3. Images of the Virgin

If a person wished to paint you, Virgin, he would need stars instead of colors, so that you, as the gate of light, might be painted with light. But the stars do not yield to the voice of mortals. Therefore you are delineated and painted by us with the material that nature and the laws of painting afford.

—Constantine of Rhodes

First, how would listeners in the Middle Ages have conceived of the performance before the Madonna, if they heard the poem recited or the story retold in a sermon? Then, what would a late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century reader have thought when perusing the medieval French in translation, Anatole France’s story, or Maurice Léna’s libretto? Finally, how do we imagine the scene today? What are the acoustics? Do olfactory elements come into play? Is there anything to taste? What can we imagine touching—nothing but cold stone? Yet beyond the other four senses, sight dominates the setting. Through what color lens do we picture it in our mind’s eye—is it cerulean blue, cherry red, or both, like the most gorgeous panes of glass from the cathedral of Chartres? Most centrally, how are we to fantasize the image—as natural wood or stone, soot-darkened, or multicolored?

The Power of Madonnas in the Round

The Picard poem constitutes a testament to the vigor and vivacity of figural representation, especially of three-dimensional carvings. The statue in the tale does not stand as an object for aesthetic wonderment, as it might do nowadays in a museum. Nor is it supposed to attract worship as a sacred thing in own right. Rather, it facilitates approach to the divine. The rendition does not objectify Mary so much as it enables imagining the Virgin in her subjective reality. The tumbler finds his way to the Madonna, which is normally kept out of sight. His displays of devotion set in motion a process, until eventually the celestial figure associated with the likeness intercedes. Thanks to this mediation, God acts to favor the worshiper. In this account, the steps are shortened, to make the receipt of devotion lead directly into the bestowal of a boon. The sculpture and the heavenly being relate closely to each other. Either it or she can act without any intermediary.

Although the minstrel is the preeminent character, in the original narrative he is anonymous, faceless, and pliant. In contrast, the voiceless cynosure in the narrative of Our Lady’s Tumbler and almost every single later reworking of it is the wonder-working Madonna. The Mother of God and her living image, if in fact it becomes animate, together constitute the lone female presence in the thirteenth-century poem, France’s prose, and Jules Massenet’s opera. Mary and her figurative impersonator are more than totems, but less than characters. They are the more striking for expressing themselves solely through inarticulate gesture and action. Despite this limitation, their charisma pervades the miracle and predominates in it.

In communicating through a bodily sign, the Virgin shares a basic trait with the jongleur. He commands no words in Latin, negotiates only fumblingly the social niceties of monastic silence, and has no facility in forming with his fingers the sign language used by the monks. Yet the tumbler possesses a range of expression, in the corporeal idiom, by which he can enunciate his devotion to the highest astral and social plane of heaven. The dialogue between Mary and the dancer takes place not directly, in words, but rather indirectly through physical movements. To all appearances he is not even aware of her side in the exchange. In reciprocation for his worship, she manifests herself in her most human and humane guise, through compassion.

Both the medieval narrative and Anatole France’s version—more the first than the second—leave gently ambiguous whether the tumbler or jongleur receives an omen, evident to the choir monks if not to him. The signal emanates either from the Mother of God herself who has descended from heaven, or by proxy through a simulacrum of her that springs to life when inspirited by her. He is consummately active, until his collapse. In contrast, the Madonna behaves as an effigy should act: she does not move a muscle, but stays stock-still like a statue or a stone—which stands to reason, since she may be a stone sculpture.

The ambiguity is understandable. In medieval culture, images of the Mother of God were initially thin on the ground, but especially from the tenth century they proliferated along with the feasts and other hallmarks in the veneration of the Virgin. Not coincidentally, the cult of images and that of Mary soared at exactly the same time, so that the images gained an expressiveness that transcended mere portraiture of a person. Instead, they were treated like real people and even molly- (or Mary)coddled. The facsimiles were regarded as actually animate. Treatment of these living statues included being enthroned, dressed in clothing, and carried in litters. They were often transported from place to place, as the equivalent for the Middle Ages of today’s featured celebrities at fundraising events to benefit renovation and building projects or political campaigns. Finally, they were incorporated into the production of dramas and set up to preside over synods.

The medieval Galician-Portuguese “Canticles of Holy Mary,” composed in the thirteenth century during the reign of Alfonso X, contains one of the most arresting episodes in literature, in which a good-looking statue of the Virgin and Child comes across as lifelike. In one miracle, a jongleur who specializes in impersonation, acting on a suggestion of the devil, mimics an image that stands above the city gates of an unidentified municipality in Lombardy. God afflicts the impressionist with a seizure that grotesquely distorts his face and body. The mime, once he has prayed and repented, is healed in a church by the Mother of God, and the bishop delivers a sermon on the wonder. The tale has become known as “The Mimicking Minstrel.”

Such circumstances can seem difficult to reconcile with biblical injunctions against the worship of graven images—against idols. The fine line, brought home in Catholic doctrine in catechisms and elsewhere, is that reverence for representations is not idolatrous so long as the adoration is directed to the figures whom the likenesses portray. Worshipers must differentiate between the heavenly prototype and the earthly depiction that represents it. This nuance explains why Mary, the figure or being, differs from a Madonna, the likeness. In Greek Orthodox Christianity, more or less the same distinction is achieved by drawing a line between the Virgin herself and Panagia. A feminine adjective meaning “all-holy” in Greek, the epithet is used in referring to icons of the Mother of God. Although theologians and most devout find no obstacle in grasping the contrast, a religious rabbit-hole awaits those who are less subtle or educated, and who might mistake the likeness of Mary for the Mother of God herself. When the symbol is taken wrongly for what is symbolized, the model becomes an idol. Adoration turns into idolatry, and devotion descends to fetishism. To enter the danger zone of crude simplification, we have here the crux—or is that a poor choice of words?—that has led to iconoclasm, both within Catholicism and between it and Protestantism.

Revered images developed retinues of passionate believers, and the passion for the effigies, like the gusto for relics, in turn propelled pilgrimages. Existing cathedrals had good reason, or at least robust financial incentive, to support the development of both veneration and pilgrimage. Paintings and carvings that attracted the faithful could necessitate the construction and expansion of great (and not so great) churches. Many centuries would have to pass before art museums came into existence. In the meantime, places of worship, especially the grandest, offered the main venues in which a broad public could view artworks. This is not to foster any misapprehension that the idea of “art for art’s sake” would have been relevant, or even intelligible. The governing conception was that of “art for Mary’s sake” as a subset within “art for God’s sake.” Among the treasures held and sometimes displayed, Madonnas were preeminent.

