The famous full-page miniature for Matins in the lavish Psalter-Hours of Yolande de Soissons (New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.729) self-reflexively depicts the user of the manuscript, Yolande or one of her peers, in the midst of her prayers before an open book and a three-dimensional image of the Virgin and Child upon an altar (Figure 5.1).Footnote ¹ Alexa Sand has noted that a text that supplements the Psalter-Hours, the “Fifteen Joys of the Virgin,” begins with a direct verbal instruction to enact the very gestures depicted on this page: “I will kneel down in front of your image fifteen times and honour it in memory of the fifteen joys you had of your true son on Earth.”Footnote ² Regardless of the medium of the Virgin and Child on the altar, both text and image concur about the use of a devotional statue. An image of the Virgin should accompany the reading and recitation of the texts in the manuscript; indeed, the image is the ideal addressee. Devotional text, iconic image, pious user – this tripartite assemblage characterized the experience of private devotions, which were intimate, extra-liturgical religious practices undertaken by increasing numbers of elite laypeople over the course of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.Footnote ³ Documents record manifold “ymages de Nostre Dame” in private, non-institutional ownership, and there are hundreds of extant examples of small-scale religious ivories. Together this evidence indicates that such objects were key protagonists in a network of spiritual ambition.Footnote ⁴

Figure 5.1 Devotee at prayer before the Virgin, in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande de Soissons. Amiens, 1280–99. New York, Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.729, fol. 232v.

Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum, NY

We know the names of very few private owners of Gothic ivories in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Many such works were intended for the domestic sphere, a realm still relatively untouched by the mounting bureaucracy of the later Middle Ages. In some rare instances an object’s provenance from a long-standing aristocratic family was recorded in the nineteenth century. For example, the seated Virgin and Child from the last quarter of the thirteenth century now in the Museo de León is said to have come from the house of the Cea family before it was acquired by the museum, and before the first inventory in 1898 (Figure 5.2).Footnote ⁵ As with so many such cases, no external evidence corroborates this oral provenance. In other cases, a period inscription suggests an original owner. The right leaf of a mid-fourteenth-century Passion diptych, now in Liverpool (Walker Art Gallery, M 8004) (Figure 5.3), has a rare contemporaneous inscription on its reverse: “Dominus Willelmus Lidiat” may indicate the Lydiate family of Lancashire.Footnote ⁶ Several William Lydiates appear in regional landholding records of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.Footnote ⁷ Remarkably, the left leaf has been identified in the Victoria and Albert Museum (161-1896). It was purchased in 1896 from Henry Willett (1823–1905), and given Willett’s collection of English ceramics, he likely acquired the diptych leaf in England.Footnote ⁸ Even with fourteenth-century written evidence and early nineteenth-century provenance, however, the complete ownership history of this Passion diptych is far from clear.Footnote ⁹

Figure 5.2 Virgin and Child from the house of the Cea family, Léon (Casa de los Ceas). French or Spanish, 1275–1300. Ivory, 16 cm. León, Museo de León, inv. 26.

Photo: © Fundacio Institut Amatller Art Hispanic

Figures 5.3 Diptych, perhaps of William of Lydiate Hall (Lancashire). Paris, 1330–40. Ivory, 20.1 × 10.4 cm (each leaf). Right leaf: Liverpool, National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, M 8004;

photo: © National Museums Liverpool. Left leaf: VAM, 161-1896; photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The few pieces of evidence for medieval ownership of extant Gothic ivories point to aristocratic and landowning families of the later Middle Ages but offer little substantive information regarding the use, value, or meaning these works held for their original owners. The textual record for ivories now lost or unidentified – found mostly in financial accounts, inventories, testaments, and donations – offers a much richer resource for reimagining the place of Gothic ivories in private hands. The evidence is skewed toward aristocratic households of France, England, and Flanders, as their records were edited and studied widely in the nineteenth century and constitute the largest corpus of readily available texts.Footnote ¹⁰ Royal household inventories and accounts furnish the most testimony, as discussed in Chapter 1, and this is supplemented by evidence from the next stratum of nobility, the ducal and comital courts, when their inventories survive.Footnote ¹¹ Wills and testaments provide instructions for passing objects from one owner, at his or her death, to the next, whether a private individual or a religious foundation. This body of documentary evidence has rarely been interrogated, but it provides some of the best evidence for the social life of Gothic ivories.Footnote ¹²

Whereas Chapter 4 concentrated on large-scale ivory sculptures and statuette groups used during liturgical rites, this chapter deals with their smaller analogues. The more diminutive scale of these statuettes, about 15–20 cm in height, made them appropriate for private devotional use rather than for large communal gatherings where visibility from afar was crucial. Such small-scale statuettes were generally used either in the chapels of noble houses or in private domestic spaces such as studies or closets (small private chambers).Footnote ¹³ Closely related to small-scale statuettes are the Marian polyptychs or tabernacles, in which a Virgin and Child carved in high relief or fully in the round is enshrined in a micro-architectural framework, with the inner wings adorned with Infancy scenes. The distinction between an “ymage” and an “ymage a tabernacle” is notably fluid in the sources, but the usual term for such objects – tabernacles – unlocks a rich array of typological associations that resonated with Marian theology. This chapter begins with a prosopographic review of the documentary evidence for the ownership of Gothic ivories in the private sphere, analyzing who was likely to own an ivory, what their social networks might have been, and how these networks involved some of the most educated and influential clerics of the day. Understanding these contexts lets us reflect on the devotional attitudes and approaches current in these tight-knit communities and highlights key individuals who were able to parse the nuances of high-level theology for a lay elite.

Gothic Ivories at Court

Texts examined in Chapter 1 helped us understand the economics of the ivory industry, and a number of the account entries cited there can also be adduced to demonstrate that certain individuals sought out and owned Gothic ivories. Key among them is the household expense account for Eleanor of Provence, queen of England, which in 1251–3 recorded the purchase of 3.5 pounds of ivory to make images for the queen.Footnote ¹⁴ Paul Williamson read the queen’s account alongside the Liberate Rolls, records of expenses to the realm and instructions for work to be reimbursed later. In the early 1250s finishing touches were being put on the refurbished queen’s chambers in the palace at Clarendon. After previous instructions for piercing windows and sourcing a marble altar, in the summer of 1250 the sheriff of Wilts (Clarendon Palace is in Wiltshire) received instructions to furnish the chapel of All Saints at Clarendon with, among other things, “an image of Saint Mary with the Child.”Footnote ¹⁵ Might this have been the order that resulted in the purchase of ivory? Similarly, in 1251 a small image of the Virgin Mary (Mariolum) was ordered for the queen’s chapel at Havering, east of London, along with other improvements to her chambers.Footnote ¹⁶ Although no other mention of these Marian images appears in the Liberate Rolls, and their material is not indicated, we can conclude that the 3.5 pounds of ivory were likely purchased for one of these projects for the queen’s private chapels.

Whatever was ordered in 1251–3, it was not Eleanor’s first ivory image. A payment record in 1242 for her chapel in Windsor notes that 14 pennyweight of silver (21.8 g) was disbursed for a tabernacle for an ivory image (“argentum ad quonddam tabernaculum factum ad quondam ymaginam de ebore”), along with two pennyweight of gold (3.1 g) to gild it.Footnote ¹⁷ Fourteen pennyweight of silver is equivalent to a hefty sterling teaspoon, underscoring the small scale of these early ivory statuettes.Footnote ¹⁸ This supplements the Virgin and Child now in Hamburg (Figures 2.24 and 2.25), which can plausibly be identified with a gift made by the prioress of Amesbury to Henry III in 1234, to show that early evidence for ivory statuettes at the English court is strong.

Fifty years later, in the records of the English crown preserved for the year 1299–1300, more Gothic ivories can be recognized. Every year the Keeper of the Wardrobe was required not only to account for new expenditures, gifts, and purchases but also to inventory the significant belongings already owned by the royal household.Footnote ¹⁹ The section titled Jocalia lists plate, jewels, and other precious objects in the royal households, including several ivories, carried over from the tenure of the previous Keeper, whose accounts do not survive.Footnote ²⁰ Among the ivory objects are a casket containing some of the king’s jewels, a chess set, a goblet with an ivory lid, and two combs.Footnote ²¹ Most pertinent are the ivory images recorded in the king’s moveable chapel: “An ivory tabernacle with diverse images in a case (coffino); a small tabernacle (tabernaculum parvum) with images of ivory in a case; an image of the blessed Mary of ivory with a tabernacle of ivory in a case … four small statuettes of blessed Mary (Quatuor mariole beate Marie) with tabernacles of ivory and diverse images.”Footnote ²² King Edward I and his household thus possessed an impressive seven Gothic ivories, recognizable by their distinctive forms. None, however, corresponds exactly to the simple Virgin and Child statuettes or the Virgin and Child with a gilt silver tabernacle described in Queen Eleanor’s accounts. We can conclude that courtly consumption of devotional ivories continued at the English court throughout the thirteenth century, resulting in Edward I’s ownership of at least seven more devotional ivories than his parents.

