TWICE in my life, I have
seen the herding of sheep. The first time was on the hills around
the Sea of Galilee in 1982. The little flock that tumbled down a
track was scraggy and assorted, goats as well as sheep. The
shepherd stopped them while he tried to persuade us to taste their
milk.
The second time, a small
flock was hurrying through an orchard on the slope between Assisi
and San Damiano, bunched and hassled along by a bossy sheepdog. On
both occasions, it seemed that we had taken a tuck in the web of
sequence, that it could have been AD 30 or 1210.
That telescoping of the
years between the life of Christ on this earth and their present
time was a constant aspect of the preaching of the Friars as they
brought alive the Gospels, not in monastic enclosures but in the
universities, the marketplace, and the home. For the first time, in
the 1220s, the stories were recounted all over Europe and into the
Near East in the vernacular, for everyone, not just the privileged,
to savour and understand.
The Dominicans have always
been associated with preaching among the learned, and the
Franciscans among the simple. St Francis had excluded books in his
prescription of holy poverty. But the distinction is too abrupt. It
was St Anthony of Padua who immediately persuaded Francis to relax
that stipulation; so there was always a strong Franciscan presence,
as well as Dominican, in the universities and in the great
houses.
St Anthony of Padua,
nevertheless, found that the Infant Christ distracted him from his
studies by sitting on his book, and so he is always represented.
Admittedly, Albertus Magnus, a giant among medieval botanists, was
a Dominican, but his precursor, Bartholomew the Englishman, whose
De Proprietatis Rerum, was finished only a few years after
Francis's death, was a Franciscan. Botany ought to have been a
specifically Franciscan discipline.
The impact of Franciscan
preaching on largely illiterate country people in the High Middle
Ages is manifest wherever you find traces on the walls of village
churches of medieval paintings. Admittedly, the chancel arch lays
out the Doom where none can avoid it. Otherwise, setting aside the
narratives of popular saints depicted in favourite corners, the
staple subjects are the infancy and Passion of Christ. Up and down
the country, from West Chiltington in Sussex through Ashampstead in
Berkshire to Corby Glen in Lincolnshire, an angel greets the
shepherds, and does so expansively.
At West Chiltington, such is
their importance that each of the three shepherds has his own
angel. To appreciate the immediacy with which this homely scene has
been endowed, we have to go forward another half-century or so to
the Mystery plays where they find voice, at its loudest in the
Wakefield cycle.
At Corby Glen Church, the
more decorous Magi wind their way along the nave north wall to the
crib, while the shepherds opposite bring their sheep and a dog with
them, all as large as life, as they stride the length of the nave
to Herod - who would not have been pleased to see them. (A muddle
there, rare in medieval iconography.)
The village of Corby Glen is
next to Irnham, where they still celebrate the Luttrell family and
their patronage of the famous Luttrell Psalter. The Dominicans
often found themselves as confessors in large households, and a
Dominican friar, a family relative, shares the Luttrell feast in
the margin of the psalm referring to feasting in that manuscript.
Part of the Dominican mission was to instil education into
families. The menfolk were usually too occupied with killing
things, but the ladies and their children were at leisure to be
beguiled into learning.
The wonderful scenes of
country life that make the Luttrell Psalter so popular today are
accompanied by the most outrageous grotesques ever associated with
a book of prayer, (rivalled only by that superficially demure
little manuscript the Macclesfield Psalter, discovered in time for
the great "Cambridge Illuminations" exhibition of 2005).
The only possible excuse for
some of these margins is their potential appeal to the adolescent
boys whom the Friars were anxious to persuade to study. The Friars
had been associated with lavishly illustrated manuscripts to tempt
a secular, often regal, audience since the glorious illustrated
Apocalypses of the mid-13th century onwards, the Alphonso Psalter
of 1284, and the Holkham Bible Picture Book of c.1300.
In the second half of the
14th century, a group of artists, one of them John de Teye, an
Augustinian Friar (so, like the Franciscans and Dominicans, free to
live outside the cloister), illuminated very lively manuscripts for
the de Bohun family, working from the de Bohun castle at Pleshey in
Essex.
If the Franciscans were
behind the rustic procession to the crib in the nave of Corby Glen,
the Dominican touch may be recognised in the north aisle, where
among popular devotional images the special subject of St Anne
teaching the Virgin to read was rediscovered a few decades ago.
