Download PDF | Sand, Alexa Kristen - Vision, devotion, and self-representation in late medieval art-Cambridge University Press (2014).
434 Pages
Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art This book investigates the “owner portrait” in the context of late medieval devotional books primarily from France and England. These mirror-like pictures of praying book owners respond to and help develop a growing concern with visibility and self-scrutiny that characterized the religious life of the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The image of the praying book owner translated preexisting representational strategies concerned with the authority and spiritual efficacy of pictures and books, such as the Holy Face and the donor image, into a more intimate and reflexive mode of address in Psalters and Books of Hours created for lay users. Alexa Sand demonstrates how this transformation had profound implications for devotional practices and for the performance of gender and class identity in the striving, aristocratic world of late medieval France and England.
Alexa Sand is associate professor of art history at Caine College of the Arts, Utah State University. She has published articles in The Art Bulletin, Gesta, Yale French Studies, Word and Image, the Huntington Library Quarterly, Studies in Iconography, and a number of edited essay collections. She is the recipient of the ACLS Charles Ryskamp Fellowship and the AAUW American Fellowship for Publication. She was recently the Gilbert and Ursula Farfel Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Introduction
Self-Reflection, Devotion, and Vision in the Image of the Book Owner at Prayer Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space1 Just as the delicate soft tissues of organisms long extinct sometimes deposit their ghostly imprint in the fossil record owing to a fortuitous confluence of environmental factors, so the interiority of human individuals sometimes leaves a trace in the material of history. Such traces collect in the historical strata of periods when interest in and concern for the experience of inner life flowers, and when a sufficient verbal and visual vocabulary for describing interiority has been developed.
The later Middle Ages is one such period, and it is not surprising, given the wealth of expressions of interiority that arise in its varied arts, that scholars, philosophers, and ideologues have often turned to this era when seeking the putative origins of modern selfhood. Yet when examined in their own right, not as forebears to modernity but as representatives of the past as a foreign culture, the words and images that late medieval people used to articulate and to formulate their understanding of what it meant to be “alone, dreaming in a world that is immense” reveal a radically different concept of self and of self-perception. A demonstration of the historical quiddity of the late medieval experience of interiority can be glimpsed in a full-page miniature in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons, a prayer book dating from about 1290 custommade for an aristocratic laywoman who lived in the diocese of Amiens in Picardy (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.729).
The miniature depicts a woman in three-quarter profile kneeling in prayer before an altar on which sit enthroned the Virgin and Child, perhaps a representation of a polychrome sculptural image (Color Plate I).2 The lady wears a luxurious golden cloak embroidered with heraldic charges in red, and her hair is covered in an elegant snood and band that identify her as married and upper class. Her lapdog waits beside her attentively, her prayer book sits open on her prie-dieu, and behind her an open door suggests that she prays in an enclosed and specially designated space. All these details index her high social status and her wealth.
The elaborate gold spires and tracery of the frame, adorned with blazoned shields, further indicate that this space is both sacred and particular to a distinct group of people whose heraldic bearings are represented. Beyond the constellation of signs that establish the noblewoman’s role in the world, the painting also concerns her spiritual identity. The Virgin and Child on the altar seem just as visually attuned to her presence as she is to theirs; she raises her hands, palms pressed together, and lifts her eyes up toward them while the Virgin places a hand on the shoulder of her son and the Child raises one hand in benediction, looking directly at the supplicant. The interaction is charged with restrained but intense spiritual energy: the lady’s fervent devotion, the holy pair’s solicitude. It draws on the wellknown iconography of the Adoration of the Magi, and amplifies and personalizes the subject of the enthroned Virgin and Child often found at this point in Books of Hours – the beginning of matins of the Little Office of the Virgin. To underscore this allusion, just such an image of the Virgin and Child in majesty appears in the large initial D that begins the text on the facing folio (Figure 1).
The book that sits open and unregarded by the lady on the prie-dieu can be understood as the book in our hands, just as the lady, clearly identified by her heraldic clothing, can be understood as the owner of the book and the originally intended primary audience for this image. Thus, the painting represents the conditions of its own viewing, and its subject reflects the viewing subject, creating a mise-en-abyme, or interior duplication, well suited to the heraldic sensitivity of its audience and the confessional ideal of making the self visible to the self.3
The reflexive character of this painting harmonizes with its setting; a combined Book of Hours and Psalter, this was a highly personalized object, its texts and images carefully selected for a specific person, perhaps at the direction of a family member and with the input of a spiritual adviser. Such self-reflecting books and their self-reflecting images of book owners lie at the center of this study, for although the image of the kneeling lady from the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons and other pictures like it are well known and often reproduced (the Morgan Library at one time sold note cards that featured this particular miniature), their status as images, their function within devotion, and their relationship to the gamut of social and spiritual practices in play around and within them have not been closely examined. This book represents the first critical history of these owner images, situating them in terms of the visual sources on which they draw, the beliefs and concerns with which they engage, and the visual practices and mental habits they both respond to and inculcate.
This investigation recognizes the self-reflecting image of the book owner as an example of how incorporeal human experiences like devotional meditation leave indelible traces in the material record of history. The vast interiority described by Bachelard – the experience of the self by the self – is strikingly visible in the art and literature of the later Middle Ages in western Europe. An astounding array of evidence for a strong and widespread fascination with the inner life of individuals speaks to a focus on interiority driven by church reform. At the same time, interest in interiority was also fueled by the vibrancy of vernacular literature, by the growing access to books and learning associated with the development of the urban universities, and by the competitive striving of aristocrats, princes, and wealthy merchants. Above all, the period between about 1200 and 1350, with which I am concerned in this book, saw the flowering of lay piety as expressed in devotional practices that emphasized luxuriously adorned physical settings, richly illustrated books, and intensively sensorial rhetoric, especially the language of visual and visionary representation. The emphasis on the visible complemented and corresponded to increased attention to self-scrutiny in the confessional process and to the visibility of the human soul before God.
This was an era of texts that proclaimed themselves mirrors: mirrors of princes, mirrors of the world, mirrors of the Church, and mirrors of the soul. The world itself could be and often was understood as that mirror famously described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:12, through which “we see in a dark manner” that which we will see “face to face” at the end of time.4 In such a climate, it is not surprising to find that people exerted extraordinary efforts to develop tools that would help them not only see better but understand the nature of their own seeing more clearly and refine their perceptual acuity with regard to the seeing of the self. To peer into one’s own soul was, after all, a necessary if grueling prerequisite for eternal life. The images of book owners found in numerous thirteenth- and fourteenth-century devotional books from France and other francophone regions of northern Europe constitute one technology that could be used in this critical process of self-examination. I call these reflexive images because, like the reflexive form of verbs in French and other Romance languages, such pictures form a recursive loop between subject and object – the viewer sees herself seeing and thereby attains a heightened awareness of her own visibility and her own vision. I argue that these images emerge from a network of pictorial and devotional practices that stretch back many centuries, but that despite this heritage they represent a new way of thinking about – and seeing – the self in relation to the sacred.
