MARIE WAS THE third daughter of Philip the Handsome and Juana the Mad, but she knew neither parent. In 1506, when she was four months old, they left her in the Netherlands and set off to seize the crown of Castile. They never returned. Philip died in Spain and Juana was confined in the fortress of Tordesillas for the rest of her life. So Marguerite raised Marie at Mechelen, understanding that the latest Habsburg princess was destined from the moment of her birth to play her part in Maximilian’s plan of controlling Europe through marriage. There were many sad parallels in the destinies of Marguerite and Marie: both were the marital tools of Maximilian until a beloved husband was carried off by death, both had to assume their brothers’ roles as Regents of the Netherlands. Despite very different personalities, each prized the Arnolfini portrait, though not necessarily for the same reasons. For Maximilian, each new grandchild was a fresh asset, girls as welcome as boys. He made all six of them kings or queens, even though Burgundy, their heritage, had only been a duchy. He promised Marie, at the age of six months, to an as yet unborn Hungarian prince (Louis). This was part of another double deal in which Maximilian betrothed his grandson and granddaughter to the infant siblings of the King of Hungary and Bohemia (Austria’s troublesome neighbour). Having linked the Habsburgs to south-west Europe, he intended that the new marriages would ensure the domination of central and eastern Europe.
Like her aunt Marguerite, Marie devoted her life to the service of the Habsburgs. The pattern was dreadfully familiar. In 1514, Marguerite, herself sent to France to be married when a very small child, had the duty of organising Marie’s departure at the age of eight, with an enormous retinue of tapestries, furniture and gold and silver plate. Marie went first to Vienna to live under Maximilian’s supervision until she was old enough to participate in the long-planned grand double wedding in St Stephen’s Cathedral, when she was nine. During her time in Austria, she mastered the German language and fashions: Marguerite displayed portraits of her niece in the family gallery, dressed like the little queen that she was, in a robe of cloth of gold draped with black velvet, wearing a necklace, a ring and the wide-brimmed bejewelled flat cap of Germanic style.
Despite the great wedding Marie did not see her husband again for several years, during which time Louis succeeded his father but found his crown challenged by rival claimants. It was only after Maximilian’s death in 1519 and her brother Charles’s election as emperor that Marie was allowed to join Louis, when the warring factions in Hungary became temporarily reconciled under the threat of invasion by the Turks. If Hungary fell, then the whole empire was at risk. Marie was at last dispatched from Austria, and sailed down the Danube to join Louis at Buda. They were both sixteen.
For a girl brought up in the refined ambience of Marguerite’s Mechelen, Marie had to expand her horizons drastically. If Austria had seemed alien, Hungary was a far greater shock, for it was an impoverished, primitive country with an impenetrable language and cliques of fractious nobles more interested in fighting each other than combining against the Turks. Magyars bore a traditional hatred towards Germans, so the alliance of their king to the emperor’s sister was not well received, nor was it ameliorated by Marie’s Habsburgian hauteur and energetic domination over her charming, powerless, penniless husband. This was like Marguerite’s relationship with the amiable Philibert of Savoy, and proved excellent training for a regent. While the Turks massed on their borders, the young couple indulged their passion for hunting, parties and tournaments, but it was Marie who received the blame for their extravagance and frivolity.
Hans Maler, Marie of Hungary
In 1526, the troops of Suleiman the Magnificent massacred the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohacs. King Louis died, not gallantly in the field but drowning while trying to escape. It took weeks for his body to be recognised. Without even knowing whether he was still alive, Marie fled to Vienna and sought the protection of her brother Ferdinand, whom Charles had put in charge of his Austrian domains. It was the first time the siblings had met. Ferdinand reported the terrible news to Marguerite: ‘as to the queen my sister, she is about ten miles from Vienna, very unhappy and desolate as you may imagine’. Marguerite responded: ‘if that you should1 send or write to her, I beg you to recommend me to her, and console her for her misfortune as much as possible, and comfort her and forward a letter which I have written to her’.
For the next three years, Marie had no role in life. Single, childless, with no responsibilities or duties, always short of money, she flung herself into travelling, hunting and religion. She refused to marry the King of Scotland (which upset Charles and Marguerite’s strategy of linking the Scots to the Netherlanders rather than the French) and she refused to return to Mechelen when Marguerite invited her in 1530. But this was her last act of defiance. Marguerite’s unexpected death at the end of 1530 left a vacancy for the regency of the Netherlands, for which Marie, born in Ghent, was the obvious, and indeed only candidate. She accepted Charles’s summons and came back to her native land in March 1531.
