13
Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious Architecture
Why should the margins of devotional books… be loaded with incongruous distortions of natural or fabulous forms of life and why did not the sense of propriety in the possessors of such books revolt at the ill-timed, and even indecent, merriment of the artist? The only answer to be given to this question is that the ornamentation of a manuscript must have been regarded as a work having no connection whatever with the character of the book itself. Its details amused or aroused the admiration of the beholder who… took no thought whether the text was sacred or profane.1
It has taken art historical study of the imagery in the margins of Romanesque and Gothic manuscripts, as well as in the figurative margins of religious architecture and furniture, nearly 70 years to get beyond this response to the question so many viewers have asked, as phrased by E. M. Thompson, Keeper of Manuscripts for the British Museum, in his 1896 essay “The Grotesque and the Humorous in Illuminations of the Middle Ages.” A few years later, Louis Maeterlinck opened his own study of satire in Flemish painting by paraphrasing Thompson’s question and answer, and then elaborating on the reasons for this compartmentalization: different zones of the manuscript page were intended for different audiences; the text written in the center was meant for the education of the men in the family, while the extraneous marginal imagery was meant for the entertainment of the women and children.2 Such a view surely says more about the leisure occupations of a nineteenth-century bourgeois family than about those of medieval monks or rich laypeople. However, it may go a long way toward explaining why progress in the analysis of marginal imagery was slow at first: it was considered to be beneath study by men.
The Battle Over the Meaning of Monsters
Today we feel ill at ease reading Emile Mâle’s ridicule of his bête noire, Félicie d’Ayzac, one of the earliest women to venture into the nascent field of art history (still called “archeology”), for her “ingenious” efforts to explain as symbols the monstrous hybrids carved in the “marginal” space of religous architecture:
In her Mémoire sur trente-deux statues symboliques observées dans les parties hautes des tourelles de Saint-Denis, she made most clever use of texts. The statues of Saint-Denis are hybrid monsters. Mme Félicie d’Ayzac broke them down into their components: lion, goat, billy goat, horse. Then, armed with the mystical dictionary of Saint Eucher or of Rhabanus Maurus, she discovered the allegorical sense of them….
Mme Félicie d’Ayzac thought she had found a method and created a science of symbolism. In reality, she demonstrated only one thing: never were our ancient artists as subtle as their modern exegetes. How likely is it that they wanted to express so many things, and such refined things, through figures that can be seen from below only with good opera-glasses!3
In this attack published in 1898 in L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France (his doctoral dissertation), Mâle also singled out Charles-Auguste Auber, for his attempt to explain the symbolism of corbels ornamented with animal and human heads on the cathedral of Poitiers and other churches;4 Charles Cahier, for a volume devoted to Curiosités mystérieuses in which he used bestiaries and theological texts to explain “works that are nothing but artists’ fantasies”;5 and Count Bastard d’Estang for falling into the same error in his Etudes de symbolique chrétienne.6 These men were named along with Félicie d’Ayzac as perpetrators of a “mania for symbols” that threatened to discredit scientific archéologie. Mâle charged: “they have turned it into a novel.”
Bastard d’Estang’s oral report of 1849 to the Comité historique des arts et monuments concerning certain plates in Auber’s study of the Poitiers Cathedral opened the polemic. In this report, he defended Auber for trying to reproduce in engravings the monstrous sculpted figures of the cathedral’s corbels, which “antiquarians have treated until now with a disdain these figures surely do not deserve.”7 Bastard d’Estang argued that these corbel sculptures are analogous to the imagery in the margins of liturgical manuscripts, images which he called vignettes and claimed “frequently have an explanation… drawn from textual passages on the same page as the vignette, often beside or directly opposite the symbol.”8 Bastard d’Estang called for comparison of corbel figures both with other sculpted figures and with painted figures in the margins of manuscripts from the thirteenth century on. He predicted that such comparative study would prove “on the authority of the Church Fathers and of numerous connections, that caprice alone is not the creator of these peculiar compositions.”9
To support his view that bizarre marginal imagery can often be explained by the textual context where it appears (a point so novel – and so poorly demonstrated – that it convinced no one), Bastard d’Estang narrated how he resolved the mystery of one monstrous figure in a Breviary of the late thirteenth century (see fig. 13-1):10
[I]n the office of Saint Stephen protomartyr, beside the historiated initial that encloses the depiction of his death, the calligrapher has placed, as an ornament in the upper margin, a monster of such a bizarre shape that I was on the point of attributing it to the hand of a delirious illuminator: it is a red beast; its head is cut off, and from its breast emanates a long blue neck terminated by a human head. The figure being new to me, I thought I should turn to the text in order to verify whether, by chance, it was justified; I had the satisfaction of reading, on the same page, the following sentence from a sermon of Saint Fulgentius: Hodie miles [Stephanus], de tabernaculo corporis exiens, triumphator migravit ad coelum. Here, then, we have an allegory of Saint Stephen dying and “already seeing the glory of God,” or, what is sometimes called an apotheosis. The peculiarity of the monster helps to call attention to the symbol.11
To Bastard d’Estang, the human head on the very elongated blue neck, which he showed in a drawing,12 symbolized the migration of the soul to heaven, and he found support for this symbolism in the images at the bottom of the same page. This bas de page depicts an archer preparing to shoot at a snail coming out of its shell, which Bastard d’Estang understood, in this instance and others, as “certainly having to do with resurrection.” He went even further to argue, in a footnote, that marginal imagery may serve as a visual commentary by the painter upon the text it borders, and likewise for “marginal” sculpture:
Long experience has convinced us that marginal figures, very often inspired by the reading of the page itself, can serve as commentaries; often the passages relating to the miniatures, if one knows how to find them, reveal in turn the dominant thoughts of the painter at the time he was working. By allowing ourselves to be guided by analogy, we arrive at an explanation of fantastic creatures, which a similar intention has lavished on the corbels of churches. It is not rare, indeed, to encounter equally bizarre and monstrous compositions in liturgical books… The understanding of a word, the sudden comprehension of a textual or figural analogy, suffice to guide the reader on the path of the sculpted symbol, there where he had thought he saw only a meaningless grotesque.13
These allegorizing explanations did not convince (for elongated necks ending in human heads are not uncommon on marginal monsters), and some antiquarians were offended by Bastard d’Estang’s regretful admission that medieval marginal imagery is not always symbolic (emblematic or allegorical) in intention, but that there are also figures “purely burlesque, presenting faults or, if one prefers, qualities of caricature, with the unique aim of provoking laughter.” To Bastard d’Estang, comic marginal imagery was “a symbolic aberration and a scandal in temples as well as in liturgical and prayer books.”14
FIGURE 13-1 Breviary page with marginal images. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 1258:179v. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
It is no wonder that Champfleury, a student of caricature in all its forms, took Bastard d’Estang to task for “excessive, sectarian symbolism” and for his “bizarre analogies,” particularly those involving the snail. Like other antiquarians, Champfleury was convinced of the utility of comparative study of motifs as they appeared across the spectrum of material supports:
This comparison of different monuments is surely rational. The miniatures, drawings, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork of a period are held together by the bonds of ornament. In order to furnish his mind with the favorite forms of a period, the archeologist can never study various arts too much.15
Champfleury concluded that Bastard d’Estang had demonstrated his good archeological sense in theory, but not in practice, for the results of his explanatory method were ridiculous.
