References

Preface

1  T. S. Eliot, What is a Classic? (London, 1945), p. 30.

ONE: Lead White

1  Workshop accounts exist for only one of the paintings featured in later chapters. The painters of the Westminster Retable probably did not make their own lead white, as there are records of it having been bought (for 2½ pence per pound) from a supplier. E 471/6, in L. F. Salzman, Building in England (Oxford, 1967), p. 168.

2  Pliny, Natural History (XX, xxvi, 63) (XX, li, 141) and (XXII, xvi, 42), trans. H. Rackham (London, 1968), vol. VI, pp. 39, 83 and 321.

3  A. Hughes, ‘“An Academy for Doing”, I: The Accademia del Disegno, the Guilds and the Principate in Sixteenth-Century Florence’, Oxford Art Journal, IX/1 (1986), pp. 3–10 (p. 3).

4  Karin Leonhard, ‘Painted Poison: Venomous Beasts, Herbs, Gems and Baroque Colour Theory’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 61, Art and Science in the Early Modern Netherlands, ed. E. Jorink and B. Ramakers (2011), pp. 117–47.

5  E. Taverne, ‘Salomon de Bray and the Re-organisation of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1631’, Simiolus, VI/1 (1972–3), pp. 50–69 (p. 57).

6  H. Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician (New Haven, CT, 2006).

7  I. Pears, The Discovery of Painting (New Haven, CT, 1991), pp. 110–11.

8  Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘Prologue’, in The Canterbury Tales, trans. N. Coghill (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 30.

9  William Shakespeare, Hamlet (I, v, 172–3).

10  Matthew 25:35.

11  Homer, The Odyssey (XIV, 30–XXI, 230), trans. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, 2003), pp. 182–282.

12  Shakespeare, Hamlet (I, v, 174–5).

13  William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (V, i, 478–9).

14  See S. Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint (London, 2009).

15  Pliny, Natural History (XXXIV, 175), trans. H. Rackham (London, 1966), vol. IX, pp. 253–5.

16  J. R. Partington, Origins and Development of Applied Chemistry (London, 1935), pp. 292–3.

17  R. C. Thompson, The Chemistry of the Ancient Assyrians (London, 1925), pp. 9, 106.

18  E. R. Caley, ‘Ancient Greek Pigments’, Journal of Chemical Education, XXIII (1946), pp. 314–16.

19  Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture (VII, xii, 1), trans. F. Granger (London, 1962), vol. II, p. 125.

20  Mappae Clavicula (7 and 107), trans. C. S. Smith and J. G. Hawthorne, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, LXIV/4 (1974), pp. 27 and 42.

21  Theophilus, On Divers Arts (I, 37), trans. J. G. Hawthorne and C. S. Smith (New York, 1979), pp. 41–2.

22  Chaucer, ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ (I), The Canterbury Tales, pp. 473–4.

23  E. Grant, ‘Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View’, History of Science, XVI (1978), pp. 93–106.

24  C. Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (New York, 2005).

25  Plumbers, who took their name from the Latin for lead, plumbum, made and installed piping for water supply and for drainage but they also secured glass for windows and made roofing. Plumbers also worked alongside painters in making the altarpiece for Westminster Abbey, see chapter Five.

26  For an alternative view, see P. Smith, ‘What is a Secret?’, in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800, ed. E. Leong and A. Rankin (Farnborough and Burlington, VT, 2011), pp. 47–66.

27  M. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London, 1966).

28  Of course, that physically embodied and socially embedded knowledge has now been forgotten. ‘Forgetting’ is the opposite of ‘remembering’ and skills have been forgotten because guilds have been ‘dismembered’. Such loss of skill has wide significance because all embodied knowledge – from that which is needed to care for the young or elderly to brain surgery or flying planes – is under threat in societies that privilege the ‘head’ over the ‘hand’.

29  Augustine, The City of God (XXI, 4), ed. M. J. Adler (Chicago, IL, 1990), p. 635.

30  ‘Some Observations Concerning the Substance Commonly Called Black-lead, by the Late Dr. Rob. Plot, F.R.S.’, Philosophical Transactions (1683–1775), vol. XX, p. 183.

31  The Cloud of Unknowing (Prologue and 74), trans. C. Wolters (London, 1978), pp. 52, 149.

32  Julian of Norwich, The Revelations of Divine Love (Colophon), trans. J. Walsh (London, 1961), pp. 209–10.

33  Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain (VIII, 10), trans. L. Thorpe (London, 1966), pp. 195–6.

34  J. O. Nriagu, Lead and Lead Poisoning in Antiquity (New York, 1983), pp. 70–71.

35  Ibid., pp. 78–9.

36  Georgius Agricola, De Re Metallica (New York, 1950), p. 37.

37  Ibid., p. 40.

38  Ibid., p. 217.

39  Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 118–26.

40  Pliny, Natural History (XXXIV, 164), pp. 246–7.

41  M. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible (Chicago, IL, 1978), p. 56.

42  Strabo, Avienus, Pytheas, Posidonius, Diodorus Seulus, Agricola, Caesar and Pliny all refer to Britain’s mineral wealth. See Nriagu, Lead, p. 106.

43  R. F. Tylecote, ‘Roman Lead Working in Britain’, British Journal for the History of Science, II/1 (1964), pp. 25–43.

44  See, for example, Ezekiel 22:18, Isaiah 1:22.

45  Dante, Inferno (XXIII, 58–62, 64–5, 70 and 147).

46  William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (II, vii, 8) and (II, ix, 19).

47  William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I, i, 170–2).

48  Ovid, Metamorphoses (I, 470) trans. M. M. Innes (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 41.

49  Pliny, Natural History (XXXIV, 138), vol. IX, pp. 228–9.

50  Ibid. (XXXIV, 141), vol. IX, pp. 230–1.

51  Ibid. (XXXIV, 152–4), vol. IX, p. 239.

52  Ibid. (XXXIV, 150), vol. IX, p. 237.

53  R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London, 1964).

54  Ovid, Metamorphoses (II, 730), p. 69.

55  William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (III, i. 57–63).

56  Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook (LVIIII), trans. D. V. Thompson (New York, 1960), p. 34.

57  Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals (III, i, 9), trans. D. Wyckoff (Oxford, 1967), p. 178.

58  Petrus Bonus, The New Pearl of Great Price, ed. J. Lacinius, trans. A. E. Waite (London, 1963), p. 163

59  Theophilus, Divers (II, 4), pp. 52–3.

60  G. de Lorris and J. de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (IX), trans. F. Horgan (Oxford, 2008), p. 249.

61  Chaucer, ‘The Squire’s Tale’ (I), in The Canterbury Tales, p. 414.

62  William Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (VI, 7), in J. M. Neale and B. Webb, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments (London, 1893), p. 93.

63  De Lorris and de Meun, Romance (IX), pp. 248–9.

64  William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (II, iii. 4).

65  Ibid. (II, iii, 5–6).

66  Ibid. (II, iii, 11–18).

67  Ibid. (I, i. 1–2).

68  Ibid. (V. iii. 290–93).

69  The profound relationship between black and white was reflected in language. In Middle English, the word for black was blac and the word for white was blác (root of the modern words ‘blanch’ and ‘bleach’ which retain connotations of whiteness). ‘Black, etymology’, Oxford English Dictionary. According to the OED’s editors, the two words were often distinguishable only by context.

70  Of course, the same law suggests that the opposite is also true – that when Nature shows her white face she is hiding her black face. Painters recognized this possibility and Cennini advised that lead white should not be painted onto walls since, there, ‘in the course of time it turns black’. Cennini, Handbook (LVIIII), p. 34. In the paintings and manuscripts considered in this book, the pigment is stable.

71  Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, p. 307.

72  Chaucer, ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ (I), in The Canterbury Tales, p. 472.

73  Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names (I, 5), trans. C. E. Rolt (London, 1920), p. 61. See also Moevs, Metaphysics, p. 52.

74  F. Pfeiffer, Meister Eckhart, trans. C. de Evans (London, 1924), vol. I, p. 192.

75  Aristotle, On the Soul (II, iv, 415b), trans. W. S. Hett (London, 1964), p. 87.

76  Walter Hilton, The Ladder of Perfection (II, 27), trans. L. Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth, 1988), p. 178.

77  Geoffrey, Kings (II, 14), p. 86.

78  Pliny, Natural History (XX, 4), vol. VI, trans. H. Rackham, pp. 7–13.

79  J. Hardy, ‘Wart and Wen Cures’, The Folk-Lore Record, I (1878), p. 226.

80  G. W. Hickish, ‘Treatment of Warts by Aromatic Vinegar’, British Medical Journal, II/4791 (1952), p. 995.

81  Psalms 69:20–22.

82  Matthew 27:34.

83  John 19:28–30.

84  J. Harvey, Mediaeval Craftsmen (London, 1975), pp. 32–3.

85  C. King, ‘National Gallery 3902 and the Theme of Luke the Evangelist as Artist and Physician’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, XLVIII/2 (1985), pp. 249–55.

86  Herodotus, The Histories (II, 111), trans. A. D. Godley (London, 1966), vol. I, p. 401.

87  First, the king dreamed that his daughter urinated so much that she flooded the whole of Asia. When she came of age, he gave her in marriage to a Persian, whereupon he had a second dream in which vines sprang from her genitals and spread across the whole of Asia. Astyages’ second dream was unambiguous – his daughter’s offspring would start a dynasty to supplant his own, but his first dream was ambiguous because urine is sometimes a good, and sometime an ill, omen. Herodotus, Histories (I, 107–8), vol. I, p. 139.

88  William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II (I, ii, 1).

89  William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (II, i, 35–40).

90  John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (II, i, 157–9).

91  Ibid. (I, i, 324–6).

92  Shakespeare similarly puns on ‘conception’ and notes that ‘the sun breed[s] maggots in a dead dog’. Hamlet (II, ii, 181–5).

93  Judges 14:14.

94  Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (IV, i, 75–8).

95  Vinegar’s sharpness not only allowed it to penetrate and remove warts, it was also used by Cleopatra to dissolve ‘the largest pearl of all time’ in order to win a wager with Anthony. Whether vinegar can actually dissolve pearls is open to question, but the story was repeated regularly. Pliny, Natural History (IX, 119–21), vol. III, p. 245–7.

96  Bucklow, Alchemy, p. 25.

97  Plato, Phaedo (72a), trans. H. N. Fowler (London, 1966), pp. 249–51.

98  The Book of Beasts, trans. T. H. White (Stroud, 1992), pp. 190–91.

99  Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 97–9.

100  Acts 1:3.

101  Genesis 7:17; Exodus 24:18; Numbers 13:25; Mark 1:13.

102  Deuteronomy 25:3.

103  F. G. Clemow, ‘The Origin of “Quarantine”’, British Medical Journal, I/3550 (1929), pp. 122–3.

104  S. M. Dickson, ‘The Origin of “Quarantine”’, British Medical Journal, I/3564 (1929), p. 790.

105  J. C. Cox, The Sanctuaries and Sanctuary Seekers of Medieval England (London, 1911).

106  William Shakespeare, The Tempest (III, i. 2–4).

107  William Shakespeare, As You Like It (II. vii. 102–3).

108  In fact, if the painter lived or worked in an old building with oak beams and lead roofing, those conditions already existed and Nature might already have been making lead white on her own, as will be seen in chapter Five.