As regent, Marguerite had always been dominated by her father Maximilian, and not entirely trusted by her nephew Charles. He placed far more confidence in Marie, the little sister with whom he had shared his earliest childhood yet had not seen for fifteen years, and allowed her greater power than he had ever granted Marguerite. Charles and Marie corresponded frequently, and she learned how to get her own way by the occasional threat of resignation. For him, the Netherlands were a source of finance for his complex European policies and wars, and he expected Marie to increase taxes on the reluctant provinces when necessary, while keeping the rival noble families under control. Being regent entailed being in charge of seventeen separate provinces, each with its own laws, customs and institutions. She ruled through the three councils that Charles had established, a more effective structure than Marguerite ever had. In fact, Marie claimed that her late aunt had not left matters in a very good state because she was too old and had been serving for too long. There may have been some truth in this, but it failed to recognise their different positions. Marie was able to take decisions in her own right, and Charles respected her skills and local understanding.
Compared to Marguerite, Marie has attracted less interest from historians. A recent biographer, Etienne Piret, depicted an enigmatic character and stressed the strong contradiction between the image she projected of herself in her letters – a submissive, weak person constantly driven by self-doubt – and the way her contemporaries saw her, as a tough, unpopular woman who scared those who had to work with her. For nineteenth-century historians, a woman who led the Netherlands through three wars and rode like an Amazon lacked the feminine qualities that made Marguerite a more sympathetic figure. In fact both women were attempting to do what was perceived as a man’s job in their distinctive ways. The role of regent was problematic enough, because a delegated ruler inevitably lacked the authority of the true heir. It was additionally hard for a woman, who had to protect her reputation yet reveal no feminine weakness. Marie once commented bitterly that it was impossible for a woman, especially a widow, to rule in peace or war, no matter how excellent her ability, because she would never be as feared or respected as a man.
One way of acquiring respect was the creation of an official image, and Marie’s artists (like Marguerite’s) responded to this. The Queen of Hungary was no longer shown as a fashionable figure in a jaunty feathered hat, but a widow in a stark black and white gown which draped her tiny frame. Her long thin face, with its prominent undershot Habsburg jaw had a grave, even grim expression. Yet this vision of piety and rectitude was only half the story, and there was a real contrast between Marie’s official image and her personal life. Hunting was her obsession. The English scholar Roger Ascham (former tutor to Princess Elizabeth Tudor) had the opportunity to observe Marie when he was serving as secretary to the British ambassador to Charles V. He was awed: ‘she is a virago;2 she is never so well as when she leaps on a horse and hunts all day long’. She was even said to select her ladies-in-waiting according to how well they rode. She kept three pet hounds in the house, as well as maintaining various packs, and had many fine horses and falcons. She was even appointed Brabant’s Master of the Hunt. Ascham’s jibe of ‘virago’ was probably incurred because she controversially rode astride like a man (unheard of in an age when women went side-saddle) in order to be able to jump better. This also meant dressing like a man, which is how she is depicted in the set of hunting tapestries now in the Louvre.
Marie was more concerned to demonstrate the grandeur of the Habsburgs than Marguerite had been. She moved her headquarters from the relatively modest Hotel Savoy in Mechelen to the Coudenberg palace in Brussels, a sprawling Gothic building which Marguerite had seldom used. Marie turned it into the largest palace in Europe, extending and refurbishing it as befitted her official residence. One reason for this was its magnificent game park, where she continued to indulge her passion for hunting, but she was also aware that Brussels was the crossroads of Europe, and that there were always important visitors to impress. She knocked down one old wing in order to add a massive new galleried extension, and built a new chapel in renaissance style. In the grounds, where there was already a vineyard and a menagerie with bears, lions, ostriches, camels, leopards, and turkeys from the New World, she added lawns and flower gardens, lakes and fountains.