I contend that although distinct from other varieties of portrait-like representations in late medieval visual culture, the self-reflecting image of the owner at prayer within the pages of a book participated in the emerging interest in the variety of means by which a picture could establish itself as authoritatively conveying some essential truth about a specific person. Questions of gender and class identity receive significant attention here because of the very specific audiences toward whom these images were addressed – upper-class laypeople, and primarily women. Because these images encourage the people they address to regard themselves as both seeing subjects and visible objects, they suggest the relevance of modern theories of the gaze as a tool of social regulation and gender construction to our understanding of medieval practices of looking. The use of the vernacular in many of the manuscripts under consideration and the interaction between devotional pictures and devotional words also figure prominently in my analysis, as word and image are incontrovertibly linked in the performances encouraged by and organized around these books. The influence of the Crusades and of the engagement of the francophone aristocracies of northern Europe with the world beyond the Rhône and the Alps are also of interest. Much of the visual material that contributed to the formation of the reflexive image of the book owner came from the German-speaking lands, Italy, and Byzantium. All three regions were brought into focus for the francophone world through the lens of the Crusades.
I am interested in the variety of ways in which books, with the totality of their texts and images, served as idealized and corrective reflections of their owners. Although the miniature at the opening of matins of the Virgin in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons is the boldest statement of the book’s function as a mirror or duplicate of its owner, this concern with the visual and bodily identification between book and owner manifests itself throughout the manuscript. The manuscript’s famous image of the Holy Face explicitly introduces the theme of Christ as a mirror of the self (Color Plate II). It also focuses attention on the materiality of images, their manufactured quality, the bodily perception of them, and the relationship of all this to the immaterial, divinely generated, and spiritual realm of visionary experience. Likewise, the Virgin and Child on the altar in the miniature of the book owner at prayer is simultaneously a polychrome sculpture of an identifiable type and a divinely activated object, perhaps even a heavenly apparition. The images of the owner at prayer and of the Holy Face in the PsalterHours of Yolande of Soissons both testify to the centrality of reflection and reflexivity to the visual culture of devotion toward the end of the thirteenth century. They share this concern with visualizing the visionary experiences toward which prayer and devotion were intended to lead practitioners with numerous other pictures that appear mostly as illuminations in manuscripts dating from the period between the middle of the thirteenth century and the middle of the fourteenth.
These representations of praying book owners find their earliest widespread expression in the middle of the thirteenth century, quietly appearing in the margins and subsidiary spaces of manuscript books created for individuals of the aristocracy and the emerging urban upper class in France and England – in other words, that small but growing portion of the medieval laity that possessed both the means to buy books and the rudiments of literacy to read them. Predominantly, but by no means exclusively, the subjects of these discreet portraits were women. They are often lumped together with a broad category of medieval imagery termed donor portraits, but they do not belong there. A donor portrait primarily concerns itself with commemoration: its subject is, for example, the aristocratic patron of an ecclesiastical institution, or the suave courtier hoping to garner his liege-lord’s favor with a gift of a luxuriously illuminated Bible. Images such as that of the kneeling woman in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons depict owners and users, not donors; sometimes they may have been the patrons of the works in which they appear, but that is not why they appear there. Just as often, the subjects of these representations were the recipients, rather than the commissioners, of the works, which were frequently given as gifts to brides or to women entering a religious vocation, and were commonly passed down from one woman to another.5 As a result, sometimes these images of owners came to function in a memorial capacity, for example when a book’s original owner (sometimes called a destinaire, a useful term for its implications of intent) died and the book was passed on to another person.
The image of the owner could then be construed as commemorative; but equally likely, the book’s new owner might be inscribed into the book and view the praying figure in some ways as a proxy. It may have been helpful, in this sense, that these images lack the physiognomic accuracy valued in later devotional portraits – beginning, as Stephen Perkinson has shown, around 1350.6 As opposed to images that depicted individual physiognomy and body type in greater detail, the signs by which these early representations of book owners identified their subjects were easily adapted or changed to suit a new owner or a new phase of life for the original owner; heraldry can be repainted, a married woman’s snood replaced with a widow’s hood, secular clothing turned into a religious habit. In many medieval books intended for personal devotion, later owners made changes and additions to the contents, indicating that although their function as memory objects was potent, inherited books remained adaptable tools for the performance of devotion on the part of the present owner. The memorial and reflective positions of the viewer vis-à-vis the image would not necessarily preclude one another; as a mirror of the owner’s identity, the book contained memorials of its earlier possessors, who were often important figures in the constitution of that identity. Even where the gender of the viewer did not match the gender of the depicted figure, the mind trained to allegorical thinking, as most educated, upper-class medieval minds were, could make the connection between the praying figure and the soul, gendered feminine in both Latin and French.7
This is not to deny the complex and mutually entangled relationship between representations of donors and patrons, the deceased, and the owners of books in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century visual culture. The appearance of kneeling, praying figures of living individuals in monumental art forms such as sculpted portals and large-scale altarpieces in France and Italy around the same moment in the third quarter of the thirteenth century suggests that the iconography of the reflexive mode developed primarily in book illumination and smaller devotional objects also resonated in more publicly visible venues.
The tingle of self-recognition in these larger-scale images would have been felt by an extremely limited sector of their potential audience, but the implications of representing the living in attitudes of supplication could have powerful semiotic thrust in a public or semipublic viewing space. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin has argued, for example, that the king and queen depicted kneeling before the Virgin in the Porte Rouge of Notre-Dame, Paris (ca. 1270) may be intended to represent Louis IX and his queen, Marguerite of Provence, but they are by no means commemorative of any act of patronage or donation; rather, they visualize an ecclesiastical view of authority, in which the Church, embodied by the Virgin, is not only the source of royal legitimacy but its model as well, a message that would have appealed to the canons of Notre-Dame, who entered the building through the Porte Rouge.8 A less subtle and more frankly propagandistic version of this same formula appears in Simone Martini’s St. Louis of Toulouse altarpiece of 1317.
Here, the enthroned Louis, clad in his episcopal regalia, receives his crown of martyrdom from a pair of angels while his younger brother Robert of Anjou kneels and prays at the foot of the throne and in turn receives his crown from Louis. As Julian Gardner observed, the political implications of the mise-en-scène in the panel outweigh any anticipated spiritual response on the part of the king that the painting might have inspired.9 Robert’s legitimacy and his subservience to the authority of the Church are more at stake than his future salvation. The difference between such representations as the Porte Rouge and the St.
