SIX 
SIX This chapter considers another retable. This one, though, was not created in a cosmopolitan workshop where craftspeople from all over the known world worked together on massive multimedia projects supported by an informed and engaged royal patron. The Thornham Parva Retable was a much more routine and humble affair (illus. 43).
At the time this particular example was made – some 60 or so years after the one in Westminster Abbey – it would have been fairly typical of literally thousands of altarpieces, nearly all of which have since been destroyed. It was not particularly special but is valuable now simply because the twists of fate have allowed it to survive. It is important for a survey of materials in art precisely because it is not an elite object. It shows that great crafts and subtle philosophy were not enjoyed only by bishops, the nobility or kings. This retable is the kind of image that every one of Chaucer’s pilgrims – from haberdashers to millers – could, and would, have appreciated.
The Thornham Parva Retable shows Christ on the cross and a weeping Mary and St John flanked by eight figures. Closest to, and either side of, the Crucifixion scene are the two pillars of the church, St Peter and St Paul. Next, flanking them, are St John the Baptist and St Edmund, who might stand for two donors, a John and an Edmund.1 Beyond these two are two female saints, Catherine and Margaret. The figures at both ends of the Retable are both Dominicans – St Dominic and St Peter Martyr.
The Retable is about 0.9 m (3 ft) high and 3.5 m (12 ft) long and it was found, sawn into three pieces, in a farm building in East Anglia in 1922, where it had been for nearly 150 years. The farmer who owned the Retable evidently no longer wanted it, because stuck on one side was a small printed label stating ‘2nd day Lot 171’, allowing it to be traced to an auction of 1778.2 The Retable had already fallen into disrepair before this auction and it was repainted to cover all the damages just before the sale. Luckily, the person who smartened it up only painted over the original paint – they did not scrape it off, as had happened to the Westminster Retable six years earlier. However, repainting the Thornham Parva Retable did not do the trick – it remained unsold and was consigned to the barn.
The Retable was not painted for the family who tried to sell it in 1778, and there are enough clues to piece together its earlier history.3 It was originally made for the altar of a modest priory in Thetford, a small market town 30 miles southwest of Norwich. It was probably rescued from destruction by one of the farmer’s ancestors when the monasteries, including Thetford Priory, were dismantled in the mid-sixteenth century. The Protestant who was charged with destroying the Retable and the Catholic who wished to save it evidently came to a gentleman’s agreement. All the figures in the painting had their eyes put out, thus blinding the Catholic vision, but the damage was clinically precise and most figures were not seriously defaced. The negotiated solution saved the Retable from the bonfires that consumed the overwhelming majority of great medieval art in England.
44 Thornham Parva Retable, detail; St Paul (see illus. 20 and 43).
Two or three artists worked together painting the Retable. Their names are not known but it is almost certain that one of them was also one of the pair who painted the Macclesfield Psalter. (Even if it is not same person, the relationship is extremely close, like contemporary members of the same workshop.4) The Psalter was dated to around 1330 and the Retable was made between 1330 and 1340. The figures in both have unusually pronounced calf muscles and, despite a difference in scale, the magician’s face in the Psalter (illus. 20) is practically identical to St Paul’s in the Retable (illus. 44). If they are indeed the work of the same person, then it is amazing that their work survives both in a manuscript and on a panel. Furthermore, it is interesting that the artist who painted for the nobility also painted for country friars sworn to poverty. The presence of St Dominic and St Peter Martyr on the Retable suggests that they were Dominicans, members of the same order as the spiritual adviser of whoever commissioned the Psalter.
Physical evidence suggests that the Catholic who rescued the Retable probably sawed it in half to manoeuvre it up narrow stairs to a small attic for secret worship. The halves were re-assembled, and the Retable then re-sawn into three to be displayed as a triptych. The disproportionate loss of paint on the figure of Christ suggests that the Retable was repeatedly kissed.5 This must have happened when it was hidden in a private chapel since it would have been quite inappropriate to kiss it on the Priory altar.
The subject of this final chapter is the very first medieval painting I had the good fortune to examine. It was the object that taught me how to look at art as if through the eyes of the artists, commencing with the materials that they started with – in this case, 42 pieces of wood – and following their progress through the workshop as the object slowly took shape. It was also the first time that I had to find experts to help me to interpret an object, which was an illuminating experience. This was the work of art that made me realize how much more there was to the material world than I had been led to believe by my late twentieth-century scientific training.
The Retable’s back is roughly thinned and unpainted wood. From the tiger-like stripes across the grain, I guessed it was probably oak. I knew that the age of a piece of oak could be determined so I asked a dendrochronologist, Ian Tyers, to date the Retable (illus. 45). He declared that the wood was indeed oak and examined the end grain of all but ten pieces, which had too few rings. After many microscopic measurements and much calculation, he said that the last growth ring on the Retable corresponded to the year 1317. None of the boards had any sapwood – worms particularly like the sugar-rich rings immediately beneath the bark, and a good carpenter cuts them off, using only the central heartwood – so the tree may have been cut down sometime in the 1320s. Leaving a few years to season the wood, this date was consistent with the date proposed by art historians (1330–40). Ian also said that the 32 examined boards had been imported via the Baltic and came from 26 trees that had germinated between about 1040 and 1200 in Russia.
I was deeply impressed that artists working for a modest priory in a small market town in East Anglia were so discerning. I imagined that they had meticulously inspected each board, and selected only the very best quality wood. I shared my admiration for the conscientious carpenters with Ian. He just laughed. Little did I know, but in fourteenth-century England, practically everything that was flat – from floorboards, doors and coffins to altarpieces – was made out of Russian or Baltic oak.6 I had wrongly assumed that the artists’ attention to detail was special and that they exercised rigorous quality control when faced with timbers of mixed quality. In fact, medieval attention to detail was far greater than I had imagined and it was not difficult for the carpenter to get the right wood because strict quality control had been exercised several centuries earlier.
The standard pattern of English wood use in the late Middle Ages was to employ local oak for structural timbers and Baltic oak for facing. English and Baltic oaks were the same species of tree but they gave very different timber. English oak made excellent load-bearing wood and was sawn into tough beams that would not break. Baltic oak, on the other hand, made excellent panels and was easily split into flat sheets that would not warp.
45 Detail of the end-grain of oak showing some 40 years’ growth over approximately 1 in. (2.5 cm) of the top edge of a single board.
The paint and a layer of chalk-in-glue ground can be seen on the board’s uppermost, prepared surface. The annual growth rings appear as consecutive vertical columns of structural cells and vessels. Their widths vary with the weather during growth, so thick rings correspond to good summers and thin rings to bad ones. By comparing with other pieces of oak of known origin, the unique growth pattern over about 60–100 rings (or a period of 60–100 years) allows a tree’s life to be located in time and also geographically. The horizontal structures in the wood are medullary rays that show as tiger stripes when they surface on the back of the panel.
The difference between the timbers was due to the way the tree grew, and that, in turn, was due to different traditions of forest management. If you wanted some oak around the eastern Baltic, then you went into a forest and took just one tree. If you wanted more, then you went to a different part of the forest and took another tree. This style of forestry was also practised in England but, at some point around the turn of the first millennium, English forestry methods changed. (The four English boards in the Westminster Retable were from among the last trees grown under the old style of forest management.) Some 60 or so years later, when the Thornham Parva Retable was being made, if you wanted some oak in England, then you cut down all the trees and planted some more.