At first, she retained the Savoy Hotel at Mechelen and kept on Marguerite’s former staff, including Etienne Lullier, who looked after the library and the cabinets of curiosities. But when the building suffered serious damage after a storm in 1546, she moved its contents and the art collections, including the Arnolfini portrait, to her other properties. These were tokens of Charles V’s gratitude for her indomitable service. In 1546, he granted her the rights, revenues and estates of Turnhout to the north-east of Antwerp, a prosperous settlement that also offered excellent hunting, and of Binche near the French border in Hainault. This was a traditional dower of Burgundian princesses, a lucrative domain of nearly fifty villages, over whom Marie acquired seigneurial rights and the power to levy taxes, fees and fines. In both places she started major building schemes. At Turnhout, where she occasionally held hunting parties, she converted the old castle into a modern renaissance-style building. At Binche, she started from scratch, using the well-travelled architect Jacques Dubroeucq to create a fairytale palace to rival that of the French kings at Fontainebleau. Marie was well aware of French taste and style through her sister Eleanor, now widow of François I of France (a singularly unhappy marriage), who returned to the Netherlands to live with Marie after being widowed in 1547.
The palace at Binche was the wonder of the world. It was where Marie held the legendary festivities (rivalling the chivalrous fêtes of her great-great-grandfather, van Eyck’s Duke Philip the Good) to celebrate her nephew Philip’s arrival in the Netherlands as Charles’s designated successor in 1540. At dinner in the ‘enchanted chamber’, food arrived on a mechanical ascending and descending table while planets and stars circled in the artificial heavens above. There were tournaments and quests involving dragon-ships, islands, special effects of thunder and rain, and a magic sword that could only be withdrawn from its jasper rock by a masked knight who eventually revealed himself to be Philip.
Marie surrounded Binche with gardens full of exotic plants, fountains and statuary that copied the antique sculptures in the Pope’s collection. Beyond was an extensive game park, in which she built a small and luxurious hunting lodge called Mariemont. To decorate her palace, she employed hundreds of specialist craftsmen, and commissioned stained glass, frescoes, statues, tapestries, carvings, stucco and paintings. The finest architectural feature was the grand gallery, with a coffered ceiling like the Pantheon, at one end of which were Marie’s apartments and at the other end Eleanor’s. Marie’s bedroom contained nine tapestries woven with silver thread, and even her wardrobe next door had a tapestry of David and Goliath. There were silver candlesticks, fashionable French chairs carved with Roman heads and lions’ paws, and the bed hangings were made of black cloth of gold. The epic scale and decoration of the gallery reflected Marie’s taste for modern art, for she commissioned four huge mythological canvases, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from the renowned Venetian painter Titian, whom Charles V had employed to define his dignity and gravitas as emperor. Marie admired his work enormously and followed this commission with orders for twenty family portraits, most of which she hung at Binche.
She also supported the top Netherlandish artists. These included the versatile Pieter Coecke, who had written about Vitruvius, stage-managed Philip’s spectacular entry into Antwerp, and designed many of her tapestries; Michiel Coxcie, an admirer of Michelangelo, who painted portraits and designed tapestries; and the portrait painter, Antonio Mor. She also retained Marguerite’s court artists Meit and Bernard van Orley, and the latter often copied family portraits as gifts. Marie appreciated the work of earlier Flemings. In the chapel at Binche, she installed Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, which she had ruthlessly removed from a guild chapel in the church of Our Lady, Louvain (replacing it with a copy by Coxcie) and she tried to get hold of van Eyck’s Madonna with Canon van der Paele from St Donatian in Bruges, but the church bravely refused to give it up. It must have been some consolation to own another signed van Eyck, the little portrait of a couple holding hands in a room.
