Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  Figure 3. Righteous and evil deeds. Augustine, City of God, Florence, Bibl. Laurenziana ms. Plut. XII.17, fol. iv. Photo: Bibl. Laurenziana, Florence.

  Figure 4. Heavenly and earthly cities. Augustine, City of God, Florence, Bibl. Laurenziana ms. Plut. XII.17, fol. Iv. Photo: Bibl. Laurenziana, Florence.

  In many ways the Cambrai miniature takes this lower structure as its subject and setting. It repeats several elements from the earlier depiction, such as the music-making angels and Christ and the apostles, but it omits the traditional attributes of paradise—the landscape, miniature cities, rivers, and guarded gate—and adds figures who are unnimbed and even unclothed. There is a more differentiated hierarchy, with multitudes in each category, and with pride of place given to officials of the church. And it is preceded not by a contrast of good and evil, as in the Canterbury City of God, but by Infancy scenes, so that the context is the history of the Incarnation rather than judgment. Finally, Christ exceptionally appears to the left of the Virgin and is the less active figure. The narrative focus changes: the emphasis is not on Christ and a heavenly city that includes the Church but on Mary, who symbolizes the Church, defined here by the faithful who constitute it, by the hierarchy that structures it, and by the role it has in the history of redemption. Whether we understand her as interceding for the faithful or as entrusting them to Christ, they are in her Church and Christ seems to be, for the moment, chez Elle.

  An analogous representation of Ecclesia with a hierarchy of the faithful appears in a drawing after the destroyed Strassburg manuscript of Herrad of Hohenburg’s Hortus Deliciarum (Figure 5).13 The accompanying text identified the upper figures as diverse ranks of apostles, popes, prelates, abbots, and abbesses, and the lower ones as adolescents with, alongside, clerics, monks, hermits, knights, and male and female laity.14 The battle between Good and Evil that we saw in the first illustration of the Canterbury City of God now occurs outside this structure, while inside, as the text explains, are those who, above, regenerate the Church through their teaching and those who, below, by their obedience, each in their class, work each day and faithfully prepare their affairs for the coming of the Spouse.15 But he has not yet come, and there is no music or rejoicing.

  Figure 5. Ecclesia and the faithful. Drawing from Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus deliciarum, ed. and trans. Aristide D. Caratzas (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Caratzas Bros., 1977).

  Figure 6. Sponsus and sponsa and elect. Psalter, Munich, Bay. Staatsbibliothek, clm. 835 fol. 29v. Photo courtesy Bay. Staatsbibliothek Munich.

  The reference to Christ as “the spouse” points to a critical aspect of our subject, one also seen in an early thirteenth-century English Psalter, now in Munich (Figure 6).16 This full-page illumination is also divided into registers with holy figures arranged in distinctive groups of saints, some distinguished by gender. Angels play musical instruments in both parts.17 On the central axis is Christ seated on a rainbow arc and blessing within a mandorla flanked by seraphim; below is the crowned Ecclesia dressed in fine robes and enthroned in a mandorla with apostles to either side. Here she appears as the sponsa, for she is youthful and wears her hair long and her mandorla, held by angels, is an extension of Christ’s. More important, in the middle of the five lower medallions is the Agnus Dei, an allusion to the Marriage of the Lamb in Revelation 19: 7. Its presence among the surrounding saints is consistent with medieval commentaries on this passage. Haimo of Auxerre and Richard of St. Victor explain that all the elect are present and exult at the marriage, which is that of Christ and the Church, and that they are brought into the company of angels and saints.18 This is also the interpretation we find in Joinville’s Credo, a work composed and originally illustrated about 1250–60. A late thirteenth century exemplar shows Ecclesia embracing the lamb at the wedding table, where she is joined by crowned saints, as angels nearby cense and play musical instruments (Figure 7).19 Although the composition depends upon the tradition of Marriage of the Lamb illustration found in contemporary Apocalypse manuscripts, the accompanying text makes clear that it shows how the righteous come into the presence of Christ: “We firmly believe that saintly men and women who have passed away, and the prudent men and women who are now living, will have eternal life and bliss in heaven, and they will be at the table of the Lord.”20 In the Credo and also in the Psalter, the next subject is the Last Judgment, but heaven is an independent image.21 Whether the setting is the wedding table or a hieratic vision of the assembled faithful, Christ receives the Church and the Elect. In both the Credo and the Psalter, the Last Judgment is the next subject illustrated, but heaven is an independent image, it is a joyous place of the union of Christ and the Church.

