Jan Gossart's Immaculate Art

Renaissance Metapainting © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. R ENAISSANCE METAPAINTING Péter Bokody Alexander Nagel HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS An Imprint of Brepols Publishers London/Turnhout British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-912554-26-3 © 2020, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Harvey Miller Publishers D/2020/0095/117 Contents Metapainting before Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Péter Bokody and Alexander Nagel ORIGIN AND RECEPTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Mimesis as Pictoriality of Semblance. On the Fictiveness of Religious Imagery in the Trecento . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 . . . . . . . Klaus Krüger Complicity and Self-Awareness: The Frescoes of Giusto de’ Menabuoi at the Santo. . . . 31 Robert Brennan Tradition and Innovation. Images-within-Images in Italian Painting after the Age of Giotto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 . . . . Péter Bokody TRANSFORMATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Depicting Panel Painting in Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Art: Questions of Transfer and Reception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Erik Eising Practical Ekphrasis. On Images-within-Images in Van Eyck and Mantegna . . . . . . . . . 121 Wolfgang Kemp Metapainting and the Painted Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Nicholas Herman © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 1 CON T E N T S REFLEXIVE DEVOTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Self-Aware Attribute, or ‘Where does a parergon begin and end?’ . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 185 Anna Degler At the Threshold of Painting: The Man of Sorrows by Albrecht Dürer . . . . . 209 . . . . . . . . 239 . . . . . . . . . . 267 . . . . . . . Beate Fricke Structures of Archaism in Leonardo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Raphael . . . . . Alexander Nagel Jan Gossart’s Immaculate Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shira Brisman EPILOGUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Picture-within-Picture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 295 André Chastel List of Illustrations. Bibliography. 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 329 Jan Gossart’s Immaculate Art SHIRA BRISMAN E arly Netherlandish painters followed a code for indicating rifts. To signal a time before Christianity, they situated the foreshadowing figures of the Old Testament as alreadydepicted details, set apart from the action of the scene and framed by the furniture within it.1 In Joos van Cleve’s Annunciation, Moses appears behind Mary in a print tacked on the wall, while Melchizedek blesses Abraham in an altarpiece that serves as a backdrop to Gabriel’s greeting of the kneeling Virgin.2 Appearances of artifacts embedded within narrative representations could also indicate a time to come, investing the moment of the main image – in which the incarnate God appears – with hints of how his presence will be substituted, and thereby preserved. In Jan Gossart’s Adoration of the Magi (fig. 1), the African king offers a gift that takes the form of a monstrance.3 He honours the Child with a container that prefigures the vessel that will hold the Host, indicating the infant’s fate by presenting him with his flesh’s eventual storage device. The white cloth covering the magus’ hands intones the sacramental setting that will become the context for how his body will be known. In these two paintings, and others like them, references to crafts such as wrought metalwork, carved stone, or images decorating interior spaces, distinguish the ‘now’ of the narrative from the ‘then’ of the past or the ‘shall be’ of the future. Disjunctions in time or in manner of worship are often set off by representations of boundary-forming devices such as containers, archways, niches, ledges, and frames. Fictional thresholds within fifteenth-century paintings have been the focus of much of the writing that has sought to locate a moment of rupture, when modern art divorced from its sacred purpose and asserted the other genres it could produce, such as still life, landscape, or 1 Panofsky includes this phenomenon in his description of disguised symbolism, and dates its origin to the trecento. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: its origins and character (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953), pp. 131–48 and Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960), pp. 141–42. 2 From van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. by Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith Christiansen (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), no. 97, pp. 364–65. 3 Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance, ed. by Maryan W. Ainsworth (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), no. 8, pp. 145–50. Gossart also designed reliquaries to be executed by metalworkers, as in the Pierpont Morgan Library’s drawing, 111, 127b, no. 110, 400–01. In an Adoration of the Magi attributed to Jacques Daret, the kneeling king hands Joseph his offering, which resembles a crystal reliquary or monstrance. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, no. 538. © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 267 S H IR A B R IS M A N Fig. 1. Jan Gossart, Adoration of the Magi, c. 1510–1515, oil on wood, 177.2 × 161.3 cm (National Gallery, London). scenes of average people on an ordinary day.4 The ultimate end-goal of modern art – to put forth paintings whose theme is painting – developed, according to Victor Stoichita, when certain isolatable episodes within sacred paintings gradually began to distinguish themselves from the motivations of religious imagery and finally stood on their own.5 This essay, however, attends to where metapainting operates without such splits.6 Its aim is to describe how a particular kind of image, the devotional icon, could refer to the process by which a painting is made and the meaning with which the creative act of making it is invested, and in doing so 4 268 Lorenzo Pericolo, ‘What is Metapainting? The Self-Aware Image Twenty Years Later’, in Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Metapainting, trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen and Lorenzo Pericolo (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2015), p. 23. See also Wolfgang Kemp, Räume der Maler: zur Bilderzählung seit Giotto (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1996), and his essay in this volume. 5 Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, p. 34 and p. 39. 6 Péter Bokody also distinguishes between how embedded images function in narrative images and how they operate in cult images, for a purpose different from, but related to mine: he describes the former as delaying the impact on the viewer, whereas with metapictorial elements in religious icons, the result is ‘an immediate access to detail’. Péter Bokody, Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250–1350): Reality and Reflexivity (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), p. 182. J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT affirm the incomparable nature of the Virgin’s body and the corporal reality of Christ. If, in the examples above, metapictorial moments are situated around the holy figures and cordoned off from them by framing devices, in the main painting under consideration here, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Virgin and Child (fig. 2), a surviving portion of a diptych by Jan Gossart, the metapictorial passages are not self-contained, nor distinguished from the depiction of holy flesh. Gossart’s painting originally served to stimulate recitation of the Ave Sanctissima prayer, a hymn to Mary associated with the doctrine of the immaculate conception. The larger reference of the painting, the creation of the Virgin without carnal contact and her absolution from Eve’s sin – an exemption predetermined before her birth – is itself a metapictorial theme. Defenders of the doctrine of the immaculate conception employed the analogy that the Virgin was like a painting by God, first conceived as an idea and then executed as colour and form. ‘The immaculate Virgin was sometimes considered to be a divine painting, a work of God the artist’, Stoichita writes; she constituted, as subject matter, ‘a metapictorial theme’.7 This metaphor was useful because it found for the argument about the prolonged chronology of the Virgin’s existence – that she had existed in the divine mind before the beginning of time – a suitably phased method of production. Painting is built from the ground up. It requires a preliminary stage of composition before its pigments are overlaid. This sequencing served as apt analogy for describing the Virgin as pre-conceived, that is, as existing before the Fall of Man; it also served to explain how the prophecies of the Old Law – cast by Christian theologians as monochromatic undertone – could find fulfillment in the coming of the (tonal) flesh. Painting thus provided a metaphor both for the immaculate conception of the Virgin and for the incarnation of Christ. While all depictions of the Virgin that accompanied the Ave Sanctissima prayer show her holding her son, none makes such a point of directing attention to the infant’s flesh as Gossart’s Chicago painting does with his rendering of the transparent veil. This garment invites a peering-through, a beholding of the body that lies underneath. The thin covering guides the beholder’s gaze to the achievement of God’s creative hand – the materialization of flesh. In Gossart’s panel, the veil operates as a pictorial defence of the incarnation that is set within a pictorial defence of the immaculate conception. These two doctrines are separate notions in Catholicism; the first was an incontestable matter of faith in Gossart’s time, the latter (which was not ratified by the church as official dogma until 1854) was, in the early sixteenth century, still a matter of debate.8 Gossart’s unique contribution was to draw particular attention to Christ’s flesh in a scene dedicated to evoking the purity of his mother’s soul. The portrayal of the gauzy cloth covering Christ may also be considered a metapictorial 7 Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), pp. 111–13. 