Another work might be connected to those commissioned for the English royal house in the 1240s and 1250s. Among the items in the tower at Nantes at the death of Jean II, duke of Brittany, in 1305, was “A little image of ivory with a chapel of silver (Une petite image d’ivoir à chapitel d’argient).”Footnote ²³ In 1260 Jean II (1239–1305) had married the youngest surviving daughter of Queen Eleanor and King Henry III, known as Beatrice the English (1242–75). The small ivory image with a silver tabernacle may have been a gift from the royal in-laws, one of the works made for the English palaces. No other trace of this ivory survives, but the connection between the household in Brittany and the English crown helps explain why a castle so far removed from the fashionable ivory-carving centres at Paris and London had a Gothic ivory in its ducal chapel.

The accounts, inventories, and testaments of the county of Flanders also offer rich evidence for the ownership of Gothic ivories across generations (Figure 5.4).Footnote ²⁴ Two sisters ruled Flanders for the majority of the thirteenth century: Jeanne and Marguerite. Their parents, Marie of Champagne and Baldwin VI of Flanders, who was emperor of Constantinople after 1204, died in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. Jeanne inherited the county first, ruling from 1205 until her death in 1244, when the mantle passed to her younger sister, Marguerite.Footnote ²⁵ If Jeanne’s reign was marked by political intrigues of the highest order, notably her conflicts with King Philip Augustus, her former protector, she also cultivated a religious and spiritual life in line with the devout climate of the mid-thirteenth century, including the possession and use of devotional aids. Patricia Stirnemann identified an early thirteenth-century Psalter (BnF, MS lat. 238) (Figure 5.5) as a gift to Jeanne from the house of Champagne on the occasion of her marriage to Ferrand of Portugal in 1212.Footnote ²⁶ Jeanne was a notably strong supporter of the new mendicant orders in her territories of Flanders and Hainaut.Footnote ²⁷ Friars from the Dominican convent in Lille, which she helped found in 1224, served as Jeanne’s confessors and spiritual advisors until her death.Footnote ²⁸ These friars were lured to Lille from the intellectual hothouse of the Paris Dominicans, the convent of Saint-Jacques. They furnish a tangible connection between the material theologies of ivory explicated in previous chapters and the Flemish noblewomen who used Gothic ivories in their private prayers. After a serious illness in 1240, Jeanne retired from public life to the Cistercian convent at Marquett – which she had founded in 1226 with her first husband, Ferrand, and where he and their young daughter were buried – named, appropriately, Notre-Dame de Bon Repos.

Figure 5.4 House of Flanders family tree. Diagram: Matilde Grimaldi

Figure 5.5 Opening of Psalm 11 with the Theophilus legend, in the Psalter of Jeanne of Flanders. Troyes, ca. 1210. BnF, MS lat. 238, fols. 78v–79r.

Photo: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

Jeanne’s testament is relatively modest for a countess of Flanders. She asked simply that those present disperse her belongings according to their conscience (“secundum conscientias suas”), to see to the health of her soul.Footnote ²⁹ The testators included her sister and heir, Marguerite, and several Dominican friars to whom Jeanne was close: Michel de Neuvireuil, prior of the convent at Lille; Jacques de Halles, prior at Valenciennes; Pierre d’Esquermes; and Michel and Henri du Quesnoy, both friars at Lille.Footnote ³⁰ The testament is dated 4 December 1244, and the countess died the next day. Perhaps anticipating that the friars would ignore their own needs in favour of those of others, Jeanne had issued a separate document five days earlier to ensure that the house of her dear confessors would receive a worthy gift in her memory:

Jeanne bequeathed a silver reliquary casket and an ivory Virgin and Child to the Dominicans of Lille, keeping both works with her at Marquette for another week while she lay dying. She retired to Notre-Dame de Bon Repos with these sumptuous devotional aids to help with her preparations for the next life. Even though the donation is mentioned regularly in early modern sources, no medieval document attests further to the presence, use, or impact of the ivory.Footnote ³²

The precocious ownership and donation of an ivory Virgin and Child by the countess of Flanders in 1244 mirrors stylistic evidence from the second quarter of the thirteenth century discussed in Chapter 2: ivory statuettes seem to have been carved first in Flanders and Hainaut. Additionally, a seated Virgin and Child at the Musée Cluny has been attributed to Paris in the 1240s (Cl. 23832) (Figure 5.6).Footnote ³³ We can imagine that Jeanne’s intention in bequeathing her prized ivory statuette and silver reliquaries to her confessors’ institution was to commemorate the hours she spent with her spiritual guides, deepening her faith before those devotional works, in the hope that her memory would be kept alive in the friars’ prayers. I return to these spiritual advisors, their education and background, and what they might have conveyed to Jeanne about the deeper significance of her ivory statuette.

Figure 5.6 Seated Virgin and Child. Paris, 1240s. Ivory, 24 cm. MNMA-Cluny, Cl. 23832.

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

After Jeanne’s death the county of Flanders and Hainaut passed to her sister. Marguerite had two sets of children from two marriages: first to Bouchard d’Avesnes, to whom she was married between 1212 and 1221 or 1223; and then to Guillaume II de Dampierre, between 1223 and 1231 (Figure 5.4).Footnote ³⁴ After considerable hostility among the children, Louis IX arbitrated a settlement in 1246, according to which the Avesnes branch was to inherit Hainaut and the Dampierres would rule Flanders. Guillaume III de Dampierre, the eldest son, died in 1251 (I discuss his widow Beatrice later), so it was Marguerite’s second Dampierre son, Gui I, who inherited the county of Flanders when she abdicated in 1252, establishing the powerful Dampierre line in Flanders for the next fifty years.

Whether Marguerite owned any ivories is not documented in extant sources; she left only relics to the Cistercian abbey of Flines, which she founded in 1234 as a mortuary chapel for the Dampierre house and where she herself was buried in 1280.Footnote ³⁵ The accounts of the comital household under Gui I de Dampierre, however, do record a pair of interesting acquisitions. While the court was in Paris in early 1277, Jeffrey (Jofroy), a member of Gui’s household, purchased a chess set and a chessboard for 52 sous parisi; soon after, still in the Capetian capital, Jeffrey was again reimbursed “Pour tavles, taveliers et pour eschés divore, par Jofroi, xli s.”Footnote ³⁶ During the court’s sojourn in Paris, an agent of the count purchased goods that evidently were available only there: chessboards, two sets of chess pieces, and what might be identified as a set of ivory writing tablets (tavles) and a diptych (taveliers). In 1294 another ivory was purchased, this one for Gui de Dampierre’s second wife, Isabelle of Luxemburg: 20 sous were paid for a “tabliaus d’ivoire,” either writing tablets or a diptych.Footnote ³⁷ These tabliaus were paid for as part of a larger account due to one Mathieu d’Arras (Mahiu d’Arras), a major buyer for the countess’s household described a year earlier as Count Gui’s goldsmith from Paris (“a Mahiu d’Arras, sen orfèvre de Paris”).Footnote ³⁸ This evidence underscores that by the second half of the thirteenth century Paris was the centre of the trade in Gothic ivories, and courtiers from across western Europe bought products typical of the Capetian capital while sojourning there.Footnote ³⁹

An inventory prepared after the death of Gui I de Dampierre in 1305 listed the personal belongings of the count currently kept in the safekeeping (warde) of two servants, Enlart and Hugenin the barber.Footnote ⁴⁰ All of the items previously purchased are included: an ivory and ebony chessboard with two sets of chess pieces (“eskierquer d’ivoire et d’ebenus a membre d’argent, et les eskiés doubles”) is directly followed by “II tavelliers a members d’argent et les tavels” without a mention of material. As the whole inventory is grouped according to medium, these items can almost certainly be identified with the ivory chess set, tavels (writing tablets), and tavelliers (a diptych, here described as joined by silver hinges) Jeffrey purchased in Paris twenty-eight years before. There is, in addition, what seems to be another ivory diptych: “Item, 1 tablets of ivory with images inside (I tavletes d’ivoire a ymaignes dedens), which monsieur wishes that his granddaughter of Châteauvillain, of Flines (se nieche de Chastiauvilain, de Felines), to have.”Footnote ⁴¹ These tablets of ivory with images inside might possibly be identified with the “tabliaus” purchased for Isabelle in 1294, who predeceased her husband by seven years. The tavletes are one of only two items willed to a loved one in Gui’s now lost testament; the other is a gold brooch given to Gui’s second-oldest son, Guillaume de Crèvecoeur (d. 1311).

