Figure 10.1
Sigena: Chapter-house in 1936 (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Photo Arxiu Mas)
The evidence presented in this paper is purely circumstantial.1 I hope however that the historical context in which the chapter-house paintings at Sigena were created and the English connection of the paintings will be to some extent illuminated. The literature on the paintings rarely refers to the Hospital. It is the founders, Queen Sancha and King Alfonso II of Aragon, who are invoked to explain the chapter-house and its decoration, never the Hospital, which after all occupied the monastery from the middle years of the 12th century and received Sancha as a sister. It was also the Hospital that created a special Rule for the female Hospitallers at Sigena in 1188, the date of the official foundation of the new convent.2 This convent was clearly conceived as the headquarters for the female Hospital in Aragon-Catalonia. By the official foundation date the Latin Kingdom was in crisis. Jerusalem was lost to Saladin in October 1187. The Prior of Saint-Gilles, the Hospital’s European headquarters, gave Sigena in 1187 to Sancha, but it was made clear in the early charters of the convent that the Castellan of Amposta, the head of the Hospital in the kingdom of Aragon, had ultimate guardianship of the sisters of Sigena. A group of Hospitaller brothers (fratres) was resident at Sigena, which was a double community throughout its history, even if the prioress took decisions on behalf of the sisters.3
The events of August 1936, when anarchists set fire to the chapter-house, are well known, as is the remarkable series of photographs recording the room and its decoration taken by José Gudiol in May of that year and which provide so much of our knowledge of the room before calamity struck (Figure 10.1). A shadow of the chapter- house is presented today in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona (Figure 10.2). For over fifty years the chapter-house was abandoned and left without a roof (Figure 10.3), before it was restored in 1992 (Figure 10.4). I am taking for granted the generally accepted identity of the Sigena painter or painters with one or more of the later artists of the Winchester Bible, an identity first suggested by Otto Pächt and further elaborated by Walter Oakeshott (Figures 10.5 and 10.6).4 I simply want to draw attention to certain events important to the history of the Hospital and which involve England and the English crown from the mid-1180s onwards. They may help to explain how some of the best painters of their time active in England came to work for the Hospital in Aragon.
Circa 1185 King Henry II founded the first house for women Hospitallers in England, among the first in Europe, at Buckland (Somerset).5 In 1184, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Heraclius, in a desperate bid for help to counter Muslim attack, mounted an embassy to the West, in which he was accompanied by prestigious relics, by the Master of the Temple, Arnaud de Torri Rubea (Arnau de Torroja), and by the Grand Master of the Hospital, Roger des Moulins (see map at Figure 10.7).6 The party disembarked at Brindisi in December 1184 and proceeded north, probably via Rome. Following the death of the Master of the Temple in Verona, where Heraclius had no success in a meeting with Pope Lucius III and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the embassy travelled west across northern Italy into Gaul. Here they met an unsympathetic Philip Augustus in Paris, and Heraclius preached in Notre-Dame. The Patriarch and the Master of the Hospital then crossed the Channel, arriving in Canterbury, according to the monk Gervase, on 29 January 1185, where they visited Becket’s tomb-shrine in the cathedral crypt. King Henry II was heading north at the time, but turned back at Nottingham and seems to have met the Patriarch and the Master at Reading Abbey on 17 March, an event famous in English history. Two less reliable sources, including the Winchester annalist, place the meeting at Winchester and it is possible as Cartellieri suggested that there were two successive meetings, one of them at Winchester.7 A week long council followed at Clerkenwell Hospital in London beginning on 18 March. It must have been on this occasion that the patriarch dedicated the church of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell, whereas it was while he had previously passed through London on 10 February that he consecrated the Temple church (according to a lost inscription, which recorded the event).8
The king’s reluctance to embark on crusade in spite of his vow to do so in 1170 led him to turn to the French king, Philip Augustus. Henry was at Dover on 10 April. With him on this occasion were, among others, Richard, bishop of Winchester; and John, prior of Winchester Cathedral priory; Roger des Moulins, the Grand Master of the Hospital; and Garnier de Nablous (or Neapolis), prior of the Hospital in England. Among the business transacted at Dover, presumably in the Castle, was the transfer of Holy Cross, Winchester, from the Hospital into the care of the bishop.9 Henry’s devotion to the Hospitallers has already been noted in connection with his foundation of Buckland; in his will of March 1182 the first bequests of 5000 marcs of silver are to the Masters of the Hospital and the Temple and a further 5000 marcs for the defence of the Holy Land. The sequel to the Dover meeting was embarkation for France (Henry landed at Wissant), Easter at Rouen, a fruitless meeting between kings Henry II and Philip Augustus at the castle of Le Vaudreuil and a disgruntled Heraclius. According to that scandal-monger, Giraldus Cambrensis, Heraclius warned Henry of divine retribution on three occasions, in London, at Dover and finally at Chinon, before he returned to the Holy Land at some time before the beginning of August.10 The Master of the Hospital seems to have visited Chartres on this journey, while Heraclius visited Angers and Saumur. Heraclius’ return journey was via Messina in Sicily. Roger des Moulins may have been in Pavia in November 1185 but he was certainly back in the east by the beginning of February 1186. It should be noted that this story of a journey by the Master of the Hospital involves Winchester and its bishop, Richard of Ilchester, King Henry II and the Hospital in England with its prior Garnier de Nablous.