Louis of Toulouse altarpiece and earlier images explicitly commemorating acts of patronage or donation – ranging from the depictions of donors in Gothic stained glass windows to the apse mosaic at San Vitale in Ravenna and its peers – is notable. Whereas the earlier images often stress the materiality of the offering by depicting it in miniature in the donor’s hands, these later monumental images stress supplication and the personal, affective nature of the relationship between the supplicant and the representative of divinity.
Recent studies of donor imagery in a variety of contexts have made clear that the memorial function of the donor portrait was closely tied to its emphasis on the tactile, sensorial, material nature of the donation; for example, Corinne Schleif’s work on the sensory range of late medieval memorials has occasioned her to trace the genealogy of what she terms “haptic” donor imagery, in which donors touch or proffer a miniature or metonymic image of their offering. Calling on both psychoanalytic and anthropological theories of the gift, Schleif investigates the way in which the gift memorialized in the donor image is relentlessly recuperated even in the face of its, or its giver’s, absence.10 Images of supplication, as distinct from donation, are deeply implicated in the development of affective piety from the late eleventh century forward. However, despite the strong kinship between donor and owner iconography, I do not directly discuss the diffusion of either supplicatory or gift-giving donor imagery in the more public context of portal sculpture or monumental painting, where its political and social implications are so complex, and so different from those of owner images in books and small works of devotional art, as to demand a more thorough investigation than the scope of this book allows.
Also beyond the scope of my discussion is the appearance of the kneeling, praying figure in funerary art, though it is worth noting the clear iconographic relationship that implies a deep conceptual connection between images of book owners and images of the dead. An early example of a tomb relief that employs the emotionally charged formula of a kneeling couple flanking a figure of the standing Virgin and Child is that commemorating Isabella of Aragon, the first wife of Philip III of France, in the Duomo of Cosenza, Italy (Figure 2).11
Both Isabella, on the left, and Philip, on the right, kneel in supplication under a canopy of Gothic tracery that might equally be found in any number of French prayer books from the same period. Although this type of tomb was hardly the norm in Gothic Europe, it was widely diffused: examples include the Bronnbach epitaph of about 1350 from the Upper Rhine, in which the deceased contemplate an image of the Veronica, and the side panel from a Milanese tomb of the early 1340s (probably for Uberto III Visconti) by Giovanni di Balduccio, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which features Saint Peter Martyr presenting kneeling figures of a man, a youth, and a woman, all in prayer. Jaroslav Folda describes the tomb slab of William of St. John, bishop of Nazareth, from Acre, dating to 1290; at the feet of the standing bishop kneels a diminutive layman, perhaps, Folda suggests, a relative of the bishop, commemorating his sponsorship of the slab and praying both for the soul of the bishop and for the bishop’s intercession on his behalf. Whatever the motive for including the supplicant, he resembles other figures of pilgrims and supplicants in Crusader art, where their appearance is clearly at once commemorative and devotional, whether in the context of pilgrimage churches or icons for individual contemplation.
As the preceding paragraphs begin to suggest, the kneeling, praying figure is pervasive in the art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from the Latin east to the German north. It can be deployed in an immense variety of media, on varying scales, and to very different ends. For this reason, I have not attempted here to provide a comprehensive account or history of the type. Instead, I have chosen to focus almost exclusively on one strand of a complex phenomenon: how a particular visual practice – the reflexive representation of the book owner – emerged in a specific social, historical, and religious context, namely the devotional activities of upper-class laypeople in the French-speaking cultures of Northern Europe. The role of Italy, as a source of some of both the theological and devotional currents that inform the owner portrait, is acknowledged but not exhaustively explored. Intriguingly, the owner portrait never became as central to the visual repertoire of Italian books for personal devotional use as it did in the north. Instead, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian portraits, as Aby Warburg pointed out, play a subtle but important role in the visual rhetoric that cemented the relationship between the living personalities that formed the nucleus of the early modern city-state and the sacred and heroic narratives that framed and legitimized their power.13
The German-speaking regions of northern Europe pose a challenge insofar as this study of the emergence and diffusion of the owner portrait is concerned. Clearly, cultural exchange between the French- and Germanspeaking courts was lively in the period under consideration: intermarriage of comital, ducal, and even royal dynasties from either side of the language divide was not uncommon, and with such marriages went, among other things, books for prayer and contemplation. Mercantile exchange and the concentration of artists and scribes around major border-region centers such as Metz and Arras encouraged cross-fertilization; one of the factors in the incredible inventiveness and high-level craftsmanship of art from Flanders, the Lorraine, and the Rhineland in the high to later Middle Ages has to have been the confluence of German and French currents. Many of the works discussed in the early chapters of this book come from Germany, where imperial and ecclesiastical patronage in the central Middle Ages spurred the development of a nuanced pictorial vocabulary concerned with authorship, scribal and artistic skill, donation, supplication, and visionary experience.
However, what happens with this vocabulary in Germany in the later Middle Ages seems for the most part quite distinct from what happens in France, French-speaking Flanders, and England. The famous image of Duke Ludwig and Duchess Agnés of Liegnitz and Brieg kneeling in agitated prayer on either side of a much larger Saint Hedwig that appears in the Vita of Hedwig, now at the Getty Library (MS Ludwig XI 7, fol. 12v), has far more in common with older, imperial models of depicting a book’s royal donors than with contemporary images of owners in prayer in French and English manuscripts. Although the illustrated hagiography of the dynastic saint (Hedwig was Ludwig’s ancestor) may have been created for the ducal couple’s personal devotion, the fact that the duke left it to the saint’s titular church at Brieg, where it came to be respected as something akin to a relic of Hedwig herself, suggests that the kneeling figures of Ludwig and Agnés were imagined from the outset as serving a long-term memorial function in a public or semipublic arena.14 The question of intent is always troublesome, and the fate of books subsequent to their production can cloud the issue. A French or English devotional book might easily come to serve as a token of ancestry, or play a role in dynastic politics, as illustrated by the fate of the Nuremberg Hours, perhaps commissioned first for a prospective marriage in 1293–1294 between one of Philip the Fair’s half-sisters and Edward II of England but not actually given as a bridal gift in a cross-Channel marriage until Henry V of England wed Catherine of Valois in 1420.15
The density of heraldry and the focus on women’s roles as mothers and ensurers of lineage in many French and English books of prayer gives a clear sense of how political the culture of devotion was. Yet this familial, lineal emphasis on women (again, noting that not all such images depict women, simply the great majority) and their reproductive function is not so much aimed at visualizing the familial identity in the public sphere as it is at inculcating a sense of the spiritual dimensions of lineal duty in the viewer. Whereas many owner images in German books of devotion from this period feature nuns, often in their communities and almost always in terms of their privileged, marital relationship with Christ and the Church, the owner portraits that concern me address the paradox of performing monastic devotion within the framework of a secular life that may include motherhood, widowhood, and the management of estates ranging in size from a few manors to entire counties, duchies, or kingdoms. None of the varieties of devotional representation of the living or once-living individual in prayer I have mentioned are hermetically sealed off from one another, but by the same token, each is quite specific to its own context and deserves careful scrutiny as such. Overlapping, cross-breeding, and slippage between the different species of images only underscore the importance of attending to these often subtle variations. The one feature of the group of images with which I am most concerned is, as I have already mentioned, their reflexive mode of address to their viewers. The owner of a book that contained such a picture was intended to perceive with her physical eyes her spiritual self, or perhaps her spiritual seeing.