In Western Europe the twelfth century saw a culmination of aesthetic and formal changes brought about by three-dimensional carvings of the Virgin and Child that in at least some cases could be seen from all sides. Sometimes nearly life-sized, the statues came nearer to seeming truly human than had any other representations for centuries, and among some of their viewers they aroused the thought of real interaction between image and onlooker, almost as one person to another. The radical newness of these sculptures can be all too easily soft-pedaled. Better than any quantity or quality of theology scratched out with pen in ink on parchment, they brought home in their full roundedness the mystery of the Incarnation that forms the heart of Christian belief. Once again, only God was to be adored, but these depictions of others were to be venerated.

The noun statue implies by its etymology a standing figure, since it derives ultimately from the Latin verb meaning “to stand.” In contrast, these early portrayals are seated. To be specific, Mary is shown cradling her infant son in her lap. Our Lady’s Tumbler makes no mention of a baby Jesus. By the same token, modern artists who have illustrated the story have frequently depicted the Madonna by herself, with no little one to be seen. Yet when the medieval French poem was written, the norm called for portraying the Mother of God with her babe on her lap or in her arms. The poet had no need to mention the infant, who was a given. The child is present in the earliest extant image that accompanies the juggler story, the manuscript illustration that an illuminator wedged at the foot of a manuscript folio. The presence of the babe in arms, it may be confidently surmised, went without saying at the point when the piece of poetry was composed.

Less certain is whether the Madonna we are to visualize would have been a painted sculpture designed to be carried in processions, a three-dimensional statue intended to be placed and stay put on an altar, or even if the two would have differed much. Whether being moved or standing, the representation would have been displayed with ceremony and stateliness (see Fig. 3.1). The first circumstance would make it all the easier to comprehend why the Madonna would be envisaged as a deus ex machina—or rather as the Mater Dei or Mother of God who in her supreme mercy is activated through the veneration of her likeness to release help through the angelic machinery of heaven. Yet the collective formality that goes by the word “ceremony” is conspicuously absent from the solo ritual of the tumbler. It is not a specific holiday. No onrushing crowd surges forward to carry the carving on a palanquin. Furthermore, in this instance it is the worshiper, and not the depiction, that moves. The figure becomes animate, but the living being is not borne in any kind of parade.

Although the bas-de-page position of the illumination may be due to the jongleur’s lowliness in the social hierarchy of the time, the decision to interpolate the painting at all is probably owed to the presence of the sculpture in the narrative. The statue inspired the painting at least as much as, and probably more than, the tumbler did.

Fig. 3.1 Five white-robed figures, three tonsured and two not, carry a sculpture of the Madonna and Child on their shoulders. Abrégé des histoires divines. Miniature, Northeast France. ca. 1300–1310. New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.751, fol. 63r.

Madonnas in Majesty

He did not remember his mother, and did not seem quite sure that he had ever had one; he had never seen a woman, nor had he any idea what sort of things women were, or what they looked like. He asked me whether they resembled the pictures of the Panagia, the Holy Virgin, which hang in every church.—Robert, Lord Cuzon, of an adult monk at Mount Athos who had been brought to the monastery as a boy

In the East, a Madonna is known as an “all-holy.” A typical pose has the Virgin seated on a throne with the Christ child before her, as if he were himself enthroned on her knees. A representation of this kind went by the full name of “all-holy bringer of victory.” The role that such likenesses played in developing images of Mary in the West cries out for further examination. More broadly, the traffic of Marianism from the Greek East into Latin Christendom merits much deeper investigation than it has elicited to date. In statues and stories, relics and rituals, and most other aspects of the cult of the Virgin, continental Europe received much novelty from the Eastern Mediterranean through trade, diplomacy, pilgrimage, crusade, and other means of communication and interchange.

Often painted in multiple colors, less frequently encased in precious metal embellished with jewels, Romanesque wooden sculptures of the Virgin and Child from Western Europe are called “Madonnas in majesty” or simply “majesties.” The portion of them representing Mary is designated the “throne of wisdom.” The designation alludes to the fact that in these depictions she is understood as constituting a duality: literally, she is the Mother of God, and figuratively, to employ Gospel phraseology, she serves as the seat of the Word made flesh. The Holy Spirit, one of the three consubstantial persons of the Christian Trinity, speaks through and in conjunction with the Word. Because the Word is equated with wisdom, the Virgin is then by the commutative principle the seat of wisdom.

This duality implies that Mary is both ordinary in her humanity and yet extraordinary in her purity. In the first regard, the Mother of God equals in her simplicity the tumbler in his. In the second, she stands separate and superior. Some representations of the enthroned Virgin depict her with tokens of rulership and sovereignty beyond the mere ceremonial chair, such as a diadem or orb. In all cases, the statues possessed a power that can be difficult to appreciate today in the Western world. In Europe and many former European colonies, effigies of the Holy Family remain ubiquitous, despite centuries of secularization. It is easy to lose sight that the portrayal of a human family as an embodiment of the divine, or the humanization of God as a male baby in the lap or arms of his mother, was ever a radical novelty.

Apart from the considerably less entire reliquaries that preceded them, “majesties” were the first stand-alone statues made in the West since antiquity. Such carvings in the round, generally measuring about three feet in height and carved on all sides, existed in western Europe by the mid-tenth century. They reached their apex in quality and quantity in the twelfth century in France, especially in Auvergne, where they were conventionally hewn from single tree trunks. In their very composition, they were organic and unfragmented wholes.

Sculptures of the Virgin Mary may have played a decisive role in the pan-European custom in the Gothic period of dedicating French cathedrals to Notre Dame, or Our Lady. Many churches in question owned such likenesses, many of these portrayals were associated with specific forms of local worship, and many of these cults were disseminated with the help of a limitless literature, in both Latin and the vernaculars, about miracles in which the representations had taken part. The mental image of Our Lady held by many worshipers in great churches would have been first and foremost the diocesan “majesty.” Mary would have been equated metonymically with both the carvings and the ecclestiastic edifices that housed them.

Although the origins of these prized sculptures are often not historically verifiable, many legends explain how these objects happened to arrive where they stand or sit today, and how they acquired their present-day physical condition. Collections of Marian miracles, such as that of Gautier de Coinci, abound in wonders that took place in the presence of painted icons and polychrome statues. His Miracles gives evidence of the vibrant visual culture that had grown up and matured around depictions and effigies, icons and images, of Mary.

The Virgin as the “throne of wisdom” predominated in the twelfth century. Beyond the carvings of wood that developed special cults and elicited especial veneration, the tympana of cathedrals sometimes focused upon “majesties” in the “throne of wisdom” posture. In the stone sculptures that occupied these spaces, the grouping of Mother and Child could be mainly by itself or within a larger scene depicting the Adoration of the Magi (see Fig. 3.2). The tumbler bears a loose resemblance to the three wise men who often participate in this veneration. Like them, the gymnast engages in physical movement so as to come before the Virgin. Like them, he makes a bodily offering to her in his devotional stances, as an alternative to the words and song of the monks in the choir above him.

