Patronage of artistic works could be likened to a performance, one played out by a cast of individuals, each of whom fulfils a particular role or roles. There are those that request the work or finance it, others that oversee its production, and still others that commit themselves to the work’s fabrication, installation and perhaps even consecration. The roles vary in scope and detail according to the circumstances but also according to the individuals’ aims and interests, and any one of a number of roles could, depending on the commission, earn the distinction of ‘patron’ (which is not always aligned with the modern usage). The personal dynamics among the actors also play a role, with relationships pivoting on economic, social, religious, personal or other factors, and sometimes generating friction or even patent conflict. All of these varied elements that make up the social performance of patronage undergo yet further inflection when the performance becomes representation; that is, when the negotiated relations undergo translation as pictorial subject.
Patronage images are not uncommon in medieval art. They often present a figure kneeling deferentially before the person or institution to whom a gift is made. Sometimes the institution is represented by spiritual proxy, namely a saint, the Virgin, or Christ himself. The kneeling figure also usually proffers a symbolic miniature of his or her gift, such as a model-sized representation of a church, chapel or monastery. The model helps to connect the presenter with the real-world gift.1
In spite of appearances, however, this motif’s seeming straightforwardness can be misleading. The nature of the gift, the identity of the donor and the role of the recipient can all undergo subtle (or even not-so-subtle) transformation when cast as visual representation. The Crucifixion window in the east axial chapel at Poitiers Cathedral, for example, seems to follow customary form by showing Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II of England kneeling as they hold up their gift of a stained glass panel to the martyred Peter, Paul and crucified Christ above them (Figure 21.1). (The little white panel is a 19th-century restoration, but the object they originally held was nonetheless likely a representation of a window.) The image gives pause on several accounts. First, no written evidence suggests that the royal couple financed the cathedral’s construction, and nothing – other than this representation – ties them specifically to the choir glazing as the miniature gift would suggest. While one could take the image at face value and consider it evidence, it may just as well make an invented argument. Second, the image’s layers of reference build a complex mise-en-abyme: its constructed visual rhetoric suggests the window gift is made not to Christ, Peter and Paul but to a window – a representation – of Christ, Peter and Paul, suggesting that the gifted window is the window in which the Plantagenet couple finds themselves represented. One outcome of this representation within a representation is to suggest that the gift includes, beyond any material patronage, the offer of themselves to the cathedral, in the sense of becoming its spiritual subjects. Much more could be said about this image, but suffice it to say that it projects complex ideas about the relationship of the royal couple to the church under construction, while it elucidates very little about what was given (funds, privileges, quarries, glazing, etc.) and to what ends (political, spiritual, salvational, etc.).2
A hemicycle capital at Notre-Dame-du-Port in Clermont-Ferrand (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes) suggests a similar web of questions (Figure 21.2). On one of the capital’s faces, a lay donor – identified by the inscription as Stephanus but otherwise unknown to us – bears a gift of a foliate capital.3 As at Poitiers, the depicted capital stands for the object on which he himself is carved and stands synedochally for the whole church as both material and ecclesiastical body. The mise-en-abyme once again establishes a visual relationship that makes the figure the agent (broadly construed) and the gift itself. An inscription adds to the rhetorical play through its mischievously opaque use of ‘fieri jussit’, which could mean that Stephanus commissioned the work (as through a monetary gift), or perhaps authorised it (in a legal or protectorship sense), or perhaps oversaw the gift’s transfer as representative of a family lineage or corporate body. On the surface of it, the text does not clarify the relationship shown in the image any more than the image helps untangle the text.
These images project complex ideas about patronage relations, even while hewing to a seemingly conventional iconography of presentation. Recent scholarship has usefully drawn attention to the ambiguities often found in the represented relationship of the recipient and patron (or the person whom we assume to be the patron).4 Jill Caskey, for example, has shown in an excellent study that the denomination by inscription on a group of southern Italian bronze doors of a certain Panteleone as ‘auctor’ – a term with juridical overtones – made him the legal overseer rather than actual donor.5 The visual language too can reveal more tendentious and contingent implications, as in Elizabeth Pastan’s study of the Bayeux Tapestry that calls for a re-consideration of what one can learn about patronage from image and text.6 These art historical treatments echo important research by historians that emphasise the negotiated, shifting parameters of the patron-client relationship.7 Many of those historical studies draw attention to new inflections of patronage performance in a crucial period beginning in the 10th and 11th centuries.
