The Routledge Companion To Medieval Iconography

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION
TO MEDIEVAL ICONOGRAPHY
Sometimes enjoying considerable favor, sometimes less, iconography has been an essential ele-
ment in medieval art historical studies since the beginning of the discipline. Some of the greatest
art historians – including Mâle, Warburg, Panofsky, Morey, and Schapiro – have devoted their
lives to understanding and structuring what exactly the subject matter of a work of medieval art
can tell. Over the last thirty or so years, scholarship has seen the meaning and methodologies of
the term considerably broadened.
This companion provides a state-of-the-art assessment of the influence of the foremost ico-
nographers, as well as the methodologies employed and themes that underpin the discipline.
The first section focuses on influential thinkers in the field, while the second covers some of the
best-known methodologies; the third, and largest section, looks at some of the major themes in
medieval art. Taken together, the three sections include thirty-eight chapters, each of which deals
with an individual topic. An introduction, historiographical evaluation, and bibliography accom-
pany the individual essays. The authors are recognized experts in the field, and each essay includes
original analyses and/or case studies which will hopefully open the field for future research.
Colum Hourihane received his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London,
in 1983 for a thesis on the iconography of Gothic art in Ireland, part of which was subsequently
published as Gothic Art in Ireland 1169–1550: Enduring Vitality (2003). He was deputy director
of the Witt Computer Index in the Courtauld Institute until 1997 before becoming director of
the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, where he was until retirement in 2014. He has
edited over twenty volumes of art historical studies and has single-authored five volumes. Among
the latter are The Processional Cross in Late Medieval England: The Dallye Cross (2005) and Pontius
Pilate, Anti-Semitism, and the Passion in Medieval Art (2009). A fellow of the Society of Antiquaries
of London, he was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Irish Academy in 2015.
THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO MEDIEVAL
ICONOGRAPHY
Edited by Colum Hourihane

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Colum Hourihane; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Colum Hourihane to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
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CONTENTS
List of figures and plates ix

Preface xviii
Biographical notes on the contributors xxi
Medieval iconography, an introduction 1

Colum Hourihane
PART I
The great iconographers 9
1 Andrea Alciato 11
Denis L. Drysdall and Peter M. Daly
2 Ripa, the trinciante 32

Cornelia Logemann
3 Adolphe-Napoléon Didron (Paris 1867–Hautvilliers 1906) 47

Emilie Maraszak
4 Louis Réau 57
Daniel Russo
5 Émile Mâle 65
Kirk Ambrose
6 Aby M. Warburg: iconographer? 75

Peter van Huisstede
v
Contents
7 Fritz Saxl: transformation and reconfiguration

of pagan gods in medieval art 89
Katia Mazzucco
8 Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) 105

Dieter Wuttke
9 Charles Rufus Morey and the Index of Christian Art 123

Colum Hourihane
10 Hans van de Waal, a portrait 130

Edward Grasman
11 Meyer Schapiro as iconographer 142

Patricia Stirnemann
12 Michael Camille’s queer Middle Ages 154

Matthew M. Reeve
PART II
Systems and cataloguing tools 173
13 The anthropology of images 175

Ralph Dekoninck
14 Classifying image content in visual collections:

a selective history 184
Chiara Franceschini
15 Library of Congress subject headings 192

Sherman Clarke
16 Iconclass: a key to collaboration in the digital humanities 201

Hans Brandhorst and Etienne Posthumus
PART III
Themes in medieval art 219
17 Religious iconography 221

Marina Vicelja
18 Liturgical iconography 235

Karl F. Morrison
vi
Contents
19 Secular iconography 251

Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck
20 Erotic iconography 267

Madeline H. Caviness
21 The iconography of narrative 282

Anne F. Harris
22 Political iconography and the emblematic way of seeing 295

György E. Szönyi
23 Picturing the stars – scientific iconography in the Middle Ages 310

Dieter Blume
24 Medicine’s image 322

Jack Hartnell
25 Patronage: a useful category of art historical analysis? 340

Elizabeth Carson Pastan
26 Royal and imperial iconography 356

Joan A. Holladay
27 The iconography of architecture 373

Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo
28 Heraldic imagery, definition, and principles 386

Laurent Hablot
29 Medieval maps and diagrams 399

Diarmuid Scully
30 The iconography of gender 412

Sherry C. M. Lindquist
31 Feminist art history and medieval iconography 425

Martha Easton
32 The iconography of color 437

Andreas Petzold
33 Flowers and plants, the living iconography 453

Celia Fisher
vii
Contents
34 The iconography of light 465

Sharon E.J. Gerstel and Michael W. Cothren
35 The visual representation of music and sound 479

Susan Boynton
36 The other in the Middle Ages: difference, identity,

and iconography 492
Pamela A. Patton
37 Animal iconography 504

Debra Higgs Strickland
38 Monstrous iconography 518

Asa Simon Mittman and Susan M. Kim
Index 534
viii
FIGURES AND PLATES
1.1 In nothos (Padua, Tozzi, 1621) 600. By permission of University

of Glasgow Library, Special Collections. 13
1.2 Gratiam referendam (Paris, Wechel, 1534) 9. By permission of University
of Glasgow Library, Special Collections. 14
1.3 Detail of one of the figures in the border (upper left side) from Sheldon’s
Spring tapestry, now in Hatfield House. The legend reads “In Consilio”
(Deliberation). Late sixteenth–early seventeenth centuries. Image courtesy
of Colum Hourihane. 25
2.1 Title page from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia 1603 (University Library of Heidelberg). 33
2.2 “Caritas,” from Ripa, Iconologia 1603, 64 (University Library of Heidelberg). 41
5.1 Émile Mâle, c. 1928. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale
de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (2832). 66
6.1 The Warburg brothers. Aby Warburg is on the far right; his four brothers
are Paul, Felix, Max, and Fritz. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute. 76
6.2 Gertrud Bing, Aby Warburg (center), and Franz Alber (right) in Rome.
Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute. 82
6.3 Screen 47 of the Mnemosyne Atlas, last series of the Mnemosyne Atlas. 83
6.4 Diagram showing two small nuclei from screen 47 of the Mnemosyne
Atlas. Matteo de’Strozzi refers to Warburg’s text (Warburg 1892);
“Pathosformel” is an important research motif throughout his work. 85
7.1 Fritz Saxl in the reading room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek
Warburg in Hamburg, 1926–1927, unknown photographer. Image
courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London. 90
7.2 The Nike-Mithras type, F. Saxl, Mithras: Typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen
(Berlin, 1931), figs. 31–36. 91
7.3 The Mundus–Annus–Homo diagram, Isidore’s De responsione mundi
et de astrorum ordinatione, Günther Zainer Augsburg 1472; A. Schramm,
Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke ( Leipzig, 1920), fig. 292. 93
7.4 Photograph showing Saint Jerome, dating to the mid-fifteenth century,
hand-colored woodcut, first stamped “Bibliothek Warburg/Hamburg
20/114 Heilwigstrasse” (old building of the library; before 1926),
ix
Figures and plates
and afterwards stamped in London “The Warburg Institute” (no address;

no affiliation with the University of London; 1933–1944) and
catalogued according to the new section “Religious Iconography,”
The Warburg Institute. 95
7.5 Photographic exhibition in the reading room of the KBW for
Saxl’s lecture “The Expressional Gestures of the Visual Art,” 1931.
Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London. 100
8.1 Panofsky and his students from Hamburg University on an excursion
to Westphalia from July 16 through July 20, 1932. Panofsky is sitting
on the right side with his wife Dora in a white blouse behind him.
For the identification of the other figures see Korrespondenz, vol. I
(as in note 1), 366 (Fig. 34), and additions in Wuttke, Kumulationen
(as in note 1), 33. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke. 109
8.2 Panofsky in his study at the Institute for Advanced Study, spring 1966.
Panofsky’s gesture is inspired by the portrait of Abbot Suger in the abbey
church of St. Denis, Paris. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke. 112
8.3 Panofsky in his Hamburg academic gown at Harvard, 1957, when he
was awarded an honorary doctorate. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke. 115
9.1 Charles Rufus Morey. Image courtesy of the Index of Christian Art. 124
9.2 The Index of Christian Art showing the two paper files. On the right side
is the subject file, consisting of the alphabetically arranged twenty-eight
thousand subject headings, while on the left side is the photographic file. 127
10.1 Hans van de Waal. Unknown photographer, date unknown, Leiden
University Libraries. 131
10.2 The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, Rembrandt
(fragment, 196 × 309 cm, originally c. 550 × 550 cm), Stockholm,
Royal Academy of Fine Arts (on loan to The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). 131
10.3 Portraits of the Syndics of the Amsterdam Clothmasters’ Guild, Rembrandt,
1662, oil on canvas, 191.5 × 279 cm, The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 137
10.4 Le Petit Orfèvre, also known as The Goldsmith, Rembrandt, etching,
7.7 × 5.6 cm, first state of three (B123, 1655), Leiden University Libraries. 139
11.1 Detail of the trumeau at Moissac showing prominent swollen udders of the
lioness. Moissac, Abbaye Saint Pierre. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 144
11.2 Edward Young carrying the corpse of his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Temple,
by Pierre Antoine Auguste Vafflard. Oil, 238 × 192 cm, c. 1804, Le Musée
d’Angoulême. Image courtesy of Le Musée d’Angoulême, Thiery Blas. 151
12.1 Club advertisements. The Michael Camille Papers, Regenstein Library,
University of Chicago Box 14, “Picturesque Gothic” file. Image courtesy
of Matthew Reeve. 158
12.2 Luxuria, Amiens West Front. Image courtesy of the Courtauld Institute
of Art, James Austin Collection. 161
12.3 Trumeau, Souillac. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 163
12.4 Trinity College, Cambridge MS B 11.22, f. 73r. Image courtesy of
Trinity College, Cambridge. 165
12.5 January page, Très Riches Heures. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 167
13.1 Michelozzo di Bartolomeo (attr.) and Pagno di Lapo Pertigiani,
tabernacle for the SS. Annunziata (c. 1340), 1448–49, Florence,
SS. Annunziata. 179
x
Figures and plates
15.1 Christ being nailed to the cross, Gerhard Remsich, c. 1538–9, Victoria and
Albert Museum, London (c. 276–1928). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 196
15.2 Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, Western façade of the Abbey Church
of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, c. 1120–1160. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 198
16.1 Iconclass system volume 2–3, p. XIX: this subtle manner of ordering
concepts was not supported by the data. 206
16.2 A man blowing his own horn while giving alms (Georgette de Montenay,
Emblèmes ou devises chrestiennes [edition: Frankfurt 1619], emblem 90). 207
16.3 (a) Saint Martin gives part of his cloak to a beggar. From Hours of Simon
de Varie, Paris, c. 1455. (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek
MS 74 G 37, fol. 80r). 210
16.3 (b) Beggar on crutches (print made by Pieter Langendijk, after a
design by Pieter Barbiers I, second quarter eighteenth century). 211
16.4 Screenshot from the Iconclass browser – at: http://iconclass.org/rkd/55C21. 211
16.5 Screenshot from the Iconclass browser – at: http://iconclass.org/rkd/46A212. 212
17.1 Master Radovan, Nativity, lunette above the entrance to the Cathedral
of Trogir, Croatia, thirteenth century. Image courtesy of Marina Vicelja. 222
17.2 Mosaic program in the apse of the Eufrasius’s basilica in Poreč,
Croatia, sixth century. Image courtesy of R. Kosinozic. 227
17.3 The Virgin of Mercy (Madonna della Misericordia), Church of San Tomà,
Venice, Italy, fourteenth/fifteenth century. Image courtesy of D. Descouens.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Tom%C3%
A0_-_Madonna_della_Misericordia_sec._XV.jpg. 230
17.4 The Triumph of Death, a detail of the fresco on the façade of the Oratorio
dei Disciplini, Clusone, Italy, fifteenth century. Image courtesy of E. Senza. 231
19.1 Ebstorf Map, c. 1300, northern Germany (modern copy of the original
destroyed in 1943). © Kloster Ebstorf, Klosterkammer Hannover. 253
19.2 Schmalkalden, Hessenhof: (a) view of the Iwein Rooms, north,
(b) welcoming man at the entrance, both drawings by P. Weber,
“Die Iweinbilder aus dem 13. Jahrhundert im Hessenhofe in
Schmalkalden,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 12 1900–1901, 73–84, 113–20. 257
19.3 Maienfeld, Burg Brandis, Upper Tower, Bar Fight, first third of the
fourteenth century, J. R. Rahn, “Zwei weltliche Bilderfolgen aus dem 14.
Jahrhundert und 15. Jahrhundert,” Kunstdenkmäler der Schweiz. Mitteilungen
der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Erhaltung historischer Denkmale, 2 (1902), 1–14. 259
19.4 Ostermiething, Old Rectory, Cockaigne, wall painting around 1470/80.
Image courtesy of Harald Wolter von dem Knesebeck. 260
20.1 Andromeda, Aratus, Phaenomena interpreted by Claudio Germanico,
Carolingian Palace School, Aachen, c. 804. Leiden University Library,
Ms Voss. Lat. Q79, folio 30 v detail initial C. Photograph licensed
by Leiden University Library. 268
20.2 Old man and young girl kissing: (a) with wyvern to the left, (b) with
serpent to the right, corbel at the roofline of the apse, Santa Maria,
Uncastillo (Aragon), after 1135. Image © Antonio García Omedes. 270
20.3 Intercourse for male health, Aldobrandino of Siena, Régime du corps,
chapter 7, North France (probably Lille), c. 1285: London, British
Library Ms Sloane 2435, folio 9 v, detail. © The British Library Board,
All Rights Reserved. 271
xi
Figures and plates
20.4 Herr Jakob von Warte bathing, with female attendants, Manesse Codex,
Heidelberg University Library Cod.Pal.germ. 848, folio 46 v. Photograph
licensed by Heidelberg University Library. 272
20.5 Man and woman engaged in sex play, corbel from the Church in
Kirknewton, Edinburgh, National Museum of Scotland, H. KG 33.
Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 274
20.6 Entwined male and female couple, The Psalter-Hours of Ghuiluys de
Boisleux, Arras, c. 1245, Morgan Library Ms M730, folio 222 r, detail.
Photo licensed by The Morgan Library & Museum. 275
21.1 Simone Martini, Annunciation, 1333. Tempera and gold on panel.
Florence, Uffizi Gallery. Image courtesy of Scala/Minesterio per I
Beni e la Attivita culturali, Art Resource, New York. 284
21.2 Opening sequence, Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and
Jean de Meun, 1353. Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. Fr. 178. Image
courtesy of HIP/Art Resource, New York. 286
21.3 Facade of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, c. 1149
(Palestine, today Israel), 1855–1860. Image courtesy of Adoc-Photos/
Art Resource, New York. 288
21.4 Medieval comb, Scenes of Courtly Love, c. 1320. Ivory, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London (A.560-1910). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 291
22.1 Emblem XC, “Loue and feare are chiefest things,/That stablish Scepters
unto kings,” Guillaume de la Perrière/Thomas Combe, A Theater of Fine
Devices, London, 1614. Illustration courtesy of Google Books. 296
22.2 Composite picture showing Pisanello’s Portrait of Emperor Sigismund I
(1433, black chalk and pen on paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris); Albrecht
Dürer’s Portrait of Emperor Sigismund I (1512, oil on lindenwood, Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg); and Albrecht Dürer’s Emperor Maximilian I
(1519, oil on lindenwood, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). 298
22.3 The Wilton Diptych (1395–99), tempera on wood, London, National
Gallery. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 301
22.4 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government, details (1338–40),
fresco, Siena, Palazzo Pubblico. 304
22.5 The Great Stove (1545), majolica, Gdansk, Artus Court. Image courtesy
of Gyorgy Szönyi. 305
23.1 Gemini, Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Ms. Voss. Lat. Q 79, fol. 16v. 311
23.2 Andromeda, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 5239, fol. 219v. 313
23.3 Aquarius, London, British Library, Harley Ms. 2506, fol. 38v.
© The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved. 315
23.4 Perseus, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 1036, fol. 10r. 316
23.5 Eridanus und Figura sonantis canonum, Vienna, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2352, fol. 19v. 318
24.1 (Detail) Leprous priests receiving instruction from a bishop, from
the Omne Bonum of James Le Palmer, c. 1360–75, England. London,
British Library, MS Royal 6 E VI, vol. 2, fol. 301r. © The British
Library Board, All Rights Reserved. 323
24.2 Muscle Man, Male and Female Genitalia, Presentations of the Fetus
in the Womb, and Pregnant Disease Woman, from the so-called
xii
Figures and plates
Wellcome Apocalypse, a medical miscellany from c. 1420, Southern

Germany. London, Wellcome Library, MS 49, fols. 37v and 38r.
Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library. 326
24.3 (Detail) Diagram of the Eye, from a medical miscellany including
the “Book of Macharias on the Eye Called Salaracer or Secret of
Secrets,” last quarter of the fourteenth or first quarter of the fifteenth
century, England. London, British Library. MS Sloane 981, fol. 68r.
24.4 Entries for Brassica silvatica (wild cabbage or wild cole?), Basilisca
(sweet basil), and Mandragora (Mandrake), from the Herbal of Pseudo-
Apuleius in a pharmacopeial compilation, second half of the twelfth century,
England. London, British Library, Harley MS 5294, fols. 42v and 43r. 332
24.5 Saint Elzéar Curing the Lepers, c. 1373, Apt (Provence). Marble. Walters
Art Museum, Baltimore. Image courtesy of the Walters Art Museum. 334
25.1 Bible presented to Charles the Bald, The First Bible of Charles the Bald
(Paris, BN, MS lat. 1, fol. 423r), Tours, c. 845. Image courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons. 342
25.2 Dedication frontispiece from the Liber Vitae of New Minster (London,
BL, Stowe MS 944, f. 6r), Westminster, c. 1031. Image courtesy of
25.3 The Visual Colophon from the Toledo Cathedral Bible moralisée
(New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.240, fol. 8r), Paris,
c. 1220–30s. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 347
25.4 Book owner kneeling in prayer, Matins of the Hours of the Virgin,
Psalter-Hours “of Yolande of Soissons” (The Pierpont Morgan Library,
New York, MS M.729, fol. 232v), Amiens, c. 1290. Image courtesy of the
Morgan Library and Museum, New York. 350
26.1 Silver denier of Charlemagne. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques. Between 801 and 814,
Mainz (?). Photo © Genevra Kornbluth. 357
26.2 Charles V, holding the scepter and the hand of justice, kneels before
Dagobert’s throne as the archbishop of Reims places the crown on
his head. Coronation Book of Charles V. London, British Library,
Cotton Tiberius B. VIII, fol. 59r. 1365, Paris. Photo © The British
26.3a Charles the Bald seated on his throne looks into the heavens. Codex aureus
of St. Emmeram. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München, Clm 14000,
fol. 5v. 870, Court School of Charles the Bald (location unknown).
Photo: courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München. 362
26.3b The twenty-four elders adore the lamb. Codex aureus of St. Emmeram.
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München, Clm 14000, fol. 6r. 870, Court School
of Charles the Bald (location unknown). Photo: courtesy of Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, München. 363
26.4 Imperial insignia, including, at left, the Bügelkrone (second half of the
tenth century with cross from the early eleventh and arch from the
reign of Konrad II [1024–39]); at right, the imperial orb (c. 1200),
and diagonally across the front, the imperial sword in its scabbard
xiii
Figures and plates
(middle third of the eleventh century). Vienna, Imperial Treasury.

Photo courtesy of KHM-Museumsverband. 365
26.5 Tomb of Philip III, king of France (r. 1271–85), at Saint-Denis.
1297–1307, Paris. Photo courtesy of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. 367
27.1 Francesco di Giorgio. Ground plan of a church corresponding to
the proportions of the human figure. MS. Ashb. 361, c. 10v.
Image courtesy of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence. 376
27.2 Anastasis Rotunda, Jerusalem, interior. Image courtesy of C. and
E. V. del Álamo. 378
27.3 Church of La Vera Cruz, Segovia, interior. Image courtesy of C. and
E. V. del Álamo. 379
27.4 Castle and town of Frías (Burgos). Image courtesy of C. and E. V. del Álamo. 381
28.1 Jeanne de Laval’s coat of arms showing a marshalling of arms.
Represented are the six arms of her husband, René d’Anjou, as well
as her own coat of arms, together with four different coats of arms.
Next to the crowned shield – she is queen of Sicily – her badge of two
linked turtledoves is symbolic of eternal love and fidelity. Jeanne de
Laval Psalter, Poitiers, Médiathèque François Mitterrand, Ms. 41, f. 22r.
Image courtesy of the Médiathèque François Mitterand, Poitiers. 388
28.2 The testone of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1466 d. 1476) shows his portrait
(the name of this coin means portrait). His arms are surmounted by his
crest showing the Biscia – a monstrous snake spitting at a man – as well
as his monogram GZM and the tizzone badge, of a flaming stick
from which two buckets hang, a possible symbol of temperance.
Image courtesy of www.cgb.fr. 391
28.3 Donatello’s heraldic work on a gravestone in the church Santa Maria
in Aracoeli at Roma. The artist used imagery from antiquity as well
as the imago clipeata – a portrait of the deceased carried by two winged
genii – here represented as two angels carrying the dead person’s coat
of arms in an almond shield typical of the renaissance. Rome, Santa
Maria in Aracoeli church. Image courtesy of Laurent Hablot. 393
28.4 Scene showing the dedication of a book, the Paradis de la Reine Sibylle.
Here, the book is presented by the author, Antoine de La Sale, to his
protector, the duchess Agnese de Bourbon. Both writer and princess
are represented by their coats of arms, showing the ability of the signs
to represent the figures in absentia. Chantilly, Bibliothèque des archives
et du château de Chantilly, Ms. 653, f. 1r. Image courtesy of the
Bibliothèque des archives et du château de Chantilly. 394
29.1 The known world of Europe, Asia, and Africa and its islands,
surrounded by ocean. Hereford mappa mundi, circa 1300.
Photo courtesy of the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the dean
and chapter of Hereford Cathedral. 400
29.2 The Roman emperor Augustus orders the measurement of the
world. He is placed next to Ireland at the northwestern ends of
the earth. Hereford mappa mundi, circa 1300. Photo courtesy
of the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the dean and chapter of
Hereford Cathedral. 403
xiv
Figures and plates
29.3 The Last Judgment. Hereford mappa mundi, circa 1300. Photo courtesy
of the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the dean and chapter of
Hereford Cathedral. 408
30.1 Trial of Eugenia, c. 1120. North aisle of the nave, La Madeleine, Vézelay.
Image courtesy of Nick Havholm. 414
30.2 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, Vision I, c. 1175. Wiesbaden,
Hessische Landesbibliothek, MS I, fol. 2r (original lost in 1945).
Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv. 416
30.3 Herman, Jean, and Paul de Limbourg, Flagellants, The Belles Heures
of John, Duke of Berry, 1405–1408/09. New York, The Cloisters
Collection 1954, MS. 54.1.1, fol. 74v. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/collections. 418
30.4 Deaths of Dives and Lazarus, Compilation of Literary Texts, France,
1355–62. Dijon, Bibl. Mun. MS 525, fol. 131v. Image courtesy
of IHRT. 419
30.5 Commendation of the Soul, “The Hours of the Earls of Ormond,” London,
before 1467. British Library, Harley MS 2887, fol. 97v. © The British
31.1 Mirror cover: Scenes of lovers, 1340–60, Ivory, 0.7 × diam. 9 cm
(1/4 × 3 9/16 in.) Gift of Mrs. Albert E. McVitty. Princeton
University Art Museum, (y1954-61). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 428
31.2 Mirror cover: Chess Game, fourteenth century, Paris, France. Paris,
Musée du Louvre. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 429
31.3 Mirror cover: The God of Love and a Couple, 1300–1320, Paris, France. Victoria
and Albert Museum, London.© Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 429
31.4 Mirror cover: Pairs of Lovers, fourteenth century, France. Photo © Royal
Museums of Art and History, Brussels. 430
31.5 Roundel with scenes of the attack on the Castle of Love, c. 1320–40, Paris,
France, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 2003. 431
33.1 Leaf carvings in the Chapter House of Southwell Minster, England,
c. 1300. Cinquefoil leaves and flowers, believed to have magical powers
associated with the number five, hence the Latin name potentilla.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 455
33.2 The Hours of Engelbert of Nassau, Flemish, c. 1470, Oxford Bodleian
Library, ms Douce 210-220, f. 133. The miniature showing the Nativity
is attributed to the Master of Mary of Burgundy; the flower-strewn borders
were added a little later, but their origins have been associated with his work.
It was typical of the Ghent-Bruges Hours that the flowers were arranged
in patterns; here red roses and red double daisies were interspersed with
white daisies, stocks, and a pea flower, alternating with blue speedwell,
borage, cornflower, columbine, and heartsease. Image courtesy of
34.1 View to apse with light penetrating nave at 10:00 a.m. in July 2015,
Katholikon, Monastery of Hosios Loukas, Greece, early eleventh century.
Image courtesy of Sharon Gerstel. 466
34.2 Interior of the ambulatory of the choir, Abbey Church of Saint-Denis,
France, 1140–1144. Image courtesy of Stephen Gardner. 468
xv
Figures and plates
34.3 Apse with tetragram over central window, Church of the Virgin
Peribleptos (St. Clement), Ohrid, Macedonia, 1295. Image courtesy
of Sharon Gerstel. 470
34.4 Nicholas of Verdun, Annunciation to the Virgin, Klosterneuburg
Altarpiece, 1181. Sammlungen des Stiftes, Losterneuberg, Austria.
Photo courtesy of Art Resource. 473
35.1 Right leaf of a diptych with The Coronation of the Virgin and Angel
Musicians. Venice (?), late fourteenth century. New York, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1971. www.metmuseum.org. 481
35.2 Angel Musicians. Beaupré Antiphonary (Volume I), fol. 2r. Walters Art
Museum MS W.759. Gift of the William R. Hearst Foundation, 1957. 482
35.3 Ivory plaque with scenes from the life of Saint Emilianus, from the reliquary
of San Millan de la Cogolla. Master Engelram and his son Redolfo,
c. 1060–80. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters
Collection, 1987. www.metmuseum.org. 483
35.4 Three Singers at a Lectern, from the Prayer Book of Bonne of
Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy (Paris, before 1349), folio 146v.
Attributed to Jean Le Noir (French, active 1331–75) and Workshop.
New York, Metropolitan Museum, The Cloisters Collection, 1969.
www.metmuseum.org. 485
36.1 Scribal doodle of Salamó Vidal on the cover of a liber iudeorum from
1334–1340 (Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, Arxiu de la Cúria
Fumada, núm. 4603). Photo courtesy of Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal
de Vic, reproduced by permission. 494
36.2 Matthew Paris, Tartars eating human flesh, from the Chronica Majora
(Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 16), fol. 167r.
Photo reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge. 494
36.3 Story of the Muslim Converted by an Image of the Virgin (Cantiga 46),
Cantigas de Santa María (Real Biblioteca de El Escorial, MS T.I.1), fol. 68v.
© Patrimonio Nacional, reproduced by permission. 498
36.4 A charivari in progress, Roman de Fauvel (Paris, Bibiliothèque
Nationale de France, MS fr. 146), fol. 36v. Photo courtesy of BnF, Dist.
RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, reproduced by permission. 499
37.1 Saint Luke and his ox, Prayerbook of Michelino da Besozzo, Milan,
c. 1420. New York, ML, MS M. 944, f. 75v. Photo courtesy of the
Morgan Library and Museum, New York. 506
37.2 Fox preaching poultry, misericord, oak, c. 1425. Ludlow, St. Lawrence
parish church. Image courtesy of Shaun Ward. 510
37.3 Bat-woman, misericord, oak, c. 1425. Ludlow, St. Lawrence parish church.
Image courtesy of Shaun Ward. 511
37.4 Schoolmaster, misericord, oak, c. 1450. Ludlow, St. Lawrence parish church.
Image courtesy of Shaun Ward. 511
38.1 “Monster Average,” London, British Library, MS Royal 20 B.xx,
Historia de proelis in a French translation (Le Livre et le vraye hystoire
du bon roy Alixandre), c. 1420. 524
38.2 Alexander Battles Blemmyes, London, British Library, MS Royal 20
B.xx, f. 80, Historia de proelis in a French translation (Le Livre et le
xvi
Figures and plates
vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre), c. 1420, © The British Library

Board, All Rights Reserved. 524
38.3 Alexander Battles Boars and Wild Men, London, British Library,
MS Royal 20 B.xx, f. 51, Historia de proelis in a French translation
(Le Livre et le vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre), c. 1420,
38.4 Cynocephalus, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, f. 3,
Wonders of the East, c. 1000, © The British Library Board,
All Rights Reserved. 526
38.5 Cynocephali, Tympanum of the Benedictine Abbey Church of
Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Vézelay. Image courtesy of Karl Steel. 529
Pl. 1 Michael Camille. Image courtesy of Stuart Michaels. 155
Pl. 2 Trinity of Saint Anne with donor, Atelier of the Master of Rabenden,
polychrome wood, c. 1515, Unter den Linden Museum, Colmar
(89.3.1). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane. 194
Pl. 3 Mary Magdalene, German, c. 1520–1530, Liebieghaus, Frankfurt (Inv. Nr. 2).
Pl. 4 Image of Christ, S. Appollinare in Nuovo. Ravenna, early sixth century.
Pl. 5 Carrow Psalter (Ms.W.34, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, f.27 r),
English, c. 1250. Note the green crosses in the Carrying of the
Cross and the Crucifixion. Illustration courtesy of Walters Art Museum,
created under Creative Commons License. 446
Pl. 6 Master of the Paradise Garden (Upper Rhenish), The Paradise Garden,
c. 1420, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, HM 54. In a typical
enclosed garden the Virgin is seated among flowers and the Christ
Child is learning music from St. Cecilia (who has a headdress of peapods),
while St. Dorothea picks cherries. Along the wall (left to right) the flowers
are red roses, speedwell, betony, lychnis, stocks, iris, and hollyhock. In the
grass the flowers include white lily, peony, strawberries, lilies of the valley,
leucojum, cowslips, yellow wallflowers, periwinkles, daisies, and violets.
Pl. 7 Transfiguration. Church of Holy Apostles, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Early fourteenth century. Image courtesy of Sharon Gerstel. 474
Pl. 8 Horses, Rochester Bestiary, southeast England, second quarter, thirteenth
century. London, BL, MS Royal 12 XIII, f. 42v (detail). © The British
xvii
PREFACE
Whether we like it or not, subject matter, iconography, iconology, or whatever term we want
to call the visual content of works of art is a field that is destined to remain at the forefront of
art historical studies. It is a field that has suffered since it was first developed in the late medieval–
early Renaissance periods and no more so has that criticism been louder than in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. It has been seen as one of the two pillars of art history, along with
style, and has been criticized as an antiquated approach to understanding a work of art. Merci-
fully, style now seems to have usurped that of iconography in terms of criticism and iconography
continues along its well-trodden and useful path. It is a complex field of study, as the many essays
in this volume prove. Iconography does not stand on its own but lies at the core of a complex
set of interrelationships going from form to period and function to intention. How do we try
to understand the working and intentions of the maker or person who commissioned the work?
How do we transpose ourselves to a mentality that is totally alien to our own, and attempt to
understand exactly what the subject represented or meant? Representation may be easily accom-
plished, but intention is a different matter and therein lie the individual creative powers that are
so difficult to understand. Subject matter can interact with other elements and change meaning
entirely; meaning can change simply by moving context. Coloration can alter meaning as can
countless other factors. Iconography is now usually understood, thanks to Panofsky’s seminal
work, as the study of the broader meanings of works of art. It does not, or at least should not, stand
on its own as a means of studying a work but is closely integrated with all the other approaches.
It is, unfortunately, a term that has now fallen into neglect, with the preferred term now being
iconology. Iconology, as these essays show, has opened iconography out into a much richer field
of study, encompassing disciplines other than art history. As complex a field as iconography or
iconology is, it is also among the most exciting ways of understanding what a work means.
The study of iconography has changed drastically since it was first viewed as a field of study.
What we now consider as iconography has been broadened considerably, as a quick perusal of the
themes or subjects in this work attests. We can now talk of the iconography of architecture or light
or sound – concepts that go beyond the tangible and attempt to incorporate aspects of a work other
than the immediately visual. It is now a far more inclusive term while, at the same time, less definite
than its original meaning. The highpoint of iconographical studies for the medieval period was in
the middle of the twentieth century when efforts were made to understand the methodologies of
the field as well as their application to a wide range of subjects. Theory and application became
xviii
Preface
firmly entwined in the studies of scholars such as Warburg, Panofsky, Morey, Van der Waal, and so
forth – for them, understanding the approaches of those who created the works was as important as
understanding what the work meant. Nowadays, understanding iconographical methodologies is a
field that has been relegated to scholars other than art historians, but we are fortunate in this volume
in having scholars whose interests span both aspects of the subject. This publication is designed so
that both aspects of the subject are covered; we hope to look at the approaches used to describe
subject matter as well as to selectively look at some of the main themes in medieval art. In much
the same way as Panofsky formulated his tripartite system of subject classification, it is important
for us to understand how modern cataloguing proceeds and how methodologies impact on this.
We are now living in the age of the image, and it is important for us to impose some level of order
and access on the huge number of images that are available in the archive or on the web. It is also
important for us to get to this material using sensible approaches, the most important of which are
detailed in this publication. These approaches continue the pioneering work undertaken by scholars
such as Warburg, Morey, and Panofsky and bring us into the age of the computer and iconography.
Even though there are many scholars working in the field of medieval iconography who could have
been included in this publication, the cutoff point for inclusion was the fact that they were deceased.
Scholars are rarely only iconographers and most of those who are studied here were all-round medi-
evalists whose foundations were fundamentally iconographical. For example, it would have been
possible to include Perio Valeriano Bolzni, Vincenzo Cartri, Karl Kunstle, Arthur Kingsley Porter,
Gertrud Schiller, or Kirchbaum’s Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, but limits had to be imposed.
For those who have been included, the most pertinent of their works have been studied to detail
their contribution to the field. It would also have been possible to cover all of medieval Europe and
not to look only at the Western world, but that is the situation that pertains and Byzantinists, such as
Kurt Weitzmann, who employed iconography throughout his many studies, are not dealt with here –
that is the subject of another publication! The second section of this first volume looks at some of
the ways we catalogue medieval iconography. It is important not only to describe accurately but
also to be able to retrieve what we are looking for, and that situation becomes even more pressing
with the rise of many personal databases of medieval images on the Internet. It is fine to put such
images on the web but they remain undervalued unless we can find them, and the way to do that
is to employ relevant standards and approaches. It is these that are outlined here. The third section
of the publication consists of a series of essays on high-level generalized iconographical concepts. It
would have been possible to adopt the usual encyclopedic approach, starting with a figure such as
Aaron and ending with somebody like Zwentibold of Lorraine, but that was never the aim of this
publication. Similarly, it would not be possible to deal with every subject within the confines of
one book and I apologize for the selective nature of what is included. Sports, games, and pastimes
are one such subject that we omitted – simply because nobody was willing to deal with the scope
of such a topic. It would also have been possible to include essays on the iconography of death or
birth, the law or marriage, or any one of a thousand other subjects – the range you have here has
had to be selective and my apologies if I have not included some theme you would have liked to
have seen here. This collection has highlighted the lack of research of many pivotal subjects for the
medieval period. It would have been possible to have significantly increased the number of topics
dealt with in this volume had limitations of time and space not prevented it. The twenty-two indi-
vidual themes discussed here represent some of the most significant in the field of medieval art. All
of the authors here deserve to be congratulated and thanked for their heroic work. They all stuck
to their topics and attempted to broaden the reading available for future research, highlighting the
healthy state of iconography in the field of medieval art and showing how methodologies have
changed over the last fifty or so years. The essays are a combination of case studies and generalized,
high-level analysis. The writers were all asked to provide a short historiography of their subject,
xix
Preface
and it is clear that such evaluations of previous research highlight the new methodologies being
used in the field. Topics are now rarely dealt with as isolated, stand-alone, self-contained subjects.
We realize that iconography is just one part of a much broader picture that interacts significantly
with what could be called cultural history, and to fully understand our subjects we also need to
understand their place in this broader picture. Such topics are now allowed to talk for themselves,
and our knowledge of them is significantly enriched. We do not simply describe but also attempt
to listen and understand what these images are saying.
The essays in this volume do not restrict themselves to visual iconography but also cover text,
idea, thought, and a myriad of other fields beyond what is represented. Iconography is no longer
restricted to the visual, and even within that field it has been broadened considerably to include ideas
outside the usual; it now forces us to look at the self in relation to the work and how it impinges on
us. The topics themselves reflect some of the new subjects we are now seeing as influencing medieval
art. Gone are the days when we dealt only with the physical and, instead, we can see how light and
sound were or were not represented and not simply in physical terms. Even though the title of these
volumes claims to deal with iconography, it is clear that we could easily have used the term iconology.
All of these essays strive to understand the subjects in their broadest and deepest meanings.
Some twenty-two themes, ranging from animals to royal and imperial iconography, are covered
by some of the most eminent scholars in the field. Even though the aim of this volume was to
study iconography in its broadest possible coverage, many authors are more comfortable dealing
with the Western world, and as such, in many cases only reference is made to the Eastern world.
This volume could not have reached its current state without the sage advice, help, and practical
input of Erika Gaffney, former commissioning editor for literary studies at Ashgate. Before leaving
the press she was an indispensable support for the entire history of this project and my sincere
thanks go to her. Her advice and help were much appreciated. She was ably assisted by Michael
Bourne, editorial administrator in the humanities in Ashgate. Some of the authors submitted their
essays in languages other than English, and I wish to thank Jane Sykora, Elizabeth Weinrich, and
Lorraine Knopek for their help in translating some of the extracts in this work. They were very
patient with me! In the middle of this publication the project was taken over by the capable hands
of Isabella Vitti, the editor for art history and visual studies at Routledge / Taylor & Francis who
fully supported the project and has seen it through to publication. It is difficult taking over such a
project but I was very fortunate to have been able to work with such an accomplished editor. I’m
grateful to her and her colleagues for their care, help and guidance. Isabella was ably assisted by a
number of colleagues including Lucy Loveluck, Julia Michaelis and Marie Louise Roberts. Lucy,
as Production Editor, monitored the transformation from manuscript to book with great ease and
charm. Julia oversaw the publication at an early stage and was extremely diligent in her work but
also particularly helpful, kind and efficient. Marie-Louise Roberts, Project Manager from Apex
CoVantage, was the final set of hands and eyes to work with the manuscript and it was she who
is responsible for delivering the book to the printer. It was a pleasure to work with her. I wish to
unreservedly thank Isabella, Lucy, Julia and Marie-Louise for all their help.
There was considerable excitement when I first approached authors to contribute to this
volume, which rapidly turned into a lot of work. I have no hesitation in saying that most of the
authors found the writing of these essays extremely difficult. It was not an easy task compiling
somebody’s life’s work in six thousand words, or trying to distil their contributions to iconogra-
phy from the rest of their career. Similarly, trying to cover the iconography of large-scale topics
is not an easy task but it is one which the authors here have attempted. They all achieved what
they set out to do and my sincere thanks go to them. These are the scholars whose writings I
wanted to read, and we are extremely lucky that they all agreed to contribute.
Colum Hourihane, PhD, HDE, FSA, MRIA
xx
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Kirk Ambrose is professor and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University
of Colorado Boulder. In addition to many articles, book chapters, and reviews, he is author of The
Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (2006) and The Marvellous and the Monstrous
in the Sculpture of Twelfth-Century Europe (2013). Along with Robert A. Maxwell, he edited and
translated Current Directions of Romanesque Sculpture Studies (2010). His current projects include
a study of blindness in medieval art and an exhibition catalogue on women artists in Colorado,
1898–1950. He further serves as editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin.
Dieter Blume studied history of art, history, and anthropology at the University of Heidelberg.
He received his PhD in 1981 for a dissertation titled “Wandmalerei als Ordenspropaganda: Bild-
programme im Chorbereich Franziskanicher Konvente Italiens bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhun-
derts,” which was published in 1983. Between 1983 and 1985 much of his time was devoted to
preparing the exhibition “Natur und Antike in der Renaissance” in the Liebieghaus Museum
of Sculpture in Frankfurt. He undertook his habilitation in 1991 at the University of Munich.
Throughout his career he has taught at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Zürich,
and Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University). Since 1994 he has been a professor at the Friedrich
Schiller University in Jena. Between 1996 and 2013 he worked on a research project on the ico-
nography of the constellations in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Since 2013 he has been
involved with Christel Meier-Staubach on the research project “Ovidius moralizatus” by Petrus
Berchorius and the illustration of Ovid in fourteenth-century Italy.
Susan Boynton is chair of the Department of Music and professor of historical musicology
at Columbia University. She is the author of Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of
History in Eighteenth-Century Spain (2011) and Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at
the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125 (2006). In addition to publishing more than thirty arti-
cles on subjects including liturgy and music in medieval Western monasticism, vernacular song,
and music and childhood, she has coedited five volumes: From Dead of Night to End of Day: The
Medieval Customs of Cluny, with Isabelle Cochelin (2005); Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of
Youth, with Roe-Min Kok (2006); Young Choristers, 650–1700, with Eric Rice (2008); The Practice
of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, with
xxi
Biographical notes on the contributors
Diane Reilly (2011), and Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, also
with Diane Reilly (2015).
Hans Brandhorst was trained as an art historian at Leiden University and has been using
Iconclass as an iconographer ever since the 1980s. He was part of the team at Utrecht University
that created the computer version of the system in the 1990s, and he has been acting as editor
of the online Iconclass system since 2000. His practical research often focuses on the simple
question “What am I looking at?” in an iconographical sense. His theoretical work deals with
the issues of how humanities scholars, in particular iconographers, can collaborate and enrich
each other’s research results rather than repeat and duplicate their efforts. To accomplish this, the
use of a shared vocabulary for the description of the content of cultural artifacts – Iconclass – is
an important condition. Together with Etienne Posthumus, he has created the online Iconclass
browser and the Arkyves website.
Madeline H. Caviness is the Mary Richardson Professor Emeritus of Art History at Tufts
University and Professeur Associé at the Faculté des Lettres, Université Laval, Québec (honorary).
She received her doctorate from Harvard University and is one of the foremost experts in the
study of stained glass of the medieval period. She was president of the International Center of
Medieval Art from 1984 to 1987 and president of the Medieval Academy of America from 1993
to 1994. She has published widely in the fields of stained glass, historiography, and sexuality.
Among her many publications are Sumptuous Art at the Royal Abbey in Reims and Braine: Ornatus
elegantiae, varietate stupendes (1990), Visualising Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic
Economy (2001), and “The Politics of Taste: An Historiography of ‘Romanesque’ Art in the 20th
Century,” in Romanesque, Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn,
ed. C. Hourihane (2008). She is currently working on a study entitled Limited Protection under the
Law: Women and Jews in Sachsenspiegel Text and Image with Charles G. Nelson.
Sherman Clarke is an art librarian specializing in cataloguing and authorities. He worked at

the University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, Rhode Island School of Design, Amon Carter
Museum, and New York University, until retiring and doing freelance and itinerant work as
a cataloguer and indexer. He studied art history and library science at Case Western Reserve
University and appreciates that library work allows for a diverse and eclectic application of his
art background and interest. He founded the Art NACO cooperative project, which builds
name authority records in the international file maintained by the Library of Congress. He
was awarded the 2005 Distinguished Service Award from the Art Libraries Society of North
America.
Michael W. Cothren is Scheuer Family Professor of Humanities at Swarthmore College,

where he has taught art history since 1978. He is also a consultative curator of medieval
stained glass at the Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, and served for twelve
years as president of the US Committee of the international Corpus Vitrearum. Until recently
his research has focused primarily on Gothic stained glass, especially the windows at Saint-
Denis, Rouen, and Beauvais. He has published widely in scholarly collections and journals
(e.g., Art Bulletin, Gesta, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Journal of Glass Studies,
Speculum, and Revue de l’art) and written a monograph, Picturing the Celestial City: The Medieval
Stained Glass of Beauvais Cathedral (2006). He is currently coauthor with Marilyn Stokstad of
a widely used series of textbooks for survey courses in art history. Recently his research has
shifted from medieval stained glass to prehistoric Native American painting, as he seeks to
xxii
discover and characterize the individual artists who painted the Mimbres bowls, produced in
Southwest New Mexico c. 1000–1150 CE.
Peter M. Daly is past president of the Society for Emblem Studies and professor emeritus
and former chair of the Department of German Studies at McGill University, Montreal. He
has numerous publications on German and English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, on the European emblem tradition, and on contemporary advertising. He is coeditor
with G. Richard Dimler, SJ, of the series of illustrated bibliographies The Jesuit Series (1997, 2000,
2002, 2005, 2007) and a founding coeditor of Emblematica, “AMS Studies in the Emblem,” and
the series “Imago Figurata.” He received a Festschrift in 2002. A Companion to Emblem Studies
appeared in 2007. He published an edition of Held’s German translation of Alciato (2007) and
a book on Alciato in England (2013). A volume of essays entitled Emblems of Death edited with
Monica Calabritto came out in 2014, as did his most recent book, The Emblem in Early Modern
Europe. Having completed An Annotated Bibliography of Emblem Studies 1990–1999, he is currently
working on bibliographies for the two following decades.
Ralph Dekoninck is a professor in art history at the Université Catholique de Louvain, as well
as codirector of the Centre for Early Modern Cultural Analysis (GEMCA). His research focuses
on early modern image theories and practices, specifically in their relationship to spirituality, and
on methodological issues related to the field of iconology. Among his publications is Ad Imaginem:
Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva, 2005).
He has also edited L’idole dans l’imaginaire occidental, with M. Watthee-Delmotte (Paris, 2005);
Emblemata Sacra: The Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Illustrated Sacred Discourse, with A. Guiderdoni-
Bruslé (Brepols, 2007); Aux limites de l’imitation: L’ut pictura poesis à l’épreuve de la matière, with
A. Guiderdoni and N. Kremer (Amsterdam, 2009); Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in
Northern Art, 1500–1700, with A. Guiderdoni-Bruslé and W. Melion (Turnhout, 2012); Relations
artistiques entre l’Italie et les anciens Pays-Bas (16e–17e siècles) (Turnhout, 2012); Fictions sacrées: Esthé-
tique et théologie durant le premier âge moderne, with A. Guiderdoni-Bruslé and E. Granjon (Leuven,
2012); Questions d’ornement (XVe–XVIIIe siècles), with M. Lefftz and C. Heering (Turnhout, 2014);
and Machinae spirituales: Les retables baroques dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et en Europe: Contributions
à une histoire formelle du sentiment religieux au XVIIe siècle, with B. d’Hainaut-Zveny (Brussels, 2014).
Denis L. Drysdall graduated from the Queen’s College, Oxford (BA 1958, Dip. Ed. 1960, MA
1964) and took a Doctorat de troisième cycle at the Sorbonne (1970) with a thesis in comparative
literature (La Célestine en France). He was appointed to the University of Waikato, Hamilton,
New Zealand, in August 1966 and retired as associate professor of romance languages in January
1996. He has published in the fields of Renaissance and seventeenth-century comedy, emblem
literature, particularly early emblem theory, and some Erasmian texts, and has a special interest in
the lawyer Andrea Alciato, with plans for a book on him as humanist and teacher. At present he is
contributing to the translation of Erasmus, in the series Collected Works of Erasmus (University
of Toronto Press), with one volume of the Adagia (CWE 35) and one of the religious controver-
sies (CWE 73); he will edit one of the texts in this volume for the Royal Dutch Academy edition
of the Opera omnia (ASD IX-12). He has been commissioned to collaborate with a colleague on
the controversies with Noël Béda and the Sorbonne (CWE 80–81).
Martha Easton is an assistant professor in the College of Communication and the Arts at Seton
Hall University, where she teaches art history, and for the MA Program in Museum Professions.
Before coming to Seton Hall, Martha Easton taught art history for many years at Cooper Union,
xxiii
New York University, and Bryn Mawr College, and she spent ten years lecturing at The Clois-
ters. While specializing in medieval art history, she also has extensive experience with Japanese
art cultivated during the six years she spent living and working in Japan. Her particular research
interests include illuminated manuscripts, gender and hagiography, feminist theory, the history of
collecting medieval art, and medievalism. She is presently writing a book about medievalism and
the patterns of collecting and displaying medieval art in the United States during the early twen-
tieth century, focused on the scientist and art collector John Hays Hammond, Jr., and his spec-
tacular medieval-style revivalist castle, built in the 1920s on the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Celia Fisher gained her BA in history at Kings College, London, and, after an initial career in
teaching, her love of plants took over and she joined a department of the Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew, which was evaluating the uses of plants. She returned to study history of art at the Cour-
tauld Institute, London, where she specialized in the history of plants in art. She gained her PhD
in 1996 with her thesis, “The Development of Flower Borders in Ghent-Bruges Manuscripts
1470–1490.” She has published articles in art and gardening journals and her books include
Flowers and Fruit (National Gallery, 1998), Flowers in Medieval Manuscripts (The British Library,
2004), The Medieval Flower Book (The British Library, 2007), and Flowers of the Renaissance (Frances
Lincoln, 2011). Gardening remains her main relaxation and her own garden in Kew has been
opened under the National Gardens Scheme.
Chiara Franceschini (PhD, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, 2008) specializes in Renaissance
and the early modern art and history of southern Europe. She is currently a fellow at the Italian
Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (2015–2016) and a teaching
fellow at University College London, having previously worked at the Warburg Institute as a
Newton International Fellow of the British Academy and an academic assistant in the Photo-
graphic Collection. Her book, which is currently in press, looks at the concept of limbo (Storia
del limbo) and explores relations between images of the afterlife, belief, and the social history of
theology. Her publications in the fields of Renaissance art, visual culture, and European history,
1300–1650, include “The Nudes in Limbo: Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo Reconsidered,” which
was awarded the I Tatti Prize for Best Essay in 2011. She coedited a special issue, “Classifying
Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Thematic Ordering,” of Visual Resources
(2014). She is now working on the status and the normativity of Renaissance and early modern
sacred images, with a focus on sculpted images of the crucifix.
Sharon E. J. Gerstel is a professor of Byzantine art and archaeology at the University of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the late Byzantine village and on the intersections of art
and ritual. She is author of Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary (1999)
and Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology and Ethnography (2015) for which
she won the 2016 Runciman Prize. She has edited A Lost Art Rediscovered: The Architectural Ceram-
ics of Byzantium (with J. Lauffenburger, 2001), Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical,
Archaeological, Liturgical and Theological Views on Religious Screens, East and West (2007), Approaching
the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai (with Robert S. Nelson,
2010), and Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterra-
nean (2016). Her current work on soundscapes in Byzantium addresses the intersection of chant
and monumental painting in monasteries.
Edward Grasman works at the Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University. He studied
art history at Utrecht University and received a PhD from Leiden University. His studies are
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mostly concerned with historiographical problems from the sixteenth century onwards, in the
field of Italian and Netherlandish art. His publications have dealt with various subjects, including
Parmigianino, Paolo Veronese, the Lion of Mark, symbol of Venice, and Vitale Bloch, art histo-
rian, collector, and dealer. He is the author of several books, one of the more recent being Gerson
in Groningen: Een portret van Horst Gerson, kunstkenner en hoogleraar kunstgeschiedenis (1907–1978)
(2007). He also wrote All’ombra del Vasari: Cinque saggi sulla storiografia dell’arte nell’Italia del Sette-
cento (2000). He coedited and contributed to a book on Saint Peter’s Church in Leiden and has
several publications due to appear in 2016. Among these is the first volume of Italian letters on
art collected by the Fondation Custodia in Paris, transcribed and annotated together with Hans
Bloemsma, Henk van Veen, and Hans Buijs. An anthology of works by Julius Held is planned
for the near future.
Laurent Hablot is Directeur d’études à l’Ecole pratique des hautes études. IVe section. Titulaire
de la chaire d’emblématique occidentale. He works on emblematic systems and heraldry, espe-
cially in relation to forms and functionality of the heraldic sign in the Middle Ages. Sitting on the
L’Académie Internationale d’Héraldique (International Academy of Heraldry), he is also involved
in Société Française d’Héraldique et de Sigillographie (the French Heraldic Society). He received
his PhD for a study on the badges in medieval Europe (La devise, mise en signe du prince, mise en
scène du pouvoir) under Michel Pastoureau and Martin Aurell. He has published several articles
on specific uses of heraldry and emblematic signs, such as the defamation of the traitor’s arms,
the symbolism of the angel support, the sharing of the Visconti arms in late medieval Europe,
and the blessing of the Joan of Arc standard. He is webmaster of the database DEVISE and is
responsible for three research programs: SIGILLA (a national database collecting all medieval
French seals), ARMMA (collecting heraldic medieval representations in Poitou), and the research
team for Renaissance Emblematics.
Anne F. Harris is vice president for academic affairs and Johnson Family University Professor
of Art and Art History at DePauw University. She received her PhD in 1999 from the University
of Chicago for her dissertation, “The Spectacle of Stained Glass in Modern France and Medieval
Chartres: A History of Practices and Perceptions.” Since then she has continued to be fascinated
by the narrativity, material production, and experiential reception of medieval art. Her earliest
work with narrative intersected with that of liturgical drama, and the interaction between spoken
word, narrative, and the architecturally situated image in the Saint Nicholas windows and plays at
Chartres Cathedral. Her publications range from a consideration of the narratives of stained glass
windows in the thirteenth-century spiritual and commercial economies of Chartres Cathedral
to an eco-critical analysis of the late medieval wooden jubé and healing fountain of St.-Fiacre,
Le Faoüet (Brittany), to a meditation on medieval art based on the word “Hewn.” She continues
to work in multiple media within medieval art and has published on stained glass, ivory, wood,
alabaster, and manuscripts. A persistent theme of her research is the effect of medieval art upon
its audiences, both medieval and modern, reflected in essays on the teaching of medieval art to
undergraduate students. Her research and publication interests have intersected with her sev-
enteen years of teaching at DePauw University, a small liberal-arts college that prizes seminar-
style teaching and discussion.
Jack Hartnell is a lecturer and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, New York,
where his teaching and research focus on the visual culture of late medieval and early Renaissance
medicine. He received his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2014 for a study entitled
“Towards an Anatomical Art History: Medieval Objects in the Shared Space between Art and
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Medicine.” He has held fellowships at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Victoria and Albert
Museum, and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, and was visiting
curator at Two Temple Place, London. He is currently completing a monograph on the image
of the Wound Man, and an introduction to medieval medicine and art entitled Medieval Bodies,
with the Wellcome Collection and Profile Books.
Debra Higgs Strickland has taught medieval art history at the University of Oregon, Uni-
versity of Toronto, and the University of Edinburgh, and has served as director of the Glasgow
Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow, where she currently
teaches medieval and Renaissance art history in the School of Culture and Creative Arts. Her
research interests revolve mainly around representations of animals, monsters, and non-Christians
in medieval and early modern Christian visual and literary cultures, on which she has published
numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is the author of Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image,
Ideology (1995) and editor of The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature
(1999, 2000). Her other major publications include Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters
in Medieval Art (2003), and The Epiphany of Hieronymus Bosch: Imagining Antichrist and Others from
the Middle Ages to the Reformation (2016).
Joan A. Holladay has taught history of art at the University of Texas at Austin since 1985. In
2003–2004 she held the Dorothy K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence at the University of Mem-
phis, and in the spring of 2013 she was NEH Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University.
She has also taught at the Universität Zürich and the Central European University in Budapest.
Her publications on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts and sculpture in France and
Germany have appeared in Gesta, Journal of Medieval History, Studies in Iconography, Art History, and
other journals as well as in numerous essay volumes. She is the author of Illuminating the Epic:
The Kassel “Willehalm” Codex and the Landgraves of Hesse in the Early Fourteenth Century (1997) and
of a nearly completed book on imagery with genealogical content in the high and late Middle
Ages. She was coeditor for Gothic Sculpture in America 3: The Museums of New York and Pennsylvania,
which was published in 2016.
Susan M. Kim is a professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University, specializ-
ing in Old English literature. She has published on the Old English Judith, the Letter of Alexander
to Aristotle, Beowulf, and the Wonders of the East, as well as on teaching the history of the English
language. With longtime collaborator Asa Simon Mittman, she has coauthored a range of arti-
cles on the Wonders of the East and on Monster studies more generally; most recently, she and
Dr. Mittman collaborated on an article on the image-text relationship and the representation of
Satan in Junius 11. In addition, she and Dr. Mittman coauthored Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders
of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (Tempe, 2013), a sustained study of the images and texts of
the Wonders of the East in BL Cotton Vitellius A.xv. Current projects include a textbook on the
history of the English language (with K. Aaron Smith), a study of Alcuin’s mathematical word
problems, and a continuing collaboration with Dr. Mittman on the texts, images, and material of
the Franks Casket. She also teaches judo and plays traditional Irish fiddle.
Sherry C. M. Lindquist is an associate professor of art history at Western Illinois University. She
is author of Agency,Visuality and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol (2008) and editor of Mean-
ings of Nudity in Medieval Art (2012). She has also published numerous articles on late medieval art
addressing artistic identity, gender and sexuality, illuminated manuscripts, and late medieval Bur-
gundy, as well as on medievalism and the history of museums. She has curated multiple exhibits
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on themes in medieval manuscripts, including “Media Revolutions in the Age before Print,” at
Knox College, Galesburg, IL, and “Medieval Monsters,” at the Figge Art Museum, Davenport,
IA. Her work has been supported by the British Academy, Fulbright, Getty, Kress, and Mellon
foundations, among others. She is currently investigating the innovative and sophisticated ways
in which often anonymous fourteenth- and fifteenth-century artists employed the human body
to make meaning and guide viewer responses as part of a “rhetoric of the flesh” in late medieval
art, an important, even defining aesthetic that needs to be better integrated into art history. This
somatic aesthetic interrogates the difference between human and nonhuman, male and female,
human and divine. To this end, her current work addresses posthuman themes in the Vienna
Hours of Mary of Burgundy, masculinist devotion in the Belles Heures, and Nude Trinities in the
Hours of the Earls of Ormond.
Cornelia Logemann teaches art history in the Department of Arts at the University of Munich.
Her research focuses on medieval art history and the interaction between text and image as well
as the role of allegory in the visual arts from the late Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. Loge-
mann’s first book, Heilige Ordnungen: Die Vie de Saint Denis und die Bildräume in der französischen
Buchmalerei des 14. Jahrhunderts, investigated the different notions of space in medieval painting
and the entanglements of devotional literature with the perception of images. In 2011, she
coedited a volume on Cesare Ripa, Cesare Ripa und die Begriffsbilder der Frühen Neuzeit, with M.
Thimann (Zurich, 2011), and in 2012 she cocurated an exhibition on the transcultural relation-
ship of art and religion at the University Library of Heidelberg (“Götterbilder und Götzendiener:
Europas Blick auf fremde Religionen,” with M. Effinger, U. Pfisterer, Heidelberg). From 2008 to
2013, she was head of the junior research group The Principle of Personification – Visual Intel-
ligence and Epistemic Tradition, 1300–1800. She is currently working on a book dealing with
personifications in French art from the late Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.
Emilie Maraszak received her PhD for a study entitled Figures et motifs des croisades: Étude des
manuscrits de l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, Saint-Jean-d’Acre, 1260–1291 under Daniel Russo at
the Université de Bourgogne. Her main research focuses on the history and historiography of the
Crusades and Crusader states. She is the author of Les manuscrits enluminés de l’Histoire Ancienne
jusqu’à César (2015). Her current research projects include a study of crusader art (military and
religious architecture, sculpture, mosaics, mural paintings, icons, illuminated manuscripts), syncre-
tism and cultural exchange between the East and West during the twelfth and thirteen centuries
in the Crusader states, and cultural and artistic patronage in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
(Queen Mélisende, Louis IX). She is also interested in medieval literature, especially medieval
historical literature which traveled to the Middle East during the Crusades (Histoire Ancienne jusqu’à
César) or else was written by crusaders themselves (Histoire d’Outremer of Guillaume of Tyr).
Katia Mazzucco is a researcher specializing in history of art and photographic history. She
holds a PhD in art history and the classical tradition from the University of Siena (2006), and has
been a postdoctoral fellow at the Università Iuav di Venezia (2008–2009). She has also held post-
doctoral fellowships at the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and the War-
burg Institute in London (2010). She has been a British Academy Visiting Scholar (2011–2012)
at the School of Advanced Study of the University of London, and visiting scholar at the Kun-
sthistorisches Institut in Florenz, thanks to support from the Istituto Veneto per i Beni Culturali
di Venezia (2014). Among her recent publications are “Sequence 1,” “Sequence 4,” J. M. Gus-
mão, P. Paiva, Teoria Extraterrestre (Milan, 2015); Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and
Theories of Thematic Ordering (2014), which she also coedited with C. Franceschini in Visual
xxvii
Resources 30/3 (September 2014); “Images on the Move: Some Notes on the Bibliothek Warburg
Bildersammlung (Hamburg) and the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection (London),” Art
Libraries Journal 38/4 (2013), 16–24.
Asa Simon Mittman is a professor of art history at California State University, Chico, where
he teaches ancient and medieval art. He is author of Maps and Monsters in Medieval England
(2006), coauthor with Susan Kim of Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf
Manuscript (2013, awarded a Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association
and an ISAS Best Book Prize), and author and coauthor of a number of articles on monstrosity
and marginality in the Middle Ages, including pieces on Satan in the Junius 11 manuscript
(Gesta, with Kim) and “race” in the Middle Ages (postmedieval). He coedited with Peter Dendle
the Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012), and is the founding president of
MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology
through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application). Mittman is codirector of Virtual Mappa,
with Martin Foys, an interface to allow searching and linking among medieval maps and geo-
graphical texts. His research has been supported by CAA, ICMA, Kress, Mellon, American
Philosophical Society, and NEH grants. He edits book series with Boydell and Brill. Current
research interests include the Franks Casket and images of Jews on medieval maps. Mittman is
an active (and founding) member of the Material Collective, and a regular contributor to the
MC group blog.
Karl F. Morrison is the Lessing Professor Emeritus of History and Poetics at Rutgers University,
where he was based until 2013. He undertook his undergraduate studies at the University of
Mississippi in 1956 and went on to receive his doctorate from Cornell University in 1961. His
research has always centered on the history of ideas and he has worked extensively on the history
of political thought, historiography (especially Church history), and the mechanics of tradition.
Among his many publications are “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature,
Theology and Art (1988), History as a Visual Art in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (1990), Under-
standing Conversion (1992), and Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Papers
from “Verbal and Pictorial Imaging: Representing and Accessing Experience of the Invisible, 400–1000,”
coedited with Giselle de Nie and Marco Mostert (2005).
Elizabeth Carson Pastan is a professor of art history at Emory University and president of the
American Corpus Vitrearum, the body of scholars devoted to the study of medieval stained glass.
Her books include Les vitraux du choeur de la cathédrale de Troyes (2006) and The Bayeux Tapestry and
Its Contexts: A Reassessment (2014), co-authored with Stephen D. White and Kate Gilbert. She also
served as a coeditor of The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Art in Honor of Madeline
Harrison Caviness (2009) and as a guest editor of the Journal of Glass Studies 56 (2014). Most relevant
to this publication is the fact that she co-organized the Princeton conference Patronage: Power &
Agency in Medieval Art (2013) with Colum Hourihane. Pastan has also contributed to numerous
anthologies, including “Problematizing Patronage: Odo of Bayeux and the Bayeux Tapestry,” with
Stephen D. White, in New Approaches to the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Martin K. Foys et al. (2009); “Char-
lemagne as Saint: Relics and the Choice of Window Subjects at Chartres Cathedral,” in The Legend
of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade, ed. Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey
(2008); and “Glazing Romanesque and Gothic Buildings,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Roman-
esque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (2006). She takes pride in receiving both
the Emory Williams Award for excellence in teaching in the humanities (elected by the faculty) and
a Crystal Apple Award for teaching (elected by the students) at Emory University.
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Pamela A. Patton is the director of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. A
specialist in medieval Iberian art, she has published two single-authored books, Pictorial Narrative
in the Romanesque Cloister: Cloister Imagery and Religious Life in Medieval Spain (2004) and Art of
Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain (2012), the latter the winner of the 2014 Elea-
nor Tufts Book Award. Her edited volume, Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia
and Latin America, was published in 2015. She has written numerous articles and book chapters
on such topics as monastic architectural sculpture, the image-text relationship, and the role of
visual culture within the dynamic multiethnic communities of high and late medieval Iberia.
Her current research project concerns the semiotics of skin color in Spain and the western
Mediterranean.
Andreas Petzold was educated at Manchester University and the Courtauld Institute of Art,
where he received a PhD on the use of color in English Romanesque manuscripts. He was a cura-
tor at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1987 to 1999, specializing in medieval and Renais-
sance art. He currently teaches history of art at Mander Portman Woodman in London, and is
an associate lecturer at the Open University. He is the author of Romanesque Art (1995) in the
Everyman Art Series. He has published several articles and papers on the subject of color, among
which are “His Face Like Lightning: Colour as Signifier in Representations of the Holy Women
at the Tomb,” Arte Medievale (1992), and “De Coloribus et Mixtionibus: The Earliest Manuscripts
of a Romanesque Illuminator’s Handbook,” in Making the Medieval Book: Techniques of Production,
ed. L. Brownrigg (1995).
Etienne Posthumus studied computer science in Johannesburg and first encountered Iconclass
in 1999 while working at the University of Utrecht. He created the various online versions of
the Iconclass service. His passion is making simple software solutions to complex problems and
he specializes in cultural heritage computing and data manipulation. In 2015 he completed a
master’s degree at the University of Amsterdam in book and manuscript studies.
Matthew M. Reeve is an associate professor of art history and Queen’s National Scholar at
Queen’s University. He has published extensively on later medieval art and architecture, including
a monograph on the vault paintings of Salisbury Cathedral, edited volumes on Gothic archi-
tecture, and a volume on architecture in the classical tradition. He is currently completing a
monograph on eighteenth-century medievalism in England, provisionally entitled Gothic Archi-
tecture, Sexuality and Aesthetics in the Circle of Horace Walpole. Aspects of this project have recently
appeared in The Art Bulletin, Architectural History, Studies in Iconography, and elsewhere. In 2015 he
was mid-career fellow of British art at the Paul Mellon Centre, London.
Daniel Russo is a French historian of medieval art who studied at the École normale supérieure
(Ulm, Paris), the Sorbonne (Agrégation d’histoire), and later at the French School in Rome. He
was a professor in Rennes and Paris before moving to Dijon, where is now based. He teaches
medieval art history with a special focus on iconography (early Christian as well as late medi-
eval), the historiography of art history, medieval Burgundy, and the art of Italian cities. He is
currently working on the writing of medieval art history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
France. Among his publications are Saint Jérôme en Italie: Étude d’iconographie et de spiritualité
(1987) and Marie: Le culte de la Vierge dans la société médiévale (with D. Iogna-Prat and É. Pala-
zzo) (1996). He has also worked on medieval and Renaissance paintings in Burgundy, Peintures
murales médiévales, XIIe–XVIe s: Regards comparés (2005), and has edited a volume in honor of
André Vauchez, Expériences religieuses et chemins de perfection dans l’Occident médiéval (2012). His
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publications range from history to hagiography, iconography, iconology, and the history of the-
ology and mural paintings.
Diarmuid Scully lectures in medieval history at the School of History, in University College
Cork, Ireland. His research and teaching explore classical, late antique, and early Insular and medi-
eval representations of Britain and Ireland, and their impact on Bede, Gerald of Wales, and other
key textual and visual sources, including the Hereford mappa mundi. These interests build on his
doctoral thesis, supervised by Dr. Jennifer O’Reilly, on classical and late antique representations
of Britain and Ireland, and their impact on Gildas and Bede. He is now writing a monograph
on Gerald of Wales’s late twelfth-century narratives about Ireland (the Topographia Hibernica and
Expugnatio Hibernica) and their impact on English representations of the island and its inhabitants,
marvels, and natural world; the maps and marginal illustrations in manuscripts of the Topographia
and Expugnatio receive close attention. He has written articles on Bede as historian and exegete,
Ocean and the British-Irish archipelago in the Greco-Roman, early Insular, and medieval imagi-
nation, Bernard of Clairvaux, Gerald of Wales, and the Hereford mappa mundi. He has coedited,
with Elizabeth Mullins, Listen, O Isles, unto Me: Studies in Medieval Word and Image in Honour of
Jennifer O’Reilly (2011).
Patricia Stirnemann was a researcher in the Institut de recherché et d’histoire des texts in
Paris until her retirement. She completed her doctorate at Columbia University under John
Plummer for a thesis entitled “The Copenhagen Psalter.” She is well known for her manuscript
studies, especially those from France, but she has also published and lectured widely on those
outside the country, such as the Insular manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France
and on manuscripts from the Academy of Science in Saint Petersburg, which she coedited with
Ludmil Kisselva in 2005. Among her recent publications are The Très Riches Heures of the Duke
of Berry (2010) and Der Psalter Ludwigs des Heiligen: Ms. Lat. 10525 der Bibliothèque nationale de
France, with a commentary by Patricia Stirnemann and Marcel Thomas (2011). A Feschrift in
her honor, Le manuscrit enluminé: Etudes réunies en hommage à Patricia Stirnemann, was edited by
Michel Pastoureau and published in 2014.
György E. Szönyi is professor of English at the University of Szeged and of cultural/intellec-

tual history at the Central European University, in Budapest. His interests include cultural the-
ory, the Renaissance, Western esoteric traditions, and the conventions of symbolization – early
modern and (post)modern. He is on the editorial board of Aries and Aries Monograph Series and
several other national and international journals. He is a board member of the European Society
for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). He has held fellowships and scholarships from
the Fulbright and Mellon Foundations. He has served as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the
Department of English, Communication, Media and Film in Anglia Ruskin University, Cam-
bridge. Among his recent publications are Pictura & Scriptura: 20th-Century Theories of Cultural
Representations (2004), Gli angeli di John Dee (2004), and John Dee’s Occultism (2004). He has also
edited European Iconography East & West (1996), The Iconography of Power (with Rowland Wymer,
2000), The Iconology of Gender (with Attila Kiss, 2008), and The Iconology of Law and Order (with
Attila Kiss and Anna Kérchy, 2012). He is currently finishing The Enoch Readers: A Cultural
History of Angels, Magic, and Ascension on High and The Mediality of Culture and the Emblematic
Way of Seeing.
Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo was a professor of art history at Montclair State Univer-
sity, New Jersey up to her retirement in 2016. Best known for her research on medieval Spain,
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monasticism, funerary arts, and audience response, her interpretation of the sarcophagus of Doña
Blanca in Nájera (1996) brought together all these interests. She coedited Memory and the Medieval
Tomb (2000), with Carol Pendergast, and Decorations for the Holy Dead (2002), with Stephen Lamia,
collections of essays on tombs and shrines. Her interest in mourning and memory also resulted
in an article about the fourteenth-century royal tombs at Alcobaça, Portugal: “La rueda de la
tumba de Pedro I como diagrama mnemotécnico” (2013). Her publications on Santo Domingo
de Silos culminated in the book Palace of the Mind: The Cloister of Silos and Spanish Sculpture of the
Twelfth Century (2012), in which the monastery’s medieval library and liturgy formed the basis
for analyzing the sculpture’s iconography. “Hearing the Image in the Cloister of Silos” extended
her Silos studies to include the soundscape of the cloister (2015). Recently, she examined Bernard
of Cluny’s customary for the use of Benedictine cloisters (2014). Earlier forays into architectural
iconography include “Tarragona, lieu de mémoire” (2013) and “Portals and Figured Columns in
Spanish Sculpture before Maestro Mateo” (2015). With Constancio del Álamo, she wrote entries
on Spanish sculpture for Gothic Sculpture in America, Vol. 2, and the recently published Vol. 3.
Upon studying the Epiphany reliefs from Cerezo de Riotirón, now at The Cloisters Museum,
her interest in twelfth-century Castilian royalty developed (1990, 2010). Her current research
focuses on art in Castille during the reign of Alfonso VIII and Leonor Plantagenet (1158–1204),
for which she received the Montclair State University Distinguished Professor award in 2015.
Peter van Huisstede studied art history and history at Leiden University. In 1992 he received
his PhD at that same university for a thesis on the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby M. Warburg. He
worked for nearly ten years at the Department of Computers and Humanities, in Utrecht Uni-
versity. While there he was part of the team that made the computer version of the Iconclass
system. Together with Hans Brandhorst he compiled the three-volume catalogue Dutch Printer’s
Devices 15th–17th Century: A Catalogue, with CD-ROM (Leiden, 1999). He is currently working at
the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he coordinates material relating to the EUR repository
(http://repub.eur.nl) of its Open Access academic publications. Future plans include a computer
edition of the Mnemosyne Atlas.
Marina Vicelja is a professor in the Department of Art History and director of the Center of
Iconographic Studies at the University of Rijeka. She graduated in art history from Zagreb Uni-
versity, where she also completed her PhD with a dissertation entitled Byzantium and the Stone
Sculpture in Istria – Origins and Influences. Her main areas of research are late antique and early
medieval art, Christian iconography, iconology, and medieval urbanism. She has a special interest
in the early medieval sculpture of the North Adriatic region. She is the main editor of IKON – the
Journal of Iconographic Studies and the principal researcher on a number of other research projects on
the medieval art of Istria and Kvarner. She is a partner in the European project “Francia media –
Cradles of European Culture” and has collaborated on several international projects on iconogra-
phy and iconology. She sits on the editorial boards of a number of publications and professional
councils, and is the organizer of the annual international conference of iconographic studies in
Rijeka. She is one of the founders of the Association of Art Historians of the region. From 2008
to 2011 she was a vice dean for research in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the
humanities representative on the Research Board of the University of Rijeka. She has held fellow-
ships from Erasmus, the University of Thessaloniki, Fulbright Fellowship, Princeton University,
Saxl Fund Fellowship, The Warburg Institute and Oxford Colleges Hospitality Scheme.
Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck has been a professor of art history at the Institute of
Art History at the University of Bonn since 2008. He has a particular focus on the arts of the
xxxi
medieval and Byzantine worlds. He received his PhD in art history from the University of Göt-
tingen in 1998 for a study entitled Der Elisabethpsalter in Cividale del Friuli: Buchmalerei für den
Thüriunbger Landgrafenhof zu Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts (The Psalter of Elizabeth: Book Illumination
Made for the Court of the Thuringian Landgraves at the beginning of the Thirteenth century), which was
later published in Denkmäler deutscher Kunst, hg. Vom Deutschen Verein für Kunstwissenschaft,
in 2001. He subsequently received his habilitation in the history of art at the University of Kassel
in 2006 for a study entitled Bilder für wirt, wirten und gast: Studien zur profanen Wandmalerei von
1200 bis 1500. Much of his research focuses on profane and Christian art and iconography,
medieval manuscript illumination, and wall paintings, especially in Germany and Italy, as well as
goldsmiths’ work and bronze casting. One of his most recent publications is his contribution to
Die Wandmalereien im Braunschweiger Dom St. Blasii (ed. by Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck
and Joachim Hempel) (2014).
Dieter Wuttke, professor emeritus in Bamberg, is a German philologist and art and cultural his-
torian. After finishing studying German, Latin philology, and history in Hamburg, Saarbrücken,
and Tübingen, he became a teacher at the Altes Gymnasium in Bremen for five years. From 1962
through 1995 he taught German philology of the Middle Ages and early modern times at the
universities of Bonn, Göttingen, and Bamberg. From the start of his career he included art and
cultural history in his teaching and research. As early as 1953 he came into contact with and was
under the guidance of Erwin Panofsky and of the legacy of Aby M. Warburg and the Warburg
Institute in London. Officially named by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 1965, he was
elected to the special commission created to promote and renew humanism research in postwar
Germany. He was a visiting professor at the Universität Hamburg, a member of the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a fellow at a number of other institutions, including The
Warburg Institute, Czech Academy in Prague, Westfield College (London), Center for Advanced
Study in the Visual Arts (Washington, DC), Stiftung Volkswagenwerk (Hannover), and Getty
Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (Los Angeles, CA). He is a corresponding
member of the Institute of Romance and German Studies of the University of London. In 1977
he started the series “Gratia” for Renaissance research (now edited by Joachim Knape) and in
1979 he began his series “SAECVLA SPIRITALIA” (still edited by himself) with his edited
publication Aby M. Warburg: Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen (Baden-Baden). The most
recent and most complete bibliography of his work is in Artium Conjunctio: Kulturwissenschaft
und Frühneuzeitforschung: Aufsätze für Dieter Wuttke, ed. Petra Schöner and Gert Hübner (2013).
xxxii
MEDIEVAL ICONOGRAPHY,
AN INTRODUCTION
Colum Hourihane
Most definitions of the term iconography begin by expounding on the Greek origins of the
word, and I too have been guilty of that!1 I will not break away from such an established tradition
here! It is derived from the Greek terms eikon, meaning an image or icon, and graphia, which has
traditionally been understood as writing, describing, or sketching. Taken together, and in their
most basic meanings, the term means the description of images. Description is just one aspect
to the meaning of the term, however, and we also have to take factors such as the classification
and interpretation into consideration. Since man first made images in the Paleolithic period he
has sought to imbue them with meaning, and the situation is no different in the Middle Ages.
Creation is a personal experience, but that does not mean to say that it does not relate beyond
the self, and iconography is in many ways trying to understand what is conveyed in such mes-
sages. Seeing is an easy task compared to understanding and describing, and all are inextricably
intertwined.
The first serious attempt to look at subject matter is usually credited to Giorgio Vasari, who
described the subject matter, its origins, and function of his works in the Palazzo Vecchio in
Florence in the Ragionamenti.2 He outlined the entire iconography as if the audience would
be unaware of its meaning, and this is the first document that describes the personal for the
many. It really was not until the very end of the Middle Ages and more significantly at the start
of the Renaissance that systematic documentation of motifs and content started with scholars
such as Cesare Ripa (c. 1560–c. 1622), Andrea Alciato (1492–1550), Perio Valeriano Bolzani
(1477–1558), or Vincenzo Cartari (c. 1531–1569) – who worked on emblem books. These
books, particularly popular in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe, were
illustrated catalogues of allegorical figures with accompanying texts and explanations, and have
to be seen as part of the humanistic movement of the period. Iconography is not referenced
in these works and, instead, it is iconologia, as in Ripa’s Iconologia overo Descrittione Dell’imagini
Universali cavate dall’Antichità et da altri luoghi. Largely classical in origin, these scholars included
allegories from Greek and Roman sources, which of course were also known to artists of the
Middle Ages. These were scholarly encyclopedias that attempted to analyze and understand the
origins of motifs as well as providing a useful reference work for future generations. There is a
considerable gap between these studies and the next generation of researchers, which happens
primarily in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars such as Adolphe Didron
(1806–1867), Anton Heinrich Springer (1825–1891), Émile Mâle (1862–1954), and Louis Réau
1
Colum Hourihane
(1881–1961) were art historians/antiquarians in their own right, with a primary interest in
Christian iconography and whose works were strongly influenced by their own beliefs. Their
work was pioneering and, whereas they did not adopt an encyclopedic approach like Ripa or
Alciato, they nevertheless attempted to be as inclusive and methodical as possible. Their efforts
raised the discipline to a scientific level and provided a framework for future generations. It
has to be remembered that images of medieval art and the works themselves were not as well
known as they are today and what these scholars had to work with in terms of material and
case studies was relatively limited. Their work was limited by what was known, and does
not compare to the current situation, where the image rules. They were also responsible for
introducing the strong dependency for iconographer to seek out a textual relationship for
whatever subject was being studied. This was also popularized by Panofsky, and it is only
recently that this overdependency on text has been abandoned, having been a hallmark of
iconographic research for many years. There is clearly a comfort for the cataloguer to work
with a textual parallel that will confirm the visual, but not all images have such a support or
parallel. We do not know if artists would have worked with such texts or how they were used
when they existed, and it is always best for the cataloguer to approach the work of art from as
impartial and objective a stance as is possible. As is constantly being demonstrated, the subject
matter of medieval art can come from a variety of sources, including the imagination, and it is
important that we remember that these works were made for different audiences – a fact we
are inclined to forget.
The general interest in iconography, which Charles Rufus Morey credits as being the impetus
behind his own iconographical research and the foundation of the Index of Christian Art at
Princeton University, happens in the early part of the twentieth century. That has to be seen as
part of a larger and more generalized humanistic approach which was underway at that time.
Were it not for his untimely death, Aby Warburg would clearly have expanded even further our
knowledge of the way man approaches subject matter. As it was, World War II, and the dispersal
of many of his students throughout the world led to the same expansion only a little later. Even
though it is now fashionable to criticize Erwin Panofsky, our enormous debt to him in the field
of iconography has to be acknowledged. It was he, as well as contemporaries such as Saxl, Morey,
and Van der Waal, who put the discipline on a firm footing and paved the way for future gen-
erations. Interest in images has never waned, despite the unfashionable stance adopted toward
iconography when the new art history developed in the 1970s. Some pivotal studies, such as those
by Baxendall, Bryson, Foucault, Freedberg, Ginzburg, Haskell, Vovelle, and Lancien, enabled us
to understand images better than we had, but the desire was always there to extend the icono-
graphical stance to its full potential.3 It is clear that the age of the great iconographers has now
largely gone, and the pivotal works so often referred to in this publication will not be repeated.
Iconographical studies still continue, but not with the same force as in the past, and certainly
not with the same pioneering efforts. Instead, this is now the age of the iconologist. Iconology
bears little or no relationship to the term as defined by Panofsky, and was first developed as a new
approach toward the end of the twentieth century.
There can be no doubt about the significant role computers have played in reviving iconog-
raphy. Medieval art is complex and its composite nature, such as a building façade or shrine with
multiple faces or an altar piece with painting and sculpture, can cause cataloguing problems.
Complex relationships have to be electronically preserved to fully understand these programs.
The application of computers to art history in the mid-1970s was significant, and nowhere more
so than in the field of iconography.4 Computer access to images has increased an awareness of
the importance of iconography and made it one of the most widely used fields. Iconographic
access has necessitated the cataloguing of minute detail. Whereas previously general subject terms
2
Medieval iconography, an introduction
sufficed, scholars are now looking for specific details. In the Index of Christian Art for example,
a general subject term such as “Christ Crucifixion” no longer caters for user needs, and now
scholars are looking for the Crucifixion with one cross and the Virgin only, or three crosses with
Sol and Luna only. Existing terms need to be refined and extended to cater for such demands.
Throughout history, iconographic cataloguing has used free text descriptions, controlled vocab-
ulary terms or thesaurus like structures or combinations of all three forms.5 Specific databases
covering individual topics, such as music or medicine, have been created to enable in-depth
cataloguing.6 Databases are also now covering more than Western art and resources covering
Islamic, Jewish, Chinese, and Indian art forms have been created. These have necessitated the
creation of suitable terminologies but the field is by no means exhausted. Similarly, the initial
drive to develop iconographical standards and guidelines that took place in the 1970s and 1980s
seems to have petered out.7 This, despite the dominance of the image, is unusual. Archives and
image collections continue to use their own in-house standards and still create new ones. A few
large-scale cataloguing standards, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings and Iconclass,
dominate the field, and other initiatives, such as François Garnier’s standard, seem to have fallen by
the wayside.8 Similarly, the Art and Architectural Thesaurus developed by the Getty Art History
Information Program does not seem to have been widely used for iconographic access and its
strength is mainly for object terminology.9 The hoped-for single portal to allow iconographic
access to disparate collections has not materialized and it may never, given the obstacles. Similarly,
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Artstor database, developed independently of any
specific collection but which was seen by many as the solution to image needs, has a long way to
go. Despite heroic efforts, the data and coverage are inconsistent and iconographic access is not
well represented. Of all institution types, museums seem to have been most successful in allowing
iconographic access to their collections, and it is rewarding to see that a number of institutions,
such as the Walters Art Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, are now offering free images for academic use through their online sites. Even
though their entire collections are not yet available online, these resources are making us aware
of the potential of such sites. A similar, free image site developed by Wikipedia –Wikimedia
Commons, where individuals and institutions can make their images available – offers limited
but useful resources. Iconographic access is provided for the images and, even though they are
catalogued at a basic and rudimentary level, it is a valuable resource covering all periods and areas.
Given the number of images taken from this resource to illustrate articles in these two volumes,
it is clear that it has more than proved its value. Of course, the value of such a database lies in
image owners making their resources available through such a site and it is hoped that this will
happen. A similar but smaller database is also available on the website of the International Center
of Medieval Art, which is once again dependent on its members making their images available
free of charge for use in the scholarly community. Libraries and individuals continue to add their
images to both of these resources, but it is a slow process. Many individual scholars have now
put their own image resources online but with limited metadata, and iconography is very rarely
included. Their initiatives are to be applauded, but the value of such resources is undermined
by the lack of cataloguing and, in many cases, these databases are never consulted or used simply
because the images are inaccessible. Even though the transfer from an analogue system to a digital
one was rapidly undertaken in the field of library catalogues, it has not yet been accomplished
in the field of image collections. This highlights the overall relatively neglected field of visual
studies. Image archives such as those in the Warburg or Courtauld Institutes in the University of
London are still not completely digitized, despite a need to have them online.
Iconographical studies have come a long way since they first started in the sixteenth and
seventeen centuries. The term itself has been broadened considerably and concepts are now
3
Colum Hourihane
included which have never entered scholarship before. In our quest to understand images we have
gone beyond the level of simply recognizing and describing and have focused on understanding
not only what is represented but also what they mean in the bigger picture and how they are
mediated through the viewer. Traditional iconographical studies have focused on the chrono-
logical and developmental stages of a motif ’s history, but this has now largely been abandoned. It
may still be there, but now it is incorporated into a deeper study. Our emphasis nowadays is on
iconology as much as iconography, but we seem to forget that to get to the iconological level we
first need to progress through the iconographical. We can never understand the subject matter of
any work by simply looking at one image. Value lies in relating the subject matter to other exam-
ples, seeing how individual works differ and why this is so. Even though iconographical research
may have lessened, it is clear that much remains to be studied in the field. Some large-scale topics
are still understudied while other topics have not even been approached. Celia Fisher, in her
essay on plants and flowers in this volume, appeals to other scholars to undertake research on the
subject. The many flowers and plants found in the borders of medieval manuscripts for example
were used with purpose, and yet their meaning has largely evaded us. The iconography of what
has been described as ornament, for example, has only recently received limited attention. Non-
representational motifs were used consciously, and certainly with meaning, but we are unaware of
what these were. One such motif consisting of three dots arranged in a triangular arrangement
and called the “cintamani” motif was recently studied with profit by Jaroslav Folda.10 The spiral
and interlace ornament on the Irish High Crosses was used with intent, and yet it has never been
explained. Space was highly valued and limited on these monuments, and decorative iconography
would simply not have been used. It is unfortunate that a vocabulary to describe these terms has
never been devised, but it is just one of the many remaining challenges in the field of iconogra-
phy.11 It would also be a good investment if software design was able to link subject matter with
period or style. It is one of the most frequently requested associations with subject matter and not
all cataloguing systems cater for such refinements. As it presently stands, neither iconography nor
iconology offers any associations beyond itself and, as these studies show, it is a quality which con-
stantly changes. It is always interesting to plot such changes in relation to period or style and taste.
Given its investigative powers, it is disappointing to find that iconography is still relatively
neglected in formal curricula. Iconography is still not formally taught in third-level education, and
yet surveys have shown it to be one of the most used fields by the public as well as the specialist.12
Most cataloguers learn just the skill of recognizing and describing subject matter through expe-
rience, and even then they are usually limited to a single period. The medievalist, for example,
will not recognize subject matter in nineteenth-century works of art to the level required by the
specialist researcher. Claims have been made for the last twenty or so years that object recognition
software will replace such cataloguers, and that it is nearly ready to be fully implemented. The
situation is unclear and even though enormous strides have been made, it still does not appear to
be fit to launch. Neither has automatic image annotation proved to be the solution it was once
hoped for and, until further enhancements are made, it is not practical.13
As an approach, iconology has increased over the last twenty or thirty years, but not with the
pace that the new exponents would have liked. Iconology does not solely deal with what images
say to us, but what we can also say about them. It is a more complete and rounded picture than
envisaged by Panofsky.14 It has also changed since Warburg’s use of the term but does not appear
to be fully understood as yet and is still developing as an approach; we are still, to use the title
of a recent monograph, working “Towards a New Iconology.”15 There seems to be a certain
dissent as to whether iconology centers on the actual investigation of the work or the results of
that research. This was first proposed by Creighton Gilbert in 1952 and subsequently extended
by other scholars.16
4
If iconographical studies continue, they are now largely focused on individual themes, as the
essays in the last section of this book show. Iconology has taken the subject out of the hands of
the art historian and made it the remit of the cultural historian. In doing so, it has opened up
the field enormously and made us aware of connections and relationships that had not previ-
ously been studied. It has validated the visual as a separate and worthy document which cannot
be ignored. The anthropology and performativity of images are now looked at, and a far more
holistic approach has been proposed – and all are examined throughout this publication.17
It seems to be unfashionable nowadays to use the term iconography, and reference is usually
made to iconology – a far trendier term. The field of iconological studies has been led by a
few intrepid scholars, such as Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Barbara
Baert, W.J.T. Mitchell, Keith Moxey, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, who have opened up the field
of understanding images enormously. Projects have been developed around the concept and its
future.18 Numerous journals, monographs, conferences, and listservs attest to its popularity but
iconography is still not dead! Iconology is heavily orientated toward anthropological studies.19
It is claimed that there is now a greater awareness of the visual thanks to visual studies or the
visual turn, terms which developed thanks to W.J.T. Mitchell’s 2004 study What Do Pictures
Want? The Lives and Loves of Images.20
This opened up the realm of the visual to other disciplines and media and elevated the
image to its own rightful position in cultural studies. Even though it is claimed that the visual
is no longer the sole remit of the art historian, it is still not being used by scholars outside of
the field to the level that it should be. The hoped-for expansion has not yet happened. It is a
movement which needs to take place and for whatever reason the holistic approach is more
often than not lacking. Iconology is now used to explain a multiplicity of factors underlying
the creation of the work of art. It is expected to provide the reasoning why the maker chose
the subject in the first place, and this comes from studying the work and subject in relation
to context, time, and form. The researcher needs to look beyond the immediate art historical
context and instead to probe the socio-historical background of the work and world in which
it was created and to explore the conscious as well as the subconscious reasons why the work
was made in the first place. Roelof van Straten believes that such explorations can then reveal
the principles that characterize not only the individual but also the entire attitude of the period,
area, group, or beliefs in which the work was made. It is believed that all can be determined
through the individual who was responsible for the work.21 Images are seen as living entities
that can communicate directly with the viewer. The image now stands in for reality and is not
a static, dead representation.22 For Belting, the image is an object that works in social space and
is animated by the gaze.23 Our perceptions may change over time, but our senses remain the
same and we develop an intimate relationship with the image. Ruben’s painting of the Cruci-
fixion known as “Le Coup du Lance,” now in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten,
Antwerp (oil on panel, 311 × 429 cm, inv. No 297) but originally made around 1620 for the
high altar of the Franciscan Church of the Minor Friars in Antwerp, has an interesting icono-
logical afterlife. The work shows one of the soldiers at the foot of the cross piercing Christ’s
side. Its composition was imitated on several occasions, one of the most interesting from an
iconological perspective is the painting on a porcelain plate from the Qing Dynasty and dating
to c. 1720–1730.24 Bolswert’s print after Rubens’s original traveled as far as China, probably
with Catholic missionaries, where it was reproduced in color in this medium. It was made there
in the reign of Kangxi, fourth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, by a local artist in Jingdezhen
who had at least seen the print but may or may not have understood it.25 Such a work shows
the power of images to travel and to cut across the borders of understanding, also showing the
difficulties in trying to unravel the place and meaning of such an image. Most theories try to
5
Colum Hourihane
evaluate the impact images have on us and how we analyze their content, but comparatively few
make any effort to see what we do after seeing such work. One of the most significant is where
we put our ideas into a physical form and that is usually done using the textual correlate. In the
end we fall back on words. Studies have shown how we mentally read an image usually from the
lower left corner and proceed in an arch ending in the upper right.26 Thorough identification,
cataloguing, and description should proceed in a similar pattern.
Whereas studies of the visual are especially welcome, it is also clear that greater collabora-
tion is needed between art historians and scholars from other disciplines and that iconology
in inexperienced hands is a dangerous tool. Iconology as used by scholars outside the field
of art history frequently lacks the basic iconographical background and knowledge, and has
meant that some scholars have a tendency to go into orbit regarding interpretation. Many
non-art historians lack the basic iconographic steps necessary to understand images, and their
iconological studies can frequently extend the interpretation into the unknown. Whereas
interpretation is personal, it always needs to be based on the evidence. It was Panofsky who
defined iconography as the “description and classification of images,” and iconology as “an
iconography turned interpretive.”27 Whatever we want to call it, our need to understand
the subject matter and meaning of images still continues. Compared to subsequent periods,
iconological research, as distinct from iconographical work, into the Middle Ages has been
relatively limited and the focus instead seems to be on the later period and the Renaissance
in particular.
The chapters in this volume represent a balance between some of the better-known icono-
graphical concepts and some of the most recent. They all highlight the contemporary role
iconography plays in medieval studies and how its approaches and methodologies have adapted
to changing needs. They highlight issues other than simple recognition, which was one of the
guiding lights for such studies at the start of the century. They continue to show the lessening
dependency on the text-image associations so beloved of past iconographers.28 Nowadays, ico-
nography is seen in all its guises – from being an important key to understanding a work to the
fact that it operates in different ways over time and space. It is no longer the static and focused
element it was, and instead is seen to operate on levels which were previously unknown. Iconog-
raphy can change when, for example, the work is moved – it can alter its meaning under different
lighting conditions, its role can change when it interacts with other elements such as sound, its
meaning can change in front of different audiences – these are just some elements which are
discussed in these essays. The chapters highlight the value of iconography not only for the art
historian but also for a variety of other disciplines, such as music, literature, and history, and the
value of all these fields working together. The chapters highlight the changes in approaches over
the last few centuries, from the value of describing and cataloguing to looking beyond the work
itself to the creator, viewer, and world. Apart from providing an iconographical history of man’s
endeavors to unravel meaning, these essays also highlight some of the future avenues for research
and methodologies which will pay dividends.
Notes
1 C. Hourihane, “Iconography,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz
(New York, 2005), 1069–78. See also M. Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans.
Philip Mairet (New York, 1961); J. Białostocki, “Iconography,” in Dictionary of The History of Ideas, ed.
P.P. Wiener (New York, 1973), 7: 524–41; J. Bialostocki, Stil und Ikonographie: Studien zur Kunstwissen-
schaft (Cologne, 1981); M. Dvořák, The History of Art as the History of Ideas, trans. John Hardy (London/
Boston, 1984); S. Sinding-Larsen, Iconography and Ritual: A Study of Analytical Perspectives (Oslo, 1984);
“Iconography,” in Automatic Processing of Art History Data and Documents. Pisa. Scuola Normale Superiore.
6
September 24–27, 1984. Proceedings, ed. L. Corti and M. Schmitt (Florence, 1985), 321–31. One of the
most recent and useful books on the subject is by R. van Straten, An Introduction to Iconography, trans. Patricia
de Man (Yverdon/Langhorne, 1994). See also F. Büttner and A. Gottdang, Einführung in die Ikonographie
(Munich, 2006); P. Taylor, “Introduction,” in Iconography without Texts, ed. P. Taylor (London, 2008), 1–10.
2 Ragionamento di Giorgio Vasari Pittore Aretino fatto in Firenze sopra le invenzioni delle storie dipinte nelle stanze
nuove nel palazzo ducale Con lo Illustrissimo Don Francesco De’ Medici primo genito del Duca Cosimo duca
di Fiorenza, Firenze, Biblioteca della Galleria degli Uffizi. See http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/
894/1/Davis_Fontes47.pdf.
3 See M. Vovelle and D. Lancien, Iconographie et Histoire des Mentalités (Paris, 1975); D. Freedberg, The Power
of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989); F. Haskell, History and Its Images:
Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT/London, 1993).
4 See M. Schmitt, Object, Image, Inquiry, the Art Historian at Work (Los Angeles, 1988).
5 C. Hourihane, Subject Classification for Visual Collections,Visual Resources Bulletin, No. 12 (Columbus, 1999).
6 Although now slightly out of date, a useful guide is that by J.B. Friedman and J.M. Wegmann, Medieval
Iconography: A Research Guide (New York, 1998).
7 See C. Hourihane, “It Begins with the Cataloguer,” in Introduction to Art Image Access, Issues, Tools, Stand-
ards and Strategies, ed. M. Baca (Los Angeles, 2002), 40–58.
8 F. Garnier, Le langage de l‘image au moyen âge, 2 vols. (Paris, 1982–1989).
9 See Guide to Indexing and Cataloging with the Art & Architectural Thesaurus, ed. T. Petersen and P.J. Barnett
(New York/Oxford, 1994).
10 See J. Folda, “Crusader Artistic Interactions with the Mongols in the Thirteenth Century: Figural Imagery,
Weapons, and the Çintamani Design,” in Interactions: Artistic Interchange between the Eastern and Western
Worlds in the Medieval Period, ed. C. Hourihane (University Park, 2007), 147–66.
11 It is worth looking at L. Finance, Ornement: vocabulaire typologique et technique (Paris, 2014).
12 A.C. Foskett, The Subject Approach to Information (London, 1981); P.G.B. Enser, “Query Analysis in a Visual
Information Retrieval Context,” Journal of Document and Text Management 1:1 (1993), 25–52; C. Gordon, “Pat-
terns of User Queries in an ICONCLSS Database,” Visual Resources XII (1996), 177–86; L.H. Armitage and
P.G.B. Enser, “Analysis of User Need in Image Archives,” Journal of Information Science 23(4) (1997), 287–99.
13 See P.G.B. Enser, C.J. Sandom, and P.H. Lewis, “Automatic Annotation of Images from the Practi-
tioner Perspective,” in Image and Video Retrieval; Fourth International Conference, CIVR 2005, Singapore,
July 20–22, 2005 Proceedings, ed. W.-K. Leow, M. S. Lew, T-S Chua, W.- Y. Ma, L. Chaisorn, and E. M.
Bakker (Berlin, 2005), 497–506.
14 E. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in Mean-
ing in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (New York, 1955), 26–54. See also E.H. Gombrich,
“Aims and Limits of Iconology,” in Symbolic Images, Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1972),
1–25, and W. Heckscher, “The Genesis of Iconology,” in Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abend-
landes, 3 vols., Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses fuÌr̂ Kunstgeschichte in Bonn 1964, (Berlin,
1967), 239–62.
15 Brendan Cassidy credits Warburg with being the first to use the term “iconology” in a lecture he
delivered in Rome in 1912; see B. Cassidy (ed.), Introduction to Iconography at the Crossroads, Papers from
the Colloquium sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23–24 March 1990 (Prince-
ton, 1993), 5. Warburg may have stopped using the word “iconography” in 1908 and replaced it with
“iconology” – see M. Hatt and C. Klonk, “Iconography – Iconology: Erwin Panofsky,” in Art History: A
Critical Introduction to Its Methods, eds. M. Hatt and C. Klonk (Manchester, 2006), 98. See also History and
Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. A. Bolvig and P. Lindley (Turnhout, 2003) and the essay on Warburg
elsewhere in this volume and the work by Wuttke referenced there.
16 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconology.
17 The performative aspect of images for example is dealt with by Ralph Dedoninck in this volume.
18 One such project is Project Bilderfahrz, Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology, See http://
iconology.hypotheses.org/uber.
19 See B. Baert, S. Lehmnn, and J. Van den Akkerveken, “A Sign of Health: New Perspectives in Iconology,”
in New Perspectives in Iconology,Visual Studies and Anthropology (Brussels, 2011), 7; see also M. Hatt and C.
Klonk, “Iconography – Iconology: Erwin Panofsky,” in Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods
(Manchester, 2006), 98.
20 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2004).
21 R. van Straten, An Introduction to Iconography: Symbols, Allusions and Meaning in the Visual Arts (Abingdon/
New York, 1994), 12.
7
Colum Hourihane
22 P. Vandenbroeck, “Matrix Marmorea: The Sub-Symbolic Iconography of the Creative Energies in

Europe and North Africa,” Baert, Lehmann, and Akkerveken, New Perspectives (as in note 19), 180.
23 H. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich, 2001), 158.
24 Among the copies recently shown in the exhibition “Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cezanne,”
held at the National Gallery, London, January 24 – April 10, 2015, were works by Edwin Landseer
(1840, Her Majesty the Queen) and Delacroix (1850, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam,
inv. 2625) and a print by Boetius Adamsz Bolswert (c. 1580–1633, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone
Kunsten Antwerp); see Rubens and His Legacy, exhibition curated by Nico Van Hout and Arturo Galan-
sino with Katia Pisvin (London, 2014).
25 Now in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, inv. No. 5160.
26 M. Baffon, “Right and Left in Pictures,” The Art Quarterly 13 (1950), 312–15.
27 See A. Tudor, Image and Influence: Studies in the Sociology of Film (New York, 1974), 115.
28 This aspect of iconography was also highlighted by Brendan Cassidy in the introduction to Iconography
at the Crossroads, Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, ed.
B. Cassidy (Princeton, 1993), 10.
8
PART I
The great iconographers

1
ANDREA ALCIATO
Andrea Alciato’s name appears in early publications as Andrea Alzatus, after the village of
Alzate near Como, where his family originated, but Giovanni Andrea Alciato, as he is known
to the world, was born in Milan on May 8, 1492. He received his early education there under
teachers who included Parrhasius, Lascaris, and Chalcondyla, from whom he acquired his
exceptional mastery of Latin and Greek and his sophisticated philological technique. At the
university of Pavia he studied law under Giasone del Maino and Filippo Decio, and then moved
to Bologna in 1511 to continue under Carlo Ruini, eventually taking the doctoral degree in
both civil and canon law at Ferrara in 1516. From as early as 1515 he was to publish a series
of outstanding legal works that applied the philological lessons of Poliziano and Budé to the
restoration of the texts of Roman law, not only of the Digest but also of the lawyers of the
earlier empire whom Justinian had pillaged and fragmented, and even of the earliest Twelve
Tables.1 It was an undertaking that earned him the reputation, with Budé and Zasius, as one of
the great “triumvirate” of humanist lawyers of his time.2 As early as 1508 he had also essen-
tially completed an historical and philological study of Roman inscriptions in the Milanese,3
which, though it remained unpublished, formed an important element of the posthumously
published Rerum patriae libri IV and was eventually recognized by Theodor Mommsen in the
nineteenth century as a significant contribution to the history of epigraphy.4 Other historical
works included a letter to Galeazzo Visconti, originally published as a preface to his Annota-
tiones in 1517, and later known as the Encomium historiae, which sought to restore the reputation
of Tacitus alongside that of Livy.
In the autumn of 1518, with the help of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, his principal Franco-Milanese
patron, Alciato took up a teaching post in the university of Avignon, where in 1520 one of his
students was Boniface Amerbach. The latter was already in close touch with Erasmus and Zasius,
and it was through Amerbach that Alciato’s letter to Bernard Mattius, later known as the Contra
vitam monasticam, was passed on to Erasmus. Fear that the letter might become public caused
Alciato much concern when, in the first years of the Lutheran dispute, he sought to conceal his
early reformist leanings.5 In 1521 he was made a count palatine by Leo X, giving him the right
to award doctorates. It was during this Avignon period that he modified his early philological
approach to include more attention to the medieval commentators, developing a broader concep-
tion of jurisprudential methods which characterized the teaching that earned him his European
reputation. He left Avignon in the autumn of 1522 after a dispute with the authorities about
11
his stipend. From 1522 to 1527 he taught in Milan, suffering considerable losses during those
troubled years, especially as a result of the Battle of Pavia.
In 1527 and 1528 he returned to Avignon, but was able to move, under much better condi-
tions, to Bourges, where he was honored with the presence of François I in his inaugural lecture.
His treatise on dueling, De singulari certamine, was written to support the king in his dispute with
Charles V. In Bourges from 1529 to 1533 his fame as a teacher reached its peak and his presence
there was largely responsible for the development in France of the historical school of law.6 How-
ever, after negotiations with both Milan and Venice, Alciato was obliged by the Duke of Milan to
return to Pavia, where he spent four rather difficult years. In 1537 he was reluctantly allowed to
take up a post in Bologna, where one of his students was the emblem writer Hadrianus Junius. It
was at this time that he began to publish his Parergon iuris, which were mostly philological notes
from his wide reading in literature and history, accumulated during his work on legal texts, but
reflecting also his particular interest in Plautus.7
In 1542 he was obliged by the imperial authorities to return to Milan. War again gave him the
opportunity to move, this time to Ferrara at the invitation of Ercole II d’Este, but he was again
obliged by the imperial authorities to move back to Pavia in 1546. Student indiscipline and the
gout made his remaining years difficult, although his reputation remained undiminished. He died
in Pavia in the night of January 11–12, 1550.
The emblems
That Alciato was in fact the father and initiator of the illustrated poetic genre which is now called
the emblem is not in doubt.8 It was, in large part, the fruit of a hobby, translating Greek epigrams,9
that he had cultivated, it seems, since his youth.10 Some sixty of his translations appeared with
others by well-known contemporaries, including Erasmus and Thomas More, in an anthology
published by Bebelius in 1529. During the 1520s he seems to have developed the idea of the
emblem; the Emblematum liber, printed – although without his authorization – by the Augsburg
publisher Heynrich Steyner in 1531, was the first printed work to use the term in its title. It
launched what was to become an immensely influential genre of illustrated books. This first edi-
tion contained 104 emblems; the second, authorized edition, by Christian Wechel of Paris, added
another nine, and two more were added by the same publisher in 1542. A second collection of
eighty-four new emblems appeared, after maneuvers which remain something of a mystery, from
the house of Aldus in Venice. The two collections were combined, though still as two separate
parts of the work, by Jean de Tournes and Guillaume Gazeau of Lyon in 1547, and the total was
brought to 212 by various additions made in the editions published by Guillaume Rouille and
Macé Bonhomme in Lyon between 1548 and 1550. In these editions Barthélemy Aneau, who
was primarily a teacher, rearranged the emblems, apparently with Alciato’s approval,11 to form
a sort of commonplace book. This became the more common form of the work, but the two
formats existed side by side until early in the next century, suggesting that there were readers who
not only used it as a commonplace book but also enjoyed it for the pleasure of the unexpected
in reading, which Aneau obliterated when he reorganized the work.
Autonomous editions of Alciato’s emblems presented from the start a three-part composition,
consisting of a title or motto, an illustration, and an epigram, but editions contained within vol-
umes of his Opera usually lack the illustrations. The format was not followed by all his imitators,
some of whom omitted the title or motto, others the epigram. In the editions which do not have
the format introduced by Aneau the emblems appear to follow no ordered sequence. Some,
as we suggest ahead, are personal and occasional devices, some seem to have a topical political
or satirical intention (the particular circumstances of some may now be unknown to us), and
12
Andrea Alciato
others propose moralizing interpretations of subjects drawn from mythology or natural history
(Figs. 1.1–1.2). The epigrams vary considerably in length from one to sixteen distichs. What
they do have in common is a description or at least an identification of the subject illustrated
and an interpretation, though even here not always in that order, and occasionally emblems are
found in which the name of the subject or the intended meaning is to be seen only in the title or
motto. The symbolism, as explained ahead, seems to be consistently of a traditionally allegorical
or metaphorical rather than a Neoplatonist nature.
How should one characterize Alciato’s emblems? Various approaches suggest themselves. One
could ask about the provenance or source of the emblem. One might look at the application or
interpretation of the emblem in the subscriptio. One could attempt to group emblems according
to some larger topic, such as politics, religion, or ethics. One could consider the central motif,
the object or event illustrated.
Source hunting is unlikely to account for the popularity of Alciato’s emblems, although ques-
tions of source and provenance may interest scholars. One possible source, however, is worth a
Figure 1.1 In nothos (Padua, Tozzi, 1621) 600. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special
Collections.
13
Figure 1.2 Gratiam referendam (Paris, Wechel, 1534) 9. By permission of University of Glasgow Library,
Special Collections.
comment. The scholars of the Renaissance wrongly believed that in the Hieroglypica Horapollinis
they had discovered a key to the meaning of the ancient Egyptian signs inscribed on obelisks
and other monuments, whereas the hieroglyphs were really a form of esoteric writing. These
hieroglyphs flowed into the mainstream of the emblem both directly through the original Greek
version of the Horapollo, first printed in 1505, and translated into Latin in 1517 (there were at
least thirty subsequent editions12), and indirectly through medieval Christian allegory, the most
important work of this kind being Physiologus, and through the books of “imprese.” One of the
first literary works to use the hieroglyphs fairly systematically was Francesco Colonna’s richly
14
Andrea Alciato
illustrated Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which probably dates back to the 1460s, although it was
first published in 1499. Colonna’s hieroglyphs and their inscriptions were considered genuine,
although in fact they were essentially recreations of his imagination, largely inspired by other
imitations of hieroglyphs. Alciato certainly used some of the same hieroglyphs as this work, but
it seems unlikely that he conceived of them as signs in the same way as Colonna.
Assuming that one opted for the application or interpretation, the “meaning” of an emblem,
then the first task would be to assign such meaning to each and every emblem. But it is not always
possible to equate one emblem with one topic, let alone one meaning. Should the motto always be
regarded as providing the meaning, or direction of meaning? For instance, Alciato uses the emblem
“Imparilitas” (Inequality) to rate Pindar above Bacchylides. Is this emblem then a form of literary
criticism? Or should the emblem be considered a comment on the inequality of Alciato’s col-
leagues? It features four birds: the high flying falcon, and the jackdaw, goose, and duck that remain
close to the earth. Alciato usually, but not always, identified the general topic of his emblem in the
motto, but some mottoes, such as those of the tree emblems, merely name the object. Then again,
Alciato’s epigrams occasionally present more than one application. For instance, the emblem “In
facile a virtute desciscentes” (On those who easily fall from virtue) shows a small remora impeding
the progress of a great ship. The epigram suggests that the image conveys three things: a petty
cause, a lawsuit, and “passion for a harlot, which draws youths from outstanding studies.”
As first printed, Alciato’s emblem book was a more or less unorganized collection of
self-contained statements on a variety of topics. Some editions, such as the French translation by
Barthélemy Aneau (Lyon, 1549), regrouped the emblems in loci communes. But the new orderly
arrangement is far from satisfactory. Why should “In silentium” be grouped under “Fides,” or
“Garrulitas” under “Superbia,” or “In colores” under “Amor,” to take but three examples? But
some early and later editions continued the original unorganized arrangement, notably those of
Jean de Tournes and those containing the French translation of Jean le Fèvre. Alciato’s emblems
do, however, provide evidence of ethical, social, political, and religious principles, and occasionally
of economic concerns.
The emblems of the originator of the new genre cover a wide spectrum of characteristic
humanistic concerns. Without prioritizing the themes, it seems clear that Alciato’s overriding
concerns may be labeled moral, rather than moralistic, and ethical in the broadest sense. “Moral”
here includes traditional notions of good and evil, with the virtues and vices taking an impor-
tant place. Then there are professional concerns with justice and education, the former perhaps
inevitable for a lawyer. Political topics are more widespread than a casual reading may suggest,
and these range from the celebration of Milan’s rulers through the denunciation of greedy rulers
and ungrateful sponsors, through questions of justice and power, statecraft and administration, to
the rights of the people in near absolutist societies. But not everyone will agree on the definition
of a topic or theme of a given emblem. Is the emblem “Nec quaestioni quidem cedendum,” for
instance, a political emblem addressing tyranny and the rights of the people to rebel, or does it
highlight bravery in the face of adversity (here torture)? Certain economic concerns also break
the surface, although they never represent a dominant topic. Social issues are raised. They include
the question of love, marriage, and of woman, and here Alciato seems very conservative, even
unrelentingly misogynist. He never married, but whether such emblems on women bespeak
personal experience or reflect a dominant mood in a patriarchal society is another matter.
It may appear odd to some readers that religious issues play a very minor role in these emblems.
The friendship and mutual respect that bound Erasmus and Alciato13 might lead one to expect
that Alciato would have used more emblems for religious commentary. In fact, his religious
emblems are few in number and they deal with very general questions. His experience with the
letter to Bernard Mattius suggests he was concerned to protect himself.
15
Perhaps the simplest and best approach to categorizing Alciato’s emblems would be to report on
the central motifs that shape the emblems. Some later emblem writers would stress the role of natu-
ral history, human history, classical mythology, the Bible, and so on in the creation of their emblems.
It is obvious that Alciato based many of his emblems on classical history and mythology.
One has only to think of his use of figures such as Achilles, Actaeon, Aeneas, Anchises, Ajax,
Arion, Aristomenes, Bellerophon, Brutus, Cadmus sowing the dragon’s teeth, Cecrops, Chi-
mera, Cyclops, Democrates, Diomedes, Geryon, the three Graces, the Harpies, Hector, Heraclitus,
Hercules performing many labors, Icarus, Janus, Leana, Marc Antony, Medea, the Minatour,
Myrtillus, Ocnus, Odysseus, Phaeton, Phidias, Phrixus, the pigmies and Hercules, Polyphemus,
Prometheus, the Sphinx, Tantalus, Thrasybulus, Triton, and Zetes. They tend to typify a human
experience, which is used for didactic purposes: personifications such as Invidia, Nemesis, and
Occasio; gods such as Bacchus, Mercury, and Pan; goddesses such as Athena, Minerva, and Venus;
the figures of Cupid and Anteros.
Then there are those many emblems that are based on nature, or natural history: animals, rep-
tiles, fish, birds, plants, and trees. Alciato’s emblems are replete with apes, beavers, bees, beehives,
beetles, crabs, chameleons, crickets, deer, dogs, dolphins, donkeys, eels, elephants, foxes, goats, hares,
horses, lions, lizards, mice, oxen, oysters, pigs, rams, snakes, scorpions, tortoises, and wolf cubs; fish
of various kinds, and many different birds. It is always a traditional property of the creature that
becomes the basis for interpretation and application. Praz was one of the first to draw attention to
the “emblematic . . . mentality . . . of the Middle Ages with their bestiaries, lapidaries and alle-
gories.”14 However, it is to Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne that we are indebted for a fuller
account of the relationship of medieval nature allegory to emblematic art.15 The typological exe-
gesis of the Middle Ages presumed an ordered and meaningful universe, created by God to reveal
Himself and His plan for salvation. Both the medieval allegorist and the Renaissance emblematist
held that everything that exists points to meanings beyond the things themselves.
The relationship of meaning to created thing is, therefore, not arbitrary or capricious in this
world view, because meanings were derived from a quality of the object. A single creature like
a lion could be seen from many different points of view, connoting many different meanings.
These meanings could be good or bad, depending on the qualities involved. The lion could mean
Christ, because it was believed to sleep with its eyes open; or the devil, because of its bloodlust;
or the blasphemous heretic, because of its evil-smelling mouth; or the upright Christian, because
of its courage. Everything could be interpreted in this way, for “good or ill” in recognition of
inherent good or evil qualities.
Alciato’s use of the term “emblem”

What is in doubt is how Alciato himself intended the word “emblem” to be understood when
he first used it.16 Nothing he says can be construed with assurance as a definition; he does not
specify the number or the relationship of the parts of the composition in the way some modern
theorists have tried to formulate definitions, nor does he explain how his compositions function
as symbols. All the evidence available gives rise to uncertainties and questions and Alciato’s con-
temporaries and imitators did not agree about how the term should be used.
The first occasion on which Alciato used the word in writing is a letter to his friend and
one-time publisher Francesco Calvo. This letter, dated January 9, 1523, contains the following
statement:
These past Saturnalia, in order to gratify the noble Ambrogio Visconti, I put together a
little book of epigrams to which I gave the title Emblems, for in each epigram I describe
16
Andrea Alciato
something which is taken from history or from nature and can mean something unu-
sual [elegans], and from which artists, goldsmiths, metal-workers, can fashion the kind
of objects which we call badges and which we attach to our hats or use as trade-marks,
like Aldus’s anchor, Froben’s dove or Calvo’s elephant, which is in labour so long and
gives birth to nothing.17
Calvo had been holding some of Alciato’s legal works without publishing them for some time;
the Saturnalia were what the humanists called the end-of-year holidays; and the Visconti family
was at the time Alciato’s patrons in Milan. It is now agreed by most scholars that Alciato used the
word “emblems” here not to specify illustrated poems but as a title for the collection of verses
he had composed. These epigrams were to have a symbolic meaning in that they attributed to
the thing described (an object, animal, person, or event) an “unusual” meaning. Elegans means
the opposite of banal; history or natural history in medieval and early modern culture suggests
familiar, traditional allegory, but elegans suggests something more esoteric. Alciato seems to be
saying that his epigrams, while retaining the basis of commonplace knowledge and assumed sig-
nificances, are chosen to demonstrate his ability to make novel interpretations. We know from his
correspondence that he had been translating Greek epigrams into Latin and composing epigrams
himself since his youth. He was well acquainted with the fact that such epigrams were intended
to accompany representations like statues and pictures, and that they usually made a moral or
satirical “point.”18
But to understand the choice of the word “emblem” we have to see how it was likely to be
understood by contemporaries. Of all the meanings which the humanists found in classical texts,
and of which they had already made considerable use,19 the common factor is the notion of an
ornament which can be inserted in or attached to something else: a badge to a hat, a carved stone
in a ring, embroideries to furniture, moldings to architecture, or, in a figurative sense, figures of
speech and commonplaces inserted in literary discourse. What explains the choice of the word
is not the symbolic use to which the epigrams are put but the notion that what the epigram
describes, or the text of the epigram itself,20 can be such a transposable ornament. Thus, although
it seems clear that Alciato used the term here as a title for his epigrams, the idea of a representa-
tion of the subject is also implied. His successors, influenced by their knowledge of the classical
meanings, were not slow to see the implication, and to shift the meaning of the new name in
that direction. In the end the “emblem” came to be primarily the illustration, although modern
scholars, looking back over the production of centuries, prefer to apply the term to the complete
combination of text(s) and visual image.
Perhaps the best evidence for what Alciato had in mind is found in his treatise on dueling,
De singulari certamine liber, written for François I in 1528. Here Alciato uses the word three
times in a way which can be understood only as intending a personal device.21 The first equates
“emblema” with items of apparel or ornaments, which were used to display the aspiration or the
loyalty of the knight in the joust:
It is accepted by a number of scholars that the practice of duelling was invented by the
Mantineans, mainly on the argument that the military cloak and ancient armour are
called “mantineae.” For this reason “mantineae” can be said in present terms [to be] the
“ephestris”, which we commonly call the “surcoat”, the apex of helmets, pennons and
emblems and combatants’ ornaments of that sort.
The second mentions an emblem called the image of Mars worn apparently as a talisman on hel-
mets: “There are those who think anyone who had on his helmet the emblem which is called the
17
image of Mars would be invincible.” The third is the passage quoted by Alciato’s commentators
to explain the emblem assigned to the duchy of Milan.
In the Annals there is the well known encounter of Otho Visconti with a certain Sara-
cen in Asia. Having defeated him and struck him down, he took the ornament from his
helmet and added it to his own family insignia, that is, a viper vomiting out of its mouth
a newly born infant still covered in blood – in fact the emblem taken by Alexander the
Great. Indeed, you can see the same image on ancient coins of his, to show how that
ruler claimed enigmatically that he was born of Jupiter. For Jupiter was worshipped in
many places in Greece in the form of a serpent, and there are in Asia types of serpents
which men say give birth through the mouth.22
In the same period this usage is supported by an occurrence in a memorial publication for the
chancellor of Charles V, Cardinal Mercurino Gattinara. Jan Dantyszek, Polish ambassador to the
imperial court, describes an epigram he contributed to this publication, which appeared in 1530,
as pertaining to the “emblem” of the chancellor, which was evidently the image of a phoenix
symbolizing faith.23 There is possibly further support, again in the circle of the imperial court, in
the bookplate described as the “emblem” of Willibald Pirckheimer in his Opera of 1610. Pirck-
heimer also died in 1530, but it is yet to be established that the word actually occurs in a work
of his published before that time.24 An undated poem of Celio Calcagnini uses the term in this
same way: “You will fashion on my ring these tokens and these emblems.”25 Another occurrence
of the term, though not quite so clear, is also suggestive. In a letter of April 22, 1490, to Geronimo
Donato, Angelo Politian uses the word in a passage where he is speaking of mottoes (breve dictum)
and devices (insigne). In this case the “emblem” is something inlaid in a ring, probably a stone,
on which the words are to be engraved.
It seems quite probable, and it is perfectly compatible with the letter of 1523, that Alciato,
in using the term “emblem” for his title, was thinking of his epigrams as verses designed to
elucidate or accompany visual devices,26 which in this case were created for Ambrogio Visconti
and his circle in 1522. These devices would have been the original core of the later collection,
which was expanded with other items that may not conform strictly to this definition. Whether
Alciato himself originally conceived of a publication with illustrated poems remains uncertain,
though the fourth line of the dedication to Peutinger, which appears in all editions, including the
unauthorized first, may indicate that visual representations existed:
While a walnut beguiles boys and dice beguile young men

And old men waste their time with picture cards. . . .
I forge these emblems in my leisure hours,
And the tokens were made by the master-hand of craftsmen.
Just as [we can] attach embroideries to clothing and badges to hats
So each should be able to write with mute signs. . . .
For my part I shall give, as one poet to another, paper gifts
Which you should accept as a pledge of my friendship.27
It is also clear from his correspondence that the appearance of the illustrations in 1531 came
as no great surprise, although he complained bitterly of their quality:
That book was published, I assure you, without my knowledge, as I also wrote to
our friend Palma. In truth, since it is so full of mistakes, whether we consider the
18
Andrea Alciato
absurdities of the pictures or the corrupt text of the poems, I am forced to put my hand
to the work and to acknowledge this disowned and exposed off-spring, just when
it was near the point of death, and to bring it forth again enlarged and better pre-
pared . . . [Italics added]28
Although there may still be some uncertainty about whether Alciato originally intended his
collection to be illustrated, he approved of the illustrations for the Wechel editions that followed
from 1534, and those who purchased or read Alciato’s emblems received illustrated emblems. In
terms of reception the question of Alciato’s original intention is in fact irrelevant.
Alciato’s notion of symbolism

Two sources allow us to gain some insight into Alciato’s notion of symbolism: the first is the
contemporary history of the hieroglyphs, to which Alciato explicitly relates his emblems, and the
second is his explanation of the nature of language. For both of these sources we need to refer to
his treatise and commentary De verborum significatione, which was published in 1530, but which
he had been working on since 1520.29 In an aside at the beginning of the commentary Alciato
mentions his emblems and compares them to the hieroglyphs30 of Horapollo and Chaeremon;
that is, he considers them at this stage not in the context of artistic production but as meaningful
signs. He says, “Words signify, things are signified. However, sometimes things too can even sig-
nify, like the hieroglyphs in Horapollo and Chaeremon; I too have composed a book of epigrams
in this genre; its title is Emblemata.”31
The mention of “mute signs” in the dedication to Peutinger may also be an allusion to the
hieroglyphs. The significance of these allusions lies in the question of how Alciato understood
the functioning of such symbols, to which he compares his epigrams here as being of the same
genre.32 The collections of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica published at this time33 consisted of verbal
descriptions of symbolic objects without illustrations. One may understand Alciato’s remark
therefore as drawing a parallel with them: his Emblemata contain epigrammatic descriptions
of “things which signify.” The question here is: how do these “things” signify? Students of the
emblems have usually referred to Ficino and his commentary on some lines of Plotinus to deduce
that the hieroglyphs were thought of as “natural” signs. These do not represent, like verbal lan-
guage, a discursive, linear account of the meaning, but provide a total, unmediated access to its
reality, which is the platonic idea itself and is beyond words. But there was another possibility. In
Bologna Giovanni Battista Pio and Filippo Beroaldo the Elder read the hieroglyphs with the help
of Diodorus Siculus and Lucius Apuleius. For these writers, the starting point for the creation of
the symbol is a natural property of the object. The hieroglyph in this case is seen as a representa-
tion of that property, a sign which is not the idea itself but an intermediary between the idea and
the reader, with this difference from the arbitrary verbal sign that it is rooted in a natural quality
of the object portrayed and functions like a simile or simple metaphor in the manner known
to all from Aristotle.34 As Alberti observed, such signs might be considered universal because to
understand them, the reader needs no other knowledge than what natural history and technology
teach him. The emblems can be understood as a form of hieroglyph, and both symbols can be
thought of as conventional in the sense that they retain the basis of commonplace knowledge and
assumed significances as, for example, in traditional allegories. Alciato, following Erasmus in his
famous commentary on the adage “Festina lente,”35 seems to have understood the hieroglyphs
in this way, not as esoteric signs whose meaning was divinely ordained or fixed by a religious
tradition but as humanly devised symbols to which he could attribute his own “unusual,” and
surprising, interpretations.36
19
In Book 2 of the treatise we find a clear statement about where Alciato stands in the debate
about natural or conventional, fixed or changing meaning in language.37 He refers to Cicero,
Horace, Quintilian, and Aulus Gellius to show that words acquire their meaning from usage
defined by the authority of the learned. In considering the nature of words and images as signs,
the humanists had three basic possibilities from which to choose.38 Firstly, Aristotle and Her-
mogenes in Plato’s Cratylus authorize the view that words are purely arbitrary and conventional,
that meaning is created by usage. Secondly, there is the view that words are endowed, in their
original form, with a certain similarity to the thing that they named; they are “natural by their
etymology.” Socrates speculates that this similarity is a matter of the phonetic representation of
the qualities of flow or constraint inherent in all things according to the philosophy of Heraclitus.
This seems to be Socrates’s own view, that names have an inherent correctness, though, when
he turns to argue with Cratylus, he makes some concessions to the role of error and convention.
Thirdly, there is the group of views, which go back to the idea of the “natural sign” espoused by
Cratylus, represented by hermetic, cabalistic, or Neoplatonic theory, that some signs are magical
or miraculous symbols, that they have the power of, or are, the thing itself. For Alciato, if there
ever was a language, Hebrew for example, which was the origin of all others, and in which letters
or words had a “natural” meaning, the languages which descended from it have not preserved
this virtue, but have formed and reformed meaning through the mechanism of usage. It is usage,
therefore, which will determine the meaning of words.
The inclusion in the Commentary of the reference to the hieroglyphs and what was still
a manuscript collection of emblems is fortunate because it is the only moment in the work
when Alciato speaks of nonverbal signs – a subject which he admits is not really relevant to
his treatise. The passage enables us to speculate with some probability about how their author
was now thinking of the emblems. The point he makes is that things as well as words can
sometimes be signs. As far as hieroglyphs and emblems are concerned, we may understand that
they are not in essence words – ekphrases or epigrams – but “things,” or at least representations
of things. His title, Emblemata, is not to be taken simply and literally as “Epigrams” would
be, but as an image referring to forms of ornament which the dictionaries and usages of the
time had already made familiar. They are, he says, giving a legal parallel, like certain forms of
circumstantial evidence (“præsumptiones”), that the law can accept as “signs,” and which are
also “things which signify.”
Alciato then gives a short account of words and meaning, in which the “res,” as meaning,
is seen as being added directly to the “verbum,” the sound pronounced, to form the “dictio,”
the meaningful word. The authority he names is Fortunatianus, but he is basing himself on an
account of meaning which would be familiar to many contemporaries as that of St. Augustine.39
This account in fact distinguished between the “res” as object, without reference to meaning,
and the “dicibile” as the idea of the object (mental image, we might say) which could be added
to the “verbum” to form the “dictio.” Alciato has simplified even this scheme, omitting the
“dicibile,” to allow himself the notion of a thing which signifies. This is clearly unsatisfactory,
even in the case of the emblem, in that it makes no allowance for a distinction between the “res”
as the object pictured and the “aliquid elegans,” which Alciato himself had in his letter of 1523
distinguished as his intended meaning. It seems that his definition is somewhat hasty, at least as
far as hieroglyphs and emblems are concerned.
However, if this argument is pursued in the context of the ideas on meaning described earlier,
it is possible to suppose that he thought the “meaningful thing” does not have to have a meaning
added to it, as the word does; it has an inherent meaning. When he says in the letter, therefore, that
in his emblems he describes an object or an event which may have an unusual meaning, he may
be thinking of the object or event not so much as having a figurative meaning added arbitrarily
20
Andrea Alciato
to it but rather as having a figurative meaning already in it because of its natural properties. The
idea of the purely conventional sign is not relevant to the hieroglyph and the emblem; only letters
and words could be considered in this light. The indications are that Alciato’s emblems, being
“things” or images of things, are signs of the second kind mentioned earlier – that is, they are
analogous to words with an inherent likeness to the thing they represent, but are capable, as such
words were capable, of change through usage, of reinvention and redeployment. The evidence
suggests that Alciato did not think out the semantics of his emblems very carefully, but we can say
that his idea, as far as it appears, is consistent with the concept of the hieroglyph to be found in
Diodorus Siculus and transmitted by the Bolognese and Erasmus, rather than with the essential,
and therefore immutable, Neoplatonic sign described by Plotinus and Ficino.
Translations
As we have noted, there were vernacular translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish,40
and many of Alciato’s emblems were also translated into English in Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems
(1586). However, one should not suppose that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century translators
were necessarily guided by modern notions of the purposes of translation. We may today assume
that translation seeks to reproduce the meaning and effect of the original in a different language.
But, although most printed translations of Alciato’s emblems include Latin texts, that is not
necessarily the purpose of the early modern translator. John Manning notes in his discussion
of Thomas Palmer, “we do not know to what extent the original was regarded as authoritative,
or merely as a stimulus to fresh composition.”41 Even when translators make pronouncements
about their translations in prefaces or introductions, these are usually so brief and general as to
afford little insight.
A full comparative account of Alciato’s translators and commentators would take too much
space, and the various translations and commentaries have not all received adequate critical atten-
tion. The material bibliographical information is summarized here.
Between 1534 and 1542 Wechel published three editions of a French translation by Jean le
Fèvre, secretary to Cardinal De Givry.42 One other edition containing Latin and French texts but
without illustrations, probably pirated, is now known to be by the Lyon printer Denis de Harsy.
Le Fèvre’s text continued to be published occasionally until the beginning of the seventeenth
century. Jean de Tournes printed the translation of the first book with the same plates as his
Latin edition in 1548, 1555, and 1570. His French edition of 1615 contained Le Fèvre’s trans-
lation for the first book and new translations for the second.43 In 1562 Jean Ruelle published a
bilingual edition with Le Fèvre’s translation but with illustrations for only about a third of the
emblems. The “line-by-line” translation of Barthélemy Aneau, which followed the new topical
organization of the emblems he had introduced in the Latin of 1548, was certainly the closest but
certainly also the least elegant of the French translations. It appeared five times between 1549 and
1574, published by Rouille or De Marnef and Cavellat. Claude Mignault’s translation, accurate
but, as Alison Saunders shows,44 mannered and overdecorated, appeared in a bilingual edition in
1584 and 1587.
The first German translation was also published by Wechel, like the French of Le Fèvre, in a
bilingual edition. Wolfgang Hunger, who claims to have made his translations between 1537 and
1539, is the first to suggest that the emblems had a potential use as an educational and especially
linguistic instrument, seeing them as a valuable and easy way to enrich his own German for both
literary and professional purposes. Like Le Fèvre, Hunger translated Alciato’s epigrams, regularly
for the most part, into eight-line verses. He apparently hoped to produce a trilingual edition in
order to include French. But Wechel could not accommodate all three texts on a page facing the
21
illustration and preferred to publish separate French and German editions in 1542. This, how-
ever, was the only publication of Hunger’s work, which seems to have been overshadowed by the
second German translation, that by Jeremias Held.45
Jeremias Held produced the second German translation.46 It, too, is a bilingual edition
with the Latin texts followed by Held’s German version. Held’s version was printed by Georg
Raben in Frankfurt for Sigismund Feyerabend and Simon Hüter in 156647 and 1567 by two
different printers, the second with “epimythia” different from those of Aneau. The first was
reprinted in 1580 and the second in 1583, both by Nicolaus Basse. Held does not seem to
have known the work of the first German translator, Hunger, or at least does not appear to
have used his edition.
Held’s version contains 13248 woodcuts in text to Alciato’s 212 emblems, and they are num-
bered i–ccxvii. The numbering of the emblems has caused some confusion. Henry Green (190)
called the number 217 a misprint, which it is not. The number 217 is correct and derives from
the separate numbering of the alternative versions of the epigrams, which Alciato had labeled
“aliud,” to four of the emblems.49 As far as the Latin text is concerned, this is the first complete
edition of Alciato’s emblems, although not all the emblems are illustrated. It does include the
often omitted “offensive” emblem with the Latin motto “Adversus naturam peccantes,” though
according to Tung’s concordance it is absent from this edition.50 A ten-page preface in Ger-
man [Vorrede] by the translator is dedicated to Raymund Graff and dated September 9, 1566; a
thirteen-page address to the reader also in German [Vorrede an den Leser] has the same date. Some
of the illustrations bear the initials of the artist. The image for emblem no. 73 bears the initials of
Jost Amman, while the picturae for nos. 113 and 135 have the initials of Virgil Solis.
A second edition of this bilingual Latin-German volume appeared in 1580, also in Frankfurt.
This time it was printed by Nicolaus Bassée. The contents, both text and pictures, are the same
as in the 1566–67 issue, although some textual contractions are now printed in full. Pagination
and fingerprint are identical.
There was only one translation into Spanish in the early period. It was made by Bernardino
Daza of Valladolid and published by Rouille and Bonhomme in 1549.51 From the phrase “aña-
didos de figuras y de nuevos Emblemas en la tercera parte” in the title, it would seem to have
been based on the edition made by Gryphius in his Reliqua . . . opera of 1548, since this is the only
edition of the Emblems which divides them into three parts. Daza’s edition is nevertheless in two
books, like that of Jean de Tournes, preserving the order of the original editions of Wechel and
Aldus. It is of interest primarily because it contains ten new emblems by Alciato, bringing the
total to 210 (the “offensive” emblem “Adversus naturam peccantes” is omitted). Daza also adds
two emblems of his own, dedicated to patrons. He uses a limited variety of verse forms, generally
matching in length those of Alciato, and keeps fairly close to the latter’s expression and intention.
At least two translations into Italian were published, one by Giovanni Marquale,52 the other by
Paolo Aemilio Cadamosto.53 Guilo Cesare Capaccio,54 author of a treatise on imprese, published
in 1620 his Il Principe, which contained unillustrated translations of Alciato’s emblems. Surpris-
ingly little has been written about these translations beyond Henry Green’s brief comments.
There is little to be learned about Marquale and his translation from the prefatory material.
The privilege is dated August 9, 1548. The dedication, to Francesco Donato, Doge of Venice,
states that the translation is made for the benefit of those who do not understand Latin, and
the poem addressed to the reader emphasizes the moral profit to be derived from the emblems.
Marquale uses Aneau’s arrangement, including some emblems from each of his categories and
concluding with eleven of the fourteen trees, but translates only 136 emblems in the 1549 edi-
tion, and 180 in 1551. This remained the total in all the other editions (1564, 1576, 1579).
22
Andrea Alciato
Commentaries
Both Bernardino Daza and Wolfgang Hunger55 claim to have written full-length commentaries
on Alciato’s emblems, but neither work has survived. The first commentaries to appear in print
were the “briefues expositions Epimythiques” added by Barthélemy Aneau to his French edition
of 1549. These are very brief, usually one-sentence summaries of the moral interpretation of the
emblem. They were not translated and added to the Latin editions until 1564,56 and subsequently
continued to appear until the edition of 1616 by the heirs of Guillaume Rouille.
The next commentaries to appear were the “Commentariola” of Sebastian Stockhamer,
whose dedication to Juan de Sotomayor is dated 1 March 1552 from the University of Coimbra.
He wrote commentaries for the emblems of the first book of Jean de Tournes edition in 1556,
a most unusual edition since it does not have Alciato’s epigrams. A second edition of the same
year contains the two books, both with Alciato’s text; the first book now has illustrations, but the
second remains without either illustrations or commentaries. In later editions by De Tournes,
including those of the French of Le Fèvre, commentaries for the second book are provided which
are based on those of Mignault.
The Latin commentaries of Sánchez de las Brozas, professor of Greek and rhetoric in the
University of Salamanca, are relatively brief, but thorough as regards sources, and complete
in that they gloss all the emblems.57 They were published by Rouille in Lyon in 1573, but, as
Luis Merino and Jesús Ureña have shown,58 were probably begun before 1554. Despite the
single publication, they were influential in that they were a source for Diego López’s Spanish
commentaries and were included with Mignault’s in the combined commentaries of the Tozzi
editions.
The only commentaries other than Aneau’s in a vernacular language were the Declaración
magistral sobre las [sic] emblemas de Andres Alciato by Diego López (1615). He was at the time a
teacher of grammar at Toro and Olmedo in the province of León, and dedicated the work to
the governor of the province, Diego Hurtado de Mendoça.59 He explains carefully the historical
allusions and symbolism of each emblem and interprets their moral teaching. There were three
subsequent editions in 1655, 1670, and 1684.
At the beginning of his commentary of Emblem 4 (“In deo laetandum”) Claude Mignault
seems to seek to distinguish himself from Las Brozas by saying that he will not always state the
source of the emblem first, “as some others do,” but say whatever seems important about each
emblem.60 In fact he spends a great deal more space than Las Brozas on what he calls the “appli-
cation” – that is, on the moral of each emblem. His commentaries are by far the most extensive
of the period. According to the dedicatory letter of 1571, they were already in a fairly finished
state at that time, but he chose in that publication to excerpt only the parts relating to origin and
meaning. In 1573 Plantin published what were then the full commentaries, with a “Letter to the
Reader,” a preface entitled “Quid emblema sit, et quae eius ratio,” and a considerable number
of “Notas posteriores.” The preface was entirely reworked and expanded in 1577 to become
the “Syntagma de symbolis,” which now constituted a history of symbolism. The commen-
taries continued to receive minor additions in the editions of 1591 and 1602.61 Considerably
shortened for the “compendious” editions of 1584, 1591, and 1599, they were translated for
Mignault’s bilingual, Latin and French, edition of 1584 and 1587. Finally Mignault’s commen-
taries formed the major part of the combined commentaries, with the notes of Sánchez de las
Brozas, the corrections of Laurentius Pignorius,62 and the “Corollaria” of Fredericus Morellus,
in the great Paduan editions, edited by Joannes Thuilius and published by Peter Paul Tozzi in
1618, 1621, and 1661.
23
The reception of Alciato’s emblems in the material culture

The actual evidence of Alciato emblems in the material culture,63 understood as cultural forms
that are not products of the printing press, is slight. But one must always bear in mind that over the
years fire and warfare have obliterated many of the products of the material culture. Much too,
and probably most, of earlier emblematic decoration has disappeared, as tastes changed, and the
need to modernize was obeyed. None the less, there is some evidence, but what we are left with
must be a pale reflection of what once was.
The emblem book is only one of the many media that disseminated the combination of sym-
bolic picture and interpretative text. As we know, emblematic designs were incorporated into
almost every artistic form. They are found in stained glass windows and carving, in jewelry and
glass, needlework and tapestry, in painting and portraiture, wall and ceiling decoration, and archi-
tecture. Veritable emblem programs may be found adorning private residences, such as Bickling
Hall and Llanhydroc House in Cornwall, and ecclesiastical buildings. Emblems were used as
theatrical properties in dramas and street processions. Poets, preachers, writers, and dramatists
frequently employed emblems and emblem-like structures in the spoken and the written word.
In addition to the emblem book, we shall find perhaps even more evidence in the material culture
of what is known as “imprese,” designed to accompany tournaments, or incorporated in tapestry
and embroidery, in wood and stone carving, and on painted walls and ceilings.
The earliest use of Alciato’s emblems in England is discovered in tournaments. It appears that
the English employed imprese in tournaments as early as 1477,64 and the practice continued
intermittently throughout the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Alan Young’s edition of
521 English tournament imprese65 shows that the English frequently used continental models.
It has long been known that the Elizabethan Accession Day tilts were important political and
emblematic exercises, in which the imprese shields of English aristocrats played a prominent
role. On occasion, Alciato’s emblems served as sources or models. For instance, in George Peele’s
Polyhymnia (London: Richard Ihones, 1590) a tilt is described that was celebrated on November
17, the first day of the thirty-third year of Elizabeth’s reign. Sir Henry Lee, the queen’s champion,
decorated his shield with the Alciatan motif of bees and helmet: “My helmet now shall make
an hive for bees.”66
Alan Young’s descriptions allow us to identify a number of possible sources, or parallels,
in Alciato for English tournament imprese.67 In 1602–1603 the Moravian nobleman Zdenek
Brtnicky z Valdstejna, otherwise known as Baron Waldstein, visited London after studying in
Strasburg. His diary68 records Waldstein as seeing a picture in Whitehall Palace “of a cripple
being carried on a blind man’s shoulders” (p. 43). Waldstein does not specify in which of the
palace rooms he saw the picture. The Moravian traveler noted that the picture was accompa-
nied by Latin verses, which we know correspond with the epigram to Alciato’s emblem of a
lame man being carried on the shoulders of a blind man. Those Latin verses were followed on
the Whitehall picture by the motto “Mutuum auxilium.” Although Waldstein does not attribute
the picture or the texts to Alciato, the Italian was evidently the source.69 This same motif of the
mutual assistance provided by the lame man and the blind man is depicted on one of the carved
wooden panels that were moved from a house built in 1572 to University College, Oxford. It
also features on the Spring tapestry of Sheldon’s Four Seasons Tapestries, now hanging in Hatfield
House (Fig. 1.3). The evidence of Waldstein’s diary account is one more small piece of evidence
of the reception of Alciato’s emblems in Elizabethan England.70
John Harvey, father of the poet Gabriel Harvey, was a successful yeoman farmer, rope-maker,
and businessman in Saffron Walden, Essex. Sometime around 1570 he decorated the fireplace
in the parlor of his town house with a large mantelpiece of carved clunch (limestone).71 The
24
Andrea Alciato
Figure 1.3 Detail of one of the figures in the border (upper left side) from Sheldon’s Spring tapestry, now in
Hatfield House. The legend reads “In Consilio” (Deliberation). Late sixteenth–early seventeenth centuries.
Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
emblematic decoration is based on three of Alciato’s emblems that receive new mottoes. On
Harvey’s mantelpiece the center panel shows Ocnus the rope-maker, and is flanked on one side
by an ass eating thistles, and on the other by a beehive. The ass eating thistles has the motto “Aliis
non nobis” [For others not for ourselves]; Ocnus is making rope that is destroyed by an ass and
has the motto “Nec aliis nec nobis” [Neither for others nor for ourselves]; the bees leaving and
returning to the hive are supplied with the motto “Aliis et nobis” [For others and ourselves]. The
three panels make a statement about the value of labor and reward, moving from the negative to
the positive. Alciato’s emblems have been re-encoded to make an economic and moral statement.
This notion is then encapsulated in a motto that literally underlines the three panels – that is, is
written beneath those three emblems. Emendated it reads “Nostrae placentae sunt labor” [Our
cakes are our labor] – that is, our labor brings its own rewards. Alciato’s warning in the Ocnus
emblem, about spendthrift wives or harlots, makes way for a celebration of mercantile entrepre-
neurialism on Harvey’s fireplace.
The Summer Room at University College Oxford is decorated with English wood carvings
dating from the late sixteenth century.72 Twenty of the twenty-eight carvings depict in relief
motifs taken from Alciato’s emblems. These include among others Prometheus and the eagle, the
ass bearing the statue of Isis on its back, Ganymede on Jupiter’s eagle, Tantalus, three girls playing
at dice, the lame man carrying the blind man, and the figure of constrained genius whose right
hand is weighed down with a stone block.73
Some warships were known to have been emblematically decorated in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. Elizabeth I’s warship the “White Bear”74 and Charles I’s warship the “Sovereign
25
of the Seas”75 had extensive emblematic decorations, which included citation and modification of
some of Alciato’s emblems, although the information is far from complete. Young notes that a Ger-
man visitor to England in 1611 copied out twenty-seven mottoes and described twelve accompany-
ing pictures in Elizabeth I’s “White Bear.” The sources were Paradin, the impresa shields on display
at Whitehall, and Whitney, although two of Whitney’s emblems are identical with Alciato’s. These
are “Festina lente” showing a dolphin and anchor, and “Maturandum” accompanied by a snake
entwined about a dart or arrow.76 The stem of Charles I’s “Sovereign of the Seas” was decorated
with an equestrian statue of King Edgar and Cupid riding and bridling a lion, which appears to be
a variation on Alciato’s emblem of Cupid holding the reins of two lions (no. 106).
Perhaps the most impressive remaining example of the appropriation of Alciato’s emblems in
the decorative arts in England is the Four Seasons tapestries, which hang in Hatfield House.77 The
tapestries, which probably date from the first decade of the seventeenth century – the Winter
tapestry is dated 1611 – were originally made for Sir John Tracy of Toddington. Francis Hyckes
is assumed to have been the designer of the Four Seasons tapestries. He had enjoyed an educa-
tion in the classics at Oxford, and he retained a lifelong interest in Latin and especially in Greek.
During what his son Thomas describes as a “countrie retirement,” Francis translated Thucy-
dides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars and selected dialogues of Lucian. It is thought that Francis
designed the Four Seasons tapestries during his retirement when he was making these translations
from the Greek. He based his designs on four engravings by Maarten de Vos.78 He retained the
central deity, the three zodiac figures at the top, and many of the rural activities depicted in his
sources. However, the English designer enriched the tapestries with additional flowers, animals,
and country scenes.
But the most significant departure from the designs of Maarten de Vos is the addition of a
wide border containing an unbroken rope of loops, 9 inches in diameter, which enclose two-
part emblems, each separated from the next by a flower. The borders of the four panels of the
tapestries contain no fewer than 170 emblems, each comprising a Latin motto and a circular
picture. These emblematic borders are virtually without parallel in the history of sixteenth- and
early seventeenth-century European tapestry.79 Since all the Spring emblems derive directly or
indirectly from Alciato and Sambucus, and none is an original creation of Whitney, it seems
reasonable to conclude that Hyckes drew on these two continental sources. A publisher of both
Sambucus and some of the most influential Alciato editions was Christophe Plantin and so prob-
ably of the edition used by Hyckes. We know that Hyckes knew Latin and Greek, and he would
therefore have had little difficulty with the Latin in the Alciato and Sambucus editions. Plantin
also published the Whitney compilation, which drew heavily on the plates Plantin had already
used for Alciato, Sambucus, and others.80
An examination of the changes in the texts of the mottoes in the Spring tapestry reveals that
Francis Hyckes read his emblem sources very carefully and made modifications according to a
clear conception of how the emblem works. Whereas Alciato composed his emblems with a cul-
tured and humanistically educated reader in mind, Hyckes was producing a tapestry for a patron,
Sir John Tracy of Toddington. The tapestry was presumably intended to adorn Sir John’s home
as an object of significant beauty, but probably not as an intellectual puzzle. The Latin mottoes of
the 170 emblems in the borders were intended to be understood by the educated visitor. With
perhaps one or two exceptions, they were not intended as intellectual riddles. On the continent
tapestry emblems were recognized as fulfilling a valuable educational and didactic function. Thus
Andreas Maximillian Fredro recommended their use for the private apartments of rulers, where
the emblems could serve as silent counsellors.81
Reviewing the distribution of some of Alciato’s emblems in the tapestries, one finds the
following pattern of usage: Spring has twenty Alciato emblems from a total of forty-two – that
26
Andrea Alciato
is, almost half derive from Alciato. Summer has nine Alciato emblems out of the forty-four.
Autumn has eleven Alciato emblems out of the forty-two. Winter has twelve Alciato emblems of
the forty-two. That means that out of a total of 170 emblematic border roundels no fewer than
fifty-two derive from Alciato. In Hyckes’s selection of emblems, Alciato plays the largest role,
accounting for almost a third of the total emblematic roundels.
But Alciato’s emblems also served in more modest fashion in the decoration of trenchers,
which were usually circular in shape, and often given as presents. Such wooden trenchers were
used to serve cheese or fruit from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries in Great Britain.
We are indebted to Michael Bath and Malcolm Jones for detailed information. Bath describes
two of seven oblong trenchers that copy Alciato emblems: “Mutuum auxilium” (Mutual help)
depicting a blind man carrying on his back a lame man, and “Fidei symbolum” (Symbol of
fidelity) with the figures of Truth, Honor, and Chaste Love. Bath is able to show that the trencher
designs are based on Wechel’s Paris editions of Alciato’s emblems. The designer evidently took
hints for the coloring from Alciato’s epigrams, although he also used Mignault’s commentaries.
As Bath observes, these trencher designs were “by no means simple or unthinking copies of
available pattern books” (p. 365). That such trenchers were quite common at the time is revealed
by Bath’s quotations from Puttenham, Harrington, Burton, and Donne.82
Notes
1 The fullest biography is by R. Abbondanza in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 2 (Rome, 1960),
69–77. For the bibliography of emblem studies, including Alciato, see the Companion to Emblem Studies,
ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 2007), 519–99.
2 So called by Claude Chansonnette (Cantiuncula) in a letter to Cornelius Agrippa (Abbondanza, 74).
3 P. Laurens and F. Vuilleumier, “De l’archéologie à l’emblème: la genèse du Liber Alciati,” Revue de l’Art
101 (1963), 86–95.
4 Corpus inscriptionum latinorum (Berlin, 1877), I, 624.
5 Andreae Alciati contra vitam monasticam epistula: Andrea Alciato’s Letter against Monastic Life, ed. D.L. Drys-
dall. Supplementa humanistica lovaniensia xxxvi (Leuven, 2014).
6 D. R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renais-
sance (New York/London, 1970), ch. 4.
7 D.L. Drysdall, “Alciato and the Grammarians: The Law and the Humanities in the Parergon iuris libri
duodecim,” Renaissance Quarterly 56:3 (2003), 695–722.
8 Most scholars who have treated the European emblem, from the Victorian Henry Green (Andrea
Alciati and His Books of Emblems [London, 1872]) to John Manning in the first years of this cen-
tury, have also revisited the emblems of Alciato. The most recent reassessment of Alciato and his
emblems is by D.L. Drysdall, “Andrea Alciato, Pater et Princeps,” in Companion to Emblem Studies
(as in note 1), 79–97.
9 The most recent critical account of Alciato’s epigrams, their illustrations, and Alciato’s translation of the
Greek Anthology is by R. Cummings, “Alciato’s Illustrated Epigrams,” Emblematica 15 (2007), 193–228.
On the relation of Alciato’s emblems to the Greek Anthology, see also J. Hutton, The Greek Anthology
in Italy to the Year 1800 (Ithaca, 1935); M. Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome, 1964); A.
Saunders, “Alciato and the Greek Anthology,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 12:1 (1982),
1–18; V. Woods Callahan, “Uses of the Planudean Anthology: Thomas More and Andrea Alciato,” in
Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis, ed. R. J. Shoeck (Binghampton, 1985), 399–408.
10 See the correspondence with Pietro Bembo: G.-L. Barni, Le Lettere di Andrea Alciato (Florence, 1953),
no. 93, 156–57, ll. 11–18, February 25, 1535; and Petri Bembi cardinalis epistolarum familiarum, libri VI . . .
(Venice, Gualterus Scottus, 1552), 267–68, March 21, 1535.
11 D.L. Drysdall, “Epimetheus, An Alciati Companion (review of William S. Heckscher, The Princeton
Alciati Companion),” Emblematica 4:2 (1989), 379–91.
12 D.L. Drysdall, “A Note on the Relationship of the Latin and Vernacular Translations of Horapollo from
Fasanini to Caussin,” Emblematica 4:2 (1989), 225–41.
13 V.W. Callahan, “Erasmus’s Adages – A Pervasive Element in the Emblems of Alciato,” Emblematica 9:2
(1995), 241–56.
27
14 Praz, Studies (as in note 9), 12, 24.

15 A. Henkel and A. Schöne, Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst der XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundert (Stutt-
gart, 1967).
16 An excellent survey of earlier discussions of this is provided by B. F. Scholz, “‘Libellum composui
epigrammaton, cui titulum feci Emblemata’: Alciatus’s Use of the Expression Emblema Once Again,”
Emblematica 1 (1986), 213–26.
17 Barni, Le Lettere (as in note 10), no. 24, 46, ll. 28–35.
18 See contributions by Cummings, Illustrated Epigrams (as in note 9), and Hutton, Greek Anthology (as in
note 9), Laurens and Vuilleumier, De l’archéologie à l’emblème (as in note 3), and M. Tung, “Alciato’s
Practices of Imitation: A New Approach to Studying His Emblems,” Emblematica 19 (2012), 153–257.
19 D.L. Drysdall, “Occurrences of the Word ‘emblema’ in Printed Works before Alciato,” Emblematica 14
(2004), 299–325.
20 Barthélemy Aneau seems also to have envisaged this possibility: “que toutes et quantesfoys que aulcun
voudra attribuer, ou pour le moins par fiction applicquer aux choses vuydes accomplissement, aux nues
aornement, aux muetes parolle, aux brutes raison, il aura en ce petit livre (comme en ung cabinet tresbien
garny) tout ce qu’il pourra, & vouldra inscripre, ou pindre aux murailles de la maison, aux verrieres, aux
tapis, couvertures, tableaux, vaisseaulx, images, aneaulx, signetz, vestemens, tables, lictz, armes, brief à
toute piece et utensile, & en tous lieux: affin que l’essence des choses appartenantes au commun usage
soit en tout, et par tout quasi vivement parlante, et au regard plaisante.” (Italics added.)
21 Alciato, De singulari certamine (Lyon, 1544). The first edition (unauthorized) was by Kerver (Paris, 1541).
The earlier manuscripts seem to have been lost. See Barni, Le Lettere (as in note 10) no. 42, dated May
26, 1528. For a general account see M. Grünberg-Dröge, “The De singulari certamine liber in the Context
of Its Time,” Emblematica 9:2 (1995), 315–41. Alciato’s source for the reference to the Mantineans is
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 4.154d.
22 Ibid., ch. 2, 7–8; ch. 37, 69; ch. 43, 81.
23 This has been identified by Agnes Kusler in an as yet unpublished piece of research as the obverse of a
portrait medal of Gattinara made by Christoph Weiditz in 1529.
24 W. Pirckheimer, Opera omnia (Frankfurt, 1610; repr. Hildesheim, 1969), 22. One of the dedicatory
poems reveals that the illustration was executed by Dürer. The bookplate has been identified as no.
300b in Ilse O’Dell, Deutsche und Österreichische Exlibris 1500–1599 im Britischen Museum (London,
2003). The word occurs in each case in a text by the contributors to this seventeenth-century edition
and the necessary proof that Pirckheimer himself used the term “emblema,” as the texts seem to imply,
is yet to be found.
25 “De annulo expoliendo” [date unknown] in Carmina illustrium Poetarum Italorum, vol. 3, ed. J. Bottari
(Florence, 1719–26), 105–06, ll. 29–30.
26 D.L. Drysdall, “Devices as ‘Emblems’ before 1531,” Emblematica 16 (2008), 253–69.
27 In Latin line 4 reads “Artificum illustri signaque facta manu”.
28 D.L. Drysdall, “The Emblems in Two Unnoticed Items of Alciato’s Correspondence,” Emblematica 11
(2001), 379–91, at 383 and 385, note 11. It is not known who Palma was nor is any letter to such a
person extant. He was possibly Johann Bebelius, publisher of the 1529 Selecta epigrammata graeca, which
included many translations by Alciato, and whose device was a palm tree.
29 The commentary grew from notes on the De verborum significatione when he lectured on it at Avignon
in 1520–21 (Barni, Le Lettere, [as in note 10] no. 5, 12, l. 44); the accompanying treatise was added in
1528.
30 E. Klecker regards Alciato’s emblems as hieroglyphs. See “Des signes muets aux emblèmes chanteurs: les
Emblemata d’Alciat et l’emblématique,” Littérature 145 (March 2007), 23–52.
31 Alciato, De verborum significatione (Lyon, S. Gryphius, 1530), 102. The lapidary formula, “Verba signif-
icant, res significantur,” is taken from Accursius: Glossa in Digestum Novum, Corpus Glossatorum IX
(Turin, ex Officina Erasmiana, 1968), 558 (f. 280v of the original), gloss of Digest 12.1.6. In Amerbach’s
manuscript notes of Alciato’s lectures (Basel, Universitäts-bibliothek, ms. C VI 13, 34, col. 1), although
the hieroglyphs are mentioned at this point, the reference to the emblems does not appear.
32 For “argumentum” as “genre” see J. Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Erasme, vol. 1 (Paris, 1981),
510 (3), 511 (10), 537 (159).
33 For example, that of Fasanini, who taught rhetoric at Bologna when Alciato was there completing his
doctoral studies. See D.L. Drysdall, “Filippo Fasanini and His ‘Explanation of Sacred Letters,’” Journal of
Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983), 127–55 and “A Note on the Relationship of the Latin and
Vernacular Translations of Horapollo from Fasanini to Caussin,” Emblematica 4:2 (1989), 225–41.
28
Andrea Alciato
34 D.L. Drysdall, “The Hieroglyphs at Bologna,” Emblematica 2:2 (1987), 225–47.

35 Erasmus, Adagia II.i.1 (2001). This commentary appeared first in the Venice edition of 1508.
36 D.L. Drysdall, “The Hieroglyphs at Bologna” (as in note 34), 234–37. This understanding of the
hieroglyphs seems to be compatible with that described by Laurens and Vuilleumier, De l’archéologie à
l’emblème (as in note 3) in the context of Alciato’s epigraphical studies.
37 De verborum significatione, 39–40. See D.L. Drysdall, “A Lawyer’s Language Theory. Alciato’s De verborum
significatione,” Emblematica 9:2 (1995), 269–92.
38 For linguistic theories of the period and knowledge of the commentaries of Ammonius Hermæus on
Plato’s Cratylus and Aristotle’s On Interpretation, see M.A. Screech, Rabelais (London, 1979), 377–85.
39 The text had been published under the name of Fortunatianus in Hoc in volumine aurea haec opuscula
continentur. . . . Dialectica Chirii Consulti Fortunatiani . . . (Venice, Christophorus de Pensis, 1495). For
Augustine see the translation by B. D. Jackson, Synthese Historical Library, vol. 16 (Dordrecht/Boston,
1975), 86–91.
40 A selection of English translations will be found in P.M. Daly and M.V. Silcox (ed.) assisted by S. Cut-
tler, Index Emblematicus: Andreas Alciatus. Volume II: Emblems in Translation (Toronto, 1985). The German
translation by Wolfgang Hunger was issued in a facsimile edition (Darmstadt, 1967 and 1980). The
German texts of the translation by Jeremias Held are in A. Henkel and A. Schöne, Emblemata . . . (as in
note 15). A facsimile edition with introduction and indexes appears in the series Imago Figurata, vol. 4
(P.M. Daly, Jeremias Held, Liber Emblematum [Frankfurt, 1566] Imago Figurata, vol. 4 [Turnhout, 2007]).
41 J. Manning, The Emblems of Thomas Palmer: “Two Hundred Poosees,” Sloane MS 3794, AMS Studies in the
Emblem 2 (New York, 1988), xiii.
42 1536, 1540, 1542, all containing the Latin as well. For a comparison of the three sixteenth-century French
translations, see A. M. Saunders, “Sixteenth-Century French Translations of Alciati’s Emblemata,” French
Studies 44 (1990), 271–88.
43 De Tournes’s Latin editions had contained two books since 1547 and continued to appear in this for-
mat until 1629 (Green Alciati and His Books of Emblems [as in note 8] no. 159). In 1614 the first book
of his Latin edition contained Stockhamer’s Commentariola and the second notes based on Mignault’s
commentaries.
44 See Manning, The Emblems of Thomas Palmer (as in note 41).
45 D.L. Drysdall, “Defence and Illustration of the German Language: Wolfgang Hunger’s Preface to Alcia-
ti’s Emblems (text and translation),” Emblematica 3 (1988), 137–60. S. Rowan notes, “Wolfgang Hunger
studied under Zazius for a while after 1533, but he left for Bourges to finish his degree under Andrea
Alciato” (Ulrich Zazius: A Jurist in the German Renaissance 1461–1535 [Frankfurt, 1987], 84). See also
P.M. Daly, “The Intertextuality of Word and Image in Wolfgang Hunger’s German Translation of Alci-
ato’s Emblematum liber,” in Intertextuality: German Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. I. Hoesterey and U.
Weisstein (Columbia, SC, 1993), 30–46.
46 Held’s version has only now been offered in its entirety in a modern reprint. See P.M. Daly, Jeremias Held
(as in note 40).
47 The colophon has 1567.
48 H. Green, Alciati and His Books of Emblems (as in note 8), indicates “130 only” (190). M. Rubensohn in
Griechische Epigramme (Weimar, 1897) writes of 212 poems and 130 illustrations, while M. Tung, “Alci-
ato’s Practices” (as in note 18), records a total of 132 with seven duplicates. We find 132 illustrations.
Some copies are defective, and that will affect the number of emblems and illustrations present.
49 There are two variant versions of the “Parvam culinam” emblem (Held nos 162 & 163), and seventeen
emblems of trees (Alciato has fourteen), with three versions of the “Cupressus” emblem (Held nos
200–2), two of the “Laurus” emblem (Held nos 203–4), and two of the “Quercus” emblem (Held nos
205–6), all of which are numbered separately.
50 See M. Tung, “Concordance” (as in note 16), 324 and 334. Rubensohn, Griechische Epigramme (as in notes
4–8), recognized that the “offensive” emblem is present as no. 83.
51 K.L. Selig, “The Spanish Translations of Alciato’s Emblemata,” Modern Language Notes 70 (1955), 354–59.
See also P.F. Campa, Emblemata Hispanica: An Annotated Bibliography of Spanish Emblem Literature to the
Year 1700 (Durham, 1990).
52 Green, Andrea Alciati (as in note 8), nos 41 and 42.
53 Green, Andrea Alciati (as in note 8), no. 155.
54 Green, Andrea Alciati (as in note 8), no. 151.
55 See Selig, The Spanish Translations (as in note 51), and Drysdall, “Wolfgang Hunger . . .” (as in note 45).
56 In the 16mo edition of 1566 they are often shortened or even omitted, apparently for reasons of space.
29
57 Except “Adversus naturam peccantes.”

58 “On the Date of Composition of El Brocense’s Commentaria in Alciati Emblemata,” Emblematica 13 (2003),
73–96.
59 Not the author of the Guerra de Granada, who died in 1575.
60 See the text and translation of this commentary on the Glasgow emblem website: http://www.emblems.
arts.gla.ac.uk/Mignault_intro.html.
61 There were many other editions with Mignault’s commentaries; we have mentioned only those that were
important for their development.
62 For Pignorius’s corrections to the iconography of several emblems, see J. Manning, The Emblem (London,
2002), 116–18, 243, 256.
63 Daly attempted to deal generally with the emblem in the material culture in the Companion to Emblem
Studies (New York, 2007), 411–56.
64 A.R. Young, “The English Tournament Imprese,” in The English Emblem and the Continental Tradition, ed.
P.M. Daly (New York, 1988), 61–81.
65 A.R. Young, The English Tournament Imprese (New York, 1988) and his essay (as in note 64). See also his
Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London, 1987).
66 See Works, ed. A.H. Bullen, 2 vols. (London, 1888), vol. 2, 283.
67 See Young, The English Tournament (as in note 65), no. 441. Many other tournament imprese make use
of classical motifs, which may or may not derive from Alciato as an intermediary – for example, nos 63,
109, 162, and 461.
68 Published as The Diary of Baron Waldstein: A Traveller in Elizabethan England (London, 1981). The diary
is translated and edited by G.W. Groos.
69 The emblem “Mutuum auxilium,” depicting a blind man and a lame man, had been printed in the first
edition of Alciato’s emblems in 1531 (B2). The picture that Waldstein saw and described evidently still
existed in 1649, since it had been transferred at some time from Whitehall Palace to Hampton Court,
and had been listed in the inventory of Charles I’s possessions by Oliver Cromwell’s commissioners. See
O. Millar (ed.), The Inventories and Valuations of the King’s Goods, 1649–1651 (London, 1972).
70 See P.M. Daly, Alciato in England (New York, forthcoming).
71 See P.M. Daly and B. Hooper, “John Harvey’s Carved Mantle-Piece (c. 1570): An Early Instance of the
Use of Alciato Emblems in England,” in Andrea Alciato and the Emblem Tradition: Essays in Honor of Virginia
Woods Callahan, ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 1989), 177–204. Reprinted in the Saffron Walden Historical
Journal 3:6 (Autumn, 2003), 2–13.
72 See P.C. Bayley, “The Summer Room Carvings,” University College Recorder 3 (1959), 192–200; 4 (1959),
252–56; 5 (1960), 341–46.
73 These are reproduced in P.M. Daly, “England and the Emblem: The Cultural Context of English
Emblem Books,” in The English Emblem and the Continental Tradition, ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 1988),
40–41.
74 A.R. Young, “The Emblematic Decoration of Queen Elizabeth I’s Warship the White Bear,” Emblematica
3 (1988), 45–77.
75 See His Majesty’s Royal Ship: A Critical Edition of Thomas Heywood’s “A True Description of His Majesties
Royall Ship,” ed. A.R. Young (New York, 1990), reviewed by M. Bath in Review of English Studies n.s. 43
(1992), 555–57.
76 These are numbered 11 and 17 in Young’s list as published in Emblematica 3 (1988), 69–70.
77 We are indebted to Mrs. Joan Kendall in charge of the restoration of the tapestries at Hatfield House
for assistance in identifying some of the emblem motifs, which in the course of time have become worn
and faint. Mr. Harcourt Williams, librarian and archivist at Hatfield House, was also kind enough to send
his transcriptions of the mottoes.
78 This was established independently by both A.F. Kendrick, “The Elizabethan Sheldon Tapestry Maps,”
Burlington Magazine 51, 161, and E.A.B. Barnard and A.J.B. Wace, “The Sheldon Tapestry Weavers and
Their Work,” Archaeologia 78 (1928), 303.
79 In the later seventeenth century, French tapestry makers wove for the king two cycles of tapestries on
the subject of the Four Elements and the Four Seasons, each adorned by eight emblems. See M. Praz,
Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed. (Rome, 1964) (as in note 9), 334.
80 A fuller account, with juxtaposed illustrations of the tapestry emblems with their book sources, where
determinable, will be found in P.M. Daly, “The Sheldon ‘Four Seasons’ Tapestries at Hatfield House: A
Seventeenth-Century Instance of Significant Emblematic Decoration in the English Decorative Arts”
Emblematica 14 (2005), 251–96.
30
Andrea Alciato
81 See A.M. Fredro, Scriptorum Seu Tages et Belli Notationum Selecta: Accesserunt Peristromata Regum Symbolis
expresa (Frankfurt, 1660). The section dealing with the twenty tapestry emblems (reistromata), intended
as a mirror of the prince, is found on pp. 251–412 in the 1685 edition. This information comes from
the richly illustrated and informative catalogue of the emblem exhibition that was held in the Stift Gott-
weig in Lower Austria in 1977. The catalogue, which was still available in 1984, is entitled Stift Gottweig.
EMBLEMATA. Zur barocken Symbolsprache. Nieder-östereich: Stift Gottweig, 1977. Fredro’s work is item
no. 21.
82 M. Bath, “Emblems from Alciato in Jacobean Trencher Decorations,” Emblematica 8 (1994), 359–70.
See also M. Bath and M. Jones, “Emblems and Trencher Decorations: Further Examples,” Emblematica
10:1 (1996), 205–10.
31
2
RIPA, THE TRINCIANTE
Cornelia Logemann
As a form of literary and pictorial expression, personifications have circulated since antiquity but
they became increasingly significant in various media throughout Europe from the late medieval
period onwards. In text, image, and theatre, human figures repeatedly came to exemplify abstract
concepts. Yet few works had as great an impact on the depiction of personifications as Cesare
Ripa’s Iconologia, which first appeared in 1593. Little is known about the author. He was born
between 1555 and 1560 in Perugia. While writing the Iconologia, Ripa worked as a trinciante for
Cardinal Lorenzo Salviati in Rome.1 He probably died 1622. These few known facts about Ripa
stand in stark contrast to the rich contents of his book, which, with some additions, became
his life’s work.2 The first edition (from 1593), dedicated to Cardinal Salviati, describes a few
hundred personified abstract concepts in alphabetical order (Fig. 2.1). The author addresses his
readers with an extended foreword, where he gives a detailed explanation of his purpose: he is
interested in those images that signify different things as can be seen with the eyes. In the proemio
(the programmatical introduction), the reader is informed as to how allegorical images should
be developed, and this is followed by the main part of the work, which has the descriptions of
such imagini.
As a handbook for dilettantes, artists, and literati, the imagini of the Iconologia eventually
appeared in countless other contexts. Individual personifications were disseminated shortly after
the publication of the second edition. By the middle of the seventeenth century, translations
of the text had appeared in many European languages and spurred the multiplication and dis-
semination of the Iconologia. It appeared in the New World and became an indispensable book
for artists.3 Even today, a standing human figure having some unusual attributes in art as well
as kitsch, in political cartoons as well as everyday culture, carries Ripa’s visual signature and can
easily be identified as a personification. It is possible that this success was probably less due to
the intellectual influence Ripa displayed in his Roman milieu than to the fortunate circumstances
of his book’s reception – and the concept of allegorical personification, which offered an easier
approach to the hidden meanings in paintings and other artwork than the emblematic literature
of that era. For the beholder, the emblem is a complex interaction of text and image and requires
more knowledge and intellectual effort than the long-established technique of personification
allegory. The first edition of the Iconologia from 1593 was made up of a series of alphabetically
arranged descriptions of abstract concepts that could be envisaged as personifications. Many of
the figures listed there were already well established in Western visual culture but they adopted
32
Ripa, the trinciante
Figure 2.1 Title page from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia 1603 (University Library of Heidelberg).
an entirely new appearance thanks to Ripa’s description. Natura, for example as found in Alain
de Lille’s (d. c. 1202) writings, appears as a foster mother referring to ancient pagan traditions in
Ripa’s catalog.4 Several other figures in the Iconologia departed entirely from the medieval tradi-
tion. In his proemio, Ripa attempted to outline a system for the invention of personifications, and
consequently, he changed the medieval pictorial tradition for many abstract concepts.
The success of his system was due to a number of factors. Ripa received a papal privilege for the
first edition, so that his creations would be safe from unlawful copying for ten years.5 After those
years had passed, the edition illustrated by Lepido Faeij and released in 1603 evidently lacked the
earlier work’s protection, as E. Leuschner has suggested.6 These circumstances may have contrib-
uted to the wide dissemination of that work. Another edition of the Iconologia appeared in Padua
in 1611, but without the support of the original author, which, in turn, sparked the publication in
1613 of a further edition by Matteo Florimi in Siena. Soon thereafter, translations, such as the 1643
French translation by Jean Baudoin, accelerated the dissemination of Ripa’s Iconologia.7
Ripa’s Iconologia obviously addressed a serious gap. The earlier emblem books that had emerged
in the course of the sixteenth century and the various print series of virtues, vices, months, and so
forth resulted in a proliferation of types that, in turn, gave rise to the need for standardization or
some kind of overview. The underlying cultural technology – the use of personifications, that is,
anthropomorphic sign carriers – had been in use since antiquity. As a visual type they had been
superior to related forms of expression, such as emblems. In this way, Ripa’s book was the culmi-
nation in the history of personifications in Western Christendom. The wide dissemination of the
33
Cornelia Logemann
Iconologia suggests that there was a need for a systematic overview of personifications throughout
Europe8 – even fresco cycles of the sixteenth century used inscriptions to unveil the meaning of
painted personifications, as can be seen in the series of painted personifications in the Villa d’Este.
The Iconologia fundamentally transformed the use and interpretation of personifications,
including the contemporary understanding of personifications from before 1593 (or 1603). In art
history, the rediscovery of the Iconologia in the early twentieth century also changed the attitude
toward medieval allegorical personification.9 The book came to be regarded as a pivotal work for
understanding allegorical images of the past. Mâle, one of the foremost French art historians (see
the essay on Mâle elsewhere in this publication), is the starting point for research on Ripa. Émile
Mâle’s 1927 report, “La clef des allegories peintes et sculptés,” was the first study to show how
important Ripa’s book was in the history of art.10 A few years later, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl
(see the essays on Panofsky and Saxl elsewhere in this volume) began work on the “Lexikon für
den Maler und den vornehmen Mann,” as it was then called, while Erna Mandowsky, a doctoral
student of both men, submitted a thesis in 1939 that examined the sources and influence of Ripa’s
Iconologia.11 The published work of Gerlind Werner, who had studied with Karl August Wirth
in Munich, stands alongside these scholars. These studies have also been critically examined by
Elizabeth McGrath, who especially emphasized Ripa’s limited intellectual opportunities. But the
proemio of Iconologia contradicts the image of Ripa as trinciante.12 The Iconologia was reprinted in
the 1970s and this once again spurred an interest among art historians. Ernst Gombrich had pre-
viously called attention to personifications and their meaning through an art historical analysis
beginning with Cristoforo Giarda’s Icones Symbolicae.13 Except for that work, personifications
were largely unnoticed until recently as they were widely considered to be a less than original cat-
egory of allegory. Ripa’s work has primarily been used as a reference book. Forays in the field of
literary criticism have also brought added attention to personifications.14 Ripa’s Iconologia has also
been addressed in a number of recent studies. For example, Stefano Pierguidi examined the mod-
els for the Iconologia, while Sonia Maffei has studied the sources and structure of Ripa’s work.15
Ripa’s work and its sources

While the first edition of the Iconologia from 1593 still had a manageable number of abstract
concepts, the illustrated edition from 1603, which was naturally more popular, had 684 entries
accompanied by 151 woodcuts.16 The two editions differed with respect to the orientation of
their contents: in the illustrated Iconologia (1603) some of the abstract concepts, such as the differ-
ent regions of Italy, the elements, the continents, the seasons, nymphs, and so forth, were pooled
together. In all probability, these groupings may reflect a new way of handling personifications
in the arts, as they were increasingly inserted as symmetrical arrangements into larger programs
and decorative borders. Scholars have meticulously studied the possible sources, from which Ripa
drew his imagini, as well as the environment in which the work was created.17 Pierio Valeriano
and Andrea Alciato’s (discussed elsewhere in this volume) increasingly popular emblem book
had a significant impact on the work. Yet the concept behind the Iconologia differs from that
underlying the emblems and imprese, whose invention and elaboration were a principal concern
to Ripa’s contemporaries.
For Cesare Ripa, man was the measure of all things. From this belief he returned to late medieval
personifications that had been popularized in a variety of media. This recourse to Aristotle or rather
to an Aristotelian-scholastic philosophy also appears in his creation of individual figures, while the
proemio mentions the four reasons: causa materialis, causa efficiens, causa formalis, and causa finalis.18
Beside this theoretical foundation, Ripa often cited his contemporaries’ pictorial inventions. The
Discorso sopra la Mascherata della genealogia degli déi by Baccio Baldini is mentioned frequently, and
34
appears to account for a considerable amount of Ripa’s imagery.19 During the sixteenth century,
there are several approaches to allegorical personification which might have influenced Ripa’s work.
Between 1541 and 1547, Cosimo Bartoli focused on Dante’s allegorical inventions,20 and Francesco
Marcolini in his Sorti intitolate giardino d’i pensieri (from 1540) also offers a series of personifications.21
Ripa also mentioned Anton Francesco Doni’s Pitture several times, which, although less systematic
than Iconologia, had already attempted in 1564 to describe twelve concepts with pictures. Even
earlier sources played a role in the creation of the Iconologia: Ripa studied several other medieval
authorities by way of Francesco Barberini’s Documenti d’Amore – that is, besides Boethius, Petrarch,
Dante, who probably migrated into the Iconologia through manuals and handbooks.
In his proemio Ripa emphasizes the exemplary nature of antiquity and gave priority to ancient
images over modern inventions. While Ripa looked mainly to Italian art and ancient works, the
eventual dissemination of his work north of the Alps also had an impact on the visual language
there. Apart from iconography, the Iconologia also transformed the structure of allegorical person-
ification, which had primarily been a literary phenomenon. The creation of personifications in
the plastic arts had been altogether different – a repetitive process. Even the relatively mechanical
deployment of personifications in painting is likely the result of standardization that followed
Ripa’s Iconologia. It is possible to see how the engraver’s copies of ancient deities and other favored
themes quickly became popular in various media at the French court in the sixteenth century. As
a result, it is possible to see how ancient deities as well as virtues and vices by Italian and Dutch
engravers were introduced into French art. Besides the dissemination of these visual prototypes,
the short descriptions for Ripa’s imagini were also widely dispersed. The earliest influence of the
Iconologia outside of Italy most likely dates to 1595 and is found in the personifications of Provi-
dence, Honor, and Vigilance on a small plate by the painter Jacque Boulvène, who was based in
Toulouse.22 Jean-Claude Boyer has suggested that it is probably the earliest visual treatment of
the 1593 edition of Ripa’s handbook.23
How the Iconologia was generally used when it first appeared can only be guessed at.24 The
general suspicion that it was more frequently used by dilettantes and less by artists would seem
to be true especially for the first edition, though decades later the Iconologia eventually became an
essential component in every artist’s library.25 At the end of the sixteenth century, there certainly
was a need for such a compendium, considering the overcomplex allegorical tableaux produced
for entries and court festivals. Shortly before the Iconologia, the print series, which stimulated the
exchange of iconography across Europe and created a seemingly endless supply of expressive
possibilities, fulfilled a function similar to that of Ripa’s book. But the stimulus to create pictorial
cycles was also taken up in other book projects and many of the allegorical themes were rehashed.
The publication of this type of book underwent a boom with the development of the printing
press. Lists of personifications or of mythological-allegorical themes were aimed at a certain target
audience.26 In the preface to his Hécatomgraphie (1544), Gilles Corrozet highlighted the possibility
of finding useful material there: “Chascune hystoire est d’ymage illustrée. . . . Aussy pourront
ymagers et tailleurs, Painctres, brodeurs, orfévres, esmailleurs, Prendre en ce livre aulcune fantaisie”
(Every story is illustrated with an image. . . . so image-makers and sculptors, painters, embroiderers,
goldsmiths and enamel artists, will find inspiration in this book).27 The Prosopographia by Philippe
Galle was also a synopsis of the personifications. In its afterword, that work also addresses the same
target audience as Corrozet’s emblem book.28 He, too, addresses painters, sculptors, engravers, and
literati, so this obviously turns into a commonplace. It is also noteworthy that, in contrast to the
Iconologia, the Prosopographia contains only those personifications that were considered unusual,
which is why the cardinal virtues and the liberal arts among others do not appear there.
The difference between common visual allegories and those that only gradually disclosed their
hidden meaning to the viewer is evident when those that predate the Iconologia are examined. At
35
Cornelia Logemann
the end of the fifteenth century, allegories by artists such as Mantegna (Virtue and Vice, British
Museum, PD, pp. 1–23) and Giovanni Bellini (Four Allegories, Galleria dell-Accademia, 595
a-d) are more cryptic and enigmatic and only gradually reveal their subject matter to the viewer.
The pleasure of deciphering the enigmatic pictures and, consequently, the audience’s reaction
gave personifications another place in the rhetoric of images as was the case after the publica-
tion of Ripa’s Iconologia. The descriptions of personifications in allegorical literature of the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are in marked contrast to Ripa’s structured explanation of
every concept and its form. The clear allocation of a body as well as its attributes enabled the
viewer to quickly recognize the personification. The onus on the artist who used the Iconologia
seems to have been less with inventing personifications than with implementing the known. This
might be interpreted as developing out of the use of images in the counter-Reformation and the
necessity to produce clear and unambiguous allegorical images.
Personifications in Europe before Ripa

As a form of expression lying between text and image, personifications in Europe underwent
many changes. Since the Middle Ages, only a few Latin allegorical texts are found on either side
of the Alps that would have allowed the essential features of the virtues and vices to circulate. First
among them was the Psychomachia by Prudentius as well as the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii by
Martianus Capellas. Ripa consulted some of these works in addition to Francesco da Barberino’s
Documenti d’Amore. Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban, evidently allowed Ripa to use a copy
of the Documenti that was in his possession.29 For example, Francesco da Barberino, who reflects
extensively on the interaction between semiotic forms of expression in text and image, also felt
the need to create pictures.30 The complex interpretation of the twelve virtues in the Documenti,
through which divine love is acquired, should, according to him, not only be explained with
images but also have their meaning extended:
Although not a painter by profession, with the aid of (divine) mercy the necessity of
love for the illustrator of these figures has made me so; because no painter in those parts,
that is, where I wrote the book, actually understood me; it can now continue following
my direction and be in better shape.31
Da Barberino probably drafted the Documenti during a stay in Provence, which in turn raised
the problem as to how personifications might work across language barriers. Francesco da Bar-
berino also discussed the difficulty of creating pictures of abstract concepts.32 Even though he
designed specific virtues, he also provided an overarching virtus generalis – with the knowledge
and great trepidation that he would also need to create a new image, which others might not
be able to do.33
It is possible to detect the influence of certain works across the main language barri-
ers in vernacular literature. Although the visual arts have generally been assessed from the
perspective of Italian allegorical texts – a tradition dominated by Dante, Petrarch, and their
contemporaries – it is important to remember that the Roman de la Rose influenced Italian
allegorical literature of the late Middle Ages as well. And as the allegorical pilgrimages of
Guillaume de Deguileville and Insular literature from Chaucer to Peacham show, the paths of
particular personifications are far more ramified than they seem at first glance. The prehistory
of Ripa’s Iconologia, therefore, encounters a number of difficulties. From the outset, it would
be expected that the personification would illuminate the allegory from a literary point of
view. Two fundamental problems arise from this perspective: first, many of the criteria that
36
had earlier developed were inappropriate for pictures – the direct transfer of particular terms
from contemporary rhetoric into pictorial rhetoric only reinforced this tendency.34 Second,
research has so far tended to focus on Italian art and on the production of allegories, which
culminate in Lorenzetti’s frescoes in Siena or Giotto’s allegories of virtues and vices. Giotto’s
personifications in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua or those on the campanile in Florence are
undoubtedly important turning points in the history of pictorial personifications. But the role
of local influences on many of those forms has often gone unnoticed – especially as Dante35
is often used as a source on the general use and appraisal of personifications in the Middle
Ages.36 The question as to whether Dante in his Vita Nova makes a general theoretical state-
ment on personifications, which he calls figurae, requires scrutiny and not just from a textual
perspective.37 Besides the literary tradition, it is also important to consider their relationship
to vision, because the figurae are not just linguistic creations but are also articulations of visual
memory as well as visual experience. If we consider, for example, the unusual incarnations of
the three theological virtues in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Maestà now in the Museo Civico in
Massa Marittima, it is clear that the Sienese painter must have dealt with issues of presentation
and mediation of allegorical pictorial content.38
If, however, the mutual dependence of different image concepts within literary tradition is
factored in, it is possible to find that an entirely different perceptual mechanism may work for
Italian pictorial allegories than can be applied to other parts of Europe. In these, it is possible
to detect a new interest in the allegorical means of representation and with it, a contempora-
neous reshaping of older personifications. In a study on the iconography of virtues and vices,
Émile Mâle noted the fundamental differences between French and Italian art, which for him
was due to the fact that there were far fewer personifications of virtues in French art of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than in Italy.39 Mâle cited the widespread practice of using
personifications of the virtues on Italian tombs, a practice that was first adopted in France by
Michel Colombe in the cathedral of Nantes and which was spread by his imitators.40 Yet the
designs of these personifications in art can be derived from sources other than pictorial tradi-
tions. The canons of Christian Latin literature that had developed in late antiquity, the same
period of the Psychomachia, were eventually interrupted by the development of rich allegorical
literature in the vernacular. The extensive descriptions of personifications in these texts are
also sporadically found in images. It was felt that such dazzling figures with unusual attrib-
utes could not be depicted. During the fifteenth century, this situation changed, especially in
France, with the emergence of more precious illuminated manuscripts that included unusual
personifications in illuminations. At the same time in Italy, personifications were visually
depicted in other media.41 In France, even long-established iconographies were reshaped and
accentuated with the addition of new and unusual attributes. Émile Mâle drew attention to
this practice as found in a manuscript on virtues and vices in which the four cardinal virtues
were depicted in an entirely new way. This “new iconography” of cardinal virtues was not
a singular phenomenon. It must have astonished viewers with the modernity of the figures’
attributes, which would have been understood through the accompanying inscriptions. It has
to be born in mind that personifications were kept alive by constantly adding and inventing
new figures. In this manuscript with several different treatises, the illustrated four cardinal
virtues with their accompanying explanations are certainly unusual.42 One of the four female
figures has the unusual attributes of bridle, glasses, windmill, and clock. The personified Tem-
perantia explains in verse:
Whoever follows the clock, considers time in everything he does. Whoever carries the
bridle in his mouth, says nothing that has to do with evil. Whoever has spectacles before
37
Cornelia Logemann
his eyes, sees the things around him better. The spurs indicate that Respect teaches boys
good manner, and the windmill that supports your body shows that it partakes in no
excess at all.43
The appearance of these unusual attributes runs as a leitmotif throughout several cycles of illus-
trations, which, as Mâle has already noted, gives new garments and unusual accessories to the
seven virtues and this shows the changing function of personifications for the viewer. For exam-
ple, the Éthiques d’Aristote (translated by Nicole d’Oresme), which is now preserved in a mid-
fifteenth-century illustrated manuscript in Rouen, has seven curiously garbed female figures in
one miniature.44 Each of them wears a different, elaborate costume and headdress. The figures’
awkwardly oversized headgear, such as the nesting pelican on Caritas or the ship above Hope,
seems to negate the laws of physics and the physical limits of the human body. They stand
on plinths that also double as attributes of their essential characteristics. Neither do the bases
offer the figures a firm ground, and instead they are symbolic in nature: while Caritas stands
on a burning stove, Hope, with a ship balanced on her head, perches on a delicate filigree cage,
home to a small bird. These features attract the viewer’s attention: not only are the figures unu-
sual combinations of elements, but also they visually convey tremendous instability, and not
without reason, as these balancing acts inscribe themselves on the viewer’s mind. These
personifications were designed as imagines agentes in the truest sense, for while they remain
unmoved, they, nevertheless, suggest movement. Just as Justice employs astonishing acrobatics
in balancing a sword upright on her thumb, so, too, must the viewer seek and maintain a sense
of balance. It is no accident that a number of text-image combinations are found in which
allegorical figures are precisely explained by the author and then stabilized as it were with
an accompanying miniature. Émile Mâle considered these “bizarre attributes” a welcome
reinvention of the virtues, as in previous centuries, they were frequently presented to the
viewer with only a bland label, and identifiable blasons, but were otherwise monotonous in
appearance.45 Yet Mâle (as well as many subsequent studies) did not consider that this accu-
mulation of virtuous props could be found in other media. Text and image are often seen
as traditionally linked with each other, and this often results in an implicit impulse to search
for the best forms of expression, while contemporary perception is completely lacking. At
the very best, the surviving sources offer a selective or fragmented picture of medieval sto-
rytelling and the everyday handling of images. Such performative and oral interpretations of
personifications may also contain simple transitional elements that mainly attempt to mediate
between written and visual allegory. The revival of personifications which may have first
happened in morality plays, and later in profane court festivals, has been overlooked, and yet
they are an essential element for assessing the role of personifications in the late medieval and
early modern imagination.
The wealth of ideas influencing the form of various personifications also led to a confronta-
tion between the textual and the visual in those authors who used fictive images in their allegor-
ical texts. It is more difficult and more of an effort to visually represent mute poetry and poetry
as thought of by Simonides of Ceos. During the Renaissance, these tendencies occasionally led to
irony when it came to representing personifications. Battista Fiera’s (1469–1538) fictive dialogue
Justitia Pingenda has Momus, the ancient god of mockery, while Mantegna explored the options
to represent Justitia, whose design contemporaries recognized as arbitrary. Fiera also considers
how creative invention is equally a literary as well as an artistic task.46 Fiera’s text clearly reflects
on long traditions, while at the same time he ironically summarizes the central problems involved
in creating personifications – a point already noted by medieval authors such as Guillaume de
Deguileville. This ongoing invention of personifications in various media became an important
38
means of expression among late medieval and early modern authors. G. Agamben has shown the
important role that painted pictures played in the imagination and memory of the late Middle
Ages. Such pictures were especially important when dealing with personifications.47 The creation
of allegorical images in literature is repeatedly paralleled in painting and other media. In this con-
text, D. Kelly has noted the importance of the central commentary in the widely disseminated
Echecs moralisées, where the builder or painter has a full picture of his project’s final shape well
before finishing it:
In the objects we see made by art we perceive that the craftsman, desirous of making
certain objects in a reasonable manner, first applies his intention and conceives before-
hand in his mind the form of what he wishes to make. Then follows Imagination,
wherein the aforesaid form is impressed and portrayed. Then the hand and chisel come,
or the brush, which complete the object in conformity with the aforementioned steps.
For just as the carpenter’s chisel or the painter’s brush conforms to the hand that directs
it, the hand moves in accordance with the Imagination, and the Imagination in con-
formity with the figure or form which the principal craftsman intends.48
The processes underlying the creation of a personification in text and image are, therefore,
analogous. The concept and creation of the figure occupy the creator’s imagination prior to its
realization but are also something perceptible to the viewer. If personifications in literature and
painting are understood as reflections of a higher, more divine knowledge, then they seem to act
a posteriori the underlying concept. This analogy for the production of allegorical texts was obvi-
ously not insignificant, at least in the development of late medieval allegorical works. Michael
Randall has emphasized its importance for allegorical texts from Molinet to Jean Lemaire de
Belges. Referring to Thomas Aquinas and his use of painting as a metaphor, Randall describes
the relationship between subject and image:
Although the painting is seen first, it is preceded ontologically by its subject, and only
the latter can be said to resemble the former. To say that the subject is like painting
reverses the underlying ontological relationship of prior and posterior and destroys the
notion of participatory analogy altogether.49
The theoretical stance of literati on images needs to be considered as well as the analogous rela-
tionships that occur in the production of painted allegories. The mental image of a concept exists
before the painted picture of that concept.
Since the late Middle Ages in French-speaking regions, painters and men of letters repeat-
edly reflected on the relationship between painting and literature, which can seem especially
contentious in the case of personifications. Jean Lemaire de Belges provided a subtle and
detailed portrait of the balance of power between literature and visual art in the dialogue
between Nature, Rhetoric, and Painting in his Plainte du Désiré. In real life, his friendship with
Jean Perréal should be viewed in this context, because, as in his other poems, he uses the topos
of the new Apelles, in order to emphasize not only his admiration for the art of painting but
also his commitment to it as the “sister art” of rhetoric.50 That his dialogue occurs between
personifications of the arts reflects the evolution of the personification in visual culture. Jean
Lemaire de Belges’s Plainte du Désiré gives us insight especially into the relative positions of
literature and painting in statements made by the personifications of Paincture and Rhétorique.
Painting puts Dame Rhétorique in her place with the topos of ineffability, but later Painting
takes an appropriate form of expression as a mute mourning poem for Louis of Luxembourg,
39
Cornelia Logemann
at which the personified Rhetoric strikes back.51 Even if Rhetoric, as Jean Lemaire de Belges
represents her, achieves a partial victory, because she convinces with greater eloquence, Painting
can also display her power by mentioning her most famous practitioners in France, Flanders,
and Italy. She has nourished all of them at her breast – a topos borrowed from notions of a
nourishing Nature or Wisdom as foster mother.52 Referring to Apelles and Parrhasios, Jean
Lemaire de Belges bridges the gap between his own day and antiquity, which was then held
up as the standard for the arts.
All of these various lines merge in Ripa’s Iconologia. He explains concepts through images –
both described and, after 1603, depicted in woodcuts.53 Ripa’s Iconologia was also indebted to
many personifications from antiquity, while those figures that had no ancient equivalents were
assigned new outfits. By effectively fixing iconographies, Ripa’s imagini occasionally superseded
preexisting iconographic traditions, while at the same time it also homogenized personifications
that had previously been differentiated in areas north and south of the Alps.
Building the canon

