Contextualising and Visualising Saints in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

21
Contextualising and Visualising Saints
in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
Kateřina Horníčková
The aim of this contribution is to examine the ways how to look at medieval
saints’ cults in connection with place attachment. The conceptual framework
is drawing back, on the one hand, to the anthropological and social disciplines
and, on the other hand, to visual studies’ critique of perception, especially the
critique of the “reality effect”, appropriated by R. Barthes, K. Moxey, and G.
Jaritz.1 With this theoretical background, the meeting points between the contemporary
concepts of “sense of place” and historical representations will be
discussed. Whilst keeping in mind the specific nature of visual language, I will
look at possible ways how to connect the spheres of emotions, historical places
and visual narratives about them by analysing saints and their images with
special focus on the saints’ role as mediators of regional attachment. I will not
consider such essential factors as time and cult development or continuing reassessment
of the relationship between the saint and the place. Instead, I will suggest
a possible reading of medieval saints’ images within the current discourse
of “place”. The paper aims at evaluating the applicability of this concept for medieval
visual representations, using selected examples mainly from late medieval
Central Europe.
Saints’ cults as factors in the meaning of a place
For a number of recent studies, place attachment is more than emotional
and cognitive experience; it “is a symbolic relationship formed by people giving
1 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed.
Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11-17;
Keith Moxey, “Reading the Reality Effect,“ in Pictura quasi fictura. Die Rolle des Bildes
in der Erforschung von Alltag und Sachkultur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed.
Gerhard Jaritz (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996),
15-21; Gerhard Jaritz, “Et est ymago ficta non veritas. Sachkultur und Bilder des späten
Mittelalters,“ in ibidem, 9-13.
22
culturally shared emotional/affective meanings to a particular space or piece of
land.”2 There are three aspects of place attachment:
1. ties between people and places;
2. the processes through which they are forged;
3. the role of places in the development of identity.
It has already been assumed that place attachment contributes to individual,
group, and cultural self-definition and is therefore a strong factor in identity construction.
3 Within this process, place is significant: “… the development of selfidentity
is not restricted to making distinctions [or – in relation to the saints –
creating a positive link4] between oneself and significant others, but extends
with no less importance to objects and things, and the very spaces in which they
are found.”
Studies of place attachment have brought to attention aspects such as the
idea of collective quality of it,5 culturally shared meanings and social relationships
to a place, and the participation in ritual as vehicles in forming and formulating
place attachment. Place attachment shared by a community increases in
correlation with a longue durée common residence in one place, shared memory
and social involvements, which are all aspects to be found in medieval town and
village communities. Environmental psychologists added the religious dimension6
as a significant factor in forming relationship to a place. Places, as well as
objects are imbued with sacred meaning,7 with a specific role played by natural
landscapes settings, sacred cities (such as Jerusalem), religious architecture and
homes. Immediately, one can observe a clear correlation between the environmental
psychology categorisation and the visual construction of settings in late
medieval religious images, where the sacred action is located in a city or with a
city in the background (figs. 1 and 1a), inside or near a church or chapel (fig. 2),
in the landscape (fig. 3), or in domestic settings. Each of these medieval settings
points towards a different reading: landscape is often associated with wilderness,
distance and human capacity to master it, city is related to organised human
presence – a community, church is associated with the transcendental that has
descended to earth, and home expresses seclusion, privacy and intensity of human
interaction and relationships. Even with such different implications, all these
places are appropriate for manifestations of saintly power. Although medieval
2 Setha M. Low, “Symbolic Ties That Bind: Place Attachments in the Plaza,“ in Place Attachment,
ed. Irwin Altmann and Setha M. Low (New York: Plenum Press 1992), 165.
3 Setha M. Low and Irwin Altmann, “Place Attachment: A Conceptual Inquiry (An Introduction),”
in ibidem, 4, 11.
4 My addition.
5 Low and Altmann, “Place Attachment: A Conceptual Inquiry,” 6; David Hummon, “Community
Attachment: Local Sentiment and Sense of Place,” in Place Attachment, ed.
Altmann and Low, 253-77, esp. 256-8.
6 Shampa Mazumdar and Sanjoy Mazumdar, “Sacred Space and Place Attachment,” Journal
of Environmental Psychology 13/3 (1993): 231-42; iidem, “Religion and Place Attachment,”
Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24/3 (2004): 385-97.
7 Mazumdar and Mazumdar, “Sacred Space,” 232-3.
23
Christian cults are rarely viewed in the context of sacralisation of a landscape
(this we hear more for other religions: Hindu, Buddhists, Shinto or Muslims), it
may be useful to look how sacralisation and emotional attachment to the sacred
could imprint in late medieval representations of saints.