This paper builds on those studies and, in keeping with this volume’s emphasis on process, suggests ways that imagery contributed to changing notions of patronage. Whereas laymen and laywomen had always made gifts to the Church, the 11th and 12th centuries saw a dramatic rise in images that represented these deeds. The Poitiers window is a good 12th-century example of the common royal type, but increasingly the diffusion of this iconography extended also in a significant way to non-royal figures, as at Clermont.8 Non-royal laity usually adopted the traditional donor-with-church-model iconography, as in the mid-10th-century wall painting of the Sylvester Chapel at Goldbach (Lake Constance) showing a local lord and in the 12th-century image of Graf Eberhard von Nellenburg as founder of Schaffhausen monastery. The proliferation of lay subjects represents an expansion of iconography to embrace a social class that previously figured only exceptionally in donor representation.9
A second aspect of transformation concerns the written record. This period experienced unprecedented writing activity, particularly in the realm of record-keeping and historical accounting, and indeed an enormous number of texts produced in this period concern gift-giving that record patrons’ actions, notably in charters, annals and chronicles. At Clermont, one could regard the inscription as a mere titulus that does little more than name the figure and ambivalently identify his role. But the inscription’s presence may be suggestive in subtle ways of donorship’s new textual environment.
This paper argues that allusions to textual culture combined with an emerging class of patron yielded a novel kind of donor imagery. The resulting iconography situated laymen and laywomen in a culture of textual, and specifically diplomatic, production. The emerging image of patronly performance reveals something about the ongoing process of defining what it meant to be a donor: as suggested here, donorship’s pictorialisation increasingly textualised the patronly performance, just as the performance increasingly textualised the laity.
Images of lay donorship multiplied in the 11th and 12th centuries, but as noted previously, there was already a tradition of royal, and especially imperial, imagery throughout the Early Middle Ages. These often showed the sovereign proffering a work in miniature or with a book. The 10th century includes several exceptional examples of non-royal donors, and these images show either a miniature church model (as at Goldbach, cf. supra) or a book offering.10 The latter scenes by extension implicate the layperson as a contributor to the literate preoccupations of the religious class in that the layperson provides a Gospel book, sacramentary or other codex needed for clerical or monastic use.
Those examples are sufficiently rare to merit our attention, yet what is distinctly novel in the Romanesque period is the appearance of images that depict the donor as an actor within the textual culture specific to donorship. By the start of the 11th century, some images of offering, sponsoring or commissioning a gift emphasise the donation as having an expressly notarial component; that is, a textual record is shown as part of the patronage performance. This textualisation of patronly action engages a different set of reference points in cultural practice than does the traditional model-in-miniature motif. This is the case whether the gift is a book or something else entirely.
When, for instance, Hugh the Poitevin set in writing the history of his abbey at Vézelay along with the abbey’s legal documents, the resulting chronicle-cartulary (c. 1170) commemorated the abbey’s 9th-century founders, Girart of Roussillon and his wife Berthe, with portrait images (Figure 21.3). The image shows Girart holding a vegetal sceptre and gesturing across his body as his wife touchingly places her hand on her husband’s shoulder. These portraits inaugurate the cartulary proper, which begins with Girart’s testamentum, the text that identifies him as the monastery’s founder.11 The image departs from the more familiar iconography of a kneeling presentation and, given the juxtaposition to the text, works instead to establish the couple as part of a textual tradition of gift recording.
The figures’ juxtaposition to the neighbouring text even confers on them a kind of authorship, in so far as their donation is conveyed exclusively as a textual event and not as part of a conveyance scene. In fact, their own bodies become part of the donation’s textualisation, as they occupy the first letter of the act (‘Omnibus’). While the traditional visual language of donorship – showing a kneeling, offering donor – is discarded, the motif of the ‘portrait’ medallion aligns with other iconographic traditions, notably funerary and dynastic. Indeed, the presence of portraits to introduce a testamentum suggests those specific commemorative traditions, which are also in keeping with the general archival nature of a cartulary. Cartularies proliferated only at the end of the 10th century as a means of preserving an institution’s acts, quickly becoming common notarial equipment of clerical, monastic and eventually lay archives. Although relatively few cartularies from the period contain images, the medium provided illuminators a ready occasion to depict donors as textual agents of their actions.
