Spain’s Toledo Virgen Abridera: Revelations of Castile’s shift in Marian iconography from Medieval to Isabelline

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ABSTRACT SPAIN’S TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA: REVELATIONS OF CASTILE’S SHIFT IN MARIAN ICONOGRAPHY FROM MEDIEVAL TO ISABELLINE By Loretta Victoria Ramirez May 2016 For what secular purposes did Spanish artists absorb into Marian Immaculate Conception devotional art the attributes of the Apocalyptic Woman from the Book of Revelation? In this absorption of a traditionally active Apocalypse motif into a traditionally inactive Marian motif, were artists and patrons responding to religious, political, and cultural turmoil of multi-faith Iberian societies? I argue that a shift in Marian iconography paralleled consolidation of Castilian national identity in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. This consolidation manifests in the Virgen Abridera at the Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas, dated 1520 in Toledo, Spain. This mutable sculpture, also called a Shrine Madonna, Triptych Virgin, or Vierge Ouvrante, is an example of the tota pulchra Immaculate Conception motif, the absorption of Apocalyptic Woman imagery, and the transference in narratives from the Joys of Mary to the Sorrows of Mary—all the products of contemporary Franciscan and Spanish worldviews.

SPAIN’S TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA: REVELATIONS OF CASTILE’S SHIFT IN MARIAN ICONOGRAPHY FROM MEDIEVAL TO ISABELLINE

A THESIS Presented to the School of Art California State University, Long Beach

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts in Art History

Committee Members: Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, Ph.D. (Chair) Catha Paquette, Ph.D. Matthew Simms, Ph.D. College Designee: Karen Kleinfelder, Ph.D.

By Loretta Victoria Ramirez B.A., 1995, Stanford University May 2016

ProQuest Number: 10046237

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

ProQuest 10046237 Published by ProQuest LLC (2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346

Copyright 2016 Loretta V. Ramirez ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS On a misty morning, I was walking to the Boboli Gardens in Florence, Italy, when I turned to my travel companion, Barbara Love, to ask if she would mind if we explore down a side street to see a building façade, about which I had suddenly remembered reading. She shrugged her consent, and we traveled a few yards down a winding street. The narrow passage soon spread into a small piazza, surrounded by former palaces of Renaissance elite. While simple when compared to the city’s star attractions, the space was still so special. Here, in the stillness of morning, one’s imagination might merge with a past that was still so present, perhaps waiting all along for visitors to experience its time-capsule effect. In such experiences, I often find myself enlivened and full of pride, as I cannot help but believe that I resuscitate the past through my acknowledgement of it. When we were leaving that piazza, Barbara asked me how I had known that down some seemingly random, unmarked walkway such a space was waiting. I did not have an answer; somehow my passion for history and art transforms into a personal compass as I wander a city. This has often occurred during past trips with Barbara, my adventure buddy with whom I am fortunate to visit and travel every couple years since we graduated from Stanford. While we have known each other for a long time and transformed in parallel from teenagers to adults, I did not know how to explain my personal compass to her. I did not quite comprehend it, myself. Still, she somehow understood my silence and responded: “I think you need to pursue this. You should be iii

doing this sort of work.” This was the beginning of my art history studies, and I now credit Barbara for being another sort of compass in my life, one that always guides me to my next destination, even when I am unaware that I need a new adventure. As the airplane descended into Los Angeles, I lifted the cover of my window. The plane was passing the Hollywood Hills, and my eyes landed on the travertine sprawl that is the J. Paul Getty Center. Within a year, I was part of the Getty’s Gallery Docent program. I am now grateful to the Getty educators, particularly Elliott Kai-Kee, for being my first art history teachers and training me to share the art experience with others. I would also like to thank my research partner and best Getty friend, Katrina Klaasmeyer. Together we studied the Getty collection and eventually embarked on conferences to present our research. Without Katrina, I never would have pursued a degree in art history. Katrina has been a constant support through the M.A. process, advising me from a source of true friendship and sincere faith in my abilities. Once in my M.A. program, I was fortunate to find another advisor who has fundamentally shaped my studies with the perfect blend of academic challenge and personal kindness. My graduate advisor and professor, Mariah Proctor-Tiffany is the most positive-minded person that I know. Yet, her optimism is grounded by a sharp mind, fully informed in the matters of which she has advised me and—perhaps most important—sensitive to my nature as a student and as a person. Because of this, I have been able to wholeheartedly trust and cherish her. I never leave her presence without a surge of motivation and concrete plans for my thesis, re-enlivened by her gracious attention. She is yet another compass in my life—not one that sets me on a known path but rather helps me create a new path, all my own. iv

I am also grateful to the various instructors who have helped me formulate my thesis. Catha Paquette is my role model of academic integrity and scholarly pursuit. She is an honorable presence and generous with her indispensable insights. Her precision with language to optimize the dissemination of knowledge will continue to influence my work for the rest of my life. I also thank Matthew Simms for the manner in which he encourages me to run free with an idea. Ultimately, it is the adventure of catching a new story that inspires me. Dr. Simms seems aware of this spirit as he contemplates my proposals and then confidently sends me to pursue my story. His faith that I can discover a new narrative, Dr. Paquette’s faith that I can hone that narrative into my most meaningful presentation, and Dr. Proctor-Tiffany’s faith that I can accumulate a lifetime of narratives into purposeful scholarship, have all given me the confidence and drive that I now present in my thesis. Before closing, however, I must thank Elizabeth Aguilera for her personal support and teachings, as well as my fantastic instructors E. Moira West who inspired me to open my mind to all art, Lora Sigler who led me to transform dreams of Spain into reality, and Julia Miller who is, perhaps unknowingly, the epitome of why I love art history. Finally, I acknowledge my family for supporting my passion for art. I include the students, staff, and faculty of the CSULB Chicano and Latino Studies Department as part of my family. My family is the core of my being—the center that is always within me, no matter the new directions or paths I travel. Thank you for being my home while I explore and learn.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .........................................................................................

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LIST OF FIGURES .....................................................................................................

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INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................

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CHAPTER 1. TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA, FIRST LAYER: OPENED YET SEALED .

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Franciscan Art ............................................................................................ The Virgenes Abrideras ............................................................................. The Immaculate Conception ......................................................................

1 7 19

2. TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA, OPENING AGAIN: ACTIVATED REVELATION ..........................................................................................

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Apocalypse Culture .................................................................................... Developments of Apocalyptic Woman Motifs in Art ................................ The Apocalyptic Tota Pulchra Immaculate Conception Motifs................

55 61 76

3. TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA, FINAL LAYER: OPENED SORROWS .....

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Borderland Art ........................................................................................... 89 The Virgenes Abrideras: Mary’s Sorrow ................................................... 108 Mary as Co-Redemptrix ............................................................................. 118 CONCLUSION: THE TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA: CLOSING ......................... 124 APPENDICES

........................................................................................................ 131

A. FIGURES ........................................................................................................ 132 B. GLOSSARY OF DISCUSSED MARIAN MOTIFS ....................................... 154 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 156 vi

LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE

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1. Virgen Abridera, the Joys of Mary, 1520, Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas, Toledo, Spain. .................................................................. 133 2. Virgen Abridera (opened), Passions of Christ, (detail), 1520, Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas, Toledo, Spain. .................................... 133 3. Virgen Abridera (opened), Passions of Christ, 1520, Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas, Toledo, Spain. .................................... 134 4. Crucifix of Saint Damian, Anonymous, North Umbria, late-twelfth century, Cappelle delle Monache, Basilica di Santa Chiara, Assisi, Italy. .................. 135 5. Crucifix, Giunta Pisano, circa 1236, Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi, Italy. .................................................................................................... 135 6. Virgen Abridera, Seven Joys of Mary (opened), circa 1270, Real Monasterio de Santa Clara, Allariz, Spain. ........................................................................ 136 7. Shrine Madonna, Trinity (opened), circa 1300, Rhine Valley, German. ......... 136 8. Virgen Abridera, Joys of Mary (opened), 1270-1280, Salamanca Cathedral, Salamanca, Spain. .......................................................................................... 137 9. Carlo Crivelli, Immaculate Conception, 1492, oil on panel, National Gallery London, England. ........................................................................................... 137 10. Francesco Francia, Immaculate Conception, circa 1515, tempera on wood, Basilica di San Frediano, Lucca, Italy. ........................................................... 138 11. Luca Signorelli, Immaculate Conception, circa 1523, oil on panel, Museo Museo Diocesano, Cortona, Italy. ................................................................... 138 12. Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Rocks, 1483-1485, oil on panel, Louvre, Paris, France. .................................................................................... 139 13. Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne, begun 1503, oil on panel. Louvre, Paris, France. ....................................................................... 139 vii

FIGURE

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14. Anonymous, Santa Ana-Triple, circa fourteenth century, polychrome wood, Dalmau Collection, Barcelona, Spain. ................................................ 140 15. Sculpture by Gil de Siloe, Tree of Jesse, late 1480s, polychrome by Diego de la Cruz, Conception Chapel, Burgos Cathedral, Spain. ............................ 140 16. Adriaen van Wesel, Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, late fifteenth century, carved oak, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. ............ 141 17. Anonymous, retablo detail: La Virgen Tota Pulchra, circa 1497, oil on panel, Iglesia del Cerco, Artajona, Spain. ...................................................... 141 18. Miguel Verger, Immaculate Conception Tota Pulchra, late sixteenth century, main portal tympanum, Mallorca de Palma Cathedral, Mallorca, Spain. ...... 142 19. Miguel Verger, Immaculate Conception Tota Pulchra (detail), late sixteenth century, main portal tympanum, Mallorca de Palma Cathedral, Spain. ........ 142 20. Canonici Apocalypse, The Woman Clothed with the Sun, circa 1320-1330, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England. ............................................ 143 21. Trier Apocalypse, Woman of Apocalypse, early ninth century, Stadtbibliothek Trier, Germany. .................................................................... 143 22. Bamberg Apocalypse, Flight of the Woman, circa 1000. ............................. 144 23. Las Huelgas Apocalypse, Woman Clothed in the Sun & Defeat of the Seven-Headed Dragon, 1220, J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. ......... 144 24. Bedford Breviary, MS Lat. 17294, fol. 567v., circa 1424-1435, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France. .......................................................... 145 25. Guariento d’Arpo, Madonna of Humility, Padua, Italy, circa 1345, J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, California, United States. .................................. 145 26. Madonna of Humility, altar, Church of Arteta, Navarra, 1325-1350, tempera on panel, Museu Nacional d’Arte de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. .............. 146 27. Jaime Serra, Madonna of Humility, circa 1360-1375, tempera on panel, Palau de Cerdaña parish church, Spain. ......................................................... 146 28. Jaime Serra, Madonna of Humility with Portrait of Enrique II of Castile And Family, circa 1366, tempera on panel, Prado, Madrid, Spain. …………. 147 viii

FIGURE

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29. Miguel Verger, Immaculate Conception Tota Pulchra (detail), late sixteenth century, main portal, Mallorca de Palma Cathedral. Mallorca, Spain. ......... 147 30. Orans Virgin, reverse: Empresses Zoe and Theodora, Constantinople, 1042, gold coin, Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Washington D.C., United States. ... 148 31. Santa Maria Mater Domini, stone icon, circa 1200, Venice, Italy. .............. 148 32. Rothschild Canticles, Saint John the Evangelist and Mulier amicta sole (Woman Clothed with Sun), MS. 404, f63v/64r, 63v., circa 1300, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, United States. ........... 149 33. La Virgen de la Esperanza, cantoral miniature, circa sixteenth century, Cathedral of Seville, Spain. ........................................................................... 149 34. Virgen Abridera (closed, with Christ Child figure, opened Trinity), midfifteenth century, Ermita de San Blas de Buriñondo, Bergara, Spain.............. 150 35. Diego de la Cruz, Virgen de la Misericordia, los Reyes Católicos y familia, 1486, Monasterio de Santa María la Real de las Huelgas, Burgos, Spain. .... 150 36. Virgen Abridera, Passions of Christ (opened), circa 1520s, Pie de Concha, Spain. ............................................................................................................. 151 37. Attributed to Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni), Double Intercession, before 1402, Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, United States. .......... 151 38. Virgen Intercesora, manuscript miniature, thirteenth century, Toledo Cathedral, Toledo, Spain. ............................................................................... 152 39. Virgin Tota Pulchra, grisaille mural, mid-sixteenth century, lower cloister, Franciscan monastery, Huejotzingo, Puebla, Mexico. ................................... 152 40. Virgin of Guadalupe, circa 1700, Mexico. .................................................. 153

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INTRODUCTION Within the Iberian Peninsula, a contested borderland between Christendom and Islam for nearly eight-hundred years, the regional church of the medieval period fostered a frontier fluidity of cultural vocabulary that was both expository to non-Christians in an attempt to bridge faiths while assertive in advancing conversion. However, a late fifteenth-century shift occurred during the restructuring of Castile’s ever-dynamic borderland art. Religious reform, a surge of education and literature, and the rapid rise to power of the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon and Sicily all spurred this change. I interpret this shift in devotional art as part of the efforts of conquest and conversion through religious iconography in Spain and its global territories during the time of Iberian unification. My primary object of focus is the 1520 Virgen Abridera, which originates in Toledo, Spain, the ecclesiastical capital of medieval to early modern Christian Iberia. Produced as a wooden triptych by an unknown artist, the Toledo Virgen Abridera, when opened, features a central panel that depicts a high relief sculpture of Mary standing with hands pressed together in prayer (Fig. 1). Surrounded by symbols of celestial and Biblical significance, Mary stands on a crescent moon that floats above a dragon. This iconography is that of the newly emerging Immaculate Conception tota pulchra motif that celebrates the belief that Mary was conceived, like her son Jesus, free of Original Sin. Further, the crescent moon and dragon allude to the Apocalyptic Woman from the x

Book of Revelation, a figure of active agency that is absorbed into late-medieval Marian art, particularly in regard to Immaculate Conception motifs. On the side panels of the opened Toledo Virgen Abridera triptych, carved biographical scenes depict the Joys of Mary, traditional to earlier examples of Virgenes Abrideras. These scenes, however, contrast with the inner narrative of the Toledo piece. By parting Mary’s hands in the central panel of the triptych, a viewer can expose Mary’s sorrow in the form of the Passion of Christ narrative (Fig. 2). This shift of narratives from joy to sorrow aligns with increased contemporary emphasis of Christ’s sacrifice and sufferings. In this way, the Toledo Virgen Abridera unfolds, in various layers, the history of Spain’s deep-rooted cult of Mary. By studying the Toledo Virgen Abridera as the extended focal piece in my thesis, I seek to explore the possible secular purposes that Spanish artists absorbed into Marian Immaculate Conception devotional art the attributes of the Apocalyptic Woman. Further, I wish to examine potential contemporary shifts in church narratives that may have led to the creation of devotional pieces like the Toledo Virgen Abridera that also absorb into their motif the Sorrows of Christ, paralleling and eventually replacing the Joys of Mary motifs. In these absorptions, were artists and patrons responding to religious, political, and cultural turmoil of multi-faith Iberian societies? I argue that a change in Marian iconography paralleled consolidation of Castilian national identity in the last decades of the fifteenth century and early sixteenth century. I propose to study, as well, the development of co-redemptrix imagery in Marian art, largely initiated by Franciscan patronage. Co-redemptrix imagery equates the role of Mary with the role of Jesus in regards to the redemption of humanity from Original Sin. xi

In the assimilation of both the Apocalyptic Woman and co-redemptrix imagery into traditional Marian motifs, devotional iconography in Spain is characterized by adaptability, allowing various manners of interpretation that might resonate within multifaith Iberian society while concurrently activating Catholic devotion. The specific society in which the Toledo Virgen Abridera was created is that belonging to the ecclesiastical capital of Spain. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, Toledo flourished, not only in regards to its influence within the church but also within political and cultural circles. Castilian monarchs favored the city and sponsored both religious and educational projects in Toledo. In particular, Toledo became a medieval center of translation as manuscripts were transcribed by the multi-faith and multilingual peoples of the city. In this atmosphere of cultural, political, and religious power, the Toledo Virgen Abridera was made for, and is still at, the Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas. This convent was created in 1459 by one of Toledo’s greatest benefactors and member of the politically powerful Silva family, Doña Guiomar de Meneses, in honor of her husband Don Lope Gaitan. Doña Guiomar’s patronage was part of the early wave of female religious revival within Toledo that would later be cultivated by Franciscan cardinal, Grand Inquisitor, confessor of Queen Isabel, and archbishop of Toledo (14951517) Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. In the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, which is the time period on which I focus, women dominated as both advisers and as recipients of new convents in the Toledo religious revival. Additionally, influential female mystics gained the support of the populace, as well as Cisneros and King

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Ferdinand, as in the case of Dominican Sor María de Santo Domingo (c.1485-c.1524) and Franciscan Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534). These female mystics, through contact with Cisneros, impacted the religious culture of Toledo. In addition, Linda Martz argues in A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo: Assimilating a Minority that the large population of single and widowed females in Toledo, which totaled 19 percent of the population by 1561, as well as the influence and example of the popular Queen Isabel, contributed to the high impact of women on Toledo’s religious establishments.1 Doña Guiomar was part of this movement in the founding of the Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas. Still functioning in the convent, the Toledo Virgen Abridera is an example of convent ideologies as well as the emerging Immaculate Conception tota pulchra motif, the absorption of Apocalyptic Woman imagery, and a shift into the Passion narrative of Mary’s Sorrows (Fig. 3). I suggest that these traits are all the products of contemporary Franciscan and Spanish worldviews. I further believe that the piece is the product of a proto-feminist environment as female mystics, patrons, and convents were wellrepresented in Toledo of this period. The Virgenes Abrideras, also called Shrine Madonnas, Triptych Virgins, and Vierges Ouvrantes, are sculptural devotional pieces of the Virgin Mary with changeable body parts. According to the extensive research by Melissa Katz, there are seventy-two documented Virgenes Abrideras, sixteen of which have their origins in Spain, including

1

Linda Martz, A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo: Assimilating a Minority (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), 89. xiii

the oldest known Virgen Abridera, dated 1270 from Allariz.2 These sculptures emphasize the mobilization of active agency, both symbolically and physically, as the devout must touch the object in order to open layers of new visions. To better engage this concept of active agency in Spain, I will consider the contemporaneous missionary efforts of the mendicant Franciscan order and the culture of multi-faith Iberian mysticism, a mysticism unique to the Iberian Peninsula as it is based on writings isolated in the region and deeply informed by both Jewish and Muslim interactions. In my study of the Franciscan efforts of conversion, I rely largely on the scholarship by Jill Webster in Els Menorets: The Franciscans in the Realms of Aragon from St. Francis to the Black Death. Webster ties the earliest Franciscan movement in Spain’s eastern territories to the Iberian reconquest, a parallel that I further develop in Spain’s western Castilian kingdoms and eventually in the realms joined through the marriage of the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel and Ferdinand.3 Further, Harvey Hames in The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century provides a framework from which I explore Iberian multi-faith religious exchanges. I argue that it is through the development of rhetorical common

Melissa Katz, “Behind Closed Doors: Distributed Bodies, Hidden Interiors, and Corporeal Erasure in Vierge Ouvrante Sculpture,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetic no. 55/56 (2009), 198. Katz lists seventy-two Virgenes Abrideras from 1250-1700, spanning Europe as well as the Americas. 2

3

The kingdom of Aragon is primarily in the eastern edge of the Iberian Peninsula and includes the Iberian islands, by the fifteenth century covering the regions of three states (Aragon, Valencia, and Mallorca) and the principality of Catalonia. The kingdom of Castile is primarily in the north and center of the Iberian Peninsula and borders Portugal. By the fifteenth-century, Castile consisted of regions of Castile, León, Toledo, Galicia, Murcia, Jaén, Córdoba, and Seville. The southern territories of the Iberian Peninsula were under Islamic rule from Granada. xiv

ground among these faiths that the Franciscans aimed to convert. This method of inclusivity resonates in the earliest thirteenth-century Virgenes Abrideras, but is later challenged by the more provocative sixteenth-century Virgenes Abrideras, such as the Toledo example, which was created in a political atmosphere of conquest and inquisition. I will demonstrate that through the Toledo Virgen Abridera church doctrine and political agendas, as interpreted by artists and patrons, imbue Marian iconography with aspects that empower both the image of the Virgin Mary as well as the devout, a member of an emerging Spanish national identity. John Edwards’s The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs: 1474-1520 and Richard L. Kagan’s Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain are two texts to which I am particularly indebted for their discussion of the dissemination of propaganda that cultivated this new national identity. Edwards offers the historical context behind the formation of Spanish national identity while Kagan provides evidence of literary propaganda that promoted a unity of vision and identity. I add to these discussions a visual analysis of religious art and propose that Marian iconography in Castile during these decades invokes the gathering of a fragmented borderland, now prepared for final battles that will open new realities for unified kingdoms. I believe that we can see this borderland art in the tota pulchra motif that the Toledo Virgen Abridera features. Detailed in my glossary of Marian motifs, the tota pulchra motif depicts the Virgin Mary who stands in prayer while symbols of her celestial and earthly power gather around her. I argue that this motif may serve a political function, as well as devotional. It is borderland art—pulling together forces for a holy crusade against the Muslim border. The tota pulchra design uses facets to define xv

and elevate the central figure. Just as the motif gathers aspects of Mary to strengthen the identity of a central wholeness, so would Castile perform a gathering of Iberian states into the wholeness of Spain. Further, Spain was forming its national identity around a religious political unit—the Catholic Monarchs.4 I believe that Isabel and Ferdinand constructed an identity that politically paralleled the tota pulchra motif. To advance my argument, I reference the scholarship of Peggy K. Liss who similarly proposes a link between Queen Isabel and the prominence of Marian iconography, particularly the iconography that utilizes imagery associated with the Apocalyptic Woman. Liss draws parallels between Isabel’s constructed narrative and that of the Apocalyptic Woman, both figures emphasizing the urgency of a holy war at the onset of historical endings. Further, Liss claims that from the start of Isabel’s reign, the queen drew upon her patron saint, John the Evangelist, often ascribed as the chronicler of Revelation, and that Isabel “associated her goals with the vivid imagery of this work.”5 Liss’s arguments enrich my own studies of the political environment of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, an atmosphere in which the Toledo Virgen Abridera was created. I propose that Spanish art of this period be considered within its unique context, in addition to within the European experience of Christendom.

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Edwards, iix. Edwards notes that Ferdinand and Isabel were labelled the Catholic Monarchs or Reyes Católicos on December 19, 1496 by Pope Alexander VI. Edwards argues that this designation formed a powerful image in defense of the political and militaristic righteousness of Spanish actions, all the way to 1936 when General Francisco Franco claimed the Catholic Monarchs’ personal emblems and designed his rebellion against Spain’s Second Republic as a “crusade.” Peggy K. Liss, “Isabel, Myth and History” in Isabel la Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays, ed. David A. Boruchoff (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 61. xvi 5

As inspiration for my study, I look to the work of Lorenzo Candelaria in his 2007 The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo, in which the author identifies an early sixteenth-century illuminated songbook manuscript, produced in Toledo under the patronage of a local confraternity. Candelaria’s study focuses on a piece temporally and geographically aligned with the 1520 Toledo Virgen Abridera. The Rosary Cantoral, acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale University in 1989, puzzled scholars who were unable to identify the songbook. Candelaria argues that lack of scholarly attention to sixteenth-century Spain and reduced emphasis on the academic training in the Spanish language may have led to many scholars not recognizing the occasional vernacular inscription in the Rosary Cantoral.6 It is with this study in mind that I now seek to analyze the Toledo Virgen Abridera, which I believe will similarly be enriched by scholarship that is focused on the regional and historical context of the piece. I, therefore, advocate the study of visual vernaculars and thus focus on the vocabulary of iconography that is particular to the Iberian Peninsula. In this way, I align my studies with those of Cynthia Robinson whose Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile is fundamental in the development of my own arguments. Robinson explores the interreligious dialogue in Iberia and the effect of such dialogue on the art of the region. However, Robinson’s primary focus is on Christological imagery, and my emphasis is the Virgin Mary. While our principal subjects may differ, Robinson and I respond to Spanish art through Castilian-specific

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Lorenzo Candelaria, The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 17. xvii

visual codes as well as through regional texts. These texts, chiefly the Franciscan writings of Ramón Llull who was active in Mallorca during the thirteenth century and Francesc Eiximenis who wrote in Aragon during the fourteenth century, demonstrate distinct religious frameworks in which Iberian art developed. Of further note is the absence of texts that were instrumental in the visualization of devotional art north of the Pyrenees, such as the Meditationes Vitae Christi and the writings of Saint Bridget of Sweden, both of which were not widely circulated in Iberia nor translated until the end of the fifteenth century.7 Thus, I maintain that Spain, in its multi-faith borderland cultures, has a distinctive medieval visual vernacular, informed by both exchange and conflict amongst Christian, Jewish, and Islamic populations—all in fragmented territories and kingdoms that are detached geographically from the cultures north of the Pyrenees. For this reason, I believe that a focus on the Virgenes Abrideras in Spain is warranted, as they served particular functions within their cultures and histories. While the Virgenes Abrideras have been studied in depth, the majority of these studies have focused primarily on the format of the art: the Virgenes Abrideras being transmutable objects that reflect medieval dynamic performance culture, that reflect the Virgin Mary’s role as opened yet sealed vessel of Christ and the church, and that reflect memory exercises of making visible an unseen. For example, in the recently published Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, Elina Gertsman studies the Virgenes Abrideras under the context of Christendom. Gertsman identifies diversity of

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Cynthia Robinson, Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile: The Virgin, Christ, Devotions, and Images in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 10. xviii

cultures within Christendom but resists narrowing her focus on one specific culture. Instead, she seeks commonalities that span primarily England, France, Germany, and to a lesser degree Spain in order to study the creation and reception of the Virgenes Abrideras. These commonalities are in the “audiences’ active, sensual involvement in the processes of beholding, the involvement that allows the viewer to be essentially constituted and reformed by the interaction with the object.”8 In this way, Gertsman ties the Virgenes Abrideras into the experiences of Christian medieval sensory absorption based on the objects’ physical functions. While I value Gertsman’s study on cognitive reaction and interaction, I believe that cognition is necessarily linked to regional impressions and sensory vernaculars. My approach also differs from that of Melissa Katz who focuses on the application of broader thematic issues to the objects. In her essay “Behind Closed Doors: Distributed Bodies, Hidden Interiors, and Corporeal Erasure in Vierge Ouvrante Sculpture,” Katz explicitly rejects the study of Virgenes Abrideras through “formal analysis, identification of regional influences, and establishment of a chronology predicated on the assumption of coherent stylistic evolution and consistent iconography.”9 While I consider regional stylistic influences, I do appreciate the apprehension that Katz holds in regards to assumptions based around stylistic evolutions. I do not advocate the argument of linear progression of styles into evolved exemplars of finished iconography.

