kempe (ca. 1373-after 1438), who writes herself into such restricted spaces as the choir screen and sacristy. For the spaces inhabited by Margery, see Raguin V. C. – Stanbury S. (eds.), Women’s Space: Patronage, Pace and Gender in the Medieval Church

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tion of architectonic elements within the illumination leads us to question whether the Gothic chancel in the background is a real church or the devotee’s vision of one, and to wonder if the devotions of Mary of Burgundy in the foreground have led her to a special kind of sight.32 Significantly, the duchess does not look at the scene in the background, but appears to summon it internally from her meditation on her book, an image that models the correct use of the book of hours where it appears. More convincingly offered as an actual Gothic setting is Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments Altarpiece [Fig. 9.2], because he has aligned the three parts of the triptych with the nave and side aisles of an architectural structure.33 The illusionistically-painted architecture posits a reciprocal relationship between the altarpiece and the larger structure of the church where it resided, and scholars have not hesitated to suggest the real-life models for the interior setting, including Saint Gudule in Brussels, Tournai Cathedral, and Saint Hippolytus in Poligny.34 Yet here too, the way in which the painted (Albany: 2005) 1–21. Also see Arnold J. – Lewis K. J. (eds.) A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: 1994); and the website Mapping Margery Kempe http:// college.holycross.edu/projects/kempe/, Accessed 22 October 2017. A visual analogy for this kind of window onto a supernatural vision may be found in apocalyptic representations, where Saint John gazes through an ostium apertum, a small aperture into the heavens. On the motif of the ‘ostium apertum’, see Freyhan R., “Joachism and the English Apocalypse”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18 (1955) 211–244, esp. 232– 234. Binski P., “English Parish Church”, Studies in Iconography 20 (1999) 1–25 at 14 has suggested that images of Saint John peering through a window in medieval Apocalypse manuscripts may be taken from the visual experience of a parishioner looking through a ‘squint’, or opening in a choir screen. For more on squints, see the introduction to Raguin – Stanbury (eds.), Women’s Space 6–10. 32  Harbison C., “Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 15.2 (1985) 87–118 esp. 91, 95–99, has put forth the provocative suggestion that in scenes featuring a figure in prayer before a devotional scene or figure, what we are seeing is the donor’s vision. In this scene, however, I would suggest that the purposeful ambiguity of what is shown engages the beholder. 33  On the Seven Sacraments Altarpiece, see De Vos D., Rogier van der Weyden: The Complete Works (New York: 1999) 217–225; Kemperdick S., Rogier van der Weyden, 1399/1400–1464 (Cologne: 1999) 46–49; and Koslow S. J., The Chevrot Altarpiece: Its Sources, Meaning and Significance, Ph.D. dissertation (New York University: 1972). The work is generally dated ca. 1445–50; see résumé in De Vos, Rogier 225, n. 13. Also see the contribution by Anna Dlabačová in this volume. 34  According to Kemperdick, Rogier van der Weyden 46, it is based on Saint Gudule (now Saint Michael’s Cathedral) in Brussels. Also see De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden 220, who noted Willibald Sauerländer’s observation that it is rare to find barrel vaults in the aisles, a feature of Tournai Cathedral, the location favoured by Koslow, Chevrot Altarpiece 93–100. De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden 221–223 reviews the literature on the question of which church the altarpiece was intended for.

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architecture and the imagery within play off one another suggests that we are not looking at a mere portrait of a building. Among other correspondences between architecture and figural imagery is the fact that the vaults of the building easily encompass the large miraculous scene of the Crucifixion at centre, whose form is replicated in the transept arms of the church.35 Beneath the lightly-angled gold tromp l’oeil painted frames of the altarpiece that guide the beholder’s approach,36 the interior setting seemingly effortlessly accommodates small anecdotal scenes of all seven sacraments, but presents them strategically within different gradations of space. Befitting its role as the most important sacrament of the church, the Eucharist is the only sacrament shown in the central panel of the triptych, behind the depiction of the Crucifixion. The altarpiece’s structure, which includes a strikingly porous choir screen, creates a sense of openness linking all forms of social life – from cradle to grave – to the liturgical and administrative provision of the church.37 This point is not only underscored by the juxtaposition of an infant in the left foreground (within the depiction of the sacrament of Baptism) to a dying person (in a nave chapel at right where Last Rites are performed), but also by the banderoles borne by angels throughout the setting that expound on each sacrament. The Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments Altarpiece frame this study in suggesting how the presentation of the architecture is intimately tied to the beholder’s apprehension of the sacred mysteries. This method of approach – which comprehends the architectural setting as curated to involve the beholder, and as a means to lead the willing devotee along a path of spiritual discovery – will now be applied to several works in which architecture figures prominently, including Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church [Fig. 9.3] and his Annunciation in Washington D.C. [Fig. 9.7]. The example of Van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church was particularly influential, since it was the source of inspiration for copies in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries [Figs. 9.5 & 9.6].

35  A connection widely recognized by medieval exegetes. See, for example, William Durand’s commentary in Book 1,14 in The Rationale Divinorum Officiorum of William Durand of Mende, trans. T. M. Thibodeau (New York: 2007) 16. 36  De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden 217–219 on the gold-painted frame-within-the frame that defines the architectural setting within the altarpiece. 37  Rubin M., “Sacramental Life”, in Rubin M. – Simons W. (eds.) Christianity in Western Europe c. 1100-c. 1500 (Cambridge: 2009) 219–237, esp. 220, 290.

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Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church

Jan van Eyck’s lovely Virgin in the Church, the small panel now in Berlin [Fig. 9.3],38 embodies the visual similitude, ‘the Virgin Mary in a Church, and as The Church’.39 Mary is literally larger than life, and even Erwin Panofsky set aside his approach of disguised symbolism in discussing the work.40 Several buildings have been put forth as the possible source of inspiration for the church in this panel including monuments in Ghent, Saint-Denis, Dijon, Liège, Tongeren, and Cologne.41 The church setting Jan van Eyck created, however, is likely neither an actual nor an imagined building, but a stunning hybrid, which by its familiarity assists the beholder in entering into the fictive space of the panel. How might this panel further serve as a machine for the beholder’s imaginative and devotional engagement? A Gothic structure such as this one, with its measurable interior setting delineated by vaulted bays that mark the building’s progress across space towards the choir and by horizontal tiers within the elevation that signal the structure’s upward trajectory [Fig. 9.3], is particularly well suited to the mental task of locating one’s self in space. The oblique perspective onto the interior of the Virgin in the Church is so clearly laid out that Panofsky provided a diagram of where the scene is set within the penultimate bay of the nave [Fig. 9.4], before the transept crossing.42 But the ‘actual’ setting is simultaneously configured as replete with relationships that prompt the beholder to think past appearances, ‘through likeness

38  From the extensive literature on the painting, see Weale W. H. J., Hubert and John van Eyck: Their Life and Work (London – New York: 1908), available online: https://archive.org/ details/hubertjohnvaneyc00wealuoft; Herzog E., “Zur Kirchenmadonna van Eycks”, Berliner Museen VI Jahrgang (1956) 2–16; Dhanens E., Hubert and Jan van Eyck (New York: 1980) 316–328, with provenance and historiography; Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting) I 144–148; Purtle C. J., The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton: 1982) 144–156; and Harbison C., “Miracles Happen: Image and Experience in Jan van Eyck’s Madonna in a Church”, in Cassidy B. (ed.), Iconography at the Crossroads, Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers 2 (Princeton: 1993) 157–170. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting I 193 dates it to ca. 1425–1427, but see Snyder J., “The Chronology of Jan van Eyck’s Paintings”, in Bruyn J. – Emmens J. A. – De Jongh E. – Snoep D. P. (eds.), Album Amicorum J.G. Van Gelder (The Hague: 1973) 293–297 advocating for a ca. 1437–1440 dating, which is adopted by Purtle, Marian Paintings 155–156. 39  Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting I 145. 40  Ibidem I 147. 41  Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck 316–328, with provenance and historiography; also see Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck 191. 42  Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting I 434.

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figure 9.3 Jan van Eyck, Madonna in the Church (ca. 1425–1440). Oil on panel, 31 × 14 cm Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Wikimedia Commons

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figure 9.4 Ground plan after the church in Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church, from Panofsky E., Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (New York: 1971) I 434 Courtesy of Harvard University Press

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and transference and metaphor’.43 The very plausible-looking building, for example, also serves as an envelope for the standing figure of the Virgin, its architectonic shape echoing hers, in the tall vaults that conform to the inclination of her head under its heavy crown.44 The two crossing piers appear to rest on her shoulders.45 By virtue of her placement within the nave, well before the choir screen, the setting emphasizes Mary’s accessibility, underscoring her role as the chief intercessor in the redemption offered by Christ.46 Visual alignments within the painting, such as the comparison of the Virgin’s bodice with the open door into the choir screen, recall her role as porta coeli, or gateway to heaven.47 The crucifix that rises from the central gable of the choir screen (easily located on Panofsky’s plan by the steps he indicated [Fig. 9.4], which precede the screen) creates a striking internal juxtaposition as the mature Christ on the cross appears to gaze down at his infant self in his mother’s arms, his entire mortal life encompassed in this carefully curated encounter. Individual elements present themselves as capable of both ‘real’ and symbolic interpretations, as the beholder must discover, taking in and prioritizing the many different visual prompts within, only a few of which can be discussed here. The pools of light on the pavement behind the Virgin to the right, for example, are central to Panofsky’s case that this is supernatural light, independent of the laws of astronomy, because the light comes in from the north, perennially the more muted side of an oriented building.48 The light is conspicuously reflected in two discrete spots, usually glossed as allusions to the human and divine natures of Christ.49 It is also the case, however, that late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century churches in eastern France and Alsace had small double rose windows on their transept arms, still evident in the south transept of Strasbourg Cathedral.50 In adapting this window type, Jan van Eyck may have 43  See n. 18 above for the discussion of Albertus Magnus’ use of these terms. 44  Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck 325. 45  Purtle, Marian Paintings 147. 46  On this theme, see Lane B. G., The Altar and the Altarpiece: Sacramental Themes in Early Netherlandish Painting (New York: 1984) 16–27; also see Purtle, Marian Paintings 3–15 on Marian imagery generally, and 52–54 on themes of house and temple in the body of the Virgin. 47  Jung, Gothic Screen 96–98. 48  Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting I 47–48. 49  On two light sources representing the two natures of Christ, see Gottlieb C., “En ipse stat post parietem nostrum: The Symbolism of the Ghent Altarpiece”, Bulletin des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 19 (1975) 75–100 at 77. 50  For the south transept roses of Strasbourg Cathedral, see Meyer J.-P. – Kurmann-Schwarz B., Cathédrale de Strasbourg Choeur et Transept: de l’art roman au gothique (vers 1180–1240)

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intended that these dimples of light serve the central conceit of the panel, that the Virgin is the single largest and most luminous element in the setting. As the partial inscription on the hem of her gown suggests, she is ‘candor lucis aeternae’ or the ‘brightness of eternal light’.51 Rather than read each inscription literally or gloss each component of the interior separately, however, the engaged beholder must establish a means of encompassing all its imagery in such a way that they lead to greater understanding.52 The notion that the architectural setting can lead to the apprehension of the sacred mysteries would have been further reinforced when the original frame was in place. According to several nineteenth-century accounts, the wooden frame added about 5 centimetres all around the panel, making the presentation more window-like, and thus recalling another epithet of the Virgin, as fenestra coeli, or window of heaven.53 This concept was elaborated upon by the inscription originally on the frame, which quoted the first stanza of a Nativity hymn.54 Significantly, the inscription ended with ‘ETCET’, or ‘et cetera’, surely exhorting the viewer to summon to mind the rest of the hymn, but perhaps also actively soliciting the beholder’s full engagement, along the lines suggested by Augustine.55 According to Millard Meiss, an altarpiece or diptych is a work of art whose main purpose was to establish a direct, sympathetic, and intimate emotional (Strasbourg: 2010) 251–270; and Pastan E. C., “Regarding the Early Rose Window”, in Pastan E. C. – Kurmann-Schwarz B. (eds.), Investigations in Medieval Stained Glass: Medium, Methods, Expressions, Brill Reading Medieval Sources series, (Leiden, 2010) 269–281. Jung J., “Moving Viewers, Moving Pictures: The Portal as Montage on the Strasbourg South Transept”, in Beyer A. – Cassegrain G. (eds.), Mouvement. Bewegung: Úber die dynamischen Potenziale der Kunst (Berlin: 2015) 23–43 at 31 discusses the evocation of the Strasbourg south transept portal in Matthias Grünewald’s Stuppach Madonna of 1518. 51  Meiss M., “Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings”, The Art Bulletin 27.3 (1945) 180. The phrase is taken from Wisdom 8:29 & 26: ‘Haec est speciosior sole, super omnem stellarum dispositionem. Luca comparata invenitur pior. Candor est enim lucis aeternae, speculum sine macula Dei majestatis’. As Meiss notes, Van Eyck repeated this inscription in at least three other works. Also see Grabbe L. L., The Wisdom of Solomon, T & T Clark Study Guides (London: 1997). 52  See Carruthers, Craft of Thought 61, 77–83, and 92–94, for her articulation of a ductus, or the movement and conduct of the mind along a path of discovery, which is a term she also locates, 252, in Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 41. 53  See Purtle, Marian Paintings 7–8; and Gottlieb C., “Respiciens per Fenestras: The Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece”, Oud Holland 85 (1970) 65–84, esp. 68, 78–79. 54  Quoted in full in Meiss, “Light as Form and Symbol” 179. I am grateful to my colleague James Morey, who attended the conference, for discussion of the inscription. 55  Ibidem, 180. Falkenburg, “Hans Memling’s Van Nieuwenhove Diptych” 98–99, views the words of the antiphon Salve Regina on other altarpieces as such a prompt.

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relationship between the spectator and the sacred figures pictured.56 As briefly resumed here, Marian hymn, artistic curation, and the beholder’s willingness to move through and beyond painted appearance converge in Jan van Eyck’s exquisite panel. Many of the means by which this emotional relationship is established – including the stunning naturalism of its pictorial language, partial inscriptions within and surrounding the panel, and symbolic use of elements such as light – are well known, but to date the potential of architectural setting itself to involve the beholder has not been explicitly explored. Yet for a viewer instructed by Augustine’s widely-known commentaries on the psalms, by monastic locational memory exercises, or by contemporary practices associated with the Devotio moderna movement, an attentive visual journey through the panel allows the prominent and diagram-ready depiction of architecture to lead beyond itself, to an inner tabernacle of union with God. The discussion of the frame and its original inscription in Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church serves as a reminder of the fact that few early Netherlandish diptychs have been preserved in their original configuration. Frame clasps along the right edge of the panel indicate that it was once the left wing of a diptych, and Mary’s downward gaze is directed to the right, encompassing a no longer extant pendant wing [Fig. 9.3]. Characteristically in a diptych, the panel on the viewer’s left features a saint or divinity, as the Virgin Mary here, while its complement portrays a devotee in prayer.57 This is the case in the two later diptychs [Figs. 9.7 & 9.8] that were plainly inspired by the Virgin in the Church.58 56  M  eiss M., Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: 1951) 145. Meiss’ definition is quoted in Purtle, Marian Paintings 57 n. 61. Harbison, “Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting” 99 observed that the altarpiece’s importance for contemporary beholders is reflected in the fact that lay donors greatly outnumbered clerical donors. Also see the contribution by Donna Sadler in this volume. 57  On the importance of the dexter panel, see Kemperdick S., “I Tableau à II Hysseoires – A Panel with Two Wings: Altarpieces with and without Foldable Wings at the Time of Roger van der Weyden” in Kemperick S. – Sander J. (eds.) The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden, exh. cat., Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (Ostfildern: 2009) 118; and Verougstraete H., “Diptychs with Instructions for Use”, in Hand J. O. – Spronk R. (eds.), Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (Cambridge, MA: 2006) 156–71, which is excerpted from her book, Frames and Supports in 15th- And 16th-Century Southern Netherlandish Painting: Contributions to the Study of the Flemish Primitives, Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage 13, (Brussels: 2015) 157–186. This work is available as an e-book through the Getty Foundation’s Panel Paintings Initiative: http:// org.kikirpa.be/frames (accessed 12 November 2017). 58  On these later copies see Purtle, Marian Paintings 155–156, and Yiu Y., “Hinging Past and Present: Diptych Variants of Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church”, in Hand – Spronk, Essays in Context 110–123. A small diptych is pictured hanging over the donor’s bed in the De Hondt Diptych [Fig. 9.5], as noted in Purtle, Marian Paintings 144–145.

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These later works offer further clues as to how Jan van Eyck’s panel painting may have originally appeared. 4

Inspired by Jan: the Diptych of Christaan de Hondt and the Doria-Pamphilj Diptych

Both the earlier copy by the Master of 1499 [Fig. 9.5], and the copy attributed to Jan Gossaert in ca. 1510–13 explicitly adapt Van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church for the left wing, but their right wings differ dramatically.59 The right wing of the Master of 1499’s diptych shows Abbot Christaan de Hondt in an interior setting with its wooden ceiling, cosy rug, and fireplace lending a domestic air [Fig. 9.5], while the later copy­depicts the donor Antonio Siciliano accompanied by his namesake, Saint Anthony, in a verdant landscape [Fig. 9.6].60 Besides the evident inspiration of Jan’s Virgin in a Church for their left wings, what these later diptychs share is their picturing, however differently, of models of prayerful meditation in the right hand panels, allowing the beholder to see the bodily activity of devotion and to imagine adopting such reverence.61 The effort required of the beholder is underscored by the strikingly discontinuous architectural settings of the wings in these diptychs, which is a point to which I shall return. Hélène Verougstraete has suggested subliminal means by which the viewer connects the wings of Christaan de Hondt’s diptych – despite their disjointed appearance – in persuasively demonstrating that the panels’ multiple vanishing point contribute to forging a unity between the two wings.62 5

Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation

If Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in a Church allowed us to focus on how the painted interior contributes to the notion of place as a starting point for the willing 59  Harbison, “Miracles Happen” 161 drew attention to the prayer tract on the compound pier to the left of the Virgin, which as he points out, is the only detail in the interior that is not part of the building’s structure or choir apparatus, and is retained in both later copies [see Fig. 9.6]. 60  Yiu, “Hinging Past and Present” 117–118 on the later artist’s decision to append a modern counterpart to a masterpiece of a bygone era. As Yiu notes, 119, to accomplish this contrast, Gossaert expands Jan’s composition laterally with another row of piers to the right that has the effect of closing off the composition and locating the Virgin in the middle axis of the painting. 61  Sand A., Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art (New York: 2014) 1–26. 62  Verougstraete, “Diptychs with Instructions for Use” 164–165.

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figure 9.5 Master of 1499, Diptych of Abbot Christian de Hondt (ca. 1499). Oil on panel, each panel approximately 37.1 × 20.4 cm Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Wikimedia Commons

beholder’s meditative engagement, his Annunciation in Washington D.C. [Fig. 9.7]63 highlights the importance of establishing a path for moving 63  The literature on this panel includes De Tolnay C., “Flemish Paintings in the National Gallery of Art”, Magazine of Art 34 (1941) 174–200; Hand J. O. – Wolff M., Early Netherlandish Painting, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (New York: 1986) 75–86; Ward J. L., “Hidden Symbolism in Jan van Eyck’s Annunciations”, The Art Bulletin 57 (1975) 196–220; Purtle, Marian Paintings 40–58; and Lyman T. W., “Architectural Portraiture and Jan van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation”, Gesta 20.1 (1981) 263–271. Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck 355–358 found it lacking in the “rigor” of Van Eyck’s manner, although conservation of the panel, discussed by Gifford, “Van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation: Technical Evidence” and Purtle, “Van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation: Narrative Time and Metaphoric Tradition”, as well as their contributions in Foister S. – Jones S. – Cool D. (eds.), Investigating Jan van Eyck (Turnhout: 2000) 59–66 and 67–78, respectively, have set aside doubts about Jan van Eyck’s authorship. Panofsky,

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figure 9.6 Attributed to Jan Gossaert, Doria-Pamphilj Diptych (ca. 1510–13). Oil on panel, each panel approximately 40 × 22 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome. Detail of the right wing showing Saint Anthony with a donor Wikimedia Commons: Web Gallery of Art

mindfully towards a deeper level of understanding.64 As Mary Carruthers has observed, the starting place for a journey of discovery, which she calls ‘the essential here of human thinking’ is what will determine ‘the kinds of “things” one will see in the way of one’s meditation on God’.65 In analysing this panel, I will also demonstrate why trying to approach this architectural evocation as a real or imagined space will not work, despite Panofsky’s extraordinary description of its muscular three-story elevation:

Early Netherlandish Painting I 193 dated it to ca. 1428–29, whereas in their review of dates, Hand – Wolff, Early Netherlandish Painting 82 prefer ca. 1434–36. 64  See Carruthers, Craft of Thought 61, 77–83, and 92–94. 65  Ibidem 73.

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figure 9.7 Jan van Eyck, The Annunciation (ca. 1428–1436). Oil transferred from panel to canvas, 93 × 37 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Wikimedia Commons

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Yet [in looking at Van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church] we are faced with an imaginary structure. And this structure seems to have been built from top to bottom instead of from bottom to top. […] Empirically, this is odd. Symbolically, however, it is not only consistent but profound. The picture illustrates, in architectural terms […] the transition from the Jewish to the Christian era. […] And the downward path of the ray divine on which the Dove of the Holy Spirit descends, the downward path from Triune God to the Trinity, is mirrored in a downward transition from one window to three and, at the same time, from Romanesque to Gothic.66 Visually, we know exactly what Panofsky means, because this architectural structure deviates noticeably from a traditional Gothic elevation [contrast Figs. 9.2 & 9.7]. ‘Never can a whole scenery or setting be shown to portray a particular place’, Panofsky stated categorically.67 Thomas Lyman, however, observed that we would esteem Jan van Eyck ‘no less for having been able to discover the very content of his symbolic program in observable reality and not in his imagination’.68 Lyman then proceeded to demonstrate the similarity of the setting in the Washington Annunciation to the church of Saint-Quentin in Tournai of ca. 1200 [Fig. 9.8].69 Beginning at the top of the structure, one can observe a number of the features that Panofsky characterized as architecturally impossible: round-headed clerestory windows, a triforium with slender columns that project against the recessed wall of the middle zone, and a lightly pointed arcade, which, in the painting [Fig. 9.7] is illuminated by three ogive-shaped windows glazed with bull’s eye panes.70 As Lyman observed, the presence of these forms in an actual building does not negate their symbolic

66  Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting I 138. 67  Ibidem I 137. 68  Lyman, “Architectural Portraiture” 264. 69   Hand – Wolff, Early Netherlandish Painting 82–82, n. 14 also mention the Cistercian abbey at Villers-la-Ville and the cloister at Orval, citing Van der Walle A., Gothic Art in Belgium: Architecture, Monumental Art, trans. J. A. Kennedy (Brussels: 1971) pls. XXII–XII. While both these buildings are in ruinous condition, and neither of them is as close a match as Saint-Quentin of Tournai, they nonetheless suggest the dissemination of the type in the region. 70  Tournai was damaged by bombing in May 1940, but work published before that date conveys the nature of the structure of Saint-Quentin very clearly. See Desmons F., “L’Eglise Saint-Quentin”, Revue Tournaisienne 1 (1905) 102–106; and Rolland P., Eglises paroissiales de Tournai (Brussels: 1936) 13–15, with excellent documentary images, plates 11–21. A good recent summary is Le Patrimoine monumental de la Belgique, 6/2 Province de Hainaut. Arrondissement de Tournai-Mouscron (Liège: 1978) 624–630.

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figure 9.8 Interior view across the transepts and into the choir of the church of SaintQuentin of Tournai (c. 1200) Wikimedia Commons: PMRMaeyvaert

effectiveness. It is instructive, however, to recognize the ways that architectural elements in Saint-Quentin were combined creatively in Van Eyck’s painting. Moving around the building of Saint-Quentin [Fig. 9.8], it is as if we can observe Jan van Eyck’s process of selection; he did not adopt the church’s rose window (behind the photographer of this image), and he eschewed the thirteenth-century stone-vaulted ceiling visible in the choir to the right, in favor of the twelfth-century wooden ceiling in the nave and facing transept.71 Van Eyck thus adapted elements that may have been present in Saint-Quentin, but are not contiguous as they appear in his painting. While the setting may 71  See Rolland P., L’Eglise Saint-Quentin à Tournai, Archeologische Handelingen in Verband Met’s Lands Wederopbouw (Antwerp: 1946) 7 for a useful plan, and views of the site before and after restoration. He dates it in relation to Saint-Yved of Braine, 39–40.

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have a basis in an observable structure – and Van Eyck is documented as having visited Tournai in 1427 – the image itself has been selectively reconfigured.72 For Panofsky, the light coming in at left, from the presumed darker northern side of the building, was meant to be understood as supernatural, but here again, Lyman could point out that the building that likely served as Van Eyck’s source of inspiration belies such a claim. Saint-Quentin is not an oriented building, as was the norm in Christian churches, but an occidented one, in order to accommodate its location on the market square in Tournai.73 The building’s siting is beside the point, however: the light is supernatural because the dove of the Holy Spirit beams down on seven discrete rays [Fig. 9.7], and because the light coming in at left contrasts to the direction of light indicated by the cast shadows elsewhere in the painting. The spatial relationships within the panel also merit further attention. The Annunciation is set deep within the fictive interior of the panel, its distance from the picture plane enhanced by the strongly foreshortened wall at left,74 and by the stool with a rich burgundy cushion in the foreground of the image. The depth of the setting may itself may hold symbolic implications, as the vessel of the church was associated with the womb of the Virgin.75 The beholder must then find a logical and compelling way into the program of the imagery. One modern scholar, who examined the iconography of the floor tiles at length, declared that Jan had ‘permitted himself to indulge in an intricate complexity of concealed and interwoven meanings […] comparable only to that in Finnegan’s Wake’.76 Here the engaged beholder’s adoption of a deliberate and mindful mode of approach – a ductus – can helpfully focus both devotee and art historian. A visual approach into this Annunciation might begin with the stool in the foreground [Fig. 9.7], which is too high to serve as a kneeler, and if it once served as a resting place for Mary’s book, she has since moved her book to the altar-like stone table closer to her. The stool’s presence is asserted by the vase of lilies that seems to nudge it forward and by the shadows that further plant it in space. The stool has been read in multiple ways, as referring to the Virgin’s humility, to the seat prepared for the second coming of Christ, and as an allusion to the verse in Isaiah 66:1 where the Lord states, ‘the earth is my 72  On Jan’s trip to Tournai in 1427 on behalf of Philip the Good, see Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck 10–11 and 191. 73  Lyman, “Architectural Portraiture” 268. 74  De Tolnay, “Flemish Paintings in the National Gallery of Art” 175. 75  Purtle, Marian Paintings 11 points out that of the twenty-three Annunciations reproduced by Millard Meiss in his study of the Boucicaut Master, twenty-one are set in church interiors. 76  Ward, “Hidden Symbolism” 220, n. 129.

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footstool’,77 a theme also carried through in imagery on the back wall, which includes a stained-glass window in which the Lord adopts the earth as his footstool.78 There is no need to choose among these resonant associations. But on a first level of viewing, the stool, with its slightly askew and beckoning pillow, establishes the low vantage point of the entire panel, as if the scene were viewed from the position of one kneeling before it.79 It also provides a logical starting point: by beginning with the stool and the adjacent stories of Samson and David in the floor tiles, which articulate how the Old Testament served as preparation for the coming of the Messiah, the viewer understands that the panel is a typological Annunciation.80 As both Panofsky and Lyman argued, this notion is enriched by the painted presentation of the architecture, whether imagined, actual, or as I suggest, curated. Frame clasps along the right-hand edge of the Annunciation indicate that this panel was once the left-hand wing of a triptych.81 At just over 90 centimetres in height, it is plausibly understood as part of a larger altarpiece.82 Although we have no indication as to the content of the missing panels, the panels making up an altarpiece often combine scenes of disparate settings, as we saw in the copies after Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in a Church [Figs. 9.5 & 9.6].83

77  Summarized, with further bibliography in Hand – Wolff, Early Netherlandish Painting 81. Also see Ward, “Hidden Symbolism” 196, 206–207 where he develops its symbolic significance as Etimasia, the preparation of a throne for Christ’s Second Coming. 78  De Tolnay, “Flemish Paintings in the National Gallery of Art” 176; and Stangel A. L., “The Cartographic Symbolism in Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.”, Comitatus 4.1 (1973) 41–48. 79  I thank Corinth Colloquium participant David Areford for his observation that the perspective of the stool is even more intriguing, because it is shown simultaneously from straight on and from above, further drawing our attention to it. 80  Purtle, Marian Paintings 52 distinguishes between the iconography of the floor tiles indicating that the Lord had prepared his chosen people to accept the Messiah, and the iconography of the back wall, indicating that those same people should be prepared to recognize the Messiah through his likeness to Moses, Isaac, and Jacob. 81  Ward, “Hidden Symbolism” 207 infers a triptych; and see discussion in Jacobs L. F., Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted (University Park, PA: 2012) 62 n. 4. 82   Hand – Wolff, Early Netherlandish Painting 76; Purtle, Marian Paintings 50 envisions it on the left side of an altar where the Mass was celebrated. 83  As frequently noted, Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments Altarpiece [Fig. 9.2] constitutes an important exception. On other examples of continuous settings, see Kemperdick, Rogier van der Weyden 64, mentioning Rogier’s Miraflores Altarpiece, and his Crucifixion Triptych, now in Vienna. To this inventory, Borchert T.-H., “Hans Memling and Rogier van der Weyden”, in Chapuis J. (ed.), Invention: Northern Renaissance Studies in Honor of Molly Faries (Turnhout, 2008) 86–93 at 93, n. 9 adds the lower register of the interior of The Ghent Altarpiece, and the Master of Flemalle’s Silern Triptych.

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Rogier van der Weyden’s Columba Triptych

Rogier van der Weyden’s Columba Triptych [Fig. 9.9], one of the few complete works with a known provenance in Cologne, offers a representative and welldocumented example of a surviving multi-winged altarpiece.84 The triptych displays conspicuously different settings in each panel: the Annunciation at left takes place in a domestic interior; the Adoration of the Magi at centre unfolds in an expansive exterior setting; and the Presentation is shown in what appears to be the vestibule of a large temple. Distinctive architectural features in each panel further draw attention to these different settings: the wooden barrel vaulted ceiling held in place by an enormous cross beam at left; the ruinous stable in the foreground at centre through which the landscape beyond is glimpsed; and the impressive stone hemicycle at right. Yet Acres has emphasised the underlying unity of the panels in the Columba Triptych, in envisioning the strong diagonals of the built environments that fan out from the arms of the anachronistic Crucifixion behind the Adoration of the Magi at centre [Fig. 9.9], which he identifies as the fulcrum for the altarpiece as a whole. As Acres states, the altarpiece’s ‘loom of broken views enlists and invests a viewer in the work of representation. We are responsible for making sense of the structures, topography, and figures here obscured by mullions, piers, and walls’.85 The different views and settings of each panel emphasize the contingent position of the beholder, who must locate and relocate herself in the represented space.86 This may be precisely why the juxtapositions of settings play an important role: as Philippe Philippot has argued, the experience of viewing thresholds to cross heightens the viewer’s identification with the illusions created within the work.87 The triptych offers a visual conundrum that encourages the engaged beholder to move through the imagery to understanding of the sacred mysteries. 84  Kemperdick, “I Tableau” 130; also see Acres A., “The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World”, The Art Bulletin 80 (1998) 422–451, with further bibliography. For the literature on how altarpieces functioned, see Kemp M., “Introduction, The Altarpiece in the Renaissance: A Taxonomic Approach”, in Humfrey P. – Kemp M. (eds.), The Altarpiece in the Renaissance (Cambridge: 1990) 1–20; and in the same volume, the contributions by Os H. van, “Some Thoughts on Writing a History of Sienese Altarpieces” 21–33; and Woods K., “The Netherlandish Carved Altarpiece c. 1500: Type and Function” 76–89. Also see Jacobs, Opening Doors 1–30. 85  Acres, “The Columba Altarpiece” 433. 86  Ibidem 434. 87  Philippot P., “Les grisaille et ses degrés de réalité de l’image dans la peinture flamande des XVe et XVIe siècles”, Bulletin des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 15 (1966) 225–240 at 230. This theme is developed in Jacobs, Opening Doors. There is evidence to Owen-Crocker G. R. – Graham H., Medieval Art, Recent Perspectives: A Memorial Tribute

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figure 9.9 Rogier van der Weyden, Columba Triptych (ca. 1455). Oil on panel, 138 × 70 cm., 138 × 153 cm., 138 × 70 cm., respectively Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Wikimedia Commons: Web Gallery of Art

The visual appearance of these places is neither wholly reliable nor incidental to the spiritual work required of the engaged beholder.88 In meditative practice, ‘likeness’ is a concession for human cognition to be enabled, but there is no final truth in ‘likeness’.89 As if seeking to gauge his reader’s comprehension, Augustine asks his reader directly, about two-thirds of the way through his commentary on Psalm 41, Miraris tabernaculum in hac terra; quomodo per[v]enisti ad secretum domus Dei? You are gazing on the tabernacle in this world, how have you come to the hidden place of God’s house?90

   to C.R. Dodwell (Manchester: 1998) 165–82; and Kemperdick S., “I Tableau” 124–125. suggest that the interiors of large altarpieces were withheld from routine view when the wings were closed or the ensemble was covered in cloth, further enhancing the beholder’s appreciation of the imagery, when revealed on feast days. See Crossley P., “The Man from Inner Space: Architecture and Meditation in the Choir of St Laurence in Nuremberg”, in 88  As argued in Falkenburg, “Hieronymus Bosch’s Mass of St. Gregory and ‘sacramental vision’” 182–183 and 196–197. 89  A paraphrase of Carruthers, Craft of Thought 76. Also see the contribution by AnnMarie Bridges in this volume. 90  Sancti Aurelii Augustini, Enarrationes in Psalmos I-L 467. The translation here is from Carruthers, Craft of Thought 252, but also see Boulding, Translation for the 21st Century 247: ‘You admire the tent on earth, but how did you reach the secrets precincts of God’s house?’

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As Augustine’s question implies, a building can serve as a means for locating and focusing the beholder’s path of spiritual discovery, but it is only a beginning for locating the true domus dei. This process of identification and recalibration is further engaged by the beholder in a multi-panel altarpiece, as the three wings of the Columba Triptych demonstrate. 7

Rose Windows and the Architectural Settings of Netherlandish Altarpieces

If I have thus far emphasized the vibrant interactive role architecture can play in early Netherlandish altarpieces, I would like to turn in closing to an architectural element that I expected to find in these paintings and did not: the rose window. I propose that the rather surprising presentation of this characteristic element of a Gothic architectural aesthetic may be shaped by the meditative function of the settings of these Netherlandish altarpieces. The large circular aperture found in Pieter Saenredam’s seventeenth-century images of the Mariakerk in Utrecht [Fig. 9.10] attests to the continuing, if less frequent, presence of the rose window in buildings in the Low Countries,91 despite the fact that it is a quintessential feature of Gothic architecture [see Fig. 9.8].92 Indeed, 91  On the Mariakerk and its foundation legends, see Schwartz G., “Saenredam, Huygens and the Utrecht Bull”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 1 (1966/67) 69–93. For images of the Mariakerk, see Helmus L. M. (ed.), Pieter Saenredam, The Utrecht Work: Paintings and Drawings by the 17th-century Master of Perspective, exh. cat., Centraal Museum, Utrecht, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Utrecht: 2000) 95–182, esp. cat. nos. 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10. For details on the rose window of Mariakerk, see Helmus, Pieter Saenredam 101–114; and Van Ruyven-Zeman Z., Stained Glass in the Netherlands, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: 2011) I 242. I am grateful to Zsuszanna van Ruyven-Zeman for directing my attention to this monument. Also see Brusati C., “Reforming Idols and Viewing History in Pieter Saenredam’s Perspectives”, in Cole M. W. – Zorach R. (eds.), The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World (Farnham: 2009) 31–55, who points out that Saenredam’s arsenal of measuring and drafting techniques is not as empirical in intent as often portrayed. 92   Viollet-le-Duc E. E., “Rose”, in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, vol. 8 (Paris: 1869) 38–69 emphasizes the engineering issues in putting a large rose window into a building. On rose windows generally, see Dow H.J., “The RoseWindow”, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957) 248–297; Suckale R., “Thesen zum Bedeutungswandel der gotischen Fensterrose”, in Clausber K. – Kimpel D. – Kunst H.-J. – Suckale R. (eds.), Bauwerk und Bildwerk im Hochmittelalter: Anschaulich Beiträge zur Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte, (Giessen: 1981) 259–294; and Pastan, “Regarding the Early Rose Window.”

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Pieter Saenredam, Nave and west window of the Mariakerk, Utrecht (1638). Oil on panel, 62.5 × 93.5 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg, inv. No. 412 Courtesy of bpk-Bildagentur

in his report of 1567 on the region, the Italian writer Ludovico Guicciardini praised the Netherlands as having brought the art of glass painting to its apogee, and a rose window would be a natural and expected part of a glazed environment.93 My search for painted images of rose windows in fifteenth-century altarpieces, however, revealed that they are not very common. One of the few rose windows to be found is in the right wing of Hans Memling’s Adoration of the Magi Triptych [Fig. 9.11].94 Even here, however, because of the way that this 93  Van Ruyven-Zeman, Stained Glass in the Netherlands I 1 notes that the enthusiastic account of Ludovico Guicciardini (1521–1589) contrasts to Karel van Mander’s account of 1601, where stained glass is ‘all but ignored’. She further points out, 6, that stained glass in the Low Countries was less the victim of iconoclastic outbreaks (as is commonly supposed) than physical decay, along with the propensity of church wardens for replacing windows in a poor state of repair with clear glass. 94   Campbell – Van der Stock, Roger van der Weyden 368. The work is clearly indebted to Rogier’s Columba Triptych, as noted in Borchert, “Hans Memling and Rogier van der Weyden” 86–93 and color plate 15. For another intriguing example with a small and unglazed, but nonetheless prominent rose window, see Barthèlemy van Eyck’s Annunciation,

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Hans Memling, Triptych of the Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1470–1472), Oil on panel, 95 × 271 cm. Prado Museum, Madrid Po1557. Wikimedia Commons

small and slightly cropped aperture hovers over Joseph to the left of the scene of the Presentation, the rose window is downplayed, its non-figural décor quaint and unremarkable.95 Its scale does not compete with the scene’s intimacy, as all the gazes of the sacred personages within lead us to the infant Jesus, whose compellingly baby-like nudity is the focus of the panel. In this adroit equation, the setting and figures maintain a delicate balance that would be disrupted by the presence of a full-sized, vibrantly coloured, and historiated rose window. Arguably, a rose is a show-stopper, an element which would impede the more sustained visual and meditative journey urged on the beholder in exegetical commentaries and practices from Augustine on. Indeed, the muting of rose windows, despite the fact that they are a characteristic feature of Gothic architecture, is indexical of the different focus of the architectural settings in Netherlandish altarpieces. Rose windows are fundamentally too high on the wall, and too large in relation to the figures now in Aix-en-Provence, reproduced in Acres, Renaissance Invention, 93, Fig. 59 and the colorplate, on 299. 95  The use of a rose window as an attribute of Joseph also appears in the Master of the View of Sainte-Gandule, Marriage of the Virgin, from the end of the fifteenth century in Utrecht (inv. RMCC s.31). Discussed in Nys L., “Le Maître de Flémalle à Gand. A propos du Mariage de la Vierge et de l’Annonciation du Musée du Prado”, in Nys L.– Vanwijnsberghe D. (eds.), Campin in Context: Peinture et société dans la vallée de l’Escaut à l’époque de Robert Campin, 1375–1445, Actes du colloque international organisé par l’Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis, l’Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique/Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium et l’Association des Guides de Tournai (Tournai: 2007) 239–254 at 241–242 and Fig. 5, where Nys connects the work to the distinctive south transept of Notre-Dame du Sablon in Brussels, from the beginning of the fifteenth century.

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within their interiors to feature prominently. A rose window establishes a new pictorial centre of gravity within an architectural representation; you can see how the inscriptions and people in the foreground of Saenredam’s painting of the Mariakerk strive valiantly to reclaim the beholder’s attention from its rose [Fig. 9.10]. The situation is helped somewhat by the fact that in this view, the Mariakerk’s rose appears in deep space, far from the picture plane, but it is nonetheless clear that its rose window occupies most of the width of the nave, as was characteristic, and this is a far cry from its rather meagre appearance in Memling’s triptych [Fig. 9.11]. Where circular apertures appear in early Netherlandish altarpieces, they are routinely sized down, alluded to through their reflections [Fig. 9.3], cropped out [Fig. 9.7], and even partially obscured, as may be seen in the small oculus window in the left wing of Rogier van der Weyden’s Columba Triptych [Fig. 9.9].96 Epilogue By the end of the fifteenth century, contemporary buildings were developing in new directions,97 and monumental ecclesiastical glazing in the Netherlands had to compete increasingly with the small, easily-purchased glass roundels that began to flood the market.98 The size of these roundels, which rarely exceeds 30 centimetres in diameter, gave their beholders the opportunity to ‘sample’ larger and more costly works of art, and display them in their own homes. The Cloisters Adoration of the Magi roundel [Fig. 9.12], for example, offers a translucent distillation that is indebted to Memling’s altarpiece [Fig. 9.11], and ultimately to Rogier van der Weyden [Fig. 9.9].99 The roundel is an artistic tour de force, consisting only of the skilful application of dark vitreous paint, enhanced by the golden-hued application of silver stain on clear glass, to evoke the color-rich setting of a painted altarpiece. 96  For the difference between an oculus, a small circular window requiring no stone tracery to sustain it, and a rose window, which is a larger circular aperture, generally over 4 metres in diameter, see Viollet-le-Duc, “Rose”. 97  See, for example, the unusual lozenge-shaped ‘rose’ windows that Jan van Scorel created for the transepts of the Mariakerk, attested both by the vidimuses he created ca. 1540 and by Saenredam’s images of them: Van Ruyven-Zeman, Stained Glass in the Netherlands I 242–243; and Helmus, Pieter Saenredam 146–147 and 166–167, cat. nos. 20 and 26, respectively. 98  See Husband T., The Luminous Image: Silver-Stained Roundels in the Lowlands 1480–1560, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: 1995). 99  Husband, Luminous Image 68–72, cat. nos. 16 and 17.

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After Hans Memling, Roundel with the Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1500). Uncolored glass, vitreous paint and silver stain, 21.9 cm. The Cloisters Collection, 1983.235. Public Domain Dedication

Characteristically, these roundels are found in a wide range of buildings, in architectural settings less indebted to traditional Gothic church glazing.100 In the Diptych of Martin van Nieuwenhove of 1487 [Fig. 9.13], for example, a domestic setting is transformed into a complex interplay of secular and sacred imagery, underscored by the appearance of glazed roundels in the upper portion of the casement window behind the Virgin, along with other examples of translucent

100   Ruyven-Zeman, Stained Glass in the Netherlands I 65–66 on the roundel of the Virgin and Child with Ste. Anne of ca. 1510–20, which is the earliest extant evidence of a roundel composition in a church setting, from the Dutch reformed church in Dronrijp.

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Hans Memling, The Diptych of Martin Nieuwenhove (1487). Oil on panel, each wing 52 × 41.5 cm. Old Saint John’s Hospital, Bruges Wikimedia Commons: Web Gallery of Art

glass compositions.101 As Reindert Falkenburg has observed, the imaginative encounter between the donor and the Virgin and Child is here ‘induced by prayer and meditation in the privacy of [the donor’s] own house – a house that is both the chapter of [Martin van Niewenhove’s] heart and the physical space where [that donor] practices his devotions’.102 Such everyday architectural settings further extend the meditative practices examined in this paper. And indeed, Augustine understood that any space can become the tabernacle of one’s devotions. He articulated the paradox that God is nowhere (‘nusquam locus’) and everywhere;103 God exists in the mental activity by which a mind desires to know him.104 As I have sought to articulate above, for the devotee willing to move with and beyond the imagery, this

101  See Falkenburg, “Hans Memling’s Van Nieuwenhove Diptych” 101–103 discussing the role of the stained-glass roundels in the sacralised domestic interior of the private devotional diptych, which he relates to the ambiguous spatial setting of the Mérode Triptych. 102  Falkenburg, “Hans Memling’s Van Nieuwenhove Diptych” 104. 103  Augustine, Confessions, Book X, Chapter 26, ed. C. J.-B. Hammond – trans. W. Watts, Loeb Classical Library 27 (Cambridge, MA: 2014) II 144–145. 104  Stock, Augustine the Reader 226.

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mystery is beautifully and wondrously engaged by the architectural settings of the painted altarpieces examined within. Select Bibliography Acres A., “The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World”, The Art Bulletin 80.3 (1998) 422–451. Acres A., Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy (Turnhout: 2013). Carruthers M., The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: 1998). Falkenburg R., “Hans Memling’s Van Nieuwenhove Diptych: the Place of Prayer in Early Netherlandish Devotional Painting”, in Hand J. O. – Spronk R. (eds.), Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (Cambridge, MA: 2006) 92–109. Hamburger, J. F., “Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion”, in Nova A. – Krüger K. (eds.), Imagination und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bilder in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Alessandro Nova & Klaus Krüger (Mainz: 2000), 47–70. Harbison C., “Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 15.2 (1985) 87–118. Jacobs L. F., Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted (University Park, PA: 2012). Jung J. E., The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–1400 (Cambridge: 2012). Kemperdick S., “I Tableau à II Hysseoires – A Panel with Two Wings: Altarpieces with and without Foldable Wings at the Time of Roger van der Weyden” in Kemperick S. – Sander J. (eds.), Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden, exh. cat., Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (Ostfildern: 2009). Lyman T. W., “Architectural Portraiture and Jan van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation”, Gesta 20.1 (1981) 263–271. Meiss M., “Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings”, The Art Bulletin 27.3 (1945) 175–181. Panofsky E., Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols. (New York: 1971). Pastan E. C., “Regarding the Early Rose Window: in eadem and Kurmann-Schwarz B. (eds.), Investigations in Medieval Stained Glass: Materials, Methods and Expressions, Reading Medieval Sources, 3 (Leiden: 2019) 269–281. Purtle C. J., The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton: 1982). Ruyven-Zeman Z. van, Stained Glass in the Netherlands, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: 2011). Stock B., Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (London: 1998).

chapter 10

Orchestrating Polyphony at the Altar: Passion Altarpieces in Late Medieval France Donna L. Sadler A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Michel de Certeau1

∵ This article will use anthropological theory to consider the altar as the singular space within the late medieval church endowed with both its own sense of place and aura of sanctity, focusing on late medieval retables in the parish churches of Rumilly-les-Vaudes, Ricey-Bas in Les Riceys, and Géraudot in the regions of Burgundy and Champagne. I will suggest that the meaning of the imagery represented on the altarpieces is inseparable from the events that transpired at the altar upon which they were found.2 These carved and polychromed polyptychs offered images of the Passion already present in devout parishioners’ hearts and minds.3 With their profusion of anecdotal detail, predilection for contemporary costume, and the highly detailed architectural interiors that set the stage for the animated figures that enact the end of Christ’s life, these retables brought the Passion to life. The Passion retable from the Church of St.-Martin in Rumilly-les-Vaudes, ca. 1533, [Figs. 10.1–10.3] vividly portrays the final days of Christ’s mortal life and his Resurrection. Sixty-five figures ranging between 8–30 cm in height, in 1  Certeau M. de, The Practice of everyday life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley: 1984) 117. 2  This is somewhat reminiscent of Pierre Nora’s ‘lieux de mémoire’. See Nora P., “Between Memory and History: “Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Representations 26 (Spring, 1989) 7–24, esp. 20–24. 3  Belting H., An Anthropology of Images Picture, Medium, Body, trans. T. Dunlap (Princeton – Oxford: 2011) 46.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_011

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figure 10.1 Rumilly-les-Vaudes, Church of Saint-Martin, Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded stone (ca. 1533)

variegated degrees of relief, portray the Way to Calvary, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. Complex architectural backdrops provide a foil for the dramatic action as well as shelter the subplots that embellish the three main scenes of the triptych. Behind the Way to Calvary one finds the Flagellation and journey of the three Marys and two thieves to the site of the Crucifixion; similarly, the Entombment and Noli me tangere enlarge the story of the Resurrection. In the staging of the Crucifixion, the thieves are placed at right angles to the frontal position of Christ on his cross, creating the visual expansiveness of an exterior niche [Fig. 10.2]. The extra height of the central panel provides space for a mix of landscape, architecture, and a host of humanity, including the swooning Virgin in the left corner supported by the Marys and Saint John. Tormentors, priests, children, and mounted soldiers weave between the crosses and the groups of figures, including the soldiers who barter for Christ’s robe opposite the fainting Virgin group; amidst this chaos, Mary Magdalene fervently holds onto the base of Christ’s cross. Identified by his coat of arms, the priest Jean Colet who built the church of Rumilly and commissioned this altarpiece, is represented kneeling to the

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Rumilly-les-Vaudes, Church of Saint-Martin, Crucifixion from Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded stone (ca. 1533)

right of the risen Christ with his patron saint, John the Baptist, on the right panel of the triptych [Fig. 10.3]. The inscription below the retable proclaims the patronage of Colet, bishop of Troyes and pleads for mercy for both himself and the people of Rumilly; it also provides a date of 1533.4 Occupying pedestals elevated on columns that frame the Crucifixion are Saints Peter and Paul, while two angels man the corners of the retable, sharing the same plane of space as the projecting tracery canopies [Fig. 10.1]. These miniature jamb figures, coupled with the organic motifs of birds, berries, foliage, and two angels that fill the upper border of the retable, throw the frame into relief and create 4  The overall dimensions of this retable are 196 cm in height and 314 cm in length. Though dated 1533 on the inscription, a shield on the retable bears a date of 1536.

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Rumilly-les-Vaudes, Church of Saint-Martin, Resurrection from Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded stone (ca. 1533)

a tension between the drama of the Passion and the competing ornamentation of the casement. The thick detail of the tracery with its ogee and round arches pierced by curvilinear openings and intersected by interpenetrating vertical lines offers a rich diversionary track for the viewer if his or her gaze should escape the narrative intrigue that comprises the remainder of the retable. The retable from Rumilly [Figs. 10.1–10.3] asserts its material presence in the space around the altar.5 Relief sculpture in particular can spur the viewer’s

5  Martin D. F., “The Autonomy of Sculpture”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34.3 (1976) 273–286, esp. 281–284. See also Baxandall M., The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven – London: 1980) 42–48, 62–69; and Brook D., “Perception and the Appraisal of Sculpture”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 27 (1969) 323–330.

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visual imagination,6 charging the surrounding space with meaning,7 a polyphony further enhanced by the activities at the altar itself.8 As Barbara Lane has observed, every altarpiece is related to the altar beneath it.9 Though altar­ pieces were not strictly necessary for the Mass, they became a standard feature of altars throughout Europe from the thirteenth century, if not earlier. One of the factors that may have influenced the creation of altarpieces in the thirteenth century was the shift from a more cube-shaped altar to a wider format, a change that invited the display of rectangular altarpieces upon the altar table.10 There is very little agreement among scholars about terminology for altarpieces. According to Kees van der Ploeg, the French retable is synonymous with altarpiece, though the latter may be further distinguished, for example, by wings, or in Italy, a predella.11 Hans Belting, on the other hand, sees the roots of the dossal, an early form of retable, in Byzantine icons. He draws an analogy between a Pisan retable crowned by a pediment and an iconostasis in the Eastern Church.12 Julian Gardner disagrees with this view and asserts that the development of the altarpiece is a wholly European phenomenon.13 Because of the fluidity of definitions, retable and altarpiece will be used interchangeably in this essay. By the late Middle Ages, the altar had evolved into a table that was alive with colour, precious stones, relics, the chalice and paten consecrated to the blood and body of Christ, and finally, a carved and/or painted retable: this was the spectacle of the holy. As Jean-Claude Schmitt put it: “this was an ensemble of sacred objects, engaged in a dialectic movement of revealing and concealing that encouraged individual piety and collective adherence to the mystery of 6  See Koss J., “On the Limits of Empathy”, The Art Bulletin 88.1 (2006) 139–157, esp. 142 and 149. See also Gluck M., “Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy”, New German Critique 80 (2000) 149–169. 7  Martin, “The Autonomy of Sculpture” 282. 8  “What do Objects Do? A Material and Visual Culture Perspective”, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ museums-static/objectretrieval/node/266, accessed October 30, 2017, 3. 9  Lane B. G., The Altar and the Altarpiece: Sacramental Themes in Early Netherlandish Painting (New York: 1984) 2. 10  Gardner J., “Altars, Altarpieces, and Art History: Legislation and Usage”, in Borsook E. – Gioffredi F. S. (eds.), Italian Altarpieces 1250–1500: Function and Design (Oxford: 1994), 5–39, esp. 12; Binski P., “The English Parish Church and Its Art in the Later Middle Ages: A Review of the Problem”, Studies in Iconography 20 (1999) 1–25, esp. 4. 11  Van der Ploeg K., “How Liturgical is a Medieval Altarpiece?” Studies in the History of Art 61: Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento (2002) 102–121, esp. 118, n. 8. 12  Belting H., Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago – London: 1994) 21–25. 13  Gardner, “Altars”, 15.

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Master of Saint Gilles, Mass of Saint Gilles (ca. 1490–1500). Oil on panel, 62 × 46 cm. National Gallery, London Image: Erich Lessing

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the ritual”.14 What I hope to demonstrate is that the altar and the altarpiece that adorns it became indivisible, which is beautifully illustrated in the Mass of St. Gilles (ca. 1490–1500) by the Master of Saint Gilles [Fig. 10.4]. Not only does the image on the altarpiece provide the solemn pathos that underlines the priest’s celebration of the ritual of the Eucharist, but it also asserts the visual weight of the retable vis-à-vis the altar below it. The priest, whose back would have faced the congregation in the late medieval period, elevated the Host against the backdrop of the richly embellished narrative of the Passion represented on the retable. 1

The Altar as Habitat for the Altarpiece

The story recounted on the Rumilly-les-Vaudes retable is framed by the altar, which doubles as a pedestal highlighting the significance of the sacrifice made by Christ and serves as the stage for the reenactment of the mystery of Transubstantiation [Figs. 10.1–10.3]. Carved and polychromed retables enhance the sanctity of the altar by rehearsing the events associated with the mysteries of the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection, which in turn provided the poignant footholds of late medieval devotion and anchored the regimes of piety observed by both ecclesiastics and the laity.15 As the milieu of the retable, the altar acquires a residue, not unlike Walter Benjamin’s patina, which foregrounds the symbolic significance of the framed representation.16 In other words, the context becomes part of the meaning of the image. The superimposition of the Mass upon the altarpiece enhances the image’s ability

14  Schmitt J.-C., “Les reliques et les images”, in Bozóky E. – Helvetius A.-M. (eds.), Les reliques: Objets, cultes, symbols, Actes du colloque international de l’Université du Littoral-Côte d’Opale, Boulogne-sur-Mer (Turnhout: 1999) 145–167, esp. 159. “C’est ensemble que ces objets sacrés, dans le movement dialectique du montré et du caché, mobilisent la piété individuelle et les mouvements collectifs d’adhesion aux mystères du ritual.” 15  See Skubiszewski P., “Le retable Gothique sculpté: Entre le Dogma et l’Univers Humain: Le retable d’Issenheim et le sculpture au nord des Alpes à la fin du moyen âge”, Actes du Colloque de Colmar (2–3 novembre 1987) (Colmar: 1989) 12–47, esp. 13–18. This author stresses the role the retable occupies in the collective consciousness of medieval society, affecting religious, social, and economic factors. The retable served not only pedagogical, but also individual devotional needs. 16  See Bordo J., “The Witness in the Errings of Contemporary Art”, in Duro P. (ed.) The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork (Cambridge – New York: 1996) 178–202, esp. 188; cf. Benjamin W., “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations, trans. H. Arendt (London: 1973) 219–253.

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to condense and collapse context into itself. And as many scholars have noted, ritual and the site of its occurrence constitute significance, as well as reflect it.17 As the altar and altarpiece merge in the worshipper’s comprehension of the story on the retable, memory begins to play a seminal role as all perception is full of memories.18 As Mary Carruthers reminds us, the ancients ‘persistently thought of memoria as a kind of eye-dependent reading, a visual process’.19 Regardless of the trope utilized to refer to this process – whether the visual sign was incised, stamped, or imprinted on wax tablets, the imagines occupied a physical space in one’s memory storage. Images thus require an abode for ‘the embodied cannot be known without a place’.20 And this place needs to reflect a relational organization; that is to say, the pictures we remember need to create a coherent image or scene to ensure a successful recollection.21 Images collude with the viewer to create a shared memory as objects cannot be divorced from the actions associated with them, because action sequences trigger memory, as we will explore below.22 Indeed, the overlapping experiences that congregated at the altar would have discouraged the visual flaneur. The mise en scène of the Mass assisted memory as it was characterised by stages contrived for the active participation of both the clergy and the laity. The repetition of the parts of the Mass would function as a mnemonic system, as the words were rooted in a regimen that could be recalled at will.23 The presence of a screen or veil separating the audience from the celebrant on festive days was part of an elaborate dance of distance and proximity, opening and closing, offering and withholding, a sequence similar to the retable’s own shutters that concealed and revealed the sacred narrative.24 Flemish altarpieces, 17  See, for example, Rappaport R. A., Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: 1999) 3–8; see also Bell C., Ritual Theory Ritual Practice (New York – Oxford: 1992), esp. 30–46. 18  Stewart S., “Remembering the Senses”, in Howes D. (ed.), Empire of the Senses, The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford – New York: 2006), 59–69, esp. 59–60. The ability of Proust’s famous tea-soaked madeleine to trigger childhood memories in the narrator is an aspect of this same phenomenon. 19  Carruthers M., The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: 1996) 27. 20  Ibidem., 73, n. 122 (corpus intelligi sine loco non potest). 21  Richardson J. T. E. Mental Imagery and Human Memory (New York: 1980) 99–105. See also Malcolm N. Memory and Mind (Ithaca: 1977) 244–50. 22  Kress G. – Leeuwen T. van, Reading Images (Geelong: 1990) 259–262; the authors distinguish between intracontextual and intercontextual types of conceptual memory and both seem to be in play in the perception of a retable. 23  Carruthers, The Book of Memory 75–79, 87,140–142. 24  Rubin M., Corpus Christi The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge – New York: 1991) 110–112.

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Maître de Sainte-Gudule, Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded wood (ca. 1470). Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (Inv. PE 156) Image: Jean Tholance

such as the Passion retable by the Maître de Sainte-Gudule, ca. 1470, often featured elaborate flamboyant tracery culminating in turrets and pinnacles, which framed energetic figures with expressive faces [Fig. 10.5].25 The outer panels of these retables were frequently painted, either in polychromy or grisaille. This hierarchy of materials conspired with the varied phases of the liturgy to create a syncopated pattern of forms in the altarpieces and gestures executed during the Mass. Indeed, the wings of a typical Passion altarpiece were customarily opened only on Sundays and feast days. Temporarily hidden from view, the retable allies itself with drawers, wardrobes, chests that all invoke intimacy and an intuitive sense of a hiding place.26 Though I am not suggesting that the retable acts like a decorative cabinet, it does participate in the dialectics of opening and closing, a characteristic it shares with a cabinet of curiosities such as that of Domenico Remps, ca. 1690 [Fig. 10.6]. Just as there is a dynamic tension 25  In certain examples, such as the altarpiece found in the church of St.-Martin in Ambierle, ca. 1466, stained glass windows form a background for the figures. Ambierle’s retable features a combination of fourteen painted and sculpted panels when open and six painted panels when closed. See Sadler D. L. Touching the Passion – Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith (Leiden: 2018) 94–102, figs. 33–36. 26  Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 78–85.

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Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities (ca. 1690). Oil on canvas, 99 × 137 cm. Museo dell’ Opificio della Pietre Dure, Florence Image: Scala/Art Resource

between inside and outside, a similar taut balance characterises revealing and concealing, as opening prompts closing, and vice versa.27 Paul Crossley notes that the opening and closing of a retable encouraged the devotional activity of the worshippers within a structured framework.28 The reaction of the interpretive community – namely the laity – was to derive meaning from the alternation of the two states of the altarpiece. The altarpiece in the final analysis possesses an aura acquired by its intrinsic properties – the skillful integration of painting and sculpture, colour and texture, movement and stasis, and an extrinsic value due to its proximity to the sacred performance of the sacraments. Éric Palazzo views the objects that inhabit the altar, from liturgical items to art works to elements of the liturgy,

27  Ibidem. 83. Bachelard refers to Rilke who describes the lid of a box having no other wish than to be on its box. Cf. Teague R., “Intimate Immensity in the Preschool Playroom: A Topo-analysis of Children’s Play”, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter 16 (2005) 10–15, esp. 12. 28  Crossley P., “The Man from Inner Space: Architecture and Meditation in the Choir of St. Laurence in Nuremberg”, in Owen-Crocker G. R. – Graham T. (eds.), Medieval Art –Recent Perspectives: A Memorial Tribute to C. R. Dodwell (Manchester: 1998) 165–182, esp. 170.

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which are activated by the senses, as different modalities of the Incarnation of the Word.29 The material object, then, is the embodiment of what it represents, what Jean-Claude Bonne has dubbed the “choséité.”30 The altarpiece asserts its material presence by the interplay of its subject matter, medium, and prominent placement upon the hallowed altar of the church. 2

Immersion in the Passion of Christ

Vision, considered the queen of the senses, plays a critical role in the reception of meaning by the beholder of the altarpiece, as it is perception that immerses the viewer in the story represented on the retable.31 In order to conjure the complex narrative worlds in these works of art, the individual must be willing to suspend disbelief.32 In other words, we project ourselves into the recreated scene; a door opens onto an interior world that subsumes the viewer and all his senses.33 Further, our ability to become immersed in the narrative, to believe in the created illusion, has been compared to the mystical state of mind engaged 29  Palazzo É, “Les cinq sens au Moyen Åge, état de la question et perspectives de recherche”, Cahiers de civilization médiévale, Xe–XIIe siècles 55 (2012) 339–366, esp. 358–61, and n. 106. See also Kessler H. “Object as Subject in Medieval Art”, The Haskins Society Journal 22 (2010) 14–50) and Bonne J.-C. “Entre l’image et la matière: la choséité du sacré en Occident”, Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome 69 (1999) 77–111. 30  Bonne “Entre l’image et la matière” 77 ff. 31  Robert Scribner coined the phrase “sacramental gaze” to refer to the visual engagement of the laity at the moment of the elevation of the Host. See Scribner R., “Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany”, Journal of Religious History 15 (1989) 448–69. St. Augustine considered sight the chief organ for the acquisition of knowledge; his theory of vision is explored in the twelfth chapter of De Genesi ad litteram (On Genesis. The Works of Saint Augustine, 1/13 (New York: 2002) 471 ff. See also Camille M., “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing”, in Nelson, R. (ed.), Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge: 2000) 197–223; Vance E., “Seeing God: Augustine, Sensation and the Mind’s Eye”, in Nichols, S. G. –Kablitz A. – Calhoun A. (eds.), Rethinking the Medieval Senses (Baltimore: 2008), 13–29; Frank G., The Memory of the Eyes (Berkeley: 2000); Miles M., “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions”, The Journal of Religion 63 (1983) 125–142. Hamburger J., “Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion”, in Krüger K. –Nova A. (eds.) Imagination und Wirklichkeit. Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit (Mainz: 2000), 47–69. 32  Wolf W., “Aesthetic Illusion”, in Wolf W. – Bernhart W. – Mahler A. (eds.) Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam – New York: 2013) 1–63, esp. 29–34 and 37–41. 33  Bachelard G. The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: 1969; reprinted 1994) 212–224.

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Géraudot, Church of Saints Pierre and Paul, Passion retable. Polychromed stone (ca. 1540)

in the Imitatio Christi.34 It is that attitude of the beholder, his or her emotions and psychology, which influence the efficacy of the illusion of the altarpiece, not its size or its use of linear perspective.35 Both this sense of absorption and the mimetic extension of the beholder’s world provide a useful framework for considering the altarpiece in the context of the late medieval parish church. Let us examine at close range how the formal tactics of this type of immersion were ‘deployed’, propelling the viewer into the dramatic centre of Christ’s Passion. For each episode in the narrative provides a visual threshold that the worshipper must traverse in order to follow the plot and subplots comprised by the story of the Passion. For example, in the altarpiece of the Passion from the church of Saints Pierre and Paul at Géraudot (ca. 1540), the artists have chosen an architectural framework composed of a Renaissance vocabulary of forms, a predilection that was not unusual in examples of indigenous retables dating from the middle of the sixteenth century [Fig. 10.7]. Double columns preface the three sections of the retable and ribbed half-domes shelter the figures that enact the Passion. The worshipper enters the scene of the Way to Calvary [Fig. 10.8] and visually zigzags his way past the figure of Christ bearing 34  W  alton K. L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: 1990), 242. 35  Wolf, “Aesthetic Illusion”, 38–42.

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Géraudot, Church of Saints Pierre and Paul, Way to Calvary from Passion retable. Polychromed stone (ca. 1540)

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the Cross, Veronica and her veil, and Simon of Cyrene, to the next layer of Roman soldiers, horses, and a man bearing a ladder, which then leads to the three Marys making their way to the site of the Crucifixion. Every story consists of multiple moments or, in our case, images, which in turn promote the act of interpretation.36 In the following scene [Fig. 10.9], the layering of human drama is even more complex as the soldiers and their horses (and a dog) compete spatially with the Compassio of Mary in the foreground, while the crucified figures of Christ and the two thieves escape the boundaries of the frame and provide another threshold for the viewer to cross. Beate Fricke, in a discussion of thresholds and mimesis in painting, characterised the viewer’s task as one of unfolding the layers of the image, stepping from one layer to the next or from one level of imagination to the next. She further sees this visual journey as part of the twofoldness (sic) of pictures and images – ‘oscillating between representation and material, between different modes of representation and their reception’.37 This careful staging of the narrative underscores the materiality of the successive thresholds that are highlighted: this is evident, for example, in Mary Magdalene’s kneeling embrace of Christ’s cross [Fig. 10.9], which is physically and psychologically isolated by the outcropping of rough terrain and the parting of the raucous soldiers. Finally, the Resurrection from Géraudot [Fig. 10.10] features an athletic figure of Christ who is gracefully balanced on the lid of his tomb. The perpendicular placement of the tomb and the effect of the wind that sweeps Christ’s hair to the left and his tunic off to the right, engender the impression that he has just arrived on the scene. Disciples and soldiers in various states of sleep, shock, and amazement circle the sarcophagus, while the middle ground harbors the angel who once guarded the tomb, and the three Marys occupy the deepest recesses of the background. The viewer is an active participant in deciphering the various moments in this scene as if he or she sees what the characters within the composition witness.38 In both the Géraudot and Rumilly representations of the Resurrection [Figs. 10.3 and 10.10] the relief ground is exploited to harbor the ancillary scenes that buttress the dramatic return of the Savior; in the former the three Marys traverse a convenient shelf of ground below the ribbed half-dome above, while the soldiers are vertically disposed on either side of the tomb. The sculptors of Rumilly’s retable create a spacious receding 36  F ricke B., “Presence Through Absence: Thresholds and Mimesis in Painting”, Representations 130.1 (Spring 2015) 1–27, esp. 6–7. 37  Fricke, “Presence Through Absence” 8–9. 38  Ibidem 7–8.

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figure 10.9

Géraudot, Church of Saints Pierre and Paul, Crucifixion from Passion retable/ Polychromed stone (ca. 1540)

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figure 10.10 Géraudot, Church of Saints Pierre and Paul, Resurrection from Passion retable. Polychromed stone (ca. 1540)

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terrain that shelters the Entombment in a cave, the journey of the three Marys, and the Noli me tangere, all of which are insulated by the pendant late Gothic tracery of the frame. In both instances the medium enhances the immediacy of this experiential understanding of the story represented on the altarpiece. The altarpieces present different forms of visual thresholds to enhance the effects of presence and immediacy in conveying the narrative. In the Passion retable of the Maître des Sainte-Gudule, ca. 1470, [Fig. 10.5], the inhabited balconies composed of flamboyant tracery both announce the front boundary of the scenes and create a self-containment of the figures unlike that found in the altarpiece from Géraudot [Fig. 10.7]. Though both retables feature the layering of figures, those of the fifteenth-century altarpiece stand on tilted floors that recede to the golden back walls that accentuate the boundaries of the space. Differing from these examples, the thresholds that incite the viewer’s path through the retable of Ricey-Bas in Les Riceys, ca. 1520–1525, [Fig. 10.12] are created by the forceful projection of the architectural backgrounds, the landscape, the tilted ground lines, and the figures, all of which are disposed to merge with the flamboyant tracery of the surrounding frame. Finally, the replication of a late medieval church interior, backed by glazed windows and crowned by flamboyant tracery, engenders a less profound spatial enclosure in the altarpiece in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, ca. 16th century, [Fig. 10.13]; the intimacy of the setting creates a shadow box effect as the figures occupy the ecclesiastical interior of the retable. 3

Ritual at the Altar

Ritual, in this instance the liturgy, is a mode of paying attention, and place directs attention.39 As noted above, the Passion of Christ and the ritual of the Eucharist are topographically conflated at the altar.40 If one perceives the altarpiece and the altar as material objects, one is able to trace the construction and translation of social relations, culture, and even value systems to the dialogue generated between these objects and their audience.41 The retable upon the altar functions as artefact signaling the importance of the Savior’s life and death in the economy of salvation. The story embodied on the altarpiece offers 39  Smith J. Z., To Take Place Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago – London: 1992) 103. 40  Ibidem 86. Smith is referring to the locative specificity of the Holy Sepulcher, however the altar is addressed as the sepulcher during certain ceremonial moments such as the ‘little elevation’ (87) and thus this simultaneity seems applicable. 41  “What do Objects Do?” 1–4.

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an object lesson in the human suffering experienced by Christ, as we saw in the retable of Rumilly-les-Vaudes [Figs. 10.1–10.3]. The worshipper’s immersion in the death and Resurrection of Christ is also an engagement with the tenets of Christianity poignantly transcribed upon the sculpted, polychromed tableaux. According to Christopher Tilley, people think in solid metaphors, which unfold in space and are more powerful because of their non-linguistic nature.42 We make sense of the world through the creation of these solid metaphors. To put it another way, narrative is linear and action is solid and involves all the senses.43 Linear narrative never achieves the more substantive density of an object, yet when narrative is infused with action as it is in the representation of the Passion on a retable [Figs. 10.1, 10.7, 10.12, 10.14], the resulting artefact engages the viewer in a palpable exchange. The depiction of the Passion on an altarpiece engenders an emotional, if not visceral response from the beholder. The subject enters into what Werner Wolf calls a ‘reception contract’ with the object.44 Objects further ‘take on important theatrical and dramaturgical roles during the staging of the social world’.45 Ritual and the gaze of the beholders activated the material images of the retables. The medieval space inhabited by these retables was not merely a void to be filled; the space played an active role in reconciling complex theological concepts with place.46 The altarpieces in conjunction with the Eucharist possessed the power to inspire the numinous in worshippers, to generate both empathy and awe in the presence of the holy. In rooting Christ in history, the retables cultivated locational memory that then became the very object of future meditation; the narrative account of salvation became an object of commemoration.47 Christ was present whenever the priest performed ceremonies in his memory. As one scholar puts it: […] the spoken words, images, and dramatic action, often associated directly with the sacred space of a church, sacralized the time spent in contemplation, and served 42  Tilley C., Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford: 1999) 263–272. 43  Gifford, Zones of Re-Membering 110. 44  Wolf “Aesthetic Illusion” 22–28. 45  Tilley, Metaphor 48. 46  Dox D., “Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of the Imagination. Three Readings of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament”, in Hanawalt B. A. – Kobialka M. (eds.), Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis: 2000) 183. 47  My thinking is very much influenced by Smith, To Take Place 80–117, though he addresses must larger issues such as the contribution of Jerusalem to the development of Christianity. The reenactment of the sacrifice and its effects are an ever-present reality.

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to bring into focus salvation history and the role of the observer who reflected on the past, devoted the present moment and dedicated the future to a holier life.48 Thus, the image, sanctified by its presence on the altar, was endowed with both cultic and devotional powers: the altarpiece guided the faithful to a state of mind conducive to prayer; promoted communication with the saints; served as a mnemonic device for meditation, and could even assist a mystic in achieving ecstatic communion with the divine.49 Whether narrative or iconic in form, the life and death of Christ, the life of the Virgin, and the lives of the saints unfolded before the believers’ eyes, proffering a powerful palimpsest to the elevation of the Host. 4

The Mass and the Altarpiece

How then did the Mass mediate the reception of the altarpiece? The Mass was a reenactment of the Calvary sacrifice and an exercise in memory, conjuring the itinerary of Christ’s last days on earth, his Crucifixion, and Resurrection. The actions of the priest during the Mass, such as extending his arms after the consecration, which invoked Christ’s Crucifixion, not only corresponded to moments in Scripture, but also excited the audience’s memory of the Passion.50 The priest, standing in for Christ, made numerous signs of the cross, bestowed kisses on the altar, pummelled his chest, and repeatedly inclined his head, pantomiming the sacred drama. This late medieval statue of Christ in the guise of a priest standing behind a covered altar and administering the Eucharist demonstrates the powerful connection between Christ and the priest acting in his stead [Fig. 10.11]. During the colourful recreation of the Passion, the elevation 48  B  yrne J. P., “Book Reviews and Notes: Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England and Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy”, Church History 67.1 (1998) 138–141, esp. 139. 49  Lipton S., “Images and Their Uses”, in Rubin M.– Simons W. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity: Christianity in Western Europe, ca. 1000-ca. 1500 (Cambridge: 2009) 254–283, esp. 274–76; Lipton includes a list of objectives fulfilled by private devotional images as well. 50  Blondel M., “Un aspect de la vie liturgique et spirituelle en Bourgogne à la fin du Moyen Âge: la célébration de la messe”, MA thesis, Université de Bourgogne (2002) 46. This allegorical consideration of the Mass stems from the Rationale of Durand Guillaume, the bishop of Mende. See also Delaruelle E. – Labande E.-R. – Ourliac P., L’Église au temps du Grand Schisme et de la crise conciliaire (1378–1449), 2 vols., (Belgium: 1962) esp. II, 742–761; Schmitt J-C, La Raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: 1990) 343.

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Figure of Christ in the guise of a priest. Polychromed stone (16th century). Musée Valuivuisant, Troyes

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of the priest’s voice at the Nobis quoque was reminiscent of the shout of the centurion; the three Sanctus commemorated the three times Christ fell to his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane; the triple silence after the Pater signified Christ’s three days in the tomb; and the five turns made by the priest toward the people recalled the five apparitions of Christ after the Resurrection.51 It has been noted that we perceive the details of an event in memory by mentally circling around them as if they were statues in a gallery.52 Because our experience of the present is embedded in past experience, memory performs the linkages between past and present so that they are both consistent with and connected to each other.53 Although all of the senses cultivate memory, seeing and hearing lend themselves most readily to mnemonic sequencing, which is a critical element of recall.54 In a way, our senses ground semantic memory that is also promoted by what one scholar dubs an ‘effort after meaning’.55 The experience of perception then is located between the mind and body, suspended in an intersubjective space between the sensate subject and the object.56 Sensory memory is a form of storage. Storage is always the embodiment and conservation of experiences, persons and matter in vessels of alterity. The awakening of the senses is awakening the capacity for memory, of tangible memory; to be awake is to remember, and one remembers through the senses, via substance. Memory is stored in substances that are shared, just as substances are stored in social memory which is sensory.57 Miri Rubin notes that at the altar all the senses were called into play, especially at the moment of the Elevation of the Host: ‘Bells pealed, incense was burnt, 51  Blondel, “Un aspect” 45–46; and D’Hainault-Zveny B. d’H, “Fonctions et usages religieux”, in D’Hainault-Zveny (ed.), Miroirs du sacré – Les retables sculptés à Bruxelles XVe–XVIe siècles. Lieux de Mémoire (Brussels: 2005) 131–147. 52  Palazzo, “Les cinq sens” 347–351. See also Martin “The Autonomy of Sculpture” 282–284; Zucker P., “The Aesthetics of Space in Architecture, Sculpture, and City Planning”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 4.1 (1945) 12–19, esp.14–17. 53  Fentress J. J. – Wickham C., Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford – Cambridge: 1992) 12, 24–26. 54   Fentress – Wickham, Social Memory 30–31. 55  Bartlett F., Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: 1932) 3–5, as cited in Fentress – Wickham, Social Memory 32–33. 56  Simonsen K., “Practice, Spatiality and Embodied Emotions: An Outline of a Geography of Practice”, Human Affairs 17 (2007) 168–181, esp. 171. 57  Seremetakis N. C., “The Memory of the Senses: Historical Perception, Commensal Exchange and Modernity” Visual Anthropology Review 9.2 (1993) 2–18, esp. 4.

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candles were lit, hands were clasped, supplications were mouthed’.58 An altarpiece, such as that found in the church at Rumilly-les-Vaudes or Géraudot provides a beautiful vehicle for storing the Passion of Christ, replete with miniature scenes that expand the narrative of the Passion [Figs. 10.1 and 10.7].] The worshippers’ senses were enlivened by their experience of the Passion, but their role in this Christian drama also dictated that they had to accept the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist, be penitent, and develop an inner devotion to Christ. In order to foster this dedication to Christ, it was recommended that the worshipper contemplate the sufferings of the Savior.59 A Passion retable such as that found in the church of St.-Pierre-èsLiens, Les Riceys in Ricey-Bas, ca. 1520–1525, provided the most graphic vehicle to assist the viewer in imagining the Savior’s humiliation, torture, and death, and thus encouraged the communicant’s spiritual union with Christ [Fig. 10.12]. The Ricey-Bas altarpiece accentuates the suffering of Christ and in the place of the Crucifixion in the middle panel, one finds the protracted continuation of the Way to Calvary begun on the left panel. In lieu of the actual death of Christ, the Deposition is depicted on the right panel. St. Peter cutting off the ear of the soldier Malchus begins the triptych, and the Flagellation and crowning with the Crown of Thorns flesh out the narrative. The overt style of wood carving is visible throughout the retable and the complex tracery motifs that compose the frame also provide refuge for Old Testament prefigurations of Christ’s sacrifice on either side of the central panel. Who was the audience of this highly expressive workmanship and theologically nuanced Passion retable? In the fifteenth-century, the pope granted Indulgences for the faithful to ‘visiter les autels’ in parish churches.60 Further, Christian Opitz has demonstrated on the basis of inscriptions that the representations on the recto of retables also functioned as a stimulus for prayer and devotion; indeed, the space behind the altar was regularly used, and it marked the intersection of the official cult and the devotions of the private worshipper.61 The altar also sustained its centrality in the realm of liturgical drama. For 58  Rubin, Corpus Christi 58. For more about the senses and their interplay with altarpieces, see Sadler, Touching the Passion 102–107. 59  Casper C., “The Western Church during the Late Middle Ages: Augenkommunion or Popular Mysticism?”, in Casper C. – Lukken G. – Rouwhorst G. (eds.), Bread of Heaven Customs and Practices Surrounding Holy Communion. Essays in the History of Liturgy and Culture (Kampen: 1995) 83–97, esp. 88. This practice dates back to the twelfth-century, especially in the writings of Aelred of Rievaulx. 60  Delehaye H., Les lettres d’indulgence collectives (Brussels: 1928) 134; the same letter granted indulgences to those who gave materials or furniture to the parish church. 61  Opitz C. N., “Die Heiligen hinter dem Altar: Überlegungen zu Gestaltung und Benutzung von Retabelrückseiten im Spätmittelalter”, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 67 (2006) 161–193.

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figure 10.12 Ricey-Bas, Church of Saints-Pierre-ès-Liens, Les Riceys, Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded wood (ca. 1520–1525)

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example, in a French rendering of the Visitatio Sepulchri the three Marys would approach the altar and remove the altar cloth in search of Christ’s body; here again the altar served as the fulcrum of Christ’s Passion play.62 5

The Dialectics of Devotion

The representation of the Passion possesses the capacity to evoke past and future simultaneously. The space between the viewer and the image is bound up with ‘the effectiveness of an image in making the observer think of both here and there, of oneself and others’.63 As a result of this union of subject and object, the viewer of the retable from Ricey-Bas experiences at the same time its meanings and its power [Fig. 10.12].64 The carved figures beckon one into the space and once there, to walk among them, to truly relive the Passion with Christ.65 The engagement the viewer experiences with the story depicted on the retable depends on a shared atmosphere, one that is ‘constructed’ between the subject and the object. Indeed, the altarpiece (or object) may be elaborated in order to fix memories, and in the process become ‘sticky’ with the emotions that accompany those memories.66 Further, the Passion retables had to be conventionalised and simplified enough so that their meaning could be grasped immediately. Images were fixed in the mind of the worshipper by rendering them as vividly as possible: memory’s task was to order and connect these images into a meaningful narrative.67 We have observed how the Mass triggers memory, which is stimulated by the Passion rendered on the altarpiece, and memory is always in the present 62  Beckwith S., “Ritual, Church and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body”, Church and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, in Aers D. (ed.) (New York: 1992) 65–89. See also Brooks N., The Sepulcher of Christ in Art and Liturgy, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 7 (Urbana: 1921) 141–248. esp. 160. 63  Strathern M., “Artefacts of History Events and the Interpretation of Images”, in Sikkala J. (ed.), Culture and History in the Pacific (Helsinki: 1997) 25–43, esp. 29. 64  Ibidem 36–37; see also Wagner R., Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power Among the Usen Barok of New Ireland (Princeton: 1986) 216. 65  Bynum C. W., Christian Materiality: An Essay in Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: 2011) 67. See also Gertsman E., Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (University Park: 2015) 168–177; 102–113. 66  Tarlow S., “The Archaeology of Emotion”, Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012) 169– 85, esp. 173–75; see also Harris O. and Sørensen T. F., “Rethinking Emotion and Material Culture,” Archaeological Dialogues 17.2 (2010) 145–163. 67   Fentress – Wickham, Social Memory 30–61.

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tense: the beholder interprets the past in the language of the present. The past is ‘contextualized, informed, and enriched by experience in the here and now’.68 Neuroscientists liken this continuous process of mapping and remapping to the intricate songlines woven across the landscape by the Aborigines that chart their path and their activities.69 Works of art facilitate memory because they help us retrieve experiences from our individual and collective past.70 Complementing the inventiveness of the stories rendered on the retables were the preachers’ dynamic sermons peppered with copious sound effects and emphatic gestures, which in a sense violated their frame.71 Sermons reinforced the liturgical present and established an intimacy between the suffering Christ and the audience.72 For example, preachers delighted in describing the hideous features of the bad thief that gave graphic evidence of the presence of demons; similarly, the artists of the retables competed in depicting the most contorted unrepentant thief [Figs. 10.9, 10.14–10.15].73 In the limestone Passion retable from Champagne, ca. 1522, the bad thief in the crowded scene of the Crucifixion is portrayed in a very melodramatic fashion: his body is thrust forward, elbows upward, legs crossed and bent, and face obscured by the cascade of hair engendered by the downward angle of his head.

68  G  ifford D., Zones of Re-membering Time, Memory, and (Un)Consciousness, ed. D. E. Morse (Amsterdam – New York: 2011) 32–33. 69  Ibidem 47–49; see also Huggan G., “Maps, Dreams, and the Presentation of Ethnographic Narrative: Hugh Brody’s ‘Maps and Dreams’ and Bruce Chadwick, ‘The Songlines’”, Ariel 22.1 (1991) 57–69. 70  This is a subject that recently has received a great deal of scholarly attention, however, it was introduced as early as the 1930s in the work of John Dewey among others. See Dewey J., Art as Experience (London – New York: 1934; reprinted 2005) 74–77, 93–94, 126–127. Cf. Biernoff S., “Carnal Relations: Embodied Sight in Merleau-Ponty, Roger Bacon and St. Francis”, Journal of Visual Culture 4.1 (2005) 39–52; Enders J., “Visions with Voices: The Rhetoric of Memory and Music in Liturgical Drama”, Comparative Drama 24.1 (1990) 34– 54; and Hirsch E., “Art, Performance and Time’s Presence: Reflections on Temporality in Art and Agency”, in Chua L. – Elliot M. (eds.), Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell (New York – Oxford: 2013) 176–200. 71  Stevens M., “Intertextuality of Late Medieval Art and Drama”, New Literary History 22.2 (1991) 317–337, esp. 317–319. Stevens is citing Tomasch’s frame analysis, which I think may be applied to the preachers in the later Middle Ages. Cf. Dalmasso V., “Jérusalem ou la mémoire de la Passion”, in Dalmasso (ed.) “Jérusalem et la mémoire de la Passion”, Actes de la journée d’études 20 mars 2007, Université de Picardie-Jules Verne (Paris: 2009) 49–79, esp. 55–67. 72  Johnson H., “Fashioning Devotion: The Art of Good Friday Preaching in Chaucerian England”, in Donavin G. – Nederman C. J. – Utz R. J. (eds.), Speculum sermonis: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Medieval Sermon (Turnhout: 2004) 315–334. 73  Dalmasso, “Jérusalem” 57–59.

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figure 10.13 Passion retable. Polychromed and gilded wood (16th century). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon (Inv. 2028) Image: François Jay

6

The Role of the Frame

One of the most compelling aspects of the late medieval retable is the role played by its elaborate architectural frame: mounted on the altar, the frame announces the significance of the enframed and commences the immersion of the worshipper in the story of the Passion [Fig. 10.13]. Amidst the spectacle of the Mass, from the flickering candlelight that glorified the risen Savior, to the incense that collapsed time, elicited powerful olfactory associations, and seemed to be a prayer wafting toward God, to the chants sung in an attitude of devotion,

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figure 10.14 Passion retable from Champagne. Limestone (ca. 1522). Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Image: Jean Tholance

stood the altar adorned with glittering precious objects: the chalice and paten, the tabernacle, censors, the altar cloth that doubled as Christ’s shroud, and, leading this material charge was the imposing altarpiece, a permanent expression of the liturgy.74 As noted above, Flemish late medieval retables invite the viewer into the story by the display of a rich array of flamboyant tracery forms that assert their presence in defining the space in which the narrative unfolds. Framed by the Mass, the sixteenth-century retable now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon is then bordered by an intricate late Gothic architectural 74  Blondel, “Un aspect” 59. Cf. Palazzo, “Les cinq sens” 339–366. For the aroma of sanctity, see 2 Corinthians 2: 14–15. It should be noted that the number of masses multiplied so that in 1496, Notre-Dame of Dijon had 26 masses daily. See Blondel, “Un aspect” 39–42. Blondel notes that canonically priests were only allowed to offer the sacrament of the Eucharist once a day except in extraordinary circumstances.

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figure 10.15 Bad Thief from Passion retable from Champagne. Limestone (ca. 1522). Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Image: Jean Tholance

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frame, which is constructed of both the ambient space and the pictorial space [Fig. 10.13].75 The elaborate tracery in this retable not only crowns each scene, but also meanders beneath the Crucifixion to set off the Entombment portrayed below. As Meyer Schapiro points out, in a medieval object such as an altarpiece, the frame may appear not as an enclosure but rather as the pictorial milieu of the image.76 The representation is magnified by the action of the frame, what Louis Marin has referred to as the ‘show on show’.77 The ecclesiastical micro-architecture of the frame not only mirrors the vocabulary of the church, but also signals the sacred content of the narrative it surrounds. Scholars focusing on the study of frames zealously champion their subject.78 Brian Richardson has claimed that ‘the story of telling becomes as prominent as the story that is told’.79 In this way the frame provides an illocutionary message, asking us to regard the image in particular ways. It is also located in a liminal position so that one visually traverses the divide between everyday reality and the fictional world.80 In both the Ricey-Bas and Dijon retables, the borders play a persuasive part in prompting the viewer through each frame of the drama of Christ’s last days: the chaotic procession on the Road to Calvary leads inexorably to the Crucifixion and its aftermath [Figs. 10.12–10.13]. During this journey the viewer is buoyed by the profusion of anecdotal detail and contemporary garb that ground the religious story in the present, while constituting the visual rhetoric of remembrance.81 In another example, small scenes depicting the Annunciation, Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, Presentation in the Temple, and Flight into Egypt occupy the balcony story, which is created by delicate forms of late Gothic tracery on the Passion retable attributed to the Maître de 75  Nelles W., Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative, American University Studies 19, General Literature 33 (New York: 1977) 142, contends that all narratives are embedded narratives and that the frame compels the understanding that story is about telling a story. 76  Schapiro M., “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field in Image-Signs”, Simiolus 6.1 (1972–1973) 9–19, esp. 11. 77  Marin L., “The Frame of Representation and Some of its Figures”, in Duro (ed.), The Rhetoric of the Frame 79–95, esp. 83–84. 78  One of the earliest scholars to generate a deeper interest in frames was Erving Goffman. See Goffman E., Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge: 1974). For more about the role of frames in altarpieces, see Sadler, Touching the Passion 161–210. 79  Richardson, “Narrative Poetics” 37. 80  Berlatsky E., “Lost in the Gutter: Within and Between Frames in Narrative and Narrative Theory”, Narrative 17.2 (2009) 162–87, esp. 163–164. 81  Hutton P., History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: 1993) 195–208.

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Sainte-Gudule ca. 1470 [Fig. 10.5]. Indeed, it was the realistic spatial articulation and psychological density of works such as these that attracted worshippers to the representation of Christ’s Passion and made the accessibility of these altarpieces a target of the Reformation.82 This article has attempted to demonstrate how the altar enhanced the sacral quality of the altarpieces, a quality that was partially inherent in the retable itself and partially engendered by the perception of the worshippers. The altar, which was part of the context of the altarpiece, became subsumed into the meaning represented on the retable.83 The story of the Passion so strikingly portrayed on the retable was an instrument of divine power that engaged the viewers to forge a community of the faithful. The liturgical afterglow of the late medieval retable perpetuated devotion in the hearts of the worshippers who experienced the Passion in the convergence of spectator and spectacle. Indeed, it was the complex interplay of the story of the Passion and the ritual of the Mass, which stirred all the senses, and orchestrated polyphony that emanated from the altar of a late medieval parish church. Select Bibliography “What do Objects Do? A Material and Visual Culture Perspective”, http://www.ucl. ac.uk/museums-static/objectretrieval/node/266, accessed October 30, 2017. Bachelard G., The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: 1969; reprint ed., 1994). Basso K. H., Wisdom Sits in Places Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: 1996). Belting H., An Anthropology of Images Picture, Medium, Body, trans. T. Dunlap (Princeton – Oxford, 2011). Blondel M., “Un aspect de la vie liturgique et spirituelle en Bourgogne à la fin du Moyen Âge: la célébration de la messe”, MA thesis, Université de Bourgogne (2002). Carruthers M., “The Concept of Ductus, or Journeying Through a Work of Art”, in Carruthers (ed.), Rhetoric beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: 2010) 190–213. Certeau M. de, The Practice of everyday life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley: 1984) 117–120. D’Hainault-Zveny B. d’H, “Fonctions et usages religieux”, in D’Hainaut-Zveny (ed.), Miroirs du sacré – Les retables sculptés à Bruxelles XVe–XVIe siècles. Lieux de Mémoire (Brussels: 2005) 131–147.

82  D’Hainault-Zveny, “Fonctions et usages” 140–145. 83  Strathern, “Artefacts of History Events” 34.

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Dalmasso V., “Jérusalem ou la mémoire de la Passion”, in Dalmasso V. (ed.), “Jérusalem et la mémoire de la Passion”, Actes de la journée d’études 20 mars 2007, Université de Picardie-Jules Verne (Paris: 2009) 49–79. Fentress J. J. – Wickham C., Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford – Cambridge: 1992). Fricke B., “Presence Through Absence: Thresholds and Mimesis in Painting”, Representations 130.1 (Spring 2015) 1–27. Gifford D., Zones of Re-membering Time, Memory, and (un)Consciousness, ed. D. E. Morse (Amsterdam – New York: 2011). Opitz C. N., “Die Heiligen hinter dem Altar: Überlegungen zu Gestaltung und Benutzung von Retabelrückseiten im Spätmittelalter”, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 67 (2006) 161–193. Richardson B., “Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theorizing the Collapse of Time, Voice and Frame”, Narrative 8.1 (2000) 23–42. Richardson J., “Seeing, Thinking, Mapping, Moving: Considerations of Space in Visual Culture”, Visual Arts Research 32.2 (2004) 62–68. Skubiszewski P., “Le retable Gothique sculpté: Entre le Dogma et l’Univers Humain: Le retable d’Issenheim et le sculpture au nord des Alpes à la fin du moyen âge”, Actes du Colloque de Colmar (2–3 novembre 1987) (Colmar: 1989) 12–47. Smith J. Z., To Take Place Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago – London: 1992). Strathern M., “Artefacts of History Events and the Interpretation of Images”, in Sikkala J. (ed.), Culture and History in the Pacific (Helsinki: 1997) 25–43. Swanson R. N., “Passion and Practice: the Social and Ecclesiastical Implications of Passion Devotion in the Late Middle Ages”, in MacDonald A. A. – Ridderbos B. – Schlusemann R. M. – Swanson R. N. (eds.), The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late Medieval Culture (Groningen: 1998) 1–30. Tilley C., Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford: 1999).

chapter 11

God’s Design: Painting and Piety in the Vida of Estefanía de la Encarnación (ca. 1597–1665) Tanya J. Tiffany At the conclusion of the seventh dialogue of the Diálogos de la Pintura (ed. princeps, 1633) by the artist and theorist Vicente Carducho (ca. 1576–1638) is an engraving of Saint Luke painting the Virgin and Christ [Fig. 11.1]*. Engraved by Carducho’s pupil, Francisco López, the image is a fitting gloss upon the dialogue, in which the example of sacred art provides eloquent testimony to the nobility of painting. In the engraving, Mary and her grown son appear bathed in a mandorla of light before the saint, who reproduces their features on canvas. Luke embodies what early modern theorists deemed the divine furor of artistic creation: his lips are parted, his gaze is rapt, and his billowing drapery accentuates his Michelangelesque pose.1 On the wall above him, an inscription modified from Psalm 99:3 reads, ‘IPSI FECIT NOS ET NON IPSI NOS’ (‘he * Work on this project was made possible with the generous support of a Franklin Research Grant (American Philosophical Society), a Research Growth Initiative Grant (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), and a Research and Creative Activities Support Award (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). I am grateful to Walter Melion, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Elizabeth Carson Pastan for the wonderful opportunity to present my research at the 2017 Lovis Corinth Colloquium and for their invaluable feedback on my presentation and on a draft of this essay. I also thank Laura Bass for her comments on various drafts and for her guidance on issues of translation. Rocío Gutiérrez Sumillera and Rafael Castillo Bejarano kindly provided additional assistance in translating various passages. Special gratitude is due to the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Biblioteca General Histórica of the Universidad de Salamanca, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. I dedicate this essay to the sisters of Iesu Communio, who now occupy the Lerma convent of La Ascensión de Nuestro Señor, where Estefanía lived for nearly five decades. The women of Iesu Communio have not only provided me with access to materials in their archive; they have also shared their knowledge of the convent’s history, and they have been truly stimulating compañeras in conversation during my visits to Lerma. 1  My discussion of the engraving takes its cue from Javier Portús Pérez’s analysis of a Saint Luke the Evangelist (ca. 1625–1627) by Francisco Ribalta; see Portús Pérez J., “The Holy Depicting the Holy: Social and Aesthetic Issues”, in Kasl R. (ed.), Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World, exh. cat., Indianapolis Museum of Art (New Haven: 2009) 50–51. On the engravings accompanying the Diálogos, see: Kubler G., “Vicente Carducho’s Allegories of Painting”, The Art Bulletin 47.4 (1965) 439–445; Portús Pérez J., “Painting and Poetry in Diálogos de la Pintura”, in Andrews J. – Roe J. – Noble Wood O. (eds.), On Art and Painting: Vicente Carducho and Baroque Spain (Cardiff: 2016) 71–90; and Thompson C., “Carducho the © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_012

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Francisco López, Ipsi fecit nos et non ipsi nos, illustration to Vicente Carducho, Dialogos de la pintvra: sv defensa, origen, esse[n]cia, definicion, modos y diferencias (Madrid, Francisco Martinez: 1633). Engraving, 20 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Image in the Public Domain; available courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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made us for himself, and not we ourselves’), in allusion to the topos of God as the ultimate painter and the creator of all things.2 The engraver affirmed his own creative power by placing his signature, ‘Fr.co lop.z f.’ [i.e., ‘Francisco López fecit’], beneath the saint’s feet. In the context of the engraving, the signature, however formulaic, assumes particular resonance; it not only proclaims López’s authorship of the image, but also, by echoing the ‘fecit’ of the Psalm, compares him to Luke, the first Christian painter.3 The identification between living artists and Luke himself is made explicit by the poem that accompanies the engraving. There, the playwright Francisco López de Zárate admonishes painters to follow either ‘Vicencio [Carducho] or Luke’ in their own attempts at soaring ‘aloft to heaven’ in sacred glory and temporal acclaim.4 The pairing of religious piety and artistic fame in Carducho’s Diálogos provides an apt counterpoint to the writings of his younger female contemporary: Estefanía de la Encarnación (born Estefanía Gaurre [or Guari] de la Canal, ca. 1597–1665), the painter-nun who is the focus of the present essay.5 Having achieved renown as a young artist in Madrid, Estefanía exchanged worldly accolades for a vow of humility. Like Carducho, she enjoyed the patronage of Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the Duke of Lerma (1552–1625), who was chief minister to King Philip III and one of the greatest art collectors in early modern Spain.6 Given Estefanía’s artistic talent, the Duke of Lerma enjoined Conceptista”, in Andrews – Roe – Noble Wood (eds.), On Art and Painting 91–104. On furor, see Summers D., Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: 1981) 68. 2  I have used the Douay-Rheims Bible. 3  It has been suggested, however, that the image was designed by Carducho, rather than by López himself; see Kubler, “Carducho’s Allegories” 440. 4  For the poem, entitled “Canción Real”, see Carducho V., Diálogos de la Pintura: su defensa, origen, esencia, definición, modos y diferencias, ed. F. Calvo Serraller (Madrid: 1979) 375–376. The final lines read: Artifices divinos, aunque humanos, Pues se os concede, hazeros soberanos, a Lucas imitando, ó a Vicencio. O no, abatais las plumas, ó no, al suelo; Que Dios las da, para bolar al cielo. My translation of the poem is excerpted from Pérez d’Ors P. – Fisher T. – Mountjoy K., “Francisco López de Zárate’s ‘Canción Real’ in Vicencio Carducho’s Diálogos de la Pintura (1633): An Annotated Edition of the Poem with an Introduction and English Translation”, Hispanic Research Journal 8.3 (2007) 239. 5  ‘Gaurre’ is seemingly a Hispanicized version of a Burgundian surname, and it is given various spellings in early sources. See Barbeito Carneiro M. I., “Una madrileña polifacética en Santa Clara de Lerma: Estefanía de la Encarnación”, Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños 24 (1987) 151. 6  On Lerma’s artistic patronage, see, in particular: Schroth S., The Private Picture Collection of the Duke of Lerma, Ph.D. dissertation (New York University: 1990); eadem, “A New Style of Grandeur: Politics and Patronage at the Court of Philip III”, in Schroth S. and Baer R. (eds.),

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her to take vows at La Ascensión de Nuestro Señor, a Poor Clare convent in his ducal town of Lerma, where her labour as a painter was substituted for her dowry. At the very time that Carducho was finishing his Diálogos at court, Estefanía was in Lerma writing her Vida (1631), a detailed account of her spiritual life.7 Estefanía’s Vida is the only known autobiography written by a woman artist from the period. Consistent with the author’s status as a nun as well as a painter, the text draws upon the conventions of women’s spiritual autobiographies – foremost among them, Teresa of Avila’s Libro de la Vida (ed. princeps, 1588)8 – and engages with discourse on painting, which was being codified in Spain by theorists such as Carducho. As Estefanía makes clear, however, her artistic ambitions were often at odds with her spiritual aspirations. Throughout the Vida, she highlights her struggle to subsume her desire for fame as an artist to the modesty required of pious women. At the same time, she negotiates the tension between worldly renown and spiritual recollection (what she and her contemporaries called recogimiento) by arguing that her artistic talent had a divine origin and a pious function. It was a gift from God, one whose significance she had long failed to understand but which eventually brought her to the convent.9 In the text, her talent thus assumes a sacramental quality: it is a sacred mystery that, in ways often hidden to the author herself, leads her to communion with God. The Vida offers rich perspectives on the intersection of gender, art, and divine favour during the early modern period. However, the text remains largely El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: 2008) 77–120; and Banner L. A., The Religious Patronage of the Duke of Lerma, 1598– 1621 (Farnham: 2009). 7  Estefanía de la Encarnación, La vida de Soror Estefanía de la Encarnación, monja profesa en el monasterio de religiosas franciscas de nuestra madre Santa Clara en esta villa de Lerma, 1631, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS 7459 (hereafter cited as Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida [Madrid]); and eadem, La vida de Soror Estefanía de la Encarnación monja profesa en el monasterio de religiosas descalzas franciscas de nuestra madre Santa Clara en esta villa de Lerma, 1631, Salamanca, Universidad de Salamanca, Biblioteca General Histórica, Ms. 1730 (hereafter cited as Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida [Salamanca]). A digital version of the Madrid manuscript is available through the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, at http:// bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000145512&page=1. 8  I have used Teresa of Avila, Libro de la Vida, in Obras completas: edición manual, ed. Efrén de la Madre de Dios – O. Steggink (Madrid: 1962; reprint ed., 2006) 31–232. 9  In early modern parlance, recogimiento referred largely to the enclosure and unworldliness that was deemed especially important for women. On the term, see Deusen N. E. van, Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima (Stanford: 2001) i–xvii. I have also considered recogimiento in Tiffany T. J., Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville (University Park: 2012) 69–70, 73–76.