This picture was especially
dear to the Dominicans, for obvious reasons. Most late-medieval
pictures of the annunciation show the Virgin interrupted as she
reads her Office. If she and her cousin Elizabeth could not read,
how did they know the Song of Hannah? So the part played by Mary's
mother, St Anne, is marked: she must have taught Mary to read.
The source of this expansion
of the Gospel accounts was The Golden Legend, the great
work of Jacobus de Voragine, the Dominican Archbishop of Genoa who
died in 1292. That The Golden Legend, and especially St
Anne as the role-model for all families educating their children,
was immediately dear to the Dominicans in this country is witnessed
by the survival of 15 paintings of Anne teaching the child Mary to
read in English churches.
Croughton in
Northamptonshire, c.1310, is probably the earliest to
survive, though Corby Glen is not much later. It is again one of
the subjects on the frontal in the Cluny Museum in Paris, belonging
to the same Dominican altarpiece as the Thornham Parva Retable,
both of them having been painted in c.1330 for a Dominican
friary in East Anglia.
SO WE are equipped for the
shock of this year's miniature of the nativity in Fitzwilliam MS
69. Nicholas Rogers, an authority on this genre of illuminated
manuscript, kindly visited the Fitzwilliam, and contributes his
analysis of the manuscript and its implications:
"Once one has got over the
initial shock of the 18th-century French harlequin binding, a jazzy
composition of coloured lozenges that look more 1930s than 1730s,
MS 69 in the Fitzwilliam Museum seems to be an ordinary French Book
of Hours of the mid-15th century, illuminated by a provincial
artist who, to be honest, is not very good, although aspects of his
style suggest an acquaintance with the work of the Rohan Master,
the most individual French illuminator of the early 15th
century.
"The contents are
unexceptional: a calendar in French, the beginning of St John's
Gospel, the Hours of the Virgin, penitential psalms, litany, Hours
of the Cross, Hours of the Holy Spirit, and eucharistic and Marian
devotions. The illustrations are conventional in appearance, but
the depiction of the nativity presents a novel reworking of a
familiar theme. All the usual elements are there - Mary, Jesus,
Joseph, ox and ass - but it is Joseph, seated humbly on the ground,
who nurses the Christ Child, while the Virgin, in a golden kirtle
and white headdress, sits up in bed reading. Mary and Joseph are
linked compositionally by the ox and ass, which are penned in by a
wattle fence. The ass appears to be nibbling at St Joseph's
halo.
"Joseph first appears in
nativity scenes in the fifth century. He is depicted as a seated,
contemplative figure. Sometimes he seems to be asleep, reminding us
of the important role of dreams in guiding Joseph. This mode of
representation remained standard in the East. In the West it was
not until the 13th century that Joseph is seen taking a more active
role in the nativity. In a fragment of the destroyed 13th-century
rood-screen at Chartres Cathedral, Mary, resting in bed, touches
the swaddled Child in the manger as a solicitous Joseph offers a
cloth.
"In 14th- and 15th-century
Netherlandish and German art, Joseph is engaged in a variety of
tasks. He can be found warming swaddling clothes, cooking food, or
blowing a fire into life. In the mid-14th-century Bohemian
Hohenfurth altar, he helps prepare the Child's bath. A particularly
charming example is the Netherlandish nativity of c.1400
in the Museum Mayer van den Berg, Antwerp, part of a portable
altarpiece, which shows him cutting up his hose to make swaddling
bands for the Child.
"In another depiction of
this motif, Joseph addresses the Virgin: 'Mary, take my hose and
wind your dear babe in them.' Such familiar images of Joseph may
derive from his depiction in Mystery plays. It is rare for Joseph
to be shown holding the Christ-child. He does so in the Petri-Altar
by Master Bertram, of c.1379, now in the Hamburg
Kunsthalle, but there he is clearly handing the Child over to his
Mother. In Fitzwilliam 69, the emphasis is more clearly on his role
as foster-father.
"This function is most
commonly depicted in late medieval German art. A woodcut of the
1470s shows Joseph leading the Christ-child by the hand, perhaps on
the return from Egypt. In an altarpiece by a follower of the Lower
Rhenish artist Hendrick Bogaert, Jesus assists Joseph in the
carpenter's shop. Out of elements of the iconography of the
nativity and the flight into Egypt, devotional images of the Holy
Family were created in the Low Countries and Germany in the 15th
century. An early woodcut of the Holy Family in the Albertina shows
the enthroned, crowned Virgin nursing the Child while St Joseph
cooks a meal.