The Vézelay work demonstrates one way this was done, but frequently in cartularies the act of giving was represented with the aid of a depicted charter. For example, a combined cartulary-chronicle from San Vincenzo al Volturno (Molise) records gifts made by the local duke Gisulf that led to the monastery’s foundation (Figure 21.4).12 The privileges and lands he offers are absent from the scene – that is, they are not figured with a kneeling donor – yet they are nonetheless evoked through the image of the scroll, a motif that suggests an enacted transfer of a document (before an altar, no less) that would have been part of the donation’s diplomatic ceremony.13 In this case, the scroll also depicts some written text, the opening words of the invocation, thus underscoring its standing as the charter upon which the duke’s gifts were recorded. The textual implication of the duke’s patronage is thus in effect doubled, as it is shown first symbolically through the performance of the proffered scroll and second through the transcribed document that the image accompanies. In a sense, the kneeling offer of a scroll takes the place of the traditional gift-in-miniature motif. But it is not so simple as a motif’s migration from one offered object to another; the importance of diplomatic praxis is fundamental to this new object, as is discussed further below.
The motif of transferring a charter became something of a visual trope for cartularies. In the Libro de las Estampas, a compilation of royal testamenta enumerating the respective donations to the cathedral of León, each of the seven royal portraits is shown wielding a charter with a dangling seal (Figure 21.5).14 In the Tumbo A of Santiago de Compostela many of the depicted royal figures hold charters in images that precede their transcribed acts.15 The Cartulary of Mont-Saint-Michel also includes several images of donors holding written scrolls.16 Patrons holding scrolls were so common in later medieval art that it is easy to forget how strangely novel the motif was just a short time before.
In practical terms the scroll motif resolves a pictorial problem for the artist, namely how to represent the sundry gifts and privileges that may be contained in a single donation. In the Libro de las Estampas the portraits preface texts that recount the extent of the subject’s largesse over a lifetime. A single depicted scroll can symbolically account for them all. Yet the prominent inclusion of a represented document is more than a convenience. In the León manuscript, Countess Sancha deliberately clutches a scroll with its conspicuously pendant seal, even while being brutally murdered by her nephew (Figure 21.6).17 Sancha brandishes the scroll (inscribed ‘ego sancia comitissa confirmo’) as if its contents – confirming her pious largesse to the Church – would parry the blow. The painted scroll stands in for the various written records – the actual diplomatic production – that she has signed and sealed over a lifetime and that here collectively provide her defence and hope for salvation. In all of these images, the scroll motif acquires greater meaning because of what it suggests about the donor’s historic relationship to diplomatic process and, more generally, the increasing importance of written texts in that process.
Charters had long recorded gifts and various other engagements for institutions and individuals, but the culture of written acts, including written forms of donorship, intensified in the 11th and 12th centuries to complement dependency on orality and memory. Michael Clanchy noted that while approximately 2,000 written acts survive for the entire Anglo-Saxon period, one could conjecture at least eight million from the 13th century alone in England.18 Among surviving private acts in Italy, A. Bartoli Langeli tallies 500 for the 8th century and over 9,000 for the 11th and another 9,000 for the 12th.19 To be sure, these estimates also reflect low survival rates for documents produced in the Early Middle Ages, but the later boom in record-keeping is undeniable.20
The phenomenon embraced not simply the literate, clerical ranks. Rosamond McKitterick, Alice Rio and others have demonstrated the importance of written production to the laity, including non-literates, at least as early as the late 9th century.21 Non-literates understood that written documents bound them to duties and also guaranteed their rights. As Matthew Innes has argued, ‘the ability to read, still less to write, a charter did not need to be widespread for the written word to play a central role in legal practice’.22 Laymen eventually achieved a form of pragmatic literacy in the 11th and 12th centuries,23 suggesting even, as Clanchy has claimed, that ‘lay literacy grew out of [the new] bureaucracy’ of written production.24
The performance of donorship in the 11th and 12th centuries thus played out within a culture that increasingly expected, and indeed imposed, a textual element. The diplomatic expectations of the textual elements were themselves increasingly systematised in terms of script, language, formulae and validation marks, not to mention the performed rites and ceremonies, yielding new legal ‘standards’ of instrumentum publicum. All these elements of diplomatic practice provided a new kind of stage for the performance of donorship, and, as already suggested, for the representation of that performance. The laity’s role in the visual discourse of ‘diplomatic’ patronage implicates more strategies than can be discussed here, but the following remarks isolate three specific ways that can be taken as representative: 1) instances in which laymen appear as agents of manuscript production; 2) projections of laymen as writers; and 3) laymen as readers. Proffering a scroll may have been the most common means to associate a patron with the diplomatic performance, but there were other ways to construct donorship as a ‘literate’ act.