If she kept this at Binche, it would not have sat well amongst the grandiose Italian canvases of the great gallery. Nor was it a suitable subject for the chapel. Yet the fact that it was associated with her aunt and was by Philip the Good’s most famous artist may have earned it a place in a more intimate space in the palace, somewhere within her suite of rooms, as Marguerite had displayed it. However, Marie moved much of Marguerite’s collection directly from Mechelen to the Coudenberg palace in Brussels, and seemed to prefer commissioning new works for Binche. Binche suffered a terrible fate before the palace was even finished, being totally destroyed by the French after the new French king, Henry II, renewed war with the emperor in 1551. But luckily Marie had wisely evacuated her collections, including all artworks and 250 tapestries, in advance of the anticipated French attack. She also moved all the preserved game from the hunting park so that it would not provide dinner for the enemy soldiers. The resourceful Marie was now responsible for defending the vulnerable Netherlands against invasion, campaigning on horseback, touring the frontiers and encouraging the troops. In the summer of 1554, Henry retaliated for her army’s destruction of the French border fortress of Folembray by advancing on Binche, which was on the direct line of march to Brussels, and burning down the palace and hunting lodge. The French king was reported to have cut down some of her trees himself to fan the flames of the burning building. Then he stuck up a vengeful placard: ‘Mad queen, remember Folembray!’3
The logical destination for Marie’s precious collection in this time of war was her palace at Turnhout, which lay safely to the north-east of Brussels. She may already have planned to move her favourite works there, because Charles, crippled by gout, piles, poor digestion and depression, and worn out by the difficulties of controlling his vast territories, the endless travelling, the campaigning, and the inability to trust anyone except his closest family, had decided to abdicate and live in retirement and seclusion in Spain. His loyal sisters Marie and Eleanor decided to go with him. Planning what to take and what to leave behind for her successor and heir Philip II preoccupied Marie for months. The Arnolfini portrait was certainly at Turnhout immediately prior to the move, according to a later inventory of the possessions and pictures she decided to take to Spain. ‘Let there be also packed4 for her a large picture with two shutters by which it is closed; in it there are a man and a woman who have taken each other by the hand; also a mirror in which the aforesaid man and woman are reflected. On the shutters are the arms of Don Diego; done by Jan van Eyck in 1434.’ It was one of only forty-two paintings that Marie took with her, leaving hundreds behind in the Netherlands for Philip. Including it was a mark of great approval, for Marie’s own taste in art was Italianate and modern (she took twenty-four Titians to Spain, plus others by the ‘northern Raphael’, court painter van Orley). Keeping the van Eyck demonstrated official Habsburg admiration for Flemish painting. It provided a link with the country she had come to regard as home, and it was a memento of the aunt who had taken the place of her mother. And perhaps this image of a sedate married couple represented a state to which a widowed pawn could never aspire.
At Charles’s abdication in October 1555, he handed over everything to his son Philip II, in the setting of the huge hall of the Coudenberg palace. There were no established precedents or protocols for such an event, and Marie had to devise and choreograph it all herself. The ceremony also included her own resignation as regent, to be succeeded by the cold nephew whom she rightly feared would not understand the Netherlanders as well as she had done. Their actual departure was delayed for nearly a year while Charles struggled to settle his outstanding debts: he was so hard up that he even had to postpone a memorial service for his mother Juana, who had died in Spain in April 1555, until he could afford appropriate hangings for the church. Then they had to wait for the winter storms to pass, then for a visit by his daughter and her husband. Marie spent these months moving between Brussels and Turnhout, making final decisions about what to do with her collections. She intended to live in some style in Spain, while Charles craved simplicity. However, it still took a huge fleet of Spanish galleons (those which had previously accompanied Philip on his triumphal voyage north to marry Mary Tudor) and a Netherlandish convoy to take the three Habsburgs, their staff and their possessions to Spain.
They set sail from Flushing on 17 September 1556. Charles and his entourage travelled on the Holy Spirit, while his sisters went on the Falcon. Avoiding their company even on the voyage, Charles immediately began practising the detachment he sought in Spain. The van Eyck must have been carried in one of the many baggage vessels, stowed for weeks before the long-delayed departure, enduring the hazards of temperature and atmospheric change, let alone the risk of theft. The weather was kinder than it had been for the voyages of Marguerite and of Philip and Juana, no baggage ships were lost, and they reached Laredo on the north coast of Spain in just eleven days.