What more needs to be said about the appearance of such Madonnine images? Many people nowadays probably encounter carvings and sculptures of the Virgin first and perhaps even exclusively in the medieval galleries of museum collections. Today these representations are often monochrome, usually the color of the stone or wood from which they are made. Many wooden statues of Mary from the twelfth century or earlier have been stripped and scrubbed to show their unpainted and unvarnished natural grain, perhaps in accord with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century presuppositions about the primitivism of the Middle Ages. Yet lingering traces of pigment tell us that once these very images were polychrome. In effect, popular conceptions of these images as with much ancient statuary, may lead us far astray from their original condition. Where Greek statues and architecture are concerned, we may have a picture of classicism that exaggerates clean and pure marble, but such a premise is out of kilter with the reality when these objects were first put on display in antiquity.

Fig. 3.2 The Virgin on the throne of wisdom, surrounded by the Magi. Stone sculpture, twelfth century. Vézelay, Vézelay Abbey, narthex south entrance.

Viewers may associate simplicity and uniformity of coloration—whether the creaminess of ivory, the grainy warmth of natural wood, or the varied hues of stone—with the Middle Ages. By the same token, they may presume that gaudily and even garishly painted Madonnas of plaster and other low-budget materials are modern developments. For want of familiarity with early polychromatic coloring, Protestants and adherents of other religions may be dumbstruck (and not necessarily approvingly so) at the brightly colored images of Mary in many Catholic churches. In fact, medieval statues would have borne an inescapable resemblance to the humble but overbrightly colored gypsum or wooden representations of the Virgin that have been beloved by the congregations of small parishes worldwide.

The mass manufacture of such Madonnas elicits comment already in the mid-nineteenth century, when John Ruskin gives his readers a cease-and-desist order: they should stop misguidedly foisting modern assumptions upon the Middle Ages. He cites Cimabue specifically. We would be injudicious to suppose, he writes, that the Florentine painter and mosaicist from the second half of the thirteenth century “had manufactured, as our Gothic Firms now manufacture to order, a Madonna—in whom he believed no more than they. Not so.”

To return to polychromy, any dichotomy between medieval whiteness and modern color is illusory. Manuscript illuminations, textual evidence, and physical analysis confirm unanimously that sculptures of Mary from the Middle Ages were often and even usually polychrome, with paint and other pigments applied where the objects’ initial monochrome was deemed insufficiently realistic. A rare Gothic instance that preserves many vestiges of its original spectrum is a standing Virgin and Child from late thirteenth-century Île-de-France (see Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.3 Unknown artist, Virgin and Child, late thirteenth century. Wood sculpture with polychromy and gilding, made in France, 54.61 × 17.78 × 19.05 cm. Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, BZ.1912.2. Image courtesy of Joe Mills. All rights reserved.

The most famous multicolored carving in this class is an enthroned Virgin and Child from Auvergne that has been dated to the second half of the twelfth century, the so-called Morgan Madonna (see Fig. 3.4).

Fig. 3.4 Unknown artist, Virgin and Child in Majesty, ca. 1175–1200. Wood sculpture made in Auvergne, France, 79.5 × 31.7 × 29.2 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1916.

Mary’s mantle was once a lapis lazuli blue, darkened by a gray underlayer and adorned with small lozenges of tin leaf (to appear gold). Underneath this outer covering draped a red robe. Like his mother’s shawl, the child’s overgarment was of the same color, over a dark green tunic with red lining. The throne itself and the small dais on which it rests were painted in a kind of trompe-l’oeil to simulate the appearance of colored marble embellished with precious stones.

What lesson is to be learned from this Virgin and Child? The “thrones of wisdom” in their pristine condition bore a much closer resemblance to the often generic-looking and sometimes gaudily or even tawdrily colored Madonnas that are treasured in unpretentious parochial houses of worship throughout the world today than to the unrelieved white or gray of unpainted or formerly painted stone sculptures in museums and in or on medieval churches.

Much remains to be considered in imagining the appearance of the image in Our Lady’s Tumbler. As the very construction of the two words suggests, images and imagination are bound in interdependence. If we seek to visualize how such a sculpture may have been conceived and represented, our very best image of a twelfth-century statue of the Virgin may well be the two-dimensional representation in the so-called Belle Verrière in the south aisle of the choir of Chartres (see Fig. 3.5).

Fig. 3.5 Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière. Stained glass window, twelfth-century core with thirteenth-century framing. Chartres, Chartres Cathedral, south choir. Photograph by Wikimedia user Micheletb, 2016, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chartres_-30a-_ND_de_la_belle_verri%C3%A8re_and_its_angel_border.jpg

The French name means “beautiful glass window,” and this twelfth-century core, closely surrounded by thirteenth-century angels, lives up to its reputation. The loveliness of the stained glass beggars belief. In it, dark and light Gothic play together, the former in the blues and the latter in the reds and other hues. The sun is both blocked and allowed in, in a tacit demonstration of the Annunciation: the glass acts as an unbroken hymen. In the upper portion of the window, Mary looks directly at us. She wears a mantle in the distinctive bleu de Chartres or “Chartres blue,” and holds in her lap her son, the young Jesus. Both mother and child are placed against a red background. Directly above them looms the Holy Spirit, descending in the shape of a dove. The general composition loosely resembles that of the bas-de-page preserved in one manuscript of Our Lady’s Tumbler. The major differences are that in the painting on parchment, the Madonna is seated to the right, robed in red against a blue background, and looking toward an angel with a nimbus rather than having one of her own.

A rich tradition developed of depicting artists as they labored to portray the Virgin and Child, and the images they crafted in the process. For example, the frontispiece of the so-called Lambeth Apocalypse, an illuminated manuscript produced between 1260 and 1275, gives us a snapshot of an artist, a Benedictine monk, painting with a full palette a sculpture of the the Mother of God with her baby (see Fig. 3.6).

Fig. 3.6 A Benedictine monk paints a sculpture of the Virgin and Child. Manuscript illustration from the Lambeth Apocalypse, ca. 1260–1267. London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 209, fol. 2v.

Portraiture of the two had an illustrious pedigree. Saint Luke himself was credited with having been a portraitist of Mary with the infant Jesus (see Fig. 3.7).

Fig. 3.7 Hans Burgkmair, Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, 1507. Woodcut, 22.4 × 15.7 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rogers Fund, 1921.

Multiple paintings purportedly by the Evangelist survive in both the Greek East and Latin West. The Lucan connection is worth driving home, since it may have laid the foundation for the conventional wisdom that artists, not exclusively painters, enjoyed a special closeness to the Virgin.

