In their solemn and sober frontality, the representations known as “majesties” have a serenely unrealistic and priestly stillness about them now. Consequently, it may surprise us to realize how forcefully medieval onlookers were impressed by such images’ relative verisimilitude, naturalism, and mobility. Ekkehard IV used the phrase “sitting as if alive” to describe the one in his anecdote. A thousand years ago, the sculptures looked animate to viewers.
To understand the big picture of spectators in the Middle Ages, we must recall the direct gaze that these likenesses level at us, as well as their realism compared to other art of the day. It would be risky to generalize about the typical appearance or treatment of such illustrations solely on the basis of the jeweled and gilded reliquary statue at the abbey of Conques, in southern France. As the only Carolingian “majesty”
that has survived, the effigy is unique. Among other distinctive features, it represents not Mary but Faith, a saint purportedly martyred during Roman persecutions of the late third or early fourth century. All the same, this pre-Romanesque sculpture shares with the “thrones of wisdom” the defining characteristic of being enthroned.
Bernard of Angers was schooled at Chartres before becoming a teacher in the place from which he has taken his name. Between 1013 and 1020, he paid three visits to the monastery of Conques. In his Book of Miracles of Saint Faith he memorialized not only the wonders wrought by the holy woman, but also his own impressions as an outsider who had not previously seen such a three-dimensional portrayal (see Fig. 3.10). The image, originally encased entirely in gold leaf, might seem utterly unlifelike to some eyes today. Yet despite what might strike us today as a deficit of verisimilitude, the hagiographer found himself discomposed by the portrayal’s resemblance to a real person. The sculpture’s three-dimensionality made it seem corporeally present, while the gilding had a distinct and to some extent opposite effect of rendering supernatural the being represented.
The reaction that the early eleventh-century schoolmaster of Angers had to the statue’s lifelikeness was intensified by his awareness that it enclosed relics of the hallowed woman. Here we need a keen eye for detail, if we are to recognize both similarities and differences that marked the cult of Mary as unique. Remnants of
her were dispersed throughout Europe, and many were squirreled away within relic cavities hollowed out of sculptures. Yet we must give heed: the dogma of the Assumption held that after Virgin died, her body was assumed or taken up into heaven. This doctrine meant that lacking bodily remains from after her death, the faithful were shortchanged of many objects that were common in the cults of other saints.
Fig. 3.10 Statue reliquary of St. Foy de Conques. Wooden sculpture with gold, silver gilt, jewels, and cameos, late tenth–early eleventh century. Conques, Abbey Church of Saint Foy. Photograph
by Wikimedia user ZiYouXunLu, 2013, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Statue_
reliquaire_de_Sainte_Foy_de_Conques_(cropped).jpg. CC BY-SA 3.0.
In lieu of conventional primary relics from the bones of a holy person, the remains of Mary were secondary and not bodily, but still physical, and many churches claimed confidently to possess such traces of her physicality. To offer only a partial enumeration, locks of her hair and phials of her breast milk that had purportedly been collected during her lifetime were all worth keeping in ecclesiastical treasure chests. Contact relics, which acquired their holiness through having touched the body of the saint, abounded. In this category, items of clothing stand out, such as headdresses and veils, shifts and slips, and girdles. Precious items of all these types could be displayed in the glass-framed shrines known as ostensories or monstrances;
shut away in châsses or reliquary cases; embedded in fixed locations such as altars to confer holiness and sacred power upon them; or, lastly, they could be sheltered in boxes within sculptures. On important ritual occasions, Madonnas that doubled as reliquaries could be processed, well-groomed and dressed to the nines for the parades in which they took part.
To return to Saint Faith, Bernard’s response to the verisimilitude of the statue paled in comparison with the astonishment of common people: “It was an image made with
such precision to the face of the human form that it seemed to see with its keen-eyed gaze the great many peasants seeing it and to grant gently with its reflecting eyes the prayers of those praying before it.” The three-dimensionality of such effigies initially ruffled the feathers of some viewers. Before long Bernard rued his own initially incredulous stance about the clad carving: he had mocked the representation by calling it a Diana or a Venus. He went on to tell of a learned companion who was punished for his own disparagement of the piece by experiencing a vision of the holy woman in which she beat him so savagely with a rod that he survived only long enough to relate the apparition.
