n 1929, in the Hospice de Beaune, in France, the Hungarian photographer André Kertész, who had trained himself in the craft during his service with the Austro-Hungarian army, took a picture of an old woman sitting up in her bed, reading.1 It is a perfectly framed composition. In the centre is the diminutive woman, wrapped in a black shawl and wearing a black night-cap that unexpectedly reveals the gathered hair at the back of her head; white pillows prop her up and a white coverlet drapes her feet. Around and behind her, white bunched-up curtains hang among the bed’s black wooden columns of Gothic design. Further inspection reveals, on the top frame of the bed, a small plaque with the number 19, a knotted cord dangling from the bed’s ceiling (to call for assistance? to draw the front curtain?) and a night-table bearing a box, a jug and a cup. On the floor, under the table, is a tin basin. Have we seen everything? No. The woman is reading, holding the book open at a fair distance from her obviously still keen eyes. But what is she reading? Because she’s an old woman, because she’s in bed, because the bed is in an old people’s home in Beaune, in the heart of Catholic Burgundy, we believe that we can guess the nature of her book: a devotional volume, a compendium of sermons? If it were so — close inspection with a magnifying glass tells us nothing — the image would somehow be coherent, complete, the book defining its reader and identifying her bed as a spiritually quiet place.
But what if we were to discover that the book was in fact something else? What if, for instance, she was reading Racine, Corneille — a sophisticated, cultured reader — or, more surprisingly, Voltaire? Or what if the book turned out to be Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles, that scandalous novel of bourgeois life published the same year Kertész took her picture? Suddenly the commonplace old woman is no longer commonplace; she becomes, through the tiny act of holding one book in her hands instead of another, a questioner, a spirit still burning with curiosity, a rebel.
Sitting across from me in the subway in Toronto, a woman is reading the Penguin edition of Borges’s Labyrinths. I want to call out to her, to wave a hand and signal that I too am of that faith. She, whose face I have forgotten, whose clothes I barely noticed, young or old I can’t say, is closer to me, by the mere act of holding that particular book in her hands, than many others I see daily. A cousin of mine from Buenos Aires was deeply aware that books could function as a badge, a sign of alliance, and always chose a book to take on her travels with the same care with which she chose her handbag. She would not travel with Romain Rolland because she thought it made her look too pretentious, or with Agatha Christie because it made her look too vulgar. Camus was appropriate for a short trip, Cronin for a long one; a detective story by Vera Caspary or Ellery Queen was acceptable for a weekend in the country; a Graham Greene novel was suitable for travelling by ship or plane.
The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users. Tools, furniture, clothes — all have a symbolic function, but books inflict upon their readers a symbolism far more complex than that of a simple utensil. The mere possession of books implies social standing and a certain intellectual richness; in eighteenth-century Russia, during the reign of Catherine the Great, a certain Mr. Klostermann made a fortune by selling long rows of binding stuffed with waste paper, which allowed courtiers to create the illusion of a library and thereby garner the favour of their bookish empress.2 In our day, interior decorators line walls with yards of books to give a room a “sophisticated” atmosphere, or offer wallpaper that creates the illusion of a library,3 and TV talk-show producers believe that a background of bookshelves adds a touch of intelligence to a set. In these cases, the general notion of books is enough to denote lofty pursuits, just as red velvet furniture has come to suggest sensual pleasures. So important is the symbol of the book that its presence or absence can, in the eyes of the viewer, lend or deprive a character of intellectual power.