For all the support, the images and image-making did not go uncontested. The perturbation about them stretches back many centuries before the Reformation. Dispute over adoration of icons and over its opposite of iconoclasm began in the Greek East, perhaps sparked by contact with Islam, with its ingrained antagonism toward representations—its iconophobia. Whatever the causes, the furor flared into a doctrinal dust storm. Its intensity suffices to be called an iconomachy, or to put the Grecism into unfancified English, a battle of images.

The dispute peaked in the Byzantine world between 754 and 787. In the Latin West, no representative of Charlemagne participated in the Second Council of Nicaea, which took place in the later of the two years just cited. Even so, he commissioned a response to the controversy from among the scholars in his entourage. Their answer is recorded in Charlemagne’s Books, composed around 790. At one juncture, the treatise poses a thinking exercise or brainteaser that takes as its very point of departure an effigy of the Virgin Mary. Later the author falls back on the apparently nerve-racking possibility that in such a likeness the Mother of God might be mistaken for another female personage from scripture—or even worse, from classical myth.

Like Eastern Christendom, the West decided, at least temporarily, to refute the charge of idolatry and run the risk that legitimate images might be confounded with illicit idols. Ekkehard IV, active during the first half of the eleventh century, recounts a relevant anecdote. This monk and writer of Saint Gall relates that none other than the Virgin herself vindicated the decision miraculously. His account asserts that more than a century earlier, an Irish-born artist and composer had been a brother of the monastery. This Tutilo was so gifted in his artistry that the abbot allowed him the exceptional privilege of working on commissions outside the cloister. Once, he was reportedly carving statues of Mary in Metz when two pilgrims in dire need begged him for alms, which he provided. Later the wayfarers quizzed a nearby cleric about the identity of the lady whom they had seen helping and guiding the sculptor as he went about his business. When asked about the matter, the Irishman was mystified, for to the best of his knowledge he had been alone during his labors. Eventually he discovered, incised upon a leaf of gold upon which he had been toiling, an autograph message from none other than the Mother of God.

The Virgin missed few occasions to demonstrate her commitment to the statues of the Mother of God that represented her. Just as they never turned a deaf ear to petitioners who approached them, so she never neglected the opportunity or the need to protect and favor these images. In many instances, the likenesses contained contact relics that relayed her physical presence from the already remote past to the then-present. These representations were like marsupials or even like Russian dolls, with something analogous to themselves housed within them. A case in point from the second half of the tenth century would be the Madonna witnessed in a reverie by Abbot Robert of Mozat. In an account composed around 984 and preserved in a single manuscript, the text is accompanied by a drawing (Fig. 3.8), picturing the “majesty” of the Virgin and Child that was crafted in 946 for the new cathedral of Clermont under Bishop Stephen II. In the dream, the depiction was not completed by the goldsmith and cathedral architect Alleaume and his younger brother Adam, who had begun the project. Instead, Mary herself brought it to an end. She fended off a cloud bank of demoniacal flies that sought to prevent the goldsmiths from executing their task, and brought in a purifying swarm of bees to dispel the muck deposited by the other, far less salubrious insects.

Even unenlivened, a good Madonna could work miracles for a devoted monk. Take by way of illustration the Virgin of Rupert. A low-relief sculpture, this image is fashioned of so-called coal sandstone that has been gilded, and that still bears tinctures of polychromy. A display piece of Mosan sculpture, the carving has been dated to the mid-twelfth century (see Fig. 3.9). It presents Mary posed on a cushioned seat as she suckles the infant Jesus. Emphasizing the tender-hearted affection that binds mother and child, it shows her supporting in her lap the infant Jesus, who presses her left breast between his hands. Both figures are haloed.

Fig. 3.8 Virgin and Child. Miniature, ca. 984. Clermont-Ferrand, Bibliothèque municipale (Bibliothèque du Patrimoine), MS 145, fol. 130v, col. 1 (detail).

Fig. 3.9 Relief sculpture of the Virgin of Rupert. Coal sandstone sculpture, made in Liège or the Meuse valley, ca. 1150. Liège, Belgium, Musée Curtius, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Li%C3%A8ge,_Grand_Curtius._Vierge_de_Dom_Rupert_(gr%C3%A8s_houiller,_vers_1150).jpg. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The statue was originally located in the monastic church of Saint Lawrence of Liège. Legend maintains that a young Benedictine of this monastery prayed successfully to this Madonna for comprehension of sacred scripture. For centuries, this monk was identified with the learned and prolific exegete Rupert of Deutz, so known after the abbey near Cologne where he was elected abbot in 1121. The facts of his biography clash irreconcilably, however, with the consensus on the chronology of the low relief. Although the Virgin of Rupert cannot have its eponym in Rupert of Deutz, the story still conveys an important lesson about devotion shown by brethren to Madonnas.

Animated Images

In their solemn and sober frontality, the representations known as “majesties” have a serenely unrealistic and priestly stillness about them now. Consequently, it may surprise us to realize how forcefully medieval onlookers were impressed by such images’ relative verisimilitude, naturalism, and mobility. Ekkehard IV used the phrase “sitting as if alive” to describe the one in his anecdote. A thousand years ago, the sculptures looked animate to viewers.

To understand the big picture of spectators in the Middle Ages, we must recall the direct gaze that these likenesses level at us, as well as their realism compared to other art of the day. It would be risky to generalize about the typical appearance or treatment of such illustrations solely on the basis of the jeweled and gilded reliquary statue at the abbey of Conques, in southern France. As the only Carolingian “majesty” that has survived, the effigy is unique. Among other distinctive features, it represents not Mary but Faith, a saint purportedly martyred during Roman persecutions of the late third or early fourth century. All the same, this pre-Romanesque sculpture shares with the “thrones of wisdom” the defining characteristic of being enthroned.

Bernard of Angers was schooled at Chartres before becoming a teacher in the place from which he has taken his name. Between 1013 and 1020, he paid three visits to the monastery of Conques. In his Book of Miracles of Saint Faith he memorialized not only the wonders wrought by the holy woman, but also his own impressions as an outsider who had not previously seen such a three-dimensional portrayal (see Fig. 3.10). The image, originally encased entirely in gold leaf, might seem utterly unlifelike to some eyes today. Yet despite what might strike us today as a deficit of verisimilitude, the hagiographer found himself discomposed by the portrayal’s resemblance to a real person. The sculpture’s three-dimensionality made it seem corporeally present, while the gilding had a distinct and to some extent opposite effect of rendering supernatural the being represented.