As a final preliminary remark, it is worth noting that the historical figures discussed previously – Countess Sancha (d. 1045), Girart of Roussillon (d. 877?) and Duke Gisulf (d. 706) – all lived long before their visual representation as ‘literate’ donors. (Further examples are found in the works discussed later.) Though donations before the 10th or 11th century were never not always recorded, these figures were involved in the production of charters, including some that recorded gifts. Nonetheless, it is striking that the 12th-century manuscripts in which they appear bestow on these ancestral figures – in spite of their belonging to a time dominated by oral tradition – 12th-century expectations for specific signs of diplomatic culture. A pervasive discourse of writing in the 11th and 12th centuries bore so greatly on notions of what it meant to be a donor that the past could, in images, be re-written.
One long-standing iconographic tradition concerning lay patronage involves the gift of a book, as noted above. In the 11th and 12th centuries, however, a book in a donor image could suggest something else. In a notarial context – in cartularies, for example – the book could suggest not so much a gift as the figure’s role as legal authority in the diplomatic process.
The mid-12th-century cartulary of St-Pierre at Vierzon (Cher) includes a half-page illumination of the 9th-century lord of Vierzon, Ambrannus, kneeling in typical donor fashion (Figure 21.7).25 He kneels before the local monastery’s abbot to present a bound codex. His actual gift was not a manuscript, but rather, as the text following the image says, lands and several churches. The codex he presents could signify the symbolic importance of those gifts, made in three separate acts; that is, his gifts were so numerous and important that a single scroll, as seen in the previous examples, would not have done justice to his magnanimity. It is more likely, however, that the offered codex represents the entirety of this very manuscript, Vierzon’s cartulary, making a statement on all the diversely transcribed acts and the entirety of the monastery’s agreements since its 9th-century foundation.
This illumination, the largest in the manuscript and covering nearly one-third of the page, comes early in the codex and after a set of prestigious bulls and diplomas. While those preceding acts establish papal, episcopal and royal privileges, the act introduced by this illumination inaugurates texts of a more ‘local’ flavour. Ambrannus’s lordship was decisive for the monastery and a source of justification for the monks when claiming their authority over neighbouring lands and a nearby monastery. This makes Ambrannus in this image not so much the patron, in the modern sense of the term, but rather a public authority exercising his legal oversight to the archival collection.26 Some of the monastery’s key possessions were in dispute when the cartulary was made, which may explain why the monastic artist chose to draw upon a long-ago lord to plead for the perpetual legitimacy of past agreements.
His legal commitment is confirmed by his two witnesses – a veiled woman (presumably his wife, mentioned in the acts) and a bearded man behind her – both of whom seem to look at and gesture towards the book. The notion of witness is important (the abbot has his own witnesses as well) as it evokes diplomatic ritual. Showing Ambrannus as ‘giver’ of the collected acts, thus endorsing the acts’ authoritative transcription into codex, the image makes him the lay representative – the local public authority – in a scene of diplomatic ritual.
The transformation of the familiar kneeling donor motif into a figure that offers his oversight to an institutional archive embraces the new place cartularies and records occupied in 12th-century society. Vierzon after all, produced a cartulary (with nearly a dozen images), so it was not unaware of the importance of written records and their diverse archival forms. What is striking, however, is how the image makes Ambrannus, through his personal handling of the monastery’s archive, a diplomatic representative. Ambrannus’s offering of the complete codex posits him as diplomatic agent for the monastery’s records, those of the deep past and also those to come.
A remarkable image from a secular cartulary conveys a similar message (Figure 21.8). The opening folio of the Liber Feudorum Maior (LFM) shows Alfonso (d. 1196), count of Barcelona and king of Aragón, conversing with Ramón de Caldes, dean of the cathedral and keeper of the count’s archives. The two exchange a sheet of parchment, as more sheets lay in a heap behind them.27 Their conversation concerns the careful selection of the documents that Alfonso will charge Ramón with transcribing, resulting in the codex in which the illumination appears.28 To the right, a smaller figure, a scribe, busily works at a desk, presumably already recording the selected charters onto codex-ready parchment.