Francesco da Barberino had already complained in his Documenti d’Amore that while writing
in Provence, he could not find a painter who could understand him. His treatise on Love,
which he designates as Mater Virtutum, thus impinges on the canonical borders, with the
naked Amor Divino turning out to be an unusual version of Caritas.54 Yet this shows that the
personifications that had survived through the Middle Ages were not reduced to a uniform
set of appearances.55 The Iconologia largely standardized these figures. A brief look at Cari-
tas, one of the most common personifications in visual culture, demonstrates the significant
impact that Ripa had on the development of personifications in general. The 1603 edition
of the Iconologia describes Caritas three times and is accompanied by two woodcuts, which
illustrate two of his three descriptions.56 He first describes a female figure with a baby in her
arms and two small children who grasp both her arm and garment. The youngest suckles
the bare-breasted female figure. As the text explains, a flame representing the brightness and
intensity of love also appears over her head. Ripa gradually explains the separate components
in this incarnation of Caritas. Ripa describes her robes as red, while referring to the bride in
the Song of Songs. The three children are the three powers of Caritas (thereby demonstrating
the superiority of Caritas over other virtues) (Fig. 2.2). Parallels for this form of Caritas can
be found elsewhere, such as the monochrome design by Filippino Lippi in the Strozzi chapel
in Santa Maria Novella in Florence. It seems to have been the most influential type. While
Ripa did not illustrate the second personification of Caritas, it is based on a long iconographic
tradition. This one has a flaming heart in her right hand and a child on the left. These com-
mon topoi reflect the survivals of a shared textual and visual tradition. The presence of the
child here can be explained as a citation from Matthew 25:40: “What you have done to the
least of my people, you have done to me.” The accompanying text also refers to the flaming
love of God, while Caritas’s red robe is identified with the color of blood in an allusion to
Paul. Cesare Ripa offers a third possible way to picture Caritas. This final option is in the
tradition of the Christian trees of virtues, which appears as an olive tree in the 1603 edition.
The withered tree, which enables new growth, can be explained by the use of the image in
imprese. In this passage, Ripa explicitly notes an invention by Isidoro Ruberti, who was in the
service of Cardinal Salviati. Ripa explains that Ruberti, as an act of charity, sponsored the
education of his nephews and other young men in Rome. This prompted the inclusion of this
representation of Caritas in Ripa’s work, but it also may have been included in an effort by
40
Figure 2.2 “Caritas,” from Ripa, Iconologia 1603, 64 (University Library of Heidelberg).
Ripa to get the benevolence of a potential sponsor.57 The visualization of Caritas runs against
the principles that were emphasized in the preface to the Iconologia as the human body was
not the center of this representation. This woodcut disappeared from subsequent editions of
the work, although the description of the imprese did not.
The descriptions of Caritas reflect pictorial formulas, as found mainly in Italian art, but which
were also known in other areas in Europe. The descriptions move between divine and neighborly
love. The heart in the hand of Caritas in Ripa’s second description can be seen in Giotto’s Caritas
in the Arena chapel. Other depictions of flaming love are to be found in other media, such as in
the works of Andrea Pisano and Giotto, who also broach the motif of the ignis caritatis. Ambrogio
Lorenzetti had Caritas – recognized by a flaming heart in her hand – preside over other virtues
in his Maestà in Massa Marittima. Apart from these pictorial references, it is also possible to
imagine a set of established personifications that could be found on the stage in contemporary
morality plays.
41
Cornelia Logemann
Although less frequently studied, personifications of virtues had already been widely cir-
culated much earlier, as in the so-called Tarocchi by Mantegna (which were neither made by
Mantegna nor intended as tarot cards), but which circulated in many different versions in
Europe. In this didactic set of cards, Caritas appears with a pelican and a flaming heart – a con-
cept which is probably related to French art of the fifteenth century, but which is also found in
Italian compendia.58 Ripa’s Iconologia binds all these forms of expression into a canon, while his
images of concepts and their systematic organization (according to the four causes mentioned
in the proemio) appear to preclude alternatives. What users of the Iconologia ultimately made
from this iconographic tradition in other media is another story. To what extent, for example,
did personifications of Caritas in panel painting escape Ripa’s influence and acquire entirely
different attributes and appetites?59
Many of the concepts pictured by Ripa have complex histories that are often hidden by the
charisma and power of his work. Besides the figures that Ripa himself devised as well as those,
such as Bellezza, which were created according to the prescribed directives in the proemio, per-
sonifications as forms of expression flourished especially during and after the late Middle Ages.
Before Ripa, personifications had been in wide circulation throughout Europe as both text and
image, and in the theater. Their inspiration and form, however, changed significantly after 1593.
If the handbook predetermined their attributes, then it was the task of artists to include these
abstract ideas into the local pictorial logic of their own compositions.
Notes
I would like to thank Andrew Griebeler for the translation and Colum Hourihane for his helpful comments.
1 As such Ripa (a pseudonym for Giovanni Campani) was responsible for cutting the meat for Salviati’s
table. The first edition of the Iconologia was published by G. Gigliotti in Rome: Cesare Ripa, Iconologia
overo Descrittione dell’imagini universali cavate dall’ antichita et da altri luoghi, da Cesare Ripa, . . . Opera
non meno utile che necessaria à poeti, pittori et scultori per rappresentare le vitii, virtù, affetti et passioni humane
(Rome, 1593).
2 For further details about his role in Salviati’s household see C. Stefani, “Cesare Ripa ‘Trinciante’ (Un
letterato alla corte del cardinal Salviati),” Atti del Convegno Sapere e/è potere. Bologna 13–15 aprile 1989, 3
vols. (Bologna, 1991), II: 257–66; C. Stefani, “Cesare Ripa: New Biographical Evidence,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990), 307–12.
3 See A. Roy, “L’Iconologia de Cesare Ripa ou la description de l’allégorie,” Le texte de l’oeuvre d’art, ed.
Roland Recht (Strassbourg, 1998), 33–43.
4 C. Ripa, Iconologia Overo Descrittione Di Diverse Imagini cauate dall‘antichità, et di propria inuentione (Rome,
1603), 351: “(‘Donna ignuda, con le mammelle cariche di latte, et con vn‘ auoltore in mano, come si
vede in vna Medaglia d’Adriano Imperatore, essendo la Natura, come diffinisce Aristotile nel 2. della
Fisica’), principio della cosa, oue ella si ritroua del moto, et della mutatione, per la quale si genera a ogni
cosa corruttibile” (“Nude woman, with milk pouring from the breasts, and with a vulture in her hand
as can be seen in a medal for Hadrian the imperator, being Nature as defined by Aristotle in his second
book of physics”).
5 E. Leuschner, “Ripas Rom, Ripas Roma. Verfahren und Kontexte visueller Kodifikation im Jahr 1593,”
Cesare Ripa und die Begriffsbilder der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. C. Logemann and M. Thimann (Berlin/Zürich,
2011), 149–65, see 159.
6 Leuschner, “Ripas Roma” (as in note 5), 160.
7 J.B. Baudoin, Iconologie où les principales choses qui peuvent tomber dans la pensée touchant les vices et les vertus
sont représentées sous diverses figures (Paris, 1643).
8 See Roy, “L’iconologia” (as in note 3), with a list of the European editions of the Iconologia.
9 A. Fenech-Kroke, Giorgio Vasari: La Fabrique de l’Allégorie: Culture et Fonction de la Personnification au
Cinquecento (Florence, 2011), 6–7 describes how the Iconologia fixes the rules for inventing personifications –
and how even Ernst Gombrich interprets the personifications before the Iconologia through the lens of
Cesare Ripa’s book.
42
10 E. Mâle, “La clef des allégories peintes et sculptées au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle: I. En Italie,” Revue des
deux mondes 39 (1927), 1er Mai, 106–29; “La clef des allégories peintes et sculptées au XVIIe et au XVIIIe
siècle: II. En France,” Revue des Deux Mondes 39 (1927), 15 mai, 375–94.
11 E. Mandowsky, Ricerche intorno all’Iconologia di Cesare Ripa (Florence, 1939).
12 G. Werner, Ripa’s Iconologia: Quellen – Methoden – Ziele (Utrecht, 1977); E. McGrath, “Review of Werner,
Gerlind: Ripa’s Iconologia: Quellen – Methode – Ziele, Utrecht 1977,” Art History 6 (1983), 363–68, here
366. About the proemio see T. Leinkauf, “Analysen zum Vorwort der Iconologia,” in Cesare Ripa und die
Begriffsbilder der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. C. Logemann and M. Thimann (Berlin/Zurich, 2011), 23–40.
13 C. Giarda, Bibliothecae Alexandriae icones symbolicae (Milan, 1626). E.H. Gombrich, “Personification,”
in Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500–1500: Proceedings of an International Conference Held
at King’s College, Cambridge, April 1969, ed. R.R. Bolgar (Cambridge, 1971), 247–57; E.H. Gombrich,
“Icones Symbolicae: Die Philosophie der Symbolik und ihr Einfluß auf die Kunst,” in Das symbolische
Bild. Zur Kunst der Renaissance, ed. E. Gombrich (Stuttgart, 1986), 150–232, 275–84. For allegory as
visual concept see Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning, ed. C. Baskins and L. Rosenthal
(Aldershot, 2007); Die Oberfläche der Zeiche: Zur Hermeneutik visueller Strukturen in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed.
U. Tarnow (Paderborn, 2014).
14 J.J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge, 1994).
15 S. Pierguidi, Dare forma humana a l’honore et a la virtù: Giovanni Guerra (1544–1618) e la fortuna delle figure
allegoriche da Mantegna all’Iconologia di Cesare Ripa (Rome, 2008); P. Pierguidi, “Guivanni Guerra and the
Illustrations to Ripa’s Iconologia,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1999), 158–75. Cesare
Ripa e gli spazi dell’allegoria: Atti del convegno, Università degli Studi di Bergamo (9–10 settembre 2009), ed. S.
Maffei (Naples, 2010).
16 Werner, Ripa’s Iconologia (as in note 12), 9–10.
17 Vincenzo Cartari e le direnzioni del Mito nel Cinquecento, ed. S. Maffei (Rome, 2013); S. Maffei, “Le Fonti
Negate dell’Iconologia: I contribute di Vincenzo Cartari, Domenico Delfino, Giovanni Battista Rinaldi,
Eustathius Macrembolites e un soprendente apporto di Théodore de Bèze,” in Cesare Ripa e gli Spazi
dell’allegoria, ed. S. Maffei (Naples, 2010); L’ “Iconologia” di Cesare Ripa: fonti letterarie e figurative dall’an-
tichità al Rinascimento; atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Certosa di Pontignano, 3–4 maggio 2012, ed.
M. Gabriele, C. Galassi, and R. Guerrini (Florence, 2013), 131–61; J. Müller, “Cesare Ripa und die
Gegenreformation,” De zeventiende eeuw 11 (1995), 1, 56–66; E. Leuschner, “Cesare Ripa et les masques
de l’Imitation,” in Masques, mascarades, mascarons, ed. F. Viatte, D. Cordellier, and V. Jeammet (Paris, 2014),
167–79.
18 Werner, Ripa’s Iconologia (as in note 12), 11; Leinkauf, Analysen (as in note 12), 35. Ripa, Iconologia 1603
(as in note 4) describes this topos as Man is the measure of all things, mainly focusing on Aristotle.
(“Percioche, si come l’huomo tutto è misura di tutte le cose, secondo la commune opinione de Filosofi,
e d’Aristotile in particolare, quasi come la definition è misura del definite, cosi medesimamente la forma
accidentale, che apparisce esteriormente d’esso, può esser misura accidentale delle qualità definibili,
qualinque si siano, ò dell anima nostra sola, ò di tutto il compost.”) For this anthropomorphic form in
comparison to emblem books, see R. Dekoninck, “Between Fiction and Reality: The Image Body in
the Early Modern Theory of the Symbol,” The Anthroporphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and
Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts, ed. W. Melion, B. Rothstein, and M. Weemans (Leiden,
2015), 323–40.
19 Pierguidi, Dare forme humana (as in note 15), 81.
20 See Fenech-Kroke, Giorgio Vasari (as in note 9), 49, on Bartoli’s work entitled Ragionamenti accademici sopra
alcuni luoghi difficili di Dante.
21 See Fenech-Kroke, Giorgio Vasari (as in note 9), 51–64.
22 J.C. Boyer, “Trois peintres au temps de la Ligue: Noël Gasselin, l’‘anonyme Magnin,’ Jacques Boulvène,”
in Peindre en France à la Renaissance: Fontainebleau et son rayonnement, ed. F. Elsig (Milan, 2012), 107–21,
here 114: (“La somme de cinquante écus à lui ordonnée pour avoir fait un grand tableau peint à l’huile
où sont peints la Providence, Honneur et Vigilance, avec certains vers escrits en latin et lettres grecques
expliquant l’énigme et interprétation de l’histoire peinte audit tableau, fixé et cloué sur la cheminée
du consistoire des conseils [. . .]”), et au dessous d’icelle escrit les noms et surnoms des huit messieurs
de Capitouls de la présente année, avec leurs armoiries et millésime, et doré le bord dudit tableau tout
autour, la Ville ayant fourni l’ or (“The sum of fifty écus was given to him to have a large painting in oil
executed where Providence, Honneur and Vigilance are painted, with several verses in Latin and with
Greek letters explaining the obstacle and interpretation of the history painted in that tableau, attached
to the chimney of the council hall”).
43
Cornelia Logemann
23 J.C. Boyer, “Boulbène, Ripa, Richeome,” Revue de l’Art 92 (1991), 42–50. Boyer also sees, however, the
influence of Dutch artists, such as Marten van Heemskerck among others.
24 M. Thimann, “Cesare Ripa und die Begriffsbilder der Frühen Neuzeit. Einige Stichworte zur Ein-
führung,” Cesare Ripa und die Begriffsbilder der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. C. Logemann and M. Thiman (Berlin/
Zürich, 2011), 9–21.
25 Thimann, “Cesare Ripa” (as in note 24), 19. Roy, “L’iconologia” (as in note 3).
26 See, for example, S. Pierguidi, “Un anonimo repertorio di personificazioni della fine del Cinquecento,”
Studi Romani 53 (2005), 51–93, and at the beginning of the sixteenth century, several manuscripts of
Henri Baudes Dictz moraux pour mettre en tapisserie can be found in the French-speaking countries; see
A. Bässler, Sprichwortbild und Sprichwortschwank: Zum illustrativen und narrativen Potential von Metaphern in
der deutschsprachigen Literatur um 1500 (Berlin, 2003), 64.
27 “Chascune hystoire est d’ymage illustrée . . . Aussy pourront ymagers et tailleurs, Painctres, brodeurs,
orfévres, esmailleurs, Prendre en ce livre aulcune fantaisie.” See V. Notin, “Les émailleurs limousins à
la Renaissance: de l’interpretation à la composition,” Poètes et artistes: La figure du créateur en Europe au
Moyen Age et à la Renaissance, ed. S. Cassagnes-Brouquet and M. Yvernault (Limoges, 2007), 339–57,
here 339.
28 Philippe Galle, Cornelius Kiel, and Théodore Galle: Prosopographia, sive, Virtvtvm, animi, corporis, bonorvm
externorvm, vitiorvm, et affectvvm variorvm delineation, sixteenth century.
29 Werner, Ripa’s Iconologia (as in note 12), 59.
30 F. Egidi, “Le miniature dei codici Barberiniani dei Documenti D’Amore,” L’ arte 5 (1902), 1–20 and
78–95, I documenti d’amore di Francesco da Barberino secondo i manoscritti originali, ed. F. Egidi, 4 vols. (Rome,
1905–1927).
31 Egidi, “le miniature” (as in note 30). 2: “sic dicas quod etsi non pictorem designatorem tamen figu-
rarum ipsarum e fecit necessitas amoris gratia informante. cum nemo pictorum illarum partium ubi
extitit liber fundatus me intelligeret iusto modo. Poterunt hinc et alij meis servatis principiis reducere
meliora.”
32 R. Freyhan in “The Evolution of the Caritas Figure in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948), 68–86, notes that the concept of charity
used by Francesco da Barberino in the Documenti was not transferable into the French-speaking
regions.
33 For the difficulties of depicting the virtus generalis see C. Logemann, “Personifikation und die Stufen
des Erkennens: Das Beispiel spätmittelalterlicher Tugenddarstellungen,” Die Oberfläche der Zeichen: Bild-
allegorien der frühen Neuzeit in Italien und die Hermeneutik visueller Strukturen, ed. U. Tarnow (Paderborn,
2015), 17–35.
34 The attempt to explain enigmatic allegories by the medieval theory of the integumentum might be diffi-
cult because the veils of allegory in literature differ considerably from visual allegory.
35 For Dante’s concepts of allegory see J. Pépin, La Tradition de l’Allégorie de Philon d’Alexandrie à
Dante, Études historiques (Paris, 1987); for the visual tradition see Fenech-Kroke, Giorgio Vasari (as
in note 9).
36 Some critical remarks about this focus on Dante from C. Kiening, “Personifikation: Begegnungen mit
dem Fremd-Vertrauten in mittelalterlicher Literatur,” Personenbeziehungen in der mittelalterlichen Literatur,
ed. H. Brall, B. Haupt, and U. Küsters (Düsseldorf, 1994), 347–87.
37 Kiening, “Personifikation” (as in note 36), 349, refers to S.A. Barney, Allegories of History, Allegories of Love
(Hamdens, 1979). Kiening interprets the theory of personification in the perspective of language –
which does not correspond to medieval perception of this mode of thinking; A. Strubel, La Rose, Renard
et le Graal: La littérature allégorique en France au XIIIe s (Paris, 1989), 68, differs between “plan linguistique”
and “représentation picturale.”
38 S. Dale, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘Maesta’ at Massa Marittima,” Notes in the History of Art 8:2 (1989), 6–11.
For allegory in public spaces see H. Belting, “Das Bild als Text: Wandmalerei und Literatur im Zeitalter
Dantes,” Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit: Die Argumentation der Bilder, ed. H. Belting and D. Blume
(Munich, 1989), 23–64.
39 É. Mâle, L’art réligieux de la fin du moyen âge en France (Paris, 1908); A. Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the
Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art: From early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century (London, 1939). For
the development of the virtues and vices also see C. Hourihane (ed.), Virtue and Vice: The Personifications
in the Index of Christian Art (Princeton, 2000).
40 Mâle, L’art réligieux (as in note 39), 343–52.
44
41 A. Fenech Kroke, “Continuité ou rupture? Le langage de la personnification dans les arts à l’aube des
temps modernes,” L’ allégorie dans l’art du Moyen Âge, ed. C. Heck (Paris, 2011), 371–86.
42 See BNF, Ms. Fr. 9186, fol. 304r, illustrating the treatise of Jean Courtecuisse on the four cardinal vir-
tues. For the sources of this text, see H. Haselbach, Seneque des IIII vertus: La “Formula honestae vitae” de
Martin de Braga (pseudo-Sénèque) traduite et glosée par Jean Courtecuisse (Bern and Frankfurt, 1975). There
are several other allegorical texts that have personifications with unusual accessoires, as for example the
Douze Dames de Rhetorique by Georges Chastelain or the Breviaire des Nobles by Alain Chartier and René
d’Anjou. Two other important allegorical works are the Livre du Cueur d’Amours Espris or the Mortifie-
ment de Vaine Plaisance.
43 “Qui a l’orloge soy regarde/ En tous ses faicts temps garde/ Qui porte le freun en sa bouche/ Chose ne
dict qui a mal touché/ Qui lunettes met a ses yeux/ Pres lui regarde sen voit mieux/ Esperans mentrent
que cremeur (creinte)/ Font estre le josne home meur/ Au moulin qui le coprs soutinent/ Nul exces
faire n’appartient.” See Haselbach, Seneque (as in note 42), and R. Tuve, “Notes on the Virtues and Vices,”
in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 3/4 (1963), 264–303, here 278f. See E.H. Gombrich,
Icones Symbolicae (as in note 13), 168f, and Mâle, L’art réligieux (as in note 39), 335.
44 Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 2, fol. 17v, c. 1454. See J.P. Antoine, “Ancora sulle Virtù: La nuova
iconografia’ e le immagini di memoria,” Prospettiva 30 (1982), 13–29.
45 Mâle, L’art réligieux (as in note 39), 336. Katzenellenbogen, Notes (as in note 39).
46 De Iusticia Pingenda. On the Painting of Justice. A Dialogue between Mantegna and Momus by Battista Fiera.
The Latin Text of 1515 reprinted with a Translation, an Introduction and Notes, ed. J. Wardrop (London,
1957). For a detailed description of the representation of virtues see Michael de Massa: “De quatuor
virtutibus,” especially the chapter about “Prudentia depingebatur”; see Tuve, “Notes” (as in note 43),
272, note 14.
47 G. Agamben, Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Turin, 1977).
48 See D. Kelly, Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love (Madison, WI, 1978), 33, from
a commentary of the Echecs Amoureux: “Es choses que nous veons par art faittes . . . nous veons que
l‘ouvrier qui voelt aulcunnes choses raisonnablement faire entent premierement et conchoit par devant
en sa pensee la fourme de la chose qu’il voelt faire. Et puis vient apres la fantasie ou la fourme dessusditte
est imprimee et pourtraite. Et puis la main et la doloire apres ou le pincel qui la chose parfait en la vertu
des choses dessusdittes. Car tout aussi que la doloire du carpentier ou le pincel du paintre se met a la
similitude de la main qui l’adresce, et la main le remeult a la similitude de la fantasie et la fantasie oultre
aussi a la similitude de la figure ou de la fourme que l‘ouvrier principal entent (Fol. 16v).”
49 M. Randall, Building Resemblance: Analogical Imagery in the Early French Renaissance (Baltimore/London,
1996), 44.
50 J. Frappier, “Jean Lemaire de Belges et les Beaux-Arts,” Actes du Cinquième Congrès International des
Langues et Littératures Modernes: Les Langues et Littératures Modernes dans leurs Relations avec les Beaux-Arts
(Florence, 1955), 107–14; F. Cornilliat, “Or ne mens”: Couleurs de l’éloge et du blâme chez les ‘Grands
Rhétoriqueurs (Paris, 1994); U. Bergweiler, Die Allegorie im Werk von Jean Lemaire de Belges (Geneva, 1976),
172 and 182.
51 P. Eubanks, “The Limits of Renaissance Aesthetics: Jean Lemaire de Belge’s 1504 Plainte du Désiré,”
Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 70:1 (2008), 147–55, here 147.
52 “J’ai pinceaux mille, et brosses, et outils,/Or et azur tout plein mes coquillettes;/J’ai des ouvriers
tant nobles et gentils,/Esprits soudains, augus, frais et subtils;/J’ai des couleurs blanches et vermeil-
lettes;/D’inventions j’ai pleines corbeillettes;/J’ai ce que j’ai, j’ai plus qu’il ne me faut,/Si n’ai point
peur d’avoir aucun défaut./Et si je n’ai Parrhase ou Apelles/Dont le nom bruit par mémoires ancien-
nes,/J’ai des esprits récents et nouvelets ;/Plus ennoblis par leur beaux pincelets,/Que Marmion, jadis de
Valenciennes,/Ou que Fouquet, qui tant eut gloire siennes,/Ni que Poyet, Roger, Hugues de Gand,/Ou
Johannes qui tant fut élegant./Besognez donc, mes nourissons modernes,/Mes beaux enfants nourris de
ma mamelle,/Toi, Léonard, qui as grâces supernes,/Gentil Bellin, dont les lossont éternes,/Et Pérugin
qui si bien coueleurs mêle./Et toi, Jean Hay, ta noble main chôme-elle ?/Viens voir Nature avec Jean
de Paris/Pour lui donner ombrage et esperits.” (Peinture describes the number of brushes and tools, she
has paste in precious colors of gold and azur and several noble workers. Instead of the famous Pharra-
sios and Apelles, she mentions contemporary French and Flemish artists such as Simon Marmion, Jean
Fouquet, Jean Poyet, Roger van der Weyden, as well as italian artists including Gentile Bellini, Perugino
or Leonardo, and again, Jean Lemaire’s friend Jean Perréal.) See P. Spaak, Jean Lemaire de Belges: sa vie,
son oeuvre et ses meilleures pages (Genf, 1975, repr. 1926), 26f.
45
Cornelia Logemann
53 See Leinkauf, “Analysen” (as in note 12); this relationship might be interpreted as the inversion of
ekphrasis.
54 N. Himmelmann, Ideale Nacktheit (Opladen, 1985), 40, n. 114, “Nudo l’o facto per mostrar com’anno/
Le sue vertù spiritual natura” (I have made him naked to show that his virtues are of a spiritual nature).
55 Freyhan, “Evolution” (as in note 32).
56 Ripa, Iconologia 1603 (as in note 4), 63–66.
57 Werner, Ripa’s Iconologia (as in note 12), 19.
58 Pierguidi, “un anonimo repertorio” (as in note 26), 58.
59 C. Weissert, “Personifications of Caritas as Reflexive Figures,” in Personification: Embodying Meaning and
Emotion, ed. W. Melion and B. Ramakers (Leiden, 2016), 491–517.
46
3
ADOLPHE-NAPOLÉON DIDRON
(Paris 1867–Hautvilliers 1906)
Emilie Maraszak
Iconographer and archaeologist Adolphe-Napoleon Didron, or Didron the Elder as he is some-

times known, is one of the fathers of medieval archeology in France. In the nineteenth century,
the Middle Ages experienced a second life that some French people have called “Renaissance”
but which is also termed “revival” in England. Didron was one of the main actors in this
movement, working toward the rediscovery of the period and its artistic inheritance. As an
archaeologist he took an active part in conservation projects for those works that survived the
Revolution. A new approach to monuments is found around this time and is recognized for its
historical, aesthetic, political, and symbolic values. Didron was fully involved in national issues.
His articles denounced carelessness and vandalism – the fate of many medieval works – and he
spent much of his time involved in administration and consulting other figures involved in the
preservation of historic monuments. Above all else, he encouraged the revival of a Christian art
which reproduced the Gothic style of thirteenth-century France. This was approached through
his research on Christian iconography and his work that allowed him to contribute to the
restoration of medieval monuments and to apply restoration techniques to what he considered
the archaeological truth. Didron had an assertive personality and was an insatiable researcher, a
demanding craftsman, and a bold and determined entrepreneur. Throughout his career, he was a
man criticized by contemporary archeologists and architects whose actions and mistakes he crit-
icized in his many articles. In his obituary published in 1865, his friend Ferdinand de Guilhermy
emphasized his selflessness, his dedication to his friends, and his bad temper.1
Career choices
Adolphe-Napoleon Didron was born to a prominent family on March 13, 1806, in Hautvilliers,
near Reims. In this provincial environment, he began classical studies in Catholic schools in
Meaux firstly, and later in Reims. Didron arrived in Paris in 1826, where he received a university
degree in classical literature. Graduating as an archaeologist, he furthered his studies in law, med-
icine, and natural history in his own leisure time.
According to Guilhermy’s obituary of Didron he was fascinated early in his career by monu-
ments, especially the cathedral of Reims, a Gothic masterpiece and the coronation site of the kings
of France. While looking at this work “his mind was driven to discover the hidden meaning
of the stone figures.” It was a monument which left a lasting impression on him – a monument
47
Emilie Maraszak
which he described in an article published in L’Artiste in 1841 as a “paradise of Christian art.”2

He really discovered his vocation and his passion for medieval art when he met Victor Hugo,
the author of Notre-Dame de Paris, in 1831. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and
a rich relationship. Didron explained in the introduction to his Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne
grecque et latine, published in 1845,3 that Victor Hugo was his mentor as well as his “illustre ami.”
He proudly explained that he became an archaeologist thanks to the support of the writer. The
rich exchange of letters between the two men was published by Didron, who did not hesitate to
show this friendship in order to gain credibility and acceptance within Paris’s intellectual circles.4
A methodology for archaeological studies

At the start of his career Didron established a work methodology that raised archeology to the
status of a “science.” He experienced this rigorous approach on his first study trip in Normandy
in 1830–1831, and used it until his death. First and foremost, he pursued as many documents
and studies as existed, prior to going to his research area. For his research in Normandy, Guil-
hermy explained that he read the lives of the saints, the Bollandists, and studies by Mabillon,
Montfaucon, and Ruinart. This initial research enabled him to plan the study trip. Didron was
as great a traveler as Prosper Mérimée and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Aside from any
official mandate, and with the support of the Comité historique des Arts et Monuments and its local
correspondents, his travels allowed him to observe and describe works from the Middle Ages not
only in France but throughout Europe. He went to Greece in 1839, Germany in 1843, England
in 1846, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and Spain in 1848, and Italy in 1848 and 1858. He
considered himself an “explorer of the past,” as he wrote to Victor Hugo. During his journeys,
Didron declared that the best way to get where he needed to go was by foot. As he observed
the monument before him, he documented his observations in travel diaries from which extracts
were published in his articles in the Annales archéologiques and elsewhere. The fact was that he
did not know how to draw what he saw. As such, his descriptions were written while he studied
the monument or work of art, and never a posteriori. In this long and fastidious process words
were chosen for their appropriateness and specificity and replaced the visual image. Guilhermy
used the expression “to photograph with words” to describe Didron’s approach. Throughout his
lifetime, he was distrustful of pictures, and was rigorous when choosing an artist for images to
illustrate his studies. He favored technologies such as stamping or engraving from photography
(as in the Annales Archéologiques in 1853) which faithfully reproduced his observations. He also
attempted to codify a descriptive scheme and frequently stressed the importance of establishing
a rigorous methodology. He defined the order to be followed in observing and describing, as for
example with churches and cathedrals, which were to start with the façade and to proceed to the
apse. As a result, Didron was one of the pioneers in the creation of technical terms, which he
laid out in his volume Iconographie chrétienne, Histoire de Dieu.5 In this book, every iconographic
motif was explained so that its meaning could be understood. Subsequently, in the Annales
Archéologiques he expanded many of these subjects, giving a better description and understanding
of the theological meanings of these decorative programs: elements of liturgical furnishings,6
the Madonna and Child 1844,7 the Crucifixion in 1845,8 and the days of Creation.9 For him,
this rigorous methodology was specifically developed to establish well-founded scientific results.
Didron was not only interested in the history of the monument. He studied its geographical
environment and analyzed statistics relating to monument types. The principal objective of this
technique was to identify all the buildings in a specific region, such as the Marne, for exam-
ple. The data relating to these studies was gathered during his own travels but also by his local
contacts. His methodology in describing a monument enabled Didron to write a monograph,
48
Adolphe-Napoléon Didron
which was at this time slowly developing as a new literary genre. His study on Chartres Cathedral
was commissioned by the Comité historique des Arts et Monuments10 and was one of the first such
works to appear. He developed a new approach for this type of study which was part history and
part description. Didron also frequently wrote the descriptive sections in iconographic studies
undertaken by colleagues. This new kind of study/report was used once again by Didron in his
book Monographie de Notre-Dame de Brou,11 published in 1842.
A late and limited official recognition

He was renowned for his intransigence and this hindered his career. Typical was his criticism
of the lack of administrative involvement in issues relating to the preservation of national mon-
uments. This prevented him rising up in the administrative ladder. After his first journey to
Normandy, Didron opposed Ludovic Vitet, the inspector of historic monuments, about the
poor state of conservation of the monuments in a letter published in the review L’Européen.12
The official answer was very disappointing for him when the secretary of the inspector, and not
Ludovic Vitet himself, explained that lack of funding was the reason why all national heritage
could not be preserved. Offended and frustrated to see that his opinion was not more valued,
in his subsequent articles Didron denounced the inspector. It may have been that Didron saw
himself as a better candidate for the post, but when Ludovic Vitet was appointed general secretary
to the Ministry of Trade in 1834, Prosper Mérimée, a member of the Conseil d’État, was given
Vitet’s post over Didron.
In 1833, François Guizot, the minister of public education, proposed to King Louis-Philippe
that a commission for the “general publication of all important and still unpublished materials
of the history of France”13 be established. This first commission was officially established on July
18, 1834, and a subcommittee for the publication of unpublished monuments was created on
January 10, 1835. It was within this subcommittee that the history of arts developed considerably.
The Ministry placed this section, which he wanted to develop into an independent commission,
under his patronage. It was his successor, the count of Salvandy, who created the Comité historique
des Arts et Monuments, which was first recognized in 1837. The mission of this committee was to
study every French monument in order to guarantee their preservation and to develop a global
history of the arts in France. Didron was actively involved as secretary to the committee. The
Comité historique des Arts et Monuments was chaired by the count of Gasparin and included Victor
Hugo, the architect Albert Lenoir, Prosper Mérimée, the count of Montalembert, and Ludovic
Vitet as members. It also enjoyed a strong network of French correspondents both in France and
abroad.
From 1835, Didron had a central position in this organization, which supported archaeolog-
ical research in France. He frequently spoke at and for local learned societies and was one of the
best informed archaeologists on the conservation of French monuments. He produced the writ-
ten records of the committee and wrote its official correspondence and reports for the Ministry
of Public Education. From 1840, Didron also edited the Bulletin Archéologique and Guilhermy
attributed the writing of the first four volumes of this scientific review to Didron.14 The archae-
ologist undertook various studies for the committee, one of the best known being an inventory of
monuments in the center and south of the country. It was here that he first statistically analyzed
monuments. In 1839, he was involved in the important descriptive work on Chartres Cathedral.
This work is primarily associated with Jean-Baptiste Lassus, who was in charge of drawing the
plans and ornamentation, with Emmanuel Amaury-Duval responsible for drawing the statuary,
and with the count of Salvandy for the history of the cathedral. Didron wrote the descriptive
study. After a prolonged period, research was finally abandoned and the monograph published
49
Emilie Maraszak
some thirty years later contained only pictures with some descriptions.15 Other studies followed:
a report on Notre-Dame de Paris, which Didron partially published in L’Univers,16 and an inven-
tory of monuments in the district of Reims for which Hippolyte Durand provided the drawings
and Pierre Joseph Varin the historic study, published in several articles of the magazine L’Artiste
in 1841.17 The succession of the Second Empire in 1852 ended his career in this official organi-
zation as Didron was finally removed from the committee for political reasons.
The founder of the Annales Archéologiques

and the Librairie archéologique
After his first success as editor of the Bulletin Archéologique, Didron realized that his official recog-
nition was very limited. Supported by some colleagues and profiting from a vast network of con-
tacts, he created a new review, the Annales Archéologiques, Encyclopédie de l’art au Moyen Âge, par les
principaux artistes et archéologues, where he could freely express his point of view. He edited the first
twenty-four volumes, from 1844 until his death in 1865, and saw it as an independent review –
not only independent from official committees and ministries but also designed for the publica-
tion and transmission of scientific articles on medieval art. By establishing this editorial approach,
Didron announced an ambitious project: “to know the whole past is to plan and prepare the
future.”18 He knew that the success of the Annales Archéologiques was guaranteed since no other
review could compete on equal terms. Articles in the Bulletin Archéologique were limited in size
and scope, and the Revue Archéologique focused on classical antiquities. The publication was man-
aged by the omnipresent Didron. He wrote more than half the articles, chose those he could not
write, and corrected them as well. He was helped by a group of regular authors – Jean-Baptiste
Lassus, Ferdinand de Guilhermy, the baron Ferdinand de Roisin, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, among
others. Together, they brought a real dynamism to the research and encouraged the development
of the archaeological discipline. The magazine appeared as an open forum, within which Didron
expressed his passions. He often wrote polemical articles to denounce the actions and papers of
his colleagues, architects or archaeologists – those who did not share his point of view and those
who competed with him. In the first edition of the Annales Archéologiques, for example, he crit-
icized Désiré Raoul-Rochette for his opinions on the lack of decoration in Gothic churches.19
This article was Didron’s first work for the Annales Archéologiques, and the first of his many pro-
tests and denunciations on the restoration of historic monuments.
The Annales Archéologiques was also a forum where he could freely write and satisfy his curi-
osity. His themes were many and varied. Didron wrote about his main research issue – Christian
iconography – as well as the preservation of historic monuments or medieval architecture in
France. The review also included articles by him on music and medieval poetry,20 artists of the
Middle Ages,21 Christian symbolism,22 the silversmith’s trade,23 stained-glass windows,24 and
travel stories.25 Didron submitted long extracts from his diaries and found new subjects to study
there. During his journey to Greece, he undertook a comparative on Greek and Latin Christian
art. His travels in Italy were mentioned in more than ten articles.26 In his obituary, Didron was
described as the first person to have studied Italian medieval monuments and artists, when in fact
he had treated only those of antiquity and the Renaissance.
While publishing the Annales Archéologiques, Didron founded a publishing house in Paris at
13 Rue Hautefeuille in 1845. This was the Librairie Archéologique and was under the direction of
his brother Victor, who was unfamiliar with archaeology. Didron again created an organization,
with human, material, and financial resources to work independently and publish his works,
according to his own rules. From its inception, the Librairie Archéologique edited the Annales
Archéologiques, and Didron’s other books, such the Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne,27 the Manuel
50
des œuvres de bronze et d’orfèvrerie du Moyen Âge,28 and works on stained-glass windows29 and on
the iconography of important Parisian monuments under the title Opera.30 Under the name of
his brother, Didron also became the publisher of other scientific archaeologists, including the
baron of Guilhermy, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Edmond de Coussemaker, the count of Vogüé,
Jean-Baptiste Lassus, Jules Labarte, Alfred Darcel, Félix de Verneilh, Ferdinand de Lasteyrie, and
later Édouard Didron, his nephew and heir. The Librairie Archéologique was Didron’s first success-
ful experience in the business world.
Christian iconography
The study of religious monuments, their sculpture and stained-glass, enabled Didron to under-
stand medieval ornamental programs as conscious and reasoned compositions, which he explained
thanks to medieval treaties. He saw cathedrals as the most accomplished manifestation of Chris-
tian art and analyzed their decorative programs in relation to theological programs intended to
moralize, educate, and guide the believer. For him the keys to understanding these programs were
to be found in the Bible and in Légende Dorée, as well as in encyclopedias, such as the Speculum
Universale of Vincent de Beauvais. Didron was the first scholar to unite the study of Gothic
cathedral architecture to great medieval texts to explain their construction and meaning. Using
this approach, he developed an archaeological language founded in Catholic thought which was
well located in the current of Christian universalism that had first appeared in the 1840s.
As well as his research on monuments and art of the Christian West, Didron wanted to go
back to the origins of Christianity by studying works of Greek Orthodox religion. He traveled to
Greece and Turkey in 1839 with three draftsmen, Paul Durand among them. He was particularly
interested in the monasteries of Meteora and Mount Athos, which became the subjects of several
articles that appeared in the Annales Archéologiques from 1844 to 1861.31 For him, Mount Athos
remained “the sanctuary of Greek art.” After this journey, Didron wrote the Manuel d’iconographie
chrétienne grecque et latine,32 which was a translation of a painting manual used for centuries by
Byzantine artists, to which he added his own comments. This guidebook, which was found in
Greece, allowed him to confirm his observations and assumptions. These looked at the continu-
ity of Byzantine iconography in its motifs and in the location of subjects within the church. In
spite of similar themes in the Western world, images changed totally from era to era, and differed
according to the region or country where they were made. He argued that, in Greece, artists were
slaves to theology and their work, which would be copied by their successors, was in fact copied
from painters who preceded them. Didron met Greek painters in churches and observed how
easily they reproduced secular motifs thanks to memory and experience. One of them told him
of the existence of a manuscript transmitted from master to pupil, the Painting Guidebook. After
some difficulties, he succeeded in ordering a copy and he took pleasure in telling the story in an
article of the Annales Archéologiques in 1845.33 Didron used this Byzantine painting guidebook for
his research when he compared Greek and Latin iconographies in order to prove that Byzantine
art did not inspire French Gothic art.
Gothic art as the golden age of Christian art

Didron defined thirteenth-century and Gothic art as the golden age of medieval art. He showed
that works of this period, such as the ornamental program of Chartres Cathedral, inspired by the
Speculum Universale of Vincent de Beauvais, were the results of ingenious compositions. He was
also proud to present this golden age as a French creation, and combined research and nationalism
in his approach.34 He was very close to the neo-Catholic ideas developed by his friend Charles
51
Emilie Maraszak
de Montalembert which defined the Middle Ages from the end of twelfth to the end of thir-
teenth century as the golden age of Christendom and an era marked by harmony between civil
and ecclesiastical societies. Gothic art was the height of Christian art between pagan antiquity
and the Renaissance. Didron rejected the vision of Gothic art as a dark and disorganized art that
prevailed in the Enlightenment, and continued into the nineteenth century. He emphasized the
order of Gothic compositions and insisted on the ingenuity of medieval artists and their complex
programs, which were adapted to the environment to create theological projects.
His opinion on restoration of monuments

In addition to his scientific publications, Didron actively defended the preservation of monuments
and was feared by architects who did their best to conserve and restore. He frequently denounced
what he considered to be acts of vandalism and highlighted renovation projects which he firmly
condemned. Didron was the leader of archaeologists in a debate between them and architects
on interventionism in architectural restoration. He understood monuments to be the outcome
of building campaigns that lasted several centuries, all of which worked into an organic unity.
Restoration, which attempted to bring the building back to its primary state, was a destructive
operation for Didron. He wrote that restoration would “destroy one half of the façade of Reims,
three quarters of the façade of Saint-Denis, the nave of the cathedral of Le Mans, the choir of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”35 In his view, to complete, destroy, or alter unfinished parts in the nine-
teenth century was another degradation. He denounced the idea in the Annales Archéologiques in
1851. This article focused on two spires on the towers of the cathedral of Reims, which would
render the monument more vulnerable than it already was.36 Instead of restoration, Didron
preferred consolidation and preservation of whatever state the building was in.37 He accused
Étienne-Hippolyte Godde of restoring Notre-Dame de Paris “as he wanted,” and reminded the
reader of damages which the architect had caused in restoring the churches of Corbie, Saint-
Germain-des-Prés, and Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. Didron also criticized other figures. These
included ministers who had sanctioned what he considered to be “destructions,” the inspector of
historic monuments, and his friend Albert Lenoir for the construction of the National Museum
for the Middle Ages that had been installed in the mansion of the abbots of Cluny (fifteenth
century) and built on the ruins of the Thermal baths of Cluny. Companies which Didron sub-
sequently founded and which were involved in restoring French monuments seem to contradict
his stated ideals of preservation, but Didron always used his scientific knowledge to justify the
authenticity of his creations.
Journalist, professor, and businessman

Didron was a jack-of-all-trades who sometimes adopted radical perspectives. He was famous
for his articles and his scientific reviews. However, apart from his archaeological research
and his official position within the Comité historique des Arts et Monuments, he had several
other jobs.
As a young man, Didron became a professor of history, which enabled him, together with
his friend Albert Lenoir, to devise an educational course at the Bibliothèque Royale. In 1838, the
president of the committee, Adrien de Gasparin, wrote to the Ministry of Public Education to
set up a course on Christian archaeology. Didron taught the iconographical component of this
course while Lenoir gave lessons on architecture. This program was published in several articles
of L’Artiste in 1839.38 Didron offered other courses in 1843. While professor at the Bibliothèque
Royale in 1838, Victor Hugo appealed to Minister Salvandy to offer the post of assistant librarian
52
at the Bibliothèque Royale to Didron. This job was to compile an inventory of miniatures in
medieval manuscripts. As it turned out Didron never took up this post for political reasons as the
curators of the department refused the decision of the ministry.
When he was very young, Didron also began a career in journalism and wrote for various
reviews. Once again, he defended his convictions, and created controversy. Reviews which
accepted his publications generated controversy in themselves and supported debates: L’Artiste,
L’Européen, Le Progrès Social, L’Univers, La Revue de Paris, La Presse, and Le Journal général de l’In-
struction publique. Didron could fulfill his scientific goals when he became editor of the Bulletin
Archéologique, which was the official review of the committee, as well as when he founded his
own magazine, the Annales Archéologiques. This publication was Didron’s biggest editorial suc-
cess, after what was a bad experience with La Liberté in 1832, a journal that stopped after only
six months.
Didron was also a businessman and succeeded in founding various companies. Reference
has already been made to the Annales Archéologiques as well as his publishing house, the Librairie
Archéologique. In 1848, he announced the foundation of a new company, the Agence Archéologique,
which was to focus on the arts. This company fully benefited from technological advances. He
created tools to answer existing demands for the repair and decoration of old churches, and
for constructing and furnishing new churches. The Agence Archéologique was strengthened in
1849 with the creation of a factory for stained-glass windows. In this company, he was joined
by Émile Thibaud, master glassmaker at Clermont-Ferrand, by Auguste Ledoux, who did the
drawings, and by his nephew Édouard. As he did not know how to draw, Didron needed
draftsmen to visualize his ideas and his iconographic programs. He also promoted his company,
explaining its objectives and accomplishments and creating its own gallery on Rue Hautefeuille
in Paris, which he defined as a “museum of archaeological industry.” It was a real showcase. The
art of stained glass was considered by Didron as archetypal to Christian painting and the repro-
duction of ornamental elements in glass from his scientific research served his vision of Gothic
art. In 1839, he took part with Lassus for the first time in the creation of stained-glass win-
dows for the Passion window of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, which was copied from the axial
stained-glass window of Sainte-Chapelle. The factory was successful and Guilhermy mentions
the most important works supervised by Didron between 1851 and 1867.39 These include the
great figures in the apse at Saint-Mammès of Langres, the Triumph of Christ at the Cathedral
Saint-Sauveur of Aix-en-Provence, the theological virtues window at Saint-Éloi at Dunkerque,
a window at Saint-Maclou church at Pontoise exposed during the World Exhibition of 1866,
a Tree of Jesse window at Sainte-Anne’s chapel, Saint Eustache’s legend and the story of Saint-
Louis at Notre-Dame-de-Paris, and windows for the new church Saint-Vincent-de-Paul of
Marseille. The company also worked for private orders, such as that for Cardinal Antonelli at
Rome, or a funeral chapel for M. de Surigny near Mâcon. In spite of many orders, some dis-
appointments arose. Didron had to compromise and accept craftsmen other than his partners
for drawing and glassmaking as well as with customer’s requirements. He was able to criticize
these in his articles, and it is clear that these works did not always adhere to his archaeological
research. In some cases he also had to stick to the style of the buildings he had to decorate and
thereby adapted iconographic programs.
The stained-glass factory was followed in 1858 by a fine art bronze foundry. Didron could
not apply the industrial methods he had experimented with in stained glass, because the cost of
materials and number of craftsmen necessary for production were prohibitive. However, some
works are referenced in his obituary, in particular the altar trapping for the chapel of the Madonna
of Saint-Roch church in Paris and for the altar of Notre-Dame-la-Grande in Poitiers, as well as
reliquaries for the cathedral at Nevers.
53
Emilie Maraszak
These factories, though, gave rise to a new artistic movement. Didron was seen to promote a
revival of Christian art, based on archaeological knowledge. His production was based on mod-
ern and industrial technologies, as well as artistic forms and ornamental programs combined with
historic truth. Didron and his vision joined the neo-Gothic movement. The aim of this move-
ment was to regenerate architecture and decorative arts through archaeological research. He was
not supported by many artists in his opinion that archaeological science guaranteed the harmony
of a monument. He preferred contemporary artists because they did not know much about res-
toration. As an archaeologist, Didron persistently tried to prove the superiority of Gothic art of
the thirteenth century. It was the Christian art of this period which he wished to revive.
His legacy
Didron died on November 13, 1867, in Paris. In much the same way he controlled his publica-
tions during his lifetime, he also set about to control his posthumous image. Guilhermy refers to
the fact that Didron collected everything about his life before dying. Thanks to his firm stances
and opinions, he was a strong personality completely devoted to his discipline. His papers show us
a man who controlled his means of communication and one who did the same for transmitting
his ideas. His articles range from scientific works to essays on current events, and the defense of
French monuments against vandalism and restoration. His radical positions are inclined to make
us forget the scientific progress of much of his research in the fields of description and under-
standing the ornamental programs of cathedrals and churches. Under his direction, the Annales
Archéologiques became an important review for the twenty years he wrote for it. His industrial
activities allowed him to take part in and develop the revival of Christian art which in essence
promoted the Gothic art of thirteenth-century France. When Catherine Brisac and Jean-Michel
Léniaud40 examined his papers and his involvement in restoration work, their conclusions were
negative. Didron himself would have been disappointed. If the Annales Archéologiques is accepted
as a scientific review, it is obvious that Didron published only papers that shared his opinion and
refused scientific debate. In the field of decorative arts, no work signed by him has come down
to us. Unlike those figures whom he saw as “competitors,” which include Prosper Mérimée,
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus, and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, whose work he tried to compromise,
Didron was almost completely forgotten soon after his death in 1867.
Notes
1 “Le cœur de l’homme était, chez notre ami, à la hauteur du talent de l‘écrivain, de l’imagination de
l’artiste. Ceux qui ne sont pas entrés dans son intimité ne pourront jamais apprécier tout ce qu’il y a
eu dans cette vie de vertu, de dévouement, d’abnégation personnelle. Sous une enveloppe un peu rude
peut-être, mais qui ne sied pas mal aux âmes de forte trempe, on découvrait une sensibilité exquise et la
disposition la plus affectueuse à venir en aide aux misères morales ou matérielles d’autrui.” F. de Guil-
hermy, “Didron,” in Annales archéologiques XXV (Paris, 1865), 377–95.
2 A.-N. Didron, “Reims,” in L’Artiste VII (Paris, 1841), 161–63, 176–79, 212–14.
3 A.-N. Didron, Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne grecque et latine (Paris, 1845).
4 A.-N. Didron, “Lettre à M. Victor Hugo,” in Annales archéologiques II (Paris, 1845), 36–37.
5 A.-N. Didron, Iconographie chrétienne. Histoire de Dieu (Paris, 1843).
6 A.-N. Didron, “Ameublement et décoration des églises,” in Annales archéologiques IV (Paris, 1846), 1–12.
A.-N. Didron, “Iconographie et ameublement d’une cathédrale,” in Annales archéologiques VIII (Paris,
1848), 315–30.
7 A.-N. Didron, “La mère et l’enfant,” in Annales archéologiques I (Paris, 1844), 211–22.
8 A.-N. Didron, “Le crucifix,” in Annales archéologiques III (Paris, 1845), 357–65.
9 A.-N. Didron, “Iconographie des cathédrales (le 1er jour de la Création),” in Annales archéologiques
IX (Paris, 1849), 41–57. A.-N. Didron, “Le second et le troisième jours de la Création,” in Annales
54
archéologiques IX (Paris, 1849), 99–111. A.-N. Didron, “Quatrième jour de la Création,” in Annales
archéologiques IX (Paris, 1849), 175–84. A.-N. Didron, “Cinquième jour de la Création,” in Annales
archéologiques IX (Paris, 1849), 232–37. A.-N. Didron, “Première partie du sixième jour de la Création,”
in Annales archéologiques X (Paris, 1850), 339–49. A.-N. Didron, “Création de l’homme et de la femme,”
in Annales archéologiques XI (Paris, 1851), 148–57.
10 A.-N. Didron, A. Duval, and J.-B.-A. Lassus, Monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres (Paris, 1842–1856).
11 A.-N. Didron and L. Dupasquier, Monographie de Notre-Dame de Brou (Lyon, 1842).
12 “Je vous conjure, Monsieur, d’avoir pitié de ces beaux débris, de ces admirables ruines, de ces monuments
magnifiques, et de les protéger contre le temps et les hommes.” A.-N. Didron, “Antiquités catholiques,”
in L’Européen, Journal des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 1 N° 3 (Paris, December 17, 1831), 46–48.
13 A.-N. Didron, “De la Commission des travaux historiques établie au ministère de l’Instruction pub-
lique,” Revue de Paris XLIX (Paris, 1838), 219–34.
14 Comité historique des Arts et Monuments, Bulletin Archéologique (Paris, 1840–1841, t. I; 1842–1843,
t. II; 1844–1845, t. III; 1846–1848, t. IV).
15 A.-N. Didron, A. Duval, and J.-B.-A. Lassus, Monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres (Paris, 1842–1856).
16 A.-N. Didron, “Feuilleton de L’Univers, Archéologie nationale, Restauration de Notre-Dame de Paris,”
L’Univers 88 (Paris, October 11, 1842).
17 A.-N. Didron, “Reims,” L’Artiste VII (Paris, 1841), 161–63, 176–79, 212–14.
18 A.-N. Didron, “Introduction,” in Annales Archéologiques I (Paris, 1844), 2.
19 A.-N. Didron, “Les anciens et les nouveaux archéologues,” in Annales Archéologiques I (Paris, 1844), 133–37.
20 A.-N. Didron, “De la musique au Moyen Age,” in Annales Archéologiques I (Paris, 1844), 36–40. A.-N.
Didron, “De la poésie du Moyen Age,” in Annales Archéologiques II (Paris, 1845), 36–40.
21 A.-N. Didron, “Artistes du Moyen Age,” in Annales Archéologiques I (Paris, 1844), 77–83, 117–21.
22 A.-N. Didron, “Symbolique chrétienne, La vie humaine,” in Annales Archéologiques I (Paris, 1844),
241–51. A.-N. Didron, “Symbolique chrétienne,” in Annales Archéologiques 8 (Paris, 1848), 1–17.
23 A.-N. Didron, “Reliquaire byzantin,” in Annales Archéologiques II (Paris, 1845), 299–303. A.-N. Didron,
“Orfèvrerie du Moyen Age (chandelier),” in Annales Archéologiques VIII (Paris, 1848), 312–15. A.-N.
Didron, “Ostensoirs du Moyen Age,” in Annales Archéologiques XI (Paris, 1851), 317–25.
24 A.-N. Didron, “Peintures sur verre,” in Annales Archéologiques I (Paris, 1844), 83–86. A.-N. Didron,
“Peintures sur verre,” in Annales Archéologiques III (Paris, 1845), 166–75. A.-N. Didron, “Vitrail de l’In-
carnation,” in Annales Archéologiques XII (Paris, 1852), 97–105. A.-N. Didron, “Vitrail de la Charité,” in
Annales Archéologiques XIV (Paris, 1854), 217–25.
25 A.-N. Didron, “Voyage archéologique en Grèce,” in Annales Archéologiques I (Paris, 1844), 29–36. A.-N.
Didron, “Promenade en Angleterre,” in Annales Archéologiques V (Paris, 1846), 284–308. A.-N. Didron,
“Huit jours en ’elgique,” in Annales Archéologiques IX (Paris, 1849), 237–40. A.-N. Didron, “Quelques
jours en ’llemagne,” in Annales Archéologiques XVIII (Paris, 1858), 301–10, 313–31.
26 A.-N. Didron, “Le Moyen Age en ’talie,” in Annales Archéologiques XIV (Paris, 1854), 341–53. A.-N.
Didron, “Le Moyen Age en ’talie,” in Annales Archéologiques XV (Paris, 1855), 51–61. A.-N. Didron, “Les
artistes du Moyen Age en ’talie,” in Annales Archéologiques XV (Paris, 1855), 112–22, 171–84, 365–72.
A.-N. Didron, “Sienne, la chapelle du palais municipal,” in Annales Archéologiques XVI (Paris, 1856), 5–26,
281–92. A.-N. Didron, “Le dallage historié de la cathédrale de Sienne,” in Annales Archéologiques XVI
(Paris, 1856), 338–60. A.-N. Didron, “Iconographie du palais ducal de Venise,” in Annales Archéologiques
XVII (Paris, 1857), 69–89, 193–217. A.-N. Didron, “Mosaïques de la cathédrale d’Aoste, Evangélistes
et fleuves du paradis,” in Annales Archéologiques XVII (Paris, 1857), 389–93.
28 A.-N. Didron, Manuel des œuvres de bronze et d’orfèvrerie du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1859).
29 A.-N. Didron, Verrières de la Rédemption à Notre-Dame de Châlons-sur-Marne (Paris, 1863).
30 A.-N. Didron, Iconographie de l’Opéra (Paris, 1864).
31 A.-N. Didron, “Les Météores,” in Annales Archéologiques I (Paris, 1844), 172–79. A.-N. Didron, “Le
Mont Athos,” in Annales Archéologiques IV (Paris, 1846), 69–87, 134–48, 222–38. A.-N. Didron, “Le
Vatopédi du Mont Athos,” in Annales Archéologiques V (Paris, 1846), 148–66. A.-N. Didron, “Le Mont
Athos et le Phalanstère,” in Annales Archéologiques VII (Paris, 1847), 41–49. A.-N. Didron, “Le Mont
Athos,” in Annales Archéologiques XVIII (Paris, 1858), 72–81. A.-N. Didron, “Le couvent d’Iviron au
Mont Athos,” in Annales Archéologiques XVIII (Paris, 1858), 109–25. A.-N. Didron, “Philothéou du
Mont Athos,” in Annales Archéologiques XVIII (Paris, 1858), 197–206. A.-N. Didron, “Le couvent de
sainte Laure au Mont Athos,” in Annales Archéologiques XIX (Paris, 1861), 27–39, 80–94, 126–37.
55
Emilie Maraszak
33 A.-N. Didron, “Histoire du Manuel d’Iconographie chrétienne,” in Annales Archéologiques II (Paris,

1845), 23–36.
34 “Didron a retrouvé son acte de naissance (l’art gothique) sur les bords de Seine, au cœur de la France,
et ce n’est certes pas pour notre pays un vain titre de gloire.” F. de Guilhermy, “Didron,” in Annales
Archéologiques XXV (Paris, 1865), 380.
35 J.-M. Leniaud, Jean-Baptiste Lassus ou le temps retrouvé des cathédrales (Geneva, 1980), 80.
36 A.-N. Didron, “Mélanges et nouvelles, Les flèches de la cathédrale de Reims,” in Annales Archéologiques
XI (Paris, 1851), 365–66.
37 “Je suis de ceux qui s’élèvent contre toutes les restaurations quelles qu’elles soient, aussi bien contre celle
de la Sainte-Chapelle que contre celle de Saint-Denis [ . . . ] Il faut réparer les monuments et non pas
les restaurer [ . . . ] La destruction s’attache sans relâche à nos monuments, aux plus importants comme
aux plus humbles [ . . . ] mais la restauration, qui ne vaut guère mieux, déshonore et dénature des édi-
fices bien plus importants encore.” A.-N. Didron, “Feuilleton de L’Univers, Archéologie nationale,” in
L’Univers (Paris, August 5, 1841).
38 A.-N. Didron, “Archéologie, Programme d’un cours d’archéologie chrétienne,” in L’Artiste Série 2, 1
(Paris, 1839), 241–45, 257–60, 272–74.
39 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises 6102.
40 “L’expérience d’un échec historique, l’échec d’un concept d’art chrétien et celui de son incarnation, le
néogothique.” C. Brisac and J.-M. Léniaud, “Adolphe-Napoléon Didron ou les média au service de
l’art chrétien,” in Revue de l’Art 77 (Paris, 1987), 33–42.
Selective bibliography
Books written by Didron

A.-N. Didron, Archeologie nationale, Rapport a M. de Salvandy, ministre de l’Instruction publique, sur la monographie
de la cathedrale de Chartres (Paris, 1839).
A.-N. Didron, Rapport sur les vitraux de Montfort-l’Amaury (Paris, 1839).
A.-N. Didron and L. Dupasquier, Monographie de Notre-Dame de Brou (Lyon, 1842).
A.-N. Didron, A. Duval, and J.-B.-A. Lassus, Monographie de la cathedrale de Chartres (Paris, 1842–1856).
A.-N. Didron, Iconographie chretienne: Histoire de Dieu (Paris, 1843).
A.-N. Didron, Manuel d’iconographie chretienne grecque et latine (Paris, 1845).
A.-N. Didron, L’Archeologie en Angleterre (Paris, 1851).
A.-N. Didron, Paganisme dans l’art chretien (Paris, 1853).
W. Burges and A.-N. Didron, Venise: Iconographie des chapiteaux du palais Ducal (Paris, 1857).
A.-N. Didron, Manuel des oeuvres de bronze et d’orfevrerie du Moyen Age (Paris, 1859).
A.-N. Didron, Quelques jours en Allemagne (Paris, 1859).
A.-N. Didron, Verrieres de la Redemption a Notre-Dame de Chalons-sur-Marne (Paris, 1863).
A.-N. Didron, Iconographie de l’Opera (Paris, 1864).
Critical bibliography
H. Nouguier, Memoire a consulter et consultation pour M. Arbanere, proprietaire de la manufacture de vitraux, a
Tonneins, contre M. Didron aine, de Paris, redacteur et editeur des Annales archeologiques (Paris, 1850).
F. De Guilhermy, “Didron,” in Annales archeologiques XXV (Paris, 1865) 377–395.
F. Coutan, Episode d’un voyage de Didron en Normandie durant l’ete de 1831; suivi d’une lettre a M.Vitet, inspecteur
general des monuments historiques (Rouen, 1906).
M. Dvořak, Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art (Notre Dame, 1967).
E. W. Kleinbauer, Research Guide to the History of Western Art (Chicago, 1982).
V. Costa, “L’iconographie d’Adolphe Didron: choix religieux, adaptation plastique,” in Annales de Bretagne
et des Pays de l’Ouest t. XCIII, n°4 (1986) 383–388.
C. Brisac and J.-M. Leniaud, “Adolphe-Napoleon Didron ou les media au service de l’art chretien,” Revue
de l’Art 77 (Paris, 1987), 33–42.
J. Nayrolles, “Deux approches de l’iconographie medievale dans les annees 1840,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts
128 (Paris, 1996), 201–222.
56
4
LOUIS RÉAU
Daniel Russo
Louis Réau, French historian of medieval art, was born in Poitiers on January 1, 1881, and died in
Paris on June 10, 1961. He studied literature at École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1900 and
Russian at the National Institute of Eastern Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). He taught
at the University of Paris, where he was a member of the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts, and
founded the French Institute in Vienna. From 1911 to 1914, he was head of the French Institute
in Saint-Petersburg.
Three core interests lay at the center of all his work in medieval as well as in the general
field of art history, and it is these which will be discussed in this essay. Firstly, he was par-
ticularly interested in the process of exchange and interaction between countries, especially
between France and Russia, where he sought to balance Germany’s position in Central and
Eastern Europe at the start of the twentieth century. His work looked at the concept of
French influence as exerted in these areas by artists and architects. From the field of for-
eign politics, he studied the concept of “expansion culturelle,” which was one of the domi-
nant themes of the period from 1900–1910. For him, this concept of “cultural expansion”
belonged to the field of international relations. His second major contribution to the field
of art history was the research he undertook on French monuments that had been destroyed
but which were known to have existed; in doing this he examined natural as well as historical
sites, and looked at the concept of “vandalism” as described in the Abbé Grégoire’s reports
and speeches on public monuments made to the National Convention of 1794.1 Thirdly, it
was as an iconographer and a historian of meaningful forms that Réau is still best known. He
broke with the conventions established by Émile Mâle (discussed elsewhere in this volume)
and his followers, such as Germain Bazin (1901–1990). Interestingly, Bazin, in his Histoire
de l’histoire de l’art (History of the History of Art), which was published in 1986, makes no
reference to any of Réau’s work.2 From the outset, it has to be admitted that Réau was not
widely appreciated because of his nationalistic, Catholic, and staunchly held beliefs.3 Above
all else, however, it is iconography which underpins these three lines of research undertaken
by Réau.
Réau was a pioneer in several respects, not least of which was his research into the field
of artistic relations between France and Eastern Europe. His particular interest in the field
of French cultural expansion especially in relation to art was published in several volumes.
57
Daniel Russo
Among these is his publication on German art L’art français sur le Rhin (Paris, 1908) as well
as his two cultural volumes on Cologne and Saint-Petersburg, which he considered to be
German towns. Neither did he neglect art and iconography in his work Peter Vischer et la
sculpture franconienne du XIVe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1909). While head of the French Institute
in Russia, he taught French literature and the history of French civilization according to a
program he himself had established4 and which also matched the expectations and wishes of
the French Slavic scholar Paul Boyer (1864–1949), who encouraged Réau in his initiatives.
Boyer was director of the School of Eastern Languages in Paris (from 1908 to 1936) and was
also to found the Revue des Études Slaves (Review of Slavic Studies)5 in 1921. For Réau, the
iconographical approach, as well as the broader artistic one, was part of the same process of
international exchange and, above all, of French hegemony. In 1925, in a book dedicated to
Paul Boyer, Réau wrote,
Parmi tous les pays d’Europe qui ont été au XVIIIe siècle tributaires du génie français,
aucun n’a accepté son hégémonie plus docilement que la Russie. [. . .] De même que
la Russie ancienne avait été pendant de longs siècles une province de l’art byzantin,
la Russie nouvelle est devenue, tout naturellement [my emphasis], une province de l’art
français, Paris a été pour Pétersbourg ce que Byzance avait été pour Kiev et Moscou.6
(Of all the European countries that were dependent on eighteenth century French
genius, none meekly accepted its hegemony over Russia. [. . .] Just as the old Russia had
been for centuries a province of Byzantine art, the new Russia became, quite naturally
[my emphasis], a province of French art, Paris became for Petersburg what Byzantium
had been to Kiev and Moscow.)
Between 1911 and 1914, he organized with his Russian colleagues a special exhibition on
nineteenth-century French art from the artistic movement called the Mir Iskovsstva in Rus-
sia, which was published in Apollon.7 Réau’s book of 1877 on Russian architecture was the
first such publication after that by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879). His Histoire de l’ex-
pansion de l’art français was published in five volumes between 1924 and 1933; in the fourth
volume, which dealt with South Eastern Europe, he discussed the arts and architecture of
Romania, from its beginnings to the twentieth century.8 This pioneering project dealt with
entirely new areas and subjects and aimed to be not only innovative but also universal in its
approach.9
When it came to the destruction and vandalism of French monuments, Réau argued for
the case of “lese-beauty,” a concept he related to that of “lese-majesty”; he wrote of this in
his Histoire du vandalisme: Les monuments détruits de l’art français (Paris, 1959).10 Some eleven
years earlier, in 1948, he published an essay on French churches from the same perspective and
also applied the same methodology in 1953 in his dictionary on technical terms in art and
archeology.11 Réau’s Histoire du Vandalisme answered a gap in the field as no comparable study
on this subject existed. This work aimed to be as comprehensive as possible and looked at the
origins of the term; the psychology of the vandals, the chronological divisions from the Middle
Ages to the twentieth century, including the Huguenots, the Age of Enlightenment, the French
Revolution, the First Empire, the Modern Age from 1814–1914, and finally the twentieth
century; he looked at the classification of monuments, as well as sites, and argued for principal
as well as secondary divisions. In using such an approach he reverted to the work undertaken
by naturalists, such as Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), in the fields of comparative anatomy and
paleontology.12 Réau classified monuments into two categories – religious and civic – and
he sought to understand the motives for the vandals’ actions: in this way, he distinguished
58
Louis Réau
blameless motives from those that were disreputable. This was not a linguistic turn, as it was
for André Grabar,13 but a scientific approach to the arts in their environments. In his intellec-
tual reasoning, Réau seems to be closely related to that of the French Jesuit Charles Cahier
(1802–1882), especially in his use of categorization and type. Earlier, Cahier had published
Mélanges of Archeology, History and Literature (Paris, 1848–1859) in four volumes, which is an
invaluable hagiographical study on the saints in religious art, their visual representation and
their place in popular imagination.14 Cahier’s study is very much based on the use of categories
and types, a characteristic which Réau also employed. Like Cahier, Réau also believed that all
art as well as everyday objects functioned in much the same manner throughout the world –
they had a kind of existential pluralism – and that it was the task of the scientist or observer to
read, describe, and then interpret.
In that way, iconographers needed to decipher the world. This was a common standpoint at
this time, as, for example, in Étienne Souriau’s (1892–1979) philosophy on the “modes of the
being of things” in society.15
Réau extended the field of iconography enormously in a series of publications which include
the Dictionnaire polyglotte des termes d’art et d’architecture (1953) and more significantly the Iconogra-
phie de l’art chrétien (Iconography of Christian Art) (1955–1959; repr. 1988), a monumental synthesis.
From every perspective this was a study which was the opposite of any work undertaken by
Émile Mâle. Réau did not simply undertake an iconographical reading of the arts in history, but
instead he placed them in the life of the forms. From that perspective his work was similar to
Élie Faure’s (1873–1937) Art Medieval (1911, republished 1921, 1924, and 1926), which was the
second volume in his Histoire de l’Art (1909–1927),16 as well as Henri Focillon’s (1881–1943)
Vie des formes (1934).
For Élie Faure, unlike Émile Mâle, there was no overriding religious nature to the Middle
Ages, which he saw as a less focused period. It was a period of Christianitas, and a distinct step
in the history of civilization, which was marked by group faith and collective civic respon-
sibility: the cathedral was not the property of the Church; it did not belong to Christianity
and instead it should be seen as an urban monument, the work of laymen in the city. Faure
explained in “La Cathédrale et la Commune,” which was published in the Grande Revue
(January 25, 1912):
Le Christianisme n’a le droit de réclamer la Cathédrale qu’en revendiquant avec elle

tout l’art contemporain du moment où elle apparut. Elle représentait une voix sans
doute, et la plus haute et la plus pure, dans la symphonie populaire. Mais elle n’était pas
toute l’architecture. [. . .] Ce qui fait la cathédrale, ce qui nous la rend sensible, c’est la
logique de sa structure et le sensualisme de sa décoration. Elle apparaît par là dans son
ensemble comme une insurrection des sens et de l’intelligence contre le christianisme
des apôtres et des pères de l’Église et la reprise de contact du peuple avec les formes de
la vie qu’ils avaient, depuis douze siècles, oubliées ou combattues.17
(Christianity did not have the right to claim the Cathedral only by also claiming
responsibility for all contemporary art from the moment it appeared. It no doubt rep-
resented a voice, the highest and the purest, in the popular symphony. But it was not
all architecture. [. . .] What makes the cathedral, and what makes us sensitive about it,
is the logic of its structure and sensuality of its decoration.
It appeared as a unified insurrection of the senses and intelligence against the Chris-
tianity of the Apostles and the Church Fathers and represented the resumption of the
people’s contact with ways of life that they had forgotten or fought against for twelve
centuries.)
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Daniel Russo
Faure also counteracted Émile Mâle’s beliefs about the twelfth- and thirteenth-century cathedral
as found in L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: L’art seul, according to the Council of Nicea,
art belonged only to the artist, as prescribed by the Fathers, when he proposed,
L’ordonnance nous indiffère, car nous savons qu’elle ne signifie pour les Pères qu’un
ordre extérieur et fini, et non pas la science vivante qui équilibrait, dans le cerveau des
architectes, les voûtes avec leurs supports.18
(We are indifferent about the layout, because we know that it only signifies an exter-
nal and finite order for the Fathers and not the living science which balanced the vaults
and their supports, in the architects’ minds.)
L’ordre ne compte pas, parce que nous savons qu’il ne veut rien dire pour les Pères,
seulement un ordre extérieur et fini, mais pas l’expérience vécue dans le cerveau des
architects, les voûtes et leurs supports.
(The Order doesn’t count, because we know that it doesn’t mean anything for the
Fathers, only an external and finite order, but not the experience envisaged in the archi-
tects’ minds, the vaults and their supports.)
In the endnote to his text, he made this point even clearer:
Viollet-le-Duc a soutenu des idées analogues à celles qui font la matière de cet article
dans son Dictionnaire d’architecture. Mais je crois apporter un certain nombre d’argu-
ments nouveaux. Je crois surtout utile de répondre à ceux de M. Émile Mâle, qui ne
cesse pas de confondre dans son livre le prétexte de l’œuvre d’art avec la nature même
de la vision plastique.19
(In his Dictionary of Architecture, Viollet-le-Duc supported similar ideas to those
which are the subject of this article. But I think I offer a number of new arguments. I
think it especially useful to respond to those of Mr. Émile Mâle, who never ceases to
confuse in his book the pretext of the artwork with the very nature of plastic vision.)
Réau adopted the same stance in the Iconographie de l’art chrétien as he had in his Histoire du van-
dalisme in 1959. In the first volume, where he discussed the methodologies of iconography, he
rejected Mâle’s idea that written documents could not be used to explain monuments or works
of art.
Bien au contraire pour lui (Réau): ses remarques (dans ses etudes) lui ouvraient d’au-
tres voies de recherché sans plus aucune relation de cause à effet entre les textes et les
oeuvres artistiques!20
(Quite the contrary for him [Réau]: his remarks opened up other avenues of research
without any more cause-effect relationship between the texts and the artistic works!)
At first, he was interested by what he called “L’appel de la vie’ or the call of life, and by what
he described as “anachronisms” within the religious image, such as those which resulted from
vernacular imagination in a theatrical set or in costumes. Similar to Focillon in the Art des sculp-
teurs romans (1931) and the Vie des Formes, Réau underlined the strength and power of aesthetic
sensibilities on sacred themes in religious art. As a result, he was preoccupied with changes,
distortions in forms, and their effects on the bigger visual Christian narrative as found in the
Bible or the saints. He discovered four factors which for him influenced the entire process, and
60
Louis Réau
he went back to the framework Focillon had discussed in his work on medieval sculpture: these
were the laws of the frame, of duality, of numbers, and of style. These factors allowed Réau to
understand why certain forms disappeared or why some merged with others, as well as why
some older forms were revived into a new thematic layout. Réau stated an iconographical fact
when he saw that, in some cases, these changes did not affect Old Testament subjects or the
iconography of the Evangelists as much as hagiographic iconography, which remained more
flexible and open to change.
Réau precise les légendes et le culte des Élus, et les caractéristiques des saints dans l’art.
Mais il admet clairement qu’il y a des exceptions à ces régles qu’il énonce parce qu’un
grand nombre des images des saints et des formes données à leurs légendes proviennent
d’autres cultes et d’autres histoires, selon un mécanisme interne de diffusion.21
(Réau is more specific about the legends and the religion of The Chosen Ones, and the
characteristics of saints in art. But he clearly admits that there are exceptions to these rules
that he lays down because a large number of saintly images and the way their legends were
molded come from other religions and other stories, and the way they were dispersed.)
Réau’s publication consisted of an introductory volume, two volumes on the Bible, and three
on the Saints. The introductory volume set out the grammar rules of Christian imagery in
the arts for all countries and for all periods, from Early Christian art to the Middle Ages,
then from the Sistine Chapel to the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, by Henri
Matisse (1869–1954). The first volume highlights two major contributions from Réau to
the history of Christian iconography: he firstly offers a new standpoint on what he calls
“symbolism’ as well as a wider interpretation of what can be called the “forces of the human
mind’ than is found in contemporary studies. Réau distinguished two symbolic concentric
circles, the first of which is the scholarly foundation of the interpretation – these are the
allegorical texts that can be used to read the iconography – an approach which belongs to the
French nineteenth-century tradition.22 Among the allegorical texts, he highlighted bestiaries,
calendars, and treatises on the liberal arts as well as those on the virtues and vices. For the
external forms, and figures, he studied medieval plays, liturgical rites, sermons, and the ver-
nacular audience. In his reading of Christian art, Réau was an encyclopedist who looked for
the meaning of art as the exegesis of Christian texts, following the interpretatio Cristiana:23 he
underlined the typological concordantia between the two Testaments, one sequence referring
to another one, and he added further interpretations from sources such as the Histoire univer-
selle or the bestiaries or calendars. He provides such a reading for the altarpiece by Nicolas
of Verdun (1130–1205) at Klosterneuburg Monastery.24 He developed his analysis not on the
analogical ground between text and image, such as Émile Mâle did, but on the intercrossed
imagery extracted from a mutually shared cultural fund. Through this, he wanted to study all
civilization throughout history. When he explained mysticism in the texts, in the arts, or on
the stage, during the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, he did not examine the supposedly
direct effects on the iconography, as Mâle did, but he studied newly configured themes and
forms which were inspired by the movement that was stimulated by great visionaries, such as
Suso of Constance (c. 1295–1366) and Brigitte of Sweden (1302/1303–1373), or some texts,
such as the best-selling Meditations on the Life of Jesus Christ (fourteenth century).
Even though this may now seem a relatively standard approach, it has to be remembered that
this was an entirely new methodology in Réau’s time. In writing on the concept of “lese-beauty’
in his foreword to Histoire du vandalisme, Louis Réau noted that the historian “must be impartial
but without being impassive.” His belief still echoes and will continue to do so for some time.
61
Daniel Russo
Notes
1 Abbot Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire (1750–1831) created the French National School of Engineering
and Technology (1794) and was the first to discuss the concept of “vandalism” [when he wrote, “Pour
tuer la chose”]. See Abbot Grégoire, Convention nationale: Rapport sur les inscriptions des monuments publics,
session of the 22 Nivôse of the second year of the French Republic [January 10, 1794] (Paris, BNF 8°
Le38. 2526); Abbot Grégoire, Convention nationale: Instruction publique. Rapport sur les destructions opérées par
le vandalisme et sur les moyens de le réprimer, session of the 14 Fructidor of the second year of the French
Republic [August 31, 1794] (BNF 8° Le38. 922); Abbot Grégoire, Convention nationale: Instruction publique.
Second Rapport sur le vandalisme, session of the 8 Brumaire of the third year of the French Republic [Octo-
ber 29, 1794] (BNF 8° Le38. 1026); Abbot Grégoire, Convention nationale: Instruction publique. Troisième
Rapport sur le vandalisme, session of the 24 Frimaire of the third year . . . [December 14, 1794] (BNF 8°
Le38. 1097): J.-M. Leniaud, “Introduction” to the Mémoires de Grégoire, suivies de la notice historique sur
Grégoire d’Hippolyte Carnot (Paris, 1989); R. Hermon-Belot, L’abbé Grégoire: La politique et la vérité (Paris,
2000), 484–85; and also 322–57; J.F. Byrnes, Priests of the French Revolution: Saints and Renegades in a New
Political Era (University Park, 2014), especially chap. 1, about Sieyès and Grégoire.
2 André Grabar (1896–1990) did not reference Réau in any of his work, such as his Christian Iconography: A
Study of Its Origins [The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Bollingen Series 35, 10] (Princeton,
1968).
3 J.F. Byrnes, Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France (University Park,
2005), especially chaps. 8 to 10.
4 L. Réau, Rapport sur le fonctionnement de l’Institut présenté au Conseil d’administration, French Institute
(Saint-Petersburg, 1913, 7): “En même temps qu’un centre de recherches et de publications scientifiques,
l’Institut doit être un centre d’enseignement et travailler à l’expansion de l’influence intellectuelle de la
France” (As well as being a research center with scientific publications, the Institute was also to be an
educational center and work toward expanding France’s intellectual influence); O. Medvedkova, “Sci-
entifique ou intellectuel ? Louis Réau et la création de l’Institut français de Saint-Pétersbourgh,” Cahiers
du monde russe et soviétique 43 (February 2002), 411–22, 420.
5 Paul Boyer conceived the entire program in order to defend and bring fame to French culture, develop-
ing the notion of “cultural expansion,” so familiar to Réau and other teachers, such as Louis Hautecoeur
(1884–1973), in the Institute in Saint-Petersburg. See P. Boyer, “Les relations scientifiques entre la France
et la Russie,” Revue du Mois scientifique 172 (April 1926), 199–200.
6 L. Réau, “Les relations artistiques entre la France et la Russie,” Mélanges publiés en l’honneur de M. Paul
Boyer (Paris, 1925), 118.
7 “Une exposition d’art français au XIXe siècle,” Apollon 4 (1912), 5–7; see also L. Réau, G. Lundberg and
R.-A. Weigert, L’art français dans les Pays du Nord et de l’Est de l’Europe (Paris, 1932).
8 L. Réau, Histoire de l’expansion de l’art français, vol. 4, Italie, Espagne, Portugal, Roumanie (Paris, 1933); L.
Réau, L’Europe française au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1938), in the series of the “Évolution de l’humanité,”
volumes which Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009) knew and read for his own work Civilisation de l’Europe des
Lumières (Paris, 1971); L. Réau, L’art roumain (Paris, 1946).
9 A. Sotropa, “Louis Réau et l’Art roumain’ (1946),” Ligeia, Dossier sur l’art n° 93–96, L’Europe de l’Est’
(juill-déc. 2009), 124–29.
10 L. Reau, Histoire du vandalisme: les monuments detruits de l’art francais, 2 vols. (Paris, 1959), vol. 1: Du haut
Moyen Age au XIXe siecle; vol. 2: XIXe et XXe siecles; L. Reau, Histoire du vandalisme, op. cit., M. Fleury
and G.-M. Leproux dir. (Paris, 1994; reprinted 2013).
11 L. Réau, Vieilles églises de France (Paris, 1948), which was a response to Mâle’s book Rome et ses vieilles
églises (Paris, 1942; Paris, 1965; Rome, 1992). Réau focused the subject on France, and not on Rome and
Italy, and dealt with the same subject that Mâle had previously examined in his L’art religieux de la fin du
Moyen Âge en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration (Paris, 1908; repr.
1995), Preface, IV–V, but in a different manner. Mâle was nostalgic when he wrote, “Partout, dans les
villes, dans les villages, la vieille France m’accueillait avec ce qu’elle eut de meilleur. [. . .] Ici nous atten-
dent tant d’œuvres, tant de pensées antiques qui veulent encore nous émouvoir!” (Everywhere, in the
towns, as well as in the villages, the old France welcomed me with what was best about her. [. . .] Here,
we are expecting so many pieces of work, so many old thoughts that still want to move us!), but Réau
was not. On Mâle’s attitude, see D. Russo, “Émile Mâle, l’art dans l’histoire,” in Émile Mâle (1862–1954):
La construction de l’œuvre: Rome et l’Italie, ed. A. Vauchez (Rome, 2005), 263–64. The Dictionnaire polyglotte
des termes d’art et d’archéologie (Paris, 1953) refuted Viollet-le-Duc’s own dictionary, Dictionnaire raisonné de
62
Louis Réau
l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, in ten volumes (Paris, 1854–1868), which had been published
almost a century before: “polyglot” as well as “polymath” was substituted by Réau for the adjective
“reasoned.”
12 P. Taquet, Georges Cuvier: Naissance d’un génie (Paris, 2006).
13 On Grabar, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and the matter of language see P. Maniglier, La vie énig-
matique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme (Paris, 2006), 129–226; A. Grabar, Les voies de
la création en iconographie chrétienne: Antiquité et Moyen Âge (Paris, 1979), 5–10, 133–36: the second part,
which dealt with the Middle Ages, was unpublished; the first part, on antiquity, was published in 1968.
See Grabar, Christian Iconography (as in note 2).
14 Charles Cahier, Caractéristiques des saints dans l’art populaire (Paris, 1867); see also his Calendrier du temps
passé (Paris, 1878). R. Hertz (1881–1915), “Saint Besse: Étude d’un culte alpestre,” in Sociologie religieuse et
folklore (Paris, 1970), 110–60. See also L. Réau, “L’iconographie de Saint Augustin,” Bulletin Archeologique
4 (1952–1954), 387–91.
15 É. Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence (Paris, 1943; Paris, 2009, with I. Stengers and B. Latour’s “Pres-
entation”), and “Du mode de l’existence de l’œuvre à faire,” Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie
50:1, session of February 25 (1956), 4–24; see also his two books, Pensée vivante et perfection formelle (Paris,
1925) and L’instauration philosophique (Paris, 1939).
16 É. Faure, Histoire de l’art, 5 vols. (Paris, 1909–1927): L’art antique (1910), L’art médiéval (1911), L’art renais-
sant (1914), L’art moderne (two books) (1921 and 1923), and L’Esprit des formes (1927) (Paris, 1976; 1985,
M. Chatelain-Courtois, ed.; 2001).
17 Quoted by M. Chatelain-Courtois, L’Esprit (as in note 16), 389; in his study Faure added, “C’est le
pavé des barricades qui s’entasse entre ses nervures ardentes pour la jeter plus profond dans l’espace
avec l’espoir, l’illusion, l’amour, la force guerrière qui donne et qui suit la victoire et féconde la
volonté” (They are the building blocks of the barricades which pile up between its fervent ribs to
bring it even further into space with the hope, the illusion, the love, the force that inspires and follows
willpower).
18 M. Chatelain-Courtois, L’Esprit (as in note 17), 389; É. Mâle, L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France:
Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration (Paris, 1898; 1948; 1993), Preface (1993,
11–25).
19 M. Chatelain-Courtois, L’Esprit (as note 17), 397.
20 Mâle specified the purpose of his book in the introduction: he first wanted to look at the “original
characteristics of Medieval art” and, second, see how the works could be read using iconographical doc-
uments, such as Vincent de Beauvais, “Speculum majus and the Speculum Humanae,” Mâle (as in note 18),
29–71: 2, 59; he wrote, “Méthode à suivre dans l’étude de l’iconographie du Moyen Âge. Les Miroirs de
Vincent de Beauvais,” 2, 61, and added, “L’œuvre se divise en quatre parties: Miroir de la nature, Miroir
de la Science, Miroir de la Morale, Miroir de l’Histoire,” 2, 62–63, before concluding “Un semblable
livre est donc le guide le plus sûr que nous puissions prendre pour étudier les grandes idées directrices
de l’art du XIIIe siècle. Il est difficile de ne pas remarquer, entre l’économie générale du Speculum majus
et le plan qui a été suivi aux porches de la cathédrale de Chartres, par exemple, des analogies frappantes”
(A similar book is therefore the safest guide that we can have to study the principal guiding ideas of
art from the thirteenth century. It is hard not to notice striking similarities between, for example, the
general economy of the Speculum Majus and the plan that was followed in the porches of Chartres
Cathedral).
“Il s’agit de la citation d’Émile Mâle qui donne le plan de son travail, la division en quatre parties suiv-
ant les quatre Miroirs de Vincent de Beauvais. Et Mâle continue dans la citation que j’en fais en disant
que le Miroir (en general) de Vincent de Beauvais est le livre le plus fiable quand on veut étudier les
grandes idées directrices de l’art du XIIIe siècle. Et la fin de la citation porte sur la correspondence dans
l’organisation générale entre le Speculum majus et l’organisation des portails de la cathédrale de Chartres”
(It is the quote from Émile Mâle which gave him the outline of his work, the division into four parts
following the four Mirrors of Vincent de Beauvais. And Mâle follows on in the same quote saying that
the Mirror of Vincent of Beauvais is the most reliable book when one wants to study the principal guid-
ing ideas of art from the thirteenth century. And the end of the quote refers to the connections in the
general organization of the Speculum Majus and the organization of the portals of Chartres Cathedral).
21 See L. Réau, “Du rôle des mots et des images dans la formation des légendes hagiographiques,” Mémoires
de la Societe National Des Antiquaires De France 78 (1934); “L’influence de la forme sur l’iconographie
dans l’art médiéval,” Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique (June 1951), special issue on “Formes
de l’art, formes de l’esprit.” On these matters, see R. Hertz, Saint Besse (as in note 14).
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Daniel Russo
22 On this tradition see R. Recht, “L’iconologie avant Warburg: L’orientaliste Charles Clermont-Ganneau
(1846–1923) et la mythologie des images,” Images re-vues hors-série 4 (2013), “Survivance d’Aby Warburg:
Sens et destin d’une iconologie critique.”
23 H. Inglebert, Les Romains chrétiens face à l’histoire de Rome. Histoire, christianisme et romanités en Occident dans
l’Antiquité tardive (IIIe–Ve s.) (Paris, 2000); on the encyclopedic way of studying in nineteenth-century
France see Inglebert, Le Monde: L’Histoire. Essai sur les histoires universelles (Paris, 2014).
24 L. Réau, “L’iconographie du retable typologique de Klosternaeuburg,” L’Art Mosan (1953), 171–86.
64
5
ÉMILE MÂLE
Kirk Ambrose
Born in 1862 to a working-class family in Bourbonnais, Émile Mâle would eventually pursue a
remarkable scholarly career that offers testimony to what achievements were possible for a gifted
and diligent student trained under the educational reforms instituted during the Third Republic
(Fig. 5.1).1 As a teenager, the future art historian gravitated toward the writings of Victor Hugo
and took up the art of painting, several examples of which survive to this day in private collections.
His academic talents garnered recognition at an early age and, from 1883 to 1886, he attended
the prestigious École normale supérieure in Paris. After graduation in 1886, Mâle taught rhetoric
at a number of lycées across France: Saint-Étienne (1889–93), Toulouse (1895), the Lakanal in
Paris (1898), and Louis-le-Grand (1899). During these years as a secondary teacher, Mâle pur-
sued graduate studies at the Sorbonne, defending two theses in 1899: one in Latin2 and the other
in French.3 The latter was based on his first book, published in the previous year. In 1906, the
Sorbonne invited Mâle to teach a course on Christian art of the Middle Ages, and, six years later,
hired him as their first chair of medieval art history. From 1923 to 1937, Mâle directed the École
Française, Rome. After World War II, he served as curator of the Jacquemard-André museum in
Chaalis. The many honors he received during his lifetime included election to the Academie des
inscriptions et belles lettres (1918), election to the Academie française (1927), and the Prix Osiris
from the Insitut de France (1948). Mâle died October 10, 1954, in Chaalis.
From an early age Mâle took an interest in medieval art, a field that would remain at the
center of his scholarly inquiries throughout his life. In a letter to his friend Joseph Texte, dated
April 26, 1899, he expressed admiration for the twelfth-century porch of Autun cathedral in
affecting terms.
I visited Autun, a remote city off the beaten track. It is astonishing in these mountains,
near the forest, to encounter the majesty of Roman monuments. The arches of the city’s
two triumphal gates are moving: one senses the discernment, the law emanating from a
sublime geometry. The porch of the cathedral manifests another form of sublimity that
is more barbaric, but more lyrical.4
Whereas the Roman arches of this city manifest a sublime geometry, the Romanesque portal,
which features a celebrated tympanum of the Last Judgment, represents another type of beauty,
more barbarous and more lyrical than that found in earlier monuments. In other letters from his
65
Kirk Ambrose
Figure 5.1 Émile Mâle, c. 1928. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, département
Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (2832).
student days, Mâle confessed that observing stained-glass windows and sculpture sustained him
through dark periods in his life. This strong personal attachment to medieval art likely informed
the many fervid passages found throughout his many publications, which primarily focus on
explicating the iconography of works of art.
Willibald Sauerländer has characterized Mâle as an “apologist” for Old French Catholicism.5
Mâle relied heavily upon theological texts to interpret works of art, which he believed offered
exemplary expressions of orthodox teachings, and self-consciously developed an interpretative
approach more systematic in its articulation and application than those offered by earlier iconog-
raphers, including Charles Cahiers and, most notably, Adolphe Napoléon Didron.6 At times, the
elegance of Mâle’s interpretative model anticipates aspects of Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture
and Scholasticism or Henri de Lubac’s synthesis of the principles of medieval exegesis.7 Yet, Mâle’s
vision of art was much more than theological in its scope and he was even critical of modern his-
torians, including Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, whom he believed regarded medieval art
from a purely intellectual vantage point.8 Mâle’s vast erudition was tempered by sensitivity to the
aesthetic and emotional needs of medieval audiences. Accordingly, monuments were fundamen-
tally imbricated within communal mores, not simply visual articulations of religious doctrines.
This connection to aspects of social life explained for him the reason that “Christian” art changed
so dramatically over time – for if art merely illustrated Church doctrine, understood as virtually
immutable, there would have been little impetus for the remarkable formal and iconographic
changes that can be observed in Christian art over the centuries.9
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The role of aesthetics in Mâle’s scholarship remains underappreciated in many assessments of

his contributions, the most critical of which have tended to construe his iconographic method
in rather narrow terms, as abandoning any formal analysis in favor of textually based interpre-
tations.10 Such a characterization is understandable because Mâle was generally rather reticent
about his methods, which thus have to be inferred from his texts. To this end, the following
comments offer a brief overview of the principal publications of this prolific scholar with an eye
to the interpretative and methodological issues they advance.
Thirteenth-century France
Mâle’s first book, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge
et sur ses sources d’inspiration, stands as his most influential and within its pages one can identify
in this early work many of the concerns that would occupy him throughout his career. The
book’s subtitle alludes to Didron’s 1843 Iconographie chrétienne and perhaps even nods to Cesare
Ripa’s Iconologia.11 Regardless, Mâle understood iconography largely in didactic terms, arguing
that thirteenth-century art clothed religious doctrine, making it accessible to a wide audience.
He denied any political significance for religious art and criticized Bernard de Montfaucon for
identifying the kings on Gothic portals as visual genealogies of French monarchs. Rather, Mâle
metaphorically described the wealth of visual materials within cathedrals as an encyclopedia of
Christian knowledge. One of his premises is that that medieval audiences, steeped in Church
teachings, would have been able to “read” these artworks rather effortlessly. He never seems to
have entertained the possibility that medieval viewers would have encountered difficulties in
interpreting works of art, which he believed worked in terms akin to language in the conveyance
of meaning.12 This “writing” adhered to mathematical principles, such as symmetry and number,
that provide the foundation for the formal beauty of thirteenth-century art. The Frenchman
repeatedly highlighted the artistry of monumental arts, describing them as “frozen music,” and
argued that Gothic sculptors, unlike their Romanesque predecessors, were receptive to the beauty
of the natural world.
In order to translate the meaning of the language of Gothic art to his modern readers, Mâle
drew heavily from Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum.13 This magisterial thirteenth-century scho-
lastic text provided the source for the divisions of his iconographic inquiry – namely, the Mirror
of Nature, the Mirror of Instruction, the Mirror of Morals, and the Mirror of History. Mâle’s
adoption of this elegant quadripartite structure offers an adequate representation of scholastic
thought that he believed undergirded thirteenth-century art. Each of the four themes is devel-
oped through a series of carefully selected case studies, which offer iconographic interpretations
informed by his deep familiarity with medieval exegetical traditions and hagiographic literature.
Mâle’s lengthy analysis of representations of virtues and vices within the section Mirror of
Morals exemplifies his approach. He asserts at the beginning that twelfth-century theologians
began to characterize the opposition of virtues and vices differently than their predecessors, who
had favored the allegory of combat found in Prudentius’s Psychomachia. This shift in perspective
provides the impetus for artistic changes; conversely, artistic innovations never prompt changes
in theology. Significantly, for Mâle some ideas are better suited to art than others, signaling his
consideration of formal issues. Honorious Augustodunensis’s conception of virtue as a ladder
leading from earth to heaven, for one, is presented as a theme that is difficult to realize in the visual
arts. Despite this claim, however, Mâle points to a miniature of this iconography from the Hortus
Deliciarum, which he further relates to Byzantine icons, presumably the Ladder of Virtue of John
Climacus. For Mâle, some theological ideas even appear better suited to specific artistic media.
Representations of virtues and vices as trees, including that articulated by Hugh of St. Victor,
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can be found in manuscript illuminations, but not in monumental arts. He does not explain why
this theme could not be represented effectively on a relatively large scale, but appears to suggest
that the relative paucity of a theme in art provides a direct index of the formal challenges that it
posed for medieval artists.
That thirteenth-century sculptors increasingly represented calm, enthroned virtues reigning
supreme over vices signaled for Mâle a desire on the part of artists and patrons to “go deeper,” to
seek representational modes that conveyed a sense of inner peace. He does not offer any textual
grounding for this interpretation, but bases it solely on his analysis of works of art. In other words,
his approach to the meaning of works of art not only is textual in its assessment of meaning but
also can carefully weigh formal characteristics of the work of art.
Mâle concludes his analysis of the virtues and vices with an examination of carved examples
on the façades of Amiens, Chartres, Notre-Dame in Paris, and Reims, as well as a stained-glass
window at Auxerre. He notes that although the arrangement of these twelve pairs of figures
consistently begins with the three theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, but does not
continue, as one might expect from patristic tradition, with the four cardinal virtues. Rather,
designers appear to have selected pairs of virtues and vices by other criteria. Mâle cannot iden-
tify a deeper rationale or a contemporary text that mirrors such choices. He then catalogues the
remaining various virtues and vices and concludes that the vitality of these images instills a sense
of sympathy that facilitates their conveyance of meaning.
For Mâle, thirteenth-century art represented an apogee of French culture. Doubtless there was
a nationalistic aspect to this agenda, for even though the scholar repeatedly contends that any
political message ultimately played a subordinate role to that of Christian thought,14 he clearly
believed that France was the preeminent artistic center of Europe for most of the Middle Ages.
The scholar could even be extremely antagonistic in his judgments on this score, dedicating an
entire volume, for one, to the thesis that German artists contributed nothing original to the his-
tory of art: “Germany aspires to be a greatly creative people, but this fallacy must be exposed.”15
The confrontational stance of this argument can be attributed largely to contemporary events,
published in 1918 at the end of World War I. The unfortunate product of anti-German sentiment
of the period, Mâle’s book nevertheless foregrounds a nationalistic impulse evident in much of his
scholarship. In his book on twelfth-century art, Mâle aimed to locate the origins of Romanesque
sculpture in France, a view stridently criticized by Arthur Kingsley Porter, who argued in favor of
a Spanish origin and argued that iconographic themes moved internationally along the pilgrim-
age routes to Santiago de Compostela.16 If religion was the driving force behind the production
of medieval art for Mâle, France represented the ideal place for this art to bloom.
Situating the thirteenth-century achievement

Having identified thirteenth-century art in France as an ideal expression of Catholicism, Mâle’s
next three books can be read largely as offering pre- and posthistories of this achievement. He
considered the decline and fall of French Gothic art in his second book, first published in 1908,
which examined the period from the fourteenth century until the Council of Trent in 1563.
The endpoint is significant for the author because it marked the moment that traditional iconog-
raphy came under increased scrutiny during an age of reason and doctrinal development. The
preface to this volume asserts that medieval art remained exempt from political vicissitudes, but
was guided by developments in Christian thought. However, the elegant schema that marked the
analysis of the thirteenth century yields in this second volume to a more episodic presentation.
This looser structure perhaps signals something of a declension narrative, in which late medi-
eval artists paid increasing attention to emotion. Chapters address the rise of various “new”
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Émile Mâle
feelings, including the rise of pathos, especially in scenes of Christ’s passion, at the end of the
thirteenth century and the emergence of human tenderness, evident in many Infancy cycles.
This emphasis on emotion in late medieval culture, based on careful reading of images and texts,
precedes by a decade the analogous arguments of Johan Huizinga regarding the Autumn of the
Middle Ages, first published in 1919.17 Rather than laying the groundwork for modernity, the
sixteenth century represents for Mâle a rupture from earlier sensibilities:
The Art of the Middle Ages was doomed. Its charm had lain in the preservation of the
innocence of childhood, in the clear eyes of its young saints. It resembled the medieval
Church itself – a faith that did not argue, but sang . . . The artist who examines, judges,
criticizes, doubts, and conciliates, has already lost half his creative force. That is why the
art of the Middle Ages, which expressed naïve faith and spontaneity, could not survive
the critical spirit born of the Reformation.18
Mâle spent most of the remaining years of the 1910s excavating the prehistory of the French
Gothic, culminating in the 1922 publication of L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France: Étude sur les
origines de l’iconographie du Moyen Âge.19 On a literal level, the reference to origins within the title
refers to the art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, from which Gothic artists directly drew to
develop an art of light of the thirteenth century. Yet, according to the author, to fully understand
Romanesque art one must return to the earlier arts produced in the Eastern Mediterranean,
including Cappadocia, Egypt, and Syria. Mâle consistently positions France as inheriting this rich
artistic tradition; the origins of the Romanesque in France trace directly to the cradle of Early
Christian civilization.
Throughout his book on twelfth-century art Mâle offers insights that scholars would develop
in subsequent decades. Although he placed undue emphasis on the influence of Cluny and
Moissac on the arts of Europe, his identification of a “monastic imprint” within Romanesque
sculpture anticipated a profitable line of inquiry taken up again in earnest in the 1970s.20 As
an example, Mâle vividly related medieval stories of hordes of demons assaulting the church in
order to give context to the representations of demons in many monasteries. In contrast to many
Enlightenment scholars, he does not denigrate monks’ fascination with the monstrous as a sign
of superstitious faith fundamentally at odds with reason, for he likewise praises the intellectual
achievements of twelfth-century monks, including their interest in Early Christian hagiography
and their encyclopedic traditions, which laid the groundwork for thirteenth-century intellectuals
and artists.
In 1932 Mâle published a major study of the impact of the Council of Trent on artistic prac-
tices in France, the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain that remains one of the key publications in
this field. The author notes that this geographic scope could be expanded to include Germany,
Poland, and other countries that were subject to Rome, for innovation in the arts was no longer
an exclusively French phenomenon, but was pan-European. While the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries are mentioned in the course of this book, it is significant to note that despite the
vast chronological range of his scholarship he never dedicated a study to Renaissance art. Mâle
acknowledged that Italian artists of the Renaissance achieved a serenity and beauty inspired by
ancient examples. Even so, the author believed that in the seventeenth century Catholicism
returned to its true nature, largely prompted by the criticisms of Protestantism. As a result,
Catholic art was more or less unified in its struggle to defend orthodox theology and practices,
including the office of the papacy, the cults of saints and of relics, and veneration of the Virgin
Mary. Mâle here emerges as a strident Church apologist, for he asserts that despite some efforts to
proscribe some artistic practices, her chief role in the wake of the Council of Trent was to fashion
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Kirk Ambrose
an art in her own image. Interestingly, he revises his earlier view that art more or less declined
after the Middle Age, asserting that the seventeenth century marked another high point in the
history of Christian art. One can perhaps identify here a less nationalistic view than in his earlier
writings, one which more fully asserts the primacy of a universal Catholic church.
Throughout his writings, Mâle presented Church doctrine as unified. Differences of theo-
logical interpretation, much less heretical views or regional traditions, rarely emerge as significant
subjects for works of art, though they could serve as foil for artists and patrons to assert staunchly
Catholic positions. Such is the conclusion, for one, in the author’s monograph of the architecture
of the cathedral of Albi, whose “militaristic” aspects serve as a visual bulwark against the threat of
the Alibigensian heresy.21
The role of beauty

Mâle’s enduring sensitivity to artistic beauty emerged as a central theme in his last two major
publications (a manuscript on Carolingian art was incomplete at the time of his death). The
opening pages of his 1942 volume, Rome et ses vieilles églises, assert that the ancient city is best
viewed in the rosy light of sunset from the summit of the Juniculum. Mentioning the paint-
ings of Claude Lorrain, Mâle’s invocation of dusk upon a hill here tacitly evokes the imagery
of Virgil’s first Eclogue, as well as Dante’s reprise in the Inferno. Direct citations of the works of
Martial, Virgil, and other ancient authors populate the pages that wax poetic on the fecund plains
of Latium and the grandeur of Roman art, which had learned beauty from Greek art. Christian
architects and artists, in turn, absorbed this lesson. The chronologically arranged chapters center
on discussions of ecclesiastical monuments from the Early Christian period down through the
thirteenth century. Mâle concludes by asserting that the beauty of medieval monuments paved
the way for papal commissions in the sixteenth century.
A similar translation of classical notions of beauty informs the central narrative of Mâle’s 1950
La fin du paganism en Gaule et les plus anciennes basiliques chrétiennes. The author concludes that
Merovingian bishops in Gaul had learned from ancient Roman monuments that it was “nec-
essary to maintain beauty in the world.”22 This conviction translated into their commissioning
churches and other ecclesiastical monuments.
In both of these late publications, Mâle focuses largely on architecture, with relatively little
attention given to figural arts. His approach does not appear to draw on the sophisticated architec-
tural historical methods developed over the course of the nineteenth century, but is more impres-
sionistic in tone. Unfortunately, the scholarly apparatus in both these works is minimal, making it
difficult to ascertain the basis for his arguments. Even so, his interest in Christian places of worship
complemented his long-standing interest in social aspects of art. The very forms of the buildings
he studies, including their decorative motifs, emerge as embodying religious and social signifi-
cance. The didactic function of figural arts, which had occupied him in earlier studies, yields to
interest in how formal aspects can aid in advancing the Christian faith. In other words, in his later
publications Mâle develops an approach to art that went well beyond the methods of iconography.
Legacy
Mâle’s approach to the study of medieval art has exerted a profound, if contested, influence on
the field. His substantial contributions, along with contemporary scholars such as Adolph Gold-
schmidt, Aloïs Riegl, and Wilhelm Vöge, were his pioneering efforts in establishing art history
as a credible intellectual discipline. This achievement is arguably all the more remarkable as it
was made without knowledge of the substantial scholarly developments in the German-speaking
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world. Even so, there have been strident critics. Erwin Panofsky regarded Mâle’s iconographic
interpretations as lacking probing historical insights and André Grabar believed that the scholar’s
lack of interest in secular culture was too limiting.23 Michael Camille offered the most sustained
critique in a book entitled The Gothic Idol, a confrontational stance to the first English translation
of Mâle’s title, The Gothic Image.24 Camille argued that Mâle had not paid enough attention to
how art functioned for thirteenth-century audiences. In particular, Camille believed that the
Gothic period witnessed profound anxiety about representational arts, which can be discerned
in, for example, the many images of the sin of idolatry. Indeed, a similar anxiety informs much
of Gothic art, which he believed advanced an agenda that sought to suppress the “Other,” from
idolaters to Jews, in an attempt to define a normative body of the faithful. Critics of Camille, in
turn, have pointed out that the profusion of images throughout the thirteenth century ultimately
belies any universal anxiety about art, the motivations of which are complex and multifaceted.25
Further, notwithstanding Camille’s claims, Mâle had an interest in the social function of art, if
only in a limited fashion. It bears keeping in mind that the Frenchman wrote his major texts on
medieval art well before, say, the anthropological and sociological approaches to history that were
developed by members of the Annales School.
Mâle certainly understood art in largely Christian terms. Despite this rather limited perspec-
tive, he deserves recognition as one of the pioneers of the practice of modern art history, whose
attention to the theological, and to a lesser extent social, aspects of Gothic art anticipates much
in the approaches practiced by many medieval art historians today. Recent studies of medieval
art have been inflected by a more theoretically self-aware and historically informed approach,
but the presumption that religious thought remains a central feature of medieval art is something
that continues to occupy many scholars to this day. Mâle certainly was not the first to make this
claim, but offered one of its most eloquent and enduring articulations.
Notes
1 A. Adam, “Les années de jeuness et de formation d’après la correspondence et les souvenirs,” in Émile
Mâle (1862–1954): La construction de l’oeuvre: Rome et l’Italie (Rome, 2005), 7–20. Additional information
on Mâle’s youth can be found in É.-M. Gilberte, K. Monique, and P. Antoine (ed.), Souvenirs et correspon-
dances de jeunesse: Bourbonnais, Forez, École Normale supérieure (Nonette, 2001).
2 Quomodo Sybillas recentiores artifices repraesentaverint.
3 L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration.
4 “J’ai vu Autun, ville lointaine, assise loin des routes. On est étonné dans ces montagnes, près de ces
bois, de rencontre la majesté Romaine. Le plein cintre de ses deux portes triomphales vous émeut – on
sent le raison, la loi émanée d’une géométrie sublime – Le porche de la cathédrale a un autre genre de
sublimité, plus barbare, mais plus lyrique,” in Joseph Bédier, Émile Mâle, Joseph Texte: Une amitié de jeunesse:
148 lettres inédites (1866–1900), ed. C. Gauraud and J. Irigoin (New York, 1999), 281. Late in his life,
Mâle would again extol the Roman portals of Autun in La fin du paganisme en Gaule et les plus anciennes
basiliques chrétiennes (Paris, 1950), 18.
5 W. Sauerländer, “Émile Mâle,” Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art actifs en France de la Révolution à la
Première Guerre mondiale, ed. Philippe Sénechel and Claire, last modified March 2, 2009, http://www.
inha.fr/fr/ressources/publications/dictionnaire-critique-des-historiens-de-l-art/male-emile.html. Sim-
ilarly, A. Gajewski emphasizes Mâle’s engagement with religious thought in “Émile Mâle: L’art religieux
du XIIe siècle en France: Etude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 1898,”
in The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, ed. R. Shone and
J.-P. Stonard (London, 2013), 21–29. See also A. Gajewski, “Emile Mâle’s ‘L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle
en France: Etude sur l’iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 1898,” The Burlington
Magazine 151 (June 2009), 396–99.
6 For Mâle’s debt to Didron see H. Bober, “Editor’s Forward,” in É. Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Twelfth
Century: A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography, ed. H. Bober, trans. M. Matthews (Princeton,
1978), xiii–xvii.
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Kirk Ambrose
7 E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York, 1957); H. de Lubac, Exégèse médiéval:
Lesquatres sens de l’écriture, 4 vols. (Paris, 1959–1964).
8 “Rodin, interprète des cathédrales de France,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 4th ser., 11 (May 1914), 378.
9 See, for example, the pithy explication of this thesis in his “Le Témoignage de l’art chrétien,” Revue des
jeunes (January 1922), 7–35.
10 E. Gombrich is particularly damning in his assessment of Mâle’s iconographic method, which he charac-
terizes as abandoning consideration of formal concerns: Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago,
1970), 312.
11 J. Nayrolle argues that Charles Cahier and Arthurs Martin anticipate iconographic developments of
Mâle and Panofsky in L’invention de l’art roman à l’époque moderne (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles) (Rennes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 224.
12 R. Huyghes, “Émile Mâle,” Revue des deux mondes (March 1955), 15–17.
13 V. of Beauvais, Speculum quadruplex: sive, Speculum maius, 4 vols. (Graz, 1964–65).
14 See, for example, M. Passini, La fabrique de l’art national: Le nationalism et les origins de l’histoire de l’art en
France et en Allemagne 1870–1933 (Paris, 2012), 147–57.
15 “L’Allemagne avait la pretention d’être le grand peuple créateur, il faut lui montrer qu’elle se trompe,”
in L’Art allemand et l’Art français du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1917), 6.
16 A. K. Porter, “Spain of Toulouse? and Other Questions,” Art Bulletin 7 (1924–25), 3–25. See the comments
of J. Mann, “Romantic Identity, Nationalism, and the Understanding of the Advent of Romanesque Art
in Christian Spain,” Gesta 36 (1997), 156–64; and L. Seidel, “Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883–1933),” in
Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 3 (New York, 2000), 281, 283.
17 J. Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: studie over levens – en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw
in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (Haarlem, 1919).
18 Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Iconography and Its Sources, ed. H. Bober,
trans. Marthiel Matthews (Princeton, 1986), 452.
19 É. Mâle, L’Art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses
sources d’inspiration (Paris, 1902).
20 Revived interest in the monastic significance of works of art is signaled by the 1973 double issue of Gesta,
most notably L. Pressouyre, “St. Bernard to St. Francis: Monastic Ideals and Iconographic Programs in
the Cloister,” Gesta 12 (1973), 71–92.
21 La Cathédrale d’Albi (Paris, 1950).
22 La fin du paganisme en Gaule et les plus anciennes basiliques chrétiennes (Paris, 1950), 327.
23 See the discussion of J. Luxford, “Émile Mâle,” in Key Writers on Art, vol. 2, ed. C. Murray (New York,
2003), 209.
24 M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989).
25 C. W. Bynum’s review of The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art, by Michael Camille,
The Art Bulletin 72 (1990), 331–32.
Principal works by Émile Mâle

For a full bibliography of Mâle’s works, see Construction de l’oeuvre, 317–39.
Books
L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration (Paris:
E. Leroux, 1898).
———. Religious Art of 13th Century France: A Study of Medieval Iconography and the Sources of Inspiration.
Translated by Dora Nussey (London, 1913); rpt. as The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth
Century (New York, 1958).
———. Religious Art in France, The Thirteenth Century: A Study of Medieval Iconography and Its Sources. Edited
by Harry Bober. Translated by Marthiel Matthews (Princeton, 1984).
L’Art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspi-
ration (Paris: A. Colin, 1908).
———. Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Iconography and Its Sources. Edited
by Harry Bober. Translated by Marthiel Matthews (Princeton, 1986).
L’Art allemand et l’Art français du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1917).
L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France: Étude sur les origines de l’iconographie du Moyen Âge (Paris: A. Colin, 1922).
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———. Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century: A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography. Edited by
Harry Bober. Translated by Marthiel Matthews (Princeton, 1978).
Art et Artistes du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1927).
———. Art and Artists of the Middle Ages. Translated by Sylvia Stallings Lowe (Reading Ridge, CT, 1986).
L’Art religieux après le Concile de Trente: Étude sur l’iconographie de la fin du XVIe siècle, du XVIIe, du XVIIIe
siècles. Italie. France. Espagne. Flandres (Paris, 1932).
Rome: la campagne romane et l’Ombrie (Paris, 1936).
Rome et ses vieilles églises (Paris: Flammarion, 1942).
———. The Early Churches of Rome. Translated by David Buxton (Chicago, 1960).
Les Heures d’Anne de Bretagne par Jean Bourdichon (Paris, 1946).
Les Grandes Heures de Rohan (Paris, 1947).
Notre-Dame de Chartres (Paris, 1948).
La fin du paganisme en Gaule et les plus anciennes basiliques chrétiennes (Paris, 1950).
La Cathédrale d’Albi (Paris, 1950); rpt. (La-Pierre-qui-Vire, 1974).
Les saints compagnons du Christ (Paris, 1958).
Essays
“Les Arts libéraux dans la statuaire du Moyen Âge,” Revue archéologique 4th ser., 17 (January–June 1891),
334–346.
“Les Chapiteaux romans du musée de Toulouse et l’école toulousaine du XIIe siècle,” Revue archéologique 4th
ser., 20 (July-December 1892), 28–35, 176–97.
“La legend de la mort de Caïn, à propos d’un chapiteau de Tarbes,” Revue archéologique 4th ser., 21 (January–
June 1893), 186–194.
“L’Enseignement de l’histoire de l’art dans l’université,” Revue universitaire 1 (January 15, 1894), 10–20.
“Les origins de la sculpture française du moyen âge,” Revue de Paris (September 1, 1895), 198–224.
“Le Portail de Sainte-Anne à Notre Dame de Paris,” Revue de l’art ancien et modern 2 (October 1897),
231–246.
“La Légende dorée et l’art du Moyen Âge,” Revue de l’art ancien et modern 5 (March 1899), 187–196.
“Histoire de l’art: les travaux sur l’art du Moyen Âge en France depuis vingt ans,” Revue de synthèse historique
(1901), 81–108.
“Le style roman,” in Le musée d’art, galerie des chefs-d’oeuvre et précis de l’histoire de l’art depuis les origins jusqu’au
XIXe siècle, ed. Eugène Müntz (Paris, 1902), 63–75.
“Trois oeuvres nouvelles de Jean Bourdichon, peintre de Charles VIII, de Louis XII et de Françoise Ier,”
Gazette de beaux-arts 3rd ser., 27 (March 1902), 185–203.
“Influence de la Bible des Pauvres et du Speculum humanae salvationis sur l’art du XVe et du XVIe siècles,”
Institut de France: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. Comptes rendus des séances (1903), 424.
“Le Renouvellement de l’art par les ‘mystères’ à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 3rd ser., 31
(February 1904), 89–106; (March 1904), 215–230; (April 1904), 283–301; and (May 1904), 379–394.
“Jean Bourdichon et son atelier,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 3rd ser., 32 (December 1904), 441–457.
“L’Art français de la fin du Moyen Âge: L’apparition du pathétique,” Revue des deux mondes (October 1,
1905), 656–681.
“L’Art français de la fin du Moyen Âge: L’idée de la mort et la danse macabre,” Revue des deux mondes (April
1, 1906), 647–679.
“La Peinture sur verre en France,” in Histoire de l’art depuis les premiers temps chrétiens jusqu’à nos jours, ed.
Michel André, vol. 2: Formation, expansion et évolution de l’art gothique (Paris, 1906), 372–396.
“La Peinture murale en France au XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” in Histoire de l’art depuis les premiers temps chrétiens
jusqu’à nos jours, ed. Michel André, vol. 2: Formation, expansion et évolution de l’art gothique (Paris,
1906), 401–407.
“Le Portail de Senlis et son influence,” Revue de l’art ancien et modern 29 (March 1911), 161–176.
“La Mosquée de Cordoue et les Églises de l’Auvergne et du Velay,” Revue de l’art ancien et modern 30 (August
1911), 81–89.
“La Part de Suger dans la création de l’iconographie du Moyen Âge,” Revue de l’art ancien et modern 35
(February 1914), 91–102; (March 1914), 161–168; (April 1914), 253–262; and (May 1914), 339–349.
“Rodin, interprète des cathédrales de France,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 4th ser., 11 (May 1914), 372–378.
“La Cathédrale de Reims,” Revue de Paris (December 15, 1914), 294–311.
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“Études sur l’art allemand, I. L’Art des peuples germaniques,” Revue de Paris (July 1916), 225–248.
“Études sur l’art allemand, II. L’Architecture romane,” Revue de Paris (August 1916), 489–520.
“Études sur l’art allemand, III. L’Architecture gothique,” Revue de Paris (September 1916), 5–38.
“Études sur l’art allemand, IV. La Sculpture,” Revue de Paris (December 1916), 505–524.
“Le Château de Coucy et l’Architecture militaire du Moyen Âge,” Revue de Paris (October 15, 1917),
673–699.
“L’Art du Moyen Âge et les Pèlerinages: Les routes d’Italie,” Revue de Paris (October 15, 1919), 717–754.
“L’Art du Moyen Âge et les Pèlerinages: Les routes de France et d’Espagne,” Revue de Paris (February 15,
1920), 767–802.
“La Cathédrale de Reims (à propos d’un livre récent) [Paul Vitry, La cathédrale de Reims],” Gazette des Beaux-
Arts 5th ser., 3 (February 1921), 73–88.
“Études sur l’art de l’époque romane: Le monde et la nature dans l’art du XIIe siècle,” Revue de Paris
(June 1921), 491–513, 711–732.
“Le Témoignage de l’art chrétien,” Revue des jeunes (January 1922), 7–35.
“La Vie de Saint Louis dans l’art français au commencement du XIVe siècle,” in Mélanges Bertaux: Recueil de
travaux, dédié à la mémoire d’Émile Bertaux (Paris, 1924), 194–204.
“L’Architecture gothique du Midi de la France,” Revue des deux mondes (February 1926), 826–857.
“La Décoration des grands ordres religieux au XVIIe siècle,” Revue de Paris (January 1932), 30–59.
“Virgile dans l’art du Moyen Âge français,” Studi medievali 5 (1932), 325–331.
“Études sur les églises romaines: L’empereur Otton III à Rome et les églises du Xe siècle,” Revue des deux
mondes (September 1937), 54–82.
“Le Gothique italien et les cisterciens,” Revue universelle (January-February 1942), 837–846.
“Vierges romanes d’Auvergne: La Vierge d’Or de Clermont et ses répliques,” Le Point (1943), 4–10.
Pèlerinage aux premiers siècles du christianisme,” Style en France 2 (1946), 3–8.
“Les Origines de la cathédrale de Chartres,” Mercure de France (January 1947), 45–52.
“La Fin du paganisme en Gaule: Les temples remplacés par les églises,” Revue des deux mondes (June 1948),
385–399, 597–612.
“Les Baptistères de Provence et l’influence orientale,” Revue de l’Académie méditerranéenne (July 1948), 11–16.
“Les Mosaïques de la Daurade à Toulouse,” in “Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire offerts à Charles
Picard,” special issue, Revue archéologique 30 (1949), 682–87.
“Les Sarcophages des ateliers d’Arles,” Revue des deux mondes (March 1949), 46–65.
“Richesses de saint François d’Assise,” Revue française de l’élite 20 (December 1949), 32–34.
“L’Art chrétien primitif et l’art byzantine,” in Histoire générale de l’art, vol. 1 (Paris, 1950), 233–283.
“L’Art roman,” in Histoire générale de l’art, vol. 1 (Paris, 1950), 284–319.
“L’Art gothique,” in Histoire générale de l’art, vol. 1 (Paris, 1950), 320–373.
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6
ABY M. WARBURG
Iconographer?
Peter van Huisstede
Introduction
Aby Moritz Warburg was a cultural historian who studied images, with the help of texts, against
their historical cultural contexts. With generous help from his family he laid the foundations of
what later became the “Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg” (KBW, also known as the
Warburg Library) in Hamburg, Germany, and later the Warburg Institute in London.
Somehow, his work has been seen as part of the discipline of iconography – the study of the
content of works of art, via what is depicted. And that is why this chapter is part of the book
you are reading. Although the incorporation of his work into the history of iconography is not
wrong (seen in hindsight from the general perspective of the history of iconography), it is a bit
superficial (seen from the perspective of Warburg’s ideas and methods) and it tends to hide some
of the most original and rigorous parts of his thinking and work.
This chapter may prove to be an outlier in this book, but that is because Warburg’s thoughts
and work, although certainly connected to it, are outliers in the field of iconography as an art
historical discipline.
Biography
Born in 1866 as the eldest son of a Hamburg banker, Aby Warburg was destined, usually after
taking up some apprenticeships elsewhere, to join the banking firm. He did not. It seems that he
exchanged, at a young age1 this firstborn right with his younger brother Max on the condition
that Max and the firm would support him financially to pursue his research goals (Fig. 6.1).
This was a wise decision for all parties, because, as became clear later on, Aby Warburg did
not enjoy a particularly stable psyche: his mood swings between elation and gloom were a little
too extreme at times.
The history of Warburg’s intellectual endeavors is related to the circumstances of his era.
When Warburg studied in Bonn (with Hermann Usener, Karl Lamprecht, and Carl Justi) and
in Strassbourg (Hubert Janitschek) in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Warburgs
were doing very nicely. Max Warburg, as well as the other brothers, Paul and Felix, proved to be
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Peter van Huisstede
Figure 6.1 The Warburg brothers. Aby Warburg is on the far right; his four brothers are Paul, Felix, Max,
and Fritz. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute.
talented bankers, and the Warburgs, as well as other successful Jewish families, seemed to have
been fully accepted as German citizens. However, the First World War (1914–1918) and its after-
math changed this Jewish emancipation dramatically.
It took only two marriages to firmly establish a branch of the Warburgs in the United States
of America. As Chernow records it seems that it was pure coincidence that brought Felix and
Frieda Schiff (daughter of Jacob Schiff a wealthy German-Jewish banker [Kuhn, Loeb] from
New York) together as man and wife (March 1895).2 In 1897 Felix became a partner in the Kuhn,
Loeb bank. Aby’s brother Paul married Nina Loeb in October 1895. They lived in Hamburg at
first, Paul and Max working together in the bank, but Paul moved to the United States in 1902,
and joined Kuhn, Loeb.
So, two of the five Warburg brothers, Felix and Paul, set up a stable banking bridge with head-
quarters in the United States, a move that proved important for the German firm, M. M. Warburg
& Co., with Max representing Kuhn, Loeb in Germany. For the cultural and historical branch
of that firm, Aby was in Germany in these difficult years, during and after the First World War.
Aby, who traveled to attend Paul’s wedding in the United States, took the opportunity to make
long journeys to Arizona and New Mexico, where he visited and studied Zuni and Hopi rituals.
The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW)

In 1897 Aby Warburg married a gentile woman, Mary Hertz. Together, they spent much of
their time in Florence, where Warburg studied Renaissance art. Warburg kept on buying books.
In the summer of 1900 he discussed the idea of developing a library with his brother Max and
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Aby M. Warburg
continued buying copious numbers of books.3 In 1903 alone he added more than five hundred
books to his collection.4 Warburg and his family, consisting of Mary, his wife, and their children –
Marietta, Max, Adolph, and Frede – returned to Hamburg in 1904 and in 1909 they moved into
Heilwigstrasse 114.
When the number of books proved too much for the household to cope with, the Warburgs –
the bankers – decided to buy Heilwigstrasse 116, thus establishing the “Kulturwissenschaftliche
Bibliothek Warburg” (KBW) as a private research library shaped by the research of a single man,
Aby, in Hamburg, a city that, at that time, did not have a university.
Warburg’s mental breakdown, Warburg Redux,

and ideas crossing the seas
Warburg became very ill in 1918 and in 1919 he was taken into the care of the psychiatrist
Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Many doubted whether Aby Warburg would
recover from his illness. However, in 1924 he succeeded in giving a coherent lecture at Kreuzlin-
gen about one of his earlier research topics, the serpent ritual (a topic he had come across during
his journey to the United States in 1895), thus proving to his medical staff that he was able to
return home and resume his research. But during his long absence, 1918/1919–1924, much had
changed, not least of which was that Hamburg now had its own university. The Warburgs had
appointed Fritz Saxl (discussed elsewhere in this volume) as librarian of the KBW and the library
had opened its doors as a research library.
Among the scholars the KBW attracted were the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the art his-
torian Erwin Panofsky (discussed elsewhere in this volume). Panofsky had moved to Hamburg at
the end of 1919 and in 1926 he joined the University of Hamburg as art historian. At the KBW
he found not only books but books organized as a research instrument to tackle art historical
questions as part of larger cultural historical contexts. Together with Saxl, Panofsky wrote a study
about Dürer’s Melancholia print (1923) and in 1930 he published his study on “Hercules am
Scheidewege.”
Panofsky was instrumental in establishing iconography, the study of the contents of works of
art to provide a cultural historical interpretation of them, through his methodological essay “Zur
Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst,” which was published in
1932. It was clear then that during Warburg’s long absence, his ideas, as expressed through his
research instrument, the books, and his small collection of published studies, had proved to be
important. Art history was to receive a third pillar. The study of the historical meaning of the
content of images came to complement the study of the formal aspects of images (“Stilkritik”)
and the more philosophical study of art (“Kunsttheorie”).
In 1933 the KBW was forced to move to London and became, at the end of the Second World
War, part of the University of London. Bing and Saxl also moved, together with the books. Cas-
sirer moved to Oxford, then to Sweden, and finally to the United States. In 1935 Panofsky moved
to the United States to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
The KBW had ceased to be a private research library, which meant that Warburg could not
move books around anymore to organize his research. It was Fritz Saxl5 who introduced War-
burg to large black screens upon which he could pin images and texts, and reshuffle them. These
black screens became Warburg’s research tool during his second working period. He organized
his lectures with the help of the screens and at a certain time he decided to present his earlier
research in the form of an image atlas, the Mnemosyne Atlas.
During the so-called Warburg redux period, Warburg closely worked together with Gertrud
Bing, his research partner. With the Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg tried to present his earlier
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Peter van Huisstede
research in a coherent way but this proved a difficult task. When Warburg became ill in 1918
his work consisted of small detailed studies all written in German and, of course, his library, the
instrument used to tackle his research questions. Warburg always had a keen methodological
interest in pursuing the historical study of images and ideas, but it is not easy to understand his
methodology. His ideas are hidden as small, seemingly unrelated snippets in his published works
(the first period up to 1918) as well as in his unpublished lectures and the Geschaeftsbuch of the
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (the scientific journal kept after Warburg’s return
to Hamburg in 1924, in the second period),6 but they are also present in his two large under-
takings: the KBW and the Mnemosyne Atlas. Analyzing Warburg’s cultural historical methods,
one cannot but notice an uncanny resemblance between them and the man he was: the swings
between despair and elation, the dark side of human existence and the fight of reason to escape
them, the need to establish distance to see things in a relevant perspective. These things, personal
and historical, mint his work in a very personal way.
This is not to say that I believe that Warburg’s ideas and work show all the signs of an unstable
and isolated figure, but that we are dealing with the ideas and work of an extremely sensitive
man, who used all this sensitivity to try to comprehend and describe the ideas and works of
people from the past. In this sense, Warburg’s research was a personal journey, but what is often
overlooked is that this journey is also characterized by scientific rigor. It is precisely that part of
Warburg’s work, how he construed his historical opponents, that draws generation after genera-
tion of art historians with a more cultural historical bend of mind toward his work and especially
toward his last and unfinished work, the Mnemosyne Atlas.
If Warburg’s work influenced others, it needs to be realized that, should this be the case, we
are looking at a very particular context in which this influence took place, a kind of extended
“vacuum”:
• Warburg’s long period of absence from 1918/19 until 1924 during which his private research
library was opened as a research institute associated with the newly established Hamburg
University.
• Warburg’s scattered publications until 1918 written in German were published, again in
German, only in 1939.
• The Warburg redux period from 1924 until 1929 in which he tried to present his works
and ideas in a coherent way through lectures, exhibitions, and the Mnemosyne Atlas. These
were all in German and, to a large extent, until recently, were unpublished material.
• The relocation of the KBW library and researchers inspired by it, Panofsky, Saxl, Bing and,
others, to new contexts in the United Kingdom and the United States.
• The relatively late impact of Panofsky’s theoretical essays on iconography and iconology
dating to around 1960 (1959–1962), which had been formulated as early as 1939.
Given these peculiar circumstances, it would be a little too easy to simply infer that, since Panof-
sky was acquainted with the KBW, and Panofsky and Warburg both used the words “iconog-
raphy” and “iconology,” they both shared a common methodology and that their work can be
grouped together as part of the iconographical method (in the sense of Panofsky). I don’t believe
that Warburg’s work influenced other researchers, such as Panofsky for example, but that any
possible influence was indirect, via the KBW, and seen passively from the perspective of Warburg’s
ideas and work.
Warburg’s work from his second working period (1924–1929), with an emphasis on the
Mnemosyne Atlas, as well as his ideas on writing cultural history forms the second part of
this essay.7
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Aby M. Warburg
Aby Warburg as iconographer
The use of the words “iconography” and “iconology” by Warburg

The German historian Dieter Wuttke (see his essay on Panofsky elsewhere in this volume)
compiled a list of twenty-three occurrences of the words “iconography” (four occurrences)
and “iconology” (nineteen occurrences) in Warburg’s writings from 1889 until 1928.8 Wuttke
found twenty-seven occurrences of the two terms in the collection of Warburg’s notes (three of
“iconography” and twenty-four of “iconology”).
What is more important is what Warburg meant by using these words. Wuttke argues con-
vincingly that Warburg used the two concepts in an interchangeable manner, with iconology
denoting, as an extension of iconography, the practice of studying works of art and all the
available historical sources as (cultural) historical phenomena (or in his own words: “Betra-
chtung der Kunst unter geschichtlichen Gesichtpunkten”). But when the words “iconog-
raphy” and “iconology” are seen in this broad context, they do not signal a new historical
method, because, as Wuttke argues, other researchers like Wolfgang von Oettingen and Jakob
Burckhardt also used this perspective (although they do not use the words “iconography”
or “iconology” in their writings). This poses the question as to how precisely did Warburg
construct his historical opponents given the broad context of the historical study of works
of art. Warburg was well aware of the fact that from an epistemological point of view what
a historian does – the whole historical process – is accidental and circumstantial when seen
from what happened in the past.
Warburg’s method
Warburg had a keen methodological interest in how to study images as historical phenomena.
He never systemized these thoughts in the form of a publication. A more or less fixed range
of methodological elements is to be found scattered throughout his work, both published and
unpublished. The elements are found together for the first time in 1907 in Warburg’s publication
“Francesco Sassettis letztwillige Verfügung” (The last will of Francesco Sassetti).9
These elements are as follows:
• The refusal to adhere to art historical practices of his days.

• The introduction of the idea of a cultural context.
• Within a cultural context the subject under study is psychologically or sociologically
defined.
• Within this frame, activity is geared toward concrete historical research differentiating all
that is possible within a context.
• The researcher realizes that, given the issues raised earlier, strictly causal arguments are aimed
too high; instead the historian presents his case as plausibly as he possibly can.
Zum Bild das Wort

The most important general truth used by Warburg to construct a historical opponent is the
famous one: “Zum Bild das Wort” (to the image the word). Adherence to this made Warburg
into such a prolific buyer of books. But it also meant that he would dig his way through Floren-
tine archives, studying wills, diaries, and money ledgers, thus being able to track the paths traveled
by people, goods, images, and ideas.
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Peter van Huisstede
Construction
Warburg, always a keen producer of drawings, graphs, schemes, and what could be called “story-
boards,” realized that cultural contexts with their socio-psychological topics were constructions
by the historian used to differentiate the way individuals or groups of individuals dealt with (the
contents of) images in the past.
For Warburg the period referred to as the Renaissance was a multidimensional semantic space
in which individuals and groups of individuals, patrons and artists, had to deal with three oppos-
ing forces that could (literally) mark the words and images they made or commissioned: the prac-
tical oriental force (with the opposites of astrology and more scientifically oriented astronomy),
the Italian humanistic force (that had to find its way between the Dionysian and Apollonian
extremes), and the North European courtly force (realism versus idealism).
Since images were carriers of the marks they were stamped with in this multidimensional space, War-
burg tried to construct an inventory of these images with the Mnemosyne Atlas; both the images and
texts had to be dealt with (that were stamped within their context) as well as the images and texts that
were produced. Warburg formulated a title for the Atlas (at half past four in the morning): “Mnemo-
syne. Bilderreihen zu einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Betrachtung antikisierender Ausdrucksprägung”
(which, very roughly, can be translated as “Mnemosyne. Images for a cultural historical view of classi-
cizing expression stamping [coining]”). In Warburg’s view, words and images could be as much actors
(“Engramme,” “Mneme”) in a historical context as were the persons upon whom they acted. Describing
these processes as part of their cultural contexts was the task of the art historian as cultural historian.
There are no shortcuts

Given the contours of the methodology sketched earlier, no shortcuts could be taken in (art)
history. It is a slow, bottom-up approach: getting the texts and images that were needed, analyz-
ing and describing the routes they traveled, working with paintings and sculptures but also with
prints and book illustrations to track the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of particular
forms and motifs, often concealed as details within larger containers; analyzing and describing their
place in the semantic space constructed with the help of the opposing models [“Hilfskonstruk-
tionen”], but always doing this in such a way that individuals or groups of individuals are involved.
The context of the Mnemosyne Atlas

A good perspective exists on Warburg’s undertakings during his last active period (1924–1929),
due to the so-called Geschäftsbuch (“Scientific journal”) he kept with Gertrud Bing and, to a
lesser extent, Fritz Saxl.10 He gave lectures and organized exhibitions, which he often prepared
with the help of the “exhibition screens”:
• The Franz Boll lecture (1925)

• The Rembrandt lecture (1926)
• The exhibition for the so-called Orientalistentag (1926)
• The Ovid exhibition (1927)
• The exhibition for the Deutsche Museum in Munich (1927)
• The Hertziana lecture in Rome (1929)
• The so-called Dokterfeier lecture (1929)
The Geschäftsbuch records an entry by Saxl, dated 26 X 26 (October 26, 1926), about a lecture
Saxl gave in Berlin. Warburg wrote, “Gehört in unseren Atlas!” (Belongs in our atlas!).
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Aby M. Warburg
The Mnemosyne Atlas

Three series of photographs of the state of the Mnemosyne Atlas are still to be found in the
Warburg Institute in London, frozen moments of a project that was always changing. The first
set of photographs dates from May 1928 and is often referred to as the “1–43 series” (there were
forty-three screens photographed); it contained 682 objects. The second state of the Atlas that
was captured is often referred to as the “penultimate series.” It consisted of seventy-one screens
with 1,050 objects displayed. It was the largest series photographed because the last series, the
so-called 1–79 series, consists of sixty-three screens with 971 objects displayed.11
The 1–43 series

The build-up of the screens of the “1–43” series closely reflects Warburg’s research themes:
• Screens 1–4 deal with relations between Italy and Northern Europe.
• Screens 11–20 deal with pictorial motifs from antiquity that Renaissance artists had to deal
with, the so-called Pathosformel.
• Screens 23–35 are devoted to astrology.
• Screens 36–40 address the theme of festivities.
• Screens 41–43 deal with works from the seventeenth century.
Bing used a similar structure for the “Gesammelte Schriften,” Warburg’s collected writings, pub-
lished in 1932.12 And when Bing wrote a memo about the Warburg Institute in its new London
setting in 1935 she used similar topics to prioritize new works to be acquired for the library:
With regard to new acquisitions, which at times amounted to 3.000 volumes a year and
should, it is hoped, keep up an average of 1.800 to 2.000, the administration is governed
by two principles: The main sections (such as astrology, Italian art and literature, Floren-
tine social history, festivals and theatre, humanism and classical scholarship, Renaissance
philosophy), are kept up to date, and missing works of earlier date are supplemented.
Gertrud Bing, The Warburg Institute, 1935, unpublished memo
“printed for private circulation” (author’s archive).
Astrology was a semantic space always present in the Atlas (Boll lecture 1925, Orientalistentag
exhibition 1926). It was accompanied by the context of the “Pathosformel” (Ovid exhibition
1927) and the works from the seventeenth century (Rembrandt lecture 1926). Taken from War-
burg’s earlier publications were the contexts of the relation between Italy and Northern Europe
and that of festivities. But with this flexible working medium at his disposal Warburg experi-
enced difficulties in bringing the different themes of his research together.
In July 1928 Warburg writes, “Tafeln (53) aufgestellt, 979 Abb. f. Mnemosyne. Schwierig-
keit: die Placierung v. Duccio” (“Screens [53] put up, 979 images for Mnemosyne. Problem: the
placement of Duccio”) (25 VII–29 VII 928). The next month, Warburg notes the following: “die
Anordnung d. Tafeln im Saale macht (doch) ungeahnte Schwierigkeiten innerer Art” (VI; p. 77;
15.VIII.928) (“the order of screens in the room presents, substantively, unforeseen difficulties”)
(15 VIII 928). These kind of factual journal entries are interleaved with more methodological
entries that touch upon topics such as “Mneme” (“Eintritt des antikis. Mneme,” “aus dem
mnemischen Erbgut”) and “Symbol” (“Wesen des Symbols”). They all highlight Warburg’s hard
work on the introduction of the Atlas.
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Peter van Huisstede
In November 1928 Warburg and Bing were in Rome, with the screens, to prepare his so-called
Hertziana lecture (Fig. 6.2). According to Bing, all was well:
Sehr intensive Arbeit für den Vortrag in der Bibl. Hertziana am 19 I 29 resultierte in
dem (in handwriting by Warburg: zunächst bei Coll. Bing nur sehr bedingt) erfreuli-
chen Bewusstsein, dass der Atlas wirklich grosse Fortschritte gemacht hat.
(Hard work for the lecture in the Hertziana library on 29 I 29 results [in handwriting
by Warburg: “however just a little with my colleague Bing”] in the happy acknowledg-
ment that the Atlas really made substantial progress.)
(23 I 29)
Back in Hamburg in August 1929 Warburg notes, “Atlas ganz schön” (Atlas really beautiful)
(31 VIII 929). But the next day he started once again to rearrange the images on the screens:
Habe angefangen, die ganze Götterwelt auszuschneiden, um sie zunächst kosmologisch-

monströs, tragisch-griechisch, römisch-heroisch zu ordnen als chronologisch histor-
isches Phänomen.
(Started to cut out the whole world of the gods in order to present them cosmological-
monstrous, tragic-Greek, roman-heroic as chronologic historical phenomenon.)
(1 Sept. 1929)
On the opposite page, Bing expressed her doubts: “Habe bedenken, möchte aber mit Ausserung
warten, bis die Anlage fertig ist” (I have my doubts but I will wait to express these until the new
arrangement is finished).
Figure 6.2 Gertrud Bing, Aby Warburg (center), and Franz Alber (right) in Rome. Image courtesy of the
Warburg Institute.
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Aby M. Warburg
On October 20, 1929, just a couple of days before his death on the 26th of that same month,
Warburg noted the state of the Atlas:
ca. 80 Gestelle mit ca. 1160 Abb. werde ca. 6 Tafeln zu Erkenntnistheorie und Praxis
d. Symbolsetzung aufstellen (A, B, C, D . . .).
(Some eighty screens on them about 1,160 images. I will prepare about six screens
on the epistemology and practice of “symbol coining” [A, B, C, D . . . ].)
(20 X 929)
Work on the last series

Up to his last working days Warburg kept finding it difficult to arrange the contents of the Atlas.
This was partly due to the medium he used. Although the large screens allow for easy arrangement
of images, and were easy to transport whilst travelling and lecturing, they were two-dimensional
(perhaps three-dimensional when the succession of screens would indicate a kind of a timeline)
(Fig. 6.3). What Warburg tried to do, in enlarging the semantic space to incorporate the various
Figure 6.3 Screen 47 of the Mnemosyne Atlas, last series of the Mnemosyne Atlas.
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Peter van Huisstede
smaller spaces, is not easily expressed in what is essentially a two-dimensional medium. To

complicate things further was the problem as to how the texts that belong to the Atlas should
be (re-)arranged.
In essence the problem is that of possible “n” to “n” relations between what were frequently
small parts or details of images and other images and texts. The more topic-oriented version of
the Atlas, the 1–43 series, built around the research topics (semantic spaces) of Warburg, showed
stable groups of images but required the onlooker to make relevant jumps to other screens con-
taining similar content appearing in another space or in a group belonging to another period.
On the other hand, the “chronological historical infusion” of the Atlas, added toward the
end of 1929, would make it much more difficult for the onlooker to distill repeated patterns
(groups of similar items) from the material. Realizing this, Warburg then started to work on the
epistemological, methodological, and practical introductory screens that were not numbered,
but which were marked with capital letters: A, B, and so forth. This way he tried to frame the
spectators in the new ordering of the Atlas to be able to regroup the material that was now laid
out in a more chronological way.
What we will never know for sure is whether Warburg would be satisfied with this new
arrangement. Was it possible to squeeze the various smaller semantic spaces he had studied into
one large coherent group? In a way that does not seem to be a very “Warburgian” solution. War-
burg’s work consisted of constructing semantic spaces with the help of polar models. Within those
spaces he seemed to differentiate endlessly: an item belongs to this group but is slightly different to
the other elements of this group. Somehow, this synthesis of the material of the latter part of 1929,
understandable from the point of view that Warburg wanted to present the Atlas as a book, with
a sequential order of screens, sidesteps the real problem, which was how to present interlocking
items, both images and texts, that might be part of various and sometimes related groups.
The Mnemosyne Atlas: a laboratory for the history of images

Take for example number 47:10 (all numbers refer to the publication of the last series of the
Mnemosyne Atlas by Akademia Verlag [Warnke and Brink 2000]). The image depicts Tobias
and the Archangel Raphael, a painting from around 1495 by Francesco Botticini. Tobias has the
portrait features of the son of Raffaelo Doni, who commissioned the painting.
The content of the painting, Tobias and the Archangel, is shared with some other entries on
the same screen: 47:11, 47:12, 47:13, 47:14, and 47:15. The Doni family from Florence can be
linked to the family tree Warburg made of the Medici/Tornabuoni family, also from Florence
(A:3). Framed by screen 47, the pictorial motif of Tobias and Raphael is connected to Judith and
her helper with the head of Holofernes: 47:20, 47:21, 47:22–1, 47:23, 47:24, and 47:25. Warburg
wrote a small but moving piece about the youngest son of A. Strozzi, Matteo Strozzi.13 All male
family members were exiled from Florence by the Medici family. And the mother was urged by
one of her elder sons to send her youngest son abroad. The places the exiled male Strozzi family
members visited (Barcelona, Bruges, etc.) are all indicated on the map of the Mediterranean (A:2).
A closer look at the way the garments of the Archangel are depicted shows the so-called
Nympha motif or bewegtes Beiwerk (“moving clothing”), which was one of Warburg’s major
research themes. This motif is all over the screens of the Atlas, but here we single out 46:6, with
the Nympha on the right of the fresco by Ghirlandajo for the Tornabuoni (A:3) chapel in S.
Maria Novella, Florence.
It is possible to draw a similar graph for 46:6 with edges to node A:3, and so forth, but also
with new edges to other nodes in the Atlas (Fig. 6.4). There is also a relationship between 47:10
and the same theme on 76:1 and 76:2 by seventeenth-century Dutch artists.
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Aby M. Warburg
Matteo de'Strozzi Pathosformel
47:10 47:20
76:1 47:11 46:6 A:2 47:21
76:2 47:12 A:3 47:22-1
47:13 47:23
47:14 47:24
47:25
Figure 6.4 Diagram showing two small nuclei from screen 47 of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Matteo de’Strozzi
refers to Warburg’s text (Warburg 1892); “Pathosformel” is an important research motif throughout his
work.
Like a genetic researcher, Warburg tried to describe and document the smallest parts and
the relations between these parts of the cultural historical fabric of human pictorial expression.
Bottom-up, no shortcuts allowed, and with rigor. Given the number of relations, geographical
diversity, and span of time Warburg had to deal with, it is not a big surprise that bringing together
the results of his work always seemed to end in “dumbing down.” Both the medium of the
screens and any possible book would prove to be too shallow to show the multiplicity of relations.
In conclusion
Warburg’s work and ideas still inspire researchers, as they inspired researchers in the past, includ-
ing Saxl, Panofsky, Klibansky, Seznec, Cassirer, Heckscher, Edgar Wind, and many others. This
is made possible through the Warburg Institute, its collection of books, its photographic archive,
and its publications. Even today, the project of the Mnemosyne Atlas lures researchers into its
spell, thereby confronting them with that essential Warburgian cultural mission, “Embrace it in
frenzy or take distance and use it in its new context.” Warburg’s research, the project of the Mne-
mosyne Atlas included, was very much his own personal work. That being the case, and given
that particular context in which the supposed transfer of ideas of iconography and iconology
supposedly took place, as outlined earlier, I do not believe that what is now known as iconography
and/or iconology, based on Panofsky’s ideas, covers the important parts of Warburg’s work and
ideas. Thanks to Panofsky’s influence, iconography and iconology simply became something else.
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Peter van Huisstede
Gertrud Bing had, as his research assistant, a good view on Warburg’s work and ideas. In
an essay entitled “A.M. Warburg,” published in the Italian edition of Warburg’s “Gesammelte
Schriften,” written in 1964, she writes,
Es ist nicht das erste Mal in der Geschichte der Forschung, dass ein Autor hinter der
Fülle der Verarbeitungen und Weiterführungen seines Werkes aus dem Gesichtfeld
verschwunden ist. Will man sich damit nicht begnügen, ihn nach dem Einfluss zu
beurteilen, den er ausgeübt had, so muss man darangehen, durch Wiederherstellung
seines Textes die Quelle neu zu erschliessen.
(It is not the first time in the history of science that a researcher disappears behind
the mass of adaptions or continuations of his work. If it is not enough to judge him for
his influence, then one has to dive in to find the source through the reconstruction of
his texts.)
In this, Bing refers to one of the methodological pillars of Warburg’s cultural historical work –
there are no shortcuts; one has to dig up textual sources time and again to be able to construct
semantic spaces in which it is possible to document (differentiate) the actual use individuals or
groups of individuals make of images (“psycho-sociological semantic spaces”). In other words,
in Warburg’s methodology the human can never be removed from the equation. It is simply out
of the question, and yet, this is precisely what Panofsky did when he defined his (in)famous third
level of iconographical research – iconology. That said, it is fascinating to see how elements of
Warburg’s work and ideas seem to have connections with later developments in other scientific
areas. Gombrich grasped one of the most important parts of Warburg’s ideas when he wrote
an article on the idea of semantic space used by the authors Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum.14
Warburg’s belief about the human condition, “Athen muss immer wieder aus Alexandrien erob-
ert werden,” also resonates strongly in the important research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos
Tversky.15
And there is still so much more in his work that remains to be studied – ideas about collective
memory, images from the past as cultural forces (“Mneme”: coined with impact), the historian
as a kind of director constructing a historical opponent, the constant play with fore- and back-
ground, back- and foreground, experimenting with new media, polarity as a model to differenti-
ate everything in between, the idea that what we call culture is a small layer of veneer underneath
which are all the primitive forces, setting up socio-psychological semantic spaces filled with
interlocking multidimensional graphs (the Atlas).
Above all, however, there is a scientific rigor that is unheard of in art history. Take for example
the small image that depicts two small details from screen 47 of the last series of the Atlas. It was
generated with the Graphviz program using the so-called dot notation. Part of the structure of
this file resembles the following:
digraph 47 {
node [shape=record];
item1 [shape=record, label="47:10"];
item6 [shape=record, label="A:3"];
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Aby M. Warburg

item9 [shape=record, label="47:22-1"];
item1 -> item2;
item2 -> item3;
item3 -> item4;
item4 -> item5;
item5 -> item1;
item6 -> item1;
item7 -> item8;
item8 -> item9;
item9 -> item10;
item10 -> item11;
item11 -> item12;
item12 -> item7;
item6 -> item7;
}
All nodes and edges, but once visualized it is possible to construct graphs of the smallest units
within the Atlas and work with them using such concepts as symmetry, interlocking, mirroring,
multiple inheritance, groups, similarity, and so forth. The nodes are the images and/or texts,
the arrows being what the historian describes and differentiates, having construed a historical
opponent – in other words, the Mnemosyne Atlas: a laboratory for cultural history.
Notes
1 R. Chernow, The Warburgs: A Family Saga (London, 1995), 63.
2 Chernow, The Warburgs (as in note 1), 49.
3 Chernow, The Warburgs (as in note 1), 117.
4 Ibid.
5 Private communication with Prof. Gombrich (1989). When I wrote my PhD on the Mnemosyne Atlas
(University of Leiden, 1992, unpublished) I read in Gombrich’s biography of Warburg that it was Saxl
who had given him the idea of the screens. Saxl served in the Austrian army during the First World War
and his unit used similar screens for communication purposes. As I could not find any physical evidence
for this in the archives of the Warburg Institute, I pestered Gombrich with questions about the topic.
One day I got a brief note from Gombrich stating, “You ask me how I know what you can’t find in the
archives? I know because Saxl told me so.” That settled it!
6 K. Michels and C. Schoell-Glass, ‘Aby Warburg: Tagebuch Der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg
Mit Einträgen von Gertrud Bing Und Fritz Saxl’. A. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (Studienausagabe), Bd.
VII (Berlin, 2001).
7 G. Bing, unpublished document, for private circulation (London, The Warburg Institute, 1935), 5.
8 D. Wuttke, Aby M. Warburg: Ausgewählte Schriften Und Würdigungen. Saecula Spiritalia (Baden-Baden,
1979), 630–33.
9 A.M. Warburg, “Die Erneurung Der Heidnischen Antike. Kulturwisschenschaftliche Beiträge Zur
Geschichte Der Europäischen Renaissance,” Reprint Der Ausgabe Leipzig/Berlin 1932, ed. H. Bredekamp
and M. Diers (Berlin, 1998), A. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (Studienausagabe), Bd. I. 1, 2. (Berlin,
1998).
10 See Michels and Schoell-Glass (Aby Warburg) (as in note 6).
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Peter van Huisstede
11 M. Warnke and C. Brink, “Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.” A. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (Studien-
ausagabe), Bd. II. 1 (Berlin, 2000).
12 Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (as in note 9).
13 A. M. Warburg, “Matteo de’Strozzi: Ein Italienischer Kaufmanssohn Vor 500 Jahren,” Hamburger
Weihnachtsbuch (1892), 236.
14 E.H. Gombrich and R. Saw, “Symposium: Art and the Language of the Emotions,” Aristotelian Society
Supplementary Volume 36 (1962), 215–46.
15 D. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York, 2011).
88
7
FRITZ SAXL
Transformation and reconfiguration
of pagan gods in medieval art
Katia Mazzucco
“Medieval Western art was [. . .] unwilling to retain a classical prototype without destroying
either its original form, or [. . .] its original meaning [. . .]. Figures which were meant to repre-
sent Orion or Andromeda no longer looked like the Orion or Andromeda of classical times [;]
thus, like the unfortunate lovers in a moving picture who await their reunion, classical subject
matter and classical form were separated.”
E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, Classical Mythology in Medieval Art
Fritz Saxl’s most important contribution to the iconography of medieval art can be identified in
his work on the problem of the “after-life” (Nachleben) of antiquity. His contribution was an art
historical and typological approach which focused on how forms survived from antiquity into
the visual world of medieval Christianity. From his early research on manuscript illustrations, Saxl
formulated the “principle of reintegration” of classical forms and contents into the Renaissance,
a theory developed while discussing the history of the classical tradition, regarding astrological
illustrations in medieval manuscripts and the language of expressional gestures in art. On the one
hand, this theory anticipates, in counterpart, Panofsky’s much better known “principle of dis-
junction” and, on the other hand, it developed out of a reinterpretation of Aby Warburg’s theory
of “pathos formulae” (see the essays on Warburg and Panofsky elsewhere in this publication).
Fritz Saxl (Vienna 1890–London 1948) (Fig. 7.1) studied art history and archaeology in
Vienna, with Max Dvořák, Julius von Schlosser, and Franz Wickhoff, and in Berlin with Hein-
rich Wölfflin. In 1912 Saxl received his doctoral dissertation on Rembrandt under Dvořák,1 and
in 1913 he became librarian and Aby Warburg’s personal assistant. Since then his name became – and
still is – “indissolubly linked”2 with that of the Warburg Library (renamed Kulturwissenschaftli-
che Bibliothek Warburg [KBW] between c. 1924 and 1933]) in Hamburg, and with the history
and biography of its founder.
“My core question [. . .] is the Nachleben of Antiquity in the Middle Ages,” wrote the young
scholar to Warburg that very year.3 As a student, he was already cultivating his interest in the
imagery of medieval astrology and the first fruit of this research was his paper on the “history
of the representation of the Planets in the East and in the West” (1912).4 Thanks to Warburg’s
and Franz Boll’s5 support, he undertook a long series of research missions in the most impor-
tant libraries in Europe and was able to start his work on the “catalogue of astrological and
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Katia Mazzucco
Figure 7.1 Fritz Saxl in the reading room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg,
1926–1927, unknown photographer. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London.
mythological illuminated manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages”: the first two volumes of Roman
and Viennese manuscripts were published in 1915 and 1927;6 the work continued with Hans
Meier in London, and the posthumous volume on English manuscripts was published in 1953.7
In the introduction to the first volume of the catalogue, the young scholar makes a clear meth-
odological statement:
We are accustomed to examine the problem of the confrontation of the post-Carolin-

gian Middle Ages with the pictorial heritage of Antiquity, so that, most of the time, we
investigate the stylistic relations between works of art of the two periods.
[. . .] We must not consider [the] problem under the aspect of the evolution of form
only, but also under that specific medieval aspect that is the preeminent importance of
the representation of content, in order to reach not a one-sided understanding of the
role of the ancient visual inheritance in medieval intellectual life. The method is old
and renowned: that is Iconography.
[. . .] It is clear that iconographic inquiries, precisely in these fields of representa-
tion where ancient themes are illustrated, would feed our knowledge on the relation-
ship between Antiquity and the Middle Ages more than investigating other fields of
knowledge.8
The impact of Warburg’s approach on the young scholar’s work is obvious in this passage, and
three critical points are obvious – points that were later to become crucial issues in the developing
field of iconological studies. First, it was necessary to study the forms of representation (circles,
areas, or fields of representation, Darstellungskreise) of ancient subjects (themes, antike Themen) in
the manuscript tradition using classification, and through visual taxonomies. Second, he iden-
tified the Carolingian renascence as a critical moment, a watershed, not only for the history of
the manuscript tradition and style but also for the history of illustrating antique themes, as was
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Fritz Saxl
to develop in future studies on the renascences of the classics. Third, his main point assumed
content as the most appropriated for understanding medieval art. This opposed a purely formal
analysis, and Saxl suggested a “disjunction” between content and form, or between themes and
motifs, in the art of the Middle Ages.9
In 1920 Fritz Saxl was asked to become acting director of the Warburg Library in Hamburg,
while Aby Warburg was ill. According to Warburg’s wish, the library, created as a private collec-
tion, turned from 1922 into a research institute. It was aligned with the University of Hamburg,
which was founded in 1921, and had attracted scholars such as Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panof-
sky. In those years, the library which Warburg had collected was described by Saxl as a “ques-
tion-library” (Problem-Bibliothek), with questions relating to the posthumous, or afterlife, of the
antique (Nachleben der Antike) being at its core.10 Saxl initiated two series of publications, collected
studies (Studien) and lectures (Vorträge), in the library, and developed a new and original approach
to the survival of pagan antiquity in Christian society as a “general historical discipline.”11 His
essay on Dürer’s Melancholia I, written with Erwin Panofsky and published as the second volume
of the Studien, developed out of his work at this time.12 In summer 1939, after many delays
and interruptions, the proofs of a revised and enlarged edition of the work on Melancholia were
ready, but the types were destroyed during the war. A new English and reformulated edition, this
time with Raymond Klibansky, was finally published as Saturn and Melancholy (1964): the book
has been described as the best example of the Warburg studies, a new science that, “differently
from many other disciplines, exists, but has no name.”13
When Warburg died in 1929, Saxl became director of the Warburg Library. In the early
thirties he published his work Mithras (1931),14 considered to be one of his major contribu-
tions (Fig. 7.2). The work on Melancholia was subtitled “a sources- and typological-historical
research”: here both word (sources) and image (typology of ) worked together in tracing the
Figure 7.2 The Nike-Mithras type, F. Saxl, Mithras: Typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Berlin, 1931),
figs. 31–36.
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Katia Mazzucco
history of that picture. In the “typological-historical inquiries” on Mithras, the methodological

approach of the history of types – such as the types of Nike killing the bull and Perseus killing
Medusa and their influences on the type of Mithras’s tauroctony – is used to trace the iconogra-
phy of the ancient god within the fields of archaeology and history of religion.
In these years, Fritz Saxl also published two important papers and a short monograph. These
were his lecture on “expressional gestures of the visual art,” presented with a special photographic
exhibition for the German Society of Psychology (1932);15 the lecture on Classical Mythology in
Medieval Art delivered at the Department of Fine Arts at Princeton University and published in
1933 with Erwin Panofsky;16 and the essay on “Agostino Chigi’s astrological faith,” published
in Italian in 1934.17 In 1933 Saxl managed the move of the library from Hamburg to London,
as he foresaw the impossibility of scholarship in Nazi Germany, especially for those institutions
connected with Jewish scholars. “The last fourteen years of his life were devoted to grafting the
tradition of the Warburg Institute (as it came to be called) into English intellectual life,”18 and
finally in 1944 the Institute was incorporated into the University of London. Fritz Saxl was then
appointed professor of the history of the classical tradition of the University of London. Since
then, that has implicitly been the “name” applied to these studies; Erwin Panofsky would go on
to develop “iconological studies” in the United States.19
There has been a rare, and not always clear, “synastria”20 between Warburg and Saxl, espe-
cially in their intellectual biographies. Contrary to the commonly held idea of the “devoted
follower” renouncing his scholarship and shipping the Institute to safe waters, Saxl in fact never
interrupted his own research.21 While director, he went back to old ideas and renewed interests,
such as Rembrandt,22 and right up to the end of his life, he continued to research the Venetian
Renaissance and medieval English art;23 he published many papers and short notes in the English
series of the Institute, and gave a number of lectures, collected after his death and published in
two volumes (1957).24 His many fields of interests and variety of approaches to the history of
images are shown in this collection and in the number of its illustrations included. His work is
best known through this publication as well as a later selection of his lectures:25 much of the
research from the Hamburg years has received only scant attention.26
A medieval diagram emblem of a “new science”

The print Melancholia I by Albrecht Dürer seems to have taken on or assumed the role of icon or
daemon for iconology. A totally different kind of image is the picture generally associated with the
Warburg studies: that is the diagram “Mundus–Annus–Homo,” with the schematic intersections
of the four elements, the four seasons, and the four temperaments.
The diagram is included in the first edition of Isidore’s De responsione mundi et de astrorum
ordinatione – more commonly known under the title De natura rerum – printed at Augsburg by
Günther Zainer in 1472 (Fig. 7.3).27 This graphic statement of the Middle Ages translates the
doctrine of cosmic harmony into a visual instruction. The diagrammatic depiction of the micro-
cosm-macrocosm analogy, originally introduced in Isidore’s manuscripts, was repeatedly copied
in the following centuries and his De natura rerum was often given the title of “liber rotarum”:
wheel schemata were used to express textual correlations graphically.28 Fritz Saxl’s interest in
these diagrammatic depictions is obvious in his research on manuscript illustration, the theory of
four humors, the illustrated medieval encyclopedias, and the tradition of macrocosm and micro-
cosm in medieval pictures.29 He remarked in 1923 in a letter to Adolph Goldschmidt how Isidore
could be considered the source for almost all secular imagery of the Middle Ages.30
The reproduction of the xylography from the Zainer edition became the logo of the Institute’s
English publications, Studies and Lectures, and the diagram still stands above the entrance to the
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Fritz Saxl
Figure 7.3 The Mundus–Annus–Homo diagram, Isidore’s De responsione mundi et de astrorum ordinatione,
Günther Zainer Augsburg 1472; A. Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke (Leipzig, 1920), fig. 292.
Warburg Institute building in London’s Woburn Square, completed in 1958. A graphic

re-elaboration of the tetragram is also found on the Warburg Library webpage; each of the four
elements was assigned to one of the thematic sections of the Library: “Image” corresponds to
earth (Terra); “Word” to water (Aqua); “Orientation” to air (Aer); “Action” to fire (Ignis).31
In looking at the origins of the Warburg Institute’s emblem, it first occurs in the first prospec-
tus of the library – reopened in Thames House after the move from Hamburg. The prospectus
was drafted in 1934 by Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl, and Edgar Wind.32 The book collection was
described in the leaflet according to a tetradic system of four sections: “Religion, Natural Sci-
ence, and Philosophy”; “Language and Literature”; “Fine Arts”; “Social and Political Life.” As
a correlate of the book collection, and as a resource and research tool, the prospectus includes
the scheme of the photographic collection, organized in two sections: “Astrological and Mytho-
logical Manuscripts” and “Iconography of Classical Subjects in Medieval and Modern Painting,
Sculpture and Applied Arts, including Festivals.”33
The system of the four thematic sections of the library – and its different Aufstellungen (dis-
positions) during the early years and travels of the library34 – goes back to the first arrangement
planned for the four stockrooms of the newly built library building in Hamburg, which was
completed in 1926. Aby Warburg wrote,
Reading room: reference library and journals.

Stock rooms: 1. History of Art; 2. Postumous life of the Antique in Religion, Science
and Education; 3. History [. . .] and history of literature; 4. Sociology, Trade, recent
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Katia Mazzucco
political history, World War, Newspapers; 5. History of Festivals and Theatre and Dutch
cultural history of the XVII century.35
The scheme also reflects the status of Warburg’s personal research – section “5” (planned to be
stored on the fourth floor, with section “4”) included material for research then in progress –
and highlights the mosaic nature of the question-library, organized according to themes, and
accessible according to this logic.
A document shows the existence of a plan for the library system as being organized into four
main sections and substantially corresponds to this draft by Warburg. It dates to after 1926 and
the rearrangement of the collections in the new building. Saxl can be identified as the author of
this systematic arrangement, which follows Warburg’s original ideas. The document is a kind of
prospectus – possibly a leaflet or panel – and shows the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek War-
burg’s (KBW) specific resources, in word – the books – and image – the pictures. The prospectus
is the first example of the four headwords together as a series, associated with the four sections:
Image (Bild); Orientation (Orientierung); Word (Wort); Action (Handlung). This scheme was ini-
tially planned to also be the basis for classifying the Warburg image collection (Bildersammlung). It
was to be the same system: Image (Bild); Word and Image (Wort und Bild); Orientation and Image
(Orientierung un Bild); Action and Image (Handlung und Bild).36
As far as medieval art is specifically concerned, most of the subcategories of the system also
have a thematic logic. For instance, under the category “Image,” the subcategories “Theory of
Image Shaping (Theorie der Bildgestaltung),” “Literary Sources for the History of Image (Literarische
Quellen zur Bildgeschichte),” and “Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbe)” include a large chronological range,
and do not follow a specific stylistic periodization. Within this same main category (“Image”), two
subcategories focus specifically on medieval art: “Early Christian Art (Altchristliche Kunst)” and
“Miniatures (Miniaturen)” – the latter also having a special morphological value, as a genre and as
an art technique, and also exhibiting a special relationship with the history of the book. Within the
image collection, and specifically within the third main category “Orientation and Image,” there is
a nice convergence of Warburg’s and Saxl’s interests. The subcategory “Magic Practice and Divi-
nation” includes pictures of the “Cosmos-Man (Kosmosmann),” “Images of Temperaments,” pictures
of the practice of “Fortune Telling” (Epatoscopy, Wahrsageleber), of “Wonders (Monstra),” “Comets,”
“Lapidaries,” and “Cards.” The following subcategory “Cosmology” includes pictures of “Ancient
Gods and Myths as Heavenly Bodies (catasterization, Verstirnung),” such as “Constellations” and
“Planets,” and “Images of the Planets and Their Children” and “Images of the Months.” It is possible
to compare the two subcategories with the range of visual documentation collected for research on
the fresco cycle in Schifanoia and on “Words and Images in the Age of Luther” by Warburg,37 and
to many of the aforementioned publications by Saxl on the tradition of the astrological pictures.
The tetradic scheme is also documented in a later text, again by Fritz Saxl, and drafted around
1931,38 another crucial moment in the history of the library, after its founder’s death and before
the move to London. This version shows no modification in content, but a shift between the two
sections “Orientation” and “Image,” resulting in the series Orientation – Image – Word – Action.
The first English arrangement of the Library, as can be read in the 1934 prospectus as well as in
two articles, by Gertrud Bing and Edgar Wind respectively,39 is not simply a translation of the system
invented by Warburg and systematized by Saxl during the Hamburg years. It shows a different layout
of the four main sections; it is different from the one originally planned in 1926, and from the var-
iant proposed circa 1931, and from the future arrangement in the building in Woburn Square (after
1958); no mention is made of the four headwords. In the first London arrangement, the section cor-
responding to “Image” shifted position in the sequence of the four terms, resulting in this series: first
section, “Religion, Natural Science and Philosophy” (ex Orientation); second section, “Language
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Fritz Saxl
and Literature” (ex Word); third section, “Fine Arts” (ex Image); fourth section, “Social and Political
Life” (ex Action). Furthermore, and most interesting, the system is simplified both in structure and
in terminology. Many subcategories are incorporated – as for instance within the section “Fine
Arts” (seven subcategories) versus Bild (seventeen subcategories). The theoretical subcategories that
were first propaedeutic subcategories in each of the German main sections are suppressed – as for
instance the first subcategory of the section Bild, called “Theory of the Image-Shaping / Aesthetic”
(Theorie der Bildgestaltung / Aesthetik) and the first subcategory of the section Orientierung, devoted to
the theory of symbols. The methodological approach is also totally different: the section Handlung,
originally organized according to the three subcategories “Theoretical Basis” (theoretische Grundlage),
“Historical Basis” (geschichtliche Grundlage), and “Morphology of Social Life” (Morphologie des sozialen
Leben), corresponds in the 1934 arrangement to the section “Social and Political Life,” including the
four subcategories “Methods of History and Sociology,” “History of Social and Political Institutions,”
“Folklore and Performing Arts,” and “Forms of Social Administration and Legal and Political Theory.”
“The outlines of the library [were] as a whole determined [. . .] but within these limits it [has grown]
as the research work gradually [has covered] historical areas [that were] not yet represented”:40 in the
course of the dialogue and adaptation to the Anglo-Saxon academic approach, the system proved
to be “flexible enough to adjust to any forthcoming development of research.”41 Medieval and in
particular Christian art finds a large place in this process, both in the four main sections of the book
collection and in the image collections. The latter was in fact organized according to the two main
categories of “Astrological and Mythological Manuscripts” and “Iconography of Classical Subjects
in Medieval and Modern Painting, Sculpture and Applied Arts, including Festivals”: among the
“new” subcategories was that of “Religious Iconography” (Fig. 7.4).
Figure 7.4 Photograph showing Saint Jerome, dating to the mid-fifteenth century, hand-colored woodcut,
first stamped “Bibliothek Warburg/Hamburg 20/114 Heilwigstrasse” (old building of the library; before
1926), and afterwards stamped in London “The Warburg Institute” (no address; no affiliation with the
University of London; 1933–1944) and catalogued according to the new section “Religious Iconography,”
The Warburg Institute.
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Katia Mazzucco
Constellations, gestures: a visual principle of reformulation

In the last few decades, thanks to critical reception, translations, and recent research, Saxl’s original
work on the reintegration of the classical style and iconography into the Renaissance has been
widely recognized.42 A crucial question as to what distinguishes the Renaissance in respect to
older revivals of antiquity was raised.
In the second volume of his “catalogue of astrological and mythological illuminated man-
uscripts of the Latin Middle Ages” Saxl discussed the iconographic tradition from antiquity,
through to the end of the Middle Ages – looking at Latin and Arabic lines of transmission –
that led to the Renaissance representation of constellations; he dealt with the ways the antique
was revived and the special status of the “real” Renaissance of antiquity. The original classical
elements of the constellation images – style and form; exactness in representing astronomical
elements, such as the number and position of the stars within the scheme of the constellation;
forms of the process of catasterization, or correct representation of the mythological aspects of
the astronomical “bodies” – were not combined with each other, or even lost, during Middle
Ages but were fully reintegrated only in the Renaissance.43
This “principle of reintegration” can be read as the counterpart to the much better-known
“principle of disjunction,” developed and discussed by Erwin Panofsky in Renaissance and Renas-
cences.44 Focusing on early revivals of classical art during the Middle Ages, such as the “Carolin-
gian renascence,” Panosky first suggested the idea in his article “Classical Mythology in Medieval
Art,” which was written with Fritz Saxl.
The “principle of disjunction,” decontextualized from studies of the classical tradition, had in
itself a varied history. This included reformulations and applications to different fields of study,
such as the history of the art of Mesoamerican antiquity or the analysis of knowledge models
in microhistory. The first reference is the review of Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences pub-
lished by Georg Kubler in 1961, and Kubler’s article “Renascence and Disjunction in the Art of
Mesoamerican Antiquity.”45 According to Kubler, the survival of ancient artistic forms after the
period in which they were realized/produced does not mean that they preserved their original
meaning, and, with the passing of time, different or even new forms may be attributed to ancient
themes or subjects. Kubler traced the origin of the principle to a lecture by Adolf Goldschmidt
on the Nachleben of ancient forms in the Middle Ages published in the first issue of the Vorträge des
Bibliothek Warburg,46 and then he reassigned it to the “Life of Forms,” published in 1934 by Henry
Focillon.47 The lineage traced by Kubler, and his application of the principle to Mesoamerican
antiquity, drew a polygenetic map of the principle, dating to the start of the 1930s.
A different theoretical perspective on the “principle of disjunction” is that of microhistory,
which relates to Warburg’s studies and German image theories of the 1920s and 1930s. The
narrative and vision of history and time are again at the core of the issue. In an article written
about Siegfried Kracauer’s last and posthumously published book,48 Carlo Ginzburg drew atten-
tion to the connection between attentiveness to the minutiae of microhistory and the principle
of disjunction,49 as quoted in Kracauer. “Emphasis on Minutiae – Close Up – Micro-analysis”
is the title of a page of notes by Kracauer for his posthumous book.50 Kracauer mentioned
the “principle of disjunction” as example of close-up – that is, a way of seeing, in this specific
case, in detail, presented as “paradigmatic instance of micro histories” or “small-scale histories.”
Photography is used by Kracauer as a paragon and it is implicitly interpreted as a “cognitive
possibility,” stressed Ginzburg. In this sense and within this intellectual context, Ginzburg, in its
turn, implicitly questions how far photography, as a “cognitive possibility,” can be considered a
“symbolical form” as the invention of perspective in early Renaissance.51 When looking at the
“principle of disjunction,” Ginzburg doesn’t quote the article on classical mythology but only
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refers to its broader development in Renaissance and Renascences, and summarizes it as “the differ-
ence, commonly found in medieval art, between classical subjects represented anachronistically
and images from antiquity that have been Christianized.”
Let us go back to Saxl and his contribution to the creation of this principle, in relation to
the iconography of medieval art. Despite the vast critical bibliography on the Warburg Library,
or that on the foundation of iconological studies, or the fruitful theoretical inventions of the
Warburg Kreis, little attention has been given to the “disjunction principle” and Saxl’s work as
librarian for the arrangement and classification of both the Warburg Bücher- and Bildersammlung.
One significant trace of Saxl’s work in the systematization of the book and image collections
dates to the fall of 1927. Fritz Saxl was then deputy director of the library while Warburg was in
Italy visiting the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. The collection of pictures of the KBW,
under the collaborative work of Saxl with Edgar Breitenbach and Franz Alber, was then in the
process of classification, using a scheme that anticipated the one described in the 1934 English
prospectus of the Warburg photographic collection (Astrological and Mythological Manuscripts;
Iconography of Classical Subjects). There are many notes about the photographic collection
dating to around 1927 which mention astrological images, mainly from manuscripts, on the
one hand; and, on the other hand, reference is made to the “systematic collection” that, though
not born out by any visual documents or schemes or descriptions, is still possible to visualize as
an iconographic collection covering Warburg’s research material and other material of a more
encyclopedic coverage.52 This is borne out by the notes and working diary of the library as well
as general correspondence. This shows that the work in the image collection was inextricably
connected to the visual material in Warburg’s last work, the atlas of Mnemosyne. An extract from
the work in progress on pictures by Saxl and library assistants was given the title “Atlas of the
Language of Gestures.” This atlas by Saxl was composed of diagrams and notes and in all prob-
ability had a display of pictures, but it has been dispersed and is currently identifiable only in a
series of fragmentary documents.
The first of these documents is a folder with a label annotated by Warburg “Fritz Saxl and
Breitenbach, Atlas of the language of gestures, Fall 1927.”53 In August 1928, while working on his
visual atlas, Warburg made some notes in the library’s working diary referring to this collection
as the “Saxl-Breitenbach materials,” which were to be incorporated in Mnemosyne.54 Another
document is a different folder with many pages of diagrams ascribable to Fritz Saxl and Edgar
Breitenbach – to which, in fact, the work on the “systematic collection” was assigned55 – and has
notes by Warburg himself.56 The horizontal diagrams, which are possible instructions for display-
ing pictures on a board or panel, consist of squares with annotations referring to single works of
art, neatly disposed in chronological order and classified thematically in three main categories:
first, pagan gods and their Nachleben, as for instance “Atlas,” “Hercules,” and “Fortuna”; second,
motives and pathos formulae (Pathosformeln), such as “Abduction” (Raub), “Pursuit” (Verfolgung),
“Triumph,” and “grasping the head” (Griff nach dem Kopf); third, individual figures and scenes,
as for example “Ninfa” and “philosophical dialogue.” Some of these pictures, and further docu-
mentation on the work as coordinated by Saxl for the photographic collection, is documented in
other folders in the photographic collection of the Warburg Institute. One of the oldest sections
in the collection is in fact devoted to “Gestures.”
This same classification system is described in detail by Saxl in a report written in November
1927 for Warburg, who was in Florence at the Kunsthistorisches Institut. Saxl was reporting on
the work in progress in the library, and his letter deals with books, images, research missions, and
the Atlas.57 This scheme should in fact be seen as Saxl’s personal interpretation of the Atlas of
Mnemosyne but it is also, at the same time, inextricably connected to the general organization of
the image collection in the library. It shows the first steps and early stages of the iconographic
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Katia Mazzucco
scheme that was to be applied to the collection in London. Saxl’s three main classification groups
are illuminating and reflect his interest in antique forms and their tradition in the Middle Ages:
1 The reconfiguration (Gestaltwandel) of the ancient gods as Olympians and

demons in the Middle Ages and the restitution (Restitution) of their ancient
forms in the Renaissance.
2 Tradition and reception (Rezeption) of the ancient pathos formulae (Pathosformeln)
in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance.
3 Transformation (Formwandel) of individual ancient figures (antiker Gestalten) into
pictorial forms (Bildformen) in Middle Ages and Renaissance.58
This schematic arrangement contains both Warburg’s “pathos formulae” and Saxl’s original
interpretations and formulations and, though written for the singular purpose of reporting and
indexing, it is a rare example of a theoretical scheme from Saxl’s work. It is possible to read the
Gestaltwandel as a process of medieval shapeshifting, reshaping, or reconfiguring ancient deities,
which were later reintegrated into the Renaissance with their original forms – such as the sub-
category “Fortune” and the related examples “with the wheel,” “with the cornucopia,” “with
the sail,” and “with the forelock.”59
The second category can be read as a partial catalogue of Warburgian Pathosformeln sche-
matized according to expressional gestures, such as “Mourning” and “Grasping the head.”60
In Warburg’s work the attention focuses on anachronistic or “shocking” and decontextualized
occurrences of ancient formulae of pathos, and on their carsic historical paths; on the contrary,
Saxl’s sentence implies a sort of uninterrupted line of tradition, with a fluid passage through
centuries of reception.
The third main section includes Saxl’s contribution to defining a paradigmatic figure of
Warburg’s research on patterns of tradition – the “Nymph.” Also included is an attempt to iden-
tify other examples of ancient subjects which were similarly transformed into “image-forms”
(Bildformen) in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Formwandel describes the transformation of
ancient figures circumscribing an articulated range of themes, expressive attitudes, and formal
solutions – for example, the “Nymph” as “pensive Muse” or as “Angel.” The short index to
this section includes only three subcategories: individual figures such as the “Nymph” or the
“Thinker,” and one single scene – namely, “Man and the Environment.” In its turn, the latter
subcategory includes “Man and the Beast” (such as “Meleager’s Hunt” and “Temptations of St.
Anthony”), “the Image of Rome,” and a most interesting invention by Saxl – that is, the concept
of “formula” applied not to the expressions of pathos but instead to a nonfigurative genre – the
“Landscape-formulae.”61
The terms Gestalt- and Formwandel hint at a sort of protean quality to ancient figures within
the visual world of the Middle Ages, and not simply a failure within medieval art to attribute
genuine ancient forms to ancient content. The scheme was evidently not considered com-
plete or finished, nor was it intended as a general theoretical instruction about the dynamics
of tradition. However, it may be interesting to compare the use of these classification terms to
describe, and visualize, the reinventions of the ancient tradition, with the term Pseudomorphosis
as suggested by Panofsky in Studies in Iconology (1939). Pseudomorphosis describes a process of
hybridization of the medieval elements of an ancient figure, being reconfigured in the Middle
Ages, with reintegrated classical elements from the Renaissance, resulting in a renewed figure
which still has false, misunderstood, or mysterious ancient attributes. Panofsky introduced the
term when referring to the figure of “Father Time” – a hybrid of the reinterpreted ancient
figures of Chronos/Time and Kronos/Saturn.62 Significantly, the index drafted by Saxl arranges
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Fritz Saxl
different subject matters according to the three main categories, and includes only a few refer-
ences to style or periodization, such as that within the subcategories related to “Saturn.” The
subcategories “in Ancient Shape (antikisierend),” “Medieval Costume (Verkleidung),” “Devour-
ing Children,” and “on the dragon chariot” are included in the first main section of Gestalt-
wandel. The debate has other contributors that include Oswald Spengler, who first used the
term Pseudomorphosis (1918, 1922), adapting it from mineralogy to explain the partial or failed
integration of a young culture with an older and deep-rooted one, resulting in a distortion of
natural development and of the expressive forms of the first one.63 The debate also includes
Adolph Goldschmidt’s concept of the “disintegration of forms” (Formenspaltung), or the mor-
phological dissociation and geographical separation of forms developed in places removed from
their origins, and discussed in a lecture delivered at Harvard University in 1936.64 Furthermore,
the concept has been contextualized in the debate on the “geography of art,” referring to the
work of George Kubler on the idea of “provincial style” and Jan Białostocki’s research on artis-
tic development in Eastern Europe.65
Finally, the last reference to Saxl’s atlas is his lecture on “expressional gestures” delivered at
the Congress of Psychology in Hamburg, and for which a small photographic exhibition was
arranged. Planned as a visual display of Warburg’s approach, the exhibition was possibly an exem-
plification of the “atlas of gestures” drafted in 1927:
We have arranged here, on the walls, a number of Renaissance works of art, of whose
so-called dependence from ancient works has to be kept in mind.
The panels are mainly arranged so that above is displayed the ancient work of art,
then its medieval conversions (Umformungen) and, finally, the restitution of the ancient
formula in the art of the Renaissance.66
The text of the lecture includes a discussion on the relationships between ancient types, such
as Mithras, and their conversion in medieval art, such as Samson defeating the lion according
to the Mithras type, and restitution in the Renaissance of the original themes – Renaissance
Mithras in his ancient form.67 The exhibition was organized in sections according to the
following subjects (Fig. 7.5): “Maenad and Satyr”; “Lamentation”; “Conclamatio”; “Medusa
and the Devil Grimace”; “The Tragic Mask in the Physiognomic of Schrines – The Grotesque
of the Ancient Comedy in the Physiognomic of Evil”; “Death and Healing”; “Flight and
Triumph”; “Round Dance of Salome”; “Glancing Upwards Inspired”; “Grasping the Head”;
“Dream and Meditation”; “Gesture of Defence of the Overwhelmed Figure”; “Pursuit and
Fleeing”; “Glancing Upwards in Pain.”68 Nearly all the panels had three lines of examples
in each section, corresponding respectively, from top to bottom, to ancient, medieval, and
Renaissance works of art. The relationship among the different works is typological, and the
dynamics of copying is not examined. In the display layout, it is possible to clearly read dis-
junction rows (“AN[tike]” and “M[ittel]A[lter]”) and reintegration rows (“AN[tike]” and
“RE[naissance]”). The lecture on “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art” was delivered in
Princeton the following year, and spread even further the principle of disjunction in “classical
subject matter” and “classical form” – discussed, formulated, and visualized in research rooted
in the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg and in the Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar
of the University of Hamburg.69
The history of the Warburg Library and Saxl’s career continues in the United Kingdom, but
his role in establishing academic art historical studies in that country has not yet been properly
outlined. Here Saxl, who defined himself “not a philosopher,” nor one “able to talk about
the philosophy of history,” but rather a scholar attracted by “the concrete historical material,”
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Figure 7.5 Photographic exhibition in the reading room of the KBW for Saxl’s lecture “The Expressional
Gestures of the Visual Art,” 1931. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London.
would have developed his own art historical approach to the “history of images”: “Images with
a meaning peculiar to their own time and place, once created, have a magnetic power to attract
other ideas into their sphere; [. . .] they can suddenly be forgotten and remembered again after
centuries of oblivion.”70
Notes
1 F. Saxl, Rembrandt-Studien, unpublished dissertation, University of Vienna (1911).
2 G. Bing, “Fritz Saxl: January 8th, 1890–March 22nd, 1948,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
10 (1947); for a detailed Saxl biography and bibliography see D. McEwan, Fritz Saxl. Eine Biografie: Aby
Warburgs Bibliothekar und Erster Direktor des Londoner Warburg Institutes (Vienna/Köln/Weimar, 2012).
3 Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), General Correspondence (GC), Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg,
13/09/1913; see McEwan, Fritz Saxl (as in note 2), 83–84. The catalogue of the WIA is in progress,
edited by C. Wedepohl; all the references should therefore be considered provisionals. The interpretation
of the documents related to the “atlas of gesture” by Saxl and Breitenbach is mine (see notes 53–58).
4 F. Saxl, “Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der Planetendarstellungen im Orient und im Okzident,” Islam 3
(1912), 151–77. On Saxl’s interpretation of the planets iconography cf. D. Blume, Regenten des Himmels:
Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin, 2000), 201–02.
5 F. Boll, Sphaera. Neue griechische Texte un Untersuchingen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder (Leipzig, 1903).
6 F. Saxl, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters in
römischen Bibliotheken (Heidelberg, 1915); F. Saxl, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter
Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters der National-Bibliothek in Wien (Heidelberg, 1927).
7 F. Saxl and H. Meier, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen
Mittelalters in englischen Biliotheken – Catalogue of Astrological and Mythological Illuminated Manuscripts of the
Latin Middle Ages in English Libraries, ed. H. Bober (London, 1953). Cf. the fourth volume: P. McGurk,
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Fritz Saxl
Catalogue of Astrological and Mythological Illuminated Manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages in Italian Libraries
(other than Rome) (London, 1966).
8 F. Saxl, Einführung, in Handschriften 1915 (as in note 6), V–VII.
9 This point has been remarked by Salvatore Settis, who has included the first – and only – translation,
though partial, of the introductory texts of Saxl, Handschtiften 1915, 1927 (as in note 6) within the
selection of Saxl’s lectures he edited in 1985: F. Saxl, La fede negli astri. Dall’antichità al Rinascimento, ed. S.
Settis (Turin, 1985); cf. S. Settis “Introduzione,” 35–40.
10 F. Saxl, “Das Nachleben der Antike: Zur Einführung in die Bibliothek Warburg,” Hamburger Universi-
täts-Zeitung II, 11, 1920–21 (1921), 244–47; F. Saxl, “Die Bibliothek Warburg und ihr Ziel,” in Vorträge
der Bibliothek Warburg 1, 1921–1922 (1923), 1–10.
11 Bing, “Fritz Saxl” (as in note 2).
12 E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, “Dürer’s ‘Melancholia I’: Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung,”
Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 2 (Berlin, 1923); expanded and translated into English with the collabora-
tion of Raymond Klibansky as Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion
and Art (London, 1964). Cf. Warburg’s interpretation of Melancholia in A. Warburg, “Heidnisch-antike
Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberg Akademie der Wissenschaf-
ten, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1920, 26, Heidelberg 1920.
13 R. Klein, La forme et l’intelligible (Paris, 1970), 224. Cf. the essay by Giorgio Agamben “Aby Warburg
and the Nameless Science” (1975, 1984), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, 1999), 89–103.
14 F. Saxl, Mithras: Typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Berlin, 1931).
15 F. Saxl, “Die Ausdrucksgebärden der bildenden Kunst,” Bericht über den XII. Kongreß der Deutschen
Gesellschaft für Psychologie in Hamburg, April 12–16, 1931, Im Auftrage der Deutschen Gesellschaft für
Psychologie, ed. G. Kafka (Jena, 1932), 13–25; rpt. F. Saxl, Gebärde, Form, Ausdruck: zwei Untersuchungen,
ed. Pablo Schneider (Zurich, 2012); cf. F. Saxl, “I gesti espressivi nell’arte figurativa,” and C. Cieri Via,
“Una nota biografica all’ombra di Aby Warburg,” Annali di Critica d’arte VIII (2012), 9–23, 25–41.
16 E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 4, 1932–33
(1933), 228–80; see E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, Mitologia classica nell’arte medievale, ed. C. Cieri Via (Torino,
2012).
17 F. Saxl, La fede astrologica di Agostino Chigi (Rome, 1934). Following Warburg’s thesis on the fresco cycle
by Peruzzi (c. 1511), Saxl interpreted the Loggia Farnesina ceiling as horoscope of Agostino Chigi.
18 Bing, “Fritz Saxl” (as in note 2).
19 E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939).
20 G. Bing, “Fritz Saxl (1890–1948),” in Fritz Saxl: A Volume of Memorial Essays, ed. D.J. Gordon (London,
1957), 1–46 (6).
21 Bing, “Fritz Saxl” (as in note 2) and E.H. Gombrich “Introduction,” in A Heritage of Images: A Selection
of Lectures by Fritz Saxl, ed. H. Honour and J. Fleming (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1970), 10.
22 F. Saxl, “Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Manoah,” Studies of the Warburg Institute 9 (London, 1939).
23 R. Wittkower and F. Saxl, British Art and the Mediterranean (New York/Oxford, 1948); F. Saxl, English
Sculptures of the Twelfth Century (London, 1954).
24 F. Saxl, Lectures, 2 vols. (London, 1957).
25 A Heritage of Images (as in note 21).
26 On Saxl’s inedited works cf. among the recent researches by Karin Hellwig on Saxl and Spanish art:
Aby Warburg und Fritz Saxl enträtseln Velázquez: Ein spanisches Intermezzo zum Nachleben der Antike
(Berlin, 2015).
27 A. Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1920), pl. 34, fig. 292.
28 On the history of these diagrams see Isidore de Seville, “Traité de la nature,” in Bibliothèque de l’École des
Hautes Étude Hispaniques 28, ed. J. Fontaine (Bordeaux, 1960).
29 Saxl, Handschriften (as in note 6), “Macrocosm and Microcosm in Medieval Pictures” (1927–28), Lectures
(as in note 24), vol. 1, 58–72.
30 WIA, GC, Fritz Saxl to Adolph Goldschmidt, 06/02/1923.
31 http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/maps/; The graphic re-elaboration of the emblem, with sections of the
library associated with the four elements, is no longer the webpage logo of the Institute; a new logo was
launched in Spring 2016.
32 WIA I.13.3.5, The Warburg Institute: Collection of Book and Photographs, Thames House prospectus includ-
ing list of resources and opening times, 1934; WIA I.13.3.5.1 draft prospectus, typescript with hand-
written notes by G. Bing, F. Saxl, and E. Wind, 4 fols.
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Katia Mazzucco
33 WIA I.13.3.5, The Warburg Institute (as in note 32); cf. G. Bing, “The Warburg Institute,” The Library
Association Record 4:1 (1934), 262–66, and E. Wind, “The Warburg Institute Classification Scheme,” The
Library Association Record 2:5 (1935), 193–95. In 1934 Rudolf Wittkower was responsible for the icono-
graphic rearrangement of the photographic collection (The Warburg Institute Annual Report, 1934); cf. K.
Mazzucco, “L’iconoteca Warburg di Amburgo: Documenti per una storia della Photographic Collection
del Warburg Institute,” Quaderni Storici 3 (December 2012), 857–87; and K. Mazzucco, “Images on the
Move: Some Notes on the Bibliothek Warburg Bildersammlung (Hamburg) and the Warburg Institute
Photographic Collection (London),” Art Libraries Journal 38:4 (2013), 16–24.
34 The Aufstellungen of the Warburg Library have been largely debated; among the related bibliography see
S. Settis, “Warburg continuatus: Descrizione di una biblioteca,” Quaderni storici 58 (1985), 5–38, and cf.
“Nota finale,” S. Settis, Warburg continuatus. Descripcion de una biblioteca (Madrid, 2010); T. von Stock-
hausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Architektur, Einrichtung und Organisation (Hamburg,
1992); M.S. Diers, Porträt aus Büchern: Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg-London (Ham-
burg, 1993); H.M. Schäfer, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Geschichte und Persönlichkeiten der
Bibliothek Warburg mit Berücksichtigung der Bibliothekslandschaft und der Stadtsituation der Freien und Hansstadt
Hamburg zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2003).
35 WIA, I.9.13.1.6.1, Description of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW), typescript, 2
fols. (cf. WIA, I.9.8.3 draft version of the text, typescript with handscript annotations by Aby Warburg,
2 fols.), f. 2: “Lesesaal: Bibliographie und Zeitschriften / In den Magazinen: / 1. Kunstgeschichte / 2.
Nachleben der Antike in Religion, Wissenschaft und Bildung. / 3. Geschichte (darunter auf breiterer
Grundlage Italiens Stadtkultur) und Literaturgeschichte. / 4. Soziologie, Handel, Neuere politische
Geschichte, Weltkrieg und Zeitungen / 5. Geschichte des Festwesens und des Theaters; Holländische
Kulturgeschichte des XVII Jahrh.” The document has no date but it is ascribable to 1926 as it described
the disposition of the Library sections testified in a longitudinal section of the new building anno-
tated by Warburg in July 1926 (WIA, I.4.8, Hamburg, Heilwigstrasse 116, plans and sections dated May
1925 with notes by Warburg dated July 1927); the text, titled “Für die Minerva 1927,” was possibly a
prospectus or press release for an article composed that year and published in 1927 (P. Trommsdorff,
“Der Zweite Niedersächsische Bibliotekartag,” Minerva-Zeitschrift. Nachrichten für die Gelherte Welt 3:6–7
(1927), 145–47).
36 Cf. Mazzucco (as in note 33).
37 A. Warburg, “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara,” in
L’Italia e l’arte straniera: atti del X Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’Arte in Roma (1912), ed. A. Venturi
(Rome, 1922), 179–93; Warburg, “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten”
(as in note 12); cf. English edition, A. Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the
Age of Luther,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed. K.W. Forster (Malibu, 1999), 597–697. Originally
delivered as a lecture in 1918, the text was published in 1920 after Franz Boll’s interest and thanks to the
assistance of Wilhelm Prinz and Fritz Saxl.
38 WIA, I.9.14.3, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Grundriß der Bücheraufstellung und Bildersammlung,
c. 1931–1932; on this document and the related bibliography, cf. Mazzucco, “L’iconoteca Warburg”
(as in note 33).
39 WIA I.13.3.5, The Warburg Institute (as in note 32); cf. Bing, “The Warburg Institute,” and Wind, “The
Warburg Institute Classification Scheme” (as in note 33).
40 Bing, “The Warburg Institute” (as in note 33), 5.
41 Wind, “The Warburg Institute Classification Scheme” (as in note 33), 195.
42 Cf. S. Settis, “Introduzone,” Saxl, La fede negli astri (as in note 9); R. Duits, “Reading the Stars of the
Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (December 2011).
43 F. Saxl, Handschrifen 1927 (as in note 6), and cf. Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology” (as in note 16).
As remarked by Rembrandt Duits (“Reading the Stars of the Renaissance,” as in note 42) Saxl’s theory
on iconography of constellations, though “imperfect,” “remains the only succinct and comprehensive
outline of the transmission of constellation images from Antiquity to the Renaissance published until” D.
Blume, M. Haffner, and W. Metzger, Sternbilder des Mittelalters: Der gemalte Himmel zwischen Wissenschaft
und Phantasie (Berlin, 2012).
44 E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm 1960; rev. ed. Uppsala 1965; New
York, 1969); cf. early Panofsky’s paper “Renaissance and Renascences,” The Kenyon Review 2, VI (1944),
201–36.
45 G. Kubler, “Disjunction and Mutational Energy,” Art News 59:10 (February, 1961), 34, 55; G. Kubler,
“Renascence and Disjunction in the Art of Mesoamerican Antiquity,” Ornament,Via III (1977), 31–39;
102
Fritz Saxl
rpt. Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler, ed. T.F. Reese
(New Haven, 1985).
46 A. Goldschmidt, “Das Nachleben der antiken Formen im Mittelalter,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg I,
1921–22 (1923), 40–50. We should keep in mind that Goldschmidt’s essay was first delivered for the
Bibliothek Warburg and then published in the volume edited by Saxl; the considerations by Saxl on
Isidore and medieval imagery are included in the correspondence between the two scholars regarding
the lecture (cf. note 30).
47 In this sense, cf. E. Gombrich (Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, London, 1970), who dates the
principle back to Anton Springer and to the introduction of the term Nachleben with specific reference
to medieval art in his Bilder aus der Neueren Kunstgeschichte (Bonn, 1867).
48 S. Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last (New York, 1965).
49 “Particolari, primi piani, microanalisi: In margine a un libro di Siegfried Kracauer,” Paragone 54, nos.
48–50 (August–December 2003), 20–37; rpt. as a chapter of the book Il filo e le tracce: Vero, falso, finto
(Milano, 2006); “Minutiae, Close-up, Microanalysis,” English translation S.R. Gilbert, Critical Inquiry 34
(Autumn 2007), 174–89.
50 Cf. V. Breidecker, “‘Ferne Nähe’: Kracauer, Panofsky, und ‘the Warburg Tradition,’” S. Kracauer and E.
Panofsky, Briefwechsel 1941–1966 (Berlin, 1996), 165–76.
51 E. Panofsky, “Perspektive als symbolische Form,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1925, 258–330; published
separately (Leipzig/Berlin, 1927); English translation Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York, 1991).
52 WIA III.15.1.3, Tagebücher der KBW (TB), III, 14/09/1927 (A. Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen
Bibliothek Warburg, ed. K. Michels and C. Schoell-Glass, Gesammelte Schriften – Studienausgabe VII [Berlin,
2001]); WIA GC, Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg, 04/10/1927, 15/11/1927; cf. WIA Ia 1.7, Annual Report,
Fritz Saxl, typescript draft with some handwritten annotations, dated November 15, 1927, 19 fols.
53 WIA III.108.10, Folder label handwritten by Warburg: “F. Saxl (u. Breitenbach) Atlas zur Gebärden-
sprach, Herbst 1927.” The folder’s content relates to a different event – that is, the provisional exhibi-
tion on cosmology arranged at the KBW in September 1927 for the project in collaboration with the
Deutsches Museum in Munich (cf. WIA III.100, Kosmologie: Deutsches Museum, 1927).
54 WIA III.15.2.2, TB, V, 14/08/1928.
55 WIA GC, Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg, 15/11/1927 (as in note 52): “Was die Photographiensammlung
betrifft, [. . .] hat Breitenbach die systematische Abteilung vollkommen geordnet und katalogisiert.”
56 WIA III.108.11, Diagrams for Mnemosyne, no date. The section includes two different collections of
papers, one with handwritten notes by Warburg on twenty-eight small sheets; the other, to which
the Saxl-Breitenbach atlas could be referred and that can be therefore dated Fall 1927, composed of
thirty-eight sheets with handwritten diagrams ascribable to Saxl and Breitenbach, and with further notes
by Warburg.
57 WIA Ia 1.7, Annual Report (as in note 52); WIA, GC, Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg, 15/11/1927. Cf. K.
Mazzucco, “(Photographic) Subject-Matter: Fritz Saxl Indexing Mnemosyne: A Stratigraphy of the War-
burg Institute Photographic Collection’s System,” Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of
Thematic Ordering, ed. C. Franceschini and K. Mazzucco, Visual Resources 30:3 (September 2014), 201–21.
58 WIA Ia 1.7, “Annual Report” (as in note 52), 13: “Der Atlas, wie er wirklich jetzt vorliegt, umfasst meiner
Schätzung nach ungefähr 400 <550> Bilder, die in drei Gruppen geordnet sind: 1) der Gestaltwandel der
antiken Götter als Olympier und Dämonen im Mittelalter und 2) die Restitution ihrer antiken Formen
in der Renaissance / 2) Tradition und Rezeption Antiker Pathosformeln im Mittelalter und Renaissance /
3) Formwandel einzelner antiker Gestalten im Bildformen im Mittelalter und Renaissance.”
59 WIA Ia 1.7, “Annual Report” (as in note 52), 15.
60 WIA Ia 1.7, “Annual Report” (as in note 52), 16, 17.
61 WIA Ia 1.7, “Annual Report” (as in note 52), 18. This is not an isolated attempt: after a seminar of the
KBW with the young student Ludwig Heydenreich, for which a small display of architectural material
had been exhibited, Saxl took notes about “Pathos-Formeln der Architektur,” WIA III.15.1.3, TB, III, F.
Saxl, 07/07/1927.
62 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (as in note 19), 70–72.
63 O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2 vols. (Munich, 1918, 1922); Decline of the West, vol. 2 (New
York, 1926), 189.
64 A. Goldschmidt, “Die Bedeutung der Formenspaltung in der Kunstentwicklung,” Independence, Con-
vergence, and Borrowing in Institutions, Thought, and Art (Cambridge, 1937), 167–77; cf. C. Wood, “The
Credulity Problem,” in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China 1500–1800, ed. P.N. Miller
and F. Loise (Ann Arbor, 2012), 149–179.
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Katia Mazzucco
65 T. Dacosta Kauffmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago, 1988).

66 Saxl, “Ausdrucksgebärden” (as in note 15). In the draft copy of the lecture, the section with annotations
for commenting on the panels is typescript on separated sheets numbered, according to the panels, A, B,
C, and so forth, and later integrated in the printed version of the text; cf. WIA, Saxl Papers, 8. Ausdrucks-
gebärden 1930/32, two draft copies of the text, twenty-two fols. each, further inserts, seventeen photo-
graphs of the photographic exhibition. It is interesting to note that further copies of the photographs
are included in the section “Gestures” of the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute.
67 Cf. the discussion of this subject in Saxl, Mithras (as in note 14) and in the lecture delivered in Reading
in 1947: F. Saxl, “Continuity and Variations in the Meaning of Images” (1947), Lectures (as in note 24),
vol. 1, 1–12.
68 WIA, Saxl Papers, Ausdrucksgebärden (as in note 66), titles of the panels in the pictures: “Mänade und
Satyr / Klage / Conclamatio / Medusa und Teufelsfratze / Die Tragische Maske in der Physiognomik
des Schreins–Die Groteske der Antike Komödie in der Physiognomik des Bösen / Tötung und Heilung /
Flucht und Triumph / Reigen – Tanz der Salome / Seighafter und Inspirierter Aufblick / Griff nach
dem Kopf / Trauer und Meditation / Abwehrgeste des Niedergeschlagenen / Verfolgung und Fliehen /
Schmerzlicher Aufblick.”
69 Panofsky wrote in the first footnote of the essay, “This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered for
the first time to the teaching staff and students of the Department of Fine Arts of Princeton University.
It resulted, however, from the common endeavor of the two authors, who in their research were assisted
by the Hamburg students of art history.”
70 Saxl, “Continuity and Variations” (as in note 67), 1, 2.
104
8
ERWIN PANOFSKY
(1892–1968)*
Dieter Wuttke
Life and work

Academic art history became one of the leading fields of the humanities in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, especially with regard to a scientifically guided understanding of
art as art. This was due mainly to the work of scholars such as August Schmarsow, Alois Riegl,
Adolph Goldschmidt, Heinrich Wölfflin, Aby M. Warburg, Wilhelm Vöge, Julius von Schlosser,1
and their followers (see the essay on Warburg elsewhere in this volume). Their precedence was
because the methodology of art history was merged with that of the other humanities, especially
history and philology. By 1912 Heinrich Wölfflin had become the symbolic father-figure of the
internal methodology and as such had secured the autonomy of the discipline. Aby M. Warburg
served the same purpose in synthesizing methods which directed academic art history toward
a new horizon looking into cultural studies. In the twentieth century, academic art history was
given an essential boost by the undoubtedly most talented art historian of that first generation
of students, Erwin Panofsky. He had been influenced both by Wilhelm Vöge and Adolf Gold-
schmidt while keeping a critical distance from the formalistic approaches of Alois Riegl and
especially of Heinrich Wölfflin. By late 1915, he had gradually embraced the methodology and
objective concerns of Warburg. When he was forced to emigrate from Germany in 1933/34,
Panofsky was considered on both sides of the Atlantic to be one of the most productive instruc-
tors and researchers of the period. This appraisal remained uncontested until his death and after.
Panofsky constantly sought to promote and develop inter- and transdisciplinarity, which are still
the foci and hallmarks of international research in the world of art history. Motivated by War-
burg, he led the way into synthetic art and cultural science which took into consideration the
history of science and aimed at bridging the gap between the “Two Cultures” – on one side the
humanities and on the other natural science and mathematics.2 From the 1980s onwards, “dense
description” has been propagated as the methodology of “new” art and cultural studies.3 If Vöge
and Warburg were the inventors of the newly acclaimed methodology, then Panofsky provided
its theoretical underlay. These ideas were then applied in fields other than art history. Panofsky’s
influence initially in the United States and then in non-European countries was immense; fol-
lowing World War II, Europe also came under the sway. This effect extended into the 1980s and
1990s, supported all along by the translation of his works into a variety of languages. Now in the
twenty-first century, despite certain criticism, his model still remains the standard.
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Dieter Wuttke
Erwin Panofsky died in Princeton on March 14, 1968, shortly before his seventy-sixth birth-
day.4 It is said that the last books he asked for were the Bible and the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales.
No grave marks his last resting place where one could linger and commemorate him. His ashes
were placed in an urn and buried under a tree he favored on the wooded grounds of the Insti-
tute for Advanced Study. The exact location is known only to his immediate family. Is this what
the author of Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini
(1964) would have wished?5 Definitely. If asked, he would have considered the visible monument
superfluous since in his eyes the dignity of man rested on immaterial intellectuality as long as it
respected human values and acted accordingly.
Panofsky’s retreat from the visual and tactile world following his death corresponded exactly
to the activity on which his life as a historian had been focused: envisioning life past in the mind’s
eye in order to disclose the future to the humane human being. In this vein the Art Museum of
Princeton University published a small commemorative booklet in 1969 entitled Erwin Panof-
sky in Memoriam. The small collection of essays came from a memorial service his friends held
one year after his death.6 Even today the thin booklet seems the most appropriate posthumous
laudation in memorial to the man. Robert A. Koch contributed an article on Lucas Cranach
the Elder’s painting Venus and Cupid, which had been acquired in 1968 by the Princeton Art
Museum (registration number y1968–111) and which Panofsky would not have seen. Thus the
painting which Panofsky could not have seen in the flesh serves as a kind of grave good for the
art historian who had been known to call out, “Goddam the originals,” which of course he meant
ironically. His friends knew him as a bookman par excellence. But, of course, they knew as well that
for Panofsky as for any art historian nothing counted as much as the originals, and he hunted
them down when- and wherever he could. Not leaving it at just a viewing, he would encourage
the application of scientific methods as seen in his efforts concerning the Ghent altarpiece. The
theme of Koch’s article served as a postscript to Panofsky’s famous paper “Blind Cupid,” which
he had published in his Studies in Iconology in 1939. Cranach’s presentation of perfect beauty and
its stylized realization were meant as an homage to the great interpreter of artistic beauty as well as
to the man of flesh and blood. The renowned Cranach scholar Jacob Rosenberg joined together
elements of style analysis, interpretative research in art history, and connoisseurship in his short
critical essay, and approached the work of art in the same way Panofsky had seen as necessary.
As important as seeing was listening to Panofsky, not only to words but also equally to tones.
Wolfgang Stechow, one of his oldest friends and highly talented musically, elucidated Panofsky’s
intimate relationship to music, especially to that of Mozart. Among Panofsky’s Latin epigrams
there is one on Mozart’s death, short as it is skillful:
Quare, Mors, juvenem Wolfgangum praeripuisti?