The reaction that the early eleventh-century schoolmaster of Angers had to the statue’s lifelikeness was intensified by his awareness that it enclosed relics of the hallowed woman. Here we need a keen eye for detail, if we are to recognize both similarities and differences that marked the cult of Mary as unique. Remnants of her were dispersed throughout Europe, and many were squirreled away within relic cavities hollowed out of sculptures. Yet we must give heed: the dogma of the Assumption held that after Virgin died, her body was assumed or taken up into heaven. This doctrine meant that lacking bodily remains from after her death, the faithful were shortchanged of many objects that were common in the cults of other saints.

Fig. 3.10 Statue reliquary of St. Foy de Conques. Wooden sculpture with gold, silver gilt, jewels, and cameos, late tenth–early eleventh century. Conques, Abbey Church of Saint Foy. Photograph by Wikimedia user ZiYouXunLu, 2013, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Statue_reliquaire_de_Sainte_Foy_de_Conques_(cropped).jpg. CC BY-SA 3.0.

In lieu of conventional primary relics from the bones of a holy person, the remains of Mary were secondary and not bodily, but still physical, and many churches claimed confidently to possess such traces of her physicality. To offer only a partial enumeration, locks of her hair and phials of her breast milk that had purportedly been collected during her lifetime were all worth keeping in ecclesiastical treasure chests. Contact relics, which acquired their holiness through having touched the body of the saint, abounded. In this category, items of clothing stand out, such as headdresses and veils, shifts and slips, and girdles. Precious items of all these types could be displayed in the glass-framed shrines known as ostensories or monstrances; shut away in châsses or reliquary cases; embedded in fixed locations such as altars to confer holiness and sacred power upon them; or, lastly, they could be sheltered in boxes within sculptures. On important ritual occasions, Madonnas that doubled as reliquaries could be processed, well-groomed and dressed to the nines for the parades in which they took part.

To return to Saint Faith, Bernard’s response to the verisimilitude of the statue paled in comparison with the astonishment of common people: “It was an image made with such precision to the face of the human form that it seemed to see with its keen-eyed gaze the great many peasants seeing it and to grant gently with its reflecting eyes the prayers of those praying before it.” The three-dimensionality of such effigies initially ruffled the feathers of some viewers. Before long Bernard rued his own initially incredulous stance about the clad carving: he had mocked the representation by calling it a Diana or a Venus. He went on to tell of a learned companion who was punished for his own disparagement of the piece by experiencing a vision of the holy woman in which she beat him so savagely with a rod that he survived only long enough to relate the apparition.

In legends, those of other faiths are portrayed sometimes as being vehemently hostile to images, such as those of Mary. In anti-Semitic legends, Jews are represented as spitting upon Madonnas, making parodies of votive offerings to them, and inflicting multiple wounds upon them. By nonbelievers more generally, such likenesses of the Virgin, if not destroyed or ignored, will be at best viewed, studied, and admired, as inanimate, insensate, and immobile objects and not as living, feeling, and moving beings. They will be treated as idols would be, not by the faithful but by those who do not put stock in them.

To true believers, the lifelike quality of the “thrones of wisdom,” as self-standing statues in the round, was and is intensified by the kinetic quality they achieve when they are processed. The verb just employed denotes the carrying of a cult object in a procession—a march to celebrate a ceremony or festival. Beyond such parades, Saint Faith and her seemingly animate eyes made her a suitable witness to such important proceedings as major financial and forensic transactions. When carvings of this type came to life, they were much more than machine-like automata or robots. In fact, the representations were sometimes operated by those holding them.

Across the gulf of many centuries, the power of processions to suggest the animation of statues is hard to appreciate. If anything, today we are overexposed to three-dimensional representations, and even more to animated images. Although those of us who see a surfeit of motion pictures may be jaded, in many sectors of the world ceremonial marches remain powerful and deeply conservative traditions. A photograph printed in 1927 freezes for the onlooker the parading of a sculpture in Chartres on a Marian feast day. The likeness was known from its usual location as Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. The French name means nothing more or less than “underground Notre Dame” or “Our Lady of Under the Earth.” On this holiday the latest incarnation of the cult carving there was brought into the streets and trotted out by the clergy, attired in their starchiest vestments (see Fig. 3.11). The depiction under consideration was a replica of one that during the French Revolution had been seized from its subterranean shrine by a mob and burned. In the nineteenth century, a copy was made of the earlier wooden figure which is still venerated even today. Henry Adams had in mind this kind of celebration and the atmosphere attendant upon it when in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres he extended an invitation to inquiring minds: “If you want to know what Churches were made for, come down here on some great festival of the Virgin, and give yourself up to it; but come alone!”

Statues of this sort could have been trotted out for the performance of Nativity and Epiphany plays, which developed roughly contemporaneously in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In such pieces of theater the three-dimensional “majesties” may be imagined as being placed in the church, near the altar and also near a temporarily erected manger. There they could serve as proxies for Mary and the Christ child. In another scenario, a real-life actor may have discharged the central role of the Virgin in a living reenactment that would make use of the sculpted Christ child.

One such arrangement would have been adopted in the experiment Francis conducted in a grotto in the Italian hill town of Greccio, in the region of Lazio, on Christmas Eve of 1223. For this realization of the first crèche (or “crib”) ever, the poor man of Assisi first set up a feeding trough with hay and then jollied along members of the community to take part. As actors, the locals staged a tableau vivant. Near the altar, a real feeder was erected. Close to both was placed a “majesty,” a statue of the Virgin Mary in the round.

The staging simulated the adoration in the stable of Bethlehem following the night of the Nativity. The scene was portrayed prepossessingly in a fresco by Giotto (see Fig. 3.12).

Fig. 3.11 A procession of the Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. Photograph by Meurisse and Harlingue, 1927, from Le Pèlerin no. 2621 (1927): 5.

Fig. 3.12 Giotto di Bondone, Presepe di Greccio, ca. 1295–1299. Fresco, 230 × 270 cm. Assisi, Basilica superiore di San Francesco d’Assisi.

Everyone took part in the drama, playing Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus, clustered around a crib together with an ass, an ox, and shepherds, all of them in the flesh. Today the pope of the Catholic Church does not process a Madonna on Christmas Eve, but as a complement to the liturgy of the Mass the Roman pontiff places an image of the infant Jesus within a humble cowshed.

Another form of animation would come, later in the thirteenth century than Our Lady’s Tumbler, with the vogue of so-called shrine Madonnas. These portrayals sometimes but by no means always contained relics in hollows or canisters. On their exteriors, such openable and operable wooden sculptures presented images of the Mother and Child that could be rigged to reveal different carvings and paintings within. Likenesses of this sort remained a feature of religious life into the sixteenth century. While not alive, they brought home gamely the reality of the incarnation—Mary’s inaugural contribution to salvation. They could be manipulated in private as well as public devotion. Would it be too much of a stretch to describe them as performers, on a par with either the jongleur himself or the vivified Virgin who brought him solace?