The LFM, originally in two volumes of nearly 900 folios, collected documents stretching from the 10th century to Alfonso’s own time. The white scraps depict in legible lettering the names of historical persons entered in the cartulary’s many acts, adding a touch of anecdotal authenticity to the mise-en-abyme. While the acts deal with a range of affairs, they generally serve to confirm – both in their subject but also in their geographic range – numerous gifts, particularly those that establish Alfonso’s land rights in Catalonia and surrounding areas, reinforcing claims at a time when he sought to consolidate his territorial power.29
The surprising opening illumination provides a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the cartulary’s creation. Ramon is undoubtedly the master of the archive (as his dedicatory preface following the image makes perfectly clear), but the image suggests Alfonso pored over each document himself and gave his approval. It asks us to believe that he drew upon his own discernment, perhaps upon his political but also diplomatic sensibilities, to determine the appropriateness of each document’s inclusion in the new codex. Such studious review effectively reconfirms the commitments, for one imagines that any irrelevant or dubious document would not have passed muster. It is as if Alfonso’s personal consultation of each charter offers a new signature by his own hand – manu mea, per the customary phrase – as once again courtly witnesses look on to observe the new ‘diplomatic’ performance. The image places Alfonso in the role of agent in the cartulary’s production, a symbolic overseer of stored records and guarantor of their archival value, and as in the Vierzon example, it makes him the validating authority even of acts passed centuries before.
Alfonso’s depicted investment in the diplomatic archive may be exceptional, but other contemporary images insinuate lay donors’ involvement in diplomatic production. In a general way, for instance, patrons shown transferring scrolls as representative of their gifts evince personal involvement in the diplomatic process. Sometimes the scroll’s pictorial role receives special emphasis. The centrality accorded scrolls in the Libro de las Estampas, for example, suggests their role as more than mere visual props. The image of Ordoño III (d. 956) shows the king handling differently his kingly attribute (the sceptre) and his charter (Figure 21.5). The latter he grasps energetically with both hands, while the sceptre wielded in the crook of one hand seems to get in the way.30 The inclusion of a sceptre is expected. Yet if the sceptre represents the investment of royal authority, one could imagine the scroll, in parallel fashion, as an attribute too, namely of diplomatic authority. Indeed, the image’s acute emphasis on tactile engagement with the charter scroll, as elsewhere in the codex, seems to invest it with more than mere symbolic proxy for a visually absent gift. The pictorial emphasis suggests the charter’s material significance, as if the energetic embrace of scrolls is the artist’s way of showing the rulers’ personal implication in his own diplomatic production.
Some examples remove the ambiguity. For a royal charter recording the gift of tithes from Pedro I (d. 1104) of Aragon to the bishop of Huesca, a line-drawn image shows Pedro presenting a charter (Figure 21.9).31 More precisely, he extends a wax tablet (discussed later) to the bishop (Figure 21.10). The image thus records for posterity an imagined scene of diplomatic conveyance. The diplomatic quality is further generated by the image’s placement: coming at the end of the text and just adjacent to Pedro’s signing phrase, it assumes the role of a pictorial signature. Pedro’s signature – ‘hoc signum manu mea facio’ – constitutes a personal enunciation that bestows on its accompanying imago the weight of pictorial ego. The image and signature work together as joint aspects of a deictic utterance, a self-declaration of personal implication, just as they are two forms of notarial validation.
Most importantly, the image specifically renders the king as scribe: while he extends a wax tablet in one hand, he clearly holds a stylus in the other. Not content merely to bestow a scroll or charter as seen previously, Pedro has taken it upon himself to write out his donation. The choice of a wax tablet in the scene is also significant. Tablets, apart from their utilitarian uses, participated in a particular visual discourse concerning practices of writing.32 They appear in scenes that highlight the activities of scribes and authors; sometimes their presence highlights the ephemeral quality of wax writing vis-à-vis parchment writing, and sometimes their presence also underscores the orality of an event or performance.33
The charter’s wax tablet offers such allusions. It alludes to the donation ceremony and the initial oral agreement, as it suggests a hastily noted initial textual rendering before being ultimately recorded for posterity onto parchment by a chancery scribe. The image of the wax tablet strives to recover lost immediacy, even authenticity, by imaging Pedro’s personal authorship in an initial, fugitive medium. It is a reminder of immediacy that a simple parchment record might otherwise allow one to forget.