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Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 10. 9

Katz, “Behind Closed Doors,” 195. xix

Rather, I propose that the Virgenes Abrideras be studied both in their environment and in the context of shifts in art that are in various states of progression, though not necessarily developing towards an ideal end state nor towards one fixed direction. The term “development” leads one to imagine a single path and a single goal. I do not believe that art can be linear or that pinnacles are ever reached, except perhaps on a purely subjective, personal perspective. Instead, it is my philosophy that artists and patrons produce threads that may cross time and space, and these threads may be interwoven by other artists and patrons to fit their new needs and new visions. These new visions are fundamentally created by shifts, both from within and without. The lived experience, impacted by culture—both regional and global—spur these shifts, leading to the production of new threads and their possible integration of and into old threads. This is the manner in which I view the Toledo Virgen Abridera. The piece incorporates various threads, woven into a unique expression of its time, region, and faith. The Toledo piece is the only Virgenes Abrideras that includes a new motif of the tota pulchra Immaculate Conception, the only example of an Apocalyptic Mary that stands over the defeated Apocalyptic Satan as the dragon, and the only example that intertwines the traditional narrative thread of the Joys of Mary that is found in earlier Iberian Virgenes Abrideras with the post-fifteenth-century narrative thread of the Passion of Christ—all in a double-layered tabernacle. The Toledo Virgen Abridera is, therefore, not an exemplar of any linear development, but rather incorporates various threads of motifs, some old and some new, into a particular vision that is colored by a specific environment of devotion and political unification in Spain’s crucial decades of nationforming, reconquest, and colonialism. xx

CHAPTER 1 THE TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA, FIRST LAYER: OPENED YET SEALED While the focus of this thesis is a Virgen Abridera in Toledo, Spain, housed in a convent of Augustinian nuns, and while my method is to study this piece in the context of its specific Castilian culture and political atmosphere, I begin my study with the Franciscan order in Italy. My reasoning is that a number of the motifs included in the Toledo piece relate to early Franciscan patronage of Marian art, as well as Franciscan church politics in support of the Immaculate Conception doctrine. Additionally, the first known Virgen Abridera was Franciscan and may have functioned as a royal and doctrinal model for later Virgenes Abrideras. Therefore, I start with Francis of Assisi. Franciscan Art Praying before a crucifix of the triumphant Christ at the church of Saint Damian near Assisi, Italy, circa 1200, Saint Francis entered a liminal state, an in-between space where through meditation his human reality receded into revelation. The painted Christ that was the focal point for Francis’s devotions suddenly became animated. It spoke: “Francis, go and repair my house.”10 This is the narrative behind the saint’s motivation

10

Bonaventure, Major Life of St. Francis, in St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies, ed. Marion A. Habig, trans. Behen Fahy (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), 640. Saint Bonaventure was directed by the General Chapter of the Friars Minor in 1260 to write the biography of Francis, thirty-four years after Francis’s death in 1226. In 1266 the Friars Minor declared it to be the only canonical text on Francis’s life. 1

to rebuild the Christian Church by spreading the teachings of humanity, humility, and focused devotion—teachings that in the early thirteenth century formed the foundation of the Franciscan order and took root in Spain as early as Francis’s visit to the Iberian Peninsula in 1213.11 That which Francis had been privileged to see through meditation upon the art of the crucifix, he hoped others would experience through his words.12 Eventually words joined visuals as Franciscans promoted art not only to instill the values of the order but influence church doctrines. It is my argument that in these efforts, a correlation developed between Franciscan teachings of humility and the rising prominence of Marian art. One can find evidence of Franciscan impact on devotional art by comparing crucifixions designed in Italy over a span of fifty years, during which time Saint Francis began his mendicant order. An example is the late twelfth-century Saint Damian Crucifix in the Assisi Basilica of Santa Chiara, a Christus Triumphans that features a passive,

11

Jill Webster, Els Menorets: The Franciscans in the Realms of Aragon from St. Francis to the Black Death (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1993), 20. Webster states that the date for Francis’s visit to Iberia remains uncertain, although it probably took place in 1213 or 1214. Webster references, Thomas of Celano who writes that Francis, filled with an intense desire for martyrdom, set out for Morocco. Webster proposes that Francis took a sea route to Barcelona and from there crossed the north to Burgos to obtain from King Alfonso IX of Castile, the permission required for his missionaries to enter Morocco. Webster states that Francis then intended to visit the shrine of the Apostle James at Santiago de Compostela, and probably achieved his aim before developing a long illness, leading Francis to abandon his mission to Morocco and return to Italy. Tradition has it that while he was praying at the shrine of Saint James, he became aware that he needed houses for friars in Spain. By 1215, Francis had already returned to Italy to attend the IV Lateran Council in Rome. Timothy Verdon, “Christianity, the Renaissance, and the Study of History: Environments of Experience and Imagination,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 14-18. 2 12

detached, and static figure of Christ as triumphant in death; compared to a Christus Patiens, also from Assisi but at the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli and dated circa 1236, this second crucifix reflects a more emotive environment as the figure of Christ suffers on his cross (Figs. 4 and 5). Giunta Pisano created this crucifix.13 Rooted in the earliest circle of Franciscans at Assisi, the Christus Patiens motif soon spread throughout Italy, almost completely replacing the older Christus Triumphans. This new motif emphasizing Christ’s human suffering signals a focus on emotive devotional art. In “Franciscans and the Man of Sorrows in Fifteenth-Century Padua,” William Barcham adds that the early extant examples of the Man of Sorrows or Imago Pietatis motif, which emphasizes Christ’s anguish and wounds, were also associated with the Franciscan order, likely informed by the Byzantine Man of Sorrows. This early association with the Passion in Franciscan art, Barcham argues, is in concordance with Francis’s teachings. These teachings were of poverty, humility, and penitence; the humble and naked figure of the Imago Pietatis embodies such principles and exhorts the faithful to accept suffering as a path towards redemption.14 Further discussing the application of Franciscan values to art, in his introduction to Beyond the Text: Franciscan Art and the Construction of Religion, William Cook suggests that the emergence of the

William Cook, “Introduction: The Early Italian Representations of Francis of Assisi,” in Beyond the Text: Franciscan Art and the Construction of Religion, ed. Xavier Seubert (Saint Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2013), 5. This crucifix is similar to the now destroyed 1236 crucifix that Giunta Pisano also produced for the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi on commission to Brother Elias, Minister General, friend, and confidant of Saint Francis. 13

William Barcham, “Franciscans and the Man of Sorrows in Fifteenth-Century Padua,” in Beyond the Text: Franciscan Art and the Construction of Religion, ed. Xavier Seubert (Saint Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2013), 65. 3 14

suffering Christ motif corresponds with Franciscan emphasis on lived and real experience, and that this emphasis might be considered as a precursor for the development of the Renaissance. Cook claims that the shift into Christ’s torment “represents, although not necessarily in literal detail, an attempt to recreate for viewers what it was like on that day [of the crucifixion].”15 This is a step into a more historical and realistic rendition of the crucifixion, one more closely aligned with the gospels and the events that are grounded on Earth for human redemption. I propose that this is also more closely aligned with the human figure of the Virgin Mary. In the late Middle Ages, Christ’s sacrifice was though to be through enduring the painful experience of his humanity as an Earth-bound man; his binding element to Earth was necessarily through his mother. Therefore, if the Franciscans promoted art to emphasize Christ’s lived human experience and thereby elevate the personal cost of his sacrifice, it follows that an increased emphasis developed in Marian art as a way to make more real these human experiences. Mary is the grounding force for the incarnation of Christ and, as a result, the bridge through which salvation entered humanity. The stigmata that Saint Francis received on his human hands and body could emulate Christ’s crucifixion wounds only because Mary allowed the godly to manifest in human form through her flesh. It therefore follows that, in parallel with the Franciscan development of the Christus Patiens motif, the cult of Mary strengthened in the art realm to emphasize Franciscan values of humanity.

15

Cook, 6. 4

For many medieval Christians, to share in the experience of Christ’s humanity became a goal. This is evident in the celebration of Saint Francis’s stigmata, the supreme mark of experiencing Christ’s sacrifice. Francis’s early biographer, Thomas of Celano, describes this mark in his 1229 The First Life of St. Francis: It was wonderful to see in the middle of his hands and feet, not indeed the holes made by the nails, but the nails themselves formed out of his flesh and retaining the blackness of iron, and his right side was red with blood. These signs of martyrdom did not arouse horror in the minds of those who looked upon them, but they gave his body much beauty and grace.16 Thomas continued to celebrate the viewing of Francis’s stigmata, “Glory and blessing be to the only wise God who renews signs and works new miracles that he might console the minds of the weak with new revelations and that by means of a wonderful work in things visible their hearts might be caught up to a love of things invisible.”17 This concept of tangibly manifesting the unseen became a crucial element in Marian art of the late medieval period since Mary was the conduit for the manifestation of the invisible holy in visible physical form. Further, in her role as portal between the earthly and the spiritual realms, Mary allowed for meditation a gentle focus of compassion rather than suffering. During this period, distinction between allegory and reality in the compassionate imitation of Christ’s sacrifice became less clear. This is in part due to the Franciscan

16

Thomas of Celano, The First and Second Life of St. Francis, in St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies, ed. Marion A. Habig, trans. Placid Hermann (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), 326. Thomas probably composed his manuscript as a commission from Pope Gregory IX. 17

Ibid., 327. 5

order’s emphasis on Francis’s stigmata as a physical actuality—a blessed manifestation of the invisible made visible in flesh. This blurring between meditation on Christ’s agony and the actual physical suffering of the devout led to a trend of self-imposed afflictions, as practiced through flagellation and, in some cases, self-crucifixion. In “The Monk Who Crucified Himself,” Kathryn Smith studies an extreme case of a monk literally self-inducing the injuries Christ suffered, an example of the severe emulations that eventually incited Augustinian mystic Walter Hilton and several contemporary writers to condemn meditative devotions on the Passion.18 In contrast, meditation on Mary allowed a shared experience with Christ through the safe vessel of his humanity and without the physical afflictions inspired by the crucifix. I maintain that this more temperate visual exchange with Mary further fortified and expanded Marian devotional art motifs—emphasizing the manifestation of an unseen in the seen, all in safe and benevolent humanity. This is especially relevant in the Iberian Peninsula. In Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile, Cynthia Robinson argues that in contrast to the rest of Europe, “individual, somatic, or intimate relationships to Christ established through the use of ‘personalized’ Passion imagery, whether actual or imagined, simply do not appear to have formed part of medieval Castilian devotional culture before the final decade of the fifteenth century.”19 In a later chapter, I will further explore the complex multi-faith

Kathryn Smith, “The Monk Who Crucified Himself,” in Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces, ed. Elina Gertsman and Jill Stevenson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 50. 18

19

Robinson, 6. 6

regional stimuli for Castile’s reduced emphasis on the Passion. However, as Castile and Aragon strayed from a focus on the Passion, these kingdoms of Iberia readily embraced devotional art of the Virgin Mary during the mid- to late-medieval rise in the cult of Mary, perhaps initially due to her less provocative iconography in a multi-faith society that consisted of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian exchange and often conflict. In this embrace, a tangible art manifested in Spain, the Virgenes Abrideras—a sculpture meant to be touched and moved, thus emphasizing the human physicality that the Franciscans celebrated in the stigmata of their founder and in the sacrifices that Christ bore as a human for humankind, yet without physically violent visual stimuli. The Virgenes Abrideras Regional and Temporal Traits The Virgenes Abrideras, also commonly referred to as Vierges Ouvrantes, Triptych Virgins, or Shrine Madonnas, are a form of Marian sculpture that opens like an altar triptych, and they developed between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are seventy-two documented Virgenes Abrideras according to the extensive research by Melissa Katz, who further claims that Spain is the likely origin for the sculptures.20 The oldest known Virgen Abridera is a circa 1270 polychrome ivory sculpture of approximately ten inches in height, without its base (Fig. 6). This piece resides in its original home city of Allariz and was likely created for the Second Order of

20

Katz, “Behind Closed Doors,” 198. 7

Saint Francis, the Poor Clares, who established monasteries in Spain as early as 1228.21 In Allariz, the Poor Clares received royal support in the foundation of the Real Monasterio de Santa Clara de Allariz, where this Virgen Abridera resided, probably bequeathed by Violante de Aragón (1236-1301), queen of Castile and wife of Alfonso X.22 This first documented Virgen Abridera is, therefore, a Franciscan invention patronized by royal women. Of note, Violante’s husband, Alfonso X the Wise (el Sabio), who was the son of Fernando III el Santo (sainted for his support of the Christian faith against Islam), wrote the Cantigas de Santa Maria or Canticles of Holy Mary, which records over four hundred miracles of the Virgin and hymns to Mary—all composed to music and paired with finely crafted illuminated manuscripts.23 Many of these cantigas give accounts of images or statues of Mary that become animated to perform miracles. Further, the painted manuscript pages that accompany the cantigas often depict sculptures of Mary that move, for example in Cantiga 18 where in the upper two frames of the page, Mary and the Christ Child enjoy each other’s company with cheek to cheek cuddling while at the bottom of the page Mary and the Christ Child sit upright as they enjoy the discovery of

21

Webster, 223. The first monastery of Poor Clares founded in Spain was Santa Engracia in Pamplona, circa 1228. The presence of the Poor Clares in Spain further demonstrates the strong establishment of the Franciscans in the peninsula. 22

Irene González Hernando, El Arte Bajomedieval y su Proyección: Temas, Funciones y Contexto de las Vírgenes Abrideras Tríptico (Madrid: Editorial Académica Española, 2011), 280. According to González Hernando, the legend behind the creation of the Allariz Virgen Abridera is that Enrique, the mute son of Violante and Alfonso, carved the piece and was miraculously cured of his inability to talk. 23

John E. Keller and Richard P. Kinkade, Iconography in Medieval Spanish Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 7. 8

their miracles. This connection between the literary life’s work of Alfonso X and the patronage of his wife Violante concerning the earliest known Virgen Abridera merits exploration for the commonality of their animated sculptures. Like all Virgenes Abrideras, the Allariz piece is a movable sculpture that opens to reveal inside Mary’s body cavity not human anatomy but spiritual revelation. Thus, through Mary’s physicality she gives birth to church concept; in her dual role as mother and vessel of the church, she does not open like a woman but like a portal into a spiritual realm. The revelations that Mary grants in the various examples of the Virgenes Abrideras varied geographically. The sculptures north of the Pyrenees tended to contain the Trinity (Fig. 7) while Spain produced bas-relief narrative series, as in the case of the Allariz example. Spain’s Virgenes Abrideras functioned like illuminated manuscripts, disclosing devotional images. The earliest of these Spanish narratives celebrated the Joys of Mary, replaced approximately two hundred years later in the fifteenth century with narratives of Christ’s Passion. These patterns are significant. North of Spain, Mary is the symbolic vessel of Christianity as she holds the Trinity in her body; she is the church that contains Christ’s teachings. In Spain, however, Mary at first contained her own narrative of the most exalted lived experience of devotion; yet a shift in Spain’s fifteenth-century religious culture affected the iconography of the Virgenes Abrideras. A core of sorrow, the narrative of Christ’s sufferings replaced the joy of motherhood. Toledo Virgen Abridera Produced as a wooden triptych in 1520 by an unknown artist, the Virgen Abridera of Toledo features the two levels of narrative revelations: first a reference to the earlier tradition of the Joys of Mary narrative and then Mary’s sorrow in the form of the Passion 9

of Christ narrative (Figs. 1, 2, and 3). By studying the Toledo Virgen Abridera as the extended focal piece in my thesis, I aim to examine the various shifts in Marian devotional art in the developing Spanish national identity—the move from joy to sorrow, as well as the emergence of the Immaculate Conception motif that absorbs the Apocalyptic Woman iconography. The Toledo Virgen Abridera unfolds in various layers the history of Spain’s deep-rooted cult of Mary. Like nearly all of the seventy-two documented Virgenes Abrideras, the Toledo example contains a triptych in Mary’s body; but, in addition, it is one of only three known examples that feature Mary contained in a triptych, herself, that folds to conceal her. In this layering of access, Mary limits her presence to the world. For this reason, she is a more somber Virgen Abridera than earlier counterparts such as the Allariz piece. In this way, the Toledo piece reflects the emotive piety that characterizes sixteenthcentury Spain with the consolidation of Catholic dominance over the Iberian Peninsula post-reconquest of Islamic Granada, as well as over the American colonies. While I maintain that the Toledo Virgen Abridera is an example of its local religious and political atmosphere, there is debate over the origins of the piece. Historian Balbina Martínez Caviro states that the piece was created in Italy, while Melissa Katz argues that it was indeed produced in a workshop near Toledo.24 Katz has located from the same period and region two similar Virgenes Abrideras with Mary set into folding tabernacles.25 One of these comparable examples is from Cuerva’s Convento de

24

Fernando Checa, Carolus: An Image of Renaissance Europe during the First Half of the 16th Century (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Commemoracion de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 2000), 467. 10

Carmelitas Descalzas. Both Katz and Martínez Caviro agree, however, that the Toledo piece was commissioned for use in Toledo convents. The Toledo Virgen Abridera resides in the Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas, also known as the Convent of las Gaitanas, an order of barefoot nuns still in service.26 The convent was built in 1459 to honor Don Lope Gaitan, the second husband of Doña Guiomar de Meneses whose first marriage to Alfonso Tenorio Gómez de Silva tied her to the powerful Silva family who, with the Ayala family, was the most dominant presence in the fifteenth-century oligarchy of Toledo, a city governed by local nobles and aristocrats, primarily from the Ayala and Silva houses.27 Beyond the oligarchy, Toledo was the ecclesiastical capital of Christian Iberia as the seat of the primate of the Spanish church, the site of church councils, and home to secular clerics. As Linda Martz points out in A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo: Assimilating a Minority, Toledo became a center of politics, religion, learning, and commerce, its prominence in the peninsula visually demonstrated by the 1375 Catalan Atlas in which Mallorcan Jewish cartographer, Abraham Cresques mapped Toledo as overshadowing all other landmarks of the Iberian Peninsula.28 When the Catholic

Melissa Katz, “Marian Motion: Opening the Body of the Vierge Ouvrante,” in Meaning in Motion: The Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art, ed. Nino Zchomelidse and Giovanni Freni (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 67. 25

26

Checa, 467. Checa writes that Balbina Martínez Caviró is of the opinion that this work first resided in the Toledo convent of the sisters of Sancta Mater Dei, and was later moved to Las Gaitanas. 27

Candelaria, 23.

28

Martz, 1. 11

Monarchs came into power, Toledo was still leading the peninsula in political, religious, and economic power. It was in Toledo where Isabel and Ferdinand made public their declaration of crusade against Islamic Granada in 1480.29 In 1495, Franciscan cardinal, Grand Inquisitor, and confessor of Queen Isabel, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros became prelate of Toledo in the midst of the city’s religious revival. According to Martz, Cisneros encouraged women to dominate this revival as both advisers and as recipients of new convents. Chief among the female spiritual advisers was mystic Sor María de Santo Domingo (c.1485-c.1524). Although a laywoman in the third-order of the Dominicans, María gained King Ferdinand’s support through her predictions, which corresponded closely to the king’s ecclesiastical and secular aims; as well, Cisneros became María’s confidante and sought her assistance in the reformations of Dominican establishments, including those in Toledo.30 Another female advisor to Cisneros was Franciscan mystic Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534), from the village of Cubas de la Sagra which is twenty-eight miles north of Toledo. Juana devoted herself to helping souls in purgatory after experiencing intense visions that led her to place upon her body heated stones which she believed contained the imprisoned suffering souls of those in purgatory. 31 Juana hoped that she could absorb the purgatorial

29

Lynette M. F. Bosh, Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo: The Mendoza and the Iglesia Primada (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 109. 30

John Edwards, The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs: 1474-1520 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 224. 31

Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 121. 12

heat into her own body, thus freeing the trapped souls who, once liberated, would confide in her, thus increasing Juana’s awareness of purgatory and deliverance, something that perhaps she would discuss with Cisneros during the cultivation of programs of reform and Inquisition. In addition, Cisneros consulted with Cistercian mystic Marta de la Cruz, whom Cisneros placed in 1511 into the Toledo convent of San Clemente.32 These three mystic female figures, along with the spiritual revival within Toledo that Cisneros fostered, set the stage for the most prominent mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) who founded in 1569 her convent San José de las Carmelitas Descalzas in Toledo.33 Beyond the female spiritual advisors and mystics, Toledo experienced a rise in female patronage. Martz argues that the large population of single and widowed females in Toledo, which totaled 19 percent of the population by 1561, as well as the influence and example of the popular Queen Isabel, contributed to the prevalent female impact on Toledo’s religious establishments.34 Further, popular literature paralleled the political and religious prominence of the female demographic. Jane Whetnall, in Castilian Writers, 1400-1500, discusses the first substantial printed anthology of Spanish literature, the Cancionero de Ramón de Llavia, published in Saragossa between 1484 and 1488, as an indication of feminine bias since the works selected are noteworthy in their support of traditional female interests and modern concerns: hymns on the Virgin Mary, Pérez de Guzmán’s Doctrina que dieron a Sarra (Instruction Given to Sara), Fray Íñigo de

32

Martz, 91.

33

Manola Herrejón Nicolas, Los Conventos de Clausura Femeninos de Toledo (Toledo: Instituto Provincial de Investigaciones y Estudios Toledanos, 1990), 43. 34

Martz, 89. See also Table 2.1 in Martz, 90. 13

Mendoza’s contribution to the querelle des femmes (the woman question) which was a centuries-long debate on the merits or demerits of women, and Fernán Sánchez Calavera’s “Señora muy linda, sabed que vos amo” (Most fair lady, know that I love you) which Whetnall argues is a protofeminist text in which the lady has the last word.35 In this atmosphere of religious, political, and literary feminine interests, Toledo experienced a shift in favor of female programs. Martz notes that of the twenty-two female religious foundations that are recorded as exiting in Toledo by 1650, ten were founded between 1476 and 1520, while in the same period only one new male monastery was created, San Juan de los Reyes, founded by the Catholic Monarchs. Of these ten female establishments, six were Franciscan, one Dominican, one Hieronymite, one Augustinian, and one Benedictine. As one of Toledo’s greatest benefactors, Doña Guiomar de Meneses was part of this early wave of female religious revival and civil impact. She founded the Convent of las Gaitanas, as well as the monastery of San Pedro Mártir and the Hospital de la Misericordia. In succeeding generations, the three properties remained under the patronage of the Silva family, which became even more empowered in Toledo when Doña Guiomar’s daughter from her first marriage, María de Silva, married Pedro López

Jane Whetnall, “Cancioneros,” in Castilian Writers, 1400-1500, ed. Frank A. Domínguez and Georgia D. Greenia (Detroit: Gale, 2004), 311. While there are examples of literature during the Isabelline period that exhibit a notable protofeminist perspective and offer subject matter traditionally appealing to the Castilian female demographic of readers, there are also numerous misogynist pieces, equally fueled by the presence of a powerful female queen. See Barbara Weissberger’s discussion of the Carajicomedia, a protest poem written towards the end of Isabel’s reign or immediately after her death. Barbara F. Weissberger, “Protest Poetry in Castile,” in Castilian Writers, 1400-1500, ed. Frank A. Domínguez and Georgia D. Greenia (Detroit: Gale, 2004), 347. 14 35

de Ayala, thus merging the two most influential families in Toledo.36 By the end of the fifteenth century, both Silva and Ayala families served the Catholic Monarchs as courtiers, diplomats, warriors, or royal councilors. Consequently, under the Ayala-de Silva watch, the convents of Toledo prospered, even garnering royal favor when in 1490 the monastery of San Pedro Mártir expanded through a donation of houses by the first Inquisitor General Tomás de Torquemada on behalf of Isabel and Ferdinand.37 In 1520 the Convent of las Gaitanas acquired the Toledo Virgen Abridera which has remained in that space for nearly five-hundred years, moved for exhibit only once in 2000.38 The Toledo Virgen Abridera measures approximately twenty-three by twentyseven by six inches when opened to reveal Mary in prayer. This classifies the piece as a small example, likely functioning as a portable triptych for private devotion, while larger Virgenes Abrideras sat permanently on high altars, most often inside convents.39 As I argue that the Virgenes Abrideras were cultivated during an atmosphere of mendicant Franciscan efforts, the small portable element of many Virgenes Abrideras aligns with the Franciscan practice of traveling into the world to convert and fortify their faith. Additionally, Melissa Katz theorizes that the first known Virgen Abridera from Allariz

36

Candelaria, 25.

37

Candelaria, 26. Candelaria suggests that this gift to a center of Toledo power may have been motivated by the Crown’s plan to raise support in the establishment of a tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo. 38

Katz, “Marian Motion,” 66.

Kelly Holbert, “The Vindication of a Controversial Early Thirteenth-Century ‘Vierge Ouvrante’ in the Walters Art Gallery,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 55-56 (1997/1998): 108. 15 39

was likely a portable devotional piece for Queen Violante who traveled in an itinerant Castilian court.40 This early model of only ten inches in height may have given rise to the concept of the Virgenes Abrideras as suitable for portable devotional functions. It is of note, however, that the Allariz example lacks the protective design that creates the portability of the Toledo example. Contained in an unadorned folding triptych, the Toledo piece is appropriate for travel into the community, in harmony with the tradition of mendicant efforts. While the Toledo example is from an Augustinian convent, its size and portability continues the tradition of preceding Franciscan pieces. However, it is not likely that the nuns who have continued to possess the piece since its creation traveled into the community and preached. Designed specifically for convent use, the Virgen Abridera may also be scaled in size for private devotion. For this reason, I am inclined to believe that the Virgenes Abrideras, while likely informed by Franciscan mendicant practices and itinerant courtly patterns, were products of the quieter meditative element of private devotion that led to personal revelation. According to Holly Flora, in her studies of Dominican and Franciscan nuns, the women could not imitate the traveling missionary life of Christ or Saint Francis. Flora argues that the nuns “lived out mendicant ideals such as apostolic poverty and charity imaginatively instead. By contemplating the particulars of the lives of Christ and Mary so intensely as to envision themselves as firsthand witnesses to

Melissa Katz, “The Non-Gendered Appeal of Vierge Ouvrante Sculpture: Audience, Patronage, and Purpose in Medieval Iberia,” in Reassessing the Roles of Women as “Makers” of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. Therese Martin (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 72. 16 40

biblical narratives, nuns were able to imitate the active life of the friars.”41 Accordingly, I propose that the Virgenes Abrideras are meant to incite active agency through contemplation. Layers are opened and closed, according to the progress of an individual meditative session. This emphasizes the human connection that the piece affords. Small in size, the Toledo Virgen Abridera allows this personal revelation, enhanced by physical access to an enclosed hidden space. In the Toledo convent, the Virgen Abridera remains largely out of view in the private cloisters rather than in the main chapel.42 Access to the public is allowed only by approved request. Therefore, the Toledo piece continues to function in the social context of the convent for private devotion, more so than as an art, cultural, or historical object. As a result, the piece has not been widely studied. However, the iconography of the first opened layer clearly maintains the integrity of earlier Spanish Virgenes Abrideras, featuring the Joys of Mary narrative.43

Holly Flora, “Order, gender, and image: art for Dominican and Franciscan Women,” in Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trinita Kennedy (Nashville: First Center for the Visual Arts, 2014), 73. 41

Balbina Martínez Caviro, Conventos de Toledo (Madrid: Ediciones El Viso, 1990), 381-382. 42

43

The seven Joys of Mary were especially celebrated in northeastern Spain, particularly in Catalonia and Aragón, north of Toledo. As Lorenzo Candelaria notes, “a ballad from the Llibre Vermell (Red Book), a collection of music compiled for pilgrims to the famous Black Madonna at the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat (in Catalonia) during the late fourteenth century, presents a good example of a rosary-like prayer that combines seven recitations of the ‘Ave Maria’ with meditations on her seven joys: the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Resurrection of Christ, the Ascension of Christ, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, and the Coronation of the Virgin.” See Candelaria, 75-78 for song lyrics of “Los Set Goytx” or “The Seven Joys.” 17

Closed, the outer surface of the triptych is undecorated, but when opened the outer wings of the now unfolded triptych feature the traditional Marian narrative scenes (Fig. 1). The wings’ narratives are intricately carved in boxwood, set against a backdrop of glistening feathers from exotic birds, the origins of which are unknown.44 These narratives feature the Joys of Mary: (left panel) the Annunciation, the marriage of the Virgin, the Adoration of the Magi; (right panel) the Nativity, Circumcision, and Christ among the Doctors. Thus, this first layer of the revealed triptych celebrates life and Mary’s role as the vessel that carried Christ into the world; her joys are inherently linked with the events of motherhood. This link is also emphasized in the earlier circa 1270 Allariz Virgen Abridera, as well as the Salamanca Virgen Abridera, dated 1270-1280 (Fig. 6 and Fig. 8). The Allariz example contains (left panel) two angels, Resurrection at the Sepulcher, the Annunciation; (central panel) the Coronation of the Virgin, the Ascension of the Virgin, the Nativity; (right panel) two angels, Pentecost, the Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 6). The Salamanca example retains only its central narrative panel, but this one panel reveals the same central narratives of the Allariz piece, indicating uniformity in the earliest Spanish Virgenes Abrideras. This demonstrates the popularity of the Joys of Mary motif, spanning from Allariz in the northwest reaches of Castile to Salamanca in central Castile. Further, this popularity crosses time into the Toledo Virgen Abridera; however, two hundred and fifty years later the joys focus more on Mary’s youthful moments: the preparation for bearing an immaculate conception and the

44

Katz, “Marian Motion,” 67. 18

immediate joys of early motherhood. Removed in the Toledo piece are any references to Christ’s later sacrifice in these side wings as Mary is the primary focal point. The Toledo piece not only features a shift on narratives to the youthful mother but also, in its middle panel, the Virgin’s piety is central. As a high-relief sculpture, she is in the act of undisturbed prayer with hands folded in quiet devotion rather than holding the joyous Christ Child, as in nearly all previous Spanish Virgenes Abrideras. The Mary in the Toledo piece stands alone as the sole image of devotion. This may be because in the span of those two hundred and fifty years she, herself, had been deemed by the Franciscans and other supporters, largely represented in Iberia, to be of immaculate conception, along with her son. The rise in Marian art and devotion thereby parallels the elevated status of Mary in religious doctrine. I maintain that this promotion is in direct connection to Franciscan desire to make manifest the unseen in the seen, as well as to connect with the holy in the context of a more realistic, human experience. This leads to Mary as the greatest intercessor. Thereby she increasingly becomes the primary and single focal point in devotional art, as evidenced in the Toledo Virgen Abridera’s central panel, in which she is specifically portrayed in an Immaculate Conception motif. Here, isolated from the Christ Child, Mary’s own immaculate conception is the focus. The Immaculate Conception As Anne Derbes argues in her study of the Passion narrative cycle in the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Franciscans were the most prolific art patrons of all orders, starting in the thirteenth century.45 This patronage makes sense in the context that it was

45

Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (New York: Cambridge University, 1996), 16. 19

through art that Francis received his order to repair the house of God; therefore, focused meditation upon devotional art might similarly inspire others to aid in this repair. As Franciscan art continued to develop, Franciscans undertook the mission of supporting, in particular, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as a way to impact church politics. While Franciscans valued Mary’s humanity as a bridge into the divine, they concurrently elevated her beyond the human experience. These efforts gained footing in 1476 when the feast day of the Immaculate Conception was officially approved by Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV.46 Here escalated the building of the Immaculate Conception motif in art as supporters pushed to establish their belief as official church dogma. Immaculate Conception in Doctrine and Debate The Immaculate Conception doctrine proposes that Mary is exempt from Original Sin since she was conceived through God’s celestial design rather than through human processes; just as Jesus was conceived through an immaculate conception, so too was the woman who would bear him. While the Catholic Church supported this concept through the establishment of a feast day in 1476, the debate over this proposed doctrine began in the second century.47 The first mention of the Immaculate Conception being celebrated as a local feast day in the West is in a marble calendar from the years 840-850 in Naples,

Mirella Levi d’Ancona, Iconography of the Immaculate Conception in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (New York: College Art Association of America in conjunction with Art Bulletin, 1957), 13. In 1480 Sixtus IV approved a second Office and Mass of the Conception, composed by Franciscan Bernardino de’ Busti. 46

47

Suzanne L. Stratton, The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (New York: University of Cambridge, 1994), 1. The Immaculate Conception of Mary (that of her Son was never considered as other than immaculate) was an idea that originated in the Greek Church. Its Eastern origins apparently owe much to the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, which could not have been written before A.D. 150. 20

where a colony of Greek monks likely imported the feast during relocation.48 Until then, only the Eastern Church acknowledged the doctrine, while the West largely rejected it. However, by the twelfth century, the feast had spread to parishes in England, France, the southern Netherlands, Germany, and Spain, thus prodding Western debate on the Immaculate Conception.49 This debate continued for another seven centuries. So tumultuous were these discussions that even after the 1476 recognition of the official feast day, the church avoided defining the Immaculate Conception and establishing it as official church dogma until 1854. The longevity of this debate reflects disputes from in the church, most resolutely between the Dominicans and Franciscans. However, the Franciscans, who were later fortified by the Jesuits and politically backed by the Spanish kingdoms, gained the advantage during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onward. Before that shift in advantage, Vatican leaders resisted the feast day and no major theologian supported the Immaculate Conception as doctrine until the end of the thirteenth century. 50 Saint Augustine had solidly established in the fifth century that Original Sin was inherent in all humans born from Adam and Eve. This included Mary. In the twelfth century, the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux considered the Immaculate Conception to be strictly against church doctrine. Bernard argued: “They say let the conception be also honoured that preceded the honourable birth. But what logic is there

48

d’Ancona, 11.