The awkwardness and uncertainty of this formulation reveal the difficulty inherent in the paradox of visually representing the metaphysical experience toward which medieval devotion aspired. Unlike the majority of medieval portrait-like images, such as gisants and images of donation, the representations I discuss in this book direct the gaze inward. As psychoanalytic theory and neuropsychology alike have shown, recognizing oneself in an image external to oneself inculcates a high level of self-consciousness about vision and its relationship to individual identity.16 It is no coincidence that this type of reflexive representation of the book owner evolved in the environment of late medieval devotion and theology, both of which were concerned to an extraordinary extent with visual phenomena. I have so far self-consciously avoided using the most common description of the type of picture that interests me here; in iconographic indices and in the scholarly literature at large, such representations are frequently classified as portraits. Portraiture, in its modern sense restricted to mimetic representations of discrete human individuals living or dead, is not a medieval term. As Édouard Pommier has noted, the various European languages did not begin to specify that their respective words for portraiture were restricted to the human image (and particularly the image of living or historical people rather than legendary or mythological figures) until the seventeenth century.17
Stephen Perkinson has demonstrated that portraiture, the Old French word employed by the thirteenth-century draftsman Villard de Honnecourt in his notebooks, means almost the opposite of what we might expect. Instead of implying artistic study based on direct observation of nature, it refers to a more abstract (and, according to Villard, superior) process of grounding representation in an understanding of “divinely ordained rules of geometry.”18 What makes a medieval portrait a portrait cannot be defined in terms of “naturalism” or “physiognomic mimesis” in any modern sense, as Perkinson has astutely observed; instead we must look at how the object or representation was understood by its makers and audiences to mark the physical presence of a person, in most cases absent, but in the instance of owner portraits, present and construed as the primary viewer.19 Recent work by Perkinson and a number of other scholars investigating the visual rhetoric of works long understood as early portraits has serious implications for the art-historical narrative of early modern portraiture. It is no longer reasonable to understand portraiture between 1350 and 1600 as the pure product of a burgeoning humanist interest in the individual.
A specifically physiognomic and illusionistic representational strategy for representing specific persons is something of a red herring when it comes to constituting the category of the portrait. Portraiture in the early modern and late medieval periods is actually more like what Paul Hills has called a pre-theoretical practice rather than a category understood and articulated as distinct from other practices in written discourse by its makers and audience.20 Richard Brilliant’s economical formulation that “portraits are art works, intentionally made of living or once living people by artists, in a variety of media, and for an audience,”21 serves well to delimit the meaning of portraiture for my purposes here; it both constrains the scope of objects that one might consider under the rubric of the portrait and teases the category out from the protean grasp of its more traditional definition as “the representation of an individual in his own character.”22 Furthermore, it does not insist on physiognomic imitation – the idea that a portrait must resemble the face of the person it represents is unmistakably anachronistic for the period under discussion here, and possibly well into modernity, especially where women were concerned.23 Petrarch’s description of a portrait of Laura made by Simone Martini states clearly that the goals pertaining to female portraiture are not those of frank copying from observable reality: “This work could only have been imagined in heaven, not here among us where the parts of the body make a veil to the soul.”24
Playing on the scriptural and patristic trope of the flesh as an obscuring garment, Petrarch praises Simone’s divinely inspired imagination rather than his faithfulness to worldly appearance. The artist makes visible the true Laura, who, being dead and among the blessed, is to be envisioned in her state of heavenly perfection. Conversely, a late medieval portrait’s quality of seeming to be modeled on a particular living subject can be quite misleading. John White observed that the individualism of Italian tomb sculpture in the later 1200s was not founded on study from nature but instead relied on a careful calibration of expressive gestures keyed to the idealized character of the subject. He argued that the apparent physiognomic mimesis of Pietro Oderisi’s tomb figure of Pope Clement IV (r. 1271–1274) or Arnolfo di Cambio’s figure of Cardinal de Braye (ca. 1282), although evocative, are essentially based on what he called “a studio pattern,” a habitus deeply ingrained in the artist’s practice that has little or nothing to do with the way a person actually appeared.25 In addition, Georgia Sommers Wright has observed in relation to the lifelike and individualized heads that appear in Bohemian, Italian, French, and Austrian sculpture in the fourteenth century that we cannot assume that even these highly particular works attest to study from life of the individual represented.26
For example, as Perkinson points out, considerable debate surrounds the seemingly veridical tomb portrait of Rudolph of Hapsburg (d. 1291), credited in the early fourteenth century with extraordinary resemblance to the once-living man but more likely sculpted with an eye to the depictions of ascetic saints then coming into the German repertoire from Italian sources.27 Notions of likeness are embedded in culture so that it is difficult to recover, in the absence of any corroborative evidence, how “like” a likeness appeared to its original audience. This is complicated further still by the historical instability of such concepts as similarity, reproduction, and individuality, and by variations over time in artistic technique and the visual expectations of audiences for art. As Nelson Goodman protested, “Resemblance and deceptiveness, far from being constant and independent sources and criteria of representational practice, are in some degree products of it.”28 In an essay on art-historical treatments of early Renaissance portraiture and the legacy of Aby Warburg, Georges Didi-Huberman suggested that scholars have generally missed the point of both Warburg’s endeavor and portraiture itself.29 The question most studies fixate on is that of identity:
what historical individual does this portrait represent? This skips past the more challenging and fundamental problems of how, and I would add why, a portrait functions in its particular cultural and historical moment. These questions become particularly relevant in the study of medieval portraits, which, for a variety of reasons, prove resistant to traditional models of portraiture studies developed by scholars dealing with the (often misleading) wealth of biographical information found in Renaissance archival material.30 The images at the center of this book are emblematic of the difficulties and the opportunities for new approaches to portraiture presented by medieval representations of individuals. From this standpoint, the crux of Brilliant’s definition of portraiture, “art works intentionally made of living or once living people,” is what allows the miniature depicting the owner in prayer from the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons to be a portrait. It represents the book owner through a system of signs easily legible to its intended audience. At the same time, its very place as a miniature in a custom-made book intentionally created for the use of a specific individual involves it in a matrix of images, texts, and performative practices that function as both a mirror of and a form for making a self visible.