Ne secreta mea prodere pergat opus.
(Why, death, have you carried off Wolfgang so young?
[Death’s answer:]
So that his work my secrets no longer reveal.)
These and a number of other aspects were integrated by William S. Heckscher into an overall
picture of Panofsky’s life and work in less than twenty printed pages.7 His contribution combined
the masterful gift of presentation with the closest approach possible to truth through content, a
reflection of the life and works of Panofsky himself. Written with the affection of an “honor”
student, it mirrors the essay Panofsky dedicated to his own teacher, Wilhelm Vöge, in 1958.
“Truth and Beauty” is, however, the motto of the Institute for Advanced Study,8 in which Panof-
sky served from 1935 to 1968, a course of thirty-three years.
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Erwin Panofsky
Today, Panofsky critics say that there is no such thing as “disguised symbolism.” Jan Białos-
tocki, the distinguished Polish art historian, considered its discovery in Dutch art as one of Panof-
sky’s lasting insights.9 No one would have reacted more calmly to the criticism than the perceiver
himself. All that is valid for Panofsky’s scientific studies is valid for this discourse; he raised the
level of discussion to a height previously unknown. Hardly any of these critics would be prepared
to accept this or even to try to reconstruct the research context to which Panofsky had reacted.
The historian Joachim Fest observed, “Was sich kritische Geschichte nennt, offenbart häufig weniger
Kraft zur Unterscheidung, als zur Verdammung, und kein Respekt vor dem Stummsein der Toten macht
den Anklägern die Schuldsprüche schwer.” (That which is called critical history often discloses not
so much the power to discern than the wish to condemn, and the accusers having no respect for
the silence of the dead are ready with their verdict.)10
A Hanoverian by birth, by blood a Prussian-Berlin Jew with a heart for Hamburg who was driven
to the paradise of Princeton: this is how one could characterize him in modification of Aby M.
Warburg’s own biographical formula.11 Erwin Panofsky was born on March 30, 1892, in Han-
nover, the son of well-to-do parents. In his forties, Panofsky’s father decided to become a man of
leisure. The family moved to Berlin and the son was enrolled in the distinguished Joachimsthalsches
Gymnasium, which educated and formed him in such a way that ensured his lifelong gratitude.
One day, the school principal discovered that the Primus omnium was reading the magazine Sim-
plizissimus; he threatened to demote the pupil one step down the ladder if he continued, to which
Erwin replied that he should go ahead and demote him.
Panofsky began to study law at Freiburg im Breisgau in the summer of 1910. However, right
after the first semester, he unofficially began to study art history, and after the second semester
he officially majored in it with minors in archaeology, history, and philosophy. Here, it was
the attraction of the subtle and sensitive as well as artistically talented and methodically sound
Wilhelm Vöge which set him onto the path of professional art history. This is where Panofsky
learned that it was more important to have methods than to write about them. It was also here
where he learned what methodology does not teach: methods cannot be learned from methods
but rather from their practical application. Although he published the methodological essay on
the unity of content and form, Meaning in the Visual Arts, in the Magazine of Art in 1951, and in
1955 the paperback of the same name with the famous methodological introduction of “Ico-
nography and Iconology,” his favorite saying was “the discussion of methods spoils their appli-
cation.” It was typical of him that from his base in the United States he did not recommend any
introduction to methodology to other art experts but instead referred only to the last book of his
former teacher, Wilhelm Vöge, Jörg Syrlin der Ältere und seine Bildwerke (Jörg Syrlin the Elder and
His Work) (1950). This, he claimed, was perhaps the closest to the ideal of a “total history of art.”12
Only in one instance did the cleverly modest man, who otherwise ironically observed that he
had written only “little books,” dare to call one of his own works an “opus magnum.” It was no
coincidence that, when he introduced the concept of disguised symbolism in Early Netherlandish
Painting (1953) into art historical discourse, he dedicated it to Wilhelm Vöge. This major work
was developed out of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Panofsky had given at Harvard, which
was according to one of his letters an honor nearly equivalent to the Nobel Prize.
His dissertation, Dürers Kunsttheorie, vornehmlich in ihrem Verhältnis zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener
(Dürer’s Theory of Art, Especially in Relation to the Theory of Art of Italian Artists), was the answer
to a question in a contest he won in 1913, the prize awarded by the Grimm Foundation of the
University of Berlin. He received his PhD in 1914 under Vöge in Freiburg, and the dissertation
was published in 1915. The book, which for a doctoral thesis at that time was uncommonly
long, reveals unique talent. The factual and stylistic mastery of a topic so challenging in its inter-
disciplinary approach is phenomenal, and even today the work has not been superseded. What
107
Dieter Wuttke
came to light then continued to mark a life of research of more than forty years, successful in
the sense of its comprehensiveness and profundity: the simultaneous mastery of mathematical,
philosophical, aesthetic, art historical, historical, and philological knowledge and methods, noth-
ing less than a seemingly effortless transdisciplinarity. It discloses a rare ability to present highly
complicated phenomena in ordered clarity, breathtaking speed in output, and a highly factual as
well as linguistic certitude. In his thesis, however, a long-term risk became evident: occasionally
his urge to communicate his findings kept him from continuing the search for further sources
and led to premature hypotheses. Since, however, Panofsky not only taught but also practiced
scientific integrity, he himself would open the way for criticism and accept and integrate it in
further publications.
By the winter of 1914–1915 Panofsky was back in Berlin. To complete his training, he sought
out the famous medievalist Adolph Goldschmidt. Apparently, though, Panofsky had quite a bit
to offer Goldschmidt, who in his typically dry manner remarked, “Wenn Erwin ein Bild sieht, dann
fällt ihm immer etwas ein.” (When Erwin sees a picture, something always occurs to him about it.)
A fellow student, Edmund Schilling, remarked that Panofsky replied: “Sie sind das Trüffelschwein,
das die Trüffeln sucht. Ich bin der Koch, der damit die guten Gerichte bereitet.” (You are the truffle pig
searching for truffles, and I am the cook using them in tasty dishes.) This is a sign of how the
Goldschmidt circle moderated scientific seriousness with humor and irony. This typical Berlin
wit remained Panofsky’s life elixir. In Goldschmidt’s seminar he met Dora Mosse, eight years his
senior, whom he married in 1916. At the end of 1915, Goldschmidt arranged Panofsky’s first visit
to the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg. Here, Warburg himself introduced
his research library as an Institut für Ausdruckskunde (Institute for the Study of Artistic Expression)
to the students from Berlin, among whom was Hans Kauffmann, the future chair of art history
in Berlin. It was here that Panofsky stepped into the magic circle of the man who must be con-
sidered the inventor of those comprehensive visual studies, now called Bildwissenschaft, and who
would become after Vöge and Goldschmidt his third major influence.13
From the time of his university studies he had traveled extensively in Germany and Europe
to study original works of art. Even his honeymoon through Franconia with a week’s stay in
Bamberg in the summer of 1916 served as an excursion in art history. During his civilian service
in 1918 he started to look for a venue where he could undertake his habilitation. He nearly went
to Heidelberg or Tübingen but instead responded to an offer made by Gustav Pauli, the director of
the Hamburger Kunsthalle, on December 31, 1919, to come to Hamburg and to join the faculty
of the newly founded university. By the summer of 1920, his habilitation on Michelangelo was
finished. He had submitted a manuscript with the title Die Gestaltungsprincipien Michelangelos,
besonders in ihrem Verhältnis zu denen Raffaels (The Formal Principles in Michelangelo’s Art, Especially
in Relation to Those of Raphael), which was never published. A sensation occurred in June 2012,
when a safe in the basement of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich which had been
unopened for years revealed a revised, 334-page version of this work.14
Gustav Pauli considered Panofsky to be the most talented of the younger generation of Ger-
man art historians and the only one qualified for the soon to be created chair of art history at the
University of Hamburg. Since the position was only to be filled in January 1926, Panofsky had
to fall back on private financial means, the occasional sale of inherited antiques, and the modest
salary of a wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter (auxiliary assistant) to bridge the unpaid gap. Despite his
poor financial situation and as soon as postwar conditions allowed, he began foreign travelling,
looking up colleagues and dealers, viewing works of art, and researching sources. In 1924 he
wrote to his wife from Amsterdam: “Es ist herrlich, für 6 Wochen Europäer zu sein” (It is wonderful
to be a European for six weeks); in Paris, 1925, he exclaimed, “Es ist tatsächlich die Hauptstadt
Europas” (This really is the capital of Europe).
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Erwin Panofsky
By 1920 the couple with their two sons, Hans and Wolfgang – Hans became a meteorologist,
Wolfgang a physicist and both were to be just as successful as their father – moved from Berlin to
Hamburg, the city Panofsky had encountered for the first time in 1911 (or possibly some years
earlier). He put down roots quickly, and whenever he recalled the thirteen years he spent there,
he considered them to be the best and most productive of his life. No other town remained so
close to his heart nor aroused more longing and nostalgia. It was the 1920s which he considered
to be the most modern years of the century and appreciated the most. The fact that he never
returned to Hamburg underlined his feelings for the irretrievable city he had to leave. He brought
great enthusiasm to the new position, finding no work too menial or any task too bothersome
as he established the art history department. As a teacher he was ingenious and extraordinarily
charismatic. In next to no time the art history department drew the highly gifted from all over
Germany to Hamburg (Fig. 8.1). When the term Hamburger Schule came into existence, this
honorary title was also due to a large extent to the scientific energy emanating from the Kultur-
wissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg.
Decisive for Panofsky’s further development as a researcher was the fact that he was so open to
Warburg’s train of thought and found in his library the best instrument imaginable for research
in art history. In Hamburg he became so involved in the library that he must have not only been
considered the ideal user but also appeared to outsiders as a second Warburg and the person
who was able to bring to light the immense power of the library as an instrument of research.
Figure 8.1 Panofsky and his students from Hamburg University on an excursion to Westphalia from July
16 through July 20, 1932. Panofsky is sitting on the right side with his wife Dora in a white blouse behind
him. For the identification of the other figures see Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 366 (Fig. 34), and
additions in Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1), 33. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke.
109
Dieter Wuttke
Naturally a person like this, striving to integrate and open to philosophical stimulation, would
focus on the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who was in contact with the Warburg circle. Due to the
stimulating influence of this circle Panofsky added typology to his studies and the new approach
to a work of art called “iconography”; this extended even further his studies which had used
the concept of style, historical art theory, and aesthetics as their methodology. In his monograph
Imago Pietatis: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des Schmerzensmanns und der Maria Mediatrix (1927)
he not only illustrated the power of typology but also was the first to elucidate its theoretical
structure. With his essay on the theory of iconography, Zur Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von
Werken der bildenden Kunst (1932), he examined the close integration of art and culture using a
scientific basis which is still, despite critical remarks, unsurpassed in terms of methodology. This
article was so fundamental and had such far-reaching consequences that its importance for the
interpretation of visual art can be compared only with Heinrich Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe (1915). If today it is self-evident in philology and comparative cultural sciences that
a picture accompanying a text must be integrated into the interpretation, that historians struggle
for a methodological foundation when studying historical images, that from their midst a call
goes out for image criticism which corresponds to textual criticism, while on the other hand art
historians regard the interpretation of a text accompanying an image as self-evidently relevant,
then all this must, to a great degree, be credited to Panofsky. Just like Warburg, he belongs to those
prophets whose shoulders posterity may stand upon to expand its vision. The evolutionary thrust
he provided to the disciplines of the humanities which interpret art is comparable for example to
the discovery of the Indo-European family tree of languages and its significance for linguistics.
In 1933 the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg moved to London. Even before his death,
Warburg had considered transferring the library to Italy and Rome, and when the anti-Jewish
terror of the Nazis commenced, the decision to leave became imperative. Panofsky, who since
1931 in his role as the library’s ambassador had already taught twice at New York University as a
visiting professor and whose lectures in English on German art were highly respected, fortunately
received a further invitation for 1934/35, so that the whole family risked the move to Princeton.
In Hamburg, the expulsion of the teachers and the loss of the library brought about the demise
of teaching and studying art history. In New York, however, Panofsky received an offer from
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, an institution he remained loyal to for the rest of
his life, even though others, including Harvard, attempted to hire him. There, the Einstein of art
history became a colleague as well as a friend of the great physicist Einstein. His friendship with
the physicist Wolfgang Pauli was even closer. When Pauli was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945,
Panofsky was chosen to deliver the institute’s congratulatory speech in which his humanistic
command of wit and language and his ability to combine the natural sciences and the humanities
in one dialogue honored not only the recipient but also Panofsky himself.
In the field of art history, cultural relations between America and Germany had already started
before World War I with among others the founding of the Germanic Museum at Harvard. In
the second half of the 1920s the bonds were strengthened. Prior to Panofsky, Adolph Gold-
schmidt and Gustav Pauli were invited to give lectures and speeches at different universities
and museums; following them came Arthur Haseloff. The College of Fine Arts at New York
University had started art history summer courses for American students in Berlin and Munich.
The Warburg Library responded positively to the American attention it had attracted since 1929
by inviting the art historian Paul J. Sachs of Harvard and Abraham Flexner, the well-known
educational reformer, cultural politician, and later founder of the Institute for Advanced Study, for
an informational trip to Germany. Since art history’s “ground work” had already been done and
Panofsky’s reputation was well known in the United States, it surprised no one when he received
three offers to teach there following his departure from Hamburg: from Harvard, New York, and
110
Erwin Panofsky
Chicago. Walter W. S. Cook and Richard Offner, both from New York, Paul J. Sachs of Harvard,
and Charles Rufus Morey of Princeton were his tireless supporters. Just as subtly effective was
the clandestine diplomat Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the young director of the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, and especially his wife, Margaret Scolari Barr. She had studied under Panofsky in
New York in the winter of 1931/32, polishing and honing his spoken and written English to the
level his language skills demanded. Without her he could hardly have balanced the job offers so
diplomatically until Morey came through with an invitation to the Institute for Advanced Study
in the spring of 1935, which he accepted.
All the American offers in 1934/35, however, would not have tempted him had there been a
comparable opportunity in Great Britain which would have enabled him to use the Kulturwis-
senschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, now called the Warburg Institute. It was only when he gave up
all hope of being able to work in Britain that Panofsky severed the emotional ties to Europe and
thus freed himself for the New World. A wound remained, however, which opened whenever
he dealt with the Warburg Institute.
After he was naturalized in 1940 and Europe was sinking into ruins he called the new Amer-
ican phase of life his “expulsion into paradise.” His appointment to the faculty of the Institute
for Advanced Study in 1935 confirmed his position as the leading art historian of the time. He
would not have been Panofsky had he not more than fulfilled all the hopes invested in him and
the demands made upon him. Collegiality and cooperation in Princeton distinguished him just
as they had in Hamburg. New friendships – for example, with the graphics expert William M.
Ivins, the author Booth Tarkington, and the film historian and theorist Siegfried Kracauer –
were formed, new students such as Millard Meiss arrived on the scene, old friends and former
colleagues and students – Walter Friedländer, Alexander Dorner, Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Hanns
Swarzenski, William S. Heckscher – were helped in any way possible. In the shortest period of
time imaginable the language genius had conquered English and went on to give his grateful
listeners new visual insights on the treasures of the fine arts. The fact that his audience was aware
of his enormous erudition and admired him for his ability to decipher the content of difficult
images, celebrating him as an iconographer, pleased him but also effected ironical understate-
ment. He was fond of iconography but he always saw content and form as a unity. This is more
than evident in the aforementioned Imago Pietatis (1927) and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1951), as
well as in his great works, Albrecht Dürer (1943), the first relevant presentation of Dürer in English,
and his Early Netherlandish Painting of 1953.
Panofsky was seen by both his proponents and adversaries to be the leading art historian of
the time – a claim he never once himself made but which aroused resistance all the same. One of
Panofsky’s most powerful adversaries in the United States was Francis Henry Taylor, the director
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who labeled him a printed-word scholar,
insensitive to the values of art. Following the publication of his Studies in Iconology (1939), the
director was driven to remark that it was hardly a wonder when students in Germany threw
themselves in despair into the arms of the National Socialists when confronted with this kind
of inscrutable and useless study. Even earlier, the legendary art connoisseur Bernard Berenson,
in a letter to Margaret Barr, of all people, made Panofsky the Hitler of academic art history and
Charles Rufus Morey his Hindenburg.
Furthermore, it must be stated that Panofsky was always very much against the isolated appli-
cation of individual methods. For example, he did not approve of the plan to start a special journal
for iconology, even though his favorite student, Heckscher, supported it. As in his professional
field, he did not keep his political outlook, which was that of a liberal, silent, supporting Roo-
sevelt, declining a lecture tour to California if it meant swearing the oath of loyalty, publicly
opposing McCarthy, and, as an opponent of nuclear defense, calling all those involved in the
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production of the neutron bomb “no better than Eichmann: efficient and obedient experts of
annihilation.”15 In his lecture first given in Princeton in 1953, which was subsequently printed as
In the Defense of the Ivory Tower, he defines the political responsibility of the scholar.
It should be stressed that as an afterthought he produced the short essay On Movies (1936),
which gave film theory a powerful, unforeseeable impulse. The occasion was the founding of
the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is today one of Panofsky’s most
cited and most studied works. Unfortunately, we know nothing of the cinema scripts which he
wrote as a young student and scholar. In any case, he and his wife Dora always enjoyed going to
the movies.
Not counting those essays published on the topic of the Middles Ages in his Deutschsprachige
Aufsätze,16 Panofsky made a mark for himself as a medievalist when he wrote Die deutsche Plastik
des elften bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (The German Art of Sculpture in the Eleventh through the Thir-
teenth Centuries, 1924), a monograph in which stylistic analysis is the prevailing method used.
One of his first lectures in Morey’s Princeton of 1931/32 was Classical Mythology in Medieval Art
(printed 1933/34). This was his introduction of Warburg’s methods to American art historians in
which he elucidated the “principle of disjunction,” discovered by him and propagated as a kind of
scientific law. He returned to the Middle Ages during World War II when he wrote Abbot Suger on
the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures, completed in 1944 and published in 1946. His
fondness for Suger increased to the extent that Panofsky saw him as his alter ego (Fig. 8.2) and
Figure 8.2 Panofsky in his study at the Institute for Advanced Study, spring 1966. Panofsky’s gesture is
inspired by the portrait of Abbot Suger in the abbey church of St. Denis, Paris. Photo courtesy of Archive
Wuttke.
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Erwin Panofsky
confessed in his letters written in Latin that his model was no longer Cicero but, rather, his idol,
Suger. The 1951 publication of Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism has been widely criticized but
lauded by paleographer Robert Marichal, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and structuralist Claude
Lévi-Strauss17 and became the most printed work by Panofsky in the United States. Among his
essential medieval writings were the already cited Early Netherlandish Painting and Renaissance and
Renascences in Western Art (1960), dealing with medieval renascences.
Only recently has one domain of Panofsky’s restless activity been made accessible to public
assessment, that of his correspondence. The publication of the extensive five-volume selection of
his letters has filled the former void.18
Panofsky’s wife Dora, of the Berlin Mosse family, supported his scientific work after the birth
of their sons, Hans (1917) and Wolfgang (1919). It was only between 1943 and 1958 that she was
able to undertake her own research and publish scientific papers. Their interests merged when
they coauthored a volume on the history and influence of the motif of Pandora’s box in the mon-
ograph Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (London, 1956). It is dedicated
to the memory of Gustav Pauli, who, as noted, steered the Panofskys to Hamburg decades earlier.
Dora’s unique, slightly masculine type of charm and intellectuality attracted a number of suscep-
tible people. Colin Eisler and William S. Heckscher have confirmed this, and her correspondence
with the Hamburg artist Eduard Bargheer proves that although she was frail, she could be quite
fervent.19 Her life, unfortunately, was restricted from the mid-1940s due to ill health, a condition
that reinforced the very close relationship she had with her husband. Dora died in October 1965.
In June 1966 Panofsky married his second wife, the art historian Gerda Soergel.
After the destruction caused by World War II, efforts were made to renew severed links. The
Panofskys worried most about their former housekeeper, Bertel Ziegenhagen, who had devot-
edly cared for their sons, Hans and Wolfgang, but who had remained in Germany, his beloved
and revered teacher, Wilhelm Vöge, and Dora’s sister, Martha Mosse, who had escaped from the
concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Through people affiliated with the occupation forces,
Panofsky successfully searched for the family friend Trux Jörgensen and his former student,
the archaeologist Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagen. He generously provided them with care
packages, and in the cases of Bertel and Martha with financial support.
Contact from Germany and Europe was to be very sparse for several years. Full honors must
go to the Freie Hansestadt Hamburg and its university as they endeavored to recall their former
professor as early as April 1946, although not without pressure from the British occupation
forces. The University of Leipzig also approached him in 1947 through Panofsky’s old friend,
the archaeologist Bernhard Schweitzer. The Greek scholar Bruno Snell, a former neighbor on
Alte Rabenstrasse 34 in Hamburg who not only had survived the Nazi dictatorship but also was
able to keep the regime at a distance, also contacted the Panofskys in 1946 and was warmly
thanked. Panofsky’s not entirely guiltless old friend Hermann Giesau had strived to renew his
old friendship with the family from 1947 onwards, and finally succeeded. While exchange
with the Warburg Institute and with researchers in Britain had never been interrupted, a more
lively intercourse with the rest of Europe and Germany developed but only at the end of the
1940s. Doctoral candidates began to consult Panofsky. In 1949, the Swedish art historian Carl
Nordenfalk and the German Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius became members of the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton. The International Art Historians’ Congress in Amsterdam
may well have served as a vehicle for normalizing relations in 1952. There, Panofsky once again
met his acquaintance Hans Kauffmann, who had been present at his engagement party, and
for the first time he met Gert von der Osten, then the director of the Landesmuseum in Han-
nover. Panofsky had been invited to the meeting by Jan Gerrit van Gelder and availed of the
opportunity to go on to Sweden, where he gave the Gottesman Lectures in Gripsholm Castle
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by invitation of the University of Uppsala. The first part of the series – and unfortunately only
this – appeared in 1960 under the title Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. At this time,
a younger, international group of art historians had recognized the exemplary and stimulating
potential in Panofsky’s work. It helped that in 1955 Meaning in the Visual Arts had been published
in paperback, which Panofsky thus labeled his “drugstore book.” In this inexpensive form it
became an academic best seller. The paperback edition of Studies in Iconology, which had initially
appeared in hardback in 1939, followed in 1962. Gradually, the interruption caused by the Nazi
regime and World War II to the flow of ideas was ending, and global recognition of Panofsky
ensued. For the first time, German art historians who had not emigrated were invited to become
members of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton: Ernst Holzinger (1950/51), Gert von
der Osten (1957/58), Willibald Sauerländer (1961/62), and Egon Verheyen (1962/63). Leopold
Ettlinger and Otto Pächt, émigrés until then working in London, were called to the Institute in
1956/57. Otto Pächt was later appointed to the chair of art history at his alma mater, the univer-
sity of his hometown – Vienna. Panofsky congratulated him with the following lovely worded
and self-revelatory note: “It is no secret that I am a split personality, half Warburgian and half
Viennese, and so I am doubly glad to see that chair filled by a scholar who is, more than anyone
else, within the Apostolic succession.”
The first translations of Panofsky’s works into a non-English language – namely, Italian –
appeared in 1951 and 1961/62, and from 1964 on, the edition of Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der
Kunstwissenschaft, which Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen had obtained, advanced the Panofsky
“renaissance” in Germany.
As a great favor to German art history and due to the persuasive efforts of Kurt Bauch, profes-
sor of art history at the University of Freiburg, Panofsky conceded to portray his former teacher
Wilhelm Vöge in the introduction of the 1958 edition of Vöge’s collected works in German.
However, the dam of reservations toward the country that he never wanted to see again only
started to crumble in 1966 when he saw it as his duty to pay his respects to the parents of his
second wife, Gerda, in Cologne. As soon as Panofsky had shown a willingness to travel to Ger-
many, initiated by Kurt Bauch, his German friends acted: Herbert von Einem in Bonn, Ludwig
Heinrich Heydenreich in Munich, and Hans Kauffmann in Berlin extended invitations to him.
Gert von der Osten, the general director of the Cologne museums, as well as Willibald Sauer-
länder in Freiburg also fell into line, so that in 1967 Panofsky visited Cologne, Bonn, Freiburg,
and Munich. The honors accorded him culminated in Panofsky’s admission to the Order Pour le
mérite, awarded in the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.
Between 1936 in Utrecht and 1967 in Bonn Panofsky received many awards and honorary
doctorates, and various academies and societies appointed him as a member. As much as this pro-
moted his renown, it did not noticeably affect his research. In answering the many congratulatory
letters, he rarely replied other than ironically: the first award one would receive is by chance; all
following would result from that first one. There are, however, occasionally signs of unclouded
joy. In 1957, on the occasion of being awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard, he was
dressed in a custom-made copy of his former Hamburg academic gown (Fig. 8.3). In 1962 he
retired as professor emeritus. In the same year, the same university he had started to teach in from
1931 onwards, New York University, conferred an honorary doctorate on him and praised him
as “one of the greatest minds of our time” and as “perhaps the greatest living figure in the whole
field of art history.” The Institute of Fine Arts persuaded him to teach there, but in the middle of
December 1967, a heart attack ended his professional career. Two weeks before his seventy-sixth
birthday, on March 14, 1968, he passed away.
Panofsky’s nature was a composite of sharp intelligence, sparkling humor, and an abiding love
of his fellow man. In kindness, humility, gratitude, patience, helpfulness, and loyalty he was just
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Erwin Panofsky
Figure 8.3 Panofsky in his Hamburg academic gown at Harvard, 1957, when he was awarded an honorary
doctorate. Photo courtesy of Archive Wuttke.
as unsurpassed as in his inconspicuous, intellectual, artistic, and linguistic abilities, which were
standard setting. One may, for fear of being misunderstood, never shy away from calling him a
humanist in the full sense of the word as Panofsky would have resented it. He knew no snob-
bishness or class conceit and was prepared to converse with anyone except barbarians. Cicero
and Erasmus, Dante and Shakespeare, Jean Paul and Fontane, Abbot Suger and Alberti, Dürer and
Tizian, Leonardo and Galilei, Mozart and Bach would have enjoyed the company of this vir bonus
dicendi, videndi audiendique peritus just as much as Klein Erna or the “inventor” of the limerick.
In 1932, after Ernst Cassirer had contributed a number of lectures and articles on the two
hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birthday, his friend Erwin Panofsky is said to have sent him a
piece of kitschy Goethe soap accompanied by the following verse:
Deines Geistes reine Reife

Tat mir arg beschmutzten wohl.
Nimm’ drum diese Goethe-Seife,
Teils als Form, teils als Symbol.
(Purest ripeness of your spirit
Soothed my soiled torso full
Take, therefore, this Goethe soap,
partly form and partly symbol.)
A number of his Latin epigrams exemplify his poetic gifts, such as the one already cited on the
death of Mozart. A further memorable example is a deep, philosophical poem which questions
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the sense of the humanists’ research. Panofsky dedicated it to his friends Herbert and Lotte von
Einem, accompanying an offprint.20
Quid iuvat in nugas talem conferre laborem?

Barbarus ad portas; ludere conveniat?
Talia quaerere non mortalibus, optime, fas est:
Quae Deus imposuit, solvere pensa decet.
Psittacus atque elephas coeli sub lumine vivunt
Extant heroes grammaticique simul.
Quidquid fata volent, animus tamen usque manebit
Aequus – et inter nos inviolata fides.
(What use to struggle with uselessness? // The barbarian is right at the door; is child’s
play now fitting? // To ask this, my friend, is not mortals’ right: // Fulfilling God-sent
tasks is our work. // The parrot and the elephant live under heaven’s light, // heroes
and scholars fare like-wise. // Whatever fate brings, equanimity should remain //
and loyalty among us abide.)
Occasionally one may hear art historians of both sexes stating that Panofsky is “out” and only
Warburg is “in.” This verdict is applied to a person who was also quite well thought of among
women in the field. Following the premature death of Fritz Saxl, the director of London’s War-
burg Institute, Panofsky was offered his vacant post by Gertrud Bing, Warburg’s assistant in
Hamburg and later assistant director in London. She knew of no one more qualified for the
position, and when he declined, she outspokenly declared that now only the second-best would
fill the position.
As far as I can tell, Panofsky’s influence resulted from his power to convince and not to per-
suade. Although he was always ready to give lectures and to participate in discussions, not only
to clearly express his liberal-humanist opinions but also to voice protest in matters of politics and
to explain and publish the results of his research, he never undertook to promote himself. As a
researcher and politician dealing with questions of learning and education he would never have
acted aggressively as a partisan of his own concerns. From my own experience I can state that
he considered himself neither sacrosanct nor beyond criticism. That is why at this point I fail to
understand the continuing irrational aggression directed toward him since his death. Whether
the increasing signs of a trans-Atlantic climate change in relation to the present bias against
him are pointing to an about-face and a return to an objectively and historically more prudent
assessment of his work remains to be seen. Perhaps the recently published Korrespondenz, which
illustrates the diversity in his life and works, can promote the turn.21
Description and interpretation of works of art

A thorough evaluation would overextend this article. However, over and above the points already
mentioned in the preceding section, the following comments will attempt to deal with basic and
differentiating aspects of the topic.
If we want to understand Panofsky, we must recognize that in his definitions of iconography,
iconology, and typology his focus is not on history but rather on theory.22 The applications
of his theories are to be found in his papers – as opposed to his still unpublished lectures23 –
which are generally free of didactic references to his theoretical statements and unconcerned
with adhering strictly to his own theoretical specifications. He neither is concerned with the
history of typology, iconography, and iconology nor gives any information, barring a few short
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references, to the impulses he might have received from others. For typology we have his ref-
erence to archaeology but no specific evidence as to the sources he might have used. In his
approach to iconography and iconology we may assume that his teachers, Vöge and Gold-
schmidt, stressed the practical before the theoretical.24 He hardly noticed the efforts made to
establish an Internationale Gesellschaft für Ikonographische Studien between 1902 and 1909. Gold-
schmidt and Warburg were engaged in the process but probably did not inform their students.
The discussions taking place at the Internationale Gesellschaft für Ikonographische Studien, in which
the term “iconology” had already been proposed as the new methodological approach, were
and still are of historical and theoretical interest today.25 The established connection to Warburg
and his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in all probability provided the greatest impulse for the
birth of Panofsky’s own theory, which then filled in the theoretical gap in academic art history.26
According to his own testimony, nothing exerted greater influence on his research. Soon after he
had emigrated to the United States in 1934, the Index of Christian Art in Princeton presumably
served as another important source.27
Typology
The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published a series of articles on Die Zukunftsaufgaben der deutschen
Wissenschaft in 1927. Panofsky contributed an article on the Probleme der Kunstgeschichte. Instead
of what the title claims, he concentrated on one problem he found especially urgent – to over-
come the disjunction of aesthetics and interpreting content by bringing about the conjunction
of form and content when viewing a work of art. He saw the answer in typology and proposed
treating a specific topic holistically so that form and content are perceived as one entity. The
same year he delivered the most convincing example using the already mentioned Imago Pietatis:
Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des Schmerzensmanns und der Maria Mediatrix.28 His interpretation
shows the following theoretical findings: (1) the term “type” refers to the “complex unity of
form and content” (komplexe Einheit von Inhalt und Form). (2) He views art objects neither by
purely analyzing the form nor by purely analyzing the content iconographically but aims at
artistic unities in a historical context “in which a certain content combines with a certain form
to form a descriptive entity” (“in denen sich ein bestimmter Inhalt mit einer bestimmten Form zu einer
anschaulichen Einheit verbindet”).
Edgar Breitenbach’s book Speculum humanae salvationis: Eine typengeschichtliche Untersuchung
(1930), which developed out of his 1927 dissertation in Hamburg, adopted, contrary to expec-
tations, none of the results from Panofsky’s groundbreaking study. It was not even cited. Brei-
tenbach used the term bildtypengeschichtliche Methode without defining it.29 This corresponds to
Panofsky’s earlier use. Together with Fritz Saxl in 1923 he had written a monograph which
became extremely well known and was called Dürers ‘Melencholia I’: Eine quellen- und typen-
geschichtliche Untersuchung, in which he did not even mention the term typengeschichtlich. He did
write on a “series of types” in the introduction to the already mentioned book Die deutsche Plas-
tik des elften bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderts. With the book Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike
Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst (Hercules at the Crossroads and Other Antique Subject Matter in Art,
1930), iconography was given preference over the history of types. In the meantime, iconography
had developed into a discrete method which could now be a new focal point. Only once did he
later emphasize the history of type and that was in the title of ‘Melencholia’(’s) second edition.
Panofsky had mainly enlarged, revised, and recast the manuscript for this second edition. His wish
was to retain “quellen- und typengeschichtlich” in the subtitle so that if the book had been published
in German, the title would have read: Melancholia: Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung
zur astrologischen Temperamentenlehre.30
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Iconography and iconology

Hercules am Scheidewege of 1930 was the work on which Panofsky’s reputation and renown as
an iconographer are based, and “iconographic” (not iconography!) is the key word which first
meets the reader’s eye in the preface.31 His intention was, he informs the reader, to “explain a
number of art works iconographically” (“eine Anzahl von Kunstwerken ikonographisch zu erklären”).
That these works were to represent “types of images,” and new ones at that, is a point the reader
realizes only at second glance. One looks as much in vain to return to the definition of “type”
as in the Imago Pietatis book as for a clear indication that “type” is defined by the aesthetic unity
of form and content. He follows the premise of the Imago Pietatis treatise to deal holistically with
“narrowly defined” (“eng begrenzte”) issues, all the while promoting an iconographic explanation
at the expense of viewing form. He correctly declares that “a successful exegesis of content does
not only come closest to historical understanding but also enriches and clarifies its aesthetics”
(“dass eine gelungene Inhaltsexegese nicht nur dem historischen Verständnis zugute kommt, sondern auch
dessen ästhetisches Erlebnis [. . .] bereichert und klärt”). He elucidates why the most formalistic art
history has no choice but “to a great extent” undertake “content exegesis” and even take it for
granted.
He acknowledges the limitation of that deliberate step, one which was the basis of his
success, in a letter which he sent to his former teacher Vöge on January 6, 1931: “From the
beginning onwards” he had “inwardly given up trying to do justice to art and found another
small corner of the great field of art history to work in, a corner where the meeting of word
and image traditions can be studied by way of simultaneously applying type-historical and
philological methods so that ‘iconological’ insight can be won” (er habe “auf die Versuche,
der Kunst [. . .] innerlich gerecht zu werden [. . .], von Anfang an verzichtet [. . .], und eine andere,
kleine Ecke des großen kunsthistorischen Arbeitsfeldes gefunden [. . .], die Ecke, wo das Zusammen-
treffen von Worttradition und Bildüberlieferung untersucht und durch die gleichzeitige Anwendung
typengeschichtlicher und philologischer Methoden eine bestimmte Form ‘ikonologischer’ Erkenntnisse
gewonnen werden kann” ).32
The appearance of the Hercules book and the probable intercession of the art historian Arthur
Haseloff33 of Kiel led to an invitation which was for Panofsky the most portentous. He had been
approached to give a lecture on May 20, 1931, at the Kant Society of Kiel which was published
one year later under the title Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bil-
denden Kunst.34 In combination with the English versions of 1939 and 1955 it made Panofsky
the leading theoretician of iconography and iconology.35 As early as late fall of 1931, he had
the opportunity in New York to elucidate his theories using examples. His colleague Albert M.
Friend concluded enthusiastically, “That’s iconography!”36 As a farewell gesture, at the end of
1933 he held a private series of lectures in Hamburg on the same topic.37 This type of didactic
engagement continued in America with such themes as “What Is Iconology?” or in the jocular
variation of “Traffic Accidents in the Relation between Texts and Pictures.”38
Although Panofsky’s three-stage model of iconographic and iconological interpretation has
belonged to the general knowledge of art historians for generations, a brief explanation here
based on the last and final version of 1955 and stressing particular aspects is in order.
According to him, when describing and interpreting works of art, three areas must be taken
into consideration: the first is the “primary or natural subject matter.” This involves recogniz-
ing objects, actions, and expressive gestures which the beholder spontaneously identifies. Since,
however, these will be depicted differently over time, the interpreter must take recourse to his or
her knowledge of form or style history to avoid misconstruction. The second level deals with
the “secondary or conventional subject matter.” The interpreter has the task of explaining the
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Erwin Panofsky
image’s content. For this a knowledge of literary sources is a prerequisite. To avoid coming to false
conclusions when linking certain visual content to certain sources, a knowledge of the history of
types comes into play as a corrective, which means knowing the pictorial forms certain images
have taken over time. This is the area of iconographic analysis. The third level relates to “intrinsic
meaning or content” and presents the viewer with the most challenging task. The viewer has to
determine both the conscious and perhaps the unconscious intentions that the artist had when
creating the work. In order to reach dependable or at least evident conclusions, the interpreter
will need an all-encompassing knowledge of the humanities and the sciences. This is the area of
iconology. Iconology depends on synthesis, as opposed to analytic iconography.
There are two noteworthy aspects to Panofsky’s theory of art interpretation: the first is that
design, style, and history of type are, so to speak, de-aestheticized. They become auxiliaries serv-
ing iconography. Panofsky apparently consciously declined to develop theories which merged art
interpretation and art aesthetics. He always proposed the unity of form and content, stressing that
iconography and iconology formed the basis of an adequate understanding of form. Whoever
wants to see how he mastered this challenge must study his practical application – that is, the
holistic approach in his great monographs Albrecht Dürer (in two volumes, 1943, as single-volume
edition in 1955) and Early Netherlandish Painting (1953), or in the extensive introduction to his
last book, Problems in Titian: Mostly Iconographic (1969). The second issue is the term “iconology,”
which denotes the third level of interpretation. He did not apply it either in 1932 or in 1939 in
spite of the title Studies in Iconology, but included it only in the amended 1955 paperback version,
Meaning in the Visual Arts.39 Only twelve years later he surprised the art world when the French
translation of Studies in Iconology appeared, and he informed his readers in the introduction that if
his work had been published at that time, he would have exchanged the title word “Iconology” for
“Iconography.” He argued that the term “iconology” had, on the one hand, caused quite a bit of
confusion and, on the other, “iconography” had taken on such significance through its use by art
historians that it now encompassed the whole interpretative spectrum.40 We may take this confes-
sion as Panofsky’s expression of skepticism about methodology evident in his earlier cited dictum –
“The discussion of methods spoils their application.”41 Asked what differentiated iconology from
iconography, he had been wittily replying for quite a while, “Optimists will say Iconology is to
Iconography as Geology is to Geography, pessimists, that it is as Astrology to Astrography.”42
It has not been possible in this short essay to depict the overwhelming impact of Panofsky’s
methodology nor the responses it has evoked.43 For Günter Bandmann44 and Jan Białostocki,45
for instance, a revelation occurred.46 Among the critics, no one has found a model to replace
Panofsky’s, with one exception – Roelof van Straten. He has proposed applying the term “iconol-
ogy” only to those functional intentions of which the artist was unconscious.47 But since the
meaning which the artist consciously employed in his work and that which he unconsciously
employed often cannot be determined, a differentiation in the practice of interpretation is hardly
applicable. So we should leave Panofsky’s theory, which has been extremely successful for so many
years, just as it stands.
Notes
* Translated from German by Jackie Plötz.
1 For information about the art historians mentioned in this chapter see the World Wide Web and
the following printed works: Encyclopedia of Art, ed. J. Turner, 34 vols. (Basingstoke, 1996ff.);
Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon, Von P. Betthausen, P.H. Feist und Chr. Fork unter Mitarbeit von K.
Rührdanz und J. Zimmer (Stuttgart-Weimar, 2007), 2nd ed.; E. Panofsky, Korrespondenz 1910 bis
1968: Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden, ed. D. Wuttke (Wiesbaden, 2001–2011), vol. I:
Korrespondenz 1910–1936 (2001); vol. II: Korrespondenz 1937–1949 (2003); vol. III: Korrespondenz
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Dieter Wuttke
1950–1956 (2006); vol. IV: Korrespondenz 1957–1961 (2008); vol. V: Korrespondenz 1962–1968 und
Nachklänge 1969–1971 (2011); bibliographic data for the aforementioned art historians easily accessi-
ble in D. Wuttke, Kumulationen: Ergänzungsband zur Erwin-Panofsky-Korrespondenz. Unter Mitarbeit von
P. Schöner (Wiesbaden, 2014). This supplement volume to the Erwin Panofsky correspondence con-
tains: corrections and additions, the most complete bibliography of Panofsky’s writings 1914 through
1969/1973 with 319 bibliographical entries, the bibliography of the reviews concerning vols. I–V, the
revised bio-bibliographical list of the correspondents of all volumes (141–606), the revised index of
names and subjects of all volumes (607–963). For Panofsky’s life see the Korrespondenz and Kumulationen
referenced earlier; K. Michels, “Panofsky, Erwin,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 20 (Berlin, 2001),
36–38; H. Bredekamp, “Erwin Panofsky,” in Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte, vol. II, ed. U. Pfisterer (Munich,
2008), 61–75. Apart from Panofsky’s correspondence see two autobiographical essays by E. Panofsky,
“The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” and “Three Decades of Art History in the United
States: Impressions of a Transplanted European,” in E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on
Art History (Garden City, 1955, second edition, 1957; Doubleday Anchor Book A 59), 1–25 and 321–46;
J. Białostocki, “Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968): Thinker, Historian, Human Being,” Simiolus 4 (1970),
68–89; H. von Einem, “Erwin Panofsky zum Gedächtnis: Bibliographie der Rezensionen zu Schriften
Erwin Panofskys,” ed. R. Heidt, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 30 (1968), 7–18. I wish to thank Jackie Plötz
for translating this essay, and Petra Schöner for editorial assistance and the electronic processing of the
images accompanying it.
2 See D. Wuttke, “From the Laboratory of a Cultural Historian: On Contacts between Mathematics,
Science, the Humanities, and the Arts” (translation by Jackie Plötz), in Tales from the Laboratory or, Homun-
culus Revisited, ed. R. Görner (Munich, 2005), 11–38.
3 See C. Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture,” in C. Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 3–30.
4 See notes 1, 6, 13, 21.
5 All other bibliographic data for this book and all other references to Panofsky’s publications can be found
in the Panofsky-Bibliography in Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1).
6 See Record of the Art Museum Princeton University, vol. XXVIII, no. 1, 1969, ed. H. Backlin-Landman.
7 See Record of the Art Museum Princeton University (as in note 6). There is an expanded version of seven
pages with additional information about publications suggested by Panofsky and the honors bestowed
on him, published privately 1970, but dated 1969.
8 See I. Lavin and M. Aronberg Lavin, Truth and Beauty at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, 2012).
The study is freely available on the Internet.
9 Białostocki, “Panofsky” (as in note 1), see 84. For a discussion on disguised symbolism see J.-B. Bedaux, The
Reality of Symbols: Studies in the Iconology of Netherlandish Art 1400–1800 (The Hague, 1990), 9–53; A. Arnulf,
“Das Bild als Rätsel. Zur Vorstellung der verdeckten und mehrfachen Bildbedeutung von der Antike bis
zum 17. Jahrhundert,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, N.F., 53 (2002), 103–62; see especially 113–21.
10 J. Fest, Wege zur Geschichte (Zurich, 1992), 127–28.
11 “Ebreo di sangue, Amburghese di cuore, d’anima Fiorentino.” See G. Bing, Aby M. Warburg (Hamburg, 1958),
32. Concerning the dictum “expulsion into paradise” see Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. IV (as in note 1),
585, and vol. V, 1001.
12 See E. Panofsky, “Wilhelm Vöge, 16. Februar 1868–30. Dezember 1952,” in W. Vöge, Bildhauer des
Mittelalters (Berlin, 1958), XXXI.
13 See D. Wuttke, “Panofskys Warburg – Warburgs Panofsky,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte
101 (2015), 87–113. See also D. Wuttke, “Erwin Panofskys Herculesbuch nach siebenundsechzig Jahren,”
in the reprint of E. Panofsky, Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst (Berlin,
1997), extrapagination 1–96; D. Wuttke, “L’Hercule á la croisée des chemins d’Erwin Panofsky: l’ouvrage et
son importance pour l’histoire de l’art,” in Relire Panofsky, ed. R. Recht and F. Douar (Paris, 2008), 105–47.
14 E. Panofsky, Die Gestaltungsprincipien Michelangelos, besonders in ihrem Verhältniszu denen Raffaels, ed.
Gerda Panofsky (Berlin/Boston, 2014). For Panofsky’s Habilitationsschrift see Wuttke, “Panofskys Warburg –
Warburgs Panofsky” (as in note13), then note 17, for compiled sources and notes on interpretation. For a critical
review see D. Wuttke in Bibliographie zur Symbolik, Ikonographie und Mythologie 47 (2014), 90–93.
15 Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. V (as in note 1), 168–69.
16 E. Panofsky, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, ed. K. Michels and M. Warnke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998). In this
edition the numbers 8, 14, 40, 48, 66, 84, 86, 164, and 269 listed in the Panofsky-Bibliographie of
Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1), are missing. A collection and publication of Panofsky’s English
essays are needed.
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Erwin Panofsky
17 E. Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique, précédé de l’abbé Suger de Saint-Denis. Traduction et
postface de P. Bourdieu. Deuxième édition revue et corrigée (Paris, 1968); R. Marichal, “L’Écriture Latin et la
psychologie des peuples,” in La XXIIe semaine de synthèse. Avec collaboration de M. Cohen et al. (Paris, 1963),
199–247, especially 234–38 and 241; C. Lévi-Strauss, “Structuralisme et critique littéraire,” Paragone
(Letteratura) (1965), no. 182, 125–33.
18 Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vols. I–V (as in note 1) and the supplementary volume Wuttke, Kumulationen
(as in note 1).
19 See the Korrespondenz-Nachtrag (KN) in Panofsky, Korrespondenz (as in note 1), vol. V. Among her letters
to Bargheer we find one of the most touching of all letters. See vol. V, no. KN 469a.
20 Von Einem, “Panofsky zum Gedächtnis” (as in note 1), especially 11. See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. V
(as in note 1), 941, fig. 80. See the correction note to von Einem, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 31 (1969), 334.
For Panofsky as a Latinist see D. Wuttke, “Latein und Kunstgeschichte. Ein Beitrag zum Methodenpro-
blem,” in Kunst, Politik, Religion. Studien zur Kunst in Süddeutschland, Österreich, Tschechien und der Slowakei:
Festschrift für Franz Matsche zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. M. Hörsch and E. Oy-Marra (Petersberg, 2000), 177–91.
21 See P. Schöner, “Autobiographie in Briefen. Die Edition der Erwin-Panofsky-Korrespondenz ist
abgeschlossen. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte,” Mensch/Wissenschaft/Magie. Österreichische
Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Mitteilungen 29 (2012), 197–210. The article ends with two exam-
ples from the Panofsky letters and a photo of 1958 showing Panofsky talking with the Polish art historian
Jan Białostocki.
22 Thus he does not discuss, for instance, the articles by K. Mannheim, “Beiträge zur Theorie der Welt-
anschauungs-Interpretation,” Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 1 (1921/22), 236–74, and by G.J. Hoogewerff,
“L’iconologie et son importance pour l‘étude systématique de l’art chrétien,” Rivista d’archeologia christi-
ana (1931), 53–82, and not the book concerning the history of types by H. Cornell, Karakteriseringspro-
blemet i konstvetenskapen: studier och bidrag till konstbetraktandets och konstbeskrivandets utveckling (Stockholm,
1928). Panofsky quotes only that he adopted the term “Dokumentsinn” from Mannheim. See E. Panof-
sky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der Bildenden Kunst,” Logos 21
(1932), 103–19; reprinted in E. Panofsky, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. H. Oberer
and E. Verheyen (Berlin, 1985), 85–97, 3rd ed., and in Bildende Kunst als Zeichensystem 1.: Ikonographie
und Ikonologie, ed. E. Kaemmerling (Cologne, 1994), 185–206, 6th ed. See the English translation and
commentary by J. Elsner and K. Lorenz: E. Panofsky, “On the Problem of Describing and Interpret-
ing Works of the Visual Arts,” trans. J. Elsner and K. Lorenz, Critical Inquiry 38 (2011/12), 467–82,
and J. Elsner and K. Lorenz, “The Genesis of Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 38 (2011/12), 483–512. For
comprehensive information see the article, praised by Panofsky, by J. Białostocki, “Iconography and
Iconology,” Encyclopedia of World Art 7 (1963), 769–85 (quoting as well research articles concerning
“Typenwanderung” and “Typenschöpfung”). Reliable information is also available from C. Cieri Via, Nei
dettagli nascosto: Per una storia del pensiero iconologico (Rome, 1994).
23 For more information see Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 673 (letter to Walter Friedländer).
24 See Panofsky, “Wilhelm Vöge” (as in note 12), and E. Panofsky, “Goldschmidts Humor,” in Adolph
Goldschmidt zum Gedächtnis, 1863–1944, ed. C.G. Heise (Hamburg, 1963), 25–32.
25 See D. Wuttke, “Unbekannte Quellen zur Geschichte der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Ikonographi-
sche Studien,” in P. Schmidt, Aby M. Warburg und die Ikonologie, 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden, 1993), 47–89.
26 See Wuttke, “Panofskys Warburg – Warburgs Panofsky” (as in note 13).
27 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 404 (Panofsky’s first visit to the Index of Christian
Art in Princeton University happened in 1931!), and Korrespondenz, vol. V (as in note 1), 216f. With
respect to the greater context see C. Hourihane, “‘They Stand on His Shoulders’: Morey, Iconography,
and the Index of Christian Art, Insights and Interpretations,” in Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-Fifth
Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2002), 3–16.
28 See the reprint of “Probleme der Kunstgeschichte” as in Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1),
957–64, and the critical note in Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1), 37f. The “Imago Pietatis” article
was printed first in the Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig, 1927), 261–308. It
was reprinted in E. Panofsky, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze (as in note 16), 186–233. See note 32.
29 The first to adopt Panofsky’s definition of 1927 and connect it to his essay of 1932 “Zum Problem
der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der Bildenden Kunst” (as in note 22) seems to
have been G. von der Osten. See G. von der Osten, Der Schmerzensmann: Typengeschichte eines deutschen
Andachtsbildwerkes von 1300 bis 1600 (Berlin, 1935), 130f.; J. Baschet, “Inventivité et sérialité des images
médiévales: Pour une approche iconographique élargie,” Annales 51 (1996), 93–133, reinvents Panofsky’s
approach without knowing of Panofsky’s “Imago Pietatis” essay (as in note 28).
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Dieter Wuttke
30 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. II (as in note 1), 138, with Fritz Saxl’s letter of September 2, 1938. As
is well-known the book appeared only in 1964 under the title Saturn and Melancholy. The vicissitudes of
its genesis are documented in Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vols. I–V (as in note 1).
31 See the afterword by D. Wuttke, “Erwin Panofskys Herculesbuch” (as in note 13).
32 Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 383. Cf. Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic
Discipline” (as in note 1), especially 17, where he as one of the tasks of the art historian describes this:
“He will observe the interplay between the influences of literary sources and the effect of self-dependent
representational traditions, in order to establish a history of iconographic formulae or ‘types.’”
33 On Haseloff ’s sixtieth birthday Panofsky dedicated the following article: E. Panofsky, “Der greise Phi-
losoph am Scheidewege: Ein Beispiel für die ‘Ambivalenz’ ikonographischer Kennzeichen,” Münchner
Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, N.F., 9 (1932), 285–90.
34 Logos 21 (1932), 103–19; for reprints, translations, and commentaries see note 22.
35 E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939),
“Introduction,” 3–17; reprint as Harper Torchbook (New York, 1962). Panofsky again does not define
the term “iconology” in the main text but in the preface of the Torchbook edition, p. V, he speaks of
“iconological method.” E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden
City, 1955), 2nd ed. (Garden City, 1957; Doubleday Anchor Book A 59), 26–41. This is the text in
which Panofsky introduces and defines the term “iconology” for the third stage of the interpretation,
in which iconological synthesis is contrasted to iconographical analysis. He gives no indication that the
present text is a revised version of the text from 1939.
36 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 404 (letter to Fritz Saxl) and 444 (letter to Dora
Panofsky).
37 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. I (as in note 1), 673 (letter to Walter Friedländer).
38 With respect to “What Is Iconology” see Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. II (as in note 1), 1133f. The
theme of iconography/iconology, which Panofsky frequently deals with in his correspondence, cannot
the least be unfolded in this short chapter. For the references see the indices to the Korrespondenz, vols. I–V,
easily accessible in the collection by Wuttke, Kumulationen (as in note 1).
39 See note 35.
40 E. Panofsky, Essais d’iconologie : Thèmes humanistes dans l’art de la Renaissance. Texte traduit par C. Herbette
et B. Teyssèdre, présenté et annoté par B. Teyssédre (Paris, 1967), 3–5. Panofsky’s letter to the Belgian art
historian and diplomat Guy de Tervarent of February 17, 1966, printed in the Korrespondenz, vol. V (as
in note 1), 794f., is relevant to this context.
41 See the indices of Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vols. IV and V (as in note 1), s.v. “Panofsky, Erwin, Dicta.”
On the relationship between methods in theory and methods in application Panofsky reported in a
letter to William S. Heckscher of April 7, 1960 (Korrespondenz, vol. IV, 667, as in note 1) the follow-
ing: “I am just coming home from a symposium where all the young people applied the Warburg-
Panofsky-Heckscher methods of interpretation in such a manner that I can say only ‘Obstupui, steteruntque
comae et vox faustibus haesit.’” One has to read “faucibus” instead of “faustibus”; see Virgil, Aeneid, II, 774.
Panofsky is quoting a student’s joke. The translation of the quotation after Virgil is: “I was stunned, my
hair stood on end and my voice remained stuck in my throat.”
42 See Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. II (as in note 1), 217, note 9 (quotation from a letter to Rudolf
Wittkower). See also vol. III (as in note 1), 165 (letter to Günter Bandmann).
43 Only one example may be quoted: L. de Vries, “Iconography and Iconology in Art History: Panofsky’s
Prescriptive Definition and some Art-Historical Responses to Them,” in Picturing Performance. The Iconog-
raphy of the Performing Arts in Concept and Practice, ed. F.Th. Heck (Rochester, 1999), 42–64. The responses
are by H. van de Waal, Chr. Tümpel, and M. Baxandall.
44 See Bandmann to Panofsky on March 23, 1962, in Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. V (as in note 1), 165–67.
45 See E. Panofsky, Studien zur Ikonologie der Renaissance, Mit einem Vorwort von J. Białostocki und einem Nach-
wort von A. Beyer (Cologne, 1997), Białostocki’s preface, 7–16, especially 12. See Białostocki, “Panofsky”
(as in note 1).
46 For more, see Wuttke, “Erwin Panofskys Herculesbuch” (as in note 13).
47 See R. van Straten, Iconography, Indexing, Iconclass: A Handbook (Leiden, 1994), 21; R. van Straten, Ein-
führung in die Ikonographie, 3rd revised ed. (Berlin, 2004), 28. Finally I should like to point only to Max
Imdahl’s endeavors to replace Panofsky’s concept of iconography/iconology with the new concept of
“Ikonik.” See Schmidt, Warburg und die Ikonologie (as in note 25), and recently F. Thürlemann, “Ikonogra-
phie, Ikonologie, Ikonik: Max Imdahl liest Erwin Panofsky,” in Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle
Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, ed. K. Sach-Hombach (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), 214–34.
122
9
CHARLES RUFUS MOREY AND
THE INDEX OF CHRISTIAN ART
Colum Hourihane
Even though much of Charles Rufus Morey’s own scholarship has been superseded by more
recent research, he is still justifiably remembered as the founder of the largest archive devoted
to medieval iconography in existence: The Index of Christian Art, which is based in Prince-
ton University and is now approaching the one hundredth anniversary of its foundation.1 He
is also fondly remembered as one of the founders of the College Art Association, where his
name has been given to the Charles Rufus Morey Award. This was established in 1953 and is
given annually to a distinguished English language book in the history of art.2 Even though it
is not widely remembered now, Morey was one of the foremost supporters of the Art Bulletin
for many years.
Charles Rufus Morey, or “Morey” as he was most commonly known, was born in Hastings,
Michigan, in 1877 and died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1955 (Fig. 9.1). After graduating
from the University of Michigan in 1899 he continued his studies at the same university for a
further year before receiving his masters in classics. This was followed by a three-year fellowship
at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome. While there, he further developed his all-
consuming passion for Italian art and the classics. He was invited by Alan Marquand, the founder
of the Department of Art and Archaeology in Princeton University, to join the developing
department in 1906, having been an instructor in classics at the university since 1903.3 By 1907
he had extended the range of courses being taught in the university to include medieval art. His
own scholarship focused on late antique/early medieval Italian art and its Christian context. He
frequently traveled to Italy, and it was on one such visit that he stopped in Paris at an archive that
had been iconographically catalogued into broad divisions, such as Portraits, Landscape, Religious
Subjects, and so forth. Inspired by such a thematic approach he began to order his own personal
collection of images on his return to Princeton. He immediately realized the potential of such
an archive and the value of extending his own personal but limited holdings. This discovery was
paralleled by what he called an interest in iconography that was found among his colleagues in
the department in Princeton, among them being Albert M. Frend (who joined the department
in 1921). In the broader world, this was the period when a considerable interest in iconography
was developing thanks to scholars such as Didron, Warburg, and Mâle, and in many ways this
was the American response.
It has to be realized that this was the age when images were limited; the 35mm slide had not
yet been invented and scholars were dependent on whatever they could get their hands on. Apart
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Colum Hourihane
Figure 9.1 Charles Rufus Morey. Image courtesy of the Index of Christian Art.
from whatever had been published, Morey’s own collection of images consisted of newspaper
cuttings, photographs, and calendar cuttings. His good friend Erwin Panofsky had not yet come
to the nearby Institute of Advanced Study, but that did not deter Morey from realizing the value
of developing an iconographically catalogued archive of early Christian art (art up to AD 700).
Undeterred by the lack of interest displayed by the university in developing such a resource,
which declined financial support when he approached it, he was determined to proceed with the
initiative. Before the university supported it, Morey with the assistance of volunteers started the
process of adding images to his own personal collection. For him, the real value of such a resource
was the range of its holdings. Unlike Émile Mâle, who was content to deal with subjects and
themes within medieval art on the basis of one or two works, Morey wanted as many examples
of particular themes as he could collect. He wanted to see how themes and ideas developed in
relation to society and culture, and this could be achieved only by amassing as many images as he
could from as many contexts as was known. The volunteers initially went to the bibliographic
holdings and surveyed the art historical books and journals for images that could be added to the
resource. Once again it has to be remembered that art historical publications were limited, unlike
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Charles Rufus Morey
the current situation. The paucity of publications led Morey and subsequent directors to claim
every five years that they would finish the Index within ten years – a claim they abandoned when
Helen Woodruff took up the directorship, realizing that what they knew about medieval art was
extremely limited and did not reflect what existed in reality. Nowadays, the Index is barely able
to keep up with the number of publications released every month, never mind every year. It is
claimed that the Index was officially founded in 1917, at which stage the university took over
official responsibility for its future, but in fact it had been going for three or four years before
that. It was one of the first archives to develop standards and guidelines for cataloguing works of
art, and these were published by Helen Woodruff in 1942, enabling other collections to follow
the practices. These guidelines are still being used by the Index, although they have also been
extended and added to over time. Perhaps a little too scholarly in approach, and more suited to
the paper environment for which they were created, they are in need of being modernized and
extended to reflect current terminology and methodologies. The collecting policy for images
has also changed over time, and nowadays the Index has catalogued existing archives and entire
collections and is no longer dependent on the published image.4 The terminus date for the Index
has also changed since it was first created by Morey, and it now stands at 1550, reflecting the entire
medieval period and not just the interests of the founder. It was extended to 1400 before 1955 – the
year Morey died, when he acknowledged that art did exist after 1400. His main concern was
that iconography became ‘loose’ towards the end of the Middle Ages and that it did not relate
to the early period. The final extension happened in 2000, with the later material being added
to the archive from the Morgan Library Cataloguing Project. It is hoped that this later material
will continue to be added, making the Index a comprehensive source for the study of medieval
iconography.
While developing the Index, Morey was at the same time pursuing his own academic career. His
first paper was published in 1905, but it was not until the 1920s that he began to achieve acclaim
for his pioneering work with such publications as Sources in Medieval Style (1924), East Christian
Manuscripts (New York, 1920), The Illuminated Manuscripts of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library (1925), The
Covers of the Lorsch Gospels with M. H. Longhurst (1928), Early Latin Illustrated Manuscripts (1929),
The Landevennec Gospels: A Breton Illuminated Manuscript of the Ninth Century (1929), and The Genesis
of Christian Art (1931). The first of these books, Sources in Medieval Style, was applauded by Erwin
Panofsky as being as significant for art historians as Kepler’s work was for astronomers. Other stud-
ies were to follow, and 1942 appears to have been particularly important, with two pivotal works
appearing: Early Christian Art: Outline of the Evolution of Style and Iconography in Sculpture and Painting
from Antiquity to the Eighth Century (1942) and Medieval Art (1942).
Although not known for his teaching abilities, he was an excellent administrator.5 His gen-
erosity and sympathetic approach to life and people were much admired. Morey’s main strength
was as a researcher and it was clearly his first love. He was far in advance of his time in the holistic
approach he adopted to his work. In 1932 he published a pamphlet at his own expense on the
role and function of the library under the title “A Laboratory-Library,” in which he proposed
what can be considered a revolution at that time as to how the library should work. He envis-
aged a unified library environment centered on faculty, student, and research space. For him,
the library was not to be seen as a passive bibliographic archive but an active and living space
in which interaction at all levels and between all participants was necessary. While undertaking
such initiatives the Index was administered by scholarly medievalists, such as Helen Woodruff,
who also managed to maintain their own academic profiles. It really was thanks to Morey that
the Department of Art and Archeology became the prime center for medieval studies in North
America at that time. He surrounded himself with scholars whose primary interest was in that
period and included Donald Drew Egbert, Ernest DeWald, Kurt Weitzmann, and Alfred H.
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Colum Hourihane
Barr. He was also responsible for inviting Erwin Panofsky to the nearby Institute for Advanced
Study – a fellow scholar with a keen interest in iconography and how it is understood. Morey
and Panofsky invested considerable scholarship into trying to see how the viewer looks at a work
of art and how the subject matter can be objectively externalized to enable it to be described and
retrieved by others. The Index of Christian Art was to provide an ideal and fertile resource for
this to be undertaken. It is still a role which it fulfills. Morey was an all-round scholar who taught
not only medieval but also Renaissance and modern art and expected all his colleagues to have the
same eclectic approach. His notes now preserved at Princeton show an enquiring and sensitive
mind who constantly attempted to understand man’s artistic legacy. For him, iconography was
not an answer in itself but simply a reflection of society’s constant changes. His motivation was to
understand why these changes took place and how they were manifested in the art of the period.
Iconography did not work in isolation, and it was necessary to see it in relation to form, function,
style, period, and all the elements that were invested in making the work in the first place. His
approach was far in advance of his colleagues.
For most of his career, Morey and his wife, Sara (Frances Tupper), had a particular interest
in Italian patrimony which was badly affected by World War II, and this led him to resigning
his post at Princeton to become the first cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Rome
(1945–1950), where he was heavily involved in repatriating works of art to their rightful owners.
He acted as advisor to the Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic
Monuments in Europe between 1945 to 1950, and for his efforts he was awarded the Star of
Italian Solidarity by the Italian government in 1952, a medal which now resides, thanks to the
generosity of his daughter, in the Index of Christian Art in Princeton. He also became acting
director of the American Academy during 1945–47. His energies and abilities to get things done
were legendary, and he was responsible for developing and reestablishing many Italian libraries
after the war and was at the forefront of developing Italian-American relations at this time. After
leaving Italy he returned for a brief period to the Index of Christian Art in Princeton. Of his
seventy-seven years of life, Morey was to spend thirty-nine of them at Princeton University,
where he left an unrivalled legacy in the Index of Christian Art, which still occupies a premier
position in medieval studies.
The Index
The Index is an iconographic archive in which the subjects of works of art in eighteen different
media, stretching from enamels to frescoes to wax and including manuscripts, ivories, sculpture,
paintings, metalwork, and mosaics, are catalogued using a series of thesaurus-like subject headings,
which number over twenty-eight thousand. Typical of such a heading is that of the Crucifixion:
Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Evangelist John

Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Evangelist John and Longinus
Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Evangelist John and Stephaton
Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Longinus
Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Longinus and Stephaton
Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Longinus, Stephaton and Mary Magdalene
Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Mary Magdalene
Christ Crucifixion, One Cross with Virgin Mary
In the paper files each subject is catalogued under a primary heading which the researcher deter-
mines and cross-references to all the secondary subjects that are also included. So, for example, the
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Charles Rufus Morey
researcher can determine that the main subject of a work of art is Christ; Crucifixion, but that
other elements, such as the sun and moon, Virgin, and Saint John, are also of interest and need
to be included. There is no limit to the number of such headings that can be used and these are
all cross-referenced to the main subject heading. Subject headings are also supported by a free
text description (again with no limit on words) in which controlled language is used to give an
overall sense of the composition and includes such features as the relationship of one element to
another, as well as gestures, coloration, and so forth. Each medium was given a different color
card and they number in excess of five hundred thousand – for example, an orange card indicates
metalwork whereas a blue one a manuscript. Other elements, such as date, specific type of work
(missal, retable, etc.), ownership, and bibliography, are also given on each card. Accompanying
this first file of subject headings and descriptions there is a second file consisting of close to two
hundred thousand black and white images, which are filed under medium and then location.
These rephotographs enable the user to see the work described and are simply reference images
and do not include significant detail. In many ways the researcher in the Index deconstructs the
work of art under various subject headings but then reconstructs it photographically, and it is
possible, for example, to see as many folios of a manuscript as have been published. In the past,
the Index was largely dependent on published material but that approach was changed in the
early 2000s, when the repository began photographing archives, libraries and collections that had
not been previously photographed in their entirety (Fig. 9.2).
As it presently stands the Index lies in two worlds, the analogue and the digital. Computers
were introduced to the archive in 1991 when a bibliographic cataloguing module was modified
Figure 9.2 The Index of Christian Art showing the two paper files. On the right side is the subject file,
consisting of the alphabetically arranged twenty-eight thousand subject headings, while on the left side is
the photographic file.
127
Colum Hourihane
for the archive. The main aim was to replicate the data amassed on the cards over the previous
ninety years and to preserve the structure with all its intricacies. The data structure was complex,
with over 150 fields.6 A chance was also taken to bring the data recorded into more current
use and fields such as School and Style were included. Even though these had been purposely
excluded by Morey as being subjective and personal, they have proved to be among the most pop-
ular. The application would be of considerable benefit as it would enable the data to be rapidly
searched. The cataloguing standards employed in the archive before computers were impressive
and in many ways were as close to modern metadata standards as was possible. When computers
were introduced it has to be remembered that emphasis was placed on the textual elements and
there was no image component to the records. The immediate task was to convert the paper
files, which had been amassed over the previous ninety years, to the digital platform. This was
no easy task as the information was out of date and needed to be thoroughly reinvestigated. It is
a task which still continues, and nowadays over half the paper files have been converted, with all
of the two hundred thousand black and white images already digitized. The Index does not own
the copyright on the majority of these images, but thanks to the fact that many were taken over
fifty years ago they are now out of copyright. Digital enhancement has enabled good-quality
reference images to be offered to the researcher. Since 2000, the Index has made a conscious
effort to acquire image collections as well as their copyright. These have come from libraries
and museums as well as private collections. They are also now in color and the black and white
requirement that operated in the past has been abandoned.
In advance of computerization there were three other fully maintained paper copies of the
Index available for consultation throughout the world. This was the solution that saved research-
ers the need to travel long distances to consult the resource. In 1999 an Internet application to
the database was made available to the scholarly world and this has extended its use enormously.
By opening up the resource both electronically and through hard-copy publications it has been
enriched enormously, and scholars now give to the archive on an unparalleled basis. One of the
main criticisms leveled at the Index was that its emphasis was on the art of the Western world
and that the East had been neglected. This, of course, also reflected scholarly interests and the
main research in medieval art had always been undertaken in the West. The Index followed such
initiatives and whatever had been undertaken in the Byzantine world was also included in the
archive. Now, however, there is considerable research into Christian art underway in areas that
were previously considered tangential. From 2000 efforts were made to redress this issue and
the art of areas such as Coptic Egypt, Christian Syria, Jordan, Israel, Armenia, and so forth was
catalogued. It is an issue which will be corrected over time but which will hopefully make the
Index a more rounded research project. Secular art was never neglected in the archive and it was
always contextualized in the broader field of medieval art. This continues unabated as it should
but users need to be more aware of the coverage in the files. Given the wealth of iconographic
material now available on the web, the Index is unique in what it is able to offer the researcher.
Its strength has always been the scholarly approach of the cataloguers employed in the archive.
They are professional art historians, and even though they all have their own particular strengths
they are also able to diversify into other material. The application of computers to the Index
has opened its resources to a much wider audience, but in doing so it has to be realized that its
approaches need to change. In the past, the paper records were relatively limited and focused, but
with the application of computers the opportunity was taken to extend the metadata enormously
and the data structure now has over one hundred fields. Whereas such a structure is unrivalled,
it has to be realized that it is impractical from the point of view of expediency. Given the wealth
of new material that is constantly being exposed to medieval scholarship it is a project that is sure
to exist for many years to come.
128
Charles Rufus Morey
Notes
1 The most comprehensive publication on the Index, although also now slightly out of date, is by H.
Woodruff, The Index of Christian Art at Princeton University (Princeton, 1942). Other publications on
the Index and Morey include J.R. Martin, Art Bulletin 32 (1950), 345–59; E. Panofsky, “Charles Rufus
Morey,” American Philosophical Society Year Book (1955), 482–91; R. Lee, “Charles Rufus Morey: 1877–1955,”
Art Bulletin 37 (December 1955), iii–vii; New York Times August 30, 1955, p. 27. Obituary, p. 485; D.F.
Blair Jr., “The Morey School, A Great Medieval Scholar Lives on in Art History,” Princeton Alumni
Weekly, March 15, 1957, 6–11; R. Green, “The Index of Christian Art, Great Humanistic Research Tool,”
Princeton Alumni Weekly, March 1, 1963, 8–16; A. Leitch, A Princeton Companion (Princeton, 1978); W.E.
Kleinbauer, Research Guide to the History of Western Art, Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2
(1982), 62–63; L. Drewer, “What Can Be Learned from the Procedures of the Index of Christian Art,”
The Index of Emblem Art Symposium, ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 1990), 121–38; I. Lavin, “Iconography
as a Humanistic Discipline (Iconography at the Crossroads),” Iconography at the Crossroads: Papers from the
Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23–24 March, 1990, ed. B. Cassidy
(Princeton, 1992), 33–42; B. Cassidy, “Computers and Medieval Art: the Case of the Princeton Index,”
Computers and Art History 4:1 (1993), 3–16; C. Hourihane (ed.), “The Princeton Index of Christian Art,”
Visual Resources: An International Journal on Images and Their Uses 13:3–4 (1998); C. Hourihane, “They
Stand on His Shoulders: Morey, Iconography, and the Index of Christian Art,” in Insights and Interpreta-
tions: Studies in Celebrations of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art (Princeton, 2002),
3–16; A. Hershberger, “The Medium Was the Method: Photography and Iconography at the Index of
Christian Art,” in Futures Past: Thirty Years of Arts Computing, CHArt Computers and the History of Art
Yearbook, Vol. 2, ed. A. Bentkowska-Kafel, T. Cashen, and H. Gardner (Bristol/Portland, 2007), 63–76;
C. Hourihane, “Classifying Subject Matter in Medieval Art: The Index of Christian Art at Princeton
University,” in Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and Theories of Thematic Ordering, ed. C. Franc-
eschini and K. Mazzucco, Visual Resources: An International Journal on Images and Their Uses 30:3 (2014),
255–62.
2 See http://www.collegeart.org/awards/morey.
3 See C.H. Smyth and P. Lukehart (ed.), The Early Years of Art History in the United States (Princeton, 1993),
and M.A. Lavin, The Eye of the Tiger, The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology,
1883–1923, Princeton University (Princeton, 1983).
4 One of the first such initiatives and certainly the largest to date was the photographing and cataloguing
of all the medieval manuscripts in the Morgan Library in New York. The premier repository for medi-
eval manuscripts in North America, this project started in 2004 and was completed in 2013.
5 See Blair, “The Morey School” (as in note 1), 6.
6 Cassidy, “Computers” (as in note 1), 7.
129
10
HANS VAN DE WAAL,
A PORTRAIT
Edward Grasman
Hans van de Waal, born as Henri van de Waal on March 3, 1910, in Rotterdam, died on May
7, 1972, in Leiden (Fig. 10.1). His fame in the field of iconography rests on two outstanding
achievements, his dissertation on the imaging of history and being the founding father of Icon-
class. In publications focusing on him, especially those by Horst Gerson, Mechthild Beilmann,
Roelof van Straten, and Eric Jan Sluijter, the greatest attention has been paid to these two achieve-
ments.1 In both his dissertation and his work on Iconclass, the subject of art was given a central
position and both showed him to be a systematic and orderly man. Nobody can undertake a
portrait of Van de Waal without paying attention to these aspects of his character. However,
the following portrait will also accent other aspects of his personality, such as his religiosity, his
capacity to change, and his love of craftsmanship, of which he was an idealistic promoter. In the
second half of his life he focused on Jewish life, which he used in particular in his research on
Rembrandt. It was at this same time that he came to appreciate modern art, which impacted his
perceptions of that of the earlier periods.
On July 12, 1940, when the Netherlands had been occupied by Nazi Germany for just two
months, Van de Waal defended his dissertation at Leiden University, with the verdict cum laude.
The dissertation, which had developed out of a paper published in 1937, examined the way Dutch
history had been visually represented.2 Due to the war, it took no less than twelve years before
the book was finally published, in 1952. The dissertation can be seen as a lengthy introduction
to Rembrandt’s Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis (Fig. 10.2) and in this it is comparable – also in the
wealth of its information – to the study by Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky on Dürer’s Melancolia
I, another book with a philological bent.3 Van de Waal demonstrated that during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries typological reasoning not only comprised the Old and New Testament
but also contemporary history. The inhabitants of the Republic opposing powerful Spain were
compared to the first inhabitants of the Low Countries opposing Rome and the people of Israel
rebelling against mighty Egypt, while William of Orange was compared with both Claudius Civ-
ilis and Gideon. The past was interpreted as symbolizing the present and the present was seen as a
symbol of the future. It is likely that Joost van den Vondel’s literary works suggested this approach
to him. For Vondel, typological reasoning was essential, as for example in his drama Pascha, written
in 1612, in which the people of Israel symbolized Vondel’s Dutch contemporaries.
Van de Waal’s main subject looked at the function of artworks, especially paintings and prints.
Why did an artist, more often than not Rembrandt, choose a specific form to express specific
130
Figure 10.1 Hans van de Waal. Unknown photographer, date unknown, Leiden University Libraries.
Figure 10.2 The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, Rembrandt (fragment, 196 × 309 cm,
originally c. 550 × 550 cm), Stockholm, Royal Academy of Fine Arts (on loan to The Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam).
Edward Grasman
content? In his dissertation, Van de Waal argued that in the Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, which
was made for Amsterdam’s new town hall, Rembrandt ignored the rules of decorum. He trans-
ferred content into form without considering the representative function of the room which his
painting was meant to adorn. Rembrandt had strictly followed Tacitus, who described Claudius
Civilis as a one-eyed barbarian, but he should have realized that such a representation would never
be acceptable to those who commissioned it, and whom Van de Waal in this way had defended.4
The subtitle of his dissertation made clear that he had chosen his method to be iconological.
The goal of his beeld-leer, Dutch for “iconology,” was the study of the function of the image in
a specific society, a definition that indicates close affinities with Warburg, focusing as it did on
the complex processes of image formation (beeld-vorming) and image transfer (beeld-overdracht).
In the English summary he stressed the semiotic connection by translating these two words as
sign-formation and sign-transfer, opening fields still hardly trodden by Dutch students of early
modern art.5
Notwithstanding his affinity with Warburg, Van de Waal adopted an independent position
toward him. He was aware of a lecture Warburg had delivered in 1926 in which attention was
paid to Rembrandt’s Claudius Civilis.6 Such was Warburg’s admiration for this picture that he
had an accurate copy of it made. In this lecture Warburg maintained that penetrating art like
Rembrandt’s was always likely to be defeated by “Lieferanten triumphaler Gegenwartsbejahung”
(those who offer works that triumphantly affirm the present). Warburg showed little sympathy
with those who had commissioned the work for the Amsterdam town hall and little understand-
ing of the refusal of the Claudius Civilis, and in this he differed from Van de Waal. Another dif-
ference was that in Warburg’s opinion, the picture was a Rachebild expressing feelings of revenge
on the part of Claudius Civilis after the killing of his brother Julius Paul, whose death had been
remarked upon only in passing by Van de Waal. His reason for doing this can be inferred from
a text he had already written in 1940, but which was published only in 1949. In the view of
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German authors, Rome was the enemy who had spoiled
German glory, while their contemporaries in the Netherlands stressed that cooperation with the
Romans by their ancestors, including Claudius Civilis, had been fruitful.7
Van de Waal’s second major claim to fame was the development of Iconclass, a refined classifi-
cation of images according to their subjects (discussed elsewhere in this publication). Iconclass is
the most visible result of his systematically functioning mind, but a drive toward systematization
is clear in everything he undertook, even for instance in the way he constructed his papers. It is
symptomatic that indexing was an important criterion in all his works, and it will come as no
surprise that in this respect his dissertation is outstanding, with six registers possibly even a bit
too much.
The DIAL (Decimal Index of the Art of the Low Countries) and Iconclass, which was the
large-scale successor of DIAL, occupied Van de Waal’s daily activities. From 1934 onwards he
worked as an assistant in the Print Room of Leiden University. With his promotion in 1945 to
the position of professor of art history at the same university he became its director. Initially,
Iconclass was designed to classify the collections of the Print Room. This classification consists
of nine main categories: the supernatural, nature, man, society, abstracts, history, Bible, nonclassi-
cal mythology, and finally classical mythology. In 1968, Van de Waal still believed that Iconclass
would be finished within five years, but this turned out to be quite an underestimation. The
project was finished only in 1985, after decades of close cooperation with the Rijksbureau voor
Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague. One of the reasons it took much longer than
expected was the later decision to add a bibliography. In the course of time Iconclass developed
into a very detailed system with the advantage of being able to adapt it to the specific needs of
its various users.
132
Hans van de Waal
Iconclass proves that, when needed, Van de Waal was not only a systematic man but also flexi-
ble. During the time it was being developed decisions had to be made on an ad hoc basis, a kind
of pragmatism that caused some inconsistencies. However, not all inconsistencies resulted from ad
hoc decisions: the main category of the Bible is not classified according to name, while both main
mythological categories are; subcategories of the Old Testament are strictly classified according
to chronology, while those of the New Testament are much less so. Van de Waal was responsible
for the general design of Iconclass, but gradually his role became that of a distant controller of
the process, with his assistants taking over many of the responsibilities involved.
Van de Waal accepted his professorial position with a speech entitled Traditie en Bezieling (Tra-
dition and inspiration).8 Many of his publications move between these two poles. In his address
he remarked on two disturbing facts: in art history any question might be considered scientific
except for one questioning the subject of a work of art and art history unhappily developed at
a time – referring to the days of Bredius and Hofstede de Groot – when many practitioners in
the sister study of literature had turned their back on philology. This discipline would have made
art historians ask other kinds of questions, such as he did in his dissertation. It cannot have been
much of a surprise to him that both Vogelsang and Friedländer, to whose Festschrift he had con-
tributed in 1942, reacted rather remotely to his oration, while the most sympathetic responses
came from abroad, from art historians including Panofsky, Saxl, and Stechow.9
The speech took place on 22nd March 1946, not even a year after the ending of World War II.
Van de Waal had spent the wartime in the Netherlands. From the end of September 1943 to the
spring of 1945 he was in Durchgangslager Westerbork, which for many was a stopover on their
way to Auschwitz. Just a few months before the war started he had married in Switzerland.
On December 28, 1939, he married Liliane Henriette Dufresne, who was Swiss by birth, but
out of a sense of duty to the Print Room they returned to Leiden, quite aware of the dangerous
situation in nearby Nazi Germany. The time he was forced to spend in Westerbork was a cae-
sura in his life, not least because it ruined his health. It made him aware of his Jewish origins
and this awareness would leave an imprint on many of his subsequent publications. However,
the main thing he learnt at Westerbork was not to attach any value to possessions.10 Unlike so
many others who were transported from Westerbork to the East, he was allowed because of his
mixed marriage to go home before the war ended. This favor did not ease his pain when forced
to come to terms with this brutal episode in his life. Unusually, his father, who was trained as a
goldsmith in Germany, spoke German fluently, and never wore the Star of David, was hardly ever
bothered by the Nazis.
From the late 1960s Van de Waal decided to respect the Sabbath. He made it into a day of
study, strictly observing its rituals, going to the synagogue on foot, and having others switch
on lights for him. His intention to devote himself completely to the study of the Talmud after
his retirement was prevented by his unexpected death, slightly after his sixty-second birthday.
Another reason why he longed for the solitude of his study was the democratization of his
beloved university. He could not cope with the criticism leveled at the institute he had created
with such care. Despite this, he could always be approached by his students, whom he supported
in their own free decisions, seeing them move into remarkably different directions.
In Westerbork he had found some solace in Fromentin’s Les Maîtres d’autrefois (1876), which
he translated and commented upon. The archive Van de Waal kept at the RKD contains the
moving results of this research.11 The book was expected to appear in 1944, but just like the dis-
sertation it took many years before it was published. It finally appeared in 1951, under the title De
meesters van weleer (The masters of ere).12 The main attraction for him must surely have been that
it is a book by a craftsman on his craft, and it is likely that he recognized something of himself in
Fromentin, who criticized developments within the art of painting in his own time.
133
Edward Grasman
Van de Waal’s commentary on Fromentin contains a singular remark in which he qualified

the importance of the subject. After noting how important a “source of secondary inspiration”
the literature of the Romantic era had become for music and the visual arts, he commented,
The reaction was unavoidable. One does not transfer without consequences the accent
from the quintessence to side-issues and in the case of the visual arts and music the
subject, the “story” remains secondary. The purely artistic qualities, resulting from the
nature of the used technique, will always have to remain in the center of the artist’s
attention.13
This sentence survived all the editing of his commentary on Fromentin. He was not exclusively
focused on the subject and, much like Panofsky, he kept his distance from those tendencies within
iconology which moved in that direction.
Van de Waal’s teaching was no less systematic than his other activities. In it he further devel-
oped his beeld-leer, which revolved around three elements basic to any work of art: form, content,
and function, a triangle proclaimed to be the holy writ by his students.14 He never intended to
publish his beeld-leer because it had to remain a flexible instrument. No matter how fundamental
the various elements were to his teaching and his research, he never defined them. “Function,”
for example, at one time might refer to the use of artistic means within a work of art, at another
time to the work of art in its original context.
Both the commentary on Fromentin and the dissertation lacked any references to the Tal-
mud, and it was also still absent from the preface to In Memoriam 1940–1945, which he wrote
in 1952 on occasion of a stained-glass window being commissioned by Leiden University.15 An
indication of his increasing interest in Judaism is offered when a comparison is made between
the two versions of the DIAL from 1958 and 1968. In 1958 a category on non-Christian reli-
gions has been mentioned (category 12), but only in 1968 was this category worked out in a
detailed manner, beginning with a whole series of subcategories on Jewish religion. However,
this was several years after Van de Waal had already revealed his knowledge of Judaism in a
paper on Rembrandt’s etchings which were meant to illustrate a book called Piedra Gloriosa by
Menasseh ben Israel.16 In Van de Waal’s opinion these prints testified to Rembrandt’s esteem
of the Jewish people. During the Rembrandt celebrations in 1956 he repeatedly displayed his
interest in Judaism, as for example in a lecture he delivered in Leiden’s Peter’s Church, which
was titled “Rembrandt and Ourselves,” in which he honored the century-old tradition of Dutch
tolerance toward Jews.17
After 1956 Van de Waal’s interest in Judaism frequently showed up, most clearly perhaps in
an article from 1969 on Rembrandt’s painting known as Haman in Disgrace.18 He considered the
choice of an ostensibly calm moment in this particular story in the Bible as characteristic of the
development Rembrandt had gone through, in relation to form as well as iconography. He iden-
tified the figures as Haman, Ahasuerus, and the chamberlain Harbonah, the old man whose pres-
ence had been a problem for all earlier interpretations. He suggested that Harbonah was Elijah
in disguise and the actual subject of the picture was the intervention in this world by the hidden
God. This paper not only demonstrated his great knowledge of Judaism in seventeenth-century
Amsterdam but also at the same time announced a theme which would become an important
topic in art history decades later, the painting of the invisible.
In the review of Steps towards Rembrandt, a collection of articles by Van de Waal which he
himself had helped prepare but which was published posthumously, Joos Bruyn identified the
author with Rembrandt.19 Elie Wiesel defined the Talmud as “a dialogue with the living and
the dead.”20 Is it too farfetched to assume that Van de Waal, while working in the silence of his
134
Hans van de Waal
study during Sabbath, identified himself with a Talmudic scholar, in dialogue not with Hillel but
with Rembrandt?
Van de Waal’s decision to focus on Judaism followed a period in which he seemed to have
approached religion in a more general way. A lecture he delivered in 1964 during a so-called
Open Veld (Open Field) meeting certainly had religious connotations, but they were not specif-
ically Jewish.21 When he published this lecture five years later, in Delta, he almost completely
ignored the religious element.22 It is possible that he did not consider it to be sufficiently scientific
or maybe the editors thought so. Anyway, it was exactly this religious dimension which gave the
text its rare beauty. The Open Field meetings were organized by Greet Hofmans, a religiously
inspired woman who played a remarkable role in Dutch history because of her ties with Queen
Juliana. It was due to the malicious way her relationship with Queen Juliana was presented in
the international press that the Dutch monarchy almost came to an end.
Van de Waal was asked to give a talk at the Open Field meeting on the meaning of light
and dark for mankind and as to whether light existed without shadow. He began his lecture
by quoting from the Old and New Testaments, and continued by illustrating problems with
Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro as a visual technique. This led him to conclude first that the
youthful Rembrandt tried to systematically master visual techniques in his self-portraits, a
point of view later affirmed by the Rembrandt Research Project; second, the ways in which
Rembrandt used chiaroscuro to suggest a dialogue as in the Disputing Scholars from Mel-
bourne; third, the reasons why he was always moved by the Titus from Rotterdam, where the
boy seems to exist on the threshold of light and dark, on the borderline of knowing and not
knowing, which is so characteristic of youth; and finally about the absence, unheard of in the
seventeenth century, of space in Rembrandt’s ultimate self-portrait, in Cologne. This lecture
clearly shows that Van de Waal’s view of Rembrandt, certainly after the war, was imbedded
in religiosity.
During this same lecture he touched on photography, also in a religious context, pointing
out that this art lives by converting light into dark and vice versa. With the acquisition of the
Grégoire collection by the Print Room in 1953, Van de Waal became a pioneer in the Neth-
erlands in collecting photography, both the photographs themselves and the tools used to make
them. Moreover, he introduced photography as part of the art history teaching program at Lei-
den University, from a theoretical and practical perspective. It was through one of his mother’s
kinsmen, Richard Polak, that he had become acquainted with this branch of art. In particular, he
admired the skills and craftsmanship of photographers like Polak.
Van de Waal’s high esteem for craftsmanship was inherited from his uncle, the portrait painter
Jos Seckel, and of course from his father, whose activities he had carefully observed. In West-
erbork he profited from these close observations when he was made responsible for repairing
the wheelbarrows. As if to show how close to his heart craftsmanship was, the archive at the
Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie has a piece of paper on which he wrote down,
probably during the late 1960s, that had his retirement started at that moment he would con-
centrate on calligraphy, woodworking, or glassblowing as well as Hebrew.23 Both his sons dearly
remember how much care and discernment their father gave to ensure that everything from toys
to vacuum cleaners worked well.
The Grégoire collection had a particular impact on him, not so much for what it contained
but for what it lacked. Grégoire had considerable holdings for photographers such as Henri
Berssenbrugge and Polak, but at some time Van de Waal realized that both of these, including his
kinsman, were dead ends. Mistakenly, they had based their medium on painting. In 1967 Van de
Waal stated his criticism explicitly in a preface to a book on Berssenbrugge, but everything sug-
gests he had come to the same conclusion years before.24 Experimental photography, such as that
135
Edward Grasman
presented by Hajek-Halke in 1955, was an eye-opener to him. He enthusiastically commented on

those photographers who had been influenced by Moholy-Nagy’s experiments in the 1920s and
who no longer took painting or one of the other arts as their point of departure. Their pictures
were exclusively grounded in photography itself.25
It was on these same pages in 1956 that Van de Waal revealed some reservations about perspec-
tive: “The art of the Renaissance went to such lengths in her craving for mathematical exactness,
that in her imaging of this phenomenon she strove for an orthogonal projection of it which was
as accurate as possible.” However, according to him, this was not the domain of photography; her
domain was “the representation of the texture of matter.” One year later he wrote an introduc-
tion to an exhibition of photography held in Brussels, The Hague, and Cologne which showed
abstract photographs by Pim van Os, among others. The exposition itself was called Images
Inventées but the title of his introduction was “The World in Which We Live.” Van de Waal came to
the conclusion that “the impeccable presentation by way of perspective” had lost terrain since
the beginning of the twentieth century to “the interest in structure.” He was thinking of the
nonfigurative creations of Klee and Kandinsky, which were, as he noted, no longer composed
within a given framework, but might be expanded to all sides.26
In 1952 he had been critical of cubism. Making a principle of abstraction, he wrote at the
time, was a dangerous decision, because it might involve crossing “the natural boundaries of the
visual arts,” with the geometrical figures of cubism as the unavoidable consequence.27 Twelve
years later, in 1964, he was responsible for a television program on modern art and this time his
attitude toward cubists was much more positive. They combined various views of the same object
in their paintings, and in doing so with impeccable instinct they anticipated technical develop-
ments, while at the same time already showing a sense of simultaneity, which would become a
characteristic of later times.28
His increased appreciation of modern art had implications for his approach to earlier art, par-
ticularly Rembrandt. A paper from 1956 on the Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis neatly followed the
text of his dissertation from four years earlier, and the sentence quoted here about Rembrandt’s
rivalry with Leonardo and Tintoretto is almost verbatim in both: “In his zeal to equal them he
struggled with formal problems of which his commissioners had not the faintest notion.” The
only difference, and it seems to me to be a significant one, is that in 1956 the word “formal” had
been added.29 Van de Waal’s famous article on the Syndics (Fig. 10.3) from 1956 is preceded by a
motto taken from Dvorák according to which the development of modern art had opened eyes
to the quality of earlier art, and it is in this same vein that the article is finished: “In as much as
the art of our own day has enabled us once again to appreciate the value of composition on a flat
surface, we are better able to understand certain aspects of Rembrandt’s artistry.”30 It appears that
those aspects we have become more appreciative of are those formal problems he had observed
in his other paper.
In his article on the Syndics Van de Waal protested against psychological interpretations,
arguing that the gestures of those represented were not directed at some presupposed viewer and
that the picture was no snapshot either. On the contrary, Rembrandt had endeavored to suggest
repose – be it a tense kind of repose – and unity within the group. It was out of the question
that he might have intended to suggest an interruption from the outside. Van de Waal concluded
that the unity of this group of people enclosed within a frame removed them from reality. It was
precisely this element of enclosure within a frame that was challenged by Puttfarken in 2000.
According to Puttfarken, Van de Waal projected upon the Syndics the kind of formal analysis
Clement Greenberg had applied to contemporary American painting.31
Van de Waal was convinced that formal problems in the visual arts had to be considered
primarily as problems of space. That is why he advocated systematic research on the structure of
136
Hans van de Waal
Figure 10.3 Portraits of the Syndics of the Amsterdam Clothmasters’ Guild, Rembrandt, 1662, oil on canvas,
191.5 × 279 cm, The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
space suggested in Rembrandt.32 In his Open Field lecture in 1964 he expressed the opinion that
Rembrandt had gained in profundity the moment he deliberately abandoned the Renaissance
system of perspective, until in his final self-portrait any indication of space was absent. In that
painting Rembrandt pictured himself standing on the threshold of light and dark. In the version
of this lecture Van de Waal published five years later he wrote that Caravaggio had attacked the
Renaissance sense of space by suggesting a movement out of the picture and in an intuitive way
he was followed in this by Rembrandt, particularly in his last self-portrait. Clearly, for Van de
Waal a gulf existed between the man who painted the Syndics and the man who painted this
final self-portrait: in the first the frame enclosed the represented group; in the second the frame
was ignored.
It is possible that photography opened Van de Waal’s eyes to modern art, while modern art
made him aware of certain aspects of earlier art, especially that of Rembrandt. Van de Waal never
wrote a comprehensive study on Rembrandt and this was not caused by his premature death.
However, the enormous insights in his Steps towards Rembrandt offer every reason for it to be seen
as his third great achievement, next to his dissertation and Iconclass.
The only review to appear after the publication of his dissertation was written by the historian
Pieter Geyl, but it was not until 1971 that the art historian Jan Bialostocki reviewed it in an art
historical magazine, The Art Bulletin.33 As it happens, Van de Waal just lived to see his dissertation,
a work which he had begun thirty-four years earlier, finally reviewed in an appropriate journal.
He always suffered from what he considered to be a lack of appreciation. Would his qualities
have been more appreciated if he had continued to do what he did in his dissertation? It might
be argued that because he kept changing his course, his dissertation was more of an ending than
a beginning. It stands to reason that there are several constant factors in his oeuvre, such as an
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Edward Grasman
interest in theatre – for example, in the article on Haman – and in ephemeral architecture –
for instance, in his posthumous publication on Rembrandt’s Ecce Homo.34 However, he did not
publish anything further on typologies and although he remained interested in iconographical
groups, his papers specifically dealing with this topic are scarce. This phenomenon took on a
central position only in Hagar in the Desert, a paper that appeared before his dissertation.35 In it,
he briefly formulated a program for future research on iconographical groups in the work of
Rembrandt: the appearance of angels to mortals, the ruler on his throne, and female nudity in
nature. The first mentioned subject he discussed in his paper on Hagar, but he never published
on the other two. However, in his 1961 article on Rembrandt’s etching of Faustus, he identified
yet another iconographical group of the inspired scholar in his study, with the accurate conclu-
sion that Rembrandt in this etching succeeded in finding a balance between interruption and
concentration.36
Van de Waal did not leave behind an extensive bibliography. His combined obligations as
professor in art history and director of the Print Room left him insufficient time to undertake
much research. In his work with the Print Room he was involved with museum problems. His
opinions regarding such institutions paralleled those on art history and he suggested a shift of
attention in the museum from style to function.
Van de Waal not only lacked time to publish but also seemed to have lacked the inclination.
Had it been his intention to build up a large bibliography he would not have devoted that much
time to the idealistic goal of developing the aesthetic and creative capacities of secondary school
pupils. “What our generation lacks,” he wrote, “is the cautiousness and wisdom of the carpenter
and the gardener who have learnt, while creating, to listen to their material.”37 He considered it
his duty to stimulate that mental attitude, in which skillfulness and craftsmanship played such a
prominent role.
Craftsmanship was the subject of a paper from 1967 on the reception of a famous anecdote
told by Pliny.38 Apelles visited Protogenes at Rhodes, but when he did not find him at home, he
drew an extremely fine line in color on an already prepared panel. On arriving home, Protogenes
identified the visitor who had drawn that line and before leaving home again, he drew an even
thinner line over the earlier one, in another color. When Apelles next called and he did not find
Protogenes at home, he cut the lines with an even thinner line in a third color, and hereupon
Protogenes realized his defeat. The rivalry between these two famous antique painters exclusively
concerned manual skill and craftsmanship and that is precisely why later commentators had such
problems with it. They amplified Pliny’s story, suggesting it really was about contours or per-
spective. What these later writers had in common, according to Van de Waal, was “the silent and
intuitive failure to acknowledge skilled workmanship as the basis of art.”39
Steps towards Rembrandt contains one text which had not been published before and con-
sequently appeared posthumously. It is a fitting end to this portrait of Van de Waal because it
again proves his affinity with craftsmanship. The text is about Rembrandt’s etching known as
Le Petit Orfèvre (Fig. 10.4), which shows a metalworker carefully handling a statue of Caritas in
his studio.40 The etching was no genre piece or portrait, as had been suggested, but according
to Van de Waal it was the representation of a scene told in Judges 13–16, which had never been
visualized before. He consistently believed that Rembrandt had a deep acquaintance with the
Bible. The element on which the statue rests could not be an anvil, because – and here Van de
Waal’s affinity with the craftsman becomes manifest – no craftsman would put an anvil on a
workbench. It is a pedestal on which the smith is cautiously fixing his sculpture. Van de Waal
not only called attention to Rembrandt’s identification with this metalworker but also con-
vincingly argued that the etching was a combination of originality and tradition. And this of
course brings us back to the speech he delivered in 1946. His final conclusion on this etching
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Hans van de Waal
Figure 10.4 Le Petit Orfèvre, also known as The Goldsmith, Rembrandt, etching, 7.7 × 5.6 cm, first state of
three (B123, 1655), Leiden University Libraries.
is that it was a true emblem of Rembrandt’s own personality. I would like to add that his paper,
in its logical construction and careful speculation on Rembrandt, is no less an emblem of Van
de Waal’s own personality.
Notes
1 H. Gerson, “Herdenking van Hans van den Waal (3 maart 1910–7 mei 1972),” Koninklijke Nederlandse
Akademie van Wetenschappen Jaarboek 1972 (Amsterdam 1973), 166–80; M. Beilmann, “Hans van de
Waal (1910–1972),” in Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, ed. H. Dilly (Berlin, 1990), 204–19; R. van
Straten, Iconography, Indexing, Iconclass: A Handbook (Leiden, 1994), 83–95; E.J. Sluijter, “Traditie en bez-
ieling: Henri van de Waal (1910–1972),” in Kunstgeschiedenis in Nederland: Negen opstellen, ed. P. Hecht,
A. Hoogenboom, and C. Stolwijk (Amsterdam, 1998), 145–68.
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Edward Grasman
2 H. van de Waal, Drie eeuwen vaderlandsche geschied-uitbeelding 1500–1800: Een iconologische studie, 2 vols.
(The Hague, 1952); “’s Lands oudste verleden in de voorstelling van Vondel en zijn tijdgenooten,” Else-
vier’s Geïllustreerd Maandschift 47 (1937), 297–318. English translation in H. van de Waal and R.H. Fuchs,
Steps towards Rembrandt: Collected Articles 1937–1972 (Amsterdam/London, 1974), 44–72.
3 R. Klibanski, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy,
Religion and Art (New York, 1964).
4 Van de Waal, Drie eeuwen (as in note 2), I, 231–38.
5 Van de Waal, Drie eeuwen (as in note 2), I, 4 and 297.
6 P. van Huisstede, De Mnemosyne Beeldatlas van Aby M. Warburg, een laboratorium voor beeldgeschiedenis
(Leiden, 1992), 126–39.
7 H. van de Waal, “Nederlands-Duitse tegenstellingen in de geschiedschrijving der Renaissance,” De Gids
112 (1949), 98–108.
8 H. van de Waal, Traditie en bezieling (Rotterdam/Antwerp, 1946).
9 Archive H. van de Waal, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague, 0625, box 3 and
Van Straten, Iconography (as in note 1), 32–33; H. van de Waal, “De zoons van Cornelis Engelbrechtsz.
of Jan de Cock, alias ‘Jan van Leyen’? Een kleine bijdrage tot een groot probleem,” in Aan Max
J. Friedländer 1867–5 juni – 1942, ed. H.E. van Gelder (The Hague, 1942), 37–39.
10 Archive Van de Waal (as in note 9), box 3, folder Rotary.
11 Archive Van de Waal (as in note 9), box 2.
12 E. Fromentin and H. van de Waal, De Meesters van Weleer (Rotterdam, 1951).
13 Van de Waal, Meesters van Weleer (as in note 12), 291.
14 H. Locher, “Lévi-Strauss en de structurele bestudering van de kunst,” in Opstellen voor H. van de Waal,
ed. L.D. Couprie a.o. (Amsterdam/Leiden, 1970), 113.
15 H. van de Waal, “Beschrijving der gedenkramen,” in In Memoriam 1940–1945, ed. J.H. Boeke (Leiden,
1952), 15–18.
16 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandts Radierungen zu Piedra Gloriosa,” Imprimatur, ein Jahrbuch für Bücherfreunde
12 (1954/1955), 52–61. English translation in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 113–32.
17 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandt en wij,” De Gids 119 (1956), II 40–44. English translation in Steps towards
Rembrandt (as in note 2), 7–12.
18 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandt and the Feast of Purim,” Oud Holland 84 (1969), 199–233. Also in Steps
towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 201–46.
19 Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2); J. Bruyn in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 87 (1974), 466.
20 E. Wiesel, Wise Men and Their Tales (New York, 2003), 291.
21 Archive Van de Waal (as in note 9), box 1.
22 H. van de Waal, “Light and Dark: Rembrandt and Chiaroscuro,” Delta 12/2 (Summer 1969), 74–88.
Also in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 13–27.
23 Archive Van de Waal (as in note 9), box 3, folder Rotary.
24 H. van de Waal, “Voorwoord,” in H.J. Scheffer, Portret van een fotograaf: Henri Berssenbrugge 1873–1959
(Leiden, 1967), 5–11.
25 H. van de Waal, “H. Hajek-Halke, Experimentelle Fotografie, Bonn, 1955,” Fotorama 5/11 (1956),
171–72.
26 H. van de Waal, “De wereld waarin wij leven,” in Catalogue Exposition Internationale de Photographies
(Brussels/The Hague/Cologne, 1957).
27 Van de Waal, Drie eeuwen (as in note 2), 9.
28 H. van de Waal, “Moderne tijd – moderne kunst,” Openbaar Kunstbezit (TV) 2 (1964), nr. 5.
29 Drie eeuwen (as in note 2), 231; H. van de Waal, “The Iconological Background of Rembrandt’s Civilis,”
Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 25 (1956), 22. Also in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 34.
30 H. van de Waal, “De Staalmeesters en hun legende,” Oud Holland 71 (1956), 88. English translation in
Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 247–92.
31 T. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800 (New
Haven, 2000), 12–16.
32 H. van de Waal, “De vormstructuur van het symbolisme,” De Gids 120 (1957), 329; H. van de Waal,
“Rembrandt 1956,” Museum 61 (1956), 205–06.
33 P. Geyl, Bijdragen voor de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 9 (1955), 142–44; J. Bialostocki in The Art Bulletin
53 (1971), 262–65.
34 H. van de Waal, “Enige mogelijke bronnen voor Rembrandts ets Ecce Homo (1655),” Nederlands Kunsthis-
torisch Jaarboek 23 (1973), 95–113. English translation in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 182–200.
140
Hans van de Waal
35 H. van de Waal, “Hagar in de woestijn door Rembrandt en zijn school,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek
1 (1947), 145–69. English translation in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 90–112.
36 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandt’s Faust Etching, a Socinian Document, and the Iconography of the Inspired
Scholar,” Oud Holland 79 (1964), 6–48. Also in Steps towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 133–81.
37 H. van de Waal, “Creatieve vorming een landsbelang,” in Gedenkbundel studiedagen VAEVO 1908–1958
(1958), 61.
38 H. van de Waal, “The ‘Linea summae tenuitatis’ of Apelles; Pliny’s Phrase and Its Interpreters,” Zeitschrift
für Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 12 (1967), 5–32.
39 Van de Waal, Linea summae tenuitatis (as in note 38), 10.
40 H. van de Waal, “Rembrandt’s Etching Le petit orfèvre: Genre Piece, Portrait or Biblical History?,” in Steps
towards Rembrandt (as in note 2), 233–46.
141
11
MEYER SCHAPIRO AS
ICONOGRAPHER
Patricia Stirnemann
Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996) came to New York from Lithuania at the age of three, attended
college and graduate school at Columbia University, and taught there throughout his career.1
As an art historian, he was a polymath: medievalist, modernist, historiographer, semiologist, and
philosopher. A voracious autodidact with a prodigious memory, he also had a dab hand as an
artist, translated Baudelaire, and wrote poetry himself. In his youth he taught himself German,
which suddenly unlocked a whole universe of visual analysis and reasoning that was virtually
unknown in the United States. To judge its effect, one need only look at the bibliography listed
at the end of his article on style, published in 1953.2 Out of twenty-three books cited, nineteen
are in German (with special attention to Riegl and Wöfflin), one in French (Focillon), and three
in English. Eighteen of the cited works date before 1930. As a philosopher one might say that
he explored the epistemology and philosophy of visual language. His exposure to each new way
of looking – Riegl, Boas, semiotics, Marx, Freud, the art of the twentieth century – extended his
reach into new realms of thought, which led to his resistance to any binding theoretical carapace,
to a sort of humility of seeing.
It is unlikely that anyone would describe Meyer Schapiro as an iconographer. If we restrict
our attention to his work on medieval iconographical problems, we approach his thought piece-
meal through the far end of the telescope. Our vision would be even further reduced were we to
eliminate the iconography of ornament and the formal aspects of iconography. Over and over,
Meyer Schapiro emphasizes that meaning is inherent in the composition and in the rendering of
the formal elements and signs, and he forges new vocabularies of description in his search for the
meanings of iconographies. His intricate descriptions oblige one to look repeatedly at a carving
or painting, as new physical aspects, meanings, and relationships are revealed. Recognizing the
tremendous breadth of his restless intellect,3 it is interesting to see how he discusses iconography,
what he chooses to discuss and what he omits, rejects, or overlooks, what tools he uses in his
research, the relative acceptance or correctness of his interpretations, and the responses they have
generated. These last, the responses, are a clear tribute to his stimulating provocation to question,
analyze, search further, and think anew.
In his relatively small corpus of published papers, Schapiro examines medieval iconography
in several ways. The two published papers taken from his dissertation on Moissac and his earliest
articles deal mainly with a formal, visual reading of an iconography that demands a sympathetic
understanding on the part of the modern spectator, a viewer who must put aside late antique
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Meyer Schapiro
and Renaissance naturalism as aesthetic yardsticks. Beginning in the 1940s, he publishes several
papers where he deciphers the content of an unusual scene or object and explains its context
(e.g., Ruthwell Cross, Disappearing Christ, Mérode Altarpiece, Joseph Scenes on the Chair of
Maximianus). In the 1950s and 1960s, the content is treated within the context of the study
of a single object or monument that he is attempting to date and localize, in which case he is
using details of the iconography as indicators within a larger argument (e.g., Castelseprio, Parma
Ildefonsus, Glazier Psalter). Late in his career, he begins regrouping patterns, types, uses, and
interpretations of iconography across time and space, as in the essays in Words, Script and Pictures:
Semiotics of Visual Language, where he explores the artist’s reading of the text, themes of state and
themes of action, full-face and profile as symbolic form, and writing in images. While the more
purely iconographical studies are often archaeological or positivist in tone, the last papers permit
the author to explore iconography and style diachronically, to develop freely the interaction of
content and form and their inflected, possible readings. He published no new work after the age
of seventy, returning to earlier articles or unpublished studies, which he polished and gathered
together in five well-indexed volumes of selected papers.4 These in turn have now been trans-
lated into several languages. Like A. Riegl, his life’s work has become accessible worldwide only
recently and posthumously.
In his various approaches to medieval art, Schapiro’s style differs. The formal analyses of
iconography can be voluble and emotive, while those presenting arguments concerning sources
and chronology can be much more densely threaded, economical, frustratingly meagre in their
illustration, and sometimes more abrupt in their transitions, conclusions, affirmations, and sugges-
tions. The late essays, which were originally conceived as lectures or developments presented in
his classes, flow rapidly as Schapiro speaks to the images and reads their many nuances.
Throughout his life, Schapiro’s published work was interwoven with his teaching, which
constantly added new observations and ideas to the work in print in a much freer and extraordi-
narily wide-ranging manner. For this reason, his students may have understood him best, notably
John Plummer in his article “Insight and Outlook” and Ilene Forsyth in her articles “Narrative
at Moissac, Schapiro’s Legacy” and “Word Play in the Cloister at Moissac.”5 Forsyth’s articles are
particularly revealing with regard to one facet of Schapiro as an iconographer. Schapiro never
published the last chapter of his thesis on the sculpture of Moissac, the one that dealt with the
iconographical sources of the sculptures. Forsyth’s article on the portal at Moissac began as a
master’s essay for Schapiro in 1955. As she sets the stage for providing evidence for a new and
rather brilliant understanding of the sculptures of the portal and trumeau, she builds on Schapiro’s
observations, but also notes the elements that he overlooked or left unqueried, such as the prom-
inent swollen udders of the lioness on the trumeau (Fig. 11.1) or the falling idols of Heliopolis
during the Flight into Egypt. She notes that Schapiro added to his reading of the sculptures in the
classroom – for example, by noting the antithetical symmetry of the bed of the Virgin receiving
the Magi and the bed of the dying Lazarus – without searching for further meaning. She points
out his fascination with “iconographic realism” and secular imagery, but is baffled by his curious
indifference to the monastic context of Moissac. She makes a fine case for identifying Lazarus’s
wife with Jezebel and Luxuria; she then parallels the fall of Jezebel with the fallen idols of Heli-
opolis, develops new levels of meaning, and presents a contextual dating c. 1100–1115.
One of the few times Schapiro went very far astray was in his article “From Mozarabic to
Romanesque in Silos,” where, in a comparison of manuscript illumination with sculpture (which
is a dubious point of departure), he attributed a change in style to indigenous artists at Silos who
were reacting to changing social and economic conditions in the church and secular world. Both
this article and the one on Souillac were published in 1939. Schapiro was thirty-five years old
and deeply fascinated with Marxism and Freud, and these ideologies left traces in both articles.
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Patricia Stirnemann
Figure 11.1 Detail of the trumeau at Moissac showing prominent swollen udders of the lioness. Moissac,
Abbaye Saint Pierre. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
It took over sixty years and one of the world’s finest historians of Mozarabic and Romanesque
Spain to set matters straight. In a superb study, John Williams takes Schapiro’s article to task with
extraordinary perception, analyzing it point by point.6 His careful examination explains how the
monks at Silos had written their own erroneous and chauvinistic history of the abbey, a history
on which Schapiro had based his assumptions and Marxist reading. He then carefully itemizes the
hypothetical slant, lapses in reasoning, ambiguities of language, and unsupported assertions with
which Meyer Schapiro manipulates the reader rather than demonstrating a proposition. As John
Williams notes, Meyer Schapiro “overturns” his own thesis twenty-five years later, but only in a
footnote, in the early pages of the Parma Ildefonsus (1964): “the coexistence of the Mozarabic and
Romanesque in Spain . . . is a matter of an old native style surviving for one or two generations
beside a newly introduced foreign style.”7 Reading the two articles back to back is a cogent lesson
in critical thought.
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Meyer Schapiro
Schapiro often left articles aging in the barrel for decades, and it is possible that the article-
made-into-a-book on the Parma Ildefonsus was begun in the 1930s, as it shares the same captiva-
tion with the confrontation of two dissimilar styles, and toys mischievously with iconographical
aspects, such as the sexual Freudian interpretation of an open door. The open door at Silos occurs
above the image of the Doubting Thomas,8 while in the Parma Ildefonsus it occurs in the image
of the appearance of the Virgin to Ildefonsus in a church. Schapiro, in one of his famously long
footnotes (note 27), acknowledges that the scene represents the vision of Ildefonsus, and then
develops the possibility of a Freudian interpretation of the open door. Walter Cahn justly ques-
tioned the sexual interpretation in his review of the book, emphasizing that the open door of the
church is described in the account of the vision of Ildefonsus.9 In the chapter on the German
artist in the manuscript,10 Schapiro briefly lists over a dozen iconographic and compositional
details that are found in Ottonian manuscripts, giving copious and pertinent references, but no
illustrations, leaving the visual quest to the reader.
During World War II and in the decade that followed, Schapiro struck a new path and con-
centrated on a series of iconographical questions. His formal preoccupations seem to fade into
the background as he hones in on the texts that inspire the artist. Many of these articles are
relatively brief, nearly all are masterful, and some are of fundamental importance for historians
of the Middle Ages in all fields.
His study on “The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross,”11 one of five iconographic
essays that appeared in rapid succession between 1942 and 1945, is illustrative of the type of
problem that attracted him – an isolated, early medieval object or iconography based partly on
unusual nonbiblical or para-biblical texts. What is the meaning the artist is trying to impart with
an original composition, and can we retrieve it? Schapiro’s article on the Ruthwell Cross appeared
at the same time as that of Fritz Saxl, with whom he corresponded at the time.12 The two articles
arrive at some similar observations, but could not be more different. Saxl is traditional, giving an
introduction to some of the past research and a fairly full description of the cross, followed by an
analysis of the iconography, especially the figure of Christ; he then provides a comparison with
the Bewcastle Cross and Mediterranean models, and a discussion of the problem of dating, all in
an additive development. Typically, Schapiro begins his article as a response to another scholar’s
work – namely, the fifth volume of G. Baldwin Brown’s The Arts of Early England (1921), devoted
to the Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses. He immediately cuts to the chaff, the image of Christ
standing on the animals, and questions the traditional identification of a “Christ triumphant.”
The animals under Christ’s feet are adoring him, not trampled, and the inscription surrounding
the panel speaks of the beasts recognizing Christ, cognoverunt. He underscores the unusual, non-
narrative grouping of scenes that surround it: Saints Paul and Anthony, Mary Magdalen at the feet
of Christ, the Flight into Egypt, the Annunciation and Visitation, the Healing of the blind man,
and the Crucifixion in the lowest panel. These have nothing to do with death or the extract from
the Dream of the Rood, written in runes on the cross. He then retraces other biblical and apocry-
phal texts where animals recognize Christ, and the rare representations of Christ surrounded by
beasts when he withdraws to the desert, an iconography that preceded the trampling versions of
the post-fourth-century Church triumphant, which refer to Psalm 90/91. Schapiro then relates
the desert and eremitical elements in the Christ panel to the panels of John the Baptist and the
hermit saints Paul and Anthony breaking bread, notes the importance of Paul as first hermit in
Anglo-Saxon calendars and martyrologies, and the modelling of Anglo-Saxon saints lives on the
lives of Egyptian saints and the desert fathers, the Celtic use of the Egyptian calculation of Easter,
Cuthbert and Guthlac’s power over beasts, Mary Magdalen’s thirty-year desert life recorded in
the Anglo-Saxon martyrology, and so on. In short, with poetic energy and almost visionary
meditation, Schapiro draws us back into the monastic seventh century and makes the integrated
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Patricia Stirnemann
religious meaning of the scenes on the cross shine forth in their simple complexity: the spiritual
withdrawal into the desert, the world of harmony with animals, and the recognition of the equi-
table judge and savior. Curiously, he emphasizes only the desert references as a unifying spiritual
theme of the panels, overlooking the importance of the equally pervasive theme of recognition,
not only in the panels of Christ, the Baptist, Annunciation, Healing of the blind man, the her-
mits Paul and Anthony, and Mary Magdalen anointing Christ but also in the Visitation,13 where
Elizabeth “recognizes” that Mary is blessed, and of course in the Dream of the Rood inscription,
where the Cross “recognizes” Christ. Finally he places the cross and its southern stylistic ele-
ments within the tensions of the political and religious context of the synod of Whitby and the
Romanization of Anglo-Saxon England. He glosses on its exocentric placement in Ruthwell on
the Thwaite Burn and the intentions of its institutional authors, and then evokes parallels with the
Life of Saint Kertigern, apostle of Strathclyde, who is obeyed by animals and restores the sight of a
blind king. He closes with the lapidary sentence “The Cross is Anglian and classic in its forms,
mainly Celtic in its religious content.”
The unveiled religious meaning brings to the fore yet another latent aspect of the cross –
namely, the formal expressiveness of the assembly and arrangement of scenes in a very badly dam-
aged masterpiece, themes of recognition, of spiritual withdrawal and seeing that unite the two sides
of the cross and explain the ordering of the seemingly isolated narrative and nonnarrative scenes.
In the article, Schapiro has turned the intellectual tables. From being an evangelist of the
formal reading, he has shown his intuition and vision as a meditative apostle of the power of the
word, text, and historical setting. Playing as ever on several keyboards at once, it is during this
moment of intense inquiry into the liturgy, commentary, biography, and history of the first half
of the Middle Ages that he writes his essay on the esthetic attitude in Romanesque art (1947).14
The 1940s were a decade in which he was ardently pursuing the question of how messages are
made and received in the pre-Gothic era, incidentally showing students how to search for and
interpret significant texts and images.
During the same year as the article on the Ruthwell Cross, 1945, he published his brief sem-
inal article on the Mérode Altarpiece, datable around 1425–1428, where Joseph the carpenter
makes mousetraps to snare the devil at the moment of the Annunciation.15 The article had many
repercussions in the following decades. Schapiro’s textual and contextual arguments were univer-
sally accepted, and scholars would provide symbolic explanations for other objects, notably the
trimming ax, saw, and rod, which reflect the words of Isaiah 10:15.16 What has often been lost in
later discussions is the import of Schapiro’s remarks on what this altarpiece tells us about a new
relationship, if not tension, that is created between the religious message and the secular setting
with the advent of northern Renaissance realism. He notes how domestic objects psychologically
evoke a dichotomy of the masculine versus feminine in apparel, tools, and belongings; mice,
chimneys, and open doors and windows call to mind sexual allusions; the basin and towel are
metaphors for chastity and cleanliness in daily bourgeois life, and at the same time these objects
transmit age-old theological and patristic symbolism:
Religious thought tries to appropriate all this for itself; it seeks to stamp the freshly
discovered world with its own categories, to spiritualize it and incorporate it within a
scheme of other-worldly value . . . But in shaping a semblance of the real world about
a religious theme of the utmost mysteriousness, like the Incarnation, the objects of the
setting become significant of the unacknowledged physical realities that the religion
aims to transcend . . . In accepting the realistic vision of nature, religious art runs the
risk of receding to a marginal position, of becoming in turn the border element that
secular reality had been . . . a secret language in the small objects.17
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Meyer Schapiro
The language of the small objects also belongs to verbal expressions, bourgeois expressions of
sexuality and purity that echo back and forth through the triptych, expressions that have now
been gathered by Rose Bidler in her Dictionnaire érotique.18 In the following reading of the trip-
tych, common sexual allusions are in italics. On the left-hand panel, in the mundane world, the
young clean-faced patron wears a virile dague à couillettes, his wife clutches a string of coral beads
which promises to protect infants, a horse and rider (chevaucher) is seen through the open door in the
garden wall, a terrestrial foppish town messenger, perhaps Bel Accueil, announces the couple’s
arrival, and a flowering rosebush (Roman de la Rose) peaks out behind the door to the house.
The angel Gabriel passes through a door that has been locked with a key from the inside! But the
door is visible only in the left-hand panel. The Virgin in her piety sits humbly on the footrest
of the bench, reading the Bible. A liturgical book with frequent rubrics and a prayer roll are on
the table. The Christ Child passes through a closed windowpane on rays of light, while on the
back wall the open windows give only onto the sky and celestial clouds. The chimney is cold, not
in use. The candle on the male side of the chimney has been removed. The flame of the candle on
the table has been extinguished. The basin and towel symbolize purification, much like the lily
in the maiolica pitcher. On the right-hand panel, the windows of the narrow rustic workshop
give onto a cityscape, where couples walk toward the church, protected from the devil by the
mousetrap set on a shelf outside the window of the atelier; the battens for the windows, like the
door to the house, are full of nails (newly driven nails on the door, rusty old nails on the battens),
evoking the expression river le clou, but there are virtually no nails in the immaculate central panel;
the scattered nails on Joseph’s table evoke “compter les cloux,” to wait patiently; a trimming ax
stamped with the three circles of the “scutum fidei,” a saw stamped with a cross, and a wooden
rod at the feet of Joseph ask, “do we rise up against or glorify ourselves over him who uses us” –
in other words, these are the tools of Joseph the carpenter or even perhaps the tools of God;19
and the aged, bearded, and chaste Joseph now only bores holes with a vilebrequin in a wooden
board to make bait-traps for the devil. The characterization of each of the panels is simple, easily
readable, hierarchical, colloquial, and intimate.20
Another short article on the Joseph scenes on the episcopal chair of Maximianus in Ravenna
distils the architectural beauty of Schapiro’s woven thought and his search for universals in the
particular.21 The details of the iconography seem nearly absent in the article; neither the number
of scenes, nor their content, nor their placement on the throne is mentioned. Basic knowledge
about the chair is assumed for anyone who would want to read the article. What interests him
is why such an extensive cycle occurs on a sixth-century archbishop’s throne. He hones in on
the texts closest to the context: the Ravennate tituli of Helpidius Rusticus (early sixth century)
and sermons of the Ravennate bishop Peter Chrysologus (fifth century) which liken Joseph to
Christ; the sermons of the Milanese bishop Ambrose who likens Joseph to a bishop; the laws of
Justinian which assigned important civic duties to the bishop. He then sketches the religious and
secular activities of Maximianus. At last he arrives at the layered meaning of the crown worn
by Joseph, the modius or modiolus, which is not only a bushel crown worn by personifications
of Greek cities, insuring fertility and good fortune, but also a crown of the Byzantine emperor.
Binding together the iconography, texts, and context, the article closes with a very elegant and
concise philosophical description of analogical interpretation, as it existed in the Christian world
before the advent of realism:
Since formal and final causes, to use Aristotelian language, were the chief ones, and
the material and efficient causes were more and more neglected, analogy and purpose
became the key concepts in explaining the world. A similarity of form, even a purely
verbal one in the names of things, was already a bond between things. Necessity was
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manifested in the formal resemblances of persons, objects, and events. These equiva-
lences, which are the ground of symbolism, are not self-evident, given directly to the
eye or the mind, but, like poetic symbols, are discovered through directing concepts
and requirements which change with the human situation. The discovered analogies in
turn serve a hidden purpose of the divine being. Every event or stage is an announce-
ment and a preparation of the subsequent stage. Just as the plant is latent in the seed,
so Christ’s life is latent in Joseph’s, and the secular authority of the bishop is already
intended in Joseph’s career. Symbolism thus includes purpose as well as analogy; the
universe – nature and history – is saturated with Christian finality, everything points
beyond itself to a formal system evident in the analogical structure of things, due to a
divine intention working itself out in time. The predominance of analogy and purpose-
fulness in much of mediaeval thinking is a primitive trait which we find among savage
peoples and also in children and psychotics. But the mediaeval practice differs from the
primitive in one important respect. The Middle Ages inherited the Greek and Roman
rationality, deductive spirit and encyclopedism, the search for completeness and order
of knowledge and applied these to the religious sphere with concepts largely restricted
to the formal and teleological. Hence the play of analogy in Christian thought, while
seemingly poetic and unconstrained, has a systematic, constructive character.22
The search for visual elements with which to create a logical argument for dating and
placing was one of Schapiro’s constant preoccupations, and his imagination was ignited by the
discovery of the frescoes at Castelseprio in 1944. His writings on the frescoes are threefold and
include a short book review of the monograph by G. P. Bognetti and A. de Capitani d’Arzago
(1950), a long review of K. Weitzmann’s monograph (1952), and a note in response to an article
written by A. Grabar (1957).23 For Schapiro, the frescoes presented the problem of dating a
work that comes to light in an artistic vacuum, a period in which sufficient quantities of com-
parative material have not survived. Were the frescoes seventh-century, as the Italians argued, or
tenth-century and painted by an artist from Constantinople in the middle Byzantine period, as
Kurt Weitzmann argued? Schapiro takes up Weitzmann’s arguments on style and iconography
one by one, examining details of figures, motifs, arrangement, costume, and gesture over the
whole range of time, from late antiquity to the tenth century and throughout the Mediter-
ranean regions, constantly asking whether the artist is Greek or Lombard, if his brushstroke,
command of perspective, and rendering of architecture, light, and shade are in continuity with
the late antique past, or part of a Byzantine Renaissance reprise, as in such works as the Joshua
Roll and Paris Psalter. He brings up and develops a wide spectrum of visual problems that
bear on his subject – for example, the coexistence of narrative and iconic modes, the nature
of copying and its effect on the resulting art, the origins of the art of the Carolingian period,
how these northern artists were trained and by whom, and what models they were using. He
points out the essential weaknesses of Weitzmann’s study: an oriented view and the omission
of comparisons stemming from an earlier period that are uncomfortable to the argument.
Schapiro canvases this earlier period as thoroughly as possible, including both extant works of
art and ancient verbal descriptions and drawings of lost works. While some details in the cycle
at Castelseprio are isolated, such as the Parthian crowns of the magi, for which Schapiro can
find only third-century comparisons, he otherwise marshals a number of highly pertinent sev-
enth-, eighth-, and ninth-century comparisons, placing Castelseprio in a position of precursor
to the Carolingian Renaissance. In his search for datable details, he finally draws attention to
two motifs that occur only from the eighth century onward, the cross-nimbus with linear nail-
head light rays and the clavis on the thigh. In the end, Schapiro’s meticulous approach and late
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eighth-century dating – between the two temporal extremes – have been twice vindicated: first
by the discovery of a sinopia for the Flight into Egypt in the mid-eighth-century church of San
Salvatore in Brescia, and second by recent radiocarbon dating of the timbers (778–952) and
thermoluminescent dating of the roof tiles (c. 826) of Castelseprio.
The article published in 1960 on manuscript Glazier 25, a Psalter that had recently been
acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library,24 is one of the few archaeological studies where
Schapiro ventures into the thirteenth century. He recognizes and announces from the outset that
the pictures preceding the Psalter are “interesting for their political meaning.” There follows a
trenchant description of the iconography: first he names each of the scenes, then compares the
cycle with the Amesbury Psalter and Westminster Psalter, notes the singularity of the initials,
characterizes the powerful binary pairing of the six facing scenes of the cycle as “episode” ver-
sus “scene of majesty,” and at last comes to bear on the scenes of David, where an unexpected
compositional comparison is drawn between the scene of Saul in bed and David playing the
harp and the Benedictional of Ethelwold. He notes the quiet composure of the demented Saul,
the unparalleled iconography of Saul in bed (repeated in the Beatus initial, where Saul is not
crowned), illustrating I Sam. 16, 23 rather than the traditional verses of violence in Chapters 18
and 19. Schapiro then summarizes the importance of anointing in the English coronation ordo,
its frequent representation in images, its absence in the Glazier Psalter, and the assertive posture
of the king’s crossed legs. He explains how, early in the reign of Henry III (1216–1272), Innocent
III “affirmed the dissimilarity of the anointed king to the anointed Christ” and the primacy of
the Church, noting also that Saint Peter and Saint Silvester (the first popes) both receive double
invocations in the litany. He also notes the close resemblance between the miniatures of Christ in
Majesty in the Glazier and Westminster Psalters. Finally, stylistic comparisons lead to a dating in
the 1220s. Every possible line of inquiry seems to have been explored, all data marshalled to the
cause. Except one! What has been overlooked is the fact that Henry III was crowned twice, first
at the age of nine at Gloucester in 1216 in the midst of the Barons’ War, and again with papal
permission at Westminster on May 17, 1220.25 There was a great and costly celebration, for the
second crowning was intended to reaffirm the authority of Henry, now thirteen years old. He
had recently been referred to as “not a king but a boy” and the regent Hubert de Burgh had been
unable to bring the barons to heel and replenish the exchequer. The day after the coronation, the
barons swore to renounce their title to royal castles at the king’s will and to pay their taxes. Within
this context, the miniatures of the David and Saul and the crowning of an assertive king take on
increased political meaning. With regard to the composition in the Benedictional of Ethelwold,
the scene is reversed. David is seated on the left side, the more sacred side of the picture, where
he is designated as Saul’s successor by the angel of the Lord, while Saul, attended by a woman
who lays her hands on his shoulders, is in bed on the right side, the more negative side. The artist
appears to be drawing a parallel between the Davidic episode and the gentle Henry III playing the
harp for his father, John, a king shown here in bed with a woman standing close and touching
him, a king who was known for his libertinism during his first marriage and for having often
stayed in bed until noon with his second wife, Isabelle d’Angoulême. The parallelism continues
on the facing page. David was twice anointed and Henry is twice crowned. The weight of the word
coronatus becomes even more layered than Schapiro has already demonstrated. The iconographic
elements in the initials at Psalms 38, 52, and 101 also take on significance when seen through the
eyes of the young king Henry: the fable of the stork and the fox at the head of a psalm begging
for wisdom in speech; monkeys frolicking in the initial of the psalm condemning fools who
renounce God and do iniquity; and finally three men exhorting God to hear their prayer, to raise
them up over their enemies, to free the oppressed and prisoners. Finally, the intriguing relation-
ship of the miniatures with the Benedictional of Ethelwold and the Westminster Psalter becomes
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clear when one realizes that Pierre de Roches, bishop of Winchester, was the tutor of Henry III
and may have made the Benedictional available to the artist, just as Guillaume de Humez, abbot
of Westminster, must have shown him the Psalter.26
The book Words, Script and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language appeared in 1996, the year
Schapiro died.27 The book’s relatively short essays, Schapiro’s Vier letzte Lieder, express in overarch-
ing volleys his understanding of the habits of representation and the complex lives of meaningful
signs in medieval art. As he reads each picture, he himself is an artist/reader looking for the artist/
reader of the picture. It is the artist/reader who conceives the image and first receives it. As each
picture has its own, often variable means and meaning, generalizations flee to the woods. With
the meticulousness of the medieval accessus, he parses the picture grammatically, rhetorically,
materially, for its intention, use, artifex (artist), finality, role, aspect, furnishings, and for its limits.
In the first part of the book, “Words and Pictures,” he is constantly posing voiced or implied
questions: what is the smallest number of elements necessary for an image to be identifiable; and
by extension, identifiable by whom and when and under what conditions; which elements are
provided by the text and which by the artist and why; why do images change over time in the
face of an unchanged text; how does the artist capture the literal sense by comparison to the
metaphorical or symbolic sense; what means of expression are available to the artist at a given
moment; which are unknown to him; which are spontaneous and which are learnt; what are
the modes and norms of the stylistic context and how do they affect the choice of elements and
their expressive force; what effect has naturalism on the rendering of typological or metaphorical
interpretations; are the preoccupations of the theologians the same as those of the artist; what
are the different possible readings, ancient and modern, of a complex symbolic ensemble? In the
second part, “Script in Pictures,” he brings up what the Renaissance viewed as the “invasive” role
of writing in pictures, showing how across history and into the art of our time words and speech
and their vehicles, whether in the air, on a roll, on a codex, or on other supports, create dramatic,
expressive, signifying relations through their orientation, legibility, and materiality. The core of
the chapter is a stroke of genius, a refreshed reading of a familiar stranger, the evangelist portrait
in the Gospels and its relation to the logos, the epicenter of the Christian religion. It prickles with
acute sensibility toward the different ways the medieval artist integrates into the miniature the
image of written words destined for the spectator.28
Schapiro was intrinsically fascinated by the gifted, original artist, how he creates, how he
reads, how he sees, what inspires him to choose an iconography and craft its form. The intricate
threading of Schapiro’s thought makes a pirouette in an interview he gave in 1994 at the age of
ninety.29 The last paragraph reads,
“I’m not an admirer of Warhol’s work,” Schapiro told me good-naturedly. “He was a
man who worked very much in the spirit of advertising.” Then, crossing realms with
his usual aplomb, he summed up Pop Art, if not civilization itself, in recondite terms.
“Do you know the work of the 18th-century British poet, Edward Young? He once
said that we’re born originals and die copies.”
The last sentence is a show-stopper. How did Schapiro know this eighteenth-century
poet-clergyman (1683–1765)? The most likely reason is that while preparing his dissertation, he
visited Angouleme to study the Romanesque façade of the cathedral. Here, he would also have
visited the museum and fallen upon its most arresting work, a somber and imposing nocturnal
painting, almost 8 feet high (238 × 192 cm), of Edward Young carrying a shovel and the spotlit
stiffened corpse of his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Temple, who, in 1736, died in Lyon on her way to
Nice (Fig. 11.2). She was refused burial in the Catholic cemetery because she was a Protestant,
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Figure 11.2 Edward Young carrying the corpse of his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Temple, by Pierre Antoine
Auguste Vafflard. Oil, 238 × 192 cm, c. 1804, Le Musée d’Angoulême. Image courtesy of Le Musée
d’Angoulême, Thiery Blas.
and Young had to bury her in the cemetery of the Swiss colony located in the Hôtel Dieu.30 It
is doubtful that the museum in Angouleme provided any information about the painter, Pierre
Antoine Auguste Vafflard. Vafflard exhibited the work in the salon of 1804, where he provided
a handbill with the explanation “Young tenant sa fille morte sur ses bras s’écrit dans sa douleur
amère: O zèle barbare et haï d’un dieu bienfaisant; ces hommes impitoyables ont refusé de
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répandre de la poussière sur une poussière.”31 The citation is from Young’s most famous poem,
Night Thoughts, which was translated by Pierre Letourneur in 1769 and became the rage of the
Romantic school in France, reprinted in fifty editions.
Returning to Columbia University and its library, Schapiro would have found the poem Night
Thoughts, the source of inspiration for Vafflard, as well as biographies of Young, and Martin Wil-
liam Steinke’s 1917 edition of Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of
Sir Charles Grandison, published in 1759.32 Conjectures, which is the source of Schapiro’s quotation,
is threaded with aphorisms about artistic genius: “Learning is borrowed knowledge, genius is
knowledge innate.” “Rules, like crutches, are a needful aid to the lame, although an impediment
to the strong.” “Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies? That meddling ape
imitation, as soon as we come to years of indiscretion (so let me speak), snatches the pen and blots
out nature’s mark of separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental individuality.”33
On the contrary, Meyer Schapiro was an original.
Notes
1 Meyer Schapiro gave all his papers to Columbia University. They are housed in the Rare Book Library
and a detailed inventory is available on the web.
2 The article entitled “Style” was reprinted in 1994 in the fourth volume of his collected works: The Theory
and Philosophy of Art; see note 4 ahead.
3 Meyer Schapiro’s work has been the subject of several colloquia, articles, books, and encyclopedia articles,
which can be found through JSTOR, Regesta Imperii, and Kubikat. Volume 45 of the periodical Social
Research, published in 1978, shortly after Schapiro’s full retirement, contains many highly perceptive
articles by eminent students and colleagues. Schapiro’s wife compiled his bibliography; see L. Milgrim,
Meyer Schapiro: The Bibliography (New York, 1995). Other works have appeared posthumously.
4 Romanesque Art (New York, 1977); Modern Art (New York, 1978); Late Antique, Early Christian and Medi-
eval Art (New York, 1979); The Theory and Philosophy of Art (New York, 1994); Worldview in Painting – Art
and Society (New York, 1999), all published by George Braziller.
5 Plummer, in Social Research, 45 (1978), 164–75, and Forsyth “Narrative at Moissac: Schapiro’s Legacy,”
Gesta, 41, 2002, 71–93; “Word Play in the Cloister at Moissac,” in Romanesque Art and Thought in the
Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2008), 154–78.
6 J. Williams, “Meyer Schapiro in Silos: Pursuing an Iconography of Style,” The Art Bulletin, 85 (2003),
442–68. See also O.K. Werckmeister, review of Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Art, in Art Quarterly, n.s. 2
(1979), 211–18.
7 Williams (as in note 6), 464, and Schapiro, The Parma Ildefonsus: A Romanesque Illuminated Manuscript
from Cluny and Related Works (New York, 1964), 3, note 5. In the introduction to his collected volume
Romanesque Art (as in note 4) Schapiro appears conscious but unrepentant of his errors: “I’m aware
of many imperfections, inconsistencies, and unclear formulations in those papers, but to correct them
would require more rewriting than I can undertake now”; ix.
8 Williams (as in note 6), 452, and note 119.
9 W. Cahn, review of Parma Ildefonsus, Art Bulletin, 50 (1967), 72–75, esp. 75; the review is also noted by
Williams (as in note 6), 468, note 176,
10 Carl Nordenfalk, who was the first to discuss the concurring styles in the Parma Ildefonsus, identified the
German artist as Albertus of Trier, a scribe illuminator recorded in documents at Cluny: C. Nordenfalk,
“Miniature ottonienne et ateliers capétiens,” Art de France, IV (1964), 44–59.
11 Schapiro, Late Antique and Early Christian (as in note 4), 150–95.
12 “The Ruthwell Cross,” JWCI, 7, 1943, 1–19. Fritz Saxl quotes a helpful letter from Schapiro in note 4, and
their correspondence, 1940–1946, can be found in the Meyer Schapiro collection, Columbia University,
Series II, box 165, folder 4.
13 Schapiro (as in note 12), 164.
14 The essay was reprinted as the lead article in the first volume of his selected papers: Romanesque Art (as
in note 4).
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15 “Muscipula Diaboli, The Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece,” in Late Antique, Early Christian and
Mediaeval Art (as in note 4), 1–11. Johan Huizinga had identified the mousetrap as a trap for the devil
and cited Peter Lombard’s Sentences in the 1935 Dutch edition of his book, The Waning of the Middle
Ages; see E. Peters and W. Simons, “The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages,” Speculum, v. 74
(1999), 616.
16 See C. Minott, “The Theme of the Merode Tryptych,” Art Bulletin 51 (1969), 267–71. This work has
been reproduced on countless occasions and is widely available online, as for example on the website
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/
search/470304.
17 Schapiro, Muscipula Diaboli (as in note 15), 9–10.
18 R. Bidler, Dictionnaire érotique, ancien français, moyen français, renaissance (Montréal, 2002). See also G. di
Stefano, Dictionnaire des locutions en moyen français (Montréal, 1991).
19 The patron of the altarpiece, Peter Ymbrechts, married a woman named Schrijnmakere or “cabinet
maker” between 1425 and 1428.
20 For a similar example of layered reading, in this case a pictorial love story, first published in Art de l’en-
luminure, n° 5, in 2003 that turns out to be that of a prostitute, based on the poems of François Villon,
see Das Buch der Liebenden: Histoire d’amour sans paroles. Ms. 388 du Musée Condé à Chantilly, commentary
by P. Stirnemann and M. Zink to the facsimile (Simbach am Inn, 2005), 11–34 and 47–67.
21 “The Joseph scenes on the Maximianus throne in Ravenna” (1952), in Late Antique, Early Christian and
Mediaeval Art, New York (as in note 4), 34–47.
22 Schapiro, “The Joseph Scenes on the Maximianus Throne in Ravenna” (as in note 21), 42–43.
23 A current website for Castelseprio lists over 550 articles and books that have appeared.
24 “An Illuminated English Psalter of the Early Thirteenth Century” (1960) in Late Antique (as in note 4),
329–54. This is G. 25 and like the Merode Altarpiece, it too has been widely reproduced and images are
available online; see the Morgan Library online catalogue at http://corsair.themorgan.org.
25 D. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (Los Angeles, 1990), 187 passim.
26 Benedictional of Aethelwold, London, BL, Add. 49598; Westminster Psalter, London, BL, Royal 2. A.
XXII.
27 The first part of the book was initially published in M. Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and
Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague, 1973).
28 This paragraph is taken in part from my review of the French edition (Macula) in the Bulletin du biblio-
phile (2002), n° 2, 373–76.
29 D. Solomon, “A Critic Turns 90: Meyer Schapiro,” The New York Times Magazine, August 14 (1994),
22–25.
30 Young paid 729 livres and 12 sols for the burial. A. Péricaud, Notes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de
Lyon, sous le règne de Henri III, 1574–1589, vol. I (Lyon, 1843), 64, note 1.
31 “For oh! the cursed ungodliness of zeal! While sinful flesh relented, spirit nursed/In blind infallibility’s
embrace,/The sainted spirit petrified the breast;/Denied the charity of dust, to spread/O’er dust!”
(ll. 165–69).
32 Samuel Richardson is the author of the epistolary novel Sir Charles Grandison, 1753. The Steinke (1886–
1971) edition is the elegant, incisive, and highly synthetic doctoral thesis (1914, University of Illinois); it
traces the English sources and German precedents and reception of Conjectures, and judges the work to
be conventional, elevated in style, if somewhat inflated, and not as original as the author claims.
33 Edith J. Morely, Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, London, 1918, p. 14, 17, 20
(available on-line at https://archive.org/details/cu31924013204155).
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12
MICHAEL CAMILLE’S QUEER
MIDDLE AGES
Matthew M. Reeve
Introduction
Michael Camille (1958–2002) is the most recent iconographer covered in this volume (Plate 1).
Born in Keighley, Yorkshire (England), in 1958, his undergraduate and postgraduate training
was undertaken at the University of Cambridge, and he spent the entirety of his subsequent
academic career at the University of Chicago.1 Considered the “enfant terrible”2 of medievalist
art history, his published work amounts to one of the most powerful and sustained critiques of
traditional iconography published during the later twentieth century. His early work in particu-
lar, stretching between the mid 1980s through the mid 1990s, was focused to a large extent on
the problematics of iconography itself. In a celebrated series of essays and monographs, Camille
sought to dismantle the authority of iconography as an interpretative strategy that had dominated
medievalist art history since the nineteenth century. His first book, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and
Image-Making in Medieval Art (1989), directly paraphrased and challenged Émile Mâle’s classic
account of French high Gothic iconography, The Gothic Image (1899); his 1992 Image on the Edge:
The Margins of Medieval Art offered a social and cultural revision of the boundaries of medieval
art – particularly the borders of the manuscript page and the carvings on the edges of buildings –
which for Camille served as metaphors for the margins of medieval life; a range of early essays,
including his “Mouths and Meanings: Toward and Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art” (1993),
takes on Erwin Panofsky’s iconographical work by exposing how certain works of medieval
art short-circuit iconography as a mode of reading, thereby demanding different interpretative
strategies for images that cannot be readily “decoded” by a Patristic text. Camille’s later work
developed many of these interpretative strategies and employed them to explore and destabilize
a range of key monuments, from the English Luttrell Psalter to the French Très Riches Heures of
the Duc de Berry. Camille also published on Renaissance art, nineteenth- and twentieth-century
art, and critical theory, and appeared in the media, including on NPR’s This American Life, where
he, opposite Ira Glass, narrated the American medievalism of a mock dinner-tournament at
Medieval Times, near Chicago.3
Like most of the figures covered in this volume, Camille’s work as an iconographer can-
not easily be disentangled from his appraisal and promotion of the Middle Ages generally.
Understood by many as an early proponent of the so-called New Art History in medieval
art history, Camille substantially overturned an established vision for the Middle Ages in art
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Michael Camille’s Queer Middle Ages
Plate 1 Michael Camille. Image courtesy of Stuart Michaels.
history and beyond. For W.J.T. Mitchell, the Middle Ages prior to Camille’s interventions
seemed “hopelessly orthodox and stuffy, dominated by religious dogma and the archaic
conventions of aristocratic romances . . . unbearably pious and obsessed with higher, more
spiritual things than we modern, secular humanists could bear to contemplate.”4 Camille’s
work reflected a self-conscious denial of the Platonic-scholastic vision of the Middle Ages
embodied in Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, of the overtly theological and
liturgical image of the Gothic cathedral as a “mirror” of the medieval world advocated by
Émile Mâle, and of the nationalistic and nostalgic “Merrie Old England” vision of the Mid-
dle Ages embodied in the work of his English predecessors John Harvey, Nickolaus Pevsner,
John Betjman, and others.5 Camille explored what for many was a far more secular and
pluralistic Middle Ages consistent with the ethical and moral sensibilities of “the literate
Left” in England and North America.
Every period creates the Middle Ages it needs and deserves, and Camille’s Middle Ages
was politically dissenting and antihegemonic, spiritually conflicted, physically and sexually
plural, violent, and aesthetically glamorous. Grounded in recent poststructuralist theory and
particularly Marxist and socialist critique, Camille’s subject was alterity (or the “marginal”)
during the Middle Ages in its many forms. As such, his work explored aspects of medieval
art that had been largely ignored or minimized by previous interpreters and by their icono-
graphic methods. He understood that consistently looking at the center rather than the
margins signified an implicit agreement with hegemonic practices of making images in the
Middle Ages and interpreting them within the terms established by religious and academic
orthodoxy. His study of manuscript margins exposed iconography that denied the heter-
onormative canon of medievalist iconography by being bawdy, and occasionally homoerotic
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Matthew M. Reeve
and or scatological in nature; or he applied new theoretical models borrowed from sociol-
ogy and queer theory to explore canonical works (the Très Riches Heures, Bourges Cathe-
dral) and exposed the social and sexual structures that informed them. Camille’s work
offered a vision of the Middle Ages that was queer in its fullest theoretical sense: to para-
phrase David Halperin, it was “at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant,” and
it functioned in Cheryl Smith’s terms as “A strategy, an attitude . . . a radical questioning
of social and cultural norms.”6
Before turning to explore Camille’s life and work in greater depth, it is worth pausing for a
moment to consider his legacy. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in
the 1990s and a graduate student at Cambridge (until 2002), Michael Camille dominated my
thought as a young person struggling to become a medievalist. His presence was still felt at Cam-
bridge, both in the institutional memory of the department and in the physical signs Camille left
behind (i.e., the many marginal doodles in books in the university library that I chanced upon
as I read the same volumes decades later). Like many of my generation, I came to consider him
to be a major influence upon my work, one of my own intellectual household gods. He offered
a voice from the margins capable of being understood and embraced by a range of alternate
modern subjectivities at the time, whether sexual, religious, ethnic, or otherwise, that also felt
disenfranchised by the social and intellectual apparatus of medievalist art history and wanted to
shatter the glass through which we gazed upon the period. And yet, unlike many of my friends
trained contemporaneously in North America, I never met him. Camille’s untimely death in
2002 meant that my own association with him remained an imagined one. Assessing his legacy
as a medievalist and iconographer is done principally on the basis of his writings. Although con-
ference sessions have been held in his honor, they remain unpublished.7 His personal papers at
the University of Chicago are not fully catalogued and have not been carefully studied.8 Unlike
some other iconographers included here, we are still living through a period in which Camille’s
writings and influence are shaping our discipline. Camille’s life and work are worthy of a more
extended account than can be offered here; I can only hope that the present essay offers some
directions for further research.
Origins
Michael Camille was born in West Yorkshire to working-class parents. His father was from the
Seychelles and of mixed race and his mother was Irish. Unconventional in its very makeup, the
Camille family was radically and esoterically left-wing: Labour supporters, enthusiastic nudists,
and antimonarchists (Michael’s father apparently threw his shoes at the television when “the
Royals” appeared). As children, Michael and his sister, Michelle, were raised part-time by their
grandparents as their parents struggled to support them. Superficially at least, there is little in
Camille’s early life that led him to either medieval studies specifically or to academia generally.
His father was apparently illiterate and the household on the council estate that he grew up in
was devoid of books. Camille was the first child from his grammar school (Oakbank School in
Keighley, Yorkshire) to “make it” to Oxbridge (the social significance of this transgression of
class boundaries will still be more keenly understood by British rather than North American
readers). He began by reading English in Part I of his undergraduate degree, which introduced
him to a range of literary and social theorists that he would grapple with through his career,
including Norman Bryson. In Part II he read history of art under George Henderson and Jean-
Michel Massing, and continued to his graduate studies alongside Paul Binski and Philip Lindley,
two figures who would be leading medievalists. In putting Camille’s writings into context, I
want to focus on two features from his early life and university education that emerge as key
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influences on his later formation as a scholar and writer: his sexual subjectivity and his political
orientations.
As Madeline Caviness put it, Camille was always “out,” although little attention has been
paid to his sexual and social development and to the specific ways these may have oriented his
research.9 Until pubescence, Camille’s sexual identity was transsexual, a word he certainly neither
knew nor used in the period. One of his earliest creative experiments with sexual images was
the result of his discovery of his father’s collection of glossy soft-core pornographic magazines
(which may well have been given to him by his father). With a male friend with whom Camille
had a romantic friendship, he dissected and eviscerated them (two words he would often use in
his scholarship) and re-formed them into “The Nipple Erection Joke Books” (complete with
annotations), which he kept until the end of his life. While there is much that seems like silly,
schoolboy foolery in this, here, surely, is an early example of an approach to the hegemonic
authority of the image (in this case heterosexually oriented male pornography and the encoded
relationship with a seemingly dominant male gaze). The literal fragmentation of the text, of the
power structure, and of the text as power structure, and the exposure of its underlying ideological
conditions (and those excluded by them) suggest a nascent approach to images that would remain
with Camille and would color his approach to the medieval image.
As Camille described it in 1994, his early imagistic sexuality was formed principally from
the images in the books he signed out of his local library. Each Saturday he could sign out up to
six “large glossy art books” – monographs on Michelangelo and studies of St. Sebastian – which
“allowed him to escape into a private world.” The context of this quotation is undoubtedly
Camille’s most confessional account of his own sexual-aesthetic position, which did not appear
in his writings on medieval art, but in “The Abject Gaze and the Homosexual Body: Flandrin’s
Figure d’Etude,” published in Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (1994). Camille notes in
particular Brandt Aymar’s The Young Male Figure in Paintings, Sculptures, and Drawings from Ancient
Egypt to the Present, in which he could “check out” Flandrin’s nude, among other naked classiciz-
ing bodies. Writing years later, Camille would lament,
I am struck by the irony of presenting naked bodies veiled by “art” – and by the fore-
word, in which the author states that he has excluded discussion of the church art of
the Middle Ages because then the figures were “so full draped and grotesquely figured
that they lost their esthetic appeal.” My eventually becoming a specialist in medieval art
might well have involved an unconscious rejection of those countless longed-for but
unattainable neo-classical “art-book” bodies.10
Camille was clear that publishing this piece – far outside the bounds of medieval studies – was
deeply meaningful to him because it signified a reattachment of his sexual subjectivity to his
aesthetic subjectivity.11 Camille suggests that his own aesthetic orientation toward medieval art
grew out of a process of de-identification with antique-derived forms: “a process that constitutes
the subject by partly detaching her or him from normative ideals, even manifestly homoerotic
or homosexual ones and however deeply rooted in her or his own psychic topography and
trajectory.”12 Thus understood, Camille’s appraisal of the Middle Ages, the shifting of his erotic
identifications from the visual cultures of the antique world to those of the Middle Ages, grew
from an increasingly ambivalent view of the ideality of the male form in the antique tradition.
For Camille, these images had become de-eroticized (intellectually, if not viscerally so) because,
via their many replications (enumerated by Camille in his essay), they had become little more
than a “consumer fetish,” a signifier that signified a detached and commodified queerness rather
than an actual sexual body or act.
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But this would seem to tell only half of the story. Insofar as sexual-aesthetic self-identification
is concerned, the antique tradition of bodily representation – and its Renaissance iteration that
Camille would become deeply engaged with at Cambridge through the teachings of Jean-
Michel Massing and Paul Joannides – was too sanitized, too mimetically real, too canonically
rooted (and therefore too safely enmeshed in the discourses that frequently denied its erotic
potential) to allow him to explore the “kinkier” side of human sexuality via his art historical
research.13 Particularly in the margins of medieval books and buildings, Camille looked for and
found sodomy, scatology, intergenerational sexuality, bestiality, and an approach to representation
that was prefiguratively “camp.”14 Camille’s conception of the Middle Ages as “queer” may be
understood to follow a tradition of English medievalism established by homoerotically inclined
writers and collectors, such as Horace Walpole (1717–97), and continued by William Beckford
and others, including Thomas Wright (a fellow historian of sexuality and of the grotesque) (d.
1877);15 like Camille, these authors explored or projected sexual fantasy into a distant, medi-
eval past, a displacement of the erotic imagination from a perceived conservative present to
an imagined Middle Ages of erotic and libidinal possibility.16 An inveterate collector of ephemera
on the Middle Ages, Camille’s collection of nightclub advertisements and postcards indicates that
he reveled ironically in modernity’s employment of the Middle Ages as a locus for alternate sex-
ualities (Fig. 12.1). Camille’s work may be understood as an extension of a sexual-aesthetic tradition
in medieval studies in which queer scholars found their sexual, moral, and ethical subjectivity to
be “normalized” within a chaotic and “queer” Middle Ages. Unsurprisingly, he was deeply inter-
ested in the medievalist productions of both Horace Walpole and William Beckford, and his notes
indicate that he explored genealogies of queer proponents and collectors of medieval art, from the
Figure 12.1 Club advertisements. The Michael Camille Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago
Box 14, “Picturesque Gothic” file. Image courtesy of Matthew Reeve.
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Duke de Berry to Walpole, Beckford, and beyond.17 What is arguably significant about this is
that, in contrast to a tradition of modern art historical writing, Camille did not seek to consist-
ently cleave his aesthetic judgment from his own erotic, emotive, and ethical judgment. On the
contrary, Camille’s appraisal of the Middle Ages and the medieval object/image were framed by
conscious and unconscious preoccupations in the present.
Camille’s interest in the marginal and queer is one strand – albeit a deeply subjective one of
a broadly socialist agenda within much of his work. Although he appears to have been nonpar-
tisan politically and had little interest in the actualities of contemporary party politics, Camille’s
writing and research nevertheless reflect “a commitment to progressive social agendas concern-
ing class and race.”18 As a student in the 1970s and 1980s, Camille was uniquely positioned to
absorb the new socialist and Marxist art history being written at King’s College by John Barrell
(The Dark Side of the Landscape, 1980), by T. J. Clark, of whom more will be said below, and by
theorists of literature, such as Frederick Jameson, whose The Political Unconscious (1981) is cited
on the opening page of The Gothic Idol. It is significant that Camille absorbed some of these
ideas while a student at Peterhouse – famously the most conservative of Cambridge colleges –
during the height of its Thatcherite hegemony, something which exacerbated the class dynamic
in his later work.19 Emblematic of this is Camille’s approach to the marginal imagery of the
fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter:
I cannot see the margins of the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter as celebrations of

country life and artistic freedom, but think of them rather as signs of feudal slavery and
social control that dominated those who ploughed the page as well as the fields . . .
the aesthetic . . . is to my mind, as tyrannous and tainted as any hegemonic practice.20
Overturning a long tradition that considered these images to be “charming” representations of

a bucolic rural life (reread through the lens of nostalgic medievalism in the Anglia Perdita tradi-
tion), for Camille they become active tools in the ideology of feudalism, beautiful signs of social
repression.
Yet here, as in much of Camille’s work, his socialist agenda lacks notation, or a specific
theoretical source. While manifestly informed by the neo-Marxist theory of his period, his
work was never consistently tethered to a particular theoretical source or stream. Yet it would
be a mistake – and a typically scholastic one – to locate and look for Camille’s socialist agenda
strictly in his bibliography. Typical of authors of his period, Camille’s own socialist leanings were
informed as much by elite culture as by popular culture. As we have seen, his university years
coincided with the height of Thatcherite Britain (Falklands War, 1982; miners’ strike, 1985);
these years produced a significant wave of protest in art and popular music expressed by the
punk and postpunk movements. Unsurprisingly, Camille was a fan of much of this music, and
particularly the Smiths (1982–1988), who were vigorous and eloquent opponents of Thatcher.
In the Smiths’ front man Morrissey, Camille found not only a remarkably articulate and beau-
tiful man but also a queer, Northern, working-class hero whose music raged against the New
Right of Margaret Thatcher and polite, middle-class monarchism (often elided in Morrissey’s
commentary as “Thatcher and the royals”).21 These countercultural statements, while socialist
in orientation if not in word, embody a particular brand of “soft socialism” that was at least as
influential on Camille as were discourses from elite culture. If Camille’s socialist leanings were
first formed in England, they were mostly expressed from America, a culture he initially claimed
to be devoid of class politics. Although he would rightly retract this statement as he spent further
time exploring American culture, his own recontextualization in America created the context
for his most influential writings.
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Camille’s writings
It is impossible to do justice to the breadth and extent of Camille’s contributions to medieval
iconography, but it is possible to give some sense of their scope and their broader social and
methodological agendas. Situating Camille’s work within medievalist art history, or art history
more broadly, has been a challenge for commentators and critics. The speakers in the 2010
sessions at the College Art Association devoted to Camille’s work struggled to situate his work
within the contours of art historical scholarship in the last quarter of the twentieth century. All
agreed that, however “theoretical” Camille’s work may have been, it was essentially “without
explicit theoretical warrants for [its] theoretical frameworks and goals.”22 Camille worked as an
intellectual magpie, selecting theories and concepts that suited particular situations, and did not
consistently adhere to a coherent tradition of analysis (or in Whitney Davis’s view, “he actually
wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool pansemiotician, narratologist or ‘calligramatologist’”).23 His “distrust
of theory” may well have its roots in his British training and its empiricist roots in which theory
is frequently considered to “embellish” or “decorate” textual analysis, or is considered a foreign
perversion (i.e., “imported” German philosophy or French poststructuralism). In other words, the
“No theory please, we’re English” approach, in which specific theoretical streams or objectives
(particularly when they become professional identities) are obfuscated or denied in intellectual
discourse in favor of an assimilation to accepted discursive modes in British academic life, may
well have inflected his writings.24
Camille’s approach to iconography in particular was also neither consistent nor systematic.
Although iconography as a practice was central to much of his work, it actually served as a
jumping-off point, leading to new questions and approaches. Emblematic of this is his 1991
essay “Gothic Signs and the Surplus: The Kiss on the Cathedral” (which introduced the notion
of “intervisuality” to medievalist art history), in which he opens with the image of two figures
embracing and kissing (Luxuria) on the west front of Amiens (Fig. 12.2).25 After evoking Émile
Mâle, Camille seeks to relocate the image from an iconographical trajectory to a sexual trajectory:
“When placed within the history of desire rather than the history of iconography, the Luxuria
image emerges as more than a literal depiction of unlawful sexual relations outside marriage. In
its lack of transcendent signifiers, it is a radically new type of representation precisely because
this opens it up to a plurality of indeterminate associations,” a “surplus” of meanings apparently
undetectable by iconography. Here as elsewhere, Camille wrote as a wordsmith and his own rhe-
torical structures are worthy of consideration as they inform his overall approach. Atypical of
his generation, Camille wrote broadly and often playfully, and not all of his work was intended
to be read as empirical academic prose. Employing what has been called his “strategy of inver-
sion,”26 Camille set up a series of imagined contrasts in his writings between apparently polarized
camps and positions in medievalist art history and/or in medieval culture: the “Old” and “New”
Art History (a concept which seems to hold less water in our more historiographically aware
present); medieval and modern – two polarities he would aim to dissolve, especially in his late
writings; iconography and anti-iconography, center and margin, image and anti-image, and so on.
Based not in the language of medievalist art history per se but rather in current poststructuralist
criticism, these strategies were brilliantly successful in his writings, serving to expose material and
methodological blind spots between two carefully articulated extremes.
Camille’s first major study of medieval iconography was his 1989 study The Gothic Idol: Ide-
ology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge University Press). Taking as its subject the
theme of idol worship in later medieval art, he showed that images of idolatry represented “the
other” to the dominant Christian hegemony of medieval Europe: pagans, Muslims, Jews, her-
etics, and homosexuals. Within Camille’s argument about later medieval idolatry was a paradox
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Figure 12.2 Luxuria, Amiens West Front. Image courtesy of the Courtauld Institute of Art, James Austin
Collection.
he readily acknowledged: that it coincided with the explosion of image making in the twelfth
and especially thirteenth centuries, in which the cult statue or image and its miracle-working
properties became commonplace. Pagan idols are imagined as being similar to yet distinct from
the Christian cult image/statue, forming a rhetoric of anti-images that served as weapons against
the non-Christian other. This paradox in fact formed the structure of his book, with Part I
focusing on Christian attitudes toward the idols of non-Christian others, and Part 2 exploring
the idols within Christianity. Extraordinary in its scope and dazzling in its range of references,
The Gothic Idol terminates with a prospective look at the Renaissance transformation of the
idol, and the apparent shift of meaning of ancient art from idolatrous to artful in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. Donatello’s bronze David (1430s) is the Gothic idol’s “most distin-
guished offspring”: witnessing the revival of the pagan pedestal statue, but for overtly Christian
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ends (unlike the attached Gothic niche statue), Camille’s David is a Christian nude, albeit one
that does not “stand innocent” of pagan implications. David’s power as a work of art – as an idol –
lies in its complex positioning between artistic categories: civic statue or idol, heroic Christian
nude (typologically understood as David as Rex Christus) or youthful fetishist in high boots with
a feather tickling his inner thigh. The end point of The Gothic Idol, David had the “power to
embody ideas in the body that had, for more than a millennium, been banished to the margins of
discourse.”27 As Camille noted in his unpublished introduction to the French edition of the text
(composed in the late 1990s), The Gothic Idol appeared contemporaneously with major texts that
likewise considered medieval “images” rather than medieval “art,” including David Freedberg’s
The Power of Images (1989), Jean Wirth’s L’image mediévalé: Naissance et Developpements, and a year
later, Hans Belting’s Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (1990).
Unlike these texts, Camille insisted on the status of medieval images as “social tools” to “define
‘us’ against ‘them,’ stemming from the Christian definition of proper images against the idols
of a defunct paganism.”28
As noted, Camille sets up Émile Mâle’s classic study The Gothic Image as his own intellectual
and methodological other, a kind of subjective positioning against prior authorities. At the center
of Mâle’s work was an aesthetically beautiful analogy: the Gothic cathedral of the thirteenth
century, with its stained-glass programs and sculpted facades, was a mirror of medieval scholastic
thought as represented in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Maius. Mâle posited a literal and indis-
soluble correspondence of text and image in which the art of the cathedrals was (inevitably) a
plastic manifestation of its textual sources. Ordered and guided by a male authority, the art of the
cathedral will “find its place and the harmony of the whole will appear.”29 Taking Mâle literally
almost a century after his text was written (a convenient sleight of hand), Camille thought he
“treated the cathedral as a coherent summa in stone, as it were, a form of writing.”30 Developed
from his early writings on the text-image relationships in medieval and Renaissance art (informed
by the teachings of Norman Bryson), Camille sought to expose “the neatly organized founda-
tions of Mâle’s cathedral [which] will reveal ambiguous gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictory
cracks in what he saw as a supremely codified whole.”31 For Camille and others of his generation
who were exploring relationships between texts (intertextuality) and the “texuality” of images
(images as texts), Mâle represented much that was deeply wrong about medievalist art history,
and his attempt to dismantle Mâle has as much to do with the demonstrable logical flaws in his
promotion of a mimetic relationship of text to image as it does with Camille’s own conception of
Mâle’s pious ecclesiology and the paternalism that informed it, carrying with it “the strong whiff
of incense and plainchant.”32 As more than one reviewer noted of the book, Camille uses Mâle as
a straw man, a convenient foil to his own very different enterprise. Neither a revision of Mâle’s
text exactly nor a comprehensive theory of the medieval image, The Gothic Idol was difficult for
reviewers to characterize, although Paul Binski’s review in the Burlington Magazine captures much
of the book’s spirit: “It is a polemic both for a more theorized approach to medieval art, less
obviously, for an essentially secularized vision of it.”33
Arguably, Camille’s most coherent statement of iconographic method was delivered in his
1990 essay “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art,” published
in Princeton’s Iconography at the Crossroads volume.34 Recounting “art history’s obsession with
written language” and its origins in philology, Camille here seeks to expose “the tyranny of the
philological method” in medievalist art history by questioning how meaning in images could be
discerned independently of a specific textual referent:
Medieval images, whether in books or on walls, were, like medieval texts, dynamically
delivered and performed aloud rather than absorbed in static isolation. The difficulty
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for the art historian becomes one of double translation – to explore in writing, ideas
that might have originated through writing like Holy Writ, but which were then
mediated outside or beyond it, in rituals, prayers, sermons, but most importantly of all
in images.35
Camille’s subject here is a work of art that would appear to resolutely avoid association with a
specific textual source: the Romanesque ex-situ trumeau at Souillac (Fig. 12.3). A rigidly ordered
composition of grappling, twisting, and writhing bodies of birds, beasts, and men in combat,
Figure 12.3 Trumeau, Souillac. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
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chiastically positioned upon the face of the trumeau, it seems to contain only one image readily
“decoded” by a textual source: Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22). Camille proposes a
reading that is based on sources “somatic rather than semantic” from within the monastic culture
of twelfth-century Souillac.36 Attempting to understand the possible meanings of the battling
figures within the context of “the spiritual life of the theologically trained monk,” Camille argues
that its “dominant” or “theological” meaning was an exegesis of a range of ideas pertaining to
spiritual struggle of good over evil – the allegory of the inner state of the monk – reflected most
obviously in the Psalms.37 Beyond the dominant meaning, the trumeau’s animal imagery “artic-
ulates wider cultural metaphors of animality linked to human appetite and embodiment” beyond
their purely theological sources. Camille’s “anti-iconography” allows for “the possibilities for
projecting new and different words on images” toward “the rereading of a work against its ‘offi-
cial’ ideological purpose which has to occur if works of art have any history at all.”38 Although
providing a rich account of possible textual sources for negotiating a viewer’s understanding of
the trumeau and the potential indeterminacy of its meaning, Camille comes closest to articulat-
ing the nontextual or supertextual nature of the trumeau in his closing sentence: “the Souillac
relief is more like a scream rent from a human body than words written outside it, words that
have made us ‘stone’ deaf, even when the stones themselves ‘cry out.’”39 Here as elsewhere in his
work, Camille provides a caricature of iconography, and in this case, the iconographic methods
of Erwin Panofsky. Camille’s “anti-iconography” is a brilliant intervention, although one that is
not anti-iconographical in the strictest sense but rather “supericonographical,” as Jérôme Baschet
has suggested.40 Although he does not make reference to it, Camille’s description of the Souil-
lac trumeau as a work of art that, intentionally perhaps, short-circuits iconography (or textual
analogues of any sort) as a guide to reading images, is grounded in earlier scholarship outside of
medieval art. Most influentially, perhaps, is T. J. Clark’s celebrated account of Manet’s Olympia
(surely known but not cited by Camille), a work that, as Clark shows, resisted interpretation
because it could not be readily located and rationalized within available textual discourses. In
this sense, the Souillac trumeau and Manet’s Olympia can deservedly be understood as “a stew of
half-digested significations.”41
Arguably Camille’s most controversial book was his 1992 study Image on the Edge: The Mar-
gins of Medieval Art, published in Reaktion’s Essays in Art and Culture series. In this study he
returned to territory most fully mapped by Lillian Randall in 1966.42 Focusing on a broad range
of “marginalia” not only in the borders of the illuminated page, as Randall had done, but also
on tapestries, ivory mirror cases, and the corbels and corners of medieval buildings, Camille
employed “the edge” to explore liminality in medieval culture, as many others did in the early
1990s.43 Positioning the edge opposite to the center allowed Camille to chart a strategy in
Romanesque and Gothic art in which the center of a thing, whether an illuminated page or the
sanctuary of a great church, represents the dominant views of the hegemony, while the margins
represent things or beings excluded or eradicated from official discourse. The book opens with
a theoretical chapter staking out the politicized “edges” of medieval art and culture and then
offers four short chapters (monastery, cathedral, court, city), each focused upon an individual
case study.
The margins offered territory to explore and articulate Camille’s own vision of the
Middle Ages, and Reaktion’s essay format allowed it to be largely untethered to the scholarly
apparatus of notion and citation. Emphasizing his own hybridity, he describes his approach
thus: “my heteroclite combination of methodologies, aping those of literary criticism, psy-
choanalysis, semiotics, and anthropology, as well as those of art history, is an attempt to make
my method as monstrous (which means deviating from the natural order) as its subject.”44
Camille’s subjects are chosen less as representatives of the ethical and aesthetic “edges” of
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medieval culture but rather of modernity: animals and animality, nudity and sexuality, scatol-
ogy, and so forth. Camille’s subchapter “Courtly Crap,” for example, discusses the scatological
borders of a book of hours in Trinity College, Cambridge (MS B 11.22, f. 73r) (Fig. 12.4) and
in the Romance of Alexander manuscript in Oxford, Bodleian (MS Bodl. 264, f. 56r), which
potentially recount a “lover’s shitty gift,” or a bequest of feces from a man to a woman.45
Camille was surely correct in suggesting that the sources for such imagery were not singu-
larly ecclesiastical (notably in exempla, a well-mined source for marginalia46), but were found
in a range of other “nonofficial” sources, including fabliaux. Citing the overtly scatological
Figure 12.4 Trinity College, Cambridge MS B 11.22, f. 73r. Image courtesy of Trinity College, Cambridge.
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c. 1200 fabliau Audigier, which, typical of its genre, inverted conventions from Romance lit-
erature, Camille glossed this imagery with reference to the fabliau’s tale of one-upmanship
in which Audigier “takes on as one of his opponents an incontinent old woman, who forces
him to eat three-and-a-half of her turds for breakfast, telling him ‘and then you will kiss my
cunt and the crack of my ass.’” Then turning to content that would fit equally within a com-
mentary on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Camille glosses the
notion of feces as a gift in the text: “in Audigier, the hero’s mother, Rainberge, brings Count
Turgibus ‘a fist full of shit, then takes some of her piss and showers him with it,’ while the
couple’s dowry consists of ‘quinze estrons de chien’”47 (“fifteen pieces of dog shit”).
Image on the Edge was a polarizing book in the 1990s. It deliberately avoided or subverted
the conventions of medievalist art history through its “contrarian stance” toward, or “ritual of
dissent” from, the language, philological, and bibliographical structure of the discipline.48 Its
201 footnotes are ordered sequentially without concern for the divisions of chapters. Closer to
the French essai (a test, trail, or attempt) it was neither densely researched nor crisply written,
as more than one reviewer noted. The book was rigorously critiqued in a well-known review
in The Art Bulletin by Jeffrey Hamburger, which reflected a clash of methodologies and sub-
jectivities allegorized at the time as “The Sheriff of Nottingham taking on the Robin Hood of
medievalist art history.” Yet, to critique this study as an academic monograph – which in many
respects it was never designed to be – gives the book more and less attention than it deserves.
In retrospect, Image was experimental not for its development of iconographical method or for
the introduction of new imagery or data, but as an experiment in subjectivity in medievalist
art history writing. Arguably, the book sees Camille at his most personal and most comic and
least connected to the conventions of his discipline. It was an attempt to reinsert an authorial
subjectivity and (temporarily) overthrow the tradition of disinterested speculation – still a req-
uisite philosophical stance in medievalist art writing. Camille’s Gothic Idol might be cited to
give some sense of the direction of Image on the Edge: “Where everything is coded and strictly
demarcated, the possibilities of play and subversion are much greater. The same is true for the
visual arts, where precisely because of the tyranny of traditional conventions, ludic overthrow
is possible.”49
Camille’s late work saw him focus on three particular areas of attention: the construction of
the Middle Ages as an ideal or anti-ideal of modernity (the subject of his last book The Gargoyles
of Notre Dame, published posthumously in 2009); a project on secular urban imagery of the later
Middle Ages entitled Signs and Street Life in Medieval France (for which he was awarded a Gug-
genheim Fellowship in 2000);50 and images of homoeroticism in medieval art provisionally called
The Stones of Sodom.51 In closing I shall focus on this final path of his research, and particularly
on one of Camille’s most penetrating analyses of medieval images: his 2001 essay “‘For Our
Devotion and Pleasure’: The Sexual Objects of Jean, Duc de Berry,” published in Art History.52
Taking account of perhaps the first great art collector in the European tradition, Camille sought
to explore the medieval accusations of sodomy leveled against the duke in light of his collect-
ing practices. In his supple and nuanced account, Camille focused in particular on the duke’s
manuscripts, notably the calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures. Turning to the inventorial
January page featuring the duke in the traditional labor of feasting (Fig. 12.5), Camille argues
that these images cannot be understood as a reflection of historical “reality” (an idea he developed
elsewhere) but rather, citing Laplanche and Pontalis’s famous paper “Fantasy and the Origins of
Sexuality,” as “a component of the duke’s fantasy.”53 Camille rereads what has been understood
as a conventional “January page” with the labor of feasting and gift giving (albeit one up to date
with fifteenth-century conventions of verisimilitude and “portraiture”) as a fictive performance
(or “phantasmatic projection”) of the duke’s erotic fantasy.
166
Figure 12.5 January page, Très Riches Heures. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I still recall sitting in the History of Art library at Scroope Terrace in Cambridge and
reading Camille’s comment that “there is perhaps no fifteenth-century manuscript image as
phallic in its imagery,” and that it comprises “a totally homosocial space,” which provided a
shock of recognition that is still with me.54 Exploring this canonical image, Camille draws
attention not only to the relatively obvious phallic puns – the objects worn at the waist of the
fashionable youths who attend the duke – but also to the rather more complex and frankly
sinister aspects of the image. Taking the place conventionally reserved for women in front of
the fire screen (and particularly of the Madonna in Northern painting), the duke sits in profile
surrounded by carefully articulated men and by carefully articulated objects, all seemingly
coterminous parts of the duke’s broader psychology of collection and control. Drawing from
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Matthew M. Reeve
psychoanalysis, Camille focuses on the duke’s heraldry (embroidered on a tapestry above the
hearth) made up of a wounded swan and a bear. Interpreted by Millard Meiss and others to
symbolize the love of a mysterious woman, Ursine (ours – bear and cygne – swan), Camille rereads
the heraldry as “a more personal inventory of selfhood,” juxtaposing the large, grasping,
aggressive, and masculine bear with the fleshy, white, youthful, and overtly feminine swan.
This collision of age and youth, male virility and femininity, power and submission would
seem to reflect the dynamics of many of the duke’s relationships, not only with “work-
ing-class” young men, including his servant Tacque-Tibaut, but also with his twelve-year-old
bride, Jeanne de Boulogne. Camille’s reading is not a “queering” of the Duc de Berry, but
rather something close to the opposite, an attempt to “mix up his gender into something more
strange” than our modern sexual categories would allow.55 Locating the Très Riches Heures
and other objects owned by the duke within the context of the history of sexuality and sexual
aesthetics, Camille provides a brilliant and enlivening reading of an image arguably deadened
by its serial replication.56
It will be clear from this brief account that Camille’s iconographic work reflected upon and
challenged many of the conventions of his discipline, making him a fitting endpoint for this
volume. Typical of the greatest medievalists, the rhetorical power of Camille’s writing drew from
the author’s typological identification with the Middle Ages as a mirror of sorts of the modern
present, a period of radical subjectivity, class upheaval, and social, aesthetic, and sexual play.57 He
often reflected upon this, as in his well-known comparison of the cathedrals of the high Middle
Ages with “the shimmering Postmodern towers of today’s corporate headquarters.”58 Camille’s
Middle Ages developed in his writing as a prelude of sorts to modernity, of a messy, fractious,
dissenting culture that consistently resisted or opposed hegemonic regimes, whether political,
sexual, artistic, or scopic. In this, Camille positions the Middle Ages as not so much as an other
to modernity but rather its evil twin. Camille often reflected upon this kinship, but never more
eloquently or with greater humor than in his interview on NPR’s This American Life, which I
noted in my introduction. Serving as America’s main interlocutor for the art of the Middle Ages
in the 1990s, Camille commented upon one of our own medievalist fantasies, Medieval Times.
Emphasizing continuities in performance – the “over the top” nature of the spectacle, its overt
and self-conscious glamor, and the play upon well-worn images of the Middle Ages (the joust,
the knight) and its sexual clichés (wenches and codpieces) – Camille rightly commented that it
“is so very medieval.”
Notes
1 I am principally indebted to Stuart Michaels, Michael Camille’s partner during his years in Chicago, for
offering me an extended interview on Michael’s life and work, and for being a wonderful host while I
was in Chicago. I am also grateful to others who knew Michael Camille who answered many questions:
Paul Binski, Madeline Caviness (who read and commented upon a draft of this chapter), Whitney Davis,
Jongwoo Kim, Elizabeth Legge, Sherry Lindquist, W.J.T. Mitchell, Nina Rowe and Linda Seidel. Finally,
I am grateful to Colum Hourihane for asking me to write it in the first place.
2 P. Crossley, “The Integrated Cathedral: Thoughts on ‘Holism’ and Gothic Architecture,” in The Four
Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, ed. E.S. Lane, E.C.
Pastan, and E.M. Shortell (Farnham, 2009), 157–73, at 160.
3 For Camille’s writings, see K. Boeyes, “A Bibliography of the Writings of Michael Camille,” Gesta 41:2
(2002), 141–44.
4 W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology,Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics (Chicago, 2015), 3. Mitchell’s
introduction is derived from his paper at College Art Association Chicago on Michael Camille (see n. 7
below). For Camille as a “New Art Historian,” see J. Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction
(London, 2001) 3.
168
5 M. Camille “The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Merrie England,” in History Today 48:9 (1998),
13–19. Camille would comment on this in his later work: “Rethinking the Canon: Prophets, Canons,
and Promising Monsters,” Art Bulletin, 78:2 (1996), 198–201, as “those aspects of art history that I had
despised – triumphant nationalism, a purely stylistic taxonomy of objects, and a rigidly chronological
system of their classification.” On nationalism in medievalist art historiography, see J. Alexander, “Medi-
eval Art and Modern Nationalism,” Medieval Art, Recent Perspectives: A Memorial Tribute to C.R. Dodwell,
ed. G.O. Crocker and T. Graham (Manchester/New York, 1998), 206–23; P. Crossley, “Anglia Perdita:
English Medieval Architecture and Neo-Romanticism,” in Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander, ed. S.
L’Engel and G.B. Guest (London, 1996), 471–85; R. Marks, “The Englishness of English Gothic Art?,”
in C. Hourihane (ed), Gothic Art and Thought in the Later Medieval Period, (Princeton 2011), 64–89.
R. Marks, Studies in the Art and Imagery of the Middle Ages (London, 2012), 1–32.
6 Cited and discussed in N. Giffney and M. O’Rourke, The Ashgate Companion to Queer Theory (Farnham,
2009), 438.
7 “Discipline on the Edge: Michael Camille and the Shifting Contours of Art History, 1985–2010,” ses-
sions at the College Art Association Conference in Chicago (2010). I am grateful to Madeline Caviness,
Whitney Davis, and Tom Mitchell for sending me their papers in this session, all of which I cite here.
Perhaps the most extensive of the many obituaries published is R.S. Nelson and L. Seidel, “Michael
Camille: A Memorial,” Gesta XLI:2 (2002), 137–9.
8 The Michael Camille Papers are now held at the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. At the
present moment the papers have not been fully processed, so the box and file numbers cited ahead are
likely to change. The Michael Camille Papers have been most carefully explored by Robert Nelson, who
plans to publish a paper on them in the near future.
9 I cite here from Madeline Caviness’s unpublished paper, “Of Camille, Chameleons, and Camelot: The
Shifting Politics of Medieval Studies in the 1980s and Beyond.” (See note 7.)
10 W. Davis (ed.), Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (New York/London, 1994), 161–88, 162.
11 Thanks to Stuart Michaels for discussing this with me.
12 I quote here from W. Davis’s unpublished response, “Losing My Religion: Michael Camille and Medi-
eval Art History,” from the “Discipline on the Edge” sessions. (See note 7.)
13 Thanks to Stuart Michaels for discussing this with me.
14 For example, Camille, “‘For Our Devotion and Pleasure’: The Sexual Objects of Jean, Duc de Berry,”
Art History 24:2 (2001), 169–94, 188.
15 Thomas Wright’s The Worship of the Generative Powers during the Middle Ages of Western Europe
(London, 1866) explored a range of sexual imagery and was published alongside Richard Payne
Knight’s 1786 Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, upon which it was based. Wright also composed
a significant early account of marginalia, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art
(London, 1875).
16 Little attention has been paid to sexual alterity in the formation of medieval art history, although con-
siderable attention has been paid to the role of queerness in the rise of medievalist fiction. For example,
G. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana/Chicago, 2006); A. Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Pre-History of
a Homosexual Role (New York, 1999). I have touched upon these issues elsewhere in a discussion of
eighteenth-century medievalism: M.M. Reeve, “Gothic Architecture, Sexuality and License at Horace
Walpole’s Strawberry Hill,” Art Bulletin XCV (2013), 411–39.
17 University of Chicago, Regenstein Library, Michael Camille Papers, Box 27, “Gay Collecting” file. This
box also includes files on the collections of Horace Walpole and William Beckford.
18 Caviness, “Of Camille, Chameleons, and Camelot.” (See note 7.)
19 I am grateful to Paul Binski for this insight. See John Mullen and Giles Foden “Peterhouse Blues,” The
Guardian September 10, 1999.
20 M. Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (Chicago, 1998).
21 J. Brooker, “‘Has the World Changed or Have I Changed?’, The Smiths and the Challenge of Thatcher-
ism,” Why Pamper Life’s Complexities? Essays on the Smiths, ed. S. Campbell and C. Coulter (Manchester,
2010, 22–42).
22 Caviness, “Of Camille, Chameleons, and Camelot” (see note 7).
23 Davis, “Losing My Religion” (see note 7).
24 On these issues, I am indebted to M.A. Cheetham, Art Writing, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain:
The “Englishness” of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century (Farnham, 2012).
25 Yale French Studies 80 (1991), 151–70. On intervisuality, see C. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo Saxon
England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2009), 17.
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Matthew M. Reeve
26 J. Hamburger’s review of The Gothic Idol, in The Journal of Religion 72:1 (1992), 109.
27 M. Camille, The Gothic Idol, Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1992), 345.
28 For Camille’s Introduction, see University of Chicago, Regenstein Library, Michael Camille Papers,
Box 30, “Reviews of Gothic Image” File.
29 É. Mâle, The Gothic Image, trans. Dora Nussey (London/Glasgow, 1961), 26.
30 Camille, Gothic Idol (as in note 27), xxvii.
31 Camille, Gothic Idol (as in note 27), xxvii. For Camille’s indebtedness to Bryson, see J. Harris, The New
Art History: A Critical Introduction (London, 2001).
32 Crossley, “The Integrated Cathedral” (as in note 2), 160.
33 P. Binski, review of Gothic Idol in Burlington Magazine 134: 1066 (1992), 36–7 at p. 36: “It reaches the
parts Mâle did not aim to reach, and thus casts doubt on postmedieval notions of what lay at the centre
of medieval art.”
34 M. Camille, “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art,” Iconography at the
Crossroads, Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers II, ed. B. Cassidy (Princeton, 1993), 43–58.
35 “Mouths” (as in note 34), n. 3 and 44–45.
36 “Mouths” (as in note 34), 46.
37 “Mouths” (as in note 34), 51. See also K.M. Openshaw, “Weapons in the Daily Battle: Images of the
Conquest of Evil in the Early Medieval Psalter,” Art Bulletin 75:1 (1993), 17–38.
40 J. Baschet, “Iconography beyond Iconography: Relational Meanings and Figures of Authority in the
Reliefs at Souillac,” in Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Sculpture Studies, ed. R.A. Max-
well and K. Ambrose (Turnhout, 2010), 23–46. Camille spends little energy critiquing Meyer Schapiro’s
classic account of Souillac: M. Schapiro, “The Sculptures of Souillac,” in Medieval Studies in Memory of A.
Kingsley Porter, II (Cambridge, 1939), 359–87. This is undoubtedly due to Camille’s own identification
with Schapiro as a medievalist-modernist and as a socialist/ Marxist. Camille charted his own kinship
with Schapiro in M. Camille, “‘How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art’: Medieval, Modern,
and Postmodern in Meyer Schapiro,” Oxford Art Journal 17:1 (1994), 65–75.
41 T.J. Clark, “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of ‘Olympia’ in 1865,” Screen 21:1 (1980), 18–41,
at 29.
42 L. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1966).
43 L. Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum LXV
(1990), 87–107; N. Kenaan-Kedar, “The Margins of Society in Marginal Romanesque Sculpture,” Gesta
XX (1992), 115–24. For a recent discussion of Camille’s theories on the margins in the context of Byz-
antine manuscript illumination, see Roland Betancourt, “Faltering Images: failure and error in Byzantine
manuscript illumination”, Word and Image 32:1 (2016), 1–20.
44 M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1992), 9.
45 K.P. Wentersdorf, “‘The Symbolic Significance of the ‘Figura Scatalogicae’ in Gothic Manuscripts,” in
Word, Picture and Spectacle, ed. C. Davidson (Kalamazoo, 1984), 1–20.
46 Classically in L. Randall, “Exempla and Their Influence on Gothic Marginal Illumination,” Art Bulletin
39 (1957), 97–107.
47 Camille, Image (as in note 44), 114.
48 J. Hamburger, review of Image on the Edge in The Art Bulletin 75 (1993), 319–27.
49 Camille, Gothic Idol (as in note 27), 311.
50 Other publications related to this project include “At the Sign of the ‘Spinning Sow’: The ‘Other’ Char-
tres and Images of Everyday Life of the Medieval Street,” in History and Images: Toward a New Iconology, ed.
A. Bolvig and P. Lindley (Turnhout, 2003), 249–76. “Signs of the City: Place, Power, and Public Fantasy
in Medieval Paris,” in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. B. Hanawalt and M. Kobialka (London/Minneapolis,
2000), 1–36.
51 Other publications related to this project include “The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto
Latini’s Body,” Queering the Middle Ages, ed. G. Burger and S.F. Kruger (Minniapolis, 2001), 57–86;
“Dr. Witkowski’s Anus: French Doctors, German Homosexuals, and the Obscene in Medieval Church
Art,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. N. McDonald (York, 2006), 17–38.
52 M. Camille, ‘Devotion and Pleasure’ (as in note 14).
53 M. Camille, “Devotion and Pleasure” (as in note 14), 175. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, “Fantasy and the
Origins of Sexuality,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49:1 (1968), 1–18. In Mirror in Parchment
(as in note 20), Camille argued that its images are not accurate “portrayals” of medieval life – potted
170
portraits on the medieval page of objective, ocular “reality” – but rather “imaginary constructions and
idealizations” (p. 81), and that “One of the problems of seeing images as mirrors of history is that history
does not stand still long enough to get its portrait painted” (p. 67).
54 M. Camille, “Devotion and Pleasure” (as in note 14), 174, 180.
55 M. Camille, “Devotion and Pleasure” (as in note 14), 188.
56 Camille had commented on this in his early work: “The Très Riches Heures: An Illuminated Manuscript
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry XVII (1990), 72–107.
57 The medieval-modern paradox in medieval studies has been recently explored in twentieth-century
historiography and art practice in B. Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of
Theory (Chicago, 2005) and A. Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (New York, 2012).
58 Camille, Image (as in note 44), 77. See also Camille, “‘How New York Stole’” (as in note 40), 65–75.
171
PART II
Systems and cataloguing tools

13
THE ANTHROPOLOGY
OF IMAGES
Ralph Dekoninck
During the Middle Ages, the Church, especially in the West, never stopped wanting to classify the
image as a symbol, in order to avoid as far as possible any danger of idolatry – that is, of confusion
between image and model. It was therefore a matter of casting a modest veil over the materiality
of the image, which was all too likely to attract the gaze of the viewer; this of course was expected
to fade into the background to allow the translatio ad prototypum1 – that is, to allow the gaze to
move toward the model. From this perspective, the dictum Gregorii, drawn from the famous letter
of Gregory the Great to the iconoclast bishop Serenus of Marseille, was to be the doxa for more
than a millennium in matters relating to the Christian imagery: “In it [painting], the illiterate
read. Hence, and chiefly to the nations, a picture is instead of reading (lectione).”2 The image here
plays the role of language, able to stand in for the sacred text in order to serve those who do not
have access to it. We should note that it was this idea of the image which was the foundation for
research in Christian iconography, and was to leave a profound impression on our understanding
of the functions of the medieval image, whose principal goal was to teach Christian doctrine
and to inculcate the story of Salvation.3 Our way of “naturally” interpreting images in terms of
meaning is historically deeply rooted in our way of thinking.
From representation to presence

Throughout the Middle Ages the image played a number of roles which research has attempted
to reveal in all its complexity. The present chapter aims to give an account of the various research
perspectives for images that are to be found in the field of historical anthropology. These per-
spectives are characterized by what might be called a critical standpoint toward iconography, a
criticism that highlights what at first sight seems to escape an iconographic “reading” but which
ultimately can be integrated within a broadened iconographic perspective. As a reaction to the
logocentrism that sees the image as a text to be read, the pendulum has tended to swing the
other way and research has shifted attention from meaning to the material presence of images.
Images appear as objects endowed with a certain power,4 a feature that short-circuits the classi-
cal metaphysics of representation, whose tendency is to reduce representation to a disembodied
sign or as an imitation of reality that has a symbolic or mimetic meaning. In this respect it is
possible to speak of a return to presence instead of representation. This is probably a reaction to
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Ralph Dekoninck
the increasing dematerialization of images in contemporary society, the very term “image” now
tending to make us forget its material density.5
The presence of the image, especially in the Middle Ages, has never been as isolated as a work
of art hanging in a museum might be (and yet is such a work really isolated, the museum itself
being a frame that locates the work of art?); the image or object is always located in a specific
place and within a network of other artifacts, gestures, words, sounds, smells . . . After considering
the nature of the work, it is therefore necessary to go beyond its immediate frame to understand
it within a network of relationships that are thus fashioned around it and because of it. In this
way, the idea of the image as the object, also forming a knotwork of social actions and interactions
with it being at one and the same time the object and the means.6 Turning away from icono-
graphic and stylistic approaches, research has attempted to understand the uses and practices to
which an image can give rise. From this, a body of thought on the functions of the image and
on its power to bring about actions or reactions has developed.
From the material turn to the performative turn

The image does not simply produce actions or reactions; it can also act. This is where it touches
on the question of performance. Nobody has spoken of the performative turn – a new emphasis on
what, since Alfred Gell, has also been called the agency of the image.7 While it had long been rec-
ognized that the image could arouse an emotion, an emotion which in turn was able to provoke
a motion,8 such as prayer, conversion, or donation – in this respect, we may say that the image
is performative insofar as it engages the spectator in a performance – it is even possible to say
that images are effective only when they are performed, in the sense of the performing arts; it still
remains to be understood how certain actions and intentions particular to the human being can
be applied to the image. In other words, how is it possible to understand the image as agent – that
is to say, as an object endowed with an ability to act and not simply as a thing to be manipulated
or interpreted as a passive transporter of ideas? To put it simply, if an image can make us cry, how
can it cry itself, or how can we believe that it might cry? This move from the material turn to the
performative turn characterizes a series of research projects carried out in a wide variety of fields,
all of which attempt to go beyond what images tell us or show us toward what they want. This
echoes the title of a book by W.J.T. Mitchell,9 whose work is interested in the life of images, and
above all in the “needs, desires and demands they embody”10 and what animates them; in short,
this work is interested in what we want from images.
Alongside Mitchell’s seminal work, a leading place must be reserved for the anthropology
of art devised by Alfred Gell,11 which has inspired a series of studies, all of which examine the
reasons we react to images as if they were alive. The anthropologist considers images as actors in
social life, as mediators in social processes. Gell distinguishes “primary agents” – namely, human
beings – from “secondary agents” – that is, the artifacts by which primary agents distribute their
agency when interacting with the world. This is therefore a purely relational notion with no
ontological content. Gell speaks of an “art nexus” to designate this system of actions, intended
to change the world rather than encode it.12
One cannot fail to notice that this new interest in the life and performance of images, in what
they do rather than what they represent, has in large part been initiated by medievalists. They
were among the first to shift attention from the presence of the image-object toward the image
as body,13 thus locating their research in the vast field of the anthropology of images, the idea
for which grew out of the assimilation of image and human being, with image agency merging
with human agency. In wishing to endow representation with presence it was all the confusion
between the image and its model that attracted research attention. While breaking with a certain
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The anthropology of images
symbolic paradigm that reduced the image to the level of a sign, this research perpetuated another
paradigm that underlies the history and theory of representation: that of mimesis based on the
idea of resemblance, however schematic this resemblance might be. To take up the typology of
the different modalities of “Bildakt” developed by Horst Bredekamp, it is possible to speak here
of “substitutive Bildakt,” which rests on a logic of substitution between image and model.14
The prototypical example of this kind of confusion is of beliefs relating to miraculous images.
Images that can move, cry, speak, bleed, heal, or drive away the Devil in effect constitute the
paradigm of images that act. Christian image theory called this power that animates images by
the term virtus, and it was established from the outset that this power was not intrinsic to them
but transmitted by divine power.15 According to Christian doctrine, this power was thought to
travel from the model through the image, or else to inhabit the image temporarily according to
popular beliefs, or to communicate with it through contact with holy material, especially relics, or
even through a suitable ritual such as consecration. “Thus, virtus is a quality of the image, or the
image is its vehicle, or it inhabits the image, or it is bestowed upon the image, or it is experienced
and communicated by the image.”16
Naturalist and culturalist approaches

Since the image was clearly not endowed with autonomous life and had no intrinsic power, the
question of its powers naturally shifted to the question of belief in these powers, belief which can
be deduced from the kinds of reaction images aroused, from the most extreme, such as adoration or
destruction, to the most common, such as lighting a candle before them. Taking up a favorite idea
from Marcel Mauss, an idea which he applied to magic, it might be possible to say that the efficacy
of the image is the result of and not the reason for us believing in its powers.17 But what causes or
supports this belief? What is acting in or through this kind of image? Two kinds of answers have been
made to these questions: one naturalist, the other culturalist. The first says that belief in the power of
the image is anchored in human nature, inscribed within the structures of the human mind. In this
respect it has been possible to speak of a universal anthropological or even psychological characteristic.
This naturalist approach encourages an enquiry with no chronological and geographical restriction
into the way mankind, through its instinct for imitation, tends to attribute action or life to images. In
other words, human beings have the cognitive ability to merge the image and the person or subject it
resembles. The image thus derives its power essentially from the viewer, who projects on to it his or her
own intentions. This is the viewpoint adopted by David Freedberg in his The Power of Images of 198918
and which he subsequently extended into the field of the neurosciences. Even if he defends himself
against the criticism of having neglected the contextual elements that play a part in the living presence
of images, he encourages historians and anthropologists to “develop an argument on the cognitive
schemas which underlie this or that reaction and which are subject to the pressures of the context.”19
The culturalist approach consists in investigating all the contextual – that is to say, cultural –
circumstances at work so that an image may become active.20 As opposed to a claimed universal-
ity, precise historical reasons are invoked, reasons that are essentially social in origin. To distinguish
it from “an internalist concept of agency,” which holds that belief in the powers of the image “is
triggered by factors that develop out of the interiority of the person, thoughts, desires, intentions,
etc.,”21 Gell speaks of the “externalist idea” that attributes these powers to a given socioreligious
context. This explains in part why a particular image becomes activated in specific circumstances.
As we have seen, Gell firmly locates himself in this perspective by seeing images as actors “in a
network of social relationships.” In other words, the reasons for belief are to be sought other than
in the psyche of the viewer, and especially in the social forces acting through the image, which
Mitchell has referred to as “ventriloquism.”
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Ralph Dekoninck
This culturalist perspective is found in a broad swath of art historical research inspired by
cultural and visual studies, in which “the image is more often than not seen as a representation, a
visual construct that betrays the ideological agenda of its makers and whose content is susceptible
to manipulation by its receivers.”22 Hence, it is a matter of seeing “around the edges of images in
order to determine the social forces responsible for their ideological agendas’ and “of identifying
the political commitments of those who make and consume them.”23 The stress is thus laid on
the operators of the image, those who make it act, who make it active, and even more on those
who are activated by it – that is to say, manipulated by those who are pulling the strings. On the
grounds that the efficacy of an image can be measured only by the responses it arouses or pro-
vokes, reception studies largely seem to have dominated research that has adopted this culturalist
point of view, which saw the image as an instrument in the service of a power or an ideology, or
as the medium serving to challenge this same power.
Intrinsic image-act: the power of ornament

In emphasizing the upstream (conditions of creation) and even more so the downstream (modal-
ities of reception), both naturalist and culturalist points of view have tended to obscure the
intrinsic being of the image as a factor that can activate its power. Hence the appeal from G. Bart-
holeyns and T. Golsenne that “In order to analyse the performance of image, we need to turn
less towards the reaction of spectators than towards the image itself, in its own materiality, in the
pragmatic conditions of the manifestation of its iconic power.”24 In this regard Bredekamp speaks
of “intrinsiche Bildakt” (intrinsic image-act) to account for the intrinsic power of images. The
presence in question here is no longer that of the referent in the image or of the forces manip-
ulating it, but that of the image itself, and it matters little whether this is anthropomorphic.25 It
is a matter of recognizing images as real actors “possessed of sovereign agency separable from
their handling or their perception by people.”26 In contrast to Alfred Gell, who saw manufactured
objects as a crucible of social relationships, and to Hans Belting, who investigated the relationships
between iconic medium and human body,27 Bredekamp attempts to grasp a principle of life
(Eigenleben) in images that can no longer be seen conceived as a direct extension of the human
body or society, but as a force (Eigenkraft) emanating naturally from images themselves, a force
that can act on the body as on society.28 It is possible to speak of figural forces, to use the termi-
nology of Louis Marin,29 while Bredekamp prefers to speak of Potentia or Latenz to designate
these latencies activated at a precise moment or in particular circumstances. To see the image as
a force is in fact to take an interest in power as potential, in potentiality – that is to say, in the
entirety of what the image is able to bring about. What then are the characteristics of this latent
force, and what activates or intensifies it, what contributes to its performance and to its efficacy?
“What power enables an image, when it is seen or handled, to spring out of latency into an out-
ward effect on sensation, thinking, and action?’30
Apart from the image’s presence as object and its resemblance as body, scholarly attention has
been directed mainly toward its ornamentation, a dimension that seems to have escaped the field
of iconography, of meaning, and of representation.31 This new interest has also had the result
of reintroducing the issue of the aesthetic dimension of images, a dimension that must not be
reduced simply to the philosophical sense of beauty but to which it is necessary to restore the
etymological sense relating to sensibility. The anthropology of the image and the visual studies
have attempted to deconstruct the aesthetic approach to the work of art so that other modes
might be considered,32 or rather other forms of reaction suppressed or sublimated by the aes-
thetic reaction, with the consequence that this dimension has been neglected in research. Now,
the power of images can be brought back to the question of their sensible force, whatever may
178
have been thought of the split between the age of the image and the age of art or between the
cult of the religious image and culture of the artistic image. “For it is perhaps, in the context of
a pragmatic analysis of its means, through its aesthetic quality (its intensity of appearance), that
the image, whether work of art or devotional image, can become effective.”33
These principles have been applied especially to sacred images, with special attention given
to the sumptuous nature of their workmanship, the issue here being to know what role this
played in belief in the powers of these images. Images reputed to be miraculous were extensively
embellished, from the lavish material used to adorn them to the altarpiece, the chapel, or even the
church dedicated to it, not to mention the numerous ex voto offerings surrounding it (Fig. 13.1).
Figure 13.1 Michelozzo di Bartolomeo (attr.) and Pagno di Lapo Pertigiani, tabernacle for the SS.
Annunziata (c. 1340), 1448–49, Florence, SS. Annunziata.
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Ralph Dekoninck
It was out of respect for the subject represented that they were honored with decorations – that
is to say, honor was expressed in material terms. It is possible to speak of a natural willingness to
adorn them as a reminder that these ordinary images have extraordinary virtues. While texts of
the period emphasize the fact that this addition of beauty was not the origin of faith but a witness
to it, practice partly contradicts theory by showing that it was also tangible proof of the efficacy
of the cultic image. As Freedberg recognizes, decoration serves to “aesthetically differentiate,”34
its efficacy lying, among other things, in its “visual particularity.”35 But he also emphasizes the
fact that this feature is not the cause of the efficacy. In fact, according to Freedberg, belief in the
power of miraculous images was at the most stimulated by the ornamental “layers”:
Could one say that apparently rude or plain images [. . .] work only because of the
splendor in which they are housed? Apparently not. We only have to read the many
accounts, often contemporary with their discovery, of how they work while they are
still outside in the cold, hanging on a tree, or pathetically painted on some shabby street
corner. They work before the fancy or elevated forms of enshrinement or decoration
were applied to them.36
As Golsenne maintains, it is possible to say that “the efficacy of cult images is not aesthetic but
‘magical.’ Its power does not produce a feeling of beauty, or disinterested pleasure, but it acts on
the body and its humours.”37 In contrast to Freedberg, however, Golsenne emphasizes the fact
that for the faithful, all the decorative apparatus that exalts the image demonstrates the image’s
miraculous power; for the historian-anthropologist, the power to confer miraculous value on
the image is due to this decorative apparatus. Although the embellishments seem simply to
honor an object of value – in reality they confer value on this object, in a relationship which is
equivalent to that which links the reliquary to the relic. As Jean-Claude Schmitt has proposed,
for the believer it is the relic that makes the reliquary. For the anthropologist, however, “it is
the reliquary that makes the relic,” in the sense that it supplies the institutional and visual proof
of the relic’s authenticity.38 This analogy between image and reliquary – which has a certain
historical pertinence if we refer to the statue-reliquaries of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
through which a kind of “revolution” in the Christian image was performed – has the merit of
emphasizing the essential connection that links the image to its ornamentation. It is therefore
possible to extrapolate and speak of the agency of precious materials used to decorate sacred
images. This is the hypothesis offered by Golsenne, who writes, “The adornment does not
follow the miracle but makes possible the belief that a miracle has been performed by means of
such an image.”39 He adds, “a cult image is not effective, magical, on its own”; “the adornment
produces this life which is lacking in the venerated image, makes it attractive; [. . .] gives it a
surplus of existence.”40 But placing the accent in this way on votive adornments as the main
animators of the image and activators of belief has the consequence of putting the image itself
in parentheses. If it goes without saying that the image in itself has no effective power, except in
belief, the aesthetic dimension should not be reduced to that of the artistic value of the image.
The unsophisticated, even “primitive,” appearance of many miraculous images not only was
recognized as a sign of their antiquity and therefore as proof of their sacrality (in that the origin
of these images has been lost in the mists of time) but also generated a visual impact that can
be likened to what anthropologists have written about African “fetishes.”41 Their immutability
and rusticity, not to mention their “primitive” quality, were only intensified by the contrast
with the artistic adornment that gave them life. Their artistic “poverty” takes nothing away
from their aesthetic power – that is to say, the emotional impact they generated and that the
sumptuous embellishments extended.
180
In the end, the question that must be answered is to see if this attention to the power of
images surpasses, or even puts paid to, iconographic analysis. Rather than opposing “effects of
sense” and “effects of presence,” meaning and performance, it would be preferable, as J. Baschet
advocates, to consider the areas of overlap between the two: “The work does not simply transmit
a meaning to be decrypted; it also produces an effect. This dimension must be integrated within
an iconographic approach, since it is true that meaning offers itself through the effect produced
by the work.”42 The way in which materiality affects meaning needs to be considered, and the
way in which meaning is conveyed and often transformed by the force of the image, but also
by the ornamental apparatus accompanying it and bringing it before the viewer, also needs to
be examined. The internalist explanation (how the image becomes a space in which the human
psyche is projected) and the externalist explanation (how the image comes to be socially empow-
ered) need to be combined without forgetting their formal characteristics. In the same way, an
anthropological history of resemblance and a historical sociology of performance need to be
joined together. Staying with J. Baschet, it is possible to speak of “active forms and meanings”:
Within such configurations, the power of the image-object depends just as much on
the presence it confers on painted figures, on its ornamental superabundance, as it does
on an overload of meaning whose very excess contributes to producing an effect of
sacrality and to the efficacy which may thus go together with it.43
Notes
1 Basil the Great, De Spiritu Sancto, 18, 45, in PG 32, col. 149. Originally intended to clarify the rela-
tionship of the Father and Son in the Trinity, this formula was adopted by the theology of the image
to describe the type of adoration owed to the latter. See G.B. Ladner, “The Concept of the Image
in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 7 (1953),
3–34.
2 “in ipsa legunt qui litteras nesciunt; unde praecipue gentibus pro lectione pictura est.” Gregory the
Great, Registrum Epistolarum, XI, 13, Ad Serenum Massiliensum Episcopum, in Corpus Christianorum,
140A, 874, The Letters of Gregory the Great, translated, with introduction and notes, by John R.C. Mar-
tyn (Toronto, 2004). C.M. Chazelle, “Pictures, Books and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to
Serenus of Marseilles,” Word & Image, 6 (1990), 138–53. L. Duggan, “Was Art Really the ‘Book of the
Illiterate’?,” Word & Image 5 (1989), 227–251. J.-C. Schmitt, “Écriture et image: les avatars médiévaux
du modèle grégorien,” in Théories et pratiques de l’écriture au Moyen Age, ed. E. Baumgartner and C.
Marchello-Nizia (Paris, 1988), 119–28. R. Recht, “Une Bible pour illettrés? Sculpture gothique et
‘théâtre de mémoire’,” Critique 586 (1996), 188–206. M. Gougaud, “Muta praedicatio,” Revue bénédic-
tine 42 (1930), 168–71.
3 See J. Baschet, L’iconographie médiévale (Paris, 2008); see especially the introduction “Pour en finir (vrai-
ment) avec la Bible des illettrés,” 26–33.
4 Jérôme Baschet has chosen to speak of the “image-object” as a reminder “that images, and particu-
larly those of the Middle Ages, are inseparable from their materiality, but also from their thing-ness,
understood as the quality of being sovereign, eluding at one and the same time the representation and
functionality of the object.” J. Baschet, “Images en acte et agir social,” in La Performance des images, ed.
G. Bartholeyns, A. Dierkens, and T. Golsenne (Brussels, 2010), 10.
5 See K. Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7 (2008), 131–46. J.
Wolff, “After Cultural Theory: The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy,” Journal of Visual
Culture 11 (2012), 3–19. H.U. Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey
(Stanford, 2003).
6 See, in particular, the actor-network theory elaborated by B. Latour: Reassembling the Social: An Introduc-
tion to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005).
7 A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998).
8 It is possible to refer for example to the antique tradition of the imagines agentes – that is, images that
were striking in their beauty, ugliness, colors, and associations.
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Ralph Dekoninck
9 “The interpretation of images would be decentered in favor of an investigation of the authority and
affect of images. This would lead back, of course, to the issue of overestimation and visual superstitions.
The question for art historians in that case would be, not ‘what pictures mean?’ but ‘what do pictures
want?’” W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Is Visual Culture?,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Essays in Honor of Erwin
Panofsky’s 100th Birthday, ed. I. Lavin (Princeton, 1995), 544.
10 W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Image, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, 2011), xix.
11 Gell, Art and Agency (as in note 7).
12 See C. van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Leiden,
2015), 45–52. P. Descola, “La double vie des image,” in Penser l’image II: Anthropologie du visuel, ed. E.
Alloa (Paris, 2015), 131–45.
13 J.-C. Schmitt, Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps: Essais d’anthropologie médiévale (Paris, 2001). J.-C. Schmitt,
Le Corps des images: Essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2002). H. Belting, An Anthropology
of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. T. Dunlap (Princeton, 2014). J. Wirth, Qu’est-ce qu’une image
(Geneva, 2013), especially chapter V: “La performativité de l’image?.”
14 H. Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts: Über das Lebensrecht des Bildes (Berlin, 2010).
15 I would like to thank Gil Bartholeyns for letting me know of his forthcoming contribution (“The Dyna-
mis of the Medieval Imago: An Unrecognized Topicality”) to the Dynamis of the Image: For an Archeology
of Potentialities volume, the result of the research initiative cosponsored by Collège d’études mondiales
and Gerda Henkel Stiftung and directed by Chiara Cappelletto et Emmanuel Alloa.
16 G. Bartholeyns, “The Dynamis of the Medieval Imago” (as in note 15).
17 M. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London, 2005).
18 D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago/London, 1989).
19 This quotation comes from the preface for the French translation of Le Pouvoir des images, trans. A. Girod
(Paris, 1998), 5.
20 See J. Goody, in his Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fictions, Relics
and Sexuality (Oxford, 1997).
21 Gell, Art and Agency (as in note 7), 126.
22 Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn” (as in note 5), 132.
23 Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn” (as in note 5), 142.
24 G. Bartholeyns and T. Golsenne, “Une théorie des actes d’images,” in La Performance des images (as in
note 4), 19.
25 “It should be clear that, with its living images, its automata, and its biofacta, the Schematic Image-Act
encompasses the patterns of thought and action for images that live through [human] bodies, through
auto-motion, and through biological constitution. The Substitutive Image-Act, in contrast, does not
evoke the living components of images; rather, it exchanges images and bodies for one another. In this
way, effects are attained by direct means – sometimes deadly means in the case of destructive media.”
Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (as in note 14), 328, trans. B. Kitzinger in her review of the book for the
CAA.reviews (September 2014) CrossRef doi:10.3202/caa.reviews.2014.103.
26 Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (as in note 14), 51; B. Kitzinger (as in note 25).
27 Belting, An Anthropology of Images (as in note 13).
28 Kitzinger (as in note 25).
29 The opposition between a classical philosophy of the image as representing something and the image
that makes something, which possesses a specific “force,” had already been clearly stated by Louis Marin:
“Hence the attempt to grasp, by returning to the ‘originating’ question, the being of the image, not by
returning it to being itself, not by making of the being of the image the pure and simple, and cognitively
insufficient, or even deceptive image of being, its mimeme, but by examining its ‘virtues’, as would have
been said in the past, its latent or manifest forces, in short, its efficacy, if this were even known. The being
of the image, in a word, is its force.” L. Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image: Gloses (Paris, 1992), 10.
30 Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (as in note 14), 52.
31 See J.-C. Bonne, “Ornementation et répresentation,” in Les images dans l’Occident mediéval, ed. J. Baschet
and P.-O. Dittmar (Turnhout, 2015), 199–212; J.-C. Bonne, “De l’ornemental dans l’art médiéval (VIIe–
XIIe siècle): Le modèle insulaire,” in L’image: Fonctions et usages des images dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. J.
Baschet and J.-C. Schmitt (Paris, 1997), 185–219.
32 See “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October 77 (1996), 25–70. R. Dekoninck, “Un conflit de valeurs:
L’histoire de l’art aux prises avec les Visual Studies,” in L’art en valeurs, ed. R. Dekoninck and D. Lories
(Paris, 2011), 341–55.
33 Bartholeyns and Golsenne, “Une théorie des actes d’images” (as in note 24), 23.
182
34 Freedberg, The Power of Images (as in note 18), 110.

