The Picard poem constitutes a testament to the vigor and vivacity of figural representation, especially of three-dimensional carvings. The statue in the tale does not stand as an object for aesthetic wonderment, as it might do nowadays in a museum. Nor is it supposed to attract worship as a sacred thing in own right. Rather, it facilitates approach to the divine. The rendition does not objectify Mary so much as it enables imagining the Virgin in her subjective reality. The tumbler finds his way to the Madonna, which is normally kept out of sight. His displays of devotion set in motion a process, until eventually the celestial figure associated with the likeness
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0147.03
intercedes. Thanks to this mediation, God acts to favor the worshiper. In this account, the steps are shortened, to make the receipt of devotion lead directly into the bestowal of a boon. The sculpture and the heavenly being relate closely to each other. Either it or she can act without any intermediary.
Although the minstrel is the preeminent character, in the original narrative he is anonymous, faceless, and pliant. In contrast, the voiceless cynosure in the narrative of Our Lady’s Tumbler and almost every single later reworking of it is the wonder-working Madonna. The Mother of God and her living image, if in fact it becomes animate, together constitute the lone female presence in the thirteenth-century poem, France’s prose, and Jules Massenet’s opera. Mary and her figurative impersonator are more than totems, but less than characters. They are the more striking for expressing themselves solely through inarticulate gesture and action. Despite this limitation, their charisma pervades the miracle and predominates in it.
In communicating through a bodily sign, the Virgin shares a basic trait with the jongleur. He commands no words in Latin, negotiates only fumblingly the social niceties of monastic silence, and has no facility in forming with his fingers the sign language used by the monks. Yet the tumbler possesses a range of expression, in the corporeal idiom, by which he can enunciate his devotion to the highest astral and social plane of heaven. The dialogue between Mary and the dancer takes place not directly, in words, but rather indirectly through physical movements. To all appearances he is not even aware of her side in the exchange. In reciprocation for his worship, she manifests herself in her most human and humane guise, through compassion.
Both the medieval narrative and Anatole France’s version—more the first than the second—leave gently ambiguous whether the tumbler or jongleur receives an omen, evident to the choir monks if not to him. The signal emanates either from the Mother of God herself who has descended from heaven, or by proxy through a simulacrum of her that springs to life when inspirited by her. He is consummately active, until his collapse. In contrast, the Madonna behaves as an effigy should act: she does not move a muscle, but stays stock-still like a statue or a stone—which stands to reason, since she may be a stone sculpture.
The ambiguity is understandable. In medieval culture, images of the Mother of God were initially thin on the ground, but especially from the tenth century they proliferated along with the feasts and other hallmarks in the veneration of the Virgin.
Not coincidentally, the cult of images and that of Mary soared at exactly the same time, so that the images gained an expressiveness that transcended mere portraiture of a person. Instead, they were treated like real people and even molly- (or Mary) coddled. The facsimiles were regarded as actually animate. Treatment of these living statues included being enthroned, dressed in clothing, and carried in litters. They were often transported from place to place, as the equivalent for the Middle Ages of today’s featured celebrities at fundraising events to benefit renovation and building projects
or political campaigns. Finally, they were incorporated into the production of dramas and set up to preside over synods.
The medieval Galician-Portuguese “Canticles of Holy Mary,” composed in the thirteenth century during the reign of Alfonso X, contains one of the most arresting episodes in literature, in which a good-looking statue of the Virgin and Child comes across as lifelike. In one miracle, a jongleur who specializes in impersonation, acting on a suggestion of the devil, mimics an image that stands above the city gates of an unidentified municipality in Lombardy. God afflicts the impressionist with a seizure that grotesquely distorts his face and body. The mime, once he has prayed and repented, is healed in a church by the Mother of God, and the bishop delivers a sermon on the wonder. The tale has become known as “The Mimicking Minstrel.”