These pictures belong to an array of representational practices concerned with reifying a self defined by notions of gender, class, and religion. In a literal sense, they are framed by depictions of architectural space, lineal identity in the form of heraldry, texts, and even individual letters. The physical embeddedness of these pictures points to their conceptual and experiential embedding in space, time, and the ritual ordering of these dimensions imposed by liturgical forms. Rather than worry over whether their audiences and makers described these pictures as portraits (which was possible, within the semantic range discussed by Pommier and Perkinson), I am more concerned with probing how these pictures were tools to think – and to see – with. The interiority that leaves its mark in late medieval prayer books and small-scale artworks is specifically tied to the liturgy and to the emulation of monastic patterns of reading, prayer, and meditation.31
Inward in its focus, the performance inscribed in and structured around a Book of Hours inculcated a state of spiritual and physical attentiveness brought about by the concerted effort to direct one’s awareness toward the divine using words, gestures, material images, and reflection. Reading a medieval prayer book was never simply a matter of sitting down in a well-lit spot and letting one’s eyes proceed in an orderly fashion through the words.32 Helen Solterer has shown that the medieval conception of reading was fundamentally sensual and bodily: reading activated all five senses, even taste, as such medieval metaphors as chewing over and digesting the text imply.33 Reading was a multimedia performance that could involve silent meditation on pictures, vocal participation in communal recitations, and physical actions such as kissing images or words. As Eamon Duffy has observed, Books of Hours and related books of prayer and religious instruction were often used very publicly, and the interiority they encouraged could be experienced in spaces that ranged from the nave of a church to the comparative privacy of a bedchamber.34 For these reasons, I avoid the term private in conjunction with devotion.
Devotion, no matter how internalized, always situated its performer within a network of social relations that extended from the immediate family to the communion of all Christian souls. The proximate goal of medieval devotion was to experience a temporary movement out of the muck of the fallen world, to paraphrase Abbot Suger, transported anagogically by the contemplation of beautiful things. However, in the later Middle Ages, the ultimate intention was to change the very constitution of the soul, preparing it for redemption and cleansing it of sin. Dante, for example, is quite specific on this point in Paradiso XXXI, when he has Saint Bernard of Clairvaux instruct the pilgrim to prepare his sight for the revelation of the Godhead by gazing first on the enthroned Virgin: “That you may consummate your journey perfectly for this, both prayer and holy love have sent me; to help you let your sight fly round this garden; by gazing so, your vision will be made more ready to ascend through God’s own ray.”35
The idea that the visual faculty must be prepared and altered before it can ascend to the perception of the unmitigated Godhead is one of the recurrent themes in Dante’s poem, and very much in keeping with contemporary theology of the beatific vision, that final visual encounter between the soul and God forecast by Paul.36 The transformative character of visual devotion was less immediately social than interior, relating to the individual’s self-perception. Yet because devotion was constituted both of actions and states of mind, and because “self” implies relation to an “other,” devotion always returned the individual to her or his place as a member of the Christian community. As such, it necessarily engaged with defining and embodying this community against otherness – thereby tangling with issues of class, religious difference, and gender. Devotion was fundamentally mainstream; it made visible, audible, and tangible ideologies of Christianitas in a period when Christian western Europeans found themselves in violent and inevitable confrontation with non-Christian, and sometimes non-European, others. In this respect, it differs from mysticism as it has traditionally been understood as a “purely personal and inward experience.”37 Yet, medieval mysticism, as Bernard McGinn has demonstrated, was from its origins enmeshed with the social, or outward, expression of religion, in the form of the Church.38 Despite its putative goal of annihilation of the worldly self, mysticism was rooted in bodily experience and, because bodies are enmeshed in the social world, mysticism was also in its way a social mode of operation.39
Even when mystics behaved transgressively, as late fourteenth-century English mystic Margery Kempe did when she burst into loud wailing and tears at socially inappropriate moments, or as the twelfth-century Cistercian nun Ida of Louvain did when she dressed herself in rags and careened about the marketplace shouting about God, their performances were framed by the social expectations that made their actions strange and uncomfortable to others.40 Sometimes, of course, their transgression took them beyond the boundaries of social and religious orthodoxy so completely that they were cast out of the religious community of Christians – for example, Marguerite Porete went to the stake in 1310 for her refusal to recant her written claims of ecstatic and total union with the Godhead. Importantly, it was probably Marguerite’s insistent claim to a constant experience of the beatific vision – the “face to face” visual encounter with God promised to the souls of the blessed – that offended her contemporaries as much as her notion that the mystical union of the soul with God did away with the need for the liturgical and ritual forms of the worldly church.41
Even in this transgression, Marguerite affirmed contemporary devotional practices that sought a foretaste of the pure, unmediated encounter with God. Ultimately, mystics often played the important social role of reaffirming the possibility that conventional devotion could indeed move the spirit beyond the mundane. Their “theoerotic imagery” – the language and the visual signs through which they signaled their difference – permeated the rhetoric of more mainstream devotion.42 Although conventional devotion was often placed by medieval writers in opposition to mysticism, Richard Kieckhefer has pointed out that the two were in fact intertwined with the conventions of devotion already containing within themselves the objectives of mysticism; namely, interiority and transformation.43 This close and complex relationship between devotion and mystical experience is encoded in the imagery of book owners at prayer. Frequently, the depicted owner participates in a mystical revelation, seeing and being seen by God, the Virgin, or another saint: a pictorial nudge that seems to suggest that with proper application to her devotions, the embodied owner might experience what her pictorial double does. However, for an aristocratic book owner to actually engage in the outward expressions of mysticism, she would have to abandon the poise that befitted her station and that was reified in her decorous appearance in the book.
These owners, no matter how extraordinary their depicted circumstances, are never endowed with the gestures of astonishment, ecstasy, or confusion that were a standard part of the artistic repertoire and of the representation of mystical experience; they had nothing to gain from such a representation given their social position. The tension between the mystical implications of, say, a hand reaching down from the heavens and the sangfroid of the recipient of this act of grace indicates the negotiated nature of the devotion structured by many prayer books. Jean Claude Schmitt has highlighted the value placed on modesty in gesture in medieval discussions of prayer, and this sense of Ciceronian propriety may also be a factor in the restrained appearance of the owner as he or she attains spiritual communion with God.44 These owner depictions speak of a pragmatic approach to devotion – a tense balance between the secular demands of their subjects’ lives as upper-class Christians and the spiritual expectations placed on them as performers of piety visible to others and to God.