These two different methods of harvesting created different types of tree. An English oak sapling grew alone or at the same time as its neighbouring trees. It was subjected to the elements, it braced against a prevailing wind and spread its branches wherever space allowed it to catch the light. As a result, English oak gave wood with internal tensions, with twisting grain and knots where the side branches grew. By contrast, a Baltic oak sapling grew completely surrounded by mature trees, in high-canopy forests (such as that still found today in Białowieża in Poland). The sapling did not have to respond to the wind and to find the light, it had no choice but to shoot straight up to the tiny gap in the forest canopy left by a single felled tree. As such, Baltic oaks gave wood with no knots, since there were no side branches, with few internal tensions and with straight grain.
It is as if one acorn created a tree that looked like giant broccoli while another acorn created one that looked like giant rhubarb. Though, if you took an acorn that fell from a rhubarb-like Baltic oak and planted it in England, then centuries later you could harvest a giant broccoli. If you took an acorn from a broccoli-like English tree and planted it in a Baltic forest, it would turn out like giant rhubarb. Exactly the same acorn could give you either tree because it responds to its environment, and that environment is shaped by mankind’s activities.7 The shapes of trees and their timber properties depend on how people treat woods and forests over many generations.
So if carpenters wanted strong beams that would not split, they used wood from trees shaped by centuries of English tradition, and if they wanted flat panels that would not warp, they used wood from trees shaped by centuries of Russian tradition. The Russian oaks were traded by the Hanseatic League, exported through Riga or Gdansk and imported through King’s Lynn or Great Yarmouth. The oak probably came upriver to Norwich and the artists’ workshops were close to the docks, giving them easy access to wood.
Norwich artists had access to plenty of oak. Baltic oak was imported in standard lengths and the Retable’s much shorter pieces were sawn from many different planks. It was, however, almost certainly not made in Norwich. After all, it would have been much easier to carry a small bag of gold, pigments, oil, glue and glass to Thetford than it would be to carry a complete gilded, painted and glazed altarpiece. (They may also have taken their own oak, but since 26 different trees were used for a relatively small job, it is more likely that they used offcuts from timbers used in the Priory.) There is no convenient river between Norwich and Thetford, so the journey would have taken the artists about ten hours on foot, or about four hours on horseback at a comfortable trot. And a microscopic sample taken from the layer that prepared the wood for painting may even throw light on their journey.
When the wood had been cut, assembled and carved, its surface was prepared for gilding and painting. This involved applying chalk in animal glue, then scraping and polishing it to create a smooth, white surface. Norwich was built on chalk so if the artists had brought chalk to Thetford, along with their gold, pigments and oils, it could have come from one of Norwich’s tunnels.
Chalk is calcium carbonate – petrified bones and breath, just like marble – the crushed remains of sea creatures that made their protective shells by fixing calcium with carbon dioxide exhaled by other creatures and dissolved in the sea.8 Changes in the populations of these creatures allow the origin of chalk to be located (illus. 46).9
I found a geologist, Jake Hancock, who knew where the source of the Retable’s chalk (upper Santonian) occurred. It was not in Norwich, so the painters did not bring it from home. It occurs in Yorkshire and along the south coast of England, forming the cliffs between Brighton and Newhaven, for example. It also occurs in Norfolk, where it runs north–south in a band about 5 miles (8 km)wide down the whole of the county, lying beneath the soil and boulder clay. I checked that narrow band for evidence of outcrops and medieval workings and found one near the village of East Harling. It was next to the church, by a bridge over the river Thet, about 7 miles (11 km) northeast of Thetford, in the direction of Norwich. Of course, no one can now know, but it is entirely possible that the Norwich artists picked up their chalk on their journey, just before they got to Thetford.
46 Grains of powdered chalk taken from the an exposed area of ground on the Thorham Parva Retable, seen through crossed-polars in a polarised light microscope.
Most of the grains are fragments of the shells of microscopic creatures. The creatures made their roughly spherical shells by growing radial crystals of calcium carbonate into elaborate discs, arranged like the sewn panels on a football. The individual discs are 1–2 microns in diameter and, where they survive intact, they appear as circular structures with a central cross. (This is, of course, the traditional structure of the world that Alfred the Great copied when he restored London.)
When chalk is examined at greater magnification, in a scanning electron microscope, the creatures can sometimes be identified by the anatomical quirks in their shell discs, so I sent the sample to Katrina von Salis, a Swiss palaeontologist who specializes in this field. She found 16 types of coccolith, which she interpreted as evidence of the particular population of microscopic organisms that lived about 84 million years ago in the sea covering what, in time, would become eastern England.
After the artists had coated the front of the Retable with chalk and turned it into an ivory-like surface, they quickly outlined where the figures should go using vermilion, with a few details in charcoal. The drawings were incomplete and were probably not even visible through the layer of lead white that isolated them from the paint layers. They may have been more for the Dominicans’ and donors’ approval, rather than for the painters’ guidance. The fact that the artists’ very first drawings were done in vermilion is almost certainly significant.
Vermilion is made from sulphur and mercury – the colouring matter for Christ’s flesh, conjoining heaven and earth – and it hints at one of the Retable’s deepest meanings.10 It hints at how to live within ‘the seal of the philosophers’, protected from the world’s corrosive effects and untouched by ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Such a secret was far too important to just hide in the alchemical composition of a pigment that was not even seen in the finished painting (illus. 47). Thus exactly the same idea – that is, how to enjoy a good life – also governed the Retable’s whole colour scheme, from the frame to the clothes worn by the saints. This is, of course, completely appropriate, since the secret of a good life is open to everyone even if it can take a lifetime to puzzle out.
The meaning of the Retable’s colour scheme would have been much more obvious to Chaucer’s Haberdasher and Miller than it is to the modern viewer. One simple reason is that some of the colours have changed. For example, the backgrounds behind the saints seem to us to be panels of black-and-gold chequerboard alternating with panels of all-gold squares. However, for the first century or so, they would have been blue-and-gold chequerboard alternating with gold. The Retable’s blue was azurite, so the saints’ background was originally like the clergy’s backgrounds in the Metz Pontifical explored in chapter Two. Manuscripts, though, can be closed and their azurite can be protected from the elements, while the Retable’s deepest blue was constantly exposed to the air in a priory, then an attic and a barn. Whenever candles were blown out, soot and wax settled on the azurite’s exposed crystal faces and the sparkling midnight blue slowly became veiled behind a black that is impossible to remove.
47 A cross-section through a microscopic sample of paint (less than half the size of a full stop) taken from a damaged area of red drapery in a red garment on the Thorham Parva Retable.
The lowest layer is the chalk-in-glue ground, above this is a thin line of vermilion under-drawing, sealed beneath a layer of lead white. Above this is an opaque red lead layer followed by a transparent red glaze made with an insect-based dyestuff, both in linseed oil. (A trace of the eighteenth-century over-paint is evident on the right-hand side of the sample and the very top and bottom of the image shows the plastic in which the sample is mounted. The whole structure is about one-hundredth of 1 mm in thickness.)
