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remembering. Smalley comments of the pictures that ‘ [t]heir many . . . traits
could hardly be illustrated,’ and concludes that they were never intended to
be other than textual in form, ‘ aural aids’’ to be used in preaching to keep his
audiences attentive and concentrated.34 She is quite right in observing this.
And a textual picture is as good as a painted one in addressing memory work,
for it can be painted by imagination without the constraints of paint and
parchment. Holcot’s are also emblematic pictures. They function as compo-
sitional aids, the use which their intended clerical audience would most
readily have for them. Indeed, they are imagines rerum, which relate the parts
of a theme like Faith or Sloth through a set of images, each of which is
associated with one of its aspects (or divisions, in scholastic language).
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A good example is Holcot’s picture of Charity:
This is said according to Augustine’s seventh sermon on John [vii, c. 4]: no one can
say what sort of face love has, what shape, what stature, what sort of hands or feet
she has. Nonetheless she has feet, for they lead to the church. Whence from this
image, it is possible to describe charity or love as a queen placed [collocata] on a
throne, of elevated stature, of a well-made shape, married to Phebus, strengthened
by children, nourished with honey, with a four-sided face and gold-appearing
clothing, having hands stretched out dripping with liquid, ears open and straight,
eyes flaming and devoted in wifely fashion, and goat-like feet. 35
In other of Holcot’s pictures, the attributes are also numbered, and the
images are partially developed as a sermon might be, with texts, exempla,
further definitions, and explanations. As Smalley notes, each attribute of
the image is moralized by Holcot with a ‘‘string of quotations’’; indeed, as
she also observes, the distinctio is a ‘‘precursor of the ‘picture.’ Holcot’s
Child [one of these images] could be rewritten as a distinctio.’’36 Holcot’s
pictures are scholastic definitions brought vividly before the eyes; given
both color and motion they are imagines agentes in the sense developed by
the Ad Herennium, a text regularly taught in the fourteenth century, when
Holcot composed his commentary. 37
The manuscript calls each of these definitions ‘‘pictures,’’ indicating
them in the margin with the words depinctio or descriptio, but the pages
are completely without graphic decoration beyond the essentials of punc-
tuation. These pictures are evidently entirely addressed to mental imagin-
ing, an aspect of the memory-directed painture which any text has. Holcot
says as much himself. Of the picture of Idolatry, which is associated by him
with the text of Hosea 9:1, he writes that he places the painting of Idolatry
‘‘over’’ the letters ‘‘Noli letari,’’ which begin the verse.38 He says the same
thing about his other pictures – each is placed above (‘‘super’’) a particular
text with which it is associated. These mental pictures organize the glosses
to these verses and, as in a glossed book, are to be visualized above or upon
the text, ‘‘super illam litteram,’’ exactly in the way written glosses are made
upon their authoring text. And the image has been mentally projected onto
the letters of the page, as a way of remembering and organizing not simply
a text but a whole apparatus of glosses from which one could develop a
sermon.
Hugh of St. Victor: the construction of Noah’s Ark
One of the most characteristic features of twelfth-century pedagogy (which
we know chiefly through Biblical commentary, sermons, and meditational
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works) is the use of pictures, both verbal and graphic, that are presented as
diagrams serving to consolidate, summarize, and fix the main subjects to be
attended to. In The Craft of Thought I discussed in much greater detail how
this feature emerges in the twelfth century, rooted firmly in the medita-
tional practices developed in monastic life of the previous centuries. In the
rest of this section, I would like to examine two of these in particular, which
are roughly contemporary, and both of the mid twelfth century: Hugh of
St. Victor’s Little Book on the Construction of the Ark (Libellus de formatione
Arche) and Hugh de Fouilloy’s On the Dove and the Hawk (De columba et
accipitre), a part of his Bestiary-style treatise On Birds (De avibus). Only
one of these (Fouilloy’s) was drawn, presumably to an exemplar made by
the author. 39 The other (Hugh of St. Victor’s) was never drawn, and,
despite the elaborately visualized and visualizable pictures Hugh paints in
his words, no scribe of its fifty-three surviving manuscripts seems to have
attempted even a crude approximation of it. Evidently a medieval reader
did not need to have pictures drawn on a parchment page in order to
understand that a book or text had picturae.40
Hugh of St. Victor’s text is called in various manuscripts ‘‘De pictura
archae’’ or ‘‘de visibilia pictura archae’’ or ‘‘depinctio archae,’’ as well as by
what has become its modern title, Libellus de formatione arche. It is also
frequently presented as the fifth book of Hugh’s other commentary on this
same subject, De archa Noe. 41 Beryl Smalley called it a diagram, and she was
clearly correct. 42 De formatione arche is a cosmography – a combination of
mappa mundi and genealogia, together with mnemonics for the vices and
virtues (including the monastic virtues), the books of the Bible, a calendar,
and other assorted categories of information – all put together as an
elaborate set of schematics imposed upon the Genesis description of
Noah’s Ark. Hugh had likened the building of the Ark to the building of
a medieval education, all tucked away in its various compartments with the
pathways between them clearly marked – this treatise is a kind of demon-
stration of this governing figure, the archetypal memorial arca. Hugh himself
calls it a ‘‘machina universitatis’ (col. 702A), containing both a mappa mundi
and a linea generationis, a world map and a historical genealogy. And it
organizes for mental storage the chief themes of Hugh’s commentary
‘ moralized,’’ here presented both summe (‘‘in summary’’) and breviter.