8 The doctrine of the immaculate conception (which pertains to the purity of the Virgin’s soul) and the doctrine of the incarnation (which pertains to the creation of Christ) are commonly confused. See the discussion of Gossart’s Danaë in Marisa Anne Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016), p. 118 and p. 124. Panofsky’s essay, footnoted in Bass (118, n. 5), likens Danaë to the Virgin at the Annunciation, that is, at the moment of the conception of Christ. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Der gefesselte Eros (Zur Genealogie von Rembrandts Danae)’, Oud Holland 50 (1933), 206–07. For the doctrine pertaining to Mary’s purity, see Frederick Holweck, ‘Immaculate Conception’, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7, ed. by Charles Herbermann (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), pp. 674–81. © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 269 S H IR A B R IS M A N Fig. 2. Jan Gossart, Virgin and Child, c. 1520, oil on panel, 53.4 × 40.2 cm (Art Institute, Chicago). 270 J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT passage set within a painting that serves on the whole as an allusion to a divine work of art. The rendering of the transparent garment serves to describe what a painting is (an additive layer whose purpose is to show) and how a painting is made (through a sequence of strokes that have been thought out in advance by their creator). The painting’s metapictorial passage, that is, the pellucid garb covering the infant’s flesh, coordinates with the rest of the image to present a coherent claim about the mother-child bond. The unity of the painting’s messages – that both the Virgin and her son are paintings by God – may be appreciated even as the supporting and contextualizing elements of the overall work, the frame and the presumed adjacent donor panel, have been lost. Aureoles and veils: Gossart’s use of transparent cloth for the Maria in sole The pictorial image most associated with the doctrine of the immaculate conception was borrowed from the Book of Revelations. In the thirteenth century, Bernard of Clairvaux had identified the Virgin Mary as the woman of the Apocalypse, who appears ‘clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet’, who gives birth ‘to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations’, but whose ‘Child is caught up to God and his throne’ (Rev. 12:1–5).9 In the visual imagery associated with this epiphany, known as the Maria in sole (of which numerous examples in print, by artists such as Israhel van Meckenem, Martin Schongauer, and Albrecht Dürer survive) (fig. 3), mother and son appear together in a sunburst; she wears a crown and stands on a crescent moon.10 This otherworldly apparition works symbolically to stand for the impregnation of the Virgin’s body with divine radiance, her extraordinary nature as one unmarked by sin, and her eventual ascent into heaven.11 These are likely some of the reasons why, in 1477, when he promised a release of 11,000 years from purgatory to anyone who celebrated the office of the immaculate conception, the Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV recommended that recitation of the Ave Sanctissima prayer take place before an image of the Virgin surrounded by the sun (ante [or coram] ymaginem marie virginis in sole).12 His endorsement of the imagery is 9 For a nuanced account of how Bernard came to be associated with the doctrine of the immaculate conception even though he himself did not endorse it, see Mirella Levi D’Ancona, The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (New York: College Art Association, 1957), p. 8. 10 Martin Schongauer and his copyists and contemporaries popularized the formulation as both an apocalyptic vision (she appears in the sky as John looks up from his book) and as an independent image, one that could be cropped to reduce the standing, full-bodied Madonna to the half-length format more familiar to devotional imagery. Dürer also understood its versatility; while he sold versions of the sun-surrounded Virgin as autonomous from particular contexts, he also used the Maria in sole image for the frontispiece to his 1498 Apocalypse (where mother and son appear as John’s vision) and his 1498 Life of the Virgin (where they appear again in heaven, this time as a vision of the beholder that is unmediated by a privileged chronicler). 11 Larry Silver, ‘Full of Grace: “Mariolatry” in Post-Reformation Germany’, in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, ed. by Michael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), p. 302. 12 For the citation of the indulgence (here listed as remission for 15,000 years), see Bernardino de’ Busti, Thesaurus spiritualis cum quamplurimis alijs additis noviter impressus (Lyons: Nicolaus Wolff, 1500), fol. 114. Nikolaus Paulus, Geschichte des Ablasses im Mittelalter: vom Ursprunge bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, vol. 3 (Paderborn: © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 271 S H IR A B R IS M A N Fig. 3. Albrecht Dürer, Maria del Sole, 1514, engraving, 11.7 × 7.6 cm (plate); 16.5 × 12 cm (sheet) (National Gallery of Art, Washington). 272 J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT Fig. 4. Southern Netherlandish Painter, Pope Sixtus IV in prayer before an image of the Maria del Sole from the Hours of Joanna I of Castile, c. 1500, parchment codex, Add. Ms. 35313, f. 237, 23.5 × 16.5 cm (British Library, London). © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 273 S H IR A B R IS M A N Fig. 5. Jan Gossart, Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, c. 1520, oil on oak panel, 110.5 × 83.5 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). supported in a manuscript which shows the pope in prayer (fig. 4), looking up at an image of the Maria in sole that is surrounded by a gold frame and whose bottom half is inscribed with text.13 The Apocalyptic Virgin is most commonly found in the context of John’s Revelation or as an isolated image intended to stimulate prayer. Yet Gossart found an uncommon occasion to insert her within Christian painting’s most self-referential moment: Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin (fig. 5). In situating the immaculate Virgin within a painting about painting, Gossart predicts the seventeenth century’s full realisation of the Maria in sole as a metapictorial inset. The articulation of the light-enveloped Virgin as a celestial painting would arrive with Francisco de Zurbarán’s Immaculate Conception in the Szépmûvészeti Múzeum in Budapest, where the F. Schöningh, 1923), p. 297. Sixten Ringbom, ‘Maria in Sole and the Virgin of the Rosary’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 25 (1962), 326 and Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting, 2nd ed. (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1984), pp. 26–27. 13 274 London, British Library, Add. MS 35313, f. 237. Bonnie J. Blackburn, ‘The Virgin in the Sun: Music and Image for a Prayer Attributed to Sixtus IV’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 124 (1999), 181–84. J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT artist’s signature, illusionistically tacked on to the surface of the picture, designates the representation of the cloud-borne mother as a work of art. But before this isolation of the divinely authored image as an independent theme, in his Saint Luke, Gossart breaks with the traditional appearance of the Mother and Son as seated, and depicts the Maria in sole in full, hovering above the ground.14 Scenes of Saint Luke are the places to look for metapictorial commentaries, for an artist’s account of his creative act. Gossart’s Saint Luke binds together immaculist imagery, incarnational theology, and self-reflexivity about painting. These interlinked themes will return again in his half-length Virgin and Child in Chicago, but they are first articulated more explicitly where the process of rendering is being shown. In representing the portraitist occupying himself with the preliminary stage, the recording of the Virgin’s traits with a stylus on paper, Gossart, following Rogier van der Weyden, contrasts the initial drawing with the appearance of Christ in the flesh. He implies that the additive process of building up skin tones is yet to come.15 Typological foreshadowing of the Old Testament was likened to the greyscale of drawing, while the incarnation was compared to the addition of colours. Understanding the incarnation to have nullified the restrictions on image-making imposed by the Judaic second commandment, the church fathers sanctioned painting through a comparative language that likened God’s formulation of his own son, and his fashioning of the rest of humankind, to the application of pigment.16 Gregory of Nyssa imagined God as endowing the image of man with hues of virtue.17 In his Vision of God, published in 1453, Nicholas of Cusa described the divine creator as mixing colours so as to paint his own likeness, thereby allowing his self-replica to inhabit the world.18 Instructing his fellow craftsmen in how to build up colour, Cennino Cennini had termed the depiction of flesh incarnazione, a word that associates every act of rendering human form with the primary event 14 See Stoichita’s discussion of the Zurbarán as well as of Diego Velàzquez’s placement of the Immaculate Conception as a separate panel accompanying Saint John’s Revelation. Stoichita, Visionary Experience, pp. 112–19. 