Fig. 1: Hans Egkel, Beheading of St. Catherine (with the view of Passau),
panel of an altarpiece, after 1490. Stiftsmuseum Melk (Lower Austria)
24
Fig. 1a: Hans Egkel, Beheading of St. Catherine,
detail: the town of Passau in the background
Medieval saints are involved in activities that contribute to the collective
sharing of memory and identity construction. Many of these activities take place
in a church or in proximity to a church or shrine. For the community, the local
church is an emotionally charged place, where all kinds of sacred messages are
communicated through symbols, relics, and images. As the church is also a
place, where community gathers, it is the best space where to express emotions
of the community’s attachment to the saintly patrons, as well as where the community
can demonstrate their closeness to the “sacred” by representing it as residing
in their own place.
This relationship works into another direction as well: Saints’ images in
churches communicate their attachment to the local/regional contexts as well as
present universal Christian concepts. By representing a saint in a particular
place, the place is made sacred through the saint’s presence. If the represented
place is at the same time the “local” place, the members of the community this
way articulate an emotional attachment to their own habitat. Thus, communication
about the attachment of the community to the saint runs in two directions,
and in both through a local place as mediator: A local place and everything it
contains – that is also the community – is made sacred by being in contact with
25
the saint; and, vice versa, by presenting the saint in a local place the community
expresses a special attachment to the saint.
Fig. 2: Master of Mariapfarr, Betrothal of the Virgin, panel of an altarpiece, c. 1500.
Mariapfarr (Salzburg), parish church
When representing a topographically identifiable local place, this place is
a sign that stands for the community itself. Thus, what Barthes calls the “insignificant
notation”, that is, the narrative background details in medieval images,
creating the “reality effect,” are far from being insignificant. They are not the
expressions of the creative mind of the artist, they fulfil other tasks: illustrating
the legend, carrying “sub-messages” to the main theme, or following a certain
pictorial tradition.
26
Fig. 3: Panel of an altarpiece with scenes of the legend of St. Corbinian.
Thal (Tyrol), St. Corbinian church, 1480-1490
In medieval visual imagery, both “place” and “space” are defined by
socio-cultural activities and physical limits, or by a lack of them. “Place” should
be understood as individualised geographically as well as culturally, whereas
space is more typified, follows generic models and is often defined by its limits
or by social action.8 It is fair to say that the images in question sometimes do not
represent just “space”, but a “place”, that is, an individualised space that was
“given meaning through personal, group or cultural processes”.9
Closeness in the represented place
Late medieval saints are depicted in a variety of environments. Some are
generic, some are individualised by including “local” references. The more
“familiar” the background of the image is to the viewers, the more emotionally
close they feel whilst contemplating the image. In the late Middle Ages,
religious images still have bi-polar effects: the capacity to making things and
relationships “real” and present, and to communicate between the faithful and
their intercessors. The images are thus visualisations of good effects and models
that the saints represent and expressions of “real” contact, close or distant,
between the community and its saints. Often overlooked by art historians, an
important role in communicating the closeness is played by the background of
the scene.
8 Michael R. Curry, “Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and
Place,” in The Handbook of New Media, ed. Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone
(London: Sage, 2002), 513-5.
9 Low and Altmann, “Place Attachment,” 5.
27
Although “places” in images are imagined, they are also “selected”10 to
represent an appropriate space for a saint. With the aim of communicating
certain types of space or specific places fit for a saint to act and move in, landscape
(mountain, river, city), architectural or interior elements are depicted in
the background, sometimes rendering a local place or interior more or less
topographically correct. These key place references complement and support the
meaning of the main narrative and, at the same time, they are “identifiers”
pointing to objects and spaces/places, which the viewer associates with existing
local places known to her or him, even when they do not necessarily imitate
their real form. By introducing recognisable landscape elements, the image is
able to communicate proximity (“closeness”) and “attachment” to a local place,
even in the case of considerable divergence of the depiction from reality. Thus,
actions of Christ, the Virgin and the apostles can take place in familiar Central
European landscape, for instance, with the Danube River (fig. 4), in a Tyrolean
village (figs. 5, 5a, and 5b) or in front of the gates of the Eastern Bohemian city
of Čáslav (fig. 6)
In the late medieval representation of space, the beholder stands “outside”
and views the structure or space from an outside point of view, able to get the
general idea of the space and comprehend its overall quality, nature and composition.