49

Ibid., 13.

Laurie Jones Bergamini, “From Narrative to Ikon: The Virgin Mary and the Woman of the Apocalypse in Thirteenth-Century English Art and Literature” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1985), 96. 21 50

in thinking that the conception was holy by the mere fact that it preceded the birth? The conception preceded the birth so that this should take place, not that it should be holy.51 Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order further denied the Immaculate Conception in the thirteenth century, stating that “God could have done it, but it was not befitting. … Therefore this was granted neither to the Blessed Virgin nor to anyone except Christ.”52 This maintained a distinction between the state of Jesus as the only human manifested free of sin and the less pure state of Mary who was cleansed only after the taint of sin. Such an insistence on distinction fueled much of the rejection towards the Immaculate Conception. This is evidenced earlier by Bernard’s 1140 letter to the Canons of the Church of Lyons in which he states that, “although it has been given to very few of the sons of men to be born holy, it has not been given to any to be conceived holy, so that the prerogative of a holy conception might be reserved for him alone who sanctified all of us; the only person who, being conceived without sin, cleansed all sinners.”53 Accordingly, Aquinas proposed a theory to solidify the separation between Jesus’s unique conception and that of his mother; the Theory of the Sanctification of Mary states that only when Mary’s sanctified soul joined her body in the womb of her mother Anne did, at that

51

Giovanni Miegge, The Virgin Mary: The Roman Catholic Marian Doctrine, trans. Waldo Smith (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), 113-114. 52

Hugolinus Storff, The Immaculate Conception: The Teaching of St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure and Bl. J. Scotus on the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (San Francisco: Saint Francis Press, 1925), 126. 53

Bernard of Clairvaux, Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1998), 293. 22

moment, her unborn body become cleansed of impurity, thus restoring Mary to grace. 54 Here began centuries of tensions, specifically between the Dominican and Franciscan orders, as the Dominicans defended Aquinas’s argument and opposed the Immaculate Conception even up to 1854.55 Through the centuries of debate, the Franciscans based their counter-argument primarily on the stance taken by Duns Scotus, who wrote chiefly during the late thirteenth century. Scotus proposed, “Christ was so perfect a mediator with regard to Mary that He preserved her from every actual sin, therefore in like manner from original sin.”56 He also paraphrased Thomas Aquinas, building from the Theory of Sanctification of Mary in his Scriptum Oxoniense, circa 1300. Scotus’s argument is that Aquinas was correct in discerning that Mary’s soul is the source of purity, but her soul united with her body at the very instant of generation, thus preventing Mary from ever having the taint of Original Sin. Therefore, the Dominican argument of Sanctification of Mary was restructured as a Franciscan proof to the Immaculate Conception. Scotus’s argument fueled Franciscan support of the Immaculate Conception, further alienating the Dominicans and providing a foundation for Pope Sixtus IV to finally in 1476 establish the Catholic feast day, although not the dogma, of the Immaculate Conception.

54

d’Ancona, 9.

55

Stratton, 3.

56

Storff, 126. 23

Variations in the Immaculate Conception Motifs in Art The development of the Immaculate Conception motifs in art is not linear. I do not subscribe to the practice of constructing a cohesive narrative that formulates a progressive rise to a model of distinction. Rather, I find the development of motifs to be a combination of various cultural and artistic factors in a particular atmosphere of space and time. Therefore, my discussion of the Immaculate Conception art focuses on variants built on artistic innovation as well as through the weaving of past motif threads into current and regional motif threads. This interweaving forms a potential reference to commonalities across regional borders when threads are picked up in multiple locations and times. However, my primary focus is the manner in which these threads are integrated into vernacular expressions in Iberia. In the Toledo Virgen Abridera, specifically, the central panel of the opened triptych represents the integration of the Immaculate Conception into regional frameworks. Therefore, it is important to explore previous threads of the Immaculate Conception motifs. At the time of the institutionalization of the Immaculate Conception feast day, many artists cast threads into the art world, in an attempt to help weave the visual representation of the Immaculate Conception doctrine. This took place for approximately fifty years throughout Europe during the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, contributing to a particular motif that later became most closely associated with Spain. The 1520 Toledo Virgen Abridera demonstrates this motif. For those initial decades, however, beginning in the 1470s, artists struggled to incorporate the most recent theories

24

into the development of a modern motif.57 As Charles Hope argues, issues arose in these motifs since theories behind the Immaculate Conception did not lend themselves to depictions that were self-explanatory in a visual format to a wide viewing audience.58 The most prominent problem was confusion between the immaculate nature of Christ’s conception and now that of his mother. For this reason, artists tended to isolate Mary from the Christ Child in order to clarify the focus on Mary’s own immaculate conception. This is the case of the motif in the opened first layer of the Toledo Virgen Abridera, which, in contrast to earlier Virgenes Abrideras, features Mary standing alone, no longer holding the Christ Child. Also in early Immaculate Conception art, God or the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove often appeared, thus denoting Mary’s exclusion from Original Sin. God was usually depicted extending a rod toward Mary, imbuing her with grace and distinction. In the Toledo Virgen Abridera, God floats above Mary and extends a hand in declaration, which the banner beneath him details in Latin: Tota pulchra es amica mea et macula originalis non est in te (All beautiful this is my love and original sin is not in you). This banner quotes a prayer recited during the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, celebrating Mary’s exemption from sin. However, while the 1520 Toledo piece celebrates the Immaculate Conception feast day, the establishment of the iconography of this celebration remained largely elusive in the decades preceding the Toledo Virgen Abridera. The majority of

57

d’Ancona, 15.

Charles Hope, “Altarpieces and the Requirements of Patrons,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 556-560. 25 58

Immaculate Conception artworks in this initial period relied upon scripted banners that explicitly declared the Immaculate Conception rather than celebrate it. Additionally, opened books with legible doctrine or inscriptions integrated into architectural elements were deemed necessary to inform viewers that the visuals represented Mary’s Immaculate Conception. An example is in the earliest dated painting officially and explicitly depicting the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. This example is by Carlo Crivelli, dated 1492 in Pergola, central Italy (Fig. 9).59 Immaculate Conception motifs. Crivelli’s Immaculate Conception altarpiece is a painting in oil on panel that features Mary without the Christ Child as she stands alone in meditative prayer against a gold-leafed ethereal background with, in the foreground, architectural and attribute details that surround her; above float angels, the dove, and God. While the concept of the Immaculate Conception had been in development as doctrine and art motif nearly two decades before Crivelli’s piece, earlier artworks, due to the ambiguity of motif, remained linked to the doctrine only through visual interpretation or external context such as patronage. For example, the Crivelli Immaculate Conception was commissioned by the Franciscan church of San Francesco in Pergola, Italy. This commission from Franciscan supporters of the doctrine indicates that this is a piece on the Immaculate Conception. However, beyond the context of the commission, the painting specifically identifies the Immaculate Conception doctrine through its internal text, in this case the banner that floats above Mary and beneath God and the dove. It

Christopher Baker and Tom Henry, “Carlo Crivelli: The Immaculate Conception, 1492,” in The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue (London: National Gallery Company, 2000), 164. 26 59

reads, “VT. INMENTE. DEI. ABINITIO. CONCEPTA. FVI. ITA. ET. FACTA. SVM.” (As from the beginning I was conceived in the mind of God, so have I in like manner been conceived in the flesh). This declares immaculate conception. Beyond the banner, Crivelli details the painting with his own iconography in support of an Immaculate Conception motif. The cluster of angels above God seemingly manifests from the primal red that infuses and surrounds them. This associates the angels as fire beings or Seraphim, the highest level of angels who stand in the sight of God and represent the burning love of light and purity.60 Here, I argue, the Seraphim align with the Franciscan promotion of Mary as human yet associated in purity with a higher level of spiritual being. I refer to the late-thirteenth-century arguments in defense of the Immaculate Conception doctrine by Duns Scotus, who compares the special grace that God gives Mary to that given to angels: “God bestowed a greater benefit and grace upon the Blessed Virgin and upon the holy Angels by confirming them in perpetual innocence that they might not sin, than if He would remit to them their sins or would justify them from sin, because never to have sinned is the greatest gift.”61 In the Crivelli painting, the Seraphim take form to witness Mary’s exclusion from sin, imparting a sense that just as the Seraphim were formed in this primeval redness of burning love and purity, so was Mary. As a human, however, Mary is also depicted standing, contained in a physical realm since, as I have previously proposed, the Franciscan emphasis upon the lived

60

Rosa Giorgi, Angels and Demons in Art, ed. Stefano Zuffi, trans. Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 301. 61

Storff, 218. 27

experience of humanity is of utmost importance in Mary’s function as the grounding force of Christ. Separating her from the golden ethereal realm is a red embroidered curtain that starts at Mary’s shoulder and falls behind her to cover the floor of the architectural niche upon which she stands. The niche is indicative of containment, reminiscent of medieval sculptured saints placed in cathedral niches. However, Mary is also long associated with a container or vessel of Christ’s immaculate birth; it is my interpretation that here, as a parallel, her own containment in a niche emphasizes her similar immaculacy. This may additionally prove true in reference to the design of the 1520 Toledo Virgen Abridera. In earlier Virgenes Abrideras that predate the development of the Immaculate Conception, Mary opened to reveal either narratives related to scripture or, north of the Pyrenees, the trinity—in both cases indicating that the holy and the purity is in Mary. However, as an example of the Immaculate Conception, the Toledo piece encloses Mary in an outer structure, the opening of which signals entry into a sacred space. Thus Mary is enclosed in purity, an immaculate state, prior to her exposure to the world. Mary originates in a space that is removed from the world of Original Sin, yet she is also in an architectural structure, thus maintaining a sense of placement in a defined, limited space, recognizable of an earthly experience. However, of note, in the Crivelli altarpiece, Mary’s right foot points over the edge of her niche’s platform. Is she about to venture from her containment for the purpose of elevating into the holy realm or for the purpose of entering the human domain? This ambiguity with the Crivelli altarpiece offers a complicated early layering of Mary’s liminal existence—she is both of the world yet of

28

sacred conception, both opened yet closed, both contained yet container, both destined to reign as heavenly queen yet grounded in humanity. Adding to this concept of Mary’s state of purity in the Crivelli piece is the vase with a lily to her left. The symbol of the lily, although traditionally associated in the context of the Annunciation, here symbolizes not only the purity of Mary as a virgin but also the purity of Mary as free of Original Sin. To impart this message, Crivelli places the lily in a crystal glass, which I observe to be an innovative reference to the Immaculate Conception. Here, purity is connected to the containment which is, as well, clear and clean; in other words, when contained in her mother, Anne, Mary was already in an immaculate state. Not only is Mary a pure container for Jesus, but she is born of purity, as well. Thus the concept of containment becomes central. Although it is the earliest explicitly designated example of the Immaculate Conception, the Crivelli motif was more often woven into later examples. Its streamlined approach to the image of Mary standing with hands pressed together in deep prayer, surrounded by attributes as God looks down upon her endures in the Toledo Virgen Abridera. Additionally, the layered concept of containment, as previously discussed, takes physical and functioning form in the Toledo piece, as Mary is contained in a folding triptych that symbolizes the bi-level of Immaculate Conception. However, in spite of the iconography, the Crivelli Immaculate Conception still relies on its banner to specify the doctrine that the painting supports since its motif can recall also the Annunciation. Therefore, the artistic endeavors to define the readily identifiable iconography of the Immaculate Conception continued.

29

Other early examples of the Immaculate Conception in art surround Mary with defenders of her doctrine. The debate over the Immaculate Conception still intense, many paintings add saints and church doctors to argue Mary’s case. For example, Francesco Francia’s circa 1515 Immaculate Conception depicts church patriarchs holding scrolls in support of Mary’s exemplary status while Mary floats above in the clouds with angels and God (Fig. 10). She kneels to God’s side as God extends a rod to mark her as free of Original Sin.62 Cherub heads surround God’s golden emanation as one fullbodied cherub supports the cloud upon which God sits. Similarly in Luca Signorelli’s circa 1523 Immaculate Conception, saints and church doctors stand in endorsement of the Immaculate Conception, now with books in hand (Fig. 11). Mary again floats in the sky and God hovers, this time above her. The positioning of Mary as central with God blessing from above, is similar to the design of the Toledo Virgen Abridera. In the Signorelli piece, though, God extends a rod in blessing as angels and cherub heads witness Mary’s exclusion from Original Sin. Beneath Mary is a miniaturized image of Adam and Eve during the moment of Temptation. Mary’s positioning above the Temptation signifies that she does not participate in Original Sin. She is removed, standing superior and untouched as Paradise is about to be lost below; simultaneously, the flowers of Paradise surround Mary. While full in its narrative, Signorelli’s vision of the Immaculate Conception was not significantly integrated into later motifs. However, the sense that Mary is removed from the world of sin resonates in the Toledo Virgen Abridera, as Mary is detached and enclosed in her triptych, and thereby untainted.

62

Hope, 556. 30

More influential but even less accessible as standard motifs are attempts by Leonardo da Vinci. In his Madonna of the Rocks (1483-85) and Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne (begun 1503), Leonardo explores new approaches to the Immaculate Conception that are far removed from contemporary expressions of the motif. He does not alienate Mary from Jesus, but instead includes the Christ Child in his paintings. In contrast, he removes God and the dove, as well as the presence of text that might identify the doctrine and the church doctors who might support and explain the Immaculate Conception. In this manner, he silences debate over the doctrine. Instead, he focuses on developing an iconography that emphasizes Mary’s state of ever-extant and eternal purity. The Madonna of the Rocks, commissioned by a Milanese confraternity associated with the Franciscan church of San Francesco Grande that venerated the Immaculate Conception, was Leonardo’s earlier attempt to make his mark on the Immaculate Conception (Fig. 12). Behind the dominant figure of Mary and her company of figures that include to one side young John the Baptist kneeling in prayer and on the other side the Christ Child and an angel, Leonardo created a primordial, craggy backdrop with an aura of mystery through the smoky sfumato atmosphere. The pristine landscape, as in the later Virgin, Child and Saint Anne, aligns with the concept of the Immaculate Conception in that the uncorrupt rawness of the rocks reflect a sense of Eden prior to Original Sin.63 This is the land in which Mary belongs. In Leonardo’s primeval setting, the rocks additionally suggest permanency—that God had always planned Mary’s role; thus her

Stephanie Fossek Fukri, “Saint Anne with the Virgin and Christ Child: Northern and Italian Reception, Interpretation and Development of a Late Medieval Iconography” (MA thesis, California State University Long Beach, 2011), 83. 31 63

conception of soul preceded human history and Original Sin. Mary is as primordial and eternal as the earth-bound rocks, much as she is as primordial and eternal as the celestialbound Seraphim fire-beings in the Crivelli piece. The concept of Mary’s primordial state is key to her exemption from Original Sin and, therefore, Immaculate Conception. Additionally, in Madonna of the Rocks, temporal foliage surrounds Mary, here indicating meditation and humanity—Mary’s contemplative life on Earth. Further echoing the transitory aspects of the flow of life, a pool in the foreground symbolizes Mary’s purity. However, she needs no baptism in the pool to cleanse her sins; Original Sin has never tainted her existence. It is significant, though, that the angel points to John the Baptist whom all others must seek for purity. Mary places a protective arm over John, as if endorsing his role to cleanse the world. It is my observation that here Leonardo switches power roles, replacing the church doctors as endorsers of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, as seen in the Francia and Signorelli pieces, with the empowerment of Mary. This sense of empowerment later manifests in the Immaculate Conception motifs in Spain, such as in the Toledo piece, where Mary stands strong on her own, now as endorser perhaps of those that open the layers of the Virgen Abridera, soliciting her prayer and support. Mary is now the endorser, and in the Leonardo painting she supports John the Baptist and the institutional sacrament of baptism. In this way, I find that Leonardo advances debate over the doctrine. The Vatican had already acknowledged the Immaculate Conception feast day, and the next stage is to put Mary’s new status into action as she now becomes advocate for Baptism. Therefore, she protectively looms over John the Baptist. To enhance Mary’s dominant status, Leonardo places her in the 32

pinnacle of a pyramidal structure that also establishes compositional unity. Mary is prominent in this unity yet functions with the other figures in the composition in order to tend to the transitory life on Earth and to redeem the souls of those tainted with Original Sin. Later, in the Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne, Leonardo similarly utilizes this structure, this time placing topmost Anne (Fig. 13). The Santa Anna-Triple motifs. Although the details of the commission for Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne are unknown, the continuation of the Immaculate Conception themes from the Madonna of the Rocks such as the eternal primordial landscape, as well as the addition of Saint Anne into the composition, leads to my argument that this piece was also intended as an Immaculate Conception motif. The earliest images of the Holy Grandparents, Saints Anne and Joachim, appear to have developed in support of the early cult of the Immaculate Conception.64 Officially, Pope Sixtus IV added to his support of the Immaculate Conception by placing the feast of Saint Anne on the Roman calendar in 1481, five years after declaring the feast of Immaculate Conception.65 In Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne, Leonardo thus commemorates Anne’s rise to prominence. This rise is of particular importance in Spain. While Anne is not present in the Toledo Virgen Abridera, her iconography in the developments of the Immaculate Conception art in Spain warrants exploration in order to more fully distinguish traits in the Toledo piece, particularly those of Mary as co-redemptrix.

Charlene Villaseñor Black, “St. Anne Imagery and Maternal Archetypes in Spain and Mexico,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 15001800, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 6. 64

65

Stratton, 30. 33

In his painting, Leonardo creates a triple-seat motif that features Anne as the foundation of what is a human trinity, from which purity and sacrifice emerge. Sitting upon Anne’s lap, Mary reaches to embrace Christ. I claim that Leonardo arranges the three to impart a sense of merging into an oneness of purpose: that of sacrifice in order to cleanse humanity of Original Sin. This is reminiscent of medieval sculptures of the Virgin and Child which fuse the two figures as if they were one.66 However, Leonardo’s bodies appear more intertwined into a living pyramid. Their movement is directed symbolically towards Christ’s sacrifice, symbolized as the Child reaches for a lamb from which Mary attempts to pull him. The younger mother, Mary is not ready for her child to seize his future sacrifice. With serene awareness Anne observes without interference; she knows that Mary will eventually assume her own role of co-redemptrix, thus allowing her son to fulfill his role, as well. The Immaculate Conception in Spain This role of Mary as co-redemptrix, with the sacrifice of her son serving humanity’s salvation, became prominent in Spain in the early sixteenth century. In my third chapter, I will discuss in further detail Mary as co-redemptrix since the Toledo Virgen Abridera opens to an inner layer that reveals Mary’s sacrifice through Christ’s Passion narrative. However, prior to the 1520 Toledo piece, artistic developments in Mary’s role as co-redemptrix were often related to Anne’s presence in the Immaculate Conception motifs. The Triple-Seat or Santa Ana-Triple motif in Spain circulated in the depiction of early Immaculate Conception art, largely due to the various kingdoms’

66

Catherine Oakes, Ora Pro Nobis: The Virgin as Intercessor in Medieval Art and Devotion (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008), 7. 34

already extant devotion to Saint Anne. In 1239 King Jaime I of Aragon, also known as Jaime the Conqueror, dedicated a convent to Saint Anne in Valencia; twenty years later, Alfonso X of Castile built a church to Anne in Seville, by 1305 the Cathedral of Valencia had a chapel named in Anne’s honor, and in 1307 the chapel of the royal palace at Palma de Mallorca was dedicated to Anne with the command that her local feast day be celebrated in that space.67 The honor bestowed upon Anne by Mallorca brings to full circle the consistent royal support of the Immaculate Conception by Aragon. Franciscan support. In Els Menorets: The Franciscans in the Realms of Aragon from St. Francis to the Black Death, Jill Webster explores the possible reasons for this support. She ties the progress of Franciscan establishments within Spain to Jaime I’s progress of Iberian reconquest during his crusade against the Islamic forces.68 Webster goes on to discuss the manner in which the crown of Aragon benefited from its support of the new mendicant order. First, the order was still in its formation, having reached Spain in 1213 with the arrival of Saint Francis, and the first chapter houses being founded in the 1220s. Support from the kings of Spain solidified loyalty from the fledgling missionaries and secured a level of trust from the Spanish crowns, as evidenced in the manner in which Franciscans were often employed to stabilize the reconquered territories and to negotiate on behalf of the kings, in particular by Aragon, as in the case of its dealings with the kingdom of Sicily, which it would later absorb.69 Second, with the Franciscan

67

Stratton, 29.

68

Webster, 18.

69

Ibid., 215. 35

values rooted in humanity, the order was increasingly popular with the strengthening middle class, as well as the populace of the poor. In reclaimed lands, the Franciscans served as strong public relations for both their mission as well as the mission of royal patrons. Third, Franciscans are a mendicant order, dedicated to travel and conversion, which is ideal for a borderland political power in the midst of reclaiming contested lands. Finally, pairing with a mendicant order emphasized Spain’s call to crusade. The presence of Franciscans, called forth on their own mission to rebuild the house of God, lent an element of holy war to the political goals of the kings of Spain. Accordingly, Webster studies documents that verify Franciscan presence at Jaime I’s reconquest of the eastern coast and islands of Aragon; in the king’s army there were at least two Franciscans in Valencia and in Mallorca when the territories were reclaimed. Following these victories, Jaime and succeeding kings set up monasteries for the Franciscans, as well as dedicated sites for the saints and proposed dogma that the order favored. This partnership in a Spanish crusade benefited Franciscans, as well. According to both Thomas Celano and Bonaventure, Saint Francis considered Spain, given its borderland position, as a site in need of refortified Christian faith, as well as a pathway to convert those of Islamic faith. Above all, Spain as a gateway into Africa provided opportunity for martyrdom. Bonaventure records this sentiment in his biography of Francis: Francis went on a missionary journey about the countryside, sowing everywhere the seed of salvation and reaping an abundant harvest. However, the prize of martyrdom still attracted him so strongly that the thought of dying for Christ meant more to him than any merit he might earn by the practice of virtue. 36

Therefore, he took the road towards Morocco with the intention of preaching the Gospel of Christ to the sultan and his subjects, hoping to win the palm of victory.70 While in Spain between 1213 and 1214, Francis became sick and returned to Italy, yet he remained invested in Franciscan efforts in the contested borderland regions. Thomas of Celano writes of Francis’s joy at reading correspondences with Franciscans who remained in Spain to establish the order.71 Later, when the Franciscans realized that structure was needed to better administrate the order, during the first general chapter meeting held in the Porziuncola in 1217, two of the eleven provinces created in the Franciscan reaches were named in Spain; and by 1232, a third province was added to Spain, thus dividing the Franciscan Iberian territories into Castile, Aragon, and Santiago.72 With this strong entry of the Franciscans into the Iberian Peninsula, their art and devotional emphasis took root in Spain. Thus, the cult of Mary based on humanity and compassion and later the cult of Saint Anne as part of the Immaculate Conception program accelerated developments in Spain’s iconic motifs. Further, local advocates for the Immaculate Conception populated the clergy and theologian circles in Spain. Followers of Duns Scotus and, therefore, promoters of the Immaculate Conception included Barcelona-based theologians Father Alfredo Gonter who became lector in Barcelona in 1322, Guillem Rubió who was a pupil of Duns Scotus, Joan Bassols who

70

Bonaventure, 702.

71

Thomas of Celano, 504-505.

72

Webster, 38. 37

was Duns Scotus’s first pupil, Father Pons Carbonell who acquired the greatest prominence of the theologians in Barcelona, and Guillem Monrodó who soon became inquisitor in Narbonne.73 In addition to the Barcelona-based disciples of Duns Scotus, in Mallorca, Ramón Llull was one of the thirteenth century’s most prolific and well-read supporters of Franciscan values. Paired with political supporters, the theologians and clergy eventually led Spain to foster recognizable Immaculate Conception motifs in art. By 1520, the Toledo Virgen Abridera is a result of these efforts as the piece represents perhaps the most recognizable and, thus, lasting Immaculate Conception motif elements. Spanish Immaculate Conception motifs. Possibly the earliest example of the Spanish Immaculate conception motifs is in the Santa Ana-Triple. One such example is a polychrome wooden sculpture from Barcelona during the fourteenth century (Fig. 14).74 This piece is significant to the Toledo Virgen Abridera since it demonstrates the increased emphasis in Iberia on the humanity of Christ through the presence of his more gentle female lineage; further, it begins to elevate Mary as part of a linked narrative experience with her son—thus preparing her for a central role in later devotional art, as found in the Toledo example. Here in the Barcelona sculpture, like the Leonardo Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne, the human trinity springs into action from a merged base. Anne’s wide lap provides the foundation for Mary to sit upon while Mary supports the standing Christ Child. Anne is the dominant figure, largest in proportion and wearing the headdress of an older woman,

73

74

Ibid., 266.

Manuel Trens, María: Iconografía de la Virgen en el Arte Español (Madrid: Editorial Plus Ultra, 1946), 121. 38

yet her face is youthful and soft, an idealized display of calm as she gazes serenely beyond. More engaged, with eyes lowered in amusement at her child, Mary is diminished in size but wears her crown as queen of heaven. In her hand, she holds an orb, another attribute to Mary’s status as celestial queen. The Christ Child, while the smallest of the figures, is central. He stands as if sprouting from both Anne and Mary. Joyful in expression, he reaches upwards, playfully cradling his mother’s chin. As he does so, he looks outwards, yet not with the detached contemplation that Anne possesses. Instead, with alert eyes Christ addresses viewers. This engagement with viewers parallels the interaction between Mary and Jesus. I note that, while the Christ Child is as active as in the Leonardo painting, roles have reversed. Rather than Mary pulling Jesus away from the lamb, a symbol of his sacrifice, here Jesus pulls his mother’s face towards himself as he addresses viewers. As I argue that this is an early example of an Immaculate Conception motif, it follows that Jesus welcomes his mother into the shared state of purity, with which only he had previously been declared by the church to be graced. As seen in already discussed examples of the Immaculate Conception motifs, that which had been exclusive to Jesus is now shared with his mother. The child welcomes the mother into his heightened state. No longer is the mother tending to the child; instead, the child tends to the mother as he stands with authority on the laps of his human vessels and takes hold of his mother as if presenting to onlookers her status of purity and of heavenly queenliness. While the Barcelona example is rare in its depiction of such a confident and purposeful Christ Child, it is standard in the Santa Ana-Triple iconography concerning the manner in which the three figures spring upwards from the base of Saint Anne. Thus, I argue, the Santa Ana-Triple 39

reinforces Anne as the starting point for the immaculacy of both Mary and Jesus, who are thus advanced as active agents in the redemption of humanity. Spanish art embraced the concept of Anne as the foundation of the immaculate lineage that leads to redemption, as evidenced by another popular motif of the Immaculate Conception, the abbreviated Tree of Jesse that focuses on Anne and Mary. By the sixteenth century nearly all representations of the Tree of Jesse in Spain had become genealogical trees of the Virgin and often referred specifically to the Immaculate Conception.75 This is a predecessor to the next dominant Immaculate Conception motif in Spain of Mary in isolated purity, as seen in the Toledo Virgen Abridera. An example of the abbreviated Tree of Jesse is the main altarpiece in the Conception Chapel at Burgos Cathedral, commissioned by Luis de Acuña, Franciscan bishop of Burgos in the late 1480s (Fig. 15).76 Carved by Gil de Siloe and polychromed by Diego de la Cruz, an artist favored by Queen Isabel who commissioned several projects of him, the Burgos Tree of Jesse centers on the Holy Grandparents, Anne and Joachim embracing at the Golden Gate. This embrace symbolizes the moment of the Immaculate Conception of Mary; below the Golden Gate the patriarch, Jesse, sleeps. At the top of the altarpiece Mary sits enthroned as celestial queen, holding the Christ Child who presents his crucifix. Although vastly more elaborate and complicated than the Santa Ana-Triple, this Tree of Jesse motif supports the same argument—that Mary’s purity and removal from Original Sin is the abbreviated and central starting point for human salvation and redemption.