How was one to be both a competent administrator of home and family and a spiritual person whose piety was not simply outward display but achieved a genuine and efficacious spiritual state? Second-wave feminism taught us to see the conflicting demands placed on women as both wage earners and homemakers as an oppressive double shift. Medieval aristocratic laywomen and some laymen and secular clergymen similarly had to negotiate between two sets of opposing demands, those of engagement with the affairs of family and household management (or the governance of even larger entities such as counties, bishoprics, or empires) and those of monastic withdrawal, both of which were promoted in their prayer books in the form of words and images. Pictorial representations, to a much greater extent than verbal texts, rely on the brain’s visual capacity to make their meaning. Within the setting of late medieval practices of devotion, visual representation plays an extraordinary role, especially as concerns the owners of books who had the leisure to contemplate at length the sacred images they possessed. Like the textual devotions contained within their books, the images allowed them to emulate monastic and mystical practices within the constraints of aristocratic or upper-class lay propriety:
whereas Ida of Louvain was known for her incessant and public recitation of the Ave Maria and her manifold prostrations before an image of the Virgin, the book owner could quietly enact a more decorous version of this piety in the space created by the open book and her own attentive looking. Thus, the lady in the miniature at the beginning of matins in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons communes with the Virgin and Child in what appears to be an intimate space set aside for prayer within her own home. The presence of her dog and her unmediated proximity to the altar argue against reading the setting as the interior of a church. Recently, Aden Kumler has characterized the particularly high level of investment made by francophone aristocrats in illuminated devotional compendia and other books of religious instruction as part of a spiritually “ambitious” class identity, in which the upper class far exceeded the minimum expectations of catechistic and confessional learning established for the laity by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Kumler’s work underscores the degree to which the culture of devotion in late medieval France and England was both the product and the engine of a premium placed on the ability to negotiate a sophisticated system of visual signification.45
The ability to work with and understand images, as much as vernacular literacy, was a mark of high social rank, but it also carried with it a moral and spiritual charge. There were good and bad ways to read, as cautioned by the tale of Paolo and Francesca, Dante’s lovers for whom shared reading led to adultery, and likewise there were good and bad ways to interact with material objects and pictures. The author of the early fourteenth-century Franciscan devotional guide Meditations on the Life of Christ makes this point by contrasting the handiwork of the Virgin Mary, who in her poverty “simply could not spend time on vanities, but would not have done so otherwise,” to the “frivolous undertaking(s)” of those who make beautiful things for the sake of making beautiful things.46
This emphasis on poverty is understandable in a text by and for those affiliated with the Franciscans, but because the Meditations were wildly popular among lay as well as cloistered audiences in the early fourteenth century, the contrast between useful and useless things is important.47 Yet, while the text councils the female monastic reader to avoid such “curios” as “shallow, vain, and fickle,” it goes on to clarify that not all beautiful works are so pointless or spiritually bankrupt: You ought not understand that to mean that in every situation it is wrong to produce beautiful and exquisite works, and especially with regard to those intended for divine worship. In such work, however, carefully and watchfully ward off and keep at a good distance from the soul every undue influence, intention, and pleasure.48
Thus, beautiful objects, including pictorial images, are understood to supply a useful and perhaps necessary spiritual aid, but they only work when looked at by both maker and audience in the correct fashion. One gets the sense from the Meditations’ description of artistic engagement that the writer has familiarity with the experience of total absorption in the process of creation: “O, how many times she looks it over, rethinks it and mentally reworks it, both when she is not working on it and also when she ought to be concerned with sacred things.”49 Similarly, a large number of miracle legends concerning material depictions of the Virgin Mary caution against aesthetic, rather than pious, attitudes toward such objects. The consequences for wrong looking can be disastrous, ranging from being thrown out of one’s home by one’s own children to being eaten alive by one’s depraved companions.50 The correct way to look at sacred images is with lingering, aspirational attention, as demonstrated in depictions of owners kneeling in prayer with their open books before them but gazing up at another depiction of a sacred personage or sign as in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons. This visual mode partially corresponds to the modern critical articulation of the gaze as “prolonged, contemplative, yet regarding the field with a certain aloofness and disengagement.”51 Cynthia Hahn has argued that thirteenth-century visuality centered around the gaze rather than the glance, which she posits as the primary visual mode of the earlier Middle Ages.52 This helps explain the particularly complex, interpictorial, and textually networked character of thirteenth-century devotional pictures as described by Kumler.
The medieval viewer of images in a Book of Hours was probably considerably less impassive before the image than the ideal viewer described by Norman Bryson, but then again, Bryson’s viewer, gazing with “a certain aloofness and disengagement,” is explicitly masculine, whereas the gender of the gaze imagined by the late medieval Book of Hours belongs to a different order of things. Because the gaze is a vector in the construction and enforcement of ideologies of gender, as film critic Laura Mulvey has shown, it is also important to attend to the gendered nature of the acts of looking represented and envisioned by the owner images and the books in which they appear. Although Hahn does not discuss the role of gender in the shift from the more percussive and wounding visionary paradigm of the early Middle Ages to the absorbed, lingering, and somaticized visionary mode of the late period, the gendered and frequently eroticized character of later medieval devotion is deeply linked to its investment in the desiring gaze. The visibility of soul to God, and of God to the soul, is, in this context, represented in highly literal terms, so that literal gazing, in the sense of absorbed, longing visual contemplation of the image, facilitates an identification with the depicted viewer, rapt in visual absorption.
The fact that so many of the depicted viewers and their flesh-and-blood counterparts, book owners, were women cannot be insignificant to our understanding of these images. In their privileging of a feminine subjectivity (even when, as Caroline Walker Bynum has shown, the physical sex of the subject is masculine), they stand in sharp contrast to the more common formulation (then as now) of the gaze as masculine and its passive object as feminine. Against the conventional construction of the desiring gaze in classic Hollywood cinema described by Mulvey, the medieval devotional gaze is feminized at times. This is not to say it is therefore necessarily empowering to women; in fact, the adoption of a feminine persona in devotion was almost certainly linked to the monastic topos of humility, women being understood as the weaker sex in intellectual, physical, and spiritual terms.
Instead, the reflexive image of the book owner that imagines that owner as female and the desiring, spiritual gaze as feminine fits into a larger scheme in which the soul gazes longingly and helplessly toward a deferred vision of the divine while the divine – often depicted in the same books as the owner images as the frontal face of a bearded and unsmiling Christ – stares implacably back, always empowered, always masculine, all-seeing. Thus, in an idealized devotional scenario, the desiring feminine gaze is subordinate to the scrutinizing masculine gaze depicted by the Holy Face, embodied by the male confessor, and reinforced by a legal and theological culture in which masculine witnessing and masculine insight were privileged. In all of this, it is important to remember that any given individual, regardless of biological sex, might at times occupy a subject position somewhere on a spectrum between absolute femininity and absolute masculinity; the depicted gender of the owners depicted in books is only partly a function of their physical bodies. Modern viewers first encountering illuminated medieval Books of Hours and Psalters are often nonplussed by the density and variety of illustrations, and for good reason.