Interdisciplinary studies devoted to the transgeneric history of satire, caricature, and the grotesque flourished in the nineteenth century. In these, scholars such as Thomas Wright, Champfleury (who published the first edition of his history of caricature in 1876), and the Belgian Louis Maeterlinck made abundant use of, and thus called public attention to, “marginal” imagery from the pages of illuminated manuscripts and from the carvings on the capitals, corbels, portals, and misericords of religious buildings.16 These entertaining surveys treat monstrosity as a type of exaggeration and a mark of ridicule, but they are less interested in the monstrous or fantasized than in Gothic marginal images of a more mundane, everyday sort: entertaining or satirical “genre” scenes. These are presented in the form of drawings of specific details copied from vaguely identified medieval contexts. More scrupulous than the others on this point, Wright identified manuscripts by collection, number, and sometimes name, but never did he give a folio number for the medieval image copied in any engraving.
None of these antiquarian scholars believed there was the slightest connection between the written text on a manuscript page and the marginal imagery surrounding it. Wright, for example, explained that it was “only natural,” considering the influence of the medieval minstrels and entertainers on “the people’s minds generally, with their stories and satirical pieces, their grimaces, their postures, and their wonderful performances,” that “when a painter had to adorn the margin of a book, or the sculptor to decorate the ornamental parts of a building, we might expect the ideas which would first present themselves to him to be those suggested by the jougleur’s performance…. The same wit or satire would pervade them both.”17 On the other hand, Maeterlinck’s interest in marginal imagery as a reflection of popular traditions had a more tendentious, nationalistic motivation: to demonstrate an original Flemish genius for satire, which led to the great paintings of a Bosch or a Breughel the Elder.
In his review of the state of “archeological” studies in 1898, Mâle criticized both Wright and Champfleury (Maeterlinck came too late) for not paying enough attention to periodization: “All the epochs are mixed together.”18 However, he commended Champfleury for perceiving that much symbolic interpretation was beside the point; not only had Champfleury attacked Bastard d’Estang, but he had openly rejected his own initial error of “revolutionary neosymbolism”: “I began these studies [of the history of caricature] with the idea that the stones of cathedrals were speaking witnesses to the state of the people’s revolt; I ended it no longer believing in such seditious eloquence.”19 Mâle used Champfleury, in spite of his shortcomings, to bolster his own judgment that “if ever works were devoid of thought, it was surely these.” For Mâle, all symbolic explanations of monstrous and fantastic marginal imagery were “condemned in advance.”20
To clinch his argument against taking too seriously hybrid monsters and other “purely ornamental” features of Romanesque and Gothic art, Mâle quoted part of St Bernard’s famous tirade against monstrous sculptures in the cloister – “what are these ridiculous monsters doing here… what is the meaning of these unclean apes…?”21 Mâle took this highly rhetorical passage at face value and concluded that, if St Bernard did not understand such sculpture, modern interpreters should not even try, for it was never intended to have any sense:
The great mystic, the interpreter of the Song of Songs, the preacher who spoke only in symbols, admits that he does not understand the bizarre creations of the artists of his time…. Such a testimony decides the question. It is obvious that the flora and fauna of the Middle Ages, real or fantastic, usually have only a decorative value.22
Mâle argued that naturalistic or fantastic flora and fauna are the result of unreflective imitation on the part of artisans “closely supervised when it came to expressing the religious thought of their time,” but “left free to ornament the cathedral just as they pleased.”23 This ornamentation took the form of copying pleasing forms, either from nature (for plant leaves and the like) or from available visual designs (whether of Oriental textiles or of manuscript pages). In Mâle’s judgment, such images are purely formal solutions to the problem of how to fill space: “Hence so many hybrid monsters, whose supple limbs, easy to fling in every direction, had the merit of occupying all the parts of the field to be filled.”24 By insisting heavily on the meaninglessness and pure formality of this marginal imagery as sheer ornament, Mâle was not only trying to put a stop to what he considered to be a dangerous drift in the new science of iconography, but also to discredit an older antiquarian trend that saw in marginal imagery (in genre scenes, as well as in monstrosity) documentary evidence of mockery of certain aspects of life in the Middle Ages, as well as signs of popular resistance to domination (especially by the Catholic Church, the priesthood, the friars).