15 For an example of an image of Saint Luke that shows the artist adding fleshtones to the underdrawing, see the Gospel Book of John of Troppau, ONB Vienna, MS 1192, fol. 91v. Paul Binski, Medieval Craftsmen Painters (London: British Museum Press, 1991), p. 13. Legends attached to icons of the Virgin and Child in Rome recounted that God had rendered the images, while Saint Luke had added the colour. Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, p. 160 and Irving Lavin, ‘Addenda to “Divine Inspiration”’, Art Bulletin, 56 (December 1974), 590–91. For a discussion of the representation of unfinished fleshtones as a metapictorial theme, see Bokody, Images within Images, pp. 97–100. 16 For this logic as expressed in the Praeceptorium of 1452, see Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980), pp. 51–53. 17 Rudolf Preimesberger, ‘…“Proprijs sic Effingebam Colouribus” … Zu Dürers Selbstbildnis von 1500’, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. by Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1998), pp. 294–95. Gregory of Nyssa also likens the following of Christ to a student of painting who imitates a beautiful image that the instructor has put forth as a model. Here too one must employ ‘the clean colours of the virtues, mixed with one another in accordance with a proper craft for such blends’. Margaret M. Mitchell, The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 63–64. The notion of Christ endowing his believers with the colours of virtues predates Gregory of Nyssa in the apocryphal Acts of John, where Christ is described as ‘paint[ing] us all in himself’. Acta apostolorum apocrypha, vol. 2/1 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1972), p. 166. Margaret M. Mitchell, ‘The Archetypal Image: John Chrysostom’s Portraits of Paul’, The Journal of Religion, 75 (1995), 27, n. 55. 18 Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God, trans. by Emma Gurney Salter (New York: Cosimo, 2007), Chap. 25. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979), p. 55. © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 275 S H IR A B R IS M A N that permitted representation of the human and divine.19 This metaphor was an active one in Gossart’s time. It was utilized by Albrecht Dürer in the inscription on his Christ-like selfportrait of 1500, where he alludes to God’s control of pigment with the words: propriis … colouribus. The phrase may be translated as a self-referential statement of the artist’s ‘own’, or ‘proper’, colours, though it has also been interpreted to describe a temporal condition, as in ‘eternal’, ‘permanent’, or ‘undying’ shades.20 Gossart suggests the supercession of the monochromatic design by the brightness of paint when he places the artist beneath the statue of Moses holding the old law. The Virgin and Child appear before him in a chromatic burst. Surrounded by light, supported by angels who lift her in the air and hold a crown above her head, this Mary – unmistakably bearing the same features as the image in front of which Sixtus IV recommended recitation of the Ave Sanctissima prayer (an iconographical identification that has been missed by previous interpreters of the painting) – departs from the ordinarily grounded position of a sitter whose portraitist paints her from life.21 Gossart has innovated, imbedding one iconography, the Maria in sole (herself borrowed from the vision of Saint John on Patmos), within another, the episode of Saint Luke setting her features down. As if to reinforce the association with Mary’s purity, Gossart shows that Luke has taken off his shoes, an acknowledgement of sacred territory that recalls Moses removing his footwear before the burning bush. The evocation of the inconsumable shrub – adopted, in immaculist theology, as a symbol of the Mary’s incorruptible flesh – further 276 19 Broecke, Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’arte, pp. 190–92. Christiane Kruse, ‘Fleisch werden-Fleisch malen: Malerei als incarnazione. Mediale Verfahren des Bildwerdens im Libro dell’Arte von Cennino Cennini’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 63 (2000): 305–25, and Christiane Kruse, Wozu Menschen malen. Historische Begründungen eines Bildmediums (Munich: Fink, 2003), pp. 175–224. Daniela Bohde finds that Cennini uses the word incarnazione forty-five times in his short text, while Vasari uses it four times in his Vite of 1550, and eleven times in his edition of 1568. Daniela Bohde, ‘‘Le tinte delle carni’ Zur Begrifflichkeit für Haut und Fleisch in italienischen Kunsttraktaten des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts’, in Weder Haut noch Fleisch: Das Inkarnat in der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2007), p. 48. Georges Didi-Huberman, La Peinture incarnée: suivi de Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu par Honoré de Balzac (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985), pp. 22–23. It should be noted that there remains some skepticism that Cennini’s use of the word incarnazione is religiously coded. See Ann-Sophie Lehmann, In the Flesh. Jan van Eyck’s Adam and Eve Panels and the Making of the Northern Nude (Zwolle: Waanders, 2007). 20 Dieter Wuttke, ‘Dürer and Celtis: Von der Bedeutung des Jahres 1500 für den deutschen Humanismus. Jahrhundertfeier als symbolische Form’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 10 (1980), 85. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 85. Ernst Rebel, Albrecht Dürer, Maler und Humanist (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1996), p. 157. Grazyna Jurkowlaniec, ‘Faith, Paragone and Commemoration in Dürer’s ‘Christomorphic’ Self-Portrait of 1500’, in Faith and Fantasy in the Renaissance: Texts, Images, and Religious Practices, ed. by Olga Zorzi Pugliese and Ethan Matt Kavaler (Toronto: CRRS, 2009), p. 215. For the interpretation of this phrase used by Dürer as referring to protective varnish, see Margaret A. Sullivan, ‘Alter Apelles: Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait’, Renaissance Quarterly, 68.4 (2015), 1177-1178. 21 The depiction of the coronation of the Virgin is an allusion to the heavenly destination of her body associated with the immaculist doctrine because it affirms a complete history in which her body escapes the ravages of corruption. Levi D’Ancona, The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception, p. 28. Maryan Ainsworth notes the unusual (and particularly Catholic) treatment of the Lukian iconography, noting the implication of divine intervention and the reference to Moses removing his shoes. Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, pp. 160–64. Marisa Bass attributes the anomalous appearance of the Virgin and Child in a cloud to an Eastern Orthodox tradition whereby Saint Luke painted a vision of the holy figures (instead of portraying them from life). Neither Ainsworth nor Bass explicitly connects these details to the iconography of the immaculate conception, as I do here. Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, pp. 122–24. J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT indicates that Luke is portraying his vision of the immaculate Virgin, God’s temporally uncircumscribed, creative work. In the Saint Luke painting, as in the Chicago Virgin and Child, Gossart alludes to the immaculate conception while employing the device of the see-through garb. The Virgin, holding her son, tucks a transparent cloth under his bottom (which thus provides a barrier between her hand and his flesh – a motif we will see again). The cloth gathers around the area of his rump, falls over his legs, and ends as a draping over the Virgin’s arm. It covers both her and him; it reveals, through its clearness, her clothing and his skin.22 The fabric’s excess, its overlaying atop her garment and his flesh, groups clothing and skin in an elision also favoured by theologians. Whereas God’s paternal role in creating Christ was portrayed in painterly terms, the Virgin’s participation in the nurturing of his body was envisioned through the vestiary device of the veil. In Christian metaphorics, the veil – Judaism’s prophylactic device that protected humans from direct apprehension of God (Ex. 34:33–35) – came to explain the manner in which Christ’s human parent participated in the divine plan by providing him with flesh.23 Spiritual lyric portrayed the Virgin as clothing her son. A fifth-century homily attributed to Proclus addressed her thus: O Virgin, unmarried maid, mother without the corruption of birth, where did you get the wool from which you prepared the garment that today clothed the Master of the world? Where did you find the uterine loom on which you wove the seamless garment?24 If, in poetry, the motif of clothing could signify the formulation of flesh, in painting, the analogy between habiliment and skin was forged by allowing the one to share planar space with – but not obscure – the other. The see-through quality of Gossart’s garment offers proof of the divine’s earthly form. In his devotional half-lengths, Gossart uses the veil even more explicitly than in the Saint Luke to direct attention to Christ’s flesh. The Chicago painting makes visible his navel. In the Virgin and Child panel in Berlin (fig. 6), and on the right-hand side of the Carondelet diptych in Paris, the cloth permits sight of Christ’s genitals. Umbilicus and penis 22 A transparent garment is also worn by the unwinged putto supporting the Virgin from behind. The putto’s thinly-painted flesh reveals the remnants of black tracing lines that would have been used to transfer a preliminary drawing to the painting’s support. Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, pp. 160–64. For commentary on the figure’s nudity, see Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, p. 124. 23 On Moses’ veil as symbolic of the mystery of Jewish scripture that was then made legible by Christ’s flesh, see Cyril of Alexandria, Letter 41:8 and John of Damascus I,16 in Orationes pro sacris imaginibus, p. 94. Quoted in Herbert L. Kessler, ‘Medieval Art as Argument’, in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. by Brendan Cassidy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 69. See also Ruth Mellinkoff, The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 82–83. See also Paul’s gloss on the Exodus passage in his second letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 3:13–16). David H. Thiele, ‘Paul and Moses in 2 Corinthians 3: Hermeneutics from the Top Down’, in Hermeneutics, Intertextuality and the Contemporary Meaning of Scripture, ed. by Ross Cole and Paul Petersen (Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2014), p. 69. Barbara Baert, ‘Veiling’, in Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), p. 159. 24 Homily 4,2; PG 65, 712 C. Luigi Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought, trans. by Thomas Buffer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), p. 252. See also Proclus of Constantinople, ‘Homily 1 on the Theotokos’, in Nicolas Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity, (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2003), p. 134. © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 277 S H IR A B R IS M A N Fig. 6. Jan Gossart, Virgin and Child, c. 1530, oil on oak, 48 × 38 cm (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin). 278 J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT – evidence of his nourishment from his mother and his own life-giving potential – attest to his humanity.25 The drapery that falls over Christ’s body can be likened to painting itself because it works by way of a layering process that makes visible the human form. An additive layer that directs attention, the diaphanous cloth, like the pigment with which it is rendered, enables sight by enhancing a visual experience just at the place where it would seem to be covering it up. The transparent cloth, like a painting, says, ‘look here’.26 In devotional liturgy, the description of Mary’s dressing of Christ took on a complicated chronology. The garbing of the child in the flesh of his mother was not portrayed as an isolated event but was tied to a more encompassing divine plan. A twelfth-century homily by Bernard of Clairvaux addresses Mary as the mother of ‘the Lord your Son, whom you have clothed with your flesh’.27 Bernard clarifies that Christ is both the recipient of his mother’s dressing and the deviser of the plan to be so dressed: ‘He was your Master long before he became your Son. He instructed your mind before he clothed himself with your flesh’.28 By the Council of Basel, in 1439, the notion that the clothing of Christ in the flesh of a mother whose freedom from original sin had been preordained had become the most controversial issue surrounding the immaculate conception. While Dominicans, following Bernard, maintained that the Virgin was created sine macula, without carnal contact, they did not concede that she had been fully spared from the disgrace of the Fall. Dominicans located the moment of her sanctification as an in-utero event, when her body joined her soul. Bernard imagined that the Virgin’s immaculacy ‘borrowed the holiness form the birth that was to follow it. Now the holiness accomplished in her already conceived could communicate itself to her birth that followed it but certainly could not go backwards to the conception that had preceded it’.29 The Franciscans, following Duns Scotus, insisted that the Virgin was pure because she had never borne Eve’s stain, and that this exemption had to have been planned from the beginning of time.30 The 25 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 10–19 and p. 55. For the association between the umbilicus and nourishment, see Amanda Jane Lepp, ‘The Rooster’s Egg: Maternal Metaphors and Medieval Men’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto, 2010), pp. 64–65 and pp. 80–81. Christ is also referred to as the umbilicus mundi, the midpoint between heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, mimesis and abstraction. Herbert L. Kessler, ‘Medietas / Mediator and the Geometry of Incarnation’, in Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, ed. by Walter S. Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 17–75. On Christ’s navel as the source of Eucharistic blood, see Beate Fricke, ‘A Liquid History: Blood and Animation in Late Medieval Art’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 63/64 (Spring/Autumn 2013), 58. 26 On the origins of see-through coverings of Christ in trecento painting, and their enabling of the apprehension of his nude form, see Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 154 and p. 157. 27 Magnificat: Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Bernard of Clairvaux and Amadeus of Lausanne, trans. by Marie-Bernard Saïd and Grace Perigo (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications Inc., 1978), p. 36. 28 Magnificat, p. 39. 29 Giovanni Miegge, The Virgin Mary: The Roman Catholic Marian Doctrine, trans. by Waldo Smith (Philadelphia: Lutterworth Press, 1955), pp. 113–14. 30 Hugolinus Storff, The Immaculate Conception: The Teaching of St Thomas, St Bonaventure and Bl. J. Duns Scotus (San Francisco: St Francis Press, 1925), p. 126. On the notion that the Virgin received her Immaculacy from Christ, see also St Fulbert of Chartres. Levi D’Ancona, The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception, pp. 5–17 and p. 25. For a general discussion of the doctrine of the immaculate conception, see Marina Warner, Alone of all her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016), chap. 16. Nancy Mayberry, ‘The Controversy over the Immaculate Conception in Medieval and Renaissance Art, Literature, and Society’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 21 (1991), 207–24. Martina Wehrli-Johns, ‘L’Immaculée Conception © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 279 S H IR A B R IS M A N proclamations of Proverbs (8:22–24), Ecclesiasticus (24:14), and Psalms (109:3) that spoke of an ante-genesis existence, had, since the twelfth century, been called upon by exegetes to prove the existence of the incorruptible Mary before the formulation of the earth. When, in 1476, Sixtus IV established the office for the feast of the immaculate conception, these pre-Christian verses formed part of the liturgy. Leading up to this papal endorsement of the doctrine, theologians had linked the Hebraic phrasing of a prehistorical arrangement – a creation of purity before the creation of the soon-to-be-corrupted world – to the planned existence of the Virgin and to the motif of the Virgin’s clothing of Christ. The poet Joan Gamiça, in his entry for the 1474 certamen, addressed the following praise to Mary: Infinite God, before the world was created, Preserved you, most holy and pure. Infinite God cloaked himself in your flesh With which he took away that payment Laid down by the first man.31 Here the motif of the Virgin lending her garb to her son is linked to her prelapsarian exclusion from the taint of Eve’s transgression. Prayer as frame How do poetic passages describing clothing, flesh, and prelapsarian creation relate to Gossart’s paintings where Mary’s celestial radiance and the transparency of Christ’s cloth are combined? Just as Gamiça’s poem connects the imagery of the mother’s sartorial gift to her son with the