37 T. Golsenne, “Parure et culte,” in La Performance des images (as in note 24), 74.
38 Schmitt, Le Corps des images (as in note 13), 284.
39 Golsenne, “Parure et culte” (as in note 37), 82.
40 Golsenne, “Parure et culte” (as in note 37), 83.
41 M. Augé, Le Dieu objet (Paris, 1988), 30–33.
42 J. Baschet, “Inventivité et sérialité des images médiévales: Pour une approche iconographique élargie,”
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 51 (1996), 106.
43 J. Baschet, “Images en acte et agir social,” in La Performance des images (as in note 24), 13.
183
14
CLASSIFYING IMAGE CONTENT
IN VISUAL COLLECTIONS
A selective history
Chiara Franceschini
The origins and reasons for iconographic classification

Even though earlier attempts, many of which are discussed in this publication, had been made
to look at art historical subject matter and its classification, it was not by chance that iconogra-
phy, as well as its classification, first started to develop in the field of Christian art. Iconography
developed as a science based on the idea of a close correspondence between image and text. In
Christian cultures the text is chiefly the sacred history as told in texts such as the Bible. Although
art historians have always been aware of the autonomy of the visual, the close and problematic
links between a text such as the Bible and the rendering in images of the Historia Sacra provided
the basis for the birth of iconography as a science. Christian authors have always shown a certain
tendency to tell artists what they were supposed to do. According to this way of thinking, and
highlighted by the famous dictum of Gregory the Great about the function of images as books for
the illiterate, Christian iconography was conceived as a form of visible theology.1 The depend-
ence on texts is evident in the approaches of the early iconographers. For example, Émile Mâle,
who coined the term “iconography” in 1927 and later rediscovered Cesare Ripa’s Iconology,
employed the medieval treatise Speculum Majus of Vincent of Beauvais to organize his book L’art
réligieux de XIIIe siècle en France. As early as 1891, when trying to choose a subject for his thesis,
Mâle wrote to a fellow student, “I just found a topic for my Latin dissertation: Michelangelo as a
theologian. I will try to demonstrate that Michelangelo did not invent a single thing in the Sistine
Chapel, but that he very closely followed Augustine’s City of God.”2
Between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, the idea of
iconography as a tendentially encyclopedic discipline that could potentially bring back images
to their written sources was reflected in the endeavors to fund and organize art historical photo-
graphic collections according to subject categories. Due to practical necessities, the iconographic
arrangement of these visual archives established a unique relationship between image and text.
However, iconographers very soon realized that it is one thing to classify images according to
the text or source which is supposed to be behind them, but it is another thing to classify images
according to subject matter. In 1939, iconography was authoritatively described as “that branch
of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art.”3
Even more interesting is the definition given thirteen years later by Creighton Gilbert, according
to which iconography “tends to be simply the identifying of subject matter for cataloguing purposes.”4
184
Classifying image content
However, this “identification of subject matter for cataloguing purposes” had already led to the
foundation of visual resources such as the Witt Library, the Frick Library, or the Index of Chris-
tian Art in Princeton, and was clearly not that simple.
Subject matter (e.g., “Virgin and child”) is certainly a notion that is not exclusively text-
related. The subject of a picture may refer to a type, without depending on any written text;
however, a subject always needs to be described in words. Accordingly, this always reestablishes
a relationship with a text, even if the text now comes not before (as in the case of a source)
but after the image, in the form of an accurate description of the subject itself. It was, in fact,
in relation to the notion of subject that the first objections to iconographic classification were
raised, as for example by Robert Klein, in his 1963 publication Thoughts of Iconography, where
he states,
It is not always possible to establish a non-equivocal correspondence between a figura-

tive work and its “subject.” Consider, for instance, a painting of the 1880s representing
the corner of a room, a man in an armchair reading the Journal des Débats, a mantlepiece
with a Louis XV clock and a vase of flowers, a mirror on the wall, part of a window, and
so on. Of all these objects, which is the “true subject” of the picture?5
Klein was dealing here with postmedieval art; but it is equally possible to wonder whether this
question makes sense for medieval art as well. While attacking Panofsky’s iconology, whose
preferred field seemed to be Renaissance art, Gilbert also wrote that “if the Middle Ages have a
more public and standardized set of symbols, amenable to the simpler attack of iconography, later
periods show a well-known tendency to loosen or dispense with associative values.”6 Certainly,
iconographers dealing with the classification of Renaissance images tend to find more and more
examples outside iconographic classification.7 However, the fundamental question is to what
extent it is possible to use words to describe, arrange, and retrieve the content of images and that
remains valid for all periods, never mind the problem of how to establish continuities and breaks
between different periods in relation to iconographic classification.
Beyond the focus on Christian material in the early days of iconography as a discipline, there
were also other endeavors to classify images by content. The idea of using tree structures to clas-
sify image content may have developed from descriptive and classificatory systems used in botany
and zoology. However, the problem with iconography (as distinct from zoography or geography)
is always the need not only to describe and classify images by their morphologies but also to bring
the image or object back to a text, whether that is a source or a textual description. In this sense,
iconography is not merely a system for the classification of forms and types but rather a semiotic
system for the classification of forms and types.
Before as well as after the invention of photography, the greatest stimulus for creating icono-
graphic systems came from scholarship and the market. Scholars and theorists dealing with the
visual in art history as well as in a number of other fields, such as history, philosophy, anthropol-
ogy, literary history, theology, and psychology, frequently have queries as to how a certain text or
subject is depicted in art. Image collections that offered this research possibility, especially before
the advent of the Internet, proved to be extremely useful for practitioners in these fields. These
collections allowed the researcher to know not only how subjects were depicted in art but also
where and when.8
Beyond the academic world, iconographic classification proved to be useful for a variety
of different motives. At least from the sixteenth century, image buyers and sellers have often
needed subject classification systems which allowed speedy retrieval (e.g., for collectors, for
use in the world of advertising, or for other commercial or noncommercial enterprises). An
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Chiara Franceschini
early example that relates to both theological and commercial needs is provided by an album,
which was assembled in Rome between 1560 and 1600 by the French publisher Lafréry, and
is now in Madrid. As noted by Zahira Véliz Bomford, the Madrid album, which includes
more than three hundred prints, “is arranged according to iconography, with Old Testament
subjects, then New Testament, followed by the Evangelists, the Fathers of the Church, Saints,
devotional images, and finally post-Tridentine formulae for the seven sacraments, and so on.”9
Here, the classification works by arrangement and not by labeling; it is possible to see that this
order made it easier for artists or patrons to find an authoritative depiction of a certain religious
subject – authoritative because Lafréry intended to make engraved reproductions by the most
famous Renaissance artists of the Historia Sacra. These were to be issued in Rome and made
available to a larger public.
When images became plentiful, as happened after the invention of photography, iconographic
arrangement alone did not suffice to retrieve an image quickly. It was essential to have a coherent
system of searchable texts (descriptions or card index). It is only very recently that web search
engines are trying to move from the use of words to describe images to a different system based
on image-recognition software.
The triumph of iconographic classification in the analog era

The greatest impulse to iconographic classification in the art historical world coincided with the
widespread use of photography as the main working media for the art historian. It was only when
art historians had access to an amount of photographic images that it became necessary to devise
systems of organization, which sometimes followed an iconographic principle. These collections
and archives, developed by either single scholars or institutions, were all started toward the end
of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the twentieth – that is, during the age
when photography was being established as a research tool.
As already mentioned, the Index of Christian Art was established at Princeton University, in
1917, initially as the personal archive of Charles Rufus Morey. This was not the only initiative in
the field of medieval iconography at the time, but it soon became the most influential. Initially,
the Index covered art only up to the year 700, but the scope was extended before Morey’s death
to 1400.10 The Index is formed by two physical files: a text file, consisting of “over one million
color-coordinated cards that are arranged under 28,000 subject headings” organized alphabeti-
cally, and a photographic file, “consisting of over 200,000 re-photographs of works of art.” The
“text file” is most important for iconography: since the foundation in 1917, it not only records
metadata for each image but also offers a “free-text description in which individual details of
the particular work are recorded.” The vocabulary of this free-text description is consistent: it is
“very much controlled as is the descriptive format in which the image is read.”11 In other words,
a parallel between image and text is clearly established – the text, which was not searchable in
the paper files, is meant to offer a way of reading the image as objectively as possible. The level
of detail offered by the Index of Christian Art proved to be most useful in the age of computer-
ization, when all the information on paper was converted to a digital format.
In 1908, in Paris, Jacques Doucet started to collect photographic materials, covering medieval
art as well. The attempt to follow scientific rules to classify Doucet’s photothèque is documented
as early as 1930, thanks to the input of Clotilde Brière-Misme, a collaborator of Doucet since
1919. Under an overarching alphabetic classification of artist, the organization followed a subject
classification in the following order: Bible (following the order of the books), religious allegories,
saints, mythology and allegory, history, literature, portraits, figures (heads, clothed figures, etc.),
genre paintings, landscapes and towns, animals, interiors with no figure, still life, and copies and
186
fakes.12 Seventy thousand photographs were classified using such a structure from 1930 to 1936:
the aim was to compete with “les plus parfaits organisations étrangères de ce genre,”13 which
must have included the Index of Christian Art and possibly (unless the influence did not go in the
other direction, which is not possible to establish at present) the archive in the Warburg Institute,
in Hamburg, which was later moved to London and which was being developed at this time.
From the late 1920s while in Hamburg, Aby Warburg started to work on Mnemosyne, his
atlas project: one of the first occasions to present his visual approach and use of photography
to fellow art historians was provided in 1927, when he gave a lecture on the Valois tapestries at
the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence – the same city where, about forty years earlier, he had
started to collect books and photographs. Still in the late 1920s, together with Fritz Saxl and with
the practical help of many young scholars and assistants, including Edgar Breitenbach, Warburg
formulated a plan for both the book and the image collection of his library: this plan was sys-
tematized and recorded in a scheme by Saxl around 1930–1931.14
In 1931, Erwin Panofsky, who at the time was teaching in Hamburg and was part of the
group of intellectuals in the Warburg circle, visited the Index of Christian Art for the first time.15
That same year, when writing “On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the
Visual Art,” Panofsky formulated the first version of his three-level scheme for describing and
interpreting works of visual art – a classificatory system which later came to be described as
pre-iconography, iconography, and iconology.16
In 1933, the Warburg Library moved to London: at this point, the Index of Christian Art
was a model for the reorganization of its photographic collection, which, at the time, was under
the direction of Rudolf Wittkower (1901–1971). The new arrangement incorporated elements
of the iconographic sections first classified by Saxl.17 Today, the Warburg Institute Photographic
Collection consists of an estimated four hundred thousand photographs of works of art, mostly
dating from classical antiquity to the eighteenth century. The photographs are mostly collected
in folders and subfolders, corresponding to the breakdown of a theme or subject in subcategories
according to different principles, sometimes referring back to a text, but other times not (e.g.,
“Amor” – “Allegories” – “The power of Amor” or “Old Testament” – “Genesis” – “Adam and
Eve” – “Adam single figure”).18 In turn, the thematic folders are stored in filing cabinets grouped
together in bays, with an indication of the main subject categories: Pre-Classical Iconography,
Antiquities, Rituals, Gods and Myths, Classical Literature, Mediaeval and Later Literature, Magic
and Science, Gestures, Secular Iconography, Portraits, History, Social Life, Religious Iconography,
and so forth.19 Unlike the Index of Christian Art, the textual description is kept to a minimum,
and the classification is entrusted not to a card index or to exhaustive textual descriptions but to
the material disposition in space itself combined with minimal but essential information provided
on the back of photographs. Flexible and not systematic, this organization has the advantage of
stimulating “serendipity,” sometimes confronting the user with unexpected discoveries.20
Earlier enterprises, such as the Index of Christian Art and the Photothek of the Kunsthis-
torisches Institut in Florence, influenced the organization of visual resources, which developed
around the Warburg Library in Hamburg and then at the Warburg Institute in London. In turn,
the thematic/iconographic approach to organizing photographic material, which was developed
by succeeding generations of Warburgians, had a great impact on other projects. Thanks to Edgar
Breitenbach, a strand of Warburgianism was infused into the project to classify the photographs
of American life in the Depression era carried out under the Farm Security Administration at
the Library of Congress from 1945.21 In the commercial field, the image bank created by Otto
Bettmann in Hamburg is another interesting case. The extent to which Bettmann’s “subject eyes”
were indebted to the Hamburg school is uncertain; however, with Bettmann having studied
history and art history at the University of Leipzig from 1923 to 1927, it is highly probable
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Chiara Franceschini
that he became acquainted with contemporary debates on iconography. One of his advisors, the
historian of economics and culture Alfred Doren (1869–1934), was one of Aby Warburg’s close
friends and colleagues.22
Although not strictly art historical, other projects from the same period are noteworthy, as
they can be considered, in one way or another, to be linked or at least comparable to those devel-
oped around the school of Hamburg-London.
Around 1931–1932, Henry Balfour (1863–1939), curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in
Oxford, created a systematic archive out of the collection of ethnographic photographs he had
collected for the museum. The result was a thematic series of boxes, which were intended to
provide a cross-cultural research tool. This archive raises questions about the legacy of cultural
comparativism. Put in context with cognate projects – and in particular with the Warburg
collection – Balfour’s classification system has been recently read within a “wider universalizing
archival movement of the inter-war period.”23
A further example of this momentum is provided by the “Eranos Archiv,” the photographic
collection of Jungian archetypes developed by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962) according to
the system of Jungian symbolism represented in the visual arts. From 1935, she corresponded
with Fritz Saxl and visited the Warburg Photographic Collection several times. The photographic
archive, which grew out of Eranos meetings during the early 1930s, was established and used for
traveling exhibitions. Somehow unaware of the fundamental difference in scope between her
collection and the Warburg Photographic Collection, in 1955, Fröbe-Kapteyn donated her orig-
inal “collection of art historical photographs for education/learning” to the Warburg Institute.24
In 1936, William Heckscher (1904–1999), a pupil of Panofsky’s, worked with Dora Panofsky
(1885–1965), his first wife, on a collection of “Pathos formulae”: this rich photographic collec-
tion followed him to Utrecht, where a copy of the Index of Christian Art is preserved and where,
during the 1950s, Heckscher developed an “index iconologicus.”25
In 1951, Henri van de Waal, who had been in contact with several members of the Warburg
Institute since the 1930s, wrote to Gertrud Bing (1892–1964) about his work on a “icono-
graphical index which could provide a directrix for the filling of iconographical material,”
asking permission “to test (its) system at the practice of your collections to make sure that no
important items have been left out.”26 This was the beginning of Iconclass – a project which
has since focused on the classification of subject matter using alphanumeric taxonomies and has
now became a standard for iconographic description. Iconclass, however, differs from the other
projects mentioned so far because it was not initiated to arrange a collection of physical images,
but was developed independently as a pure classificatory system.
Although historically interconnected, these different case studies show different ways of arranging
textual and visual material and data within the image archive of the analog era. There are cases of the-
matically organizing the archive and the card index, corresponding to a typological-topographical
arrangement of the image (the Index of Christian Art). In other instances, miniature photos are
attached to the card index (the Bettmann Archive). Elsewhere, it is possible to appreciate the
value of a material arrangement, which corresponds spatially to the thematic logic of the system
and physically acts as a visual index. Such is the case of the Warburg Institute Photographic Col-
lection, where information derives directly from the photographs and their physical location, and
only incidentally with the help of a card index; such is the case of the attributes of the saints, for
which a partial card index is available.
Sometimes the cataloguers’ ideal target was to provide a virtually comprehensive visual cat-
alogue of all the possible images or depicted subjects of a given culture, or cultural context. For
example, in the 1930s, the Warburgians set out to complete and arrange “as far and as system-
atically as possible” their “iconographical collection” of all the medieval and Renaissance visual
188
materials related to the history of the classical tradition in religion, art, literature, and science.27
This was only one of the phases of the history of the collection and its classification system.
Another telling example of the endeavor to classify and organize an entire culture through its
images is provided by the American Life in the Depression Era Project, as envisioned by Edgar
Breitenbach. In both cases the attempts to offer a complete visual documentation in relation to
a culture go beyond textual reference and research needs: here the effort is to classify cultures
through images.28
In the field of art history, the iconographic or thematic classification principle was not the
only one. The standard art historical photographic archive could follow a different pattern. At the
Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florenz, for example, the iconographic classification was entrusted
to a subject cross-reference index, while the overarching arrangement followed a typological
scheme (architecture, sculpture, applied arts, painting) and, subordinately, a stylistic arrangement,
such as “Romanesque,” “Gothic,” “Renaissance,” “Baroque,” and “Classicism.”29
Challenges of the digital era

From a theoretical point of view, all of the examples discussed earlier are concerned with one
central question: how to use language to classify and retrieve the content of images for a spe-
cific purpose. One of the central notions of classification is the concept of keyword. Willingly
or not, our googlified world is dominated by the practice of looking for contents by keyword
searches. Google defines its mission as follows: “to organize the world’s information and make
it universally accessible and useful.”30 Of course, the realm of images is a subset of the world’s
information. Still, the problem of retrieving the content of images is so complex that it has not
yet been completely resolved – even by the developers and programmers of Google. At the center
of this problem lies the relationship between word and image. Pattern recognition technology,
though promising, is not yet fully developed, and it is still through keywords that Google Images
allows users to search the web for image content. If we look back to the old, specialized analog
archives of photographs mentioned earlier, we can appreciate what refined tools were developed
by archivists, curators, and art historians before the digital era, and in particular before the era of
the page rank algorithms which are at the heart of the Google’s domination, first of the web and
then of advertising (through the practice of content-targeted advertising). As we have seen in the
cases discussed, the choice of keywords depends on logic and functions of each collection.
Beginning in the 1990s, the digital conversion of many analog archives, and especially those
specializing in art history, has brought about further research in classifying iconographic mate-
rial. Iconclass, the Index of Christian Art, the KHI Digital Photo Library, the Photo Archive of
the Fondazione Federico Zeri, the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database, the Photographic
Archive of Villa I Tatti, the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, the Census of Antique Art and Architecture
Known to the Renaissance in Berlin (one of the most important digital enterprise for Renaissance
art), and the various projects developed at the Getty Research Institute, not to mention the digital
research tools currently developed by many of the world’s museums, are expanding the materials
and research possibilities available to scholars in the fields of medieval and Renaissance art. Large-
scale projects which are useful for iconographic research include Artstor, a digital image library
funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation in the late 1990s, and Wikimedia Commons.
Available by subscription to many institutions for educational purposes, Artstor includes today
more than 1.9 million images from many different repositories (including some of the ones listed
earlier).31 All these projects offer new tools for iconographic or thematic image research, which
are both rooted in their respective analog history and much more refined and useful than what
Google Images is able to offer at present.
189
Chiara Franceschini
In this wider and progressively interconnected picture, where digital tools are offering new
perspectives for art history,32 the question needs to be asked about the future of iconography and
iconographic classification, beyond mere usefulness and practicalities. The world now has visual-
ity at its center as has never happened before, and it is clear that image and text work in different
ways and are completely different media. The classic methodology of iconography, with its strong
tendency to anchor image to text, if not to a source, and to a subject matter (described either with
a text or a simple textual label), needs to be rethought. The study of how types, forms, subjects,
and themes migrate from one image to another and from one cultural context to another may
give a historical and geographical depth to the study and understanding of images. Moving from
approaches that tended to rely on textual sources, today’s art historians tend to focus more and
more on the proper visual elements of art. Without sounding too paradoxical, it may be possible
to say that we are today assisting in a visual turn in art history. Thanks to all the work that has
already been done, as dwarfs on the shoulders of the giants of past generations, we may now
attempt to focus on the study of proper visual elements and visual evidence (and not just mate-
rial evidence as in the recently fashionable material turn) offered by the images themselves. For
this new turn in the field of art history a new iconography with new tools is needed. The new
iconographic classification by themes such as animal iconography, color, light, and music/sound
as offered by this publication is certainly the first step toward it.
Notes
1 Gregory the Great, Registrum epistolarum tomus II, libri VIII–XIV, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, ed.
P. Ewald and L.M. Hartmann (Berlin, 1899), 195, IX, 208.
2 “Je viens de trouver le sujet de ma these latine: Michel-Ange théologien. J’essaierai de montrer qu’il
n’y a dans la Sixtine aucune donnée qui soit de l’invention de Michel-Ange, et qui’il a suivi de très près
la Cité de Dieu de Saint-Augustine”: G. Giustiniani, “Gli esordi critici di Emile Mâle: le tesi in latino
sulle sibille,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Moyen Âge, 125/2 (2013), 585–620, esp. 585–86.
3 E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939), 3.
4 C. Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,” The Art Bulletin, 34, 3 (1952),
202–16, 202.
5 R. Klein, “Thoughts of Iconography,” in Form and Meaning: Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art,
trans. M. Jay and L. Wieseltier (New York, 1963), 143.
6 Gilbert, “Subject and Not-Subject” (as in note 4), 202.
7 Examples may be found, for example, in the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute. For a
possible critical development of this point see A. Nagel and L. Pericolo (ed.), Subject as Aporia in Early
Modern Art (Farnham, 2010).
8 Just to mention only one of the many possible examples, see M. Meiss, “Scholarship and Penitence in
the Early Renaissance: The Image of St. Jerome,” in Id., The Painter’s Choice: Problems in the Interpretation
of Renaissance Art (New York, 1976), 190 and 198, n. 7, where he establishes that the image of Jerome in
the wilderness, which was previously supposed to be a medieval subject, is, on the contrary, “extremely
rare” before 1400, since “no example is listed by the Index of Christian Art, which classifies subjects to
1400.”
9 Z. Véliz Bomford, “The Authority of Prints in Early Modern Spain,” Hispanic Research Journal 9:5
(2008), 416–36, 425.
10 C.P. Hourihane, “Classifying Subject Matter in Medieval Art: The Index of Christian Art at Princeton
University,” in C. Franceschini and K. Mazzucco (eds.), “Classifying Content: Photographic Collections and
Theories of Thematic Ordering,” Visual Resources 30:3 (2014), 255–62, esp. 256. Most of what follows in
this paragraph is taken from the introduction to the aforementioned special issue of Visual Resources (as
in note 24).
11 Hourihane, “Classifying Subject Matter in Medieval Art” (as in note 10), 258.
12 See “Le fonds photographique: La photothèque de Jacques Doucet: passé, présent, avenir,” Les Nouvelles
de l’INHA 15 (June 2003), 2–5, in particular p. 4.
13 Doucet (as in note 12), p. 4.
190
14 K. Mazzucco, “On the Reverse. Some Notes on Photographic Images from the Warburg Institute Pho-
tographic Collection,” Aisthesis 2 (2012), 217–32.
15 I. Ragusa, “Observation on the History of the Index,” in C. Hourihane (ed.), “The Princeton Index of
Christian Art,” Visual Resources 13:3–4 (1998), 243.
16 On the development of this scheme see J. Elsner and K. Lorenz, “The Genesis of Iconology,” Critical
Inquiry 38:3 (2012), 483–512. On the relations between Panofsky’s theory and the Index of Christian
Art see Hourihane, “Classifying Subject Matter in Medieval Art” (as in note 10), 259.
17 K. Mazzucco, “(Photographic) Subject-Matter: Fritz Saxl Indexing Mnemosyne – A Stratigraphy of the
Warburg Institute Photographic Collection’s System,” in Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classifying Con-
tent” (as in note 10), 201–21.
18 A complete subject index is available at http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/photographic-collection/subject-index.
19 See the website of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection and R. Duits, “A New Resource
Based on Old Principles: The Warburg Institute Iconographic Database,” in Franceschini and Mazzucco,
“Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 263–75, 263–66.
20 Duits, “A New Resource” (as in note 19), 266.
21 E. Sears, “American Iconography: Assessing FSA Photographs,” in Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classi-
fying Content” (as in note 10), 239–54.
22 E. Blaschke, “The Bettmann Archive and the Commodification of Images”, in Franceschini and
Mazzucco, “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 222–39, quotation on p. 230.
23 C. Morton, “Photography and the Comparative Method: The Construction of an Anthropological
Archive,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18:2 (June 2012), 369–96, p. 369.
24 Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Introduction,” in Franceschini and Mazzucco “Classifying Content” (as in
note 10), 175–76, and R. Bernardini, “Tracce: Jung e l’Archivio di Eranos,” in Jung a Eranos: il progetto
della psicologia complessa (Milan, 2011), 247–353.
25 E. Sears, “The Life and Work of Willliam S. Heckscher: Some Petit Perceptions,” Zeitschrift für Kunst-
geschichte 53:1 (1990), 107–34.
26 Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 176.
27 Franceschini and Mazzucco, “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 173.
28 For a philosophical insight into this type of approach, although relating to earlier periods, see P. Giaco-
moni, “Classificare per immagini,” Annuario 28 (2012), 301–21.
29 U. Derkcs, “‘And because the use of the photographic device is impossible without a proper card
catalog . . .’: The Typological-Stylistic Arrangement and the Subject Cross-Reference Index of the KHI’s
Phototek (1897–1930s),” in Franceschini and Mazzucco “Classifying Content” (as in note 10), 181–200.
30 J. Gleick, “How Google Dominates Us,” The New York Review of Books, August 18 (2011).
31 See at http://www.artstor.org/mission.
32 See, for example, the dedicated program at the Getty Institute: http://www.getty.edu/foundation/
initiatives/current/dah/index.html.
191
15
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
SUBJECT HEADINGS
Sherman Clarke
The Library of Congress (LC) collection is comprehensive and universal by topic, format, lan-
guage, and audience level; it serves as the national library of the United States, though it reports
specifically to the US Congress. It considers itself a comprehensive public library rather than a
research or special library. The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) system developed
in the era of the card catalog, long before the influence of computerization and web browsing
led us to think of searching by discrete terms or single words isolated from their context and
function for access to resources. LCSH is universal in coverage, primarily in American English,
and aims to use language that can be comprehended by a large and diverse audience.1 It is not a
specialized vocabulary, though it is used by many research collections, such as the Morgan Library,
Harvard University, Getty Research Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Terms are
based on literary warrant – that is, all terms are developed because they are needed for a work
being catalogued. LCSH is not a fully realized thesaurus as not all broader, narrower, and related
terms are connected by references. LCSH terminology may be freely searched on the LC site at
http://authorities.loc.gov.
In the card catalog, it was important for a subject heading string to include all aspects of the par-
ticular topic. The subject heading may be a single word, but “string” is here being used to refer to
the entire subject heading, which may consist of several words making up a main topic or concept
and various subdivisions. One might have a topic subdivided by subtopic, geography, chronology,
and/or form – for example, Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint – Apparitions and miracles – France –
History – 19th century; Hundred Years’ War, 1339–1453 – Campaigns – France – Limousin –
Exhibitions. To save typing in the card era as well as the inevitable typographical errors, there was
a limit to the number of subject headings that would be applied to any particular title.
It should be remembered that LCSH terms are mostly built for books, which can indeed be
on specialized topics but are not generally as specific as journal articles or single images may be.
They also mostly aim at access to the topical content of the book. Still, the terms can be used
to describe what is depicted in a single image or work of art. The Morgan Library, for example,
catalogues both its collection material and reference material in the same Corsair catalog. The
search result for “Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint – Art” includes both representations of the Virgin
and books about the topic. The Prints & Photographs Division of LC has developed the The-
saurus for Graphic Materials (TGM), which largely uses terms that are also in LCSH in the same
form.2 Some indexes to periodicals use LCSH, modified LCSH, or LCSH-like headings for the
192
Library of Congress subject headings
particular field covered by the index.3 Most libraries use the LCSH terminology as published
according to documented policies and procedures.
Subject cataloguing and classification guidelines in each discipline or field of knowledge
were developed by the LC subject or language team that catalogued those books, following gen-
eral principles. Cataloguers at the Library of Congress were assigned and specialized in either
descriptive or subject cataloguing, or in another area, such as serial publications or Dewey decimal
classification, as well as being language specialists. This led to some variation in practice about
subdivision order and to varying patterns in different classification schedules. Class N is the
main class for the visual arts, though photography is classified in TR. Other areas which are now
commonly collected by art and architecture libraries are also found outside N. City planning may
be in HT or elsewhere in the social sciences; cultural geography is in G with other geography;
landscape design is in SB with agriculture. Iconography, by its very nature, may fall pretty much
in any class, from religion to history to the social sciences. Regardless, the subject headings used
to provide access will adhere to LCSH guidelines.
Until the 1970s and 1980s, most cataloguers in the United States applied LC subject headings
by using the printed version (bound in red and known as the Red Books) or seeing how they
appeared on cards distributed by LC. A letter to LC policy experts could provide an explanation
of a particular subject heading or string. Cooperative cataloguing programs, a new edition of
the Anglo-American cataloguing rules in 1979, and computerization brought many changes to
the cataloguing world and the place of the Library of Congress within that world. LC certainly
retained, and retains, its central role but there are strong cooperative programs, such as NACO
and SACO, for name and subject cooperation respectively. As stated earlier, LCSH terminology is
freely available and searchable on the LC site at http://authorities.loc.gov.
LC held a subject heading workshop in the early 1980s, and the training materials for that
workshop developed into the publicly available manual now known as the Subject Headings Man-
ual. It contains general instructions for constructing subject headings, general patterns, patterns
specific to particular types of headings, free-floating subdivisions, and memos (as they are called)
about particular topics, such as geographic features, extinct cities, classes of persons, city sections,
fine arts, buildings, pictorial works, biblical topics, religious groups, and mythological characters.
The manual is now available online.4 Though aimed at cataloguers, some of the instructions may
be of benefit to the researcher in determining how to search for a topic.
Pattern headings are those that provide guidance on similar headings. If a subdivision or
practice is established under the pattern heading, it can be applied to similar headings without
explicit authorization. For example, subdivisions under Shakespeare can be applied to other
authors. Subdivisions under “English language,” “French language,” and “Romance languages”
can be applied to other languages and language groups. “Art, Italian” is the pattern for art head-
ings, along with “Art, Chinese [Japanese, Korean]” for headings particular to their Asian context.
Free-floating subdivisions are those that can be applied in LCSH without explicit authorization.
For example, the subdivision “– History” can be applied to a wide variety of headings. Other
free-floating subdivisions can be applied to types of headings, such as individual persons, classes of
persons, ethnic groups, individual corporate bodies, types of corporate bodies, animals, industries,
disciplines, and activities (Plate 2).
A conference on subject subdivisions was held in 1991 at Airlie House in Airlie, Virginia, and
is thus known as the Airlie House Conference.5 The conference built on studies of subdivisions
at LC and by subcommittees of the Subject Analysis Committee (SAC), the principal committee
of the American Library Association looking at subject access to library materials. Based on
the studies and the conference papers and discussion, the conference made several recommen-
dations, which began to be implemented by LC by the mid-1990s. Similar subdivisions have
193
Sherman Clarke
Plate 2 Trinity of Saint Anne with donor, Atelier of the Master of Rabenden, polychrome wood, c. 1515,
Unter den Linden Museum, Colmar (89.3.1). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
LCSH:
Note: The Anne-Mary-Jesus trio is not established in LCSH.
ICONOGRAPHY
Anne (Mother of the Virgin Mary), Saint – Art
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint – Art
Jesus Christ – Art
Patrons in art
Pomegranate in art
HEADINGS OTHER THAN ICONOGRAPHY
Sculpture, German – Germany – Munich – 16th century
Polychromy – Germany – Munich – 16th century
Meister von Rabenden, active 1510-1525, Studio of
been harmonized when the meaning was the same or substantially similar in intent and usage.
For example, “Description” was applied to cities and other local places and “Description and
travel” was applied to nations and other larger places; the subdivision for all places was conflated
to “Description and travel.” Order of subdivisions was regularized so that the order is “topic –
topical subdivision – geographic subdivision – chronological subdivision – form subdivision.”
Form and genre were to be separately coded to differentiate them from topical information.
Geographic subdivision was to be more comprehensively and consistently applied. More subject
headings built on patterns were to be explicitly established. The pattern “[topic] in art” became
one of the patterns which is explicitly established rather than applied in a free-floating manner.
194
This is primarily because it is a phrase heading, where explicit authorization is important, versus
a subdivision, where the main topic and subdivision can be authorized separately.
A change to subject headings for art materials also resulted from the conference and its
follow-through. Chronology had been handled in a way that resulted in two subject headings,
such as “Painting, German” and “Painting, Modern – 17th-18th centuries – Germany.” This
was simplified by allowing for chronological subdivision of “Painting, German,” resulting in the
single string “Painting, German – 17th century” (and/or 18th century, as warranted) (Fig. 15.1).
Maintenance of cataloguing records is a significant effort, though it is somewhat easier in
current computerized catalogues than it was in the card catalog. The difficulty of changing cards
led to reluctance in modernizing headings, which would affect potentially many thousands of
cards. Since current practice in US libraries generally involves each library maintaining its own
catalogues, changes in subject headings mean that catalogue records around the bibliographic
world will vary in their adherence to current LCSH terminology. The central database WorldCat
maintained by OCLC is regularly updated and revised based on changes in subjects and names
as well as advances in machine manipulation of records and clustering of records from diverse
sources. Authority vendors offer similar services to individual libraries to revise records. Still,
individual library databases may vary in their currency.
Geographic subdivision is now consistently applied, though the United States, Canada, and
the United Kingdom are subdivided through first-order subdivision (state, province, constituent
country) rather than nation. Early on, famous places such as Paris and London were subdivided
directly. Now, all local places are subdivided indirectly through a larger geographic entity. Geo-
graphic entities larger than a nation or that straddle nations or states are subdivided directly.
The only exception now to the indirect subdivision practice is Jerusalem and that is for polit-
ical reasons – for example, Painting, Gothic – England – London; Architecture, Romanesque –
Europe, Central; Psalters – Germany – Reichenau (Baden-Württemberg); Psalters – Macedonia
(Republic); Sculpture, Romanesque – Meuse River Valley; Temples – Jerusalem; Temples, Khmer –
Cambodia – Angkor (Extinct city). The form of names used in geographic subdivisions is based
on the Name Authority File, which in turn is based on the cataloguing rules (now Resource
Description and Access or RDA). Nonjurisdictional geographic names, such as bodies of water and
regions, are established in LCSH and can be used as warranted in geographic subdivision. Based
on the relevant rules and policies, most places are established in English and are the modern
(current) name for the place.
Chronological subdivision is fairly specific for historic periods and events but is generally not
more specific than century elsewhere. The century may be preceded by the subdivision “ – History,”
which can also appear without a specific period subdivision – for example, France – History – Louis
IV, 936–954; Peasants – France – Social life and customs – 16th century; Peasants – Germany –
History – 16th century; Pilgrims and pilgrimages – Middle East – History. Style terms such as
“Gothic” are generally not subdivided by chronology but may be combined with other subject
strings that include chronology – for example, Art, Gothic – France; Art, French – 14th century;
Architecture, Romanesque – France – Burgundy; Architecture – France – Burgundy – History –
12th century. Note that “Art” and “Architecture” have different patterns for chronological and geo-
graphic subdivision (unfortunately). Art is specified by a national or other adjective in inverted order;
the century is applied directly following any local place subdivision. Architecture may have style
adjectives in inverted order but is subdivided by place and then “– History” and then the century.
“Christian art and symbolism” is chronologically subdivided at an era level – for example, Christian
art and symbolism – Medieval, 500–1500; Christian art and symbolism – Modern period, 1500-. A
place subdivision may be inserted before the chronological subdivision – for example, Christian art
and symbolism – Croatia – Dalmatia – Medieval period, 500–1500.
195
Figure 15.1 Christ being nailed to the cross, Gerhard Remsich, c. 1538–9, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London (c. 276–1928). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
LCSH: Nailing of Christ to the Cross – V&A
Note: The denial and betrayal are both set up in LCSH and presumably any of the Passion steps could be
established. The “wealth of domestic detail” could be noted in detail but probably would not, in practice, go
as far as these examples, though the headings do show some variety in how the strings would be constructed.
ICONOGRAPHY
Jesus Christ – Passion – Art
Holy Cross in art
Carpenters in art
Carpentry – Tools – Pictorial works
Jerusalem – In art
Saints in art
Glass painting and staining – Germany – Steinfeld (North Rhine-Westphalia) – 16th century
Steinfeld (Premonstratensian abbey) [established by earlier cataloguing rules; current rules would probably
call for Abtei Steinfeld (Steinfeld, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany)]
Remsich, Gerhard, active 1522–1543 [he is not yet in LC/Names or ULAN]
Individual works of art and names of individual artists are established in the Name Authority
File. Artworks are established under the artist or title as appropriate, usually in English. Artists and
artworks can be used in LCSH but are not combined with topical subject headings. Rather, they
would appear in distinct subject strings and can be subdivided according to patterns and other
instructions – for example, Gislebertus, active 12th century – Adaptations; Book of Kells – Fiction;
Giotto, 1266?-1337. Crucifix (Padua, Italy). Subject access would be given in separate subject
heading strings – for example, Sculpture, Romanesque – France – Autun; Sculpture, French –
France – Autun – 12th century.
Iconography is handled in a variety of ways. One principal way that LCSH deals with topical
subjects is “[topic] in art” headings. Topics are generally expressed in the plural, following thesau-
rus standards for objects. Concepts are generally expressed in the singular. The topics or concepts
are generally also established without the “. . . in art” extension for iconographic treatments – for
example: Unicorns in art; Birds in art; Architecture in art; Buildings in art; Holy Cross in art;
Distress (Psychology) in art. “[Topic] in art” headings are not subdivided by place or time period.
Such a heading can be combined with other subject headings to cover place or time. For example,
representations of flowers in Ghent-Bruges manuscripts would be covered by “Flowers in art”
and headings such as “Illumination of books and manuscripts, Flemish – Belgium – Ghent – 15th
century” and “Illumination of books and manuscripts, Flemish – Belgium – Bruges – 15th century.”
For named entities such as corporate bodies, places, and works, the subdivision “– In art”
can be applied – for example, Musée du Louvre – In art; Florence (Italy) – In art; Bible – In art.
Representations of premodern persons as well as deities and mythological and legendary per-
sons are subdivided by “– Art.” Topics that are topically subdivided can also be subdivided by
“– Art” – for example, Hercules (Roman mythological character) – Art; Sebastian, Saint – Art;
Holy Cross – Legends – Art.
Modern (after 1400 or thereabouts) persons and families can be subdivided by “– Portraits” – for
example, Marie, de Médicis, Queen, consort of Henry IV, King of France, 1573–1642 – Portraits;
Medici, House of – Portraits. Other subdivisions, such as “– Family” or “– Travel,” are applied to
either premodern or modern persons and can be further subdivided by “– Portraits.” “Portraits”
can also be applied to classes of persons – for example, Henry II, King of England, 1133–1189 –
Family – Portraits; Emperors – Rome – Family – Portraits.
Places and other topics may also be subdivided by “– Pictorial works.” It should be stated that,
theoretically, “Pictorial works” is about the nature of the work being catalogued, not the contents
of the work. This is similar to “[topic] in art” but a book could be about dogs in art without being
a “pictorial work”6 – for example, Paris (France) – Pictorial works; Africans – Pictorial works;
Animals – France – Pictorial works; Architecture, Greek – Mediterranean Region – Pictorial
works. Also, when a topic is already subdivided by place or other aspect, “in art” would not be
appended for an iconographic treatment – for example, Birds – Ireland – Pictorial works. Subdi-
visions such as “– Pictorial works” are applied to all of the relevant subject heading strings on a
work being catalogued. This is particularly true of genre/form terms but is also the case with some
geographic and chronological subdivisions.
Individual literary and other works as well as individual authors and classes of literature may
be divided by “– Illustrations” – for example, Beowulf – Illustrations; Dante Alighieri, 1265–
1321. Divina commedia – Illustrations; Catholic Church. Gradual – Illustrations; Charlemagne,
Emperor, 742–814 – Legends – Illustrations.
For wars, the subdivision “– Art and the war” is applied to the topic – for example: Trojan War –
Art and the war; Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815 – Art and the wars. Usually when the war heading
is subdivided, the subdivision “– Pictorial works” will be used instead of “Art and the war” – for
example, Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815 – Campaigns – Italy – Pictorial works (Fig. 15.2).
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Sherman Clarke
Figure 15.2 Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, Western façade of the Abbey Church of St.-Gilles-du-Gard,
c. 1120–1160. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
LCSH: Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem - St-Gilles-du-Gard
Note: The event is the essential part of the iconography. The plants, animals, and setting could also be
indicated using LCSH.
ICONOGRAPHY
Jesus Christ – Entry into Jerusalem – Pictorial works
Jerusalem – In art
Palms in art
Processions in art
Donkeys in art
Relief (Sculpture), Romanesque – France – Saint-Gilles (Gard)
Relief (Sculpture), French – France – Saint-Gilles (Gard) – 12th century
Despite this disparity in handling iconography, the value of LCSH or any subject heading list
or thesaurus is in providing authorized forms for concepts, following guidelines. Consistency in
use of authorized forms leads to collocation of material on the concept. It needs to be noted that
subject analysis is, of course, subjective. Each cataloguer, even if applying the same vocabulary and
using the same procedures, may end up with different subject headings. This is partly based on
experience but also on point of view. That is, an art cataloguer will look with art eyes at a resource
to be catalogued; a history or theology expert could see the resource differently. We library
cataloguers naturally strive for objectivity and consistency in the application of subject analysis.
Constructing subject heading strings is clearly somewhat complicated. With this in mind,
OCLC started development of the Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) project
198
in conjunction with LC, SAC, and other partners.7 FAST is based on LCSH and grew out of
projects OCLC had been doing with digital collections where cataloguers might be the authors
of the documents or others not trained in library cataloguing. Topics and subtopics are in one
facet, places in another, form in yet another, with chronology faceted separately from the others.
Deconstructing the LCSH strings does mean that some words may be ambiguously matched. For
example, a work on Cistercian manuscripts created in Burgundy and housed in a Paris reposi-
tory could mix creation and provenance place access. Still, the ease of applying FAST headings
is attractive. The potential relevance of hits from a search can be determined by the person
searching.
Under the influence of web browsers and a desire to broaden searches to include databases and
digital collections, libraries and system vendors have developed software platforms referred to as
discovery layers. Such interfaces may provide collective access to library materials, journal data-
bases, archival finding aids, image databases, digital collections, authority files, resource vocabular-
ies, and other materials. These are usually characterized by a single search box in which one enters
words without indicating whether they represent authors, topics, publishers, or titles. That is, it is
similar to web browsing. The user can, in some discovery layers, then limit the search results by
particular aspects or facets, such as format, language, publication date, or subject. One-box search-
ing can lead to false matches since the subject strings will be deconstructed into words. A string
such as “Illumination of books and manuscripts, Ottonian – Byzantine influences” combines two
style/culture terms with an important relationship. The ease and ubiquity of searching in a web
browser, however, strongly influence library catalogue builders, and work is continually under-
way to make a library catalogue be smarter about holding onto the nuance of subject headings
in cataloguing, not relying merely on word occurrence and proximity to determine relevance.
Both FAST and discovery layers are possible and enhanced by the coding in library
records. Since the late 1960s, the main standard for coding of library data has been MARC
(MAchine-Readable Cataloguing). It has been stretched and revised for more than forty years
and may be nearing the end of its useful life. Efforts are underway to develop a new bibliographic
framework that will be adhere to Semantic Web and Linked Open Data standards, allowing richer
relationships between works, agents such as authors and illustrators, and subjects of various sorts
as well as genres and forms. In such an environment, it might be possible to have a relationship
coding that indicated that something was depicted. That thing could be a person (living or dead,
or legendary or imaginary), institution, place, concept, event, work, or topic with “depiction”
as the relationship between the work being catalogued and the thing depicted. LCSH subject
strings were not built for such an environment. MARC does allow for inclusion of terminology
from other vocabularies, such as Iconclass or the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, with the source
vocabulary explicitly coded.
LC, SAC, and others have been working on a separate genre/form thesaurus (LCGFT) for the
past several years.8 Some areas have already been developed. This will allow more focused access
and lessen the need for long strings. Presently, the headings in the record for an exhibition cata-
logue will each have the subdivision “– Exhibitions.” With full implementation of genre/form
headings, the LCGFT term “Exhibition catalogs” would replace the subdivision on the topical
headings as well as clarify that “– Exhibitions” generally stands for the catalogue of an exhibition.
As with FAST and other faceted searching, it might lead to some false hits.
Subject heading strings, by their nature and as practiced in LCSH, have a certain amount of
redundancy within the cataloguing for a particular work. That is, each string needs to cover
an aspect of the topic, and subdivisions like place and time are often relevant to more than one
aspect. The subdivisions, particularly place and genre/form, may repeat in each of the strings.
Work on LCGFT is promising, though it will probably be some time before the terms will fully
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replace the subdivisions and significant catalogue maintenance will be necessary for full imple-
mentation. In the meantime, LCSH will continue to be the principal subject heading system used
by most North American libraries as well as libraries elsewhere around the world.
Notes
1 Foreign-language terms that are widely used in English are established in the foreign language – for
example, Ut pictura poesis (Aesthetics); Catalogues raisonnés (used as heading as well as subdivision under
individual persons).
2 For more information on TGM and to search terms, see http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/tgm/
(accessed August 20, 2015).
3 Art Source uses some headings which are the same as LCSH (Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
Devotion to), mostly LCSH (Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint – Purification – In art; LCSH would be just –
Art), direct order–style headings (Venetian art, rather than Art – Italy – Venice as in LCSH), and other
modifications. The Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals uses LCSH-style headings along with AAT,
but subdivisions are given in a different order.
4 http://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeSHM/freeshm.html (accessed August 12, 2015).
5 The Future of Subdivisions in the Library of Congress Subject Headings System: Report from the Subject
Subdivisions Conference Sponsored by the Library of Congress, May 9–12, 1991 (Washington, DC, 1992).
6 The purpose of this essay is to talk about the coverage, structure, and usage of LCSH. Much has been
written on ABOUT-ness and OF-ness in cataloguing of art and resources about art, and the separation
is not absolute. A picture book of dogs tells us about dogs.
7 For more information on FAST, see L.M. Chan and E.T. O’Neill, FAST: Faceted Application of Subject
Terminology (Santa Barbara, 2010).
8 For more information on LCGFT and to search terms: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/genreForms.html
(accessed August 13, 2015).
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16
ICONCLASS
A key to collaboration in the digital humanities
In a speech he gave at the Royal Library of the Netherlands on September 10, 1999, Pierre
Vinken, CEO of Reed-Elsevier,1 fondly remembered his conversations with Henri van de Waal
some thirty years earlier. Back in those days Vinken combined his work as a neurosurgeon with
his job as editor of Excerpta Medica,2 but was also engaged in art historical research.3 More specif-
ically, Vinken recalled that in the 1960s he worked on a subject classification system for medical
information, while Van de Waal was working on something similar for art history. Both he and
Van de Waal were stimulated by the possibilities computers had to offer for the processing of large
data collections. Their joint fascination was the underlying theory of information and knowledge
organization: “we were looking for the best way to structure an index, to design a comprehensive
classification, to standardize a terminology.” Vinken and Van de Waal enjoyed their conversations
“like fathers who cannot stop talking about their children.” However, Vinken added, “I don’t
think we could have had these discussions with many other people, because there were not many
of those children around.”
In the preface to the abridged edition of Iconclass, published in 1968, Van de Waal wrote, “We
hope with this edition to draw attention to the possibilities of information collation and retrieval
by means of computers. These possibilities have interested us ever since we started this project –
almost two decades ago – but which now have become technologically possible.”4 Whatever the
exact scope of this interest in information technology, which he dated back to the late 1940s, it
is indeed safe to assume that Van de Waal could not discuss his ideas on this topic in depth with
many colleagues in the humanities. When he mentioned his intentions to use computers for the
creation of an index to the first complete edition of the Iconclass system, at a CNRS (Centre
national de la recherche scientifique) conference in Paris in 1969,5 he had to defend himself to
objections made by “adversaries of mechanization,” who feared “too great facility of use, danger
of popularization, introduction of an inhuman factor into the humanities.” Van de Waal defended
his choice by pointing out that the
computer is a memory and a means of communication; it receives only what is

brought to it by man; gives only answers compatible with the questions presented
to it . . . it does not solve the formal essential problems in the history of art: because
of this it will always be essential in these studies to have well classified series of
reproductions.6
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The computerized index, so Van de Waal announced at this conference, would be created on
a computer “dressé par nos amis Allemands.”7 It is not clear who these German friends were, but
the forty thousand concepts, sixty thousand index terms, and fifty thousand bibliographic refer-
ences that composed the Iconclass system according to Van de Waal’s estimate were certainly not
entered into a computer at this stage. A little later, his contact with Vinken seemed to provide
Van de Waal with an opportunity to actually use computers. In 1971 Frans van der Walle, devel-
oper for Infonet, the firm that created a computer system for Excerpta Medica,8 wrote a quotation
for a computerized version of Iconclass. This project would involve the computerization of the
Iconclass schedules, the alphabetical index to the classification, and the Iconclass bibliography.9
The project brief contains the first attempt to describe the structure of the Iconclass system from
the point of view of information science. It analyzed the properties of the system as it existed on
paper, for the purpose of recreating it in a computerized form. Not surprisingly, the description
of the notational structure began with a reference to the abridged edition of the Iconclass sys-
tem, which formed the bulk of the Decimal Index of the Art of the Low Countries (DIAL).10
This DIAL was published in a single volume in 1968 and included an introduction of ten pages
explaining the principles of the classification. Eventually, Infonet was not awarded a contract,
and the input of Iconclass data in a computer started some seven years later, on August 16, 1978.
The computer used at that time was an IBM mainframe at the Centraal Rekeninstituut (CRI) of
Leiden University.11
The Infonet proposal was not implemented, and the DIAL introduction predates the first
processing of Iconclass data by a decade. Still, these texts illustrate key features of the system and
of Van de Waal’s ideas about its use. A few of these features shall be discussed. But first, it will be
helpful to readers to summarize its basic principles even though this chapter is not intended as a
general introduction to Iconclass.12
Some general principles

Iconclass was conceived to address a problem that Van de Waal described as follows:13
That there is such a thing as the problem of iconographic classification is known to

everybody who ever tried to get a reply on an iconographic question, as e.g.: How
was the Annunciation portrayed in 17th-century Dutch painting? In an interior, in a
church? With an Angel, or without? If with an Angel, is that Angel represented flying
or walking, is he with wings or without? You all know that in the actual state of things
it is almost impossible to get a conclusive reply to such questions which – purely icono-
graphic as they may be – nevertheless may represent an important link in various kinds
of investigations. If we could solve these problems, the results – I think – would be to
the profit of art history in the largest possible sense of the word.
Like all systematic classifications, the Iconclass system groups concepts into classes, each with their
own members, who may again be a class, thus creating hierarchical chains of concepts.
As these concepts describe the subject matter of cultural artifacts, they are often multidi-
mensional, and the similarity between them is subjective, almost intuitive, as is illustrated by the
following list of categories:
4 Society, Civilization, Culture

46 social and economic life, transport and communication
46A communal life
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Iconclass
46A1 social stratification, social groups

46A2 social contrast
46A3 public welfare
46A4 relations between races
46A5 linguistic communication
46A6 societies and directory boards
46A7 crowd, mob
46A8 unusual manners of living
46A9 primitive social structure
The location of a concept in a chain is expressed by an alphanumeric notation: the more specific
a concept, the longer its notation. Therefore, a series of related subjects can be indicated by a
simpler notation than any of the subdivisions.

46A communal life
46A21 contrast between rich and poor
46A211 bad rich man, good poor man
46A212 giving alms or other charity, e.g.: handing out food
46A213 philanthropist . . .
Much of the system’s content – naturally – is based on the observation of images, so many con-
cept definitions function as ready-made labels waiting to be assigned to images.14
For Van de Waal, the system’s principle resembled that of a geographical map,15 in the sense
that it should try to represent the structure of a whole area, rather than identify all locations. The
consistency of the structure should allow for continued subdividing, and to be of practical use,
concepts should also be easily citable. Alphanumeric notations answered the second demand:
complex definitions could be easily encoded and cited. The first goal – a consistent structure of
the whole area – required many hours of observation, data collection, analysis, and experiment.
By 1964, enough effort had been invested in this to enable Van de Waal to declare,
I soon found, that all the portrayable could be reduced to a few fundamental main-
divisions. I chose:
(1) The Supernatural
(2) Nature
(3) Man
(4) Society
(5) Abstracts
In these five main sections, which form a system, closed in itself, there is in principle
a place for each possible subject.16
However, as Van de Waal also soon discovered, specific instances of many of the subjects included
in these five categories could be identified in history, mythology, and literature. For example, the
general subject of giving alms, found in the list just referred to as “46A212 giving alms or other
203
charity, e.g.: handing out food,” is also found in biblical stories – for example, “71W122 Job
giving alms, relieving the poor.” Although the latter case is an instance of the alms-giving theme,
it also has another dimension, as it is part of the biblical story of Job’s piety:
7 Bible
71 Old Testament
71W the book of Job
71W1 Job’s wealth and piety
(Job 1:1–5)
71W12 the piety of Job
71W122 Job giving alms, relieving the poor
As Van de Waal put it in 1964,
We get as a supplement to the general sequences the following main divisions of a

unique (“historical”) character:
(6) History
(7) Bible
(8) Myths and legends, tales (with exception of class. ant.)
(9) Myths and legends, of class. ant.
In the final published form of the Iconclass system, some divisions or classes were renamed,17 and
there were to be some shifts – for example, classical history moved to class 9 – but Van de Waal’s
basic principle – the division between “general” and “specific” subjects – remained intact.
Designed on paper: the flexibility of the Iconclass structure

There is an instructive difference between the description of the basic structure of Iconclass
in the introduction to DIAL: “like any decimal classification our system can be extended
from the left to the right, from main groups into an unlimited number of subdivisions,”18 and
in the Infonet brief: “every classification consists of an alphanumeric code with a fixed length
of 13 symbols.”19
The contradiction between “an unlimited number of subdivisions” and “a fixed length of
13 symbols” may seem a minor detail, indicative of the restrictions of many early database man-
agement systems, but it is also symptomatic for the tension between Iconclass’s very flexible
organization of themes and motifs and the more rigid logic of software systems. The reason
for this tension is simple: the Iconclass schedules and its system of notations20 were constructed
on paper, which allowed the logic of the notational system to develop “organically,” sometimes
almost on an ad hoc basis. Whether this logic would actually work in a computer was seriously
tested after the notational system had been completed. Moreover, its first emanation as a computer
file had the production of a static, printed system as its objective,21 so there was no real need for
dynamic functionality in this first application. The human user supplied that functionality. A
simple example helps to understand the issue. When the following list is examined, it will come
naturally to read these lines from top to bottom:

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Iconclass
46A communal life

46A21 contrast between rich and poor
There may also be a little difficulty interpreting this as a group of related concepts of increasing
specificity, expressed by the notations at the start of each line. However, while this can be simply
read from the line starting with 46A to the next line starting with 46A2, a computer algorithm
designed to allow the user to descend this hierarchy might very well trip over the fact that 46A1
is missing from this sequence.
So, the translation of the paper version of Iconclass into a computer system had to deal with
both aspects of the system. The notational structure had to be made totally consistent, and the
instructions for its use – which were scattered over the seven printed volumes – had to be trans-
formed into a single rule base, a “grammar” for Iconclass language. This translation was quite a
complicated process, because
although the repertoire of human concepts is in a sense hierarchical . . . it is nonetheless

extremely different in nature from the precise and rigid way that concepts are built up
systematically and strictly hierarchically in mathematics or computer science.22
By the end of the 1980s, an Iconclass datafile had been imported into several different database
management systems, which resulted in divergent adaptations of the file to its new “habitats.”23
In some applications, for example, the original spacing of notations was preserved. Most algo-
rithms would by default interpret 46 A 21 2 as a series of four “words.” In others, the spaces
were removed, so 46A212 became a single “word,” requiring different algorithms. In addition to
this, different database systems offered different options for the retrieval or sorting of Iconclass
concepts.
Initially it was thought that the creation of an authoritative machine-readable Iconclass file,
accompanied by an exhaustive grammar, would reduce the risk of divergencies and dialects.24 It
soon became clear that the integration of an authoritative file and a grammar into an autonomous
application would be a far better solution,25 and in 1992 the first version of an Iconclass browser
was published.26
Words, keywords, and cross-references

The Infonet project aimed to produce printed versions of the Iconclass schedules, bibliography,
and the alphabetic index. Beyond the algorithms that could produce these book pages, no further
retrieval functionalities were required, although the programmers promised to take future devel-
opments into account. In particular, they foresaw “online queries, consisting of, for example,
logical combinations of Iconclass codes and keywords.”27
An example of the keywords they were thinking about would be “alms,” which would
retrieve circa fifteen different concepts from the system, among which:

71W122 Job giving alms, relieving the poor
In all, an entry vocabulary of some sixty thousand handpicked keywords was built to help locate
concepts in the systematic schedules. Van de Waal, however, had more ambitious ideas about
205
Figure 16.1 Iconclass system volume 2–3, p. XIX: this subtle manner of ordering concepts was not
supported by the data.
helping users to find concepts. The Infonet brief, the DIAL, and the general introduction to
the first Iconclass volume (2–3) described an elaborate system of cross-references that he hoped
would be “in itself a tool for iconographic research.”28
This sample from Volume 2–3 may not immediately betray the amount of manual preparation
that would have been needed to produce this type of output. However, if examined closely it
will be realized that the sort order of these concept definitions would require the manual tag-
ging of all the words which were marked with small dots. Eventually, these ideas could not be
206
Iconclass
implemented. The Alphabetic Index, although elaborate and extremely useful, was based on the
simpler principle of sorting the concepts according to their notation.
Coding of works of art with more than one subject

As the DIAL was first of all a collection of photocards, ordered by subject – that is, Iconclass
notation – the identification of multiple subjects in the same picture necessitated multiple prints.
It was clear, therefore, to Van de Waal that “a more or less complete analysis of the numerous
details within pictures could only be attempted successfully with the aid of a computer. The
Iconclass system in its unabridged form can be of great use for such a task.”29 When Van de Waal
wrote this, in 1968, using Iconclass in a computerized format was not yet a realistic option, and
working with a limitless number of digital reproductions of works of art was not even a fantasy.
Things have changed.
Iconclass, a tool in a digital world

In the final part of this essay the results of some of these changes shall be examined. The point of
departure shall be an image that illustrates an already mentioned concept:
Figure 16.2 A man blowing his own horn while giving alms (Georgette de Montenay, Emblèmes ou devises
chrestiennes [edition: Frankfurt 1619], emblem 90).
207
This picture of a man giving alms to a beggar is part of an emblem by the sixteenth-century
Protestant author Georgette de Montenay.30 The motto Ne tibiis canatur31 and the fact that
the donor is playing a trumpet while dropping a coin in the bowl show that giving alms
describes only part of the subject matter. Christ’s message to “give to the needy in secrecy,”
here blatantly ignored by the donor who “blows his own horn,” adds an important thematic
dimension.
The same Gospel chapter instructs Christians “to not let your left hand know what your right
hand is doing” when helping others.32 This phrase is quoted in another book of moral instruction
which was also popular in the early modern period. “Mikrokosmos – Parvus Mundus,” originally
by Laurentius Haechtanus and Gerard de Jode,33 shows in its fifty-eighth emblem the rich man
Archilla hiding a purse under a pillow, after his initial offer to help them financially had been
rejected by his destitute friends (shown in the background). The German version by Martin
Meyer calls Archilla an example of a true friend.
The biblical idea that the poor should be secretly helped to ensure that the act is free from
self-interest is a fairly general one, as is the definition of the Iconclass concept:
73C7425 “ . . . that your alms may be in secret” ~ doctrine of Christ on possessions

(Matthew 6:4)
To convey this abstract Christian doctrine, a specific story from classical antiquity is used on the
one hand, while on the other hand the acts of “giving” and of “trompetter” are represented in a
literal, concrete form. These modest images demonstrate that Van de Waal’s distinction between
“general” and “specific” subjects does not coincide with levels of abstraction, since the more spe-
cific concept definition – “giving alms or other charity, e.g.: handing out food” is found among
the general subjects of Class 4 Society, Civilization, Culture.
The whole purpose of using a classification or any type of controlled vocabulary, for that
matter, is its capacity to create and retrieve groups. By deliberately reducing the variety of the
words and phrases used for the description of what is visible, similar phenomena will be labeled
in the same way. Consider the first picture. In describing the act of the donor we have used both
“playing a trumpet” and “blowing his own horn.” It would be easy to imagine other variants to
describe a person blowing a trumpet, horn, or other wind instruments. By using the standardized
phrases from a classification instead, systematic grouping is ensured and retrieval becomes much
easier – for example:
48C7352 horn, trumpet, cornet, trombone, tuba

48C7525 one person playing wind instrument
It is equally easy to see that in a database that uses a classification for information retrieval, much
larger groups of similar material can be retrieved just by using a shorter form of the notation.
The common denominator of these two concepts is:
48C7 music
and Van de Waal took it for granted that future computer systems would have no trouble filtering
all representations of the notion “music” from a bibliography or a photo archive, if they were
indexed with this notation. He also foresaw that “a more or less complete analysis of the numer-
ous details within pictures could only be attempted successfully with the aid of a computer.”34
208
Iconclass
The automatic creation of groups of shared details might lead to unexpected observations and
research questions. Again, a simple example should suffice. The beggar holding up his bowl to
catch the donor’s coin is obviously handicapped. His right leg is bandaged and his foot seems
to be missing; he also supports himself on low crutches. He thus combines details of different
levels of abstraction: he is obviously poor and he has a physical handicap. His poverty, although
visualized in a very concrete way – lifting a begging bowl – is also a more abstract condition,
which places him in a social group:

46A communal life
46A15 the poor
46A151 beggar
46A1511 begging bowl
It is important to realize that identifying and labelling a concrete detail such as a begging bowl in
a picture automatically associate it with a more abstract concept – for example, the social group
the poor. It is easy to find images where a physical handicap is used as a shorthand expression,
like a default word in a visual language, for a beggar.
3 Human Being, Man in General

31 man in a general biological sense
31A the (nude) human figure; “Corpo humano” (Ripa)
31A4 disabilities, deformations and monstrosities; diseases
31A41 disabilities, deformations
31A415 crippled
31A4153 crutches
The application of Iconclass thus allows easy retrieval of series of pictures combining the
details found in these examples, randomly selected from a database of documents indexed with
Iconclass.35
These pictures of Saint Martin offering part of his cloak to a beggar, and of a beggar with
crutches and a wooden leg,36 also demonstrate that what is a detail in one picture can easily be
the main theme in another one.
For the creation of series, and the documentation of traditions, it is important to realize
that categories are often fluid and their members may change with the context. The picture
of Saint Martin and both emblem pictures simultaneously illustrate the concrete act of giving
and the abstract notion of Generosity, here shown as it appears in the online Iconclass browser
(Fig. 16.4).
Upon closer inspection this browser screenshot tells quite a lot about the transformation over
time of the Iconclass system, and also about its potential when used on the Internet. First of all,
the context of every concept is immediately clear because its broader terms – its path through
the hierarchy – is always shown. The keywords, originally handpicked for the alphabetic index,
are shown in italics. They can be used in logical combinations to retrieve concepts. In this case,
for example, the combination of giving+abstract+idea will not only retrieve the abstract concept
of Generosity but also automatically exclude well over 150 biblical scenes as well as classical
209
Figure 16.3 (a) Saint Martin gives part of his cloak to a beggar. From Hours of Simon de Varie, Paris, c. 1455.
(The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 74 G 37, fol. 80r).
mythology that involve an act of giving. The “see also” cross-references are fully operable, but
with the present version of the browser, they have also become user-driven, which allows the
community of users to enrich the system, going beyond the original ideas of Van de Waal about
the role of the system.
210
Iconclass
Figure 16.3 (b) Beggar on crutches (print made by Pieter Langendijk, after a design by Pieter Barbiers I,
second quarter eighteenth century).
Figure 16.4 Screenshot from the Iconclass browser – at: http://iconclass.org/rkd/55C21.
The user as collaborator and editor

It is clear that Iconclass has a variety of options available to catalogue representations of “giving.”
While the indexer will choose the concept(s) that will best fit the focus or the context of the
documents, the focus of an end user may be different from that of the original indexer. The
211
default description of the scene of Saint Martin and the beggar, for example, does not mention a
potential physical handicap, beggar’s attributes, or crutches:
11H(MARTIN)41 St. Martin divides his cloak (i.e. the charity of St. Martin): he is usually
shown on horseback, cutting his cloak with his sword, or putting part of the cloak round
the shoulders of a beggar who kneels beside him
Using only this default Iconclass concept will not find pictures it has been assigned to, findable
with, for example, the keyword “crutches.”
Now imagine a researcher who is aware of the iconography of Saint Martin and searches for
representations of that theme from a collection of images, not because he is primarily interested
in the saint’s iconography, but – much broader - in the “visible signs of Poverty, like the crutches
that often are the attributes of the handicapped and the old. It is not unlikely that the descriptive
metadata found in a web catalogue will not explicitly mention the subject details the researcher
is interested in. It would then be helpful if a web catalogue’s interface offers this researcher the
possibility to tag the details he or she is interested in, with the help of the same vocabulary that
was used by the cataloguer – in other words, with the help of the online Iconclass browser. For
the storage and transfer of concepts from the online Iconclass system to target databases or web-
sites, the browser has been equipped with a dedicated clipboard functionality. Dependent on the
functional design of the target website, researchers can participate in the cataloguing process,
creating their own layers of descriptive metadata, which they can share with their colleagues.37
Needless to say this development could not have been envisaged by Van de Waal, no matter how
much of a visionary he was.
Another feature of the online browser would probably have pleased Van de Waal. Every
researcher who has registered as a user of the online browser also has the possibility to suggest
improvements and expansions to the system in real time. One of the options that is easiest to use is
that of creating additional cross-references, and the following screenshot illustrates this (Fig. 16.5).
Originally, the printed Iconclass system contained a single cross-reference at 46A212 – that is, the
one to 46A33 charitable works. Over time this has expanded, showing that users can indeed help
to transform the system into a much more dynamic tool than could be imagined in the 1960s.
Figure 16.5 Screenshot from the Iconclass browser – at: http://iconclass.org/rkd/46A212.
212
Iconclass
To exploit its true potential, and allow others to make the most of the thousands of hours
that have been invested in the system, Iconclass has been made available as Linked Open Data.
This aspect of the online system is treated separately in the technical appendix at the end of this
chapter.
In addition there is also a special retrieval version of the Iconclass browser, which can be
inserted as a plug-in to most modern websites, virtually without a programming effort.38 To
make use of this service, all that is needed is a copy of the Iconclass notations that were actually
used in a database and the unique identifiers – shelfmarks, inventory numbers – that identify the
document or object the Iconclass concepts have been assigned to. Since this Harvester of Iconclass
Metadata (HIM) acts as a web service, edits of the Iconclass browser are immediately available for
the website “plugged into” the service.
Typical of this is the Arkyves site, where a query is submitted that combines – in one big
“OR” – all those concepts that have been discussed earlier as additional cross-references for:
To conclude we quote Henri van de Waal’s wisdom one final time:
We may smile at such a formule (which as a matter of fact I often do); as long as we are
aware that such a system is nothing more than a tool, no harm is done. But in many
instances the evolution of human knowledge has been determined by the development
of our tools. And the best tools are forged by those who have become conscious of
their failing.39
Technical appendix: enriching metadata using Iconclass

It is all easy to use Iconclass as a tool to describe images, but this is a useless activity if there is no
equivalent tool to subsequently search the resultant collection. In this section the effectiveness
of the Iconclass structure and rich multilingual textual descriptions in retrieval systems will be
described. When recording metadata for a given item from a collection it is sufficient to store
the alphanumeric Iconclass notation. For example, here is a simplified selection of fields for an
item from the Rijksmuseum collection.40
TITLE Het korporaalschap van kapitein Frans Banninck Cocq en luitenant Willem
van Ruytenburch, bekend als de “Nachtwacht” (voormalige titel); Officieren en andere
schutters van wijk II in Amsterdam onder leiding van kapitein Frans Banninck Cocq en
luitenant Willem van Ruytenburch, bekend als de “Nachtwacht’
CREATOR schilder: Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn
DATE 1642–1642
ICONCLASS 31D11222 ; 34B11 ; 45(+26) ; 45C1 ; 45D12 ; 48C7341
When a searchable index is made, the “extra” textual information for each of these codes
at indexing time is retrieved. The language used to retrieve this extra textual information
can be selected. Each Iconclass notation can be referenced on a HTTP URI41 containing a
data representation that can be ingested by software. This is also known as “Linked Data.”42
For example, taking the first entry of the codes from the foregoing metadata record, if it is
213
viewed at the address http://iconclass.org/31D11222.json, the following structured data43

are returned:
"n": “31D11222,”
"p": [
"3,”
"31,”
"31D,”
"31D1,”
"31D11,”
"31D112,”
"31D1122"
],
"c": ["31D11222(+0),” "31D11222(+1),” "31D11222(+2),”
"31D11222(+3),” "31D11222(+4),” "31D11222(+5),”
"31D11222(+6),” "31D11222(+7),” "31D11222(+8),”
"31D11222(+9),” "31D112220"],
"txt": {
"fr": "fille (entre toute petite et adolescente),”
"en": "girl (child between toddler and youth),”
"de": "Mädchen (Kind zwischen Kleinkindalter und Jugend),”
"it": "ragazza (bambina tra fanciullezza e giovinezza),”
"fi": "girl (child between toddler and youth)"},
"kw": {
"fr": ["biologie,” "enfant,” "fille,” "petite enfance,”
"vie,” "âge,” "être humain"],
"en": ["age,” "biology,” "child,” "girl,” "human being,”
"infancy,” "life"],
"de": ["Alter,” "Biologie,” "Kind,” "Kindheit (frühe),”
"Leben,” "Mädchen,” "Mensch"],
"it": ["bambino/a,” "biologia,” "essere umano,” "età,”
"infanzia,” "ragazza,” "vita"],
"fi": ["biologia,” "elämä,” "henki,” "ihminen,” "ikä,”
"lapsi,” "lapsuus,” "tyttö"]}
For the “p” (path) key in the data, an ordered list of parent path notations are listed, progressively
becoming broader. For each of the Iconclass codes in the metadata record to be indexed, the path
key is retrieved and a set of new Iconclass codes is built for which the relevant codes are retrieved.
The indexing software references the same URI for each entry in the path, automatically add-
ing a richer collection of texts to the object being indexed. So if the cataloguer was interested in
indexing the “Nachtwacht” using the German texts, the codes
31D11222 ; 34B11 ; 45(+26) ; 45C1 ; 45D12 ; 48C7341
are expanded to
3 ; 31 ; 31D ; 31D1 ; 31D11 ; 31D112 ; 31D1122 ; 31D11222 ; 34 ;

34B ; 34B1 ; 34B11 ; 4 ; 45 ; 45(+2) ; 45(+26) ; 45C ; 45C1 ;
45D ; 45D1 ; 45D12 ; 48 ; 48C ; 48C7 ; 48C73 ; 48C734 ; 48C7341
214
Iconclass
For each of these listed codes the structured representation (as described earlier) is referenced, and
from the “txt” and “kw” fields the chosen language string is selected.
This expansion of the codes and selection of the textual data results in this richer text string:
(militärische) Fahnen und Standarten; Kind (unbestimmten Geschlechts); Fahnen-

träger (beim Militär); Kunst; Kriegsführung; Militär; die Künste; die Künstler; Kind
zwischen Kleinkindalter und Jugend (unbestimmten Geschlechts); der Mensch
(allgemein); Gesellschaft, Zivilisation, Kultur; Haustiere, die zu Hause gehalten
werden; die Lebensalter des Menschen: erste Jahre; die Lebensalter des Menschen;
Mädchen (Kind zwischen Kleinkindalter und Jugend); Haustiere (innerhalb und
außerhalb des Hauses); Hund; Musikinstrumente; Gruppe von Musikinstrumenten;
Waffen; Trommel; Schlaginstrumente; der Mensch im allgemein-biologischem Sinn;
Mensch und Tier; Ausrüstung und Versorgung des Militärs; Abzeichen; Gliederung
der Streitkräfte; Dienstgrade; Musik; das menschliche Leben und die Lebensalter
(jung, erwachsen, alt etc.); Alter; Ausrüstung; Berufe; Biologie; Fahne; Fahnenträger;
Gesellschaft; Haustier; Heeresangelegenheiten; Hund; Kind; Kindheit (frühe); Kultur;
Kunst; Künstler; Leben; Mensch; Musik; Musikinstrument; Mädchen; Schlaginstru-
ment; Standarte; Tier; Trommel (Musikinstrument); Versorgung; Waffe; Zivilisation;
im Hause; innen
The foregoing string is added to the indexing of the record and can be used in textual queries for
that item in combination with the metadata as added by the original cataloguer.
The same can be done for any of the supported Iconclass languages if there is a need to cater
for various audiences. It needs to be emphasized that the cataloguer doing the description of a
collection does not need to be working in the same language as the end user. This feature has
been put to great use for international collections, spanning English/German/Italian/French
collaborations.
Enriching the metadata of an object using the Iconclass codes at indexing time means that
the codes can be “hidden” from the end user and need not encumber the search process with an
overly complicated user interface. All queries can be done using familiar full-text query interfaces
popularized by search engines. Under the hood, the full power of enhanced precision or broader
recall is still retained if needed by using the raw hierarchy of Iconclass codes in a “specialist”
mode.
Note that Iconclass can be effectively used to describe textual materials and not only the classic
application to art historical pictorial items. The strategies outlined earlier have been used in the
Arkyves database44 to also classify diverse textual collections.
Notes
1 Pierre Vinken combined a career as a neurosurgeon with a rich variety of positions in the world of
libraries and publishing, probably being best known internationally as the first chairman of the board
of directors of Reed-Elsevier. He also published widely in the field of art history and iconography. The
memories of Vinken I quote here are to be found in his biography: P. Fentrop, Tegen het idealisme: Een
biografie van Pierre Vinken (Amsterdam, 2007), 186–87.
2 The early emanation of the system of medical abstracts that is now EMBASE. See http://www.elsevier.
com/solutions/embase (URI of August 2015).
3 See P.J. Vinken, “H.L. Spiegel’s Antrum Platonicum: A Contribution to the Iconology of the Heart,”
Oud Holland 75, 1960, 125–42.
4 Also noted by C. Richter Sherman, in her article “Iconclass: A Historical Perspective,” Visual Resources,
IV (1987), 242.
215
5 H. van de Waal, Système de classification iconographique “ICONCLASS” et la collection de reproductions

D.I.A.L. (Decimal Index of the Art of the Low Countries). A summary of the lecture was published in the
series “Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Bibliographie d’
Histoire de l’Art,” Paris, March 25–26, 1969, 187–90.
6 Van de Waal, Système de classification iconographique “ICONCLASS” (as in note 5), 187.
7 Van de Waal, Système de classification iconographique “ICONCLASS” (as in note 5), 189.
8 R.R. Blanken and P.J. Vinken, Medical Databases: Medline versus Excerpta Medica, in: E.H. Fredriksson,
A Century of Scientific Publishing (Amsterdam, 2001), available as e-book at: http://ebooks.iospress.nl/
book/a-century-of-science-publishing.
9 F. van de Walle and P.L.W. Aerts, Memo 4–71–31: Globale Analyse Iconografisch Bibliografie Systeem.
Unpublished typescript, dated 1971.
10 H. van de Waal, Decimal Index of the Art of the Low Countries: Abridged Edition of the Iconclass System (The
Hague, 1968), 5–14.
11 Personal communication from Ger Duijfjes-Vellekoop, who has recorded the exact date of the first
input. However, no details are recorded about the contact of Van de Waal and Guus Zoutendijk, who
had been appointed in 1964 as professor of applied mathematics and director of the Centraal Rekenin-
stituut (CRI) in Leiden. André van de Waal kindly informed me about this, but neither he nor Leendert
Couprie or Els Tholen could provide additional information.
12 The selective bibliography lists quite a number of articles that describe the system in detail.
13 H. van de Waal, Some Principles of a General Iconographical Classification, in: Actes du Cinquième Con-
grès International d’Esthétique / Proceeding of the Fifth International Congress of Aesthetics (Amsterdam,
1964), 728.
14 Originally, “images” were limited to physical images – (reproductions of) paintings, prints, drawings,
sculpture, and so forth. From the 1990s onward “images” were also understood to be the mental images
evoked by texts.
15 On topography Van de Waal published “De rangschikking en catalogiseering van een topografischen
atlas,” Oudheidkundig Jaarboek 9 (1940), 14–25.
16 H. van de Waal, Some Principles of a General Iconographical Classification (as in note 13), 730.
17 Class 0 (zero) was added to the computer version in the 1990s, so these are now the ten main classes:
0 Abstract, Non-representational Art

1 Religion and Magic
2 Nature
3 Human Being, Man in General
5 Abstract Ideas and Concepts
6 History
7 Bible
8 Literature
9 Classical Mythology and Ancient History
18 H. van de Waal, Decimal Index of the Art of the Low Countries (as in note 10), 5.
19 F. van de Walle and P.L.W. Aerts, Memo 4–71–31, section 2 (as in note 9), 7.
20 Also called “signatures” by Van de Waal.
21 The data input that started in August 1978 resulted in the three volumes of the Alphabetic Index, which
were published in 1985.
22 D. Hofstadter and E. Sandler, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (New York,
2013), 54.
23 In particular the Marburger Index, the Automazione del Catalogo dei Beni Culturali, and the Witt Computer
Index. See J.P.J. Brandhorst and P. van Huisstede, Report on the Iconclass Workshop, June 26–28, 1989,
Special Issue of Visual Resources VIII (1992), 51–52, for references to these projects.
24 See J.P.J. Brandhorst and P. van Huisstede, Report on the Iconclass Workshop, June 26–28, 1989, Special
Issue of Visual Resources VIII (1992), i–xiv and 1–78. The final chapter of the report was called Descrip-
tion of Characteristic Functions of an Iconclass Retrieval System.
25 J.P.J. Brandhorst and P. van Huisstede, “Iconclass: Recent Developments,” Visual Resources VIII (1992),
367–82.
216
Iconclass
26 The Iconclass browser was published in 1992 by the department of Computers & Humanities of Utre-
cht University, the University of Leiden’s Department of Art History, and the Iconclass Research and
Development Group.
27 F. van de Walle and P.L.W. Aerts, Memo 4–71–31, section 6 (as in note 9), 1.
28 Iconclass system volume 2–3, p. XIX. To implement this idea would have required a very elaborate
further enrichment of the data, with a lot of extra work.
30 Georgette de Montenay, Emblèmes ou devises chrestiennes, was first published in Lyons, in 1567. Ne tibiis
canatur is emblem number 90. The book was republished several times in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries and the original French text was translated into Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, Eng-
lish, and Dutch. Various editions are available online, at http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/
books.php?id=FMOb and http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:monumentaemblema00mont, for
example.
31 http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FMOa090 gives a literal translation: “Do
not sound the pipes.” N.Z. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2000), p. 25, translates it
as “Don’t blow your own horn.”
32 Matthew 6:2–4.
33 The illustration is found in Martin Meyer, Homo microcosmus, hoc est: parvus mundus . . . etc. (Frankfurt,
Daniel Fievet, 1670), of which a digital edition is to be found at here: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/
UIUCOCA:homomicrocosmush00meye. Emblem 58 is found here: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/
EmblemRegistry:E010167.
35 The Arkyves database: http://arkyves.org. See also http://www.brill.com/products/online-resources/
arkyves.
36 Digital copy at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-46.573.
37 These options are available on the Arkyves website. For a description of the integration of the Iconclass
Clipboard and Arkyves, see http://arkyves.org/static/misc/Arkyves%20Annotate.pdf.
38 The Harvester of Iconclass Metadata (HIM) service can be seen in action at several websites at http://
www.virtuelles-kupferstichkabinett.de/?subPage=icbrowser.
39 H. van de Waal, Some Principles of a General Iconographical Classification, in: Actes du Cinquième Congrès
International d’Esthétique / Proceeding of the Fifth International Congress of Aesthetics (Amsterdam, 1964), 733.
40 http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/collectie/SK-C-5: note that the Rijksmuseum publishes its caption in the
original Dutch.
41 See http://iconclass.org/help/lod.
42 For more information see http://linkeddata.org. And in the case of Iconclass the data are also available
under an open license, making it Linked Open Data (LOD).
43 These data are in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format (http://www.json.org), a widely used
lightweight data-interchange format. The data can also be retrieved in the SKOS RDF dialect under
http://iconclass.org/31D11222.rdf – see http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/intro.
44 http://arkyves.org.
Selective bibliography
J. van den Berg, J.P.J. Brandhorst, J.W.J.M. Broeren, P. van Huisstede, B. Jongejan, and G.J. Duijfjes-
Vellekoop, Iconclass Browser User’s Guide (Utrecht, 1992).
J. van den Berg, and G.J. Duijfjes-Vellekoop, “Translating Iconclass and the Connectivity Concept of the
Iconclass2000 Browser,” in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index
of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 1999), 291–307.
J.P.J. Brandhorst and P. van Huisstede, “Report on the Iconclass Workshop, June 26–28, 1989,” Visual
Resources VIII (1992), i–xiv and 1–78.
J.P.J. Brandhorst and P. van Huisstede, “Iconclass: Recent Developments,” Visual Resources VIII (1992),
367–382.
A.E. Cawkell, Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Information Technology and Systems (Bowker, 1993), 132–154. (In the
lemma Images Catherine Gordon describes the use of Iconclass at the Witt Library.)
L. Heusinger, Ikonographie und die Iconclass – Datei, Marburger Informations-, Dokumentations- und
Administrations-System (MIDAS): Handbuch (Munich, 1989), section 60, 361–424.
C.R. Sherman, “Iconclass: A Historical Perspective,” Visual Resources IV (1987), 237–246.
217
R. van Straten and L.D. Couprie, “Corrections of the Iconclass System,” Visual Resources V (1988), 123–134.
R. van Straten, An Introduction to Iconography: Symbols, Allusions and Meaning in the Visual Arts (Documenting
the Image) (Langhorne, PA, 1994), in particular chapter 7: “Iconclass: A New Method of Research in
Iconography,” and the appendix, “An Overview of the Iconclass System.”
C. Togneri, “Iconclass and Its Application to Primary Documents,” in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration
of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 1999), 259–271.
H. van de Waal, Decimal Index of the Art of the Low Countries: Abridged Edition of the Iconclass System (The
Hague, 1968, 2nd edition 1971).
H. van de Waal, Iconclass: An Iconographic Classification System, completed and edited by L.D. Couprie with
R.H. Fuchs, E. Tholen, and G. Vellekoop (Amsterdam, 1974–1985), 17 volumes.
H. van de Waal, Iconclass, edizione italiana a cura di Marco Lattanzi, Simona Ciofetta, Elena Plances (Rome,
2000), 8 volumes.
www.iconclass.org: the online browser of the Iconclass system, launched on November 10, 2009. Since
the launch some two thousand corrections and expansions were incorporated in the online system.
H. van de Waal, “De rangschikking en catalogiseering van een topografischen atlas,” Oudheidkundig Jaarboek
9 (1940), 14–25.
H. van de Waal, Propositions pour une méthode générale de classification iconographique. 2ème Congrès. Florence,
September 28 – October 1, 1960 (typescript of a lecture).
H. van de Waal, “Some Principles of a General Iconographical Classification,” Actes du Cinquième Congrès Interna-
tional d’Esthétique/Proceeding of the Fifth International Congress of Aesthetics (Amsterdam, 1964).
H. van de Waal, A General System for Filing Photographs according to Their Subject Matter. Unpublished typescript
of a lecture delivered in St. Gallen in August 1971.
218
PART III
Themes in medieval art

17
RELIGIOUS ICONOGRAPHY
Marina Vicelja
Definition of the field, methodological considerations,

and a brief historical overview
Religious iconography in medieval Europe was related to Christianity, its philosophical funda-
ments, messages, and ideas, from the time of the emperors Constantine and Theodosius in the
fourth century. It was the “Age of Faith” since the supreme authority of the Church influenced
every aspect of medieval life. Visual arts were structured around the liturgical calendar and
religious festivals, and were shaped by theological dogmas, treatises, and commentaries. The pri-
mary sources for this iconography are literary, the main being the Bible and apocryphal writings,
as well as the texts of the Church Fathers and other prominent Christian writers. Also included
are other important sourcebooks that developed later in the Middle Ages, such as Legenda aurea
(The Golden Legend), written by the Genoese bishop Jacobus de Voragine around 1265, Med-
itationes Vitae Christi, Biblia Pauperum, and Speculum Humanae Salvationis.1 However, Christian
imagery was not shaped exclusively by text; it was also influenced by mystical visions, sermons,
liturgical practices, medieval drama, poetry, daily life, and the visual arts of preceding periods
and cultures, primarily Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Egyptian. The Weighing of Souls, as part of
the Last Judgement, in which St. Michael weighs souls based on the deeds during their life on
earth, is derived from the Greek psychostasia or kerostasia, a divine determination of fate, but was
also influenced by the Egyptian Weighing of the Heart, in which the dead were judged by the god
Anubis.2 There are countless examples testifying to the complex origins of various motifs and
dynamic changes in the representational forms and modes affected by multiple factors. This
resulted in a rich corpus of images with specific and sometimes unique iconographic forms.
Hence, the thirteenth-century scene of the Nativity above the main portal of the cathedral in
the Dalmatian town of Trogir (Fig. 17.1) was apparently influenced by medieval theatre, visible
in the theatrical display of the central scene taking place on a stage which added to its dramatic
qualities and significance.3
In more than a thousand-year period covered in this essay, it is clear that all these elements
changed, and this resulted in an extensive shift in context, content, style, and the methods of rep-
resentation. Iconography deals not only with the identification, description, and classification of themes
and subjects in art but also with assessing their significance and function within social and reli-
gious contexts, in different historical periods and different geographic areas. Much of the recent
221
Marina Vicelja
Figure 17.1 Master Radovan, Nativity, lunette above the entrance to the Cathedral of Trogir, Croatia,
thirteenth century. Image courtesy of Marina Vicelja.
approach is devoted to the reception of images by medieval viewers and the reconstruction of
the role and impact of images on the audience through concepts such as imitation, competition,
wish for grandeur and prestige, censorship, prudishness, and political influence.4 Iconographic
analysis of religious art is close to a “literary approach” to the visual arts; it is concerned with the
norms and canons of representation, the thoughts, ideas, and texts from which representational
conventions have arisen, symbolism, symmetry, order, and the dynamic concepts of every evolu-
tionary stage, as well as recognizing individual creativity and invention and separating tradition
from innovation. It is possible to say that medieval “artists” constructed compositions using
compliant interpretation – they were logical and adequately communicated the content; they
were literally visualizing, which sometimes unintentionally resulted in a misunderstanding of
the meaning when texts were rigidly transferred into visual signs; or else there may have been
an uncontrolled interpretation that embedded concepts and ideas with different and sometimes
new meaning.5 This is especially the case in later medieval art when representations of biblical
events were modeled and brought up to date using anachronisms in architecture or other scenic
details, such as clothes or other accessories or elements in the image. Hans Memling situated the
scene of the Crucifixion in a typical late medieval surrounding and represented Christ’s con-
temporaries as medieval citizens, noblemen, and common folk. These disjunctions in medieval
art do not necessarily reveal the inabilities or ignorance of the medieval artist. Sometimes it was
the way linear time and history in sacred events were “understood”: art configured time differ-
ently; it was its function to collapse temporal distance since religious narratives, though set up in
history, contained spiritual meaning that was omni-temporal and could move an event from its
real historical frame and connect it to the beholders in the present.6
One of the central issues within the field has been the relationship between text (word) and
image, often engaging researchers in complicated debates about the primacy or relevancy of each
format in communicating the meaning.7 The case was mostly based upon Gregory the Great’s
letter to Serenus, bishop of Marseilles, in which the pope rebuked Serenus for destroying images
by asserting that
For what writing presents to readers, this a picture presents to the unlearned who
behold, since in it even the ignorant see what they ought to follow; in it the illiterate
read. Hence, and chiefly to the nations, the picture is instead of reading.8
222
Religious iconography
This statement largely shaped the Western perspective on religious art as a “Bible of the illit-
erate” and was seldom challenged during the Middle Ages. Its importance as the means of
defending art from iconoclasms throughout the centuries has been the focus of more recent
studies that have revealed different layers of meaning to the original text and its latter interpre-
tations, especially with regard to images as representing the invisible truth.9 Images have been
defined in their manifold capacity: as the adornment of God’s earthly house, the symbols of
Ecclesia, and the principal emblems of the universal church, as effective narratives that sustained
verbal communication and endorsed education, and, most of all, in their capacity to convey
and communicate meaning and messages, and to lift the mind to God. They were capable of
representing spirituality through material elements, such as forms, colors, and especially light,
and they have been considered active and productive more than just reproductive. The capacity
to transmit messages, either in narratives or as symbols, rested on their particular mediality and
their “bodies.”10 They were experienced as inseparable from their “bodies,” which, to a large
extent, determined the mode of representation, the choice of content, the access to the object,
and the way they were to be received (e.g., private versus public veneration).11 This did not
imply just the materials and techniques of execution but also the spatial context – the place they
were meant for. Within the original environment, the image constructed its identity, logic, and
significance, and it was within this context that its meaning could be adequately grasped. Images
were interactive with the audience, which added new perspectives to their role and power – they
were venerated, adored, carried in processions, touched, kissed, approached by believers, but also
criticized, violated, and destroyed in the iconoclastic periods, of which the Byzantine iconoclas-
tic movement led in the attempts to redefine the role of images and to reduce and restrict their
“power” in the religious world.12
Interest in the description and cataloguing of religious subjects is documented as early as
the sixteenth century in Italy with publications that classified and briefly described themes and
subjects of ancient mythology, such as Illustrium imagines by Giacomo Mazzocchi (1517), Achil-
les Statius’s Imagines et elogia vivorum inlustrium (1570), or Giovanni Canini’s Iconografia (1669).13
The most popular and influential was Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, published in Rome in 1593 (the
first illustrated edition in 1603; discussed elsewhere in this volume), which presented allegorical
personifications of figures such as virtues and vices, arts and sciences in an alphabetic order.14
Iconographic manuals largely provided rules and guidelines about what to depict and how to do
it. They were more formally accepted after the Council of Trent,15 when they were composed
to support the theological education of artists, to give instructions on complex dogma and truth.
At the same time an interest in Christian themes appeared with the project to edit the lives of
the saints that was structurally continued by Jean Bolland, who founded Acta Sanctorum, which
had become the main source for the iconography of the saints. With the establishment of the
Société des Bollandistes in Brussels in 1837 the intensive publication of works related to hagiog-
raphy began, with important publications such as Analecta Bollandiniana, Subsidia hagiohraphica,
and Martyrologium Romanum, all of which would be significant sources for saintly iconography.16
The interest in Christian subjects and art was intensified in France from the mid-nineteenth
century; several important lexicons and manuals were published that opened a new direction
in this iconographical research, among others A. N. Didron’s Iconographie chrétienne: Histoire de
Dieu (Paris, 1843), A. N. Didron and J. Durand’s Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne grecque et latine
(Paris, 1845), A. Crosnier’s Iconographie chrétienne (Paris, 1848), É. Mâle’s L’art religieux du XIIIe
siècle en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’inspiration (Paris, 1898),
F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq’s Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (Paris, 1907–1953),
and L. Bréhier’s L’art chrétien: Son développment iconographique des origines à nos jours (Paris, 1918).
Particularly important is the work of Émile Mâle, who discussed the need for a comprehensive
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knowledge and understanding of images through a thorough analysis of displayed content within
the framework of medieval art:
In medieval art every form clothes a thought; one could say that thought works within
the material and fashions it. [. . .] The art of the Middle Ages is first and foremost a
sacred writing of which every artist must learn the characters. [. . .] In the art of the
Middle Ages everything depicted is informed by a quickening spirit.17
Mâle introduced the analysis of medieval iconography as the visualization of theological thoughts
and Christian texts that preserved the “philosophy of medieval times” and represented the foun-
dation of artistic expression.18 His introduction of “iconography” as a hallmark of his methodol-
ogy and as a core explication of medieval art established him as a founder of the “French School
of iconography” as a modern and objective discipline,19 which was paralleled in Germany by
scholars who developed interpretative strategies that also viewed Christian art in larger social,
religious, and political contexts as well as referencing Greco-Roman art and culture. The “Ger-
man School” was represented by Anton Springer, Joseph Dölger, Heinrich Detzel, Theodore
Klauser, and Karl Künstle, who, with his edition Iconographie der christlichen Kunst (1926–1928),
inaugurated the publishing of great reference works, such as Gertrud Schiller’s Iconographie der
christlichen Kunst (1966) and Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, edited by Engelbert Kirschbaum
(1968–1976). Although not as extensive as German lexicons, the six volumes of Louis Réau’s
Iconographie de l’art chrétien (1955–1959) remains in my opinion the benchmark for the study of
Christian iconography, despite the fact that some parts have been superseded by more recent
research. The author’s endeavor to implement a new structure for cataloguing biblical and hag-
iographic themes, not in alphabetical order but in larger thematic clusters, produced a real com-
pendium, which was easy to understand. It also had an important introduction that recapitulated
the principal elements of iconography. Réau emphasized the importance of defining methodo-
logical approach(es) in iconography so that it would not be seen as just an auxiliary discipline, the
task most intensely worked on by Erwin Panofsky and his followers. Another scholar interested
in structures was Charles Rufus Morey, who founded the Index of Christian Art at Princeton
University in 1917 as the institution involved in establishing ways of classifying works of art
according to their iconographic themes.20 The Index has grown into the largest collection of
recorded works of art of the Middle Ages, enabling researchers to explore iconography using a
variety of means (an in-house structure as well as the Iconclass classification system, designed by
Henri van der Waal at the University of Leiden in the early 1950s).21 Van der Waal’s enterprise
was promoted by Roelof van Straten’s handbook Een inleiding in de iconografie: Enige theoretische en
praktische kennis (An Introduction to Iconography; 1985), which has become an indispensable text-
book for students. More recent dictionaries and manuals have been mostly dedicated to specific
subjects, such as saints, medieval calendars, and eschatological themes, but the need to compile
a critical reference book of iconography based on a contemporary interdisciplinary approach is
recognized in Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art, edited by
Helene Roberts (1998), and Dictionnaire critique d’iconographie occidentale, edited by Xavier Barral
i Altet (2003).
Unlike the aforementioned authors, André Grabar was not interested in creating lexicons,
cataloguing subjects, or investigating their variants and provenance. Instead, he approached the
subject more theoretically and searched for the creative mechanisms of images and iconographic
schemes that represented theological and political ideas, as shown in his seminal work Christian
Iconography: A Study of Its Origins (1968).22 He also extended his research to Byzantine art and
iconography as well as to Islamic and Jewish art, contributing to the methodological shift toward
224
the general relations between East and West. This was continued in the work by many great
scholars involved in Christian iconography, such as Ernst Kitzinger, Kurt Weitzmann, Richard
Krautheimer, Henry Maguire, Alexei Lidov, Beat Brenk Herbert Kessler, Thomas Mathews, Vik-
tor Elbern, Gerhart Ladner, Fabrizio Bisconti, Hans Belting, Jérôme Baschet, Jean Wirth, or Jaś
Elsner – to mention just a few from the long list of scholars who dedicated their work to specific
problems in Christian iconography.
The poststructuralist period from the 1980s influenced research in Christian iconography as
it did in other disciplines. Texts were focused on particular issues and delivered case studies or
were more interested in the broader and critical analysis of the context regarding images (art)
as objects-products of a specific period. Researchers were under the influence and pressure of
various philosophical movements or growing disciplines, such as semiotics, anthropology, and
gender studies, which resulted in reexamining the ideas of the “fathers of the discipline” in
new interpretations, reshaping methodologies, and, in conclusion, the fragmented and diverse
approaches, practices, and theories. Considering the vast and continually growing bibliography,
it is a difficult task to write an overview of the modern and recent scholarly contribution to the
field of Christian iconography in reference to the Middle Ages.
Iconographic topography – art and its context(s)

Most religious art in the Middle Ages was produced for sacred spaces. Church space underwent
an intricate and complex development not only in terms of its architecture but also with regard
to its symbolic function, since the church was perceived not just as a building but also as a reality
that achieves its purpose through interaction with its community and through the special codes
by which the space was used, adorned, and understood. Church architecture has an iconography
of its own – comprising the symbolic significance of the parts of a structure and the relations
between inner spaces and specific religious rituals.23 It encompassed the concept of Ecclesia in
the best possible way – the union of the living, the dead, and the celestial powers, governed by the
cosmic order. The embellishment of churches was ruled by accurately defined principles.24 The
choice of themes depended largely on the function and symbolic significance of the space they
were meant for, the liturgy, and the viewer, so that the iconographic schemes (that were often
repetitive and almost standardized) were strictly structuralized on the basis of the parallelism of
the meaning of the “place” in the real space and spiritual sense. Therefore, the symbolic signif-
icance of up-down, south-north, east-west, right-left correlated with the theological interpre-
tations of the terms – the good and more valuable was designed for the right, east, or south part
of a building or representation, while the bad and less relevant was restricted to the left, west,
or north side; the infinite, the sublime, and the spirit resided in the heavenly “above,” whereas
the man and his corporeal realm dwelt in the material “below.” The line that divided the two
domains was situated in the capital’s zone and architectonically corresponded with the area that
mediated between the supporters (pilasters, columns, walls) and the load thrusting down upon it.
A church building became a model of the universe, with the heavens hovering in the ceiling and
the earth placed in the lower levels. This scheme was elaborated in the early Byzantine period
upon Plotinus’s vision of the world and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, for
whom light was closely associated with God, beauty, and the good and was emanated down to
earth to animate and transform inert matter into being.25 Light transformed the interior of a
church into a divine dwelling space so that by using its symbolic values, as well as the construction
laws, the upper parts of churches, lit by large windows, became the place for the most elevated
persons or scenes of Christian iconography.26 With the introduction of the dome in early Byz-
antine architecture, a vertical axis was created as the foundation for the hierarchical system of
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Byzantine iconographic programs: in the dome Christ was represented as the holiest figure and
the Ruler of All, who embraced the congregation below.27 A level below the Mother of God was
depicted in the apse, followed by the narrative scenes of the life of Christ (Festival Cycle)28 in the
upper zones – pendentives and vaults of the cross-arms – and by the choir of saints, often at the
level of the beholder to indicate their earthly nature and good deeds that provided them a place
in heaven.29 It is interesting to point up to the relation between “analogue” and “adequate” in
the example of placing the evangelists on the pendentives of the dome: they represent the four
fundaments of the faith, the same way the triangular constructive segments support the dome.
This scheme, together with the naturalistic representations, became the framework for creating
the “real presence” of the holy figures and the holy events in the church, and the innovation or
changes in pictorial representations were not desirable; traditional forms ensured recognizability
and logic in understanding the images.
The Western tradition retained the longitudinal plan of the early Christian basilica through-
out the medieval period, with the axis leading from the entrance to the apse, the singular symbolic
focus of the interior. The conch of the apse acquired the utmost symbolic significance as the
space for both Christ and the Virgin. The horizontal axis reenacted the passing from the west
to the east, the passage of homo viator (man wanderer between two worlds) toward the source of
salvation and the place of the Eucharist.30 This passage started with the transfer from the outer
world to the consecrated space through the entrance, which acquired special symbolic meaning
as well as appropriate iconography.31 The dominant theme on the façades and contra-façades
is the triumphal eschatological vision of Christ in Majesty of the Second Coming and the
Last Judgment.32 Having originated from religious narrative, these monumental representations
served didactic and admonitory purposes enabling specific actions and evoking emotions, such
as repentance, fear, and guilt.
Following the foregoing scheme it is possible to discern the spatial disposition in a church that
influenced medieval iconography, creating a specific psychological impact on the viewer. The
apse contained the images referring to Christ’s sacrifice and the theme of incarnation as well as
the role of the Virgin Mary as a protectress and advocate – all directing to hope and salvation, but
also the tenderness and care for every believer.33 Exiting the church the upholder was presented
with images of the Passion, Resurrection, heaven and hell, virtues and vices – the synthesis of the
Christian doctrine and world order as a reminder for proper Christian conduct.
The congruence between space and image made a strong and logical bond: themes and sub-
jects were selected for a specific part of the church and they became an integral part of the ritual.
Images were not only intended for observation but also considered “present” at the moment
of liturgy.34 In the baptisteries, for example, the representation of the Baptism of Christ corre-
sponded to the baptism of the catechumen celebrated in the space;35 the representation of the
Last Supper in the refectory in monasteries had a sacramental message, but it was also viewed as a
model for the Imitatio Christi.36 Pictorial programs were carefully developed and constructed but
also fell within the laws of communicating message. A medieval observer possessed a far more
potent imaginative sensibility heightened by rhetoric, and he could see more and beyond the dis-
played. The image must have seemed to him a carefully balanced mixture of realism and abstrac-
tion, expressed by a combination of the human and the divine in predominantly Christological
iconography.37 If the elaborate program of the apse in the Eufrasius’s basilica in Poreč is looked at
(Fig. 17.2) it is possible to discern different connotations and implications that exceed liturgical
and religious messages and involve a private and political sphere.38 “Reading” the mosaic from
the top down, following the central axis, it is possible to see the sequence of Christological refer-
ences: Christ seated on a globe among his disciples, representing his Second Coming, is followed
by the image of the Lamb in the apex of the intrados of the arch. Beneath, in the center of the
226
Figure 17.2 Mosaic program in the apse of the Eufrasius’s basilica in Poreč, Croatia, sixth century. Image
courtesy of R. Kosinozic.
apse vault, the enthroned Virgin holds the Child on her lap – the scene is accentuated by the
presence of God’s hand with the crown of glory above the Virgin’s head. Just below the Virgin’s
throne is the image of an archangel holding the orb with an inscribed cross and three concentric
rings of emanating light – the sign of the Trinity and the visualization of the words in the highest
zone of the composition held by Christ: Ego sum lux vera. The Hill of Golgotha with the cross,
flanked by candlesticks, is found in the section of opus sectile below the mosaic level. The dom-
inant vertical axis has its horizontal extensions in the images that are found in zones. The
uppermost image of Christ is flanked by his Apostles; the medallion with the Lamb is among the
medallions containing busts of the virgin-saints, while the central image with the Mother of God
is flanked by three saints to her left and the patron, Saint Maurus, Bishop Eufrasius, Archdeacon
Claudius, and a child named Eufraisus to her right. Bishop Eufrasius thus appeared in the favored
position, to the right of the Virgin and Christ, depicted as a worthy successor to the illustrious
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first bishop of the town. The scenes illustrate the idea of Incarnation and the dogmatic discourse
of the two natures of Christ as well as enhancing the statement of Chalcedonian orthodoxy and
the doctrine of the Trinity. The whole program also confirms Eufrasius’s standing in the matter
of the orthodoxy within the turbulent historic moment dominated by the schism of the Three
Chapters that seriously threatened the unity of the Christian world.39 Constructed in the visual
language of the Early Byzantine period, symmetry and hierarchy, the pictorial program develops
descending from the upper zone, reserved for the representation of God in Glory, to the lower
zones, where Christ’s human nature is represented through the acceptance of the Incarnation,
Mary as Theotokos and the idea of Logos embodied in flesh to redeem the world, as suggested
by the image of the cross on Golgotha just above the bishop’s throne.
Iconographic methods and thematic density

Along with the laws that determined spatial significance, different times within the medieval
period used different methods to transpose words and ideas into pictorial representations. The
early Christian and early medieval periods used symbols and symbolic scenes, similar to picto-
rial language and ideograms that transmit a message to those who comprehend the meaning of
the signs. Thus, the depiction of a shepherd in ecclesiastical vestments tending sheep was not
perceived literally but as a symbolic representation of Christ the Good Shepherd, who “kept
and protected those who believed in him” (Isaiah 40:11). The imagery of the early Christian
periods consists of the language of graphic, zoomorphic, and anthropomorphic symbols (cross,
anchor, dove, fish, lamb, peacock, shepherd, philosopher-teacher, fisher, orant) as well as “abbre-
viated” scenes (Daniel with lions, stories of Noah, Jonah and Moses, Chris’s miracles, etc.).
Within this type of imagery, symbolism may have been the most theologically broad, encom-
passing central Christian values and ideas of the early Church.40 However, these images were
ambiguous and may have had several different significations, sometimes even simultaneously.
The fish, for example, could be a Christological symbol (the Greek word for fish, YXΘYΣ, is
the acronym for Jesus Christ, Son of God Savior), or could refer to the miracle of the multi-
plication of loaves and fishes, or, if it appears on the table in a meal scene, it could denote the
funerary banquet or eschatological significance intended for the Last Supper. Early Christian
art often adapted and transformed elements from “pagan art” of the contemporaneous artistic
environment, transforming Orpheus or Helios into Christ, the sheep-carrying figure in the
Good Shepherd, the veiled figure of pietas into the orant, and so forth. One of the main foci in
the iconographic programs of the early Church was the hope of salvation and resurrection
from death as promised at baptism. This was manifested in the divine figure of Christ and
through his miracles, which constitute a considerable corpus in early art. The iconography of
the early periods was prevalently Christological, representing an incarnated or transcendent
Jesus, and the prominent episodes of his life that represent his human and divine attributes.
This duality was epitomized in his portrait that was composed upon doctrinal and theological
disputes as well as tradition and miraculous stories – mandilion and Veronica’s veil as “images
made without hands” (acheiropoietos) – that hold special place in the history of icon painting.
These sources justify the variety of Jesus’s depictions: beardless and youthful, bearded and
austere – even elderly, but there is still an element of disagreement as to whether the various
portrayals relate to doctrinal controversies or express specific roles. Missing among the newly
constructed images of Christ were scenes of the Passion. Although a central biblical event,
the Crucifixion was introduced somewhat late – not before the fifth century.41 Passion events
were represented through visual metaphors, such as a cross, a wreathed Christogram, the Lamb
of God, or typological Old Testament scenes, such as Abraham’s Offering of Isaac. Instead, the
228
message of the victory over death, modeled on Christ’s resurrection, was very early composed
in representations of the empty tomb and the Ascension42 or in the scene of the Raising of
Lazarus as a prefigurement of Christ’s own resurrection.
Gradually, text-based iconography and the use of narrative took over in the later period of
the Middle Ages – the change began in the eleventh century and was influenced by the reform
of the Church. Instead of representing the complexity of dogmatic and doctrinal symbolism,
Romanesque iconography illustrated texts in a reduced mode, according to the pars pro toto (“a
part for the whole”) principle. In this approach all that was mentioned in the text was presented
in the image so that elements such as scenery, accessories, architectural setting, or supporting fig-
ures entered the scene as important parts of the content. Unlike Byzantine art, where figures are
named by inscriptions, in Western art a new category developed – the attribute, a visual sign as
part of a character which identified the person. Attributes can be general, denoting a particular
category (a halo for saints, a palm branch for the martyrs, a book for the apostles), or individual,
referring to a specific event from the life of the person depicted (keys for St. Peter, wheel for St.
Catherine). If attributes were not entirely transposed into signs, but were interpreted as objects
with a function, a grotesque image could result: St. Peter Martyr standing prudently, with his
eyes open and with a knife or sword embedded in his skull. Similar combinations can also be
found with saints carrying parts of their bodies while graciously gazing at the viewer. The
number of attributes multiplied over time to the extent that identification is frequently difficult.
This was partially generated by a growing interest in the individual stories and lives of the saints
but also in nonsaintly figures (popes, bishops) and laypersons. The choice of themes was not
limited and the interest was transferred from the miracles, symbolical scenes, and Old Testament
stories toward the events from Christ’s life, especially the Passion cycle.43 The most important
iconographic change that mirrored the innovative culture of the period was the emergence
of a narrative tradition that developed a discourse whereby the world and the word could be
presented and “read” as texts.44 This revitalized the concept of monumental and public art, the
great programs that represented biblical themes in a storytelling manner, the introduction of
new genres (daily life, medieval symbolism, mystical visions, hagiographical stories, micro- and
macrocosmos, etc.), the epic, and the vernacular.45 The Gregorian Reform also influenced the
development of medieval art and iconography, although the scope of its influence remains a
subject of scholarly debate.46
The Gothic changed the reductive method into extensive pictorial narration, which resulted
in the loss of balance between the important and the subordinate for the representation, as well
as between principal and supporting characters. The amount of “information” in the images
increased and one scene could develop in several successive clips. This made a considerable
impression on the viewer, but was also more time-consuming and asked for more concentration
in viewing the pictorial programs. Conversely, the representations were transparent and easy to
comprehend, and, with the help of more elaborate technology, engaged beholders more power-
fully in visual communication.47 At the same time, this period saw a demand for a more intimate
involvement in spiritual matters, using images among lay folk so that a parallel world of works
for private devotion developed. This influenced the language and iconography of Gothic art,
especially in the iconography of saints and mystical visions. Images were used as propaganda,
which developed the specific category of heraldry but also the representations of rulers and
governments, decorum and courtly life, chivalric love, romance, and various forms of virtuous life.
Public art became more theatrical and dramatic, with specific themes elaborated in detail, such as
scenes of the Passion and the Crucifixion, which were colored with elements of suffering, pain,
blood, and wounds in order to bring the beholder closer to compassio with Christ. The trium-
phant Romanesque Christ was supplanted by the suffering Christ, whose emphasized humanity
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became the object of devotion and imitation. The twelfth century based devotion and piety upon
the intense emotion and sensuality which would be especially demonstrated in the role of Mary,
who was transformed from Stabat Mater to Mater Dolorosa in various adaptations of the image:
Pietà, Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, Mother of Sorrows, and the Deposition from the Cross.48
It was the time of the resurgence of Marian devotion in the West and the East49 and her iconog-
raphy was enriched with new details from the scenes of her early life and the development of the
special iconographic types of the Madonna of Majesty, the Nursing Madonna (Maddona Lactans),
the Virgin of Mercy, the Adoration of the Christ, and others (Fig. 17.3).
In the Middle Ages death was one of the central themes, both through spiritual learning and
its presence in daily, physical experience. Death was a terrifying fact but also a desired event since
a new, better, eternal life was expected. Thus the main eschatological themes – the “last things” –
were connected with the representation of Christ’s death and the events that followed particularly
in the impressive composition of the Last Judgment. Death was perceived through the martyr-
dom and sacrifice of the saints since time was measured in saint’s days. However, death was also
present in narrative images of the moment of dying, the deathbed scenes, the preparation for the
last moment, and the instructions for a “Good Death.” It was illustrated in Ars Moriendi (The
Art of Dying), but also in a personified depiction as a skeletal figure triumphant in the scenes of
the Danse Macabre, Triumph of Death, or Imago Mortis. The didactic anecdotal visualization of
Figure 17.3 The Virgin of Mercy (Madonna della Misericordia), Church of San Tomà, Venice, Italy,
fourteenth/fifteenth century. Image courtesy of D. Descouens. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:San_Tom%C3%A0_-_Madonna_della_Misericordia_sec._XV.jpg.
230
Figure 17.4 The Triumph of Death, a detail of the fresco on the façade of the Oratorio dei Disciplini,
Clusone, Italy, fifteenth century. Image courtesy of E. Senza.
the living and the dead meeting was particularly popular because of the way it communicated
the message of the inevitable for everyone and the necessity to focus on spiritual matters in the
hope of an eternal life (Fig. 17.4).50
This short essay covers over one thousand years of building, deconstructing, and changing the
“image” in the religious context of the European Middle Ages. The capacity of the image as a
mechanism for recollection, contemplation, and remembrance (memento) diminished toward the
end of the medieval period as the images distanced themselves from the institutional power of
the Church and marked the beginning of a new period – the “era of art.”51
Notes
1 H. Van de Waal, Iconclass: An Iconographic Classification System, Bibliography 7 (Amsterdam, 1982); Helps to
the Study of the Bible with a General Index, a Dictionary of Proper Names, a Concordance, and a Series of Maps
(Oxford, 1881).
2 M.P. Perry, “On the Psychostasis in Christian Art,” Burlington Magazine XXII (1912–1913), 94–218.
3 Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed. E. Gertsman (Aldershot, 2008).
4 M. Harisson Caviness, “Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers,” in A Companion to Medieval Art, ed.
C. Rudolph (Chichester, 2010), 65–85; J. De Coo, “A Medieval Look at the Merode Annunciation,”
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 44, Bd., H. 2 (1981), 114–32; E. Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual
Image in Neo-Platonic Thought,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948), 163–92.
5 L’Image: Fonctions et usages des images dans l’Occident médièval, Proceedings of the VI International Work-
shop on Medieval Society, ed. J. Bachet and J.-C. Schmitt (Paris, 1996); J. Wirth, L’Image médiévale:
Naissance et développements – IVe–XVe siècle (Paris, 1989).
6 A. Nagel and C. Wood, “Intervention: Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” Art Bulletin
87:3 (September 2005), 402–32.
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7 D.R. Cartlidge and J.K. Elliott, Art and Christian Apocrypha (London, 2001); G. Cavallo, “Testo
e imagine: una frontiera ambigua,” in Testo e imagine nell’alto medieoevo, XLI (Spoleto, 1992), 103–47;
J. Marrow, “Symbol and Meaning in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Early
Renaissance,” in Simiolus 16:2/3 (1986), 150–69; E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scolasticism (New
York, 1951); J. Daniélou, Sacramentum future: Études sur les origins de la typologie biblique (Paris, 1950).
8 Gregory the Great, Ep. 13, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. J. Barmby, ser. 2, vol. 13 (Buffalo,
1898), 53–54.
9 For this argument and good bibliography see more in H.L. Kessler, “Gregory the Great and Image The-
ory,” in A Companion to Medieval Art (as in note 4), 151–72.
10 J. Baschet, L’iconografia medievale (Milan, 2014), 12–13.
11 Image and Christianity:Visual Media in the Middle Ages, ed. P. Bokody (Pannonhalma, 2015).
12 G. Ladner, “The Concept of Image in Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy,” Dum-
barton Oaks Papers 7 (1953), 1–34; Byzance et les images, ed. A. Guillou and J. Durand (Paris, 1994); The
Sacred Image East and West (Illinois Byzantine Studies, 4), ed. R. Ousterhout and L. Brubaker (Urbana,
1995); L. Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm (London, 2012); Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and
Present, ed. S. Boldrick, L. Brubaker, and R. Clay (Farnham, 2013); Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity,
ed. K. Kolrud and M. Prusac (Farnham, 2014).
13 A. Henkel and A. Schone, Emblemata: Hanbuch zur Sinnibildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts
(Stuttgart, l967).
14 E. McGrath, “Cesare Ripa,” in Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology, vol. 2, ed. N.T. de
Grummond (Westport, 1996), 960–61; G. Werner, Ripa’s Iconologia: Quellen, Methode, Ziele (Utrecht,
1977).
15 Church councils were important ecclesiastic meetings for Christian iconography since the represent-
atives discussed the complex relationship between religion and art(s) and often regulated norms and
canons for visual arts. The Council in Trent was held between 1545 and 1563 and was one of the most
important concerning visual arts, since it issued decrees that proscribed a long list of medieval representa-
tions and iconography; therefore it represents the formal end of medieval (or pre-Trident) iconography.
16 P. Peeters, “L’oeuvre des Bollandistes,” in Subsidia Hagiographica, 24 (Brussels, 1961).
17 É. Mâle, L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’in-
spiration (Paris, 1898) – English translation Religious Art of the Thirteenth Century in France (London/New
York, 1913), vii, 1, 15.
18 G.J. Hoogewerff, “L’iconologie et son importance pour l’étude systématique de l’art chrétien,” Rivista
di Archeologia Cristiana VIII (1931), 60.
19 Hommages à Émile Mâle (1862–1954). La construction de l’œuvre. Rome et l’Italie. Proceedings of
the Colloquium at the École française de Rome, June 17–18, 2002, Collection de l’École française de
Rome, 345 (Rome, 2005).
20 C. Hourihane, “‘They Stand on His Shoulders’: Morey, Iconography, and the Index of Christian Art,” in
Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art
(Princeton, 2002), 3–16.
21 R. van Straten, Iconography – Indexing – Iconclass, A Handbook (Leiden, 1994).
22 H. Maguire, “André Grabar: 1896–1990,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991), xiii–xv.
23 R. Ousterhout, “The Holy Space: Architecture and the Liturgy,” in Heaven on Earth: Art and the Church
in Byzantium, ed. L. Safran (University Park, 1998), 81–120; R. Krautheimer, “Introduction to an ‘Ico-
nography of Mediaeval Architecture’,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), 1–33.
24 L’image medieval: Fonctions dans l’espace sacré et structuration de l’espace cultuel, ed. C. Voyer and É. Sparhu-
bert (Turnhout, 2008); P. Piva, “Lo spazzio liturgico: architettura, arredo, iconografia (secoli IV-XII),”
in L’arte medievale nel contesto (300–1300), ed. P. Piva (Milan, 2006); M.A. Lavin, The Place of Narrative:
Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431–1600 (Chicago, 1990).
25 G. Mathew, Byzantine Aesthetics (London, 1964), 62–91; A. Grabar, “Plotin et les origines de l’ésthétique
médiévale,” Cahier archéologique 1 (1945), 15–36.
26 N. Schibille, Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Aesthetic Experience (Farnham, 2014); L. James, Light and
Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1996).
27 R. Cormack, “Rediscovering the Christ Pantocrator at Daphni,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 71 (2008), 55–74.
28 E. Kitzinger, “Reflexions of the Feast Cycle in Byzantine Art,” Cahier archéologique 36 (1988), 51–73.
29 T.F. Mathews, The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy (University Park/London,
1971).
232
30 D. Méhu, “Locus, transitus, peregrination: Remarques sur la spatialité des rapports sociaux dans
l’Occident medieval (XIe–XIIIe siècle),” in Construction de l’espace au Moyen Âge: practiques et representa-
tions (Paris, 2007), 275–93.
31 P. Klein, “Pogrammes eschatologiques, fonction et réception historiques des portails du XIIe siècle:
Moissac-Beaulieu-Saint-Denis,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 33 (1990), 317–49; M.F. Hearn, Roman-
esque Sculpture: The Revival of Monumental Stone Sculpture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Ithaca,
1981).
32 P. Klein, “Entre paradis présent et jugement dernier: les programmes apocalyptiques et eschatologiques
dans la porches du haut Moyen Âge,” in Avant-nefs et espaces d’accueil dans l’église entre le IVe et le XIIe siècle,
Actes du colloque international du CNRS (Paris, 2002), 464–83; Y. Christe, Jugements derniers (Paris,
1999).
33 E. Thunø, The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome. Time, Network, and Repetition (Cambridge University
Press, 2015); B. Brenk, The Apse, the Image and the Icon: An Historical Perspective of the Apse as a Space
for Images (Wiesbaden, 2010); A.-M. Yasin, “Making Use of Paradise: Church Benefactors, Heavenly
Visions, and the Late Antique Commemorative Imagination,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams, and
Insights in Medieval Art & History, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2010), 39–57.
34 P. Piva, “Lo ‘spazio liturgico’: architettura, arredo, iconografia (secoli IV-XII),” in L’arte medievale in
contesto, 300–1300: Funzioni, iconografia, techniche, ed. P. Piva (Milan, 2006), 141–80; E. Palazzo, “Ico-
nographie et liturgie dans les études médiévales aujourd’hui: un éclairage méthodologique,” Cahiers de
civilisation médiévale 41 (1998), 65–69.
35 A.J. Wharton, “Ritual and Reconstructed Meaning: The Neonian Baptistery in Ravenna,” Art Bulletin
69:3 (1987), 358–75.
36 D. Hiller, Gender Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, c. 1350–1490 (Farnham, 2014); D. Rigaux,
A la table du Seigneur: l’Eucharistie chez les Primitifs italiens – 1250–1497 (Paris, 1989); C.E. Gilbert, “Last
Supers and Their Refectories,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, Papers
from the University of Michigan Conference, ed. C.E. Trinkaus and H. Augustinus Oberman (Leiden,
1974), 371–406.
37 E. Thunø, The Apse Mosaic (as in note 33); E. Borsook, “Rhetoric or Reality: Mosaics as Expressions of
a Metaphysical Idea,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenze, 4 (2000), 3–18; A.
Cameron, Continuity and Change in Sixth-Century Byzantium (London, 1981).
38 A. Terry and H. Maguire, Dynamic Splendor: The Wall Mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrassius in Poreč (Uni-
versity Park, 2007); M. Vicelja-Matijašić, “Christological Program in the Apse of Basilica Eufrasiana in
Poreč,” Ikon 1 (2008), 91–102.
39 The Crisis of the Oikoumene, ed. C. Chazelle and C. Cubitt (Turnhout, 2007).
40 B. Kiilerich, “The State of Early Christian Iconography in Twenty-First Century,” Studies in Iconography
36 (2015), 99–134; M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (New York, 2000); P.C. Finney, The Invis-
ible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York, 1994); T. Mathews, The Clash Gods: A Reinterpretation of
Early Christian Art (Princeton, 1993); A. Grabar, Christian Iconography: The Study of Its Origins (Princeton,
1968).
41 R. Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the
Eve of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2006); C. Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era (Cambridge,
2001).
42 A. Kartsonis, Anastasis: The Making of an Image (Princeton, 1986).
43 J. Wirth, L’image à l’époque romane (Paris, 1999).
44 S.G. Nichols, Romanesque Signs (New Haven/London, 1983).
45 H.L. Kessler, “A Storie sacre e spazi consacrati: la pittura narrativa nelle chiese medievali fra IV e XII
secolo,” in L’arte medievale nel contesto (Milan, 2006), 435–62; S. Settis, Iconografia dell’arte italiana 1100–
1500: una linea (Turin, 1979).
46 X. Barral i Altet, “Arte medievale e la riforma gregoriana: Riflessioni su un problema storiografico,”
Hortus atrium medievalium XVI (2010), 73–82; D.F. Glass, “Revisiting the ‘Gregorian Reform,’” in Roman-
esque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2008), 200–18; D.F. Glass, The
Sculpture of Reform in North Italy, ca 1095–1130: History and Patronage of Romanesque Façades (Farnham,
2010); Arte e iconografia a Roma: Dal Tardoantico alla fine del Medioevo, ed. M. Andaloro and S. Romano
(Milan, 2002); M. Camille, “The Gregorian Definition Revisited: Writing and the Medieval Image,” in
L’image (as in note 5), 89–107; H. Toubert, Un art dirigé: Réforme grégorienne et iconographie (Paris, 1990); E.
Kitzinger, “The Gregorian Reform and the Visual Arts: A Problem of Method,” The Prothero Lecture,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 22 (1972), 87–102.
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47 M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1991); J. Wirth, L’image
à l’époque gothique – 1140–1280 (Paris, 2008); J. Wirth, L’image à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris, 2011).
48 T. Verdon, Mary in Western Art (Hudson Hills, 2005).
49 Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. M. Vassilaki (Aldershot, 2005).
50 Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. S. Oosterwijk and S. Knöll
(Newcastle upon Tyne, 2011).
51 H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago, 1994), 1–16.
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18
LITURGICAL ICONOGRAPHY
Karl F. Morrison
Who has the mind of Christ?

The Apostle Paul concocted a dangerous elixir for the ages in his ecstatic cry: “We have the mind
of Christ” (I. Cor. 2:16). Paul’s jubilation went far beyond the discernment of long-hidden sacred
lore or doctrines. He spoke convinced that a prophecy of Isaiah had been fulfilled by Christ.
Isaiah had stood back in awe before God’s inscrutable wisdom: “Who has known the mind of
the Lord,” Isaiah asked in wonder, “that he may instruct him?” (Isa. 40:13). But, Paul knew, Isaiah
had prophesied that the power of God would “destroy the wisdom of the [worldly] wise” and
undo the intelligence of the clever. The prophecy had come true, Paul declared, when the folly of
the Cross put to naught the wisdom of this world. Paul himself lived to see the dangers brought
into the world by the diversity and intransigent factionalism that splintered more than one of the
congregations he founded. Age after age, liturgy proved to be the chalice where Paul’s vision of
corporate unity – one body and one Spirit (Ephesians 4:4–6) – mingled with the yeast of human
wit, for, through liturgy, the sacraments were performed and the mysteries of salvation, the mind
of Christ, opened; and the invisible power of the sacraments was conveyed under signs and sym-
bols perceived by physical senses and recognized by human minds. Through signs and symbols
angels, human beings, and all creation joined in the same hymn of praise. How could human
beings sing the same words with lethally variant meanings? Paul had ruled out compromise with
purely human ingenuity, for, he wrote, the wisdom of God was folly to the Gentiles and a scan-
dal to the Jews, and, he added, the wisdom of the world was folly in God’s eyes (I. Corinthians
1:21–25, 3:19).
And yet, all efforts to read the mind of Christ, in reading the Bible, in liturgy, and in daily life,
produced such a compromise, by grafting the sacred into the profane. The liturgy that accom-
plished this equilibrium of opposites was built around a central paradox at the very foundation
of Christian identity. A singularly well-equipped connoisseur of Christian obscurities, Emperor
Julian the Apostate (330–363, r. 361–363), captured that paradox when he wrote that Christians,
admitting that they were “different from the Jews, [were still] precisely speaking, Israelites in
accordance with their prophets.”1 Paul had assured Christians that they had the mind of Christ,
the folly of the Cross, and that the wisdom of God was a stone, a stumbling block, in the path
of the Jews. Among Latin Christians in the early medieval West, liturgical iconography, the lan-
guage of symbols in worship, centered on Julian’s paradox.
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Need for an identity transfer

Why was the transfer of Israelite identity of such overwhelming and enduring urgency to Chris-
tians? The answer is that, thanks to what Paul called the folly of the Cross, they could not see
themselves in the mirror of the Hebrew Bible, except with significant distortions. They had to
construct a history of their own, incorporating Jewish history, before they could affirm that
they were God’s chosen people, heirs of God’s everlasting Covenant with Abraham. They had
to construct this sacred history of themselves from the initiation of the Covenant until the final
consummation of God’s promises to Abraham and his seed forever. They had, not to recall, but
to relive this narrative of themselves over and over in liturgy until the symbols, the types, and
shadows of the promises faded away before the realities they foretold. This great narrative had as
its centerpiece the story of two Israels, the Israel of the Law and the Prophets, rivalry dividing the
elder brother and the Israel of the Gospel, “the younger brother,” exemplified by Esau and Jacob,
twin sons of the Patriarch Isaac. How was the birthright of the elder transferred to the younger
and converted into another species, and yet, in a mysterious way, both the same and the other?
The Apostle Paul had sketched the outlines of this huge drama. Authentic Jews, he wrote,
were not biological descendants of Abraham, sealed by circumcision of the flesh. In Christ, they
were people of faith, Jews and Gentiles alike, whose hearts were circumcised. Through baptism,
they had put on a new and different self. They had been “clothed with Christ.” Through and in
him they were all children of God and coheirs with Christ of God’s covenant promise of life to
Abraham. (See Romans chapters 2, 7; Galatians chapters 3–4.)
The legitimacy of Christians’ claim to have superseded the Jews as Israel, God’s chosen people
on earth, depended on vindicating the paradox, also framed by Paul, that Christ had consum-
mated the Law of Moses and emancipated the new Israel from that Law, including obligations
of circumcision, Sabbath, and diet, and from other bondage the Law entailed to sin and death.
Much hinged on demonstrating that the legacy of Abraham and the Covenant promises contin-
ued without the Law of Moses.
Exactly how intractable the problem was came to light in the writings of a Christian convert
who had pronounced Samaritan affinities (Justin Martyr, c. 100–c. 165). Justin is known as an
apologist for his new faith, eventually defending it against Roman persecutors in Rome itself. Yet
earlier, he mounted a defense against persecution by Jews in his native Palestine. Justin’s Dialogue
with Trypho purports to be the record of an extended debate between Justin and Trypho, a rabbi,
in Ephesus (c. 130). The lines of enduring sacralized violence are already staked out in this early
tract.2 At one point in the debate, Trypho expresses incredulity that the Messiah would die by cru-
cifixion. To be sure, Scripture declares that he must suffer, Trypho added, but it seemed doubtful
that he would suffer by the precise manner of death cursed in the Law: being hanged upon a tree.
To the contrary, Justin responded. Everything depended on the mystery of the Cross. Jus-
tin’s explication locates the mystery of the Cross at the very center of all the great mysteries of
Christ – Incarnation by the flesh of the Virgin, thus making him heir of God’s promises to Abra-
ham, the Nativity, and Resurrection. All of them were foreshadowed by events and ceremonies
of the Mosaic Law. Among the elements of Eucharistic sacrifice foreshadowed by the Law, Justin
was careful to include the consecrated bread. Indeed, he taught, the Law was consummated and
ended in Christ. But adhering to the letter of the Law was not keeping its spirit.
Though some Christians kept the law of Moses, Justin held, the Law was not by any means
the essence of saving righteousness. Before Abraham and after Moses, the righteous pleased God
by faith, by circumcision not of the flesh but of the heart. While the Jews knew the words of the
Law and its prescripts, they were blind to their inner sense. They had killed the prophets; they
had crucified the Messiah for which they had waited many generations, bringing the biblical
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Liturgical iconography
curse on crucifixion down not on the Crucified but on themselves. Even so, God stood ready
to pardon the Jews if they repented and left aside their malice, deceit, and hardness of heart,
and received graces open to them through the name of Christ. Every day, indeed, some were
becoming disciples.3
In Justin Martyr’s account, conflict between Jewish brothers, the same yet other, the elder
the type of latter-day Jews, and the younger that of Christians, owed its treacherous anger to the
malice, hatred, and envy of the Jews. Always “idolaters and murderers of the just,” he wrote, Jews
had killed the Messiah, hanging him on a gibbet “as an accursed enemy of God.” That done,
they cursed Christians in their synagogues and sent messengers far and wide to defame Christ
and his followers and rouse Jews to kill anyone who confessed to being a Christian, and their
campaign of vilification, “bitter, dark, and unjust accusations,” had dangerously prejudiced civil
authorities against Christians (Dialogue with Trypho, 16.4, 17.1, 3, 93.4, 95.2–3, 96.2, pp. 28–29,
145–147). They had faulted Christians for assigning them guilt for killing Jesus, noting that, if
God the Father wished Jesus to suffer on the Cross to heal the human race, they had done no
wrong by expediting the Father’s will.
Other writers, more attentive than Justin Martyr to the end of the world, also retained a
firmer hold on the holy calling of the Jews than he did. Some developed an analogy between
the brothers Cain and Abel so as to affirm a continuing of the Covenant vocation of the Jews
in the divine plan for redeeming the world.
In killing Jesus, they thought, the Jews were like Cain, the jealous elder brother, who killed
his innocent, younger brother, Abel. They drew the further analogy between Jesus and Abel by
virtue of God’s acceptance of Abel’s blood sacrifice of an animal, and rejection of Cain’s herbal
sacrifice. The analogy between Cain and the Jews in the divine plan for redemption, they argued,
came in the fact that, while God cursed Cain for his fratricide and condemned him to live as a
homeless wanderer without relief, he also scarred him with conspicuous physical disfigurement,
marking him as taboo, to be scorned by all but never killed, cursed but on a sacred mission of
witness. By the same token, they argued, divine punishment had fallen upon the Jews soon after
they killed Christ. Enemies had destroyed their holy city, Jerusalem, and banished them from
it, to wander as outcasts forever. There was a blessing in this curse. The loss of their homeland
scattered them through all the peoples of the earth. Custodians of their sacred books, they spread
to every corner of the world their witness to sacred prophecy and its fulfillment in Jesus, witness
that, being hostile, was beyond criticism by unbelievers who heard it. They became heralds of the
fulfillment of prophecy in Jesus and its final consummation in the Last Judgment before the
throne of Christ. Fittingly, as not all nominal Christians were faithful witnesses, but fallen souls
were mixed with righteous, so also among the Jews there were some true believers, like Abra-
ham and the patriarchs Christians before Christ, and they would be gathered into the Heavenly
Jerusalem and glorified with righteous Christians, as members of the true Israel. In a class of
their own, Jews were neither complete outsiders, as were idolatrous pagans, nor Christians, but
amphibians, the same yet other, both outsiders under the curse and bearers of blessing. They were
unwitting witnesses to the truth hidden in the words they proclaimed, killers of the Messiah for
whom they had longed for centuries. Enemies within the penumbra of faith, they were agents of
the salvation which they knew and unwittingly both lived for and disavowed.
Development of new iconographic languages

Though it has been a virtuoso sport for theologians in the premodern era and for highly spe-
cialized scholars since the nineteenth century, the subject of this chapter (liturgical iconography)
has always been common property for the whole community of believers.4 Still, the dynamic of
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Karl F. Morrison
individual and of collective lives in Christian communities fell alike under the metaphor of con-
version. Conversion embraces countless divergences and radical inequalities in kind, authenticity,
and effects, for, as the word “indigenation” indicates, conversion always entails inner struggles
among competing allegiances, frequently between the demands of an alien religion and those of
the society in which converts were born. The community of believers itself, following the way of
conversion, consists of many divisions, some of which replicate the stereotype of warring brothers
or, even more extreme, of distant strangers.
Communication was essential to repatterning, almost cross-hybridizing, the identities of Gen-
tile converts into those of Biblical Israelites. Two new languages evolved in the trial-and-error
project: the first, the language of Latin theology, and the second, the language of symbols. Both
were tools of indigenizing an alien religion, and both illustrate the multiplication of cultural filters
between the cultures of origin, the host of original mentalities incorporated in the Hebrew and
Greek Scriptures, and the recipients.
Nothing could have been more obvious than that the earliest filter in the chain was the series
of translations of Hebrew (and Aramaic) writings into Greek, most decisively with the Septuagint
translation (traditionally in Egypt under Ptolemy Philadelphus, r. 285–246 BC). In the normal
course of assimilation, the cultural Hellenization of many Jews, beginning much earlier, also pre-
pared for the assimilation of early Christian teachings and practices into the wider discourse of
the Levant and Greece, and, eventually, along with the multiplication of Hellenic colonies in the
western Mediterranean, into areas where Latin was the dominant cultural language.
Greek writers had not only translated Hebrew and Aramaic texts into Greek. They had also
reformulated the ideas they found in them to suit the very different patterns of thought they had
learned from elementary schooling and advanced studies, patterns developed in Greek philoso-
phies to suit whole systems of thought quite alien to ancient Jewish culture, and, in some essen-
tial respects, antithetic to Hebraic beliefs and doctrines about God, world, order, and the human
psyche. The Greek language accommodated this transmutation. However, the Latin language had
not developed in those ways. The Roman political force and rhetorician Cicero (107–43 BCE)
considered it a particular claim to admiration that he had invented a vocabulary and syntax for
philosophy, a Latin philosophical language. In time, Latin-speaking Christian writers, imbued with
Greek systems of speculative analysis, discovered that their native language was deficient likewise in
words and constructs needed to translate into Latin idioms what they found in Greek translations
of Hebrew Scriptures and in Greek Scriptures. Several writers, above all the North African lawyer
and apologist Tertullian (c. 155–c. 240), invented a Latin for theology. At this stage, readers of
Latin Scriptures and Scripture-based texts were at least three stages of mediation removed from the
original mentalities, more if the multiplicity of translations at every stage is considered.
The development of a pictorial language, and therefore for visual iconography, was very much
more contentious than that of a verbal idiom for interpreting Scripture, for it arose in what many
Christians considered violation of God’s explicit prohibition of representational art inscribed in
the Law of Moses (Exodus 20: 4), a lapse into the horrendous sin of idolatry. Yet, it also arose from
general characteristics of the texts of Scriptures. Meticulously studying every syllable and word
in Scripture, interpreters found a range of peculiarities, such as apparent inconsistencies, contra-
dictions, incoherence, and even absurdities. In human writings, they could have dismissed them
as signs of authorial incompetence or dishonesty. However, their conviction that God was the
author of all Scripture kept them from this conclusion. Their conviction of unitary authorship
brought into play their relative conviction of the perfection of God. Their conviction of God’s
perfection drove them to discover God’s reason for hiding truth beneath the camouflage of error,
and, indeed, to hold up to human sight the single truth pervading all Scriptural witnesses in every
part. They resorted to well-established methods of analysis that transcended historical, textual, or
238
logical analysis, that united prophecies and their fulfillments, no matter how distantly separated
in time, and that displayed all peoples in one timeless dimension, like the eternity in which God
lived and all things were equally present to the eyes of God. They applied methods of envisioning –
analogy, allegory, typology, and symbolism – of thinking that evoked pictures in the mind.
Thus, the invention of verbal language enabled iconography as a skill-set, or protocol, com-
municating liturgy as a science or technology, and, fundamentally, as a handmaid of theology.
By contrast, the invention of visual language enabled iconography as the living spirit in liturgy.
François Villon (1431–after 1463), a freewheeling denizen of Paris’s demi-monde, portrayed his
mother exercising iconography in the second sense in a prayer to the Virgin Mary (Ballade pour prier
Notre Dame). Haunted by a picture in her parish church of the Last Judgment, she is torn between
joy inspired by the “painted paradise with its harps and lutes” and terror branded into her heart by
the picture of hell, with the damned being cooked in everlasting fires. She prayed to the Virgin for
help. In a little drama of the same and the other, Villon’s mother stands before her, a poor, little, old
woman, an illiterate sinner whose hope is in her nullity, without resources, entirely dependent on the
pity of Heaven. She beseeches the Virgin, the High Goddess, her Lady and Mistress, to intercede with
her Son. Villon’s mother, as a “humble Christian,” finds herself, her identity, in the emotions broken
open in her by the picture’s virtual reality. From her total investment of herself in Scripture, legend,
and devotional practices she extracted haunting trauma and passionate hope for deliverance. What
she felt in the static, virtual reality of the painting, she felt in the living enactments of the liturgy. All
her terrors and hopes intersected in the Almighty’s offering of himself to death, repeated in “the sac-
rament celebrated in the Mass”: that is, in liturgy. While Villon could write on his own account that
he knew everything but himself (“je connais tout forsque moi-même,” in Ballade des menus propos),
he portrayed his mother in the act of realizing her identity through liturgical iconography, realizing
it with certainty: “I’m no chatterbox,” he has her say (“je n’en sais jaugleresse”).
It is a cameo drama of the same and the other, the announced subject of Villon’s poem.
However it comes enfolded inevitably and invisibly in a greater drama on the same theme. By
intense emotion, Villon’s mother seized as her own story the subject of the painting (the Last
Judgment), inseparably part of a grand narrative of human existence beginning in the eternity
of the Almighty (before the Creation) and returning to the same eternity in the Last Judgment
and its sequel of blessedness and damnation. The greater drama, accessible to understanding,
was distilled into passions of visceral joy and terror from Scripture and other documents of the
faith (e.g., biographies of saints and miracle stories), all of which were testimonies to the powers
sustaining, shaping, and impelling humanity toward its destiny.
This greater drama framed the little one of individual identity and otherness, enacted by Villon’s
mother. Through the Virgin, she claimed for herself in liturgy the same tremendous divine
energy of regeneration that moved the world toward the promised new humanity, the conversion
of the birthright lost by the elder Israel – the Israel of Abraham and Moses – into the specie of
the younger Israel of Christ.
Essential as the language of words was for communicating liturgy as a science or protocol to
the learned, the pictorial language of envisioning was the universal means for communicating
the living spirit in the liturgy, even to the least members of the community as a whole. Ontol-
ogy recapitulated phylogeny. Visceral emotion, not erudition, was the common denominator. In
the same way, following in prophetic tradition, the Apostle Paul had assured his followers that
observing the Law was not individual observance of the letter of the Law by the righteous (as
“the Jews” did), but its spirit, for the letter killed, while the spirit gave life to the whole body of
the faithful in every member (II. Corinthians 3:6).
For that reason, the small-scale transit Villon described his mother making, emotional and rational,
from painting to redemption by way of liturgy – the very act of transit – was built into the placement
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Karl F. Morrison
of pictures of the Last Judgment in countless churches through the centuries before Villon – for
example, in the collection of paintings that Benedict Biscop took back from Rome to Anglo-
Saxon England (679), to the monasteries among then-remote and recently Christianized peoples
of Northumbria. He put them on the wall of the nave, where everyone who entered could see
them and, even if they could not read, could judge the contents of their own hearts as virtual eyewit-
nesses when they had before their very eyes the benefits of the Lord’s incarnation and the terror of
the Last Judgment.5 A later example, Pietro Cavallini’s fresco of the Last Judgment in Rome (Santa
Caecilia in Trastevere, c. 1293), makes a link in this endemic-grassroots, intellectual, and affective
iconography between Benedict Biscop and Villon’s mother and between their communities.
Who is the true Israel?

A principal medieval commentator on the liturgy, Bishop William Durand of Mende
(c. 1230–1296), wrote that the “office” of the Mass engaged four categories of elements: people
(“in personis”), actions (“in operibus”), words (“in verbis”), and objets (“et in rebus”). Each cat-
egory consisted of subcategories (e.g., “words” included prayers, song, and readings). Plainly three
of these categories consisted of inert materials. Only “people” could be agents, “celebrating, min-
istry, and attending,” and so, in three cohorts, receiving, assimilating, and transmitting ceremonies
believed to have been handed down in essence from Christ and the apostles. William Durand
knew that change had quickly entered the story of the Mass. After Christ’s ascent into heaven,
he wrote, the Apostles expended the “meal” instituted by Christ. The sequence of revisions
continued into Durand’s own day, for, Durand himself noted, critics denounced him and other
“new teachers” for intruding “new doctrines” of their own, alterations far beyond what Christ
and the Apostles had instituted (Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, IV.1.5–12).
Durand’s conception of liturgy as a living reality had at its base an assumption that the liturgy
was an organic unity, a body with different members, but one spirit. The arts differed in mate-
rials, methods, and effects, but they were united in serving the same symbolic code. Thus, the
distinctions of “works” (gestures, actions, movements), “words” (prayers, singing, lessons), and
“things” (ornaments, instruments, elements, presumably including works of visual and tactile arts)
preserved the inherent disparities that separate kinesthetic, vocal, and mechanical arts.
However, when he wrote that “each of these” was “filled with divine mysteries,” he referred to
the prologue of the Rationale where he used a different nomenclature: “‘offices,’‘things,’ and ‘orna-
ments’ of the Church.” Whatever categorical ambiguity may have slipped into his cross-reference,
what is clear through the treatise is that, diverse as the arts were in their exercise, they served one
and the same iconography. This was true above all in the Eucharist, for Durand, the apex and sum
of all offices.
Consequently, as among the members of a tree, there could be no independent and distinct
iconographies among the arts – for example, between visual art and music. Durand undertook
his vast inquiry into symbolic meanings through the span of liturgy with the object of editing
out what earlier generations had handed down and for which he could discover no explanation.
Without divine aid, he wrote, he had no hope of achieving his goal (Rationale, prologue, 1). But
liturgy would still be the dynamic interplay of performance and transformation: that is, process.
Recent studies have given new perspectives on the workings and idiosyncrasies of that process.6
The character of liturgy as both the same and other in process is illustrated by what are argu-
ably the most enduring works of liturgical iconography, and among the earliest: the designation
of Sunday as the chief day of communal worship and the framing of the liturgical calendar for
the church year.7 Both achievements began with the detachment of increasingly Gentile churches
from their Jewish past as a second Israel, superseding the Jews as God’s chosen people and
240
Plate 1 Michael Camille. Image courtesy of Stuart Michaels.
Plate 2 Trinity of Saint Anne with donor, Atelier of the Master of Rabenden, polychrome wood, c. 1515,
Unter den Linden Museum, Colmar (89.3.1). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
Plate 3 Mary Magdalene, German, c. 1520–1530, Liebieghaus, Frankfurt (Inv. Nr. 2). Image courtesy
of Wikimedia Commons.
Plate 4 Image of Christ, S. Appollinare in Nuovo. Ravenna, early sixth century. Image courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons.
Plate 5 Carrow Psalter (Ms.W.34, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, f.27 r), English, c. 1250. Note the green
crosses in the Carrying of the Cross and the Crucifixion. Illustration courtesy of Walters Art Museum,
created under Creative Commons License.
Plate 6 Master of the Paradise Garden (Upper Rhenish), The Paradise Garden, c. 1420, Stadelsches
Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, HM 54. In a typical enclosed garden the Virgin is seated among flowers and the
Christ Child is learning music from St. Cecilia (who has a headdress of peapods), while St. Dorothea picks
cherries. Along the wall (left to right) the flowers are red roses, speedwell, betony, lychnis, stocks, iris, and
hollyhock. In the grass the flowers include white lily, peony, strawberries, lilies of the valley, leucojum,
cowslips, yellow wallflowers, periwinkles, daisies, and violets. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Plate 7 Transfiguration. Church of Holy Apostles, Thessaloniki, Greece. Early fourteenth century. Image
courtesy of Sharon Gerstel.
Plate 8 Horses, Rochester Bestiary, southeast England, second quarter, thirteenth century. London, BL,
MS Royal 12 XIII, f. 42v (detail). British Library.
authentic heirs to God’s Covenant promises to Abraham. Sabbath observance was of a piece with
other prescripts of the Mosaic Law, such as dietary prohibitions, circumcision, and rejection of
the cult of images. Transposing the Christian Sabbath, the first day of the week from the Jewish
Sabbath, the seventh day – thus sanctifying the day of Christ’s resurrection – took between two
and four hundred years to become general practice.
The first great difficulty, and the most tenacious in framing an annual liturgical calendar,
similarly hinged on Christian ambivalence toward their claim to have replaced the Jews as God’s
chosen people, both desirous and hostile. Were Christians bound to observe Easter according
to the Mosaic rule for calculating the date of Passover, or, under the dispensation of the New
Covenant should Easter always be kept on a Sunday, the day of the Resurrection? The complex-
ities of this debate were many; they ramified through the centuries and became entangled with
an immense variety of local cults and rites. At the core of much confusion was the fact that the
Julian calendar followed as a common civic calendar varied ever more widely from the actual
lunar calendar as computed from astronomical observations.
How were believers to worship together without a common calendar? Beginning in the
thirteenth century, a series of individual mathematicians turned their attention to computing the
date of Easter, the golden key on which the construction of a coherent annual liturgical calen-
dar depended. Intensive study continued at the papal court in Avignon and continued at four
ecumenical councils, convened as challenges to papal authority. Few impairments of the papacy’s
magisterial authority ranked with its incapacity to regulate the Church calendar, the annual cycle
of worship on which all pastoral offices depend. Accordingly, the accelerating pace of reform
councils carried with it urgent attempts to find some fulcrum that would move the intransigent
roadblock to institutional stability.
Liturgy was the incandescent center of the furnace that was the Reformation. In the wave of
liturgical reforms, the papacy made constructing an astronomical and calendrical Church year
the keystone of its encyclopedic and penetrating offense against the many fronts of Protestantism.
The Council of Trent remitted the enormous task to the Papacy; Pope Paul V laid the ground-
work for accomplishing it. Some twenty years after Trent, Pope Gregory XIII announced that the
solution sought for 1,400 years had been found (1582). He was able to abolish the old calendar
and proclaim a restoration of the new that permanently accommodated astronomical realities and
preserved the “ancient rite of the Church” intact.
Before he published his reform and made it obligatory for praying the divine office and
celebrating all festivals, Gregory had been able to secure a consensus of Catholic princes and
universities. He urged them to adopt the new calendar for their lands. However, his decree was
repudiated as yet another papist trick through much of Protestant Europe until acceptance fol-
lowed, slowly, throughout the eighteenth century. Indeed, the process of revising the liturgical
calendar unmistakably continued in the series of revisions to the General Roman Calendar at the
middle of the twentieth century (1954, 1955, 1960, 1969).
As they surveyed the continuing history of liturgical reform, the authors of Sacrosanctum
Concilium, a decree issued by the Second Vatican Council (1963), repeated several characteristics
persistently recognized by their predecessor reformers as marking liturgy as the same and other
in process. (1) Drawing on tradition beginning with Christ and the Apostles, they affirmed the
continual “restoration” of the liturgy. (2) They affirmed two elements in the contents of the
liturgy: (a) those that were divinely instituted, and (b) “those that may and ought to be dropped
with the passing of time if they have suffered from the intrusion of anything out of harmony with
the inner nature of the liturgy or have become unsuited to it.”8 (3) They identified two moments
of testing and revision: the first, daily in the performance of liturgy, the second, at particularly
critical times of revision as, for example, in Church councils.
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Karl F. Morrison
As in daily performance, the agents of process were “the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ,
that is [. . .] the Head and His Members” (p. 6): in other words, what Durand had spoken of as
three cohorts or people, celebrants, ministers, and the congregation (or witnesses). There could
be no Mass, no entering into divine mysteries, without a priest celebrating and a minister for
responding, nor was Christ’s mediation between God and human beings completely represented
or recapitulated without the people witnessing, the reciprocal prayers of priest and people for one
another united, one Body and one Spirit.
In some regards, the three agents of liturgical revision were moved by quite different motives,
and when with shared motives, they acted in quite different modulations.
With its own alterations to the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium illustrated in action the peren-
nial objective of deleting from the liturgy components that were no longer understood, or that no
longer conformed with or served canons of faith and practice. For example, the master narrative
of salvation underlying the provisions of Sacrosanctum Concilium has lost the all-pervasive conflict
between Christ and Satan, the invisible warfare between mysteries of righteousness and iniquity,
that struck hearts with love and terror in paintings of the Last Judgment.
From the early New Testamental period onward, Satan and his demonic armies were fearful
and present dangers. In Durand’s account, the order for the Eucharist is in fact the struggle
and victory of the priest over the Ancient Enemy, recapitulating the battles and wars of God’s
chosen people throughout sacred history in their various journeys to the promised land,
whether in Israel or in Paradise. Thus, the procession to the altar is drawn up like an army in
battle array against hosts of demons lurking in ambush. The celebrant sprinkles the altar, the
church, and the people to exorcise “the filth of unclean spirits” as well as to “free the hearts
of the faithful” and to protect the altar from evil spirits that might cluster there. When, fully
vested to celebrate the Mass, he approached the altar, he went up as though armed for battle.
As he received the elements offered in the Eucharist, he made the sign of the cross over each
one in turn – host, water, wine, and incense – to put to flight the power of every attempt by
diabolical malice against the sacrifice, and he made a further sign of the cross with incense over
the consecrated elements and the altar to exorcise the evil of demonic fraud (Rationale, 4.1.43;
4.4.1–5; 4.6.14–16; 4.30.23).
Sacrosanctum Concilium also illustrated how it continued a motive for reform acted upon
from the earliest Christian communities, but in quite a changed social context and mode: that
is, indigenation, the cross-fertilizations between Christian practice and the alien, unbelieving
world in which it exists, tactics for remaining faithful while in, but not of, the world. Sacro-
sanctum Concilium presented this dilemma and task as characteristic of evangelism, particularly
outside Europe.
Still, the Council knew well the necessity to assimilate practices “of various races and peo-
ples,” and, particularly in mission fields, how the visual and plastic arts and music “from every
race and region” could be drawn into the service of the Church, provided they had been laun-
dered and edited, “made suitable for sacred use [. . .] and truly contribute to the edification
of the faithful” (I.iii.D.37–38; I.iii.D.40.3; VI.119–120; VII.123). Pope Gregory I (600/601)
issued directions resembling these in principle to missionaries he had sent to Anglo-Saxon
England, tactics for changing “people in bondage to idols into a church of Christ.” The mis-
sionaries were to use enticements of similarity in dissimilars. Their assaults on long-standing
and cherished customs of the British people must be discreet. While they must destroy idols,
they were advised to purify temples with holy water, and to set up new altars in the reconse-
crated temples, being careful, with this retrofitting and rededication, to add a further safeguard
against dispossessed demons with relics of the saints. They should also sanitize and consecrate
the British calendar, preserving the inherited rhythm of the Britons’ ancestral celebrations
242
while replacing festivals of sacrifice to devils with festivals of Christian martyrs.9 Even when
indigenous calendars, temples, and rites were purified and consecrated, Satan and his minions
were sometimes seen by the faithful besieging holy places as they whirled in frenzied, dense,
black swarms of malice.
Moreover, the danger that liturgy could be contaminated by superstition from popular cults
and forbidden arts came from all three categories of witnesses identified by Durand as agents
of liturgical revision: two clerical (celebrants and ministers) and one mixed (clerical and lay
congregants). The earliest major liturgist of the Middle Ages, Agobard of Lyons (c. 779–840)
lamented the justifiable disesteem in which priests were held in his day. While he defended
priests against uncanonical correctives by laity, his denunciations exposed the need for correc-
tion. He distinguished four notable classes of priests: (1) those worthy of being loved because
they were meritorious both in their lives and in their teaching; (2) those who were merely
tolerable because they either taught well and were morally reprehensible or lived virtuously
and knew too little to teach; (3) those meriting scorn, because they were both morally defective
and ignorant of what they presumed to teach; and (4) those worthy only of scorn because they
lived in vice and taught heresy.10 Much later, Durand issued censures of his own. The clergy,
the very class of society most explicitly charged with monitoring purity of faith and order, was
as liable as any other to fall into confusion of divine religion with demonic superstition. Instead
of shining with the virtues communicated through the orders of worship, instead of illuminat-
ing the people with light imparted from above, the clergy was ignorant, the blind leading the
blind. Most priests, Durand wrote, had no vision, much less any understanding of the sacred
mysteries. For their failures, Durand threatened them with a terrible punishment at the Last
Judgment (Rationale, prologue, 2). A century earlier, in the pontificate of Innocent III, one of
the greatest medieval popes, Francis of Assisi (1181/1182–1226) had had his life-changing
encounter with the crucifix of San Damiano. Spellbound, he saw the lips of the painted image
of Christ Crucified move, and he heard a voice say, “Francis, go, build up my house which, as
you see, is all being torn apart.”
Becoming other than one is in liturgy

Liturgy was a living process, both the same and other, in continual development, and the critics
and revisers of liturgy were the immense, protean company of its participating witnesses. Con-
version of the birthright of the elder Israel into the specie of the younger had one great point
of similarity to individual conversion, as, for example, in monastic conversion. In both, variation
cross-fertilized with identity. By its very nature, liturgy creates outsiders as it creates insiders.
The distinction between insider and outsiders was most distinct in the early churches, when the
sacred mysteries were closed to the uninitiated, and those who had not yet been baptized were
formally ushered out before performance of the sacraments and entrance into the sacred begun.
Even after witnessing became less stringently restricted, liturgy continued to be revered as mark-
ing the boundaries between authentic believers and others in consecrated spaces. The liturgies in
performance were themselves precincts of mysteries to which unbelievers and infidels, heretics
and the excommunicate were alien, and as Christians outside Europe also might be. It also made
the soul an outsider to itself.
The Cistercian mystic William of St. Thierry (ca 1080–1148) pinpointed what made this prob-
lematic and liable to issue in never-ending debate. “Every man,” he wrote, “forms the Lord, his
God, for himself, or sets him before himself after his own manner.” As a result, “the Lord God of
All is to be adored and worshiped beneath the mask of many faces.”11 How could one even locate,
much less reduce, such a nebula of metamorphoses of the self as both the same and as other?
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The mixing of water and wine in the Eucharistic chalice symbolized not only Christ’s
embodiment of two natures in one person but also the union of the people with Christ,
the Church being incorporated in the holiness of Christ, not Christ in the blessedness the
Church, for holiness could derive only from the Holy One (Durand, Rationale, IV.30.18–21).
The doctrine of the indwelling Christ provided an analogous explanation of how the believ-
ers’ bodies could be both human and the dwelling-places of God, and how Christ became
the inner light of their hearts and minds. In this way, with many variations, stories about
individual participation in the divine by means of the sacraments became the key by which
authors fitted the most intimate human changes of heart into the gigantic master narrative
of the world’s salvation.
In his encounter with the Christ in the crucifix at San Damiano, Francis felt himself pumme-
led with strange afflictions. The words he heard filled him with such joy and light that he sensed
that Christ himself had spoken to him. From that hour, his heart was so wounded and melted
at the memory of the Lord’s Passion that as long as he lived he carried the wounds of the Lord
Jesus in his heart. He left San Damiano as another man than as he had entered. How were others
similarly changed as their hearts melted into the living spirit of the liturgy, constantly reminded
that that melding enacted the conversion of the birthright of the elder Israel into the specie of
the younger?
Biographical materials for Cuthbert (c. 634–687), Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109),
and Juliana of Mont Cornillion (ca 1192–1258) provide three illustrative examples.12 The
main sources for us are by contemporaries of the subjects: the Venerable Bede’s prose life of
Cuthbert (written after 721 from an anonymous life written c. 699–705), Eadmer’s lives of
Anselm, both the biography and the account in the Historia Novorum (written simultaneously
from contemporary notes before 1100 and slightly revised on several occasions thereafter), and
an anonymous life of Juliana by a Cistercian in her home city, Liège (written c. 1261–1269).
While, as a much younger contemporary in another monastery, Bede did not meet Cuthbert, he
made it his business to work from contemporary materials, including personal testimonies from
Cuthbert’s circle, which he scrupulously verified. Eadmer was in Anselm’s service from 1093 for
the rest of the archbishop’s life, attending him constantly in England and during his protracted
exiles in France and Italy. He worked from notes for a memoir he began collecting early, some-
times surreptitiously, and he may have broken one quite long account into the two that survive.
While neither the identity of the author of Juliana’s life nor any personal connection between
him and Juliana can be determined, he did know at first hand members of her circle and her
circumstances. All three accounts can be trusted regarding the places liturgy had in shaping their
subjects’ spiritual self-consciousness.
These case studies enable us to detect three prongs of indigenation as a dynamic in play. The
conflict-ridden lives of Cuthbert, Anselm of Bec, and Juliana of Mont-Cornillion are narratives
of tensions in the most intimate areas of their self-consciousness. Each was pulled in three direc-
tions: first, by the prophetic identity they assimilated from cultures of the ancient Near East,
which they considered the “Old Testament”; second, by the apostolic identity of an evolving
humanity assimilated from Levantine writings canonized as the New Testament in the Christian
Bible; third, by the prevailing norms of their own cultures.
They indigenized the alien, and imagined, identities with their birth identities, in their own
real times, cultures, and places. Indigenation is an individual matter. I receive my identity and am
changed by receiving it, but I also change the identity I receive by adapting it as I adopt it. Thus,
the social penalties for nonconformity beset Cuthbert, Anselm, and Juliana as they moved out
of step with dominant behavior patterns in their societies. All were intensely conscious of being
244
engaged, by way of their struggles in this world, in the spiritual warfare between Christ and Satan,
and, indeed, of being lethally attacked by Satan and his minions.
Christian iconography expressed, taught, and was modified by this three-pronged and open-
ended dynamic. It is a study of themes and variations on a primal theme enshrined in the story
of Esau and Jacob (or, alternatively, Cain and Abel), for the trauma of that rivalry was more than
a story. Throughout many ages, the conflict of brothers was at the core of the essential narra-
tive Christians told about themselves, asserting that they were different from the Jews, while
they were also precisely speaking Israelites in the biblical tradition of prophecy and fulfillment.
Powerful forces imposing and inculcating conformity – above all, those of liturgy – made the
conflict of Esau and Jacob a symbol, and the purpose of a symbol is not to record or recall but
to relive. Liturgy exercises its greatest and most lasting power to impose and inculcate narratives
of conformity when it works subliminally, working on emotions in silent ways. The ways of love
are among the most powerful of all.
The three case studies also indicate that the threefold dynamic of indigenation engendered
profound spiritual anxiety and trauma interpreted according to the great traumas of the Jewish
people, above all Exodus and exile. In very different ways, the personal histories that Cuthbert
and Anselm grafted into the grand narrative of the world’s creation, fall, and salvation were stories
of their own indigenations into alien societies. Cuthbert found himself, with segments of his
church, putting off many Celtic ways and putting on Roman replacements, exemplified by ways
of computing the date of Easter. Anselm came into Anglo-Saxon England as an occupier and
settler after the Norman Conquest. He found himself, as an alien, attacking what were defended
as indigenous customs, including lay investiture, and replacing them with the new, continental
norms of the Gregorian Reform. Both Cuthbert and Anselm were reculturalizing themselves and
the churches in which they lived.
Juliana consciously shaped her whole life to change with the rhythms of the liturgical year.
Yet, her life story, as told by her anonymous biographer, centers on one liturgy, the veneration
of the Blessed Sacrament, the communion wafer consecrated in the Eucharist. She believed that
God commissioned her to compose this rite, to secure its official sanction, and to promote its
dissemination. Though the office that, with collaboration, she composed has not been recovered,
the indirect evidence that is known indicates that it was not a Eucharist but a rite that could be
celebrated by laity, such as her own community of nuns, as well as by clergy.
Cuthbert, Anselm, and Juliana alike made Jesus the liturgical point of entry and growth,
but Jesus was differently modulated for each. When Cuthbert celebrated the Eucharist, Bede
wrote, he could never complete the liturgy without weeping floods of tears, for, within himself,
he was imitating with compunction of heart the sacrifice of Christ which he was perform-
ing. He was so overwhelmed that his voice hardly rose above a sigh.13 He was overwhelmed
by paroxysms of tears when he inwardly experienced identity between the sacrifice of Jesus
taking place in his hands and his own self-sacrifice. Anselm, too, “venerated the consecration
of the Lord’s Body, with special fervor” (Eadmer, Life, II.65, p. 141). Yet, given Anselm’s abstract
theology, it is hard to determine whether his fervor was fired more by the anguished humanity
of the Crucified or by the Logos, the beauty in reason, the creative power that brought forth
the universe and everything in it and made His own body in the Virgin’s womb. Juliana’s great
ardor for Jesus was driven not only by such compelling loves as these but also, and especially,
by the spiritual eroticism that from the eleventh century interpreters had read into the Song of
Solomon. Rejecting all else, inflamed with ardor for Christ, her Bridegroom, her heart melted
in the warmth of his countenance, and she yearned to die crucified by the agonies of this life
for love of the Crucified (Life, II.46, p. 136).
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The primal tension between Jews, the Old Israel, and Christians, the New, is by no means
overt in biographical accounts of our three subjects. Certainly, it is there, not at all invisibly, in
the Passion and death of Jesus, a Passion play for all seasons. But generally, with the calm assur-
ance of what is taken for granted and seen without being noticed, “an elephant in the room,”
it is there between the lines, the massive piles, the underpinnings on which the authors of those
accounts constructed their narrative superstructures. It may be enough to remember that almost
the entire history of medieval Jewry in England occurred between the Norman Conquest of
England (1066) – or, alternatively, Anselm’s entrance as a novice into the monastery of Bec – and
Juliana of Mont-Cornillon’s death (1258) – or, alternatively yet again, the expulsion of the Jews
by Edward I (1290).
Spiritual anxiety
Part of iconographers’ work has always been to go more or less boldly into areas of silence.
That is inevitably the case whether the work has to do with the “speaking pictures” of verbal
arts (poetry or prose that depends on suggestively conjuring up pictures in readers’ imagina-
tions), or with the “mute poems” of pictorial arts. The magnificent Cloisters Cross, with its
visual links between the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible and the Crucifixion, and its putative
reference to Christian-Jewish conflicts in England (c. 1140), suggests much more than it
says. Taken together with the contemporary life histories of Cuthbert and Anselm, Juliana’s
narrative of the transactions with Christ that impelled her to compose and disseminate the
liturgy of the Blessed Sacrament makes a brief notice of silence in the iconography of liturgy
imperative.
As decoders of symbols, modern iconographers are obliged to read with care what is unsaid
in the silences between the lines of what is said. Indeed, this was also the laborious task of
medieval iconographers seeking to read the mind of Jesus between the lines of Scripture, for
they were convinced that God had hidden sacred mysteries from profanation by the unbe-
lieving and unsanctified, concealing them in various symbolic verbal codes. The words of
Scripture were “the oracles of God,” mysterious, fateful, and beyond the grasp of the many.
Christian interpreters inclined to believe that, except for particularly holy individuals, Jews
had long been, and remained, blind to the inner, spiritual truth in the sacred oracles. They
could not decode what had been entrusted to them under the symbols of Law and Prophets.
They also misread God’s promises of salvation. Unable to decipher the oracles conveyed by
their own prophets, they could not recognize the long-awaited Messiah the prophets foretold.
They had killed him, their own Messiah, and God transferred the birthright of Israel from
them to the followers of Christ.
As we noted, early Christian writers characterized this split in the household of faith as on the
pattern of the fratricidal rivalry of the patriarch Isaac’s two sons, the elder, Esau, who recklessly
abandoned his birthright, and the younger, Jacob, who snapped it up. We located this allegory
of how the antipathy between Jews and Christians began as early as the second century, in a
Christian apologist’s dramatic rendition of a debate between himself and Trypho, a learned rabbi
(Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, c. 130).
A parallel dialogue from the late eleventh century offers nothing to compare with this
charge of lethal violence.14 The treatise was written by Gilbert Crispin, a fellow monk of
Anselm at Bec, and a friend. Like Anselm, Gilbert was moved from Normandy to England
to assist in the Normanization of the English church. Like Anselm, he received a particularly
eminent position as abbot of Westminster. He dedicated his treatise to Anselm, slightly before
Anselm became archbishop of Canterbury (1093). One of the most remarkable contrasts with
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Justin Martyr’s treatise is the absence of reference to violence on either side in dealings between
Jews and Christians.
Yet here again, there is something essential in the iconographic silence. Preconditions for
fratricide of Jews by Christians were already present in scattered local attacks in France and the
Rhineland earlier in the eleventh century. About three years after Gilbert Crispin’s dialogue was
written warriors of the First Crusade left trails of massacres and forced conversions through Jewish
communities along their lines of march. Their boast was to have avenged the death of Christ.15
In the time between these massacres and Juliana’s death, several lines of persecution inter-
sected at the point at which the rivalry between Jews and Christians had begun: the incarna-
tion of God. That was the flashpoint of the debate and the violence, the great divide between
orthodoxy and heterodoxy, whether nonbelief or wrong belief. With her own experience of
receiving her divine Bridegroom into her soul through contemplation of his living presence
in the Eucharist, Juliana composed and promoted the Office of the Blessed Sacrament as a
public ritual available to clergy and laity alike, a weapon against “the madness of certain her-
etics” (Life, II 15, p. 98), perhaps with the Cathars and their legacy in mind. In thanksgiving
for his sanguinary and costly victory over the Cathars (1226), King Louis VII of France had
commanded the bishop of Avignon to exhibit the veiled Sacrament for adoration, and such was
the devotion that the ritual became continual, day and night. A wide and urgent preoccupation
with the physical presence of the divine had begun to swell with Berengar’s provocative denial
of the real presence, and the tide of theological disputes and legal processes etching that denial
deep in Christian consciousness, and a little later with irrepressible rage and terror ignited by
rumors of Jewish attacks on consecrated hosts and dark rituals of cannibalism, blasphemous
parodies on eating the Body of Jesus and drinking his Blood, injected into common knowl-
edge by blood libels.16
The connection between the persecution of Jews and the violations of the body of Christ of
which they were accused was precise in France, with the bonfires of Talmuds and other Jewish
writings judged to have attacked the Church, the body of Christ, or Christ himself. Occasion-
ally, the ritual of burning was expanded to include burning of Jewish converts to Christianity
who had returned to their original faith, chaining the books in which they had written their
“apostasies” to their bodies to be burned together at the stake.17
Juliana’s sense of divine mission in framing and raising up the Office of the Blessed Sacrament
against heretical madness was grounded in overpowering awe and consuming passion that had
melted her own heart in her contemplation of Christ’s living presence, and impressed God’s glory
in her soul, and that had left her speechless for long days at a time after she received communion.
But her reasoning was iconographical. Its flaw had long been apparent.
Gilbert Crispin indicated it in his Disputation of a Christian and a Jew, dedicated to Anselm
and submitted to him for corrective review.
The Jew in Crispin’s minidrama, adverting to the Biblical prohibition against painted and
carved images, denounced the Christian use of devotional art. His first example was a particularly
gruesome crucifix.18 The Christian responded that, if God had intended to forbid all images,
he would have sinned against his own law when he commanded that figures of two cherubim
be carved for the Ark of the Covenant and other images and utensils made for the Tabernacle.
In themselves, figures served the same function as written words: to represent or describe. God
forbade idolatry, not images. We call a cross holy, he said, but we do not adore or worship it. It
has no power of itself in itself. However, the Christian continued, when a bishop blesses an image,
we do reverence it not with divine honors but with honors due a likeness of the Lord’s Passion.
We worship the suffering of a man assumed into God and into unity of personhood with God,
but we honor the image as a likeness, not as the real God-man (153–162, pp. 50–53).
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The Jew in Crispin’s Disputation had already negated the doctrine of the Incarnation built
into this distinction between the image of the Crucified and the real, living, bleeding, anguished
Crucified. Christians taught that, since Christ was the Messiah, he fulfilled the prophecies that
the Messiah would be of the seed of Abraham. They also taught that, as a sacrificial victim, he
had to be entirely sinless, spotless, and unpolluted, to make full and complete satisfaction for the
sins of humankind. The Jew’s point is clear: the two requirements were mutually exclusive. By
making them in tandem, Christians were doing violence to Scripture and torturing it to insist
that, being made from the Virgin’s flesh, he was unpolluted by the seed of a man, while also being,
through her, of Abraham’s seed (106, p. 36).
Actually, the Jew’s iconographical question was unusual in its logical challenge to a vicious
circle. Others addressed the whole structure of calls for a second look at basic principles of the-
ology. Along with their communities, some Jews burned with their books in twelfth-century
France paralleled some Christian sifting through individual and collective traumas, and won-
dering how such suffering could be visited on the righteous. Had God abandoned his people?19
Traditions developed from writings of the Church Fathers also found imponderables concerning
the justice of God in the reprobation of the Jews for their disobedience. The same prophetic
tradition that was read as foreseeing the vocation of the Gentiles’ tradition declared that God had
made the Jews blind and deaf to truth. There was deep anxiety for all in the hiddenness and
foreknowledge with which divine justice was seen in these acts of retribution, for the rationale
was that, in the loss of their Temple and sacred City and the ultimate catastrophe of the Diaspora,
divine Providence had used the Jews as living witnesses before the whole earth to the antiquity
of the truth preached by Christians, and of their guilt in the death of Jesus, the happy crime (felix
culpa) that secured the redemption of the world. There was profound disequilibrium in teaching
that, at the end of time, the redeemed of the Old Israel and of the New would together enter the
eternal Jerusalem as the true Israel.
In every way, the adoration of Christ’s real presence, flesh, blood, and spirit, including the sing-
ing of the exultant victory songs, the Te Deum and the Magnificat, was iconographically designed
to celebrate the triumph of the Christian’s affirmation over the Jew’s objection that the Chris-
tian’s basic premise was self-contradictory. But the Jew had cast a strong light into the silence
where iconographers must venture. In liturgical iconography, as in other areas, not answers but
only questions are perennial. The air around the Christian’s iconography was filled with noisy
responses; the Jew’s iconographical question remained suspended and clear in its silence for later
ages to ponder, each in its own way. There was a fateful challenge to basic assumptions on which
the whole iconographic structure, verbal and visual, stood in the question, asked by Christians in
speculation and by Jews at the stake, of why God ordered the world and its salvation with such
suffering to his people and himself.
Notes
1 Julian the Apostate, Against the Galilaeans, in Wilmer Cave Wright (trans.), The Works of the Emperor
Julian, III (Cambridge, 1953), 253A-B, 392–93.
2 On the general subject, see F.J.E. Boddens Hosang, “Attraction and Hatred: Relations between Jews
and Christians in the Early Church,” in Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators, ed. A.C.
Geljon and R. Oukema (Leiden, 2014). Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 125, 8–30.
3 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, in trans. Thomas B. Falls and Thomas P. Halton (Washington, 2003),
Selections from The Fathers of the Church, 3, chapters 31–47, 89–108, 42–67–139–163.
4 Select bibliography (see also following notes): journals: Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft (1950–); Arte cris-
tiana: Revista internazionale di stroria dell’arte e di arti liturgiche/An International Review of Art History and
Liturgical Arts (1913–); Ephemerides Liturgicae (1887–); Les actes des colloques du Centre international d’études
248
liturgiques (1996–); Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques (1907–); Studia Liturgica: An International
Ecumenical Quarterly for Liturgical Research and Renewal (1962–); inventory of texts: E. Dekkers, Clavis
Patrum Latinorum, 3rd ed. (Steenbruggen: Abbatia Sancti Petri, 1995); C. Vogel (ed.) and William G. Sto-
rey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen (trans.), with John K. Brooks-Leonard, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction
to the Sources (Washington, DC, 1986); general orientations: A.J. Chupungo (ed.), Handbook for Litur-
gical Studies, vol. I: Introduction to the Liturgy (Collegeville, 1997); Aimé Georges Martimort in trans.
M.J. O’Connell, The Church at Prayer: An Introduction to the Liturgy, new edition, vol. I: Principles of the
Liturgy (Collegeville, 1987); P. Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo-Dionysian Synthesis
(Toronto, 1984), series: Studies and Texts, 71.
5 P. Meyvaert, “Bede and the Church Paintings at Wearmouth-Jarrow,” Anglo-Saxon England 8 (1979),
63–77, reprinted in P. Meyvaert, The Art of Words: Bede and Theodulf (Aldershot, 2008), 63–77, with
analysis of Bede’s account of Benedict Biscop’s pictures in Bede, Lives of the Holy Abbots of Wearmouth
and Jarrow, in ed. and trans. Christopher Grocock and I. N. Wood, Bede the Venerable, Abbots of
Wearmouth and Jarrow (Oxford, 2013), 9, 43–44.
6 With the accidental and patchy survival of evidence, actual steps of transmission and development
seem to be beyond recovery for many rites and ceremonies. And yet some recent studies have demon-
strated how, often by slow and highly localized steps, parochial ways mutated and spread into general
practice. On the Eucharist, an older, classic study is G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London, 1945).
See the very general orientation in J. Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to
the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford, 1991), and
Eric Palazzo (trans.) and M. Beaumont, A History of Liturgical Books from the Beginning to the Thirteenth
Century (Collegeville, 1998). On baptism, see M.L. Colish, Faith, Fiction, and Force in Medieval Baptismal
Debates (Washington, DC, 2014). Concerning the Romano-German Pontifical, a pivotal collection in
the whole history of Church liturgy, see H. Parkes, The Making of Liturgy in the Ottonian Church: Books,
Music, and Ritual in Mainz, 950–1050 (Cambridge, 2015). On rituals of dying and death, see F.S. Paxton,
Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 1990), and F.S. Paxton
with I. Cochelin, The Death Ritual at Cluny in the Central Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2013), series: Disciplina
Monastica. See also M.C. Salisbury, The Secular Liturgical Office in Late Medieval England (Turnhout, 2015),
series: Medieval Church Studies, 36.
7 A.A. McArthur, The Evolution of the Christian Year (London, 1953).
8 Second Vatican Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium) Solemnly Prom-
ulgated by His Holiness, Pope Paul VI on December 4, 1963 (Boston, n.d.), 11, 20, 42. The Council
frequently named the enduring authority, or power, as “the spirit of the liturgy.” It was repeating a
term that the theologian Romano Guardini made current, and that one leader of the Second Vatican
Council, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), made his own. For a full explica-
tion of the meaning of the name, see J. Ratzinger, trans. John Saward, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San
Francisco, 2000).
9 The Venerable Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and trans. R.A.B. Mynors
(Oxford, 1969), I.25, 27 c. 2; I.30; 73–74, 80–82, 106–08.
10 J.A. Cabaniss, Agobard of Lyons: Churchman and Critic (Syracuse, 1953), 60–62, 94–95.
11 William of St. Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, trans. C. Hart (Shannon, IRE, 1970), Cistercian
Fathers Series, nr. 6), pref. cc. 13, 17, 11, 14.
12 B. Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life
(New York, 1969). Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. and trans. R.W. Southern
(Oxford, 1962). Eadmer, Eadmer’s History of Recent Events in England: Historia Novorum in Anglia, trans. G.
Bosanquet (London, 1964). Anonymous, The Life of Juliana of Mont-Cornillon, trans. Barbara Newman
(Toronto, 1991).
13 Bede’s Prose Life, c. 16, 212.
14 Gilbert Crispin, The Works of Gilbert Crispin Abbot of Westminster, ed. A.S. Abulafia and G.R. Evans
(London, 1986).
15 On the change in the magnitude of violence, see R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power
and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford, 1987).
16 See C.W. Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond
(Philadelphia, 2007).
17 See S. Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, 2002) and
Trial by Fire: Burning Jewish Books (Kalamazoo, 2000), series: lectures on Medieval Judaism at Trinity
University, Occasional Papers III.
249
Karl F. Morrison
18 Cf. the impact of a painting of the crucifixion on a putative thirteenth-century German Jew in Herman-
nus quondam Judaeus Opusculum de Conversione Sua, ed. G. Niemeyer (Weimar, 1963), series: Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, QZGDM 4, cc. 2–3, pp. 75, 79. Karl F. Morrison (trans.), Conversion and Text: The
Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville, 1992), 80, 82. See H.
Kessler, “Shaded with Dust: Jewish Eyes on Christian Art,” in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anx-
ieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. H. Kessler and D. Nirenberg (Philadelphia, 2011), 74–114.
M. Camille, “The Idols of the Jews,” in Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in
Medieval Art, ed. Michael Camille (Cambridge, 1989), 165–94.
19 Einbinder, Beautiful Death (as in note 17), pp. 27–28, and Einbinder, No Place of Rest, 12–13, 67.
250
19
SECULAR ICONOGRAPHY
Secular or “worldly” iconography is by its very nature related to the world, the saeculum in the
medieval Latin sense of the word, where it stands for “earthly world,” “delight in the world,”
or “life of the world.”1 In the Middle Ages it has to be delimited from religious iconography,
which is in many ways antagonistic to Christian iconography (and to medieval Jewish art as well,
which has many points of contact with Christian iconography).2 Christian iconography has to
be the necessary reference point for the definition of secular iconography, because in theory at
least everything outside of it can be described as secular. Like the secular arts secular iconography
is a modern concept.3 It is closely related to secularization as a decisive event in the wake of the
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the new order of political relations in Europe. It is
also related to a clear shift in art practices toward production that was becoming increasingly
detached from the patronage of the Church and religious themes and objects.
If an effort is made to list the fields covered under the umbrella of secular iconography, it is
clear that these fields theoretically have to include images that deal with the world as created by
God, but this is a world that is transient and deals with human existence on earth, and beyond
the pictures which deal explicitly with the capability of man to be saved and his part in salvific
history. Strictly speaking, therefore, nearly all the subjects discussed in this publication, apart from
religious iconography, should come under the remit of secular iconography.
Secular iconography, like the secular arts, is a comprehensive term and, at the same time, a
wide-ranging and simultaneously heterogeneous field. It is a field which lacks clearly defined
literary links, unlike Christian iconography, which has the Bible as well as the legends of the saints
as well as many other such texts. As such, there is no manual or lexicon for all the subjects of
secular iconography.4 Research into secular iconography has tended to fragment into individual
fields, according to theme, field of knowledge, genre, group of works, or period, and sometimes it
has been undertaken with reference to great literary works or authors, such as Chaucer,5 or else
studies have looked at the relationship of images to vernacular literature.6 The bibliography for
secular art or iconography is limited and only a few references can be given for some outstanding
wall paintings and tapestries as many works are still unstudied.7 Misericords and pilgrim souve-
nirs and secular badges now have a rich specialist literature,8 even if works such as oven tiles and
biscuit molds do not always attract the attention of the art historian.9 Book illumination, as in
religious iconography, is an important field that cannot be overlooked. Even in the Carolingian
period, for example, copies of late classical manuscripts and their illuminations were a rich source
251
of material10 that increases over time.11 Particular emphasis has to be given to the genuine treasure
trove of miniatures in Gothic manuscripts, which has been catalogued on a thematic basis by
Randall.12 The work undertaken by Michael Camille on marginal images in a variety of media
is also inspiring (see the chapter on him elsewhere in this volume).13
Unusual material – well outside of the established canon – that still remains unstudied for
the period 1200 to 1500 has been documented in a fascinating publication by Malcolm Jones.14
The somewhat lurid title The Secret Middle Ages has, among other things, chapters on proverbs,
the world turned upside down, narratives, gender relations, and scatology.15 This book developed
from the justified feeling that many images and objects from the field of secular art had not
made it into art history because they were created, as it were, in a universe parallel to that of great
art with its better-known works. The fact that these unknown works sometimes came from
archaeological contexts did not also help. This problem may have to do with the systematization
of material that has so far been almost impossible to achieve and is perhaps not sensible.16 The
variety of subjects and themes as well as the constant stream of new discoveries and neglected
material gives a new dynamic to the whole field of secular iconography which unfortunately
can create difficulties regarding its integration. It is not possible to cover the entire subject in
the confines of this chapter, and the topics chosen are subjective and should be attributed to my
long-standing preoccupation with the field of secular iconography.
The relationship of secular to religious art is central to this study, and the most important
question in defining secular iconography is to see whether it is possible and how sensible it is to
demarcate it from religious iconography – to separate the secular from the sacred. In nineteenth-
and twentieth-century art history the separation of the fields was strictly adhered to. Religious art
was easier to systematize and occupied the center ground, while works of secular art occupied a
relatively marginal position, and still do. Works of religious art are also numerically more domi-
nant in the earlier part of the Middle Ages. The dominance of religious works is also due to the
fact that they were better preserved from one generation to the next; monumental painting and
sculpture, goldsmith work, and textiles were better preserved in an ecclesiastical space and church
property was more ensured of being passed from one generation to the next than similar work
in castles, palaces, or upper-class town houses. Johann Michael Fritz states in his standard work
on the art of Gothic goldsmithing that the ratio between profane and religious works seems to
be exactly reversed in today’s tradition.17
In contemporary research a clear line between sacred and secular is barely perceptible, although
the two divisions clearly existed and there certainly was an awareness of them being separate in
the Middle Ages. The tendency nowadays is to look at the relatively complex interplay of both
divisions – secular and sacred – which at first glance is usually scarcely visible. Alicia Walker and
Amanda Luyster used such an approach in their volume Negotiating Secular and Sacred in Medieval
Art:18 “Rather than performing dissections of secular and sacred organs from the anatomies of
objects and buildings, scholars today allow worldly and spiritual features that were conjoined by
their makers to work together as a single body.” Function and context are central in any future
study of secular art. Studies such as this provide contemporary art history with a promising
repertoire of methodologies to understand secular iconography.19 The interplay of secular and
sacred as well as the integration of the two fields is to be the subject of this chapter and particular
attention will be paid to works on the boundaries of the two divisions. Such an approach seems
to me to be the best way of looking at secular iconography.
The first work is the Ebstorf Map (Fig. 19.1), which was made in Northern Germany around
1300; it is a particularly detailed image of the world that is also a strange mixture of wall painting,
book, devotional object, and teaching aid.20 At about 3.6 meters in height it is the largest world
image of its kind. It is not a wall painting but was created as book illumination on thirty parchment
252
Secular iconography
Figure 19.1 Ebstorf Map, c. 1300, northern Germany (modern copy of the original destroyed in 1943).
© Kloster Ebstorf, Klosterkammer Hannover.
sheets stitched together so that it could be rolled out on two bars. With its extensive accompanying
texts, it resembles a book. According to a recent count there are around 1,500 Latin texts for eight
hundred images, including five hundred representations of towns and buildings, 160 watercourses,
sixty animals, and forty-five human beings and fabulous creatures in the map.
While earlier images of the world were limited to small representations in manuscripts, world
maps of such monumental size were first produced in the later Middle Ages. Their development
was possibly connected to a move to embrace the world by the clerical elite in the later Middle
Ages. The world in all its manifestations became, for groups such as the Augustinian canons of
St. Victor in Paris, the Victorines, an important reference point for their teaching as an instructive
tool for those seeking wisdom and God.21 Their school, which played an important role in the
development of the University of Paris, had wall-sized images of the world for teaching pur-
poses.22 It was, after all, Hugo of St. Victor (c. 1097–1141) who gave us the plan of a large and
complex diagrammatic image of the world in his work De Archa Noe.23
Because the axis of the Ebstorf Map runs east-west, Paradise, situated in the Far East, appears
at the very top.24 All fixed points on the map – that is, the center and the cardinal points – are
253
points of Christian geography. In the center of the world, Jerusalem appears as an eternal golden
city with an image of the resurrected Christ. In a second representation, Christ is positively
shown as the Suffering Servant of the world. His large head appears as the Vera Icon at the top
toward the east on the edge of the world. His hands and feet, with the stigmata, are to be found
to the north, south, and in the east. God reveals himself in the world that he has created but that
is also transient and in need of salvation. Only God remains apart from those who approach
and behold him and then find their way to Paradise. This is in the east and is reproduced close
to his face, but does not show the Blessed but instead the beginning of salvation history from
the fall of man.
Many elements in this image naturally belong to secular iconography. Directly next to the
image of the Resurrected Christ in heavenly Jerusalem in the center of the map is a camel, which
is only slightly smaller than the city. It belongs to a whole catalogue of animals worked into the
map and closely connected to the accompanying texts in the map. This makes the map a sort of
bestiary, popular in the late Middle Ages (see the chapter on animal iconography elsewhere in
this volume), which in this case is organized topographically. Additionally, next to the hands of
Christ, in the outer regions of the world are the monsters from the remote parts of Africa; in the
north there are the Amazons and cannibal people Gog and Magog, whom Alexander the Great
was able to confine behind a mountain range. Ancient history is also included in the map with
several other representations and Alexander the Great being named. Similarly, the contemporary
world is also present in Europe’s urban landscape. This landscape makes Christian Europe look
like a continent of cities, and this raises it, in quite a positive way, above the other continents
with their monsters.25 In Europe there is almost a complete lack of figurative elements, apart
from two lions. One stands on the pinnacle of Rome and represents the supposedly lion-shaped
layout of the city. The other reproduces the famous lion statue of Henry the Lion in his castle at
Brunswick. Brunswick was one of the two great cities of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the
site of the Ebstorf monastery, from which the map comes. Apart from Christological elements,
the map also includes many other subjects that can be subsumed under the heading of secular
iconography, in particular animal iconography, or otherness, or political iconography (referring
to the Brunswick Lion), scientific iconography, flowers and plants, and monster iconography, as
well as representations from ancient history, such as Alexander the Great, and the Garden of the
Hesperides from mythology.
Whether the Ebstorf map was intended for school use or as a sort of meditation image has
to remain an unanswered question. A prayer on the Vera Icon, the head of Christ at the top end
of map, promises an indulgence. The extensive amount of information on the worldly objects
is really unnecessary for religious purposes. So the classification of the map as purely sacred or
purely secular is meaningless. It fulfills its potential and function only when the two worlds are
combined and it is seen as neither. It is constructive to consider the reception of the map. In the
diversity of the represented world, the viewer can get lost if he wanders in a curious fashion.
Curiosity of this kind was called “curiositas” in the Middle Ages and considered to be a vice.26
Fixed points in the map that hold the viewer’s gaze are found only in the emphasized representa-
tion of Christ. The message of the map seems therefore to be that only Christ can provide any
meaning to the world in all its diversity and as such also in secular matters. But the world as an
image of Christ is also a legitimate object of interest for every Christian.
Man’s relationship to the world in the Middle Ages, even in the religious sphere, was not a
fixed concept. It stretches from acceptance as a sort of book that can lead man to God as its
creator to the denial of it in the most complete form of escapism possible. But the world is
always finite, deficient, in need of salvation, and focused on God. This is illustrated by the second
biggest map of the Middle Ages in Hereford.27 It is sealed with the word “mors” (death) and,
254
Secular iconography
with a representation of the Last Judgment on its upper edge, it is directed even more clearly at
transitory qualities and transience than the Ebstorf Map.
It is significant that Christological elements are separated from secular ones by formal mark-
ing, size, and position at the outstanding points in the Ebstorf Map. This subordinates the secular
to the sacred. A similar, even hierarchical, and formal designation can also be observed with the
beginnings of secular wall painting. The earliest cycle of secular wall painting – the Iwein cycle,
in Burg Rodenegg near Brixen in South Tyrol – may pave the way for the first independent lay
culture of the Middle Ages, that of court chivalry.28 This culture dealt in poetry and imagery, and
discussed how one could equally serve God and the world. The Rodenegg wall paintings show
how the Arthurian knight Iwein finally wins a wife, land, and dominion after successful adven-
tures in the forest and knightly battles at the end of many dangers and unexpected perils. If struc-
tural (frame and white background) and iconographical parallels to the Iwein cycle are looked for
in contemporary wall painting, direct connections are to be found to the almost contemporary
apse painting of the church of St. Jakob in Kastelaz, also in South Tyrol.29 Christ as Majestas
Domini between Mary and John is to be found in the apse, above the twelve apostles, who stand
under arcades. The plinth area of the apse at the bottom has numerous fabulous creatures from
land and sea on either side of the altar, which is set against a white background. That the motifs
are set against a white background in Rodenegg connects these wall paintings with the plinth area
at Kastelaz, which forms the lowest point in apse hierarchy in Kastelaz and has fabulous creatures,
also on a white background. The walls above the apse are emphasized by a colored background
following their importance as the place of the saints and God. The program at Rodenegg has all
the adventures of the forest shown in such a way that it can be viewed as worldly and deficient.30
The formal means like the white background are similarly reduced in the case of the Bayeux
Tapestry, whose depiction of the events before and after the Battle of Hastings in 1066 stands
today at the beginning of large-scale medieval narratives of contemporary history.31 In the pan-
egyric written by Baudri de Bourgueil in honor of Adele de Blois, daughter of William I of
England and victor of 1066, the poet sketches out in detail an ideal chamber for Adele.32 The
conquest of England is incorporated in a world history on wall hangings around Adele’s alcove.
This history begins with the Creation and proceeds via the Flood and Hebrew and Greek history
to the conquest of England behind the alcove. The marble floor also has a map of the world and
the ceiling is a sky of stars, planets, and signs of the zodiac. In the alcove itself Baudri arranges
personifications of knowledge with representations of philosophy, medicine, and the liberal arts.
The mid-twelfth-century floor of the main apse of Hildesheim Cathedral shows that the poet’s
compositions are not entirely fictitious. The four cardinal virtues and the three theological vir-
tues (1 Cor 13:13) as well as the stages of life are all arranged around a central circle, showing
the world and the place of man in it.33 Time, with its three faces looking at the past, present, and
future, is shown at the crown of the apse. It is flanked immediately by blossoming life in the form
of a beautiful young woman and death, who is emaciated and bald. The four elements – fire, air,
earth, and water – are on the left and right sides. Christ’s bloodless sacrificial death can be seen
on the high altar, bringing the prospect of salvation to mankind and victoriously overcoming
death and breaking through the world banished to the floor with its cycles of life and death.
In accordance with the pictorial setting of the apse, the Hildesheim representation of the world
has a salvific perspective which Adele’s room does not, but it works with a similar conventional
stock of knowledge.
The earliest preserved example of secular wall painting so far discovered is in Gamburg in
Taubertal, which has a cycle made before 1219 on Barbarossa’s third Crusade. Like the Bayeux
Tapestry, it depicts contemporary history, while older wall paintings, such as those in the royal
palaces, are known only from references.34 A contemporary example is to be found in the book
255
illumination of Petrus de Ebulos’s Liber ad honorem Augusti of 1194–1197.35 It shows the com-
monly found wheel of fortune, the turning of which illustrates the fate of the ruling elite and
their constant rise and fall.36 To escape this fate, the personifications of the virtues, especially
the cardinal virtues, are mobilized to enable the virtuous to break out of this fatal cycle.37 The
representations of the virtues in images like the one on the floor in Hildesheim change from the
religious sphere to the secular world.
New subjects such as the Iwein material can be formally programmed into the hierarchies of
their genre of wall painting as secular, as the comparison with Kastelaz shows. They can also in
their own way highlight positive values in secular iconography independently of the use of per-
sonifications. This is clear from the early Iwein cycle (Fig. 19.2a) in Hessenhof in Schmalkalden
in southern Thuringia.38 The cycle was created in the second quarter of the thirteenth century
and, as at Rodenegg, it depicts Iwein winning a wife, land, and dominion. In this case, the wall
paintings are found in bands across barrel vaulting, with the wedding and wedding feast strongly
emphasized by their positions at the crown of the vault or in a large area on the entrance wall
directly underneath the vault.39 Any visitors to the house, which was administered as the official
seat of the Landgrave of Thuringia, first encountered the painted figure of a man with a wel-
coming drink in a door opening to their right (Fig. 19.2b). By pictorially greeting each visitor
he was a symbol of the hospitality of Hessenhof and its residents. If the visitor turned around in
the room to look at Iwein’s wedding banquet on the entrance wall, he immediately found more
servants to the side of the married couple and their guests, serving them with food and drink,
immediately above the welcoming man. In this way the visitor to Hessenhof is integrated into
the act represented in the wall paintings and at the same time the hospitality of Hessenhof is
associated in a distinctive way with the wedding feast of Iwein.
It was only a house so well appointed that was able to provide hospitality of the level shown
in these scenes. For this, the host had to have the necessary ability and knowledge and to be
the undisputed master of the house, with respect to wife, children, and servants. Accordingly,
the works displayed in houses such as this often show the order of the world and human life, the
relationship between the sexes, generations, and classes. Persons of authority who were masters
of their own house were intimately related to such works in their house. This is found especially
in wall paintings and tapestries, but also on oven tiles and wooden ceilings. These conventional
objects are often treated in catalogue form,40 but can also be expressed in other guises, such as
illustrated proverbs.41 To be able to use these sources of knowledge and reproduce them as images
was important in determining the status of the secular and the sacred elites in their environment.
This can be seen in the calendars in manuscripts such as psalters and books of hours, as well
as in large wall paintings where the images for each month and zodiac signs are organized as
monthly cycles. Typical of this is the Torre Aquila (Eagle Tower) of the bishop’s residence in
Trento, which dates to around 1400.42 The wall paintings represent knowledge of the yearly
seasonal cycle as well as the time and types of human activity and at the same time reflect the
ownership and pride of the patron. As in the slightly later and better-known calendar miniatures
of the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, the representations of the bishop’s own castles
as well as his residence in the city of Trento serve the same purpose.43 The Torre Aquila was
commissioned by an ecclesiastical prelate, the prince bishop of Trento, George of Lichtenstein,
but the Très Riches Heures is the prayer book of a bibliophile member of the French royal fam-
ily, Jean Duc de Berry; these two examples show, especially in the case of the latter, how these
pictures negotiate between the secular and sacred spheres. Both examples contrast the life of
simple country people with that of the aristocracy and the court. The courtly pleasures of the
aristocracy, especially the hunt as an aristocratic privilege, had a pictorial tradition that goes back
to ancient times.44 The hunting mosaics in twelfth-century garden palaces of oriental design in
256
Figure 19.2 Schmalkalden, Hessenhof: (a) view of the Iwein Rooms, north, (b) welcoming man at the
entrance, both drawings by P. Weber, “Die Iweinbilder aus dem 13. Jahrhundert im Hessenhofe in
Schmalkalden,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 12 1900–1901, 73–84, 113–20.
the South Italian–Sicilian Norman kingdom provided a stimulus for the depiction of these pur-
suits in monumental wall paintings of the later Middle Ages.45 In addition to the hunt, in which
women also participated in Trento (falconry), the tournament before women and the meeting of
the sexes in dance are also represented. The same combination of courtly activities and pleasures
of combat, hunting, and love is described as typically Roman in the late medieval Lucretia novella
of the imperial chronicle.46
Tournaments, hunting, and the common pleasures of the sexes are also found in the decora-
tion of the so-called Tournament Hall in Rodenegg Castle near Bozen in South Tyrol.47 Instead
of the snowball fight depicted in front of the Trento castle for January, the ball game is shown
in Rodenegg. The use of shared patterns shows how much they have in common. They might
well come from pattern books, which from the middle of the fourteenth century were clearly
aimed at secular iconography.48 The Chamber of Knightly Games in the so-called West Hall,
in the same complex in Runkelstein, shows the greeting of guests on the meadow in front of
the castle and the game known as quintaine. This attractive tournament was played between
the sexes for contact between men and women.49 These motifs are brought together with com-
parable ones in the famous contemporary so-called Games Tapestry (“Spieleteppich”) in the
garden of Frau Minne in Nuremberg.50 The game as a meeting point for the sexes, whether
it is chess or some other board game, is a common theme in secular iconography.51 The same
is true of the famous Manesse Codex, the largest collection of popular lovesongs, which was
gradually illuminated with author portraits in Zurich from 1300 to about 1340.52 In addition
to numerous miniatures on the theme of the lovesongs there are many representations showing
fighting, jousting, and hunting.
If the rural population in the wall paintings of the Torre Aquila and their typical seasonal
work in the field, garden, and vineyard are examined it becomes clear that these wall paintings
are in line with the large collection of pictures showing human activities, human nourishment,
and health that were created at the same time in the manuscripts of the Tacuinum Sanitatis in
Northern Italy.53 A pleasure and joy are shown in all facets of everyday life in the catalogue-like
spread of these pictures, which are conventional stocks of knowledge, which in Trento is due to
the ruler. This concept of the good regime, which is found in the communes of Italy, was to lead
as early as the late 1330s to the first differentiated representation of town and country in the wall
painting of the “buon governo” by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.54 A
court counterpart to this image of human coexistence is in the Brussels Codex of the so-called
Leges Palatinae, the administrative manual for the Mallorca Court. It is dominated by the activities
of people of different classes, ages, and sexes and is almost contemporary with the Siena paint-
ings.55 There are also images from the world of the court and the town hall images, such as the
Nine Worthies, or the best rulers from classical antiquity, Judaism, and Christianity. Typical of
these is a sculpture group that lines the walls of the Hansasaal in the town hall in Cologne, which
was created about 1330.56 In Siena, the representation of the bad regime serves as the counter
image to the ideal state of “buon governo.” Counter images are common in secular iconogra-
phy. In the case of Ambrogio Lorenzetti their starting point is the representation of virtues and
vices in the plinth area of Giotto’s decoration of the Arena Chapel.57 Counter images serve to
demarcate as well as to better illustrate what is meant. At the same time they have a special visual
value in their excess and intensification, which can stretch to representations along the lines of the
upside-down world, examples of which will be shown later. Sometimes they offer rare glimpses
into the humor of the time.
Country life and its activities served as a counter image to life, appearance, and behavior
among the aristocracy and at court. This is the case with the peasants who set themselves against
the love poet Neidhart, who had become well-known as an enemy of the peasants and who in the
258
Secular iconography
Manesse Codex seems to be under threat from foppishly dressed peasants with distorted faces.58
In secular wall painting from the Manesse period it is possible to see the coarse and ungainly
circle dance of the peasants around the first spring violet that they stole from Neidhart and his
courtly society.59 The peasants with large swords, shaggy beards, and drinking vessels on their
heads sometimes appear at this dance, and are often compared and contrasted with court society.
This subject lives on in the cycles of peasant festivals and dances, which could also include the
scatological.60
Stronger, didactic, and negative examples are the wall and façade paintings and hangings that
depict the story of the Prodigal Son or the wastrel who went through his fortune in brothels.
The subject became common in secular wall painting from the fourteenth century. Typical are
those in Haus Fischergrube 20 in Lübeck, which date to 1330–1350.61 The subject is related to
the drinking and dancing miniatures that can be seen as early as 1230 in the manuscript of the
Carmina Burana.62 In particular, it is associated with the large early thirteenth-century rep-
resentations of the parable that can be seen in the stained glass of French cathedrals.63 There is an
emphasis on the life of the wastrel in the Prodigal Son cycle and it is depicted in detail. In this
way, this subject is freed from the parable and establishes a connection with related subjects. There
are scenes with anonymous wastrels, gambling away their shirts in Brandis Castle in Maienfeld
in Switzerland (Fig. 19.3). These are connected to the cycle of Samson, the Biblical hero who
Figure 19.3 Maienfeld, Burg Brandis, Upper Tower, Bar Fight, first third of the fourteenth century, J. R.
Rahn, “Zwei weltliche Bilderfolgen aus dem 14. Jahrhundert und 15. Jahrhundert,” Kunstdenkmäler der
Schweiz. Mitteilungen der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Erhaltung historischer Denkmale, 2 (1902), 1–14.
259
came to grief as a result of his infatuation with Delilah.64 The decoration of a room in the town
hall of San Gimignano from around 1300 has a representation of a young man being parted from
his inheritance. Found in what may have been a kind of living room of the podestà of the city,
it is directly above the scene of Aristotle being led astray by Phyllis, the serving girl of the wife of his
pupil Alexander, and then ridden like a horse.65
The knowledge that even the strongest, most powerful, richest, and cleverest were weak with
beautiful women becomes conventional wisdom in the catalogue of lovesick fools. One such
catalogue is a poem illustrated with lovesick fools from Adam to Arthur and Parzival, possibly to
serve conversational purposes, which was also part of the decoration of the house in Constance
known as “Zur Kunkel” from the Manesse period.66 The so-called Malterer Tapestry from
around 1310–1330 is a catalogue of lovesick fools from Samson and Aristotle via Virgil in the
Basket to Iwein.67 Here too, as with the Prodigal Son and the wastrel, it is wisdom about human
nature and its weaknesses that is displayed in the images. It is not surprising that cycles of this
sort, like the one in Constance and the one from the old rectory in Ostermiething from 1470–80
(on the vault wall of the room), are found in clerical residences.68
The first Cockaigne in art history is found in Ostermiething (Fig. 19.4). It is accompanied by
other scenes, such as the lion serving the donkey and the huckster robbed by the ape, which is
Figure 19.4 Ostermiething, Old Rectory, Cockaigne, wall painting around 1470/80. Image courtesy of
Harald Wolter von dem Knesebeck.
260
Secular iconography
also to be found in expensive enamel works, such as on the Beaker with Apes in New York69 –
examples of the didactic use of the world turned upside-down. As the war between cats and
mice, which ultimately goes back to ancient models, became widespread in fifteenth-century
printing,70 they in turn offer conventional wisdom about the order of the world by being able
to negate it. The diffusion of the theme of the fool from the later Middle Ages, as promoted by
humanist writers such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, added to
this.71 The prodigal son, lovesick fool, and wastrel, world turned upside-down, and imagery of
the fool mark the one who owned or commissioned these pictures. They reveal the person to
be someone who knows about divinely willed order in the world, hierarchies between the sexes
and the generations, and the dangers of the world, but who can handle this wisdom playfully
and humorously in any conversation that would develop around such pictures and their rooms.72
Indeed such conversations may have been deliberately stimulated by these cycles or what remains
of them. This can be guessed at if the typical life span of a man is arranged as going from the cradle
to the grave, and is combined with cycles of people who can be named. This can be seen in the
parable of the Prodigal Son from a tapestry in Marburg or in the thin marginal stripe as well as the
frieze-like story of Parzival from a lost wall painting in a house in Lubeck.73 In the cycle a normal
life span time is understood as the time of a human life in general. In contrast, the personal history
of literary figures shows clear breaks. This contrast between a normal life and the unusual life of
literary figure might have led to a productive tension that was supposed to be resolved in the con-
versation about this work of art.
To conclude this short survey of subjects in secular iconography, reference has to be made to
the Wild Men, characterized by their total body hair, who are found on numerous late medieval
tapestries. They represent a counterworld to that of humans, but one that can have positive connota-
tions.74 This shows them in their idyllic life, in a friendly countryside setting, jousting and storming
the castle of love, enjoying a banquet with princesses who have been captured by them but who
appear to be quite happy nevertheless. They hunt and enjoy the well-known pleasures of the court,
which would in fact have been the privilege of the aristocracy. The well-known Bal des Ardents
shows that in egregious sections of the French court, the king himself dressed as a Wild Man, and
wanted to perform a dance. The Wild Men performed a costume dance at court, which may have
been similar to the Neidhart dances that were performed at festivals by dancers dressed as peasants.75
It is possible only to speculate at the importance such living images had for secular iconography.
In addition to the great illustrations of the parable of the Prodigal Son in the churches and related
images of the wastrel’s life in secular iconography, court romances were being illustrated almost con-
temporaneously. This is a subject that will pay dividends when further examined in the development
of secular narrative. In addition to the early Iwein cycles, unusual images, such as Erek, the Arthurian
knight, on two diadems which were remodeled into a crown, may refer directly to festival culture.76
The original connection of the three Tristan tapestries to the women’s convent of Wienhausen is
disputed;77 however, the Malterer tapestry with its lovesick fools was also made for a women’s convent.
The already mentioned Burg Runkelstein was completely decorated around 1400, and will
be briefly mentioned once again in this concluding section. The range of motifs and subjects
found there includes almost the entire spectrum of secular iconography.78 The East Hall had
a Neidhart dance, while courtly pleasures and various coats of arms can be found in the West
Hall.79 Conventional wisdom is depicted in the Kaiserreihe (Emperor Series) and the Liberal
Artes led by Philosophia that are found in the courtyard or the arcaded hall of the summer house.
The summer house also had many other subjects, including the Nine Worthies (balcony) as well
as Tristan, Wigalois, and Garel. Lancelot is another Arthurian knight found in the contemporary
wall paintings of Frugarolo at Alessandria in Northern Italy.80 If properties as prominent as Burg
Runkelstein make us aware of secular iconography as an outstanding part of medieval imagery,
261
in the same way as the well-known Bayeux Tapestry or the Ape Beaker in New York, we also
have to realize that many secular objects and themes still remain unknown. This is true not only
of works such as the Frugarolo wall paintings or those in Gamburg in Taubertal but also of those
in historic buildings, such as the Romanesque apartment in the fortress of Salzburg, where one
of the earliest pieces of secular medieval wall painting is to be found and probably shows the
consecration of the archbishop of Salzburg by the emperor Friedrich II. Despite it being clearly
visible and visited by thousands on an annual basis, it was decades before it was published.81 To
record, reproduce, and research the known materials so that they can be contextualized is an
important task. It will be necessary to see why, where, and when certain groups of themes or
subjects developed and how they were or were not integrated into their cultural context. Atten-
tion will need to be given to the social groups responsible for these subjects and how secular
iconography was related to vernacular literature. Issues of reception will need to be studied. The
secular arts have historically been seen as minor and my comments on them can also be applied
to the secular iconography:
Their values are based to a certain extent on their importance in the larger develop-
mental picture, but are also the result of their independent existence from such develop-
ments. This has to be seen both as being posited by a discipline such as art history and
also as a resistance to the mainstreams of traditional art history in general. This shows
what a great potential there is for the thematic research as well as for the advancement
of theory in art history.82
Notes
1 The designation “profane iconography,” where “profane” ultimately has ancient roots in the sense of
being before or outside the fanum (sacred area), like “profane art” or “arte profana,” is also commonly
used. See A. Cutler, “Sacred and Profane: The Locus of the Political in Middle Byzantine Art,” in Arte
profana e arte sacra a Bisanzio, ed. A. Iacobini and E. Zanini (Rome, 1995), 315–38, especially 317.
2 Compare the sensational discovery of profane wall paintings for Jewish clients from the first half of
the fourteenth century in Haus Brunngasse 8, Zurich; see R. Böhmer, “Bogenschütze, Bauerntanz und
Falkenjagd. Zur Ikonographie der Wandmalereien im Haus ‘Zum Brunnenhof in Zürich,” in Literatur
und Wandmalerei I. Erscheinungsformen höfischer Kultur und ihre Träger im Mittelalter (Freiburger Colloquium
1998), ed. E.C. Lutz, J. Thali, and R. Wetzel (Tübingen, 2002), 329–64; D. Epelbaum, “Zu den Wand-
malereien im Haus ‘Zum Brunnenhof,’ Zürich. Ein Beispiel jüdischer Kunst aus dem 14. Jahrhundert
im Spannungsfeld zwischen Adaption und Abgrenzung,” Judaica 58 (2002), 261–80.
3 H. Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Secular Arts: Their Order and Importance,” From Minor to Major: The
Minor Arts in Medieval Art History, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2012), 66–81.
4 For an early comprehensive overview see R. von Marle, Iconographie de l’art profane au moyen âge et à la Renais-
sance et la décoration des demeures, vols. 1–2 (The Hague, 1931–32), of which two other volumes were planned.
For the ancient subjects used in the Middle Ages, largely excluded in this chapter, see the useful work of J.D.
Reid, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300–1990s, vols. 1–2 (New York/Oxford, 1993);
Mythenrezeption (Der Neue Pauly, Supplement, vol. 5), ed. M. Moog-Grünwald (Stuttgart/Weimar, 2008).
5 D.W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, 1962).
6 M. Curschmann, “Wort-Schrift-Bild. Zum Verhältnis vom volkssprachlichem Schrifttum und bil-
dender Kunst vom 12. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert,” in Mittelalter und frühe Neuzeit: Übergänge, Umbrüche
und Neuansätze, ed. W. Haug (Fortuna vitrea, vol. 16) (Tübingen, 1999), 378–470.
7 See A. Martindale, Painting the Palace: Studies in the History of Medieval Secular Painting (London, 1995);
A.R. Buri and M. Stucky-Schürer, “Zahm und wild”: Basler und Straßburger Bildteppiche des 15. Jahrhun-
derts (Mainz, 1990); L. Weigelt, “The Art of Tapestry: Neither Minor nor Decorative,” in From Minor to
Major: The Minor Arts in Medieval History, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2012), 103–21.
8 For literature see M. Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (Stroud, 2002), passim. On the misericords see W.
Muller, “The Art of the Misericord: Neglected and Important,” in From Minor to Major: The Minor Arts
in Medieval History, ed. by C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2012), 271–84, and The Elaine C. Block Database
262
Secular iconography
of Medieval Misericords, which has been catalogued and digitized by the Index of Christian Art in
Princeton University; see http://ica.princeton.edu/misericordia/index.php. On the pilgrim badges, see J.
Koldeweij, “Notes on the Historiography and Iconography of Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges,” in
From Minor to Major: The Minor Arts in Medieval History, ed. by C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2012), 194–216.
9 On biscuit molds, for example, see Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (as in note 8), 1–12.
10 See D. Blume, “Wissenschaft und Bilder: Vermittlung antiken Wissens im Frühmittelalter,” in Karolingis-
che und ottonische Kunst (Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Deutschland, vol. 1, ed. B. Reudenbach (Munich,
2009), 519–35.
11 Only the most general reference can be made to the large collection of manuscripts dealing with diverse
areas of secular knowledge that can be treated individually in this chapter.
12 L.M.C. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (California Studies in the History of Art, 4)
(Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1966).
13 M. Camille, Images on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992).
14 Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (as in note 8).
15 Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (as in note 8), Ch. VII–IX, XI, XII.
16 The criteria for classification in secular iconography are often determined by classical antiquity and the
Renaissance; see, for example, F. Büttner and A. Gottdang, Einführung in die Ikonographie: Wege zur Deu-
tung von Bildinhalten (Munich, 2006), 123–272, especially 127, where the categories of (1) symbolism,
allegory, and personification, (2) mythology, (3) history, and (4) literature are specified. In J.B. Friedman
and J.M. Wegmann, Medieval Iconography: A Research Guide (New York/London, 1998), it is the category
of the natural world and medieval daily life.
17 J.M. Fritz, Goldschmiedekunst der Gotik in Mitteleuropa (Munich, 1982).
18 A. Walker and A. Luyster, “Introduction: Mapping the Heavens and Treading the Earth: Negotiating
Secular and Sacred in Medieval Art,” in Negotiating Secular and Sacred in Medieval Art, ed. A. Walker and
A. Luyster (Farnham, 2009), 1–16, especially 8.
19 See Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Secular Arts (as in note 3), 66–81.
20 On the following see Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Secular Arts (as in note 3), 67–69. The map is edited in
Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte: Kommentierte Neuausgabe in zwei Bänden, ed. H. Kugler (Berlin, 2007). See also Ein
Weltbild vor Columbus: Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. H. Kugler (Weinheim, 1991); J. Wilke, Die Ebstorfer Welt-
karte (Veröffentlichungen des Institutes für Historische Landesforschung der Universität Göttingen, vol. 39)
(Bielefeld, 2001); H. Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Neue Formen der Bildung und neue Bildformen im
Vorfeld der Ebstorfer Weltkarte in Sachsen,” in Kloster und Bildung im Mittelalter, Ebstorfer Kolloquium 2004
(Studien zur Germania Sacra, vol. 28; Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 218),
ed. N. Kruppa and J. Wilke (Göttingen, 2006), 231–61. The following Internet site is very helpful for a
complete facsimile with notes: http://www.uni-lueneburg.de/hyperimage/EbsKart/start.html.
21 C. Meier, “Malerei des Unsichtbaren: Über den Zusammenhang von Erkenntnistheorie und Bildstruk-
tur im Mittelalter,” in Text und Bild, Bild und Text, DFG-Symposion 1988, ed. W. Harms (Stuttgart, 1990),
35–65; Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Neue Formen der Bildung (as in note 20), 239–42.
22 P.G. Dalché, La “Descriptio Mappe Mundi” de Hugues de Saint-Victor, Texte inédit avec introduction et com-
mentaire (Paris, 1988), 95–101, 133.
23 Hugonis de Sancto Victore, De Archa Noe Libellus de formatione Arche 1–2, ed. P. Siccard (CCCM 176)
(Turnhout, 2001), especially 2, Figura XI on “De Archa Noe,” XI, 4–118.
24 On the following see Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Neue Formen der Bildung (as in note 20); Wolter-von
dem Knesebeck, Secular Arts (as in note 3), 67–69.
25 See H. Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Der Kontinent der Städte und der Wege: Europa und seine Stel-
lung in Welt und Weltgeschichte auf der Ebstorfer Weltkarte,” in Gründungsmythen Europas im Mittelalter,
ed. M. Bernsen, M. Becher, and E. Brüggen (Gründungsmythen Europas in Literatur, Kunst und Musik,
vol. 6) (Göttingen, 2013), 105–32.
26 See Curiositas: Welterfahrung und ästhetische Neugierde in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. K. Krüger
(Göttingen, 2002).
27 P.D.A. Harvey, The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context (London, 2006). See the
essay by Diarmuid Scully elsewhere in this volume.
28 On Rodenegg see J.A. Rushing, Jr., Images of Adventure: Ywain in the Visual Arts (Philadelphia, 1995),
30–90; V. Schupp and H. Szklenar, Ywain auf Schloß Rodenegg: Eine Bildergeschichte nach dem “Iwein” Hart-
manns von Aue (Sigmaringen, 1996); Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Secular Arts (as in note 3), 76–81. On the
evaluation from a German studies perspective, see, for example, M. Curschmann, “Wort-Schrift-Bild”
(as in note 6), 378–470, especially 402ff. On the culture of court chivalry, see, for example, J. Bumke,
263
Mäzene im Mittelalter: Die Gönner und Auftraggeber der höfischen Literatur in Deutschland 1150–1300
(Munich, 1979).
29 On the wall paintings in Kastelaz, see U. Düriegl, Die Fabelwesen von St. Jakob in Kastelaz bei Tramin:
Romanische Bilderwelt antiken und vorantiken Ursprungs (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar, 2003).
30 Düriegl, Die Fabelwesen (as in note 29), 111, interprets the bestiary in Kastelaz as part of the world in need
of salvation that also includes evil. A.M. Bonnet, Rodenegg und Schmalkalden: Untersuchungen zur Illustra-
tion einer ritterlich-höfischen Erzählung und zur Entstehung profaner Epenillustration in den ersten Jahrzehnten
des 13. Jahrhunderts (tuduv-Studien, Reihe Kunstgeschichte, vol. 22) (Munich, 1986), 63, refers to the
associations of Rodenegg with the plinth areas of the decoration of the sacred area and cites the wall
paintings in the crypt of the cathedral at Aquileia.
31 On the Bayeux Tapestry see J.F. Szabo and N.E. Kuefler, The Bayeux Tapestry: A Critically Annotated
Bibliography (Lanham, 2015).
32 The edition is in Baldicus Burgulianus, Carmina, ed. K. Hilbert (Editiones Heidelbergenses, vol. 19)
(Heidelberg, 1979), Nr. 134. On the reconstruction of the room see C. Meckseper, “Wandmalerei im
funktionalen Zusammenhang ihres architektonisch-räumlichen Orts,” in Literatur und Wandmalerei I.
Erscheinungsformen höfischer Kultur und ihre Träger im Mittelalter (Freiburger Colloquium 1998), ed. E.C.
Lutz, J. Thali, and R. Wetzel (Tübingen, 2002), 255–81, especially 260f., fig. 2.
33 See T. Weigel, Schmuckfußböden des 12. Jahrhunderts aus inkrustiertem Estrichgips (Studien zur internatio-
nalen Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte, vol. 67) (St. Petersberg, 2009), 79–107.
34 Meckseper, Wandmalerei im funktionalen Zusammenhang (as in note 32), 259–60. On the wall paintings of
Gamburg see H. Fabritius, “Die mittelalterlichen Wandmalereien der Gamburg,” in Burgen und Schlösser
in Thüringen und seinen Nachbarländern (Munich/Berlin, 2000), ed. G. U. Groβmann, and H. H. Háffner
253–64, with partially outdated reconstructions before the clearance of the whole area; Peter Rückert,
“Adelige Herrschaft und Repräsentation im Hohen Mittelalter: Literatur und Architektur im Umfeld
der Grafen von Wertheim und der Herren von Gamburg,” in Wirtschaft – Gesellschaft – Mentalitäten im
Mittelalter. Festschrift zum 75. Geburtstag von Rolf Sprandel (Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte,
vol. 107), ed. H.-P. Baum, R. Leng, and J. Schneider (Stuttgart, 2006), 289–306, especially 301–06.
35 Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Codex 120 II; see Petrus de Ebulo, Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de rebus Siculis,
Codex 120 II der Burgerbibliothek Bern: Eine Bilderchronik der Stauferzeit, Edition und Beiträge, ed. T. Kölzer
and M. Stähli, Textrevision und Übersetzung von Gereon Becht-Jördens (Sigmaringen, 1994).
36 Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Codex 120 II, fol. 146r–147r; see Kölzer/Stähli, Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de
rebus Siculis (as in note 35), 238–45. In general on Fortuna see, for example, Fortuna, ed. W. Haug and B.
Wachinger (Fortuna Vitrea, vol. 15) (Tübingen, 1995).
37 See D. Blume, “Planetengötter und ein christlicher Friedensbringer als Legitimation eines Macht-
wechsels: Die Ausmalung der Rocca di Angera,” in Europäische Kunst um 1300, Akten des XXV. Interna-
tionalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Vienna 1983, vol. 6 (Vienna, 1986), 175–85, pl. 112–22.
38 On Schmalkalden see Rushing, “Images of Adventure” (as in note 28), 91–132; R. Möller, “Untersu-
chungen an den Wandmalereien des Iwein-Epos Hartmanns von Aue im Hessenhof in Schmalkalden,”
in Sachsen und Anhalt, Jahrbuch der historischen Kommission für Sachsen-Anhalt 19 (Festschrift für Ernst
Schubert) (Weimar, 1997), 389–453.
39 On this and the following see H. Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Die Bedeutung des Themenkreises
‘Haus’ in der profanen Wandmalerei des Spätmittelalters für die Genese der Genremalerei,” in Peiraikos‘
Erben: Die Genese der Genremalerei bis 1550, ed. B.U. Münch and J. Müller with the collaboration of
E. Oßwald (Trierer Beiträge in den historischen Kulturwissenschaften, 14) (Wiesbaden, 2015), 267–95,
colored plates 17–21.
40 See in general Literatur und Wandmalerei II. Konventionalität und Konversation (Burgdorfer Colloquium
2001), ed. E.C. Lutz, J. Thali, and R. Wetzel (Tübingen, 2005).
41 See Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (as in note 8), 121–43.
42 E. Castelnuovo, I Mesi di Trento: Gli affreschi di torre Aquila e il gotico internazionale (Trento, 1986); D.E.
Booton, Pictorial Seasons: A Cultural Study of the Cycle of Calendar Paintings in the Torre dell’Aquila, Phil.
diss., New York University (1994); Le vie del Gotico: Il Trentino fra Trecento e Quattrocento, ed. L. Dal Prà, E.
Chini, and M.B. Ottaviani (Beni Artistici e Storici del Trentino, Quaderni, 8) (Trento, 2002), Kat.-Nr.
21, 600–09 (Francesca de Gramatica).
43 Chantilly, Musée Condé, Ms. 65; see J. Longnon, Les très riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Musée Condé, Chan-
tilly (London, 1969); M. Müller, “Das irdische Territorium als Abbild eines himmlischen: Überlegungen
in den Monatsbildern in den Très Riches Heures des Herzogs von Berry,” in Bildnis, Fürst und Territorium,
rev. A. Beyer (Rudolstädter Forschungen zur Residenzkultur, 2) (Munich/Berlin, 2000), 11–29.
264
Secular iconography
44 H. Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Aspekte der höfischen Jagd und ihrer Kritik in Bildzeugnissen des
Hochmittelalters”, in Jagd und höfische Kultur im Mittelalter, Festschrift für J. Fleckenstein zum 75. Geburtstag,
ed. W. Rösener (Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 135) (Göttingen,
1997), 493–572; H. Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Bildliche Darstellungen der Jagd zwischen Antike
und Mittelalter als Teil der Erinnerungskultur und Repräsentation von Eliten,” in Die Jagd der Eliten in
der Erinnerungskultur von der Antike bis in die Frühe Neuzeit, ed. W. Martini (Formen der Erinnerung, vol. 3)
(Göttingen, 2000), 39–78.
45 H.-R. Meier, Die normannischen Königspaläste in Palermo: Studien zur hochmittelalterlichen Residenzbaukunst
(Manuskripte zur Kunstwissenschaft in der Wernerschen Verlagsgesellschaft) (Worms, 1994).
46 Die Kaiserchronik eines Regensburger Geistlichen, ed. E. Schröder (MGH Deutsche Chroniken, I, 1), 1892,
v. 4415ff.; see also http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/12Jh/Kaiserchronik/
kai_ch00.html and Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Aspekte der höfischen Jagd und ihrer Kritik (as in note 44), 500.
47 Schloß Runkelstein: Die Bilderburg, exhibition cat. (Bozen, 2000), especially the chapter by K. Domanski
and M. Krenn, “Die profanen Wandmalereien im Westpalas,” 51–98, especially 77–90.
48 See R.W. Scheller, Exemplum: Model-Book Drawings and the Practice of Artistic Transmission in the Middle
Ages (ca. 900–ca. 1470) (Amsterdam, 1995), especially cat. nos. 17–36.
49 Domanski and Krenn, Die profanen Wandmalereien im Westpalas (as in note 47), 54–64.
50 Der Spieleteppich im Kontext profaner Wanddekoration um 1400. Beiträge des internationalen Symposions am 30.
und 31. Oktober 2008 im Germanischen Nationalmuseum, ed. J. Zander-Seidel (Germanisches National-
museum, Wissenschaftliche Beibände zum Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, vol. 29)
(Nuremberg, 2010).
51 An entire room with play scenes of this sort from the period 1364–1373 can be found, for example, in
the Castello von Arco in Trentino; see Le vie del Gotico. Il Trentino fra Trecento e Quattrocento, ed. L. Dal
Prà, E. Chini, and M.B. Ottaviani (Beni Artistici e Storici del Trentino, Quaderni, 8) (Trento, 2002), Cat.
no. 20, 572–99 (Giovanna degli Avancini).
52 Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. Germ. 848; see Die Miniaturen der großen Heidelberger Lie-
derhandschrift, ed. and annotated by I.F. Walther with the collaboration of G. Siebert (Frankfurt, 1988).
A complete facsimile is found on the Internet at http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848.
53 See, for example, L.C. Arano, The Medieval Health Handbook: Tacuinum Sanitatis (New York, 1976); C.S.
Hoeniger, “The Illuminated ‘Tacuinum sanitatis’ Manuscripts from Northern Italy ca. 1380–1400:
Sources, Patrons, and the Creation of a New Pictorial Genre,” in Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural
History, 1200–1550, ed. J.A. Givens, K.M. Reeds, and A. Touwaide (AVISTA Studies in the History of
Medieval Technology, Science and Art, vol. 5) (Aldershot, 2006), 51–81.
54 Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit: Die Argumentation der Bilder, ed. H. Belting and D. Blume
(Munich 1989); M. Seidel, Dolce vita: Ambrogio Lorenzettis Porträt des Sieneser Staates (Vorträge der Aene-
as-Silvius-Stiftung an der Universität Basel, vol. 33) (Basel, 1999); J. Poeschke, Wandmalerei der Giottozeit
in Italien, 1280–1400 (Munich, 2003), 290–309.
55 Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 9169; see H. Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Haus und
Herrschaft in den ‘Leges Palatinae’ und in anderen Bildzeugnissen des 14. Jahrhunderts,” in Utilidad y
decoro: Zeremoniell und symbolische Kommunikation in den “Leges Palatinae” König Jakobs III. von Mallorca
(1337) (Trierer Beiträge on den Historischen Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 6), ed. G. Drossbach and G.
Kerscher (Wiesbaden, 2013), 119–33.
56 S. Altensleben, “Politische Ethik im späten Mittelalter: Kurfürstenreime, Autoritätensprüche und
Stadtregimentslehren im Kölner Rathaus,” in Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 64 (2003), 125–85.
57 On virtues and vices, see in general A. Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art (Lon-
don, 1939); C. Hourihane, Virtue & Vice: The Personifications in the Index of Christian Art (Princeton, 2000).
58 Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. Germ. 848, fol. 273r; see http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.
de/diglit/cpg848/0541?sid=6aecb315413da9037a0f34e8440e26d7.
59 See Neidhartrezeption in Wort und Bild, ed. G. Blaschitz (Medium Aevum Quotidianum, special issue 10)
(Krems, 2000).
60 On this see H.-J. Raupp, Bauernsatiren: Entstehung und Entwicklung des bäuerlichen Genres in der deutschen
und niederländischen Kunst, ca. 1470–1570 (Niederzier, 1986).
61 On the Lübeck wall paintings, see B. Schirok, “Die Wandmalereien in der ehemaligen Johannisstr. 18
und in der Fischergrube 20,” in Ausstattungen Lübecker Wohnhäuser: Raumnutzung, Malereien und Bücher im
Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. M. Eickhölter and R. Hammel-Kiesow (Häuser und Höfe
in Lübeck, 4) (Neumünster, 1993), 269–98, especially 288–95; see Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Secular
Arts (as in note 3), 270f.
265
62 On the miniatures of the Carmina Burana, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4660, see P. and
D. Diemer, “‘Qui pingit florem non pingit floris odorem’: Die Illustration der Carmina Burana (Clm
4660),” Zeitschrift des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte 3 (1987), 43–75.
63 On the Prodigal Son in thirteenth-century stained glass and on the subject in general, see W. Kemp,
Sermo Corporeus: The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass (Cambridge, 1997).
64 Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Die Bedeutung des Themenkreises ‘Haus’” (as in note 39), 272–77.
65 C.J. Campell, The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano 1290–1320 (Princeton,
1997). On the widespread representation of Aristotle being ridden, see C. Hermann, Der “Gerittene
Aristoteles”: Das Bildmotiv des “Gerittenen Aristoteles” und seine Bedeutung für die Aufrechterhaltung der
gesellschaftlichen Ordnung vom Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts bis um 1500 (Pfaffenweiler, 1991).
66 Washington, DC, Library of Congress, Rosenwald Coll. Ms. 4, fol. 7v–8r; see M. Castelberg, “Beschädigte
Bilder und Texte: Entstehung, Thematik und Funktion einer spätmittelalterlichen Tafelsammlung,” in Lit-
eratur und Wandmalerei II. Konventionalität und Konversation (Burgdorfer Colloquium 2001), ed. E.C. Lutz,
J. Thali, and R. Wetzel (Tübingen, 2005), 303–33, especially figs. 42–43. On the wall paintings in the
Constance ‘Zur Kunkel’ house, see W. Wunderlich, Weibsbilder al fresco: Kulturgeschichtlicher Hintergrund und
literarische Tradition der Wandbilder im Konstanzer Haus “Zur Kunkel” (Constanz, 1996), especially 112–56.
67 Rushing, Images of Adventure (as in note 28), 219–44.
68 On Ostermiething see Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Die Bedeutung des Themenkreises ‘Haus’” (as in
note 39), 278–90.
69 Beaker with Apes, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, Inv. no.
52–50; see B. Young, “The Monkeys and the Peddler,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26 (1968),
441–54; Schatzkammerstücke aus der Herbstzeit des Mittelalters: Das Regensburger Emailkästchen und sein
Umkreis, ed. R. Baumstark, exhibition catalogue (Munich, 1992), cat. no 13 (Renate Eikelmann).
70 For example, Gotha, Schloss Friedenstein, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. no. 40, 41 (Old Catalogue no. xyl. II, 201;
see Flugblätter der Reformation und des Bauernkrieges: 50 Blätter aus der Sammlung des Schloßmuseums Gotha, ed.
H. Meuche; Katalog von Ingeburg Neumeister (Leipzig, 1976), 98, pl. B 32; on this leaf and its use as model in
the wall paintings of Schloß Moos in Eppan near Bozen from around 1470 and the subject in general see
H. Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, “Zahm und wild: Thematische Spannungsverhältnisse und ihre (topogra-
phische) Organisation: Die Wandmalereien des Jagdzimmers von Schloß Moos in Eppan,” in Lutz, Thali, and
Wetzel, Literatur (as in note 66), 479–519, figs. 107–17, colored plates XIV–XV, especially 492–96, figs. 110–11.
71 See, for example, Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (as in note 8), 100–20.
72 On the forms of such a conversation in the Middle Ages, see in particular E.C. Lutz, “Einleitung,” in
Literatur, ed. Lutz, Thali, and Wetzel (as in note 66), 1–7.
73 On the Marburg Tapestry see Kemp, “Narratives” (as in note 63), 34–37; on the Lübeck wall painting,
see Schirok, Wandmalereien (as in note 61), 269–98.
74 R. Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment and Demonology (Cambridge,
1952); Buri and Stucky-Schürer, Zahm und Wild (as in note 7).
75 See M. Curschmann, “Konventionelles aus dem Freiraum zwischen verbaler und visueller Gestaltung,”
in Literatur, ed. Lutz, Thali, and Wetzel (as in note 66), 237–52, especially 237–40, pl. II.
76 J. Mühlemann, Artus in Gold: Der Erek-Zyklus auf dem Krakauer Kronenkreuz (Studien zur internationalen
Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte, vol. 104) (Petersberg, 2013).
77 D. Fouquet, Wort und Bild in der mittelalterlichen Tristantradition: Der älteste Tristanteppich von Kloster Wien-
hausen und die textile Tristanüberlieferung des Mittelalters (Philologische Studien und Quellen, vol. 62) (Ber-
lin, 1971); S. Romeyke, “Pactum pacis – Der Tristan im Kloster Wienhausen”, in Frauen-Kloster-Kunst:
Neue Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters. Beiträge zum Internationalen Kolloquium vom 13. bis
16. Mai 2005 anlässlich der Ausstellung “Krone und Schleier,” ed. J.F. Hamburger, C. Jaeggi, S. Marti,
H. Roeckelein (Turnhout, 2007), 255–64.
78 Schloß Runkelstein: Die Bilderburg, Exhibition Catalogue (Bozen, 2000).
79 On coats of arms and profane wall painting in general see H.-R. Meier and S. Sommerer, “Von der kollektiven
Identität zur individuellen Ahnenprobe: Heraldik in der spätmittelalterlichen Profanraumdekoration,” in Paroles
de murs: peinture murale, littérature et histoire au Moyen Âgprechende Wände, ed. E.C. Lutz (Grenoble, 2007), 167–82.
80 Le Stanze di Artù: Gli affreschi di Frugarolo e l’immaginatio cavalleresco nell’autunno del medioevo, ed. E. Castel-
nuovo, exhibition catalogue, Alessandria 1999 (Milan, 1999).
81 E. Lanc, “Neue religiöse und profane Monumentalmalerei der Romanik in der Festung Hohensalzburg”,
in 12. Österreichischer Kunsthistorikertag,” Im Netz(werk): Kunst-Kunstgeschichte-Politik, Salzburg 2003 (Vienna,
2004), 116–23.
82 See Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Secular Arts (as in note 3), 81.
266
20
EROTIC ICONOGRAPHY
Relating to Eros, the ancient Greek god of love, erotic art takes lovemaking, or an invitation to it,
as its central theme; it has to do with sexual arousal, passions, and pleasures, as well as intercourse.
Christian love or Caritas was constructed in opposition to this pagan carnality, known as amor
in the Middle Ages.1 Erotica and obscaena are among a dwindling number of Latin words that
continue to be used in the West into the twenty-first century; like medical terms, their function
in modern learned discourse is largely to avoid normal vernacular descriptions of sexual activities
and anatomical parts that might seem vulgar, embarrassing, or even downright obscene.2 Erotica
and obscaena are categories that involve subjective judgments, though modern laws pretend that
there is a community consensus about what is obscene (and therefore not protected “speech” in
the United States).3 Those who disapprove of erotica may consider it pornographic or obscene,
and the three are often collapsed together today in popular understanding.4 In antiquity Por-
nographia was associated with writings on prostitution, and came into vernacular use only in
the eighteenth or nineteenth century, after the “invention of pornography” as discourse.5 The
association brings to mind the erotic art used to inspire clients in the paintings and statues found
in Pompeii, and these were among the first objects to be hidden from public view in the nine-
teenth century.6 The term pornography itself went out of use in the Middle Ages, and obscene
was more likely to be used for words or representations that were judged to be blasphemous or
scurrilous than for sexual content. Yet medieval writings and visual representations are redolent
with erotic motifs and signs in a broad sense, occasionally with a view to encouraging propaga-
tion, more often simply titillating or arousing, and open to homosexual and heterosexual gazes
and readings.7
Although “the Middle Ages” was largely constructed in the nineteenth century as a period
when pious beliefs and morals dominated European societal attitudes and cultural production,
medieval erotica were occasionally noticed, along with grotesques – for instance, by Champ-
fleury.8 Late twentieth-century scholars have been rediscovering the freedoms craftsmen and
donors had in representing partial or full nudity, genital sex, erotic embraces, and veiled erotic
signs.9 Many new interrogations grew out of gender studies and postcolonialism, and it is difficult
now to envisage the polarized criticism that greeted some of Michael Camille’s work, or the spe-
cial issue of Speculum on Studying Medieval Women in 1993;10 in retrospect it is apparent that the
political climate of that moment included the debate in the United States over public exhibition
of the erotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.11 Among numerous publications since then,
267
papers from a conference held in Bamberg in 2008 debated whether there was an appreciation of
erotic nudity in the medieval culture.12 And the diverse collection of articles in The Meanings of
Nudity in Medieval Art, edited by Sherry Lindquist in 2011, is representative of new and ongoing
interrogations of erotic art in the high and late Middle Ages.13
Representations of naked bodies can be sacred or secular, raising the question whether an
erotic response would have been equally appropriate to each context. Postmedieval viewers with
an appreciation of ancient statuary had expected images of the nude body to be sensual, perhaps
even physically beautiful, to be called erotic.14 Adhering to this canon, in 1959 the medievalist
Walter Oakeshott illustrated the ivory plaques that were incorporated into the eleventh-century
ambo in Aachen as late antique examples of the pagan gods Bacchus and Venus; their inert
fleshy bodies and wooden facial expressions probably had little ability to arouse except by asso-
ciation with mythology.15 Yet a Carolingian painting of a chained seminude Andromeda, with
drapery that has slipped below her pubis, has the erotic appeal of sensuality and vulnerability
(Fig. 20.1).16 The master narrative of art history maintained that the dominant representational
codes for Christian art disrupted such pleasures of viewing, more or less from late antiquity to
the fifteenth century, except for brief Carolingian and twelfth-century renascences.17 According
to that paradigm, form rather than content is iconographic, yet it claimed the pleasure of viewing
to be purely aesthetic rather than erotic. From that perspective, Romanesque art is often found
Figure 20.1 Andromeda, Aratus, Phaenomena interpreted by Claudio Germanico, Carolingian Palace
School, Aachen, c. 804. Leiden University Library, Ms Voss. Lat. Q79, folio 30 v detail initial C. Photograph
licensed by Leiden University Library.
268
Erotic iconography
lacking in aesthetic qualities. Some naked figures may not appear sensual enough to inspire Eros,
but there is plenty of evidence in texts that the idea of nudity did, as in a ribald fabliau when a
wife’s physical assets are shown off:
piez & jambs, cuisses & flans, les hanches & les costez blans, les mains, les bras & les mameles,/
qu’ele avoit serres & beles,/ le blanc col & la blanche gorge.
(feet and legs and flanks and thighs/ and haunches and snowy-white sides/ and hands
and arms and bosoms, which/ are firm, well-rounded, ripe and rich.)18
Evocative words are cheap but visual codes are harder to come by; a modernist eye often discerned
a gap between idea and artistic execution. It has not been contested, however, that by the four-
teenth century, painterly techniques and representational codes allowed artists to render the sensual
contours and surfaces of the body so that women bathing, or standing with a mirror like Venus, are
agreed to be erotic spectacles.19 Yet despite the construction of a Greek canon in which the nude
male was prominent, male bodies received little consideration in the modernist period.
Occasionally, nude biblical figures measure up to the test of antiquity. A bronze casting of
a lion wrestled by a male nude who has been interpreted as the biblical David (or Hercules) is
now a freestanding statuette; the surface qualities of the medium and rendering of the wrestler’s
buttocks and thigh muscles associate the piece with the “twelfth-century renaissance” and prob-
able production in the south of Italy during the Hohenstaufen period.20 Among twelfth-century
clerics with a taste for antiquity, an Englishman called Master Gregory confessed to having gone
out of his way three times in Rome to gaze at a statue of Venus: “This statue was dedicated by
the Romans to Venus in that guise in which, as it is said in the story, she showed herself naked to
Paris . . . it seems rather a living being than a statue, for her nudity seems to blush . . . and I know
not what magic charm it held.”21 Yet Gregory reviled the notorious spinario of Rome – the sensual
bronze figure of a young man removing a thorn from his foot and thus displaying his genitals
to viewers below the plinth – as a ridiculous image (simulachro) of Priapus because his genitals
are too large.22 The figure had a medieval afterlife as Marcolf, a lewd rustic character associated
with luxuria (lust), who tried to outwit Solomon and exposed himself to him; utterly devoid of
eroticism, he is depicted on a voussoir in the south portal of Ourense Cathedral in Galicia dating
from about 1200, and crouched beneath Solomon in the north transept of Chartres.23 Other
Romanesque sculptors created nudes with sensual forms and surfaces, but their work may not be
straightforward iteration of antique models nor can it be relegated to the domains of the obscene
or the grotesque: Francisco Prado-Vilar has written on an extraordinary nude inspired by classical
models of satyrs in a capital from a funerary chapel in Jaca Cathedral (dated 1105) where it was
part of a program devoted to the resurrection, alongside other motifs coming from the bestiary,
such as the phoenix and the lion. The classical nude, in all its beauty and somatic appeal, is revived
in that case to illustrate the “corporeality” of the resurrection of the dead, and the beauty of the
glorified bodies in the fullness of time, reflecting theological arguments which go back to early
Christian writers, especially Augustine. The debates over the corporeality of the resurrection
gained new importance in twelfth-century exegesis, in the context of the need to fight heresies
that negated this aspect and argued for an exclusively spiritual existence after death.24 To an
unsophisticated male or female viewer, however, the satyr might appear simply erotic; the burden
always falls on the gaze, which risks accusation as lascivious or prurient.
The life-size statue of Adam made c. 1250 for the south transept of Notre-Dame in Paris is
an evocative example of a male nude from the thirteenth century that seems to place temptation
in the way of its audience.25 Whether medieval viewers were able to counter their response to
269
this statue with lessons of moral turpitude and sexual sin we cannot know, but multivalence was
ubiquitous, and is aptly illustrated in a popular Middle English jingle of about 1320:
Erthe took of erthe, erthe wyth wogh;