"In Joos van Cleve's
Holy Family in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Joseph is depicted as an old man, with missing teeth and a stubby
beard, holding a pair of spectacles. This is an extreme example of
the standard medieval portrayal of him as a patriarchal,
grey-bearded figure. The theologian Jean Gerson, the chief promoter
of the cult of St Joseph in 15th-century France, objected to the
depiction of the saint as a decayed old man, arguing that the
Virgin would have required the support of someone in full vigour,
especially during the Flight into Egypt. However, the
representation of Joseph as a grey-beard remained standard until
the 17th century.
"The Blessed Virgin Mary is
most commonly associated with a book in the context of the
annunciation, reading the word at the moment when the Word became
incarnate. Sometimes, the book is inscribed with the words of her
response to the angelic greeting. The book she reads in the
Fitzwilliam nativity is meant to remind us of that event, just as
the book which St Anne uses to teach the Virgin foreshadows the
annunciation. The Virgin's book also provides a point of contact
with the user of the Book of Hours, who is thereby encouraged to
cultivate a spiritual union with Mary in her devotional reading,
linking her prayers with those of the Virgin at the nativity.
"What do we know about the
person for whom this image of the nativity was created? There is no
coat of arms or inscription to enable the first owner of
Fitzwilliam 69 to be identified, but there are several clues. De
Gaulle once complained about the difficulty of governing a country
that has 246 different kinds of cheese. Many popes must have felt
the same when faced with the Gallican Church, with its multiplicity
of local liturgical Uses.
"Fitzwilliam 69 is of the
Use of Besançon in the Franche-Comté, between Burgundy and
Switzerland. The calendar and litany are peppered with obscure
local saints: Ferreolus, Ferrutio, Antidius, Nicetius, Prothadius.
The book was made for a lady who is depicted kneeling in prayer
before the Virgin and Child at the beginning of a French
translation of the prayer 'Deprecor te domina'. Her
rose-madder gown with white turned-down collar and green
heart-shaped horned head-dress would have been fashionable in the
1440s. It is possible that the book was a wedding present. It was
customary in France well into the 20th century for a bride to be
given a Book of Hours, or, later, a paroissien (a
layfolk's missal with added devotions) on her wedding day. Some 30
years later, either this owner or a subsequent one had further
Gospel readings added at the end of the book. Thereafter, there is
no sign of usage until the book passed into the collection of
Richard, 7th Viscount FitzWilliam."
THERE was a Dominican
presence in Besançon. (Where was there not?) A son of the city,
Stephen of Besançon, served briefly as Master of the Order in
1292-94.
I am tempted to add just one
more example to Nicholas Rogers's list of helpful St Josephs. In
the years 1350-63, the newly built private chapel for Edward III
and his Queen, Philippa, in Westminster Palace was painted with the
royal family coming in state to worship the Holy Family, and with
scenes of the Old and New Testament. Only pathetic fragments of the
paintings survived the disastrous fire of 1834, and are now in the
British Museum.
A few copies were made,
however, when the paintings were rediscovered behind panelling in
the first years of the 19th century. Among these was a poor
rendering of the annunciation to the shepherds by J. T. Smith of
1804.
We must thank him, despite
his inept brush; for without him we would not have any account of
this bucolic scene - four shepherds again, a sufficiency of sheep
with a dog - and then, above them all, the Virgin in bed with a
plainer red rug over her, ox and ass in support, and Joseph helping
to wind up the baby in his swaddling cloth - a role-model for the
private devotions of one of our most powerful kings and his family.
The representation in the Besançon hours of a century later is
luxurious in comparison.
To return to it: in the
unprecedented emergency in which they have found themselves in this
account of the scene in the stable at Bethlehem, the ox and ass
have come to a mutual arrangement. They have split forces: the ox
keeps Mary warm, while the ass, bending over Joseph, directs his
breath, the reassuring warm breath of stable and straw, on to the
Infant Christ (and, if he is tempted to nibble Joseph's halo at the
same time, we are not criticising).
In this version, the helpful
way in which Joseph is sharing the care of the Holy Infant means
that the exhausted mother has a small space in her life to do
something else. Let us hope that the joyful bride who first
received this book found such a space. In the myriad images of the
nativity which have come our way, neither Nicholas Rogers nor I
have seen elsewhere this endearing iconographic touch.
Dr Tudor-Craig is an
art-historian. Nicholas Rogers is the archivist of Sidney Sussex
College, Cambridge. The authors acknowledge the help of Dr Nicholas
Robinson of the Manuscript Department of the Fitzwilliam
Museum.