Mâle may have felt that his argument was not entirely convincing, for he attempted to nuance and bolster it in his study of twelfth-century religious art, first published in 1922, where he suggested pictorial, literary, or real-life models for numerous motifs of Romanesque sculpture, “the most virile of the arts,” hence the primary focus of his research.25 As sources for images of warriors or jongleurs and acrobats carved on capitals or façades, for example, he posited the real presence of jongleurs entertaining and reciting epics to the crowds in front of churches on the pilgrimage routes. To some monstrous carvings Mâle now allowed a moralizing intention; these he traced to descriptions and images from early Bestiaries and writings on natural history and the peoples of the world. Nevertheless, Mâle concluded his chapter on the Romanesque imagery of “The World and Nature” by reiterating his earlier views, this time backed with photographs and drawings of motifs borrowed from Oriental textiles:
It has become obvious today that the efforts of a whole generation of scholars have been fruitless. They worked in a vacuum, and it was Saint Bernard who was right. Our greater understanding today of Oriental decorative art leaves no doubt as to the truth of this. It is clear that, almost always, the peculiar animals of our Romanesque churches reproduce, more or less freely, the magnificent animals of Oriental textiles. Our sculptors were not always thinking of teaching; most of the time they were thinking only of decorating. This is the point it is important to establish.26
As sheer ornament, the pagan, monstrous imagery of Romanesque and Gothic sculpture merited scholarly attention only to identify its foreign sources and to appreciate its lines or style.
After Mâle, much scholarly effort was directed toward the discovery of distant sources of decorative motifs and to analysis of the “stylistics” of ornamentation. Questions of artistic intent or meaning were left aside. These new research parameters are evident in the publications of Jurgis Baltrušaitis on monstrous plastic and painted imagery of the Romanesque and Gothic periods.27 Nevertheless, Baltrušaitis took a certain delight in complicating the conventional nineteenth-century narrative of the progress or organic “evolution” toward naturalism of medieval Western art. Using a vast number of drawings and photographs, some reproduced in the margins of his own text in imitation of medieval marginalia, others showing entire manuscript pages rather than mere details, Baltrušaitis demonstrated that ancient stocks of stylized, “fantastic” (meaning fantasized or unnatural) imagery were continually recycled and varied in new schemes, to purely decorative ends, throughout the medieval period. He used words like réveil (resurgence, revival), recrudescence (upsurge or outbreak), renaissance (rebirth), and libération des refoulements (liberation from repressions) to describe this phenomenon, which made it seem to have a life – and a psychology – of its own: “the revivals are due, strictly speaking, to an organic evolution. They happen like a liberation from repressions, at the moment when barriers are let down, in an atmosphere of effervescence, immediately after a time of serenity and peace.”28
Baltrušaitis paid lip service to the division of medieval art, whether plastic or painted, into two distinct categories of different value. Statues and figures representing religious doctrine were considered to be of central importance. Ornament or “decor” was considered to be marginal, whatever its spatial position. The case of “decorated” initial letters formed by or enclosing struggling, stylized beasts, birds, plants, and humans in early medieval illuminated Bibles and liturgical manuscripts is instructive. Even though these initial letters were the center of attention and sometimes took up the greater part of the page, they were treated by most art historians as incidental or marginal, as meaningless ornament, like the monstrous sculptures of cloister capitals. Even when they appeared in a central position on medieval pages or monuments, fantastic images were considered extraneous and evacuated into the “margins” of art historical discourse as sheer decoration. The progress toward greater naturalism from Romanesque to Gothic art and beyond depends partly on these categorizations conventional to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art historical discourse.
The Gothic tendency to develop fantastic imagery in the margins of the page, rather than in major initials (as in earlier periods), was interpreted as conducive to greater naturalism in manuscript art. Baltrušaitis explained this, for example, in the opening of his chapter on the revival of the fantastic in the decor of the book:
A double development, determining the two independent and stylistically opposed aspects of architectural sculpture – its statuary and its decor, strictly speaking – also dominates the evolution of painting in manuscripts, where we see, on the one hand, illustration (the miniature) withdrawing progressively to its domain of storytelling in lifelike forms, and on the other hand, ornamentation (illumination) discovering nearby, in the borders of the page, a space of escape to the limitless distance of the impossible.29
Yet Baltrušaitis was much more interested in the margins than in the center, and he chose to describe this displacement of fantastic imagery as an escape rather than an exclusion. Drawing support from a 1941 review by Francis Wormald, Baltrušaitis remarked that the creatures which appear in the margins of the manuscript page beginning in the mid-thirteenth century are not a sudden creation, but a “freeing,” a “liberation” of the fantastic living forms that had earlier been “imprisoned” in initial letters.30 In effect, Baltrušaitis’s choice of the psychoanalytic concept of a lifting of repression to account for the multiple revivals and revisions of fantastic imagery (whose origins he identified in Hellenic, Saracen, and Far Eastern ornament) may reveal his own implicit project: to break out of the ideological parameters defined by turn-of-the-century art historians. In their often bewildering profusion, his studies of fantastic, stylized ornament are a kind of “return of the repressed,” that is, of a subject that had been treated as marginal and minor.