Charles made it clear that he did not intend to live with Marie and Eleanor. He had been planning this escape for a long time, and was having a house built beside the monastery of Yuste, in a remote valley in the heart of the bleak Castilian plains. After they landed, he set off in haste, while his sisters took their time and enjoyed the official welcomes he had managed to bypass. Those in the party reported how happy ‘the two queens’, as they were known, appeared, and how Marie suddenly looked years younger; typically, she travelled on horseback while Eleanor was carried in a litter. The sisters spent the winter in Valladolid, to see if they wanted to settle there permanently. The paintings were unpacked and hung, to add distinction to the new residence. In addition to her favourite works, Marie had brought a real artist in her retinue, Catherine van Hemessen, and her husband, a fashionable Antwerp organist. Marie loved music as much as she loved art, and bringing the couple with her ensured she would not lack culture in her new home, wherever it was to be. The two queens decided that rather than Valladolid they preferred the climate of Guadalajara, to the east of Madrid, where there was good hunting too. Before moving there, they visited Charles, then travelled to the Portuguese border to meet Eleanor’s daughter, the Queen of Portugal, who had not seen her mother for years. The emotional strain of the brief reunion, combined with Eleanor’s already fragile health, was fatal: she died on the return journey, ten days after taking leave of her daughter. Marie was at her side.
Losing her beloved sister made Marie’s life in Spain seem pointless. She longed for something to do, but was rebuffed when she offered to act as an adviser to Charles’s daughter, who was serving as Regent of Spain as long as Philip remained in the Netherlands. She had still not found a permanent home, having decided that Guadalajara was too expensive without Eleanor’s contribution, but she spent several months in 1558 at Cigales, near Valladolid, where she would again have unpacked her paintings and tapestries. As she was alarmingly short of money to maintain the lifestyle she desired, she requested help and a pension from Philip. Her nephew’s haughty ways had made him deeply unpopular in the Netherlands, which was now on the verge of civil war as well as war with France, and he longed to return to Spain. Seeing Marie as his salvation, he used the influence of the dying Charles, whom she could never resist, to propose that she might save the Netherlands for the Habsburgs by returning as regent again. Swayed by Charles’s persuasive arguments that this was for the sake of the family, in the autumn of 1558 she reluctantly agreed, though she insisted that it must only be on a temporary basis. Content with this news, Charles died on 21 September. In the first two weeks of October, Marie moved between Valladolid and Cigales to organise her departure, while the fleet to transport her and retrieve Philip assembled at Laredo. But it was too late. Her health did not equal her willpower. Having complained of palpitations for years, she suffered a series of heart attacks and died on 18 October, at the age of fifty. Her will left everything, including the art collection that contained the van Eyck portrait, to her nephew Philip II, a man whom she disliked intensely.
THE PAINTING’S LAYOUT means that only part of the bed can be seen and the perspective gives it a distorted shape. Like beds in other contemporary images, it stands on a low platform, and its canopy is quite separate, being hung on cords from the ceiling. This was an independent mark of estate: a canopy (celour) was frequently suspended over the chairs of kings or dukes, and also of van Eyck’s Madonnas. Another, separate length of cloth, the tester (dossier), hung behind the seat. A canopied bed had the further refinement of curtains around the other three sides as well. At least one of these side curtains was kept looped up on social occasions, so that the covers and pillows could be properly appreciated, as van Eyck shows in the painting. Inventories and wills of the early fifteenth century described hangings in some detail, because they were precious possessions frequently transported by peripatetic rulers like the Dukes of Burgundy to provide instant luxury and a reminder of rank wherever they were. Hangings masked the basic wooden structures beneath, which did not travel but remained in the various residences.
In addition to canopy and tester, sets of bed accessories included three running curtains, valance, feather mattress (straw for humbler people), blanket, coverlet and pillows. These could be made of extremely expensive materials, like the ensemble of cloth of gold hangings and ermine coverlet that King Richard II presented to an earlier Duke of Burgundy in 1396. Gold, green or red were the colours favoured by the nobility and these fabrics might also be embroidered or woven with patterns and images. Aliénor of Poitiers goes into great detail about appropriate hangings in her account of the arrangements for the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy’s first grandchild in 1456. She distinguished ‘the bed that was not for sleeping’,5 in the outer, or state chamber (whose walls were hung with red silk) with its embroidered canopy and matching satin curtains and coverlet, from the beds ‘arranged for sleeping’ in Madame’s inner chamber. This room contained a pair of beds which shared the same green damask canopy with a silk-fringed pelmet. Both beds had green satin running curtains hung from movable rings attached to the canopy, one of which was kept permanently looped up. These beds had bolsters, and were covered with ermine and a fine violet cloth, both of which ‘reached fully to the ground and trailed along it for a yard and a half’. There was also the ultimate refinement of a ‘fine gauzy sheet’ under the covers which ostentatiously extended onto the floor to show how grand it was. Between the two beds was a high-backed chair with a cushion, covered with cloth of gold, and on the floor was a carpet.