Miracles of Madonnas

The most beautiful blooms of medieval ecclesiastic fantasizing are the Marian legends.

Reports of miracles continue to evoke fascination. Nowadays, the secularism well entrenched in some circles in Western countries subjects the possibility of wondrous epiphanies to skepticism and even ridicule. But such derision would have been cockeyed beyond belief in some earlier periods. Today, one can purchase a novelty mug for coffee or tea, at the bottom of which the Mother of God is supposed to become visible when hot liquid is decanted into it: Our Lady of the Latte. It even has competition, in the form of a “miracle mug”: “pour in a hot beverage and see how the Virgin Mary magically appears!” Along the same lines, a “Holy Toast” stamper exists (with a name that puns upon Holy Ghost) that can imprint a Madonna-like image upon a slice of bread, making a Marian equivalent to a wafer employed in the Eucharist (see Fig. 3.13). More seriously, a kit was sold in the late 1990s under the name of “The Virgin Mary Tradition.™” The assortment of objects and instructions includes a statuette of the Blessed Virgin Mary, distinguished as the “Patron Saint of Miracles,™” to assist those seeking intercession. For such novelty items to have been promoted in the nineteenth century or earlier would have been unimaginable.

The Middle Ages had its own methods for commercializing and exploiting the Mother of God. No unpassable gap intervened between perceiving a likeness as lifelike and ascribing lively powers to it. Small wonder that the literature of the period teems with stories in which statues of the Mother of God and the infant Jesus became animate and moved, or at least behaved as if they were alive. This proliferation stands out especially in tales of miracles of the Virgin as accumulated and organized in collections such as Gautier de Coinci’s and Caesarius of Heisterbach’s.

Such Marian miracle tales, most of them attested in multiple versions, already totaled almost 1800 when they were catalogued in 1902. By chance, Massenet’s Le jongleur de Notre Dame premiered in that banner year. The stock of such narratives encompasses many that involve images of one sort or another. Thus, the so-called Soissons manuscript of Gautier’s Miracles of Our Lady features among many images of the Virgin Mary illustrations of both two-dimensional paintings and three-dimensional statues.

Advancing the trend even further, Caesarius’s Dialogue of Miracles has been aptly styled “a veritable summa of statues that come to life.” To take one from among a multitude of moving and memorable instances, the good prior of Heisterbach reports one miracle that centered on the Golden Madonna of Essen (see Fig. 3.14).

Fig. 3.13 Blessed Virgin Mary with halo on a piece of toast. Photograph Shutterstock 544671613.

This late tenth-century sculpture was preserved in the cathedral of that German city but had belonged previously to the nearby royal convent. The carving has a wooden core onto which wafer-thin sheets of gold have been hammered, with nails of the same noble metal. This fabrication is the earliest known and extant group of figures in which the Virgin is represented with her young boy across her lap. According to Caesarius, once during a Mass a carpenter gazed upon the Madonna. Before the watchful woodworker’s very eyes, the child raised himself up, snatched Mary’s crown from her head, and donned it on his own. Then Jesus returned his mother’s headdress to its original position at the appropriate point in the Creed, when Christ was said to be made man.

Outside exempla literature, an episode in June of 1187 is extremely telling. In the days preceding a battle between the forces of Kings Henry II of England and Philip Augustus of France, a soldier of fortune in the service of the British monarch’s son Richard lopped or broke off the arm of the infant Jesus from a stone statue of the Virgin and Child at Déols, near Châteauroux. Allegedly the carving of Mary is first bled miraculously, later moved, and even bared her breast.

Fig. 3.14 Golden Madonna of Essen. Wood sculpture with gold plating, ca. 980. Essen, Essen Minster. Photograph by Wikimedia user Arnoldius, 2006, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Essen_muenster_goldene_madonna-4.jpg. CC BY-SA 2.5.

Accounts of miracles tell of representations of the mother or child that apparently come alive, speak, move, and issue fluxes of liquids. The actions and reactions run a gamut that embraces laughing, smiling, nodding, winking, waving, kissing, striking, slapping, catching hold of people, eating food, turning pale and pasty, changing colors, or radiating light. Beyond motions, medieval writers ascribed emotions to the effigies. The statues were described as having feelings. The effusions reported include shedding tears, oozing blood or oil (such as olive oil, presumably extra virgin), and, last but not least, spurting milk (definitely organic). In English we have the phrase “spitting image.” Its etymology has been untangled in many imaginative, speculative, and un- or poorly substantiated ways; implicating phlegm-hawking effigies would be the most bizarre. However the idiom originated, sputum is one bodily fluid that is not routinely emitted from Madonnas in medieval miracle tales. But many other substances flow forth. For example, the famed image of Saydnaya, near Damascus, produced oil. The technical term for miraculous oozing is exudation, which according to its basic Latin roots means “sweating forth.” Viewers and statues were often reported to have exchanged or come in contact with each other’s fluids, including bodily ones. Reports of depictions that perform miracles or behave in ways that involve seepage continue down to the present day, even prompting forensic scientists to conduct blood-type analysis. As such noteworthy events suggest, nothing in the Madonna’s tender ministrations to the tumbler as he perspired was out of the ordinary.

Not all the miracles were, to put it mildly and diplomatically, genuine. Effigies allow for the possibility of consolidating art and artifice. For instance, Philipp Melanchthon (see Fig. 3.15), the Protestant reformer, reported: “In one monastery we saw a statue of the blessed Virgin which was manipulated like a puppet so that it seemed to nod yes or no to the petitioners.” Although in Western Europe such contrivances were destroyed in the iconoclastic upheaval of the Reformation, later equivalents from Russia were exhibited in anti-religious displays after the Revolution in the former Soviet Union.

Fig. 3.15 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Portrait of Philip Melanchthon, 1537. Oil on beech wood, 35.9 × 23.3 cm. Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philipp-Melanchthon-1537.jpg

Two such installations demonstrated the water-powered mechanism by which an icon of the Virgin could be made to weep tears from hidden ducts. Such miracles in which a lachrymose Madonna gives spectators a tearful have been controversial for centuries.

It would be naïve not at least to consider the possibility of such chicanery in the so-called usual or habitual miracle at the Blachernae chapel in Constantinople. Every Friday the silk veil that covered the face of the image rose, as if wafted by a puff of air or by a still more mysterious spontaneity. The fabric remained suspended until the morning of the following day, Saturday. The “usual miracle” was the closest approach that medieval Byzantium could make to the famous scene in Billy Wilder’s 1954 film The Seven Year Itch, in which a subway passing below a grate produces an updraft that causes Marilyn Monroe’s full-skirted white summer dress to balloon and billow suggestively above her knees, giving a glimpse of her panties. Similarly, the extraordinary occurrence at Blachernae could have been orchestrated, almost like clockwork, by emanating hot air through a strategically placed vent from a hypocaust. The weekly wonder was the high-degree part of blowing hot and cold.