109  Petrus Bonus, The New Pearl of Great Price, ed. J. Lacinius, trans. A. E. Waite (London, 1963), p. 163.

110  Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 104–6.

111  Luke 10:42.

112  Hilton, Ladder (I, 1–15), pp. 1–15.

113  William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 1.

114  Pliny, Natural History (XXXIV, 175), vol. IX, trans. H. Rackham, pp. 253–5.

115  Robert Kilwardby, De ortu scientiarum (139), in G. Ovitt, The Restoration of Perfection (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), pp. 129–30.

116  Ecclesiasticus, 42:25 (Douay Rheims version).

117  Shakespeare, As You Like It (V, i, 30–31).

118  Ibid. (V, iv, 60–61).

119  S. Shapin, ‘Proverbial Economies: How an Understanding of Some Linguistic and Social Features of Common Sense can Throw Light upon More Prestigious Bodies of Knowledge, Science for Example’, Social Studies in Science, XXXI/5 (2001), pp. 731–69.

120  J. Gage, Colour and Culture (London, 1993), p. 64.

121  Luke 10:17.

122  St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (II, ii, 193a9–b21), 156, trans. R. J. Blackwell, R. J. Spath and W. E. Thirlkel (London, 1963), p. 76.

123  Petrus Bonus, Pearl, p. 204.

124  Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge and Building (III, 11), trans. R. Haydocke (Farnborough, 1970), p. 112.

125  Chaucer, ‘Prologue’, p. 30.

TWO: The Metz Pontifical

1  St Bonaventura, De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam (13), cited in A. K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York, 1956), p. 102. This statement is in accord with the traditional idea that ‘beauty is the splendour of the truth’. It sees beauty as an objective fact that we may or may not be able to recognize easily in all things, but is necessarily everywhere. According to this definition of beauty, something’s apparent ugliness is a side effect of not understanding it or its role in ‘the bigger picture’ and is a sign, like physical pain, that suggests we might profitably adopt a different approach.

2  N. Morgan, ‘Pontifical’, in The Cambridge Illuminations, ed. P. Binski and S. Panayotova (London, 2005), pp. 138–9.

3  P. Aiken, ‘Vincent of Beauvais and Chaucer’s Knowledge of Alchemy’, Studies in Philology, XLI (1944), pp. 371–89.

4  J. D. North, Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford, 1988), p. 38–9.

5  Plato, Phaedrus (275b), trans. H. N. Fowler (London, 1966), p. 565.

6  Homer, The Odyssey (XIV, 320–30), trans. E. V. Rieu (London, 2003), p. 189.

7  Jupiter is expansive and Mars is war-like. Could oak and iron’s astrological connections thus have given the written word a different character to the spoken word? And if so, might that have reinforced the observation that ‘The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth’, since the ‘letter’ – made from Jupiter and Mars – is potentially expansionist and militant, while the spoken word’s vehicle is life-giving breath, synonymous with the ‘spirit’? See 2 Corinthians 3:6.

8  Dante, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso (XXXIII, 85–7 and 94). See J. Ahern, ‘Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, XCVII/5 (1982), pp. 800–09.

9  S. Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint (London, 2009).

10  Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook (LIX), trans. D. V. Thompson (New York, 1960), p. 34.

11  E. J. Holmyard, Alchemy (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 239–49.

12  Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. G. du C. de Vere (London, 1996), vol. I, pp. 941–2.

13  See William Shakespeare, Hamlet (I, ii, 113).

14  Paris had been abandoned by his father, the king of Troy, and was bought up by a shepherd. He was called upon by Mercury to decide which of three goddesses was the most beautiful. Each offered inducements: Athena promised victory in war; Juno, land and riches; and Venus, the love of any woman. His judgment in favour of Venus won him Helen, but led to defeat in war and the loss of Troy.

15  H. Nickel, ‘The Judgment of Paris by Lucas Cranach the Elder’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, XVI (1981), pp. 117–29. See also, G. Heydenreich, Lucas Cranach the Elder (Amsterdam, 2007), p. 282.

16  The Painter’s Manual of Dionysius of Fourna, trans. P. Hetherington (London, 1978), p. 4.

17  R. Cormack and S. Mihalarias, ‘A Crusader Painting of St George: Maneira Greca or Lingua Franca?’, Burlington Magazine, CXXVI (1984), pp. 132–41.

18  L. White, ‘Theophilus Redivivus’, Technology and Culture, V (1964), pp. 224–33.

19  C. R. Dodwell, Theophilus: The Various Arts (Oxford, 1961), pp. xviii–xxxiii. See also, J. Van Engen, ‘Theophilus Presbyter and Rupert of Deutz’, Viator, XI (1980), pp. 147–64.

20  Theophilus, On Divers Arts (III), Prologue, trans. J. G. Hawthorne and C. S. Smith (New York, 1979), pp. 78–9.

21  E. Skaug, ‘Cenninoana’, Arte cristiana, LXXXI/754 (1993), pp. 15–22.

22  Cennini, Handbook (I), pp. 1–2.

23  Ibid. (XL), p. 24.

24  J. Gage, Colour and Culture (London, 1993), pp. 131, 137.

25  J. R. Farr, Artisans in Europe (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 10–12.

26  Alberti was more interested in a psychological science of illusion – perspective. It is significant that this naturalistic mode of depiction presupposed a single, unique vantage point. As such, it risked running counter to the traditional principle of multiple legitimate points of view.

27  Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. J. R. Spencer (New Haven, CT, 1976), p. 49.

28  Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘Prologue’, in The Canterbury Tales, trans. N. Coghill (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 30.

29  J. Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1819), vol. II, pp. 22–3.

30  In other contexts, duller blues were also present in the manuscript – indigo, a plant extract, and optical blues made from mixed black and white. This chapter focuses on the two richer blues. The infrared reflectographs were unambiguous because they confirmed previous analysis of a few blue passages with reflectance spectroscopy and because the unfinished illuminations confirmed the order of working in multilayered passages.

31  The insight was obtained with autoradiography, which indicates the distribution of short-lived radioactive isotopes in paintings irradiated with a neutron source. E. van der Wetering, Rembrandt (Amsterdam, 1997), p. 150. Not all owners would be happy to put their paintings inside a nuclear reactor. The technique was not used on the Pontifical.

32  Liber Diversarum Arcium (I, iii, 17), in M. Clarke, Medieval Painters’ Materials and Techniques (London, 2011), p. 102.

33  Celestial ultramarine was probably the ‘azure’ that was bought in Westminster for 120 pence per pound at the same time that lead white cost 2 ½ pence per pound.

34  In artist’s manuals, ‘lapis lazuli’ sometimes also referred to the cheaper blue, which was actually a completely different mineral, azurite. And lapis lazuli was sometimes also called ‘sapphire’, as was blue stained glass. The interchangeable names do not betray confusion, and the identity of the material – either artificial glass or one of three natural stones – was usually obvious from the context in which it was mentioned.

35  J. Mertens, ‘The History of Artificial Ultramarine (1787–1844): Science, Industry and Secrecy’, Ambix, LI/3 (2004), pp. 219–44.

36  Cennini, Handbook (LX), p. 35.

37  Ibid.

38  Marco Polo, The Travels (II), trans. R. Latham (Harmondsworth, 1987), pp. 76–7.

39  Ibid., p. 106.

40  Bābur-Nāma (II), trans. A. S. Beveridge (New Delhi, 1979), p. 214.

41  R. Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John (Athens, OH, 1972).

42  Bābur-Nāma (II), p. 203.

43  Petrus Hispanus, Thesaurus Pauperum, in J. Evans, Magical Jewels (Oxford, 1922), p. 113; Dioscorides, Materia Medica (V, clvii), in Evans, Magical, p. 16; Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals (II, ii, 20), trans. D. Wyckoff (Oxford, 1967), p. 125; Albertus, Minerals (II, ii, 17), p. 115.

44  On the Properties of Things, John of Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum (XVI, 86), ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford, 1975), vol. II, pp. 869–71; Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (II, iv, l. 4), in Evans, Magical, p. 172.

45  L. F. Salzman, English Life in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1927), p. 184.

46  North Midland Lapidary of King Philip, Bodlean MS Add. A106, in J. Evans and M. S. Sergeantson, English Medieval Lapidaries (London, 1933), p. 42; Bartholomaeus, Rerum (XVI, 86), vol. II, ed. M. C. Seymour, p. 870.

47  Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge and Building (III, 11), trans. R. Haydocke (Farnborough, 1970), p. 112. Alberti asked ‘what help is it for a painter to know’ these ‘different qualities’? and Lomazzo’s answer might have been ‘to have a beneficial effect in the beholder’.

48  Marbode of Rennes, De Lapidibus (V), trans. J. M. Riddle, Sudhoffs Archiv, 20 (Wiesbaden, 1977), pp. 42–3.

49  Cennini, Handbook (LXII), pp. 36–9.

50  Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 43–74.

51  Cennini, Handbook (LXII), p. 39.

52  S. Bucklow, ‘Processes and Pigment Recipes’, Kunsttechnologie, XX/2 (2006), pp. 269–77.

53  ‘Bolognese MS’ (11), in M. P. Merrifield, Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting (New York, 1967), vol. II, pp. 356–60.

54  S. Bucklow and R. Woudhuysen, ‘Pigments and Processes: Azurite’, Hamilton Kerr Institute Bulletin, IV (2013), pp. 95–103.

55  Psalm 1:4.

56  Psalm 136/7:5. Jerome, Breviarium in Psalmos (PL 26:1305B), in A. Cutler, ‘The Right Hand’s Cunning’, Speculum, LXXII (1997), p. 971.

57  The missal is Verdun, BM, MS 98. The breviary is in two volumes; British Library, Yates Thompson, MS 8, and Verdun, BM, MS 107.

58  ‘Jehan le Begue’ (LI, 241), in Merrifield, Original, vol. I, pp. 246–7.

59  The same penalty was levied on those who substituted false for fine gold, tin for silver and brick dust for vermilion. Breve dell’Arte dei Pittori Senesi (XIV), trans. G. Erasmi, in H.B.J. Maginnis, The World of the Early Sienese Painter (University Park, PA, 2001), p. 205.

60  The Westminster Retable (chapter Five) used only ultramarine and the Thornham Parva Retable (chapter Six) used only azurite. In neither case was the painter’s use of colour restricted by not using both blues.

61  Cennini, Handbook (CXLVI and LXXXIII), pp. 93 and 54–5.

62  Robert Kilwardby, De ortu scientiarum (139), in G. Ovitt, The Restoration of Perfection (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), pp. 129–30.

63  Dionysius of Fourna, p. 4.

64  J. S. Ackerman, ‘“Ars Sine Scientia Nihil Est”: Gothic Architecture at the Cathedral of Milan’, Art Bulletin, XXI/2 (1949), pp. 84–111. See also St Bonaventura, De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam (13), in Coomaraswamy, Philosophy of Art, p. 29.