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unstudied by art historians, and, indeed, has never been published.10 Two manuscript versions survive, both anonymous seventeenth-century copies of Estefanía’s lost original. One copy, now in the Universidad de Salamanca, is the product of a variety of hands.11 The other, in Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional, is more polished; it is written in an elegant, uniform script and includes a pen and ink frontispiece drawing that depicts a nun, evidently Estefanía herself, receiving a veil from the Virgin of Mercy [Fig. 11.2].12 The existence of these two early manuscripts suggests that the Vida was circulated during the seventeenth century, probably among a select group of nuns, clerics, and pious men of letters. Such was the case with other writings by Estefanía,13 who also composed theological works (which likewise survive in manuscript copies) that were known to religious luminaries such as María de Ágreda, the Conceptionist nun who became spiritual advisor to Philip IV.14 In the intervening centuries, however, Estefanía was almost entirely forgotten outside her own convent.15 Only since the 1980s, with the growing interest in Spanish convent writings, have scholars begun to study Estefanía and to locate her within her historical and religious contexts. María Isabel Barbeito Carneiro, for example, has established Estefanía’s place within the broader literary production of seventeenthcentury madrileñas, while Isabelle Poutrin, Sonja Herpoel, and others have explored the close relationship between Estefanía’s Vida and the spiritual autobiographies of various Spanish nuns from the time.16 In her important 10  I am currently collaborating with Laura Bass on a bilingual critical edition based primarily on the Biblioteca Nacional version; in keeping with the criteria of that edition, I have modernized spelling and punctuation when quoting from the Vida. 11  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Salamanca). 12  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid). 13  In addition to the Vida, Estefanía’s two extant written works are a Tabernáculo místico (also known as the Fábrica del Tabernáculo) and a text entitled the Siete hojas (which survives only in part); for a list of extant copies of both works, see Barbeito Carneiro M. I., Escritoras madrileñas del siglo XVII (Estudio bibliográfico-crítico), Ph.D. dissertation (Universidad Complutense: 1986) 235–247. 14  See Barbeito Carneiro M. I., Mujeres y literatura del Siglo de Oro: espacios profanos y espacios conventuales (Belmonte de Tajo: 2007) 366; and Baranda C., “La función de la censura en la configuración de la religiosidad femenina del siglo XVII. Una propuesta”, in Esteve C. (ed.), Las razones del censor: Control ideológico y censura de libros en la primera Edad Moderna (Barcelona: 2013) 166. 15  She is, however, included in Serrano y Sanz M., Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras españolas desde el año 1401 al 1833, 2 vols. (Madrid: 1903) I 350–351. 16  See: Barbeito Carneiro, “Escritoras madrileñas”; eadem, “Una madrileña”; eadem, “¿Por qué escribieron las mujeres en el Siglo de Oro?” Cuadernos de historia moderna 19 (1997) 189–190; eadem, Mujeres y literatura 361–376; eadem, “En Él fueron transformadas”, Via Spiritus 14 (2007) 54–63; Poutrin I., Le voile et la plume: autobiographie et sainteté féminine dans l’Espagne moderne (Madrid: 1995); eadem, “Les chapelets bénits des mystiques espagnoles (XVIe–XVIIe siècles)”, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 26.2 (1990) 33–54;

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Anonymous, frontispiece to Estefanía de la Encarnación, La vida de Soror Estefanía de la Encarnación, monja profesa en el monasterio de religiosas franciscas de nuestra madre Santa Clara en esta villa de Lerma, 1631, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS 7459. Pen and ink drawing, 21 × 16 cm IMAGE REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE BIBLIOTECA NACIONAL DE ESPAÑA

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book on the Duke of Lerma’s religious patronage, Lisa Banner has considered Estefanía’s status as a protégée of the duke.17 Taking a sociological approach to labour in early modern convents, Mindy Nancarrow Taggard has investigated Estefanía’s position as a working artist, a role that distinguished her from the other, aristocratic nuns at La Ascensión.18 This essay centres on the interdependence of Estefanía’s artistic practice and her realization of her religious calling. I focus in particular on the early chapters of the Vida, in which Estefanía recounts how her abilities as a painter brought her to the Lerma convent and made her a bride of Christ. For Estefanía, her artistic talent was far more than a useful skill that allowed her to become a nun, despite her lack of a conventional dowry. Indeed, she affirms that it was part of the ‘design’ by which God demonstrated her favoured status in his eyes.19 Estefanía also acknowledges, however, that her renown as a painter tempted her toward the sin of pride. As she puts it, she received God’s call, but, in her youthful arrogance, instead indulged in the vainglory of temporal ambition. Yet God persisted in summoning her, and, at age eighteen, she finally followed his providential path to the Lerma convent, where she took vows as a painternun. In so doing, she fulfilled God’s plan for her and came to embrace the religious life that was made possible by her artistic talent.

Herpoel S., “La endemoniada de Lerma o visión e imaginación”, in García Martín M. (ed.), Estado actual de los estudios sobre el Siglo de Oro (Salamanca: 1993) 495–500; eadem, A la zaga de Santa Teresa: autobiografías por mandato (Amsterdam: 1999) 62, 167–180; and Holloway A. – Wray R., “‘O Daughter … Forget Your People and Your Father’s House’: Early Modern Women Writers and the Spanish Imaginary”, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 93.7–8 (2016) 1409–1413. Also see Julia Lewandowska’s forthcoming book, Escritoras monjas: autoridad y autoría en la escritura conventual femenina de los Siglos de Oro (Madrid: 2019). Although Lewandowska’s book was not available at the time this article went to press, I am grateful to the author for discussing her work with me via email. 17  Banner, Duke of Lerma 139–44. Banner has also published the only surviving paintings by Estefanía’s hand: an Immaculate Conception on canvas (reproduced in ibid. 142) and the wall paintings of the Chapel of San Juan Evangelista (a detail is reproduced in ibid. 143). The surviving works remain in La Ascensión in Lerma. 18  Nancarrow Taggard M., “Art and Alienation in Early Modern Spanish Convents”, South Atlantic Review 65.1 (2000) 24–40. For a broader discussion of artisans’ labour and selfpresentation during this period, see Amelang J. S., The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Auto­ biography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: 1998). 19  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 23r: ‘traza’.

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1 Estefanía’s Vida Like other women who composed sacred autobiographies, Estefanía wrote the Vida at the directive of her confessor, Alonso de Villamediana, the Franciscan friar to whom she addresses her account. All that is known of Villamediana comes from the Vida. In his prologue to the text, he explains that he became vicar of the Lerma Poor Clares in 1630 and soon commanded Estefanía to compose, ‘in her own hand’, a narrative of her spiritual development, both ‘for the memory of the past’ and so that the story of her life would be passed down ‘for posterity’.20 He acknowledges that he added chapter titles to the original manuscript and that he wrote various ‘remarks and notes’ in the margins.21 (The surviving versions include his chapter titles, but not his marginalia.) In giving titles to the chapters, he refers to Estefanía as the ‘Servant of God’, a term used for women and men of exemplary piety, including those promoted for beatification.22 Among other examples, one chapter thus describes ‘How This Servant of Our Lord Took the Habit’, another considers ‘An Intelligence Had by This Servant of God, which Prepared Her for […] a Mercy’, and still another addresses the ‘Illness and Mercies […] Received by This Servant of God’.23 As suggested by these exalted descriptions of Estefanía and her piety, Villamediana may have deemed her a potential candidate for sainthood. For her part, Estefanía credited him with encouraging her religious practice and visionary experiences.24 Addressing herself directly to Villamediana, Estefanía focuses the Vida on both her myriad ‘faults and defects’ and on the many ‘benefits’ that she received from God, despite her ‘ingratitude’ and ‘wicked customs’.25 She thus employs what Alison Weber has termed a ‘rhetoric of humility’ in her discussion of Teresa of Avila, who navigated the pressure of writing for censorious male 20  Ibid., fol. 3r: ‘Me pareció muy conveniente, así para memoria de lo pasado como para lo porvenir, la escribiese de su mano’. 21  Ibid., fol. 3v: ‘advertencias y apuntamientos’. 22  For an early modern definition, see Real Academia Española [online], Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739), http://web.frl.es/DA.html, accessed July 31, 2018: ‘SIERVO DE DIOS. Llaman à el temeroso de Dios, que guarda sus preceptos, y le sirve’. 23  See the table of contents in Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fols. 265v–268r. The full chapter titles are: ‘Cap. VI. De cómo tomó el hábito esta Sierva de Nuestro Señor y de su aprobación’; ‘Cap. XV. En que se pone una inteligencia que tuvo esta Sierva de Dios, previniéndola y avisándola para una merced, y de otros [sic] que de Dios ha recibido’; and ‘Cap. XX. En que se prosigue en dar cuenta del suceso de la enfermedad y las mercedes que en ella recibió esta Sierva de Dios’. 24  See ibid., fols. 212r–265r (chaps. 22–26). 25  Ibid., fol. 5r: ‘faltas y miserias’; ‘beneficios’; ‘ingratitudes’. Ibid., fol. 10v: ‘ruines costumbres’.

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superiors by declaring herself an undeserving recipient of God’s blessings.26 A devotee of Teresa, Estefanía adapts this strategy by highlighting her own Godgiven attainments, whether religious or artistic, while at the same time declaring herself unworthy of such divine rewards.27 In keeping with the conventions of sacred life writing, Estefanía begins the Vida with a description of her parents, their religious devotion, and their social position. This section of the Vida is important because it establishes the framework for Estefanía’s pious construction of her life and because it foregrounds the social concerns that later informed her approach to artistic practice in the convent. She characterizes her father and mother as ‘very Christian and God fearing’ and ‘pure’ in the ‘quality of their blood’,28 that is, untainted by what Spanish contemporaries deemed the ‘stain’ of Jewish or Moorish ancestry.29 Born in Burgundy, her father enjoyed close contact with members of the French and Flemish elite at the Spanish court, where he served in the prestigious Burgundian royal guard.30 Estefanía acknowledges the ‘humble’ Castilian origins of her mother, arguing that her parents’ marriage was socially ‘unequal’ and beset with financial worry.31 Yet it may have been precisely that background that allowed Estefanía to move readily between the artisanal and the aristocratic classes. In her youth, Estefanía spent several years living with a maternal aunt and her husband, the painter Alonso Páez (d. 1612), who had a reputation as a portraitist and copyist.32 (None of Páez’s paintings is known 26  Weber A., Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: 1990) 42–76. 27  On Estefanía’s reverence for Teresa, see Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), esp. fols. 104v, 117r–117v, 141r. 28  Ibid., fol. 6r: ‘cristianísimos y temerosos de Dios, y en cuanto a calificación de sangre limpios’. 29  For a recent discussion of limpieza de sangre, see Hering Torres M. S., “Purity of Blood: Problems of Interpretation”, in Hering Torres M. S. – Martínez M. E. – Nirenberg D. (eds.), Race and Blood in the Iberian World (Vienna: 2012) 11–38. 30  He is described as an ‘archero de Su Māg [i.e., Majestad]’ in the 1612 death notice of his brother-in-law, the painter Alonso Páez; the document is published in Entrambasaguas J., “Datos nuevos sobre varios pintores españoles de la Edad de Oro”, Archivo español de arte 47 (1941) 480. On Gaurre’s role in the Burgundian guard of Archeros, see the document dated February 12, 1622 in Madrid, Archivo General del Palacio Real, Sección Histórica, Caja 168. In the Burgundian guard, Gaurre would also have become acquainted with artists of Flemish and Burgundian heritage, among them the painter Juan van der Hamen; see Jordan W. B., Juan van der Hamen y León and the Court of Madrid (New Haven – London: 2005) 40–70. 31  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 6v: ‘humilde’; ‘eran desiguales’. 32  Ibid., fol. 22v, describes Páez as a ‘pintor de los buenos que ha habido en España en materia de retratos, que es la nata de la pintura’. In a letter, Páez was also recommended to the Count of Gondomar for his skills as a copyist; see Banner, Duke of Lerma 139.

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today.) At the same time, Estefanía and her mother took advantage of their loftier social connections and regularly paid visits to local noblewomen, including the benefactresses of convents and several court ladies who later became nuns.33 Estefanía thus portrays her family as one with close proximity to court society, where she had immediate contacts with workaday artists as well as with the elite women and men whose patronage would determine her career as a painter and Poor Clare. 2

God’s Design

It was supposedly in the household of Estefanía’s uncle, the painter Alonso Páez, that God miraculously revealed her artistic talent. ‘One morning’, the teenage Estefanía was helping with chores and began dusting a figure of Christ that hung above her aunt’s bed.34 (The figure was surely a crucifix, an image routinely placed in bedrooms.)35 Longing to enter the religious life, Estefanía gazed ‘intently’ at the sculpted Christ, clutched his hand, and implored him, ‘my Lord and eternal God, give me a design (traza) for how I am to be your bride’.36 Her prayer was answered that very day. Estefanía explains that she had been watching one of her cousins, a boy, struggling to draw, when she herself suddenly picked up the pencil: [He] was drawing, as he had been for some time, but he couldn’t produce anything satisfactory, because painting requires talent, and he didn’t have it. In sum, I went to see what he was doing, and laughing, I said, ‘I’ll do it better’. And, taking the pencil, I made a drawing of Our Lady, such that 33  See the visits described in chapters 2, 3, and 5 of Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fols. 13r–22v, 34r–42v. 34  Ibid., fol. 23r: ‘una mañana’. 35  Crucifixes are often placed near beds in visual images from the early modern period. See, for example, Pedro Bedón, Dream of Pope Innocent III (choir book illustration), 1613 (Quito, Convento de San Francisco); reproduced by the Project for the Engraved Sources of Spanish Colonial Art (PESSCA), n.d., “1575B,” https://colonialart.org/artworks/1575B, accessed July 1, 2019. See also José Montes de Oca, ‘Tocando los umbrares [umbrales]’, engraving in Vida de San Felipe de Jesus protomartir de Japon y patron de su patria Mexico (Mexico City: 1801); reproduced in J. F., “Domestic Display in the Spanish Overseas Territories”, in Aste R. (ed.), Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492– 1898, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum, New York (New York: 2013) 89. 36  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 23r: ‘atentamente, le dije, “Señor mío y Dios eterno dad vos traza de cómo yo sea esposa vuestra’”. On this passage, see also Banner, Duke of Lerma 141; and Nancarrow Taggard, “Art and Alienation” 26.

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all those who heard about this crossed themselves and did not cease to be amazed, taking such a thing for a miracle. This was the same day (as I understand it) that I took the hand of the Christ.37 From this moment, her spiritual calling was inextricably linked to her gift as an artist. Estefanía’s use of the word traza in her prayer to become Christ’s bride is significant. Much like the English word ‘design’ and the Italian concept of disegno, traza refers literally to a preliminary drawing of something to be made or constructed and also has a more abstract meaning as a plan for achieving an end.38 Art theorists and preachers also used traza to describe the providential designs of God, the supreme artificer, and they argued that painting itself was a means of making God’s designs visible. Carducho employs the term when detailing the various maps and architectural plans in Madrid’s royal palace, whose walls displayed ‘trazas […] of the roads of the Kingdoms of Valencia and of the Principality of Catalonia’ and of ‘the great construction’ of El Escorial and other royal residences.39 He also proclaims his own role in the ‘traza and execution’ of paintings for a chapel commissioned by Philip III.40 Carducho’s contemporary, the artist and theorist Francisco Pacheco, similarly characterizes ‘traza and outlines’ as essential to painting as well as to ‘sculpture, architecture […] and other, innumerable arts’.41 Applying the term to a sacred context, he affirms that an angel gave Noah the ‘traza of the arc’.42 Pacheco also designates no less an event than the advent of Christ as a traza by which 37  Ibid., fol. 23v: ‘estaba un primo mío dibujando, y había algunos tiempos que lo hacía. Y no podía salir con hacer nada de provecho. Porque esto de la pintura ha menester inclinación, y él no la tenía. En fin, llegué me a ver lo que hacía. Y riéndome, dije, “mejor lo haré yo”. Y, tomando el lápiz, hice un dibujo de Nuestra Señora, tal que todos los que entendían de ello se hacían cruces y no acababan de espantarse, teniendo a milagro cosa semejante. Y esto fue el mismo día (a lo que entiendo) que tomé la mano al Cristo’. 38  See Real Academia Española [online], Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739), http://web .frl.es/DA.html, accessed July 31, 2018. The first definition of traza in the Diccionario is ‘La primera planta, ò disseño, que propone, è idéa el Artífice para la fabrica de algun edificio, ù otra obra’; the second definition speaks to the abstract sense of the term: ‘significa el medio excogitado en la idéa para la conservacion, y logro de algun fin’. 39  Carducho, Diálogos 431: ‘Las trazas […] de los caminos de los Reinos de Valencia, y Principado de Catalunia’; ‘la gran fabrica’. 40  Ibid., 331: ‘traza y execucion’. 41  Pacheco F., Arte de la Pintura, ed. B. Bassegoda i Hugas (Madrid: 1990; reprint ed., Madrid: 2001) 344: ‘traza y perfiles’; ‘la escultura, arquitectura […] y otra [sic] innumerables’. 42  Ibid. 318: ‘traza del arca’; as pointed out in ibid. 317 n. 23, Pacheco is quoting from an Aprobación by his little-known Sevillian contemporary, the Franciscan Fray Bernardino de los Ángeles.

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God sought to ‘exalt man’ and the pictorial arts. When God sent ‘his son to the world’, Pacheco explains, he ‘found a traza […] to exalt painting’ by giving artists the opportunity to represent the Lord as he had appeared on earth.43 Estefanía’s account of the traza sent by God fuses these literal and metaphorical uses of the term: her first drawing was the material expression of a heavenly design. Like the traza of the ark that saved Noah from the flood, her miraculous drawing of Mary indicated a divine plan for salvation. Like the maps of Valencia and Catalonia mentioned by Carducho, it outlined her path to become a nun. Most significantly, however, the talent revealed by that traza would be the very means by which Estefanía carried out God’s design and entered La Ascensión in Lerma. Estefanía thus affirms that God gave her a talent for drawing with a specific aim: he wanted her to enter a convent. According to the Vida, Estefanía herself had long dreamed of the religious life. In explicit imitation of Catherine of Siena, she had first made a vow of chastity at age seven, declaring her virtuous intention before an image of the Virgin. Yet, like holy women from Catherine to Teresa of Avila, Estefanía faced parental opposition.44 Reluctant to lose their daughter to a convent, her parents refused to pay the enormous sum required for a convent dowry.45 ‘Because my parents didn’t want me to be [a nun]’, She explains, ‘they objected to the dowry’ and the expense it entailed.46 God’s revelation of Estefanía’s artistic gift resolved that practical problem: Her talent would allow her to become an a nun, like other women who entered convents at no financial cost because of their skills in painting, music, and other arts.47 In his gloss on the text, Villamediana made this connection between Estefanía’s painting and her religious vocation even more explicit. Highlighting her saintly persona, he entitled the chapter “On What Happened to This Servant of God

43  Ibid. 232: ‘halló traza para engrandecer al hombre, enviando su Hijo al mundo, también este mismo Señor, vestido de nuestra carne la halló, para engrandecer la pintura’. 44  See Ribadeneira Pedro de, “La vida de Santa Catalina de Sena, virgen, religiosa de la Orden de Santo Domingo”, in Flos sanctorum, o libro de las vidas de los santos […] Primera parte (Madrid, Luis Sanchez: 1610), esp. 337–338; and Teresa of Avila, Libro 39–41. 45  On convent dowries, see Lehfeldt E. A. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Aldershot: 2005), esp. 338–39. 46  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 23r: ‘como mis padres no se inclinaban a que yo lo fuese, ponía[n] dificultad en el dote, The corresponding passage in Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Salamanca), fol. 15v, reads slightly differently: ‘como mis padres no se indignaban a que yo lo fuese, ponían dificultad en el dote’. 47  On the practice in Spain, see Baade C. R., Music and Music-Making in Female Monasteries in Seventeenth-Century Castile, Ph.D. dissertation (Duke University: 2001) passim; and Nancarrow Taggard, “Art and Alienation”.

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Between Age Thirteen and Age Sixteen, and How She Learned to Paint, and the Reason for This”.48 Estefanía’s description of her talent both builds upon and nuances early modern accounts of artistic genius. Given her place among artists and aficionados at court, Estefanía was surely familiar with topoi of extraordinary artistic virtuosity, such as Vasari’s description of the young Giotto, whose talent was supposedly revealed when Cimabue watched him ‘portraying a sheep from nature on a flat and polished slab […], without having learnt any method of doing this from others, but only from nature’.49 As in Vasari’s Life of Giotto, Estefanía portrays the discovery of her talent as spontaneous;50 she took the pencil from her cousin and unexpectedly produced a work that caused amazement in those who saw it. Yet, whereas Giotto became Cimabue’s pupil, Estefanía required almost no artistic training. ‘My aunt’s husband’, she contends, ‘gave me one lesson […]. He didn’t give me another, nor did I want one’.51 (Elsewhere in the same chapter, however, she acknowledges having spent two years in Páez’s studio.)52 She thus places her art within an emphatically sacred framework, one appropriate to her religious vocation. This exalted Christian context removes any sense of personal credit for her talent, but it also heightens the importance of her skill. Those who saw her drawing did not simply ‘marvel’ as Cimabue had at Giotto’s sketch.53 Rather, they ‘crossed themselves’ (‘se hacían cruces’) in acknowledgment that they had witnessed a supernatural event.54 Unlike Giotto, moreover, Estefanía depicted not lowly sheep from nature, but rather one of the most glorious subjects in Christian art – the Mother of God herself.

48  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 22v: ‘Cap. III. De lo que aconteció a esta Sierva de Dios desde edad de trece años hasta los diez y seis, y cómo aprendió a pintar, y el motivo que para ello tuvo’. 49  Vasari G., Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. G. du C. de Vere, 10 vols. (London: 1912–1915) I 72. Cf. Vasari G., Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: 1878) I 370–371: ‘sopra una lastra piana e pulita […] ritraeva una pecora di naturale, senza avere imparato modo nessuno di ciò fare da altri che dalla natura’. 50  Nancarrow Taggard, “Art and Alienation” 26, likewise explores how Estefanía’s talent ‘emerged spontaneously’. 51  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 24r: ‘dándome una lección de ello el marido de mi tía […] No me dio otra, ni yo quise aprenderlo’. 52  Ibid., fol. 25v. 53  Vasari, Lives I 72. Cf. Vasari, Vite I 371: ‘fermatosi Cimabue tutto maraviglioso’. 54  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 23v.

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Estefanía also modifies traditional comparisons between painting and divine creation.55 As we have already seen, artistic theorists routinely argued that painter-saints such as Luke partook of God’s creative powers. Carducho thus affirmed that Luke carried ‘inside his soul a portrait of the entire Holy Trinity’, a mystical image that informed the piety of his actions and surely also contributed to the ‘devout’ quality of his paintings.56 For Carducho, contemporary Christian artists were imitators of Luke, whose paintings of Christ and the Virgin had ‘converted many people and worked many miracles’.57 But following Luke’s example was no small feat. Consistent with post-Tridentine discourse on art, Carducho averred that painters charged with the august task of making sacred images needed to avail themselves of their intellects and education; artists must ‘judge with gravity and prudence’ the manner of giving pictorial form to a ‘mystery, thought, or history’ from Scripture.58 Estefanía, by contrast, emphasizes her thirst for ‘knowledge’ and ‘good books’, but she downplays the role of judgment or erudition in her artistic creation.59 She characterizes her first drawing of the Virgin not as the product of study and training, but rather as the visual manifestation of God’s plan for a woman such as she, who professed to be ‘ignorance itself’ in matters of the sacred.60 The role played by divine grace in Estefanía’s artistic production is further highlighted in a chronicle written in the 1670s by a male Franciscan, Francisco Calderón, the only known early modern writer to comment on her painting. In a broader discussion of miraculous images in the Lerma Poor Clare convent, Calderón praises the ‘paintings done by the hand of the […] venerable Mother Sor Estefanía, without her ever having been taught by a living person (persona 55  On medieval discourse concerning the divine origin and function of painting, see Engen J. van, “Theophilus Presbyter and Rupert of Deutz: The Manual Arts and Benedictine Theology”, Viator 11 (1980) 147–164. For these issues in early modern Spain, see Stoichita V. I., Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: 1995), esp. 103–20. 56  Carducho, Diálogos 374: ‘dentro del alma retratada toda la Santisima Trinidad’; ‘devoto’. See also Bustillo M., “Carducho and Ideas about Religious Art”, in Andrews – Roe – Noble Wood (eds.), On Art and Painting 163–181. 57  Carducho, Diálogos 374: ‘convertia mucha gente, y hazia muchos milagros’. 58  Ibid., 342: ‘arbitrar con gravedad y prudencia’; ‘el misterio, pensamiento, ó historia’. Here, Carducho is referring specifically to the problem of representing the ‘incidental’ details of sacred history (the elements that ‘se reputan por accidentales’), which are not given detailed description in Scripture. His argument corresponds largely to Gabriele Paleotti’s discussion of the ‘verisimilar’ in sacred art; see Paleotti G., Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. W. McCuaig (Los Angeles: 2012) 223. 59  She states that she was ‘amiguísima de saber’ and fond of ‘buenos libros’; see Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fols. 24r, 22v, respectively. 60  Ibid., fol. 226r: ‘la misma ignorancia’.

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humana)’.61 With this affirmation, Calderón tacitly compares her works to sacred images that were said to be non manufactas – those mysteriously formed not by human hands, but rather by the ‘sovereign mastery’ of God himself.62 More specifically, Calderón discusses Estefanía in concert with another nun at La Ascensión, a noblewoman who, he implies, had no knowledge of artistic practice and yet miraculously completed a sculpture of the Virgin of the Assumption. In keeping with the piecemeal manufacture of Spanish sculptures at the time, the convent of La Ascensión had received only the Virgin’s ‘face, hands, and feet’ from a workshop in Burgos.63 Wanting to assemble the image and ‘to form the [Virgin’s] body’, the nun in question ‘prayed fervently’ and then ‘shut herself up for three days […] at the end of which she finished it perfectly, and ordered the nuns never to ask how it was made’.64 Despite this injunction, Calderón affirms, Estefanía herself declared that the nun who assembled the image had enjoyed ‘special assistance from the holy Virgin’.65 Although Estefanía highlights the sacramental nature of her own talent, she also contends that her labour as a painter often thwarted her pursuit of the spiritual life. In particular, she suggests that her artistic skill served a sacred function only when it expressed God’s will, as it had when she produced her drawing of the Virgin. Describing her artistic production at La Ascensión, she thus exults in a ‘particular [divine] intelligence’ that helped her ‘to put into execution’ a painting of Christ on the Cross, a subject that she had chosen to depict.66 Throughout the Vida, she distinguishes the creation of such divinely inspired works from the fulfilment of commissions that interfered with her devotional practice. During her novitiate, Estefanía thus chafed when the 61  C  alderón F., Primera parte de la Crónica de la Santa Provincia de la Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Señora de la Regular Observancia, ed. H. Barriguín (Valladolid: 2008) 336–337: ‘pinturas hechas por la mano de dicha Venerable Madre Sor Estefanía, sin haber sido jamás enseñada de persona humana’. 62  Carducho, Diálogos 371: ‘magisterio soberano’. For recent discussions of such images in Spain and its empire, see Portús Pérez, “Holy Depicting the Holy”; Alcalá L. E., “The Image and Its Maker: The Problem of Authorship in Relation to Miraculous Images in Spanish America”, in Kasl (ed.), Sacred Spain 55–73; and Pereda F., Crimen e ilusión: el arte de la verdad en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: 2017), esp. 257–316. 63  Calderón, Chronica 335: ‘rostro, manos y pies’. On the construction of such images, see Barbour D. – Ozone J., “The Making of a Seventeenth-Century Spanish Polychrome Sculpture”, in Bray X. (ed.) The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600– 1700, exh. cat., National Gallery, London (London: 2009) 59–72. 64  Calderón, Chronica 335: ‘formar el cuerpo’; ‘fervorosa oración’; ‘se encerró tres días […], al cabo de ellos, la sacó perfectísima, encargando a las Religiosas que en ningún tiempo fuesen curiosas en saber cómo estaba formada’. 65  Ibid.: ‘especial asistencia de la Virgen Santísima’. 66  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 132r: ‘por particular inteligencia me mandaron lo pusiese luego en obra’.

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abbess charged her with decorating the choir of the convent church in honour of another nun who was joining the community. Similarly, she voiced irritation at the many courtiers who passed through Lerma in the months before her profession, complaining that they seemed ‘to have no entertainment other than to watch me paint and see my paintings, and also to commission works from me’.67 On these occasions, she perceived painting as an impediment to the ‘recogimiento from external matters’ and the glorious ‘suspension of the soul’ that she had come to enjoy in prayer.68 A few months after arriving at La Ascensión, Estefanía realized that, far from making spiritual progress, she had become ‘so involved’ in painting that she had stopped ‘practicing the prayers and exercises that had been my daily delicacy’ in Madrid.69 She therefore prioritized her religious vocation over her duties as an artist. ‘I thus decided’, she declares, ‘that I wouldn’t give up prayer, be that as it may. For I hadn’t come to religion in order to paint, but rather to love him whom I decided to find’.70 3 Feminine Recogimiento and the Artist’s Studio This emphasis on prayerful recogimiento also provides a context for examining the marginal place occupied by Páez’s workshop in the Vida. As we have seen, Estefanía takes pains to downplay her uncle’s role in her artistic development and even claims to have received only ‘one lesson’ from him – an assertion contradicted elsewhere in the text.71 By distancing herself from Páez’s workshop, however, Estefanía emphasizes her commitment to spiritual devotion. Early modern writers on recogimiento admonished pious laywomen to remain enclosed within the spheres of church and home and to confine their labour to the domestic realm. In his Aviso de gente recogida, the theologian Diego Pérez de Valdivia explains that it was through enclosure that women pleased God and preserved their own sacred ‘treasure of chastity’.72 A woman’s 67  Ibid., fol. 54r: ‘ni tenían otro entretenimiento que era verme pintar, y mirar mis pinturas, y cargarme también de obras’. See ibid. on the nun for whom Estefanía was required to decorate the choir. 68  Ibid., fol. 33r: ‘suspensión de ánimo y recogimiento exterior’. 69  Ibid., fol. 54v: ‘tan metida […] que no trataba de la oración ni de los ejercicios que en el mundo eran mi manjar cuotidiano’. 70  Ibid., fol. 55r: ‘y así propuse […] de no dejar de tenerla, fuese como se fuese. Pues no había venido a la religión para pintar, sino amar a quien me determiné buscar’. 71  Ibid., fol. 24r. 72  Pérez de Valdivia Diego, Aviso de gente recogida y especialmente dedicada al servicio de Dios (Barcelona, Hieronymo Genoues: 1585), fol. 79r: ‘thesoro de la castidad’. See also Deusen, Sacred and Worldly i–xvii.

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presence in a painter’s workshop would have undermined her practice of the recogimiento deemed essential to feminine piety.73 As exemplified by the rape trial of Estefanía’s Italian contemporary Artemisia Gentileschi, the overwhelmingly male space of the studio also presented particular dangers to women.74 Throughout Artemisia’s trial, witnesses remarked on the unseemliness of the continual comings and goings of the men who frequented the residencecum-workshop where Artemisia and her painter father lived and worked. It was in this space that Artemisia had taken lessons in perspective from Agostino Tassi, and it was when she was painting in that space that Tassi raped her. The case of Artemisia is especially relevant to the Vida because Estefanía acknowledges that Páez developed an ‘extreme passion’ for her talents and her person, praising her in such ‘extreme’ terms ‘that it that it isn’t fit to say them’.75 Nevertheless, Estefanía insists, she strove to practice virtuous recogimiento throughout her adolescence.76 In addition, she describes herself as impervious to the wanton advances of men in general: God always guarded her like a ‘jealous lover’ and gave her a ‘modest expression’ that covered her face with a ‘veil of shame’ so pious that it frightened away potential suitors.77 Moreover, she ‘never put myself in front of the window to lend my ear to any man, not even to pass the time for awhile’.78 With these assertions, Estefanía shields herself from the kinds of accusations levelled against Artemisia, whose rapist alleged 73  On the studio in Spain, see Cherry P., “Artistic Training and the Painters’ Guild in Seville”, in Davies D. (ed.), Velázquez in Seville, exh. cat., National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (Edinburgh: 1996) 67–75; Véliz Z., “Becoming an Artist in Seventeenth-Century Spain”, in Stratton-Pruitt S. L. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez (Cambridge: 2002) 11–29; and Martín González J. J., El artista en la sociedad española del siglo XVII (Madrid: 1984; reprint ed., 1993) 17–23. The masculine space of the early modern studio has been explored largely with reference to Italian examples; see Cropper E., “Artemisia Gentileschi, la ‘pittora’”, in Calvi G. (ed.), Barocco al femminile (Rome: 1992) 191–218; and eadem, “Michelangelo Cerquozzi’s Self-Portrait: The Real Studio and the Suffering Model”, in Flemming V. von – Schütze S. (eds.), Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift für Matthias Winner (Mainz am Rhein: 1996) 401–12. 74  For the trial documents, see Menzio E. (ed.), Lettere; precedute da, Atti di un processo per stupro (Milan: 2004) 9–112. See also the discussion by Cohen E. S., “The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History”, Sixteenth Century Journal 31, 1 (2000) 47–75. For a recent assessment of the role played by the rape in scholarship on Artemisia, see Locker J., Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting (New Haven: 2015) 1, 3, 11. 75  Estefanía de la Encarnacion, Vida (Madrid), fols. 25v–26r: ‘extremada pasión’; ‘tantos extremos que no son para dichos’. 76  See ibid., fols. 22v–33v. 77  Ibid., fols. 30v–31r: ‘amante celoso’ (fol. 30v); ‘la modestia de […] rostro’ (fol. 30v); ‘velo de la vergüenza’ (fol. 31r). 78  Ibid., fol. 30r: ‘jamás me puse a ventana, aun para un rato de pasatiempo, a dar oídos a ningún hombre’.

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that she ‘flirt[ed] at the window’ like a prostitute.79 Estefanía also emphasizes the spiritual recogimiento that she maintained even when her artistic practice put her on public display. On one occasion at her parents’ house, a crowd supposedly gathered to watch her paint, and ‘the doors to the house couldn’t be closed, because the people asked and desired for them to be opened farther’.80 Yet Estefanía responded to this event with characteristic reserve and ‘singular modesty, of which I was always fond, because God so inclined me’.81 Similarly, when a wayward Franciscan friar came to observe her as she worked, she spoke to him only of pious matters, including ‘the brevity of life and how poorly employed was time not spent with God’.82 She also took the opportunity to counsel the friar, and even helped him to embark upon a ‘new life’ of rekindled piety.83 Although Estefanía thus affirms her commitment to religious contemplation and pious enclosure, she admits to her innate inclination to the vice of pride (soberbia), which was exacerbated by the acclaim she received as an artist.84 This admission, however, exemplifies Estefanía’s own rhetoric of humility. For all its gravity, the sin of pride had tempted even the holiest of women. Teresa of Avila herself claimed to have too ‘little humility’ and to be so ‘proud and miserable’ that she failed to recognize the many spiritual benefits that God gave her.85 In a deft rhetorical move, Estefanía also mitigates her own blameworthiness by alleging that it was her uncle who fuelled her prideful thoughts. Spurred by his adulation, she longed to ‘be somebody and be worth something’.86 More specifically, she endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of Sofonisba Anguissola, the celebrated Italian painter who had served as portraitist and lady-in-waiting at the Spanish court. As Estefanía writes, ‘I now imagined myself to be as fortunate as Sofonisma [sic], whom the Emperor Charles V

79  G  arrard M. D., Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: 1989) 455. Cf. Menzio, Lettere; Atti 69: ‘alla finestra scherzar’. 80  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 38r: ‘no se pudiese cerrar la puerta en casa de mis padres, según lo pedían y deseaban más abrírselas’. 81  Ibid.: ‘con singular modestia a que siempre fui (porque me inclinó Dios) aficionada’. 82  Ibid., fol. 38v: ‘la brevedad de la vida, y cuán mal empleado era el tiempo que no se gastaba en Dios’. 83  Ibid., fol. 39r: ‘nueva vida’. 84  See ibid., fol. 24v. 85  Teresa of Avila, Teresa of Avila: The Book of Her Life, trans. K. Kavanaugh – O. Rodríguez (Indianapolis: 2008) 297, 141, respectively. Cf. Teresa Libro 219, 121, respectively: ‘poca humildad’; ‘sobervio y miserable’. 86  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 31r: ‘ser y valer’.

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[…] so favoured that he made her a lady to the empress’.87 (Sofonisba was, in fact, lady-in-waiting to Isabel de Valois, third wife of King Philip II.)88 In concert with Sofonisba’s example, Estefanía developed her own ‘desire to be esteemed and to enter into the palace’, an aim that further ‘diverted’ from her sacred vocation.89 With this emphasis on her worldly concerns, however, Estefanía illustrates her piety as much as her supposed turpitude. Although tainted by personal ambition, her desire to join the court of Philip III and Queen Margarita was hardly a sin in and of itself. Philip and Margarita presided over a court renowned for its devotional fervour, and the queen actively encouraged her ladies-inwaiting to enter ‘the perfect state of religion’ by becoming nuns after leaving her service.90 In her longing for a court appointment, Estefanía shared the ambitions of the many male artists who served the Spanish monarchy: among them, Carducho, who worked as royal painter to Philip III and Philip IV;91 Juan Bautista Maíno, the Dominican friar who was appointed painting tutor to the future Philip IV;92 and, most famously, Diego Velázquez, who became Philip IV’s aposentador de palacio (‘usher to the palace’).93 By seventeenth-century standards, the worldly acclaim enjoyed by these men in no way lessened their status as ‘Christian artisans’, to borrow a term from Carducho’s text.94 Indeed, Velázquez’s teacher, Pacheco, included Maíno in a discussion of ‘holy men who practiced painting’.95 87  Ibid., fol. 26r: ‘ya me juzgaba con otra tanta dicha como la Sofonisma, a quien el Emperador Carlos Quinto […] favoreció tanto que la hizo dama de la emperatriz’. 88  For a recent discussion, see Gamberini C., “Sofonisba Anguissola at the Court of Philip II”, in Barker S. (ed.), Women Artists in Early Modern Italy: Careers, Fame, and Collectors (Turnhout: 2016) 29–38. 89  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 26v: ‘el apetito de ser estimada y de entrar en palacio, de que yo tuve grande gana, me divertía’. 90  Guzmán Diego de, Reyna catolica: vida y mverte de D. Margarita de Austria reyna de Espanna (Madrid, Luis Sanchez: 1617), fol. 130r: ‘estado perfecto de religion’. 91  See Bass L. R. – Andrews J., “‘Me juzgo por natural de Madrid’: Vincencio Carducho, Theorist and Painter of Spain’s Court Capital”, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 93.7–8 (2016) 1301–1337; and Pérez Preciado J. J., “Art Aficionados at Court”, in Andrews – Roe – Noble Wood (eds.), On Art and Painting 119–147. 92  See Marías F. – Carlos Varona M. C., “El arte de las ‘acciones que las figuras mueven’: Maíno, un pintor dominico entre Toledo y Madrid”, in Ruiz Gómez L. (ed.) Juan Bautista Maíno, 1581–1649, exh. cat., Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (Madrid: 2009) 63–64. 93  The classic discussion of Velázquez’s rise at court remains Brown J., Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton: 1978) 87–111. 94  Pérez d’Ors – Fisher – Mountjoy, “López de Zárate’s ‘Canción Real’” 239. Cf. Carducho, Diálogos 375: ‘Christiano Artifice’. 95  Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura 213; Pacheco’s chapter is entitled, ‘De los nobles y santos que exercitaron la pintura, y de algunos efectos maravillosos procedidos della’.

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Yet for Estefanía, there existed a tension between her desire to ‘be somebody’ as a painter and God’s desire that she become his pious bride.96 She thus describes her artistic talent as both the gift that had eventually brought her to the convent and, paradoxically, as the temptation that had threatened to destroy her pious aspirations. Her skill as an artist, she writes, ‘was the cause in making me a nun, although the Devil, with that same thing, tried to keep me from becoming one’.97 Putting it another way, she argues that, with her first drawing of the Virgin, ‘[God] his majesty gave the design (traza) and persevered in calling me. And I, evil that I am, then distracted myself in order not to respond’.98 God had sketched out a plan that led to the convent, but she had ignored the path that it showed her. By becoming a nun, she would not only follow God’s plan, but also complete the picture whose outlines he had shown her on the day she first took up the pencil. 4

Painting and Providence

Fortunately for Estefanía, God persevered by continually sending ‘messengers who aided him’ in beckoning her to the religious life.99 Befitting the ‘strange means’ by which the Lord worked his wonders, it was Estefanía’s renown as a painter that brought her into contact with various godly men and women who ‘hardened [her] to the things of the world’ and helped to reawaken her pious desires.100 For example, the errant Franciscan who came to watch her paint introduced her to the royal preacher, Diego del Escurial, who urged her to follow God’s path to the convent.101 With her increasing fame, Estefanía came to the attention of other celebrated clerics, and she received spiritual consolation from Juan Bretón, a Minimite who wrote an influential Mistica theologia, and from a certain ‘saintly Hieronymite friar known as the Apostle of Cuéllar’.102 96  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 31r. 97  Ibid., fol. 23v: ‘fue causa para que yo fuese monja, aunque el Demonio, con eso mismo, procuró apartarme de serlo’. 98  Ibid.: ‘su majestad dio la traza y perseveró en llamarme, y yo, como mala, me divertí después para no responderle’. 99  Ibid., fol. 29v: ‘mensajeros de auxilios’. 100  Ibid., fols. 32v, 29v, respectively: ‘medios extraños’; ‘con que me enfriaba en las cosas del siglo’. 101  Ibid., fols. 39r, 48r–48v. 102  For the discussion of ‘Padre Bretón’, see ibid., fol. 48r; also see Bretón Juan, Mistica theologia y doctrina de la perfection evangelica (Madrid, Francisca de Medina, viuda de Alonso Martin: 1614). On the ‘santo fraile Jerónimo, que llaman el Apóstol de Cuéllar’, see Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 34v.

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Foremost among Estefanía’s heavenly messengers, however, was a noblewoman whom she tutored in painting, Beatriz Sousa y Villena (1586–1628), one of the pious ladies-in-waiting to Queen Margarita.103 Upon meeting Beatriz, Estefanía and her mother hoped that the acquaintance would produce an invitation to the royal palace. Their hopes were in vain, but Beatriz aided Estefanía in a far more important way. Around the time the queen died in 1611, Beatriz abandoned Madrid in order to become a Poor Clare at La Ascensión in Lerma, and she facilitated Estefanía’s entrance into the same convent. As stated in the Vida, Beatriz took it upon herself not to ‘remember’ Estefanía in the royal palace, as the painter had anticipated; instead, Estefanía writes, ‘[Beatriz] remembered me in God’s palace, in order to bring me to him’.104 The noblewoman charged her brother, the Count of Miranda do Corvo, with the task of ‘persuading [Estefanía] to come to Lerma’ and with ‘covering the cost’ of the journey.105 Beatriz may also have promoted Estefanía’s talent to the family members of the Duke of Lerma, with whom she had been closely allied while serving the queen.106 Estefanía’s artistic skill soon came to the notice of the duke himself. As Banner has shown, the recruitment of a painter-nun typified Lerma’s ambitions for his ducal town, in which he sought to evoke the pious grandeur that characterized the visual culture of Philip III’s reign more broadly.107 Although founded by his daughter-in-law, the Duchess of Uceda, the convent of La Ascensión functioned under the aegis of Lerma himself. Throughout the foundation were placed works by the duke’s preferred artists, among them the painter Bartolomé Carducho (elder brother of Vicente) and the sculptor Gregorio Fernández, whose magnificent Supine Christ still dominates the

103  Beatriz Sousa y Villena’s biography is discussed in García Barriuso P., “Una biografía inédita de Anastasia de la Encarnación, monja clarisa de Valladolid, fundadora de los monasterios de Lerma (Burgos) y Monforte de Lemos (Lugo)”, Verdad y Vida 52.205–206 (1994) 285–310. 104  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 28v: ‘ella se acordó en el [palacio] de Dios, para traer me a él’. 105  Ibid., fols. 33r–33v: ‘de persuadirme a que me viniese con ella, y que saliese él hacerme el gasto’. 106  On the integral role played by Lerma’s female family members at court, see Sánchez M. S., The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain (Baltimore: 1998), esp. 42–43; and Feros A., Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621 (Cambridge: 2000) 97–98. 107  Banner, Duke of Lerma 135–44. My use of the term ‘grandeur’ here depends on Schroth, “A New Style of Grandeur” 77–120.

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lower choir of the convent church.108 For Estefanía, La Ascensión presented opportunities both artistic and social. As a painter-nun in Lerma, she would have her works displayed alongside those of the most celebrated artists in early seventeenth-century Spain. Equally important, she would enjoy the distinction gained by proximity to La Ascensión’s aristocratic nuns, who, in the convent’s early years, included not only doña Beatriz, daughter of the first Count of Miranda do Corvo, but also María Sarmiento de Acuña, daughter of the powerful Count of Gondomar, and Juana de Borja, the Duke of Lerma’s aunt and a niece of Saint Francis Borgia himself.109 Yet even as she acknowledges the temporal considerations involved, Estefanía deems her entrance into La Ascensión as providential. She suggests that her parents’ resistance to her profession there was so strong that God himself must have intervened in order to bring it about. Although she received invitations from a number of convents, her parents supposedly judged La Ascensión, far off in northern Castile, to be the ‘worst’ possible option and ‘the one that repulsed them the most’.110 Nevertheless, Beatriz’s brother, the Count of Miranda do Corvo, continued to ‘expend every effort’ in attempting to persuade them, so much so that Estefanía’s mother suddenly and inexplicably relented.111 ‘My mother’, Estefanía writes, ‘shocked by what she had done, said that she must have been mad’ when she gave her consent.112 Distraught, Estefanía’s father ‘cried’ over her impending departure and ‘put up a good fight’ against it.113 Nevertheless, he ultimately honoured the word that his wife had given because ‘it seemed to him that he didn’t have the mouth to contradict it’, or, more precisely, the strength to thwart the Duke of Lerma’s will.114 As Estefanía explains, ‘the Duke of Lerma and [his son] the Duke of Uceda then ruled the world,

108  Banner, Duke of Lerma 135–44; and Colón Mendoza I., The Cristos Yacentes of Gregorio Fernández: Polychrome Sculptures of the Supine Christ in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Farnham: 2015) 74–75, which points out that Fernández’s sculpture, a reliquary, was surely donated either by Lerma himself or by Queen Margarita. On the decoration of the convent and its church, see also Cervera Vera L., El Monasterio de la Ascensión de Nuestro Señor en la Villa de Lerma (Lerma: 1985) 25–58. I am grateful to the sisters of Iesu Communio in Lerma for giving me a copy of this book. 109  Banner, Duke of Lerma 135–44; García Barriuso, “Una biografía inédita” 285–310. 110  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fol. 44v: ‘peor’; ‘la que más repugnaban’. 111  Ibid., fol. 44r: ‘hacía todas sus diligencias’. 112  Ibid., fol. 44v: ‘mi madre, absorta de lo que había hecho, y diciendo que debía de estar loca cuando tal pronunció’. 113  Ibid., fols. 44v, 47v: ‘ojos […] para llorarlo’; ‘grande batería’. 114  Ibid., fol, 44v: ‘le parecía no tuvo boca para contradecirlo’.

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and it pleased them both for me to come to their house’.115 Nevertheless, she argues that it was God, and not the duke, who had truly ‘chosen this house for me’.116 Nor, she affirms, had she herself played any part in the outcome. Rather, she had simply ‘let myself be governed by God’s providence’.117 Estefanía thus treats her abandonment of Madrid as the culmination of the various signs that she had received since her artistic skill first emerged. She writes that, on the day following the feast of the Incarnation (March 25) in 1615, she left Madrid, accompanied by her parents on the journey to Lerma. After they passed through the city gates, she felt such joy ‘as if I were leaving the blazing fire of Sodom’.118 Just a week later, ‘on April 2, the day of Saint Francis of Paul, at age eighteen and in the year of our Lord 1615, I took the habit, which I unworthily enjoy’.119 5 Conclusion Perhaps unsurprisingly, Estefanía’s discussion of her artistic practice shifts as she turns to her role as a nun in Lerma. At La Ascensión, she continued to work as a painter, albeit one who needed to reconcile her practice with the rigors of the novitiate and, later, the duties of a professed nun. As we have seen, Estefanía came to express resentment toward the commissions she received from her superiors inside and outside the convent.120 Yet she continued to derive satisfaction from creating works of art that commemorated or enhanced her spiritual development. Although she had taken umbrage at decorating the choir for another nun, she delighted in celebrating her own profession by giving that same space ‘the greatest adornment it has ever had, with paintings that I had done for that purpose’.121 Upon completing an artistic commission for the beatification of Pascual Baylón (a sixteenth-century Spaniard beatified in 1618), she gratefully accepted the divine ‘reward’ that arrived in the form of a ‘learned man’ who became a trusted spiritual advisor.122 Years later, she witnessed visions in which Christ and the Virgin seemingly paid homage to her 115  Ibid., fol. 45v: ‘los duques de Lerma y Uceda mandaba[n] entonces el mundo, y entrambos estaban gustosos de mi venida a su casa’. 116  Ibid., fol. 47r: ‘me habéis escogido la casa’. 117  Ibid., fol. 33v: ‘dejarme gobernar por su providencia’. 118  Ibid., fol. 52r: ‘como si saliera del abrazado fuego de Sodoma’. 119  Ibid.: ‘a dos de abril, día de San Francisco de Paula, a los diez y ocho años de mi edad, y del nacimiento de Cristo de mil y seiscientos y quince años, tomé el hábito que indigna gozo’. 120  See Nancarrow Taggard, “Art and Alienation” 24–40. 121  Estefanía de la Encarnación, Vida (Madrid), fols. 58v–59r: ‘el mayor adorno que ha tenido nunca, de pinturas que al propósito había yo hecho’. 122  Ibid., fol. 102r: ‘premio’; ‘una persona docta’.

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practice as a painter of sacred images by appearing in spaces displaying works of art that she had made.123 When viewed in light of Estefanía’s role as an artist, the anonymous frontispiece in the Biblioteca Nacional version of the Vida assumes particular resonance [Fig. 11.2]. In the drawing, Estefanía appears kneeling before an image of Christ on the cross – the very subject of the effigy which she had begged for a sign of her future life as a bride of Christ. Wearing the habit of the Poor Clares, she is portrayed as if already granted her pious wish of becoming a nun. Yet the anonymous artist eschewed the representation of Estefanía as a practicing painter, thus eliding the role that she had assumed almost immediately after receiving the traza from God. Whereas the illustration to Carducho’s seventh dialogue [Fig. 11.1] depicts Luke in the thrall of artistic creation, poised with brush, maulstick, and palette, the frontispiece to the Vida portrays Estefanía in prayer, hands folded and eyes decorously downcast. If the engraved image of Luke commemorates the masculine furor of the Christian painter, the drawing in the Vida corresponds to the rhetoric of humility employed throughout Estefanía’s text. On her knees and barefoot, Estefanía is shown as an epitome of the saintly recogimiento and conventual virtue she strove to embody. Her favoured status in God’s eyes is made clear by the heavenly gift she receives from the Virgin, whose cloak harbours a group of nuns bearing witness to the miraculous event. The image thus exalts Estefanía’s piety, but it also places that piety at a remove from the artistic production that had enabled her to become a nun and that continued to inflect the sacred revelations that she received in the years that followed. Bibliography Alcalá L. E., “The Image and Its Maker: The Problem of Authorship in Relation to Miraculous Images in Spanish America”, in Kasl R. (ed.), Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World, exh. cat., Indianapolis Museum of Art (New Haven: 2009) 55–73. Amelang J. S. The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: 1998). Baade C. R., Music and Music-Making in Female Monasteries in Seventeenth-Century Castile, Ph.D. dissertation (Duke University: 2001). Banner L. A., The Religious Patronage of the Duke of Lerma, 1598–1621 (Farnham: 2009).

123  See, in particular, ibid., 84r–85r, 205v–206r.

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Rivas J. F., “Domestic Display in the Spanish Overseas Territories”, in Aste R. (ed.), Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum, New York (New York: 2013) 49–104. Sánchez M. S., The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain (Baltimore: 1998). Schroth S., The Private Picture Collection of the Duke of Lerma, Ph.D. dissertation (New York University: 1990). Schroth S., “A New Style of Grandeur: Politics and Patronage at the Court of Philip III”, in Schroth S. and Baer R. (eds.), El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: 2008) 77–120. Serrano y Sanz M., Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras españolas desde el año 1401 al 1833, 2 vols. (Madrid: 1903). Stoichita V. I., Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: 1995). Summers D., Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: 1981). Teresa of Avila, Libro de la Vida, in Obras completas: edición manual, ed. Efrén de la Madre de Dios – O. Steggink (Madrid: 1962; reprint ed., 2006). Teresa of Avila, Teresa of Avila: The Book of Her Life, trans. K. Kavanaugh – O. Rodríguez (Indianapolis: 2008). Thompson C., “Carducho the Conceptista”, in Andrews J. – Roe J. – Noble Wood O. (eds.), On Art and Painting: Vicente Carducho and Baroque Spain (Cardiff: 2016) 91–104. Tiffany T. J., Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville (University Park: 2012). Vasari G., Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: 1878). Vasari G., Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. G. du C. de Vere, 10 vols. (London: 1912–1915). Véliz Z., “Becoming an Artist in Seventeenth-Century Spain”, in Stratton-Pruitt S. L. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez (Cambridge: 2002) 11–29. Weber A., Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: 1990).

chapter 12

Amber, Blood, and the Holy Face of Jesus: the Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Bruges Elliott D. Wise and Matthew Havili The ‘precious blood of Christ’ is at the core of sacramental mystery.*,1 St. Paul defends its privileged status throughout his epistles, declaring that ‘almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission’.2 He emphasizes that the blood sacrifices once required by the Mosaic Law find their antitype in Christ’s Passion and the ‘propitiation through faith in his blood’.3 In the liturgy, there are few substances bodied forth with more consistency and variety than this atoning blood. The newly baptized figuratively ‘was[h] their robes […] white in the blood of the Lamb’, and in the Eucharistic ‘cup [of] the new testament in [his] blood’ the sanguis Christi is adored under the accidentals of bread and wine.4 St. Thomas Aquinas (1225−1274) declared that ‘by His Passion [Christ] inaugurated the Rites of the Christian Religion’, ‘that the sacraments of the Church derive their power specially from Christ’s Passion’, and ‘[i]t was in sign of this that from the side of Christ hanging on the Cross there flowed water and blood’.5 Late medieval and early modern art represents those twin rivers from Christ’s side – the ‘headwaters’ of salvation – under a variety of forms and media. This essay will consider the material of amber as a particularly potent signifier for Christ’s historical and sacramental blood. The physical and spiritual qualities of amber would * N. B. We would like to express appreciation for feedback and suggestions from colleagues attending the 2018 Sixteenth Century Society Conference, as well as from colleagues and students at Brigham Young University. 1  1Peter 1:19. 2  Hebrews 9:22 See also Kaiser E., “The Devotion to the Precious Blood”, The Ecclesiastical Review 83, 1 (July 1930) 1−14. 3  Romans 3:25. 4  Revelation 7:14, 1 Corinthians 11:25. 5  3.62.5, in Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. J.-P. Migne, 4 vols. (Paris: 1859) vol. 4, 568: ‘per suam passionem initiavit ritum christianae religionis […] quod sacramenta Ecclesiae specialiter habent virtutem ex passione Christi […] in cujus signum de latere Christi pendentis in cruce fluxerunt aqua et sanguis’. The translation comes from the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trans.), The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, 22 vols. (London − Manchester − Birmingham − Glasgow: 1916–1937), part 3, 39.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_013

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have also facilitated meditation on the reformation of the votaries’ innermost souls, in which ‘the blood of Christ […] purge[s] [the] conscience’ in mystical communion with God.6 The mythical origins of amber derive from the tale of Phaethon, son of the god Helios, who once obtained permission to borrow his father’s fiery chariot and drive the sun across the sky. Woefully unprepared for the task, Phaethon steered the celestial horses too close to earth, and Jupiter hurled a thunderbolt at him to prevent a conflagration of the world. Helios’s daughters bitterly mourned the death of their brother and stood so resolutely beside his tomb that they put down roots and transformed into trees. Dripping from their bark like sap, the sisters’ tears crystalised in the sun and became precious drops of amber.7 Amber was prized in the ancient world for its light weight and soft aroma, its natural warmth, and rich hue ranging from gold to vibrant orange-red. In medicine, it was administered to counteract stomach pains and weak eyesight, to ensure healthy pregnancies, and to staunch blood.8 Roman patricians and emperors – especially the Julio-Claudians – imported enormous quantities of amber from the Baltic coast, and Pliny the Elder wrote that even a small amber figurine was worth more than the price of several humans.9 Like other ancient scholars and naturalists, Pliny correctly identified amber as fossilized resin. Sometimes imprisoning prehistoric insects, this translucent ‘tree blood’ maintains the swirling and rippling appearance of viscous liquid, even in its petrified state.10 In his thirteenth-century De mineralibus (On Minerals), St. Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280) aptly refers to drops of amber as ‘“tears” distilled from trees’.11 6  Hebrews 9:14. 7  37.11.31, in Pliny, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eichholz, Loeb Classical Library 6 (Cambridge: 2014) 187; 2.31, in Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. F. J. Miller, Loeb Classical Library 42 (Cambridge: 1916) 63. It is generally agreed that in ancient and medieval texts, the terms Lyngurium (Lyncurium), electron, and succinum all refer to amber. See Duffin C., “Fossils as Drugs: Pharmaceutical Palaeontology”, Ferrantia 54 (2008) 44. Lyngurium is a particularly fraught term. See Walton A., “Theophrastus on Lyngurium: Medieval and Early Modern Lore from the Classical Lapidary Tradition”, Annals of Science 58, 4 (2001) 357–379, esp. 365–366, 366–372. 8  See Riddle J. M., “Amber in Ancient Pharmacy: The Transmission of Information About a Single Drug: A Case Study”, Pharmacy in History 15 (1973) 9. 9  37.12.49, in Pliny, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eichholz, 201. 10  37.11.42–46, in ibidem. 195, 197, 199. 11  2.2.17, in Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. D. Wyckoff (Oxford: 1967) 121. See also 16.8.6–8, in Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. S. A. Barney – W. J. Lewis – J. A. Beach (Cambridge: 2006) 323–24; 16.24.1–2, in ibidem. 333.

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The collapse of the western portion of the Roman Empire devastated the amber trade until the Teutonic Knights gained control of the Baltic coast in the mid thirteenth century and began to export amber across Europe.12 Medieval pharmacists compounded medicines from the stone, and children wore it in apotropaic amulets.13 It contributed a pungent scent to incense and was frequently an ingredient in pomum ambrae, or perfumed, ambergris ‘apples’ that were believed to sanitize the air from plague.14 The cosmopolitan city of Bruges, richly patronized by the Burgundian dukes during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, became one of the most important centres for amber production. Bruges benefited from a close alliance with the grand master of the Teutonic Order, and in 1302, a Paternostermacher guild, specializing in amber rosary beads and small-scale carvings, opened shop with seventy masters and 300 apprentices.15 Extant carvings in amber from the late Middle Ages, however, are rare. Among the handful still in existence are three similar depictions of the Vera icon, housed, respectively, in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich, the Wallace Collection in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Cloisters Collection in New York City [Figs. 12.1−12.3]. Surprisingly, these lonely survivors from a once prosperous luxury trade have not generated much scholarship. It is likely that some – if not all – of the Vera icon ambers were produced in Bruges at the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century.16 This essay will examine these three portraits of Christ in light of the spiritual and political associations inherent in the substance of amber. Marshaled together under the carved countenance of Jesus, the stone’s physical properties, mythical allusions, and geographical origins assisted in the construction of civic identity for Bruges and in the sacramental devotion of its citizens. Each small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, the ambers portray Jesus’s likeness according to the description in the apocryphal letter of Publius Lentulus: 12  Clark N. D., Amber: Tears of the Gods (Edinburgh: 2010) 29. 13  Riddle, “Amber in Ancient Pharmacy” 8. 14  See Riddle J. M., “Pomum ambrae: Amber Ambergris in Plague Remedies”, Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften 48, 2 (June 1964) 111–122. 15  Hackenbroch Y., “A Paternoster Pendant in the Robert Lehman Collection”, Metropolitan Museum Journal 24 (1989) 128. See also Houtte, J. A. van, “Ambernijverheid en paternostermakers te Brugge gedurende de XIVe en XV e eeuw”, in Houtte J. A. van (ed.), Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Economy and Society (Leuven: 1977) 49–80; Drinkwater H., “Material in Context: The Amber Head of Christ of the Wallace Collection Pax”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 169, 1 (2016) 99–100; King R., “Rethinking ‘the oldest surviving amber in the west’”, The Burlington Magazine 155 (November 2013) 761. 16  Another possible location for production is Königsberg. See ibidem. 756–762.

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Unknown Artist, Medallion with the Face of Christ (ca. 1380–1400). Baltic amber with traces of paint, 8.2 × 3.3 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection (inv. no. 2011.503) By courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

There appeared in these our days a Man of great virtue, called Jesus Christ […] a Man of stature somewhat Tall and Comely, with a very reverend Countenence, such as the beholders may both Love and Fear, his Hair of the colour of a Chestnut full ripe, and plain almost down to his ears, but from the ears downward somewhat curled, and more orient of colour waving around his Shoulders. In the middest of his Head goeth a seam or partition of his Hair, after the manner of the Nazarites; his Forehead very plain and smooth; his Face without spot or wrinckle, beautified with a comely red; his Nose and Mouth so formed as nothing can be reprehended; his Beard somewhat

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figure 12.1a Unknown Artist, Medallion with the Face of Christ (ca. 1380–1400). Baltic amber with traces of paint, 8.2 × 3.3 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection (inv. no. 2011.503) By courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

thick, agreable in colour to the Hair of his Head not of any great length, but forked in the midst; of an innocent look; his Eys gray, clear, and quick. In reproving he is severe, in admonishing courteous, and fair-spoken, pleasant in speech mixed with gravity.17 The luster of these polished stones makes Christ’s forehead particularly ‘plain and smooth’, ‘without spot or wrinckle’, and the ‘comely red’ of his face takes on new literalness when rendered in amber. The carvings carefully define the Lord’s curling hair and forked beard, with his head set against a cruciform halo. The eyes, highlighted with dark pigment in the New York amber [Figs. 12.1, 12.1a], look forward solemnly, engaging the viewer in introspective selfexamination, as if in a red mirror or ‘through a glass darkly’, in the words of

17  P ublius Lentulus: His Report to the Senate of Rome concerning Jesus Christ (London, Elephant and Castle: 1677).

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Unknown Artist, Head of Christ (pax) (late 14th century). Amber, silver, gold and enamel, 14.3 × 12.4 cm. London, The Wallace Collection (inv. no. W19) Image © The Wallace Collection, London / Bridgeman Images

St. Paul.18 The London [Fig. 12.2] and Munich [Fig. 12.3] examples were placed in silver-gilt and enameled frames, the London setting bearing an inscription based on St. John’s gospel: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life; he that

18  1 Corinthians 13:12. See Boehm B. D. − Fajt J. (eds.), Prague: The Crown of Bohemia, 1347−1437 (New York: 2005) no. 64.

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figure 12.3 Unknown Artist, Head of Christ, (ca. 1380–1400). Baltic amber, silver-gilt, bassetaille enamel, 8.3 × 5.1 × 2.5 cm. Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum (inv. no. MA2478) Image © Bayerisches Nationalmuseum München

followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have eternal peace’.19 The back of the Munich setting [Fig. 12.4] depicts the Holy Trinity surrounded by

19  The inscription is based on John 14:6 and 8:12, reading as follows: ‘Ego sum via veritas et vita qui sequitur me non ambulant in tenebris et pacem eterna[m]’, transcribed and translated in Drinkwater, “Material in Context” 97. The Munich eample is also briefly discussed in Lightbown R. W., Mediaeval European Jewellery with a catalogue of the collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum (London: 1992) 211−212.

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the evangelists. A sun and crescent moon flank the cross of God the Son, imbuing the staring, red eyes on the reverse with the perpetual wakefulness cited in the psalms: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills […] he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper […] The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night’.20 The exacting description of Jesus in the Lentulus letter finds a pictorial parallel in relics of Christ’s true likeness, produced non manufactum – ‘without hands’ – by impressing his face on cloth. The most ancient of these is the Mandylion veil that, like a surrogate for Christ, healed King Abgar of Edessa as he lay on his sick bed.21 In Northern Europe, the frontal, staring face of Jesus would have most readily called to mind the sudarium, or sweat cloth, of St. Veronica.22 This devout woman is said to have followed the Lord along his torturous trek to Calvary and offered him a cloth to blot his injured face. Like miraculous paint, Christ’s streaming blood, sweat, and tears perfectly transferred his portrait onto the fabric. This ‘imprinting’ of his likeness in a clean, white textile echoes the mystery of divine artifice that, at the Incarnation, imprinted deity into the pure flesh of the Virgin Mary.23 That the three amber carving would have been associated with the sudarium is implied by an inventory of the treasury of King Charles V (1338–1380), which lists ‘a “Veronica” of amber, round, with four evangelists of ivory’. It is possible, given that the

20  Psalms 121:1, 3−6. 21  See Belting H., Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: 1994) 208−211. 22  For Drinkwater’s comments on the ambers’ connection to the sudarium, see Drinkwater, “Material in Context” 110–113. 23  On the devotional significance of printing, particularly as it pertains to the Veronica image, see Belting, Likeness and Presence 425–432; Kessler H. L. – Wolf G. (eds.), The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome and The Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996, vol. 6 (Bologna: 1998); Areford D., “Multiplying the Sacred: The Fifteenth-Century Woodcut as Reproduction, Surrogate, Simulation”, in Parshall P. (ed.), The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, Studies in the History of Art 75 (Washington, DC: 2009) 118–153; Hamburger J., “‘In gebeden vnd in bilden geschriben’: Prints as Exemplars of Piety and the Culture of the Copy in FifteenthCentury Germany”, in Parshall, The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, esp. 155–156. For the Incarnational relationship between the sudarium and the Virgin Mary, see Fein S., “Mary to Veronica: John Audelay’s Sequence of Salutations to God-Bearing Women”, Speculum 86, 4 (October 2011) 964–1009, esp. 973, 1002.

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figure 12.4

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Unknown Artist, Trinity with Evangelist Symbols, (ca. 1380– 1400). Baltic amber, silver-gilt, basse-taille enamel, 8.3 × 5.1 × 2.5 cm. Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. Back of Head of Christ pendant (inv. no. MA2478) Image © Bayerisches Nationalmuseum München

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Munich and London ambers are framed in silver, that this description could refer to the New York carving and a now-lost ivory setting.24 The precise function of the amber Holy Faces is unknown, although the Munich example seems to have been a pendant, and recent scholarship suggests that the London carving may have been a pax tablet, reverently kissed during Mass as the ‘peace of Christ’ was passed. This is particularly likely due to the inscription on its setting that foregrounds ‘eternal peace’.25 Significantly, the miraculous image imprinted on St. Veronica’s sudarium was ‘painted’ using the bloody tears and sweat of Christ – a portrait crafted from blood.26 The Holy Faces formed from amber are likewise made from mythological exudations – the tears of Phaethon’s sisters and the sticky ‘blood of trees’. Moreover, the colour of the ambers evokes blood, especially with the frozen waves of sap that shift from pools of golden orange to vibrant vermillion in the refracted light of the stone.27 These associations with amber are enhanced by considering a few related cases of materials being manipulated to represent mysteries.28 Medieval and Renaissance artisans have a long history of using red jewels to signify the Redeemer’s precious blood. A brooch from the British Museum offers a pertinent example. Made in France or the Low Countries during the first half of the fifteenth century, it depicts the Christological pelican in gold, reviving its offspring with blood from its pierced heart [Fig. 12.5].29 A luminous ruby, uncut and polished to mimic a pool of blood, seems to well up from the bird’s breast,

24  B  oehm B. D., “Medallion with the Face of Christ”, in “Recent Acquisitions. A Selection: 2010–12”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 70, 2 (Fall 2012) 20. For other inventories listing amber Vera icons, see King, “Rethinking ‘the oldest surviving amber in the west’” 758, 760. 25  Drinkwater, “Material in Context” 97; King, “Rethinking ‘the oldest surviving amber in the west’” 760. 26  Drinkwater briefly notes amber’s resemblance to blood in considering the material from which the sudarium was made. Drinkwater, “Material in Context” 110. 27  In her discussion of the devotional and theological implications of light, Drinkwater cites the ‘constant state of flux’ evoked by the waves of colour in semi-translucent amber. Ibidem. 107–108, 110–114. 28  Christopher Nygren’s recent study on Titian’s Ecce Homo of 1547 provides a comparable example of the artist’s medium contributing to the mystical argument of a composition. In choosing to paint with oils on a stone slab, Titian uses the materiality of his work to reflect on Eucharistic theology, paragone, and mimesis. Nygren C. J., “Titian’s Ecce Homo on Slate: Stone, Oil, and the Transubstantiation of Painting”, The Art Bulletin 99, 1 (March 2017) 36−66. 29  See Robinson J., Masterpieces: Medieval Art (London: 2008) 72.

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figure 12.5

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Unknown Artist, Pelican Brooch (ca. 1420–1450). Gold, ruby, and diamond, 2.95 × 35.8 × 13.3 cm. London, British Museum (inv. no. AF.2767) Image © Trustees of the British Museum, London

marking the devotional focus of the brooch. In Burgundian panel painting, few artists rival Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1399–1464) in using jewels and precious cloth as tropes for blood. In his Descent from the Cross [Fig. 12.6], the pale torso of Christ is silhouetted against a luxurious, midnight-purple robe worn by a bearded Joseph of Arimathaea. Rogier has arranged the Lord’s body so that the blood staining his hands, side, and head is in close proximity to swaths of crimson velvet, edged in red jewels. The orange-red stocking of Joseph’s leg connects Jesus’s scarred hand with the hand of his mother, underscoring the invisible nails that empathetically pierced her palms during her compassionate co-suffering with her dying son. Even Christ’s blood-streaked feet find an echo in the red damask sleeves of the Magdalene who hunches forward over them.30 The sleeves are pinned to her shoulders, and the figured silk slumped around the pinhead further mimics the blood that cascaded from the nail in 30  Lorne Campbell has described ‘vortices’ of red encircling the head of Christ and reaching out to the Magdalene and St. John. Campbell L., “The New Pictorial Language of Rogier

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FIGURE 12.6

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Rogier van der Weyden, Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435–1438). Oil on panel, 204.5 × 261.5 cm. Madrid, Museo del Prado (inv. no. P002825) IMAGE © MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO / ART RESOURCE, NY

Jesus’s feet. The red jewel in the Magdalene’s ring, combined with the scarlet stones edging Joseph of Arimathaea’s tunic offer analogies for the spiritual richness streaming from the Lord’s wounds. Rogier’s ‘glycerine’ tears, with their jewel-like gleam, have frequently been acknowledged as hallmarks of his wrenching compositions.31 His depictions of rivulets of blood, however, borrow as well from the sparkling and translucent characteristics of gemstones. Glittering blood beads and drips alongside crystalline tears on Christ’s face in the Escorial Crucifixion [Fig. 12.7], and in the Triptych of the Seven Sacraments [Fig. 12.8] Christ’s feet are plainly visible van der Weyden”, in Campbell L. – Stock J. van der (eds.), Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions (Zwolle – Leuven: 2009) 46. 31  See Panofsky E., Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols. (Cambridge: 1966), vol. I 258; Asperen de Boer J. R. J. van – Dijkstra J. – Schoute R. van, Underdrawing in Paintings of the Rogier van der Weyden and Master of Flémalle Groups, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 41 (Zwolle: 1992) 55, note 78.

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figure 12.7 Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion (ca. 1455). Oil on panel, 323.5 × 192 cm. San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Detail of Christ’s head (inv. no. 10014602) Image © Patrimonio Nacional

figure 12.8

Rogier van der Weyden, Triptych of the Seven Sacraments (ca. 1440–1445). Oil on oak panels, 204 × 99 cm (centre panel), 122.8 × 65.7 cm (side panels). Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Detail of Christ’s feet (inv. no. 393-395) Image © KMSKA. Photo Hugo Maerten

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through the copious blood that hangs from his toes and arms like glistening stalactites. Amber, of course, shares its likeness to blood with other red and orange-red stones, including rubies, garnets, and carnelians. In his exegesis of the jeweled breastplate worn by the Old Testament high priest, the Brabantine mystic Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381) uses various red stones to typify Christ’s blood. Regarding the breastplate’s amber (Lyngurium) setting, he notes that this particular stone is ‘bright red, and by its natural heat and the air, it draws to itself dry, light things, if they are but near it’.32 He then applies these properties to the Lord’s apocalyptic appearance at Judgment Day, when he shall be ‘shining red, on account of His wounds. And by means of the overflowing heat of His love, there shall flow out from Him a sweet air, and herewith He shall draw to Himself all that is light and dry’.33 Ruusbroec’s commentary resonates with a twelfth-century discussion of the Jewish breastplate, in which St. Bruno of Segni (1045−1123), abbot of Montecassino, calls on the reader to carefully consider the physical properties of the precious stones as an avenue toward exegetical enlightenment: The bishop should always look at the rationale, he should read in the book of his heart, he should see how it is called […] Whatever is figured in either Testament, all this is figured in an ornament […] Thus all those seeking wisdom approach the breast of the bishop and the ornament placed upon it, and it does not suffice to see only its beauty; they ought to ask about each aspect of it, why those colors, why the gold, why those stones, what does the rest signify?34 32  D5.1327–1329, E5.1260–1261, in Ruusbroec J. van, Van den Geesteliken Tabernakel, ed. T. Mertens, trans. H. Rolfson, in Baere G. de (ed.), Jan van Ruusbroec Opera Omnia, 2 vols., in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 105−106 (Turnhout: 2006), vol. 1, D727, E726: ‘Ligurius es blickende roet ende hi trect ane heme overmids sine naturlike hitte ende die locht droeghe, lichte dinghe, eest alsoe dat si heme bi sijn’. In citing Ruusbroec’s texts, I use an ‘E’ to refer to the English translation of the text with corresponding page numbers and a ‘D’ to refer to the original Middle Dutch. The English translation of the above passage renders ‘ligurius’ as ‘jacinth’. ‘Ligurius’, however, generally refers to amber. 33  D5.1333–1336, E5.1265–1268, in ibidem.: ‘blickende roet overmids sine wonden. Ende overmids overvloedeghe hitte sire minnen soe sal ute heme vloeien ene sute locht ende hier mede sal hi ane heme trecken al dat licht ende droeghe es’. 34  2.7, in Bruno of Segni, Sententiarum, ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae latinae 165 (Paris: 1854) 1065, trans. in Hamilton L. I., Decor et decorum: Reforming the Episcopacy in Bruno of Segni’s De laudibus ecclesiae (Eleventh Century), Ph.D. dissertation (University of Toronto: 2007) 71, cited in Kessler H. L., “‘They preach not by speaking out loud but by signifying’: Vitreous Arts as Typology”, Gesta 51, 1 (January 2012) 57, 67, note 15: ‘Respiciat semper episcopus ad rationale, legat in libro pectoris sui, videat quomodo vocetur […] Quidquid in utroque Testamento continetur, totum hoc in ornamento figuratur […] Huc omnes

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St. Bruno continues: These are living stones, which revolve above the earth; which arranged in the breastplate of the High Priest teach silently, and preach. For they preach not by speaking out loud but by signifying. We must always bear them on our chests, with which our heart is taught and protected. All the people look at these things and what they signify, and they diligently interrogate them.35 As if following the abbot of Montecassino’s injunction, Ruusbroec draws meaning from the very qualities of amber that had consistently impressed ancient and medieval scholars: its natural warmth, soft odor, and electrostatic ability to draw feathers and fragments of straw. The former two resonate closely with Christ’s blood, the life-giving power of which was manifested by its warmth and fragrance: His holy blood is hot, it flows, it is red […] through its heat it burns off the rust of the soul. Even he who has confessed and repented continues to suffer the pains of the sinner, but the flow of the blood washes him […] the colour of the blood restores him and renews the divine image that is impressed on the soul.36 Given amber’s mythological origins in the resinous ‘tears’ and ‘blood’ of trees, it is noteworthy that Ruusbroec invokes Christ’s perfumed blood in his discussion of gums, leaves, and flowers gathered from incense trees:

accedant, hic omnes sapientiam quaerant ad pontificis pectus, et ad ornamentum superpositum; et non tantum ejus pulchritudinem videre sufficiat: interrogent per singula, quid illi colores, quid aurum, quid lapides, et caetera quaeque significent’. 35  Bruno of Segni, Lectio S. Evangelii secundum Joannem, ed. Migne, Patrologiae latinae 165 (Paris: 1854) 843, cited in Kessler, “They preach not by speaking” 66, 70, note 71: ‘Isti sunt lapides vivi, qui volvuntur super terram; qui positi in rationali summi pontificis etiam sine voce docent, et praedicant. Praedicant enim non clamando, sed significando. Nos semper in pectore habere debemus, quibus corda nostra instruantur et muniantur. Ad hos totus populus respiciat, et quid significant, diligenter inquirat’. 36  Attributed to Conrad of Esslingen, from the first part of the fourteenth century. König J. (ed.), Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen, Freiburger Diöcesan-Archiv 13 (1880) 189–190, cited in Bynum C., Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: 2007) 169.

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But the sweet-scented flowers were His five death-wounds which brought us the fruit of life. For the scent of these flowers was so sweet in the Father’s presence that He was wounded by love of us […] And therefore, from these noble flowers, which are the five holy wounds, we receive ointment and medicine for all our needs, namely: the seven sacraments.37 Ruusbroec repeats a myth from Dioscorides’s analysis of amber in De materia medica, (On Medicinal Materials), where he cites a ‘foolish report’ first promulgated by Theophrastus of Eresus in the fourth or third century BC that amber is petrified lynx urine.38 Ruusbroec explains that the cat’s urine is eventually ‘hardened by the heat and the force of the sun’.39 Interestingly, he uses precisely the same language several pages later when he likens the sun-baked exudations of a myrrh tree to the bloody body of Christ: ‘See, this is choice myrrh, for it has flowed, on account of the force and heat of the sun, namely divine love. And it has also flowed, on account of the injuries to the tree. For the gracious body of our Lord was wounded through and through’.40 Indeed, the ‘colour of blood’ is the most striking characteristic of the three ambers, with Christ’s features taking shape from the planes and ridges of the red stone, as if his visage were washed in blood or the viewer were looking at him through a scarlet prism. Cupped in the hands and held close to the eyes, the mirror and ‘dark glass’ of the Vera icon could prompt worshipers to assess the spiritual state of their hearts, hearts as warm and blood-red as the amber itself. The semi-translucent material then becomes a sacramental instrument 37  D5.2036–43, E5.1928–34, in Ruusbroec, Van den Geesteliken Tabernakel, vol. 1, D799, E798: ‘Maer die wel riekende bloemen dat waren sine.v. doet wonden, die ons brachten die vrocht des levens. Want die roke van dien bloemen was soe soete in des vaders jeghewordecheit dat hi wart van onser minnen ghewont […] Ende hier omme, ute desen edelen bloemen, dat sijn die heileghe.v. wonden, soe ontfaen wi salve ende medicine tote al onser noet, dat sijn die seven sacramente’. 38  2.100, in Osbaldeston T. (ed.), Dioscorides: De materia medica, Being an Herbal With Many Other Medicinal Materials Written in Greek in the First Century of the Common Era (Johannesburg: 2000) 227. See also 8.57.137, in Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 6 (Cambridge: 2014) 97, 99; 37.11.34–35, in Pliny, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eichholz, 189; 37.13.52–53, in ibidem. 203, 205. See also Walton, “Theophrastus on Lyngurium” 364. 39  D5.1329–1330, E5.1262, in Ruusbroec, Van den Geesteliken Tabernakel, vol. 1, D727, E726: ‘verhardet overmids hitte ende cracht der sonnen’. 40  D5.1845–1848, E5.1754–1757, in ibidem. I D781, E780: ‘Siet, dit es utevercoerne mirre want si es gevloijt overmids cracht ende hitte der sonnen, dat es godleke minne. Ende si es oec ghevloijt overmids quetsure des boems want die graciose lichame ons heren was al dore wont’ [italics added].

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for communing with the enigmatic face of God, etched in the heart: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’.41 Visual and literary meditations on the heart abound in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Low Countries, especially under the far-reaching and affective tide of Carthusian spirituality. The heart of Jesus – rent asunder by the lance that pierced his side on Calvary – was envisioned as the refuge of the faithful and the bleeding portal to salvation.42 It is from his chest wound that the Christological pelican feeds his children, and, reciprocally, it is in his or her heart that the worshiper prepares to receive the sacramental Lord, as voiced by Ludolph of Saxony (ca 1300–1377): Write with your finger on the tablets of my heart the remembrance of what you have endured for me, that I may have this always before my eyes […] O Jesus, when dying for us on the Cross, you willed that your side should be opened by a spear, so that blood and water, emblems of the Sacraments, might flow out. I beseech you to wound my heart with the spear of divine love, that I may be worthy to receive the Sacraments which flow from your most holy side.43 The votary’s heart was also the primary site for repairing the ‘scarred’ likeness of God once created in Adam and Eve, by retooling the soul into an image of Christ. The process of duplicating the face of Jesus in the heart was often envisioned through the lens of artisanship. To this end, worshipers figuratively sanded, carved, molded, incised, and painted their hearts using the tools of a painter or sculptor.44 A fourteenth-century Carthusian text employs the language of smelting and Biblical silver refining to describe the welding together of divine and mortal hearts: ‘His heart is the furnace of divine love, always burning with the fire of the Holy Spirit and purifying, kindling, and transforming into himself all who yield themselves to him, or who wish to be his’.45 From the Nuremberg charterhouse comes a fifteenth-century prayer that, like 41  1 Corinthians 13:12. 42  See, for instance, Lockhart R. B. (ed.), Listening to Silence: An Anthology of Carthusian Writings (London: 1997) 32–41, 44–45. 43  Ibidem. 29. 44  On this rich topic, see Melion W. S., The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print 1550–1625 (Philadelphia: 2009) 333–341, 359–367, 373–374. On earlier iterations of artisan-inspired soul formation, see Gearhart H. C., Theophilus and the Theory and Practice of Medieval Art (University Park: 2017) 65–66. 45  Lockhart, Listening to Silence 36. See also Malachi 3:3.

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Ludolph of Saxony’s words, emphasizes the violence of manipulating the material of the heart: Saviour of the faithful, who willed that your holy side should be opened by the point of a ruthless lance, I humbly and fervently beseech you to open the doors of your mercy to me and allow me to enter through the large wound of your most holy side, into your infinitely loving Heart, so that my heart may be united to your Heart by an indissoluble bond of love. Wound my heart with your love; let the soldier’s spear penetrate my breast. May my heart be opened to you alone and closed to the world and the devil. Protect my heart, and arm it against the assaults of its enemies by the sign of your holy cross.46 Christ’s portrait was etched into the ambers with similar violence as the stones were upbraided, cut, filed, burnished, and marked with the ‘sign of [the] holy cross’ in their cruciform haloes. The instructions for carving gems in Theophilus’s De diversis artibus (On the Various Arts) is even more brutal, calling for the artisan to ‘take a goat, two or three years old, cut an opening between its chest and stomach in the position of the heart, insert the crystal and let it remain in its blood until it becomes warm’. Softened with the animal’s heart blood, the stone is carved and then reinserted whenever it starts to cool. Upon finishing, Theophilus advises the sculptor to ‘rub it with a cloth so that you obtain a lustre for it from this blood’.47 With the understanding that the Holy Face ambers functioned as intimate objects of devotion – kissed in the form of pax tablets or worn over the heart as pendants – they approximate the personal closeness inherent in St. Paul’s longing to see God ‘face to face’ and ‘know even as also I am known’. The motif of Christ staring out from the votary’s heart resonates with themes in the Imitatio Christi (Imitation of Christ), a renowned Devotio moderna text translated into Latin ca. 1427 but probably written earlier. In this treatise, the tender voice of Christ pleads, ‘I am the lover of purity and the giver of all holiness. I seek a pure heart, and there is the place of My rest. Make ready for Me “a large upper room furnished, and I will eat the pasch with thee […]” […] For every 46  Lockhart, Listening to Silence 44. 47  Theophilus, De diversis artibus (The Various Arts), ed. and trans. C. R. Dodwell, Medieval Texts (London − New York: 1961) 169: ‘[…] accepto hyrco duorum vel trium annorum, colligatisque pedibus eius, incide foramen inter pectus eius et ventrem in loco cordis, et impone cristallum, ita ut in sanguine eius iaceat, donec calefiat […] cum panno laneo fricabis, ut cum eodem sanguine ei fulgorem acquiras’.

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lover prepareth the best and fairest room for his dearly beloved’.48 The reciprocal gazing prompted by the ambers also alludes to nuptial imagery, with the votary sponsa contemplating the visage of the sponsus, etched in petrified sap and meditatively emblazoned on her heart. This is especially true considering that all three ambers depict beautiful, unflawed portraits of Christ, rather than the torn and pierced face encountered by St. Veronica. The carvings allude iconographically to the Passion with their cruciform nimbuses pooling out from around the heads like the edges of a scarlet paten. Christ’s countenance, however, corresponds more closely to the Bridegroom of the Canticles, who ‘looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice’, or to the noble, unblemished face in Lentulus’s letter.49 As much as amber’s materiality alludes to Christ’s blood and pain, so also its glowing translucence points to a core property of the beautiful face of Jesus: illumination. The Vera icon’s most richly indulgenced prayer, Salve sancta facies (‘Hail, Holy Face’), proclaims, ‘Hail, holy face of our Redeemer, wherein shineth the beauty of God’s splendour […] Pour thy light into our hearts by the power given thee, and take away from our senses all that is darkened’.50 For Christians, the effulgent visage of the Saviour is again invoked in the book of Numbers: ‘The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace’.51 This benediction of peace is consonant with the London amber’s probable use as a pax tablet. Furthermore, amber’s dual evocations of blood and luminous splendour effect a meditative transition on the part of the votary. By contemplating the beloved and harboring his image in the heart, the worshiper moves from the compunction of penitential artisanship – enacted, as with the lance of Christ’s Passion – to consolation in the bright, flawless features of God. Dionysius van Rijkel (ca. 1402–1471), of the Roermond Charterhouse, described a similar transition from penance to peace when he prayed, ‘[…] give me a contrite and devout heart, a very humble and pure heart, a very fervent and faithful heart, a heart like yours; a heart that you will keep 48  4.12, in Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. R. Challoner (New York – Cincinnati – Chicago: 1926) 318. 49  Song of Solomon 2:9. 50  Corbin S., “Les offices de la Sainte Face”, Bulletin des Etudes Portugaises 11 (1947) 32–33: ‘Salve, sancta facies nostri redemptoris, in qua nitet species divini splendoris […] Lumen funde cordibus ex vi tibi data et a nostris sensibus tolle caligata’. The English translation comes from a recording of The Clerks’ Group, Jacobus Barbireau: Missa Virgo parens Christi, Kyrie Paschale. Sacred Music by Obrecht, Pipelare, Pullois (1999). 51  Numbers 6:24–26. Note the similar imagery from the Office of the Holy Face, in Corbin, “Les offices de la Sainte Face” 52: ‘Jesu illuminans vultum tuum super nos’.

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holy, that you will bind to yourself – your heart’.52 This Carthusian scholar also meditated on the final apotheosis of seeing the shining God ‘face to face’: My soul, how great and what priceless happiness and glory will it be to see the God of infinite beauty face to face, and to abide with him in the depths of his sweetness. Think what it will be like to belong for ever with the almighty changeless God! In him, happily to hold and to possess, in overflowing measure, the fullness of all beauty, and of all that can be wished: yes, and safe in eternity to have your heart’s wish; ah! think what it will be! To taste the peace of God which he has created, to plumb the depths of the sweetness of his love! What will it be like, O my soul, to be wrapped up in the love of the Creator, to be made a partaker in the Godhead – how thrilling and how much to be sought after! And then, to be closely locked in God’s most loving arms, so that no one can ever tear you away from the glowing gaze of his joyous countenance, nor from the embrace of his love!53 In the Imitatio Christi, the instructions for imitation are outlined in multiple conversations between the devotee and Christ. These dialogues are internal, taking place within the votary’s heart. In one passage, the soul cries out, as if from an inner, secret chamber: ‘Who will give me, O Lord, that I may find Thee alone, that I may open my whole heart to Thee […] that Thou alone speak to me, and I to Thee; as the beloved is wont to speak to his beloved, and a friend to entertain himself with his friend’.54 In another section, Christ answers, from within: ‘I will hear what the Lord God will speak in me. Blessed is that soul which heareth the Lord speaking within her; and from His mouth receiveth the word of comfort’.55 In the New York amber, the mouth of Christ is open – underscored by accents of paint on the lips – prompting worshipers to imagine the comforting voice issuing from an image imprinted on the inner topography of their hearts. As mentioned earlier, amber was acclaimed for its medicinal properties, many of which reinforce the stone’s connection to blood. In his late eleventhcentury De lapidibus (On Stones), Marbode of Rennes (1035–1123) writes that the stone heals chest pain – likely associated with the heart – and restores

52  Lockhart, Listening to Silence 40. 53  Ibidem. 39. 54  4.13, in Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ 321. 55  3.1, in ibidem. 109.

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ruddiness to the jaundiced.56 Amber was further prescribed to staunch bleeding, including from the eyes, and to normalize heartbeat. These attributes bring another layer of meaning to the New York, Munich, and London carvings of the sudarium, which the Salve sancta facies hails as the ‘remedy of the weary’ (cura languidi) and ‘medicine of life’ (medicina vitae).57 Legend conflated St. Veronica with the nameless woman mentioned in the gospels of Sts. Matthew and Mark who was healed of a twelve-year issue of blood by touching the hem of Christ’s garment.58 Subscribing to the belief that these characters were one and the same, it is significant that St. Veronica – as the composite of both women – witnessed the intervention of holy cloth to staunch bleeding on two occasions: first when her hemorrhaging miraculously ceased, and later when she dried Christ’s bloodied face through her charitable ministration.59 Placed side by side as mysteries of faith, these events elide together, for the hemorrhaging stream of salvific blood from Christ’s face echoes and substantiates the ‘virtue [that went] out of [him]’ in order to dry up St. Veronica’s bleeding.60 In an English Passion play, Christ makes this paradox self-evident by juxtaposing the blood-stained portrait on the sudarium with his newly cleansed countenance, identifying the former as a vehicle for healing the grisly maladies that it itself embodies: ‘Veronica, thy wiping does me ease. My face is clean that [was] black to see. I shall them keep from all mis-ease [t]hat looken on thy kerchief and remember me’.61 The scriptural accounts of the hemorrhaging woman make the exact moment of healing ambiguous. It seems to occur somewhere between the time 56  R  iddle J., Marbode of Rennes’ (1035–1123) De lapidibus Considered as a Medical Treatise with Text, Commentary and C. W. King’s Translation Together with Text and Translation of Marbode’s Minor Works on Stones, Sudhoffs Archiv: Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 20 (Wiesbaden: 1977) 62–63. 57  Corbin, “Les offices de la Sainte Face” 33. Translations from The Clerks’ Group, Jacobus Barbireau. 58  The Gospel of Nicodemus 5:26, trans. W. Hone, in The Apocryphal New Testament (Boston: 1832) 57. See also Wolf G., “From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the ‘Disembodied’ Face and Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West”, in Kessler H. L. – Wolf G. (eds.), The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome and The Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996 (Bologna: 1998) 156. 59  On the role of cloth in eliding St. Veronica and the hemorrhaging woman, see Baert B., “Touching the Hem: The Thread between Garment and Blood in the Story of the Woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5:24b−34parr)”, in Rimmele M. − Ganz D. (eds.), Das Kleid der Bilder, Textile Studies 4 (Konstanz-Zürich: 2012) 159−182. 60  Wolf, “From Mandylion to Veronica” 174–179; Luke 8:46. 61  Sofer A., “Absorbing Interests: Kyd’s Bloody Handkerchief as Palimpsest”, Comparative Drama 34, 2 (Summer 2000) 132.

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when St. Veronica touches Christ’s garment and when the Lord turns and looks upon her. The text notes that ‘[…] she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole’, but then the evangelists draw special attention to Jesus’s healing gaze: ‘And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing’, ‘[…] and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour’.62 The healing gaze of Christ comes more clearly to the fore in St. Veronica’s second encounter with Jesus. On the road to Calvary, she again touches him through cloth. This time, however, the medicinal power of the fabric extends well beyond individual relief, for the sudarium’s bloody simulacrum of the Lord’s riveting stare staunches the bleeding wounds – both literal and spiritual – of generations of votaries who exercise faith in the Holy Face. Itself a tested pharmaceutical against hemorrhaging, the material of amber adds a final dimension to the Vera icon’s nexus of polluted blood, gracious blood, and healing gaze.63 Set against the social context of the city that likely produced them, the Holy Face ambers’ allusions to blood become even more pointed. Perhaps the most precious object in Bruges was a crystal vial containing a fragment of Christ’s blood. It had been brought to Flanders by Count Thierry d’Alsace (1100–1168), who, returning from the second crusade in the year 1148, procured the relic from the patriarch of Jerusalem, via his brother-in-law, King Baldwin III (1129– 1163).64 The Holy Blood of Bruges was safeguarded in the Chapel of St. Basil on the Burg, and by the late thirteenth century it was honoured with an annual procession on the third of May, the feast of the Invention of the True Cross. Civic funding for the procession and upkeep of the cult began in 1303 and increased substantially over the next hundred years.65 By the time the Holy Face ambers were produced, the procession featured a gem-studded reliquary, gilded baldachin, and scarlet canopy; torches and candles; dramatic enactments of scriptural stories; chanted psalms and specially composed hymns; an honour guard of archers, crossbowmen, and members from all the guilds of Bruges;

62  Matthew 9:21–22; Mark 5:32 [italics added]. 63  Wolf, “From Mandylion to Veronica” 175. 64  Huyghebaert N., “Iperius et la translation de la relique du Saint-Sangue à Bruges”, Annales de la Société d’Émulation de Bruges 100 (1963) 110–187. The earliest archival record of the relic comes from 1256. For more information on the relic’s history, see Brown A., Civic Ceremony and Religion in Medieval Bruges c. 1300–1520 (Cambridge: 2011) esp. 8–11; Omond, G., Bruges and West Flanders (Frankfurt: 2018) 34. 65  Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion 39–52.