The Arnolfini bed possesses all the features of these high-society beds – fringed canopy, tester, curtains, coverlet, bolster. The tester is overshadowed by the canopy but appears to have a band of decoration at the top, possibly an embroidered inscription. The bedspread is as extensive as that of Madame, being much longer than the height of the bed requires, and the change of direction in the folds proves that the bed stands on a dais which the excess of fabric covers completely. The neat corner tucks of the bedspread suggest that it may have been sewn into the shape of a fitted valance. At the head of the bed lies a bolster covered in the same red fabric as the coverlet. The canopy, evidently suspended from the ceiling, runs parallel to the beams, a clever device that enhances the lines of perspective. It is edged by a thick, fluffy fringe which seems to be of a different fabric and texture.
The curtain by the head of the bed is concealed by the woman but it presumably hangs straight down. That at the other end is looped up in the manner described by Aliénor and often depicted in contemporary images such as the lively illustrations to Netherlandish printed bibles of the first half of the fifteenth century. Intended for the private devotion of the literate, such texts were brought to life by the use of familiar imagery showing biblical characters living in modern domestic settings. These helped make the stories accessible, relevant and up to date and were the ultimate foundation of the realistic tradition of Netherlandish art. They also provide invaluable insights into how furniture was perceived and used. Hung beds (and high-backed chairs with finials) are common, and the looped curtain features, for example, in scenes of the birth of Samson, and of Solomon’s meeting with the Queen of Sheba; this is evidently a bed ‘not for sleeping’ but a status symbol, for the couple and the bed are in a reception chamber which also contains a plate-laden buffet. However, David suggestively begins his seduction of Bathsheba beside a hung bed that does not have its curtain looped up, proof that privacy will be required.
More elaborate beds, whose hangings are invariably red, appear in contemporary manuscript illuminations and paintings of the life of the Virgin. Her chamber may contain a bed on a platform, as shown by van Eyck’s close contemporary Rogier van der Weyden. In his first Annunciation (Prado, Madrid), a work that may predate the Arnolfini portrait, the Virgin’s bed has one curtain looped up, and a high-backed chair with a red cushion close beside. In a later Annunciation (Louvre, Paris), the curtains all hang straight down, and the room also contains a settle with lion finials, red cushions and the sides carved with the standard cusped arch and berries. So it seems that Campin, van Eyck and van der Weyden were all drawing on the same repertoire at much the same time, not necessarily copying each other but recording what they felt was appropriate for the particular setting. van Eyck was paying the Arnolfinis a great compliment by surrounding them with the furniture artistically associated with Christ’s mother.
An even greater compliment was his reference to their wealth, for the vivid red textiles in the room proved they could afford to surround themselves with the most expensive materials of the day. Textile historian J. J. Munro has calculated that in 1440 one Flemish scarlet cloth, or scarlatto,6 cost the equivalent of the wages of a master mason for two years and two months; or 6,000 pounds of Flemish cheese; or 1,100 litres of fine Rhine wine; or 780 metres of coarse linen. The fabrics in the Arnolfinis’ room – on the settle, cushions, chair arm, bed curtains and cover – would have required several of these fabulously expensive cloths.
The term ‘scarlet’ did not originally describe a specific colour but a superior type of woven wool, made silky-smooth by the long and complex procedures of fulling, teasing, clipping and shearing, only available in Flanders, with Bruges a major centre of production. As red was an expensive dye, the cost of the colour became associated with the cost of the fabric, and scarlatto came to mean red cloth only. The costliest red dye, kermes, produced a range of hues called vermeil, violet, rose, sanguine and cramoisy. The word ‘kermes’ (‘red worm’ in Arabic) gave rise to ‘crimson’, but cramoisy referred only to silks dyed with kermes, while scarlatto was restricted to wool. Whether the Arnolfini textiles ever existed in the real world or whether van Eyck selected them from the visual storehouse of his imagination, those who saw the painting would have known they were scarlatto, yet another quality product that an Italian merchant would export from Bruges. Once again van Eyck refers to his patron’s trade as the source of his wealth and social status. Yet at the same time, he offsets any material vanity by relating these worldly goods to the images and symbols of Christian art.