65  St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (I, q. 117, a. 1 c), in A. K. Coomaraswamy, ‘Medieval Aesthetic I’, Art Bulletin, XVIII/1 (1935), p. 33.

66  Petrus Bonus, The New Pearl of Great Price, ed. J. Lacinius, trans. A. E. Waite (London, 1963), p. 194.

67  Theophilus, Divers (III), Prologue, pp. 78–9.

68  Genesis 1:3.

69  Daniel 3:23–5.

70  Hesiod, Works and Days (293–320), in Theogony, Works and Days and Testimonia, trans. G. W. Most (London, 2006), pp. 111–13.

71  J. Brückmann, ‘Latin Manuscript Pontificals and Benedictionals in England and Wales’, Traditio, XXIX (1973), pp. 391–458.

72  In their purification processes, the rich blue ultramarine wanted to get into the water, while the rich blue azurite wanted to get out of the water. In the apothecary, ‘watery’ ultramarine was sold for its cleansing and cooling properties, whereas azurite had no pharmaceutical uses.

THREE: The Macclesfield Psalter

1  A twelfth-century commentary on Worcester Cathedral’s Chapterhouse, cited in T. A. Heslop, ‘Worcester Cathedral Chapterhouse and the Harmony of Testaments’, in New Offerings, Ancient Treasures, ed. P. Binski and W. Noel (Stroud, 2001), p. 301.

2  S. Panayotova, ‘Psalter’, in The Cambridge Illuminations, ed. P. Binski and S. Panayotova (London, 2005), pp. 187–8.

3  The Psalter has 254 folios, is now 170 × 108 × 63 mm and weighs about 800 grams. Not counting the part in Prague, the Pontifical has 140 folios, is now 320 × 245 × 65 mm and weighs about 2.5 kg. The margins of both have been cut down and neither have their original bindings.

4  S. Panayotova, The Macclesfield Psalter (London, 2008), p. 53.

5  E. Millar, English Illuminated Manuscripts from the XIVth to the XVth Centuries (Paris, 1928), p. 7.

6  S. Panayotova, Psalter, pp. 72–3.

7  Medieval Norwich, ed. C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (London, 2004).

8  S. Panayotova, Psalter, pp. 44–9.

9  J. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry (Woodbridge, 1982).

10  M. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge, 1998).

11  J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (London, 1970).

12  M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN, 1984).

13  C. W. Bynum, ‘Wonder’, American Historical Review, CII/1 (1997), pp. 3 (n. 9) and 7.

14  The poses are meaningful. See D. Summers, ‘Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art’, Art Bulletin, LIX (1977), pp. 336–61.

15  Panayotova, Psalter, p. 74.

16  M. Camille, Image on the Edge (London, 1992).

17  Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Monk’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, trans. N. Coghill (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 219.

18  The idea that work is burdensome and that play is frivolous is modern. As a modern philosopher said, ‘Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art.’ J. Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York, 1916), p. 242.

19  Chaucer, ‘The Summoner’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, pp. 333–8.

20  R. Pratt, ‘Albertus Magnus and the Problem of Sound and Odor in the Summoner’s Tale’, Philological Quarterly, LVII (1978), pp. 267–8.

21  Chaucer, ‘The Parliament of Fowls’ (24–5), in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. J. H. Fisher (New York, 1977), p. 566.

22  William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (V, i. 478–9).

23  A. Galloway, ‘The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late-Medieval England’, Speculum, LXX/1 (1995), pp. 68–105.

24  Ibid., p. 87.

25  Ibid., p. 97.

26  C. de Hamel, The Library of the Earls of Macclesfield, sale cat., Sotheby’s (London, 22 June 2004), lot 587.

27  The National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Friends of the National Libraries and the Cadbury Trust.

28  These were popular nineteenth-century tourist attractions but are no longer considered safe. In 1988 one collapsed, swallowing half a double-decker bus.

29  Theophilus, On Divers Arts (I, 36), trans. J. G. Hawthorne and C. S. Smith (New York, 1979), p. 41.

30  M. Grieve, A Modern Herbal (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 134–7.

31  H. Schweppe and H. Roosen-Runge, ‘Carmine’, in Artists’ Pigments, vol. I, ed. R. L. Feller (Oxford, 1986), pp. 255–83.

32  J. H. Harvey, ‘Westminster Abbey: The Infirmarer’s Garden’, Garden History, XX/2 (1992), p. 106.

33  C. J. Singer, The Earliest Chemical Industry (London, 1948).

34  Theophilus, Divers (I, 37), p. 42.

35  M. P. Pomiès, M. Menu and C. Vignaud, ‘Red Palaeolithic Pigments: Natural Hematite or Heated Goethite?’, Archaeometry, XLI/2 (1999), pp. 275–85.

36  F. Nunes, Arts of Poetry, and of Painting and Symmetry, with Principles, in Artists’ Techniques in Golden Age Spain, ed. Z. Véliz (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 12–13.

37  P. Willard, Secrets of Saffron (London, 2001).

38  W. Harrison, The Description of England, ed. G. Edelen (New York, 1994), pp. 148–56.

39  R. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow, 1994), vol. V, pp. 140–41.

40  Procopus of Caesarea, De Bello Gothico (V, 17), and Theophanes of Byzantium, cited in D. Jacoby, ‘Silk Economics and Cross-cultural Artistic interaction’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, LVIII (2004), p. 198.

41  Chaucer, ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, The Canterbury Tales, p. 484.

42  Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. G. Thomson (New York, 1995), p. 5.

43  Hesiod, Theogony (567), in Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M. L. West (Oxford, 1988), p. 20.

44  Pliny, Natural History (VII, 198–9) trans. H. Rackham (London, 1996), vol. II, p. 641.

45  S. Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint (London, 2009), p. 262.

46  Song of Songs 4:14.

47  Chaucer, ‘The Pardoner’s Prologue’, in The Canterbury Tales, p. 259.

48  ‘Introduction’, in Norwich Since 1550, ed. C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (London, 2004), p. xxvi.

49  D. King, ‘Medieval Glass Painting’, in Medieval Norwich, ed. Rawcliffe and Wilson, p. 123.

50  Breve dell’Arte dei Pittori Senesi (XIV), trans. G. Erasmi, in H.B.J. Maginnis, The World of the Early Sienese Painter (University Park, PA, 2001), p. 205.

51  L. F. Sandler, ‘In and Around the Text’, in The Cambridge Illuminations, ed. S. Panayotova (London, 2007), p. 109.

52  Panayotova, Psalter, p. 73.

53  Ibid., p. 63.

54  Chaucer, ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, p. 249.

55  To appreciate the extraordinary philosophical depth and sophistication of this particular ‘cock and (no) bull’ story, see P. W. Travis, ‘Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor’, Speculum, LXII/2 (1997), pp. 416–27.

56  G. Sarton, ‘Aristotle and Phyllis’, Isis, XIV/1 (1930), pp. 8–19.

57  G. S. Kirk, Myth (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 162–71.

58  Homer, The Odyssey (IX, 210–80), trans. E. V. Rieu (London, 2003), pp. 115–17. Ovid, Metamorphoses (XIII, 760–890), trans. M. M. Innes (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 305–8.

59  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (III, 71), in A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA, 1976), p. 77.

60  M. A. Michael, ‘Seeing-in: The Macclesfield Psalter’, in Illuminations, ed. Panayotova, pp. 115–21.

61  E. R. Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (London, 1979).

62  E. Herrigel, The Method of Zen (London, 1988), pp. 25–39.

63  Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon (III, x) in M. Carruthers, The Medieval Craft of Memory (University Park, PA, 2002), pp. 2–3.

64  Aristotle, Physics (II, iii, 194b–195b), trans. P. H. Wickstead and E. M. Cornford (London, 1963), vol. I, pp. 129–39.

65  J. Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics (New Brunswick, NJ, 2008).

66  G. P. Balbi, ‘Il libro nella societa Genovese del sec. XIII’, La Bibliofilia, LXXX (1978), pp. 13–15, and A. Adversi, Storia del Libro (Florence, 1963), pp. 230–31 in J. Ahern, ‘Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, XCVII/5 (1982), p. 800.

67  Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 112–17.

68  Many histories of art focus on patronage and forms, which are both masculine in Aristotelian terms. This book focuses on artists’ materials, which are essentially feminine. It is an exercise in microhistory, which was defined by an early exponent as matria history or yin history. L. González, Invitación a la microhistoria (Mexico City, 1972), p. 14, in C. Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things I Know About It’, Critical Inquiry, XX/1 (Autumn 1993), pp. 10–35, p. 12.

69  Origen, Cant. (II, 3–4), in D. Janes, God and Gold in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1998), p. 79.

70  Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 216–21.

71  Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. D. V. Thompson (New York, 1960), pp. 101–2.

72  M. A. Michael, ‘Seeing-in: The Macclesfield Psalter’, in Illuminations, ed. Panayotova, p. 118.

73  Actually, luck has nothing to do with it. Obscurity about the Psalter’s mother is inevitable since matter (in the absence of form) is literally unintelligible. Noble Prize-winning physicists have discovered that the closer you look at matter, the more elusive it becomes and all you find are some of the forms it can take. See C. Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (New York, 2005), pp. 37–106 and 187–92.

74  Petrus de Crescentiis, Liber ruralium commodorum, in C. Thacker, The History of Gardens (Berkeley, CA, 1979), p. 85.

75  Romans 12:5.

76  Ovid, Metamorphoses (II, 5), p. 50.

77  E. Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures (Princeton, NJ, 1946), p. 33.

78  One cannot know if Suger intended an allusion to a lead white-like transformation by his reference to a dunghill, yet his life was transformed. And his transformation was felt beyond the Abbey because, in a modest way, he embodied the paradox that those who actively seek to withdraw from the world are those who have the greatest influence over it. Lovejoy, Chain, pp. 27–8.

79  Panofsky, Suger, pp. 1–37.

80  A. Speer, ‘Is there a Theology of the Gothic Cathedral? Re-reading Abbot Suger’, in The Mind’s Eye, ed. J. F. Hamburger and A-M. Bouché (Princeton, NJ, 2006), pp. 65–83.

81  Abbot Suger, De administratione (XXVII), in Panofsky, Suger, pp. 47–9.

82  Ibid. (XXXIII), in Panofsky, Suger, pp. 61–3.

83  R. Branner, ‘The Painted Medallions in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., LVIII/2 (1968), p. 8.

84  Ovid, Metamorphoses (IV, 25–170), pp. 95–8.

85  The very unviability of the painters’ monsters as material creatures of flesh and blood but their undoubted existence as mental forms was itself a proof of form’s superiority over matter. But one problem of this hierarchy is its apparent placing of the ‘head’ over the ‘hand’ and consequent temptation to downgrade craft.