The intended recipient of the ivory tavletes – almost certainly a diptych– has not previously been identified. The second marriage of Gui I de Dampierre’s daughter, Marie, was to Simon II, lord of Châteauvillain (d. 1305). Although the history books document only their sons, a Marguerite of Châteauvillain is recorded as abbess of Flines (r. 1304–9), the Dampierre family’s mortuary chapel.Footnote ⁴² That Countess Marguerite of Flanders’s descendants were actively involved in the abbey she founded is unsurprising. In bequeathing his ivory tavletes to Marguerite, Gui I remembered in his will his Châteauvillain granddaughter, abbess of the foundation where he would be buried. Bequeathing his ivory diptych to Marguerite ensured that she would keep her grandfather in mind during her daily prayers.

One last inventory entry underscores the intergenerational taste for ivories in England and Flanders. An inventory of the gold and silver objects belonging to Jeanne of Bretagne, lady of Cassel, made around 1331 includes an ivory statuette (“une ymaige qui est divoire”) on a silver base (“le tabler dargent”) that monseigneur had given her.Footnote ⁴³ Jeanne of Bretagne was the granddaughter of Jean II of Brittany and Beatrice the English, the couple mentioned earlier with the inventory of Nantes; Jeanne had married Robert, lord of Cassel, a grandson of Gui I de Dampierre and first cousin of Abbess Marguerite of Flines.Footnote ⁴⁴ Both spouses thus came from households rich in ivory devotional images. The donors of the majority of the items in this inventory are noted, and monseigneur, her husband, gave Jeanne this ivory image as well as one of her crowns and a tiara. We do not know whether the ivory on the silver base was purchased new by Robert of Cassel for his wife or was inherited, but it is clear that a taste for Gothic ivories was passed from generation to generation, signalling their participation in a refined, international court culture. Even though chains of ownership are difficult to track, it seems likely that ivories functioned as heirloom objects in much the same way as personal devotional books.

The extant records of England and Flanders chart generations of sophisticated courtly patrons buying, using, gifting, and venerating Gothic ivories. Frustratingly, not a single item is identifiable today. This makes it all the more remarkable that an individual who married into the house of Flanders, Beatrice of Brabant, has been almost continuously associated with an ivory statuette revered today in Kortrijk (Courtrai) as Our Lady of Groeninge (Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Groeninge) (Figure 5.7). According to local tradition, Beatrice gave the ivory statuette to the Cistercian convent at Groeninge, outside Kortrijk, upon her death in 1288. Delving into the history of both the ivory and Beatrice of Brabant’s life allows us to glimpse a grain of truth behind the legends.

Figure 5.7 Our Lady of Groeninge (Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Groeninge). Paris, ca. 1260. Ivory, approx. 18.5 cm. Kortrijk, Jesuit church of Saint Michael.

Photo: © KIK-IRPA, Brussels

Our Lady of Groeninge and Beatrice of Brabant

Only one extant Gothic ivory statuette can be firmly associated with its original private owner. Tradition holds that Our Lady of Groeninge was donated to the convent by one of its avid early supporters. Beatrice of Brabant, the chatelaine of Kortrijk, was part of the house of Flanders through her second marriage to Gui I’s elder brother, Guillaume III de Dampierre, who died in a jousting tournament as a young man. During a long widowhood spent in Kortrijk, Beatrice cultivated an artistic and devotional life that followed the customs and tastes of her mother-in-law, the countess Marguerite of Flanders, to whom she remained close. Beatrice’s alleged ownership and donation of an ivory statuette can best be understood in this context, even though it is not supported by documentary evidence.

The ivory statuette was given to the Jesuit church of Saint Michael in Kortrijk after the French Revolution and the dissolution of the convent of Groeninge. The ivory stands only about 18 cm high on an approximately rectangular base.Footnote ⁴⁵ Its diminutive size signals that it was made for private use rather than for a public liturgical setting. The Christ Child sits in the crook of the Virgin’s left arm and embraces his mother tenderly, an intimate gesture reinforced by the direct gaze between Mother and Child. In his left hand Christ holds a sphere (Figure 5.8). The Virgin’s right hand doubtless originally held a rose, but the whole arm was altered and its present form is a nineteenth-century restoration.Footnote ⁴⁶ Today Mary and Jesus wear bejewelled gold crowns – gifts in 1952 to mark the 650th anniversary of the Battle of the Golden Spurs, an important flashpoint in Flemish nationalismFootnote ⁴⁷ – but the Virgin’s head was not originally intended to have a crown.Footnote ⁴⁸ Her red lips and deep blue irises recall the delicate polychromy of the contemporary Virgin from the Sainte-Chapelle.Footnote ⁴⁹ Mary’s veil is a single piece of cloth folded in half, with the crease framing her face and falling gently over neatly ordered hair. She wears a cotte and mantle, and the former was gilded extensively at some point with an overall pattern. The Christ Child’s tunic was covered in gilt fleur-de-lys, one of which is still discernible under his right arm.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Virgin’s mantle was more discreetly decorated: its blue underside accentuated the elegant play of the folds and an ornate gilded border ran along the hem.Footnote ⁵¹ The double cloak strings preserve remains of red polychromy and, like the Virgin from the Saint-Denis group (Figure 4.2), a real metalwork brooch originally adorned her neckline.Footnote ⁵² The mantle is pulled tight around the Virgin’s right forearm (Figure 5.8), making the contour of her elbow protrude significantly from her silhouette as the tension of this arrangement causes the material to fall in three nesting polygonal folds, an arrangement popular in Parisian works of the period from 1250 to 1275.Footnote ⁵³

Figures 5.8 Detail of Our Lady of Groeninge (Figure 5.7).

Photo: author

The striking similarity between the statuette at Kortrijk and the one from Saint-Denis strongly argues that the two works were carved by the same master ymagier in the 1260s.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet minor variations prove that the small-scale work was not a slavish copy: the fold arrangements, the Virgin’s expression, the difference in courtly accessories all indicate an artist expressing creativity through variety, not rote emulation of a well-known exemplar. We can thereby conclude that one carver was responsible for at least two commissions destined for clients at the highest level. A third statuette, acquired from the Timbal Collection by the Louvre in 1882 (OA 2583) (Figure 5.9), and a seated Virgin and Child at the Cloisters discussed later in this chapter can also be ascribed to the same skilled carver.Footnote ⁵⁵ If Beatrice of Brabant did originally own Our Lady of Groeninge, this Parisian ivory carver had ties to several of the most exalted aristocratic households of the day. This recalls Jehan le Scelleur’s aristocratic clientele, discussed in Chapter 1, and that of the carver of the Saint-Sulpice triptych treated in Chapter 6.

Figure 5.9 Virgin and Child from the Timbal Collection. Paris, ca. 1260. Ivory, 18.6 cm (with original ivory base). Louvre, OA 2583.

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

The earliest documents that testify to the cult of Our Lady of Groeninge date to the seventeenth century, however, and many aspects of its story are fabrications of that period’s nascent Flemish nationalism.Footnote ⁵⁶ The origin myth records the miraculous appearance of the statuette and its alleged discovery by the pope in the woods outside Rome, alerted to its presence by angelic song.Footnote ⁵⁷ The pope then gave the statuette to Beatrice, in Rome on pilgrimage, and she in turn gave it to the convent of Groeninge upon her return to Flanders. In addition to performing such thaumaturgic miracles as reviving sick infants and expelling maddening spirits, Our Lady of Groeninge appeared in statuette form to support the Flemish against the French. At the decisive Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302, the Virgin was said to have appeared to a fictional King Sigis of Majorca who fought with the French, and predicted his death and Flemish victory.Footnote ⁵⁸ The tale took shape in the seventeenth century, during the Wars of Religion and in a period of Catholic Hapsburg rule in the Low Countries, because it helped articulate a specifically Flemish-Catholic identity distinct from that of Flemish Protestants and French Catholics. The statue’s mythic Roman origin and its role as a palladium in an earlier war against the French tied this Flemish emblem to the Roman Catholic Church.