imagery of the son’s gift of a spotless soul to his mother, Gossart’s Chicago painting, building on the suggestions made in his Saint Luke, is unique in the corpus of Maria in sole images in investing a depiction of Mary’s purity and eternity with a rendering of Christ’s gossamer garment – a figurative motif that could stand for both how the Incarnation worked (through Christ’s clothing in his mother’s flesh) and what it replaced (the veils associated with the Old Law). The aureole of light and radiating beams around the Virgin in this painting have only tentatively been linked to the Maria in sole iconography and the Ave Sanctissima prayer to which the iconography was attached.32 Elaborating on this devotional context opens up a deeper understanding of the interconnected details in Gossart’s panel and makes more visible the double reference to both Christ’s flesh and to the immaculate Virgin as divine paintings. First, it is necessary to speculate about what kind of information the original frame might have provided before moving on to observe what kinds of connections within the painting may be appreciated as the panel now stands. It is possible that the painting, like several of the après le concile de Bâle dans les provinces dominicaines et franciscaines de Teutonie et de Saxe: débats et iconographie’, L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, 10 (2012) (http://arch.revues.org/4280). 280 31 Lesley K. Twomey, Serpent and the Rose: The Immaculate Conception and Hispanic Poetry in the Late Medieval Period (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 178–79. 32 Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, no. 14, pp. 167–68. J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT surviving prints with the Maria in sole imagery, such as the one by Dürer where the Child holds the apple (fig. 3), or those by Schongauer and his copyists where the Virgin and Christ appear in half-length, delivered the image without the accompanying prayer.33 The prints may have been pasted into books of hours to accompany the text, but it is also possible that they, and the painting, operated autonomously, triggering a recitation that had been memorized.34 Yet many of the prints from the 1470s on that provide images of the Virgin surrounded by rays are accompanied by a transcription of the benediction and a citation of the Pope’s issuance of the indulgence. The prayer, which has been attributed to the proto-notary Leonardo Nogarolo, appears in a number of languages such as Latin, a Nuremberg dialect of German, and Middle Dutch.35 Its variants – it has both a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’ form – attest to the controversial nature of the doctrine it presumably was intended to endorse. One version makes the safer statement, ‘You conceived Jesus without sin’ (Tu conceptisti sine peccato), while the longer line makes clear that the she not only conceived without sex but also without the stain of original sin (Tu concepta sine peccato / Concepisti hiesum sine macula).36 The texts are either examples of an original and a recension, or they may have deliberately targeted both Dominicans and Franciscans; either one or the other alternative may be found on the bottom of engravings signed by Israhel van Meckenem (fig. 7). Placing an apple in the Child’s hand, linking the Virgin to Eve, an artist could reinforce the immaculist message of the ‘strong’ version. The fruit appears – to name a few cases – in a woodcut in the Bodleian where the prayer includes the words ‘sine macula’, in the engraving by Albrecht Dürer, and in the Chicago painting by Gossart.37 It is not difficult to imagine that the original frame of Gossart’s painting would have included a written form of the Ave Sanctissima prayer. When he inscribed the borders of his Virgin and Child diptych paintings in Berlin, Paris, and Cleveland with Marian hymns, Gossart was operating in the tradition of Jan van Eyck, who had begirded his Virgins with songs of praise exalting her radiance.38 In both the Ghent Altarpiece and the Madonna of Canon van der Paele, she is surrounded by the words from the Book of Wisdom (7: 29, 26): 33 The Ave Sanctissima prayer appears without the expected image (a half-length Madonna and Child not in the Maria del Sol aureole) as side panels of a triptych attributed to a follower of Gerard David and today in the National Gallery of London. Ringbom, ‘Maria in Sole’, p. 326. Craig Harbison, ‘Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 15, (1985), 103–04. The inscription contains the ‘strong’ version of the prayer. Blackburn, ‘The Virgin in the Sun’, p. 187. 34 Between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, composers devised over forty different musical settings for the Ave Sanctissima prayer. In the list of musicians compiled by Bonnie Blackburn, several, such as Alexander Agricola, Pierre de la Rue, Josquien des Prez, Heinrich Isaac, and Nicolas Gombert, worked in the service of royals of the Burgundian court. Given the popularity of the prayer and its accompanying imagery in Books of Hours commissioned by members of this court, it is possible to imagine that the commission of the painting by Gossart could have come out of his contact with the Burgundian court. For the list of musical settings, see Blackburn, ‘The Virgin in the Sun’, pp. 190–95. 35 Ursula Weeks, ‘Convents as Patrons and Producers of Woodcuts in the Low Countries around 1500’, Studies in the History of Art, 75 (2009), p. 271, notes 53 and 54. 36 On the question of whether the ‘weak’ preceded the ‘strong’ version, or vice versa, see Ringbom, ‘Maria in Sole’, p. 326, and Blackburn, ‘The Virgin in the Sun’, pp. 173–87, especially note 22. 37 See Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 113, Blackburn, ‘The Virgin in the Sun’, fig. 2. 38 For the Cleveland picture, see Walter S. Gibson, ‘Jan Gossaert de Mabuse: Madonna and Child in a Landscape’, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 61 (1974), 291–92. © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 281 S H IR A B R IS M A N Fig. 7. Israhel van Meckenem, The Maria del Sole and the Ave Sanctissima Prayer, c. 1475–1480, engraving, 10.1 × 7.5 and 16.6 × 11.5 cm (The British Museum, London and Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden). She is more beautiful than the sun and above the whole order of the stars. When compared to the light, she is found to precede it. For she is the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God (speculum sine macula Dei). A few of these words are also legible on the border of the robe worn by the Virgin in Van Eyck’s Madonna in the Church, which once possessed a frame with the inscription: This mother is the daughter, This father is born. Who has heard of such a thing? God born a man.39 The content of these prayers and their placement on the borders of clothing and furniture within the paintings, or on the liminal space of the frame, worked together to evoke passages between the material and immaterial world. The divine took on the substance of light and became flesh; the beholder’s imagination moved from the physical stimulus of the painting to 39 282 For a discussion of these passages in van Eyck’s work, see Millard Meiss, ‘Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings’, The Art Bulletin, 27 (1945), 180–81. J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT the mental production of his own vision. Van Eyck had devised the utilization of boundaries as thoroughfares allowing a back and forth between metaphor and material, word and image, here and there. Gossart advanced this trope by investing with meaning the painterly passages of overlap. He thought through the relationship of over and under as it correlates to mediation and presence, after and before. Evidence for his experimentation with this motif may be found in Gossart’s Berlin Virgin and Child (fig. 6), where the veil on the mother’s head and the garments that cover her flesh trespass in front of the (painting of the) frame. In the Chicago picture, the absence of an original frame requires reconstructing the possible triggers for the devotional act the painting was intended to incite; it also affords appreciation of Gossart’s treatment within the picture of the matter of layering. The sequence of before and after, below and atop was the painter’s occasion to contemplate Christianity’s complex chronologies. As with the lines ‘This mother is the daughter / This father is born’, the pictorial references to both Christ and his mother as paintings connected the Virgin and Child in a mutually generative bond. Adopting the image of the Madonna in sole for what was likely a devotional diptych with an accompanying panel showing a donor in prayer, Gossart’s innovation was to indicate the immaculist emphasis on the likeness of Mary to Christ – their similarity in having been born free of sin, and their elliptical creation of one another – through painterly strategies of overlapping. The inclusivity of Gossart’s veils Gossart’s handling of translucent cloth serves as a source of praise in Carl van Mander’s didactic poem, where he asserts that for renderings of fabrics with fine weave, as in depictions of the mother and child, ‘one can neither seek nor find better than in Mabuse’.40 Gossart’s diaphanous gauze crumples and