The Ark is presented in two projections, one as a flat plane seen from
above (called the ‘‘planus,’’ ‘‘plan’’), the other an elevation (‘‘altitudo’’) or
cross-sectional view, and Hugh moves between these two as his purpose
changes. Moreover, the details of the model are often incoherent, impos-
sible to graph completely because they shift and change. A successful
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ekphrasis invites one to draw it, but it can only fully be so with the mind’s
eye, which is invited by the words to augment, to color, to fill in, and
straighten out their gaps and silences as part of the experience of hearing or
seeing them. And, indeed, Hugh’s picture only works as a mental encyclo-
pedia, whose lineam
ents can merge and separate and shuffle about in the
way that mental images do, but ones fixed on a page cannot. 43
On a flat, rectangular surface – like the page of a book or a tablet, the page
of memory – Hugh says that he draws and paints (‘ depingere,’ ‘ pingo’’) a
diagram.
First, in order to show in a figure the religious significances of the Ark of Noah,
I find the center of the plane [which is also the plan] on which I want to draw the
Ark, and there I fix a point. Around this point I make a small square, which is like
the cubit from which the Ark was constructed. And around this square I make
[circumscribo] another, a little bit bigger than the first, in such a way that the space
between the two squares looks like a band around the cubit. Next, I draw [pingo] a
cross in the innermost square in such a way that the four limbs of the cross meet
each of its sides, and I go over [circumduco] the cross with gold. Then, I colour in
[colore uestio] the spaces between the four angles of the cross and those of the
square: the two above with red, the two lower ones with blue; in such a way that
the one half of the cubit resembles fire, with its bright red colour, and the other
half resembles a cloud with its blue. Next, in the band around the cubit, above the
cross I make [scribo] an alpha [A], which is the beginning. Opposite that, under
the cross, I make an omega [X], which is the end. Next to the right limb of the
cross I make a chi [X], which is the first letter in Christ’s name. The chi [X]
signifies the decalogue of the law, which was given first to that ancient nation, as
being elect and rightly placed at the right hand. Next to the left limb of the cross,
I make [pono] a C [resembling the lunate form of sigma, |], which is the final letter
in Christ’s name. C, in that it stands for 100, signifies the perfection of grace,
which was first given to the gentile nations; the gentile nations, before they
received the faith, were at first not in favour, and so they belonged on the left
hand. Then in the space within the band I paint two bands of colour: a band of
green inside, and a band of purple outside. In the middle of the golden cross,
I paint [pingo] a yearling lamb, standing.44
Aspects of this diagram are fashioned in accordance with familiar mne-
monic advice of the most elementary sort. An empty, rectangular space is
marked off into distinct compartments, each in turn painted with coded
information recorded in both writing and pictorial images. These images
function as cues, imagines rerum, for remembering highly complex mate-
rial; both the images themselves and their relationship to one another are
mnemonically important. Once he has described its basic construction,
Hugh then makes a lengthy moralization of the features he has placed in his
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mental diagram. The nature of this moralization is crucial to understand;
Hugh himself explains it at the end of this treatise:
I have said these things about the drawing of our Ark [de arche nostre], so that if it
please anyone to gaze inwardly [intueri] upon the elegance of the Lord’s house and
His miracles (which are without number), he might at the same time rouse his
emotion [affectus] with this examplar. (De formatione arche, XI. 119–122)
Notice first that Hugh is clearly describing his own composition, ‘‘our
Ark.’’ Since much of the content is similar, but in an abbreviated form, to
the concerns of Books I, II, and IV of De archa Noe, this diagram would
appear to be at least a version of the mental plan or imago rerum from
which he spoke his collatio.
Hugh had spent quite a lot of time in De archa Noe on the details of
lodging within the Ark, and he refers to this previous discussion.