As successive twentieth-century artistic movements found ever new ways of rejecting naturalism, there seemed to be less and less sense in a nineteenth-century evolutionary theory that posited exact imitation of nature as the highest stage of development and the supreme value in art, that judged earlier art by how nearly it approached this ideal, and that constructed a theory of development on that basis. If the point of farthest “development” was not realism but, for example, Abstract Expressionism, there was no reason for histories of art to devalue expressive medieval stylization, no reason to marginalize the fantastic or monstrous. In an essay of 1947, Meyer Schapiro announced his intention to re-evaluate certain aspects of medieval art in the light of modern art:
What concerns us here… is not the defense of modern art, but rather the inquiry into the common view that mediaeval art was strictly religious and symbolical, submitted to collective aims, and wholly free from the aestheticism and individualism of our age. I shall try to show that by the eleventh and twelfth centuries there had emerged in western Europe within church art a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content and imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in color and movement, and the expression of feeling that anticipate modern art.31
Schapiro agreed with Mâle’s rejection of any programmatic theological or moral symbolism in monstrous sculptures and marginal imagery, but he tried to define the ornamental in a less denigrating way. It is not necessarily without meaning simply because it does not have a didactic religious sense:
Are the religious and the ornamental the only alternatives of artistic purpose? Apart from the elements of folklore and popular belief in some of these fantastic types, they are a world of projected emotions, psychologically significant images of force, play, aggressiveness, anxiety, self-torment and fear, embodied in the powerful forms of instinct-driven creatures, twisted, struggling, entangled, confronted, and superposed. Unlike the religious symbols, they are submitted to no fixed teaching or body of doctrine. We cannot imagine that they were commissioned by an abbot or bishop as part of a didactic program. They invite no systematic intellectual apprehension, but are grasped as individual, often irrational fantasies, as single thoughts and sensations. These grotesques and animal combats stand midway between ancient and modern art in their individualized, yet marginal character.32
Schapiro suggested a new history of the development of art, this time focused on the expression of individual subjectivity, a history in which what was marginal eventually becomes central.
In Schapiro’s contrast between the absolute regularity of classical Greek ornament and the deliberate variety of Romanesque ornament, which can be understood as a “fruitful instance of liberty of individual conception,”33 there are echoes of John Ruskin’s chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice (London, 1851–3), wherein Ruskin argued that the variety of Gothic ornament (as opposed to “servile” Greek, Ninevite, and Egyptian ornament) is a sign of the artist’s freedom. The medieval commentaries Schapiro offered as evidence of an aesthetic appreciation of art emphasize the medieval viewer’s delight in variation, but also in fine workmanship, in the expertise of the crafts-man. St Bernard’s tirade against monstrous sculptures in cloisters is interpreted as proof of his opposition to “idle” or useless aesthetic expression devoid of didactic content or religious symbolism: “the monsters are not regarded by Bernard as symbols of evil; nor is there reason to suppose that the sculptors conceived them deliberately as such.” Schapiro also pointed out that Bernard would have had occasion to encounter the same sort of monstrous imagery in the initial letters of Cistercian religious manuscripts, where they were “entirely independent of the accompanying text.”34
From Romanesque to Gothic, From Monstrous to Droll
In Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, H. W. Janson devoted a whole chapter to “The Ape in Gothic Marginal Art” and stressed the inadequacy of iconographical study that either relies solely on theological sources to explain marginal imagery or else treats it as purely decorative, conveying no thought:
This rigid division has been broken down more and more in recent years. We have come to realise increasingly that mediaeval painters and sculptors, even though their status as craftsmen excluded them from the exalted realm of the artes liberales, did not simply carry out the commands of the clergy; that they enjoyed, in fact, considerable freedom in exercising their own imagination, so that their work must be regarded as complementary to the literary sources in expressing the thoughts and emotions of the era.35
However, as Janson admitted, to concede individual intention to the medieval creator of drôleries causes major difficulties for the modern interpreter: “How, then, is he to determine the level of meaning appropriate to a given design?… Even if the source of a motif is known, he has no assurance that its meaning has not been submerged in the free play of forms so characteristic of Gothic marginal art.”36
Janson chose to focus on the motif of the ape because, as he claimed, “apes play a more conspicuous part in marginal grotesques than any other animal” and because he hoped, by studying one type of imagery, to “contribute… to a better understanding of the nature of Gothic drôlerie and thus help to pave the way for more comprehensive studies of the subject-matter of marginal art as a whole.”37 The ape is a kind of test case for the revised narrative of the development of Western art suggested by Schapiro, a narrative showing how individual subjectivity is finally granted center stage. Whereas in Romanesque marginal imagery the ape appears rarely and is engaged in serious struggle with monstrous creatures or vegetation, in Gothic drôleries the omnipresent ape is treated in a more diverse and playful manner – in short, with more liberty of imagination and with reference to a wide range of literary sources or real-life situations.
Janson was the first to devote a whole chapter to the study of one motif in manuscript margins (exclusive of other material supports) and to try to analyze simian representations by categorizing them: parodies, performing apes, illustrations of fables and anecdotes, apes and birds. Yet Janson agreed with the predominant view that there was no meaningful connection between the text and the visual images of its margins, and he did not search for any: “a study of the texts is apt to be… fruitless, since drôleries, with rare exceptions, have no illustrative function.”38
Lillian Randall’s Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts is the first book devoted exclusively to marginal imagery in manuscripts, leaving aside stone, wood, and all other supports. It is a vast extension of Janson’s effort to categorize one motif. Originating in a 1955 Radcliffe dissertation, Randall’s study catalogues and classifies marginal imagery from 226 Gothic manuscripts, both religious and secular in content, all made in Northern Europe between 1250 and 1350 (with a few later exceptions).39 “Isolated renderings of inactive creatures” are considered to be “purely ornamental detail” and are not taken into account. Randall focuses, instead, on “scenes depicting humans, animals, or hybrids in some sort of activity,” which “constitute the essence of marginal subject matter.” These she classifies into four principle groups based on “religious sources, secular literature, daily life, and parody.”40 With its voluminous subject index, comprising hundreds of themes and subthemes, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts provides what remains today a fundamental reference tool; it describes marginal imagery in detail, classifies it iconographically, and clearly identifies its manuscript location. As Randall pointed out, such a catalogue was badly needed to make more comprehensive analysis of marginal imagery possible.41 Although far more images are indexed than reproduced, Randall also provided more than 700 photographic reproductions of details from the margins of manuscripts, thus demonstrating the great variety of themes and offering examples for further study.