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as well as fifteen days of ancillary processions with the city’s clergy.66 Duke John the Fearless (1371–1419) participated in the festivities in 1397, and starting in 1405 the Confraternity of the Holy Blood took a prestigious role in the procession, sporting tunics emblazoned with the dying pelican and a shower of scarlet blood drops.67 Bruges’s Paternostermacher guild of amber workers was established in 1302, almost exactly the same year that the city began contributing financially to the Holy Blood procession. Civic identification with the relic grew in tandem with Bruges’s reputation for amber production. By 1420, the economic value of the city’s ‘Baltic gold’ industry was such that Duke Philip the Good (1396– 1467) himself intervened in the guild’s behalf when the price of raw amber spiked.68 Bruges craftsmen actively engaged with the religious syntax of the Holy Blood in order to endow their craft with the prestige of the renowned relic. The fact that the reliquary vial was traditionally worn around the neck on a chain resonates with the Munich amber, which functioned as a pendant, worn over the heart.69 Furthermore, in the London Holy Face [Fig. 12.2] there is a small bird fashioned in silver relief with unfurled wings positioned at the base of the enameled frame, directly below the Lord’s head. It has been identified as a ‘dove of peace’, underscoring the London amber’s function as a pax tablet, but the creature’s physiognomy – especially the long, serpentine neck – throws this classification into question.70 In light of the evidence connecting amber to the Holy Blood relic, it is tempting to see in this bird a reference to the Christological pelican. Amber’s origins as petrified tree sap, with wave-like traces of its viscous past still visible in the stone, has specific relevance to the fourteenth-century cult 66  See Gilliodts-van Severen, L. (ed.), Archives de la ville de Bruges. Publié sous les auspices de l’administration communale (Bruges: 1875), vol. 3, 401–402 (no. 848); ibidem. 429–430; ibidem., vol. 4, 462, 468. 67  Much has been written about the Holy Blood Procession. See Boogaart T. A., “Our Saviour’s Blood: Procession and Community in Late Medieval Bruges”, in Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Ashley K. – Hüsken W. (eds.), Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama 5 (Amsterdam: 2001) 69–116; Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion 37–72; Cuvelier J., Inventaire analytique des archives de la chapelle du St-Sang à Bruges. Précédé d’une notice historique sur la chapelle, Annales de la Société d’Émulation (Bruges: 1900) esp. 13–21; Gailliard J., Recherches historiques sur la chapelle du Saint-Sang à Bruges, avec une déscription détaillée de tous les monuments archéologiques qu’on y admire (Bruges: 1846) 51–59. 68  See Hackenbroch “A Paternoster Pendant” 128. 69  Thierry d’Alsace is said to have given the relic to Lionnel, abbot of Saint-Bertin, who wore it as a necklace during his journey to Bruges. Huyghebaert, “Iperius et la translation de la relique du Saint-Sangue à Bruges” 117–118. 70  Drinkwater, “Material in Context” 97, 109.

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of the Holy Blood. A bull of indulgence, given by Pope Clement V (1264−1314) in 1310, recounts a series of recent miracles in which the Holy Blood, though normally appearing ‘frozen, coagulated’, and ‘petrified’, regularly liquified on Fridays at the hour of Christ’s death, distilling ‘drop by drop’ and circulating in its crystal vial.71 The liquefaction reports ceased, due, in the opinion of Guillaume, bishop of Acône, to the sins of the people.72 But in 1388, after seventy-eight years as an impenetrable mass, the relic was translated to a newer, grander receptacle, and Guillaume witnessed the stone-like substance once again darken and a few drops of fresh blood detach from it.73 This he ‘verified by the most scrupulous examination’ having ‘touched with [his] own hands’.74 In honour of the miracle, the bishop proclaimed an indulgence for the intention of reviving the faith of Bruges’s citizens, as if trying to warm their hardened hearts to life, like the coagulated relic. Warm and delicately fragrant themselves, the Holy Face ambers likewise straddled the states of liquid and solid and evoked the sweet odors that, in hagiography, often attend the longdead bodies of uncorrupted saints. Gazing into the luminous depths and shifting colours of the Holy Face gems would have approximated Guillaume of Acône’s witness of the faded blood, moving and changing colour, all the while locked in its vial of translucent stone. Much has been written about Bruges’s spiritual identity with Jerusalem, manifested most notably in its famous ‘Jerusalem Chapel’ constructed by Anselm 71  Clement V’s bull, Licet is, issued 1 June 1310 from Avignon, appears in French translation in Gailliard Recherches historiques sur la chapelle du Saint-Sang 48–50, esp. 49: ‘[…]ce même Sang sacré se liquéfie tous les vendredis et cela dès six heures du matin, de manière qu’on le voit distiller goutte à goutte et circuler dans la fiole […] ce même Sang n’est plus qu’une matière figée, coagulée et pour ainsi dire pétrifiée’. For the original Latin, see Regestum Clementis papae V: ex vaticanis archetypis sanctissimi domini nostri Leonis XIII pontificis maximi iussu et munificentia / nunc primum editum cura et studio monarchorum ordinis s. Benedicti, 10 vols. (Rome: 1885–92), vol. 5, 310–311 (no. 6046). Boogaart compares the miracle to transubstantiation. Boogaart, “Our Saviour’s Blood” 87. For more information on the relic’s liquefaction, see Huyghebaert, “Iperius et la translation de la relique du SaintSangue à Bruges” 170–73; Gailliard, Recherches historiques sur la chapelle du Saint-Sang esp. 47–49, 61–65. 72  Ibidem 63. 73  Huyghebaert, “Iperius et la translation de la relique du Saint-Sangue à Bruges” 173: ‘[…] in instanti satis modico rubicudior solito et aliter quam statim ante fuerat videri se dignatus est, gutaeque sanguinis recentissimae et a massa separate locis in pluribus clarissime intueri’. Guillaume’s apostolic letter also appears in French translation in Gailliard, Recherches historiques sur la chapelle du Saint-Sang 61–63. On the political implications of the relic’s translation in 1388, see Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion 58. 74  Gailliard, Recherches historiques sur la chapelle du Saint-Sang 62: ‘[…] nous l’avons vérifié par l’examen le plus scrupuleux, nous l’avons touché de nos propres mains’.

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Adornes to house relics of the True Cross and a copy of Christ’s sepulcher.75 The Holy Blood and its annual procession further contributed to Bruges’s emulation of Jerusalem. The relic had, of course, originated in the Holy City, where Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus procured it from the body of the dead Christ.76 Thierry d’Alsace, who subsequently carried it to Flanders, had been to Jerusalem four times, and his wife retired there as a nun.77 As Jesus’s historical blood was processed through the streets and around the walls of Bruges, the citizens identified themselves with the children of Israel at Christ’s Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday.78 At the city gate, the intonation of penitential psalms invited participants to reenact the road to Calvary with a fragment of the very blood that once bountifully streaked the stations along the Via dolorosa, where Jesus had stumbled.79 Accompanying tableaux vivants brought Biblical history to life with actors staging scenes from the Old and New Testaments, as well as representations of the Tree of Jesse and city of Jerusalem. The Metropolitan Museum of Art conserves a panel from ca. 1470 by a north Netherlandish master depicting the procession of the Holy Blood under the guise of Christ’s historical march to Golgotha [Fig. 12.9]. Copied from a lost work by Jan van Eyck, Christ Bearing the Cross includes a knight in gilded armour carrying the ensign of the Holy Blood Confraternity, crowned with the pelican piercing its own heart [Fig. 12.9a]. The knight’s confrères follow close behind him, disguised as soldiers and citizens of a Flemish-looking Jerusalem in the distance.80 Christ stands in the position the relic would have occupied, in close proximity to the confraternity members, while his heavy cross evokes 75  See Gelfand L. D., “Sense and simulacra: Manipulation of the senses in medieval ‘copies’ of Jerusalem”, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 3, 4 (December 2012) 407−422; Koldeweij J., Geloof & Geluk: Sieraad en Devotie in Middeleeuws Vlaanderen (Arnhem: 2006) esp. 177–190. 76  Heuvel J. G. M. van den, “Aspekten van Volksdevotie tot het Heilig Bloed”, in Het Heilig Bloed te Brugge (Bruges: 1990) 280–281; Huyghebaert, “Iperius et la translation de la relique du Saint-Sangue à Bruges” 118. 77  Ibidem 186. 78  Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion 70–72. 79  Boogaart, “Our Saviour’s Blood” 89–93. 80  Ainsworth M. W. – Christiansen K. (eds.), From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: 1998) 107–109. Part of the rationale for connecting the painting to the Holy Blood procession is an inscription on the rosecoloured robe and pointed hat of the man on the left, seen from behind. The inscription includes the words ‘omagame’ (procession) and ‘bloet’ (blood). It is also possible, as Ainsworth suggests, that the object identified as the ‘ensign’ of the Confraternity could actually be the relic itself, enclosed in a golden tabernacle. In that case, the meditative gaze of the reliquary bearer, looking toward Christ, seems prompted by his proximity to the relic, underscoring the Holy Blood’s ability to embody divine presence.

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North Netherlandish Master, Christ Bearing the Cross (ca. 1470). Oil on wood, 107.6 × 82.2 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. no. 43.95) By courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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figure 12.9a North Netherlandish Master, Christ Bearing the Cross (ca. 1470). Oil on wood, 107.6 × 82.2 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Detail of the ensign of the Confraternity of the Holy Blood (inv. no. 43.95) By courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

the feast of the Invention of the True Cross, which the Holy Blood procession had co-opted. In two recent studies on German Corpus Christi plays from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Glenn Ehrstine analyzes the way in which relics and other devotional objects could assume ‘roles’ in sacred theater, eliminating the need for certain tableaux vivants, sometimes even the most climactic ones. In the procession at Künzelsau, the mystical presence invoked by tiny and nearly invisible fragments of the True Cross was deemed more potent for instilling affective devotion in onlookers than a full-scale Crucifixion

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scene staged with actors, costumes, and props.81 Similar substitutions of relics for tableaux vivants do not seem to have been the norm in Bruges, in which a wide array of Passion scenes was regularly staged as part of the Holy Blood procession. The Metropolitan Christ Bearing the Cross, however, registers a related insistence on sacramental presence, as if the blood relic had transformed into Christ himself, traversing the processional route on his way to Golgotha. Significantly, it is the Lord’s encounter with St. Veronica that gives narrative form to the relic, as a thick collection of blood seeping from the thorns in Christ’s brow anticipates the scarlet printing of his face on the sudarium. The painting’s foregrounding of St. Veronica argues persuasively for a connection between Holy Face devotion, the Bruges relic cult, and the Vera icon ambers.82 In fact, the Salve sancta facies alludes to gemstones and the mechanics of carving and polishing them as a prompt for meditation on Christ’s countenance: Hail, noble jewel, true pearl, Perfectly adorned with celestial graces, Not depicted by human hands, sculpted or polished, The Greatest Artist knows, who formed you in this way.83 The prayer’s analogy of a smooth, three-dimensional pearl, combined with its tactile lexicon – ‘sculpted and polished’ – serves as a foil for the Holy Face’s manufacture ‘without hands’ and its flat, two-dimensional imprint on cloth. 81  Ehrstine G., “The True Cross in Künzelsau: Devotional Relics and the ‘Absent’ Crucifixion Scene in the Künzelsau Corpus Christi Play”, in Dietl C. – Schanze C., – Ehrstine G. (eds.), Power and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Theater (Goettingen: 2014) 73–106; Ehrstine G., “Raymond Peraudi in Zerbst: Corpus Christi Theater, Material Devotion, and the Indulgence Microeconomy on the Eve of the Reformation”, Speculum 93, 2 (April 2018) esp. 337–350. For further literature on the crucial role of relics and images in mystery plays, see Forsyth I., “Magi and Majesty: A Study of Romanesque Sculpture and Liturgical Drama”, The Art Bulletin 50, 3 (September 1968) 215−222; Flanigan C. C., “Medieval Liturgy and the Arts: Visitatio as Paradigm”, in Lillie E. L. − Peterson N. H. (eds.), Liturgy and the Arts in the Middle Ages: Studies in Honour of C. Clifford Flanigan (Copenhagen: 1996) 9−35. 82  Given this association between the sudarium and the Holy Blood, it is interesting that the Chronicon Sancti Bertini, written ca. 1380 by Jean d’Ypres, abbot of Saint-Bertin, recounts the legend of the Mandylion of Edessa and its relevance to the second crusade immediately before its account of Thierry d’Alsace and the translation of the Holy Blood to Bruges. Huyghebaert, “Iperius et la translation de la relique du Saint-Sangue à Bruges” 117. 83  Corbin, “Les offices de la Sainte Face” 33: ‘Salve gemma nobilis vera margarita[,] Caelicis virtutibus perfecte munita, Non depicta manibus sculpta vel polita, Hoc scit summus artifex quite fecit ita’. This translation comes, in part, from Karr S., “Marginal Devotions: A Newly Acquired Veronica Woodcut”, Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2002) 100.

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figure 12.10 Martin Schongauer, Christ Bearing the Cross, (ca. 1480). Engraving, 16.2 × 11.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (inv. no. RP-POB-1009) By courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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And yet the devotional significance of the Mandylion and sudarium lies in their precious traces of the formless Word made three-dimensional flesh in the fabric of the Virgin’s body. Artistic renderings of St. Veronica’s cloth routinely underscore this Incarnation thematic by giving weighty mass to the head of Christ. In an engraving by Martin Schongauer [Fig. 12.10], the face appears to hover above the veil, solid and impervious to distortion from the folds. Paradoxically, both the Salve sancta facies and Schongauer’s Holy Face reveal the mystery of God’s tangibility through their very denial of ‘human hands’. The Holy Face ambers also depict the Lord’s features in ‘high relief’, rising ‘sculpted and polished’ from a flat plane of amber [Fig. 12.1a]. The carvings become sacramental tools for the votary to exercise the senses of vision, touch, and smell in order not only to see ‘face to face’ but to ‘know even as also I am known’. This ‘hands-on’ devotion is akin to that of Guillaume of Acône, whose witness of the Holy Blood liquefaction was ‘verified by the most scrupulous examination’ by sight and touch. Such tangibility is particularly marked in the New York amber, in which worshipful rubbing has worn away much of the paint highlighting the eyes, mouth, and hair.84 Finally, these amber emblems of Christ’s historical blood were, significantly, made from a material which was safeguarded and strictly controlled by the Teutonic Knights. Before monopolizing the Balkan amber trade, this religious order had been founded in the Holy Land, where the knights facilitated pilgrimage to the sacred sites of Christ’s life and death. The Order’s legacy of protecting relics would have heightened the aura of exotic sanctity attending the amber they exported to Bruges. Even though the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem had long since fallen, the Burgundian court continued to foster crusading aspirations, particularly during the reign of Philip the Good. The possession of Christ’s blood and the propagation of its cult transfigured Bruges into a kind of ‘final outpost’ of the old Latin Kingdom, a space where the spiritual valence of tableaux vivants and Holy Faces made from petrified ‘tree blood’ flirted with political ambition and economic prowess. In both public and private spheres, these ambers represented Christ sacramentally as their physical, medicinal, and mythical properties gave form to the mystery of redemption in his blood. Selective Bibliography Ainsworth M. W. – Christiansen K. (eds.), From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: 1998). 84  On the worn paint, see Drinkwater, “Material in Context” 105–106.

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Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. D. Wyckoff (Oxford: 1967). Areford D., “Multiplying the Sacred: The Fifteenth-Century Woodcut as Reproduction, Surrogate, Simulation”, in Parshall P. (ed.), The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, Studies in the History of Art 75 (Washington, DC: 2009) 118–153. Asperen de Boer J. R. J. van – Dijkstra J. – Schoute R. van, Underdrawing in Paintings of the Rogier van der Weyden and Master of Flémalle Groups, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 41 (Zwolle: 1992). Baert B., “Touching the Hem: The Thread between Garment and Blood in the Story of the Woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5:24b−34parr)”, in Rimmele M. − Ganz D. (eds.), Das Kleid der Bilder, Textile Studies 4 (Konstanz-Zürich: 2012) 159−182. Belting H., Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: 1994). Boehm B. D., “Medallion with the Face of Christ”, in “Recent Acquisitions. A Selection: 2010–2012”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 70, 2 (Fall 2012) 20. Boehm B. D. − Fajt J. (eds.), Prague: The Crown of Bohemia, 1347−1437 (New York: 2005). Boogaart T. A., “Our Saviour’s Blood: Procession and Community in Late Medieval Bruges”, in Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Ashley K. – Hüsken W. (eds.), Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama 5 (Amsterdam: 2001) 69–116. Brown A., Civic Ceremony and Religion in Medieval Bruges c. 1300–1520 (Cambridge: 2011). Bruno of Segni, Sententiarum, ed. Migne J.-P., Patrologiae latinae 165 (Paris: 1854). Bruno of Segni, Lectio S. Evangelii secundum Joannem, ed. Migne J.-P., Patrologiae latinae 165 (Paris: 1854). Bynum C., Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: 2007). Campbell L., “The New Pictorial Language of Rogier van der Weyden”, in Campbell L. – Stock J. van der (eds.), Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions (Zwolle – Leuven: 2009) 32–63. Clark N. D., Amber: Tears of the Gods (Edinburgh: 2010). Corbin S., “Les offices de la Sainte Face”, Bulletin des Etudes Portugaises 11 (1947) 32–33. Cuvelier J., Inventaire analytique des archives de la chapelle du St-Sang à Bruges. Précédé d’une notice historique sur la chapelle, Annales de la Société d’Émulation (Bruges: 1900). Drinkwater H., “Material in Context: The Amber Head of Christ of the Wallace Collection Pax”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 169, 1 (2016) 95–121. Duffin C., “Fossils as Drugs: Pharmaceutical Palaeontology”, Ferrantia 54 (2008) 1–83. Ehrstine G., “Raymond Peraudi in Zerbst: Corpus Christi Theater, Material Devotion, and the Indulgence Microeconomy on the Eve of the Reformation”, Speculum 93, 2 (April 2018) 319–356.

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Ehrstine G., “The True Cross in Künzelsau: Devotional Relics and the ‘Absent’ Crucifixion Scene in the Künzelsau Corpus Christi Play”, in Dietl C. – Schanze C., – Ehrstine G. (eds.), Power and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Theater (Goettingen: 2014) 73–106. Fein S., “Mary to Veronica: John Audelay’s Sequence of Salutations to God-Bearing Women”, Speculum 86, 4 (October 2011) 964–1009. Flanigan C. C., “Medieval Liturgy and the Arts: Visitatio as Paradigm”, in Lillie E. L. − Peterson N. H. (eds.), Liturgy and the Arts in the Middle Ages: Studies in Honour of C. Clifford Flanigan (Copenhagen: 1996) 9−35. Forsyth I., “Magi and Majesty: A Study of Romanesque Sculpture and Liturgical Drama”, The Art Bulletin 50, 3 (September 1968) 215−222. Gailliard J., Recherches historiques sur la chapelle du Saint-Sang à Bruges, avec une description détaillée de tous les monuments archéologiques qu’on y admire (Bruges: 1846). Gearhart H. C., Theophilus and the Theory and Practice of Medieval Art (University Park: 2017). Gelfand L. D., “Sense and simulacra: Manipulation of the senses in medieval ‘copies’ of Jerusalem”, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 3 (2012) 407−422. Gilliodts-van Severen, L. (ed.), Archives de la ville de Bruges. Publié sous les auspices de l’administration communale (Bruges: 1875). Hackenbroch Y., “A Paternoster Pendant in the Robert Lehman Collection”, Metropolitan Museum Journal 24 (1989) 127–133. Hamburger J., “‘In gebeden vnd in bilden geschriben’: Prints as Exemplars of Piety and the Culture of the Copy in Fifteenth-Century Germany”, in Parshall P. (ed.), The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, Studies in the History of Art 75 (Washington, DC: 2009) 154–189. Houtte, J. A. van, “Ambernijverheid en paternostermakers te Brugge gedurende de XIVe en XVe eeuw”, in Houtte J. A. van (ed.), Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Economy and Society (Leuven: 1977) 49–80. Heuvel J. G. M. van den, “Aspekten van Volksdevotie tot het Heilig Bloed”, in Het Heilig Bloed te Brugge (Bruges: 1990) 265–323. Hone W. (trans.), The Gospel of Nicodemus, in The Apocryphal New Testament (Boston: 1832). Huyghebaert N., “Iperius et la translation de la relique du Saint-Sangue à Bruges”, Annales de la Société d’Émulation de Bruges 100 (1963) 110–187. Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. S. A. Barney – W. J. Lewis – J. A. Beach (Cambridge: 2006). Kaiser E., “The Devotion to the Precious Blood”, The Ecclesiastical Review 83, 1 (July 1930) 1−14.

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Kessler H. L., “‘They preach not by speaking out loud but by signifying’: Vitreous Arts as Typology”, Gesta 51, 1 (January 2012) 55−70. Kessler H. L. – Wolf G. (eds.), The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome and The Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996 (Bologna: 1998). King R., “Rethinking ‘the oldest surviving amber in the west’”, The Burlington Magazine 155 (November 2013) 756–762. Koldeweij J., Geloof & Geluk: Sieraad en Devotie in Middeleeuws Vlaanderen (Arnhem: 2006). Lightbown R. W., Mediaeval European Jewellery with a catalogue of the collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum (London: 1992). Lockhart R. B. (ed.), Listening to Silence: An Anthology of Carthusian Writings (London: 1997). Melion W. S., The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print 1550–1625 (Philadelphia: 2009). Nygren C. J., “Titian’s Ecce Homo on Slate: Stone, Oil, and the Transubstantiation of Painting”, The Art Bulletin 99, 1 (March 2017) 36−66. Omond, G., Bruges and West Flanders (Frankfurt: 2018). Osbaldeston T. (ed.), Dioscorides: De materia medica, Being an Herbal With Many Other Medicinal Materials Written in Greek in the First Century of the Common Era (Johannesburg: 2000). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. F. J. Miller, Loeb Classical Library 42 (Cambridge: 1916). Panofsky E., Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols. (Cambridge: 1966). Pliny, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eichholz − H. Rackham, in Loeb Classical Library 6 (Cambridge: 2014). Publius Lentulus: His Report to the Senate of Rome concerning Jesus Christ (London, Elephant and Castle: 1677). Riddle J. M., “Amber in Ancient Pharmacy: The Transmission of Information About a Single Drug: A Case Study”, Pharmacy in History 15 (1973) 3–17. Riddle J. M., Marbode of Rennes’ (1035–1123) De lapidibus Considered as a Medical Treatise with Text, Commentary and C. W. King’s Translation Together with Text and Translation of Marbode’s Minor Works on Stones, Sudhoffs Archiv: Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 20 (Wiesbaden: 1977). Riddle J. M., “Pomum ambrae: Amber Ambergris in Plague Remedies”, Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften 48, 2 (June 1964) 111–122. Robinson J., Masterpieces: Medieval Art (London: 2008). Ruusbroec J. van, Van den Geesteliken Tabernakel, ed. T. Mertens, trans. H. Rolfson, in Baere G. de (ed.), Jan van Ruusbroec Opera Omnia, 2 vols., Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 105−106 (Turnhout: 2006).

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Sofer A., “Absorbing Interests: Kyd’s Bloody Handkerchief as Palimpsest”, Comparative Drama 34, 2 (Summer 2000) 127–153. Theophilus, De diversis artibus (The Various Arts), ed. and trans. C. R. Dodwell, Medieval Texts (London − New York: 1961). Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. R. Challoner (New York – Cincinnati – Chicago: 1926). Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, 22 vols. (London − Manchester − Birmingham − Glasgow: 1916–1937). Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. J.-P. Migne, 4 vols. (Paris: 1859). Walton A., “Theophrastus on Lyngurium: Medieval and Early Modern Lore from the Classical Lapidary Tradition”, Annals of Science 58, 4 (2001) 357–379. Wolf G., “From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the ‘Disembodied’ Face and Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West”, in Kessler H. L. – Wolf G. (eds.), The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome and The Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996, vol. 6 (Bologna: 1998) 153–179.

chapter 13

Anchoring the Appearance of the Sacred: the Abbot of Choisy & His Translation of the Imitatio Christi (1692) Lars Cyril Nørgaard Within the history of the book, the Imitatio Christi holds a place of prominence. In the early modern period, its success was enormous,*,1 even though the work had been composed with a limited readership in mind. As four separate manuscripts, it first circulated within the communities of the Devotio moderna. Quickly disseminated beyond this community of readers, vernacular translations point to a broadening of its audience, and dedications in early printed editions explicitly evoke worldly readers.2 The four disparate texts were intentionally transformed into a book.3 In this process, the manuscripts became * The research presented in this chapter is part of my research project on Mme de Maintenon, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark and carried out in association with IMEMS, Durham University, and the Centre for Privacy Studies, housed at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. I owe special thanks to emeritus prof. Richard Maber, Durham University, and to prof. Mette Birkedal Bruun, University of Copenhagen. Thanks are due also to Lee Palmer Wandel, Walter Melion and Elizabeth Pastan as well as the participants of the conference Quid est sacramentum. 1  The 16th century saw more than three hundred editions published, while the number in the 17th century was in an excess of eight hundred. The increase in number of editions peaked in the 18th century, when one thousand one hundred editions were made. In comparison, the 15th century only saw seventy-four editions, see Sordet Y., “Formes éditoriales et usages de L’Imitatio Christi, XV e–XIXe siècles”, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 2 (2012) 869–95 (871). In terms of the actual number of prints, a conservative estimate comes to 2,3 million prints, while a maximum of 15 million printed copies may have circulated in Europe between the 15th and 19th centuries, cf. Sordet, “Formes éditoriales et usages de L’Imitatio Christi” 872; Barbier F., “Quelque observations sur les origines d’un succès européen”, in Delaveau M. – Sordet Y. (eds.), Édition et diffusion de l’imitation de Jésus-Christ (1470–1800), Études et catalogue collectif (Paris: 2011) 35–51. 2  The merging of lay and monastic piety was a salient feature of the reform movement founded by Geert Groote (1340–1384) and known as the Devotio moderna. Translating works into the vernacular was one important vehicle to realize such mergers, see, e.g., Von Habsburg M., Catholic and Protestant Translations of the Imitatio Christi 1425–1650 (Farnham – Burlington: 2011) 31–48. 3  Identified by the titles of their first chapters, these four parts became known as Admonitiones ad spiritualem vitam utiles (‘Helpful counsels for the spiritual life’), Admonitiones ad interna © LARS CYRIL NØRGAARD, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_014 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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equipped with paratextual devices such as chapters with titles, sections within these chapters and the unifying name of an author.4 Instead of texts copied individually and compiled in a multitude of ways,5 the dispositive of the book was imposed upon the written words. The paratextual devices on the printed page support this abstract ordering: they present words and sentences as part of an argumentative whole and thereby guide the process of reading. As an almost fixed feature of this paratextual system, early modern editions also include a number of images. A frontispiece opens a gateway into the Imitatio, while an image prefaces each of its four books negotiating the transition from one part of the book to the next. In its own right, the frontispiece prompts the reader’s reflection on the action of reading, while the four plates, from within the Imitatio, affirm the specific theme of its respective parts. This paper explores the iconographical programme of these prefatory images, which, on different levels and in specific situations, make the sacred mystery appear. trahentes (‘Counsels for the interior life’), De interna consolatione (‘On Interior Consolation’) and Devota exhortatio ad sacram communionem (‘Devout Exhortation to Holy Communion’). 4  In the 16th century, the German-speaking and Habsburg Netherlands seem to have attributed authorship to Thomas à Kempis, while Jean Gerson was held to be the author in the Kingdoms of France, Castile and Aragon, and on the Italian peninsula. Other contenders for the title included Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and Ludolph of Saxony († 1378). In the 17th century, the Benedictines added another possible name to the list: the unknown Italian Giovanni Gersen, who, allegedly, had been abbot of St Étienne at Verceil in the first part of the 13th century. Although ‘Gersoncito’ had initially been the Society’s official title for the work, the Jesuits reacted to the Benedictine claim and came out in full support of Thomas à Kempis. For an overview, see Von Habsburg M., “Short Title Catalogue of all Latin and Vernacular editions of the Imitatio Christi, c. 1470–1650”, in Catholic and Protestant Translations of the Imitatio Christi 255–307. 5  Before the explosion of printed editions, we know of almost nine hundred manuscripts, mostly in Latin and dating from the period between 1424 and the 16th century; close to eight hundred of these manuscripts antedate 1600, cf. Axters S., De Imitatione Christi: Een handschrifteninventaris bij het vijfhonderdste verjaren van Thomas Hemerken van Kenpen (Kempen-Niederrheim: 1971); Neddermeyer U., “Redix Studii et Speculum votae. Verbreitung und Rezeption der Imitatio Christi in Handschriften und Drucken bis zur Reformation”, in Helmrath J. – Müller H. (eds.), Studien zum 15. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Erich Meuthen, 2 vols. (Munich: 1994–1995) vol. 1, 457–481. These early copies rarely comprise all four books, because, originally, they were not an organic whole. Indeed, three manuscripts were often bound together and given the title De Musica Ecclesiastica. In these compilations, the fourth book is not part of the ‘work’. In other instances, the third and fourth manuscripts switch places: this is the case for the so-called Codex Kempensis, dated to 1441 and in the autograph of the author. On this manuscript, see Delaissé L., Le manuscript autographe de Thomas a Kempis et l’imitation de J.-C.: examen archéologique et édition diplomatique du Bruxellensis 5855–61, 2 vols. (Brussels: 1956). Marginal additions in this important manuscript point to a composite process of writing and rewriting. Here, we should recall the Devotio moderna’s technique of spiritual notetaking – the rapiaria – that constituted a fluid reworking of texts.

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The Royal Couple

In the following, we shall analyse the images that accompany the translation of the Imitatio, carried out by François-Timoléon de Choisy (1644–1724) in the spring of 1692.6 This translation contains six images. As a special feature, Choisy’s “Epître” includes an anonymous engraving that portrays Louis XIV attending Mass [Fig. 13.1].7 This image of the royal dedicatee serves the purpose of personalizing the translation, but, as we shall see, it also echoes Choisy’s “Epître” and its vision of sacred rulership. Furthermore, the depiction of Louis XIV attending Mass [Fig. 13.1] can be connected to the frontispiece [Fig. 13.2], to Saint Arsenius fleeing court [Fig. 13.3] and to Saint Louis receiving the Last Rites [Fig. 13.6]. Together, these four images present the mystery of the king’s body and its imitation of the transcendent humility of Christ: this paradoxical mystery culminates in the visual treatment of the Eucharist [Fig. 13.1 and Fig. 13.6]. A second mystery surrounds the depiction of Mme de Maintenon in the Church of Saint-Cyr [Fig. 13.4].8 Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye (1634–1706) suggested that we extend the biblical inscription in this image (‘Audi filia’, Ps 44.11 / ‘Hear, O daughter’, Ps 45.10), and thereby integrate ‘the king will desire your beauty’ (Ps 45.10–11) into our interpretation. Amelot also claimed that this plate and its depiction of Maintenon had caused courtly scandal. For this reason, it had supposedly been removed from the second 6  De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692) Paris, Bibliothèque National de France (hereafter: BnF) Ms. Rés. 16457. Choisy carried out the translation during the late winter of 1691 and early months of 1692. In January 1692, the abbot consulted his friends on the Latin titles of each chapter, arguing that they rarely describe the content of the chapters; could the translator not change them? Against such alterations, his friends maintained that Choisy should remain true to the traditional titles, while others suggested that he should also consult the manuscripts. According to Choisy, the latter suggestion would amount to an endless task, comparable to trying to drink the oceans, cf. ‘Journal de l’assemblée de Luxembourg’ Paris, BnF (Arsenal), Ms. 3186, fols. 176v–177. Choisy’s translation was also debated, when the group gathered five days later, see ‘Journal de l’assemblée de Luxembourg’ f. 177v–178. 7  Anon., Messe du roi dans la chapelle de 1682 BnF Ms. Va 78e, fol., t. 7, cf. Maral A., “L’étonnante destinée d’un édifice provisoire: la chapelle royale de Versailles entre 1682 et 1710”, Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles (https://journals.openedition.org/ crcv/11452#ftn47). 8  In late 1683, Louis secretly married Françoise d’Aubigné, the marquise de Maintenon (1635– 1719). Together, the royal couple founded La Maison Royale de Saint Louis (1686–1793), located at Saint-Cyr just 5 kilometres southeast of the gates of Versailles. In its initial phase, this community consisted of thirty-six Ladies of Saint Louis. Together with a small number of novices and postulants, these Ladies educated two hundred and fifty ‘demoiselles’ from the lesser nobility, who, on entrance, had to prove noble lineage for a minimum of four generations. Their families also had to have supported the king in his war efforts. In return, the king paid for their education and eventual dowry.

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figure 13.1

Anonymous, “Louis XIV Attending Mass”, vignette to François-Timoléon de Choisy’s “Epître” in De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692) © BnF Ms. D-16457, Unpag

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Nørgaard

Mariette, “The Cross”, frontispiece to De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692) © BnF Ms. D-16459, Unpag

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figure 13.3

[Mariette], “Saint Arsenius Fleeing Court”, frontispiece to Book I, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692) © BnF Ms. D-16457, Unpag

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edition of Choisy’s translation.9 Amelot’s claim, however, seems difficult to corroborate. The secret marriage between Louis XIV and Mme de Maintenon surely bewildered courtiers, and this bewilderment prompted confusion and rumours. Besides Amelot, no other contemporary, however, mentions that controversy arose after Choisy published his translation. Nevertheless, this claim was subsequently repeated,10 although the depiction of Maintenon was not replaced before the fourth edition of Choisy’s translation.11 It is thus safe to say that the removal of the depiction of Mme de Maintenon in the Church of Saint-Cyr [Fig. 13.4] was no quick response: it took six years before the plate was removed. Furthermore, the eventual removal was part of an overall reworking of the visual programme which Nicolas II Pitau (1670–1724) carried out.12 Instead of repeating Amelot’s claim to courtly controversy,13 this paper suggests a different interpretation. Two black curtains visually connect the depiction of Mme de Maintenon in the Church of Saint-Cyr [Fig. 13.4] and the depiction of Christ in the home of Mary and Martha [Fig. 13.5]. Below, we shall return to this connection and the apparent unity of these two scenes, where female figures [Figs. 13.4–13.5] interact with the divine Word and visualize the sacred mystery as an interior mode of listening.

9  La Houssaye Amelot de, Mémoires historiques, politiques, critiques et littéraires, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, Michel Charles Le Cène: 1724 [1722]) vol. 2, 84–85. 10  Thoulier Pierre-Joseph, La vie de Monsieur de l’abbé de Choisy de l’Académie française (Lausanne-Genève, Bousquet: 1742) 166–167; Angliviel de La Beaumelle Laurent, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Madame de Maintenon et à celle du siècle passé, followed by the Lettres de Madame de Maintenon, 15 vols. (Amsterdam, Aux dépens de l’auteur: 1755–1756) vol. 3 (1756), 70. 11  De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle. Dediée au roi, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 41699). Already Barbier noted Amelot’s mistake and speculative suggestions, cf. Barbier A.-A., Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes, 4 vols. (Paris: 1806–1809) vol. 1 (1806), 896–899; idem., Dissertation sur soixante traductions françaises de l’imitation de Jésus-Christ (Paris: 1812) 49–51. 12  Pitau removed the architectural structure from which Saint Arsenius runs away [Fig. 13.3]. As a visual threshold to the second book, Pitau inserted a male figure in prayer. In an interior setting, he kneels down in front of a prie-dieu, where open books rest: above the male figure, a heavenly light breaks through a dark cloud formation and makes appear a verse from Ps 30: ‘Seigneur, je crierai vers vous et vous adresserai ma priere’ (‘To You, Lord, I cried, and to You I made my supplication’, Ps. 30.8). Prefacing the third book [Fig. 13.5], Pitau placed Mary and Jesus in an open courtyard with pillars in the background: Martha completely disappears in this image. The final representation of Saint Louis is moved from the camp in Tunis to an interior setting [Fig. 13.6]. 13  The claim is repeated in, e.g., Preyat F., Le Petit Concile de Bossuet et la christianisation des mœurs et des pratiques littéraires sous Louis XIV (Berlin: 2007) 145; Meyer V., “Suites et cycles: les éditions illustrées de l’Imitation de Jésus-Christ au XVIIe siècle”, in Delaveau – Sordet (eds.), Édition et diffusion de l’imitation de Jésus-Christ (1470–1800), 53–70 (64).

the Abbot of Choisy & His Translation of the Imitatio Christi

figure 13.4

Mariette, “Mme de Maintenon in the Church of SaintCyr”, frontispiece to Book II, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692) © BnF Ms. D-16457, p. 70v

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Mariette, “Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha”, frontispiece to Book III, in De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692) © BnF Ms. D-16457 (between p. 110 and p. 111)

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Choisy’s Translation

Today, the Abbot of Choisy is best known for his adventures in cross-dressing and in drag.14 The Journal du voyage de Siam has also attracted scholarly attention. In December 1684, while Choisy was preparing himself for a life within the Congrégation de Missions Etrangères at the Rue du Bac in Paris,15 he caught wind that volunteers were needed for a royal mission to present-day Thailand. By authoring a number of texts that detailed how to rebuild and reorganize the French embassy, the abbot positioned himself as a liaison between members of the religious community and the court at Versailles. With Choisy on board, the ships set sail on 1 March 1685. Shortly after their return in June 1686, Choisy published his travel narrative,16 followed by two historical portraits of biblical kings: first, La vie de David appeared alongside an interpretation of the Psalms,17 and second, La vie de Salomon.18 Together with the popularity of the Journal, these portraits secured Choisy, on 25 August 1687, membership 14  Choisy François-Timoléon de, “Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme”, in Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy, ed. G. Mongrédien (Paris: 1966) 429–522 (Paris, BnF (Arsenal), Ms. 3188, f. 1–51). This work comprises a number of texts to which Choisy’s nephew, René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy (1694–1757), added the unifying title “Avantures de l’abbé de Choisy, habillé en femme”, Ms. 3188, f. 1. Paul Scott has argued that no single shred of independent evidence supports what Choisy recounts: the same holds true for the accounts of cross-dressing in Choisy’s here Mémoires pour servir à la cour de Louis XIV, see Scott P., “Authenticity and Textual Transvestism in the Mémoires of the Abbé de Choisy”, French Studies 69 (2014) 14–29. This lack of historical authenticity does not render the accounts untruthful; it is rather a matter of the level upon which we are to understand their truth claims. 15  After finishing his theological studies, Choisy divided his life between the Palais de Luxembourg and longer stays in Rome and Venice. In 1682, the abbot made his permanent return to Paris, but the following year he fell seriously ill. Surviving this near-death experience, Choisy’s lukewarm religious sentiments became increasingly fervent, and the instalment at Rue du Bac was a first manifestation of this change of heart. During the spring of 1684, Choisy and his old friend, Louis de Courcillon (1643–1723), published an account of his conversion: Quatre dialogues. I. Sur l’immortalité de l’Ame, II. Sur l’Existence de Dieu, III. Sur la Providence, IV. Sur la Religion (Paris, Sebastian Mabre-Cramoisy: 1684). For biographical information, I refer to Van der Cruysse D., L’abbé de Choisy. Androgyne et mandarin (Paris: 1995). 16  Choisy François-Timoléon de, Journal du voyage de Siam fait en M.DC.LXXXV et M.DC. LXXXVI (Paris, Sebastian Mabre-Cramoisy: 1687), cf. Van der Cruysse D., Louis XIV et le Siam (Paris: 1991). 17  Choisy François-Timoléon de, Interpretation des Pseaumes, où les differences notables de l’hebreu & de la Vulgate sont marquées. Avec la vie de David (Paris, Antoine Dezaillier: 1687). 18  Choisy François-Timoléon de, La Vie de Salomon (Paris, Claude Barbin: 1687).

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in the Académie française.19 Upon his induction, the abbot launched an ambitious historiographical project. He set out to write the history of the French kings who had ruled from 1328 until 1461. Like his accounts of David and Solomon, Choisy’s royal portraits are hardly oblique in their praise of Louis XIV. The first instalment, published in 1688, deals with the reigns of Philip VI (1293–1350) and John the Good (1319–1364),20 while the victorious reign of Charles V (1338–1380) was initially planned to appear that same year. However, Choisy had to delay this publication.21 For reasons unclear, he diverged from the outlined plan and instead portrayed Louis XIV’s most prominent ancestor, Louis IX (1214–1270).22 The total of five royal portraits, written between 1688 and 1695, and the portraits of David and Solomon, both written in 1687, correspond with Choisy’s translation of the Imitatio. All these publications were dedicated to Louis XIV.23 Furthermore, the translation of 1692 shows both Louis XIV and Louis IX: the vignette [Fig. 13.1] in Choisy’s “Epître” depicts the kneeling Louis, and the plate that prefaces the fourth book repeats this bodily pose in the figure of Saint Louis [Fig. 13.6].24 19  D  iscours prononcés à l’Académie français, le 25 août 1687, à la réception de M. l’abbé de Choisy, par le récipiendaire et M. Bergeret (Paris, Claude Barbin: 1687). 20  Choisy François-Timoléon de, Histories de Philippe de Valois et du roi Jean (Paris, Claude Barbin: 1688). 21  It was published the following year: Choisy François-Timoléon de, Histoire de Charles cinquième, roi de France (Paris, Antoine Dezaillier: 1689). The public had to wait even longer for the final installation in Choisy’s project: Choisy François-Timoléon de, Historie de Charles VI, Roi de France (Paris, J.-B. Coignard: 1695). 22  Choisy François-Timoléon de, Vie de Saint Louis (Paris, Claude Barbin: 1689). In his dedication to La vie de Saint Louis, Choisy connects this work with his previous publications, collectively defined as ‘les Histoires’. The successful reigns of the biblical kings and the failed reigns of Philip the Fortunate and John the Good are said to overlap in the life of Louis IX: like David and Salomon, the Saint-King saw victory in France, while his defeat under foreign skies is similar to what past French kings suffered at home, cf. Choisy, Vie de Saint Louis Unpag. [1–2]. 23  In total, Choisy addresses Louis XIV in eight dedications; Van der Cruysse D., “L’abbé de Choisy et le mythe louis-quatorzien”, in De Branche en Branche. Études sur le XVIIe et le XVIIIe siècles français, La République des lettres 26 (Louvain: 2005) 213–23. 24  A similar overlap is detectable in Choisy’s written accounts: these texts cast the king in the mould of past rulers and make visible different aspects of sacred kingship. In the figure of Solomon, the abbot invites the king to see that this biblical king made his enemies tremble: the present ruler and his glory in war are hereby made visible. This mirroring should also make Louis XIV see Solomon trembling before the living God; Choisy, La Vie de Salomon Unpag. [3–4]. In his preface to the life of Charles V, Choisy underlines this point: ‘It is almost impossible to study the history of kings and heroes, without constantly seeing the image of Your Majesty’ (‘Il est presque impossible de travailler à l’Histoire des Rois & des Heros, qu’on ne voie sans cesse l’image de VOTRE MAJESTE’), Choisy, Histoire de Charles cinquième Unpag. [1–2]. The written portrait of the monarch thus refers itself

the Abbot of Choisy & His Translation of the Imitatio Christi

figure 13.6

Mariette, “Saint Louis Receiving the Last Rites”, frontispiece to Book IV, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692) © BnF Ms. D-16457 (between p. 272 and p. 273)

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In fact, Choisy presents his translation of the Imitatio as a culmination of the previous portraits: ‘Sire, after having proposed to Your Majesty the example of the greatest kings and Saints, nothing remains but for me to place before your eyes Jesus Christ himself, the king of kings and the Saint of Saints’ (‘Sire, après avoir proposé à VOTRE MAJESTÉ l’exemple des plus grans Rois & celui des plus grans Saints, il ne me restoit plus qu’à vous mettre devant les yeux JESUS-CHRIST même, le Roi des Rois & le Saint des Saints’).25 The Imitatio makes Christ appear, and the act of reading thus amounts to having something placed before the eyes. More specifically, as Choisy puts it: ‘In the book that I present to you, his ethics, in all its divinity, can be found diffused across all of the pages, and there [in the book] you will everywhere see the emptiness of human greatness and even of human virtues’ (‘Sa morale toute divine se trouve répanduë dans toutes les pages du Livre que je vous presente, & vous y verrez par tout le néant des grandeurs, & même des vertus humaines’).26 The appearance of the divine – that is, true humanity as expressed in the life of Christ – renders void everything that belongs to the terrestrial world. Unlike the royal portraits and their mirroring of the present ruler, the image of Christ, as presented by the Imitatio, breaks the frame of social reality: it invites the king to see an emptiness where others recognize greatness and virtuous acts. Lending something to the eyes, the appearance of Christ invites the dedicatee to change his outlook on the world. 3

The Kneeling Figure of Louis XIV

Alongside this general presentation, Choisy states that the king, paradoxically, is as grand in times of defeat as in times of triumph.27 Indeed, the Nine Years War (1688–1697) caused an important shift in royal ideology: the experience of political isolation prompted a new symbolic framework for representing authority.28 In Choisy’s words, the nations that join forces against France do to an iconic semblance between past and present, cf. Marin L., Le portrait du roi (Paris: 1981) 49–109. 25  Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [1–2]. 26  Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [2]. 27  Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [3]. 28  This change is noticed by, e.g., Apostolidès J.-M., Le Roi-machine: spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: 1981) 114–131 (128–31) and Burke P., The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven – London: 1992) 126–133. More specifically, the late 1680s and early 1690s saw an increasing effort to cast the king in the mould of Saint Louis, see, e.g., Gouzi C., “Louis XIV en Saint Louis: une autre image de la figure royale”, in Da Vinha M. – Maral A. – Milovanovic N. (eds.), Louis XIV l’image et le mythe (Rennes: 2014) 57–70. The foundation

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nothing but excite her people’s love for their king, while also demonstrating the inexhaustible might of her military.29 Europe has gone blind or turned raving mad, Choisy laments, but yet Louis still wins battles and secures territory. Accordingly, he can now legitimately call himself the sole defender of God and of the rights of anointed kings. Isolated from his disciples, falsely accused and made to endure intolerable pain, the suffering Christ is here presented as a model for all men but, specifically, for the king: his Passion is the interpretive key that unlocks the present political predicament. Glorifying the image of Louis XIV, Choisy not so much blindly praises the king as he fleshes out a royal ideology of humility, sacrifice, and interiority. Indeed, suffering and defeat are proofs that Providence has tested the king. When Louis is publicly humiliated, this is, in fact, a divine course of action whereby God runs a test of royal humility. Why else would God select Louis XIV to add lustre to the throne that was already the most powerful in the world? According to Choisy, it was with the sole intention of making the king fall from the summit of the highest possible peak.30 In his steep, precipitous descent, the king’s display of humility honours God in a way so perfect that it surpasses the capacities of all other men. No one else can be humiliated in the manner of such a man, placed high above everyone else. With this in mind, the abbot asks why so many marvels have been accomplished, despite of the entire world having rallied against the crown. Why have France’s many enemies not overrun her? Choisy’s framework of interpretation insists on the fact that the only credible explanation resides within the king. Humiliated by God, Louis, by remaining humble, has saved the realm from the full extent of divine wrath. Hidden humility, if it is the true reason behind France’s surprising success, causes Choisy to ponder, perhaps ironically, whether Louis XIV has gone out of his way to hide this transcendent humility.31 The abbot nonetheless maintains that royal humility, whether discernible or not, is what safeguards the realm, and his dedication thus inscribes humility into the heart of authority.32 This state is invisible, but Choisy posits it as the of La Maison Royale de Saint Louis at Saint-Cyr and the order of the Ladies of Saint Louis shared this focus on Saint Louis; see Neveu B., “Du culte de Saint Louis à la glorification de Louis XIV: la maison royale de Saint-Cyr”, Journal des savants 3 (1988) 277–290. 29  Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [3]. This point is already stated in Choisy’s “Epître” to the second edition of his Interpretation des Pseaumes (1690), where the abbot also speaks of a Europe in league against the king. 30  Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [4–5]. 31  Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [5]. 32  For similar ideas about royal humility, see, e.g., Bossuet Jacques-Bénigne, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Ecriture sainte à Monseigneur le Dauphin, ed. J. Le Brun (Geneva: 1967 [1709]) Book 7, Article VI, Propositions 1–13, 271–283. On Choisy’s ties to Bossuet and

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only credible explanation of the present state of affairs. By implication, political events reveal what cannot readily be observed. In his “Epître”, Choisy distinguishes the king’s exterior actions from his interior state that remains invisible. Defeats can be interpreted as part of the divine plan and as tests of royal humility. Unlikely in the face of overwhelming opposition, the king’s achievements in battle are incremental signs that Louis has passed God’s test. As such, the narration of royal actions refers to a hidden level of reality, tied to the king’s person and, as such, not readily perceivable. Keeping these two levels in mind, the king’s relationship to the divine is anchored into his interior realm. This mode of interiority is not subject to change in the same way as the king’s historical body, making Louis XIV, simultaneously, a mortal man and immortal monarch. If one could enter into the king’s interior, Choisy avers, the royal heart would be seen to be humble before God: the sovereign, in his private relation to the king of kings, epitomizes the condition of humility. Indeed, his hidden humility is comparable to the strength and greatness by which Louis stands before his fellow men.33 Dialectically, Choisy thus positions the figure of Louis XIV between visible superioritas and hidden humilitas, incorporating these two in the same persona.34 However, the abbot of Choisy points to a specific situation in which what is interior to the king is put on display. When the king participates in ‘the most majestic of our mysteries’ (‘le plus auguste de nos mysteres’), his respect for things divine becomes visible. Participation in the Lord’s Supper is nothing short of a perpetual testimony to the truth that Louis neither indulges in courtly praise nor blindly believes in glorifying his achievements.35 The king instead

the courtly network that gravitated towards him, see Preyat, Le Petit Concile de Bossuet 433–481. 33  ‘Permettez nous d’entrer aujourd’hui dans le cœur de votre Majesté & nous le découvrirons aussi humble, aussi petit devent Dieu, qu’il est fier & grand devent les hommes.’ Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [3]. 34  The study of the French king’s mortal body vis-à-vis his immortal body was initiated by Kantorowicz E., The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: 1957) 195–232. As stressed by Alain Boureau, the theory of the king’s two bodies, as reconstructed by Kantorowicz, makes no simple claim to the sacred nature of the king’s person. Rather this theory outlines a “fictional space” wherein the immortality of the political body, rationally, can be elaborated at the intersection of theology and law, see Boureau A., Le Simple corps du roi. L’impossible sacralité des souverains français – XV e–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 2000) 16–24. Kantorowicz maintained that this fictional space of elaboration was an important step towards the secularization of political rule. We shall return to this point below. 35  Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [4].

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demonstrates humility whenever he kneels before the altar.36 The mystery of the elements – bread and wine transubstantiated – translates to the visible and the hidden aspects of the royal corporality. Choisy thus refers the reader to a liturgical situation, where the corpus mysticum is the Sacrament of the Altar, but, simultaneously, connected to the king as a persona mystica.37 The Eucharist’s mystical materiality – its incarnational signification between absence and presence, between invisible and visible – is linked to the king’s hidden humility and its effect upon events in the visible domain.38 Furthermore, Choisy’s reference to Louis XIV’s liturgical participation points the reader to the anonymous vignette that accompanies his dedicatory statement [Fig. 13.1]. The king kneels beside his royal aumôniers on a liturgical cloth of honour: this scene takes place in the chapel at Versailles, and immediately behind the kneeling king stands a number of figures; their close proximity to the king may suggest that these individuals are ‘les enfants de France’. In the left foreground, two male figures are seemingly conversing rather than participating in the liturgical rite. Behind the entire group, faceless courtiers are positioned on the balconies and floor of the chapel: the chancel lamp signals 36  Alexandre Maral details how the ‘roi liturgique’ was assimilated to the figure of the bishop: certain liturgical deeds, normally reserved for those vested with episcopal authority, were granted to the king, see Maral A., “Portrait Religieux de Louis XIV”, Dix-septième siècle 217 (2002/4) 697–723 (698–705). 37  The shift from a sacramental understanding of the corpus mysticum, closely linked to the consecrated Host and specific liturgical situations, to the ‘mystical person’ is central to what Kantorowicz and his followers call the secularization of the mediaeval Church, cf. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies 197; 201. This historical event, dated to the 12th century, is said to have transported the mystical from liturgical situations to a vocabulary of ecclesiastical and juristic abstraction. To make this argument, Kantorowicz draws on de Lubac H., Corpus mysticum. L’Euchariste et l’Église au Moyen Âge. Étude historique (Paris: 21949). According to Jennifer Rust, Kantorowicz plays down the ‘fluid relation between ecclesia and Eucharist’ in de Lubac’s historical reconstruction: in his outline of a linear process of secularization, Kantorowicz flattens out de Lubac’s historical analysis and its claim that ‘the “liturgical or sacramental” was always already “sociological” in the milieu of the early church’. Rust J., “Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum: Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and de Lubac”, in Hammill G. – Lupton J. R. (eds.), Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: 2012) 102–123 (114). 38  With regard to Louis XIV, Louis Marin divides royal corporality into three, interconnected bodies: a historical body that is mortal; a juridical, political body that is immortal; a sacramental body, where the mortal and the immortal bodies continually merge, see Marin, Le portrait du roi 7–22 (20–21). According to this hypothesis, the king is not king outside of his sacramental body, where the historical individual is portrayed as outside the realm of history: visual, written or other modes of representing the king thus straddle the difference between physical caducity and institutional continuity, making a mortal man into an eternal monarch.

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the divine presence in the Blessed Sacrament. On display is the appearance of the sacred as this takes place in a recognizable liturgical setting. The vignette, on one level, portrays an event that was part of court life – that is, the king’s participation in the celebration of the Mass.39 In this very rudimentary sense, the kneeling figure of the king anchors this translation of the Imitatio into a historical setting. However, Choisy’s “Epître” calls into question the straightforward reality of the depicted scene. The kneeling king is presented as an historical individual, but also as the embodiment of an invisible state of humility: it is this state that the plate makes visible. The mystical presence of Christ in the Sacrament prompts the king to perform a public act of imitatio that bodies forth interior humility, revealing it to the reader-viewer. 4

The Royal Gaze

To this interpretation and its interlacing of private and public, Choisy adds that Louis should not see himself in an earthly perspective. This self-image will only support a sense of grandeur and thereby confuse his vision. Instead of indulging in courtly praise, the king should turn his eyes upwards and look towards Christ. In this change of sight line, Louis will see everything that Christ is and, by this light, worldly values will lose their blinding effect. By heavenly standard, all that surrounds a king becomes ‘nothing but a feeble image of the eternal: such objects sustain but a flimsy participation in the divine; they are nothing but a shadow of the eternal splendour that belongs to the almighty God’ (‘toute cette Majesté qui vous environne, n’est qu’une foible image, une lègere participation, une ombre de la splendeur du Tout-puissant’).40 Courtiers and courtly splendour engage the king at his own eye level and glorify his image: this engagement, however, distorts the royal perspective, urging him to believe flattery. Turning his eyes upwards and towards Christ shatters false images and restores perspective. The king will recognize how small he is in the eyes of Christ, moving from aggrandizing gestures to the abasement of self. As mentioned above, Choisy presents the Imitatio as a book which places Christ before the king’s eyes: this allows Louis, in turn, to see the emptiness of human greatness and of human virtues.41 In this part of his “Epître”, Choisy complicates 39  Ignoring the complex genesis of the Mémoires pour l’instruction du dauphin, the king here states that ‘les respects publics’ which princes render unto the ‘puissance invisible’ should be considered the most important part of his politics, cf. Louis XIV, Mémoires pour l’instruction du dauphin, ed. P. Goubert (Paris: 1992) 83. 40  Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [4]. 41  Choisy, “Epître” Unpag. [2].

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our understanding of vision. The state of humility involves a specific kind of looking past earthly matters and fixating the royal gaze upon Christ. Continuing this line of enquiry, the frontispiece to Choisy’s translation shows a male figure with his right arm around the cross [Fig. 13.2]. From the background, a heavenly light shines forth and illuminates the top half of the cross. Breaking through two columns of smoke that rise from the ground, light emanates from a sun-like shape placed behind the male figure’s head and serving as his halo. In the shadow of the folds of the man’s waistline, the bottom half of the cross remains in shadow. What is here put on display? The anonymous figure? The cross? The entire scene unfolds on a rock formation; above the scene two angles carry a cartouche which reads: ‘Inspice et fac / Voyés et faites’ (‘See and make’). These three words are from the Revelation on Mount Sinai, when God gives Moses precise instructions how the lampstand should be realized (Ex 25.31–40). About the seven lamps on the stand, God exhorts: ‘Inspice, et fac secundum exemplar quod tibi in monte monstratum est’ (‘And see that you make them (the seven lamps) according to the model that is being shown to you on the mountain’, Ex 25.40). The smoke appearing in the scene is thus a reference to Mount Sinai, when the Lord descended upon it ‘in fire and ascending smoke’ (Ex 19.18). The visual representation integrates two burning lamps: they frame the design at the bottom where the place and name of the publishing house are displayed. This design protrudes into the ‘frame’ and rests on the thin line that separates it from the paper, thus conveying a sense of depth to the entire scene. The male figure stands behind this design but in front of the light breaking through the rising smoke. This substance, simultaneously, serves as a symbolic frame of support and as an obstacle to the viewer, referring to the clouds that always accompany the manifestation of God’s glory (e.g. Ex 24.15–18 or Ex 40.34) and underlining the impossibility of directly seeing this glory (Ex 33.18–23), which, visually, supports the imperative not to make images/ idols of God (Deut 5.8). Who is the male figure? We might be tempted to identify him as Christ. Indeed, Choisy states that the Imitatio makes Christ appear to its royal dedicatee. This identification is made problematic, however, by the representation of Christ in the home of Mary and Martha [Fig. 13.5]. There are clear differences between the two male figures. Still, the frontispiece clearly refers the viewer to Calvary and the supernatural darkness caused by the crucifixion of Jesus (Mk 15.33 and Mt 27.45, but cf. Lk 23.44–45). Nevertheless, this is neither the revelation of Mount Sinai nor the Crucifixion. It calls forth both these scenes and maps them onto each other, resulting in an imaginary blend: elements from each scene are presented simultaneously, leaving it for the viewer to imagine a new image encompassing both. The elevated peak is therefore not an actual

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place, and the depicted incident is no representation of an event narrated in the biblical text. Evoking the appearance of the sacred, the frontispiece illustrates the title of the book, Imitatio Christi, turning it into a visual instruction for the reader-viewer. The elevated site, near the text’s beginning, symbolizes the position of readers about to enter the book. The biblical injunction ‘inspice et fac secundum exemplar’ relates to the reader-viewers’ imitation of Christ – their becoming, through reading, an Image of Christ, who, in his own turn, is the Image of God. However, such imitation requires that readers, first, mind the crucified Christ, and the frontispiece presents this requirement by way of an imaginary blend. Simultaneously, the frontispiece presents God’s revelation on Mount Sinai and the Crucifixion to its viewers, who are to see a depiction of neither scenes but rather to construe an unforeseen scene. Producing this new image, the turning motion of the anonymous figure’s head and the twisting motion of the cross command attention. The divine injunction to inspect is encapsulated by this minute detail: it shows the inspection of the cross as the model that is to be followed; to imitate Christ is to create oneself in his image. Presenting the Imitatio as a book where Christ is put before the dedicatee’s eyes, this visibility involves an act of image making, and the frontispiece encapsulates this second dimension. It shows the inspection of the cross, but displaces this scene from the biblical narrative and relocates it to the domain of the reader-viewer. On an immediate level, the visual instruction of the frontispiece demands that the reader-viewer, univocally, focuses on the cross, but this clear instruction, in blending biblical scenes, also prompts the creation of an unforeseen image: the act of inspecting the cross entails imagination – that is, creating oneself in the image of Christ, the true image of God. 5

Leaving Court

As Choisy states, the imitation of Christ involves a specific kind of looking past: producing an image of oneself based on this Christological model, terrestrial things turn out to be but a feeble image of the divine. In this connection, the first book in Choisy’s translation is prefaced by a depiction of Saint Arsenius († 445) and his flight from court [Fig. 13.3]. In the upper middle, the Latin inscription fuge, late, tace unfolds on a banderol. In the subscription, this motto is rendered in French: ‘Fuyes, cachés vous et gardés le silence’ (‘Flee, hide yourself, and observe silence’). The three Latin words are a condensation of the opening lines in the Saint’s life: One day, while he was still at court, Arsenius asked God in his prayer: ‘Lord, teach me what I must do to save myself’. He then heard a voice that

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answered him: ‘Arsenius! Flee the company of men, and in this way you will save yourself’. Making the same prayer to God when he was in the desert, he again heard a voice that said unto him: ‘Arsenius! Flee men, keep silent, and remain in tranquillity’. These, then, are the most important things that must be done to save oneself.42 This stub of text describes two distinct acts of withdrawal from the world. In the first, the saint removes from the court to the desert; in the second, he removes himself from humankind, entering a spiritual as well as a physical isolation. The image, however, conflates these two acts. Saint Arsenius exits the door of an architectural structure, while the banderol, with the imperative to keep silent, also speaks to his second and more complete rupture. A similar conflation can also be found in Choisy’s own account of the Saint’s life, which he wrote on the behest of Mme de Maintenon. During 1691, the king’s wife commissioned Choisy to write a number of pious stories, intended to assist the Ladies of Saint Louis charged with educating the ‘demoiselles’ housed at Saint-Cyr.43 Maintenon mentions the stories in a letter of 1702, in which she also refers to ‘many other (stories) which I do not much remember’ (‘plusieurs autres (histoires) dont je ne me souviens pas trop’).44 Long before their 42  ‘Estant encore à la Cour, comme il disoit un jour à Dieu dans sa prière: Seigneur apprenezmoi ce que je dois faire pour me sauver, il entendit une voix qui lui répondit: Arsène fui la compagnie des hommes, & par ce moyen tu te sauveras. Lorsqu’il fut dans le désert, faisant la mesme prière à Dieu, il entendit encore une voix, qui lui dit: Arsène fui les hommes: garde le silence, & demeure dans le repos. Car ce sont là les premières choses qu’il faut faire pour se sauver’. Les vies des Saints pères des déserts et de quelques saintes, écrites par des pères de l’Eglise et autres anciens auteurs ecclésiastiques Grecs et Latins, trans. A. d’Andilly, 2 vols. (Paris, Pierre Le Petit: 1647–1653) vol. 2, 151–162 (151). 43  For information about this site, see note 8. Choisy’s stories were later elaborated and published as Choisy François-Timoléon de, Histories de piété et de morale par M.L.D.C. (Paris, Estienne: 1710). This edition was reedited the following year: Choisy François-Timoléon de, Les plus beaux événemens de l’histoire sacrée & de l’historie prophane raportez à la morale par. M. l’Abbé de Choisy (Paris, Estienne: 1711). Seven years later appeared Choisy François-Timoléon de, Histories de piété et de morale par M.L.D.C., 2 vols. (Paris, JeanBaptiste Coignard: 1718). In the inventory of the library at Saint-Cyr, we find references to: ‘16 Histoires de Piété de L’abbé de Choisy’ (Seconde Armoire 7e PL) and ‘6 Histoires commençant par Esther de Mr de Choisy (Seconde Armoire 7e PL)’, Inventaire des Livres de la Bibliothèque Archive Dép. Yvelines Ms. D 118. 44  Letter from Madame de Maintenon to the Count of Ayen. 4 March [1702] in Madame de Maintenon, Lettres de Madame de Maintenon, 11 vols. (Paris: 2009–2018) vol. 3 (2011), 352–353. In her letter, Maintenon mentions stories about Esther, Clotilde, Saint Arsenius as well as the life of David. The earliest known versions of Choisy’s pious stories are two undated, anonymous collections, simply titled Histoires de piété. These collections comprise stories about Placidus, Queen Clotide of France, Paul of Thebes, Queen Elizabeth of Portugal, Alexius of Rome and Saint Arsenius. In one of the manuscripts, the following

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publication, Choisy’s stories circulated within this communal setting. According to Preyat’s meticulous reconstruction of the editorial process, a number of the stories, including the one on Saint Arsenius, may have been finished in 1692.45 If this holds true, Choisy wrote his short account of Saint Arsenius the same year as he translated the Imitatio. We should here notice that Choisy, in his written account, explains the Saint’s withdrawal from the world by reference to courtly intrigues. In response, Saint Arsenius turns to God and, in his most intimate recess, a divine voice answers his prayers: ‘Flee, Arsenius, flee the company of men and you will find heaven’ (‘Fui, Arsene, fui les hommes & tu trouveras le Ciel’).46 Choisy seems less interested in the story of the Saint’s second act of withdrawal, which moves him from a coenobitic space, situated in the desert, to a more complete solitude.47 Rather the abbot focuses on his position at court and the drama that made him leave it behind. According to his vita, the Saint took flight from a courtly setting where he, according to legend, had served as a princely tutor at the court of Theodosius the Great (347–395). A book lying open in the lower left corner of the image [Fig. 13.3] may point towards Arsenius’ role at court, where he was renowned for his great knowledge and rhetorical skill. But the book, left in the lower left, also refers to that from which the Saint flees in search of an insight that runs deeper than the worldly knowledge that he already masters. Famously, the first book of the Imitatio opens with a meditation on ‘Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas’ (‘Vanity of vanities! All is vanity’ Ecc 1.2), which includes reference to the desert saints.48 The saint fleeing the world is thus an illustration of the theme of the first book: running out of an open door, the image of the Saint serves as a doorway into the Imitatio. On one level, the door thus belongs to a scene narrated in the life of Saint Arsenius – that is, the very moment when he leaves the court. Simultaneously, the architectural structure inscription is found: ‘Donated by Madame to the infirmary of the community, on the 26th of December, the day of Saint Stephen, 1695’ (‘Donné par Madame de à l’infirmerie de la communauté le 26 de Décembre jour de saint Estienne 1695’), Historié de piété BnF Ms. Y2–42516 Unpag. This refers to the infirmary at Saint-Cyr. 45  Preyat F., “L’histoire à Madame la duchesse de Bourgogne”, in Preyat F. (ed.), MarieAdélaïde de Savoie (1685–1712). Duchesse de Bourgogne, enfant terrible de Versailles (Bruxelles: 2014) 76–82. 46  Choisy, Histories de piété et de morale (1710) 437–438. 47  In passing, Choisy mentions this second withdrawal as the result of the Saint’s holiness and not as a divine command, cf. Choisy, Histories de piété et de morale (1710) 441–442. 48  See Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 35–36. This theme attracted special attention in early modern France: see, e.g., Surin Jean-Joseph, Les Fondements de la vie spirituelle tirés du livre de l’Imitation de Jésus Christ (Paris, Claude Cramoisy: 1667), cf. Le Brun J., Le pouvoir d’abdiquer. Essai sur la déchéance volontaire (Paris: 2009) 73–77.

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represents the reader’s entry into the book. This use of an architectonical edifice was common in the early modern period, indicating, in visual terms, that the reader has arrived at the threshold of the book. In this respect, the depiction of the Saint’s withdrawal from the world [Fig. 13.3] serves a purpose similar to that of the frontispiece [Fig. 13.2]. Both images visualize a step from the outside to the inside: the figure on the elevated peak figuring the cognitive state that reading requires; the fleeing Saint Arsenius figuring the first step on a path that leads to a sacramental union with Christ.49 The gesturing angel in the depiction of the Saint supports this interpretation. Arsenius looks towards this heavenly being, his arms raised as if terrified by its presence, although no such angelic appearance seems to occur in, e.g., Choisy’s narrative of the Saint’s life. We are thus intended ‘to see’ what is ‘told’ – that is, to see the divine voice speaking in the figure of the angel, and, as sound, having an overwhelming effect upon Arsenius. This impact of the divine is caught in the Saint’s dramatic gestures and in the movements of his clothing. Almost casually leaning on a cloud, the angel points with its right hand down towards the Saint, while its left gestures away from the built environment. Inside the actual print, the angel’s gesture is made on the verso page, while the recto page shows the title of the book: ‘DE L’IMITATION DE JESUS-CHRIST’. Following the implied line from the angel’s finger, the readerviewer is directed towards the first page of the physical book.

49  In the early modern period, Jesuit authors outlined a link between the four books of the Imitatio and Pseudo-Dionysius schema of purgation, illumination and union. To mention just one example, Martin de Funes (1560–1611) argued for a strong connection between the four books and the phases of meditation. He identifies the act of purgation to the first book and the second book, while the state of union takes place in the final book and its focus on the Eucharist. However, Funes struggles to identify the second phase in meditation, because the illumination of the soul is the subject matter of the entire work and therefore resists univocal identification with any specific part of the text; Funes Martin de, Methodus Practica Aurei Libelli Thomae de Kempis de Imitatione Christi: In Qua Docetur Homo A principio perfectionis Christianae usque ad summum gradum ordinate progredi, tam Magistris, quam Discipulis vitae spiritualis perutilis (Cologne, Anton Hierat: 1590), cf. De Backer A. – Sommervogel C., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 12 vols. (Paris: 1890–1932) vol. 3 (1893), 1067. A French translation was a permanent appendix to Marillac’s immensely popular translation, cf. L’Imitation de Jesus Christ divisez en 4. Livres composez par Thomas a Kempis chanoine regulier et nouvellement mis en françois par M.R.G.A. Avec uune [sic] Methode pour lire avec fruict les livres de l’imitation de Jesus-Christ (Paris, Claude I Calleville: 41630). Following the Pseudo-Dionysius schema, Saint Arsenius fleeing court [Fig. 13.3] visualizes the act of purgation, while Saint Louis receiving the Last Rites [Fig. 13.6] depicts the state of union. Below, we shall suggest how the remaining plates might be fitted into the meditative schema.

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On this reading, the gesturing angel, the book and the architectonical artifice serve a purpose that is comparable to the frontispiece [Fig. 13.2]: these elements structure Saint Arsenius’ movement away from court, making it into a visual instruction to the reader-viewer. The depicted book in the lower left corner refers to the vanity of worldly knowledge, and the angel’s gesture commands the reader-viewer to leave that vain knowledge behind. On the brink of reading the first sentences of Choisy’s translation, the angel and the book encapsulate the readers’ liminal position: they are about to enter the book and engage with the act of reading, and this engagement opens by leaving the terrestrial world behind. As Choisy informs the dedicatee, courtly glorification of the king’s image distorts his sight line. Producing himself in the imitation of Christ, this glorification will be rendered void, and the royal perspective will be restored. Saint Arsenius fleeing court [Fig. 13.3] chimes with this restoration of sight. It shows an escape from court, which the king, of course, is not to literally perform, but rather to imitate. Accordingly, the visual instruction of the frontispiece is slightly different from the instruction visualized by Saint Arsenius fleeing court. The frontispiece [Fig. 13.2] depicts a univocal, cognitive attention to the cross, but also the injunction to produce images and thereby imitate Christ. On a more concrete level, Saint Arsenius instructs the readerviewer about an aspect of the imitation of Christ—that is, the act of purgation and withdrawal from the world. The saintly escape visualizes this mode of imitation. Arsenius depicts Christ’s movement away from the world. 6

The Absent Crown

A number of motifs repeat in the four images that preface each of the four books in Choisy’s translation [Figs. 13.3–13.6]. Most immediately, the act of royal genuflexion connects the image of Louis XIV and the final plate, an image of Louis IX. Christ’s presence is signalled in both images, not as a represented figure but through the everlasting light of the altar lamp [Fig. 13.1] and the power of absolution manifested in the confessor’s hand [Fig. 13.6]. As the first and last scenes, these two images portray union with Christ in terms of sacraments and their liturgies. Unlike the frontispiece [Fig. 13.2] and Saint Arsenius fleeing court [Fig. 13.3], the appearance of the sacred involves no direct intrusion of the divine: the altar lamp and the confessor’s hand point to this appearance, but without, directly, figuring it within the spatio-temporal outline of the plates. Furthermore, the depictions of Louis XIV and Louis IX represent the mystical union as a lived experience: the first unfolds in the historical ‘now’, while the last scene, like Saint Arsenius fleeing court, unfolds in

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the historical past. As we have seen, Choisy connects the sacramental presence with royal humility. Indeed, the “Epître” to Choisy’s La Vie de Saint Louis repeats the connection. Saint Louis ‘has made visible’ (‘a fait voir’) that it is possible to combine the throne with the saintliness of the Gospel: in the image of his predecessor, Louis XIV is to see that a king can perform the humility of penitence without compromising the position of royal dignity.50 The image of Louis IX [Fig. 13.6] has a Latin inscription at the top and its French translation at the bottom: ‘Qui manducat hunc panem vivet in aeternum / Celuy qui mange ce Pain vivra Eternellement’ (‘Whoever eats this bread will live forever’, Jn 6.59). The Latin quotation is written on a banderol in the upper middle of the scene, with each of its sides trailing into the frame and its rectangular centre protruding into the depicted scene. The French translation of the Latin is to be found in a cartouche placed in the lower middle of the image. A closed helmet sits on top of the cartouche, where a display of spears surrounds it; the bottom of the cartouche folds around the ‘frame’ and, like the banderol, occupies a space between inside and outside. The biblical verse thus hovers above and below and slightly in front of the depicted scene that unfolds in front of the crusader’s tent. In turn, Jn 6.59 is closely related to the assemblage of biblical quotations that open the last part of the Imitatio. In Choisy’s translation, the first chapter of the fourth book is titled ‘Avec quel respect il faut recevoir JESUS-CHRIST’ (‘The reverence with which one has to receive Jesus Christ’) and opens on a combination of five biblical verses: Mt 11.28, Jn 6.51, 1 Cor 11.24, Jn 6.56, and Jn 6.63.51 Together, these verses encourage the soul, because they speak of sweetness and love. At the same time, however, they also intimidate. Approaching the great mystery at the altar- the corpus mysticum- the soul’s unclean conscience causes pain: the sweetness of the words draws the soul in, while man’s many vices pull him away from the sacramental mystery.52 The presence of Christ at the altar thus prompts mixed emotions: it appeals and repels the soul, placing man’s interior between being drawn in and pushed away.

50  Choisy, Vie de Saint Louis Unpag. [3]. In the Cour sainte (1624), Nicolas Caussin (1583–1651) had evoked the Saint King as the perfect example of the ‘vita mixta’. For the Jesuits’ promotion of Saint Louis in texts, sermons, paintings, chapels, and other media, see Lavieille G., “Les Jésuites et la dévotion à saint Louis au XVIIe siècle: la célébration du Roi très chrétien”, Les Cahiers de Framespa 11 (2012); Tietz M., “Saint Louis Roi Chrétien: Un mythe de la mission intérieure du XVIIe Siècle”, in La conversion au XVIIe siècle, Actes du XIIe Colloque de Marseille (Marseille: 1983) 56–69 (63). 51  Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 273–281 (273–4). 52  Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 274.

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The material elements of the Eucharist, once consecrated, had long been held to be a nourishment for the soul; following a long tradition of commentary, the consecrated elements produce affective states, which, subsequently, manifest themselves in virtuous actions. For this transformation of the votive’s states and actions to take place, a strict adhesion to a sequence of gestures was required: these manifest an appropriate respect for the divine mystery. In this respect, the act of genuflexion is one in a larger sequence of movements whereby the priest imitates the actions of Christ, and the community of believers, in their turn, imitate the actions of the priest. The act of genuflexion, as carried out by the celebrant, can thus be interpreted as a restaging of Christ’s humility as expressed, for instance, in the Agony in the Garden.53 In addition, the priest’s initial act of prostration is no veneration for the altar or its representational programme; it is the outward manifestation of his interior movement towards the divine mystery that takes place on the altar.54 Without denying either the visual elements of the Mass or the sacerdotal priesthood,55 the fourth book of the Imitatio focuses on such inwardness. Prayers during the elevation are templates for an interior spirituality. Human speech and the material forms of the Eucharist prompt a silent mode of contemplation. In the offer to the sinner to commune with the body of Christ, the mystery surpasses all human reasoning, and the heart remains blind, if it refrains from silently contemplating what cannot be represented; God being given to the sinner.56 As figurations of such contemplation, the Imitatio invokes Noah, Moses, David and Solomon. In its contemplative state, the soul should emulate, for instance, the hard and lengthy effort involved in creating the Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Holy of Holies in the Temple. Mindful of these efforts, the soul should ask itself in a fictitious monologue: how can I, within the span of a single hour, prepare myself for receiving the one who created the world; why is it hard for me to allocate just a half hour to prepare for this divine presence?57 53  See Le Clerc Sébastian, Tableaux ou sont representees la passion de NS Jesus Christ et les actions du Prestre a la S. Messe. Avec des prieres correspondantes aux Tableaux (Metz, C. Bouchard: 1685) Unpag. [3–4]. 54  See, e.g., Molin Louis, Prattique des Ceremonies de la Sainte Messe Selon l’usage Romain (Lyon, Horace Huguetan: 1658) Art. II, V, 5, cf. Le Clerc, Tableaux Unpag. [5–6]. 55  Cf. Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 292–294. 56  Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 279–80. In its own context, the Imitatio’s emphasis on contemplation of the invisible was a reaction to a strong veneration of the consecrated Host in late medieval Eucharistic devotion: we might here recall the Feast of the Corpus Christi and its institution in the first half of the 14th century. 57  Cf. Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 275; 276.

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The gift of grace thus requires humility and the abnegation of self.58 In this line of argument, the Imitatio also invokes individuals who travel far to visit the relics of the Saints. Reading the stories of the Saints’ achievements, these individuals, in their own lives, seek out saintly remains: reading turns into visual adoration, and in that moment, the past is made present.59 In Choisy’s translation, the depiction of Louis IX [Fig. 13.6] shows the Saint King far away from his homeland: Louis IX is depicted as crusader, thus manifesting an exceptional mode of penitence. Moreover, the king’s (failed) attempt to conquer the Holy Land and recapture what had been lost points toward the sacramental presence that requires a continual effort of self-sacrifice, which Saint Louis embodies. Indeed, Choisy narrates the king’s final act as a manifestation of extraordinary strength. In his telling, Louis IX disregards immense bodily pain and, in superhuman manner, moves himself towards the celestial realm. During his illness, he [Saint Louis] took communion several times, and, as he felt his powers leaving him, he asked for the holy viaticum. Having great difficulty in just raising his own head because he was so weak, Saint Louis, having always his eyes set on his God, lifted himself to his feet and then fell to his knees in order to receive it [the holy viaticum]. ‘Do you firmly believe’, his confessor asked him, ‘that this is the true body of Jesus Christ?’ ‘Yes,’ answered the Saint King, ‘and I do not believe it any less than if I saw him as when the Apostles saw him on the day of his Ascension’. Hereafter he asked for the Last Rites and responded to all the prayers of the Church.60 Choisy’s written account refers to a visual appearance. Narrating a past event, datable to 25 August 1270, the Saint King invokes the ‘Ascensio Iesu’ as it had been witnessed by the Apostles (Acts 1.9–11). Like this displacement, the verse from the Gospel of John hints to the apotheosis of Saint Louis. This hint is furthered by the crown in the centre of the depiction [Fig. 13.6]. Like the book 58  See Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 322–324. 59  Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 278. 60  ‘Il [Louis] communia plusieurs fois pendant sa maladie, & sentant que les forces commençoient à lui manquer, il demanda le saint Viatique. A peine pouvoit-il lever la tête tant il étoit foible, & toutefois à la vuë de son Dieu il se leva tout seul, & se mit à genoux pour le recevoir. Croyez-vous fermement, lui dit son Confesseur, que ce soit là le vrai Corps de JESUS-CHRIST, ouï, répondit le Saint Roi, & je ne le croirois pas mieux, quand je le verrois tel que les Apôtres le virent le jour de son Ascension. Il demande ensuite l’Extrême-Onction, & répondit à toutes les prières de l’Eglise’. Choisy, La vie de Saint Louis 141–142.

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left behind by Saint Arsenius [Fig. 13.3], the abandoned crown, partially hidden behind the helmet, refers not simply to the historical scene, but also prompts the reader-viewers to reconsider what they see. The image shows Louis’s crown and helmet, positioned in close proximity: these objects are tokens of visible superioritas, which the king’s kneeling gesture seems to contradict; we see the monarch defeated, humiliated and turned into a mere mortal. However, the biblical quotation, hovering over the scene, calls this reading into question. About to receive the body of Christ, Louis IX ‘will live forever’ ( Jn 6.59). The ‘vivet in aeternum’ thus prompts a reconfiguration of royal demise. In a manner similar to the book in the image of the Saint Arsenius, the crown refers to the worldly status that the Saint leaves behind, but it also invites us to imagine what is not depicted: the Saint’s apotheosis. In early modern representations, Louis IX’s crown was an important visual device: saintliness was manifested by the king receiving the crown of thorns and leaving the regalia behind.61 This celestial crowning is not figured in spatio-temporal terms, but inscribed, visually, by the biblical citation. Like in the depiction of Louis XIV [Fig. 13.1], the mystical presence of Christ in the Sacrament invites us to see more in the kneeling, dying figure of the king. He is no mere mortal, subject to the entropy of existence; he embodies a divine order of things. 7

The Interior Domain

Taking one further step in the analysis, we should notice how Saint Arsenius’s movement is represented as unfolding in the transition from a built to a natural environment: the male figure runs from an architectural structure into the desert [Fig. 13.3]. Under open skies, Saint Louis [Fig. 13.6] kneels to receive the sacrament of the Last Rites: his action conjoins the earthly and the heavenly realms. Moreover, both Saints are in movement, actively taking steps away from the world and towards the heavenly realm. The male figure, in motion, frames the depiction of Mme de Maintenon at the Church of Saint-Cyr [Fig. 13.4] and the visualization of the biblical theme of Christ in the home of Mary and Martha [Fig. 13.5]. Visually, a set of black curtains connects these plates: the fabric hangs in the upper left of the depiction of the church at Saint-Cyr and in

61  This theme appeared in paintings and in the illustrations that accompanied the highly influential poem Saint Louys, ou la Sainte Couronne reconquise (1653) by Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1672). On these illustrations, see Meyer V., “L’illustration du Saint Louis du Père Le Moyne”, Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 57 (2005) 47–73.

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the upper right in the depiction of the home of Mary and Martha. Together, the two images open a window into built interiors, where female figures listen to the divine voice. The negotiation of inside and outside complicates these plates and their otherwise realistic settings; they figure the soul.62 Before we can make this claim good, we should first remark that the kneeling figure of Maintenon [Fig. 13.4] serves a purpose similar to the image prefacing Choisy’s “Epître” [Fig. 13.1]. Each of the two images anchors Choisy’s translation into specific settings. Like the scene from Versailles, the church room at Saint-Cyr is immediately recognizableand both sites were consecrated to Saint Louis and the Virgin. The church at Saint-Cyr had two raised apses, separating the ‘chœur’ from the ‘avant-chœur’, where the novices and postulants participated in the liturgical celebrations.63 Between the high altar and the choir, the ‘église du dehors’ served the public. An elaborate ‘grille’ closed the choir off from this public space.64 This structure is not included in the depiction. In fact, the choir appears almost in miniature. Originally, this vast space was equipped with four rows of four benches [Fig. 13.7]. The sixteen pieces of furniture were reserved for the ‘demoiselles’,65 who were educated at the royal foundation by the Ladies of Saint Louis. The image in Choisy’s translation shows one of these four rows of benches [Fig. 13.4]. Behind them and at the furthest distance from the ‘église du dehors’, the Ladies of Saint Louis sat in choir stalls: the antiphonal psalmody could be performed between two groups of thirteen Ladies, each seated on each side of the choir and immediately below the two apses [Fig. 13.7].66 In the image from Choisy’s translation, we see no such stalls. Turned in ‘L’-shaped configurations, they would have been visible from the vantage point, where the female figure has fallen to her knees. 62  Following the Pseudo-Dionysius schema of purgation, illumination and union (see note 49), the connection between the two plates, visually manifested by the black curtains, allows for us to allocate both to the phase of illumination and thus make the tripartite schema fit: the male Saints represent purgation and union respectively, while the female figures represent the soul’s illumination. 63  In the following, we refer to the architectural plan of the ground level and its explication in Manseau Pierre Gabriel, Les Mémoires de la fondation et communauté royale de Saint Louis. Establie à saint Cyr près Versailles par Louis le Grand, 3 vols. BmV. Mss. G. 351–53, vol. 1, 189–205. The plans are inserted between pages 205 and 206. 64  Manseau, Les Mémoires vol. 1, 191. 65  The ‘demoiselles’ entered at the age of seven and left ten to thirteen years later. They were divided into colour-coded bands, referring to their age and allocating them to specific classrooms, libraries, and dormitories. Manseau identifies each bench as ‘les bancs des bleues’ (seventeen to twenty year-olds), ‘celuy des jaunes’ (fourteen to sixteen year-olds), ‘celuy des vertes’ (eleven to thirteen year-olds) and ‘celuy des rouges’ (seven to ten yearolds), cf. Manseau, Les Mémoires vol. 1, 192. 66  Manseau, Les Mémoires vol. 1, 192.

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Le Pautre, “The Church Room at Saint-Cyr”, Heures, prières et offices à l’usage et devotion particulièrement des demoiselles de la Maison Royale de saint Louis à Saint-Cyr (Paris, Jacques Collombat: 1714) © Lars Cyril Nørgaard

The realistic placement of Maintenon in a convent setting evokes her reputation as a devout ‘Queen without a crown’. In fact, the figure’s black habit suggests to us that she is a Lady of Saint Louis, while her elevated position distances her from the community, making persuasive the identification with Maintenon. More precisely, the figure is situated in one of the two lodges where the king, his wife, and their guests could participate in the community’s liturgical celebrations. The realistic setting is displaced by a cloud formation that appears above the choir with a light shining forth. In letters reversed, two words from Ps. 44.11 can be seen: ‘Audi Filia’ (‘Hear, O daughter’, Ps 45.10). Unlike the depiction of Saint Louis and the hovering presence of Jn 6.59, the biblical inscription is here integrated into the scene. We should not neglect, however,

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that the individuals seated in the choir seem not to notice the divine voice. The ‘Filia/ ma Fille’ is in the singular: the voice is addressing the individual in the royal lodge, not the girls seated in the choir. Addressed in the singular, the female figure is thus separated in space and by hearing the divine voice. In response, the king’s wife, situated above the choir, has fallen to her knees in front of a prie-dieu upon which an open book rests. The deep background shows the high altar of Saint-Cyr [Fig. 13.4], but the semi-circular apse remains concealed behind, first, the black curtain and, second, an additional cloud formation. Not visible in this image is therefore the altarpiece, created by Jean Jouvenet (1644–1717) and representing the Annunciation.67 The view from Maintenon’s lodge, situated in the left bottom of the choir, would certainly have included Jouvenet’s painting. This absence may led us to reconsider the clouds above the choir and inside the sanctuary. Above the choir, this formation represents the appearance of the sacred: the two words single out the female figure in her lodge. Unlike this intrusion of the divine speech, it is not immediately clear, why there is a second cloud hanging in the background. Why include this ephemeral substance? 8 Annunciations Clouds play a central role in Jouvenet’s altarpiece and its visualization of the Incarnation [Fig. 13.8]. Hovering between solid and liquid, the cloud is a metaphor for representing this mystery; it is an amorphous substance oscillating between different states. Jouvenet also has Gabriel moving towards Mary on a cloud rising from the lower left corner, while God the Father, in the upper half of the image, leans down towards the Virgin from another cloud formation. Indeed, this substance takes up much of the scene: the viewer has to work to discern the concrete setting, where the Angel visits the Virgin. Returning to the depiction of Mme de Maintenon at the Church of Saint-Cyr [Fig. 13.4], we might claim that a significant part of the altarpiece – the clouds – has

67  On Jouvenet’s altarpiece, see Schnapper A., Jean Jouvenet, 1644–1717, et la peinture d’histoire à Paris (Paris: 1974) 85–88; n° 35, 190. The painting survives at La Fléche, where it has been since 1816. The original painting was framed by depictions of Saint Louis and the Virgin, cf. Manseau, Les Mémoires vol. 1, 189–190. These paintings remain unknown, but can still be detected see Fig. 13.7.

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Jouvenet, L’Annonciation, painted for the chapel of Saint-Cyr (1687), oil on canvas, 309 × 204 cm © Photo courtesy of Patrick Buti, Conservator, Musées de Vendée

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separated itself from its framing, taken on a life of its own, and floated into its physical surroundings. With the removal of the altarpiece from the space of representation, something nevertheless remains, and this indivisible remainder evokes the mystery of the Incarnation as impossible to represent. In the Lucan account of the Annunciation (Lk 1.26–38),68 the act of overshadowing plays an important role: ‘et respondens angelus dixit ei Spiritus Sanctus superveniet in te et virtus Altissimi obumbrabit tibi ideoque et quod nascetur sanctum vocabitur Filius Dei’ (‘The angel said to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God’, Lk 1.35). Having the Spirit supervene upon her and, hereby, being overshadowed by divine power, Gabriel explains to Mary what is about to take place. Jouvenet’s altarpiece visualizes this angelic explanation and, specifically, obumbrare. Above the Angel and the Virgin, God the Father appears in a cloud formation and reveals, from his chest, a light beam that connects to the Virgin. Along this translucent line, a white dove descends: God overshadows Mary, and the Spirit descends upon her. In the biblical account, these events are located in the future. Already Gabriel’s initial announcement (Lk 1.31) is a citation of the prophet Isaiah (Is 7.14). The angelic message thus detaches itself from the setting wherein it is pronounced, journeying from the protagonists in dialogue to the sacred text, to its representation of the voice of a past prophet, and, thereby, to a past voice that made statements about the future in accordance with God’s revelation. Rendering the sequence of events temporally complex, the Angel embodies the voice of a past prophet, while, simultaneously, locating his prophecy in the immediate future. In Jouvenet’s painting, a number of mundane objects refer to this conflation of past and future. In the lower middle of the painting, a linen basket rests on a footstool, while an open book sits on a prie-dieu. The book, evidence of Mary’s interrupted reading, reminds the viewer that the birth of Jesus was foreseen in the Old Testament, while the basket of linen refers at once to the birth of Christ and the basket of Moses (Ex 2.1–10) in which he floated in the river and, as such, the basket evokes Noah’s Ark (Gen 6–9). Like

68  The research literature on the Annunciation is vast. In the following, I mainly draw inspiration from: Marin L., “Logique du secret et représentation de peinture: sur quelques Annonciations Toscanes à la renaissance”, in Falassi A. (ed.), La Cifra e l’immagine. Rappresentazioni del segreto nella cultura toscana (Siena: 1988) 57–84.

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the open book and the basket in Jouvenet’s painting, the Angel’s words to Mary collapse the distinction between the past and the future: they create a connection between what has been and what will come; the Incarnation becomes a prefigured future. In response to Gabriel’s prophecy of the descending Spirit and God’s overshadowing power, the Virgin replies: ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word’ (Lk 1.38). Within the biblical narrative, this closing statement – expressed in the present tense (‘fiat mihi’ / ‘let it be with me’) – refers back to Mary’s question about the impossible future (‘Quomodo fiet istud’/ ‘How can this be?’, Lk 1.34). These juxtapositions of past and present, of prophecy and present realization, give a kind of impetus to the Angel’s statement, nearly bringing it into realization: echoing the ‘fiat lux’ of Creation (Gen 1.3), the Virgin’s final utterance is almost a speech act, bringing the mystery closer to realization. This performativity is visualized by Jouvenet as the Virgin has left her chair and fallen to her knees: Mary’s bodily gesture of humility and obedience [Fig. 13.9] makes the impossible event of the Incarnation come into closer contact with the present. Indeed, Jouvenet’s composition further elaborates this complex nexus of prophecy, embodiment of pure virtue, and Incarnation. In the middle ground, where the Angel gestures towards the Virgin, his left palm opens into the shared space of communication. In the middle of this horizontal axis, a window opens into a natural setting with trees and a dawning sky. The principal line of sight, receding into the hole of the window, grants ‘depth’ to the space and situates Mary inside a built environment. Above this vanishing point, where depicted objects are condensed and, as such, disappear out of view, the ‘invisible’ realm breaks through. Gabriel’s right hand deictically refers us to this third party alluded to in the dialogue between Gabriel and Mary: a translucent line materializes this vertical axis and connects the kneeling figure of Mary with God the Father. In Choisy’s translation, the cloud formation in the background [Fig. 13.4] evokes the ‘missing’ altarpiece and its depiction of the event of the Incarnation. Furthermore, the reader-viewer may have connected the kneeling figure of Maintenon with Jouvenet’s painted representation of the kneeling Virgin [Fig. 13.9]. With open right hand and a left that seemingly reaches out for her priedieu, the figure of Maintenon is overwhelmed by the appearance of the sacred. The cloud formation in the foreground and its divine message would seem to trouble her. Connecting Maintenon to Mary through their shared gesture, Maintenon’s distress then evokes Mary’s startled response to Gabriel’s initial salutation (Lk 1.28–29). Indeed, the ‘Audi Filia’ was the ‘tractus’ for the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March), and here the nuptial Ps 44 precisely echoes

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Jouvenet, L’Annonciation, painted for the chapel of Saint-Cyr (1687), Oil on canvas, 309 × 204 cm. Detail. © Photo courtesy of Patrick Buti, Conservator, Musées de Vendée

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the Angel’s initial salutation.69 Following this interpretation and sidestepping speculations on courtly scandal, Mme de Maintenon simulates the pose of the Virgin: the king’s wife, in her private space, reiterates Mary’s interior response to Gabriel’s initial salutation. Unlike the male Saints and their actions [Fig. 13.3 and Fig. 13.6], the female figure and her placement [Fig. 13.4] represent an interior state. In the guise of Mary, the king’s wife does not take action in response to the mystical appearance of the sacred; she finds herself in a passionate state, struggling to maintain a grip on reality. 9

The Soul Conversing with Christ

Like the Annunciation, the story of Christ at the home of Mary and Martha is to be found uniquely in the Gospel of Luke (Lk 10.38–42). The two plates [Figs. 13.4–13.5] thus present scenes from the same Gospel, ornamented with quotations from Ps 44 and Ps 84, respectively. Furthermore, the image of Mme de Maintenon in the Church of Saint-Cyr [Fig. 13.4] visualizes the imperative to listen (‘Audi Filia’). In response, the following plate [Fig. 13.5] carries the biblical verse from Ps 84.9 ‘Audiam quid loquatur in me Dominus’ (‘I will listen to what the Lord will say in me’, Ps 85.8). In the first scene, God is the grammatical subject of audire; in the second scene, the speaker is the female figure kneeling at the feet of Jesus. First, a heavenly voice speaks, demanding to be heard. Second, the female figure ‘speaks’, affirming her obedience in listening to what the Lord will teach. Connecting these two plates, the sacred is an interior dialogue between the soul and the divine: visually, the black curtain supports this connection and makes the two images into depictions of stages in the same dialogical exchange. As in the depiction of Mme de Maintenon, the positioning of Mary in the foreground distances and separates her from the rest of the scene. Jesus sits on the floor with his left foot showing on a step. Below him, Mary rests her back against the elevated floor and gazes at Jesus, almost as if in ecstasy; her hands are crossed in focused meditation. Looking down and returning her gaze, Jesus shows his open left palm, while his right index finger points upwards. Around his head, a halo appears with radiant beams, supporting the transcendent authority of his teachings. Mary listens to the Lord, while Martha has turned her back to Jesus, distracted by worldly commitments. These female figures 69  For Saint-Cyr, this use in the celebration of the Annunciation can be found in, e.g., the gradual by Guillaume Gabriel Nivers (1632–1714), see his: Graduel (1685–1691?) BnF. Dép. Musique Ms. Res F-1374 f. 98–99.

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represent the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, respectively.70 By measuring out the distance between the two figures, images and texts represent different levels of withdrawal from and engagement in the world. The story of Mary and Martha posits a vision of the soul on a continuum between two extremes – at the one end, meditation and love (‘amor’) of God or, on the other, charitable actions and love (‘dilectio’) of the neighbour.71 The relationship between the two figures is therefore no opposition, but instead a progression from a worldly state towards an otherworldly state, designated as the contemplative life. In this light, the in me from Ps 84 becomes important. In its French translation, the plate renders the entire verse: ‘J’ecouteray ce que le Seigneur me dira au fonds du cœur’ (‘I will listen to what the Lord will say in the very core of my heart’). The act of listening is here clearly located in the interior, both spatially and metaphorically. The image thus represents the soul, when it, univocally, directs itself towards the Word (Mary in the foreground) and not towards the world (Martha in the background). Indeed, the first chapter of the third book of the Imitatio is titled ‘On the interior conversation between Jesus Christ and the faithful soul’ and opens on the same verse from Ps 84.9.72 The depiction relates directly to the part of the book, which it prefaces. Moreover, the third part of the Imitatio is structured as a dialogue between ‘the faithful soul’ (‘l’âme fidèle’) and Christ. The opening chapter praises the soul that listens inwardly and from the mouth of the Lord receives words of consolation. In the detailing of this state of interior listening, the ears of the soul are singled out: they hear the sounds of a divine language and close themselves off to the noises of the world. This mode of listening is even more praiseworthy when the same ears, actively not hearing exterior voices, have no other focus than the truth that instructs them in the interior realm (‘si négligeant les voix du dehors, elles n’ont d’attention, qu’à la verité que les enseigne au dedans’).73 In like manner, the eyes are praised as having the ability to make choices: to be blind to exterior things, so that they see nothing but what moves the soul. As argued above, Mme de Maintenon is depicted in the guise of the Virgin as she, initially, is troubled by the Angel’s words [Fig. 13.4]. At the feet of Jesus, 70  For an overview of the rich history of interpretation of the tension between Martha’s charitable engagement and Mary’s meditative withdrawal, see Constable G., Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: 1995) 1–142. Within the monastic tradition, this tension relates to the difference between ‘otium’ and ‘negotium’, cf. Leclercq J., Otia monastica: études sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au moyen âge, Studia Anselmiana 51 (Rome: 1963) 27–34. 71  Constable, Three Studies 46. 72  See Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 111. 73  See Choisy, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ 112.