Text–image relations in medieval prayer books are seldom straightforward – these are not illustrated texts but fugues of words, pictures, and nonrepresentational visual elements such as pen scrolls and line fillers that complicate, rather than explain, the meanings of one another. Furthermore, though a coherent, chronologically organized series of pictures concerned with, for instance, the Incarnation and Infancy of Christ gradually came to be associated with the standard divisions of the text of the Hours of the Virgin over the course of the fourteenth century, other less common or less frequently illustrated texts abound in iconographic and organizational variety. In the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons, the cycle of full-page miniatures associated with the major ferial divisions of the Psalter highlights the value placed on visual complexity in such books: not only do they constitute a unique selection of episodes from the public life of Christ, but they also eschew a chronological sequence and take an eccentric approach to iconography, making some scenes difficult to identify. Allusions to contemporary preaching and vernacular spiritual instruction are embedded in the biblical scenes, and relationships between the Psalm texts and the Gospel texts represented in pictures are subtle and elusive.
This difficulty is itself the point: the mind must work to unravel what seems, at first sight, like a confused tangle of words and images, and this is a fundamental part of devotional practice.53 Kumler addresses an important aspect of this engagement with difficulty, focusing on how the complex imagery of books that provided practical and theoretical instruction in Christianity to readers in the vernacular challenged those readers to become more sophisticated interpreters of text and image. She argues that the viewer’s oblique relationship to the texts and the interpictorial sophistication of the images add an element of intellectual challenge that responds to the lofty ambitions of the upper-class laity as they sought to differentiate themselves from the masses of those classified by the Church as “the simple.”54
In order to learn to perform such feats of meditative decoding, children had to be taught from an early age not just to read but also to see critically. In the aristocratic lay household, the teaching of these visual skills fell to mothers who often used the same books they employed in their own devotions to instruct their children.55 Evidence for this pedagogical function can be found embedded in the manuscripts themselves, as Roger Wieck and Kathryn Rudy have demonstrated; larger, more legible hands, alphabetical poems, and catechistic material were frequently included in books intended for the instruction of children.56
Images of mothers teaching children to read and to pray are also common in the late medieval iconographic repertoire, often focusing on the image of Saint Anne as the exemplary mother, teaching her daughter, Mary, or on Mary holding the Christ child in her lap with a book open before them. Dominique AlexandreBidon has scoured both the visual and the literary sources to identify this theme of maternal instruction in rudiments of religion and literacy. One of her most suggestive discoveries is a fifteenth-century French vernacular miracle story concerning a mother who frequently took her child to a monastery church and showed him “beautiful and well-fashioned images,” teaching him to say his Ave Maria before them, so that whenever he later saw an image of the Virgin, the words came instantly to his lips.57
As this late example suggests, the ability to work between words and images was perhaps as important to the religious formation of children in the upper social classes as the ability to read.58 Louis IX of France, whose mother almost certainly taught him the fundamentals of literacy along with the basics of Christian faith, and who may have played a part in developing innovative ways of teaching the visual by commissioning the early Bibles Moralisées, serves as a fine example of what a visually skilled monarch could do.59 Alexandre-Bidon points out that Joinville specified that Blanche of Castile instructed Louis to say his hours; she also emphasizes that “without the annotated visual example, without the image, Christian education would not have known how to proceed,” and she speculates that even the act of flipping through the pages of a devotional book with a child while looking at the pictures would have been understood as spiritually and perhaps even medically beneficial.60 Visual literacy increasingly became an indispensable asset in the aristocratic culture of late-thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe.
In regard to the elaborate orchestration of Latin and French texts and pictures in the Lambeth Apocalypse, M. T. Clanchy notes, “The difficulty for Lady Eleanor de Quincy probably did not lie in reading ... the Latin text or the French captions in her book, but in comprehending the pictures ... where the reader sought for visionary meanings.”61 Kumler has further demonstrated that it is in the careful recalibration of iconographic themes such as the scutum fidei that the artist of the Lambeth Palace Apocalypse challenged the book’s noble owner to engage with the spiritual struggle the book was intended to facilitate.62 The ability to tease out significance in the play between written texts, pictorial representations, remembered words, and internalized images allowed an individual access to the highest forms of spiritual striving – the visionary and the mystical – but it had its empowering effect in more secular arenas as well. In the courtly culture of the Valois princes of late fourteenth-century France, mastery of the pictorial was a means by which influence could be wielded and political agendas advanced.
This is exemplified by the patronage and collecting activities of Jean de Berry, whose mania for luxury objects was at least in part an outgrowth of his upbringing by the visually literate matriarchs of the early Valois court.63 Brigitte Buettner has described a “mute but persuasive grammar made of objects, words, and gestures that ceaselessly spoke of rank and status” as critical to Jean and his contemporaries’ collection and commission of works of art.64 Careful attention to the visual allowed courtly actors to precisely gauge and fine-tune the performance of prestige and power. Joachim Bumke’s detailed study of the material permutations of what he called “social style” in twelfth- and thirteenth-century German-speaking courts reveals that the rituals of courtly life, ranging from highly choreographed displays of martial prowess to what sort of headgear a person chose to wear, emphasized nonverbal, visible signs.65
Always, the visual acuity that underlay even the most profane performances of aesthetic delectation were entwined with concerns about the fate of one’s immortal soul; beauty, after all, proceeds from God in the logic of this society. Bernd Carqué has studied the interpenetration of political, devotional, and aesthetic concerns in the constitution of aristocratic and princely identity in the courts of the Valois rulers: “A glance at a few passages from the Grandes Chroniques ... suffices to demonstrate that even on the part of their viewers, sacred and profane were closely enmeshed.”66 Between an elaborately jeweled belt buckle and a painting that depicts the Annunciation lies an important distinction. The balance of the semiotic weight of the materials themselves and that of their combined visual effect shifts toward the latter in a manuscript illumination no matter how lavishly gilded it might be. Interpreting pictures and thinking through them required a distinct subset of visual skills, skills that were rooted as much in internalized narratives and imaginative practices as in the canny assessment of material value, craftsmanship, and style.