In her introduction, Randall suggested a broadly aesthetic explanation for much Gothic marginal imagery: “the medieval propensity for juxtaposition of contrasting elements,” and she stressed the generally entertaining nature of this imagery, as she had done in an article pointing out the analogous use of profane exempla to spice friars’ sermons, thereby “dispelling the lethargy of the congregation.” 42 With respect to the scenes she classed as parody, Randall wrote:
No matter how outrageous the distortion, the function of the travesties which constitute the bulk of the iconographic repertory of marginal illustrations was less overtly didactic than in analogous subjects preserved in fabliaux and exempla. An element of humor was seldom absent, in the rendering if not in the theme, and the aim was both to divert and to elevate.43
Like Schapiro and Janson, Randall viewed the margins as a space permitting individual artistic freedom: “the margins afforded an opportunity for more spontaneous individualistic expression, whether in the realm of sacred imagery, social commentary, or fantastic invention.”44 She went on to say that she believed further exploration might discover a specific reason for seemingly inappropriate motifs “in a surprising number of instances,” and that the enigma of intention is “most easily solved when the subjects in the margin are directly related to their adjoining text or miniature.”45 Probably to reduce expense and bulk in this catalogue, Randall squeezed many photographed details onto each page rather than trying to reproduce whole manuscript pages, which would have enabled preliminary analysis of relationships between texts, miniatures, and marginal imagery.
Randall also published a series of articles exploring particular motifs. In the earliest of these, she tried to discover a general explanation for the motif by reference to contemporary literature and other historical documents. For example, in “A Mediaeval Slander,”46 Randall took up the late thirteenth-century French and Franco-Flemish marginal motif of a man sitting on a nest of eggs, which she explained as a slander of the English (as “hatched” and as cowardly egg-hatchers), a slander deriving from the much better-known medieval taunt against the “tailed” English. The point of connection between the two debasing images is the medieval French word cové meaning both “hatched” (modern French couvé) and “tailed” (modern French coué). These particular images in the margins visualize familiar taunts against the English enemy. In “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare,”47 Randall returned to one of the earliest debates about the meaning of a marginal image (between Champfleury and Bastard d’Estang) and proposed a new solution: images of warfare against snails, chiefly in northern French and Franco-Flemish manuscripts from 1290 to 1310, could satirize the Lombards, the new bankers of Europe, whose cowardice was exemplified ironically in vernacular literature by their “prowess” at fighting or fleeing “armored” (shell-encased) snails.
Such wide-ranging studies of the cultural background behind a motif enrich our understanding and, in their mastery of detail, go far beyond nineteenthcentury interdisciplinary studies of satire and caricature featuring marginal motifs. However, they leave aside the questions of why the motif under consideration appears on a particular page of a particular manuscript, and how and why it may vary from one manuscript context to another. Randall’s later articles tend to focus on single manuscripts. “Humour and Fantasy in the Margins of an English Book of Hours” uses a manuscript from around 1300 to demonstrate the general trend in marginal imagery from Romanesque to Gothic: “the intense ferocity of earlier motifs waned in the wake of the dominant new interest in anecdotic detail… [while] dragons and grotesques… became tamer and… often designedly comical in appearance.”48 A final example out of many, “Games and the Passion in Pucelle’s Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux,” analyzes two bas de page drawings, their cultural references, and their relationship to other images in the same fourteenth-century manuscript.49
Most of the published research of Lucy Freeman Sandler falls outside the period of this volume, being devoted to Gothic manuscripts illuminated in England after 1300. However, Sandler’s work illustrates the trend toward closer examination of marginal imagery within its particular manuscript context, in relationship both to the words of the central text block and to other images in the same manuscript (in framed miniatures, in initial letters, after line endings, or in the margins). In “A Series of Marginal Illustrations in the Rutland Psalter,”50 Sandler proposed that certain marginal scenes are burlesque variations on or “expansions” of the elements of a courtly calendar scene that appears earlier in the Psalter. “Reflections on the Construction of Hybrids in English Gothic Marginal Illustration”51 compares the method of construction of the “non-descript” monsters (those with no classical names) in certain English manuscripts in order to categorize them into six different types. In more recent articles devoted to the analysis of single manuscripts, such as “Pictorial and Verbal Play in the Margins,”52 Sandler has offered a variety of explanations for marginal imagery in particular contexts. In Stowe MS 49, a Legenda sanctorum copied around 1300 in a monastic environment and filled with marginal sketches, Sandler found that only “a few of the marginalia.. . clearly respond to the meanings of words and phrases in the text … yet many of the marginal images make a kind of sense when they are considered as a group independent of the text.”53 In effect, the margins of this book of saints’ lives are the space into which the unsaintly – wayfarers, beggars, women, and people and creatures engaged in sexual activities prohibited to monks – is deliberately expelled and excluded by “depicting it with contemptuous familiarity, and presenting it by turns as grotesquely funny, and disgustingly sinful.”54 The notion that marginal imagery should represent sin or behavior to be avoided is not new, but here it is explored in a specific manuscript context, not stated as a general rule.