The Retable’s now lost blue-and-gold was once like the Diptych’s, so this chapter will focus on its other main colour scheme. The meanings of these colours were more accessible to medieval viewers because they would have been seen as reflecting colours in the natural world. Today, we can still see some of these natural phenomena, but others have been eclipsed over the last few centuries. The colours that we still see are those of leaves and the colours that have been eclipsed (by changes in us, not by changes in the world) are those of the rainbow.
Today, in school, we are told that leaves are coloured by chlorophyll. Knowing that chlorophyll colours leaves has its uses, yet such knowledge raises questions. For example, if chlorophyll absorbs energy from the sun, then would it not be more efficient if it was black? A world with black leaves would be a very different place but, for whatever reason, leaves are green. Yet there is no chlorophyll in the Retable’s green paint, so modern science’s insights into plant chemistry do not add to our understanding of art.
The people who made and looked at the Retable also knew their plants. After all, they knew how to get two completely different trees out of a single acorn. And, unlike modern plant science, traditional plant lore encompassed more than just plants. For example, Merlin tied England’s fate to the fate of Cornish oaks; and strong oak (heartwood, not sapwood) built England’s navy, leading to the idea that the English people had ‘hearts of oak’.11 Unlike modern plant chemistry, traditional plant lore did throw light on the Retable’s colour scheme because it was directly related to everyday life and because, in it, the colour of leaves had ‘final’, ‘formal’, ‘efficient’ and ‘material’ causes.12 Chlorophyll may be the ‘material cause’ of green leaves but the material cause was the least important, and the medieval world focused on the higher causes – ultimately, what green (not black) leaves meant in the mind of God.
Over centuries, oaks respond to their surroundings and grow like broccoli or rhubarb, and every year trees respond to the seasons. Some trees are evergreen but others lose their leaves in winter, and the ‘higher cause’ of colour in leaves has to take into account the fact that leaves are not always green – in the autumn, they can turn red. So the Retable’s red and green echoes the seasonal changes of trees.
Nature’s colour schemes change with the seasons. The seasons, in turn, reflect the qualities – winter is cold and wet, spring is wet and warm, summer is warm and dry and autumn is dry and cold.13 This makes each of the seasons share qualities with elements, so that winter has an association with water, spring with air, summer with fire and autumn with earth. When trees first put forth shoots in spring, they reflect the accumulated qualities of winter and when they change in autumn, they reflect the accumulated qualities of summer. Leaves’ colours reflect elemental changes through the year so that springtime green is a sign that trees are full of winter’s wateriness and autumnal red is a sign that trees are full of summer’s fieriness.
Seeing the colour of a leaf as the sign of a tree’s recent experience is different from seeing it as the consequence of its chemical composition. Also, explaining green (or red) by the presence of chlorophyll (or anthocyanins) makes us none the wiser when looking at art because these material causes – different molecules – do not resonate with our personal experience. However, seeing green as a response to watery winter and red as a response to fiery summer does throw light on the Retable because these efficient causes – different seasons – can and do resonate with our personal experience.14 Plotinus, the man who compared the soul at prayer with one end of a plucked string, said, ‘All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.’15 Now, it is very difficult to ‘read in’ a molecule anything apart from its possible relationships with other molecules, but it is quite easy to ‘read in’ the seasons many other phenomena or experiences. The Retable’s red-and-green colour scheme would naturally evoke summer’s fire and winter’s water for those versed in traditional plant lore. That, of course, included everyone who was interested in their health, since, as Pliny said, Nature ‘has coloured the remedies [for our ills] in her flowers’.16
However, when looking at the Diptych, water was associated with blue, not with green, and fire was associated with gold, not red. Yet traditional science was not monolithic and it accommodated two key facts: all things have more than one side, and there is more than one way of looking at anything. Of course, water is nothing if not changeable, so appropriately enough it can be silver (as in Richard’s uncle’s description of the sea) or grey (as in Westminster Abbey’s Purbeck marble), green as well as blue. Everything depends upon context, and St Augustine, for example, described the sea as blue, purple and green.17
Green’s inherent wateriness is evident in the Retable’s only green pigment. In exactly the same way that painters made lead white, they used copper to make the Retable’s green pigment, verdigris.18 It will be recalled that lead was connected to Saturn as silver was to the moon, and copper was likewise connected to the planet Venus.19 Now, silver was characterized as a watery metal, reflecting the moon’s relationship with the tides, and copper was also watery since Venus was born from sea foam,20 famously depicted by Botticelli. The green pigment’s associations would have been known by those who looked at the Retable because verdigris was also used in medicine. Until quite recently, formulations for cleansing and cooling eyes and ulcers acknowledged verdigris’s watery properties.21
The inherent fieriness of red is evident in ‘inflamed’ skin, in the supposed temperament of red-haired people and, of course, in the colour of a glowing fire. It is also evident in the Retable’s red pigments. These are lakes (such as cochineal, harvested around the summer solstice), burnt earths (yellow earths subjected to fire), red lead (lead white subjected to fire) and vermilion (mercury burned with sulphur). Hence, green’s association with water and red’s with fire are reinforced by the nature of the artists’ materials themselves.
Today, red and green leaves are still seen, even if they now only evoke the elements for artists (like Steinbeck’s remark ‘There’s a quality of fire in [Vermont’s autumn] colors’), not for scientists.22 But another of nature’s pieces of elemental colour-coding – the rainbow – has been completely lost.
We are taught the colours of the rainbow at school, yet when we actually look at rainbows, we do not really see bands of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Ovid commented on the problem of the colours of the rainbow:
Though a thousand different colours shine there, the transition from one to another is so gradual that the eye of the beholder cannot perceive it. Where they meet, the colours look completely the same, yet their outer bands are completely different.23
There is no scientific reason why ‘a thousand different colours’ should be reduced to the seven we are taught in school.24 Dante saw seven bands, but the usual solution to Ovid’s problem was to reduce the rainbow to three colours with two ‘completely different’ colours on the outside bands and one ‘completely the same’ on the inside band.25 As recommended in manuals for artists, the outside bands were almost always red and green, while the central band was usually white, to which we will briefly return.26 Thus, typically, the Macclesfield Psalter showed Christ sitting on a red, white and green rainbow (illus. 48) and the same artist – or their colleague – painted red, white and green arches over the heads of every figure in the Retable.
The rainbow was considered the covenant between the Creator and His creation.27 It was also a manifestation of Iris (daughter of Thaumas, god of wonder, and granddaughter of Oceanus), who, like Hermes, was a messenger of the gods.28 It was also a serpent that recharged the clouds with water, stole cattle and had cannibalistic tendencies.29 There was much speculation about its shape and colour.30 The curve was said to come from the shape of clouds and the arching vault of the heavens, but the colours were more difficult to explain. They were thought to be the result of sunlight interacting with clouds, either by reflection,31 or by refraction.32
48 Macclesfield Psalter, detail (f8v); Christ in Judgment sitting on Theophilus’ recommended red-white-green rainbow.
Different authorities associated different colours with each element but Leon Battista Alberti – despite his professed lack of interest in them – gave associations that helped connect the rainbow’s colours with their scientific causes. He said that fire was red, air was blue, water was green and earth was yellow.33 Job of Edessa identified red and green in the rainbow and also identified them as fire and water, explicitly relating their presence to the way the rainbow was formed – as sunlight mingling with clouds. He said the rainbow’s red was due to the fiery nature of the sun and its green was due to the watery nature of the clouds.34
Isidore of Seville also connected the rainbow’s red with fire and its green with water.35 But rather than considering them in terms of how the phenomenon was formed, his description relates to what it meant. He said the rainbow’s colours referred to past and future judgments.36 God’s covenant was a reminder of divine purifications. Green recalled purification by water, as in Noah’s flood. Red pointed towards purification by fire, as in the Day of Judgment. As Plato said,
There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been bought about by the agencies of fire and water.37
Hot and dry red together with cold and wet green are consistent with the rainbow’s appearance (to the medieval eye), with its mode of production and with its meaning. Of course, these elemental interpretations of the rainbow’s ‘completely different’ colours also agreed with how the leaves of trees responded to the seasons.