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Mary Magdalen overcomes this initial trouble: unlike Martha, she obediently listens to the Word [Fig. 13.5]. This development takes place in the soul’s interior realm, and the plates thus figure two different stages in illumination. Within the visual itinerary of the four prefatory plates [Figs. 13.3–13.6], these two stages in listening make possible a union with Christ [Fig. 13.6], while they, first, require a preceding act of purgation [Fig. 13.3]. Becoming an image of Christ, each of these phases parcels out the reader-viewers and their road to a life in resemblance of Christ, whose life the Imitatio paints as the perfect image of God’s will. 10 Conclusion The Imitatio makes Christ appear. According to Choisy’s words, this appearance tears at the very fabric of court society, revealing flattery as false imagery. This negative thrust invites the dedicatee to see the emptiness of worldly splendour and inscribes humility into his royal interior. This inscription allows Choisy to interpret political opposition as a divine test: by humiliating him in public, God in fact targets Louis in private. This personal sphere is, however, not immediately accessible. Princely privacy remains mysterious. Nevertheless, Choisy maintains that privacy has a profound, albeit hidden impact upon political events. To further this argument, Choisy points to the liturgical situation, where Louis XIV participates in the celebration of the Eucharist. Here, royal humility comes to the fore, and the vignette shows one such public display [Fig. 13.1]. In tandem, word and image support the interlacing of hidden humility and visible actions: the mystical body, in a sacramental sense, is paralleled by the king’s mystical person and by that person’s political implications. With reference to this overlap between what remains hidden and what is revealed, the frontispiece evokes God’s revelation on Mount Sinai and the Crucifixion [Fig. 13.2]. Following my interpretation, this plate, rather than depicting either of these scenes, invites the reader-viewer to construe an unforeseen scene. The inspection of the cross is a process, wherein readers create themselves in the image of Christ, the true image of God. The following plates are, in this sense, the outcome of a creative process of imagining Christ [Figs. 13.3–13.6]. First, the depictions of Saint Arsenius fleeing court [Fig. 13.3] and of Saint Louis receiving the Last Rites [Fig. 13.6] mark the beginning and the end of this process. Mediating between these extremes, the images of Mme de Maintenon in the Church of Saint-Cyr [Fig. 13.4] and Christ in the home of Mary and Martha [Fig. 13.5] present the soul’s illumination in figurative and spatio-temporal terms. As an image of the divine will, the life of Christ,

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encapsulated by the cross, prompts the production of images that visualize different stages in spiritual progression. In this light, the depiction of Maintenon might have caused courtly scandal, but its main objective seems much subtler than mere provocation. Like the visual overlap between the kneeling figures of Louis XIV and Saint Louis, the king’s wife is depicted in the guise of another. In implicit parallel to the Annunciation, the reader-viewer is encouraged to see much more in the kneeling figure of Maintenon: this historical person represents the soul’s initial incomprehension of the mysterious appearance. Together with the depiction of Mary and Martha, these images visualize stages in the spiritual progression of the reader-viewer who engages with Christ as the ultimate model. The images in Choisy’s translation anchor the sacred in specific settings and in historical individuals, attaching the imitation of Christ to a lifelike or, better, a living image. Besides the obvious and important political configurations of the corpus mysticum, these images transport the mysterious into history, making the two realms continually pass over into each other without ever being completely reconciled. Selective Bibliography Barbier F., “Quelque observation sur les origines d’un succès européen”, in Delaveau M. – Sordet Y. (eds.), Édition et diffusion de l’imitation de Jésus-Christ (1470–1800), Études et catalogue collectif (Paris: 2011) 35–51. Choisy François-Timoléon de, Interpretation des Pseaumes, où les differences notables de l’hebreu & de la Vulgate sont marquées. Avec la vie de David (Paris, Antoine Dezaillier: 1687). Choisy François-Timoléon de, La Vie de Salomon (Paris, Claude Barbin: 1687). Choisy François-Timoléon de, Vie de Saint Louis (Paris, Claude Barbin: 1689). Choisy François-Timoléon de, Histoire de Charles cinquième, roi de France (Paris, Antoine Dezaillier: 1689). Choisy François-Timoléon de, Historie de Charles VI, Roi de France (Paris, J.-B. Coignard: 1695). Choisy François-Timoléon de, Histories de piété et de morale par M.L.D.C. (Paris, Estienne: 1710). Le Clerc Sébastian., Tableaux ou sont representees la passion de NS Jesus Christ et les actions du Prestre a la S. Messe. Avec des prieres correspondantes aux Tableaux (Metz, C. Bouchard: 1657; third ed. Metz, C. Bouchard: 1685). Constable G., Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: 1995). Van der Cruysse D., L’abbé de Choisy. Androgyne et mandarin (Paris: 1995).

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Van der Cruysse D., “L’abbé de Choisy et le mythe louis-quatorzien”, in De Branche en Branche. Études sur le XVIIe et le XVIIIe siècles français, La République des lettres 26 (Louvain: 2005) 213–223. Delaveau M., “Les traductions française de l’imitation de Jésus-Christ au XVIIe siècle. Étude d’ensemble et présentation de deux best-sellers illustrés”, in Bodemann U. – Staubach N. (eds.), Aus dem Winkel in die Welt. Die Bücher des Thomas von Kempen und ihre Schicksale (Frankfurt am Main: 2006) 80–99. Gouzi C., “Louis XIV en Saint Louis: une autre image de la figure royale”, in Da Vinha M. – Maral A. – Milovanovic N. (eds.), Louis XIV l’image et le mythe (Rennes: 2014) 57–70. Von Habsburg M., Catholic and Protestant Translations of the Imitatio Christi 1425–1650 (Farnham—Burlington: 2011). Kantorowicz E., The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: 1957). Thomas à Kempis, L’Imitation de Jesus Christ divisez en 4. Livres composez par Thomas a Kempis chanoine regulier et nouvellement mis en françois par M.R.G.A. Avec uune [sic] Methode pour lire avec fruict les livres de l’imitation de Jesus-Christ, Paris: Claude I Calleville: 41630). Thomas à Kempis, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle, trans. FrançoisTimoléon de Choisy (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1692). Thomas à Kempis, De l’imitation de Jésus-Christ. Traduction Nouvelle. Dediée au roi, trans. François-Timoléon de Choisy, fourth edition (Paris, Antoine Dezallier: 1699). Lavieille G., “Les Jésuites et la dévotion à saint Louis au XVIIe siècle: la célébration du Roi très chrétien”, Les Cahiers de Framespa 11 (2012). Leclercq J., Otia monastica: études sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au moyen âge, Studia Anselmiana 51 (Rome: 1963). Maral A., “Portrait Religieux de Louis XIV”, Dix-septième siècle 217 (2002/4) 697–723. Marin L., Le portrait du roi (Paris: 1981). Marin L., “Logique du secret et représentation de peinture: sur quelques Annonciations Toscanes à la renaissance”, in Falassi A. (ed.), La Cifra e l’immagine. Rappresentazioni del segreto nella cultura toscana (Siena: 1988) 57–84. Meyer V., “L’illustration du Saint Louis du Père Le Moyne”, Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 57 (2005) 47–73. Meyer V., “Suites et cycles: les éditions illustrées de l’Imitation de Jésus-Christ au XVIIe Siècle”, Édition et diffusion de l’imitation de Jésus-Christ (1470–1800), Études et catalogue collectif (Paris: 2011) 53–70. Neveu B., “Du culte de Saint Louis à la glorification de Louis XIV: la maison royale de Saint-Cyr”, Journal des savants 3 (1988) 277–290. Preyat F., Le Petit Concile de Bossuet et la christianisation des mœurs et des pratiques littéraires sous Louis XIV (Berlin: 2007).

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Preyat F., “L’histoire à Madame la duchesse de Bourgogne”, in Preyay F. (ed.), MarieAdélaïde de Savoie (1685–1712). Duchesse de Bourgogne, enfant terrible de Versailles (Bruxelles: 2014) 58–85. Schnapper A., Jean Jouvenet, 1644–1717, et la peinture d’histoire à Paris (Paris: 1974). Sordet Y., “Formes éditoriales et usages de L’Imitatio Christi, XVe–XIXe siècles”, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 2 (2012) 869–895. Tietz M., “Saint Louis Roi Chrétien: Un mythe de la mission intérieure du XVIIe Siècle”, in La conversion au XVIIe siècle, Actes du XIIe Colloque de Marseille (Marseille: 1983) 56–69.

chapter 14

Spiritual and Material Conversions: Federico Barocci’s Christ and Mary Magdalene Bronwen Wilson In 1590, Federico Barocci painted an unusual variation on the Noli me tangere story [Fig. 14.1].1 Mary Magdalene, on the right, turns her upper body toward the standing figure of Christ, her legs still folded beneath her from grieving at his tomb. Her rotation is accentuated by the gold brocade that spirals around her, and by the hinge-like effect of her left arm as she presses her palm to her cheek. With the appearance of the resurrected Christ before the earthbound Mary, we anticipate her reaching out to touch him and his recoil in response. Instead, he extends his right hand to her, the tips of his fingers arrested as if by an invisible veil suspended across the opening between them. His right hand also passes across the dark opening of the tomb, directing us to Mary’s right hand, which fastens onto her unguent jar, tethering her to the ground. Verdant landscapes, familiar from numerous pictorial renditions of the Gospel narrative, have apparently been set to the side. Instead, Christ appears at the threshold of an interior space, his left foot raised on a stone at the entrance. The emphasis on liminality together with Mary Magdalene’s turn toward Christ are only two of many ways in which the painting engages with conversion – a change in direction, in state, or in form. My proposition in this essay is that this composition thematises the temporality of spiritual and material conversions, processes in which the present, the before, and the after are continually replayed.2 This temporal character together with Barocci’s singular approach to the Gospel narrative, invites ongoing exegesis of the sacred mysteries of the Church while also resisting easy interpretations of them. In this way the composition incites contemplation of both the on-going and mystical character of spiritual revelation, and the revelatory potential of painting. 1  John 20:1–2, 11–18. All citations are from the Noli me tangere research project, https://theo.kuleuven.be/apps/nolimetangere/9/. I am grateful to Walter Melion, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Elizabeth Pastan for their thoughtful assistance and brilliant insights, and to participants of the Lovis Corinth Colloquium for their suggestions. 2  See Hadot P., “Conversion”, Encyclopaedia Universalis 4 (1968) 979.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_015

Federico Barocci ’ s Christ and Mary Magdalene

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Federico Barocci, Christ and Mary Magdalene (1590). Oil on canvas, 259 × 185 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen Image © bpk Bildagentur, Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Art Resource, NY

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Barocci painted two versions of Christ and Mary Magdalene, the title I use to refer both to the large canvas now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and also to a smaller one in the Uffizi in Florence [Fig. 14.2]. Both have been studied by scholars, particularly in relation to the artist’s style and his corpus. The unusual iconography, however, is surely one reason the paintings have not surfaced frequently in discussions of Noli me tangere imagery, in spite of a recent wave of studies on the theme.3 Another reason for the relative lack of interest may be perceptions of their middling status. Nicholas Turner, for instance, is dismissive of the painting in Munich, describing it as a rare example of Barocci taking a shortcut by simply reusing the smaller version in the Uffizi, which he describes as a bozzetto – a rough sketch [Fig. 14.2].4 However, there is some evidence that the painting in Munich was completed first [Fig. 14.1]. Signed and dated on the lower left edge and measuring 259 × 185 cm, it was commissioned by Monsignor Giuliano della Rovere as a gift for his cousin, Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino and also Barocci’s patron.5 The artist made detailed copies of large paintings on paper from which replicas could be made, such as the smaller version in the Uffizi (122 by 91 cm), which was requested by the duke for a gift. According to a document dated January 1608, the duke inquired when a painting, described as a ‘Madalena quando l’apparve Nostro Signore’ (‘Magdalene when Our Lord appeared to her’), would be ready in order to send it to a friend.6 This reference to the subject matter confirms that at least the replica, if not both versions, was still in the artist’s studio in Urbino nearly two 3  On the theme, see Arasse D., “L’apparition à Marie-Madeleine noli me tangere: L’excès des images”, in Bédard-Arasse C. – Arasse D. – Brock M. (eds.), Désir sacré et profane: Le corps dans la peinture de la Renaissance italienne (Paris: 2015) 215–247; Baert B., “Touching with the Gaze: A Visual Analysis of the Noli me tangere”, in Baert B. (ed.), ‘Noli me tangere’: Mary Magdalene: One Person, Many Images (Leuven: 2006), 43–51; Baert B., “Noli me tangere: Six Exercises in Image Theory and Iconophilia”, Image & Narrative (Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative) 7.2, issue 15 (2006) n.p.; Baert B., To Touch with the Gaze: Noli me tangere and the Iconic Space (Oostakker: 2012); Baert B., “The Gaze in the Garden: Mary Magdalene in Noli Me Tangere”, in Erhardt M. A. – Morris, A. M. (eds.), Mary Magdalene, Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Leiden: 2012) 187–221; and Baert B., “An Odour. A Taste. A Touch. Impossible to Describe: ‘Noli Me Tangere’ and the Senses”, in Boer W. de – Göttler C. (eds.), Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Leiden – Boston: 2013) 109–151. For further bibliography, see https://theo.kuleuven.be/apps/nolimetangere/9/. 4  Turner N., Federico Barocci (Paris: 2000) 92. 5  The painting was later given to Cardinal Carlo de Medici, passed to Cosimo III, given to Count Johann Wilhelm in Dusseldorf, and then transferred to Munich in 1805 and to the museum in 1836. See Gillgren P., Siting Federico Barocci and the Renaissance Aesthetic (Farnham, Surrey: 2011) Cat. 25. 6  ‘per regalarne un amico’ (‘in order to gift it to a friend’), Gronau, G. Documenti artistici urbinati. Raccolta di fonti per la storia (Florence: 1936) 190.

Federico Barocci ’ s Christ and Mary Magdalene

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Federico Barocci, Christ and Mary Magdalene (ca. 1600–1610). Oil on canvas, 122 × 91 cm. Florence, Uffizi Image © Scala, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali, Art Resource, NY

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decades after the first painting was completed. That both renditions of the theme were commissioned as gifts, and that neither was intended to function as an altarpiece, are points to which I will return. Barocci did paint an altarpiece pertinent to this discussion, a Noli me tangere, that was commissioned for a church in Lucca. Measuring 295 × 206 cm, it was purchased for the collection of the Viscount of Allendale at Bywell Hall in Northumberland.7 Surface layers of paint have disappeared from the canvas, but its composition is known from a print engraved in 1609 by Luca Ciamberlano [Fig. 14.3].8 According to Andrea Emiliani, who published many of the artist’s thirty preparatory drawings and interpreted aspects of their iconography and architecture, the Bywell Hall picture was the last to be completed.9 Judith Mann has made a case for it being first, and even as early as the 1570s, noting that the composition differs from Barocci’s later works. For Mann and others, the engraving of the altarpiece accentuates the tension between the figures, as if the moment of Christ’s appearance is arrested, whereas in works such as The Calling of St. Andrew [Fig. 14.4], painted from 1580 to 1583, the artist uses a diagonal axis to accentuate the protagonists’ interaction.10 A similar dynamism characterizes the figures in Barocci’s two paintings of Christ and Mary Magdalene [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2]. Regardless of whether the Bywell Hall picture was created prior to, or after, the two versions of Christ and Mary Magdalene, its differences attest to probing artistic engagement with the Noli me tangere theme [Fig. 14.3]. In the background of the engraving, for instance, Urbino and Golgotha are brought into relation with each other. On the left, the rocky cliff of Golgotha rises steeply, its three crosses visible above Christ’s head. Similarly, the spire of San Francesco punctuates the cityscape in the distance, but, positioned just to the left of the Magdalene’s face, it also connects her visually to the church, an idea furthered by the apse-like structure behind her. In the two paintings commissioned as gifts [Figs. 14.1, 14.2], it is instead the distinctive profile of the Ducal Palace on the horizon that identifies Urbino, and Golgotha is rendered on the right, behind Mary. The location of the archway also changes. It divides and conjoins the protagonists in the Munich and Florence pictures [Figs. 14.1, 14.2], whereas in the engraving, the arch distinguishes the space of the encounter from the 7  M  adsen S. T., “Federico Barocci’s ‘Noli Me Tangere’ and Two Cartoons”, The Burlington Magazine 101.676/677 (1959) 273–277. 8  Another copy was engraved in 1816 by Raffaello Morghen. An 18th-century copy in oil on canvas (132 × 110.3 cm) was recently on auction. 9  Emiliani A., Federico Barocci (Urbino, 1535–1612) II (Bologna: 1985) 239–249. 10  Mann J. – Bohn B., Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master of Color and Line (New Haven: 2012) 14.

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Luca Ciamberlano, after Barocci, Noli me tangere Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene as a Gardener after the Resurrection (1609). Engraving, 39.6 × 27.0 cm. Published by Francesco Villamena Image © British Museum, London

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Federico Barocci, The Calling of St. Andrew (1583). Oil on canvas, 321 × 240 cm. Brussels, Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts Image © Peter Horree, Alamy Stock Photo

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background, while also bridging and iterating the protagonists’ interaction [Fig. 14.3]. The arrangement of the figures in the Bywall Hall picture contributes to the uneasy combination of force and suspension. Mary, who is riveted to the ground at her knees, reaches diagonally toward her master with her left arm, unable to touch him. The force of her forward movement is equalled by that of his retreat, rendered in the sharp incline of his body and the cloud of drapery that reverberates behind him. Preparatory drawings attest to constant adjustments to Christ’s limb and to the fingers of the Magdalene’s left hand, which echo his [Fig. 14.5]. At first glance she appears unsteady, but her pose is carefully calibrated, her lunge forward balanced by the waver of her hand and body in response to his words, ‘Noli me tangere’, ‘Do not hold on to me’ ( John 20:17). The atrium-like space in the foreground of the Bywall Hall picture is at once capacious and constricting. Two gates swing into the space near the arch; the one on the left with ample apertures between its slats is illuminated, whereas the fence on the right recedes into the shadow behind the rocky wall of the tomb, thereby accentuating the distance of Mary’s body from Christ’s [Fig. 14.3]. Conspicuous greenery and garden tools embellish the scene at the picture plane. Cane rods from the broken trellis nearby are strewn on the ground. A large stone block on the left, incised with the artists’ names and date of the engraving, 1609, emphasizes the threshold between worlds, thereby connecting the painting formally with the altar once positioned below. Similarly, the architectural space with its archway that houses the figures evokes a chapel. Within this setting, the miraculous appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene would have reiterated the mysteries of the Eucharist during the Mass. In contrast to this Noli me tangere, whose liturgical function required adherence to Counter Reformation demands for clarity of subject matter,11 the two paintings that were commissioned as gifts evidently granted Barocci some artistic license. Recall that the painting now in Munich was devised at the behest of Monsignor Giuliano della Rovere as a gift for Barocci’s patron, who supported the artist in Urbino and who was known for his piety [Fig. 14.1]. The commission was therefore an opportunity for Barocci to address two patrons in one painting, both of whom were particularly knowledgeable about Scripture and about art. The Noli me tangere theme lent itself to interpretation of the sacred 11  Delenda O., “Sainte Marie Madeleine et l’application du Décret Tridentin (1563) sur les saintes images”, in Marie Madeleine dans la mystique, les arts et les lettres. Actes du Colloque International Avignon 20–22 July 1988 (Paris, 1988) 191–210. On Barocci and the Counter Reformation, see Verstegen I. Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation (Kirksville, MO: 2015).

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Federico Barocci, Figure study for Noli me tangere. Drawing (Inv.: KdZ 20388) Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen Image © bpk Bildagentur, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Jörg P. Anders, Art Resource, NY

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mysteries in visual images, as I elaborate below, and Barocci could develop this appeal to the beholder in Christ and Mary Magdalene without being compelled to conform to requirements for unequivocal treatment of religious stories in ecclesiastic settings. Although my analysis does not depend on the order in which the three paintings were created, it seems likely that experimentation with the potential and the limits of the narrative in the altarpiece [Fig. 14.3] gave rise to the compositional, temporal, and interpretative inventiveness that characterizes the picture devised for the duke [Fig. 14.1]. Uncertainty about the iconography in the Florence and Munich paintings has resulted in diverse ways of identifying them, which points toward artistic experimentation in the telling of the story [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2]. Recent titles include The Appearance of Christ to the Magdalene, Noli me tangere, and Christ and Mary Magdalene, with more than one of these noted in some instances. I use the latter title to allow for the multiplicity of meanings, places, and processes to which the paintings give thought. Pietro Bellori, Barocci’s biographer, writing in 1672, described it as ‘l’apparitione del Signore à Madalena in atto dolente con la mano alla guancia’ (‘the appearance of the Lord to the Magdalene in a gesture of sorrow with her hand to her cheek’), which he distinguishes from ‘l’altra tavola del Noli me tangere’ (‘the other painting of the Noli me tangere’), the altarpiece for Lucca [Fig. 14.3].12 Bellori’s term, ‘apparitione’, resonates with Jean-Luc Nancy’s critical reading of the Gospel narrative. The evangelical account of Christ’s life, for Nancy, can be considered ‘a parable of parables’.13 As a mode of telling a story, a parable does not instruct listeners about its meaning. Its truth is not revealed through pedagogy or through interpretation. On the contrary, it refuses knowledge; its ‘objective ... is first to sustain the blindness of those do not see’.14 A parable’s truth should be revealed only to one who is receptive to it, to one who is open to its meaning. To have a receptive disposition means that one already knows the truth prior to the telling – that one already sees. The Noli me tangere episode is therefore a crucial instance of ‘the thought of the parable’.15 The Magdalene, who hears her master calling her name, turns to see him because she is already open to his appeal. The mysteries of Christ’s life – his appearance, his death, the resurrection, his ascension – are manifested in his appearance as a gardener, his withdrawal from touch, and his vanishing 12  B  ellori G. P., Le vite de’pittori, scultori et architetti moderni, parte prima (Rome: 1672) 194, 184. 13  Nancy J-L., Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body (New York: 2008) 5. 14  Nancy, Noli me tangere 5. 15  Nancy, Noli me tangere 5–9.

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from sight. He prohibits her from touching his body because he has already ascended.16 The episode transforms events in his life into a revelation; he appears to Mary suddenly, only to say that he is not here, but rather elsewhere, that he has already vanished. For Nancy, Christ’s injunction to Mary, Noli me tangere, thereby opens up a deictic void. This lacuna – the time and place in the narrative are ambiguous – is particularly intriguing for the Munich and Florence paintings [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2].17 For uncertainty about the situation, a condition of being in between, is central to Barocci’s experimentation with the theme, as I propose, and rendered in manifold and novel ways. Christ’s injunction to Mary gives rise to the ubiquitous emphasis on her hands in visual representations, and what is often a sliver of space between her fingers and his body. It is this ‘pulsating lacuna’, to use Barbara Baert’s apt words, ‘where the mysterious merger of speech and gaze takes place’ [Figs. 14.3, 14.6, 14.7, 14.10, & 14.11].18 This lacuna is the focus of Barocci’s Bywell Hall composition, with the directionless gap between Mary and Christ echoed in and amplified by the landscape that opens up behind them [Fig. 14.3]. Mann argues that this earlier concern with the Magdalene’s desiring touch is subordinated in Christ and Mary Magdalene to emphasise sight and revelation, registered in Mary’s open eyes [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2]. The scene, in Mann’s rich analysis, presents the earlier moment in the text, when she wipes her eyes, prior to her full recognition, but with the ensuing drama also intimated.19 Peter Gillgren also argues for the importance of vision, but takes the shift in emphasis from touch to sight further. Citing the interior setting and absence of gardening tools, he argues ‘that it is not a true Noli me tangere but rather a merging of that subject with a Repentant Magdalene, creating a work between narrative and iconic vision’.20 Perceiving incorrectly that Jesus bears no wounds (their presence is a critical detail discussed below), he proposes the scene occurs prior to when Christ speaks to the Magdalene; instead of an appearance, she has conjured a vision of him through her ‘performative gaze’.21 And yet, while her pose calls to mind images of the Repentant Magdalene, her body is framed by the doorway as if in a picture, and Christ reaches out to her, as if he is creating an image of her. 16  Nancy, Noli me tangere, esp. 14–19. 17  Nancy, J-L., The Birth to Presence (Stanford: 1993) 275. Cited in Baert, “The Gaze in the Garden” 18, n. 9. 18  Baert, “The Gaze in the Garden” 8. 19  Mann J. – Bohn B., Federico Barocci 16–17. 20  Gillgren, Siting Federico Barocci 132. 21  Gillgren also compares the composition to Barocci’s Annunciation, ca 1582–84, observing that both women turn, ‘interrupted by the presence of divinity’, 132.

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Heightened attention to sight and the evocation of the Repentant Magdalene are important factors, but other allusions also proliferate, seemingly at every turn [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2]. Sacred, liturgical, pictorial, and artistic references unfold in different directions, inviting new connections and re-interpretations. Christ and Mary Magdalene stages conversion in the apparatus-like character of the internal frame, in its multiple thresholds, and in its engagement with materials. Scholars have probed exhaustively how the Noli me tangere narrative lends itself to thinking about pictorial representation, but in the work explored below, those considerations come into play with the recursive and transformative character of conversion. The design generates unceasing reflection on spiritual and material conversions, and how these can be expressed through painting. For it is through the emphasis on thresholds, the mirroring of colours, and the metamorphosis of stone, described below, that we witness Mary becoming Christ, her continuous spiritual conversion. 1 Turning Similarities and variations in Barocci’s compositions, numerous preparatory drawings for them, and his study of earlier paintings all attest to on-going inquiry into artistic and sacred aspects of the story. For example, the interaction of the figures in his Noli me tangere altarpiece [Fig. 14.3] resembles Titian’s version, ca. 1514, in the National Gallery in London [Fig. 14.6].22 The Venetian artist organises the encounter through a sequence of gestures that leads from one side of the tree to the other, thereby slowing our vertical ascent. The Magdalene’s fingers, affixed to her attribute, root her to the ground. She extends her right hand toward Christ, but, unable to touch his marble-white body, gazes at him instead. Mary’s hand passes in front of his white shroud; flesh and cloth thereby appear to come into contact, and yet we understand that they do not. In one of Titian’s habitual demonstrations of the superiority of painting over sculpture, everything overlaps, but nothing touches. In contrast to Titian’s calligraphic tree, in Barocci’s composition it is the undulating space between the figures that guides our vertical ascent from the foreground to the top of the arch [Fig. 14.3].

22  Emiliani, Barocci 239–249. Also see Fontana J., “Duke Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Federico Barocci, and the Taste for Titian at the Court of Urbino”, in Verstegen I. (ed.) Patronage and Dynasty (Kirksville, MO: 2007) 161–178.

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For Christ and Mary Magdalene [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2], the most explicit conversation is with Correggio’s Noli me tangere, ca. 1525, now in the Prado [Fig. 14.7]. Correggio’s painting, then on wood panel, was in Bologna where it was much admired. Giorgio Vasari saw it there, citing it twice in his Lives of the Artists in 1568.23 On the left of a leafy landscape, Mary Magdalene is seated on the ground, parallel to the picture plane, with her legs folded beneath her. She faces Christ, her elongated neck and right arm extended behind her, accentuating her imploring countenance. Her left hand is fingering her own cloak as if resisting her desire to touch him. Like Titian, Correggio gives priority to the sense of sight, but instead of the interlacing of shroud, arms, hoe, and tree seen in the earlier Venetian picture, touch is translated into their interlocking gazes. In Correggio’s version, her body, on the verge of springing forth, is restrained by the downward gesture of Christ’s right arm. He points upward on the right, extending this diagonal axis, his arm and the limbs of the tree emulating each other. The setting reinforces their poses; the rocky hill behind Mary is in dialogue with the tree adjacent to Christ, its new growth rising above the bare branches that criss-cross – trellis-like – behind. Whereas Titian focuses on the prohibition, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father’ [Fig. 14.6], Correggio takes up Christ’s instructions: ‘But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”’ (John 20:17) [Fig. 14.7]. Like a divine human compass, Christ gestures toward her with his right hand; he directs her to move forward with his right foot, and he points upward with his left arm to indicate his ascent. In Christ and Mary Magdalene [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2], Barocci inverts the position of Correggio’s two protagonists, retaining and transforming Mary’s golden dress and elements of the setting. The rocky outcrop has become Golgotha, the tree has transmuted into the wooden door behind Christ, and its lush greenery has become foliage overhanging the tomb just to the right in the middle ground. The forms in the landscape similarly echo the poses of the figures. In contrast to the diagonal movement upward seen in Correggio’s painting [Fig. 14.7], Barocci’s composition is devised as a structure that rotates, for which the internal frame provides momentum [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2]. The angle of this frame, defined by the wooden tie and threshold, appears to have rotated about forty degrees to the right. This impression is created by the convergence of architectural details in the corner behind Christ, including the wooden tie that is

23  Its presence in Bologna was first recorded in 1560, where it remained until the 17th century. https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/noli-me-tangere/ d5bb017a-4c8f-4293-a08d-4d97e7057d2b.

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Titian, Noli me tangere (ca. 1514). Oil on canvas, 110.5 × 91.9 cm. London, National Gallery Image © National Gallery, London, Art Resource, NY

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Correggio (Antonio Allegri), Noli me tangere. Christ Appears to Mary Magdalen after His Resurrection and Asks Her Not to Touch Him. Oil on canvas, originally on panel, 130 × 103 cm. Madrid, Museo del Prado Image © Madrid, Museo del Prado, Erich Lessing, Art Resource, NY

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embedded in the arch and the door behind him that runs parallel to the picture plane. Material considerations of this wooden doorway complicate the otherwise unambiguous textual reference: ‘I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved: and he shall go in, and go out, and shall find pastures’ ( John 10:9). For the pictorial elaboration of the text calls attention to process, and thus to details of the Noli me tangere episode, and to human artifice. Spiritual and physical movement described in the text – going in and going out – is translated in the image into the metal hinge carefully delineated above Christ [Fig. 14.8]. The angle of the internal frame furthers this impression of the swinging door and of his liminal position between worlds [Fig. 14.2]. His rotation toward Mary, accentuated by the crossing of his right arm toward her, establishes the importance of the dynamic between the wooden door, the body of Christ, the stone threshold, the opening that frames the Magdalene, her body, and her soul, explored further below. The rotational structure thereby adds to the iconographic association of the door with Christ from earlier in the Gospel narrative, its movement back and forth between the two figures conjuring the directionless energy compressed in the lacuna, noted earlier, between the Magdalene’s outstretched fingers near Christ’s arm in Barocci’s Noli me tangere [Fig. 14.3]. The physical and spiritual nature of the door in Christ and Mary Magdalene furthers this temporal complexity [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2]. Its woodgrain and knots, carefully delineated across the surface, dematerialise around Christ’s head, suggesting that he and the door are merging together. Particularly in the Uffizi version, the grey pigment diffuses unevenly around Christ’s head as if the painting is unfinished or disappearing [Figs. 14.2 & 14.8]. Grey patches on Christ’s flesh, and the colour of the stone where his foot alights, add to this impression of moving between states, between matter and spirit. The emphasis on of painting as a process, jointly functions to declare material presence and to allude, through the non-mimetic flow of pigment, to spiritual presence. Thus, what Turner saw as a rough sketch might instead be an attempt to render visible Christ’s vanishing – the Ascension – even while he is appearing to Mary: he is here yet not here, both here and already elsewhere. It is tempting to interpret Bellori’s term ‘apparitione’ as gesturing to this oscillation between visible and invisible worlds. With its surface parallel to the picture plane, the wooden panel reminds us that this is a painting, that Christ appears and vanishes also through the artist’s act of creation. Evidence that contemporaries saw this connection between the subject matter of Christ as a door and the medium of painting is suggested by a tapestry

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Federico Barocci, Christ and Mary Magdalene (ca. 1600–1610). Oil on canvas, 122 × 91 cm. Florence, Uffizi. Detail, centre of painting Image © Scala, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali, Art Resource, NY

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made in Florence in 1653 after Barocci’s design.24 Although the tapestry follows the composition closely, the door has been exchanged for a masonry wall. Instead of woodgrain and knots, readily delineated by the flow of the artist’s brush, the horizontal and vertical patterning of stone blocks to make a wall is fabricated by the warp and weft of weaving. The association also prompts consideration of tapestries being hung on walls as works of art, an idea perhaps indicated by the name of its producer being woven into the bottom right corner. Instead of grey paint seeping between the wooden panel and rays of Christ’s nimbus seen in Barocci’s work, luminous and undyed threads intertwine in patches behind his head before merging into the colours of the stone wall. Further references to the medium of tapestry are seen in the prominent textiles and intensity of their colours. The interconnectedness of the figures is suggested by the more dynamic movement of their woven draperies, and through the vibrant blue, red, and gold that is used in the robes of both figures. By contrast, in the painting, areas of Mary’s white underdress are gradually becoming red, as if the flow of red on Christ’s robe has infused hers.25 The reflected colours further this effect, their vaghezza (beauty) turning the erotic into a sacred experience, bleeding out, to use Marcia Hall’s idea. Through the diffusion of red, the colour conveys both that Christ touches Mary and that she is receptive to him, that she is infused with him. Through the art of painting, physical sensuality is transformed into a sacred experience. Together with the use of sfumato, Barocci’s manner of painting arouses the desire of beholders to scan the surfaces. This visual experience was in keeping with Gabriele Paleotti’s recommendations, in his Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, published in 1581, for sensual experiences moving viewers to a higher spiritual level.26 Because the soul is open ‘to receive images’, he explains, ‘there is no 24  It is recorded in an inventory of tapestries made in Florence; see Thomson W. G., A History of Tapestry from the Earliest Times until the Present Day (London: 1906) 413. On Pietro Févère’s tapestry, also see Giannotti A. – Pizzorusso C. (eds.), Federico Barocci 1535–1612. L’incanto del colore. Una lezione per due secoli (Milan: 2009), cat. no. 42, 308–309. 25  On Barocci’s distinctive use of colour, see Lingo S. Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (New Haven: 2008). 26  Hall M., The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven: 2011) 213–215. She associates this process of viewing his painting with Gabriele Paleotti’s three levels of cognition. He contrasts Aquinas’s physical and spiritual modes of understanding. The former are associated with animals and the senses, which provide knowledge to the illiterate. For Paleotti, the senses also activate the mind, leading to a third level, supernatural spiritual cognition. See Paleotti G. Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. W. McCuaig (Los Angeles: 2012) 215–217. On Paleotti and the priority given to images over texts, see Chapter 3, “On Blindness”, in Wilson B. The Face of Uncertainty, forthcoming.

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doubt that there is no stronger or more effective instrument for this than naturalistic images, which almost violate our unwary senses’. Responding to the primacy of the word for Reformers, Paleotti argued that the sensual experience of images was prior to the knowledge received from texts.27 In this light, Mary Magdalene’s robe, which in its form and texture is an evocation of ecclesiastical attire and its rituals, is an indication of her on-going conversion. The white and gold colours of her garment, also seen in Correggio’s painting [Fig. 14.7], were worn by contemplatives when they celebrated her feast day.28 An illustrative precedent is the panel painted in 1507 by Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, now in Kassel [Fig. 14.9]. The blue and gilded hem of Christ’s robes, echoed in Mary’s blue sleeves and elaborate gold brocade, furthers the connection between them as he places his hand on her head while she weeps. Striking also, for our purposes, are the multiple loci: the patch of stone on which he stands as he blesses her, and its angle in the garden, that lead us to other scenes in the continuous narrative, such as the tomb on the left, where the Magdalene appears again. In Barocci’s Christ and Mary Magdalene [Fig. 14.2], the voluminous fabric envelops her, filling the ground around her, and flowing up against the stone near his foot with marked similarity to the same detail in the Cornelisz. More ceremonial in its weighty folds, and with white lining folding over the edge, the robe resembles a chasuble.29 Such an interpretation is furthered by the stone threshold between them; evoking both Church and altar, and oscillating between altarpiece and host – note the wounds, the encounter establishes a nexus of devotional experiences. Recall for example the prominent rock in the foreground of Barocci’s Noli me tangere [Fig. 14.3], that would have reiterated the altar it once decorated. In Christ and Mary Magdalene [Fig. 14.2], the threshold has pivoted, so that she is positioned before the altar, as both deacon and congregant. In this line of thinking, the fabric she holds to her cheek may also allude, in its accordion-like folds, to a sacramental veil. That gesture with her hand is also multivalent, and replete with sensual potential. There are medieval precedents for her hand being viewed as a sign of 27  Paleotti, G. Discorso intorno alle imagine sacre e profane. Fondazione Memofonte onlus Studio per l’elaborazione informatica delle fonti storico-artistiche, http://www.memofonte .it/home/files/pdf/scritti_paleotti.pdf 230: ‘Essendo donque la imaginativa nostra così atta a ricevere tali impressioni, non è dubbio non ci essere istrumento più forte o più efficace a ciò delle imagini fatte al vivo, che quasi violentano i sensi incauti’. 28  Haskins S., Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (New York: 1993) 258. 29  For example, see the Willigis chasuble, Byzantine, second half of the 10th century (Inventory number: 11/170.1–2), in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich. I am grateful to Lee Palmer Wandel for the idea and the example.

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Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen as a Gardener (Noli me tangere) (1507). Oil on oak, 54.5 × 38.8 cm. Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Museumslandschaft Hessen (Inv. GK 29) Image © Scala, Art Resource, NY

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shame, thereby alluding to her repentance.30 Bellori saw the gesture as a sign of sorrow, and thus connected to her grief and Jesus’s words: ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ ( John 20:15). Pressing her palmto her ear, more emphatic in a preparatory drawing, as Mann has noted, indicates having heard him call her name ( John 20:16).31 Lisa Rafanelli and Erin Benay align the aural character of her gesture with the suppression of the tactile that accompanied the climate of reform. Citing Cornelius à Lapide’s Commentaria in scripturam sacram, they propose that Barocci’s painting is an illustration of his exegesis: But when [Mary Magdalene] heard Jesus addressing her by name, and recognized His voice, she was enraptured with joy, and at once looked straight towards Him. The voice of the Shepherd, reaching the ears of the lamb, at once opened her eyes, and soothed all her senses with its secret power and wonted sweetness; and so carried her away out of herself that she at once was carried away with unhoped for and inexplicable joy.32 The flash of recognition and rapture is fused into one moment, following this reading, and the Magdalene rendered ‘more docile’, her desire to touch subordinated to her revelation. À Lapide’s Commentaries were published well after Barocci painted Christ and Mary Magdalene; nevertheless, the comparison attests to his knowledge and to the explicit exegetical thinking in the image. The insistently durational and multidirectional character of Mary’s conversion, and the pivoting of the composition, might be considered in relation to the rhetorical devices of epistrophe and metanoia. In the antique tradition, epistrophe describes a change of orientation resulting from an ‘awakening’ or an ‘illumination’, as well as a return to the origin of the self, through selfknowledge. Metanoia, in contrast, refers to a change of mind, to repentance, and implies the idea of mutation and rebirth. Through the death and Resurrection of Christ, metanoia became understood as a radical rupture in which, through repentance and transcendence, the self was born again.33 Partly because these two understandings of conversion co-mingle in the Noli 30  See Werckmeister O. K., “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve from Saint-Lazare, Autun”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972) 1–30. 31  Mann J. – Bohn B., Federico Barocci 17. 32  Benay E. E. – Rafanelli L. M., Faith, Gender and the Senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art: Interpreting the Noli Me Tangere and Doubting Thomas (Surrey – Burlington: 2015) 191. 33  Hadot P., “Conversion”, in Encyclopaedia Universalis 4 (1968) 979–981; also see McGushin E. F., Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston: 2007) 111.

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me tangere narrative, as a parable of Christ’s life and as an encounter with Mary Magdalene, the theme itself provides impetus for their pictorial interconnectedness. Both epistrophe and metanoia have materialized, so to speak, in the compositional and pictorial expressions of movement and metamorphosis. Christ and Mary Magdalen [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2] appeals purposefully to the beholder to contemplate the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the before and the after, over and over again. Light renders this motion perpetual. One source illuminates the figures in the foreground, while the sun rises above the horizon in the background, bringing past, present, and future together. Like a cosmic compass, beholders can reflect on different places and times, moving from Urbino, to Golgotha, to the tomb, to the church, to the door, to the altar. They may contemplate Christ’s appearance and departure, Mary’s selfreflection, her anointing of his feet, her grief, her turning, and her becoming like Christ, – her becoming his first apostle. 2 Interlacing Those multiple orientations are set in motion by the networks of lines that traverse Christ and Mary Magdalene. Christ’s foot alights upon a cut stone block, where the garments of the two figures overlap, and where two diagonal lines intersect. One of these can be traced from the shadow cast on the bottom left upward along the silhouette of Mary’s body until it follows the rocky contour of Golgotha behind her, leading us to the three crosses on the right corner of the internal frame. The axial arrangement seen in The Calling [Fig. 14.4] and Christ and Mary Magdalene [Fig. 14.1] has oft been remarked, but worth underlining is the role of the draperies in the interaction of the figures. In The Calling, we are led diagonally from Andrew’s foot on the lower right, where his blue robe touches the edge of the picture plane, to where his shadow merges with Christ. Crossing over Andrew to Christ’s sleeve, the blue drapery draws the men together. Evidence from of an eighteenth-century copy of the Noli me tangere [Fig. 14.3] indicates that Barocci used a similar strategy in that version as well. The calligraphic blue border of the Magdalene’s vermilion robe, still coiling on the ground to the right of her knees, follows the vertical movement of her body and accentuates the dramatic gesture of her left arm also edged with blue. Correspondingly, the recoil of Christ’s body is marked by the whorl of blue drapery that flows around and behind him. In Christ and Mary Magdalene [Fig. 14.1], in contrast, the blue is confined to Christ’s body, with the red beneath (reversed from The Calling) becoming a border. Interlaced around his torso

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and limbs, the red emphasises the gesture of his arms and brings into focus the trellises rendered behind the Magdalene. As noted earlier, Gillgren was perturbed by the absence of gardening implements; but we might ask, following Baert for a different work: are not fences a part of gardens?34 In Fra Angelico’s fresco from San Marco, 1420–1425, for example, the fence in the background is a definitive marker of the garden’s boundary [Fig. 14.10]. More conspicuous is the trellis depicted by Andrea del Sarto [Fig. 14.11]. The Magdalene reaches for Christ, her body mediating between the stone block and rising tree on the left and the trellis. The incline of her body, reiterated by angles of the lattice, directs us to Christ and then back again. The trellis also turns behind Christ’s body, pointing out his wounds, where it is in a state of disrepair – a small detail, but one that is accentuated by the carefully laced ties of the crosses elsewhere [Fig. 14.12]. In Barocci’s Noli me tangere, a trellis is prominent on the left where Christ withdraws from Mary [Fig. 14.3]. He is not only leaning against it, but enmeshed within it. The fence is broken on the left near the picture plane, as if damaged by the force of his retreat. His left leg is visible, however, on the other side where the lattice work is intact, thereby conveying the immaterial nature of his body. In Christ and Mary Magdalene [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2], the trellis has not only moved behind Mary; it has also been doubled to demarcate two spaces [Fig. 14.13]. While the green pigments of the plants have lost their intensity over the centuries, the tapestry described above suggests that the foliage was once more verdant, and its spiralling character more visible. John Mitchell has traced the repeated use of this pattern, citing a striking instance of the lattice found thirty years ago during archaeological excavations at the early medieval monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno in southern Italy [Fig. 14.14]. The example ‘is a terracotta special-purpose floor tile, incised while still leather-hard, before firing, with a three-part lattice’ that he dates to about 800 CE. It was used on the threshold of the doorway that separated the cloistered space of the monks from the entrance hall used by distinguished guests. Initially the design appeared to be purely functional, with the criss-crossing pattern scratched into the surface to save monks from slipping when passing through the door. Now having traced numerous instances of the pattern, Mitchell has shown how ‘the lattice designates the critical passage from a more mundane secular zone to a more spiritually elevated spiritual area’, where the monastic community resided.35 34  Baert, B., “Noli me tangere. Six Exercises in Image Theory and Iconophilia”, n.p. http:// www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/iconoclasm/baert.htm. 35  I am grateful to John Mitchell for this example, which I have paraphrased, and for his reference to Paul’s Letter to Hebrews. His research on the lattice pattern was presented

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figure 14.10 Fra Angelico, Noli me tangere (ca. 1440–1445). Fresco. Florence, Museo di S. Marco Image © Scala, Art Resource, NY

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Andrea del Sarto, Noli me tangere (1510). Oil on panel, 176 × 155 cm. Florence, Uffizi Image © Scala, Art Resource, NY

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figure 14.12 Andrea del Sarto, Noli me tangere, (1510). Oil on panel, 176 × 155 cm. Florence, Uffizi. Detail, lower right of painting Image © Scala, Art Resource, NY

With this in mind, the crossed hands of Christ and the interlacing of his robe in Christ and Mary Magdalene take on new significance. Instead of Christ’s torso straddling the fence, seen in Noli me tangere, he has become the threshold, the horizon to which she has turned. The gold cloth is at once heavy, anchoring her to the ground, and also light, its swelling folds animated by circular patterning, from which she appears to rise. In contrast to Correggio’s Magdalene [Fig. 14.7], whose upward movement is held in check by Christ’s gesture, in Barocci’s version, he draws her toward him while also directing her upward movement. In both versions the lattice is either broken or shattered. In this way, as in del Sarto’s earlier painting, it is both boundary marker and reference to the veil of the flesh, the final veil, broken and rent at the Crucifixion, through the spilling of Christ’s blood. According to St. Paul, ‘the blood of Jesus makes us free to in his inaugural lecture, “Ways of Seeing: Eyes and Minds in the First Millennium”, at the University of East Anglia, March 2015.

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figure 14.13 Federico Barocci, Christ and Mary Magdalene (ca. 1600–1610). Oil on canvas, 122 × 91 cm. Florence, Uffizi. Detail, right side of painting Image © Scala, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali, Art Resource, NY

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figure 14.14 Terracotta Floor Tile, San Vincenzo al Volturno (ca. 800) Image © John Mitchell

enter boldly into the sanctuary of the new living way which he has opened for us through the curtain, the veil, that is the way of his flesh’ (Hebrews 10:19–20). Through his translation of the veil into a trellis, Barocci allows us to draw connections between the cross on Golgotha and the sanctuary, between the door and the body of Christ, and between him and Mary. 3 Metamorphoses The double trellises to the right of Mary, with their reference to a change in state, also prompt us to contemplate the anthropomorphic face behind her. This was not unusual a century earlier when skulls were frequently incorporated into images of Mount Golgotha. On one level it identifies the meaning of Golgotha as the Place of the Skull.36 For example, consider Andrea Solario’s Crucifixion (1503), in which the artist prompts us to compare the bony skull with mandible painted at the foot of the cross to the anthropomorphic profile, created by nature, on the face of the mount to the right [Figs. 14.15 & 14.16]. The brutish contours of the face in the landscape serve as a sign of the evil soul of the man seen in profile on horseback below. For Barocci, the material conversion from stone to flesh instead manifests Mary Magdalene’s spiritual transformation. As noted above, the tension between desire and prohibition in the words, ‘Do not hold on to me’, is most commonly rendered in the lacuna 36  See Berra G., “Immagini casuali, figure nascoste e natura antropomorfa nell’iimmaginario artistico rinascimentale”, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 43.2/3 (1999) 358–419.

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figure 14.15 Andrea Solario, Crucifixion, 1503. Oil on panel, 110 × 80.5 cm. Paris, Louvre Image © Erich Lessing, Art Resource, NY

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figure 14.16 Andrea Solario, Crucifixion, 1503. Oil on panel, 110 × 80.5 cm. Paris, Louvre. Detail, upper right of painting Image © Erich Lessing, Art Resource, NY

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between the figures and by the rhetoric of Mary’s hand and gaze. The turn from touch to sight could also be used, as exemplified in Titian’s picture [Fig. 14.6], to express the power of painting over sculpture. In sculpture, we can move around a composition, but because figures are carved from the same block they are not distinct from each other. The Venetian artist demonstrates how in painting the figures and objects can appear to touch by overlapping each other, and yet we perceive through our eyes that they do not. In Christ and Mary Magdalene [Figs. 14.1 & 14.2], her gesture has been interpreted as a turn from touch to sight, and from the aural to the revelatory. And in pressing her hand to her face, Barocci incites us to contemplate the stony physiognomy behind her. Sculpture is becoming painting, and stone is becoming flesh. As Tiffany Werth has observed, in early modern English literature, to be human and not stone is to be animated by God’s power. It is through grace and divine will that matter is converted into being, that stone becomes spirit.37 Not unlike the infusion of colour from Christ into the Magdalene, the movement from the stony face of Mount Golgotha to her face registers the temporality of conversion. We follow the transformation of stone to flesh slowly but then grasp its meaning in a flash – the revelation of her conversion. That the trellis is situated here, and doubled, presents another locus for contemplation. The garden allows for reflection on another encounter between the two, perhaps earlier, when he calls her name, and perhaps later, when he has vanished. The repetition of the fences multiplies the temporal and spatial dimensions of the design, allowing beholders to return to the garden, to the skull of Golgotha, to Adam’s skull, and to the skull against which the Magdalene’s hand is so often pressed in images of her repentance. Some decades ago John Freccero described how, for Dante and for Saint Augustine, the function of a conversion narrative was to tell the story of the death and rebirth of the self: ‘How the self that was, becomes the self that is’.38 For Freccero literary narratives conjoin religious experience and poetry, the transformation of the self is manifested in the poetics that emerge from writing the story.39 The temporal nature of writing is akin to, but also different from, the poetic dimension of pictorial forms I have been describing in Barocci’s picture. Herein lies a distinctive aspect of the role played by stone. Its material and metaphorical character are evident throughout, from the stone at Christ’s foot and the tomb, to the ground on which we orient ourselves spatially and 37  Werth T. J., A Heart of Stone: The Ungodly in Early Modern England (New York: 2012). 38  Freccero J., Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge – London: 1986) xii. 39  On the Magdalene and conversion, see Leone M., “The Conversion of Passions: The Mirror and the Ointment”, in M. Leone, Religious Conversion and Identity: The Semiotic Analysis of Texts (London: 2004) 104–150.

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in relation to others. Stone can be transformed into buildings, formless matter into forms, the inanimate fashioned into the animate, as suggested by the skull in the mountain, redeemed by conversion, and by the self-aware touch of Mary Magdalene. Stone, lapis lazuli, also becomes the blue in painting, specifically Mary’s blue. Christ’s gesture is surely critical here, for with his fingers alighting on the invisible screen between them, we are invited to imagine Barocci with his brush, creating Mary Magdalene by converting matter into flesh.40 With its proliferation of loci, the rotational structure, and the emphasis on spiritual and material transformations, Christ and Mary Magdalene fosters repeated reflection on his appearance to her but also on her transformation to Christian beholders, the process of her becoming him. With its conversion of matter into art, the picture asserts that material transformations can manifest spiritual conversion. Touching, hearing, and seeing, together with turning, approaching, and crossing, draw attention to the embodied and temporal character of conversion, to being always in between. Bibliography Apostolos-Cappadona D., In Search of Mary Magdalene: Images and Traditions (New York: 2002). Atwood R., Mary Magdalene in the New Testament Gospels and Early Tradition (Bern: 1993). Arasse D., “L’apparition à Marie-Madeleine Noli Me Tangere: L’excès des images”, in Arasse C. B. – Arasse D. – Brock M. (eds.), Désir sacré et profane: Le corps dans la peinture de la Renaissance italienne (Paris: 2015) 215–247. Baert B., “An Odour. A Taste. A Touch. Impossible to Describe: ‘Noli Me Tangere and the Senses”, in Boer W. de – Göttler C. (eds.), Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Leiden – Boston: 2013) 111–152. Baert B., “Noli Me Tangere. Exercises in Image Theory and Iconophilia”, Image and Narrative 15 (2006) n.p. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/iconoclasm/ baert.htm. Baert B., (ed.), ‘Noli Me Tangere’: Mary Magdalene: One Person, Many Images (Leuven: 2006).

40  On this idea, see Giovan Battista Marino’s elegiac poem commemorating Barocci, published in C. Van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Leiden: 2015) 65: ‘So great a one Barocci was that you. / O Nature, emulous and criminal, / Killed him. Because he made your brushes his, / Jealously you did him in. For if / He could not fashion living men, / He exposed the soulless with fanciful colors / And made others believe the depicted lived’.

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Baert B., “The Gaze in the Garden: Mary Magdalene in Noli Me Tangere”, in Erhardt M. A. – Morris A. M. (eds.), Mary Magdalene, Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Leiden: 2012) 187–221. Bellori, G. P., Vite de’pittori, scultori et architetti moderni, parte prima (Rome, Mascardi: 1672). Benay E. E. – Rafanelli L. M., Faith, Gender and the Senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art: Interpreting the Noli Me Tangere and Doubting Thomas (Surrey – Burlington: 2015). Berra G., “Immagini casuali, figure nascoste e natura antropomorfa nell’immaginario artistico rinascimentale”, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 43.2/3 (1999) 358–419. D’Angelo M. R., “The Case of Mary Magdalene”, in Shepard Kramer R. – D’Angelo M. R. (eds.), Women and Christian Origins (New York – Oxford: 1999). Delenda O., “Sainte Marie Madeleine et l’application du décret Tridentin (1563) sur les saintes images”, In Duperray E. (ed.), in Marie Madeleine dans la mystique, les arts et les lettres. Actes du colloque international Avignon 20–22 July 1988 (Paris: 1988) 191–210. Dillenberger J., “The Magdalen: Reflections on the Image of the Saint and Sinner in Christian Art”, in Yasbeck Haddad Y. – Banks Findly E. (eds.), Women, Religion and Social Change (New York: 1985) 115–146. Eck C. van, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Leiden: 2015). Emilani A., Federico Barocci (Urbino, 1535–1612), 2 vols. (Bologna: 1985). Erhardt M. A. – Morris A. M. (eds.), Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Leiden: 2012). Freccero J., Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge – London: 1986). Giannotti A. – Pizzorusso C. (eds.), Federico Barocci 1535–1612. L’incanto del colore. Una lezione per due secoli (Milan: 2009). Gillgren P., Siting Federico Barocci and the Renaissance Aesthetic (Farnham: 2011). Gronau G., Documenti artistici urbinati. Raccolta di fonti per la storia (Florence: 1936). Hadot P., “Conversion”, in Encyclopaedia Universalis 4 (1968) 979–981. Hall M., The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven: 2011). Haskins S., Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (New York: 1993). Ingenhoff-Danhaüser M., Maria Magdalena, Heilige und Sünderin in der italienischen Renaissance: Studien zur Ikonographie der Heiligen von Leonardo bis Tizian (Tubingen: 1984). Jansen K. L., The Making of the Magdalen. Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: 2000).

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Jansen K. L., “Maria Magdalena: Apostolorum Apostola”, in Kienzle B. M. – Walker P. J. (eds.), Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millenia of Christianity (Berkeley: 1998) 57–96. Kleinbub C., “To Sow the Heart: Touch, Spiritual Anatomy, and Image Theory in Michelangelo’s Noli Me Tangere”, Renaissance Quarterly 66 (2003) 81–129. Leone, M., Religious Conversion and Identity: The Semiotic Analysis of Texts (London: 2004). Lingo S., Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (New Haven: 2008). Mann J. – Bohn B., Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master of Color and Line (New Haven: 2012). Madsen S. T., “Federico Barocci’s ‘Noli Me Tangere’ and Two Cartoons”, The Burlington Magazine 101. 676/677 (1959) 273–277. McGushin E. F., Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston, 2007). McLaughlin E., “Noli me tangere: Bonnefoy, Nancy, Derrida”, French Forum 37.1–2 (2012) 183–194. Nancy J-L., Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body (New York: 2008). Nancy, J-L., The Birth to Presence (Stanford: 1993). Paleotti G., Discorso intorno alle imagine sacre e profane, Fondazione Memofonte onlus Studio per l’elaborazione informatica delle fonti storico-artistiche http://www.memofonte.it/home/files/pdf/scritti_paleotti.pdf. Paleotti G., Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. W. McCuaig (Los Angeles: 2012). Pardo M., “The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene”, The Art Bulletin 71.1 (1989) 67–90. Rafanelli L. M., “Thematizing Vision in the Renaissance: The Noli me tangere as a Metaphor for Art Making”, in Sanger A. E. – Kulbrandstad Walker S. V. (eds.), Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice (Surrey – Burlington: 2012) 149–168. Rafanelli L. M., The Ambiguity of Touch: Saint Mary Magdalene and the “Noli Me Tangere” in Early Modern Italy, Ph.D. Dissertation (Institute of Fine Arts, New York: 2004). Schaberg J., The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament (New York: 1997). Thomson W. G., A History of Tapestry from the Earliest Times until the Present Day (London: 1906). Turner N., Federico Barocci (Paris: 2000). Verstegen I., Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation (Kirksville: 2015). Werckmeister O. K., “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve from Saint-Lazare, Autun”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972) 1–30.

part 3 Representing Divine Presence and the Mysteries of Faith

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chapter 15

The Fine Art of Dying: Envisioning Death in the Somme le Roi Tradition Alexa Sand Enviz muert qui apris ne l’a. Apren a morir, si savras vivre; car nuns bien vivre ja ne savra qui a mourir apris n’avra. […] Se tu veuz vivre franchement, apren a morir liement. Se tu me diz: ‘Comment l’aprent?’ je le te dire maintenant. […] Ceste vie tant seulement n’est fors un trespassement.

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[He hates to die who has not learned how/ To learn to die is to know how to live; / For none can live well who do not know / And who has not learned to die […] If you wish to live freely, / Learn to die joyfully. / If you ask me ‘How shall I learn this?’/I will tell you straightaway […] This life, so worldly / Is nothing but a brief crossing.]*,1

∵ * Many thanks to Walter S. Melion, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Lee Palmer Wandel, and the participants in the 2017 Lovis Corinth Symposium for their valuable feedback on this essay, and the first three for their valiant editorial interventions. Further thanks to Laura D. Gelfand, who played both the roles of critic and cheerleader through the revisions process. 1  Frère Laurent, La Somme le roi, ed. and trans É. Brayer – A.-F. Leurquin-Labie (Abbeville: 2008) 173–174 (Chapter 40 § 2–12). My translation.

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Envisioning death became a central feature of visual, liturgical, and literary cultures over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe. Tomb sculpture, poetry, illustrated self-help books, and wall-paintings, among other media, explored the process from mortal illness through the physical decomposition of the body, and to the fate of resurrected dead.2 All of human life could be conceived as a pilgrimage towards death, and the post-mortem world was the subject of intense imaginative engagement. Death itself became an art form, a mode of self-expression with distinctive aesthetics, a thing to be learned, as suggested by the doggerel verse with which I open here. The text comes from La Somme le roi, composed in 1279, at the dawn of a period when the business of dying and its sequelae emerged as a central leitmotif of late medieval Christian art.3 La Somme le roi, an ensemble of vernacular texts on morality and accompanied quite often in its manuscript and early print tradition by a complex suite of moralising and allegorising pictures, was among the most popular books of spiritual instruction in the period under consideration, and so it is hardly surprising that it proposes itself as a guidebook of sorts to those who wish to ‘learn to die to know how to live’. Among the concerns about death by the living, the moment of transition from one state to the next figured prominently. Extreme Unction, paired with the sacrament of final Communion, became the gold-standard for successful navigation of this alteration of state from sinful life to pre-Judgment death. Typically for most rites de passage, the subject was at a moment of heightened existential vulnerability precisely at the alteration of status, that liminal, 2  There is a vast literature on the cultural and artistic engagement with death in this period. Most recently, and with excellent bibliography, see Hartnell J., Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages (London: 2018); for a variety of recent perspectives on medieval approaches to death, see Classen A. (ed), Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death (Berlin – Boston: 2016). Also valuable for its attention to the performative aspect of medieval engagement with the visual representation of death is Gertsman E. The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (Turnhout: 2010). For a relevant study of literary images of death in fourteenthand fifteenth-century England, see Kinch A. Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture (Leiden – Boston: 2013). 3  As noted above, the centrality of death to the literary, musical, and visual arts in the late medieval period has been widely discussed; in addition to the sources cited in the preceding note and throughout this essay, the work of the French cultural historian Philippe Ariès is foundational. Ariès P., Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident: du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris: 1975), L’Homme devant la mort (Paris: 1977), and Images de l’homme devant la mort (Paris: 1983). For art historians, Erwin Panofsky is equally important, especially Panofsky E., Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: 1964). As a counterpoint to Ariès, see Volvelle M. La mort et l’occident de 1300 á nos jours (Paris: 1983).

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undefined void between two identities. La Somme le roi, though little concerned with the mechanics or forms of the liturgy, continually returns in its verbal and visual imagery to the question of how the individual negotiates this passage (which begins at birth) from life into death through the careful cultivation of virtue and rejection of vice. In other words, how one practices the art of dying. Two episodes from the long life of La Somme le roi as an ensemble of words and pictures stand out as particularly concerned with the issue of passage and its sacramental framework. One comes in manuscript form from early in the fourteenth century in an aristocratic context in northern France, the other in a printed edition from the early sixteenth century produced in the mercantile environment of London. Both point toward the way in which representations of the moment of death, framed by the sacrament, provided a punctum in the Barthian sense, touching on the very marrow of what it meant to be alive, and to be dying, and to be possessed of a Christian soul.4 By calling attention, visually, to the moment of passage, the images in these two historically-distant but textually-connected books highlight the sacraments associated with Last Rites as efficacious representations of the Holy Spirit. In this essay, I consider the two episodes side-by-side in order to probe at how the visual representation Last Rites in conjunction with La Somme le roi’s treatise on dying well effected a mimesis of the representational and instrumental efficacy of the sacraments themselves. Although widely separated in terms of chronology and audience, both the early and the late forms of visual engagement with the sacramental rituals of dying point towards a conception of the La Somme le roi as an entry in the genre of literary and artistic represenatation known as the artes moriendi, in which the process of death itself is conceived of as a teachable ‘craft’ or ‘art’. This notion constructs death as a form of self-representation, but one that can only be realized properly with divine aid, received through the grace of the Holy Spirit. Sacraments associated with dying, as the instrumental representations of this grace, lie at the center of the depiction of death in these two 4  The punctum being that element in a representation that arrests the viewer, partaking of both Latin senses of the word: punctuation mark and piercing. The punctum is a point around which a state of heightened affective awareness and vulnerability coalesces. Barthes R., La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: 1980), 48. Donna Sadler writes, “The language of the punctum resonates with late medieval spirituality and its admonition to dwell in the wounds of Christ in order to know the suffering he endured on behalf of mankind. It was this embodied understanding of the Passion that characterized late medieval piety. By re-forming the object, the viewer achieves a type of immortality, yet, at the same time, dies.” Sadler D., Stone, Flesh, Spirit: The Entombment of Christ in Late Medieval Burgundy and Champagne (Leiden – Boston: 2015), 44–45.

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manifestations of La Somme le roi. Elina Gertsman has observed in her study of Danse Macabre iconography that the visual object stands not only as a trace or recording of a past or idealized ritual performance, but also as a script for its internalized, but no less authentic reenactment.5 Likewise, I argue here that in the visual representations of Last Rites found in these two disparate copies of La Somme le roi, the books’ users are invited to become artists of the good death. 1

Representing Death in the Somme le roi, 1311

Composed by a Dominican friar named Laurent at the request of King Philip III of France, La Somme le roi enjoyed a particularly long and successful life as both a didactic and a devotional guide.6 It begins with careful, line-by-line translations and short, practical expositions of the Latin texts of the Decalogue and the Apostles’ Creed, proceeds to a lengthier yet still systematic examination of the Seven Deadly Sins, then to a succinct tract, the Eloge de la vertu, on the art of dying well, and finally on to the piece de resistance, a complex exploration of the ‘five sevens’ – Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Beatitudes, Petitions of the Pater Noster, Spiritual Virtues, and their contrary Vices.7 In addition to the original French version, the text circulated in translation in Italian, English, Provencal, Catalan, Castilian, and Dutch.8 The earliest manuscripts, dating to 5  Gertsman E., The Dance of Death, 14 et in passim. 6  The critical edition of the text, cited above, is based on a dated manuscript of 1295 (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Ms. 870). 7  Notably, the seven sacraments are not included in La Somme le roi’s septenary scheme; this despite the fact that the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais is generally credited with the correlation between the sacraments and the Cardinal and Theological virtues. On Vincent’s septenary, see Rubin M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: 1991) 102. 8  Philological studies of La Somme le roi and its translations include: Quetif Jacques – Echard Jacques, Scriptores ordinis Prædicatorum recensiti, notisque historicis et criticis illustrate, 2 vols. (Paris, Ballard et Simart: 1719–1721) I 386–388; Meyer P., “Notice sur le manuscrit 27 de la Bibliothèque d’Alençon (Somme le Roi. – Vies des saints, en prose)”, Bulletin de la Société des anciens textes français 18 (1892) 68–93; Fowler R. E., Une source française des poèmes de Gower (Mâcon: 1905); Tinbergen D. C., Des Coninx Summe (Leiden: 1907); Mandonnet P., “Laurent d’Orléans auteur de la Somme-le-roi”, Revue des langues romanes 56 (1913) 20–23; Langlois C.-V., La Vie en France au Moyen-Age IV, La Vie Spirituelle (Paris: 1928) 123–98; Francis W. N., The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century English Translation of the Somme le Roi of Lorens d’Orléans, Edited from the Three Extant Manuscripts, Early English Text Society Original Series 217 (London: 1942); Brayer É., La Somme le Roi: Edition du MS Mazarine 870, avec Introduction, Ph.D. dissertation (Ecole nationale des Chartes: 1940); “Contenu, Structure

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the mid-1290s, are luxurious copies that contain, or once contained, a cycle of fifteen full-page illuminations executed by Parisian or Messin illuminators. The four earliest manuscripts, along with three more from the early fourteenth century, feature a striking degree of iconographic consistency for an illustrated vernacular text of this period, and further copies continue to reproduce the main features of the standard picture cycle throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.9 The Eloge de la vertu, which falls at the textual midpoint of La Somme le roi, between the treatise on Vice and that on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, belongs to the category of literature known as ars moriendi. Its opening verse, quoted at the beginning of this essay, makes quite clear the purpose of the text, and it goes about this business with characteristically Dominican thoroughness. In case of any uncertainty about why one might want to learn the art of dying, in the standard picture cycle of La Somme le roi established by the manuscripts of the 1290s, the illustration for the Eloge is the Last Judgment [Fig. 15.1]. The upper register emphasizes Christ’s dual role as sacrificial victim and judge, with both the instruments and wounds of the Passion and the kneeling figures of Mary and John the Evangelist as intercessors. The middle register depicts the resurrection of the dead, who are often given specific attributes to indicate their high social status. In the lower register, the damned are carried off to hell to suffer their vividly-imagined torments while the blessed proceed in an orderly fashion towards the un-depicted pleasures of paradise, stage right. The picture could serve as a point of departure for the meditation counselled by Friar Laurent, who urges his reader to leave the physical body behind for a time while embarking on a mental journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven: ‘Thus, if you wish to know what is good and what is evil, go outside yourself, outside the world; learn to die. Sever your spirit from your body through

et Combinaisons du Miroir de Monde”, Romania 79 (1958) 1–38, 433–470; Carruthers L. M., La “Somme le Roi” et ses traductions anglaises: étude comparée (Paris: 1986); and LeurquinLabie A-F., “Mise en page et mise en texte dans les manuscrits de la Somme le roi”, in Charon A. – Diu I. – Parinet É. (eds.), La mise en page du livre religieux, XIIIe–XXe siècle. Actes de la journée d’étude de l’Institut d’histoire du livre organisée par l’École nationale des chartes (Paris, 13 décembre 2001), Études et rencontres de l’École des chartes 13 (Paris: 2004) 9–25. 9  The four manuscripts are Paris, BnF Ms. lat. 938 (1294), Paris, Bib. Maz. Ms. 870 (1295), London, British Library Additional Ms. 28162 (undated, probably 1290–1294), and Additional Ms. 54180 (undated, probably 1295). For a detailed discussion of these early manuscripts, see Kosmer E., A Study of the Style and Iconography of a Thirteenth-Century Somme le roi (British Museum Ms. Add. 54180), Ph.D. dissertation (Yale University: 1973); and Rouse R. – Rouse M., Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200–1500, 2 vols. (Turnhout: 2000) I 145–167.

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“Last Judgment”, from La Somme le Roi, Paris (1295). Manuscript illumination, 194 × 133 mm. Paris, Bibl. Mazarine, Ms. 870, fol. 44 verso © Bibliothèque Mazarine

thought; send your heart to the other side, that is, to heaven, to hell, to purgatory; there you will see that which is good and that which is evil’.10 In most manuscripts of La Somme le roi with a full cycle of pictures, this reminder of the ultimate fate of all the dead seems to have been enough. But 10  L a Somme le roi, 40 § 53–54: ‘Donc se tu veuz savoir que est biens et que est maus, is hors de toi, is hors dou monde; apren a morir. Dessevre t’ame dou cors par pensee; envoie ton cuer en l’autre siècle, c’est ou ciel, en enfer, en purgatoire; la verras tu que est biens, que est maus’.

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in the 1311 manuscript written by an otherwise unattested scribe, Lambert le Petit, and painted in the region of Picardy for Jeanne, Countess of Guînes and Eu, additional pictorial elements allow the artist to explore such themes in greater depth.11 Throughout the manuscript, the already dense pictorial program is augmented and subtly adapted to address Jeanne’s role as a moral and spiritual guide and guardian in her capacity as widow, ruler in her own right, and regent for her minor son. Where earlier luxury manuscripts of La Somme le were content with elaborately foliated initials, the initials at the divisions of the text in Jeanne’s manuscript burgeon with human action. A youthful figure scrambles up a ladder over a black pit in the initial for the fourth branch of pride, clerkly ambition (folio 22r); a man dispenses bread to the poor under the rubric, ‘On the virtue of charity’ (folio 71r); a kneeling woman, perhaps the book’s owner, prays under the watchful gaze of God at the opening of an exposition on the Pater Noster (76v). All of these initials, and many more, perform the abstract ideas of vice, virtue, or devotion found in the verbal text and provide a workaday counterpoint to the allegorical and historical episodes found in the full-page miniatures. They constitute a running commentary on the text, translating its metaphors and figures into plain, bodily terms, perhaps in imitation of the way a spiritual advisor or teacher might have aided the book’s reader. The Countess Jeanne, who likely commissioned this book as an instructional tool for her young son might have found its historiated initials useful in discussing its moral instructions with a child. Jeanne’s Somme le roi contains the usual full-page miniature at the opening of the Eloge [Fig. 15.2]; in this instance, unlike the earlier manuscripts, the blessed in the lowest of the three registers are naked, while the risen dead in the middle register are clothed (except for the one woman), indicating their social status. Furthermore, Christ himself is shown leading the blessed into heaven, rather than Saint Peter, as seen in earlier versions. Finally, the elimination of the earlier versions’ partition of the background in the lowest register puts the saved in an uncomfortably continuous space with the damned, and the artist has added some disturbing details, particularly the figure trussed and spitted over the flames, turned by a pair of demons, one of whom wields a longhandled comb-like implement that might well be the sort of torture-weapon imagined by Dante in his contemporary description of the Malebranche tormenting the corrupt officials in the Malebolge. The nudity of the saved and the 11  Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 6329. A digital facsimile is available on Gallica: URL http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55006387b. Accessed 9 June 2018. For more on this manuscript, see Sand A., “Virtuous Bodies: La Somme le roi of Countess Jeanne of Guînes and Eu”, in Patton P. – Golden J. (eds.) Tributes to Adelaide Bennett Hagens: Manuscripts, Iconography, and the Late Medieval Viewer (Turnhout: 2017) 41–68.

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“Last Judgment”, from La Somme le roi, Picardy (1311). Manuscript illumination, 215 × 150 mm. Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal, Ms. 6329, fol. 54 verso © BnF

particularly gruesome nature of the tortures of hell echo the written text’s emphasis on the bodily nature of death and damnation: ‘burning flames, stinking sulfur, roiling storms, horrible devils, hunger, thirst that cannot be quenched, a multitude of torments, tears, and pains beyond what the heart can imagine or the tongue express; lasting forever, without end’.12 All of this sets the stage for 12  L a Somme le roi, 41 § 6–8, 176: ‘Feu ardant, sofre puant, tempeste bruiant, deables horribles, fain, soif qui estanchier ne puet, divers tormenz, pleurs, doleurs plus que cuers ne porroit penser ne langue deviser; et touz jors dureront senz fin’.

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a particularly frightening contemplation of the wages of sin and underscores the urgency for making a good death. Facing this foreboding image, at the opening of the Eloge, in an initial A that does not in fact represent the first letter of the text (an E, written to the letter’s right), we see an adult man, sick and in bed, attended by a pair of monks in white habits who appear to minister to him [Fig. 15.3]. Except for the strange fact that it represents an unnecessary letter, this little initial is so much in keeping with the others in its series, that it is easy to overlook how notable it really is, in iconographic terms. It is one of the earliest examples of an explicit depiction of the sacrament of Extreme Unction, outside the context of liturgical books that specifically describe the rite (and even in liturgical books it is very rarely depicted before 1350).13 While the notion of anointing the sick with holy oil had biblical precedent, like many other aspects of sacramental theology it began to take definite liturgical form only in the ninth century, and was not explicitly described as Extreme Unction until the late tenth or early eleventh century.14 Its precise sacramental nature and action were up for debate in numerous Scholastic treatises of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Peter Lombard, in his Sentences, Book IV, distinction 23, traces it to its apostolic origins in James 5:14–15, ‘Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in the priests of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick man: and the Lord shall raise him up: and if he be in sins, they shall be forgiven him’.15 Peter conceived its efficacy, however, as being in equal parts spiritual and physical: ‘This sacrament was instituted for a double cause, namely for the remission of sins, and for the relief of bodily infirmity’. Sometimes, the recipient does not experience the latter; as Peter notes, ‘if perhaps it is not expedient that he should have bodily health, he acquires in this sacrament that health which pertains to the soul’.16 By the end of the thirteenth century, the rite focused more specifically on the dying, and its theological conception was as a cure not primarily for 13  Another very early example is an English Psalter, possibly from London or Canterbury, of the second decade of the fourteenth century, where four monks administer unction to a dying brother; emphasis is on the objects they carry. See Morgan Ms. G.53, fol. 150 recto. URL: http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/15/76992. Accessed 11 July 2018. This is the initial o for the ‘Ordo uisitande infirmari’, so, as in the liturgical books, it is associated directly with the liturgical care of the sick and dying. 14  Porter H. B., “The Origin of the Medieval Rite for Anointing the Sick or Dying”, Journal of Theological Studies, ns 7 (1956) 212; and Poschmann B., Penance and Anointing of the Sick, trans. F. Courtney (Freiburg – London: 1964) 242–257. 15  Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 4 On the Doctrine of Signs, trans. G. Silano (Toronto: 2010) 136–137. Biblical citations are from the Douay-Rheims edition (reprint of 1899 edition, Rockford, IL: 1971). 16  Ibidem.

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Incipit, “Eloge de la vertu”, from La Somme le roi, Picardy (1311). Manuscript illumination, 215 × 150 mm. Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal, Ms. 6329, fol. 55 recto © BnF

bodily ailments, but for the wounds of sin, preparing the soul for its entrance into glory.17 The initial depicts one of the monks reaching with both hands towards the face of the sufferer. In the rite of Extreme Unction as it was established in pontificals of the period, the impositio manuum, which preceded the administration of the viaticum, or final Communion, involved anointing the 17  Rouillard P., “The Anointing of the Sick in the West”, in Chupungco A., Handbook for Liturgical Studies, Volume IV: Sacraments and Sacramentals (Collegeville: 2016) 171–190, at 177.

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afflicted person on the organs of the five senses – eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and fingertips.18 Rare, earlier depictions the rite, such as an initial from a midtwelfth century copy of Hugh of Saint Victor’s collected works [Fig. 15.4], tend to represent less specific actions, while later initials, such as that found in a Sens pontifical of the third quarter of the fourteenth century [Fig. 15.5], share the 1311 Somme le roi’s focus on the impositio manuum.19 Regardless, the iconography of Extreme Unction remained rare throughout the fourteenth century.20 In many books of hours for lay people, the Office of the Dead, a logical place to envision Extreme Unction, is given over instead to the depiction of the funeral or vigil of the dead. The miniature of Extreme Unction at the opening of the Eloge in the 1311 La Somme le roi reflects a wider investment in the dead made by its patron, Countess Jeanne. Widowed in 1302 when her husband, Jean II of Brienne, Count of Eu was killed at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, Jeanne was also in her own right the Countess of Guînes. For many years, she governed both counties, 18  According to Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, vol. III, trans. Anonymous (New York: Benzinger Bros., 1948) Question 32, article 6: ‘Now all our knowledge has its origin in the senses. And, since the remedy for sin should be applied where sin originates in us first, for that reason the places of the five senses are anointed. the eyes, to wit, on account of the sight, the ears on account of hearing, the nostrils on account of the smell, the mouth on account of the taste, the hands, on account of the touch which is keenest in the finger tips, (in some places too the loins are anointed on account of the appetite), and the feet are anointed on account of the motive power of which they are the chief instrument. And since the cognitive power is the first principle of human activity, the anointing of the five senses is observed by all, as being essential to the sacrament. But some do not observe the other unctions – some also anoint the feet but not the loins – because the appetitive and motive powers are secondary principles’. See digitized edition at URL (http://dhspriory. org/thomas/summa/XP/XP032.html#XPQ32A5THEP1), accessed 18 April 2018. 19  Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Ms. 729 fol. 180 recto; Arras, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 986 (882), fol. 109 recto. 20  One exception is the Belleville Breviary winter volume (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. lat. 10483), dated just after Jeanne’s manuscript to 1323–1326. Here Vincent of Beauvais’ scheme of sacraments and virtues is worked out in relation to the Psalter; in the basde-page illumination under Psalm 26 (folio 17 verso), three scenes correlate the sin of despair, figured by the suicide of Judas, to its remedies – the virtue of Hope and its related sacrament, Extreme Unction. Here, though, the scriptural precedent is invoked by the appearance of an apostle, presumably James, in the turret of the house in which the dying man receives the sacrament in the form of the dove of the holy spirit touching his breast, and as the caption notes, imbuing him with the gift of Wisdom. Although both La Somme le roi and the Belleville Breviary share a Dominican context, their iconography of Extreme Unction is different enough to rule out a direct relationship. For a digital facsimile of the Belleville Breviary, see: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8451634m/f1.planchecontact. r=, accessed 9 June 2018. Also see Sandler L. F., “Jean Pucelle and the Lost Miniatures of the Belleville Breviary”, Art Bulletin 66 (1984) 73–96 at 77–78.

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figure 15.4

“Last Rites”, initial to chapter fifteen, Hugh of Saint-Victor, “De Sacrementis”, from Hugh of Saint-Victor, Opera, central France, possibly Vendôme (1140–1150). Manuscript illumination, 75 × 91 mm. Paris, Bibl. Mazarine, Ms. 729, fol. 180 recto or verso? © Bibliothèque Mazarine

figure 15.5

“Extreme Unction”, initial for the office of the unction of the sick, Sens Pontifical, Paris (ca. 1350–1375). Manuscript illumination, 85 × 81 mm. Arras, Bibl. Mun., Ms. 986, fol. 109 recto © Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes – CNRS

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regent for Eu on behalf of her only surviving child, Raoul I of Brienne, who was still quite young in 1311.21 Elsewhere, I have detailed Jeanne’s involvement in the funerary monuments installed at the comital necropolis of Eu, the Cistercian monastery of Notre Dame and Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Foucarmont, and her particular care to have Jean II’s body disinterred from its battlefield grave and returned to Eu.22 The depiction of a seemly and ritually correct enactment of Extreme Unction for a grown man on his deathbed could be viewed as a pictorial antidote to the harsh truth of Jean II’s demise at a battle famous for the wholesale slaughter of the French knights by their lower-class Flemish enemies, perhaps alluded to by the two men fighting with clubs who stand on the stem of the rinceau that frames the lower edge of the text-block [Fig. 15.3]. Where the real Jean was hacked to death and buried in situ before being disinterred and reburied several years later, his pictorial counterpart receives Extreme Unction in a decorous setting, reclining in his own bed, assured thereby of his safe passage through the door to paradise depicted in the lower left of the facing miniature. In commissioning her copy of La Somme le roi, Jeanne was in effect orchestrating not only her own good death through virtuous life, but also, posthumously, that of her husband, and above all, it is likely, that of their son. Whatever Jeanne’s – or the illuminator’s – motivation for including the depiction of Extreme Unction, it marks a very early moment in which the process of dying rather than what happens to the body or soul after death receives any visual attention. This, however, would change over the course of the fourteenth century, as a visual vocabulary of dying developed alongside a more robust iconography of the sacraments. Michael Camille observes that a visual fascination with corpses in various states of decay was produced by an awareness of the body as representation: the decomposing corpse as ‘a static image in the process of becoming nothing’.23 Concurrently on the rise was the dissection of the dead for both medical and hagiographic purposes, alongside the mos teutonica, the division of the corpses of the princely dead for distributed interment.24 Paul Binski, who argues for an understanding of the fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury fascination with the macabre as ‘an internal development of medieval 21  On Jeanne’s governance, see Lebailly É., “Le connétable d’Eu et son cercle nobilaire: Le réseau de familiers d’un grand seigneur au XIV siècle”, Cahiers de recherches médievales et humanistes 13 (2006) 41–52. 22  Sand, “Virtuous Bodies” 44–47. 23  Camille M., Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet Illuminator (New Haven – London: 1996) 176. 24  See Bynum C. W., The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: 1995) 322–326.

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visual culture itself’, rather than as a product of any particular social, psychological, or biological factor, observes that the transi tomb, representing the morbidly decaying body of the deceased ‘acted […] to challenge and expose the myths and silences of the decorous medieval effigial tomb’.25 In this account, the bodies of the soon-to-be and recently dead became a field of visual representation unto themselves, and so it is not surprising that alongside the development of a repertoire of grotesquely dissolving corpses emerged an iconography of the transitional stage between the living body and the dead – that is to say, the passage marked by Extreme Unction and final Communion. Imagery of the sacraments, and of Extreme Unction among them, became more widespread in Books of Hours and related prayer-books for the laity over the half-century between about 1390 and 1440; for example, Extreme Unction appears in the bas-de-page both in the cycle of the seven sacraments associated with the Hours of the Holy Spirit in the Très Belles Heures de Notre-Dame and of the Matins of the Dead in the Dunois Hours.26 Visual depiction of the sacraments was grounded in the codification of liturgical forms, a process acknowledged and reinforced by the full ecclesiastical recognition of the seven sacraments at the Council of Florence in 1439.27 To see representations of the sacraments was, to some degree, to witness the action of the Holy Spirit in the world, even if these representations were in a book, rather than a live performance. Could a sacrament, indeed, be manifest in the visual contemplation of the actions that represent and reify the Holy Spirit?28 At the very least, the iconographic codification of the Sacraments in liturgical books as well as in such monumental works as Rogier van der Weyden’s Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments (1445–1450), discussed by so many of the essays in this collection, gave visible form to the ineffable.

25  Binski P., Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY: 1996) 133–134, 151. 26  London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 3, f. 211. Also in the Belleville Breviary, fol. 17 verso, cited in n. 19 above. 27  Session 8, November 22, 1439, Bull of Union with the Armenians, online: https://www .ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/FLORENCE.HTM#3. Accessed 9 June 2018. 28  The Council is not specific about pictorial versus performative manifestations of the action of the Holy Spirit, but there is ample precedent for the late-medieval concept of ‘occular’ or ‘visual’ communion, in which the visual perception of the Eucharist or the visual contemplation of Eucharistic imagery stands in for bodily (oral) participation in the rite. See Rubin M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge:1991) 63–64, 150; Biernoff S., Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke – New York: 2002) 133–164.

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Appropriating the Iconography of Dying from the Ars Moriendi, 1508

Alongside the development of an iconography of the sacraments, the depiction of mortal illness and death in general became far more elaborate and loaded with narrative, moralizing, and allegorical elements, or as Roger Chartier puts it, ‘In the fifteenth century, a novel sensibility that translated and fashioned a new image-vocabulary placed death at its center’.29 This was in part due to official Church support for the development of a curriculum of the ars moriendi. A six-chapter text known as the Tractatus artis bene moriendi is dated to 1415 and attributed to a Dominican friar who may have composed it at the request of the Council of Constance.30 The work appears to have been intended as a practical tool for the clergy in their ministry to the sick and dying, but it also gave rise to a shorter version directed more immediately toward the laity, the Ars Moriendi, which began to circulate widely with the introduction of blockbooks in the 1460s.31 Printed in a variety of languages in over seventy incunable editions, the Ars Moriendi includes eleven woodblock prints that illustrate five temptations to sin that might afflict the mortally ill, five remedies for that temptation, and the good death as an outcome of the practice of avoiding sin. The iconography of these prints is fairly standardized, as seen in the famous early series of engravings by Master E.S., dating to around 1464, probably based on a source such as the South German manuscript of about 1420 now in the Wellcome Library.32 Xylographic editions, in which both image and text are carved as woodblocks, proliferated in Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, and most other European languages. But the pictorial blocks were not limited to use in such simple editions alone. They could be reused in typographic editions of the longer Ars moriendi text and its variants, or in books 29  C  hartier R., “Les arts de mourir, 1450–1600”, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 31 (1976) 51. My translation. 30  For a short summary of the debates of authorship for the text, see Campbell J., “The Ars Moriendi”: An Examination, Translation, and Collation of the Manuscripts of the Shorter Latin Version, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Ottawa: 1995) 4–6. 31  On the Ars moriendi, see (in addition to Chartier and Campbell cited above) O’Connor M. C., The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: 1942); Saxl F., “A Spiritual Encyclopedia of the Later Middle Ages”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942) 82–142; Rudolf R., Ars moriendi: Von der Kunst des heilsamen Lebens und Sterbens (Cologne – Graz: 1957); Beaty N. L., The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven, CT: 1970); and Appleford A., Learning to Die in London, 1380–1450 (Philadelphia: 2015). 32  See Stevenson A., “The Quincentennial of Netherlandish Blockbooks”, British Museum Quarterly 31 (1967) 86.

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containing altogether different texts. And because it was a standard practice of early printers across Europe to reuse illustration blocks across a variety of editions in order to economize, it is not surprising to find these lively and even somewhat humorous depictions of the sordid business of dying frequently deployed in new settings. This is how blocks from the Ars moriendi group ended up in the swan-song edition of La Somme le roi. In 1507, the London printer Wynkyn de Worde published a second edition of the translation his mentor, William Caxton, had first printed in 1486 as the Ryal boke, grandiosely retitled The Boke Named the Royall.33 Unlike Caxton’s edition, which featured a modest program of woodblock illustrations borrowed mostly from his edition of the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (1486), De Worde’s edition opens with a splashy xylographic title page and fills the text full of woodcuts drawn from the printer’s considerable stock of moralizing, theological, and biblical images. The title-page [Fig. 15.6] incorporates one of the Ars moriendi woodblocks that De Worde owned, a clumsy copy of the blocks used by the foremost French printer of the day, Antoine Vérard, in his 1496 Paris edition of Guillaume Tardif’s L’Art de bien mourir, a MiddleFrench translation (and liberal expansion) of the Ars moriendi dedicated to Charles VIII of France. De Worde originally deployed these blocks in his 1505 edition of Andrew Chertsey’s translation of Tardif, The crafte to lyue well and to dye well.34 The title-page image is the fifth subject from the Ars moriendi series: the temptation to impatience. The sick man kicks the doctor who has come to tend him, overturns a table of food, and invites the attention of a devil who creeps out from under his bed. In The crafte to lyue well and its French model, the banderoles contained moralizing Latin text, set into the block using the process of factotum printing, but here the Latin has been scrambled into nonsense or near-sense, perhaps so as not to distract from the pictorial image itself. De Worde’s audience, which surely included people who owned or had at least come across copies of one of the most popular illustrated books of the day, would have quickly recognized both the picture and its source; they may also have registered the nonsense quality of the inscriptions, but what this might have meant to them is an open question.35 Jordan Kirk argues that 33  For English editions, I cite the English Short Title Catalog (ESTC) index numbers. The database is online at http://estc.bl.uk/, accessed 9 June 2018. Caxton’s Ryal book: ESTC 21429; De Worde’s The boke named the royall: ESTC 21430(a). 34   E STC 792. 35  Kirk J., Theories of the Nonsense Word in Medieval England, Ph.D. dissertation (Princeton University: 2013), and idem, “The Hideous Noise of Prayer: The Cloud of Unknowing on the Syllable-Word”, Exemplaria 28 (2016) 97–117.

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“The Temptation of Impatience”, title-page, The boke named the royall, trans. William Caxton (Fleet Street, London, Wynkyn de Worde – Richard Pynson: 1507). Woodcut, 102.5 × 102 mm Photo by author, taken by permission of the Folger Library, Washington, D.C.

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nonsense was a particular preoccupation of literary culture in fourteenth-century England, and that its anti-logical character imbued it with apophatic mystical implications, so it seems possible that the inscrutable pseudo-Latin of the title page here gestures towards the spiritual aims of the book itself. A related question has to do with the choice of this woodblock, with its clear association with the Ars moriendi blockbook tradition, as the frontispiece image to The boke named the royall. Certainly, there is no obvious connection between the title and the image; the sick man is hardly regal. The linked themes of sickness, sin, and mortality, however, are apposite. La Somme le roi is fundamentally a text intended for layfolk who wish to ensure the eternal salvation of their own souls; time and again, in both the original French and in Caxton’s translation, the reader is encouraged to contemplate the torments that accrue to those who live and die in sin. The Eloge de la vertue, falling at the middle of the text in terms of its length and the distrubition of its traditional picture cycle, is truly the linchpin of the whole enterprise, as it is the part of the book that most directly addresses the notion of life as a preparation for death, and death as the central, transformative event in the spiritual history of each and every soul. In describing dying as something to be learned, La Somme le roi focuses on the individual’s agency. Similarly, the woodblock from the Ars moriendi chosen by De Worde as a title page image for his edition of the text places the dying man at the center of the representation. The anxious presence of the woman (a wife?) and the physician, both of whom ought perhaps to be of greater use to the dying man, and the servant, whose help the sufferer violently rejects, may serve as a visual reminder to the book’s potential user that in the end, it is up to the individual to learn to die well, that is, to learn to live well by practicing the virtues and resisting the nonsensical, demon, voices of sin.36 Notably, The boke named the royall includes one other image drawn from the eleven-block sequence of illustrations in the Ars moriendi at the opening of the Eloge de la vertue itself: the “Good Death” [Fig. 15.7]. In the block-book tradition, this is the final image in the series and the only one not designed to operate as one of an opposed pair of temptation to sin and remedial virtue. It celebrates instead the instant of mortality with a triumphal account of the good death as victory over evil. The moribund man reclines peacefully in his bed, ministered to by a priest who steadies a candle in his hand; angels gather above the 36  The conception of the dying individual as ‘alone in a crowd’ in sixteenth-century deathbed ritual is lucidly discussed by Edward Muir, who writes, ‘According to the art of dying … the sick or injured person was to die in bed, surrounded by a room full of people. However, the living were unable to see the real drama faced by the dying person who watched a supernatural spectacle visible to him alone’. Muir E., Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition (Cambridge: 2005), 52.

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“The Good Death”, frontispiece to the “Eloge de la vertu”, in The boke named the royall (Fleet Street, London, Wynkyn de Worde – Richard Pynson: 1507). Woodcut, 100 × 100 mm Photo by author, taken by permission of the Folger Library, Washington, D.C.

bedstead and draw his small, naked soul upwards, while the Crucifixion appears with a host of saints in the upper left quadrant. Below the bed, a crowd of demons gesticulate and grimace, expressing their frustration at losing the battle for the soul. Banderoles proclaim their laments, this time with legible Latin inscriptions that match those found in the earlier block-book tradition. One proclaims, ‘Our hope has come to nothing’, while another ‘We have lost this soul’, a third, ‘I am consumed with rage’, a fourth, ‘We are confounded’, and a fifth, succinctly, ‘Oh, ill luck’.37 The noisy, verbose exclamations, expressed in the Latin of the liturgy, contrast the wordless culmination of the soul’s liberation from the body, above. Like Christ, who hangs dead on the cross, the soul is silent. Even in this not-particularly-well-crafted rendition, the scene renders 37  ‘Spes nobis nulla’, ‘Animam amisimus’, ‘Furore consumor’, ‘Confusi sumus’, ‘Heu infame’.

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the dramatic hush of the moment after that described in Matthew 27:50 when ‘Jesus again crying with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost’. The play between noise and silence, words and wordlessness links this image to the rite of Extreme Unction, as do the presence of the priest, the candle in the dead man’s hands, and the image of the Crucifixion, all of which were elements in the performance of this sacrament.38 In a sense, the woodblock print envisions the view of the sacrament from within, that is, from the perspective of the dying soul itself, capable of perceiving the drama invisible to the living. If the title-page image represents the book’s reader as a sick and dying soul in need of spiritual aid, mired in nonsense, and prey to demonic ruses and wretched pain, the “Good Death” depicted at the beginning of the Eloge holds out a promise of redemption through Christ. Suffering and demonic torment giveway to the angelic embrace. Further borrowings from the ars moriendi illustration tradition, specifically as manifested in Vérard’s oeuvre and in De Worde’s 1505 The crafte to lyue well, crop up throughout The boke named the royall, indicating that De Worde situated the book as belonging to the category of literature concerned with the ‘craft’ of dying (in which he published numerous volumes). The idea that dying (and by this could be meant a whole approach to living) is a skill, an art, or a craft to be learned rather than simply the inevitable fate of all men, fundamental to this genre, meshed with De Worde’s own craft as a printer – meticulous, demanding, and when exercised properly, profitable. However, in addition to framing The boke named the royall as an ars moriendi, De Worde also reused pictorial material from works more specifically concerned with sacramental theology. The upper block on the frontispiece page to The boke named the royall comes from The crafte to lyue well, but the lower block is borrowed from another 1506 collaboration between Andrew Chertsey and De Worde, Thordynary of crysten men, a translation of the popular French work, L’Ordinaire des crestiens, which appeared in over twenty editions between 1485 and 1514, of which eight were published by Vérard [Fig. 15.8].39 In its original context, the block and 38  On the liturgical use of candles in Extreme Unction, see Jolly P. H., Picturing the Pregnant Magdalene in Northern Art, 1430–1550: Addressing and Undressing the Sinner-Saint (Farnham, Surrey – Burlington, VT: 2014), 77; and Garces-Foley K., Death and Religion in a Changing World (London: 2006) 100. Although the placement of the candle in the hands of the dying is not prescribed in sacramentaries, it is often commented upon by Protestant critics of Catholic ritual, and is clearly part of the iconography of Last Rites in the Ars moriendi. 39  Thordenary: ESTC 5199. On L’Ordinaire, see Pettegree A. – Walsby M. – Wilkinson A., French Vernacular Books: Books Published in the French Language before 1601/Livres vernaculaires francais: Livres imprimes en francais avant 1601, 2 vols. (Leiden – Boston, MA: 2007) I 448–449, nos. 39894–39915. Vérard’s early editions (1490–1494) do not contain

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figure 15.8

Frontispiece to The boke named the royall (Fleet Street, London, Wynkyn de Worde – Richard Pynson: 1507), with “Christ Teaching” (above), and “The Five Commandments of the Church” (below). Woodcut, 70 × 100 mm (above), 68 × 100 mm (below) Photo by author, taken by permission of the Folger Library, Washington, D.C.

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its factotum-printed text serve as the opening to part II, chapter 16, in which the ‘five commandments of the Church’ are spelled out: keeping the Sabbath, annual confession, Eastertide communion, the keeping of feast days, and the keeping of the four major Lenten fasts.40 The sacramental and liturgical emphasis of these five commandments is underscored in the picture by the presence of a pope, the embodiment of the Roman church, on the left, properly honoured by a bishop and two deacons, while an emperor and several kings kneel to the right. The source for this image, found in several of the French editions of the Ordinaire, is a bit more polished, but conveys the same message of papal power and the subjugation of worldly powers to that of Rome. In both its original catechistic setting in Thordynary, and in The boke named the royall, the Five Commandments block situates the text and the doctrine and praxis it advocates within the sphere of orthodox Catholic religion, emphasizing the centrality of the Church and its clergy for the efficacious salvation of souls. The sick soul, thrashing on its deathbed, certainly seems to need this strong medicine. Wynkyn de Worde thus introduces into the pictorial world of La Somme le roi an element of institutional religion and ideology not strongly present in its first incarnation, largely because it was not as necessary in 1279 as in 1507 to argue for the Catholic Church’s authority. England in the early sixteenth century was a hotbed of anti-papal and anti-sacramental impulses, with a distinctive uptick in either the practice of Lollardy or its detection and persecution, between the 1490s and 1520s, as Richard Rex has argued.41 De Worde’s choice of imagery for his edition of Caxton’s translation of La Somme le roi may reflect a climate of increasing anxiety about vernacular language as a vehicle for religion, with its implications of ‘popular’ anti-clericalism. Although only the Eloge de la vertu specifically casts itself as a meditation on dying well, as I have already noted the whole of La Somme le roi constitutes an ars moriendi, based on the premise that to live well is to prepare oneself for a good death. Amy Appleford contends that religious dread and suffering from guilt over one’s inevitably sinful state were central themes in the spiritual lives of upper-class Londoners in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.42 These urban merchants, gentry, and nobles were the clientelle for a variety of textual and pictorial artes moriendi in which the physical and spiritual torments of terminal illness were cast as the framework for spiritual enlightenment and woodblocks; some luxury copies do, however have a program of illumination. The five commandments text is not illuminated in the copy at the BnF (VELINS-357, 1494). 40  The “Five Commandments” text appears to date to the middle of the fifteenth century. See Villien A., A History of the Commandments of the Church (St. Louis, MO: 1915) 1–13. 41  Rex R., The Lollards (New York: 2002) 113–114. 42  Appleford, Learning to Die 103–105.