In legends, those of other faiths are portrayed sometimes as being vehemently hostile to images, such as those of Mary. In anti-Semitic legends, Jews are represented as spitting upon Madonnas, making parodies of votive offerings to them, and inflicting multiple wounds upon them. By nonbelievers more generally, such likenesses of the Virgin, if not destroyed or ignored, will be at best viewed, studied, and admired, as inanimate, insensate, and immobile objects and not as living, feeling, and moving beings. They will be treated as idols would be, not by the faithful but by those who do not put stock in them.
To true believers, the lifelike quality of the “thrones of wisdom,” as self-standing statues in the round, was and is intensified by the kinetic quality they achieve when they are processed. The verb just employed denotes the carrying of a cult object in a procession—a march to celebrate a ceremony or festival. Beyond such parades, Saint Faith and her seemingly animate eyes made her a suitable witness to such important proceedings as major financial and forensic transactions. When carvings of this type came to life, they were much more than machine-like automata or robots. In fact, the representations were sometimes operated by those holding them.
Across the gulf of many centuries, the power of processions to suggest the animation of statues is hard to appreciate. If anything, today we are overexposed to three-dimensional representations, and even more to animated images. Although those of us who see a surfeit of motion pictures may be jaded, in many sectors of the world ceremonial marches remain powerful and deeply conservative traditions.
A photograph printed in 1927 freezes for the onlooker the parading of a sculpture in Chartres on a Marian feast day. The likeness was known from its usual location as Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. The French name means nothing more or less than
“underground Notre Dame” or “Our Lady of Under the Earth.” On this holiday the latest incarnation of the cult carving there was brought into the streets and trotted out by the clergy, attired in their starchiest vestments (see Fig. 3.11). The depiction under consideration was a replica of one that during the French Revolution had been seized from its subterranean shrine by a mob and burned. In the nineteenth century, a copy was made of the earlier wooden figure which is still venerated even today. Henry Adams had in mind this kind of celebration and the atmosphere attendant upon it when in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres he extended an invitation to inquiring minds:
“If you want to know what Churches were made for, come down here on some great festival of the Virgin, and give yourself up to it; but come alone!”
Statues of this sort could have been trotted out for the performance of Nativity and Epiphany plays, which developed roughly contemporaneously in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In such pieces of theater the three-dimensional “majesties” may be imagined as being placed in the church, near the altar and also near a temporarily erected manger. There they could serve as proxies for Mary and the Christ child. In another scenario, a real-life actor may have discharged the central role of the Virgin in a living reenactment that would make use of the sculpted Christ child.
One such arrangement would have been adopted in the experiment Francis conducted in a grotto in the Italian hill town of Greccio, in the region of Lazio, on Christmas Eve of 1223. For this realization of the first crèche (or “crib”) ever, the poor man of Assisi first set up a feeding trough with hay and then jollied along members of the community to take part. As actors, the locals staged a tableau vivant. Near the altar, a real feeder was erected. Close to both was placed a “majesty,” a statue of the Virgin Mary in the round.
The staging simulated the adoration in the stable of Bethlehem following the night of the Nativity. The scene was portrayed prepossessingly in a fresco by Giotto (see Fig. 3.12).
Fig. 3.11 A procession of the Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. Photograph by Meurisse and Harlingue, 1927, from Le Pèlerin no. 2621 (1927): 5.
Fig. 3.12 Giotto di Bondone, Presepe di Greccio, ca. 1295–1299. Fresco, 230 × 270 cm. Assisi, Basilica superiore di San Francesco d’Assisi.
Everyone took part in the drama, playing Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus, clustered around a crib together with an ass, an ox, and shepherds, all of them in the flesh.
Today the pope of the Catholic Church does not process a Madonna on Christmas Eve, but as a complement to the liturgy of the Mass the Roman pontiff places an image of the infant Jesus within a humble cowshed.
Another form of animation would come, later in the thirteenth century than Our Lady’s Tumbler, with the vogue of so-called shrine Madonnas. These portrayals sometimes but by no means always contained relics in hollows or canisters. On their exteriors, such openable and operable wooden sculptures presented images of the Mother and Child that could be rigged to reveal different carvings and paintings within.
Likenesses of this sort remained a feature of religious life into the sixteenth century.
While not alive, they brought home gamely the reality of the incarnation—Mary’s inaugural contribution to salvation. They could be manipulated in private as well as public devotion. Would it be too much of a stretch to describe them as performers, on a par with either the jongleur himself or the vivified Virgin who brought him solace?