If the Roman origin of the statuette can no longer be accepted, was Beatrice of Brabant’s donation of the ivory image to the convent also a convenient fiction fabricated for seventeenth-century political ends? This mistress of Kortrijk was a fascinating figure, active in both the political and cultural spheres in the second half of the thirteenth century. An impressive extant textual record includes charters signed in her name, household accounts, and many letters.Footnote ⁵⁹ After her second husband died when she was only twenty-six, Beatrice lived as a widow for thirty-seven years.Footnote ⁶⁰ She remained close to the Dampierres, especially her mother-in-law, who established her as chatelaine of her dowry town, Kortrijk, safeguarded her rights, and included her at court. Although Beatrice did not have children of her own, she raised her niece and nephew, Blanche and Robert II of Artois, the children of her sister Mathilde of Brabant and Robert I Artois (1216–50), a younger brother of Louis IX.Footnote ⁶¹ Throughout her life Beatrice remained close to Robert II’s children as well, including Mahaut of Artois; both Robert and Mahaut were cited in Chapter 1 as owners of Gothic ivories. Another niece, Marie of Brabant (1260–1321), daughter of Beatrice’s brother Duke Henry III of Brabant, married the French king Philippe le Hardi in 1274, and Beatrice is thought to have attended Marie’s coronation in 1275 at the Sainte-Chapelle, one of her many trips to the Capetian capital.Footnote ⁶²

Beatrice of Brabant definitely patronized the convent at Groeninge, as a number of cartularies delineate her support.Footnote ⁶³ Notably, in 1259 she helped the sisters move to a safer location just outside the walls of Kortrijk, finding appropriate land and contributing to construction costs.Footnote ⁶⁴ By 1284 Beatrice had built a small house (huge or huche) with a chapel on the convent’s grounds, where she lived until her death in 1288.Footnote ⁶⁵ Her twentieth-century biographer noted that it was natural for the sisters, in later centuries, to attribute all early relics to their great thirteenth-century patron.Footnote ⁶⁶ Can we be certain that Beatrice gave the abbey an ivory statuette? As we have seen, the Flemish nobility did donate ivory statuettes to religious foundations. An inventory of Beatrice’s huge made around the time of her death enumerates her relics, jewels, gold, and silver plate, but it fails to mention any item of ivory.Footnote ⁶⁷

The historical record does not prove that Beatrice of Brabant gave an ivory statuette to the Cistercian sisters of Groeninge. Yet I have shown earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 1 that many of Beatrice’s immediate family and members of her close-knit social milieu did own Gothic ivories: Jeanne of Flanders, Gui I of Dampierre, Isabelle of Luxemburg, Robert II of Artois, Mahaut of Artois, and Beatrice’s niece Marie of Brabant, queen of France. The documentary record makes clear that these were important objects in their owners’ spiritual lives, and sometimes they were bequeathed to foundations that were relevant to them personally. On the whole, it seems likely that, near the end of her long life, Beatrice bequeathed an ivory carved in the 1260s to the community that nursed her body and soul.

Furthermore, the 1322 inventory of the castle at Kortrijk made after the death of Robert III, Lion of Flanders supports this conclusion. Robert III became count after his father, Gui I of Dampierre, passed away in 1305, but he had inherited the city of Kortrijk, with its hôtel, upon the death of his aunt Beatrice in 1288.Footnote ⁶⁸ The executors began with the chapel, where there were a number of Gothic ivories: “Item, a tabliel of ivory, closed with two doors, where there is a crucifix, Notre-Dame, and Saint John, of elevated work (d’euvre eslevée). Item, two caskets of ivory, full of holy things (saintewaires, i.e., relics) … Item, a tablel of ivory, with images.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The richly arrayed chapel at Beatrice’s former residence was filled with Gothic ivories. Beside the tablel, perhaps a retable, and two ivory caskets, there was a closing tabliel, likely a triptych with a central scene of a Crucifixion flanked by Mary and John “d’euvre eslevée.” This descriptor most likely indicates work in high relief, although it could refer to a particularly refined style.Footnote ⁷⁰ A central panel of a triptych or polyptych now in the Vatican Museums (inv. 64618) (Figure 5.10) shows the precise iconography described in the Kortrijk inventory, and the figures are almost completely undercut from a panel an astonishing 3.65 cm deep.Footnote ⁷¹ Although the Vatican panel has no provenance before the eighteenth century, when it was recorded in the papal collections, Paola Giusti has persuasively argued that it was produced in northern France or Flanders in the mid-thirteenth century.Footnote ⁷² It therefore helps us imagine the tabliel in the chapel at Kortrijk.

Figure 5.10 Central panel of a polyptych or triptych with the Crucifixion. Northern France, 1250–60. Ivory, 16.5 × 11.7 × 3.65 cm (with modern wood restoration). Vatican City, Musei Vaticani, inv. 64618.

Photo: author

Many other Gothic ivories were present in Robert III’s residence, including an ebony and ivory chess set and “un cornet d’ivoire,” an ivory hunting horn.Footnote ⁷³ A small diptych (“un petit tabliel d’ivoire a deus foilles tout unit”),Footnote ⁷⁴ two small reliquary pyxes, and two small images of the Virgin and Child are described in sections that list belts and small items attached to them, such as a number of small phylacteries and portable reliquaries.Footnote ⁷⁵ An ivory hanap and an ivory toiletry set are also listed.Footnote ⁷⁶ Therefore, in 1322 the courtly household at Kortrijk possessed a wide range of Gothic ivories, secular and sacred, some of which were surely recent purchases while others were likely inherited from Robert’s aunt. Again, this evidence does not prove that Beatrice of Brabant owned Our Lady of Groeninge and donated it to the abbey, but it does increase the likelihood that the statuette was originally in such a collection of courtly objects. Tracing Beatrice’s familial and patronage networks, which encompassed the closely knit families of Brabant, Flanders, Artois, and France, helps paint a picture that directly opposes the Flemish nationalist interpretation that has dominated the ivory’s history. Twenty years after the Battle of the Golden Spurs, the count of Flanders had no qualms about surrounding himself with lavish works from French workshops, including a dozen Gothic ivories.

Examining the textual record has enabled us to identify a privileged segment of the population that owned Gothic ivories in the second half of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, one that cherished diminutive ivory statuettes as objects of devotion. Assessing what role these objects played in the evolving practices of private prayer in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is more difficult, however. Wills and testaments intimate how closely Gothic ivories were linked to the inner lives of prominent individuals: Jeanne of Flanders wished to keep her ivory Virgin and Child with her until her death, for example, and Gui I of Dampierre left a diptych to his granddaughter. The preponderance of small-scale religious ivories in the private sphere, in household chapels and among secular belongings, implies a connection with the often-discussed phenomenon of increasing lay devotion at precisely the same time. Networks of courtly kinship perpetuated a shared appreciation of ivories, and the spiritual ambitions of these close-knit communities were guided by an equally intimate group of friars who translated, formally or informally, not only their erudition but also their views on spiritual practice.

Devotional Dialogues, Spiritual Communities

Beatrice of Brabant and Jeanne of Flanders, as well as Marguerite of Flanders and another of her daughters-in-law, Mahaut of Béthune (first wife of Gui I de Dampierre), had more in common than the possession of sumptuous devotional goods. They also shared a small elite group of spiritual advisors, many from the Dominican convent at Lille, founded in 1224.Footnote ⁷⁷ Michel de Neuvireuil (ca. 1200–1270/1), active at the court of Flanders, was named in the will of Jeanne and was a prized confidant and arbitrator of Marguerite’s.Footnote ⁷⁸ Prior of the Lille Dominicans from about 1244 until his death, Michel, like many early mendicants, was involved not only in scholarly debates but also in the social and political worlds of the court. He would have been able to convey the nuances of scriptural exegesis to aristocratic owners and users of ivory Virgin and Child statuettes, thus narrowing the distance between Latin texts and vernacular devotional contexts.

Born to an aristocratic mother and a burgher father, Michel de Neuvireuil seems to have studied at the Parisian convent of Saint-Jacques in the late 1220s and early 1230s.Footnote ⁷⁹ This was contemporaneous with the regency of Eudes de Châteauroux and also the period when Hugh of Saint-Cher (ca. 1195–1263) was regent master in theology at Saint-Jacques (1230–6).Footnote ⁸⁰ Hugh directed ambitious projects to rationalize variants of the biblical text, compile a concordance of words in the Bible, and provide a definitive commentary on sacred scripture, the Postillae.Footnote ⁸¹ In Chapter 3 a passage from Hugh’s Postilla on the ivory domus of Psalm 44 synthesized various traditions on ivory’s coldness and chasteness and wove them together with a Neoplatonic allegory for the refinement of the martyrs’ chaste flesh. The text melded various exegetical, philosophical, and scientific traditions, and Michel must have been aware of this range of interpretations and likely shared them with the women for whose souls he cared.