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liberation. In its original pictorial form, and in its textual contents, La Somme le roi has far more in common with confessional and penitential practices than with this more extreme approach to handling sin, but De Worde knew his audience. In selecting the image of the impatient sick man for the title page, he demonstrated a keen critical understanding of how to frame Frère Laurent’s text. In a sense, the sick man is the reader – the sinner – impatient to benefit from the book’s tuition. The scrambled Latin of the scrolls may even resonate with the book user’s urgent need for the patient translation and clarification of religious principles contained within its pages. The deployment of the Five Commandments block as a frontispiece serves as a reminder to the book’s user that only within the sacramental structures of the orthodox Catholic religion can the soul be redeemed, no matter how scrupulously the moral teachings of the text are otherwise followed. Finally, the use of the image of the Good Death, in effect a visual dramatisation of the spiritual action embedded in the Last Rites, holds out the promise that after the struggle, and within the embrace of the Church, the soul may achieve its release from mortal suffering and sin. 3

A Joyful Conclusion: Envisioning Last Rites

The verses that open both this essay and the Eloge de la vertue encourage the reader to live freely by learning to die joyfully. Joy may not be the first emotion a modern viewer thinks of when looking at the 1311 manuscript’s imagery of death, including the full-page miniature of the Last Judgment and the initial depicting Extreme Unction, but for the countess Jeanne, as for her contemporaries, these are indeed evocative of the deepest wellspring of Christian spiritual joy, namely union with God. The blessed led off to heaven by Jesus himself are already fully, bodily in the company of God, while the dying man receiving the chrism prepares for this joyous reunion. The insertion of the sacramental imagery into the pictorial program of La Somme le roi in this manuscript connects the (idealised) ritual experience of Last Rites with the iconography of last things, visualising the invisible action of the sacrament itself as it sanctifies the soul in preparation for death. As Peter Lombard had written a century and a half earlier, ‘A sacrament is properly so called, which is a sign of the grace of God and the form of invisible grace, in as much as it bears the likeness of the grace and is its cause. Thus, the sacraments were instituted for the sake not only of signifying but of sanctifying’.43 Contemplating the image of a 43  Lombard Peter, Libri IV Sententiarum, ed. P. P. Collegii S. Bonaventurae (Quaracchi: 1916), vol. 2, Sent. IV, d. 1, c. 4, a. 2, 233: ‘Sacramentum enim proprie dicitur quod ita signum est

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successful ritual navigation of the process of dying may have amounted to a recuperative, retrospective performance of the Last Rites for the compromised dead of the family, whether those who died suddenly of an illness, or on the battlefield far from home. Even less evocative of joy might be the title-page image in The booke named the royall. The thrashing of the sick man, the gibberish taunting of the demons, and the helplessness of servant, spouse, and physician alike to truly assuage his psychic as well as physical suffering present a dark view of the death process. However, for the viewer familiar with the Ars moriendi tradition as found in blockbooks, this state of agitation and torment is only half the equation; its resolution is to be found, implicitly, in the contents of the book itself, with its sage moral guidance on the good, Christian life, which is ultimately an art or craft of dying well. Wynkyn de Worde delivers on this visual promise with the use of the block depicting the Good Death for the opening of the Eloge de la vertue, placed almost exactly at the midpoint of the book as a whole, and at the turning-point from the text’s focus on vice and sin to its exploration of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and their associated spiritual virtues. The joyous release from physical and spiritual torment depicted in the Good Death block is stated in terms of the (by-now) familiar iconography of the Last Rites. Thus, although entirely different in its form and style to the traditional miniature of Last Judgment and the Extreme Unction initial found in the 1311 manuscript, The boke named the royall shares the earlier version’s visual argument’s key element – the insistence on the sacrament as (in Peter Lombard’s terms) not only representing the soul’s unification with God, but also effectuating it. Across a span of nearly two centuries, the visual engagement of La Somme le roi with the art of dying remained constant. A conception of death as a teachable craft or skill aligns the work of the artist, craftsperson, or patron with a larger, salvific economy; like the priest whose actions and words effectuate the invisible presence and work of the Holy Spirit, perhaps the artist or the person behind the creation of a work of art also functions to some degree as a facilitator of divine intervention. This leads to an even more exhillerating potentiality, namely that as the artist of her or his own death, the spiritually self-disciplined individual might have the power to control or at least influence the ultimate outcome of that passage, and to join in the joyful hymns of the elect in heaven.

gratiae Dei et invisibilis gratiae forma, ut ipsius imaginem gerat et causa existat. Non igitur significandi tantum gratia Sacramenta instituta sunt, sed etiam sanctificandi’. English translation: Peter Lombard, The Sentences Book 4: The Doctrine of Signs, trans. Silano G. (Turnhout: 2010) 4.

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Selective Bibliography Appleford A., Learning to Die in London, 1380–1450 (Philadelphia: 2015). Binski P., Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY: 1996). Bynum C. W., The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: 1995). Camille M., Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet Illuminator (New Haven – London: 1996). Campbell J., The “Ars Moriendi”: An Examination, Translation, and Collation of the Manuscripts of the Shorter Latin Version, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Ottawa: 1995). Chartier R., “Les arts de mourir, 1450–1600”, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 31 (1976) 51–75. Frère Laurent, La Somme le roi. ed. and trans É. Brayer – A.-F. Leurquin-Labie (Abbeville: 2008). Lebailly É., “Le connétable d’Eu et son cercle nobilaire: Le réseau de familiers d’un grand seigneur au XIV siècle”, Cahiers de recherches médievales et humanistes 13 (2006) 41–52. Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 4 On the Doctrine of Signs, trans. G. Silano (Toronto: 2010). Rubin M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: 1991). Sand A., “Virtuous Bodies: La Somme le roi of Countess Jeanne of Guînes and Eu”, in Patton P. – Golden J. (eds.), Tributes to Adelaide Bennett Hagens: Manuscripts, Iconography, and the Late Medieval Viewer (Turnhout: 2017) 41–68. Sandler L. F., “Jean Pucelle and the Lost Miniatures of the Belleville Breviary”, The Art Bulletin 66 (1984) 73–96. Saxl F., “A Spiritual Encyclopedia of the Later Middle Ages”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942) 82–142.

chapter 16

Christ Child Creator David S. Areford In fifteenth-century Europe, images of the Madonna and Child tended to stress the intensely human relationship between mother and son. Perched on the lap of Mary or cradled in her arms, Jesus often appears to be like any other child – sleepy, hungry, playful, and thoroughly dependent – and thus a perfect proof of the validity of the Incarnation. Yet, these depictions also usually indicate through composition, pose, or the inclusion of a telltale sign, such as a piece of fruit, a sheaf of wheat, a certain flower or bird, that the Christ Child is far from a regular kid, with something quite menacing lurking in his future.1 A mid-century German woodcut of the Virgin nursing the infant Jesus, in the collection of Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett, communicates both meanings at the same time [Fig. 16.1].2 Painted in bright blue, yellow, pink, and green, with haloes accented with metal leaf (Zwischgold, a mixture of gold and silver, now oxidised and darkened), the print combines a rich perceptual experience with an equally rich conceptual and symbolic dimension that encompasses the full story of humankind’s fall and redemption through Christ. The interpretative model most often applied to such images is the so-called ‘Proleptic Passion’ (via Latin from the Greek prolepsis, or anticipation), that is, the anachronistic manifestation of Christ’s torture and death in scenes of his Infancy.3 The woodcut conflates the Child’s beginning with his earthly end in a dramatic fashion, expressed primarily through Mary’s conflicted mind and body. As she 1  Schiller G., Iconography of Christian Art, trans. J. Seligman, 2 vols. (Greenwich, CT: 1971–1972) II 196–197, figs. 674–680. 2  Schreiber W. L., Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts, 8 vols. (Leipzig: 1926–1930) no. 1043; and Kristeller P., Holzschnitte im Königl. Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin (Berlin: 1915) 23, no. 109. For another impression of the same print, see entry by Areford D., in Parshall P. – Schoch R., Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC: 2005) 266–268 (cat. 82). Also see, Acres A., Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy (London – Turnhout: 2013) 79, fig. 44. 3  Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art II 196–197; Acres A., “The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World”, The Art Bulletin 80.3 (1998) 422–451, esp. 424, 434; Acres, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy 31–157; and Gertsman E., “Signs of Death: The Sacrificial Christ Child in Late-Medieval Art”, in Dzon M. – Kenney T. M. (eds.), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O! (Toronto: 2012) 66–91.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_017

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figure 16.1 The Virgin Nursing the Christ Child, German, c. 1450–1460. Colored woodcut, 203 × 140 mm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 149–1 Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY

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lifts Jesus to her breast with her left hand, Mary is clearly preoccupied with thoughts of her son’s fate, her foreknowledge literalised by the crucified figure hanging from the cross in her right hand. Since it emphasises Mary’s psychology, the Berlin print can be grouped with related images of the Mother of Sorrows (Schmerzensmutter) and the Sorrows of the Virgin that highlight the full extent of Mary’s anguish, both mental and physical, often through the depiction of the actual wounding of her body. In a German woodcut of the Mother of Sorrows, the dark theme is belied by a rather jubilant vision of a crowned and bejewelled Queen of Heaven framed by a scalloped cloud motif along the lower edge [Fig. 16.2].4 Supported by Mary, Jesus holds several arma Christi or Instruments of the Passion – the cross, crown of thorns, and nails – while a sword pierces his mother’s chest. The sword, with its hilt and blade mirroring the form and diagonal position of the Christ Child’s cross, is explained by the xylographic inscription (i.e. cut into the woodblock). The Latin text is a quote from Luke 2:34–35, the scene of the Presentation in the Temple, specifically the words of Simeon who informs Mary: ‘Behold: this child is set for the fall and for the resurrection of many in Israel […] and thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that out of many hearts thoughts may be revealed’.5 Although there is no sword in the print of the nursing Christ Child [Fig. 16.1], the crucifix’s pointed end transforms the cross into a threatening weapon. The Berlin woodcut’s remaining details – the painted blood drops, the femaleheaded snake, and the piece of fruit – suggest a range of potential interpretations, not unlike a densely poetic scriptural passage that must be carefully parsed in order to tease out its meanings. As Georges Didi-Huberman has put it, in his discussion of the work of Fra Angelico, such images are ‘[…] authentic fields of exegesis: not only brief, illustrated repetitions of textual exegesis but even exegetical inventions […], the ever-renewed and diversifiable production of a thousand and one networks of sacred meaning’.6 Furthermore, in the Berlin print, the various elements are ‘not symbols’ but ‘situations’, as Alfred Acres suggests in his analysis of Rogier van der Weyden’s Columba Altarpiece.7 These situations – compositional, spatial, and temporal – create networks or 4  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 1029; and see entry by Schreiber W. L., in Heitz P., Einblattdrucke des Fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts, 100 vols. (Strasbourg: 1923) LV, no. 3. Also see Areford D. S., The Art of Empathy: The Mother of Sorrows in Northern Renaissance Art and Devotion (London: 2013) 33–43, fig. 25. 5  All biblical citations are from the Douay-Rheims translation. See The Vulgate Bible: DouayRheims Translation, eds. S. Edgar and A. M. Kinney, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 2010–2013). 6  Didi-Huberman G., Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. J. M. Todd (Chicago – London: 1995) 6. 7  Acres, “The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World” 447.

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Mother of Sorrows with Christ Child, German, c. 1470. Colored woodcut, 383 × 264 mm. London, British Museum, 1872,0608.323 © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY

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paths of meaning that lead us forward or backward in time in an endless circuit. Indeed, the repetition of circular forms – the child’s embracing arms, the haloes, the double loops of the snake’s tail, the roundness of Mary’s breast and the piece of fruit – suggest that no single direction is dictated and that we can start or stop at any point. If we begin with the nursing Jesus at the Virgin’s breast, we are inevitably led to the apple-like fruit proffered by the female serpent below. Because Mary was typically regarded as the New Eve and Jesus as the New Adam, her breast is the perfect counterpoint to the fruit wilfully consumed by the first woman and man in the Garden. From the forbidden fruit, it is just a glance upward to the miniature figure of Christ on the cross, his wounds spurting blood. Such connections accord with the late medieval analogy between Jesus’s body on the cross and fruit hanging ripe on a tree.8 In this way, the original sin that was instigated by a mouthful of fruit from a tree in Paradise is undone by the Christ Child’s mouth suckling Mary’s breast, one step in the assumption of a human life that will end on the tree of the cross. Moreover, based on legendary accounts, the cross was constructed from the wood of the Tree of Life.9 This tree-cross connection is made clear in an early fifteenth-century sandstone sculpture in Mainz that is very similar to the Berlin woodcut’s subject matter and composition [Fig. 16.3].10 Mary holds a crucifix that has transformed into a tree, the ‘Tree Cross’ (arbor crucis), complete with multiple vines or branches and topped by a nesting pelican, believed to revive its hatchlings with its own blood and thus a symbolic parallel to the Crucifixion. The redemptive power of the cross is further emphasised through bust-length angels collecting Christ’s blood in chalices. In the print, the cross is more bluntly an instrument of torture and death; and Mary noticeably turns it away from herself and her newborn son. Her gesture implies, perhaps, that her son is blissfully unaware of the events to come. In the sculpture, the Christ Child may appear, at first glance, innocent of the future as well; but he is preoccupied in a different way. With a pen and inkwell in hand, he writes on a scroll. Through this action, he proves to be the divine Child overflowing with

8  T  he Works of Bonaventure, Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, and Saint, trans. J. de Vinck (Paterson, NJ: 1960) I, 95–144; Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art II 134. 9  Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art II 12, 133–137; Voragine Jacques de, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W. G. Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: 1993) I, 209, 277–278. 10  See Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art II 135–136, fig. 445; Arens A., Skulpturen des 13. bis 15. Jahrhunderts im Landesmuseum Mainz (Mainz: 1997) 94–95, 97.

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Virgin Mary with Writing Christ Child, German, c. 1405. Sandstone sculpture, 110 × 52 cm. Mainz, Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum Photo: Foto Marburg / Art Resource, NY

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knowledge from the very beginning. In contrast, the Berlin print with which we began [Fig. 16.1] stresses Mary’s knowledge and not that of Jesus. The difference between these two depictions is representative of the key positions in a long-standing medieval debate that focused on basic questions central to Christology, specifically: What did the young Jesus know about his divine origins and his earthly mission and when precisely did he know it? This essay will analyse several fifteenth-century, mainly anonymous single-sheet prints of the Christ Child that include references to the Passion, focusing primarily on a little-known woodcut of the Christ Child with the Veronica Veil or sudarium. These prints offer variations on the intersecting themes of knowledge and temporality, representing different ways of interrogating the nature of the Christ Child himself. My argument stresses not only how time collapses in a forward direction (present to future) but also backwards (present to past), as well as in both directions simultaneously. Although the Passion is almost always foregrounded in these images, its dominant presence – sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrific – can inhibit a full understanding of the Christ Child’s role, in both iconographic and theological terms. Implicit to this study is an acknowledgment of early printmaking’s contribution to the dissemination of complex didactic and catechistic information. The relatively crude formal qualities of these woodcuts can sometimes distract modern viewers from perceiving otherwise nuanced expressions of sacred mysteries, especially in relation to the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Eucharist. Although iconographic content motivates most of the following analysis, the technical aspect of print production is considered as well. As we will see, the exact process of making a print can also speak to the workings of the divine. 1

The Child of Sorrows

Printed representations of the Christ Child offer a wide variety of expressions of the Proleptic Passion. In some cases, as with the Berlin woodcut, Jesus is simply in close proximity to signs of his suffering; while in others, he is depicted actually handling the instruments of his torture and death. In a German woodcut, referred to as a ‘tinsel print’ due to the application of gold glitter to outline the halo, the naked Christ Child sits alone on a cushion silhouetted against a black background [Fig. 16.4].11 He holds the lance and cross, along with the nails and titulus, and is surrounded on two sides by other arma Chrisi: the column of 11  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte, no. 810; and Areford D. S., The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Burlington, VT: 2010) 32, 211, fig. 9.

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Christ Child with the Arma Christi, German, c. 1460. Colored woodcut, 191 × 133 mm. Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 118288 © Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München

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Sleeping Christ Child, Italian, c. 1500. Colored woodcut, 89 × 138 mm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 890–301 Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Art Resource, NY

the Flagellation, paired with a knotted whip, to the left; and a scourge made of branches at his feet. The banderole that wraps around the lance’s blade is marked with a short xylographic text: ‘Ecce homo dolorum [sic]’, a reference that correlates the adult Christ as ‘Man of Sorrows’ with the infant Jesus, more properly identified here as the Child of Sorrows (Schmerzenskind). This identification is moderated to a degree, considering that the print requires a shift in scale in order to unite the Instruments of the Passion with the boy’s small body. In so doing, these objects become more like toys than weapons. An Italian woodcut, c. 1500, is much more indirect in its approach, depicting a sweet, rosy-cheeked Christ Child snuggling with a pillow and seemingly in a peaceful sleep [Fig. 16.5].12 Yet the classicizing inscription in Latin capitals, ‘IN SOMNO MEO REQUIES’ (‘In my sleep you shall rest’), relies on the metaphor of Christ’s sleep as death, referenced also by the red cruciform halo. Subtlety is entirely abandoned in a French woodcut of the Madonna and Child, c. 1490–1500, still glued inside the lid of a metal-clad wooden box of 12  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 830; and Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image 212, fig. 94. On the sleeping Christ Child, see Firestone G., “The Sleeping Christ-Child in Italian Renaissance Representations of the Madonna”, Marsyas 2 (1942) 43–62, plus plates; and Acres, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy 105–111.

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similar date in Berlin [Fig. 16.6].13 The print is undoubtedly among the most explicit expressions of the Proleptic Passion, in that, the baby Jesus truly becomes the Child of Sorrows with his whole body marked with gaping, bleeding wounds. The outlines of these mouth-like gashes, as well as the blood drops, are part of the printed design, reinforced by touches of red paint. A second surviving impression, now in a private collection, includes a bold xylographic title at the sheet’s upper edge, ‘[Notre] dame de grace port de salut’, which honours Mary and also may be a clue to localising the print to a specific church or monastery.14 The Berlin impression still retains twenty-two lines of rhymed xylographic text in French, although it is frustratingly difficult to decipher due to the over-inking of the block.15 A few clear words (‘mon chier enfant’ and ‘noble mere’) suggest that the poem is structured as a dialogue between mother and child. Leaving aside the illegible text, the image’s theme is ultimately about Mary’s foreknowledge, albeit visualised through her son’s wounded figure. Although the visual prolepsis is extreme, the woodcut could serve as an illustration of Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations, specifically a passage in which the depth of Mary’s understanding is made clear well before the Presentation, in the first moments of holding Jesus and admiring his newborn body. In Mary’s words, as reported by Bridget: ‘When I contemplated the places where, as I learned through the prophets, his hands and feet would be nailed at the crucifixion, my eyes filled with tears and my heart was torn by sadness […]. So my joy was always mixed with sorrow’ (1.10).16 Thus, even as Mary wraps the Christ Child in swaddling clothes, she cannot stop herself from imagining the future violence that awaits him. Scholars of both texts and images have long characterised the goals of the Proleptic Passion not only in terms of a conflation of different time frames and states of being but also in terms of a conceptual and poetic contrast designed to enrich the mental and emotional experience of devotion. In the 13  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 1021a. On other prints glued into boxes, see Lepape S., “When Assemblage Makes Sense: An Example of a Coffret à Estampe”, in Art in Print 2.4 (2012) 9–14. 14  This print is similarly pasted inside a box; see Hindman S., Pen to Press / Paint to Print: Manuscript Illumination and Early Prints in the Age of Gutenberg (Paris – Chicago: 2009) 54–55, 62–63 (cat. 20). The suggestion that the woodcut is related to the church of NotreDame de Grace in Le Havre and the church of Notre-Dame de Salut in Fécamp is likely incorrect, especially since the print is thought to pre-date the church in Le Havre. Of course, if the print is eventually re-dated to the 1520s or later, then this connection might be possible. 15  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 1021a. 16  As quoted in Dzon M., “Brigitta of Sweden and Christ’s Clothing”, in Dzon – Kenney (eds.), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture 117–144 at 128.

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Virgin and the Bleeding Christ Child, French, c. 1490–1500. Colored woodcut, 300 × 190 mm (trimmed). Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 117–1908 Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Volker-H. Schneider / Art Resource, NY

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visual realm, as explored above, the devices of rhetoric can remain plainly and sometimes awkwardly on display (as in the boy Jesus with miniaturised arma Christi); or they can be thoroughly integrated (as with the sleeping or bleeding Christ Child). Both approaches were apparently deemed successful, at least based on the surviving visual evidence. In her essay, “Signs of Death: The Sacrificial Christ Child in Late-Medieval Art”, Elina Gertsman focuses on a feature of almost every image of this type: the combination of opposites, whether the conflation of ‘infant vulnerability’ and ‘adult sacrifice’ or ‘juxtapositions of innocent childhood and torturous death’.17 For Gertsman, the goal of such depictions is a ‘visceral appeal’ that ‘plays on the most basic emotions of the viewer’ in order to elicit an ‘empathetic response.’18 Although such a conclusion is certainly true, I also think that the conventional framework of the Proleptic Passion blocks our recognition of other possible meanings and motives. A new approach can be demonstrated through an analysis of the Christ Child with the Veronica Veil, a German woodcut produced around 1475, quite modest in size and appearance and long ago removed from any fifteenth-century context [Fig. 16.7].19 Published here for the first time since it was catalogued in the early twentieth century, the print survives because it was most likely pasted into a manuscript or early printed book. As in related prints, the Christ Child is depicted as a solitary figure without his mother; and thus the potential implications of the image are not dependent on Mary’s presence. And although the woodcut is clearly in the iconographic tradition of the Child of Sorrows with the arma Christi, in this case he is shown with only one of the Instruments: the sudarium (Latin for ‘sweat cloth’ or handkerchief), also called the Veronica Veil (or the Veronica, from ‘vera ikon’ or ‘true image’), the cloth that was used to wipe Jesus’s face during the Passion and preserved as a relic in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.20 It was believed that the fabric was miraculously imprinted 17  Gertsman, “Signs of Death” 66. 18  Ibidem 68, 82. 19  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 815; Lemoisne P.-A., Les Xylographies du XIVe et du XVe siècle au cabinet des estampes de la Bibliothèque nationale, 2 vols. (Paris: 1927–1930) II 42, pl. LXXX. A second impression of the print with similar though not identical hand colouring is found in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, Inv. No. 3089; V 6220; see Field, R. S. (ed.), German Single-Leaf Woodcuts Before 1500, The Illustrated Bartsch 163 (New York: 1990) 96. 20  On the Veronica, see Hamburger J. F., “Vision and the Veronica”, in idem, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: 1998) 316–382, 558–568; Wolf G., Schleier und Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbild und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich: 2002); and Sand A., Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art (New York: 2014) 27–83, 302–311.

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Christ Child with the Veronica Veil, German, c. 1475. Colored woodcut, 129 × 79 mm. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Res. EA-5-BTE (9) © Bibliothèque nationale de France

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with Christ’s portrait, which, in this case, is complete with crown of thorns and dripping blood. The faded Latin xylographic inscription on the fluttering scroll above announces ‘Jesus Christ’. The Veronica Veil was often depicted on its own or presented by its saintly namesake, as in a mid-century German woodcut [Fig. 16.8].21 Held aloft by the saint, the print’s sudarium is much more than simply an identifying attribute or a summation of a narrative (the saint’s encounter with Jesus). Unfurled and filling the frame, the cloth is noticeably oversized in relation to the saint’s body; and Christ’s face, surrounded by a perfectly circular cruciform halo, visually advances as an emphatically two-dimensional icon of devotion. In the woodcut of the Christ Child [Fig. 16.7], the veil and its face are more naturalistically integrated into the spatial and representational logic of the image. Most striking is the incongruity of the baby Jesus displaying the cloth marked with the bleeding adult face of his Passion. Has he just pressed it to his face, as did the adult Christ on the road to Calvary? If so, then the resulting self-portrait reveals the future, propelling the viewer forward in time through the image within the image. Following the Proleptic Passion, therefore, Jesus is simultaneously present in two guises: newborn Child and tortured Saviour. 2

Divine Time and Knowledge

The anachronistic presence of the sudarium along with the Christ Child’s gesture of presentation is crucial to the print’s potential meanings. The veil as a vehicle of time travel is not entirely unique to this woodcut. Surprisingly, it plays a similar role in some depictions of the Nativity and the early life of the Virgin Mary. In a woodcut of the Ährenkleidmadonna or ‘Wheat Madonna’, the pious Mary is presented worshipping in the temple prior to her betrothal to Joseph and the Annunciation of Gabriel [Fig. 16.9].22 Her flowing garment is covered in ears of wheat, a reference to the Song of Songs 7:2: ‘[…] Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies’, implying that Mary is an untainted and fertile vessel for the divine. Of course, the image’s metaphoric use of wheat 21  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 1719; Lepape S. – Rudy K. M., Les origins de l’estampe en Europe du Nord 1400–1470, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre (Paris: 2013) 59–60, 65, 177 (cat. 27). Also see Parshall’s entry in Parshall – Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking 313–314 (cat. 100). 22  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 1003; Hamburger, “Vision and the Veronica” 347–348, fig. 7.33; and Areford D. S., “Multiplying the Sacred: The FifteenthCentury Woodcut as Reproduction, Surrogate, Simulation”, in Parshall P. (ed.), The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Washington, DC: 2009) 118–153 at 125, fig. 6.

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Saint Veronica, German, c. 1440–1450. Colored woodcut, 290 × 184 mm. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Res. EA-5 (8) B.143 © Bibliothèque nationale de France

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figure 16.9

Virgin Mary in Ahrenkleid, German, c. 1490. Colored woodcut, 134 × 89 mm. Weimar, Kunstsammlungen, Inv. DK112/87 Photo: Klassik Stiftung Weimar / Museums

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also alludes to the Eucharist and thus ultimately to the sacrificial body of Jesus on the cross. But the most unusual aspect of this particular version of the scene is the Holy Face that hangs over the altar and is clearly the focus of Mary’s devotion.23 Depicted to suggest a cloth pinned at its corners, this can only be the miraculous sudarium, now made even more extraordinary due to its presence in Mary’s chamber well before Christ’s birth. In this context, it may serve as a vision of her son, the future Messiah; and therefore it signifies Mary’s foresight, her special ability to see through the Old Testament rites to the mystery of the Passion. Or perhaps it is meant as a stand-in for the presence of God the Father, who has yet to impregnate her with his Son. A more understated form of anachronism is found in a woodcut of the Nativity, c. 1450–1460, although it also depends on a cloth-borne image of Christ or, in this case, the Christ Child [Fig. 16.10].24 In accordance with extrabiblical narratives of Jesus’s birth, such as that found in the thirteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ, Mary has removed her veil to use as swaddling clothes for the infant Jesus.25 But before she can securely bundle him, several angels have spread the cloth beneath him, grasping it from the corners so that it perfectly isolates and frames his body. As a result, the humble textile upstages the standard signs of heavenly origin – the rays of light surrounding the baby – and becomes the primary indicator of his divine status.26 The uncommon emphasis on the veil is heightened by its spatial ambiguity. It appears to be both suspended above the ground, like a hammock or trampoline, and stretched out and flattened on the grass. Then again, in the absence of systematic perspective, the cloth also seems to be hanging vertically with Jesus visually pressed forward, his small figure iconic and glowing. According to the Proleptic Passion, the swaddling clothes are usually interpreted in relation to Christ’s burial shroud; but here the veil is not wrapped around his body (as is typical) but unfurled to display the Christ Child as an image on a veil, in an explicit prefiguration of the sudarium. The merging of Christ’s earthly beginning 23   For another woodcut of the Ährenkleidmadonna (National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen), that includes the Holy Face framed and hanging on a wall behind Mary, while she prays before an altarpiece of God the Father (?) holding the tablets of the Law, see Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 999x; as illustrated in Field, German Single-Leaf Woodcuts Before 1500, The Illustrated Bartsch 164 (New York: 1992) 4. 24  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 85a; Lepape – Rudy, Les origins de l’estampe 58–60, 177 (cat. 24). 25  Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Ital. 115), trans. I. Ragusa – R. B. Green (Princeton: 1961) 33. 26  In an ivory relief panel of the Annunciation, Lower Rhine, c. 1100, a tiny half-figure of the Christ Child is suspended in a cloth between Mary and Gabriel, seemingly indicating the ‘descent of the divine soul of Jesus’; See Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art II 44, fig. 94.

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figure 16.10 The Nativity, German, c. 1450–1460. Colored woodcut, 260 × 375 mm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Rothschild Collection, 27LR recto © RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Fuzeau / Art Resource, NY

and end is further conflated with a specific reference to the scope of his divinity and his existence outside of human conceptions of time. The Christ Child is framed by banderoles that give voice to the angels around him. On the left, the scroll reads, ‘You are a mirror of eternal charity’ (‘tu es speculum caritatis eternia’), perhaps a reference to the Cistercian spirituality of Aelred of Rievaulx.27 And on the right, the text begins, ‘You are alpha and omega […] ’ (‘tu es alpha et omega […]’), which is reminiscent of several verses found in the book of Revelation, including: ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, saith the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty’ (1:8). Beyond the veil’s proleptic function, the notion of God ‘who is and who was and who is to come’ – existing concurrently in the present, past, and future – is key to understanding the temporal dimensions of these prints. In the woodcut of the Christ Child with the Veronica Veil [Fig. 16.7], the boy’s firm grip on the cloth implies much more than simply the convergence of time frames and states of being. His gesture is more properly one of presentation, a dramatic flourish of revelation, one that confirms his comprehension of things to come. The extent of his knowledge is indicated in the Gospel of Luke, which suggests 27  Aelred of Rievaulx, The Mirror of Charity, trans. E. Connor (Kalamazoo, MI: 1990).

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that the child Jesus matured like any other human being. Luke 2:40 simply states, ‘And the child grew and waxed strong, full of wisdom, and the grace of God was in him’. Furthermore, Luke’s gospel offers an exact moment when Jesus’s knowledge of his identity becomes clear. During a visit to Jerusalem, the twelve-year-old Jesus intentionally wanders off; and after three days, Mary and Joseph find him in the Temple, ‘sitting in the midst of the doctors, hearing them and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his wisdom and his answers. And seeing him, they wondered […]’ (2:46–48). When his mother complains to Jesus about his callous disregard for her and Joseph’s feelings, he replies, ‘How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?’ (2:49). Thus, on his own, the young Jesus knows who he is and his parents are mystified: ‘And they understood not the word that he spoke unto them’ (2:50). After the holy family returns to Nazareth, as Luke narrates, ‘And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and grace with God and men’ (2:52). Apocryphal and legendary stories of Christ’s childhood suggest that his divine wisdom, along with his understanding of his identity, was not gradual but immediate. In the first chapter of the Arabic Infancy Gospel, it is claimed that ‘[…] Jesus spoke even when he was in the cradle, and said to his mother: Mary, I am Jesus the Son of God, that word which you did bring forth according to the declaration of the angel Gabriel to you, and my father has sent me for the salvation of the world’ (1:2–3).28 Later in the same Gospel, during the holy family’s wanderings in Egypt and beyond, they meet two thieves and a three-year-old Jesus tells his mother: ‘When thirty years are expired, O mother, the Jews will crucify me at Jerusalem; and these two thieves will be with me at the same time upon the cross […] ’ (8:6–7).29 Although the Church considered such accounts to be false, theologians were no less intrigued by the question of the Christ Child’s knowledge. To some, such as Bede, Luke’s statement that Jesus ‘grew and waxed strong, full of wisdom’ (2:40) meant that Jesus only became aware of his mission over time.30 Augustine had argued, however, that the human Christ had absolute knowledge from the very start of his life, and revealed his omniscience

28  T  he Lost Books of the Bible, trans. W. Hone – J. Jones (Cleveland: 1926 – New York: 1979) 38; and Dzon M., The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: 2017) 152. Also see Robbins V. K., Who Do People Say I Am? Rewriting Gospel in Emerging Christianity (Grand Rapids: 2013). 29   Hone – Jones, Lost Books 47. 30  Colish M., Peter Lombard, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 41.1 (Leiden – New York: 1994) 439.

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gradually in order to conform to normal stages of human development.31 In his discussion of apocryphal narratives of the Christ Child, Thomas Aquinas took Augustine’s lead, stressing that Jesus’s childhood needed to appear as ordinary as possible in order to affirm ‘the reality of his human nature’ (veritas humanitatis).32 For other theologians, Jesus knew everything at the instant of conception, but his understanding was not as clear or as precise as that of God.33 The followers of Peter Abelard argued, as Marcia Colish has put it, that ‘[…] while the human Christ could contemplate the divine essence, He could not do so during His lifetime, in an exhaustive manner; and God thus retains, for the human Christ, a measure of His unknowability’.34 In this theological context, the woodcut of the Christ Child holding the Veronica Veil [Fig. 16.7] offers a visual argument concerning the infant Jesus’s knowledge. This is evident in the overt presentation of the veil’s tortured face, as well as by the Christ Child’s thoughtful expression, communicated by the tilt of his head and his downcast, sideways glance. He understands the events that will end his human life, so much so that he offers us the bloody image of his future self. In the related prints in which Jesus is holding the cross or sleeping or even bleeding, he often seems disconnected and unaware. In contrast, this Christ Child actively takes part in revealing his future by uncovering his youthful face to present his adult face on the veil. More than any other scholar, Alfred Acres has explored the sinister complexities of Christ Child iconography, especially in scenes of the Nativity, culminating in his 2013 book Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy.35 In both his book and an earlier essay, “What Happens When Christ Sleeps?”, Acres analyses an intriguing Austrian panel painting of the Virgin and Child, now in the Louvre [Fig. 16.11].36 The work’s most notable feature is the pose and activity of Jesus: he sits on Mary’s lap with an open book and appears to have nodded off. For Acres, the Christ Child’s sleep is both a conventional allusion to mortality in the tradition of the Proleptic Passion and a very human 31  Ibidem 439; Dzon, The Quest for the Christ Child 124. 32  Ibidem 123. 33  Colish, Peter Lombard 442. 34  Ibidem 440. 35  Acres A., “Porous Subject Matter and Christ’s Haunted Infancy”, in Hamburger J. F. – Bouché A.-M. (eds.), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton: 2006) 241–262; idem, “The Columba Altarpiece”; and idem, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy. 36  Acres A., “What Happens When Christ Sleeps?”, in Heck C. (ed.), L’allégorie dans l’art du Moyen Âge. Formes et fonctions. Héritages, creations, mutations (Turnhout: 2011) 125–137, esp. 128–131, fig. 5; and idem, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy 106–109, figs. 75, 76.

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Virgin and Child, Austrian school, c. 1410. Tempera on wood, 47 × 29 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF2047 © RMN-Grand Palais / Gérard Blot / Art Resource, NY

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experience that is about time (i.e., the duration of sleep) that evokes anticipation of the future Gospel events yet to be recorded in the book. Thus, he also interprets the Christ Child as an author on the verge of writing his own story. Acres’s argument partly depends on his identification of the object in Jesus’s hand as a ‘pen’ or ‘quill’;37 a typical attribute of the Writing Christ Child.38 As in the Mainz sculpture of the Madonna and Child, the quill pen is usually joined by an inkpot [Fig. 16.3]. However, the object in the Louvre panel is definitely not a quill, its rigid and pointed appearance suggesting instead a metal stylus used to rule parchment folios with straight lines (clearly visible on the book’s open pages), the step in manuscript production before the words are written. Alternatively, the object could be identified as a gold pointer or yad, which, following Jewish tradition, is used when reciting from the Torah scrolls and sometimes found in depictions of the Christ Child reading.39 Nevertheless, the artist’s detailed rendering is unambiguously without the tools of writing, in the form of a quill pen or an inkwell. In addition to the missing writing implements, there are no words on the book’s pages (nor written in the three banderoles above). This is explained, I would argue, by the presence of the Christ Child himself; for as the Logos or Word, he is the text supreme. As Mary McDevitt has suggested, in her study of the iconography of the Writing Christ Child, Jesus as Logos is ‘made readable by means of human flesh’.40 Further, McDevitt notes that medieval authors describe God the Father as ‘writing’ in the womb of Mary with the ‘pen’ of the Holy Spirit, incarnating his Son the Word’.41 This notion of a divine act of writing in the womb helps make sense of the Christ Child’s odd pose on his mother’s lap. The painter has positioned the little boy (the Word) as if he were still curled up in Mary’s womb. Thus the dozing Christ Child, in this case, is entangled in a web of meanings beyond those of the Proleptic Passion. Furthermore, as Acres mentions, there is another possible implication of sleep, as a ‘medium of inspired dreaming’, but he stops short of pursuing this direction, concluding that the idea of the 37  Acres, “What Happens When Christ Sleeps?” 130; and idem, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy 106. 38  Parkhurst C. P., “The Madonna of the Writing Christ Child”, The Art Bulletin 23.4 (1941) 292–306; and McDevitt M., “‘The Ink of Our Mortality’: The Late-Medieval Image of the Writing Christ Child”, in Dzon – Kenney (eds.), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture 224–253. 39  See the painting: Pinturicchio, Virgin Teaching the Christ Child to Read, c. 1494–1497, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, Inv. 1336. 40  McDevitt, “‘The Ink of Our Mortality’”, in Dzon – Kenney (eds.), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture 239. 41  Ibidem 230.

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Logos dreaming and needing inspiration is too ‘bizarre’ to consider.42 Yet, in the Middle Ages and beyond, sleep was believed to be a gateway to dreams, revelation, and visionary experience.43 Of course, the Christ Child might be dreaming of his Passion, as implied by a scene from the right wing of Master Bertram’s Buxtehude Altarpiece [Fig. 16.12].44 Reclining on the grass near his mother, who is busy knitting his seamless tunic, Jesus has lost interest in an open book and top. With his cheek resting on his hand, he is apparently daydreaming and thus privy to a glimpse of his future suffering in the form of the arma Christi – the cross, lance, crown of thorns, and nails – presented to him by two angels. Dubbed the ‘Annunciation of the Passion’ by art historians, the scene is also found in French illuminated manuscripts, where it usually includes the infant or toddler Jesus, who in the tradition of the Christ Child with the arma Christi, receives the Instruments by expressly taking hold of the cross and scourge.45 In Master Bertram’s version, this tactile encounter is denied as the Christ Child keeps his distance, looking over his shoulder from below. His vision is more purely one of foreknowledge of the events that the objects represent. One limitation of the Proleptic Passion is that by definition it insists on the anticipation of something in the future. Thus, if the Christ Child sleeps, it must signal his death. If we permit him to dream, his dreams must be about the Crucifixion. In other words, the Proleptic Passion is a one-way street with only a single beginning and single end, usually experienced simultaneously. But I would like to propose a different model for understanding such images of the Christ Child, one that retains simultaneity but also allows for the possibility of movement in both directions and with multiple stops, including ones beyond the standard itinerary. In the Louvre painting, for instance, the Christ Child’s pose as if still in the womb and his lack of a pen transports viewers back to the originating moment of the Incarnation itself, bringing us closer to the divine 42  Acres, “What Happens When Christ Sleeps?” 131; and idem, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy 108. 43  See Koet B. J. (ed.), Dreams as Divine Communication in Christianity: From Hermas to Aquinas (Leuven: 2012); and Hourihane C. (ed.), Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History (Princeton, NJ: 2010). 44  Dzon, The Quest for the Christ Child 234, fig. 22; and Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art I, fig. 65; II 196, fig. 680. 45  For a discussion of the Annunciation of the Passion as it appears in several fifteenthcentury French manuscripts, see Davis L. F., “Scrolling through History: La Chronique Universelle, Boston Public Library Ms. pb. Med.32”, in Netzer N. (ed.), Secular Sacred: 11th– 16th Century Works from the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exh. cat., McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College (Boston: 2006) 43–50, esp. 46–47, figs. 4 and 5.

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figure 16.12 Master Bertram, Annunciation of the Passion, c. 1400–1410. Tempera on wood, right wing of Buxtehude Altarpiece. Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle Photo: WikiCommons

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presence. And thus, following this reasoning, we might conclude: If the Christ Child sleeps, he might be dreaming of God. 3

The Christ Child Unmasked

Interpreted using this more flexible model, the woodcut of the Christ Child holding the sudarium [Fig. 16.7] suggests more than just Jesus’s recognition of his mission or a revelation of the future. Related prints emphasise the truly uncanny nature of merging timeframes and bodies, as demonstrated by a Netherlandish woodcut of the Christ Child in the Sacred Heart [Fig. 16.13].46 The naked infant Jesus wields the whip and scourge, framed by his own heart and the mature, disembodied wounded hands and feet of the Crucifixion, in addition to the cross, nails, crown of thorns, and titulus. Combined with these fragmented elements is an explosion of clouds and rays of light. This must be the divine presence of God the Father, who although obscured is made visible in the form of the light that was crucial to all creation (Genesis 1:3). Of course, combined with the hands and feet, this primordial radiance references Christ as well. The notion of Christ as divine ‘light’ is in accordance with the ‘Logos’ in John’s Gospel, both existing at the beginning of time.47 In John 8:12, Jesus states, ‘I am the light of the world; he that followeth me walketh not in darkness but shall have the light of life’. In the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus gives a fuller explanation, ‘I am the light which is before all things. It is I who am all things. From me all things came forth, and to me all things extend’.48 In both gospels, Jesus is fundamentally characterised as ‘God’s own light in human form’ (40).49 Read in this way, the woodcut’s rays of light encompass and emit from both God the Father and God the Son. The presence of God the Father is not as obvious in a German woodcut, prominently dated 1472, with similar subject matter [Fig. 16.14].50 Exhibiting many of the same connotations as the previous print, the light shines only from Christ’s free-floating hands and feet. At first glance, his suffering appears to be the predominant message, as evidenced by various arma Christi and especially the blood-red heart pierced by the Holy Lance. Yet the heart proves not to belong exclusively to the Son but also to the Father. This is revealed by 46  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 796. 47  Pagels E., Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: 2003) 40. 48  Ibidem 52–53. 49  Ibidem 40. 50  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 797.

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figure 16.13 Peter de Wale (?), Christ Child in the Sacred Heart, Netherlandish, c. 1480–1500. Colored woodcut, 250 × 167 mm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 670–2 Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Volker-H. Schneider / Art Resource, NY

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figure 16.14 Christ Child in the Sacred Heart, German, 1472. Colored woodcut, 193 × 126 mm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 128–1 Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY

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the German xylographic couplet below, which gives voice to Jesus: ‘In mines vatters herzen, fand ich disen schmerczen’ (‘In my father’s heart, I find these wounds’).51 In several other prints, the Christ Child signals the role of God as Creator by holding a cross-topped orb of the world while sitting in a springtime landscape. Although some of these were designed as New Year’s greetings or calendar borders, at least one surviving German example includes a long Latin inscription consisting of prayers that yield an indulgence of three years [Fig. 16.15].52 The text opens: ‘Ave Jesu principium nostre creationis’ (‘Hail Jesus, beginning of our creation’), and a few words later, ‘Ave precium nostre redemptionis’ (‘Hail price of our redemption’). Therefore, it connects the Christ Child to the ‘beginning’ and specifically to the ‘creation’ before mentioning the ‘price of redemption’ and later ‘Ave salus nostre salvationis’ (‘Hail deliverance of our salvation’).53 Linked to the text, the detail of the cross-topped orb, held somewhat awkwardly by Christ, references both his sacrificial burden and the world’s formation in the hands of God. The Christ Child also appears in a lush spring setting in another German woodcut, surrounded by grass, flowers, a tree, and even a rabbit [Fig. 16.16].54 In the upper left corner, God the Father looks down through a cloud-edged opening in heaven, as the dove of the Holy Spirit is transported headfirst on rays of light. Inscribed on the banderole are the words of John 1:14: ‘Et verbum caro factum est’ (‘And the Word was made flesh’). This reference to the Incarnation recalls the opening of John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning 51  This is also noted by Acres, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy 79. 52  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 775a; and Reinhard-Felice M., Einblattholzschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts aus dem Kupferstichkabinett Basel (Basel: 1994) 68 (cat. 25). For the prints of the Christ Child that served as New Year’s greetings or calendar borders, see Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte nos. 771–795; as illustrated in Field, German Single-Leaf Woodcuts before 1500, The Illustrated Bartsch 163, 46–73. Also see the entry by Peter Parshall, in Parshall – Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking 198–200 (cat. 53); and Reinhard-Felice, Einblattholzschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts 70 (cat. nos. 29 and 30). 53  For a transcription of the text, see Reinhard-Felice, Einblattholzschnitte 68: ‘Ave Jesu principium nostre creationis. Ave / premium nostre orationis. Ave precium nostre redemptionis / Ave viaticum nostre peregrinationis. Ave solatium / nostre expectationis. Ave salus nostre salvationis. Ju / be dies nostros in tua pace disponi et nos in electo- / rum tuorum grege numerari. Amen. / Benedictum sit dulce nomen domini nostri Jesu Christi et gloriosissime virginis Marie matris eius in / eternum et ultra. Amen. Nos cum prole pia benedicat virgo / maria. Amen. Sic orans sequitur indulgentiam trium annorum’ (abbreviations expanded). 54  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte no. 814; and Reinhard-Felice, Einblattholzschnitte 60 (cat. 4).

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figure 16.15 Christ Child with the Orb of the World, German, c. 1490. Colored woodcut, 103 × 82 mm. Basel, Kunstmuseum, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. X.1867 Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler

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figure 16.16 Christ Child with Chalice, German, c. 1460. Colored woodcut, 275 × 190 mm. Basel, Kunstmuseum, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. 1930.148 Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel

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with God. All things were made by him, and without him was made nothing that was made’ (1:1–3). As Elaine Pagels has noted, with reference to Origen’s commentaries, John’s gospel more than the other canonical gospels ‘suggests that Jesus is not merely God’s human servant but God himself revealed in human form’.55 This unity of God and Christ as the Word (Logos), joined by the Holy Spirit, is clearly articulated by their shared haloes, each marked by a cruciform. In this manner, all three persons of the Trinity signal the future Crucifixion, which is referenced also by the tiny image of Christ on the cross that marks the Host hovering above the chalice. How should one define the past, present, and future in such an image? Should we understand the Christ Child as in the present with a prefiguration of his sacrifice in the Eucharistic elements? Or are we, the viewers, in the liturgical present, being drawn back to Christ’s beginning and his end, or back even further to God the Father and the Logos? Then again, perhaps the point is to make us aware of the ways in which all aspects of the divine are always fully available and simultaneous. Although not as immediately evident, God the Father is also present in the woodcut of the Christ Child holding the Veronica Veil [Fig. 16.7]. On one level, this is most conspicuously manifest by the agency that animates the boy as he thrusts the sudarium forward for our viewing pleasure. Furthermore, in the specific pictorial situation, it is implied that he has made the image; and in the process, he re-enacts the dynamics of the Creation, as well as the Incarnation. The truth of the latter – the ‘Word […] made flesh’ – is reinforced by the careful way in which the veil reveals the boy’s genitalia just below its lower edge. In short, the Christ Child demonstrates his power as the Creator; and thus, he has unmasked himself, essentially revealing his true identity as God. Ultimately, the Christ Child with the Veronica Veil, along with all the other prints explored above, is inherently Eucharistic in meaning. Although most obvious when depicted with the chalice and Host, these representations of the solitary Christ Child suggest a visionary encounter. To varying degrees, one is reminded of the many miracles involving the Host transforming into a boy, whether on the altar, in the celebrant’s hands, or when attacked by Jews or doubted by infidels.56 Such miracles proved the truth of the Real Presence in the Eucharist but also emphasised the idea of the liturgy as a re-enactment 55  Pagels, Beyond Belief 37. 56  For a woodcut broadside recounting the 1478 desecration of the Host by the Jews of Passau, see Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image 209, fig. 92. For the well-known fresco by Ugolino di Prete of the Host Miracle of the Saracens in Orvieto Cathedral, see Gertsman, “Signs of Death” 75, fig. 3.5; and Camporesi P., “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess”, in Feher M. et al. (eds.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One (New York: 1989) 220–237.

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of the Passion, as well as the Incarnation. As Leah Marcus has noted: ‘Just as [God] was born once in Bethlehem, he is reborn daily in the ceremony of the Mass. By the words of consecration, God is again made flesh and blood […]’.57 In the woodcut of the Christ Child with the orb of the world, the opening Latin prayer ‘Ave Jesu principium nostre creationis’ is very similar to other popular prayers that were recited by congregants at the moment of the Elevation of the Host.58 In the hands of the Christ Child who is ‘veiled by the consecrated Host’, the Veronica Veil definitely points to a liturgical interpretation.59 Indeed, as Jeffrey Hamburger has demonstrated, the sudarium became a fitting substitute for the Eucharist itself in late medieval Germany; and as a textile, it was even identified with the corporal, the square linen cloth upon which the Host was placed.60 In this way, the Christ Child and the Veronica Veil are implicated in a series of meanings involving obfuscation and revelation, culminating in the removal of a final veil, that is, the ‘veil’ of Christ’s flesh that hides his divinity.61 In conclusion, this analysis can be expanded by taking into consideration the ways in which the print of the Christ Child with the sudarium references the inherent features of the medium that produced it, thus suggesting an image that seems especially ‘self-aware’, to borrow Victor Stoichita’s terminology.62 In the woodcut, the Christ Child is not only the Creator but also an artist, and more specifically, a printmaker. In the implied scenario, Jesus has just pressed the cloth against his face, an action technically not unlike that required to make a woodcut. At the same time, the print offers a novel variation on the notion of Christ being ‘pressed’ as part of his torture and death, a fairly commonplace feature of contemporaneous northern European texts and images.63 Originating in Isaiah 63:3: ‘I have trodden the winepress alone […]’, a passage long interpreted as a typological reference to the suffering of Christ, the pressing of grapes served as a potent metaphor and allegory, as well as inspiration for acts of violence featured in extra-biblical Passion accounts. In his Vita Christi, Ludolph of Saxony explains, using Christ’s voice: ‘I have trodden 57  M  arcus L. S., “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the English Cycle Plays”, in Dzon – Kenney (eds.), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture 3–28 at 7. 58  Rubin M., Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (New York: 1991) 155–163. 59  Marcus, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice” 8. 60  Hamburger, “Vision and the Veronica” 333–345. 61  On references to the ‘curtain’ of Christ’s flesh in the canonical gospels and the proceedings of the Second Council of Nicaea, see Holmes M., The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven – London: 2013) 219–220. 62  Stoichita V., The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (New York: 1997). 63  Marrow J. H., Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk: 1979) 83–94.

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figure 16.17 Caspar (?), Christ in the Wine Press, south German, c. 1460–1470. Colored woodcut, image 384 × 242 mm, sheet 388 × 257 mm. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Rar. 327–1/4#1, front inner cover Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München

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the winepress. Which is to say […] I alone bore the pressure of the cross, of the Flagellation, and of all the torments of the passion, in which I was squeezed as if in a press, my entire body being sprinkled with blood for the salvation of the world’.64 In many late medieval depictions of the Carrying of the Cross and the Crowning with Thorns, the goal of Christ’s tormentors is clear: to press and squeeze his body not only to cause suffering but also to drain as much blood as possible. By the fifteenth century, allegorical and literal meanings are combined in the figure of Christ in the Wine Press, spectacularly depicted by a south German woodcut, c. 1460–1470, which survives glued in a printed Breviary in Munich [Fig. 16.17].65 One of this image’s most striking aspects is the way in which Jesus wraps his right arm around the cross beam so as to assist the press bearing down on his wounded body. In the woodcut of the Christ Child with the Veronica Veil [Fig. 16.7], little Jesus also facilitates his own passion by enacting the pressing himself. In so doing, an instance of image-making is combined with a self-sacrificial infliction of pain.66 As with other early prints, the hand coloured detail of blood is necessary to complete the image and its meaning, making clear the result of the pressing in the vivid red streams that frame the sudarium’s visage. This entirely painted detail is indicative of the variability of hand colouring from one impression to another, along with the potential for participatory collaboration on the part of both the professional colourists and the eventual owners of each devotional print, who could also add more ‘blood’ (i.e., red paint or ink) to Christ’s face.67 In recent years, scholars have posited a more sophisticated audience for fifteenth-century printmaking than has hitherto been assumed, suggesting that viewers were aware of the medium-specific and self-referential qualities typical of some of these prints.68 In other words, there was an understanding 64  As quoted by Marrow, ibidem 91. 65  Entry by Areford D. S., in Parshall – Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking 255–258 (cat. 77). 66  The Veronica Veil is often depicted amongst the Arma Christi or Instruments of the Passion. See Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image 232–234, figs. 96, 97, 99; and Parshall – Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking cat. nos. 75 and 78. Interpreted in relation to the act of ‘pressing’ and inflicing pain, the cloth becomes a true instrument of the Passion, instead of simply an attribute of the narrative of Saint Veronica. 67  See Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image 36–54, 76–80, 92–93. 68  Talbot C., “Prints and the Definitive Image”, in Tyson G. – Wagenheim S., Print Culture in the Renaissance (Newark, DE: 1986) 189–205 (201); Koerner J. L., The Moment of SelfPortraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: 1993) 223; Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image 255–258; Dackerman S., “Dürer’s Indexical Fantasy: The Rhinoceros and Printmaking”, in Dackerman S. (ed.), Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2011) 164–171; Gertsman E., “Multiple Impressions: Christ in the

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of how these images were produced, the specifics of techniques, and the medium’s unique power for multiplication. In response, artists seemed to delight in referencing the process of printmaking in various ways. Thus in Christ in the Wine Press [Fig. 16.17], the wooden device towering over the Man of Sorrows suggests more than a typological parallel to the treading of grapes; it becomes the equivalent of the printing press used to make the image.69 Perhaps the most compelling case studies involve prints of the Veronica Veil, especially those in which the cloth is depicted on its own, such as a south German woodcut produced around 1475–1500 [Fig. 16.18].70 Although supplied with a vegetal background design, fringe, and cords that suggest a brocaded textile hanging from a rod, this print’s rectangular sudarium fills the paper sheet so that the image becomes one with its support. In this case, it is impossible to overlook the merging of subject matter (the miraculous image made by Christ pressing a cloth to his body) with the woodcut itself and the process that made it (the pressing of a sheet of paper against an inked woodblock). For the original viewers, such a conflation was undoubtedly more obvious than it is today, particularly for those who were closer to the origins of printmaking, which likely began as relief printing on fabric, such as clothing and wall hangings.71 In the Christ Child with the Veronica Veil [Fig. 16.7], these connections are made even more explicit. The boy Jesus has pulled the veil – like a woodcut – from the matrix of his face, from the raised design of his flesh. He offers each viewer an impression (from an endless edition), a gift from God the Father, the Creator, the First Artist, the Original Printmaker.72 Winepress and the Semiotics of the Printed Image”, Art History 36.2 (2013) 310–337; and Pon L., A Printed Icon in Early Modern Italy: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire (New York: 2015) 59–68. On the trope of printing as applied in seventeenth-century gebedenboeken, see Melion W., “Convent and cubiculum cordis: The Incarnational Thematic of Materiality in the Cistercian Prayerbook of Martin Boschman (1610)”, in Melion W. S. – Wandel L. P. (eds.), Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 39 (Leiden and Boston: 2015) 413–458 (424–429). 69  Gertsman, “Multiple Impressions” 321–323. 70  Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte, no. 759a; and entry by Parshall P., in Parshall – Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking 238–240 (cat. 70). Also see the entry by Schmidt, Origins of European Printmaking 240–242 (cat. 71). 71  King D., “Textiles and the Origins of Printing in Europe”, Pantheon 20.1 (1962) 23–30. Also see entry by Nevins T., in Parshall – Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking 62–68 (cat. 2); Nevins T., “Picturing Oedipus in the Sion Textile”, in Parshall P. (ed.), The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, Studies in the History of Art 75 (Washington, DC: 2009) 16–37; and Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image 28–36. 72  On God as the ‘first printmaker’, see Bezzi Giuliano, Il fuoco trionfante: Racconto della traslatione della miracolosa imagine detta la Madonna del Fuoco, protettrice della città di

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figure 16.18 Hanns Schlaffer (?), The Holy Face on a Cloth (Veronica Veil), German (Ulm?), c. 1475–1500. Colored woodcut, image 257 × 194 mm, sheet 281 × 206 mm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1941, 41.47 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Image source: Art Resource, NY

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Selective Bibliography Acres A., Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy (London – Turnhout: 2013). Acres A., “What Happens When Christ Sleeps?”, in Heck C. (ed.), L’allégorie dans l’art du Moyen Âge. Formes et fonctions. Héritages, creations, mutations (Turnhout: 2011) 125–137. Acres A., “Porous Subject Matter and Christ’s Haunted Infancy”, in Hamburger J. F. – Bouché A.-M. (eds.), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: 2006) 241–262. Acres A., “The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World”, The Art Bulletin 80.3 (1998) 422–451. Areford D. S., The Art of Empathy: The Mother of Sorrows in Northern Renaissance Art and Devotion (London: 2013). Areford D. S., The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Burlington, VT: 2010). Areford D. S., “Multiplying the Sacred: The Fifteenth-Century Woodcut as Reproduction, Surrogate, Simulation”, in Parshall P. (ed.), The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Washington, DC: 2009) 118–153. Colish M., Peter Lombard, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 41.1 (Leiden – New York: 1994). Didi-Huberman G., Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. J. M. Todd (Chicago – London: 1995). Dzon M., The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: 2017). Dzon M. – Kenney T. M. (eds.), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O! (Toronto: 2012). Field R. S. (ed.), German Single-Leaf Woodcuts Before 1500, The Illustrated Bartsch 163 and 164 (New York: 1990 and 1992). Firestone G., “The Sleeping Christ-Child in Italian Renaissance Representations of the Madonna”, Marsyas 2 (1942) 43–62. Gertsman E., “Signs of Death: The Sacrificial Christ Child in Late-Medieval Art”, in Dzon M. – Kenney, T. M. (eds.), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O! (Toronto: 2012) 66–91.

Forlì (Forlì: Cimatti, 1637) 7; discussed in Areford, The Viewer and Printed Image 12; and Pon, A Printed Icon in Early Modern Italy 39, 43–44. For the Christ Child depicted as painter, see Anton Wierix II’s print series Cor Jesu amanti sacrum (late 16th-early 17th century); cited in Hamburger J. F., “‘On the Little Bed of Jesus’: Pictorial Piety and Monastic Reform”, in Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary 383–426, 568–578, esp. 403–405, fig. 8.3. Also see van Ruyven-Zeman Z., The Wierix Family, New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts 1450–1700 13.3 (Rotterdam: 2003) 44–49 (cat. 445–462).

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Gertsman E., “Multiple Impressions: Christ in the Winepress and the Semiotics of the Printed Image”, Art History 36.2 (2013) 310–337. Hamburger J. F., “Vision and the Veronica”, in idem, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: 1998) 316–382, 558–568. Hindman S., Pen to Press / Paint to Print: Manuscript Illumination and Early Prints in the Age of Gutenberg (Paris – Chicago: 2009). Holmes M., The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven – London: 2013). The Lost Books of the Bible, trans. W. Hone – J. Jones (Cleveland: 1926 – New York: 1979). Kristeller P., Holzschnitte im Königl. Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin (Berlin: 1915). Lemoisne, P.-A., Les Xylographies du XIVe et du XVe siècle au cabinet des estampes de la Bibliothèque nationale, 2 vols. (Paris: 1927–1930). Lepape S. – Rudy K. M., Les origins de l’estampe en Europe du Nord 1400–1470, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre (Paris: 2013). Marcus L. S., “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the English Cycle Plays”, in Dzon M. – Kenney T. M. (eds.), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O! (Toronto: 2012) 3–28. Marrow J. H., Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk: 1979). McDevitt M., “‘The Ink of Our Mortality’: The Late-Medieval Image of the Writing Christ Child”, in Dzon M. – Kenney T. M. (eds.), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O! (Toronto: 2012) 224–253. Parkhurst C. P., “The Madonna of the Writing Christ Child”, The Art Bulletin 23.4 (1941) 292–306. Parshall P. – Schoch R., Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Washington, D.C.: 2005). Pon L., A Printed Icon in Early Modern Italy: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire (New York: 2015). Ragusa I. – Green R. B. (trans.), Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Ital. 115) (Princeton: 1961). Reinhard-Felice M., Einblattholzschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts aus dem Kupferstichkabinett Basel (Basel: 1994). Schiller G., The Iconography of Christian Art, trans. J. Seligman, 2 vols. (Greenwich, CT: 1971–1972). Schreiber W. L., Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts, 8 vols. (Leipzig: 1926–1930). Voragine Jacques de, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W. G. Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: 1993).

chapter 17

Lady Scripture’s Sacred Commitments: Dialogic Understanding in Dutch Religious Literature of the Late Fifteenth Century Geert Warnar The first major work in Dutch, entirely devoted to the sacraments, was published in Gouda in 1484 by Gerard Leeu – shortly before this printer would move his business to Antwerp.*,1 The book, simply called On the Seven Sacraments (Van den seven sacramenten), is typical of Leeu’s ambitions: the woodcuts were especially designed for the occasion; the book has a (relatively large) folio format, and the text is new and does not seem to have circulated previously as a manuscript.2 Vanden seven sacramenten is based on standard textbooks of the medieval canonists, but the work is directed to a lay audience. Whereas Holy Orders is discussed only in passing, the sacraments of Confession and Matrimony are treated in great detail, with the inclusion of genealogical trees that illustrate the degrees of kinship that would (or would not) be allowed in marriage. The focus on the laity is evident from the self-aware use of the vernacular, even to the extent of calling attention to differences between Latin and Dutch usage. For instance, in Dutch the word ‘I’ is used when baptizing, whereas in Latin, one says, ‘Baptiso te in nomine patris etc.’ As a work of religious instruction, Vanden seven sacramenten could easily be categorized among the many late medieval texts that provided access to mainstream theology in the vernacular. From the late thirteenth century onwards, knowledge of this kind was translated and circulated in texts for audiences * My conversations with Prof. Dr. Arie Verhagen (Leiden University) inspired this essay, which also greatly benefitted from my student assistant Nikki Borreman’s work on commitments in literature. 1  For a basic introduction to Leeu, with reference to the older literature, see Goudriaan K., “Een drukker en zijn markt. Gheraert Leeu (Gouda 1477 – Antwerpen 1492/3)”, Madoc 8 (1992) 194–205. 2  On Vanden seven sacramenten (Gouda, Gerard Leeu: 1484), see Pettegree A. – Walsby M., Netherlandish Books: Books Published in the Low Countries and Dutch Books Printed Abroad before 1601 (Leiden: 2010), nr.27131. The copy used for this article is The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 30. Other editions of the text were published under the title Die seven sacramenten der heyligher kercken (Jan Seversz, Leiden: 1504 and 1511), on which see Pettegree – Walsby, Netherlandish Books nr.32032.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_018

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that had no direct access to Latin literature: these were lay readers, both in the ecclesiastical and intellectual sense. They were neither professed clergy nor educated in the Latin tradition of learning.3 The introduction of Vanden seven sacramenten (preceding even the table of contents) positions the work in this process of transmission. After listing the seven sacraments, the author claims that ‘ordinary people’ (‘ghemeen luyden’) lack ‘understanding and enlightenment’ (‘verstant ende verclaringhe’) of the sacraments; in order to ameliorate this lamentable state of affairs, he utilizes dialogue, proceeding as if he, the author, were posing the relevant questions, and great masters were providing the necessary answers.4 These masters are Hostiensis (Henricus de Segusio) and Panormitanus (Nicolaus de Tudeschis), whose works on canon law were the text’s main sources. Hostiensis returns as the character who responds to the author’s, the Actoer’s, pressing queries. The image of two persons conversing which appears beside every woodcut of the sacraments, underscores the book’s reliance on the dialogic format [Fig. 17.1]. This dialogic understanding of sacramental knowledge will be central to this paper. Dialogue functions as an instrument, by turns virtual, actual and fictive, through which mysteries are explored, appropriated, and experienced. The modern idea of dialogue as a colloquial rather than literary mode of discourse, incorporates notions of inclusion and engagement that were in fact present, to some extent, in the medieval and early modern understanding of this literary form. The use of dialogue had a direct bearing on the reader’s engagement; I will discuss the particular consequences of dialogue in literary works that use the conversational frame to convey various kinds and degrees of knowledge, and, more importantly, to initiate the audience into the world of religious mysteries. The use of dialogue in itself is not that spectacular. Many medieval texts (in Latin and the European vernaculars) present their subject matter in the form of a conversation between an expert and someone who needs to be informed. The archetype is the dialogue between a master and a pupil, but medieval and early modern literature show a wide variety of authoritative voices educating 3  Warnar G., “Theory into Practice. The Theological Tradition in Dutch Medieval Literature (ca. 1300–1400)”, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 130 (2011) 255–266. 4  Quoted in Pleij H., “Over betekenis en belang van de leesinstructie in de gedrukte prozaReynaert van 1479”, in Pleij H. – Reynaert J. (eds.), Geschreven en gedrukt. Boekproductie van handschrift naar druk in de overgang van Middeleeuwen naar moderne tijd (Gent: 2004) 207– 232, esp. 214: ‘Ende opdat die materie te bet verstaen ende verlicht sel moghen worden, soe ist dat ickse by een maniere van luyden die te samen sprekende die duysternisse van als by die hulpe gods dencke te verlichten, soe dat ick die questien vraghen sel ende dese grote leerres die sellen mi op mine vraghen antwoert gheven’.

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figure 17.1 Vanden seven sacramenten (Gouda, Leeu: 1484). Penance. On the right side of the woodcut the recurring image of two persons in dialogue (The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 30, fol.1r)

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students of all sorts. These texts explore various forms of knowledge transfer in the widest possible sense, from the purely didactic dialogue to the introspective soliloquy, and from philosophical inquiry to debate and disputatio. Open or closed dialogues with historically identifiable characters appear, but also abstract allegories; the reader encounters conflict and cooperation, catechesis and argument, play and seriousness.5 Within this wide range, Vanden seven sacramenten represents a relatively specialized form of dialogic understanding. At first sight the interaction between Actoer and Hostiensis reflects the standard situation of the medieval didactic dialogue with a master and pupil, but the position and presence of the author are different. The reader is not witnessing (the performance of) a conversation between an authoritative voice and a faithful disciple.6 In the dialogue on the sacraments the author explicitly takes on the role of an intermediary. When talking to Hostiensis, the author is engaged in a conversation not with Hostiensis himself but with the written words of the canonist; he offers the reader the results of his careful study of these words, with a view to clarifying the mysteries of faith. He is the inquisitive student engaged in the formidable task of looking for answers in authoritative literature. Hostiensis, living in the thirteenth century, was one of the great medieval canonists.7 His commentary on the Gregorian Decretals was the results of a lifetime’s work, eventually numbering seventy (!) ‘quinternos magni voluminis’ – fourteen hundred folio pages.8 At present, it is almost impossible to assess how the Dutch work relates to Hostiensis’ commentary, as there is no modern edition, and the (partial) manuscript transmission remains understudied. However, it is surely safe to say that Vanden seven sacramenten was only loosely based on the Summa. Even if the author relied on shorter compendia focusing exclusively on the 5  For recent surveys, see Cox V., “Dialogue”, in Moul V. (ed.), A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature (Cambridge: 1980) 289–307; Marsh D., “Dialogue and Discussion in the Renaissance”, in Norton G. P. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge: 1999) 265–270; Kruger S. F., “Dialogue, debate and dream vision”, in Scanlon L. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100–1500 (Cambridge: 2009) 71–82; Cardelle de Hartmann C., Lateinische Dialoge 1200–1400 (Leiden – Boston: 2007); and, on the Dutch literary context, see Warnar G., “The Discovery of the Dialogue in Dutch Medieval Literature: A Discourse for Meditation and Disputation”, in Enenkel K. – Melion W. (eds.), Meditatio – Refashioning the self. Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture (Leiden: 2011) 69–88. 6  Cardelle de Hartmann, Lateinische Dialoge 58–103. 7  Bertram M., “Handschriften und Drucke des Dekretalenkommentars (sog. Lectura) des Hostiensis”, in Bertram (ed.), Kanonisten und ihre Texte (1234 bis mitte 14 Jh.): 18 Aufsätze und 14 Exkurse (Leiden – Boston: 2012) 319–341. 8  See Segusio Henricus de, Summa aurea (Basel, Thomas Guarinus: 1573).

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sacraments, rather than ploughing through the entirety of Hostinesis’ magnum opus, he succeeded in distilling the theologian’s commentary on canon law into a treatise suitable for a lay audience. This was no mean feat. The dialogue is his main literary device; it not only functions as a didactic tool but also invites the reader to follow Actoer’s example and enter into dialogue with the text. The question-and-answer sequences are not meant simply to structure the text. Much of this work is done by the detailed table of contents, which corresponds to the chapter headings and facilitates consultation and navigation. The chapters often start with Hostiensis responding to the question Actoer poses in the last lines of the preceding chapter. After Hostiensis’ exposition, Actoer asks for additional information and further clarification, or shows himself anxious to delve into the practical consequences of the things he is learning. For instance, the first five chapters on the sacrament of Penance consist of twenty-one questions from Actoer. Sometimes they ask for more information (when Hostiensis identifies four ways in which the soul is captured by sin, Actoer asks for a fuller account of these four ways), or the translation of a Latin word, or the nature of an experience such as remorse or an experiential activity (what are the eight ways in which a person is led to feel remorse?). The dialogue digresses on selected topics, whenever supplementary knowledge is required. When Actoer expresses his desire to know more about the bitterness of confession, Hostiensis compares the bitter taste of certain herbs to the bitterness that a soul experiences from certain spiritual signs (‘gheestelike teykenen’). This sounds strange to Actoer: ‘You tell me wondrous things that I have never heard. I beg you, enlighten me’.9 Hostiensis gladly explains that there are three signs: shame, humility, and the tears that flow when one contemplates sins, brevity of life, and the eternity of the afterlife. And if this is not enough to bring tears to the eyes, states Hostiensis, then Actoer should think about Christ’s Passion. Hostiensis’ short summary of Christ’s journey to the cross has its effect on Actoer: ‘Hearing these words, I am halfway crying. Thank God for your teaching, but tell me more […]’.10 The interaction between Hostiensis and Actoer generates a dialogic method of understanding and appropriating religious knowledge. The questions distribute information in units easy to digest, but primarily, they help to make clear which information is specifically relevant, how it is to be communicated, and for what purpose. The dialogue in Van den seven sacramenten thus invites 9  The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 30, fol. 9v–10r: ‘Ghi segt mi al wonderlike dinghen die ich nye ghehoert en hebbe; ick bidde u: verclaert mi dat’. 10  The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 30, fol. 10v: ‘Dese woerden horende so ween ick wel half. God danck van uwe goeden leren, maer segt mi voert […]’.

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readers to identify with Actoer as an exemplary reader: his approach to studying the master text, like the issues he raises, questions he poses, and answers he supplies, must be studied and imitated. But this is not a purely intellectual process of imitative verbal communication; the dialogue also affects an audience, moving it to action. Actoer himself exemplifies that this is the case: upon hearing Hostiensis’ words, he starts straightaway to cry. Modern readers may struggle with the paradox that literary dialogue pretends to do something that it cannot do – namely, to speak.11 Vanden seven sacramenten explicitly acknowledges the fictive nature of the dialogic interaction on show, when the author points out that he writes as if two persons were talking to each other. Such a statement responds to the medieval distinction between oral and written communication, but the separation between these two forms was not as categorical as that which we experience nowadays. In the fifteenth century, it could still be claimed that books (or texts) speak to us ‘like living masters’, or that ‘books and written texts are masters that instruct and teach us without (beating us with) rods and switches’.12 Both sayings, which come from Dutch texts that circulated not far from the milieu of Vanden seven sacramenten, testify to the idea that the written word, as a vehicle for conveying knowledge, could be thought to operate, either potentially or actually, like a master teaching in person.13 The dialogue form adds to the effect of speech the idea of (fictive) interaction between the reader and the text. This use of the dialogue combines the idea of teaching as (individual) initiation, rooted in oral culture, with the new practice of disseminating knowledge by means of the printed book.14 The advent of the printing press and the concomitant expansion of the audience for literature were not the sole factors underlying the use of dialogue and the growth of an engaged readership in the fifteenth century. The introduction of texts explicitly written in the manner of a dialogue (‘in maniere van dyalogus’), as if two persons were speaking to each other, has been interpreted 11  Womack P., Dialogue (London: 2012) 1–4. 12  First citation in Warnar G., “The Dominican, the Duke and the Book. The Authority of the Word in Dirc van Delft’s Tafel vanden kersten ghelove (ca. 1400)”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K. A. E. – Melion W. (eds.). The Authority of the Word. Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700 (Leiden: 2012) 49–74, esp. 64; second citation in Aurelius C., Die cronycke van Hollandt, Zeelandt ende Vrieslant, met die cronike der biscoppen van Uutrecht (Divisiekroniek), ed. A. de Hamer (s.l: 2011) 1: ‘Want die boecken ende scrifturen sijn meesters die ons instrueren ende leren sonder roede ende gheessele’. 13  Womack, Dialogue 4 and 17. 14  For a recent analytical survey of Dutch religious literature and the printing press, see Goudriaan K., Piety in Practice and Print. Essays on the Late Medieval Religious Landscape, eds. A. Dlabačova – A. Tervoort (Hilversum: 2016) 240–307.

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as evidence for limited familiarity with the practices of silent and individual reading.15 However, this does not explain why so many early printed texts (old and new) take the form of a dialogue. Could it be that printers and their editors and authors anticipated new practices of individual reading and therefore produced texts that could speak like a living master? And if so, how did the dialogic format operate in the religious sphere as a way of disseminating religious knowledge and understanding? These questions can be situated at the intersection of literary studies, the history of reading, and the history of the book. My analysis of dialogue will also benefit from linguistic research on the mechanisms that subtend natural conversation. Dialogue, a basic form of human interaction, can only work if the interlocutors are committed to cooperating on a joint project.16 If the same rules of mutual commitment apply to the reader’s interaction with a text that speaks like a living master, what does this mean for the process of religious formation through literature? 1

Dialogue and Print

Vanden seven sacramenten is part of a small but coherent corpus of books in Dutch, published within the community of Holland’s first printers, authors, editors, and translators.17 There are at least two other texts that feature a person engaged in dialogue with a personified representative of authoritative writing – vrouwe scrifture (‘Lady Scripture’): Die spieghel des ewighen levens (Mirror of Eternal Life) and Tboeck vanden leven ons heren Jhesu Christi (The Book of the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ). Dated 1480, the Spieghel is the oldest, printed twice in Delft by Jacob Jacobszoon van der Meer, and reprinted twice in Antwerp two years later, in 1484; the edition printed half a century later, probably again in Antwerp, is the only one I know that acknowledges the dialogic form of the text: ‘fashioned as a dialogue, that is, with the man posing 15  P  leij H., “Printing as a Long-Term Revolution”, in Wijsman H. (ed.), Books in Transition at the Time of Philip the Fair: Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Century Low Countries (Turnhout: 2010) 287–307, esp. 297. Also see Pleij, “Over betekenis en belang van de leesinstructie” 213–215. 16  This is an extremely short summary of a much deeper analysis of ‘commitment’ in human interaction, as formulated in Clark H. H., “Social Actions, Social Commitments”, in Levinson S. C. – Enfields N. J. (eds.), Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition, and Human Interaction (Oxford: 2016) 126–150. 17  These texts have been brought together in Dlabačova A., “Chatten met Scriptura. Het leven van Jezus in een Antwerpse bestseller”, De Boekenwereld 33 (2017) 25–30.

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questions and Scripture answering’ (‘ghemaect als een dyalogus, te weten, die mensche vraghende ende scriptura antwoordende’).18 The text has a first person narrator, Heinric, engaged in a lengthy conversation with Lady Scripture. In Vanden seven sacramenten, Hostiensis refers to his appearance in the Spieghel: ‘as I have explained sufficiently in that book, the Mirror of Eternal Life’ (‘ghelijck dat ick di ghenoech verclaert heb in dat boec van die spieghel des ewighen levens’). This would mean that Actoer in Vanden seven sacramenten can be identified as Heinric of the Spieghel, and further, that Hostiensis, the embodied spokesman for his texts, may be seen as a proxy for Lady Scripture.19 Even if Heinric cannot be identified with certainty as the author of both works, Van den seven sacramenten and the Spieghel are so closely related that they must have been written by the same person. The second text featuring Lady Scripture is Tboeck vanden leven ons heren Jhesu Christi, a long meditative treatise on the life of Christ.20 There is no evidence for a manuscript tradition that predates the first printed edition, published by Gerard Leeu in 1487, a few years after his move from Gouda to Antwerp [Fig. 17.2]. Within a year, a second edition was printed in Delft, by Christiaan Snellaert, who seems to have worked closely with Leeu. As the opening woodcut of the Snellaert edition [Fig. 17.3] was used in a 1487 edition of the Passionael (the Dutch version of the Legenda aurea), there might have been an earlier edition of which no copies survive; another possibility, of course, is that Snellaert and Leeu prepared parallel editions with separate sets of similar woodcuts.21 We know of ten other editions before 1536, all illustrated. The Dutch text is based on the Latin Vita Christi by Ludolphus of Saxony, but as in the case of Vanden seven sacramenten (also printed by Gerard Leeu), the original treatise is turned into a dialogue – specifically, a conversation between Man and Lady Scripture. Although the author of Tboeck might not be the same Heinric who wrote the Spieghel and/or the Sacramenten, the parallels are obvious. 18  On this text, see Pettegree – Walsby, Netherlandish Books nr.28392–95, 28398, and 28406; and Bange P., Spiegels der christenen. Zelfreflectie en ideaalbeeld in laat-mideleeuwse moralistisch-didactische traktaten (Nijmegen: 1986) 75–76. A hitherto unidentified excerpt from the text is found in ms. The Hague, Royal Library, KNAW 37, fols. 82v–89r. 19  Dlabačova, “Chatten met Scriptura” 26–27. One small section of Van den seven sacramenten replaces the heading Hostiensis with Scrifture, perhaps accidentally. 20  For literature on the text and its transmission in print, see in Dlabačova A., “Drukken en publieksgroepen. Productie en receptie van gedrukte Middelnederlandse meditatieve Levens van Jesus (ca. 1479–1540)”, Ons geestelijk erf 79 (2008) 321–368. 21  Defoer H., “De houtsneden in de Delftse en Antwerpse drukken van het Ludophiaanse Leven van Jezus”, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis 24 (2017) 33–55.

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Tboeck vanden leven ons heren (Woodcut from the edition Gouda, Leeu: 1487 in a copy with only the woodcuts). Lady Scripture and Man (The Hague, Royal Library, 171 D 29, unfoliated)

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figure 17.3

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Tboeck vanden leven ons heren (Delft, Snellaert: 1488). Lady Scripture and Man (The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 8, fol. A3v)

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Tboeck and Spieghel, which I shall presently discuss in more detail, should first be contextualized by reference to the broader interest in dialogues. In 1482, Gerard Leeu printed Van den drie blinde danssen (On the Three Blind Dances), a Dutch version of Pierre Michault’s Danse des aveugles; Leeu announces that it has been fashioned ‘in the manner of a dialogue, that is, questions and answers between two people, namely, the Acteur or Author who wrote the text, and on the other hand, his Intelligence’.22 Like Van den seven sacramenten, this dialogue has the author participate as Acteur (only in the last line does the author make himself known as clercxken Martijn). There is also a parallel to the Spieghel: a melancholic first-person narrator encounters in a dream state an allegorical character in human form. In the Spieghel, Heinric sees a beautiful lady ( joncvrou), who turns out to be Scripture. In Van den drie blinde danssen, the Acteur character describes how Intelligence appears in human form and forthwith starts to speak (‘in eender menscheliker vormen twelc ter stont mij an te spreken began’).23 As a rhetoricians’ text, written in complex strophic verse, the Danssen belongs to a different literary culture than the theological Spieghel, Sacramenten, and Tboeck. Thematically closer to these dialogues is Vanden vier oefeninghen, printed for the first time in Antwerp in December 1487, under the name of Claes Leeu, the brother and probable associate of Gerard Leeu. This adaptation of Bonaventure’s Soliloquium circulated widely in manuscript from the first half of the fifteenth century, but would prove equally popular in print. Only the printed version mentions that ‘the text is drawn up in the manner of a dialogue; this is a conversation between two [persons], namely, the soul asking and man answering inwardly’.24 A few months later, in March 1488, Gerard Leeu published Die spieghel der bekeeringhen der sondaren (The Mirror of Conversion of the Sinner), with additional information on the title page: ‘and it is composed as a dialogue, that is, a conversation of two, namely, the righteous and the sinner’.25 This Spieghel is a Dutch version of the Speculum conversionis

22  Quoted in Pleij, “Over betekenis en belang van de leesinstructie” 213: ‘in maniere van dyalogus, dat is een tale ende andwoirden tusschen twee persoenen, te weten tusschen den acteur, dat is den genen die twerc ghemaect heft ter eender zide ende sinen verstande ter ander side’. 23  Schuijt W. J. (ed.), Van den drie blinde danssen. Naar de Nederlandse bewerking in facsimile herdrukt (Amsterdam – Antwerpen: 1955) 6–7. 24  Cited in Warnar, “The Discovery of the Dialogue” 81. 25  Cited in Pleij, “Over betekenis en belang van de leesinstructie” 21: ‘Ende es gheset als een dyalogus dat es een sprake van tween, te weten die rechtvaerdighe ende die sondaer’.

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peccatorum, originally by Denys the Carthusian, who is described as ‘a very distinguished and devout man’ (‘eenen zeer notablen ende devoten man’).26 There must have been more such ‘men of letters’ associated with Leeu’s printing presses in Gouda and Antwerp: trained intellectuals, they were equipped to transform canon law or a learned Latin treatise on the life of Christ, into Dutch texts for the literate laity. However, the division of labor around the early printing press is very unclear, and identifying persons has proven to be very difficult. There is nothing to go by, except for the famous passage from a letter by Erasmus: while residing at the convent of Steyn near Gouda, he met Gerard Leeu, describing him as ‘vir sane lepidus’.27 The praise of Leeu might be read as a recommendation, since the addressee of Erasmus’ letter, Jacob Canter, was preparing an edition of Petrarch’s Secretum, later published by Leeu in Antwerp (1489). Canter’s work is of interest because the Secretum counts as a landmark in the literary history of dialogue: originally written in the fourteenth century, the text signalled a return to the style of the classics, to Cicero in particular, and renewed interest in the dialogue as a generic form in Renaissance humanism.28 I shall circle back to this point. Canter also offers a glimpse of the intellectuals who collaborated with printers such as Leeu – learned men educated at university. Canter completed the liberal arts curriculum at the university of Cologne, then moved to Antwerp where he worked as a private tutor between 1489 and 1490), before travelling to Italy. He was familiar with humanist culture, but also edited for Leeu a Latin life of Christ, based on the revelations of Bridget of Sweden.29 Leeu must already have been in contact with intellectuals like Canter in Gouda, although evidence of the small circle of Dutch humanists becomes traceable only after Leeu’s departure.30 Their centre of activity seems to have 26  Hendrickx, F., De kartuizers en hun klooster te Zelem. Tentoonstelling ter gelegenheid van het negende eeuwfeest van de orde, 1084–1984 (Diest: 1984) 205–208. 27  Lemaire C., De vijfhonderdste verjaring van de boekdrukkunst in de Nederlanden. Catalogus (Brussels: 1973) 288. 28  See, for instance, Rigolot F., “Problematizing Renaissance Exemplarity: The Inward Turn of Dialogue from Petrarch to Montaigne”, in Vallée J.-F. – Heitsch D. (eds.), Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2004) 3–24, esp. 3; and Marsh D., The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge: 1980) 1–23. 29  On Canter, see Enenkel, K. A. E., “Jacob Canter”, in Bloemendal J. – Heesakkers C. (eds.), Bio-bibliografie van Nederlandse Humanisten, Digitale uitgave DWC/Huygens Instituut KNAW (Den Haag: 2009). 30  Goudriaan K., “The Gouda Circle of Humanists”, in Goudriaan K. – Moolenbroek K. – Tervoort J. (eds.), Education and Learning in the Netherlands, 1400–1600. Essays in Honour of Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Leiden – Boston: 2004) 155–177.

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been Steyn, the monastery of regular canons, where Leeu met Erasmus. The most prominent figure in this circle of humanists was Cornelius Aurelius (ca. 1460–1531), author of Latin poetry and the Dutch Divisiekroniek, which was published in 1517 by Jan Seversz in Leiden. It is the prologue of the Divisiekroniek that speaks of books as ‘masters that instruct and teach us without beating with rods and switches’). Aurelius studied in Cologne, Louvain, and Paris, and then spent his days at the Dutch monasteries of Hemsdonk (Schoonhoven, near Gouda) and in Lopsen (Leiden). The latter community’s patron saint was the church father Saint Jerome, who is emphatically invoked in the prologue to Van den seven sacramenten: the author claims to have taken up his work in honor of the blessed mother of the only son of God, and of the holy doctor Jerome, light of the holy Church (‘den heylighen doctoer, licht der heyligher kercken Jheronimus’).31 Another reason seriously to consider a Leiden connection for Van den seven sacramenten is the fact that a copy of Hostiensis’ Summa was available for consultation there in the library of the fourteenth-century jurist Philips van Leyden.32 Seversz, the Leiden printer of Aurelius’ Divisiekroniek, reprinted Van den seven sacramenten in 1504 and 1511.33 Printers such as Leeu and Seversz, along with their authors and editors, shaped the intellectual climate and literary culture of Holland in the decades that witnessed the publication of Van den seven sacramenten, the two texts with Lady Scripture, and other dialogues. This was a period of transition and continuity, when the new medium of the printing and the earliest traces of humanist culture ran parallel with older traditions of sacramental thought, Passion meditation, and religious instruction. These ‘double trends’ are noticeable in the work of such individuals as Canter, but also in the use of the literary form, or, better, genre of the dialogue. Its history can be viewed through the lenses of humanism and scholasticism: the conversation culture of Renaissance dialogue derives from and transforms the medieval didactic mode comprising questions and answers. The situation was quite complex. The transition from scholastic to humanist dialogue not only developed over time, but also involved a growing distinction between forms of literary production, that reflected the practices of specific milieus.34 Scholastic dialogue was concerned with the methods of academic disputation – the quaestiones that aimed at problem solving and knowledge acquisition – with an authoritative 31  On Lopsen, see Kohl W. et al., Monasticon Windeshemense. Tl. 3: Niederlande, Archives et bibliothèques de Belgique, numéro spécial 16 (Brussels: 1980) 265–279. 32  Feenstra R., Philips van Leyden en zijn bibliotheek (Leiden: 1994) 24. 33  See note 2. 34  See in particular, Tinkler J. F., “Humanism and Dialogue”, Parergon 6 (1988) 197–214.

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professorial figure in the standard role of the master. Humanist dialogue turned away from the hierarchies of institutionalized learning toward more open conversations between friends in an informal setting. Single works, however, may combine characteristics from both literary traditions. Vanden seven sacramenten, for example, follows the systematic treatment of Hostiensis’ Summa, but combines respect for the authoritative text with a more inquisitive model of readership, marked by an increased reliance on personal judgement and interpretation. Given Canter’s work on Leeu’s edition of Petrach’s Secretum, it is worthwhile noting that this text has been assigned a pivotal role in the changing use of dialogue, from the authority-based scholastic approach to the individually-based humanist one. This does not mean that Leeu’s life of Christ featuring Lady Scripture (printed by Leeu two years before his Secretum edition) should be read as foreshadowing Netherlandish humanism, but neither should the text’s openness to changes occurring in the literary landscape be ignored.35 2

Fictive Interaction and Commitments

A possible way around the difficulties of categorizing dialogue types on the grounds of themes or historical developments is to focus on what these texts purport to do – turn the reader into the witness of a conversation, or even into a participant, when a text starts to ‘talk like a living master’. The dialogue in Van den seven sacramenten can be characterized as fictive interaction, in the (general) sense that a text or another form of discourse is structured within a conversational frame, even though there is no real interaction.36 Examples of fictive interaction permeate local usage at every level, ranging from Frequently Asked Questions to such expressions as ‘listening to your conscience’, or the conference title ‘Quid est sacramentum?’ We use modes of fictive interaction naturally, perhaps even without being aware of them, because we are continually exposed to conversation. People talk, or hear people talk, from the first days of their lives. Our intellectual, cognitive, social, emotional, and religious experiences are shaped through conversation. Considered from a linguistic point of view this fictive interaction is something other than the dialogue as a literary 35  On early humanist elements in Dutch late medieval literature, see Pleij H., “De laatmiddeleeuwse rederijkersliteratuur als vroeg-humanistische overtuigingskunst”, Jaarboek Koninklijke soevereine hoofdkamer van retorica ‘De Fonteine’ te Gent 34 (1984) 65–95. 36  Pascual E. – Sandler S., “Fictive Interaction and the Conversation Frame”, in Pasqual E. – Sandler S., The Conversation Frame. Forms and Functions of Fictive Interaction (Amsterdam – Philadelphia: 2016) 3–22.

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device or genre. Fictive interaction as a conversational structure helps to organize discourse: for instance, it structures the medieval practice of the ‘quaestio disputata’, a form of teaching favored at universities, wherein every concept to be defined is framed conversationally as a question to be answered.37 Simple forms of instruction in grammar (e.g., Donatus’ Ars grammatica), catechesis, or didactic dialogues present information in a similar way. Fictive interaction also has a cognitive function when it shapes thought processes or philosophical inquiry. Augustine’s idea of thinking, based on his knowledge of Plato, describes it as conversation with one’s soul.38 The concept of ‘fictive interaction’ has been developed for discourse studies and the analysis of spoken language. Its relevance to the study of later medieval literary culture has yet to be explored fully. However, pending this discussion, it is undeniable that conversation served as a frame for written communication in the essentially oral culture of medieval Europe. This did not change dramatically during the transition from manuscript to print, even though the greater availability of written texts accelerated a shift towards silent and private reading. On the contrary, dialogue and conversation became even more popular as framing devices.39 The conversational frame of reference helped readers to apprehend and assimilate difficult texts, such as Van den seven sacramenten. By structuring the treatment of the sacraments through question and answer, the author created small and logical units of information, following the example of his source text. Hostiensis organised his Summa as a series of questions, and they resurface in Vanden seven sacramenten. The difference is that Hostiensis uses ‘fictive interaction’ systematically to discuss one question per chapter, under a single rubric (for instance, De baptismo), whereas the Dutch text may expand upon this model, incorporating sequences of sub-questions and answers into the various chapters. Here the fictive interaction between Actoer and Hostiensis reflects the thought process of the author contemplating the text: he chases down many cross references in order to provide his readers with a comprehensive and comprehensible introduction to the sacraments. The concept of fictive interaction is not incompatible with dialogue as a form of literary production; in particular, medieval dialogue is closely related to the practices of the disputatio in academic teaching.40 But there is a differ37  N  ovikoff A. J., The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance (Philadelphia: 2013). 38  Stock B., “Self, Soliloquy, and Spiritual Exercises in Augustine and Some Later Authors”, The Journal of Religion 91 (2011) 5–23, esp. 6–7. 39  Womack, Dialogue 17–19. 40  Cayley E., Debate and Dialogue. Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (Oxford: 2006) 12– 51; and Novikoff, Medieval Culture of Disputation 151–155. On the importance of the late

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ence. In a dialogue (defined as ‘a literary treatment of a conversation between two or more persons’), the interaction between the interlocutors is imagined, but not necessarily fictive.41 Denys the Carthusian’s dialogue between the ‘righteous man’ and the ‘sinner’ may be read as the literary representation of a conversation between two individuals, which could have taken place. This is harder to imagine in the case of Actoer and Hostiensis, not so much because the latter was long dead when his supposed interlocutor composed Vanden seven sacramenten. Rather, the author makes no pretence to writing a ‘real’ dialogue. Having consulted the great doctors in canon law, he now claims to transmit what they wrote about the sacraments, in the ‘manner of two persons talking together’. The author engages in fictive interaction with a book – the Summa of Hostiensis – giving his text a voice and bodying it forth in his very person. It is not always easy or even possible to distinguish between the idea of fictive interaction and the format of a literary dialogue. How did medieval audiences interpret personifications like Lady Reason in the Roman de la Rose or Boethius’ Lady Philosophy? Are these allegorical characters engaged in a conversation imagined as if it were actually transpiring, or is their appearance an example of explicitly fictive interaction? Perhaps the one cannot exist without the other. Many medieval morality plays, especially those written and performed by the rederijkers (rhetoricians), incorporate personifications that speak and interact recognizably as living creatures, including allegorical characters that resemble Lady Scripture – Scriptural Evidence or Scriptural Consolation, for instance, as well as other ‘scriptural’ characters to be found in numerous zinnespelen.42 Even though it is difficult to imagine how an actor would perform the role of Scriptorial Evidence, these characters are clearly written to be seen interacting

medieval tradition of rhetoricians’ literature in Dutch, see Spies M., “‘Op de questye …’: Over de structuur van 16e – eeuwse zinnespelen”, Nieuwe Taalgids 83 (1990) 139–150; Spies’ important article is contextualized in Ramakers B., “Dutch Allegorical Theatre: Tradition and Conceptual Approach”, in Strietman E. – Happé P. (eds.), Urban theatre in the Low Countries, 1400–1625 (Turnhout: 2006) 127–147. On earlier Dutch literature, see Kinable D., “Latijnse en Middelnederlandse ‘disputaties’. Babelse tweespraak en lexicale analyse”, Queeste 15 (2008) 70–95. 41  Definition in Binkley P., “Debates and Dialogues”, in Mantello F. A. C. – Rigg A. G. (eds.), Medieval Latin. An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (Washington: 1996) 677–681. 42  See the list of characters in Dutch morality plays in, Hummelen W. M. H., Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama 1500-ca. 1620 (Assen: 1968) 325. Especially interesting is a rhymed dialogue between Scripture and a young man, unfortunately surviving only fragmentary; see Pauw N. de (ed.), Middelnederlandsche gedichten en fragmenten I (Gent: 1897) 669–683.

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plausibly from the moment they appear on stage, moving and speaking.43 But what about the conversation between Man and Lady Scripture? This text ‘in the manner of a dialogue’ is surely an example of fictive interaction, in that a mode of interaction that is not really identifiable as a conversation provides the frame of reference. The reception of the text also mattered: a morality play is designed to be performed and witnessed, whereas Tboeck would have been read privately and silently. But no matter whether we think of a dialogue as the literary (or dramatic) treatment of a conversation, or as a form of fictive interaction, the underlying mechanisms of communicative language remain intact. There is no barrier between the realm of fictive interaction and literary dialogue, neither in the medieval and early modern texts discussed here nor in the academic disciplines of linguistics and literary studies. Therefore, the interpretation of literary dialogue may benefit from analysis of natural conversation (and vice versa). Especially helpful is the work by Herbert Clark on the use of dialogue in social actions.44 When two or more persons agree on a joint activity, whether repairing a chair or discussing the two world systems, they use dialogue successfully to manage or navigate their joint ‘project’. They must agree on what to do, what to achieve, and how to reach a common goal. The participants need to commit themselves to the joint project, and dialogue is used to formulate their ‘participatory commitments’, based on the common ground of the interlocutors. When the joint project takes the form of a conversation, it is crucial that participants jointly commit to their respective roles and actions. If a celebrity and a talk show host communicate when the cameras are rolling, they will be loyal to their commitment of participating in a television interview as entertaining personalities. Afterwards they may interact in a private discussion on climate change, flirt with each other, or one may learn from the other why the invention of printing changed intellectual life in the sixteenth century. All these types of conversation, if they are to work out well, require shared commitment from both parties. Dialogue issues from these commitments, even as it helps to establish them. We have encountered a very simple example in Actoer’s words, ‘You tell me wondrous things that I have never heard before. I beg you to elucidate them’. This question, together with Hostiensis’ answer, form a ‘projective pair’, a request and agreement that constitute a unit of communicative interaction and establish a joint commitment. We do this continu43  R  amakers B., “Eloquent Presence: Verbal and Visual Discourse in the Ghent Plays of 1539”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K. A. E. – Melion W. S. (eds.). The Authority of the Word. Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700 (Leiden: 2012) 217–261. 44  Clark H. H., “Social Actions, Social Commitments”, in Levinson S. C. – Enfields N. J. (eds.), Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition, and Human Interaction (Oxford: 2016) 126– 140. Clark’s publications are available at https://web.stanford.edu/~clark/.

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ously in daily life: when you accept an invitation to have dinner with a friend, you agree to a mutual activity. You have reached common ground through the projective pair of invitation and acceptance, or in general terms, a ‘proposal’ and an ‘uptake’. From this common ground and joint commitment you may start a new sub-project of agreeing where to go or perhaps first agree on whether you would like Italian or Chinese. Every new step in arranging the joint activity of having dinner together requires the (explicit) agreement that common ground has been established before proceeding to the next step. This is crucial for successful communication. There is no point in discussing the benefits of the Chinese around the corner, if one of us is not committed to going to a Chinese restaurant. The concept of commitment with projective pairs and common ground was introduced by the cognitive scientist Herbert Clark for the analysis of natural language use. His focus on natural conversation leads us far from the use of dialogue in late medieval literary culture, but the analysis of patterns in everyday language helps us to understand fictive interaction in and with texts like Van den seven sacramenten. The reasons for the use of dialogue and its (presumed) effectiveness emerge more clearly when we take into account the linguistic models that describe conversation: when applying Clark’s model to a dialogue with Lady Scripture in one of her leading roles, we would ascribe to her a commitment to a joint project. This goes beyond the standard interpretation of Lady Scripture as the personified authority figure with a primarily didactic function. Lady Scripture is ‘committed’ and may be expected to participate in a joint project with Man and the reader. 3

Lady Scripture’s Commitment

Tboeck vanden leven ons heren, printed for the first time in 1487, survives in different versions, but the original format represents most clearly the setting and even layout of the dialogue.45 The book opens with a table of contents or, rather, a list of chapters, as there is no reference to pages or folia. This table ends with the announcement of the book’s title, contents, and the way of proceeding.46 This last element refers to the dialogue that is introduced as follows: 45  Dlabacova, “Drukkers en publieksgroepen” 330–346. I have consulted The Hague, Royal Library 170 E 8 (Snellaert, Delft: 1488) for the citations, and also 171 E 39 (Leeu, Gouda: 1487). 46  The Hague, Royal Library 170 E 8, fol. A2v–A3r: ‘Ende hier volcht nae die titel vanden selven boecke, ende wat daer in ghescreven is ende hoe daer in gheprocedeert werde’.

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And [the book] is composed in the manner of a dialogue, which is a conversation (twisprake, literally ‘two talk’, as in the German, Zwiegespräch) between Man, who asks, and Lady Scripture, who answers each question. And Man comes first, beginning with a prayer, as follows hereafter.47 These are the last words on the page; the reader has to turn the leaf to see how this prayer starts. The next opening reveals the full-page woodcut of Man kneeling in front of Lady Scripture in her library [Fig. 17.3]. He is gazing upward to God, toward whom he directs the prayer that opens the text-page facing the woodcut: Lord God, eternal and almighty Father, who through the love of your Holy Spirit has gathered people from many lands and nations/descent in a united understanding of faith in your only son Jesus Christ, bestow on me your divine grace that I, through your pure, unstained Lady Scripture may understand clearly why you caused your only blessed son Jesus Christ, our lord of all consolation and shelter, to take human form […] that I with complete faith must thus imitate/follow his holy life and must have in my memory his bitter passion and resurrection, in order to rise with Him and come into eternal life with you. Amen.48 Although the prayer is directed at God, Man asks for Lady Scripture’s guidance. She responds, saying that man will not arrive at the desired state of devotion to Christ without first gaining knowledge of ‘the foundation of all these things’ (‘tfundament van alle dese dinghen’). When Man invites Lady Scripture to explain what the foundation of all these things might be, she willingly agrees – ‘Ic wilt gaerne doen’ – and from this point onward a long conversation unfolds, in which we see a joint project taking shape. Scripture defines the foundation 47  The Hague, Royal Library 170 E 8, fol. A3r: ‘Ende is altemael ghestelt bij een manyere van een dyalogus: dat is een twisprake tusschen den mensche, die daer vraghet, ende vrou scriptura, die daer op elck vraghe antwoirde ghevet. Ende die mensche is yerst, beghinnende aldus met een ghebeth soe hier nae volcht’. 48  The Hague, Royal Library 170 E 8, fol. A4r: ‘Here god, vader ewich ende almachtich, die doer die minne dijns heilighen gheestes tvolc van menigherande landen ende nacien in eendrachtich verstant des gheloves van dinen enighen zone onsen heere Jhesum Cristum versaemt hebt, wilt mi doch dine godlike gracie verleenen dat ick doer dyne reyne onbesmette joncvrouwe scriftura claerlic sal moghen verstaen waer om ghi den selven uwen eenighen ghebenediden zone Jhesum Cristum onsen heere alre troest ende toeverlaet menschelike vorm hebt doen ontfaen […] op dat ic also sijn heilighe leven met volcomen gelove na volgen moet ende sijn bitter passie ende verrijsenisse in mijn memorie altijt hebben moet dat ic met hem tot u int ewige leven opverrisen ende comen moet. Amen’.