Even more remarkable is that this particular parchment is itself a later confirmation, a 12th-century copy of the 1098 original. The original survives, and it is undecorated, so this imagined scribal donation scene is this copy’s invention. That fact suggests that the episcopal chancery of the mid 12th century desired a visualisation of Pedro’s commitments, perhaps as a means of re-authenticating the act in more than just a juridical sense: the performance of the donor writing carried great weight and was worth memorialising pictorially. With the signature of Pedro’s successor, Alfonso, added to the confirmation copy, the new document constructs an implied scribal genealogy from one ruler to the next. It projects for Alfonso a heritage of ‘literate’ donorship that the episcopal chancery must have felt strengthened its archival copy.
A similarly retrospective mise-en-scène of writerly diplomatic is on display in the chronicle-cartulary of Saint-Martin-des-Champs (Figure 21.11).34 Two illuminations on one folio present a two-part performance of Henry I’s patronage towards the Paris abbey. The upper scene signals Henry’s agency as founder of the new church. It shows him enthroned on a folding stool under a royal canopy; he gestures towards the church that he had provided for in his foundation charter of 1059–60 but had not yet seen built by the time of his death in August 1060.
In contrast to the top image, the bottom of the page features a scene of royal audience (Figure 21.12). A half-dozen tonsured clerics approach and petition the crowned, seated king. Henry addresses the group, brandishing a curling sheet of parchment with one hand as he wields a stylus in the other. The illumination reproduces legibly the words ‘Libertas æcclesiæ Sancti Martini’ that clearly identify the document’s gist. The stylus is positioned just beneath the king’s signature: ‘Henrici regis signu[m]’. More precisely, the stylus indicates the mark of the cross, reinforcing the idea that Henry’s own hand – manu mea – has made the cross, validating his signature that ratifies the charter’s contents. The staged scene allows one to imagine Henry signing the document just before handing it over the waiting clerics. The clerics hold still additional parchment charters, no doubt to suggest that each of those, in turn, will receive confirmation by the king’s own hand.
The scenes juxtapose two kinds of actions within a performance of patronage: Henry commands or supervises the foundation above, while he exercises his writerly, diplomatic role below. This juxtaposition offers a stark demonstration of patronage iconography’s shifting concerns, from that privileging the donor with his church model (above), to a scene implicating the donor in a textual, and specifically diplomatic, performance (below). In the latter scene, furthermore, the gifts spelled out are intangibles (the ‘libertates’) difficult to pictorialise but which a written document could elaborate and guarantee. These two pendant images suggest that in the new diplomatic culture the gesture of foundation found its confirmation not solely in the erected church, but in its diplomatic trace.
When the church was completed in 1067, Henry’s son, Philip, presided over the dedication.35 The chronicle-cartulary, consisting of just three acts, was probably completed about that time.36 The first document is one of Henry’s, the foundation charter itself that is the subject of the illuminations. ‘Libertas’ on the brandished scroll, beyond its obvious message, may also refer to a passage in which Henry rhetorically makes an oath to the canons.37 Philip issued the two other diplomas included in the cartulary, one of which in particular (no. 2) confirms the liberties granted by his father. As at Huesca, picturing of writing – played out as notarial performance – was part of the creative ‘re-validation’ of earlier agreements by a successor. The retrospective casting of an earlier donor as a stylus-holding performer of diplomatic practice may have lent greater authenticity through an imagined ‘literate’ ancestry.
Prior to the widespread increase in textual records, performance and orality – and the memory thereof – were essential to agreements and transactions. The written document, with its signatures and wax seals of authentication, translated performance and memory into a material trace for posterity. Cartularies were direct products of this interest in re-presenting one kind of material trace (sealed charter) as another (bound codex), with all of the archival advantages a cartulary offered.38 Sometimes an interest in transforming the material document spread to monumental contexts, as donations and privileges were sometimes recorded on church façades and choirs, and even on city gates and bridges. These inscriptions often used the language, formulas and even validating signs of contemporary diplomatic. At Sant’Antimo in Tuscany, the steps leading to the altar include an inscription of a local layman’s gifts for a re-foundation (Figure 21.13).39 The inscription continued onto a column flanking the altar, containing the eschatocol, witness and notary names, and date. Its location before and around the altar is pregnant with sacred meaning, and not least because, in keeping with common practice, the initial donation would have been made at a ceremony that included an oath upon the altar. At the Asturian church San Salvador de Fuentes, a 12th-century inscription on the jambs of an interior door transcribes the foundation gift made long before by a local layman in the 1020s, listing three ‘signing’ witnesses (Figures 21.14, 21.15).40 Inscriptions such as these do not qualify as charters per se, as their standing in legal use is unclear at best, but like parchment charters they constituted a material trace of an earlier performance, and they clearly aimed to affect diplomatic style.41 Some inscriptions even emulated the visual effect of a charter, as at Treviño (Burgos), where a rectangular relief recording the founding donation by a local layman imitates a charter form, including even a seal (Figure 21.16).42
Figure 21.13
Sant’Antimo: donation inscription before and around the altar (photo: Robert A. Maxwell)
As an object of public regard, these monumentalised acts entered the public discourse.43 Their importance may have been more as images of text than as legible documents, as they must have been a challenge to read even for the most accomplished lector. Regardless of their legibility, however, the public rendering of the document promoted the named lay figures as actors in a textual discourse. It rendered patrons as performers in the social community of textual production.
