Anselm of laon, head of the cathedral school responsible for the widely disseminated biblical commentaries known as the Glossa Ordinaria, was steeped in scriptural knowledge and well informed by the bestiary tradition. Yet his words are puzzling. Referring to the ivory belly of the beloved in Song of Songs 5:14, Anselm notes that ivory both signifies chastity and is truly frigid. The first statement emphasizes an iconography of the material, in which one quality of elephants – their cold nature – points to something outside of itself, chastity, as in an abstract semiotic system. The second statement introduces slippage, however, in which the signifier is demonstrably, even experimentally, present in the tusk: ivory is so cold that it extinguishes fire. If the signifier is truly present, is the signified as well? By looking at large-scale statuettes of the Virgin Mary fashioned in the last third of the thirteenth century, we can explore the impact of the real presence of frigidity/chastity in both art and the liturgy.Footnote ²

In this chapter I examine ivory figures of the Virgin and Child crowned or being crowned and flanked by two angels. Raymond Koechlin named this configuration the “Vierge Glorieuse,” which I translate as Glorification of the Virgin.Footnote ³ In the simplest sense, this iconography conflates the Coronation of the Virgin with the depiction of the Mother and Child.Footnote ⁴

The Glorification of the Virgin does not represent a “historical” moment in the life of Christ and the Virgin; instead it expresses a theological truth: Mary was the Theotokos, God-bearer, and that status rendered her body worthy of veneration. In other words, because Mary’s perpetual virginity enabled the Incarnation, she was hailed by angels in heaven and crowned queen, a message expressed centuries earlier in iconography of the crowned “Maria Regina.”Footnote ⁵ With the Glorification of the Virgin, Mary’s numerous roles in salvation history are condensed into a single polysemous image that, in the second half of the thirteenth century, gained popularity over the stiff, furniture-like representations of the Throne of Wisdom. Married with the implications of frigidity/chastity inherent in the material and analyzed in medical and exegetical texts, this new ivory representation foregrounded the virtue for which Mary is so celebrated.

The Marian statuettes examined here measure at least 30 cm in height and were destined for institutional use. In a few instances we know the original settings for extant statuettes, notably such major ecclesiastical sites as the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (Figure 1.11), the Duomo in Pisa (Figure 1.10), and the abbey of Saint-Denis (Figure 4.1). Most of this chapter focuses on the Glorification ensemble at Saint-Denis because the wealth of liturgical and archaeological information available for that foundation permits a detailed reconstruction of its ecclesiastical spaces and the ceremonies performed within them in the late thirteenth century. Considering a Gothic ivory as part of a program of liturgical furnishings raises the possibility that the material of the statuettes had special significance. Scientific and medical texts reveal that contemporary viewers saw chastity as physically present in elephant ivory, beyond a mere indexical relationship between ivory and chastity. This was especially germane on the feast of the Assumption, when the church celebrated the elevation of Mary’s sacred body to the heavenly sphere. Ivory uniquely made present the Virgin’s chief virtue, and this new iconography revealed the material’s exceptional ability to express the Marian mystery.

Figure 4.1 Glorification of the Virgin group, formerly in the abbey of Saint-Denis. Paris, 1260s. Ivory. Central Virgin and Child, 34.8 × 12 cm, Cincinnati, Taft Museum, 1931.319. Two flanking angels, ca. 25 cm (each), currently on the reliquary of Saint Romain (Figure 4.3).

Photo: courtesy of Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, 1991

A Masterpiece Recovered: The Saint-Denis Glorification of the Virgin Group

The Glorification of the Virgin group from the treasury of Saint-Denis is one of the masterpieces of thirteenth-century French sculpture, ranking in quality if not in size with such monuments as the south transept of Notre-Dame in Paris, the jamb statues at Reims, or the apostles of the Sainte-Chapelle. The Virgin and Child originally at the centre of the group is now at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. Mary stands 34.4 cm tall with a maximum diameter of 11.5 cm, and given that ivory was sold by weight (see Chapter 1), her size alone places her among the most precious Gothic ivories. To quote a seventeenth-century commentator on the treasury of Saint-Denis, “This piece is very beautiful, as much for the material as for the artifice with which it is carved.”Footnote ⁶ In other words, the exquisite workmanship does the fine material justice.

The Virgin stands in contrapposto with her weight on her left leg, lending her pose an elegant sway that disguises the natural curve of the elephant tusk. Like the early Block Style standing Virgin at the Walters Art Museum (Figure 2.19), the tusk is oriented so the wider proximate end is toward the top with the whole balanced on the narrower distal end. Mary holds a rambunctiously kicking Christ Child on her left hip, keeping him steady with her left palm as he reaches to grasp the double rose in her right hand (Figure 4.2). Close examination shows the extraordinary dexterity with which the artist handled his material: the Virgin’s right hand is exquisitely carved in three dimensions, each finger completely undercut and each joint, knuckle, wrinkle, and fold meticulously rendered. This high level of detail also translates to the Virgin’s jewellery: a ring set with an oval stone on her right middle finger, a ring brooch at the collar of her lightweight chemise, and a double cloak string held in place with a tassel at one end and a painstakingly rendered lion’s head, only millimeters high, at the other. A narrow belt that holds the Virgin’s cotte low on her waist preserves its original polychromy, gold leaf on an orange bole with translucent red and green glazes laid on top, imitating a sumptuous enamelled belt.

Figure 4.2 Detail of the central Virgin and Child from the Saint-Denis Glorification of the Virgin group (Figure 4.1).

Photo: author

Remains of polychromy persist elsewhere. Mary’s golden hair reflects the original color and the inside of her mantle was originally an intense aquamarine blue that served to highlight undulating folds and make legible the garment’s organization.Footnote ⁷ Gilding on all the hems emulated orfois, fine embroidery in gold thread affixed to the borders of garments, but now only the negative image is visible where the bole layer protected the ivory from discolouration.Footnote ⁸ The silver crown she now wears is a nineteenth-century replacement, but the top of the Virgin’s head is notched to accommodate a coronet that was part of her original conception.

Two candlestick-holding angels completed the Glorification of the Virgin group at Saint-Denis; they are now part of the reliquary of Saint Romain in the treasury of Rouen Cathedral (Figure 4.3). Both stand just under 25 cm tall without their nineteenth-century wings. Clearly carved by the same hand as the Virgin and Child, the angels display an equivalent love of ornate detail, playful handling of drapery, and chubby rendering of flesh. The angel that stood to the viewer’s left was badly damaged and substantially recarved, but the angel to the right is in pristine condition (Figure 4.4). Although it is slipping off the left shoulder, the angel’s mantle is held in place by a double cloak string ending in a decorative tassel very similar to Mary’s. The belt also displays the same multilayered polychromy, and the original candlestick – which now has a modern ivory candle – is carved with three clawed feet, a minuscule detail not copied in the seventeenth-century restoration of the other angel.

Figure 4.3 Reliquary of Saint Romain (formerly Saint Placide) from the abbey of Saint-Denis. Ivory angels, 1260s; gilt copper base, 1340; gilt silver, rock crystal, glass, and pearls central monstrance, mid-sixteenth century; 38.5 × 35 × 19 cm. Rouen, treasury of the cathedral of Notre-Dame.

Photo: © Centre des Monuments Nationaux

Figure 4.4 Detail of the right angel from the reliquary of Saint Romain (Figure 4.3).

Photo: author

Like so many portable ecclesiastical objects, these three statuettes were dispersed after the French Revolution and their illustrious origins forgotten. They shared the anonymous fate of most Gothic ivories until Blaise de Montesquiou-Fezensac recognized the objects in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote ⁹ With help from Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, he reconstructed the detailed history of the ivory Glorification of the Virgin group described in manuscript and printed sources from the abbey of Saint-Denis, which led to the reidentification of the Virgin and Child in Cincinnati and two angels.Footnote ¹⁰ Therefore, one of the largest and finest groups of Gothic ivories belonged to that politically savvy Benedictine house closely allied to the Capetian crown.

The most complete description of the Glorification of the Virgin group comes from an inventory of the treasure at Saint-Denis from 1634, which recopied and brought up to date earlier, now lost, inventories of 1505 and 1534.Footnote ¹¹ The detailed description leaves no doubt as to the identity of the ivory statuettes, and it also helps us reconstruct the group’s original configuration:

The entry goes on at great length to describe this crown, giving the weight of all of the precious stones and noting that many were missing. There follows a detailed description of a lost golden brooch (fermillet) “in the breast of the said image of Our Lady,” with emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, but the jewel was already missing by 1576.Footnote ¹³

The next item describes three ivory angels that were already separated from the central Virgin and Child by 1634. Nevertheless, the inventory author gives considerable thought to how the statuettes might originally have been arranged:

The two candlestick-holding ivory angels originally stood to either side of the Virgin, and a smaller angel, also of ivory, held her crown from behind. The 1634 redactor noted that the two larger angels were missing; they had been repurposed after the 1567 sack of Saint-Denis during the Wars of Religion, and were remounted in the 1630s on a new reliquary for Saint Placide.Footnote ¹⁵ This reliquary was composed of a gilt bronze socle and a central rock-crystal monstrance, both also recycled, with the two ivory angels on either side (Figure 4.3). When engravings of the abbey’s treasury were made for Michel Félibien in the early eighteenth century, the angels had already been separated from the standing ivory Virgin and Child for two centuries, and the reliquary of Saint Placide and the ivory Virgin and Child were accordingly depicted in separate vitrines (Figures 4.5 and 4.6).Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 4.5 Engraving of first cabinet in the treasury of the abbey of Saint-Denis. From Michel Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Denys en France … (Paris, 1706), plate 1.