Red and green was the dominant colour scheme in the Middle Ages (illus. 49). The Retable’s rainbow arches are red (and white) and green, its pillars are red and green and tiny splashes of paint show that its now lost frame was originally red and green. Some of the figures are even clad in garments of red and green. Very little was left to chance in medieval art and, with so much red and green on the Retable, those who saw it day after day, week after week, would eventually wonder what it all meant.
When seen in a (medieval) rainbow or a tree, red and green evoked fire and water, but on the Retable, the colours also had a more human meaning – one was male and the other was female. All the green paint was made from copper, the metal associated with Venus, goddess of love. One of the red paints was made from iron, the metal associated with Mars, god of war. In ‘The Knight’s Tale’, Chaucer reinforced these colour–gender connections in a jousting arena with two entrances, one marked with a statue of Venus emerging from green water and the other by a fiery red statue of Mars (and the everyday impact of Mars’ fiery nature is shown by Chaucer putting a ‘scalded cook’ in the temple of Mars).38
49 Detail of cut porphyry in the Cosmati pavement: the combination of red and green was an extremely widespread colour scheme in the Middle Ages (see illus. 29 and 31 and also the Macclesfield Psalter’s red and green leaves in illus. 14, 15–17 and 19–22).
Individually, each colour could refer to many, even contradictory, things. When paired, however, red evoked fire, war and masculinity, whereas green evoked water, love and femininity.39 The painters wanted the viewer to notice these combinations because they purposely put them on the Retable in orderly but slightly strange ways. The columns that separate figures are both red and green. Now, if the red was a reference to fire, then we might expect it to be on the top of the column with the watery green below, reflecting the elements’ relative positions in an ideal world. In some columns, though, red is above green, and in others, green is above red. Also, the Retable is a symmetrical structure – in it, things hinge upon Christ, so that the Crucifixion scene is flanked by pairs of figures radiating from the centre, for example. The alternate red over green and green-over-red columns do not, however, radiate from the centre – they proceed across the Retable, disrupting its axial symmetry. Strangely, the painters’ use of red and green seems to ignore the elements’ ideal homes and Christ’s centrality.
The decorative colours are not consistent with our everyday experience of fire (which we see rising up) and water (which we see falling down), nor are they consistent with the symmetrical scheme that underlies the figurative painting and the carpentry. Although on their own, the positions of red and green are consistent, so the decorative scheme is not a mistake. In fact, there are two distinct paint schemes: the figurative painting exhibits axial reflection, whereas the decorative painting employs linear translation. If the Retable was compared to a piece of music, it is as if the figurative and decorative schemes are playing in different keys. Now, in music, a purposeful change of key catches the attention, just like an accidental discordant note. A key change in a pop song is an anomaly designed to re-engage the listener’s flagging attention and, in the Retable, the painters’ purposeful break with orderly symmetry is an anomaly designed to engage the viewer.
Such anomalies capture the attention by defying expectations.40 One of the Zen-koan-like secrets of a good joke is the shock of defied expectation, the overriding of everyday logic by another way of looking at things. Thus, simply by ignoring the centre upon which everything, including Christ, hangs, the red and green decoration poses a riddle for all to see.
The medieval word for ‘painting’ was the same as the word for ‘map’, and the use of colour in medieval paintings has been compared to the use of colour on modern maps. These do not try to replicate real colours in the world – some encode topographic features, like deciduous, mixed or coniferous forests, while others chart the allegiance of colonies and the spread of empires. Likewise, in medieval paintings, patches of colour are not intended to recreate the appearance of things on earth; rather, ‘they indicate an order above earthly reality’. The art historian John Shearman listed medieval Italian paintings where the passages of colour coordinated across the image.41 Shearman said the colour simply served to hold the composition together in later paintings, but in earlier paintings, he detected a symbolic meaning that he said ‘seems to be forgotten’.42
The comparison between medieval paintings and modern maps is useful because the meaning of the spread of pink across the globe and its subsequent contraction has not yet been completely forgotten. If the pink on maps referred to an imperial British geo-political order, what does the ‘forgotten’ red-and-green colour code mean?
The most rigorous pairing of red and green is on the carved parts of the Retable that surround and stand proud of the figures, providing them with physical protection from accidental knocks and bumps. The alternating colours also offer the figures a non-physical form of protection, just as today, flimsy, alternating coloured tapes protect crime scenes. One of the ways that the colours provided figures with protection was by ignoring the Retable’s overall symmetry. The decorative paint does not guide the eye towards, and invite it into, the centre; the red over green and green over red zigzag over the whole front of the Retable, criss-crossing like sticks in the lattice fences depicted surrounding Paradise.43
Criss-crossing sticks echo the crossroads of the marketplace and the gestures of those who met there. The cross protects against evil. For example, when St George was plunged into a cauldron of molten lead, he made the sign of the cross and ‘settled down as though in a refreshing bath’; and St Margaret, among others, killed a dragon with the sign of the cross.44 The cross protects because it is a graphic mnemonic combining opposites, being composed of both up, down (the spiritual) and side-to-side (the temporal).45 Positively, the combination reflects the true nature of reality, thus dissipating illusion (as will be seen). Negatively, the combination provides apparent choices that distract adversaries. So, for example, crossroads present travellers with different options – to turn left, right or go straight on – which is why the spirits of those buried at crossroads are said to be lost in limbo.
Lots of options create mazes, like the earthen defences around ancient hill forts, where access was granted to those who knew the encircling labyrinth’s secret but was denied to those without such knowledge. The labyrinth was an appropriate symbol for limiting access to heaven, since its tortuous twists and turns were compared to sins.46 Traces of similar evil-deflecting decorative patterns can still be found in the timbers and plasterwork of some half-timbered cottages.47 In art, potentially confusing maze-like geometric patterns are apotropaic, conserving positive influences inside and deflecting outside negative influences.48
Now, if Chaucer’s Haberdasher or Miller were to contemplate, or ‘mix with’, images of Christ and the saints, then their eyes had to take them through the arches, pillars and frame. The Retable’s decoration does not involve confusing changes of direction, but it does involve apparently anomalous changes of colour, so the red and green forms a symbolic barrier around the figures depicted in heaven. The red and green is a frame that – like a labyrinth – protects those depicted within the painting by letting some viewers pass through and mix with the saints, while stopping others. Who, then, can pass and who is stopped?