Evidence for Michel de Neuvireuil’s involvement in Hugh of Saint-Cher’s ambitious textual projects is found in the colophon of a five-volume Parisian Bible (Lille, Bibliothèque municipale, MSS 835–8), which states: “In ad 1264 this Bible was written by Guillaume de Sens and diligently corrected, according to the books of the Hebrews and the ancients, by Friar Michel of Neuvirelle, then prior of the Dominicans of Lille and chaplain of the lord pope, and very learned in Scripture.”Footnote ⁸² Guillaume of Sens was a Parisian libraire who worked closely with the Dominican house of Saint-Jacques on many scholarly publishing projects, including the early dissemination of the texts of Thomas Aquinas.Footnote ⁸³ Michel, “expertissimo in biblia,” is described as carefully correcting the text after older Latin exemplars and against Hebrew scripture, just the types of tasks mobilized by Hugh of Saint-Cher at Saint-Jacques. Michel of was undoubtedly one of the Hebrew experts who contributed to the massive Dominican project during his time in Paris. As a scriptural expert, Michel was surely aware of the various literal phrasings of the biblical passages and had also read and synthetized the volumes of commentary written about biblical passages that circulated among the highly literate Dominican houses at that time. Like Eudes de Châteauroux in Chapter 3, Michel must have been familiar with the full range of learned readings I have brought to bear on Gothic ivories, as well as others that have not survived.

Michel of Neuvireuil and Hugh of Saint-Cher appear to have remained close throughout their long lives. Hugh’s stratospheric career made him the first Dominican cardinal in 1244, papal legate to Germany (1251–3), and finally apostolic penitentiary (1256–63). He died in Orvieto at the court of the French pope Urban IV (Jacques Pantaléon, r. 1261–4). In 1262 Michel was sent to Viterbo on behalf of Marguerite of Flanders to help resolve a disagreement about the position of chancellor of Flanders; his former teacher was one of two judges for the case. This occasion seems to have spurred Hugh to nominate Michel for an honorary appointment to the papal curia.

This short biographical sketch helps us imagine a devotional discourse that might have taken place between Michel of Neuvireuil and Jeanne of Flanders, for Jeanne’s donation of her ivory Virgin and Child to Michel’s house in Lille demonstrates the importance of the ivory in their shared spiritual journey. Jeanne’s ivory might have spurred a dialogue that drew specifically from Hugh of Saint-Cher’s Postilla on Psalm 44 or more generally from the triangulation of ivory, Psalter, and Michel’s erudition.Footnote ⁸⁴ The prologue to Hugh’s commentary outlines the layers of meaning in Psalm 44, indicating that it was sung to praise Christ, the victor of all – a victory for which Christ “assumed arms in his tabernacle, that is, in the uterus of the Blessed Virgin (sumptas armis in tabernaculo suo, id est, in utero Beatae Virginis).”Footnote ⁸⁵ The Psalmist calls this song an epithalamium, a song for the bridal chamber (thalmos), understood by Christian exegetes as the Virgin’s womb, seat of the mystery of the incarnation. The content of the Psalm (materia) is the nuptials between Christ and the Church, between Sponsus and Sponsa, between king and people.Footnote ⁸⁶ The intention (intentio) of Psalm 44 is to move listeners in praise of Christ and the Church. Hugh’s introduction thus included rich pathways that Michel might pursue when discussing this text with his spiritual charges, many of them also undertaken in this book: Christ hewn from the chaste material of Mary’s womb, the Virgin’s womb as bridal chamber; and the sensuous Song of Songs as a prefiguration of the relationship between Christ and Ecclesia.

The indomitable Marie of Champagne, the grandmother of Jeanne of Flanders who gifted Jeanne her Psalter (Figure 5.5), is known to have discussed Psalm 44 with one of her own spiritual advisors, Adam of Perseigne (ca. 1145–1221).Footnote ⁸⁷ In the late twelfth century, he penned an Old French verse paraphrase of the Psalm for her edification.Footnote ⁸⁸ Adam casts the wedding hymn as a tale of David having been admitted to the heavenly court to witness the wedding of the king and queen of heaven. The poem is pitched to appeal to the literate and pious court of Champagne. In the stanzas treating Psalm 44:9–10, “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,” Adam has little to say about the materiality of ivory. Yet materiality plays a major role in his analysis of the significance of the exotic aromatics, outlining a hermeneutical strategy appropriate for the court. Myrrh, which burns brightly, signifies and demonstrates the death that Christ the king suffered (lines 1223–5); balsams demonstrate the unction of the holy resurrection, the day the king is invested, blessed, and embalmed (1237–40). Most redolent of the material hermeneutics we have examined for ivory is Adam’s reading of the sweet cassia bark:

Weaving together scientific and theological strands, Adam of Perseigne walked Marie of Champagne through an iconology of materials. Although Adam did not treat the ivory houses with the same exegetical approach – perhaps because ivory was not yet a material familiar at court – Michel of Neuvireuil might well have pursued such a reading with Jeanne two generations later, drawing on his formation at the University of Paris. The modes of discourse between countess and advisor permit us to imagine how elite learning was translated into cultured vernacular contexts.

Tabernacles and the Rhetoric of Enshrinement

When the powerful chamberlain of France Raoul de Clermont-Nesle (1245–1302) died at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, his multiple residences were richly arrayed with Gothic ivories.Footnote ⁸⁹ Imbricated in the courts of three generations of Capetian kings, Raoul demonstrably shared the refined aesthetic and devotional tastes of other peers of the realm. He was especially intimate with the cadre assembled around the vivacious young Queen Marie of Brabant, including Robert II of Artois and, for a time, Gui I of Dampierre.Footnote ⁹⁰ Raoul owned the same ivory devotional objects that his friends also prized, including retables, large and small statuettes, and images with tabernacles. Looking again at the posthumous inventory already excerpted in Chapter 3 forces us to confront the ambiguity of the term tabernacle, used by the early fourteenth-century redactors. I argue that this ambiguity derives from the theological appropriateness of associating the Virgin with a tabernacle; the term’s polysemy encompasses a theological conception of enshrinement as well as specific object types.

At Raoul’s residence in Beaulieu-les-Fontaines (Picardy) was an image of ivory with a wooden tabernacle (“une ymage d’yvoire a j tabernacle de balène”), valued at 30 sous.Footnote ⁹¹ Chapter 3 cited four other ivories at Raoul’s château in Fresnes, including a retable, a small closing image, a diptych, and “une ymage d’yvoire, senz tabernacle,” meaning an ivory statuette without a micro-architectural frame. The terse original sources are difficult to parse. Even in a single document, tabernacle seems to indicate two things: first, an openwork micro-architectural frame for an ivory statuette, potentially made of any number of materials including gilt wood, gilt copper, and gilt silver (like those discussed in Chapter 4); and second, a folding polyptych in which ivory statuettes and reliefs are carved or mounted (like that at Trani) (Figure 1.6). It is this latter type of multimedia polyptych-tabernacle that seems to be described at Beaulieu-les-Fontaines. Similarly, tabernacles in gilt copper, such as a polyptych now in Berlin (Kunstgewerbemuseum, 1917,72) (Figure 5.11), were also used to house and enshrine small-scale statuettes (in ivory and other materials), and these replicate both the repertoire and disposition of Infancy scenes on ivory polyptychs.Footnote ⁹²

Figure 5.11 Polyptych with Infancy scenes (and a plaster cast of the Tournai Virgin, Figure 6.33). Paris or Tournai (?), ca. 1280 (with nineteenth-century additions). Gilt copper, 81 × 46 cm (open, with base and towers). Berlin, Kunstgewerbemuseum, 1917,72.

Photo: author

Marian tabernacles carved entirely of ivory are among the most popular devotional objects produced by Parisian ivory workshops in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (Figure 5.12), but their homogeneity and repetitiveness have stymied their analysis. The language of inventories, however, identifies features appreciated by contemporary observers, notably the ability to close (cloans) and the juxtaposition of the principal figures with narrative images. Moreover, the insistent repetition of the word tabernacle in inventories helps unlock why these particular Marian ivories were considered rich and engaging devotional objects.

Figure 5.12 Marian tabernacle with scenes from the life of Christ. Paris, 1295–1305. Ivory (with modern hinges), 38.9 × 28.5 cm (open with base). VAM, 4686-1858.

Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

In the inventory of the objects that Pope Boniface VIII bequeathed to the cathedral of his home town of Anagni, a Marian polyptych is described with the first two characteristics: “a certain ivory image of the blessed Virgin with her son in her arms, with tablets with which it is closed (cum tabulis quibus clauditur) with many images carved into them (pluribus ymaginibus ipsis tabulis intrinsecus).”Footnote ⁹³ Moveable wings and narrative scenes stood out as distinguishing characteristics for the redactor at Anagni. An object that can be closed is especially appropriate for an itinerant household. Aristocratic courts, secular and sacred alike, regularly circulated among their territories for safety, to maintain feudal ties, to strengthen kinship relations, and for pleasure.Footnote ⁹⁴ All of the individuals featured in this chapter spent the majority of their lives moving from place to place, from one château, palace, or residence to the next. The ability to close an item and pack it for safe travel was clearly an important consideration, one that is echoed in the predominance of leather cases for Gothic ivories noted in the inventories (e.g., Figure 1.8).Footnote ⁹⁵

If closing a polyptych was important, so too was its opposite: the ritualized opening of a devotional object establishes a threshold with the everyday.Footnote ⁹⁶ Opening the doors of a polyptych (or a diptych or triptych, for that matter) is an act of revelation, unveiling a holy vision. When a devotee controls such a revelation in a private setting, free from the institutional regulations placed on public altarpieces, he or she interacts with the images through an appropriately prepared mind and a receptive soul. Together with myriad other devotional objects developed in the thirteenth century, Gothic ivory polyptychs responded to the dialectic between seen and unseen in the private sphere while properly safeguarding the sacred images.

The Anagni redactors noted that the wings of the tabernacle were carved with many images (“pluribus ymaginibus”). The increased narrative potential furnished by the wings offers a historical gloss on the iconic presence of the Virgin and Child within. I noted the tension between devotional image and narrative when discussing the Victoria and Albert Museum triptych in Chapter 3 (Figure 3.13). Framing the central image with scenes from the infancy of Christ magnifies the devotional potential for the viewer, just as in vita icons.Footnote ⁹⁷ When a central hieratic image is surrounded by smaller scenes from that individual’s life, the juxtaposition between icon and narrative instigates a viewer’s internal critique of the role of representation. As Paroma Chatterjee wrote, “The vita image, thus, conflates two different kinds of spectatorship, bringing to the fore its potential for the critical appraisal of different regimes of visuality and the salient structures of representation.”Footnote ⁹⁸ While Chatterjee focused on two-dimensional painting, the enmeshing of icon and narrative in a three-dimensional object – such as an Infancy tabernacle – introduces a similar tension and prompts reflection on the role of the statuette in personal devotional practice.

Whereas the Anagni inventory describes the Marian polyptych as having closing wings carved with narrative scenes, an inventory of the papal collection compiled in 1295 uses a specific term to define a similar object. A statuette of the Virgin holding the Christ child is seated in a certain podium or tabernacle (“sedentis in quodam podio sive tabernaculo”).Footnote ⁹⁹ Here again the word tabernaculum is used to describe a micro-architectural structure or niche surrounding a central Virgin and Child. Inventories from England, France, and Flanders, from the mid-thirteenth century into the fourteenth, all use this same word to describe certain Gothic ivories. In addition to the many instances already cited, we may add several more. William Brewer, bishop of Exeter 1224–44, donated a tabernacle of ivory (“tabernaculum eburneum”) with images of the blessed Mary and other figures to his cathedral.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The 1336 inventory of Genoese-born Cardinal Luca Fieschi (r. 1300–1336) includes “unum thabernaculum de ebore clausum cum ymaginibus intu de ebore,” merging both the salient formal features (ability to close and multiple images) with the term tabernaculum.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Finally, the 1343 inventory of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris noted an ivory image of Mary in a tabernacle also made of ivory (“tabernaculo eburneo”), donated in the will of Frederic of Piacenza, a canon of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.Footnote ¹⁰²

The term tabernaculum was replete with typological references and far from merely descriptive. I argue that in using this term, the inventory redactors were recognizing an important typology at the heart of this type of Gothic ivory. In classical Latin tabernaculum was a synonym for tentorius, tent, and it was used in Jerome’s Vulgate translation of the Bible to describe the many tents used by the desert peoples of the Old Testament and also the one described in Exodus 25 and 26, the structure made to protect the Ark of the Covenant that contained the Tablets of the Law.Footnote ¹⁰³ The tabernacle of Exodus is a tent-like structure of cloth and setim (acacia) wood, and the text describes the fine linens of violet, purple, and scarlet, twice-dyed and embroidered, and how all was arranged into a two-room structure. To anyone steeped in biblical learning, the term tabernaculum of the inventories signalled the three archetypal Old Testament forms contained within it: Tabernacle, Ark of the Covenant, and Tablets of the Law. When the term is used to refer to the exterior micro-architectural forms of ivories, the whole polyptych can be understood as translating the Old Testament objects of faith into contemporary Christian terms. The exterior architectural element of the polyptych – its tabernacle – make a visual argument for the importance of the contents, equating what is contained with the sacred objects of the Tabernacle in Exodus.

As embodiments of God’s word, the Tablets of the Law, the Ark, and the Tabernacle furnished visual types for generations of theologians searching to mediate visible manifestations of the divine.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The threefold, nesting arrangement is key, as the actual Christian forms substituted for the Judaic elements were fluid and adaptable. I have argued elsewhere that this tripartite schema is the ruling metaphor to explain the presence of architectural forms on Gothic ivories, especially tabernacles.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the polyptych in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (50.304) (Figure 5.13), the elaborate architectural frame composed of gables, cusped arches, and nail-head crockets is meant to evoke the Tabernacle that sheltered the Ark of the Covenant.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Standing on its original ivory-faced base with four claw-shaped feet, the central compartment depicts a standing Virgin and Child flanked by two angels in high relief; the wings are carved with scenes of the Infancy of Christ. What we see represented in the tabernacle in place of the Ark is not an inanimate container, however, but the carnal vessel who bore God. The Toledo polyptych can be read as a contemporary Gothic tabernacle sheltering the corporeal Ark who embodied the new covenant, a Virgin cradling the incarnated Word. This threefold schema based on Old Testament types also explains other iconographic elements standard in ivory polyptychs. The two angels who flank the Virgin correspond to the cherubim on either side of the Ark, and the crowning of the Virgin by the angel above – a representation of the Coronation of the Virgin – evokes the golden crown atop the Ark described in Exodus 25:11. Thus the standard Gothic iconography of the Glorification of the Virgin, often simplistically understood as an anachronistic conflation of the Virgin and Child with her post-Assumption coronation, is a fully developed visual typology.

Figure 5.13 Glorification of the Virgin polyptych with Infancy scenes. Paris, 1280s. Ivory (with original base), 29.4 × 26.7 cm (open with base). Toledo Museum of Art, 50.304.

Photo: courtesy of museum

The Virgin was frequently described in exegetical literature as the Ark of the Covenant, an interpretation derived from typological parallels established in the Gospel of Luke.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The figure of Mary as Ark was widely used in sermon literature in thirteenth-century France. For example, Guillaume of Auvergne, bishop of Paris from 1228 to 1249, underscored in his second sermon on the Assumption that Mary is to be praised (on that feast day and in general) because David brought the Ark into Jerusalem with jubilation (2 Kgs 6). Mary is “The Ark in which God placed his treasure, where the price of our redemption was placed, to which the Church turns in its needs, that is the Blessed Virgin.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Such a statement reveals the slippage of the terms tabernacle and Ark. Although strictly speaking the Tabernacle contained the Ark, which in turn contained the Law, exegetes tended to conflate the terms and employ them both as Marian metaphors, types for the vessel that contained Christ.

References to Mary as tabernacle abound in the liturgies of the high feasts. Thus, the verse “Elegit eam deus et preelegit eam (God chose her and preferred her)” generates the response “Et habitare eam facit in tabernaculo suo (And he dwelt within her, in his tabernacle), “which echoed dozens of times in public veneration of the Virgin and, as we will see, in private veneration as well. The French cleric William Durandus, glossing the closely related text “Et qui creavit me requievit in tabernaculo” (Eccles. 24:12), which was often part of the celebration of the vigil of the Assumption, linked the tabernacle explicitly to the Marian metaphors traced in this book:

Writing in Rome at the end of the thirteenth century, Durandus succinctly wove together the various typologies that explicate the role of the Virgin in salvation: the Incarnation, Assumption, and Glorification are indelibly linked through the Virgin’s role as tabernacle, as Theotokos. The figure of the tabernacle, the motif of enshrinement, is part and parcel of the iconography of the Marian polyptychs, and ivory is explicitly the material that best communicates this theological truth.

Translation of Liturgy: Ivory and the Hours

The rising spiritual ambitions of the laity in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries led to new forms of devotional art.Footnote ¹¹⁰ To build religious capital, laypeople and their spiritual directors looked to religious professionals for appropriate models of piety. The path from the lifeways of regular clergy, shaped profoundly by the Opus Dei – the systematic chanting of the liturgy eight times each day – to the novel forms of prayer introduced to laypeople over the course of the long thirteenth century is well charted.Footnote ¹¹¹ Established structures of monastic prayer were adapted for the laity, and Gothic ivories took the same journey from choir to aristocratic chamber. Large ivory statuettes were employed during Marian liturgies, not only for the Assumption (as explored in Chapter 4) but also for all feasts that celebrate the Virgin’s chastity, such as the Birth of the Virgin, the Nativity, and the Purification. This made small-scale ivories a natural accompaniment to daily prayers by laypeople, who relied on texts based on those very same festal liturgies. We can connect the recitation of the Little Hours of the Virgin as it was chanted in the choir at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris to the Hours of the Virgin present in the earliest extant Books of Hours. As noted in Chapter 4, the canons of Notre-Dame directed their chants to an ivory Virgin and Child on the altar; similarly, lay devotees could focus prayerful attention, and often the same texts, on ivory statuettes in their own chapels and private chambers.