The “usual miracle” may have played a role in the evolution of the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler. It requires no wild fantasy to envisage a Latin Christian visitor to the Byzantine metropolis, whether a pilgrim, crusader, or other wayfarer, awe-struck by the wonder and carrying back word of it. Talk of the Virgin’s veil being puffed upward could lead to thinking of Mary, or a Madonna herself, fanning a worshiper with a cloth. The train of thought is rickety, but that is the nature of human recall: trails of association are often hit-or-miss, which is why supposed firsthand witnesses can be notoriously unreliable and why millions of research dollars have been allocated for investigating the fallibility of testimony. Then too, situations, especially in drafty spaces filled with flickering candles, can be pictured effortlessly in which optical illusions could have brought into being deceptive impressions of vitality: they are truly ignis fatuus. In a flurry of experiences in 1796 and 1797, viewers reported seeing Madonnas and other images open or move their eyes, tear up, perspire, change color, twitch with convulsions, and flail their arms. Exactly two centuries pass, and on another continent a 1996 documentary tells of a filmmaker who accidentally caught on tape a millisecond in which a Madonna in Boston’s North End appeared to blink (see Fig. 3.16). Although the moviemaker realized nearly immediately that the moment was nothing more than a technical glitch, she could not avoid (and was fascinated to witness) the ensuing storm of interest that developed in the media. Apparently not only girls go crazy, but the Virgin does too: Marian miracles go viral.

Many exempla turn on encounters between on the one hand pious devotees and on the other images of the Virgin that acknowledge the devotion shown them by becoming endowed with life. Such animation was not uncommon. For instance, a snoozing pilgrim reputedly saw a woman, presumably the Madonna, float down from a glass window that would most likely have depicted Mary. The Walloon town of Walcourt had in its basilica a “majesty,” sheathed in silver. The carving allegedly saved itself from a conflagration in 1228 by jumping out of the burning church into a tree or into the arms of a nobleman as he stood outside. Are we to infer that it defenestrates itself? Whatever the place and mode of egress, the statue is still extant, a so-called Black Virgin, not quite charcoal-broiled but allegedly smoke-blackened by this very mishap (see Fig. 3.17).

Fig. 3.17 The Madonna of Walcourt. Wood sculpture with silver gilding, tenth century. Walcourt, Belgium, Sint-Maternusbasiliek. Photograph by Marc Ryckaert, 2013, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Walcourt_Statue_Notre-Dame_R01.jpg. CC BY-SA 3.0.

One exemplum that has motifs comparable to Our Lady’s Tumbler tells of a simple-minded friar who gave a hearty salutation to the image of the Virgin whenever he loped by it. One day, he uttered such a hail-fellow-well-met hello and as usual received no reply. Unamused, he recriminated with the effigy by saying: “Dear Lady, I always greet you, but you never answer me.” The Mother of God responded by blessing him. Another describes a nun who after the other sisters departed would say the “Hail, Mary” nightly to a Marian sculpture in church. The carving made an obeisance to her when in her singsong she mouthed the third phrase, the words “The Lord is with you.” A third related that a woman who intoned the same prayer stimulated a likeness of the Mother of God to smile at her. Finally, a thirteenth-century tradition pertained to a Madonna in the cloister of Afflighem. As Bernard prayed his “Hail, Mary” in prostration at her feet, she leaned down in acknowledgment and responded to him “Greetings, Bernard.”

The miracle of the Lactation of the Virgin that was ascribed to Bernard of Clairvaux vividly exemplifies the fascination with statues (see Fig. 3.18).

The legend was not attested until after the saint’s death and in fact not before the thirteenth century. According to the hagiographic accounts, the wonder took place when the pious monk did reverence before a representation of Mary. This Madonna was a real carving in the crypt of the church of Saint-Vorles at Châtillon-sur-Seine, where Bernard had experienced in childhood an apparition of the Nativity. The likeness in the miracle of the Lactation was a Black Virgin (see Fig. 3.19).

Fig. 3.19 Madonna and Child. Wood sculpture with paint, eighteenth-century replacement of twelfth-century original. Châtillon-sur-Seine, France, Église Saint-Vorles. Photograph by Wikimedia user GFreihalter, 2015, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ch%C3%A2tillon-sur-Seine_St-Vorles_563.jpg. CC BY-SA 3.0.

While reciting the vesper hymn “Hail, Star of the Sea” before the image, Bernard had a vision in which the Mother of God appeared to him. When asked to “show yourself as a mother,” she bared the nipple of one mammary gland and shot from it into his mouth three drops of her milk, sometimes represented as a jet. Thanks to this gesture, Bernard became the “suckling brother of Christ.” Other Cistercians were reported to have merited the rapture of partaking from Mary’s milk, sometimes even nursing directly at her breast.

Another report relating to the twelfth century tells of a heretic named Tanchelm, who clapped his hand upon the hand of an effigy of Mary and claimed to be wedded to her, so as to elicit wedding gifts from onlookers. The scoundrel’s blasphemy enacted in reality a motif that is common in Marian miracles as well as in folk literature, whereby young men who place rings on the fingers of images that represent the Mother of God are bound by their vows to her. Such tales were also told in the Middle Ages with Venus instead of the Virgin—and we have seen already that writers could succumb to anxiety over the close similarity between representations of the two. William of Malmesbury adduces a very brief version. Directly or indirectly from his telling, William Morris takes the story centuries later for “The Ring Given to Venus” (see Fig. 3.20).

Fig. 3.20 Edward Burne-Jones, The Ring Given to Venus, 1865. Etching proof, 128 × 170 cm. Birmingham, UK, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Fine Art Prints and Drawings, 1927P1031.1

These tales may speak to an eroticism in which the statues have been marinated. If not, they at least approach as close as can be expected in medieval culture to the situation of Pygmalion, the legendary ancient sculptor who was said to have felt sexually attracted to his own miraculously lifelike sculpture of a woman. The story of the maker who wanted to make out with his own maquette originated with the Roman writer of poetry Ovid, through whose Metamorphoses the carver’s love for his own creation was well known to the Middle Ages. Jean de Meun’s medieval French Romance of the Rose contains a lengthy recounting of the Ovidian legend. According to this poet, the artist knows that his devotion and love can amount to nothing. After all, a deaf and dumb depiction of a delectable woman cannot take pity on him, look sweetly and smile upon him, or grant him a kiss. Yet eventually the goddess Venus becomes implicated, when the image-maker prays to her for grace and vows to repent of the service he has paid to chastity. If she animates the ivory likeness, he will perform penance in her erotic cult by having sex with his beloved.