75

Stratton, 13.

76

Ibid., 16. 40

However, the emphasis on Anne as the foundation of this immaculacy became even more controversial than Mary’s own exemption from Original Sin. Devotional images to Anne soon became censored by the Spanish Inquisition, therefore making short-lived the Santa Ana-Triple and truncated Tree of Jesse motifs.77 The growing prominence of Anne as a matriarch of Mary and Jesus too closely supplanted the patriarchy of God in visual imagery. In the Santa Ana-Triple by Adriaen van Wesel, carved in oak during the second half of fifteenth century, Anne is alone in her seated throne, as she reaches downward to hold the shoulders of both Mary and Jesus who sit lowly on the ground (Fig. 16). In this example, I propose that the later Santa Ana-Triple indicates Anne’s increasingly augmented role as overseer of the line of salvation. Reminiscent of the Barcelona Santa Ana-Triple’s Christ Child who confronts viewers while presenting his immaculate mother, the Van Wesel example depicts Anne in a similar role. She addresses the audience while presenting both the Christ Child and Mary. Her hands are firmly on both figures as she looks straight ahead, seated majestically on her throne. It is reasonable to infer that such positioning of Anne caused backlash from contemporary thinkers, as later evidenced in the writings of Jesuit Joahannes Molanes and Pedro de Ojeda, both reflecting on the already established shift in art away from Anne. This shift was towards a streamlined focus solely on Mary, as seen in the central panel of the Toledo Virgen Abridera. The supporting figure of Anne as well as church

77

Villaseñor Black, 3. Villaseñor Black points out that in the sixteenth century, while the cult of Saint Anne declined in Spain, it flourished in Mexico, leading to Anne becoming the most celebrated female holy person in Mexico, second to the Virgin, despite Spanish Church and Inquisition attempts to squelch such devotion. 41

doctors and saints, present in the Francia and Signorelli examples (Fig. 10 and Fig. 11), were eliminated. Pedro de Ojeda stated in his Información Eclesiástica en Defense de la Limpia Concepción de Dios (1616) that “the Immaculate Conception with Saint Joachim and Saint Anne embracing is no longer in use, and with reason, so that the ignorant not be given occasion to think the Conception of the Virgin consisted of that meeting of her holy parents at the Golden Gate;” Ojeda continues, like Molanus whom he cites, to promote the established Immaculate Conception motif “in which the Virgin is painted with her attributes, closed garden, mirror, sun, moon, etc.”78 Elaborate motifs such as those created by Leonardo da Vinci also faded. Instead, the Immaculate Conception motifs picked up the thread of simplicity found in the Crivelli altar painting (Fig. 9). I argue that this simplification is based on the idea that the purity of Mary needs no elaboration. She needs no support from lineage, church, or saints since her aspects of goodness are sufficient to reveal her true state. This concept also aligns with Franciscan values—that trappings of the earth such as pedigree and patronage distract from the core self. Simple and silent humility speaks loudest of one’s greatness. Thus, a lasting Immaculate Conception motif features the solo standing figure of Mary, surrounded by symbols of her aspects. This motif dominates in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, particularly in Spain and is featured in the Toledo Virgen Abridera. This specific Immaculate Conception motif is the tota pulchra or all beautiful.

78

Stratton, 39. In 1568, Molanes states that the image of the Immaculate Conception had best been served by the development of iconography that depicted Mary as an isolated figure surrounded by her attributes. Similarly, Stratton cites from Pedro de Ojeda’s Información Eclesiástica en Defense de la Limpia Concepción de Dios (Seville, 1616), 16v-16r. 42

Tota Pulchra Concept and Art The tota pulchra motif, which defines Mary by her aspects, developed first in the literary arts, primarily in the thirteenth century, prior to entering the visual arts in the latefifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries.79 Partaking in this earlier literary tradition, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote detailed visualizations of Mary surrounded by her attributes that are largely based on attempts to tie Mary to Old Testament passages and references to the Song of Songs. The term tota pulchra is adopted from the description of the bride figure in the Song of Solomon (4:4-15): “thou art all fair my love, there is no spot in thee.”80 In this way, Bernard helped to develop picture-words that later formed into the visual iconography of the tota pulchra.81 Included in those developments were iconographies related to the Apocalyptic Woman, which will be the focus of my next chapter since the aspects that surround Mary in the tota pulchra motif is my focus here. It is the consolidation of the power aspects around the central figure of Mary that I observe an intriguing parallel with the contemporary efforts of the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel and Ferdinand, who concurrently consolidate political aspects of Christian Iberia around the central power of Castile, after the conquest of Granada in 1492. The earliest example of the tota pulchra motif may be the circa 1497-1515 retablo or altarpiece at the Iglesia del Cera in Artajona, Spain (Fig. 17). Another early

79

Trens, 150.

Sarah Schroth and Ronni Baer, “The Immaculate Conception,” in El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, ed. Sarah Schroth and Ronni Baer (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2008), 259. 80

81

Oakes, 115. 43

example is the circa 1500 frontispiece of the Heures de la Vierge a l’usage de Rome, published by Thielman Kerver.82 While there is debate over which of these images is the earlier of the tota pulchra motif, both precede the motif as it manifests in the 1520 Toledo Virgen Abridera. However, across time, the iconography of the motif is highly consistent, as evident in the Toledo piece where Mary’s aspects surround her. The Toledo Virgen Abridera. The newly emerged tota pulchra iconography featured in the Toledo Virgen Abridera adds to the celebration of Mary already established in the Joys of Mary scenes in the opened triptych’s side wings (Fig. 1). Paired with the joys of motherhood, the attributes of the tota pulchra extol Mary’s virtues, associated with the Immaculate Conception and various Marian hymns. Above the figure of Mary who silently prays with hands clasped in the central panel, God emerges from a banner and offers blessings. The banner, as previously discussed, does not state that this piece professes the Immaculate Conception. Unlike the Crivelli piece, the iconography speaks for itself and has no need for internal text to argue for the Immaculate Conception. Again, the simplicity of the aspects that orbit Mary is indication enough that Mary was conceived free of Original Sin. In this way, I consider the Toledo piece a dismissal of debate, in favor of focusing on the success of securing the feast day. The banner beneath God celebrates Mary’s feast day and virtues rather than argues dogma. Further, I propose that the banner’s quote is one that would be immediately familiar both from the literary performance culture associated with the Immaculate

82

Trens, 152. Trens argues that the retablo in Artajona predates the Kerver publication; however, there are conflicting dates as to the age of the retablo, perhaps being dated between 1505 and 1515. 44

Conception and from the feast day celebrations. Viewers, therefore, could identify the motif’s purpose by the manner in which it manifests visuals from prayers and songs. In the central panel of the Toledo Virgen Abridera these aspects of the tota pulchra motif manifest around Mary. To the left of Mary’s head is the Porta Celli, which is the closed gate to Paradise, signifying Mary’s closed virginal state but also her intercession that may allow passage into heaven.83 The other three icons that surround Mary’s head are celestial and, thereby, allude to Mary’s ascendancy but also her charity as she illuminates the world; these icons are the personified sun (Electa ut Sol), the star of the sea (Stella Maris), and the personified moon (Pulcra ut Luna). Below and left of these symbols, the Speculum Sine Macula is the mirror that reflects Mary’s untainted state, yet also reveals an impassible barrier to the realm envisioned beyond the mirror’s surface—again indicating Mary’s inaccessibility. The symbols most familiar to Marian art are those of the garden, and the Toledo example has five references to Mary both as a reproductive agent that blossoms into Christ’s mother and the closed garden that retains virginity. Representing these dual aspects are the palm and cypress trees, the lily and the rose, and the Hortus Conclusus which is the closed-wall garden, sealed like the Virgin. Also related to the protected womb is the Turris Davidica or Tower of David, at Mary’s right. Further, life is contained in the Fons Signatus which is the sealed fountain and the Puteus Aquarum Viventum which is the well of life-giving, much as Mary is a well of life for Christ. Finally, the Civitas Dei or City of God is at Mary’s bottom right. Through Mary, Christ delivers salvation to humans and the potential to reach this Holy Jerusalem

83

Katz, “Marian Motion,” 76. 45

after Judgment Day. All of these aspects that surround Mary form the standard tota pulchra motif, signaling the raised estimation of Mary as serving roles beyond birth vessel. She is more closely tied to redemption and possible salvation, post-Apocalypse. In this way, this motif also indicates a move away from Mary’s humanity. While many of the aspects that surround Mary in the tota pulchra extol her virtues as a presence in the world, others indicate distance and inaccessibility. Further, although Mary’s joyful lived experiences are narrated in the wings of the Toledo Virgen Abridera—in line with values of humanity and earthly reality, and in line with the tradition of past Virgenes Abrideras—the focal point of the Toledo piece is an empowered and ethereal Immaculate Mary. She is the core around which symbols of holiness, salvation, and judgement orbit. This elevates her into a central position in the redemption of humans, and thus departs from the traditionally inactive Marian motifs that emphasize humility, humanity, and thereby passivity. I offer that this is a reason that the Toledo Virgen Abridera is the only example in the family of Virgenes Abrideras that presents the tota pulchra motif.84 If the Virgenes Abrideras are primarily intended for private devotion, particularly in the case of Spain’s diminutive pieces in cloistered settings, then the personal connection with Mary’s emphasized humanity is more effective for emotive meditation, particularly in the Franciscan tradition. However, while the Toledo Virgen Abridera weaves threads of tradition through its Joys of Mary narratives, it is also an anomaly in its central focus on the tota pulchra. It is my claim that this merging of entrenched humanistic Marian motifs

84

González Hernando, El Arte Bajomedieval y su Proyección, 251. In her survey of Virgenes Abrideras, González Hernando observes that the Toledo piece is the only one that contains the tota pulchra motif. She does, however, state that two later pieces may have once been contained in a triptych that could have included the tota pulchra. 46

and traditions with emerged late-fifteenth-century power symbols provides a rare example of the restructuring of Spanish borderland art and politics. Tota Pulchra as political symbol. While I previously discussed the political advantages that the Spanish kingdoms may have observed in their support and alignment with the Franciscans, by the late thirteenth century the kings of Spain, particularly those of Aragon, began to focus on the Immaculate Conception, as well. As early as 1281, the Cathedral of Barcelona celebrated the local feast day of the Immaculate Conception; in the thirteenth century, Jaime I of Aragon, appointed the Mercedarians as defenders of the Immaculate Conception and supported the ideas of Ramon Lull, a courtier and tertiary member of the Franciscan Order.85 Lull was also a pivotal figure in the development of a joint agreement between Aragon and Castile to form a crusade against Granada in 1308. 86 In 1333 Alfonso IV established the royal confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Zaragoza, and in 1414 the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception of Barcelona began to petition Holy Roman Emperor Sigismond to join Aragon in the defense of the doctrine, thus launching Spain’s international campaign for the Immaculate Conception.87 When Ferdinand II of Aragon married Isabel of Castile in 1469, Castile also promoted the Immaculate Conception. At court, the queen retained her favorite poet and personal preacher to the royal family, Ambrosio de Montesino, a Franciscan Immaculist who wrote the Brevario de la Inmaculada Concepción de la Virgen Nuestra Señora in

85

Stratton, 5-6.

86

J. N. Hillgarth, Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 67. 87

Stratton, 7. 47

1508 at Toledo.88 Isabel also requested a copy of the 1497 Vita Christi by Sor Isabel de Villena that related the story of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, funded celebrations of the Immaculate Conception at the monastery in Guadalupe, and founded the Franciscan Order of the Conception in Toledo, run by Beatriz da Silva.89 Beatriz had been present in Queen Isabel’s life as a former lady-in-waiting to Isabel’s mother; and it is through that personal connection that both figures had an impact on Toledo, the contemporary Iberian Christian spiritual capitol.90 As well, Isabel sponsored capellanías or chaplaincies to the Immaculate Conception in Toledo, Guadalupe, and Seville.91 Continuing the royal patronage of the Immaculate Conception, in 1508 Isabel’s daughter Queen Juana, mother of Charles I of Spain who was also Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, established a convent of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in Palma de Mallorca.92 This royal support culminated with the solidification of the Immaculate Conception tota pulchra motif in a monumental example constructed at the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca in the early sixteenth century (Fig. 18 and Fig. 19). Commissioned to Miguel Verger, the tympanum of the main portal features Mary clasping her hands in prayer and surrounded by her attributes.93 Above her, a banner proclaims in Latin: Tota

88

Dictionary of the Literature of the Iberian Peninsula, ed. Germán Bleiberg, Maureen Ihrie, Janet Pérez (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993), 1127. 89

Stratton, 9.

90

Edwards, 223.

91

Liss, “Isabel, Myth and History,” 72fn15.

92

Stratton, 35.

93

Trens, 161. 48

pulchra es amica mea et macula originalis non est in te (All beautiful this is my love and original sin is not in you), quoting the same prayer for the feast day of the Immaculate Conception that the Toledo Virgen Abridera featured. Additionally, in this example the attributes of Mary surround her, such as the Speculum Sine Macula, the Civitas Dei, the Puteus Aquarum Viventum, the Turris Davidica, the palm and cypress trees, the lily and the rose, the Porta Celli, the Hortus Conclusus, and the Fons Signatus. The three icons that surround Mary’s head are celestial: the personified sun (Electa ut Sol) at her left, the star of the sea (Stella Maris) above, and the personified moon (Pulcra ut Luna) at her right. Again, surrounded by cosmic symbols as her topmost feature emphasizes Mary’s nonhuman otherworldliness, which may make the tota pulchra motif more suitable for public works that function as statements of institutional power, as in the Mallorca Cathedral portal, rather than as a private devotional piece, as in the Toledo Virgen Abridera. However, the Toledo example is remarkable for applying the motif in harmony with past traditions. The piece functions as a capsule of a shifting time period where monumental gestures began to dwarf personal devotion of humility and humanity. In the first layer of the Toledo Virgen Abridera, we can still see a culture that values the divine joys of human motherhood yet turns its focus to a figure of devout empowerment. We can also see, I believe, a political element in the tota pulchra. This is borderland art—pulling together forces for a holy crusade against the Muslim border. The tota pulchra design uses facets to define and elevate the central figure. Just as the motif gathers aspects of Mary to strengthen the identity of a central wholeness, so would Castile perform a gathering of Iberian states into the wholeness of Spain. Further, Spain was forming its national identity around a religious political unit—the Catholic 49

Monarchs.94 It is my belief that Isabel and Ferdinand constructed an identity that politically paralleled that of the tota pulchra motif. The Catholic Monarchs pulled their satellite domains into a unifying Spanish wholeness, an action that elevated Isabel and Ferdinand into nearly mythical status. The Catholic Monarchs reconquered Muslim Granada in 1492 and initiated, that same year, expeditions by Christopher Columbus into the Americas—all for Catholic empowerment and Spanish control. Also in 1492, the second Spanish pope, Alexander VI began his term in the papacy, following the lead of the first Spanish pope, his uncle Callixtus III (pope from 1455-1458). Thus Spain was exercising its power beyond its region— extending outward while consolidating into a defined central identity, much as the iconography of the tota pulchra functions. It is an elevation of a central power that expands beyond its previous confines. Also like the tota pulchra motif, particularly as seen in the Toledo Virgen Abridera with its Apocalyptic Woman imagery, Spain was in the position to defeat the figurative dragons of non-Christian faiths and to open a new epoch of Iberian life. In this way, the Apocalyptic Woman element of the tota pulchra motif emerges as a vital feature and will be the sole focus of my next chapter. In addition to the Joys of Mary and the celebration of Mary’s immaculate greatness, the Toledo Virgen Abridera includes the activating presence of the Apocalyptic Woman, which enhances the sculpture as a moving and opening piece.

94

Edwards, iix. Edwards notes that Ferdinand and Isabel were labelled the Catholic Monarchs or Reyes Católicos on December 19, 1496 by Pope Alexander VI. Edwards argues that this designation formed a powerful image in defense of the political and militaristic righteousness of Spanish actions, all the way to 1936 when General Francisco Franco claimed the Catholic Monarchs’ personal emblems and designed his rebellion against Spain’s Second Republic as a “crusade.” 50

CHAPTER 2 TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA OPENING AGAIN: ACTIVATED REVELATION Once we have these kingdoms and domains of Castile and León in our joint power, we will be obliged to wage war on the Moors, enemies of the holy Catholic faith, as the other preceding Catholic monarchs have done; and in succeeding to these kingdoms, I will take on the obligation to pay, and I will pay, the expenses for the fortresses on the frontier with the Moors, as other kings have done.95 In his marriage concessions to Isabel of Castile, Ferdinand of Aragon and King of Sicily declared the obligation of this marriage union to fight a holy war. Such a war was part of his and Isabel’s shared legacy and commitment. I suggest that the central panel of the Toledo Virgen Abridera also functions as a commitment to holy war as it features characteristics of the Apocalyptic Woman, who ushers a period of final battles for the glory of the Church. Further, this central panel calls forth the devout to open a hidden panel. In this way, the apocalyptic imagery incites action, a forward motion on behalf of a legacy of Christian battles against adversities. Castile and Aragon incited similar action. Also focusing on legacy and forward motion, during this time, Spain’s writers and theologians contributed to a large outpour of publications, predominately promoting the

Ferdinand of Aragon, “Marriage Concessions (1480),” in Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, ed. Jon Cowans (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 7-8. 51 95

accomplishments and future roles of a consolidated nation. In this way, literature and politics were forging a new narrative of Spain’s legacy. In 1470, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo wrote his History of Spain which extoled Spanish leadership in the protection of Christendom from Islam, and in 1492 Alfonso de Palencia completed his Deeds of the Spaniards, which adopted the rhetorical format of Imperial Rome’s historians, such as Livy, and proclaimed the cultural greatness of Spain.96 Under Isabel’s command and published with royal assistance in 1482, the first vernacular history of Spain was written by royal chronicler Diego de Valera, whose resulting Crónica abreviada de España demonstrated the role of Providence in granting Isabel accession to the throne and positioned the Catholic Monarchs in the role of saviors.97 In 1492, Antonio de Nebrija published the grammar of the Castilian language, which was the first vernacular grammar written or published in Western Europe.98 In his prologue, Nebrija writes, “Language has always been the companion of empire,” a sentiment that the Catholic Monarchs evidently shared as they cultivated many of these Castilian texts, circulated in greater numbers through the printing press, which was introduced into Spain as early as 1474 and implemented by Isabel for her projects by 1476.99

96

Edwards, 268.

97

Richard L. Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 45. 98

During a visit in Salamanca with the Catholic Monarchs, Fray Hernando de Talavera asked Nebrija to chronicle the monarchs’ pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and translate the Introductiones latinae. The translation may have led to the Gramática de la lengua castellana. José Perona, “Antonio de Nebrija,” in Castilian Writers, 14001500, ed. Frank A. Domínguez and Georgia D. Greenia (Detroit: Gale, 2004), 146. 99

Kagan, 7. See page 46 for Kagan’s discussion on the printing press in Spain. 52

More local Castilian pride was the focus of Gabriel Alonso de Herrera’s 1513 Book of Agriculture, which narrated the experience of Spanish farmers, from the Romans to the author’s present day.100 In 1517, Franciscan cardinal, Grand Inquisitor, and confessor of Queen Isabel, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros created his Polyglot, the first printed Bible that was translated in three languages: Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. Thus in the role of disseminator of a new Castilian identity and protector of Catholicism, Spain was cultivating a new narrative of its legacy, that of the golden age of the classic world while advancing forward to the concept of Spain as leader of the modern Christian world. Taking on this role was crucial, particularly in a culture that heavily focused on concerns regarding the apocalypse. It was politically advantageous for the monarchy to position itself as an opponent to the Antichrist of whom John of Patmos in Revelation prophesized as ushering a reign of terror into the world. In his essay on millennial beliefs during the fourteenth-century, Robert Lerner explains: Ever since the eleventh century, the view that a last great emperor would inaugurate wondrous times on earth before the appearance of Antichrist had enjoyed great favor in Western Europe as a result of its circulation first in the extremely popular prophecies of Pseudo-Methodius and the ‘Tiburtine Sibyl’ and then in numerous adaptations and imitations that often introduced kings or popes in place of the original emperor. Such prophesies were naturally reformulated and recirculated

100

Edwards, 268. 53

by dynastic and papal propagandists, and they unquestionably found resonance among the masses who longed for right order to be installed by epic heroes.101 I argue that through the unification efforts of the Catholic Monarchs there was a concerted effort politically, militaristically, and academically to position Spain as the great empire prophesized in Revelation. Ferdinand and Isabel’s marriage contract indicates such a positioning, as Aragon and Castile promised to embark on a new epoch that would defeat the “enemies of the holy Catholic faith.” For this reason, Juan de Flores, royal chronicler of the Catholic Monarchs, defined his office as that of an earthly “evangelist” meant to lift the sovereigns’ reign into the “immortal;” similarly, Fernández de Oviedo, an early chronicler of Spain’s conquests in the Indies, likened the office of royal chronicler to that of an evangelist in his 1519 Libro de la cámara real del príncipe Don Juan.102 Finally, royal chronicler Hernando del Pulgar, according to Peggy Liss, wrote on the birth of Prince John, son and heir to Queen Isabel, a comparison between Isabel and Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, creating an unambiguous messianic reference; while other contemporaries went further, claiming that Prince John was destined to be a savior of earth.103 Possibly in recompense for these

Robert E. Lerner, “The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities,” in Black Death: The Impact of the Fourteenth-Century Plague, ed. Daniel Williman (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982), 87-88. 101

102

Kagan, 7.

Liss, “Isabel, Myth and History,” 62. In “Isabel of Castile (1451-1504), Her Self-Representation and its Context,” Liss further notes that Iñigo de Mendoza referenced Isabel as a second Eve, like Mary, “come by grace of God to remedy our ills.” See Peggy Liss, “Isabel of Castile (1451-1504), Her Self-Representation and its Context,” in Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. Theresa Earenfight (Seattle: Ashgate, 2005), 122-123. 54 103

evangelizing efforts, Isabel raised the royal chronicler annual salary from 25,000 to 40,000 maravedís; Ferdinand doubled that figure in 1509 to 80,000 maravedís.104 Outside the efforts of royal chroniclers, contemporary Franciscans further intensified the positioning of the Catholic Monarchs as deliverers of divine rule by urging preparation for new epochs that would lead to apocalypse and Last Judgement. Preparation for these new epochs in Revelation was partially through the actions of the Apocalyptic Woman, whose aspects in the Toledo Virgen Abridera are absorbed in the central panel by Mary. Apocalypse Culture The Franciscan reading of the Apocalypse was heavily informed by the writings of late-twelfth century Benedictine abbot, Joachim of Fiore who lived in Cambria, the then-contested southern region of modern-day Italy. Joachim departed from standard Augustinian interpretations of Revelation by asserting that John of Patmos’s visions be read as continuous prophesies from beginning to end.105 This linear reading gave rise to theological attempts to place into a timeline the reign of peace that was predicted to occur between the defeat of the Beast and the Last Judgment. In 1260, Franciscan Bonaventure applied his timeline to the continuous readings of prophesies, claiming in 1266 during a sermon given to a general chapter meeting held in Paris that a “clear revelation and one worthy of faith” indicated that Saint Francis was the angel of the sixth seal.106 According to Revelation, when the sixth seal opens there is a period of chaos and disaster:

104

Kagan, 47.

105

Robert E. Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 18. 106

Ibid., The Feast of Saint Abraham, 49. 55

And I saw, when he opened the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair; and the whole moon became as blood. And the stars of heaven fell upon the earth, as the fig tree sheds its unripe figs when it is shaken by a great wind. And heaven passed away as a scroll that is rolled up; and every mountain and the islands were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the princes, and the tribunes, and the rich, and the strong, and everyone, bond and free, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains. And they said to the mountains and to the rocks, ‘Fall upon us, and hide us from the face of him who sits upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; For the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?107 If Francis is the angel of the sixth seal, then the post-thirteenth century is an era of darkness, in which the fearful hide in caves. I suggest that in referencing the above passage, Bonaventure may have implied that those that follow the angel, the Franciscans, will stand. As mendicants, Franciscans proceed beyond the cave. Likewise, rulers who contest borderlands and venture to new worlds, take a “stand” against darkness. In John Edwards’s The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs: 1474-1520, Edwards discusses the efforts of Christopher Columbus to claim a role in the prophesies of Revelation. In Columbus’s Lettera Rarissima, written to Ferdinand and Isabel during his last voyage (1502-1504), Columbus discusses prophesies that Jerusalem and Mount Zion were to be rebuilt by Christian hands, and he writes that “the abbot Joachim [of Fiore]

John Williams, “Commentaries: Illustrations in St. John’s Commentary on the Apocalypse,” in A Spanish Apocalypse: The Morgan Beatus Manuscript (New York: George Braziller, 1991), 182. 56 107

said that this man was to come from Spain.”108 Edwards, however, argues that in this quote Columbus wrongly references ideas to the teachings of Joachim. Instead, Columbus refers to the teachings of Arnold of Vilanova (circa 1240-1311), specifically in Arnold’s Vae Mundo in Centum Annis. Further, Edwards contends that much that was ascribed to Joachim in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spain was written primarily by Arnold, an influential mystic and Catalan physician of Jaime II of Aragon. Edwards continues that “Columbus seems to have gained his belief in the messianic and eschatological role of Spain, and hence of himself, from Arnold’s Vaticinia de summis pontificibus (Prophecies concerning the supreme Pontiffs).”109 The Book of Revelation and the popular teachings of regional Spanish mystics activated much of Columbus’s ambitions, as well as the political and cultural perceptions of the Iberian region. After Arnold, and perhaps the most prominent theologian in medieval Spain, was Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis (circa 1330-1409), whose ideas circulated through the court of Aragon, particularly with the support of King Martin and Queen Maria de Luna.110 According to Robert Lerner, Eiximenis believed that the world had entered the time foretold by John of Patmos as that of the seventh seal, which was a time of silence and meditation.111 In my last chapter, I will discuss Eiximenis’s impact on the theology of Spain, particularly in regard to the reduced focus on Christ’s Passion narrative, prior to

108

Edwards, 225.

109

Ibid.

David Guixeras, “The Life of Francesc Eiximenis,” in Francesc Eiximenis: An Anthology (Barcelona: Editorial Barcino, 2008), 21. 110

111

Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham, 106. 57

the fifteenth century. Eiximenis’s argument for sedate calm, however, is not the focus of this chapter on activation. This is because closer to the activities of Castile’s push for unification and holy war were the writings of Joannes Menesius da Silva (1431-82), later known as Blessed Amadeus of Portugal, who was a Franciscan visionary. In the mid-fifteenth-century Amadeus wrote his New Apocalypse, which provided his commentaries on Revelation and correlating personal visions. Although Amadeus was eventually condemned as heretical, Spain’s Franciscan theologians defended his writings, and Saint Peter of Alcántra (1499 –1562) later published and distributed Amadeus’s works and teachings.112 Further, Isabel and Ferdinand indicated support of Amadeus as they commissioned architect Donato Bramante in 1502 to rebuild the Amadeist church of San Pietro in Montorio.113 Additionally, as previously noted, Isabel also supported the building of a Franciscan Order of the Conception in Toledo, run by Amadeus’s sister, Beatriz da Silva.114 Like his sister, Amadeus was a supporter of the Immaculate Conception, narrating a vision that he received in the fourth raptus of the New Apocalypse in which archangel Gabriel confirmed to him the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception.115 Further, Amadeus envisioned an angelic pope who would

112

David A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 29. Jack Freiberg, “Bramante's Tempietto and the Spanish Crown,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 50 (2005): 151. 113

114

Stratton, 9.

Anna Morisi-Guerra, “The Apocalypsis Nova: A Plan for Reform,” in Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period, ed. Marjorie Reeves (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 38. 58 115

unite the Eastern and Latin Churches, thus inaugurating a new epoch in Christendom. Most important to my studies, he reported a vision of Mary informing the apostles that she would be “bodily present” in her holy images until the end of the world, her presence made manifest by the miracles she would perform through these images.116 It is in this atmosphere of growing mysticism and Apocalyptic writings that, according to William A. Christian in his Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain, reports of personal visions and miraculous revelations increased. Many of these visions, peaking in occurrence between 1400 and 1525 and thus part of the atmosphere in which the 1520 Toledo Virgen Abridera was created, focus on Mary’s bodily presence. This presence occurs through her reported appearances in flesh in usually rural locations, her manifestation in miraculously weeping or bleeding images of the Virgin in urban institutes, and the miraculous rediscoveries of her sculptures and paintings that often have backstories of being lost or buried for protection at the time of invasion by Muslim forces.117 During this peak of reports, church orders were fiercely debating the Immaculate Conception doctrine which finally gained ground with the feast day sanctioned in 1476. As well, the art of the Immaculate Conception began to absorb aspects of the Apocalyptic Woman with her crown of stars, golden aura as if she were clothed by the sun, and standing position on a crescent moon. These Immaculate Conception motifs, at this point, may have begun to merge with people’s religious and cultural imaginings of Mary. According to Christian’s research, when Mary appears as

116

117

Brading, 29.