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as God, the supreme good and creator. Subsequently man asks Lady Scripture help him know his Lord and creator, and who, where, and what He is. Scripture replies that this is impossible to explain and even more impossible for man to comprehend. Man insists and requests that Scripture teaches him as much as she reasonably can, and he is capable of understanding. Man’s prayer and Lady Scripture’s response are comprised by a somewhat special ‘projective pair’, but they pave the way for a joint commitment. Man’s prayer describes the goal of the project for which he (indirectly) asks the help of Lady Scripture: he hopes to better understand the life of Christ, and thereby to enrich his devotion, compassion, and meditation, and to convey himself to salvation. Scripture introduces a necessary sub-project that has to be dealt with first: ‘the foundation of all these things’, which will turn out to be knowledge of creation and of the fall. Scripture agrees to teach man, on the condition that he listen and pay attention to her seriously: ‘but you must diligently pay heed and listen closely to the words I shall utter’ (‘mer ghi moet naerstelic audiencie gheven ende toehoren totter woorden die ic segghen sal’). The words of lady Scripture almost take the idea of a conversation frame beyond fictive interaction. The Dutch expression ‘audiencie gheven’ may be read as ‘remain silent until the speaker is finished talking’, as if Scripture were lecturing. Man and Lady Scripture really reach an agreement on how to proceed and coordinate their joint project, and both are committed to making it work. Lady Scripture instructs, informs, and explains; Man eagerly takes in her teachings and fires additional questions at her. At the end of chapter one, Man thanks Scripture for what she has ‘clarified and disclosed’ (‘Ic danc u, o Scriptura, van tghene dat ghi mi als nu hier verclaert ende ontdect hebt’), but then immediately proceeds to a new question: But would you further tell me how and when this great high almighty God created and made this world and everything in it, and why he sent his only son into this miserable world to take on human form, who was willing to be born from the chaste virgin Mary? Scriptura: All this I will clarify and tell you, if you are prepared to listen.49 49  The Hague, Royal Library 170 E 8, fol. A5r: ‘Mer wilt mij nu voort segghen hoe ende wanneer heeft dese grote hoghe almachtighe god die werelt mit gaders al dat daer in is ghescepen ende gemaect ghehadt, ende waerom heeft hi sinen eenighen zoon hier in dese ellendighe werelt neder ghesonden ghehadt om menschelike form aen te nemen ende woude geboren sijn ut dier reynre maghet Marien. Scriptura: Dat sal ic u altemael verclaren, in dien ghi toehooren wilt’.

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Thanking Lady Scripture for her instruction, Man makes clear that there is common ground: he grasps what she has taught him and now is ready to proceed to a new (sub-)project, which he proposes in the following questions. Lady Scripture further commits herself to explaining, on the condition that Man continues to listen. Again, the verbs tell and listen give the impression of a real dialogue, although the reader does not actually hear anything, unless the text is read aloud. But even then, what is being presented as conversation is the reader’s interaction with the book. Man’s role in Tboeck is different from Actoer’s in Vanden seven sacramenten. Actoer was the intermediary between the text and the reader; in Tboeck the reader is Man, from the moment he or she speaks (silently) the words of the opening prayer. And Lady Scripture is the book, both textual and material, as there is a carefully executed correspondence between word and image. Turning the next leaf (Lady Scripture’s final words, cited above, appear last on the page), the reader sees a full-page illustration of the Creation, facing Scripture’s exposition, which is connected to this image [Fig. 17.4]. The opening chapters on ‘the foundation of all these things’ have no counterpart in the Vita Christi of Ludolphus. These chapters and the accompanying woodcuts were especially designed for Tboeck.50 There are some additional questions: Man does not know what to make of God’s spirit carrying Him across the waters, nor whether the earth prevented the light of the sun from reaching the stars, or when the angels (and devils) were created. This last question is difficult because the ‘opinions of the doctors’ (‘der doctoren opinien’) differ, as Scripture explains briefly, adding that if Man wishes more fully to be informed, he may turn to Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas (Aquinas). Subsequently Man asks Scripture to continue with her exposition of God’s work on the second day, the third, etc. Lady Scripture often refers to additional sources when she is not prepared to discuss Man’s questions in detail, but this never frustrates their joint project of elucidating the meditative mysteries of the life of Christ as sources of salvation. When Man appears not fully satisfied, Scripture provides additional information.51 She even encourages Man when he points out contradictions in her narrative: for instance, when he is surprised to hear, in the episode of Christ’s presentation in the temple of Jerusalem, that Joseph and Mary could 50  Lane B., “The Genesis Woodcuts of a Dutch Adaptation of the Vita Christi” in Hindman S. (ed.), The Early Illustrated Book. Essays in Honor of Lessing J. Rosenwald (Washington: 1982) 63–85. 51  See Bruggen M. van, “Scriptura en die mensche. Onderricht in religieuze leeshoudingen voor leken”, Madoc 26 (2012), 155–163.

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figure 17.4

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Tboeck vanden leven ons heren (Delft, Snellaert: 1488). Creation of Adam and Eve (The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 8, fol. A5v)

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only afford to sacrifice two doves, a few weeks after the three wise kings with all their wealth had come to visit the child Jesus (‘Ic hoor al hier so vele wonders ende weet wat segghen’). Lady Scripture is impressed by Man’s critical attitude. Complimenting him for his ‘sharp question’ (‘Het is scarpelijken ghevraecht’), she admits that there is no better answer than to assume and accept that Mary’s contempt for worldly goods must have impelled her to embrace a simple life (‘ende hier op en is gheen beter antwoorde dan dattet wel te vermoeden ende te houden is’).52 Earlier on, Man had expressed his surprise at the many reports of Mary’s poverty, while her father was said to be rich: ‘I hear wonder after wonder. One tells me so much about Mary’s poverty that it becomes too much’. Lady Scripture replies: ‘I can say to you what is in me; the people can say what they wish’.53 The passage is typical of the detailed discussions that sometimes turn the text into an encyclopedia on the life of Christ, but also of the way that the interaction of Man and Scripture offers the model for the reader studying the book. When Lady Scripture answers that she can only tell what is inside her, it is obvious she is talking about herself as a text or a book. Although she is depicted as reading, with a set of additional books on the shelves behind her, she represents not the compiler but the knowledge collected from other books. Compared to the Latin Vita Christi, which served as a point of departure for Tboeck, the Dutch text has sacrificed the numerous references to relevant literature. It is only Lady Scripture who speaks, and Man listens to her as if he were attending a lecture (‘audience gheven’), and asks for additional information whenever he encounters a new problem or puzzles about various issues. This idea of Lady Scripture as both the book to be studied and the allegorical authority who lectures on the book, is complex, perhaps even confusing, but the dynamics that enable this reading are established naturally through the lay-out and presentation of the text, especially the opening chapters. Following the introductory text and woodcut that provide the conversational frame in word and image, there are more full-page illustrations to which the text refers: Lady Scripture invites Man and thus the reader to combine the two. The third chapter again opens with a woodcut, now of Adam and Eve in the earthly paradise, and its accompanying text, voiced by Lady Scripture: ‘See here, Man, the form and the creation, as accurately as I can judge, and listen

52  The Hague, Royal Library 170 E 8, fol. F6r. 53  The Hague, Royal Library 170 E 8, fol. C1v–C2r: ‘Ick hoore al hier wonder meer dan wonder. Men seit mi so vele van die armoede van Maria dattet te vele is’ […] ‘Ic mach dij segghen wat in mij is; die luyden moghen segghen dat si willen’.

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figure 17.5

Tboeck vanden leven ons heren (Delft, Snellaert: 1488). Adam and Eve in paradise (The Hague, Royal Library, 170 E 8, fol. B1v)

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to the explanation’ [Fig. 17.5].54 This is her response to Man’s request for information on the earthly paradise and the fall. It is highly significant that Lady Scripture orders Man to see and listen, like the reader, who is supposed to look at and read the book. The woodcuts are being presented as part of the book, or rather, as part of what Lady Scripture communicates. The dialogical understanding of the Boeck is reminiscent of Vanden seven sacramenten, which originated in the same literary culture around Gerard Leeu’s printing press. A crucial difference is that the reader of the Sacramenten bears witness to the work of the author and his joint project with Honorius, whereas the reader of the Boeck inevitably assimilates the role of Man and shares in his participatory commitment with Lady Scripture. Tboeck is similar to the Sacramenten, in that it reworks a treatise into a dialogic text that is ultimately didactic, but the interlocutors have slightly different functions. Lady Scripture is an authority figure, but not in the institutionalized sense of playing a master role, like Hostiensis. Lady Scripture is allegorical and female. She is not so much the expert who imparts knowledge of the mysteries of faith and religion; she herself is this knowledge (in the last section of this article I will return to the possible origins of Lady Scripture’s authority). Her position has its effects on that of the pupil in the dialogue (who, as we have seen, is committed to interacting with Scripture) and that of the reader, who is expected to participate actively in the process of grasping, to the fullest extent possible, the mysteries of the life of Christ. The explicitly joint commitment of Lady Scripture and Man extends to the relation between text and reader. The conversation frame (the manner of a dialogue) shows the reader how to interact with the text, about which we might say that it expresses a commitment to being understood. Instead of focussing exclusively on what must be understood, as in the didactic dialogue, it also focuses on how to understand. Thus, the most frequently asked question throughout Tboeck is, ‘How should I understand this’? And repeatedly, Man poses this question in combination with an expression of wonder. The medieval Dutch word wonder had the meaning (still current in modern Dutch) of ‘miracle’, but even more, of ‘mystery’, that is, something sacramental and fit to be contemplated. The reader of Tboeck (or Man as his or her avatar) does not merely digest an authoritative text, but participates in a joint project with commitments from both parties. This is not unlike what Peter Womack describes as the task of literary scholars in his introductory study on the dialogue (as genre and as method). Referring to the German philosopher Gadamer, Womack argues that 54  The Hague, Royal Library 170 E 8, fol. B1v: ‘Siet hier, mensche, die ghedaente ende sceppenisse, so na als ic dat ramen can ende hoort die verclaringhe daer of’.

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effort to understand a literary text, especially a text written in the distant past, has the character of conducting a dialogue with it. Works of art communicate a meaning, and we try to come to an understanding of what is being communicated (assuming the other is also committed to being understood). Although Womack speaks of reaching an agreement, his argument can be seen to correspond with Clark’s terminology of commitment and shared goals: […] the effort to understand what the other person is saying is, in the same breath, an effort to reach agreement with them. This argument is easier to make in German, because of the close connection between the words corresponding to ‘understanding’ (Verständnis) and ‘agreement’ (Einverständnis). But it is not really untranslatable: in English, in legal or commercial contexts, for example, there is not much difference between an ‘understanding’ and an ‘agreement’. The mechanism of the attempt is that of ‘the art of conversation’. Through ‘argument, question and answer, objection and refutation’, we work towards a shared perception of the matter in hand; agreement may not be reached, of course, but in any case the attempt to reach it is what gives shape to the interaction. In one word, understanding a verbal communication, even a written one, entails conducting a dialogue with it.55 The conversation frame of Tboeck (with the opening woodcut) prepares the reader to conduct this dialogue, to ‘come to an understanding’ of the sacred mysteries of Christ’s humanity. Obviously he or she is reading the questions that the author thought were necessary or appropriate to coming to an understanding of the life of Christ, but the presentation in the ‘manner of a dialogue’ teaches the reader how and why to turn to (Lady) Scripture. The reader is introduced to (humanist reading practices of) judgment and interpretation, not at the expense of the text’s authority, but in a ‘joint project’.56 This may be witnessed also in the first text with Lady Scripture in the leading role – the Spieghel des ewighen levens (first printed in Delft in 1480 and reprinted in Antwerp in 1484).

55  Womack, Dialogue 128–129. 56  Cf. Kahn V., “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum”, Publications of the Modern Language Association 100 (1985) 154–166, for the humanist approaches to reading Petrarch, especially his Secretum, which was likewise printed by Leeu.

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4 The Spieghel des ewighen levens Unlike Van den seven sacramenten or Tboeck, the Spieghel has no preliminary texts that give some idea of the author’s intentions. However, there is a narrative introduction (preceding the numbered chapters that correspond with the table of contents) [Fig. 17.6]. Technically, the Spieghel is a first-person narrative: a certain Heinric recounts his sorrows and the ways of the world in a contemplative frame of mind close to melancholy: One morning, not long ago, I was in deep thought, thinking about my sorrows and the ways of the world, and speaking inwardly with the prophet (viz., David, as he appears in Psalm 143:2): What is Man, O Lord, that you honor him so? What is he made for? What is he made of? Who has made him? Where is he who has made him? Where does [Man] go when he dies? Will he return?57 Heinric is lost in his thoughts; in Dutch, Heinric is said to be ‘wandering within himself’. This indicates the sort of dream state in which an author may enter the literary world of allegorical figures.58 Heinric sees a beautiful lady before him: ‘As I roamed within myself, there appeared standing before me a beautiful maiden’.59 She hides three other ladies under her cloak. She introduces herself as ‘Sacred Scripture, that is to say, Holy Writ’ (‘Ic ben scriptura sacra; dat is te segghen die heilighe scrifte’), with her three daughters Faith, Hope, and Charity. The lady reminds Heinric that she has told him before not to dwell in his misery. She quotes biblical dicta and religious aphorisms, the first of which is a paraphrase of Psalm 33:7: ‘As that the tribulations of the just are many; yet the Lord frees them of all sorrow’(‘Als dat der rechtvaerdigher tribulatien sijn veel; nochtan verlossetse die heere alle tijt van allen verdriet’). The scriptural excerpts that follow are typical of the late medieval anthologies and florilegia popular among the Modern Devout. They collected and copied relevant 57  ‘Eens des morghens onlanghes gheleden, lach ic in een swaer ghepeyns, mijn verdriet ende des warelts loep overdenckende, end in mijn selven met den propheet sprekende: Wat is die mensche, o Heer, dattu dien dus groteliken eerst ende bi di gheacht is? Waer toe is hi ghemaect? War van is hi ghemaect? Waer is hi dien ghemaect heeft? Waer vaert hi als hi stervet? Sel hi oec weder comen’? The name of the first-person narrator is alternatively spelled Heynric or Heinric. I have consulted The Hague, Royal Library 169 G 47 (Van der Meer, Delft: 1480); see fol. A3r for the citation. 58  Kruger S. F., “Dialogue, Debate, and Dream Vision”, discusses allegorical dreams and dialogues in tandem. 59  The Hague, Royal Library 169 G 47, fol. A3r: ‘Als ic dus in my selven dwaelde, so vernam ic voer mi een scoen joncfrou staen’.

Dialogic Understanding in Dutch Religious Literature

figure 17.6

Opening Die spieghel des ewigen levens (The Hague, Royal Library, 169 G 52, fol. A2r)

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passages from their reading, for private meditation and spiritual exercises. Some of these personal notebooks (rapiaria) were circulated, one of the most famous being De imitatione Christi, but anonymous collections made for individual use survive in significant numbers.60 The opening chapter of the Spieghel refers to the reading practices associated with these rapiaria. As in the case of Tboeck, the appearance of Lady Scripture turns a dialogue into a conversation with a (written) text. Heinric, inevitably, becomes a reader. Although Scripture in the Spieghel interacts with Heinric as a character, she is also ‘scriptura sacra’. In the course of the text she refers to herself as a divine source of consolation: God comforts man ‘through me, as the holy writings have given me teachings and exempla’.61 And she tells Heinric to turn toward her often and with the utmost concentration: When you come to see me, turn completely toward me, or you will forget me, because as the common expression goes: reading without remembering is forgetting. Therefore, whatever you do, never forget me, but come often to behold me.62 This advice echoes the opening words of Lady Scripture, reminding Heinric of her earlier teachings (dicta). He is addressed as a reader, although the narrative frame of his interaction with Lady Scripture turns her into an allegorical character far less static than the authority figure of Tboeck. Heinric is invited to join Lady Scripture and her daughters. They promise to lead him to their city, the holy and heavenly Jerusalem. They dress Heinric in the allegorical garments of penitence and confession, but his first concern is to be released from his ponderous thoughts (‘drome mijns gepeins’, that is, ‘dream of my pondering’). Having been approached for help, Lady Scripture agrees to answer Heinric’s initial question: What is man? The situation is reminiscent of the fourteenth-century dream-allegory, Pelerinage de la vie humaine, which describes a pilgrim’s journey to the

60  Mertens T., “Lezen met de pen. Ontwikkelingen in het laatmiddeleeuws geestelijk proza”, in Oostrom F. P. van – Willaert F (eds.), De studie van de Middelnederlandse letterkunde: stand en toekomst (Hilversum: 1989) 187–200. 61  The Hague, Royal Library 169 G 47, fol. F3r: ‘[…] doer mi, als die heilighe scriften mi die heylighe leeringhen ende exempelen ghegheven heeft’. 62  The Hague, Royal Library 169 G 47, fol. C8r: ‘Wanneer als ghi mi siet, so doet u volcomen tot mi of ghi selt mi vergheten, want het is doch een ghemeen sprake: als dat te lesen ende niet te onthouden, dat is vergheten. Daer omme: wat ghi doet, en vergheet mi ymmer niet, mer coemt mi dicwijl besien’.

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heavenly Jerusalem under the guidance of a female personification, God’s Grace.63 Again, the mechanism of dialogue is easily discernible, here used by the protagonists to navigate and negotiate a joint project. Their shared goal is to convey Heinric to the celestial Jerusalem, but in order to arrive there safely (and remain there peacefully), he must ask to be informed about the human condition, for ignorance and doubt are the engines of his current misery. The joint project unfolds as soon as Scriptura commits herself explicitly: ‘I shall do it gladly’ (‘Ic wilt gaerne doen’). Her initial answer, which identifies Man as a soul clothed in a mortal body, leads to the sub-project, couched by Heinric in the form of the question: Then what is the soul? Lady Scripture’s response is full of the abstractions and (quasi-)neologisms of mystical language: ‘the soul is a spiritual substance without a body, the life of the body, invisible, sensible, mutable, unstable, with the capacity to suffer, having no measure, form, or colour, with the capacity to memorize, reasonable, intelligible, immortal’.64 Heinric’s reacts with wonder and amazement, and poses a question that leads to the next sub-project: How should I understand this? The dialogic pattern is similar to that in Tboeck: wonder at the answer to a what is question leads to a how to understand question. Heinric is not only informed by an expert, but also initiated into a newly discovered world of religious thought. Guided by Lady Scripture, Heinric proceeds toward the great mysteries of Man’s relation to God, the origins of the soul, and the source of the created soul’s life. Lady Scripture is aware that they sometimes reach the limit of what can be said in Dutch, that the vernacular does not offer the terminology to be found in the specialized Latin of the professional theologian. Sometimes her interaction with Heinric is so lively that it evokes a real classroom situation, with Lady Scripture examining him in almost Socratic fashion, as she endeavours to lead Heinric to a fuller understanding of the sacred mysteries and to a fuller experience of God. Typical of the deep understanding Heinric seeks (and Scripture is prepared to offer) is chapter eleven on the mystery of the Incarnation. Heinric admits that it diverges from the heart of the matter he has been considering 63  Kamath Viereck Gibbs S. A., Authorship and First-Person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England (Woodbridge: 2012). For the Dutch version of the Pelerinage, see Biesheuvel I. (ed.), Die pelgrimage vander menscheliker creaturen. Een studie naar overlevering en vertaal- en bewerkingstechniek van de Middelnederlandse vertalingen van de Pèlerinage de vie humaine (1330–1331) van Guillaume de Digulleville met een kritische editie van handschrift Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent BMH 93 (Hilversum: 2005). 64  The Hague, Royal Library 169 G 47, fol. A4v–A5r: ‘Die siele is een gheestelike substancie sonder lichaem, het leven des lichams, onsienlic, bevoelic, verwandelic, onstedelic, lidelic, noch maet, noch form, noch verwe ontfanghende, ghedachtelic, redelic, verstandelic, ontsterflic’.

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(‘een weynich uter materien’), but he is eager to know how the Word became flesh. Scripture at first refuses to explore this topic, partly because it is too complicated, partly because she would have to touch upon the intricate, incomprehensible mystery of the Holy Trinity.65 Heinric persists: if she cannot provide a straightforward answer, then he will make do with a similitude (‘een ghelikenisse’) that provides some measure of understanding. To this Scriptura agrees: ‘That I will do gladly, although it will be hard for me’ (‘Dat wil ic gaerne doen, hoe wel het mi swaer sel wesen’). She discusses the threefold meaning of ‘word’: what one utters in speaking, is what one understands in the heart without speaking, and what one imagines and thinks about in the intellect. In this third meaning, God the Father is understood to have given birth to the Word. After Scripture’s brief exposition, Heinric declares himself to be completely satisfied: The one who is the light that enlightens all men shall wish to thank you, beautiful lady, for everything that you have disclosed through Caritate – that is, through your daughter Love, who has released me from the darkness of my intelligence, so that I should know how to receive this divine light. Now, I don’t want to trouble you further by asking about the substance of divine understanding. Your good teaching is enough for me. And should something more occur to me, I shall make peace with it, through Fides, that is, Faith, your daughter. But prithee explain to me now: How am I to comprehend that man is made after God’s image? Scriptura: I have promised to answer your questions, and I shall do this to the best of my abilities. However, I need to come back to the matter of the Trinity.66

65  The Hague, Royal Library 169 G 47, fol. B6v: ‘Dat is te veel ghevraecht, ende te swaer te begripen ende te segghen. Ende in die materie te treden, so most ic weder keeren in die grondelose sublijlheyt des heilighe drievoudicheits’. 66  The Hague, Royal Library 169 G 47, fol. B8r: ‘Die ghene die tlicht is dat alle menschen ver­ licht die wil u dancken seer, scoen joncvrouwe, van alle dat gheen, dat welc dat ghi doer die Caritate – dat is: doer die minne, u dochter – mi hebt ontdaen die duusterheit mijns verstans ende dat ic dit clare godlike licht weet te ontfanghen. Nu soe en wil ic u op dit pas niet vorder moyen, om van die materie des godliken begrijps te vraghen. Uwe goede leeren sijn mi ghenoech. Ende of mi yet meer inviel, des wil ic mi met Fides – dat is: dat ghelove u dochter – te vreden setten. Maer ic bidde u, besceyt mi voert: Hoe sel ic verstaen dat die mensche na den beelde gods ghemaect is?  Scriptura: Ic hebbe u beloeft te besceiden u vraghen; ende ic wilt na mijn vermoghen doen. Nochtan moet ic weder inder materien der drievoudicheit comen’.

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Once more, the terminology of conversation analysis is helpful in parsing the nature of the dialogue. Heinric and Scripture repeat their participatory commitments, secure their common ground, and (re)define their sub-projects. Even though Scripture is reluctant to go into detail, they manage to reach agreement on an alternative road toward their common goal. The initial commitment is never in danger, not least because Heinric and Scriptura continuously affirm their common ground. In the passage just cited, Heinric expresses his gratitude for Scripture’s efforts to illuminate him, emphasizes that he is completely satisfied, and advances toward the next sub-project, seeking to understand how Man is made after God’s image. As Scripture has thus far committed to answering Heinric’s questions, she now agrees to continue. Gradually the emphasis in Lady Scripture’s teaching moves from theory and theology to the practices of devotion, preparing Heinric for life in a religious community where he will more surely attain access to the heavenly Jerusalem (the eternal life of the title). Scripture repeatedly encourages Heinric to ponder what she tells him, and thereby assists him to exercise a rule of life. Lady Scripture in the Spieghel is the expert, and Heinric behaves like a novice, also in the literal sense. Focusing on the use of dialogue to navigate a joint project, Heinric and Scripture engage in a highly pedagogical exchange, but their commitments are similar to those encountered in Tboeck. Although there is no intermediary narrator in Tboeck (whether as the author’s alter ego, or not), it is fair to say that Tboeck owes much of the Spieghel – for example, its conversation frame and the figure of Lady Scripture. Her (Dutch) origins lie in this text which combines the allegorical dream narrative of the Pelerinage de la vie humaine with the emphasis on consolation that we find in numerous other texts, quite often in the form of a dialogue, with a female figure in the authority position. Most famous is Boethius De consolatione philosophiae, with lady Philosophy, but a genealogy of female authorities would also include Lady Reason from the Roman de la rose, and Eternal Wisdom from Seuse’s Horologium.67 Lady Scripture’s closest relative is Saint Sophia from the Legenda aurea, the mother of three daughters, Faith, Hope, and Charity, who are killed by the Roman emperor Hadrian.68 This Sophia is sometimes identified with the female figure of Biblical Wisdom.69 In the Spieghel, we find a further contamination. Although the three daughters 67  Fleming J. V., Reason and the Lover (Princeton, N.J.: 1984). 68  See the indices in Williams-Krapp W., Die deutschen und niederländischen Legendare des Mittelalters. Studien zu ihrer Ü berlieferungs-, Text-, und Wirkungsgeschichte (Tübingen: 1986). 69  Newman B., “Some Medieval Theologians and the Sophia Tradition”, Downside Review 108 (1990) 111–130.

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suggest a connection to Saint Sophia, more important than the somewhat abstract notion of biblical wisdom is the specific notion of ‘scriptura sacra’. She represents written knowledge, as found both in private rapiaria and authoritative texts such as Ludolphus’ Vita Christi. The new portrait of Lady Scripture imagines her in a study, surrounded by books, ready to share her sacred wisdom with any committed reader. 5

Towards a Conclusion: Coornhert

The dialogical mode of the three texts we have been discussing is bound up with the changing role of the reader in the gradual transition from a literary culture that accepts the authority of the text towards a more critical attitude that asks for judgment and interpretation. This transition, whether it was licensed by the emergence of humanist reading practices, or accelerated by the advent of printing, entailed new ways of relating to Scripture through dialogue: by entering into conversation with her, the interlocutor (author, reader, or literary character) was encouraged to share Lady Scripture’s commitment to finding the answers to the question Quid est sacramentum. The dialogic understanding of sacramental knowledge became a joint project of the reader and Scripture. To underscore this conclusion, but also to see the elements of continuity and change, I want to close by taking a look at a sixteenth century Dutch literary relative of Lady Scripture. The prolific dialogue writer and humanist Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522–1590) arranged his Van wel bidden onderwijs (On Teaching How to Pray Well) as a conversation between leergierighe mensche (Studious Man) and Onderwijsende godtlijcke Schrifture (Divine Scripture Who Teaches).70 She is a female figure introduced as ‘die waarachtighe ende sekere Leermeesterinne, die godtlijcke Schriftuyre selve’: ‘the true and infallible teacher (female form), divine Scripture herself’. Coornhert’s dialogic play is extremely interesting: according to Studious Man he has been sent to Lady Scripture by Coornhert himself, who pointed out that in these uncertain times of religious conflict many claim to have found the truth in Scripture, but only 70  There is no modern edition of Coornhert’s Van wel bidden onderwijs. I have used the transcription and digital reproduction of Jacob Aertszoon Colom’s edition of Coornhert’s complete work in three volumes: Dieryck Volckertsz. Coornherts Wercken (Amsterdam: 1630); see: http://coornhert.dpc.uba.uva.nl/c/coo/. Van wel bidden onderwijs was edited in the first volume, fol.196r–210v. Unfortunately, there has been a paucity of research on Coornhert’s many dialogues, since the publication of Geeraerts D., “De dialogen van D. V. Coornhert: een vergelijkend onderzoek”, Spiegel der letteren 2 (1958) 241–255.

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figure 17.7

Dieryck Volckertsz. Coornherts Wercken Vol. I (Amsterdam, Colom: 1630). Van wel bidden onderwijs (Amsterdam, University Library, Cat. Ned. Lett. UBA 195, fol. 199v)

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Scripture herself offers the teaching that can guide man away from the dregs of earthly concupiscence, and thence toward the vivifying bread of the soul (‘af te keeren van den draf der aardsche wellusten om te vinden het levendtmaakende broodt der zielen’). The long dialogue on prayer combines questions, but also observations, thoughts, anxieties, arguments, and statements of Studious Man’s need for scriptural evidence. Almost everything that Divine Scripture brings to the dialogue is taken directly from the Bible. Using another type, Coornhert’s seventeenth-century editor even separated the biblical quotations from the verbal interactions of the dialogue. Some pages have a layout that make the dialogic format barely recognizable [Fig. 17.7]. When Studious Man asks Divine Scripture (addressed as dear lady, lieve vrouwe) how man should prepare to be taught by God, she distinguishes four conditions (labeled a, b, c, and d) that are illustrated with a series of quotations under captions in the same order. Divine Scripture explains far less than her late fifteenth-century predecessors. Her chain of citations is presented to Studious Man in the form of a rapiarium (that assemblage of texts embodied by Lady Scripture in the Spieghel); the role of the reader has evolved even more into that of an independent student. Coornhert, the author, is absent from the text, after he sends Studious Man to Divine Scripture. Therefore, if we compare the joint project of the protagonists, Van wel bidden onderwijs can be seen to stage a dialogue that looks back to the kind of conversation marshaled in Tboeck. It is impossible to say whether Coornhert was familiar with this text (which in his day circulated in mutiple copies), but he surely would have recognized the significance of Lady Scripture’s commitment to any reader desirous of unfolding sacred mysteries. Literature Aurelius C., Die cronycke van Hollandt, Zeelandt ende Vrieslant, met die cronike der biscoppen van Uutrecht (Divisiekroniek), ed. A. de Hamer (2011), https://www.dbnl .org/tekst/aure001cron02_01/colofon.php. Bange P., Spiegels der christenen. Zelfreflectie en ideaalbeeld in laat-mideleeuwse moralistisch-didactische traktaten (Nijmegen: 1986). Bertram M., “Handschriften und Drucke des Dekretalenkommentars (sog. Lectura) des Hostiensis” in Bertram M. (ed.), Kanonisten und ihre Texte (1234 bis mitte 14 Jh.):18 Aufsätze und 14 Exkurse (Leiden – Boston: 2012) 319–341. Biesheuvel I. (ed.), Die pelgrimage vander menscheliker creaturen. Een studie naar overlevering en vertaal- en bewerkingstechniek van de Middelnederlandse vertalingen van de Pèlerinage de vie humaine (1330–1331) van Guillaume de Digulleville met

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een kritische editie van handschrift Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent BMH 93 (Hilversum: 2005). Binkley P., “Debates and Dialogues”, in Mantello F. A. C. – Rigg A. G. (eds.), Medieval Latin. An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (Washington: 1996) 677–681. Bruaene A.-L. van, “‘A wonderfull tryumfe, for the wynnyng of a pryse’: Guilds, Ritual, Theatre, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries, ca. 1450–1650”, Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006) 374–405. Bruggen M. van, “Scriptura en die mensche. Onderricht in religieuze leeshoudingen voor leken”, Madoc 26 (2012) 155–163. Burke P., “The Renaissance Dialogue”, Renaissance Studies 3 (1989) 1–12. Cardelle de Hartmann C., Lateinische Dialoge 1200–1400 (Leiden – Boston: 2007). Cayley E., Debate and dialogue. Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (Oxford: 2006). Clark H. H., “Social Actions, Social Commitments”, in Levinson S. C. – Enfields N. J. (eds.), Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition, and Human Interaction (Oxford: 2016) 126–150. Cox V., “Dialogue”, in Moul V. (ed.), A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature (Cambridge: 1980) 289–307. Defoer H., “De houtsneden in de Delftse en Antwerpse drukken van het Ludophiaanse Leven van Jezus”, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis 24 (2017) 33–55. Dingemanse C., Rap van tong, scherp van pen. Literaire discussiecultuur in Nederlandse praatjespamfletten (circa 1600–1750) (Hilversum: 2008). Dlabačova A., “Drukken en publieksgroepen. Productie en receptie van gedrukte Middelnederlandse meditatieve Levens van Jesus (ca. 1479–1540)”, Ons geestelijk erf 79 (2008) 321–368. Dlabačova A., “Chatten met Scriptura. Het leven van Jezus in een Antwerpse bestseller”, De Boekenwereld 33 (2017) 25–30. Enenkel, K. A. E., ‘Jacob Canter’ in Bloemendal J. – Heesakkers C. (eds.), Bio-bibliografie van Nederlandse Humanisten. Digitale uitgave DWC/Huygens Instituut KNAW (Den Haag: 2009), http://www.dwc.knaw.nl/canter-jacob-1469-1529/. Feenstra R., Philips van Leyden en zijn bibliotheek (Leiden: 1994). Fleming J. V., Reason and the Lover (Princeton, N. J.: 1984). Geeraerts D., “De dialogen van D. V. Coornhert: een vergelijkend onderzoek”, Spiegel der letteren 2 (1958) 241–255. Goldhill S., “Introduction. Why don’t Christians do dialogue?”, in Goldhill S. (ed.), The End of Dialogue in Antiquity (Cambridge: 2008) 1–12. Goudriaan K., “Een drukker en zijn markt. Gheraert Leeu (Gouda 1477 – Antwerpen 1492/3)”, Madoc 8 (1992) 194–205. Goudriaan K., “The Gouda Circle of Humanists”, in Goudriaan K. – Moolenbroek K. – Tervoort J. (eds.), Education and Learning in the Netherlands, 1400–1600. Essays in Honour of Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Leiden – Boston: 2004) 155–177.

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Goudriaan, K., Piety in Practice and Print. Essays on the Late Medieval Religious Landscape, eds. A. Dlabačova – A. Tervoort (Hilversum: 2016). Hendrickx F., De kartuizers en hun klooster te Zelem. Tentoonstelling ter gelegenheid van het negende eeuwfeest van de orde, 1084–1984 (Diest: 1984). Hummelen W. M. H., Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama 1500-ca. 1620. (Assen: 1968). Kahn V., “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum”, Publications of the Modern Language Association 100 (1985) 154–166. Kinable D., “Latijnse en Middelnederlandse ‘disputaties’. Babelse tweespraak en lexicale analyse”, Queeste 15 (2008) 70–95. Klunder N., Lucidarius. De Middelnederlandse Lucidarius-teksten en hun relatie tot de Europese traditie (Amsterdam: 2005). Kohl W. [e.a.] Monasticon Windeshemense. Tl. 3: Niederlande, Archives et bibliothèques de Belgique. Numéro spécial 16 (Brussels: 1980). Kruger S. F., “Dialogue, debate and dream vision”, in Scanlon L. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100–1500 (Cambridge: 2009) 71–82. Kushner E., Le dialogue à la Renaissance: histoire et poétique (Geneva: 2004). Lane B., “The Genesis Woodcuts of a Dutch Adaptation of the Vita Christi” in Hindman S. (ed.), The Early Illustrated Book: Essays in Honor of Lessing J. Rosenwald (Washington: 1982) 63–85. Lemaire, C., De vijfhonderdste verjaring van de boekdrukkunst in de Nederlanden. Catalogus (Brussel: 1973). Luff R., Wissenvermittlung im europäischern Mittelalter. “Imago mundi-Werke” und ihre Prologe (Tübingen: 1999). Marsh D., The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge: 1980). Marsh D., “Dialogue and Discussion in the Renaissance”, in Norton G. P. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge: 1999) 265–270. Moos P. van, « Consolatio », Studien zur mittelalterlichen Trostliteratur über den Tod und zum Problem der christlichen Trauer, 4 vols. (Munich: 1971–1972). Newman B., “Some Medieval Theologians and the Sophia Tradition”, Downside Review 108 (1990) 111–130. Novikoff A. J., The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance (Philadelphia: 2013). Pasqual E., Fictive Interaction: The Conversation Frame in Thought, Language, and Discourse (Amsterdam – Philadelphia: 2014). Pascual E. – Sandler S., “Fictive Interaction and the Conversation Frame”, in Pasqual E. – Sandler S., The Conversation Frame: Forms and Functions of Fictive Interaction (Amsterdam – Philadelphia: 2016) 3–22.

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Pauw N. de (ed.), Middelnederlandsche gedichten en fragmenten I (Ghent: 1897). Pettegree A. – Walsby M., Netherlandish Books. Books Published in the Low Countries and Dutch Books Printed Abroad before 1601 (Leiden: 2010). Pleij H., “De laatmiddeleeuwse rederijkersliteratuur als vroeg-humanistische overtuigingskunst.” In: Jaarboek Koninklijke soevereine hoofdkamer van retorica ‘De Fonteine’ te Gent 34 (1984) 65–95. Pleij H., “Over betekenis en belang van de leesinstructie in de gedrukte proza-Reynaert van 1479”, in Pleij H. – Reynaert J. (eds.), Geschreven en gedrukt. Boekproductie van handschrift naar druk in de overgang van Middeleeuwen naar moderne tijd (Gent: 2004) 207–232. Pleij H., “Printing as a Long-Term Revolution”, in Wijsman H. (ed.), Books in Transition at the Time of Philip the Fair: Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Century Low Countries (Turnhout: 2010) 287–307. Ramakers B., “Dutch Allegorical Theatre: Tradition and Conceptual Approach”, in Strietman E. – Happé P. (eds.), Urban Theatre in the Low Countries, 1400–1625 (Turnhout: 2006) 127–147. Ramakers B., “Eloquent Presence: Verbal and Visual Discourse in the Ghent Plays of 1539”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K. A. E. – Melion W. (eds.). The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Intersections 20 (Leiden: 2012) 217–261. Rigolot F., “Problematizing Renaissance Exemplarity: The Inward Turn of Dialogue from Petrarch to Montaigne”, in Vallée J.-F. – Heitsch D. (eds.), Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2004) 3–24. Schuijt W. J. (ed.), Van den drie blinde danssen. Naar de Nederlandse bewerking in facsimile herdrukt (Amsterdam – Antwerpen: 1955). Segusio Henricus de, Summa aurea (Basel: Thomas Guarinus, 1573), https://www.erara.ch/bau_1/content/titleinfo/497636]. Spies M., “‘Op de questye …’: Over de structuur van 16e–eeuwse zinnespelen”, Nieuwe Taalgids 83 (1990) 139–150. Stock B., “Self, Soliloquy, and Spiritual Exercises in Augustine and Some Later Authors”, The Journal of Religion 91 (2011) 5–23. Tinkler J. F., “Humanism and Dialogue”, Parergon 6 (1988) 197–214. Vallée J.-F. – Heitsch D., Printed Voices. The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2004). Warnar G., “The Discovery of the Dialogue in Dutch Medieval Literature: A Discourse for Meditation and Disputation”, in Enenkel K. – Melion W. (eds.), Meditatio – Refashioning the self. Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture, Intersections, Intersections 17 (Leiden: 2011) 69–88. Warnar G., “Theory into Practice. The Theological Tradition in Dutch Medieval Literature (ca. 1300–1400)”, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 130 (2011) 255–266.

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Warnar G., “The Dominican, the Duke, and the Book. The Authority of the Word in Dirc van Delft’s Tafel vanden kersten ghelove (ca. 1400)”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K. A. E. – Melion W. (eds.), The Authority of the Word. Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Intersections 20 (Leiden: 2012) 49–74. Williams-Krapp W., Die deutschen und niederländischen Legendare des Mittelalters. Studien zu ihrer Ü berlieferungs-, Text-, und Wirkungsgeschichte (Tübingen: 1986). Womack P., Dialogue (London: 2012).

chapter 18

Coemeterium Schola: the Emblematic Imagery of Death in Jan David, S.J.’s Veridicus Christianus Walter S. Melion Before the publication of Robert Bellarmine, S.J.’s popular handbook on dying well, De arte bene moriendi libri duo (Paris, Sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy: 1620), Jan David, S.J.’s emblematic treatise on the Christian forms, functions, and meaning of death held pride of place as the foremost Jesuit ars moriendi. This treatise within a treatise constitutes the closing section of his magnum opus, the Veridicus Christianus (True Christian) of 1601 [Fig. 18.1].1 The book is a doctrinal compendium that trenchantly examines the key articles of faith, closely following the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent. With respect to the topic of death, David (1545–1613) cleaves closely to the view, codified in the Tridentine decrees concerning original sin and justification, and the sacramental decrees on the Eucharist, Penance, and Extreme Unction, that the sin of Adam is the source of the bodily and spiritual death that plagues humankind. The redemptive death of Christ, into which the faithful have been baptised, is the essential antidote to the death of sin; shown forth in the Eucharist, the benefit of the Saviour’s sacrificial death is applied to those who have fallen from grace after baptism, through the sacrament of Penance complemented by the penitent’s good works. David takes to heart the injunction, voiced in 1  David Jan, S. J., Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). On David, who was founding rector of the Jesuit College in Kortrijk (1586–1590), superior of the Jesuit residence in Brussels (1590), rector of the Jesuit College in Ghent (1598–1602, 1611–1612), and the Belgian Province’s foremost catechist and polemicist, see Allegambe Philippe de, S. J., Bibliotheca scriptorum Societatis Iesu (Antwerp, Joannis Meursius: 1643) 234; Geerts van Roey L., Jan David s.j. als polemiet (Leuven: 1954); Geerts van Roey L. – Andriessen J., S. J., “Pater Joannes David S. J.”, Ons geestelijk erf 30 (1956) 113–155; Andriessen J., S. J., “Leven en werk van Joannes David S. J.”, West-Vlaanderen: tweemandelijks tijdschrift voor kunst en cultuur 12 (1963) 220–224; and Andriessen J., S. J., “David, Joannes, seculier priester, daarna jezuïet; predikant, catecheet en schrijver,” Nationaal biografisch woordenboek I (Brussels: 1964) 378–384. On the Veridicus Christianus, see Insolera M. – Salviucci-Insolera L., La spiritualité en images aux Pays-Bas Méridionaux dans les livres imprimés des XVIe et XVIIe siècles conserves à la Bibliotheca Wittockiana, Miscellanea Neerlandica 13 (Leuven: 1996) 141–145; and Imhof D., Jan Moretus and the Continuation of the Plantin Press, Bibliotheca Bibliographica Neerlandica, Series Major III, 2 vols. (Leiden: 2014) I 229–234.

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figure 18.1

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Theodoor Galle (engraver), Title-Page to Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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chapter ten of the decree on justification, that the penitent should supplement the grace of Christ by recourse to justification by works: ‘He that is just, let him be justified still; and again, Be not afraid to be justified even to death; and also, Do you see that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only. And this increase of justification holy Church begs, when she prays, “Give unto us, O Lord, increase of faith, hope, and charity”’.2 Chief amongst the good works that secure an increase of justifying faith, hope, and charity, is the practice of meditative prayer. Such prayer, if it is properly to be exercised, relies upon processes of visualization that represent the deadening effects of sin, and conversely, represent the life-giving effects of the Lord’s death as distilled in the sacraments of Baptism, the Eucharist, Penance, and Extreme Unction. For David, remedial images of both sorts must be produced throughout a Christian’s life, and nowhere more critically than at the moment of a Christian’s death. A discourse on image-making thus anchors his mortuary propaedeutic, and accordingly, my essay focuses on the manner and meaning of the images upon which his death-centred emblems dwell. How were David’s primary readers – youthful catechumens and laymen schooled in Latin – taught to apprehend death in the form of vivid and compelling images fashioned in word and image, and ascribed to their hands and hearts? David, a brilliant apologist, preacher, pedagogue, and emblematist, ministered mainly within the Jesuit Provincia Belgica, where he served as rector of the Jesuit College in Ghent between 1594 and 1602. In addition to numerous anti-Lutheran, anti-Mennonite, and anti-Calvinist tracts and treatises, he composed four of the order’s earliest emblem books: Veridicus Christianus (True Christian) (ed. prin., 1601), Occasio arrepta, neglecta (Occasion Seized, Shirked) (ed. prin., 1605), Paradisus sponsi et sponsae et Pancarpium Marianum (Paradise of the Bride and Bridegroom and Marian Garland) (ed. prin., 1607), and Duodecim specula (Twelve Mirrors) (ed. prin., 1610).3 Both genres of text – 2  The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. – trans. J. Waterworth (London, Doman: 1848) 37. 3  Anti-Lutheran polemic permeates the Veridicus Christianus; in particular, David opposed Luther’s later teachings against the doctrine of purgatory. On the fundamental separation between the living and the dead upon which Lutheran and Reformed attitudes to the death of the body and the soul were premised, see Koslofsky C. M., The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700, Early Modern History, Society, and Culture (Basingstoke – London: 2000) 17–77, 175–187; and Tingle E. – Willis J., “Introduction: Death, Dying, and the Quest for Social Control in the Palatinate, 1547–1610”, in Tingle – Willis (eds.), Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe (Farnham, UK – Burlington, VT: 2015) 1–24. By contrast, David’s community of the faithful, since it encompasses souls in purgatory, closely resembles the “system of solidarity of the living and the dead” endorsed by Jean Gerson in his sermons on the corpus mysticum ecclesiae, on which see Taylor S. L.,

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apologetic and emblematic – contain extensive reflections on what an image is and what sorts of moral and spiritual effects it can produce.4 Along with Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia of 1595, David’s Veridicus established a template for the order’s soon to be copious production of emblem books.5 Addressed to a scripturally literate, Latinate audience, his first emblem book, the Veridicus Christianus, explores in word and image the pivotal role that imagines played (and continue to play) in evincing the covenant of Christ and promulgating the doctrine of salvation. Published by Jan Moretus, head of the Officina Plantiniana in Antwerp, the book consists of one hundred emblems, each comprising an engraved picture, motto, and epigrams – in Latin, Dutch, and French – followed by a lengthy commentary that explains the relation amongst the emblem’s three parts.6 David conceived it as a supplement to the Tridentine Catechism: the sequence of emblems is meant to impress “Pro defunctis exorare: The Community of the Living and the Dead in Jean Gerson’s Sermones de omnibus sanctis and de mortuis”, in Classen A. (ed.), Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 16 (Berlin – Boston: 2016) 297–309. 4  On David as an exponent of Jesuit image theory, see Dekoninck R., Ad imaginem. Status, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: 2005) 194–196, 286–297, 312–324, 339–349; and Melion W. S., “Introduction: The Jesuit Engagement with the Status and Functions of the Visual Image”, in Boer W. de – Enenkel K. A. E. – Melion W. S. (eds.), Jesuit Image Theory, Intersections 45 (Leiden – Boston: 2016) 1–49. 5  On David’s emblematic theory and practice, see Dekoninck R. – Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. – Vaeck M. van, et al. (eds.), Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, exh. cat., Maurits Sabbe Bibliotheek, Leuven; Francis A. Drexel Library, Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: 2006) 29–31, 55–62; Daly P. M., The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem (Farnham, Surr. – Burlington, VT: 2014) 126, 192; Melion W. S., “Introduction: Scriptural Authority in Word and Image”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K. A. E. – Melion W. S. (eds.), The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Intersections 20 (Leiden – Boston: 2011) 22–37; and Melion W. S., “Meditative Images and the Portrayal of Image-Based Meditation”, in Melion – Dekoninck R. – Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. (eds.), Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700, Proteus 4 (Turnhout: 2012) 32–60. 6  The Veridicus Christianus was first written in Dutch, then translated into Latin by David himself, who enriched his text, making it more exegetical; on the Christeliicken waerseggher and its relation to the Veridicus Christianus, see Waterschoot W., “Veridicus Christianus and Christeliicken Waerseggher by Johannes David”, in Dekoninkck R. – Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. (eds.), Emblemata Sacra: Rhétorique et herméneutique du discours sacré dans la littérature en images (Turnhout: 2007) 527–534; and Imhof, Jan Moretus and the Continuation of the Plantin Press I 234–236. On the joint involvement of the publisher Jan Moretus and printmaker Philips Galle in the production of the Veridicus Christianus, see Sellink M., “Joannes David, Veridicus christianus”, in Imhof D. (ed.), The Illustration of Books Published by the Moretuses, exh. cat., Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp (Antwerp: 1996) 88–89.

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inexpugnably the key principles of the Christian life and faith. As he puts it in the dedicatory epistle to his good friend, the Right Reverend Petrus Simons, Bishop of Ypres, the book’s point of origin was the one hundred distichs he had written in Brussels for the use of catechists. As he writes, the engraved images will allow their catechumens ‘to apprehend what they have just read, as if they were seeing these points of doctrine placed before their eyes’.7 Simons for his part, in a letter published as part of the book’s front matter, astutely compares the Veridicus Christianus to Horace’s Epistula 1.1 (especially the claims made in verses 33–40 for the restorative properties of poetry): he animadverts that David’s Christian cultura, in its ability to quell carnal passion and provide a lenitive to human misery, trumps the pagan poet’s self-proclaimed power to civilize even the most savage and wayward of men.8 David’s emblems narrate the clash between Christian cultura and the sinful passions, beginning with the opposition of timor Dei (fear of God) to godless obstinacy, and ending with the opposition between constancy of faith and inconstancy, in the face of the four last things (death, judgment, hell, and heaven). Each of the Veridicus’s one hundred chapters centres on an elaborate engraving (in emblematic parlance, the pictura) co-designed by David and the draughtsman Theodoor Galle, and engraved by Galle, probably with the assistance of his brother Cornelis.9 The final subset of twenty emblems – David’s ars moriendi – focuses on the inevitability of death, on the contingencies and uncertainties that beset the dying Christian, and on the prophylactic functions of emblematic image-making, which David adduces as the chief means whereby death may be meditated and, paradoxically, propounded as a rule of life centering on the imminence of death.10 These death-centred chapters can 7  David, Veridicus Christianus, fol. +2r: ‘Ea ipsa deinde scholiis quibusdam, atque adeo centum in aes incisis iconibus illustrare visum est; ut, qui lecta intelligerent, eadem quasi subiecta oculis viderent’. 8  Ibidem, fol. ++1r–v. 9  On the complex and in some respects contingent relation between Galle’s images and David’s text, see Sors A.-K., Allegorische Andachtsbücher in Antwerpen – Jan Davids Texte und Theodoor Galles Illustrationen in den jesuitischen Buchprojekten der Plantiniana (Göttingen: 2015) 59–83. In my view, David’s texts and Galle’s images tend to be fully integrated and, in this sense, they are truly emblematic in form and function. This holds true for all four emblem books. 10  Implicit throughout David’s chapters on death is the conviction that these emblematic spiritual exercises constitute a kind of ars moriendi, a therapeutic for healing the sick and suffering soul; on the late medieval ars moriendi, see Binski P., Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: 1996) 29–50; and Chaunu P., La mort à Paris, 16e, 17e, 18e siècles (Paris: 1978) 275–287. David was surely arguing against Luther’s transformation of the ars moriendi in key works such as the Sermon on Preparing to Die of 1519 and the Babylonian

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be seen to provide the capstone to David’s doctrina imaginis (image doctrine). Systematically interwoven throughout the Veridicus, that doctrine construes sacred images as the chief means of fixing the life and teachings of Christ within the votary’s mind, heart, and spirit, so indelibly that his soul is re-formed in the Lord’s image, as if it were a panel painting or copperplate (‘in aere’).11 The emblems on death thus begin by restaging a master trope adapted from Augustine’s Confessions – the story of his conversion, precipitated by the sound of a child’s voice mysteriously chanting the phrase ‘Take up [the book] and read’. David emblematically transforms this incident, substituting the image of a cemetery for the book, and close viewing of this deathly image for the action of scriptural reading [Fig. 18.2]. At the heart of this cemetery, as we shall see, David implants another image – or, more particularly, an effigy in the image – the crucifix [Fig. 18.3].12 The next nineteen emblems introduce other kinds of images – illustrative, parabolic, typological, specular, and allegorical – in order fully to explore the lineaments of death and reflect on the psychology of dying. The sequence then Captivity of 1520, on which see Reinis A., Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528) (Aldershot, UK – Burlington, VT: 2007) 47–82. 11  The analogical allusion ‘in aere’ derives from Philippe de Allegambe’s entry on David in the Bibliotheca scriptorum Societatis Iesu, which recounts his urgent desire to undo the effects of apostasy in the order’s Belgian Province, comprising Brabant, Flanders, and the United Provinces, the so-called Missio Hollandica. David’s renowned sermons exemplify his life-work of causing the country’s sacred images to be renewed: ‘By the sermons he gave in Ghent, he caused to be restored in bronze / in copper (aere), both publicly and privately, the images of the saints that the iconoclasts had toppled everywhere’. See Allegambe, Bibliotheca scriptorum Societatis Iesu 234: ‘Gandavi concionibus suis effecit, ut Imagines Sanctorum passim per urbem ab Iconomachis deturbatae, publico privatoque aere reponerentur’. 12  David’s subseries on death markedly differs from the Dance of Death imagery codified by Hans Holbein the Younger in Les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort (Lyon, Melchior & Gasper Trechsel: 1538). Holbein personifies and personalizes Death, yet describes death as a remote event that affects each person differently. David construes death as integral to every person’s life, not least the reader-viewer’s, and specifies that its presence is best discerned as a spiritual or, better, dispiriting effect upon the mind, heart, and soul. On Holbein’s Simulachres and its divergence from earlier Dance of Death cycles, see Gertsman E., The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance, Studies in the Visual Culture of the Middle Ages 3 (Turnhout: 2010) 169–180. David also eschews the trope of the topsy-turvy world associated with the Danse Macabre, on which see Wardo S., “Dance, Music, and Inversion: The Reversal of the Natural Order”, in Oosterwijk S. – Knöll S. (eds.), Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: 2011) 73–100; and Cerchio B., “Alcune considerazioni sul simbolismo della Danza Macabra,” in Cerchio (ed.), Anonimo del XV secolo, Ars Moriendi – L’arte di morire (Turin: 1997) 89–117.

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climaxes in an analogy that tropes the constituent parts of a drawn or engraved image, comparing death to the final stroke in a set of hatched lines or to the final outline that completes a picture drawn on a panel or engraved on a copperplate (‘penicillo in tabula ducit’). In addition, the various kinds of image deployed throughout the sequence are layered one upon the other as a way of fixing mnemonically a densely imbricated symbolum (symbolic image) of death as the Christian modus vivendi (mode of life). From the full set of twenty emblemata, my chapter investigates the uses to which David puts the trope of image-making in just six – Emblems 81, 82, 89, 92, 99, and 100 – asking why image doctrine proves crucial to his emblematic project of describing and regulating the art of living for death [Figs. 18.2, 18.3, 18.7, 18.9, 18.12, & 18.13]. 1

Emblems 81, 82, and 100: from Cemetery to Final Judgment

Emblems 81 and 82 are pendants: the former launches the embedded treatise on death by introducing the image of a cemetery, described simply, if not rudimentarily, in the pictura; the latter, anchored in a more detailed pictura, elaborates upon this image, providing a more descriptive account of the cemeterial imagery to be meditated, within which the crucifix is now inserted [Figs. 18.2 & 18.3].13 The transition from a simple to a complex pictura signifies the process whereby the exercitant comes to grips with the newly introduced thematic of death by deploying increasingly vivid and fully-formed mortuary imagery. Like all the engravings in the Veridicus, pictura 81 includes Roman capitals dispersed throughout the image that correspond to designated passages, likewise lettered, in the respective commentaries. The alphabetical order sets not only the sequence of viewing, but also the corollary sequence of textual argumentation. In addition, the pictura is framed above by a motto – here, ‘The lesson of the cemetery is contempt for the world’ – and below by an epigram that amplifies upon the relation between motto and pictura – in the Latin version, ‘By what teacher shall I be able to grasp these Stoic paradoxes? Ah! Behold the 13  On the cemetery as a place of private and communal devotion in the Low Countries between the late fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Cohn S. K., Jr., “The Place of the Dead in Flanders and Tuscany: Towards a Comparative History of the Black Death”, in Gordon B. – Marshall P. (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge – New York – Melbourne: 2000) 17–43; and Geest J. de – Goudriaan K., “Het kerkhof als plaats van herinnering en devotie. De zusters van Sint-Agnes te Amersfoort en hun begraafplaats”, in Bitter P. – Bonenkampová V. – Goudriaan K. (eds.), Graven Spreken. Perspectieven op grafcultuur in de middeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Nederlanden (Hilversum: 2013) 205–220.

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Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 81, “Coemeterii lectio; mundi despectio” (“The lesson of the cemetery is contempt for the world”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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figure 18.3

Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 82, “Optima philosophia, mortis meditatio” (“The most excellent philosophy, to meditate death”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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mortuary fields of burial’.14 The question and answer format derives, of course, from David’s starting point, the catechism. In pictura 81, ‘A’ marks the entry to a churchyard, where a well-dressed woman, her foot poised on the first step, stops to gaze at skulls, bones, crosses, and a freshly dug grave [Fig. 18.2]. This threshold stands for the transition between our desire to dwell on the beauty of temporal things, and our dawning recognition of the Stoic paradox that living is a form of dying, bodily beauty a prelude to bodily corruption. The woman, whose position before the churchyard stands proxy for ours before the pictura, is caught in this dilemma, having only just begun to discern the truth bodied forth by the cemetery. Her relation to the image we see is tentative or, better, interrogative, as the commentary makes clear: The question is thus posed, by what teacher are we to master Stoic paradoxes such as these, which in previous chapters have been adduced as contempt for the world and, finally, as the neglect of semblance: in a word, beauty is like a fine flower whose fragrance soon turns into a foul smell. For I know that this [paradox] appears the mere likeness of a dream to those who greatly incline towards bodily beauty, apply themselves to cultivating it, and thereby often put themselves at risk of playing the fool; not to mention those who endanger themselves for the mere sight of beauty.15 The cemetery, B., provides the answer to this question, in the form of an image that must be visualized on the model of the parabolic analogy, promulgated in Jeremiah 18:2–6, between the potter’s clay and the mortal substance of humankind. David emphasizes the importance of this scriptural prophecy, which teaches by means of a visual analogy, that is, the comparison between sinful human flesh and the potter’s friable clay, or rather, between the image of a person and the image of a broken pot being turned on a wheel. As Jeremiah in his prophetic vision learns to liken himself to malleable clay in the hands of the Deus Artifex, so one must learn to discern that humankind, ‘formed of the 14  ‘Coemeterii lectio; mundi despectio’. ‘Stoica quo valeam capere haec paradoxa Magistro? / Eia, Sepulchreti ferales adspice campos’. 15  David, Veridicus Christianus 284: ‘Interrogator igitur, quo magistro tam Stoica paradoxa, qualia iam superioribus aliquot Capitibus in contemtum mundi tradita sunt, & postremo de neglectu formae, addiscere valeamus: nominatim pulchritudinem instar floris excellentis & bene redolentis, mox in foetorem teterrimum converti. Scio etenim, istud somnij speciem referre, iis qui tantopere erga corporis pulchritudinem afficiuntur; eique curandae ita incumbent, ut amentiae etiam periculo se non raro exponant: ut eos omittam, qui solo formae aspectu eo se discriminis quoque coniiciunt’.

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slime of the earth’, is composed of the cemetery’s mud and mire.16 This analogy, like the analogy whence it derives, consists of a set of paired images, and this dual structure – the one analogy juxtaposed to the other – is modelled on the juxtaposition of elements A. and B. in the pictura, to elements C. and D., the prophet Jeremiah’s image of himself entering a potter’s workshop and seeing the potter turn a shattered vessel. The benedictory gesture made by the potter’s right hand indicates that he is an image of God. Indeed, the visual logic of the prophecy dictates that prophetic vision itself be construed as a species of divine image-making: the artisanal analogy is in the last analysis an analogy for God’s crafting of the parabolic images seen and reported by the prophet Jeremiah. David explains the parallel structure of the pictura as follows: And so the Lord God, wishing to teach his people in a new and efficacious way, which would be capable of helping them, raising them when they had fallen, and as it were restoring them when they were contrite […] said to the prophet Jeremiah: ‘Arise, and go down into the potter’s house, and there thou shalt hear my words. And I went down [says the prophet] into the potter’s house, and behold he was doing a work on a wheel. And the vessel was broken, etc.’ By the breaking of the vessel and its immediate repair, the prophet learned from the Lord and heard him say, on behalf of all the people: ‘Cannot I do with you as this potter, O house of Israel, saith the Lord? Behold, as clay is in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand’. Therefore, the response [viz., in the epigram] despatches us to the cemetery, where we may learn the needful doctrine to be applied with respect to bodily beauty, strength, and adornment […] and to the fleeting, fragile, and momentary things, so fraught with danger, in which mundane men place such weight. For in that place may be seen what must be made of all these’.17 16  Ibidem 285: ‘[…] nos lutum & limum terrae esse, formam autem testeam & figlinam esse […]’. 17  Ibidem 285: ‘Ita Dominus Deus volens populum suum novo efficacique modo docere, quod potens esset eos adiuvare, collapsos erigere, & quasi contritos restaurare, dummodo saniora consilia sequerentur: dicebat Hieremiae Prophetae: Surge, & descende in domum figuli; & ibi audies verba mea. Et descendi (inquit Propheta) in domum figuli, & ecce, ipse faciebat opus super rotam. Et dissipatum est vas, etc. Per vasis confractionem, eiusdemque statim reparationem, didicit Propheta, audivitque nomine totius populi Dominum dicentem: Nunquid sicut figulus iste, non potero vobis facere, domus Israël: ait Dominus: ecce, sicut lutum in manu figuli, sic vos in manu mea. Ita remittit nos Responsio ad coemeterium, ubi discamus quod scitu est opus, quoad pulchritudinem, robur, & corporis ornatum […] temporanea, fragilia, momentanea, vana, periculorum plenissima, in

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More important than the image of this earthen vessel, however, is the interior image of God that it allows us to discern, if we look past bodily formam (visual beauty) to what the body enshrines. By considering the ‘terrestrial figmentum’ (‘image’, but also, ‘anything fashioned’, as in the vessel turned by a ‘figulus’, viz., a ‘potter’), we may glimpse the light of God that this ‘little bodily vessel’ (‘corpusculus’) contains, since it was fashioned by him, as David states by reference to 2 Corinthians 4:7: ‘But we have this treasure [the light of God shining in our hearts] in earthen vessels, that the excellency may be of the power of God, and not of us’. It will already be apparent how David, in meditating death, in fact meditates the process of image-making that makes death discernible to the eyes, mind, and heart. He adverts to Jeremiah 18 in order to affirm that this process is divinely sanctioned by prophetic and exegetical precedent. Emblem 82 enlarges upon the mortuary image broached in Emblem 81, implanting within it, as a comparandum, the effigy of Christ crucified [Fig. 18.3]. This secondary image, an epitome of the willingness to die, is seen to emerge from the first, as if taking shape from its lineaments. The presence of the crucifix concretizes David’s argument that the cemetery is the breeding ground whence the certainty of death and the need to embrace it become fully known, in a sense come to life, in the form of a fully embodied sacred image. He urges us to linger in this place, to sit at the foot of the cross, our eyes fixed on Christ, in the manner of Job’s true friends, who sat with him for seven days, sharing in his affliction: We read that the friends of Job came by common consent to visit and console him. ‘And when they had lifted up their eyes afar off, they knew him not, and crying out they wept […]. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no man spoke to him a word: for they saw that his grief was very great’. What is seen here? Does it not behoove us, with greater reason, to bring these and more things to pass in this public place of instruction, sitting beside the sepulchres and bones of the dead, especially when these are heaped around the effigy of Christ crucified, gathered there in a certain order? For the thing to be seen there is worthy of greater admiration, a greater occasion of sorrow, a greater cause of silent horror. Truly, there is greater reason here to ruminate, to marvel, to weep, to mourn […].18 quibus mundani homines tantum momenti ponunt. Ibi siquidem videre est, quid de his omnibus sit sentiendum’. 18  Ibidem 286: ‘Legimus, amicos Iob venisse ex condicto, ut visitarent eum, & consolarentur. Cumque elevassent procul oculos suos, non cognoverunt eum, & exclamantes ploraverunt

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In pictura 82, this passage, marked E., coincides with the plaque inscribed ‘Learn from me’, from Matthew 11:29: ‘Take my yoke upon yourselves, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart’ [Fig. 18.3]. The arrow held by Death (F.) connects Christ crucified to the proverb, likewise inscribed on a plaque, from Ecclesiasticus 38:23: ‘Yesterday for me, and today for thee’. The young catechumen in the foreground attends to this visual analogy that teaches him to compare Christ’s fate with his own. Inclined to the left, head and one hand raised, he resembles the silent figure of Job (D.) and the young students (C.) who point at their closed mouths, learning that attentive silence is the first step towards eloquence. The silence of Job, his friends, and of the students underscores David’s point that the primary instrument of instruction is the silent, ruminative pictura: ‘In this school of mortal men, silence and silent inspection are necessary above all: not only for the purpose of speaking prudently hereafter, but also of weighing more attentively, judging more righteously, and living more justly’.19 The exercitant, unlike his predecessor in pictura 81, has now entered the cemetery, where he more fully engages in the meditative exercise at hand: he visualizes this place – indeed, to such an extent that he appears as if comprised by the meditative image issuing from him, subsumed into it, one might say. His youth indicates that the impressionable votary, like a child, must remain open to the instructive effect of the visual images he meditates. Whereas he appears younger, the cemetery has grown larger: it expands to fill the viewer’s field of vision, its threshold coterminous with that of the pictura. All these devices are symptoms of the reflexive project initiated by Emblems 81–82: the votary, tasked with learning how one meditates death by means of images, fulfils this charge by visualizing himself, on the model of picturae 81 and 82, in the act of calling forth the requisite images and dwelling upon them. These picturae can be read as images of the votary learning to produce potent, panoptic, and habitable images of death. David further calls attention to the reflexive nature of pictura 82 in his commentary on A. and B., which identifies the cemetery as a schola (school) or […]. Et sederunt cum eo in terra, septem diebus, & septem noctibus; & nemo loquebatur ei verbum: videbant enim dolorem esse vehementem. Quid videtur? Nonne maiori ratione, nos haec & plura facere conveniat, in hoc publico gymnasio, secus sepulchra & ossa mortuorum desidentes, praesertim ubi illa in acervum, circum Christi crucifixi effigiem, certo ordine congesta sunt? Ibi namque rem maiori admiratione dignam videre est; maior ibi doloris occasio, maior horroris & silentij causa. Maior enim cogitandi, obstupescendi, flendi, ingemiscendique ratio […]’. 19  Ibidem 286: ‘In hac etiam mortalium schola, primum silentio opus est, & tacita inspectione: non solum ad postea prudentius loquendum, sed etiam ad attentius expendendum, & de his omnibus rectius iudicandum, meliusque vivendum’.

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ludus (place of instruction), wherein one may see oneself learning how to exchange images of death for those of worldly beauty. This exchange takes place as a function of the revisualization of Emblem 81’s coemiterium that becomes Emblem 82’s schola [Figs. 18.2 & 18.3]: Since we are then sent to the cemetery by dint of the former chapter, therein to learn this rare, useful, and sublime lesson, and this philosophy of neglect for beauty and worldly ornament, the cemetery can justly be called a school, where as a consequence, any person may discover (‘quempiam ibi ludum aperire’) a place of instruction that teaches how to tread underfoot the promoters of the prideful world. And so [the epigram] asks: ‘Who is that [teacher]?’ [It also] replies: ‘The putrefying bones of the dead and the gaping, stinking sepulchres […]. For whatsoever the world is wont to aggrandize, praise, and love, we see here shown to the eye as vile, vain, and altogether nugatory’.20 The phrase ‘where any person may discover’ empowers the exercitant to become his own teacher: he is not merely death’s pupil but may also teach himself. As such, pictura 82 is doubly reflexive, for in illustrating the reflex of learning, it also implicitly encourages the exercitant to teach himself. David puts this very succinctly in his call to the votary to attend this school as if it were a Pythagorean house of learning: ‘Thus let us go to this public school, and at once learn how to learn (‘modum discendi discamus’). Previously, in chapter 46, we heard about the quinquennial silence of the Pythagoreans, who from the start learned to speak better by means of silence’.21 Throughout chapter 82, David keeps returning to the point that silent images, not spoken words, are the cemetery’s medium of instruction. He refers to its sights as spectacula and embroiders upon their visual impact: we shall fall justly silent, he avers, when confronted by the spectacle of a cadaver, its bones gnawed-upon by scavengers, its vestigial flesh worm-eaten. Such spectacula 20  Ibidem: ‘Cum igitur ad coemiterium praecedentis Capitis indicio mittamur, ut raram hanc, utilem, ac sublimem lectionem & Philosophiam neglectus formae ac mundani ornatus addiscamus, potest merito coemeterium schola appellari, unde & consequens est, quempiam ibi ludum aperire; qui doceat superbos mundi fastus calcare. Quaeritur itaque, quis ille sit? Respondetur, Ossa putria mortuorum, & sepulchra patentia ac foetentia […]. Quidquid enim magni facere, laudare, & amare solet mundus; hic illud vile, & vanum, & nihil prorsus esse, ad oculum videmus’. 21  Ibidem: ‘Eamus igitur ad scholam hanc communem, & in primis modum discendi discamus. Iam antea, Cap. XLVI. audivimus quinquennale Pythagoricorum silentium, cum primum inciperent, ut silentio melius loqui tandem discerent’.

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must be called up as if they were mirror-reflections, images whose clarity and vividness will induce affective contemplation (‘res magni motus & affectus est […] ossa defunctorum in speculum rite comparata expositaque contemplari’). Moreover, it is incumbent upon the reader-viewer to keep this mirror-image fresh, not allowing its affective charge to fade, as occurs with most visual novelties (‘consuetudine […] vilescit spectaculum’).22 David also instructs the viewer to attach the mirror-image to pertinent biblical passages, thus infusing them with the particularity and affective intensity that such an image can confer, and conversely, bestowing scriptural authority on this same image. In the case of F. (at the skeleton’s left shoulder), the pericopes would be Genesis 3:19, ‘Remember, man, that thou are dust, and into dust thou shalt return’; and Ecclesiasticus 38:23, ‘Remember my judgment, for also shall be so. Yesterday for me, and today for thee’. So powerful is this silent scriptural image, that its transformative spirtual effect on the beholder is likened to the divine voice that converted Augustine, urging him: ‘Tolle, lege; tolle, lege’ (‘Take up and read [the book]’): Frequent this place of instruction, perform this labour diligently and with affection, read and reread these books. Let there come into mind and hand, [the words that] divinely resounded at the divine Augustine’s conversion, as the cause of his transformation to a better life: ‘Take up, read; take up, read’. […] And what sort of show, pray, is here to be seen? With what voice do the dry bones speak? […] Truly this is the highest Philosophy, the meditation on death, which transmits the art that surpasses all other arts, namely the art of living well and dying well […]. For through frequent meditation on death, and by beholding these lessons, one comes by way of death to eternal life.23 How does David propose to keep such scriptural mirror-images span-new? By contemplating them with ‘attentive eyes and spirits’ (‘intentis oculis animisque contemplemur’) and jointly imagining, in a corollary series of descriptive images, the beauty of face and form and the sumptuary splendour that once 22  Ibidem 287. 23  Ibidem 287: ‘Hunc ludum frequentate, his studiis operam navate, hos libros evolvite & revolvite. Hic illud in mentem manumque veniat, quod divo Augustino sub conversionem caelitus insonabat, eique causa mutandae in melius vitae fuit: Tolle, lege: tolle, lege […]. Et quisman ludus hic nobis videtur? Quae illa vox, quam ossa arida proloquuntur? […] Haec est vere summa Philosophia, mortis meditatio, artem tradens quae omnes artes superat, bene scilicet vivendi, & moriendi bene […]. Nam per frequentem mortis meditationem, harumque lectionum observationem, venitur per mortem ad vitam aeternam’.

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adorned the now sorry and indeterminate vestiges of these self-styled ‘Venuses’ and ‘Junos’: ‘Say now, pray, if you can, which of all these piled-up corpses once cultivated their appearance exceedingly, as if they had been Venuses, Junos, and similar diabolical goddesses. Which of them exulted so pompously, so royally, that the wide ways seemed small to their scornful pride?’24 By contrast, this visual exercise, by turns contemplative and imaginative, will restore the very different sort of image – the imago Dei (image of God, viz., of Christ) – impressed upon every soul; this divine image, made indiscernible by the failure to recognize our death-prone and sordid humanity, can be rediscovered by means of meditative immersion in the coemeterium schola’s deathly images. The final chapter of the Veridicus, Emblem 100, develops the theme of the beholder’s agency, comparing the votary to a draftsman or painter, the sum total of his life to a drawing or painting, the four last things, and death above all, to the constituent hatches or brushstrokes of such a drawing or painting [Fig. 18.13].25 The epigram augments this comparison by adding a reference to engraving: ‘I bear [the image of] these self-same things; wherefore I shall continuously reflect upon them engraved in my spirit: Death, Judgment, Hell, the Kingdom of Heaven’.26 David insists upon the pictorial status of this eschatological imagery: in treating the final things as if they had been drawn, painted, or engraved, David drives home the point that the novissima are meditative images manufactured by the person who recalls and peruses them. He avows that every effort must be made to render these images in as lively and compelling a manner as possible, since their function is to ‘furnish spirit and life’, that is, spiritually to renew the person who fixes them in memory and lives (and dies) while holding them in view (‘homini animum & vitam suppeditat ad recte vivendum’).27 They are comparable, states David, to the living images of the four wheels envisioned by the prophet in Ezechiel 1:16–20 and 10:9–19: ‘And therefore, they are likened not unsuitably to those four, mutually entwined wheels full of eyes, and somehow constitutive of a single wheel, seen by the prophet Ezechiel. By which we should understand that for every Christian 24  Ibidem 288: ‘Dic iam, quaeso, si potis es, quaenam ex omnibus hic congestis cadaveribus illae fuere, quae tanti suae formae cultum fecerunt, ac si Veneres, Iunones, & similes deae diabolicae fuissent? Quaenam illae inter ista cadavera, quae tam pompatice vel basilice incesserunt, ut platearum laxitas angusta eis esset prae fastu?’ 25  On this emblem and its relation to the “Orbita probitatis”, which functions an appendix to the Veridicus Christianus, see Göttler C., Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (Turnhout: 2010) 196–203. 26  David, Veridicus Christianus: ‘Ipsa refer, quo iuge animis incisa revolvam? / Lethum, Iudicium, Infernus, caelestia regna’. 27  Ibidem 342.

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who conforms his life to the testimony of the evangelists, the memory of each and all [of the novissima] ought to be furnished with eyes, as if made present [to him] (‘oculatam ac quasi praesentem’)’.28 These ocular attributes hearken back to the earlier comparison of the novissima to mirrors in which the readerviewers see themselves portrayed and, as it were, returning their own gaze. The peculiarity of the image, enforced by the term oculatam, strongly implies that the four last things are mnemonic in form and function, and for this reason, memorably strange in appearance. Indeed, the presence and immediacy of such images brings to mind the example of Jerome, whose ‘powerful memory’ (‘efficax […] recordatio’) of the novissima was ‘so indelibly imprinted, that they seem never to have deserted him’ (‘infixa fuerit Novissimorum memoria, ut nunquam eum destituisse videatur’).29 Pictura 100 aligns with the emphasis on image production in David’s epigram and commentary. The devout man perched atop Ezechiel’s wheels within wheels (A.), his arms crossed to indicate that he bears in mind the image of Christ crucified, actively memorializes the four last things (C., D., E., F.), which are to be seen as emanating from him. The proverbial text, ‘Be mindful of your final end’ (Ecclesiasticus 7:40), inscribed on the banderole, as if spoken by him, confirms what his gesture and heavenward gaze likewise certify – that he keeps the image of his future salvation ever in view. Similarly, the Latin epigram’s opening phrase, ‘Ipsa refer’(‘I bear’, or alternatively, ‘I represent the self-same things’), identifies scenes C.-F. as representational images engraved (‘incisa’) upon the man’s memory and consciousness.30 Positioned above and below, to his left and right, these scenes encircle him like the compass points described in commentary A.; they thus illustrate how fully he appears to inhabit the immersive images of the novissima that he himself has generated: We come to know the whole world through the earth’s four points or regions – East, South, West, and North; so too, one might say that the whole of the human race is comprised by these four final things. Wheresoever a man finds himself, he has in view the four quarters of the world; in the same way, whosoever lives ought to keep the four final things before 28  Ibidem: ‘Ideoque, non male haec quatuor illis rotis assimilet, quas Propheta Ezechiel vidit, quae sibi invicem implicitae, unam quasi rotam constituebant, erantque plenae oculis. Quo intelligamus, omnium & singulorum oculatam ac quasi praesentem debere esse memoriam homini Christiano, iuxta quatuor Evangelistarum testimonium vitam suam instituenti’. 29  Ibidem. 30  Ibidem 342: ‘Ipsa refer, quo iuge animis incisa revolvam? / Lethum, Iudicium, Infernus, caelestia regna’.

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his eyes, as if he were seeing himself encircled by them. And so, he may liken them, not without cause, to those four wheels which the prophet Ezechiel saw mutually entwined […].31 The association of the eye-strewn wheels (B.) with prophetic vision implies that the man – who is, of course, an image of the reader-viewer – looks to the future, seeing the novissima not with bodily eyes, but with the eyes of the mind (‘oculis mentis’). He is the antithesis of the negative exempla adduced in commentary C. as images of an improvident death: And yet it is certain that the day of death shall seize the living in such wise, as unexpectedly as the hand of the judge or executioner seizes a man fit soon to be hanged, who, thinking less than nothing about it, and abounding in joys, is borne under full sail towards his pleasures. Like unto an ox led to slaughter, unaware of the mallet’s impending blow, caressed all the while by gentle hands and a soothing voice […].32 Instead, David proclaims the man’s providence: perched upon the prophet’s wheels, he is likened to ancient effigies of the goddess Wisdom, which were set upon a stable quadrate base, just as he sits upon the prophetic symbols of divinely inspired circumspection and foresight. A quadrate base retains its shape and orientation, whichever way it falls; so too, the spherical wheels (‘semper sibi simile est’).33 This is to say that assiduous meditation on the novissima provides the perfect foundation for a well-considered life. Such a life, led in constant view of one’s final end, resembles a set of wheels, for it issues from a heart that constantly meditates – turns over – the four last things (‘ista versantur in cordibus hominum’).34 31  Ibidem: ‘Per quatuor terrae angulos sive regiones, Orientem, Meridiem, Occidentem, & Septentrionem, universum semper Orbem terrarum intelligimus: ita etiam dici possit, his quatuor Novissimis totum genus humanum comprehendi. Sicuti namque ubicunque est homo, quatuor mundi plagas in conspectu habet; ita quisquis vivit, haec quatuor extrema ante oculos habere debet, quibus se quasi circumseptum conspicit. Ideoque, non male haec quatuor illis rotis assimilet, quas Propheta Ezechiel vidit, quae sibi invicem implicitae […]’. 32  Ibidem 343: ‘Certum est tamen, mortis diem taliter viventes tam imopinato comprehensurum, ac si iudicis aut tortoris manus quempiam mox suspendendum arripiat, qui nihil minus cogitans, plenis velis per suas voluptates ferebatur, affluens gaudiis. Quemadmodum etiam bos ad mactandum ductus, nihil minus quam ictum mallei imminentem exspectat, interim dum blanda voce & mollibus manibus demulcetur […]’. 33  Ibidem 346. 34  Ibidem.

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Every Christian, if he is wise, will fix his eyes on death, the first of the novissima, as if his life were a drawing or painting, or for that matter a map, and death the drawing’s final line, the painting’s final stroke, or the map’s final border. This analogy originates from the premise, stated at the start of Emblem 100, that the four last things consist of discernible extrema – ‘outermost things’ or ‘farthest borders’ (‘haec quatuor extrema ante oculos habere debet’).35 A drawing’s lines, a painting’s strokes, and a map’s borders are its extremities, its outermost parts, in the sense that the drawn, painted, or cartographical image arises from these primary elements, as from its irreducible constituents, or conversely, resolves into them. David paraphrases Horace’s Epistle I 16:79: In truth, death [is called extrema] because it is the final line of things (‘quia ultima linea rerum est’). Whether by ready analogy to lines set down in a certain order, the last of which death occupies, bordering all the rest; or by analogy to the painter’s strokes rendered with brush on panel (‘penicillo in tabula’), the last of which completes the whole work. For all our actions, like various lines, are brought to a close by death, and the painted panel of the whole of life is perfected by death’s final stroke, and the final application of the hand; so that nothing further remains to be achieved or endured.36 Since the term linea jointly signifies a ‘region, tract, or boundary’, the second sentence can also be translated: ‘by analogy to tracts or regions set down in a certain order, the last of which death occupies, bordering all the rest’. Be that as it may, the trope of picturing, like that of mapping, construes death as a pictorial subject that must first be imaged if it is properly to be meditated or surveyed.37 35  Ibidem 342. 36  Ibidem 344: ‘Mors quidem, quia ultima linea rerum est. Sive a lineis ordine ductis accepta similitudine, quarum postremam mors occupet reliquasque conterminet: sive a lineis quas Pictor penicillo in tabula ducit, quarum ultima totum opus absolvit. Morte enim & omnes actus nostri ut lineae variae terminantur, & picta totius vitae tabula ultimo mortis tractu perficitur, atque extrema adhibetur manus; ut hic nihil amplius restet faciendum patiendumve’. 37  The Tridentine definition of Extreme Unction as the rite of anointing, perforce administered by the priest’s assured hand, undergirds the association between extrema and linea, the ‘final line of things’ and the skilled ‘painter’s strokes’. On the Council of Trent and its decree on Extreme Unction, see Palmer P. F., S.J., Sacraments and Forgiveness: History and Doctrinal Development of Penance, Extreme Unction, and Indulgences, Sources of Christian Theology 2 (London – Westminster, MD: 1959) 310–314; on administration of the sacrament, as defined in the Catechism by Decree of the Council of Trent of 1567, see 314–316.

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The artisanal analogies that permeate every aspect of Emblem 100 serve to clarify the meditative exercise it puts forward, which involves the orderly application of the novissima to the matter at hand – the imagined end of a person’s life – by means of an extended visual similitude (‘iam quatuor Novissima ex ordine, similitudini coeptae insistentes, ad rem applicemus’).38 The process requires the exercitant to elaborate upon the initiatory pictura by generating alternative, complementary pictorial images. The purpose of these visual comparanda is to make the images of the four last things – more precisely, the primary image of a votary (A.) propagating images of the novissima (C.-F.) – more lucid and memorable: But after these two [viz., death and judgment], there follow a great sundering and an admirable separation of the good from the bad [viz., the saved from the damned]: whereby one looks to the other two novissima. These [two] can be more clearly observed and more deeply imprinted on the mind by means of an extended visual analogy (‘similitudine prolata’).39 David then pictures the analogical image, describing it in great detail: whoever the person is, whether good or bad, his perishable body imprisons him, imposing the penalty of death that burdens sinful humankind; bound and fettered for the crime of lèse-majesté against God his king, he depends upon the mediation of the king’s son, Christ, for pardon. On this account, if we embrace the reconciliation Christ offers, both directly and through his Church, then salvation shall be ours; if we refuse to be reconciled, then our passage through the portal of death (‘per portam carceris’) shall lead to irredeemable perdition. The supplementary images of death as a doorway and a passageway (‘transitus’) subtend the courtly and judicial images of Christ and his Church as mediators.40 These images lead to other associative images, in a cascading stream of images upon images, many of which circle back to the thematic of artisanship, calling attention to their status as fabricated. Take, for instance, the closing analogy of the four last things to the four rings that God commanded Moses to manufacture at the four corners of the arc (Exodus 25:12). As the arc is to Christ, the living arc, so the four rings that allow the arc to be carried are to the four last things that assist the Christian to uphold the faith, reminding him to 38  David, Veridicus Christianus, 345. For a parallel case of engaging with death through artisanal analogy, see Classen A., “Death, Sinfulness, the Devil, and the Clerical Author: The Late Medieval German Didactic Debate Poem Des Teufels Netz and the World of Craftsmanship”, in Classen (ed.), Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time 277–296. 39  David, Veridicus Christianus 344. 40  Ibidem 345.

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live for Christ, that he may be united with him in death. As the arc was borne from place to place, so the meditative image of Christ, along with its corollary images – the novissima – must accompany the votary, whithersoever he goes: In like manner the true Christian, exhibiting to himself the image of the living arc, ought to be furnished with these four rings, whereby he shall be ever ready to render every manner of service to God, whether he stands amongst the living or advances towards death. And as he shall see, so great is the assistance furnished by these [four], that possessed of them, he may scatter and pulverize the devil’s every machination, if the memory of those [novissima] is at all times prompt and powerful.41 The image of the four rings then mutates into another artisanal image: the novissima are compared to the four smiths or carpenters (‘fabri’) prophesied by the prophet Zechariah, who demolish the four horns – viz., the four kingdoms – that have persecuted Juda, Israel, and Jerusalem (Zechariah 1:20–21).42 Finally, David superimposes upon the typological images of the smiths and the rings the allegorical image of an elaborate contraption fashioned by the art of memory, as if by human hands: the chariot of memory rides on wheels comprising the four last things; drawn by the horses of good intention and honest effort, its carriage conveys the votary heavenward, along with his recollected thoughts, words, and deeds.43 This allegorical device clearly derives from the image of the man who, intent upon the novissima, rides the prophet Ezechiel’s living wheels in pictura 100. Like the reflexive images that have preceded it – the image of oneself entering a cemetery and viewing its spectacula, of oneself treasuring the soul as if it were a Praxitelean masterpiece, of oneself gazing into the quadripartite speculum of one’s final end and picturing its four parts – the chariot, in that it paradoxically contains the person whose memories also call it into being, is an image about imaging. But the chariot of memory differs in degree of reflexivity from the precedents described in Emblems 81–99, since it forms part of a chapter that places greater emphasis on the trope of picturing and even dwells on the symbolic value of a picture’s 41  Ibidem 347: ‘Sic verus Christianus, arcae vivae prae se ferens imaginem, quatuor hisce annulis munitus esse debet, quo semper ut praesto ad omne Dei obsequium, sive sistant in vivis, seu pergat ad funus. Tantumque norit horum esse praesidium, ut omnis quoque generis machinamenta diaboli solvat atque confringat his praeditus; si praesens eorum semper fuerit & efficax recordatio’. 42  Ibidem. 43  Ibidem: “quisquis omnem suum cogitatum, sermones omnes & actus, & se pariter super curru Memoriae collocat […]”.

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extrema – its constituent lines, strokes, and borders. Moreover, chapter 100, as we have seen, is replete with artisanal tropes of all kinds. As such, this final image, the last in the Veridicus, provides a fitting conclusion to David’s argument that death, as a meditative subject, is best approached through the reflex of image-making. 2

Emblems 85 and 88: on the Necessity of Fashioning Images of Death

Emblems 85 and 88 reflect on the reasons why such images of death must be conjured up in the first place [Figs. 18.5–18.6]. They are, David argues, a lenitive to the inborn aversion to dying and, on the other hand, an antidote to human obliviousness. In Emblem 88, he invokes the example of Christ, comparing and contrasting the reader-viewer’s attitude towards death to Christ’s: by nature, no one dies willingly, not even Our Savior, but in spite of his innate aversion – deeply rooted in his humanity and most fully expressed during the agony in the garden – Christ nevertheless determined to die, by a supreme act of the will. On the contrary, the sinful man exerts his deliberative faculties of will and judgment to achieve just the opposite effect, putting out of mind the image of impending death that his guilty conscience insistently posits. Such a man does more than succumb to the natural dread of death; he exaggerates it and, as a result, obstinately refrains from visualizing sin and its dire consequences. The image of sin intensifies the fear of death, and so, along with his sins, the sinner also effaces the image of death. Using a term that derives from Aristotelian psychology by way of scholastic moral philosophy, David designates the image-making mnemonic faculty against which the sinner labours so mightily synderesis: But I am not inquiring here about this kind of fear of death, the reluctance of the dying to die, which naturally befalls even those who die most willingly and religiously, as we have just seen with reference of Our Lord, who died and was offered up, as he wished, even though he dreaded to die; for the will to die is something different from natural propensity. But I am investigating him who not only shows himself reluctant by nature, but wilfully and by deliberative judgment: […] namely, when he sees in earnest that [death] approaches, and no hope of life remains. […] Who, then, is it, who is thus fearful and perplexed when he realizes that he must die. The answer is: he whom the consciousness of wicked deeds justly marks out for hell […]. And though conscience is properly regarded

the Emblematic Imagery of Death in Jan David, S.J.

figure 18.4

Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 83, “Praestantissimum hominis pignus, anima” (“Man’s most excellent gage, the soul”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 85, “Statutum est hominibus, semel mori. Hebr. 9” (“For men one thing is ordained, but once to die. Hebr. 9”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

the Emblematic Imagery of Death in Jan David, S.J.

figure 18.6

Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 88, “Mortem timet, quem terret conscientia” (“He whom conscience dismays, fears death”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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as an act of the intellect, whereby knowledge or cognition is applied to some particular which we must either do or refrain from doing, yet as generally employed, it is equated with synderesis.44 In order to combat this repressive impulse and liberate the synderetic faculty, David proposes that one imprint images such as pictura 88, in which the natural capacity to discern the presence of death and, concomitantly, to distinguish good from evil is restored or, better, liberated [Fig. 18.6]. David conceives of such images as bifurcated, both as a whole and in their parts: The Book of Wisdom [Ecclesiasticus 15:17–18] makes this point very aptly, using the simile of water and fire: ‘He hath set water and fire before thee: stretch forth thy hand whither thou wilt. Before man is life and death, good and evil, that which he shall choose shall be given him’. By this manner of speaking is signified the interior trial of conscience, whereby one can discern what is good, and what is evil, as if water and fire, death and life, nay, even hell and heaven were set before the eyes. By this same operation, free will is expressed, which leads a man to exercise the free election of will, and to undertake one thing or another. […] And so Wisdom says: ‘A troubled conscience always pictures to itself grievous things’.45 Pictura 88 recuperates this endangered image, restoring the skeletal presence of death (A.) to the centre of consciousness [Fig. 18.6]. Death divides 44  Ibidem 304: ‘At non quaeritur hic de tali pavore mortis, vel reluctamine moribundorum, quae naturaliter etiam sanctissime & maxime voluntarie morientibus obveniunt, ut iam in ipso Domino nostro ostendimus, qui oblatus & mortuus est, quia ipse voluit, & tamen mori horruit; alia est enim voluntatis determinatio, alia naturae propensio. Sed quaeritur, quis non solum natura, sed voluntate & iudicio deliberato invitus moriatur: […] quando scilicet iam videt serio agi; nec ullae vitae spem superesse. […] Quis igitur sic pavidus & turbidus tumultuatur, quando iam moriturum se arbitratur? Respondetur, quod ille quem mens scelerum conscia merito ordo devovet […]. Et licet Conscientia proprie sit actus ille intellectus, quo applicatur Scientia seu cognitio ad aliquid particulare, an agendum sit vel non: tamen large sumendo, pro sinderesi accipitur’. 45  Ibidem 305: ‘Declarat istud & Sapiens valde accommode, assumta ad id aquae & ignis similitudine. Apposuit tibi aquam & ignem: ad quod volueris porrige manum tuam. Deinde: Ante hominem, vita & mors: bonum & malum; quod placuerit ei, dabitur illi. Quibus loquendi modis significatur interior illa conscientiae cognitio, per quam homo bonum a malo potest discernere; atque si ante oculos aquam & ignem, mortem & vitam, immo infernum & caelum constituta videret. Liberum arbitrium eadem opera declaratur; cuius ductu homo, libera voluntatis suae electione, unum aut alterum suscipiat […]. Sic Sapiens ait: Semper enim praesumit saeva, perturbata conscientia’.

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the picture in two, his pose mimicking that of the richly attired young man and woman (B. & C.) whom he grasps and thereby ironically conjoins, even while sundering them. The picture’s bipartite structure, with death as its initiating wedge, is augmented by the attributes cast aside by the young couple – flowers, lute, recorder, part-book, and feathered hat (G. & H.) – and by their bathetic analogy to a fearful hen and a pig being slaughtered (E. & F.). For his part, Death is compared to the swordsman who executes Samuel’s sentence against King Agag in 1 Kings 15:32 (D.). The quotation, ‘And Agag said: “Doth bitter death separate in this manner?”’, serves to emphasize what Death, or rather, the image of Death, accomplishes: it forces apart what has been elided, insisting on the free play of conscience, repairing its power to separate life and death, the good from the bad, to visualize them as if they were fire and water, hell and heaven. Drawn from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, scene I. depicts the soldier who refused to keep death in view and finally died in a state of despair, his sins unconfessed.46 Such are the consequences, warns David, of failing to instil the message that pictura 88 purveys. In fact, many of the picturae in David’s ars moriendi share the template of pictura 88: pictura 89, for instance, contrasts St. Martin (B.), who acceded to the Lord’s will, living a long life in service to the Church, even though he longed to die, with the Christian (C.), who claims to be ready for death, but then anxiously importunes God to extend his life just before dying [Fig. 18.7]. Emblem 85 explains further why picturing death is so crucial [Fig. 18.5]. Since it is common knowledge that the man who recognizes death’s inevitability is more likely to fortify himself against the many evils that constantly threaten, why do so few men, wonders David, make timely use of this ‘shield of memory and foresight’ (‘hoc clypeo recordationis & praevisionis’).47 Given that the ‘excellence and efficacy of the living memory of death’ (‘praestantiam efficaciamque vivae mortis memoriae’), by which David means an efficacious image capable of vivifying the process of recollection – an image such as pictura 85 – ‘alone has the power to convert sinners’ souls’ (‘sola ad convertendas peccatorum animas sufficiat’), the devil endeavours ever to entangle and ensnare human hearts and senses, deflecting all thoughts of future death, even when death everywhere impends. The devil therefore makes a ‘practice of effacing the memory of death from the eyes of mind’, which is to say, of ‘erasing’ this mnemonic image from conscience and consciousness (‘haec praxis diaboli, memoriam mortis semper ab oculis mentis nostrae amolientis’). 46  On this Bedan exemplum, see Parsens Robert, S.J., Christian Directory, Guiding Men to their Eternal Salvation (London, n.p.: 1696) 755–756. 47  David, Veridicus Christianus 298.

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Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 89, “Optat mori, cui mens est conscia recti” (“He whose heart knows righteousness, desires to die”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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David compares the apotropaic images of death, with which he strives to counteract the devil’s stratagems, to a ‘most sure tessera of death’ (‘veluti certissimam mortis tesseram’) that ‘we ought always to meditate’ (‘semper animo voluamus’).48 The term tessera refers to a small tablet, properly square or rectangular, bearing a sign, token, or watchword – to an analogue, in other words, of the engraved plates that anchor his emblemata. The context for this analogy is his closing anecdote, taken from Book I, chapter 8 of Valerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia (Memorable Words and Sayings), about the philosopher Gorgias Epirota, born from his dead mother’s womb just before her corpse was placed on the funeral pyre. The moral of this grisly tale, condensed into an indelible image – as it were, into a tessera – is that our mortal birth is as sure a token of death as of life. And as Gorgias drew sustenance from his dead mother’s body, so we can draw spiritual sustenance from the image of death discernible at every infant’s birth.49 Pictura 85 is another such tessera [Fig. 18.5]: ‘pallid Death’ (D.) swings his scythe remorselessly (E.), cutting down every human rank and station: ‘Neither the wisdom nor glory of Solomon, nor the strength of Samson, nor the sanctity of all the saints renders them immune to the sting of death; nor the subtlety of philosophers, nor the fierceness and violence of tyrants, nor the whole world’s favour and riches’.50 Moreover, the pictura gives pictorial weight and specificity to scriptural passages about ineluctable death, that themselves assist to proverbialise this theme, conveying it to memory. Death’s crown is an hourglass that alludes to Hebrews 9:27 (A.): ‘And as it is appointed to men once to die’. The corpses body forth Psalm 88:49 (B.) and 2 Kings 14:14: ‘Who is the man that shall live, and not see death?’; ‘We all die, and like waters that return no more, we fall down into the earth’. 3

Emblems 83 and 89: Prophylactic Functions of Deathly Image-Making

David conceives of the soul itself as imageable – more exactly, he compares it to a work of art whose preciousness derives from both its design and execution. This is the subject of Emblem 83, which argues that the rational soul, 48  Ibidem 299. 49  Ibidem. 50  Ibidem 298: ‘Neque contra eam valet Salomonis sapientia & gloria, neque Samsonis fortitudo, neque omnium Sanctorum sanctimonia eos a mortis aculeo reddit immunes: neque subtililtas Philosophorum, nec Tyrannorum saevitia aut violentia, neque omnis mundi amicitia aut opulentia’.

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made in the image of God, can encompass the whole of Creation – viz., the image of every single thing created by him – and yet not be filled to capacity, for it is capable of containing God himself, and whatever is less that God could never fill it completely (‘repleri omnino non potest: capacem enim Dei’) [Fig. 18.4].51 Pictura 83 depicts the particular judgment of a virtuous soul (B.) that outweighs the whole world, tipping the scales held by the hand of God (D.), but it conveys as well how highly God values each and every soul, as Christ’s eschewal of the devil’s offer of worldly riches and dominion demonstrates (C.). David’s commentary makes clear that C. refers not only to the final temptation of Christ in Matthew 4:8–10, but also to Matthew 16:26: ‘For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul’. David then concludes with an analogy taken from the visual arts: the soul’s value is comparable to the price elicited by a work of high artifice (‘artificium ad pretium rei eliciendum’).52 Explicit in the invocation of artifice as the tertium comparationis is the notion that the soul is malleable: it may be shaped, refined, and refashioned by its owner’s thoughts and deeds, his prayers and good works. In this respect, the soul resembles Praxiteles’s beloved Satyr and Cupid, the statue he valued above all his other creations. Tellingly, the comparison of the soul to a Praxitelean masterwork issues from a preliminary reference to the fires of purgatory (E.): From all this, we see how various are the reasons for valuing the soul at so high a price. As Seneca stated truly: ‘A good soul can neither be loaned nor purchased; and I reckon that were one for sale, it would have no buyer’. So be it. I, too, believe that no adequate price would present itself. Let that self-same fire teach us whether we ought to hold the soul most dear – from out of which, if placed in so critical a position, we should wish above all else that the soul be plucked. For thus formerly did Praxiteles reveal which of the works made by his hand was most dear to him, after having promised the most beautiful of them all to Phryne, and yet concealing it from her in his workshop. Now she, to elicit the truth, suborned one of his servants into going to the marketplace where Praxiteles had gone to sell his works, and saying that his house had perished in a great conflagration. In response, Praxiteles at once asked whether the Satyr and Cupid had survived. And similarly, it is agreed that the soul is most precious, for if nothing else, we would preserve it alone from a conflagration, like Bias of Priene [who was wont to say: ‘All that is mine, I carry with me’.] All that 51  Ibidem 291. 52  Ibidem 293.