If the decorative painting obeyed the Retable’s overall symmetry, then the columns either side of the centre would both have to be red over green or green over red. Cosmologically, this would make both central columns have fire and water in either their ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ positions. Or, reading them as masculine and feminine – as in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait – both central columns would place man over woman or woman over man.49 If the decorative scheme was symmetrical, then it would imply a social order that privileged either men or women. However, the scheme is not symmetrical, so one of the central columns appears to put men on top, while the other puts women on top.50 By ignoring symmetry, the decoration seems to avoid judgment upon fire or water, Mars or Venus, war or love, male or female. According to the logic of the decorative colour scheme, each has its proper place and neither is necessarily out of place. The pillars seem to suggest equal access to the saints in Paradise.
Thus, once Chaucer’s Haberdasher or Miller noticed the asymmetric anomaly, the colour scheme might encourage them to question the relative status of different worldly states. Together, the Retable’s red and green and green and red seem to suggest that earthly inequalities do not follow a heavenly mandate. Such a reading would be reinforced by the Bible, in which it is said ‘There is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ.’51
Yet this statement implies that there is more to the colour scheme than just promising equal access. After all, it does not say ‘both male and female’, it says ‘neither male nor female’. In other words, the colour scheme may indeed be about qualified access, but the qualification to pass is defined by something other than worldly categories, like male and female. The red-and-green decorative border interrupts the gaze – as the sphinx interrupts the traveller – to pose a riddle.52
Some of the riddles considered in this book were hidden for the entertainment of patrons and painters and were not necessarily easy for outsiders to appreciate. That was part of their appeal.53 This one, though, is different. It is there for everyone, on the Retable and on literally tens of thousands of other works painted over the centuries. Chaucer’s Haberdasher and Miller would have seen exactly the same colour-coding many times and in many places. Like the juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal in the sign of the cross, the pairing of red and green was a combination of opposites. It was a graphic example of an ‘open secret’.
Riddles divide people into two groups. One group is the outsiders who have not tried, or been able, to master the secret and to whom the riddle remains a mystery. The other group is the insiders who ‘get it’. In biblical terms, the first group merely ‘see’ and ‘hear’, while the second group ‘perceive’ and ‘understand’.54 The power of riddles – and one of the reasons for their use in religious contexts55 – harnesses the outsider’s innate desire to become an insider.56 So what are we to ‘perceive’ in, and ‘understand’ by, the riddle of red and green?
The Retable’s red and green stand between us and the saints in Paradise, alluding to opposites – summer and winter, fire and water, male and female – yet giving priority to none. The red and green and green and red repeatedly turn defined states on their head and confuse the relationship between everyday categories. The decoration is a warning that things may not be as they seem. Of course, this would not have been too much of a surprise to the Retable’s carpenters and painters. For example, they knew that after dinner, white bones could give a black pigment; after a month, black lead could give a white pigment; after a few generations, a single acorn could become a broccoli- or rhubarb-shaped tree; and in the fullness of time, a horizontal sea floor could turn into an abbey’s vertical walls.
Nevertheless, to get on with life, it helps to take things at face value – summer is not winter, fire is not water and male is not female. The ways of the world therefore encourage dividing up reality into convenient categories and juxtaposing one state against another. Yet the ways of the world are not the ways of heaven and the Retable’s anomalous decoration encourages questioning the worldly status quo (illus. 50, 51). After all, the Retable was painted for Dominicans, the order of preachers, whose mission was to encourage re-thinking.
The decoration’s position between the viewer and the saints is reminiscent of the forest’s position in the Diptych – between heaven and earth. The decoration’s failure to prioritize worldly states is reminiscent of the forest’s apparent lawlessness expressed in Shakespeare’s ‘greenwood’ plays in which Bottom sprouted a donkey’s head and in which the apparently weakest person is actually the one who directs the others. (In As You Like It, Rosalind has no protective father or lover, no money and is under sentence of death – she is a woman, disguised as a man, pretending to be a girl and, of course, was originally played by a boy.)57 Robin Hood, Maid Marian and Friar Tuck also showed that the wood’s apparent lawlessness was simply an inversion of the usual flow of worldly goods – from rich to poor – so that, for different parties, the same action by Sherwood Forest’s Merry Men could seem simultaneously just and unjust.
The red over green, green over red border that stands between the Retable’s viewer and its depicted saints was a graphic reminder that whatever worldly point of view one adopts, others may see things differently. Each point of view may be justifiable but each can also be stood on its head and neither can be completely true.58 Despite that, the more caught up in worldly affairs we become, the more difficult it is to see the points of view of others. This limitation in our judgment was alluded to by Nicholas of Cusa in terms that relate directly to the Retable’s decorative scheme.
The eye of the flesh, looking through a red glass, thinketh that it seeth all things red, or, looking through a green glass, all things green. Even so the eye of the mind, muffled up in limitation and passivity, judgeth.59
Nicholas loved paradox and he was one of those who showed how to solve the riddle of the Middle Ages’ most widespread colour code.
Nicholas of Cusa was probably born in 1400, the year Richard II died. He was educated in Holland and Heidelberg, travelled widely and became a bishop in the Tyrol.60 As clearly as is possible, he wrote down the secret of how to penetrate worldly illusions, contemplate Paradise and catch a glimpse of God. He presented his spiritual method as a commentary on reading a painting like one by Roger van der Weyden, his contemporary.61 Nicholas of Cusa described the secret as a ‘very simple and commonplace method’ and what he taught was nothing new.62 The same teaching was available to those who commissioned, painted and first gazed upon the Retable, and it was also committed to writing, about ten years after the Retable was painted, by a country parson who lived less than a day’s ride west of Thetford.63
Nicholas wrote about a wall around Paradise that ‘no genius can scale’.64 His description of that wall was such that, if he had tried to paint it, it would have looked much like the frame, arches and columns that encircle the Retable’s saints. According to him, the wall around the Paradise in which God dwells is ‘at the same time all things and nothing’.65 This wall, and its doorway, is a ‘coincidence of contradictories’, where earlier and later, beginning and end, Alpha and Omega are all one and the same.66 This wall is the boundary between our temporal world and the spiritual world of the saints, where Creator and creature and cause and effect are one.67
50 Metz Pontifical, detail (f34v); the inversion of worldly relationships.
The Retable’s red-and-green decoration is a ‘coincidence of contradictories’, a meeting of male and female or fire and water. A seventeenth-century alchemical text, The Water Stone of the Wise, used exactly the same imagery of a wall around Paradise, saying, ‘A man who would enter Paradise must go through fire and water’.68 It is not, however, easy for ‘a man’ to ‘go through fire and water’, since, as we have seen, ‘there is neither male nor female’.
The apparent disqualification of both males and females from Paradise makes more sense in the light of a ‘coincidence of contradictories’ and a world seen through Nicholas of Cusa’s red-or-green glasses. Although the world might seem red to someone wearing red glasses, their mind is ‘muffled up’ with limitations caused by taking the world of oppositions – of east and west, past and future, and so forth – at face value. If we identify ourselves with, and define ourselves by, any of these oppositions – distorting our view by aligning ourselves with either males or females, the rich or the poor, for example – then we trap ourselves in this world of oppositions. Those whose view of reality is ‘coloured’ by a particular state – whether exclusively male or female, rich or poor, for instance – cannot find the doorway. All coins have two sides. We might only be able to see one of them, but we ignore the other at our peril.