William A. Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 8. 59

an apparition or in bodily flesh, “seers” often described Mary as “brighter than the sun.” Christian notes that “while pre-Christian seers also saw heroes and gods with blinding auras, our seers’ formulation must derive in part from a Marian interpretation of the passage in Revelation. As Mary in these visions also brings warning of impending punishment, the Apocalypse parallels are all the more evident.”118 In these warnings, Mary often calls the faithful to refortify the church, through new endeavors and constructions, in order to avoid the severity of a final judgement. I argue that in Spain’s atmosphere of Apocalyptic concerns, the Apocalyptic Woman motif empowers Marian art with an activated element that in part responds to the tumultuous religious, cultural, and political realities of a borderland territory. It follows that during this period, the Spanish Virgenes Abrideras adopted Immaculate Conception motifs that incorporated aspects of the Apocalyptic Woman. Seven of these Virgenes Abrideras are documented, and the Toledo Virgen Abridera is among them.119 In these pieces, the joys of Mary recede, except in the Toledo example which pays homage to previous Virgenes Abrideras tradition; however, Mary’s joy is relegated to the outer

118

119

Ibid., 6.

These seven Virgenes Abrideras include the now lost Castile sculpture that was last housed in the collection of Countess de Belloch, the Pie de Concha sculpture, the Toledo sculpture, the Cuerva double-layered triptych that is similar to the Toledo example’s tabernacle design, the now lost Virgen de San Pio V which was given to Philip II by Pope Pius V for Spain’s victory at the Battle of Lepanto, the Castile sculpture now housed in the Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano Isaac Fernández Blanco in Argentina, and the sculpture now in Madrid’s Museo Arqueologico Nacional. An interesting observation made by Melissa Katz is that a dragon sits at the feet of the Allariz Virgen Abridera, thus referencing the Apocalyptic Woman in the first known Virgen Abridera; however, Irene González Hernando states that the figure is too small to identify and is an animal that could be a dog or a dragon. See Katz, “The Non-Gendered Appeal of Vierge Ouvrante Sculpture, 75; González Hernando, El Arte Bajomedieval y su Proyección, 281. 60

wings of the Toledo piece. Central instead in these seven Virgenes Abrideras is the Apocalyptic Mary. Developments of Apocalyptic Woman Motifs in Art In the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos describes the Apocalyptic Woman as “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.”120 She gives birth to a son whom a dragon attempts to devour; however, the woman saves the child by handing him to the safekeeping of angels. The Canonici Apocalypse from Peterborough, England (circa 1320-1330) features this opening moment of conflict (Fig. 20). The Apocalyptic Woman, clothed in an orb of radiating gold, her feet nestled in the curve of a crescent moon, and a crown of light radiating around her head, sits in her iconic post-partum position with knees slightly parted, one higher than the other. She twists to hand her child to an angel who reaches through an orifice from the sky. Firmly on Earth below, the dragon looks threateningly upwards at the celestial beings. Beyond this scene from the Canonici Apocalypse, the narrative continues. The Apocalyptic Woman is now isolated, relying on her own strengths to defeat evil, much like the isolated praying figure of Immaculate Mary in the Toledo Virgen Abridera. Her son removed from the Earthly realm, the Apocalyptic Woman then faces the dragon on her own, leading her to eventually flee to the desert where she sprouts eagle wings to free herself from the dragon’s reach. Battles then erupt between good and evil, signaling the dawning of Judgment Day.

120

Nigel Morgan, Illuminating the End of Time: The Getty Apocalypse Manuscript (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 52. 61

A symbol of birth but also of Earth’s end, the Apocalyptic Woman is a figure with duality. Her dualism further strengthens when, during the fifteenth century, theologians in support of the Immaculate Conception paired her image with Marian narrative—the joyous mother who is simultaneously the sorrowful mother. With the birth of her son, tragedy is secured in Mary’s life; Jesus is born to die. Thus, both the Apocalyptic Woman and Mary experience an opening narrative of glorious life with a core of death, darkening initial joys which inevitably end in separation and sorrow on Earth. Their pairing into the Immaculate Conception iconography was, in this way, logical, particularly in a culture that sought activation, such as Spain. With a beginning, an end is in sight. This is the narrative for both Mary and the Apocalyptic Woman. It is also a narrative that best fits any call to action: to start for the sake of a foretold end. The Iconography of the Apocalyptic Woman Before this pairing, however, for more than a millennium, the Apocalyptic Woman was her own Biblical entity and existed primarily in illuminated manuscripts.121 She first appears in the oldest illustrated Apocalypse manuscript from circa 500 in Italy, copied into the Trier Apocalypse during the early ninth century.122 Here, the Apocalyptic Woman steps on both the sun and moon while stars crown her. She wears a Byzantine gown, and her palms push outward to contest the dragon (Fig. 21). While the Apocalyptic Woman’s iconography is recognizable in the Trier Apocalypse, it is with the Bamberg Apocalypse, Germany circa 1000, that the illustrations function as art, not just

121

122

Ibid., 9. The Apocalypse, or the Book of Revelations, dates to circa 95.

Frederick Van der Meer, Apocalypse: Vision from the Book of Revelation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), 93. 62

documentation. In this manuscript’s Flight of the Woman, the dragon attempts to drown the Apocalyptic Woman, yet she defies him by taking flight with newly sprung wings. Stars again circle her head, and her expression is of calm resolve (Fig. 22). She is utterly unaffected by the dragon’s evil attacks. This firm faith in the face of danger imbues the Apocalyptic Woman with strength as a female icon, suiting the needs of various people and campaigns—both spiritual and secular. As a symbol of female power, the Apocalyptic Woman and the advancement of her iconography found support from three twelfth-century women, Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabeth of Schonau, and Herrad of Landsberg. While Mary is a redemption figure, making amends for the original sin of Eve, who is the source for indoctrinated misogyny, the Apocalyptic Woman directly defeats Satan and is therefore an even more direct counter to Eve and, more importantly, to Satan. The Apocalyptic Woman avoids temptation and sin through actively fighting it. Hildegard, in particular, grasped this narrative of powerful female resolve and transformed the conventional imagery of the Apocalyptic Woman, as well as Mater Ecclesia or Mother Church, through the use of visual arts.123 Combined with Hildegard’s efforts and previous theological theory, the twelfth-century Bible Moralisée asserted to secular society that the Apocalyptic Woman represented the institution of the Church, solid and unaffected by evil due to deep faith and an unfaltering power to defend herself and her child. The argument was that as symbol of the Church, the Apocalyptic Woman nurtured faith in the hearts of those who

Ann Storey, “A Theophany of the Feminine: Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabeth of Schonau, and Herrad of Landsberg,” Woman’s Art Journal 19, no.1 (1998): 17. 63 123

resided in her influence.124 Thus, the faithful were saved from the evils of figurative dragons, be they temptations, heresy, or nonbelievers confronted during religious campaigns. It follows that although she ushered an epoch of destruction, the Apocalyptic Woman was amongst those who allowed passage into Heavenly Jerusalem. Through her role in the confrontation of the seven-headed dragon, the battle between good and evil escalated towards the imminent victory of the holy and, thus, the opening of Heavenly Jerusalem to those who are deemed worthy after the Last Judgment. This narrative of struggle that culminated in reward may have provided comfort to those in turmoil of whatever dragons they may face. Production of Apocalyptic manuscripts, therefore, flourished during social upheaval, religious persecution, and natural disaster such as famine and plague.125 These manuscripts prevailed particularly in Spain, which led in Apocalypse production between the ninth and late-thirteenth centuries.126 An exemplary display of this production is the Spanish Beatus Apocalypse, which features commentaries by the eighth-century theologian Beatus and illustrations by tenthcentury monk Maius who takes creative license with the art of the Apocalypse by adding innovative compositions and regional distinctions (Fig. 23). In John Williams’s commentaries of Maius’s art, as featured in the J. Piers Morgan Library example of the manuscript, Williams points out that the folios that feature the Apocalyptic Woman

124

Bergamini, 21.

125

Nancy Grubb, Revelations: Art of the Apocalypse (New York: Abbeville Press,

1997), 7. 126

Morgan, 9. 64

contain a two-page merging of her individual scenes. Maius compresses the narrative’s time and space into a single frame. This contrasts with Apocalyptic Woman compositions found in other manuscripts that fill continuous pages with individually framed narrative scenes.127 For example, as we have already seen, the Canonici Apocalypse illustrates the scene of the Apocalyptic Woman handing her child to angels, the Trier Apocalypse includes a stand-alone scene of the Apocalyptic Woman warding off the dragon, and the Bamberg Apocalypse features the flight of the Apocalyptic Woman. However, these scenes merge in Maius’s manuscript. Towards the upper left corner of his two-page spread, the Apocalyptic Woman stands in her iconic pose: floating upon a crescent moon, sunlight emanating from her figure, and stars encircling her head. Simultaneously, in the upper right corner, God greets the angel who has carried the Woman’s child to safety, away from the dragon’s reach. The dragon’s body cuts through the center of the two-page spread, as its various heads function across time and space: a grouping of heads threatens the Apocalyptic Woman who holds out one hand to ward off the attack, another grouping battles angels who jab spears into the heads, and from the dragon’s neck spills a flood into the lower left corner where the Apocalyptic Woman again appears, here with newly sprung wings and one leg bent upward as if about to rise into her flight from the flood. In the bottom right corner of the spread, the dragon is defeated and reduced to the dark figure of Satan, his head scratched off over time by the manuscript’s devout readers.

127

Williams, “Commentaries,” 193. 65

Particularly noteworthy in this Apocalypse is that the Last Judgement becomes part of the Apocalyptic Woman’s narrative. Surrounding Satan are condemned souls, naked and twisted, since the defeat of the dragon signals the Last Judgement. In this way, Maius elevates the impact of the Apocalyptic Woman’s story. He links her with a warning of final battle and final punishments. This is in concordance with Maius’s statements in his colophon, where he declares that his intentions are to fill the readers of his Apocalypse with apprehension so that they will best prepare for imminent judgement: Let the voice of the faithful resound, and re-echo! Let Maius, small indeed, but eager, rejoice, sing, re-echo and cry out! Remember me, servants of Christ, you who dwell in the monastery of the supreme messenger, the Archangel Michael. I write this in awe of the exalted patron, at the command of Abbot Victor, out of love for the book of the vision of John the beloved disciple. As part of its adornment I have painted a series of pictures for the wonderful words of its stories, so that the wise may fear the coming of the future judgment of the world’s end.128 Therefore, Maius combines in a single scene the Apocalyptic Woman as initiator of both Satan’s defeat and the judgment of souls. This merging of simultaneous events is enclosed in a single geometric-patterned frame that is distinctive at this time in the Iberian Peninsula.129 Also characteristic to the region are the broad blocks of color that span the composition. According to Marie Kelleher, the color blocks used in the Beatus

John Williams, “The History of the Morgan Beatus Manuscript,” in A Spanish Apocalypse: The Morgan Beatus Manuscript (New York: George Braziller, 1991), 12. 128

129

Williams, “Commentaries,” 193. 66

Apocalypse are representative of Catalan Romanesque color bands, especially the use of red and yellow bands; this is a regional style that is found as well in architectural spaces and murals.130 In this way, the Beatus Apocalypse shares the traditions of Western Europe in presenting the defined iconography of the Apocalyptic Woman while weaving in regional styles and narrative techniques to elevate the Apocalyptic Woman into a role that is prominently linked to the duality of supreme victory and punishment. It is also noteworthy that when the Beatus Apocalypse is closed, the Apocalyptic Woman reunites with her child, whose image is in the upper right corner. The two-page spread folds onto itself, allowing the Apocalyptic Woman to overlap the image of God, and stand before both God and her child. This is reminiscent of the dynamic narratives found in the mutable Virgenes Abrideras, where the mother’s movements from closed to opened to closed again highlight her different stages of motherhood and her ultimate union with God and their holy son. I believe that in the layered and dynamic narrative found in the tenth-century Beatus Apocalypse, the Apocalyptic Woman is elevated in Iberian culture and religion. Thus she is primed for a future merging with the Virgin Mary. The Merging of the Apocalyptic Woman and Marian Motifs In many medieval manuscripts, images of the Apocalyptic Woman were paired with texts and images on the life of Mary. An example is from the thirteenth-century Apocalypse and Commentary at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, Portugal.131

130

131

Marie Kelleher, e-mail message to author, May 29, 2015.

Beth Williamson, The Madonna of Humility: Development, Dissemination and Reception c.1340-1400 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), 40. 67

On consecutive pages it features the Adoration of the Magi depicting Mary offering Jesus for the Magi to revere and the Apocalyptic Woman depicting the Woman offering her infant for the angel to receive. Here, there is a parallel between the mothers’ sacrifices, accepting roles that demand the sharing of and the separation from their sons. This parallel was further cultivated, especially by supporters of the Immaculate Conception. In particular, the pairing of scripture and illustration recalling Genesis 3:15 and Revelation 12:1-12 draws parallels between Mary and the Apocalyptic Woman in a manner that supports the argument that God conceived of Mary’s celestial presence prior to the fall of Eden; therefore, she was free of Original Sin—and, consequently, immaculate in conception.132 Genesis 3:15 narrates God’s curse upon Satan: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring, he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” An example of imagery associated with this passage is in the Bedford Breviary, illuminated between 1424 and 1435 (Fig. 24). Enthroned in the sky, Mary holds an open book. Below, God delivers his curse to Satan and points towards Mary who is, therefore, indicated as the woman whose offspring will crush Satan.133 Depicted here in celestial form prior to taking an earthly form, Mary floats in the air, much as the Apocalyptic Woman traditionally appears. Additionally, it is the Apocalyptic Woman’s later offspring that defeat Satan, according to Revelation 12:17; “And the dragon was angered at the woman, and went away to wage war against the rest of her offspring.”134 Therefore, the roles of both women were fusing.

132

d’Ancona, 18.

133

Ibid., 22. 68

Illuminated manuscripts further blurred the line between both figures by depicting the Apocalyptic Woman much as Mary traditionally appears. According to Revelation, immediately after childbirth the Woman must separate from her child, thus saving him from the dragon’s threat. However the Apocalypse of Queen Isabella, which belonged to Isabella of France, dated 1313, offers an alternate moment to this narrative. Depicted below the traditional image of the Apocalyptic Woman’s initial confrontation with the dragon is a moment of peace that is not detailed in Revelation. Here, sitting low to the earth, the mother holds her child, a motif usually associated with Mary and Christ.135 Additionally, gone is the Apocalyptic Woman’s crown of stars, replaced by a halo— again, more aligned with images of Mary. These developing links between Mary and the Apocalyptic Woman eventually led to the merging of identities. The Madonna of Humility Motif In the mid-fourteenth century, the first widespread merging of the Apocalyptic Woman and Marian iconography appeared in the Madonna of Humility.136 In her article, “Madonna of Humility,” Ilse Hecht credits the humanistic values of both the Franciscans and Dominicans as a possible accelerator for the rapid dissemination of the Madonna of Humility. Hecht argues that the simplicity of the Madonna of Humility was attuned to the mood of the time, specifically the humanistic concepts promoted by mendicant

134

Williams, “Commentaries,” 193.

135

Williamson, 47.

136

The earliest dated Madonna of Humility is by Bartolomeo da Camogli from 1346 in Palermo, Sicily, South of the Italian mainland. 69

orders.137 However, while the Madonna of Humility motif appears simple, it is complicated in its merging of iconographies. This is because the motif unites the Apocalyptic Woman with three distinct Marian motifs: the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, the Annunciation Mary, and Maria Lactans. The Madonna of Humility (Padua, circa 1345-1350) by Guariento Di Arpo is one of the earliest manifestations of the motif (Fig. 25). Here, Di Arpo places Mary as the dominant image in a triangular composition. As in all Madonna of Humility images, and similar to the previously discussed depiction of the Apocalyptic Woman in the Apocalypse of Queen Isabella, Mary sits low to the ground, symbolizing deep humility in recollection of the Annunciation. Her gently bowed head contributes to this sense of modesty as she gazes in acceptance outwards at her audience. As proposed by Millard Meiss in his study of the motif, this humble position expresses solicitude for all souls, even the lowly and sinful.138 However, although Mary sits in a diminished position in the Di Arpo painting, she still wears her crown as Heavenly Queen. With this dual element of floor-level modesty and exalted nobility, Mary’s humanity further manifests in the nurturing Maria Lactans. She nurses in public, more like a human housewife than Heavenly Queen.139 Christ is also humanized in this act as he is engrossed solely in feeding, much like any hungry baby. Because nursing was thought to transmit character,

Ilse Hecht, “Madonna of Humility,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 70, no. 6 (1976): 10-13. 137

138

Millard Meiss, “Madonna of Humility,” The Art Bulletin 18, no. 4 (1936): 461.

139

Williamson, 132. 70

it follows that Christ would absorb his mother’s mercy.140 In adult heavenly form, he accordingly appears in the space above the main scene and grants blessings with a raised hand. Thus, Mary provides intercession between viewers and God. By serving Christ through breastfeeding, she also serves worshippers; this, I believe, implies that viewers are her children, as well, receiving her sustenance. The Apocalyptic Woman is similarly an intercessor, but one who directly battles evil in order to save both her narrative child and her symbolic children of the church. In Di Arpo’s painting, Mary’s seated posture with one knee protruding higher than the other is a standard element of the Madonna of Humility motif. This positioning is also similar to that traditionally found in depictions of the Apocalyptic Woman (Fig. 20). Of note, I observe that this positioning is almost exclusively used in scenes where the Apocalyptic Woman hands her child to the angels and thus signals the sacrifice that she suffers in the separation from her son. Mary’s quiet solemnity in the Madonna of Humility motif may allude to the gravity of her similar situation, which also requires much loss and pain. However, the separation of the Apocalyptic Woman from her child also heralds the start of battle, with the Woman being an active agent in the defeat of evil. Mirroring this valor, in Di Arpo’s painting, the Apocalyptic Woman’s sunrays emanate from Mary’s body and a golden sun-brooch secures Mary’s traditional blue cloak. In short, Di Arpo’s painting, representative of early contemporary motifs, seamlessly combines Mary of the Annunciation, the Heavenly Queen, and Maria Lactans with the Apocalyptic Woman to

Sandra Miesel, “Mothering God,” in Crisis (Washington D.C.: The Morley Institute, 2001), 28-33. 71 140

create in one image the Madonna of Humility who is the humanist queen mother that gently nourishes and fiercely intercedes for all. As previously argued by Hecht, this humanistic gesture that the motif embodies appealed to the sentiments that were increasingly circulated by the mendicant orders of the time. It follows that between the mid-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries, the Madonna of Humility motif spread from Italy with unprecedented speed and saturation. An interesting observation, in need of further concentrated study, is the manner in which the motif’s growing prominence corresponds with the expansion of the Black Death. The plague outbreak began in 1347, also in Sicily where the first identified Madonna of Humility emerged a year before. If a correlation does exist, wherein the devastating death gave rise to the spread of the Madonna of Humility motif, an argument might be made that Mary’s combined aspects, paired with the active forces of the Apocalyptic Woman, created a fortified image of active compassion and intercession. Similarly, the Madonna of the Misericordia motif, which depicts Mary standing above the devout, her cloak opened as a protective barrier behind and over them, is linked with plague art.141 Although there are, as yet, no studies that have researched the Madonna of Humility as plague art, it is well documented that in the one hundred years after the outbreak of the Black Death the motif thrived, evidenced by its presence in funerary monuments, church altarpieces, and private devotional shrines.

Joseph Polzer, “Aspects of Fourteenth-Century Iconography of Death and the Plague,” in The Black Death: The Impact of the Fourteenth-Century Plague, ed. Daniel Williman (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 113. 72 141

Further, examples of the motif appeared throughout Europe, including Spain’s Castilian area and Catalonian regions of Barcelona and Valencia, as well as the Kingdom of Mallorca under Aragon.142 Beth Williamson proposes that the motif may have entered Spain through the collection left by Mallorca’s Queen Sancia.143 After marrying Robert of Anjou, Sancia became queen of Naples, where early versions of the motif are found.144 Further, Sancia was highly influential throughout the Iberian Peninsula, particularly as a woman of education and culture. In his 1396 Libre de les dones (Book of Women), Francesc Eiximenis referred to Sancia as a saintly queen who followed the values of the Franciscan Second Order of Poor Clares and, therefore, circulated pious advice on education and lifestyle; Eiximenis particularly emphasized that Sancia advocated that “every woman should know how to read, for she said that they would have more opportunity to be devout, to occupy themselves, to find out about every kind of good.”145 In this way, Sancia is renowned for disseminating knowledge, not only in the form of textual readings but painted iconography. I suggest that for its quiet humanity but also its

142

Williamson, 83.

143

Beth Williamson, e-mail message to author, September 11, 2014.

144

Darleen Pryds, Women of the Streets: Early Franciscan Woman and their Mendicant Vocation (New York: Franciscan Institute, 2010), 70. Pyrds states that Sancia desired to enter the Poor Clare order, but her noble position necessitated marriage, which she later used to advance public devotion, establishing communities of Poor Clare sisters, working on reformation of prostitutes, and founding Santa Chiara in Naples. Francesc Eiximenis, “On how the manners of women from other nations are not in all cases exemplary and on how it is good for women to be able to read,” in Francesc Eiximenis: An Anthology, ed. Xavier Renedo and David Guixeras, trans. Robert D. Hughes (Barcelona: Editorial Barcino, 2008), 127. 73 145

active agency, the Madonna of Humility would appeal to Sancia’s interests as a follower of the Poor Clares and also as an advocate for female activity. Whether or not it was transmitted through Sancia’s correspondences home to Spain, the iconographic merging of Mary with the Apocalyptic Woman soon populated Spain’s devotional art. Early examples include Madonna of Humility pieces such as the circa 1325-1350 frontal panel of the altarpiece from the Church of Arteta in Navarra, Spain. (Fig. 26). While this Madonna of Humility alludes to Mary as Queen of Heaven with her crown, the Mary of the Annunciation with the Virgin holding a book, and the Apocalyptic Woman with the seated position of one knee protruding higher than the other, this example does not incorporate the Maria Lactans element since the Christ Child is not breastfeeding. Instead, Jesus and Mary look to their side at narrative scenes from the Joys of Mary, reminiscent to the celebrations of Mary’s life that are also depicted in early Virgenes Abrideras. However, later examples by Jaime Serra that date between 1360 and 1375 are more representative of the predominant Madonna of Humility motif (Fig. 27 and Fig. 28). In both of these very similar examples, the devout pray for intercession while angels, also soliciting compassion, surround Mary. The first example from a parish church in Palau de Cerdaña features an unknown tonsured monk while the second example depicts the founder of the House of Trastámara, King Enrique II of Castile and his family. In many examples of the Madonna of Humility, a crescent moon lays at Mary’s feet. This element is present in the Palau de Cerdaña painting, with the moon placed on the ground between the kneeling monk and the seated Mary. Of note, in the King Enrique II example, the moon is replaced by highly ornate war helmets that the king and prince have placed 74

before themselves on the ground, in honor of Mary. As the Apocalyptic Woman is associated with the activation of final battles of holy wars, I find this detail to be especially symbolic, particularly since it is the House of Trastámara that assumes the role of Christian warriors approximately one hundred years later, in the form of the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel and Ferdinand, claiming the Iberian Peninsula. It is this political connection to religious activation that most relates to the focus of my study. Peggy K. Liss in “Isabel, Myth and History” also proposes a link, in particular, between Queen Isabel and the prominence of the Marian iconography of the Apocalyptic Woman. Liss draws a parallel between Isabel’s narrative and that of the Apocalyptic Woman, describing the queen’s reign as emphasizing “urgency, a sense of crisis, of history coming to a head and soon to end, surely influenced by the enjoining of holy war in her youth and, as shall be seen, by other ideational currents.”146 Further, Liss claims that from the start of Isabel’s reign, the queen drew upon her patron saint, John the Evangelist, the assumed chronicler of Revelation as John of Patmos, and that Isabel “associated her goals with the vivid imagery of this work.”147 To build her case, Liss references Isabel’s commissioning of the Toledo church, San Juan de los Reyes in 1477, where an eagle, the animal attribute of John the Evangelist, shelters beneath its wings the royal coat of arms; as well, Liss details that Isabel’s confessor and counsellor, and newly appointed archbishop of Granada, Fray Hernando de Talavera, wrote a piece personally for the queen on Saint John and alluded to the queen as soaring, like an eagle, queen of

146

147

Liss, “Isabel, Myth and History,” 61.

Ibid. See, also Peggy K Liss, Isabel the Queen: Life and Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 174-175. 75

the skies.148 Thus, the queen rises, as in the narrative of the Apocalyptic Woman, above the reaches of Satan and his forces. In the Apocalypse, the Woman soars with eagle wings to escape evil and join God and her son before final battles end at the Last Judgement. Concerning Isabel, I argue that her political image rises to become a unifying force to join the Catholic kingdoms of Iberia before final battles against Islamic forces. The Apocalyptic Tota Pulchra (All Beautiful) Immaculate Conception Motifs While the Madonna of Humility solidified a link between the Apocalyptic Woman and Mary, it is in examples of Immaculate Conception art that the pairing relates to images of active power, as seen in the Toledo Virgen Abridera. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, the ongoing debate of the Immaculate Conception had shifted directions, moving from the physical conception of Mary through her parents, as previously discussed, to the spiritual conception of Mary through God. Also previously detailed, a long tradition existed of theologians drawing parallels between Genesis 3:15 and Revelation 12:1-12, linking the human Mary with the celestial Apocalyptic Woman. One such example of these early parallels is in the twelfth-century Sermon for the Sunday in the Octave of the Assumption by Bernard of Clairvaux. Here, Bernard claims the necessity of Mary’s role as intercessor by borrowing imagery from Revelation 12: “He is in you and you in him: you clothe him and are clothed by him.”149 This reference to clothing alludes to the Apocalyptic Woman, “clothed with the sun,” but with the sun a symbol here of God’s blessing through Jesus. By the late-fifteenth century, defenders of

148

Ibid., 62 and 71fn13.

149

Oakes, 114. 76

the Immaculate Conception more frequently recalled this parallel and used it to argue that Mary is exempt from Original Sin through the workings of God and not through any involvement of a human trinity, stemming from Anne. I assert that in Marian art of this period, it is the clothing of God’s blessing, the containment of sunlight, which persists as the signal of Mary’s immaculate purity, rather than symbolic references of human containment in Anne’s physical womb. Accordingly, Mary absorbs the entire appearance of the Apocalyptic Woman: stars around the head, sunbursts from the body, and moon beneath the feet. It is the sunlight surging around the Apocalyptic Mary that heightens a sense of purity, free from Original Sin. Additionally, the celestial stars and moon indicate an unsoiled body; this Mary never steps foot upon Earthly soil. Mallorca de Palma Cathedral Tympanum. An example of this Apocalyptic Mary is in the previously discussed colossal tympanum of the main portal at the Mallorca de Palma Cathedral (Figs. 18, 19, and 29). In addition to assuming the figure of Apocalyptic Mary, this Mary also performs her role of mediator as Christ’s mother. In Bernard of Clairvaux’s previously quoted writing, he transforms the sun metaphor, as it pertains to the Apocalyptic Woman, into a metaphor of God’s blessing through the birth of Christ and in this way replaces the Apocalyptic Woman with Mary. Bernard continues, “What else is the symbolic fleece placed between the dew and the floor, and the Woman standing between the sun and the moon, but Mary mediating between Christ and the Church?”150 Thus, I interpret the celestial iconography that surrounds Mary in the tota pulchra motif to be a narrative of mediation. On the

150

Ibid., 115. 77

tympanum, the sun by Mary’s head symbolizes Christ, and the moon on the other side of her head references the church. Mary stands as sun-blessed mediator between her son and the devout. In this way, the tympanum is an example of the complex development of Immaculate Conception doctrine and the elevation of Mary’s role as active intercessor in the tota pulchra motif. Though, this iconography is not solely about empowering Mary. The Apocalyptic Woman was a force in her own right for centuries in scripture and a popular icon especially in Spain, as evidenced by heavy production of illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts such as the Spanish Beatus Apocalypse. As such, the Woman could not be completely absorbed by Mary. The Mallorca tympanum figure, therefore, retains her twelve-star crown and steps on a crescent moon. In this emphasis on the Apocalyptic Woman, the tympanum is closely aligned with the Toledo Virgen Abridera (Figs. 1 and 3). Further, both the tympanum and Virgen Abridera implement an event of passage— one through a physical barrier into a cathedral; the other through a series of opening and closing levels of revelation. The active agency of the Apocalyptic Woman who opens passage to a final battle and judgement prompts the devout towards physical action, which in the Toledo piece is an opening of a second layering of the triptych. Toledo Virgen Abridera. As already noted, the Toledo Virgen Abridera opens to a complicated first layer that features in the side wings the traditional Joys of Mary and in the central panel the emerging tota pulchra aspects of Mary who stands in silent prayer, absorbing the attributes of the Apocalyptic Woman. Beyond the figure of Apocalyptic Mary, the Toledo example applies additional iconography to emphasize the Apocalypse. With the 78

religious, cultural, and political atmosphere of multi-faith turmoil, while a shift occurred post-Reconquista and post-contact with the Americas, and with the rise of mysticism and reports of miraculous visions, I argue that the heightened Apocalyptic elements in the Toledo Virgen Abridera corresponds to its regional and temporal climate. In Revelation, John of Patmos depicts heavenly Jerusalem as built on a foundation of twelve levels of gems; thus, the Civitas Dei or City of God icon is a layered structure, and in the Toledo Virgen Abridera, as previously noted, it is at the bottom right of Mary, who is deep in prayer, perhaps interceding with Christ to deliver salvation to humans and, thus, the potential to reach this Holy City after Judgment Day. It is also significant that the Civitas Dei sits beside the dragon in the Toledo piece—the only Virgen Abridera with an identifiable dragon. Although this dragon is defeated, he still furiously looks up at the Apocalyptic Woman, now recognized as Mary. His back legs flex in an in-between state. Is he bending into submission or tensing into action? His mouth opens and his back spikes, even as Apocalyptic Mary floats above. In this way, he resonates with the Flight of the Woman image from the Bamberg Apocalypse (Fig. 22). Assuming the narrative in Revelation, the dragon’s open mouth in the Toledo piece may signal the moment before he releases the flood—the last encounter between the Woman and Dragon, prior to final battle and judgement. This dragon is not an icon of the Immaculate Conception, but rather the Apocalypse. Further, he is central in the triptych, as is the moon that Apocalyptic Mary stands upon and the incised golden sunrays that emit from her. She even has a protruding knee, reminiscent of the uneven leg positioning of early Apocalyptic Woman imagery and a carry-over into the Madonna of Humility motif.