Photo: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

Figure 4.6 Engraving of second cabinet in the treasury of the abbey of Saint-Denis. From Michel Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Denys en France … (Paris, 1706), plate 2.

Photo: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

The third, smaller angel who held the Virgin’s crown is not mentioned after 1634 and no trace of it remains today. It must have been similar to two angels now in the Museum Meyer van den Bergh, Antwerp, which once graced the Coronation of the Virgin group at the Louvre (Figure 4.7).Footnote ¹⁷ Recognizing that an essential component of the group’s original arrangement was missing, the redactor of the Saint-Denis inventory speculated about the original disposition of the statuettes, suggesting that they originally stood on a base or socle with the little angel perched on a column. This charming proposal lacks thirteenth-century comparanda. Reflecting on this problem, Richard H. Randall observed a number of unusual holes on the Virgin’s back and head, the latter plugged with ivory (Figure 4.8), and suggested that the small angel floated above the Virgin’s head by means of ivory rods.Footnote ¹⁸ My assessment of the “constructed technique” used by Gothic ivory carvers (discussed in Chapters 1 and 6) supports Randall’s suggestion.Footnote ¹⁹

Figure 4.7 Angels from the Louvre Coronation of the Virgin group. Paris, 1250–60. Ivory, 7.1 cm (left) and 7.7 cm (right). Antwerp, Museum Mayer van den Bergh, MMB.0439.

Photo: © KIK-IRPA, Brussels

Figure 4.8 Detail of the back of the Saint-Denis Virgin (Figure 4.1).

Photo: author

Two other contemporary Glorification of the Virgin groups in ivory, today known only from texts, describe a similar arrangement of the statuettes on a metalwork base. The 1634 inventory of Saint-Denis mentions a seated ivory Virgin and Child flanked by boxwood (bouis) angels in the chapel of Saint-Eugène; all three statuettes were placed on a gilt silver socle (“ung petict soubassement d’argent doré”).Footnote ²⁰ In 1315 the Sainte-Chapelle treasury paid Guillelmo Aurifabro 21 livres, 14 sols, 6 deniers parisis to repair an ivory image with two angels, adorn it with gold, silver, and precious stones, and make a copper socle (pede) for the image.Footnote ²¹ The Sainte-Chapelle payment and the Saint-Denis inventory both describe lost three-figure versions of the Glorification of the Virgin mounted on gilt silver and copper pedestals, suggesting a possible reconstruction for the extant Glorification group from Saint-Denis.

Other evidence, however, points toward complex micro-architectural canopies made of ivory, wood, or precious metals for ivory statuettes.Footnote ²² For example, Giovanni Pisano’s Glorification of the Virgin altarpiece for the Duomo of Pisa was placed under a gilt wood ciborium (“ciborium unum de lingo deaurato”), described in 1369 and discussed in Chapter 1. The 1328 inventory of the Arras Cathedral treasury describes a certain large (magne) ivory image of the Blessed Mary within a large tabernacle (“magno tabernaculo”) of gilded copper supported by four lions.Footnote ²³ Gaborit-Chopin suggested a similar arrangement for the Louvre Deposition group.Footnote ²⁴ Micro-architectural frames fashioned from gilt wood, gilt copper, and perhaps even gilt silver surmounted many ivory statues, and the Saint-Denis Glorification group may also have been furnished with such a tabernacle. The reliquary of the Holy Thorn now in Pamplona Cathedral, made in Paris around 1260, helps us imagine such an architectural canopy structure for the Glorification group (Figure 4.9).Footnote ²⁵ A similarly proportioned tabernacle for the latter would yield a structure approximately 1 m high and 0.66 m wide.Footnote ²⁶ If made of gilt copper or gilt silver, such a structure would have presented a tempting source of bullion, explaining its disappearance before the early sixteenth century. A handful of small ivory polyptychs discussed in Chapter 5 demonstrate how the lost fourth angel might have been attached to the interior of an architectural structure above the Virgin’s head (Figures 4.10 and 5.13).Footnote ²⁷

Figure 4.9 Reliquary of the Holy Thorn. Paris, 1255–64. Gilt silver engraved, chased, and repoussé, gilt bronze base, and opaque cloisonné enamels, 88 cm. Pamplona, treasury of the cathedral of Santa María Real.

Photo: courtesy of Javier Martínez de Aguirre

Figure 4.10 Detail of the Toledo Glorification of the Virgin polyptych with Infancy scenes (Figure 5.13).

Photo: author

Because of its royal status, Saint-Denis was fiercely suppressed during the French Revolution and all of its treasures that were not melted down were sent to the Louvre.Footnote ²⁸ Although the Concordat in 1801 stipulated the return of confiscated treasure to the church, Saint-Denis had already been converted into a “temple of reason” known as Franciade, so the objects were redistributed among other institutions. The ivory Virgin and Child statuette was sent to the archbishop of Paris in 1802 and the reliquary of Saint Placide, with its ivory angels, went to the cathedral of Rouen, where it became the reliquary of Saint Romain.Footnote ²⁹ The Virgin and Child entered the art market sometime between 1811 and 1821.Footnote ³⁰ Charles Phelps Taft of Cincinnati purchased the ivory from the Duveen Brothers in 1924, and the statuette is today the crown jewel of the Taft Museum.Footnote ³¹

Thirteenth-Century Renovations at Saint-Denis

The foregoing object biography contributes to a plausible reconstruction of the Glorification of the Virgin group, but it does not inform us about the commissioning of the group, its placement at Saint-Denis before the Wars of Religion, or its meaning. Based on stylistic evidence, these ivories can be dated to the decade between 1260 and 1270, a period when the monastic community at Saint-Denis was engaged in a number of major projects to improve the fabric of the abbey church.Footnote ³² Indeed, this was a moment when that enterprise intensified: not only was the church being rebuilt in the most up-to-date Gothic style but the decorative program, furnishings, and liturgical objects were also being modernized and the liturgy itself was being refreshed for the new spaces. The fact that the ivory ensemble was commissioned at the same time as the renovation and refurbishment campaign was under way suggests that the two were related. A close look at the renovation process for the ambulatory chapels shows how a large-scale ivory group might have fit into the liturgical furnishing of the basilica at the heart of the royal foundation.

The demolition of the basilica’s Carolingian nave and its reconstruction in the latest Rayonnant style occupied the abbots of Saint-Denis for half of the thirteenth century (Figure 4.11). The new structure needed to be in harmony with the west front and chevet built under Abbot Suger in the twelfth century.Footnote ³³ After Suger’s extensive work, the second major stage of renovations was begun by Abbot Eudes Clément in 1231, perhaps as an attempt to bolster young King Louis IX’s regime by strengthening an important monarchical symbol, but the new church was not consecrated until fifty years later.Footnote ³⁴ The abbacy of Matthew of Vendôme (r. 1258–86) was a period of great prosperity for the monastery. Matthew successfully shepherded the construction campaign to completion, and he also served twice, like his illustrious predecessor Abbot Suger, as regent of France while its kings were on crusade.Footnote ³⁵ The beginning of Matthew’s tenure marked the final push in the building program and was simultaneously a period of general renovatio at Saint-Denis that included the liturgy and liturgical arts.Footnote ³⁶

Figure 4.11 Crossing of nave and transept, abbey church of Saint-Denis. Begun 1231.

Photo: © Centre des Monuments Nationaux

As work progressed clockwise around the chevet in the first phase of the building campaign, a series of reconsecrations beginning in 1241 indicate that the twelfth-century ambulatory chapels were gradually returned to use (Figure 4.12).Footnote ³⁷ Each was redecorated to harmonize the old space with the new Rayonnant aesthetic.Footnote ³⁸ They received new pavements and liturgical furnishings: altar tables, retables, and raised daises behind the altar surmounted by baldachins.Footnote ³⁹ While the Revolution and later the imperial remodelling nearly obliterated these furnishings, a number of documents and archaeological discoveries allowed Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jules Formigé to restore the thirteenth-century arrangements with some degree of accuracy. Notably, the drawings of French architect Charles Percier (1764–1838) recorded the state of the chapels after the Revolution but before the “improvements” under Napoleon.Footnote ⁴⁰ Key drawings showing the micro-architectural canopy and pavement of the Virgin Chapel and the altar and retable in the chapel of Saint-Firmin informed Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration of the chapels (Figures 4.13 and 4.14).Footnote ⁴¹

Figure 4.12 Ambulatory chapels, abbey church of Saint-Denis, refurbished as part of thirteenth-century building campaign. Reconsecrated from 1241 onward.

Photo: © Centre des Monuments Nationaux

Figure 4.13 Dais from the axial chapel of the Virgin, abbey church of Saint-Denis. Charles Percier, Saint-Denis album, 1793–4. Paper, pencil, and wash. Compiègne, Musée municipal Antoine Vivenel, F 43.

Photo: courtesy of museum

Figure 4.14 Altar and retable from the chapel of Saint-Firmin, abbey church of Saint-Denis. Charles Percier, Saint-Denis album, 1793–4. Paper, pencil, and wash. Compiègne, Musée municipal Antoine Vivenel, F 32.