Erthe other erthe to the other drough;
Erthe leyde erthe in erthen through;
Than hadde erthe of erthe ynough.
This has been interpreted by Russell Peck on four levels: earthy copulation to overcome love-
sickness, Adam’s union with Eve, which earned them the grave, mankind’s plight, which has
some relief in lying in the earth, and Christ as the second Adam (“other erthe”), who redeemed
mankind when he was laid in the earth. He aptly demands that we ask not what does it mean but
what can it mean, without privileging any one interpretation.26 Yet nudity in art was regarded
by some as guilty unless proved innocent. Giles of Rome, in his guide to good governance
written in the thirteenth century, stresses that young men must renounce pleasure in women
(deliz de fame) by avoiding frivolous words and the sight of ugly or evil things, such as paintings
or statues of nude women.27 In order to control the viewer’s response, sculptors often provided
dreadful warnings against desire. On the cathedral front in Strasbourg they added toads and slimy
creatures behind the back of a personification of Worldliness to demonstrate the moral risks it
brings to humankind.28 A remarkable twelfth-century figural corbel at the roofline of the apse
of Santa Maria in Uncastillo appears from the front to represent a couple tenderly embracing
and kissing, the young woman seated on the man’s knee.29 Yet from the left we can see a wyvern
pressing against the girl’s back and inserting its tongue in her ear, transforming her into Eve or
Salome (Fig. 20.2a). And behind the man’s back her foot rests lightly on a serpent that gnaws his
genitals as though he is already being punished in hell; his clerical tonsure brings him into the
contemporary Christian world (Fig. 20.2b). As Georges Bataille perceived, the erotic is never far
Figure 20.2 Old man and young girl kissing: (a) with wyvern to the left, (b) with serpent to the right,
corbel at the roofline of the apse, Santa Maria, Uncastillo (Aragon), after 1135. Image © Antonio García
Omedes.
270
Erotic iconography
from death, even in ancient art.30 Bathsheba and Susanna give license to represent erotic female
nudity; yet David and the Elders sinned by gazing desiringly at their naked bodies.31 Only occa-
sionally before about 1400 does a painter render a delicate porcelain-pale Bathsheba according to
the medieval poetic ideal, with small breasts and rosebud lips.32 The nudity of Noah was taboo,
and I have posited that the punishment of his voyeuristic son underlies proscriptions of “frontal
male nudity” and homo-scopophilia down to the present time.33 Yet he was often represented
completely exposed, from the front or the back, as if to offer an occasion to resist temptation.
Here again is the conundrum of representing what should not be looked at with a desiring gaze.
Yet even the Christian church had to license “the mingling of limbs” for procreation. And
a medical treatise by Aldobrandino of Siena, originally written for Beatrice de Savoie in 1256,
instructed highborn laypeople in an appropriate “Régime du corps” (regulation of the body); he
described sexual intercourse as one of the “principaux cose dou cors sainnement maintenir”
(a principal means of maintaining good health) for men, along with humoral balance and diet.34
Illustrating the text might indicate that intent to arouse sexually was a legitimate function of art,
but the illustrations inspired by the text are very dull. A pedantic author portrait and scenes from
creation denoting the four elements that also make up the human microcosm are a prelude to the
healthy balance of these “humors.” Chapter 7 opens with an image of a couple in the missionary
position, well-covered by bedclothes, though Camille has drawn attention to the veiled references
to labia in the curtains “curling at the edges to form a kind of lip” and in the man’s arm that
extends downwards like his hidden member (Fig. 20.3). Similar representations serve to illustrate
Figure 20.3 Intercourse for male health, Aldobrandino of Siena, Régime du corps, chapter 7, North France
(probably Lille), c. 1285: London, British Library Ms Sloane 2435, folio 9 v, detail. © The British Library
Board, All Rights Reserved.
271
Aristotle’s De generatione and De animalibus, whereas a treatise on manners just shows a couple next
to each other in bed, despite the insistence in these texts on sexual pleasure. Vernacular poetry
succeeded in expressing desire and fulfillment where images failed: Anglo-Saxon and Welsh
women, Trobairitz and Troubadors, the monks who composed or collected the Carmina Burana,
and the German poets whose work was anthologized in the Manesse Codex provide many
examples, though seldom of marital sex.35 The Manesse Codex painters avoided overt images of
intercourse, instead making pictures that are redolent with possible sexual encounters, such as a
bedroom scene with a seminude woman receiving her lover in the presence of her maid, or an
elderly poet in a bathtub strewn with rose petals, attended by women who offer to bestow a floral
wreath on him, and fan the fire with rhythmically inflated bellows (Fig. 20.4). Such veiled sym-
bols are essential to the erotic aura of these poems; pawing horses evoke unbridled sex, and even a
Figure 20.4 Herr Jakob von Warte bathing, with female attendants, Manesse Codex, Heidelberg University
Library Cod.Pal.germ. 848, folio 46 v. Photograph licensed by Heidelberg University Library.
272
Erotic iconography
tamed falcon, that faux con of the fabliaux, denotes a lover; chess is the equivalent of strip gammon,
and genital sex is transferred onto the folds in a woman’s garment, bagpipes and trumpets, or a
tent pole on a mirror back.36 A man reaching out to touch a woman’s face, with a gesture that has
become known as a chin-chuck, is a ubiquitous iconographic code for a sexual advance, as seen
in the Bayeux Embroidery and Romanesque sculpture as well as the Manesse Codex.
There are a few portable erotic figurines, corresponding visually to the genre of pagan and
Christian cult figures, and the hyperphallic ones may have referenced fertility, even while per-
forming some other function. For instance, the famous lost bronze known as “Jack of Hilton”
was filled with water and when he “jacked off ” on the hearth, the jet of steam served to fan the
fire; the spectacle rewarded peasant farmers paying their rents at a manor in the sixteenth century,
as if to license merriment and mollocking.37 Jack relates in a general way to the ancient cult of
Priapus, which would have been known in the north in Roman times, but more specifically to a
category of Roman figures that ridiculed hypervirility. It reminds us that erotic images can work
by invoking bawdy language and jokes. Some lead-tin brooches, once either kept from public
view or purified by labeling them as “pilgrim badges,” imitate Roman bell-pulls by representing
winged penises; Stahuljak has traced the vicissitudes of a very large collection dredged from the
River Seine in the nineteenth century.38 Some of these brooches have equally active female gen-
italia; one has a small vulva striding on her way, equipped with a pilgrim’s staff and hat.39 Such
autonomous body parts have roles in the humorous tales known as fabliaux, where tricksters can
detach dicks and cunts, or make them speak.40 A Welsh poet sends his “round black diligent prick
throttled by my two balls” to his lady love instead of a letter, and drinking “horns” of blown blue
glass preserved in Germany fit this description.41 It is also important to note that medieval use of
Latin cunus could mean both anus and vulva, so it seems that what these words had in common
was to indicate openings for sexual penetration, regardless of sexual identity (vulva is literally a
door); if sexual identity was an issue, other words for the female were available, such as vagina,
but this literally means a sheath (as for a sword), thus also associated with penetration rather than
birthing. Vulgar words for the penis were frequently avoided, in favor of aggressive metaphors,
such as sword, spear, and dagger.42 Such metaphorical uses also permeate medieval visual art,
letting the viewer into erotic secrets.43
Erotic images were often for private viewing, as in the margins of manuscripts, or on the
carved seats that supported clerical rumps in the choir, but they also occur on monuments that
were open to the public.44 Along with freaks and devils, animals and birds, fruit and foliage,
their visual chatter seems to call the viewer’s attention away from grandiose sculptural pro-
grams informed by biblical history, salvation theology, and the liturgy. Most medieval erotic art
is positioned alongside apparently unrelated texts and images, and its impact on the viewer is
enhanced by surprise, whether on suddenly noticing entwined naked figures in the margins of a
sacred text or figures squatting to exhibit their genitals at a Romanesque roofline, on looking up
at sado-erotic scenes in hell as one enters a church portal, or even encountering a disembodied
arse on turning a corner on a stair down to a cathedral crypt (Figs. 20.2–20.3).45 Medieval art is
interactive, and its shifting physical relationship to the viewer is part of its performativity; small
three-dimensional objects like mirrors, combs, caskets, and brooches were meant to be held,
carried, or worn, and larger ones invite viewing (and sometimes touching) from a variety of
positions. Especially mirrors and combs, associated with women’s sensuality and lust, and often
gifts to them from suitors, are redolent with erotic symbolism.46
Several interpretations have been offered for a type of brooch that sets up a vulva as if it were
a precious relic; they may resonate with the Virgin genetrix, but I prefer to think they lampoon
the late medieval cult of the bleeding wound of Christ.47 Isolated from his body in devotional
images, as in a Bonne of Luxembourg’s Psalter and prayer book, a likely resonance of the elliptical
273
wound would be with the gaping “sheela-na-gigs” that crouch to display their genitalia, and
decorate the rooflines and corbels of an earlier era.48 Especially when the “wound” is carried
by three unambiguous erect penises it seems to be a cunt adored by pricks. Would there be any
agreement, now or then, that these images are erotic, or might they be merely ribald and scur-
rilous? Is the Bourges bum erotic or scatological, or both? Do sheela-na-gigs celebrate birthing,
invite penetration, or repel? The sight of the female pudenda was taboo to men, and exposed
buttocks and genitals have a medieval history of being apotropaic, which adds to the problem of
speculating about reception.49
A couple engaged in sex play seems to provide a unique variant on the sheela-na-gig
(Fig. 20.5). In this corbel stone from the Church of Kirknewton, now in the National Museum
of Scotland in Edinburgh, the man and woman hold her labia open with one hand, while with
the other hand she reaches for his genitals and he caresses her hair (Fig. 20.6).50 It is in the margins
of thirteenth-century prayer books, however, that the most blatant full-body nudes and sexual
couplings appear, apparently with slender or no theological justification other than occasional
wordplay on the accompanying psalms. The manuscript collection of the Morgan Library in
New York happens to house three books that have attracted attention for the blatant sexuality of
some figures. “The Psalter-Hours of Ghuiluys de Boisleux” (once known as the Hours of Cath-
erine de Courtenay, Morgan Ms. M. 730) was made in Aras for a female patron, probably just
before her marriage in 1246.51 Richard Leson has explicated unique aspects of the program of
the pictures: scenes of all three of David’s marriage alliances are included, with his bedding down
with Bathsheba, and the long narrative cycles are complemented in the line-endings and margins
on almost every page; women defending a castle from attacking knights take control by grasping
their spears (phallic emblems), while couples fencing with swords, or naked and entwined so
Figure 20.5 Man and woman engaged in sex play, corbel from the Church in Kirknewton, Edinburgh,
National Museum of Scotland, H. KG 33. Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
274
Erotic iconography
their genitals touch, seem equally matched; the female patron must have felt empowered by the
imagery, and the entwined man and woman smile blissfully as though they experience jouissance
despite the strain on their arms, and the dog-headed serpents biting them and binding the wom-
an’s breasts52 (Fig. 20.6); they seem in harmony with a joyful ode to Venus in the Carmina Burana
that turns Alpha and Omega into orgasmic gasps:
Amor tenet omnia et a et o / Amor cecus caret pudicicia, . . . /Amor regit iuvenes in
gaudio, . . . / Amor capit virgines./ Venus tenet iuvenes in gaudio, . . ./ sana fit coni-
unctio. Quam diligo, / tuo fit imperio. / quicquid melius sit, nescio.
(Love rules everything: and Aah, and Ooh, blind Love does away with modesty . . .
Love rules joyous young men, Love wins over virgins . . . Venus keeps young men joy-
ful, fit to be conjoined, as I love to be, and as you choose. I do not know what could
be better.)53
Figure 20.6 Entwined male and female couple, The Psalter-Hours of Ghuiluys de Boisleux, Arras, c. 1245,
Morgan Library Ms M730, folio 222 r, detail. Photo licensed by the Morgan Library & Museum.
275
A many-storied tower rises above the lovers, with a boy seated cross-legged in an alcove to play
a recorder and a handbell, and another standing on the battlements at the very top to sound a long
horn. Wind instruments like these were considered phallic, and the clapper moving rhythmically
in the bell simulated copulation.54 Two pairs of similarly entwined naked youths without visible
genitalia seem to be playful jongleurs or acrobats, a topic that has been explored with good results
by Elizabeth Hunt; she notes, for instance, the symbiotic role played by well-dressed patrons and
nude jongleurs in order to emphasize rank and ceremony.55 In that way, more than being an erotic
presence, the acrobats perform the normal function of the obscene by returning the viewer to
orderly societal structures. Two fragments of a book of hours and life of Saint Margaret, part of
which is in New York (Morgan Ms. M.754), have received similar attention for their marginal
decoration.56 At the top of one folio is a nude couple with a man kneeling between the knees of
a woman, a posture that has been interpreted by Paula Gerson and myself as cunnilingus, whereas
Camille’s “queer reading” sees a man trying to reenter the womb.57 One interpretive advance
made by questioning heterosexual readings has been to bring attention to the prevalence of anal
iconography in this book and in the Voeux du paon (Vows of the Peacock, Morgan Ms. G.24). In
M. 754, autonomous body parts include legs and buttocks, long-beaked birds peck anuses, and
bare bums (including those of apes) have an ink dot surrounded by an aureole like a target, even
when they are seen in side view. Dominic Leo has provided a table to quantify the obscenae in the
margins of the early fourteenth-century Voeux du paon group of manuscripts, finding that all of
them have numerous examples of “anal intrusion”; the aura is humorous and scatological rather
than erotic.58 In many later cases, secular male patrons commissioned nudes, documented or
preserved; naked or scantily clothed female bath-attendants in Wenceslas IV of Bohemia’s books
seem to be a personal emblem, their nonchalant poses far outdoing the maids in the Manesse
Codex (Fig. 20.4).59 Yet, as Easton pointed out, the nude bodies that such royal patrons favored,
including female saints and Eve, complicate notions of a hetero-normative “male gaze”; and
clothed women with the aura of prostitutes can be erotic too.60
The spectacle of the vulnerable chained Andromeda, awaiting either to have her flesh torn by
a mythical beast or to be rescued by a heroic man, invokes the issue of the sado-erotic spectacle
or “scopophilic sadism” (Fig. 20.1).61 Descriptions and visual images of tortured (and about to be
tortured) saints, such as Agatha and Sebastian, and of the body of Christ have a similar trajectory
to that of the sexual body in the late Middle Ages.62 And though churchmen tried to proscribe
the aesthetic pleasure of nudity, scenes of sinners who had indulged their sexual appetites and
suffered condign punishments in hell were readily available to diverse viewing communities.63
The usual suspects have contributed to our understanding of sadistic categories of representation,
assisted by recent interest in the body in pain.64
This essay has barely touched on the diversity of erotic visual images made in the Middle Ages.
It seems that the most outspoken erotic art was made by and for laypeople in Western Europe
after about 1100, or that most scholars have focused on that era. I may not have paid sufficient
attention to early Christian and Byzantine art, and that is a lacuna that should be filled. We
know little about the decorations in town houses and country manors, but it is possible that the
increasing secularization of art and its makers after 1200, as well as the prosperity of the middle
class, made domestic wall paintings, as well as erotic trinkets and baubles, easily available, and
more traces may be found. The eroticism of women’s dress has begun to enter the discussion,
but male dress demands more interrogation. Whereas women’s legs seldom held the attention of
medieval artists, men’s legs were shown off by tights and framed by codpieces, short tunics, and
fashionable shoes; Froissart’s puritanical critique of the French knights during the Hundred Years’
War is well-known, as are the accounts of the costly and colorful garments made for aristocratic
men in the fourteenth century.
276
Erotic iconography
Ultimately, there can be no clear-cut “erotic iconography”: human responses cannot be

anticipated and contained; pictures of men and women in bed can leave us unmoved, but all
of nature can throb with eroticism, which raises questions about the other emblems chattering
on the edge and in the margins.65 The dominant culture of the Christian Middle Ages made
human nudity and sexuality problematic, yet it surely could not suppress natural reactions to the
sight of the Virgin’s breast, or prepubescent naked souls, let alone Noah and Bathsheba.66 The
spiritual goal driving these representations may have been to train the mind to work through
the carnal to higher levels of understanding, but this was surely beyond ordinary untutored
viewers; even many who knew better, like Gregory in Rome, may have gazed privately at Bath-
sheba as though she were Venus. Andrew Taylor has reminded us that “reading the dirty bits”
is normally private, but if the reader/viewer has to articulate their thoughts they become part
of a different discourse.67
Notes
1 A.d. La Croix, L’érotisme au Moyen Âge: le corps, le désir et l’amour, nouv. éd. rev. et corr. (Paris, 2003),
11–30.
2 Obscaena is used in the online catalogue of the Morgan Library for obscene and erotic figures, some of
which are discussed here. This is based on the terminology used in the Index of Christian Art in Prince-
ton University. I am grateful to members of the Material Collective on Facebook who let me know
some of the medieval works they consider erotic, as well as publications on the topic. I also owe deep
gratitude to Francisco Prado-Vilar for discussing ideas and particulars, and to Antonio García Omedes,
who permitted use of his photographs for Fig. 20.2; and many thanks to Gabriel Quick for assistance
with research and editing.
3 M. Heins, Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America’s Censorship Wars (New York, 1993), 168–88.
4 K. Mey, Art and Obscenity (London/New York, 2007), 5–18; L. Nead, “‘Above the Pulp-Line’: The
Cultural Significance of Erotic Art,” in Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power, ed. P.C. Gibson and R.
Gibson (London, 1993), 144–55, 144–47.
5 L. Hunt, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York,
1993), 13–23; it seems the English term first appears in a dictionary in 1857, though the French was
current in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Illustrated books were first to be banned. Z. Stahul-
jak, Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (Philadelphia,
2013), 188–98, traces the nineteenth-century retraction against an “obscene” national past. Early in the
twentieth century “profane” covered all categories.
6 Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology, 192–93 (see n. 5); L. Nead, “Bodies of Judgment: Art, Obscenity, and
the Connoisseur,” in Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law, ed. C. Douzinas and
L. Nead (Chicago, 1999), 203–25, 203–04; a “Cabinet of Obscene Objects” was created in the Naples
museum, renamed the “Pornographic Collection” in 1860; the British Museum already had a similar
annex, for Greek works considered obscene.
7 M. Easton, “‘Was It Good For You, Too?’ Medieval Erotic Art and Its Audiences,” Different Visions: A
Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (September 2008), 1–30, http://differentvisions.org/issue
1PDFs/Easton.pdf. Readers might use the illustrations there as an adjunct to this article; Easton’s is also
an admirably clear statement about the issues of viewing and interpreting erotic medieval art, further
developed in M. Easton, “Uncovering the Meanings of Nudity in the Belles Heures of Jean, Duke of
Berry,” in The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. S.C.M. Lindquist (Farnham/Burlington, 2011),
149–82.
8 J. Adeline and Champfleury, Sculptures Grotesques et Symboliques: Rouen et Environs (Rouen, 1879), whose
long annotated bibliography cites “symbolisateurs” as well as the minority opinion that the sculptures
had been done at the whim of the craftsmen (p. 269). For the historiography of interpretations of “gro-
tesques” search “Weir and Jerman” in chapter 3 of M.H. Caviness, Reframing Medieval Art: Difference,
Margins, Boundaries (e-book, Medford, 2001), http://dca.lib.tufts.edu/caviness/chapter3.html.
9 Michael Camille led the way with his article “Gothic Signs and the Surplus: The Kiss on the Cathedral,”
Yale French Studies, Special Issue: Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature (1991), 151–70,
and his book Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1992).
277
10 Immediately reprinted as Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism, ed. N.F. Partner (Cam-
bridge, 1993); it contained my article on the phallic imagery in the margins of the Hours of Jeanne
d’Evreux, and participants in the discussion panels at the Medieval Academy of America annual
meeting and the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 1994 tended to be unfriendly to the
project. Further studies were soon underway, however: M. Camille, “Play, Piety and Perversity in
Medieval Marginal Manuscript Illumination,” in Mein ganzer Körper ist Gesicht: groteske Darstellungen
in der europäischen Kunst und Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. K. Kröll and H. Steger, Rombach Wissenschaft.
Reihe Litterae; Bd. 26 (Freiburg, 1994), 171–92; M. Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects
of Desire (New York, 1998), a lavishly illustrated monograph on erotic art; and Obscenity: Social Control
and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions, vol. 4), ed. J. Ziolkowski
(Leiden, 1998).
11 The so-called culture wars: R. Meyer, “The Jesse Helms Theory of Art,” October 104 (2003), 131–48.
12 “Und sie erkannten, dass sie nackt waren”: Nacktheit im Mittelalter (“And they knew that they were naked”:
Nakedness in the Middle Ages), ed. S. Bießenecker et al. (Bamberg, 2008), e-book at https://opus4.kobv.
de/opus4-bamberg/frontdoor/index/index/docId/144.
13 Lindquist (ed.), Meanings of Nudity (as in note 7).
14 For an outdated psychological evaluation permeated by this view of the eroticism of the female nude
body, see A. Ellis, The Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior, ed. A. Abarbanel (New York, 1973), 161–64, 174,
2nd ed. At the other extreme, Bataille sees it as lovely and horrifying, always tinged with obscenity:
G. Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. II: The History of Eroticism (New York,
1993), 148–53. Neither mentions the erotic male body!
15 W. Oakeshott, Classical Inspiration in Medieval Art (London, 1959), Pls. 99 D and 100 A. The author uses
his theme to judge medieval art against antique prototypes.
16 Oakeshott, Classical Inspiration (as in note 15), Pl. 36 B, which he contrasts with a lifeless Ottonian copy.
17 The classic statement of this thesis, which attempts to distinguish nude from naked, is K. Clark, The Nude:
A Study of Ideal Art (London, 1956); some editions are titled rather ambiguously The Nude: A Study in Ideal
Form. This premise is critiqued by several authors in Lindquist (ed.), Meanings of Nudity (see n. 7).
18 N.E. Dubin and R.H. Bloch, The Fabliaux: A New Verse Translation (New York/London, 2013), 248–51.
19 D. Wolfthal, “Sin or Sexual Pleasure? A Little-Known Nude Bather in a Flemish Book of Hours,” and
P. Nuttall, “Reconsidering the Nude: Northern Tradition and Venetian Innovation,” in Meanings of
Nudity, ed. Lindquist (see note 7), 279–98, 299–318; see also J.B. Friedman, “L’Iconographie de Vénus
et de son miroir à la fin du Moyen Age,” in L’Erotisme au Môyen Age: études présentées au troisième colloque
de l’Institut d’études médiévales: [communications présentés à l’Université de Montréal les 3 et 4 avril 1976], ed.
R. Bruno (Montreal, 1977), 51–81.
20 Oakeshott, Classical Inspiration, 114, Pl. 30 D (see note 15); H. Swarzenski, Monuments of Romanesque Art:
The Art of Church Treasures in North-Western Europe, 2nd ed. (London, 1967), 81, fig. 510, who shows a
different view, suggested it is English. The present location of the piece, in the 1960s in the Untermeyer
Collection in New York, is unknown.
21 C. Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art 300–1150: Sources and Documents, vol. 17, Medieval Academy Reprints
for Teaching (Toronto, 1986), 160; see also J.C. Long, “The Survival and Reception of the Classical Nude:
Venus in the Middle Ages,” in Meanings of Nudity, ed. Lindquist (as in note 7), 47–64.
22 M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge New Art History and
Criticism) (New York, 1989), 82, 85–87.
23 S. Moralejo Alvarez, “Marcolfo, el Espinario, Priapo: Un Testimonio Iconografico Gallego,” in Primera
Reunion Gallega de Estudiios Clasicos: Santiago-Pontevedra, 2–4 julio 1979 (Santiago de Compostela, 1981),
331–55. In arguing with Solomon, Marcolf had exhibited his rear and genitals; the chartrain spinario,
however, is not lewd.
24 F. Prado-Vilar, “Signum resurrectionis: La transfiguración de la belleza y la búsqueda de la eternidad
en la escultura de Jaca,” Románico 20 (2015), 212–22. A similar but less well-supported thesis about the
association of spirituality with perfected bodies is presented by K. Ambrose, “Male Nudes and Embod-
ied Spirituality in Romanesque Sculpture,” in Meanings of Nudity, ed. Lindquist (as in note 7), 65–84.
25 M. Camille, Gothic Art Glorious Visions (Upper Saddle River, 1996), 155, fig. 13.
26 R.A. Peck, “Public Dreams and Private Myths: Perspective in Middle English Literature,” PMLA 90
(1975), 465–66.
27 Giles of Rome, Li Livres du Gouvernement des Rois: A XIIIth Century French Version of Egidio Colonna’s
Treatise De Regimine Principum, trans. H.d. Gauchy (New York/London, 1899), 206–07 II/II ch. 10.
28 Camille, Glorious Visions (as in note 25), 133, fig. 95.
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Erotic iconography
29 C. Weising, “Vision of ‘Sexuality,’ ‘Obscenity,’ or ‘Nudity’? Differences between Regions on the

Examples of Corbels,” in Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to
a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme, ed. A. Classen (Berlin/New
York, 2008), 325–82, fig. 6. The illustrations to her article form a useful repertory of exhibiting
figures, as also those in A. Weir and J. Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches
(London, 1986).
30 G. Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. M. Dalwood (San Francisco, 1986); see also L. Bonfante,
“Etruscan Sexuality and Funerary Art,” in Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, ed.
N.B. Kampen, Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism (Cambridge, 1996), 155–69.
31 For Susanna: G. Kornbluth, “The Susanna Crystal of Lothar II: Chastity, the Church, and Royal Justice,”
Gesta XXXI (1992), 25–39; K.A. Smith, “Inventing Marital Chastity: The Iconography of Susanna and
the Elders in Early Christian Art,” Oxford Art Journal 16:1 (1993), 3–24.
32 H. Stahl, “Bathsheba and the Kings: The Beatus Initial in the Psalter of Saint Louis (Paris, BNF, ms lat.
10525),” in The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of Its Images, ed. F.O. Büt-
tner (Turnhout, 2004), 427–34, and Easton, “Was It Good for You, Too?” (as in note 7), 7, fig. 4; A.R.
Stanton, “From Eve to Bathsheba and Beyond: Motherhood in the Queen Mary Psalter,” in Women and
the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. J. Taylor and L. Smith (Toronto, 1997), 172–89.
33 M.H. Caviness, “A Son’s Gaze on Noah: Case or Cause of Viriliphobia?,” in Meanings of Nudity, ed.
Lindquist (see note 7), 103–48; for the early Christian and Byzantine tradition: J.-P. Deremble, “La
nudité de Noé ivre et ses relectures typologiques et iconographiques médiévales,” in Mariage et Sexualité
au Moyen Âge: Accord ou crise? Colloque international de Conques, ed. M. Rouche, Cultures et Civilisations
médiévales XXI (Paris, 2000), 147–55, col. pls. I-7.
34 M. Camille, “Manuscript Illumination and the Art of Copulation,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality,
ed. K. Lochrie, P. McCracken, and J.A. Schultz, Medieval Cultures 2 (Minneapolis, 1997), 58–90. Most
of this paragraph depends on the same article. I am grateful to Jennifer Borland, who is studying all the
Régime manuscripts, for pointing out that the book as a whole is applicable to both women and men,
and that the other manuscripts show the couple standing by the bed.
35 Especially notable is D. Johnston, Canu maswedd yr Oesoedd Canol = Medieval Welsh Erotic Poetry
(Caerdydd, 1991), 54–55; most poetic erotic encounters are with country girls in the pastourelle tradition
and are barely veiled descriptions of seduction and rape. A more tender description of the lover’s body
is in Carmina Burana 83, cited by Long, “Survival and Reception” (as in note 21), 53–54.
36 I.F. Walther and G. Siebert (ed.), Codex Manesse: Die Miniaturen der Großen Heidelberger Liederhandschrift
(Frankfurt, 1988), pls. 6, 11, 12, 20, 23, 29, 48, 51, 52, 59, 66, 80, 81, 93, 106; the falcon, though biolog-
ically female, can also connote a male lover, as in several German poems. For mirror backs see note 46
ahead.
37 J. Cherry, “Sex, Magic, and Dr. Gerald Dunning (The Fourth Gerald Dunning Memorial Lecture),”
Bulletin of the Medieval Pottery Research Group 9 (1985), 13–14; M.H. Caviness, “Obscenity and Alterity:
Images that Shock and Offend Us/Them, Now/Then?,” in Obscenity, ed. Ziolkowski (as in note 10),
155–75, 11–12, figs. 30, 31; a similar figure in the Society of Antiquaries, London. “Mollocking” is a
term coined for the sexual antics of rural lads and wenches by S. Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (New York,
2006), passim.
38 Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology (as in note 5), 188–98.
39 Many pieces are illustrated in Heilig en Profaan: Laatmiddeleeuwse insignes in cultuurhistorisch perspectief, ed.
A.M. Koldeweij and A. Willemsen (Amsterdam, 1995), with vulva and winged penises in figs. 5 and 13.
See also A.M. Koldeweij, “‘Shameless and Naked Images’: Obscene Badges as Parodies of Popular Devo-
tion,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles (Leiden/
Boston, 2005), 493–510; A.M. Koldeweij, “The Wearing of Significant Badges, Religious and Secular:
The Social Meaning of a Behavioural Pattern,” in Showing Status: Representation of Social Positions in the
Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 1999), 307–28.
40 For example, “Le Chevalier qui fesoit las cons parler,” “Le pescheor de Pont-sur-Seins,” and “La sorieste
des estopes,” Dubin and Bloch, The Fabliaux: A New Verse Translation, 142–77, 438–51, 894–909.
41 Johnston, Canu maswedd (as in note 35), 32–35; for sixteenth-century “fallusglazen” see Koldeweij and
Willemsen (ed.), Heilig en Profaan (as in note 39), 18–20, figs. 6a and b.
42 J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore, 1982), 9–11, 19, 22, 55, 60, 88–89, 96, 104, 15–16,
224.
43 L.F. Sandler, “A Bawdy Betrothal in the Ormesby Psalter,” in A Tribute to Lotte Brand Phillip, ed. W. Clark,
C. Eisler, W. Heckscher, B. Laine (New York, 1985), 154–59.
279
44 “Uncovering” them is greatly aided initially by extensive studies of marginalia, such as L.M.C. Randall,
Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (California Studies in the History of Art; 4) (Berkeley, 1966); D.
Kraus and H. Kraus, The Gothic Choirstalls of Spain (London/New York, 1986), and Elaine C. Block’s
ongoing Corpus of Medieval Misericords.
45 M. Camille, “Dr. Witkowski’s Anus: French Doctors, German Homosexuals and the Obscene in Medi-
eval Church Art,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. N. McDonald (Woodbridge/Suffolk, 2006), 17–38, fig. 1.
46 An unusual twelfth-century German bronze mirror handle and case in the Frankfurt Museum für
Kunsthandwerk are embellished with a couple kissing, standing upright, and in a bed while a harpist
plays: Swarzenski, Monuments (as in note 20), 78, figs. 469 a and b, and Camille, Medieval Art of Love (as
in note 10), 21, fig. 13; the figures have been variously identified as the Sponsus and Sponsa or Tristan
and Iseult. For later mirrors: C.J. Campbell, “Courting, Harlotry, and the Art of Gothic Ivory Carving,”
Gesta 34 (1995), 11–19; D. Wolfthal, “The Sexuality of the Medieval Comb,” in Thresholds of Medieval
Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces, ed. E. Gertsman and J. Stevenson (Woodbridge, 2012), 176–94. For studies
of the brooches and pendants known as “pilgrim badges,” see notes 38 and 39.
47 McDonald (ed.), Medieval Obscenities (as in note 45), 7, 10 n.21, who notes that Fettered Cock, the web-
site where replicas are sold, calls this one “Pussy Litter.” Cf. M.H. Caviness, “Retomando la Iconografía
Vaginal (Revisiting Vaginal Iconography),” Quintana 6 (2007), 13–37, 20–23, figs. 15–17.
48 Caviness, “Retomando” (as in note 47), 16, fig. 4; M. Bleeke, “Sheelas, Sex, and Significance in Roman-
esque Sculpture: The Kilpeck Corbel Series,” Studies in Iconography 26 (2005), 1–26; anon, The Sheela Na
Gig Project (c. 2004 [cited December 2004]), available at http://www.sheelanagig.org. The wound of
Christ and implements of the passion in Bonne of Luxembourg’s prayer book, New York, the Metropol-
itan Museum of Art, Ms. 69.85 fol. 331r, are also reproduced in Easton, “Was It Good For You, Too?”
(as in note 7), fig. 1.
49 Camille, “Witkowski’s Anus” (as in note 45), 20, 25.
50 See B. Freitag, Sheela-Na-Gigs: Unravelling an Enigma (London/New York, 2004), 120, 156 no. 160.
According to the museum label the woman is giving birth.
51 R.A. Leson, “The Psalter-Hours of Ghuiluys de Boisleux,” Arte Medievale V/1 (2006), 115–30, 115.
52 See http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/icaimages/7/m730.222ra.jpg.
53 Carmina Burana, vol. 16, ed. B.K. Vollmann (Frankfurt, 1987), 298–99, no. 87. Translation by Caviness.
54 E.P. Thompson, “<<Rough Music>> et charivari: Quelques réflexions complémentaires,” in Le Chari-
vari: actes de la table ronde organisée à Paris, 25–27 avril 1977 par l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales
et le Centre national de la recherche scientifique, ed. J. Le Goff and J.C. Schmitt (Paris/New York, 1981),
273–84.
55 E.M. Hunt, “The Naked Jongleur in the Margins: Manuscript Contexts for Social Meanings,” in Mean-
ings of Nudity, ed. Lindquist (as in note 7), 85–102.
56 J. Steinhoff, “Pregnant Pages: Marginalia in a Book of Hours (Pierpont Morgan Library, Ms. M. 754/
British Library, Ms. Add.36684),” in Between the Picture and the Word: Manuscript Studies from the Index of
Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2005), 180–86.
57 P. Gerson, “Margins for Eros,” Romance Languages Annual 5 (1993), 47–51, 50, fig. 11; cf. Camille, Image
on the Edge (as in note 9), 54, fig. 24, whose association of the image with the adjacent phrase in Psalm
87:5, “This man and that man were born in you. The habitation of all delights is within you,” does not
rule out sexual pleasure.
58 D. Leo, Images, Texts, and Marginalia in a “Vows of the Peacock” Manuscript (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library
MS G24): With a Complete Concordance and Catalogue of Peacock Manuscripts (Leiden/Boston, 2013), 97,
108–23, 359–74.
59 Nuttall, “Reconsidering the Nude” (as in note 19), 303, fig. 11.4, and passim, for other examples.
60 Easton, “Meanings of Nudity” (as in note 7).
61 The latter is Easton’s term: Easton, “Meanings of Nudity” (as in note 7), 152.
62 For the early Christian period, see D. Frankfurter, “Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze,” Journal of Early
Christian Studies 17 (2009), 215–45.
63 R. Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (New York, 2005).
64 In addition to work, notably by Easton, already cited: A. Stones, “Nipples, Entrails, Severed Heads, and
Skin: Devotional Images for Madame Marie,” in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth
Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 1999), 48–70; M.H. Caviness,
Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy, the Middle Ages Series, ed.
R.M. Karras (Philadelphia, 2001), chapter 2; M. Camille, “Seductions of the Flesh: Meister Francke’s
Female ‘Man’ of Sorrows,” in Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter: Politisch-soziale Kontexte,Visuelle Praxis, körperliche
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Erotic iconography
Ausdrucksformen, ed. K. Schreiner and M. Müntz (Munich, 2002), 243–69; C. Schleif, “Christ Bared:
Problems of Viewing and Powers of Exposing,” in Meanings of Nudity, ed. Lindquist (as in note 7),
251–78.
65 As a modern example, in the film Padre Padrone (“Father and Master,” Taviani, 1977) the rhythmic
movement of his mother kneading bread inflames desire in the protagonist, as does everything he sees
and hears in isolation as a shepherd until he eventually achieves climax with a sheep.
66 Pace Bynum, who has done brilliant work on the higher modes of seeing. M.R. Miles, “The Virgin’s
One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Art in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,” in The Female
Body in Western Culture, ed. S.R. Suleiman (Cambridge, 1986), 193–207.
67 A. Taylor, “Reading the Dirty Bits,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed.
J. Murray and K. Eisenbichler (Toronto, 1996), 280–95.
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21
THE ICONOGRAPHY
OF NARRATIVE
Anne F. Harris
Introduction
How does narrative announce itself? Medieval oral tradition recorded in text positions declarative
words to signal a story to their audience. Think of Beowulf ’s “Hwaet!” or the “b’reishit” (“In the
beginning”) of the Bible.1 How do images do so? What are the markers that indicate narrative
ways of seeing and understanding to viewers? For narrative asks much of its audience: an atten-
tiveness, an ability to follow developments, multiple emotional registers often staged in an arc, and
a commitment through from initiation to dénouement to resolution are all sought from viewers.2
This essay argues for an iconography of narrative in gesture, space, and time. These visual signs
of narrativity initiate and guide their viewers through the transformative experience of medieval
narrative. Whether sacred or secular, or in some combination of the two, medieval narrative was
designed for transformation: of its own figures and of its audience.
In delineating an iconography of narrative, this essay seeks to identify how gesture, space, and
time coded images as narrative, how they made images recognizable as narrative. It is not the
mere presence of these factors that renders an image a narrative one: gesture, space, and time are
present in icons, the other prevalent visual mode of the Middle Ages. Rather, it is the arrangement
and deployment of these three factors that create the necessary conditions of responsiveness for
narrative experience. A narrative image behaves as such (moving its viewer through a story), once
it is recognized and responded to as such. In what he calls “systemic narration,” Wolfgang Kemp
identifies a series of relations in medieval narrative images.3 I will argue that relational dynamics
within narrative image create relational dynamics with, and within, the audience. The eye moves
from gesture to gesture across space and through narrative time, drawing the viewer into relation-
ship with the image. As gestures initiate movement, as space frames changing interactions, and
as time extends into performative experience and transformation, narrative makes itself known
to its audience and shapes its response to figural, emotional, and moral or ethical transformation.
Historiography
Narrative emerges in art history as a structural category of imagery with specific modes. The
“continuous narrative” mode of imagery delineated by Franz Wickhoff, for example, displays
multiple episodes within one visual space, with repeating figures.4 Providing a structural analysis
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The iconography of narrative
of narrative, these categorizations remain helpful in terms of identifying narrative structures. There
are many ways to tell a tale, and determining the narrative structure of an image cycle positioned
the work of art history in resonance with that of literary criticism, with its own analyses of struc-
tures operative in narrative, while identifying the specific modes operative in visual art.5 The struc-
tural analysis of visual narrative was mostly exercised upon Christian narrative, which contains a
complex theological temporality stretching from Genesis to the Apocalypse. The strong linearity
of Christian time, pushing ever-forward from Genesis and pulling ever-toward the Apocalypse,
shaped the structural analysis of visual narrative as a revelatory, progressive one. This strong line-
arity intersected with the vertical temporal structure of typology, which created narrative connec-
tions between, for example, the Old and New Testaments.6 Set apart from the analysis of Christian
narrative, and much less studied, is that of secular narrative, despite being created in Christian
culture.7 Pulled from Celtic or ancient Greek and Roman tales, the stories of secular narrative
operate within a different temporal structure, one that often intersects with that of oral narration.8
A second historiographic trajectory of narrative begins with didacticism and is continued in
contemporary discussions of interactivity. The initial argument in which narrative images func-
tioned as a “Bible for the Poor” has been reshaped by a critique of textual adherence, and an explo-
ration of an embodied, extratextual response by viewers.9 Texts, biblical or otherwise, are not the
only determining factors in narratives images. Oral tradition, performance, and the bodily experi-
ence of viewers (from movement with the narrative, as in the Bayeux Tapestry, to empathy with the
physical experience of the figures in the image, as in the Passion cycle) have become determining
factors in the modern understanding of medieval narrative.10 Narrative images do not provide the
full information of texts, but far from this situation being a lack, it invites a consideration of bodies,
voices, and performance into the operations of medieval narrative. The “gaps” in visual narratives
when these are compared with the full delineation of a narrative in text are filled in by commen-
tary, performance, or previous knowledge. Indeed, most medieval narrative images existed more in
relationship to oral tradition than to textual precision.11 Medieval visual narratives were often more
a process of re-cognition than of cognition, of recognizing characters in new visual guises rather
than learning about them through images. The following analysis of gesture, space, and time seeks
to consider both sacred and secular narrative, and both cognitive and embodied responses.
Gesture
Gesture is the initiation of visual narrative. It is a call to narrative action, a signal to the viewer for
attentiveness.12 In this section, I will examine gestures of two of the most pervasive narratives in
medieval imagery, one sacred, the other secular: the moment of contact of the Annunciation and
the beginning of the Roman de la Rose. I have chosen two well-known narratives to highlight the
role gestures had not in explaining a narrative but in initiating it. A crucial moment of any narra-
tive is its beginning, and as medieval texts called for the attentiveness of their audiences (“Hwaet!”)
so, too, medieval visual narratives called for their audiences’ full participation. While dénouement
and level of detail could vary from one visual narrative to another, the opening gesture tended to
be very similar from site to site. The iconography of narrative is one of repeated initiatory gestures.
The initiatory gesture of narrative extends into ever-expanding space and time. Textually, the
opening gesture of the Annunciation ends in the Apocalypse. In the lived experience of history
and the presence of Christianity in the modern world, it has yet to end. The power of the ini-
tiatory gesture is its open-endedness, the fact that it signals an opening, never an ending. There
is the potential here to think of the opening gesture as “self-perpetuating” – as having a kind
of momentum that carries narrative beyond textual borders and into lived experience. Images
become part of the lived experience of narrative. In their perpetuation of narrative beyond text,
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Anne F. Harris
and in their interaction with viewers, images open up textual narrative to potentially endless
interpretation and expression.
Images of the Annunciation abounded in the Middle Ages. As of the fourteenth century, their
most pronounced initiatory role came as the primary image for Matins in Books of Hours.13 The
first of the eight canonical hours, Matins initiated the entire devotional cycle of a book of hours. The
repetition of gesture was arguably daily for a devout user of this devotional tool. The daily opening
of the book resonated with the daily viewing of the initiatory gesture. Narrative opening becomes
devotional opening. Associated with the words “Domine labia mea” (Lord open my lips), the gesture
of the Archangel Gabriel before the Virgin Mary signals silence and attentiveness, a stillness and a
focus. The specific request of Matins involves the viewer in an act of prayer.14 The viewer is at once
active (praying) and passive (asking God to open her lips). This combination of active and passive
holds the viewer in a fixed devotional place, hovering between action and meditation. Narrative
asks for the active participation of its viewers: in understanding the action, in sometimes moving
physically with the image. It also leads the audience along, setting the visual terms of the narrative
trajectory, establishing the pace and level of detail. Gestures contain this active/passive dynamic in
being a call to action. Like the phrase beseeching God to open lips for devotional speech, the opening
gesture of the Annunciation signals divine presence and its long narrative trajectory.
Gabriel’s hands are engaged in a series of gestures: palm open and facing the Virgin Mary,
holding long-stemmed lilies signifying her virginity, or proffering forth a scroll with the Biblical
Figure 21.1 Simone Martini, Annunciation, 1333. Tempera and gold on panel. Florence, Uffizi Gallery.
Image courtesy of Scala/Minesterio per I Beni e la Attivita culturali, Art Resource, New York.
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text “Ave Maria gratia plena” (Hail Mary, full of grace). The physicality is at once delicate and
inexorable (Fig. 21.1). Simone Martini’s Annunciation from 1333 (at the Uffizi in Florence)
reveals the impact of Gabriel’s gesture on Mary: the fluttering drapery and unfurled wings of the
archangel give motion and force to his gestures.15 The easy grace with which he holds the olive
branch contrasts with the powerful call upwards to the dove of the Holy Spirit. The Virgin Mary
swerves in a famous sway, appearing to recoil from the impact of Gabriel’s presence. But on the
other side of her sway, Mary’s hands are held in gestures that precisely mirror Gabriel’s. She, too,
has one hand down (fingers delicately holding a page in her book) and one hand up (protectively
holding the neckline of her cloak). In her gesture mirroring the angel’s, Mary reveals her kinship
with the divine. Gestures are rhetorical, and they initiate a conversation. The Annunciation is
the initiation of Christ’s conversation with humanity. Its signaling by hand gestures, which are
present in every Annunciation, creates an iconography of narrative initiation. The beginning of
a narrative is recognized in its repeated gestures. In the case of the Annunciation, the gestures
may range across a series of spaces and flora, but always the call and response between Gabriel
and Mary invite that of the viewer and the event.
The scale of the narrative initiated by the Annunciation gesture also varies according to the
attentiveness of the audience. On this point, the iconography of narrative is open-ended, and
exists in an expansive relationship to the text. While the immediate gesture of the Annunciation
is described in Luke 1:26–38, the relationship of the image to the text can extend throughout
the Bible until its Apocalyptic end. Similarly, the gesture of the Annunciation can initiate an
entire image and devotional cycle. We have already discussed this dynamic in books of hours;
it was also known to occur on the monumental scale of wall painting. Giotto’s Annunciation
from around 1305 in the Scrovegni Chapel is painted on the eastern archway above the altar.
The “pregnant pause” visually is the empty span of the arch, a space filled with the devotional
practice that occurs at the altar.16 Gabriel’s open hand to Mary is this time met by Mary’s hand
folded across her chest, her book page held by her fingers as she cradles it. The conversation
initiated across the span of the arch extends throughout the entire Scrovegni Chapel, potentially,
if the viewer follows the entire narrative, all the way to the Last Judgment on the western wall
of the chapel.
The visualization of secular narrative also operated in this expansive open-endedness, perhaps
more so than Biblical narrative in that the textual tradition on which secular visual narrative
was based, itself stemming so immediately from dynamic oral tradition, was hardly fixed.17 The
textual instability of secular narrative, in the multiple redactions and scribal versions found in
manuscript traditions, puts initiatory images in an especially powerful position: they initiate nar-
ratives without clear textual parameters. The manuscript and textual tradition of the Roman de la
Rose is one of the most rich and complex of medieval secular literature.18 A man asleep in bed is
the initiatory image of that textual tradition, creating the marvelous proposition of unconscious-
ness as a call to attention. The parameters of the unconscious, of dreams in particular, are still
unknown. The entire narrative of the Roman de la Rose, save for the opening lines at the opening
and the final words at the end, operates within the framework of a dream.
It may seem odd to conceptualize a man asleep in bed as an initiatory gesture (Fig. 21.2), but I
do so to emphasize the power of initiatory images in visual narrative. A figure need not gesture
dramatically to initiate a narrative; narrative does not need a “big push” to begin. Even a sleeping
figure can activate and generate a narrative of grand proportions. And so the Dreamer lies in bed
in the stillest of gestures: body outstretched, arm often curved behind his head, hands completely
relaxed. Many Rose manuscripts initiate their narrative with just the sleeping figure. Others will
use the sleeping Dreamer as the opening image in a four-image sequence that delineates the
Dreamer’s transformation into the Lover as he awakens in a bedchamber, carefully dresses, and
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Anne F. Harris
Figure 21.2 Opening sequence, Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun,
1353. Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. Fr. 178. Image courtesy of HIP/Art Resource, New York.
ventures forth into a landscape that leads him to the Garden of Love, wherein he will pursue the
elusive Rose for the duration of the narrative.19 Interestingly, the first pause in the narrative is a
series of anti-love allegories carved on the outside of the wall of the Garden of Love.20 But the
anti-narrative image of the allegory rearing up to block the Lover will become the pro-narrative
of the allegory once the Lover makes his way inside the Garden to a realm of live allegories.
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Sleeping Dreamers and awakening Lovers initiate many love narratives in secular literature.
The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer is not visually expressed in an artistic tradition,
but it does use initiatory images in a dream to signal the open-endedness of the iconography of
narrative that I have been describing, and so I will end with it. When the Dreamer awakens to be
the Lover in the Book of the Duchess, he does so in a bedchamber illuminated by two image cycles
unbounded by physical constriction: the entire cycle of Troy in stained glass, and the Roman de
la Rose and all of its textual glosses in a wall painting. Both of those image cycles exist without
end: has the last image of the cycle of Troy been drawn? Has the last word been written on the
Roman de la Rose? Images are a crucial part of the perpetuation of narrative, perhaps nowhere
more powerfully than in the initiatory gestures of visual narrative. Opening images of narrative
signal perpetual re-openings of narrative rather than any bounded ending, and invite viewers to
participate in the perpetuation of narrative.
Space
In considering space, we move into narrative. The operations of narrative in space and through
space activate the physical relationship of viewer to visual narrative. Space is both a part of
narrative (in the space between figures) and a framework of narrative (in the space that sur-
rounds images). It is the element of visual narrative that asks for the physical engagement of
the viewer. Whether poring over a manuscript and moving through its physicality by turning
pages, or walking with the spatial stretch of the narrative sculptural frieze of Chartres Cathe-
dral21 or the Bayeux Tapestry, space physically implicates the viewer.22 In the development of
ideas, narrative’s operations across space are fundamental to its genre. As the ideas of a narrative
develop, and the gestures and bodies of its protagonists change, the viewer changes as well – even
if only in physical location. The most powerful narratives provoke the transformation of both
the represented figures and the present viewers, and this process of transformation begins with
movement in space.
The physical quality of space can become the spiritual quality of transformation. The space
of narrative transports viewers. I will treat two visual narratives that move (and move the viewer)
across space: the Passion narrative articulated on the twelfth-century lintel of the Holy Sepulcher
in Jerusalem,23 and a fourteenth-century Tristan cycle in the Chateau of Saint-Floret in the
Auvergne.24 The consideration of specific image cycles brings forward the important realization
that, in the discussion of space and visual narrative, place matters as well. An interesting contrast
forms here to become one of the dynamics of narrative: where initiatory gestures perpetuate
narrative into the open-endedness of future interpretations and visualizations, space creates a
framework for narrative hosted by place. The space of a narrative does not operate in a vacuum:
viewers bring their own set of expectations to the place in which a narrative is on display. Space
is the framework within which viewers’ expectations and narrative’s movement interact.
The narrative lintel of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (Fig. 21.3) presents two particularities
that make the spatial operations of its narrative salient: it represents events in the place where they
occurred, and it does so out of narrative order. Carved around 1149 under Frankish Crusader
patronage, the narrative lintel stretches across what is now the only open doorway on the south
façade entrance to the Holy Sepulcher, telling tales of the Passion narrative. A second, bricked-up
doorway, is topped by a figurative lintel of wild men and mythological beasts entangled in thick,
scrolling vines.25 The lintels were taken from the Holy Sepulcher in the 1930s after a fire and are
now displayed flat under glass cases at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem. The
contrast of narrative lintel with figurative lintel makes each genre distinct, and indeed, scholars
have been hard-pressed to make coherent sense of the two lintels.26
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Anne F. Harris
Figure 21.3 Facade of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, c. 1149 (Palestine, today Israel),
1855–1860. Image courtesy of Adoc-Photos/Art Resource, New York.
The lintel initiates its narrative with the muscular gesture of the Raising of Lazarus. Three dif-
ferent figures strain on ropes that pull Lazarus’s body forward out of the tomb, whose abandoned
cover frames the scene with the open book that Christ holds to the right of the gathering of
figures, blessing the assembly, and Lazarus in particular, with this miracle. Physicality abounds: the
stone figures’ thickly set bodies are draped in garments of thick-cut fabric, and are either straining
with the effort of righting Lazarus’s body or struggling to overcome the stench of his tomb. The
narrative moves slowly and strenuously across the visual field, with the (almost) dead weight of
Lazarus. The space between the figures is very compact and itself thus slow in movement. View-
ers would have come to this portal with great eagerness to enter the sacred place of the Holy
Sepulcher. The arresting and “sluggish” narrative pace of Lazarus’s raising would slow the viewer
down, and prolong the experience of entering. At a site that welcomed fervent pilgrims from
around the world, this is quite a feat for narrative images to attempt to accomplish. At first, the
interaction of the viewer is perpendicular in their seeking to enter the building beneath the lintel.
But once the narrative has been seen and has had its effect on the viewer, the interaction becomes
a parallel trajectory and the viewer can walk with the figures of the lintel, from left to right.
Jesus meeting Mary and Martha on the Road to Bethany picks up the narrative pace: there
is now more space between the figures, and the edges of Christ’s clothing flutter in a breeze
which gives the space “breathing room.” Scholars had remained puzzled as to why this narrative
moment, which chronologically precedes the Raising of Lazarus, should visually succeed it, until
Molly Lindner’s suggestion that the images are not in visual order, but in topographical order.27 In
explaining the choice to represent the narrative in topographical rather than chronological order,
Lindner connects the images to the Palm Day Procession and its topographical perambulations, in
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which the site of Lazarus’s tomb preceded the road to Bethany. These processions were practiced
by the Frankish patrons of the lintels, whose physical and religious engagement with the land-
scape was projected by the lintel sculpture, and may have inspired pilgrims to take on the same
journey. Space is an iconographic element of narrative: it invites the movement of its viewers and
frames a physical interaction with narrative.
At the castle of St. Floret in Auvergne, viewers are invited to move with the space of secular
narrative. Are there differences in the operations of sacred and secular narratives when it comes
to space?28 With initiatory gestures, a similarity was noted in the open-endedness of narrative
signaled by the gesture. Because space is related to place, and place calls to identity in different
ways, distinctions in the ways that narrative calls to identity will arise. I would also argue for an
epistemological distinction between what is known in the temporally and geographically dis-
tant biblical narrative and what is known in the more immediate materials of secular narrative.
Finally, as ever, distinctions remain in how the iconography of religious narrative relates to the
codified, authoritative text and how the iconography of secular narrative relates to an oral tra-
dition so newly codified in text, and without the authority of sacred text. These distinctions are
not mutually exclusive – and indeed commonalities remain – but, rather, point to the versatility
of narrative, to its multiplicity in human experience.
At St. Floret, the viewer follows the story of Tristan across the two-dimensional surface of a
wall painting. The story itself wends its way from wall to wall, often operating across the cor-
ners of the room. Amanda Luyster’s work has brilliantly traced the operations of narrative at St.
Floret, with an argument that details both the movements of the narrative across surfaces and
the demands and invitations extended to viewers in the reading of narrative across surfaces.29
Because the images are accompanied by text pulled from the fourteenth-century poem Meliadus
by Rusticien de Pisa, the images operate in conjunction with the written word. But they do not
merely illustrate it. Instead, text behaves as an active presence in the images. A scroll, for example,
that unfurls from a messenger describing the past deeds of the knight Branor hangs unattended
to by Guinevere and her entourage, as their gazes are turned to the surface of the adjacent wall,
where Branor’s feats are represented. This dynamic of narrative across space and time, as noted
and analyzed by Luyster, argues for the liveliness of text and its link to oral performance in the
iconography of secular narrative.30
In much the same way that a viewer could see the feats of knights through the live perfor-
mances of troubadours (and imagine yet more in their mind’s eye), so Guinevere and her ladies
have the images of the feats described in the messenger’s scroll unfurling before them made vis-
ible. Their being represented on the separate space of an adjacent wall signals the temporal and
geographic remove of the events from those “seeing” them. Luyster’s work allows me to make a
key distinction about the iconography of secular narrative: in its involvement of the viewer, the
iconography of secular narrative is connected to the live performance of recitation, an enlivening
of text that is distinct from that of liturgy and other performances which enliven biblical text,
especially as these different kinds of performances call to the identities of their viewers. Guinevere
is seen seeing the feats of Branor alluded to in the scroll in a way that is distinct from the way
that, for example, saints are seen seeing mystical visions. For Guinevere, and her viewers, the texts
and oral traditions from which they were pulled exist outside the realm of authority of sacred
text.31 In this, the iconography of secular narrative exists in relation to words that very much
hover between live performance and textual codification. Indeed, in the prizing of the spoken
word as described by Michael Camille,32 the iconography of secular narrative could be called an
icono-opsis: a visualization of performance.
This visualization occurs across space at St. Floret, and in other secular medieval wall paint-
ings and tapestries, in places where the courtly identity of the viewers was systemically asserted.
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Anne F. Harris
Castles, and the banquet halls and receiving rooms within them, framed and promoted the
authority and power of the knights and ladies gathered within them to both themselves and those
whose place was lower in or other to the court’s hierarchy. The feats of the knight Branor could
very well provoke a narration of those of the lord of St. Floret. In the dynamic of icono-opsis,
visual narrative performed identity.
Time
The temporal operations of visual narrative are connected to its work of transformation. An ini-
tiatory gesture will bring a viewer into an open-ended narrative, and the space and place of visual
narrative can reframe the identity of the viewer. In our final analysis, we will examine how the
manifestations of time and its passage in visual narrative set the stage for the transformation of the
viewer. As we have seen, the iconography of narrative is one keenly aware of its viewer: initiatory
gestures call out to viewers, and space signals physical interaction. Time signals transformation,
both in the visual narrative and, because of its connections and interactions with the viewer, in
the viewer. This transformation was not instantaneous – that kind of transformative power is
reserved for miraculous images, which tend to present themselves in iconic, not narrative, form.
Rather, transformation through visual narrative itself occurs over time, in repeated viewings and
interactions.
A discussion of time in medieval visual narrative will necessarily intersect with our previous
work with gesture and space. In its temporal concerns, medieval visual narrative will continue to
call out to its viewer in initiatory gestures, and it will continue to implicate its viewer physically in
its spatial interactions. Through the repetition of this gestural, spatial, and temporal dynamic, the
viewer is transformed. Our case studies here will be a fourteenth-century medieval ivory, whose
intimate gestures and spaces inform a specifically female identity, and the eighth-century Ruth-
well Cross, whose heroic gestures and spaces shape a complex and competing religious identity.
In both instances, and throughout a consideration of the operations of time in medieval visual
narrative, the dynamic of transformation is related to that of repetition. Even at a pilgrimage site
seen only once, rituals frame repeated interactions, and images are designed to be memorable for
future time. For intimate objects, the repetition is quotidian, deeply ingrained in the habits of
self of the viewer.
Medieval ivory combs were made for both domestic and liturgical use. Liturgical combs
have their own fascinating use and history in being used in removing nits from the hair of
priests in the final preparations before the performance of the Eucharistic ritual.33 A domes-
tic comb made around 1320 in Paris, and now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, will be
our focus.34 It affords us the chance to discuss the materiality of medieval narrative in a way
only alluded to with the manuscript of the Roman de la Rose and quite distinct, because of
the possibility of intimate touch, from narratives found in panel or wall painting and stone
carving. Ivory was a vivid and sought-after material in the Middle Ages, as attested in the
expansion of ivory commerce in the fourteenth century. A series of intimate ivory objects
began to be made at this time: combs, mirror cases, and writing tablets most prominent
among them. The softness of the material and its symbiotic relationship with its viewer/user
are a primary element of the transformative power of the ivory comb. The symbiosis comes
in the repeated pull of the comb through the hair of its owner, giving luster to the latter and
providing needed oils to the former. The transformation here is mundane, from unkempt
privacy to readiness for the public sphere, but it is significant in its repetition, in the person-
alization of material that is established in the repeated gesture in intimate space. Narrative
is most often a public or even spectacular occasion; in the small-scale ivory material of the
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Figure 21.4 Medieval comb, Scenes of Courtly Love, c. 1320. Ivory, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
(A.560-1910). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
domestic comb, we have an opportunity to witness the transformation of the viewer/user from
its most humble beginnings.
The narrative of the domestic comb (Fig. 21.4) presents itself in three parts across a broad
stretch of ivory. Each scene is framed by lush, bending trees that add a sensual movement to each
scene, as they bend and sway with the desiring bodies of the narrative’s protagonists. In the first
scene, the young lover, legs tensely crossed, reaches over to a beloved young woman and cups
her chin in his hand. Her body is relaxed, her legs in fact falling open to reveal expansive and
pliant folds of cloth. The lover holds a falcon in a disciplined grip, and the beloved cradles her
small squirming dog as it strains to come up into her lap. The second scene witnesses the beloved
crowning her lover. He kneels as though a young knight about to receive his title, and indeed, the
interweaving of courtly love with knightly courts is tight.35 In the final scene, the bodies of the
two lovers draw closer and intertwine in visual echo with the leafy branches of the trees that frame
them. It is now the beloved who cups the chin of her lover, and who presses her body against his
in an elegant sway. The lover’s stance remains humble in his bowing before her, but the prize of
her body is now within reach, and he stretches his hand toward her sex in sure anticipation.
Domestic ivory combs were given as wedding gifts in the Middle Ages.36 As such, they are
gifts that signal initiations into sexual congress. Time and transformation intersect dramatically
in this iconography of narrative. The young bride’s identity will be radically changed when she
marries and has sex with her husband. That change will also be signaled in less radical ways: in
the daily use of the comb, and the repeated viewing of its narrative. The simple three-part story
delineating wooing, acceptance, and union plays on a quotidian level in the intimate sphere, as
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Anne F. Harris
well as on the public stage of the sociopolitical arrangements of medieval marriage. The transfor-
mation of the comb’s viewer and user is itself both dramatic, in the ritual moments of marriage,
and long-lasting, in the transformation from virgin to sexual being, from young woman to wife,
from wife to mother, and the other possible identities that awaited women in the Middle Ages.
The identities of the interactors of the Ruthwell Cross are much less fixed. Carved of local
sandstone, standing 18 feet tall, and erected outdoors in the eighth century, the Ruthwell Cross
was moved indoors in the nineteenth century and now resides in the apse of Ruthwell church in
Dumfriesshire, Scotland.37 As with any narrative, there is the time of the narrative, and the time of
the narrative’s audience. The Ruthwell Cross carries two narrative modes upon its surfaces: on the
broad sides, scenes from the life of Christ are framed by Latin inscriptions; on the narrower sides
of the Cross, runic inscriptions frame birds intertwined with scrolling vines. Each biblical scene
is a powerful moment in the larger narrative of Christ’s life: on one side, the Annunciation, the
Healing of the Blind Man, Mary Magdalene Washing the Feet of Christ, and the Visitation; on the
other, the Flight into Egypt, Sts. Anthony and Paul, Christ Trampling the Beasts, and John Hold-
ing the Agnus Dei. In walking around the Ruthwell Cross, the worshipper could interweave these
episodes into the greater Christic narrative, making associations and connections across the scenes.
It will be the vivid visual presence of the runic inscriptions, already archaic and remarkable
by the time the Cross was raised, that will provide continuous narrative and its accompanying
transformation. The runes carve out excerpts from the poem which has come to be known as
the “Dream of the Rood,” and whose earliest written version exists in the tenth-century Ver-
cilli Book, making this much earlier visualization of the text in stone a powerful presence. The
dreamer in the poem hears the narrative of the Crucifixion from the voice of the Cross itself.
In a remarkable series of narrative transformations, the Cross remembers itself as a tree at the
edge of the woods; it recalls being cut down and carried by men; and, in the verses carved into
the Ruthwell Cross, it vividly describes Christ’s heroic body being nailed into its wood. The
transformations continue: the Cross will be gently laid down along with the body of Christ, then
forgotten for hundreds of years, until it is found again and, in being dispersed in relic form, will
be bedecked and bejeweled in cross reliquaries.
The narrative operations of the Ruthwell Cross are complex: it is almost impossible to discern
whether viewers would have experienced the runes through their own literacy or through the
oral performance of another. The interplay of the scenes framed by Latin biblical inscriptions,
which pointedly do not represent the Crucifixion, and the intense and bloody Crucifixion that
is present in the poetic language of the runes makes the Ruthwell Cross a highly interactive and
transformative experience. Repeated circumambulations of the Cross yield new connections,
new narrative interactions of text and image, transforming the viewer into an interpreter of bibli-
cal and extrabiblical narrative. In the Cross’s own transformation chronicled in the “Dream of the
Rood” poem, and in the transformation from Latin to runic inscriptions, and from image to text
(and back again), the viewer vividly experiences the mutability of Christ’s presence – one that
would have been met and amplified in Eucharistic ritual and its own transformations. Erected in
a time of religious and ethnic conflict, the iconography of narrative of the Ruthwell Cross was a
formidable force of transformation in its landscape.
Conclusion
The iconography of narrative begins as the “image writing” of a story. Initiatory gesture, move-
ment in space, and performance in time are the vibrant fundamentals of an iconography of nar-
rative: they are the first elements to look for in identifying narrative as such and in considering
its power to transform its viewer. All medieval images have the power to transform, and they do
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so within multiple formats from icons and rituals, to manuscripts and domestic devotion. Nar-
rative does so within a physical format that calls upon a dynamic variety of materials, scales, and
settings. In its ability to capture and awaken the human imagination, and be present in both text
and image, narrative will continue to unfold into the open-ended perpetuity of its readers’ and
viewers’ interpretations and fascinations.
Notes
1 E.B. Vitz, N.F. Regalado, and M. Lawrence (ed.), Performing Medieval Narrative (Rochester, 2005), 1–11.
2 M. Caviness, “‘The Simple Perception of Matter’ and the Representation of Narrative, ca. 1180–1280,”
Gesta 30:1 (1991), 48–64.
3 W. Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass (Cambridge, 1997), 42–65. The relational dynamics of
center and periphery, order of size, overlapping forms, and multiplicity of image panels mark systematic
narration in Kemp’s semiotic analysis of narrative.
4 F. Wickhoff, Roman Art: Some of Its Principles and Their Applications to Early Christian Painting, trans. Euge-
nie Strong (New York, 1900); see also S. Lewis, “Narrative,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque
and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. C. Rudolph (Malden, 2008), 86–105.
5 O. Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford, 1962), simultaneously makes
a distinction between visual and textual narrative, and asserts the structural analytical possibility of both.
6 The most systematic example of the intersection of this linear structure with a vertical one is the Bible
Moralisée. For a discussion and reproductions see G. Guest, Bible Moralisée; Codex Vindobonensis 2554,
Vienna, Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (London, 1995).
7 The most prominent work of visual secular narrative remains that of R. Sherman and L.H. Loomis,
Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (London, 1938). More contemporary work includes S. Hindman, Sealed
in Parchment: Rereadings of Knighthood in the Illuminated Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes (Chicago, 1994).
8 M. Curschmann, “Hören – Lesen – Sehen: Buch und Schriftlichkeit im Selbstverständnis der volkssp-
rachlichen literarischen Kulture Deutschlands um 1200,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache
und Literatur 106 (1984), 218–57.
9 M. Caviness, “Biblical Stories in Windows: Were They Bibles for the Poor?” in The Bible in the Middle
Ages: Its influence on Literature and Arts, ed. B.S. Levy, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 89
(Binghampton, 1992), 103–48.
10 See my own analysis of both sacred and secular narrative in Anne Harris, “Narrative,” Studies in Iconog-
raphy 33 (2012), 47–60.
11 K. Starkey, Reading the Medieval Book: Word, Image, and Performance in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm
(South Bend, 2004).
12 J.A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge, 2008).
13 R.S. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1999).
14 For the specific text of all the Hours, see R.S. Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art
and Life (New York, 2001).
15 For more on the devotional framework of Martini’s painting see A. van Dijk, “The Angelic Salutation
in Early Byzantine and Medieval Annunciation Imagery,” Art Bulletin 81:3 (September 1999), 420–36.
16 For more on the devotional context of Giotto’s Scrovegni Annunciation see L. Jacobus, “Giotto’s Annun-
ciation in the Arena Chapel,” Art Bulletin 81:1 (March 1999), 93–116.
17 P. Zumthor, Essai de poétique medievale (Paris, 2000), especially the concept of mouvance as it speaks to
textual mutability and instability.
18 S. Huot, The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission
(Cambridge, 1993).
19 Romandelarose.org.
20 S.G. Nichols, “Ekphrasis, Iconoclasm, and Desire,” Rethinking the Roman de la Rose: Text, Image, Recep-
tion, ed. K. Brownlee and S. Huot (Philadelphia, 1992), 133–66.
21 M. Fassler, “Liturgy and Sacred History in the Twelfth-Century Tympana at Chartres,” Art Bulletin 75:3
(September 1993), 499–520.
22 O.K. Werckmeister, “The Political Ideology of the Bayeux Tapestry,” Studi Medievali 17:2 (1976),
535–95.
23 M. Lindner, “Topography and Iconography in Twelfth-Century Jerusalem,” in The Horns of Hattin, ed.
B.Z. Kedar (London, 1992), 81–98.
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Anne F. Harris
24 A. Luyster, “Time, Space, and Mind: Tristan in Three Dimensions in Fourteenth-Century France,” in
Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde, ed. J. Eming, A.M. Rasmussen, and K. Starkey
(Notre Dame, 2012), 148–77.
25 L.Y. Rhamani, “The Eastern Lintel of the Holy Sepulcher,” Israel Exploration Journal 26:2/3 (1976),
120–29.
26 For a different interpretation of the iconography of the lintel narrative, see N. Keenan-Kedar, “The Fig-
urative Western Lintel of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem,” in The Meeting of Two Worlds:
Cultural Exchange between East and West during the Period of the Crusades, ed. V. Goss and C. Bornstein
(Kalamazoo, 1986), 123–31.
27 Lindner, Topography (as in note 23).
28 A. Walker and A. Luyster (ed.), Negotiating Secular and Sacred Art: Christian, Muslim, Buddhist (Farnham,
2009).
29 Luyster, Time (as in note 24): “Increases the viewer’s sense of involvement in the narrative world” (155).
30 Luyster, Time (as in note 24), 162.
31 G. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley,
1992).
32 M. Camille, “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art
History 8 (1985), 26–49.
33 J. Cruse, The Comb: Its History and Development (London, 2007). The standard academic volume on
liturgical combs remains A.M.A. Bretagne, Quelques recherches sur les peignes liturgiques (Nancy, 1861).
34 P. Barnet (ed.), Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age (Princeton, 1997).
35 G. Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1996).
36 Barnet, Ivory (as in note 34).
37 M. Schapiro, “The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross,” Art Bulletin 27:4 (December 1944),
232–45; É. Ó Carragáin, “The Ruthwell Crucifixion Poem and Its Iconographic and Liturgical Con-
texts,” Peritia 6–7 (1987–88), 1–71.
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22
POLITICAL ICONOGRAPHY
AND THE EMBLEMATIC
WAY OF SEEING1
György E. Szönyi
Political iconography refers to those medieval representations (both text and image) that use
traditional symbols to express some political content.
The emblematic way of seeing

It is helpful to start my discussion of medieval political iconography by introducing the emblem-
atic way of seeing and thinking. The term comes from the name of the humanist genre of
emblem, which came into fashion in the first half of the sixteenth century and enjoyed a spec-
tacular career in European culture until the middle of the eighteenth. Emblems have a tripartite
structure which consists of a symbolic image (pictura) sandwiched between two texts, a motto
(inscriptio) and an explanatory poem (subscriptio). This structure might be completed by additional
para-textual elements and the subject of the whole could deal with a variety of topics, such as
moral advice, religious teaching, and natural philosophical reflection.2
Emblematic pictures drew their motifs from all spheres of life: mythological and fantastic
images, natural phenomena, human parts, man-made objects, and so forth. Characteristically,
emblems were gathered into collections and then published; their program either aimed for ver-
satility (varietas delectat) or instead concentrated on a homogeneous topic, such as political ideas,
religious devotion (Jesuit or Puritan emblem books), or alchemy.3
Since the subject of this essay is political iconography, it is convenient to look at an emblematic
example. The history of the French emblem books started with Guillaume de la Perrière’s Le
Theatre des bons engins (Paris, 1540), which was then translated by the English Thomas Combe
as The Theatre of Fine Devices (London, c. 1593, 1614) (Fig. 22.1).4 The structure is very simple:
the motto announces that the scepter of a king is best supported by love and fear. The picture
shows a dog and a hare holding up a crown and also supporting a scepter. The poem restates
this by naming the two animals, with the dog representing loyalty and the hare timidity. From
this example it is possible to deduce the two most important and characteristic features of the
emblem: on the one hand it employs figurative or symbolic ambiguity, meaning that the signs
used do not stand for themselves but call to mind something else based on associative similarity
(in this case the two animals personify two characteristics of royal subjects). On the other hand,
the emblem also employs multimediality; the intentional ambiguity is communicated using more
than one medium, which in this case are the visual and the verbal.
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György E. Szönyi
Figure 22.1 Emblem XC, “Loue and feare are chiefest things,/That stablish Scepters unto kings,”
Guillaume de la Perrière/Thomas Combe, A Theater of Fine Devices, London, 1614. Illustration courtesy of
Google Books.
It is possible to ask how emblems relate to medieval, political iconography, since the first
emblem books appeared only in the sixteenth century, well after the Middle Ages. The point is
that emblems embodied and crystallized those two characteristics – figurative-symbolic ambi-
guity and multimediality – which had always been present in Western cultural representations
but which reached their first great flowering during the medieval period, especially from the
twelfth century throughout Europe. Learned humanist emblems and their popular offspring
were rooted in certain late antique and medieval genres which offered symbolic interpretations
in a visual-verbal presentation.
Peter Daly established that Greek epigrams, later to be developed into Renaissance loci com-
munes, classical commemorative medals (combining pictures and inscriptions), hieroglyphics, her-
aldry, impresas, and medieval bestiaries were forerunners of the emblem.5 To these can be added
illustrated medieval “books of secrets,” such as alchemical treatises, and lapidaries, astrological,
magical, and cosmological compilations. Before these genres are examined, a related question also
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Political iconography
needs to be asked as to what the sources were for the medieval figures, symbols, allegories, and
personifications. Apart from everyday experience, people were familiar with certain major systems
of thought that offered images suitable for carrying conceptual ambiguities. First and foremost was
the Bible, which was full of stories and parables exemplifying human nature, and which were easily
applicable to political situations. The interpretation of everyday experience was seen as paralleling
the Book of Nature, in which everything had multiple meanings, promising information to the
attentive reader about the intentions of the Creator. Classical mythology was also interpreted by
the Christians as a storehouse of moral allegories. These repositories were full of secret information
inviting specialists to decipher them: theologians for Bible exegesis and natural philosophers for
reading the Book of Nature, as well as mythographers to interpret pagan mythologies.6
One of the first scholars to emphasize the “emblematic mentality” of the Middle Ages was
Mario Praz, who referred to the conventional symbolism found in bestiaries, lapidaries, and
other collections of scientific or moralizing commonplaces.7 The complete investigation of the
symbolism of medieval nature was undertaken by Albrecht Schöne and Dietrich Jöns, who,
conversely, followed the suggestions of Friedrich Ohly8 regarding the intellectual meaning of
certain words. As Tibor Fabiny has emphasized, this aspect of medieval symbolism developed in
relation to biblical exegesis and typological thinking. The latter – having been worked out by the
Church Fathers – approached the world along the binary opposites of type and antitype, shadow
and reality, prophecy and fulfillment.9
It is important to remember that there were no parts of medieval, Renaissance, or Baroque
life that were completely free from the emblematic way of seeing and thinking. Emblematic
symbolism determined not only the logic of artistic expression but also the semiotics of everyday
life. All of the decoration and ornaments of the house, the furniture, the tapestries, the jewels, and
household items led the early modern person to constant interpretation.10
Apart from objects, other creative areas, such as fashion and dress,11 religious vestments and
the iconography of processions and pilgrimages,12 the conventional meanings of body language
and gestures,13 the symbolism of entertainment, such as tournaments and tilting, carnival, dance,
and, last but not least, the rituals and ceremonies of public and social life, from court festivals and
royal entries to funerals, from witch burning to public executions, were all imbued with con-
ventional symbolism.14 All these spectacles were topped by the very complex Gesamtkunst – an
expression of medieval and Renaissance theater, which combined exegetical, didactic, political,
and entertaining functions. In the political world, early sixteenth-century moralities increasingly
introduced political motives, which were then elevated into high drama in the history plays of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
High art and literature also made good use of applied emblematics. As iconographical studies
have shown, medieval altarpieces and hagiographical picture cycles, as well as Michelangelo’s
Medici tombs in Florence or Rafael’s frescoes in the Vatican Stanzas, were all based on com-
plicated literary programs, or at least they followed and symbolically used elements from the
Judeo-Christian and classical mythological systems.15 This technique was universal in medieval
and early modern Europe, and in the Baroque centuries it became the main catalyst of ecclesias-
tical as well as political art from Spain to Hungary.16
In order to relate the emblematic way of seeing and thinking to the medieval political sphere, I
would like to look at royal imagery and the emergence of the political portrait (see the chapter
on royal iconography elsewhere in this volume). After that I will examine heraldry as a semiotic
system, the function of which was to highlight political and social identities using a uniquely
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György E. Szönyi
symbolic approach (see the chapter on heraldic iconography elsewhere in this volume). In the
last part of my survey I shall look at civic political iconography which emerged in Italy but soon
became common all over the continent.
Royalty and typological symbolism

As is known from Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic study,17 the Middle Ages approached rulership in
a complex way, and the different interpretations – Christ-centered kingship, law-centered king-
ship, polity-centered kingship, and man-centered kingship – resulted in various and characteristic
representations. The two most important aspects were the king’s “two bodies,” relating to body
politic and body natural.
Not surprisingly, the most important exemplum of medieval political iconography was the
representation of rulers. The regalia had emblematic significance: the crown symbolized the
indivisibility of the kingdom, the orb referred to the lands under his or her jurisdiction, the sword
and scepter stood for might and legal authority (see also Joan Holladay’s chapter in this volume).
Since the king’s or queen’s office was supposed to be derived from God, and she or he was seen
as the deputy of the Lord on earth, the symbolic attributes often included typological elements,
holy relics, groups of patron saints, or angels.
Sigismund of Luxemburg (1368–1437) was one of the outstanding although controversial
monarchs of the high Middle Ages. He became prince elector of Brandenburg in 1378, king of
Hungary in 1387, of the Romans (Germany) in 1411, of Bohemia in 1419, of Italy in 1431, and
finally Holy Roman Emperor in 1433. Obviously during this spectacular career he lived through
numerous anointments and inaugurations as well as innumerable processions and celebratory
pageants. Images of him are many and represent various styles, offering a good insight into the
iconography of rulership. On his great seals, he sits in full majesty with his regalia, comparable to
representations of maiestas Domini. To emphasize the political significance of his representations,
the king is usually surrounded by the arms and badges of his lands, most spectacularly shown in
Dürer’s posthumous portrait from 1512, which shows him similar to a saint (Fig. 22.2). There are
Figure 22.2 Composite picture showing Pisanello’s Portrait of Emperor Sigismund I (1433, black chalk
and pen on paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris); Albrecht Dürer’s Portrait of Emperor Sigismund I (1512, oil on
lindenwood, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg); and Albrecht Dürer’s Emperor Maximilian I
(1519, oil on lindenwood, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).
298
numerous illustrations of him in the chronicles showing him accepting the homage of vassals and
electors. He is always shown with formal dignity, and notables carry the imperial regalia before
him. Sigismund was also a devout person and combined politics with religion by organizing the
Council of Konstanz between 1414 and 1418. In this context he was often represented as a holy
prince in the center of processions.18
The typological parallel between rulers and biblical personages resulted in interesting
crypto-portraits and Sigismund often took on such roles. He can be shown as King David, or as
one of the three magi heading toward the Infant Jesus, or as Pilate washing his hands, or as Nic-
odemus taking the cross from Christ on Calvary.19 One of the most interesting crypto-portraits
is from the workshop of Jan van Eyck, showing The Journey of Christ toward the Cross (1420,
Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest), where Sigismund is represented as the Roman captain riding
behind the stumbling Jesus.
Typological comparisons were not restricted to either secular leaders or biblical characters.
By the Renaissance, Greco-Roman mythological heroes were also used to enhance the images
of rulers and princes. Hercules, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar were often used for
such comparisons.20 A typical example is A. van Leest’s woodcut of “William of Orange as
Perseus” (1579).21
From heraldry to portraits

One of the major political semiotic systems of the Middle Ages was heraldry. It was a multime-
dial code, synthesizing pictures and text. Its original purpose was to connect the individual to
a family or a (professional/national) group on the basis of clearly identifiable symbolic pictures
and mottoes. Heraldry goes back to medieval chivalry and it had an important role in military
history as well, since it enabled differentiation among the participants of a battle who wore their
insignia on their clothing and flags.22
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, heraldry went through some major changes: on the
one hand the coats of arms of the nobility developed into a complicated and ornate art, mixing
colored geometrical elements with animals, mythical monsters, and symbolic objects. On the
other hand, it became widely used in most spheres of everyday life. Examples are found, for
example, in the world of administration (coats of arms of cities, towns, and countries) and various
intellectual and professional bodies (guilds, printers, freemasons, shops, and inns, etc.). Individuals
were also keen on having their own insignia and these ranged from humanistically designed
imprese to the small art of ex libris.23
Semiotically speaking, a heraldic device was perfectly capable of representing a person, his or
her origins, family relations, rank in the social hierarchy, and alliances. In the high Middle Ages,
however, it became desirable to show individual features of significant personages, and later on
even commoners. This is how, after a long dormant period, portraits were revived and portrait
painting emerged as an individual artistic genre. In order to combine the representation of social
rank and individual features (in accordance with the notion of the king’s “two bodies”) it became
the norm to add the coat of arms, which was eventually complemented with textual information,
to the more or less naturalistic portraits.
In this respect it is interesting to compare Dürer’s portraits of Emperors Sigismund I (1512)
and Maximilian I (1519). Although the faces of the rulers are personalized and show the painter’s
interest in Renaissance naturalism, Sigismund is depicted in a medieval manner, in a stiff, digni-
fied posture, surrounded by heraldic devices and text. In contrast, Maximilian’s portrait shows
a more simple man with whom the painter was well acquainted; he wears a hat and casually
leans on something. Instead of an orb, the emperor holds a broken pomegranate, a symbol of the
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György E. Szönyi
Resurrection and his own personal emblem. Maximilian’s rank is indicated only by the Habsburg
coat of arms topped by the Imperial Crown. Next to it, there is an inscription enumerating the
emperor’s achievements and the dates of his birth and death.
In Dürer’s paintings it is possible to see the influence of both the northern international
Gothic style and the Italian Renaissance that greatly contributed to the enhanced representation
of individual human features as opposed to the formal characteristics. This could already be seen
in Pisanello’s famous drawing of Sigismund I (1433), which depicted the emperor in profile, in a
casual pose, wearing a simple dress without any headpiece, the only ornament being a badge of
his own creation, the Dragon Order, pinned on his breast (Fig. 22.2).
A particularly instructive example to demonstrate the interrelations of royalty, typological
symbolism, and heraldry is the famous portrait of Richard II on the Wilton Diptych (1395–99;
Fig. 22.3). The painting perfectly illustrates the king’s “two bodies” with an intricate symbol-
ism. The right panel, with the Virgin Mary and infant Christ blessing the English flag, endows
body politic with a cosmic and theological significance; furthermore, on the left side Richard is
shown in a triple context. His crown and regalia emphasize the body politic; however, his golden
garment decorated with his personal emblem – white harts – combines the body politic with
references to the devout private person – that is, the body natural. His gown is also decorated
with rosemary sprigs, a device of his deceased wife, thus indicating his political alliance (see also
Celia Fisher’s chapter elsewhere in this volume). The public/private duality is also reflected on the
outer panels, which on the left side display Richard’s arms (lilies and lions) combined with that
of Edward the Confessor (golden cross with birds on a blue shield – these are attributed arms,
because such devices had not yet been invented in Edward’s day in the eleventh century)24 and
Richard’s own emblem, the white hart on the right. The three patron saints behind the king are
John the Baptist, Edward the Confessor, and Edmund the Martyr. John was Richard’s personal
patron, Edward his role model, while the third was also a canonized English king. Since Richard
was born on Epiphany day, the sixth of January, the three patrons could also be interpreted as a
type of the three magi heralding the birth of Christ. Thus, the political dimension of the painting
was widened into a universal, Christian perspective. The heavenly gathering of angels on the
other panel directed the viewer back to English politics, not only because of the national flag but
also because they wear white hart badges on their robes.25
The complexities of political iconography

While warfare greatly contributed to the rise of heraldic iconography, it then permeated all
spheres of life. Chivalry was one important manifestation of such emblematism, with the colors,
badges, and mottos of the knights in the tiltyard. But the tournament also contributed to the
spectacular theatricality of the Middle Ages, a subject that greatly developed pageantry. Religious
processions and royal entries were all part of this together with legal settings, ceremonial public
punishments, and executions. Depictions of royal arrivals and funerals are frequently found in
medieval chronicles. Images of torture and punishment proliferated in religious pictures and
include calvaries, crucifixions, and lives of martyred saints. By the Renaissance these became
politicized and secularized into images of wars, religious strifes, the Ottoman advance, the crimes
of American Indians, and so forth. Special backdrops, such as emblematic-allegorical scaffolds,
triumphal arches, and tapestries, were often created for occasions.26
By the Renaissance, complex political iconography became more and more secular, but
during the Middle Ages it was strictly intertwined with religious themes and imagery. The
political message was often hidden under the surface of Christian topics, such as in the Syl-
vester Chapel of the Basilica of the Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome. This early Christian
300
Figure 22.3 The Wilton Diptych (1395–99), tempera on wood, London, National Gallery. Image courtesy
of Wikimedia Commons.
church was remodeled in the mid-thirteenth century by Cardinal Stefano Conti, who also
added the chapel connecting the church to his palace next to it. In 1246 the chapel was dec-
orated with frescoes, depicting Pope Sylvester I (d. 335) receiving homage from Constantine
the Great and apparently given the “Donation of Constantine” (in fact a medieval forgery),
according to which the emperor let the pope rule over the Western part of the empire. The
political message is clear and through an intricate iconography it emphasizes the power of
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the Church over the Holy Roman Emperor. The chapel was consecrated by Rinaldo Conti,
nephew of Pope Gregory IX, later himself Pope Alexander IV; and the commissioner, Cardinal
Stefano, was the nephew of Innocent III and chief advisor of Innocent IV. All of these church-
men were sworn enemies of the Hochenstaufen and styled themselves as the supreme spiritual
and secular power for all of Europe.27
Civic political iconography

Religious and political pageants took place most frequently in urban environments, and accord-
ing to the mechanism of gesunkenes Kulturgut, the city folk were inspired to imitate and creatively
extend emblematic symbolism. Towns and their guilds acquired arms and heraldic devices, their
communities created their own ritualized customs, and their public places and even private
houses were decorated with religious or classical mythological scenes.
It is important to remember the elaborate rituals of the Sposalizio del mare (marriage of the
sea) ceremony, which was celebrated on Ascension Day from 1000 to 1798, and commemo-
rated Venice’s sea power. From 1311 it featured a special boat, the bucintoro. The ceremony was
originally political, and it later became tinted with religious features, and was finally styled as
a nuptial. In 1177, Pope Alexander III, in exchange for Venice’s assistance in his struggle with
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, gave a ring to the doge and bade him to throw a similar one
into the sea every year, to wed the Adriatic. Henceforth it was done with the Latin declaration
“Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique domini” (We wed thee, sea, in the sign of the
true and everlasting Lord).28
An even more openly political ritual was held in Florence with the election of the governing
council, the Signoria and its nine priors, who were led by the Gonfalonier of Justice, to be changed
every two months. The elections were elaborate, and the whole system of republicanism was
dressed in iconographically charged ceremonies.29
One characteristic example showing the interrelations of beliefs and politics was the Journey
of the Magi festival in Florence. This was a spectacular pageant held on Epiphany Day, and dating
back to 1390; it was organized by the Compagnia (Confraternity) dei Magi. The event consisted of
a procession with a number of scheduled stops, along a specified route. The procession usually
started at the Piazza San Marco, where the Compagnia had its seat, and proceeded along Via
Larga as far as Herod’s palace at the Battistero, before finally reaching the crib at the Duomo,
where the kings offered their gifts. After this, the procession returned from where it had come,
or continued on to Piazza della Signoria for the reconstruction of the Massacre of the Innocents.
As the informative website for the Medici Palace states,
For the families that took part, the procession gave them the opportunity to flaunt pre-
cious and elegant fabrics, garments and jewels that indicated their social standing, and
often the refinement of goods that they themselves produced, purchased or sold. The
feast thus assumed self-celebratory, worldly and ostentatious connotations that perpet-
uated the customs of courtly ceremonial and the late Gothic taste.30
No wonder the upwardly mobile Medici family saw this event as a good opportunity to
enhance their public image, so eventually they dominated the confraternity and also became
the main sponsors of the festival. It is not surprising, then, that the route of the procession was
directed along Via Larga (today’s Via Cavour), lined with Medici residences and crowned by the
monumental palace of Cosimo il Vecchio, completed by Michelozzo in 1460. To emphasize the
relationship, in the same year Piero de’ Medici entrusted the painter Benozzo Gozzoli to create a
302
family chapel in the palace and to decorate it with frescoes representing the Journey of the Magi.
The impressive mural cycle was not simply a religious artwork but also a political testament to the
might of this family. Its members were represented in crypto-portraits: behind the Young King
rides Piero de’ Medici and his father, Cosimo il Vecchio; among the retinue behind there is the
painter himself (his red cap bears the inscription “BENOTII”), and in front of him two youths,
Guliano and Lorenzo, the later “il Magnifico.”31
Since Italy had a thriving civic social life in the late medieval period, it is not surprising that
the greatest allegorical political representation was created there: the frescoes of Good and Bad
Government in the Council Room of the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena by Ambrogio Lorenzetti
(1337–40). Upon entering the room through the door in the northern wall, the representation
of bad government stretches on the left side, while the good one is on the right. Opposite, on
the southern wall there is no fresco but a window letting light into the room. Upon turning
around to the northern wall, there is a complex allegory centered on the royal figure of the Good
Governor (in some interpretations the Common Good, or the Commune of Siena), surrounded
by six female personifications of civic virtues (Peace, Fortitude, Prudence, Magnanimity, Tem-
perance, and Justice) and the three theological virtues (Faith, Hope, and Charity) directly above
the entrance door. There are also emblems of the city of Siena and at the feet of the Governor
references are made to the conquered enemies of the town. Dame Justitia sits on a throne, to the
left of the Governor, under the winged Sapientia, holding her scales, from which a cord stretches
to the seated Concordia, who in turn passes it to a procession of the twenty-four city counselors
of Siena (Fig. 22.4).
According to Frederick Hartt, the most surprising achievement is the depiction of the results
of Good Government in the country and in the city. “No such comprehensive panorama of the
natural world and its human inhabitants is known to us from the entire previous history of art.”
Emblematic figures such as Securitas, from whom “many good things come, behold, how sweet
life is,” are also found. This can be read on the elaborate inscription which explains the meaning
of the allegories. The iconography of the Bad Government on the opposite wall is dominated
by the enthroned devil-like Tyrant, surrounded by Pride, Avarice, Vainglory, Deceit, Treason,
Cruelty, Fury, Discord, and War. The battered Justice with her scales broken lies at his feet. In
the city, robbers are plundering and the countryside is devastated.32
The novelty of Lorenzetti’s murals is that he managed for the first time to translate eccle-
siastical idealism into propagating civic virtue and created secular symbolism. Considering its
place in the city hall, the political message is unmistakable; that is why Alios Riklin rightly called
it Lorenzetti’s political summa, a pictorial counterpart to Aquinas’s theological synthesis. Andrea
Campbell’s opinion is that the political program consists of “Justice, inspired by divine Wisdom,
will be achieved by citizens acting in Concord and serving the Common Good.”33
Civic emblematics were not restricted to Italy and by the early Renaissance they had per-
meated the whole continent. A particularly interesting example is an enormous majolica stove
which is found in Gdansk, decorating the Artus Court (Fig. 22.5). This spectacular building
was the meeting place of local merchants who imitated the nobility by calling their gathering
venue after King Arthur. Such Artus Houses existed in the Hanseatic towns from the fourteenth
century. The one in Gdansk, Curia Regis Artus, was built by the St. George Brotherhood in 1350
(the building was remodeled in a Dutch Mannerist style in 1617, in the golden days of the grain
trade). It also functioned as the headquarters for several fraternities associated with ship owners;
one of them – coincidentally – was named after the biblical Three Kings (1483).34
The most majestic item among the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque decorations of the Artus
Court is the Great Stove, which was erected in 1545, when Catholics and Protestants in Poland
engaged in religious strife. The symbolism of this enormous pottery work reflects the political
303
György E. Szönyi
Figure 22.4 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government, details (1338–40), fresco, Siena, Palazzo
Pubblico.
views of the contemporary citizens, since by that time the city was Lutheran and nurtured
anti-Catholic sentiments and resistance toward the then ruling king Sigismund the Old. The
citizens demonstrated their wish for religious tolerance on the lower levels of the tiles, group-
ing portraits of monarchs regardless of their denomination (including Protestant leaders of the
Schmalkalden Union, Princess Sybilla of Clivia and Berg, the Saxon elector Frederick III vis-a-vis
Emperor Charles V, his brother, King Ferdinand, Louis II Jagello of Hungary, and their wives).
304
Figure 22.5 The Great Stove (1545), majolica, Gdansk, Artus Court. Image courtesy of Gyorgy Szönyi.
Anti-Catholic sentiments are highlighted by the sarcastic image of a monk and a nun with wine
cups, referring to the clergy’s indulgence in sex and alcohol. Some moralizing tiles advertise civic
virtues, such as Patience, Prudence, and Cognition.35
Last but not least, mention should be made of one of the most complex multimedial art
forms that also exploited emblematic symbolism: the theater. An unprecedented development
from medieval biblical mystery cycles through the emerging late Gothic political moralities,36 to
the achievements of Shakespeare and his generation, in the genres of historical dramas and great
tragedies, would deserve a separate chapter.37 Let it suffice to say that the motto of the Globe
theater – totus mundus agit histrionem –not only expressed a Renaissance enthusiasm for life but also
was rooted in John of Salisbury’s twelfth-century idea of the theatrum mundi, a symbolic political
science of the Middle Ages.38
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György E. Szönyi
Conclusions
In the late fifteenth century, inspired by the secular splendor of the Renaissance and by an
unfolding information revolution whose flagship was printing, emblematic symbolism became
even more widespread and spectacular than before. Political displays, secular processions, and tri-
umphal arches became more ornate, while new topics also enriched political iconography: from
the excessive use of pagan mythology to the inclusion of motives from the recently discovered
Americas, or reflections on the military and artistic interactions with the Arabs and the Otto-
mans.39 I hope that this essay demonstrated that emblems – symbolic combinations of pictures
and words – created by the Renaissance humanist elite had their origins in the Middle Ages. By
introducing the concept of the emblematic way of thinking and seeing it can be argued that the
same representational logic was at work from late antiquity through the Baroque period. It faded
away but not entirely – in the rationalism of the eighteenth century. Political ideas and situations
were always ready to find symbolic expression, very often intertwined with religious-moral con-
cerns; however, throughout the Middle Ages these became ever more secularized, increasingly
propagating worldly power and civic virtues.
Notes
1 I thank Dr. Jill Bepler and the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, without whose help this essay
would not have been completed.
2 The study of emblems and emblem books gained a new impetus in the 1960s and still thrives. Some
seminal studies in chronological order are R. Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948); Emblemata:
Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, ed. A. Henkel and A. Schöne (Stuttgart,
1967); P.M. Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto, [1979] 1998); The Emblem in Renaissance
and Baroque Europe: Tradition and Variety, ed. A. Adams and A.J. Harper (Leiden, 1992); M. Bath, Speaking
Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London, 1994); Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque
Symbol Theory, 1500–1700, ed. P.M. Daly and J. Manning (New York, 1999); Companion to Emblem
Studies, ed. P.M. Daly (New York, 2008); see also the international journal Emblematica (1986–).
3 The pioneering emblem collection was Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber (Augsburg, 1531; Paris, 1534).
See the chapter by D. Drysdall and P.M. Daly in this volume. A similar nonthematic publication
was Johannes Sambucus’s Emblemata (1564), which greatly inspired Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of
Emblems (London, 1586). A typical collection of political emblems was Julius W. Zincgreff ’s Emblemata
ethico-politica (Frankfurt, 1619); Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim, 1617) dealt with alchemy;
Daniel Cranmer’s Emblemata sacra (Frankfurt, 1617) was a Lutheran, while Herman Hugo’s Pia desideria
(Antwerp, 1624) a Jesuit emblem book. Particularly in Holland, emblems about love and daily life were
also popular (Daniel Heinsius, Emblemata amatoria, Amsterdam, 1608; Roemer Visscher, Sinnepoppoen,
Amsterdam, 1614).
4 Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices Containing an Hundred Morall Emblemes (London, 1614),
Emblem XC. Apart from the freely available Google book, I am quoting J. Doebler’s 1983 edition (San
Marino, Huntington Library).
5 Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (as in note 2), 9–42.
6 See Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (as in note 2), 9–42, Some classic works: J. Seznec, The Sur-
vival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (Princeton,
1972 [1953]); G. Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven, 1988); N. Frye, The
Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London, 1983). Recent important contributions include T. Fabiny,
The Lion and the Lamb: Figuralism and Fulfilment in the Bible, Art, and Literature (Basingstoke, 1992); C.
Brown, Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford, 1998); The Book of
Nature in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. K. Berkel and A. Vanderjagt (Leuven, 2005); The Word and
the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, ed. K. Killeen and P.J. Forshaw (Basingstoke, 2007);
The Multiple Meaning of Scripture: The Role of Exegesis in Early-Christian and Medieval Culture, ed. I. van ‘t
Spijker (Leiden, 2009); Le paysage sacré: le paysage comme exégese dans l’Europe de la premiere modernité, ed.
D. Ribouillault (Florence, 2011); T.J. Furry, Allegorizing History: The Venerable Bede, Figural Exegesis, and
306
Historical Theory (Eugene, 2013); The Book of Nature and Humanity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
ed. D. Hawkes and R.G. Neewhauser (Turnhout, 2013).
7 M. Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome, 1964), 12, 24.
8 F. Ohly, “Vom geistigen Sinn des Wortes im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche
Litteratur 83 (1959), 1–2. See also D. Jöns, Das Sinnen-Bild: Studien zur allegorischen Bildlichkeit bei Andreas-
Gryphius (Stuttgart, 1966), and A. Schöne, Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock (Munich, [1964]
1968).
9 T. Fabiny, The Lion and the Lamb (as in note 6); and “Rossz ízlés, vagy művészi érték?” in A reneszánsz
szimbolizmus: Ikonográfia, emblematika, Shakespeare, ed. T. Fabiny, Gy. E. Szönyi, and J. Pál (Szeged, 1998),
21–33.
10 See the chapter “‘Extra-Literary’ Emblematics: Painting, Tapestry, Carving, Jewellery, Funerary Mon-
uments, Imprese” in The Modern Critical Reception of the English Emblem, ed. P. Daly and M.V. Silcox
(Munich, 1991), 203–38; D. Russell, “Perceiving, Seeing and Meaning: Emblems and Some Approaches
to Reading Early Modern Culture,” in Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque Symbol Theory, 1500–1700, ed.
P. Daly and J. Manning (New York, 1999), 77–92.
11 See the numerous studies on fashion – for example, A. Bönsch, Formengeschichte europeischen Kleidung
(Vienna, 2001); M.R. DeLong and P.A. Hemmis, “Historic Costume and Image: A Factor in Emblem
Analysis,” in The Telling Image: Explorations in the Emblem, ed. A.L. Bagley, E.M. Griffin, and A.J. McLean
(New York, 1996), 117–38; H.H. Glaser, Was Man Trug Anno 1634: Die Basler Kostümfolge (Basle, 1993).
12 See L.K. Davidson, Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Research Guide (New York, 1993); H. Belting, Bild
und Kult (Munich, 1990), translated into English as Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the
Era of Art (Chicago, 1994).
13 On the rhetoric of the body see P. Burke, “Gesture Language in Early Modern Italy,” in Varieties of
Cultural History (Cambridge, 1997); L. Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cam-
bridge, 2000); D. Grantley, The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Aldershot, 2000); M. Kro-
bialka, This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, 1999); C. Mueller,
Redebegleitende Gesten: Kulturgeschichte, Theorie, Sprachvergleich (Berlin, 1998); J.C. Schmitt, La Raison de
gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 1990).
14 N. Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975),
152–87; R. van Dülmen, Theater of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge,
1991 [1985]); S.Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine
Renaissance (Ithaca, 1985); R.J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987
(Oxford, 1996); I. Sz. Kristóf, “How to Make a (Legal) Pact with the Devil?” in Christian Demonology and
Popular Mythology in Early Modern Europe, ed. G. Klaniczay and É. Pócs (Budapest, 2008), 165–79; M.B.
Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance
Europe (London, 1999); M. Pointon, “Wearing Memory: Mourning, Jewellery and the Body,” in Trauer
tragen – Trauer zeigen: Inszenierungen der Geschlechter, ed. G. Ecker (Munich, 1999), 65–83; M.C. Ruggieri-
Tricoli, Il “funeral teatro”: apparati e mausolei effimeri dal XVII al XX secolo a Palermo (Palermo, 1993). On
court festivals see J.R. Mulryne and E. Goldring (ed.), Court Festivals of the European Renaissance (Alder-
shot, 2002), and the two-volume representative edition of J.R. Mulryne, H. Watanabe-O’Kelly, and M.
Shewring (ed.), Europa Triumphans: Court Festivals in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2004).
In German scholarship a new subfield has evolved since the 2000s, called “Zeremonial wissenschaft” –
that is, the study of early modern ceremonies. See V. Bauer, Hofökonomie: Der Diskurs über den Fürstenhof in
Zeremonialwissenschaft (Vienna, 1997), and M. Velc, Zeremonialwissenschaft im Fürstenstaat (Frankfurt, 1998).
A useful thematic volume on political iconography is Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation, ed. A.
Ellenius (Oxford, 1998), especially J. Chrośicki’s study “Ceremonial Space,” in this volume on (193–217).
15 Pioneers of deciphering and interpreting of these programs were the art historians usually associated
with the “Warburg School”: Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, Ernst Gombrich, Jan Białos-
tocki, and others. See chapters elsewhere in this volume.
16 I have published some interesting case studies by a number of colleagues. See Gy.E. Szönyi (ed.), European
Iconography East & West (Leiden, 1996).
17 E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957).
18 See B. Kéry, Kaiser Sigismund: Ikonographie (Vienna, 1972); J.K. Hoensch, Kaiser Sigismund: Herrscher an der
Schwelle zur Neuzeit 1368–1437 (Munich, 1996); Sigismund von Luxemburg: Ein Kaiser in Europa, ed. M.
Pauly and F. Reinert (Mainz, 2006). See also K. Johannesson, “The Portrait of the Prince as a Rhetorical
Genre,” in Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation (as in note 14), 11–37; S. Bertelli, “Rex et Sacerdos:
307
György E. Szönyi
The Holiness of the King in European Civilization,” in Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation (as in
note 14), 123–47.
19 B. Kery, “Kryptoportraits oder nicht?” in Sigismund von Luxemnburg: Kaiser und Konig in Mitteleuropa
1387–1437, : Beiträge zur Herrschaft Kaiser Sigismunds und der europäischen Geschichte um 1400 :Vorträge der
internationalen Tagung in Budapest vom 8.–11 Juli 1987 anlässlich der 600, ed. J. Macek, E. Marosi, and F. Seibt
(Warendorf, 1994), 279–86.
20 See the classical study of E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art,” Metropolitan
Museum Studies 4:2 (1933), 228–80; N.T. Burns and C.J. Reagan, “Concepts of the Hero in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance,” Speculum 51 (1976), 162 (review of a number of books dealing with this
topic); M.M. Donato, “Hercules and David in the Early Decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio,” Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991), 83–98; F. Polleross, “From the Exemplum Virtutis to the
Apotheosis: Hercules as an Identification Figure in Portraiture,” in Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitima-
tion (as in note 14), 37–63; B. Bussman, Die Historisierung der Herrscherbilder, 1000–1200 (Cologne, 2006).
21 Reproduced in Ut pictura politeia oder der gemalte Fürstenstaat Moritz der Gelehrte und das Bildprogramm in
Eschwege, ed. H. Borggrefe, T. Fusenig, and B. Kümmel (Marburg, 2000), 12.
22 On the basics of heraldry see F.J. Baigent and C.J. Russell, A Practical Manual of Heraldry and of Heral-
dic Illumination: With a Glossary of the Principal Terms (London, 1864); O. Neubecker, Heraldry: Sources,
Symbols and Meaning (London, 1977); T. Woodcock, The Oxford Guide to Heraldry (Oxford, 1990); V.V.
Filip, Einführung in die Heraldik (Stuttgart, 2000); P. Lovett, The British Library Companion to Calligraphy,
Illumination & Heraldry: A History and Practical Guide (London, 2000); B. Bedos-Rezak, Form and Order in
Medieval France: Studies in Social and Quantitative Sigillography (Aldershot, 1993).
23 See D.S. Caldwell, The Sixteenth-Century Italian “Impresa” in Theory and Practice (New York, 2004);
B. Trinca, “Albrecht’s ‘Jüngerer Titurel’: A Thirteenth-Century Precursor of the Impresa?” Emblem-
atica 18 (2010), 195–205; Deutsche und österreichische Exlibris 1500–1599 im Britischen Museum, ed. I.
O’Dell-Franke (London, 2003); M. Hopkinson, Exlibris: The Art of Bookplates (London, 2011); C. Valter,
Kunstwerke im Kleinformat: deutsche Exlibris vom Ende des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Nürnberg, 2014).
24 It was Henry III (1207–72) who initiated the attribution of a golden cross on a blue shield to Saxon
kings (Neubecker, Heraldry, 30, as in note 22).
25 See Gy.E. Szönyi, “Concepts and Representations of Sovereignty on the English Renaissance Emblem-
atic Stage,” IKON 5 (2012), 210.
26 See the literature listed in note 14. Furthermore: W. Brückle, Civitas Terrena: Staatsrepräsentation und
politischer Aristotelismus in der französischen Kunst, 1270–1380 (Berlin, 2005); E. Korsch, Bilder der Macht:
Venezianische Repäsentationsstrategien beim Staatsbesuch Heinrichs III, 1574 (Berlin, 2013); F. Buttay-Jutier,
Fortuna: Usages politiques d’un allégorie morale à la Renaissance (Paris, 2008); P. Schneider, “Political Ico-
nography and the Picture Act: The Execution of Charles I in 1649,” in Pictorial Cultures and Political
Iconographies, ed. U.J. Hebel (Berlin, 2011), 63–85.
27 See a detailed iconological analysis with the historical background in T. Noll, Die Silvester-Kapelle in SS:
Quatro Coronati in Rom. Ein Bildzyklus im Kampf zwischen Kaiser und Papst (Berlin, 2011). A similar study
is I. Grötschke, Das Bild des Jüngsten Gerichts: Die ikonografischen Konventionen in Italien und ihre politische
Aktualisierung in Florenz (Worms, 1997).
28 See the Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, Knight, 1496–99, ed. Malcolm Letts (London, 1946); on the festival
“Bucentaur,” The Encyclopadia Britannica, ed. H. Chisholm (London, 1910), 11th ed., and M. O’Con-
nell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Baltimore, 2009), 17, referring to E.
Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth (Baltimore, 2002), and E. Muir, Civic Ritual in
Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981).
29 See The “Libro cerimoniale” of the Florentine Republic by Francesco Filarete and Angelo Manfidi, ed. R.C. Trex-
ler (Geneve, 1978); G. Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1977, 1997); and
R.C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY, 1980, 1991).
30 Mediateca di Palazzo Medici-Riccardi–Window on the Renaissance, www.palazzo-medici.it/mediateca/en/
schede.php?nome=La_festa_dei_Magi_(XV_secolo) (accessed July 23, 2015).
31 The Museums of Florence, www.museumsinflorence.com/musei/chapel_of_the_magi.html# (accessed
July 28, 2015).
32 For a detailed description of the work see L. Schmeckebier, A New Handbook of Italian Renaissance Painting
(New York, 1981), 81–85; F. Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (Lon-
don, 1987), 116–19; the quotation is on page 117.
33 A. Riklin, Lorenzettis Politische Summe (St. Gallen, 1994). See also J.B. Steinhoff, “Urban Images and
Civic Identity in Medieval Sienese Painting,” and A.W. Campbell, “Iconography and Identity in a
308
Renaissance Republic,” both in Art as Politics in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena, ed. T.B. Smith and
J.B. Steinhoff (Farnham, 2012). The quotation is on page 102.
34 On the Artus Court see the homepage of the City Museum of Gdansk: http://www.mhmg.gda.pl/
oddzial/11/artus-court (accessed July 24, 2015). On the Hanseatic backgrounds see T.H. Lloyd, England
and the German Hanse, 1157–1611 (Cambridge, 1991, 2002).
35 I have not found a detailed iconographic analysis of this curious work. My summary is based on the
information provided by the museum. For the artistic reconstruction of the Artus Court see T. Grzyb-
kowska and J. Talbierska, Dwór Artusa w Gdańsku: sztuka i sztuka konserwacji (Gdansk, 2004).
36 C. Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis,
1997).
37 See Gy.E. Szönyi, “From Image Hunting to Semiotics: Changing Attitudes toward Shakespeare’s Imagery,”
in Modellierungen von Geschichte und Kultur / Modelling History and Culture, ed. J. Bernard, P. Grzybek, and
G. Withalm (Vienna, 2000), 799–808; and “Concepts and Representations of Sovereignty” (as in note 25).
38 J. Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, 1994), 76; also F.A. Yates, Theatre of the
World (London, 1969).
39 M. Wintroub, “Civilizing the Savage and Making a King: The Royal Entry Festival of Henry II (1550),”
The Sixteenth-Century Journal 29:2 (1998), 465–94; A. Greve, Die Konstruktion Amerikas: Bildpolitik in den
Grand Voyages aus der Werkstatt de Bry (Böhlau, 2004); Interactions: Artistic Interchange between the Eastern
and Western Worlds in the Medieval Period, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2007); L. Jardin, Global Interests:
Renaissance Art between East and West (Ithaca, 2000).
309
23
PICTURING THE STARS –
SCIENTIFIC ICONOGRAPHY
IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Dieter Blume
Watching the stars was essential from mankind’s earliest times. Observing the regular movement
of the stars was the only way to facilitate a clear orientation in time and space. But to do that it, it
was necessary to impose an order on the chaotic multitude of the stars. Constellations had to be
defined and named. Groups of stars were represented as figures and there always was a relatively
strong correspondence between the geometric patterns of the constellations and the appearance
of these figures. Astronomy was therefore possible only when images were created and used. Even
though astronomy is a very specific subject, it is also a characteristic case of scientific iconography
and the following article will therefore concentrate on astronomical and astrological imagery.1
Right up to the present, constellations are named after figures from Greek mythology. Before
written records, the ancient Greeks defined the constellations and put the stars in a new order.
Both Homer and Hesiod described these constellations.2 The Greek system of ordering the stars
has surprisingly never changed and the Latin names of these constellations are still used in mod-
ern astronomy. The early fathers of the Christian church polemicized against pagan astronomy
and astrology. Hieronymus (c. 327–420) called the mythological tradition of the constellations a
ridiculous and ugly slandering of the magnificent sky which had been created by God.3 Attempts
to define a new Christian sky were never successful. Therefore, the church had to study what was
considered a pagan astronomy for measuring time for the canonical hours during the night and
even more importantly to calculate the exact date of the Easter calendar.
So the science of computus, which is concerned with the reckoning of time and the calculation
of the calendar, was established in the early Middle Ages. The first handbook for this new science
was written by the English monk Bede (672/73–735) in the monastery of Saint Paul’s in modern
Jarrow around 725 and has the title “De ratione temporum.”4 Bede intentionally avoided giving
any information on the single constellations or a precise description of the signs of the zodiac.
Later, the emperor Charlemagne (768–814) initiated a general reform of the calendar and
a renewal of the sciences, especially of astronomy. Around 810, scholars at his court in Aachen
created an extensive compendium, which collected all known cosmological information as
well as that on the calculation of time. This work is known today under the title “The Sev-
en-Book-Computus” or Libri computi.5 The fifth book discusses the planets and the stars and con-
tains a catalogue of the single stars in every constellation, but gives no further information about
the figures or their mythological background. It is likely that the Carolingian scholars planned
their fundamental handbook without images. It was felt that the pagan figures that illustrated
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Picturing the stars
the ancient manuscript they used should not be reproduced and neither should they be intro-
duced into the education of the monks in the monasteries throughout the empire. At the start of
medieval astronomy it is possible to detect a hesitation or maybe even a fear to accept the pagan
names of the constellations as well as images of the mythological figures. In some of the earliest
manuscripts, spaces into which images from the ancient models would be placed were left empty.6
This situation changed fundamentally under Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious (814–840).
During his reign, classical manuscripts were produced in considerable numbers in Aachen and
are characterized by an extensive use of antique models. Around 816, in a very ambitious col-
laboration between scholars and artists, a fine picture book of the constellations was produced.7
This codex is not a compilation of computistical and astronomical material, but is nothing else
than the textual edition of an ancient poem, the Latin translation of the Phainomena of Aratos by
Germanicus.8 This text is a tentative description of the starry sky, but offers no real astronomical
information. Therefore detailed commentaries on that poem existed already in ancient times.
This bundle of texts, the poem as well as the commentaries, which was also known as the tradi-
tion of Aratea, is the starting point for medieval astronomy. The manuscript for Louis the Pious,
however, is a real picture book. The main focus is the collection of carefully painted images and
there is a strong correspondence between text and images. Every constellation occupies a full-
page miniature, which shows the mythological figure in an illusionistic manner, copying ancient
painting in front of the blue sky. These images are not simply a copy of an ancient model, but
represent instead a careful compilation of elements from different traditions and different models.
A good example is the zodiac sign of Gemini (Fig. 23.1). The nakedness and the attribute of a
Figure 23.1 Gemini, Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Ms. Voss. Lat. Q 79, fol. 16v.
311
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lyre are based on the Roman tradition of Germanicus illustrations, but the arming with lance
and club as well as the presentation of separate figures who do not embrace goes back to the
Greek tradition. The Carolingian painter added further details, such as the helmets crowned by a
Christian cross. So the ancient twins – Castor and Pollux – appear as miles christiani or Christian
warriors and this may well relate to the emperor Louis the Pious.
Near the end of the codex, next to a chapter discussing the zodiac in its entirety, as well as
the planets and seasons, there is a specific combination of diagram and images, which is surpris-
ing. The basic structure corresponds to the diagram from the Libri computi, in that it shows the
eccentric orbits of the planets around the earth. Venus and Mercury are shown with additional
orbits around the sun. This theory is described by Martinaus Capella and used to explain some
of the irregularities in the orbits of these planets close to the earth.9 Detailed information, such as
the time of their orbit and their specific positions on the zodiac, all coming from Pliny’s Natural
History, was written along the orbit lines of the single planets. This complex diagram was then
replenished with carefully painted figures in medallions. There is an image of every planet and
a personification of the earth is found in the middle. The signs of the zodiac and the labors of
the months are shown in the outer circle. The iconography of all these images closely follows
different ancient models. This full-page miniature is a sort of map of the universe, a model of the
cosmos, which contains every piece of information that was available at this time. Furthermore,
the position of the planets corresponds to their positions on April 16, 816!10 This was not an
accidental date; it had the full moon just before Easter and was therefore a very important date
for the calculation of the liturgical calendar. In addition, the sun is near to her exaltatio – that is,
astrologically a very powerful position. Jupiter standing in Gemini may have been the zodiac sign
of the emperor. Here, the Carolingian astronomers painted a remarkable and positive horoscope,
which must surely have related to the reign of their emperor.
In the miniatures of the constellations, single stars are shown as golden rhombs in more or
less the same positions they have in the figures. Astonishingly, it is possible to count more stars
than in any other star catalogue of the early Middle Ages.11 So, all the relevant astronomical
information is shown in the images, and not in the text, but this information is available only
for someone who has a basic knowledge of astronomy. This luxurious manuscript was probably
created for the emperor and impressively documents the high level of astronomy practiced in
Aachen at this time.
It also represents a sort of breakthrough for the images. After completing this famous codex,
pictures of the constellations became an integral part of handbooks for computistical matters and
were copied for all the important monasteries in the empire. A manuscript of the Libri computi was
produced around 820 in the scriptorium at Aachen and has colorful images of the constellations
between sections in the text. Some traces of gold remain in the miniatures and indicate that golden
stars were once found in front of the illusionistic figures.12 Now, nearly every copy of the Libri
computi has drawings accompanying the descriptions of the constellations. So the pagan imagery
preserved in these pictures became an integral part of the scientific education of the monks.
With the adoption of these images, a new interest in the mythological legends associated with
these figures arose; this was still lacking in the Libri computi. The earliest such work also comes
from the court in Aachen. The sophisticated manuscript with impressive miniatures of the
constellations was made there soon after 830, and also has a translation of Aratos by Cicero.13
The miniatures are made according to the ancient manner of a carmen figuratum. This means that
the bodies of the figures were filled with text. As this text offers mythological explanations, both
the myth and the image are presented in a sort of superimposition. Obviously myth and image
are mutually dependent. These images opened the door for a new preoccupation with the pagan
world of the mythologically defined constellations.
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Picturing the stars
It is possible to describe three steps in the adoption process of pagan astronomy at the Car-
olingian court: first, there was the elaboration of a written star catalogue under Charlemagne
(c. 810); second, there was the development of the images under Louis the Pious (c. 816); and
last, there was a new reading of the ancient myths (c. 830). The images are an integral part of this
intellectual process and inside the books they were used to transmit specific knowledge.
From the tenth century onwards it is possible to observe a shift in astronomical interests.
There was no longer any focus on calendrical problems and instead there were cosmological
questions. The description of the constellations with their image sequences was usually now part
of the manuscripts that gathered basic material for the study of the Quadrivium, the mathematical
sciences of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The monastic scholars now looked for a
logical understanding of the universe as a harmonic building that was created by God. The center
for these advanced studies was the abbey of Fleury in Saint Benoit-sur-Loire in France. There
was an immense library in this monastery with a considerable collection of all the basic ancient
texts. An impressive number of astronomical manuscripts are also connected to this abbey. In
the tenth and eleventh centuries, monks from all over Europe came to Fleury to improve their
knowledge. At this time, the first texts to explain the Islamic invention of the astrolabium came
from Fleury. Images of the constellations also attracted new attention, as documented by a series
of framed and colorful miniatures in a codex dating from 940 to 950.14 These pictures show
the figures in motion and integrate some elements from the mythological stories. For example,
the painter has added a big snake under Andromeda’s feet that refers to the sea monster in the
myth, and this may also have been connected to Eve and the serpent from Paradise. With the
help of Perseus, who of course could be a type of Christ, Andromeda resisted the sea monster
and could be seen as a sort of counter image to Adam’s sinful wife. A monk from Limoges who
copied these images a little later strengthened these associations and showed Andromeda com-
pletely naked, which went against the ancient tradition (Fig. 23.2).15 The picture representing an
Figure 23.2 Andromeda, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 5239, fol. 219v.
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astronomical constellation had thus mutated into an image of female sexuality. Even if they are only
simple drawings, it is clear that these illustrations could also stimulate different areas of the human
imagination. The images of pagan figures in these astronomical books exerted a strong influence
on the readers beyond scientific studies. In the memory of the monks who worked at Fleury these
images were dispersed throughout Europe.
One of the most famous abbots of Fleury was Abbo (940/45–1004), who was responsible for
writing some important astronomical texts. It is possible that a manuscript with some of the basic
works on astronomy was compiled for him. The pictures of the constellations are copies from
one of the aforementioned Carolingian luxury manuscripts and were executed by a very talented
English draftsman (Fig. 23.3). His work transformed the figures into strange, demonic beings,
who in their nakedness hurry around the sky and have little wings on their heads to demonstrate
their celestial origins.16 These drawings are yet another example of the creative transformation of
the iconographic tradition connected with ambitious astronomical studies.
In the eleventh century new compendia were compiled at different locations throughout
Europe, and these attempted to systematize the growing knowledge in the fields of astronomy
and cosmology. In 1056, in the monastery of Ripoll in northern Spain, the monk Oliva compiled
a handbook that offered a completely new and systematic organization of the material.17 For the
first time he distinguished the zodiac signs from the constellations and treated them separately as
different types of illustrations. He also discussed the planets and created the first images of these
wandering stars since antiquity.18
At the same time, a new commentary was written for the aforementioned poem by German-
icus at the abbey of Montecassino in Southern Italy. Like the monk Oliva in Ripoll, material
from different ancient authors was used anew and this work included considerable mythological
information. This important work survives as a copy from the twelfth century, with a consid-
erable number of miniatures closely following ancient models.19 However, new elements are
also to be found. At Montecassino, the figure of Eridanus, who is normally shown prostrate as a
river-god, is interpreted as the falling Phaeton, who crashes into the river. The miniature shows
a naked man with waving legs and arms, similar to a swimmer (Cf. Fig. 23.5). It may be that the
inspiration for this new interpretation came from a relief representing the fall of Phaeton on an
ancient sarcophagus. The commentary also has a chapter on the South Pole that is impossible to
see from Europe, and so the ancient texts offered no information on this important astronomical
feature. Using mythological information, the author tried to find concrete information on the
Austronothus or Southern Pole. Combining remarks from Hyginus and Ovid he offered a picture
of a hybrid monster with female upper parts and the body of a female tiger.20 This interesting
detail shows the medieval monks’ scientific curiosity and demonstrates how ancient myths could
offer new solutions for open questions and could expand the thought process.
Throughout the Middle Ages there was a continual search for correct astronomical illustra-
tions and different models were repeatedly balanced. Pictures of the constellations were always
an integral part of the design and used to mediate astronomical knowledge. To alleviate the
slightly monotonous nature of the star catalogues, the graphic quality of the images was essential
for a fuller understanding. It is possible to distinguish three different functions for the images.
First, they were didactic and have to be seen as an aid to memory. Second, the images often have
information, such as the positions of the single stars or the figures that give the constellations their
names, which is not always found in the texts. Third, the images could stimulate the painter’s
imagination as much as the viewers – and this may have nothing to do with the primary task of
the illustration.
In twelfth-century Spain and Sicily, scholars translated scientific works from Arabic into Latin.
Astronomy and astrology were the primary interests of these scholars and they opened a new field
314
Figure 23.3 Aquarius, London, British Library, Harley Ms. 2506, fol. 38v. © The British Library Board,
All Rights Reserved.
Dieter Blume
of knowledge. Ptolemy’s famous work was now available in Latin. Astrology offered a theory that
could explain the role of the upper parts of the cosmos in the creation of the world. The practical
use of astrology and the calculation of horoscopes were, however, limited in the twelfth century
and really developed only in the thirteenth century. Cathedral schools and royal courts replaced
monasteries as the centers for these developments.
In Sicily, scholars became acquainted with Abd al-Rahman ibn Umar al-Sufi’s book (903–986)
written in Bagdad around 964. This large book by the Persian astronomer studied the fixed stars
and was famous throughout the Islamic world. It has very detailed images, showing all the stars
listed by Ptolemy, in their exact position and appropriately scaled to reflect their size. However,
the figures look strange and have now lost their connection to the Greek myths. For the Sicilian
scholars these pictures were fascinating, because they showed more stars in their exact positions
than any of the other Latin sources. It was easy to compare these pictures to the detailed star
catalogue by Ptolemy translated into Latin by Gerhard of Cremona. Therefore they did not trans-
late al-Sufi’s extensive text, but instead combined the Islamic images with the Ptolemaic star
catalogue and today this book is called Sufi latinus. Around 1188–89 a splendid exemplar, which
is now unfortunately lost, was made for the Norman king, William II (1166–1189). The oldest
surviving copy was made around 1250 in Bologna (Fig. 23.4).21 Several additions clearly show
Figure 23.4 Perseus, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 1036, fol. 10r.
316
Picturing the stars
that astronomers who observed the stars and undertook calculations with the astrolabe used this
book on the fixed stars. The miniatures, with their strange appearance, were a sort of mediator
between the abstract list of numbers, which gave the position of the single stars, and the visible
constellations in the sky. It is astonishing that this spectacular book of the Sufi latinus was not
more widely circulated and this may have been due to its courtly origins. It was only at the end
of the fourteenth century in the Visconti court in Milan that three other copies were produced.
However, the intention here was no longer astronomical, as several indices make clear; the interest
had shifted to astrology and the occult sciences. One of these manuscripts from Milan was very
soon brought to Prague and was used there as the model for the most luxurious book on astrol-
ogy ever compiled. Apart from the Sufi latinus this work also has other important astrological
texts and was made for King Wenzel (1361–1419) soon after 1400 as an unusually large format
manuscript (47.2 × 34.8 cm).22 In order to read it, it is necessary to turn it around at a ninety-
degree angle and look at double-pages (measuring c. 70 × 50 cm) with text and images. For
over two centuries, the exoticism of the Islamic images was more or less preserved in the copies.
Obviously it was the strange appearance which gave them a specific authority.
The book of al-Sufi was read and translated into Catalan at the Spanish court of King Alfonso
X, El Sabio (1252–1284). King Alfonso’s interests in the sciences are well known and four large
books on astronomy, astrology, and magic were written for him. The Libro de las estrella fixas
is a detailed discussion of the constellations and makes extensive use of al-Sufi’s work.23 Every
constellation is allocated one page, with a general description on one page and a depiction of the
figure in a medallion in the middle, surrounded by a description of the single stars written in a
radial system. It appears as if the picture has a sort of aureole. Every page is a sophisticated syn-
opsis of text and image similar to diagrams. The iconography of the constellations is a simplified
version of the images from al-Sufi.
Another center for scientific studies was in southern Italy at the court of Emperor Frederic II
of Hohenstaufen (1194–1250). Here again there was a special focus on astrology, which was,
at that time, a new and fascinating science that offered useful knowledge, especially for rulers.
Around 1230, an astrological picture book was compiled there by Georgius Zaparus Zotorus
Fendulus, who would be unknown apart from this work. It shows the signs of the zodiac together
with the other constellations that rise jointly with them over the horizon – the so-called paran-
atellontes – and the planets in an impressive sequence of miniatures.24 Every planet can be seen
in four different pictures demonstrating six different positions on the zodiac. The wandering
stars are shown as rulers and kings, and in positions where they have little or no influence we
see them falling from their thrones. Some attributes refer to particular areas of their activities.
Venus, for example, holds a psaltery and a drinking vessel, Mercury a book, Mars a sword, and
Saturn points to a grapevine. Beside the much simpler images by the monk Oliva from the
eleventh century, which have been referred to earlier, these were the first depictions of planets
undertaken after antiquity and employed a completely new iconography, which was developed
from the long descriptions in the astrological texts that explained the influence of every single
planet. It is clear that a wish existed at the court to have images of the important astrological
powers for a lay audience who was interested in this new science, but who could not practice it.
These miniatures were eminently suitable to promote astrology and to explain its methods in a
courtly environment.
More important than this little book by Georgius Fendulus, however, was the work of
Michael Scotus (c. 1117–1235), who was connected with the court of Frederic II in the second
part of his life.25 He wrote an extensive introduction to astrology and the natural sciences called
Liber introductorius. An essential chapter is an astrological description of the sky under the title
Liber de signis et imaginibus celi. This section was frequently handed down as a separate work
317
Dieter Blume
and even today it still exists in twenty-two manuscripts. It was the most successful astrological
text from the entire Middle Ages.
The starting point for Michael Scotus was the series of miniatures in a manuscript of the Ara-
tos translation by Germanicus as well as the eleventh-century commentary from Montecassino,
mentioned earlier. His explanations of the single constellations are like descriptions of the images
from this manuscript. These images were very important for him and he took them seriously. A
good example is Cassiopeia. In the twelfth-century miniature there is a red wavy line extending
downwards from the figure’s left hand. This detail is found only in this single miniature and its
origins are mysterious. It may represent a decorative band from the dress that was falling down
in a gesture of mourning of the crying Cassiopeia. In the Latin translation of Ptolemy, Michael
Scotus would have read that Cassiopeia was a woman with a wet or colored hand. He recognized
a close relationship between the image and the information from the other text. Therefore he
wrote that the right hand was pierced and there was a strong flow of blood similar to Christ on
the cross. Even his astrological interpretation stems from this detail. He says that people born
under this sign are beautiful and rich, but will suffer a sudden and violent death – and this only
because of the red wavy line in the miniature of the Germanicus manuscript.
Another case is Eridanus, who in the Germanicus manuscript he used as a model was shown
as a swimmer paralleling the fallen Phaeton who drowned in this river. Michael Scotus wrote that
Eridanus was known as a swimmer or a figure who fell into the water but could also be a sitting
figure. He added the Figura sonantis canonum, a well-dressed man who played a sort of zither as an
alternative image (Fig. 23.5). He described Phaeton as the son of the Sun who sat in a wagon and
Figure 23.5 Eridanus und Figura sonantis canonum, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod.
2352, fol. 19v.
318
Picturing the stars
played this stringed instrument. In this description it is possible to recognize elements of Phaeton
before and after his fall. But this may all have resulted from an error in the writing. Canopus, as
the brightest star in this constellation, received special attention in most medieval descriptions of
the sky and was also often visually represented in the images. In Germanicus’s twelfth-century
manuscript, however, Canous appears instead of Canopus, so it may well have been that Michael
Scotus read that a star named canous was located there. Canonus, however, is an Arabic musical
instrument, similar to a zither, and is widely found in the southern Mediterranean countries.
Michael Scotus knew it well, and so he simply put this instrument into Eridanus’s hands. By
doing this he added something from his own experience as well as that of his readers.
Germanicus described forty-two constellations, but Ptolemy has forty-eight. Therefore,
Michael Scotus looked for a further six constellations; three of them, including the Southern
Pole Austronothus, he found in other miniatures in the twelfth-century codex. The allegorical
representation of the Milky Way he called the demon of the midday (demon meridianus), which
referred to Psalm 90, verse 6, and posted this new constellation in the southern sky. There he
also introduced a second horse, a drill and a flag. The drill and the flag obviously originate from
the everyday world. Again he is looking for a strong reference to the experience of his readers.
His interpretation of the planets was based on the description of the influence of these wan-
dering stars in astrological handbooks in a manner similar to that made by Georgius Fendulus.
But Michael Scotus offered significantly more detail and also distinguished the single planets. It
was astrological influences and not the classical tradition that determined his vision of the celestial
bodies. But he was also at pains to be clear and to find points of reference for his readers. Every
planet represented a characteristic group in society. Saturn was the farmer in a simple dress. Jupi-
ter could be a judge, bishop, or noble citizen; Mars was a warrior with modern arms, such as the
crossbow. Venus was a refined, crowned lady wearing a fine dress and smelling a rose. Smelling
the rose, he explained, stood for sensual joy, the fashionable coiffeur for love, and the elegant dress
for the art of seduction. When representing her, it is clear that Michael Scotus was well aware that
all these details were also used when representing Spring. He used an established picture type, so
that meaning could be easily understood. Mercury looks like a university professor in a pulpit
with books, but could also be a cleric similar to many intellectuals of his times – not least himself.
All of these image types correspond to the experiential world of the readers, who could
immediately get a vivid idea of the planets. Astrology in this way became firmly anchored in
their store of experience.
Michael Scotus planned images of the constellations and the planets which do not employ
unusual or fantastic beings, but instead there were many connections to the readers’ experiences.
All of the figures have modern dress and everyday tools which were well known in this period.
He avoided inconsistent elements and gave every figure an astrological explanation that justified
their appearance. So his Liber de signis et imaginibus celi was a popular handbook for laypeople who
wanted to understand the basic outlines of the astrological system and to be provided with clear
guidelines. This is probably the reason for the great success of the text and images, which were
copied in the Renaissance and were finally distributed in a printed version by Erhard Ratdolt in
Augsburg in 1491.26
Written in a courtly environment, Michael Scotus’s book was widely circulated in the cities
of northern Italy from the second half of the thirteenth century onwards. At the beginning of
the fourteenth century it was also known in Germany, England, and Bohemia.27 This work rep-
resented a dynamic shift in audience which is also characteristic of the bigger history of science
in the high Middle Ages. Knowledge was first elaborated at court, promoted by a ruler or king,
and was transferred in a second step to a wider audience based in the city. In such a context,
knowledge was further developed and found a wider circulation.
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Dieter Blume
Notes
1 This chapter is based on two extensive publications, which cover images of constellations from 800
to 1500. Notes here are reduced to a minimum, and for more detailed information see D. Blume,
M. Haffner, and W. Metzger, Sternbilder des Mittelalters: Der gemalte Himmel zwischen Wissenschaft und
Phantasie, part I 800–1200 (Berlin, 2012), and D. Blume, M. Haffner, and W. Metzger, Sternbilder des
Mittelalters und der Renaissance: Der gemalte Himmel zwischen Wissenschaft und Phantasie, part II 1200–1500
(Berlin, 2016).
2 Homer, Ilias, 18, 484–90; Homer, Odyssee 5, 270–77; Hesiod, Erga, 384, 564, 597, 609, 615, 619.
3 Hieronymus, Commentarium in Amos Prophetam, Lib. II, 7/9, 274–83: “Quando autem audimus Arctu-
rum et Oriona, non debemus sequi fabulas poetarum, et riducula ac portentosa mendacia, quibus etiam
caelum infamare conantur, et mercedem stupri inter sidera collocare.” (If we hear about Arcturum and
Oriona, we should not follow the fables of the poets, which tells ridiculous and ugly lies, with them they
shame even the heaven and put the reward of disgrace under the stars.)
4 F. Wallis, Bede, the Reckoning of Time (Liverpool, 1999); C.W. Jones, Beda Venerabilis, De Ratione Temporum,
Beda Venerabilis opera, vol. 6.2 (Turnhout, 1977).
5 A. Borst, Die karolingische Kalenderreform (Hannover, 1998), cf. also B.S. Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens,
Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance (Leiden, 2007).
6 Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder I 800–1200 (as in note 1), 43–51.
7 Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Ms. Voss. Lat. Q 79; see Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Stern-
bilder I 800–1200 (as in note 1), 53–67, Cat. Nr. 23; E. Dekker, Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial
Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013), 65–73.
8 D.B. Gain, The Aratus Ascribed to Germanicus Caesar (London, 1976); E. Maas, Commentariorum in Aratum
reliquiae (Berlin, 1898, 1955).
9 Martianus Capella, De nuptiis philologiae et Mercurii, ed. A. Dick (Leipzig, 1925), VIII, 857, 879–83; East-
wood, Ordering the Heavens (as in note 5), 238–46.
10 E. Dekker, “Carolingian Planetary Observations: The Case of the Leiden Planetary Configuration,”
Journal of the History of Astronomy 39 (2008), 77–90; Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder I 800–1200
(as in note 1), 61–65.
11 E. Dekker, “The Provenance of the Stars in the Leiden Aratea Picture Book,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 73 (2010), 1–37.
12 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Ms. 3307; Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder I 800–1200 (as in
note 1), 65–66, Cat.-Nr. 33.
13 London, British Library, Harley Ms. 647; Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder I 800–1200 (as in
note 1), 68–69, Cat.-Nr. 28.
14 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 5543; Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder I 800–1200 (as in
note 1), 85–87, Cat.-Nr. 44.
15 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 5239; Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder I 800–1200 (as in
note 1), 96–97, Cat.-Nr. 43.
16 London, British Library, Harley Ms. 2506; copying London, British Library, Harley Ms. 647; Blume,
Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder I 800–1200 (as in note 1), 91–95, Cat.-Nr. 29.
17 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Vat. Reg. lat. 123; Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder I
800–1200 (as in note 1), 100–02, Cat.-Nr. 55.
18 D. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin, 2000), 15–17.
19 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Ms. 19; Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder I 800–1200 (as in note 1),
102–06, Cat.-Nr. 32. The new commentary is also known under the name “Scholia Strozziana.”
20 Hyginus (De astronomia II, 1, 5) writes that Thetys, the wife of Oceanos, refused to accept the constel-
lation of the great bear or Callisto in the waves. So the scholar of Montecassino thought that Thetys
was in opposition to the northern pole and identified her with the southern pole. Ovid (Metamorpho-
sesXI, 243ff ) tells the story that Thetis was raped by Peleus and tries in vain to escape with some meta-
morphoses, among others, as a female tiger. But our scholar didn’t recognize that Thetys and Thetis are
not the same person.
21 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’ Arsenal, Ms. 1036, Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder II 1200–1500 (as in
note 1), Chap. 4, Cat.-Nr. 34; P. Kunitzsch, “The Astronomer Abu’l-Husayn al-Sufi and His Book on
the Constellations,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 3 (1986), 56–81.
22 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbiblothek, clm 826, Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder II 1200–1500
(as in note 1), Cat.-Nr. 38.
320
Picturing the stars
23 Rome, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Lat. 8174, Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder II 1200–
1500 (as in note 1), Cat.-Nr. 44.
24 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lt. 7330, Blume, Regenten (as in note 15), 34–46; Blume, Haffner, and
Metzger, Sternbilder II 1200–1500 (as in note 1), Chap. 2, Cat.-Nr. 1.
25 Blume, Regenten (as in note 18), 52–69; S. Ackermann, Sternstunden am Kaiserhof, Michael Scotus und sein
Buch V on den Bildern und Zeichen des Himmels (Frankfurt, 2009); Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder II
1200–1500 (as in note 1), Chap. 3.
26 Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder II 1200–1500 (as in note 1), Chap. 8, Cat.-Nr. 137.
27 Blume, Haffner, and Metzger, Sternbilder II 1200–1500 (as in note 1), Chap. 2, Cat.-Nr. 8–13.
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24
MEDICINE’S IMAGE1
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Inside a looping illuminated letter “C,” a group of men stand before a mitered bishop (Fig. 24.1).
They are not well. Their colorful robes and hoods are neatly turned out, but their skin is covered
in blotchy spots, red pustules that creep across hands and faces. As a picture it is surprisingly
popular, featuring in tourist pamphlets, television documentaries, and across the Internet. And it
is seductively simple, labeled in most settings as a scene of plague: disease-struck victims receiv-
ing spiritual comfort before a gruesome demise. In 2012 this interpretation was considered firm
enough for the initial to be the front cover of the Encyclopedia of the Black Death.2 Its diagnosis,
however, is wrong. Work on the fourteenth-century Omne Bonum of James Le Palmer, where
the initial resides, has made clear it heads a text on clergymen struck by leprosy, not plague.3 One
stereotypically medieval disease has been effortlessly morphed into another, an elision that can be
traced back to an unresearched caption by the British Library’s Images Online. Recently, a small
group of medical historians have attempted to wrestle the image back into the correct tradition,
issuing appeals to publishers, cataloguers, and Wikipedia editors alike.4
This vignette of Le Palmer’s leprous clergymen exemplifies a number of issues important to
anyone interested in the iconography of medieval medicine. Today, we are subtly surrounded by
medicine’s insistent images, from X-rays and food calorie warnings to billboards advertising the
popular fictions of House or Grey’s Anatomy. Its knowledge and character are deeply intertwined
with visual culture, so much so that even medieval medical illuminations speed around the web,
arousing genuine interest. Conversely, images of medicine in the Middle Ages played a signifi-
cantly smaller role: medical texts, objects, and spaces did not always make a systematic attempt to
utilize the visual. This is not, however, to say that the twinned concerns of sickness and health
were any less vital to medieval people, nor that imaging them had limited value. As with all prac-
tices stemming from the infinitely extendable subject of The Body, medieval medicine’s bound-
aries can be difficult to define, graded from the indisputably medical – a surgeon’s instrument or
physician’s treatise – to softer evocations of disease and cure found delicately knitted into other
historical practices. The very appearance of leprosy in the Omne Bonum, a wide-ranging ency-
clopedia covering subjects as diverse as childhood, the nature of trees, and biblical figures, makes
clear medicine could be present amid a whole array of subjects and images. Likewise, the fact
that today leprosy and plague are even mistakable suggests rich iconographies of both diseases.
What the faulty fourteenth-century initial thus teaches is not to ignore medical imagery as either
unreadably rare or fuzzy and indefinable, but instead to recognize its persistence in surprising
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Medicine’s image
Figure 24.1 (Detail) Leprous priests receiving instruction from a bishop, from the Omne Bonum of James
Le Palmer, c. 1360–75, England. London, British Library, MS Royal 6 E VI, vol. 2, fol. 301r. © The British
Library Board, All Rights Reserved.
locations and its simultaneous fragility out of context. This short essay tries to do just that, putting
some of medieval medicine’s visual repertoire into place.
In order to make useful sense of such an expansive field, what follows focuses mostly on medical
iconography in later Western Europe. This, of course, was not the only time or place that medi-
cine and its imagery appeared in the famously “long” and (more recently) “global” Middle Ages.
The diversity and proficiency of non-Western medicine meant European authors and artists often
owed substantial debt to Middle Eastern, African, and Asian traditions.5 Chronologically, too, the
discipline of medicine varied significantly between Roman Empire and Renaissance, shifting from a
small concentration of healers to fully blown university disciplines and artisanal traditions.6 But by
centering on later Western Europe, a summary of medicine’s imagery might be brought into line
with the periods and locales most explored in recent work on the history of medicine. By high-
lighting innovative visual schemes and scenarios of medieval medicine alongside this supporting
historical frame, the following essay hopes to reveal the art of medicine for a new reader.
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Historiographies and histories

Historical interest in images of medieval medicine began in earnest at the same time as art histo-
ry’s earliest iconographic enterprises. Contemporary with the emergent work of Reigl, Wölfflin,
and Warburg, turn-of-the-century scholarship on the history of medicine gathered around the
totemic figure of Karl Sudhoff (1853–1938). Sudhoff ’s influence on medical history cannot be
overestimated, and it was in early volumes of his Leipzig-based monographic series, Studien zur
Geschichte der Medizin, that a plethora of typological explorations of medieval medical images
emerged.7 From this concentrated start, medico-iconographic studies ebbed and flowed. The
subject only occasionally aroused the interest of famous mid-twentieth-century iconographers
like Panofsky, Pächt, or Saxl, but it was taken up seriously in the 1960s and 1970s in influential
works by Loren McKinney and Robert Herrlinger.8 In the fifty years since, much of this work
has been extended, particularly through the near-exhaustive studies of John Murdoch and Peter
Jones.9 These and other volumes suggest a new impetus for medical iconography as a field, both
in print and online.10
More recently, iconographers have also crafted increasingly detailed analyses of specific tradi-
tions, either dwelling on particular bodies of medical thought (gynecology and obstetrics, surgery,
heart medicine) or organizing their work instead through an artistic lens to consider particu-
lar media (metalwork, manuscripts, wall painting). This dual focus is reflective of the historical
material itself, for both issues of clinical content and of media significantly warp the presence
of medieval medicine’s images. Particular types of practice were more prone to illustration, and
certain materials featured medical imagery much more commonly than others, two factors which
combine to see manuscript traditions overwhelmingly dominate the field. As a result, chronologies
of written medical traditions also matter immensely to the frequency of images. The foundations
of this textual medicine are found in the authoritative corpus of the classical and Arabic worlds:
Greek authors such as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) or the Hippocratic Collection (fifth to third
centuries BCE), Roman writers like the influential Galen of Pergamum (c. 130–216), and later
commentaries or syntheses of both sets of classical sources by Byzantine and Arabic scholars – for
example, the highly respected ibn-Sīnā (c. 980–1037, known as Avicenna). Few examples attest
to an extant illustrative tradition stretching back as far as the earliest of these primary texts, the
survival of images among Western medicine’s early material both unusual and uneven.11 However,
during the eleventh and twelfth centuries many canonical writings reentered Western traditions
through translations of Arabic into Latin undertaken in the scholastic centers of Italy and Spain. In
this new generation of medical texts, imagery appears to have grown to become a small but sub-
stantive feature, continuing to expand in the subsequent centuries alongside the growing scholastic
debates and practical developments undertaken by medical men and women.
The medical body

The human body is the primary subject of medicine, and throughout the classical and medieval
periods debates on the accuracy and superiority of differing physiological traditions were com-
mon. Alongside these discussions several iconographic schemes emerged which sought to picture
the foundational concepts of medieval anatomy.
The first group of images uncovered by historians that express a concern for the body’s
internal makeup were published by Sudhoff in 1907, naming them the Fünfbilderserie, literally the
“five-picture-series.”12 His nomenclature hinged on a twelfth-century manuscript from a Ben-
edictine monastery in Prüfening, near Regensburg, which preserved a scheme displaying five of
the body’s internal systems as theorized by Galen and his followers: arteries, veins, bones, nerves,
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Medicine’s image
and muscles.13 These figures are shown squatting and surrounded by text, each with a particular
internal structure plotted onto their skin in black and red. Despite their naturalistic body shapes
and faces, the anatomical detail pictured within the figures is largely schematic: organs are ren-
dered in simple outline, thoroughfares of nerves and veins appearing as feathered lines stretching
to the extremities, and tubular blocks of muscle presented flat and wavy (Fig. 24.2). Within
five years of their discovery, Sudhoff had identified several other Fünfbilderserie groups, positing
their origin alongside early anatomical writings of the Alexandrian schools in the first century
BCE.14 Scholars still agree that the Prüfening manuscript is the earliest known example, and
there is little evidence either to prove or disprove Alexandrian origins, but his original claim that
the series contained only five systems has been convincingly overturned.15 Despite the dogged
persistence of its fivefold moniker, closer readings of the text accompanying the figures, as well
as the incorporation of a number of new examples into the group, suggest the scheme is made
up of Nine-System Figures, the original five alongside a further four: the male reproductive
system, a combined abdominal system (stomach, liver, belly), the female reproductive system, and
a final combined cephalic system showing the brain and eyes.16 Sudhoff ’s reluctance to consider
all nine as a group perhaps stemmed from the distinct pictorial treatment of these final four, not
mapped onto realistic figures but instead rendered diagrammatically through abstract colored
shapes adjoined by blocky lines (Fig. 24.2).
Medieval medical books were often cumulative affairs comprising gatherings of different
complementary or clashing texts, so it is perhaps unsurprising that these Nine-System Figures
were not consistently pictured as a complete group.17 They could be shown alone or combined
with other schematic iconographies from different textual anatomical traditions; for example,
images of individual bodily organs – sometimes naturalistic, sometimes schematic – often shown
in bold clashing colors and floating in a sea of text describing their function within the Galenic
system. The liver, stomach, gallbladder, heart, or lungs were all sometimes included, as well as an
almond-shaped organ more difficult to identify (perhaps the abdominal membrane) and some-
times the bones presented as a complete skeleton.18
In other cases, the Nine-System Figures appear alongside much older physiological imagery, for
example material illustrating the long-standing textual traditions of gynecology and obstetrics,
especially an influential Greek text known as the Gynaecia. Written in the first or second century
by Soranus of Ephesus, it was known in the medieval West predominantly through its sixth-
century Latin translation by Muscio (sometimes Moschion or Mustio, a North African author
about whom we know little), copies of which occasionally depict up to seventeen presentations
of unborn fetuses in the womb.19 Here, a tiny man or small child is shown in place of a realistic
unborn fetus, and the womb too is shown highly schematically, taking the form of either a closed
roundel, a circle with a small opening to indicate the direction of delivery, or a more tangibly
three-dimensional, oval vessel. Drawn in outline and only sometimes lightly colored, most often
in red, some vessel-shaped wombs exhibit a particularly careful semitransparent treatment, ren-
dered opaque as if blown from fragile glass (Fig. 24.2). In the earliest-known such series, found
in a ninth-century manuscript in the Royal Library, Brussels, fetuses are shown in a variety of
combinations and positions: twins, triplets, quadruplets, more complicated breach and compound
births, and even a monstrous womb containing eleven children.20
A particularly vivid group of three figures also frequently accompanied the Nine-System
Figures in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Germany, suggesting the easy pictorial coupling of
classical works with contemporary, vernacular medical texts. In an extension of his Fünfbilder-
serie, Sudhoff loosely grouped together this trio as the Dreibilderserie: the Wound Man, Disease
Man, and Pregnant Disease Woman.21 Their specific origins are hard to trace, but the relatively
clear trajectory of the Wound Man offers a model for the Dreibilderserie’s evolution, emerging
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Figure 24.2 Muscle Man, Male and Female Genitalia, Presentations of the Fetus in the Womb, and Pregnant Disease Woman, from the so-called Wellcome
Apocalypse, a medical miscellany from c. 1420, Southern Germany. London, Wellcome Library, MS 49, fols. 37v and 38r. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library.
Medicine’s image
around 1400 as an indexical illustration of a text on wound healing derived from the writings of
the Southern German surgeon Ortolf von Baierland.22 Over the following century the striking
image of a bruised and bleeding man appeared in at least twelve surgical manuscripts, before its
transition into early printed surgical books saw it separated from Ortolf ’s text and used instead
as a visually arresting frontispiece, heralding the surgical cures contained within.23 The Disease
Man and Woman likely stem from similar surgical contexts, themselves inscribed all about their
skin with short descriptions of potential diseases of the body (Fig. 24.2). Both Man and Woman
appear to share common ancestry in an enigmatic image from a twelfth-century medical miscel-
lany now in Bamburg, where a schematic figure modeled on Christ strikes a striding pose across
the lower margin, overwritten with various maladies and humoral elements.24 Although the texts
and labels found within the Wound Men and Disease Men and Women are not always particu-
larly enlightening from a medical standpoint, nor necessarily placed in the actual location of a
particular complaint (some read alphabetically, others from head to toe), like the Nine-System
Figures they seem to function as creative rerenderings of largely textual material.
Some large-scale versions of these figures still exist, drawn onto sizeable individual parchment
sheets, suggesting the possibility that each or all of them might have circulated individually,
acting as easy referents for surgeons and physicians to particularly valuable or familiar texts.25
Such a practical use for this textual imagery would not be out of sorts with other evidence from
the period. Large-scale anatomical illustrations seem to have informed the teaching practices
of at least one fourteenth-century university practitioner, the acclaimed Frenchman Henri de
Mondeville.26 But the use of such images for reference or teaching turns the spotlight onto one
of their major iconographic problems: verism. Modern standards of scientific illustration pres-
ent literal accuracy as highly important, even as the impetus of such images, yet the foregoing
figures and schemes have only slight resemblance to precise human anatomies. Judged against
these post-Enlightenment standards it is easy to write off such images, concluding that their
unrealistic illustration meant the books in which they are found contained “bad” anatomy. Yet,
it is important to remember that such naturalism was not necessarily the function nor the goal
of these types of anatomical iconography. Instead, these were images designed to elucidate text,
regardless of whether that same long-standing and authoritative text was accurate. Their role was
to visualize the medical theory of the age, offering either a prefatory prompt to the treatises they
accompanied or stand-alone visualizations of medical information that could themselves be read
like a book of the body.
Burning, bleeding, urinating, diagramming

Medieval anatomical iconographies might give the impression that medical imagery functioned
exclusively as textual illustration, direct visualizations of the medical word. But as Peter Jones
has highlighted, text was in fact occasionally subordinated to the visual, used only secondarily to
direct the extraction of medical information actually held in images.27
One of the oldest schemes of surgical illustration known to us today affirms this visual capac-
ity of medieval medicine, a group of schematic images illustrating the technique of cautery, in
which a hot poker was seared into various points of the body.28 Medieval theories of health put
extreme emphasis on the alignment of the four classical humors of the body: blood, phlegm,
yellow bile, and black bile. Cautery’s ultimate goal was to allow for the escape of excess essences
within the body to grant it overall balance, different conditions thus requiring cautery in different
places. Images of the technique highlight sites for alternative placements of the heated poker,
with patients depicted in flattened outline (similar to the Nine-System Figures), bearing dark-
black spots at key cautery points. Although its iconography might have once originated alongside
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full textual treatises – perhaps another visual output of ancient Alexandrian medicine – visual
cautery instruction survives today only in treatises from the ninth century onwards, all of which
display only fragmentary captions to title particular cautery scenarios. Instead of linking back to
an authoritative text, medical power is invested in the black spots of the image itself; the pictures
are what must be read by professionals seeking guidance in the technique.29
A more definably medieval evocation of this idea is the so-called Bloodletting Man (some-
times Phlebotomy Man), one of a group of medical figures in which the human form was
utilized to plot not medicine’s texts but its actual practice. The drawing of blood was another
important tool used by physicians to maintain humoral balance, and the Bloodletting Man aided
practitioners by highlighting particular points on the human figure from which blood could be
taken to alleviate symptoms or illnesses.30 Using a tangled series of lines, often rendered in evoc-
ative blood-red, specific veins and arteries of the body were linked to short passages of marginal
text explaining which parts to bleed, when, and in what cases. Dramatic variance in the artistic
quality of Bloodletting Men suggests a variation in their use. Extremely detailed, full-page figures
might have served to impress the patient upon consultation, lavishly expressing a practitioner’s
competency, financial success, and guild affiliation. Plainer Men, simply outlined on the pages of
rougher, more practical tomes, suggest the figures also served as genuine phleboto-mnemonics,
playing a functioning role as a visual aegis of medical knowledge.31
In much the same way as the Bloodletting Man, the frequently illustrated figure of the
Zodiac Man could aid physicians and surgeons in the accurate timing of their work. Since the
first- and second-century writings of Manilius and Ptolomy it was considered important for
medical practitioners to understand melosthesia, the correspondences between the body’s parts
and the stars, particularly the moon. In these figures, rather than marking points of actual med-
ical intervention, long lines instead link parts of a male figure’s body to captions recounting the
influence of the planetary movements on medical affairs.32 More commonly, these Men were
figured in more fantastical and visually inventive ways, plotting the twelve figures of the zodiacal
calendar directly onto human bodies to create monstrous figures, the fish of Pisces exuding from
their feet, Scorpio’s scorpion at their genitals, and the twins of Gemini atop their arms, among
others. In correspondence with the calendrical devices and lunar diagrams accompanying them,
the image of the Zodiac Man could be read to aid the complex navigation of both celestial and
human bodies.
Color was also a medical detail that could be expressed more clearly in imagery than in text,
an idea exemplified in the iconography of uroscopy. Understanding it to be a keen indicator
of the body’s internal humoral alignment, patients’ urine was collected by practitioners and
examined for its clarity, viscosity, smell, taste, and hue.33 The round-bottomed flasks associated
with the practice were commonly shown lain out on tables or wheels on the page, arranged
in sections depending on the urine’s tone and corresponding diagnosis. Often, specific colors
were noted in accompanying labels – from black and dark reds through to golds, yellows, and
greens – and frequently with corresponding colorific evocation: “pale like unreduced meat
juice,” “green like a cabbage leaf,” “slightly red, like occidental saffron.” Although unable to
render the urinal subtleties acknowledged in the text – transparency, viscosity, luster – the
actual color visible on the page helped to direct practitioners around urine treatises, high-
lighting particular categories of color and solidifying the often fluctuating similes of the text.
Such use of shape, form, and illustrative color again speaks to the intermittent importance of
medicine’s imagery beyond text.
As these uroscopy wheels suggest, much imagery found within the medieval medical sphere –
both practical and theoretical – sometimes troubles modern boundaries between “illustration”
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Medicine’s image
Figure 24.3 (Detail) Diagram of the Eye, from a medical miscellany including the “Book of Macharias on
the Eye Called Salaracer or Secret of Secrets,” last quarter of the fourteenth or first quarter of the fifteenth
century, England. London, British Library. MS Sloane 981, fol. 68r. © The British Library Board, All Rights
Reserved.
and “diagram.” But even the diagrammatic laying out of text could be transformed in medical
iconography into a more pictorially sensitive mode. One particularly evocative image of the
eye, for example, shows an anatomy so schematic as to be almost completely undetectable as an
illustration. Found in the so-called Book of Macharias, now in the British Library, the seven
“tunics” and three “humors” of the eye are realized as a series of emanating concentric circles,
placed within semicircular strips labeled for the parts of the head (Fig. 24.3).34 The core of
the neat scheme is essentially diagram, but the artist has made some attempts to humanize its
information into a naturalistic mode: the central circle has been transformed into a cartoonish
eye, and the whole circular affair is appended by a face with the roughly sketched features of a
nose, mouth, and second eye, all surmounted by a tonsured haircut. This part-illustration-part-
diagram was also a common way of imaging the medieval brain. Classical authors outlined
the three primary functions of the brain as locus of the soul, controller of all motor activities,
and refiner of bodily spirits produced in the heart. The latter happened in a section toward
the base of the brain known as the rete mirabile (marvelous net), an evocative term that often
saw the organ depicted filled with hatched lines. In addition to this classical formula, early
medieval authors evolved the so-called Cell Doctrine, in which the brain was split into three
sections: the first cell, the sensus communis (common sense), which received information from
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the senses and formed it into images; the second cell, responsible for aestimativa, the refining
of the sensory information through judgment and rational thought; and the third cell, memo-
rativa, where thought was deposited as memory.35 These cells fitted well with the iconography
of “brain as diagram,” and a series of linked circles was often enough to indicate the many
complex systems of the mind.36
It was not just body parts that could be so diagrammed: the entirety of a human life could be
neatly laid out in circles on the page. A remarkable fourteenth-century wheel at the front of the
De Lisle Psalter outlines the twelve “Ages of Man” – from infans (infancy) to infirmus (sickness)
and mortuus (death) – bordered by evangelist symbols and centered around a symmetrical bust
of Christ.37 Similar semimedicalized, decorative diagrams even claimed to be able to predict life
and death. Found in a number of Greek and Latin manuscripts, the so-called Sphere of Life and
Death (sometimes the Sphere of Democritus, Pythagoras, Plato, or others) consists of a circular
roundel containing an upper and lower group of numerals.38 The reader begins by assigning a
numerical value to the letters of a sick individual’s name, before adding the number of the lunar
day on which the person fell sick and dividing by thirty. If the resulting total is featured in the
top half of the sphere, the patient will live; if in the bottom half, the patient will die. Such was
the potential power of medicalized information set into decorative and diagrammatic form,
and with the weight of such authority often came extreme textual detail. Diagrams of medical
concepts could become so complex that their looped and linked sections grew to span entire
double-folios: extensive diagrams of the humors and their different forms and interactions were
common;39 simpler diagrams showing the geographical direction of the winds could be swelled
through combination with the humors or elements;40 and the reliance of medicine on astrology
meant that Bloodletting or Zodiac Men were frequently presented alongside cross-referenced
calendrical tables or solar and lunar diagrams to guide readings of heavenly movements.41 Blurring
image with text, almost as a precursor to the modern infographic, the visual played a key icono-
graphic role in the explication of medical material.
Material medicine
Like painters or sculptors, medieval medical practitioners needed both tools and raw materials
when plying their craft. Medicine’s material tools find their way into the field’s artistic traditions
in a number of ways, yet the actual objects of medicine have received almost no attention in
comparison to the illustrated books of the trade.42 This is partly due to poor survival rates, and the
limited opportunity for precise provenance that comes with unattributed metalwork. Yet illus-
trative traditions within surgical texts – especially the Arabic sources of Al-Zahrāwī (936–1013)
and the Latin works of Roger Frugardi (fl. 1180) – suggest a rich instrumentation within the
medieval surgical craft.43 The elaborate knives, saws, and cautery equipment residing in science
and medical museums today are testament to the care and complex artisanship that went into the
design and manufacture of such tools.
Medicine’s materiality is, however, more commonly discussed through the long-standing
iconographic tradition of the illustrated “herbal,” a term used as a catchall for pharmaceutics and
herbalism. In reality, between the field’s Greek precursors and later Renaissance pharmacology,
a number of distinct traditions can be traced.44 A sixth-century book now in Vienna preserves
a text originally compiled around the year 70 by the Roman surgeon Dioscorides, in which he
records the medicinal properties of several hundred plants alongside nearly four hundred detailed
illustrated specimens.45 Copied around 513, it is difficult to verify if its illustrations were taken
from an earlier copy of Dioscorides’s text or constitute an original scheme. Either way, from the
330
Medicine’s image
sixth-century onwards illustrative material clearly formed an important part of “materia medica,”
to borrow the title of a later Latin translation of Dioscorides.46
Not all such pharmaceutical books were illustrated, but images were also found in a parallel
textual tradition known as the Pseudo-Apuleius Complex, the most common early grouping
of medieval materia medica texts. The content of the Complex speaks to the breadth of subjects
considered under the broad heading of material medicine, including the Herbarius of the epon-
ymous Pseudo-Apuleius, listing the medical uses and nomenclature of plants, an anonymous
herbal derived from Dioscorides, and a group of more specific texts on the plant Betony, the
Mulberry, and the Badger, and another treatise known as the Medicina ex quadrupedis (Medi-
cine from quadrupeds), attributed to an unknown Roman physician, Sextus Placitus. When
illustrations feature in the Complex they are as varied as the texts’ diverse topics suggest, from
full-page illustrations showing herbs, roots, or leafy and flowering plants to inserted miniatures
of mammals, insects, and fantastic creatures. An early example, now in the British Library (Fig.
24.4), shows the casual intermingling of these themes among Pseudo-Apuleius’s text. In the
upper left, the entry for Brassica silvatica (wild cole or perhaps wild cabbage) is accompanied
by a carefully considered image of the plant, complete with dark green leaves, tripartite red
flowers, yellowing roots, and pinkish sprouting tubers beneath. But below and to the right of
the Brassica, myth intervenes: three spine-tongued basilisks spring from the roots of the spiky-
leaved Basilisca (sweet basil), and two men use a dog to pluck the deadly Mandragora (Mandrake)
from the ground.
Alongside these classical traditions, an influx of Arabic pharmacological texts and the increased
academic discussion of medicine prompted a rise in various Latin and vernacular herbals from
the late twelfth century onwards. New herbal compilations – like the Salernitan Circa instans
and Tractatus de herbis, or the French Livre des simples médicines – overtook the Pseudo-Apuleian
Complex in popularity, bringing with them a number of changes in illustration.47 Shifting away
from schematic and noncontextual images, these later treatises introduced depictions of the
habitats of plants and animals, sometimes peopled with human figures in the process of sourcing
or cultivating particular medicines. The growth in material found within such books provided
artists with opportunities to include not only new images of plants but also a variety of scenes
which imagined the origins of increasingly exotic produce. Occasionally containing fanciful and
imagined histories of materia medica – from ferreting miners to walled Crusader gardens – these
later books blurred the line between medicine, myth, and contemporary Romance traditions.
As in the anatomical imagery discussed earlier, the issue of illustrative accuracy again flares up
in these botanical depictions. The emergence of increasingly veristic herbal imagery has been
vaunted by historians as evidence of a long-term quest by artisans for intellectual recognition,
the picturing of nature with pinpoint accuracy seen as an official claim to the philosophical
knowledge embodied within the natural world.48 Certainly this view captures visual changes in
the herbal field: early illustrated objects from the corpus show little regard for botanical likeness,
presenting schematic “plant portraits” whose accuracy had been contested as early as Pliny, rather
than direct “plant illustrations.”49 And from this there was a distinct naturalistic evolution across
herbals of the Middle Ages, despite the written content of such pharmaceutical texts remaining
relatively static and certainly making no calls for a greater verism. Yet it is important to be careful
not to align illustrative accuracy and medical understanding too closely. On the contrary, that
herbals were not always illustrated makes clear that, at least in earlier books, imagery was not
necessarily vital for their function. Such contradictions are part and parcel of the intricate and
complex status of medical iconography, always fluctuating somewhere between diagrammatic
knowledge and artistic imagination.
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Figure 24.4 Entries for Brassica silvatica (wild cabbage or wild cole?), Basilisca (sweet basil), and Mandragora (Mandrake), from the Herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius
in a pharmacopeial compilation, second half of the twelfth century, England. London, British Library, Harley MS 5294, fols. 42v and 43r.
Medicine’s image
Picturing patients and practitioners

Medical imagery was also capable of considering medicine’s social dimension, especially in the
later Middle Ages, depicting the people intimately involved in its labors. As well as providing a
visual map for plotting cautery points or bloodletting locations, the body of the patient was more
humanely imaged in the process of seeking cure. They commonly featured in discussions of diet
and regimen, for example, a field that since Galen was thought to be governed by a classical list of
factors: food and drink, air and atmosphere, motion and rest, sleep, the retention and elimination
of humors (via excretion), and movements of the spirit (one’s emotion or mental state). Images
accompanying several illustrated luxury health books – the Tacuinum sanitatis or Aldobrandino da
Siena’s Li Livrez dou santé – give a glimpse of a specific class of sick.50 That patrons of such books
could afford their often lavish decorative schemes suggests they were the preserve of the upper
class, as is the inherent suggestion that the reader might have any choice over their atmospheric
surroundings, quality of rest, or diet. The poorer and more generic sick tend to pepper the mar-
gins of medieval manuscripts both medical and religious, sometimes beside paragraphs describing
treatment, posing with broken bones, damaged organs, or befalling accident. Iconographies of
medieval hospitals also shed light on the bedridden poor. Either in too advanced a state of sick-
ness or unable to afford their own private doctor, they are shown two to a bed and deathly pale,
evoking a sense of their generalized ill health.51
Certain diseased figures are, however, easier to identify through strong iconographic traditions.
Victims of plague might be identified through the presence of distinctive buboes in their armpits
or groins.52 Likewise, the leprous can sometimes be picked out through their scarred or marked
skin, missing extremities, or the inclusion of a clapper or bell to alert others of their arrival.53 The
presence of such patients varies according to context, either shown in a specifically medical mode
receiving cure or appearing in religious books during commonplace miraculous medical inter-
ventions. The Omne Bonum lepers with which this essay started (Fig. 24.1) are clearly depicted
in a religious mode, the accompanying text noting their need for religious instruction from their
bishop, rather than a cure, whereas three similarly posed figures gathered in a fourteenth-century
marble sculpture from Provence (Fig. 24.5) are quite definitely appealing to a holy man for
healing. Looking up at the smooth-skinned Saint Elzéar of Sabran, named after Lazarus for his
curative powers, the three lepers smile with pockmarked faces as they strain to receive his restor-
ative touch. Patients, high and low, can be identified in this way in the midst of particular cures,
diagnoses, or operations, recognized through their individual treatments.
Such clinical scenarios were also an important space for depicting medical practitioners.54
Shown in the act of providing a cure, the presence of the trained professional metonymically
emblazoned medicine’s books and spaces with visual evidence of the field’s potency. For phy-
sicians this predominantly meant diagnostic acts, and they are most commonly found taking
the pulse or inspecting flasks of urine for evidence of internal humoral disorders, the latter
so common a trope it was even mimicked in manuscript margins.55 Mostly these are isolated
instances of cure focusing more on figures than their contexts, although some images feature fully
equipped dispensaries and clinics, complete with attendant physicians and queues of patients.56
Apothecaries too could be so pictured, surrounded by the medicinal trappings of their trade.57 In
a different context, medieval physicians who had prized positions within academic circles were
sometimes prominently shown in author-style portraits within their texts.58 Likewise, opening
folios or illuminated initials in high-status medical books included illustrations of the gesticu-
lating physician in the process of teaching, dispensing masterly knowledge ex cathedra.59 This
was not, however, the preserve of the surgeon, a craft separated from physicianship for much of
the Middle Ages by grades of academic distinction and social status. The supposed superiority
333
Jack Hartnell
Figure 24.5 Saint Elzéar Curing the Lepers, c. 1373, Apt (Provence). Marble. Walters Art Museum,
Baltimore. Image courtesy of the Walters Art Museum.
of the physician meant interaction with surgeons was as rare in imagery as it was in the medical
milieu of the time, but occasional iconographic traditions do show the two bound together.
Images of the dissection scene, for example, emerge after anatomy’s reintroduction to Western
university learning in the fourteenth century. These show both the robed physician discussing
and directing proceedings from classical texts and the subservient surgeon carving up the corpse.60
When portrayed in their own context, however, outside of these academic circles, it is pos-
sible to find particularly potent images of surgeons at work, either receiving patients or frozen
in action within stylized operating theatres.61 The iconography of one text highlights the sur-
gical task with particular vivacity. In the mid-fourteenth century, the English surgeon John
Arderne recorded a series of treatments he had originated and refined, including the treat-
ment of anal fistula for which he had become exceptionally renowned. Instead of the static
spaces of medicine or portrait-style images of patient and surgeon, Arderne’s fistula treatments
are accompanied by whirligig clusters of continuous details that show the surgical procedure
334
Medicine’s image
actually unfolding step-by-step. That a surgeon might, by the fourteenth century, use a treatise
as a space to experiment with novel illustrations of his craft provides further evidence for the
significant iconographic traditions which medical imagery had slowly garnered over the preced-
ing four centuries.62
Future directions: the medical outside medicine

The outline sketched in this essay suggests only the rough shape of some of medicine’s most
prominent iconographic themes. But more extensive new work is emanating from the relatively
embryonic field of the medieval medical humanities which emphatically argues that medicine
should not, indeed cannot, be so extracted from a broader medieval culture, in either text or
image. With this has come the recognition that medicine’s most fruitful images might in fact
be found in contexts which parallel, rather than intersect, medical visual traditions. Many cases
discussed earlier make reference, for example, to the intertwining of medicinal concerns with
religion, and it is in depictions of the life of Christ and the saints that many more images of
miraculous cure, and therefore depictions of the sick, can be found.63 Literary works from across
the medieval period also contain not only textual but also visual evocations of medical events:
legal documents, chronicles, philosophical tracts, and romances, all are known to have medical
material and bodily acts to be explored in greater detail.64 And all the while, ongoing studies
more directly within the history of medicine – especially discussions around the social contexts
of medicine, from physical disability to medicine’s architectural spaces – are continuing to shed
light on new visual strategies used to depict the medical craft, as well as its subtle presence in a
host of unexpected places.65
The task now facing iconographers of medieval medicine is to harness the power of these
interdisciplinary investigations, weaving this disparate material ever tighter around a core of med-
ical knowledge. If undertaken with care and tact, skills necessary to both medical and historical
endeavors, the study of medieval medical images might be granted a healthy prognosis in years
to come.
Notes
1 I am sincerely grateful to Monica H. Green (Arizona State University) for her generosity in discussing
the contents of this chapter on several occasions and for sharing her own research on the subject, and to
Taylor McCall (University of Cambridge) for sharing her expertise on the “Nine-System Figures.”
2 J.P. Byrne, Encyclopedia of the Black Death (Santa Barbara, 2012).
3 L.F. Sandler, Omne Bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge (London, 1996). The
book is: London, British Library, Royal MS 6.E.vi, vols. 1 and 2.
4 M.H. Green, K. Walker-Meikle, and W.P. Müller, “Diagnosis of a ‘Plague’ Image: A Digital Cautionary
Tale,” Medieval Globe 1 (2014), 309–23.
5 On Islamic medicine: P.E. Pormann and E. Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh, 2007),
and E. Savage-Smith “Anatomical Illustration in Arabic Manuscripts,” in Arab Painting: Text and Image in
Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts, ed. Anna Contadini (Leiden, 2007), 147− 59. On Byzantium: M. Grünbart,
E. Kislinger, A. Muthesius, and D. Stathakopoulos (eds.), Material Culture and Well-Being in Byzantium
(400–1453) (Vienna, 2007). On China: C. Cullen and V. Lo (ed.), Medieval Chinese Medicine (New York,
2005). On Japan: A. Goble, Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan (Honolulu, 2011). Sub-Saharan
African medicine remains largely undiscussed: see M.H. Green, “Taking ‘Pandemic’ Seriously: Making
the Black Death Global,” Medieval Globe 1 (2014), 27–62.
6 Recent introductory studies include: N. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990);
L.I. Conrad, M. Neve, V. Nutton, R. Porter, and A. Wear, The Western Medical Tradition (Cambridge,
1995); M.D. Grmek (ed.), Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1999);
F. Wallace, Medieval Medicine: A Reader (Toronto, 2010); L. Demaitre, Medieval Medicine (Santa Barbara,
2013); L. Kalof (ed.), A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age (London, 2014). For
335
Jack Hartnell
practices by country: C. Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud, 1997); D. Jac-
quart, Le milieu médical en France (Geneva, 1981); K. Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence
(Princeton, 1985); L. García-Ballester, Medicine in a Multicultural Society: Christian, Jewish and Muslim
Practitioners in the Spanish Kingdoms, 1222–1610 (Aldershot, 2001).
7 Most notable are three volumes: Tradition und Naturbeobachtung in den Illustrationen Medizinischer Hand-
schriften und Frühdrucke vornehmlich des 15. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1907); Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Anat-
omie im Mittelalter speziell der anatomischen Graphik nach Handschriften des 9. bis 15. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig,
1908); and Beiträge zur Geschichte der Chirurgie im Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1914 and 1918). Similarly
prolific are Sudhoff ’s contributions to the Archiv für due Geschichte der Medizin (1907–), now Sudhoffs
Archiv. On Sudhoff: T. Rütten, “Karl Sudhoff and ‘the Fall’ of German Medical History,” in Locating
Medical History, ed. F. Huisman and J.H. Warner (Baltimore, 2004). See also: L. Choulant, Geschichte und
Bibliographie der anatomischen Abbildung (Leipzig, 1852).
8 E. Panofsky, “Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the Renaissance-Dämmerung,” in The Renaissance, ed.
W.K. Ferguson (New York, 1962); O. Pächt, “Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar
Landscape,” JWCI 13:1/2 (1950), 13–47; F. Saxl, “A Spiritual Encyclopaedia of the Later Middle Ages,”
JWCI 5 (1942); R. Herrlinger, History of Medical Illustration (London, 1970); L.C. Mackinney, Medical
Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts (London: Wellcome, 1965). See also: P. Huard and M.D. Grmek, Mille
ans de cirurgie en occident:Ve–XVe siècles (Paris, 1966).
9 J. Murdoch, Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York, 1984); P.M. Jones, Medieval
Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts (London, 1998), revised from Medieval Medical Manuscripts (1984).
J.A. Givens, K.M. Reeds, and A. Touwaide (ed.), Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History,
1200–1550 (Aldershot, 2006); S. Riches and B. Bildhauer, “Cultural Representations of the Body,”
in A Cultural History of the Human Body (as in note 6); H.-M. Gross, “Illustrationen in medizinischen
Sammelhandschiften,” in Ein teutsch puech machen, ed. G. Keil (Wiesbaden, 1993), 172–348; K.B. Roberts
and J.D.W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body (Oxford, 1992); La médecine médiévale à travers les manuscrits
de la Bibliothèque Nationale, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1982.
10 Recent online resources include University College Los Angeles’s “Index of Medieval Medical Images,”
Paris Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé’s “Medic@,” and digitized medieval manuscripts at the
Wellcome Library, London.
11 For example, the late-Roman herbal known as the Johnson Papyrus. London, Wellcome Library,
MS 5753.
12 K. Sudhoff, “Anatomische Zeichnungen (Schemata) aus dem 12. und 13. Jh.,” in Sudhoff, Tradition und
Naturbeobachtung (as in note 7), 49–66.
13 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm. 13002.
14 K. Sudhoff, “Abermals eine neue Handschrift der anatomischen Fünfbilderserie,” Archiv für Geschichte
der Medizin 3:6 (1910), 353–68.
15 B.H. Hill Jr., “The Fünfbilderserie and Medieval Anatomy,” PhD diss., University of North Carolina
(1963); C. Maccagni, “Frammento di un Codice di Medicina del secolo XIV della Biblioteca Universi-
taria di Pisa,” Physis 11 (1969), 311–78; Y.V. O’Neill, “The Fünfbilderserie – A Bridge to the Unknown,”
Bull. Hist. Med. 51:4 (1977), 538–49.
16 Two key manuscripts displaying this iconographic trope are: Cambridge, Gonville and Caius, MS
190/223, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 399. The resultant nomenclature of the series is
uncertain. In an ode to Sudhoff “Neunbilderserie” is sometimes used; however, given his denial of the
complete nine-part series this seems inappropriate. I use the term “Nine-System Figures,” coined by
Taylor McCall (University of Cambridge) in her ongoing doctoral research.
17 On the makeup of medical books: L.E. Voigts, “Scientific and Medical Books,” in Book Production and
Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), 345–402.
18 Perhaps the grandest skeleton forms the frontispiece to a 1452 German translation of Bruno da Lon-
goburgo’s Chirurgia Magna: London, British Library, MS Add. 21618. See: K. Sudhoff, “Das Skelett der
provenzalischen Handschrift in Basel und andere mittelalterliche graphische Skelettdarstellungen als
anatomische Illustrationen,” in Sudhoff, Geschichte der Anatomie (as in note 7), 29–51. Another features
alongside a thirteenth-century version of the Nine-Figure Series’ anatomical text in: Dresden, Sächsiche
Landesbibliothek, MS c.310, f. 57v.
19 M.H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine (Oxford, 2008); A.E. Hanson and M.H. Green, “Sora-
nus of Ephesus: Methodicorum princeps,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, ed. W. Haase and H.
Temporini (1994), 968–1075, including a complete list of all manuscripts containing fetal images. For
female bodies more generally: K. Park, Secrets of Women (New York, 2010).
336
Medicine’s image
20 Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 3701–15.