79

Thus, with this central Apocalyptic Woman figure, the accumulation of Mary’s surrounding motifs takes new meaning—Mary’s traditional Joys of Life narratives frame Spain’s reverence of the tota pulchra, or all beautiful, Immaculate Conception Mary, but central is the Virgin as Apocalyptic Woman. This pulls together first the joys and then the virtues of life into a central solemn prayer before final battles and final judgement. In this way, the Apocalyptic Woman aligns with her narrative core of end times, a narrative in which the Catholic Monarchs, prominent theologians, and the Iberian population, at large, demonstrated a strong interest through battle, writings, and visions. It is noteworthy that in the Toledo Virgen Abridera the dragon has leopard spots and the Joys of Mary scenes have a backdrop of exotic feathers. While the feathers have never been examined—since the piece has left its convent only once in five centuries— along with the dragon’s leopard spots both features include a sense of the exotic. The leopard’s natural habitat is in Africa and tropical Asia.151 In the fifteenth century, leopards were collected for private menageries such as those of the Medici, who revived the Roman pastime of staging battles between bears and leopards during Pope Pius II’s 1459 visit.152 This fascination with exotics reveals a division between Christian Europe and the “otherness” beyond borders. As Spain was actively pushing borders, I propose that the exotic signals in the Toledo piece be further examined for political and cultural implications. This is particularly vital since contemporary with the Toledo example,

Lourens Swanepoel et al., “Extent and Fragmentation of Suitable Leopard Habitat in South Africa,” Animal Conservation 16, no. 1 (2013): 41. 151

Erik Ringmar, “Audience for a Giraffe: European Expansionism and the Quest for the Exotic,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 381. 80 152

patriotic chroniclers were hailing Spain as the site of the Second Coming for its persistent wars of faith. With the fall of Islamic Granada, a mood of messianic expectation arose and took root in future centuries of colonization.153 In this light, Apocalyptic Mary stands over the dragon who is identified as a specifically exotic presence in the world. Thus, the activation that the Apocalyptic Woman brings to the Toledo motif is one that might prompt political and religious response to the multi-faith sectors in and outside a newly consolidating Spain. Upon reflection on the Apocalyptic Woman, viewers are meant to physically engage with the Virgen Abridera. Mary’s stillness must be interrupted by action. Her quiet prayer is only a moment of peace before viewers reach to part Mary’s pressed hands—thus revealing an inner narrative of sacrifice and death.

Brading, 34. Brading cites Juan de Salazar’s Spanish Polity (1619) that claims Spaniards as God’s new chosen people, in parallel with Israelites in Old Testament Egypt. 81 153

CHAPTER 3 TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA, FINAL LAYER: OPENED SORROWS It then occurred to him that he should go to the pope, to kings, and to Christian princes to incite them and get them to institute, in whatever kingdoms and provinces might be appropriate, monasteries in which selected monks and others fit for the task would be brought together to learn the languages of the Saracens and other unbelievers, so that, from among those properly instructed in such a place, one could always find the right people ready to be sent out to preach and demonstrate to the Saracens and other unbelievers the holy truth of the Catholic faith, which is that of Christ.154 This was the mission of Ramon Llull, as described in his biography, the Vita coaetanea, written in 1316 five years prior to Llull’s death, perhaps dictated in third person by Llull, himself. Llull’s goal of opening communications across faiths for the purpose of conversion provides an example of attempts to establish common ground, which I argue affected both rhetorical and visual arts in Iberian borderland cultures. I suggest that the traditional outer layer of the Toledo Virgen Abridera is an example of this borderland common ground, focusing on Mary and her joys. However, hidden inside Mary’s breasts

“A Life of Ramon Llull (ca. 1311),” in Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed. Olivia Remie Constable, trans. Anthony Bonner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 278. 82 154

is a final layer of sorrow that indicates a shift from Llull’s strategies. Thus, it is crucial to my thesis that I explore this move from joy to sorrow in the Toledo piece, and from common ground to confrontation in Castilian rhetoric. Llull, a prominent theologian in the court of Aragon and Mallorca, was inspired by the mendicant example of Saint Francis to spread Christianity and convert those of other faiths. Llull’s method, however, was not through evangelization but through education and rhetoric, based on layers of structured deductions. With the support of James II of Mallorca, Llull founded the missionary college of Miramar in November 1276, employing thirteen Franciscans to study the Arabic language for the purpose of conversion.155 In a borderland society with over six hundred years of contested territories at the time of Llull’s efforts, this communication was another tactic to gain ground and power. Not only did Llull promote the study of language, he utilized shared modes of understanding amongst Iberian multi-faith societies. According to Harvey Hames in The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century, Llull may have used Jewish mysticism in the form of Kabbalistic themes as a framework in his most important work, the Ars Magna (Great Art).156 In early pre-medieval Jewish mysticism, such as Merkabah mysticism, God is not easily reached. Focused meditation through layers of transcendence and time is needed to approach an understanding of God. This concept continued in medieval Kabbalah mysticism where knowledge of God is not a process of transmission through codified

155

156

Webster, 37.

Harvey J. Hames, The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 27-28. 83

systems, but rather a process of discovery and innovation.157 Leaders in Jewish mysticism, particularly those associated with the Kabbalah, were rooted in Iberia by the thirteenth century, the time in which Llull began to write and in which the Franciscans launched their missionary efforts. I find this to be significant since Llull and the Franciscans also based their work in innovation. Through cross-cultural education and through mendicant activities, both Llull and the Franciscans challenged previously codified systems. This aligns the two faiths in this period, both cultivating in subgroups a progressive awareness. To assist in this cultivation, language and translation efforts such as those advanced by Llull in Mallorca also found patronage by royalty. Toledo, in particular, became a center of translation and dissemination. According to María Rosa Menocal in The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, King Alfonso X of Castile, during his reign from 1252 to 1284, proved instrumental in establishing Toledo as a city of scribes with the mission to translate and copy, particularly into the vernacular language.158 In this atmosphere of translation and exchange, prominent Iberian writers and leaders in Jewish mysticism included the Girona circle in Catalonia, which was active in the thirteenth century through Rabbi Ezra, Rabbi Ya’akov bar Sheshet, and Rabbi

157

Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications, trans. Jackie Feldman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 80. 158

María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 224. Menocal claims that in the thirteenth-century Toledo became “the first laboratory in Europe dedicated to forging a modern language, a vernacular that would replace Latin in all its functions save the purely ecclesiastical and liturgical.” 84

Azriel.159 Azriel, who wrote Kabbalistic texts and letters that addressed the nature of the sefirot, which is the emanation of God’s divinity, argued that the sefirot could be understood only through applying logic and reason after a journey of multiple-layered studies. This concept of study and reason is in line with Llull’s mission to advance Franciscan efforts through his own development of argumentative rhetoric. Other influential leaders of Jewish mysticism during this time in Iberia included the Cohen brothers of Castile, Rabbi Moshe of Burgos, and Rabbi Abraham Abulafia of Zaragoza. Most relevant to my thesis is the inclusion in Jewish mysticism writings and teachings of a female component in the description of God’s aspects. This is seen in major Jewish mystic writings such as the Bahir (The Book of Brilliance, late twelfthcentury in Provence) and the Zohar (The Book of Splendor, late thirteenth-century in Castile), allowing duality in God that corresponds with human gendered experience. This correlates with the rising devotion of Mary. Franciscans similarly valued Mary as a more realistic intermediary between the divine and the lived experience, as well as a female source of compassion and intercession. The strongest evidence of a parallel between contemporary Iberian writers of Jewish and Catholic faiths manifests between Llull and Moses de León.160 Moses and his

159

Halbertal, 77.

In Menocal’s studies, she notes an example of translation and dissemination amongst the theologian circle of writers. She states that Moses de León purchased a 1264 copy of the Hebrew translation of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. Menocal says, “This was not a particularly early translation of the book that was already dramatically affecting religious thought among both Jews and Christians in the West, since the Guide had been translated from Maimonides’s native Arabic into Hebrew much earlier in the century, and then rendered from the Hebrew into Latin by a group of translators at the court of Frederick II working under the direction of Michael Scot.” Menocal, 222-223. 85 160

Castilian collaborators wrote the Zohar, which teaches that the male and female join to form a whole human; further, this whole human is the structure in which the sefirot, the emanation of God’s divinity, manifests: the keter which is the topmost aspect is at the crown, then downwards is a series of binaries (chochmah or wisdom, which is male; and binah or the womb as the understanding of potential, which is female; gevurah or judgement, which is the left arm; and chesed or mercy, which is the right arm), tif’eret or balance is at the core, hod or majesty and netzach or endurance are the left and right legs, yesod or foundation is the phallus, and at the foot is malkuth which is presence or kingdom. Metaphorically this is a body garment produced from God’s emanations that he places over human experience. Much as the Apocalyptic Woman is clothed in the sunlight as a symbol of God’s presence through blessing, the Zohar advocates an understanding of God’s presence through focusing on the holy garment that enwraps all of humanity. Llull promoted a similar model in which to access God. Harvey Hames highlights these correlations by analyzing Llull’s nine classifications of the dignitates Dei or aspects of God. While Llull did not use a structure based on the human form and instead described these aspects as contained in a circle, thus attempting to avoid hierarchy, in Llull’s definitions he does create hierarchy, much like the sefirot structure. Llull writes in his 1289 Ars inventive veritatis that Gloria is “the bliss where Goodness, Greatness and all the other dignities come to rest.”161 Gloria is, therefore, the apex of the other aspects, much like the keter is the crown of the body, as defined by the Zohar. In this way, while

161

Hames, 130-131. 86

retaining his distinct classifications of God’s elements, Llull maintains commonalities between his Catholic system of expression and those of Jewish mystics. I observe that this system of breaking down aspects of the divinity later manifests in the tota pulchra motif, as applied to Mary who is surrounded by symbols of her aspects and, herself, clothed with God’s realized divinity as she radiates sunlight, much like the Apocalyptic Woman. To place Mary in the later tota pulchra Immaculate Conception iconography as a possible counterpart to the framework in which both the Zohar and Llull’s dignitates Dei define the divinity, raises the status of Mary through shared contemporary rhetoric of discourse. In his studies of the Immaculate Conception in Aragon, Father Basili de Rubí states that Llull was instrumental in rationalizing the Immaculate Conception to the Franciscans of Barcelona.162 As an advocate for Mary’s heightened status in Catholic doctrine, Llull may have embraced the gendered system of classifying the divinity in Jewish mysticism. Further study may develop a correlation between the tota pulchra hymns and resulting art motifs and the classification system of God’s aspects in both the Zohar and Llull’s various writings. However, the correlation between Llull’s writing and contemporary Jewish mysticism is well established. It is clear that Llull remained consistent in his efforts to establish a common vocabulary with contemporary writers and thinkers of other faiths to best communicate in a multi-faith society.

Webster, 266. Webster cites Rubí’s “La escuela franciscana de Barcelona y su intervención en los decretos inmaculistas de la Corona de Aragón,” Estudios Franciscanos, 57: 363-406. 87 162

This was not an effort to bridge faiths for peaceful relations, but rather a strategy of conversion. Llull’s mission was to create a government-sponsored army of missionaries with an ability to converse in languages and in philosophical frameworks that established common ground for dialogue. As Cynthia Robinson summarizes, Llull was driven “by the conviction that discourse and debate based in combinations of topoi culled from a set of symbols recognized, understood, and accepted by members of all three traditions would make the inevitable Christian triumph all the more meaningful.”163 Robinson further argues that the symbol of Christ did not accommodate this strategy. Llull was, thus, challenged to present a non-alienating argument on God’s incarnation through a human son, the incarnation being largely rejected by Jewish and Islamic populations. Hames details Llull’s resulting argument, as follows: It is not the divine dignities on the highest and most simple level of being themselves which become man, because that would imply change in God. However, it [is] their likeness through the operation of filiation to the greatest degree possible which is incarnated in Jesus. Thus, Jesus is the most perfect man in his human nature, and the closest being to God in that he has the greatest degree of likeness to the divine essence of any other created being.164 Hames continues to analyze Llull’s argument as problematic in the context of Christianity and even the Franciscan order since it separates the Son of the Trinity from the man, Jesus; however, the argument is more compatible with other faiths as it creates distance

163

Robinson, 21.

164

Hames, 243. 88

between God and Jesus, as well. This distance, I argue, affects Jesus’s visibility in the art of Spain and allows greater emphasis on Mary, whose role serves as a conduit, not as an incarnation—and, thus, is less controversial for the purpose of conversion missions. Borderland Art It is in this atmosphere of multi-faith tensions that the Virgenes Abrideras’ Joys of Mary narratives appear in thirteenth-century Spain, while north of the Pyrenees, Trinity figures with the crucified Christ dominate. I propose that in a contested borderland region, Mary offers a narrative that is less confrontational while still expressing the core values of Catholicism. Her iconography signals her role as container of the incarnation of Christ, and Christ therefore does not need to be explicitly depicted. She represents a process of discovery that brings the devout closer to God, yet God and his incarnate remain unseen. In an atmosphere of heightened mysticism across faiths, this position as an intercessor or bridge figure is particularly accessible. In his The Way of Faith and the Way of Heresy, written at Girona (north of Barcelona) in the early thirteenth-century, Rabbi Azriel wrote that “the language of faith does not apply to what is, that which is seen and conceived, nor to the nothingness that cannot be seen or conceived, but rather to the place of juncture of nothingness and what is.”165 I argue that the thirteenth-century Catholic traditions established Mary as this place of juncture, where the invisible becomes visible. Only at this intersection, an understanding of the invisible and of that which lacks language may begin.

165

Halbertal, 180-181n2. 89

This is reminiscent of Thomas of Celano, also writing in the thirteenth century, when he celebrates the viewing of Saint Francis’s stigmata. As previously quoted, Thomas praises God who “renews signs and works new miracles that he might console the minds of the weak with new revelations and that by means of a wonderful work in things visible their hearts might be caught up to a love of things invisible.”166 While Thomas was referencing Francis as an instrument through which God made visible the invisible, Mary dominated in the tradition of this concept. In art, it is through Mary that the unseen manifests. This is present in the tradition in which the Virgenes Abrideras participates, where Mary opens to reveal the workings of the divinity—either through her joys as the mother of God’s incarnate or through the incarnate, himself. This tradition of depicting Mary as the juncture where the invisible is made visible traces back to devotional art in another contested borderland region, the Byzantine Empire. Further, in the Toledo Virgen Abridera, when Mary’s praying hands are parted, thus revealing an inner triptych concealed in the Virgin’s breasts, Mary’s parted arms take the positioning of the Orans Virgin, strongly associated with Byzantine tradition. This correlation is significant because when Constantinople fell to Turkish invasion in 1453, shortly after Queen Isabel’s birth, many writers and influential leaders within Iberia claimed Spain as “a new sun, or a new star, rising in the west to counterbalance that loss and redress it.”167

166

Thomas of Celano, 327.

167

Liss, Isabel the Queen: Life and Times, 393. 90

Orans Virgin The Orans Virgin motif and its associated themes are prominent in borderland culture. The motif consists of Mary spreading her arms into the air as a medallion floats over her chest, and in that medallion is the image of the Christ Child. In 451, Byzantine Empress Pulcheria was instrumental in gathering a council at Chalcedon to address church disagreement on the two natures of Christ, with Mary as the mother of the human god being core to this debate. After the council determined that Christ is of dual natures—both divine and human—Pulcheria dedicated to Mary three churches in Constantinople, one being the Blachernae.168 Almost immediately, the Blachernae became associated with imperial victory and protection, and emperors prayed at the site prior to battle campaigns.169 Initially the idea that the Blachernae could provide protective blessings is a result of the church claiming the relic of Mary’s mantle, secured in the papacy of Leo I (457-474).170 This mantle symbolized Mary’s intercession, a wrap of security on the edges of a newly emerging Christendom. By the mid-eleventh century, a second association further raised the status of the Blachernae. The church contained an icon of Mary that performed a miraculous transformation every Friday. The cloth that veiled the icon began to rise on its own,

168

Vasiliki Limberis, Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople (London: Routledge, 1994), 57. 169

Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 4. 170

Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 34-35. 91

revealing the image of Mary. Byzantine monk and historian, Michael Psellos chronicled this weekly event in 1075: The doors are opened, and entry is given to the ones who stand in front of the temple. And as they enter in a mixture of fear and joy, the veil on the icon lifts up in front of the crowds, as if raised by the Spirit. And this event seems incredible for those who did not see it, yet, for those who saw it, it is paradoxical and clearly a descent of the Holy Spirit. Together with this occurrence, the shape of the Virgin changes, I believe, having received her [the Virgin’s] animated empsychos visit, marking the invisible with the visible.171 This uncovering of an image through a physical barrier and the interpretation of Mary as the source of the invisible made visible are traits that become core to Marian art, as seen four hundred and fifty years later in the Toledo Virgen Abridera. In the Toledo piece, Mary is hidden until the first layer is opened, much like the lifting of the veil in the Blachernae; and, once opened, the Toledo Mary transforms by opening a narrative in her chest. However, it is the active agency of the devout, rather than miraculous forces, that reveal Mary in the Toledo example. In this way, humans are empowered in their devotion, able to activate the narrative of the visible made invisible. I propose that for the nuns of Toledo, this active agency aimed to emulate, to some degree, the focus, courage, and sacrifice that Mary maintained in her own role of manifesting the holy.

171

Pentcheva, Icons and Power, 157. Pentcheva cites Psellos, Orationes Hagiographicae, ed. Fisher, 204-5; and Grumel, “Le ‘miracle habituel’ de Notre Dame des Blachernes,’ 137. 92

This role became the focus of the iconography of the Byzantine Orans Virgin that developed in honor of the Blachernae miracle and which became threaded in later Marian motifs. An early example of the Byzantine Orans Virgin appears on a 1042 gold coin of the empresses Zoe and Theodora (Fig. 30).172 In this example, Mary separates her arms to the side of her chest and holds her palms upwards in prayer, her forearms extending from beyond the heavy drapery of her cloak. She is making visible the invisible, as on her chest she reveals the medallion. Yet, while Christ’s image on the medallion is that of a human child, he remains in an abstract otherness, framed in the medallion’s spiritual realm. He is seen in this otherwise invisible existence only through Mary’s revelation. According to Bissera Pentcheva in her Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, the Byzantine Orans Virgin motif spread quickly, particularly in lead seals from the last quarter of the eleventh century, of which three-hundred-and-eleven survive, attesting to the dominance of the motif.173 In the same century, the motif reached Prata di Principato Ultra in the south of Italy, in the region of Campania, later to be under the control of Aragon through the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. During the eleventh century in the Basilica dell’Annunciata, an Orans Virgin fresco was created, which features Mary in a similar positioning as the Byzantine gold coin: arms spread apart with hands raised to the sky, and in her chest is a now-obscured medallion featuring the Christ Child. Yet the obscuration of the Christ Child is thematically insignificant, since the point of this motif is the concept of Mary’s ability to make visible the invisible.

172

Ibid., 146.

173

Ibid., 146-147. 93

Regardless of Christ’s visibility in the fresco, Mary’s role as conduit is still clear and central; and this defined role allows the invisible to remain elusive yet at the same time present. Mary can become a signifier of the divine. As later seen in borderland Catholic devotional art in Iberia, Christ’s visibility is intentionally obscured. In the fifteenth century, Mary assumes a stand-alone motif, particularly in works that depict the Immaculate Conception, where strategically she does not alienate multi-faith populations, yet her presence still calls to memory the invisible for the Catholic devout. However, this recall of memory is not necessarily rooted in the past, but in an activation of reliving the miraculous unseen. In Elina Gertsman’s Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, Gertsman devotes a chapter to the study of the Virgenes Abrideras as part of a medieval art culture that aimed to aid in the recollection of memory. She ties the sculptures into contemporary medieval meditation treatises that promote images that anchor the wandering “mind’s eye” to help recall spiritual teachings and to aid in contemplation before the eye moves to the next visual anchoring elements of the piece.174 While the pieces clearly aid in memory recall as viewers physically open narratives of religious significance, I argue that the event unfolded and Mary’s role are not meant to recall only a past. Rather, they are to recall a living God and a still-active intercession through Mary. Gertsman analyzes these pieces in the context of medieval performative cultures, where activation is by the devout; however, I argue that the Virgenes Abrideras, similar to the Byzantine tradition, demonstrates a dynamic moment of juncture where active

174

Elina Gertsman, 158. 94

symbolic transformation occurs in and through the objects, a sentiment particularly useful in borderland societies. In Worlds Within, Gertsman likens Mary’s body in art to a monstrance that contains the transformed host during the sacrament of the Eucharist.175 Gertsman writes specifically of Western European tradition, a tradition that I believe contrasts to those of the borderland regions on the edges of Christendom. In Byzantine art and in traditions of mystic Iberia, art is deemed living. Mary’s body is not solely the site of containment, like a monstrance. After all, a monstrance is not the location of transfiguration but rather the site of adoration of the already-extant mutation. Deeming Marian art as providing a visual memory, including the memory of the sacrament of the Eucharist, limits Mary as merely the vessel of a finished action. This retracts active agency from Mary. In borderland cultures such as in the areas that would become Spain and Turkey, this suppression of dynamic agency would be a particularly notable restriction of the icon. Further, such an interpretation of Mary as mere vessel counters the established findings at the Council of Epheus in 431 that declared the incarnation of Jesus to be dependent on the indispensable active role of a human mother, since only the human mother could guarantee the human life of Jesus; therefore, Mary must have conceived Christ through God in her body if the unity of Jesus as a person was to be valid.176 It follows that Mary contains the site of transformation and is not a vessel for that which God had already conceived outside of Mary’s body. The sight of Mary’s body in

175

Ibid., 50.

176

Belting, 32. 95

borderland art, I argue, does not recall memory of a past event so much as the potentiality of an active point of juncture. The potentiality is, however, based on recalling the memory of Jesus—yet in the capacity of a living human experience and an active divine presence. In 1 Corinthians 11: 23-26, the apostle Paul speaks of Jesus’s Last Supper and thus details the “institution narrative” of the Eucharist with the first symbolic breaking of bread as the body of Christ.177 In that narrative, Paul records Jesus as offering the bread to his disciples and saying, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” The Eucharist is, therefore, a moment of remembrance. However, it is also a moment of dynamic change through both the transformation of Christ from the unseen spirit to the seen host and the ingestion of this spiritual teaching into a physical absorption by the devout who take the host into their own body. In this ingestion, the potential for Christ’s teachings activates the human experience, thereby giving renewed life to Christ—no longer a memory but now part of the absorbed present and future. Thus, there is a dual nature in this remembrance, one in solemn respect of the past and one in activation towards a future that is ever in flux. This, I argue, is the heart of the Orans Virgin art motif and of the similar motif found in the Toledo Virgen Abridera—a dynamism that is apart yet part of time. In this distinctive positioning, Mary’s power is immense, particularly in the manifestation of intercession. As borderland art, this intercession is of utmost importance, not just in regards to spirituality but to the lived experiences of battle in contested regions.

177

Ralph McMichael, Eucharist: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 9. 96

The fact that examples of the Orans Virgin can be found on imperial coins points to the use of Mary as a protectress of the empire. According to Bissera Pentcheva, the Byzantine understanding of Mary as the Theotokos, or mother of God, embodies two concepts that are tied to war: “virginal motherhood, which is the source of Mary’s invincibility, and motherly sacrifice—in selflessly offering her Child to the world, the Theotokos presented a model of selfless love indispensable for any state recruiting armies.”178 Pentcheva further suggests that Mary’s impenetrable virginity connects her to earlier protectresses of the empire, chiefly the virgin Athena who is most closely associated to success at war. Vasiliki Limberis in Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople also links Mary with Tyche, who is the goddess of fortune. As such, Tyche is associated with walls of the city gates as she determines the prosperity of the lived experience, symbolized by walls of wealthy and impenetrable cities. To support this early link between Mary and Tyche, Limberis references the early fifth- to sixth-century Marian Akathistos Hymn that in its praise of Mary as protectress, uses architectural imagery that resonates with Tyche as the previous protectress of empire such as a wall, a door, a gate, and a bridge.179 Of note, in the later tota pulchra motif, which is part of the Toledo Virgen Abridera central panel, I observe that Mary is still associated with the architectural elements: the Porta Celli which is the closed gate to Paradise, the Turris Davidica or Tower of David, and the Civitas Dei or City of God. In the borderland of Castile, the kingdom which uses on its own coats of arm the symbol of

178

Pentcheva, Icons and Power, 61.

179

Limberis, 127-128. 97

the closed impenetrable castle, it is interesting that Mary continues to have strong associations with architecture—as defense and territory remain of priority in this contested region. The active agency of Mary to bridge the invisible with the visible and the intangible with the tangible is of great significance in her role as protectress. Mary is a creator of the visible and the tangible, not a passive container of memory. Containers are not as conducive to victory as is an active site of transformation. Politically, the image of a strong and solid foundation, paired with a sense of purposeful dynamism can activate populations of both devout and militaristic forces. More aligned with this sense of dynamism, it is the symbol of a mutable protective mantle rather than the impassable stones of a castle or city wall that prevails in the Byzantine Orans Virgin motif. The mutability of the Orans Virgin aligns with the Byzantine aesthetics of variable, ever-changing appearances in objects of devotion; the icons live, transforming in space through effects in the shifts of light, air, sound, and smell.180 Even slightly removed from its original context in Constantinople, the Orans Virgin retains motion. In a circa 1200 Byzantine-influenced Venetian stone icon in Santa Maria Mater Domini, the Orans Virgin seems to be in movement in her hard relief engraving (Fig. 31). This Orans Virgin is in process, revealing the medallion of the Christ Child that floats at her chest, actualized yet still not quite attached to space. The floating element imparts the sensation that the miracle of the incarnation of God in Christ is now occurring and a birth has yet to be realized. This is a layered process in motion.