86  Abbot Suger, De administratione (XXVII), in Panofsky, pp. 47–9.

87  Ibid. (XXXIII), in Panofsky, pp. 63–5.

88  St Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God (I, ix), trans. E. Cousins (New York, 1978), p. 63.

89  Plato, The Republic (VII, 514a–518e), trans. P. Shorey (London, 1963), vol. II, pp. 119–37.

90  Dante, Paradiso (XIII, 76–8).

91  1 Corinthians 13:12.

92  Matthew 10:29.

FOUR: The Wilton Diptych

1  See A. Tuck, ‘Richard II’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

2  William Shakespeare, Richard II (III, ii, 54–62).

3  K. F. Thompson, ‘Richard II, Martyr’, Shakespeare Quarterly, VIII (1957), pp. 159–66.

4  Shakespeare, Richard II, II, i, 241–2.

5  C. Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford, 2008).

6  While The Canterbury Tales might have been a storytelling competition that started in a Southwark pub, it was also a poetry recital in a king’s court.

7  M. Hallissy, ‘Writing a Building: Chaucer’s Knowledge of the Construction Industry and the Language of the “Knight’s Tale”’, The Chaucer Review, XXXII/3 (1998), pp. 239–59 (p. 240).

8  Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles (New York, 1976), vol. II, p. 823.

9  Holinshed’s Chronicles, vol. II, p. 868 and vol. III, pp. 13–14.

10  Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Monk’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, trans. N. Coghill (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 219–21. See also Dante, Inferno (XXXIII, 69).

11  Hermetica (IV, 10), trans. B. P. Copenhaver (Cambridge, 1992), p. 17.

12  H. Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 85 and 343–6.

13  S. Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint (London, 2009), p. 259.

14  Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (I, vi), trans. W. H. Stahl (New York, 1952), p. 99.

15  Aristotle, De Caelo (I, i), and St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (I, qu. 3, art. 1, obj. i), in V. F. Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism (New York, 1938), pp. 41 and 107.

16  Proclus, Elements (L, 148), in Hopper, Number, p. 41.

17  Albertus Magnus, De Caelo et Mundi, ab initi, in Hopper, Number, p. 94.

18  William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor (V, i, 2–4).

19  Aristotle, Metaphysics (A, 5) in Hopper, Number, p. 41.

20  Plotinus, Enneads (V, i, 5), trans. A. H. Armstrong (London, 1984), vol. V, pp. 27–9.

21  On the Properties of Things, John of Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum (XIX, 117), ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford, 1975), vol. II, p. 1357.

22  Capella, De Nuptiis (VII), in Hopper, Number, p. 39.

23  Genesis 1:27.

24  The Christian tradition downplayed this interpretation of Genesis, but it endured from the Jewish tradition and was embraced by medieval alchemists like Maître Canchez and Nicolas Flamel. M. C. Horowitz, ‘The Image of God in Man – is Woman Included?’, Harvard Theological Review, LXXII/3–4 (1979), pp. 175–206.

25  L. F. Salzman, Building in England (Oxford, 1967), p. 198.

26  Mark 6:3.

27  Wisdom, 11:20.

28  St Augustine, On Free Will (II, 42), in V. Sekules, Medieval Art (Oxford, 2001), p. 126.

29  Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (IXX), in L. J. Bowman, ‘The Cosmic Exemplarism of Bonaventure’, The Journal of Religion, LV/2 (1975), pp. 193–4.

30  All you need is a compass or a pin and a piece of string. The square root of two is the length of the diagonal of a square whose sides are equal to one. A root-two rectangle is made when one side of the square is extended until it meets the arc formed by the string or compass swung out from the square’s diagonal.

31  Aristotle, Metaphysics (I, ii, 983a), trans. H. Tredennick (London, 1968), vol. I, 15–17.

32  Dante, Paradiso (XXXIII, 86). See J. Ahern, ‘Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, XCVII/5 (1982), pp. 800–09.

33  T. A. Heslop, ‘Worcester Cathedral Chapterhouse and the Harmony of the Testaments’, in New Offerings, Ancient Treasures, ed. P. Binski and W. Noel, (Stroud, 2001), pp. 302–3.

34  1 Corinthians 13:12

35  William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (III, i, 97).

36  John Manwood, Manwood’s Treatise of the Forest Laws, in R. P. Harrison, Forests (Chicago, IL, 1992), pp. 73–4.

37  Shakespeare’s joke transformation has a serious side that Chaucer, and possibly also Richard II, would have known since parallels were drawn between Pyramus and Christ. See C. Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (New York, 2005), pp. 90–106.

38  D. Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge, 1981).

39  R. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2010), p. 135.

40  O. Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London, 1986), p. 147.

41  L. Silver, ‘Forest Primeval: Albrecht Altdorfer and the German Wilderness Landscape’, Simiolus, XIII (1983), pp. 4–43.

42  Dante, Inferno (I, i, 2).

43  Dante, Paradiso (XXIX, 31–6). See Bucklow, Alchemy, p. 166, and Moevs, Metaphysics, p. 39.

44  Numerically, Lancelot’s illness in the forest echoes Christ’s earthly suffering with four (peripheral) wounds and his release from suffering with a fifth (central) wound. This is another example, like the Diptych, of the importance of number in the construction of medieval art. It is also an example of art imitating nature, since there are four earthly elements and a fifth heavenly one. The Death of King Arthur (199–202), trans. J. Cable (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 230–34.

45  G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge, 1941).

46  P. Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic (Oxford, 1995).

47  Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras (XIII and XXVIII), trans. Thomas Taylor (Frome, 1999), pp. 221 and 250.

48  Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 43–74.

49  Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge and Building (III, 11), trans. R. Haydocke (Farnborough, 1970), p. 112.

50  Turba Philosophorum (IV), trans. A. E. Waite (London, 1970), p. 10.

51  Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 75–108.

52  Today, we might consider them as the ancient Western equivalents of the Eastern tradition’s yin and yang. Thus water is the dark, earthly or yin-like principle and fire is the light, heavenly or yang-like principle.

53  The order in which these principles are mentioned depends upon one’s point of view. ‘Fire and water’ emphasizes the masculine principle (like the phrase ‘man and wife’) and approaches the pair as a theoretical concept in which the inward (heavenly) aspect is considered first. The Eastern equivalent, ‘yin and yang’, emphasizes the feminine principle (like the phrase ‘ladies and gentlemen’) and approaches the pair as a practical phenomenon in which the outward (earthly) aspect is encountered first.

54  In bestiary lore, this interdependence is expressed by the entwined fates of the elephant and dragon, whose mutual destruction engenders the pigment dragon’s blood. Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 141–72 and 280.

55  Plutarch, Quaestiones Conviviales, 725c, in J. Gage, ‘A Locus Classicus of Colour Theory’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XLIV (1981), p. 6.

56  If (hot and wet) air dominates, then people incline towards a sanguine (happy and sociable) temperament, while (cold and dry) earth inclines people towards a melancholy (sad and withdrawn) temperament. Most people wanted to be sanguine (which is midway between fiery choleric and watery phlegmatic), which is a mixture of opposite temperaments, like melancholy, the humour favoured by artists.

57  Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (I, x, 188a–189a), trans. R. J. Blackwell, R. J. Spath and W. E. Thirkel (London, 1963), p. 42.

58  Ezekiel 36:19.

59  Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook (LXIII), trans. D. V. Thompson (New York, 1960), p. 36.

60  1 Chronicles 13:5.

61  L. Monnas, ‘Fit for a King: Figured Silks in the Wilton Diptych’, in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (London, 1997), pp. 170–77.

62  R. S. Lopez, ‘Silk Industry in the Byzantine Empire’, Speculum, XX/1 (1945), pp. 1–45.

63  A. K. Coomaraswamy in G. Bain, Celtic Art (London, 1977), p. 20.

64  Although they are angel wings, they look like bird wings and birds, of course, are the creatures that populate or decorate the sphere of air.

65  Bartholomaeus, Properties (XVI, 86), vol. II, ed. M. C. Seymour, pp. 869–71.

66  Genesis 44:5 and 15.

67  Marbode of Rennes, De Lapidibus (V), trans. J. M. Riddle, Sudhoffs Archiv, XX (1977), pp. 42–3.

68  Plotinus, Enneads (IV, iv, 42), vol. IV, p. 269.

69  Lomazzo, Tracte (III, 11), p. 112.

70  It is also the way in which planets and metals are connected. Pythagoras described the planets as a seven-stringed lyre. J. E. McGuire, and P. M. Rattansi, ‘Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan”’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, XXI/2 (1966), p. 115. In the fabric of the universe, sympathy between a planet and metal is a vibration transmitted down a warp thread, so the sun’s vibration in heaven ‘awakens’ the ‘string’ that, on earth, is gold. (They share a warp and their wefts are ether and entwined fire and water, respectively.) Similarly, silver is the terrestrial echo of the celestial sound of the moon, iron is in tune with Mars and lead resonates with Saturn. It is also how the metals are connected with bodily organs. As Chaucer said of his rich doctor, ‘Gold stimulates the heart, or so we’re told / He therefore had a special love of gold.’ Chaucer, ‘Prologue’, in The Canterbury Tales, p. 31.

71  Albertus Magnus, Libellus de Alchimia (III), trans. Sister V. Heines (Los Angeles, 1958), p. 10.

72  Nicholas Ridolfi, Short Method of Mental Prayer (X), trans. R. Devas (London, 1921), p. 50.

73  It could also be said that the fiery spirit is relatively ‘fixed’ and the watery soul ‘volatile’, and traces of the difference can still be discerned today when it is said that someone’s ‘spirit is broken’ by adversity, or that they are a fluid but aimless ‘lost soul’.

74  Julian of Norwich, The Revelations of Divine Love (41 and 48), trans. J. Walsh (London, 1961), pp. 113–15 and 127–8.

75  Meister Eckhart (II, 12), trans C. de B. Evans (London, 1924), vol. I, p. 368.

76  The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (XIII, ii, 1), trans. and ed. S. A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and O. Berghof (Cambridge, 2006), p. 276.

77  Shakespeare, Richard II (II, ii, 14).

78  Ibid. (III, iii, 58).

79  Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain (VII, 4), trans. L. Thorpe (London, 1966), p. 180.

80  Marbode of Rennes, De Lapidibus (V), pp. 42–3.

81  William Shakespeare, As You Like It (II, vii, 102–3)

FIVE: The Westminster Retable

1  William Shakespeare, Richard II (I, ii, 13).

2  Ibid. (II, i, 50–51).

3  Ibid. (II, i, 40–45). Shakespeare’s ‘little world … set in the silver sea’ is reminiscent of the Diptych’s globe – smaller than a thumbnail, on the top of the flagpole held by an angel – and that, in turn, is reminiscent of the globe held by Christ on the Westminster Retable.

4  Ibid. (III, iv, 43–7).

5  M. F. Vaughan, ‘Chaucer’s Imaginative One-day Flood’, Philological Quarterly, LX/1 (1981), pp. 117–23.

6  Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain (I, 11), trans. L. Thorpe (London, 1966), p. 65.