21 On the Dreibilderserie: G. Keil, “Dreibilderserie,” Lexikon des Mittelalters, pt. 3 (1986), 1373–74.
22 On Ortolf ’s text: E. Auer and B. Schnell, “‘Der Wundenmann’: Ein traumatologisches Schema in
der Tradition der ‘Wundarzenie’ des Ortolf von Baierland,” in Ein teutsch puech machen (as in note 9),
349–401.
23 For example, Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Chirurgia (Strassburg, 1497).
24 Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS Msc. Med. 6, f. 142r (likely a German copy of an Italian original). The
Disease Woman appears to antedate the Man, found first in a thirteenth-century Provençal manuscript
now in Basel: Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, MS D.II.11. The group is most widely known through a
Venetian printed book of 1491, the Fasciculus Medicinae, containing texts supposedly gathered by the
little-known Württemberg physician Johannes von Kirchheim (Ketham). On the Fasciculus: T. Pesenti,
Il “fasciculus medicinae” ovvero le metamorfosi del libro umanistico (Treviso, 2001); J.J. Byleybl, “Interpreting
the Fasiculo Dissection Scene,” J. Hist. Med. 45 (1990), 285–316.
25 For example, the so-called Pisa Leaf (Pisa, Universitaria Biblioteca MS 735, f. 2r), or a later gathering of
sheets in Copenhagen: Kongelige Bibliothek, Ms. Ny. Kgl. Saml. 84b.
26 L.C. MacKinney, “The Beginnings of Western Scientific Anatomy: New Evidence and a Revision in
Interpretation of Mondeville’s Role,” Medical History 62:3 (1962), 233–39.
27 Jones, “Image, Word, and Medicine in the Middle Ages,” in Visualizing Medieval Medicine (as in
note 9).
28 On cautery: Jones, Medieval Medicine (as in note 9), 77ff.
29 Among the earliest are images found in Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS Plut. 73.41.
30 On bloodletting: P. Gil-Sotres, “Derivation and Revulsion: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Bloodlet-
ting,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. L. Garcia-Ballester, R. French, J. Arrizabalaga,
and A. Cunningham (eds.) (Cambridge, 1994), 110–155; D. Krause, Aderlass und Schröpfen (Aachen, 2004).
31 Compare, for example, London, British Library, Harley MS 3719, fol. 158v-159r, with Washington,
Library of Congress, Rosenwald MS 4, fols. 2a-3b.
32 Murdoch identifies the earliest Bloodletting Man in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat.
7028, fol. 154r. For a classic study of one Zodiac Man, see: H. Bober, “The Zodiacal Miniature of the
Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry: Its Sources and Meaning,” JWCI 11 (1948), 1–34.
33 L. Moulinier-Brogi, L’Uroscopie au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2012).
34 London, British Library, Sloane MS 981, fol. 68. On theories of the eye and optics: D.C. Lindberg, Theo-
ries of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976); S.C. Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil (Toronto, 2004);
F. Salmón, “The Body Inferred: Knowing the Body through Dissection of Texts,” in Cultural History of
the Human Body (as in note 6), 77–98.
35 E. Clarke, K. Dewhurst, and M.J. Aminoff, An Illustrated History of Brain Function, 2nd ed. (Novato,
1996), 10–48. Imaginativa and fantasia were sometimes attributed to the second cell. The processual,
digestive conception of thought first appears in tenth-century Cell Doctrines.
36 Perhaps the earliest example is Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 428, fol. 50r. For a more
typical brain diagram, c. 1400: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon Misc. 366, fol. 1v.
37 London, British Library, Arundel MS 83, fol. 126r. On the Ages of Man, see: E. Sears, The Ages of Man:
Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, 1986).
38 J. Edge, “Nomen omen: The ‘Sphere of Life and Death’ in England, c. 1200–c. 1500,” PhD diss., Univer-
sity of London (2015).
39 For example: Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm. 13046, fol. 39v.
40 B. Obrist, “Wind Diagrams and Medieval Cosmology,” Speculum 72:1 (1997), 33–84.
41 On astrology: Sophie Page, Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto, 2002); A. Akasoy, C. Burnett, and
R. Yoeli-Tlalim (ed.), Astro-Medicine (Florence, 2008).
42 J. Hartnell, “Tools of the Puncture: Skin, Knife, Bone, Hand,” in Flaying in the Premodern World, ed. L.
Tracey (Woodbridge, 2017) 20–50; J. Kirkup, The Evolution of Surgical Instruments (Novato, 2006); M.-V.
Clin, “Surgical Instruments as Art Objects,” in Antique Tools and Instruments from the Nessi Collection
(Milan, 2004), 103–14.
43 On Al-Zahrawi: M.S. Spink and G. Lewis, Albucasis on Surgery and Instruments (London, 1973). On Fru-
gardi: H. Valls, “Studies on Roger Frugardi’s Chirurgia,” PhD diss., University of Toronto (1995).
44 M. Collins, Medieval Herbals (London, 2000); J. Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance (Aldershot, 1999); K.M. Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York,
1991); W. Prinz and A. Beyer (ed.), Die Kunst und das Studium der Natur (Wienheim, 1987).
45 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS Medicus Graecus 1.
337
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46 H. Grape-Albers, Spätantike Bilder aus der Welt des Arztes: Medizinische Bilderhandschriften der Spätantike
und ihre mittelalterliche Überlieferung (Wiesbaden, 1977).
47 On the Circa instans: I. Ventura, “Un manuale di farmacologia medievale ed i suoi lettori: Il Circa instans,
la sua diffusione, la sua ricezione dal XIII al XV secolo,” in La Scuola Medica Salernitana, ed. D. Jacquart
and A. Paravicini Bagliani (Florence, 2004), 465–533. On the Tractatus de herbis: J. Givens, “Reading
and Writing the Illustrated Tractatus de herbis, 1280–1526,” in Visualising Medieval Medicine (as in note 9),
115–45; J. Givens, “Tractatus de herbis: Images, Information and Communication Design,” Mediaevalia
29:1 (2008), 179–206. On the Livre des simples médicines: C. Opsomer, E. Roberts, and W.T. Stearn. Livre
des simples médecines (Antwerp, 1980).
48 P. Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago, 2004).
49 Collins, Herbals, 27 (as in note 44).
50 A. Bovey, Tacuinum Sanitatis (London, 2005); C. Hoeniger, “The Illuminated Tacuinum sanitatis Manu-
scripts from Northern Italy, c. 1380–1400,” in Visualizing Medieval Medicine (as in note 9), 51–82.
51 B.S. Bowers (ed.), The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice (Aldershot, 2007). For a particularly fine
depiction of a hospital interior, see Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS Gaddi 24, fol. 247v.
52 For a recent work on Plague see Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World, inaugural double-issue of Medieval
Globe (as in note 4); or a general work by C.M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence (Kirksville, 2000).
53 On Leprosy see Luke Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine (Baltimore, 2009); or the more general
work of C.M. Boeckl, Images of Leprosy (Kirksville, 2011).
54 On medical practitioners and their biographies see C.H. Talbot and E.A. Hammond, The Medical Prac-
titioners in Medieval England: A Biographical Register (London, 1965), and a recent addenda by F. Getz,
“Medical Practitioners in Medieval England,” Social History of Medicine 3:2 (1990), 245–83; E. Wicker-
sheimer, Dictionnaire biographique des médecins en France au Moyen Âge, with supplement by D. Jacquart
(Geneva, 1979); M.R. McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of
Aragon, 1285–1345 (Cambridge, 2002).
55 For an extensive late fifteenth-century series of medical authorities holding urine glasses, see Heidelberg,
Universitätsbibliothek, MS Cod. Pal. germ. 644, fols. 94r–108v. On such pastiches: compare, for exam-
ple, the opening initial of Boulogne-sur-mer, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 197, fol. 1, showing a doctor
inspecting a urine sample, with Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS Fr. 298, fol. 81r, where a seated
monkey examines a pelican’s urine. Monkey physicians also feature in the stained glass of York Minster
nave, a city well-known for its medical practitioners. On York’s monkeys: P. Hardwick, “The Monkeys’
Funeral in the Pilgrimage Window, York Minster,” Art History 23 (2000), 290–99.
56 For example, see Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (1482), now London, British Library,
Royal MS 15.E.ii, fol. 165.
57 For example, see London, British Library, Royal MS 15.E.ii, fol. 165, or Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale,
MS Fr. 218, fol. 111r.
58 Such portraits come to prominence in the twelfth century. For early examples see Murdoch, Album of
Science (as in note 9), entry no. 156.
59 For example, the elaborate frontispiece of Avicenna’s Canon, now Glasgow, Hunterian Library, Hunter 9
(S.1.9), fol. 1; or the far more sketchy fifteenth-century image of a teacher showing a skull to students
in Cambridge, St. John’s College 19 (A.19), fol. 4.
60 A. Carlino, La Fabbrica del Corpo (Milan, 1994); G. Wolf-Heiddeger and A.-M. Cetto, Die anatomische
Sektion in bildlicher Darstellung (Basel, 1967); Park, Secrets of Women (as in note 19).
61 For example, manuscripts of Roger Frugardi’s Cirurgia: London, British Library, Sloane MS 1977, fol.
2r; Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS 1004 (O.I.20), fol. 241v onwards. The latter contains an
exceptional series of marginal images, extensively discussed in T. Hunt, The Medieval Surgery (Wood-
bridge, 1992).
62 On Arderne see P.M. Jones, “Sicut hic depingitur . . . John of Arderne and English Medical Illustration in
the 14th and 15th Centuries,” in Die Kunst und das Studium (as in note 44), 103–26; P.M. Jones, “Staying
with the Programme: Illustrated Manuscripts of John of Arderne, c. 1380–c. 1550,” in Decoration and
Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts, ed. A.S.G. Edwards (London, 2002), 204–27.
63 M. Kupfer, The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town (University Park,
2003); A. Montford, Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
(Aldershot, 2006); L.E. Wilson, “Miracle and Medicine: Conceptions of Medical Knowledge and
Practice in Thirteenth-Century Miracle Accounts,” in Wounds in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Kirkham
and C. Warr (Farnham, 2014); P. Biller and J. Ziegler (ed.), Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages
(York, 2001).
338
Medicine’s image
64 W.J. Turner and S.M. Butler (ed.), Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2014); M.G. Bondio,
Medical Ethics: Premodern Negotiations between Medicine and Philosophy (Stuttgart, 2014); E. Carrera (ed.),
Emotions and Health, 1200–1700 (Leiden, 2013); E. Gemi-Iordanou, S. Gordon, R. Matthew, E. McInnes,
and R. Pettitt (eds.), Medicine, Healing and Performance (Oxford, 2014); R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of
Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, 1990).
65 J.R. Eyler, Disability in the Middle Ages (Aldershot, 2010); P.A. Baker, K. van t’Land, and H. Nijdam (ed.),
Medicine and Space (Leiden, 2011); S. Katajala-Peltomaa and S. Niiranen (ed.), Mental (Dis)order in Later
Medieval Europe (Turnhout, 2014).
339
25
PATRONAGE
A useful category of art historical analysis?1
The reviewer of a recent collection of essays expressed concern that a volume that takes patronage
as its subject “might seem out of step with more contemporary turns in the study of medieval
art.”2 Yet anthologies devoted to the examination of critical terms in art history have demon-
strated that foundational concepts of the discipline can be fruitfully reopened.3 Moreover, recent
overviews by Jill Caskey and Holly Flora have drawn attention to ‘the widening of the patronal
field,’ through works that take investigative models originating in literary criticism, anthropology,
and performance studies.4 In assessing the scholarship on medieval patronage, this essay will pro-
ceed by treating patronage as a field of inquiry, rather than as a fixed, necessary, or determinative
structure for the creation of art, thus allowing the full interest and complexity of its study to
come into view.
Who’s your daddy?

At its most basic, a work of art requires only its creator. The patron – namely, a person who
initiates a work of art by putting forth a concept, issuing a commission, advancing resources, or
nurturing an artist’s talent – is a nonessential actor in the creative process. Nonetheless, patrons
have played significant roles within many cultural settings, both singly and collectively through
organizations such as the church. Indeed, art made for the church has survived at a significantly
higher rate than lay commissions, and has generally occupied a more central place in the study of
medieval art, as it will in this essay. Historically, patronage was a form of sponsorship, primarily
male, involving the beneficial action of one dominant person toward another, whether a Roman
statesman freeing his slave or a medieval churchman conferring benefices.5 True to this history,
the term patronage ultimately traces its roots to the Latin word “pater” or father, and has tradi-
tionally carried connotations of a one-sided, unequal vertical alliance.6
However, patronage is no longer regarded as originating solely in the tastes and intentions
of one party,7 but is viewed instead as a dynamic relationship.8 In the delightful phrasing of the
fifteenth-century Italian architect Filarete: the patron is the father and the architect is the mother
of a building.9 Triangulating the process further are the recipients of works of art. Particularly
influential has been the impact of gift theory, drawing on the work of Marcel Mauss, with its
emphasis on the recipient’s role and the networks of reciprocal relationships and expectations
that extend far beyond an initial act of giving.10 Of interest in this regard are works of art that
340
Patronage
were made for women, commissions such as the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux (New York, The Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 54.1.2), in which its royal recipient played
no directive role, but was nonetheless integral to the work of art conceived for her.11 Indeed, as
this example illustrates, scholars interested in women have found new material in the study of
patronage, not simply by supplanting male patrons with females but by considering a range of
dynamics involving women.12
Patronage is thus best understood as a “catchall” term that describes the many relationships
and activities that contribute to a work of art’s making and use,13 leading Madeline Caviness
to call attention to “the constant blurring of boundaries among patrons, donors, recipients,
and users.”14 Analysis of the terminology found in medieval texts and inscriptions reveals a
similar conceptual flexibility among those who commissioned and created, authored, founded,
or “made” works of medieval art.15 Modern scholars often cast words related to patronage in
opposition, to convey specificity that the term does not intrinsically carry:16 a suppliant, not the
donor;17 a purchaser, not the patron,18 and an owner and user, not its commissioner.19 Foreign
language and hyphenated terms are also employed to add further inflection, including patron-
as-artist,20 and patron-concepteur versus patron-donateur,21 to name only a few. In his influential
examination of contracts between Florentine artists and patrons, Michael Baxandall set aside the
term “patron” because he felt that it carried too many overtones from other contexts, calling his
particular subjects “clients.”22 Far more problematic than terminology, however, is the assump-
tion that patronage is a stable or one-size-fits-all phenomenon. And this is especially acute for
the study of the “Middle Ages,” which is a retrospective scholarly designation encompassing over
a millennium (c. 400–1500) and many distinct cultures that were not monolithic in outlook or
practice.23
The dedication page of the First Bible of Charles the Bald (Paris, BN, MS lat. 1, fol. 423r) will
help elucidate issues in the study of medieval patronage. The manuscript has been attributed to
the patronage of Count Vivian, a military hero who was named lay abbot of St. Martin of Tours
in 843 in compensation for his services to the emperor. A miniature depicting the presentation of
the large book at the far left (Fig. 25.1) is accompanied by a facing poem (fol. 422v), which says
that “the picture truthfully discloses how the hero Vivian and his company” offered the book to
the emperor. Together poem and miniature would seem to offer unusual evidence of the count’s
involvement. However, Herbert Kessler demonstrated that Vivian not only was little engaged in
the iconographic program devised by the monks at the abbey but also may in fact be undermined
by it.24 Symptomatic of this history is the fact that the count is difficult to locate in the dedication
miniature. As Kessler wryly remarked, “the commissioner of one of the greatest masterpieces
of Carolingian art is not easily recognized in the dedication picture of the Bible that now bears
his name.”25 This work, which is often referred to without any apparent irony as the “Vivian
Bible,” suggests that neither textual evidence nor imagery that seems to signal “patron” should
trump any conclusions that arise from detailed analysis and contextual study. The patronage of
this illuminated manuscript emerges as a collaborative process involving: a named commissioner
(Count Vivian), the hands-on creators of the book (the monks of Tours), and its recipient, who
is implicated throughout its artistic program (Charles the Bald).
In contrast, a seemingly straightforward image of donation is depicted in the frontispiece of the
Liber Vitae from New Minster (London, BL, Stowe MS 944, f. 6r).26 Here Queen Emma-Ælfgifu
and King Cnut, each identified by inscriptions in green and sepia that stand out from the fine pen
drawing, are shown on either side of the gleaming gold cross they offer (Fig. 25.2). As Corine
Schleif observed, in images like this, “the giving is forever presentized,” and, as seen in the king’s
grasp of the base of the cross, the giver “does not and cannot let go.”27 The Liber Vitae, which
literally means the Book of Life, is a register into which was entered the names of the brethren
341
Figure 25.1 Bible presented to Charles the Bald, The First Bible of Charles the Bald (Paris, BN, MS lat. 1,
fol. 423r), Tours, c. 845. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
and benefactors of the abbey, and was understood to reflect the book with the names of those
to be saved described in the biblical chapter of Revelation (20:12), with the queen and king
thereby claiming a place in salvation. However, the frontispiece, which at first seems to provide
an unmediated image of royal giving, incorporates multiple layers of meaning. For example,
Elizabeth Parker read the composition as a schematic rendering of the sanctuary space of the
abbey,28 thus tying the image to its liturgical use at New Minster.29 Among other resonant aspects
of the page, the queen’s unusual and privileged position to the right of Christ (the viewer’s left)
and her gesture toward the cross not only echo the Virgin’s above but also recall the imagery of
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Patronage
Figure 25.2 Dedication frontispiece from the Liber Vitae of New Minster (London, BL, Stowe MS 944,
f. 6r), Westminster, c. 1031. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
St. Helena’s discovery of the True Cross.30 The gifts of a veil and a crown bestowed from above
onto the queen and king, respectively, hint at the reciprocal nature of their offerings. Finally, it is
worth considering how the depiction of the queen and king in a manuscript presented daily on
the main altar of the abbey may have served the broader purposes of New Minster in empha-
sizing its closeness to the crown, and thereby helping to attract further benefactors. It is images
like these that led Aden Kumler to question whether representations of patrons are the causes or
the effects of works of art.31
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Chronology
The study of patronage was reembraced by art historians in the 1970s as part of a concerted effort
to set works of art in their larger context. In his address of 1971, Ernst Kitzinger, reflecting the
connoisseurship focus of art historical scholarship at the time, proposed the study of patronage as
a means for art historians to “build bridges” toward their colleagues in the humanities. He stated,
As long as the art historian confines himself to the study of stylistic interrelationships of atel-
iers, schools and individual masters, and the historian to the study of the flow of political, dip-
lomatic and military events there is scant likelihood of the two finding common ground.32
Kitzinger noted the mutual interest of the two fields in “aspirations, claims, ideologies, [and]
mystiques . . . as powerful agents in the historical process.”33 Reviewing Kitzinger’s contribution
at a remove of several decades, one can see that his is among a number of works that signaled a
reorientation within art history.34
Similarities may be discerned between the scholarly conceptualization of the fields of patron-
age, on the one hand, and gender studies, on the other, as they developed in the succeeding
decades. The now classic article on gender of 1986 by Joan Scott is helpful in drawing attention
to methodological issues in gender studies, while at the same time allowing the art historian to
consider patronage in light of this analogous field.35 Although to my knowledge these fields
have not been compared before, they both share the ambitious social project of investigating
broad-reaching cultural and historical phenomena. In attempting to account for the sheer variety
of individual experiences and contingencies, both fields have traditionally focused on descriptive
analyses and microhistories, thus as Scott argued at the time, leaving the discipline of gender
studies undertheorized.36 While this is no longer the case for gender studies, to date art historians
have resisted overarching narratives or universal causal explanations in the domain of patronage.37
Even Francis Haskall in his chapter, “The Mechanics of Seventeenth-Century Patronage,”38 a
textured and satisfying overview focused on painters at a particular place and time, pointedly
refrained from “explaining” the art in terms of its patronage.39
Moreover, like scholars of women’s history, who consciously adopted the term “gender studies”
in acknowledgment that the study of women necessarily entails the study of men,40 art historians
recognized that in order to understand patrons and their agency they needed to investigate artists and
their contemporary valuation.41 Contesting the view that medieval art was strictly religious and sym-
bolical, Meyer Schapiro documented a complementary “aesthetic attitude” in the individual responses
of Western medieval viewers, which demonstrates “a conscious taste of the spectators for the beauty
of workmanship, materials and artistic devices.”42 Another testament to the medieval appreciation of
artistic skill is the recruitment of skilled lay artists, even for the illumination of medieval manuscripts,
which would seem to be the natural domain of the literate clergy.43 Indeed, part of the critical recep-
tion of Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency of 1997, an anthropological study that analyzes the networks of
social relations in which works of art are embedded, is that it neglects the aesthetic and experiential
character of works of art.44 Rather than seeking to understand those qualities in a work of art that
elicit a beholder’s response, Gell focused on the agency the art itself exerts, leading Carol van Eck to
conclude that his so-called agency of art is in reality “an anthropology of the agency of objects.”45
Methods and evidence

Having drawn attention to ways that the study of medieval patronage resembles historiographic
trends of the later twentieth century, we turn now to distinctive characteristics of the art historical
literature, including the role of textual narratives. Patrons are primarily identified in texts and
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Patronage
inscriptions, but these seldom offer full evidence for how the work of art was conceived.46 As
Peter Kidson cautioned, “since nearly all medieval documents pertaining to the arts emanated
from the patronage side of the proceedings, it follows that we are liable to get from them a totally
distorted impression of what actually happened.”47
Moreover, the application of written accounts to forms of visual expression is far from evident.
Among the most important extant literary accounts is Abbot Suger’s description of the reconstruc-
tion and embellishment of Saint-Denis in the mid-twelfth century.48 Yet, as Larry Hoey noted, while
Suger’s writings “have been like water in the desert to medieval architectural historians parched from
the general aridity of contemporary building documentation,” they nonetheless leave unanswered
basic questions, such as why the several parts of the abbey church built in less than a decade look
so different.49 The various scholarly accounts of the rebuilding of the abbey church, with Suger
appearing in some as an enlightened impresario and virtually disappearing from others, demonstrate
a lack of consensus about how to portray the abbot’s role.50 Kidson also feared that Suger’s writings
would inspire art historians to concentrate on documentation, “restricting their researches to just
those problems and aspects of problems which are subject to documentary elucidation.”51 Insisting
on the importance of the visual, both for the art historian and in understanding the artist’s role, Kid-
son opined, “In the last resort, however meticulous or exceptional the brief, an artistic imagination
is always required to translate the patron’s verbal specification into visual forms.”52
Even in those cases where a surviving document portrays a certain ideal, medievalists are
accustomed to regarding textual evidence as one aspect of a larger story. For example, the col-
laborative study of the later thirteenth-century Italian glass painter Antonio of Pisa overseen by
Claudine Lautier and Dany Sandron showed that, in spite of the Florentine system where Italian
panel painters provided the cartoons, and where written contracts spelled out the obligation
of the glassmakers to follow the cartoon faithfully, a glass workshop could nonetheless make
a significant impact on the visual appearance of the windows.53 The French team compared
the contracts for Antonio of Pisa and his fellow glaziers, as well as Antonio’s innovative treatise
on glassmaking, with the extant late thirteenth-century windows at Florence Cathedral. They
demonstrated how, using the same cartoons, different glaziers nonetheless made strikingly dif-
ferent creations through color choices, paint handling, and border designs, as well as through the
cutting of the panes of glass and the placement of the leading.54 Significantly, the study insists
on the visual and material evidence of what the artist Antonio of Pisa brought to the outcome,
despite his contract stipulating his indebtedness to another’s template.
Another characteristic of the art historical literature is that those traditional divisions into
types of patrons – namely, clerical, courtly, corporate, and private – rarely work well for medieval
examples.55 There is some rationale for these categories, which may have been intended to give
a comprehensive view of society and recognize different modalities of giving. In early medieval
monasteries, for example, where the commissioner, author, artist, and consumer might be encom-
passed in one well-trained monk, patronage assumed a distinctive valence.56 However, categories
of patrons can create rigid and unworkable divisions, as the example of the medieval monastery
again demonstrates, since monasteries also depended on external support. This support most
often took the form of gifts from lay donors that were believed to serve their givers as a “paradise
purchase” and were one of the main conduits through which medieval ecclesiastical institutions
grew and prospered.57 Classifying the patrons of these gifts according to the existing categories,
such as private or corporate, fails to do justice to the salvific context in which the gifts were given.
Likewise would the Vivian Bible and Liber Vitae (Figs. 25.1 and 25.2), works that were undertaken
as part of a socially significant exchange that reinforced ties between their monasteries and the
ruling elite, be designated clerical or courtly, or is it not the point that they reflect the relationship
between the two realms?
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Media and materiality

Another noteworthy aspect of art historical analysis is the recognition that different media make
distinctive claims on their makers and beholders. Cynthia Hahn posited that the “strange beauty”
of jewel-encrusted reliquaries was produced in order to teach viewers how to understand relics.58
Studies focusing on materiality have also brought insights into how the choice of a given medium
impacts the efficacy of a work of art, revealing a far more complex and intentional process than
previously imagined.59 As Caroline Bynum insists, “the stuff of which medieval images were made
was not incidental.”60 The phenomenon is wonderfully evident in Jacqueline Jung’s analysis of how
visionary experiences were often portrayed in works of three-dimensional sculpture, the tactile per-
ception of which helped to shape the religious imagination of the viewer, allowing the devotional
image to communicate between the artist and the beholder, and between the viewer and God.61
Architecture has traditionally been viewed as a creative endeavor that requires exceptional
resources and planning, as well as technical expertise, factors that accord it a special status in the
literature on medieval patronage.62 Yet in his analysis of the mid-twelfth-century rebuilding of
Laon Cathedral, undertaken with an eye to determining those initiatives that might be credited
either to the cathedral chapter or to the designer, Dany Sandron demonstrated that many of the
building’s most original features resulted from an exchange between the liturgical specifications
that may reasonably be ascribed to the canons of the chapter, who served as its collective patrons,
and design initiatives on the part of its architects.63 Sandron also cited other factors that help to
explain why comparatively few names of medieval architects survive. Because ambitious struc-
tures like Laon Cathedral routinely took several generations to complete, this has the effect of
downplaying the singular vision of any one architect. Moreover, in part to justify the expense
involved in large-scale building, contemporaries often described medieval churches as miraculous
undertakings, such as the miracle of the oxen that carried stone for Laon Cathedral mentioned
by Guibert of Nogent. As Sandron reminds us, this is yet another phenomenon at odds with the
mundane recognition of the actual architects, masons, and other workers who built the structure.
Christopher Wilson’s analysis of the role of King Henry III in the mid-thirteenth-century
rebuilding of Westminster Abbey focuses on a very different set of circumstances.64 Yet despite
the presence of a named mason in Master Henry and a named patron in King Henry, a “pas-
sionate aesthete” who assumed sole financial responsibility for the reconstruction of the church,
Wilson likewise views the process as fundamentally collaborative. Any proposed intervention of
the king is justified in specific terms; although arguing for a number of decisions where the king
weighed in personally, Wilson’s study of Westminster is not a one-sided story but one in which
the creative dynamic between the two Henrys is repeatedly evoked.
Another medium with implications for medieval patronage is manuscript illumination, since
the coordination of text and images within a book can be helpful in gauging intent. The choice
and arrangement of image programs can complement evidence provided by the calendar, the
nature of the prayers selected, and dedications.65 In particular, Psalters and books of hours, which
had no fixed set of images associated with them, gave substantial scope for personalization.66 This
is also a domain where female patrons, recipients, and dedicatees appear prominently, not only
reflecting rising rates of literacy and new modes of spirituality but also because women often
assumed responsibility for the family legacy and early education, symbolized by the family Bible
handed on from mother to daughter.67 Alexa Sand has argued that the earnest lay female figures
found in books of hours beginning in the later thirteenth century were effective proxies for their
beholders – and not only female – who could see the bodily activity of devotion in the images
before them and imagine themselves experiencing prayer in the manner depicted (Fig. 25.3).68
In a miniature from a Psalter-hours now in the Morgan Library (New York, Pierpont Morgan
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Patronage
Figure 25.3 The Visual Colophon from the Toledo Cathedral Bible moralisée (New York: Pierpont
Morgan Library, MS M.240, fol. 8r), Paris, c. 1220–30s. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Library, MS M.729, f. 232v) of c. 1290, the female devotee is emphasized through her large scale,
which is nearly twice that of the statue of the Virgin on the adjacent altar to whom she prays. She
engages the viewer because of her specificity: the exertion of her physical posture; the wimple that
identifies her as a married or widowed woman of status; the large, lined golden cloak embroidered
with heraldic charges in red; and the presence of her lapdog. As Sand emphasizes, this portrayal
“considers the owner’s act of prayer itself worthy of a level of pictorial attention equal to that
given elsewhere in the same manuscript only to sacred subjects.”69
347
Sand’s focus in the so-called Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons is less of a “whodunnit?” than
an analysis of its representational discourse.70 On the basis of cues provided by dress and heraldry,
Alison Stones persuasively demonstrated that the kneeling woman is in all likelihood not Yolande
of Soissons but a relative, probably her widowed stepmother Comtesse de la Table.71 This inves-
tigative work also helps to explain the condition of this formerly eponymous manuscript, which
Stones argues was taken over, adapted, and completed by Yolande. Fundamentally, however, the
new identification of the person who initiated the book does not alter the analyses of the visual
rhetoric of the picture; rather, it enlarges upon them because the image was evidently transferra-
ble to its new owner, who left the “portrait” unaltered and embraced the specificity it intimates
as her own, adapting instead the book’s coats of arms and calendar.72
Agency
The problem of agency, defined as the culturally mediated capacity of human beings to act and make
choices, has already been alluded to in the discussions of patrons such as Count Vivian and King
Henry III, where the presence of a named historical personage provoked questions about that person’s
actual involvement in the creation of a work of art. Scholars have examined the habits of deference
adopted toward the powerful, evinced in rhetorical strategies and protocols that routinely credit
those further up the hierarchy for work accomplished by others. In recognition of this phenomenon,
Melissa Meriam Bullard provocatively declared, “Lorenzo the Magnificent was a committee.”73
Focusing primarily on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century materials, Creighton Gilbert offered
a useful summary of the three ways in which, in the absence of other documentation, scholars
hypothesize the extent of patrons’ control of themes in commissioned art:74 the existence of detailed
instructions to the artist, despite their general absence from contracts;75 the hypothesized learned
advisor, who was more prevalent in commissions of religious art, and sometimes called for by the
artist;76 and the “extra messages,” which the art historian finds and uses to support a hypothesis
of the patron’s intervention. There is no doubt about where Gilbert stands when he states that
“proposals claiming detailed instructions [by patrons] are often linked to others claiming second
intended levels of meaning [by art historians]; perhaps the second hypothesis needs the first.”77
As Flora and others have complained, scholars have often just assumed that any named or
kneeling figure depicted in a work of art was the person who paid for it,78 a situation that led
Linda Safran to advocate using the descriptive term “supplicant,” rather than an interpretive one,
such as “donor.”79 Indeed, the proverbial “donor” figure may be observed in a variety of media,
each with its own norms and visual language. Turning to the figures at work in the bottoms of
the stained-glass windows at Chartres Cathedral (where donors often appear in later examples),
Jane Welch Williams argued that these workers are unlikely to represent the medieval guilds that
they have routinely been interpreted to be.80 Rather, drawing on the fractious local context at
the time, the socioeconomic level of many of the workers depicted, and the scant evidence for
the existence of the guilds that are assumed to serve as the corporate donors of windows within
Chartres at this time, Williams read the workers as representing a clerical ideal of labor in sup-
port of the church, a didactic image of how workers should behave, in marked contrast to the
contemporary discord. As Michael Camille showed, medieval images like these rarely originated
with the workers themselves, but reflect instead the views of those who paid.81 But even for
images of those who could afford to pay, the context requires careful consideration. In a study
of portal sculpture at Notre-Dame of Paris, Cecilia Gaposchkin argued that the kneeling king
and queen carved on the early fourteenth-century tympanum of the Porte Rouge, who, in the
absence of any substantial documentation, have simply been assumed to be donors by a process
of association, are more persuasively understood as an ecclesiastical presentation of royal piety and
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deference.82 Far from being patrons in any traditional sense, these kneeling royals are presented
in the way contemporary churchmen would have liked to see them.
I have argued elsewhere that inquiry into the patronage of the Bayeux Embroidery may have
initially given rise to fruitful speculations about the context for this long and narrow pictorial
narrative, which, at nearly 225 feet in length and only 20 inches in height, is the largest surviving
textile from the Middle Ages.83 But hypotheses that focused narrowly on the personal agency of
Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who is named and depicted in the textile and was an important bene-
factor of the abbey of Saint Augustine’s in Canterbury, which oversaw the creation of the work,
subsequently became a limitation to be accommodated. Scholars engaged in increasingly fanciful
speculations about Odo’s self-insertion into the pictorial narrative of the Norman Conquest of
England in 1066, and about the textile’s presumed display in one of his many palaces.84 In fact,
every feature of the textile that has been cited as evidence that Odo of Bayeux commissioned it
and controlled its narrative can be explained by accepting that it was made at the collective initia-
tive of the monks of St. Augustine’s to tell their own story of the conquest and to serve their own
purposes, when hung at the abbey itself.85 In addition, the tradition of referring to this textile as
a “tapestry,” which is an inaccurate description of its material form, ultimately has the effect of
assimilating it to the large triumphal secular tapestries that covered the walls of baronial halls, rather
than to the embroideries favored in liturgical usage, which offered no such practical insulation.
As this example suggests, questions about patronal agency benefit from examining the mate-
rial evidence within a work of art.86 Noting the scarcity of contracts for manuscript illumination
before the fourteenth century, Jonathan Alexander drew attention to the fascinating sketches and
instructions written in the margins of manuscripts that were intended to be erased, covered over
by illuminations, or cut off in binding.87 Significant numbers of these written marginal directions
survive – for example, in the London volume of the Bible moralisée now divided between Oxford,
Paris, and London, a three-volume twin to the exemplar now largely in Toledo Cathedral, with
a final gathering in New York.88 Next to one of the historiated medallions on folio 395 of the
London volume, for example, is the notation in French, “erase the baby!” where someone had
evidently substituted the holy family’s Flight into Egypt for the Journey to Bethlehem, which
culminated in Mary giving birth.89 Although these notes must stem from communications
within the workshop producing these great tomes, they ultimately point back to the conditions
of their patronage. The ability to undertake such extensive “proofreading” is evidence of the
depth of financial and organizational resources available.
The royal sponsoring of the Bibles moralisées is often discussed around the visual colophon from
the Toledo Cathedral exemplar (in the gathering now in New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS
M.240, fol. 8r), depicting a queen and king acting in concert with a cleric and an artist (Fig. 25.4).90
The image depicts many of the agents already mentioned, including: a prominent female figure in
the upper left, the queen who seems to encompass the projected commission in the interval between
her open-palmed and gesticulating hands; royal backing indicated by the king at the upper right
whose hand encircles a small gold sphere reminiscent of a coin or seal; a learned clerical advisor at
the lower left working from a page with an inscription that John Lowden read as, “Let it be left here
to paint,” a further amplification of the directions he gives;91 and a lay artist at lower right bending
to a page figured with eight paired medallions, which is the composition of the other pages in the
book. Clearly the artists who created these great tomes are proportionally underrepresented in this
image. Indeed, because such dedication miniatures often present an idealized or interested view of
the commission, the information conveyed needs to be complemented by other kinds of evidence.
Added to this general caution is Lowden’s observation that this visual colophon follows the pattern
established in the rest of the pictorial program, and reads from left to right and from the top down,
just as the biblical scenes and their moralizations throughout the manuscript.92
349
Figure 25.4 Book owner kneeling in prayer, Matins of the Hours of the Virgin, Psalter-Hours “of Yolande
of Soissons” (The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.729, fol. 232v), Amiens, c. 1290. Image
courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum, New York.
The royal sponsorship of the Bibles moralisées may in fact be better attested by the scale of the
undertaking and by the record of their gifting than by this image. From the extensive archival
and codicological research undertaken by Lowden, we know that there were four such tomes
made in the early thirteenth century, the largest exemplar containing nearly five thousand illu-
minated medallions, which served as gifts to noble houses related by marriage to the Parisian
court. In addition, there is the material evidence the codices themselves yield, which points to a
sponsor with unlimited resources: the extensive use of gold throughout, both as ground for the
figures and as pictorial enhancement; the blank folios left between miniatures to minimize colors
bleeding through the page; the unusual effort to make twin copies of the work;93 and the close
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editorial oversight reflected in the notations in the margins of the London volume. If Lowden is
right that the early fourteenth-century Holkham Bible Picture Book frontispiece with its amus-
ing caution from the cleric to the artist, “make it well, for it will be shown to rich people,” and
the artist’s proud rejoinder, “never will you see such a book,” deliberately copied and tropes the
Toledo Cathedral Bible moralisée’s visual colophon, then it further calls into question the claims
of images that purport to describe, or have been interpreted as describing, the circumstances of
a book’s commission.94
In this brief overview of issues in the study of patronage, I have chosen well-studied works of
art to suggest the great interest and complexity of the creative forces at play. In closing, however,
I would like to turn to a lesser-known entry in a late medieval inventory, which is explicit about
how a particular donation was intended to be used. An entry in the inventory of Bayeux Cathe-
dral (Caen, Archives départementales de Calvados, série G, Bibiliothèque du chapitre cathedral
de Bayeux, MS 199, fol. 84v-85) of 1476 refers to a set of garments and objects for the use of
future bishops, given by Bishop Louis II d’Harcourt (1424–1479), who commissioned the inven-
tory.95 The set included a miter, gold cloth for a chasuble, two tunics, gloves, a cross, a ring, and
a pontifical missal, of which only the missal survives. The entry stipulates that the items were to
be available to each of Louis’s successors throughout his term of office and were to be returned
to the cathedral treasury in good condition. So far it resembles any standard rental arrangement;
however, the entry also declares that the sum of 40 livres was to be paid by each bishop for the
maintenance of the set, of which 10 livres was to be devoted to a mass in memory of Bishop
d’Harcourt. Like the inventory itself, this episcopal gift both commemorates the munificence of
Bishop d’Harcourt and, “paying it forward,” establishes a tradition of giving for his successors
in office. As is the case for many other acts of patronage where this information might remain
implicit, the performative role of the objects is as important as the objects themselves. Originat-
ing as it did in the interval after the English Occupation (1345–1450) and before the Huguenot
pillaging of the cathedral (1562) that would destroy many of the works of art named in the
inventory, this gift registers a poignant vote of confidence in the future.
By closing with this entry, I have sought to indicate that inquiries into patronage, for all their
fictions of presentation and contingencies that still elude generalization, reward us with many
such insights. What is at stake is nothing less than the contextual study of works of art and the
refinement of methodologies to meet that challenge.
Notes
1 See J.W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” AHR 91 (1986), 1063–75; when
Scott returned to the subject in “Unanswered Questions,” AHR 113 (2008), 1422–29, she indicated that
she had intended her title to be posed as a question, which I have adapted in the title of this essay.
2 E. Gatti, Review of Patronage: Power & Agency in Medieval Art, ed. C. Hourihane, Index of Christian Art
Occasional Papers, 15 (University Park, 2013), for The Medieval Review, TMR14.10.07. Gatti ultimately
concluded that the anthology was a “welcome surprise.” Full disclosure: I served as co-organizer for the
conference behind this volume, which will be referred to as Hourihane, Patronage.
3 Critical Terms for Art History, ed. R.S. Nelson and R. Shiff (Chicago, 2003), 2nd ed.; and Studies in Iconog-
raphy 33 (2012), special issue, Medieval Art History Today – Critical Terms, guest ed. N. Rowe.
4 J. Caskey, “Whodunnit? Patronage, the Canon and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and
Gothic Art,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. C. Rudolph,
Blackwell Companions to Art History (Oxford, 2006), 203–04; H. Flora, “Patronage,” Studies in Iconography
33 (2012), 209; J. Caskey, “Medieval Patronage & Its Potentialities,” in Patronage, ed. Hourihane, 3–30.
5 OED, 561, at I.1.2, and II.4.
6 OED, sub “patron,” 561–62.
7 W. Cahn, “The Artist as Outlaw and Apparatchik: Freedom and Constraint in the Interpretation of
Medieval Art,” in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, ed. S.K. Scher (Providence, 1969), 1–14.
351
8 A. Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie” (1902), reprint in Aby Warburg,
The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. D.
Britt, Getty Research Institute Texts & Documents (Los Angeles, 1999), 187–89.
9 M. Kemp, “From ‘Mimesis’ to ‘Fantasia’: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and
Genius in the Visual Arts,” Viator 7 (1977), 360.
10 M. Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (1925; New
York, 2000); discussion in J. Luxford, “The Construction of English Monastic Patronage,” in Patronage,
ed. Hourihane, 51–52; B. Buettner, “Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Courts, ca. 1400,” AB
83 (2001), 598–625.
11 M.H. Caviness, “Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,”
Speculum 68 (1993), 333–62. Also see P. Sheingorn, “Subjection and Reception in Claude of Frances’
Book of First Prayers,” in The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline
Harrison Caviness, ed. E.S. Lane, E.C. Pastan, and E. Shortell (Oxford, 2009), 313–32: and the application
of this “patron-recepteur” concept for a nonfemale patron in B. Zweig, “Picturing the Fallen King: Royal
Patronage and the Image of Saul’s Suicide,” in Patronage, ed. Hourihane, 151–74.
12 See Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. T. Martin, 2 vols. (Leiden,
2012), and the review by K.A. Smith, “Women Are Good to Think With,” for the Journal of Art Histo-
riography 9 (2013), 9/KAS 1–15; C. Schleif, “Seeking Patronage: Patrons and Matrons in Language, Art,
and Historiography,” in Hourihane, Patronage, 206–52; and E. van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval
Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto, 1999). Targeting key issues: K.L. French, “‘I Leave My Best Gown as a
Vestment’: Women’s Spiritual Interests in the Late Medieval English Parish,” Magistra 4 (1998), 57–77;
A. Gajewski, “The Patronage Question under Review: Queen Blanche of Castile (1188–1252) and the
Architecture of the Cistercian Abbeys at Royaumont, Maubuisson, and Le Lys,” in Reassessing the Roles
of Women, I: 197–244; F.J. Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth
Century (Philadelphia, 2007), esp. 108–33.
13 Flora, Patronage (as in note 4), 207.
14 M.H. Caviness, “Anchoress, Abbess, and Queen: Donors and Patrons or Intercessors and Matrons?” in
The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. J.H. McCash (Athens, 1995), 113.
15 L. Seidel, Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun (Chicago, 1999), 12–26,
63–78; Caskey, “Whodunnit,” 222–28; Caskey, “Medieval Patronage,” 23–28; Schleif, “Seeking Patron-
age,” 210–14; A. Kumler, “The Patron-Function,” in Patronage, ed. Hourihane, 307–10; T. Martin,
“Exceptions and Assumptions: Women in Medieval Art History,” in Reassessing the Roles of Women (as in
note 12), I: 2–5.
16 Besides works cited in notes 1–24, see S. Kettering, “Patronage in Early Modern France,” French Historical
Studies 17 (1992), 839–62; M. Garber, Patronizing the Arts (Princeton, 2008).
17 C. Maines, “Good Work, Social Ties, and the Hope for Salvation: Abbot Suger and Saint Denis,” in Abbot
Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium, ed. P.L. Gerson (New York, 1986), 79.
18 J. Burke, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (University Park, 2004), 4.
19 A. Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art (New York, 2014), 6.
20 Burke, Changing Patrons (as in note 18), 6–8.
21 B. Brenk, “Committenza,” in Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale, ed. A.M. Romanini and M. Righetti, 12 vols.
(Rome, 1994), 5: 203–19.
22 M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial
Style (Oxford, 1972), 1.
23 Unfortunately, Byzantine examples are beyond the scope of this essay, although see R. Cormack, “‘Face-
less Icons’: The Problems of Patronage in Byzantine Art,” in Patronage, ed. Hourihane, 194–205.
24 H.L. Kessler, “A Lay Abbot as Patron: Count Vivian and the First Bible of Charles the Bald,” in Commit-
tenti e Produzione Artistico-Letteraria nell’Alto Medioevo Occidentale (4–10 April 1991), Settimane di Studio
del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 39 (Spoleto, 1992), 647–79.
25 Kessler, Lay Abbot (as in note 24), 650–51. Kessler suggests the bearded figure at the middle right, who
regards the monks lifting the book at the left from the other side of the image.
26 S. Keynes, “The ‘Liber Vitae’ of the New Minster,” in The Liber Vitae of the New Minster and Hyde Abbey,
Winchester: British Library Stowe 944, ed. S. Keynes, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, 26 (Copen-
hagen, 1996), 49–92; E.C. Parker, “The Gift of the Cross in the New Minster Liber Vitae,” in Reading
Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, ed. E. Sears and T.K. Thomas (Ann Arbor, 2002), 177–86.
27 Schleif, Seeking Patronage (as in note 12), 215–17.
28 Parker, Gift (as in note 26), 178.
352
Patronage
29 Keynes, Liber Vitae (as in note 26), fol. 13rv, 82–83.

30 Parker, Gift, 179–83; Keynes, Liber Vitae, 35–36 and 79–80 on New Minster’s “great cross” with relics.
31 Kumler, The Patron-Function (as in note 15), 296–319.
32 E. Kitzinger, “The Gregorian Reform and the Visual Arts: A Problem of Method,” TRHS 22, 5th ser.
(1972), 91.
33 Kitzinger, The Gregorian Reform (as in note 32), 101. Compare to Michael Camille’s statement of
method in idem, “Labouring for the Lord: The Ploughman and the Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter,”
Art History 10 (1987), 445.
34 R.S. Nelson, “At the Place of a Foreword: Someone Looking, Reading, and Writing,” in Critical Terms
(as in note 3), xv–xvii.
35 Scott, Gender (as in note 1).
36 Scott, Gender (as in note 1), 1055–56.
37 See S. Settis, Artisti e committenti fra Quattro e Cinquecento (Turin, 2010), esp. 51–81.
38 F. Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the
Baroque, 2nd rev. ed. (New Haven, 1980), 3–23.
39 Haskell, Patrons and Painters (as in note 38), viii.
40 Scott, Gender (as in note 1), 1056.
41 J. Van Engen, “Theophilus Presbyter and Rupert of Deutz: Manual Arts and Benedictine Theology in
the Twelfth Century,” Viator 11 (1980), 147–63.
42 M. Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art,” (1947), reprint in idem, Romanesque Art:
Selected Papers (New York, 1977), 1–27 at p 2.
43 W. Cahn, “The Rule and the Book: Cistercian Book Illumination in Burgundy and Champagne,” in
Monasticism and the Arts, ed. T.G. Verdon (Syracuse, 1984), 139–72; M. Gullick, “Professional Scribes in
Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century England,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 7 (1998), 1–25.
44 A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998).
45 C. van Eck, “Living Statues: Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, Living Presence Response and the Sublime,”
Art History 33 (2010), 647.
46 For representative examples see C.B. Kendall, The Allegory of the Church: Romanesque Portals and Their
Verse Inscriptions (Toronto, 1998); N. Morgan, “What Are They Saying? Patrons & Their Text Scrolls in
Fifteenth-Century English Art,” in Hourihane, Patronage (as in note 2), 175–93.
47 P. Kidson, “Panofsky, Suger and St. Denis,” JWCI 50 (1987), 2.
48 Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. and trans. E. Panofsky, 2nd ed. G.
Panofsky-Soergel (1946; Princeton, 1979).
49 L.R. Hoey, “A Critical Account of the State of Some Questions concerning Suger’s Architecture at
Saint-Denis,” AVISTA Forum Journal 12 (1999), 12–13.
50 For example, É. Mâle, “Enrichment of the Iconography: Suger and His Influence,” Religious Art in France:
The Twelfth Century, ed. H. Bober, trans. M. Mathews (1922; Princeton, 1978), 154–86; E. Panofsky,
“Introduction,” Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church, 1–37; C. Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot
Suger’s Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art, Princeton Essays on the Arts (Princeton,
1990); C.M. Radding and W.W. Clark, Medieval Architecture, Medieval Learning: Builders and Masters in the
Age of Romanesque and Gothic (New Haven, 1992), 57–76.
51 Kidson, Panofsky, Suger (as in note 47), 2.
52 Kidson, Panofsky, Suger (as in note 47), 1–2.
53 Antoine de Pise: L’art du vitrail vers 1400, ed. C. Lautier and D. Sandron, Corpus Vitrearum France,
Études, 8 (Paris, 2008).
54 Also see the foundational study of Hartmut Scholz, Entwurf und Ausführung: Werkstattpraxis in der Nürn-
berger Glasmalerei der Dürerzeit (Berlin, 1991).
55 D.S. Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, History in Depth (Columbia, 1971); A. Mar-
tindale, The Rise of the Artist in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (New York, 1972); remarks in Settis,
Artisti e committenti (as in note 37), 87.
56 Haskell, “Patronage,” Encyclopedia of World Art 10 (New York, 1966), 120; the nature of this milieu led
J.M. Luxford, The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–1540: A Patronage History
(Woodbridge, 2005), to adopt the term “internal patronage.”
57 B. Hill, “Lay Patronage and Monastic Architecture: The Norman Abbey of Savigny,” in Monasticism and
the Arts, ed. T.G. Verdon (Syracuse, 1984), 173–87.
58 C. Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204 (University
Park, 2012).
353
59 H.L. Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art, Rethinking the Middle Ages, 1 (Ontario, 2004), esp. 19–43; K.E.
Overbey and B.C. Tilghman, “Active Objects: An Introduction,” in Different Visions: A Journal of New
Perspectives on Medieval Art 4 (2014), 1–9.
60 C.W. Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Brooklyn, 2011), 28.
61 J.E. Jung, “The Tactile and the Visionary: Notes on the Place of Sculpture in the Medieval Religious
Imagination,” in Looking Beyond:Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art & History, ed. C. Hourihane,
Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers, 11 (University Park, 2010), 202–40.
62 Martindale, The Rise of the Artist (as in note 55), 79–96; Radding and Clark, Medieval Architecture (as in
note 50), 1–8.
63 D. Sandron, “La cathédrale de Laon, la volonté du clergé, la liberté des architectes,” in L’artiste et le com-
manditaire aux dernier siècles du Moyen Age: XIIIe–XVIe siècles, ed. F. Joubert (Paris, 2001), 5–16.
64 C. Wilson, “Calling the Tune? The Involvement of King Henry III in the Design of the Abbey at West-
minster,” JBAA 161 (2008), 59–93.
65 See K.A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and Their Books of
Hours (London, 2003), 1–47. Arguing for the public role of later medieval books, see J. Coleman, M.
Cruse, and K.A. Smith, “Introduction: The Social Life of Illumination,” in The Social Life of Illumination:
Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages, ed. idem (Turnhout, 2013), 1–13.
66 A. Bennett, “The Transformation of the Gothic Psalter in Thirteenth-Century France,” in The Illumi-
nated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of Its Images, ed. F.O. Büttner (Turnhout, 2004),
211–21.
67 S.G. Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture” (1982),
in Sisters and Works in the Middle Ages, ed. J.M. Bennett (Chicago, 1989), 135–61; and the works cited
in note 12.
68 Sand, Vision, Devotion (as in note 19), 149–210.
69 Sand, Vision, Devotion (as in note 19), 181.
70 Sand, Vision, Devotion, 178–85; G. Didi-Huberman, “The Portrait, the Individual and the Singular:
Remarks on the Legacy of Aby Warburg,” in The Image and the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed.
N. Mann and L. Syson (London, 1998), 165–88.
71 A. Stones, “The Full-Page Miniatures of the Psalter-Hours New York, PML, ms M. 729: Programme
and Patron,” in The Illuminated Psalter, ed. Büttner (as in note 66), 281–307.
72 See S. Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago, 2008).
73 M.M. Bullard, “Heroes and Their Workshops: Medici Patronage and the Problem of Shared Agency,”
JMRS 24 (1994), 196.
74 C.E. Gilbert, “What Did the Renaissance Patron Buy?” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998), 392–95.
75 See L.F. Sandler, “Notes for the Illuminator: The Case of the Omne Bonum,” AB 71(1989), 551–64,
where by examining the marginal notes left for the artist in an encyclopedia of c. 1380, Sandler demon-
strates that the artist assumed an active role in formulating the images, including reading the text
independently.
76 L.F. Sandler, “Jean Pucelle and the Lost Miniatures of the Belleville Breviary,” AB 66 (1984), 73–96, who
argues that the preface to this early fourteenth-century Dominican breviary is not the work of a clerical
advisor, as had been assumed, but of an artist.
77 Gilbert, What Did the Renaissance Patron Buy? (as in note 74), 443.
78 Flora, Patronage (as in note 4), 209.
79 L. Safran, “Deconstructing ‘Donors’ in Medieval Southern Italy,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte
60–61 (2011–12): 135–51. Although a synonym, note the slightly different inflection in the term “sup-
pliant” used by others, including Maines, Good Works (as in note 17).
80 J.W. Williams, Bread, Wine & Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago, 1993).
81 Camille, Labouring for the Lord (as in note 33).
82 M.C. Gaposchkin, “The King of France and the Queen of Heaven: The Iconography of the Porte Rouge
of Notre-Dame of Paris,” Gesta 39 (2000), 58–72.
83 E.C. Pastan and S.D. White, “Problematizing Patronage: Odo of Bayeux and the Bayeux Tapestry,” in
New Approaches to the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. M.K. Foys, K.E. Overbey, and D. Terkla (Woodbridge, 2009),
1–24; S.A. Brown, The Bayeux Tapestry, Bayeux Médiathèque Municipale: MS 1, A Sourcebook, Publications
of the Journal of Medieval Latin 9 (Turnhout, 2013), for an annotated bibliography.
84 E.C. Pastan, “Imagined Patronage: The Bayeux Embroidery and Its Interpretive History,” in Patronage,
ed. Hourihane (as in note 2), 54–75.
354
Patronage
85 E.C. Pastan and S.D. White, with K. Gilbert, The Bayeux Tapestry and Its Contexts: A Reassessment
(Woodbridge, 2014).
86 Flora, Patronage (as in note 4), 210–15.
87 J.J.G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (New Haven, 1992), 52–71.
88 J. Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park, 2000), I: 154–65.
89 Lowden, Making, I: 157 (as in note 88), fig. 58.
90 Lowden, Making, I: 95–137 (as in note 88), and his color plate X.
91 Lowden, Making, I: 129 (as in note 88).
92 J. Lowden, “The Bible of Saint Louis as a Bible Moralisée,” in The Bible of Saint Louis, II: Commentary Volume,
ed. R.G. Ruiz (Barcelona, 2004), 147–50.
93 Lowden, Making, I: 167–80 (as in note 88), and color plates XIX–XX.
94 J. Lowden, “The Holkham Bible Picture Book and the Bible Moralisée,” in The Medieval Book: Glosses
from Friends & Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, ed. J.H. Marrow, R. Linenthal, and W. Noel (Houten,
2010), 75–83.
95 E. Deslandes, “Le trésor de l’église Notre-Dame de Bayeux, d’après les inventaires manuscripts de
1476, 1480 et 1498,” Bulletin archéologique du comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (1896), no. 104
at 377–78.
355
26
ROYAL AND IMPERIAL
ICONOGRAPHY
Joan A. Holladay
Kings wear crowns. Queens do too. Sometimes they hold scepters. Sometimes they sit on thrones.
Royal iconography would seem to be straightforward, unproblematic, and obvious. In fact, the
ways in which royals were portrayed over the centuries – their poses, the environments and sit-
uations in which they appear, the figures that accompany them – were not constant but instead
reflect changing perceptions of their status, power, and proximity to God.
The doyen of the study of royal iconography is Percy Ernst Schramm. His books, Die deutschen
Kaiser und Könige in Bildern ihrer Zeit 751–1190, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik, and Die
Denkmale der deutschen Könige und Kaiser, remain essential sources, appreciated for their encyclo-
pedic coverage.1 They have been updated for specific monuments by Eliza Garrison,2 Thomas
E. A. Dale,3 and others. To my knowledge nothing attempting a reach comparable to Schramm’s
exists for any of the other countries of medieval Europe.4
Crowns, scepters, and thrones

The crowns, scepters, and thrones mentioned earlier, among the earliest medieval objects that
marked royal status – and indeed in some cases conferred it – are known through texts, preserved
and excavated objects, and representations of such objects on seals and coins and in manuscript
illuminations. They seem to go back uniformly to Roman origins.
One of the sources for the medieval crown was the laurel wreath of antiquity. First worn as a
sign of triumph, it later became a mark of the prince. While early Christians may have avoided
it for its pagan connotations, it appears on the denier of Charlemagne (r. 768–814) (Fig. 26.1),
which was modeled on a medal of Constantine (r. 306–37).5 Metal diadems seem to have had a
similar trajectory, worn first by members of wider elite circles as jewelry before being understood
as marks of high political status.6 The Liber pontificalis, first assembled in the fifth or sixth century,
mentions votive crowns hung over the altars and elsewhere from the fourth century; functional
crowns that had been worn to denote status were sometimes given as votives.7 Schramm notes
that, from the end of the fifth century, Vandal rulers appear on their coins wearing diadems and
that this was soon taken up by the Franks and Visigoths, and the sixth-century author Gregory
of Tours in his Historia Francorum (II, ch. 38) mentions a “crown with precious gems” (regnus [sic]
cum gemmis pretiosis) worn by Clovis (r. 482–511), king of the Franks, at the beginning of the
sixth century.8 Not all early medieval rulers wore crowns, however. The early seventh-century
356
Royal and imperial iconography
Figure 26.1 Silver denier of Charlemagne. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des
Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques. Between 801 and 814, Mainz (?). Photo © Genevra Kornbluth.
Anglo-Saxon burial at Sutton Hoo, long taken to be a royal interment,9 contains no crown, for
example; a helmet with tinned copper alloy panels with animal interlace and human figures
in heroic scenes seems to have served as an equivalent mark of status. Before the coronation
of Edgar in 973, in fact, Anglo-Saxon kings were invested with helmets rather than crowns.10
Schramm proposes the neck ring or torque as the third source of the crown. A sign of honor
given to members of the Roman army, the neck ring as a mark of status for men and women of
princely rank was known in the Roman province of Germania from the early imperial period;
finds date from as early as the fourth century.11 The use of the neck ring declined with the arrival
of Christianity except among the Merovingians.12 The crown not only was a sign of status but
also by the Carolingian period was understood as a deposit or pledge for the realm such that the
physical transfer of the crown indicated the transfer of rule.13
Roman consuls, emperors, and empresses wielded scepters as signs of their power.14 A spec-
tacular find in 2005 on the northeast slope of the Palatine hill in Rome included three scepters
with glass or chalcedony balls on one or both ends; their similarity to objects portrayed on coins
and in other images points to their use in civil and military rather than religious ceremonies.15
A four-sided whetstone 60 centimeters long from the Sutton Hoo burial may have had a
similar function. The two ends are each decorated with four small human heads, probably of
ancestors or gods; a metal base and a metal crest, a circle with the image of a stag, completed the
object. Adolf Gauert sees the human heads as ancestors, including perhaps gods, and assigns them
an apotropaic function; they would also mark the bearer as a member of his clan and his actions
as occurring with the support of that long-standing and illustrious group.16 Using later Icelandic
texts, Jacqueline Simpson associates whetstones with the thunderbolts of Thor and the power
and justice of Tiwaz, the northern equivalent of Zeus or Jupiter.17 The grave of a six-year-old
boy discovered under the choir of Cologne Cathedral contained a wooden scepter 20 inches
long; the placement of the grave, which dated to the second quarter of the sixth century, together
357
Joan A. Holladay
with the richness of the grave goods identifies the child as a member of the Merovingian royal
house.18 The Carolingian kings in the images discussed ahead carry either a long staff or a shorter
scepter topped with a fleur-de-lis, an early use of the type of object that would appear in images
of the French kings for centuries.19 From the time of Louis X (r. 1314–16), the seals of the kings
of France show them with a long fleur-de-lis scepter in the right hand and a shorter staff topped
with a hand of justice in the left. A nineteenth-century ivory hand at the Louvre (MS 85) corre-
sponds to images of the object offered to Charles V (r. 1364–80) at his coronation, portrayed in
Charles’s copy of the Grandes Chroniques de France (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr.
2813, fol. 439r) and at numerous reprises in the Coronation Book made for him in 1365 (Fig. 26.2),
soon after his coronation in the previous year (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. VIII,
fols. 58–64r).20 The Coronation Book also portrays Charles with a distinctive scepter, which Charles
had presumably commissioned and which he may have had reworked or entirely remade near
the end of his reign (Paris, Musée du Louvre, MS 83).21 At the top of the staff a pomme ringed
with gems bears three repoussé scenes of Charlemagne’s interactions with Saint James; a lily on
top of it supports an enthroned figure of Charlemagne, crowned and bearing a cross-topped orb
and a scepter. Charles’s tenuous political situation as the embattled third king of a new dynasty
accounts for his attempt to link himself with the powerful early Carolingian. With the other
objects used in the coronation, the hand of justice and the scepter were kept at Saint-Denis; they
appear in Felibien’s 1706 prints of the cupboards in which the treasury of the abbey was stored.22
Starting under Henry III (r. 1216–72), the kings of England used a scepter, understood as the
Rod of Virtue of Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–66), topped with a dove, a symbol of peace and
mercy.23 Henry felt a special devotion to Edward, who had been canonized in 1161, and wall
and manuscript paintings of the coronation of this king made for Henry show the saint holding
Figure 26.2 Charles V, holding the scepter and the hand of justice, kneels before Dagobert’s throne as the
archbishop of Reims places the crown on his head. Coronation Book of Charles V. London, British Library,
Cotton Tiberius B. VIII, fol. 59r. 1365, Paris. Photo © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved.
358
the bird-headed staff. Henry’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, antiking of Germany (r. 1257–72),
gave “a gold crown, . . . a scepter, and a gilt orb” to the palace chapel at Aachen for use in the
coronation ceremony; there is some disagreement about whether a silver gilt staff with a bird still
in the treasury there is Richard’s gift.24
Schramm dates the folding X-shaped throne in the form known as the sella curulis to Repub-
lican Rome; its use continued under the empire.25 The earliest representation of an enthroned
Germanic ruler, which seems to derive from Byzantine images, appears on a gilded plate from
a helmet at the Bargello in Florence (inv. no. 681). The Lombard Agilulf (r. 591–615) is por-
trayed among symmetrically arranged standing figures; the two outermost each carry a crown,
suggesting this as a scene of coronation.26 The throne now in the Musée des monnaies, médailles
et antiques of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris has long been associated with King
Dagobert (r. 623–39). It came from the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, where Dagobert had built the
first large church, but Schramm argues on the basis of the material and technique – cast bronze,
originally gilded – and the other gifts to the abbey by Charles the Bald, that it may be a Carolin-
gian object brought from Aachen to the abbey near Paris by that ninth-century king (r. 840–77)
and emperor (r. 875–77) and perhaps renovated by his artists as well.27 Abbot Suger, writing just
before the middle of the twelfth century, situates the throne in the coronation ceremony: “On
it, as ancient tradition relates, the kings of the Franks, after having taken the reins of government,
used to sit in order to receive, for the first time, the homage of their nobles.”28
The gilded ivory throne of King Solomon described in 3 Kings 10:18–20 served as the model
for the throne of the Byzantine emperor.29 Six places in documents from the first two decades
of Charlemagne’s rule indicate that he saw enthronement as constitutive of the office of king;30
a white marble throne on the west side of the upper story of his new palace chapel at Aachen,
opposite the altar once dedicated to the Savior at the east, has traditionally been associated with
him.31 Six steps recall the Solomonic model.32 The marble pieces for both throne and steps were
spolia, repurposed probably from architectural structures in Rome and Ravenna.33 A chamber
under the seat presumably housed relics, perhaps the Saint Stephen purse reliquary now in Vienna
(Schatzkammer, Inv. Nr. XIII 26).34 Widukind of Corvey records the coronation of Otto I at
Aachen in 936 (emperor 962–73): after the sword, belt, chlamys, and scepter were presented to the
new king, he was anointed and crowned. Then the bishops led the king to the throne; once he
was seated he “could see everyone and could, himself, be seen by all who were in attendance.”35
A similar sequence of events – presentation of regalia, anointing, crowning, and enthroning – was
followed for the many coronations of German kings carried out at Aachen over the next centu-
ries and used elsewhere as well.36 At Aachen the unique and divinely ordained status of the new
king in his realm conveyed by the ceremony was reinforced by the relics under the throne and
his intermediate position in the gallery between the earth below and the mosaic image of heaven
at the end of time in the dome above. A cast bronze throne commissioned by Edward I for the
abbey church at Westminster was started in 1297, and then abandoned; a gilded wood version
was completed and installed in 1300.37 A special openwork compartment below the seat held the
Stone of Scone, on which the Scottish kings had been installed; Edward had captured the stone
in 1296. The incorporation of the stone into the chair made Edward’s claim to Scotland – and
that of all subsequent kings of England – easily visible.
Other royal symbols

Other signs of royal status are also noted at an early date. A seal of Childerich (d. 481) shows
that the Merovingian king wore his hair long; his successors continued to do so until they
were deposed in 751. Theodorich, king of the Ostrogoths from 493 to 526, is also said to have
359
Joan A. Holladay
eschewed the crown that other princes wore in favor of the one nature had given him, his long
hair.38 The seal of the Visigothic king Alarich II (r. 484–507) indicates that he distinguished
himself from his subjects by his bowl-shaped haircut. That the materials of these early seal rings
with kings’ images – Alarich’s is sapphire and Theodorich’s amethyst – were reserved for rulers
indicates that certain gems and/or colors also carried royal connotations. Seal rings themselves
were signs of power and were worn and used by royal women as well as men.39 Armillae, wide
bands worn around the upper arm in the late antique to mark military honors, became a sign of
nobility, and then, no later than the time of Conrad II (r. 1124–39), insignia reserved for the king
alone.40 Charlemagne’s daughters wore armillae, suggesting that they were still a mark of men and
women of high status in the ninth century, but Guthred (r. 883–95), king of Northumbria, was
invested with armillae and Odo, the Robertian who ruled as king of West Francia for a decade
starting in 888, requisitioned them from Saint-Denis with the crown and other objects needed
to establish his kingship.41 A bejeweled fragment in the cathedral treasury at Hildesheim from
about 1000 and the matched pair of about 1175–80 with champlevé enamel scenes of the Cru-
cifixion and Resurrection, now split between the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg
(KG 1239) and the Louvre in Paris (OA 8261), testify to the range of decorative possibilities for
this type of object.42 Carol Neuman de Vegvar has proposed that drinking horns, found in the
mound burial at Sutton Hoo and elsewhere, may also have been a kind of regalia, “the physical
vehicle of the establishment of binding alliances and social bonds.”43
The numbers of preserved objects, images, and texts put us on firmer ground with respect
to royal iconography in the Carolingian period. Charlemagne’s revival of the Roman Empire
consisted not only of reusing and adapting Roman architectural forms, but also of painting
styles, paleography, and technologies like cast bronze. Representations of the emperor himself – as
on the denier mentioned earlier – hark back to Roman coins and medals with the profile por-
trait, the laurel wreath, and the title Imp[erator] Aug[ustus]. One of the most striking objects
associated with the Carolingian court is the cast bronze equestrian figure of a king, now at the
Louvre (OA 8260).44 In his left hand, the crowned king holds an orb, a symbol of the universe
and of the extent of royal power and later one of the imperial insignia; his right probably held a
cylindrical object, perhaps a sword handle. Measuring only 25 centimeters in height, the work is
clearly modeled on over-life-size ancient equestrian figures, like the one still preserved of Marcus
Aurelius, which was thought to represent Constantine in the Middle Ages.45 The composition
and pose of both horse and rider are similar in the two works, although the Carolingian bronze
moves away from the naturalism of the Roman work, abstracting and softening all the forms.
The identity of the king represented is uncertain: the figure resembles Einhard’s description of
Charlemagne and other images of that ruler, like that on the silver denier, but it was made in an
era before the expectation of veristic portraiture. Complicating the matter further is the way in
which representations of Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald were fashioned to look like
those of his grandfather in an effort at claiming legitimacy and establishing political continuity.46
More typical of the representations of Carolingian kings are the images in contemporary
manuscripts, and they reveal a great deal about conceptions of royal power. The First Bible of
Charles the Bald was one of a series of great Bibles produced at the scriptorium at the abbey
of Saint-Martin at Tours.47 It was given to Charles during a royal visit to the abbey at the end
of 845, an event depicted on the last page of the manuscript (fol. 423r). Charles sits on a draped,
high-backed throne at the center of the page. He wears a Bügelkrone, the crown topped with an
arch running from ear to ear and another that extends back from the forehead, and he holds a
long staff in his left hand. A courtier wearing a narrow diadem stands at each side of the throne
and next to him an armed guard. Forming a circle in front of the throne are the canons of
Saint-Martin’s; two of them at the far left of the image offer a large manuscript to the king, who
360
gestures at it with his right hand. Despite the attempt to arrange the figures in a three-dimensional
space, the base of the king’s throne and the feet of his courtiers and guards are located in the
clouds, denoting his otherworldly status, and the whole takes place under a baldachin draped with
a white cloth; above this space the hand of God reaches down to grant divine approval to the pro-
ceedings. From the spandrels outside the arch, two female figures in half-length offer crowns.48
In a subtle analysis of the image and the accompanying poetry, especially the lengthy poem at
the beginning of the manuscript and the verses on the two folios that immediately precede the
presentation image, Paul Dutton and Herbert Kessler have pointed out the combined didactic and
panegyric character of the manuscript. The Bible is recommended to the king as a handbook for
good, just kingship, which should include protection of the rights and immunities of the abbey.
At the end of the book, the presentation image portrays the king as a “perfected ruler.”49 Referred
to as David, as his grandfather had been, Charles is likened to that Old Testament king in both
word and image. On folio 215v, David is represented flanked by two guards and surrounded by
four musicians. The figures stand on cloud bands in a mandorla against a blue ground that evokes
the heavens. Female personifications of the cardinal virtues in half-length occupy the spandrels.
David bears the same features as the figure of Charles the Bald at the end of the manuscript and
wears a similar crown. David’s nakedness proposes humility to Charles, who by the end of the
book has become “fully Davidian and fully just.”50
The First Bible of Charles the Bald was a gift to the king from the canons at Saint-Martin’s, so
the image of the ruler, the first of a number of depictions of Charles the Bald, reflects their wishes,
but two roughly contemporary manuscripts of slightly later date usually considered to have been
produced at the emperor’s behest take up the representation of the king in the First Bible, repeat-
ing and developing the iconography of the ruler. In the Gospel book known as the Codex aureus
of St. Emmeram (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000, fol. 5v), the emperor, now
much bigger than the surrounding figures, sits under an elaborately decorated, three-dimensional
baldachin from which the hand of God projects downwards to convey divine approbation and
protection (Fig. 26.3). Charles’s throne is high-backed and bejeweled; a swag of cloth, presumably
a cloth of honor, is arranged behind his head. The king again wears a Bügelkrone, now inset with
gems; the borders of his mantle and the sleeves and hem of his robe are also bejeweled. A guard
stands at each side of the throne. Behind each military attendant stands a female personification
indicating Charles’s rule over the reunified territories of his father and grandfather: Francia and
Gotia are crowned and bear horns of plenty. Angels again occupy the upper spandrels. The scene,
which is too often reproduced by itself, gains in both richness and specificity when considered
with that on the facing page (fol. 6r). Here, in a dramatic circular composition, the twenty-four
elders of Revelation 4:10–11 lift up off their seats and offer their crowns to the lamb at their
center. The subject and its circular arrangement recall the mosaic decoration in the dome of
Charlemagne’s palace chapel at Aachen.51 Charles sits on the manuscript spread as he would
have sat on the throne of his grandfather in the second story of the octagonal chapel, enjoying
privileged visual access to the vision of heaven at the end of time in the dome above his head.
A closely related image in the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura in Rome also shows the
large-scale emperor enthroned, again under an elaborate draped baldachin.52 He wears similar
bejeweled clothing and crown and is accompanied by four symmetrically arranged attendants:
two guards at his right and two women at his left. The woman closest to the emperor in the
richly embroidered veil represents his wife.53 Above the throne four haloed female figures
personify virtues that allow and characterize his good government. Flanking the virtues, two
angels guarantee heavenly protection for the king. The poem inscribed at the bottom of the
page describes the various elements of the picture and relates them to Charles’s effective rule
and his role as defender of the church.54 That the composition resembles that of the frontispiece
361
Figure 26.3a Charles the Bald seated on his throne looks into the heavens. Codex aureus of St. Emmeram.
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München, Clm 14000, fol. 5v. 870, Court School of Charles the Bald (location
unknown). Photo: courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München.
Figure 26.3b The twenty-four elders adore the lamb. Codex aureus of St. Emmeram. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,
München, Clm 14000, fol. 6r. 870, Court School of Charles the Bald (location unknown). Photo: courtesy of
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München.
to Proverbs on folio 188v, where Solomon sits in a similar pose under a baldachin and is also
accompanied by symmetrically arranged attendants, links the living king to the biblical model
of wisdom.55 The rigidly symmetrical construction of the image, hierarchic scaling, mix of sym-
bolic and historical figures, and architectural framework and costume suggest earlier Byzantine
objects, like the so-called Missouriam of Theodosius, a large silver plate from 388 (Madrid, Real
Academia de la Historia).
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Joan A. Holladay
The two manuscripts share their large size, elaborate decoration, and the inclusion of accom-
panying text in gold letters on a ground of imperial purple.56 That the two Bibles were both
created about 870, although at different sites where books for the king were produced, suggests
a concerted effort to use imagery to construe the king’s roles in his kingdom and in the entirety
of God’s creation in all time. Charles may have given the Bible to Pope John VIII at the time of
his coronation as emperor on Christmas in 875.57 The lavishly illustrated work not only would
have been an appropriate gift but also would have served to advertise Charles’s understanding of
his position to the pontiff. The Codex aureus may have been given or left to the royal abbey at
Saint-Denis; it was later in the possession of Arnulf of Carinthia, king of East Francia (r. 887–99),
who gave it to the monastery of St. Emmeram at Regensburg about 893.58
The small equestrian king holds an orb in his left hand, and Charles the Bald in the Bible of
San Paolo and in his Psalter (fol. 3v) holds a large flat disk that must be interpreted in a similar
fashion.59 A symbol of the world, and of dominion over it, and as such often an attribute of
Christ, the “supreme imperial model,”60 the orb would become a nearly omnipresent attribute of
the ruler from the Ottonian period onwards. Deriving, again, from Roman precedents, an orb is
held by each of the two corulers on the Missourium of Theodosius and by an empress on an early
sixth-century Byzantine ivory in the Bargello in Florence. This latter is topped by a cross, and it
is in this form that the orb will appear with great regularity in the images of Ottonian and later
emperors on seals and coins and in manuscripts, although orbs inscribed with crosses and simple
spheres also appear. The cross-topped orbs found among the grave goods buried with the Ger-
man kings Henry III (r. 1028–56; emperor 1046–56), Lothar III (r. 1125–37; emperor 1133–37),
Frederick II (r. 1212–50; emperor 1220–50), and Sigismund (r. 1411–37; emperor 1433–37) and
the Bohemian king Rudolf I (r. 1306–7) were typically made of baser materials than the example
in gold and jewels from about 1200 preserved among the imperial regalia in Vienna (Schatzkam-
mer, Inv. Nr. XIII 2) (Fig. 26.4).61
The Bügelkrone that Charles the Bald wears in all three of the manuscript illuminations dis-
cussed earlier also deserves some comment here as it will serve as perhaps the most recognizable
of the imperial insignia for the rest of the Middle Ages. Perhaps an idea of Charlemagne’s, this
particular form seems to have derived from the royal helmet, and in such early examples as
Charlemagne’s bull and a Carolingian ivory in Florence it is difficult to distinguish between the
two.62 Manuscript images of Lothar I (co-emperor with his father from 817, then alone 840–55)
in the Lothar Gospels (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 266, fol. 1v) and Charles
the Bald in the First Bible of Charles the Bald, both about 850, clearly show the headgear as a
crown. The double arches, intended to stabilize a functioning helmet against blows, quickly gave
way to a single one, which extended back from the forehead.
The Bügelkrone also identifies the Ottonian emperors, who appear in manuscript illuminations
similar to those of their Carolingian predecessors. In fact, the image of Henry II (king 1002–24;
emperor 1014–24) enthroned on folio 11v of his Sacramentary (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibli-
othek, Clm 4456) is closely modeled on that of Charles the Bald in the Codex aureus, although
two additional provinces carry similar laden horns in the upper spandrels. On the preceding
page, however, Christ crowns the standing king, holding the crown by the arch as he places it on
Henry’s head, while angels swoop in from the upper corners to hand the king the royal insignia,
the lance and the sword. Christ is also shown at the moment of placing oversized circular crowns
on the heads of Henry and his wife Kunigunde in the Pericopes of Henry II (Munich, Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4452, fol. 2r). Similar divine approval and the accompanying otherworldly
status of the emperor are made evident in the extraordinary image of Otto III (king 983–1002;
emperor 996–1002) in the Liuthar Gospels (Aachen, Cathedral Treasury), painted about the time
of Otto’s coronation at Charlemagne’s palace chapel at Aachen in 983 and perhaps presented to
364
Figure 26.4 Imperial insignia, including, at left, the Bügelkrone (second half of the tenth century with cross
from the early eleventh and arch from the reign of Konrad II [1024–39]); at right, the imperial orb (c. 1200),
and diagonally across the front, the imperial sword in its scabbard (middle third of the eleventh century).
Vienna, Imperial Treasury. Photo courtesy of KHM-Museumsverband.
the church on that occasion. On folio 16r Otto sits on a throne supported by Terra, a personifi-
cation of the Earth; the gold ground and the overlarge hand of God that extends from the upper
reaches of the image to crown him mark his location between heaven and earth. Two courtiers
stand beside and slightly below the throne, and at the bottom of the image, two military and two
ecclesiastical dignitaries. The image “reproduces an idealized political hierarchy.”63
Images in which God or his divine representative is physically present to crown the king may
depend on Byzantine precedents. An ivory knob known as the scepter of Leo VI (r. 886–912),
traditionally taken as the head of a scepter but more recently thought to be a handle for a box to
hold the crown of the Byzantine emperor, shows, on one side, the Virgin flanked by the emperor
and the archangel Gabriel, both holding the orb and scepter (Berlin, Museum für Spätantike
und Byzantinische Kunst).64 The queen of heaven has her hand on the earthly ruler’s crown. A
Constantinopolitan ivory from 945–49, now at the Musée des monnaies, médailles et antiques
365
Joan A. Holladay
in Paris, shows the emperor Romanos (r. 945–63) and the empress Eudokia (d. 949) standing on
either side of Christ, who places crowns on their heads. The marriage of the Byzantine princess
Theophanu to Otto II (king 961–83; emperor 967–83) in 972 brought objects like this one to
the west, and an ivory representing Christ crowning Otto and Theophanu in a similar fashion,
now at the Musée national du moyen âge in Paris, repeats closely the composition and details of
the slightly earlier Byzantine object. Other Ottonian objects portray the king humbling himself
before Christ; on the Basel antependium, probably a gift of Henry II to Basel cathedral in 1019
(Paris, Musée national du moyen âge, Cl. 2350), and in the Codex aureus of Henry III (king
1028–56; emperor 1046–56), the king and queen prostrate themselves before a Christ in dramat-
ically larger scale (Escorial, Cod. vit. 17, fol. 2v).
The Bügelkrone, the orb topped with a cross, and other objects, including the Coronation Gos-
pels, the purse reliquary of Saint Stephen, the Holy Lance, reliquary crosses, and numerous articles
of highly decorated ceremonial clothing, make up the imperial regalia, preserved today in the
Treasury in Vienna.65 That these objects, most of them gifts from past kings, played specific roles
in the coronation ceremony indicates that they were perceived to confer royal status. The efforts
of Charles IV (king of Bohemia 1347–78; German king 1346–78; emperor 1355–78) to acquire
them from the recalcitrant heirs of the dead antiking Louis of Bavaria (r. 1314–47, emperor
1328–47) indicate their importance for the legitimacy of the king, as does Charles’s decision to
build a special site to store and protect them, the chapel of the Holy Cross at the remote hilltop
castle of Karlštejn outside Prague.
The scabbard of the imperial sword (Vienna, Schatzkammer, Inv. Nr. XIII 17), dated in the
middle third of the eleventh century, establishes the pattern for the official portrayal of single
standing rulers: fourteen images in low relief showing crowned kings carrying scepters and orbs
prefigure the depiction of the antiking Rudolf of Swabia on his tomb in Merseburg cathedral,
dated about the time of his death in 1080.66 This cast bronze tomb, one of the very earliest with
a life-size effigy, establishes a type for royal gisants that would be used for centuries; the stone
tomb for Rudolf of Hapsburg (r. 1273–91) in Speyer Cathedral is just one example.67 French
tombs for members of the royal family vary this form slightly. The sixteen tomb effigies installed
for long-dead members of the Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian dynasties at Saint-Denis
in 1263–64 and the tombs for the last five kings of the Capetian dynasty and two of their queens
sculpted between 1271 and about 1328 showed them holding a scepter in one hand and looping
the fingers of the other through the cord of their mantle (Fig. 26.5).68 Despite differences in style,
these effigies and other sculptures of kings from about this date, such as the standing figure of
Saint Louis from Mainneville, dated about 1305–8, and the image of the youngest magus from the
Adoration on the choir screen at Notre-Dame in Paris from the second quarter of the fourteenth
century,69 suggest that the iconography of the French king in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries also included an ideal head type marked by a broad forehead, strong jaw line, knobby
chin, and slightly wavy chin-length hair with short bangs. At least by the twelfth century royal
women distinguished their public faces from those of their husbands and sons by employing dif-
ferently shaped seals, using innovative tomb types, and choosing burial at sites they had founded
and where they were likely to get more attention in the form of prayers than at Saint-Denis.70
Royal narratives
In the eleventh century kings started to appear in narratives that justified their status by their
deeds. The embroidery commonly known as the Bayeux Tapestry, made soon after the Norman
conquest of England in 1066, shows the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings, including
Edward the Confessor sending his emissary Harold to William of Normandy and receiving him
366
Figure 26.5 Tomb of Philip III, king of France (r. 1271–85), at Saint-Denis. 1297–1307, Paris. Photo
courtesy of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
Joan A. Holladay
at Westminster on his return and the king’s death. An illustrated manuscript of Peter of Eboli’s
Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de rebus Siculis, dated between 1195 and 1197 (Bern, Burgerbiblio-
thek, Cod.120.II), describes Henry VI’s conquest of Sicily, which he claimed through his wife; she
also plays a significant role in both text and image.71 The picture cycle known as Kaiser Heinrichs
Romfahrt (Koblenz, Landeshauptarchiv, MS 1 C 1) describes the election and the coronation in
Aachen of Henry VII (king 1308–13; emperor 1312–13) and his queen Margaret of Brabant, their
trip to Rome, and the imperial coronation in half-page scenes with short Latin rubrics.72 Two
manuscripts, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS 1346, from the mid-thirteenth century,
and the 1365 Coronation Book of Charles V, discussed earlier, describe in detail the steps taken to
anoint, crown, and install the king of France; the latter also includes a series of scenes describing the
coronation of the queen.73 The many manuscripts of the Grandes Chroniques de France produced
between about 1275 and 1500 show the kings of France in battle, at their coronations and wed-
dings, pronouncing on legal matters, meeting with their counterparts, and with saints in visions.74
The genealogical structure of these chronicle manuscripts, in which the narrative of one king’s
reign is followed by that of his successor, is given explicit form in the many royal genealogies
created at this time. In the Grand’ Salle at the palace in Paris, built between about 1308 and 1311,
life-size sculptures of the kings of France beginning with the mythical Pharamond stood against
the piers on the perimeter and down the center of the room, explaining the legitimate descent
of the ruling king, whose sculpted image was added to the cycle after his death, and providing
dynastic legitimacy and historical approbation for the official deeds of the living ruler carried out
on the floor below.75 Charles IV of Bohemia, who had lived in Paris as a youth between 1323 and
1330, adapted this model in a painted cycle of about 1355 that portrayed his ancestors from Noah
through Charlemagne, the Carolingians, and the dukes of Luxembourg, including his grandfather
Henry VII, in a similar reception space at Karlštejn castle.76 Genealogies in manuscripts and on
rolls look more like modern family trees. Between 1240 and 1253 Matthew Paris included two
pages of royal genealogy among the maps and other supplementary materials intended to help in
the reading of his Chronica majora (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 26, fols. ivv and viiir-v
and MS 16, fols. vr-v).77 A group of more than twenty rolls departing from Matthew’s schema is
preserved from the second half of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; at least some of
them were intended to explain the English kings’ claim to Scotland.78
Subtler means were also used to convey royal status. The bust-length portrait on panel iden-
tified by its inscription as John the Good, king of France from 1350 to 1364, has long been
considered one of the first examples of independent portraiture – defined as physiognomic
mapping of the facial features – since antiquity in the West. The king wears no crown, nor does
he carry any other obvious attribute marking his royal status. Stephen Perkinson has shown in a
subtle and convincing analysis, however, that many of the “representational strategies” used in the
image work together to convey the station of the figure represented.79 Among them he includes
the profile view, its use on medals, cameos, and coins going back to ancient Rome, and the way
that it creates distance between subject and viewer; the gold ground and its traditional reference
to a sacral space; the inscription, particularly its resemblance to that on John’s personal seal; and,
yes, realism as one possibility for symbolic representation, one that was appreciated for its novelty
at this date. The conjunction of these features may suggest a different viewing context than the
other, more official images examined here and an educated audience more intimately connected
to the king. The more obvious devices had a long life. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1806
portrait of Napoleon (Paris, Hôtel des Invalides, Musée de l’Armée, inv. no. 4; Ea 89/1) depicts
the emperor seated frontally in the manner of the Carolingian rulers in their Bibles and Psalters.
He holds the clearly recognizable scepter and hand of justice of Charles V, their use claiming his
place in the centuries-long line of legitimate French rulers.
368
Notes
A grant from the Sherry Smith Fund of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas
helped with the purchase of photographs for this article.
1 P.E. Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser und Könige in Bildern ihrer Zeit, vol. 1: Bis zur Mitte des 12. Jahrhun-
derts (751–1152), 2: Tafeln, Die Entwicklung des menschlichen Bildnisses, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1928); P.E.
Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser und Könige in Bildern ihrer Zeit 751–1190, Neuauflage unter Mitarbeit
von P. Berghaus, N. Gussone und F. Mütherich, ed. F. Mütherich (Munich, 1983); P.E. Schramm,
Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte vom dritten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert,
3 vols., Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, vols. 13/1–3 (Stuttgart, 1954–55); P.E. Schramm
and F. Mütherich, Denkmale der deutschen Könige und Kaiser, vol. 1: Ein Beitrag zur Herrschergeschichte von
Karl dem Großen bis Friedrich II. 768–1250, Veröffentlichungen des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte
in München, vol. 2 (Munich, 1962; 2nd expanded edition 1981); P.E. Schramm and H. Fillitz in Zusam-
menarbeit with F. Mütherich, Denkmale der deutschen Könige und Kaiser, vol. 2: Ein Beitrag zur Herr-
schergeschichte von Rudolf I. bis Maximilian I. 1273–1519, Veröffentlichungen des Zentralinstituts für
Kunstgeschichte in München, vol. 7 (Munich, 1978). Less well known but still important in this regard
are P.E. Schramm, Die zeitgenössischen Bildnisse Karls des Grossen: Mit einem Anhang über die Metallbullen der
Karolinger (Leipzig, 1928); and P.E. Schramm, Sphaira, Globus, Reichsapfel: Wanderung und Wandlung eines
Herrschaftszeichens von Caesar bis zu Elisabeth II.; Ein Beitrag zum “Nachleben” der Antike (Leipzig, 1958).
2 E. Garrison, Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture: The Artistic Patronage of Otto III and Henry II (Alder-
shot, 2012).
3 T.E.A. Dale, “The Individual, the Resurrected Body, and Romanesque Portraiture: The Tomb of Rudolf
von Schwaben in Merseburg,” Speculum 77 (2002), 707–43.
4 A number of works deal with the images of single kings. See, for example, G.S. Wright, “The Tomb
of Saint Louis,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971), 65–82, especially 77–80, for
consistency in images of Saint Louis after his canonization in 1297, and I. Rosario, Art and Propaganda:
Charles IV of Bohemia, 1346–1378 (Woodbridge, 2000), for the images of that ruler.
5 Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen (as in note 1), 2:380.
6 Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen, 1:128.
7 Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen, 1:135 and 378–79.
8 Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen, 1:137 and 2:379.
9 The British Museum website reiterates the frequent proposals that this may have been the burial site of
Raedwald (d. c. 625) or one of his successors as king of East Anglia: whoever was buried here “was of
exceptional status, enjoyed immense personal wealth and – more than likely – wielded great power”;
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/articles/w/who_was_buried_at_sutton_hoo.aspx
(accessed January 5, 2015).
11 Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen, 1:154–62.
14 Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen, 1:205 and 263–64.
15 C. Panella, “Insegne imperiali di Massenzio,” in Costantino 313 d.C: L’editto di Milano e il tempo della
tolleranza (Milan, 2012), 195–97, nos. 37–41. On the basis of the find site near the Curiae Veteris, a
sanctuary associated with Romulus, the stratigraphy, and the preciousness of the materials and quality of
the work, Panella has associated the scepters and the lances with which they were found with Maxentius
(r. 306–12), who may have buried them before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in October 312.
16 A. Gauert, “Das Szepter von Sutton Hoo,” in Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen (as in note 1), 1:275–78.
17 J. Simpson, “The King’s Whetstone,” Antiquity 53 (1979), 96–101.
18 J. Werner, “Frankish Royal Tombs in the Cathedrals of Cologne and Saint-Denis,” Antiquity 38 (1964),
206–07.
19 Charles the Bald and Lothar carry the long staff in the First Bible of Charles the Bald (Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, MS lat. 1, fol. 423r) and the Lothar Psalter (BNF, MS lat. 266, fol. 1v), respectively,
and Charles carries the scepter in the Psalter of Charles the Bald (BNF, MS lat. 1152, fol. 3v).
20 On these two manuscripts, see, respectively, A.D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes
Chroniques de France, 1274–1422 (Berkeley, 1991), Part III and pp. 244–48; and C.F. O’Meara, Monarchy
and Consent: The Coronation Book of Charles V of France (British Library, Ms. Cotton Tiberus B.VIII) (London/
Turnhout, 2000).
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Joan A. Holladay
21 D. Gaborit-Chopin, “Sceptre de Charles V dit ‘de Charlemagne,’” in Le trésor de Saint-Denis, ed. D.

Alcouffe (Paris, 1991), 264–71, no. 57.
22 M. Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Denys en France (Paris, 1706), pls. I and IV, respectively.
23 P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power (New Haven,
1995), 84.
24 Binski, Westminster Abbey, 84, feels that it is. See, however, E.G. Grimme, Der Aachener Domschatz, Aachener
Kunstblätter 42, 2nd ed. (1973), 76, no. 51.
26 Die Langobarden: Das Ende der Völkerwanderung (Bonn, 2008), 375, no. 186; M. McCormick, Eternal Victory:
Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1986), 289–93.
27 Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen (as in note 1), 1:326–31. D. Gaborit-Chopin, “Trône de Dagobert,” in Le trésor
de Saint-Denis (as in note 21), 63–68, no. 5, discusses the dates of the different parts of the throne, including
reworking under Abbot Suger (r. 1122–51) and by the goldsmith Master Gossoyn in 1294–96. She comes
down strongly in favor of the throne as a Carolingian work with later additions and renovations.
28 E. Panofsky (ed. and trans.), Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 2nd ed. by
G. Panofsky-Soergel (Princeton, 1979), 73.
31 C. Horch, “Königstuhl – Kaiserthron – Reliquiar: Forschungsgeschichte der Aachener sedes imperiales,”
Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 213 (2010), 84 and 94, points out that the first indi-
cation of a throne in this position dates to the Ottonian period and the first concrete association of the
throne with Charlemagne is twelfth-century. The seat of the throne was wood, understood to come
from Noah’s ark; J. Buchkremer, Dom zu Aachen: Beiträge zur Baugeschichte, vol. 2: Vom Königstuhl und
seiner Umgebung (Aachen, 1941), 12. It has been dated dendrochronologically to the period between 750
and 824, but a wooden dowel that holds the throne together is tenth-century; Horch, “Königstuhl,”
87. S. Schütte, “Der Aachener Thron,” in Krönungen: Könige in Aachen – Geschichte und Mythos, ed. M.
Kramp (Mainz, 2000), 1:219, points out that advances in dendrochronological technique have rendered
the Carolingian date of the seat untenable but cites other evidence for a Carolingian date for the throne
on pages 214, 216, and 220; see also Buchkremer, 37.
32 The rounded back of the throne at Aachen, which also recalls the description of Solomon’s throne, is
the result of a recutting after 1804.
33 H. Appuhn, “Zum Thron Karls des Grossen,” Aachener Kunstblätter 24–25 (1962–63): 127.
34 Buchkremer, Dom zu Aachen (as in note 31), 31–32. The 1999 discovery in the throne of a small copper gilt
nail, of the type that would have been used to fasten metal plates to the wood core of a reliquary, provides
support for Buchkremer’s thesis; see Schütte, “Der Aachener Thron” (as in note 31), 218 and 220.
35 Widukind of Corvey, Deeds of the Saxons, ed. B.S. Bachrach and D.S. Bachrach (Washington, DC,
2014), 64.
36 See, for example, the events described in the Coronation Book of Charles V of France; O’Meara, Monarchy
and Consent (as in note 20).
37 W. Rodwell, The Coronation Chair and Stone of Scone: History, Archaeology and Conservation (Oxford/
Oakville, CT, 2013), 36–39. The stone was returned to Scotland in 1996.
38 Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen (as in note 1), 1:213–22 and 2:384–85.
39 For the ring found in the grave of Queen Arnegunde at Saint-Denis, see Werner (as in note 18), 214.
40 Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen (as in note 1), 2:537–38 and 544.
42 On the former, see Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim, ed. P. Barnet, M. Brandt, and G. Lutz (New York,
2014), 88–89, no. 31. It has been repurposed as a crown for the reliquary bust of Saint Oswald (DS 23);
Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen, 2:544–45. On the latter, see Die Zeit der Staufer: Geschichte – Kunst – Kultur,
ed. R. Haussherr (Stuttgart, 1977), 1: no. 541; and R. Kahsnitz, “Armillae aus dem Umkreis Friedrich
Barbarossas,” Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (1979), 7–46. See also Die Zeit der Staufer, 1:
no. 540, for documentation on a lost pair from the imperial treasury. Both these enamel pairs, from the
Rhine-Meuse area, are associated with Frederick Barbarossa (r. 1152–90); the preserved pair has been
suggested as a gift from the emperor to the Grand Duke of Vladimir-Suzdal, Andrey Bogolyubsky
(r. 1154–74).
43 C. Neuman de Vegvar, “The Sutton Hoo Horns as Regalia,” in Sutton Hoo: Fifty Years After, ed. R. Farrell
and C. Neuman de Vegvar, American Early Medieval Studies, vol. 2 (Oxford, OH, 1992), 66.
44 D. Gaborit-Chopin, La statuette équestre de Charlemagne, Collection Solo, vol. 13 (Paris, 1999).
370
45 On the Carolingian use of not just any Roman forms but especially those associated with early Chris-
tian Rome of the fourth and fifth centuries, see R. Krautheimer, “The Carolingian Revival of Early
Christian Architecture,” Art Bulletin 24 (1942), 1–38.
46 W.J. Diebold, “Nos quoque morem illius imitari cupientes: Charles the Bald’s Evocation and Imitation
of Charlemagne,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 75 (1993), 271–300; Gaborit-Chopin, La statuette équestre
(as in note 44), 29–36. See, however, N. Girardin, “Charles le Chauve et les objets ‘de Charlemagne,’”
in Charlemagne et les objets: Des thésaurisations carolingiennes aux constructions mémorielles, ed. P. Cordez,
L’Atelier, vol. 5 (Bern, 2012), 115–34.
47 The manuscript measures 495 x 345 mm (19 1/2 × 13 1/2 in.). It is also known as the Vivian Bible, but
Dutton and Kessler argue against associating the manuscript with the count and lay abbot Vivian, who
probably wasn’t appointed by the king until the very visit at which the manuscript was given to him;
P.E. Dutton and H.L. Kessler, The Poetry and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bald, Recentiores:
Later Latin Texts and Contexts (Ann Arbor, 1997), 34–35.
48 Dutton and Kessler, The Poetry and Paintings (as in note 47), 81, identify these figures as virtues; see,
however, W. Diebold, “The Ruler Portrait of Charles the Bald in the S. Paolo Bible,” Art Bulletin 76
(1994), 11, note 27.
49 Dutton and Kessler, The Poetry and Paintings (as in note 47), 91.
50 Dutton and Kessler, The Poetry and Paintings, 97–99.
51 H. Schnitzler, “Das Kuppelmosaik der Aachener Pfalzkapelle,” Aachener Kunstblätter 29 (1964), 39, has
proposed that the manuscript page reproduces the mosaic directly and that the twenty-four elders orig-
inally adored the lamb rather than the figure of the seated Christ that appears in the nineteenth-century
version of the Carolingian mosaic now in situ. Diebold, “Nos quoque morem illius imitari cupientes”
(as in note 46): 276, note 14, is skeptical, citing H. Schrade, “Zum Kuppelmosaik der Pfalzkapelle und
zum Theoderich-Denkmal in Aachen,” Aachener Kunstblätter 30 (1965), 25–28, and W. Grape, “Kar-
olingische Kunst und Ikonoklasmus,” Aachener Kunstblätter 45 (1974), 54–55, and noting that Schnitzler’s
logic in arguing this point is circular.
52 Like that in the First Bible of Charles the Bald, this image was originally at the end of the book,
fol. 337v; it is now fol. 1r; see Diebold, “The Ruler Portrait” (as in note 48), 6, who cites H. Schade,
“Untersuchungen zu der karolingischen Bilderbibel zu St. Paul vor den Mauern in Rom,” PhD diss.,
Universität München (1954), 10.
53 Presumably his second wife, Richilde, whom he married in 870; F. Mütherich, “Carolingian Manuscript
Illumination in Rheims,” in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David, ed. K. van der
Horst, W. Noel, and W.C.M. Wüstefeld (Westrenen, 1996), 106.
54 Diebold, “The Ruler Portrait” (as in note 48), 9, and Mütherich, “Carolingian Manuscript Illumination”
(as in note 53), 318, publish slightly divergent translations of the text.
55 Diebold, “The Ruler Portrait” (as in note 48), 12, cites Schade, “Zum Kuppelmosaik” (as in note 51),
15–19. Diebold, 12–15, develops the idea that the similarities of these two images to numerous other
ruler images in the manuscript help the book, both the images and the text of the Bible, to function as
a mirror of princes.
56 The Codex aureus measures 42 × 33 cm (16 1/2 × 13 in.), the Bible of San Paolo 448 × 345 mm
(17 1/2 by 13 1/2 in.). The former is ascribed to the so-called Court School, although the location of
this group of scribes and artists is not known. The latter was made at Reims.
57 Diebold, “The Ruler Portrait” (as in note 48), 16, proposes that Hincmar, archbishop of Reims from 845
until 882, may have commissioned the manuscript, perhaps as a gift for Charles. The manuscript was
given to San Paolo during the reign of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85).
58 K. Dachs and E. Klemm, Thesaurus librorum: 425 Jahre Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; Ausstellung München 18.
August–1. Oktober 1983 (Munich, 1983), 32, no. 7.
59 An inscription on fol. 172r dates the Psalter during the lifetime of Charles’s wife Hermintrude, 842–69.
H.L. Kessler, The Illustrated Bibles from Tours, Studies in Manuscript Illumination, vol. 7 (Princeton, 1977),
138, suggests, following J. Gaehde, “The Painters of the Carolingian Bible Manuscript of San Paolo
fuori le mura in Rome,” PhD diss., New York University (1963), 1:130, that the orb in the San Paolo
Bible may be a “late addition.” On the difficulties in deciphering and interpreting the monogram on
the disk in the San Paolo Bible, see Diebold, “The Ruler Portrait” (as in note 48), 8, note 7.
60 Garrison, Ottonian Imperial Art (as in note 2), 64.
61 See, respectively, Schramm, Sphaira, Globus, Reichsapfel (as in note 1), figs. 61a and b, 79, 81c, 89a, and
76–77.
371
Joan A. Holladay
63 Garrison, Ottonian Imperial Art (as in note 2), 49.

64 K. Corrigan, “The Ivory Scepter of Leo VI: A Statement of Post-Iconoclastic Imperial Ideology,”
Art Bulletin 60 (1978), 407–16; A. Cutler, The Hand of the Master: Craftsmanship, Ivory, and Society
in Byzantium (9th–11th Centuries) (Princeton, 1994), 200–01; A. Cutler and J.-M. Spieser, Byzance
médiévale: 700–1204, L’univers des formes, vol. 41 (Paris, 1996), 120 and 126 and fig. 97. The object
measures about 10 × 10 × 2 cm.
65 Schramm, Denkmale (as in note 1), 1: nos. 13, 24, 62, 67, 145, 159, 180–83, 194, 197, 199, and 200–01.
66 See Schramm, Denkmale 1: nos. 159 and 162, respectively. On the tomb of Rudolf of Swabia, see also
Dale, “The Individual” (as in note 3), and B. Hinz, Das Grabdenkmal Rudolfs von Schwaben: Monument der
Propaganda und Paradigma der Gattung, kunststück (Frankfurt, 1996).
67 Ill. in Schramm, Denkmale (as in note 1), 2: no. 1.
68 Ill. in A. Erlande-Brandenburg, Le roi est mort: Étude sur les funérailles, les sépultures et les tombeaux des
rois de France jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle, Bibliothèque de la Société Française d’Archéologie, vol. 7
(Geneva, 1975), figs. 131–55 and 157–59; G. Schmidt, Gotische Bildwerke und ihre Meister (Vienna, 1992),
2: figs. 34, 42, 50, and 58; and E.A.R. Brown, Saint-Denis: La basilique, Le ciel et la pierre, vol. 6 (Saint-
Léger-Vauban, 2001), fig. 127.
69 Ill. respectively in P.-Y. Le Pogam and C. Vivet-Peclet (ed.), Saint Louis (Paris, 2014), fig. 27, and D. Gil-
lerman, The Clôture of Notre-Dame and Its Role in the Fourteenth-Century Choir, Outstanding Dissertations
in the Fine Arts (New York, 1977), fig. 13.
70 K. Nolan, Queens in Stone and Silver: The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France, New
Middle Ages (New York, 2009).
71 Petrus de Ebulo, Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de rebus Siculis: Codex 120 II der Burgerbibliothek Bern; Eine
Bilderchronik der Stauferzeit, ed. T. Kölzer und M. Stähli, trans. G. Becht-Jördens (Sigmaringen, 1994).
72 F.-J. Heyen, Kaiser Heinrichs Romfahrt: Die Bilderchronik von Kaiser Heinrich VII. und Kurfürst Balduin von
Luxemburg (1308–1313) (Boppard am Rhein, 1965); V. Kessel, “Il manoscritto del ‘Viaggio a Roma’
dell’imperatore Enrico VII,” in Il viaggio di Enrico VII in Italia, ed. M. Tosti-Croce, Le grandi opere (Città
di Castello, 1993), 13–27.
73 J. Le Goff, É. Palazzo, J.-C. Bonne, and M.-N. Colette, Le sacre royale à l’époque de saint Louis d’après le man-
uscrit 1346 de la BNF (Paris, 2001); C.R. Sherman, “The Queen in Charles V’s Coronation Book: Jeanne
de Bourbon and the Ordo Ad Reginam Benedicendam,” Viator 8 (1977), 255–97; and O’Meara, Monarchy
and Consent (as in note 20).
74 Hedeman, The Royal Image (as in note 20).
75 U. Bennert, “Art et propagande politique sous Philippe IV le Bel: Le cycle des rois de France dans la
Grand’ Salle du Palais de la Cité,” Revue de l’art 97 (1992), 46–59; and J.A. Holladay, “Kings, Notaries,
and Merchants: Audience and Image in the Grand’ Salle of the Palace at Paris,” in Ritual, Images, and Daily
Life: The Medieval Perspective, ed. G. Jaritz, Geschichte: Forschung und Wissenschaft, vol. 39 (Vienna,
2012), 75–93.
76 Rosario, Art and Propaganda (as in note 4), 27–30.
77 The folio numbers given here correspond to the new foliation of some five years ago; in older publica-
tions these folios are cited as iiir-v.
78 J.A. Holladay, “Charting the Past: Visual Configurations of Myth and History and the English Claim
to Scotland,” in Representing History, 900–1300: Art, Music, History, ed. R.A. Maxwell (University Park,
2010), 115–32.
79 S. Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago, 2009).
372
27
THE ICONOGRAPHY
OF ARCHITECTURE
The house of God is “the pillar and ground of truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). The Bible, with its many
allusions to the symbolic meaning of buildings, lays the basis for the iconographic interpretation
of medieval architecture. Christian authors such as Hrabanus Maurus (c. 780–856), Bernard of
Clairvaux (1090–1153), Abbot Suger (c. 1081–1151), and Durandus (c. 1230–1296) compiled
ideas concerning the symbolism of churches and their parts for their contemporaries. Modern
readings of medieval architectural iconography have been developed by historians of art, such as
Richard Krautheimer, Otto von Simson, Erwin Panofsky, and John Onians; historians of liturgy,
such as Margot Fassler; and historians of aesthetics, such as Umberto Eco. Two major topics
emerge from these studies: how medieval authors understood architecture, and how modern
scholars identify significance in medieval buildings. Furthermore, there are differing approaches
to the iconography of architecture: one is to identify the significance of each part of a build-
ing; the other is to identify qualities that characterize groups of related buildings. Krautheimer
pointed out that medieval authors did not write about the technical aspects of buildings; rather,
they were interested in the religious or symbolic qualities of architecture.1 He emphatically
asserted that “any medieval structure was meant to convey a meaning which transcends the visual
pattern of the structure”; hence, the study of a building’s symbolic content is as important as
the study of its formal or technical elements.2 One of the most important functions of a church
building, or of any religious art, is how it allows the visitor to experience God.3
By the fourth century, the Apostolic Constitutions had already introduced a symbolic read-
ing of the Church by using the simile of a ship.4 Bishops were told that they are like the com-
manders of a great ship, and that the church building should be long, with its head to the east,
like a ship – hence the term “nave” for the extended part of the building. But the systematic
explication of the mystical significance of architecture was initiated by Hrabanus Maurus’s De
universo (842–847).5 The ninth-century encyclopedia became one of “the intellectual founda-
tions of the Middle Ages” and had tremendous impact upon medieval architecture.6 Developing
the straightforward definitions of architecture and its parts offered by Isidore of Seville in his
Etymologies (c. 600–625), Hrabanus Maurus added symbolic readings to his compilation of defi-
nitions, “so that the diligent reader might find, placed together in this work, both their particular
nature, according to history, and their spiritual meaning, according to mystical understanding.”7
For example, a city, civitas, is defined by Isidore as “a multitude of people united by a bond of
community”; Hrabanus Maurus specifies that “When a city or town is understood in a good
373
way, it signifies the holy Church or a faithful soul. . . . When ‘city’ is used in a negative way, it
signifies spiritual Babylon, that is, the city of the devil.”8 For Isidore, the suburbs are the build-
ings that surround a city; for Hrabanus Maurus, they are catechumens, who are comparable to
suburbs insofar as they may begin to experience the city of God.9 Vici are neighborhoods with
no walls that may be part of a city or beyond one, according to Isidore, and are interpreted by
Hrabanus Maurus as the locations of pagans, out of contact with the people of God.10 Whereas
walls and ramparts are defined by Isidore as defense for a city, Hrabanus Maurus describes walls
as gatherings of righteous people, or the Lord himself protecting the Church everywhere, or even
as divine scripture.11 A castrum (fortress) or castellum (castle), located in a high place, is where men
live with angels, according to Hrabanus Maurus.12
Several definitions for buildings and their parts are applicable to elements of church architec-
ture. A house, domus, may be the dwelling of one family, but is comparable in concept to a city
as the residence of one population, or the world as the domicile of the human race, according
to Isidore.13 For Hrabanus Maurus, the house built by Solomon signifies the Church, which, in
its length, expresses the patience of the church in adversity, and, in its width, expresses charity to
not only those friendly to God but also those inimical people who will eventually be converted.
Its altitude expresses the hope of future retributions which make it possible to see the good
God has done on earth.14 In addition, he states that the house of our Lord may be the Church,
the celestial Jerusalem, or the hearts or bodies of the faithful.15 A similar definition is given to
“court” (aula), a spacious dwelling enclosed by four colonnades, according to Isidore, that may
signify the Church or the habitat of the Holy Spirit, according to Hrabanus Maurus. An atrium,
another spacious structure, this one flanked by three colonnades, is Christianized as signifying not
only the Church but also the entrance of the faithful.16 The definition of thalamus, bedroom or
wedding chamber, is amplified to include the womb of the Virgin Mary, in which human nature
was joined to the divine.17 Isidore explains “pavement” as that which is flattened beneath our
feet, to which Hrabanus Maurus adds that by “pavement” we understand humility.18 It is notable
that the later encyclopedia of Hrabanus Maurus does not add anything to the simple definition
by Isidore of “basilica”: originally described as the dwelling of a king, the term came to describe
the place where worship and sacrifices are offered to God, the king of all.19
The discussion of “temple” by Isidore, and then Hrabanus Maurus, is enlightening insofar as
understanding the orientation of most Christian churches.20 Both authors record that, on the
one hand, a temple is a spacious building, and that, on the other, the term is applied to places for
contemplation, counsel, and prayer. They state that the front of the building faces east, so that
whoever might pray would face in that direction. To achieve this orientation for a Christian
congregation, many churches came to place the altar to the east of a church, with the primary
entrance to the west, effectively directing the churchgoer to face eastward.
Because Hrabanus Maurus’s work is such a fundamental resource for the iconography of
architecture, it is worth dwelling upon his ideas further. He adds anthropomorphic qualities to
his definition of “temple,” describing it as both the body of the Lord, or the gathering of holy
people. The concept follows Paul’s words in 1 Cor 3:16–17: “You are the temple of God and . . .
the Spirit of God dwells in you.”21 Developing the architectural image, Hrabanus Maurus states
that Christ became a temple of God by the assumption of humanity, and that he is the chief cor-
ner stone on which the temple stands (Eph 2:20); its foundations are the apostles and prophets.
Hrabanus Maurus provides several related interpretations of “foundation,” including that, alle-
gorically, the foundation is Christ, or his catholic faith, over which the Church was constructed.
Abbot Suger (c. 1081–1151), in recording the reconstruction of the Church of Saint-Denis, calls
upon the same metaphor for foundation, using the words of Paul in 1 Cor. 3:11: “For other
foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid; which is Christ Jesus.”22
374
The iconography of architecture
In Hrabanus Maurus’s discussion of entrances, he interprets faith as a “fore-court” since it is

before the stairs and door of a church; faith makes it possible to enter the door of celestial life.23
The “portal” or “door” (porta) is given special attention by the Carolingian author, whereas for
Isidore, a portal is simply the place at which something may be carried in or out of a space.24
As described by Hrabanus Maurus, a portal is the instrument of transition to celestial life; it is
fundamental to the concept of passing into a state of grace. The whole structure of the portico
designates the faithful people of that time; the “door in the portico” expresses teachers, who
spread open for others the light of life and the door for entering to the Lord.
Durandus, in his thirteenth-century treatise Rationale Divinorum Officium, stated that his purpose
was to define what was universal in church ritual, not what was specific to particular places.25 While
much of his discussion of the structure of a church reflects the words of Isidore of Seville and Hra-
banus Maurus, his emphasis is on what he understood as the reasons for the variations of meaning in
the terminology. The word “church” (ecclesia), he writes, has two meanings: the physical structure,
and the gathering of the faithful.26 He expands the concept of the gathering to define “church”
as a “city, because of the communion of her holy citizens, being defended by the munitions of the
Scriptures, whereby heretics are kept off.”27 The material church, he explains, is constructed from
various stones, and the spiritual Church, of various men. The larger stones placed at the corners are
those whose lives are holier than others, and who retain the weaker elements.28 Durandus then lists
alternate terms in Greek and Latin (synagoga, congregatio, House of God, Body of Christ, and basilica)
to explore the range of possible meaning. The material, earthly, church, he writes, symbolizes the
Church in heaven. In discussing why the altar is oriented to the east, Durandus explains that we
should pray facing east because Christ is the eternal light of salvation.29
No element of a building is left without interpretation. The lime, sand, and water that form
cement are charity and good works bound together by the Holy Spirit.30 According to Duran-
dus, the arrangement of a church corresponds to the arrangement of the human body.31 This
concept had a long life and was illustrated by Francesco di Giorgio (1470–1506) in his treatise
on architecture in the fifteenth century (Fig. 27.1).32 According to Durandus, the apse with the
altar represents the head; the transepts, hands and arms; the nave, the rest of the body. Durandus
includes the view of Richard of Saint-Victor that the parts of the church reflect the spiritual
state of the faithful: the apse, the smallest, represents virgins, fewer in number than the rest; the
chancel, those who are continent; and the nave, the largest, represents the most numerous group,
the married. The four walls of the church are the doctrines of the four Evangelists.33 The height
is courage; the length, fortitude; the breadth, charity. Height may also be understood as hope for
retribution. In fact, he assigns various meanings to some parts of buildings, perhaps a reflection
of his having collected information from various sources. He goes on to list the foundations as
faith; the roof, charity; the four walls, the four cardinal virtues; the windows, cheerful hospitality
and charitable tenderness.34 The choir is so-named because of the chanting of the clergy.35
The sacristy, where priests robe before coming into public view, is identified with the womb of
the Virgin, from where Christ was born into the world.36 Crypts are identified with hermits.37 The
porch, or porta, as well as the actual door of the church is Christ, through whom one enters
Heaven.38 Towers signify priests and prelates of the Church, and their pinnacles, their heavenly
aspirations.39 The glass windows that keep out wind and rain but admit light are both scripture
and the senses of the body.40 Piers and columns are identified as the bishops and doctors who
sustain the Church with doctrine.41 The pavement is described as the foundation of faith, as the
poor in spirit, and as the multitude whose labor supports the Church.42 Church beams and the
vaults are the preachers who sustain the Church spiritually.43 The rail that separates the altar from
the choir corresponds to the separation of the celestial from the terrestrial.44 Roof tiles protect
the church from paynim, nonbelievers such as Jews and Muslims.45
375
Figure 27.1 Francesco di Giorgio. Ground plan of a church corresponding to the proportions of the
human figure. MS. Ashb. 361, c. 10v. Image courtesy of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence.
The cloister receives more extended treatment. Identified as the celestial paradise wherein the
clergy live together, the cloister separates them from the laity.46 It is also identified as a contem-
plative state in which the soul is separated from carnal thoughts and meditates only on the celes-
tial.47 The four sides of the cloister are interpreted by Durandus as contempt of self, contempt
of the world, love of God, and love of our neighbor. Each of these sides has a row of columns,
the bases of which are patience. The structures around the cloister garth are also given symbolic
readings. The chapter house is the secret of the heart; the refectory, love of meditation; the cellar
is scripture; and the dormitory, a clear conscience.48 The garden is characterized as the collection
of virtues; the well as God’s heavenly gifts.
Modern scholars describe the meanings not only of parts of buildings but also of larger
groups of related structures. One study, by John Onians, examined the significance of columns
and piers, but goes beyond identifying them as prophets and apostles to an examination of the
ways in which they are employed.49 He points out that, in contrast to the consistent repetition
376
of capitals and shafts in pagan temples, Christian architecture of the fourth century employed
a variety of column types in a single monument. Nevertheless, a great deal of logic went into
their positioning. For example, at S. Agnese fuori le mura (625–628), in Rome, the nave capitals
are chiefly Corinthian, with the exception of the two carrying the triumphal arch, which are
Composite.50 In like manner, the gallery capitals are Ionic, except for those at the triumphal arch.
The variations express the capitals’ functions in their different locations; thus, they are signifiers
of their functions.
The idea that columns in medieval architecture represent human figures occurs frequently in
the writings of medieval authors. To some extent, this is a legacy from Vitruvius (c. 80–70 BC –
after AD 15), who compared the architectural orders to the bodies of men and women.51 More
importantly, the Bible, especially the New Testament, is filled with architectural imagery; for
example, the apostles are described as columns in Galatians 2:9 (Jacobus, et Cephas, et Joannes,
qui videbantur columnae esse). Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians (2:20–22), provides an image of
the Church “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, In whom all the building,
being framed together, groweth up into an holy temple in the Lord.” Galatians 2:9 may lie behind
Hrabanus Maurus’s interpretation of columns as standing for the apostles, discussed earlier.52 In
addition, he must have known the biblical description of the Temple of Solomon (II Par. 3:17),
in which the two columns before the Temple were named Iachin and Boaz.53
The concept of the anthropomorphic column had far-reaching consequences in medieval
architecture. Before the rise of monumental sculpture, the anthropomorphic column was fre-
quently given life with painted or mosaic decoration. Byzantine churches, such as those in Thes-
salonika or Bethlehem, had images of saints on the columns within. Often, such figures were
painted around the apse, as at San Clemente of Tahull in Spain. Once monumental sculpture
began to develop, c. 1100, cloister piers were carved with reliefs of the Apostles, making them
the literal supports of the monastic structure at Moissac.54 The use of piers, in this case, reflected
the apostles, “strong in faith and works and contemplation,” described by Hrabanus Maurus.55 It
may have been Hrabanus Maurus’s conception of the column as human figure that led to Abbot
Suger’s creation of statue columns for the façade of his church of Saint-Denis in the 1140s.56
Following the encyclopedist, the undecorated columns around the apse of Saint-Denis were
conceived by Abbot Suger as the twelve apostles and prophets.57
Drawing on another source, Suger paraphrased John the Evangelist in the inscriptions on
the portal of Saint-Denis, writing that Christ was “the true door” – an image also employed by
Hrabanus Maurus.58 The significance of church portals has been extensively studied in light of
the concept of Christ as the door. Calvin Kendall pointed out that portals with the function of
directing the visitor usually place an image or symbol of Christ on the vertical axis of the door.59
Margot Fassler focused on the liturgical function of the portal as the ceremonial entrance to
the church.60 Perhaps the function and meaning of the portal are even better explored than the
meanings of other parts of the church interior.
Apart from identifying the significance of parts of buildings, the iconography of architecture
includes the study of groups of buildings that share design elements derived from an earlier
important structure. These could be designated as copies, but Krautheimer, who first addressed the
iconography of medieval architecture, pointed out that they are not exactly copies in the modern
sense of the word.61 Rather, before the thirteenth century, in order to evoke a venerable prototype,
architects would select distinctive elements of the model and apply them to other buildings in
various ways. A modern viewer might not perceive the connection between such models and
copies were it not for medieval texts which discuss how one building is based upon another. For
example, the tenth-century Miracula S. Maximi reports that the church at Germigny-des-Prés was
built like the palace chapel at Aachen (both completed in 805).62 As Krautheimer noted, these
377
two buildings look quite different from each other to a modern eye. The palace chapel at Aachen
is a domed octagonal structure with a sixteen-sided ambulatory and a gallery on the interior.
The church at Germigny-des-Prés was originally square, with a central tower and barrel vaulted
cross arms with domed corner bays. Apparently, they were comparable because they were both
centrally planned, crowned by a central tower, and dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
In order to identify the shared features of model and copy, Krautheimer focused on a distinc-
tive group of buildings: those derived from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, also known as the Anastasis (Resurrection) Rotunda, rose over the
site of Christ’s tomb, and was in use by 350.63 The large domed rotunda interior was surrounded
by an ambulatory, and had a three-story elevation with another arcaded gallery at the second
story (Fig. 27.2). Three apsidioles were added to the ambulatory in the seventh century. The
original circular design was traditional for late antique tombs, particularly imperial mausolea and
heroa.64 Furthermore, the choice of a circular plan may have been influenced by the idea that a
circle was a symbol of virtue.65
Buildings derived from the Anastasis Rotunda were constructed throughout Europe from the
fifth through the nineteenth centuries, so significant was its image. For example, the funerary
chapel of St. Michael in Fulda, constructed by Abbot Eigil between 820 and 822, recalls the
Rotunda in its arrangement of an altar surrounded by a circle of columns and an ambulatory. At
the center is a structure emulating the tomb of Christ. To make the connection clear, the altar
bears an inscription referring to Christ’s tomb: “Hoc altare deo dedicatum est maxime Christo/
Cuius hic tumulus nostra sepulcra juvat” (This altar is dedicated to Christ the Lord highest,
whose tomb benefits our sepulchers).66 The verses were written by the architectural theoretician
Figure 27.2 Anastasis Rotunda, Jerusalem, interior. Image courtesy of C. and E. V. del Álamo.
378
Hrabanus Maurus, who most likely contributed to the sophisticated design. In turn, Abbot Eigil
recorded that the circle symbolized the Church which never ends, and the hope of future life.67
Another example of derivation from the Anastasis Rotunda, not extant but known through
documents and excavations, was located at the Busdorf convent at Paderborn.68 Bishop Meinw-
erk sent Abbot Wino of Helmershausen to Jerusalem to measure the Rotunda in order to build
that copy, consecrated in 1036. The Rotunda at Lanleff, near Caen, and the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre at Cambridge are also included by Krautheimer as known copies of the Jerusalem
Rotunda, and such copies are often located in cemeteries, reflecting the memorial function of the
original. The features that identify these as copies are the round, or in rare instances polygonal,
structure, the ambulatory separated from the central space by columns, the arcaded gallery, the
central structure that houses a chapel, and the dedication to the Holy Sepulchre. These features
may be said to constitute the iconography of the Holy Sepulchre, but they do not necessarily
appear together in every case.
Not included in Krautheimer’s survey, but identified by Roger Stalley, is an example found
in Spain.69 On a rocky ledge outside of Segovia, the Church of La Vera Cruz, the true cross,
was originally dedicated as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Fig. 27.3). The location outside
the city and on rocks corresponds to the location of Calvary outside the original city limits of
Jerusalem. Designed and situated to evoke the Anastasis Rotunda, its construction is attributed
to the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, although this is not documented. Consecrated in 1208,
the twelve-sided building encloses a two-story structure at its core. Within the upper story is a
chapel where religious services take place. All these features were most likely chosen because the
church housed a relic of the True Cross.70
A different iconography informs the palace chapel of Charlemagne in Aachen. Unlike
St. Michael in Fulda, a burial chapel for clerics, the Aachen chapel was intended for the burial
of a king. The palace chapel was said to be built “after the model of the most wise Solomon”
according to Bishop Notger of Liège (972–1008).71 A model more accessible to us is in Ravenna,
which Charlemagne visited at least two times, the first in 787 when the palace chapel was
Figure 27.3 Church of La Vera Cruz, Segovia, interior. Image courtesy of C. and E. V. del Álamo.
379
begun.72 San Vitale was particularly interesting to Charlemagne because of its own status as a
chapel linked with a palace. For the emperor, it was not only the visual recreation of San Vitale
in Ravenna that was important but also the use of the very materials from which it was built.
They carried with them the aura of Justinian’s empire. With the permission of Pope Hadrian I,
Charlemagne removed marble columns, mosaics, and even an equestrian statue from Ravenna and
sent them to Aachen. The structural features shared by both imperial chapels are the polygonal
ground plan, domed and octagonal central space, an ambulatory at ground level and a gallery
above, a projecting apse at the east, a towered entrance porch, and an atrium.73 A key distinction
between buildings inspired by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and those inspired by San Vitale
lies in their shape. Almost all buildings invoking the church in Jerusalem are round, whereas
those invoking Ravenna are polygonal, an iconography, even if unarticulated.74
San Vitale was not the only centrally planned palatine chapel in Italy at the time of Charle-
magne. Additional examples are the eighth-century Church of Santa Sofia in Benevento, built
for Duke Arechi II, and the nonextant seventh-century Church of Santa Maria in Pertica (Pavia),
founded by Queen Rodelinda.75 Both have ambulatories defined by columns around the central
core, as does San Vitale. Most likely, the regal, iconographic implication of the centrally planned
church did not escape the notice of Charlemagne or of Odo of Metz, who built Charlemagne’s
chapel.
Included in the groups of buildings derived from the Anastasis Rotunda are baptisteries.76
In Krautheimer’s opinion, the traditional explanation that baptisteries derive from Roman baths
is inadequate because the round rooms in bath houses usually served as either steam baths or
cloakrooms, neither of which contained water basins, as a baptistery should. He also points out
that the oldest baptisteries known, such as the one at Dura-Europos (231), were rectilinear.77 It is
only after the mid-fourth century that circular or octagonal baptisteries eventually become the
norm – that is, after the Anastasis Rotunda was in use. The iconography associated with a funer-
ary monument was transferable to a baptistery because, theologically, one’s former self dies during
baptism, while a new, Christian self is born (Romans 6:3).78 The concept was expressed in church
ritual by performing baptisms on Easter, the celebration of the Resurrection. In the Orthodox
Baptistery at Ravenna, the fifth-century mosaic decoration represents paradisal foliage and saints
carrying the crown of martyrdom below the dome’s image of John the Baptist christening his
cousin. Furthermore, numerous baptisteries were constructed in or near cemeteries, including
those at the Cathedral of Aquilea; Johanneskirche at the Cathedral of Worms (not extant); and
San Giovanni, the cathedral baptistery in Florence. The Florentine baptistery housed at least three
burials, two bishops and the Anitpope John XXIII (d. 1419).79 In the Piazza del Duomo of Pisa,
also a burial ground, the baptistery is one of the closest copies of the Anastasis Rotunda known,
with its circular shape and interior surrounded by an ambulatory and gallery.80 It is notable that
many baptisteries of the eleventh and twelfth centuries include galleries even though galleries in
baptisteries had no liturgical or practical function. Krautheimer suggests that their purpose must
have been, in part, to evoke the Anastasis. They are iconographic.
There is yet one more type of structure to consider in the category of centrally planned
buildings: the cruciform mausoleum. The first of this kind may have been Constantine’s Church
of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, although this is far from certain.81 Justinian and his
architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus reconstructed the church in the form of
a cross in 536. Whether a rotunda or a cruciform church in the fourth century, Constantine was
buried under the central dome flanked by shrines to the apostles on either side, a visualization of
his desire to be seen as the thirteenth apostle. In Ravenna, Galla Placidia’s chapel, c. 425, followed
the typology of a cruciform mausoleum, now identified as an imperial format, but modified by
a slightly longer nave.82 This plan was typical of martyrs’ chapels in the area of Milan, capital of
380
the Western Roman Empire at the time, and therefore the Milanese detail in itself signified both
the imperial and the memorial.
What has not been explored as thoroughly as the iconography of the centrally planned church
is the iconography of the longitudinal basilica. This may be, in part, because it is so universal as a
church plan. The pre-Christian basilica was a secular building that served as a law court and place
of business.83 It was characterized by the nave, a large rectangular space; side aisles; and an apse,
a semicircular or squared space located at one end or sometimes both.84 In imperial basilicas, the
emperor would sit in the apse.85 Less prestigious basilicas emulated the practice by placing sculp-
tured images of the emperor in the apse where judges held court. As a building associated with
the cult of the emperor and also made for large gatherings, the basilica was a convenient model
for Christian churches. In fact, basilican churches carried over some iconographic features from
their model. Most notably, the Christian apse is decorated with paintings or mosaics depicting
the Lord, one of whose functions was as judge in the afterlife.
More worldly lords developed their own form of architectural symbolism in their castles and
fortresses “where men live with angels.”86 Walled towns, whether situated in high places or near
a well-traveled road, often incorporated a castle, church, and residences within the bailey.87 The
very function of the walls, defensive, could symbolize divine protection of the Church, as pro-
posed by Hrabanus Maurus.88 But they, and the seigneurial castles within, also express the obliga-
tion of the castellan to protect the local population, a secularization of God’s function described
in Psalm 17:3: “The Lord is my firmament, my refuge.” Sometimes, the walls literally become
“gatherings of righteous people,” as he put it, in cities with “hanging houses” such as Frías, Spain
(Fig. 27.4). Although the primary function of a castle was residential, the protective, military
function was expressed through the construction of towers and battlements, an iconography of
power. During the late Middle Ages, castles evolved from defensive to symbolic architecture,
Figure 27.4 Castle and town of Frías (Burgos). Image courtesy of C. and E. V. del Álamo.
381
palaces rather than fortresses.89 Eventually, many of the symbolic aspects of castle architecture
were adapted to express the power of a civic government, as in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena.
It is notable that details such as the open arcade on the ground floor and the tower derive not
only from local communal palaces but also from bishops’ palaces. In terms of scholarship, there
is a gender gap in castle studies, as Coulton noted, for most such studies are written by men.90
The representation of architecture in other media often conveys more than the setting for
a scene. These artworks sometimes seem informed by the iconography laid out by Hrabanus
Maurus. For example, the concept of a city as “people united by a bond of community” is
expressed in objects such as the altar frontal from Santo Domingo de Silos, or the architectural
canopies in choir stalls.91 Here, the bond of the apostles is visualized by the cityscape behind
them. Much the same concept may account for the architectural decoration in capital friezes,
such as that of the west façade of Chartres Cathedral. The delicate microarchitecture of reliquar-
ies and ivory carvings of the Virgin, as well as the larger tabernacles, was intended to signify the
Church as guardian of the sacred.92 In the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance, artists broaden
the iconography of architecture by drawing distinctions between Romanesque and Gothic.93
Romanesque expresses the old, the pre-Christian world. In the Belleville Breviary of 1324–1326,
Jean Pucelle represents the figure of Synagoga standing next to the wreckage of a building with
rounded Romanesque windows beneath the calendar of December.94 In the Bladelin altarpiece
of c. 1450, Rogier van der Weyden set the Nativity in a crumbling stable with rounded Roman-
esque windows, an expression of the birth of a new era.95 On the other hand, the miraculous
vision of the Madonna in a Church, by Jan van Eyck, c. 1438–1440, depicts the Virgin and Child
in luminous Gothic architecture, symbolic of the new era.96 What seems clear from these images
is that not only the makers of the art but also a good part of their audience understood the con-
ceptual significance of architecture.
Notes
1 R. Krautheimer, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture,’” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), 1–33.
2 Krautheimer, “Iconography” (as in note 1), 20; see also P. Crossley, “Medieval Architecture and Its Mean-
ing: The Limits of Iconography,” Burlington Magazine 130, no. 1019 (February 1988), 116–21, esp. 121.
3 U. Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 1959, trans. H. Bredin (New Haven/London, 1986), 15.
4 The Apostolic Constitutions, vol. 7, ed. J. Donaldson, A. Roberts, A. Cleveland Coxe, and Ante-Nicene
Fathers, trans. J. Donaldson (Buffalo, 1886), 2, 57.
5 Hrabanus Maurus, De Universo: The Peculiar Properties of Words and Their Mystical Significance, trans. P.
Throop, 2 vols. (Charlotte, 2009) (hereafter referred to as Throop); in Latin in Pat. Lat. 111.
6 J. Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Prince-
ton, 1988), 74–76.
7 Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, in Throop (as in note 5), vol. 1, v.
8 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:2,1, in Isidore of Seville, Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. J.A. Beach,
S.A. Barney, and O. Berghof (Cambridge/New York, 2002) (hereafter referred to as Beach et al.) 305;
Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, in Throop (as in note 5), 63.
9 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:2,16 in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 379; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo,
in Throop (as in note 5), 63.
10 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:2,16 in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 306; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo,
11 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:2,17–18, in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 306; Hrabanus Maurus, De uni-
verso, in Throop (as in note 5), 65.
12 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:2,13, in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 306; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo,
13 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:3,1, in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 309. See also F. Ohly, “Haus als Met-
apher,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 13 (1986), 905–1063.
382
14 Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, in Throop (as in note 5), 80–81.

15 Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, in Throop (as in note 5), 71.
16 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:3,4, in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 308; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, in
Throop (as in note 5), 71.
17 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:3,4, in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 308; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, in
Throop (as in note 5), 72.
18 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 19:10, 25, in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 379; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo
14:23, in Throop (as in note 5), 86.
19 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 19:10, 25, in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 310; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo
20 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:4,7, in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 309; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo
21 Hrabanus Maurus, De universo 14:23, in Throop (as in note 5), 80.
22 Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 1946, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky
(Princeton, 1979), 88–89, 2nd ed.
23 Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, in Throop (as in note 5), 81.
24 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 15:2,22, in Beach et al. (as in note 8), 306; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo
14:23, in Throop (as in note 5), 82; M.E. Fassler, “Liturgy and Sacred History in the Twelfth-Century
Tympana at Chartres,” The Art Bulletin 75:3 (September 1993), 499–520.
25 William Durandus, “Proeme,” no. 16, in William Durandus, Churches and Church Ornaments: Rationale
Divinorum Officiorum, ed. John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb (New York, 1893), 10.
26 Durandus, Churches 1, 1 (as in note 25), 12.
29 Durandus, Churches 1, 8; Appendix B (as in note 25), 16, 177–79.
30 Durandus, Churches 1, 10 (as in note 25), 17–18.
32 Trattato di architettura militare e civile, di idrostatica, geometria e prospettiva, libri di mulini e macchine, trattato di
fortificazione e macchine militari di Leonardo da Vinci, MS 361, c. 10 b, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence;
published as: Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattato Di Architettura Civile e Militare, ed. Cesare Saluzzo
(Turin, 1841). The text in question is Book 4, chapter 4, p. 229. Although the treatise is attributed to
Leonardo in the title, the treatise is by Francesco di Giorgio, who was both architect and painter.
34 Durandus, Churches 1, 16–17 (as in note 25), 20.
38 Durandus, Churches 1, 20,26 (as in note 25), 22, 24. See also Fassler, “Liturgy and Sacred History”
(as in note 25).
44 Durandus, Churches 1, 31 (as in note 25).
45 Durandus, Churches 1, 36, 42 (as in note 25), 27, 29.
47 In addition to Durandus: C. Whitehead, “Making a Cloister of the Soul in Medieval Religious Treatises,”
Medium Aevum 47:1 (1998), 1–29.
49 Onians, Bearers of Meaning (as in note 6), esp. chapter 6, “The Column in the Christian Middle Ages,”
74–90.
50 Onians, Bearers of Meaning (as in note 6), 65–66.
51 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, book 4:1, 6–7, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge/London,
1914), 103–04. See also Onians, Bearers of Meaning (as in note 6), 34.
52 Hrabanus Maurus, De universo 14:23, in Throop, vol. 2 (as in note 5), 88. “the columns [which stand for
the apostles] stood in the portico before the doors of the Temple.”
383
53 Onians, Bearers of Meaning (as in note 6), 75, cites R. Kreusch, “Kirche, Atrium und Portikus der
Aachener Pfalz,” Karl der Grosse 3 (1965), 478.
54 L. Pressouyre, “St. Bernard to St. Francis: Monastic ideals and Iconographic Programs in the Clois-
ter,” Gesta 12 (1973), 71–92, esp. 74–76; I.H. Forsyth, “The Vita Apostolica and Romanesque Sculp-
ture: Some Preliminary Observations,” Gesta 25:1 (1986), 75–82; E. Valdez del Álamo, “The Populated
Porch: Figures and Foliage in Spanish Sculpture Before the Pórtico de la Gloria,” in Santiago de Com-
postela: Pilgerarchitektur und Bildliche Repräsentation in Neuer Perspektive/ Pilgrims Architecture and Pictorial
Concepts in a New Perspective, ed. K. Rheidt and B. Nicolai (Bern/Berlin/Brussels/Frankfurt/New York/
Oxford/Vienna, 2015), 199–211, esp. 201. Some of the foregoing material is derived from this article.
55 Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, in Throop (as in note 5), 88; cited by Onians, Bearers of Meaning (as in
note 6), 85.
56 Onians, Bearers of Meaning (as in note 6), 88.
57 Onians, Bearers of Meaning (as in note 6), 86.
58 Onians, Bearers of Meaning (as in note 6), 75, 88. The portal inscription reads: “the work/Should brighten
the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights,/ To the True Light where Christ is the [T]rue
[D]oor.” See P.L. Gerson, “Suger as Iconographer,” in Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium, ed. P.L.
Gerson (New York, 1986), 186.
59 C. Kendall, The Allegory of the Church: Romanesque Portals and Their Verse Inscriptions (Toronto/Buffalo/
London, 1998), 68.
60 M.E. Fassler, “Liturgy and Sacred History” (as in note 24); idem, Virgin of Chartres: Making History through
Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven, 2010).
61 Krautheimer, “Iconography” (as in note 1), 2–3, 20. See also J.H. Shaffer, “Recreating the Past: Aachen
and the Problem of the Architectural Copy,” PhD diss., Art History and Archaeology, Columbia Uni-
versity (1992).
62 J.v. Schlosser, Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der Karolingischen Kunst, Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte
und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, n.F., vol. 4 (Vienna, 1892), no. 682, cited by Krau-
theimer, “Iconography” (as in note 1), 2; see also 15–16.
63 Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 1965, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, 1975), 77.
64 Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (as in note 63), 66.
65 Krautheimer, “Iconography” (as in note 1), 9.
66 Hrabanus Maurus, “Tituli et inscriptiones: Altarium Basilicae S. Salvatoris Fuldensis, 43: In caemeterio
fratrum in Ecclesia sancti Michaelis, in primo altare” in Pat. Lat. 112: 1624–1625; cited erroneously by
Krautheimer, “Iconography” (as in note 1), 4, note 1.
69 R. Stalley, Early Medieval Architecture, Oxford History of Art (Oxford/New York, 1999), 78.
70 The relic was recently translated to another location for safety, as there have been numerous attempts to
steal it.
71 Notger, in G. Bandmann, “Die Vorbilder der Aachener Pfalzkapelle,” Karl der Grosse, vol. 3, 1965, 452,
cited by Onians, Bearers of Meaning (as in note 6), 76.
72 A. Ranaldi and P. Novara, “Carlo Magno, Ravenna e Aquisgrana,” in Karl der Grosse: Orte der Macht
(Dresden, 2014), 118–22, esp. 118; “Charlemagne, Italy and Ravenna,” Imperiituro: Renovatio Imperii:
Ravenna Nell’Europa Ottoniana = Ravenna in Ottonian Europe, exh. cat., ed. M.P. Guermandi and S. Urbini
(Bologna, 2014), 114–21, esp. 114, 118; W.E. Kleinbauer, “Charlemagne’s Palace Chapel at Aachen and
Its Copies,” Gesta 4 (Spring 1965), 2–11, esp. 3.
73 Kleinbauer, “Charlemagne’s Palace Chapel” (as in note 72), 3.
74 Kleinbauer, “Charlemagne’s Palace Chapel” (as in note 72), 6.
75 A. Ranaldi and P. Novara, “Carlo Magno” (as in note 72), 118.
76 R. Krautheimer, “Iconography” (as in note 1), 21.
77 R. Krautheimer, “Iconography” (as in note 1), 22.
78 Krautheimer, “Iconography” (as in note 1), 26–28, 30–31; see also Anita S. Stauffer, “The Font as Sym-
bol: A Place for Burial, Birth and Bath,” Liturgy 5:4 (1986), 50–57.
80 Krautheimer, “Iconography” (as in note 1), 31–32.
81 Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (as in note 63), 72–73, and comments in notes 4
and 6 on 489; J. Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph, Oxford History of Art (Oxford/New
York, 1998), 164–65; in addition: Constantine of Rhodes, On Constantinople and the Church of the Holy
384
Apostles: With a New Edition of the Greek Text by Ioannis Vassis, ed. L. James (Burlington, 2012), which
I have not yet seen.
84 Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (as in note 63), 43, 98–99.
86 C.L.H. Coulson, “Structural Symbolism in Medieval Castle Architecture,” Journal of the British Archaeo-
logical Association 132 (1979), 73–90; see note 12.
87 C.L.H. Coulson, Castles in Medieval Society: Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the Central Middle
Ages (Oxford/New York, 2003), 252.
88 See note 11.
89 N. Coldstream, Medieval Architecture, Oxford History of Art (Oxford, 2002), 165–73.
90 Coulson, Castles (as in note 87), 5.
91 The Art of Medieval Spain A.D. 500–1200 (New York, 1993), 277–79.
92 Coldstream, Medieval Architecture (as in note 89), 162–65.
93 E. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Characteristics, 1953, 2 vols. (New York/Evanston/
San Francisco/London, 1971), 1: 134–40, esp. 134–5.
94 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (as in note 93), 2, fig. 11, pl. 5.
95 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (as in note 93), 2, fig. 337, pl. 198.
96 Oil on oak panel, 31 × 14 cm (12.25 × 5.5 in), Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, in Panofsky, Early Netherlandish
Painting (as in note 93), 2, pl. 109, fig. 236.
385
28
HERALDIC IMAGERY,
DEFINITION, AND PRINCIPLES
Laurent Hablot
At the start of the twelfth century, a new system of emblematic signage which is now called
heraldry is first found among the original high Carolingian aristocracy of the northeast quarter
of Europe. It must have been clear from the outset that the use of these signs promised a bright
future. The motifs, devices, or “connaissances” in Anglo-Norman, based on highly colored sim-
ple patterns, were applied to different pieces of military equipment and became, from the 1140s
onwards, a unique identifier for all the major Western family lines and those related to them.
These motifs were probably based on older emblematic practices, which are still not fully
understood. In the twelfth century, however, they certainly met the specific needs of the newly
structured feudal society which was developing. In the early thirteenth century, signs of identity,
kinship, or authority were needed and “arms” or “coat of arms” became the preferred means of
emblematic representation for territorial princes.
Seals and literary sources show that emblems are first found on symbolically important pieces
of feudal authority and military uniform, such as the banner or the horse covering, or on any
of the other material trappings of lordship or the manor. It was not long before such signs came
to be found on specific pieces of military equipment, such as the shield, which was used by all
who fought from the horse, especially the new military and social elite. It is likely that the use
of heraldic emblems increased thanks to the many large tournaments in northern France, which
were the meeting point for Western nobility. It is also likely that large-scale military endeavors,
such as the Crusades, encouraged the spread of these motifs throughout Western society. By the
middle of the thirteenth century almost all the elite of Western society had coats of arms.
The use of arms was restricted on the medieval battlefield and it was mainly the heads of
armies and lords who could fight under their heraldic signs, around which gathered their troops.
Other visual signs and sounds, such as scarves and war cries, made opponents stand out. As such,
it was mainly in tournaments that coats of arms served as symbols of personal identity.
It was in a civil context that arms became signs of lordly authority, and were adopted by all
who claimed them: the lords or domini were the first to use such signs, but noncombatants, both
male and female, whether ladies, bishops, or simply rich citizens, all used them. Corporations
ranging from religious communities, abbeys, and chapters to secular groups from the cities to the
guilds all had their own signs. By the end of the thirteenth century, a large part of the European
population had coats of arms, and these were seen as a standard means of social identity. Their
use was no longer restricted to the nobility.
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Emblems are ubiquitous in medieval visual culture and not only do they identify but also
they organize and prioritize space. Arms, attached to public buildings, fortifications, places of
worship, on the inside as well as the exterior, in public spaces as well as in the private domain, on
public or personal property, can all be used to identify and describe. Heraldry has now become
a key element in the vocabulary of ornament and has been such from 1250 onwards for most of
the Western world.
This expansion in the use of the heraldic image contradicts its original elite social function
and its political-legal values, and has led to the development of fringe elements who have tried to
single out particular motifs and to individualize coats of arms still further. Heraldic shields could
be extended by adding a warrior, with a helmet and crest. From the early fourteenth century,
kings and princes added a crown as a material symbol of their sovereign authority. Supporters
(characters, animals, plants, or objects) were sometimes added and are shown holding the shield
on both sides. Text, such as the battle cry or the cri d’armes, could be added above the shield and,
from the mid-fourteenth century onwards, a set of new emblematic signs, the badge, not only
competes with but also completes this expansion.
Although most of these heraldic components were in place by the end of the twelfth century,
it is clear that their origins are much older. Even if it is possible to find individual iconographic
elements in older silks or oriental ivories, it is still not possible to identify older heraldic systems
among the barbarian kingdoms or the Carolingian culture which could have inspired this new
system of identification. Probably not created ex nihilo, the heraldic image has to be seen as a
product of the Roman period. Heraldry has all the key elements of that style, including the
hieratic stylization of the figures, the prioritization of the idea over form, the love of repetitive
geometric patterns, the use of vivid and saturated colors, which are ordered according to specific
rules, a horror vacui, the use of levels and planes, and a fixed hierarchy of proportions. Even today,
these basic principles still control the development of any heraldic design and contribute to the
uniqueness of these images, especially their graphic consistency and semiotic relevance.
It is still surprising to see how quickly and how consistently heraldry was adopted throughout
Europe in just a few decades. It followed rigorous rules with equal success everywhere and has
to be seen as a reflection of medieval Western culture. By rigorously sticking to the principles of
construction, its ability to adapt to the emblematic needs of its users throughout time and space
was ensured. Even if this kind of image is a relatively simple composition, colored, and more often
than not enclosed within a shield, it can still be a relatively complex creation. The compositions
always follow a limited number of rules that determine the proportions used, the use of colors,
the stylization of the figures, and the placement of the various elements. This is what is called the
blazon in modern terminology. Conformity in these compositions, in what could be a limitless
field of possibilities, guarantees its success. From the signaletic’s point of view, heraldry is semi-
ologically discursive and has an astonishing mnemonic capacity. The coat of arms is therefore a
performative image.
A specific vocabulary existed to describe coats of arms, and this was based on French-Roman
terms, even when used in England. This vernacular vocabulary – the so-called language of
blazon – was used from the late twelfth century to describe the image and constantly developed.
In the Middle Ages there is no other type of image that has such a vocabulary except perhaps
textiles and furs. When this vocabulary was used to describe a coat of arms, it was not necessary
to draw it. For example, in the tournament, the heraldic description was often shouted instead of
actually showing the shield with the coat of arms.
In the Middle Ages, the coat of arms had to change to answer heraldic demands. The main
requirement was to emblematically distinguish members of a group, all of whom came under the
same heraldic sign, without affecting the common image. Therefore, in most European countries,
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different branches of the same family kept the same arms, but new members introduced mod-
ifications, which were indicted by color inversion or the addition of a border, band, or small
elements, such as a label (specific heraldic charge), star, or crescent.
From the fourteenth century onwards, the heraldic emblem became a sign not only of the
individual but also of his family or fiefdom, and this sometimes led to several distinct coats of
arms being appended to the same shield. These were governed according to relatively standard-
ized rules, relating to ownership, kinship, or feudal service. A bride, for example, usually had a
shield parti per pale – that is, vertically divided into two parts – having the husband’s arms on the
left and those of her father to the right. The husband of an heiress can add those of his father in
law to his own arms in what is called a quartered combination – that means it is divided into four
parts – each of which contains duplicate coat of arms. But many other combined forms existed.
At the end of the fifteenth century, the use of combined arms with several quarters became a
genealogical or political tool and a means of social representation for the European high nobility
(in fact, to have several arms in the same shield was a way of showing all the families you were
linked with), especially if they were prestigious. Some princes used the combined arms to show
the arms of the kingdoms they pretended to own. These combined coats of arms may look some-
what confused, but they show heraldic iconography at its maximum use and potential.
The arms of Jeanne de Laval (1433–1498), wife of King René of Anjou, which are attached to
one of her manuscripts, illustrate some of these governing principles (Fig. 28.1).1 In this crowned
coat of arms, Jeanne de Laval is effectively shown as Duchess of Anjou and Queen of Naples and
Jerusalem, along with her husband. Here, the arms of her husband are combined with those of
her father in a relatively sophisticated combination.
Figure 28.1 Jeanne de Laval’s coat of arms showing a marshalling of arms. Represented are the six arms
of her husband, René d’Anjou, as well as her own coat of arms, together with four different coats of arms.
Next to the crowned shield – she is queen of Sicily – her badge of two linked turtledoves is symbolic of
eternal love and fidelity. Jeanne de Laval Psalter, Poitiers, Médiathèque François Mitterrand, Ms. 41, f. 22r.
Image courtesy of the Médiathèque François Mitterand, Poitiers.
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Every one of the ten coats of arms painted here follows the rules of heraldic composition
and is relatively simple. The left half has René of Anjou’s coat of arms of seven parts, which he
started using in 1443. This shows – from the top – his three kingdoms of Hungary (Barry of
eight gules and argent), Naples (France a label gules), and Jerusalem (Argent, a cross potent between
four plain crosslets or); at the bottom, on the left side there are the arms of the duchies of Anjou
(France a border gules), Bar (Azure crusily fitchy, two barbels addorsed or), and the Kingdom of Aragon
(Or four pallets gules). On the right side, Jeanne de Laval’s family’s coat of arms consisting of the
Montmorency-Laval (Or a cross gules charged with five scallops argent between twelve eagles azur) and
those of her grandmother from the royal family (France and Evreux: France a bend componny
argent and gules) are found. In the middle, the arms of the lordship of Vitré (gules a lion argent
crowned or) are represented. This heraldic coat of arms also speaks to us about the culture of those
who saw it and who must have been able to identify and recognize the symbols of the Duke
and Duchess of Anjou, and to understand all the information embedded in the details of these
different coats of arms.
Para-heraldic signs
The para-heraldic systems that developed from the middle of the thirteenth century answered
some formal and functional needs within heraldry.
Crests that adorn the tops of helmets identified arms shared among a family group. Here, the
arms were represented in a freer and looser manner, without the stylistic or chromatic constraints
that usually governed heraldry. They are usually accompanied by motifs not commonly found
elsewhere in the heraldic repertoire, including fantastic or evil figures, as well as other fanciful
compositions. Some of these crests indicated membership of a particular knightly fraternity,
but only a few of them really existed. Most of the crests shown in iconographic sources, such
as armorials, existed only as drawings or in verbal descriptions, and were occasionally used to
decorate heraldic works.
Supporters, figures which sometimes support the heraldic shield, fulfilled the same purpose and
were yet another feature used to individualize a shared coat of arms. Some of the supporters have
a symbolic or emblematic meaning but most of them are simply part of the general evolution in
heraldic aesthetics. Here, it is possible to find wild men, bridesmaids, or angels, all taken from the
medieval imagination and each having symbolic meaning.
The use of heraldic mottoes is more complex. The ritual and legal purpose of cries in
medieval society is well known. Among the many kinds of exclamations or declarations, some
were used in armed conflicts, battles, tournaments, or civil wars and these were the war cries.
These vocal declarations were seen as a means of recognition on the battlefield and some of
them were used over time and space, from the Norman armies at Hastings to the companies
of the late Middle Ages. Typical of such a motto is “Montjoie!” which was shouted aloud by
the French, and heard as early as the battle of Mortemer in 1054 but still used at the end of
the fifteenth century. Paralleling these collective war cries, the heraldic system produced
territorial or heraldic cries or mottoes as a way of vocally transmitting the political, legal, or
military identity of the owner of the arms. These cries were inspired and based on themes
associated with the fiefdom and could include the name of the land, the family name, the ban-
ner, the patron saint, or specific military actions relating to the family. During the Hundred
Years War, the two types of cries – the war and the heraldic – coexisted on the battlefield.
Some of those cries were linked to other types of signs, such as crosses, or to specific cults as,
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in England, where St. George’s cross and the cry for the royal armies are united. At the end
of the Middle Ages, these national cries continued to be formally used. At the same time,
heraldic representations of sovereigns or lesser lords used the war cry around the shield as a
claim to military and lordly prerogatives.
Badges or heraldic devices

Badges developed in much the same way as crests or supporters, but they gradually estab-
lished their own emblematic system that developed in the princely courts of the later Middle
Ages, the Hundred Years War, and the national and international conflicts that resulted. Even
though badges are related to the heraldic system, with which they have close ties, they are
nevertheless separate as regards function and purpose. They complement rather than com-
pete with arms, and can be seen to fill a number of gaps or deficiencies in heraldry itself.
These identity signs, which could be freely chosen by a prince, were as much a symbol that
referred to his person as one which expressed his ideals. They allowed him to mark or iden-
tify his property instead of entering into representation. Heraldic devices were also signs of
power that the prince could share with his carefully chosen faithful servants but badges were
mostly political and military signs. Transmitting a real message, they allowed propaganda to
be shared and identified the opponents in political and civil conflicts. Whether deployed
on standards, or displayed on clothes or liveries, they also can be seen to have structured the
battlefield.
From the formal point of view, the badge is a figurative sign and employs an iconography
of animals, plants, or objects, which are often in color, and realistically represented according
to the canons of the Gothic style. They illustrate the tastes of the time for plants, or exotic or
fantastic animals which were ignored by formal heraldry, which used more technical tools or
religious symbols.
These motifs were often accompanied by short sentences that are called “mottoes” (French
le mot). Sometimes, this motto does nothing more than describe the symbolic content of the
emblem, but it can also act as a fully fledged emblem in itself and can be associated with other
badges. These figures, badges, and mottoes frequently have colors that are different to those
used in heraldry. Sometimes these colors make up the field on which the badges are depicted,
and have their own emblematic and symbolic meaning. Such colors were used to color flags –
especially standards, liveries, and uniforms – and to convey the dominant colors of the badge’s
owner. These three elements are sometimes supplemented by letters that can be monogrammed
and have the name or initials of the main figure or those of the husband and wife, or else a
combination of words or numbers whose enigmatic meaning is often impossible to unravel.
Besides their emblematic purpose, which unites figures to specific users, these heraldic devices
can also have their own symbolic and often polysemic meaning whose interpretation stems
from the courtly culture of the late Middle Ages and reflects the knowledge of the designer,
user, and reader.
A typical example is the testone of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1466 d. 1476) (Fig. 28.2). This
consists of his arms surmounted by his crest representing the Biscia – a monstrous snake spitting
a man – as well as a monogram of GZM and the tizzone badge, a flaming stick from which two
buckets hang. This emblem was adopted by Gian Galeazzo Visconti around 1390, and symbol-
izes the contrasting water and fire. Temperance is also shown – for example, by the horse bit
of Charles VIII or the salamander in flames which spews water on Francis I. The device of the
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Heraldic imagery
Figure 28.2 The testone of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1466 d. 1476) shows his portrait (the name of this coin
means portrait). His arms are surmounted by his crest showing the Biscia – a monstrous snake spitting at
a man – as well as his monogram GZM and the tizzone badge, of a flaming stick from which two buckets
hang, a possible symbol of temperance. Image courtesy of www.cgb.fr.
two turtles of Jeanne de Laval (Fig. 28.1), which are linked by their neck, expresses the virtue of
fidelity as found in the bestiaries.
From the late fourteenth century, most European rulers used this new way of representing
identity and exploited its personal as well as its collective potential. Signs, which were used
originally to unite a small group of faithful companions, were gradually shared by all those
known to the prince in livery companies. The most formal and best known of these badges
and livery companies were the so-called orders of chivalry. Besides the Order of the Garter
or that of the Golden Fleece, there were many other livery companies, orders, emprises – all
with their own and flexible heraldic device. In themselves, badges contrasted with official,
feudal, and military heraldry. Sources refer to these as “shield of peace” to describe signs
carrying badges as distinct from coats of arms. Many princes also adopted several of these
badges, which they frequently changed throughout their lifetime. The use of badges was
not restricted to princes or ladies, and many courtiers and court officials also adopted these
emblematic practices.
One picture, several styles

Despite what is clearly a complex evolution, heraldic images traversed centuries and styles.
Created in Roman time, the heraldic image invades the scene in the early thirteenth century
and flourished in the Gothic period. It became an essential element in the decorative vocab-
ulary, even with the risk of losing some of its emblematic meaning. Heraldry penetrated
unexpected spaces, including books, liturgical dishes, and sacred spaces, in which it developed
all its semiotic and symbolic potential, revealing itself to be eminently flexible. Stylistic evolu-
tion in the Gothic period as well as in the Trecento and Quattrocento, however, significantly
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disrupted this harmonious picture. From the beginning of the fourteenth century heraldic
imagery was at odds with developments in realism, chromaticism, perspective, and the figura-
tive dimensions of contemporary images. It was regenerated, however, with the arrival of the
international Gothic style, which supported the development of heraldic devices. Heraldic
imagery continued to be used throughout the Renaissance with no loss of style and a minimal
change in form. In the Renaissance the coat of arms is found alongside garlands of flowers
and putti, but it does not lose its graphic and emblematic details. It integrates the ornamental
vocabulary of the Renaissance by simply adopting new forms. Instead of the classic shield,
other possibilities existed, such as the almond shield a l’antique, or the pelta – the shield born
by the Amazons formed of a floriated crescent – or the testa di cavallo, a shield formed as a
horse armor chamfer.
As such, heraldry can be seen as contributing significantly to the decorative vocabulary of
medieval art right up to the late sixteenth century. Examples are found throughout Europe, as
for instance in the so-called Manueline style of late fifteenth-century Portugal or in the Baroque
interpretations of the Pontifical emblems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The use
of heraldry in the postmedieval period ensured its survival right up to the present. The coat of
arms did not remain a static image but shifted and evolved over time in response to stylistic can-
ons while still keeping some of its Roman characteristics. With these changes, the performativity
of the coat of arms increased and it assumed an identity of its own – an image within an image.
With simple colors, no perspective, and stylized figures, it stands apart in Renaissance art – it
stands on its own.
Current research
For over thirty years research undertaken by Michel Pastoureau2 has promoted and encour-
aged the study of heraldry and made it into an academic science supported by new approaches
and underpinned by the historical sciences and anthropology. With his global vision, based
on solid erudition, Professor Pastoureau has redefined the subject; his followers have similarly
extended our knowledge. His research into the subject was the first to encourage an interdisci-
plinary approach to the material. For fifteen years French scholars have led this research and have
gradually been followed by the rest of Europe. Numerous studies are now totally dedicated to
heraldry, and these have been undertaken by collaborative projects between historical societies
dedicated to heraldic scholarship and universities. Nowadays, the discipline seems to be suffi-
ciently open and welcoming to interest historians and even art historians! Nonspecialists, devoid
of all scholarly preconceptions, have upset some of the conventional and accepted approaches
and yielded significant results.
This new research was particularly encouraged by approaches found in other fields, such as
those in the field of mentalities and sensibilities, as well as Professor Pastoureau’s research on
animals and colors. Although not limited to heraldry, these studies have attempted to expand
heraldic research to include medieval social and cultural practices. It is also important to remem-
ber recent heraldic research by historians working on the history of kinship or the nobility in
medieval and modern society.3 There has also been an increasing interest by manuscript scholars
as well as those interested in monumental decoration, such as François Avril and Francis Salet.4
Similarly, recent work by Hans Belting5 on the links between the portrait and the coat of arms is
part of this renewed interest in heraldry.
Despite the absence of a university chair for the study of heraldry, the scientific recognition
of the discipline, the international dimensions of research, and the sheer dynamism of heraldic
studies all guarantee a high visibility and bright future for the subject.
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Research
Despite this interest, some important issues in the field of medieval heraldry have been somewhat
neglected. Questions such as the precise functions of the images, the arrangements for sharing
and structuring coats of arms, the reception and legibility of heraldic signs, and the performance
of the emblem have still not been fully analyzed.
In absentia
In the Middle Ages, the coat of arms acted as an emblematic projection of its bearer; it was in
effect an imago of the bearer.6 It was the human substitute for the lord where he was either invis-
ible or else when he was absent. This ontological capacity was similar to that of the seal. Seals
frequently carried the bearer’s coat of arms. When not used on a seal, the coat of arms brought
the symbolic value of the seal with it. They worked in unison in making the bearer present when
he was not.
The staging of these signs, the rules and strategies governing the display of heraldry, and the
principles of lateralization in the heraldic shield also highlight their ability to make real the pres-
ence of the user in absentia.7
As such, the heraldic shield could exist for the person using it, as well as instead of him. It
could convey the virtual presence of the owner, it could be crowned in much the same way as
his head,8 and it could be honored by a canopy, wear a necklace of the order of chivalry,9 be
dressed in mourning, or be tried and defamed in absentia (Fig. 28.3).10 Allowing for these added
dimensions, the heraldic image could also be seen as the main iconography of the donor kneeling
in front of his patron, God, or the blessed Virgin and as such having important eschatological
functions.
Figure 28.3 Donatello’s heraldic work on a gravestone in the church Santa Maria in Aracoeli at Roma.
The artist used imagery from antiquity as well as the imago clipeata – a portrait of the deceased carried by
two winged genii – here represented as two angels carrying the dead person’s coat of arms in an almond
shield typical of the renaissance. Rome, Santa Maria in Aracoeli church. Image courtesy of Laurent Hablot.
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Figure 28.4 Scene showing the dedication of a book, the Paradis de la Reine Sibylle. Here, the book is
presented by the author, Antoine de La Sale, to his protector, the duchess Agnese de Bourbon. Both writer
and princess are represented by their coats of arms, showing the ability of the signs to represent the figures in
absentia. Chantilly, Bibliothèque des archives et du château de Chantilly, Ms. 653, f. 1r. Image courtesy of
the Bibliothèque des archives et du château de Chantilly.
Heraldic imagery
One emblem, many functions

To review the military functions of a coat of arms it is necessary to explore many questions on
the other uses of these signs. In the Middle Ages, numerous tensions centered on the expression
of the individual, and our modern perception of identity. It seems to have been up to the users of
heraldic signs to convey seemingly opposite concepts, such as the individual or the group, male
primogeniture or the significance of maternal ancestry,11 or the concept of the family as against
the familiar. Yet the very richness of this system allows all these concepts to be resolved, including
the ability of the shield to accommodate many pieces of heraldic information by juxtaposing,
superimposing, and fusing images.
Much research on the social associations and uses of heraldry still remains to be under-
taken. When the whole field of heraldry was upgraded to the level of a science in the 1970s
in what was clearly an ideological period, it was argued that everyone wore a coat of arms in
the Middle Ages. The coat of arms, although accessible to all, is first and foremost a symbol
of the elite and those who have them are indicated as belonging to such a group. Ignoring
this concept can lead only to misunderstanding the functions of the heraldic emblem and to
risking misinterpretation.
Emblematic and symbolic

By emphasizing the mainly emblematic nature of the coat of arms, contemporary research has
partly obscured its symbolic function,12 which is more than obvious in any discourse on the
object. If the coat of arms is not understood as an accumulation of symbolic figures, it is more
than certain that the symbolic value of the selected figures was crucial when the emblem was
created. This is more than obvious in the way crosses, lions, eagles, and crescents have their own
symbolic meaning that cannot be ignored. The very choice of the shield as the preferred frame-
work for any heraldic emblem is also highly symbolic and refers to both the chivalrous and lordly
social identity as much as to the moral and religious dimensions of the sign.13
Frequently in the Middle Ages, the “memory” or purpose behind creation can be forgotten
very quickly as the emblematic function is often the highest priority, but it is not uncommon
that a posteriori interpretations have been used to make sense of certain coats of arms. By the end
of the thirteenth century these “heraldic legends” had multiplied and were used to consolidate
the legendary fame of a particular house or to lay the foundation for many myths surrounding
them and thus contribute to the sanctification of sovereign power.15 Analysis of the badge system
has specifically highlighted the importance of the symbolic dimensions of medieval emblemat-
ics in the later Middle Ages. Similar studies on crests and supporters would likewise add to our
knowledge.
The heraldic image

As this essay has shown, the heraldic image is an image apart. In addition to its mnemonic qualities,
it has the amazing ability to be able to remain a virtual image that does not need to be figured to
exist. This particular dimension enlightens our perception of the Middle Ages’ visual imagination.
If our knowledge of the coat of arms as an image has advanced significantly, many questions
still remain, especially relating to the composition and structure of heraldic images rather than
our perception of them. Heralds, long considered the “gatekeepers,” now see their role as super-
visors of the system. But we still do not know who made these images. What knowledge were
they based on? What standards were used? Who controlled this knowledge? What is the place of
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heraldry in medieval visual culture? Can we know how many coat of arms an ordinary individual
had in the Middle Ages? Historians are now trying to understand the heraldic environment –
what it really was and what a person from the Middle Ages would make of it. It is obvious that
some knowledge of heraldry was necessary for everyday life – for example, a citizen of early
fourteenth-century Florence would know or recognize at least a hundred coats of arms – town,
district, businesses, neighbors, relatives, etc. – just to understand his environment. Nowadays,
scholars are interested in the place of heraldry in visual culture and to fully understand this, it is
necessary for us to explore and understand heraldic signs in all their locations – from the church
to the city wall, the city hall, the castle, the house etc. These signs are similar to painted armorials
and are more than deserving of our attention.
Iconographic evidence as well as princely and municipal accounts confirms the importance
that political powers gave to this type of image, until late in the sixteenth century. Recent work
on court artists emphasizes the critical investment that these painters and sculptors had in the
production of heraldic images.15
This subject has never been properly investigated. Who were these heraldic artists? What
was their training? What were their innovations? Artists from Colard de Laon to Donatello,
Pisanello, Barthélemy d’Eyck, Jean Malouel, and Jean Fouquet were just some of the great artists
who produced heraldic images. Several of them, such as Jean Malouel or the famous Limbourg
brothers, are known to have been trained in family workshops specializing in heraldry and to have
come to the more figurative styles for which they are better known from the world of heraldry.
This is a subject which has yet to be analyzed, but it reveals the interest that the princes gave
to the emblematic image. How were these stereotypical images processed by the artist? What
makes one heraldic image superior to another? How did the artists integrate stylistic innovations
of their period? What flexibility was permitted in the treatment of these emblems?
Of course art historians have also not neglected the flowering of heraldry happening in the
same period as the first great treatises of Alberti, Vasari, and their followers appeared. Serious
consideration has yet to be given to the forms and functions of the heraldic emblem, which fill
a theoretical framework left almost empty since Bartolo da Sassoferrato’s treatise De Insigniis et
Armis first appeared in 1358. This has to be seen as the first treatise on the legal and graphic
practices in heraldry. In his Vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani, written in 1550,
Vasari also returned to some issues relating to heraldic representations, their composition, and
their functions in contemporary art.
In this spiritual period it is not surprising that heraldry also incurred the interests of a number
of clerics who saw the coat of arms invading sacred space, and really saturating it from the late
fifteenth century.16 Great figures in the history of the Church, such as St. Charles Borromeo,
were quick to denounce these signs of vanity. They enlivened the debate considerably and had
firm opinions that determined the relationships between stylistic developments and the coat of
arms and in many ways defined the place of heraldry in Baroque art.
Marginal systems
Marginal emblematic elements, which are usually difficult to understand, have long been regarded
by heraldic specialists with some disdain and seen as resulting from the collateral effects of medie-
val creativity. They have often been overlooked or neglected. The crest, the supporters, the cries,
mottoes and badges, emblematic colors, chiffers, and letters still remain in terrae incognitae. The veil
of understanding is slowly being raised, but it is clear that these details can inform us significantly
about medieval sensitivities as well as the relationship of society to the image.17
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Analyzing different emblematic systems which were used in the medieval period allows us in
retrospect to see the mechanisms governing or controlling how and why the various elements,
such as coats of arms, crests, and badges, were used. As part of the intellectual and visual culture of
the time, they answered social and political needs as expressions of competing identities, whether
of the individual or the group.
The digital future