Roger des Moulins was killed in battle some two months before Hattin in 1187. His interim successor was Ermengol de Aspa, and though according to Luttrell he was never elected Grand Master, he assumed control as provisor of the Order between May and October 1188.11 He had become Castellan of Amposta, the frontier fortress near Tortosa, in 1180, and Sigena fell within the orbit of this Castellany from the time of its original creation in 1157. In 1182 Ermengol was appointed Prior of Saint-Gilles and general administrator of the Hospital in Provence and the Kingdom of Aragon. In Jonathan Riley-Smith’s words, this effectively made him commander of much of France and Spain ‘and probably in England as well’.12 With two gaps (he was replaced in Saint-Gilles for a short time in 1185 and he assumed governance of the whole Order in 1188) he was Castellan of Amposta for most of the 1180s and was back in his post by 1190. It was Ermengol who confirmed the new Rule of Sigena while in the Holy Land as provisor of the Order in 1188. He was with Sancha the joint founder of the Sigena convent. He was thus uniquely well placed to introduce an ‘international’ artist to an important commission in Aragon through the Hospitaller movement. As for Garnier de Nablous, he probably arrived in England from the East with the Patriarch and the Grand Master in 1185, and we left him as Prior of England at Dover in April 1185. His subsequent career was stellar. By June 1191 he had reached Syria from England and had become Grand Master of the Hospital, though he may have been elected as early as the second half of 1189. His interim movements included a visit to Paris still in his capacity as Prior of England in the first half of 1190, and he was in Messina with Richard I in October 1190. He played a prominent part in the Third Crusade and died in late 1192. But any or all of the other candidates mentioned above could have played a part in shaping the international career of ‘The Morgan Master’, for he is the most important artist linking the Winchester Bible and Sigena. I suggest that he could have been sent to Queen Sancha directly by Henry II before or soon after the king died in 1189. It should be remembered that at the death of Raymond Berengar IV of Aragon in 1162, Sancha’s future husband, Alfonso II, was a minor and his territories were put under Henry’s protection, a situation which at the least implies regular contacts between the two courts. Alternatively, he could have been sent to Sancha by the Prior of England, Garnier, in the late 1180s, with the knowledge and support of the Castellan, Ermengol de Aspa. The ‘Morgan Master’ may have become known to the Grand Master (Roger des Moulins) and the Prior of England (Garnier) at Winchester or Dover in early 1185.13
As to the date of the chapter-house paintings, they decorate a building which from its eccentric position on the plan of the convent (Figure 10.8) in relation to the church must have been built before the church was extended to the east in the early-13th-century.14 It is intrinsically unlikely, though not impossible, that the paintings predate the 1188 foundation of the new convent. The great room is clearly more than a mere chapter-house and must have been conceived as an assembly room for the female Hospital in the kingdom of Aragon, where Queen Sancha could hold court with the Castellan of Amposta. Their seats would probably have been against the south wall, not facing the chapter-house entrance, which is the usual place for the president of chapter. The evidence for this unusual position is that the Crucifixion painting was in the centre of the south wall. A cross or its image was invariably placed above the president’s seat in a chapter-house.15
A serious study of the monastic buildings is required, as many questions remain open. What was the original purpose of the huge room to the north of the chapter-house, for instance, which is always referred to as the dormitory (Figure 10.9)? It runs the entire length of the east and north ranges of the cloister at ground level. It would have housed a vast community, which, even allowing for the optimism of monastic founders, can never have been envisaged at Sigena. In 1207 the closed number (numerus clausus) of sisters was set at 30. Or did this room in part provide accommodation for the sick? Vestiges of paintings still on its walls (Figure 10.10) suggest that this vast space, architecturally similar to the chapter-house and clearly contemporary, was also decorated by the same team. The few decorative motifs which survive would not be out of place in the borders of the Winchester Bible. In which case the Morgan Master and his associates could have been active at Sigena for several years. For the time being, Karl Schuler’s date for the paintings in the late 1180s or early 1190s seems entirely reasonable.16 I would add that Queen Sancha took her vows in 1196, at the death of her husband Alfonso, and that she died and was buried at Sigena in 1208.