In this, pictorial visual literacy was informed by the centrality of narrative and the imaginative reliving of past events that was particularly marked in mendicant preaching and in female monastic devotional practice, two arenas far removed – at least in principle – from the luxurious material excess of courtly visual culture.67 We have already heard the author of the Meditations on the Life of Christ, a Franciscan writing for an audience of Clarissan nuns, distinguishing between the frivolous and serious modes of interacting with beautiful things, and on a more abstract level as well the text of the Meditations is insistently visual. The reader is counseled repeatedly to “picture” episodes from the narrative, relying on its audience’s familiarity with Christological narrative iconography; some manuscript versions also supply a range of new pictures for contemplation. Recent studies of the Meditations have emphasized its documentary, rather than prescriptive, status: its verbal images are akin to ekphrases based on common motifs in the visual arts, rather than instructions on which artists might base their visual representations.68
This moves away from a long tradition of scholarship that sought in the Meditations an essential key to late medieval iconography of Christ.69 Notably, the text dwells on visual contemplation as a behavior engaged in by the holy actors themselves. Describing Mary’s vigil at the crib of her son, the text waxes ecstatic about the Virgin’s contemplative looking: “How frequently and how intently did she gaze upon his countenance and on each and every part of his most sacred body.” And just in case the reader or listener has not picked up on the exemplary nature of Mary’s visual contemplation, it goes on to counsel, “You too stay with our Lady as she watches by the crib, and take your delight often with the boy Jesus,” suggesting that this “visit” ought to occur “at least once a day.”70
One aspect of the intensely visual emphasis of late medieval piety that has been largely overlooked has to do with the role of artists themselves in the shaping of the visual environment of devotion. Unsurprisingly, paintings created by artists whose practices were professional and commercial, and whose livelihoods depended on the continued demand for such work, privilege images and the gaze. Although such visionary texts as Revelation were well suited to pictorial depictions of the relationship between seeing and visionary experience, artistic interest in representing both vision and its objects was hardly limited to illustrating visions.71 Careful attention to depicted vision can be found in a huge variety of devotional books and objects from the period, yet it is unlikely that artists set out to make vision the sole concern of their pictorial depictions. By the same token, it seems equally preposterous to suppose that some theologian or other religious authority, looking over the artists’ shoulders, directed them to make vision more visible. Existing evidence of the role of patrons and “programmers” in the design of the pictorial elements of illuminated manuscripts attests that instructions tended to focus on the materials (colors, for example) and basic iconography or composition, leaving the artists some latitude for interpretation.72
These artists were working in the same devotional environment in which their audiences operated: an environment where the visual was particularly privileged, and where professional lay illuminators both benefited from and contributed to this state of affairs. To the extent that such attention as late medieval artists pay to vision is intentional – in Michael Baxandall’s sense of “the forward leaning look of things” – it is the outcome of a complex set of relations, processes, and communications.73 To pay attention to the visual was part of the habitus of the artist, as an artist but also as a participant in the devotional culture of his or her time.74
Working from Rudolph Arnheim’s theory of “visual thinking,” in which the physiological process of vision is not separable from the thought process and in fact constitutes one aspect of thought,75 I see the pictures in devotional books for the laity, and especially the images of praying owners, as constituting nonverbal arguments about the nature of prayer and the place of pictorial representation and looking within the performance of devotion. The complex interdependency of vision and thought was recognized by medieval thinkers; Michael Camille pointed out that for such figures as Roger Bacon, John Pecham, and Thomas Aquinas, the physical senses were the basis for all cognitive activity.76 The preeminence of vision among the senses was by the late medieval period already an established precept of Western philosophy.77 Mary Carruthers’s work has shown that medieval intellectuals from late antiquity forward understood certain aspects of cognition in terms of the making and perception of visual images, especially in the context of spiritual meditation.78
Particular to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, was an emphasis on the visual as a pathway to a sustained encounter with God, a problematic formulation that clashed with earlier discourses about and practices of making images.79 In an important essay on the medieval concept of speculatio, Jeffrey Hamburger explores the incarnational concerns that tied bodily vision to spiritual vision in a continuum, rather than as an opposition, in this period.80 He ties the development of interest in and theorizing of the role of visible images in the pursuit of the mystical vision of God to the Victorines of the twelfth century, noting that the Victorine understanding of human nature rejected a dualistic concept of body and soul and encouraged the emotional response to verbal and visual images as a movement of the soul toward God.81 Ultimately, in the works of Gertrude of Helfta and Heinrich Suso, Hamburger identifies an important shift of emphasis that allowed physical vision rather than visionary revelation to attain an unprecedented centrality in devotional performance and experience.82 Physical vision is undeniably central to the devotional books that interest me here and to the reflexive images of book owners they contain. Gazing, seeing oneself gazing, seeing oneself being seen as one gazes, and sometimes, suddenly, coming face to face with the all-seeing gaze of God himself are experiences that figure prominently in the pictorial and textual contents of the books I investigate in the following pages.83 In the first chapter, I focus on the concept of the “true image” of Christ as it manifested itself in the devotional culture of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, primarily in France and England.
In particular, I look at the mirroring function of the Holy Face and its correspondence to contemporary discourses about the visibility of the soul during confession and the spiritually corrective practice of Christomimetic contemplation. The second chapter turns to the iconographic sources of the reflexive image of the book owner and traces the development of the type within Psalters and other books intended for use in contemplative prayer; I am particularly interested in how people learned to see themselves within the pages of their books. Chapter 3 deals with the sudden burst of intense visual interest in the book owner in devotional books for the laity of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. From a timid and constrained presence in earlier Psalters, book owners emerge as the subjects of full-page miniatures and large-scale programs of illumination even as access to religious knowledge in the vernacular and rigorous confessional training was becoming available to the laity for the first time. In the fourth chapter, I continue to examine these images, framing them within the social and performative aspects of gender and domesticity, for seeing oneself also meant seeing the environment in which one lived and one’s place in that ecosystem.
The final chapter looks at the reflexive image of the book owner in the period after 1350, when, as Perkinson has shown, the stakes of representation shifted toward physiognomic mimesis and a highly selective strain of naturalism. The reflexive image shows a remarkable tenacity, and it is possible to trace its influence well into the early modern era, when the portrait as we know it began to take its distinctive form. For a medieval person, the immensity of the dream-space of interiority was dwarfed by the immensity of God. The number and variety of reflexive images found in devotional books suggests the urgency with which the owners of these books sought to witness that infinitude. Turning from their workaday tasks to pray as many as eight times a day, they yearned for eternal life, and they provided images for themselves that explicitly depicted this yearning. As we examine what they saw, and what their pictures tell us about what they hoped to see, we come a little closer to understanding their lives. The great Dominican redactor of the Vulgate Hugh of SaintCher described the Book of Ruth, that shortest and most homely of the Old Testament’s historical books, as “a small door in terms of the letter, but inside it is filled by the greatness of its spirit.”84 The reflexive image of the book owner also opens a small door onto the inner universe of the late Middle Ages.
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