We must now hope that new technologies, especially those offered by the application of com-
puters to the study of heraldry, will produce important discoveries. This has so far been neglected
partly because of the disappointing results from early attempts to process heraldic data using
computers. The temptation to use a global approach, producing information disconnected from
spatial and temporal contexts (however essential for interpreting the data), may partly explain
the failure of older studies. Nowadays, the large volume of dated and well-documented infor-
mation,18 the cross-reading of sources and media which is enabled by computers, and the wealth
of information on the Internet promise significantly useful results for the future, especially in
the field of image recognition and the study of heraldic relationships, which offer new paths
for research.
Notes
1 Jeanne de Laval Psaltar, Poitiers, Médiathèque François Mitterrand, Ms. 41, fol. 22.
2 Among his many books and articles see especially M. Pastoureau, Traité d’héraldique (Paris, 1979, reissued
2007) and L’art héraldique au Moyen Age (Paris, 2009).
3 D. Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (London, 1992); J. Morsel, “La construction
sociale des identités dans l’aristocratie franconienne aux XIVe et XVe siècles: individuation ou identifi-
cation?” in L’individu au Moyen Âge: Individuation et individualisation avant la modernité, ed. B.-M. Bedos
Rezak and Dominique Iogna-Prat, (Paris, 2005), 79–99 and 320–21.
4 For example, F. Salet, “Histoire et héraldique: la succession de Bourgogne de 1361,” in Mélanges René
Crozet (Poitiers, 1966), 1307–16; F. Avril, “Le livre des Merveilles, manuscrit français 2810 de la bibli-
othèque nationale,” in Marco Polo, Le livre des Merveilles, Tournai, ed. F. Avril, M.-T. Gousset, and M.-H.
Tesnière (Paris, 1999), 197–223.
5 H. Belting, “Le portrait médiéval et le portrait autonome: Une question,” in Le portrait individuel, réflex-
ions autour d’une forme de représentation XIIIe–XVe siècles, ed. D. Olariu (Berne, 2009), 123–36, especially
128–29, from the same author “Kap. 5 Wappen und Poträt. Zwei Medien des Körpers,” Bild-Anthopologie:
Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich, 2001), 115–42.
6 B.-M. Bedos-Rezak, When Ego Was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Visualizing the Middle Ages
3) (Leiden, 2010).
7 In trying to understand the coat of arms, the blazon, one has to consider the point of view of the holder
of the shield and not the reader. The description always begins in the upper left corner: the dexter in
heraldry; in reality this is the right side of the knight standing behind his shield. On the subject see L.
Hablot, “Aux origines de la dextre héraldique: Ecu armorié et latéralisation au Moyen Age,” Cahiers de
civilisation médiévale, 56e année (July–September 2013), 281–94.
8 The appearance of the crown on the king’s coat of arms has not yet attracted the attention of political
researchers. We don’t yet know the symbolic and political meanings that these representations had in
France in the late Middle Ages, especially in conflicts between the French monarchy and principalities,
such as Anjou or Brittany. On the subject see M. Jones, “‘En son habit royal’: le duc de Bretagne et son
image vers la fin du Moyen Age,” in Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du Moyen Age, ed. J. Blanchard
(Paris, 1995), 253–78.
9 On this question and the larger subject of the relationship of portrait, coat of arms, and badges see S.
Slaniska, “La fonction distinctive des ordres et du portrait noble dans les sociétés de cour (XIVe–XVIIe
siècles),” in Signes et couleurs des identités politiques du Moyen Age à nos jours, ed. D. Aurell, M. Aurell, C. Mnigand,
J. Grévy, L. Hablot and C. Girbea (Rennes, 2008), 313–32.
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Laurent Hablot
10 See L. Hablot, “‘Sens dessubz dessous’: Le Blason de la trahison au Moyen Age,” in La trahison au Moyen
Age: De la monstruosité au crime politique (Ve–XVe siècle), ed. M. Billoré and M. Soria (Rennes, 2009),
331–47.
11 See D. Crouch, “The Historian, Lineage and Heraldry, 1050–1250,” in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social
Display in Medieval England, ed. P. Coss and M. Keen (Woodbridge, 2002), 17–37; D. Crouch, The Birth
of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900–1300 (London/New York, 2005), 156–62;
J.-L. Chassel, “Le nom et les armes: la matrilinéarité dans la parenté aristocratique du second Moyen
Âge” (Droit et cultures, t. 64), 2012; online: http://droitcultures.revues.org/2849.
12 An “emblem” is a sign designating a person (e.g., the fleur-de-lis for the king of France); a “symbol” is
a sign meaning an idea or a concept (e.g., the cross for faith).
13 See L. Hablot, “Entre pratique militaire et symbolique du pouvoir, l’écu armorié au XIIe siècle,” in
Estudos de Heràldica medieval, ed. M. Metelo de Seixas and M. de Lurdes Rosa (Lisbon, 2012), 143–65.
14 See L. Hablot, “Sacralisation of the Royal Coats of Arms in Europe in the Middle Ages,” Political Theology
in Medieval modern Europe. Discourses, Rites, and Representations, ed. M. Herrero, J. Aurell and A. Miceli
(Turnhout, 2017).
15 A colloquium held in Poitiers in 2010, Heraldic Painters in the Middle Ages, discussed this issue and will
soon be published.
16 See M. Michael, “The Privilege of ‘Proximity’: Towards a Re-definition of the Function of Armorials,”
Journal of Medieval History 23:1 (March 1997), 55–74, and L. Hablot, “L’héraldisation du sacré aux
XIIe–XIIIe siècles, une mise en scène de la religion chevaleresque?” in Chevalerie et christianisme aux XIIe
et XIIIe siècles, ed. M. Aurell (Rennes, 2011), 211–33.
17 I tried to understand some of them in my doctoral thesis “La devise, mise en signe du prince, mise en
scène du pouvoir” (University of Poitiers, December 2001) as well as in some articles, such as “Cris de
guerre et d’armes: Formes et fonctions de l’emblème sonore médiéval,” in Les paysages sonores du Moyen
Age et de la Renaissance, ed. L. Hablot and L. Vissière (Rennes, PUR, 2016) 157–171; “Masque de guerre
et don des armes: Les échanges de cimiers, une pratique chevaleresque à la fin du Moyen Age,” in Armes
et Jeux militaires dans l’imaginaire. XIIe–XVe siècles, ed. C. Girbea Classique Garnier (Paris, 2016) 241–268.
18 As found at the University of Poitiers project ARMMA (Armorial Monumental du Moyen Age), which
collects in a database all documents relating to medieval heraldry found in Poitou.
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29
MEDIEVAL MAPS
AND DIAGRAMS
Diarmuid Scully
I
Recent decades have witnessed a transformation in our understanding of medieval maps and
diagrams. Once viewed as interesting curiosities or the products of obscurantism, ignorance, and
superstition, they are now recognized as sophisticated artifacts tackling issues of fundamental
concern to medieval society, most notably concepts of time and space, interconnections between
the human and the divine, and the nature of creation in all its forms.1 These issues are prominent
in the single greatest map to survive from the medieval West: the Hereford mappa mundi (world
map), made circa 1300 in England (Fig. 29.1).2 This map contains an iconographic program of
exceptional richness and subtlety; it offers a unique resource for the exploration of medieval map-
ping and diagrammatic traditions, and it will be discussed here in the context of other medieval
maps and diagrams and their classical and Judaeo-Christian inheritance. The map’s treatment
of Ireland will be given close attention, as an example of how research into the representation of
individual countries and regions may further our understanding of the mapmaker’s objectives.
II
Medieval sources generally use the Latin terms mappa, carta, and descriptio for maps, and pictura and
figura for diagrams.3 It is impossible to make a neat distinction between the concerns of medi-
eval maps and diagrams. Maps were interested not only in physical and human geography but
also in every branch of knowledge; a number of important map types appear in diagrammatic
form. Diagrams were used to facilitate the understanding of complex information about matters
including the human body, human relationships, the world’s climates, winds and tides, the calcu-
lation of time, and the structure of the cosmos as a whole.4
Byrhtferth’s diagram, located in an early twelfth-century English manuscript principally
focused on computistical issues, is indicative of medieval diagrams’ didactic potential. This dia-
gram maps the universe from microcosm to macrocosm. The signs of the zodiac, the four
elements, and the principal winds appear around its outer edges, linked to information about
equinoxes, solstices, the seasons, and the ages of man; at the center, the initials of the cardinal
directions in Greek spell out the name of the first human being, “Adam.”5
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Figure 29.1 The known world of Europe, Asia, and Africa and its islands, surrounded by ocean. Hereford
mappa mundi, circa 1300. Photo courtesy of the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the dean and chapter of
Hereford Cathedral.
The spiritual concerns of Byrhtferth’s diagram are mirrored in medieval world maps. The
term mappae mundi (singular: mappa mundi; literally, “cloth of the world”) describes medieval
maps of the known world comprising Africa, Asia, and Europe.6 These maps are oriented on an
east-west axis; our word “orientation” comes from the Latin “oriens,” meaning “east.” The Latin
phrase for the known world – the orbis terrarum or circle of lands – reflects classical and medieval
conceptions of that landmass as a gigantic world-island surrounded by ocean.7 In their simplest
form, medieval world maps appear as T-O diagrams. Ocean forms the “O,” a circle encompassing
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Medieval maps and diagrams
a tripartite world. The “T” reflects the division of that world: Asia appears above the bar of the
“T,” with Europe below on the left and Africa on the right. Diagrammatic T-O maps often list
the sons of Noah and align them with the different parts of the world: Shem with Asia, Ham
with Africa, and Japheth with Europe. The maps’ orientation, structure, and inclusion of Noah’s
sons indicate that they are far more than neutral representations of space and history. The world’s
eastward orientation is a reminder of the rising sun, symbolizing Christ and the promise of
resurrection, its tripartite structure recalls the Trinity, with the “T” also suggesting a tau-shaped
cross and Christ’s crucifixion, while the reference to Noah’s sons affirms the biblical statement
that all peoples are descended from these men (Gen 9:18–19).
Medieval maps of the entire planet, depicting its climate zones, put maps of the known world
into a further theological perspective. Zonal maps follow ancient sources in dividing the Earth
into five climate zones on a north-south axis: two frozen, uninhabitable zones at the Arctic and
Antarctic, a burning, uninhabitable zone around the Equator, and two temperate, habitable zones
on either side of the Equator.8 The ancients speculated on the existence of unknown peoples in
the southern habitable zone, but medieval Christian authorities insisted that this was impossible.
Scripture proclaimed that salvation would reach everyone; no missionaries could cross the burn-
ing Equator, and therefore no people could live in that southern zone. Moreover, scripture located
Noah’s sons in the northern habitable zone alone, and showed that they were the descendants of
Adam and Eve, for whom God created Eden in the furthest parts of Asia. If any beings existed
outside the orbis terrarum, they could not be human beings, since they could not be descended
from Adam or Noah.9
Cosmological map diagrams locate the Earth within its ultimate theological and spatial con-
text. Appropriating Greco-Roman ideas, they depict the round, not flat, Earth at the center of the
universe, with the sun, moon, and planets revolving around it within fixed spheres, and the fixed
stars and the signs of the zodiac beyond them. God, the prime mover, or his angels in the highest
heaven are depicted holding this universe in place.10 Manuscript illustrations of the moment of
creation emphasize the harmony implied here; for example, the early thirteenth-century Bible
Moralisée depicts Christ as creator with a compass, measuring out the universe and imposing
order on chaos (cf. Prov 8: 26–30; Isa 44:13).11 The meaning of a universe created by a rational
God may be explored by human beings made in his image and likeness (reason is one of the
essential defining characteristics of humanity in medieval thought). Marcia Kupfer considers the
cartographical implications of this approach to creation in relation to the Ebstorf mappa mundi
from Germany, which is approximately contemporary and iconographically comparable with
the Hereford map.12 Citing Rom 1:20 and 1 Cor 13:12, she locates the Ebstorf map within a
medieval tradition where “pictorial images, things of human artifice, might serve as vehicles by
which the embodied soul ascended from and through divine reflections in the Creation to attain
a foretaste of the visio Dei [vision of God].”13 This interpretation of the Ebstorf map may also be
applied to the Hereford mappa mundi.
III
The Hereford map is drawn on a single calfskin, pentagonal in shape and measuring 5 feet,
2 inches by 4 feet, 4 inches (1.59 meters by 1.34 meters). The earliest surviving descriptions
and visual representations of the map, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, depict it
enclosed within a wooden triptych that shows Mary with the archangel Gabriel at the Annun-
ciation.14 Employing the traditional eastward orientation, the map displays the tripartite known
world and its islands, circled by ocean; Asia is at the top, Africa on the right, Europe on the left.
Jerusalem is at the center of the map and the world. The map displays the orbis terrarum hugging
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the Mediterranean and surrounded by ocean and its islands, most prominently Britain and Ire-
land and their adjacent islands in the extreme northwest, in the lower left corner. The map acts
as a universal visual library. It offers a glorious celebration of life. It teems with activity; multiple
time periods appear at once in texts and images that provide information, ideas, and suggestions
concerning world history, geography and topography, the winds, real and imagined peoples,
monsters, birds, animals, fish, trees, and plants.
The mapmaker is not concerned with the accurate depiction of physical space, as we would
understand it. A navigator could not use the Hereford map to guide his ship along a coastline, for
example, and the size of particular regions on the map often reflects their spiritual, cultural, and
political significance rather than their actual dimensions; the Holy Land is a dominant presence
for that reason. In contrast, an earlier English map, the eleventh-century Cotton mappa mundi,
very likely inspired by an imperial Roman map, visualizes the received understanding of the actual
appearance of the coasts and contours of the orbis terrarum.15 Small-scale medieval architectural
or diagrammatic plans also indicate a concern for accuracy, most notably the ninth-century plan
of the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland, which owes much to Roman surveying techniques.16
Furthermore, later medieval portolan charts of the Mediterranean, delineating its coastlines, are
strikingly accurate to a modern eye.17 The Hereford map’s representation of the world, then, is a
matter of choice and not a failure to comprehend geographical reality.
The map’s circle of the known world is contained within a pictorial framework that provides
vital theological and political-ideological commentary and contextualization. At the apex of
the map, the framework displays the Second Coming, with Christ in judgment, angels leading
the saved to the open gates of the New Jerusalem, and demons dragging the damned toward a
devouring hell-mouth. This vision of eternity in every sense frames the map’s vision of the orbis
terrarum. The mapmaker creates the illusion that his map of the world is pinned to the pictorial
framework by four thongs containing letters that spell out “MORS” (death). At the framework’s
lower right corner, a mounted huntsman, his boy, and his dog leave the world behind; the accom-
panying inscription comments: “passe avaunt” (go ahead). In the opposite corner, immediately
outside the map’s representation of Ireland, the Roman emperor Augustus orders three surveyors
to measure the whole world; an inscription dates this order to the time of Christ’s birth recorded
in Luke 2:1, and the wording of the order recalls Christ’s command to go out to the whole
world and preach to all peoples, with its accompanying promise that he will be with his disci-
ples until the end of time (Matt. 28:19–20; Mark 16:15–16). Augustus appears as a composite
pope-emperor; there is a cross on his imperial tiara. The combined message of these images and
inscriptions is that the gospel will be preached to the ends of the earth, Christ will return to judge
the living and the dead, and the faithful will be saved and live eternally in heaven (Fig. 29.2).18
Other mappae mundi use different framing imagery to convey related ideas about God’s prov-
idential care for his people and creation. The Ebstorf map, which measures some 12 feet in
diameter, depicts the world itself as the body of Christ, suggestive of the Eucharistic host, with
his head at the east, at the top of the map, flanked by the apocalyptic letters alpha and omega
(Rev 22:13), his hands at the extreme north and south and his feet at the Pillars of Hercules or
Straits of Gibraltar at the world’s western limits. The map thereby provides a visual restatement
of scriptural promises that we are all members of Christ’s body (1 Cor 12:27; Rom 12:5) and
that salvation encompasses the whole world. The tiny and exquisite thirteenth-century Psalter
map, from England, takes another approach. It shows Christ in majesty outside and above the
easternmost part of the world, blessing the delicately illustrated orbis terrarum and holding a T-O
map/orb, flanked by two angels, while two wyverns or dragons, symbolizing the powers of evil,
cringe outside the map below the Straits of Gibraltar. The message of Christ’s benevolent rule
over his people and triumph over their adversaries is supported by another map overleaf. There,
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Figure 29.2 The Roman emperor Augustus orders the measurement of the world. He is placed next to
Ireland at the northwestern ends of the earth. Hereford mappa mundi, circa 1300. Photo courtesy of the
Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the dean and chapter of Hereford Cathedral.
flanked by four angels, Christ stands behind – and holds up – a diagrammatic T-O map again
evocative of a Eucharistic host, which lists the world’s chief places; he crushes two wyverns in a
visual allusion to Ps 90 (91):13, “thou shalt trample under foot the lion and the dragon.”19
IV
An inscription on the Hereford map’s pictorial framework requests prayers to Jesus in godhead
that he may give joy in heaven to its author, Richard of Haldingham or Sleaford.20 The frame-
work’s Last Judgment scene continues the intercessory and salvific theme; it depicts the Virgin
Mary appealing to Christ on behalf of those who made her their way to salvation. If the map
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Diarmuid Scully
and its enclosing wooden triptych displaying Mary and Gabriel at the Annunciation were asso-
ciated from the beginning in Hereford Cathedral, then the theme of salvation was proclaimed
all the more powerfully, since Christians believed that Christ’s incarnation heralded universal
redemption.21
The map’s request for prayers is addressed to all “who hear or read or see” it (oyront, ou lirrant,
ou veront), suggesting that its maker envisaged an audience beyond a learned elite who could read
its Latin and Anglo-Norman French inscriptions; his work seems intended for active, immersive,
and inclusive encounters with people also looking at its images and exchanging ideas or listening
to the views of experts on text and image alike. The Hereford map might, then, be experienced
on different levels, depending on its audience’s level of knowledge and understanding. It was
intended to delight and teach; the Ebstorf world map’s self-description is apposite: “It offers to
readers no small utility, to wayfarers direction and the pleasure of the most pleasing sight of things
along the way.”22
Legends on the Hereford map define it as an estorie (a history or narrative) and identify the late
Roman providential historian Orosius as its chief authority. The map’s dominant visual narrative
continues and elaborates Orosius’s account of authority and salvation progressing from east to
west, with the Christian Roman Empire presiding over global evangelization and enjoying God’s
unique favor.23 Directly below the pictorial framework’s representation of the Second Coming,
the opening of heaven’s gates, and the end of history, the map displays the Garden of Eden – an
earthly prefiguration of heaven – in the furthest East and traces the beginnings of human history
from Adam’s and Eve’s expulsion into a fallen world after the serpent deceived them. They are
depicted alongside Cynocephali, dog-heads with human bodies, labeled as giants on the map.
Like the Psalter, Ebstorf, fragmentary Duchy of Cornwall, and other mappae mundi, the Hereford
map is fascinated by the strange or monstrous races described by Pliny, Solinus, Isidore, and other
classical and postclassical sources.24 Their cartographical presence provides delight and celebrates
God’s care for diverse humanity; if they exist and are human (defined as rational, mortal, and
descended from Adam and Eve; their physical appearance is irrelevant), then they are destined to
be evangelized and offered salvation.25
Below Eden, a structure representing “the extremely ancient city of Enos” (Enos, civitas anti-
quissima) has sinister implications, literally as well as spiritually; from the viewer’s perspective, it is
located to the left (in Latin, sinister) of the first humans and the Cynocephali. This city was built
by Adam and Eve’s first son, Cain, who became the first murderer when he killed his brother
Abel; banished by God, he built this city and named it after his own son (Gen 4:17). The great
theologian Augustine, who inspired Orosius’s history and whose image appears prominently on
the Hereford map, identified Cain’s city with the earthly City of Man, corrupt and destined for
death, in contrast with the City of God, which the pilgrim Church on earth will reach in heaven
at the end of time.26 Moving westward and following an imagined straight line from the heavenly
Jerusalem, Eden, and Enos, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the single largest image on the Hereford
map: Babylon and the Tower of Babel, from which a serpent-like dragon emerges, mirroring the
serpent displayed in the map’s image of Eden.27 God destroyed the Tower, which men built to
challenge him, and he punished their presumption with the division of languages (Gen 11:1–9).
In patristic exegesis, following scripture, Babylon (“Confusion”) appears as the ultimate symbol
of pride, paganism, and human evil, a true heir to Cain’s city; Augustine comments that it is an
appropriate symbol for the city of the earthborn.28
Further west again and directly below Babylon, the map locates Jerusalem, surmounted by
an image of Christ on the Cross, at the center of the world and its own center too.29 The map
shows Jerusalem as a circle containing a series of circles, a symbol of perfection microcosmically
reflecting the circle of the world itself. Here God “wrought salvation in the midst of the earth”
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(Ps. 73 [74]:12), indicated by the crucified Christ, whom scripture presents as the second Adam,
overcoming death through his own sacrifice (1 Cor 15:21–22). The curse of Babel was reversed
in Jerusalem (“Vision of Peace”) at Pentecost, when Christ’s disciples received the gift of tongues
(Acts 2), a foreshadowing of Christian unity on earth and the unity that humanity will enjoy with
God and his angels in heaven, as depicted in the pictorial framework.30 The gift of tongues at Pente-
cost meant that the disciples could fulfill Christ’s command to go and convert all peoples, alluded to
in the map’s representation of Augustus ordering the measurement of the world, and thus advance
the inauguration of the New Jerusalem.31 Moving west from Jerusalem via Rome to the limits of
the known world and out into ocean, the map ultimately traces the extension of salvation to Ireland
under the spiritual guidance of Augustus’s spiritual and temporal successors: the bishops of Rome.
V
The Hereford map reflects classical and medieval traditions when it depicts Ireland as one of
the world’s largest islands and part of an archipelago physically dominated by Britain. Orosius’s
outline of world geography is its key source here.32 The map describes the western shores of the
Iberian peninsula as “Terminus Europe” (the limits of Europe). Locating Ireland beyond the Pillars
of Hercules, it indicates that the island lies at the absolute limits of the habitable earth. This gives
Ireland immense symbolic importance.
The map depicts Hibernia (Ireland) very close to Britain, with Spain to the southwest. In
Ireland, it shows and names the rivers Bann and Shannon (Fluvius Bande; Fluvius Schene) and also
shows two mountain ranges. It names the northern part of the island: Ulvestria (Ulster). The map
identifies two peoples in the south: the Luceni and the Velabri. It names four cities, each repre-
sented by an architectural device: Dublin, Bangor, Armagh, and Kildare. The last three of these
cities are holy places, associated with saints. The map makes this explicit in the case of Armagh
and Kildare, naming them as the cities of St. Patrick and St. Brigit respectively. The map displays
Ireland in several time periods at once. It shows Ireland as Orosius understood it in the early fifth
century, before its conversion to Christianity; he is its source for the Luceni and Velabri. The
map also locates Ireland in the Golden Age, extending from its conversion until the Viking era
(fifth to late eighth centuries): Armagh, Kildare, and Bangor still existed in the fourteenth century
but their names and associations evoke the much earlier island of saints and scholars. And the
map shows Ireland as it was c. 1300, when Dublin was its biggest city and the center of English
authority; the English crown claimed legitimate rule over Ireland and had been engaged in its
conquest since the late twelfth century.
The map’s representation of Ireland mirrors its representation of England, Scotland, Wales,
and Western Europe as a whole: a landscape dominated by cities and natural features – rivers and
mountains. This is normative civilization, from a Western medieval perspective. But this rep-
resentation makes Ireland exceptional when viewed in the context of the Hereford map as a total-
ity. Consider the map’s treatment of other remote, peripheral oceanic locations. Like the Ebstorf,
Psalter, and fragmentary Duchy of Cornwall world maps, the Hereford map situates monsters and
marvels in these places. In the northeast – Scythia – it shows the evil monstrous races, cannibals,
Cain’s kin, and the apocalyptic peoples of Gog and Magog. In the southeast – the Indies – not
far from the Cynocephali, the map depicts dragons on Taphana (Taprobane/Sri Lanka), which
directly faces Ireland at the opposite ends of the earth. In the far south – Africa – the map repre-
sents most of the world’s physically divergent monstrous races, such as headless men with eyes and
mouths in their shoulders and chests, and marvels like the fatally poisonous basilisk.
In contrast, there are no marvels or monsters in the Hereford map’s Ireland. Yet Ireland was
closely associated with marvels in the medieval imagination. Fra Mauro’s mid-fifteenth-century
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Diarmuid Scully
Venetian mappa mundi, for example, somewhat skeptically emphasizes Ireland’s marvels – including
water that changes wood to iron and stone – and links them with Eastern wonders before refer-
ring the reader to Solinus, among others, as an authority on marvelous and monstrous issues.33
Solinus (circa AD 200), is one of the Hereford map’s vital sources on wonders, but he has no
role in its representation of Ireland. Emphasizing Ireland’s remoteness, Solinus depicts the Irish as
inhuman in their customs, inhospitable, and warlike, smearing the blood of their victims on their
own faces, and unable to distinguish right from wrong; they live on an island with no snakes
and few birds.34 By the early fourteenth century, a new version of this hostile classical image of
Ireland dominated English and continental European discourse about the island. The Hereford
map rejects this image and projects an entirely positive view of Ireland, based on ideas that first
emerged when the Irish became Christian. Early medieval authorities proclaimed that Christi-
anity abolished Irish barbarism; Walafrid Strabo declared that the reports of Solinus and others
were obsolete now that Christ’s faith shone upon the Irish and where sin abounded, grace more
exceedingly abounded (Rom 5:20).35
This positive image receded in the twelfth century, when authorities in the dominant territo-
ries of Christian Europe began to apply the term “barbarian” to fellow Christians in less devel-
oped, peripheral European regions.36 Bernard of Clairvaux played a vital role in reviving classical
stereotypes concerning the Irish in this period. His mid-twelfth-century Life of the Irish ecclesi-
astical reformer Archbishop Malachy of Armagh dramatizes Malachy’s achievements by depicting
the unreformed Irish as violent, chaotic, and immoral: Christians in name, but pagans in action.37
For Bernard, Irish rejection of a progressive urban architecture symbolized their barbarism. When
Malachy proposed to build a stone oratory at Bangor, he met opposition from ignorant people
who declared themselves Irish, not French (“Scoti sumus, non Galli”) and expected him to build
a traditional wooden structure.38 But Malachy reformed the people, built the stone oratory, and
reestablished Bangor as a true Christian city: a miniature of his reform of all Ireland.
Bernard’s treatment of Irish barbarism informed Gerald of Wales’s depiction of Ireland in the
Topographia Hibernica (Topography of Ireland), which first appeared in 1188.39 This work is perhaps
the single most influential and controversial book ever written about Ireland. Gerald had close
links with Hereford and sent a copy of the Topographia to its cathedral chapter.40 His representa-
tion of Ireland and the Irish shaped texts, maps, and other visual sources concerning Ireland until
at least the seventeenth century, but it did not determine the Hereford map’s vision of the island.41
Gerald and his family, Marcher Lords from Wales, were closely involved in the English conquest
of Ireland. He dedicated the Topographia to King Henry II, who claimed sovereignty over the
island. The Topographia is a courtly entertainment, a book of wonders, but it is also a justification
of the conquest as a civilizing mission.
Gerald calls Ireland “the furthest island of the West” (Insularum occidentalium hec ultima).42 His
understanding of its location is replicated on a map of Europe illustrating a circa 1200 manuscript
of the Topographia (MS 700 in the National Library of Ireland); there is nothing beyond Ireland
except ocean and the map’s own margins.43 Drawing on traditions about the wonders of the
East, Gerald uses Ireland’s remoteness to depict it as the most marvelous land in the West, where
Nature indulges herself in hidden, freakish behavior.44 The Topographia’s text and its manuscripts’
marginal illustrations depict an unnatural natural world there, in part caused by Irish sinfulness.45
Gerald claims that bestiality is a particular Irish vice, and describes a cow giving birth to a man-
calf in the mountains near Glendalough.46 Irish marvels comment on the consequences of such
depravity: a talking wolf-man says that the English conquest was sent by God to punish the
Irish.47 A fish with gold teeth serves as a portent of that conquest.48
Gerald presents the Irish as a handsome and naturally gifted people, but perversely backward,
savage, and semipagan or worse. They are “a woodland and inhospitable people” ( gens silvestris,
406
gens inhospita; the reference to their inhospitality alludes to Solinus), who have rejected the usual
human progression from woods to settled agriculture and finally to cities.49 Gerald says that the
woodland-dwelling Irish are literally barbarous, and his emphasis on their long, uncultivated
hair and beards, matching their uncultivated minds and countryside, supports that statement.
Cassiodorus, summing up ancient ethnographical stereotypes, explains that the Latin term bar-
barus comes from barba (beard) and rus (countryside).50 Rejection of urban life is a key barbarian
characteristic. Gerald states that the Irish do not live in towns and have no interest in citizenship,
a rejection of civilization itself since a citizen – civis – is one who lives in a civitas, a community
in the sense of a city: hence our word “civilization.”51 Paradoxically, the map illustrating the
Topographia in MS 700 supports Gerald’s representation of the Irish as barbarous by depicting an
urban landscape in Ireland. It shows Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, and Limerick. In Gerald’s day,
they were centers of English colonial administration and commerce, and he emphasizes they were
originally built by the Ostmen (Vikings), because the innately lazy Irish refused to engage in trade
and build cities themselves.52
The Hereford map offers an entirely different vision of Ireland. It emphatically identifies
Ireland’s four cities as cities: Civitas Divelin; Civitas Bencur; Arhmaca, Civitas Sancti Patricii; Celdara,
Civitas Sancte Brigide. Use of the term civitas affirms Irish civilization. Bangor, Armagh, and Kil-
dare were ethnically Irish foundations, associated with the great saints of the Golden Age and, in
the case of Armagh and Bangor, the twelfth-century reform movement too. By specifying that
these places, as well as colonial Dublin, are cities, the map counters hostile stereotypes of the Irish
and integrates the island’s Irish and English colonial communities; it presents Ireland as a united,
harmonious, and civilized Christian country.
The map’s selection of Bangor, Armagh, and Kildare has further significance. Their founders
and rulers were associated with papal Rome, the guarantor of orthodoxy and Christian unity.
Armagh, the primatial see of all Ireland, was foremost among them in its romanitas. Armagh tradi-
tions claim that the See was founded by the national apostle, St. Patrick; they depict it as an Irish
Rome, sanctified by the relics of Peter and Paul and other martyrs, and the hagiographer Tírechán
attributes this saying to the saint: “church of the Irish – no – of the Romans” (Aeclessia Scotorum
immo Romanorum).53 St. Brigit’s hagiographers also promoted Kildare as a mirror of Rome; in
a vision, Brigit heard Mass at the tombs of Peter and Paul and afterwards sent experts to Rome
so that she could reproduce the Roman liturgy in Kildare.54 The early medieval Irish empha-
sized that their faith was Roman from its beginnings. St. Columbanus, who founded Bangor,
assured the early seventh-century papacy that the Irish, living at world’s edge, were the disciples
of Peter and Paul and maintained the Catholic faith unbroken “as it was delivered by you first.”55
Bernard recalls Columbanus when he says that Bangor, before the Vikings, was “a very
holy place highly productive of saints” (Locus vere sanctus fecundusque sanctorum), with daughter
houses across Ireland and Scotland. From Bangor, Columbanus went to “our Gaullish parts”
and founded Luxeil, where God’s praises were sung without interruption. Reestablishing Ban-
gor, Malachy was “replanting paradise.”56 Bernard writes that Malachy effectively reevangelized
Ireland and restored its romanitas through liturgy, law, and architecture, so that “today one could
apply to that people what God says through his prophet: ‘Those who were not my people hith-
erto, are now my people’ [1 Pet 2:10; cf. Hos 2:24]” (ut hodie illi genti conveniat quod Dominus per
prophetam dicit: “Qui ante non populus meus, nunc populus meus”). Bernard here implicitly aligns
Malachy with Patrick, his ultimate predecessor as archbishop of Armagh, who applied the same
quotation to his Irish converts’ abandonment of barbarous paganism.57
Read in the context of these sources, the Hereford map’s depiction of Ireland – no monsters,
no barbarians, an urban landscape dominated by holy cities – replicates an Irish narrative of
continuing evangelization and integration into the universal Church centered in papal Rome.
407
Diarmuid Scully
The map locates English rule over Ireland within this narrative. The papal decree Laudabiliter
provided the legal basis for English rule. Pope Adrian IV granted Ireland to Henry II in the
1150s to “reveal the truth of the Christian faith to unlearned and savage peoples” (ad declarandam
indoctis et rudibus populis Christiane fidei veritatem); his authority to make this grant came from the
Donation of Constantine (not revealed as a forgery until the fifteenth century), which described
the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine granting the West, including “the islands,” to
the papacy.58
In a commentary beneath a plan of Rome on his Chronica Maiora’s itinerary map (c. 1250),
Matthew Paris explains that papal Rome succeeded imperial Rome, and Rome is now capital
of the world because it is the capital of Christendom. He cites a Latin motto – also used by the
Holy Roman emperor Frederick II – that bears witness to its continuing dominion: “Rome, head
of the world, holds the bridle of the spherical earth” (Roma caput mundi tenet orbis frena rotundi).59
The Hereford map quotes the same phrase next to its own image of Rome and shares Matthew’s
sense of the city’s spiritual and temporal imperium. Locating the composite pope-emperor figure
of Augustus in the pictorial framework next to Ireland and Britain, the map indicates Ireland’s
place in papal Rome’s spiritual empire. The map’s combined depiction of Augustus, Ireland, and
the wider archipelago further indicates that English rule over Ireland, legitimized by the papacy
as successor of the Roman Empire, completes Ireland’s conversion, reform, and renewal, begun by
Patrick, Brigit, Columbanus, and Malachy.
Patristic and medieval authorities interpreted Ireland’s and the archipelago’s conversion as the
fulfillment of scriptural prophesies concerning the extension of salvation to the gentiles at the
ends of the earth, thus heralding the end-times.60 The Hereford map inherits and develops this
eschatological and apocalyptic vision. Ireland’s complete integration into Christendom symbol-
izes the fulfillment of Christ’s command to convert all peoples and the whole world, to which the
map alludes in its representation of Augustus. The pictorial framework at the apex of the map,
directly above Augustus and the western limits of the orbis terrarum, displays the end of history
that will ultimately follow: the Second Coming and the New Jerusalem (Fig. 29.3).
Figure 29.3 The Last Judgment. Hereford mappa mundi, circa 1300. Photo courtesy of the Hereford
Mappa Mundi Trust and the dean and chapter of Hereford Cathedral.
408
Notes
1 Explorations of medieval maps and diagrams include D. Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and
Space in Medieval World-Maps,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985), 510–21; J.B.
Harley and D. Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography.Volume 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and
Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago, 1987); M. Kupfer, “Medieval World-Maps: Embedded
Images, Interpretative Frameworks,” Word and Image 10 (1994), 262–86; B. Obrist, “Wind Diagrams and
Medieval Cosmology,” Speculum 72 (1997), 33–84; E. Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval
Map-Makers Viewed Their World (London, 1997); E. Edson and E. Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the
Cosmos (Oxford, 2005); E. Edson, The World Map 1300–1492: The Persistence of Tradition (Santa Fe, NM,
2007); P. Barber, “Medieval Maps of the World,” in The Hereford Map: Medieval World-Maps and Their
Context, ed. P.D.A. Harvey (London, 2006), 1–44; A.S. Mittman, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England
(New York/London, 2006).
2 S.D. Westrem (ed.), The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary (Turn-
hout, 2001). The specialist literature includes N. Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm
(Woodbridge, 2001; P.D.A. Harvey, Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World-Map, 2nd ed. (Hereford, 2002);
Harvey (ed.), The Hereford Map (as in note 1).
3 Edson, Mapping Time and Space (as in note 1), 2; Edson observes that carta and descriptio may also refer to
documents and textual descriptions.
4 Edson, Mapping Time and Space (as in note 1), 36–96; Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought (as in note 2), 7–48.
5 MS 17, fol. 7v, St. John’s College Library, Oxford; The Calendar and the Cloister: Oxford, St. John’s College
MS17. 2007. McGill University Library. Digital Collections Program. http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/
ms-17 (accessed August 28, 2015).
6 A. Scafi, “Defining Mappaemundi,” in The Hereford Map, ed. Harvey (as in note 1), 345–54.
7 Pliny, Historia Naturalis 3:1; Isidore, De Natura Rerum 48:2; Bede, De Natura Rerum 48:2.
8 Virgil, Georgica, 1.233–34 provides a much-quoted summary of the tradition. Zonal maps are often
described as “Macrobian,” since many illustrate manuscripts of the Macrobius’s late antique commentary
on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of Scipio).
9 A. Hiatt, Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (Chicago, 2008); A. Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A
History of Heaven on Earth (London, 2006); E. Wajntraub and J. Wajntraub, “Noah and His Family on
Medieval Maps,” in The Hereford Map, ed. Harvey (as in note 1), 381–88.
10 Thus, Matfré Ermengar of Béziers, Breviari d’Amour, MS Yates Thompson 31, fol. 66, British Library,
London (late fourteenth century), with four angels flanking the universe.
11 Codex Vindobonensis 2554, fol. 1v, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (1220s).
12 H. Kugler (ed.), Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte (Berlin, 2007), 2 vols; scholars must rely on facsimiles of the map:
the original was destroyed in World War II.
13 M. Kupfer, “Reflections in the Ebstorf Map: Cartography, Theology and Delectio Speculationis,” in Map-
ping Medieval Geographies: Geographical Encounters in the Latin West and Beyond, 300–1600, ed. K.D. Lilley
(Cambridge, 2013), 103; “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made” (Rom. 1:20); “For now we see through a glass [per spec-
ulum] darkly; but then face to face.”
14 M. Bailey, “The Discovery of the Lost Mappa Mundi Panel: Hereford’s Map in a Medieval Altarpiece?”
in The Hereford Map, ed. Harvey (as in note 1), 79–93.
15 P. McGurk, D.N. Dumville, M.R. Godden, and A. Knock (ed.), An Eleventh-Century Anglo-Saxon Illus-
trated Miscellany: British Library Cotton Tiberius B.V., Part 1 (Copenhagen, 1983), fol. 56v. On the Gre-
co-Roman cartographical tradition: O.A.W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps (London, 1985).
16 W. Horn and E. Born (ed.), The Plan of St. Gall, 3 vols. (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1979).
17 R.W. Unger, Ships on Maps: Pictures of Power in Renaissance Europe (Basingstoke, 2010), 37–61.
18 D. Scully, “Augustus, Rome, Britain and Ireland on the Hereford Mappa Mundi: Imperium and Salvation,”
Peregrinations 4 (2013), 107–33; http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu (accessed September 1, 2015).
19 Psalter Map, Additional MS 28681, fol. 9r and fol. 9v, British Library, London.
20 His identity is discussed in Harvey, Mappa Mundi (as in note 2), 7–10.
21 On the map’s medieval placement, see D. Terkla, “The Original Placement of the Hereford Mappa
Mundi,” Imago Mundi 56 (2004), 131–51; T. de Wesselow, “Locating the Hereford Mappa Mundi,” Imago
Mundi 65 (2013), 180–206.
22 “que scilicet non parvam prestat legentibus utilitatem, viantibus directionem rerumque viarum gratissime speculationis
dilectionem,” Kupfer, “Reflections in the Ebstorf Map” (as in note 13), 102.
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Diarmuid Scully
23 Historiarum Adversus Paganos Libri Septem: M.-P. Arnaud-Lindet (ed. and trans.), Orose: Histoire (Contre les
Päiens), 3 vols. (Paris, 1990–91), hereafter abbreviated as Hist; S. McKenzie, “The Westward Progression
of History on Medieval Mappaemundi: an Investigation of the Evidence,” in The Hereford World Map, ed.
Harvey (as in note 1), 335–44.
24 J.B. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (New York, 1981); Kline, Maps of Medi-
eval Thought (as in note 2), 141–64; Mittman, Maps and Monsters (as in note 1); C. Van Duzer, “Hic sunt
Dracones: The Geography and Cartography of Monsters” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters
and the Monstrous, ed. A.S. Mittman and P.J. Dendle (Farnham, 2012), 387–435. For the fragmentary
Duchy of Cornwall Map: Duchy of Cornwall Office, London, Maps and Plans 1.
25 See Augustine’s discussion in De Civitate Dei 16.8; B. Dombert and A. Kolb (ed.), CCSL 47–48 (Turn-
hout, 1955); hereafter DCD.
26 DCD 15.1.
27 Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought (as in note 2), 187–88; 208–09.
28 DCD 16.17.
29 A.-D. von den Brincken, “Jerusalem on Medieval Mappaemundi,” in The Hereford World Map, ed. Harvey
(as in note 1), 355–79.
30 Details in the map’s image of the earthly Jerusalem evoke the foursquare New Jerusalem of Rev 21:16;
Westrem (ed.), The Hereford Map (as in note 2), 166.
31 Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought (as in note 2), 206–15, where the Hereford map is compared with other
medieval maps and visualizations of the Pentecostal mission.
32 Hist. 1.2, 75–82 (Ireland within the entire British-Irish archipelago).
33 P. Falchetta (ed.), Fra Mauro’s World Map, with a Commentary and Transcription of the Inscriptions, translated
from the Italian by J. Scott (Turnhout, 2006), 578–79.
34 T. Mommsen (ed.), Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium 22 (Berlin, 1895). Solinus’s view of the Irish is rep-
resentative: J.F. Killeen, “Ireland in the Greek and Roman Writers,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy
76C (1976), 207–15; P. Freeman, Ireland and the Classical World (Austin, 2001).
35 B. Krusch (ed.), Vita Galli, prologus, MGH SRM 4 (Hanover, 1902).
36 W.R. Jones, “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History
13 (1971), 376–407; R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales (Oxford, 1982), 130–46.
37 Vita Sancti Malachiae in J. Leclercq, H.M. Rochais, and C.H. Talbot (ed.), Sancti Bernardi opera, 8 vols.
(Rome, 1957–1977), iii (1963), hereafter VM; D. Scully, “Ireland and the Irish in Bernard of Clairvaux’s
Vita Malachiae; Representation and Context,” in Reform and Renewal: Ireland and Europe in the Twelfth
Century, ed. D. Bracken and D.Ó. Riaín-Raedel (Dublin, 2006), 239–56.
38 VM XXVIII.61.
39 Topographia Hibernica in J.F. Dimnock (ed.), Giraldi Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica et Expugnatio Hiber-
nica, vol. 5 of Giraldi Cambrensis Opera (London, 1867), in Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores,
8 vols., Rolls Series; hereafter TH.
40 D. Birkholz, “Hereford Maps, Hereford Lives: Biography and Cartography in an English Cathedral
City,” in Mapping Medieval Geographies, ed. Lilley (as in note 13), 225–49.
41 On Gerald’s reception: H. Morgan, “Giraldus Cambrensis and the Tudor Conquest of Ireland,” in Political
Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641, ed. H. Morgan (Dublin, 1999), 22–44.
42 TH 1.1.
43 MS 700, fol. 48r, National Library of Ireland, Dublin.
44 TH praefatio secunda.
45 A. Murphy, “Ad remotissimas occidentis insulas: Gerald and the Irish,” in A. Murphy, But the Irish Sea
Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (Lexington, 1999), 33–59; M.P. Brown, “The
Marvels of the West: Giraldus Cambrensis and the Role of the Author in the Development of Marginal
Illustration,” in Decoration and Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts, ed. A.S.G. Edwards (London,
2002), 34–59; pls 1–2; A.S. Mittman, “The Other Close at Hand: Gerald of Wales and the Marvels of
the West,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. B. Bildhauer and R. Mills (Cardiff, 2003), 97–112.
46 TH 2.21.
47 TH 2.19.
48 TH 2.10.
49 TH 3.10.
50 Expositio in psalmum cxiii, M. Adriaen (ed.), CCSL 98 (Turnhout, 1958), 1029.
51 TH 3.10.
52 TH 3.43.
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53 Dicta Patricii 4 in Tírechán’s Collectanea; Collectanea II.3 claims that Armagh possesses the relics of
Peter and Paul, Stephen and Laurence; L. Bieler (ed.), The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh SLH 10
(Dublin, 1979).
54 Acta Sanctorum, Februarii tomus I, Cap. XV; S. Connolly, “Vita Prima Sanctae Brigidae: Background and
Historical Value,” JRSAI 119 (1989), 5–49: 41.
55 Ep. 5 in G.S.M. Walker (ed.), Sancti Columbani Opera, SLH 2 (Dublin, 1957).
56 VM VI.12; cf. Gen 2.8.
57 VM VIII.17; Patrick, Confessio 40–41.
58 M.P. Sheehy (ed.), Pontificia Hibernica: Medieval Papal Chancery Documents concerning Ireland, 640–1261,
vol. 1 (Dublin, 1962), 15–16.
59 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 26, fol. 3r (itinerary from Pontremoli to Apulia); S. Lewis,
The Art of Matthew Paris (London, 1987), 344, 505, n. 49; see also Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
MS 16, fol. 126 and Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris, 77–81; D.K. Connelly, The Maps of Matthew Paris:
Medieval Journeys through Space, Time and Liturgy (Woodbridge, 2009), 109–27.
60 T.M. Charles-Edwards, “Palladius, Prosper and Leo the Great: Mission and Primatial Authority,” in Saint
Patrick, A.D. 493–1993, ed. D. Dumville (Woodbridge, 1993), 1–12; D. Bracken, “Rome and the Isles:
Ireland, England and the Rhetoric of Orthodoxy,” in Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations before the Vikings, ed. J.
Graham-Campbell and M. Ryan (Oxford, 2009), 75–97; J. O’Reilly, “Islands and Idols at the Ends of
the Earth: Exegesis and Conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica,” in Bède le Vénérable: Entre Tradition et
Posterité. The Venerable Bede: Tradition and Posterity, ed. S. Lebecq, M. Perrin, and O. Szerwiniack (Lille,
2005), 119–45; O’Reilly, “The Multitude of Isles and the Corner-Stone: Topography, Exegesis, and the
Identity of the Angli in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica,” in Anglo-Saxon Traces, ed. J. Roberts and L. Webster
(Tempe, 2011), 201–27.
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30
THE ICONOGRAPHY
OF GENDER
The relevant entry for “gender” in the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the state of being
male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biologi-
cal ones.”1 In insisting on this binary, the dictionary lags behind social media sites like Facebook,
which provides a custom option for users who do not feel the fifty-eight choices offered provide
adequate terms to describe their gender identities. That “gender” might define a fluid aspect of
identity constructed and performed by the individual in relationship to social expectations and
pressures is a new use for a word whose previous primary meaning is associated with grammatical
declensions.2 Joan Scott’s argument that “gender” is a useful category of historical analysis has
inspired countless studies that nuance our understanding of subjectivities and societies.3 Some
scholars have worried that the concept of gender may be contributing to the replacement of one
distorting, universalizing, transhistorical narrative with another in which the history of gender
“looks very much the same no matter which century or culture is examined.”4 In considering
the gendered implications of medieval iconography, it is important, therefore, to heed Scott’s own
prescription for using the tool critically:
The “language of gender” cannot be codified in dictionaries, nor can its meanings be
easily assumed or translated. It doesn’t reduce to some known quantity of masculine or
feminine, male or female. It’s precisely the particular meanings that need to be teased
out of the materials we examine.5
Gendered readings of visual materials destabilize traditional interpretations, but they themselves
are also unstable; they shift according to how ideologies of gender factor into the multiple
identities of various viewers at different times.6 Furthermore, possessing layered and sometimes
contradictory meanings is a quality of the visual and the source of its power. As Mary Sheriff
astutely observes, “no matter how open to interpretation, no matter how overdetermined is the
text, the visual image is a little more so.”7 It is impossible to isolate an “iconography of gender”
in medieval art; rather, we gain a richer perspective on medieval iconography every time we
interrogate a visual product in light of how it may impose, construct, complicate, subvert, and/or
enable resistance to gender identities for both individuals and communities.
The legacy of Christianity as the hegemonic religion of medieval Western Europe contin-
ues to shape discourse about gender, and part of it is embedded in the visual products from the
412
The iconography of gender
period. From its origins, the tenets and practices of the faith were unclear, fluid, and inconsistent
with regard to gender. Paul wrote in the Letter to the Galatians that “There is neither Jew nor
Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ
Jesus” (3:28). Accordingly, Gregory of Tours endorsed a vision of heaven filled with “a throng
of people, neither men nor women.”8 Nevertheless, early Christian writings make clear that the
egalitarianism that may pertain in heaven was not to be applied to human relationships on earth.9
Influenced by Aristotle, Christian thinkers generally accepted that the female body was cold and
wet in contrast to the male body, which was hot and dry.10 Based on this misunderstanding of
biology, antique thinkers asserted that the female body was not capable of generative power and
was fit only to serve as a passive incubator of offspring. The Aristotelian characterization of the
female vessel as feeble and passive was a given for many Christian thinkers, who particularly asso-
ciated female bodies with the weaknesses of the flesh. The doctrine was debated, but a dominant
conclusion was that man was made in God’s image – body and soul – and woman was like God in
soul only.11 This rationale was used to explain the subordination of women to men in the earthly
realm, where human souls are subject to the limitations of human bodies. Jesus was incarnate
as male, the reasoning went, and so only men could be priests. This intellectual scaffolding was
and is used to justify excluding women from leadership roles in the church and discriminating
against them in myriad other ways.
The unjust gendered asymmetry, however, proves to be a difficulty. St. Jerome, who is noto-
rious for his misogyny, but who also maintained important and complicated relationships with
holy women throughout his long life, suggested that a woman might overcome her enslavement
to a defective body: “As long as woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as
body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, she will cease to
be a woman and will be called a man.”12 The idea that the only way a woman can truly serve
Christ is to abjure what were considered female aspects of herself cannot but devalue women;
nonetheless, it also betrays Jerome’s desire to find a way out of a restrictive binary that seemed to
exclude the holy women of whom he approved. According to Jerome, voluntary virginity sets
one apart, and as Sarah Salih, Jacqueline Murray, and others show, virginity was a surprisingly
fungible status in the Middle Ages that constituted a “third” or alternative gender to aspire to.13
Like other gendered identities, virginity required constant, vigilant performance of a socially
expected role. Sworn virgins, like monks and nuns, used imagery to perform and project a gender
role that cannot be reduced to a biological sex or to a heterosexual norm.
A capital at the abbey church of La Madeleine, Vézelay, depicting the trial of St. Eugenia
illustrates how images of bodies operated in the performance of virginity for the religious
(Fig. 30.1). The Life of St. Eugenia tells the story of a pious woman who assumes a male identity
and enters a monastery where she eventually becomes abbot. The capital illustrates the dramatic
moment when Abbot “Eugenius” reveals her breasts in order to prove she cannot have raped a
local woman, who, spurned by the abbot, spitefully accused “him.” The capital, as Kirk Ambrose
points out, mixes gender cues by showing a tonsured monk with breasts, suggesting that the
iconography of the nude female body might signify innocence, even in the context of male
monasticism.14 It is telling, however, that Eugenia/us is situated between stock, unambiguously
gendered characters: the conniving temptress and the wise judge. The contrast between the
dressed and sinful accuser and the undressed and righteous Eugenia no doubt called to mind
for medieval viewers the first temptress, Eve, whose prelapsarian innocence is signified by her
nudity and whose clothing is understood as a sign of sin and shame.15 The drama of virtue and
vindication on the capital creates an alternative narrative for the viewer to the Genesis tale of sin,
shame, and death sentence meted out by the divine Judge. The positive outcome is effected by
the immaculate character of the religious virgin, with whom the sculpture encourages the monks
413
Figure 30.1 Trial of Eugenia, c. 1120. North aisle of the nave, La Madeleine, Vézelay. Image courtesy of
Nick Havholm.
to identify – an operation of identification that both subverts and reinforces the male/female
binary, just as Jerome’s theory that a woman can more perfectly serve Christ by metaphorically
becoming male at once reinforces the subjection of women in Christianity and makes a (limited)
space of religious privilege for them. The meaning of this sculpture, which was quite accessible
in the aisle of the nave of a pilgrimage church, shifts when one imagines its import to a wide
range of potential viewers: layman or woman, novice or a monk, male abbot or female servant,
all with potentially heterogeneous desires and subjectivities. We read it differently according to
the contexts we interrogate, whether in diachronic or synchronic relationships to other sculptures
in this church or neighboring churches, to the texts the monks might have been reading, to the
liturgy, and/or to the historical events and social structures operant at the time they were made
or viewed.
The contrast between female sinner and virgin fueled a rich and complicated iconographic
relationship between Eve and Mary in medieval art, with consequences for constructing gen-
dered social roles. Artists staged tales from Genesis using strategies like manipulating the pace
of the narrative, the relationship of the figures of God, Eve, Adam, and the Serpent, and the
414
depiction of the first couple’s flesh and genitalia, all of which pictorialized varying levels of Eve’s
second-class status, carnal nature, and blame for the Fall. Adam Cohen and Anne Derbes show
that the visualization of this episode at St. Michael’s, Hildesheim, is a pointed criticism of seduc-
tive, disobedient women that conformed with both the patron Bishop Bernward’s ideas about
monastic reform and his exasperation with the imperial abbess Sophia of nearby Gandersheim,
who repeatedly thwarted his ambitions.16 In Venice, a similar message was conveyed in the most
prominent communal symbol – the cupola mosaics of St. Marco – which emphasized Eve’s dif-
ference from Adam, the weakness of her flesh, her guilt, and her lack of repentance.17 Such public,
negative representations of Eve’s nature theorized a male/female binary that served patriarchal
rationalizations for subordinating women in hegemonic structures.
And yet, the prevalence of such negative visual readings did not preclude alternative inter-
pretations with the potential to destabilize. One example is an illustration supervised by the
multitalented abbess Hildegard of Bingen for a manuscript recording her visions: Scivias (Wies-
baden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. I, fol. 2r; Fig. 30.2). In it she praised Eve, the “mother of
all living,” and has her represented emerging from Adam’s side as a glittering cloud of pulsing
stars, while a satanic serpent emerges menacingly from a nearby “hideous mist.”18 This dramatic
departure from familiar iconographic conventions startles the viewer into reappraising the misog-
ynistic narrative, even while it accepts its premises. Adam’s nude, flesh-toned body is associable
with representations of Christ in the manuscript, whereas Eve’s ethereal appearance draws com-
parisons to the glittering golden bodies of Ecclesia/Mary, and even God (cf. fols. 41v, 115v).
Hildegard’s emphasis on the association of the mother of humankind with the mother of Christ
offered a more positive lens through which to view women in Christian terms, especially since
the parallel was understood as an important factor in salvation history. The role of Eve and the
Virgin Mary as mothers was to be celebrated because they made necessary and possible, respec-
tively, the Incarnation. Since the body of Mary and the body of a priest were both vessels that
could miraculously produce the flesh of Christ, it was possible to conceive of Mary as a priest, and
indeed she might be represented with priestly qualities in some medieval art.19 The increasingly
theological and iconographic centrality of the Virgin, however, did not necessarily translate into
social gains for women.20 Marina Warner famously argued that Mary’s exceptionalism created
an unattainable ideal that excluded women from being able to identify with her or leverage her
status to their advantage in their everyday lives.21 Images of Mary, however, are so pervasive and
so varied that a single interpretive model is inadequate for understanding their implications in
the history of gender.22
Carolyn Walker Bynum’s groundbreaking work demonstrates, in fact, that women’s social role
as food-providers – especially as breastfeeding mothers – inclined them to identify with a figure
as exceptional as the Virgin: Christ, whose body also nourished the faithful through the Eucha-
ristic sacrament.23 This affinity found validation in exegetical writings that metaphorically fem-
inized Christ in explorations of the meanings of his Incarnation in the flesh: how he suffered to
compensate for the first sin, as women were condemned to suffer in childbirth; how he nurtured
the faithful with the fluids of his body – his blood – as women did with their milk.24 Bynum
draws our attention to late medieval images in which Christ’s side wound is anatomically analo-
gous to a breast, and he is even shown expressing blood with the same gesture given to images of
Mary expressing breast milk. Others have identified images in which Christ’s wound resembles
a vagina.25 Such apparent inversions have many valances that must be considered in light of a
larger medieval imaginary. Representations of a priestly Mary or feminized Christ that seem to
blur gender assignments operated alongside representations that insisted on the female-flesh/
male-spirit binary. These include representations in which the female body is figured as inferior
or even monstrous, but also images that heroicized hypermasculine bodies.26 Leo Steinberg has
415
Figure 30.2 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, Vision I, c. 1175. Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, MS I,
fol. 2r (original lost in 1945). Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv.
drawn attention to a category of medieval and Renaissance images that emphasizes the mascu-
linity, especially the genitalia, of Christ, testifying to and insisting on his male sex.27 Steinberg
and Bynum have argued about the implications of seemingly opposed visual conventions that
show Christ as man and mother, but both agree that the images were meant to be theological
meditations on Christ’s Incarnation, that it is anachronistic or wrongheaded to imagine the
potential sexualization of Christ’s body by hypothetical medieval viewers.28 Bynum argues that
the body brought up issues of nourishment, suffering, and resurrection for medieval people rather
than sexuality, which she believes is a modern preoccupation. And yet images emphasizing the
maleness of the virgin Christ must have addressed the uneasy status of virgin clerics operating
in a broader culture that valued male sexual potency. Mocking representations of St. Joseph and
visual attempts to recast him as the head of his earthly family suggest anxiety about the subor-
dinate role of this husband cuckolded by God.29 While Bynum is right to point out that the
significance of the gendered body is culturally determined, the extent to which she minimizes
sexuality as a factor in the medieval worldview is inevitably dependent upon the hegemonic
sources permitted and preserved by the Church.30
If evidence of sexual responses is difficult to recover, it is not nonexistent.31 The exuberant
sexual language of female mystics and nuns may have theological implications, but that does not
mean we should refuse to acknowledge their apparent delight in imagining union with Christ
in a literal, physical sense.32 In fact, some medieval texts show authorities worried that viewers
were having what they thought were inappropriate sexual responses to devotional imagery.33
Martha Easton has theorized that violent martyrdom scenes in medieval art were designed to
elicit a “sado-erotic” response, one that destabilized the viewers’ gendered subject position by
providing opportunities for them to shift their identification between the male torturer and the
passive, often female martyr. Socially expected sexual roles and desires inflect the construction of
gender, and medieval images – sometimes the same image – both modeled acceptable attitudes
and enabled transgressions.
The unique scene of flagellants in the Belles Heures (New York, The Cloisters, MS. 54.1.1,
fol. 74v; Fig. 30.3), for example, offered Duke John of Berry (1340–1416) a scene of heroic
masculinist devotion with which to identify: it featured members of a flagellant movement exclu-
sively for men, whose paraliturgical practices and voluntary bloodshed engendered comparisons to
priests and even to Christ.34 As such it flattered Berry’s masculinity in the face of attacks by polit-
ical enemies that capitalized on his alleged sexual relationships to young men, including, plausibly,
Paul Limbourg, one of the illuminators responsible for the Belles Heures. The sexual undertones of
the miniature are evident from the way in which a central figure grasps his groin and holds a phal-
lic whip handle, while two of the figures fall to their knees and present their exposed backs to their
brethren. Since flagellation was a punishment prescribed for sexual sins, the duke confronts a scene
that reminds him of his (potential) transgressions, and, in the context of the broader penitential
emphasis in the manuscript, urges him to repent in order to claim the kind of sanctified worldly
power available to the purged – like the flagellants pictured.35 The manuscript was a mechanism
that allowed the duke both to indulge his desire and to construct a dominant masculine gender
identity in the face of the threat his sexual appetites may have posed to his claim. This case, in
which we have some unusual documentary knowledge of the principals, draws our attention to
viewers whose sexual desires and/or behavior may not have conformed to hegemonic Christian
notions of what was “natural,” whose sexuality destabilized gendered expectations. Any medieval
image might be read against the grain in order to gain insight into the ideological structures of
exclusion, and such “queer” readings enrich our knowledge of the past and our relationship to it.36
Gender operates in concert with other “identity machines” – not only sexuality but also race,
class, ethnicity, and creed – which affect real bodies in the real world.37 One way that images
417
Figure 30.3 Herman, Jean, and Paul de Limbourg, Flagellants, The Belles Heures of John, Duke of Berry,
1405–1408/09. New York, The Cloisters Collection 1954, MS. 54.1.1, fol. 74v. Photo courtesy of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/collections.
shored up the hegemony of powerful men, for example, was to denigrate disenfranchised groups,
to suggest for them an alternative and lesser masculine state, or “third gender,” as Madeleine
Caviness suggests occurs in the Bayeux Embroidery, where, through positioning, gestures and
dress, the vanquished Saxons are depicted as an inferior category of men.38 Images of the poor
also show them as separate and inferior according to gendered criteria.39 Scholars have also noted
a contrast between the representations of male and female Jews that both reinforces commonly
held gender stereotypes and denigrates and demonizes Jews in general. Artists seem to reserve
418
exaggerated features like hooked noses and other negative visuals to the male Jew, interpreting
women as more malleable, passive, and convertible, not to mention exotic and sexually available.40
Images of Jews in medieval art and literature undoubtedly fueled repression of and violence
against Jews in medieval Europe. They were also an important part of the medieval imaginary
even in places where Jews had been expelled for hundreds of years.41 Christians used the idea of
the Jew and Jewess to address aspects of their own identities, and the way they gendered these
images operated in medieval constructions of both the other and the self.
As is the case with concepts of “self ” in modernity and postmodernity, one cannot pin down
a singular concept of a medieval “sense of self ” or the precise role that notions of gender played
in formulating it at any given time.42 Issues of identity that gendered images addressed were con-
tested and in flux. A brief consideration of images of the soul, for example, demonstrates the way
in which such iconography offered opportunities for viewers to consolidate or subvert gendered
identities.43 Egalitarian theories about the nature of the soul put forth by some church fathers
discussed earlier were, perhaps, at the root of the gender-neutral homunculus representing the
soul, common in medieval art, whose genitalia is nondescript and irrelevant. And yet, there was
a strong medieval impulse to insist that one retained for eternity one’s gender, class, vocation,
and other aspects of earthly identity that seemed located in the body. Carolyn Walker Bynum
elucidates the medieval “concern for material and structural continuity,” persistent “even where
it seemed almost to require philosophical incoherence, theological equivocation, or aesthetic
offensiveness.”44 For example, a fourteenth-century representation of the story of Dives and
Lazarus shows the beggar and the rich man at the moment of their deaths (Dijon, Bibl. Mun.
MS 525, fol. 131v; Fig. 30.4). In spite of being saved, the homunculus representing Lazarus’s
soul is marked by the sores that are also visible on his corpse below; it is gendered male with a
prominent penis that extends all the way down to the knees. This unusual rendering asserts the
continuing existence of one’s own gendered body in the afterlife, which might have been reassur-
ing to those invested in their gendered earthly identity, except that it implies that they will retain
Figure 30.4 Deaths of Dives and Lazarus, Compilation of Literary Texts, France, 1355–62. Dijon, Bibl.
Mun. MS 525, fol. 131v. Image courtesy of IHRT.
419
disfigurements acquired while living. Lazarus came to be linked with leprosy in the Middle Ages,
and leprosy with sexual sin, an association that the soul’s giant phallus here seems to confirm.45
The artist has altered the narrative from Luke 16:19–31 to make it Christ Himself, rather than
angels, who takes charge of Lazarus’s soul as it leaves his body. Christ’s expression betrays shock
or even revulsion as he gingerly receives the pockmarked and well-endowed soul. Perhaps His
sideways glance and grimace are meant to convey dismay at the ravages that Lazarus endured.
Perhaps we are to imagine that this is a transitional moment before Lazarus’s soul is cleansed of
its frightful earthly residue. It may be, also, that Christ’s expression mirrored and justified the
viewer’s own revulsion with lepers, with the poor – the underclass with whom the owner of the
book may not have wished to identify. Lazarus’s prominent genitalia may have been a distancing
mechanism mitigating the critical message of the parable for the comfortable book-owning
class.46 The presence of a prodigious phallus in medieval art was typically a negative marker for
the demonic, the poor, and other beings designated as evil or inferior.47 If representing oversized
male genitalia on a soul may have lessened the inclination for identification for male viewers,
representing souls with female genitalia did not necessarily exclude them.
Because the word for soul in Latin, anima, is feminine, and because the soul was to take the
inferior or feminine role in its marriage to Christ, medieval representations of the soul encour-
aged men to identify with souls pictured in feminine bodies. This is the case in a fifteenth-century
English book of hours (London, British Library, Harley MS 2887, fol. 69v; Fig. 30.5): in spite of
the stomach’s fleshiness – a marker of female attractiveness in the Middle Ages – and apparent
lack of penis, the soul pictured is most likely male.48 Here the marker of gender identification is
hair rather than genitalia. The close-cropped bowl cut is likely male, since incontestably female
souls are shown with breasts and hair flowing below their shoulders.49 Apparently female souls
Figure 30.5 Commendation of the Soul, “The Hours of the Earls of Ormond,” London, before 1467.
British Library, Harley MS 2887, fol. 97v. © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved.
420
can be interpreted as personifications of souls, animae with whom both male and female viewers
might identify. Male haircuts operated to exclude identification by female viewers more than
unambiguously female bodies might have excluded male identification.
These complicated examples are among thousands of representations of souls that join many
other iconographic puzzles accompanying a new landscape of lay devotion in the later Middle
Ages. The souls that go on journeys to heaven and hell, dispute with their bodies, or act out their
nuptial relationships with Christ testify to the fluid terms of gender identification in the Middle
Ages. Identifiable individual souls, like the figures that Dante encounters, which are imaged to
match their earthly body’s gender, are the exception rather than the rule.50 The state of dress or
undress of the soul – in no way a consistent semiotic system in medieval art – nevertheless indexes
the degree to which their owners and/or creators envisioned gender as part of their eternal
core identity.51 There are male bodies in dialogue with their own souls imaged as female, which
permits males in particular to imagine their essence encompassing male and female aspects.52
Eroticized versions of the soul doubled as fantasy objects for both male and female viewers
whose contemplation enabled a complicated form of self-love.53 Markers of sex difference in
representations of souls (or lack thereof) thus offered fertile opportunities for diverse viewers to
wrestle with issues of gender identity.
The soul is, of course, just one of a great number of iconographic motifs that explicitly or
implicitly embed ideas about gender. These include hermaphroditic hybrids; domestic scenes;
anatomical diagrams; heraldic displays; gendered monsters, demons, and animals; personifications –
among many others that have only begun to receive attention by scholars concerned with parsing
their gendered implications. Every body imaged in medieval art has the potential to unlock and
enrich our knowledge of the way medieval selfhood was gendered, as well the consequences of
this ideological operation in the social arena. Reading medieval iconography through the lens of
gender thus opens avenues of research and reveals new perspectives, which must challenge and
revise our understanding of medieval art and society as well as its lasting impact on ourselves.
Notes
1 For further analysis of the eccentricities of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of “gender,” see S.
Lindquist, “Gender,” Studies in Iconography 33 (2012), 113–30. For historiographic surveys of the appli-
cation of the concept of gender to medieval art, see B. Kurmann-Schwarz, “Gender and Medieval Art,”
in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (Malden, 2006), 128–58; and
M. Caviness, “Feminism, Gender Studies and Medieval Studies,” Diogenes 57 (2010), 409–16.
2 The classic study is J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990). For
an overview of the development of Butler’s thought and its influence, see M. Lloyd, “Judith Butler,” in
Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. M.W. Gibbons (Chichester, 2015), 409–16.
3 J. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91/5 (1986),
1053–75. Scott’s article is one of the most cited historical essays of its time according to A. Shephard
and G. Walker, “Gender, Change and Periodisation,” Gender & History 20:3 (2008), 453–62, 455. For
recent forums on its legacy, see “Revisiting ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,’” American
Historical Review 113:5 (2008), 1344–429; and J. Butler and E. Weed, The Question of Gender: Joan W.
Scott’s Critical Feminism (Bloomington, 2011).
4 A. Shepard and G. Walker, “Gender, Change and Periodisation,” Gender & History 20:3 (2008), 453–62,
456. See also E. L’Estrange and A. More, Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe: Construc-
tion, Transformation, and Subversion, 600–1530 (Burlington, 2011), esp. 4–5.
5 J. Scott, “Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis?” Diogenes 57:7 (2010), 7–14, 13.
6 See J. Butler, who writes that “gender” is the “mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine
are produced and naturalized, but gender might very well also be the apparatus by which such terms
are deconstructed and denaturalized”; “Regulation,” in Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, ed. C.R.
Stimpson and G.H. Herdt (Chicago, 2014), 411–27, 413. See S. Lindquist, “Gender” (as in note 1), for a
demonstration of how a range of gendered meanings is possible in a single work.
421
7 M.D. Sheriff, “Seeing beyond the Norm: Interpreting Gender in the Visual Arts,” in The Question of
Gender (as in note 3), 161–86, 170.
8 As cited in J. Murray, “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval
Europe: New Perspectives, ed. L.M. Bitel and F. Lifshitz (Philadelphia, 2008), 34–51, p. 50.
9 For further discussion and additional bibliography, see D. Elliott, “Flesh and Spirit: The Female Body,”
in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition C. 1100–C. 1500, ed. A.J. Minnis and R. Voaden
(Turnhout/Belgium, 2010), 13–46.
10 J. Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Natural Philosophy, and Culture
(Cambridge/New York, 1993), 178.
11 See E.A. Matter, “Undebated Debate: Gender and the Image of God in Medieval Theology,” in Gender
in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. T.S. Fenster and C.A. Lees (New York, 2002),
41–55.
12 Jerome, Commentary to the Ephesians, 16, as cited in Murray, “One Flesh” (as in note 8), 42. For discus-
sion and additional bibliography, see M.R. Miles, “‘Becoming Male’: Women Martyrs and Ascetics,” in
Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston, 1989), 53–77. J.T.
Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, Ca. 500–1100 (Chicago, 1998); D. Elliott,
The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500, 1st ed.,
The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, 2012).
13 Murray, “One Flesh, Two Sexes” (as in note 8); S. Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Wood-
bridge/Rochester, 2001). R. Evans, S. Salih, and A. Bernau, Medieval Virginities (Toronto/Buffalo, 2003).
14 K. Ambrose, “Male Nudes and Embodied Spirituality in Romanesque Sculpture,” in The Meanings of
Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. S.C.M. Lindquist (Farnham/Burlington, 2012), 65–83, 75–76; and his The
Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (Toronto, 2006), 39–44.
15 For discussion of contrasting sanctified nudity with lascivious clothed figures in medieval art, see M. Eas-
ton, “Uncovering the Meanings of Nudity in the Belles Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry,” in The Meanings
of Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. S.C.M. Lindquist (Farnham/Burlington, 2012), 149–81.
16 A. Cohen and A. Derbes, “Bernward and Eve at Hildesheim,” Gesta 40 (2001), 19–38.
17 For an analysis of the cupola mosaics of San Marco, Venice, in this light see P.H. Jolly, Made in God’s
Image?: Eve and Adam in the Genesis Mosaics at San Marco,Venice (Berkeley, 1997).
18 For a thorough art historical analysis of the images in Hildegard of Bingen’s visionary text Scivias, see
L.E. Saurma-Jeltsch, Die Miniaturen im “Liber Scivias” der Hildegard von Bingen: die Wucht der Vision und die
Ordnung eer Bilder (Wiesbaden, 1998). See also M.H. Caviness, “‘To See, Hear, and Know All at Once’:
Hildegard of Bingen as a Creative Artist,” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed.
B. Newman (1998), 110–24. On Hildegard’s theology, see B. Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s
Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley, 1997).
19 See A.L. Clark, “The Priesthood of the Virgin Mary: Gender Trouble in the Twelfth Century,” Journal
of Feminist Studies in Religion 18:1 (2002), 5–24; and P.Y. Cardile, “Mary as Priest: Mary’s Sacerdotal
Position in the Visual Arts,” Arte Cristiana 72 (1984), 199–208.
20 An early and still useful treatment of this question is P.S. Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude,
and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago, 1985).
21 M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London, 1976).
22 This diversity is on display in M. Rubin’s Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, 2009).
For studies arguing for the positive consequences of certain images of the Eve/Mary opposition, see B.
Williamson, “The Virgin Lactans as Second Eve: Image of the Salvatrix,” Studies in Iconography 19 (1998),
105–38; and A. Dunlop, “Flesh and the Feminine: Early-Renaissance Images of the Madonna with Eve
at Her Feet,” Oxford Art Journal 25:2 (2002), 129–47.
23 C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987).
24 C.W. Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982).
25 M. Easton, “The Wound of Christ, the Mouth of Hell: Appropriations and Inversions of Female
Anatomy in the Later Middle Ages,” in Illuminations: Medieval and Renaissance Studies for Jonathan J.G.
Alexander, ed. G.B. Guest, E. Inglis, and S. L’Engle (London, 2006), 395–409; F. Lewis, “The Wound in
Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” in Women and the
Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. L. Smith and J.H.M. Taylor (Toronto, 1996), 204–29.
26 On the female body as monstrous, see M.R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious
Meaning in the Christian West (Boston, 1989), esp. 160–63; J. Ruda, “Satan’s Body: Religion and Gender
Parody in Late Medieval Italy,” Viator 37 (2006), 319–50; and J.J. Paxson, “The Nether-Faced Devil and
the Allegory of Parturition,” Studies in Iconography 19 (1998), 130–76.
422
27 L. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed., rev. and expanded
(Chicago, 1996).
28 C.W. Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” Renaissance
Quarterly 39:3 (1986), 399–439; Steinberg responds to Bynum in the revised version of his Sexuality of
Christ (as in note 27), 364–89.
29 For discussion, see P. Sheingorn, “Joseph the Carpenter’s Failure at Familial Discipline,” in Insights and
Interpretations: Studies in Celebrations of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art., ed. C.
Hourihane (2002), 156–67; P. Sheingorn, “‘Illustris Patriarcha Joseph’: Jean Gerson, Representations
of Saint Joseph, and Imagining Community among Churchmen in the Fifteenth Century,” in Visions
of Community in the Pre-Modern World, ed. N. Howe (Notre Dame, 2002), 75–108. C. Hahn, “Joseph
Will Perfect, Mary Enlighten, and Jesus Save Thee’: The Holy Family as Marriage Model in the Merode
Triptych,” Art Bulletin 68:1 (1986), 54–66.
30 Visual sources in lay contexts have much more to reveal on this point; see, for example, R.C. Trexler,
“Gendering Jesus Crucified,” in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. B. Cassiday (Princeton, 1993),
107–20.
31 See my discussion of the problem in “Visualizing Female Sexuality in Medieval Cultures,” Different
Visions 5 (2014), 1–24.
32 Jeffrey Hamburger’s work, groundbreaking in drawing our attention to the art of the female religious,
aligns with Bynum’s view that its sexual implications are mostly irrelevant to its medieval significance;
see, for example, his Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley, 1997), 218–19,
222.
33 R.C. Trexler, “Gendering Jesus Crucified,” (as in note 30).
34 For an examination of this miniature in its larger manuscript and historical contexts, see S. Lindquist,
“Masculinist Devotion: Flaying and Flagellation in the Belles Heures,” Flaying in the Premodern World: Prac-
tice and Representation, ed. L. Tracy (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 2016), pp. 174–207. See also M. Camille,
“‘For Our Devotion and Pleasure’: The Sexual Objects of Jean, Duc de Berry Art History,” Art History
24 (2001), 169–94.
35 This operation resembles the function of sexualized images in the cloister as mechanism of and testi-
mony to the struggles of monks against corporeal desire as described by T. Dale, “The Nude at Moissac:
Vision, Phantasia, and the Experience of Romanesque Sculpture,” in Current Perspectives in Romanesque
Sculpture Studies, ed. K. Ambrose and R. Maxwell (Turnhout, 2011), 61–76.
36 See K. Whittington, “Queer,” Studies in Iconography 33 (2012), 157–68; and R. Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the
Middle Ages (Chicago, 2014).
37 On this useful construct, see J.J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, 2003).
38 M. Caviness, “Anglo-Saxon Women, Norman Knights and a ‘Third Sex’ in the Bayeux Embroidery,”
in The Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations, ed. M.K. Foys, K.E. Overbey, and D. Terkla (Woodbridge/
Rochester, 2009), 84–118.
39 There have been few art historical studies that examine the intersection of gender and the poor, but
see K. Dimitrova, “Class, Sex, and the Other: The Representation of Peasants in a Set of Late Medieval
Tapestries,” Viator 38:2 (2007), 85–125. Literary and historical studies suggest that this is fertile ground
for research; see S.A. Farmer, “The Beggar’s Body: Intersections of Gender and Social Status in High
Medieval Paris,” in Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society: Essays in Honor of Lester
K. Little, ed. S.A. Farmer and B.H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, 2000), 153–71; and P.H. Freedman, Images of the
Medieval Peasant (Stanford, 1999), 157–73.
40 S. Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York, 2014), 201–37. See also
C.A. Bradbury, “Picturing Maternal Anxiety in the Miracle of the Jew of Bourges,” Medieval Feminist
Forum 47:2 (2012), 34–56. For the implications of Jewish biblical characters and abstractions such as
Synagoga, see N. Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth
Century (Cambridge/New York, 2011), esp. 40–81; and H. Abramson, “A Ready Hatred: Depictions of
the Jewish Woman in Medieval Antisemitic Art and Caricature,” Proceedings of the American Academy for
Jewish Research 62 (1996), 1–18.
41 J. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, 1999).
42 For discussion of the concept of “self ” in the Middle Ages, see R. Ganze, “The Medieval Sense of Self,”
in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, ed. S.J. Harris and B.L. Grigsby (New York, 2008), 102–16.
43 There is no comprehensive study of souls in medieval art, but see M. Barasch, “The Departing Soul: The
Long Life of a Medieval Creation,” Artibus et Historiae 26:52 (2005), 13–28.
44 C.W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995), 11.
423
45 For an exploration of the intersection of the iconography of gender, sexuality, leprosy, and the poor, see
E. Gertsman, “Si Grant Ardor: Transgression and Transformation in the Pühavaimu Altarpiece,” Different
Visions 5 (2014), 1–30.
46 An early owner of this compilation of literary texts is identified inside the back cover as “Jehan Regnault,
demeurent a Dijon.” For a description of the manuscript and additional bibliography, see G.M. Cropp,
“Les Manuscrits du Livre de Boece de Consolacion,” Revue d’histoire des textes 12 (1985), 263–352, esp.
280–82.
47 On oversized genitals as indexes of difference and monstrosity, see D. Williams, Deformed Discourse:
The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal, 1996), 160; and S. Salih, “The
Medieval Looks Back,” in Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image, ed. E.
Campbell and R. Mills (New York, 2004), 223–31.
48 A description and additional bibliography on this manuscript are available at the British Library’s web-
site: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_50001.
49 For an example of a female soul with these characteristics, see a Flemish book of hours made for the
English market, c. 1470, NYC, Morgan Library, MS M.93 fol. 125v, described at http://ica.themorgan.
org/manuscript/page/22/77343.
50 As evident in an illustrated version of the Divine Comedy in London, British Library, Egerton 943. Even
so, the operation is not necessarily straightforward; see J. Schnapp, “Dante’s Sexual Solecisms: Gender
and Genre in the Commedia,” in The New Medievalism, ed. M.S. Brownlee, K. Brownlee, and S.G. Nichols
(Baltimore, 1991), 201–25.
51 For a case in which souls in hell and limbo are shown naked while souls in purgatory and heaven are
shown clothed, see a copy of the Speculum humanae salvationis, France, c. 1470–80, Marseille, Bibl. Mun.
MS 89, fol. 28v.
52 See, for example, an illustration of Jean Gerson’s Spiritual Poverty, Bruges, mid-fifteenth century, Paris,
BnF, MS 190, fol. 1r, discussed in S.C.M. Lindquist, “Luxuriating in Poverty and Philosophy: Some Unu-
sual Nudes in the Manuscripts of Louis of Bruges,” in Staging the Court of Burgundy, ed. A.v. Oosterwijk
(Turnhout, 2013), 325–34.
53 See, for example, an illumination by Loiset Liedet of the Soul Personified as a Woman in Dialog with Her
Heart, illustrating Le Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance by René of Anjou, Hesdin, before 1468, Cambridge,
Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 165, fol. 31r.
424
31
FEMINIST ART HISTORY AND
MEDIEVAL ICONOGRAPHY
Martha Easton
Simply defined, the standard definition of feminism is the advocacy for the social, economic,
and political rights of women to ensure that they are guaranteed equal status with men.1 The
word in English is derived from the French féminisme, first used in a very particular historical
moment, during the social unrest in late nineteenth-century France when women struggled
to promote their rights.2 Feminist approaches to art history became popular in conjunction
with the large-scale shift in awareness and activism surrounding women’s issues in the 1970s,
and art historians used feminist theory to interrogate the ideological construction of gender,
and in particular, the way that women have been underrepresented as active makers of art, and
objectified as passive subjects.
The concept of feminist iconography is probably most appropriately applied to modern artists,
particularly beginning in the 1970s, who created works to highlight contemporary social and
political causes, and these artists were and are, by and large, female.3 On occasion, these contem-
porary artists took their inspiration from the medieval past; Judy Chicago’s iconic Dinner Party
invited a number of medieval women to the dinner table, including Brigit, Theodora, Hrotsvit,
Trotula, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegard of Bingen, Petronilla de Meath, Christine de Pizan, and
Isabella d’Este, among the other women Chicago and her researchers felt had been left out of
a male-constructed history.4 Other feminist artists were inspired by medieval art; Nancy Spero
created a Rockette-style kickline of interlocked Kilpeck sheela-na-gigs as a way of reclaiming and
defusing the sexualized and monstrous female nude.5 In this sense, it is more difficult to think
of medieval iconography that is specifically feminist in nature that intentionally promoted the
cause of women’s equality or concerns. Rather, it is probably more useful to analyze the way that
scholars have employed feminist theory to interrogate the iconography of medieval art.
The use of feminist theory as a tool to analyze medieval visual culture has followed a trajectory,
with shifts in attention and interest. Like feminist art historians who focused on post-Renaissance
periods, early feminist scholarship on medieval art made an attempt to recover forgotten female
artists, inspired by Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking article, “Why Have There Been No Great
Women Artists?”6 Nochlin’s title was deliberately facetious, and while she explored the social and
cultural barriers that barred women from artistic success (particularly in the nineteenth century, the
inability of women to study the live nude model), some scholars took her title as a challenge. This
was more productive for artists from later periods; the identification of artists is notoriously elusive
in medieval art history, and therefore the association of particular bodies of work with particular
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Martha Easton
figures is necessarily based on stylistic analysis, which in itself has fallen out of favor as a method
of scholarly inquiry. Nevertheless, the recovery of female artists from the Middle Ages was one of
the first feminist-inspired projects, although not all participants in this enterprise would necessarily
identify themselves as feminist scholars.7 Iconography is sometimes seen as a fruitful diagnostic tool
in determining authorship, with the idea that female artists might have been drawn to particular
sorts of subjects, such as images of female saints, or women in general, although this sort of assump-
tion, both for female producers and consumers of art, has more recently been called into question.
There are many obstacles to determining the role of women in the creation of images. We
sometimes have textual evidence of women’s involvement with the arts, but no actual objects;
perhaps the most famous example of this is Christine de Pizan’s description of the manuscript
illuminator Anastaise, whom she praises for her beautiful manuscript borders and miniature back-
grounds;8 it should be noted that Anastaise’s marginalized status as a female illuminator extends
to the areas of the manuscript she is responsible for painting. We also have examples where the
objects themselves are the sole remaining evidence of female authorship. While determining
the so-called self-portrait is tricky in medieval art, it has been tempting to identify the woman
swinging from the initial “Q” with the name “Claricia” inscribed above her head, in the late
twelfth- or early thirteenth-century South German Psalter now in the Walters Art Museum, as
the artist of the image and others in the manuscript.9 If we read the image as reflecting reality,
which is a problematic thing to do, Claricia’s dress suggests that she might be a lay student at a
convent, and convents in general seem to be a place for female creators of all kinds – writers,
textile workers, and illuminators; often the objects created by nuns were for their own devotional
use.10 One of the most well-known examples of a female religious author/creator is Hildegard of
Bingen, and scholars have attempted to determine how much control she had over the illustration
of her works.11 The same can be said for Christine de Pizan herself; while she is often pictured
in author portraits in manuscripts of her own texts, it is not clear how much, if any, control she
had over the decoration of these manuscripts, or her own self-image.
The initial focus on the recovery of female artists from the Middle Ages relatively quickly
changed to investigations of medieval representations of women, and the way that such images
served as vehicles to examine attitudes toward women. It is in the depiction of medieval women,
and in the reception of these images, that we can best think about feminist interpretations of
medieval iconography. Feminist historians of medieval art have been influenced by theories of the
gaze, as formulated in particular by film critic Laura Mulvey, and the way that images of women
both reflect and reinscribe cultural norms. There are a number of essential sources that consider
the ways that women were imaged in medieval art, and they are a useful place to understand
both the variety and the codification of medieval depictions of women.12 One of the earliest
publications to consider the way particular themes illuminate the construction of gender roles
in medieval society focused on Eve and Mary as dichotomous antitypes,13 and these two figures
often function as vehicles to explore medieval attitudes toward women.14 Other biblical and holy
figures have inspired feminist interpretations, often because they serve as models for medieval
women of proper behavior both in and out of the church.15 Mary Magdalene, in her role as
penitent sinner, shares the qualities of both Eve and Mary, and thus she is a popular figure both in
medieval iconography and in feminist contextualizations of the ideological work performed by
such images.16 Binary oppositions are common constructions in medieval art, apparent not only
in biblical models but also in the personifications of the virtues and vices,17 and even in the spa-
tial location of donors in altarpieces.18 Feminist scholars have also focused on images of women
depicted in the roles they occupied in medieval society – as queens,19 as wives, and as mothers.20
Often feminist analyses of medieval iconography pressure interpretations to move beyond the
obvious, to understand that there might be multiple ways of understanding an image, and thus
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Feminist art history
images themselves not only reflect but also help to construct social mores and cultural assump-
tions. For example, images of female martyrs are not just figures of devotion to be admired for
their faith and sacrifice; depending on their presentation, context, and audience, they may also be
spectacles of sado-erotic titillation.21 The body has been a popular theme, as has more recently
nudity, sexuality, eroticism, and obscenity;22 whereas an earlier art history imagined that the most
well-known examples of medieval art had religious or devotional intentions at their heart, with
the assumption that such images were fundamentally straightforward and unproblematic in their
object/viewer interaction, more recent work has muddied these essentialist views and posited
more nuanced ways that images might be consumed. Feminist scholars have also done the fun-
damental work of bringing once overlooked works of art into the center of scholarship, and thus
manuscript marginalia,23 misericords,24 sheela-na-gigs,25 secular ivories, and other such objects
have drawn increasing attention.26
Feminist scholars have focused their attention on the art of Western Europe, and primarily
on the art of the central and later Middle Ages; there has been comparatively little work done on
early Christian, Byzantine, and Islamic art, although there are some exceptions.27 On the other
hand, there are a number of publications in these areas on the gender fluidity apparent in early
representations of Christ;28 for example, the baptism scenes in the Orthodox and Arian baptister-
ies in Ravenna are remarkably similar, except that the figure of Christ in the latter is represented
with a softly voluptuous body, even with the suggestion of breasts. The maternal, feminine,
and sexualized characteristics of Christ,29 and the masculinization of both religious and secular
women,30 have also been topics explored by art historians and other medievalists interested in the
ideological construction of gender in both text and image.
In more recent years, the focus of feminist art historians has shifted yet again, perhaps as a
reaction against earlier scholarship that understood medieval images of women as primarily
embodying negative stereotypes of women typical of a fundamentally patriarchal society. There-
fore, a great deal of more recent work has centered on the positive agency of women. The idea
of women as “makers” of art has been reconfigured to consider the numerous ways that medieval
women were involved in the production of art and architecture, not simply as artists but also as
patrons, donors, owners, and users; an important contribution has used the word “maker” in its
title.31 Scholars have focused on the way women commissioned and/or consumed objects, such
as seals,32 stained-glass windows,33 ivories (both devotional and decorative),34 and, especially,
illuminated manuscripts.35 The iconography of self-representation factors in such explorations,
particularly in images of women with the objects that they either commissioned, owned, or
used. There has been particular interest in the images of women with books, and Books of
Hours, above all, were the manuscripts most likely for women to use and pass on to other family
members.36 Images of women holding books contained within the books themselves have been
interpreted as “portraits” of the owners, as serving as models of devotional practice, and perhaps
even as vehicles of self-representation.37
How did women respond to objects that were not constructed or commissioned by them, but
even so were created for their consumption? By way of a brief case study I would like to consider
how women might have reacted to images of so-called courtly love on ivory objects. The trade
in ivory was brisk in the later Middle Ages, and many objects were produced with both religious
and secular themes, particularly in fourteenth-century Paris. While ivories have received a grow-
ing amount of scholarly attention in recent years, most scholarship has focused on items used
in personal devotion, such as statuettes of the Virgin and Child, or plaques depicting the scenes
from the Passion or the Coronation of the Virgin. With a few important exceptions,38 there has
not been as much interest in secular ivories, although the establishment of the Gothic Ivories
database will make further research much more efficient.39 Similarly, while the textual traditions
427
Martha Easton
of courtly love have been a source of great scholarly interest, there has not been as much work
on the depiction of courtly love themes in art.
The vast majority of courtly love scenes appear on items that were used by women: combs,
gravoirs (or hair parters), caskets, and other objects associated with the toilette. By far the great-
est number of surviving secular ivories from the fourteenth century is mirror backs; a polished
metal disc would have been placed on the other side, but there are few that survive intact from
the Middle Ages. It is thought that often these items were gifts presented by men to women,
and thus it seems significant that so many of these images were placed on mirrors – women gaze
into a mirror and see themselves reflected in the scene, much as do the personifications of Vanity,
thereby participating in their own objectification as sight and sexual goal.
At first glance these romantic encounters look like fairly innocuous scenes of couples engaged
in sedate flirtations. The growing popularity of courtly love poetry and images of secular romance
during the later Middle Ages has sometimes been characterized as indicating positive changes in
the status of women, at least in part connected to the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary. The
codification of chivalry is often seen as religious homage to Mary transferred to a secular realm, in
which the knight kneels before his lady and proclaims her superiority and his undying allegiance.
However, an examination of some of the images of courtly love produced during the later Middle
Ages suggests a different interpretation. Particularly when these images are examined in conjunc-
tion with medieval texts, such as romances, poetry, and fabliaux, it becomes clear that many of
them are visualized sexual metaphors. Rather than proclaiming the superiority of the female sex,
much of the standard iconography conflates adoration and eroticism, with allusions to seduction
and illicit love, often with underlying hints of deceit, violence, and even rape.40
One of the most common motifs in the courtly love canon is that of the crowned lover;
usually the man kneels before his lady while she places a round circlet, or chaplet, on his head.
Rather than serving as an innocuous symbol of the confirmation of love, the crowning of a lover
perhaps connotes the sex act itself. This is more explicit in a mirror case in which the scenes
take place in a castle setting (Fig. 31.1). The man kneels to accept his crown, and then hastens to
follow his lady as she points up the stairs, where by implication the couple will indulge in further
Figure 31.1 Mirror cover: Scenes of lovers, 1340–60, Ivory, 0.7 × diam. 9 cm (1/4 × 3 9/16 in.) Gift of
Mrs. Albert E. McVitty. Princeton University Art Museum, (y1954-61). Image courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
428
erotic pleasures. The chaplet itself, with its suggestively round shape, is likely a visual metaphor
for the female genitalia, joining an array of such motifs used in medieval images and literature,
with small, furry animals, such as squirrels, rabbits, and mice, perhaps the most familiar.41
Couples playing chess are also popular themes on courtly love mirrors; the game in progress
is not just the game of chess but also the game of love. In one example, the attendant standing
behind the woman holds a chaplet, and the one behind the man holds a falcon, which along
with other hunting motifs connotes romantic pursuit, underscoring what is really in play here
(Fig. 31.2).42 More pointed are the vulvic drapery folds of the woman’s garment43 and the phallic
pole grasped by the man, while the parted curtains above the scene are suggestive both of bed
curtains and, even more explicitly, of female anatomy.44
Some ivories depict a God of Love tossing arrows from his treetop perch; in one, the arrows of
the God of Love in juxtaposition with the chaplet and the falcon create a conglomeration of sug-
gestive imagery and emphasize the aggressive nature of the sexuality portrayed here (Fig. 31.3).
Figure 31.2 Mirror cover: Chess Game, fourteenth century, Paris, France. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Image
courtesy of Colum Hourihane.
Figure 31.3 Mirror cover: The God of Love and a Couple, 1300–1320, Paris, France. Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
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Martha Easton
Figure 31.4 Mirror cover: Pairs of Lovers, fourteenth century, France. Photo © Royal Museums of Art and
History, Brussels.
Another French mirror shows two pairs of lovers engaged in amorous embraces flanking a central
pair; they appear to be making some sort of pledge on a sword, but the weapon is in the shape
of an enormous phallus (Fig. 31.4). In fact, in many Old French fabliaux, a common euphemism
for the sex act is “battre” or to beat, and many graphic descriptions of sexual liaisons include
metaphors of violence.45
The fabliaux often portray women as ready and eager for sex, generally fully complicit in a
sexual activity even if it is forced, or means cuckolding a husband. A woman may be deceived
initially by the seducer, but she is usually pleased to participate fully in the ensuing act. The
famous story in Boccaccio’s Decameron of the young, beautiful, and sexually innocent girl Alibech
(Day 3, Tenth Story) has a similar trajectory; she leaves her home and material possessions behind
in order that she may better “serve God” and she comes upon the cell of a young religious hermit
named Rustico, who cannot battle his temptation to seduce her. He convinces her that she is the
means of his salvation, if only she will let him put his “devil” into her “hell,” which they do so
many times that finally Rustico begs to be left in peace. The use of ivory objects for scenes of
courtly love is particularly suggestive, since the material properties of ivory itself can underscore
the way the resistance of women to sexual overtures was understood in medieval culture. It is
said that authentic ivory warms to the touch the longer it is held, in a manner consistent with
the way women were described in medieval literature as compliant and complicit in their own
seductions, with any initial hesitation quickly turning into insatiable desire.
The focus on violence and aggression in lovemaking, often encouraged or at least tolerated
by women, is illustrated in the extremely popular motif of the Castle of Love, which appears in
manuscripts as well as in a large number of ivory caskets and mirror cases. The standard depic-
tion includes a fortress attacked by knights and ineffectively defended by women throwing roses
430
Figure 31.5 Roundel with scenes of the attack on the Castle of Love, c. 1320–40, Paris, France, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 2003.
(Fig. 31.5). It is not difficult to see that the castle is really a substitute for the female body, an
edifice waiting, even wanting, to be penetrated, particularly since roses could be used as poetic
substitutes for female genitalia, and thus the women are throwing themselves, so to speak, at their
male invaders. As I have discussed elsewhere,46 the literary passage most closely aligned to the
visual image of the siege of the Castle of Love takes place in the conclusion of the Roman de la
Rose, the most popular work in French of the late Middle Ages. When the protagonist Amant
succeeds in his pursuit and seduction of the Rose, the final act is described as a relentless attack
on an ivory tower, just as the mirror backs and other objects with the Castle of Love depict a
building populated by defenseless women and overwhelmed by heavily armed men.
And so how did women react to these courtly love scenes, which seem to represent the world
of seduction and sex ordered through male eyes but consumed by their own? In our search to
recover the meaning of images, it is often just as difficult to understand audience reception as
it is artistic intention. But at the same time that these “courtly love” ivories were produced in
vast numbers, there was a recognizable voice of resistance. Christine de Pizan, although born in
1365 in Venice, lived most of her life in Paris, the center of ivory production. She is of course
famous for her writings which extolled the virtues of women, and she was often responding in
direct opposition to prevailing attitudes of the time. As one of the main correspondents in the
famous Quarrel of the Roman de la Rose, she disparaged the work for its immorality and antifemale
speeches. Even more significantly, she wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, defending women
against misogynist attacks by men; in the book, Christine as narrator is visited by three crowned
ladies, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who instruct her how to build the City of Ladies, populated
by virtuous women culled from history (just as six hundred years later, Judy Chicago invites
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Martha Easton
them to her dinner party, and includes Christine herself among their number). All three women
carry attributes, and that of Lady Reason is a mirror, but here, the combination of mirror and
woman is not indicative of vice, or a passive sight to be enjoyed by men, but rather a vehicle of
personal awareness rather than vain self-involvement.
Christine’s examination of good women is a reworking of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, in
which he writes about famous pagan women from history – notable contemporary women he
considered too few to mention, and women in religious history were excluded as he felt they
did not act in accordance with human nature. One of Christine’s innovations was her insistence
that only virtuous women be included, both pagan and Christian, and that they be allowed into
her City on the basis of their own merits rather than by a comparison of their deeds to those of
men. The motif of the City of Ladies alludes to Augustine’s City of God, but it is likely that it is
also in response to these common images of the Castle of Love, particularly since Christine’s City
seems to invert the trope of the building containing ineffectual women, and reverse the motif of
the female body as a penetrable structure highlighted in the very literary work that Christine so
passionately denounced. Lady Reason assures Christine that “this City, which you will found
with our help, will never be destroyed, nor will it ever fall . . . Although it will be stormed by
numerous assaults, it will never be taken or conquered.”47 Christine specifically addresses the issue
of rape in the Book of the City of Ladies. She tells Rectitude, “I am . . . troubled and grieved when
men argue that many women want to be raped and that it does not bother them at all to be raped
by men even when they verbally protest.” Rectitude answers, “Rest assured dear friend, chaste
ladies who live honestly take absolutely no pleasure in being raped. Indeed, rape is the greatest
possible sorrow for them.”48 Christine’s City populated by virtuous women is transformed into
a castle of female intellectual capability rather than an easily overwhelmed edifice/orifice, and
she reappropriates the mirror and the castle as objects of female power and agency rather than
passivity and penetration.
Christine’s writings are an impassioned response to misogynist works such as the Roman de la
Rose, and to the encoded world of courtly love visualized in medieval secular ivories. In a later
work, The Book of the Three Virtues, Christine specifically addresses the hypocrisy and deceitful-
ness inherent within the art of courtly love, and warns women to beware the pitfalls of illicit
romance.49 It is difficult to know if her opinions were widely shared, or if other women were
socialized to accept the roles they were expected to play. Based on the condition of the ivory
objects that survive (the detached mirror backs, the broken comb teeth), we know that they
were heavily used. Since Christine lived in Paris and was a writer for several dukes at the court,
she probably saw these ivory combs, caskets, and mirrors, and one wonders what she might have
made of them. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that she owned such an item herself.
It is deeply satisfying to find a passionate advocate for women speaking up for herself. Feminist
scholars of the Middle Ages have also highlighted Marie de France; one of the few female authors
of romantic poetry, in some of her famous lais she seems to upend constructions of gender, with
female protagonists who pursue and save their men, rather than the other way around. But the
popularity of such figures in our time may underscore how unusual they were in their own –
women like Christine, or Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Hildegard of Bingen, or Margery Kempe, or
Joan of Arc, are restudied and reimagined over and over again. In the recently published Oxford
Handbook on Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (which sadly includes almost no art historical
scholarship), E. Jane Burns suggests that in the courtly world, agency is not in fact rigidly binary,
but rather fluctuates depending on subject positions that are not necessarily tied to gender;50
however, it could be said that the idea of agency itself may be masculinized and privileged.
Feminist theory in general, once seen as either radical, inconsequential, or, above all, anach-
ronistic for the study of medieval art, and therefore dismissed and marginalized (as were many
432
of the objects that feminist scholars of medieval art studied), is now rich enough to have its own
historiography and works of reference. Recent articles by Marian Bleeke, Jennifer Borland, and
Rachel Dressler have traced the way that feminist scholarship has impacted the study of medieval
visual culture.51 Students and scholars who are interested in feminist theory, or in images that are
ripe for critical analyses informed by feminism and gender theory, have a number of resources
at their disposal. The massive Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, edited by
Margaret Schaus, provides short entries, with accompanying essential bibliography, on a large
variety of topics.52 Schaus is also the editor of the ever-expanding database Feminae: Medieval
Women and Gender Index, which recently began including images along with its bibliographic
citations and helpful abstracts of books, articles, and book reviews.53 And yet, as I discussed in my
article “Feminism,” written for the special issue of Studies in Iconography devoted to critical terms
in medieval art history,54 feminism as a methodological tool seems to have fallen out of fashion
and other theoretical approaches have risen to take its place. Yet even these new strategies for
analyzing images connect to feminism in some way. For example, the more recent material turn
in medieval art history, with its emphasis on the pleasure inherent in the sight and touch of the
physical object, creates a focus on the tangible and embodied image that becomes a pseudo-erotic
encounter with the object under study, emulating in some sense the lure that the female body was
believed to possess for its medieval (and modern) viewers.55 In addition, the focus on the agency
of the inanimate object is perhaps inspired by the way feminist artists and art historians have given
a voice to medieval women, by problematizing their representation, and recognizing their power
as people who made, used, donated, commissioned, looked at, and responded to medieval art.
Notes
1 Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/69192?redirectedFrom=feminism#eid.
2 See the discussion in C.G. Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, 1984).
3 N. Broude and M.D. Garrard (ed.), The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History
and Impact (New York, 1994).
4 For more on The Dinner Party, see Amelia Jones, “The ‘Sexual Politics’ of The Dinner Party: A Critical
Context,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art after Postmodernism, ed. N. Broude and M.D. Garrard
(Berkeley, 2005), 409–33.
5 See J. Withers, “Nancy Spero’s American-Born Sheela-na-gig,” Feminist Studies 17 (1991), 51–56.
6 L. Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Art News 69 (January 1971), 22–39,
67–71.
7 One of the earliest publications on medieval women artists was D. Miner, Anastaise and Her Sisters: Women
Artists of the Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1974), which was derived from an earlier lecture. See also C. Havice,
“Women and the Production of Art in the Middle Ages: The Significance of Context,” in Double Vision:
Perspectives on Gender and the Visual Arts,” ed. N.H. Bluestone (Cranbury, 1995), 67–94; and A.W. Carr,
“Women Artists in the Middle Ages: ‘The Dark Is Light Enough,’” in Dictionary of Women Artists, ed.
Delia Gaze (London/Chicago, 1997), 3–21.
8 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E.J. Richards (New York, 1982, 1998), 85 (I.41.4).
9 The Claricia Psalter, Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W. 26, fol. 64r. See L. Ross, Artists of the Middle Ages
(Westport, 2003), 141.
10 J. Frings and J. Gerehow, Krone un Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern (Munich, 2005);
J. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New
York, 1998); and J. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of A Medieval Convent (Berkeley/Los
Angeles, 1997).
11 Madeline Caviness has several publications on Hildegard; see especially M. Caviness, “Hildegard as the
Designer of the Illustrations to Her Works,” in Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art,
ed. C. Burnett and P. Dronke (London, 1998), 29–63.
12 M. Bleeke, J. Borland, R. Dressler, M. Easton, and E. L’Estrange, “Artistic Representation: Women and/
in Visual Culture,” in A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages, vol. 2, ed. K.M. Phillips (London,
2013), 179–213; J.L. Carroll and A.G. Stewart, Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in
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Medieval and Modern Europe (Burlington, 2003); M. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight,
Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia, 2001); C. Grössinger, Picturing Women in Late Medieval and
Renaissance Art (Manchester/New York, 1997); S. Smith, The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and
Literature (Philadelphia, 1995); and C. Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” trans. C. Botsford, in A History
of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. C. Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, 1992), 336–422.
13 H. Kraus, “Eve and Mary: Conflicting Images of Medieval Women,” in Feminism and Art History: Ques-
tioning the Litany, ed. N. Broude and M.D. Garrard (New York, 1982), 78–99. The article was originally
published in 1967.
14 For Eve, see especially M. Meyer, “Eve’s Nudity: A Sign of Shame or Precursor of Christological
Economy,” in Between Judaism and Christianity: Art Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elizabeth) Revel
Neher, ed. K. Kogman-Appel and M. Meyer (Leiden/Boston, 2009), 243–58; A.S. Cohen and A. Derbes,
“Bernward and Eve at Hildesheim,” Gesta 40:1 (2001), 19–38; B. Williamson, “The Virgin ‘Lactans’
as Second Eve: Image of the ‘Salvatrix,’” Studies in Iconography 19 (1998), 105–38; and P.H. Jolly, Made
in God’s Image? Eve and Adam in the Genesis Mosaics at San Marco, Venice (Berkeley, 1997). For Mary, see
especially E. Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (University Park, 2015); M.
Katz (ed.), Divine Mirrors: The Virgin Mary in the Visual Arts (Oxford, 2001); M. Vassilaki (ed.), Images
of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium (London, 2001); A. Neff, “The Pain of
Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” Art Bulletin 80:2 (1998), 254–73; M. Miles, “The
Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Nudity, Gender, and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,”
in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. N. Broude and M.D. Garrard (New York,
1992), 27–37; P.S. Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France
(Chicago, 1985); and I. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculpture of the Madonna in Romanesque France
(Princeton, 1972).
15 A.A. Jordan, “Material Girls: Judith, Esther, Narrative Modes and Models of Queenship in the Win-
dows of the Ste.-Chapelle,” Word and Image 15:4 (1999), 337–50; G.B. Guest, “Picturing Women in the
First Bible Moralisée,” in Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of
the Index of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2002), 106–30; J.A. Holladay, “Relics, Reliquar-
ies, and Religious Women: Visualizing the Holy Virgins of Cologne,” Studies in Iconography 18 (1997),
67–118; and K. Ashley and P. Sheingorn, Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society
(Athens, 1990).
16 P.H. Jolly, Picturing the “Pregnant Magdalene in Northern Art, 1430–1550: Addressing and Undressing the
Sinner-Saint (Burlington, 2014); M.E. Carrasco, “The Imagery of the Magdalen in Christina of Mark-
yate’s Psalter (St. Alban’s Psalter),” Gesta 38:1 (1999), 67–80; and S. Haskins, Susan, Mary Magdalen: Myth
and Metaphor (London, 1993).
17 N. Rowe, “Rethinking Ecclesia and Synagoga in the Thirteenth Century,” in Gothic Art and Thought in
the Later Medieval Period: Essays in Honor of Willibald Sauerländer, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2011),
264–91; and C. Karkov, “Broken Bodies and Singing Tongues: Gender and Voice in the Cambridge,
Corpus Christi 23 ‘Psychomachia,’” Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001), 115–36.
18 C. Schleif, “Men on the Right – Women on the Left: (A)symmetrical Spaces and Gendered Places,”
in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. V.C. Raguin and S. Stanbury
(Albany, 2005), 207–49.
19 K. Nolan, Queens in Stone and Silver: The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France (New
York, 2009); and T. Martin, The Queen as King: Politics and Architectural Propaganda in Twelfth-Century
Spain (Leiden/Boston, 2006). C.J. Brown, “Grief, Rape, and Suicide as Consolation of the Queen:
Ambivalent Images of Female Rulers in the Books of Anne de Bretagne,” Journal of the Early Book
Society 4 (2001), 172–201.
20 E. L’Estrange, Elizabeth, Holy Motherhood: Gender Dynasty and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages
(Manchester, 2008); G.M. Gibson, “Scene and Obscene: Seeing and Performing Late Medieval Child-
birth,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29:1 (1999), 7–24; A.R. Stanton, “From Eve
to Bathsheba and Beyond: Motherhood in the Queen Mary Psalter,” in Women and the Book: Assessing
the Visual Evidence, ed. J.M. Taylor and L. Smith (London/Toronto, 1996), 172–89; P. Sheingorn, “The
Wise Mother: The Image of Saint Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary” Gesta 32:1 (1993), 69–80; and R.
Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarian Birth in Medieval and Renaissance
Culture (Ithaca, 1990).
21 J. Borland, “Violence on Vellum: Saint Margaret’s Transgressive Body and Its Audience,” in Represent-
ing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe: Construction, Transformation, and Subversion, 600–1530, ed.
E. L’Estrange and A. More (Aldershot, 2011), 67–88; L.A. Callahan, “The Torture of Saint Apollonia:
434
Deconstructing Fouquet’s Martyrdom Stage,” Studies in Iconography 16 (1994), 119–38; M. Easton,

“Saint Agatha and the Sanctification of Sexual Violence,” Studies in Iconography 16 (1994), 83–118.
22 See, for example, S. Lindquist and M. Meyers (ed.), “Female Sexualities,” Different Visions 5 (2014), http://
differentvisions.org/issue-five/; S. Lindquist (ed.), The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (London,
2012); M. Easton, “Was It Good For You, Too? Medieval Erotic Art and Its Audiences,” Different Visions
1 (2008), http://differentvisions.org/one.html; M.H. Caviness, “Retomando la Iconografia Vaginal/
Revisiting Vaginal Iconography,” Quintana: Revista do Departmento de Historia da Arte, Universidade Santiago
de Compostela 6 (2007), 13–37; T. Kren, “Looking at Louis XII’s Bathsheba,” in A Masterpiece Recon-
structed: The Hours of Louis XII, ed. T. Kren and M. Evans (Los Angeles, 2005), 43–61; and M. Camille,
The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York, 1998); and J.M. Ziolkowski, Obscenity:
Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Leiden/Boston, 1998).
23 J.J.G. Alexander, “Chastity, Love, and Marriage in the Margins of the Wharncliffe Hours,” in Reading
Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and Patronage: In Honor of Margaret M. Manion,
ed. B.J. Muir (Exeter, 2002), 201–20; M. Caviness, “Patron or Matron: A Capetian Bride and a Vade
Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,” Speculum 68:2 (1993), 333–62; and L.F. Sandler, “A Bawdy Betrothal
in the Ormesby Psalter,” in A Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip, ed. W. Clark, C. Eisler, W. Heckscher, and B.
Lane (New York, 1985), 154–59.
24 E.C. Block, “Half Angel-Half Beast: Images of Women on Misericords,” Reinardus 5 (1992), 17–34.
25 M. Bleeke, “Sheelas, Sex, and Significance in Romanesque Sculpture: The Kilpeck Corbel Series,” Stud-
ies in Iconography 27 (2006), 1–26; B. Freitag, Sheela-na-gigs: Unravelling an Enigma (London/New York,
2004); C. Karkov, “Sheela-na-gigs and Other Unruly Women: Images of Land and Gender in Medieval
Ireland,” in From Ireland Coming: Irish Art from the Early Christian to the Late Gothic Period and Its European
Context, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2001), 313–31; A. Weir and J. Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual
Carvings on Medieval Churches (London, 1986); J. Andersen, The Witch on the Wall: Medieval Erotic Sculpture
in the British Isles (Copenhagen, 1977).
26 A basic overview of marginal material is M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art
(Cambridge, 1992).
27 T. Gouma-Peterson, A.-M. Talbot, and N. Aschenbrenner, Bibliography on Gender in Byzantium, http://
www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/resources/bibliography-on-gender-in-byzantium#c2=all&b_
start=0; F. Leoni and M. Natif (ed.), Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art (London, 2013); M. Meyer, An
Obscure Portrait: Imaging Women’s Reality in Byzantine Art (London, 2009); I. Kalavrezou, Byzantine Women
and Their World (New Haven/London, 2003); A. McClanan, Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses:
Image and Empire (New York, 2002); D.F. Ruggles (ed.), Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic
Societies (Albany, 2000); and L. James (ed.), Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium (London/New
York, 1997).
28 T. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton, 1999); and R. Jensen,
“The Femininity of Christ in Early Christian Iconography,” Studia Patristica 29 (1995), 269–82.
29 M. Camille, “Seductions of the Flesh: Meister Francke’s Female ‘Man’ of Sorrows,” in Frömmigkeit im
Mittelalter, ed. K. Schreiner and M. Müntz (Munich, 2002), 243–69; R.C. Trexler, “Gendering Jesus
Crucified,” in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. B. Cassidy (Princeton, 1993), 107–20; and C.W. Bynum,
Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1982).
30 M. Easton, “‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ Transforming and Transcending Gender in the
Lives of Female Saints,” in The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline
Harrison Caviness, ed. E.S. Lane, E.C. Pastan, and E.M. Shortell (Burlington, 2009), 333–47.
31 T. Martin (ed.), Reassessing the Roles of Women as “Makers” of Medieval Art and Architecture, 2 vols. (Leiden,
2012). See also J.H. McCash, The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women (Athens, 1996).
32 B. Bedoz-Rezak, “Women, Seals and Power in Medieval France, 1150–1350,” in Women and Power in the
Middle Ages, ed. M. Erler and M. Kowaleski (Athens, 1988), 61–82.
33 C. Schleif and V. Schier, Katerina’s Windows: Donation and Devotion, Art and Music, as Heard and Seen
through the Writings of a Birgittine Nun (University Park, 2009).
34 C. Schleif, “St. Hedwig’s Personal Ivory Madonna: Women’s Agency and the Powers of Possessing Port-
able Figures,” in The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison
Caviness, ed. E.S. Lane, E.C. Pastan, and E.M. Shortell (London, 2009), 382–403.
35 P. Sheingorn, “Subjection and Reception in Claude of France’s Book of First Prayers,” in The Four Modes
of Seeing (as in note 30), 333–47; A. Stones, “Nipples, Entrails, Severed Heads, and Skin: Devotional
Images for Madame Marie,” in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the
Index of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 1999), 47–70; and J. Holladay, “The Education
435
Martha Easton
of Jeanne d’Evreux: Personal Piety and Dynastic Salvation in Her Book of Hours at the Cloisters,” Art
History 17 (1994), 585–611.
36 Taylor and Smith, Women and the Book (as in note 20); and S.G. Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners:
Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,” Signs 7 (1982), 742–68.
37 Several representative examples include A. Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval
Art (Cambridge, 2014); K.A. Smith, The Taymouth Hours and the Construction of the Self (London/Toronto,
2012); and A. Bennett, “Making Literate Laywomen Visible: Text and Image in French and Flemish
Books of Hours, 1220–1320,” in Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces, ed. E. Gertsman and
J. Stevenson (Suffolk, 2012), 125–58.
38 D. Wolfthal, “The Sexuality of the Medieval Comb,” in Gertsman and Stevenson, Thresholds (as in note
37), 176–94; A. Sand, “The Fairest of Them All: Reflections on Some Fourteenth-Century Mirrors,”
in Push Me, Pull You: Interaction, Imagination and Devotional Practices in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,
Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, ed. S. Blick and L. Gelfand (Leiden, 2011), 529–99; E.
L’Estrange, “Gazing at Gawain: Reconsidering Tournaments, Courtly Love, and the Lady Who Looks,”
Medieval Feminist Forum 44:2 (2008), 74–96; S. Smith, “The Gothic Mirror and the Female Gaze, in
Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. J.L. Carroll
and A.G. Stewart (Burlington, 2003), 73–93; and C.J. Campbell, “Courting, Harlotry and the Art of
Gothic Ivory Carving,” Gesta 34:1 (1995), 11–19.
39 http://www.gothicivories.courtauld.ac.uk.
40 D. Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge/New York), 1999.
41 Sandler, “Bawdy Bethrothal” (as in note 23).
42 M. Friedman, “The Falcon and the Hunt: Symbolic Love Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance Art,” in
Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages: Texts and Contexts, ed. M. Lazar and N.J. Lacy (Fairfax, 1989), 157–75.
43 Caviness, “Patron or Matron” (as in note 23), 40.
44 M. Camille, “Manuscript Illumination and the Art of Copulation,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality,
ed. K. Lochrie, P. McCracken, and J.A. Schulz (Minneapolis, 1997), 62.
45 See T.D. Cooke, The Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux: A Study of Their Comic Climax (Columbia,
1978), 147. For violence in the fabliaux in general, see L. Tracy, “The Uses of Torture and Violence in
the Fabliaux: When Comedy Crosses the Line,” Florigelium 23:2 (2006), 143–68.
46 M. Easton, “The Wound of Christ, the Mouth of Hell: Appropriations and Inversions of Female Anat-
omy in the Later Middle Ages,” in Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Illumi-
nated Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Art and Architecture, ed. S. L’Engle and G.B. Guest (London/
Turnhout, 2006), 404–05.
47 Christine de Pizan, City of Ladies (as in note 8), 11 (I.4.3).
48 Christine de Pizan, City of Ladies (as in note 8), 160–61 (II.44.1).
49 Christine de Pizan, A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies, trans. C.C.
Willard (New York, 1989), 135–39.
50 E.J. Burns, “Performing Courtliness,” Oxford Handbook on Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed.
J.M. Bennett and R.M. Karras (Oxford, 2013), 396–411.
51 M. Bleeke, “Feminist Approaches to Medieval Visual Culture: An Introduction,” Medieval Feminist Forum
44 (2008), 49–52; J. Borland, “The Immediacy of Objects: Reassessing the Contribution of Art History
to Feminist Medieval Studies,” Medieval Feminist Forum 44 (2008), 53–73; and R. Dressler, “Continuing
the Discourse: Feminist Scholarship and the Study of Medieval Visual Culture,” Medieval Feminist Forum
43 (2007), 15–34.
52 M. Schaus (ed.), Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2006).
53 Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index, http://inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/Feminae/default.aspx.
54 M. Easton, “Feminism,” Studies in Iconography 30 (2012), 99–112.
55 See, for example, J. Borland, “Unruly Reading: The Consuming Role of Touch in the Experience of a
Medieval Manuscript,” in Scraped, Stroked and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts,
ed. J. Wilcox (Turnhout, 2013), 97–114; the essays in K.E. Overbey and B.C. Tilghman (ed.), “Active
Objects,” special issue of Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 4 (2014), www.
differentvisions.org; and the essays in M.M. Williams and K.A. Overbey (ed.), Transparent Things: A
Cabinet (Brooklyn, 2013).
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32
THE ICONOGRAPHY OF COLOR
Andreas Petzold
Introduction
Color iconography may be understood as the capacity of colors when found in specific artistic
contexts to have meanings, interpretations, or associations attached to them. For example, Mary
Magdalene is frequently represented from the twelfth century onwards in a saturated red gar-
ment, usually her outer garment. An early example of this convention can be seen in the scene
representing Mary Magdalene announcing Christ’s resurrection in the St. Albans Psalter (p. 51)
made in England in the early twelfth century.1 From the late twelfth century, the convention
becomes more commonplace. It even extended to polychromed wooden sculpture, as can be
seen in an early sixteenth-century German sculpture in the Liebighaus in Frankfurt (Plate 3).2
From the eleventh century the cult of Mary Magdalene developed to an unprecedented degree,
as is reflected in an important sermon attributed to Odo of Cluny, which emphasizes her unlim-
ited capacity for love.3 Neither this text nor any other known to me elucidates the practice of
representing Mary Magdalene in red, but of the cluster of associations attached to red in textual
sources of the time, the one which would fit most closely with the way Mary Magdalene is
characterized in this sermon and by later commentators is divine love, “caritas,” one of the three
theological virtues.4 The use of the color red can also be read at another level relating to social
practices of the time, as garments dyed in red at this time, usually from madder or kermes, would
have been very expensive and were the prerogative of the wealthy or royalty. The use of red could
thus function as a signifier of wealth, reinforcing the characterization of Mary Magdalene at this
period in the exegetical literature as of aristocratic parentage. In the case of the illustration in the
St. Albans Psalter, it has also been pointed out that the gesture that Mary Magdalene makes is one
of preaching and that she is represented in the active rather than contemplative life.5 Charitable
acts as expressions of divine love were seen as part of the active life that could also bear witness
to Christian faith as much as contemplative prayer, further reinforcing the link between caritas
and the color red. The link with the active life is further emphasized by placing the figure of
Mary Magdalene against a green background, as opposed to the blue background used for the
apostles.6 In this case the use of color may also raise gender issues, with woman associated with
the earth and nature. If this seems like overinterpretation it should be borne in mind that the
type of prefatory illustrations found in the St. Albans Psalter were intended as aids for devotion
and private reflection.
437
Plate 3 Mary Magdalene, German, c. 1520–1530, Liebieghaus, Frankfurt (Inv. Nr. 2). Image courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons.
The iconography of color
Garments are the most obvious but not the only attribute of a figure which may have sig-
nificance from the standpoint of color. Physical attributes, such as the color of the hair, skin,
and eyes of figures, may also be significant. These natural colors of the body are as susceptible
to artistic fabrication as manufactured colors used in material culture. Ruth Mellinkoff has, for
example, demonstrated how from the late twelfth century Judas is frequently represented with
red hair, for which there is no basis in the Bible and which had anti-Semitic associations at the
time.7 The designation of red hair demonstrates the lack of linguistic precision in color classifi-
cation (to be discussed later) as red hair is not red but more orange in hue. Heather Pulliam has
drawn attention to the piercing green irises used in the depiction of the eyes of St. John in his
portrait in the Lindisfarne Gospels in comparison with the pale bluish-green of the other evan-
gelists’ eyes, and draws attention to a contemporary source which associates the green emerald
specifically with John.8 According to one popular legend current from the early Middle Ages
the eyes of Christ were green, but in the later Middle Ages green eyes tend to have nefarious
associations.9
What little has been written on color in medieval art has rarely discussed iconographic con-
ventions such as these but has taken as its starting point textual sources of the time which discuss
color symbolism.10 As valuable as this may be, it needs to be correlated with the observations on
color in works of art. Two pioneering scholars who have made major contributions to the study
of color in the medieval period, especially from the conceptual and methodological standpoint,
are John Gage and Michel Pastoureau.11 Both of these scholars have approached the subject
from an interdisciplinary standpoint, treating color as a historical and culturally relativistic phe-
nomenon, and taking into account assumptions, writings, and social practices of the time. Gage
has in particular drawn on more recent linguistic theory, especially the work of Berlin and Kay
on color classification and lexicalization, and Pastoureau on anthropology and social history, and
much of what I say here has been informed by their work. One of the distinguishing features
of Pastoureau’s approach is the primacy he assigns to textiles and the dyeing industry, one of the
most important industries in the Middle Ages.
The notion of a fixed canon of color iconography operating in the period discussed in this
survey, extending from the early Christian period to the late Middle Ages and encompassing both
Byzantine and Western art, is one that has not been taken up by art historians, nor is it supported
by observation. Colors for the most part seem to be used from the standpoint of meaning in an
arbitrary manner. Given the huge span both chronologically and geographically covered, this is
not entirely surprising and much of what I say here will be generalized. Even in the specific case
of Mary Magdalene discussed earlier, red is not the only color with which she is represented, with
green from the fourteenth century another distinct favorite.
For Byzantine art the notion has been firmly rejected, though there are obvious instances of
color iconographic usages in it, such as the use of purple, which will be discussed in the second
section.12 In the West in the later Middle Ages, especially in northern Europe, a more standard-
ized use of color iconography emerges, though this is by no means systematic. One also needs
to bear in mind that other factors and constraints may be at play in the way color is used, such
as the availability of materials, aesthetic and technical considerations, the internal syntax of color
relationships within the pictorial image, and regional variations.13 Nevertheless, having taken into
account these factors, it does seem that figures are frequently represented in colors which both are
consistent with and contribute to their characterization at the time and within the context they
are represented, and thus that color may in certain circumstances function as a bearer of meaning
just as much as gesture and figure type. From the late twelfth century, for example, the three main
colors that are used in the representation of Judas, yellow (discussed in the second section), satu-
rated red, and dark green, or a combination of all of these, can have negative associations attached
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Andreas Petzold
to them which are consistent with and reinforce his perfidious and anti-Semitic characterization
at the time.
In traditional iconographic analysis a visual feature is usually elucidated by means of the
written text to which it relates and textual sources which relate to this. But in the case of color
there is no textual source that survives or is recorded which might function as an iconographic
guide to the way that colors are deployed in art, so that interpretations have to be inferred from
related textual sources.14 Much of the imagery in Christian art is of course based on the Bible,
which contains sporadic references to color, especially in relation to fabrics and precious gems.
Of particular significance from the standpoint of color are the Books of Exodus (in which par-
ticular emphasis is given to the colors of the curtains of the tabernacle and those of the garments
worn by the high priest) and Revelation, especially the description of the twelve precious stones
that form the foundation of the heavenly Jerusalem (21: 19–21), the color in the case of each of
which is discussed by later commentators and invested with moral or mystical significance. These
Biblical references, however, present problems in terms of the translation of the language of the
text in which they were originally written into the language used in later standard textual recen-
sions.15 I have restricted myself here to the Latin vulgate. How references such as these may be
interpreted visually can be seen in the Crucifixion miniature in the mid-twelfth-century Stamm-
heim Missal (a missal was a book used in the celebration of the Mass), at the base of which the
prophet Isaiah holds a scroll with an inscription on it, derived from the Book of Isaiah 63: 2–3,
on which are written the words “Quare rubrum est vestimentum?” (Why is your robe red?).16
To this the young man, who is center stage and in the act of trampling grapes, replies, “I have
trodden the winepress alone.” Within Christian exegesis these verses were interpreted as Christ
washing away the sins of the world with his blood and a prefiguration of the Passion. The artist
has interpreted the term “rubrum” by representing the youth in a wine-red mantle, a reference
both to Christ’s sacrifice by the spilling of his blood and to the Eucharist in the performance of
which a missal would have been used. Colors are also associated with the liturgy and the liturgical
year, such as white for the Ascension, and these distinctions become increasingly codified from
the twelfth century.17
Two German philologists have compiled a lexicon of references to color terms, starting with
those in the Bible, and then looking at those from later sources from the early Christian period
up to the thirteenth century.18 In the early medieval period, they demonstrate that the interpreta-
tion of colors is principally confined to encyclopedic texts, and to patristic and exegetical works.
From the twelfth century and beyond, this base was expanded to include new types of textual
sources, such as the visions of female mystics, of whom the most famous was Hildegard of Bin-
gen (1098–1173), whose work was illustrated in her lifetime and incorporates significant color
imagery, and later, new types of secular literature, such as German courtly love poetry.19 New
specialized codes of color imagery also evolve, of which the most important was that of heraldry,
and colors are frequently arranged into sets relating to specific attributes20 – for example, a color
set relating to the virtues, with white, green, and red associated respectively with faith, hope, and
charity, the three theological virtues. This color triad can be seen reflected in art – for example,
in the allegorical figures of faith, hope, and charity in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Maesta altarpiece in
Massa Marittima, where it even extends to the steps upon which they are seated.21
One practical factor that has made the question of color and its meaning difficult to explore is
that until recently the majority of images of medieval art were rarely reproduced in color. Even
when reproduced in color they were rarely of a high quality, and even today with advances in
color technology the discrepancy between the colored reproduction and the original can be very
great. This lacuna of colored reproductions was particularly marked in manuscript illumination,
so that a manuscript of such major importance as the Stammheim Missal was known, before its
440
acquisition by the Getty Museum, only in black and white reproductions found in specialized
publications. This situation has, however, been considerably rectified in the last two decades by
the greater availability of publications with color reproductions and, more importantly, by ambi-
tious digitization programs, especially of manuscript holdings.22 Another factor which needs to
be taken into account is the way in which colors have deteriorated or their appearance has been
modified over the course of time, or, especially in the case of stained glass, the way that later res-
toration has intervened. In this connection, the study of color in illuminated manuscripts, where
the pigments have remained relatively stable and are for the most part true to how they were
when first painted, is particularly valuable.
Another methodological issue which needs to be taken into account when interpreting colors
is that of their linguistic classification and lexicalization, which are relative to different cultures
and periods. The eye is able to discriminate between far more colors than there are terms in
any language to describe them, and the terms used to designate them may be variable between
languages. To quote John Gage, “the identification of a color in a given array is a conscious and
verbalized act, and that is thus dependent upon the available color language.”23 The area of the
spectrum designated by color terms in one language such as modern English may not necessarily
exactly correspond to that found in similar terms used in other languages. Conversely, one would
expect the mental picture which a person had of a particular color to correspond to the meaning
which that color had at the time. Nor are color terms fixed but they develop over time – the color
term “orange,” for example, emerged only in the fifteenth century in Old French, and yet one of
the most common colors found in medieval art is an orange, one produced from the pigment red
lead. Would that have been identified at the time by its pigment name or by the abstract color
term “red”? Gage has emphasized that in modern color terminology priority is given to the hue
of a color, whereas in earlier systems of color classification (as in the case of those in the early
medieval period, such as Latin, ancient Greek, and Anglo-Saxon) greater emphasis was placed on
other aspects of color, especially its light-dark axis, or may refer to an attribute other than hue,
such as luster, surface texture, or facture, or the material which embodies the hue.24 The Latin
color term “purpureus,” for example, appears to have encompassed areas of the spectrum which
today would be described as red and violet (and this appears to be reflected in how this color was
used in art), but can also refer to a fabric.25 In general, saturated colors appear to have been val-
orized in the medieval period, and very pale or dark ones tend to have a negative interpretation
attached to them. As we enter into the later Middle Ages, with increasing predominance given
to vernacular languages, more emphasis appears to have been given to a hue-based conception
of color.26
Analysis of specific colors

Given the size of the topic, I have restricted my observations on color iconography to a discussion
of only five colors: purple, red, blue, green, and yellow. In each case, I have outlined the main
associations attached to these colors, and briefly traced how these are reflected in art. As can be
seen, a broad range of interpretations may be attached to these colors, both positive and negative,
and these may change over the course of time. It also can be seen that in interpreting colors in
art it is essential to take into account both the physical and cultural context in which they occur.
To quote Meyer Schapiro, “there is never exclusively one symbolic meaning attached to a color,
for in every concrete situation, the color or colors are not only outer surfaces, but also expressions
of the situation itself.”27 Colors are also frequently arranged in pairs (yellow for Synagogue, for
example, is frequently paired with red for Ecclesia), or the variation in the color of the garments
of the principal dramatis personae within an array of images in a narrative sequence, such as a
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Marian or Christological one, may have significance.28 In all the scenes, for instance, to do with
the resurrection in the late tenth-century Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 24), Christ
is represented in a green outer mantle, in contrast to the earlier scenes, where he is represented
in purple.29
Purple
In the early Christian and Byzantine period, purple was the prestige color, and its association was
primarily with power and heaven, but it was also seen as a sign of sinful luxury and worldliness.30
Bede, for example, characterizes the purple of the amethyst as emblematic of heaven.31 In
religion, it was associated with both the Incarnation and Christ’s passion. Its prestige was inher-
ited from antiquity and related to the practice of clothing emperors in garments dyed in Tyrian
purple. This practice was taken up by the Byzantine emperors, as can be seen in the famous
pendant mosaics of Emperor Justinian and his empress Theodora, made in the sixth century, in
the church of S. Vitale in Ravenna, and was emulated c. 1000 by Holy Roman Emperor Otto
III.32 The practice was grafted onto representations of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and by the
sixth century had become widespread. Examples can be seen in the sixth-century mosaics in the
church of S. Appollinare in Nuovo in Ravenna, where Christ is represented wearing a purple
garment with gold clavi (Plate 4), and in a sumptuously illustrated late ninth-century manuscript
of the Homilies of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, where Christ is similarly clothed.33 This last exam-
ple is particularly interesting as the manuscript was personally made for the Byzantine emperor
Basil I, so that the clothing of Christ and the Virgin Mary in purple may suggest the associa-
tion between Christian and temporal power. In 431, at the Council of Ephesus, representations
of the Virgin Mary dressed in purple were first officially allowed. A factor in the adoption of
purple in representations of the Virgin Mary may have been an early Christian apocryphal text,
the Protoevangelium of James, in which it is described how Mary was one of the pure virgins
who were chosen to help spin the curtain for the temple and that she was allocated the task of
spinning the “true purple and the scarlet” threads.34 According to the text, when Gabriel entered
Mary’s home to announce the Incarnation, she was in the act of spinning the purple wool. Later
Byzantine commentators interpreted the scarlet and especially the purple as alluding to the royal
lineage of the Virgin back to the house of David. The purple yarn has also been linked with the
Incarnation.35 By the sixth century the practice of representing the Virgin Mary in purple had
become ubiquitous, as can be seen, for example, in the Ascension image in the Syrian Rabbula
Gospels, completed in 586.36
The practice of representing Christ and the Virgin Mary in purple was taken up in Western
art and is particularly evident in Christological cycles in Ottonian manuscript illumination of the
late tenth and early eleventh centuries. These Ottonian codices were frequently commissioned by
Holy Roman emperors; thus, again the use of purple reinforces the association between Christ
and the endorsement of temporal power. An earlier example can be seen in the eighth-century
Insular Book of Kells in the image representing the Virgin and Child (Dublin, Trinity College
Library, MS A. I, fol. 7v), where the Virgin is represented in purple, and this appears to directly
reflect Byzantine sources.37
By the late twelfth century, the prestige of purple had been eclipsed by that of blue, though it
is still a marked feature in the garments of Christ and the Virgin Mary, especially in the stained
glass of the period. There may be a syntactical reason for this due to the widespread use of satu-
rated blue glass for the backgrounds in twelfth- and thirteenth-century glass, especially that made
in northern France. In two twelfth-century Western sources, purple is clearly associated with
regality. In a sermon on the Assumption of the Virgin attributed to Hugh of St. Victor, it is stated
442
Plate 4 Image of Christ, S. Appollinare in Nuovo. Ravenna, early sixth century. Image courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons.
that the Virgin Mary was dressed in purple at her Assumption as “purple signifies royal dignity.”38
In his treatise, the Sacred Mystery of the Altar, Pope Innocent III stated that “purple signifies royal
dignity and papal power.”39 By the end of the Middle Ages, according to Michel Pastoureau,
purple had been devalorized and had become associated with penance and affliction or, even,
treachery.40 In spite of this Christ is frequently dressed in a greyish-purple garment in illustrated
cycles of his life in northern European manuscript illumination and stained glass of the period.41
Red
The principle associations of red are with blood and fire.42 On the positive side, red was linked
with Christ’s passion and sacrifice (and hence the Eucharist), the fire of the Holy Spirit,
and divine love, and on the negative, with sin, judgment, and hellfire. In Western art, Mary
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Magdalene from the twelfth century and St. John the Evangelist from at least the eleventh are
frequently represented in red, probably intended in this context as a signifier of divine love,
as is also the personification of the Church (Ecclesia). From the fourteenth century, the con-
vention was to represent seraphims in red, whose function was to adore God, and cherubims,
who were associated with knowledge, in blue.43 In the West, monarchs were, with the excep-
tion of the French kings, dressed at their coronations in red, and it may be that this practice
informs the representation in this color of King David and of Christ in scenes to do with the
resurrection.44 In the Stammheim Missal, for example, in one of the earliest representations
of Christ’s resurrection in art, Christ is represented in a bright red mantle combined with a
green undergarment.45 In Byzantine thought, red is associated with the earthly, and it may be
this idea which informs the practice of representing Eve in the Anastasis scene in bright red.46
Blue is traditionally seen as the color of the Virgin Mary (as will be discussed ahead), but there
is a distinct group of images in which the Virgin Mary’s primary color is red. Early examples
can be seen in the twelfth century in the Hunterian Psalter, but it becomes commonplace
only in the fifteenth century in Flemish and Dutch art.47 A late example of it can be seen in
Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s Glorification of the Virgin in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum
in Rotterdam. In the twelfth century St. Bernard of Clairvaux in a sermon on the Virgin
Mary compares her to a rose, and equates the white rose with her virginity, and the red with
her charity or divine love:
Mary was a white rose by reason of her virginity, a red rose by reason of her charity;
white in her body, red in her soul; white in cultivating virtue, red in treading down
vice; white in purifying affection, red in mortifying the flesh; white in loving God, red
in having compassion on her neighbor.48
It may be that it is this idea which informs her representation in red.

Red also has a negative aspect to it. The primary associations are again with blood and
fire. The Old Testament figure Cain, the first murderer who slayed his brother, is frequently
represented in red.49 The associations with hellfire and judgment frequently underlie the
use of red in Last Judgment scenes; Christ as supreme Judge is frequently represented in a
red mantle, as can be seen in Stefan Lochner’s Last Judgment panel in the Wallraf Richartz
Museum in Cologne.50
Blue
The primary associations of blue were with the celestial, the spiritual, and the heavenly.
Michel Pastoureau has demonstrated how in the twelfth century in northern Europe the
color blue was valorized, supplanting purple as the prestige color.51 This blue characteristi-
cally is saturated and has a dark tone to it, to which appropriately the name royal blue has
been given. This development can be seen reflected in the saturated blue backgrounds found
in the stained glass of the period, to which Abbot Suger gave the name sapphire glass, the
increasing use of blue for the mantle of Christ, and to an even greater extent that of the
Virgin Mary with whom the color has become virtually synonymous, and in the adoption
by the French kings of blue in the thirteenth century for their coronation garments and regal
dress and as the color for the background of their coat of arms. In explaining this develop-
ment, one practical factor may have been the greater availability of high-quality ultramarine,
the only source of which was a mine in Badakshan in present-day Afghanistan, which has
an intense blue color to it. Another factor was the equating of blue with divine light by
444
theologians and churchmen, such as Abbot Suger, under the influence of Pseudo-Dionysus’s
light aesthetic.
Prior to the twelfth century in Western art, the Virgin Mary is represented in a variety of
colors, though Michel Pastoureau has noted a predominance of dark colors, which he regards
as appropriate for her activity of mourning.52 In Byzantine art, there is greater standardiza-
tion with purple and, from the eleventh century, increasingly though not exclusively blue as
the favored color for her, as can be seen in the eleventh-century mosaic of the crucifixion at
Daphni, and it may be that Western artists adopted the convention from a Byzantine source,
given the prestige of Byzantine art at the time. The increasing rise in the cult of the Virgin
Mary in the West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the adoption of blue as the pri-
mary color for her dress must have in turn further promoted the status of the color and may
be one factor in explaining its adoption by the French kings. From the thirteenth century,
new procedures in the dyeing of cloth using woad enabled the manufacture of more colorfast
and saturated blue clothes, and these became fashionable among the elite, rivaling red clothes
in their popularity.53
Blue may also have a negative aspect to it, and it can be used in the representation of fallen
angels, demons, and pagan effigies. In the scene representing Christ as shepherd separating the
sheep from the goats in an early sixth-century mosaic from the church of Sant Appollinare
Nuovo in Ravenna, for example, the angel to the left of Christ associated with the goats and the
damned is, contrary to what one might expect, represented entirely in blue, and that to his right
associated with the sheep and the blessed in red.54 Within the color theory of the period, blue
would have been seen as a dark color and in elemental codes was usually associated with air. In
the thirteenth century, it is recorded how the merchants in Thuringia in Germany who dealt in
madder used in the dyeing of red cloth petitioned the stained-glass painters to include blue devils
in their windows to discredit their rivals who dealt in woad used in the dyeing of the increasingly
popular blue clothes.55 It may be this factor that informs the presence of blue demons in the late
fifteenth-century Last Judgment window at Fairford in England.
Green
Green was associated with faith, immortality, paradise, hope, and eternity, and these associations
are reflected in its use in artistic contexts. It is frequently used for one of the garments of St.
John the Evangelist, where it is a sign of faith, usually in combination with red, and from the
fourteenth century occasionally used in representations of Mary Magdalene. It may also be used
as the color of the cross, where it may function as a reference to Christ’s resurrection (Plate 5).
In the twelfth century, there was a change in the status of green, which is reflected in a state-
ment of Hugh of St. Victor, who praises it as “beautiful beyond any color” and describes it as
“an image of future resurrection.”56 Paul Thoby in discussing the green crosses (edged in red)
in the twelfth-century Passion window at Chartres has suggested that the green is a reference
to a passage in Luke (23, 31), where Christ states, “For if they do this when the wood is green,
what will happen when it is dead.”57 He connects this verse with the liturgy of the time, noting
that an antiphon based on this passage was used in the Adoration of the Cross during the Good
Friday liturgy: “O crux, viride lignum, quia in te pependit Redemptor gentium” (O, crucifix of
green wood, because on you the Redeemer of the gentiles hung). Michael Camille has further
connected the color green with the liturgical performance of the time as enacted at Amiens
on the Feast of St. Firmin, when the exterior and interior of the cathedral were bedecked with
flowers and greenery in memory of a miracle in which the saint had caused the trees to blossom
in the midst of winter.58
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Plate 5 Carrow Psalter (Ms.W.34, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, f.27 r), English, c. 1250. Note the green
crosses in the Carrying of the Cross and the Crucifixion. Illustration courtesy of Walters Art Museum,
created under Creative Commons License.
Green also had negative associations attached to it. Green demons first emerge in the mid-
twelfth century in northern European art, as can be seen in the representation of hell’s mouth in
the Winchester Psalter, where all the figures, both the damned and the demonic, are represented
entirely in green.59 Michel Pastoureau has suggested that their emergence may reflect anti-Islamic
sentiment at the time as green was particularly valorized within Islamic culture, an idea that
is reinforced by the fact that the banners that would have confronted the Christian Crusader
knights when encountering their Islamic adversaries were green in color.60
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Yellow
On the positive side, yellow may be used in Byzantine and early medieval Western art as a
substitute for gold. Pseudo-Dionysius in the Celestial Hierarchy praises it for its resemblance
to gold.61 It is often used in representations of St. Peter for his outer mantle. A late example
of this can be seen in an early fourteenth-century icon of St. Peter from Constantinople in
the British Museum, probably painted by that great artist known as the Master of the Chora,
where St. Peter has a yellow mantle with a blue undergarment.62 But from the twelfth century
in the West, yellow had increasingly negative associations attached to it, when it began to
be used to distinguish Judas, in representations of Synagogue, and for other figures who had
negative associations attached to them. It may be significant that of the two ancestors in the
cycle of windows representing the ancestors of Christ from Canterbury recently exhibited
at the Ancestors of Christ exhibition, the two which had nefarious characters, Lamech and
Thara, are both represented in yellow mantles combined with pointed red Jewish hats, the
only two figures to be so depicted.63 This portrayal should be seen in the context of increasing
anti-Semitism in England at the time. The most memorable example of Judas represented in
yellow is in the image of the Betrayal in Giotto’s Arena Chapel, where he is dressed entirely in
yellow, and it is very common in German late medieval art.64 This convention has anti-Semitic
associations attached to it and relates to a social practice at the time in the dress regulations
that were enforced on Jews. At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, it was stipulated that
Jews had to distinguish themselves by means of their dress. The nature of this distinction
was not specified, but at an early date it came increasingly to take the form of a badge, most
commonly, though not exclusively, yellow in color. Yellow was also used to distinguish other
marginalized groups, such as prostitutes, heretics, and felons. It is used, for example, for the
seated, abject figure of the philosopher Averroes, whose writings were regarded as heretical by
the Dominicans, in the mid-fourteenth-century wall painting of the Triumph of St. Thomas
Aquinas in the chapter house at Santa Maria Novella, a doctrinal manifesto of Dominican
ideology.
Conclusion
It is curious that many associations attached to colors in the medieval period have resonances
in our own time, a chilling reminder of which is the yellow badges which Jewish people were
forced to wear in the Nazi period. With the increasing availability of color reproductions of
medieval art, it is inevitable that questions relating to color and its meaning will come more to
the fore. Certain of the difficulties encountered in exploring these questions have been discussed
here, but the following are intended as ideas for future research. There is a need for a more
systematic survey of color iconographic conventions, tracing genealogies and patterns of dissem-
ination, and for more analysis of the factors underlying their use. One line of research which
might be pursued, following the lead provided by Michel Pastoureau and for Venetian art in the
Renaissance period by Paul Hills, is to explore further the connections between the visual art
and material culture of the period, especially fabrics and jewelry.65 This might be productively
pursued, for example, in relation to Byzantine art, with its rich tradition of silks. Another poten-
tially fruitful line of research, based on the foundation provided by Meier and Suntrup’s seminal
work, is to explore further, and in more detail than has been possible here, the interrelationships
between textual sources and visual art.66 Links in relation to color between liturgy, performance,
and the wider environment in which medieval art functioned, such as the Mass in relation to
altarpieces or liturgical books, could also be explored.67 Above all the chromophobic mind-set
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which has so characterized the practice of Anglo-American medieval art history needs to change
and eyes to be opened to color.
Short bibliography
General
P. Dronke, “Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Western Color-Imagery,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 41 (1972),
51–108.
J. Gage, “Colour in History: Relative and Absolute,” Art History 1:1 (1978), 104–30.
J. Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London, 1993).
J. Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London, 1999).
C. Meier and R. Suntrup, Lexikon der Farbenbedeutungen Im Mittelalter. CD-ROM (Cologne, 2011).
S. Panayotova (ed), Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts, (London, 2016).
M. Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton, 2001).
M. Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, 2009).
M. Pastoureau, The Colours of Our Memories (Cambridge, 2012).
M. Pastoureau, Green: The History of a Color (Princeton, 2014).
H. Pulliam, “Color,” Medieval Art History Today – Critical Terms (a Special Issue of) Studies in Iconography 33
(2012), 3–14. Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. S. Panayotova (London, 2016)
Byzantine
A. Hermann, “Farbe,” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des
Christentums mit der antiken Welt, ed. G. Schöllgen (Stuttgart, 1969), vol. 7, 358–447.
L. James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1996).
K. Wessel, “Farbensymbolik,” in Reallexikon zur Byzantinischen Kunst, ed. M. Restle and K. Wessel (Stuttgart,
1971), 524–33.
Insular
G. Henderson, “The Colour Purple: A Late-Antique Phenomenon and Its Anglo-Saxon Reflexes,” in Vision
and Image in Early Christian England, ed. G. Henderson (Cambridge, 1999), 122–35.
H. Pulliam, “Looking to Byzantium: Light, Color, and Cloth in the Book of Kells’ Virgin and Child Page,”
in Insular and Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton,
2011), 59–78.
H. Pulliam, “Eyes of Light: Colour in the Lindisfarne Gospels,” in Newcastle and Northumberland Roman and
Medieval Architecture and Art, ed. J. Ashbee and J. Luxford (Leeds, 2013), 36.
Romanesque
S. Bolman, “De Coloribus; the Meanings of Color in Beatus Manuscripts,” Gesta 38 (1999).
A. Petzold, “‘Of the Significance of Colours’: The Iconography of Colour in Romanesque and Early Gothic
Book Illumination,” in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of
Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 1999), 125–34.
Late medieval
M. Lisner, “Farbgebung und Farbikonographie in Giottos Arenafresken,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen
Institutes in Florenz (1985), 1–78.
M. Lisner, “Die Gewandfarben der Apostel in Giottos Arenafresken Farbgebung und Farbikonographie,”
Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte (1990), 309–75.
R. Mellinkoff, “Judas’ Red Hair and the Jews,” Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982), 31–46.
R. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1993).
448
Notes
1 Dombibliothek, Hildesheim, Ms St. Godehard 1, 51. For colored illustration see “The St. Albans Psalter
Project, Kings College, University of Aberdeen, Scotland,” https://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/
english/commentary/page051.shtml (accessed August 10, 2015).
2 On polychromy in medieval sculpture see V. Brinkmann, Circumlitio: The Polychromy of Antique and
Medieval Sculpture (Munich, 2010).
3 On Mary Magdalene see K.L. Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the
Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 2000).
4 On this see C. Meier and R. Suntrup, Lexikon der Farbenbedeutungen im Mittelalter (Cologne, 2011),
674–79. Currently this publication is available only as a CD-ROM but is due to be published in book
form in 2016. On the depiction of Mary Magdalene see also R. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness
in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Berkeley, 1993), 55–56, and for examples of
Mary Magdalene represented in red see vol. 2, II.26, VI.46, XI.10, and XI.13. She does not comment
specifically on the color red, but does draw attention to the practice of representing Mary Magdalene in
ornate or brightly colored clothing, which she links to Mary Magdalene’s earlier supposed occupation
as a prostitute. Mellinkoff tends to draw her examples primarily from the late Middle Ages and the
northern Renaissance. See also M. Lisner, “Farbgebung und Farbikonographie in Giottos Arenafresken,”
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz (1985), 43 and note 114, where she discusses Italian
examples.
5 Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene (as in note 3), 265.
6 The Carthusian monk Adam of Dryburgh in the twelfth century in his treatise On the Tripartite Tabernacle
used the language of Luke 10.38–42 to distinguish lay and clerical life. He equates the contemplative
life pursued by clerics with the color blue, and the active pursued by laymen with the color green (see
De tripartito tabernaculo, Migne PL 198, 727. “Color etenim sapphirinus, qui coelo similis est, coelestam
et contemplativam vitam designat clericorum; viridis vero, qui terrae est, terrenam, et activam vitam
laicorum.”
7 R. Mellinkoff, “Judas’ Red Hair and the Jews,” Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982), 31–46. The question of
skin color is too large to go into here, but for preliminary observations see M. Pastoureau, Black: The
History of a Color (Princeton, 2009), 79–86.
8 H. Pulliam, “Eyes of Light: Colour in the Lindisfarne Gospels,” in Newcastle and Northumberland Roman
and Medieval Architecture and Art, ed. J. Ashbee and J. Luxford (Leeds, 2013), 58.
9 J.R. Puértolas, “Leyendas Cristianas Primitivas En Las Obras De Fray Íñigo De Mendoza,” Hispanic
Review 38 (1970), 376–77. On the nefarious associations attached to green eyes see M. Pastoureau, Green:
The History of a Color (Princeton, 2014), 99.
10 Exemplary of this approach is G. Haupt, Die Farbensymbolik in der sakralen Kunst des abendländischen
Mittelalters (Dresden, 1941), and P. Dronke, “Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Western Color-
Imagery,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 41 (1972), 51–108.
11 For Gage in relation to the questions raised here see most importantly J. Gage, “Colour in History:
Relative and Absolute,” Art History 1:1 (1978); J. Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from
Antiquity to Abstraction (London, 1993); and J. Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism
(London, 1999). Michel Pastoureau’s works on color are numerous and the majority are in French.
For a representative example of his approach in English see M. Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color
(Princeton, 2001).
12 See K. Wessel, “Farbensymbolik,” in Reallexikon zur Byzantinischen Kunst, vol. 2, ed. M. Restle and K
Wessel (Stuttgart, 1971), 529. “Von einem symbolisch interpretierten Farbkanon im Sinne der Kunst des
abendländischen MAs . . . kann nicht der Rede sein.” See also L. James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art
(Oxford, 1996), 102–05, who concurs in this. One area that would be interesting to examine further is
the relationship between color in Byzantine art and the fabrics of the period, especially the purple silks.
On this see A. Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving: AD 400 to AD 1200 (Vienna, 1997). Another impor-
tant contribution to color iconography in early Christian and Byzantine art is A. Hermann, “Farbe,”
in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der
antiken Welt, vol. 7, ed. G. Schöllgen (Stuttgart, 1969), 358–447.
13 For some color syntactical relationships see Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 1 (as in note 4), 38–43. She com-
ments on the following principles: the isolation principle, the shape and drape principle, and the color
contrast principle.
14 The Mount Athos Handbook occasionally specifies the colors figures should be represented in but
these correspond to those specified in the Bible (P. Hetherington [ed. and trans.], The Painter’s Manual
449
Andreas Petzold
of Dionysius of Fourna [London, 1974]). Another interesting area to investigate is that of stage directions
in liturgical plays. The late fifteenth-century Donaueschinger Passion play, for example, contains stage
directions specifying in which colors actors should be dressed, which it has been demonstrated corre-
spond to those used in German painting of the period. On this see R. Toepfer, “Das Leiden Christi in
Farbe: Zur Funktion der Bühneanweisungen im Donaueschinger Passionspiel,” in Farbe im Mittelalter:
Materialität – Medialität – Semantik, vol. 2, ed. I. Bennewitz and A. Schindler (Berlin, 2011), 767–80.
15 On this see Pastoureau, Green (as in note 9), 36–39. See also F. Jacquesson, “La chasse aux couleurs: à
travers la Patrologie latine,” in Histoire et géographie de la couleur: faits de langue et systèmes de communication,
ed. P. Dollfus, F. Jacquesson, and M. Pastoureau (Paris, 2008), available online at http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.
fr/programmes-partenariat/couleur/index.htm. See also S. Bolman, “De Coloribus: The Meanings of
Color in Beatus Manuscripts,” Gesta 38 (1999), 22–34. She demonstrates how the color bands in the
Beatus Commentaries on the Apocalypse serve mnemonic functions related to the key descriptive words
in the text.
16 For a discussion of this miniature see E.C. Teviotdale, The Stammheim Missal (Los Angeles, 2001), 65. See
also P. Carmassi, “Purpurismum in Martyrio,” in Farbe im Mittelalter: Materialität – Medialität – Semantik
(as in note 14), vol. 1, 258, who relates it to the work of Hrabanus Maurus.
17 R. Kroos and F. Kobler, “Farbe (Liturgisch),” in Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, vol. 7 (1981),
54–139.
18 Meier and Suntrup (as in note 4).
19 On this see C. Meier, “Die Bedeutung der Farben im Werk Hildegards von Bingen,” Frühmittelalterliche
Studien 6 (1972), 245–355.
20 On this see the relevant chapter in this book and on color in heraldry see M. Pastoureau, Traité d’héraldique
(Paris, 1993), 101ff.
21 Gage, Colour and Culture (as in note 11), pl. 56.
22 I have wherever possible provided links to relevant sites.
23 Gage, Colour and Meaning (as in note 11), 52.
24 Gage, Colour and Meaning (as in note 11), 68.
25 J. André, Étude sur les termes de Couleur dans la langue Latine (Paris, 1949), 102. See also James, Light and
Colour, 50 and n. 15 (as in note 12), for a discussion of the Greek term for purple. See also C.R. Dodwell,
Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective (Manchester, 1982), 145–50. Dodwell suggests that the term purpura
may refer to shot silk taffeta.
26 For a recent study of color classification and lexicalization which discusses the medieval period see W.J.
Jones, German Colour Terms: A Study in Their Historical Evolution from Earliest Times to the Present (Amster-
dam, 2013).
27 M. Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague,
1973), 47.
28 On Synagogue as yellow and Ecclesia as red see Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 1 (as in note 4), 48–51, and for
illustrations vol. 2, II.33–37. For a discussion of the use of color iconography in relation to a narrative
cycle, specifically the Arena chapel, see M. Lisner, “Die Gewandfarben der Apostel in Giottos Arenafre-
sken Farbgebung und Farbikonographie,” Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte (1990), 309–375.
29 G. Franz, Der Egbert-Codex: das Leben Jesu: Ein Höhepunkt der Buchmalerei vor 1000 Jahren: Handschrift 24
der Stadtbibliothek Trier (Darmstadt, 2005).
30 James, Light and Colour, 104 and 139 (as in note 12). On purple in general see La porpora: realtà e immag-
inario di un colore simbolico, ed. O. Longo (Venice, 1998).
31 Bede, Bede: Commentary on Revelation (Liverpool, 2013), 276.
32 A. Muthesius, “The Role of Byzantine Silks in the Ottonian Empire,” in Byzanz und das Abendland im
10. und 11 Jahrhundert, ed. E. Konstantinou (Cologne, 1997), 314: “Otto III customarily appeared on
Easter Monday at St. Appolinarius in Classe, in purple silk embroidered with gold.”
33 Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Ms.Grec. 510. For images of these see http://mandragore.bnf.fr/jsp/
rechercheExperte.jsp (accessed August 10, 2015).
34 M. Evangelatou, “The Purple Thread of the Flesh: The Theological Connotations of a Narrative
Iconographic Element in Byzantine Images of the Annunciation,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images
in Byzantium. Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed. A. Eastmond and L. James (Aldershot, 2003),
261–79.
35 Evangelatou, Icon and Word (as in note 34), 261.
36 Florence, Laurentian Library, cod. Plut. 1, 56, fol. 13v. For colored illustration see K. Weitzmann, Late
Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination (London, 1977), 36.
450
37 On the use of purple in Insular manuscript illumination see G. Henderson, “The Colour Purple: A
Late-Antique Phenomenon and its Anglo-Saxon Reflexes,” in Vision and Image in Early Christian England,
ed. G. Henderson (Cambridge, 1999), 122–35. On the use of purple in the Virgin and child image in
the Book of Kells see H. Pulliam, “Looking to Byzantium: Light, Color, and Cloth in the Book of Kells’
Virgin and Child Page,” in Insular and Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period, ed. C.
Hourihane (Princeton, 2011), 59–78.
38 Hugh of Saint-Victor, “De Assumptione Beatae Virginis Sermo,” Migne PL 177: 1025. “Purpura regale
significat dignitatem. Beata itaque Virgo Marie purpura fuit, quae super omnes sanctos regali dignitate
velut domina mundi et regina coeli effulsit.”
39 Innocent III, De Sacro Altaris Mysterio, Migne PL 217: 786. “Per purpuram regiae dignitatis significatur
pontificalis potestas.”
40 M. Pastoureau, The Colours of Our Memories (Cambridge, 2012), 141.
41 For examples see Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 2 (as in note 4).
42 On this see M. Pastoureau, “Ceci est mon sang: Le christianisme médiéval et la couleur rouge,” in Le
Pressoir mystique: Actes du colloque de recloses, ed. D. Alexandre-Bidon (Paris, 1990), 43–56, and Meier and
Suntrup, Lexikon der Farbenbedeutungen Im Mittelalter, 640–704 (as in note 4).
43 On this see E. Kirschbaum, “L’angelo rosso e l’angelo turchino,” Rivista di archeologia cristiana 19 (1940),
209–49. See also A. Petzold, “‘His Face Like Lightning’: Colour as Signifier in representations of the
Holy Women at the Tomb,” Arte medievale 2 (1992), 149–55.
44 An example of this is the Coronation mantle of Roger II in Vienna.
45 Fol. 111 and for colored illustration Teviotdale, The Stammheim Missal, 84 (as in note 16). For a late
example see the Ottheinrich Bible, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 8010 (2), fol. 44r, http://
daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0002/bsb00026283/images/index.html?id=00026283&groesser=
&fip=ewqxsxdsydenwwqrseayasdasfsdr&no=5&seite=7. He is also represented in a bright red mantle
in the crowning of thorns (fol. 68) in contrast to the other scenes where he is represented in purple.
46 See Wessel, “Farbensymbolik” in Reallexikon zur Byzantinischen Kunst, vol. 2 (as in note 12), 530.
47 Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 229, fol.14 and 17v. Images of these can be seen at http://special.
lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/psalter/psalterindex.html (accessed August 10, 2015).
48 Bernard of Clairvaux, “Item De Beata Maria Virgine Sermo,” Migne PL 184, 1020.
49 Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Othernes, vol. 1 (as in note 4), 47–48.
50 M. Linares, “Kunst Und Kultur Im Mittelalter Farbschemata und Farbsymbole,” in Farbe im Mittelalter:
Materialität – Medialität – Semantik (as in note 14), vol. 1, 305.
51 Pastoureau, Blue (as in note 11). It may be that Pastoureau has overstated his case (for which see H.
Pulliam, “Color,” in Medieval Art History Today – Critical Terms, a Special Issue of Studies in Iconography
(2012), 5. Nevertheless, Pastoureau’s basic scheme of developments in color remains convincing, though
the detailed analysis needs to be refined more.
52 Pastoureau, Black (as in note 7), 60.
53 Pastoureau, Blue (as in note 11), 62.
54 Kirschbaum, “L’angelo rosso e l’angelo turchino” (as in note 43), 209–48.
55 Pastoureau, Blue (as in note 11), 64.
56 Dronke, “Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Western Color-Imagery” (as in note 10), 84.
57 P. Thoby, Le Crucifix, Des Origines Au Concile de Trente: Étude inconographique (Nantes, 1959), 120. For
colored illustration of windows at Chartres see The Corpus of Medieval Narrative Art, http://www.medi
evalart.org.uk/Chartres/051_pages/Chartres_Bay051_Panel07.htm (accessed August 11, 2015).
58 M. Camille, Gothic Art: Visions and Revelations of the Medieval World (London, 1996), 136. Space does
not make it possible to discuss the interesting question of the iconography of color in architecture of
the time. Barbara Deimling had drawn attention, for example, to the red doors in church buildings in
Germany, which were associated with the judiciary; B. Deimling, “Medieval Church Portals and Their
Importance in the History of Law,” in Romanesque: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, ed. R. Toman (Cologne,
2004), 324–25. There has been considerable new research on polychromy in architecture, for which see
Farbe im Mittelalter: Materialität – Medialität – Semantik (as in note 14).
59 London, British Library, Cotton Ms Nero C IV, fol.39r. For colored illustration see British Library Digit-
ised Manuscripts, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_nero_c_iv (accessed
August 11, 2015).
60 Pastoureau, Green (as in note 9), 91.
61 The Celestial Hierarchy, 15.7. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (London, 1987), 188.
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62 British Museum, M&ME 1983, 0401, 1. For colored reproduction see http://www.britishmuseum.org/
research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=34990001&
objectId=60247&partId=1 (accessed August 11, 2015). See also on the convention of representing
St. Peter in a yellow outer garment Lisner (as in note 28), “Die Gewandfarben Der Apostel in Giottos
Arenafresken Farbgebung und Farbikonographie,” especially 314.
63 J. Weaver, The Ancestors of Christ Windows at Canterbury Cathedral (Los Angeles, 2013), 52 and 62 for
illustrations.
64 Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 1 (as in note 4), 51–52, and vol. 2, fig.II.38 for colored illustration. See also
A. Petzold, “‘Of the Significance of Colours’: The Iconography of Colour in Romanesque and Early
Gothic Book Illumination,” in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index
of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 1999), 131–33.
65 P. Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, and Glass, 1250–1550 (New Haven, 1999).
66 Meier and Suntrup, Lexikon der Farbenbedeutungen Im Mittelalter (as in note 4).
67 For an attempt to do so in relation to a liturgical manuscript see J.C. Bonne, “Rituel de la couleur:
Fonctionnement et usage des images dans la sacramentaire de Limoges,” in Image et Signification, ed.
D. Ponna (Paris, 1983), 129–39.
452
33
FLOWERS AND PLANTS, THE
LIVING ICONOGRAPHY
Celia Fisher
Leaves and flowers are such a natural form of decoration that it is easy to ignore their signifi-
cance; but like the acanthus, which adorned Corinthian columns in classical times, and in the
fifteenth century became the dominant leaf pattern in illuminated manuscripts, there is usually
a good story attached. According to legend, the Greek architect Callimachus adopted this motif
after he saw acanthus growing from under a gravestone (or a basket placed on a gravestone),
full of vigorous new life, and was doubly inspired by the beauty of its form and its resurrection
symbolism. From the eleventh century acanthus leaves were reworked in Romanesque and then
Gothic styles, often twisted to frame people and monsters, but they were not specifically asso-
ciated in Christian art with resurrection, and their reappearance in the margins of manuscripts
seems purely decorative. On the other hand, pomegranate fruits did retain the primeval aura of
sacrifice and rebirth suggested by the seeds surrounded in sticky red juice. In classical mythology
they were integral to the story of Persephone’s captivity in the Underworld and her springtime
rituals of return. Since they were also sanctified by Old Testament references, like the Song of
Solomon (4.13, 6.7, et al.), pomegranates were accepted as a Christian symbol of resurrection,
though their appearances were rare, as were the fruits themselves. In the Hours of Margaret of
Orleans (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, lat 1156B), created around 1430, seeds like drops of blood
burst from the fruits around a miniature of the Crucifixion (f.139), and in the tapestry of the
Hunt of the Unicorn (New York, Cloisters Museum) the risen unicorn lies under a pomegranate
tree, with the red seeds spilling over his flanks. However, when Dürer portrayed Holy Roman
Emperor Maximilian holding a pomegranate (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, GG_825), it
spoke more of worldly power. The seeds had come to represent the dominions of the church over
which he exercised a disputed control. Pomegranates were also the emblematic fruit of Granada, a
key kingdom of reunited Spain to which Maximilian (and Henry VIII) were linked by marriage
and therefore inclined to use its emblems. Heraldry was often based on wordplay. The Romans
had called pomegranates Mala punica (Carthaginian apples), but this evolved into the later Latin
name Punica granatum (many seeded) and hence the etymological link with Granada. Plants offer
all these possibilities, from their classical and biblical heritage to the connotations of their names,
together with their uses and their appearance – a rich compendium of complicated, fascinating,
and all too often speculative clues to their appearance in medieval art.
In order to read the message contained in an artistic depiction of a plant it is necessary to
recognize the plant. Foremost in chronology and significance, grapevines appeared on the walls
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of the Christian catacombs of Rome, representing the communion wine and the sacrificial
blood of Christ, and recalling inspirational biblical sayings, such as “I am the true vine, you
are the branches” (John 15:5). In medieval devotional texts it became customary for the large
decorative capital letters marking the beginnings of chapters or prayers to be decorated with
tendrils of vines. These could be embellished with gold leaf or color and gradually they spread
until they surrounded the text on all four sides, giving their name vignette to the frameworks of
foliage design and vignetteur to its practitioners (although other leaves, especially ivy, started to
appear and also tiny flowers, not to mention marginal figures and drolleries). It was possibly from
decorations in books – appearing as early as the tenth century and increasingly in the eleventh
and twelfth – that leaf carvings in churches derived. In Romanesque churches these sprouting
branches remained stylized, but in the great Gothic cathedrals of the thirteenth century they were
often astonishingly realistic, springing from an expertise that originated with the stonemasons of
northern France – Chartres, Reims, and, in Paris, Ste. Chapelle and parts of Notre-Dame – then
rapidly influencing Germany (e.g., Naumberg and Bamberg cathedrals) and England, starting
with the chapter houses of Southwell and York (Fig. 33.1). Among these leaves there are vines
in plenty with bunches of grapes, and also ivy with their tighter clusters of berries. Evergreen
plants like ivy were endowed with an aura of immortality suitable for religious festivals and
buildings. The Jewish feast of tabernacles and the Roman Saturnalia both offered precedents for
constructing leafy shrines for sacred rites, which the Christian church reluctantly transferred to
the calendar for Christmas with the words templa ornantur (let the church be decorated). Ivy was
first associated with vines because they were both sacred to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine –
“ivy his winter crown, the vine his crown in summer,” as if ivy were the evergreen equivalent
to vines. In northern Europe holly and ivy were paired and in certain carols they retained a
pre-Christian sense of a midwinter contest between light and dark. But holly does not appear in
church carvings, perhaps because it remained too pagan. In a fourteenth-century English poem
it was the attribute of the Green Knight, who challenged Sir Gawain to a beheading contest.
Other leaves which might seem equally pre-Christian in their associations were sanctified
in line with the wisdom of church teachings that mystic symbols were better adapted than
repressed. Thus oak leaves and acorns became one of the most widespread of thirteenth-century
leaf carvings, sacred to the fierce Norse gods, to Druids, and to the chief god of the Greek and
Roman pantheon, Zeus/Jupiter, because the whispering leaves of the sacred oak of Dodona was
his oracle. Oak also appeared in the Old Testament as a tree where God might make his will
known to such heroes as Joshua and Gideon. Occasionally the more authentic holm oak of the
Mediterranean regions (which resembles holly and is evergreen) featured in carvings, but it was
generally replaced by the familiar leaves of the European oak. Rivaling oak in carved popularity,
hawthorn, the May tree, was gathered to honor the goddess of spring (for the Romans this was
Flora), but in the Christian calendar the month and the tree were rededicated to the Virgin
Mary and branches were brought inside for protection (it was only with the Reformation that
this practice was declared unlucky). For good measure the red berries were linked with drops of
Christ’s redeeming blood and the thorns with the crown of thorns. More tenuously hawthorn
was described as Joseph’s staff, but whether this was Joseph who won the hand of the Virgin by
planting his stick in the ground, which immediately flowered, or Joseph of Arimathea arriving
in Glastonbury is seldom relevant. It was probably the protective aspect of oak and hawthorn that
was of paramount importance, especially in their frequent appearance surrounding the head of
the Green Man, that puzzling and ubiquitous creature whose purpose was usually apotropaic – to
ward off evil spirits. In 1235 several versions of a foliate head appeared in a book of architectural
sketches by the master mason Villard de Honnecourt (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Ms. Fr.
19093), who called it tete de feuilles, but without explanation. Two other protective leaves that
454
Flowers and plants
Figure 33.1 Leaf carvings in the Chapter House of Southwell Minster, England, c. 1300. Cinquefoil
leaves and flowers, believed to have magical powers associated with the number five, hence the Latin name
potentilla. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
often appear in leaf carvings are from herbaceous plants, not trees. Artemisia (which when ren-
dered in wood or stone can be mistaken for acanthus) was dedicated to Artemis, the goddess of
hunting, and a fierce guardian of chastity. Together with various related plants of the daisy family,
which have a sharp insect-repellent smell, artemisia has been used by our ancestors worldwide to
protect people, their homes, and their dead – both in practical ways to ward off insect predation
and in more esoteric ways to preserve the body for the afterlife. The other powerfully protective
leaf from a little plant was potentilla or cinquefoil, a small-flowered member of the rose family
with five lobes to its leaves and five petals (which has been mistaken sometimes in carvings for
a buttercup, a plant that has no place and no meaning in medieval art). The number five was a
medieval symbol of great power – as in the pentagon, a five-sided fort – and it was Christianized
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as an emblem of the Virgin. The pentangle would be placed on the shields of crusaders and it
also became associated with the five wounds of Christ.
Another herbaceous plant that appears surprisingly frequently in medieval church carving is
white bryony, a climbing plant with tightly twisting tendrils, red berries (again), and perhaps most
importantly a forked root that was widely used as a substitute for mandrake. Mandrake was a
fertility drug, approved by its use in the Old Testament when Jacob and Rachel conceived Joseph
with mandrake roots tucked under the bed (Genesis 30). To what extent the stonemasons, or the
patrons who oversaw their work, knew all this plant lore is endlessly debatable and symbolism
will always range from obvious to dubious. Another explanation for the widespread popularity
of all these particular leaves is that they are deeply lobed and therefore create wonderful patterns
that are harmonious but varied. One other leaf that fits this theory should be mentioned – indeed
sometimes it outnumbers all the others: maple, which can be identified when its characteristic
winged seeds are carved alongside. Perhaps they seemed airborne like little angels. But the gen-
erally accepted explanation is that maples belong to the acer family, like the oriental plane and
sycamore. Since the latter are Middle Eastern and did not grow in medieval Europe, although
they may have been known, maple provided an indigenous substitute. Their attribute was that
they grow beside springs of water and could therefore symbolize the waters of salvation, and
more apocryphally the story of the Flight into Egypt, where the Holy family was refreshed by a
miraculous spring gushing out under a “sycamore” tree. Strictly speaking the sycamore of Egypt
is a species of fig, but botanical exactitude might not deter the search for biblical symbolism in
this instance.
The realism of carved leaves was a thirteenth-century phenomenon which faded back into
stylization all too soon, but meanwhile in illuminated manuscripts the impulse toward accurate
representation was growing, especially in Italy. In certain luxury editions of herbals the illustra-
tions departed from the classical prototypes, which had been rendered lifeless and often unrecog-
nizable by centuries of copying. This movement started in the medical schools of Salerno, near
Naples, and was exemplified in a text by the leading physician Platearius, generally known by
its opening words Circa Instans. It was based as usual on Dioscorides, a first-century Roman
doctor who wrote Materia Medica, but also registered the input of Arabic expertise in botany
and medicine. The oldest surviving copy of Circa Instans (London, British Library, Egerton 747)
dates from c. 1300 and includes some illustrations that spring to life across the page, including
coincidentally white bryony (f.16v). A hundred years later, when the center of medical excel-
lence had moved north to Padua, the Carrara Herbal (London, British Library, Egerton 2020),
the Venetian Rinio Herbal (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Cod. Lat. VI 59), and the
Belluno Herbal (London, British Library, Add. 41623) – which included plants indigenous to
the Venetian Alps – all demonstrated an urge to display plants to maximum advantage as well
as realistically. These works, like all illuminated manuscripts, were for wealthy patrons, but the
botanical knowledge they contained was widely known and integral to the symbolism of plants –
especially where it related to the doctrine of signatures, whereby the appearance of a plant bore
a clue to the affliction it treated.
At the same time, toward the end of the fourteenth century, a curious Italian manuscript
was created for the Cocharelli family of Genoa, a Treatise on Vices (London, British Library,
Egerton 3781) for the moral instruction of children. The margins were adorned with gourds,
olives, vines, and roses weighed down by gigantic crickets, caterpillars, spiders, and scorpions, no
doubt to reinforce graphically the message of the text. In Lombardy too there was a move toward
naturalistic plant motifs in manuscript border decoration, seen first in the work of Pietro da
Pavia. Then around 1410 his associate Michelino da Besozzo created a prayer book for a patron
in Milan or Venice (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, mss 944) in which the miniatures and
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Flowers and plants
their facing text pages have exquisite repeat patterns of a single flower. But only once is there
an obvious symbolic link with the miniature – a dramatic and grief-stricken Entombment
(f. 24v-25) surrounded by broad bean flowers. Beans have been associated with death rites since
preclassical times, and subsequently they appeared occasionally in paintings of the Last Supper.
Meanwhile in France, under the patronage of the king’s brother, Jean Duke of Berry, some of
the earliest recognizable flowers were also appearing in manuscript borders, possibly under the
guidance of Italian illuminators. But it was in the duke’s Tres Riches Heures (Chantilly, Musee
Conde), created by the Netherlandish Limbourg Brothers before 1416, that a uniquely interest-
ing flower border appeared. The miniature of Christ feeding the five thousand with loaves and
fishes (f. 168v) is surrounded by larkspurs with the correct feathery leaves and buds like little
fish. The Latin name for larkspur, delphinium, is derived from dolphin because of the fish-like
shape of the buds (which the artist has emphasized), giving a direct link with the miniature and
probably also with the cryptic name of Christ. Another decorative and meaningful flower study
from these early decades of the fifteenth century was produced by an anonymous Dutch master
(called the Master of the Morgan Infancy Cycle, after a manuscript in the Morgan Library New
York and his unusual miniatures depicting the childhood of Christ). In one of his prayer books
(London, British Library, Add. 50005) the border decorations include penwork sketches of real
plants, the loveliest of which is a pea surrounding the text opposite the Nativity scene (f.23r).
The stems curve abundantly, the flowers are white with flopping petals like folded linen, and one
flower grows into the center of the gilded initial. The splitting peapods are washed with shades
of green to emphasize the circular peas. Here is an obvious but one-off delight in the patterns
to be found in nature, as if peas in some particular way celebrated the birth of Christ. The same
phenomenon occurs again in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves (New York, Morgan 917&945),
created during the 1440s by a Dutch illuminator. Around a miniature of three angels singing of
the birth of Christ (f.11r), pea pods lie interspersed with pink flowers, and stems that appear to
pierce the page. This trompe l’oeil plant, enlarged out of all proportion to the figures it frames,
was a precursor to the 1470s, when many different flowers featured in the borders of manuscripts
looked as if they had been plucked from their stems and scattered across the golden and colored
borders that surround the pages. Their realism was enhanced by the shadows they cast and insects
alighted as if they had been tricked by the artist’s skill. These decorative borders were mainly
associated with Books of Hours produced in the southern Netherlands, especially Ghent and
Bruges – hence their grouping as Ghent Bruges Hours (Fig. 33.2).
The scattering of flowers reflected ceremonial occasions when images of the Virgin, or
patron saints, were carried in procession. In February, Candlemas, the Purification of the Virgin,
called for white flowers, and in northern Europe, leucojums (snowflakes) were more in evidence
than snowdrops – which are native only to Eastern Europe and Turkey. Leucojums do appear
in some manuscript borders but more especially in fifteenth-century paintings of the Virgin by
German masters. In springtime, to mark the Annunciation (Lady Day in March) violets would
be scattered in honor of the Virgin. It has been suggested that their gently drooping flowers
reflected her humility; their purplish color the mourning she would endure (or if white, her
purity); their sweet smell, like all scented flowers, conveyed the invisible essence of spirituality.
And in May, Pentecost was a festival of summer flowers often culminating in the release of a
profusion of petals from on high to represent the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples.
The ceremony is depicted in the Hours of Margaret of Orleans where the border around the
Pentecost miniature (f.146r) shows angels at the top of the page scattering roses, pinks, violets,
daisies, columbines, and stocks toward tiny ladies, who are gathering them into baskets at the
bottom of the page. These are some of the most frequently recurring flowers in late medieval
manuscripts and paintings, roses above all.
457
Figure 33.2 The Hours of Engelbert of Nassau, Flemish, c. 1470, Oxford Bodleian Library, ms Douce
210-220, f. 133. The miniature showing the Nativity is attributed to the Master of Mary of Burgundy; the
flower-strewn borders were added a little later, but their origins have been associated with his work. It was
typical of the Ghent-Bruges Hours that the flowers were arranged in patterns; here red roses and red double
daisies were interspersed with white daisies, stocks, and a pea flower, alternating with blue speedwell, borage,
cornflower, columbine, and heartsease. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Flowers and plants
Although roses have always been associated with earthly lovers, and with the passions of
Venus, the medieval church judiciously absorbed them into Christian iconography. White roses
became symbols of purity, red roses of redeeming blood, and both colors, together with the green
of their leaves, also represented the three cardinal virtues faith, hope, and love. Other meanings
accrued; one of the favorite descriptions of the Virgin was rosa sine spina (a rose without a thorn),
which may also explain the appearance in fifteenth-century paintings of rose-like flowers with-
out thorns, especially peonies but also hollyhocks. In Dante’s Paradiso (Canto 30) heaven was
envisaged as a white rose with the blessed resting in the petals and the golden glory of God at
the center – and the great rose windows of medieval cathedrals reflected a comparable concept.
Like roses, pinks and carnations also offer various interpretations. Their Latin name, dianthus,
meant flower of God. Carnation may derive from coronation since it was traditionally used in
headdresses and garlands for ceremonial occasions; but the name carnation evolved alongside
the Latin carnus for flesh, used to describe the color of the flower, and also offering a punning
reference to the Incarnation – “and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) –
which would explain the frequent appearances of a pink held out toward the Christ Child
in fifteenth-century paintings. Pinks were also thought to resemble nails, their German name
negelblum meant nail-flower, and this led to an association with the nails with which Christ was
crucified, especially when three appear in a painting. Daisies were virginal and might also appear
alongside important female patron saints, like Barbara, Catherine, and more especially Margaret,
since the French marguerite made them her namesake (it also means pearl). Alternatively their
Latin name, bellis, linked them with the Roman goddess of war, and they were among herbs
like plantain, cinquefoil, mallow, mullein, and marigold that were used to heal wounds. All these
plants appear in fifteenth-century paintings, and in certain narrative contexts their medicinal
value might be part of their message. Columbines, which commonly share the same mournful
purple/blue of violets, were often painted to reflect the color of the Virgin’s mantle and their
French name ancolie signified melancholy. But as well as being associated with the grief of the
Virgin (and in certain works the bereavement of a patron) columbines were seen to resemble
birds. The name columbine linked them with the dove of the Holy Spirit, the Latin aquilegia
with an eagle soaring toward heaven like a spirit ascending. Last, but not least in terms of their
frequent use by artists, stocks are members of the plant family named cruciferae because they have
four petals in the form of a cross, giving an obvious link with Christ’s crucifixion.
The Wilton Diptych (London, National Gallery, NG4451), created in the 1390s for Richard II,
is one of the earliest paintings to depict flowers (roses, violets, and daisies) scattered at the feet
of the Virgin as she held her Child. But the painting also contains more unusual plants, includ-
ing ferns and rosemary, which were personal emblems of his dead queen, Anne of Bohemia.
Rosemary was carried at weddings and funerals as a flower of fidelity and remembrance. But if
plants in paintings had several attributes, so much the better, and the white flowers of rosemary
were said to be tinged with blue because the Virgin hung her blue robe over a rosemary bush
to dry in the sun. An alternative way to display symbolic flowers was inaugurated in 1311,
when Duccio of Siena placed a vase of white lilies in the center foreground of an Annunci-
ation scene (London, National Gallery, The Maesta, NG1139). In the Middle Ages cultivated
lilies were always white (Virgil first called them Lilium candidum; Madonna lily was a Victorian
naming). Their luminosity was enhanced by the shining golden stamens, and their strong scent
added an apt metaphor for the spiritual mystery of conceiving a child through a purely reli-
gious experience. By the same token white roses, jasmine, and lilies of the valley also appear in
religious paintings. In 1475 the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes both revised and reinforced
the familiar usages when he placed two vases of flowers before a Nativity scene, known as the
Portinari altarpiece, after the Florentine banker who commissioned it (Florence, Uffizi). There
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Celia Fisher
are two white irises conveying the message of purity (they were also the emblematic flower
of Florence), while the lily alongside them is orange-red – this is Lilium bulbiferum, which had
recently been brought into cultivation from its alpine habitat – and presumably in this context
its reddish tones represented Christ’s blood. The other flowers are columbines, three pinks, and
scattered purple and white violets. There is also one purple iris, the more familiar color, which
reflected the nearby robe of the kneeling Virgin, perhaps indicating her royal status in heaven as
well as her earthly grief. Like roses and lilies, irises bore much symbolism. They were also royal,
being the original fleur de lys of France, and then England. Their common name was sword lily
on account of the shape of the long, pointed leaves (the Latin gladiolus has now officially passed
to a different plant). It was said that at the Crucifixion sorrow pierced the Virgin’s heart like a
sword, an image occasionally used by artists, but the subtlest use of sword imagery occurs in the
Hunt of the Unicorn tapestry, where the risen unicorn sits inside a fenced sanctuary and the gate
is guarded by a large iris, like the angel with a fiery sword at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.
In classical mythology Iris was the messenger of the gods, and her symbol was the rainbow as
well as the flower. In the Old Testament God’s reassurance to Noah after the flood was pledged
in a rainbow. During the fifteenth century artists started to use irises in the context of divine
visions or messages – for instance, when the Master of Mary of Burgundy painted her portrait
at a church window with a vision of the Virgin and Child (Vienna, Osterreichische National-
bibliothek, Cod. 1857 f.14v); when Gerard David painted yellow irises at the waterside in the
Baptism of Christ (Bruges, Groeninge Museum, 0000.GRO0035.I-0039.I); when Botticelli in
the Primavera painted an iris at the feet of Chloris as she transformed into the goddess Flora
(Florence, Uffizi, 1890 no. 8360).
A garden setting offered the maximum opportunity for depicting symbolic plants, while the
garden itself reflected the earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden, and, since a typical medieval gar-
den was an enclosed space, the analogy of the hortus conclusus, which was another description of
the Virgin applied. In the 1390s, contemporary with the Wilton Diptych, the Flemish painter
Melchior Broederlam produced the Dijon Altarpiece for the Duke of Burgundy (Dijon, Musee
des Beaux Arts). In the Annunciation wing he created an early association of the Virgin with a
lily in a vase, plus a tiny walled garden, a rose hedge, and flowery grass – which seems unusually
to include a nettle, perhaps a reminder of worldly tribulation. Indeed plants could be threaten-
ing. Thistles in paintings of the Christ Child represented the crown of thorns, and in paintings
of saints like John the Baptist in the wilderness they spoke of temptation and hardship. Poppies
were associated with battlefields, in the Middle Ages as now, and made a spectacular appearance
in Bartolome Bermejo’s St. Michael vanquishing the devil (London, National Gallery, NG6553),
painted c. 1468, at the time when Christian Spain was still fighting the Moors. But to return to the
garden, early in the fifteenth century both Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin created influential
prototypes of the Virgin and Child in little paradise gardens, while van Eyck’s Altarpiece of the
Adoration of the Lamb, completed in 1432 (Ghent, St. Bavo Cathedral), transformed the grassy
setting and the flowers to a huge scale. He even introduced palms, exotic trees with strong biblical
associations, but hard for northern European artists to depict. Van Eyck must have seen palm trees
when he joined an embassy sent by Philip the Good to Portugal, but normally his compatriots,
when representing Christ’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, or the Holy Family
resting beneath a palm tree, showed dates sprouting from the branches like cones on a pine tree.
In Italian frescoes the flowery grass of paradise had appeared even earlier. In 1365 the Domin-
ican chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence showed the blessed dancing among fruit-laden
trees and meadows full of flowers (Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer evoked similar scenes),
although it was not until the fifteenth century that most painted flowers became identifiable.
Among the most frequent to appear in the grass were little wild strawberries, which since they
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Flowers and plants
have no thorns, rind, pips, or stones were taken to symbolize the pure sweetness of the Virgin –
although they might also represent drops of Christ’s blood; and the trifoliate leaves of strawberries
related them to the Trinity – a feature they shared with clover, the prototype of a trefoil. Another
Trinity flower was wild viola or heartsease, sporting three colors – purple, yellow, and white – and
appearing almost as often as violets in flowery grass and manuscript borders. Alongside daisies
and marigolds (miniature sunflowers because they open and close according to sunlight), dan-
delions were featured in paintings (though never in manuscript borders), and perhaps at the feet
of the Virgin feeding her Child; the white latex from their stems was miraculously reminiscent
of her milk. One of the finest paintings of a paradise garden, dated around 1420, and lending its
name to an anonymous German master (Frankfurt, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, HM 54) (Plate 6),
also included wallflowers (an alternative to stocks, being cruciform) and cowslips. Since cowslips
were nicknamed key flowers, Our Lady’s keys, or key of heaven they served to emphasize that this
garden was a subliminal place between earth and heaven. And it seems obvious that by this stage
artists were making sketches of flowers from nature, although it was only later in the century that
Dürer and Leonardo produced surviving studies that can be related to their paintings.
Plate 6 Master of the Paradise Garden (Upper Rhenish), The Paradise Garden, c. 1420, Stadelsches
Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, HM 54. In a typical enclosed garden the Virgin is seated among flowers and the
Christ Child is learning music from St. Cecilia (who has a headdress of peapods), while St. Dorothea picks
cherries. Along the wall (left to right) the flowers are red roses, speedwell, betony, lychnis, stocks, iris, and
hollyhock. In the grass the flowers include white lily, peony, strawberries, lilies of the valley, leucojum,
cowslips, yellow wallflowers, periwinkles, daisies, and violets. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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Celia Fisher
The floweriest of all medieval scenes are in fifteenth-century Flemish tapestries, known as
verdures to contemporaries and as millefleurs since. Here too the flowers created a paradise setting,
while their numbers and variety suggest their purpose was mainly decorative, although several
had romantic connotations, like heartsease (their French name pensees/pansies meant thoughts)
and also pinks – because both had a lively secular existence as love tokens. This was also true
of blue flowers, since blue was the color of constancy. Periwinkles – the name derived from
Latin pervinca, meaning to bind, and inspired by their tendrils – might twine hearts together like
love knots. Forget-me-nots had names with similar meanings in other European languages, and
they were held like pinks in fifteenth-century portraits, possibly signifying betrothal. Bright
blue speedwells, cornflowers, and borage may have been regarded as offering the same mes-
sage, but they were evidently being used for color patterning, both in manuscript borders and
against the rich red background of the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries (Paris, Musee Cluny,
Cl. 10831–10834). Incidentally this red background meant that white pinks and columbines
displayed to best advantage, and here they provide an early record of color variation in cultivated
flowers. However the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries definitely used flowers and fruit (the iris
and pomegranate have already been mentioned) to convey symbolic meanings. The unicorn was
an allegory of Christ’s death and resurrection, but folklore lurked beneath the surface, especially
with the risen unicorn. The orchid growing up against its white flanks was widely used as an
aphrodisiac (the two tuberous roots were likened to testicles and by the doctrine of signatures
were considered efficacious); the church, however, had reclaimed orchids by explaining that
the brown stains on their leaves came from drops of Christ’s blood as an orchid grew under
the cross. The wild arum beneath the unicorn’s hoof represented another source of aphrodisiac
powders, and all its folk names alluded to the sexy purple spadix poking like a penis from the
green spathe. This seems to carry resurrection symbolism into unwonted areas, certainly more
pagan than Christian.
This mixed heritage of meanings rendered plant symbolism ambiguous, sometimes even in a
religious painting. Apples on a tree plucked by Eve, let alone Venus, represented temptation. The
Virgin, known as the new Eve, was believed to offer apples of redemption, which absorbed their
earlier danger. But in paintings of the Virgin and Child by the Venetian artist Carlo Crivelli
(active 1457–93) there are also quinces, peaches, pears, nuts, and cucumbers. All or none might
have seductive qualities. For instance, Crivelli’s cucumber has been interpreted as bitter and mis-
shapen to represent sin and particularly lust, but the Bible casts no such slur on cucumbers. They
are recorded as the simple luxury for which the Israelites yearned after two years wandering in
the desert (Numbers 11:5). They might even be linked to the gourd which grew up and sheltered
Jonah outside the walls of Nineveh (Jonah 4:6) and, since he survived being in the belly of the
whale, his gourd became another symbol of resurrection. In other fifteenth-century paintings,
the oranges and lemons that appear were definitely bitter (sweet oranges had not reached Europe
in the Middle Ages) and as such they were sometimes placed before the Christ Child, cut across
with a knife as a symbol of his sacrifice (much as red fruits – cherries, redcurrants, and straw-
berries – were also depicted in this context). But in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait (London,
National Gallery, NG186) oranges represented a luxury fruit, source of scents and flavorings; and
a lemon tree, linguistically confused at some point with the biblical cedar tree, was a symbol of
the Virgin. Rarest of all fruits to appear in late medieval art, a banana plant (though admittedly
not a banana) featured alongside an Annunciation by Fra Angelico (Madrid, Prado, P00015)
in the scene of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden. Bananas are Asiatic fruit; it was fabled that
Alexander the Great sought wisdom from the wise men of India who ate bananas, and in Ara-
bic folklore bananas grew in Eden – which was presumably the information Fra Angelico had
gleaned, sheltered though he was within the walls of San Marco in Florence.
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Flowers and plants
At what point did flowers and fruit cease to be medieval and become Renaissance? Cer-
tainly Botticelli, Leonardo, and Dürer were Renaissance artists, but the significance of the flow-
ers they portrayed still lay in their traditional meanings. When Botticelli painted The Birth of
Venus (Florence, Uffizi, 1890 no. 878) circa 1480 it was fashionable in humanist circles to create
a synthesis between Christianity and the classical writings they so admired. Even Venus could
be regarded as one of the prototypes of the Virgin since both manifested heavenly love, and
at the moment of her birth from the waves Venus was indeed still virginal. Botticelli scattered
roses in her honor, and the robe that her attendant hurried to fling around her was embroidered
with virginal daisies. There may also be a protective element (already mentioned in relation
to artemisia). Members of the daisy family had healing and insect-repellent qualities that once
linked them to the immortals of the ancient Near East and were inherited by the classical
world. Tansy, in Latin tanacetum and in Greek athanasia, means immortal; parthenium, mean-
ing virgin, the specific name of feverfew, especially linked the plant with the virgin goddess
Athene, to whom the Parthenon was dedicated. The cornflowers, with which Botticelli dec-
orated the gown of Venus’s attendant, were named centaurea in honor of the centaur Cheiron,
who according to legend explained the properties of plants to the Greeks, and as a result often
appeared galloping across the pages of medieval herbals. Botticelli’s Primavera also featured
Venus, this time fully clothed and presiding over the springtime regeneration of her garden of
love, with white roses scattered at her feet, the grass carpeted in flowers, and an orange grove
substituted for her golden apples. To her right Mercury reaches up to pierce the clouds for a
shower and tiny cress flowers fall across his boot as if they represent the god’s own seed. Flames
of love start from Cupid’s arrow and form patterns on Mercury’s cloak, down toward the lychnis
and verbascum at his feet. Both plants have soft furry leaves that were used as lamp wicks and
were therefore lying ready to kindle. To Venus’s left the nymph Chloris is being transformed
by the embrace of Zephyr into Flora the goddess of spring, her robe embroidered with pinks,
flower of the gods. Other prominent flowers are more puzzling: the euphorbia under the Graces’
dancing feet, a green hellebore and a coltsfoot beneath Venus – were they intended for purging
melancholy humors?
All of which serves only to suggest that the attributes of plants, real or imagined, were
wide-ranging and this chapter can only touch on the subject, its sources, and a few examples. If
it stimulates more research it has served its purpose, and to this end a list of further reading, rather
than footnotes, has been added.
Further reading
A. Coates, Flowers and Their Histories (London, 1956).
M. Collins, Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Tradition (London, 2000).
P. Coremans et al., “L’Agneau Mystique al laboratoire,” Les Primitifs Flamands III, Contributions 2 (Brussels,
1953).
C. Eisler, The Prayerbook of Michelino da Besozzo (New York, 1981).
W. Emboden, Leonardo da Vinci on Plants and Gardens (London, 1987).
C. Fisher, Flowers in Medieval Manuscripts (London, 2004).
C. Fisher, The Medieval Flower Book (London, 2007).
C. Fisher, Flowers of the Renaissance (London, 2011).
M. Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries (New York, 1976).
M. Grieve, A Modern Herbal (London, 1931: repr 1976).
J. Harvey, Medieval Gardens (London, 1981).
R. Koch, “Flower Symbolism in the Portinari Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin 46 (1964), 70–77.
R. Koch, “Martin Schongauer’s Dragon Tree,” Print Review 5 (1976), 115–119.
E. Konig, Les Heures de Marguerite d’Orleans (Paris, 1991).
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Celia Fisher
M. Levi d’Ancona, The Garden of the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1980).

E. MacDougall, Medieval Gardens, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture IX
(Washington, DC, 1986).
N. Pevsner, The Leaves of Southwell (London, 1945).
J. Plummer, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves (London 1966).
M. Tisdall, The Flowers of Exeter (Plymouth, 2004).
D. Turner, The Hastings Hours (London, 1983).
J. Williamson, The Oak King, the Holly King and the Unicorn (New York, 1980).
464
34
THE ICONOGRAPHY OF LIGHT
Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Michael W. Cothren
The Old and New Testaments are full of references to light – both natural and artificial. Light is
equated with the word of God, the truth, and the good. Light is associated with armor (Rom
13:12), guidance (Ps 119:130), and life (Eph 5:14). Light chases away darkness (2 Sam 22:29; Ps
18:28; Is 42:5–7, 16; Lk 11:33–35; Jn 1:3–5; Jn 3:18–20; Jn 12:35; Rom 13:12). It signifies the
presence of God (Ex 34:29–35; Ps 89:15; Jn 9:5) and even embodies or represents God himself
(Jn 8:12; Jn 1:5–7). Light is related to fire (Neh 9:11–13) and lamps (Ps 18:28; 2 Sam 22:29; Mt
5:13–16; Lk 11:33–35).
Biblical references to light entered into liturgical texts and hymns from an early date, even
forming part of the Nicene Creed (“Light of Light . . .”), proclaiming and reinforcing the belief
that the divine was manifested in light itself. Considering the frequent mention of light in the
Bible and in service books, it is not surprising that light features prominently in the liturgical
and paraliturgical texts that generated images and guided the faithful in the reception of imagery.
Philosophical writings concerning light symbolism – particularly those by Neoplatonists like
Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite – found a place in the work of many medieval theologians.
In time, these philosophical notions influenced both the design of ecclesiastical architecture and
the symbolism of Christian art. For medieval men and women, shining light, which mystically
descended from the sky to penetrate darkness, bridged the divide between heaven and earth and
purified the soul of sin.
Ecclesiastical architecture
From an early date in Christian history, church buildings were conceived and perceived as con-
tainers of light, actualizing the symbolic value of illumination. The sixth-century Hagia Sophia
in Constantinople was designed to maximize the effects of light – as the manifestation not only
of God’s Word but also of his Wisdom, a related concept enshrined in the very name of the
church. Luminosity was integral to the symbolic meaning of the church. The sparkling tessellated
mosaics,1 gleaming marble revetments and pavements,2 reflective silver furnishings, and liturgical
paraphernalia,3 when touched by the sun’s penetrating rays or stroked by the flickering lights
of hundreds of lamps, created an impression of divine immanence and transcendence. Beyond
the illumination of Hagia Sophia, which has generated long-term scholarly interest,4 church
inscriptions, ekphrastic texts, and material remains provide ample evidence that the symbolic
465
value of light – filtered through theological and Neoplatonic writings – stimulated the design
of church architecture and its decoration throughout the early Byzantine world – from Mount
Sinai to Ravenna.5
Early writings on the symbolic importance of light played a role in architectural design and
monumental decoration in later Byzantine periods as well. In the main church of the monastery
of Hosios Loukas, built and decorated in the first half of the eleventh century, light animated the
sacred figures in the vaults and squinches, reflected off the polished surfaces of the marble wall
revetment, and demarcated a path to the heavenly sanctuary, which extends from the altar table
to the west end of the nave (Fig. 34.1).6 Rays of light, usually invisible to the eye, were broken
Figure 34.1 View to apse with light penetrating nave at 10:00 a.m. in July 2015, Katholikon, Monastery
of Hosios Loukas, Greece, early eleventh century. Image courtesy of Sharon Gerstel.
466
The iconography of light
up by the shapes of window apertures and were revealed, either touching wall surfaces and fur-
nishings or descending through shimmering dust and the smoke of incense. Within the church,
light played a role in the conception and apprehension of monumental images. In the Koimesis
Church, Daphni, light falls at the center of a squinch containing the Annunciation, incorporating
the natural phenomenon as a component of the iconography, equal, if not superior, to the flank-
ing representations of the Virgin and Archangel. Certain aspects of ornament may also have been
related to light. From the twelfth century, many Byzantine and Serbian churches were decorated
on the interior and exterior with small radiating discs, an enigmatic motif that some scholars
have associated with divine light.7 In a sense, these are reminiscent of the burnished circles in the
gold backgrounds of several icons from Mount Sinai, whose function was to enhance the radiant
qualities of the painted panel. The discs also recall the golden haloes that surround the heads of
sacred figures, a practice that had its origins in ancient art. In addition to circular forms, radiant
friezes executed in brick or in paint are widespread in architecture and art and may have also
been connected to light symbolism.8
In Western Europe, care was also taken in the design of churches to control and showcase
the effects of interior lighting. For example, in Romanesque pilgrimage churches, such as
Santiago de Compostela, St. Sernin in Toulouse, or Ste. Foy in Conques, whereas the lofty
interior spaces of nave and transept received only the limited light that filtered inward through
side aisles and tribunes, the choirs were flooded with direct illumination from the clerestory
windows and the lantern towers over the crossing. This emphasis on light effects not only
drew the attention of pilgrims and worshipers to the main altar and liturgical stage but also
created a shimmering aura when the descending rays reflected off the burnished surfaces of
reliquary shrines.
As Romanesque transformed into Gothic, the design of churches reached higher levels of
luminosity through the replacement of stone walls with vast expanses of glowing stained glass,
an effect that was made possible by streamlining and focusing support systems away from walls
and onto piers and buttresses.9 This influential design development seems to have been initiated
by Suger of Saint-Denis (abbot 1122–1151), who began reconstructing the church of the royal
abbey during the 1130s. As in Romanesque pilgrimage churches, the lighting effects were con-
centrated on the monks’ liturgical choir, which also housed the glistening reliquary of the patron
saint, visited on feast days by throngs of pilgrims. This eastern part of Suger’s church (Fig. 34.2),
enveloped by a luminous, undulating stained-glass membrane, was dedicated in 1144,10 and
the survival of the abbot’s own text documenting the architectural project, its funding, and its
dedication11, leaves no doubt as to the grounding of this innovative design in Neoplatonic light
symbolism, for the divine presence. Inscribed on the bronze doors that he commissioned for the
new church, Suger declared,
Bright is the noble work; but being nobly bright, the work should lighten the minds,
so that they may travel, through the true lights, to the True Light, where Christ is the
true door, in what manner it be inherent in this world the golden door defines: the dull
mind rises to truth through that which is material and, in seeing this light, is resurrected
from its former subversion.12
He also credits the stained-glass windows with creating this new light, describing the choir as “a
circular string of chapels by which the whole would shine with the wonderful and uninterrupted
light of most luminous windows, pervading the interior beauty.”13 Erwin Panofsky proposed that
the source for Suger’s interest in showcasing light through stained glass in his new church was to
be found in the writing of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite – believed in the twelfth century
467
Figure 34.2 Interior of the ambulatory of the choir, Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, France, 1140–1144.
Image courtesy of Stephen Gardner.
at Saint-Denis to be the same person as the patron saint of the abbey itself.14 Recently scholars
have challenged Panofsky’s proposal of a Pseudo-Dionysian source,15 but the Neoplatonic iden-
tification of God with light clearly stands behind the reconception of the church enclosure as
luminous walls of colored glass.16
A major shift occurred in the design of Gothic glazings a century after Suger’s innovative
project. The new system – which seems to have developed in the area around Paris – highlighted
colorless, “grisaille” glass into which were inserted bands or panels of colored glass, creating an
effect quite different from the deeply saturated full-color windows featured in Suger’s choir
and the Gothic cathedral glazings that had followed in its wake. This led to a dramatic increase
in the amount of light that actually entered into architectural spaces. Earlier Gothic windows
had created glowing walls, but they did not transmit as much light into the interior as did
the new grisaille frameworks for the presentation of full-color figures and scenes. Meredith
Lillich has proposed that this change was rooted in Parisian theological shifts, specifically in a
thirteenth-century reconsideration of the work of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite through
the lens of Augustinian Neoplatonism, which led to a new understanding of light symbolism,
one that emphasized the clarity of divine light (as in grisaille windows) over the unapproachable
468
mystery of divine gloom (which she associates with twelfth- and early thirteenth-century full-
color windows).17
Because of their orientation and the manipulation of fenestration, church buildings through-
out the Middle Ages, in the East as well as the West, highlight the role of light as the manifes-
tation of God. Oriented toward the east, the rays of the rising sun entered the church through
its eastern windows in the early morning, coinciding with the celebration of the Mass. In the
early fourteenth-century monastic church of the Virgin Hodegetria in Mystras, the sun’s rays
move slowly across the altar, beginning at 7:45 a.m. The entire table is bathed in light at 10:20,
gradually illuminating and then shining brightly over the altar through the course of the liturgy.
Within half an hour, with the dismissal of the faithful, the table is left in shadow.18 The illumi-
nation of the altar was also significant in Western Europe and points to common beliefs in the
manifestation of God through light. In Visigothic Spain, a horseshoe arch divided the nave and
the choir, where the small window that pierced the eastern curve of the apse allowed a strong
beam of light to touch the altar table, penetrating the darkness to illuminate the space of the
sacrifice.19 In Romanesque churches in Ireland – for example, at Cormac’s Chapel at Cashel
(1134) – large angled windows pierced the north and south walls of the rectangular altar niche,
illuminating both the table surface and the celebrant.20 At the mid-twelfth-century Cistercian
church of Fontenay in France, light flooded into the sanctuary over the main altar through eleven
huge windows cut into the flat eastern wall, whereas only filtered light reached the main space
of the nave.21 The highlighting of the altar, and indeed the entire church sanctuary, manifested
the presence of the Divine, a presence activated during the Eucharistic rite. Given the ritual and
symbolic importance of the altar, architects took pains to frame the space around it.22
In many Byzantine churches, the apertures in the church walls – openings through which
light penetrates the building – are framed by tetragrams – four abbreviated words whose first
letters are painted to either side of crosses. One of the most frequent tetragrams is ΦΧΦΠ,
the abbreviation of “Φῶς Χριστοῦ φαίνει πᾶσιν” (The light of Christ illuminates all), a phrase
used in the liturgy – particularly in the Presanctified liturgy – and in monastic offices.23 The
placement of the tetragram on the window and doorjambs of Byzantine churches is signifi-
cant, as is its representation above the altar table, in niches used to prepare the offerings, or
on the reverse side of icons intended for installation in the icon screen.24 In the church of
the Virgin Peribleptos in Ohrid (1294/5) the tetragram is located above the central window
of the sanctuary where the light streaming into the sanctuary manifested the light of Christ
(Fig. 34.3); in the church of St. John the Baptist in the Lips Monastery in Constantinople,
built between 1282 and 1304, the letters are carved into the mullion capitals of the central
apse.25 The tetragram ΦΧΦΠ is also frequently found in Byzantine manuscripts, often coupled
with another common formula, ΙC ΧC ΝΙ ΚΑ, “Jesus Christ conquers.”26 Found at the end
of columns and elsewhere, these scribal additions may refer to enlightenment as knowledge,
but may also express the hope for salvation. Clay lamps and objects of personal use from the
earliest Christian centuries are also marked with the tetragram ΦΧΦΠ,27 indicating the lon-
gevity of this abbreviated phrase. The tetragrams are linked to ceremonies of initiation and to
the lychnikon (Vespers), a service in which the lighting of the lamp at dusk symbolized Christ
illuminating the sin-darkened world. Standing before the sanctuary gates at Vespers, the clergy
intoned the Phos hilaron (Lumen Hilare), one of the oldest hymns of Church.28 The hymn
begins, “O Joyful Light of the holy glory of the immortal, heavenly, holy blessed Father, O
Jesus Christ. Having come to the setting of the sun, having beheld the evening light, we hymn
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God!” An emphasis on light is found in other liturgical hours
as well.29 Within the Orthodox Church, hymns and liturgical texts elucidated the meaning
of illumination for the faithful. A series of short hymns sung at Orthros (Matins) during Lent
469
Figure 34.3 Apse with tetragram over central window, Church of the Virgin Peribleptos (St. Clement),
Ohrid, Macedonia, 1295. Image courtesy of Sharon Gerstel.
called the Exaposteilarion, but often referred to as the Photagogika (Hymns of Light),30 ask for
salvation, speaking of light as purifying the soul: “Lord, you who brought forth the light, purify
my soul of all sin.” The rising light of the day is thus linked to the light of Christ, for which
the eyes of one’s soul need to be purified. Connections between the lighting of the evening
lamp and the symbol of Christ as the light of the world would have been inescapable to anyone
holding lamps or candles as the hymn was sung.
Like natural light, artificial light was also given symbolic meaning. The orchestrated lighting
of candles, lamps, and polykandela also responded to symbolic meanings of liturgical texts and
theological concepts. According to St. Jerome, when the Gospel was read in Eastern churches,
470
“lights are kindled as the only illumination, not merely to dispel the darkness but also to show a
sign of rejoicing while the sun is still shining: and so that under the sign of corporeal light, that
light may be set forth of which we read in the Psalms.”31 In medieval Byzantium, the darkened
church interior was the site of dramatic lighting by candles and chandeliers.32 Monastic foun-
dation documents describe with precision the types of lighting, the placement of lamps, and the
occasions for illumination.33 Lamps were used at rites of Baptism, over tombs, in front of shrines,
and in the presence of icons.34 At the moment of Christ’s resurrection, light pours out of the
sanctuary into the darkened church, moving from one candle to another until the entire building
is mystically illuminated.35 One type of Byzantine lamp – the choros – provided an astonishing
burst of light as the large chandelier was spun at the apex of the Easter vigil, a ceremonial use
of light that had a transformative effect on those gathered in darkness below.36 Art historians
have closely examined church inventories to understand the importance that such light-bearing
objects held for donors, from the most humble to the most regal.37
In the West, no prayer is more closely associated with the symbolic power of light than the
Exultet, which was chanted in the darkened church at the apex of the Resurrection service.
According to the Beneventan rite, the deacon proclaimed “Lumen Christi” three times before
the evocative words were sung and the Paschal candle was lit. This moment is captured in a series
of southern Italian parchment rolls, which contain both the lengthy text and illustrations of ritual
practice.38 The celebratory chant associates light with the expulsion of darkness and the triumph
of Christ over death:
This therefore is the night which purged the shadows of sin with a column of light.
This is the night which through all the world for those who believe in Christ, who are
separated from the vices of the world and the darkness of sin, restores them today to
grace and unites them to holiness.39
Surviving Paschal candlesticks – monumental in scale and fashioned from precious metal and
marble – are frequently decorated with scenes from the Passion and Resurrection of Christ,
linking them directly to the words of the Easter service and to the ritual illumination of the
church interior.40
Mirroring ritual actions and settings, medieval paintings frequently include representations of
candlesticks and lamps. Pairs of elaborate candlesticks are represented to either side of the apse
in St. Panteleimon, Nerezi (1164), flanking representations of the Communion of the Apostles
and the concelebrating bishops; in the ossuary of the Bačkovo Monastery, painted candles divide
concelebrants and the eastern window. These candles symbolize illumination – both actual and
metaphorical.41 In the main church of Hosios Loukas, two large painted candlesticks form part
of the program of a funerary chapel. Their representation has been linked both to the metaphys-
ical experience of divine light by the deceased and to the ritual use of light in commemorative
services.42 Large candlesticks, each with a lit candle, accompany the painted representation of the
Forty Martyrs of Sebaste in the south aisle of the Acheiropoietos basilica in Thessalonike. Dated
c. 1230, the paintings have been viewed recently as a memorial to the soldiers who died at the
Battle of Klokotnitsa, on March 9, 1230, the Feast of the Forty Martyrs.43 In the nighttime settings
for narrative episodes that take place in churches or chapels, candles or lamps find prominent
places in Western medieval art as well, not only to signify the time of the action but also to signal
the special nature of a sacred space. Often overlooked as components of ornament, representations
of lamps, candles, and candelabra appear to be a significant part of church decoration, imagina-
tively spotlighting ritual settings and invoking collective memory.
471
Pictorial representation
It is impossible to divorce the reading of images from the image-rich prayers chanted before
them and, occasionally, written on them. The central-most image of the Byzantine church was
the Pantokrator, the half-length image of Christ that looked down at the faithful from the apex
of the dome. He is encircled by a colorful border of rainbow-like hues, “leaning and gazing out
as though through the rim of heaven.”44 Beams of light entering the church through the dome
enhanced the importance of the symbolic space. The connection to light is made clear in the text
that Christ holds in his left hand. In Karanlık Kilise, an eleventh-century church in Cappadocia,
his open Gospel book reads, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in
darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). This text is also found on the band encircling
the Pantokrator in the Church of Mary of the Admiral in Palermo and on many Byzantine icons
representing the Pantokrator, including the mosaics above the so-called royal doors – the thresh-
olds between the dimly lit narthex and the more brightly illuminated nave – in Hagia Sophia
and Hosios Loukas. An image of transformation, Christ illuminates the faithful and leads them
to light. In several fourteenth-century churches located in Macedonia and Kosovo, the heavenly
band that surrounds Christ is extended outward to form jagged rays.45
The beams of light that penetrated the church interior are mirrored in the representation of
rays descending from heaven within several scenes of the Christological cycle, occasional episodes
within hagiographic narrative, and in images of evangelists and prophets in the process of com-
position. In images of theophany – corresponding to major church feasts – the rays often descend
from an arc symbolizing heaven or directly from the hand of God. This is particularly notable
in scenes of the Annunciation, Nativity, and Baptism of Christ, where beams of light emerging
from the arc of heaven symbolize the divine light emanating from God.
In Byzantine scenes of the Annunciation the rays descend diagonally, touching the Virgin Mary
as she spins thread for the Temple veil. From the twelfth century, Byzantine painters increasingly
incorporate references to the Holy Spirit in the Annunciation, including the dove, but even images
of Christ and the Ancient of Days.46 In one of the most striking representations of this scene, the
late twelfth-century Annunciation icon from Mount Sinai, the ray is interrupted by the image of a
dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, framed within a reflective circle scored into the gold surface of
the icon. Painted in a thin gold line and barely visible against the Virgin’s chest is an image of the
Christ Child framed in a medallion, visualizing the Incarnation of the Logos.47 From the thirteenth
century in many churches in Lakonia, Greece, between the Virgin and Archangel is the small Christ
Child, who is connected by a vertical ray to the Ancient of Days at the top of the composition. The
child is surrounded by circular lines, which, according to one church inscription, must be identified
as Gideon’s bedewed fleece (Jg 6:37–38; Ps 71:6), a type of the Virgin.48
In Western medieval art, an aged figure of God the Father is often shown dispatching the dove,
the symbol of the Holy Spirit, to Mary, and occasionally the dove travels toward the Virgin down
beams of light. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a tiny Christ Child, often with a
cross-headed staff slung over his shoulder, slides down the descending beams as if headed for the
womb of the Virgin herself (e.g., the Workshop of the Master of Flémalle’s Mérode Altarpiece in
The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). In Nicholas of Verdun’s Klosterneuburg
Altar of 1181, neither a dove nor a Christ Child appears, but beams of light project from Gabriel’s
hands into the eyes of the Virgin to signal the moment of the Incarnation (Fig. 34.4). The
Nativity is also represented in Byzantine art with rays of light descending from heaven into the
cave. The rays frequently touch the infant Christ, either the halo around his head or his chest. In
many representations of the scene, a star is depicted in the middle of the rays. As in other scenes
illustrating major church feasts, the representation responds to prayers chanted during the service:
472
Figure 34.4 Nicholas of Verdun, Annunciation to the Virgin, Klosterneuburg Altarpiece, 1181.
Sammlungen des Stiftes, Losterneuberg, Austria. Photo courtesy of Art Resource.
“Thy Nativity, O Christ our God, has shone to the world the light of wisdom! For by it, those who
worshiped the stars were taught by a star to adore Thee, the Sun of Righteousness and to know
Thee, the Orient from on high. O Lord, glory to Thee!” In one of the most interesting develop-
ments of the use of light in Western representations of the Nativity, beginning in the fourteenth
century and continuing into the fifteenth (e.g., fifteenth-century Nativities by the Workshop of
the Master of Flémalle in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and by Geertgen tot Sint Jans in the
National Gallery, London), light emanates from the Christ Child himself, a motif that has been
linked to the visions of the fourteenth-century St. Brigitta (Bridget) of Sweden (c. 1303–1373).49
Like the scene of Annunciation, the representation of Christ’s Baptism also features rays of
light (either as a single beam or divided rays) descending from the arc of heaven, a semicircle
often populated with angels and, on occasion, even a throne.50 The rays frequently emanate from
the hand of God and are interrupted by a dove. Together, the hand, dove, and form of Christ
manifest the Trinity, whose revelation is celebrated in the Orthodox feast of Theophany (Vision
of God), celebrated on January 6. The celebration is called the “feast of lights” because of the
473
revelation of the Trinity, but the name also refers to the faithful’s spiritual illumination through
Baptism on this day. The liturgy for this Church feast makes repeated use of symbolic language,
calling Christ the “true Light.”51
The Christological scene most closely associated with light in Byzantine art is the Transfig-
uration, which was described as a feast of light from an early time. In early representations, such
as the monumental image in the apse of the Sinai monastery, Christ’s whitened robes signify the
purity of the light, as the radiant Christ stands between created man and the uncreated God.
Images of the Transfiguration in Byzantium follow a similar formula; Christ, clad in white robes,
is framed by a round or oval mandorla. Changes in the shape of the mandorla from the thirteenth
century have given rise to scholarly speculation that the image was connected with spiritual
practices known as hesychasm.52 Examples of this enhanced mandorla – formed of overlapping
geometrical forms and emitting numerous rays – can be found in manuscripts,53 liturgical tex-
tiles,54 and monumental painting of the late Byzantine period (Plate 7).55 Followers of hesychasm
Plate 7 Transfiguration. Church of Holy Apostles, Thessaloniki, Greece. Early fourteenth century. Image
courtesy of Sharon Gerstel.
474
sought to participate through repetition of the Jesus prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,
have mercy on me, a sinner”)56 in the uncreated light of the Godhead (the energy of God), the
light in which Christ was transfigured at Mount Tabor in the presence of his disciples. Images
of the Transfiguration are rare in Western medieval art,57 but they do appear in works where
the influence of Byzantium may be at play. For example, in the Floreffe Bible (London, British
Library MS Add. 17737–8), a Mosan work of the mid-twelfth century, and the French Ingeborg
Psalter of c. 1200 (Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 9), prominent beams of light emanate from the
body of the transfigured Jesus, and in the Psalter, the representation of his face is gilt, a physical
manifestation of his glowing state with actual reflected light.
In both Byzantine and Western art, rays descending from heaven or from the hand of God are
also found in scenes of revelation, and are often associated with evangelists, prophets, or sacred
authors who are divinely inspired in composition. The descending rays link cognition with
divine light and Holy Scripture, or visionary writings with divine wisdom. Even in cases where
the heavenly rays are not represented, sacred authors are often illuminated by lamps or unseen
sources, inspired as much by biblical descriptions of light as by the physical requirements for
written composition.
The absence of light, within church decoration and pictorial scenes, is often associated with
representations of hell and damnation. In Byzantine scenes of the Anastasis, Hades is represented
as a chasm of darkness. In stark contrast, Christ, who reaches out to grasp the forearms of Adam
and Eve, is vested in brilliant white robes and is often surrounded by a gleaming white mandorla.
Compartmentalized scenes of sinners in Byzantine churches, too, are often set against a black
ground – equating light or its absence with the state of the soul’s salvation. In Western Last Judg-
ments (e.g., William de Brailles Psalter, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 330, fol. 3r; Giot-
to’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Western Wall), the realm of the blessed is often set against gold
ground or ethereal blue, whereas the home of the eternally damned is a blackened, lightless void.
Notes
1 L. James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1996); E. Borsook, “Rhetoric or Reality: Mosaics as
Expressions of a Metaphysical Idea,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz 44 (2000), 2–18.
2 On the reflective qualities of polished marble, see F. Barry, “The House of the Rising Sun: Luminosity
and Sacrality from Domus to Ecclesia,” in Hierotopy of Light and Fire in the Culture of the Byzantine World,
ed. A. Lidov (Moscow, 2013), 82–104.
3 H. Hunter-Crawley, “The Cross of Light: Experiencing Divine Presence in Byzantine Syria,” in Expe-
riencing Byzantium, Papers from the 44th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Newcastle and Dur-
ham, April 2011, ed. C. Nesbitt and M. Jackson (Farnham, 2013), 175–93.
4 N. Schibille, Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Aesthetic Experience (Farnham, 2014); B. Pentcheva, “Hagia
Sophia and Multisensory Aesthetics,” Gesta 50 (2011), 93–111.
5 R.S. Nelson, “Where God Walked and Monks Pray,” in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai (Los
Angeles, 2006), 1–38; E. Swift and A. Alwis, “The Role of Late Antique Art in Early Christian Worship:
A Reconsideration of the Iconography of the ‘Starry Sky’ in the ‘Mausoleum’ of Galla Placidia,” Papers of
the British School at Rome 78 (2010), 193–217.
6 H. Maguire, “Heaven on Earth: Neoplatonism in the Churches of Greece,” in Viewing Greece: Cultural
and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean, ed. S. Gerstel (Turnhout, 2016), 53–65.
7 J. Trkulja, “Divine Revelation Performed: Symbolic and Spatial Aspects in the Decoration of Byzantine
Churches,” in Spatial Icons: Performativity in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, ed. A. Lidov (Moscow, 2011),
213–46; E. Schwartz, “The Whirling Disc: A Possible Connection between Medieval Balkan Frescoes
and Byzantine Icons,” Zograf 8 (1977), 24–29.
8 S. Ćurčić, “Divine Light: Constructing the Immaterial in Byzantine Art and Architecture,” in Architec-
ture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium, ed. B. Wescoat and R.
Ousterhout (Cambridge, 2012), 307–37.
475
9 Scholars have often noted and cited the relationship between fully glazed Gothic churches and the bibli-
cal description of the Heavenly Jerusalem (Rev 21:18–21). For an overview of the spiritual associations
conveyed by stained glass within the Gothic church, see L. Grodecki, “Fonctions spirituelles,” in M.
Aubert , A. Chastel, L. Grodecki, J.-J. Gruber, J. Lafond, F. Mathey, J. Taralon, and J. Verrier, Le vitrail
français (Paris, 1958), 39–45; and L. Grodecki and C. Brisac, Le vitrail gothique (Fribourg, 1977), 11–18.
10 S.M. Crosby, The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis from Its Beginnings to the Death of Suger, 475–1151 (New
Haven, 1987).
11 E. Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. G. Panofsky-Soergel
(Princeton, 1979), 2nd ed. The first edition of Panofsky’s book appeared in 1944.
12 Panofsky, Abbot Suger (as in note 11), 46–49.
15 P. Kidson, “Panofsky, Suger, and St. Denis,” JWCI 50 (1987), 1–17; C. Rudolph, Artistic Change at Saint-
Denis: Abbot Suger’s Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton, 1990); L. Grant,
Abbot Suger of St.-Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France (London, 1998), 265–71.
16 For example, Suger says, “When out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God – the loveliness of
the many colored stones has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me
to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred
virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling as it were, in some strange region of the universe
which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that by
the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.”
Panofsky, Abbot Suger, 62–65.
17 M.P. Lillich, “Monastic Stained Glass: Patronage and Style,” in Monasticism and the Arts, ed. T.G. Verdon
(Syracuse, 1984), 222–36; eadem, The Armor of Light: Stained Glass in Western France, 1250–1325 (Berkeley,
1994), 6–8.
18 Light measurements taken by S. Gerstel in July 2015. See also I. Potamianos, Το Φως στην Βυζαντινή
Εκκλησία (Thessaloniki, 2000).
19 J.D. Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain (University Park, 1990), 20.
20 T.Ó. Carragáin, Churches in Early Medieval Ireland: Architecture, Ritual and Memory (New Haven,
2010), 177.
21 Presumably these windows, if they were glazed, would have been filled with the light-transmitting gri-
saille that was favored in Cistercian churches at this time. See Lillich, “Monastic Stained Glass,” 218–22.
22 Jorge Rodrigues has argued that in Western Romanesque architecture, not only were the controlled effects
of interior lighting used to spotlight features of the sanctuary but also the gradual illumination of the
Western portal that took place as sunlight arrived from that direction late in the day spotlighted the sculp-
tural program, which had until that point been cloaked by the shadow cast under an arching hood over
the recessed main doorway. See “Light and Colour in Portuguese Romanesque Churches: The Shaping of
Space,” https://institutodehistoriadaarte.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/rodrigues-jorge-2015-light-and-
colour-in-portuguese-romanesque-churches-the-shaping-of-space-ashgate-pending-publication.pdf.
23 R. Jordan, The Synaxarion of the Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis: March-August, the Movable Cycle,
Belfast Byzantine Texts and Translations, 6.6 (Belfast, 2005), 370–71, 468–71; J. Mateos, Le typicon de
la Grande Église: Ms. Sainte-Croix no. 40, Xe siècle, I, Le cycle des douze mois, Orientalia christiana analecta,
165 (Rome, 1962), 246–47. For the Presanctified liturgy, see P. Trempelas, Αἱ τρεῖς λειτουργίαι κατὰ τοὺς
ἐν Ἀθήναις κώδικας (Athens, 1935), 206.
24 S. Gerstel, “An Alternate View of the Late Byzantine Sanctuary Screen,” in Thresholds of the Sacred: Archi-
tectural, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens, East and West, ed. S. Gerstel
(Washington, DC, 2006), 146–47; G. Babić, “La décoration en fresques des clôtures de choeur,” Zbornik
za likovne umetnosti 11 (1975), 3–49.
25 S. Gerstel, Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary, College Art Association
Monograph on the Fine Arts LVI (Seattle, 1999), 101, fig. 42; T. Macridy, “The Monastery of Lips
(Fenari Isa Camii) at Istanbul,” DOP 18 (1964), 267, fig. 59.
26 See, for example, the deluxe twelfth-century copy of the select homilies of Gregory of Nazianzen, Sinai.
gr. 339, fols. 73, 197 (K. Weitzmann and G. Galavaris, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai,
The Illuminated Manuscripts, vol. 1 [Princeton, 1990], figs. 583, 585).
27 See, for example, S. Loffreda, Lucerne bizantine in Terra Santa con iscrizioni in Greco, Studium Biblicum
Franciscanum, Collectio Maior 35 (Jerusalem, 1989); S. Loffreda, “Ancora sulle lucerne bizantine con
iscrizioni,” Liber Annuus 42 (1992), 313–29.
476
28 P. Planck, Phos hilaron: Christushymnus und Lichtdanksagung der frühen Christenheit (Bonn, 2001).
29 R. Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today
(Collegeville, 1986), 273–91, 348–52.
30 Τριῴδιον Κατανυκτικόν (Athens, 2003), 1014–20.
31 Jerome, Contra Vigilantium 1 in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, XXIII: 360–61.
32 C. Nesbitt, “Shaping the Sacred: Light and the Experience of Worship in Middle Byzantine Churches,”
BMGS 36 (2012), 139–60.
33 L. Theis, “Lampen, Leuchten, Licht,” in Byzanz, das Licht aus dem Osten: Kult und Alltag im Byzantinis-
chen Reich vom 4 bis 15 Jahrhundert, Katalog der Ausstellung im Erzbischöflichen Diözesanmuseum, ed. C.
Stiegmann (Paderborn, 2001), 53–64.
34 G. Galavaris, “Some Aspects of Symbolic Use of Lights in the Eastern Church: Candles, Lamps and
Ostrich Eggs,” BMGS 4 (1978), 69–78. For experiential aspects of illumination, see B. Pentcheva, “The
Performative Icon,” AB 88 (2006), 631–55.
35 In the late fourth century, the pilgrim Egeria describes a similar ceremony for Vespers. See J. Wilkinson,
Egeria’s Travels (Oxford, 1971), 143.
36 B. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, 2010),
153–54.
37 For an inventory written on a fifth-century ostrakon from Egypt, see D. Montserrat, “Early Byzantine
Church Lighting: A New Text,” Orientalia, n.s. 64 (1995), 430–44. For the lavish lamps listed in the Liber
Pontificalis, see H. Geertman, “L’illuminazione della basilica paleocristiana secondo il Liber Pontificalis,”
Rivista di archaeologia cristiana 64 (1998), 135–60.
38 N. Zchomelidse, Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy (University Park, 2014), 34–71.
39 For the text, see T. Kelly, The Exultet in Southern Italy (New York, 1996), 36.
40 Zchomelidse, Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity, 108–37 (with collected bibliography).
41 I. Sinkević, The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi: Architecture, Programme, Patronage (Wiesbaden, 2000),
31–32; E. Bakalova, V. Kolarova, P. Popov, and C.V. Todorov, The Ossuary of the Bachkovo Monastery
(Plovdiv, 2003), fig. 46.
42 D. Kotoula, “‘With Respect to the Lavishness of the Illumination’: The Dramaturgy of Light in the
Burial Chapel of the Monastic Founder,” in Hierotopy of Light and Fire in the Culture of the Byzantine
World, ed. A. Lidov (Moscow, 2013), 185–99.
43 L. Fundić, “Art and Political Ideology in the State of Epiros during the Reign of Theodore Doukas
(r. 1215–1230),” Βυζαντινά Σύμμεικτα 23 (2013), 239–40.
44 G. Downey, “Nikolaos Mesarites: Description of the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople,”
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 47 (1957), 869.
45 T. Papamastorakis, Ο διάκοσμος του τρούλου των ναών της Παλαιολόγειας περιόδου στη Βαλκανική
χερσόνησο και την Κύπρο (Athens, 2001), 77–78.
46 J. Lafontaine-Dosogne, “L’évolution du programme decoratif des églises de 1071 á 1261,” in Actes du
XVe Congres international d’études byzantines, I (Athens, 1976), 287–329.
47 K. Weitzmann, “Eine spätkomnenische Verkündigungsikone des Sinai und die zweite byzantinische
Welle des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Festschrift für Herbert von Einem, ed. G. von der Osten and G. Kauff-
mann (Berlin, 1965), 299–312; A. Weyl-Carr, “Icon with the Annunciation,” in The Glory of Byzan-
tium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261, exh. cat. (New York, 1997), 374,
cat. no. 246.
48 N. Drandakis, “Πόκος ἢ νεφέλη; Ἀσυνήθιστη λεπτομέρεια τῆς παραστάσεως τοῦ Εὐαγγελισμοῦ στὴ
Βυζαντινὴ εἰκονογραφία,” Ἐπιστημονική Ἐπετηρίς τῆς Θεολογικῆς Σχολῆς τοῦ Πανεπιστημίου Ἀθηνῶν
26 (1977–1978), 258–68; A. Euthymiou, “Ευαγγελισμοός-Πόκος. Η Ταυτοποίηση μιας εικονογραφικής
λεπτομέρειας παραστάσεων του θέματος στην περιοχή της Λακωνίας,” Abstracts of the 30ο Συμπόσιο
ΧΑΕ (Athens, 2010), 39–40. The inscription in the Old Monastery at Vrontamas, which will be published
by Ms. Euthymiou, is taken from Psalm 71: “He shall come down as rain upon a fleece” (καταβήσεται
ὡς ὑετὸς ἐπὶ πόκον). For the use of this image in the feast of the Annunciation, see Mother Mary and
Archimandrite K. Ware, The Festal Menaion (New Canaan, 1998), 451, 462.
49 The foundational work on this connection is M. Meiss, “Light as Form and Symbol,” AB 27 (1945),
175–81. See also E. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, 1953),
esp. 126, n. 5; and G. Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art I (Greenwich, 1971), 78–79.
50 For the empty throne, see the Gospels of John II Komnenos (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vati-
cana, Urb. Gr. 2), fol. 109v, dated 1119–43.
51 The Festal Menaion, 382.
477
52 A. Louth, “Light, Vision, and Religious Experience in Byzantium,” in The Presence of Light: Divine Radi-
ance and Religious Experience, ed. M. Kapstein (Chicago, 2004), 85–103.
53 I. Drpić, “Art, Hesychasm, and Visual Exegesis: Parisinus Graecus 1242 Revisited,” DOP 62 (2008),
217–47.
54 W.T. Woodfin, The Embodied Icon: Liturgical Vestments and Sacramental Power in Byzantium (Oxford, 2012),
77–79.
55 See, for example, Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki: Ch. Bakirtzis (ed.), Mosaics of Thessaloniki (Athens,
2012), 337.
56 K. Ware, The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford, 1977).
57 F. Boespflug, “Sur la Transfiguration dans l’art médiéval d’Occident (IXe–XIVe siècle),” in Symbolisme et
experience de la lumière dans les grandes religions, ed. J. Ries and C.-M. Ternes (Turnhout, 2002), 199–223.
478
35
THE VISUAL REPRESENTATION
OF MUSIC AND SOUND
Susan Boynton
Introduction: the iconography of music

Music iconography focuses on the depiction of instruments and musicians in the visual arts,
including the analysis, description, and cataloguing of images. The field was developed more
recently than other areas of iconography; the last half of the twentieth century saw many of the
foundational publications and the institutional organization of the field.1 The Répertoire Inter-
national d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM) was founded as a collaborative association in 1971 and
the Research Center for Music Iconography (RCMI) at City University in New York was estab-
lished by Barry S. Brooke in 1984. Much of the scholarship in the field of musical iconography
has appeared in either the RIdIM journal, Imago Musicae, or the RCMI journal, Music in Art. While
the broader field of music iconography addresses the entire history of music from antiquity to
the present day, for the purposes of this chapter, the medieval iconography of music and sound is
limited to the centuries between late antiquity and circa 1500.
Depictions of music can be useful sources of information on the performance of music and
the construction of instruments, and much research on the medieval iconography of music has
interpreted images of music as records for practical music-making. However, visual representa-
tions of music often employ symbolism that conveys a range of extramusical meanings.2 In some
of the first critical studies of iconography for this period, James McKinnon and Emanuel Win-
ternitz both pointed out the subtlety of signification in musical images.3 In recent decades art
historians have moved beyond the iconographic framework to consider musical representations
in an expanding range of contexts.
Overview of the subject

Representations of music-making are found in all visual media. The best-known examples are
found in painting and sculpture, but there are also some notable examples in tapestry and stained
glass, particularly in the late Middle Ages. The earliest medieval Western representations of
music-making and depictions of instruments are the images of King David, either alone with
his harp (and sometimes with bells) or with other musicians, often in Psalter frontispieces. Illu-
minated Psalters are the richest single source for musical iconography in the Latin West during
the early Middle Ages.4 Islamic art of the same period includes numerous depictions of wind
479
Susan Boynton
instruments, usually identified as oliphants (horns made from elephant ivory); from the thirteenth
century onward, trumpets and ouds are more common.5 By the twelfth century, the depiction of
music permeated all the arts in a wider range of contexts and took on more complex meanings.
The thirteenth century saw a proliferation of musical representations both secular and sacred,
of all sizes, and on practically every type of object and surface; this ubiquity continued and even
increased in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this period, music-making began to be
depicted on the carved undersides (misericords) of the seats in wooden choir stalls.6 Although
choir stalls existed earlier as ecclesiastical furnishings, the representation of musical scenes on the
misericords seems to have begun in the fourteenth century, with the stalls of Cologne Cathedral
(1308/11) among the earliest extant examples.7 As Frédéric Billiet has pointed out, although the
stalls “were conceived as simple, folding seats for the performance of psalmody, they became part
of an enclosed musical space in the choir that was used to keep the chanting isolated from the
noise of pilgrims and other clerical activities.”8 Most of the extant choir stalls with misericords
are from the fifteenth century and later, but they are valuable sources for musical iconography
and portray instruments as they existed in the Middle Ages as well.
Depictions of the liberal arts sometimes include a personification of Music, with a famous
example being the twelfth-century sculpture of Musica playing bells on a voussoir of the south
portal on the west facade of Chartres Cathedral. In a thirteenth-century musical manuscript
produced in Paris (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, F. 29, fol. 29r), Boethius’s tripartite
division of music is visualized as three registers of double compartments. In the left compartment
of each register stands the personified figure of Music pointing to one of the three categories
of music described by Boethius in his De Institutione Musica: musica mundana (the music of the
spheres, represented by an image of the cosmos), musica humana (the music produced by the
human body, rendered as a group of singers), and musica instrumentalis (music that is sounded by
instruments, represented by a fiddle player).
Musical ratios and proportions, which were the substance of the liberal art of music among
the numerical sciences of the quadrivium, influenced the design of some images that are not
explicitly musical. Isabelle Marchesin has demonstrated that the proportions of many Psalter
frontispieces in the early Middle Ages are based on the numerical principles set forth in music
theory treatises.9 According to Owen Wright, the numerical ratios of music may be related to
the design of some visual elements in Islamic art, but he considers the relationship between music
and art in Islamic art “both mysterious and problematic.”10 Some musical compositions share an
underlying numerical design with a building or a work of art. In the best-known example, the
proportions from the biblical description of Solomon’s Temple influenced both the design of the
dome of Florence Cathedral and the structure of the motet that was sung at the dedication of
the cathedral in 1439.11
The representation of instruments in medieval art

For most of the medieval period almost no instrumental music survives, not because it was
unusual but rather because it was not customarily written down. Instrumentalists were omni-
present, both indoors and outdoors, and were particularly prominent on festive occasions, such
as banquets and processions. Instruments played alone and in groups accompanied dancing and,
to varying degrees, singing. An instrument could function as a symbolic attribute simply to
indicate that a figure was a musician. In addition, some instruments had figurative associations,
such as the harp, which was the common attribute of King David.12 Generally speaking, images
of instruments had a range of meanings, with multiple layers of symbolism in religious contexts.
480
Music and sound
Many representations of instruments in sacred art are based on a verse from Psalm 150: “Praise
him with sound of trumpet: praise him with psaltery and harp. Praise him with timbrel and choir:
praise him with strings and organs. Praise him on high sounding cymbals.” The instruments
mentioned in this text are frequently represented together, as seen in the right leaf of a diptych
with the Coronation of the Virgin from late fourteenth-century Venice (Fig. 35.1). However,
as in Trecento paintings, the combination of instruments played by the angels in this scene is
fictive; louder instruments, such as trumpet and cymbals, would not have been played at the same
time as the quieter ones, such as harp and fiddle.13 The image is a figurative representation of
angelic praise. Later depictions of angel concerts likewise employ equally symbolic combinations
of instruments.14 Images of angels playing instruments become much more frequent beginning
in the fourteenth century. Examples from the period 1280–1300 include angels on the columns
Figure 35.1 Right leaf of a diptych with The Coronation of the Virgin and Angel Musicians. Venice (?),
late fourteenth century. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1971. www.
metmuseum.org.
481
Susan Boynton
in the choir of Cologne Cathedral,15 and in the Beaupré Antiphonary now at the Walters Art
Museum (MS W.759, fol. 2r; Fig. 35.2).
Bowed and plucked strings – vielles, rebecs, harps, and psalteries – proliferate in depictions
of the Elders of the Apocalypse on Romanesque church portals.16 In churches on the Iberian
peninsula, the elders often hold frame drums.17 The depictions of the elders playing stringed
instruments are based on verses from Revelations 5:8–9: “the four and twenty ancients fell down
before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are
the prayers of saints: And they sung a new canticle.” As a result of the presence of elders with
instruments on the façade of Saint-Denis, this iconographic element became common in Gothic
churches (including in the thirteenth-century stained glass of Chartres Cathedral).
Figure 35.2 Angel Musicians. Beaupré Antiphonary (Volume I), fol. 2r. Walters Art Museum MS W.759.
Gift of the William R. Hearst Foundation, 1957.
482
Music and sound
In addition to images of instruments that illustrated verses from the Bible, some depictions
of instruments were influenced by theology and biblical exegesis. One of the capitals from the
hemicycle of the third abbey church at Cluny (dedicated in 1095) depicts musicians playing
instruments, along with inscriptions referring to the church modes employed in plainchant.18
One face presents what may be the earliest northern European image of a lute. Another face
shows an instrument that combines features of a lyre and a harp, which is an unrealistic depic-
tion of an instrument, but may be intended to be a purely symbolic amalgam of diverse forms.19
Following the interpretations of patristic writers, such as Augustine and Cassiodorus, Sébastien
Biay argues that the stringed instruments on the Cluny capital represent Christ’s body.20 Stringed
instruments depicted in the Oppenheimer Siddur, a small Jewish prayer book of the fifteenth
century, are expressions of a similar vein of mystical theology in the Jewish tradition.21
Some images of instruments have an implicitly exegetical meaning that must be deduced from
context. For instance, an early depiction of a fiddle appears on an ivory plaque from the reliquary
of San Millan de la Cogolla in northern Spain (second half of the eleventh century), in which the
shepherd saint Emilianus blows a horn as he guards sheep (Fig. 35.3).22 The Christological sub-
text of this image is clear from the inscription on the ivory carving, “the future shepherd of men
was a shepherd of sheep” (FUTURIS PASTOR HOMIN[U]M ERAT P[A]ST[OR] OVIUM),
which is taken from the Vita of Saint Emilianus by Braulio of Saragossa. The small fiddle hanging
Figure 35.3 Ivory plaque with scenes from the life of Saint Emilianus, from the reliquary of San Millan de
la Cogolla. Master Engelram and his son Redolfo, c. 1060–80. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
The Cloisters Collection, 1987. www.metmuseum.org.
483
Susan Boynton
from the saint’s shoulder illustrates the continuation of this passage in the Vita, which states that
the saint took a harp (cithara) with him to the sheep’s pasture, probably an allusion to the biblical
description of King David playing a harp while he watched his flock.23 The stringed instrument
in the ivory probably illustrates the reference to the harp (cithara) in the hagiographical text;
categories of plucked and bowed strings were sometimes conflated. At the same time, the horn
blown by Emilianus represents his identity as a shepherd.
Horns had a variety of associations, including the hunt and dancing in addition to war. As
Richard Brilliant has pointed out, the very image of a man lifting a horn to his lips effectively
evokes the instrument’s powerful sound.24 In Jewish tradition, the sounding of the shofar heralds
the new year. In the Christian Book of Revelations, the trumpet has an apocalyptic connotation.
Announcement and celebration may be implied by the horn-blowing and tambourine figures in
the upper corners of the Doubting Thomas relief in the cloister at the abbey of Silos, although
these figures have sometimes been interpreted as secular entertainers.25
Wind instruments were commonly represented in scenes of banqueting, processions, and
secular festivities in which heralds played trumpets. In one of the capitals from the cloister at St.
Michel de Cuxa that are now at the Cloisters Museum, the depiction of a naked, dancing horn
player evokes the secular music performed by medieval entertainers.26 Thomas Dale has sug-
gested that the appearance of the dancers on the capital refers to the bodily distortion associated
with lust, which was a quality ascribed to secular entertainers; in a monastic cloister, the image
would have the effect of reminding a reflective monk of the evils of the world he had left.27
The musical instruments and musicians in Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua
(also called the Arena Chapel), which were completed around 1305, are deployed to moralizing
effect.28 Furthermore, according to Eleonora Beck, Giotto’s depiction of trumpets in this fresco
cycle shows the influence of ancient art and alludes to the use of trumpets in processions and
theatrical pageants.29
Representations of minstrels are particularly common beginning in the thirteenth century,
but they do exist earlier.30 Illustrated tonaries from what is now southwestern France produced
in the second half of the eleventh century show entertainers dancing, juggling, and fiddling
alongside the notation for chants and for melodic formulae for singing the psalms.31 In the later
Middle Ages the presence of secular musicians in the visual arts increased along with the growing
professionalization of musical performance. Many images of musicians represent and articulate
their social position in the cities and courts they inhabited.32 The representation of musicians
as an element of court culture continued into the early modern period with the illustration of
Indo-Persian manuscripts in Mughal India.33 In late medieval Europe, as in the Renaissance, the
musicians of a court were considered an extension of the identity of their noble patron.
The fusion of the courtly and the sacred is the underlying message in the illustrated man-
uscripts of the Cantigas de Santa María associated with Alfonso X of Leon and Castile. For
instance, Cantiga 100, one of the decadal songs in praise of the Virgin Mary, is illustrated
by an angel concert with Arab instruments (including the rabab, ‘oud, and qanum).34 In the
Codice rico, the distinction between vocal and instrumental music is explicitly thematized in
the illustration of the prologue, where Alfonso X (“El Sabio”) sits enthroned with a group of
instrumentalists on one side, and on the other, a group of tonsured, evidently clerical singers.
Both groups have scribes in front of them, apparently taking dictation from the king.35 In this
image telescoping composition, transmission, and performance, the king is depicted as produc-
ing the music – the songs – that are preserved in the manuscript. The composition seems to
be a figurative rather than a literal representation of his agency, for the Cantigas were probably
compiled by a group of musicians and poets at the court. Alfonso’s creative activity is here
representative of the broader self-fashioning of his image.36 The illuminated manuscripts of
484
Music and sound
the Cantigas depict a variety of instruments, encompassing the full range of sounds known
in the multicultural Iberian peninsula.37 These images are intriguingly vivid but they do not
prove that instruments were used in the performance of the Cantigas; indeed, there is very little
evidence to suggest that the Cantigas were performed in the Middle Ages at all. However, the
depictions of instruments in the manuscripts are among the most extensive sources of musical
iconography from the period.
Depictions of singers
Singers were not consistently depicted with open mouths until the later Middle Ages; more often,
the liturgical office of a singer was indicated by his vestment or by the book he held. One rather
exceptional example is the conflation of the Entry into Jerusalem with a Palm Sunday procession
in the twelfth-century lintel from San Leonardo al Frigido, now at the Cloisters. In addition to
the representation of figures with open mouths, the scene includes diminutive figures illustrating
the texts of the two antiphons sung during the blessing of the palms, Pueri Hebreorum vestimenta
(“The children of the Hebrews spread their garments in the road”) and Pueri Hebreorum portantes
(“The children of the Hebrews bore palm branches”).38
From the thirteenth century onward, Psalm 96 (“Sing to the Lord a New Song”) was fre-
quently illustrated in Psalters by a group of singers at a lectern, as in Fig. 35.4.39 The proliferation
Figure 35.4 Three Singers at a Lectern, from the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of
Normandy (Paris, before 1349), folio 146v. Attributed to Jean Le Noir (French, active 1331–75) and
Workshop. New York, Metropolitan Museum, The Cloisters Collection, 1969. www.metmuseum.org.
485
Susan Boynton
of such scenes in the later Middle Ages is a visual reflection on the increasing reliance on chant
books in the performance of the Divine Office, which had been performed almost entirely from
memory in earlier centuries. Here the numerous birds in the margins seem to call attention to
the parallel between human and animal song, a juxtaposition that is only highlighted by the rather
realistic eagle on the lectern.
A choir of singers could also represent the theological meaning of a particular liturgical occa-
sion and the music sung on that day. For instance, in the Codex Gisle from around 1300, the ini-
tial letter for the first chant at the third Mass on Christmas Day is illustrated by a Nativity scene
with the angelic choir singing above while the choir of nuns stands below. The nuns’ mouths are
closed; the significance of the singing is implicit in the juxtaposition of the two choirs. One of
the nuns, possibly the choirmistress, points to the words of the sequence for Mass on the Vigil of
Christmas. This sequence contains the words of the angels at the Annunciation to the Shepherds,
“Gloria in excelsis Deo” (Glory be to God on high), which appear in the banderole held by the
angels in the upper register of the illumination. The image effectively visualizes the sequence text
that links the angelic and earthly choirs.40
In the fifteenth century, the depiction of singers became more realistic, and they were more
often shown with open mouths, as seen in the Cantoria that Luca della Robbia sculpted in
1431–38 for Florence Cathedral (now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo). The verisimilitude
of this striking image is comparable to that of the Ghent Altarpiece panel portraying a group of
singing angels.41 Realism was also employed even when singers were represented not as distinct
individuals but more homogeneously as members of a group, as in the Gradual of the Olivetan
Benedictines produced in Lombardy (probably Santa Maria di Monte Oliveto di Baggio?) around
1439–1447.42 Perhaps increasing emphasis on the individual identities of singers can be corre-
lated with the growing awareness of their value as highly skilled professionals in the courts and
churches of the fifteenth century and later.
Mythological, demonic, and grotesque

Many medieval representations of musical performance are fantastical. Ancient mythology is not
one of the most important sources for musical iconography; images of famous musicians from
antiquity, such as Orpheus and Amphion, were comparatively rare in the Middle Ages, and sirens,
although common in medieval art, are not usually represented as musicians. The supernatural in
musical images most often takes the form of angelic or demonic musicians; grotesque imagery
usually employs animals, monsters, or other nonhuman figures.43 Starting in the twelfth century,
monstrous musicians proliferate. In the frontispiece of the St. Remigius Psalter, a twelfth-century
triple Psalter from Reims, the contrast between sacred and secular music is indicated by David
and his musicians in the top half of the page, while a drum-playing demon flanked by dancers,
jugglers, a horn player, and a vielle player occupy the lower register.44 As in the Psalter-hours of
Bonne of Luxembourg, playful depictions of musical scenes in the margins of medieval manu-
scripts can be grotesque and even obscene (by implication, if not explicitly). Likewise, Madeleine
Caviness and Emma Dillon have argued that the musical scenes in the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux
were intended to shape the young queen’s viewing and reading experience.45 The symbolic
character of representations of animal and demoniac musicians is often interpreted by art histo-
rians as moralizing or apotropaic.46 In choir stalls, representations of musical disorder presented
a contrast with the orderly conduct that was supposed to reign in the choir.47 As an element of
the grotesque, in the late Middle Ages the musical macabre was most directly expressed by the
visual motif of the Dance of Death.48
486
Music and sound
Musical notation
Musical notation in Western Europe developed by the ninth century. The earliest neumes did
not always indicate precise pitches but rather functioned as representations of musical direction.49
Neumatic notations that varied by region remained the norm until the twelfth century, when
the system of “square notation” (composed of combinations of black squares) began to replace
the more graphic neumes, and became generalized in most of Europe in the thirteenth century.
Musical notation appears in liturgical chant manuscripts and also, beginning in the thirteenth
century, manuscripts of secular music.50
The illuminations in music manuscripts constitute an additional layer of representation that
interacts with the music on the page. In her analysis of the thirteenth-century Montpellier
Codex, Emma Dillon has argued that the “book’s shapes, decorations, and order of its contents
prompt the reader to a meditative engagement with its music.”51 The neumes in the Codex
Gisle and some other luxury chant manuscripts are painted in blue, red, or gold to mark the
melodies of feasts that merit a special degree of solemnity.52 Illustrations that include inscrip-
tions of chant texts make for an especially close intertwining of text and image in the manu-
scripts from the Dominican convent of Paradies bei Soest.53 Even in a nonmusical manuscript
containing the prayers of Anselm, the inscription of chants with their neumes vividly evokes
the sung liturgy.54 Manuscripts from Florence Cathedral showcase the identities of the home
institution and its patrons in parallel with the markers of Florentine identity in their musicol-
iturgical contents.55
In some narrative works, musical notation illustrates the description of musical performance
or composition, complementing the illuminations accompanying the text. For instance, in some
manuscripts of the works of Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377) musical notation punctuates
narrative and functions as a second layer of illustration. In the lengthy narrative poetic dits, music
and image are more closely integrated than in the Roman de Fauvel manuscript with musical
interpolations. A manuscript of the Remède de Fortune from the middle of the fourteenth cen-
tury transmits the musical notation for the songs that are part of the narrative framework, with
depictions of the poet-protagonist, the Lover, composing or singing songs, along with the songs
themselves. The Lover is shown composing with a scroll and dancing in a group; in the introduc-
tion to a dance-song known as a virelai, the caption describes the Lover as singing it to his lady
(Paris, BnF fr. 1586, fol. 51r). The dance-song, performed in a circle by a group holding hands,
visually represents the circular, repeating musical structure of the dance-song.
As a visual representation of music, musical notation is a form of visual art portraying sound.56
Notation’s quality as a visual medium is manifested to varying extents in medieval music manu-
scripts. In the later Middle Ages, certain idiosyncratic examples of musical notation are unusually
self-referential: these are literally “picture songs,” graphic scores in which the musical notation
outlines the shape of a symbolic object, such as a heart, a harp, or a labyrinth.57
Some late medieval panel paintings include the musical notation for known compositions of
chant or vocal polyphony. In a few panels of the early fifteenth century, angels hold scrolls with
musical notation without any visualization of music-making: the notation itself stands in for the
sound of music. A Marian antiphon is depicted on the scroll encircling the Virgin and Child
in Taddeo di Bartolo’s Virgin and Child with Angels, now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard.58
Angels hold scrolls with musical notation also in three panels by Gentile da Fabriano (now at
the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria at Perugia, and the Met-
ropolitan Museum). The musical angels in other panels by Gentile play the “soft” or “sweet”
instruments in a combination broadly suggestive of the celestial sound of paradise.59
487
Susan Boynton
Nonmusical sound
Since the 1970s, sound (as distinct from music) has become the focus of a new interdisciplinary
field loosely defined as sound studies.60 As scholars of historical sound studies turn to the Middle
Ages and early modern period, the visualization of nonmusical sound in the art of the Middle
Ages has recently emerged as a new area of research. Noise, defined as a category of sound in
contradistinction to music, is famously depicted in the illustrated manuscript of the Roman de
Fauvel (Paris, BNF MS f.fr. 146, fol. 34r, c. 1317) in the form of the charivari (a folk ritual in
which townspeople noisily disrupt a married couple’s first night). Alongside the text and music
of songs accompanying the ritual, the illuminations depict, and the narrative describes in detail,
the instruments and other objects used to produce a nonmusical racket.61 Dillon has also pointed
out the “noisiness” created by the illuminations on the pages of prayer books.62 In the monu-
mental arts, nonmusical sound can be found in scenes of the Last Judgment, as in the relief on
the fourteenth-century façade of Orvieto Cathedral, clearly depicting the full-throated cries of
the damned.63 Sculpture, although mute, can evoke the sounds that were heard in the viewer’s
lived environment.64
Visual art also can evoke sound indirectly through the depiction of the listening subject. The
most detailed study of this mode of representation addresses listening to the sounds of nature
in Chinese art of the eleventh through fifteenth centuries.65 The iconography of listening has
been analyzed in Psalter illustration of the early Middle Ages.66 Hearing in relation to sight has
been explored by historians of art and architecture seeking to understand the nature of medi-
eval devotion as a multisensory experience.67 Future research in the iconography of music and
sound could continue to explore the performativity of the page and the visualization of the
voice.68 Another subject that merits further attention is the visual representation of silence and
the soundscape.69
Notes
1 R.L. Kendrick, “Iconography,” in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, ed. T. Shephard
and A. Leonard (New York/London, 2014), 43–49.
2 A. Buckley, “Music Iconography and the Semiotics of Visual Representation,” Music in Art 23 (1998),
510.
3 J.W. McKinnon, “Iconography,” in Musicology in the 1980s, ed. D.K. Holoman and C.V. Palisca (New
York, 1982), 79–93; “Representations of the Mass in Medieval and Renaissance Art,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 30 (1978), 21–52; and Emanuel Winternitz, Musical Instruments and Their
Symbolism in Western Art: Studies in Musical Iconology (New Haven, 1979).
4 K. Corrigan, Visual Polemics in the Ninth-Century Byzantine Psalters (Cambridge/New York, 1992);
T. Seebass, Musikdarstellung und Psalterillustration im früheren Mittelalter: Studien ausgehend von einer Ikonologie
der Handschrift Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Fonds Latin 1118, 2 vols. (Bern, 1973).
5 A. Shalem with M. Glaser, Die mittelalterlichen Olifante (Berlin, 2014), vol. 1, 186–90; A. Shiloah, “Musi-
cal Scenes in Arabic Iconography,” Music in Art 33 (2008), 283–300.
6 On the historiography of misericords, see W. Muller, “The Art of the Misericord: Neglected and
Important,” in From Minor to Major: The Minor Arts in Medieval Art History, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton/
University Park, 2012), 271–84.
7 On the choir stalls at Cologne, see B.R. Tammen, Musik und Bild im Chorraum mittelalterlicher Kirchen
1100–1500 (Berlin, 2000), 176–220.
8 F. Billiet, “Choir-Stall Carvings: A Major Source for the Study of Medieval Musical Iconography,” in
From Minor to Major (as in note 6), 285–94, at 287.
9 I. Marchesin, L’image organum: la représentation de la musique dans les psautiers médiévaux 800–1200 (Turn-
hout, 2000); Marchesin, “Temps et espaces dans le frontispice du Psautier de la Première Bible de Charles
le Chauve,” Die Methodik der Bildinterpretation / Les méthodes d’interprétation de l’image: Deutschfranzösische
Kolloquien 1998–2000, vol. 2 (Göttingen, 2002), 317–53.
488
Music and sound
10 O. Wright, “The Sight of Sound,” Muqarnas 21 (2004), 359–71, at 368.