These public images at the same time transform the spectator into a diplomatic ‘participant’. They draw the viewer into a witnessing role, insofar as the inscribed image constitutes a recreation (of sorts) of an earlier diplomatic performance. Given that acts of donation were often not located finitely in the past but were revived when disputes arose – even to the point where any living witnesses to the original agreement might be summoned, or the original charter was produced for inspection – the monumental inscriptions present a renewed diplomatic staging. The public viewer becomes party to that restaging.
Donor images could emphasise readership in a similarly public way, drawing attention to the donor as the reading subject of his own donation’s diplomatic ceremony. On a relief from Clérieu (Drôme) a layman dressed in a long mantle sits facing a clerical figure, recognisable as such by the tonsure, mantle and incised cross (Figure 21.17).44 The cleric holds a book and demonstratively points at its open page, as if inviting his interlocutor, the layman, to see what is written. The relief’s inscription, while difficult to interpret, qualifies a certain Hugh as ‘magister’, a title that (along with the incised cross) has led scholars to consider him a Templar. It names another individual ‘Silvius’, recently identified as Silvius II, lord of Clérieu.45 The scene thus portrays the cleric holding up the text of the layman’s gift for his inspection. The composition fixes Silvius in a visual discourse of written text. It presents him as a ‘reader’ in the sense that he is shown in the act of recognising the probative textual record.46
A somewhat different, yet still readerly portrayal commands a tympanum scene at the small church of Mervilliers (Eure-et-Loire) (Figure 21.18).47 A local knight, dressed in chain mail and a helmet and identified in the inscription as Rembaud, kneels as if in an attitude of vassalage before St George, patron of milites, to offer him a gift in the form of a vase or pyx-reliquary.48 Behind St George stands a priest, who acknowledges the gift by his blessing gesture. The priest stands before an altar bearing a Eucharistic chalice that is itself blessed by the hand of God emerging from the tympanum’s frame.49 Further to the right, crouching in the corner, a small tonsured scribe busily records the donation. His parchment scroll continues in a ribbon encircling the entire tympanum to provide the sculpture with a frame of text. The scribe’s text appears not incised but in relief, just as ink sits raised in relief upon parchment. It reads: ‘Herbert, just as William, granted, and the knight Rembaud his descendent transferred to me [his] present [terrestrial] treasures in order to gain those that have no end’.50 Rembaud hopes that with his gift of an earthly possession, he will receive in return the eternal gifts of Heaven, juxtaposing an act of giving to an eschatological purpose. The reciprocity described in the inscription is a classic feature of medieval gift economy.