Photo: courtesy of museum

The extant stone retables from Saint-Denis are now considered central works of the mid-thirteenth-century renovatio.Footnote ⁴² Stylistic analysis correlates their execution with the reconsecration dates of particular chapels, and Fabienne Joubert has demonstrated just how carefully the retables were integrated into the chapel programs: the retable iconography responded directly to the presence or absence of hagiography in the stained-glass windows.Footnote ⁴³ In the first chapel on the north end of the ambulatory, reassigned to Saint Firmin in the early thirteenth century, a late twelfth-century Christological retable was reused (Figure 4.14), and to make the chapel’s dedication clear, a new set of stained-glass windows depicting the life of Firmin was ordered.Footnote ⁴⁴ By contrast, the chapel of Saint-Pérégrin had renowned twelfth-century typological and allegorical windows (Figures 4.15 and 3.35), but the absence of relevant hagiography in the windows meant that Peregrine’s vita needed to be represented in the retable (Figure 4.16).Footnote ⁴⁵ These retables were thus integral to the thirteenth-century refurbishment campaign, and they were almost certainly in place for each chapel’s reconsecration. The fact that new and old liturgical objects were thoughtfully harmonized in a cogent program for the reconsecrated spaces is important for our assessment of the ivory Glorification of the Virgin group.

Figure 4.15 Typological and allegorical windows of Moses (left) and Saint Paul (right) from the chapel of Saint-Pérégrin, abbey church of Saint-Denis, 1140–4. Stained glass.

Photo: author

Figure 4.16 Retable from the chapel of Saint-Pérégrin, abbey church of Saint-Denis, mid-thirteenth century. Limestone, 59 × 186 × 11.2 cm.

Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

New reliquaries and liturgical implements were also commissioned to complement the remodelled chevet chapels, but these objects, unlike the retables, were commissioned over longer intervals and do not have such a clear relationship to the reconsecration dates. Documentary evidence indicates that the costly execution of reliquary chasses and liturgical objects proceeded at a steady pace throughout the period. For example, the chapel of Saint-Osmanne was reconsecrated in 1243. A plaque in the chapel, still extant in the seventeenth century, stated that the translation of Osmanne’s body took place on Easter 1246, and the precious stones on the gilt silver chasse used for the translation had recently been donated by Thibault de Milly, a monk who was treasurer of the abbey.Footnote ⁴⁶ Only three years passed between the consecration of the chapel’s altar and the inauguration of the chasse. A longer time span elapsed at the chapel of Saint-Cucuphas. It was reconsecrated in 1244, but a new chasse was only commissioned from Master Gosuin (“Magistro Gosuyno”) in 1297–8.Footnote ⁴⁷ This long intermission was likely because in 1244 the gilt silver chasse of Saint Cucuphas was less than twenty years old, reportedly commissioned during the abbacy of Pierre d’Auteil (r. 1221–8).Footnote ⁴⁸ New liturgical objects were evidently commissioned as part of Matthew of Vendôme’s renovatio, but decisions were made judiciously to avoid wasting precious resources.

Inventories from Saint-Denis give detailed descriptions of the magnificent reliquary chasse in each chevet chapel before the 1567 sack.Footnote ⁴⁹ The presence of a large chasse underscores that the physical presence of the dedicatory saint was essential to the chapel’s overall program. The inventories, along with Percier’s drawings, indicate that the reliquary chasses were displayed on the daises behind each altar.Footnote ⁵⁰ The architectural baldachins, open on all four sides, sheltered the chapel’s dedicatory saint. Even if a new reliquary was not commissioned for every ambulatory chapel, the bodily presence of a saint was meant to be a permanent fixture of the chapel’s program and must be considered as an integral part of the sacred space. I propose that the ivory Glorification of the Virgin group was produced in response to the need for a saint’s body to be present in his or her chapel, a need intensified on the feast days dedicated to that saint.

The basilica of Saint-Denis had three altars devoted to the Virgin,Footnote ⁵¹ but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the axial ambulatory chapel was the focus of Marian devotions.Footnote ⁵² In 1253 this chapel was reconsecrated and maintained its dedication to Mary (Figure 4.17). Like all the other chapels in the chevet it was dedicated concomitantly to a number of other saints, including James the Apostle, Firmin, Nicaise, Patroclus, and Hilaire, all named in inscriptions.Footnote ⁵³ The sixteenth-century inventories state that here too, underneath the architectural baldachin, there was a sumptuous reliquary chasse; based on the description, it seems to date to the mid-thirteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁴ But instead of holding a relic of the chapel’s titular saint, the chasse placed behind the altar of Our Lady contained relics of saints Hilaire of Poitiers and Patroclus, the chapel’s secondary dedicatees. The absence of a permanent bodily presence of the Virgin Mary in the main liturgical space dedicated to her at Saint-Denis is a key problem to which I return.

Figure 4.17 Chapel of Notre-Dame (reconstructed), ambulatory of the abbey church of Saint-Denis.

Photo: author

Two thirteenth-century ordinaries from Saint-Denis provide extensive detail about the liturgical life of the abbey in the Gothic period. Edward Foley argued that the first (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 526, dated 1234–6) was written to preserve Suger’s liturgy during renovations.Footnote ⁵⁵ Anne Walters Robertson dates the second ordinary (BnF, MS lat. 976) to the first years of Matthew of Vendôme’s abbacy (ca. 1258) and considers it part of his renovatio.Footnote ⁵⁶ Together the two texts provide unambiguous evidence that the axial chapel of the ambulatory was the centre of Marian worship. There were processions to its altar every Saturday, when a special mass in honour of the Virgin was said; on such major Marian feast days as the Purification of the Virgin, the Annunciation, the Nativity of Mary, and Christmas, there was not only a procession to this altar but also morning mass was celebrated there.Footnote ⁵⁷ Accordingly, the axial chapel was the appropriate setting for the Glorification of the Virgin group.

Despite depredations over the centuries, the chapels of Saint-Denis still offer a rich environment for this contextualization. Today, the most striking features of the axial chapel are the two large stained-glass windows depicting the Tree of Jesse (Figure 4.18) and the Infancy of Christ, which date to the time of Abbot Suger; he is depicted at the base of the Tree of Jesse gifting the radiant windows.Footnote ⁵⁸ While the Infancy cycle is fairly standard, the Tree of Jesse was innovative in the twelfth century, and the axial chapel window has been rightly celebrated as one of the first and finest exemplars.Footnote ⁵⁹ In addition to emphasizing the dedication of the chapel to the Virgin Mary, the sophisticated iconography of the windows establishes a theological leitmotif for Marian liturgies at the altar.

Figure 4.18 Tree of Jesse window from the chapel of Notre-Dame (Figure 4.17), 1140–4. Stained glass.

Photo: © Centre des Monuments Nationaux

The altar of the axial chapel stands at the centre of its rear wall, atop a low platform.Footnote ⁶⁰ The intricate tiles on the chapel floor combined a tendril border, remarkably similar to the orfrois on the ivory Virgin’s mantle, with a diapered pattern of castles and fleurs-de-lys.Footnote ⁶¹ The Infancy retable currently in situ dates to the thirteenth century, but its provenance is unknown.Footnote ⁶² As in all the ambulatory chapels, behind the altar is a raised dais for the reliquary chasse. Here it is supported by two octagonal columns with foliate capitals; basilisks perched atop the capitals hold a shelf ornamented with rosettes (Figures 4.17 and 4.19).Footnote ⁶³

Figure 4.19 Axial chapel of the Virgin, abbey church of Saint-Denis. Charles Percier, Saint-Denis album, 1793–4. Paper, pencil, and wash. Compiègne, Musée municipal Antoine Vivenel, F 41.

Photo: courtesy of museum

While the ordinaries confirm that the axial chapel was the locus for Marian worship at Saint-Denis in the thirteenth century, they make no mention of the ivory Glorification of the Virgin group. This is frustrating, but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and very few of the sumptuous artworks of Saint-Denis are mentioned in these texts.Footnote ⁶⁴ Examining evidence from other institutions about how ivory groups of the Virgin and Child were used in liturgies elsewhere helps us reimagine the ceremonies at Saint-Denis.

Ivories in Action: Liturgical Uses

Four pieces of evidence support my contention that on Marian feast days the Glorification of the Virgin group was placed on the main altar of the Virgin in the axial chapel at Saint-Denis. This evidence concerns ivories both extant and lost, from as near as Paris and as far as Austria. While two sources indicate that ivory Virgin and Child statues were permanently installed on the high altar of particular foundations, in both cases that altar was dedicated to the Virgin of the Assumption. The other two sources attest to ivory Virgin and Child statuettes being deployed on Marian feasts, in one case explicitly for the feast of the Assumption. I propose that this last case best reflects the thirteenth-century situation at Saint-Denis.