Nigel Morgan studied a key witness in the history of the development of marginal imagery, the Rutland Psalter illuminated in England around 1260, the earliest manuscript to present such fully elaborated border images.55 Close comparison of technique, style, and choice of subjects for marginal figures allowed Morgan to distinguish personal preferences in the five different artists, and thus to define individual artistic subjectivity more precisely than had previously been done, as well as to demonstrate that the artists were not subject to the same regime, but free to differ in how and what they designed. For example, Morgan distinguished Artist A from Artist B in terms of the greater naturalism of the latter’s images:
Artist B … prefers genre subjects and clearly defined actions. Even in fantasy subjects, the men, animals, and hybrids are involved in recognizable activities, and hold proper weapons, musical instruments, and other accessories. Artist A likes animals and birds as decorative features, but above all chooses pure fantasy subjects in which the action has little or no contact with reality.56
A series of tabular appendices presents each artist’s work for easier comparison. Yet verbal categorizations of the visual are not always entirely satisfactory. For example, the monkey riding an ostrich on the verso of one page is tilting toward the facing recto, toward the butt of a nude man, whose hand seems to want to shield the target (see fig. 13-2). In the table of Appendix B, devoted to comparison of bas de page subjects by different artists, this double-page spread is presented, with no acknowledgement of interaction, as two entirely separate images, both by Artist B, one a “fantasy subject” (“hybrid riding bird”) and the other a “genre scene” (“nude man with hand over posterior”).
FIGURE 13-2 Double page view of Rutland Psalter. London: British Library, MS 62925:66v–67r.
After long ignoring manuscript contexts and giving visual images a wide berth as the subject matter of a different discipline, scholars of medieval vernacular literature have begun to try to understand marginal images as evidence of medieval reactions to or interpretations of texts, in short, as a kind of visual commentary. For example, in a 1985 essay on the image of women in manuscripts of troubadour verse, Angelica Rieger noted a coherent system of illustrative marginal drawings, keyed to the text by red marks, in one thirteenth–century manuscript (Pierpont Morgan Library M. 819), where the metaphoric language of the poet concerning his experience of love is “transformed directly by the designer into a symbolic image.”57 Figures of speech prompt marginal figures. In a tabular annex, Rieger juxtaposed a brief description of each marginal image with a citation of the lines of Occitan verse that evoked it. Sylvia Huot58 returned to the same manuscript to try to explain why figurative language should be materialized in images this way; she suggested that the images might “help to fix the song in the mind of the reader by providing visual cues for key words and phrases,” but that they also serve as a “visual gloss” that “reflect[s] an impulse toward an allegorical reading of the songs.”59 In The Game of Love, I discussed evidence of historicizing as well as facetious interpretative traditions provided by the illuminations, especially the figures of initial letters, in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century anthologies of troubadour verse.60
Suzanne Lewis has also explained some of the figures within initial letters, this time in a thirteenth-century Biblical text, as playful, punning interpretations of the adjacent words or phrases – such as the Latin noun for heaven (celo), which may be confounded with the Latin word for arrow or missile (telo) figured in images of shooting. She suggested that “rebus-like images that pun visually on certain words or themes in the text” may serve as a mnemonic device,61 like the Cuerdon Psalter’s initials (c.1270), as Mary Carruthers demonstrated.62 Until Lewis’s essay, the historiated initials of the Getty Apocalypse had “passed unnoticed,” all critical attention being focused on the framed miniatures illustrating the text and on the figure of St John peering into the frames.
Exploration of the possible senses of the figures of initial letters in medieval manuscripts was long hampered by their marginalizing designation as “decoration.” It was not until the 1970s that figurative initial letters began to emerge as a subject for analysis, with Carl Nordenfalk’s catalogue and classification of the earliest figural motifs, J. J. G. Alexander’s historical overview introducing an anthology of color plates, and Howard Helsinger’s revisionist essay, “Images on the Beatus Page.”63 Helsinger demonstrated that, at least on the Beatus vir page of the Psalter, bas de page scenes of deer hunting, which appear from the late thirteenth century on, should not be taken as irrelevant genre scenes. Like other scenes of spiritual struggle against sin and the devil (for example, David overcoming Goliath or the lion), these deer hunts emerge from the initial B, and they retain an allegorical sense even when displaced to the margins. On the evidence provided by the twelfth-century St Albans Psalter, where a marginal commentary explains as a figure of spiritual struggle the two knights fighting on horseback in the upper margin of the Beatus page, Helsinger extended allegorical signifance to other profane scenes of struggle in the margins, such as jousts, on the Beatus pages of later Psalters. In a chapter entitled “Sacred Letters as Dangerous Letters and Reading as Struggle,” I treat the spiritual combat of monastic psalmody, but also the struggle to achieve spiritual understanding of the text (and to overcome the “killing letter” of literal understanding) represented in initials that embody or enclose struggle in Romanesque and early Gothic Psalters.64
Conrad Rudolph has provided a case study of figurative initials in their relation to the text of a single manuscript.65 Whereas these had been “traditionally interpreted as ornamental or generic because they were typically not seen as illustrating the text of the Moralia in Job,” Rudolph’s closer reading discovered that “virtually all the initials of the Cîteaux Moralia are related either to specific passages of the books that they head or to the general sense of one of the issues raised in those books, although sometimes in an idiosyncratic or seemingly arbitrary way.”66 These initials represent spiritual struggle as Gregory conceived it in the adjacent text, which can be used to explain specific details of the initials.