Rebecca A. Baltzer reconstructed the trajectory whereby the diurnal Little Office of the Virgin at Notre-Dame gave rise to the Hours of the Virgin for the Use of Paris that was integrated into early Psalter-Hours and Books of Hours.Footnote ¹¹² The Little Office formed the basis of the defining set of prayers found in late medieval Books of Hours, the so-called best sellers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Footnote ¹¹³ Baltzer notes that the liturgical materials used for the Parisian Little Office – psalms, hymns, antiphons, and responses – were “drawn from the major Marian feasts already established in the liturgy, particularly the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin (15 August).”Footnote ¹¹⁴ As a result, several of the texts for the Assumption that I used to analyze the Glorification of the Virgin group at Saint-Denis were incorporated into the Parisian version of the Hours of the Virgin.

Baltzer used an Ordinary from Notre-Dame (BnF, MS lat. 16317) dated to the second half of the thirteenth century to demonstrate that the Little Office of the Virgin was performed in the choir, before the main altar dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin, and not at a side altar or in a subsidiary liturgical space.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Unlike foundations dedicated to other saints (such as Saint-Denis), where the Marian altar occupied a secondary space, at the cathedral of Paris the high altar was the most appropriate setting for singing praises to the Virgin.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The performance of the Little Office of the Virgin, Baltzer argues, “was essentially a liturgy that reinforced the sense of mission and devotion of the cathedral’s clerics who regularly performed it.” It bolstered the community’s self-fashioning as Maria-Ecclesia.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Inventories examined in Chapter 4 revealed that a large-scale ivory Vierge ouvrante was installed on the high altar at Notre-Dame throughout the thirteenth century, until 1320. In other words, the statue was the intended addressee of the Little Office at the Paris cathedral. In the very years that a version of Notre-Dame’s Little Office of the Virgin was gaining popularity in prayer books for laypeople (both the combined Psalter-Hours and the then novel stand-alone Books of Hours), the liturgy enacted almost daily at the cathedral took place before an ivory Virgin and Child. Emma Dillon has shown that the communal liturgy of Notre-Dame continued to resonate in the minds of the individual lay practitioners who privately recited the hours, just as today we find it impossible to read the lyrics of a well-known song – such as “Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme” – without the melody running through our heads.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Might these ingrained associations have gone beyond the melodic and extended to the addressee of the prayers, an ivory statuette of Mary? Could the dissemination of the text among the laity have inspired a demand for Gothic ivory statuettes to accompany private prayers?

The hermeneutics of the chaste flesh of the Virgin explored in Chapters 2 and 4 is buttressed by specific psalms, hymns, antiphons, and responses that compose the Parisian Hours of the Virgin. A precocious Parisian Book of Hours now at the Walters Art Museum (MS W.40) is among the earliest of this type of manuscript. On stylistic and paleographic grounds it has been localized to Paris in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, but the calendar, an early fourteenth-century addition, shows strong affinities to Reims.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The folios original to the thirteenth-century manuscript include a cycle of full-page prefatory images of Christ’s Infancy and Passion (fols. 13v–32v); the Hours of the Virgin, Use of Paris (33r–97v); ancillary psalms and litanies (97v–115r); fifteen gradual psalms and prayers (115r –126v); and the office of the dead, also Use of Paris (127r–171v).

Walters W.40 bears witness to how the private Hours of the Virgin evolved from the public Little Office of the Virgin. It offers a concrete example of how a specific text may have been recited before an image of an ivory Virgin and Child and stimulates us to reflect on how the ductus on the Virgin’s chaste flesh was taken up and modified in the space of private devotion. Antiphons and versicles examined in Chapter 4 for the Assumption procession reappear here in Matins: “Felix namque” (fol. 42r), “Ad nutum domini” (47v), and “Stirps Jesse” (54r), additionally, “Post partum virgo” is repeated three times in the last lection, “O beata Maria” (54v). Furthermore, the key psalm around which the exegesis of ivory developed, Psalm 44, is the fourth to be recited at Matins (42v–44v), introduced by “Felix namque” and reminding the reader of the Virgin’s royal heritage. Whenever the Hours of the Virgin was recited before an ivory statuette – not just from this manuscript, but from all Parisian Hours – the devotee would actually articulate Psalm 44: 9–10, “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.” In short, the rich and complex intellectual journey charted in Chapter 4 around the experience of an ivory group in the liturgy could be elicited in private by uttering many of the same texts before a smaller-scale ivory statuette of the Virgin and Child.

Matins in Walters W.40 opens with an initial depicting the Virgin and Child seated upon a bench-like altar, flanked by two candlesticks (fol. 33r) (Figure 5.14). The candles make clear that this is an altar and not a bench, so the Virgin and Child must be a statuette. This image cues the book’s user to imagine or to physically assemble such a tableau as an appropriate complement to the Hours of the Virgin. In the early fourteenth century an ancillary text included in many prayer books, including the Psalter-Hours of Yolande de Soissons with which we began the chapter, was added to Walters W.40 on folio 13r. The Fifteen Joys of the Virgin enjoins the reader to kneel fifteen times before an image: “I will kneel down fifteen times before your blessed image in honour and remembrance of the fifteen joys that you had on earth from your dear son (Et ie magenoillere.xv. fois devant vostre benoit ymage en lonneur et en la remembrance des .xv. joies que vous eutes en terre de votre chie filz).”Footnote ¹²⁰ In its second generation of use, then, the owner of this early Parisian Book of Hours read a direct invitation to perform her or his devotions before an image of the Virgin. Conceivably, inspired by the model of the Little Office of the Virgin at Notre-Dame, it was an image of ivory.

Figure 5.14 Virgin and Child seated on an altar, initial for Matins in the Paris Hours. Paris, 1250–75. WAM, MS W.40, fol. 33r.

Photo: The Walters Art Museum, CC0

Ivory and Touch: Hedwig, Pygmalion, and Ludus Dei

The best-known image of an ivory statuette in use in the private sphere is found in a mid-fourteenth-century book known as the Hedwig Codex now in Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig XI 7, fol. 12v). It shows the pious duchess Hedwig of Silesia (1174–1243) clutching a small statuette along with her soft-soled boots, a rosary, and a small prayer book (Figure 5.15).Footnote ¹²¹ The book was created for Hedwig’s descendants, Duke Ludwig I of Liegnitz and Agnes of Glogau. The image comes from the a frontispiece for the Legenda maior, composed around 1300 and based on documents assembled for Hedwig’s canonization process in 1267.Footnote ¹²² This work emphasized the saintly aristocrat’s devotion to and use of her ivory statuette:

Figure 5.15 Saint Hedwig holding her devotional ivory, detail of the frontispiece of the Legenda maior in the Hedwig Codex. Silesia, 1353. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS 83 MN.126, fol. 12v.

Photo: courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

If Hedwig did own an ivory statuette, and there is no reason to be skeptical on this point, she joined her peers – other aristocratic women and men across Europe – in owning a Gothic ivory in the 1240s. But the case of Hedwig demonstrates a key difference between objects used in public liturgy and those owned privately: with the latter, one could do as one wished. Private devotion engendered relative freedom vis-à-vis religious objects, and the strictures and norms enforced during public communal worship were not in effect.Footnote ¹²⁴ In what follows, I consider a variety of devotional uses to which medieval ivory statuettes could be put, uses that go beyond the sanctioned forms of prayer modelled on the Opus Dei. The free, imaginative, and in some cases even transgressive aspects of these devotions lead me to suggest that a different term might be applicable: Ludus Dei, a sort of divine play.