The 1343 inventory of the treasury of Notre-Dame in Paris records several ivory statuettes: an ebony altar cross with ivory corpus and a gilt copper base; an ivory statuette of the Virgin and Child in an ivory tabernacle; and, most interesting, a quite ancient ivory image cut down the middle with images carved in the opening, which had been placed on the high altar (“quedam alia ymago eburnea valde antiqua scisa per medium et cum ymaginibus sculptis in appertura, que solebat poni super magnum altare”).Footnote ⁶⁵ This remarkable entry informs us that the high altar at Notre-Dame displayed not just an ivory Virgin and Child statue but, rather, a Vierge ouvrante, akin to examples in ivory preserved in Allariz (ca. 1280) and Salamanca (ca. 1275),Footnote ⁶⁶ or, closer to Paris, a wooden version from the royal abbey of Maubuisson of circa 1240 (Figure 4.20).Footnote ⁶⁷ The inventory redactor emphasized the ivory’s age, suggesting that the Vierge ouvrante long predated the 1343 inventory.Footnote ⁶⁸ The past tense that indicates the ivory Virgin’s former use (“solebat poni”) should be understood in concert with the donation of funds for a new repoussé silver altarpiece in 1320; the new altarpiece depicting the Coronation of the Virgin and other saints displaced the Vierge ouvrante, relegating it to the treasury.Footnote ⁶⁹ The mid-fourteenth-century inventory’s references to the past permit the conclusion that a century earlier, in Paris, an ivory Virgin was an appropriate work with which to proclaim an altar’s dedication to Mary. That the high altar at Notre-Dame was dedicated specifically to the Virgin of the Assumption reinforces the association between ivory and that Marian feast.Footnote ⁷⁰

Figure 4.20 Maubuisson Shrine Madonna. Île-de-France, ca. 1240. Walnut wood, 140 cm. Stolen in 1993, photography by the Foto Marburg project, ca. 1920–36.

Photo: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (30.715a) / Art Resource, NY

In Chapter 1 the ivory altarpiece commissioned from Giovanni Pisano in 1299 was discussed in terms of its sculptor’s multimedia skills and the detailed extant contract. Here it is worth noting that the “opus heburneum” was created for the high altar of the Pisan Duomo, which was dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, Saint Mary of the Assumption.Footnote ⁷¹ The fifteenth-century Pisan inventories describe the same iconography as the Glorification of the Virgin group at Saint-Denis: a central Virgin and Child statue, today at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (Figure 1.10), flanked by two candle-holding angels arranged under a tabernacle.Footnote ⁷² At Pisa too the canons chose to adorn the high altar dedicated to the Assumption with an ivory altarpiece featuring the same iconography as found at Saint-Denis, the Virgin adored by angelic acolytes.

At Saint-Denis the high altar was dedicated not to the Virgin Mary but to the patron saint of France and martyred first bishop of Paris. It would not have been logical or appropriate for Marian images to be installed there. Nor was the Glorification of the Virgin group permanently installed on the Virgin’s main altar in the axial chapel; as already discussed, that space had a stone retable and a shrine containing the relics of saints Hilaire and Patroclus, attested in the thirteenth-century Grandes chroniques de France as well as the sixteenth-century inventories.Footnote ⁷³ Furthermore, the sack of Saint-Denis in 1567 destroyed all the precious objects not locked away in the treasury or installed out of arm’s reach; therefore, by that date the ivory group was kept in the treasury, which accounts for its survival. Given this evidence, I propose that the Glorification of the Virgin was brought out on such prominent Marian feasts as the Nativity, Purification, and especially the Assumption, and temporarily placed on the altar in the axial chapel.

Ivories at the abbey of Zwettl in the thirteenth century and the cathedral of Arras in the eighteenth were used in just such a fashion. The purchase of the ivory tabernacle at Zwettl before 1258 was discussed in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.7). The Cistercian Abbey’s 1311 Stiftungsbuch also records that the ivory was displayed on the altar of the Virgin on feast days (“summon altari beate Virginis in festivitatibus supponitur”).Footnote ⁷⁴ The ensemble, which was likely a wooden tabernacle with appliqué ivory plaques, was removed from its storage location, perhaps a cupboard in the sacristy, and placed on the altar to prepare the space properly for the Marian liturgy.Footnote ⁷⁵ The difference in size between the Zwettl ivory and the Saint-Denis Glorification group (the latter at least one-third larger) would not have precluded a similar usage.

Arras Cathedral had a large (magne) ivory image of the Virgin and Child, described in a 1328 inventory, with a large gilt copper tabernacle (“magne tabernaculum”) resting on four lions.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although the liturgical functions of other objects are described in this inventory, such as a gold cross that was carried in solemn processions, no such information is given for the large ivory statuette.Footnote ⁷⁷ A Revolution-era inventory compiled with the intent of claiming the cathedral’s treasures for the state included the Virgin and Child with its gilt copper niche, but the parishioners of Arras petitioned for the statue’s return on 13 August 1792 because it was “indispensable for the celebration of the feast” of the Assumption two days later.Footnote ⁷⁸ The only other items demanded by the congregation were the relics of the True Cross, which underscores the ivory statue’s paramount importance to the community. Even though this evidence dates from the eighteenth century rather than the fourteenth, the Gothic ivory at Arras was considered essential for the proper celebration of the feast of the Assumption at the cathedral – a use that very likely dates back to the Middle Ages.

The emphasis on the size of the ivory statue and tabernacle in the 1328 Arras inventory suggests an association with a handful of enormous ivory statuettes, more than 40 cm tall, of unknown provenance. A standing Virgin and Child today at the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Caen is 42 cm tall and was in the local collection of Pierre-Bernard Mancel before 1866 (Figure 4.21).Footnote ⁷⁹ At 52 cm tall, the ivory Virgin and Child purchased by Alexandre du Sommerard in 1851 from a certain Barroux, now at the Musée Cluny (Cl. 1954), would equally live up to the descriptor “magne” (Figure 4.22).Footnote ⁸⁰ Sadly, until further evidence comes to the fore, the medieval contexts for these very large works remain unknown, but it was almost certainly liturgical.

Figure 4.21 Mancel Virgin and Child. Paris, 1250–75. Ivory, 42 cm. Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, M.2009.0.1.

Photo: Patricia Touzard, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen

Figure 4.22 Barroux Virgin and Child. Paris, ca. 1250–60. Ivory, 52 cm. MNMA-Cluny, Cl. 1954.

Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

On the basis of these comparisons, I propose that the Glorification of the Virgin group at Saint-Denis was a peripatetic object brought from the monastery’s treasury to the principal Marian altar to celebrate her feast days. It was as indispensable there as the ivory Virgin and tabernacle was to the people of Arras in the eighteenth century. At all other times, the ivory group at Saint-Denis was kept safely in the treasury, located on the upper floor of a fortified structure where the south transept met the nave.Footnote ⁸¹ Moving the work into the charged liturgical space of the axial chapel activated it and removed it from symbolic dormancy.

Corine Schleif studied a sacristan’s manual from late fifteenth-century Nuremberg that describes the use of reliquaries and statuettes to mark feast days.Footnote ⁸² If the church possessed a relic of a saint, it was brought out and placed on the appropriate altar to highlight the dedication. If there was no relic, then a generic statue, frequently of gilt silver but sometimes simply of wood, was adorned with particularizing attributes to give the anonymous image an identity before it was placed on the appropriate altar. In Rouen, an early fourteenth-century bishop-martyr figure of gilt copper seems never to have served as a reliquary, and interchangeable attributes might have allowed the sacristan to particularize that statue.Footnote ⁸³ In the Nuremberg manual there is a preferential hierarchy among the objects chosen to mark a saint’s feast day. Ideally relics were mobilized so that the saints themselves could participate in the celebration of the anniversary, but if bodily presence was impossible because the church did not possess relics of the saint, then a portable statue would suffice to bring the saint to mind. In such a case the image functioned as a mnemonic tool to sharpen congregational memory and focus attention on the feast dedicatee.

The ivory Glorification of the Virgin group at Saint-Denis lay between these two functional poles. Even though it was dedicated to Mary, the axial chapel in the chevet did not display relics of the Mother of God; as with any chapel dedicated to Notre-Dame, there are no bodily relics of the Virgin. Like her divine son, she was assumed bodily into heaven after death, a story constructed to assuage medieval anxieties about the lack of a corpse.Footnote ⁸⁴ As with Christ, secondary relics were found and venerated, most prominently Mary’s veil at Chartres, her girdle in Toledo and Prato, and the many vials of her breast milk, which were very popular in the later Middle Ages.Footnote ⁸⁵ Portable Marian reliquary statues certainly existed in the late thirteenth century, of which the best preserved is perhaps the gilt silver Virgin and Child in the Aachen Cathedral treasury, made in that city around 1280 (Figure 4.23).Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1205 King Philip Augustus donated a chasse to Saint-Denis filled with relics obtained from Baldwin I of Constantinople (Baldwin VI of Flanders), including some drops of the Virgin’s milk and fragments of her tunic, but the royal abbey remained without a major Marian relic until Jeanne d’Évreux donated a magnificent enamelled and gilt silver reliquary statue in 1339 (Figure 4.24).Footnote ⁸⁷ It contained all three major types of Marian relics: strands of her hair, drops of her milk, and pieces of her vestments.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the absence of relics or a major reliquary exclusively for her, a dedication to the Virgin must be exhibited through other criteria, especially when celebrating her feast days. The ivory statuettes that composed the Glorification of the Virgin group therefore filled a void created by the lack of Marian relics. Not only did the sculptures serve to call the Virgin to mind but the group also acted as a surrogate for the chaste body of Mary. The material of ivory itself substituted for the corporeal presence traditionally manifested by relics, and so image worked together with material to complete the chapel’s program.

Figure 4.23 Virgin and Child altar statuette. Aachen, ca. 1280 (later base). Repoussé silver, partial gilt, and precious stones, 80 cm. Aachen, Domschatzkammer, Gr. 55.