Written for a broad audience, Michael Camille’s Image on the Edge presents past and present research on marginal imagery, including Camille’s own eclectic approach, which here takes on a strong anthropological and sociological cast, with margins (or “edges” or “fringes”) interpreted as liminal social spaces.67 Like the earliest art historians, Camille discusses carved images as well as drawn and painted ones, the figurative margins of medieval buildings, furniture, and artifacts as well as the margins of medieval pages. Regardless of their different material supports, he groups marginal images according to the different medieval “centers of power” for which they were produced: the monastery, the cathedral, the court, and the city. On the first page of his preface, Camille points out that he is not interested in exploring the general meaning of particular motifs (like Randall and others), but rather in “their function as part of the whole page, text, object or space in which they are anchored.” His reproductions are a model in this respect, often providing separate photos of the detail enlarged and the detail in its context, whether that be a full manuscript page, a double-page spread (see fig. 13-2), a façade, or other architectural unit. In this way, Camille is able to demonstrate how marginal figures interact with other marginal figures on opposite or nearby pages, with other elements on the same page (large miniatures, the words or syllables of the text), or with other features of a sculptural program. Although it analyzes a mid-fourteenth-century manuscript, and thus falls outside the scope of this volume, Camille’s subsequent case study, Mirror in Parchment, carries to new limits cultural contextualization of the marginal imagery of a single manuscript.68
Since the publication of Randall’s Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, marginal imagery in manuscripts has received more scholarly attention than “marginal” sculpture and has usually been treated separately. In a series of articles followed by a book, Nurith Kenaan-Kedar has returned to the subject of corbel sculptures.69 Her neo-Bakhtinian interpretation of the carved animals, monsters, and humans (chiefly “people from the margins of society – jongleurs, acrobats, musicians, female drunkards, fools and beggars”) allows for the possibility of different meanings for different audiences. To ecclesiastical patrons, “these distorted figures could be understood as punished sinners, although their punishment was expressed only metaphorically, implicit in the burdens they had to bear [as architectural supports].”70 However, to the Romanesque artists who first created these provocative, boldly expressive, unstylized images, they represented both a protest against and a deliberate transgression of the codes of “official culture.”71 Since the late 1960s in the West, renewed interest in understanding the sense of medieval marginal images is part of a much broader interest in all aspects of marginality. For the current generation of art historians, restoring significance to the marginal is a symbolic act.72
1 Thompson, “The Grotesque,” p. 309; my emphasis.
2 Maeterlinck, Le genre satirique, p. 2, paraphrasing Mr Lapidoth, a reviewer of the first edition of the book (1903). [On Romanesque and Gothic manuscript illumination, see chapters 17 and 20 by Cohen and Hedeman, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
3 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle, p. 105. All translations from French in this essay are mine. [On the monstrous, see chapter 12 by Dale in this volume (ed.).]
4 Auber’s Histoire de la cathédrale de Poitiers dates from 1849; his four-volume Histoire et théorie du symbolisme religieux was published in 1870–1.
5 Cahier, Nouveaux mélanges. The offending material appeared in volume two of this work.
6 Bastard d’Estang, Etudes.
7 Bastard d’Estang, “Rapport,” p. 169.
8 Ibid., pp. 172–4.
9 Ibid., p. 172.
10 Paris, BNF ancien fonds latin MS lat. 1258.
11 Bastard d’Estang, “Rapport,” pp. 172–3.
12 Ibid., unnumbered illustration on p. 172.
13 Ibid., p. 174.
14 Ibid., p. 176.
15 Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature, p. 31.
16 Wright, History of Caricature; Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature; Maeterlinck, Le genre satirique dans la peinture flamande and Le genre satirique, fantastique et licencieux.
17 Wright, History of Caricature, p. 118.
18 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle, p. 136, n.117.
19 Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature, pp. 173–4.
20 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle, p. 124.
21 Ibid., p. 107. This passage from Bernard’s letter to William of St Thierry is analyzed, reproduced, and translated in Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance.
22 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle, p. 107.
23 Ibid., p. 114.
24 Ibid., p. 124.
25 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle, p. 2. [On Romanesque sculpture, see chapters 15 and 16 by Hourihane and Maxwell, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
26 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle, p. 341.
27 Baltrušaitis, La Stylistique ornementale; Le Moyen-Age fantastique; and Réveils et prodiges. Although Réveils et prodiges takes into account the most recent criticism, including that of Schapiro, Janson, an essay by Randall, and even Bakhtin, Baltrušaitis’s organicist, evolutionary argument belongs to an earlier phase of art history, characterized by the works of Henri Focillon, to whom Baltrušaitis dedicated La stylistique ornementale.
28 Baltrušaitis, Réveils et prodiges, rev. edn. (Paris, 1988), p. 335.
29 Ibid., p. 197.
30 Ibid., pp. 154 and 352, n.101. This displacement had been remarked as early as 1896 by Thompson, “The Grotesque,” pp. 309–12, and also by Haseloff, Psalterillustration, p. 5.
31 Schapiro, “Aesthetic Attitude,” p. 1.
32 Ibid., p. 10.
33 Ibid., p. 4.
34 Ibid., p. 6.
35 Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, p. 42.
36 Ibid., p. 163.
37 Ibid., p. 164.
38 Ibid., p. 163.
39 Although nearly all the features of Gothic border imagery had been developed by 1300 (the cut-off date for the present volume), the period from 1300 to 1350 saw the making of most of the best-known and most studied manuscripts, such as the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, the Luttrell Psalter, the Smithfield Decretals, to name but a few.
40 Randall, Images, p. 15.
41 Ibid., p. 10.
42 Ibid., pp. 8, 14, 18. See also Randall, “Exempla,” p. 98.
43 Images, p. 19.
44 Ibid., p. 20.
45 Ibid., pp. 16, 19.
46 Randall, “A Mediaeval Slander.”
47 Randall, “The Snail.”
48 Randall, “Humour and Fantasy,” p. 482.
49 Randall, “Games.”
50 Sandler, “Series of Marginal Illustrations.”
51 Sandler, “Reflections.”
52 Sandler, “Pictorial and Verbal Play.”
53 Ibid., p. 56.
54 Ibid., p. 62.
55 Morgan, “The Artists of the Rutland Psalter.”
56 Ibid., p. 169.
57 Rieger, “Ins e.l cor port, dona, vostra faisso,” p. 399.
58 Huot, “Visualization and Memory.”
59 Ibid., pp. 3, 5.
60 Kendrick, “Lo Gay Saber.”
61 Lewis, “Beyond the Frame,” pp. 73–4.
62 Carruthers, The Book of Memory.
63 Nordenfalk, Die spätantiken Zierbuchstaben; Alexander, The Decorated Letter;
Helsinger, “Images.”