Concerning the raven released after the flood he remarks (De formatione
arche, VIII. 12): ‘‘I discussed all these things more fully in my book about the
Ark [in eo libro quem de archa dictaui].’’ From remarks of this sort, it seems
clear that Hugh regarded his picture of the Ark (pictura arche) as related to
this other treatise, the De archa Noe, to whose themes and concerns this
diagrammatic treatise refers. Hugh’s pictura arche is thus not a picture of
the Ark in the sense of being an illustration, even in allegory, of that object
in Genesis; it is rather a picture-summary of Hugh’s colloquies, and aids
the related rhetorical processes of memory and invention. (It should always
be remembered that medieval summaries can occur either before or after
the text they accompany.) The diagram of the Ark does not include the
material in Book III of De archa Noe; of course we remember that Book III,
which I examined in my previous chapter, is a digression from his original
plan. This diagram is personal to Hugh, yet is presented to others as an
example which may provoke someone else’s imagination and memory,
their affectus.
Thus the diagram and its values are not seen by Hugh as prescriptive,
nor are they exactly what we think of as iconographical, if by iconography
we understand the images to represent fixed, generally accepted meanings.
Rather, it employs just that kind of associational heuristic which the
scholastic writers distinguished from universal logic, and defined as partic-
ular to reminiscence. Basic to the pedagogy of memory is the caution that
each individual must make up his own set of associations – what works
for one will not automatically work for all. Because of this, the values
which the images are given by one author can only be exemplary, not
universally normative (as mathematical images are). In his moralization of
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297
the images in his diagram (and by ‘‘moralization’’ Hugh meant the process
of giving something personal valuation or signification, ‘‘making it mine’’),
Hugh explains what his own associations with them are, but these are not
consistent.45
So, for example, the purple color of the border of the central cubit may
represent the blood of Christ’s passion, and the green the rewards of grace
which it made possible. Or, the purple may signify Christ’s blood and the
green the water by which, in Noah’s day, the world was judged. Or purple
might be the damnation of the wicked and green the liberation of the good.
The moralizing procedure gathers an increasingly dense store of associa-
tions around the focal image, as the composer looks mentally at his images,
down different chains of thought and in different contexts. It is important
to notice how these associational chains vary – they may even be contra-
dictory, as they are in the example I have just given. That is because the
technique addresses the task of reminiscence. Hugh’s memory diagram of
the Ark is an investigative device for meditation and composition.
Having completed his picture of the central cubit (its importance to the
Ark based on Genesis 6:16), Hugh turns to the plan of the whole structure
that extends out from it. A quadrangular figure is drawn again around the
midpoint, but this one corresponds in the ratio of its sides to the dimen-
&nb
sp; sions of the Ark itself, being six times as long as it is wide (Hugh admits,
however, that this is an awkward ratio, and so for convenience’s sake four to
one is more easily managed). Across this area four lines are extended, two
laterally and two vertically, forming a cross in the middle. The distance
between each pair of lines corresponds to the dimensions of the central
square, so that they cross exactly under the cubit. The rectangle of the Ark
itself is oriented east and west in its long dimension, east being directed to
the top (sursum) of the mental page and west to its bottom (deorsum). The
north side is also called the right (dextera) and the south the left (sinistra),
though this nomenclature is not consistent.46
Within the perimeter of the large rectangle, two others are drawn about
the central cubit, one inside the other in such a way that their angles are
formed at points equidistant along the diagonals of the outermost rectan-
gle. Thus there are four quadratures in the planar projection: the central
square or cubit, and the three rectangles, each four to six times as long as it
is wide. The three rectangles are the three main decks or chambers (man-
siones) of the three-storey Ark. And drawn across the whole plan are the two
sets of double lines described earlier, which meet under the middle cubit.
Hugh then turns to a description of the elevation. In this projection, the
double lines which are drawn latitudinally across the Ark and under the
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central cubit are seen to represent the halves of a central column that runs up
the middle of the Ark, through the center of each of its storeys. Atop it, the
central cubit sits like a crown or capital, imbricating the central beams, and
forms a lantern window, the only source of light for the structure beneath.
From the central imbrex, the beams extend downwards to the exterior walls
of the Ark, forming the roof. At the bottom of the column is the Ark’s
entrance. The whole structure looks like a cut-off pyramid, exactly as Hugh
describes the Ark in De archa Noe, ‘‘ad similitudinem curtae pyramidis.’ 47
The description of these three basic models – of the central cubit and of the
Ark’s plan and elevation – comprises chapter 1 of the pictura of the Ark.