Photo: © Ann Münchow, Domkapitel Aachen

Figure 4.24 Vierge de Jeanne d’Évreux. Paris, 1324–39. Repoussé silver, partial gilt, on wood core, gold, basse-taille enamels, precious stones, and pearls, 68 cm (with base). Louvre, OA 342 and 419.

Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

Ivory As Chastity and Substitutional Relic

A broader understanding of the materiality of elephant ivory heightens the significance of the Glorification of the Virgin Group at Saint-Denis. As discussed in Chapter 2, ivory connoted chastity and was therefore appropriate for sculptures of the Virgin. Beyond signification, however, I argue that the effective powers of ivory transformed the Glorification of the Virgin group from a mere representation to an actual “physical” embodiment of the Mother of God’s principal attribute, her virginity. To understand this, we need to explore the spiritual power of materials and the role of ivory in medieval scientific treatises and biblical exegeses. These reveal an unexpected mixture of likeness and presence that complicates our perception of the functions of medieval art.Footnote ⁸⁹

Chapter 2 traced the incorporation of antique conceptions of elephants and their ivory into the Christian commentary tradition, including Guerric of Igny’s sermon on the Annunciation. In particular, we should recall that elephants were supposedly cold-blooded, a trait transmitted to their elongated teeth. Elephant dentine was thus a frigid material. For early Christian commentators, this coolness of ivory plainly signified sexual abstention, furnishing an appropriate moral for the enigmatic references to ivory in the Psalms and the Song of Songs. Cassiodorus glossed the ivory palace of Psalm 44 as Christ’s bride, fittingly emerging from a house of chastity, and Bede incorporated Cassiodorus’s exegetical trope almost verbatim into his commentary on Song of Songs 5:14: “His belly is as of ivory, set with sapphires.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Coining an enduring formula, Bede summarized his interpretation as, “Ivory properly signifies (indicat) chastity, which remains immune in the flesh from the corruption of the sins of the flesh.”Footnote ⁹¹

The interpretation of ivory as chastity was gradually given an ecclesiological sense. Following Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, “Christ is the head of the church. He is the saviour of his body” (5:23), the body of Christ is the Church itself. If the lover of the Song of Songs is Christ, then his ivory body signifies the qualities of the corporate and institutional body, the Church. Thus, in Anselm of Laon’s widely read commentary on the Song of Songs:

Good Christians – the people of the Church – ought to be as chaste as ivory. Yet this straightforward metaphorical reading is complicated by another explanation that Anselm includes: the coldness of ivory is so potent that it resists flames. This quasi-scientific assertion advances a stronger link between ivory’s coldness and chastity than simple signification. While Anselm here studiously echoes the trope “ivory signifies chastity (unde per ebur castitatem significamus),” his reliance on an ostensibly observable physical phenomenon suggests that the relation between chastity and coldness is more than metaphorical.

The curious power of ivory to resist and extinguish fires demonstrates a real, physical presence of frigidity that surpasses an abstract, symbolic reading. The medieval medical and scientific traditions further demonstrate that ivory had real cooling powers. In particular, the pharmaceutical use of ivory suggests that its coldness was thought to have real effects on the body, effects that were commensurate with chastity. As a result, the relationship between coldness and chastity is not simply iconological or metaphorical. Ivory’s coldness was effective, so chastity was present in reality.

Ivory’s quality of coldness, and thus its chasteness, gave the material a clear role in balancing the humours in the Galenic system as it was taught to medical students at the University of Paris.Footnote ⁹³ That it was ingested differentiated it from other artistic materials, such as wood and stone. The influential late eleventh-century gynecologist Trotula of Salerno prescribed a “drink of ivory” to guard against miscarriage; it was thought to cool and soothe the womb.Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1147 Wibald, abbot of Stavelot, Corvey, and Monte Cassino, counselled a friend suffering from a cold to use the remedy diacalamentis, a concoction made of garden-variety herbs, rather than the more expensive diamargariton, which he described as a powdered mixture of pearl, cloves, cinnamon, galangal, aloes, nutmeg, ginger, ivory, and camphor, among other exotic substances.Footnote ⁹⁵ This flamboyant recipe was taken from the repertoire of the Salernitan medical school, with which Monte Cassino was intimately involved.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Antidotarium Nicolai, a widely circulated compilation of prescriptions by the physician Nicholas of Salerno (fl. 1150), includes ivory shavings in 9 of its 140 recipes. Most indicative of ivory’s frigid nature is its presence in a recipe for Copho’s cold electuary to be taken in case of fever or stomach cholera. The ingredients are red and white sandalwood, calamine (spodium), gum tragacanth, gum arabic, starch, ivory shavings (rasure eboris), rhubarb, senna, roses, violets, seeds of common fumitory, barberry, cordia latifolia (sebesten), and purslane, three drams of aniseed, and Indian gooseberry (emblica).Footnote ⁹⁷ Frigid ivory here joins other cooling ingredients, notably rose, fennel, and anise. The ivory shavings are listed among pharmacologically active substances, the materia medica, as being cold and dry in the first degree.Footnote ⁹⁸ The doctor Jean of Saint-Amand (1233–1303) testified to ivory’s use as a pharmaceutical in thirteenth-century Paris by including it as an ingredient in a text contemporaneous with the rise of the ivory-carving industry.Footnote ⁹⁹

Its medicinal use demonstrates the qualities and virtues inherent in ivory and suggests that, for a medieval viewer of an ivory sculpture, the material did not merely signify chastity but actuality embodied it.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Anselm’s anecdote – that ivory is of such a frigid nature that a burning cloth will not ignite it – is an innovative and enigmatic addition to the commentary tradition. It is not found among classical authors or in works by the Church Fathers read by exegetes in the Laon school.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Anselm’s assertion was repeated by several later writers in both Latin and French, including Honorius Augustodunensis, Philip of Harveng, and Peter of Beauvais in the so-called Picard Bestiary.Footnote ¹⁰² Jacques de Vitry, in his Historia orientalis (ca. 1215), gives perhaps the most interesting version: “They [elephants] are of a cold nature, and ivory which are their bones, is cold and white. For if a cloth is placed on top of ivory, and [both] placed on a fire, the cloth will not burn, but the natural coldness of the ivory (naturali eboris frigiditate), it is said, will extinguish the fire.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This careful elaboration suggests that Jacques had a practical and instrumental understanding of Anselm’s point. While we do not know whether Anselm had direct access to any ivory objects, we know with certainty that Jacques did.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His ivory bishop’s crosier (Figure 4.25) still survives, part of the treasure of the priory of Oignies to which Jacques donated all his belongings upon his death.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The crosier, of Sicilian manufacture and probably purchased in Rome before 1216, is precisely contemporary with the Historia Orientalis. We can only speculate about how Jacques’s opinion might have been influenced by his lived experience of handling the magnificent ivory crosier. Was he ever tempted to verify the information provided by the textual authorities? Did the experience of taking up his crozier on a hot day, swathed and sweating in heavy liturgical robes, and find it refreshingly cool to the touch? And did this confirm in his mind the exegesis of the material? Would he have considered the physical sensation of coolness a manifestation of chastity, and might this concretized virtue have cooled his spirit as well as his skin?

Figure 4.25 Crosier of Jacques de Vitry. Sicily, 1216. Ivory, L 57 cm, D 12 cm. Namur, TreM.a–Musée des Arts Anciens, Trésor d’Oignies, inv. 30. Photo:

© Hughes Dubois, Fondation Roy Baudoin

Ivory did not simply signify chastity; the physical manifestation of its coldness was coextensive with its chastity. Medieval pharmacists knew that elephant ivory is cold to the touch. (Dentine’s hygroscopic qualities, wicking away moisture, generate a sensation of coolness.Footnote ¹⁰⁶) The coldness is chasteness and chastity inheres in the material. This substantial presence makes ivory the ideal substance from which to fashion statues of the Virgin Mary. The presence of her chief virtue in the material pushes works like the Glorification group from Saint-Denis beyond the mere representation of the Mother of God; it makes her virginity present, actually and palpably.

The medical powers of ivory may help explain how ivory carvers, and not just elite patrons with access to erudite knowledge, might have learned of the virtus inherent in the medium. Apothecaries were not only among the artisans’ interlocutors but also members of the ivory economy of Paris themselves. If both ivory shavings and burnt ivory powder were considered active and effective substances in the Gothic pharmacy, we need to determine the source of these materials.

Very few archaeological sites in Paris have yielded finds that attest to the ivory-carving industry that flourished in the Gothic city, so the excavation in 2000 of a knife-making shop at 34 rue Greneta (north of Les Halles) is noteworthy. Based on coin evidence, the workshop appears to have been active from 1310 to 1328. The floor was littered with iron castings and debris from the metalworking process for the blades, as well as cow- and horse-bone offcuts. One incomplete ivory knife handle and a broken bit of ivory were found, but no offcuts of dentine.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This suggests that the ivory offcuts in particular were put aside and saved by the artisans, akin to what goldsmiths did with their material, because the scraps continued to have monetary value. The ivory-carving ateliers that flourished in the city, described in Chapter 1, are the most likely source of Jean of Saint-Amand’s ivory powder, mixed into such wondrous concoctions as diamargariton. A trade-based connection between ivory carvers and apothecaries would, at the very least, reinforce for the carvers the value of their raw material through second-hand knowledge of its pharmaceutical potency, which derived from its frigidity. Perhaps Jean shared his understanding of the material’s potency with his supplier of ivory shavings.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Understanding ivory as the virginal material of Mary’s flesh extends the representative function of an ivory statuette beyond mere likeness. Fashioning such an image from a substance that embodies the Virgin’s chief moral trait establishes material continuity between the sculpted image and the person represented – a material continuity otherwise possible only with relics. I propose that the ivory image of the Virgin and Child effectively substituted for relics of the Virgin during liturgical celebrations on Marian feast days at Saint-Denis. Ivory truly made present the chastity of the Virgin’s flesh and thereby acted as an appropriate substitute for her bodily presence. The absence of the Virgin’s body was filled by the presence of chastity, her foremost virtue.