Simone Martini’s Annunciation in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. (photo credit 15.1)
In the year 1333 the painter Simone Martini completed an Annunciation for the central panel of an altarpiece for the Duomo of Siena — the first surviving Western altar dedicated to this subject.4 The scene is inscribed within three Gothic arches: a high arch in the centre containing a formation of angels in dark gold, encircling the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove, and a smaller arch to each side. Beneath the arch on the viewer’s left a kneeling angel in embroidered vestments holds an olive branch in his left hand; he raises the index finger of his right hand to indicate silence with the rhetorical gesture common in ancient Greek and Roman statuary. Beneath the right arch, on a gilded throne inlaid with ivory, sits the Virgin in a purple cloak fringed with gold. Next to her, in the middle of the panel, is a vase of lilies. The immaculately white flower, with its asexual blooms and lack of stamens, served as a perfect emblem of Mary, whose purity Saint Bernard compared to the “inviolate chastity of the lily”.5 The lily, the fleur-de-lis, was also the symbol of the city of Florence, and towards the end of the Middle Ages it replaced the herald’s staff borne by the angel in Florentine Annunciations.6 Sienese painters, arch-enemies of the Florentines, could not entirely delete the traditional fleur-de-lis from depictions of the Virgin, but they would not honour Florence by allowing the angel to carry the city’s flower. Therefore Martini’s angel bears an olive branch, the plant symbolic of Siena.7
For someone seeing the painting in Martini’s time, every object and every colour had a specific significance. Though blue later became the Virgin’s colour (the colour of heavenly love, the colour of truth seen after the clouds are dispelled),8 purple, the colour of authority and also of pain and penitence, stood in Martini’s day as a reminder of the Virgin’s coming sorrows. In a popular account of her early life, in the apocryphal second-century Protoevangelion of James9 (a remarkable bestseller throughout the Middle Ages, with which Martini’s public would have been familiar), it is told that the council of priests required a new veil for a temple. Seven undefiled virgins from the tribe of David were chosen, and lots were cast to see who would spin the wool for each of the seven requisite colours; the colour purple fell to Mary. Before starting to spin, she went to the well to draw water and there heard a voice that said to her, “Hail thou art full of grace, the Lord is with thee; thou art blessed among women.” Mary looked right and left (the protoevangelist notes with a novelist’s touch), saw no one and, trembling, entered her house and sat down to work at her purple wool. “And behold the angel of the Lord stood by her, and said, Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favour in the sight of God.”10 Thus, before Martini, the herald angel, the purple cloth and the lily — representing in turn acceptance of the word of God, acceptance of suffering and immaculate virginity — marked the qualities for which the Christian Church wanted Mary to be honoured.11 Then, in 1333, Martini placed in her hands a book.
Traditionally, in Christian iconography, the book or scroll belonged to the male deity, to either God the Father or the triumphant Christ, the new Adam, in whom the word of God had been made flesh.12 The book was the repository of God’s law; when the governor of Roman Africa asked a group of Christian prisoners what they had brought with them to defend themselves in court, they replied, “Texts by Paul, a just man”.13 The book also conferred intellectual authority, and from the earliest representations Christ was often depicted exercising the rabbinical functions of teacher, interpreter, scholar, reader. To the woman belonged the Child, affirming her role as mother.
Not everyone agreed. Two centuries before Martini, Peter Abelard, the canon of Notre Dame in Paris who had been castrated as a punishment for seducing his pupil Heloise, initiated a correspondence with his old beloved, now abbess of the Paraclete, that was to become famous. In these letters Abelard, who had been condemned by the councils of Sens and Soissons and prohibited either to teach or to write by Pope Innocent II, suggested that women were in fact closer to Christ than any man. Against man’s obsession with war, violence, honour and power, Abelard counterpoised woman’s refinement of soul and intelligence, “capable of conversing with God the Spirit in the inner kingdom of the soul on terms of intimate friendship”.14 A contemporary of Abelard, the abbess Hildegard of Bingen, one of the greatest intellectual figures of her century, maintained that the weakness of the Church was a male weakness, and that women were to make use of the strength of their sex in this tempus muliebre, this Age of Woman.15
But the entrenched hostility against women was not to be overcome easily. God’s admonition to Eve in Genesis 3: 16 was used again and again to preach the virtues of womanly meekness and mildness: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” “Woman was created to be man’s helpmate,” paraphrased Saint Thomas Aquinas.16 In Martini’s time, Saint Bernardine of Siena, perhaps the most popular preacher of his age, saw Martini’s Mary not as conversant with God the Spirit but as an example of the submissive, dutiful woman. “It seems to me,” he wrote, reviewing the painting, “surely the most beautiful, the most reverent, the most modest pose you ever saw in an Annunciation. You see she does not gaze at the angel, but sits with that almost frightened pose. She knew well it was an angel, so why should she be disturbed? What would she have done if it had been a man? Take her as an example, girls, of what you should do. Never talk to a man unless your father or mother is present.”17
In such a context, to associate Mary with intellectual power was a bold act. In the introduction to a textbook written for his students in Paris, Abelard made clear the value of intellectual curiosity: “By doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we learn truth”.18 Intellectual power came from curiosity, but for Abelard’s detractors — whose misogynistic voices Saint Bernardine echoed — curiosity, especially in women, was a sin, the sin that had led Eve to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge. The virginal innocence of women was to be preserved at all costs.19
In Saint Bernardine’s view, education was the dangerous result of, and the cause of more, curiosity. As we have seen, most women throughout the fourteenth century — indeed throughout most of the Middle Ages — were educated only as far as was useful to a man’s household. Depending on their social standing, the young girls familiar to Martini would receive little or no intellectual teaching. If they were brought up in an aristocratic family, they would be trained as ladies-in-waiting or taught to run an estate, for which they required only rudimentary instruction in reading and writing, though many became quite literate. If they belonged to the merchant class, they would develop some business ability, for which a little reading, writing and mathematics was essential. Merchants and artisans sometimes taught their trades to their daughters, who were then expected to become unpaid assistants. Peasant children, both male and female, usually received no education at all.20 In the religious orders women sometimes followed intellectual pursuits, but they did so under the constant censorship of their male religious superiors. As schools and universities were mostly closed to women, the artistic and scholarly blooming of the late twelfth to fourteenth century centred around the men.21 The women whose remarkable work emerged during that time — such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pisan and Marie de France — succeeded against seemingly impossible odds.