  Marie-Louise Thérel’s magisterial study, Le triomphe de la Vierge-Église, traces how this imagery of the Church as a queen or as the sponsa or as the embodiment of the faithful was continually in tension with that of Mary in the same guises.22 But with the acceptance of the bodily assumption of Mary, these meanings converged and her coronation clearly marked the glorification of all humanity within the history of salvation. Although these meanings were implicit in representations of the Coronation of the Virgin from its beginnings in the twelfth century, it is only in the mid-thirteenth that the elect begin to appear alongside the crowned and enthroned Mary. One early example is an ivory diptych made in Paris about 1260–70 (Figure 8).23 The cuttings for the hinges make it certain that the panels were always connected as they are now, with the Coronation of the Virgin at the left, preceding the Last Judgment, as we saw in the analogous subjects in the Psalter and Credo. The details of the Last Judgment are traditional for this time, except that the carver is particularly innovative in the use of arches within arches to suggest three levels, one below the other, corresponding to the Christ in judgment, the resurrection, and hell. In addition, the scene of heaven, which would normally balance the hell scene at the lower right, is represented on the left leaf where, beneath the Coronation, is a procession of figures—a mendicant, a king, a pope, and possibly a deacon—whom one angel descends to greet as a second leads them toward a ladder ascending to heaven. This group almost certainly derives from a composition for the Last Judgment, for related diptychs made by the same Parisian atelier either show the resurrected rising in their tombs, already dressed like those approaching the ladder in the left leaf, or else all three parts—resurrection, heaven, and hell—immediately below the figure of Christ in judgment.24 However, no diptych at this time shows a subject beginning on one leaf and continuing onto the next, and the very high quality of the ivory makes it unlikely that its carver was simply filling the available space beneath the Coronation. Rather, I believe the unusual placement of this group under the Coronation ivory is purposeful: it is an early example of a narrative structure found in some of the finest Parisian diptychs, a structure in which complementary themes, gestures, and patterns of reading are deliberately played off one another, often to dramatic effect, and in ways that deepen the devotional import of the ivories.25 In this case the rising forms of the left panel, with its ladder, its stair-step sequence of levels, and the highly placed figures of Mary and Christ, complement the low figure of Christ and the obliquely descending diagonals of the right panel; similarly, the angel pointing up to the Coronation at the lower left contrasts with the devil pointing down to the hell mouth at the lower right. This is not just a Coronation scene with a bit of the Last Judgment beneath; it is a thematically integral diptych that defines heaven largely in Marian terms. In the circular reading that is typical of many of these diptychs, Mary seems to receive the elect both before and after the Last Judgment, and humanity continually triumphs in her Coronation. The ivory accurately indicates how the elect are increasingly destined to Mary’s protection, whether the context is linked to the Last Judgment or not.

  Figure 7. Marriage of the Lamb and Last Judgment. Joinville, Credo, St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia ms. Lat. Q.v.I, 78. Photo: I. P. Mokretsova and V. L. Romanova, Les manuscrits enluminés français du XIIIe si�
�cle dans les collections soviétiques, 1200–1270.