The shared semantic field of reliquaries and ivory statuettes of the Virgin is demonstrated by two works in ivory contemporary with the Glorification of the Virgin group but transformed at an unknown date into reliquaries. Such items, visually manifesting their contained substances, differ from the statuette-pyxes discussed in Chapter 2. A Virgin and Child at the Musée Cluny (Cl. 11155), originally seated on a wood or metal throne (now replaced), has a polygonal cavity excavated in Mary’s abdomen (Figure 4.26).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The sides and edges of this aperture are smooth with no evidence of a closing mechanism, but a covering is easily imagined.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The 1380 inventory of King Charles V’s study at Saint-Germain-en-Laye describes a remarkably similar statuette with glass inserted over her breast: “Item, an image of Our Lady of ivory, with a piece of green glass in her breast (“en la poictrine”), seated in a chair/throne (chayère), on a socle (pyé) of copper.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Such cavities may have accommodated relics that index a relationship with the womb, such as the holy umbilical cord (“Saint Nombril”) or Christ’s swaddling clothes.Footnote ¹¹² The early modern inventories of Clairvaux, for example, describe an ivory image of the Virgin and Child in which Mary holds the Christ child in her left hand and in her right proffers a rock-crystal vase that contains drops of her life-giving milk. The whole was housed in an ornamented gilt copper tabernacle.Footnote ¹¹³

Figure 4.26 Seated Virgin and Child. Paris, 1260–70. Ivory with modern wood throne, 15.2 cm. MNMA–Cluny, Cl. 11155.

Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

Another conjunction of ivory and relic, closely related in style to the seated Virgin and Child at the Musée Cluny, is a reliquary of the True Cross now in the parish church of Saint-Étienne in Balledent (Haute-Vienne); it came from the treasury of the abbey of Grandmont (Figure 4.27).Footnote ¹¹⁴ An ivory plaque of the face of the Virgin is mounted as the central door of a quatrefoil reliquary typical of Limoges in the mid-thirteenth century.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The plaque is unlikely to have been made for this location, and its high relief suggests that it came from a polyptych. The four bands of twelfth-century filigree that frame the door indicate that the work is a pastiche assembled sometime before 1495, when it was described in an inventory.Footnote ¹¹⁶ By that date the ivory plaque was identified with Saint Veronica, but I propose that placing the face of an ivory Virgin on the door to the relic chamber re-enacted a theological truth: guarded within the chaste ivory of the Virgin are pieces of the cross, worshipped because (as Aquinas emphasized) they bear traces of the blood of Christ himself, just as the Virgin herself encompassed and gave flesh to Christ. This echoes the theology behind the eucharistic pyxes discussed in Chapter 2. The rhetoric of enshrinement plays out as a relationship between container and contained, between the flesh of the mother (ivory) and that of the son (relic).Footnote ¹¹⁷ These reused ivory statuettes of the Virgin suggest a purposeful play on the significance of ivory as chastity and its power to make the Virgin’s chief virtue truly present, a material well suited to hold the body of Christ.

Figure 4.27 Reliquary of the True Cross, formerly in the treasury of the abbey of Grandmont. Ivory: Paris, 1260–70; metalwork: Limousin, mid-thirteenth century. Ivory, gilt copper, champlevé enamel, filigree, rock crystal, and precious stones, 30.5 cm. Balledent (Haute-Vienne), church of Saint-Étienne.

Photo: © Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel. P. Rivière, 1995

Returning to Saint-Denis, the materiality of ivory assumed great importance on those days when the Glorification of the Virgin group was taken out of the treasury and activated in the chapel dedicated to Mary. The exegetical context of the biblical references to ivory, which glossed the material as a signifier of chastity, drew from a classical and secular understanding of ivory and of elephants. Chastity and frigidity were conflated, and the mechanics of this conflation were not merely semeiologic. The coldness of ivory did not only signify chastity but also incarnated it. Ivory was a physical manifestation of the Virgin’s special virtue, so it became a compelling stand-in for her missing bodily relics. Rather than reifying a binary opposition between image and relic, the effective presence of chastity in the ivory statuettes reconfigures a continuum between representation and presence, image and relic – a continuum on which ivory approaches the impossible goal of manifesting a body assumed to heaven.

Under Abbot Matthew of Vendôme, efforts were made to augment the liturgical celebrations in the chevet chapels, whether in the form of a procession or a special mass said on the saint’s day. The lack of a Marian relic must have been keenly felt on the many feasts of Our Lady until the abbey procured the ivory group of the Glorification of the Virgin that could stand in for a relic. As outlined earlier, the group did more than simply represent the Virgin; its material brought to the chapel chastity incarnate. Many of the theological nuances of this substitution were alluded to or explored during the various rituals enacted for the celebration of the Marian feasts, especially that of her Assumption. This feast re-enacted the Virgin’s physical withdrawal from the world, an event necessitated by her embodiment of chastity.

The Liturgical Encounter at Saint-Denis

The vast array of textual sources from the royal abbey of Saint-Denis permit a thick description of the local liturgy. This includes the two thirteenth-century ordinaries already described, a number of antiphonaries still in use in the thirteenth century, and missals newly commissioned under Matthew of Vendôme.Footnote ¹¹⁸ We can correlate liturgical texts with the architectural environment and insert the ivory Glorification group into this context to reconstruct the ductus of the medieval liturgical performance. This concept, usefully articulated by Mary Carruthers, indicates the intellectual journey through which a work of art guides – conducts – the attentive viewer/participant toward a particular interpretation.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This is a chronological, almost narrative experience of liturgy, in which leitmotifs are built up diachronically and themes layered one atop the other.

The Assumption of Mary, celebrated on 15 August, was one of the most exalted feasts celebrated at Saint-Denis, comparable to Easter, Christmas, and even the feast of Saint Denis and his companions.Footnote ¹²⁰ It commemorates the ultimate glorification of Mary and her coronation by Christ once her body is brought up to heaven, so it was most appropriate for the exhibition of the Glorification of the Virgin group. The Psalms, antiphons, and readings recited on the feast day resonate powerfully with the ivory group. The liturgical climax was a procession starting around 10 a.m., after Terce, followed immediately by mass at the high altar (Figure 4.28).Footnote ¹²¹ All the monks were instructed to put on fine white linen vestments (“omnes in albis”), worn only for the most important liturgical celebrations of the year.Footnote ¹²² After chanting the antiphons and verses of Terce, the monks processed out of the south door of the choir toward the south transept portal, through which they exited the church and entered the cloister.Footnote ¹²³ While processing through those arcaded passages, the monks sang the “Felix namque”: “For you are happy, O holy Virgin Mary, and most worthy of praise because from you arose the sun of justice, Christ our God.”Footnote ¹²⁴ An image borrowed from the prophecy of Malachi 4:2, “But unto you that fear my name, the Sun of justice (sol iustitiae) shall arise, and health in his wings,” the sun of justice establishes a theme of typological fulfilment, with Christ as the long-prophesized image of just rulership. This verse, chosen specifically for the monks’ procession around the cloister, responds directly to the sculptural decoration in that space.

Figure 4.28 Plan of the abbey of Saint-Denis with the procession on the Feast of the Assumption, ca. 1300. Plan: Matilde Grimaldi

In the mid-twelfth century column statues of prophets and kings of the Old Testament ornamented the cloister arcades.Footnote ¹²⁵ Antoine Benoist sketched some of them for the album of Bernard de Montfaucon, assembled around 1729 (Figure 4.29).Footnote ¹²⁶ The one figure still extant, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is possibly Solomon, the wise king of Israel (Figure 4.30). Two other figures drawn by Benoist may be identified as King David, holding the Psalter, and a prophet holding a phylactery.Footnote ¹²⁷ Singing about the Virgin Mary and her son using the prophetic vocabulary of the Sun of Justice, and filing past figures of prophecy, good government, and justice from the Old Testament, the monks must have reflected on the consonances between sung text and lived environment. The column statues underscored how Christ had fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. Walking past a representation of Solomon would remind the monks of Christ’s role as the new Solomon dispensing justice under the New Law. Moreover, doing so on the feast of the Assumption must have prompted them to think about how Mary’s flesh offered physical continuity with the royal lineage of the house of David, a theme that recurred throughout the day.

Figure 4.29 Antoine Benoist, drawings of column statues in the cloister of the abbey of Saint-Denis, ca. 1729. BnF, MS fr. 15634, pp. 42, 45, and 46.

Photo: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

Figure 4.30 Column statue of a king from the cloister of the abbey of Saint-Denis. Saint-Denis, 1150–60. Limestone, 116.5 cm. MMA, 20.157.