7  Ibid. (I, 12–16), pp. 66–72.

8  Ibid. (I, 2), p. 53.

9  Virgil, Eclogues (I, 66), trans. H. R. Fairclough (London, 1999), vol. I, p. 29.

10  Arthur Golding, The Excellent and Pleasant Work of Julius Solinus Polyhistor (XXXIV, ii), in J. W. Bennett, ‘Britain among the Fortunate Isles’, Studies in Philology, LIII (1956), p. 115.

11  Bennett, ‘Fortunate’, pp. 116–17.

12  Homer, The Odyssey (V, 73), trans. E. V. Rieu (London, 2003), p. 64.

13  Ibid. (VII, 257), p. 91.

14  H. R. Patch, The Other World: According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1950), pp. 16–17.

15  Golding, Polyhistor (XXXIV), in Bennett, ‘Fortunate’, p. 117.

16  Constantius, Panegyrici Latini (VII, vii, 1), in F. Barry, ‘The Mouth of Truth and the Forum Boarium’, Art Bulletin, XCIII/1 (2011), pp. 7–37 (p. 23).

17  George Peele, Araygnement of Paris, in Bennett, ‘Fortunate’, p. 125.

18  Ibid. (I, 18), p. 74.

19  Geoffrey, History (I, 17 and III, 20), pp. 73 and 106.

20  Asser’s Life of King Alfred (83), in Alfred the Great, ed. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 97.

21  Ibid. (23 and 76), pp. 75 and 91.

22  K. D. Lilley, City and Cosmos (London, 2009), pp. 21, 48 and 58.

23  R. Krautheimer, ‘Introduction to an Iconography of Medieval Architecture’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, v (1942), pp. 1–20.

24  Sometimes, if the centre is counted, the cross can also reflect the number five, as in the cross-shaped distribution of five churches in Bamberg. (Krautheimer, ibid., p. 8.) This reflects the relationship between four and five noted in the previous chapter.

25  Geoffrey, History (III, 5), pp. 93–4.

26  Lilley, Cosmos, p. 64.

27  Ibid., pp. 18 and 103.

28  Romulus’ black cow and a white bull were symbols of the twin cosmic principles, matter and form or yin and yang. This hints at the plan’s universality, variations of which can be found all the way to China. Of course, town plans are best appreciated from above and before the emergence of satellite surveillance; ‘aerial views’ were known as ‘katascopic visions’. A katascopic vision could occur when the soul separated from the body and flew in meditation. It was one aspect of a medieval spiritual tradition that stretched back, through neo-Platonic and pre-Socratic philosophers, to shamanic practices of the East. See Plutarch, Romulus (XI); Ovid, Fastes (IV, 825f); Varro, De Lingua Latina (IV, 143); M. Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions (Chicago, IL, 1976), pp. 22–3. A. Snodgrass, Architecture, Time and Eternity (New Delhi, 1990). M. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 77–81 and 231–7.

29  Snodgrass, Architecture, vol. I, pp. 122–7, and Lilley, Cosmos, pp. 119–20.

30  Lilley, Cosmos, p. 27.

31  Lucian, De Laude Cestrie, in Lilley, Cosmos, p. 24.

32  R. Sennett, Flesh and Stone (London, 1994).

33  This idea is depicted (rather literally) in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of the ‘Vitruvian Man’ with outstretched arms touching the circumference of a circle.

34  R. Klibanski, Continuity of the Platonic Tradition (New York, 1982), p. 28.

35  Lilley, Cosmos, pp. 8–9

36  J. Mitchell, ‘The Asymmetry of Sanctity’, in Raising the Eyebrow, ed. L. Golden (Oxford, 2001), pp. 209–20.

37  Lilley, Cosmos, pp. 44 and 24.

38  P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets (New Haven, CT, 1995), p. 1.

39  R. K. Lancaster, ‘Artists, Suppliers and Clerks’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXV (1972), pp. 81–107 (p. 81).

40  T. Burckhardt, Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral, trans. W. Stoddart (Ipswich, 1995).

41  H. M. Colvin, A History of the King’s Works (London, 1963), vol. I, pp. 155–7.

42  F. Toker, ‘Gothic Architecture by Remote Control’, The Art Bulletin, LXVII/1 (1985), p. 69.

43  Nicholas de Biart in J. Harvey, The Medieval Architect (London, 1972), p. 78.

44  Binski, Westminster, pp. 35, 15–29, 13–15 and 21–2.

45  Ibid., pp. 15–34.

46  H. M. Colvin, Building Accounts of Henry III (Oxford, 1971), pp. 229–31 and 351.

47  In pre-decimal English currency, there were 12 pence (d) to a shilling (s.) and 20 shillings to the pound (£).

48  Colvin, Henry III, pp. 229 and 233.

49  Lancaster, ‘Artists’, pp. 83–4.

50  Ibid., p. 85.

51  J. G. Noppen, ‘William of Gloucester, Goldsmith to King Henry III’, Burlington Magazine, LI/295 (1927), pp. 189–92, and Lancaster, ‘Artists’, pp. 91–6.

52  A. R. Jones, ‘Gleanings from the 1253 Building Accounts of Westminster Abbey’, AVISTA Forum Journal, XI/2 (Fall 1998/Winter 1999), pp. 13–32 (p. 21).

53  D.W.H. Miles, Tree-ring Dating of the Roof Carpentry of Salisbury Cathedral, Centre for Archaeology Report, 94/2002 (Portsmouth, 2002), p. 43.

54  D. Turnbull, ‘The Ad Hoc Collective Work of Building Gothic Cathedrals’, Science, Technology and Human Values, XVIII/3 (1993), pp. 321–4.

55  Bede, Op. Hist., ed. Plummer, p. 368, in L. F. Salzman, Building in England (Oxford, 1967), p. 173.

56  N. Turner, ‘The Recipe Collection of Johannes Alcherius’, Painting Techniques, Conference Proceedings, ed. A. Roy and P. Smith (London, 1998), p. 49.

57  Colvin, Henry III, p. 383.

58  Salzman, Building, pp. 265–6

59  I. C. Bristow, Interior House Painting Colours and Technology (New Haven, CT, 1996), p. 10.

60  Flavius Merobaudes, Carmina (II, 8), in F. Barry, ‘Walking on Water’, The Art Bulletin, LXXXIX/4 (2007), p. 631.

61  Iliad (XIV, 273) in Barry, ibid., p. 631.

62  Genesis 1:6.

63  Avitus, De transitu Maris Rubri (V, 592–3), in Barry, ‘Walking’, p. 632.

64  Dante, Epistle to Cangrande (7), in K. Hilliard, The Banquet of Dante Alighiere (London, 1889), p. 394.

65  The stone is about 26 × 12 × 10 inches and weighs 336 pounds (152 kg).

66  Andrew of Wyntourn, Orygynale Cronykil, in N. Aitchison, Scotland’s Stone of Destiny (Stroud, 2000), p. 23.

67  John of Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, in Aitchison, Destiny, pp. 105–7.

68  The idea of a middle kingdom surrounded by four territories echoes the four Irish provinces that were called cóliceda (fifths). They were Ulaid (Ulster), Connachra (Connaught), Lagin (Leinster) and Mumu (Munster), together with a traditional province called Mide (Meath), which means ‘middle’. Both Scottish and Irish kingdoms echoed the traditional division of worldly wholes into four with a transcendent fifth. The same pattern is manifest in cities with their four ‘quarters’ and shared market or forum.

69  Such a connection is reinforced in painting. For example, Coptic and Pictish depictions of St Paul and St Anthony breaking bread. Also, ninth-century Irish and Scottish artists depicted Cain’s murder weapon as the jawbone of an ass, an implement used in the prehistoric Near East. A. A. Barb, ‘Cain’s Murder-Weapon’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXV (1972), pp. 386–7. A connection between the Celts and the Near East was introduced in Sir John Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (London and Edinburgh, 1888). In the light of black and white’s relationship (as demonstrated by the alchemical pigment, lead white), it might also be significant that a rock supposedly from the ‘black land’ (Kemi, or Egypt) was placed at the centre of the ‘white land’ (Alba, or Scotland).

70  John of Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, and William de Rishanger, Chronica et Annales, in Aitchison, Destiny, p. 123.

71  Genesis, 28:11–18.

72  Shakespeare, Richard II (II, iv, 21) and (III, ii, 218).

73  J. Armitage Robinson, Two Glastonbury Legends: King Arthur and St Joseph of Arimathea (Cambridge, 1926), pp. 8–9.

74  C. Shenton, ‘Royal Interest in Glastonbury and Cadbury: Two Arthurian Itineraries, 1278 and 1331’, The English Historical Review, CXIV/459 (1999), pp. 1249–1255 (p. 1250–51).

75  R. S. Loomis, ‘Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast’, Speculum, XVIII/1 (January 1953), pp. 114–27 (p. 117).

76  R. S. Loomis, ‘From Segontium to Sinadon – The Legends of a Cité Gaste’, Speculum, XII/2 (October 1947), pp. 520–33 (pp. 530–31).

77  The Quest of the Holy Grail, trans. P. M. Matarasso (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 25.

78  Geoffrey, History (VI, 17), p. 167.

79  The Quest (I), ‘The Departure’, p. 33.

80  The Quest (VI), ‘The Peregrinations of Perceval’, p. 100.

81  The Quest (I), ‘The Departure’, p. 37.

82  The Quest (II), ‘The Shield’, p. 64.

83  The Quest (XV), ‘The Holy Grail’, p. 271.

84  The Quest, ‘Introduction’, p. 13.

85  John of Salisbury, Polycratius, in Lilley, Cosmos, p. 79.

86  Of course, Richard’s danger was not death – that comes to us all – it was the dangers his soul faced after his murder (to be contrasted with the glories that followed Edward the Confessor’s martyrdom).

87  E. M. Treharne, ‘Romanticizing the Past in the Middle English Athleston’, The English Historical Review, n.s., L/197 (1999), pp. 1–21 (p. 3).

88  P. A. Knapp. ‘Gawain’s Quest: Social Conflict and Symbolic Mediation’, Clio, VI (1977), pp. 290–91.

89  The Quest (VI), The Peregrinations of Perceval, p. 99.

90  Shenton, ‘Glastonbury’, p. 1249.

91  Cited in R. Foster, Patterns of Thought (London, 1991), p. 147.

92  E. Kitzinger, ‘World Map and Fortune’s Wheel: A Medieval Mosaic Floor in Turin’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, CXVII (1973), pp. 344–73.

93  It is still because it is not just marble, but marble and porphyry. Porphyry is fire, just as marble is water, so the pavement is both form and matter, heaven and earth, yang and yin.

94  Following translations in P. Binski, ‘The Cosmati at Westminster’, The Art Bulletin, VII/1 (1990), p. 10, and Foster, Patterns, p. xx.