  Figure 8. Coronation of the Virgin and Last Judgment. Ivory diptych, Metropolitan Museum of Art. acq. 1970.324. 7a–b. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  In his book on purgatory, Jacques Le Goff comments that “Purgatory, in its upper reaches, may be nothing less than evidence of the reality of a beatific vision prior to the Last Judgment.”26 Although those “upper reaches” are never named as clearly as purgatory is, there can be no doubt of the currency, after about 1240, of the belief in the souls of the elect being gathered together and having access to a vision of the divine before the Last Judgment. The nature of this vision was under intense scrutiny at that time, especially in the quodlibetal discussions of William of Auxerre, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas.27 Discussions of this in-between place, frequently referred to as the patria, employ such metaphors as the bosom of Abraham or the place “across the Jordan.”28 Key to these texts is the essential desire of the soul for unity with the Deity, a fulfillment expressed in terms of proximity and vision, of seeing God “face to face.” In this desire, Mary often plays a figurative role both in terms of access, as the porta coeli or scala coeli, as the ivory suggests, and as the Sponsa, as a sign of the union of soul and body in the marriage of Christ and his Church.29 That relation is important because, as Caroline Bynum has shown, the very definition of self in this context depends upon notions of the glorified soul’s continuity with body; indeed, the qualities or dotes the beatified soul bestows on the glorified body are one element in its restoration of identity.30 The patria and Mary’s role become vivid in a different way in sermon and visionary literature. Helinand of Froidmont (c. 1160) tells of the miracle of the man who died, was shown purgatory, and was then led by an angel to the east, where a wall set apart a beautiful, sunny, flower-filled field for the souls of saints before the “regnum dei.”31 In a contemporary example, a pleasant place presided over by Mary precedes a vision of the lower world, and in numerous mid-thirteenth century exempla Mary herself is the guide and the place is one distinguished not by flora but by the company of saints over which she herself presides.32 By the time of the ivory diptych, Mary is not an unfamiliar figure in these “upper reaches.”

  Although this imagery was slow to appear in the visual arts, by the second decade of the fourteenth century many works had begun to elaborate the themes and motifs we have seen in the Cambrai miniature. What Panofsky referred as the “new style” Allerheiligenbilder made their appearance.33 In these All Saints images Christ and Mary are above a large and sometimes diverse group of saints and musical angels, the setting may be sky or clouds, and heretofore traditional elements, such as the Agnus Dei, are not always present. In some, the souls of the faithful are lifted by angels into orders of the elect; in others, Mary and Christ are enthroned with Christ at Mary’s right, as though to suggest that the multitudes of surrounding saints are in her protection or that she is their representative.34 This is also the suggestion in Cimabue’s influential fresco of c. 1280 in the upper chapel at Assisi, where Christ and Mary share an impressive throne and Mary, to Christ’s right, gestures to the surrounding company of the elect as if to present them to the blessing Christ (Figure 9).35 The emphasis of the image, which follows scenes of Mary’s death and ascension, is clearly that of the Triumph of the Virgin, and the same is true of a number of independent panels that show Mary and Christ enthroned, alone or with a multitude of saints, but with Christ at her right even as she is crowned.36 It is also the case in Nardo di Cione’s fresco of Heaven in the Strozzi Chapel at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, a work of c. 1350 in which Christ and Mary are crowned and enthroned together above a large assembly of the elect and angels (Figure 10). With the resurrection of the dead and Christ in judgment on the adjacent wall and with hell on the opposite one, the arrangement would seem to be that of a traditional Last Judgment, except that here, as in the Munich and Cambrai pages, the angels and elect are in distinct ranks and references to the Church figure prominently.37 Here again the Marian imagery is central. In this case it probably reflects Dominican hymns sung at the church, hymns which address Mary as Queen and ask to be gathered up into the company of heaven.38 The painting is particularly interesting in our context because unlike the Hell fresco, which is indebted in many details to Dante’s poem, the Heaven fresco seems to depend directly on Aquinas’s theology of a century earlier; if it parallels the Paradisio, it is in the way they both describe Mary’s role in providing access to the beatific vision.39 Indeed, the very proximity of the Heaven and Last Judgment frescos underscores Mary’s distinctive role in the former: how she gives the painting a devotional focus and enables it to take on institutional implications and to figure the soul’s embodiment and protection in the timeless period of the afterworld.40

  Figure 9. Cimabue, The Heavenly Throne. S. Francesco, Assisi. Photo: Sacro Convento, Assisi.