In this context, Martini’s Mary requires a second, less cursory look. She sits awkwardly, her right hand tightly gripping her cloak beneath her chin, turning her body away from the strange presence, her eyes fixed not on the angelic eyes but (contrary to Saint Bernardine’s biased description) on the angelic lips. The words the angel pronounces stream from his mouth to Mary’s gaze, written in large letters of gold; Mary can not only hear but see the Annunciation. Her left hand holds the book she was reading, keeping it open with her thumb. It is a fair-sized volume, probably an octavo, bound in red.
But what book is it?
Twenty years before Martini’s painting was completed, Giotto had given the Mary of his Annunciation a small blue Book of Hours, in one of the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua. From the thirteenth century onwards, the Book of Hours (apparently developed in the eighth century by Benedict of Anane as a supplement to the canonical office) had been the common private prayer-book for the rich, and its popularity continued well into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — as seen in numerous depictions of the Annunciation, in which the Virgin is represented reading her Book of Hours much as any royal or noble lady would have done. In many of the wealthier households, the Book of Hours was the only book, and mothers and nurses would use it to teach their children to read.22
A detail of Giotto’s Annunciation in the Arena of Padua. (photo credit 15.2)
It is possible that Martini’s Mary is simply reading a Book of Hours. But it might also be another book. According to the tradition that saw in the New Testament the fulfilment of the prophecies made in the Old — a popular belief in Martini’s day — Mary would have been aware, after the Annunciation, that the events of her life and her Son’s had been foretold in Isaiah and in the so-called Wisdom Books of the Bible: Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, and two books of the Apocrypha, The Wisdom of Jesus, the Son of Sirach and The Wisdom of Solomon.23 In the sort of literary parallelism that delighted medieval audiences, Martini’s Mary might have been reading, just before the arrival of the angel, the very chapter of Isaiah that announces her own fate: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”24
But it is even more illuminating to surmise that Martini’s Mary is reading the Books of Wisdom.25
In the ninth chapter of the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom is represented as a woman who “hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: … She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city, Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled”.26 And in two other sections of Proverbs, Lady Wisdom is described as originating from God. Through her He “hath founded the earth” (3: 19) at the beginning of all things; “I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was” (8: 23). Centuries later, the Rabbi of Lublin explained that Wisdom was called “Mother” because “when a man confesses and repents, when his heart accepts Understanding and is converted by it, he becomes like a new-born child, and his own turning to God is like turning to his mother.”27
Lady Wisdom is the protagonist of one of the most popular books of the fifteenth century, L’Orloge de Sapience (The Hourglass of Wisdom), written in (or translated into) French in 1389 by a Franciscan friar from Lorraine, Henri Suso.28 Sometime between 1455 and 1460, an artist known to us as the Master of Jean Rolin created for it a series of exquisite illuminations. One of these miniatures depicts Wisdom sitting on her throne, surrounded by a garland of crimson angels, holding in her left arm the globe of the world and in her right hand an open book. Above her, on both sides, larger angels kneel in a starry sky; below her, to her right, five monks discuss two scholarly tomes open in front of them; to her left a crowned donor, with a book set open on a draped lectern, is praying to her. Her position is identical to that of God the Father, who sits on just such a golden throne in countless other illuminations, usually as a companion piece to the Crucifixion, holding an orb in His left hand and a book in His right, and circled by similar fiery angels.