95  The sum 1212 + 60 – 4 might seem a strange way of saying 1268. However 1212 + 60 = 1272, the date of Henry’s death, and 60 – 4 = 56, the number of years he reigned. It suggests that the inscription was a later addition. P. Tudor-Craig, in C. Wilson, Westminster Abbey (London, 1986), p. 98. It also fits into the riddle tradition, such as Beatrice’s statement that ‘five hundred, ten and five, A messenger from God, shall kill the whore’. Dante, Purgatorio (XXXIII, 43–4). This has baffled scholars but may be related to the Secretum philosophorum’s code 50 + 5 + 10 (which transcribes in Roman numerals as LVX) or ‘lux’, since light is a messenger from God. A. Galloway, ‘The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late Medieval England: The “Oxford” Riddles, the Secretum Philosophorum and the Riddles in Piers Plowman’, Speculum, LXX/1 (1995), pp. 68–105 (p. 77).

96  William Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (VI, 24), in J. M. Neale and B. Webb, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments (London, 1893), p. 100.

97  The metacosm is ‘beyond the cosmos’ and is the metaphysical reality that encompasses all manifestation, and of which all manifestation is merely a reflection.

98  God is the unmoved first mover but, in cosmology, the first mover is the invisible crystalline sphere within which all the stars and planets move. The poem promises ‘If the reader reflects upon what is laid down / he will discover the measure of the primum mobile’. Following the poem’s instructions (31 + 32 + 33 + 34 + 35 + 36 + 37 + 38 + 39 or 3 + 9 + 27 + 81 + 243 + 729 + 2,187 + 6,561 + 19,683) gives 29,523 years as ‘the measure of the primum mobile’. With this particular meditation on the natural trinity, 29,523 years is the closest one can get to the Great Year, or the precession of the equinoxes, of about 26,000 years. (Estimates of the Great Year varied up to 36,000 years) For statements on the life spans of plants, animals and civilizations in the context of various cycles, see Plato’s explanation of the origins of social and political strife in The Republic (VIII, 545d–547b), trans. D. Lee (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 359–62.

99  E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Garden City, NY, 1957), p. 136.

100  In 1268 the world was supposed to be 6,466 years old, calculated from Adam’s date of birth (5198 BC), his lifespan (930 years), his time in hell (4,302 years) and his release from hell in 34AD. Hence, the poem could suggest that in 1268, the end of the world was 13,217 (19,683–6,466) years away. This is close to half the ‘Great Year’ of about 26,000 years. In other words, the pavement was laid near the centre of time, halfway between the alpha and omega. Dante, Inferno (IV, 55) and Paradiso (XXVI, 118–23).

101  Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Knight’s Tale’ (II), in The Canterbury Tales, p. 60.

102  Shakespeare, Richard II IV, i, 183-8.

103  Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (II, i–iv), trans. V. E. Watts (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 54–65.

104  Shakespeare, Richard II (III, iii, 147–53).

105  Ibid. (V, v, 49).

106  Or, ‘All things fall and are built again’. The line comes from a poem inspired by that other great mineral embodiment of water – lapis, a small piece of which was carved out of an Afghan mountainside, then carved into a miniature Chinese mountain scene. W. B. Yeats, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London, 2008), pp. 250–51.

107  The extent of their interest shows in language. ‘Sidereal’ means ‘of the stars’, so the word ‘consider’ literally means to be ‘with the stars’, or next to the realm of Ideas or the Divine Mind.

108  Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles (New York, 1976), vol. II, p. 477.

109  Dante, Purgatorio (VII, 130).

110  Ibid. (VII, 73–8).

111  J. Rose, ‘Eighteenth- to Twentieth-Century Documentation’, in The Westminster Retable, ed. P. Binski and A. Massing (London, 2009), pp. 172–81.

112  R. Marchant, ‘Manufacture of the Wooden Support’, in Retable, ed. Binski and Massing, pp. 227–9.

113  S. Bucklow, ‘Dimensions’, in Retable, ed. Binski and Massing, pp. 432–5.

114  I. Tyers, ‘Tree-ring Analysis’, in Retable, ed. Binski and Massing, pp. 215–21.

115  C. Heard and S. Bucklow, ‘Reconstruction’, in Retable, ed. Binski and Massing, pp. 392–400.

116  The Westminster carpenter worked in feet and inches. There are 12 inches to the foot and an inch is about 25 mm. One sixteenth of an inch is about 1.5 mm and the Retable is about 3 m.

117  S. Bucklow, S. Robson, and N. Woodhouse, ‘Digital Documentation’, in Retable, ed. Binski and Massing, pp. 427–31.

118  Genesis 1:14, Ecclesiastes 3:1–2.

119  W. J. Ong, ‘Wit and Mystery: A Revaluation of Medieval Latin Hymnody’, Speculum, XXII/3 (1947), pp. 310–41.

120  S. Bucklow, ‘Analysis of Materials’, in Retable, Binski and Massing, pp. 438–9.

121  D. Bomford, J. Dunkerton, D. Gordon and A. Roy, Art in the Making, Italian Painting before 1400 (London, 1989), pp. 17–19.

122  Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. G. du C. de Vere (London, 1996), vol. II, p. 862.

123  R. White and J. Kirby, ‘Medium Analysis’, in Retable, ed. Binski and Massing, pp. 252–9.

124  Romans 12:5.

125  Epistle of James 1:8.

126  Theophilus, On Divers Arts (I, 1, 3, 5 and 8), trans. J. G. Hawthorne and C. S. Smith (New York, 1979), pp. 14–18. Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook (CXLVII), trans. D. V. Thompson (New York, 1960), p. 94.

127  Chaucer, ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales.

128  Nicolas Flamel, A Short Tract or Philosophical Summary, in The Hermetic Museum, ed. A. E. Waite (London, 1953), vol. I, p. 142.

129  S. Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint (London, 2009), pp. 75–108 and 224–46.

130  ‘Chancellor’s roll, 56 Henry III’ (PRO), trans. L. Wrapson, in Retable, ed. Binski and Massing, pp. 350–51.

131  S. Bucklow, ‘Materials, Wages and Painting’, in Retable, ed. Binski and Massing, pp. 341–50.

132  S. Bucklow, ‘Stories from a Building Site’, Conservation and Access, ed. D. Saunders, J. H. Townsend, and S. Woodcock (London, 2008), pp. 126–9.

133  Boethius, Consolation (II, 5), p. 66.

134  Ibid. (III, 10), p. 104.

135  Ibid. (III, 12), p. 114–15.

136  Genesis 19:26.

137  Ovid, Metamorphoses (III, 410–40), trans. M. M. Innes (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 85.

138  Dante, Purgatorio (XIV, 9 and 150).

139  Upon breaking his looking glass, Richard knew that appearances were ‘merely shadows’, Richard II (IV, i, 296), but his earlier tyrannous downward glance can be compared to that of the lion who drowned in a well after leaping in to attack his own reflection, mistaking it for a rival. Kalila and Dimna, Selected Fables of Bidpai, trans. R. Wood (New York, 1980), pp. 90–101. Richard would have known many similar stories, like the one about the wolf who drowned in a well, tricked by a fox who persuaded him that the moon reflected in its water was a big cheese. A. C. Henderson, ‘Medieval Beasts and Modern Cages’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, XCVII/1 (1982), pp. 40–49.

140  Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (68), trans. J. Walsh (Wheathamstead, 1961), p. 179.

141  Marbode of Rennes, De Lapidibus (V), trans. J. M. Riddle, Sudhoffs Archiv, XX (1977), pp. 42–3.

142  Psalms 118:22.

143  Since most of the Retable’s imitation gems have been stolen, they were obviously an irresistible source of temptation for a large number of people. Their value derived from their proximity to St Edward’s shrine.

144  W. S. Heckscher, ‘Relics of Pagan Antiquity in Medieval Settings’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, I/3 (1938), pp. 204–20.

145  G. F. Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (Philadelphia, PA, 1913), pp. 266–7.

146  Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals (I, ii, 8), trans. D. Wyckoff (Oxford, 1967), pp. 52–3.

147  Ovid, Metamorphoses (IV, 740–50), p. 114.

148  Albertus, Minerals (II, ii, 2), p. 131.

149  Ibid. (II, iii, 3), pp. 134–5.

150  Ibid. (II, ii, 2), p. 131.

151  Summa perfectionis of pseudo-Geber (xi–xii), in W. R. Newman, ‘Alchemical and Baconian Views on the Art–Nature Division’, in Reading the Book of Nature, ed. A. G. Debus and M. T. Walton (St Louis, MO, 1998), p. 86.

152  Genesis 1:6.

153  Albertus, Minerals (II, ii, 17), p. 115.

154  M. A. Michael, ‘Re-orienting the Westminster Retable’, in Retable, ed. Binski and Massing, pp. 97–103.

155  Albertus, Minerals (I, i, 3), p. 15.

156  Theophilus, Divers (I, 18), pp. 62–3.

157  Albertus, Minerals (II, ii, 17), pp. 115–16.

158  Bucklow, Alchemy, pp. 109–40.

159  Shakespeare, Richard II (II, i, 46).

160  Albertus Magnus said mirrors were ‘solidified moisture’ – the moist aspect receiving images and the solid aspect retaining them. Watery silvered glass is wholly appropriate for this role. At an elemental level, the watery prayerful soul can resonate sympathetically with the imitationlapis just as it can with real lapis. Albertus, Minerals (III, ii, 3), p. 192.

161  Albertus, Minerals (II, iii, 6, III, i, 2 and III, i, 8), pp. 150, 158, 175.

162  Ibid. (III, ii, 3), p. 193.

163  Ibid. (III, i, 5, III, i, 10, and III, ii, 1), pp. 165, 182, 187.

164  P. Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke (London, 1988), p. 9.

165  The poor did not stink (in death, at least) because their bodies were buried outdoors and they decomposed un-smelled – their subtle and fiery elements were dispersed into the fresh air while their dense and watery elements were absorbed by Mother Earth, maintaining her fertility. Anthony and Cleopatra (V, ii, 288–9).

166  Bolgnese MS (II, 30), in M. P. Merrifield, Original Treatise on the Arts of Painting (New York, 1967), vol. II, p. 386.

167  According to a seventeenth-century scientist, works of art may ‘out-live their Authors’. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1642), p. 46. But their life span is limited. The almost perfectly preserved Diptych demonstrates that a harmoniously constructed painting can enjoy good health for over 600 years. The Retable’s life span has been drastically shortened by unsympathetic treatment, and in terms of the Cosmati pavement’s poem, most of the figurative paint was lost when it was just over twice the life span of a stag (aged 486, or twice 243, years) but the untarnished, bright and reflective silver has already outlived ravens (life span 729 years).

168  Chaucer, ‘The Knight’s Tale’ (II), in The Canterbury Tales, p. 60.

169  A. van Loon, P. Noble and A. Burnstock, ‘Ageing and Deterioration of Traditional Oil and Tempera Paints’, in Conservation of Easel Paintings, ed. J. H. Stoner and R. Rushfield (Abingdon, 2012), p. 226.

170  Plotinus, Enneads (V, viii, 1), trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA, 1966), vol. I, p. 239.

171  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (X, vi–viii), trans. H. Rackham (London, 1963), pp. 613–25.

172  John the Scot Eriugena, Periphyseon, On the Division of Nature (III) trans. M. L. Uhlfelder (Indianapolis, IN, 1976), p. 140.