The inscription’s nod to forebears Herbert and William makes the scene, like others discussed previously, a retrospective confirmation.51 As in those other works, the scribe at Mervilliers writes this patronage performance as a new charter; he is recording not an original performance but a notarial confirmation of an original performance that is renewed in front of a contemporary signatory, Rembaud. Visually, too, the composition emphasises this new notarial process: the scribe’s confirmation text literally circumscribes the event. Unfurling around the tympanum, the charter encompasses the full experience of the diplomatic act, embracing at once the terrestrial and celestial, the priestly and lay, the liturgical and feudal. This performance of patronage is rendered through a textual prism, just as it is also the written word that provides the stage for the actors to assume their roles. The scene makes Rembaud as much the reader of the text as he is its producer: without his generous gesture, this textual performance would not take place.52
The Clermont capital assembles several of these codes, making the donor a reading actor in a textualised performance. The layman Stephanus points to a book, but unlike at Clérieu it is an angel that holds the codex (Figure 21.19). With one hand the angel graces the inscribed lettering of Stephanus’s name, while with the other he guides the layman’s hand over the inscription. Stephanus’s fingers point to the precise words spelling out his agency – ‘fieri jussit’ – although as noted previously, the phrase lacks precision to identify Stephanus’s particular intervention. In the context of the present discussion, one could understand the book as a medium of diplomatic, as a cartulary or other notarial record – and indeed, the paired figures with text between them recall somewhat the motif of proffering a scroll, discussed previously (cf. Duke Gisulf). The book’s role, however, is more likely symbolic. Prompted by the angel’s presence, the open codex surely represents the Book of Life, although it is not out of the question that an ecclesiastical institution may have considered their archival records of gifts as having bearing on the latter. Stephanus’s generosity would earn him mention in the liber vitae – which he seems to read – with the hope of receiving heaven’s counter-gift, salvation.53
The scene emphasises the material, textual recording of patronage in other important respects, most notably in Stephanus’s touching, indeed fingering, of the written record, a detail also noted in examples discussed previously. The tactile performance may have reminded viewers of the phrase ‘manu mea’ and that here would be introduced by an angelic ‘scribe’. The touching hand could also be construed a gesture of guided reading, as at Clérieu, as Stephanus personally confirms the donation’s material trace as text. Of course, the materiality of the gift is registered on another level by the miniature leafy capital just above the book. Yet even while Stephanus’s donation is rendered by the miniature capital he offers – employing the venerable donor-and-his-model motif – the scene’s imagery recasts the donation – and the old motif – into a textual performance.
Though this is the only face that records the donation, the capital’s flanking scenes of Psychomachia, where Caritas and Largitas trample vices, complement the donor motif’s message of salvational economy (Figure 21.20). Like the battling Virtues, Stephanus too, participates in the triumph over a vice: Avarice spills out from the adjacent Psychomachia face and thus finds himself defeated not only by Largitas but also trampled by Stephanus. Stephanus’s feet land upon Avarice’s clasped hands that mimic a vassalage gesture, and indeed mimic Stephanus’s own hand above that is received by the angel. The message is clear: vassalage to Avarice is broken, as Stephanus’s victory was won through his material largesse to Notre-Dame. That the angel’s gesture towards Stephanus resembles the taking of hands in the vassalage rite, only further reminds one that gifts to the Church were above all commitments to saints and that the saints reciprocally offered their patronage, or protection. All of these elements conjure the complex oral, aural and increasingly diplomatic cast of donorship in the 12th century, and of the new visual vocabulary deployed to convey that intertwined complexity.
Figure 21.20
Clermont: Notre-Dame-du-Port, hemicycle capital. Psychomachia (photo: Robert A. Maxwell)
Brian Stock’s fundamental study of literacy in the 12th century offered a new framework for reconsidering the traditional binary model of literacy/illiteracy.54 Stock proposed instead a model that included shades of orality, literacy and textuality, wherein literacy was a middle ground. Stock’s literacy described not so much a medium of communication, as a shifting, interpretive cultural space that derived its discursive existence from the opposing poles of oral and textual means of communication. Scenes of donation, with their inclusion of diplomatic practices, could be considered to occupy that middle space described by Stock. Representations of donor performance in these centuries drew on both oral traditions and textual novelties, the two bleeding into one another to produce ultimately an image that suggests a new relationship of the donor to past oral and present textual cultural conditions. These images furthermore project a form of ‘literacy’ based not on the layman’s ability to read or write, but on his belonging to a culture that imposed new ideas about the place of writing in society. The rise in diplomatic practice and the importance of written documents redrew expectations for how patronage could be, or should be, visualised.
It would probably not be accurate to interpret these images as tacit celebrations of advances in ‘literacy’ by the laity or of their mastery of textual knowledge, even if both were indeed on the rise.55 Instead, these images may present a more sober reality: the laity’s subjection to a textual discourse that it scarcely controlled and only modestly mastered. Whereas donors had long benefited from the majestic, even auric, power of donation ceremonies, with their gestural rites, sworn oaths and witnesses, these images reinforced the rising diplomatic component of donations. The laity was obliged to keep step with the new textual discourse of donation, and those responsible for these images – ecclesiastical institutions for the most part – may have wanted to show patrons as subjects within that discourse. The fact that many of the examples are also retrospective scenes featuring ancestral figures only further suggests that these institutions understood the importance of showing patronage, even that of the past, as occupying a place in a textual diplomatic community and of the gifts themselves having a textual history. While rising diplomatic practice clearly impacted how lay patronage was performed, the transformation clearly also involved the pictorial assimilation of patrons into a discourse of diplomatic literacy, with all of the social changes and ideological impositions implied.