twists, billows, drapes, and catches the light, but demurs to obscure what it overlays. In the painting in Chicago, a golden ringlet has fallen over the Virgin’s right shoulder. The sheer fabric that covers it bends and tucks, tracing the tress, accentuating its swerving course. The delicate gossamer includes a decoration along its border, a tincture of gold that harmonizes with the colour of Mary’s hair and the radiating undulations around her. This auriferous ornament to the accessory she wears may evoke the comparison made by apologists for the immaculate conception, who likened Mary’s pure flesh to a vein of gold that stretched from the time of Adam and Eve to the moment of her conception.41 For Gossart, veils are not merely performances of painterly technique. They are conjunctive devices. They link different beings to one another and suggest relationships between the diverse forms of matter they encompass. In this half-length, the veil covering Mary’s head and the garment wrapping 40 ‘Maer gheschilderde fijn dwadighe doecken, / Als ontrent Mary-beeldts kindekens, soecken / Soude men geen beter, noch vinden moghen, / Dan van Mabeusen, duckt my onghelogen’. Karel van Mander, Het schilderboeck waer in voor eerst de leerlustighe iueht den grondt der edel vry schilderconst (Haarlem, 1604), fol. 42v and Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, ed. Hessel Miedema, vol. 3, trans. Derry Cook-Radmore, (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1996), p. 149. Sytske Weidema and Anna Koopstra, Jan Gossaert: The Documentary Evidence (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), n. 69, pp. 87–88. 41 Lesley K. Twomey, The Fabric of Marian Devotion in Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013), p. 183. © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 283 S H IR A B R IS M A N Christ work together to hint at the preternatural bond between the unique mother and her singular son. One motif that artists had employed since the fourteenth century was to follow the account in the Meditations on the Life of Christ that portrays the Virgin wrapping her infant with her veil at the nativity.42 Translated pictorially, a cloth covering the Virgin’s head extends downward to wrap the child’s loins, allowing the fabric to point proleptically to the eventual wrapping of his body at his death.43 In such a configuration, in Leo Steinberg’s words, the veil ‘serves as omen, it aggrieves the child’s nudity by premonition’.44 In the Chicago picture, the veil covering the Virgin’s hair and the garment cloaking Christ are related analogically to each other by virtue of their transparency, though they do not link up. Instead of showing the Virgin and Child sharing a single cloth, Gossart invests the indication of their connectedness in other passages of the painting. Rather than don the garment his mother wears, Gossart’s child encompasses her with his, that is to say, his transparent garb extends out beyond the boundary of his body and includes parts of her (these passages are familiar from the Saint Luke painting, where his garment falls over her arm). Here, at his right shoulder and left wrist, the excesses of his sleeves permit the blue of her robe to enter under the sheerness of his shirt.45 What Gossart achieves with this layering is the inclusion of the Virgin’s symbolically endowed colour in the garment worn by her son. The blue she wears points to her eventual place in heaven.46 Thus, in this Gossart painting, the garment she lends him to descend to earth (the veil, that is, human flesh) also permits a glimpse at her ultimate ascent to the heavens, where she will join him again. In the Chicago painting, as in the Vienna Saint Luke, Christ’s garment covers not only his mother’s hue but also her hand. A wrapping intervenes between her fingers and his flesh. Mary does not touch her son, skin-to-skin, with the hand that supports him. The protective mediation of the cloth recalls the magus’ covered hand in the Adoration of the Magi (fig. 1). It also evokes the hidden hands in Dürer’s Trinity of 1511, where the father who holds his son is wearing a garment like a humeral veil, much as a priest does to protect the monstrance from human contact.47 Mary’s semi-obscured hand thus points forward to the modes of presenting 284 42 Meditations on the Life of Christ, An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, MS ital. 115), trans. and ed. by Isa Ragusa, ed. by Rosalie B. Green (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961), p. 33 and p. 333. 43 Gossart was more apt to show a variant on this motif, in which the child plays peek-a-boo with the mother’s veil. See, for example, his Madonna and Child in the Rijksmuseum. A painting after Gossart, in a private collection in Stuttgart, combines the playful motif with the more doom-foretelling detail, where the cloth covers the child’s loins like a shroud. Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, no. 10, pp. 154–57, and especially fig. 160. 44 Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 33. 45 On the level of materials and technique we might say that Gossart builds up sheer glazes to overlap a colour – ultramarine – that is known to be opaque. Powdered lapis rebuffs infrared. Under this form of examination, the underneath of the Virgin’s robe could not be seen. For reference to the layers visible underneath, see the technical report written by Cynthia Kuniej Berry at Art Institute of Chicago, July 26, 1999. I am grateful to Martha Wolff and Frank Zuccari for allowing me access to this report and for examining the painting with me. 46 The connection between the blue of the Virgin’s robe and the colour of the heavens is made explicitly in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (XIX, xxi, 1–8). John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 130. 47 Joseph Braun, ‘Humeral Veil” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), p. 542. J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT Christ’s body that are yet to come. But this forshadowing explains only part of the work of the inclusion of her hand beneath his transparent garb. By the second decade of the sixteenth century, hands had long been serving as a metonymy for the creative act of the maker. Once a lone appendage emanating from the sky (thus signifying the Old Testament’s prohibition on bodily representation), by the earlier part of the century, as in Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, the representation of the hand, as part of the artist’s body, was a visual testament to the docta manus, the agent of genius expertise.48 Parmigianino and Murillo, both of whose self-portraits magnify the hand, would come to make ‘hyperbole of the topos’, as Stoichita writes.49 On one level, Mary’s top hand, which caresses the curls of her Child, is Gossart’s manner of behaving like Dürer, who, in his self-portrait, fingers the fur of his collar to show how finely he can paint; Mary’s upper hand thus fondles the crowning achievement of this painter, who excels in the luminous rendering of curls. The upper hand, then, strokes what both she and he – the painter – have fashioned, while her lower hand also clutches what she – and he – have made. The Virgin is the fabricator of clothing, the spinner of garments. In this manner, she is a new Eve. In response to God’s question in Job, ‘Who gave woman the skill in weaving, or knowledge of embroidery?’ (38:36), Saint Epiphanius wrote that it was Eve, ‘who skillfully wove the visible garments of Adam, whom she herself had reduced to nakedness … Just as nakedness was discovered because of her, so to her was given the task of reclothing the sensible body against visible nakedness’. Here to redeem that first woman’s sin, Mary tucks her fingers under the fine gauze clothing her son, revealing her handiwork.50 Gossart implicitly introduces Eve into his Marian devotional picture in another place in the painting that may also be characterized as a passage of overlap – the apple in Christ’s hand.51 Setting one element from an earlier moment in the story over another that becomes visible only later on, Gossart again finds a particularly painterly vocabulary for expressing the predetermined nature of Mary’s role in the divine plot.52 The apple that the child holds rests atop 48 Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 161. 49 Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, p. 249. 50 Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church, p. 129. 51 The presence of the fruit of temptation further involves Mary in the annulment of Eve’s sin by way of the figurative language of the Song of Songs, in which the female speaker (interpreted as the Virgin) addresses her bridegroom (understood as Christ): ‘At our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved’ (Song of Songs 7:13). Reindert Leonard Falkenburg, The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450–1550, trans. by Sammy Herman (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Johns Benjamins, 1994), p. 11, p. 18, and p. 92. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York; Chichester: Columbia UP, 2005), p. 409. Andrea Pearson suggests that the presence of an apple, ‘like the faultless, polished surface of the mirror’, ‘without blemish, fissure, or tear” might enhance a painting’s emphasis on the Virgin’s bodily purity. Andrea Pearson, Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350–1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2017), p. 115. 