173  ‘Imitation’ was the opposite of ‘wonder’. Wonder is a response to that which is ‘other’, but imitation happens when the observer becomes one with the object of wonder. According to Bernard of Clairvaux, imitatio is ‘taking into oneself’ or ‘consuming’. Sermons for St Benedict and St Martin (V, 399–412), and Sermon for St Andrew (VI, 144–9), in C. W. Bynum, ‘Wonder’, American Historical Review, CII/1 (1997), p. 11. Imitation is therefore intimately related to contemplation and to true consciousness, since ‘con-sci’ means the knower and the known ‘share knowledge’.

174  William Shakespeare, Hamlet (III, i, 58).

SIX: The Thornham Parva Retable

1  C. Norton, D. Park and P. Binski, Dominican Painting in East Anglia (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 41–2.

2  Ibid., p. 83.

3  Ibid., pp. 95–100.

4  S. Panayotova, The Macclesfield Psalter (London, 2008), p. 55.

5  S. Bucklow, ‘Patterns of Loss’, in The Thornham Parva Retable, ed. A. Massing (London, 2003), pp. 209–17.

6  Of course, other woods were also used, but they are not as durable as oak so have mostly perished. I. Tyers, ‘The Eastern Baltic Timber Trade’, in Retable, ed. Massing, pp. 219–21.

7  The tree’s consciousness of its environment is evidence of its ‘vegetative’ soul. In Aristotelian terms, the acorn wishes to become an oak in order to make actual its potential. But which oak? The sapling comes into being as part of a whole (forest or field) so cannot completely fulfil itself without simultaneously fulfilling its function in the whole. The particular being it manifests has to accord with universal being, so the diversity of oaks is necessary for the unity of Nature. See O. Blanchette, The Perfection of Nature According to Aquinas (Philadelphia, PA, 1992). Of course, what is true for Baltic and English oak also applies to azurite and lapis lazuli as diverse blue rocks, lead and the other metals, as well as all created things, including humans. Selfless conformity of the individual to the whole is none other than the ‘obedience’ of Ridolfi’s prayer that alone allows perfection of the particular self.

8  As an aside, it is interesting that these sea creatures made shells from carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide is breathed out and breath is synonymous with the spirit. These creatures therefore lived within protection provided by the spirit, natural models for people who strove to live within the spiritual seal of the philosophers. Today, by contrast, carbon dioxide is seen as a potentially destructive agent that requires active management.

9  S. Bucklow, ‘Chalk’, in Retable, ed. Massing, p. 225.

10  S. Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint (London, 2009), pp. 75–108 and 224–46.

11  Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain (VII, 3), trans. L. Thorpe (London, 1966), pp. 173 and 175.

12  Aristotle, Physics (II, iii, 194a–195b), trans. P. H. Wickstead and F. M. Cornford (London, 1963), vol. I, pp. 129–39.

13  Hugh of St Victor, A Little Book about Constructing Noah’s Ark (28), trans. J. Weiss, in The Medieval Craft of Memory, ed. M. Carruthers and J. M. Ziolkowski (University Park, PA, 2002), p. 68.

14  The seasons are connected with the humours through the qualities: spring with sanguine, summer with choleric, autumn with melancholic and winter with phlegmatic. These same qualities are, of course, also connected to diseases, remedies and pigments.

15  Plotinus, Enneads (II, iii, 7), trans. A. H. Armstrong (London, 1966), vol. II, p. 69.

16  Pliny, Natural History (XXII, 7), trans. H. Rackham (London, 1966), vol. VI, p. 307.

17  Augustine, The City of God (XXII, 24), ed. M. J. Adler (Chicago, IL, 1990), p. 688.

18  Theophilus, On Divers Arts (I, 36), trans. J. G. Hawthorne and C. S. Smith (New York, 1979), p. 41.

19  Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ (I), in The Canterbury Tales, trans. N. Coghill (Harmondsworth, 1975) p. 475.

20  T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth (Baltimore, MD, 1993), pp. 10–16.

21  F. Bache, A System of Chemistry for the use of Students of Medicine (Philadelphia, PA, 1819), p. 385.

22  J. Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (London, 1997), p. 23.

23  Ovid, Metamorphosis (VI, 65), trans. M. M. Innes (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 136.

24  Modern science owes its seven-colour rainbow to Newton’s experiments with a prism, but it forgets that Newton was an alchemist whose interpretation of natural phenomena included some very traditional, and musical, reasoning. Newton chose seven colours to correspond to the harmonies between the seven notes in an octave which ultimately connected them to the planets, days of the week, virtues and vices, and so forth. A. E. Shapiro, ‘Artists’ Colors and Newton’s Colors’, Isis, LXXXV/4 (1994), p. 619.

25  Dante, Purgatorio (XXIX, 76–7).

26  Theophilus, Divers (I, xvi), pp. 23–5.

27  Genesis 9:13.

28  Hesiod, Theogony (266), trans. M. L. West (Oxford, 1988), p. 11.

29  C. B. Boyer, The Rainbow, from Myth to Mathematics (London, 1959), pp. 17–32.

30  A. Sayili, ‘The Aristotelian Explanation of the Rainbow’, Isis, XXX/1 (1939), pp. 65–83.

31  Aristotle, Meteorologica (373a–374b), trans. H.D.P. Lee (London, 1962), pp. 253–9.

32  B. S. Eastwood, ‘Robert Grosseteste’s Theory of the Rainbow’, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, LXXVII (1966), pp. 313–32.

33  C. Parkhurst, ‘Leon Battista Alberti’s place in the History of Colour Theories’, in M. B. Hall, Colour and Technique in Renaissance Painting (New York, 1987), p. 163.

34  Job of Edessa, Book of Treasures (III, 3), trans. A. Mingana (Cambridge, 1935), pp. 131–2.

35  Isidore, De Rerum Natura (XXXI, ii, 15–20), in P. Dronke, ‘Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Western Colour Imagery’, Eranos Yearbook, 41 (1972), p. 69.

36  Isidore, De Rerum Natura (XXXI, ii, 15–20), in Dronke, ibid., p. 69.

37  Plato, Timaeus (22c), trans R. G. Bury (London, 1966), p. 33.

38  Chaucer, ‘The Knight’s Tale’ (III), in The Canterbury Tales, pp. 71–3.

39  U. Eco, On Beauty, trans. A. McEwen (London, 2004), pp. 121–3.

40  K. Nolan, ‘Narrative in the Capital Frieze at Notre-Dame at Etampes’, Art Bulletin, LXXI/2 (1989), pp. 166–84.

41  Paintings include: Deodato Orlandi, Maestà (Pisa); Pietro Lorenzetti, Maestà (Cortona); Paolo Veneziano, Coronation (Venice); Duccio, Maestà (Siena); Lorenzo Monaco, Coronation (London and Florence); Masolino, Madonna (Munich); Cosimo Tura, Roverella Polytypch (London) and others. The pattern is also in the Assumption window (Duomo, Florence); the Assumption window (Duomo, Siena); the mosaic facade (San Freiano, Lucca); and the Deposition polychrome (Duomo, Volterra).

42  J. Shearman, ‘Isochromatic Colour Compositions in the Italian Renaissance’, in Colour and Technique in Renaissance Painting, ed. M. B. Hall (New York, 1987), pp. 151–60

43  J. Geddes, Medieval Decorative Ironwork in England (London, 1999), pp. 39–41.

44  Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. W. G. Ryan (Princeton, NJ, 1993), pp. 241 and 369.

45  R. Guenon, The Symbolism of the Cross, trans. A. Macnab (London, 1975).

46  P. R. Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth (Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 144–5.

47  They are also present in feng shui, the Eastern design tradition, as a means of protecting against ‘cutting chi’. E. J. Eitel, Feng-Shui (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 52–4.

48  C. N. Deedes, ‘The Labyrinth’, in The Labyrinth, ed. S. H. Hooke (London, 1935), p. 11.

49  J. Gage, Colour and Culture (London, 1993), pp. 142–3.

50  In practice, women were on top during carnival days which dominated three months of the year. J. Klene, ‘Chaucer’s Contribution to a Popular Topos: The World Upside-down’, Viator, XI (1979), pp. 321–34. See also N. Z. Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in The Reversible World, ed. B. A. Babcock (Ithaca, NY, 1978), pp. 147–90.

51  Galatians 3:28

52  Exactly the same riddle was embodied on church doors. The riddle – an anomaly – therefore marked the physical threshold to the church as well as the visual threshold to the image. Doorways also had anomalous conjunctions of symmetric structure and asymmetric decoration that were intentionally contradictory. See K. Nolan, ‘Narrative’, pp. 166–84. Westminster Abbey had alternate colours painted around doorways. See E. W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting, The Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1950), pp. 37–8. Such ornament suggested how the church door and Retable’s frame should be perceived. See O. Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, NJ, 1992), p. 227, and E. M. Kavaler, ‘Renaissance Gothic in the Netherlands: The Uses of Ornament’, Art Bulletin, LXXXII (2000), pp. 226–51.

53  A. Galloway, ‘The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late Medieval England’, Speculum, LXX/1 (1995), pp. 68–105.

54  Mark 4:12.

55  2 Chronicles 9:1–2.

56  It is in the nature of jokes to be shared and the bond an audience has with a comic is an expression of xenia, a welcoming of strangeness, as Hamlet counselled. However, xenophobia – the fear of strangers – combined with a failure to ‘get the joke’ can make the outsiders convince themselves that the insiders are deluded and never had anything of value to share.

57  M. B. Beckman, ‘The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XXXIX/1 (1978), pp. 44–51.

58  In the realm of artists’ materials, for example, ultramarine is ‘celestial’ with respect to ‘terrestrial’ azurite but ‘earthly’ with respect to ‘heavenly’ gold.

59  Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God (VI), trans. E. G. Salter (London, 1928), p. 25.

60  Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, trans. G. Heron (London, 1954), pp. ix–xxviii.

61  Nicholas, Vision (Preface), pp. 3–6.

62  Ibid. (Introduction), p. 2.

63  The Cloud of Unknowing, trans. C. Wolters (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 9.

64  Nicholas, Vision (XII), p. 55.

65  Ibid. (X), p. 50; (XII), p. 55.

66  (IX and X), pp. 44 and 46; (X), p. 49.

67  Ibid. (XI), p. 53.

68  The Sophic Hydrolith, in The Hermetic Museum (London, 1953), vol. I, p. 112.

69  William Shakespeare, Richard II (II, i, 42 and 49).

70  The Cloud of Unknowing (68), p. 142.

71  Julian of Norwich, The Revelation of Divine Love (Colophon), trans. J. Walsh (Wheathamstead, 1961), pp. 209–10.

72  Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology (I), trans. C. E. Rolt (London, 1920), p. 193.

73  Meister Eckhart (II, 9), trans. C. de B. Evans (London, 1924), p. 346.

74  For example, living not far from Thetford were Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich, as well as the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing. On mainland Europe were Mechthild, who was born the same year as Henry III, Gertrude, Angela de Foligno, Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Catherine of Siena and Ruysbroeck, who died shortly after Richard II came to the throne. All wrote sublime mystic texts like Nicholas of Cusa’s work.