Such circumstances can seem difficult to reconcile with biblical injunctions against the worship of graven images—against idols. The fine line, brought home in Catholic doctrine in catechisms and elsewhere, is that reverence for representations is not idolatrous so long as the adoration is directed to the figures whom the likenesses portray. Worshipers must differentiate between the heavenly prototype and the earthly depiction that represents it. This nuance explains why Mary, the figure or being, differs from a Madonna, the likeness. In Greek Orthodox Christianity, more or less the same distinction is achieved by drawing a line between the Virgin herself and Panagia. A feminine adjective meaning “all-holy” in Greek, the epithet is used in referring to icons of the Mother of God. Although theologians and most devout find no obstacle in grasping the contrast, a religious rabbit-hole awaits those who are less subtle or educated, and who might mistake the likeness of Mary for the Mother of God herself. When the symbol is taken wrongly for what is symbolized, the model becomes an idol. Adoration turns into idolatry, and devotion descends to fetishism. To enter the danger zone of crude simplification, we have here the crux—or is that a poor choice of words?—that has led to iconoclasm, both within Catholicism and between it and Protestantism.
Revered images developed retinues of passionate believers, and the passion for the effigies, like the gusto for relics, in turn propelled pilgrimages. Existing cathedrals had good reason, or at least robust financial incentive, to support the development of both veneration and pilgrimage. Paintings and carvings that attracted the faithful could necessitate the construction and expansion of great (and not so great) churches.
Many centuries would have to pass before art museums came into existence. In the meantime, places of worship, especially the grandest, offered the main venues in which a broad public could view artworks. This is not to foster any misapprehension that the idea of “art for art’s sake” would have been relevant, or even intelligible. The governing conception was that of “art for Mary’s sake” as a subset within “art for God’s sake.” Among the treasures held and sometimes displayed, Madonnas were preeminent.
In Western Europe the twelfth century saw a culmination of aesthetic and formal changes brought about by three-dimensional carvings of the Virgin and Child that in at least some cases could be seen from all sides. Sometimes nearly life-sized, the statues came nearer to seeming truly human than had any other representations for centuries, and among some of their viewers they aroused the thought of real interaction between image and onlooker, almost as one person to another. The radical newness of these sculptures can be all too easily soft-pedaled. Better than any quantity or quality of theology scratched out with pen in ink on parchment, they brought home in their full roundedness the mystery of the Incarnation that forms the heart of Christian belief.
Once again, only God was to be adored, but these depictions of others were to be venerated.
The noun statue implies by its etymology a standing figure, since it derives ultimately from the Latin verb meaning “to stand.” In contrast, these early portrayals are seated. To be specific, Mary is shown cradling her infant son in her lap. Our Lady’s Tumbler makes no mention of a baby Jesus. By the same token, modern artists who have illustrated the story have frequently depicted the Madonna by herself, with no little one to be seen. Yet when the medieval French poem was written, the norm called for portraying the Mother of God with her babe on her lap or in her arms. The poet had no need to mention the infant, who was a given. The child is present in the earliest extant image that accompanies the juggler story, the manuscript illustration that an illuminator wedged at the foot of a manuscript folio. The presence of the babe in arms, it may be confidently surmised, went without saying at the point when the piece of poetry was composed.
Less certain is whether the Madonna we are to visualize would have been a painted sculpture designed to be carried in processions, a three-dimensional statue intended to be placed and stay put on an altar, or even if the two would have differed much.
Whether being moved or standing, the representation would have been displayed with ceremony and stateliness (see Fig. 3.1). The first circumstance would make it all the easier to comprehend why the Madonna would be envisaged as a deus ex machina—or rather as the Mater Dei or Mother of God who in her supreme mercy is activated through the veneration of her likeness to release help through the angelic machinery of heaven. Yet the collective formality that goes by the word “ceremony” is conspicuously absent from the solo ritual of the tumbler. It is not a specific holiday. No onrushing crowd surges forward to carry the carving on a palanquin. Furthermore, in this instance it is the worshiper, and not the depiction, that moves. The figure becomes animate, but the living being is not borne in any kind of parade.
Although the bas-de-page position of the illumination may be due to the jongleur’s lowliness in the social hierarchy of the time, the decision to interpolate the painting at all is probably owed to the presence of the sculpture in the narrative. The statue inspired the painting at least as much as, and probably more than, the tumbler did.
Fig. 3.1 Five white-robed figures, three tonsured and two not, carry a sculpture of the Madonna and Child on their shoulders. Abrégé des histoires divines. Miniature, Northeast France. ca.
1300–1310. New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.751, fol. 63r.