52 A number of illuminated manuscripts produced for the Burgundian court associate the imagery of Mary and Eve together with immaculist sayings and prayers, such as a manuscript produced in 1477 celebrating the marriage of Emperor Maximilian of Austria to Mary of Burgundy, which shows Mary at the scene of the temptation, and a Burgundian missal dated to around 1515, in which the illustration of the office of the immaculate conception portrays Frederick III and Maximilian before images of Eve standing with the Virgin and Child in the Garden of Eden. Levi D’Ancona, The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception, p. 33 and p. 36. Jena Universitätsbibliothek Ms. Chorbuch Nr. 4, fol. 29v. Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 285 S H IR A B R IS M A N Fig. 8. Jan Gossart, Virgin and Child (Infrared Photograph), c. 1520, oil on panel, 53.4 × 40.2 cm (Art Institute, Chicago). his mother’s robe. Donning a crimson mantle, she wears the colour of blood.53 When the blood is understood to be his, her wearing of red is a sign of her compassion at her son’s passion: through chromatic harmony, she reflects his pain. But when the red of her cloak is taken to symbolise her bodily fluid, the colour is an indication of her contribution to the generation of the child (by Aristotelian theory, the mother’s blood nourishes the fetus). Like much of the costuming connected to Mary’s life-granting capacity, the blood-coloured fabric also activated associations with the Virgin’s own unique arrival in the world. A poem by Baltasar Joan Balaguer, submitted to the 1486 certamen, envisions the Holy Spirit in the act of painting a retable with the Woman of the Apocalypse, building up the tonality of her robe: For first the Paraclete Added colour, painting the tunic In crimson covered with rich purple: For you were fecund by him through grace At the instant when Saint Anne conceived you.54 Kunst, vol. 4, pt. 2: Maria (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1980), p. 173. Suzanne L. Stratton, The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), p. 12. 286 53 The crimson mantle is also compared to the fire of the holy spirit in which the Virgin dresses when she accepts the angelic greeting. Twomey, The Fabric of Marian Devotion, p. 103. On the Holy Spirit made visible as fire, see Beth Williamson, ‘Altarpieces, Liturgy, and Devotion’, Speculum, 79 (April 2004), 392. 54 Twomey, The Fabric of Marian Devotion, p. 104. J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT In the poem, the imagined application of colour gives way to the mentioning of Mary’s capacity to bear fruit. A similar segue occurs in Gossart’s painting. Having laid down layers of red-lake pigment for the mantle, Gossart paints the apple by adding only a few dabs of pink, yellowishgreen, and black, to define it shape and the light that falls on it from the left. For the fruit’s distinguishing colour, he allows Mary’s mantle to serve as the red. This economy of means is made visible in the infrared photograph of the painting (fig. 8), where a single stroke that defines the fold of her cloak also blushes the fruit. The apple may thus be associated with a mark (Mal) in the Benjaminian sense: as opposed to the sign, which is printed on the outside, the mark – a ‘warning of guilt’ – rises to the surface from within.55 With underlayer acting as overlayer, Mary’s garment lends the fruit – which stands for both the death-delivering offense she negates and the productivity of her own body – its hue. Painting according to plot Defenders of the doctrine of the immaculate conception rooted the notion of Mary’s purity in divine foreknowledge. Mary was a conception in God’s mind even before the world was created: The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. (Proverbs 8:22–24). These pre-Christian verses formed part of the liturgy of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, to which the book of Ecclesiasticus provided another pronouncement, also reimagined to be Mary’s voice: ‘From the beginning, and before the world, was I created, and unto the world to come I shall not cease to be’ (Ecclesiasticus 24:18–20).56 In his treatise, On the Annunciation to the Mother of God, Pseudo-Chrysostom established that the notion of Mary bearing the Child had preceded the performative word of God. Here the creator addresses his creation: ‘The mysterious conception was faster than my voice. You already carried within your womb the Lord … the painter of nature, who, by his grace, is restoring his own timeworn image’.57 As part of God’s ancient plan – one that antedated his manufacturing of the world – the spotless mother provided amplification of particular qualities associated with the artist. The topos of the immaculate conception as a divine painting stressed less the materialization of matter (which is what the analogy of God to painter emphasized when praising the incarnation of Christ), and more how God could hold an idea in his mind. The Italian monk Cesare Calderari, writing after Gossart’s time, would describe the immaculate Virgin as a perfect creation 55 Walter Benjamin, ‘Über die Malerei oder Zeichen und Mal’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II.2, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 603–09, translated as ‘Painting, or Signs and Marks’, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard UP, 2003), pp. 83–86. 56 Before it was appropriated by immaculists as Mary’s voice, the first-person speaker had been initially interpreted both as Sapientia and as the voice of the Incarnate Logos. Blackburn, ‘The Virgin in the Sun’, p. 189. Levi D’Ancona, The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception, pp. 18–20 and pp. 50–51. 57 Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church, p. 277. © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 287 S H IR A B R IS M A N because she was conceived from eternity as an inner thought, ‘and later brought to light as a work of the very excellent gesture of the brush of his sovereign and omnipotent hand. Tota pulchra’.58 The analogy of God to painter, when applied to the immaculate Virgin, affords consideration of artistic processes that are particular to the medium of painting as distinctive from other forms of image-making; that is, that a design is preliminarily sketched before colours are laid down in an allotted space and in a manner predicative of how they will respond to the superimposition of later layers. It might be useful to consider how painting’s process relates to its content by drawing a comparison to the two different meanings of the English word plot, which can refer to an apportioned territory as well as to a story’s scheme. Painters in the service of rendering Christian images planned according to designated spaces and timed coatings that enhanced, altered, or concealed the stratum that had come before. They also encoded their pictures with indications of signs that had happened before and predictors of what was to come. To recognize how the process of painting could align with a worldview, we might consider here a departure from the phenomenon I am describing as belonging to Gossart and his contemporaries, and one that marked its destabilization. This counteraction can be found in the work of Pieter Bruegel. Joseph Koerner, building on an observation about technique made by Carl van Mander, has called attention to Bruegel’s employment of the preliminary coating of his paintings in the service of describing the land he portrays.59 In Landscape with Birdtrap, the primer, white chalk mixed with gelatin, forms both the ground of the painting – that is, the material support for the pigment, and describes the ground of the image – and the terrain on which the action takes place.60 Koerner perceives the deliberate visibility of the underneath to have an unsettling effect. The earth, in Bruegel’s view, is a slippery and infertile place. It is not built up with thick impastos; it yields no lush fields. The parsimonious use of paint, the revealing of the picture’s ground, exposes the fragility of the world’s moral ground. In his resistance to overpaint the prepared underneath to the point of its concealment, Bruegel was unmaking a tradition that called forth humans into the visible world by preparing phased applications of colour with the knowledge, judgment, and prediction of how they would appear after multiple layers. The painting of devotional images, whose task it was to produce palpable figurative presences, proceeded by designating the realm for flesh and building up thickness. Other modes of making followed different operational chains. Drawing permitted hesitancy and tentativeness in the absence of a given orientation, border, or frame. Engraving could only express through line. It had no recourse for exposing an underlayer. (Hence prints struggled to convey the transparency of a veil – a challenge that Dürer’s Angel with the Sudarium, of 1516, 288 58 Cesare Calderari, Conceptos escriturales sobre el magnificat, trans. Jaime Rebullosa (Madrid 1600), 35r. Stratton, The Immaculate Conception, p. 43. In his discussion of Calderari’s poem, Stoichita notes that Tota pulchra echoes the words from the Song of Songs (4:7) that form part of the liturgy of the immaculate conception: ‘Tota pulchra es arnica mea, et macula non est in te’ (Fair in every part, my true love, no fault in all they fashioning). Stoichita, Visionary Experience, p. 108. 