75  William Shakespeare, Hamlet (II, ii, 249–50).

76  Genesis 2:17.

77  Nicholas, Vision (VII), p. 32.

78  Ibid. (XXII), p. 110.

79  Ibid. (XXIV), pp. 120–21.

80  Bucklow, Alchemy, p. 239. Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise for tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. That fruit corresponds to the separative reasoning faculty. Paradise returns for those who taste the fruit of the Tree of Life, corresponding to the unitive intellectual faculty.

81  For Julian of Norwich, the paradox that God does not blame the blameworthy – ‘Between these two opposites my reason was greatly travailed’ – was effortlessly resolved by a ‘wonderful parable’. Julian, Revelation (50 and 51), pp. 131–43. For the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, the ‘nowhere’ and ‘nothing’ are only so-called by the outer self, while ‘Our inner self calls it “All”, for through it he is learning the secrets of all things, physical and spiritual alike, without having to consider every single one separately on its own.’ The Cloud (68), p. 143.

82  The colour scheme’s meaning seems to have endured beyond the Retable. Thanks to Victorian restorations of medieval churches and the development of neo-Gothic taste, the decorative combination of red and green now marks Christmas, the liminal celebration that involves reflection upon the old and new years. In art, the combination has been used to reflect the tensions that the world of opposites can offer. For example, Vincent van Gogh told his brother that he wished to paint a bar in which one could go mad (The Night Café). He said, ‘I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green.’ Letter 676, Saturday 8 September 1888. Between 1998 and 2007, J. K. Rowling repeatedly used the same colours – Harry’s green eyes, Voldemort’s red eyes, the Weasleys’ red hair, the green of Avada Kedavra, and so forth – and it has been suggested that Rowling used red and green to identify ‘different sides of the same coin’ and the significance of choice. K. Cronn-Mills and J. Samens, ‘Sorting Heroic Choices: Green and Red in the Harry Potter Septology’, in Millennial Mythmaking, ed. J. Perlich and D. Whitt (London, 2010), pp. 5–31.

83  Shakespeare, Richard II (V, v, 31–2 and 39–41).

84  For example, Daedalus told his son to ‘follow a course midway between earth and heaven’ and fly neither too high nor too low, but Icarus ignored the advice and plunged to his death. Ovid, Metamorphoses (VIII, 200), p. 184. A happier example of the middle way is provided by Goldilocks, who managed to find a chair that was neither too high nor too low, porridge that was neither too hot nor too cold, and then a bed that was neither too hard nor too soft, but ‘just right’.

85  Ephesians 5:31–2.

86  In Shakespeare’s As You Like It (V, iv, 107–9). Hymen, god of marriage, reiterates the divine delight that accompanies the ‘two made one’. ‘Then is there mirth in heaven / When earthly things made even / Atone together’. This particular marriage was a mock marriage and, in the light of the coincidence of opposites, all the more serious for being a game, resolving matters for Rosalind.

87  Ovid, Metamorphoses (V, 190), p. 99.

88  Nicholas, Ignorance (I, xxv), pp. 56–7.

89  Plutarch, Moralia, trans. F. C. Babbit (London, 1969), vol. V, p. 117. Of course, the union of Mars and Venus is not always balanced Harmony. Alison, Chaucer’s attractive, manipulative and frequently widowed Wife of Bath, was an accomplished sexual predator, ‘fair outside and foul inside’. ‘For Venus sent me feeling from the stars / And my heart’s boldness came to me from Mars / Venus gave me desire and lecherousness / And Mars, my hardihood, or so I guess’, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ (pp. 292–3).

90  L. Spitzer, ‘Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, Part II’, Traditio, III (1945), pp. 311.

91  Abot Suger On the Abbey Church of Saint Denis and its Art Treasures (Princeton, NJ, 1979), ed. and trans. E. Panofsky, p. 82. This ‘reconciliation’ is why Suger built a new church using the ruins of an old one and made a new door in the style of an old one. It is also why Henry III used ancient Egyptian porphyry for the pavement, laid at the centre of time, that still stands today. They knew that the ‘old’ and ‘new’ were incomprehensible without each other. Both have to be present to ‘fix’ the ‘volatile’. The uniting of what seems to oppose is represented in the cross which was ‘planted in the world to establish the things that are unstable … [it] bound down the mobility of the world … O, shape of understanding that hast shaped the shapeless!’ Acts of Andrew, The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. M. R. James (Oxford, 1924), p. 360.

92  Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle, On Sense and the Sensed, in E. Gilson, Painting and Reality (Princeton, NJ, 1968), pp. 183–4.

93  Julian, Revelations (56), p. 155. See also Genesis 15:10.

94  A single acorn not only has long and straight or short and twisted timbers ‘enfolded’ in it, but it also contains all future generations of oaks. This is why Nicholas of Cusa considered the small and apparently insignificant seed to be the most powerful part of the tree and why, in general, the weakest (like Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It) could also be the also strongest. Nicholas, Vision (VII), pp. 28–9.

95  Bolognese MS (VII, 268), in M. P. Merrifield, Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting (New York, 1967), vol. II, p. 524, and Heraclius, De Coloribus et Artibus Romanorum (III, i), in Merrifield, Original, vol. I, p. 204.

96  Craft mysteries linked the two colours in plants even more closely through a pigment called ‘sap green’, made from buckthorn berries. These were collected in the late summer and, when squeezed, gave an intense red juice. Yet, within seconds of painting out the red juice, it turned into a rich green. The dramatic colour change was such a commonplace that it is not recorded.

97  R. Wittkower, ‘Eagle and Serpent’, in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London, 1987), pp. 15–44.

98  The popular modern view sees space and time as voids populated with things or events. The traditional (theophanic) idea of space was the ordering of places in which things could fulfil their potential and time was the ordering of events that enabled that potential to become actual, allowing fulfilment to unfold.

99  Dante, Paradiso (XXVIII, 16–78) for space, (XXVII, 115–20) for time, and (XXIX, 1–36) for creation. See C. Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (New York, 2005), pp. 107–46.

100  Between the Retable’s different coloured gaments there was a very thin line of white and between the columns’ red and green there was another expression of union, a band of gold. Bucklow, Alchemy, p. 274.

101  L. Monnas, ‘Fit for a King: Figured Silks in the Wilton Diptych’, in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (London, 1997), pp. 170–77.

102  C. N. Elvin, Dictionary of Heraldry (London, 1977).

103  R. Guénon, Man and His Becoming according to the Vedānta (New Delhi, 1999), pp. 14–22.

104  Aitaremya Aranyake (II, iii, 17), in A. K. Coomaraswamy, ‘Correspondence’, in G. Bain, Celtic Art (London, 1977), p. 20.

105  Plato, The Republic (439d), trans. D. Lee (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 215.

106  Julian, Revelations (19), p. 80. See also Corinthians 4:16.

107  Julian, Revelations (19, 51 and 52), pp. 80, 132–43 and 144–7. See also Ephesians, 2:15.

108  The ‘inner part is master and sovereign of the outward, neither censuring nor taking heed of its desires … the inward part, by grace, draweth the outward part.’ Julian, Revelations (53), p. 149.

109  Geoffrey, History (VIII, 3), p. 174.

110  Together, Mary and John’s clothes are a European version of the far-Eastern yin-yang symbol with Mary’s yin enveloping her yang and John’s yang enveloping his yin. Of course, yin and yang refer to more than just the feminine and masculine principles. The male Dominicans, for example, are outwardly black, or yin, and their garments could be interpreted as representing outer bodily matter and inner spiritual form. Artists would have known these yin-yang-like relationships through their materials – black (lead metal) contained white (pigment) and white (silver metal) contained black (tarnish).

111  Mark 15:17 and John 19:2. Other accounts (Matthew 27:28 and Luke 23:11) said it was red. The Retable gives the garment a red lining, implying that the inner nature of purple is red.

112  This suggests a potential gendering of the asymmetric gilded patterns on the Westminster Retable’s imitation lapis and the leaves around the Psalter’s contemplative cleric in illus. 15.

113  Ovid, Metamorphoses (IV, 380), p. 104.

114  C. Crisciani, ‘The conception of alchemy as expressed in the Pretiosa Margarita Novella of Petrus Bonus of Ferrara’, Ambix, XX (1973), pp. 165–81, especially pp. 171–3.

115  J. Balfour-Paul, Indigo in the Arab World (London, 2004), p. 3.

116  J. H. Munro, ‘The Medieval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour’, in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe, ed. N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (London, 1983), pp. 55–7.

Epilogue

1  G. Steiner, After Babel (London, 1975), pp. 1–48.

2  S. H. Nasr, Man and Nature (London, 1968).

3  While make-believe can be fun, it also has a serious side. Make-believe is essential for children’s development and it has been said that ‘Scientific models are props in games of make-believe, which represent their objects by prescribing imaginings about them.’ This statement was made in the context of modern science, not the traditional sciences alluded to in this book, but it is, of course, equally applicable to both. A. Toon, in Beyond Mimesis and Convention, Representation in Art and Science, ed. R. Frigg and M. C. Hunter (New York, 2010), p. 95.

4  H. Belting, Florence and Baghdad (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

5  Of course, this twist was prefigured in the Westminster Retable’s imitation materials and in the Thornham Parva Retable’s decorative paint, which depicted nothing, or at least, signified no-thing’s limits. According to Cennini, the science of painting ‘calls for imagination and skill of hand in order to discover things not seen, hiding under the shadow of natural objects … presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.’ Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. D. V. Thompson (New York, 1960), p. 1. The ‘non-existent’ that is presented by painters whofollowed Cennini’s advice must be understood in its strictly etymological sense of that which does not ex-sist or ‘stand apart’ (from God) – all physical existence being that which does stand apart from God, as a creation that is separate from its Creator. In other words, to use an example from previous chapters, Cennini recommends trying to paint the essence of blue, as it stands in the Divine Mind, and recognizes that the azurite or ultramarine and what they depict, such as the Virgin’s robe, are merely aids for meditation on that essence.

6  Medieval theory held that vision resulted from a conjunction of opposites since images were formed when ‘fiery’ rays of light mixed with ‘watery’ humours in the eye. Our perceived microcosmic colours are therefore made the same way as the rainbow’s macrocosmic colours.

7  However, see J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ, 1986).

8  Odysseus’ craftiness can be seen as the cunning of a trickster – introducing himself to the Cyclops as ‘Nobody’, for example, a trick that saved his life – but he was also a cunning craftsman who built a unique, immovable marriage bed. Homer, The Odyssey (IX and XXXIII), trans. E. V. Rieu (London, 2003), pp. 119 and 305–6. In a book about craft – the science of art – it should be recognized that the craftsman-scientist-artist is a trickster and that their tricks can have spiritual significance. After all, the life won by Odysseus’ (nominal) non-existence (in Cennini’s sense, see ref. 5, above) is exactly what Nicholas of Cusa urged us to seek and, according to an anagogic reading of Shakespeare, was Richard’s goal – to ‘be eased / With being nothing’. William Shakespeare, Richard II (V, v, 40–41).