180

Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 14. 98

I observe that the attention to Mary’s mantle underscores this sense of layering and motion. As she spreads her arms and exposes her bodily form, rippling outwards is the abundant fabric of both her under robe and her mantle, specifically a maphorion which is an outer robe that covers the body from head to foot. The section of her under robe that covers her legs is incised with V-shaped chevrons that over her thighs point upwards towards the floating Christ medallion and that below her knees point downwards to the ground. In this way, her body directs attention both to the celestial divine and the human earth. Yet the vertical grooves that run the length of her inner legs, from waist to feet, bisect Mary. I propose that this alludes to the dualities of divinity and humanity, joined through the incarnation of Christ who will emerge from his mother’s womb. For this emergence to occur, Mary must open herself physically and spiritually to the will of God. Thus, in the image she indicates this acceptance of her role by opening her arms in prayer and simultaneously revealing the Christ Child. In this action, the maphorion flows from Mary’s body in sharply angular folds around her midsection. This forms an oval around Mary as if she, like her son, may also be emerging from a medallion. Additionally, around Mary’s head and neck is abundant cloth, hooding Mary protectively as a wide halo emits behind her, again mimicking the medallion of the Christ Child and framing Mary’s head in the same manner as the Christ Child’s head. Such parallels heighten Mary’s role as a juncture point. As in the Toledo Virgen Abridera, Mary is in a level of containment that separates her from the earthly world, while Jesus is in a second layer of containment, even further removed. This concept anticipates similar developments in the doctrine and art of the Immaculate Conception. Mary is of the earthly experience but conceived for an unseen spiritual experience. 99

While attention to Mary’s clothing is important in the motif’s expression of movement towards revelation of the miraculous, the fabric also references the mantle that the Blachernae in Constantinople claimed as Mary’s relic, the relic that helped to raise the church into a site of protection and of military blessing, prior to the miraculous eleventh-century rising of the veil covering Mary’s icon. Thus the link is significant between Mary’s cloak as relic and the Byzantine Orans Virgin motif that heavily emphasizes Mary’s clothing. In the Santa Maria Mater Domini Orans Virgin, Mary’s outer robe or maphorion, like a curtain, rises to expose divinity, much like the Blachernae icon was revealed through the rising of its covering; yet concurrently the Orans Virgin’s maphorion forms a potential shelter to protect humanity. It is, therefore, interesting that the same motif occurs in the depiction of the Apocalyptic Woman in the circa 1300 Rothschild Canticles (Fig. 32). In his studies of the Rothschild Canticles, likely produced for a Dominican nun in Flanders or the Rhineland, Jeffrey F. Hamburger focuses on its illuminated art as embodying a double paradox; Hamburger suggests that the “miniatures attempt to make us see that which cannot be seen, to depict that which is above all images.” In this attempt the main subject is, therefore, not the futile depiction of the unseen Trinity but rather necessarily focused upon the lived experience of an encounter “between viewer and the image as a simulacrum of the encounter between God and the soul.”181 In this manuscript, John the Evangelist, the assumed chronicler of Revelation as John of Patmos,

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Revelation and Concealment: Apophatic Imagery in the Trinitarian Miniatures of the Rothschild Canticles,” Yale University Library Gazette, 66 (1991): 134. 100 181

appears on a page facing the Apocalyptic Woman. John is in the active process of writing his book when interrupted by revelation. On the opposite page, the Apocalyptic Woman is depicted stepping on her personified moon and clothed in the emanations of a personified sun. However, here, the sunlight radiates from a medallion that floats at the center of the Woman’s body, rather than entirely engulfing her as in the more traditional depiction seen in the fourteenth-century Canonici Apocalypse (Fig. 20). This is because the canticle is a clear reference to the Orans Virgin. The Apocalyptic Woman’s opened and lifted arms, as well as the drapery of her outer robe, also recall the Orans Virgin, thus linking the two female figures to the concept of transformation, activation, and protection. In the case of Mary, she activates the incarnation while positioning into her role as protectress or intercessor of humans; and in the case of the Apocalyptic Woman, she activates the end process of that incarnation which, after she protects her child from the dragon, leads to salvation in Heavenly Jerusalem. As I discussed in chapter two, the link between the Apocalyptic Woman and Mary resonated particularly in the Iberian Catholic cultures that were politically motivated in borderlands to promote images of activation. A late example of this link is a sixteenthcentury La Virgen de la Esperanza featured as a miniature in a cantoral or song book at the Cathedral of Seville, Spain (Fig. 33). Here, Mary sits on a throne as she spreads her arms open and upwards to reveal the Christ Child who floats over his mother’s body in a sun medallion, reminiscent of the image of the Apocalyptic Woman in the Rothschild Canticles, and on the ground at Mary’s right side is the apocalyptic moon. La Virgen de la Esperanza is also reminiscent of the mid-fifteenth-century Virgen Abridera at Bergara, Spain (Fig. 34) in both the seating and Mary’s arm positioning. In fact, the concept of 101

Mary manifesting the unseen into the seen is a key concept of all Virgenes Abrideras and it, therefore, follows that threads of earlier Orans Virgin motifs would merge into one of these sculptures. In its original location in the hermitage of San Blas de Buriñondo, the Bergara Virgen Abridera lifts and separates her arms in the Orans Virgin manner. Further, the outer robe remains an emphasized feature, forming a circular protection around Mary’s swollen stomach that, when opened, reveals her pregnancy to contain the Trinity. In her research, Irene Gónzalez-Hernando has observed a crack along Mary’s left arm, leading to speculation that the orans hands were added in later modifications to the sculpture; additionally, the Christ Child sculpture that is fitted to sit upon Mary’s lap is a later addition, according to Gónzalez-Hernando who suggests that this Christ Child piece may have been added due to the problematic imagery of the Virgin being clearly pregnant with the Trinity.182 There is no indication, however, of a date in which these changes may have occurred and there is no evidence that Mary’s robe has been modified. I suggest that as a protective circle, the robe may have been originally designed to impart a sense of security to Mary’s pregnancy and later influenced the adaptation of the piece into an Orans Virgin sculpture—since the addition of the Christ Child then fits in the medallion-shaped space and the newly raised hands would finish the orans motif. Further, as an Orans Virgin, the physicality of the Bargara example becomes less literal since the Orans Virgin motif emphasizes Mary’s role as a junction point between the visible and the invisible. Therefore, the revelation of the Trinity in Mary’s pregnant

182

Gertsman, 198n20. 102

stomach is minimized as a physical pregnancy that would imply Mary as mother of Christ, God, and the Holy Spirit; rather she encloses the revelation of the divine unseen. What I find particularly significant in the Bergara piece, however, is its shift away from the Joys of Mary narrative that were featured in earlier examples in Iberian Virgenes Abrideras. A fourteenth-century Virgenes Abridera in Toldaos, Spain, also residing in its original church of San Salvador de Toldaos, similarly encloses the Trinity. However, both Bergara and Toldaos are located in the north of Spain, near the Camino Francés, the popular medieval pilgrim route from Jean-Pied-du-Port, France to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Toldaos is only eleven miles from two pilgrim rest stops along the Camino Francés: Triacastela and Sarria. It is possible that these two Virgenes Abrideras, therefore, absorbed the Trinity motif from north of the Pyrenees. However, they may also indicate a transition into a later Castilian narrative of Mary’s sorrow, during the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. In this way, they could signal an approaching shift away from Llull’s conversion strategies. With emergences of the Trinity Virgenes Abrideras and later narratives of the Passion, it is possible that art was emulating a political atmosphere that had turned from discourse and instead heightened a more aggressive conversion effort. This may also run in parallel with developments in the Orans Virgin, the motif’s element of the opened protective cloak being absorbed into iconography of the Madonna of Misericordia or the Madonna of Mercy. Hans Belting in Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art states that the Madonna of Misericordia embodies the idea of the protective mantle from the Orans Virgin, in reference to the Blachernae relic and

103

miracle.183 Belting offers an example of a fourteenth-century Madonna of Mercy from a private collection in Venice, Italy. In this example, the floating medallion of the Christ Child remains over Mary’s chest, yet now Mary’s opened arms point downwards, protecting the small humans who pray at her feet. A huge figure in scale to the humans, Mary towers as a powerful intercessor. Gone is any sense of humility and passivity. Mary dominates the space. This power image of Mary appears in Spain, as well, and is later linked politically to both the Catholic Monarchs and the conquest of the Americas. In the decade leading to the Reconquista of southern Iberia, Diego de la Cruz painted La Virgen de la Misericordia con los Reyes Católicos y su familia in 1486 at the Cistercian Monasterio de Santa María la Real de las Huelgas in northern Castile at Burgos (Fig. 35). Queen Isabel commissioned Diego de la Cruz to paint many works and created the previously discussed Tree of Jesse in the Conception Chapel, Burgos Cathedral (Fig. 15). In La Virgen de la Misericordia con los Reyes Católicos y su familia, depicted is the Madonna of Mercy in elaborate brocaded robes, the inner layer red perhaps in indication of her son’s sacrifice and the outer layer blue in indication of celestial purity. As demons run across the Iberian landscape in the background, throwing long arrows and stealing books, Mary extends her outer robe as a shield over the royal family who are accompanied in prayer by Cardinal and Archbishop of Toledo Pedro González de Mendoza and a group of Cistercian nuns who gather behind a nun who holds a crosier or staff of ecclesiastical office; the nun is the cardinal’s sister, Leonor de Mendoza, the abbess of the monastery from 1486 until 1499.

183

Belting, 357. 104

In her protective role, Mary also catches the deadly arrows in both her outspread arms, positioned almost perpendicular to her body, alluding perhaps to the crucified Christ. Again, in this borderland art, Mary is a signifier to the unseen Christ. Yet her role here, as I perceive, clearly demonstrates a growing line of division between the multi-faith societies. She defends the political forces of the Catholic Monarchs as well as the spiritual efforts of the nuns and, more specifically, of the powerful Mendoza family who were crucial in helping to secure the crown for Ferdinand and Isabel.184 Through Mary’s intercession and colossal power, the political and spiritual agendas of the monarchs and their heirs, as well as the church and its featured cardinal and nuns, are presented in a state of protection and perseverance. Mary is clearly aligned with the Catholic Monarchs to the extent of sharing Isabel’s distinctive red hair. Further, Mary holds arrows, the symbol adopted by the Catholic Monarchs at their marriage. The arrows, flechas, represent the first letter of Ferdinand’s name; while the yolk, yugo, represents Isabel, spelled traditionally with the first letter “Y.” The undulating quality of Mary’s robe and arm positioning could reference the symbol of the yolk in the Catholic Monarchs’ coat of arms, in addition to the bundled arrows in her hands. Considering Mary’s symbolic alignment in this image with the monarchy of Castile, I argue that this painting represents an ending to potential

184

Edwards, 18. Edwards discusses negotiations made by Juan II of Aragon, father of Ferdinand, who arranged with then papal legate to Spain, Rodrigo Borja, future Pope Alexander VI, to mediate an alliance between the powerful Mendoza family and Ferdinand and Isabel. As a Valencian, Rodrigo Borja was a subject to Juan II and agreed to induce cooperation from the Mendozas, in part, by arranging Pedro González de Mendoza to be named cardinal and later promoted to the archdiocese of Seville; Mendoza soon served as archbishop of Toledo (1482-1495). This crucial political realignment with the Mendoza family began in 1472 and helped to secure Isabel as queen. 105

discourse. The context of the piece is highly political, connecting the ambitions and goals of the royalty with those of the church. This is an example of political borderland art that empowers Mary and begins to produce motifs of Christ and his Passion as central activating forces. My argument correlates with those advanced by Cynthia Robinson. She suggests that Llull and particularly the late-fourteenth-century writings by Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis “deployed common topoi and motifs” to “pave the way for the conversion of ‘infidels’ to Christianity.”185 Robinson’s studies are particularly convincing in the contrast that she details between Eiximenis’s Vida de Cristo (taken from Eiximenis’s larger work, Llibre del Crestià or Book for Christians) and the Meditationes Vitae Christi. The Vida de Cristo dominated in the kingdoms of Christian Iberia while the Meditationes Vitae Christi dominated outside Iberia in the larger European Christendom. In the Vida de Cristo, Eiximenis demonstrates Iberian Christian distance from the focused meditations on the Passion and Christ, a meditation that is, in contrast, encouraged in the Meditationes Vitae Christi. Eiximenis writes, concerning the Passion meditations: He who wishes to contemplate at length the injuries and dishonors received by the Savior, let him read the planctus made by the blessed Saint Bernard, and the treatise on the Seven Hours, which was made in memory of the Passion of the

185

Robinson, 21. 106

Savior, and other recent treatises that have been made by certain doctors of these times, and in them he will be able to find quite a lot of material.186 Eiximenis does not urge readers to meditate on Christ or his Passion. Instead, he simply provides references, should readers be interested in independently pursuing meditations on the Passion. Robinson argues that this avoidance of the Passion is characteristic of Iberian writings prior to the fifteenth century. Further, when Eiximenis does present Christ, Christ is an almost exclusively divine and all-powerful figure, not the human son of God; concurrently, Mary is close to Christ’s equal. As Robinson states, Mary is “herself the recipient of divine revelations and celestial knowledge independent of her more traditional [non-Iberian] role as the human vessel.”187 This fits Eiximenis’s goal to humble his readers, according to Robinson, by realizing that Christ and Mary are beyond human understanding; in contrast, the Meditationes Vitae Christi “turns the holy and the ineffable into the familiar props of readers’ everyday surroundings.”188 I will add to Robinson’s argument that this presentation of the divine as beyond knowledge aligns with Kabbalah teachings, where levels of awareness must be passed to reach—though never to actualize—an understanding of God. The unseen and the unspeakable remain ever elusive; they can be symbolized only as aspects, and humans can access only the edges of a juncture point. In Christianity, that point would be Mary. Further, I argue that the art in Iberia reflects Mary’s status, as elevated by Eiximenis—in

Ibid., 13. Robinson cites from Eiximenis’s Vida de Cristo, as recorded in Santoral, BNE MS 12688, fol. 386r. 186

187

Ibid.

188

Ibid., 16. 107

both her Immaculate Conception and Madonna of the Misericordia motifs. Mary retains this elevated status in Spanish art, even as a shift occurs towards Christ and his Passion; and her iconography, particularly in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, becomes progressively powerful, political, and active. However, she is also joined by Passion motifs. The Virgenes Abrideras: Mary’s Sorrows In 1492, royal chronicler Hernando del Pulgar recounted the last days before the Catholic Monarchs successfully reclaimed Muslim Granada from Boadbil, the twentysecond and last Nasrid ruler of Granada. Hernando describes the moment on January 2, 1492 when victory was signaled: Once the queen saw the cross, her clergymen sang a Te Deum laudamus. And such was the happiness that they all began to cry. Later [that day] all the great lords who were with the king, went to where the queen was and kissed her hand [in obeisance] as queen of Granada. And next to the royal banners also rose the banner of the Order of Santiago which had been brought to Granada by the Master of the Order.189

Hernando Pulgar, “The Christian Conquest of Granada,” in Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed. Olivia Remie Constable, trans. Teofilo Ruiz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 344. The excerpt is taken from Hernando del Pulgar’s, Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, a threebook chronicle of the actions of the Catholic Monarchs, commissioned by Isabel in 1482. According to Joseph Abraham Levi, the Crónica is designed “to counteract the notion that Isabel had illegally usurped the throne.” See Joseph Abraham Levi, “Hernando del Pulgar (Fernando del Pulgar),” in Castilian Writers, 1400-1500, ed. Frank A. Domínguez and Georgia D. Greenia (Detroit: Gale, 2004), 191. 108 189

The rising of the cross over Granada is symbolic, not only in military and political terms but also, as I perceive it, as a sign that Spain would now be more aligned with the Christendom that existed north of the Pyrenees for the few decades until the impending Protestant Reformation. Eiximenis’s Vida de Cristo which adhered to Llull’s efforts to best reach a multifaith population through coordinated discourse was largely replaced by Queen Isabel’s reforms of the 1490s, three decades prior to the creation of the 1520 Toledo Virgen Abridera. During this time, Isabelline reforms sponsored the first Castilian translation of the Meditationes Vitae Christi, as well as European devotional standards such as Bonaventure’s Lignum vitae and Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi, all originally written during the late-thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth-century but never integrated into the borderland culture of Iberia.190 Written by an anonymous Franciscan, unaffected by borderland politics and, therefore, not compromised in his order’s emphasis of Christ as God’s human incarnate, Meditationes Vitae Christi became dominant in Isabel’s nation-building efforts while the queen continued to fund literary, educational, architectural, and artistic projects into the formation of a new Castile and, ultimately, a new Spanish nation. These efforts were largely orchestrated by Franciscan Cardinal and Archbishop of Toledo Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, Isabel’s confessor and counsellor. Cisneros was also instrumental in Isabel’s reform of the Spanish Franciscans.191 As evidenced in Llull

190

Robinson, 10.

191

Edwards, 216. 109

and Eiximenis’ attempt to find common ground with other Iberian faiths, segments of regional Franciscans modified their rules to respond to a borderland environment. However, Isabel took a personal interest in the efforts of the Observances, the clerical houses that aimed to return to original teachings of their founders; this branch of Franciscans opposed the conventuales or claustrales who were dedicated to maintaining the way of life, or rule, which had been handed over time. Isabel’s commitment to the Observances manifested to the extent that she took the vows of a tertiary Franciscan member and was buried in a Franciscan habit.192 As well, the Catholic Monarchs founded in 1477 a new monastery in Toledo, San Juan de los Reyes, to house the Observant branch of the Franciscans. According to Linda Martz, Toledo’s conventuales who resided in the monastery of San Francisco were eventually fused into the Observant branch between 1486 and 1496 and forced to take up residence in the new monastery of San Juan de los Reyes.193 Interestingly, this reform project also allowed Isabel to grant property to Toledo’s female orders. It is through the forced relocation of the conventuales from the monastery of San Francisco that Isabel was able to gift that monastery property to the previously mentioned newly established Franciscan Order of the Conception run by Beatriz da Silva; the order repurposed the location as a nunnery: La Concepción Franciscana.194

192

Ibid., 219.

193

Martz, 89.

194

Herrejón Nicolas, 57. 110

Isabel’s reform programs also relate to the emerging interest in Christ and his sacrifice. In “Isabel la Católica as Patron,” Chiyo Ishikawa argues this position, as well. In addition to the court-sponsored translations previously mentioned, Ishikawa lists five major original treatises published in Castile and Aragon between 1490 and 1505 that were devoted to the life or passion of Christ: El Comendador Román, Coplas de la passion con la resurección (Toledo, ca 1490); Diego de San Pedro, La pasión trobada (Zaragoza, 1492); Pedro Ximenes de Prexano, Luzero de la vida cristiana (Salamanca, 1493; Burgos, 1495); Andrés de Lí, Tesoro de la pasión (Zaragoza, 1494); and Juan de Padilla, Retablo de la vida de Cristo (Seville, 1505 and 1512). Of these works, three contain dedications to Isabel, four are recorded in Isabel’s inventories, and Isabel was familiar with the piece by Juan de Padilla since she had prayers copied from it.195 Particularly noteworthy is La pasión trobada by Diego de San Pedro, in which the poet’s details of the agonies of Christ are taken directly from descriptions in the newly translated Meditationes vitae Christi. As well, according to Sol Miguel-Prendes in Castilian Writers, 1400-1500, Diego de San Pedro follows the Meditationes vitae Christi narrative structure of asking readers to engage with the humanity of Jesus by reconstructing details, and San Pedro presents much of this material as direct speech through soliloquy and dialogue, characteristic of Franciscan preaching in the Meditationes vitae Christi.196 The success of this Passion narrative is evident as La

Chiyo Ishikawa, “La Llave de Palo: Isabel la Católica as Patron of Religious Literature and Painting,” in Isabel la Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays, ed. David A. Boruchoff (New York: Plagrave Macmillan, 2003), 113. 195

Sol Miguel-Prendes, “Diego de San Pedro,” in Castilian Writers, 1400-1500, ed. Frank A. Domínguez and Georgia D. Greenia (Detroit: Gale, 2004), 224. Miguel111 196

pasión trobada was reprinted later in the sixteenth century and was performed in theatrical version in 1566.197 In fact, Passion plays were increasingly present during the Isabelline reforms; and of the rare preserved theatrical texts that still exist from the latemedieval Castilian theatre is the circa 1486-1499 Auto de la Pasión, which is attributed to Alonso de Campo who organized the Corpus Christi celebrations in Toledo between 1481 and 1499.198 Also noteworthy and particularly relevant to my studies is Diego de San Pedro’s Las siete angusitas de Nuestra Señora (The Seven Sorrows of Our Lady), which was composed after La pasión trobada. According to Miguel-Prendes, this is the first Spanish poem to transfer the Passion and sufferings of Christ to Mary, matching the previously celebrated Seven Joys of Mary with the Seven Sorrows of Mary.199 This is a match that is later manifested within the Toledo Virgen Abridera as the Joys of Mary in the sculpture’s outer wings are paralleled with the Sorrows hidden within her breasts. The shift to sorrow as a bookend to earlier joys, I maintain, reveal a turning point in church and political atmospheres. Further discussing this shift in political environment, Cynthia Robinson points out that Isabel ordered her previous confessor and counsellor, and newly appointed

Prendes dates La pasión trobada to the late 1470s, significantly earlier than Ishikawa’s date of 1492, yet still within the age of the Isabelline reform efforts. 197

Ibid.

Karoline J. Manny, “Late-Medieval Castilian Theater,” in Castilian Writers, 1400-1500, ed. Frank A. Domínguez and Georgia D. Greenia (Detroit: Gale, 2004), 325. 198

199

Miguel-Prendes, 224. 112

archbishop of Granada, Fray Hernando de Talavera to write his Católica impugnación. In this writing, Talavera states that all Christians must remember the Passion of Christ: Because it is reasonable that the homes of faithful Christians be furnished with the memory of the Passion of our Redeemer Jesus Christ and his Blessed Mother, we desire and ordain that every faithful Christian have in the house where he dwells some painted image of the Cross on which Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered, and some painted images of Our Lady… which provoke and awaken…devotion.200 While Talavera does not explicitly state that Christ must be detailed in the images, the cross and the memory of the Passion is now of emphasis. Accordingly, this new art may have altered the trends in apparition reports amongst the Christian population. In chapter two of my thesis, I discussed the manner in which seers reported apparitions that aligned with the emerging Immaculate Conception and Apocalyptic Mary art motifs. Mary often appeared in these visions as clothed in the sun. William Christian, in his studies of divine visions in Spain, further notes that while the major shrines of Castile and Catalonia remained focused on Mary, “the miraculous signs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were almost exclusively dedicated to crucifixes and images of the Passion.”201 In this context the Virgenes Abrideras of Spain began to also reveal images of Christ’s crucifixion. This shift to an emphasis on suffering is visible in the 1520 Virgen Abridera of Pie de Concha, Spain (Fig. 36). Stepping on the crescent moon, this Apocalyptic Mary in

Robinson, 387fn34. Robinson cites and translates Hernando de Talavera’s Católica impugnación, 186, as published in Felipe Pereda’s Imágenes de la Discordia, 30. 200

201

Christian, 221. 113

her closed position offers her right hand in greeting to viewers, as does her child, arms outspread in joy. Yet when viewers take the offered hands and open the sculpture, what they find inside is sorrow. Embedded in Mary’s body, a triptych features carved relief panels of Christ’s Passion. In this opened state, the panels hide Mary’s body, now no longer beckoning viewers. Visible only is her robe’s lower edges over the Apocalypse moon and the face of a mother who eerily transforms, even in static wooden form. She seems suddenly grief-stricken as her son’s torments spill from her inner core. The joyous maternal moment has passed. Interestingly, I note that human agency is part of this transition. This change is the consequence of viewer action. Had no human agent existed, Mary and the Christ Child would have forever been in a state of union—much like the Apocalyptic Woman and her child may have been had the seven-headed dragon not threatened their peace. However, now, the viewer of the Pie de Concha’s Virgen Abridera witnesses tragedy. I propose that this recalls through personal action that Christ died to cleanse human sin. Sorrow enters the world through human error. I also propose that this message aligns politically with Isabelline reforms that identified with the Franciscan Observance movement. The message is that of a return to an original state and to the original teachings of the order’s founder Saint Francis, who focused on Christ’s human experience. To rebuild Christ’s church, Francis emphasized Christ’s lived human sufferings as a sacrifice for redemption. Coupled with the iconography of the Apocalyptic Woman, this Virgen Abridera additionally alludes to the figure of the mother who must stay on Earth as her son rises to God’s throne. In this opened state, the sculpture’s Christ Child turns from the viewer, only the back of his head visible above a side panel of the triptych. However, directly 114

behind and beneath him is the image of his Resurrection. Christ is reborn, triumphing over evil. This reminds viewers that initially both mother and child, hands reaching outward, welcomed this sacrifice. However, even in victory, the mother remains in a fixed state of grief. In sorrow, she confronts viewers as she looks beyond her son’s crucifixion, deliberately recalling the viewers’ debt to Christ who suffered for their sins. My sense is that the sculpture emphasizes that Mary remains on earth to fight a figurative dragon, much like the Apocalyptic Woman. I argue that here Mary defies the threat of human disregard of Christ’s teachings and sufferings—a threat that was perhaps realized by the previous teachings of multi-faith Iberian Catholicism that reduced Christ to an unseen signified memory, thus lessening his presence as the incarnate. However, in the Pie de Concha Virgen Abridera, Mary invites viewers to open, see, remember, and reflect. Further, viewers participate in the activation of Christ’s sacrifice and Mary’s sorrow; and, as a result, the action of human sinfulness and the consequences upon mother and child become a personal compulsion to repent while simultaneously remembering Christ’s glory. The Toledo Virgen Abridera is a contemporary of the Pie de Concha example and also serves a similar purpose when its last layer is opened (Fig. 1). This inner level of the Toledo piece reminds worshippers of the Virgin’s lament and Christ’s sacrifice. Though, it is also layered with a far more complex interweaving of various Marian iconographic threads and doctrinal themes. Compared to the Pie de Concha piece, however, the Toledo Virgen Abridera is less confrontational while also less welcoming. Closed, the Toledo example’s outer triptych is undecorated, but when opened Mary’s piety is central in a tota pulchra Immaculate Conception motif. She is in the act of undisturbed prayer 115

with hands folded in quiet devotion rather than holding a joyous Christ Child. Unlike the Pie de Concha Mary, she does not reach out to the viewer, except as a role model to emulate in prayer. Therefore, to reveal the compartment inside the Toledo Virgen Abridera, viewers must interrupt Mary’s prayers and, thereby, her state of blessed peace that is granted by God, hovering above the scene. This intrusion activates the tragedy within. However, it also opens Mary’s hands to the side in an Orans Virgin position— making visible the invisible. This further activates the memory of Mary’s protective robe as a symbol of her elevated power of protection and intercession, as emphasized in the Madonna of Misericordia or the Madonna of Mercy motifs.202 Of significance, the parting of the Toledo Virgen Abridera gains viewers only partial access to Mary at her breast area, unlike earlier examples that open Mary’s entire body. This emphasis on Mary’s upper body is more reminiscent of the chest-level floating medallion of the Christ Child in the Orans Virgin. However, rather than a force of action and perhaps even joy at the incarnation, the Toledo Mary is more restrained, limited both in her reception of viewers and in her willingness to reveal herself. When her breasts open, her sorrows spill out, a departure from the Orans Virgin tradition which

202

The allusion to Madonna of Mercy motif is timely in the 1520 Toledo Virgen Abridera. In 1506, Toledo had suffered a lack of grain and meat; and by 1507 plague and famine hit the city. Concurrently, civil order broke down, leading many prominent citizens to leave the city. Martz quotes a Toledo chronicler who described the living conditions of Toledo: “In the year of 1507 the three wolves—famine, plague, and warfare—walked abroad.” Martz, 82. See also Martz, 126, on the 1520-1521 Comunero revolt in Toledo. Also Jaime Vicens Vives explains the economic system of Isabel and Ferdinand that prioritized wool trade above agriculture, thus contributing to famine and inflation of wheat prices. Jaime Vicens Vives, “The Economy of Ferdinand and Isabella’s Reign,” in Spain in the Fifteenth Century, 1369-1516: Essays and Extracts by Historians of Spain, ed. Roger Highfield (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 248-275. 116

shows only the awe of incarnation. Rather, picking up the thread of the Pie de Concha’s Mary, the Toledo example reveals the Passion of Christ in the form of small yet intricately carved low reliefs (Fig. 2). This inner-most triptych depicts the Agony in the Garden, the kiss of Judas, the Flagellation, the Crucifixion, Christ Carrying the Cross, the Crowning of Thorns, and the Resurrection.203 However, while functioning much like the Pie de Concha’s Virgen Abridera in the revelation of both human debt and divine glory, the Toledo example also recalls transformation.204 This theme of transformation occurs on five distinct levels in the Toledo Virgen Abridera that thereby emphasize the piece as one that incorporates various threads of both tradition and novelty in Marian art. By opening the first layer of the triptych, the side panels with the Joys of Mary narratives, like the earliest Spanish Virgenes Abrideras, teach of the transformation of Christ into human flesh.205 Central in the first layer triptych is also Mary’s transformation through the incarnation, as she, herself, becomes blessed by God through her preconceived role; thus free of Original Sin, the Immaculate Conception motif threads are present here with the symbols of Mary’s divine immaculacy orbiting her body. Further, Mary is transformed into the celestial figure of the Apocalyptic Woman since her role is no longer simply a vessel of the incarnation but rather a role that spans across time—conceived by God prior to the Fall of Paradise and designated as a central intercessor for humankind at the launching of the Apocalypse;

203

Checa, 467.

204

Katz, “Marian Motion,” 66.