51 Metz Pontifical, detail (f37r); the resolution of worldly differences.
The doorway to Paradise is not found in any state that is defined by worldly oppositions. It is not in the east or west, nor is it in the past or future. In fact, if the wall around Paradise separates heaven and earth, then the doorway recognizes that even the distinction between heaven and earth is just another illusory product of a mind ‘muffled up’ with limitations. As John Scottus Eriugena – who was quoted at the end of the last chapter – implied, the door is ‘the comprehension of the Incomprehensible’ or the understanding that everything is God.
The wall around Paradise is not like the wall that John of Gaunt saw around that ‘demi-paradise’, England; a wall which stood ‘Against the envy of less happier lands’.69 Nicholas’s wall around Paradise was ‘all things’ that no genius could scale but, on the other hand, it was also ‘nothing’. The wall must be ‘nothing’ because Paradise is not a gated community – it automatically welcomes strangers because those in Paradise do not live in fear and cannot suffer phobias, such as xenophobia. The wall is built by those on the outside – by people who can only see one side of things. The wall instantly evaporates for those whose perception is not limited by their accidents of birth or their experiences and who are not attached to one particular way or another. After all, any one-sided view is only partially true, so it must also be partially false and there is no place for falsehood in Paradise. All earthly realities change over time and space but true reality must be unchanging.
Whether or not the wall around Paradise is insurmountable and its doorway is distant depends on your point of view. As the country parson who preached near Thetford said in the book he wrote just after the Retable was painted, ‘when you are “nowhere” physically, you are “everywhere” spiritually’.70 If you are attached to particular likes, dislikes, identities or locations, then you face the wall, as Julian of Norwich warned.71 If you are not attached, however, the door to Paradise is where you are and it is open. It is as if you are always already on Paradise’s doorstep (and, of course, the origins of ultramarine suggested that Paradise’s doorstep was made of a stone that broke captive’s chains, made fetters fall away and gates fly open). The way to Paradise is ‘here’ and ‘now’, and as the Areopagite Dionysius said, those who pass through the door ‘pass right through the opposition of fair and foul’ to see the whole ‘naked truth’.72 Indeed, as another mystic, Meister Eckhart, said ‘This door … is none other than absolute detachment.’73
Nicholas’s ‘simple and commonplace’ method involves simply letting go of worldly certainties. Over the period when the paintings in this book were painted, many people were teaching exactly the same spiritual method.74 Yet now it is very difficult for the busy modern Western mind to let go. We have forgotten, as Hamlet said, that ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’.75 The mystic’s advice follows logically from a well-known biblical event. If Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise was caused by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (of Good and Evil), then re-entry to Paradise depends on relinquishing the opposition of good and evil. Reasoning divides reality and reality is regained by regathering what has been scattered; by seeing that both kinds of fruit hang from a tree with a single root and recognizing it as the Tree of Life.76
Thinking can trap us in the world of opposites – Hamlet’s world of ‘good or bad’ – and Nicholas’s ‘coincidence of contradictories’ recognized that, no matter how clever we may be, the power of reason is limited. Nicholas called God the ‘Reason of reasons’.77 Human reason was the ‘discursive faculty’ that ‘runneth hither and thither’, behaviour he likened to that perfected by dogs.78 We can not reason our way into Paradise just as we can not catch horses by chasing them – if we want to ride a horse, we have to be still and let it come to us. Nicholas knew that we all possessed a power greater than reason: the intellect, which alone can carry us to Paradise.79 All we have to do is trust in a power greater than reason, rethink, stop looking for differences and start seeing similarities.80 Rather than waste energy by constantly worrying about this or that – namely, the endless options that the world of opposites has to offer – we can be liberated from deliberation.81 The Retable’s red and green point towards worldly tensions and offer a way out.82
When you worry about something for a long time and then stop worrying, everything changes. Nonetheless, nothing has changed except your state of mind. Similarly, when the eye moves from the Retable’s borders to the pictures they contain, everything and nothing changes. The decorative schemes shifts from predominantly red and green to predominantly blue and gold but, at first sight, it is still an alternation of opposites.
However, unlike the frame’s red and green, the alternation of the saints’ blue-and-gold and all-gold backgrounds is symmetrical. Christ’s background in the centre is gold and alternate backgrounds radiate outwards. The anomalous asymmetry of the worldly red-and-green columns has been resolved in Paradise’s blue-and-gold symmetric backdrop. So, the Retable’s decorative painting and carving seem to suggest conflict between the spaces occupied by the viewer and by the saints. The figurative painting and carving are, though, ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ in the space that the saints occupy. Numbers show why: there are ten (asymmetric) columns but only nine (symmetric) niches. Ten is even and nine is odd, and, in the context of the Diptych, even numbers were seen to be potentially ‘diabolical’, whereas there was ‘divinity in odd numbers’.
Even numbers have diabolical potential because they have no centre. Richard’s Diptych had no centre – his personal altarpiece was divided, as was his kingdom, and his bloody fate was the inevitable consequence of divisions. Shakespeare saw those external divisions as reflections of Richard’s internal divisions, and had him say
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented …
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing …83
For Richard, burdened with an indelible identity by accident of royal birth, the ease of ‘being nothing’ was brought by death, not the liberation of anonymity and detachment that Nicholas of Cusa or Meister Eckhart counselled. However, for Chaucer’s Haberdasher and Miller, the ease of being nothing – therefore being ‘nowhere’ physically, ‘everywhere’ spiritually and on Paradise’s doorstep – involved finding the ‘middle way’ in a world of opposites. This middle was absent from the Retable’s red-and-green columns but present in the saints’ blue-and-gold background. The middle way has some value within this world, but its true value lies in leading out of this world.84
The middle way that leads to Paradise is not found through compromise, but through marriage, or at least through a conjugal union. In the Christian tradition, marriage is a ‘mystery’ – like all the crafts considered in this book – in which two become one, and part of the mystery is the attraction of opposites.85 The definitive opposites are Mars and Venus and they were attracted to each other even though Venus was married to Vulcan. When tipped off about their affair, Vulcan made chains so fine they could not be seen and trapped Mars and Venus in their embrace, much to the amusement of the assembled gods.86 According to Ovid, ‘for long, this was the best-known story in the whole of heaven’.87 Nicholas of Cusa would not have been offended by this story, since he saw the pagan gods as personifications of God’s qualities. As such, for him, Mars was Victory, Venus, Love, and their union, the Victory of Love.88 Mars and Venus’ illicit union was blessed with a child who was, of course, illegitimate. The girl’s status merely underlined the nature of her parents’ union – she was not the product of a conventional relationship, she was a ‘love-child’ and her name was ‘Harmony’.89
The Middle Ages’ most powerful musical harmonies – chimes from the belfry – were echoes of this mythical union. Church bells were arranged by number, with four, or a carillon, being related to the four elements.90 Bells were made of copper alloys (so were mainly venereal) and clappers were iron (or martial). When the bell rope was pulled and the clapper struck the bell, Mars and Venus touched. Their rhythmic union created the harmony of a peal that rang out to mark time, call to prayer, mark the return of ashes to ashes, or even to celebrate another wedding. Harmony is the result of the ‘at-one-ness’ that is the culmination of two opposites’ attraction for one another.