59 See van Mander’s description of how Bruegel allows the preparation on the panel to play a part. Van Mander, in The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 1:118. 60 Koerner argues his point by considering the double meaning of the Greek word hyle, as both ‘matter’, ‘primordial stuff’, and as ‘cause’, ‘foundation’, or reason’. Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016), p. 190 and p. 334. J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT tries to overcome by portraying light, in actuality the white space of uninked page, hitting the raised cloth from above.)61 To achieve overlap, the engraver had to allot space in advance. The skill displayed in Schongauer’s Virgin with the Vase of Lilies (fig. 9) involves making the technical challenge of one element overlapping another appear as a casual happenstance. A single flower trespasses into the space of Mary’s mantle; to accomplish this, the artist had to silence his hatching of her cloak. In terms of execution – when cutting into the plate – Schongauer did not, in fact, place the flower over the garment (as a painter would), but instead designed the fabric around the petals so that the lily appears to rest on top. When Cornelis Cort transferred Titian’s Annunciation from pigment to lines (fig. 10), he had to eradicate the obfuscation of distinction between the potted flowers in the foreground and the ornamental vines of the carved prie-dieu behind. Painting permits passages of unintelligibility, at times towards meaningful ends; for engraving, each incision is a decision. In Cort, the petals, bursting into flames (an immaculist indication that the burning bush predicted the Virgin’s incorruptible flesh), are in fact surrounded – rather than backed – by the furniture’s leafy design.62 Intersections and shadows – the only way to distinguish over from under – posed challenges to the print. Painting’s care was for the body and the rendering of flesh. Craft manuals offered instructions on how to prepare groundtones for different shades of skin. White lead could be mixed with other whites or cinnabar and other reds.63 Next applied, the ‘shadow pigments’ delineated the face’s features: eyes, nostrils, mouth, chin, wrinkles on the forehead and neck.64 Gossart was in the habit of using a grey layer to achieve the polished marble look of his faces.65 Cennini had recommended applying green earth (terre-verte) for the shadows of the face and dabbing pink to enhance the ‘little apples’ of the cheeks (lle meluze dell Theophilus’ and Cennini’s were written in a straightforward, how-to tone. But the theological ghote) before covering these hues with a thin wash the colour of flesh.66 Treatises such as imaginary found metaphorical opportunity in the procedures of painting, likening its phases to the meditations of the mind. The fourteenth-century Franciscan, Ugo Panziera, described Christ as appearing to the contemplative believer first as a written inscription (scritto), then as a sketch (disegnato), third as an underdrawing and underpainting (disegnato e ombrato), and 61 Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, p. 96. 62 David Rosand, ‘Titian’s Light as Form and Symbol’, The Art Bulletin, 57 (1975), 64. On the association of the burning bush with immaculist iconography, see Levi D’Ancona, The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception, p. 46 and pp. 67–68. Twomey, Serpent and the Rose, pp. 189–90. 63 See the twelfth-century English manuscript in the Corning Museum of Glass, New York, Phillipps 3715. Esther P. Wipfler, ‘“Color humanus”: das Inkarnat in den Quellenschriften des Mittelalters’, in Kunsttechnik und Kunstgeschichte: das Inkarnat in der Malerei des Mittelalters, ed. by Esther Wipfler (Munich: Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, 2012), pp. 50–51. On the different grinding times for different pigments, see Susie Nash, Northern Renaissance Art (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), pp. 181–82. 64 On Divers Arts: The Treatise of Theophilus, trans. by John G. Hawthorne and Cyril Stanley Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 14–18. 65 On Gossart’s use of the grey layer, see Ainsworth, ‘Observations concerning Gossart’s Working Methods’, in Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, pp. 85–86. 66 On Gossart’s practice of using red lake glaze for cheeks and lips, see Ainsworth, ‘Observations concerning Gossart’s Working Methods’, p. 81; Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte, trans. by Lara Broecke (London: Archetype, 2015), pp. 77–78 and pp. 97–106. For a discussion of ‘green earth” to warm the flesh tones, see Daniel V. Thompson, The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 163 and Wipfler, p. 54. © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 289 S H IR A B R IS M A N Fig. 9. Martin Schongauer, The Virgin with the Vase of Lilies, c. 1470–1480, engraving, 16.9 × 11.7 cm (British Museum, London). fourth as coloured in skintones (colourato e incarnato). In the fifth and final stage, Christ appears in the flesh (incarnato e rilevato). As Péter Bokody has remarked, a self-aware reflection upon painting’s potential to describe at once its own mechanisms and the gradual emergence of the incarnate God, was as open to the artists as it was to the poets.67 It was the job of painters, when their subject matter provided occasions to reflect upon the act of making, to provide clues about the meaning of their practice. In the Chicago Virgin and Child, Christ holds the apple below – and in line with – his ruddy cheek, as if drawing the analogy, as Cennini had, between the blush of the fruit and the flush of the flesh. Stipulations about the pigments, their degree of grinding, and the order in which they were 67 290 Bokody, p. 54. For the passage, see Ugo Panziera, Tavola di Questo Libro di Ugo Panziera Dell’Ordine de Fratri Minori, ed. by Antonio Miscomini (Florence, 1492), 65v. For the translation, see Lars Raymond Jones, ‘Visio Divina, Exegesis, and Beholder-Image Relationships in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Indications from Donor Figure Representations’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Harvard University, 1999), p. 137. J A N G O S S A RT ’ S IM M A CU L AT E A RT Fig. 10. Cornelis Cort (after Titian), The Annunciation (detail), c. 1566, engraving, 41.1 × 27.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington). © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. 291 S H IR A B R IS M A N to be laid down, had to do not only with the desire for the appearance of vitality but also with a concern for the painting’s long life (a matter in which we imagine Gossart, who was called upon to restore paintings in Margaret of Austria’s collection, had some expertise).68 Durability – the holding up of flesh tones, their resistance to give way to the preliminary colours that lay below – required the advanced plotting of where the bodies were to go. Skin had to have a spot reserved so as not to be contaminated by any other shade underneath. The long-term effects of painting over a colour inhospitable to the delicacy of flesh are visible, for example, in the Fall of Man by Hugo van der Goes. Where the artist adjusted the position of Eve’s apple-grasping hand, painting over the already laid down landscape, the tips of her fingers now appear green. Her offending gesture has, over time, been tarnished by the paradisiacal garden she must leave. To avoid the eventual corrosion of flesh, painters had to construct worlds built for humankind. They set up landscapes and architecture around spaces ordained for beings. Eternal incorruptibility – an advance-planned assurance against the staining or fading of flesh – informs the doctrine of the immaculate conception and shapes the techniques that guide how bodies within Christian paintings assume visible form. This connection between content and process comes into view when the existence of the Mother, rather than the birth of her Son, is understood as the ur-image of Christian art. Though the biographical facts of their exceptional lives as incorruptible bodies begin and end in the same way, with a preordained exemption from original sin and an assumption into heaven after death, the faith required by each of their narratives is of a different order. Painting, when focusing on the Son, who, unlike his Mother met a violent end, locates the miracle of his life in the sensorially apprehensible nature of his flesh: the circumcision (his first piercing), and the side-wound (his torture mark). Painting, when focused on the immaculate Mother, attested to her ever-present availability as intermediator. Her life was not set off by the sharp cuts of carnal events. Replacing her unsullied essence as painting’s self-reflexive moment shifts the emphasis of images made in the Christian tradition from an epistemology of trauma – the anticipation of death – to an epistemology of endurance. 68 292 Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, p. 16, p. 83, p. 264.