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a man hath, he will give for his soul [ Job 2:4]; therefore must the soul be valued more than everything.53 How is the soul fashioned into a Praxitelean masterwork? Through the image-making process set forth in Emblem 89, which argues that the image of one’s impending death must be pictured at every moment of life [Fig. 18.7]. If the votary wishes to ensure that death does not overtake him unawares, in the manner of scene ‘F’, before he has adequately prepared, through constant prayer and a plenitude of good works have paved the way to dying well – in the manner of scene B., the death of St. Martin – then he must imitate St. Paul (A.), who desired always, in the words of Philippians 1:23, ‘to be dissolved and to be with Christ’. Inscribed on the banderole issuing from Paul’s mouth in pictura 89, this passage is marked 2 Corinthians 5, to associate it with collateral sayings such as verse 1 of this epistle: ‘For we know, if our earthly house of this habitation be dissolved, that we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in heaven’. The motto, ‘The soul conscious of rectitude desires to die’, and the epigram, ‘Who is it whom death’s unforeseen dangers leave unshaken? He whose soul [alternatively, whose mind or heart] Virtue, self-aware of sweetness, fills full’, alert us to the function of the antithetical scenes B. and F.: they are to be seen as emanations of Paul, who, ever conscious of the imminence of death, visualizes such scenes to himself, thus ensuring his readiness to die in a state of grace.54 The distant beams of celestial light in scene E. signify that a death well anticipated in this way is like the gateway to heaven (‘caeli portam’) seen by St. Stephen at the moment of martyrdom (‘videt siquidem cum Stephano caelos apertos’).55 Pictura 89, properly understood, is yet 53  Ibidem: ‘Ex his omnibus videmus, quam sint variae rationes, ob quas animae pretium nobis magni est faciendum. Ut vere dixerit Seneca: Bona mens nec commodatur, nec emitur: & puto si venalis esset, non haberet emtorem. Ita ille. Et crederem ego quoque, quia non suppeteret pretium condignum. An merito nobis debeat charissima esse anima, incendium ipsum doceat, ex quo prae omnibus illa erutam desideraremus, in eo discrimine constituti. Sic enim olim Praxiteles, quondam ex operibus quae fecerat, esset ei charissimum, prodidit, quod alioqui Phrynem celabat, cui pulcherrimum omnium quae in officina habebat, promiserat. Illa enim ut veritatem eliceret, servum subornavit, qui Praxiteli in foro sua vendenti diceret, domum suam maximo flagrare incendio, & pleraque iam incendio consumta esse. Praxiteles igitur statim interrogat, an Satyrus & Cupido superesset. Inde constitit quid omnium esset praestantissimum. Ita haud dubie constat, animam esse pretiosissimam omnium, quia si nihil aliud, illam saltem cum Biante ex incendio servaremus. Omnia dabit homo pro anima sua; ergo pluris omnibus aestimanda’. 54  ‘Optat mori, cui mens est conscia recti’. ‘Quem neque concutient inopina pericula leti? / Conscia cui Virtus mentem dulcedinis explet’. 55  Ibidem 309.

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another image of an image, or, more particularly, of an image-making exercise that David considers essential for the exercitant’s future salvation. For David, only the soul (or alternatively, the soul’s faculties of mind and heart) that knows itself by such visual means can hope to meet death readily and confidently. He makes this case explicitly: Here then is the state of those who go to meet death with alacrity of will and security of conscience. In whom is to be found what Christ, by nature fearful of death, attested about himself and his followers, namely, that the spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh weak. But the security of the soul [mind, heart] that knows itself well (‘mentis sibi bene consciae securitas’), gives to the dying such promptitude and good cheer, that they neither fear death’s bitter sting, nor even appear to feel it; but rather, they welcome it as if it were for them the key wherewith to open the portals of the heavenly palace.56 There are three other prophylactic images that David encourages the provident Christian to conjure up as aids to this salutary process of self-knowing. The first consists of the ten commandments: in preparation for death, which is never distant, one must cast one’s spiritual eyes (‘oculos mentis coniiciens’) upon the commandments, construing them as a spotless mirror wherein the self is reflected (‘mandata Dei, ut in speculum sine macula, oculos mentis coniiciens’), and descry, as if looking at a portrait, the countenance of one’s unstained conscience (‘conscientiae suae faciem in eo contemplans, nihil invenit quod illam maculet’) – assuming, of course, that like the pristine surface of this mirror, one’s complexion remains unblemished by sin.57 The image of oneself keeping the commandments in view and, in every sense of the term, observing them, will help to insulate the soul from the ravages of sinful transgressions. The next defensive image adumbrates the subject of Emblems 99 and 100: it involves representing to oneself the day of judgment, as if that day were imminent or already dawning. The person best prepared to be judged by Christ, avows David, is he who never ceases to portray the Last Judgment to himself (‘qui semper […] postremum diem sibi instare, immo iam venisse, 56  Ibidem 310: ‘Hic igitur status, mortem alacri voluntate & secura conscientia opetentium. In quibus, quod Christus ipse de se & suis testabatur, spiritus quidem promtus est, caro autem infirma, naturaliter a morte abhorrens. Sed mentis sibi bene consciae securitas, illam dat morientibus promtitudinem & hilaritatem, ut acerbum mortis aculeum nec timeant, nec etiam sentire videantur; sed illum accipiant velut clavem qua sibi calestis aulae portas aperiant’. 57  Ibidem 309.

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proposuerit’).58 And finally, the votary should call forth the hopeful image of himself visualizing at the very moment of death a typological image in two parts: on the one hand, the type, Moses climbing Mount Abarim, whence he glimpsed the land of promise; and then, the antitype, Christ climbing Mount Calvary, where the promise of salvation would be fulfilled: ‘For happy in his sort is the man who climbs Mount Calvary of Christ and with Moses climbs Mount Abarim of the mercy of God, in order there securely to die’.59 This is the man who anticipates death by calling up the image of his deathbed, in imitation of Paul in pictura 89, and further, imagines himself, from within this self-image, educing the exegetical images of the deaths of Moses and Jesus, the former in anticipation of the latter [Fig. 18.7]. The result is a mise en abyme, in which the exercitant’s image of himself anticipating death is mirrored by the anticipatory image of Moses’s death that adumbrates Christ’s. And one might well add that viewed in light of Emblem 82, Christ’s death on Calvary constitutes a further adumbration of the exercitant’s [Fig. 18.3]. This layering of images about image-making drives home the point that for David the good death is perforce steeped in reflexive images: dying well entails the production of images in and through which the manner and meaning of one’s dying may be meditated. The theme of judgment leads David to pose another question about the meditative exercise of picturing one’s final end. How is one to deal with the terror provoked by the words of final judgment to be spoken by God at the end of days? How are those curt words – ‘Render account’ (‘Redde rationem’) and ‘Depart’ – voiced by Christ in Luke 16:2, the parable of the unjust steward, and in Matthew 25:41, his account of the Last Judgment – to be assimilated constructively, rather than inciting despair? In pictura 92, these commands, written on banderoles and juxtaposed to emblematic distillations of the Last Judgment – the trumpet blast that announces the second coming (A.) and the fiery sword that permanently sunders sinners from paradise (B.) – appear to either side of the word ‘Eternity’ (‘Aeternitas’) encircled by the ourobouros (C.) [Fig. 18.9]. All three emblematic devices are held by the hand of God, who also appears to the boy prophet Samuel in scene D., taken from 1 Kings 3:1–14, in which God communicates his irrevocable, and, in this sense, eternal judgment upon the priestly house of Heli. His word is heard, but he is not seen, as the clouds encircling him indicate, and as Samuel’s response, ‘Speak, Lord [for thy servant heareth]’, and by implication, 1 Kings 3:1, import: ‘And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no manifest 58  Ibidem 311. 59  Ibidem 310.

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Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 90, “Qui in statu gratiae moritur, caelo asseritur” (“He who dies in a state of grace, is claimed by heaven”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

the Emblematic Imagery of Death in Jan David, S.J.

figure 18.9

Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 92, “Tria sunt asperrima verba” (“Three words are most bitter”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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vision’. Below, the figures at left and right respond fearfully, even despairingly to the Lord’s words. The middle figure, however, gestures towards his heart: his realization that God’s final judgment will be irrevocable, has deeply stirred him, and his pose portends resolution, suggesting that he is now primed to take action, presumably constructive. David’s commentary explains how this figure’s positive response is to be achieved: the answer lies in visualizing the distinction between the harsh, unappeasable God of Samuel and the mercy and forebearance of Christ, and moreover, in reflecting upon the difference between the former’s words, as condensed into the very short texts and cryptic symbolic images of A. and B., and the latter’s incarnate personhood, which is given to humankind to be heard and seen, and even more crucially, to be introspected. The pictura refrains from portraying Christ, because the accompanying commentrary argues that his image must be found deep within the heart, where its presence will be discernible to anyone who earnestly seeks to find it. Moreover, his image, as impressed upon the votary in Emblem 82, and again in Emblem 83, may easily be recollected [Fig. 18.3 & 18.4]; and in addition, he will soon reappear in Emblem 93, an elaboration upon the parabolic injunction ‘Redde rationem’, where he lords over the judgment scene (A.–D.), as the living fulfilment of the parables of stewardship recounted in Luke 16:1–12 [Fig. 18.10]. For David, the fully realized image of Christ internal to each Christian, and specifically, the beneficent image of the Holy Face that answers each Christian’s inward-turning gaze, supplies the only efficacious antidote to the fearsome words and forbidding symbolic images displayed in pictura 92 [Fig. 18.9]. His commentary, read in light of the pictura, together with the pictura, viewed in light of the commentary, distinguish between the mimetic, approachable image of Christ to be found within, and these elliptical emblematic devices. Whereas the meaning of the former is easily discoverable, that of the latter, like many Old Testament types and prophecies, is less forthcoming and requires a measure of decoding. The collateral distinction that he draws pictorially between the two kinds of image, and textually between the justice of the Father and the mercy of the Son, emerges from the underlying disparity between the word of the Law and Christ the Word. What is more, this disparity arises from the fact that the Word has been made apprehensible in Christ, indeed observably manifest, through the mystery of the Incarnation: The words of God are sweet like honey, if one is disposed to hear and observe them for the salvation of one’s soul, the end for which they have been made known to us. Hence the prophet royal, aroused to admiration, as if anointed by this sweetness, exclaims: ‘How sweet are thy words to

the Emblematic Imagery of Death in Jan David, S.J.

figure 18.10 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 93, “Quo plus acceperis, hoc maior reddenda ratio” (“The more you shall receive, the more you must render account”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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my palate! More than honey to my mouth [Psalm 118:103]’. And is there anything strange about this, if we but gaze inwardly (‘quando penitius introspicimus’)? Since for that same cause, for which Christ the Son of God came forth into the world, so too was the Word of God made known and promulgated. Namely: for the sake of humankind, for our salvation. So that Christ, who is called, who is the Word of the Father, also became visible as the sweetest, kindest, and dearest of mortal men. ‘Beautiful in form, above the sons of men (says [King] David). Grace is poured abroad in thy lips [Psalm 44:3]’. Is there any fountain so delightful as this one, which causes honey-sweet words to flow, and the water leaping unto life eternal. But truly, if now we refuse to hearken to these sweet and delightful words, if we give no place to them in our heart: then surely we shall have to hearken to harsh, disagreeable, and bitter words, about whose intolerable severity can be said what God formerly uttered to Samuel, when he was still a boy: ‘Behold, I do a thing in Israel, and whosoever shall hear it, both his ears shall tingle’.60 4

Emblems 90, 98, and 99: Incertitude and the Novissima

Emblem 99 introduces the problem of agency, more fully treated in Emblem 100, by connecting it to the allied problem of incertitude, addressed in Emblems 90 and 98 [Figs. 18.8, 18.11, & 18.13].61 The question David poses is how does one achieve a salvific death, given that God alone is capable of judging who has truly died in a state of grace or otherwise (‘solius Dei est certo 60  Ibidem 316: ‘Verba Dei mellis instar suavia sunt; si illa ad salutem animae nostrae audire & observare est animus, sicut eum ob finem nobis proferuntur. Hinc Propheta regius quasi dulcedine hac delibutus, in provocationem admirationis exclamat: Quam dulcia faucibus meis eloquia tua! Super mel ori meo. Et quid mirum, quando penitius introspicimus? Nam eandem ob causam, ob quam Christus Dei filius in mundum venit, ob eam etiam Verbum Dei nobis nunciatum & promulgatum est. Hos est: Propter nos homines; & propter nostram salutem. Adeo ut Christus, qui Verbum Patris vocatur, & est; etiam suavissimus, mitissimus, & dulcissimus mortalium exstiterit. Speciosus forma prae filiis hominum: (inquit David). Diffusa est gratia in labiis tuis. Ecquid tam amoenus fons aliud, quam dulcem mellitorum verborum scaturiginem, & aquam salientem in vitam aeternam profundat?  ‘Verum enimvero, quod si nunc verba ista mellita & dilecta audire refugimus, si iis in corde nostro non dederimus locum: certo nobis aspera, inamoena, & acerba verba erunt audienda; de quibus prae intoleranda severitate illud dici potest, quod Deus olim Samueli adhuc puero dicebat: Ecce, ego facio verbum in Israel, quod quicunque audierit, tinnient ambae aures eius’. 61  On printed images of the novissima mainly produced in Antwerp, see Göttler, Last Things 157–215; on this emblem in particular, 192–196.

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dignoscere’). On the contrary, the sure determination of this blessed state exceeds the limits of human knowledge, nor can it simply be willed into existence (‘non ab hominum pendet arbitrio aut scientia’).62 Pictura 90, for instance, portrays a dying man surrounded by his family (A.): they pray fervently for his salvation, but as David points out in the commentary, no one can know for certain – by reference to external signs – whether the death being witnessed is beatific or not [Fig. 18.8]. Many who seem to have died blessedly were in fact damned, and conversely, many whose deaths seem sudden, singular, or disordered, will actually have died in a state of blessedness. Furthermore, as David argues in Emblem 98, the condition of sin likewise imposes incertitude, and so too does the perennial imminence of death [Fig. 18.11]: first, because one can never presume that God will inwardly take hold of the sinner’s heart before he dies (‘timendumque ne non’); second, because death impends at every moment, so that the sinner can never be certain that he will not suddenly die (‘puncto mors imminet omni’); third, because amendment brooks no delay, whereas evils of every kind increase when repentance is forestalled (‘malum ingravescit per moram’).63 And at any event, we are all subject in this life to the devil’s stratagems. In pictura 98, the first point correlates to counter-example H., Paul’s deathlike conversion at the hands of Christ; the second point to example C., the fearful man pursued by a serpent; the third point to examples A., the man trapped in quicksand, B., the ass caught in a ditch, F., the recalcitrant crow that caws ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’ (‘cras, cras’), and G., the provident dove that coos ‘soon, soon’ (‘cito, cito’). Just as the man and the ass sink ever deeper, if they are not soon rescued, so the fallen sinner sinks ever lower, if he does not soon lift himself out of sin. He resembles the devilish crow, rather than the virtuous dove. The moral is simple: since the power to avoid sin sometimes eludes us, even when our will is strong, we must strive all the more to identify every occasion of sin, and strenuously cultivate the desire to extricate ourselves from it (‘ideo occasio & temporis opportunitas arripienda est’).64 We should imitate Paul who threw the viper – the image of viperous sin – into the flames at Malta (D.), and the Magdalene, who seized the opportunity of confessing her sins to Christ in Galilee (E.). Emblems 90 and 98 provide the context for Emblem 99, which asks how one is to become the agent of one’s purgation, and, concomitantly, the proponent of one’s longed-for salvation, when faced with doubts of the sort raised in the previous emblems [Figs. 18.8, 18.11, & 18.12]? Even if no living person can judge 62  David, Veridicus Christianus 312. 63  Ibidem 339. 64  Ibidem 336.

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Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 98, “Ne tardes converti ad Dominum” (“Lest you delay to turn towards the Lord”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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whether he is truly saved, he can still take steps to combat the innately human tendency to die an injudicious death. Since sin magnifies incertitude, the sinner must endeavour mightily to repent every transgression and refrain from sinning further, if he wishes fervently to nourish the hope of being saved. The incontrovertible fact that certainty is unavailable makes this the only available option worth exercising. Visual images and, specifically, images of the novissima, the four last things – death, judgment, heaven, and hell – are the chief means to this end, for when placed before the eyes, as if reflected in a pellucid mirror (‘veluti in speculo […] ob oculos’), they kindle desire for the rewards of eternal glory, instil terror of eternal damnation, and thereby motivate us to behave rightly.65 More accurately, as pictura 99 shows, the votary is required to fashion a reflexive image of agency, picturing himself as an image-maker who stares at self-made images of his death, judgment (both particular and final), and ultimate salvation or damnation (A.) [Fig. 18.12]. These images are comprised by convex mirrors that reflect his facial features (lightly traceable on their surfaces), thus implying that he projects himself into this quartet of scenarios. Additionally, David construes him as a Christian epitome – indeed, as an antitype, an exegetical image – that fulfils the Mosaic type adumbrated in Deuteronomy 32:5, 28–29: The power and efficacy of these remembered things is likewise confirmed by the example and testimony given and spoken by Moses […]: ‘They have sinned against him and are not his children in their filth; they are a wicked and perverse generation […]. They are a nation without counsel, and without wisdom. O that they would be wise and would understand; and would provide for their last ends (‘ac Novissima providerent’)’.66 So, the mnemonic image of the man is seen to enact the action of imagemaking; the image is also exegetical, in that it answers to the Mosaic call for reformative images of the novissima. And last but not least, it functions as a mirror-image of the votary, that prompts him to gaze into the quadripartite speculum of his final end. The emphatically reflexive status of image A. bolsters the overall argument of Emblem 99, namely, that meditative images have the power to incite both thought and action; they are the chief instruments through which we become, as much as is humanly possible, self-aware agents 65  Ibidem 340. 66  Ibidem: ‘Vis & efficacia memoriae horum, etiam exemplo testimonioque eius quod Moyses dixit & egit, comprobata est […]: Peccaverunt ei, & non filij eius in sordibus: generatio prava atque perversa[…]. Gens absque consilio est, & sine prudentia. Utinam saperent, & intelligerent; ac Novissima providerent!’

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figure 18.12 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 99, “Memorare novissima: nec peccabis” (“Remember the four last things: you shall not sin”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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the Emblematic Imagery of Death in Jan David, S.J.

figure 18.13 Theodoor Galle (engraver), Emblem 100, “Quatuor hominis novissima” (“Humanity’s four last things”), in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Engraving, in-4. Chicago, The Newberry Library

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of our life, death, and eventual redemption. Such images, states David, enable us to emend ourselves, while there is still time [Fig. 18.12]: No doubt, he should emend his life, and not entangle himself in faults of any kind. But how can anyone undertake a goodly manner of life, without recalling the past attentively, or engaging intelligently with the present, and using it according to the judgment of right reason, or anticipating the future, and directing all his actions accordingly? For the damage caused by past errors does not make such a person wiser, nor does he shun present evils, having failed to comprehend them; and for the same reason, he fears neither imminent nor future adversity, having foreseen neither. And so he lives and conducts himself according as fortune has led him. He keeps no due measure in happy and prosperous circumstances, nor knows how to maintain the mean when an ill wind blows. Instead, just as by the former he is exalted without measure, so by the latter he is cast down immeasurably. And living thusly, without law, without king, without God and conscience, after a dissolute and negligent life, and a lamentable death, he arrives at the place of horror and misery.67 In allowing the reader-viewer to visualize, lay claim to, and implement a measure of agency, the novissima license the production of other kinds of meditative image, as David makes clear by guiding the reader-viewer through these subsidiary visual similitudes, after first quoting Psalm 76:6–7: ‘I thought upon the days of old: and I had in my mind the eternal years. And I meditated in the night with my own heart: and I was exercised, and I swept my spirit’. The things, he continues, that threaten our salvation must be viewed as if they were wild animals assailing us (‘sicut omnia animalia videmus apprehensione discriminum’).68 Conversely, the four last things can be compared to a horse’s 67  Ibidem: ‘Dubium non est, quin vitam suam emendarent; neque ullo pacto tot criminibus se implicarent. Qui enim fieri potest, ut quis bene vitae suae rationem instituat, qui nec praeteritorum ulla cum attentione recordatur, neque praesentia ullo cum intellectu complectitur, neque illis secundum rectae rationis iudicium utitur; neque quae ventura sunt praevidet, ut secundum illa omnes suos actus dirigat? Neque enim is praeteritorum errorum damno fit prudentior; neque praesentia mala devitat, ut quae non intelligit; neque futura ob id venientiaque adversa formidat, ut quae non praevidet: atque ita vivit, itaque habet, prout sors tulerit. Neque in laetis ac prosperis modum servat; neque cum ventus ei contrarius est, novit mediocritatem tueri. Sed sicut in illis citra modum elevabatur; ita in istis immoderate deiicitur. Atque ita vivendo, sine lege, sine rege, sine Deo & conscientia, post laxam discinctamque vitam, per lamentabilem mortem, venit ad locum horroris & miseriarum’. 68  Ibidem 340–341.

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tail that flicks away wasps and horseflies, just as the novissima avert sins (C.); to a rudder that steers a ship safely to port (D.); to the tail of a fish or a bird that allows it to swim or fly clear of danger (D. bis); to the feathered end of an arrow that guides it to its target (D. ter) (Fig. 18.12).The novissima beget other kinds of image as well, some of which are temporally complex: like the saints, who perennially beheld every aspect of their life and death through the lens of the four last things, David writes, we may choose to live our lives for the future, constantly asking ourselves whether our current behaviour tallies with the image of such behaviour that we should wish to adduce upon our death, when called to account by God. Throughout the novissima, as in Emblem 99, David asks his reader-viewers to imagine how the things they think and do in the present might look in the future, when those thoughts and acts will be recollected in the form of images, and evaluated from the vantage point of death and final judgment: ‘They who set the presence of the four novissima before their eyes, having led the whole of their lives for the future, as each of them shall wish to have behaved, when, encompassed by the four last things, they will see that there is no further room for flight or for taking counsel’.69 This proleptic image once again casts them in the role of image-makers, urging them to picture themselves visualizing the four last things at the moment of death and judgment. David at this point reintroduces the theme of doubt, not as a possible impediment to the reader-viewers’ motivating desire for salvation, but as an object of immersive contemplation. They are urged to close the eyes of the body (‘claude igitur oculos corporis’), and to open the eyes of the mind (‘et apertis mentis oculis’); and then, having curtailed the remembrance of present affairs (‘abstractus ab omni praesentium rerum recordatione’), to fashion an image of themselves lying upon their future deathbeds (‘te quasi in lecto aegritudinis tuae stratum considera’), awash with doubts as they await the weighing of their souls, either for good or ill, in the equable scales of Christ the judge (‘teque ancipitem exspectare’). Torn between two prospects – hope of celestial glory and fear of eternal damnation – they will see themselves striving all the more to be saved, even as they lie dying, if the four last things are kept in view (‘ergo iuxta horum intuitum est vivendum’). With equal intensity, the desire to die well and the aversion to dying badly will rightly seem to have arisen from efforts to marshal meditative images of the novissima (‘qualem autem te mors inveniet, talem 69  Ibidem 341: ‘Qui quatuor Novissima sibi ut praesentia ante oculos statuentes, ita se in posterum toto vitae suae tempore gesserunt, qualiter certum est quemque optaturum se fecisse, quando ab illis circumventus, videbit nullum esse amplius effugij vel concilij capiendi locum?’

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sistet iudicio’).70 Only by meditating death, as David urges his reader-viewers to avow in this resonant series, can they confidently be assured of transcending its mortuary embrace. Bibliography Allegambe Philippe de, S.J., Bibliotheca scriptorum Societatis Iesu (Antwerp, Joannis Meursius: 1643). Andriessen J., S.J., “Leven en werk van Joannes David S.J.”, West-Vlaanderen: tweemandelijks tijdschrift voor kunst en cultuur 12 (1963) 220–224. Andriessen J., S.J., “David, Joannes, seculier priester, daarna jezuïet; predikant, catecheet en schrijver”, Nationaal biografisch woordenboek I (Brussels: 1964) 378–384. Binski P., Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: 1996). Bitter P. – Bonenkampová V. – Goudriaan K. (eds.), Graven Spreken. Perspectieven op grafcultuur in de middeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Nederlanden (Hilversum: 2013). Boer W. de – Enenkel K. A. E. – Melion W. S. (eds.), Jesuit Image Theory, Intersections 45 (Leiden – Boston: 2016). Brusati C. – Enenkel K. A. E. – Melion W. S. (eds.), The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Intersections 20 (Leiden – Boston: 2011). Cerchio B. (ed.), Anonimo del XV secolo, Ars Moriendi – L’arte di morire (Turin: 1997). Chaunu P., La mort à Paris, 16e, 17e, 18e siècles (Paris: 1978). Classen A. (ed.), Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 16 (Berlin & Boston: 2016). Daly P. M., The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem (Farnham, Surr. – Burlington, VT: 2014). David Jan, S.J., Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, Ex officina Plantiniana: 1601). Dekoninck R., Ad imaginem. Status, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: 2005). Dekoninck R. –Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. – Vaeck M. van, et al. (eds.), Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, exh. cat., Maurits Sabbe Bibliotheek, Leuven; Francis A. Drexel Library, Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: 2006). Dekoninkck R. – Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. (eds.), Emblemata Sacra: Rhétorique et herméneutique du discours sacré dans la littérature en images (Turnhout: 2007). Geerts van Roey L., Jan David s.j. als polemiet (Leuven: 1954).

70  Ibidem.

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Geerts van Roey L. – Andriessen, J., S.J., “Pater Joannes David S.J.,” Ons geestelijk erf 30 (1956) 113–155. Gertsman E., The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance, Studies in the Visual Culture of the Middle Ages 3 (Turnhout: 2010). Gordon B. – Marshall P. (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge – New York – Melbourne: 2000). Göttler C., Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (Turnhout: 2010). Holbein Hans the Younger., Les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort (Lyon, Melchior & Gasper Trechsel: 1538). Imhof D. (ed.), The Illustration of Books Published by the Moretuses, exh. cat., PlantinMoretus Museum, Antwerp (Antwerp: 1996). Imhof D., Jan Moretus and the Continuation of the Plantin Press, Bibliotheca Bibliographica Neerlandica, Series Major III, 2 vols. (Leiden: 2014). Insolera M. – Salviucci-Insolera L., La spiritualité en images aux Pays-Bas Méridionaux dans les livres imprimés des XVIe et XVIIe siècles conserves à la Bibliotheca Wittockiana, Miscellanea Neerlandica 13 (Leuven: 1996). Koslofsky C. M., The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700, Early Modern History, Society, and Culture (Basingstoke – London: 2000). Melion W. S. – Dekoninck R. – Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. (eds.), Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700, Proteus 4 (Turnhout: 2012). Oosterwijk S. – Knöll S. (eds.), Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: 2011). Palmer P.F., S.J., Sacraments and Forgiveness: History and Doctrinal Development of Penance, Extreme Unction, and Indulgences, Sources of Christian Theology 2 (London – Westminster, MD: 1959). Reinis A., Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528) (Aldershot, UK – Burlington, VT: 2007). Sors A.-K., Allegorische Andachtsbücher in Antwerpen – Jan Davids Texte und Theodoor Galles Illustrationen in den jesuitischen Buchprojekten der Plantiniana (Göttingen: 2015). Tingle E. – Willis J. (eds.), Dying, Death, Burial, and Commemoration in Reformation Europe (Farnham, UK – Burlington, VT: 2015).

chapter 19

The Limits of ‘Mute Theology’: Charles Le Brun’s Lecture on Nicolas Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul Revisited James Clifton If I must glory (it is not expedient indeed): but I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ above fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not, or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man (whether in the body, or out of the body, I know not: God knoweth): That he was caught up into paradise, and heard secret words, which it is not granted to man to utter. 2 Corinthians 12:1–4; Douay-Rheims

∵ Nicolas Poussin’s painting of The Ecstasy of Saint Paul of 1649–1650 [Fig. 19.1], based on the apostle’s description of being ‘caught up to the third heaven’ in 2 Corinthians 12, entered the French royal collection, via Everhard Jabach and Cardinal Richelieu, in 1665 and was the subject of conférences (lectures) by two painters at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture shortly thereafter: Jean Nocret on 6 December 1670 and Charles Le Brun a month later, on 10 January 1671.1 Nocret emphasised the formal qualities of the painting, especially Poussin’s mastery of light and colour; Le Brun, by contrast, offered an 1  On the painting and the lectures, see Montagu J., “The Painted Enigma and French Seventeenth-Century Art”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968) 330–333; Rosenberg P., “Le ravissement de saint Paul”, in Rosenberg P. – Prat L.-A. (eds.), Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665, exh. cat., Grand Palais (Paris: 1994) 434–436; Dempsey C., “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul: Charles Le Brun’s ‘over-interpretation’”, in Scott K. – Warwick G. (eds.), Commemorating Poussin: Reception and Interpretation of the Artist (Cambridge: 1999) 114–133; Mérot A. (ed.), Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: 2003) 202–207; and Cojannot-Le Blanc M., À la recherche du rameau d’or: L’invention du Ravissement de saint Paul de Nicolas Poussin à Charles Le Brun (Paris: 2012).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_020

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Nicolas Poussin, Ecstasy of Saint Paul, 1649–1650. Oil on canvas, 148 × 120 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 7288 © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

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iconographic reading of the painting – a controversial one – which he saw as a figuration of three states of grace symbolised by the three angels lifting Paul into the air. In introducing his lecture, Le Brun averred that painters use a kind of ‘mute theology’ (‘théologie muette’), and he made the remarkable assertion that, through their figures (‘par leurs figures’, which may be understood both literally and, as it were, figuratively), they could reveal the most hidden mysteries of religion (‘fissent connaître les mystères les plus cachés de notre religion’).2 Le Brun seems not to acknowledge the fundamental incomprehensibility of the sacramenta through human reason or the senses, instead positing painting as a means – a unique, privileged, visual means – to comprehend them. Le Brun’s unexpected interpretation of Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul has sparked debate both at the time of his lecture at the Academy and especially in modern scholarship, with, on one hand, Daniel Arasse characterizing Le Brun’s reading as ‘exégèses maniaques’ and, on the other, Charles Dempsey offering a compelling defense and explication of it.3 I do not intend to question the (exclusive) accuracy of Le Brun’s reading or proffer another; as should become clear, I accept its validity without preferring it over some other interpretation. Rather, I would like to reconsider Poussin’s painting and Le Brun’s lecture on it in light of Le Brun’s unusual term, ‘mute theology’, and his assertion that painters could ‘make known’ the mysteries of faith, an ability, however, that is not without limits. 1

The Painting and the Lectures

Poussin painted the picture for the Abbé Paul Scarron. He had initially declined Scarron’s request for a painting, but their mutual friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou intervened to persuade him. In a letter to Chantelou, Poussin referred to Scarron, rather unkindly, as an invalid (malade) and a cripple (estropié), amid some harsh criticisms of Scarron’s literary work,4 but he ultimately agreed to paint a picture for him. He changed the subject, however – for reasons unknown – from an initially proposed Bacchic theme to what he

2  Mérot, Les Conférences 202. 3  Arasse D., Le Détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: 1996) 59; Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul”; for a review of the reactions to Le Brun’s interpretation, see ibid. 118–119. 4  Thuillier, Nicolas Poussin 233–234; and Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul” 113 and 128 nn. 6, 7.

Le Brun ’ s Lecture on Nicolas Poussin ’ s Ecstasy of Saint Paul

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Nicolas Poussin, Ecstasy of Saint Paul, 1643. Oil on wood, 41.6 × 30.2 cm. Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, SN690

called in a letter to Chantelou the ravissement de saint Paul.5 The subject was appropriate for Scarron because it depicted the patron’s namesake, but also 5  Letter of 29 May 1650. But he called the painting an ‘Ascension de Paul’ in a panegyric to Camillo Massimi at the end of his life, saying of Massimi: ‘vous qui d’un élan généreux vous élevez au ciel’; see Bonfait O., “‘Ut pingerem perpetuas virgilias …’: Un éloge de Poussin adressé à Camillo Massimi”, in Bonfait O. et al. (eds.), Poussin et Rome: Actes du colloque à l’Académie de France à Rome et à la Bibliotheca Hertziana, 16–18 novembre 1994 (Paris – Rome: 1996) 51; and Cojannot-Le Blanc, À la recherche du rameau d’or 31. ‘Ravissement’ suggests in this context ecstasy, although it may carry an undertone of its principal meaning, abduction, in Paul’s position as the object of this transitive action; see Furetière Antoine, Dictionaire universel, contenant generalement tous les mots françois tant vieux que modernes, & les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts, 3 vols. (The Hague – Rotterdam, Chez Arnout & Reinier Leers: 1690) III, s.v., ‘Ravissement’: ‘Enlevement. Le ravissement se punit de mort. Le ravissement des Sabines [a subject Poussin painted more than once], d’Ariadne. Ravissement, se dit aussi

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because the Apostle mentions in the subsequent passage in Corinthians the affliction he suffered from – the mysterious thorn in his flesh (stimulus carnis) – which would have resonated with a highly crippling and deforming disease that afflicted Scarron. The subject probably suggested itself as well because Poussin had first painted it for Chantelou – another namesake of Saint Paul – in 1643, a much smaller picture now in Sarasota [Fig. 19.2]. The subject seems to have been relatively new: Domenichino’s painting on copper now in the Louvre of around 1606–1608 may be the first instance of it [Fig. 19.3]. But there are obvious visual precedents, not least of which is Raphael’s painting of the Vision of Ezekiel, now at the Palazzo Pitti [Fig. 19.4]; Chantelou owned a similarly small painting of this subject he thought to be by Raphael, for which Poussin proposed his first Saint Paul not as an emulative pendant, but as a cover – a sort of humbler introduction. In his lecture on the Louvre Ecstasy of Saint Paul, known only through a brief summary by Georges Guillet de Saint-Georges, Jean Nocret focused especially on the pictorial effects Poussin achieved in the painting.6 Thus, for example, the sky is of a gentle colour and contains a light and transparent cloud to allow the upper parts of the painting to be distinguished clearly; Paul’s head is clarified by a gentle light that makes an agreeable contrast with the dark tint of his hair; and so on. Nocret did, however, make a few iconographic gestures. Thus, the two fluttering ends of the stole worn by the angel at the lower left are said to represent divine authority. He also remarked that in Poussin’s picture, one could find ‘une savante pratique’ of the Academy precepts (‘tout ce qui s’était déjà dit dans l’Académie’) concerning various aspects of painting, including the art of giving figures their natural attitude and ‘de leur faire exprimer les plus secrets mouvements de l’esprit’ (‘to make them express the most secret movements of the spirit’).7 Le Brun, whose lecture is known from a much more ample account, but still not verbatim, was less concerned with Poussin’s pictorial achievements. He focused on the iconographic meaning of the picture as a kind of counterbalance to formal assessments such as Nocret’s, understanding the Saint Paul de la joye, de l’admiration. L’extase est une espece de ravissement. Tout l’Auditoire de ce Predicateur étoit dans le ravissement’. 6  Mérot, Les Conférences 199–201; in this regard, it is in line with Sebastien Bourdon’s lecture on Poussin’s Christ Healing the Blind, of 3 December 1667 (Mérot, Les Conférences 113–129). Kemp M., The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London: 1990) 281, has placed Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul in the context of contemporaneous colour theory; see also Rosenberg, “Le ravissement de saint Paul” 435; and Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul” 116–117, 129 n. 14. 7  Mérot, Les Conférences 200.

Le Brun ’ s Lecture on Nicolas Poussin ’ s Ecstasy of Saint Paul

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Domenichino, Ecstasy of Saint Paul, ca. 1606–1608. Oil on copper, 50 × 38 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 792 Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

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Raphael, Vision of Ezekiel, 1518. Oil on wood, 40 × 30 cm. Galleria Palatina, Florence Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

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as a kind of ‘mute theology’ that could make known the most hidden mysteries of religion. Everything in the painting, he said, is mysterious, including the sword. Even the overheated air around the figures, he asserted, ‘is not without mystery’.8 Most ambitiously, Le Brun read the angels lifting Saint Paul in the painting as figuring the three states of grace – prevenient (the angel in golden yellow, at lower left), co-operating (the angel in blue, at lower right), and sanctifying (the angel clothed in the colour of the sky, above Saint Paul) – a surprising interpretation.9 According to Claude Nivelon, the artist’s pupil and biographer, Le Brun’s lecture elicited contrasting responses, but these ‘spiritual disputes’ scarcely developed,10 with one exception: On s’attacha seulement à une question qui ne pouvait tourner qu’à la gloire de M. le Poussin et de M. Le Brun, savoir si le premier pouvait avoir eu ces véritables pensées si justes à l’application dans l’ordonnance de ce suject. They stuck only on one question which could not but redound to the glory of M. Le Poussin and M. Le Brun, and this was to know whether the former could really have had these thoughts so justly applicable to the arrangement of this subject.11 Le Brun did not indicate a source for his interpretation. According to a note from Guillet de Saint-Georges, he relied on a treatise titled De raptu sancti Pauli ad tertium coelum, found at the time in the royal library, but, as far as I know, now untraced.12 Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc has, while rejecting the search for a unique textual source, recently brought to bear on Poussin’s painting La Vie de l’apostre saint Paul by Antoine Godeau (1605–1672), the bishop of Grasse. Godeau adduced the well-rehearsed idea that Paul discerned the orders of 8  Ibid. 205. 9  Mérot, Les Conférences 203–204. For a thorough analysis of Le Brun’s interpretation of the angels, see Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul”. 10  Nivelon Claude, Vie de Charles Le Brun et Description Détaillée des Ses Ouvrages, ed. L. Pericolo, École pratique des hautes études, Sciences historiques et philologiques V; Hautes études médiévales et modernes 86 (Geneva: 2004) 376: ‘mais ces contestations spirituelles prirent fin presque en naissant’. 11  Ibid. 376–377; trans. Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul” 119. 12  That is, unless it refers to either Bovillus Carolus, De Raptv Divi Pavli (Paris: Apud Simonem Colinaeum, 1531) or Ziegler Jakob, “De raptu Pauli in tertium coelum, tractatus”, in Conceptionu[m] i Genesim mundi, & Exodum, Commentarij […] (Basel, apud Ioannem Oporinum: [1548]), neither of which is especially concerned with either angels or grace. Guillet’s note is reported by Mérot, Les Conférences 199.

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angels, but without any specificity or the symbolism proposed by Le Brun.13 Dempsey concluded that ‘Le Brun’s “source” was doubtless the Abbé Scarron, Chantelou, or Poussin himself’.14 One might recall in that regard Le Brun’s comments in his conférence at the Academy on Poussin’s Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert of 5 November 1667, in which he noted the conjectural nature of comments on paintings by Raphael and other painters of that century, but with Poussin, ‘comme il a eu l’avantage de converser souvent avec ce grand homme […] il en pourra dire son sentiment avec plus de connaissance et de certitude que des autres’ (‘since he had the advantage of speaking often with this great man, he could give his opinion with greater knowledge and certitude than the others’).15 Nonetheless, at several points, albeit not in direct regard to the triadic interpretation of the angels, Le Brun uses the phrases ‘je crois qu[e]’ (‘I believe that’) and ‘je me suis imaginé que M. le Poussin a voulu figurer’ (‘I imagined that M. le Poussin wanted to depict’),16 which suggests speculation or, at best, tentative assertion. Moreover, if the source had been Poussin, Chantelou, or Scarron, one would expect Le Brun to have insisted on it at the first sign of dissent, thus foreclosing the ensuing debate reported by Nivelon. In Nivelon’s account, Le Brun limited himself to a general comment about Poussin’s careful consideration: M. Le Brun fit connaître, en peu de mots, que le jugement et le savoir de M. Poussin avaient tounjours été tels: de ne rien faire entrer dans tous 13   Cojannot-Le Blanc, À la recherche du rameau d’or 79ff. 14  Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul” 132 n. 29. 15  Mérot, Les Conférences 100; note, however, that Le Brun was speaking in this context specifically of colours that had altered in Raphael’s paintings but maintained ‘encore le même lustre et la même vivacité’ in Poussin’s. 16  Ibid. 205–206: ‘Mais comme tout est mystérieux dans ce tableau, je crois que cette épée n’a été mise là que pour montrer que ce grand apôtre avait été le défenseur de l’Église, et qu’il avait soutenu le nom de Jésus-Christ aux dépens de sa vie, et qu’il avait retranché du glaive de ses écrits toutes les hérésies qui commençaient à se former dans l’Église.’ ‘L’air échauffé qui paraît autour des figures n’est pas sans mystère. Je crois qu’il est ainsi pour montrer que ceux qui veulent s’élever dans la grâce ne doivent point être tièdes, mais qu’il faut qu’ils soient ardents et échauffés pour profiter de la grâce.’ ‘Si j’ai remarqué que la tête de ce saint penche sur le sein lumineux de l’ange qui la soutient, c’est que je me suis imaginé que M. le Poussin l’avait représenté de cette sorte pour figurer que le grand apôtre avait épuisé toutes ses lumières dans le sein de la Grâce et qu’il en avait été le favori, de même que saint Jean l’avait été de Jésus-Christ, qui en est la source.’ ‘C’est pourquoi, Messieurs, je me suis imaginé que M. le Poussin a voulu figurer par le movement des parties d’en haut du visage de cet ange la douceur et la tranquillité dont jouissent ceux qui sont dans l’état parfait de la grâce, et par les parties d’en bas le mépris et l’aversion qu’ils ont pour les choses du monde’.

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ses ouvrages sans en approfondir les raisons, et qu’il n’avait rien exposé qu’après une mûre et longue délibération d’étude et de recherche, et que c’était une partie qui le rendait si recommandable. M. Le Brun let it be known in a few words that M. Poussin’s judgement and knowledge had always been such: to let nothing enter into any of his works without considering deeply the reasons, and that he would not have shown anything until after a mature and long deliberation of study and research, and that it was an aspect that made him so recommendable.17 Whether he knew Poussin’s specific intentions or not, Le Brun’s conviction is that the work of the great artist – in fact, the great man, as he calls Poussin – is fully infused with carefully considered meaning by methods that remain mysterious to others.18 Though the three kinds of grace represented by the angels lifting Saint Paul described by Le Brun may have been common teaching,19 they were not traditionally associated with angels, and there is no self-evident reason why Le Brun would have chosen this particular intepretation, unless he was informed, directly or indirectly, by Poussin. Even if Le Brun is right that this is what Poussin intended, there is still no self-evident reason why Poussin would have chosen to invest the painting with this particular symbolic meaning, because there are many other possibilities. One wonders why he did not invest his earlier depiction of the subject – a painting with four angels, two of which are nude – with the same meaning. It is entirely possible that the three kinds of grace were of more interest to Le Brun than to Poussin. What is especially puzzling (and interesting) about this whole affair is that the considerable exegetical tradition gives no emphasis to grace in commenting on Paul’s rapture. And Le Brun could just as easily have interpreted the three angels differently in accordance with that tradition – the three angels, which, scarcely noted by art historians (with the important exception of Cojannot-Le Blanc), are not mentioned in the biblical text, but are solely part of the visual tradition.20 The Glossa Ordinaria does adduce in connection with Paul’s rapture the three orders of angels described by Pseudo-Dionysius in De Coelesti Hierarchia, but if this were Poussin’s reference point, one would expect them to be more clearly distinguished from each 17  Nivelon, Vie de Charles Le Brun 377. 18  See below, p. XX and p. XX. 19  Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul” 132 n. 29. 20   Cojannot-Le Blanc, À la recherche du rameau d’or 79. For the visual precedents of Poussin’s painting (including Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Domenichino), see Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul” 128–129 n. 12.

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other, and they would be the subject of Paul’s vision, rather than assistants in his elevation. In any case, there is no mention in the Glossa – or anywhere else in the exegetical tradition, to my knowledge – of three states of grace. Drawing on traditional commentary – which, for our purposes, may perhaps be best conveyed by the relevant passages in the Glossa and the monumental Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram by the post-Tridentine Jesuit, Cornelius a Lapide21 – Le Brun could have plausibly asserted that the three angels represent the three orders of angels or the three heavens implicit in Paul’s term ‘the third heaven’. These three heavens might, in turn, represent any one of several triads: Augustine’s types of vision (visio corporalis, visio imaginaria, and visio intellectualis), which had emerged from his exegesis in De Genesi ad litteram of Paul’s rapture;22 cognition of heavenly bodies, of spiritual bodies, and of God; knowledge of mores, of natural philosophy, and of theology; or the three Persons of the Trinity. 2

The Burden of Meaning in Le Brun’s Angels

Le Brun is effectively pressing Poussin’s angels into service as allegorical figures without attributes other than a dubious colour coding and lighting effects, and in this he may be projecting his own approach to comparable subject matter onto Poussin. In his own work, if Nivelon is to be believed, Le Brun at times required angels to carry a substantial burden of signification, with varying meanings as unpredictable as those he applied to Poussin’s. 21  For 2 Corinthians 1–4, see Bibliorum Sacrorum cum glossa ordinaria iam ante quidem a Strabo Fulgensi collecta: nunc autem novis, cum Graeorum, tum Latinorum patrum expositionibus locupletata: Annotatis etiam ijs, quae confuse antea citabantur, locis: et Postilla Nicolai Lyrani: Additionibus Pauli Burgensis ad ipsum Lyranum: ac easdem Matthiae Toringi Replicis, 6 vols. (Venice, n.p.: 1603) VI, cols. 445–448; and Lapide Cornelius a, Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram. Vol. 18. Divi Pauli Epistolarum (Paris: 1861) 498–502 (first published in 1614). A Lapide commented substantially on the controverted subject of grace (including, explicitly, not only prevenient, co-operating, and sanctifying grace, but also the distinct sufficient and efficacious grace), but at the many clearly more relevant passages – e.g., 1 Timothy 2:4, 6; Ephesians 1:-45, 6; John 6:37–44, Philippians 2:12–13 – rather than at 2 Corinthians; on A Lapide in general and this topic more specifically, see François W., “Grace, Free Will, and Predestination in the Biblical Commentaries of Cornelius a Lapide”, Annali di storia dell’esegesi 34 (2017) 175–197. 22  Augustine, “De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim”, in Opera Omnia, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: 1875) III, cols. 453–486. See Clifton J., “Secret Wisdom: Antoon Wierix’s Engravings of a Carmelite Mystic”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K. – Melion W. S. (eds.), The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Emory University, Lovis Corinth Colloquia III (Leiden: 2012) 651–653.

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Nivelon’s account of Le Brun’s lecture on Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul immediately precedes his description of the cupola of the chapel of Sceaux, painted by Le Brun for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, now lost but engraved by Gérard Audran [Fig. 19.5]. Nivelon makes this segue by asserting that […] dans ce temps, l’occasion se présenta à M. Le Brun de prouver cette vérité avancée, que les grands hommes s’élèvent toujours au-dessus des autres par des voies qui sont inconnues à plusieurs, se servant de ce même langage muet et allégorique, qui lui était si familier, dans la composition de l’ouvrage qu’il a peint à fresque dans la chapelle de M. Colbert à Sceaux. […] at that time, the occasion presented itself to M. Le Brun to prove this advanced truth, that great men always rise above the others by means that are unknown to many, serving himself of the same mute and allegorical language, with which he was so familiar, in the composition of the work that he painted in fresco in M. Colbert’s chapel at Sceaux.23 In the cupola, God the Father was accompanied by three angels, said to figure the three Laws governing the three eras: Natural Law, the Law of the Old Testament, and the Law of Grace. Nivelon’s description of the angels’ means of signification bears great similarity to Le Brun’s interpretation of Poussin’s angels: Par eux [two of the angels] son représentées les deux premières Lois, naturelle et écrite; celui qui représente la première est entièrement privé de lumière et son vêtement est de rouge brun, pour marquer la rigueur de Dieu dans ce premier état et la disgrâce des premiers Pères pour la cause du Péché. Le second, plus proche du Père éternel, est éclairé sur le front et vêtu de jaune, pour signifier que les hommes, sous ce second état de la Loi, donnée à Moïse sur le mont Sinaï au milieu des lumières et des feux célestes, ont été rapprochés de Dieu par adoption. Par le troisième est dépeint celui de la Loi évangélique. Il regarde le Père éternel, joignant les mains en action de grâce de la plénitude de celle qu’il reçoit, désignée par la lumière répandue sur son sein, et en exprimant le culte qui se rend à Dieu actuellement, sous cette Loi de grâce. Son vêtement est vert, dont les bruns sont d’un rouge couleur de sang, 23  Nivelon, Vie de Charles Le Brun 378 See also ibid. 465, where he calls allegory ‘delicate and a mysterious language’.

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Gérard Audran after Charles Le Brun, Triumph of the New Testament over the Old Testament (Cupola of the Château de Sceaux), 1681. Etching and engraving, five plates, 56.8 × 84.4 cm total. Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ, GA 2012.01256-01260

symboles l’un et l’autre que l’espérance du salut des hommes n’a été fondée que sur l’effusion du sang de Jésus-Christ. By them are represented the two first Laws, natural and written; the one that represents the first is entirely devoid of light and his garment is reddish-brown to indicate God’s rigour in this first era and the disgrace of the first Fathers because of Sin. The second, closer to the eternal Father, is lighted on the front and dressed in yellow to signify that men, under this second era of the Law given by Moses on Mount Sinai in the midst of lights and celestial fires, have been brought nearer by God for adoption. By the third is depicted that of the Gospel Law. He looks at the eternal Father, joining his hands in thanks for the plenitude of that which he receives, designated by the expansive light on his breast, and expressing the cult that is now rendered to God, under this Law of grace. His garment is green, of which the browns are a red the colour of blood, both symbols

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that the hope of the salvation of humankind is founded on nothing but the shedding of the blood of Jesus Christ.24 Le Brun’s three angels are formally quite similar to Poussin’s and similar as well in their means of figuration according to Le Brun and Nivelon, but quite different in what they symbolise. In Le Brun’s late Saint Louis, lost but engraved by Gérard Edelinck [Fig. 19.6], we find three angels again, now hovering over the king, who kneels in devotion before a cross and crown of thorns, but this time, according to Nivelon, they all ‘expriment les Intelligences spirituelles qui assistent les âmes chrétiennes’ (‘express the spiritual Intelligences who assist Christian souls’).25 In the Crucifixion with Angels and Christ in the Desert (when Christ was succoured by angels after his temptation by Satan), Le Brun painted multiple angels, investing, according to Nivelon, several of them with specific significance [Figs. 19.7 & 19.8]. Nivelon writes that in the Crucifixion with Angels, Le Brun painted the nine orders of angels, although there are more than twice that many present. Among them are Saint Michael, he says, protector of France against heresy, an angel in blue signifying the purity of religion of the realm, and another, which embraces the foot of the cross, representing the Third Estate and opposing with zeal and courage the fury of its enemies.26 Nivelon equates the seven angels in Christ in the Desert with the seven spirits who surround the divine majesty in heaven and points to three that Le Brun has specifically characterised ‘pour les fair considérer comme les génies des trois ordres ou âges du monde par leurs caractères et fonctions’ (‘so that they might be considered the geniuses of the three orders or ages of the world by their characters and functions’),27 recalling, but not replicating, his interpretation of the three angels in the cupola at Sceaux. Cojannot-Le Blanc asserts that Nivelon’s interpretation of the Christ in the Desert is no more ‘aberrante’ than Le Brun’s of Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul, and she notes that it ‘témoigne du goût véritable du premier peintre pour l’allégorie recherchée mise au service d’un sujet religieux’ (‘testifies to the premier peintre’s veritable taste for obscure allegory in the service of a religious subject’).28 Indeed, Le Brun’s penchant for obscure allegories was noted by his contemporaries. We detect the frustration in Roger De Piles’s comment 24  Ibid. 379–380. See also his comments on Le Brun’s lost Fathers in Limbo (ibid. 384–385). 25  Ibid. 566–567. 26  Ibid. 280–281. 27  Ibid. 176. 28   Cojannot-Le Blanc, À la recherche du rameau d’or 193.

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Gérard Edelinck after Charles Le Brun, Qu’il s’elevoit en s’abaissant ainsy (Saint Louis in Prayer). Engraving, 55.1 × 40.9 cm. British Museum, London, 1917,1208.1334 © Trustees of the British Museum

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Charles Le Brun, Crucifixion with Angels (ca. 1660, retouched 1686). Oil on canvas, 174 × 128 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 2886 © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

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Charles Le Brun, Christ in the Desert, ca. 1653. Oil on canvas, 390 × 254 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 2882 © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

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(in 1699) that ‘Il a traité ses sujets allegoriques avec beaucoup d’imagination: mais au lieu d’en tirer les symboles de quelque source connue, comme de la Fable, & des Médailles antiques, il les a presque tous inventés, ainsi ces sortes de Tableaux, deviennent par-là des énigmes, que le spectateur ne veut pas se donner la peine d’éclaircir’ (‘He treated allegorical subjects with much imagination: but instead of drawing the symbols from some known source, like myths and ancient medals, he invented almost all of them, so that these types of paintings become enigmas that the viewer does not want to take the trouble to clarify’).29 It is no wonder, then, that Le Brun read Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul as such an allegory. 3

Multiple Interpretations

Le Brun’s interpretation may have been controversial in great part because the goal of academic attention to the painting, both in the seventeenth century and more recently, seems to be to discern Poussin’s intention therein – ‘savoir si le premier [Poussin] pouvait avoir eu ces véritables pensées si justes à l’application dans l’ordonnance de ce sujet’ – rather than to explore the manifold possibilities generated by the painting. Dempsey rightly asks: ‘Had Le Brun not given his conférence, would it have been possible for us to read Poussin’s painting, not only in terms of the concept of grace (to which the second letter to the Corinthians easily leads us), but also in terms of the three subdivisions of actual grace?’30 He answers himself, reasonably enough: ‘almost certainly we would not have been able to discern the fullness of Poussin’s treatment of his subject without Le Brun’s conférence, and even if we could, the difficulty in convincing others of the validity of such an argument is shown by the extreme scepticism with which Le Brun’s interpretation has been received in this [that is, the twentieth] century.’31 Such a reading may have been possible, if unlikely, without Le Brun’s intervention, but what would not be possible – as Dempsey recognised – is convincingly to argue that this interpretation is what Poussin 29  De Piles Roger, Abregé de la vie des peintres, avec des réflexions sur leurs ouvrages, et un traité du peintre parfait; de la connoissance des desseins; de l’utilité des estampes, 2nd ed. (Paris, Chez Jacques Estienne: 1715) 511; cited by Lee R. W., Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York, 1967) 22 n. 86. In using the term ‘enigmas’, De Piles may be alluding to the genre of ‘visual riddles’ set for Jesuits students, which would place Le Brun’s paintings far from a more august revelation of mysteries to which he would aspire; on the enigmas, see Montagu, “The Painted Enigma” 307–335. 30  Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul” 125. 31  Ibid.

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had in mind. And yet, for Dempsey, ‘the fullness of Poussin’s treatment of his subject’ is dependent on ‘whether this concept of grace was really in Poussin’s mind when he painted the Ravissement de Saint Paul’.32 But the fullness of Poussin’s treatment of the subject may lie in its openness to diverse interpretations, and, rather than accepting, dismissing, or even contesting Le Brun’s interpretation, which is perfectly in keeping – in its technique if not its content – with patristic biblical exegesis, we might contentedly multiply such interpretations. Like the scriptural passage itself, Poussin’s painting can be read in a number of ways that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And even if they may not have been anticipated by the artist himself, they may still be perfectly viable – that is, not contradicted by the painting itself.33 Le Brun’s figurative reading is unique only in that it was articulated and published; there were and are many potential figurative readings permitted by the subject and Poussin’s realisation of it. To paraphrase what Umberto Eco said of a novel: a painting – I would say a good painting – is a machine for generating interpretations.34 Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul was, of course, not the only painting that stimulated debate in the Academy. According to Nivelon, in response to Le Brun’s assertion that Poussin never painted without careful consideration, it was pointed out that Poussin deviated from Scripture through both commission and omission: on the one hand, he had included a ‘figure fabuleuse’ of the Nile in his depiction of the rescue of the infant Moses, and, on the other, he omitted the camels – ‘une essentialité historique’ (‘an historically essential thing’) – from his Rebecca and Eliezer.35 With regard to the latter, Nivelon may have been conflating two different lectures, thus here referring to Philippe de Champaigne’s lecture on Poussin’s Rebecca and Eliezer of three years previous 32  Ibid. 120. Montagu, “The Painted Enigma” 333, was likewise concerned with the artist’s intention: ‘The ingenuity which Le Brun displayed in finding hidden meanings in the Ecstasy of Saint Paul will, if true, redound to the credit of both Poussin and Le Brun. And, if it is not true? We are left with a suspicion that it is Poussin who will be the poorer, and that, at least in some circles, Le Brun’s glory will be undiminished’. Yet she also acknowledges, approvingly and in accordance with seventeenth-century practice, ‘a class of explanation which one might describe as “potentially true”’ (ibid. 334). 33  Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul” 132 n. 32, hints at such a reading, potentially independent of the artist’s intentions, of Domenichino’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul [Fig. 19.3]: ‘Whatever may have been in Domenichino’s mind, it is not hard to imagine a Jesuit exegesis of the image along lines similar to Le Brun’s reading of Poussin’s painting.’ 34  Eco U., “Postille a ‘Il nome della rosa’ 1983”, in Il Nome della Rosa. In Appendice Postille a “Il Nome della Rosa” (Milan, 2007) 507: ‘Un narratore non deve fornire interpretazioni della propria opera, altrimenti non avrebbe scritto un romanzo, che è una macchina per generare interpretazioni’. 35  Nivelon, Vie de Charles Le Brun 377.

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(7 January 1668),36 in which Champaigne called for ‘exactitude and fidelity’ in the illustration of Scripture, and its ensuing discussion; but it is also perfectly feasible that the well-known issue of the camels, perhaps a festering point of contention among the academicians, was raised again at Le Brun’s lecture on the Saint Paul. The disagreements regarding Poussin’s paintings suggest that there was ongoing debate in the Academy about how and to what purpose artists should illustrate Scripture. In fact, the Academy lectures were structured to engender discussion, so that, according to the Academy secretary, André Félibien, each of those attending would have ‘la liberté de dire son sentiment, l’on ferait un examen de tout ce qui entre dans la composition d’un sujet, et même que les avis différents qui se pourraient rencontrer serviraient à découvrir beaucoup de chose qui feraient autant de préceptes et de maximes’ (‘the liberty to speak his sentiments, and even so that the different opinions that one could encounter would serve to discover many of the things that would form precepts and maxims’).37 Conclusions and resolutions – or perhaps we should say, in Geert Warnar’s terms, understanding and agreement – were sought, but not unanimously achieved.38 Indeed, such conclusions, implying a unitary and unequivocal reading of a painting, are not possible or perhaps not even desirable. In this regard, paintings such as the Ecstasy of Saint Paul are like the biblical sources on which they are based, likewise subject to diverse interpretations that are sometimes conflicting, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, because the source is rich and adaptable to a variety of contexts and audiences. Poussin’s painting and others act as exegetical instruments, interpreting the texts they illustrate. 4

Mute Theology

Poussin’s visualisation and the Academicians’ verbalisation of a narrative only laconically described in the biblical text manifest a struggle with something – a sacred mystery – that is at its heart unverbalisable or even silent. Giorgio Agamben has pointed out that ‘[e]tymologically speaking, myein, the root of the Greek word mysterion, means “to close the mouth, to silence.”’39 In this 36  Suggested by Pericolo in Nivelon, Vie de Charles Le Brun 377 note b. 37  Mérot, Les Conférences 47. I previously made this point in Clifton J., “‘Exactitude and Fidelity’? Paintings of Christ Healing the Blind by Nicolas Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne”, in Robbins V. K. – Melion W. S. – Jeal R. J. (eds.), The Art of Visual Exegesis: Rhetoric, Texts, Images, Emory Studies in Early Christianity 19 (Atlanta: 2017) 355. 38  See Geert Warnar’s essay in this volume. 39  Agamben G., “Image and Silence”, Diacritics 40 (2012) 95.

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sense, Le Brun chose well a painting through which to proffer an argument for the revelation of mystery, because in the state depicted by Poussin, Paul ‘heard secret words, which it is not granted to man to utter’ (2 Corinthians 12:4). For exegetes, the unutterable slid into the unimageable so that the obvious question was posed as ‘quae arcana viderit vel audierit Paulus in paradiso’? (‘what secrets will Paul have seen or heard in Paradise’?)40 A Lapide answers his own question with the observation that one cannot know with certainty what Paul himself was silent about,41 which, of course, had not kept commentators from speculating. It had been suggested that he had witnessed the nature and glory of the angels; the glory of Christ; the beauty of paradise and the singing choirs of the saints. More subtly, he was thought to have seen and heard ‘arcana de secreto, ratione, modo, ordine divinae reprobationis et praedestinationis ac vocationis hominum’ (‘secrets of the mystery, reason, means, and order of the divine rejection, predestination, and calling of men’) – a subject that could have taken A Lapide into a discussion of predestination and the states of grace, but did not – or ‘arcana quaedam Christi redemptionis ac Evangelii mysteria’ (‘some secrets of Christ’s redemption and mysteries of the Gospel’) or ‘arcana de oeconomia, regimine ac successu Ecclesiae praesentis ac futurae’ (‘secrets of the structure, governance, and succession of the Church, present and future’).42 Even if, however, one were able to identify the arcana verba, they would remain a mystery, neither speakable nor explicable: ‘sicque ineffabilia vocat, tum quae fari prohibitum est, tum quae fando adaequare et plene explicare non possumus’ (‘and thus they are called ineffable [words], which first it is prohibited to utter, [and] which we then cannot approximate by speaking or fully explain’).43 According to Nivelon, Le Brun himself likewise represented the mysteries of faith, or, rather, we might suggest, their status as mysteries: that is to say, he represented not the content or workings of a mystery, as if revealing the trick to a magician’s sleight of hand, but the very mysteriousness of a mystery, as it were – its incomprehensibility and ineffability. The Vie de Charles Le Brun addresses such mysteries in discussing three of the artist’s paintings of the Virgin and Child in a row. Foremost among them is The Sleep of the Infant Jesus, also known as The Silence, painted in 1655 [Fig. 19.9]. Mary raises her finger and looks down at the young John the Baptist, cautioning him not to disturb the Christ Child sleeping in her lap. Elizabeth tugs on her son’s garment to restrain 40  A Lapide, Commentaria 502. 41  Ibid.: ‘nihil hic certo dici posse, cum ea Paulus siluerit’. 42  Ibid. 43  Ibid.

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Charles Le Brun, The Sleep of the Infant Jesus (The Silence) (1655). Oil on canvas, 87 × 118 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Inv. 2880 © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

him, pointing at Jesus, and Joseph leans in, concerned. As Zechariah joins his hands in adoration, Anne carefully approaches to cover Jesus with a cloth. A cat warms itself under a brazier at right. What could be viewed as a charmingly anecdotal domestic scene is, in Nivelon’s account, so much more. Le Brun surpasses the ‘expression commune’ of the Virgin’s gesture by injecting, as he always does, a ‘délicatesse spirituelle’. John the Baptist, ‘montrant le Sauveur du monde, semble dire ces belles paroles, que c’était l’agneau qui devait ôter les péchés du monde’ (‘indicating the Saviour of the world, seems to be saying these beautiful words, that it is the lamb who shall take away the sins of the world’).44 But the Virgin enjoins him to maintain silence about ‘un si grand secret’ that she keeps in her own heart, knowing the time is not yet come for its manifestation. The mini-narrative, so simple and seemingly obvious, is exalted to an ‘action mysterieuse’.45 As Matthieu Somon has recently observed, 44  Nivelon, Vie de Charles Le Brun 165. 45  Ibid. Note that Nivelon’s description of John the Baptist’s gesture does not accord exactly with the painting.

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the pictorial qualities of the painting, in concert with the Virgin’s gesture, ‘visibly connote the ineffable mystery of the Incarnation, turning it into the mute subject of silent contemplation’.46 Nivelon follows his analysis of The Silence by asserting that in a Virgin and Child (now lost, but known through an engraving by Gilles Rousselet), in which the Virgin’s veil extends across the head of Jesus as well, Le Brun has with this motif signified, ‘by the shadow that it casts, these mysteries that are still hidden from the eyes of men’.47 Nivelon subsequently describes a painting, a Holy Family in Egypt, also known as Christ Reading (of which several versions are known), in which the young Christ, holding open a scroll and pointing at the text, looks up to his mother who inclines her head with hands joined ‘in gratitude’. ‘[I]l semble [Nivelon avers] par la rencontre de leurs divins regards, qu’il expose à sa mère le sens ou plutôt le secret caché sous ces caractères’ (‘it seems by the meeting of their divine gazes that he shows his mother the sense, or, rather, the hidden secret, in the characters’).48 Nivelon’s discovery of mysteries and secrets in Le Brun’s paintings echoes Le Brun’s own discovery of mysteries in the Ecstasy of Saint Paul. The shared subject of all these pictures is mystery itself. In his lecture on Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul, Le Brun sought to examine a part of painting he felt was previously ignored, what he calls the ‘partie toute mysterieuse’ (‘completely mysterious part’) and the ‘Partie toute spirituelle ou chaque figure cache autant de mysteres’ (‘completely spiritual part where each figure hides mysteries’).49 He asserts that there is nothing new in this. The Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans had not ignored cette belle partie: all their religion, he says, was represented through figures invented by painters and sculptors. He asserts that painters are exercising ‘une theologie muette, et que, par leurs figures, ils fissent connaitre les mysteres les plus caches de notre religion’ (‘a mute theology and that, through their figures, they make known 46  Somon M., “The Ineffability of Incarnation in Le Brun’s Silence or Sleep of the Child”, in Melion W. S. – Wandel L. P. (eds.), Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 39 (Leiden: 2015) 153. Somon sees Le Brun’s Silence as ‘an early attempt to represent the “mute theology” for which he continued to search’ (p. 153) and which was verbalised a decade and a half later in his lecture on Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul. 47  Nivelon, Vie de Charles Le Brun 166 (with a reproduction of Rousselet’s engraving): ‘C’est ce que M. Le Brun a exprimé, faisant adroitement passer une partie du voile de la Vierge sur la tête du Christ pour signifier, par l’ombre qu’il porte, ces mystères encore couverts aux yeux des hommes’. 48  Ibid. 168. 49  Mérot, Les Conférences 202.

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the most hidden mysteries of our religion’).50 ‘Mute theology’ is, in a sense, oxymoronic in that the logos of the term ‘theology’ is a verbalisation. Painting might be an analogue of Scripture, but that formulation itself is dependent on the logos – the ratio, reason, word, speech. In paraphrasing Le Brun’s position, Nivelon puts it slightly differently: Le Brun wanted to make it known ‘que les peintres ont cet avantage et la science de traiter des choses divines par ce langage muet, et de figurer, par l’art du dessin et l’application des couleurs les plus mysterieux secrets de la religion que les plus doctes plumes peuvent mettre en lumière’ (‘that painters have this advantage and the knowledge to treat divine things by this mute language, and to figure, by the art of design and the application of colours, the most mysterious secrets of religion that the most learned pens could bring to light’).51 The term ‘mute theology’ evokes the apothegm, attributed to Simonides by Plutarch and frequently deployed in early-modern Europe, that painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture.52 This comparison and Horace’s equally popular simile, ‘ut pictura poesis’, expressed the belief that the sister arts, as Rensselaer Lee put it, ‘differed […] in means and manner of expression, but were considered almost identical in fundamental nature, in content, and in purpose’.53 Yet, by substituting ‘theology’ for ‘poetry’, Le Brun is staking a higher claim, that the painter rivals the theologian in plumbing sacred mysteries. But must we believe him? Does he even believe himself? Le Brun ultimately undermines his own remarkable claims. At the end of his lecture, he notes that in speaking of the spiritual part of painting, he did not intend it to be considered as a principal thing, nor that those who love painting should condemn works as bad just because this part seems to be missing. Rather, he posits the spiritual part as ‘l’eclat et le poli de l’or’ (‘the gleam and polish of the gold’), the icing on the cake, as it were. He concludes: Je veux dire que quand un tableau est bon en toutes ses principales parties, comme celui que je montre ici, s’il arrive que cette partie spirituelle s’y rencontre, alors elle donnera un grand éclat à tout l’ouvrage et le 50  Ibid. 51  Ibid. 376. On this advantage, see Somon, “The Ineffability of Incarnation” 154, who argues that ‘In the case of Le Brun’s Silence, painting succeeds in converting its fundamental handicap, its muteness, into an asset perfectly adapted to the “subject” of the painting: “the unspeakable mystery of the Incarnation” (Binet)’ (quoting Le Brun’s Jesuit patron, Étienne Binet). 52  Noted in ibid. 53  Lee, Ut pictura poesis 197; on this paragone, see also Barkan L., Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Princeton: 2013).

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rendra parfait, et que ceux qui travailleront de cette sorte imiteront ce grand homme; et ils s’acquerront comme lui par leurs travaux une gloire immortelle. I want to say that when a painting is good in all its principal parts, like the one I am showing here, if it happens that one encounters this spiritual part, then it will give a great brilliance to all the work and render it perfect, and that those who do work of this sort will imitate this great man; and, like him, they will acquire by their works an immortal glory.54 Nonetheless, painting as mute theology is an attractive concept (though Le Brun’s analysis of Poussin’s painting may not best explicate it), because that which it seeks to reveal, mystery, is itself without words – or at least without human words – and requires another vehicle for revelation. What are the limits of mute theology? Le Brun’s contemporary, Antoine Furetière, in his definition of mystere, asserts that it cannot be penetrated by human reason.55 Neither Poussin nor Le Brun would imagine a painting without reason. Even ‘speaking’ theologians may admit to not being able to ‘make known the most hidden mysteries of our religion’; their task may be only to restate our limited knowledge of the mysteries in different terms through various exegetical devices and to confirm their status as mysteries. Likewise, but appropriate to their medium, painters – mute theologians – may be tasked not so much with revealing mysteries, as Le Brun would have it, as with restating them in different, more pictorial and more affective, terms.56 Bibliography Bibliorum Sacrorum cum glossa ordinaria iam ante quidem a Strabo Fulgensi collecta: nunc autem novis, cum Graeorum, tum Latinorum patrum expositionibus locupletata: Annotatis etiam ijs, quae confuse antea citabantur, locis: et Postilla Nicolai Lyrani: 54  Mérot, Les Conférences 207. 55  Furetière, Dictionaire universel II, s.v., ‘Mystere’: ‘Chose cachée, secrette ou difficile à comprendre. Il se dit premierement des veritez revelées aux Chrestiens par la divine bonté, & dans l’intelligence desquels la raison humaine ne peut penetrer. Le mystere de la Trinité, de l’incarnation, de la Redemption, de l’Eucharistie. La foy consiste en la croyance des mysteres’. 56  Cf. Somon, “The Ineffability of Incarnation” 154: ‘Through the gesture of the Virgin, Le Brun’s Silence appears to evince with great specificity how the suggestive power of painting, in its muteness, differs from that of the word’.

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Additionibus Pauli Burgensis ad ipsum Lyranum: ac easdem Matthiae Toringi Replicis, 6 vols. (Venice, n.p.: 1603). Cojannot-Le Blanc M., À la recherche du rameau d’or: L’invention du Ravissement de saint Paul de Nicolas Poussin à Charles Le Brun (Paris: 2012). Dempsey C., “Poussin’s Ecstasy of Saint Paul: Charles Le Brun’s ‘over-interpretation’”, in Scott K. – Warwick G. (eds.), Commemorating Poussin: Reception and Interpretation of the Artist (Cambridge: 1999) 114–133. De Piles [Roger], Abregé de la vie des peintres, avec des réflexions sur leurs ouvrages, et un traité du peintre parfait; de la connoissance des desseins; de l’utilité des estampes, 2nd ed. (Paris, Chez Jacques Estienne: 1715). Lapide Cornelius a, Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram. Vol. 18. Divi Pauli Epistolarum (Paris: 1861). Lee R. W., Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York, 1967). Mérot A. (ed.), Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: 2003). Montagu J., “The Painted Enigma and French Seventeenth-Century Art”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968) 307–335. Nivelon Claude, Vie de Charles Le Brun et Description Détaillée des Ses Ouvrages, ed. L. Pericolo, École pratique des hautes études, Sciences historiques et philologiques V; Hautes études médiévales et modernes 86 (Geneva: 2004). Rosenberg P., “Le ravissement de saint Paul”, in Rosenberg P. – Prat L.-A. (eds.), Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665, exh. cat., Grand Palais (Paris: 1994) 434–436. Somon M., “The Ineffability of Incarnation in Le Brun’s Silence or Sleep of the Child”, in Melion W. S. – Wandel L. P. (eds.), Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 39 (Leiden: 2015) 137–157.

chapter 20

A Private Mystery: Looking at Philippe de Champaigne’s Annunciation for the Hôtel de Chavigny Mette Birkedal Bruun Mysteries elude immediate access. The core meaning of the Greek word μυστήριον (mystérion) is something that is hidden, and hence accessible only through some form of initiation or revelation.1 The key Christian mysteries concern the meeting between Heaven and Earth in the Incarnation and the soteriological grace wielded in Christ’s Passion and Resurrection as well as in the sacraments of the Church. Visual representations of the Christian mysteries strive to capture and convey what is hidden and to express the ineffable in a congruent way. Such representations are produced in historical contexts, and in their aspiration to represent motifs that transcend time and space and indeed embrace time and space, they are marked through and through by their own Sitz-im-Leben. Also, the viewers’ perceptions of such representations are embedded in a historical context. It is the key assumption of this chapter that early modern visual representations of mysteries are seen by human beings whose gaze and understanding are shaped by historical factors.2 We shall approach one such historical gaze. It belongs to a figure who navigated a particular space; who was born into a particular age and class; endowed with a particular set of experiences and aspirations; and informed by a particular devotional horizon. The figure whose gaze we shall approach is Léon Bouthillier, Comte de Chavigny (1608–1652). The mystery in focus is the Annunciation, and the visual representation is the Annunciation painted 1  See Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, “3466. mustérion” https://biblehub.com/str/greek/3466. htm (08.08.2018) and The Online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, “μυστήρι-ον” http:// stephanus.tlg.uci.edu.ep.fjernadgang.kb.dk/lsj/#eid=71742&context=lsj&action=from-search (08.08.2018). 2  The research presented in this chapter is associated with the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY), housed at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen (DNRF 138). I thank each of my PRIVACY colleagues for having inspired the insights presented here. I am particularly grateful to Lars Nørgaard. Thanks are due also to Anne Régent-Susini, Walter Melion, and Lee Palmer Wandel, as well as to the other participants of the conference Quid est sacramentum for stimulating questions. © METTE BIRKEDAL BRUUN, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004408944_021 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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around 1643 by Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674) for the count’s private chapel in the Hôtel de Chavigny, located in what is now the rue de Sévigné in the Marais. First, I sketch some historical contours. Chavigny’s political career is not central in this context, but we shall linger over his devotional profile. This profile is elusive, for archives are scattered,3 and sources are biased. The greatest methodological challenge is, however, how to evaluate critically issues to do with belief and sincerity, since, judging from contemporary assessments of the count’s faith or lack thereof, Chavigny spent his adult life as an unresolved convert. Positioning this dimly lit historical figure at the centre of our study, insistently reminds us that this specific Annunciation, if it is properly to be appreciated, must not be construed in black-and-white, and also encourages us to examine its particularities, situating it in relation to a particular building, a particular set of texts, and a particular human trajectory. On this basis, we shall try to determine how Chavigny was taught to view Champaigne’s picture, the gaze he brought to bear when looking at the encounter between Gabriel and Mary, in his private chapel in the Hôtel de Chavigny. 1

The Person

Typical of his age, class, and kin, the Comte de Chavigny strove to excel in politics and religion [Fig. 20.1]. Many contemporaries deemed him wanting in both respects, finding that his ambition wrecked his political career while worldly entanglement got in the way of true conversion. Chavigny was the only child of Marie de Bragelogne (1590–1673) and Claude Bouthillier (1581­­–1652), secretary of state and surintendant des finances.4 His birth into the Bouthillier clan came with links to Richelieu,5 the Queen Mother, and Gaston d’Orléans, 3  See Le Guillou Y., Les Bouthillier, de l’avocat au surintendant (ca 1540–1652): histoire d’une ascension sociale et formation d’une fortune, Thèse pour le diplôme d’archiviste paléographe (École nationale des chartes: 1997) 9–12. 4  From 1635, Léon Bouthillier was known as ‘Chavigny’ to distinguish him from his father. For the rumours that Chavigny was Richelieu’s offspring, see, e.g., Brienne L.-H. de Loménie, comte de, Mémoires inédits de Louis-Henri de Loménie, comte de Brienne, secrétaire d’état sous Louis XIV publiés sur les Manuscrits autographs, ed. F. Barrière, 2 vols. (Paris – Leipzig: 1828) I 278; and Le Guillou, Les Bouthillier 148–154. 5  Chavigny’s father and three uncles were Richelieu’s créatures; they consolidated their careers in the early 1620s in step with his ascent; see Ranum O., Richelieu and the Councillors of Louis XIII: A Study of the Secretaries of State and Superin­tendents of Finance in the Ministry of Richelieu 1635–1642 (Oxford: 1963) 28; and Mousnier R., Les Institutions de France sous la monarchie absolue, 1598–1789, 2 vols. (Paris: 1974–1980) II 150–151. The First Minister relied on

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Robert Nanteuil, Léon Bouthillier, comte de Chavigny, ca. 1651. Engraving, sheet: 31.6 × 24.8 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Georgiana W. Sargent, in memory of John Osborne Sargent, 1924

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with connections to the Oratorians and to Port-Royal,6 as well as to circles graced by diplomats, clergy, and cultural icons.7 Chavigny was a member of the Queen Mother’s council (from 1629) and secrétaire d’état, with responsibility for foreign affairs (from 1632).8 With Richelieu’s assistance, he became Gaston d’Orléans’s counsellor in 1634 and his chancellor in 1635,9 and in 1638 he took up the position of governor of Vincennes. Chavigny was a member of the regency council that Louis XIII (1601–1643) constituted in his will to assist Anne d’Autriche (1601–1666) in ruling for her infant son. When the king died in May 1643, however, Mazarin overturned the plan, and through the last decade of Chavigny’s life, his career suffered from ongoing feuds with the Cardinal and an oscillation between favour in Paris and exile to his rural estates, culminating in a wavering course during the Fronde.10 Condé’s ensuing accusations of treason – and a harsh diet – al­legedly took their toll to such an extent that Chavigny died at the age of forty-four.11

Claude for information about the king, on Denis (1585–1650), the Queen Mother’s secretary, for information about her, and on Victor (1596–1670), archbishop of Tours, for information about the clergy. The relationship between Richelieu and Chavigny harked back to his paternal grandfather, Denis Bouthillier, who had been a clerk of Richelieu’s maternal grandfather. After his father’s death in 1590, Richelieu was raised in Denis Bouthillier’s home and treated like one of his children. On Chavigny’s aunts and uncles, see Ranum, Richelieu and the Councillors 32–33; and Le Guillou, Les Bouthillier 128. 6  Goldmann uses the family as a key case for the widely contested hypothesis that the noblesse de robe were the backbone of Jan­senism; see Goldmann L., Le Dieu caché: étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Ra­cine (Paris: 1959; reprint ed., 1975) 124–128. 7  Lesaulnier J., “Chavigny, Léon Bouthillier, comte de”, in Lesaulnier J. – McKenna A. (eds.), Dictionnaire de Port-Royal (Paris: 2004) 256–258; and Mayer D., “Madame du PlessisGuénégaud, née Elisabeth de Choiseul (1610–1677) I–II”, XVIIe siècle 155 (1987) 173–186; 156 (1987) 313–327. 8  Le Guillou, Les Bouthillier 141. On Chavigny’s career, see ibid. 156–157; Lesaulnier, “Chavigny” 256–258; and Josse A.-C., “Introduction”, in Josse A.-C. (ed.), Lettres d’Antoine Singlin (Paris: 2004) 9–145, esp. 92–95. 9  See Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de, Mémoires, ed. Y. Coirault, 8 vols. (Paris: 1983–1988) I 70. On the relationship between Chavigny and Gaston, see Scott P., Le Gouvernement présent, ou éloge de son Eminence, satyre ou la Miliade (London: 2010) 141; and Ranum, Richelieu and the Councillors 85–87. 10  Lesaulner, “Chavigny” 258. For a contemporary and biased account of this process, see Retz Jean-François Paul de, Cardinal de Gondi, Les Contre temps du Sieur de Chavigny, premier ministre de M. le Prince (n.p.: 1652). 11  Motteville F. B. de, Mémoires de Mme de Motteville, nouvelle édi­tion, ed. M. F. Rieaux, 4 vols. (Paris: 1896) IV 31‒32; Rapin R., Mémoires du P. René Rapin de la compagnie de Jésus sur l’église, la ville et le jansénisme, ed. L. Aubineau, 3 vols. (Paris: 1865) I 466–470; and Hermant G., Mémoires (1630–1663), ed. A. Gazier, 6 vols. (Paris: 1905–1910) I 670–697.

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Chavigny’s religious horizon was shaped by his familial background. His father had bonds to Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran (1581– 1643),12 and cultivated connections with Robert Ar­nauld d’Andilly (1589–1674), whose mem­oirs attest to their friendship,13 and whose letters refer with warmth to the beauty of Claude Bouthillier’s estate at Pont-sur-Seine and the repose that D’Andilly hopes to enjoy there.14 D’Andilly also praises Chavigny’s mother for her constant affection,15 but indications regarding Marie de Bragelogne’s religious piety date above all from after Chavigny’s death, and her possible devotional influence on her son is not easily determined.16 Most important in our context is Chavigny’s uncle Sébastien Bouthillier (ca. 1580–1625), bishop of Aire and close friend of Saint-Cyran.17 On his deathbed, Sébastien asked SaintCyran to supervise his seventeen-year-old nephew, and two years later, the year of Chavigny’s marriage to Anne Phélypeaux (1613–1694),18 Saint-Cyran’s instructions appeared as Le cœur nouveau, a treatise on conversion with the subtitle “Exercice pour une personne engagée dans le monde, & dans le mariage, nouvellement convertie à Dieu” (“Exercise for someone engaged in the On Chavigny’s strict diet, maintained in order to stay slender, see, among other sources, Brienne, Mémoires inédits 422, describing his emaciated appearance. 12  Orcibal J., Les Origines du Jansénisme, vol. 2: Jean Duvergier de Hauranne: Abbé de SaintCyran et son Temps (Louvain – Paris: 1947) 380. 13  See D’Andilly R. A., Mémoires, suivis de Antoine Arnauld, dit l’abbé Arnauld: Mémoires, ed. R. Pouzet (Paris: 2008) 255. 14  Letter of 28 September 1642 from D’Andilly to Claude Bouthillier; see Lettre 232 in Lettres de Monsievr Arnavld d’Andilly (Paris, La veuve Jean Camusat – Pierre le Petit: 1645) 386– 387, esp. 387. 15  D’Andilly, Mémoires, 256; on this friendship, see also Rancé A.-J. Bouthillier de, Corre­ spondance, ed. A.-J. Krailsheimer, 4 vols. (Paris – Cîteaux: 1993) I 125. 16  D’Andilly sent to Marie Bragelogne the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth Lettres provinciales by Pascal on 7 December 1656, and the sixteenth on 23 December 1656; cf. D’Andilly R. A., Arnauld d’Andilly Défenseur de Port-Royal (1654–1659): sa correspondence inédite avec la Cour, ed. P. Jansen (Paris: 1973) 113–114. See also D’Andilly, Mémoires 256, note 1. In Pascal’s sixteenth provincial letter, Mme Bouthillier could read about the turmoil following her son’s death (see below); see Pascal B., Les Provinciales, ed. L. Cognet (Paris: 1965) 299. Chavigny’s mother seems to have offered religious inspiration to her husband’s nephew, the Trappist reformer Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) during his conversion; see, among other sources, Rancé’s letters written from Pont-sur-Seine to D’Andilly on 16 June 1659 and to Louise Rogier on 1 June 1660; Rancé, Correspondance I 124–125 and 149–150. Rancé credits Marie Bragelogne with having introduced him to D’Andilly; see his letter of 19 June 1673 to D’Andilly; Rancé, Correspondance I 561. 17  On this friendship, see Lancelot Claude, Mémoires touchant la vie de Monsieur de S. Cyran, 2 vols. (Cologne, La Compagnie: 1738) I 281–282 and II 267; and D’Andilly, Mémoires 213– 214. See also Orcibal J., Saint-Cyran et le jansénisme (Paris: 1961) 9–10; and Orcibal, Les Origines II 223–227, 381, 643. 18  Le Guillou, Les Bouthillier 282–288.

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world and in marriage, recently converted to God”).19 A decade later, in 1638, the two men found themselves on opposite sides, with Saint-Cyran imprisoned at the Château de Vincennes, in Chavigny’s charge.20 In an attempt to ameliorate Saint-Cyran’s difficult situation, Chavigny urged him to recant in writing on a number of controversial issues, including his conviction that contrition, and not merely attrition, is necessary for salvation.21 According to Hermant, the recantation, which Saint-Cyran afterwards regretted,22 was fruitless at the time, but eventually led to Saint-Cyran’s release.23 After a brief period under the spiritual guidance of Charles de Condren (1588–1641), the second superior of the Oratory and confessor of Gaston d’Orléans,24 Chavigny turned to Saint-Cyran’s successor as director at Port-Royal, Antoine Singlin (1607–1664), and in his memoirs, René Rapin counts Chavigny among ‘les importans du party’, the key friends of Port-Royal, who sat beneath Singlin’s pulpit: a group including prominent converts such as Louis Charles d’Albert, Duc de Luynes (1620–1690),25 Anne de Rohan-Guéméné (1606–1685),26 Roger du Plessis, Duc

19  Lancelot, Mémoires I 183. See also Josse, “Introduction” 93; Lesaulnier, “Chavigny” 258; and Orcibal, Les Origines II 381. Le cœur nouveau was printed in the Théologie familière (1637) and was curricular reading for the convent school at Port-Royal; cf. Pascal J., Règlement pour les enfants, in Blaise Pas­cal: Œuvres complètes, ed. J. Mesnard, 4 vols. (Paris: 1991) II 1155. Several versions appeared in 1643–1644, disseminating Saint-Cyran’s instructions to a broader public; see Orcibal, Les Origines II 141. 20  It is difficult to assess the degree of personal contact up until then. Hermant, for one, is not aware of any close connection; see Hermant, Mé­moires I 110. 21  Lancelot, Mémoires I 178–186; and Hermant, Mémoires I 110–114. Orcibal dates the meeting 23 or 24 August 1641; see Orcibal J., Les Origines du Jansénisme, vol. 3: Jean Duvergier de Hauranne: Abbé de Saint-Cyran et son Temps: Appendices, bibliographie et tables (Paris: 1948) 223. 22  Hermant, Mémoires II 297. 23  Hermant, Mémoires I 189; and Lancelot, Mémoires I 209–210. See also Mère Angélique’s recognition of Chavigny’s role in Saint-Cyran’s release in her letter of October 1652 to Le Maistre; see Arnauld Angélique, Lettres de la Reverend Mere Marie Angelique Arnauld: abbesse et reformatrice, 3 vols. (Utrecht, Aux Depens de la Compagnie: 1742–1744) II 192 (Letter 482). 24  Lesaulnier, “Chavigny” 258. 25  Quantin J.-L., “Port-Royal et la haute noblesse: sur le cas du duc de Luynes (1620–1690)”, in Grell C. – Ramière de Fortanier A. (eds.), Le second ordre: I’idéal nobiliaire. Hommage à Ellery Schalk (Paris: 1999) 109–131, esp. 116–129. See also Quantin J.-L., “Augustinisme, sexualité et direction de conscience: Port-Royal devant les tentations du duc de Luynes”, Revue de l’histoire des religions 220.2 (2003) 167–207. 26  Orcibal J., Les Origines du Jansénisme, vol. 5: La spiritualité de Saint-Cyran (Paris: 1962) 275; and Hillman J., Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France (Abingdon: 2014) 57.

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de Liancourt (1609–1674), and Jeanne de Schomberg, Duchesse de Liancourt (1600–1674),27 as well as Guillaume Du Gué de Bagnols (1616–1657).28 Contemporary observers describe Chavigny’s devotional trajectory as fluctuating. In his pamphlet on the count’s political failure, Cardinal Retz (1613– 1679) remarks that people hoped in vain that the count’s association with Port-Royal might soften his proud and wild spirit;29 and Rapin adds in his memoirs that Chavigny’s zeal for the doctrine of Port-Royal was soon devoured by his colossal ambition.30 Only Jean-Jacques Olier (1608–1657), in a description of Condren’s charisma, avows that the count underwent conversion at the Oratorian’s deathbed in 1641, and from that day was a ‘modèle de piété à la cour’ (‘a model of piety at court’).31 However, in Mère Angélique Arnauld’s view, the count converted only as he himself lay dying,32 and most observers seem to agree that up until that point Chavigny intermittently strove to be a dévot. A few hints of this striving stand out. The first is an enthusiastic and admiring letter sent from the nineteen-year old count to Saint-Cyran on 21 August 1627, the year of the publication of Le cœur nouveau. Chavigny envisages how the

27  Boileau Jean-Jacques, “Avertissement”, in Liancourt Jeanne de Schomberg, duchesse de, Reglement donné par une dame de haute qualité a M*** sa petite-fille Pour sa Conduite, & pour celle de sa Maison, avec un autre Reglement que cette Dame avoit dressé pour ellemesme (Paris, Augustin Leguerrier: 1698) 1–101. 28  Rapin, Mémoires I 332. On Bagnols, see Neveu B., “Un ami de Port-Royal: Guillaume Du Gué de Bagnols (1616–1657)”, Chroniques de Port-Royal 15–16 (1966) 45–92. On the converts drawn to Singlin, see also Fontaine Nicolas, Mémoires pour server a l’histoire de Port-Royal, 2 vols. (Utrecht, Aux dépens de la Compagnie: 1736) II 74–84 and Le Maistre Antoine, “Memoire de M. le Maitre touchant les personnes que Dieu auoit touchées d’un sentiment de pénitence & qui s’étoient retirées en divers tems dans l’ancienne Abbaye de PortRoyal des champs”, in Fontaine Nicolas, Mémoires pour server a l’histoire de Port-Royal, 2 vols. (Utrecht, Aux dépens de la Compagnie: 1736) I i–x. For other examples, see Josse, “Introduction” 69–76; see also Hillman, Female Piety 37–42. On Singlin’s preaching, see the letters from Mère Angélique to Marie Louise Gonzaga of 4 July 1647 and 20 March 1648; Lettres I 337 and 363 (Letters 204 and 216). See also Josse, “Introduction” 81–85. 29  Retz, Les Contre temps 6. 30  Rapin, Mémoires I 439–441 (439). 31  Olier reports that Chavigny, one of the greats at Court, suddenly burst into tears and out of a true heart renounced the world and made a public profession of henceforth belonging to God. See Faillon E.-M. (ed.), Vie de M. Olier, fondateur du séminaire de S. Sulpice, 2 vols. (Paris: 1853) I 355. Lesaulnier takes Olier’s statement at face value, giving 1641 as Chavigny’s year of conversion; see Lesaulnier, “Chavigny” 257. 32  See Mère Angélique’s letter to Le Maistre, of 11 October 1652, in Lettres II 195 (Letter 485): ‘S’il se trouve de vraies conversions à la mort, comme il n’en faut pas douter, la sienne en sera une.’ (‘If there is such a thing as true deathbed conversions, of which we can have no doubt, his was one.’).

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director’s vow to Sébastian Bouthillier obliges him to desire the young man’s conversion, and he assures him of his own commitment to this endeavour, Ie me console dans la promesse que vous m’auez faite de nous venir voir à Ville-,33 en vous attendant auec vne tres-grande impatience […]. Ie me prepare tous les iours à receuoir vos bonnes instructions, & à vous faire gaigner en vn iour, ce que vous auez poursuiuy trois ans durant.34 […] Ie vous coniure donc par luy35 de me tenir parole, & de me faire tousiours la faueur de m’aimer; i’esséray de la meriter, en recherchant les occasions de vous tesmoigner que ie suis, & seray toute ma vie, Monsievr, Vostre treshumble, & tres-obligé seruiteur, L.B.36 Awaiting you with great impatience, I take comfort in the promise that you have made to come and see us at Ville-. […] I prepare myself each day to receive your good instruction and to make you achieve in one day what you have pursued for three years. […] I thus implore you through him, to keep your word and always do me the favour of loving me; I shall strive to merit it, seeking occasions to show you that I am, and shall be for the rest of my life, Monsieur, your most humble and most faithful servant, L.B. Grand-siècle conversions were ideally grad­ual, sometimes even hesitant, and sudden conversions such as Saint Paul’s were considered miracles rather than models.37 Saint-Cyran himself described the ideal conversion as gradual and laborious,38 and we can only begin to imagine how the spiritual director reacted to Chavigny’s eager wish for a swift effect. 33  That is, Villesavin, the castle of Chavigny’s father-in-law, Jean Phélypeaux; see Orcibal, Les Origines vol. III, 211. 34  Sébastien Bouthillier died on 17 January 1625; see Orcibal, Les Origines vol. III, 207. 35  That is, Sébastien Bouthillier. 36  Extract of letter from Chavigny to Saint-Cyran of 21 August 1627. The extract is printed in Pinthereau François, Le Progrez dv Ianssenisme descovvert, a Monseignevr le Chancelier par le sievr de Preville (Avignon, Pierre Thomas: 1655) 104. The letter is identified in Orcibal, Les Origines III 160, where the page is, however, given as ‘14’. 37  Quantin J.-L., Le rigorisme chrétien (Paris: 2001) 26. On Paul’s conversion, see below. 38  As heirs to Saint-Cyran’s model, the directors of Port-Royal would encourage conversions based on prolonged reflection and mature decision. For two examples of a gradual conversion related to Port-Royal, see the later account of the conversion of Antoine Le Maistre (1608–1658), the first solitary of Port-Royal, and of his younger brother Simon Le Maistre de Séricourt (1611–1650), and its physical manifestation in a retreat still further into la solitude, in Anon., Histoire de l’origine des penitens et solitaires de Port-Royal des champs (Mons, Migeot le fils: 1733) 2–5. Cf. Jean-Jacques Boileau’s account of the Duc de Liancourt, whose circuitous conversion was closely supervised by his wife; among other

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Some twenty years later, the count arrived at the gates of Port-Royal, on 9 March 1648,39 together with the Duc de Liancourt and Singlin. The two courtiers came incognito, tearfully declaring that they wanted to withdraw from court and do penitence, and offering a substantial sum for the construction of a walled modest lodging adjacent to the Granges of Port-Royal de Champs. The offer was refused, and the two men left, allegedly much edified.40 Sincere tears were the sign of a penitential spirit, and Antoine Le Maistre, who reports the incident, seems content that the count’s tears on this occasion were indeed genuine.41 Two years later, in the autumn or early winter of 1650,42 we find Chavigny planning a religious retreat to a house in Saint-Jean des Troux owned by a friend of Port-Royal, Gué de Bagnols, which, Singlin assures him, is ‘un vrai lieu de retraite’ (‘a veritable place of retreat’).43 Singlin conveys Bagnols’s happiness at being able to assist Chavigny ‘au dessin que vous avez de server Dieu’ (‘in your design to serve God’); offers to come and see him during his stay; and reports that all the brothers pray for Chavigny.44

means, she deployed horticulture and refined company at the Château de Liancourt, to draw the duke away from court; see Boileau, “Avertissement” 8–27. See also Neveu B., Sébastien-Joseph du Cambout de Pontchâteau (Paris: 1969) 15, and, for a description of the time, discipline, étapes, and efforts required to prepare the heart and soul for re­treat, Beugnot B., “Loisir, retraite, solitude”, in Fumaroli M. – Salazar P.-J. – Bury E. (eds.), Le loisir lettré à l’âge classique (Geneva: 1996) 173–195, esp. 180. See also Singlin’s list of the rules by which a soul’s true conversion is judged, and of the stages at which conversion is threatened; Singlin Antoine, “Pour le Jour des Rois: Troisième instruction”, in Instructions chrestiennes sur les mysteres de Nostre Seigneur Jésus-Christ et sur les principales festes de l’année, 5 vols. (Paris, A. Pralard: 1692) I 287–297 (290–292). 39  Lesaulnier dates this event 1649; see “Chavigny” 258. Sainte-Beuve dates it 1647; see SainteBeuve C.-A., Port-Royal, 5 vols. (Paris: 1840–1859) II 256. 40  Le Maistre, “Memoire” V. 41  On the role of tears in the discretio spirituum, the examination of one’s inner condition, including the sincerity of conversion, see McCor­mack J. W., “Discerning Tears in Early Modern Catholicism”, in Aydelotte L. (ed.), A Mirror for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Chicago: 2010) 49–59. 42  Singlin says that they can meet, but not on Christmas, when he is preaching at Port-Royal; see Singlin’s letter to Chavigny of 1 September 1650, in Singlin A., Lettres d’Antoine Singlin, ed. A.-C. Josse (Paris: 2004) 322 (Letter 77). 43  See Singlin’s letter to Chavigny of 1 September 1650, in ibid. 322 (Letter 77). On Bagnols, who was quite the model convert compared to Chavigny, see Neveu, “Un ami” 45–92. 44  Singlin’s letter to Chavigny of 1 September 1650, in Singlin, Lettres 322 (Letter 77). While supportive, the timbre of Singlin’s three extant letters to Chavigny is very different from, e.g., his instruction to Gué de Bagnols not to worry about his devotional sterility and susceptibility to distraction, but simply to avoid the world as much as he can; see Singlin’s letter to Gué de Bagnols of 26 May 1651, in ibid. 339 (Letter 86).