11 This is an inherent value to the visually represented medieval
place/space – when viewed this way, it is a place, which the viewer conceives at
one sight as a united and structured whole.12 Thus, already with the development
of multifocal late medieval space and before the birth of unifocal Renaissance
perspective, there is a sense of structured unity and coherence in rendering of a
place/space that communicate the place as “close” and comprehensible as possible.
(Such type of visual communication takes place only if there is any
representation of an articulated space/place in the background, that is, if the
background is not abstract.) This comprehensive capacity and the sense of
“known” are important qualities of a place when it is communicated to the viewer
through depiction.
10 Jaritz, “Et est imago ficta,” 11-2.
11 Ibidem, 12.
12 As in the views on Lüneburg: Hansjörg Rümelin, “Das Einzelne im Ganzen. Das Bild der
Hansestadt Lüneburg auf den Altartafeln des Hans Bornemann von 1446/47,” in Rathäuser
und andere kommunale Bauten, Jahrbuch für Hausforschung 60 (Marburg: Jonas Verlag
2010), 40.
28
Fig. 4: Rueland Frueauf the Younger, Sermon of St. John the Baptist
(with a view of the Danube river valley), panel painting, 1498.
Stiftsgalerie Klosterneuburg (Lower Austria)
29
Fig. 5: St. Elisabeth of a Visitation of the Virgin, panel painting, 1460-70.
Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum
30
Fig. 5a: St. Elisabeth of a Visitation of the Virgin,
detail: peasant house and windmill
Fig. 5b: St. Elisabeth of a Visitation of the Virgin,
detail: barns
31
Fig. 6: Čáslav Antiphonary, after 1472. Vienna, Austrian National Library, Mus. Hs. 15.502,
initial on fol. 1r with the Entry to Jerusalem, detail: church tower of Čáslav (Bohemia)
The example of a landscape
Landscape in the fifteenth century is not a record of reality, but composed
from characteristic elements in the backgrounds of images, which are accentuated
and together form a coherent structured unity, as in the viewing “window”.
The landscape is presented in an all-encompassing way as seen from a small hill
opening towards us, presenting the plot without hiding anything or shielding it
from our view. The point of such representation is to “reveal” the landscape in
the most comprehensible way possible. The single elements in the structure,
such as city, mountain, forest, river, lake or building bear a (general) reference
to a particular type of environment (urban, rural, mining, wilderness, river valley,
mountainous, etc.) and help to construct an additional, side-meaning of the
image. In the case of the famous Miraculous Fishing by Conrad Witz the peaceful
countryside teaches about buon governo, the good government by the bishop
in the land around Lake Geneva (fig. 7).13 The patron and painter of the image
13 Conrad Witz, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Geneva, Musée d’Art et Historie, 1444.
Florens Deuchler, “Warum malte Konrad Witz die Erste Landschaft? „Hic et nunc“ im
Genfer Altar von 1444,” Medium Aevum Quotidianum 3 (1984): 39-49.
32
selected those landscape elements that were important for the communication of
intended meaning concerning the environment in which the action takes place.
Fig. 7. Conrad Witz, Miraculous Draught of Fishes. Geneva, Musée d’Art et Historie, 1444
[from: Florens Deuchler, “Warum malte Konrad Witz die Erste Landschaft? „Hic et nunc“ im
Genfer Altar von 1444,” Medium Aevum Quotidianum 3 (1984): 40, fig. 1]
The result is not a realistic landscape, but a new representation of the
place identifiable through outstanding features of the setting, in which the sacred
action in the foreground takes place. In the sense of symbolical depiction of
good government and order, the represented landscape is therefore still a type.