205

Henk Van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 3001500 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 55. 117

therefore the iconography of the Apocalyptic Woman is woven into the Toledo Virgen Abridera. The fourth transformation, alluding to threads of the Orans Virgin, is signaled by the parting of Mary’s praying hands; here, Mary transforms from a mother to an abstract container of the active events of Christ’s Passion. Finally, the last level of narrative revelation depicts the transformation of Christ into the Resurrection, a motif thread less frequently disseminated in pre-Isabelline reforms. In this way, various nonlinear motifs are interwoven into this piece, celebrating both tradition and change. Further, thematically in this object of interconnecting motifs, Christ’s glory and human redemption are entwined with the concept of transformation through and of the Virgin Mary. In fact, the Mary of the Toledo Virgen Abridera is essential to Christ’s glory since only through her Immaculate body could he manifest on Earth and only through the opening of her nourishing breasts could Christ reach adulthood—and the viewers then witness Christ’s transformation through Resurrection. This emphasis on levels of transformation of and through Mary raises her status as co-redemptrix, particularly through the symbol of her breasts as gateway into the Passion. Mary as Co-Redemptrix Previously I have discussed Elina Gertsman’s argument that Mary’s body in latemedieval art of Christendom is comparable to a monstrance that holds the sacrament of the Eucharist, and I maintain that in borderland art of medieval Spain Mary’s role is more dynamic than that of a container for an already-concluded transformation. However, I do believe that the Toledo Virgen Abridera picks up narrative threads of the Eucharist, not in the manner that would liken Mary to a monstrance but that would liken Mary to a coredemptrix. The Eucharist is the body of Christ offered for the redemption of human 118

souls, just as Mary’s body is offered to the Holy Trinity for the actuality of that redemption—the physical actuality of that offering being tactile in the layers of the Toledo Virgen Abridera. In regards to the piece opening at Mary’s breasts, the parallel between the Eucharist and Mary’s own body as transformative sustenance further advances Mary’s functions as beyond mere vessel. The opening breasts of the Toledo Mary reference both the Eucharist and Mary’s active efforts. In her studies of Mary as co-redemptrix in art, Beth Williamson discusses Mary’s symbols of power as being intimately bound to her physical connection with the body, and thus sacrifice, of Christ, conceived in the blood of her womb and then nurtured with the milk of her breasts.206 In this way, Mary advances human redemption, allowing Christ to manifest and strengthen in his own endeavors to save humanity. Additionally, a close link existed in medieval minds between Mary’s milk and Christ’s blood, as evidenced in art. Blood and milk were considered interconvertible, symbolically merging the sacrifice of milk and blood into one unifying effort—an intercession for human petitioners.207 According to Merrall Llewelyn Price in “Bitter Milk: The ‘Vase Menstrualis’ and the Cannibal(ized) Virgin,” medieval theories on lactation argued that just as the fetus was nourished in the womb by its mother’s blood, breastfeeding infants fed upon their nurses’ blood which was channeled from the womb to the breast through a lacteal duct known as the vasa menstrualis. The thirteenth-century De Proprietatibus Rerum by Franciscan Bartolomaeus Anglicus, describes such “an holough veyne” that

206

Williamson, 109.

207

Miesel, 28-33. 119

transports blood to breasts, citing classical sources from Greek Hippocrates to Roman Galen and from Byzantine Constantine to Iberian Isidore of Seville.208 Portions of Isidore’s Etymologies, to which Bartolomaeus Anglicus refers, circulated throughout Spain, including in the Beatus Manuscript, on folios 234r to 237r.209 Outside the medical theories, the connection between blood and breast milk was further advanced by stories of visions. For example, the narrative of thirteenth-century Saint Mechtild of Magdeburg tells of the saint’s revelation of Christ, who told Mechtild that “the blood of grace is like the milk that I drank from my Virgin Mother.”210 Paired with a long history of medical theory, this revelation contributed to the rise of imagery that compared Mary’s lactating breasts to Christ’s bleeding wounds. Examples include Lorenzo Monaco’s Double Intercession (1402), in which to either side of God stand Mary and Christ as Mary bares her breast and Christ touches his wounded side (Fig. 37); Goswyn Van der Weyden’s Man of Sorrows triptych (1507), in which the central panel features Christ lifting his bleeding wound in the same gesture that Mary lifts her bare breast in a side panel; and Jan Provoost’s Last Judgment (1525), in which Mary and Christ bare and lift their breasts, again in parallel gestures.211 In Spain, the

Merrall Llewelyn Price, “Bitter Milk: The ‘Vase Menstrualis’ and the Cannibal(ized) Virgin,” in College Literature 28, no. 1 (2001): 146. 208

Barbara A. Shailor, “The Codicology of the Morgan Beatus Manuscript,” in A Spanish Apocalypse: The Morgan Beatus Manuscript (New York: George Braziller, 1991), 23. 209

210

211

Miesel, 28-33.

Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 272. 120

correlation between Mary’s breasts and Christ’s wounds is less direct, possibly due to the borderland cultures. However an early example of this theme in Iberia is in the collections of the Toledo Cathedral in a thirteenth-century manuscript miniature, entitled the Virgen Intercesora (Fig. 38). Here, Christ’s wounds are not equated with Mary’s breasts. Instead Mary crosses her hands over her breasts to present them to Christ, who floats in an orifice of his divine realm. In Mary’s gesture, she secures Christ’s blessing, indicated by Christ’s raised hand. However, the emphasis on Christ’s crucifixion wounds through the overly enlarged holes on his feet and especially his left hand remind viewers of the sacrifice that has taken Christ to the realm beyond the orifice. Mary, still of the human realm in this image, bridges the gap between the lived human experience and the spiritual unseen; and, it is through the milk of her breasts that she can remind Christ of her own sacrifices that led to human redemption. The spilling of Christ’s blood is an extension of the milk that Mary spilt to nourish the future Redeemer. United in this sacrifice of life fluids, Mary’s capacity to serve not only as intercessor but also as co-redemptrix is exalted. In her essay, “Las Vírgenes Abrideras,” Irene Gónzalez-Hernando observes that the Virgenes Abrideras that feature the Passion of Christ, as does the Toledo piece, develop three theological arguments: the spiritual martyrdom of Mary who suffers the Passion, the identification of Mary as the tabernacle of Christ, and Mary’s key role in the Redemption.212 Melissa Katz in “Behind Closed Doors: Distributed Bodies, Hidden Interiors, and Corporeal

Irene González Hernando, “Las Vírgenes Abrideras,” Revista Digital de Iconografia Medieval 1, no. 2 (2009): 56. 212

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Erasure in Vierge Ouvrante Sculpture,” adds to this observation by stating that in the Toledo Virgen Abridera, when Mary opens her arms, the Virgin’s body takes the shape of the Crucifix.213 This is significant since Mary, along with Christ, suffers and triumphs over evil. The Toledo design underscores this importance by placing the breasts as a gateway into salvation. However an element that González Hernando and Katz do not fully address is the Apocalyptic Woman. I argue that, beyond transformation, the Toledo Virgen Abridera is a reminder of conclusion—that birth leads to death and that redemption follows only after devastation. The Apocalyptic Woman adds to this duality. Salvation for humans arrives only after destruction of the world. It is therefore significant that when the inner triptych of Christ’s Passion opens, the dragon at the base of the outer triptych looks upwards, now not only at the image of Apocalyptic Mary but also at the acts of Christ in the inner-most triptych. With this opening, the dragon appears no longer defeated but now waiting. Before salvation, the dragon must attack the Apocalyptic Woman. That is the vision of Saint John of Patmos. In this way, time collapses in the Toledo Virgen Abridera; birth, nourishment, death, resurrection, and apocalypse combine when all layers of revelation are opened. The viewer’s hands set all into motion, both the past and future; the only narrative yet to occur is that of the Apocalyptic Woman. She will fight the dragon who is perhaps now more fueled and enraged by the revelation of Christ’s sacrifice and victory. Thus a final battle still awaits, as does the Apocalypse and Judgment Day. Closing the inner triptych, a viewer might therefore be all the more sensitive to Mary’s need to again

213

Katz, “Behind Closed Doors,” 204. 122

clasp hands in prayer; and closing the outer triptych, a viewer might feel all the more determined to reenter the earthly reality to protect Mary and the church that she represents. This message that battles await is one that would serve political purposes in the aftermath of the Catholic Monarchs’ Reconquista of Islamic Iberia. Rather than lose the momentum after victory over Islam, Isabel and Ferdinand set into motion a series of aggressive militant-like surges in nation-building: reform in the Spanish faiths, strategic cultural developments in universities and city centers, and expansion into the Americas and Spain’s global holdings. A sense of urgency based on the concept that more battles are to arrive, would, I argue, help continue the Catholic Monarchs’ motion and power. I argue that the Toledo Virgen Abridera is a testament to the consolidation of threads— those of Catholic history and power, not only concerning Marian art motifs but also concerning political functions. When the Toledo Mary opens her arms, it is to activate the devout into a new Castilian vision.

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CONCLUSION THE TOLEDO VIRGEN ABRIDERA: CLOSING The new Castilian identity of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries was one of consolidation of various aspects, centered around the unit of Catholic monarchs who positioned themselves as holy saviors against threats along Christian borderlands. In their role as disseminators of emerging Castilian identity and protectors of Catholicism, Isabel and Ferdinand cultivated a new narrative of legacy while advancing Spain as leader of the modern Christian world. Similarly, the Toledo Virgen Abridera placed the Virgin Mary into a central role as the aspects gathered about her in the tota pulchra motif emphasize her purity, strengths, and powers. In the elevated role of immaculate juncture between the seen and unseen, this image of Mary also cultivated a narrative of past lived joys and sorrows while advancing through the opening of her body the potential for future redemption after the Last Judgement; such a future was traditionally heralded by the appearance of the Apocalyptic Woman, whose persona Mary absorbed. I propose that the Toledo Virgen Abridera was designed to inspire ardent prayer upon reflection of divine glory, past sacrifice, and future judgment. With the closing of the outer triptych, the viewer would thus be released to live in a manner to secure positive judgment through emulating the sacrifices of Jesus and Mary for the divine design of God’s glory. According to the Toledo piece, such a life would be best served through devotion towards Mary and the unseen that she manifests through purity, but also towards 124

the Apocalyptic Woman whose final battle with the dragon is crucial in signaling the Second Coming of Christ. In this manner, the opening and closing of the Toledo Virgen Abridera convey transformation and conclusion. Only through the success of both female figures—the Virgin Mary and Apocalyptic Woman, as separate but coexisting entities—can viewers gain intercession in life and secure in death entry into Heavenly Jerusalem, thus escaping the trials of Purgatory or eternal condemnation in Hell. The power that the Toledo Virgen Abridera signifies is immense and explains the prominence of similar Apocalyptic Mary motifs in later examples of Virgenes Abrideras, particularly during the Counter-Reformation.214 This iconography enhanced a potent theme of duality: Mary’s narrative of redemption for life’s continuance and the Apocalyptic Woman’s narrative of salvation after life’s destruction. Together, life and death united as a focus in faith. In this way, both Marian and Castilian image-making at this time forged a cohesiveness between sacrifice and salvation, past and future, earthly activities and spiritual responsibilities—all in new guises, one as a Castilian and Aragonian unit of Catholic Monarchs and the other as a Biblical and Apocalyptic mother and son unit of Co-Redeemers. These symbolic units functioned for both secular and religious purposes during times of reconquest, colonization, and eminent counter-reformation as faith became action and action was taken on behalf of faith. Throughout the Reconquista religious icons, such as the Black Madonnas and the Virgin of Remedios, were utilized as military symbols. The year following the fall of

214

González Hernando, “Las Vírgenes Abrideras,” 7. 125

Granada, Spanish Pope Alexander VI issued the 1493 Papal Bull, granting the Catholic Monarchs dominion over the Americas on the provision that they spread Christianity.215 Already positioned as conquerors of faith, the Catholic Monarchs readily advanced their efforts of colonize in the name of conversion, using military conquest but also methods of syncretism developed by mendicant orders in a multi-faith borderland. These methods included the propagation of devotional art. It is the image of the Virgin of Remedios that most prominently rose to this Papal mission of conversion—in the hands of Hernán Cortés who carried her image into the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan in 1519. In Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women, Jeanette Rodriguez suggests that Cortés understood that Christianity was an essential accessory for conquest.216 Conversion was generally thought proof of conquest. In fact, at this time, all of Christendom was in a parallel military mode. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the doors of Wittenberg Cathedral, publically condemning the church and launching the Reformation. In response, Catholic leaders gathered at the 1545 Council of Trent, which directed art to pull individuals back into the arms of Catholicism. In Spain, in particular, religious iconography became an intensification of Counter-Reformation concerns, both religious and political. It follows that the replenishment of both the church’s population of worshippers and its claim of

Donna Pierce, “From New Spain to New Mexico: Art and Culture on the Northern Frontier,” in Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America, ed. Diana Fane (New York, NY: The Brooklyn Museum, 1996), 59. 215

216

Jeanette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), 13. 126

property motivated settlement of the Americas, thus prompting conquerors to carry icons and escort priests into colonies.217 The earliest colonial priests and, thereby, first to entrench their associated iconography in the Americas were the Franciscans.218 Visions of the Apocalypse and the imminent Second Coming raised urgency in the Franciscan order to prepare souls for the end of the world, including through the conversion of native populations. In 1524, the Franciscans assembled in the conquered capital of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, to establish several convents in the surrounding regions, including one in the Puebla town of Huejotzingo.219 In the Franciscan cloister at Huejotzingo, a grisaille mural depicts the tota pulchra Immaculate Conception (Fig. 39). Similar to the central panel in the 1520 Toledo Virgen Abridera, this mural features Mary surrounded by her aspects: the personified sun (Electa ut Sol), star of the sea (Stella Maris), personified moon (Pulcra ut Luna), spotless mirror (Speculum Sine Macula), City of God (Civitas Dei), well of life-

217

Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1791 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 19. Poole offers a perspective on the Spanish religious atmosphere of Castilian Roman Catholicism. “The nationalistic modifier ‘Castilian’ is essential in understanding religion in colonial Mexico…. Untouched by the religious upheavals following the revolt of Martin Luther in 1517, it reflected the nature, genius, and shortcomings of the people of Castile. Spanish Catholicism, like the Spanish character itself, was molded during the seven-century struggle to drive the Moors (Arab and Berber Muslims from North Africa) from Iberian soil…. By the thirteenth century it was essentially complete. In the course of this struggle Catholicism and Spanish identity became fused both in reality and in myth. Militancy, a crusading spirit, intolerance, and the use of force for religious ends were among the legacies of the Reconquest.” 218

Pierce, 60. Pierce states that the Franciscans arrived in Mexico in 1523-24, followed by Dominicans in 1526, Augustinians in 1533, and Jesuits in 1572. 219

Luis MacGregor, Huexotzingo: Official Guide (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1957), 4. 127

giving (Puteus Aquarum Viventum), Tower of David (Turris Davidica), the palm and cypress trees, the lily and rose, the closed gate of Paradise (Porta Celli), enclosed garden (Hortus Conclusus), and sealed fountain (Fons Signatus). Above Mary, God appears, as in the Toledo piece, with a banner reciting the same prayer, minus one missed word, of the feast day of the Immaculate Conception: Tota pulchra es amica mea et macula non est in te (All beautiful this is my love and sin is not in you). As well, Mary stands upon an Apocalypse moon as stars circle her head, in allusion to the Apocalyptic Woman. Finally, like the Toledo Virgen Abridera, Mary’s hands are pressed together in prayer. However, she does not look outward at the viewer. Instead, she looks downward towards her left. Jeannette Favrot Peterson, in Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas, proposes that here Mary gazes down to “the most consistent symbol of her immaculacy, the spotless mirror.”220 I suggest that while the Toledo Mary looks ahead, this Huejotzingo Mary perhaps is more vigilant in maintaining purity in a land that is well beyond the borders of Christendom. The world that meets this Mary’s prospect is less certain, no longer New Castile. Hence, she turns towards what she knows as her constant aspect, the spotless mirror. Also, the narrative outer wings of the Toledo triptych are altered here, from the Joys of Mary to the figures of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Although opposed to the Immaculate Conception, Dominican Thomas Aquinas’s Theory of the Sanctification of Mary was restructured by Franciscan Duns Scotus as a proof of the Immaculate Conception, as discussed in my first chapter. The mural, therefore, unites discord between the orders by

220

Jeanette Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 128. 128

declaring victory and celebration of the Immaculate Conception. I suggest that this Franciscan gesture of unity, as well as the heightened vigilance of Mary in the image, adjusts to the needs of a new reality. Additionally, rather than open her breast to an inner chamber that reveals the Passion of Christ, this Mary offers passage through the door that spans beneath the mural. The door leads to the vestibule of the chapter room.221 A chapter room is designed for clergy to discuss spiritual and material tasks assigned to each day; it is a space where faith is actualized into purposeful activity and community. In this way, while the mural is in a new world, far removed from the political and cultural environments of Toledo, Spain, it preserves consistency with the core purpose of the interwoven motifs of iconography in the Toledo Virgen Abridera. Both pieces call for passage, from the past to the future, from the mundane to the spiritual, and from the passive to the active. “Go, rebuild my Church,” is the message that Saint Francis of Assisi heard upon meditation of a painted crucifix. This rebuilding advanced the construction of new orders that split with church convention, new dogmas that manifested into reality an altered spirituality and mysticism, and new missions that relocated from the seclusion of cloisters to the activities of mendicant orders. New art, as well, materialized. The Franciscans fostered an atmosphere in which the image of Mary, as the conductor of divine lived experience, offered a less controversial yet still potent bridge to multi-faith discourse amongst borderland cultures. In fact, the cult of Mary became so pervasive in Spain, and later Mexico, that the extended family of holy grandparents eventually met church

221

Louise M. Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature (Albany: Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, 2001), 9. 129

resistance. Thus, the human trinity in the Santa-Ana triple motif came to a sudden halt, as did the abbreviated Tree of Jesse. However, left unchallenged, Mary’s image in devotional art soon dominated, particularly as the Immaculate Conception. Beyond art, Mary’s image even transcended into living visions experienced by seers of mystical occurrences. Such mystical visions became the impetus for the surges of shrines in Spain and later in the Americas. In the Ibero-American reaches, the Immaculate Conception further expanded, as evidenced in the variations of the motif in the Huejotzingo mural. The motif crossed oceans and cultures to continue its apocalyptic revelations, albeit transformed and merged in a New World reality. Names altered— from Patmos to Tepeyac, from John to Juan, from the Apocalyptic Woman to the Immaculate Conception to the Virgin of Guadalupe. However, the new merged iconography conjured the same desire to defeat a figurative apocalyptic dragon that tainted with sin the spotless yet changing world. With malleability in the changing world, the iconography of the Immaculate Conception continued to bend, as it had already proven so flexible and inclusive of various motifs in the Toledo Virgen Abridera. Soon the Immaculate Conception adapted to meet the needs of different groups of people, culminating in arguably the most prevalent single religious image. The Virgin of Guadalupe would aid in centering Spanish and Aztec faiths into a unified syncretic form of Mexican Catholicism (Fig. 40). In this way, both Spain and the Franciscans would lose some of their control over their long-developed motif, yet concurrently lay claim, spiritually and politically, to Mexico—the mission of a New Castile.

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APENDICES

131

APPENDIX A FIGURES

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FIGURE 1. Virgen Abridera, the Joys of Mary. 1520. Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas, Toledo, Spain. (Photo by Antonio Pareja)

FIGURE 2. Virgen Abridera, Passion of Christ (detail). 1520. Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas, Toledo, Spain. (Photo by Antonio Pareja) 133

Tota Pulchra, featuring Mary standing on a crescent moon, while attributes encircle her: closed gate of Paradise, star of the sea, personified sun and moon, spotless mirror, Tower of David, palm, cypress, lily, rose, sealed fountain, well of life-giving, enclosed garden, City of God.

Joys of Mary left panel: Annunciation, Marriage of the Virgin, Adoration of The Magi.

Joys of Mary right panel: Nativity, Circumcision, Christ among the Doctors.

Apocalyptic dragon and moon Passion of Christ Motif: (from left): Agony in the Garden, Kiss of Judas, Flagellation, the Crucifixion, Christ Carrying the Cross, Crowning of Thorns, Resurrection FIGURE 3. Virgen Abridera (opened), Passions of Christ. 1520. Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas, Toledo, Spain. (Photo by Antonio Pareja)

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FIGURE 4. Crucifix of Saint Damian. Anonymous. North Umbrian. Late-twelfth century. Cappelle delle Monache, Basilica di Santa Chiara, Assisi, Italy. (Image courtesy Scala Archives)

FIGURE 5. Crucifix. Giunta Pisano. Circa 1236. Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi, Italy. (Image courtesy Scala Archives) 135

FIGURE 6. Virgen Abridera, Seven Joys of Mary (opened). Circa 1270s. Real Monasterio de Santa Clara, Allariz, Spain. (Photo courtesy Manuel Trens)

FIGURE 7. Shrine Madonna, Trinity (opened). Circa 1300. Rhine Valley, German. (Image courtesy ARTstor IAP, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 136

FIGURE 8. Virgen Abridera, Joys of Mary (opened). 1270-1280. Salamanca Cathedral, Spain. (Photo courtesy Manuel Trens)

FIGURE 9. Carlo Crivelli. Immaculate Conception. 1492. Oil on panel. National Gallery, London, England. (Image © The National Gallery, London.) 137

FIGURE 10. Francesco Francia. Immaculate Conception. Circa 1515. Tempera on wood. Basilica di San Frediano, Lucca, Italy. (Image courtesy Fondazione Federico Zeri, Università di Bologna)

FIGURE 11. Luca Signorelli. Immaculate Conception. Circa 1523. Oil on panel. Museo Diocesano, Cortona, Italy. (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain) 138

FIGURE 12. Leonardo da Vinci. Madonna of the Rocks. 1483-1485. Oil on panel. Louvre, Paris, France. (Photo by Barbara Love)

FIGURE 13. Leonardo da Vinci. The Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne. Begun 1503. Oil on panel. Louvre, Paris, France. (Photo by Barbara Love) 139

FIGURE 14. Anonymous. Santa Ana-Triple. Circa fourteenth century. Polychrome wood. Dalmau Collection, Barcelona, Spain. (Photo courtesy Manuel Trens)

FIGURE 15. Sculpture by Gil de Siloe. Tree of Jesse. Late 1480s. Polychrome by Diego de la Cruz. Conception Chapel, Burgos Cathedral, Spain. (Image used courtesy Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain) 140

FIGURE 16. Adriaen van Wesel. Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. Late fifteenth century. Carved oak wood. Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. (Image used courtesy the website of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya of Barcelona, www.museunacional.cat.)

FIGURE 17. Anonymous. Retablo detail: La Virgen Tota Pulchra. Circa 1497. Oil on panel. Iglesia del Cerco. Artajona, Spain. (Photo courtesy Manuel Trens) 141

FIGURE 18. Miguel Verger. Immaculate Conception Tota Pulchra. Late sixteenth century. Tympanum of the main portal. Mallorca de Palma Cathedral. Mallorca, Spain. (Photo by Loretta Ramirez)

FIGURE 19. Miguel Verger, Immaculate Conception Tota Pulchra (detail). Late sixteenth century. Tympanum, main portal. Mallorca de Palma Cathedral. Mallorca, Spain. (Photo by Loretta Ramirez) 142

FIGURE 20. Canonici Apocalypse. The Woman Clothed with the Sun. MS. Canon. Bibl. Lat. 62, fol. 15r. Circa 1320-1330. (Image courtesy Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)

FIGURE 21. Trier Apocalypse. Woman of Apocalypse. Early ninth century Stadtbibliothek Trier, Germany. (Photo courtesy ARTstor) 143

FIGURE 22. Bamberg Apocalypse. Flight of the Woman. Circa 1000. (Image: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)

FIGURE 23. La Huelgas Apocalypse, Woman Clothed in the Sun and the Defeat of the Seven-Headed Dragon. MS M.429 (fols 101v-2). 1220. J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. United States. (Image courtesy, J. Pierpont Morgan Library, http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Las-Huelgas-Apocalypse/23) 144

FIGURE 24. Bedford Breviary. MS Lat. 17294, fol. 567v. Circa 1424-1435. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France. (Photo courtesy Mirella Levi D’Ancona)

FIGURE 25. Guariento d’Arpo. Madonna of Humility. Padua, Italy. Circa 1345. J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, California, United States. (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.) 145

FIGURE 26. Madonna of Humility, Altar Frontal. Church of Arteta, Navarra. Circa 1325-1350. Tempera on panel. Museu Nacional d’Arte de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. (Image used courtesy the website of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya of Barcelona, www.museunacional.cat.)

FIGURE 27. Jaime Serra. Madonna of Humility. Circa 1360-1375. Tempera on panel. Palau de Cerdaña parish church, Spain. (Photo courtesy Manuel Trens)

146

FIGURE 28. Jaime Serra. Madonna of Humility with Portrait of Enrique II King of Castile and Family. Circa 1366. Tempera on panel. Prado, Madrid, Spain. (Copyright of the image Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, NY)

FIGURE 29. Miguel Verger, Immaculate Conception Tota Pulchra (detail). Late sixteenth century. Tympanum, main portal. Mallorca de Palma Cathedral. Mallorca, Spain. (Photo by Loretta Ramirez) 147

FIGURE 30. Orans Virgin. Reverse: Empresses Zoe and Theodora. Constantinople 1042. Gold coin. Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Washington D.C., United States. (Image courtesy © Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC)

FIGURE 31. Santa Maria Mater Domini. Stone icon. Circa 1200. Venice, Italy. (Photo courtesy Hans Belting Collection) 148

FIGURE 32. Rothschild Canticles, Saint John the Evangelist and Mulier amicta sole (Woman Clothed with the Sun). MS. 404, f63v/64r, 63v. Circa 1300. (Image courtesy: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Yale University)

FIGURE 33. La Virgen de la Esperanza. Cantoral miniature. Circa sixteenth century. Cathedral of Seville, Spain. (Photo courtesy Manuel Trens) 149

FIGURE 34. Virgen Abridera (closed, with Christ Child figurine, opened Trinity). Midfifteenth century. Ermita de San Blas de Buriñondo, Bergara, Spain. (Images courtesy Belosticalle.blogspot.com)

FIGURE 35. Diego de la Cruz. La Virgen de la Misericordia con los Reyes Católicos y su familia. 1486. Monasterio de Santa María la Real de las Huelgas, Burgos, Spain. Patrimonio Nacional. (Image: COPYRIGHT © PATRIMONIO NACIONAL) 150

FIGURE 36. Virgen Abridera, Passions of Christ (opened). Circa 1520s. Pie de Concha, Spain. (Image courtesy Todocoleccion.net)

FIGURE 37. Attributed to Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni). Double Intercession. Before 1402. Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, New York City, United States. (Image courtesy ARTstor IAP, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 151

FIGURE 38. Virgen Intercesora. Manuscript miniature. Thirteenth century. Toledo Cathedral, Toledo, Spain. (Photo courtesy Manuel Trens)

FIGURE 39. Virgin Tota Pulchra. Grisaille mural. Mid-sixteenth century. Lower cloister, Franciscan monastery, Huejotzingo, Puebla, Mexico. (Photograph used courtesy the School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection, The University of Texas at Austin from Artstor’s Hal Box and Logan Wagner Collection of Mexican Architecture and Urban Design 92-9826.) 152

FIGURE 40. Virgin of Guadalupe. Circa 1700. Mexico. (Image courtesy of ARTstor IAP, Indiana Museum of Art)

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APPENDIX B GLOSSARY OF DISCUSSED MARIAN MOTIFS

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Immaculate Conception Motif. Alludes to the Catholic doctrine that proposes Mary is exempt from Original Sin since she was conceived through God’s celestial design rather than through human processes. While variations exist to this motif, predominant traits include an emphasis on Mary who is often isolated from Christ and a designation of Mary’s exclusion from Original Sin; this designation usually manifests in the figure of God hovering above Mary and extending a rod to mark her purity. Madonna of Humility. A motif that features Mary seated low to the ground, often sitting upon a pillow as she breastfeeds the Christ Child. Mary typically looks outwards towards viewers, her head bowed in modesty and acceptance. Aspects of popular devotional iconography are usually incorporated into this motif: the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, the Annunciation Mary, Maria Lactans or Mary nursing the Christ Child, and the Apocalyptic Woman from the Book of Revelation. Madonna of Misericordia or the Madonna of Mercy. Depicts Mary standing above the devout, her cloak opened as a protective barrier behind and over the devout. Orans Virgin. A motif that typically consists of Mary separating her arms to the side of her chest, her palms upwards in prayer as heavy drapery of her cloak spreads around her. In the action of separating her arms, Mary reveals on her chest a floating medallion with the image of the Christ Child. The motif is associated with Mary’s role of manifesting the incarnate; she makes visible the invisible and thereby makes earthly the holy. Santa-Ana Triple. A motif that features Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, seated with Mary upon her lap and often the Christ Child either standing or sitting on Mary’s lap. The motif is associated with the Immaculate Conception doctrine, referencing the purity of Mary as stemming from her birth from Anne. Tota Pulchra. Motif in the Immaculate Conception theme that derives from a prayer recited during the feast day of the Immaculate Conception: Tota pulchra es amica mea et macula originalis non est in te (All beautiful this is my love and original sin is not in you). The tota pulchra features Mary standing in prayer as she floats upon a crescent moon, sunlight emanating from her figure, and stars often orbiting her head. Encircling her body are Mary’s attributes: the personified sun (Electa ut Sol), star of the sea (Stella Maris), personified moon (Pulcra ut Luna), spotless mirror (Speculum Sine Macula), well of life-giving (Puteus Aquarum Viventum), palm and cypress trees, lily, rose, enclosed garden (Hortus Conclusus), closed gate of Paradise (Porta Celli), Tower of David (Turris Davidica), City of God (Civitas Dei), and sealed fountain (Fons Signatus). Truncated Tee of Jesse. Traces the lineage of Christ, stemming from Saints Anne and Joachim, the Holy Grandparents. This truncated ancestors of Christ motif may allude to Immaculate Conception doctrine by emphasizing the purity of lineage that stems from the Holy Grandparents and continues from Mary’s immaculate nature to Christ. Virgenes Abrideras. Mutable sculpture that features the Virgin Mary. These sculptures open to reveal often narrative panels or the Trinity. The Virgenes Abrideras may have originated in Spain, as the earliest known example dates to circa 1270 in Allariz, Spain. 155

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