The Virgin represented with the attributes of Wisdom in an illuminated manuscript of Henri Suso’s L’Orloge de Sapience. (photo credit 15.3)
Carl Jung, associating Mary with the Eastern Christian concept of Sophia or Wisdom, suggested that Sophia-Mary “reveals herself to men as a friendly helper and advocate against Yahweh, and shows them the bright side, the kind, just, and amiable aspect of their God”.29 Sophia, the Lady Wisdom of the Proverbs and of Suso’s Orloge, stems from the ancient tradition of the Mother Goddess whose carved images, the so-called Venus figurines, are found all over Europe and Northern Africa, dating back to between 25,000 and 15,000 BC, and throughout the world at later dates.30 When the Spaniards and Portuguese arrived in the New World carrying their swords and their crosses, the Aztecs and Incas (among other native peoples) transferred their beliefs in various earth-mother deities such as Tonantzin and Pacha Mama to an androgynous Christ still evident in Latin American religious art today.31
Around the year 500 the Frankish emperor Clovis, after converting to Christianity and reinforcing the role of the Church, banned the worship of the Goddess of Wisdom under her several guises — Diana, Isis, Athena — and closed down the last of her temples.32 Clovis’s decision followed to the letter Saint Paul’s declaration (I Corinthians 1: 24) that only Christ is “the wisdom of God”. The attribute of wisdom, now usurped from the female deity, became exemplified in the vast and ancient iconography depicting Christ as a book-bearer. About twenty-five years after Clovis’s death, the Emperor Justinian attended the consecration of Constantinople’s newly finished cathedral, Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) — one of the largest man-made structures of antiquity. There, tradition has it, he exclaimed, “Solomon, I have outdone thee!”33 Not one of the famous mosaics of Hagia Sophia — not even the majestic Virgin Enthroned of 867 — allows Mary a book. Even in her own temple, Wisdom remained subservient.
Against this historical background, Martini’s portrayal of Mary as the inheritor — perhaps the incarnation — of Holy Wisdom may be regarded as an effort to restore the intellectual power denied to the female godhead. The book Mary is holding in Martini’s painting, whose text is hidden from us and whose title we can only guess, might suggest itself as the last utterance of the dethroned goddess, a goddess older than history, silenced by a society that has chosen to make its god in the image of a man. Suddenly, in this light, Martini’s Annunciation becomes subversive.34
Little is known of Simone Martini’s life. It is likely that he was a disciple of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the father of Sienese painting; Martini’s first dated work, his Maestà of 1315, is based on Duccio’s model. He worked in Pisa, Assisi and of course Siena, and in 1340 moved to Avignon, to the papal court, where two ruined frescoes on the portal of the cathedral are all that remain of his work.35 We know nothing of his education, of his intellectual influences, of the discussions he may have had about women and power and the Mother of God and Our Lady of Wisdom, but in the red-bound book that he painted sometime during the year 1333 for the Siena cathedral he left perhaps a clue to those questions, and possibly a statement.
Martini’s Annunciation was copied at least seven times.36 Technically it provided painters with an alternative to the sober realism put forward by Giotto in his Padua Annunciation; philosophically it may have enlarged the scope of Mary’s reading from Giotto’s minute Book of Hours to an entire theological compendium with roots in the earliest beliefs in the wisdom of the goddess. In later depictions of Mary,37 the Christ Child rumples or tears a page of the book she is reading, indicating His intellectual superiority. The Child’s gesture represents the New Testament brought by Christ superseding the old one, but for late-medieval viewers, to whom Mary’s relation to the Books of Wisdom may still have been apparent, the image served also as a reminder of Saint Paul’s misogynist dictum.
The Child Jesus tearing the pages of the Old Testament, showing that the New One is coming into being, in Rogier van der Weyden’s Virgin and Child, c. 1450. (photo credit 15.4)
I know that, for me, seeing someone reading creates in my mind a curious metonymy in which the reader’s identity is coloured by the book and the setting in which it is being read. It seems appropriate that Alexander the Great, who shares in the popular imagination the mythical landscape of Homer’s heroes, always carried with him a copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey.38 I’d love to know what book Hamlet held in his hands when he dismissed Polonius’s question — “What do you read, my lord?” — with “Words, words, words”; that elusive title might tell me a little more about the prince’s cloudy character.39 The priest who saved Joan Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc from the pyre to which he and the barber had destined Don Quixote’s maddening library,40 rescued for future generations an extraordinary novel of chivalry; by knowing exactly what book Don Quixote was reading we can understand a little of the world which fascinated the doleful knight — a reading through which we too can become, for a moment, Don Quixote.
Sometimes the process is reversed, and knowing the reader affects our judgement of a book: “I used to read him by candle-light, or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying glass,” said Adolf Hitler of the adventure-story writer Karl May,41 thereby condemning the author of such Wild West novels as The Treasure of the Silver Lake to the fate of Richard Wagner, whose music wasn’t publicly performed in Israel for years because Hitler had praised it.
Islamic fundamentalists burning a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. (photo credit 15.5)
During the early months of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, when it became public knowledge that an author had been threatened with death for writing a novel, the American TV reporter John Innes kept a copy of The Satanic Verses on his desk whenever he delivered one of his commentaries on any number of subjects. He made no reference to the book or to Rushdie, or to the Ayatollah, but the novel’s presence by his elbow indicated one reader’s solidarity with the fate of the book and its author.
Court women of medieval times depicted in a woodcut by Hishikawa Moronobu in the 1681 edition of the Ukiyo Hyakunin Onna. (photo credit 15.6)