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Grand-siècle observers queried devotional motives with keen suspicion. Chavigny was one of the figures whose possible conversion was scrutinized by the penetrating gaze of specialists. The Recueil d’Utrecht features an undated letter from Le Maistre to D’Andilly in which the count serves comparatively as a prototype of superficiality. The letter concerns the alleged conversion of an anonymous common friend, and Le Maistre is not convinced. He has heard such Christian words before in Chavigny, but they turned out to be nothing but sterile and fruitless phrases, and thus he fears, ‘Peut-être que ce cher ami, comme M. de Chavigny, n’aura pas été huit jours à la Cour caressé & favorisé des Majestés & de l’Eminence, qu’il se trouvera tout tel qu’il étoit avant son affaire’45 (‘Perhaps, like M. de Chavigny, our dear friend shall not have spent eight days at court, pampered and favoured by their Majesties and his Eminence, before he finds himself to be exactly what he was before this affair’). Mère Angélique seems to say the same, albeit in a more benevolent way, when she remarks that during the last four years of his life, Chavigny was often touched by God and incited to convert, and thus had begun to see Singlin ‘avec de grands mouvemens de penitence’ (‘with great inner stirrings of penitence’), but that he was ever involved in worldly intrigues. The abbess recounts that when God finally let him fall into a fever,46 Chavigny called for Singlin and confessed his sins ‘avec tous les sentimens de vraie pieté’ (‘all the sentiments pertaining to true piety’). An intense dialogue developed between Singlin and the medical doctors who did not deem the illness fatal and thus saw no need to give the count the Sacrament, and in this deplorable state, Chavigny lost consciousness and died soon after.47 Two months later Mère Angélique has more details to offer, and in a letter to the Polish queen conjures up a vivid portrait of the dying Chavigny scrambling to gather money for Singlin: 900,000 livres worth of bills of exchange from his cabinet and 300,000 livres in pistols from a casket in his chamber.48 Chavigny’s ultimate donation aimed to signal 45  Undated letter from Le Maistre to D’Andilly, in Recueil de plusieurs pieces pour servir a l’histoire de Port-Royal (Utrecht, Aux Dépens de la Compagnie: 1740) 203–206, esp. 203– 204. See also the account of Singlin’s suspicion vis-à-vis the advocate Nicolas Richer and his wife; Fontaine, Mémoires II 78–80. 46  Illness, be that of the convert in spe or the spouse, is a recurrent motif in conversion accounts; see, e.g., the description of Nicolas Richer’s conversion in ibid. II 74–84, and that of Liancourt’s in Boileau, “Avertissement” 8–27. 47  See Angélique Arnauld’s letter to the Queen of Poland of 18 October 1652, in Lettres II 200–202 (Letter 489). 48  See Angélique Arnauld’s letter to the Queen of Poland of 19 December 1652, in ibid. II 238 (Letter 507). Chavigny’s wife did not know about these transactions, and since Chavigny had not signed the papers, his deathbed donation was followed by two months of deliberations, involving clergy, doctors from the Sorbonne, and friends of the widow. Eventually

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world-renunciation.49 In Le cœur nouveau, Saint-Cyran had taught him that just like marriage and other worldly involvements, wealth ties human beings to the world.50 From Singlin’s pulpit Chavigny might have heard the perils of wealth described in expositions of the general idea that the poor are an opportunity for the rich to demonstrate their love of God.51 If Chavigny was not entirely confident that he had managed to live as a spiritual pauper, he could at least divest himself of worldly riches as death drew near. Summing up Chavigny’s devotional profile, Lancelot informs us that the count wanted God de le rendre également utile & à l’Etat & à l’Eglise: ce qu’il savoit bien ne se pouvoir faire qu’en le portant à travailler sérieusement à son salut; & the bulk of the money was returned to Mme de Chavigny. See Hermant, Mémoires I 670–697; Lesaulnier, “Chavigny” 258; and Josse, “Introduction” 102–107. Josse shows that Chavigny initiated this transaction in 1648; see ibid. 104; see also Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal II 552–569. 49  It is a hagiographic topos that world-renunciation is inspired by Mt 19:21: ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me’. See, for example, Athanasius’s Vita Antonii chapter 2. Anthony’s example was available to Chavigny in Arnauld d’Andilly’s translation, Les vies des saints pères des déserts (Paris, la veuve Jean Camusat and Pierre le Petit: 1647). On this influential work, see Bruun M. B., “A Solitude of Permeable Boundaries: The Abbey of La Trappe between Isolation and Engagement”, in Göttler C. – Enenkel K. (eds.), Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Intersections 56 (Leiden: 2018) 451–479, esp. 453­–455. As one step in his conversion, in 1642, the Duc de Liancourt made a promise to sell paintings from his collection, valued at 50,000 écus, and give the money to the poor if God would preserve his sick wife; Boileau comments that this was ‘un vœu […] de soumission’ (‘a vow of submission’); see Boileau, “Avertissement” 25–26, esp. 26. Liancourt and Chavigny’s contrite appearance at PortRoyal in 1647 was likewise accompanied by pecuniary gifts; see Le Maistre, “Memoire” V. In his will of 1647, Palus bequeathed to the brothers Séricourt and Le Maistre his furniture, silver, and books. Singlin pressed Palus had made his will, in order to ensure that his heirs would not bother Port-Royal and knowing that the legacy would be sold and given to the poor; see Le Maistre, “Memoire” IX–X. Chavigny was less sagacious. Bible quotations in English are given according to the New Revised Standard Version. 50   Saint-Cyran Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de, Le coeur nouveau, ov exercice pour une personne engagée dans le monde, & dans le mariage, nouvellement convertie à Dieu, in Theologie familiere avec divers autres petits traitez de Devotion (Paris, la Veuve Jean Le Myre: 1643 ; reprint ed., 1669) 109–128, esp. 128. 51  Almsgiving is a response to Mt 19:21 (see above), but also to Mt 25:35–40, and specifically to Jesus’s statement that he is present in the poor and the needy: ‘for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me […]. Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’. On alms, see Singlin, “Instruction pour le Jour de Noel. Premiere instruction”, in Instructions chrestiennes I 144–153, esp. 147–149.

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c’est ce qui lui faisoit continuellement demander à Dieu sa conversion. Cependant nous avons vu en lui combien il est dangereux d’être dans les grands engagements du siecle; car il ne put jamais executer les bons mouvements que Dieu lui donnoit de tems en tems, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin étant surpris de maladie il mourut en 1651 [sic].52 to make him equally useful to the State and to the Church. This he knew well to be impossible without serious work on his salvation, which is why he continuously pleaded God for his conversion. However, we have seen in him how dangerous it is to be involved in grand worldly engagements, for he could never fully execute the good movements that God instilled in him from time to time, until he died surprised by illness in 1651. While Lancelot’s memoir rehearses the topos that politics and religion are incompatible, in his funeral oration, the Oratorian Jean-Baptiste Noulleau (1604–1672) casts Chavigny as the pious statesman par excellence.53 The preacher presents the count as an embodiment of the qualities typical of the perfect statesman54 and as a victim of political misfortune, who heralds a new form of martyrdom, the ‘Martyre de l’Estat’.55 Most important in our context is Noulleau’s description of Chavigny’s piety, exercised despite multiple traps, as he recalls how Ce Comte parmy les plus grandes delices […] de la Cour de France, est vn homme de Penitence, vn homme d’austerité! parmy l’abondãce de tant de bien, est vn homme de ieusne! & pour les mieux pratiquer hors du monde; […]; vn homme de retraitte!56 amidst the greatest pleasures […] of the court of France, this count is a man of penitence, a man of austerity! Amidst this abundance of delights he is a man of fasting! And, in order that he might better practice these [inclinations] away from the world […], a man of retreat! 52  Lancelot, Mémoires I 183. 53  Noulleau Jean-Baptiste, Le grand Homme d’Estat selon toutes les maximes de la politique chrétienne, la seule vraie politique du monde (Rennes, J. Durand: 1653) 5–6. The funeral oration was delivered in the cathedral of Saint-Brieuc; Chavigny’s cousin, Denis de La Barde, bishop of Saint-Brieuc (1600­–1675) was the celebrant. 54  Ibid. 14–15. Chavigny is thus described as the opposite of irreligious politicians, ‘tous les vrays Machiauellistes’ (‘all the veritable Machiavellists’). 55  Ibid. 30. 56  Ibid. 16.

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With such a character, Chavigny from time to time needed to breathe the air of a purer devotion, and therefore sought the cloister. Noulleau’s mention of the count’s retreat with Carthusians and Capuchins introduces an account of Chavigny’s self-annihilating piety during his occasional retreats, and he describes the monastic cell as a sacred furnace where the count was gradually consumed by saintly love; it is compared to a pyre where this divine Phoenix each day died to himself and to the world and all its vanities in order daily to be recreated for the glory of God and Jesus Christ.57 From his retreat, Chavigny emerged like another Moses, offering to the world his example as a law to be followed.58 In order that he might teach by example, Providence impelled the disgraced Chavigny to engage in a new series of retreats at his houses in Champagne and the Tourraine. These retreats were were imposed on him by the spirit of God according to ‘nostre saincte Escole; l’Escole du Crucifié’59 (‘our saintly School, the School of the Crucified’). Noulleau thus deftly turns Chavigny’s fall from grace into a God-given estrangement from the world and into a persecution endured with Christ-like humility, and he identifies his exiles to the Château de Pont and the Château de Chavigny as eminent solitudes in the count’s devotional universe.60 While there is no doubt that the Oratorian deploys the hyperbole inherent to the genre, it is unlikely that he diverges radically from the truth.61 The funeral oration thus confirms the impression of Chavigny as a figure who engaged in some degree of religious practice, had some penchant for retreat, and from time to time embraced the discipline of penance, but whose devotional commitment was less staunch than that of the more fervent supporters of Port-Royal. 2

The Place

As Noulleau indicates, like many of his peers, Chavigny navigated a composite religious topography. The count was attached to his Parisian parish church,

57  On the idea that complete devotional absorption is a holocaust, an annihilation, see Belin C., La conversation intérieure: la méditation en France au xviie siècle (Paris: 2002) 99­–111. 58  Noulleau, Le grand homme d’estat 16. 59  Ibid. 22. 60  For the topos of solitude in grand-siècle devotion, see Bruun, “A Solitude” 451–455. 61  I owe this insight to Anne Régent-Susini’s expertise on seventeenth-century funeral orations; see her forthcoming monograph Le Marbre et la Cendre. L’oraison funèbre (1643–1715).

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Saint Paul,62 and to the parish priest, Nicolas Mazure.63 He was affiliated with religious institutions such as Port-Royal, the Capuchins of Pont-sur-Seine, and the Carthusians of Paris.64 To this topography, the spaces reserved for prayer and worship at the family castles also belong, and with his new chapel in Hôtel de Chavigny, the count added an important locus to this topography. Chavigny bought the Hôtel de Saint Paul in 1635.65 After some alterations in 1639, he began a more extensive renovation in 1642–1643, supervised by François Mansart (1598–1666),66 which was still incomplete when he died in 1652.67 People of the count’s rank had chapels in their homes,68 and the masonry contract refers to a chapel that is to be built in ‘ung residue de bastiment joignant la gallerye’ (‘an appendage to the building, adjoining the gallery’), adding that a special design will be supplied for this work. We lack this drawing, and the size and situation of the chapel are unclear, but the contract seems to indicate that 62  At least two of his daughters were baptised there; see “Gazette de Paris 5 April 1536”, in Renaudot Théophraste, Recveil de tovtes les novvelles Ordinaires, Extraordinaires, Gazettes & autres Relations (Paris, Au Bureau d’Adresse: 1637) 220. Chavigny donated money to the chapel of St Jacques at Saint Paul, in March 1640; see AN L/697, fol. 11. 63  Hermant underscores the fact that at his deathbed Chavigny asked for Mazure’s consent to confess to Singlin; see Hermant, Mémoires I 670–671. This remark speaks to Mazure’s conviction that confessions should be made to the parish priest; see his L’obligation des fidelles de se confesser à leur curé suiuant le chap. 21 du concil general de Latran IV. (1653), which includes an attack against Jesuit confessors. Mazure was a supporter of Port-Royal; see Rapin, Mémoires I 130 and 112–113. 64  Noulleau says that Chavigny built a house adjacent to the convent of Pont-sur-Seine and had a cell in the Carthusian house of Paris; see Noulleau, Le grand homme d’estat 16. Rapin informs us that Chavigny attended conferences held by the Carthusian Dom Carrouge that were also frequented by friends of Port-Royal and were sites of political intrigue; see Rapin, Mémoires I 439. It is unclear whether the Carthusian cell mentioned by Rapin and Noulleau respectively is one and the same, and if so, which account is more accurate. 65  In 1641, he bought a neighbouring plot of land, which enabled an extension of the palace; see Le Guillou, Les Bouthillier 242. 66  Braham A. – Smith P., “François Mansart’s work at the Hôtel de Chavigny”, Gazette des Beaux Arts 66.2 (1965) 317–330, esp. 317, 320; and Braham A. – Smith P., François Mansart, 2 vols. (London: 1973) I 215–219, II 306–315. For the contracts, see Louis P.-Y. (ed.), François Mansart: les bâtiments: Marchés de travaux (1623–1665) (Paris: 1998) 215–235. On the history of the site, see Sellier C., “La caserne Sévigné”, Procès-verbaux / Commission municipale du Vieux Paris, 30 May (1901) 80–86. 67   Braham – Smith, “François Mansart’s work” 318. 68  Mérot A., Retraites mondaines: Aspects de la décoration intérieure à Paris, au xviie siècle (Paris: 1990); Gady A., Les hôtels particuliers de Paris: du Moyen âge à la Belle époque (Paris: 2008) 82–83. For antecedents, see Webb D., “Domestic Space and Devotion in the Middle Ages”, in Hamilton S. – Spicer A. (eds.), Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Farnham: 2006) 27–47.

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it was to be positioned on the second floor.69 As part of the general expansion, Chavigny commissioned Philippe de Champaigne to paint an Annunciation for the chapel.70 The religious space added to Hôtel de Chavigny had equivocal connotations. In Chavigny’s world, private chapels were deemed privileged sites of devotional prolificacy and ambiguous spaces that required careful regulation. The terminology applied to such sites was pliable. The formal term chapelle domestique is used interchangeably with chapelle particulière71 and chapelle privée,72 while oratoire covers a broader range of locations, from chapel to chamber, and thus also a wider array of devotional practices, from Mass to prayer.73 Devotional texts esteem private chapels. They teach believers to seek God in solitude, and describe private oratories and chapels as key loci of a form of devotion which is different from, yet on a continuum with, the liturgy of the Church.74 Jean Suffren (1571–1641), the Jesuit confessor of Marie de Medici, is confident that the private oratory is a site of prolific meditation. He even uses the space itself as a meditative vehicle for the compositio loci, advising that during Advent the devout reader consecrate ‘vostre Oratoire, ou vostre chambre’ to a meditation on the Incarnate Word in the Virgin’s womb; ‘comme si c’estoit la chambre ou l’Oratoire de la Vierge enceinte, & pleine de Dieu en Nazareth’ (‘as if it had been the chamber or the oratory of the Virgin, pregnant 69   Braham – Smith, “François Mansart’s work” 328, states that the position of the chapel is unknown; Louis, François Mansart 220 refers to renovations done ‘au second estage’, and to the chapel ‘qui sera attenant audict estage’ (‘which will be connected to this floor’). While common, a second-floor position is by no means standard; for example, the chapel at the Château de Pont was situated on the first floor, while the chapel that Mansart designed for the Hôtel de Nevers (1648­–1652) was on the ground floor; see Mignot C., “Le château de Pont en Champagne, la ‘maison aux champs’ de Claude Bouthillier, surintendant des finances de Louis XIII”, Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot 84 (2005) 173­–212, esp. 185; and Braham – Smith, François Mansart I 240. 70  Saint Georges Guillet de, Mémoires inédits sur la vie et les ouvrages des membres de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, eds. L. Dussieux – E. Soulié – Ph. De Chennevières – P. Mantz – A. de Montaiglon, 2 vols. (Paris: 1854) I 241–242. 71  See, for example, Arnauld Henri, Statuts du diocese d’Angers (Angers, Olivier Avril: 1680) 674. 72  See, for example, Antoine Godeau, Ordonnances et instructions synodales (Paris, Jean Camusat – Pierre le Petit: 1644) 174. 73  Le Camus uses the two terms in tandem, ‘Oratoires ou Chapelles privées’; see Le Camus Étienne, Ordonnances synodales dv diocese de Grenoble (Grenoble – Lyon, Alexandre Giroud – Claude Rey: 1690) 243. 74  Bruun M. B., “Time Well Spent: Scheduling Private Devotion in Early Modern France”, in Maber R. – Barker J. (eds.), Managing Time: Literature and Devotion in Early Modern France (Oxford: 2017) 35–68; Bruun M. B., “Prayer, Meditation, and Retreat” in Lyons J. D. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque (Oxford: 2018)

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and replete with God in Nazareth’).75 The thirty years during which Christ led a hidden life resonates with this space of secluded devotion, and Suffren suggests that his readers meditate on this unknown part of Christ’s life when they cross the threshold to their private oratory.76 Funeral orations show les grands retreating to their oratoires to be alone with God. According to one such oration, Louis XIII would rather humble himself before God in his oratory than reign over people from his throne, and in order to relax from the strains of ruling, he would withdraw there, immersing himself in tearful prayer, kissing relics, and composing hymns.77 Readers were encouraged to follow Anne d’Autriche into her chapel and to observe her selfdebasement before God,78 and to envision Louis XIV’s Queen, Maria Theresia (1638­–1683), prostrate on the floor of her chapel, her arms spread out as if on a cross, or prompted to imagine that, when going on a journey, she would betake herself to the chapel at five in the morning and remain there until departure.79 Hagiographic texts showed reverence for private chapels. In his Meditations, the Jesuit Paul de Barry (1587–1661) explains how Saint Praxedes lodged people of virtue, offering them the best possible conditions, including the opportunity to ‘se Communier dans vne chapelle domestique qu’elle auoit fait dresser & embellir toute propre à cela’ (‘to take Communion in a domestic chapel that she had furnished and adorned to this end’),80 and in L’Annee Chrestienne Suffren invites his readers to envisage Philippo Neri (1515–1595) hearing Mass in a small chappelle domestique close to his chamber.81 Along with such Jesuit examples, it is important to underline that, as Hillman has shown, rigorist circles also cherished their private chapels.82 75  Suffren Jean, L’Annee Chrestienne, ov Le sainct et profitable employ du temps pour gaigner l’Éternité (Paris, Claude Sonnius and Denis Bechet: 1640–1641; reprint ed., 1642) II.1 95. 76  Ibid. II.1 634. 77  Grillié Nicolas, Oraison fvnebre prononcee dans l’Eglise des Avgvstins de Paris […] pour les Tres-Chrestien Roy de France & de Nauarre, LOVYS LE IVSTE (Paris, Vuefue Martin Durand: 1643) 15, 17. 78  Fromentières Jean-Louis de, Oraison funebre d’Anne d’Autriche infante d’Espagne, Reine de France, et mere du Roi (Paris, Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy: 1666) 10. 79  David Claude, Oraison funebre de tres-haute et tres-puissante Princesse Marie-Therese d’Autriche, Reyne de France et de Navarre (Paris, Edme Couterot: 1684) 18–19. Another sermon tells how in her oratoire the queen opened her heart to Christ, rejoicing in the king’s victories and mourning her dead children; see Fléchier Esprit, Oraison funebre de Marie Terese d’Autriche, Infante d’Espagne, Reine de France et de Navarre (Paris, Sébastien MabreCramoisy: 1684) 29. 80  Barry Paul de, Les Meditations de Philagie, povr tovs les iovrs de l’année, 2 vols. (Lyon, Philip. Bordes – Laurent Arnaud – Cl. Rigaud: 1649) II 318–319. 81  Suffren, L’Annee Chrestienne II.2 208. 82  Hillman, Female Piety 87–91.

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Authors of Church regulations were less enthusiastic. The Council of Trent had sought to curb masses said in private homes,83 and in the decades before and, especially, after Chavigny’s renovation, private chapels feature regularly in ecclesiastical literature as an unavoidable, but suspicious phenomenon. It is unsurprising that episcopal permission is required both for dedicating such chapels and for celebrating Mass there,84 but even with episcopal blessing, private chapels are seen as fraught with risks of abuse. Their position is an issue: they are to be built far away from workshops and other rooms associated with ordinary life; no one is allowed to sleep above or below them; and their ideally remote position requires that the doors be locked in order to prevent anyone from sneaking in to sleep or conduct unseemly business.85 For rural areas, authorities stress that private chapels must be situated away from stables and dovecotes.86 The access must be tidy; no dumping of dung and garbage is permitted; the roof must not protrude so as to serve as shelter for animals; no dogs are allowed inside, just as doves and other birds must be prevented from nesting.87 Nor may chapels be close to the dairy, the wine cellar, the kitchen, or halls where people dine or dance.88 With his campaign against the aristocracy, Jean Richard (1615–1686) is above all bothered by people who position their chapel in an attic or in a cabinet next to a chamber. He writes that if the king comes to spend the night, he is never put up in the chapel because it is too modest for the king, and he complains that whereas Monsieur and Madame lodge in the most magnificent apartment of the house, Christ is crammed into a corner.89 Private chapels tend to compete with the parish church. Authorities enjoin their readers to attend their parish service at major liturgical feasts, and to be 83  Session 22 (17 Sept. 1562) decreed that Mass must not be celebrated in private houses (‘privatis in domibus’); Canones et decreta sacrosancti oecuminici Concilii Tridentini (Rome: 1834; reprint ed., Leipzig: 1866) 122. 84  Godeau, Ordonnances 174–175. 85  Ibid. 174; similar prohibitions are outlined in Le Camus, Ordonnances 242. 86  The position adjacent to the dovecote is particularly troublesome; see also Arnauld, Statuts 353. 87  La Croix Claude de, Le parfaict ecclesiastiqve ov Diverses instrvctions sur toutes les fonctions Clericales (Paris, Pierre de Bresche: 1666) 568. 88  Le Camus, Ordonnances 243. 89  Richard Jean, Pratiques de pieté pour honorer le S. Sacrement, tirées de la Doctrine des Conciles & des Saints Peres (Cologne, Balthasar d’Egmond: 1683) 155. This seems to hold true for Louis Le Vau’s Hôtel Lambert (built 1640–1644). Ayers comments that ‘[n]o space was wasted at the Hôtel Lambert, the chapel, for example, being squeezed into the gap between the library and the party wall of the neighbouring building, on top of the stables’. See Ayers A., The Architecture of Paris: An Architectural Guide (Stuttgart – London: 2004) 86.

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good examples to their fellow Christians.90 Rites must be celebrated there, and thus no Mass is to be held in a private chapel in connection with the distribution of the viaticum;91 penitence can be administered there only with written episcopal permission;92 and there can be no baptism or churching of women.93 It is particularly important that les grands show up in their parish church and submit to the discipline of hearing Mass: […] à l’heure reglée pour tous les Paroissiens, & de l’entendre avec tous les autres qui leur sont inferieurs, comme s’ils leur étoient égaux. L’Eglise dans ses prieres, & dans l’administration des Sacramens, agissant toûjours avec égalité.94 […] at the hours decreed for all parishioners and to hear it with all the others who are their inferiors, as if they were equal. In its prayers, in its administration of the Sacraments, the Church always conducts itself with equality. If parishioners neglect their parish church, they miss Masses, processions, benedictions, sermons, and important announcements – often at the risk of deadly sin.95 The private chapel resembles a church, but is not a church. Liturgical furnishings, vestments, and vessels are a sine qua non; but while La Croix allows that a small bell be used to gather the household for communal prayer evenings and, if possible, mornings,96 Le Camus is adamant that private chapels must forgo bells in order not to draw people away from the parish church.97 90  Godeau, Ordonnances 175; see also Démia Charles, Tresor clerical ou Conduites pour acquerir et conserver la Sainteté Ecclesiastique, recueilli des Autheurs les plus considerables de ce temps, qui ont traité de ces matieres (Lyon, Jean Certe: 1682) 508. 91  See, for example, the catechism of Claude Joly, bishop of Agen, Les devoirs dv chrestien dresses en forme de catechisme […] en favevr des cvrez & des Fidelles de son Diocese (Paris, Pierre le Petit: 1677) 371. 92  Ibid. 205. 93  Le Camus, Ordonnances 244. 94  Richard, Pratiques de pieté 156. Other authors do not wish les grands to subject themselves to religious égalité, but to deploy their rank to be good models in the parish church; see Bruun M. B. – Nørgaard L. – Nagelsmit E. – Havsteen S. R. – Mejrup K., “Withdrawn amidst the World: Rancé’s Conduite chrétienne for Mme de Guise (1697)”, Early Modern French Studies 39.1 (2017) 57–74. 95  La Croix, Le parfaict ecclesiastiqve 566. 96  Ibid. 568. 97  Le Camus, Ordonnances 244. La Croix prescribes that the chapel must have four chasubles in white, red, green, and violet, each with a stole and maniple, two albs, two belts, and three amices. For the altar three napkins, two candlesticks, a cross, a crucifix, and the

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Along somewhat similar lines, commentators fear that the staffing of private chapels is a way to circumvent the controls usually applied to churches. La Croix complains that private chapels are often used by women and peasants who cannot assess the quality of the preacher’s Latin, and Le Camus fears that lay owners of private chapels call on the services of random vagrant preachers.98 A last recurrent issue is the inappropriate mixture of sacred and profane that bedevils the private chapel. Authorities repeat that rural chapels are not to be used for storage of sheaves and fruit.99 Observers of chapels in large households comment how difficult it is to preserve the proper sanctity when the chapel is managed by a common servant; when liturgical textiles are washed and bleached together with the common linen; and when people attend Mass in an undignified attire, unkempt and half-dressed.100 Richard regrets the modish air that surrounds this space and which he presents as heavily gendered. Recalling how Felix IV (d. 530) found that it is better not to say Mass than to say it in a non-consecrated space, he muses about what the saint would have said, […] voyant tant de Chapelles domestiques, dans lesquelles on offre presque tous les jours le Corps de Nôtre-Seigneur Jesus-Christ sans autre necessité, que de contenter la devotion douce & aisée des femmes qui l’entendent souvent de leur lit, & qui tiennent le Cercle où l’on a offert le plus saint, le plus auguste, & le plus terrible de nos Mysteres? Cet abus est si public par la coûtume, que peu de personnes ouvrent les yeux pour le connoître.101

Canon. The front of the altar must be in the liturgical colours, and above the altar there must be either a painting or a piece of textile. The chapel must have a cover for the altar, as well as a chalice and a paten of gilded silver, two palls covered in white linen, as many veils as there are chasubles, burses, and purificators, a Roman Missal, a cushion, and an altar bell, a candlestick for the Gospel side, crewets, an oval basin, and four hand towels; see Le parfaict ecclesiastiqve 568–570. Most of these recommendations reappear in Démia, Tresor clerical 506–508. 98  Le Camus, Ordonnances 239. 99  Arnauld, Statuts 674. 100  La Croix, Le parfaict ecclesiastiqve 566. But see Suffren’s counsel that readers begin their morning prayers as soon as they have dressed according to health and propriety; Suffren Jean, Advis et exercises spiritvels pour bien employer les iours, les semaines, les mois & les années de la vie (Paris, Claude Sonnius – Denis Bechet: 1642; reprint ed., 1646) 52–55. 101  Richard, Pratiques de pieté 154–155; possibly, ‘la devotion aisée’ opposes the ‘easy devotion’ propagated in works such as Pierre Le Moyne’s Dévotion aisée (Paris, Antoine de Sommaville: 1652).

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[…] seeing so many domestic chapels where one offers almost daily the Body of our Lord, Jesus Christ, without any other motive than to satisfy the soft and easy devotion of women who often hear [Mass] from their beds, and [ladies gather]102 where one has offered the most holy, the most august, and the most terrifying of our mysteries? This abuse has now become so general and so common that few people open their eyes to it. Richard finds that private chapels nourish the lack of devotion in the rich and mighty who have become so accustomed to hearing Mass in confraternities, congregations, and domestic chapels that mingling with the common people at the parish Mass has become unbearable to them.103 Priests who, when by the altar, are viewed as messengers of God, are treated like paid domestics who eat with the servants and are paid for only half an hour’s service per day. Thus one priest, completely vested and ready to say Mass, was told by a lackey to wait, since Madame had not yet had her hair done.104 Worst of all, the owners of private chapels show disrespect for God’s sovereign majesty, no longer seeking God, but simply making him come to their home.105 Richard concludes that owing to private chapels, priests have lapsed and most parishes have fallen into ruin and desolation.106 This quick sketch of the grand-siècle view of private chapels warns us not to jump to conclusions about the devotional significance of the chapel at the Hôtel de Chavigny. Chavigny’s new chapel accorded with the conventions of his class and age, and albeit later, Richard’s jibes at the chic levity that surrounded private chapels may easily have applied to his chapel too. In fact, Rapin discretely hints at various abuses in his account of Chavigny’s death, telling how Anne Phélypeaux, when she learnt upon rising that her husband had shut himself up with Singlin, ‘Elle se lève, se fait habiller à demy par ses femmes pour aller entendre la messe en sa chapelle domestique, parce qu’il étoit fête’ (‘She got up, had her ladies dress her halfway and went to hear Mass in her domestic chapel, since it was a holiday’). After Mass, she went down to her husband’s 102  ‘Tiennent le cercle’ [literally, ‘hold the circle’] signifies in this context the princesses and duchesses surrounding the queen. 103  Richard, Pratiques de pieté 155. Mme de Liancourt’s assurance to her granddaughter that even though she has permission to hear Mass in her domestic chapel, she preferred to go to her parish church, should be read in the light of such decrees; see Liancourt Jeanne de Schomberg Duchesse de, Reglement donné par une dame de haute qualité a M*** sa petitefille Pour sa Conduite, & pour celle de sa Maison, avec un sutre Reglement que cette Dame avoit dressé pour elle-mesme (Paris, Augustin Leguerrier, 1698) 207. 104  Richard, Pratiques de pieté, pratique 155–156. 105  Ibid. 156. 106  Ibid. 159.

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apartment and finding him drowsy, returned to her room to dress.107 Rapin’s remark that Anne Phélypeaux wanted to hear Mass in the private chapel on a liturgical feast day already has a disturbing ring, but even more striking is his aside that she went to the chapel half-dressed and only dressed properly later. However, we should not reject out of hand the devotional significance of the chapel. In Le cœur nouveau, Saint-Cyran taught Chavigny to retreat on a daily basis and to resort to silent prayer whenever the world encroached on his love of God. Such retreats did not depend on physical isolation, but the chapel would have afforded one place fitted to these prayers.108 Noulleau, for one, was adamant that Chavigny experienced moments of genuine religious transformation in his palaces. His audience would have been familiar with the topos of the home as a locus of devotion with the private oratory at its heart, and they would likely have accepted the preacher’s presentation of Chavigny’s houses as religious retreats. In order to get a better sense of the dynamics ideally at play in such a retreat, we shall consider the painting that adorned the chapel at the Hôtel de Chavigny. 3

The Painting

Chavigny’s turn to Philippe de Champaigne was not a one-off. He also commissioned an Assumption for Saint Germain l’Auxerrois (ca. 1638)109 and probably a Presentation in the Temple (ca. 1630).110 His choice of painter accords with his parents’ patronage of Champaigne,111 and given that Champaigne portrayed Chavigny’s father,112 his mother,113 his uncle Victor,114 and possibly

107  Rapin, Mémoires I 467. 108   Saint-Cyran, Le coeur nouveau 118. 109  Gonçalves J., Philippe de Champaigne: le patriarche de la peinture (Paris: 1995) 47–48. 110  Tapié A. – Garnot N. S. F. et al., Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674) entre politique et dévotion (Paris: 2007) 87–89; and Gonçalves J., Philippe de Champaigne: La vie, l’œuvre et le catalogue en cinq livres […]. Catalogue des peintures, dessins et désattributions. Nouvelle édition revue et corrigée (April 2013 [2008]) http://www.josegoncalves.fr/tronc/PdCcatalogue-2013-fusionn%C3%A9.pdf (21.05.2018), cat. 1, 36. 111  See for this patronage, Gonçalves, Philippe de Champaigne cat. 1, 25–27 and 41, as well as 6, 4–5; Kerspern S., “Un décor d’église inconnu de Philippe de Champaigne?”, Re­vue de l’Art 118, 4 (1997) 78–80; and http://www.dhistoire-et-dart.com/Fortunecritique/ Champaignejeune2s4.html (19.06.2018). 112  See Gonçalves, Philippe de Champaigne cat. 1, 49. 113  Champaigne painted Marie Bragelogne in 1630–1635, ca. 1646–1648, and ca. 1652–1653; see Dorival, Philippe de Champaigne 1602–1674, 2 vols. (Paris: 1976) I 87, nos 151–153. 114  Dated to 1650; see Gonçalves, Philippe de Champaigne cat. 2, 47; and Tapié – Garnot, Philippe de Champaigne 174–175.

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Chavigny himself,115 it is likely that in choosing Champaigne, the count simply continued the familial predilection. His choice may also have been assertively careerist. By the first half of the 1640s, the Flemish painter was cherished in prominent circles, and the count was perhaps mimicking Richelieu for whom Champaigne painted no fewer than ten portraits.116 Félibien points to Champaigne’s portraits of the king, the queen, and the dauphin in 1641 as evidence of his fame,117 and when Anne d’Autriche moved into the Palais-Royal in 1643, she commissioned an Annunciation for her chapel.118 Champaigne’s painting for Chavigny has been seen in the light of Jansenism,119 but if Chavigny commissioned the painting in 1642–1643, it precedes Champaigne’s close connection with Port-Royal by a few years.120 While scholars debate whether Champaigne can be described as a ‘Jansenist painter’,121 his growing connection with Port-Royal is clear only from the mid1640s.122 In the period 1646–1667, Champaigne painted several portraits of Port-Royal figures, two paintings for the convent of Port-Royal (1648), and one for Port-Royal des Champs (ca. 1652).123 His daughters entered the school at 115  Gonçalves dates the Champaigne portrait, which probably underlies Nanteuil’s engraving, ca. 1656, i.e., after the model’s death; see Philippe de Champaigne cat. 6, 45. See also Dorival, Philippe de Champaigne I 133. 116  See ibid. II passim; see also Garnot N. S. F., “Philippe de Champaigne et ses commanditaires”, in Boyer J.-C. – Gaehtgens B. – Gady B. (eds.), Richelieu patron des art (Paris: 2009) 395–406, esp. 395 and 405. 117  Félibien André, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes, cinquième partie (Paris, Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy: 1688) 173. 118  Bertrand A., Art and politics in Counter-Reformation Paris: The Case of Philippe de Champaigne and his Patrons (1621–1674), Ph.D. dissertation (University of Pittsburgh: 2001) 277–278. Garnot dates the Annunciation produced for Anne d’Autriche’s chapel 1643; see Tapié – Garnot, Philippe de Champaigne 130. 119  Allden M. – Beresford R., “Two Altar-Pieces by Philippe de Champaigne: Their History and Technique”, The Burlington Magazine 131.1035 (1989) 395–406, esp. 395–396. 120  According to Marin, this connection begins ca. 1644–1645; see Marin L., Philippe de Champaigne: Ou la présence cachée (Paris: 1995) 245. See also Marin, “Signe et représentation: Philippe de Champaigne et Port-Royal”, Annales 25.1 (1970) 1–29, esp. 7, where he dates Champaigne’s turn to Port-Royal between 1643 and 1648; and Tapié A. – Garnot N. S. F., “Dialogues avec Port-Royal: une pensée picturale (1646–1662)”, in Tapié – Garnot et al., Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674) entre politique et dévotion (Paris: 2007) 147–217, esp. 147. 121  Famously, Marin is convinced that he is; see Marin, “Signe et représentation” and Philippe de Champaigne. This notion is thoughtfully challenged in Cojannot-Le Blanc M., “La foi et les oeuvres: Postface sur l’oeuvre peint de Philippe de Champaigne et ses possibles liens avec la spritualite de Port-Royal”, in Cojannot-Le Blanc M. (ed.), Philippe de Champaigne ou la figure du peintre janseniste (Paris: 2011) 171–216. 122   Cojannot-Le Blanc, “La foi et les œuvres” 200. 123  See Tapié – Garnot, Philippe de Champaigne 147–219; and Pericolo L., Philippe de Champaigne: “Philippe, homme sage et vertueux”. Essai sur l’art et l’oeuvre de Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674) (Tournai – Bruxelles: 2002) 228–262.

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Port-Royal in 1648,124 and the same year he designed the frontispiece for the second edition of Traité de la fréquente communion.125 When Chavigny commissioned his new chapel, however, Champaigne was above all a favourite of the grands dévots, and the patronage of the count’s family, his political aspirations, and the aristocratic penchant for the Flemish artist were likely his principal incentives. The Annunciation was a popular motif for paintings in private chapels. To mention but a few examples, Champaigne painted an Annunciation for the chapel at the Château Tubeuf (1644–1645)126 and one for Anne d’Autriche’s oratory at the Palais-Royal (ca. 1643).127 The chapel of the Hôtel de Brienne had an Annunciation,128 and in 1650 Eustache Le Sueur (1616–1655) produced one for the chapel of the Hôtel de Brissonnet (later Turgot).129 Closely related to the Annunciation as a subject focussing on the mystery of the Incarnation, the Nativity was also favoured for private chapels. The chapel of the Hôtel de Liancourt was graced by a Nativity;130 Château de Pont had one, perhaps painted by Champaigne;131 and the oratory of Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency (1594–1650) at the Hôtel de Condé had a Nativity by Le Sueur.132 According to Dorival, sources predating the Revolution list seventeen Annunciations by Champaigne, ten of which still exist.133 Three of these paintings have been identified as the Annunciation produced for the Hôtel de Chavigny. Dorival claims that the Annunciation currently in the church of Clermont-Ferrand is ‘without doubt’ the one commissioned by Chavigny and dates it 1639 [Fig. 20.2].134 In his catalogue of the Wallace Collection, John 124   Tapié – Garnot, “Dialogues avec Port-Royal” 147; and Lesaulnier J., “Philippe de Champaigne et Port-Royal: Les leçons d’une correspondance”, in Cojannot-Le Blanc M. (ed.), Philippe de Champaigne ou la figure du peintre janséniste (Paris: 2011) 13–29, esp. 13–14. See also Tapié – Garnot, Philippe de Champaigne 192–196. 125  Marin, “Signe et représentation” 7; and Cojannot-Le Blanc M., “La foi et les œuvres” 200. 126  D’Argenville Antoine Joseph Dezallier, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, avec leurs portraits gravés en taille-douce, les indications de leurs principaux ouvrages, 3 vols. (Paris, de Bure l’Aîné: 1745) II 184. 127  Garnot N. S. F., “L’Annonciation, vers 1642”, in Tapié – Garnot, Philippe de Champaigne 129–131, esp. 130. 128  Hillman, Female Piety 88, note 159. 129  Mérot A., Eustache Le Sueur (1616­­–1655) (Paris: 1987) 245–246; and D’Argenville, Abrégé II 297. 130  Hillman, Female Piety 88. It was probably painted by Francesco da Ponte Bassano the Elder (1475–1530). 131  Mignot, “Le château de Pont” 207. 132  Mérot, Eustache Le Sueur 346–347, with a suggested date of ca. 1650. 133  Dorival B., “Les oeuvres de Philippe de Champaigne sur le subjet de l’Annonciation”, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’Art Français (1970; publ. 1972) 45–71, esp. 50. 134  Dorival, Philippe de Champaigne II 19, no. 22. The painting measures 260 × 210 cm.

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Philippe de Champaigne, Annunciation, ca. 1639. Oil on wood, 260 × 210 cm. Notre-Dame-du-Port de Clermont-Ferrand Photograph by Quentineo (2018)

Ingamells proposes, however, that that museum’s Annunciation may have been produced for Hôtel de Chavigny between 1643 and 1648,135 and suggests that the ‘unusual austerity of the composition’ might have been appealing to a ‘patron with Jansenist sympathies’ [Fig. 20.3].136 Ingamells’s hypothesis is corroborated by Allden and Beresford, who strengthen the Jansenist argument and find that the substantial size of the Wallace Annuncation is compatible with the fact that Chavigny built a chapel rather than a private oratory.137 Both 135  I ngamells J., The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Pictures III: French before 1815 (London: 1989) 111. The painting measures 334 × 214.5 cm. 136  Ibid. 111. 137   Allden – Beresford, “Two Altar-Pieces” 395–396. Garnot associates the Wallace Annunciation with altarpiece made by Champaigne for Sainte Catherine de la Couture, which was situated opposite Hôtel de Chavigny; see Garnot, “Philippe de Champaigne” 403; and D’Argenville, Abrégé II 184. Gonçalves dates this painting 1654–1656 and associates it with the chapel of Saint Anne in Anne d’Autriche’s Val-de-Grâce; see Philippe de Champaigne cat. 3, 15 and 16.

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Philippe de Champaigne, Annunciation, ca. 1648. Oil on canvas, 334 × 214.5 cm © The Wallace Collection, London

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Philippe de Champaigne, Annunciation, ca. 1643. Oil on canvas, 215 × 170 cm. Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montrésor Photograph by Alain Crozemarie (2015)

Gonçalves and Garnot argue instead that the Champaigne Annunciation, which is currently in the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Montrésor, originally graced the chapel of the Hôtel de Chavigny,138 and date it 1642–1643, contemporaneous with the campaign of renovation [Fig. 20.4].139 138  Garnot, “L’Annonciation” 129–131; and Garnot, “Philippe de Champaigne” 398–400. In the latter, Garnot confuses Claude and Léon Bouthillier and ascribes the association with Richelieu to the proximity of their estates in the Tourraine, rather than to their shared upbringing. The painting measures 215 × 170 cm. 139  Garnot dates the painting toward the end of 1642; see “Philippe de Champaigne” 400. Similar conclusions are drawn in Gonçalves, Philippe de Champaigne cat. 2, 12, but he

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Garnot and Gonçalves argue persuasively for their association of the Annunciation in Montrésor with the Hôtel de Chavigny, but the identification of Chavigny’s painting still seems too uncertain to warrant any in-depth correlation of the count’s devotional preferences and Champaigne’s execution of the motif of the Annunciation. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile lingering over the three Annunciations that have been linked to the Hôtel de Chavigny (here identified by their current location) as a prelude to our study of the way in which Chavigny would have beheld the one he owned. The three paintings share a set of basic features. They all represent Mary and Gabriel in an indoor space with a few pieces of furniture; all hint at communication between the two figures; all show a ray of light emanating from the dove of the Holy Spirit accompanied by clouds and angels; and in all of them Mary bears the traces of a smile and gestures toward her heart. Some features occur only in two paintings. Thus, while the Montrésor and the Clermont-Ferrand Annunciations show Mary kneeling at her prie-dieu and looking at the angel Gabriel who has just alighted (cf. Lk 1:28–29), the Wallace Annunciation portrays Mary with lowered eyes, responding ‘Ecce ancilla Domini’ – ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord’ (Lk 1:38). The light of divine grace flows towards Mary, but in different ways. In the Montrésor Annunciation, the ray is a straight line, extending in the direction of her eyes; in the Clermont-Ferrand Annunciation, the light envelopes her upper body; and in the Wallace Annunciation, the light proliferates into several rays, showering the entire scenery, but always in Mary’s direction. The interaction between Mary and Gabriel is shown in different ways too; in the Wallace and the Montrésor Annunciations, Gabriel points upwards, while in the Clermont-Ferrand Annunciation, both the Virgin and the angel place hand to heart in a reciprocal gesture. In the Clermont-Ferrand Annunciation, Mary’s lifted hand signals her surprise; the Wallace and the Montrésor Annunciations show her with arms crossed in a gesture of submission and humility.140 The paintings feature different topoi, and while the Clermont-Ferrand and the Wallace Annunciations both include swaddling bands spread out on the floor – a possible double allusion to the infant Moses as a prefiguration of Christ and to the shroud of the Passion – the Montrésor Annunciation features the more dates the Montrésor Annunciation ca. 1636, in Philippe de Champaigne 148. Pericolo dates the Montrésor Annunciation 1638–1640 and associates it with the Jesuit noviciate in the faubourg Saint-Germain, but does not comment on the Hôtel de Chavigny; see Pericolo, Philippe de Champaigne 105. 140  Krüger K., “Mute Mysteries of the Divine Logos: On the Pictorial Poetics of Incarnation”, in Melion W. – Wandel L. P. (eds.), Image and Incarnation in Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, Intersections 39 (Leiden – Boston: 2015) 76–108, esp. 86; see also Rubin M., Mother of God (New Haven – London: 2007) 343.

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standard vase of flowers. In the Montrésor Annunciation, Gabriel holds a lily; in the others, he is empty-handed. In the Wallace Annunciation, both figures stand, and Gabriel seems virtually motionless, whereas he moves dynamically in the other two. Finally, in the Montrésor Annunciation, the background is arranged perspectivally. Garnot suggests that the fireplace in the background conveys a sense of domestic familiarity, but possibly the fireplace with its smoking embers and the cat, an icon of lust,141 serves above all as the symbolic earthly foil for the radiant light of grace signifying Mary’s chastity. No matter which of the three paintings hung in Chavigny’s chapel, the count would thus have had before him a representation of the indoor meeting between Gabriel and Mary, accompanied by a host of angels, lit by the radiant light of divine grace, and engaged in an encounter comprised by gaze and gesture,142 all converging in the representation of the origin of the mystery of the Incarnation. 4

The New Heart and the New Gaze

We do not know how Chavigny gazed at his painting, but we do have an idea of the kind of viewing experience that Saint-Cyran and Singlin tried to instil in him. This is a gaze shaped by the intersection of the discourses of conversion, prayer, and of contemplation of the mystery of the Incarnation. While the two key Port-Royalist figures strive to activate the eyes of the heart, their ideal gaze is very different from the spiritual gaze rehearsed in Jesuit, Salesian, and mystical prayer manuals and from the interaction between the carnal eyes and the eyes of the soul evoked in those contexts.143 The gaze that SaintCyran and Singlin sought to teach does not aim to shape or explore mental 141  Ross L., Medieval Art: A Topical Dictionary (Westport ­– London: 1996) 14. 142  See, on their interaction, Krüger K., “Mute Mysteries” 76–108. 143  On early modern instruction in the formation of mental images, see Boer W. de – Enenkel K. – Melion W. S. (eds.), Jesuit Image Theory, Intersections 45 (Leiden – Boston: 2016); Melion W. S. – Dekoninck R. – Guiderdoni-Bruslé A. (eds.), Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700 (Turnhout: 2012), esp. Melion, “Meditative Images and the Portrayal of Image-Based Meditation” 1–60 and Cousinié F., “The Mental Image in Representation: Jean Aumont, L’Ouverture intérieure du royaume de l’Agneau occis dans nos cœurs (1660)” 203–246; Boer W. de, “Invisible Contemplation: A Paradox in the Spiritual Exercises”, in Enenkel K. – Melion W. S. (eds.), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self: Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture, Intersections 17 (Leiden – Boston: 2010) 235–256; and Fabre P.-A., Ignace de Loyola: Le lieu de l’image. Le problème de la composition de lieu dans les pratiques spirituelles et artistiques jésuites de la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (Paris: 1992). On meditative imagination in De

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images; instead the Port-Royalist conception of the gaze of the heart aims to divest the soul of most images, leaving only the imprint of its own humility and the grace of God. Important is the fact that contrary to Jesuit image theory, the gaze imparted to Chavigny is not defined in relation to material images. It is true that the alleged Port-Royalist opposition to images does not apply to SaintCyran’s Le cœur nouveau, written before he became the director of the convent, in which he instructs Chavigny to make use of images as a means of devotional nourishment.144 To my knowledge, Singlin does not voice any strong opposition toward material images either – he simply does not mention them;145 the images of interest to him are above all the biblical figures who serve as portrayals of qualities or virtues. Thus, according to Singlin, Jesus puts forward the tax collector in Lk 18:9–14 as an image excellente of penitence;146 the Canaanite woman (Mt 15:21–28) as an image of trust; the hemorrhagic woman (Mt 9:20– 22) as an image of faith; Mary Magdalene as an image of charity, penitence, and conversion;147 and Paul as an image of conversion.148 Learning to see the deep implication of such written images and to adopt the virtues they exhibit is the first step taught in Singlin’s instructions; applying the eyes of the heart is the second. Conversion is the condition, the impetus, and the aim of this gaze, and with this in mind, we shall begin with an examination of Le cœur nouveau, the treatise on conversion that Saint-Cyran wrote for Chavigny. The new heart of the title refers to Ezek 36:26, quoted at the opening: ‘Ie vous donneray un Cœur nouveau, & je mettray un esprit nouveau au milieu de vous; Ie vous osteray vostre cœur de pierre, & vous en donneray un de chair.’ (‘A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’).149 The biblical and, in particular, Pauline concern with cordial renewal is key to grand-siècle conversions. Sales, see Lyons J. D., Before Imagi­nation: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Palo Alto: 2005) 61–89. 144  See Saint-Cyran, Le coeur nouveau 118, discussed below. 145  For a succinct paraphrase of the discussion regarding the Port-Royalist opposition against the visual arts, see Martin É. M., Port-Royal Aesthetics, Ph.D. dissertation (Princeton University: 2006) 6–10. 146  Singlin, “Instruction pour le X’. Dimanche après la Pentecoste”, in Instructions chrestiennes IV 202–212, esp. 203. 147  These three images all appear in Singlin, “Instruction pour le Jour de Sainte Magdelaine: Cinquième instruction”, in Instructions chrestiennes IV 405–415, esp. 412–414. 148  Singlin, “Instruction Pour le Jour de la Conversion de Saint Paul”, in Instructions chrestiennes I 700–709 (701). 149   Saint-Cyran, Le coeur nouveau 109. The Ezekiel reference is erroneously given as chapter 16 instead of chapter 36.

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This notion of cordial renewal gained ground with François de Sales’s seminal Introduction à la vie dévote (1609/1619),150 and it continued to develop throughout the century, as the Salesian ideals filtered down into manuals and devotional practices; as the heart as a devotional space underwent theoretical and practical scrutiny;151 and as the conversional ethos was broadcast in sermons and handbooks. Chavigny navigated the early phases of this process. In Le cœur nouveau, Saint-Cyran teaches his ward that Christ became incarnate to bring a new heart and a new love which are semblable à la tendresse du cœur d’un petit enfant nouvellement formé dans le ventre de sa mere, ou né depuis peu de jours, qui à cause de sa foiblesse n’est pas capable de faire de grandes actions, ny des exercices tant soit peu penibles. […] Il faut que cette comparaison serve de regle, & de direction generale à une ame dans laquelle Dieu vient d’inserer ce cœur, c’est-à-dire son amour & sa grace […].152 similar to the tenderness of the heart in a small child recently shaped in its mother’s womb or born only a few days ago, who because of its feebleness is not able to do great deeds, nor exercises that are too strenuous. […] It is necessary that this comparison serve as the rule and the general direction for a soul in whom God has inserted this heart, that is, his love and his grace […]. Owing to the feeble state of the new heart, a recent convert, such as Chavigny, must be his own mother and nurse and protect his soul against worldly corruption and other looming dangers. Turning inward, he must work on shaping the new heart and the new love, strengthening himself in his desire to please God.153 In order to support this process, Saint-Cyran suggests three exercises: first, to weed out from his life anything that threatens this new love; second, to meditate at least once or twice a day on the marvellous truth that all Christians form one collective Church and to this end worship in the spirit Christ and

150  Dumonceaux P., “Conversion, convertir, étude comparative d’après les lexicographes du XVIIe siècle”, in Duchêne R. (ed.), La conversion au XVIIe siècle (Marseille: 1983) 7–17, esp. 9–10; see also Bruun, “Prayer, Meditation, and Retreat”. 151  See Papasogli B., Le “fond du cœur”: figures de l’espace intérieur au XVIIe siècle (Paris: 2000). 152   Saint-Cyran, Le coeur nouveau 110–114, esp. 112–113. On Saint-Cyran’s strategy of conversion and its effects among, not least, the nuns of Port-Royal, see Orcibal, Les Origines II 425–427. 153   Saint-Cyran, Le coeur nouveau 114.

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‘le corps qu’il a pris dans le ventre de la Vierge’154 (‘the body he has assumed in the Virgin’s womb’), and further, to wonder at the fact that he has given us this body for the Eucharistic nourishment of our souls; and third, to deploy the common means offered by the Church, that is, honouring priests, monks, churches, relics, and everything related to the worship of God, such as crucifixes, images, blessed water, rosaries, medals, and so forth. These exercises should be accompanied by little daily soul-strengthening deeds such as reading, prayer, retreat, moments of silent solitude, and a sign of affection or a service done to someone who has offended the believer.155 In this tender state, ‘dans son premier âge’156 (‘in his first age’), the recent convert must pay heed to three things: first, that the new heart owes everything to God and nothing to his own merit; second, that the devil sets his traps everywhere; and, third, that it is the prerogative of God to persevere in his donation of grace, and that, little by little, he separates the convert from what is illegitimate.157 All the convert can do is to dwell in a state of constant and silent supplication: […] il faudra lever les yeux du cœur au Ciel, & par un simple regard diversifié en mille façons que l’amour entend, demander secours à Dieu sans dire mot, & ne cesser jamais de l’implorer, tandis que ces ennemis nous presseront, lesquels il faut défaire en se retirant, s’il est possible, sur tout lors que le lieu & l’occasion les favorise.158 […] we must direct the eyes of the heart towards Heaven, and by a simple159 gaze proliferating in a thousand ways that love hears, ask for help from God without saying a word, and never cease to implore him while these enemies pressure us, whom we must undo while withdraw154  Ibid. 116. 155  Ibid. 115–118. The sentence is striking, given the harsh attitude towards such instruments of devotion among later Port-Royalists. 156  Ibid. 119. 157  Ibid. 119–122. 158  Ibid. 122–125, esp. 125. Saint-Cyran’s insistence on silent prayer accords with the instruction that the oraison mentale or even the curt and fervent oraison éjaculatoire is a more resourceful instrument than the more formulaic oraison verbale; see, on these kinds of prayer, Sales François de, Introdvction a la vie devote (Paris, l’imprimerie royale du Louvre: 1609/1619; reprint ed. 1641) 108; and D’Argentan Louis-François, Les exercices dv chrestien interievr, Où sont enseignées les pratiques pour conformer en toutes choses nostre interieure auec celuy de Iesus-Christ, & viure de sa vie, 2 vols. (Paris, Claude Cramoisy: 1664) II 269–270. 159  The word simple means ‘simple’ and ‘single’, and Saint-Cyran generally uses it to denote a devotional demeanour divested of superfluous deeds or sentiments.

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ing, if it is possible, especially when the place and occasion are favourable for them. In the otherwise quite terse, direct, and pragmatic instruction of Le cœur nouveau, this passage stands out. Merging several senses and forms of expression, Saint-Cyran prescribes a particular address to God: the silent prayer conveyed by the eyes of the heart. The passage brings together the notion of the eyes of the heart160 and the trusting elevated gaze of the Psalms.161 The important feature of this gaze is not that it sees, but that it trusts even when it does not see, and that it speaks from the heart while the voice is mute. It is thus a sign of directedness and trust. Saint-Cyran elaborates the notion of the simple gaze in a letter treatise from 1641, addressed to an anonymous gentleman who wishes to surrender himself to God. Here Saint-Cyran remarks that in order to draw ‘cet amour du Ciel dans la terre & du cœur de Dieu mesme […] dans le cœur de l’homme conuerty, Dieu ne demande qu’vn simple regard interieur de cet homme, & vne secrette inuocation’162 (‘this love from heaven to earth and from the very heart of God into the heart of the converted human being, God requires nothing but a simple interior gaze of this human and a secret 160  Possibly, Saint-Cyran was influenced by the Augustinian theory of the eyes of the mind (occuli mentis) as a spiritual twin of the physical eyes; see, for this theory, Miles M., “The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De trinitate and Confessions”, The Journal of Religion 63.2 (1983) 125­–142. Several Augustinian points underlined by Miles are important in this context, especially the intimate connection between the viewer and the thing which is seen spiritually; however the agency that Augustine ascribes to the soul in the spiritual vision (cf. Miles, “The Eye” 128–129), is downplayed in Saint-Cyran. Probably the wording of Ephesians 1:17–18a is an important inspiration as well: ‘I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you’ (Vulgate: ‘[memoriam vestri faciens in orationibus meis:] ut Deus Domini nostri Jesu Christi, Pater gloriæ, det vobis spiritum sapientiæ et revelationis in agnitione ejus, illuminatos oculos cordis vestri, ut sciatis quæ sit spes vocationis ejus’). As we shall see, this passage was important for Singlin. 161  See, for example, Ps 121:1 (Ps 120:1 in the Vulgate): ‘I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come’? (‘Levavi oculos meos in montes, unde veniet auxilium mihi’?). This verse is one of three biblical phrases suggested by Saint-Cyran to Chavigny as a source of affection and a shield against diabolic temptations; see Le coeur nouveau 126. See also Ps 123:1 (Ps 122:1 in the Vulgate): ‘To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens’! (‘Ad te levavi oculos meos, qui habitas in cælis’!). 162   Saint-Cyran, letter to an anon. gentleman, dated January 1641; see Letter 32, in Saint-Cyran Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de, Lettres chrestiennes et spiritvelles de messire Iean Dv Verger de Havranne, abbé de St Cyran, 2 vols. (Paris, La Veuve Martin Durand – Sébastien Huré – Jean Le Mire – Rolet Le Duc: 1645–1647) II 380–461, esp. 451–452.

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invocation’). Also, the diversification that Saint-Cyran prescribes for Chavigny’s simple regard reappears in other instructions. He recommends, for example, the ‘oraison continuelle diuersifiée en mille manieres’ (‘the continuous prayer proliferating in a thousand ways’) as the only remedy to purge the soul;163 and he explains how the solid devotion ‘se diuersifiée en mille façons sans peine, & souuent auec vne joye qui se renouuelle de temps en temps, sinon dans les sens, pour le moins dans le fonds de l’ame, & de l’esprit’164 (‘proliferates in a thousand ways without effort and often with a joy that renews itself little by little if not in the senses, at least at the bottom of the heart and in the spirit’). Less is more. For Saint-Cyran it is exactly the unified simplicity of the cordial gaze in its focused trust that secures its communicative abundance and thus turns this gaze into the fundamental form of supplication. There is thus for Saint-Cyran a direct connection between grace, gaze, and the convert’s new heart, but we have yet to see what happens when the eye of the renewed heart is directed towards the Annunciation. 5

Looking at the Annunciation

At Port-Royal in the 1640s, Chavigny would have heard again the demand for a new heart and a gaze to go with it. For example, Le Maistre, a key figure in the definition of the Port-Royalist profile, declares that conversion requires un cœur nouveau, & non pas seulement un entendement nouveau: un cœur de feu […]. Or ce cœur est en la seule disposition de Dieu, & non en la notre; & tout ce qu’un pécheur peut faire c’est d’élever les yeux vers les montagnes saintes d’où il doit descendre, & de le demander à Dieu avec ferveur, avec gémissemens, avec assiduité.165 a new heart and not simply a new mind; a fiery heart […]. But this heart is only at God’s disposal and not at ours, and all that a sinner can do is to raise the eyes of the heart towards the saintly mountains from where it will descend, and ask God for it with fervour, with sighs, and with persistence. 163   Saint-Cyran, letter to an anon. lady, dated 20 July 1641; Letter 71, in Lettres chrestiennes I 563–588, esp. 587. 164   Saint-Cyran, letter to an anon. lady, dated 18 February 1642; Letter 93, in Lettres chrestiennes I 775–792, esp. 786. 165  Undated letter from Le Maistre to D’Andilly, in Recueil de plusieurs pieces 203–206, esp. 205.

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Le Maistre reiterates Saint-Cyran’s requirement for the lifted gaze. He presents it as the token of that surrender to the trust in divine help which is the only form of agency available to the convert according to the stern Augustinianism of Port-Royal. Le Maistre’s view chimed in with Antoine Singlin’s preaching which funnelled a broad spectrum of Port-Royalist teaching to a dedicated audience – among them Chavigny, if we are to believe Rapin.166 Three feasts are particularly relevant in our context. The Feast of Paul’s conversion inspires Singlin and his homilectic co-authors to a pedagogical exposition, as if in slowmotion, of the condensed and invisible dynamics at work in conversion; the Feast of the Annunciation prompts an exposition of Mary as a model believer; and the Feast of Epiphany occasions a representation of the Magi as the ideal viewers. According to Singlin, Paul’s conversion fleshes out the otherwise evasive work of divine grace, and therefore he invites his audience to consider toutes les circonstances de cette Conversion. Car tout ce qui s’est fait au dehors a esté l’image de ce qui se faisoit au dedans, & Dieu a montré visiblement dans la Conversion de ce grand Apostre, ce qu’il fait invi­ siblement dans celle de tous ceux qu’il attire à sa connoissance & à son amour.167 all aspects of this conversion. For everything that happened on the outside was an image of what happened on the inside, and in the conversion of this great apostle, God showed visibly what he does invisibly in the conversion of all those whom he draws into his knowledge and his love. Singlin reminds his audience how Christ descended from heaven, blinded Paul, and threw him to the ground.168 This blinding shows how God divests the convert of worldly insight, throwing him or her into an ‘aveuglement heureux’, a ‘fortunate blindness’, which gives access to the light of truth and life,169 but also isolates the convert from the sages of this world, turning him into a child who 166  Since Singlin was busy, the sermons were generally written by Sacy and sometimes by Antoine Arnauld at Singlin’s direction as to key points and biblical passages; see Goujet Claude-Pierre, “Vie de Monsieur Singlin”, in Instructions Chrétiennes sur les mystères de N. S. Et sur les principales fêtes, 5 vols. (Avignon, Aux dépens de la Societé: 1644 [=1744]) V, xxij. Josse concludes that Singlin’s instructions, first published in 1671, reflect Sacy’s textual rather than Singlin’s oratorical work, but that their gist reappears in Singlin’s letters and direction; Josse, “Introduction” 81–85. 167  Singlin, “Instruction pour le Jour de la Conversion de Saint Paul”, in Instructions Chrestiennes I 702. 168  Ibid. 701. 169  Ibid. 703.

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relies on the guidance of others. The apostle thrown to the ground teaches us that conversion must come with a complete renversement (‘inversion’) of our will which makes for an all-embracing renouvellement (‘renewal’).170 The next step, Paul’s question, ‘Domine, quid me vis facere’ (‘Lord, what do you want me to do?’) of Acts 22:10,171 shows the Apostle’s readiness to obey even to the point of suffering, adopting a state of penitence, ‘un changement de cœur renouvelé par une impression de grace & d’amour’172 (‘a change of heart, renewed by an imprint of grace and love’). Singlin explains that when Christ asks Paul to rise and enter the city, it is a command to enter ‘dans le fond de nostre cœur pour voir tout ce qui s’y passe’ (‘into the bottom of our heart in order to see everything that goes on there’).173 In short, the true convert remains blind to the world while contemplating God’s secrets in the depths of his or her heart.174 This shedding of agency and assumption of a new and unworldly form of vision is the sine qua non of Port-Royalist conversion. Singlin’s instructions on the Annunciation add further dimensions to this vision and offer yet another model to emulate. The preacher sets the scene with verve. Mary has withdrawn into her chamber where she is occupied with secret and silent mediation on saintly matters.175 Enter Gabriel, whose greeting, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’, acknowledges that she is the summit of virtue in her perfect humility.176 In her response to this angelic address, she shows herself a model recipient of divine grace as she accepts unhesitatingly the great mystery that God has chosen her to be the mother of his Son without losing her virginity, and quoy que cette merveille parût entierement incroyable & incomprehensible à toutes les pensées des hommes, neanmoins elle s’est contentée de se soumettre absolument à sa divine volonté, adorant les secrets de sa sagesse qu’elle ne pouvoit penetrer, & se contentant de suivre ses ordres avec une prompte & fidéle obéïssance.177 170  Ibid. 171  Ibid. 704. Paul’s retelling of his conversion in Acts 22 adds an immediate submissiveness which is absent in the first rendering of Acts 9. 172  Ibid. 706. Singlin expands this point into a section on ecclesiastical ministry which is, however, not pertinent to our argument. 173  Singlin, “Instruction Pour le Jour de la Conversion de Saint Paul: Seconde instruction”, in Instructions Chrestiennes I 710–716, esp. 714. 174  Singlin, “Instruction Pour le Jour de la Conversion de Saint Paul: II” 715. 175   Singlin Antoine, “Instruction pour l’Annonciation de la Vierge: I”, in Instructions Chrestiennes II 757–766, esp. 758. 176  Ibid. 758–761. 177  Ibid. 762.

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although this marvel appeared unbelievable and incomprehensible to human thought, she nonetheless contented herself with submitting completely to the divine will behind it, worshipping the secrets of its wisdom which she could not penetrate and contenting herself with following its orders with unhesitating and faithful obedience. The feast of the Annunciation inspires not only a celebration of Mary’s docile humility and her conception of Christ, but also a meditation on the daily conception of Christ in the believer: Car il est vray qu’il n’est né spirituellement & corporellement tout ensemble que dans la sainte Vierge. Mais il naît encore tous les jours spirituellement dans chacun de ses membres […]. Afin que Jesus-Christ se forme dans nous, il faut qu’il y soit conçûauparavant.178 For it is true that he is only born both spiritually and physically in the Virgin. However, he is born spiritually everyday still in his members […]. In order that Jesus Christ be formed in us, he must first be conceived there. In her communication with the Archangel, the Virgin ‘a témoigné […] une parfaite simplicité’179 (‘demonstrated a perfect simplicity’). Singlin contrasts this simplicity with Eve’s curiosity, thus underlining the sense of focus and resistance to deviation to the notion of ‘simplicité’ that we met in Saint-Cyran. Mary invites scrutiny, and Singlin draws on Ambrose as he states that ‘des moindres gestes de son corps, qu’elles ont esté comme la figure & le tableau de la sainteté de son ame’180 (‘the slightest movements of her body were like the figure and the painting of the saintliness of her soul’). He explains this saintliness as a double disposition of ‘un abbaissement continuel devant Dieu, & un aneantissement de tout ce qu’elle estoit’ (‘a continuous debasement before God and an annihilation of everything that she was’), and from this first disposition emerged the second, ‘un silence interieur, & une attention à JesusChrist residant dans son sein, pour donner lieu aux operations secrettes de sa grace dans son ame’181 (‘an interior silence and an attention to Jesus Christ, 178  Ibid. 764. 179  Singlin, “Instruction pour l’Annonciation de la Vierge: Seconde instruction”, in Instructions Chrestiennes II 766–776, esp. 767. 180  Singlin, “Instruction pour les Quatre-Temps de Noel”, in Instructions Chrestiennes I 85–97, esp. 87. I have not been able to locate the Ambrose reference. 181  Ibid. 85–97, esp. 87.

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lodging in her womb, [which served] to make space for the secret operations of his grace in her soul’). Singlin’s third instruction on the Annunciation is dedicated to the state in which Gabriel found Mary. Withdrawal is her first quality, and again Singlin turns to Ambrose to depict her: Elle est seule, […] dans le secret de son cabinet, elle est seule sans aucune compagnie, & c’est en cét etat qu’elle est saluée par l’Ange.182 […] Puis donc que la sainte Vierge est nôtre modéle, la premiere chose que nous devons apprendre d’elle, est l’amour de la retraite.183 She is alone, […] in the secret of her chamber, she is alone without any company, and it is in this state that she is greeted by the Angel. […] Thus since the saintly Virgin is our model, the first thing that we must learn from her is the love of retreat. Mary teaches the proper motives for retreat. Wanting to read undisturbed does not qualify: nor does the wish to avoid other people. Retreat should be prompted only by the preference for God’s company over human company,184 and Singlin commands his audience to follow the Virgin’s model: to withdraw from the world and to preserve in secrecy the grace that God may offer.185 Apart from solitude, the Virgin teaches believers to see the greatness of Christ behind his humble appearance and to look at worldly splendour with a sancta superbia, a saintly pride, that disregards what falsely allures and seeks instead eternal glory. This she can do because ‘elle voyoit toutes choses par un œil qui ne considere point […] les choses visibles, mais les invisibles’186 (‘she saw everything with an eye that does not see […] the visible, but the invisible things’). When believers turn this gaze towards themselves, they see that they owe everything to God and nothing to themselves: this is true humility, to ‘reconnoitre que de luy-même il n’est rien, & qu’il ne tient que de Dieu tout ce qu’il possede’187 (‘recognize that they are nothing by themselves and receive 182  Singlin does not give a reference, but his translation seems to paraphrase a section from Ambrose’s Expositio euangelii secundum Lucam II. 183  Singlin, “Instruction pour l’Annonciation de la Vierge: Instruction III”, in Instructions Chrestiennes II 777–786, esp. 779. 184  Ibid. 780. 185  Ibid. 781. 186  Ibid. 782–783. 187  Ibid. 785. The connection between humility and self-knowledge is not particular to Port-Royal, but is rehearsed here with ardent specificity. For a discussion of the role of

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only from God what they have’). All this the Virgin teaches by her model behaviour at the Annunciation, and in order to understand what this Feast is about, we have only to ‘jetter les yeux sur la sainte Vierge, la considerant autant que nous pourrons comme la regle & le modèle de nôtre vie’188 (‘cast a glance at the Virgin, considering her as much as we can as the rule and the model of our life’). Singlin’s invitation is not simple. He urges his audience to study the Annunciation, and while referring to the Virgin in two-dimensional terms, as image and painting, invites them to enter her body, envisaging the life that is commencing there in order to recognize it in themselves – should God bestow it. Humility is the hinge. No mere exterior attitude, humility is a deep, cognitive process that rests on knowledge of oneself as unworthy and completely dependent on divine grace. In these instructions, Singlin offers concrete embodiments of Saint-Cyran’s ideal of the renewed heart and its spiritual gaze, and the soteriological mystery that underlies it. If Paul, blinded and thrown to the ground in debasement, was the image of conversion, and Mary portrays the ideal of responsive humility in her place of retreat as she conceives the Word of God, the Magi are the model spectators.189 The Magi personify faith, for while a preacher can persuade through words and verbal responses to doubts and queries, they followed ‘une étoille dans le ciel, est un objet muet, qui ne parle qu’à nos yeux, & qui ne peut appaiser nos doutes’ (‘a star in the sky [which] is a silent thing that only speaks to our eyes and cannot appease our doubts’).190 While they looked at this star, however, a new light formed in their interior qui les ait persuadez pleinement des veritez que cette étoille leur annonçoit, comme n’estant qu’un signe exterieur de la lumiere interieure

self-knowledge in seventeenth-century culture, see Moriarty M., Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (Oxford: 2006) 275–315. 188   Singlin, “Instruction pour l’Annonciation de la Vierge: Quatriéme instruction”, in Instructions Chrestiennes II 786–794, esp. 786. 189  Singlin begins his instruction for Epiphany by introducing the Nativity as the beginning of all mysteries and the Epiphany as its consummation. Much as this makes sense in terms of the liturgical context, it is motivally meaningful to add the Annunciation to this constellation; see Singlin, “Pour le Jour des Rois: Premiere instruction”, in Instructions chrestiennes I 261–273, esp. 261–262. See, for example, Singlin’s comment that the Annunciation is the very source of the Nativity and thus the origin of all mysteries and the fulfilment of all prophesies; see Singlin, “Instruction pour l’Annonciation de la Vierge: I” 757. 190  Singlin, “Pour le Jour des Rois: I” 263.

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& invisible, qui a penetré le fond de leurs ames. C’est ainsi que doit estre nostre foy […].191 which completely persuaded them of the truths that this star conveyed to them so that it was nothing but an exterior sign of the inner and invisible light that had penetrated the depth of their souls. This is how our faith should be […]. This exterior light of the star, Singlin adds, ‘n’étoit que l’image de cette autre lumiere invisible & interieure, par laquelle il leur a ouvert les yeux du cœur, selon le langage de saint Paul, illuminatos oculos cordis vestri’192 (‘was nothing but the image of this other invisible and interior light by which he opened the eyes of the heart, according to Saint Paul’s words: with the eyes of your heart enlightened’). Singlin concludes this passage with a hearty encouragement to be like the Magi, ‘Ne perdons point de veüe l’étoille dont il nous éclaire. Voyons les choses invisibles & ne voyons plus les visibles’193 (‘Let us not lose sight of the star with which he enlightens us. Let us see the invisible things and no longer the visible’). Having arrived before the Infant Christ, the Magi show the ideal form of worship, silent and humble: ‘Ils ne luy parlent que du cœur qui est la langue de Dieu’194 (‘They only spoke to him with their heart which is the tongue of God’). The Magi’s prostration (cf. Mt 2:11) signifies their humble imitation of the humble appearance of the Infant,195 and all the believer can do is signified in their three-fold offering: the gold of external qualities, the incense of the elevation of the soul toward God, and the myrrh of mortification and penitence.196 We cannot know whether Chavigny brought home the lesson and, in his chapel at the Hôtel de Chavigny, complied with Singlin’s instruction to study, in the insightful manner of the Magi, the model of his own renewal in the humility of the Virgin. We cannot know whether, looking at his painting, he contemplated the possibility that God in his infinite grace might bestow upon him conversion and make him conceive Christ spiritually, or whether he was inspired to silent prayer of the heart by the sight of Mary’s encounter with 191  Ibid. 264. 192  Singlin, “Pour le Jour des Rois: Troisième instruction”, in Instructions Chrestiennes I 287– 297, esp. 289, with reference to Eph 1:18. 193  Singlin, “Pour le Jour des Rois: I” 267. 194  Singlin, “Pour le Jour des Rois: Seconde instruction”, in Instructions Chrestiennes I 274–287, esp. 285. 195  Singlin, “Pour le Jour des Rois: III” 296. 196  Singlin, “Pour le Jour des Rois: II” 285–286.

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Gabriel. Any of Champaigne’s three Annunciations identified as the painting from the Hôtel de Chavigny could have supported such messages. They could have offered to Chavigny a mirror of what he ought to be and, indeed, what the mystery of the Incarnation might enable him to be. Whichever picture it was, the sheer motif of the Annunciation would have served to represent the ideal devout in her retreat, alone with God’s messenger, communicating intensely with words, with gestures, and in silence, thus personifying the silent prayer that was prescribed by Saint-Cyran in Le cœur nouveau and by Singlin in his instructions. 6

The Private Chapel Revisited

This contemplation would have been framed by Chavigny’s chapel. Was it a locus of prayer, a locus of retreat, and a locus of intensified communication with God – or a cramped stage for lightweight devotion? Did he associate his private oratory with the Virgin’s chamber, as suggested by Suffren? Did he forge a particularly strong bond between the Virgin and his domestic space, as suggested by modern scholars? As we have seen, the Annunciation and the Nativity were favourite motifs in grand-siècle private oratories.197 Scholars have suggested that paintings of the Annunciation located in a domestic setting such as Mary’s chamber were particularly fitting for a private chapel. Based on her study of the new domestic iconography emerging in Annunciations of fifteenth-century Netherlands, Nuechterlein finds that the domestic context turns Mary into ‘a pious housewife, reading quietly at home when Gabriel appears to her’.198 Closer to our chronological focus, Garnot points to the presence of a fireplace with a nestling cat as elements of a familiarly domestic 197  Gonçalves even argues that it would be surprising to see an Annunciation in a parish church; see Gonçalves, Philippe de Champaigne cat. 3, 15. See, however, the list of Annunciations in parish churches of Le Mans, in Ménard, Une histoire 190–195. 198  Nuechterlein J., “The Domesticity of Sacred space in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands”, in Hamilton S. – Spicer A. (eds.), Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Farnham: 2006) 49–79 (55); see also LeZotte A., “Mary Magdalene and the Iconography of Domesticity”, in Erhardt M. A. – Morris A. M. (eds.), Mary Magdalene, Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Leiden: 2012) 383–397, esp. 385– 396. Reindert Falkenburg, in his fresh look at Panofsky’s iconographical reading of the various fifteenth-century Annunciations, shows how, when viewed against the backdrop of contemporary devotional literature, the domestic utensils and everyday artifacts displayed in Campin’s Merode Triptych encourages the viewer to prepare her soul for Christ’s entry; see Falkenburg, “The Household of the Soul: Conformity in the Merode Triptych”, in Ainsworth M. (ed.), Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads: A Critical Look at

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character, in his argument that the Montrésor Annunciation best fits within the alleged intimacy of Chavigny’s private chapel.199 However, this domestic perspective does not seem applicable to the Hôtel de Chavigny; nor, I suggest, to seventeenth-century private oratories more generally. On the one hand, the grand-siècle Mary is not domestic. Indeed, one of her key features is the power to convert, if need be, with force; and the early modern Mary has a militant streak that accords with her victorious association with the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and with patronage of campaigns waged against heretics and unbelievers.200 Her attributes are not primarily those of home and family, and it is her exemplary chastity and humility that are presented as models of imitation for individual men and women. On the other hand, as we have seen, the private oratory or chapel is, ideally, not quite domestic either. Conflation of the chapel and the rest of the house is considered an abuse, and the candlesticks, vases, cushions, and other paraphernalia mentioned in inventories for private chapels,201 rather than fostering an impression of ‘homeliness’, are remedies to sustain and enforce devotional concentration.202 Current Methodologies (New York: 2001) 2–17. See also the discussion of Falkenburg in LeZotte, “Mary Magdalene” 385–386. 199  Garnot, “Philippe de Champaigne” 399. On the increasing importance of the setting of Annunciation scenes from the fourteenth century onward, see Robb D. M., “The Iconography of the Annunciation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”, The Art Bulletin 18.4 (1936) 480–526 (485). Compared to late medieval antecedents, Champaigne generally reduces the furnishings of Mary’s chamber to a bare minimum. 200  To mention but two grand-siècle examples, the Jesuit François Poiré describes the Virgin as a determined champion against all forms of heresy, from Arius and the Albigensians, to Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin; see Poiré, La triple covronne de la bien-hevrevse vierge Mere de Diev (Paris, Sébastien Cramoisy – Gabriel Cramoisy: 1630; reprint ed. 1656) 400–401. Cf. Condren’s prayer of greeting composed for Marian feasts: ‘Rejoüissez-vous Marie, toûjours Vierge! Parce que vous avez détruit, vous seule, toute les heresies dans tout le monde’ (‘Hail be to you, Mary, ever Virgin! Because you have destroyed all heresies in the whole world’); see Condren Charles de, Saintes instructions pour la conduite de la vie chrestienne, dressées pour une personne de grande qualité (Paris, M. Le Petit: 1671) 343. For more examples, see Bruun M. B. – Havsteen S. R. – Nagelsmit E. – Mejrup K. – Nørgaard L., “A Marvellous Model of Female Conduct: Judith in Seventeenth-Century France”, Transfiguration 2014 (publ. 2018) 9–64, esp. 23­–28. 201  See, for example, the inventory for Mme de Guise’s chapel in her palace in Alençon, ADO, inv. H 192. I owe a debt of thanks to Eelco Nagelsmit for his insights regarding this inventory. See also the description of chapel furnishings in Hillman, Female Piety 87–91. 202  See Laven M., “Devotional Objects”, in Avery V. – Calarescu M. – Laven M. (eds.), Treasured Possessions: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: 2015) 239–244; and Fairchilds C., “Marketing the Counter-Reformation: Religious Objects and Consumerism in Early Modern France”, in Adams C. – Censer J. R. – Graham L. J. (eds.), Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France (University Park: 1997) 31–58.

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I would instead argue that the close connection, even resemblance, between representations of the Annunciation and the private oratory resonates with the ideal of retreat that was so central to grand-siècle devotion, and which, as Singlin reminds us, produced, in the sense of framing and fashioning, the convert. 7

A Private Mystery: Concluding Remarks

When Chavigny commissioned Champaigne to paint an Annunciation for his new chapel, he abided by social codes and familial patterns. These were norms pertaining to patronage, trends, and appearance, but they were also tinged by the call for sincere conversion, retreat from the world, and deep contemplation of humility and divine grace. Chavigny’s directors encouraged the count and his peers to see the Annunciation as a representation not only of the mystery of the Incarnation, but also of the mystery of conversion, and Champaigne’s visual image thus set before Chavigny’s physical and spiritual eyes the contours of a radical, but intangible challenge. It showed the incarnational meeting between Heaven and Earth; it staged Mary’s chamber as the locus of withdrawal and communication with God; it portrayed her, in her radical humility and her conception of Christ, as a figure of identification; and it hinted at the embryonic shape of the new heart of a convert. The example of Chavigny reveals a system of devotional zones, established across a broad array of materials, media, and genres: the Hôtel de Chavigny, its chapel, Champaigne’s Annunciation, the Virgin’s womb, and the new heart conceived in the convert, are on a continuum and yet are distinct devotional spaces. On the horizon hover the court, the Château de Chavigny, and PortRoyal, as well as other religious institutions. These zones, which we have seen to revolve around the Annunciation at the Hôtel de Chavigny, constitute a micro-cosmos of their own, but they also exemplify the devotional temper of mid-seventeenth century France and the more or less explicitly material, spatial, and spiritual circumstances that embed grand-siécle representations of the mysteries of faith. Centering on the elusive figure of Léon Bouthillier, Comte de Chavigny, who navigated these zones – perhaps with fluctuating success – this example, for all its open questions, yields a glimpse of the grand-siècle believer, spurred on by political ambition, disciplined by zealous directors, and scrutinized by various and sundry observers. Chavigny possibly epitomizes the gaze that devotional instructors taught their protégés to apply when considering the mystery of the Annunciation – a gaze expressive of faith, that shuns the visible in favour of the invisible, that strives for self-annihilation

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and acknowledges the need for God’s grace, and that converts spiritual insight into silent prayer. Perhaps Champaigne’s Annunciation for Chavigny’s chapel at the Hôtel de Chavigny helped to shape this gaze. Bibliography Sources

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Index Nominum Abelard, Peter 475 Abgar V (King of Edessa) 327 Abraham, Patriarch (= Abram) 40–41 Aelred of Rievaulx 282 n. 59, 473 Agag, King 559 à Kempis, Thomas 338 n. 48, 339 n. 54, 355 n. 4 Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus) 69, 233, 241, 321 Alcuin of York (Ealhwine) 84 Alexander of Hales 70 Allegambe, Philippe de, S.J. 533 n. 1, 538 n. 11 Amalar, bishop of Trier and Lyon 84, 202 Amalarius of Metz see: Amalar, bishop of Trier and Lyon Ambrose, Aurelius, Saint and Bishop of Milan 40, 71 n. 45, 162, 641–642 Angelico, Fra 416, 458 Angélique Arnauld 611 n. 23, 612, 615 Anguissola, Sofonisba 309–310 Anna, mother of Mary 142, 146 Anne d’Autriche 609, 621, 627–628, 629 n. 137 Anne de Rohan-Guéméné 611 Anne Phélypeaux 610, 625–626 Antiochus IV Epihanes, King 32 Antoine Singlin 611, 612 n. 28, 614–615, 619, 625, 633–634, 637 n. 160, 639–645, 647 Antonio Draghi 187 Aquinas, Thomas, Saint 70, 320, 411 n. 26, 441 n. 18, 475, 514 Aristotle 115 Armand Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu 607–609, 627 Arsenius, Saint 356, 360 n. 12, 372–376, 380, 390 Aubigné Françoise d’ (Madame de Maintenon) 356, 360, 373, 380–383, 386, 388–391 Audran, Gérard 591 Augustine of Hippo, Aurelius, Saint 3, 8, 17, 20, 47, 90, 126–133, 232–234, 243–244, 253–254, 256, 259, 271, 424, 508, 514, 538, 547, 590, 637 n. 160

Aurelius, Cornelius 499 n. 12, 506 Ausanius, Saint (Raitenhaslach) 164, 181 Baldwin III (King of Jerusalem) 341 Baldwin of Canterbury 69 Bale, John 114 Barberini, Francesco 140 Barocci, Federico 394–425 Bede, Venerable, Saint 474, 559 Bellarmine, Robert, S.J. 50, 533 Bellori, Pietro 403, 409, 414 Beninus, Saint (Steingaden) 167, 175 Bernard Gui 70 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint 17, 355 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 145 Beza, Theodore 136 Bias of Priene 562 Boendale, Jan van 203–204, 206, 224 Boethius 509, 524 Bonaventure 16, 69 n. 40, 504 Borgia, Francis, Saint 313 Borja, Juana de 313 Borromeo, Charles 170 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 367 n. 32 Bourghesius, Joannes, S.J. 12 Bretón, Juan 311 Bridget of Sweden 465, 505 Bruno of Segni (Abbot of Montecassino) 333–334 Bulloys, Jan van 201 Busaeus Noviomagus, Petrus 8, 12 n. 15 Caesarius of Heisterbach 72 n. 49 Cajetan, Thomas de Vio 131, 136 Calderón, Francisco 305–306 Calvin, John 105–123, 136, 646 n. 200 Campin, Robert (sometimes identified with the Master of Flemalle) 251 n. 83, 645 n. 198 Canisius, Petrus, S.J. 8 Canter, Jacob 505–507 Caranza, Sanctius 131 Carducho, Bartolomé 312 Carducho, Vicente 292, 294–295, 302–303, 305, 310, 312, 315

658 Catherine of Siena, Saint 303 Caxton, William 446, 448, 452 Champaigne, Philippe de 51, 598–599, 606–648 Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes 611 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 309 Charles VIII (King of France) 446 Charles V (King of France) 329, 364 Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency 628 Chertsey, Andrew 446, 450 Choisy, François-Timoléon de 354–391 Christ 57–58, 61–63, 65–66, 68, 71–74, 76–78, 200, 203–204, 206–214, 217, 221–222, passim Ciamberlano, Luca 398 Cicero 505 Cimabue (Cenni [Benciviene] di Pepo) 304 Claude Bouthillier 607, 610, 620 n. 69 Claude de La Croix 622 n. 87, 623–624 Claude Lancelot 610 n. 17, 611 nn. 19, 21, 23, 616–617 Clemens, Saint (Sandizell) 165–166, 181–182 Clement V, Pope (Raymond Bertrand de Got) 343 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 591 Concordia, Saint (Raitenhaslach) 164, 181 Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, Jacob 412 Correggio (Antonio Allegri) 406, 412, 419 Courcillon, Louis de (the abbot of Dangeau) 363 n. 15 Curopolita, Johannes 30 David, Jan, S.J. 12, 14–16, 18–20, 23–25, 27, 29–44, 50–51, 533–578 David (prophet and king) 200, 251, 364, 373 n. 44, 378, 520 De Hondt, Christaan 244 Delft, Dirc van 206, 499 n. 12 Denderis 30 Denys the Carthusian 505, 509 De Piles, Roger 593, 597 n. 29 Desiderius, Saint (Kollbach) 170 de Villenor, Robert 66 de Worde, Wynkyn 446, 448, 450, 452–454 Dionysius, Saint (Geisenfeld) 164 Domenichino 584, 589 n. 20, 598 n. 33 Donatus 84, 508 Durand, Guillaume (William) 45, 83–98, 103, 202–203, 212, 237 n. 35, 279 n. 50

Index Nominum Durandus of Saint-Pourçain 126 Edelinck, Gérard 593 Emperor Leopold I 186 Erasmus, Desiderius 46, 125–131, 136, 149–150, 505–506 Escurial, Diego del 311 Estefanía de la Encarnación, Sor (Estefanía Gaurre [or Guari] de la Canal) 48, 292–315 Estius, Guilielmus 125, 133, 135–136, 139, 147 Eugene IV, Pope (Gabriele Condulmer) 126 Eustache Le Sueur 628 Eyck, Jan van 230 nn. 7, 9, 237–244, 245 n. 63, 247–251, 344 Ezechiel, Prophet 548–550, 553 Faustinus, Saint (Erbendorf) 170 Félibien, André 599, 627 Felix, Saint (Gars am Inn) 176 Felix, Saint (Hahnbach) 154, 164 Fernández, Gregorio 312–313 Fortunata, Saint (Raitenhaslach) 164, 181 Francesco Maria II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino 396 Francis of Assisi, Saint (= Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone) 30–31 Francisco Suárez 192 Frants, Hyacinth 164 Fréart de Chantelou, Paul 142, 582 Gabriel (Archangel) 383, 385–386, 388, 469, 472 n. 26, 474, 607, 632–633, 640–642, 645 Galle, Cornelis 537 Galle, Theodoor 537 Gaston d’Orléans 607, 609, 611 Gaurre (or Guari) de la Canal, Estefanía see: Estefanía de la Encarnación, Sor Geminus, Saint (Munich) 171 Gentileschi, Artemisia 308 Gerald of Wales 72 n. 49 Gervasius, Saint 162 Giambattista Martini 185 Giotto di Bondone 304 Giovanni Felice Sances 46, 187 Giovanni Tiepolo 192–193, 194 n. 21 Godeau, Antoine 587, 620 n. 72, 622 nn. 84, 85, 623 n. 90

Index Nominum Godefroi Hermant 609 n. 11, 611, 616 n. 48, 619 n. 63 Goes, Mathias van der 209 n. 48 Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, Cristóbal see: Uceda, Duke of Gondomar, Count of (Diego Sarmiento de Acuña) 300 n. 32, 313 Gonzaga Eleonora 186–187 Gorgias Epirota 561 Gossaert, Jan 244 Goude, Gerrit van der 212–219, 221–224 Gregory the Great, Saint 61, 158, 221 n. 77 Groote, Gerard 354 n. 2 Guibert of Nogent 69 Guicciardini, Ludovico 255 Guillaume (Bishop of Acône) 343, 349 Guillaume Du Gué de Bagnols 612 Guillet de Saint-Georges, Georges 584, 587, 620 n. 70 Hadrian, Roman emperor 525 Herp, Hendrik 209 Hessels van Est, Willem see: Estius, Guilielmus Honoratius, Saint (Vilsbiburg) 169 Horace (Horatius), Quintus Flaccus 537, 551, 603 Hostiensis see: Segusio, Henricus de   Hugh of Saint Victor 16–17, 18 n. 21, 72 n. 49, 233 n. 21, 441 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint (= Iñigo López de Loyola) 3 Innocent III, Pope 84 Isaac, Patriarch 40, 251 n. 80 Isabel de Valois, Queen of Spain 310 Isaiah (Jesaja) 142, 200, 385 Isidore of Seville 114 n. 59, 321 n. 11 Jabach, Everhard 580 Jacob, Patriarch 34, 38 James the Greater, Saint 26–27, 36, 441 n. 20 Jean-Baptiste Noulleau 617–619, 626 Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran 610, 616 n. 50, 637 n. 162 Jean Gerson 70, 355 n. 4, 535–536 n. 3 Jean II of Brienne, Count of Eu 441, 443 Jean-Jacques Olier 612

659 Jeanne, Countess of Guînes and Eu 49, 437, 441, 443, 453 Jeanne de Schomberg, duchesse de Liancourt 612, 625 n. 103 Jean Richard 622, 623 n. 94, 624–625 Jean Suffren 620–621, 624 n. 100, 645 Jerome, Church father 88, 128, 135, 506, 549 Jesus see Christ Joachim, husband of Anna and father of Mary 142, 146 Job, Prophet 544–545, 563 Johannes Dominici 58 n. 4 John Beleth 69 John Moschus 58 n. 4 John Peckham 71 John, Saint and Evangelist 26–27, 34, 36, 38, 45, 128, 130–131, 136, 139, 147, 149–150 John the Fearless 342 John the Good (King of France) 364 Jorhan, Christian 176 Joseph, husband of Mary 141–145, 149, 178 n. 45, 256, 469, 474, 514, 601 Jouvenet, Jean 383, 385–386 Jovinian 128 Jules Raymond Mazarin 609 Julius, Saint (Indersdorf) 164 Koberger, Anton, publisher 231 n. 10 Kurz, Maximilian Emanuel 165–166, 181–182 La Beaumelle, Laurent Angliviel de 360 n.10 Lambert le Petit 437 Lapide, Cornelius a 125, 133, 136, 138–140, 414, 590, 600 Laurent, Frère 431 n. 1, 434–435, 453 Laventurier, Martin 64–65 Le Brun, Charles 51, 580–604 Lee, Edward 131 Leeu, Claes 504 Leeu, Gerard 47, 199–201, 203, 209–210, 494, 501, 504–507, 518, 519 n. 56 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques 127 Leffelleuthner, Bertrandus 175–176 Le Moyne, Pierre 380 n. 61, 624 n. 101 Léon Bouthillier, comte de Chavigny  51, 606, 607 n. 4, 631 n. 138, 647 Lerma, Duke of (Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas) 294, 298, 312–313

660 Lombard, Peter 59, 126, 133, 439, 453–454, 474–475 López de Zárate, Francisco 294 López, Francisco 292, 294 Lorens, Frère see: Laurent, Frère Louis IX / Saint Louis (King of France) 364, 375 n. 49, 376–377, 379–382, 383 n. 67, 390–391 Louis XIII 609, 621 Louis XIV 356, 360, 364, 366–370, 376–377, 380, 390–391, 621 Ludolph of Saxony 3, 336–337, 355 n. 4, 487, 501, 514, 525 Ludovico Burnacini 187 Luther, Martin 8 n. 14, 106 n. 11, 136, 535 n. 3, 537 n. 10, 646 n. 200 Maíno, Juan Bautista 310 Malgaritta, Stephan 164 Manetti, Giannozzo 127 Manrique de Padilla y Acuña, Mariana see: Uceda, Duchess of Marbode of Rennes 339–340 Margarita of Austria, Queen of Spain 310, 312, 313 n. 108 Margherita Teresa 188, 190 María de Ágreda, Sor 296 Maria Theresia 621 Marie de Bragelogne 607, 610, 626 n. 113 Mariette, Jean 358–359, 361–362, 365 Marino, Giovan Battista 194, 425 n. 40 Martijn 504 Martin of Tours, Saint 31, 559, 563 Mary Magdalene 26–27, 34–35, 49, 262, 274, 330–331, 390, 394–425, 571, 634, 646 n. 198 Mary, mother of Christ 141–144, 146 n. 66, 149 Mary (Virgin) 25, passim, esp. 141, 235, 238, 243, 327, 469 Mary of Burgundy 227, 234–237 Master of 1499 244 Maurice de Sully 72 Maximus, Saint (Sandizell) 165–166, 181–182 Maximus, Valerius 561 Medici, Cardinal Carlo de 396 n. 5 Medici, Cosimo III de 396 n. 5

Index Nominum Meer, Jacob Jacobszoon (Jacobszoen) van der 209, 500, 520 Memling, Hans 255, 257 Michault, Pierre 504 Miranda do Corvo, first Count of (Henrique de Sousa Tavares) 313 Miranda do Corvo, second Count of (Diogo Lopes de Sousa) 312–313 Moretus, Jan 536 Moser, Georg 186 Moses, Patriarch 200, 552, 565, 573 Müller, Jakob 170, 177 Münchner, Franciscus Josephus 175 Munditia, Saint (Munich) 166, 174 Nadal, Jerónimo, S.J. 536 Nicolo Minato 46, 187 Nivelon, Claude 587–588, 589 n. 17, 590–591, 593, 598–603 Nocret, Jean 580, 584 Noneau, Pierre 66 Oppendorp, Catharina van 201 Orban, Ferdinand 163 Ovid 321 n. 7 Pacheco, Francisco 302–303, 310 Páez, Alonso 300–301, 304, 307–308 Paganus of Corbeil 69 Paleotti, Gabrielle 305 n. 58, 411–412 Panormitanus see: Tudeschis, Nicolaus de   Paul, Apostle, Saint 7, 20, 27, 30, 41, 126, 129, 131–132, 135, 139, 150, 263, 320, 325, 337, 416 n. 35, 419, 563, 565, 571, 580, 582–584, 587, 589–590 Paul de Barry 621 Peter of Blois 70 Peter of Poitiers 69, 72 n. 47 Peter, Saint 26–27, 36, 189–190, 193, 263, 282, 437 Peter the Chanter 69, 72 n. 47 Petrarch 505, 519 Phaethon 321, 329 Philip III (King of France) 434 Philip II, King of Spain 310 Philip III, King of Spain 294, 302, 310, 312 Philip IV, King of Spain 296, 310

Index Nominum

661

Philippe de Champaigne see: Champaigne, Philippe de Philippo Neri 621 Philips van Leyden 506 Philip the Good 250 n. 72, 342, 349 Phryne 562 Picard, Pierre 66–67 Placidus, Saint (Erding) 165, 373 n. 44 Plaichshirn, Adam 166, 181 Pliny the Elder 321 Poussin, Nicolas 125, 140–151, 580–604 Pozzo, Cassiano dal 140 Praxiteles 562–563 Prosper of Aquitania 135 Protasius, Saint 162 Pseudo-Bonaventure 3, 16 Pseudo-Dionysius 84, 128, 375 n. 49, 381 n. 62, 589 Publius Lentulus 322–324

Schongauer, Martin 349 Sébastien Bouthillier 610, 613 Segusio, Henricus de 50, 495, 497–499, 501, 506–510, 518 Seuse, Henry 525 Seversz, Jan 494 n. 2, 506 Sheba, Queen of 14, 16 Siciliano, Antonio, chamberlain and patron 244 Simon of Cyrene 274 Simons, Petrus, Bishop of Ypres 537 Snellaert, Christiaan 501, 511 n. 45 Solario, Andrea 421 Solomon, King 14–16, 364, 378, 561 Sophia, Saint 525–526 Sousa y Villena, Beatriz 312 Stephen Langton 68, 70 Stunica, Jacob 131 Surin, Jean-Joseph 374 n. 48

Raphael 584, 588, 589 n. 20 René Rapin 609 n. 11, 611–612, 619 nn. 63, 64, 625–626, 639 Richelieu, Cardinal (Armand-Jean du Plessis) 580, 607, 609, 627, 631 n. 138 Riele, Romment van den 205 Rijkel, Dionysius van 338 Robert Arnauld d’Andilly 610, 616 n. 49 Robert of Courson 72 n. 49 Robert Mannyng 73 n. 51 Rocca, Angelo 184 Roger du Plessis, duc de Liancourt 611 Rovere, Monsignor Giuliano della 396, 401 Ruusbroec, Jan van 48, 223 n. 80, 234, 333–335

Tardif, Guillaume 446 Tassi, Agostino 308 Teresa of Ávila, Saint 295, 299–300, 303, 309 Theodora, Empress 30 Theophilus, Emperor 30, 337 Theophrastus of Eresus 335 Thierry D’Alsace 341, 342 n. 69, 344, 347 n. 82 Thomas à Kempis see: à Kempis, Thomas Thomas Aquinas see: Aquinas, Thomas, Saint Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) 329 n. 28, 405–406, 424 Tudeschis, Nicolaus de 495

Saenredam, Pieter 254, 257 Samson, Judge 251, 561 Samuel, Prophet 559, 565, 568, 570 Sandoval y Rojas, Francisco Gómez de see: Lerma, Duke of Sarmiento de Acuña, Diego see: Gondomar, Count of Sarmiento de Acuña, María 313 Sarto, Andrea del 416, 419 Scarron, Paul 582–584, 588 Schedel, Hartmut, author 230 n. 10

Uceda, Duchess of (Mariana Manrique de Padilla y Acuña) 312 Uceda, Duke of (Cristóbal Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas) 313, 314 n. 115 Ulrich, Saint 102–103 Valerius, Saint (Aldersbach) 167 Vasari, Giorgio 304, 406 Velázquez, Diego 310 Venlo, Simon van 209–211, 213, 214 n. 70 Vérard, Antoine 446, 450 Veronica, St. 188, 274, 327, 329, 338, 340–341, 347, 349

662 Victorinus, Saint (Arnstorf) 163 Victor, Saint (Bad Tölz) 169 Villamediana, Alonso de 299, 303 Vliederhoven, Gerardus de 199 Weyden, Rogier van der 96–97, 219, 221, 227, 236–237, 251 n. 83, 252–254, 255 n. 94, 257, 330, 331, 444, 458

Index Nominum Wilhelm, Count Johann 396 n. 5 William of Auxerre (Guillelmus Autissiodorensis) 69, 71 Zampieri, Domenico see: Domenichino Zechariah, Prophet 553, 601