The episode in the Romance of the Rose deals exhaustively and provocatively with many troubling overtones of the wholesale medieval devotion to Madonnas. Even without the help of Pygmalion, we should know that the stirring beauty of the human figure when represented in the round can induce sexual arousal. The adjective statuesque connotes not only proportion and stateliness but also feminine comeliness in a curvaceously three-dimensional way. Such lively attractiveness could cause passionate affection for a likeness to go too far and to make men turn torrid and tumescent. That would be swell—or not. Sexualized iconophily can be documented even in conjunction with representations of the Virgin. One miracle, or anti-miracle, has God afflict a man who has had an illicit thought in reaction to the appearance of the holy image of Mary.

Among the many distorted misrememberings of Our Lady’s Tumbler, one lands in a strange territory between Pygmalion and the Pietà. A historian of ballet summed up our miracle bizarrely as “the tale of an old street entertainer who paid ecstatic homage to the Mother of God by the only craft he knew—dancing. Falling exhausted before her image in a church, he was noticed the next morning sleeping in the statue’s arms.” Monasticism vanishes entirely, as the aperture of the lens narrows to concentrate solely upon the personal intimacy between the performer and the likeness. Could they have joined for part of his routine, and even more forever afterward? The old saw holds “it takes two to tango”—but our story is not about a mating dance and tends more to the noli me tangere end of the scale.

Artists and audiences have understood in astonishingly varied and complex fashion the mechanics of what happens with the statue or painting of the Virgin Mary in the climactic scene of Our Lady’s Tumbler and its multitude of adaptations. Let us take only a single case in point, when any of dozens would serve equally well. One American illustrator selects this narrative and this episode over all the other possibilities to put on the front of a 1927 anthology of Golden Tales of Anatole France (see Fig. 3.21). The cover depicts a naked man set to descend a flight of stairs, at the bottom of which stand a demon to the left (sinister indeed) and an angel to the right, with cowled brethren on either side. Inside the book, the crucial scene is illustrated with the familiar quotation “Blessed are the simple-hearted, for they shall see God” underneath (see Fig. 3.22).

Fig. 3.21 Front cover of Anatole France, Golden Tales of Anatole France, illustration by L. A. Patterson (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927).

Fig. 3.22 “Blessed are the simple-hearted, for they shall see God.” The Virgin descends to wipe the brow of the juggler. Illustration by L. A. Patterson, 1927. Published in Anatole France, Golden Tales of Anatole France (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), facing p. 112.

A tonsured monk juggles daggers before a scalloped niche where the outlines of a veiled Madonna can be seen; meanwhile the Virgin herself has alighted from her plinth with a kerchief in hand to mop the brow of the entertainer. The animated statue of Mary, or the Mother of God herself, is at all times above the juggler or jongleur, who is prostrate and prone or kneeling. When he performs, he does so under her nose.

And what of the infant Jesus? Though the baby goes unmentioned, the medieval narrative is first recorded at a time when any and every statue of Mary would have included him. The Virgin and Child were indivisible, even if an image of them together could be called simply a Madonna. But what happened to the youngster in our story, at the instant when the Mother of God made her gesture of solace? She could have leaned partway down or fully disembarked to soothe the tumbler without letting Jesus out of her grasp. Alternatively, she could have put her babysitter-less moppet down by himself so that she could perform unencumbered either of these motions. Mary was known now and then to put down her little one. In one amusing tale in the medieval French Life of the Fathers, the Virgin threatens the young Jesus that she will release him from her arms and set him down. This maternal menace persuades her toddler to bend to her request that he pardon a sinner who has petitioned his mother for mercy.

Later miracles are even more vivid. In the Tuscan town of Prato on July 6, 1484, an eight-year-old boy was eyewitness to one. A figure of the Virgin emerged from a fourteenth-century fresco on a prison wall, set her infant down on the ground, adored him, and went into the maximum-security facility to clean the vaults—chambers that in a castle might be called the dungeon. Afterward she retrieved her son and resumed her place in the artwork (see Figs. 3.23 and 3.24).

Fig. 3.23 At center of prison wall, fresco from which Mary emerged in miracle at Prato in 1484. Engraving, 1884. Artist unknown. Published in Giovacchino Pelagatti, La madre di Dio presso le carceri di Prato nel 1484: Ricordo del quarto centenario, offprint from the journal Amico del popolo (Prato: Tipografia Giachetti, 1884), between pp. 12 and 13.

Subsequently, the representation of Mary allegedly swiveled her eyeballs and shed tears of blood. Lorenzo de’ Medici enlisted an architect to construct a church where a copy of the image is now domiciled (see Fig. 3.25).

In retellings of the tale about the tumbler, Ruth Sawyer confronted the issue head on. Even so, she made the episode only the more mysterious by modifying the Madonna’s act of recognition to be a leisurely embrace, as the sculpted image metamorphoses into the Virgin herself. By ignoring the child to focus on Mary, the twentieth-century storyteller was not blazing a new trail. When dwelling upon the so-called Golden Virgin that stands high in the trumeau of the South Porch at Amiens cathedral (see Figs. 3.26 and 3.27), both the Protestant John Ruskin and the Catholic Marcel Proust omit mention of the infant she holds seated upon her left forearm. Instead, they zero in on her virginity—and by implication upon her maidenly good looks.

Fig. 3.24 Fresco on prison wall from which Mary emerged at Prato in 1484. Frontispiece of Giovacchino Pelagatti, La madre di Dio presso le carceri di Prato nel 1484: Ricordo del quarto centenario, offprint from the journal Amico del popolo (Prato: Tipografia Giachetti, 1884).

The question of the Christ child is a live one even as we read the medieval forms of Our Lady’s Tumbler. It has been speculated that the male writers of Miracles of the Virgin never mention the infant in discussing the Mother of God because they imagined her “primarily as a maiden rather than a mother.” The tumbler has his thoughts fixed not at all on Jesus. Instead, all his hopes of the intercession that will lead to redemption rest in Mary. He has her all to himself, almost as if he owns a likeness of her privately for his personal use. Furthermore, he worships her in her special precincts, in the crypt. Only by visiting there ourselves—by being truly cryptic—can we aspire to get literally to the bottom of the story.

Fig. 3.25 Madonna delle Carceri, Prato. Fresco, fourteenth century. Prato, Basilica Santa Maria delle Carceri.

Fig. 3.26 The Golden Virgin of Amiens. Stone sculpture, ca. 1240–1245. Amiens, Basilique Cathédrale Notre-Dame d’Amiens. Photograph, date and photographer unknown.

Fig. 3.27 Postcard of the Golden Virgin of Amiens (early twentieth century).