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0

After completing the procession around the cloister, the monks re-entered the basilica by the south transept. This portal had Infancy scenes nestled among its voussoirs (ca. 1240–5) (Figure 4.31).Footnote ¹²⁸ Passing underneath might have stimulated reflections on the passage from one age to another, as the monks moved from the space of the Old Testament (the cloister) to the New (the church). Once inside the monks turned right to ascend the stairs leading to the raised chevet, processing past Suger’s ambulatory chapels toward the axial chapel of the Virgin (“ad oratorium ipsius sancti”).Footnote ¹²⁹ The large stained-glass windows in the chevet glowed with ethereal light, and the monks must have strained to make out specific details as their eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. They accompanied their approach to the Virgin’s oratory with the responsorial “Stirps Jesse”: “The stock of Jesse produced a branch, and the branch produced a flower, and on this flower the nourishing spirit came to rest.”Footnote ¹³⁰ This popular responsory was based on Isaiah 11:1–2, “And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root. And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” When the monks reached the axial chapel, their thoughts already prepared by the typologies of “Felix namque” chanted in the cloister, a glowing materialization of the words appeared before them: the Tree of Jesse window to the left, and the historical actualization of its promise in the adjacent Infancy window (Figures 4.17 and 4.18). In the former, Jesse lies asleep at the bottom while a verdant tree trunk grows from his side. Sitting among the top branches like sweet fruit, the vine culminates with the Virgin and Child blooming from the stalk in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecies. The Infancy window, which reads upward from the Annunciation to the apocryphal Flight into Egypt, also emphasizes that from the house of David (referenced in the scenes of the Massacre of the Innocents and a long Epiphany cycle), a Saviour has been born. Mary, descended from this royal lineage, is the link that unites the old and new covenants.

Figure 4.31 South transept portal of the abbey church of Saint-Denis, ca. 1260.

Photo: © Centre des Monuments Nationaux

As the monks’ eyes adjusted to the light filtering through the stained glass, the rest of the chapel would have emerged from its penumbra, with the Glorification of the Virgin group on the altar glowing with reflected ambient light. The “Post partum virgo” versicle that follows the “Stirps Jesse” introduced the theme of Mary’s intact virginity, the physical proof of her miraculous motherhood: “After childbirth you did remain an inviolate virgin: Mother of God, intercede for us.” The Virgin’s chastity and pure flesh are thus foregrounded as the reasons for her commemoration on this day, the justifications for both her bodily assumption into heaven and her intercessory powers. Because the Virgin’s flesh remained purely chaste, her body was taken wholly into heaven. Mary’s body was so fully imbued with the divine, manifested most clearly in her chastity, that it could not be allowed to rot. Bodily relics of her virginal flesh were impossible, but a representation of the Mother of God, with the physical presence of chastity manifested in ivory, was possible. On a day when the absence of the Virgin’s body is celebrated, an ivory statuette made her unique virtue present.

Psalm 44, with its ivory palace, is one of the texts most frequently reiterated during the feast of the Assumption. At Saint-Denis the monks chanted it no fewer than three times throughout the day, including as the psalm for the high mass.Footnote ¹³¹ The equation of ivory and chastity, as found in the standard gloss on this psalm in the Glossa Ordinaria, surely resonated in the monks’ minds as they stood before the ivory figures, singing of Mary’s inviolate virginity. The ivory Glorification of the Virgin group substituted for the physical presence normally manifested by relics. The group’s presence on the altar not only acted as a mnemonic tool to remind the congregation of the day’s dedication – a function accomplished by a statue in any medium – but also manifested Mary’s inviolate virginity, making it tangibly present.

As the monks prepared to leave the chapel, Christ and Mary’s descent from Jesse was again invoked with the response “Ad nutum domini”: “According to the will of our Lord to increase honour, like the bramble engenders the rose, so Judea engendered Mary.”Footnote ¹³² Mary is presented in this antiphon as the unblemished rose that blossomed from the thorny bush of the house of Judah. This modifies the metaphor of continuity inherent in the Tree of Jesse, replacing it with one of difference and rupture: the emphasis is on ontological contrast, differentiating the soft and generative rose from the prickly and woody brush. This resonates even more deeply with the ivory Glorification group because it draws attention to the floral arrangement that the Virgin holds in her right hand. Sitting atop a stiff, woody stalk, a double rose is finely carved (Figure 4.2). Mary herself proffers the sign of her descent from the Old Testament Kings of Judea, a blossom burgeoning from a bramble, on which, as the “Stirps Jesse” put it, “the nourishing spirit came to rest.” The result of that mystical union, the Virgin birth, is held in Mary’s left arm: the Christ Child, who playfully reaches for the bouquet his mother holds, seemingly oblivious to the theological complexities therein.

Leaving the chapel, the Assumption Day procession continued around the ambulatory and descended the stairs into the transept.Footnote ¹³³ As the procession moved into the newly reconstructed nave, they sang the response “Candida virginitas,” a joyful litany of Marian metaphors. Compared to the other antiphons sung throughout the procession, this text is rare, but it features on the first folio of the twelfth-century antiphonary from Saint-Denis: “O shining-white virginity, beloved pillar of paradise, a garden enclosed, a springtime flowering plot of earth: for whose sake the whole world celebrates with song.”Footnote ¹³⁴ The ivory group materializes this prayer, the subtle lustre of the polished white dentine giving form to the Virgin and the glorifying angels. Three cantors respond with the verse “Qui meruit domini,” bringing the procession – and the story of salvation it described – to a close: “Who was worthy to bear her Lord, may this same flowering virgin give us her son again.” The final versicle describes a bountiful Virgin whose pure and chaste flesh not only dignified her role as Theotokos but also earned her a place at the right hand of God. It recalls the Virgin’s clemency at the Last Judgment, the close of salvation history, when the eternal virtues enshrined in her immaculate flesh will allow her to intercede on behalf of believers.

The poetic texts recited during the Saint-Denis Assumption procession announced the major themes of the feast, themes that also inhered in the ivory Glorification of the Virgin group placed atop the Virgin’s altar on that day. The participants in the ritual were led on an iconographically dense physical journey through the abbey that inspired an interior journey through Marian theology. The variety of interpretations suggested by this ductus aid our understanding of the Glorification group. Reinserting the ivory group into its liturgical context permits the full significance of the “shining-white virginity” of the work to be realized: it made Mary’s corporeal virtue of chastity physically present for the congregation at Saint-Denis on the feast that celebrates her absence.

The Assumption in Ivory

In the decades after the Glorification of the Virgin was commissioned and first used at Saint-Denis, scenes of the Virgin’s death and assumption were introduced into the iconographic repertoire of Gothic diptychs and triptychs, bringing the theological potential inherent in ivory to its logical conclusion. If, as I have argued, elephant ivory manifested chastity, then carving scenes from the end of Mary’s life story reinforces that it was for her chasteness that the Virgin was taken bodily into heaven. The introduction of the new Death of the Virgin imagery responded directly to the materiality of ivory and its role in salvation history. The small-scale diptychs and triptychs adorned with these stories record a process whereby the meaning and valence of ivory fashioned in liturgical contexts is transmitted into the sphere of private devotion.

The cyclical nature of the Marian theme is clearly articulated on a triptych now at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (inv. 422) (Figure 4.32), which draws the viewer into the story of Mary’s role in salvation with its intimate and charming narrative.Footnote ¹³⁵ The story of Mary’s life, chastity, and death is here broken into three “chapters” corresponding to the three registers and to three states of corporality: at the bottom Christ’s infancy (scenes of the Annunciation, Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, and Presentation in the Temple); in the middle Mary’s deathbed, surrounded by the twelve apostles; and at the top her coronation in heaven, flanked by Peter and Paul, which underscores the ecclesiological significance of the scene.

Figure 4.32 Gulbenkian triptych with the life and death of the Virgin. Paris, 1280s. Ivory with silver hinges, 22 × 26.1 cm (open). Lisbon, Gulbenkian Museum, inv. 422.

Photo: courtesy of museum

The Gulbenkian triptych, likely carved in the 1280s, was an early attempt to conclude the story of Mary’s chaste flesh in the medium of ivory. The lower and middle registers juxtapose the traditional seated Virgin and Child with an inverted parent–child relationship, further expounding the mystical and bodily correlation manifested in the Incarnation: Christ, the Son, descended from heaven to gather Mary’s soul (represented as an infant) to his bosom. In so doing, Christ reprises and reverses the maternal embrace depicted below. A compelling visual rhyme reflects Jesus and Mary’s reciprocal theological relationship, a sort of logical quid pro quo: Mary bore Christ, so he will bear her body to heaven.

A close correlation between the Incarnation and Assumption was formulated in a popular anonymous sermon that served as one of the chief sources for understanding the mystery. In the Middle Ages it was ascribed to Augustine.Footnote ¹³⁶ This Pseudo-Augustine De Assumptione Beatae Mariae Virginis, probably from the eleventh or twelfth century, reasoned that because Christ assumed flesh from Mary’s womb (the author rejoices in this wordplay), it is only right that her flesh not become food for worms:

Enumerating many of the Old Testament typologies used to glorify Mary, Pseudo-Augustine states that it is proper the Virgin be taken up to heaven, along with Christ after his Ascension. The abject state of corruption that awaits the human body after death, reported in gruesome detail by the author, is impermissible for the Mother of God, because her own flesh enrobed the divine in human nature. Elsewhere the author argues that Mary is an exception to the curse of Adam after the Fall, “For dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return” (Gen. 3:19).Footnote ¹³⁸ With the Virgin’s corporeal contribution to salvation, the curse of Adam was broken, so her own human body should be exempt from disintegration into abject, unformed matter.