11 M. Trachtenberg, “Architecture and Music Reunited: A New Reading of Dufay’s Nuper Rosarum Flores
and the Cathedral of Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly (2001), 740–75; and C. Wright, “Dufay’s ‘Nuper
rosarum flores,’ King Solomon’s Temple, and the Veneration of the Virgin,” Journal of the American Musi-
cological Society 47 (1994), 395–441.
12 C. Hourihane (ed.), King David in the Index of Christian Art (Princeton, 2002).
13 J. María-Salvador González and C. Perpiña García, “‘Exaltata super choros angelorum’: Musical Ele-
ments in the Iconography of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Italian Trecento Painting,” Music in Art
39 (2014), 61–86.
14 K. Meyer-Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology (New York, 1984),
130–87; and E. Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts in the 15th Century: A Critical Approach to Realism
and Symbolism in Sacred Painting,” Musical Quarterly 49 (1963), 450–63.
15 Tammen, Musik und Bild (as in note 7), 39–75.
16 C. Homo-Lechner, “L’instrumentarium du Porche de la Gloire à SaintJacques de Compostelle: Étude sur
la fantaisie et la réalité dans l’art du 12e siècle,” in Los instrumentos del Pórtico de la Gloria: su reconstrucción
y la música de su tiempo, ed. J. López-Calo, 2 vols. (La Corun~a, 1993), vol. 2, 513–34.
17 M. Molina, “In Tympano Rex Noster Tympanizavit: Frame Drums as Messianic Symbols in Medieval
Spanish Representations of the Twenty-Four Elders of the Apocalypse,” Music in Art 32 (2007), 93–101.
18 K.T. Ambrose, “Visual Poetics of the Cluny Hemicycle Capital Inscriptions,” Word & Image 20 (2004),
155–64; I. Marchesin, “Les chapiteaux de la musique de Cluny: une figuration du lien musical,” in Les
représentations de la musique au Moyen Âge : Actes du colloque du musée de la Musique (2–3 avril 2004), ed.
M. Clouzot and C. Laloue (Paris, 2005), 84–90.
19 M. Jullian, “La lyre dans l’art roman: transmission et diffusion par l’image d’un modèle antique à l’épo-
que romane,” Cahiers de Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa 37 (2006), 57.
20 S. Biay, “Building a Church with Music: The Plainchant Capitals at Cluny, c. 1100,” in Resounding
Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, ed. S. Boynton and D.J. Reilly (Turnhout, 2015),
231–34.
21 S. Wijsman, “Silent Sounds: Musical Iconography in a Fifteenth-Century Jewish Prayer Book,” in
Resounding Images (as in note 20), 313–33.
22 On this ivory see J. Harris, “Scenes from the Life of Saint Aemilian,” in The Art of Medieval Spain, a.d.
500–1200 (New York, 1994), 262–63, cat. 125c.
23 For a translation of the Vita see Lives of the Visigothic Fathers, Translated Texts for Historians 26, trans. A.T.
Fear (Liverpool, 1997), 21.
24 R. Brilliant, “Making Sounds Visible in the Bayeux Tapestry,” in The Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations,
ed. M.K. Foys, K.E. Overby, and D. Terkia (Rochester/New York, 2009), 71–84.
25 E. Valdez del Álamo, Palace of the Mind: The Cloister of Silos and Spanish Sculpture of the Twelfth Century
(Turnhout, 2012), 122–25; Valdez del Álamo, “Touch Me, See Me: The Emmaeus and Thomas Reliefs in
the Cloister of Silos,” in Spanish Medieval Art: Recent Studies (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies
346), ed. C. Hourihane (Tempe/Princeton, 2007), 35–64.
26 Capital from St.-Michel-de-Cuxa, 1130–40. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters
Collection, 1925.
27 T.E.A. Dale, “Monsters, Corporeal Deformities and Phantasms in the Romanesque Cloister of St.
Michel de Cuxa,” Art Bulletin 83 (2001), 412–14 and fig. 67.
28 E.M. Beck, “Justice and Music in Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel Frescoes,” Music in Art 24 (2004), 38–51.
29 E.M. Beck, Giotto’s Harmony: Music and Art in Padua at the Crossroads of the Renaissance (Florence, 2005),
143–46, 163–66.
30 M. Clouzot, Le jongleur: mémoire de l’image au Moyen Age: figures, figurations et musicalité dans les manuscrits
enluminés (1200–1330) (Bern/New York, 2011).
31 London, British Library, Harley 4951, gradual from Toulouse, last quarter of the eleventh century or first
quarter of the twelfth century; Paris, BNF MS lat. 1118. See J.-C. Bonne and E.H. Aubert, “Quand voir
fait chanter. Images et neumes dans le tonaire du ms. BnF latin 1118: entre performance et performativ-
ité,” La performance des images, ed. A. Dierkens, G. Bartholeyns, and T. Golsenne (Brussels, 2010), 225–40.
32 M. Clouzot, Images de musiciens (1350–1500): Typologie, figurations et pratiques sociales (Turnhout/Tours, 2007).
33 B. Wade, Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India (Chicago/
London, 1998).
34 San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio, Ms. T11 (Codice rico), late thirteenth century
or c. 1300, fol. 145r.
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Susan Boynton
35 San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio, Ms. T11, fol. 5r.
36 J.F. O’Callaghan, “Image and Reality: The King Creates His Kingdom,” in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X
the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, ed. R.I. Burns (Philadelphia, 1990), 14–32.
37 M. del Rosario Álvarez Martínez, “Los instrumentos musicales en los códices alfonsinos: su tipología, su
uso y su origen. Algunos problemas iconográficos,” Revista de musicología 10 (1987), 67–104.
38 G.C. Mann, “Encounter: The San Leonardo al Frigido Portal at The Cloisters,” Gesta 53 (2014), 13.
39 C. Page, “An English Motet of the 14th Century in Performance: Two Contemporary Images,” Early
Music 25 (1997), 714, 17–24, 26–29, 31–32.
40 For a full facsimile of the Codex Gisle see Der Codex Gisle: das goldene Graduale der Gisela von Kerssenbrock
(Luzern, 2015). On the depiction of the sequence for the Nativity in the Codex Gisle see J. Oliver,
Singing with Angels: Liturgy, Music, and Art in the Gradual of Gisela von Kerssenbrock (Turnhout, 2007), 107;
L. Kruckenberg, “Neumatizing the Sequence: Special Performances of Sequences in the Central Middle
Ages,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59 (2006), 267–72.
41 D. Freedberg, “Choirs of Praise: Some Aspects of Action Understanding in Fifteenth-Century Painting
and Sculpture,” in Medieval Renaissance Baroque: A Cat’s Cradle for Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, ed. D.A. Levine
and J. Freiberg (New York, 2010), 64–81.
42 New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 1184, fol. 9v.
43 R. Hammerstein, Diabolus in musica: Studien zur Ikonographie der Musik im Mittelalter, Neue Heidelberger
Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 6 (Bern, 1974).
44 Cambridge, St. John’s College B.18, fol. 1r. I. Marchesin, L’Image Organum (as in note 9), 24, 26, 87, 89,
95–97, 244 (ill. 54).
45 M.H. Caviness, “Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,”
Speculum 68 (1993), 333–62; E. Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (New
York, 2012), 243–62.
46 Vézelay, La Madeleine, nave capital, first half of the twelfth century.
47 F. Billiet, “Diabolus in musica dans les stalles médiévales: significations du désordre musical,” in Profane
Imagery in Marginal Arts of the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2009), 315–38.
48 E. Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance, Studies in the Visual Cultures
of the Middle Ages 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); K. Meyer-Baer, Music of the Spheres (as in note 14),
291–319.
49 S. Rankin, “On the Treatment of Pitch in Early Music Writing,” Early Music History 30 (2011), 105–75.
50 For general overviews of musical notation in medieval manuscripts see N. Bell, Music in Medieval Man-
uscripts (Toronto/Buffalo, 2001); O. Cullin, L’image musique (Paris, 2006).
51 Dillon, The Sense of Sound (as in note 45), 296–319, at 305.
52 J. Oliver, “Singing a Blue Note on a Red Letter Day: The Art of Easter in Some North German Con-
vents,” in Femmes, art et religion au Moyen Âge, ed. J.-C. Schmitt (Strasbourg/Colmar, 2004), 115–30.
53 J.F. Hamburger, “Inscribing the Word – Illuminating the Sequence: Epithets in Honor of John the
Evangelist in the Graduals from Paradies bei Soest,” in Leaves from Paradise: The Cult of John the Evangelist
at the Dominican Convent of Paradies bei Soest (Houghton Library Studies 2), ed. J.F. Hamburger (Cam-
bridge, 2008), 161–213; M.E. Fassler and J.F. Hamburger, “The Desert in Paradise: A Newly Discovered
Office for John the Baptist from Paradies bei Soest and Its Place in the Dominican Liturgy,” in Resound-
ing Images (as in note 20), 251–79.
54 M. Curschmann, “Integrating Anselm: Pictures and the Liturgy in a Twelfth-Century Manuscript of
the ‘Orationes sive Meditationes,’” in Resounding Images (as in note 20), 295–312.
55 M. Tacconi, Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa
Maria del Fiore, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 12 (Cambridge, 2005).
56 T.F. Kelly, “Picturing Sound in Medieval Manuscripts,” in Quod Ore Cantas Corde Credas: Studi in onore
di Giacomo Baroffio Dahnk, ed. L. Scappaticci (Vatican City, 2013), 415–26.
57 On these songs see particularly E.E. Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages
(Ithaca/London, 2007), 114–19; D. Melini, “Music in Iconography in the Visconti Codices,” Music in
Art 37 (2012), 45–56; A. Stone and Y. Plumley, “Introduction,” in Codex Chantilly: Bibliothèque du château
de Chantilly, Ms. 564: Facsimilé, ed. A. Stone and Y. Plumley (Turnhout, 2008), 112–15.
58 S.M. Kraaz, “Music for the Queen of Heaven in Early Fifteenth-Century Italian Paintings,” Music in Art
39 (2014), figs. 3 and 7.
59 F. Billiet, “Entendre le concert céleste dans oeuvres de Gentile,” in Il mondo cortese di Gentile da Fabriano e
l’immaginario musicale: La cultura musicale e artistica nel Quattrocento europeo e la sua riscoperta in epoca moderna
e contemporanea, ed. M. Lacchè (Rome, 2008), 104–27.
490
Music and sound
60 On sound studies, see particularly Keywords in Sound, ed. D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny (Durham, 2015);
and The Sound Studies Reader, ed. J. Sterne (London/New York, 2012).
61 E. Dillon, Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel (Cambridge, 2002), 105–14; Dillon, The Sense
of Sound (as in note 45), 93–128.
62 Dillon, The Sense of Sound (as in note 45), 186–242.
63 M. Shoaf, “The Voice in Relief: Sculpture and Surplus Vocality at the Rise of Naturalism,” in Resounding
Images (as in note 20), 31–45.
64 E. Valdez del Álamo, “Hearing the Image at Santo Domingo de Silos,” in Resounding Images (as in note
20), 71–90.
65 S.E. Nelson, “Picturing Listening: The Sight of Sound in Chinese Painting,” Archives of Asian Art 51
(1998), 30–55.
66 E. Sears, “The Iconography of Auditory Perception in the Early Middle Ages: On Psalm Illustration
and Psalm Exegesis,” in The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgment from Antiquity to the
Seventeenth Century (Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts, 22), ed. C. Burnett, M. Fend, and P. Gouk
(London, 1991), 19–38.
67 C. Bruzelius, “Hearing Is Believing: Clarissan Architecture, ca. 1213–1340,” Gesta 31 (1992), 83–91; B.
Pentcheva, “Hagia Sophia and Multisensory Aesthetics,” Gesta 50 (2011), 51–69; B. Williamson, “Sen-
sory Experience in Medieval Devotion: Sound and Vision, Invisibility and Silence,” Speculum 88 (2013),
1–43.
68 See, for instance, M. Cruse, “Pictorial Polyphony: Image, Voice, and Social Life in the Roman d’Alex-
andre (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264),” in The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images
and Communities in the Late Middle Ages, ed. J. Coleman, M. Cruse, and K.A. Smith (Turnhout, 2013),
371–402.
69 S. Bonde and C. Maines, “Performing Silence and Regulating Sound: The Monastic Soundscape of
Saint-Jean-des-Vignes,” in Resounding Images (as in note 20), 47–70; F. Prado-Vilar, “Silentium: El silen-
cio cósmico como imagen en la Edad Media y la Modernidad,” Revista de poética medieval 27 (2013),
21–43.
491
36
THE OTHER IN THE
MIDDLE AGES
Difference, identity, and iconography
Pamela A. Patton
To be Other in the medieval world was to inhabit a welter of social, cultural, geographical, and
somatic variation far untidier than the classic Lacanian binary that underlies the term’s modern
usage in art history. For the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Other was a conceptual abstraction
grounded in the individual mind, a by-product marking the borders of the newly awakened
Self.1 In the collective sense more familiar to art historians, influenced by cultural theorists such
as Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, cultural Others of various kinds
functioned similarly to delimit a communally conceived Self.2 This broadened notion of Oth-
erness, in which the articulation of what one’s culture or community is not articulates what it
desires to be, offers an appealing lens through which to scrutinize medieval understandings and
constructions of identity.
The Self-Other model poses risks for historians of culture: as Paul Freedman and others have
pointed out, its potential to flatten out differences among medieval communities into sweeping
oppositions of “us” and “them” can blunt scholarly understanding of the diversity internal to
these categories, camouflaging the ways in which local variation and contextual factors might
have refined any given culture’s sense of both its Others and itself.3 Yet employed thoughtfully,
the concept of the Other could be argued to achieve just the opposite, since it assumes that
medieval notions of identity were self-generated, autonomous, and above all flexible. In this sense,
it applies especially well to the study of medieval iconography, a system that relied on a similar
manipulation of familiar yet multivalent visual signs to articulate the perceived characteristics of,
and relationships between, its subjects.
Whom medieval artists presented as Others depended foremost on their own sense of
what was familiar or foreign, whether in appearance, behavior, language, dress, foodways, or
religious practices. And what counted as familiar could vary greatly within the wide cultural
sphere addressed by the present volume, which embraces both Western and Eastern Europe,
including the multiethnic, multicultural communities of the Mediterranean, the Balkans,
and the Scandinavian north, from the fall of Rome until the early modern era. Amid this sea
of cultures and peoples, difference was relative: a pale blond northerner might have seemed
as much an Other to an early medieval Roman like Gregory the Great, who purportedly
expressed wonderment at the sight of enslaved Angles in his home city, as the African fea-
tures of the sculpted Saint Maurice at the cathedral of Magdeburg would have to his Germanic
thirteenth-century viewers.4
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The Other in the Middle Ages
Certain peoples and communities stood firmly enough outside the world of normative
European Christendom to qualify conclusively as Other: these included several loosely defined
ethnic groups, such as Ethiopians and Mongols (often called “Tartars”), as well as confessional
Others, such as Jews, Muslims, pagans, and Christian heretics.5 Less often depicted, but still
often perceived as Other, were people whose behavior or physical status disqualified them
from membership in their dominant culture, including such “proximate Others” as prostitutes,
homosexuals, lepers, and the disabled.6 Two further categories that might have been seen as
Other are addressed by other contributors to this volume: women, the enduring exception to
a masculinist medieval norm, and the hybrids and monsters that many believed to inhabit the
margins of the civilized world.7
The iconography employed in representing these outgroups was inconsistent and often con-
textually driven, encompassing a broad vocabulary of motifs that could be deployed, combined,
and amended to suit the particularities of its subject and viewership. Somatic signs were among
the most powerful of these. They set others apart through dark or unnaturally colored skin;
wild, tangled, or curly hair; enlarged or undersized facial features; unusual stature or bodily
proportions; gender-crossing attributes, such as a beard worn by a woman; or even hybridized
animal parts, such as the horns occasionally given to Jews or the hooves and tails displayed by
the unfortunate hybrids in Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica.8 Closely associated with the
body was costume, another primary means of displaying difference: Others might be identified
by elaborate, oddly colored, or unusually shaped hats; bright, gaudy, or dramatically patterned
clothing; partial or total nudity; or accessories that implied a lack of civilization or morality,
such as a club or a moneybag.
Multiple signs often worked in concert, as they do in the extraordinary scribal caricature of
the moneylender Salamó Vidal that was doodled by an idle scribe on the cover of a fourteenth-
century liber iudeorum from the Catalan town of Vic in 1334–1340 (Fig. 36.1). Salamó’s hunched
back, goatlike beard, stupendous nose, and skewed eyes, along with his long robe and preposter-
ously ornamented hat, signal his status as an outsider while also trading on the long-held medieval
equation of physical imperfections with a sinful nature – in this case, Salamó’s role as Vic’s most
powerful and detested usurer.9 In this, it exemplifies the multivalency of such signs, which could
both identify and comment on the depicted Other.
Medieval Others could also be set apart by visual references to their exotic or unacceptable
cultural behaviors, such as the worship of idols, the practice of cannibalism, or the inappropriate
and/or sexualized display of body parts. The depiction of Jews clustered in worship around a
cat on an altar in the Parisian Moralized Bibles, as Sara Lipton has shown, casts them as heretical
outsiders to the Christian faith, while the Tartars feasting on human limbs in a carnage-strewn
wasteland by the scribe-artist Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora leave little doubt of their Otherness
(Fig. 36.2).10
Context was critical to the reading of such images, since similar signs often could carry either
positive or negative connotations. The near-nudity and crude loincloths of the possessed men
healed by Christ in the Canterbury Psalter clearly denote their uncivilized madness, while
the same features in an image of John the Baptist imply his asceticism and piety.11 Indeed,
very few signs of Otherness were especially fixed in meaning: whereas for much of medieval
Europe, certain constellations of features did become traditional to some Others – the shaggy
beards, large noses, and pointed hats of Jews or the turbans and dark skin often assigned to
Muslims – these well-worn formulae never achieved complete consistency even in the most
culturally stable European centers.12 Indeed, in some they were totally absent: in early Byzantine
iconography, Jewish figures were commonly identified by prayer shawls or tefillin rather than by
exaggerated physiognomy, while in the Mediterranean and the Christian East, images of Muslims
493
Figure 36.1 Scribal doodle of Salamó Vidal on the cover of a liber iudeorum from 1334–1340 (Arxiu i
Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, Arxiu de la Cúria Fumada, núm. 4603). Photo courtesy of Arxiu i Biblioteca
Episcopal de Vic, reproduced by permission.
Figure 36.2 Matthew Paris, Tartars eating human flesh, from the Chronica Majora (Parker Library, Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, MS 16), fol. 167r. Photo reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows
of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
often displayed a wider and more naturalistic range of skin color, facial type, and costume than
was typical in northern Europe.13
Signs of Otherness were not just variable; they were also surprisingly transferable. The canni-
balistic Tartars just mentioned share features with multiple Others: their large noses and pointed
hats resonate with those often deployed in depictions of Jews, while the seated figure munching
on a human leg recalls shorthand depictions of various monstrous races.14 Similarly, whereas
Ethiopians were nearly always depicted with dark skin, many Muslims and even occasionally
Jews sometimes also were portrayed as dark-complexioned, a practice that traded on the potential
of depicted dark skin to connote foreignness, sinfulness, and even diabolism.15 How such signs
were understood by their artistic makers and viewers thus depended on the expectations and
experience of both.
The flexibility and responsiveness of such iconography attest to the rhetorical power it held:
more than merely identifying members of specific social out-groups, images of Others adapted
and repositioned their subjects to suit the viewers and ideologies surrounding them. Because of
this, they speak simultaneously to the local perception and understanding of the various Others
whom medieval artists chose to portray; the values, social patterns, and concepts of identity by
which their iconography was shaped and surrounded; and the centrality of the visual in articu-
lating, as well as reflecting, such ideals.
Historiography
Scholarship on what might be called the “iconography of Otherness” – although its originators
would hardly have put it in those terms – is nearly as old as the study of iconography itself: as early
as 1898, Émile Mâle referred to the “cone-shaped cap” of the Jews as just one of the codelike
signs that he saw as central to Gothic image-making.16 His focus on the potential of iconographic
signs to aid in the identification and classification of Others, rather than on an analysis of their
meaning, set the tone for much work on the topic until the revolution in iconographic studies
initiated by the Warburg School toward the mid-twentieth century, which emphasized the read-
ing of such elements as expressive of contextually grounded attitudes or ideals.
Jews were the first Others to be closely scrutinized in these new terms, a phenomenon partly
prompted by concerns about anti-Semitism during and following the Second World War. Pio-
neering articles on the subject by the historian Cecil Roth, followed by books by Joshua Tracht-
enberg and Bernhard Blumenkranz, emphasized the pejorative connotations of many visual signs
commonly used in depicting Jews, such as an exaggerated nose, a pointed hat, a Jewish badge, or
a moneybag, as reflective of the Jews’ progressively worsening status in central and late medieval
European society and, implicitly, to the development of modern anti-Semitism.17
Another comparatively early subject of study was the medieval iconography of black and
African figures, perhaps also prompted by modern social concerns in the United States during
the 1970s. Coinciding with similar work on Greek and Roman art,18 the study of black figures
in the Middle Ages was catalyzed by the 1979 publication of the multivolume Image of the Black
in Western Art, sponsored by the Menil Foundation.19 Drawing upon the Foundation’s exten-
sive photographic archive of the same name, the Image of the Black volumes aimed to catalogue
and assess how people of African descent had been represented in Western art of all eras. The
body of imagery assembled in its two volumes on the Middle Ages formed a critical reposi-
tory for the more focused studies that would follow, such as those by Paul Kaplan and Guda
Suckale-Redlefsen.20
By the late 1980s, these two lines of inquiry had established a foundation not only for research
on the depiction of Jews and black figures but also for future study of other out-groups. To this
495
Pamela A. Patton
point, such work tended to privilege breadth over depth, giving priority to the collection and
presentation of previously unknown iconographic motifs rather than to the tightly contextual-
ized analysis that would become typical of iconographic studies in later decades. This breadth
was in fact quite critical, given the dearth of prior scholarship and near-total lack of image cata-
logues devoted to medieval depictions of any out-group at this date. The resulting work offered
access to substantial numbers of images as well as a general cultural framework against which to
understand them.
The late 1980s and 1990s witnessed a groundswell of interest in the study of minorities
and out-groups by medievalists in many disciplines, as exemplified by historians like John
Boswell, R. I. Moore, and Jeffrey Richards. This multidisciplinary scholarship helped to vali-
date the study of medieval out-groups as a field in its own right while paving the way for fresh
methodological approaches.21 Among the most important of these was the postcolonial work
inspired by Edward Said’s watershed book Orientalism (1978).22 Said’s use of the Self-Other
binary to frame an oppositional cultural relationship between East and West in the modern
era offered scholars in multiple disciplines a potent model for analysis of similarly segregated
medieval societies.
Among art historians, the earliest and boldest embrace of this approach was made by Michael
Camille, whose Gothic Idol (1989) employed medieval depictions of idolatry as a lens for decoding
contemporaneous attitudes to the Muslims, Jews, and other groups who stood most proximately
outside the bounds of normative European Christian society.23 Three years later, Camille’s Image
on the Edge (1992) further explored the question by examining the potential of marginal visual
spaces to reveal self-created boundaries between the dominant cultures of Western medieval
Christendom and the out-groups that stood at their social margins.24 In keeping with Lacan’s
model, Camille’s analysis framed an understanding of the Other as a result of the dominant com-
munity’s collective effort to define itself through the pictorial rejection of undesirable peoples and
groups, whose deformation, discoloration, and literal displacement made visible the boundaries
between them.
Camille’s understanding of medieval out-groups as visual foils to a communal self-image had a
sustained impact on subsequent scholarship. While some scholars, among them Ruth Mellinkoff
and Heinz Schreckenberg for the medieval West and Elisheva Revel-Neher for the Byzantine
Empire, continued to pursue the traditional survey and analysis that remained central to such
work,25 others, such as Debra Strickland, processed the lessons learned from postcolonialism to
frame the development of a pejorative iconography for multiple medieval out-groups as part
of an expanding Western Christendom’s desire to assert its own cultural superiority.26 Many of
these scholars narrowed their analyses to smaller groups of, or even single, works within local,
particularized contexts as case studies revealing of wider social relationships and ideological
trends. Exemplary of this approach are Sara Lipton’s study of the portrayal of Jews in the Bibles
moralisées in the context of anti-Jewish ideology at the French court and Kathleen Corrigan’s
study of anti-Jewish imagery in ninth-century Byzantium, as well as a substantial body of work
on the representation of Jews and Muslims in medieval Iberia, discussed ahead.
The trend toward case studies in the 1990s and early 2000s also favored the production of
multidisciplinary essay collections and special journal issues dedicated to various aspects of the
Other. These often included art historical contributions that drew innovatively on nontraditional
approaches, such as postcolonial and borderlands theory, monster theory, and queer theory.27 Key
collections include a special issue on race published by the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies in 2001, as well as edited volumes on Jews in Europe by Eva Frojmovic and Mitchell
Merback, on multiculturalism in Iberia by Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi, and on Others
through the lens of queer theory by Glenn Burger and Stephen Kruger.28 Further art historical
496
work took the form of individual journal articles and book chapters, some of which encompass
iconographies of Others that had until recently lacked sustained attention, such as the Mon-
gols, the Irish, and the poor.29 The tighter contextual focus undertaken by such scholarship has
brought considerable texture to current understanding of how medieval artists represented the
Other, especially in revealing the variability of their decisions in response to widely differing
circumstances.
The most recent years have seen no slackening in scholarship on the iconography of the
Other: they have witnessed a new edition of the Image of the Black volumes by Harvard University
Press in 2010; several important museum exhibitions, including Revealing the African Presence in
Renaissance Europe (Walters Art Gallery, 2012) and Cranach’s Saint Maurice (Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2015); and the publication of several important essay collections, among them The Origins
of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (2009),
and Images of Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Times (2012), edited by Anja Eisenbeiss and
Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch.30 Scholarship on specific types of Others has also remained abun-
dant: the depiction of Jews has been further explored in books by Nina Rowe, Irven Resnick,
Herbert Kessler and David Nirenberg, and Sara Lipton, among others, while the 2012 Ashgate
Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle,
includes essays addressing gender, sexuality, and race.31
An especially vital subfield in the depiction of the Other has been that of medieval Iberia,
where the close coexistence of Christians, Muslims, and Jews offered a rich sociocultural con-
text for such analysis. The late John Williams’s 1977 analysis of anti-Muslim iconography at San
Isidoro in León stood in the vanguard of this scholarship.32 Subsequent publications by Otto Karl
Werckmeister, Jerrilyn Dodds, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Peter Klein, Francisco Prado-Vilar, Isabel
Monteira Arías, Paolino Rodríguez-Barral, and the present author, among numerous others, have
revealed the fluidity with which iconographic forms could be selected, intermingled, and revised
in concord with the changes in ideology and social relationship that accompanied the expansion
and Europeanization of the Spanish Christian kingdoms.33
Key problems and questions

Scholarship on the medieval iconography of Others has by now matured substantially, and its
openness to new methodologies, new topics of research, and new kinds of questions has paved
the way to multiple new areas of inquiry, just a few of which are outlined here. One long-standing
problem much in need of analysis is the well-documented increase in depictions of Others
around the end of the twelfth century. While this development has been linked by some to
sweeping social changes – an increasingly authoritarian Church hierarchy; the new centrality
of Jews, Muslims, and other foreigners in Europe’s growing commercial networks; and military
threats posed by external Others, such as Muslims and Mongols – that reshaped Europe at about
the same time, much could be gleaned from deeper scrutiny of how, as well as why, the emer-
gence of specific new iconographies of Otherness intersected with these developments.34 Why,
for example, did the depiction of Mongols as savage cannibals and idolaters intensify even as
peaceful trade and diplomatic contact with the Mongol Empire increased? Why did the rise in
pejorative imagery of Jews and Muslims in Iberia intersect so irregularly with the imposition of
normative Christian policies and social practices there in the wake of the so-called Reconquest?
Also deserving of further consideration is the frequent ambiguity of the iconography assigned
to Others in both Eastern and Western art. While the somatic exaggerations, distinctive cloth-
ing, and other signs associated with medieval out-groups often carried negative connotations,
these seem to have been nullified in the case of “positive” figures, such as Moses, Saint Maurice,
497
Pamela A. Patton
or the Queen of Sheba, so that even traditionally negative markers, such as Moses’s stereotyped
physiognomy or Sheba’s black skin, were reduced to simple denotative signs or even hinted at the
feasibility of conversion.35 Because the interpretation of such images rests so strongly on context,
the most successful analyses will take the form of case studies that attend carefully to the specifics
of setting and audience.36
The depiction of black or dark skin itself offers a promising field for future research, especially
in multicultural Mediterranean societies, such as Sicily and Iberia, where it constituted a more
concrete visual reality than in other areas of Europe. In such settings, dark skin appears not just
in a wider range of iconographic contexts but also in relation to a wider range of ethnicities and
social classes.37 In the illustration to Cantiga 46 in the Códice Rico of the Cantigas de Santa María
(Escorial MS T.I.1., fol. 68v), for example, the Muslim armies that gather to divide the spoils of
battle include foot soldiers with both dark and light brown skin, while their equestrian superi-
ors, including the elite Muslim convert at the center of the story, are as pale as their Christian
opponents (Fig. 36.3). Skin color here plays multiple roles, signaling social and military status as
well as the potential for conversion.38 How such nuance shaped the reading of such imagery by
medieval viewers remains an intriguing question.
Figure 36.3 Story of the Muslim Converted by an Image of the Virgin (Cantiga 46), Cantigas de Santa
María (Real Biblioteca de El Escorial, MS T.I.1), fol. 68v. © Patrimonio Nacional, reproduced by permission.
498
A more difficult problem linked with this is how tightly medieval iconography can be linked
to ideas about race. As scholars such as Robert Bartlett, William Jordan, David Nirenberg, and
Geraldine Heng have shown, the degree to which medieval classifications of human difference
can be compared with modern racial constructs is difficult to calculate; for example, there is little
evidence that most medieval viewers would have linked visible somatic features, such as dark
skin or an enlarged nose, firmly with any human category.39 Thus, while it may be heuristically
fruitful to apply a racial lens to medieval iconography of the Other in certain cases, these will
always require careful attention to the specifics of context and viewership.
Figure 36.4 A charivari in progress, Roman de Fauvel (Paris, Bibiliothèque Nationale de France, MS fr. 146),
fol. 36v. Photo courtesy of BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, reproduced by permission.
499
Pamela A. Patton
Especially promising for future research on the iconography of the Other are those out-groups
that have not, to date, received substantial scholarly attention. These include both faraway others,
such as those Asians – Mongols, subcontinental Indians, Chinese, and Pacific Islanders – who
were becoming familiar to Europeans with the expansion of trade and missionizing along the
Silk Roads,40 and more proximate Others whose place in the majority culture was eliminated
by exceptional circumstances, such as poverty, physical disability (e.g., blindness, or leprosy), or
nonnormative beliefs and practices, such as heresy, homosexuality, or prostitution.41
The potential for study in this last category is especially strong: while their iconography is not
as strongly marked or consistent as, say, that of Jews, the boundaries of proximate Others often
blur with those of other out-groups in ways that speak revealingly of how self-identity was fash-
ioned in majority medieval cultures. In the well-known depiction of a charivari in the early four-
teenth-century manuscript of the Roman de Fauvel now in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris
(MS fr. 146, fol. 36v), the costumed, animal-masked figures typical of such gatherings include
multiple visual references to the conventional social outcasts of early fourteenth-century Paris: a
disabled man with two canes, his buttocks uncovered; a childlike figure pushed in a dung-barrow
by a hooded man with “Jewish” features; two bald, brown-skinned figures; and a mysteriously
veiled woman thought by some to be a cross-dressing man (Fig. 36.4).42 This image speaks to far
more than the reversal of behavioral norms associated with the charivari; in visually blurring the
boundaries among Europe’s medieval Others, it exposes the more resistant frontier that separated
all of them from the notional medieval Self.
Notes
1 J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,”
in idem, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Heloise Fink
and Russel Grigg (New York, 2006), 75–81. For an example of Lacan’s impact on cultural historians
generally, see S. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, 1985),
15–35; for a crisp analysis of its relevance for medievalists, see P. Freedman, “The Medieval Other,” in
Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. T.A. Jones and
D.A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo, 2002), 1–24.
2 E. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978); G.C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse
and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. P. Williams and L. Chrisman (New York, 1994); and H. Bhabha,
“The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Screen 24 (1983),
18–36.
3 Freedman, The Medieval Other (as in note 1), 5–8; see also S. Kinoshita, “Deprovincializing the Middle
Ages,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (Santa Cruz/Berkeley,
2007), 75–89.
4 For Gregory, see W.D. Phillips, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia, 2014), 60. On the
Magdeburg Saint Maurice, see G. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius: der heilige Mohr/The Black Saint Maurice
(Houston, 1987), 18–20, 42–47, and 158–61; see also G. Heng, “An African Saint in Medieval Europe:
The Black Saint Maurice and the Enigma of Racial Sanctity,” in Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy
Flesh, ed. M.H. Bassett and V.W. Lloyd (London, 2014), 18–44.
5 Especially useful in considering this distinction is Debra Strickland’s notion of “the exotic”; see D.H.
Strickland, “The Exotic in the Later Middle Ages: Recent Critical Approaches,” Literature Compass 5:1
(2008), 58–72. For scholarship on individual groups, see the section on historiography below.
6 For the term “proximate Other,” see J. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault
(Oxford, 1991), 135.
7 See the essays by S. Lindquist, M. Easton, and A.S. Mittman and S. Kim in this volume.
8 For an extensive catalogue of somatic as well as other kinds of signs, see R. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of
Otherness in Northern European Art of the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1996). On Gerald of Wales’s hybrids,
see A.S. Mittman, “The Other Close at Hand: Gerald of Wales and the ‘Marvels of the West,’” in The
Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. B. Bildhauer (Toronto, 2004), 97–112.
500
9 P.A. Patton, Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain (University Park, 2012), 59–61.
10 S. Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley,
1999), 88–90. On the Matthew Paris images, see Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters
in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003), 192–93, and S. Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora
(Berkeley, 1987), 285–87.
11 Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, MS lat. 8846, fol.3v; see Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews (as
in note 10), 80–81, and C.R. Dodwell, The Canterbury School of Illumination, 1066–1200 (Cambridge,
1954), 98–103.
12 See, for example, the discussion of the beard and other “Jewish” signs in Lipton, Images of Intolerance (as
in note 10), 20–21.
13 E. Revel-Neher, The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art (Jerusalem, 1992), 51–72; for a thoughtful recent
discussion of depicted dark skin in Eastern lands, see L.-A. Hunt, “Skin and the Meeting of Cultures:
Outward and Visible Signs of Alterity in the Medieval Christian East,” in Images of Otherness in Medieval
and Early Modern Times: Exclusion, Inclusion, Assimilation, ed. A. Eisenbeiss and L. Saruma-Jeltsch (Berlin,
2012), 89–106.
14 Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews (as in note 10), 192–93.
15 On the traditional connotations of dark skin in European art, see, among others, Strickland, Saracens,
Demons, and Jews (as in note 10), 83–86; J. Devisse, “The Black and His Color: From Symbols to Real-
ities,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art. 2. From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery”,
ed. D. Bindman and H.L. Gates (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 73–137, and in the same volume, P.H. Kaplan,
“Introduction to the New Edition,” 1–30, esp. 12–18; D. Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk:
Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, 2006), 157–81; and D. Verkerk, “Black Servant, Black
Demon: Color Ideology in the Ashburnham Pentateuch,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
(2001/1), 57–77.
16 “Les Juifs se reconnaîtront à leur bonnet conique.” É. Mâle, L’Art Religieux de du XIIIe siècle en France:
Étude sur l’iconographie du moyen age et sur ses sources d’inspiration (Paris, 1898), 3. Scholarship on the
iconography of Others is extensive and impossible to present exhaustively in an essay of this scale. The
section ahead therefore cites key publications only, emphasizing those that track back to broader histo-
riographic trends and additional bibliography.
17 C. Roth, “The Medieval Conception of the Jew: A New Interpretation,” in Essays and Studies in Honor
of Linda R. Miller, ed. I. Davidson (New York, 1938), 171–90, and idem, “Portraits and Caricatures of
Medieval English Jews,” The Jewish Monthly 4 (1950), suppl., i–vii; J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the
Jews: The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism (Yale, 1943); B. Blumenkranz, Le juif medieval au miroir de l’art
chrétien (Paris, 1966).
18 On the ancient period, see the somewhat controversial works of F.M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity:
Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, 1970), and idem, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient
View of Blacks (Cambridge, 1983), as well as L. Thompson, Romans and Blacks (Norman, 1989).
19 Ladislas Bugner, general editor, The Image of the Black in Western Art, 5 vols. (Houston, 1979–1989); in
2010 it was republished, with new volume introductions, by Harvard University Press and the W.E.B.
Dubois Institute under the editorship of David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
20 P.H. Kaplan, Rise of the Black Magus; Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius: Der Heilige Mohr (as in note 4).
21 J. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning
of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980); R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting
Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford, 1987; second ed. rev. 2007); J. Richards,
Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (New York, 1990).
22 Said, Orientalism (as in note 2).
23 M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989).
24 M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992).
25 Mellinkoff, Outcasts (as in note 8); H. Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History
(London, 1996); Revel-Neher, The Image of the Jew (as in note 13).
26 Strickland, Saracens, Demons, & Jews (as in note 10).
27 The theoretical turn is exemplified by the essays in J.J. Cohen, The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York,
2000), as well as by many of the works cited ahead.
28 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Special Issue: Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages, ed.
T. Hahn), 31:1 (2001). See also: Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jew-
ish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. E. Frojmovic (Leiden, 2002);
Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed.
501
Pamela A. Patton
M.B. Merback (Leiden, 2003); Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, ed.
C. Robinson and L. Rouhi (Leiden, 2005); and G. Burger and S.F. Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages
(Minneapolis, 2001).
29 D. Strickland, “Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence in Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde,” Viator 36
(2005), 493–529; Mittman, “The Other Close at Hand” (as in note 8), 97–112; Camille, Image on the
Edge (as in note 24), 129–52.
30 D. Bindman and H.L. Gates, Jr., ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 2010–2014);
Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, ed. J. Spicer (Baltimore, 2012); M. Ainsworth, S.
Hindriks, and P. Terjanian, “Lucas Cranach’s Saint Maurice,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 72:4
(Spring, 2015); The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. M. Eliav-Feldon, B. Isaac, and J. Ziegler (Cambridge,
2009); Images of Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Times: Exclusion, Inclusion, Assimilation, ed. A.
Eisenbeiss and L. Saruma-Jeltsch (Berlin, 2012).
31 N. Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century
(Cambridge, 2011); Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed.
H.L. Kessler and D. Nirenberg (Philadelphia, 2011); I.M. Resnick, Marks of Distinction: Christian Percep-
tions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, DC, 2012); S. Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins
of Anti-Semitism (New York, 2014); Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. A.S.
Mittman and P.J. Dendle (Farnham, 2012).
32 J.W. Williams, “Generationes Abrahae: Reconquest Iconography in León,” Gesta 16:2 (1977), 3–14. Also
early and of note is M. García-Arenal, “Los moros en las Cantigas de Alfonso X,” Al-Qantara 6 (1985),
133–51.
33 The scholarship on Iberia is vast and growing; just a sample of key publications includes O.K. Werck-
meister, “The Islamic Rider in the Beatus of Gerona,” Gesta 36:2 (1997), 101–6; D.F. Ruggles, “Mothers
of a Hybrid Dynasty: Race, Genealogy, and Acculturation in al-Andalus,” Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 34:1 (2004), 65–94; F. Prado-Vilar, “The Gothic Anamorphic Gaze: Regarding the Worth
of Others,” in Robinson and Rouhi, Under the Influence (as in note 28), 67–100; P.K. Klein, “Moros y
judíos en las ‘Cantigas’ de Alfonso el Sabio: imágenes de conflictos distintos,” in Simposio Internacional “El
Legado de Al-Andalus”: el arte andalusi en los reinos de León y Castilla durante la edad media, ed. M. Valdés
Fernández (Valladolid, 2007), 341–64; J. Dodds, M.R. Menocal and A.K. Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy
(New Haven, 2008); P. Rodríguez-Barral, La imagen del judío en la España medieval: El conflicto entre cris-
tianismo y judaismo en las artes visuales góticas (Barcelona, 2009), I. Monteira Arias, El enemigo imaginado:
La escultural románica hispana y la lucha contra el Islam (Toulouse, 2012); and Patton, Art of Estrangement (as
in note 9).
34 The classic treatment is R.I. Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society (rev. ed. 2007), esp. 1–60; a broader
perspective is offered by Freedman, Medieval Other (as in note 1), 4–9.
35 Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius (as in note 4); on Sheba, see M.H. Caviness, “(Ex)changing Colors: Queens
of Sheba and Black Madonnas,” Architektur und Monumentalskulptur des 12–14 Jahrhunderts: Produktion
und Rezeption. Festschrift für Peter Kurmann zum 65 Geburstag (Bern, 2006), 553–70. J. Devisse, “A Sanc-
tified Black: Maurice,” in Image of the Black in Western Art. 2. From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of
Discovery”, ed. Bindman and Gates (as in note 15), pp. 139–94. Another positive black figure to emerge
in the late Middle Ages was the black magus; see P.H. Kaplan, The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art
(Ann Arbor, 1985).
36 For one such study, see E.A. Foster, “The Black Madonna of Montserrat: An Exception to Concepts of
Dark Skin in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia?” Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia
and Latin America, ed. P.A. Patton (Leiden, 2015), 18–50.
37 As noted by Hunt, “Skin and the Meeting of Cultures” (as in note 13), 89–106.
38 On Muslims and conversion in this cantiga, see Prado-Vilar, Gothic Anamorphic Gaze (as in note 33),
67–71; on skin color in Castile more generally, see P.A. Patton, “An Ethiopian-Headed Serpent in the
Cantigas de Santa María: Sin, Sex, and Color in Late Medieval Castile,” Gesta 55:2 (2016), 213–38.
39 See W.C. Jordan, “Why Race?” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31:1 (2001), 165–73;
R. Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies 31:1 (2001), 39–56; G. Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Stud-
ies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 8:5 (2011), 258–74 and idem, “The Invention
of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race,” Literature Compass 8:5 (2011),
275–93. See also D. Nirenberg, “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and Its Jews,” in Rereading
the Black Legend, 71–87; and idem, “Was There Race before Modernity? The Example of ‘Jewish’ Blood
in Late Medieval Spain,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. M. Eliav-Feldon, B. Isaac, and J. Ziegler
502
(Cambridge, 2009), 232–64. On the postmedieval evolution of the term “race” in application to humans
rather than animals, see C. de Miramon, “Noble Dogs, Noble Blood: The Invention of the Concept of
Race in the Late Middle Ages,” in the same volume, 200–16.
40 See, for example, Strickland, “Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence in Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde”
(as in note 29), 493–529.
41 Promising work in these areas includes S. Zimmerman, “Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary,” Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38:3 (2008), 559–87; E. Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks before the Blind:
Medieval Constructions of Disability (Ann Arbor, 2010); M. Camille, “The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze,
Brunetto Latini’s Body,” in Queering the Middle Ages (as in note 28), 57–86.
42 See Camille, Image on the Edge (as in note 24), 143–45, and Le Roman de Fauvel in the Edition of Mesire
Chaillou de Pesstain: A Reproduction in Facsimile of the Complete Manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds
Français 146, intro. E.H. Roesner, F. Avril, and N.F. Regalado (New York, 1990), 11–13. See also N.F.
Regalado, “Masques réeles dans le monde de l’imaginaire: Le rite et l’ecrit dans le charivari du Roman
du Fauvel, MS B.N. Fr. 146,” in Masques et Deguisements dans la littérature médiévale, ed. M.-L. Ollier
(Montreal, 1988), 111–28.
503
37
ANIMAL ICONOGRAPHY
From Genesis to Revelation, the many creatures mentioned in the Bible ensured the importance
of animals in medieval Christian art. Study of medieval animal iconography has been largely ori-
ented around the bestiaries, medieval books that picture and describe real and imaginary creatures,
holding up many – but not all – as examples of good and bad moral behavior. But as influential
as they undoubtedly were, it would be a mistake to limit iconographical study to the bestiaries,
since so much medieval animal imagery is grounded in popular stories, beliefs, and symbolism that
circulated independently from the bestiary tradition, and the bestiarists themselves were informed
by pre- and extra-Christian animal lore and contemporary social and political ideas.
Looking across twelve centuries (c. 300 – c. 1500), it is clear that medieval artists went beyond
reporting the mere appearance of animals to express ideas about human nature and experience; or
to put it another way, animal forms were important vehicles by which artists communicated what
it meant to be human, and what it meant to be a Christian.1 In medieval art, animals without
human referents are empty signs, except insofar as they functioned (importantly) as reminders of
God’s diverse creation. While concerns with animals qua animals informed late medieval hunting
and falconry manuals,2 and nonmorally freighted animal representations populate sketchbooks,
world maps, and illuminated calendar pages,3 the lion’s share of medieval animal iconography
conveyed ideas about God, the Devil, saints, non-Christians, gender roles, virtues, and sin. The
signifying potential of medieval animals was thus very great, and also very flexible: the same ani-
mal could communicate universal Christian ideas in one context, and more locally contingent
meanings in another – or both at the same time. Indeed, medieval animal meanings are never
fixed or absolute; patronage, historical circumstances, artistic context, and audiences provide vital
keys to interpretation.
The first part of this chapter will survey medieval animal iconography under the rubrics of
symbolism, bestiary, and marginalia, with reference to past and suggested future art historical
approaches. Its exclusive focus on Western medieval Christian art should not obscure the fact
that there were equally rich animal iconographical traditions in Byzantine, Jewish, and Islamic
art, and that cross-cultural influences were catalysts in the development of animal imagery all
over the medieval world.4 In the chapter’s second part, I present a short case study that addresses
some of the theoretical and interpretative issues raised in the first part. The fifteenth-century
misericords in the parish church of St. Lawrence in Ludlow (Shropshire) display a mean-
ingful mix of animal and human subjects. By this time, the animals represented had accrued
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Animal iconography
multiple meanings, which I attempt to access by looking beyond the conventional animal/human
divide to local circumstances and the special interests of their clerical and elite lay viewers.
Symbolism
Animal symbolism grounded in Scriptures lies at the heart of early Christian art, in which it
provided visual shortcuts to the nature of God, the nascent religion, and its followers.5 The earliest
cult symbol was a fish, whose Greek name (ΙΧΘΥΣ) is an acrostic for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Sav-
ior. As an emblem of a minority religion whose followers were in constant danger of persecution
by Roman authorities, a benign, defenseless animal hidden underwater was a significant choice.
To outsiders, fish carved on clay lamps to outsiders were merely decorative, but more overtly, they
marked early Christian tomb stelae, houses, and catacombs.6
First among other animals in early Christian art is the lamb. As a symbol of Christ, it carries
sacrificial connotations inherited from Judaism, but also recalls John the Baptist’s reference to
Christ as “the Lamb of God” (John 1:29), allowing it to also function as the Baptist’s attribute.
Christ’s command to “feed my sheep” (John 21:15) extended ovine symbolism to the Chris-
tian faithful writ large, and his parable of the separation of the sheep from the goats (Matt
25:32) transformed these beasts into symbols of the blessed and the damned, respectively, as in
a sixth-century mosaic panel at Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. Later, the Lamb with seven
horns and seven eyes described in the Book of Revelation (5:6) became a central figure in late
medieval Apocalypse iconography.
Animal motifs inherited from pagan Celtic and Germanic traditions were creatively rede-
ployed in early medieval metalwork, carved stones, and illuminated manuscripts.7 Examples
include Visigothic gold and enamel bird fibulae, the famous sixth-century gold belt buckle
found at Sutton Hoo intricately decorated with beasts and birds, and the seventh-century Pictish
“Burghead Bull” symbol stone. In the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells, animals represent
the four Evangelists, but in the Lindisfarne Gospels and thereafter, human Evangelists are accom-
panied by their symbolic animals. In later medieval Evangelist portraits, naturalistically rendered
animals look more like pets than symbols, as in the fourteenth-century prayerbook of Michelino
da Bezozzo, where a young ox cradles the Gospel book between his front hooves as he gazes up
lovingly at Luke painting an image of the Virgin Mary (Fig. 37.1).
Animal-human pairings are also important in the iconography of the saints, as the ability
to communicate with animals was considered a mark of holiness. Francis’s birds, Eustace’s stag,
Hugh’s swan, Jerome’s lion, Roch’s dog, and Giles’s hind, as described in the widely circulating
Golden Legend and other hagiographical sources,8 are among the more popular companions of
saints in medieval art. While most of these animals are friends, a few are foe, such as the dragons
who threaten George and Margaret. Some, such as Anthony’s pig, have no textual basis, but were
apparently invented by artists. Miraculous rapport with animals was extended even to Christ,
who, according to apocryphal sources, as a child was observed playing with lion cubs, as depicted
in fourteenth-century England on one of the Tring tiles and in the Seldon manuscript.9
By contrast, certain animals often symbolize evil. Following on from his early Christian asso-
ciation with the damned, the goat enjoyed a rich career as a symbol or attribute of the Devil, for
whom the creature’s beard, horns, hooves, and tail are iconographically essential, as in the lively
scenes of demons and hell in the fifteenth-century Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur (Book of Our
Lord’s Vineyard) (Bodleian Library, Douce 134). Dogs are often associated with social outcasts,
Christ’s tormentors, and function as negative motifs in Crucifixion scenes, where they snarl and
fight, or snuffle around at the base of the cross.10 But not all dogs were bad: in the bestiaries, they
are compared to the Devil, but they are also praised for their loyalty to their masters; lapdogs
505
Figure 37.1 Saint Luke and his ox, Prayerbook of Michelino da Besozzo, Milan, c. 1420. New York, ML,
MS M. 944, f. 75v. Photo courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum, New York.
are a fashionable attribute of noblewomen in patron portraits, as in the thirteenth-century Psal-

ter-hours of Yolande of Soissons (Morgan Library, M. 729, f. 232v); and elegantly reclining
greyhounds were de rigueur in the iconography of the court, as in the feast scene on the January
calendar page of the Duke of Berry’s early fifteenth-century Très Riches Heures.
Apes, whose humanoid appearance was regarded as both ugly and suspicious, are often associ-
ated with evil and mockery in medieval art,11 and with a few exceptions, such as the heraldic pigs
that decorate the tomb of John Swinefield (d. 1311) in Hereford Cathedral, pigs were considered
an ignominious animal, freighted with bad associations inherited from Jewish purity laws. They
thus function as a negative intensifier in anti-Jewish imagery, which attained its most vicious
form in the late medieval German motif of the Judensau.12 Pigs, goats, asses, and other underclass
beasts sometimes accompany human personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins, as in the splendid
series painted in a French book of hours around 1475 (Morgan Library, M. 1001, ff. 84–98).
Dragons, snakes, toads, worms, and insects frequently symbolize sin and vice. This is why snakes
cling to the pendulous breasts of the emaciated female figure of Luxuria (Lust) carved on the
twelfth-century Moissac abbey porch, and three toads emerge from the mouth of the blasphemous
dragon in the Silos Beatus, dated 1109 (British Library, Add. 11695, f. 178v). As symbols of both
spiritual and physical corruption, toads, snakes, bugs, and worms wriggle from the back of the
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Animal iconography
thirteenth-century sculpture of the unsavory Tempter originally positioned on the south portal
of Strasbourg Cathedral, and from decomposing corpses carved on numerous late medieval transi
tombs.13
In the medieval language of heraldry, animals were a primary means by which elite indi-
viduals constructed their public identities: on a third of all arms, the main charge is an ani-
mal.14 From the thirteenth century, heraldic animal emblems informed by positive cultural
associations shaped public perceptions of the character, power, and authority of the bearer
and his or her lineage. It is therefore unsurprising that the lion – symbolizing power, strength,
supremacy, and above all, Christ – emerged as a favorite heraldic animal, notably in England,
in the lion-rich arms of the Plantagenets. After the lion, the next most popular heraldic ani-
mal was the eagle, associated with baptism and renewal, and considered the most powerful of
birds. The popularity of the bear, fish, swan, unicorn, griffin, and boar is apparent in heraldic
manuscripts, such as the fourteenth-century Dutch Gelre Armorial;15 these and other animals
also appear on shields, banners, tombs, cups, plates, stained glass, and painting, either as coats
of arms or as personal heraldic (livery) badges. The latter include the c. 1400 gold and enamel
Dunstable swan jewel, and the Wilton Diptych, which depicts King Richard II’s emblem of a
chained white hart as an isolated animal on the exterior, and on the interior in the form of
livery badges worn by the king and several angels.16
Earlier studies have surveyed animal symbolism across medieval art and literature,17 and have
also addressed the symbolic significance of selected animals in particular artistic and literary
contexts.18 Still needed is more probing assessment of the role of animal symbolism in the
early Christian cult, as recent work on the Jewish foundations of Christian art suggests that
study from this perspective will shed new light on its functions in the multicultural contexts in
which it was created and displayed.19 Consideration of the ways in which observation of real
animals, such as lambs and doves, might have “activated” and intensified reception of animal
representations might expand our understanding of the extratheological dimensions of medi-
eval devotional experience. Broader approaches to the study of heraldry might uncover how
associations with particular individuals changed the reception of a given animal in subsequent
artistic contexts, and close assessment of the condemnatory efficacy of animal attributes in neg-
ative representations of Jews and Muslims will help to clarify the role of animal symbolism in
medieval persecuting societies.
Bestiaries
Bestiaries were produced all over Western Europe, especially in England, from the twelfth cen-
tury onwards. For their reader-viewers, they functioned as handbooks to moral behavior, deriv-
ing their authority from the Christian belief that the natural world was a marvelously complex
lesson created by God for the edification of humans. The ubiquity of bestiary imagery in other
artistic media, such as wall painting and sculpture, bears witness to widespread familiarity across
medieval Europe.
Bestiary images of domestic, wild, and imaginary beasts, birds, fish, reptiles, and insects are
varied and inventive, and sometimes incorporate references to contemporary social, religious,
and political concerns, especially in the thirteenth-century imagery. For example, the image
of three men riding dromedaries in Bodley 764 is an intervisual reference to the three magi,
the Westminster Abbey Bestiary presents in sequence those species of deer protected under
forest law, and the magician in the story of the asp in Harley 3244 was recast as a preaching
friar.20 Narrative images often depict conflict between humans and animals in certain scenes,
such as hunters chasing the beaver for his testicles (to be used for medicine), knights defending
507
Plate 8 Horses, Rochester Bestiary, southeast England, second quarter, thirteenth century. London, BL, MS
Royal 12 XIII, f. 42v (detail). © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved.
themselves from the anal blast of the bonnacon, the entrapment of the unicorn by hunters using
a virgin as a lure, and the whale drowning the clueless sailors who have lit a fire on his back,
thinking he is an island. In the Rochester Bestiary, two wrestling horses mirror the hostility of
their knightly riders (Plate 8).
In the scholarly literature, the bestiary is sometimes confused with the Physiologus, which in
fact is a distinct genre. The Physiologus (uncertainly translated as “The Naturalist”) refers to the
bestiary’s core, moralized text,21 which was composed in Greek, probably in second-century
Alexandria, and was translated into Latin by the sixth century. The Carolingian survival of the
Bern Physiologus (Bern, Burgerbibl., Cod. 318) indicates that the text was illustrated by at least
the ninth century. By contrast, the term “bestiary” refers to later, longer, and more complex
medieval textual compilations that incorporate all or parts of this core text.
Following the lead of M. R. James, most bestiary scholars have focused on the texts in order
to refine the antiquarian classifications of the manuscripts into various “families.”22 Others have
attempted to integrate the bestiaries into a wider cultural landscape and to clarify text-image
relationships.23 Helping to move this important genre from the purview of specialists into the
scholarly mainstream are numerous shorter studies in interdisciplinary collections,24 and a grow-
ing number of facsimiles and translations, both printed and electronic, that greatly aid research.25
Closely related to the bestiaries are the aviaries, illustrated books devoted to birds, with a
twelfth-century text attributed to the French cleric Hugh of Fouilloy.26 The aviaries circulated
independently but were also incorporated into or excerpted in many of the bestiaries. While
most aviary imagery is stylistically and iconographically similar to bestiary illustrations, the text’s
monastic character inspired some distinctive compositions. For example, the dove, allegorized as
a figure of the contemplative life, received elaborate diagrammatic treatment in a thirteenth-cen-
tury bestiary in the Getty Museum (Ludwig XV3, f. 2); and the turtledove nests in a palm tree
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Animal iconography
rendered in the form of a cross in the Ashmole Bestiary (f. 44). Beyond translation, classification,
and iconographical description, the aviaries remain very understudied. They need to be situated
more broadly among other late medieval, illustrated contemplative texts and the avian leifmotif
traceable across late medieval monastic literature, hagiography, and pictorial imagery. Using the
aviaries as a touchstone, more work is needed to explain why medieval religious found it so
fruitful to “think with birds,” and to clarify the role of aviary and other bird iconography in
such thinking.
The most important later bestiary development was the composition of the Bestiaire d’amour
(Bestiary of Love) by the cleric and troubadour Richard of Fournival (1201–1259/1260).27 Writ-
ing for a courtly audience, Richard’s innovation was to synthesize bestiary and courtly love tradi-
tions into a love-plea organized around animal metaphors aimed at an anonymous woman, who
in some manuscripts is given a retaliatory voice in an appended Response du bestiaire (Response to
the Bestiary). Richard’s animals represent different stereotyped, negative aspects of women, rang-
ing from cold neglect to jealous wrath, giving the work a distinctly misogynist character. That
the Bestiaire and, less often, the Response were illustrated in numerous English, French, Italian, and
German manuscripts is testimony to the genre’s pan-European appeal. Although the importance
of the text for courtly love studies has been clarified by literary critics, the animal iconography
remains very understudied, on the assumption that it was imported wholesale from the Latin
prose bestiaries. But closer scrutiny of the manuscripts, such as a late thirteenth-century north
Italian example (Morgan Library, M. 459) or a French one dated around 1300 (Bibliothèque
nacional de France, fr. 25526), reveals that the new text demanded a new iconography. Identified
as the first gendered prose debate in a European vernacular, preliminary text-image analysis has
demonstrated the importance of this work for our understanding of medieval gender roles, and
suggests rich potential for future investigations along these lines.28
Marginalia
Animal imagery in medieval manuscript margins, stained-glass borders, tiles, aquamaniles, and mis-
ericords has attracted art historical attention in tandem with theoretical interests in “unofficial” art
and its socially subversive possibilities.29 Sculptural cycles, such as the twelfth-century beast corbels
on the church of Saints Mary and David in Kilpeck (Herefordshire), or the extensive set of mis-
ericords in Toledo Cathedral, exhibit a wide variety of animal types. While bestiary iconography
is sometimes “imported” into the margins of Psalters and books of hours,30 more often, marginal
manuscript beasts engage in quotidian activities, such as fighting, hunting, or feeding; or more
eye-catching ones, such as dressing like clerics, copulating, or defecating.31 Especially popular in
England were adventures of Reynard the Fox, as depicted in the margins of manuscripts and on
misericords,32 and fourteenth-century contributions to the marginal theme of “the world upside-
down” include rabbits, hunting dogs, and men in the Smithfield Decretals, and mice catapulting
cats in an English book of hours (British Library, Harley 6563). In some manuscripts, irreverent
apes masquerade as ecclesiastics, expose their anuses, or hurl dung precariously close to sacred texts,
as in a fourteenth-century French book of hours made for a woman (Morgan Library, M. 754).
Relevant to the wider field of manuscript studies, more work is needed to connect marginal
animals with the texts and images that surround them to uncover interdependent relationships. In
support of this chapter’s thesis that medieval animal images ultimately point to humans, more inten-
sive study of marginal imagery’s anthropomorphic meanings will broaden our understanding of
medieval people’s reception of the sacred images and texts they encountered in their private books,
as well as inside and outside architectural spaces. Ideological and theoretical relationships between
animals and monsters, who often cavort together in marginal art, not infrequently in hybrid forms,
509
suggest the importance of animal iconography to monster studies,33 an approach especially relevant
to the study of monuments such as the Kilpeck corbel series mentioned earlier, the twelfth-century
Narbonnais arch in the Cloisters Collection, and the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter.
As a postscript, the study of medieval animal iconography at both the margins and the center is
today more timely than ever in cultures increasingly concerned with animal rights, and in an aca-
demic climate in which animal studies are gaining momentum across disciplines. One driver has
been accelerating scholarly interest in ecocriticism, which aims to examine relationships between
literature and the natural environment, with particular attention to human-animal relationships.34
Bestiaries should be high on the list for scrutiny from this theoretical perspective, as should the
study of relationships between animal iconography and medieval royal menageries.35 As noted
earlier, animal iconography contributed to the formation of medieval Christian identity, and it
continued in this role throughout the entire Middle Ages. As the following case study aims to
demonstrate, even a few strategically placed animal images in a larger series of other types could
fulfill this and other functions relevant to both the spiritual and social concerns of their viewers.
∗∗∗∗∗
The twenty-eight misericords that decorate the choir stalls in the parish church of St. Lawrence in
Ludlow include carved images of a falcon, a stag, a fox preaching (Fig. 37.2), another fox strangling
a goose (?), a chained antelope, a griffin, a pelican, and an owl. From their marginal positions under-
neath seats, these animals carried familiar heraldic, bestiary, and literary associations. However, to
understand their full signifying power, they must also be viewed in relation to the other misericords
in whose midst they are situated. The full list of subjects, including the animals, is, on the north
side (from west to east): four roses; the falcon; an angel blowing a trumpet; a king’s head; the stag;
the fox; three feathers; a bishop’s head; the antelope; three figures quarrelling; the chained antelope;
a siren; two devils, one with a woman clutching a beer mug slung across his shoulder; a bat-woman
(Fig. 37.3); and a grotesque woman’s head. On the south side (from west to east) are: a rose and
fetterlock; a schoolmaster (Fig. 37.4); two men dancing around a wine or beer barrel; a man pouring
Figure 37.2 Fox preaching poultry, misericord, oak, c. 1425. Ludlow, St. Lawrence parish church. Image
courtesy of Shaun Ward.
510
Figure 37.3 Bat-woman, misericord, oak, c. 1425. Ludlow, St. Lawrence parish church. Image courtesy
of Shaun Ward.
Figure 37.4 Schoolmaster, misericord, oak, c. 1450. Ludlow, St. Lawrence parish church. Image courtesy
of Shaun Ward.
beer from a barrel into a large mug; the griffin; a very damaged scene, whose remaining carved
fragments suggest a fox strangling a goose while other poultry scatter; five men, four of whom are
wrestling; a man warming himself by the fire; the pelican; the owl; a young woman’s head; a peddler
with his wares on his back, pulling on his boot; a leaf ornament; and a well-dressed man standing
between a seated figure and emblems of death.36
Although only eight of the central misericord subjects are animals, there are numerous addi-
tional fish, bird, and beast supporters (smaller images that flank the central ones). Small lion heads,
a beast mask, and a crane on the front of the choir stalls, and a small dragon crouching under a
poppycock further augment the animal presence. Some of the other subjects evoke animals indi-
rectly: the three feathers reference an ostrich, the angel and the bat-woman are bird hybrids,37 the
siren is a fish hybrid, the two sides of meat hanging on hooks beside the man warming himself
represent dead pigs, and in medieval thought, women were closer to animals than humans.38
Although some of these same animal subjects are carved on misericords elsewhere in Eng-
land,39 in the church of St. Lawrence, I suggest they took on more specialized meanings related
to contemporary life in Ludlow, which by this time was a prosperous market town and Yorkist
stronghold, signified on the misericords by the rose and fetterlock (the Yorkist badge) and other
rose imagery.40 While the contemporary heraldic significance of the chained antelope (King
Henry VI), the falcon and fetterlock (Richard, Duke of York), the three feathers (Prince of Wales,
including the Black Prince), and the griffin (Edward III) has already been noted,41 the remain-
ing subjects have been only generically linked to bestiary, fable, and satirical traditions.42 The
possibility of any thematic unity across the group has been discounted, based on the generalized
assumption that misericords were less strictly programmed than other types of church art, and
thus their subjects are arbitrary, and their function only decorative.43 But in the church of St.
Lawrence, a new set of misericords was carefully integrated with the existing ones into a revised
arrangement, which suggests both the continued relevance of the earlier set and a concern with
the sequential order of the iconographical subjects.
In what follows, I aim to provide a particularized, local reading of the St. Lawrence miser-
icord series and the place of the animal iconography within it. My analysis is grounded in the
experiences of the misericords’ clerical and lay viewers, which included the documented patrons
of the new series. In 1446–47, the religious fraternity known as the Palmers’ Guild purchased
120 planks of wood at Bristol for “new installations” in the St. Lawrence choir. These included
a set of twelve misericords, which were integrated with sixteen older ones (dated c. 1425) in
order to double the space of the choir.44 In the revised order, on both sides, the misericord ani-
mals were evenly distributed, singly or in pairs, among the other subjects to create an alternating
animal-human rhythm.
Who were these patrons? Founded in the late 1250s and incorporated in 1329, the Palmers’
Guild, whose name refers to Holy Land pilgrims, was a dominant influence in Ludlow town life
for three hundred years.45 Like other late medieval English religious fraternities, it was composed
of laymen and women drawn from different professions and a relatively small number of clerics,
whose collective purposes were to honor their patron saint and to serve each other’s spiritual,
economic, and educational needs.46 According to the earliest ordinance (1284), the Palmers were
dedicated to the Virgin Mary and to St. John the Evangelist, and were responsible for offering
financial aid to impoverished, sick, aged, and wrongfully imprisoned members; for providing
dowries for the daughters of members whose families had met with unexpected misfortune; and
for organizing and attending funeral services for deceased members.47 They were headquartered
in their own guild hall on Mill Street and also in the parish church, where they built and richly
decorated a guild chapel dedicated to St. John.48 The Palmers were responsible for much of
the fourteenth-century building work on the church, and they were major contributors to the
512
Animal iconography
mid-fifteenth-century expansion and decoration campaign. They hired chaplains – as many as

ten – for private chantries and the Lady Chapel to provide extra Masses for their dead brethren
and to assist the parish priests. They also hired singers and the organist, and probably also pur-
chased the organ.49 Such dedication to the musical life at St. Lawrence may account for their
special interest in the decoration of the choir with richly carved misericords.
Beyond the walls of the parish church, the Palmers contributed to the wider life of the town,
and were also well connected to the English monarchy and nobility. They built an almshouse
next to the church, and founded and staffed a free grammar school for the education of members’
children. As major property owners with considerable resources, they undertook civic building
works, repairs, and other social objectives, and many members served as bailiffs and sat on the
Twenty and Five town council. Those of means who looked favorably upon the guild’s spiritual
and social works often bequeathed gifts, usually of property and rent-charges.50 During the
early fourteenth century, the Palmers enjoyed the patronage of the rich and powerful Mortimer
family, and by the mid-fifteenth century, their high-ranking brethren included the resident Duke
Richard of York (1411–1460) and his wife, Cecily Neville (1415–1495). The Guild registers for
the early part of King Edward IV’s reign list over fifty royal servants and officeholders, thirty
members of the royal household, the Duke of Suffolk, and two other noblemen and their families.
Edward IV himself made a large donation in 1472–3, and helped secure for the guild a papal
indulgence for all who gave alms and contributed toward the restoration costs of the guildhouse
and the church of St. Lawrence.51
Guild processions, funeral marches, lavish feasts, and worship services kept the Palmers in the
public eye. Their annual feast, held on Pentecost in the guildhall, was the main social event of
the year in Ludlow for two and a half centuries.52 It afforded members opportunities to perform
public charity by inviting a group of the town’s poor to attend, and for social advancement, by
inviting and freely giving livery hoods to prestigious “outsiders and gentry.” The feast was a com-
munity event: many Ludlow citizens were involved in the supply and preparation of the candles,
rushes, beer, wine, bread, cheese, bacon, fish, and venison; it was also a lively one, characterized by
heavy drinking and merriment.53
Like other late medieval religious guilds, the Palmers recognized that good moral conduct
was crucial for continued community support, and the importance of exemplary behavior
for upholding their good public reputation is articulated in the Palmers’ records. Fines were
imposed for making noise during prayers, excessive rowdiness, and bad-mouthing or assaulting
other members. During the feasts, members could be fined for drunkenness, sleeping loudly,
or failing to pass the cup quickly enough when it was handed to them. There was also a dress
code: livery had to be worn, bare feet and dagged clothing (with decorative scallops) were pro-
hibited, and hoods and caps were not to be worn at table. Other proscribed behaviors included
public quarrelling, gambling, wrestling, adultery, prostitution, and other forms of sexual mis-
conduct, such as clandestine marriages.54
Let us return now to the St. Lawrence misericords, which were viewed and used primarily
by the choristers, the parish priests, the Palmers, and their hired chaplains. How did the carvings
address the interests of this audience, especially the Palmers, who were responsible for the new
additions and arrangement of the entire series? Representations of well-dressed men and women
in different occupations, the king’s head, the bishop, and the heraldic references together represent
the guild’s diverse membership, and the misericord of the young woman’s head flanked by two
similar ones on the supporters evokes the guild’s responsibility to provide dowries for daughters
of needy members. The images of drinking and merrymaking point to the annual guild feast, and
perhaps also warned to temper behavior. The wrestling and assault scenes highlight two activities
explicitly proscribed for members in the guild’s earliest ordinance. The supporter imagery of the
513
coffin, skulls, bones, and grave implements depicted to the right of the well-dressed man standing
before the barrel perhaps functioned as a memento mori, but it also signaled the guild’s funerary
responsibilities to its deceased members.
The most direct reference to the Palmers appears on the westernmost misericord on the south
side, positioned next to the return stalls (Fig. 37.4). The seated schoolmaster holding a long scroll
has already been identified with the guild’s grammar school,55 and it is on record that in the same
year the misericord wood was purchased, the guild paid for bars on the windows of the Master of
the Scholar’s house.56 I suggest that Palmer identity is reinforced by the supporters, which depict
a pair of men’s heads wearing livery headdresses similar to those worn by the Palmer figures
depicted on the stained-glass window dedicated to the guild’s founding legend that was installed
in their chapel at the same time as the misericords.57 Bearing the only figure holding a scroll,
this misericord, strategically positioned at the western beginning of the south side series, perhaps
reminded viewers of the misericords’ donors, and the need to read the various subjects in light of
their shared values and contributions to parish life.
How did the animal iconography serve this agenda? Compared to the human subjects, the
signifying powers of the animals are greater, because their meanings are multiple. For example, the
small lion’s heads carved on the front of the stalls complement the other carved roses as emblems
of the Yorkist king, Edward IV, but at the same time, they carried their bestiary associations,
especially when viewed in tandem with the poppycock carving of the Pietà, which rhymes with
the lion’s bestiary association with Christ’s resurrection. The small crane carved on the front of
the south stall is biting his leg, presumably to keep himself awake for the sentinel duty outlined
in the bestiaries, which in turn allowed him to symbolize the group solidarity and communal
responsibility so important to the Palmers. The pairing of the pelican, the popular bestiary
symbol of Christ, with the owl, identified in the bestiaries as a sign of the “unbelieving Jews,”
is fully visible in the opening between the stalls as a universal Christian antithesis. Beyond their
heraldic associations, the antelope recalled the bestiary’s identification of antelope horns with the
Old and New Testaments, and the stag, as a bestiary figure of friendship, embodied a core value
of the community-minded Palmers. Also beyond heraldry, according to the aviaries, the tamed
falcon (accipter), here depicted with his fetterlock, signified “any spiritual father . . . who draws
laymen to conversion through preaching.”58
The griffin, unmoralized in the bestiaries, also pointed beyond heraldry to the legend of the
flight of Alexander via tamed griffins, and thus to the sin of pride, with which Alexander was
identified in contemporary theological thought.59 Interpretation of the fox misericords is more
complex. The motif of a fox preaching to poultry was popular in late medieval art, and is com-
monly identified with Reynard the Fox, but a mitered one is more unusual (Fig. 37.2). With two
men conversing on the left supporter, and positioned next to the misericord depicting a bishop’s
head, it suggests a wider satirical purpose. In fifteenth-century Ludlow, a preaching fox could be
a sly reference to the declining reputation of the local Carmelites, prominent here as elsewhere
as preachers and scholars, whose priors were frequently involved in lawsuits over various offenses
and territorial disputes.60 It is tempting to read the fox as a criticism of the established Church
if, as previously suggested, the creation of religious guilds was an attempt on the part of the laity
to take religion into their own hands and exclude the corrupt clergy.61 Either way, the generic
bishop’s head on the adjacent misericord could commemorate the corrupt – or saintly – bishop
of the moment, while the vulpine preacher was grounded in the bestiary characterization of the
deceptive fox as a figure of the Devil, a theme reiterated on the (mostly destroyed) misericord
that originally depicted a more conventional fox attacking poultry.
The ale-wife, bestiary siren, bat-woman (Fig. 37.3), and “ugly duchess,” arranged in sequence
like a phalanx, warned of the dangers of female sexuality. They also reminded viewers that sexual
514
Animal iconography
offenses, especially among the clergy, were the main business of the Ludlow courts: during the
fifteenth century, an average of one chaplain or friar was prosecuted each year in courts held in
the chancel of St. Lawrence; punishment typically included fines, some of which were payable to
the church fabric.62 A wider interest in misogyny cloaked in an animal idiom is evident from a
miscellany dated c. 1300–49, which includes an illustrated Bestiaire d’amour compiled by a local
scribe, with a dedication to the parish church of St. Lawrence in Ludlow (lodelowe).63 Without
identifying this manuscript as a direct source, I observe that the lively, pen-drawn images include
some of the same animals carved on the Ludlow misericords and choir stalls, including the lion,
crane, fox, pelican, siren, dog, and birds, which are compared in the accompanying text to wicked
women’s ways.
As a guide to good moral behavior, I suggest that the Ludlow misericords functioned
like a bestiary, albeit positioned inside the church rather than inside a book, and glossed
with nonanimal subjects. At the same time, references to the Palmers’ diverse membership,
social activities, and proscribed behaviors made them a visual form of their guild statutes. In
the living theater of the choir, they were a metaphor for social control: the act of sitting on
undesirable figures – women, Jews, wrestlers, corrupt bishops, drunks – literally suppressed
them. Or equally, aspirations and allegiance could be performed through intimate contact
with emblems of princes and nobility. Because the moral transgressions depicted on the
misericords were the same ones named in the town nuisance statues and denounced by the
parish priests,64 they furthermore aligned the guild with the social and spiritual interests of
their larger community.
The animal misericords installed in the choir of St. Lawrence parish church in Ludlow car-
ried familiar heraldic and bestiary meanings, which when carefully integrated with nonanimal
subjects helped to break down conceptual barriers between humans and animals. By situating
these sculptures in their local historical and social contexts, this brief sketch has highlighted the
contemporary social power of animal iconography, and most importantly, its dependence on
contemporary viewer experiences for activation of its multiple meanings, beyond heraldry, and
beyond the bestiaries.
Notes
1 S. Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Manchester, 1993); J. Salisbury, The Beast
Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (London, 1994); S. Crane, Animals Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in
Medieval Britain (Philadelphia, 2013).
2 J. Cummins, The Art of Medieval Hunting: The Hound and the Hawk (Edison, 2003).
3 C.F. Barnes, Jr., The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt (Aldershot, 2009); N. Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought:
The Hereford Paradigm (Woodbridge, 2001); Time in the Medieval World: Occupations of the Months and the
Signs of the Zodiac in the Index of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2007).
4 M.M. Epstein, Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art & Literature (University Park, 1997); H. Magu-
ire, Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (Oxford, 2012); R.C. Foltz, Animals in Islamic
Tradition and Muslim Cultures (Oxford, 2006).
5 I.S. Gilhus, Animals, Gods, and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman, and Early Christian
Ideas (London, 2006).
6 P.C. Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York, 1994).
7 C. Hicks, Animals in Early Medieval Art (Edinburgh, 1993); G. Henderson and I. Henderson: Art of the
Picts: Sculpture and Metalwork in Early Medieval Scotland (New York, 2004); H. Pulliam, Word and Image in
the Book of Kells (Dublin, 2006).
8 J. de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W.G. Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1993);
D. Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2008).
9 Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 35, in The Apocryphal New Testament, ed. J.K. Elliott (Oxford, 2005), 97; Les
Enfaunces de Jesu Crist (BL, Seldon Supra 38, ff. 27v-28).
515
10 J. Marrow, “Circumdederunt me canes multi: Christ’s Tormentors in Northern European Art of the Late
Middle Ages and Early Renaissance,” AB 59 (1977), 167–81; R. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness
in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1993).
11 H.W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London, 1952).
12 I. Shachar, The Judensau: A Medieval Anti-Jewish Motif and Its History (London, 1974).
13 K. Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance
(Berkeley, 1973).
14 M. Pastoureau, Heraldry: Its Origins and Meanings (London, 1997).
15 M. Popoff and M. Pastoureau, L’armorial de Gelre: Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Ms 15652–15656 (Paris,
2012).
16 The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. D. Gordon , L. Monnas, and C. Elam (London, 1997).
17 F. Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages (London, 1971); B. Rowland,
Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism (Knoxville, 1973); B. Rowland, Birds with Human
Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Knoxville, 1978).
18 Animals and the Symbolic in Mediaeval Art and Literature, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen (Groningen, 1997).
19 Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. D. Nirenberg and H.
Kessler (Philadelphia, 2011).
20 As discussed in D. Hassig [D.H. Strickland], Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge, 1995).
21 M.J. Curley, Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature Lore (Chicago, 2009).
22 M.R. James, The Bestiary; Being a Reproduction in Full of the Manuscript Ii.4.26 in the University Library,
Cambridge, with Supplementary Plates from Other Manuscripts of English Origin, and a Preliminary Study of
the Latin Bestiary as Current in England (Oxford, 1928); W.B. Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Sec-
ond-Family Bestiary: Commentary, Art, Text and Translation (Woodbridge, 2006); C. White, From the Ark
to the Pulpit: An Edition and Translation of the “Transitional” Northumberland Bestiary (Louvain-la-Neuve,
2009).
23 Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries (as in note 20); D. Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English
Literature (Oxford, 2000).
24 Birds and Beasts of the Middle Ages: The Medieval Bestiary and Its Legacy, ed. W. Clark and M. McMunn
(Philadelphia, 1989); The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, ed. D. Hassig
[D.H. Strickland] (New York, 1999).
25 These include J. Geddes and I. Beavan, The Aberdeen Bestiary Project, https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/;
C. de Hamel, Book of Beasts: A Facsimile of Ms. Bodley 764 (Oxford, 2008); C. de Hamel, L.F. Sandler, and H.
Zotter, Das Bestiarium aus Peterborough: MS 53 (fol. 189–210v), The Parker Library, College of Corpus Christi
and the Blessed Virgin Mary, Cambridge, 2 vols. (Lucerne, 2003); and White, From the Ark (as in note 22).
26 W. Clark, The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarum (Binghamton, 1992).
27 Master Richard’s Bestiary of Love and Response, trans. J. Beer (Berkeley, 1986); J. Beer, Beasts of Love: Richard
of Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour and A Woman’s Response (Toronto, 2003).
28 H. Solterer, “Letter Writing and Picture Reading: Medieval Textuality and the Bestiaire d’Amour,” Word
& Image 5 (1989), 131–47.
29 M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992); P. Barnet and P. Dandrige,
Lions, Dragons, & Other Beasts: Aquamanilia of the Middle Ages (New Haven, 2006); E.C. Block, Corpus of
Medieval Misericords, 5 vols. (Turnhout, 2003–2010).
30 D. Hassig [D.H. Strickland], “Marginal Bestiaries,” in Houwen, Animals and the Symbolic (as in note 18),
171–88.
31 For many examples, see L. Randall, Images in the Margins of French and English Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley,
1966).
32 Reynard the Fox, trans. P. Terry (Berkeley, 1983); K. Varty, Reynard, Renart, Reinaert and Other Foxes in
Medieval England: The Iconographic Evidence (Amsterdam, 1999).
33 The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. A.S. Mittman and P. Dendle (Farnham,
2012).
34 See The Journal of Ecocriticism, http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe/; and S. Kay, “Legible Skins: Animals
and the Ethics of Medieval Reading,” postmedieval 2 (2011), 13–22.
35 L. Kiser, “Animals in Medieval Sports, Entertainment, and Menageries,” in A Cultural History of Animals
in the Medieval Age, ed. B. Resl (Oxford, 2011), 103–26.
36 At St. Lawrence, I would like to thank Alan Hobbes for allowing me close access to the misericords, and
Shaun Ward, director of music, for providing me with a full set of excellent photographs.
37 The bat was classified among the birds in the bestiaries.
516
Animal iconography
38 Yamamoto, Boundaries of the Human (as in note 23), 205.

39 G.L. Remnant, A Catalogue of Misericords in Great Britain (Oxford, 1969).
40 M. Faraday, Ludlow 1085–1660: A Social, Economic and Political History (Chichester, 1991), 11–12, 103–33.
41 P. Klein, The Misericords & Choir Stalls of St. Laurence’s Church, Ludlow, 3d ed. (Ludlow, 2015), 7–20.
42 C. Grössinger, The World Upside-Down: English Misericords (London, 1997), 38, 53, 54, 77, 78; P. Hardwick,
English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning (Woodbridge, 2011), 19–20, 29–30.
43 L. Houwen, “Bestiaries in Wood? Misericords, Animal Imagery, and the Bestiary Tradition,” in the Play-
ful Middle Ages: Meanings of Play and Plays of Meaning: Essays in Memory of Elaine C. Block, ed. P. Hardwick
(Turnhout, 2010), 195–231.
44 Shropshire Archives, LB/5/3/28: Stewards’ Account Roll, 1446–47; cited in C. Liddy, “The Palmers’
Gild Window, St. Lawrence’s Church, Ludlow: A Study of the Construction of Guild Identity in Medi-
eval Stained Glass,” Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society 72 (1997), 26–37, at
32. The patrons of the older series are undocumented, but they are likely to have also been the Palmers,
for reasons to be discussed.
45 Faraday, Ludlow (as in note 40), 77–95.
46 G. Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages: Guilds in England, 1250–1550 (Oxford, 2015).
47 For the text, see English Gilds, ed. T. Smith, EETS 40 (London, 1870), 193–95. See also H.F. Westlake,
The Parish Gilds of Mediaeval England (London, 1919), 19, 224.
48 Liddy, “Palmers’ Guild Window” (as in note 44), 26–37; H.T. Weyman, “A Contract for Carvings in
Ludlow Church, 1524–5,” Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society 3 (1903), i–ii.
49 A. Smith, “Elizabethan Church Music at Ludlow,” Music and Letters 49 (1968), 108–21; Liddy, “Palmers’
Guild Window” (as in note 43), 32–33; Rosser, Art of Solidarity (as in note 46), 223.
50 Deeds of the Palmers’ Gild of Ludlow, ed. M.A. Faraday (Ludlow, 2012).
51 The Victoria History of Shropshire, vol. 2, ed. A.T. Gaydon (Oxford, 1973), 94; Faraday, Ludlow (as in note
40), 86.
52 Faraday, Ludlow (as in note 40), 88.
53 G. Rosser, “Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval Eng-
land,” Journal of British Studies 33 (1994), 430–46.
54 B.R. McRee, “Religious Gilds and Regulation of Behavior in Late Medieval Towns,” in People, Politics and
Community in the Later Middle Ages, ed. J. Rosenthal and C. Richmond (Gloucester, 1987), 108–22, at 114.
55 Klein, Misericords (as in note 41), 20.
56 Faraday, Ludlow (as in note 40), 86.
57 Liddy, “Palmers’ Gild Window” (as in note 44), pl. 8; also reproduced on the St. Laurence Ludlow web-
site: http://www.stlaurences.org.uk/history/the-palmers-guild-a-brief-history.
58 Clark, Medieval Book of Birds (as in note 26), 143.
59 G. Cary, “Alexander the Great in Mediaeval Theology,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 17
(1954), 98–114.
61 B. Hanawalt, “Keepers of the Light: Late Medieval English Parish Gilds,” Journal of Medieval and Renais-
sance Studies 14 (1984), 21–37, at 21.
63 British Library, Harley 273, dedication on f. 1v; Bestaire d’amour, fols. 70–81. Digital facsimile and
bibliography are available on the British Library Digitised Manuscript website: http://www.bl.uk/
manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_273.
64 McRee, “Religious Gilds” (as in note 54), 118 (on correspondences between religious guild, parish, and
civic behavioral codes more generally).
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38
MONSTROUS ICONOGRAPHY
Introduction: “The inexhaustible history of monsters”

Monstrous iconography was a major, even central, element of the visual arts throughout the entire
medieval period, early Christian through late Gothic, east and west, north and south. There are
few – if any – medieval cultural traditions that do not rely on monstrous imagery for vital cultural
functions. Within this catchall category, often defined through exclusion from all of the more
clearly defined categories of the period, there is tremendous dynamism and variety, as well as
great hermeneutic and epistemological potential. There have been a few attempts to define the
monstrous, though the protean nature of the subject eludes final clarity.1 However, the study of
the iconography of the monstrous was, until relatively recently, underdeveloped. It was a subject
of interest within the period, but was not frequently discussed in secondary scholarship about the
period. In this essay, we will provide a historiography of modern monsters studies, with particu-
lar attention to works addressing iconographical concerns, and then will consider the differing
cultural and artistic functions of the monstrous.
It is worth noting that prominent medieval scholars, most notably Augustine of Hippo and Isidore
of Seville, wrote important works theorizing the role of the monstrous. For Augustine, in City of
God, the monstrous provides a context for understanding God’s infinitely orderly creation and his
power over the bodies of men: what seems to be aberrant to our partial vision is orderly and beautiful
in God’s whole. Just as relatively trivial human differences cannot be understood as divine error,
differences on a larger scale – he covers Cyclopses, Antipodes, Hermaphrodites, Astomi, Pygmies,
Sciopods, Blemmyes, and Cynocephali, before turning to the minor variation of people born with a
finger or toe more than the usual – are similarly part of God’s intentional creation and as such exhibit
for us the power of that creation, the fact that “even if a greater variation were to arise, he, whose
works are justly faulted by none, knows what he has done.”2 The monstrous in its apparent violations
of the norm thus demonstrates at once the power and orderliness of God’s creation and the limits of
human vision. Isidore takes up the etymological connection to the Latin monstrare and demonstrare.
For Isidore, and many other medieval theorists, the monstrous, in its form as portents, prodigies, or
omens, points to meaning located elsewhere. Omens (mostrum), for example, “derive their name from
admonition (monitus), because in giving a sign they indicate (demonstrare) something, or else because
they instantly show (monstrare) what may appear.”3 For Isidore, as for Augustine, the potential viola-
tions or threats of the monstrous are neutralized and the monstrous is normalized by its capacity to
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Monstrous iconography
function as a sign or demonstration of something else. As Bruno Roy argues in his 1974 essay, “En
marge du monde connu: Les races de monstres,” the monstrous is both recognized and assimilated as
part of its function throughout the Middle Ages. Roy offers three propositions regarding the medie-
val monstrous: “a) ils existent; b) on les connaît; c) on les assimile” (a) they exist; b) they are known;
c) they are assimilated).4 That is, medieval scholars and theologians (as well, presumably, as the larger
populace) believed in the existence of beings that we would now call monsters – hybrids, giants,
magical creatures, fire-breathing, dog-headed anthropophages, and so on – and believed not only
that they had accurate knowledge of them but also that these beings were ontologically meaningful.
As part of God’s rich and vast creation, they had to bear the mark of his divine plans and intentions.
From their places on the periphery, they seemed to threaten, disturb, and disrupt, but ultimately they
were absorbed back into and thus reaffirmed the power of the center.
Monsters and the monstrous were therefore as worthy of careful study as all other natural
and supernatural phenomena, and so we should not be surprised that vital patristic and medieval
scholars dedicated their energies to thinking about a subject that much scholarship of the twen-
tieth century saw as marginal, at best. Émile Mâle, one of the founders of the iconographical
methodology and a towering figure in medieval art history, gives the subject substantial treatment
in his landmark study, L’art réligieux de XIIIe siècle en France: Étude sur l’iconographie de moyen âge et
sur ses sources d’inspiration, later published in English as Religious Art in France, XIII Century: A Study
of Medieval Iconography and Its Sources.5 He gives, for example, a detailed reading of the monstrous
figures of the famous portals of the Basilica Church of St. Mary Magdalene at Vézelay and the
Cathedral of Saint Stephen at Sens. Ruminating on the figures more generally, Mâle asks,
What is the meaning of all the plants, animals, monsters? Are they due to caprice or
have they significance, and do they teach some great and mysterious truth? May one not
suppose that they too are symbols, clothing some thought like the statues and bas-reliefs
which we shall have occasion to study later?6
Mâle seems to dismiss some as “monsters born of the craftsman’s fancy,” but others (especially,
unsurprisingly, those of the Physiologus and bestiary traditions) were, he argued, freighted with
meaning, and whether that meaning was the production of “imagination” was irrelevant to the
seriousness with which the symbolism was received during the period. As Mâle argues,
It occurred to no one, moreover, to verify the accuracy of stories in the Bestiary. In

the Middle Ages the idea of a thing which a man framed for himself was always more
real to him than the actual thing itself, and we see why these mystical centuries had no
conception of what men now call science. The study of things for their own sake held
no meaning for the thoughtful man. How could it be otherwise when the universe was
conceived as an utterance of the Word of which every created thing was a single word?7
This is a complex passage, suggesting as it does that the monsters of the bestiary and their “moral
interpretations” – now generally referred to as “moralizations” – were made up, but were also a
meaningful reflection of and on the Word. For Mâle, the fact that monsters were generated by and
then “framed for” human consumption did not diminish their significance during the period.
And yet, he is not convinced that every monster is freighted with specific, symbolic meaning, and
derides those who think they are:
Ingenious archaeologists have, it is true, claimed to leave nothing in the cathedral

unexplained. According to them the tiniest flower or smallest grinning monster has a
519
meaning which the mediaeval theologians can reveal to us . . . Each of these monsters
became a minute psychological study, setting forth some state of the soul, and precisely
illustrating the combination of passions which may co-exist in a single consciousness.
[Such scholars] demonstrated one thing only – that the old craftsmen were never so
subtle as their modern interpreters. What likelihood is there that they would have
attempted to express so many and such subtle meanings through figures which are
invisible from below except with good glasses?8
This all may seem somewhat inconsistent. Monsters are meaningful, except when they are not;
they bear meanings imprinted by the Word of God, except insofar as they are products of the
imagination of craftsmen. And Mâle’s seemingly contradictory assertions reproduce contradic-
tions explicit within medieval discussions: Isidore, for example, explains that monsters as portents
have divine meaning, though he does not link specific monsters to specific meanings, and he
warns that although some monsters are portents, others are imaginary, human constructs, expla-
nations of natural or cultural phenomena, and he does not provide us with any way to distinguish
between these kinds of meanings.9 There are medieval monsters with very specific iconograph-
ical meanings, and others that are imaginary, or invented, or resist such interpretation.10 Given
that there is no single, correct way to “read” all the monsters of the Middle Ages, in the medieval
context or in our own, in this essay, we will consider some of the roles monsters play in medieval
art, each of which requires a different route toward interpretation. We will also argue that this
multiplicity of meanings, the excess and thus opacity of monstrous iconography, may function
not to disable interpretation but to make visible, to demonstrate, and thus to allow for re-vision of
the very ways we make and find meaning.
Throughout the twentieth century, among the handful of landmark studies of monstrous
iconography, Rudolf Wittkower’s “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters”
(1942) stands out for its depth of engagement with the subject, as well as its erudition. This
article follows a traditional iconographical approach by locating literary sources for a few
characters from within what he refers to as the “the inexhaustible history of monsters, those
compound beings that have always haunted the human imagination.”11 He traces their ori-
gins to a diverse array of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit sources, including Herodotus, Pliny, and
the Mahabharata; these textual sources have become something like gospel in modern studies
of medieval monsters, particularly the Latin texts, likely owing to the linguistic strengths of
medievalists. Wittkower’s work also privileges certain modes of thought – the section on
ancient Greece is subtitled “An Enlightened Interlude,” which he describes as notable for its
“progressive scientific attitude” and rejection of “superstition.”12 He then performs icono-
graphical readings of some monsters, relying on textual “moralizations.” However, Wittkower
presses beyond the static, overly fixed iconographical readings of some of his contemporaries,
noting that “late mediaeval moralizations are interchangeable and attach to the moral values
of human society.”13
There was little art historical response to Wittkower’s article, and the next major contri-
bution to the study of the iconography of the monstrous was, in a sense, not deliberate. Lilian
M. C. Randall’s major 1966 catalogue, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, tackled the
iconography of the monstrous in Gothic marginality.14 Her volume is largely an iconographical
index, with nearly two hundred pages of subject headings, indexed to over seven hundred illus-
trations. That many of these are in some way monstrous is less the result of Randall’s interests
and more a practical result of the nature of gothic marginalia. Still, she chooses to open her
study with Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous Apologia, with its critique-cum-advertisement of the
520
“distractive influence” of “those half-men” and other such monstrosities.15 Randall argues that,
in incorporating them, “the Church . . . often endow[ed] them with symbolic overtones.”16
Her main goal is to draw attention to the marginal images that had been to this point largely
overlooked, and of course – as art historians are now well aware – monstrous and grotesque
figures were a staple thereof. Randall chronicles (and at times endorses) the view that “a good
initial and border . . . is spoiled by a repulsive grotesque.”17 Though she notes that she has
omitted any references to “isolated renderings of inactive creatures,” including “monsters, and
hybrids, which constitute stereotype elements of marginal decoration,” her index lists several
entries under “Monster,” as well as entries for “Centaur,” “Mermaid,” and other individual
monsters.18 The “Monster” entries, including “Monster crippled” and “Monster vomiting,”
clearly deserve their own study.19 In essence, Randall provides the first major guide to the ico-
nography of the monstrous without either setting out to do so or at any point theorizing the
nature of her subject.
John Block Friedman’s 1981 The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought significantly
extends Wittkower’s treatment and surveys representations of the monstrous throughout the
Middle Ages.20 Friedman’s extended examination includes different approaches to the mon-
strous within the medieval tradition. As he notes of the early medieval manuscript illustrations
in London, British Library Cotton Vitellius A.xv (Figure 38.4) and Cotton Tiberius B.v (both
containing the Wonders of the East), the moralizations of the bestiary even in the early tradition
partner very uneasily with some of the monstrous illustrations: the monstrous images in these
manuscripts fill or extend beyond the margins of their frames, and for Friedman,
[t]his uneasy relationship of creature to frame suggests that the monstrous men are leav-
ing the borders confining them to the static page and beginning to occupy landscapes;
they cannot be contained in isolation, as they were in the miniatures presenting the
moralists’ point of view.21
It is perhaps not coincidence that Michael Camille opens Image on the Edge, his landmark
study of Gothic marginalia (broadly categorized), with the very same text used by Randall:
Bernard’s Apologia. He says, “I could begin, like St. Bernard, by asking what do they all mean,
those lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, [and] pot-bellied heads . . . that protrude at the
edges of medieval buildings, sculptures and illuminated manuscripts,” but he might just as well
have said, “I could begin, like Lilian Randall . . .”22 Indeed, he cites her volume in the next
paragraph as the most notable in the field. While he deals with the subject of the monstrous
throughout Image on the Edge, Camille’s most direct treatments of the iconography of the
monstrous are in two essays. First, he took on the very notion of iconographical practice via
monsters in 1993 in his “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval
Art,”23 and then in 1996 used monstrous iconography to challenge the art historical canon
and the basic notion of canonicity in “Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters (Rethink-
ing the Canon).”24 Camille was perhaps the most imaginative and invigorating scholar of
medieval art in the late twentieth century; ask any mid-career medieval art historian what
drew her to this subfield, and Camille’s work is a likely answer. His work is iconoclastic, in that
it challenged traditional conceptions about medieval art and the Middle Ages, and the period
that we now discuss seems a messier, sexier, dirtier thing than the Middle Ages of scholarship
prior to Camille’s work.
It is fitting that, in tackling two of the central pillars of the field – iconographical practice
and the artistic canon itself – Camille would turn to monstrous imagery for rhetorical assistance.
521
Monsters are not really the subject of either “Mouths and Meanings” or “Prophets, Canons,
and Promising Monsters.” Instead, monsters are, for Camille, as for Bernard, a concise means of
approaching his subjects. In “Mouths,” he offers the magnificent, roiling mess of the trumeau
now mounted on the inner side of the west wall of the Abbey of Sainte-Marie at Souillac, “a
work of medieval art that has long intrigued art historians precisely because of its resistance to
written models of explanation.”25 Through this work, Camille exposes flaws in traditional text-
based iconographical approaches.26 As he writes,
Suffused with language, either iconically (in the form of inscriptions and speech
scrolls) or indexically (by referring to written narratives of the Bible text) medieval
art is often described as though it were entirely text-driven. Ever since Mâle’s influ-
ential metaphor, taken over from Romantic writers like Victor Hugo, that medieval
artists are “writers in stone,” the notion of legibility has been used unproblematically,
reducing medieval images to a neatly coded series of signs waiting to be decoded by
scholarly exegetes.27
But, as Camille argues, much of medieval art – perhaps especially evident in the iconography
of the monstrous – is rooted in “the uninscribed codes and cultural practices that are generated
orally and performatively.”28 Surely, many of us would like to discover a passage from Augustine
or Isidore that would explain away the Donestre, or a bit from Bede that clarifies just what an
elf is, but these passages likely do not, and did not, exist. The trumeau might be tied to various
passages from Augustine, Peter of Celle, Bernard of Clairvaux, Caesarius of Heisterbach, and
Ysengrimus (as Camille dutifully demonstrates), but it cannot be reduced to a visual cipher for these
passages of text. When “stone turns to feathers, claws and fur, textures that ruffle and slither
between the cranky joints of shaft and pillar to create an architecture of animality, a spiraling
ascent and descent of biting bestiality,” a work can become “more like a scream rent from a
human body than words written outside it.”29
Camille is more explicit in his focus on monsters in “Prophets, Canons, and Promising
Monsters.” In his desire to press back against the “set of predetermined, isolated images of ‘great
works’ reproduced in books,” the “worthy objects” of the canon, he settles on a small monster
from Senlis Cathedral, which he describes as “a superbly ambiguous thing, less than a foot long,
part reptile, part bird, and all stone.”30
Whereas the canon is a transcendent, uncreated text, like the Bible or the Torah, the
monster is a material creature, a creation. Whereas the canon is constructed out of the
always already known, prejudged and expected, the monster, being unstable, crosses
boundaries between human and nonhuman, mingling the appropriate and the inap-
propriate, showing itself in constantly novel and unexpected ways . . . [T]he monster is
always lurking somewhere, guarding the threshold . . . The monstrous . . . is all sensa-
tion, at one point soft and slimy, at another sharp and spiky.31
These are not properties that can be accessed via traditional text-based iconography, nor are they
qualities of the artistic canon. Some scholars therefore have dismissed their significance.32 For
Camille, monsters are neither codes to be unlocked nor masterpieces to be venerated, but oppor-
tunities to connect on a human and intimate, visceral way with art, giving him a route not “to
worship at the shrine of actual art or to read in the inscribed traces of the historical past [but] to
feel my flesh crawl and to be haunted.”33
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What are monsters for?

In the preface to Monster Theory, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen echoes Camille as he argues that the mon-
ster in its hybridity and doubleness “introjects the disturbing, repressed, but formative traumas of
‘pre-’ into the sensory moment of ‘post-,’ binding the one irrevocably to the other.” He continues:
The monster commands, “Remember me”; restore my fragmented body, piece me

back together, allow the past its eternal return. The monster haunts; it does not simply
bring past and present together but destroys the boundary that demanded their twinned
foreclosure.34
As we consider the question “What are monsters for?” we recognize the difference monsters
demonstrate on many levels – temporal difference, physical difference, cultural and linguistic
difference – but we also recognize that even in its marginality, the monstrous, in Cohen’s term,
“commands,” exerts powerful, if profoundly contradictory, calls to interpret, to “piece together,”
the fragmented into a whole. And while this call may appear conservative, a “restoration” rather
than a creation of something new, it also exaggerates, and thus renders legible, the otherwise invis-
ible processes of interpretation: piecing together requires separation, categorization, reinforcing
of boundaries even as it traverses them. It is no surprise to consider the number of monstrous
representations and interpretations that appear within or take as their source the great encyclo-
pedic texts of the Middle Ages – texts themselves that are attempts at categorizing and piecing
together the world. For this reason, we have chosen as our “case study” a number of the widely
present monsters of the Alexander materials, and have followed the contemporary work of Jesse
Hurlbut in our examining of the images of British Library Royal 20 B.xx, a lavishly illustrated
fifteenth-century French Historia de proelis, containing images of confrontations between Alex-
ander and these monsters.
In his work with the “manuscript average,” Hurlbut superimposes digitized manuscript
images, creating startling, evocative, haunting hybrid images. He approaches the project not
with the explicit aim of departure from the “original” but rather as a return from the partiality
of the digitized image to an idea of the physical whole of the manuscript as well as the sensual
apprehension of that whole. He writes,
Without the physical presence of the actual volume between our hands, is there a way
for us to take in some aspect of it all at once? For instance, what if we took all the pages
of a given manuscript and overlaid them as if they were transparent?35
His “manuscript average” reveals continuities across the images – format, color spectrum,
framing – continuities that bind the images and texts of the manuscript as a whole, though often
unconsciously for the reader/viewer. At the same time, the superimposition makes it impossible
to recognize single figures or images; rather, what emerges from an attempt to locate a whole
figure or coherent image in the fields of colors and lines are fragments. With Hurlbut’s generous
help, we have generated not a full manuscript average but something of a “monster average” by
superimposing transparent images of the numerous images in Royal 20.xx containing scenes of
battles between Alexander and his men and hordes of monsters, some particularly creative and
bizarre (Figs. 38.1, 38.2, and 38.3).36 We clarified the image some by increasing the contrast and
making other small image adjustments. In the Royal 20.xx “monsters average,” fragments emerge
from the Chagall-like image: a snout, a foot, perhaps a wing, a stirrup. With reference to this new
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Figure 38.1 “Monster Average,” London, British Library, MS Royal 20 B.xx, Historia de proelis in a French
translation (Le Livre et le vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre), c. 1420.
Figure 38.2 Alexander Battles Blemmyes, London, British Library, MS Royal 20 B.xx, f. 80, Historia de
proelis in a French translation (Le Livre et le vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre), c. 1420, © The British
Library Board, All Rights Reserved.
Figure 38.3 Alexander Battles Boars and Wild Men, London, British Library, MS Royal 20 B.xx, f. 51,
Historia de proelis in a French translation (Le Livre et le vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre), c. 1420,
© The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved.
composite image, made by overlaying twenty-four existing images, as our “case study,” we survey
three roles monstrous iconography serves in medieval art.
1 Monsters demonstrate difference, and thus at once threaten

and confirm the norm – in body, in culture, and in language
The monsters of the Alexander material include monsters of culture, like the wild man; monsters
of language, like the horse-headed and dog-headed peoples whose bodies disallow speech; and
monsters of body, including hybrids like the dog-headed people but also creatures of excess and
lack, like giants or the famous Blemmyes (people with no heads; Fig. 38.2). All of these monsters
can be subject to broad iconographical readings: the nakedness and hairiness of the wild man
itself, as Friedman observes, “was a sign of wildness and bestiality – of the animal nature thought
to characterize those who lived beyond the limits of the Christian world” (Fig. 38.3).37 The
Blemmye, also naked, whose later medieval moralizations would range from humility (the Gesta
Romanorum) to the extraction of excessive legal fees (Liber de monstruosis, Thomas of Cantimpré),38
often appears with a club as his characteristic weapon. As Friedman argues, the linking of the
monster and such a nonchivalric weapon poses “a resemblance between the representative of a
monstrous race and the rustic or churl whose uncivil nature is commonly shown by the club he
wields”:39 the Blemmye as a monster of culture is also a monster of class.
Whereas the monstrous as it appears in contexts like the mappae mundi (e.g., the Psalter Map,
BL MS Add. 28681, fol. 940) and the Marvels of the East manuscripts (perhaps mostly clearly in BL
Cotton Vitellius A.xv, Fig. 38.441) is often presented as a catalogue or in a sequence of monsters,
often without human interactants, the Alexander material more often partners these monsters
with representations of Alexander and his men, figures of the Western, the human, the mascu-
line, the normative. The hairy wild men and naked Blemmyes with their clubs in Royal 20 B.xx
525
Figure 38.4 Cynocephalus, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, f. 3, Wonders of the East,
c. 1000, © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved.
are clearly contrasted with, and outnumbered as well as overpowered by, the lavishly garbed and
armored Alexander and the tight group of his sword-, pike-, and banner-wielding men. Perhaps
more effectively than even the tight frames of the Psalter Map, the miniatures out of which our
“average” was constructed contain the threats of the monstrous through the display of mastery
by Alexander, the putatively nonmonstrous. In this sense, the monstrous figures affirm and con-
firm the power of the norm. In the “monster average” image, the left side is dominated by what
526
had been in the miniatures the figures of Alexander, his men, and their horses. Above them is
a bristling forest of pikes and lances. Their side of the image is all dynamic, forward motion,
pressing toward the monstrous average to the right. Of course, we recognize which side of the
average is Alexander’s and which belongs to the monstrous only by disambiguating the superim-
posed frames of the “average,” and thus by reinscribing the very work of differentiation which
underlies one function of the monstrous. Here, making sense of the image of the “monstrous
average,” the call to “piece it together,” can be articulated only in pulling the image apart into
the miniatures by whose accretion it is formed, by returning to difference which both antecedes
and constitutes the image. And the return to difference is also affirmation of boundary, legibility,
and the normative.
2 Monsters demonstrate difference, and thus embody

and make visible the difference already within the norm
As David Gordon White argues, although monsters are positioned as “marginal groups that
haunt the boundaries of human, civilized spaces,” nonetheless we cannot conclude that “they
have been of marginal concern to humans living within such bounded spaces.”42 And the fasci-
nation with the monstrous cannot be restricted even to the question White poses in this context
of where the human begins and ends. Even the foregoing readings of the Blemmye and his club
complicate our discussion of what monsters are for (Fig. 38.2). If the club links the Blemmye to
class anxieties as it represents the “uncivil nature” of the monster, at the same time, difference
externalized in the figure of the monster exists within the nonmonstrous: class difference is a
human matter.
As Michael Camille has observed, in Gothic art, animal and human realms are usually rep-
resented as clearly distinct territories, with the notable exception of the monstrous. He argues
that the half-human, half-animal bodies of some monsters can figure illicit, but nonetheless
extant, desires and actions: given the definition in canon law of acts like sodomy as being both
bestial and “against nature,” the activities of the monstrous body could make visible “illicit
couplings that could not be talked about, but could be pictured.”43 That is, the monstrous can
represent not simply the unknown or unknowable, but also acts and relationships, ways of being
that are proscribed but nonetheless known, even intimately familiar. In our “monster average,”
at the interface between the two halves of the image, what had been the human and the mon-
strous in the miniatures interpenetrate. There are two clear halves, but there is nonetheless
no actual point of divide between them. The “human” half, taken in aggregate, and with the
horses and weapons and armor, forms a mass just as monstrous and hybrid as the “monster”
half.44 And throughout the “monster” half, there are traces of the human, perhaps most clearly
the foot and stirrup in the lower right corner of the image. The monstrous and the human
interpenetrate, however strenuously – or perhaps even because of how strenuously – they are
differentiated. That interpenetration emphasizes that the difference externalized in the mon-
ster is never simply a difference from but rather also a difference within the norm. Returning
to one of the original images from the manuscript, one of the layers of our “average” image,
the Battle with Boars and Wild Men reveals the same sort of blurring of sides as the com-
posite image (Fig. 38.3). While one Wild Man hefts a class-identifying club like that of the
Blemmyes, another has a curiously self-reflexive image on his shield. The boar-tusked Wild
Man bears a shield carved with the face of a Wild Man. The style of the illumination allows
for slippage, here, in that the shield appears as lively as the being who carries it is. However,
across the image, at the far left, one of Alexander’s men bears as shield that seems to reflect
the self-reflexive shield, as it is carved with another Wild Man face. Indeed, the two rather
527
animate, smiling shield-faces seem to be making eerie eye contact across the battle, as if sharing
in a private joke. Perhaps they notice that both sides wield similar spears, and one combatant
on each side raises a giant, curved sword more appropriate to the monstrous warrior than to
the noble knight striving against him. How different, then, are these mortal combatants? And,
inversely, how similar, how unified, how resolutely normal are Alexander’s men? The British
Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts titles this image “Detail of a Miniature of Alex-
ander’s Battle with Boars and Many-Handed Savages,” and yet the “savages” each have a rather
underwhelming complement of only two hands, and the knights, with a seemingly alive Wild
Man face and giant’s sword among their more noble weapons, enact again and again a violence
that, in its ferocity and its scale, is savage.45
3 Monsters demonstrate difference and thus signification,

in image as well as language
In his study of the monstrous, Deformed Discourse, David Williams stresses the importance of
Isidore’s etymological definition of the monster, through monitus, demonstrare, and monstrare, as we
have discussed earlier:
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this definition of the monster, not
only because it was universally accepted in the Middle Ages and not only because by
its acceptance and celebration of the monster it sets this period apart from the periods
that preceded and succeeded it but also because this definition elevates the monster in
all its various manifestations – as the deformity and as the grotesque that arise from
negation – to the level of conceptual sign.46
The monster in its difference from itself, and in its capacity to point away from itself to meaning
elsewhere, embodies and figures signification itself. It is no surprise then to find monstrous forms
as text itself – for example, in anthropomorphic alphabets, or in monstrous initial capitals.47 In
the Alexander materials, too, in Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle, bound with the illustrated Wonders
of the East in Cotton Vitellius A.xv, Alexander’s journey into the land of the monstrous unfolds
as the progress of the letter itself: the insistent concern with writing and the letter in that thread
of the Alexander material replicates the coterminal concern with the monstrous. And again, this
coterminal concern re-presents the monstrous not as experiential but as representational: the
transmission and sometimes even the origin of the monster are in text and image, even when the
reception of the monster is as reality rather than representation or fiction. As Wittkower details,
the origins of medieval monsters can be traced in literature back to Herodotus, Megasthenes,
and Ktesias. Even there, as he notes, “the majority of the fabulous stories were of literary origin;
they were borrowed from the Indian epics.”48 As Mary B. Campbell notes, even beyond literary
origin, some monstrous figures arise in the act of writing itself: unlikely creatures such as the
“bird-centaurs of Wonders of the East belong to the genre of fact, but they do not and never did
exist – they were begotten of an error in scribal transmission.”49 Hence, at least in part, the dura-
bility of the monstrous in the face of increasing geographic and scientific knowledge: even when
the monstrous is apprehended, in contexts like the Wonders traditions, the encyclopedias, and even
the Alexander materials, as “real,” it also inheres in the representational strategies through which
we continue to encounter it.
The monstrous as we encounter it in medieval art and thought is seemingly infinitely accre-
tive. We can attempt to trace its sources, its interpretations, and its functions as we read it; as David
White proposes in his study of the dog-man, we can attempt to “go back in time, and move
528
from a complex sedimentation of symbols and socio-religious elements to simpler, less elaborate
composites.”50 White is concerned with following through a specific analysis and its capacity
to “intercept, as it were, certain very basic human categories in their embryonic formation.”51
Doing so more generally than White does in his study, however, often presumes the existence of
an entity recognizable as the monstrous before and behind the accretion of those sources, inter-
pretations, and functions. And the problem with that assumption is that the monstrous, as we
have argued earlier, appears exactly in and through those representations.
Even if we do not pose such an “original,” certainly the iconography of the monstrous
requires a degree of stability, and in many senses stability persists. Campbell argues,
Visual representations of the dogheads, for instance, remained as constant as verbal

ones, throughout centuries of stylistic change in the languages of both visual and verbal
mimesis. This is perhaps because a very bare minimum of features was necessary for
definition, and once these features had been sketched or mentioned, the image “dog-
head” had been evoked to the limit of its usable significance.52
We can read the Cynocephalus in BL Cotton Vitellius A.xv as a Cynocephalus, and similarly the
two Cynocephali from the famous tympanum of the Benedictine abbey church of Sainte-Marie-
Madeleine at Vézelay as Cynocephali by the informing contexts, the text of the manuscript,
the surrounding figures in tympanum, and the shared features of the representations, the human
bodies and elongated, muzzle-like faces (Fig. 38.4 and 38.5). And once we identify these figures
Figure 38.5 Cynocephali, Tympanum of the Benedictine Abbey Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine,

Vézelay. Image courtesy of Karl Steel.
529
as Cynocephali, we can progress with the pluralities of iconographical readings that, as Cyno-
cephali, they point to. But if we limit our focus to these stabilities through which we identify and
read the Cynocephalus as such, we also elide the problem that these monsters are significantly
different from each other, even in those identifying features. The Vitellius figure is elaborately
clothed, even regal, in contrast to the bent and twisting figures on the Vézelay tympanum, one
naked and one clothed in a short, simple tunic, for example. And furthermore, even the identify-
ing features like the dog-head are not so transparent: the elongated muzzle-like faces in both the
BL Cotton Vitellius A.xv and the Vézelay figures, for example, are not simply or unambiguously
canine, and not, for example, dissimilar in shape to the horse-heads represented in Royal 20 B.xx
(f. 29).53 The problem we are articulating here is also the invitation offered through Hurlbut’s
“manuscript average.”
These “average images” are something of a rebuke to traditional iconography, which, espe-
cially since Erwin Panofsky’s landmark work, has in seeking to determine the “correct icono-
graphical analysis” of a work of art taught us to look away from that work, and inevitably toward
a text.54 “Literary sources,” he says, are “indispensable and sufficient for an iconographical anal-
ysis,” when coupled with “a corrective principle which may be called the history of style,” and,
if absolutely necessary, some knowledge of cultural context.55 Any remaining ambiguities are, for
Panofsky and his method, problems rather than strengths in works of art, and can be dismissed
as the result of “clumsiness,” “incompetence” of a “poor . . . copyist,” and other examples of
“failure.”56 Indeed, even when his system is functioning well, for Panofsky, “we deal with the
work of art as a symptom.”57 In contrast, Jennifer Borland encourages us to embrace the idea that
“in cases where so little is known about the object, its function, or its meaning,” as is so often the
case with monstrous imagery, we can adopt an approach that “acknowledges and capitalizes on
necessary speculation,” since “iconography demands knowledge of ‘original’ meanings usually
based on textual sources that we often do not have.”58
Of course, we can still posit iconographical meanings in the absence of reliable texts, but the
“manuscript average” images ask us to look at art differently, in a way never before possible, to
look at manuscripts and the monsters they contain in more complete ways than our eyes can
manage. The result does not produce the sort of clarity and “correctness” that Panofsky was
seeking, not the “oneness” he praises in Renaissance art.59 Rather, the bizarre and beautiful one-
ness of our “monster average,” this composite aggregate image of hybrid monsters and collective,
violent action, invites puzzled contemplation: how did that stirrup come to be on the monster
side? What are those leathery wings attached to? Who, if anyone, is winning? In the singular
images, time and again Alexander triumphs, but the “average” emphasizes the endless nature of
these battles, and the endless chains of signification they imply.
Hurlbut’s project is restorative in its explicit aim: the recreation of the apprehension of the
manuscript as “a whole thing,” complete with weight, the smell, the groaning of the bindings, the
crackling of parchment.60 Of course, one other premise must also be that such recreation, through
another kind of digitized image, creates something different, necessarily dislocated from the man-
uscript as an original object, however effectively it evokes that “whole thing.” There is no view of
an actual manuscript – seen in person in a library reading room, held in the hands, its sharp scent
smelled, its leather cover and vellum pages felt – that affords anything close to the view provided
by Hurlbut’s wonderful reimaging and reimagining of the manuscripts he has “averaged.” There
is, without such techniques, no way to see “a whole thing” at once, except perhaps in one’s mind.
In this sense, his “manuscript averages” and, following his lead, our “monster average” are new
creations, but ones that generate previously unarticulated information about the original artifacts.
And further, as the “manuscript averages” evoke the simultaneity of the “whole thing” we expe-
rience in the manuscript, they also allow for what both Camille and Cohen have described as
530
the “haunting” of the monstrous: in that simultaneity, in the disorienting superimposed frames,
we can see, feel, and know something, even though we may not be able to articulate what that
something is without losing what provokes it in the first place.
Conclusions: “A great bulk of material, which may seem bewildering”61

Any study of the iconography of the monstrous arrives quickly at a sense of excess, in the pro-
liferation of material offered up for examination, in the exponential expansion of possibilities for
interpretation, and in the seemingly unavoidable self-reflexiveness of iconographical readings of
images created as signs, in representation, and thus as signs of signs, and, as such, demonstrating
the process of interpretation itself (among many other things). Uneasiness with this excess is
manifest in Mâle’s suggestion about the monstrous figures on the Vézelay portals, that “ingenious
archaeologists” may read more than “the old craftsmen” could have intended in images “which
are invisible from below except with good glasses.”62 It is certainly tempting to counter the
suggestion – for example, with discussion of the impact of these highly detailed figures barely
discernable from below, in the context of the cathedral, or of the fact that these images are now
available in high resolution in digital photographs, and their reception cannot be limited, now, to
only the physical context of the cathedral itself. But more important than the immediate argu-
ment about the cathedral portal is the expression of discomfort with the interpretation of these
figures, and by one of the founding scholars of iconographical methodology itself. Uneasiness
about the monstrous becomes immediately discomfort with too much “subtlety” or too much
“ingenuity” – that is, with excess in interpretation, with the implication that we can go too far
in our attempts to make and find meaning. We suggest here that going too far is part of what
engaging with the monstrous requires of us, that, haunted and bewildered, we have in the iconog-
raphy of monstrous the chance to see and feel more than we might know how to write about.
Notes
1 See, for example, J.J. Cohen’s influential “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in J.J. Cohen (ed.), Mon-
ster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, 1996), 3–25, and A.S. Mittman, “Introduction: The Impact of
Monsters and Monster Studies,” in Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. A.S. Mittman
with P. Dendle (London, 2012), 1–14.
2 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, PL 41, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1845), 16.8: “Ita etsi major diversitas oriatur,
scit ille quid egerit, cujus opera juste nemo reprehendit.”
3 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. S.A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, and O.
Berghof (Cambridge, 2006), XI.iii.3, 244.
4 B. Roy, “En Marge du Monde Connu: Les Races de Monstres,” in Aspects de la Marginalité au Moyen Age,
ed. G.-H. Allard (Montreal, 1974), 72.
5 É. Mâle, L’art réligieux de XIIIe siècle en France: étude sur l’iconographie de moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspi-
ration (Paris, 1898); É. Mâle, Religious Art in France, XIII Century: A Study of Medieval Iconography and Its
Sources (London, 1913).
6 Mâle, Religious Art (as in note 5), 27–28.
7 Mâle, Religious Art (as in note 5), 33.
9 Etymologies XI.iii.28–31 (as in note 3): “Dicuntur autem et alia hominum fabulosa portenta, quae non
sunt, sed ficta in causis rerum interpretantur.”
10 See Mâle, Religious Art (as in note 5), 47, for further discussion.
11 R. Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), 159.
12 Wittkower, “Marvels of the East” (as in note 11), 165.
14 L.M.C. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley, 1966).
531
15 Randall, Images (as in note 14), 3, with internal quotation and translation from Apologia ad Guillelmus
Sancti Theoderici Abbatem, MPL, CLXXXII, cols. 915–16.
16 Randall, Images (as in note 14), 4.
17 Randall, Images (as in note 14), 10, sympathetically quoting as “not unjustifiably in the particular
instance”; M.J. Rickert, Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1954), 148–49.
20 J.B. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, 1981).
21 Friedman, Monstrous Races (as in note 20), 154.
22 M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1992), 9.
23 M. Camille, “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art,” in Iconography at
the Crossroads, ed. B. Cassidy (Princeton, 1993), 42–48.
24 M. Camille, “Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters (Rethinking The Canon),” The Art Bulletin 78
(June 1996), 198–201.
25 Camille, “Mouths and Meanings” (as in note 23), 45.
30 Camille, “Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters” (as in note 24), 199.
32 For a personal account of the dismissive attitude, see Mittman, “The Impact of Monsters and Monster
Studies” (as in note 1), 1–2: “‘Listen, Asa, you’ve got to drop all this monster stuff and start doing real
scholarship.’”
34 J.J. Cohen, “Preface: In a Time of Monsters,” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. J.J. Cohen (Min-
neapolis, 1996), ix–x.
35 J. Hurlbut, “The Manuscript Average, Part 1,” Manuscript Art (12/14/2013), http://jessehurlbut.net/
wp/mssart/?page_id=2097 (accessed August 21, 2015).
36 For many of the images from this manuscript, see “Detailed record for Royal 20 B XX,” British Library
Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (no date), http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/
record.asp?MSID=6533&CollID=16&NStart=200220 (accessed August 2015).
40 The Psalter Map is available online at the British Library’s website: “Psalter World Map,” British Library
Collection Highlights (no date), http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/psalter-world-map (accessed August
2015).
41 For a complete color facsimile of the Wonders of the East, see A.S. Mittman and S.M. Kim, Inconceivable
Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (Tempe, 2013).
42 D.G. White, Myths of the Dog-Man (Chicago, 1991), 1.
43 M. Camille, Gothic Art:Visions and Revelations of the Medieval World (London, 1996), 152.
44 For a discussion of the unification of warrior and armor into a posthuman cyborg, see A.S. Mittman
and P. MacCormack, “Rebuilding the Fabulated Bodies of the Staffordshire Hoarders,” postmedieval 7:3,
“Hoarders and Hordes: Responses to the Staffordshire Hoard” (October, 2016), 356–68.
45 “Detail of a Miniature of Alexander’s Battle with Boars and Many-Handed Savages,” British Library
Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (no date), http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/
ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=46701 (accessed August 2015).
46 D. Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal,
1996), 13.
47 Williams, Deformed Discourse (as in note 46), 216–22.
49 M.B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, 1991),
4. For discussion of a similar instance of scribal transformation of a monster, the People with Three
Colors, see Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts (as in note 41), 79–81.
50 White, Myths of the Dog-Man (as in note 42), 31.
51 White, Myths of the Dog-Man (as in note 42), 33.
532
52 Campbell, Witness and the Other World (as in note 49), 72.
53 For an image, see “Royal 20 B XX, f. 79, Battle with Horse-Headed Men,” British Library Catalogue
of Illuminated Manuscripts (no date), http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.
ASP?Size=mid&IllID=46745 (accessed August 2015).
54 E. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in The Art
of Art History, ed. D. Preziosi (Oxford, 2009), 224, 2nd ed. This is a reprint of a text first published as
Studies in Iconology (Oxford, 1939).
55 Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” (as in note 54), 225–27.
56 Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” (as in note 54), 232, 233, 234.
57 Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” (as in note 54), 223 (emphasis added).
58 J. Borland, “Audience and Spatial Experience in the Nuns’ Church at Clonmacnoise,” Different Visions:
A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 3 (September 2011), 1–45, 4, http://www.differentvisions.
org/issue3/Borland.pdf (accessed September 2015).
59 Panofsky (as in note 54), 224, 234.
60 Hurlbut, “The Manuscript Average” (as in note 35).
533
INDEX
Italic indicates a figure on the corresponding page.
Abbey Church of Saint-Denis 467–8, 468, 482 Andrew W. Mellon foundation 189
Abbot Suger on the Church of St. Denis and Its Art Aneau, Barthélemy 12, 15, 21, 22, 23
Treasures (Panofsky) 112–13 animal iconography 504–6; bestiaries in
Acta Sanctorum 223 507–9; in emblems 16; marginalia 509–10;
Agamben, G. 39 St. Lawrence Church, Ludlow 510–15;
agency and patronage 348–51 symbolism in 505–7
Agilulf 359 Annales Archéologiques 48, 50–1, 53, 54
Agobard of Lyons 243 Annales School 71
Airlie House 193 Annotationes (Alciato) 11
Alarich II, King 360 Anselm of Canterbury 244–5, 246
Alber, Franz 97, 115 anthropology of images 175–81
Alberti 19 anti-iconography of Camille 164
Albrecht Dürer (Panofsky) 111, 119 Antonio of Pisa 345
Alciato, Andrea 1, 2, 11–12, 34; commentaries on anxiety, spiritual 246–8
emblems of 23; emblems of 12–16; emblems apes 506
reception in the material culture 24–7; notion Apollon 58
of symbolism 19–21; translations of emblems of Apologia (Bernard of Clairvaux) 520–1
21–2; use of the term “emblem” 16–19 Aquinas, Thomas 39, 447
Aldobrandino of Siena 271 archaeological studies by Didron 48–9, 52
Aldus, house of 12, 17, 22 architecture, iconography of 373–82; castles 381–2;
Alexander III, Pope 302 columns in 377; cruciform mausoleums 379–80;
Alexander IV, Pope 302 ecclesiastical 465–71; entrances in 375; groups
Alexander the Great and monsters 523–7 of buildings and 377–9; longitudinal basilicas
Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle 528 381; palace chapel of Charlemagne 379–80;
Alexander, Jonathan 349 significance of different parts of buildings in
Alfonso X 317, 484 374–7; symbolism of the church and 373–4
al-Sufi, Abd al-Rahman ibn Umar 316–17 Arías, Isabel Monteira 497
Al-Zahrāwī 330 Aristotle 19, 20, 34, 272, 324, 413
Amaury-Duval, Emmanuel 49 Arnulf of Carinthia 364
Ambrose, Kirk 413 Art Bulletin, The 137, 166
Amerbach, Boniface 11 Art des scupteurs romans (Réau) 60
American Library Association 193 Art Medieval (Faure) 59
Amman, Jost 22 Arts of Early England, The (Brown) 145
Analecta Bollandiniana 223 Artstor database 3
Anastasis Rotunda 378–9 Artus Court 303–4
534
Index
Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem
Monstrous 497 Zeitalter der Kunst (Belting) 162
astronomy See scientific iconography Bildarchiv Foto Marburg 189
Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaf 114 Billiet, Frédéric 480
Augustrodunensis, Honorious 67 Bing, Gertud 77–8, 80–1, 86, 93, 94, 116, 188
Aulus Gellius 20 Binski, Paul 156, 162
Autumn of the Middle Ages (Huizinga) 69 Binswanger, Ludwig 77
aviaries 508–9 birds 507–9, 528
Aymar, Brandt 157 Birth of Venus, The (Botticelli) 463
Bisconti, Fabrizio 225
badges 390–1, 507 black and African persons as Others 495, 497, 498
Baert, Barbara 5 Blanckenhagen, Peter Heinrich von 113
Baldini, Baccio 34 Bleeke, Marian 433
Balfour, Henry 188 blue color 444–5
Bandmann, Günter 119 Blumenkranz, Bernhard 495
Barberini, Maffeo 36 Boccaccio 430, 432
Bargheer, Eduard 113 body, the medical 324–7
Barr, Alfred H., Jr. 111, 125–6 Bognetti, G. P. 148
Barr, Margaret Scolari 111 Bolland, Jean 223
Barral i Altet, Xavier 224 Bolzani, Perio Valeriano 1
Barrell, John 159 Bomford, Zahira Véliz 186
Bartholeyns, G. 178 Bondone, Giotto di 41
Bartlett, Robert 499 Bonhomme, Macé 12
Bartoli, Cosimo 35 Book of the City of Ladies, The (de Pizan) 431–2
Bartolo, Taddeo di 487 Book of the Duchess (Chaucer) 287
Baschet, Jérôme 164, 181, 225 Book of the Three Virtues, The (de Pizan) 432
basilicas, longitudinal 381 Borland, Jennifer 433, 530
Bassée, Nicolaus 22 Boswell, John 496
Bath, Michael 27 Botticini, Francesco 84, 460, 463
Bauch, Kurt 114 Boulvène, Jacque 35
Baudoin, Jean 33 Boyer, Jean-Claude 35
Baxandall, Michael 341 Boyer, Paul 58
Bazin, Germain 57 Bredekamp, Horst 5, 177, 178
beauty role in iconography 70 Bréhier, L. 223
Beauvais, Vincent de 51, 67 Breitenbach, Edgar 97, 117, 187, 189
Bebelius 12 Brière-Misme, Clotilde 186
Beckford, William 158–9 Brigitte of Sweden 61
Beilmann, Mechthild 130 Brilliant, Richard 484
Belles Heures 417, 418 Brisac, Catherine 54
Bellini, Giovanni 36 Broederlam, Melchior 460
Belting, Hans 5, 162, 178, 225 Brooke, Barry S. 479
Berenson, Bernard 111 Brown, G. Baldwin 145
Bernard of Clairvaux 373, 406, 444, Bryson, Norman 156
520–1, 522 Bullard, Melissa Meriam 348
Beroaldo the Elder 19 Bulletin Archéologique 49, 53
Berry, Duke John of 154, 158–9, 166, 168, 256, Burckhardt, Jakob 79
417, 457 Burger, Glenn 496
Besozzo, Michelino da 456–7 Burlington Magazine 162
Bestiaire d’amour 509 Bynum, Caroline 346, 415, 417, 419
bestiaries 507–9 Byrhtferth’s diagram 399–401
Betjman, John 155
Bhabha, Homi 492 Cabrol, F. 223
Bialostocki, Jan 99, 107, 119, 137 Cadamosto, Paolo Aemilio 22
Biay, Sébastien 522 Caesarius of Heisterbach 522
Bible moralisée 349–51, 496 Cahier, Charles 58–9, 66
Bibliothèque Royale 52–3 Cahn, Walter 145
Bidler, Rose 147 Calcagnini, Celio 18
535
Index
Callimachus 453 Cohen, Jerome 523, 530–1

Calvo, Francesco 16–17 Colombe, Michel 37
Camille, Michael 71, 252, 267, 271, 276, 348, 496; Colonna, Francesco 14–15
introduction to work of 154–6; on color 445; color, iconography of: analysis of specific colors
on monsters 521–2, 527, 530–1; origins of in 441–7; blue and 444–5; garments and 439;
156–9; writings of 160–8 green and 445–6; introduction to 437–41;
Campbell, Mary B. 528, 529 purple and 442–3; red and 443–4; religious
Campin, Robert 460 imagery and 437–48; yellow 447
Canini, Giovanni 223 Combe, Thomas 295
Cantigas de Santa María 498, 498 combs, hair 290–2
Capaccio, Guilo Cesare 22 Comité historique des Arts et Monuments 48, 49
Capellas, Martianus 36, 312 computer technology: in studying heraldic imagery
Caritas (Ripa) 41, 40–2 397; role in reviving iconography 2–3, 189–90;
Carrow Psalter 445, 446 see also classification systems and cataloging tools
Cartari, Vincenzo 1 Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the
Caskey, Jill 340 Author of Sir Charles Grandison (Young) 152
Cassiodorus 522 Conseil d’État 49
Cassirer, Ernst 77, 110, 115 Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, The
castles, architecture of 381–2 (Rembrandt) 131, 132, 136
Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts 528 Conti, Rinaldo 302
Cavallini, Pietro 240 Contra vitam monasticam (Alciato) 11
Caviness, Madeline 157, 486 Cook, Walter W. S. 111
Census of Antique Art and Architecture 189 Coronation Book 358, 368
Charlemagne 310, 356, 357, 360–1, 364, 368; Corrigan, Kathleen 496
palace chapel of 379–80 Corrozet, Gilles 35
Charles I 26 Council of Trent 69–70, 223, 241–3
Charles IV 366 Courtauld Institute 3
Charles the Bald 341, 342, 345, 359, 360–4, 362–3 courtly love imagery 427–31
Charles V 12, 358, 358, 368 Coussemaker, Edmond de 51
Charles VIII 390 Covers of the Lorsch Gospels, The (Morey) 125
Chaucer, Geoffrey 251, 287 Cranach’s Saint Maurice 497
Chicago, Judy 425, 431–2 Cratylus (Plato) 20
Choice of Emblems, A 21 Crispin, Gilbert 246, 247, 248
Christian iconography See religious iconography Crivelli, Carlo 462
Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins Crosnier, A. 223
(Grabar) 224 crowns 356–9
Chronica Maiora (Paris) 408, 493 cultural expansion 57
chronology of patronage 344 culturalist approaches to image 177–8
Cicero 20, 115, 312 Curtius, Ernst Robert 113
City of God (Augustine) 184, 432, 518 Cuthbert 244–5
civic political iconography 302–5 Cuvier, Georges 58
Clark, T. J. 159, 164 Cuxa, Michel de 484
classical history and mythology in imagery 16, Cynocephali 529, 529–30
17–18, 297, 453, 454–5
Classical Mythology in Medieval Art (Panofsky and d’Arzago, A. de Capitani 148
Saxl) 89, 92, 112 d’Eyck, Barthélemy 396
classification systems and cataloging tools: d’Oresme, Nicole 38
anthropology of images and use of 175–81; Da Barberino, Francesco 35, 36, 40
classifying image content in visual collections Daly, Peter 296
184–90; DIAL (Decimal Index of the Art of the Dante 35, 37, 115, 421, 459
Low Countries) 132–3, 134, 202, 207; Iconclass Dantyszek, Jan 18
132–3, 188, 189, 201–15; Library of Congress Darcel, Alfred 51
subject headings 192–200 David, Gerard 460
coats of arms see heraldic imagery Davis, Whitney 160
Cockaigne 260, 260–1 Daza of Valladolid, Bernardino 22–3
Codex Egberti 442 De animalibus (Aristotle) 272
Codex Gisle 486 De Archa Noe (Hugo of St. Victor) 253
536
Index
De generatione (Aristotle) 272 disguised symbolism 107

De Givry, Cardinal 21 disjunction, principle of 96
De Insigniis et Armis (da Sassoferrato) 396 Disputation of a Christian and a Jew (Crispin) 247
De mulieribus claris (Boccaccio) 432 Documenti d’Amore (Barberino) 35, 36, 40
De natura rerum 92–5 Dodds, Jerrilyn 497
De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (Capellas) 36 dogs 505–7
De singulari certamine (Alciato) 12, 17 Dölger, Joseph 224
De universo (Maurus) 373 Donatello 396
De verborum significatione (Alciato) 19 Donato, Francesco 22
Decameron (Boccaccio) 430 Donato, Geronimo 18
Decio, Filippo 11 Doni, Anton Francesco 35
Declaración magistral sobre las [sic] emblemas de Andres Doni, Raffaelo 84
Alciato (López) 23 Doren, Alfred 188
Deformed Discourse (Williams) 528 Dorner, Alexander 111
Deguileville, Guillaume de 36, 38 Doucet, Jacques 186
Dendle, Peter 497 Dreibilderserie (Sudhoff ) 325–7
Detzel, Heinrich 224 Dressler, Rachel 433
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 117 Dufresne, Lilian Henriette 133
Deutschsprachige Aufsätze (Panofsky) 112 Durand, Hippolyte 50
DeWald, Ernest 125 Durand, J. 223
diagrams see maps and diagrams Durand, Paul 51
DIAL (Decimal Index of the Art of the Low Durand, William 240, 243
Countries) 132–3, 134, 202, 207 Durandus 373, 375–6
Dialogue with Trypho (Justin) 236, 246 Dürer, Albrecht 90, 92, 111, 115, 300, 463
Dictionnaire critique d’iconographie occidentale (Barral Dürers Kunsttheorie, vornehmlich in ihrem Verhältnis
i Altet) 224 zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener (Panofsky) 107
Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie Dutton, Paul 361
(Cabrol and Leclercq) 223 Dvorák, Max 89
Dictionnaire érotique (Bidler) 147
Dictionnaire polyglotte des termes d’art et d’architectur Eadmer 244
(Réau) 59 Early Christian Art: Outline of the Evolution
Didron, Adolphe-Napoléon 1, 47, 66, 223; Annales of Style and Iconography in Scupture and
Archéologiques and Librairie archéologique and 48, Painting from Antiquity to the Eighth
50–1; as journalist, professor, and businessman Century (Morey) 125
52–4; career choices of 47–8; Christian Early Latin Illustrated Manuscripts (Morey) 125
iconography and 51; gothic art and 51–2; late Early Netherlandish Painting (Panofsky) 107, 111,
and limited official recognition for 49–50; 113, 119
legacy of 54; methodology for archaeological East Christian Manuscripts (Morey) 125
studies 48–9; opinion on restoration of Easton, Martha 417
monuments 52 Ebstorf Map 252–5, 401, 404
Didron, Édouard 51, 53 Ebulos, Petrus de 256
Die Denkmale der deutschen Könige und Kaiser Ecce Homo (Rembrandt) 138
(Schramm) 356 Echecs moralisées 39
Die deutsche Plastik des elften bis dreizehnten Eco, Umberto 373
Jahrhunderts (Panofsky) 112, 117 École Normale Supérieure 57
Die deutschen Kaiser und Könige in Bildern ihrer Zeit Edward I 246, 359
751–1190, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik Edward IV 513
(Schramm) 356 Edward the Confessor 358, 366
Die Gestaltungsprincipien Michelangelos, besonders in Egbert, Donald Drew 125
ihrem Verhältnis zu denen Raffaels (Panofsky) 108 Eigil, Abbot 378
difference: and the Other 492–500; monsters Einem, Herbert von 114
demonstrating 525–31 Eisenbeiss, Anja 497
Dillon, Emma 486, 487 Eisler, Colin 113
Dinner Party (Chicago) 425 Elbern, Viktor 225
Dioscorides 330–1, 456 Eleanor of Aquitaine 432
Discorso sopra la Mascherata della genealogia degli déi Eliav-Feldon, Miriam 497
(Baldini) 34 Elizabeth I 25–6
537
Index
Elsner, Jas 225 454–5; religious imagery and 453–4, 457–63;

Emblemata (Alciato) 19, 20 symbolism of 462
emblems: Alciato’s 12–16; commentaries on 23; Focillon, Henri 59, 96
content of 15–16; defining 16–19; formatting Folda, Jaroslav 4
of 12–13; meaning of 15, 20–1; political Forsyth, Ilene 143
iconography and 295–297; popularity of Francis of Assisi 243, 244
13–14; reception in material culture 24–7; François I 17
symbolism of 19–21; translations of 21–2; see Frederic II of Hohenstaufen 317
also heraldic imagery Freedberg, David 162, 177, 180
Encomium historiae (Alciato) 11 Freedman, Paul 492
Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Freie Hansestadt Hamburg 113
Depicted in Works of Art (Roberts) 224 Frick Library 185
Encyclopedia of the Black Death 322 Friedman, John Block 521, 525
epigrams 17 Friend, Albert M. 118, 123
Erasmus 11, 12, 15, 19, 115 Fritz, Johann Michael 252
Ercole II d’Este 12 Fröbe-Kapteyn, Olga 188
erotic iconography 157–8, 166, 168; allusions to Frojmovic, Eva 496
sex and 147, 160, 417; Christian art and 147, Fromentin, Eugène 133–4
269–71; diversity of 276–7; in manuscripts Frugardi, Roger 330
273–6; Manesse Codex 272, 272–3, 276; on Fünfbilderserie (Sudhoff ) 324–5
public monuments 273; portable figurines 273;
sadism in 276, 417, 427; sheela-na-gigs 274; Gage, John 439, 441
studies of 267–8 Galen of Pergamum 324, 333
Erwin Panofsky in Memoriam 106 Galle, Philippe 35
Éthiques d’Aristote (Ripa) 37, 38–9 Gaposchkin, Cecilia 348
Ettlinger, Leopold 114 Gargoyles of Notre Dame, The (Camille) 166
Etymologies (Isidore of Seville) 373 Garnier, François 3
Eucharist, the 244–5 Gasparin, Adrien de 52
Excerpta Medica 201, 202 Gattinara, Charles V Cardinal Mercurino 18
Eyck, Jan van 299, 382, 460, 462 Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History 157
Gazeau, Guillaume 12
Fabiny, Tibor 297 Gell, Alfred 176, 177
Fabriano, Gentile da 487 gender, iconography of 412–21; identity and 417–20;
Faceted Application of Subject Terminology religious themes in 412–17, 419, 419–20, 427;
(FAST) project 198–9 sexual violence against women and 430–2;
Faeij, Lepido 33 sexuality and 417–18; souls and 420–1
Fassler, Margot 373, 377 Genesis of Christian Art, The (Morey) 125
Faure, Élie 59–60 Gerald of Wales 406, 493
Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index 433 Gerhard of Cremona 316
feminist art history 425–33; courtly love imagery Germanicus 318–19
and 427–31; feminist scholars of the Middle Gerson, Horst 130
Ages and 432; recent scholarship in 432–3; Gerson, Paula 276
sexual violence against women and 430–2; gesture: in narrative 283–7; language of 97–100
women artists and 425–6 Getty Museum 441, 508; Art History Information
Fendulus, Georgius 317 Program 3; Research Institute 189
Fest, Joachim 107 Geyl, Pieter 137
Feyerabend, Sigismund 22 Giarda, Cristoforo 34
Fiera, Battista 38 Giesau, Hermann 113
Filarete 340 Gilbert, Creighton 4, 184, 185, 348
First Bible of Charles the Bald 341, 342, 345 Ginzburg, Carlo 96
Fisher, Celia 4 Giorgio, Francesco di 375, 376
Flexner, Abraham 110 Glass, Ira 154
Flora, Holly 340, 348 goats 506
Florimi, Matteo 33 Godde, Étienne-Hippolyte 52
flowers and plants, iconography of 453–63; in Goes, Hugo van der 459
Flemish tapestries 462; in manuscripts 456–7; Goldschmidt, Adolph 70, 92, 96, 105, 108, 110
paradise depicted with 461, 461; pre-Christian Golsenne, T. 178
538
Index
Gombrich, Ernst 34 393–4; see also emblems; royal and imperial

Google 189 iconography
Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Panofsky) 66, Hercules am Scheidewege (Panofsky) 118
113, 155 Hereford mappa mundi 399–408
gothic art 51–2, 229–31; see also Mâle, Émile Hermogenes 20
Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Herrlinger, Robert 324
Art, The (Camille) 71, 154, 159, 160–2, 166, 496 Hertz, Mary 76–7
Gothic Image, The (Mâle) 71, 154 Heydenreich, Ludwig Heinrich 114
Gozzoli, Benozzo 302–3 Hieroglypica Hotapollinis (Horapollo) 14, 19
Grabar, André 58, 71, 148, 224 Hieronymus 310
Graff, Raymund 22 Hildegard of Bingen 415, 416, 426, 432, 440
Grande Revue 59 Hills, Paul 447
Grandes Chroniques de France 358, 368 Hippocrates 324
Gratiam referendam (Alciato) 14 Histoire de l’art (Faure) 59
green color 445–6 Histoire de l’expansion de l’art français (Réau) 58
Green, Henry 22 Histoire de l’histoire de l’art (Bazin) 57
Gregory I, Pope 242 Histoire du vandalisme: Les monuments détruits de l’art
Gregory IX, Pope 302 français (Réau) 58, 60, 62
Gregory of Tours 413 Historia de proelis (Hurlbut) 523
Gregory the Great 175, 184, 222, 492 Historia Francorum 356
Gregory XIII, Pope 241 History of the Peloponnesian Wars 26
Guilhermy, Ferdinand de 50, 51, 54 Hoey, Larry 345
Guizot, François 49 Holy Sepulcher 287–8
Holzinger, Ernst 114
Hadrian I, Pope 380 Horace 20
Hagar in the Desert (Rembrandt) 138 Horapollo 19
Hagia Sophia 465–6, 472 Hortus Deliciarum 67
Hahn, Cynthia 346 Hosios Loukas 472
hair: combs 290–2; royalty and long 359–60 Hours of Engelbert 457, 458
Halperin, David 156 Hourse of Jeanne d’Evreux 341
Haman in Disgrace (Rembrandt) 134 Hugo of St. Victor 253
Hamburger Kunsthalle 108 Hugo, Victor 48, 49, 52–3, 65, 522
Hamburger, Jeffrey 166 Huizinga, Johan 69
Harsy, Denis de 21 human body in medicine 324–7
Harvey, Gabriel 24 Hunger, Wolfgang 21, 22–3
Harvey, John 24, 155 Hurlbut, Jesse 523
Haseloff, Arthur 110, 118 Hurtado de Mendoça, Diego 23
Haskall, Francis 344 Hüter, Simon 22
Hécatomgraphie (Corrozet) 35 Hyckes, Francis 26, 27
Heckscher, William S. 106, 111, 113, 188 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Colonna) 15
Held, Jeremias 22
Henderson, George 156 Iconclass 132–3, 188, 189; coding of works of art
Heng, Geraldine 499 with more than one subject 207; digital world
Henkel, Arthur 16 and 207–10, 211; enriching metadata using
Henry II 364, 366, 406 213–15; general principles 202–4; structure
Henry III 346, 348, 358–9, 365–6 flexibility 204–5; user as collaborator and
Henry VI 368 editor of 211–13; words, keywords, and cross-
Henry VII 368 references 205–7
Henry VIII 453 Icones Symbolicae (Giarda) 34
Heraclitus 20 Iconografia (Canini) 223
heraldic imagery 299–300, 386–97; animals iconographic languages, development of 237–40
in 507; as emblematic and symbolic 395; iconographic topography 225–8
badges or heraldic devices 390–1; development Iconographie chrétienne (Crosnier) 223
of styles of 391–2; digital future of studying Iconographie chrétienne, Histoire de Dieu
397; functions of 395; importance of (Didron) 48, 223
395–6; marginal systems 396–7; para-heraldic Iconographie de l’art chrétien (Réau) 59, 60, 224
signs 389–90; used in absentia of bearer Iconographie der christlichen Kunst (Künstle) 224
539
Index
Iconographie der christlichen Kunst (Schiller) 224 Imagines et elogia vivorum inlustrium (Statius) 223
iconography: animal 504–15; as historical Imago Musicae 479
construction 80; classical history and mythology Imago Pietatis: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des
in 16, 17–18, 297, 453, 454–5; classification Schmerzensmanns und der Maria Mediatrix
of images in 184–90; computer technology (Panofsky) 110, 111, 118
role in 2–3, 189–90; cultural expansion and In Memoriam 1940–1945 (Van de Waal) 134
58; dating of 148–9; deciphering the world In nothos (Alciato) 13
59, 143; definitions of 1, 6, 79; development In the Defense of the Ivory Tower (Panofsky) 112
of scholarship on 3–6; early 20th century Index of Christian Art 2, 3, 123, 125, 126–8, 185,
interest in 2; early works on 1–2; erotic (see 186–7, 189, 224
erotic iconography); feminist art history and Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 368
425–33; iconology and 118–19; language Innocent III, Pope 302
of gestures in 97–100; Library of Congress Innocent IV, Pope 302
subject headings and 192–200; liturgical (see instruments, representations of 480–5
liturgical iconography); methods and thematic International Center of Medieval Art 3
density 228–31; Mnemosyne Atlas of 80–7, Ireland 405–8
97; monstrous 518–31; of architecture 373–82; Irish High Crosses 4
of black and African figures 495–6; of color Isaac, Benjamin 497
437–48; of flowers and plants 453–63; of Isidore of Seville 373
gender 412–21; of light 465–76; of music and Ivins, William M. 111
sound 479–88; of narrative 282–93; of the
Other 492–500; patronage of 340–51; political James, M. R. 508
(see political iconography); postructuralist Janitschek, Hubert 75
theory and 155, 225; recent increase in 4; Jesus Christ: color and imagery of 442–47;
secular (see secular iconography); shortcuts depicted in Hereford map 402–3; depicted in
in 80; topography and 225–8; typology in the Ebstorf Map 254–5, 401; depicted royal
117; Warburg Institute emblem 92–5; see also portraits 300; killing of 237, 246–8; Lazarus and
classification systems and cataloging tools; 419, 419–20; light imagery and 468–71, 473–5;
images mind of 235; the Eucharist and 244–5;
Iconography at the Crossroads 162 see also liturgical iconography; religious
Iconologia overo Descrittione Dell’imagini Universali iconography
cavate dall’Antichità et da altri luoghi (Ripa) 1, Jews and Otherness 493–500
32–4, 223; sources for 34–6; standardization of Joan of Arc 432
personifications 40–2 Joannides, Paul 158
iconology 118–19 John of Berry 417
identity: and the Other 492–500; gender 417–20; John of Salisbury 305
new iconographic languages and 238–40; of John the Evangelist 377
true Israel 240–3; through heraldic emblems John the Good 368
386–9; transfer, Israelite to Christian 236–7 John VIII, Pope 364
idols, pagan 160–2 John XXIII, Pope 379
Illuminated Manuscripts of the J. Pierpont Morgan Jones, Malcom 27, 252
Library (Morey) 125 Jones, Peter 324, 327
Image of the Black in Western Art 495, 497 Jöns, Dietrich 297
Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art Jordan, William 499
(Camille) 154, 164–6, 496, 521 Jörg Syrlin der Ältere und seine Bildwerke (Panofsky) 107
images: classifying content of 184–90; congruence Jörgensen, Trux 113
between space and 226–7; from material Journal général de l’Instruction publique, Le 53
turn to the performative turn 176–7; from Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 496
representation to presence 175–6; heraldic (see Journey of Christ toward the Cross, The (van Eyck) 299
heraldic imagery); intrinsic image-act and power Judaism 133, 134–5
of ornament 178–81; naturalist and culturalist Julian the Apostate 235
approaches to 177–8; of constellations 314; see Juliana of Mont Cornillion 244–5, 246, 247
also iconography Jung, Jacqueline 346
Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Randall) Junius, Hadrianus 12
520–1 Justi, Carl 75
Images of Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Justin Martyr 236–7, 246
Times 497 Justitia Pingenda (Fiera) 38
540
Index
Kahneman, Daniel 86 Lazarus 419, 419–20

Kaiser Heinrichs Romfahrt 368 Le Coup du Lance (Rubens) 5
Kaplan, Paul 495 Le Fèvre, Jean 15, 21, 23
Katzenellenbogen, Adolf 111 Le Petit Orfevre (Rembrandt) 138–9, 139
Kauffmann, Hans 114 Leclercq, H. 223
Kaufmann, Hans 108 Ledoux, Auguste 53
Kelly, D. 39 Lee, Henry 24
Kemp, Wolfgang 282 Lees, A. van 299
Kempe, Margery 432 Légende Dorée 51
Kendall, Calvin 377 Lemaire de Belges, Jean 39–40
Kessler, Herbert 225, 341, 361, 497 Léniaud, Jean-Michel 54
Kidson, Peter 345 Lenoir, Albert 49, 52
Kirschbaum, Engelbert 224 Leo VI 365
Kitzinger, Ernst 225, 344 Leo X 11
Klauser, Theodore 224 Leo, Dominic 276
Klein, Peter 497 Leonardo da Vinci 463
Klein, Robert 185 Les Maîtres d’autrefois (Fromentin) 133
Klibansky, Raymond 90, 130 Leson, Richard 274
Koch, Robert A. 106 Letourneur, Pierre 152
Koninklijk Museum 5 Leuschner, E. 33
Konrad II 365 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 113
Kracauer, Siegfried 96, 111 Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie
Krautheimer, Richard 225, 373, 377–8, 379 (Kirschbaum) 224
Kruger, Stephen 496 Liber ad honorem Augusti (Ebulos) 256
Kubler, Georg 96, 99 Liber de signis et imaginibus celi 317–18
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg Liber introductorius 317
(KBW) 76–7, 78, 97, 108, 110, 111, 117 Liber pontificalis 356
Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Wölfflin) 110 Liber Vitae 341–2, 345
Kunsthistorisches Institut 187, 189 Liberté, La 53
Künstle, Karl 224 Librairie Archéologique 48, 50–1, 53
Library of Congress 3, 187; subject headings
L’Artiste 48, 52, 53 192–200
L’Univers 50, 53 Libri computi 312–13
L’art chrétien: Son développment iconographique des Libro de las estrella fixas 317
origines à nos jours (Bréhier) 223 Lidov, Alexei 225
L’art français sur le Rhin (Réau) 57 light, iconography of 465–76; ecclesiastical
L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France: Étude sur les architecture and 465–71; pictorial representation
origines de l’iconographie du Moyen Âge (Mâle) and 472–6; symbolism in 468–9
67–71, 69, 184, 223, 519 Lille, Alain de 33
L’Européen 53 Lillich, Meredith 468
L’image mediévalé: Naissance et Developpements Lindley, Philip 156
(Wirth) 162 Lindquist, Sherry 268
La fn du paganism en Gaule et les plus anciennes Lippi, Filippino 40
basiliques chrétiennes (Mâle) 70 Lipton, Sara 493, 497
Labarte, Jules 51 literature and painting, relationship between 39–40
Lacan, Jacques 492 liturgical iconography: becoming other than one
Ladner, Gerhart 225 in liturgy and 243–6; development of new
Lamprecht, Karl 75 iconographic languages in 237–40; identity
Landevennec Gospels: A Breton Illuminated Manuscript transfer from Israelites to Christians and 236–7;
of the Ninth Century, The (Morey) 125 mind of Christ and 235; spiritual anxiety and
Laon Cathedral 346 246–8; who is the true Israel addressed in 240–3;
Laon, Colard de 396 see also religious iconography
Las Brozas, Sánchez de 23 livery companies 391
Lassus, Jean-Baptiste 49, 50, 51, 54 Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur 505
Lasteyrie, Ferdinand de 51 Lochner, Stefan 444
Lautier, Claudine 345 Loeb, Nina 76
Laval, Jeanne de 388, 388, 388–9, 391 Longhurst, M. H. 125
541
Index
López, Diego 23 Maximilian I 299–300, 453

Lorenzetti, Ambrogio 37, 41, 303, 440 Mazzocchi, Giacomo 223
Louis the Pious 311–12 McGrath, Elizabeth 34
Louis VII, King 247 McKinney, Loren 324
Louis X, King 358 McKinnon, James 479
Louis-Philippe, King 49 meaning: from representation to presence 175–6;
Lowden, John 349–51 naturalist and culturalist approaches to 177–8;
Lubac, Henri de 66 performance and 181; relationship between text
Luttrell Psalter 154, 159, 510 and image in relaying 222–3
Luyster, Amanda 252 Meaning in the Visual Arts (Panofsky) 107, 111, 114, 119
Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, The
Machaut, Guillaume de 487 (Lindquist) 268
Madonna in a Church (van Eyck) 382 Medici, Piero de’ 303
Maestà (Lorenzetti) 37 medicine 322–3; burning, bleeding, urinating,
Maffei, Sonia 34 diagramming iconography in 327–30;
Magazine of Art 107 future directions in iconography of 335;
Maguire, Henry 225 historiographies and histories 324; material
Maino, Giasone del 11 330–1, 332; picturing patients and
Mâle, Émile 1, 34, 37, 38, 57, 59–60, 65–7, 124, practitioners in imagery of 333–5; the medical
184; legacy of 70–1; Michael Camille and body and 324–7
154, 162; on 13th century France 67–71; Medieval Art (Morey) 125
on monsters 519–20, 531; on need for Meditations on the Life of Jesus Christ 61
comprehensive knowledge and understanding of Meiss, Millard 111, 168
images 223–4; on Otherness 495 Melancholia I (Dürer) 90, 92, 130
Malouel, Jean 396 Mélanges of Archeology, History and Literature
Mandowsky, Erna 34 (Cahier) 58–9
Manesse Codex 272, 272, 272–3, 276 Mellinkoff, Ruth 439, 496
Manet, Edouard 164 Memling, Hans 222
Manning, John 21 Menil Foundation 495
Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne grecque et latine Merback, Mitchell 496
(Didron) 48, 50, 51, 223 Mériméee, Prosper 49
Manuel des œuvres de bronze et d’orfèvrerie du Moyen Merino, Luis 23
Âge (Didron) 50–1 metadata, Iconclass 213–15
Mapplethorpe, Robert 267 Metropolitan Museum of Art 3
maps and diagrams, Medieval 399–408; Mic 23
cosmological 401; Ebstorf Map 252–5, 401, 404; Mignault, Claude 21, 23
Ireland represented in 405–8; physical material mind of Christ 235
used for 401; religious components in 402–5; Mitchell, W. J. T. 5, 155, 176
uses of 402 Mithras (Saxl) 90–1
MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloguing) 199 Mittman, Asa Simon 497
Marcolini, Francesco 35 Mnemosyne Atlas 80–7, 97, 187
Marichal, Robert 113 modern art 137
Marin, Louis 178 modernity: ideal versus anti-ideal of 166; self in
Marquale, Giovanni 22 419–20
Marquand, Alan 123 Moissac 143–4, 144
Martyrologium Romanum 223 Mommsen, Theodor 11
Marxism 155, 159 Mondeville, Henri de 327
Mary Magdalene 426, 437–8, 438, 445 Monographie de Notre-Dame de Brou (Didron) 49
Massing, Jean-Michel 156, 158 Monster Theory (Cohen) 523
Materia Medica (Dioscorides) 456 monstrous iconography: excess of 531;
material medicine 330–1, 332 inexhaustible history of monsters and 518–21;
Mathews, Thomas 225 purpose of 523–31
Matisse, Henri 61 Monstrous Races in Medieval Art, The (Friedman) 521
Mattius, Bernard 11, 15 Montalembert, Charles de 51–2
Maurus, Hrabanus 373–5, 377, 381, 382 Montpellier Codex 487
mausoleums, cruciform 379–80 Moore, R. I. 496
Mauss, Marcel 177, 340 morality 15
542
Index
More, Thomas 12 Osten, Gert von der 114

Morellus, Fredericus 23 Otherness 492–500; historiography of 495–7; key
Morey, Charles Rufus 2, 111, 112, 123–6, 186, 224 problems and questions in studying iconography
Morgan Library 192, 346, 457 of 497–500
Mosse, Martha 113 Otto I 359
Moxey, Keith 5 Otto II 366
Mulvey, Laura 426 Otto III 364–5, 442
Murdoch, John 324 Oxford Handbook on Women and Gender in Medieval
Murray, Jacqueline 413 Europe 432
music and sound: depictions of singers and 485–6;
iconography of 479; musical notation and Pächt, Otto 114, 324
487; mythological, demonic, and grotesque pagan idols 160–2
representations in 486; nonmusical sound 488; painting and literature, relationship between 39–40
representation of instruments and 480–5; subject Palmer guild 512–15
overview 479–80 Palmer, James Le 322
Music in Art 479 Palmer, Thomas 21
Muslims and Otherness 493–6, 497, 498, 498 Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical
Symbol (Panofsky and Panofsky) 113
narrative 282, 292–3; gesture in 283–7; Panofsky, Dora Mosse 108, 113, 188, 324, 373
historiography 282–3; on hair combs 290–2; Panofsky, Erwin 2, 4, 5, 6, 34, 66, 71, 98, 130, 154, 155,
on the Ruthwell Cross 292; religious 283; royal 164, 185, 224, 530; Aby Warburg and 77, 78, 85–6;
366–8; space in 287–90; time in 290–2 Charles Morey and 124, 125, 126; description and
National Institute of Eastern Languages and interpretation of works of art 116–19; Fritz Saxl and
Civilizations (INALCO) 57 89, 92, 96; Index of Christian Art and 187; life and
naturalist approaches to image 177–8 work of 105–16; on iconography and iconology
nature, emblems based on 16 118–19; on light 467; on typology 117
Negotiating Secular and Sacred in Medieval Art Panofsky, Hans 109, 113
(Walker and Luyster) 252 Panofsky, Wolfgang 109, 113
Neville, Cecily 513 para-heraldic signs 389–90
New Art History 154 Paradiso (Dante) 459
Nicene Creed 465 Parergon iuris (Alciato) 12
Nicholas of Verdun 472–3, 473 Paris, Matthew 408, 493, 494
Night Thoughts (Young) 152 Parker, Elizabeth 342
Nirenberg, David 497, 499 Parma Ildefonsus (Schapiro) 144–5
Nochlin, Linda 425 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 166
nonmusical sound 488 Pastoureau, Michel 392, 439, 444, 447
Nordenfalk, Carl 113 patriarchy 15, 146
notation, musical 487 patronage: agency and 348–51; chronology of 344;
Notger of Liège, Bishop 379 defined as a dynamic relationship 340–3; media
Notre-Dame de Paris 48 and materiality 346–8; methods and evidence in
studying 344–5
Oberer, Hariolf 114 Paul V, Pope 241
OCLC 195, 198–9 Paul, Apostle 235, 236
Odo of Bayeux 349 Pauli, Gustav 108, 110, 113
Odo of Cluny 437 Pauli, Wolfgang 110
Oettingen, Wolfgang von 79 Pavia, Pietro da 456
Offner, Richard 111 Peck, Russell 270
Olympia (Manet) 164 Peele, George 24
Omne Bonum (Le Palmer) 322, 323, 333 performance and image 176–7, 181
On Movies (Panofsky) 112 Perkinson, Stephen 368
Onians, John 373, 376–7 Perréal, Jean 39
Open Field meetings 135 Perrière, Guillaume de la 295
Opera (Pirckheimer) 18 personifications 34–6; in Europe before 36–40;
Orientalism (Said) 496 standardization by Ripa 40–2
Origins of Racism in the West, The 497 Peter of Celle 522
ornament, power of 178–81 Peter Vischer et la sculpture franconienne du XIVe au
Os, Pim van 136 XVIe siècle (Réau) 58
543
Index
Pevsner, Nickolaus 155 Raoul-Rochette, Désiré 50

Philip III 367 Rationale Divinorum Officium (Durandus) 375
Photo Archive of Archive of Villa I Tatti 189 Réau, Louis 1–2, 57–62, 224
photography: experimental 135–6; used in red color 443–4
classification 186–9 Reed-Elsevier 201
Physiologus (Horapollo) 14 reintegration, principle of 96
Pierguidi, Stefano 34 religious iconography 51; animals in 505–15;
Pignorius, Laurentius 23 anthropology of images and 175–81; as cultural
pigs 506 expansion 58; Christianitas and 59; civic political
Pio, Giovanni Battista 19 iconography and 302–5; classification of
Pirckheimer, Willibald 18 images in 184–90; color in 437–47; dating of
Pisanello 396 148–9; definition of the field, methodological
Pisano, Andrea 41 considerations, and brief historical overview
Pitt Rivers Museum 188 221–5; flowers and plants in 453–4, 457–3;
Pitture (Doni) 35 gender and 412–17, 419, 419–20, 427; gesture
Pizan, Christine de 426, 431–2 in 283–7; gothic art as 51–2, 229–31; impact
Plainte du Désiré (Lemaire de Belges) 39 of Council of Trent on 69–70, 223, 241–3;
Plantin, Christophe 26 in 13th century France 67–71; in emblems
Plotinus 19 of Alciato 15, 16; in maps 402–5; Index of
Plummer, John 143 Christian Art and 2, 3, 123, 125, 126–8; light in
Polak, Richard 135 465–76; music and sound in 479–88; narrative
Politian, Angelo 18 283–7; patronage of 341–3; personification in
political iconography 306; civic 302–5; 34–42; role of beauty in 70; Ruthwell Cross
complexities of 300–2; emblematic way of 145–6, 292; sexuality in 147, 269–71; symbolism
seeing and 295–7; heraldry and portraits in of the church and 373–6; see also liturgical
299–300; royalty and typological symbolism in iconography
298–9; see also royal and imperial iconography Rembrandt van Rijn 130–2, 134–9
Political Unconscious, The (Jameson) 159 Remède de Fortune 487
Polyhymnia (Peele) 24 Renaissance and Renascences (Panofsky) 96–7, 114
Porter, Arthur Kingsley 68 René of Anjou 388
Portrait of the Syndics of the Amsterdam Clothmasters’ Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale
Guild (Rembrandt) 136–7, 137 (RIdIM) 479
portraits 299–300 Rerum patriae libri IV (Alciato) 11
poststructuralist theory 155, 225 Resnick, Irven 497
Power of Images, The (Freedberg) 162, 177 Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe
power of ornament 178–81 497
Prado-Vilar, Francisco 497 Revel-Neher, Elisheva 496
preservation of monuments 52 Revue Archéologique 50
Presse, La 53 Revue de Paris, La 53
Primavera (Botticelli) 463 Revue des Études Slaves 58
Progès Social, Le 53 Richard II, King 300
Prosopographia (Galle) 35 Richard of Cornwall 359
Prudentius 36, 67 Richard of Fournival 509
Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons 346–8, 350 Richard of York 513
Pseudomorphosis 98–9 Richards, Jeffrey 496
Psychomachia (Prudentius) 36, 37, 67 Riegl, Aloïs 70, 105, 142, 143, 324
Ptolemy 318, 319 Ripa, Cesare 1, 2, 32–4, 184, 223; personifications
Pucelle, Jean 382 in Europe before 36–40; sources for work of
Pulliam, Heather 439 34–6
purple color 442–3 Roberts, Helene 224
Robinson, Cynthia 496
Qing Dynasty 5 Rodríguez-Barral, Paolino 497
Quintilian 20 Roisin, Ferdinand de 50
Roman de Fauvel 487, 488, 499
Raben, Georg 22 Roman de la Rose (Lorris and Meun) 283–7,
Randall, Lillian 164, 520–1 290, 432
Randall, Michael 39 Roth, Cecil 495
544
Index
Rouhi, Leyla 496 Scott, Joan 344

Rouille, Guilluame 12, 21, 23 Scotus, Michael 317–19
Rowe, Nina 497 Seckel, Jos 135
Roy, Bruno 519 Secret Middle Ages, The (Jones) 252
royal and imperial iconography 356; crowns, secular iconography: Cockaigne in 260, 260–1;
scepters, and thrones 356–9; other symbols in country life depicted in 258–9; defined 251–2;
359–66; royal narratives in 366–8; typological Ebstorf Map 252–5; prodigal son depicted in
symbolism in 298–9; see also heraldic imagery; 259–60, 261; relationship to religious art 252;
political iconography tapestries 261–2; Tournament Hall, Rodenegg
Rubens, Peter Paul 5 Castle 258; wall paintings 255–8; Wild Men
Ruberti, Isidoro 40 depicted in 261; women depicted in 262
Ruggles, D. Fairchild 497 self in modernity 419–20
Ruini, Carlo 11 Sextus Placitus 331
Ruthwell Cross 145–6, 292 sexuality see erotic iconography
Sforza, Galeazzo Maria 390
Sachs, Paul J. 110, 111 Shakespeare, William 115
Sacrosanctum Concilium 241–2 sheela-na-gigs 274, 427
Said, Edward 492, 496 Sigismund of Luxemburg 298, 298, 298–300, 364
Saint Elzér 333, 334 Signs and Street Life in Medieval France
Saint Emilianus 483, 483–4 (Camille) 166
Salih, Sarah 413 Simpson, Jacqueline 357
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini) 166 Simson, Otto von 373
Salviati, Cardinal Lorenzo 32, 40 singers, depictions of 485–6
San Vital chapel 379 Sluijter, Eric Jan 130
Sand, Alexa 346–8 Smith, Cheryl 156
Sandron, Dany 346 snakes 506
Sassoferrato, Bartolo da 396 Snell, Bruno 113
Saturn and Melancholy (Saxl) 90 social issues in emblems 15
Sauerländer, Willibald 66, 114 Société des Bollandistes 223
Saunders, Alison 21 Socrates 20
Saurma-Jeltsch, Lieselotte E. 497 Soergel, Gerda 113
Saxl, Fritz 77, 130, 145, 324; impact of Warburg on Solis, Virgil 22
work of 89–92, 187, 188; on medieval diagram Sorti intitolate giardino d’i pensieri (Marcolini) 35
emblem of a “new science” 92–5; visual Sotomayor, Juan de 23
principle of reformulation 96–100 souls and gender 420–1
scepters 356–9 sound see music and sound
Schapiro, Meyer 142–52, 344; interesting in dating Sources in Medieval Style (Morey) 125
148–9; on color 441; study of the Ruthwell Souriau, Étienne 59
Cross 145–6 space in narrative 287–90
Schaus, Margaret 433 Speculum humanae salvationis (Breitenbach) 117
Schiff, Frieda 76 Speculum Majus (Beauvais) 184
Schiff, Jacob 76 Speculum Universale (Beauvais) 51, 67
Schiller, Gertrud 224 Spengler, Oswald 99
Schilling, Edmund 108 Spero, Nancy 425
Schlosser, Julius von 89, 105 spiritual anxiety 246–8
Schmarsow, August 105 Spivak, Gayatri C. 492
Schmitt, Jean-Claude 5, 180 Springer, Anton Heinrich 1, 224
Schöne, Albrecht 16, 297 St. Albans Psalter 437, 438
Schramm, Percy Ernst 356, 359 St. Augustine 20, 269, 404, 483, 522; City of God
Schreckenberg, Heinz 496 184, 432, 518
Schweitzer, Bernhard 113 St. Floret castle 289–90
scientific iconography 310–20; astronomy 310–11; St. Jerome 413, 414
Charlemagne and 310–11; constellations codex St. Lawrence Church, Ludlow 510–15
311–13; cosmological questions and 313–14; Stalley, Roger 379
Greek system 310; Michael Scotus and 317–19; Statius, Achilles 223
miniatures used in 314; translations of Arabic Stefano, Cardinal 302
works in 314–15 Steinke, Martin William 152
545
Index
Steps towards Rembrandt (Van de Waal) 134–5, 137, Trachenberg, Joshua 495
138–9 Tracy, John 26
Steyner, Heynrich 12 transfiguration 474–5
Stockhamer, Sebastian 23 translations of emblems 21–2
Stones of Sodom, The (Camille) 166 Très Riches Heures 154, 156, 166–8, 256, 457
Stones, Alison 348 Trial of Eugenia 413–14, 414
Straten, Roelof van 119, 130 Trivulzio, Gian Giacomo 11
Strickland, Debra 496 trumeau at Souillac 163, 163–4
Studien zur Geschichte der Medizin (Sudhoff ) 324 Tversky, Amos 86
Studies in Iconography 433 typology 117; symbolism and royalty 298–9
Studies in Iconology (Panofsky) 98, 106, 111,
114, 119 Urban, Pope 36
Subsidia hagiohraphica 223 Ureña, Jesús 23
Suckale-Redlefsen, Guda 495 Usener, Hermann 75
Sudhoff, Karl 324–7
Sufi latinus 316–17 Valeriano, Pierio 34
Suger, Abbot 359, 373, 374, 377; color iconography Van de Waal, Hans 130–40, 188, 201–2, 213; areas
and 444–5; Erwin Panofsky and 112–13, 115; of study 130–2; commentary on Fromentin
on light 467; patronage and 344–5 133–4; DIAL (Decimal Index of the Art of the
Suso of Constance 61 Low Countries) and Iconclass projects 132–3,
Swarzenski, Hanns 111 134; experimental photography and 135–6;
Swinefield, John 506 modern art and 137; on craftsmanship 138–9;
Sylvester I, Pope 301 Open Field meetings 135; see also Iconclass
symbolism: Alciato on 19–21; animal 505–7; van Straten, Roelof 5
disguised 107; o flowers and plants 462; of Varin, Pierre Joseph 50
church architecture 373–6; of coats of arms 395; Vasari, Giorgio 1
of light 468–9; of topography 225–8; royalty Vecchio, Cosimo il 303
and typological 298–9; Schapiro on 146, 148 Verheyen, Egon 114
systemic narration 282 Verneilh, Félix de 51
Victoria and Albert Museum 3
Tarkington, Booth 111 Vidal, Salamó 493, 494
Taylor, Andrew 277 Vie des formes (Focillon) 59, 60
Temple, Elizabeth 150–2, 151 Villon, François 239
Texte, Joseph 65 Vinken, Pierre 201
Thatcher, Margaret 159 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 50, 51, 54, 58, 60, 66
Theatre des bons engins, Le (Perrière) 295 Visconti, Ambrogio 16–17, 18
themes in Medieval art: erotic iconography 267–77; Visconti, Galeazzo 11, 390
iconography of narrative 282–93; liturgical Visconti, Otho 18
iconography 235–51; medical 322–39; political Vita Nova (Dante) 37
iconography 295–306; religious iconography Vitet, Ludovic 49
221–31; secular iconography 251–63 Vitruvius 377
Thibaud, Émile 53 Vivian Bible 345
thirteenth-century France, art of 67–71 Vöge, Wilhelm 70, 105, 106, 107, 113
This American Life 154, 168 Vondel, Joost van den 130
Thoughts of Iconography (Klein) 185 Voragine, Jacobus de 221
thrones 356–9 Vos, Maarten de 26
Thuilius, Joannes 23
time in narrative 290–2 Walker, Alicia 252
toads 506 Walle, Frans van der 202
Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects Walpole, Horace 158–9
from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (Panofsky) 106 Walters Art Museum 3, 426
Topographia 406–7 Warburg Institute 3, 75, 92, 113, 116, 187, 188,
Topographia Hibernica (Gerald of Wales) 493 189; emblem 92–5
Torre Aquila 256–8 Warburg, Aby M. 2, 4, 75, 105, 110, 112, 187, 324;
Tournament Hall, Rodenegg Castle 258 “Zum Bild das Wort” and 79; as iconographer
Tournes, Jean de 12, 15, 21, 22, 23 79–80; biography of 75–8; Fritz Saxl and
Tozzi, Peter Paul 23 77, 89–91, 93–4, 97–8; Hans Vand de Waal
546
Index
and 132; Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Winternitz, Emanuel 479

Warburg (KBW) and 76–7, 78; legacy of Wirth, Jean 162, 225
85–7; mental breakdown and recovery 77–8; Wirth, Karl August 34
Mnemosyne Atlas 80–5; on historical Witt Library 185
construction 80 Wittkower, Rudolf 187, 520, 528
Warburg, Felix 75–6 Wölfflin, Heinrich 89, 105, 110, 324
Warburg, Max 75–6 women see feminist art history; gender,
Warburg, Paul 75–6 iconography of
Wechel, Christian 12, 21–2, 27 Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An
Weitzmann, Kurt 125, 148, 225 Encyclopedia 433
Wenzel, King 317 Woodruff, Helen 125
Werckmeister, Otto Karl 497 Words, Script and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual
Werner, Gerlind 34 Language (Schapiro) 143, 150
What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of WorldCat 195
Images (Mitchell) 5 worms 506
White, David Gordon 527, 528–9 Wright, Owen 480
Wickhoff, Franz 89, 282–3 Wuttke, Dieter 79
Widukind of Corvey 359
Wiesel, Elie 134 yellow color 447
Wikipedia-Wikimedia Commons 3, 189 Young Male Figure in Paintings, Sculptures, and
William I 255 Drawings from Ancient Egypt to the Present, The
William II 316 (Aymar) 157
William of Normandy 366 Young, Alan 24, 26, 150–2, 151
William of St. Thierry 243 Young, Edward 150
Williams, David 528
Williams, Jane Welch 348 Zainer, Günther 92
Williams, John 144, 497 Zasius 11
Wilson, Christopher 346 Ziegenhagen, Bertel 113
Wilton Diptych 300, 301, 459, 460 Ziegler, Joseph 497
Wind, Edgar 93, 94 Zur Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der
Wino, Abbot 379 bildenden Kunst (Panofsky) 110
547

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION

Edited by Colum Hourihane

List of ﬁgures and plates ix

Medieval iconography, an introduction 1

2 Ripa, the trinciante 32

3 Adolphe-Napoléon Didron (Paris 1867–Hautvilliers 1906) 47

6 Aby M. Warburg: iconographer? 75

7 Fritz Saxl: transformation and reconﬁguration

8 Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) 105

9 Charles Rufus Morey and the Index of Christian Art 123

10 Hans van de Waal, a portrait 130

11 Meyer Schapiro as iconographer 142

12 Michael Camille’s queer Middle Ages 154

13 The anthropology of images 175

14 Classifying image content in visual collections:

15 Library of Congress subject headings 192

16 Iconclass: a key to collaboration in the digital humanities 201

17 Religious iconography 221

18 Liturgical iconography 235

19 Secular iconography 251

20 Erotic iconography 267

21 The iconography of narrative 282

22 Political iconography and the emblematic way of seeing 295

23 Picturing the stars – scientiﬁc iconography in the Middle Ages 310

24 Medicine’s image 322

25 Patronage: a useful category of art historical analysis? 340

26 Royal and imperial iconography 356

27 The iconography of architecture 373

28 Heraldic imagery, deﬁnition, and principles 386

29 Medieval maps and diagrams 399

30 The iconography of gender 412

31 Feminist art history and medieval iconography 425

32 The iconography of color 437

33 Flowers and plants, the living iconography 453

34 The iconography of light 465

35 The visual representation of music and sound 479

36 The other in the Middle Ages: difference, identity,

37 Animal iconography 504

38 Monstrous iconography 518

1.1 In nothos (Padua, Tozzi, 1621) 600. By permission of University

and afterwards stamped in London “The Warburg Institute” (no address;

Wellcome Apocalypse, a medical miscellany from c. 1420, Southern

(middle third of the eleventh century). Vienna, Imperial Treasury.

vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre), c. 1420, © The British Library

Sherman Clarke is an art librarian specializing in cataloguing and authorities. He worked at

Michael W. Cothren is Scheuer Family Professor of Humanities at Swarthmore College,

György E. Szönyi is professor of English at the University of Szeged and of cultural/intellec-

22 P. Vandenbroeck, “Matrix Marmorea: The Sub-Symbolic Iconography of the Creative Energies in

The great iconographers

Alciato’s use of the term “emblem”

While a walnut beguiles boys and dice beguile young men

Alciato’s notion of symbolism

The reception of Alciato’s emblems in the material culture

14 Praz, Studies (as in note 9), 12, 24.

34 D.L. Drysdall, “The Hieroglyphs at Bologna,” Emblematica 2:2 (1987), 225–47.

57 Except “Adversus naturam peccantes.”

Ripa’s work and its sources

Personifications in Europe before Ripa

Building the canon

Iconographer and archaeologist Adolphe-Napoleon Didron, or Didron the Elder as he is some-

which he described in an article published in L’Artiste in 1841 as a “paradise of Christian art.”2

A methodology for archaeological studies

A late and limited official recognition