The topographically precise details however fix the saintly scene in the “local”,
which becomes a natural setting for the scene and, in turn, the saint becomes an
inseparable part of the place and a guarantee of the rule of law as depicted. Even
without the topographically precise references that help us to identify the
historical place and even may let us draw conclusions on its real shape in the
past, we would be able to decipher the meaning in a similar way. Any medieval
representation of “a place” – depending on the artist’s capacity – captures the
intended character of the place by combining carefully selected landscape
elements into a coherent whole depicting the legend of the saint and/or
33
responding to the intention of the local community or individuals to self-styled
portraits of themselves. Thus, the representations in the background can provide
both the ambient for the saints’ narrative and a self-styled image of oneself and
ones’ community, rather than give accurate record of a place’s topography or
reality.14
The positive presence of sainthood
Fixing the saints’ scene in an identified place “close to us” and adding
meaning, such as visualising the absent community, belong among the new
functions that are required from fifteenth-century images. Visual references to
local places are getting more important and saints often act in these local
contexts. Communities are only symbolically present in the image through their
local places, towns, farms, typical works or objects. The saintly figure’s
background is used for communicating secondary messages related to the
community, such as its appropriation of place, its desired qualities, its emotional
relationships, and self-styled presentation. To portray themselves, the communities
appropriate both generic Christian and local saints, defining the close mutual
relation between the saint and the local community. In all images the saint is
depicted in an assigned place inside or close to the community. To give an
example, the miners of Rožňava put themselves under the protection of Saint
Anne, the Virgin and Jesus, offer them direct participation in the community`s
effort and achievement, and at the same time provide them with their own
“place” in the community (figs. 8, 8a and 8b).15
In Sv. Primož nad Kamnikom, nowadays Slovenia, former Carniola, a
wall painting tells outspokenly about the social misery of the region and the
community’s sentiments towards that situation. The common quest for protection
from war, plague, and misery is mediated through the presence of the saints:
the Virgin of Protection, and saintly patrons popular in the region, St. Primus
and Felicianus (figs. 9, 9a, 9b, 9c, and 9d).
14 Jaritz, “Et est imago ficta. ”10-11.
15 Gerhard Jaritz, “Nähe und Distanz als Gebrauchsfunktion spätmittelalterlicher religiöser
Bilder,” in Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter. Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis,
körperliche Ausdrucksformen, ed. Klaus Schreiner and Marc Müntz (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink Verlag, 2002), 332-334.
34
Fig. 8: Master L. A., St. Anne, the Virgin Mary and Jesus (with a view of mining work),
panel from an altarpiece, 1513. Rožňava (Slovakia), parish church
35
Fig. 8a: Master L. A., St. Anne, the Virgin Mary and Jesus,
detail: the mining site
Fig. 8b: Master L. A., St. Anne, the Virgin Mary and Jesus,
detail: the mining site
36
Fig. 9: Virgin Mary of Protection with St. Primus and Felicianus, wall painting, 1504.
Sv. Primož nad Kamnikom (Slovenia),
church of St. Primus and Felicianus, northern wall of the main nave
In the image, dated 1504,16 the threatened community directly addresses
the Virgin and Saint Primus and Felicianus for help. The saints are placed within
a familiar countryside but, unlike as in the case of Witz’s positively-charged
landscape, this time, it is shown as negative and threatening the order. One sees
the threats unfold: dead and hungry animals, locusts, hailstorm, attacks on
people, rapes of women, dead and abandoned children lying on the ground,
people suffering from plague, as well as burning churches and houses. In order
to balance the negative message, the saints stand for the positive side: They are
the powerful counterbalance to the evil, the real fighters for the battered region
and for the depicted community. The community is not the local one; the figures
hiding under the mantle represent the political structure. On the left side, one
recognises the German Emperor Maxmilian I among lay people of rank, on the
right the Pope with other high church officials (figs. 9c, and 9d). The community
is constructed as a clear projection of political ideas communicated again
through the depiction of a place. The hills and valleys in the Sv. Primož image
16 Ferdinand Šerbelj, Sv. Primož nad Kamnikom (Kamnik: M. Šuštar, 1995), 181.
37
stand as a sign for the whole threatened region, to which the Virgin, St. Primus
and Felicianus are called.
Fig. 9a: Virgin Mary of Protection with St. Primus and Felicianus,
detail: animal disease and crosses on dress and skin
Fig. 9b: Virgin Mary of Protection with St. Primus and Felicianus,
detail: war, rape of women
38
Fig. 9c: Virgin Mary of Protection with St. Primus and Felicianus,
detail: the Virgin of Protection
Fig. 9d: Virgin Mary of Protection with St. Primus and Felicianus,
detail: Emperor Maximilian I as one of the protected persons
* * *
39
To sum up: One knows that saints are fully capable of miraculously
choosing their place of effect. The localised saints’ images should therefore be
read as the communities’ strategy to attach the saint to their place. The generic
saint is often appropriated to become the patron of a particular local community
which is depicted through the representation of its piece of land. The image of
closeness is the communities’ attempt to create a direct, functional, and mutual
bond between themselves and their patron, regardless of the topographical relevance
of the representation of the community’s place or of the saint’s legend’s
narrative. The emotional attachment to the saint is expressed through the depiction
of familiar environment where saints exercised their power, and it is
through the same representation that one’s own place is re-conceptualised, made
sacral, and emotionally reassessed.
All images, except fig. 7: Institut für Realienkunde, Austrian Academy of Sciences,
Krems/Donau (Austria).