64 Kendrick, “Sacred Letters.”
65 Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life.
66 Ibid., pp. 9, 12.
67 Camille, Image on the Edge.
68 Camille, Mirror in Parchment.
69 Kenaan-Kedar, Marginal Sculpture in Medieval France.
70 Kenaan-Kedar, “The Margins of Society,” pp. 15, 18.
71 Kenaan-Kedar, Marginal Sculpture, p. 1. For the concept of “official culture,” see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.
72 For further historiography, see Sandler, “Study of Marginal Imagery”; Wirth, “Les marges à drôleries.”
J. J. G. Alexander, The Decorated Letter (New York, 1978).
Charles-Auguste Auber, Histoire de la cathédrale de Poitiers (Paris, 1849).
——, Histoire et théorie du symbolisme religieux avant et depuis le christianisme, 4 vols. (Paris, 1870–1).
M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1965).
Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Le Moyen-âge fantastique: Antiquités et exotismes dans l’art gothique (Paris, 1955).
——, Réveils et prodiges: Le gothique fantastique (Paris, 1960).
——, La Stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane (Paris, 1931).
Auguste, Count Bastard d’Estang, Etudes de symbolique chrétienne (Paris, 1861).
——, “Rapport de M. Auguste de Bastard, membre du comité, sur les planches I, II, III, IV, VI, VIII, IX, et X de L’histoire de la cathédrale de Poitiers par M. l’abbé Auber, président de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, correspondant du ministère pour les travaux historiques,” Bulletin du comité historique des arts et monuments: archéologie, beaux-arts 2 (1850), pp. 166–82.
Charles Cahier, Nouveaux Mélanges d’archéologie, d’histoire et de littérature sur le moyen âge, 4 vols. (Paris, 1874–7).
Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
——, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (Chicago, 1998).
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990).
Jules Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature au moyen âge et sous la renaissance, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1898).
Günter Haseloff, Die Psalterillustration im dreizehnten Jahrhundert: Studien zur Buchmalerei in England, Frankreich und den Niederlanden (Kiel, 1938).
Howard Helsinger, “Images on the Beatus Page of Some Medieval Psalters,” The Art Bulletin 53 (1971), pp. 161–76.
Sylvia Huot, “Visualization and Memory: The Illustration of Troubadour Lyric in a Thirteenth-Century Manuscript,” Gesta 31 (1992), pp. 3–14.
H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1952).
Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, Marginal Sculpture in Medieval France: Toward the Deciphering of an Enigmatic Pictorial Language (London, 1995).
——, “The Margins of Society in Marginal Romanesque Sculpture,” Gesta 31 (1992), pp. 15–24.
Laura Kendrick, “Lo Gay Saber in Words and Pictures,” in The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley, 1988).
——, “Sacred Letters as Dangerous Letters and Reading as Struggle,” in Animating the Letter: The Figurative Embodiment of Writing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Columbus, 1999).
Suzanne Lewis, “Beyond the Frame: Marginal Figures and Historiated Initials in the Getty Apocalypse,” The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 20 (1992), pp. 53–76.
Louis Maeterlinck, Le genre satirique dans la peinture flamande (Brussels, 1903; 2nd edn. 1907).
——, Le genre satirique, fantastique et licencieux dans la sculpture flamande et wallonne: Les miséricordes de stalles (Paris, 1910).
Emile Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: Etude sur l’iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, vol. 1, 8th edn. (Paris, 1958).
——, L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France: Etude sur l’origine de l’iconographie du moyen âge, 4th ed. (Paris, 1940).
Nigel Morgan, “The Artists of the Rutland Psalter,” The British Library Journal 13 (1987), pp. 159–85.
Carl Nordenfalk, Die spätantiken Zierbuchstaben (Stockholm, 1970).
Lillian Randall, “Exempla as a Source of Gothic Marginal Illumination,” The Art Bulletin 39 (1957), pp. 97–107.
——, “Games and the Passion in Pucelle’s Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux,” Speculum 47 (1972), pp. 246–61.
——, “Humour and Fantasy in the Margins of an English Book of Hours,” Apollo 84 (1966), pp. 482–8.
——, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley, 1966).
——, “A Mediaeval Slander,” The Art Bulletin 42 (1960), pp. 25–40.
——, “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare,” Speculum 37 (1962), pp. 358–67.
Angelica Rieger, “‘Ins e.l cor port, dona, vostra faisso’: Image et imaginaire de la femme à travers l’enluminure dans les chansonniers de troubadours,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 28 (1985), pp. 385–415.
Conrad Rudolph, “The Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia, 1990).
——, Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and Polemics in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job (Princeton, 1977).
Lucy Freeman Sandler, “Pictorial and Verbal Play in the Margins: The Case of British Library, Stowe MS 49,” in Michelle P. Brown and Scott McKendrick, eds., Illuminating the Book: Makers and Interpreters (London, 1998), pp. 52–68.
——, “Reflections on the Construction of Hybrids in English Gothic Marginal Illustration,” in Moshe Barash and Lucy Freeman Sandler, eds., Art, the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson (New York, 1981), pp. 51–65.
——, “A Series of Marginal Illustrations in the Rutland Psalter,” Marsyas: Studies in the History of Art 8 (1959), pp. 70–4.
——, “The Study of Marginal Imagery: Past, Present, and Future,” Studies in Iconography 18 (1997), pp. 1–49.
Meyer Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art,” in Romanesque Art: Selected Papers (London, 1977).
E. M. Thompson, “The Grotesque and the Humorous in Illuminations of the Middle Ages,” Bibliographica 2 (1896), pp. 309–32.
Jean Wirth, “Les marges à drôleries des manuscrits gothiques: problèmes de méthode,” in Axel Bolvig and Phillip Lindley, eds., History and Images: Towards a New Iconology (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 277–300.
Thomas Wright, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (London, 1865).