I will end by mentioning another building outside England, which may well reflect Henry II’s patronage of the poor and sick. As mentioned above, following the meeting at Dover in April 1185, Henry crossed the channel and spent Easter at Rouen. The chapel of the leper hospital at Le Petit-Quevilly lies across the Seine from Rouen in the forest where Henry II had a residence and hunting lodge.17 The leproserie is first mentioned in a charter datable between 1185 and 31 January 1188. Henry’s only known stays at the Petit-Quevilly are in 1171 and 1174, but it would be surprising if he did not go there in 1185. Another pious hospital foundation of the king, its paintings survive (Figure 10.11). These are earlier than Sigena, probably of c. 1160–70, certainly paid for by the king and closely associated, like the Sigena chapter-house, with an insular artist – this time connected in style to the so-called Winchester Psalter (London, British Library, MS Cotton, Nero C IV). Henry II here disposed of the talents of a major ‘English’ painter within the lands of his Empire beyond the Channel. There is nothing surprising in this, just as there is nothing surprising in the presence of a major ‘English’ painter working for the Hospital in Sigena.
[Excepting the final section listing the primary sources, the following bibliography is arranged chronologically and is intended historiographically]
del Arco y Garay, R. Catalogo monumental de España: Huesca, 2 vols (Madrid 1942), 394–412 (vol. 1), figs 931–980 (vol. 2).
Pächt, O. ‘A cycle of English frescoes in Spain’, Burlington Magazine, 103 (1961), 166–175.
Ubieto Arteta, A. Documentos de Sigena, I, Textos Medievales, 32 (Valencia 1972), particularly numbers 1–11 on the foundation of the Convent.
Ubieto Arteta, A. El Real Monasterio de Sigena (1188–1300) (Valencia 1966).
Oakeshott, W. ‘The Sigena paintings and the second style of rubrication in the Winchester Bible’, in: Kunsthistorische Forschungen Otto Pächt zu seinem 70. Geburtstag, ed. A. Rosenauer, G. Weber (Salzburg 1972), 90–98.
Oakeshott, W. Sigena. Romanesque paintings in Spain and the Winchester Bible artists (London 1972).
Oakeshott, W. letter ‘Sigena’ to: Times Literary Supplement, 1 December, 1972.
Ayres, L. M. ‘The work of the Morgan Master at Winchester and English painting of the Early Gothic period’, Art Bulletin, LVI (1974), 201–223.
Gardelles, J. ‘Le prieuré de Sigena aux XIIème et XIIIème siècles: étude architecturale’, Bulletin Monumental, 133 (1975), 15–28.
Oakeshott, W. The two Winchester Bibles (Oxford 1981), 25, 71, 75–82, plates 15,78, 84, 99, 102, 105, 157, 160.
Schuler, K. F. The Pictorial Program of the Chapterhouse of Sigena, Ph.D thesis, New York University Institute of Fine Arts (1994), UMI Dissertation Services (Ann Arbor, Michigan), 1994.