Abbot Suger claimed that the two become one when following God’s will.
The awesome power of one sole and supreme Reason reconciles the disparity between all things of Heaven and Earth by due proportion: this same sweet concord, itself alone, unites what seem to oppose each other into single exalted and well-tuned harmony.91
Thomas Aquinas said that ‘just as few harmonies are pleasing to hear, so are few colours pleasing to see’.92 The harmony of a single colour – like vermilion, in the Retable’s initial underdrawing – is due to ‘two [ingredients] becoming one [pigment]’. The harmony of a combination – like the Retable’s red and green – is due to ‘two [colours] becoming one [pattern]’ in the eye of the beholder. The craft mysteries harnessed the inherent desire of elements, or materials, to transform their relationships from restless opposition into contented complementarity.
A clue to the transformation is in the words. ‘Op-pose’ literally means ‘to stand against’, and implies two separate, independent things, while ‘com-plement’ means ‘with fullness’ and implies two parts of a greater whole. Opposites coincide – or are complementary – in their common origin, in the divine Being, but, once in this world of ‘becoming’, things are divided. (In the words of Julian of Norwich, God ‘willed that we should be double’.)93 For example, the acorn contains two complementary possibilities but as soon as the oak grows, it conceals one possibility to the extent that it reveals the opposite possibility. The acorn is universal, but the timber is either Baltic or English.94
Things that are divided and show only one of their possibilities thus find balance in a union with another thing that shows the opposite possibility. In numerous mythological paintings, Venus’ hidden martial side is implied by her playing with Mars’ armour, and Mars’ hidden venereal side is suggested by his being chained to Venus’ throne. Opposites become complementary by recognizing the hidden coexistence of each within the other and entering into a union, the bliss of which is an echo of each one’s originally undivided state and a foretaste of each one’s ultimate reunion.
It follows that the Retable painters’ union of red and green should really be seen as a reunion because, while they appear opposite, they are really just different sides of the same coin. For example, Nicholas of Cusa used the analogy of red and green glasses to illustrate opposite points of view, yet all glaziers knew that the red and the green pieces of glass were both made by staining with copper, the one just being heated a bit more than the other.95 Everyone knew that, on the same tree, a leaf could be green one day and red the next.96 Things that appear opposite literally share a common root and, in their origin, all apparent oppositions are resolved – like black and white in lead, red and green in copper or two different oaks in a single acorn.
While the artists’ use of colours is entirely consistent with the broad cultural meaning of colours, we cannot know if the individuals who painted the Retable really appreciated their red and green as a union or reunion of opposites. This is for the simple reason that we do not know who they were. One of the named artists, however, who was briefly mentioned earlier, Lucas Cranach the Elder, left a clue: his cryptic signature, the winged serpent, which suggests that he did appreciate the significance of such a union. He was fully aware of the long artistic tradition of depicting a fight between the eagle and the snake, the one representing heavenly forces and the other representing the forces of the underworld.97 His cryptic signature is then a conscious graphic union of what is above and what is below.
Artists may have been interested in the union of opposites, but they knew that all things on earth are composed of the four elements forever in flux, so different sides of the same coin appear fragmented and are spread across either space or time. This fragmentation means that we have to choose a frame of reference in which to glimpse any reunion. In earlier chapters, a spatial framework saw ‘terrestrial’ azurite below ‘celestial’ ultramarine in the Pontifical, while a temporal framework saw the Diptych’s use of ‘heavenly’ gold before ‘earthly’ ultramarine. In the Westminster Retable, the carpenter purposely confused the two frames of reference for co(s)mic effect, making eternity ‘advance’ towards the viewer. Ultimately, though, space and time are no different from the things they appear to contain.98 As Dante experienced them, they are all projections of the Divine Mind.99
Heaven and earth may be the same from a heavenly perspective, but they look different from an earthly point of view. So the ways of the world are not the ways of Paradise and the first hint of that difference came in the rainbow arches. Here the mixed red and green merge into white, exactly as they originally emerged from white. The union of opposites in white was evident in how the painter’s pigment was made – a purity that came from filth, born from death. Thomas Aquinas said that ‘whiteness is a complete form’, while ‘the privation of whiteness’ – in other words, each individual colour – ‘is an imperfect form’. So, in the rainbow, red and green, two ‘imperfect’ forms, combine to create white, a ‘complete’ form.100 Each could be said to have found ‘its other half’, and since, according to an alchemist, ‘whiteness signifies the eternal peace and concord of the elements’, the reunion of red and green is blissful.
White is perfect and peaceful. It is therefore completely inscrutable and gives no clues that it might be the reunion of opposites and the mixing of red and green at the centre of the rainbow. A similarly inscrutable union of opposites takes place in the Retable’s depiction of clothing. Since the clues are few, however, it will help to look at a more obvious piece of cloth before considering them (see illus. 27).
Now returning to the Wilton Diptych, at first glance, Edmund’s and Richard’s robes looked similar.101 However, the king’s robe was an asymmetric weave, while the saint’s was symmetric. The king’s robe was also gold and red, suggesting imbalance with too much fire (possibly hinting at a choleric temperament prone to anger and ambition), whereas the saint’s gold and blue indicated elemental balance.
In heraldic terms, Edmund’s gold-and-blue pattern could be described as ‘respecting reguardant birds enfiled by a coronet’ but it is much older than heraldry.102 It was found on Eastern silks imported through Venice and came to Europe complete with a specific set of meanings. The two birds in profile (or sometimes one frontal bird with two heads) have meanings at several levels. One bird (or one head) can represent temporal power, while the other represents spiritual authority. So, in the king and St Edmund’s case, one bird could stand for his crown and the other his halo. However, the birds’ innermost meaning relates to the soul, where one bird stands for the egotistical self and the other the spiritual self.
The spiritual self is universal. It defines all aspects of the person, whatever is currently manifest as well as its hidden opposite, in this life as well as in the next.103 The egotistical self possesses no independent reality – it is only the passing one-sided shadow, or reflection, of the spiritual self. Yet it can fiercely defend the illusion of a separate identity. Now, these two selves can live together in the soul in harmony. Or they can live in conflict, as, for example, when the ego tries to impose its limited view of reality. When the two selves are in conflict, the person is said to be ‘self-ish’. When the two selves are in harmony, the person is said to be ‘self-less’.
Appropriately for the spiritual self and its passing shadow, the two birds in Edmund’s robe are mirror images of each other. Nonetheless, they are actually just different parts of the sgraffito’s unbroken heavenly part, glimpsed through the sgraffito’s fragmented earthly part. The pattern emerged when the covering ultramarine behaved like a soul, displaying the watery qualities of passivity and receptivity, selflessly yielding to the creator’s will and allowing the underlying golden spirit to make itself known.
Hindu texts make the potential relationships between the two selves crystal clear, using imagery identical to the patterned silks that Europeans imported from the East.