M E D I U M A E V U M
Q U O T I D I A N U M
62
KREMS 2011
HERAUSGEGEBEN
VON GERHARD JARITZ
GEDRUCKT MIT UNTERSTÜTZUNG DER KULTURABTEILUNG
DES AMTES DER NIEDERÖSTERREICHISCHEN LANDESREGIERUNG
Titelgraphik: Stephan J. Tramèr
ISSN 1029-0737
Herausgeber: Medium Aevum Quotidianum. Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der
materiellen Kultur des Mittelalters, Körnermarkt 13, 3500 Krems, Österreich.
Für den Inhalt verantwortlich zeichnen die Autoren, ohne deren ausdrückliche
Zustimmung jeglicher Nachdruck, auch in Auszügen, nicht gestattet ist. –
Druck: Grafisches Zentrum an der Technischen Universität Wien, Wiedner
Hauptstraße 8-10, 1040 Wien.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Vorwort ……………………………………………………..…………….…… 4
Angelika Kölbl, Frauen im Allgemeinen und Ehefrauen im Besonderen.
Zur frauendidaktischen Relevanz der Lehrdichtung des
„Seifried Helbling“ ……………………………………………….……… 6
Kateřina Horničková, Contextualising and Visualising Saints
in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries …….……………………….. 21
Susanne Rischpler, Memoria Mittelalter – aktiv, passiv oder manipuliert?
Rezensionsartikel zu Lucie Doležalová (Hg.),The Making of Memory
in the Middle Ages (Leiden und Boston: Brill, 2010) …………………. 40
Buchbesprechungen ………………………………………………………..….. 54
Anschriften der AutorInnen ….…………..……………………………………. 62
4
Vorwort
Das vorliegende Heft von Medium Aevum Quotidianum beinhaltet zwei
Schwerpunktartikel, welche sich einerseits auf die Analyse literarischer und andererseits
auf die Untersuchung visueller Quellen beziehen. Die Germanistin
Angelika Kölbl widmet sich der Lehrdichtung des sogenannten „Seifried Helbling“
und seinen genderspezifischen Inhalten, die bis dato in der Forschung interessanterweise
erst wenig Beachtung gefunden haben. Sie kann dabei feststellen,
dass sich die Didaxe dabei hauptsächlich auf verheiratete Frauen bezieht.
Der zweite Beitrag ist ein erstes Ergebnis im Rahmen einer internationalen
und interdisziplinären Forschungskooperation im EUROCORECODE-Programm
(„European Comparisons in Regional Cohesion, Dynamics and Expressions)
des EUROCORES-Schemas („European Collaborative Research“) der
European Science Foundation. Drei EUROCORECODE-Projekte beschäftigen
sich hierbei mit der Rolle von Regionen und regionalen Entwicklungen in der
Vergangenheit und Gegenwart Europas:
o Das „Unfamiliarity“-Projekt („Unfamiliarity as signs of European times:
scrutinising historical representations of otherness and contemporary daily
practices in border regions“) konzentriert sich auf die Analyse von Alltagspraktiken
der Bewohner von Grenzregionen innerhalb der Europäischen
Union.
o Das „Cuius Regio“-Projekt („Cuius Regio. An analysis of the cohesive
and disruptive forces destining the attachment of groups of persons to and
the cohesion within regions as a historical phenomenon“) zielt auf die
komparative Analyse einer Gruppe von europäischen Regionen über sieben
Jahrhunderte in Bezug auf deren kohäsive und disruptive Dynamiken.
o Das Projekt „Symbols that bind and break communities: Saints’ cults as
stimuli and expressions of local, regional, national and universalist identities“
setzt sich mit der mittelalterlichen Heiligenverehrung und ihren modernen
Aneignungen auseinander, um damit den Wandel kultureller und
sozialer Werte in unterschiedlichen Regionen Europas (im Besonderen
Zentraleuropas und Nordeuropas) festzustellen. Forschungsinstitutionen
in Dänemark, Estland, Norwegen, Österreich und Ungarn kooperieren in
diesem Projektverbund. Das Kremser Institut für Realienkunde der Österreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften beschäftigt sich dabei vor al5
lem mit der visuellen Repräsentation von Heiligen und deren regionalen
Spezifika und Entwicklungen.
In jenem Kremser Forschungszentrum entstand der Beitrag der Projektmitarbeiterin
Kateřina Horničková. Er setzt sich mit den regionalen Kontextualisierungen
und Unterschieden von spätmittelalterlichen Heiligendarstellungen
in Österreich und Böhmen auseinander.
Gerhard Jaritz