Schuler, K. F. ‘Seeking institutional identity in the Chapterhouse at Sigena’, in Shaping Sacred Space and Institutional Identity in Romanesque Mural Painting. Essays in honour of Otto Demus, ed., T. Dale and J. Mitchell (London 2004), 245–256.
Ocón Alonso, D. ‘Une salle capitulaire pour une reine: les peintures du chapitre de Sigena’, Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa, XXXVIII (2007), 81–94.
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Pagès i Paretas, M. ‘Un saltiri de Guillem II per a Monreale? Sobre els origens del Saltiri Anglocatalà de Paris’, Miscellània Liturgica Catalana, XX (2012), 287–308.
Ocón Alonso, D. ‘The Paintings of the Chapter-House of Sigena and the Art of the Crusader Kingdoms’, in Romanesque and the Mediterranean, ed., R. Bacile and J. McNeill (Leeds 2015), 277–295.
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Round, J.H. ‘Garnier de Nablous, Prior of the Hospital in England, and Grand Master of the Order of St John of Jerusalem’, Archaeologia, LVIII (1903), 383–390.
Cartellieri, A. Philipp II. August König von Frankreich, Bd. II. Der Kreuzzug (1187–1191) (Leipzig and Paris 1906), 18–25 (1184/5 mission).
Riley-Smith, J. The knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus c.1050–1310 (London 1967), 106–107 (Ermengol de Aspa).
Kedar, B. Z. ‘The Patriarch Eraclius’ in Outremer. Studies in the history of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem, presented to Joshua Prawer, ed., B.Z. Kedar, H.E. Mayer, R.C. Smail (Jerusalem 1982), 177–204.
Mayer, H. E. ‘Henry II of England and the Holy Land’, English Historical Review, XCVII, 1982, 721–739.
Luttrell, A. ‘Ermengol de Aspa, Provisor of the Hospital: 1188’ Crusades, 4 (2005), 15–19.
Luttrell, A., Nicholson, H.J., ‘Introduction: a Survey of Hospitaller Women in the Middle Ages’, in Hospitaller Women in the Middle Ages, ed., A. Luttrell and H. Nicholson (Aldershot and Burlington, VT. 2006), particularly 29–41.
García-Guijarro Ramos, L. ‘The Aragonese Hospitaller Monastery of Sigena: its early Stages, 1188-c. 1210’ in Hospitaller Women in the Middle Ages, ed., A. Luttrell and H. Nicholson (Aldershot and Burlington, VT. 2006), 113–151.
Riley-Smith, J. ‘King Henry II, Patriarch Heraclius and the English Templars and Hospitallers’, in Come l’orco della fiaba: Studi per Franco Cardini, ed., M. Montesano (Florence 2010), 249–255.
Riley-Smith, J. The Knights Hospitaller in the Levant, c. 1070–1309 (Basingstoke 2012), 38–41, 195–196 (Roger des Moulins and the 1184/5 mission).
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Continuator of William of Tyre, L’estoire de Eracles Empereur et la Conqueste de la Terre d’Outremer, in Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Historiens occidentaux, (Paris 1859), Vol. 2, 2–3, 57–61.
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Ralph Niger: Radulfus Niger. De re militari et triplici via peregrinationis Ierosolimitanae (1187/88), ed. L. Schmugge, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters, Vol. 6 (Berlin and New York 1977), 186–187, cf.193–194.
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Roger of Howden: Chronica magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Series, LI/2, London, 1869), 299–304.
Roger of Wendover: Rogeri de Wendover Chronica, sive Flores Historiarum, ed., H. Coxe (London 1841), Vol. 2, 415–418.
Royal Commission for Historical Monuments (England): London, Vol. 4: The City (London 1929), 137 (the lost inscription on the south door of the Temple church).
William of Andres: Willelmi Chronica Andrensis, ed., I. Heller, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, XXIV (Hannover 1879), 716.
William of Newburgh: Historia rerum anglicarum Willelmi Parvi, ordinis sancti Augustini canonici regularis in coenobio Beatae Mariae de Newburgh in agro eboracensi, ed. H.C.Hamilton (London 1856), Vol. 1, 243–246.
Winchester annals: Annales Monastici, Vol. II: Annales monasterii de Wintonia (AD. 519–1277), ed. H. Luard (Rolls Series, XXXVI, London, 1865), 62.