The reciprocity between mother and son, based on their shared corporeality, became the most oft-repeated rationale for the Assumption. Excerpts from Pseudo-Augustine, backed by the authority of the bishop of Hippo, were quoted directly in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend and also paraphrased in Christ’s words when he accompanies Mary’s assumed body to heaven.Footnote ¹³⁹ Because Mary gave Christ his perfect flesh, her body was raised up after death and glorified. It was therefore proper to depict these scenes in a material understood to embody the virtue that drove the narrative itself. The scenes are elevated by being rendered in ivory, a material that manifests Marian theology and avoids abject base materiality.

The iconography of the Gulbenkian triptych must have appealed to customers in Gothic Paris, as two triptychs at the Louvre (OA 6931 and OA 6932) replicate its tripartite organization of the key events in Mary’s life.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Similar iconography was also adapted to smaller formats. Two petite diptychs, one at the Art Gallery of Ontario (inv. 29102) (Figure 4.33) and another at the Louvre (OA 11096) (Figure 4.34), concentrate on the events of the death and afterlife of Mary; the incarnation and infancy of Christ are implicit and not depicted. In both diptychs, four scenes encapsulate the last key events in the Virgin’s terrestrial life and show how she was transformed into the most effective of heavenly intercessors.

Figure 4.33 Death of the Virgin diptych. Paris, 1280s. Ivory and silver hinges, 10.9 × 6.7 cm (each leaf). AGO-Thomson, inv. 29102.

Photo: © Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Figure 4.34 Death of the Virgin diptych. Paris, 1280s. Ivory, 11.3 × 5.9 cm (each leaf). Louvre, OA 11096.

Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

Three large triptychs move beyond the tripartite presentation of the key events in Mary’s death and afterlife to depict, in a dense narrative, her last days as recorded in apocryphal accounts. Their storytelling recalls the Passion diptychs, especially the “Soissons” diptych at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Figure 3.5), a fact Paul Williamson noted in his examination of a stylistically related Passion triptych in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection (Figure 4.35) that provides a sort of bridge between the Passion iconography and triptych form.Footnote ¹⁴¹ A triptych in Amiens further discussed in Chapter 6 (Figure 6.16), a now lost triptych from the Martin le Roy collection,Footnote ¹⁴² and one in the Wyvern Collection (Figure 4.36) typify this intensely narrative format, depicting ten separate episodes of the Virgin’s Death and Assumption and represents the apogee of this genre.Footnote ¹⁴³

Figure 4.35 Triptych with Passion scenes. Paris, 1285–95. Ivory, silver hinges (restored?), 24.6 × 20 cm (open). Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, DEC 1519 (formerly K 91C).

Photo: courtesy of owner

Figure 4.36 Death of the Virgin triptych. Paris, 1295–1305. Ivory with original silver hinges, 26.7 × 26.5 cm (open). Wyvern Collection, UK, inv. 1909.

Photo: courtesy of owner

The new iconography of the Death of the Virgin on Gothic ivories is often said to be based on the account in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, a text that circulated widely after 1260. But it is more accurate to say that the ivories share specific idiosyncrasies with Jacobus’s stated source, “a small apocryphal book attributed to John the Evangelist,” the Transitus Mariae.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Many versions of that apocryphal text circulated in Latin and French, but the one that corresponds most closely to the iconography on the ivories is a Picard text with the incipit “Ci commence la vie et lasumptions,” found in a manuscript made in northern France around 1275 (BnF, MS fr. 6447, fols. 263v–265v).Footnote ¹⁴⁵

In the superlative triptych in the Wyvern Collection, the carved narrative begins in the upper left-hand compartment, where the Virgin Mary kneels on the ground crying. Below her, the angel Gabriel reappears to console her and gives her a palm branch (now broken) as a promise of her reunion with Jesus at her own death. Although Mary is comforted by this news, she asks to see the apostles before she leaves the earthly realm. In the next scene, depicted below, a bewildered John the Evangelist, gesticulating with his right hand toward the clouds that have just transported him, appears before Mary and her companions. The Virgin entrusts John with the palm (again broken), asking him to guard her in her last days. The other eleven apostles join John, and for three days they keep watch at Mary’s bedside, praying and singing. On the third day Christ himself appears to accompany his mother into the next life, and he can be seen descending from the clouds at the upper left.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

At this point the narrative splits, depicting events occurring in parallel, synchronically, to Mary’s body and to her soul. In the bottom register of the central panel, the Apostles prepare the Virgin’s body for burial; the hand of God indicates a readied tomb in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. On the right wing, the apostles carry the funeral bier (now lost) while a Jewish priest attempts to overturn it. He does not believe in Christ and is angry that Mary was “the tabernacle and house of he who tormented us (le tabernacle et la maison de celui qui nous tormenta; fol. 264v).” The episode recalls when Oza (Uzzah) was struck dead by God for touching the Ark of the Covenant (2 Kgs 6:1–7; 1 Chron. 13:9–12), a typological precedent that offers a foundation for the theological understanding of the whole narrative.

On the right wing’s middle register, Mary’s corpse is taken up by angels, to the astonishment of the apostles gathered at her sepulchre. In the Transitus Mariae text Christ appears at her tomb and, paraphrasing Pseudo-Augustine, orders the Virgin: “Arise, my beloved and my closest one; you who were not corrupted by any man, will not suffer the death of the flesh in the sepulcher (Lieve sus m’amie et ma proisme. Et tu ki ne receus corruption nule par assamblee doume, ne souferras nule mort de cors en sepulture; fol. 265r).” These words purposefully echo those of Song of Songs 2:13–14, one of the principal antiphons for the feast of the Assumption: “Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come: My dove in the clefts of the rock.” Paradoxically, while the central premise of the Assumption hinges around Mary’s chaste flesh, the event is narrated through the most amorous and sensuously charged words of sacred scripture.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The mystical theology of Maria-Ecclesia, both bride and mother of God, strongly inflects the following scenes as well.

Meanwhile, in the large middle register of the central panel, a heavenly chorus welcomes, separately, the body and soul of Mary. First her body is represented, borne up by two angels in a small mandorla.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The surrounding angels, playing an array of courtly instruments – viol, psaltery, tambourine, and citole – joyously serenade Mary’s arrival in heaven. Above, Christ tenderly accepts the infant soul of his mother in the company of additional angels. While the apostles below are preoccupied with the corporeal remains of the Virgin, her soul and then her body enter heaven.

The joyful reunion between lover and beloved, rather than mother and son, is depicted at the top of the triptych. On the right wing, body reunited with soul, Mary is presented as a beautiful young maiden: she is arrayed as the beloved (m’amie), to be presented momentarily to her bridegroom. The encounter takes place in the cusped upper arch of the central panel. The Virgin is seated with Christ, and an angel swoops from above to place the crown on her head. Candle-bearing angels kneel to either side. As Marie-Louise Thérel, Philippe Verdier, and many others have pointed out, this key scene is not described in any of the source texts: not the Golden Legend, the Pseudo-Augustine sermon, or any version of the Transitus Mariae. The Coronation of the Virgin is, rather, an artistic reimagining of a theological truth garnered from such sacred scriptures as the epithalamium of Psalm 44:9–11: “Myrrh and stacte and cassia perfume thy garments, from the ivory houses: out of which the daughters of kings have delighted thee in thy glory. The queen stood on thy right hand, in gilded clothing; surrounded with variety.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

While the texts that recount the death of the Virgin do not mention ivory among the metaphors used for the Virgin’s flesh, chastity, and her glorified state, the Picard version of the Transitus that the Wyvern triptych follows most closely does describe in detail, on several occasions, the spectacular whiteness of the Virgin’s soul and body. As Mary’s soul is departing, the apostles witness a vision: “The apostles saw her soul was of such great whiteness (si grant blanceur) that none could say how great. For it vanquished all whiteness of snow and of all resplendent metals in brightness and clarity” (fol. 264v). Surpassing white snow and shining more brightly than silver, the Virgin’s corpse proclaims its immaculate state with no mark, no sin. Later, when the three virgins attending to Mary prepare her corpse for burial, the same splendour and blinding brilliance emanated from her body: “Li saint cors de li resplendi de si grant clarte ke on ne la por veoir por la grant clarte ki de li ert” (fol. 264v). Dazzling whiteness was used in the French text as a sign and symbol of the Virgin’s chastity. Might it have been equated to ivory, the resplendent material from which the triptych was carved? The lustrous sheen of elephant dentine here acts as the substrate for the last events in the worldly life of the tabernacle of the Lord. The narrative text and the exquisitely rendered triptych both recall the closing hymn of the Assumption procession at Saint-Denis, the “Candida virginitas”: “O shining-white virginity, beloved pillar of paradise, a garden enclosed, a springtime flowering plot of earth: for whose sake the whole world celebrates with song.”

The Virgin’s chaste flesh was celebrated in private devotional contexts, where triptychs and diptychs displayed minutely detailed narratives of the last moments of Mary’s life, as well as in an ivory group displayed for a major feast day at the greatest abbey church of the French realm. Her chastity enabled the Incarnation and necessitated the Assumption. The quid pro quo logic of the Pseudo-Augustine sermon is grounded in the material theology of Mary’s elevated corporeality. The use of ivory adds additional layers of meaning. The Glorification of the Virgin group paradoxically made present Mary’s embodied virtue on the day her very absence was celebrated, and the shining white panels of ivory narrated the tale of her chaste flesh being saved from corruption.