  So far our discussion has dealt with the Cambrai painting as though it merely extended the forms we found in earlier manuscripts, albeit substituting a Gothic structure for the Romanesque forms of the Canterbury miniature or for the geometrically partitioned one of the Munich page. But this would not explain the most striking features of the Cambrai miniature: its gilt forms, the miniaturization of a three-story structure, or the narrow decorative strips that frame each compartment. Although the forms may be architectural, they refer not to the built forms of Gothic churches but to those of metalwork reliquaries. An apt analogy is the Louvre reliquary of the True Cross from Floreffe, a work of about 1255–60 (Figure 11).41 All those details in the miniature that make no sense as an architectural cross-section fall into place when they are seen in terms of metalwork: the miniature’s narrow lateral compartments with musical angels correspond to the inner part of the reliquary’s wings, the part that covers the side of the object when it is closed; each of the broader lateral compartments, which are exactly half the width of the central compartment, correspond to the parts of a reliquary wing that close over the front of the object; and the small pinnacles above the roof of the lateral compartments, which are normally alongside the central tower, are now at the far sides, a position they would have only when the reliquary is open. Moreover, there are similar decorative details, such as leaf work along the edges and borders and, most telling of all, supportive footings for the base of the object. This is not a picture of a reliquary, but it reproduces certain reliquary forms in unusually explicit detail.

  Figure 10. Nardo di Cione, Heaven. Fresco, Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

  Figure 11. Floreffe reliquary of the True Cross (open). Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris.

  It is well known that reliquaries from at least the eleventh century began to take on the general form of churches and that by the mid-thirteenth century, they evolved into modern buildings with contemporary-looking details, as in the case of the shrine of St. Taurin at Evreux of about 1245, with its gables and aediculae, or the shrine of St. Gertrude at Nivelles, with its elaborate roses and side aisles. The essay by Bruno Boerner in the catalogue of the recent exhibition devoted to the Nivelles shrine makes a compelling case that these architectural reliquaries derive from earlier shrine reliquaries and never lost the associations they had with sarcophagi and with the idea of Holy Jerusalem.42 But these later reliquaries, with their Gothic details, also have institutional associations: it is now the modern Church that superintends the way to Jerusalem for the relics of the saints within. Ecclesiology intersects with eschatology.43

  Although illuminations have always used architectural forms as framing devices, those made at this time in the region of Cambrai often make specific reference to metalwork shrines. A telling example is the Crucifixion page before the Canon of the Mass from an early fourteenth-century Missal made for the cathedral of Cambrai (Figure 12).44 The architectural forms enclose the body of Christ much as a monstrance encloses the host. By depicting the figure of Christ a
s if enshrined rather than merely enframed, the illumination underscores both the corporal presence of what it describes pictorially and what the priest is about to offer liturgically. The implications of this multivalent image are far-reaching and would require a separate essay to develop. Suffice it to say that looking into the space of a reliquary shrine is not the same as looking into that of an ordinary picture: the space in a shrine is uniquely reserved, sacrosanct, and empowered, a place where matter is especially durable and potentially affective, a place not of narrative performance but of symbolic exchange between this world and the next. From the spectator’s point of view, a picture with such an interior space offers a different structure of representation, one that authenticates visual experience no less than perspective will in the centuries which follow.

  The Cambrai page is a variation of this type of pictorial construction, a variation similar to those we encounter in a series of triptychs, compartment reliquaries, and box reliquaries of the True Cross made in the Rhine-Meuse region in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.45 The Floreffe reliquary may again serve as our example. A rear view with the wings open shows the angel on one wing and Mary on the other (Figure 13), enabling us to envision that when the reliquary is closed, the Annunciation is seen on the front. When it is opened, there are scenes from the Passion on the wings while, on the platform in the center, two angels stride outward and hold up the relic of the True Cross (Figure 11). What this and the earlier Cross reliquaries develop is a program keyed to the viewer’s unfolding encounter with what is normally invisible. The setting is the history of salvation. Opening is synonymous with revelation. And inside is the sacred residue that links past to future and that is proffered for view.