Two birds … clasp close … This self lends itself to that self, and that self to this self; they coalesce or are wedded together. With this aspect, he is united with this world and with that aspect united with yonder world.104
The two selves are also in the Greek tradition, and closer to the Diptych and Retable in both time and space.105 Julian of Norwich called them the ‘outward part … which is now in pain and woe’ and the ‘inward part … in peace and in love’.106 Like the Indian tradition, the Greek tradition also strove to coalesce, wed or weave the two selves together and Julian of Norwich described how the two were ‘knit in this knot and oned in this oneing’.107 The coronet around the two birds’ necks is reminiscent of a yoke – like the yoke between the white bull and black cow that ploughed Rome’s boundary. Furthermore, the word ‘yoke’, which shares the same root as the Indian word ‘yoga’, means ‘union’.
One of the messages of St Edmund’s robe is that we can be divided, with our egotistical and spiritual selves in conflict. In that divided state, the individual is relatively powerless. The robe’s pattern reminds us that if the ‘individual’ is to be truly ‘in-divisible’, then their two selves must be united. Internal conflicts must be resolved and the soul must be reintegrated. To unite, the egotistical self must accept its role yoked to the spiritual self.108 The individual becomes empowered when the two selves are united – when ‘one is truly oneself’ – because being oneself is the only way to pass unscathed through ‘fire and water’ or ‘fair and foul’.
If we coming back once more to the Retable’s red-and-green frame and columns, these are reminders of everyday divisions, like male and female, but they are also reminders of hidden divisions, like that between the two selves of one whose ego rebels. The central band in the red, white and green rainbow is a reminder that the different sides of divided realities can find completion in each other. The saints in Paradise have passed through ‘fire and water’ or ‘fair and foul’ and thus presumably have healed all internal divisions.
In the Middle Ages, the colour of people’s clothes was controlled by sumptuary laws, hence citizens were conditioned to see them as meaningful. But in addition to being markers of social status, clothes can also represent a person’s nature. However, in this world, all things are divided, so, for example, Chaucer’s predatory Wife of Bath was ‘fair outside but foul inside’. Clothes can also outwardly display inner aspirations, rather than realities, as in Richard’s robe with its allusions to a sought-after political alliance. These complications are part of the world of opposites and they are resolved in heaven’s unity. So the saints’ clothes can be taken as true expressions of their inner state, or, as the magician Merlin prophesied, ‘the outer garment shall be a fair index of the thoughts within’.109
St Edmund’s pattern was created from the complex interplay of the fabric’s warp and weft, which was entirely appropriate since he was depicted on the Diptych’s earthly panel and earthly realities are woven from the four elements spread across space and time. Things are different in heaven, though. Heaven is united in ether and in eternity. It is therefore entirely appropriate that the saint’s robes in the Retable are all plain, with no distinction between warp and weft. Where distinctions are made, it is mainly between inner and outer garments, which are generally different colours.
The Dominicans are both in black and white. St Margaret is in (black-and-white ermine fur-lined) red and green and St Catherine is in (fur-lined) red and purple. John the Baptist is in (blue-lined) purple fur and St Edmund is in (fur-lined) blue-and-red. St Paul is in (yellow-lined) purple-and-red and St Peter is in (green-lined) two shades of red. Mary is in (fur-lined) blue and red and St John the Evangelist is in (purple-lined) red and blue.
The clothes include pairings of the opposites that Leonardo mentioned but there is also variety in the colour pairs because too formulaic a scheme would look rigid. There are also good technical reasons for mixing up the red and green and the gold and blue. For example, verdigris was not the easiest pigment to use and in some contexts, such as the borders of the Pontifical’s illuminations, the red-and-green scheme was replaced with rigorous schemes of alternating red and blue (often using another copper-based venereal pigment, azurite, and sometimes also with watery ultramarine). An additional reason for pairing red and blue will become apparent shortly.
The Retable’s outermost red and green referred to Nicholas of Cusa’s world of opposites. The innermost gold and blue, by virtue of its symmetry, alluded to the coming together of opposites and their transformation into complements. The saints’ clothes further refine the ideas of opposition and complementarity, and they are the last but one step on the colour-coded journey from worldly diversity and strife to heavenly unity and peace.
Not surprisingly, the clearest colour coding is found in the Crucifixion scene (illus. 52). Mary’s outer garment is blue and her inner one is red, while John’s outer garment is red and his inner one blue. Mary is female, so she is outwardly blue, while John is male and is outwardly red. Yet both are in Paradise, so they must be perfectly balanced with their outward qualities covering equally developed inward qualities. Mary’s outward wateriness is thus complemented by an inner fire and John’s outward fieriness is tempered by inner wateriness.110
Mary’s blue over red and John’s red over blue garments are heavenly prototypes for the Retable’s protective green above red and red above green columns. Yet they are far more than just prefigurations of worldly opposition, and their ultimate resolution is indicated in the single garment that lies between them – Christ’s loincloth. The colour of that garment was made by mixing azurite, the pigment in Mary’s outer and John’s inner garments, with cochineal, the pigment in Mary’s inner and John’s outer garments. It was a deep, rich purple, although over the course of 700 years, its glory has been muted by the yellowing of linseed oil. This third way of mixing red and blue is consistent with accounts of the Crucifixion that say Christ’s loincloth was purple, and it affirms the teachings of mystics including Nicholas of Cusa and the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing.111
52 Thornham Parva Retable, detail; the central Crucifixion scene (see illus. 43).
If Mary and John had been dressed in green and red and red and green, then the painters would not have blended their robes to make Christ’s robe – it would have been a muddy brown. But Mary and John’s balanced and blendable garments suggest that the mixing of red and blue in Christ’s loincloth could be seen as a unification of the masculine and feminine. Alchemically minded painters could have seen the red-and-blue-cum-purple as a reflection of another of Ovid’s stories about Venus’ extramarital affairs.
In her union with Mars, Venus produced a daughter called Harmony, but she also had a son by Mercury, called Hermaphroditus (after Hermes and Aphrodite, his parents’ names in Greek). A nymph called Salmacis fell for him but her love was unrequited and she ‘twined around him’ like a vine encircling an oak.112 She prayed never to be separated and her prayers were answered.
As when a gardener grafts a branch on to a tree … the nymph and the boy were no longer two, but a single form, possessed of a dual nature, which could not be called male or female, but seemed to be at once both and neither.113
The technical blending of pigments, like the mythical blending of sexes in Hermaphroditus, was fitting for Christ’s loincloth because alchemists like Petrus Bonus compared Christ to the Philosopher’s Stone – at once natural and supernatural, corruptible and incorruptible, male and female.114 The painter’s purple was also entirely consistent with Nicholas of Cusa’s teaching in which God is at once all things and no thing.
Art reflects Nature, which in turn reflects God, and the colour that dyed Christ’s real loincloth, Tyrian purple, was extracted from a snail that could itself be a hermaphrodite.115 The painter’s mysterious mixing of pigments was reflected in the more prosaic mixing of dyes in fourteenth-century Norfolk. Cloth was dyed blue ‘in the wool’ because indigo was cheap and dyed red ‘in the piece’, after being made up into garments, because insect dyes were expensive.116 It was common knowledge that purple clothes were dyed twice, first blue, then red. So, one way or another, Chaucer’s Haberdasher and Miller knew that Christ was clad in a robe that was ‘at once both and neither’ red and blue.
In Christ’s purple, the last hint of Nicholas of Cusa’s wall of opposites is erased. Following the ‘obedience of the elements’, fire and water – as red and blue – enter into a union so profound that, in it, all distinctions are annihilated.