The modes of manipulation described in the Legenda maior of Saint Hedwig, continuous handling and thaumaturgic use, have left few traces on Gothic ivory statuettes still extant today.Footnote ¹²⁵ Such intense use may have damaged the ivories to such an extent that they have not survived to the present day; indeed, Hedwig’s hagiography notes that she was so devoted to her statuette that the ivory was buried with her.Footnote ¹²⁶ Statuettes with clear signs of use and wear are thus relatively uncommon. A small Virgo lactans in a Belgian private collection, contemporary with the Hedwig Codex, is an interesting exception: it seems to have been worn by frequent kissing or rubbing (Figure 5.16). The faces of the two holy figures, marks delineating hair and facial features, and even half of Christ’s ear have nearly been rubbed away. Yet the majority of Gothic ivories show no such use. Many pieces that have survived are damaged in other ways, but few show evidence of continuous tactile engagement.Footnote ¹²⁷ Only in rare cases do objects testify to past use,Footnote ¹²⁸ and there is no way to date such evidence, as the wear might be from the nineteenth century rather than the thirteenth.Footnote ¹²⁹ A seated Virgin and Child statuette now at the Cloisters (MMA 1999.208) (Figure 5.17), carved by the master responsible for the Saint-Denis Glorification of the Virgin group and Our Lady of Groeninge, does show signs of wear from touching.Footnote ¹³⁰ This stimulates me to ask why, in this particular case, the owner of the statuette transgressed the conventional boundary between seeing and touching and thereby explored a new way of comprehending the divine.

Figure 5.16 Seated Virgin and Child. Paris, mid-fourteenth century. Ivory, 9.6 cm. Ghent, Collection of Jan Pareyn.

Photo: courtesy of owner

Figure 5.17 Seated Virgin and Child. Paris, 1260–70. Ivory, 18.4 cm. MMA-Cloisters, 1999.208.

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0

The Cloisters Virgin is distinguished from other statuettes carved by the same hand because of its iconography. Seated on a low bench covered with a cushion, the Virgin is carved completely in the round, with her long, doubled veil sensitively rendered across her back. The rear corners of the bench are not carved, however, but flat and incised with cross-hatchings for glued-on additions to square the tusk. Mary’s left foot is propped up on a bolster, and her raised left knee supports her large, toddler-aged child, who has turned his body three-quarters toward his mother and away from a strictly frontal view. Unusually, Mary steadies her son on her knee with both hands, and the Child returns the embrace with his right arm around her neck, lightly tugging on her veil. The head of the Christ child is a nineteenth-century restoration. The Virgin’s head was not carved to support a crown, and there is no evidence that one was ever attached. This humble depiction resonates with the seemingly casual interaction between mother and son. I suggest that this iconography models haptic behaviour for the viewer, eliciting a certain mode of address and form of veneration.

The signs of wear on the statuette take on special significance, especially in comparison with their absence on other figures carved by the same master. Where Mary firmly grasps Christ’s waist with both hands, her fingers are worn almost level with the Child’s gown (Figure 5.18). There is also significant wear on Jesus’s left hand, which proffers a small orb. His thumbnail has been completely erased and his thumb nearly so. This deterioration is localized, as the Virgin’s double cloak strings, just beside Christ’s hand, are in pristine condition with no visible damage.

Figure 5.18 Detail of Seated Virgin and Child, MMA-Cloisters (Figure 5.17).

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0

The two-handed iconography of the embracing figures perhaps finds explanation in the conflation of exegetical traditions concerning Mary and Ecclesia, the personification of the Church. Christian exegesis of the Bible’s sensual love poem, the Song of Songs, helps explain this fusion of theological concepts. Long read by Jewish and early Christian commentators as an allegorical expression of God’s love for his people, such twelfth-century exegetes as Rupert of Deutz and Honorius Augustodunensis read the amorous relationship as that between God the Father and his beautiful spouse, the Virgin Mary.Footnote ¹³¹ The fruit of their chaste union was Jesus, God the Son. As seen in Chapter 4, the Western Church adopted the Song of Songs to animate the liturgy of the Assumption, an event not recounted in the canonical books of the Bible.Footnote ¹³² Through the logic of Trinitarian theology, in which the Father and Son are one, the actions of the lovers in the Canticles can be applied to the tender mother-and-son relationship. Describing his commentary on the Song of Songs in another work, Honorius explicitly spelled out the interpretative intricacies of the amorous text: “We have edited a small work on the Song of Songs … to the honour of Our Lady Saint Mary, perpetual virgin, whose true spouse and principal beloved is the eternal, that is to say God the Father, nevertheless she is also spouse and mother of the Son of the same God the Father.”Footnote ¹³³ In twelfth- and thirteenth-century iconography, sensual passages from the Song of Songs increasingly coloured traditional depictions of the Virgin and Child.Footnote ¹³⁴

Such passages as Song of Songs 2:6 – “His left hand is under my head, and his right hand shall embrace me” – might therefore be understood as inspiration for the iconography depicted on the Cloisters ivory statuette. The mutual embrace of Mother and Child expresses the same theological content as the chin-chuck motif, famously unpacked by Leo Steinberg.Footnote ¹³⁵ The image of the Christ Child delicately grasping his mother’s chin has obvious parallels with the iconography of courtly love, explored by ivory carvers beginning in the last decades of the thirteenth century. For example, a mirror back in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich (MA 1998) features an amorous couple; the youth caresses the chin of the lady while she holds a chaplet behind her back to bestow it later upon her beloved (Figure 5.19).Footnote ¹³⁶ The cross-pollination of courtly motifs and religious iconography is even more inevitable for Gothic ivories, as the same artisans demonstrably produced pieces with both sacred and secular imagery.Footnote ¹³⁷ Even if the motif is more popular on secular courtly ivories, the chin-chuck can also be found in religious contexts to express the sacred love between Mary and her son.

Figure 5.19 One valve of a mirror case with courting lovers. Paris, ca. 1325. Ivory, 7.6 × 7.7 cm.Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, MA 1998.

Photo: Karl-Michael Vetters, courtesy of museum

A Virgin and Child at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans (A.6958) may have come from the Dominican convent of Montargis, east of Orléans, founded in 1244 (Figure 5.20).Footnote ¹³⁸ The potency of the small work comes from the Christ Child reaching over to cup his mother’s chin gently with his right hand. The many noble ladies who lived in and were buried at Montargis, such as its foundress, Amicie of Joigny (or of Montfort, d. 1252/53),Footnote ¹³⁹ or her sister-in-law Eleanor of England (m. Simon of Montfort, 1215–75) who retired there,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ would have recognized the courtly gesture as flirtatious in nature, assimilating the erotic ethos of the Song of Songs to the tender relationship between Mary and Jesus. The Orléans statuette shows signs of wear that are very different from those on the Cloisters ivory. They are especially visible on the Child’s face, possibly from kisses inspired by the caress he offers to his own beloved.

Figure 5.20 Standing Virgin with Christ “chucking” Mary’s chin. Paris, ca. 1260. Ivory, 23 cm. Orléans, Musée historique et archéologique de l’Orléanais, A.6958.

Photo: author

In the Cloisters statuette (Figure 5.18), Mary’s two-handed embrace of the Child’s waist similarly echoes the caresses of the Song of Songs and encourages the viewer to pick up the sculpture and hold its substantial weight with two firm hands. When this is done, the holder’s right thumb naturally rests on the very place where Mary’s hands grasp the Christ Child. The composition practically begs the holder to stroke the Virgin’s hands gently with the right thumb: the statue models its own use. Engaging with the ivory in this way, the devotee replicates and participates in the intimacy between child and mother, between God and his Church, between Christ and the individual Christian soul. The recursive action, the mise-en-abîme of touching and being touched, further underscores the discourse of incarnational theology inherent in all depictions of the Virgin and Child, especially those made of ivory. It was through the tissue of Mary’s body that the Word became flesh and that the miracle of men being able to touch their God became possible.Footnote ¹⁴¹ This miracle was re-enacted metaphorically whenever the owner of the Cloisters statuette engaged in this deeply physical encounter.

The lived experience of lifting, holding, and cradling an ivory statuette pushes this interpretation further because the tactile qualities of ivory contribute to the sensual allusions drawn from the Song of Songs. The high collagen content of dentine not only enables the material to accept fine details and an extremely smooth polish but it also gives ivory objects a lustre and texture similar to that of human skin. This satiny property has long made ivory an avatar for human flesh. The ancient Greeks employed ivory, embellished with gold, to embody their gods in the most important temples of the Hellenic world, the Parthenon in Athens and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.Footnote ¹⁴² In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the gods fashioned a prosthetic shoulder for Pelops out of ivory (VI.411).Footnote ¹⁴³ The most notorious and salacious example is one we have already seen: the making of Pygmalion’s beloved, as told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses (X.243–97). As discussed in Chapter 1, when Jean de Meung completed the Roman de la Rose he included his own version of the myth in its closing chapters, retaining ivory as the material Pygmalion elected to carve. As construed by Jean and thus received by generations of medieval readers, ivory was the apposite medium through which artistic genius could vie with nature. Examining the climax of the tale in Ovid – which may have been read even more widely in the Middle Ages than in antiquity – lets us pivot to the fantasy of ivory animation, enlivening our consideration of how ivories were used in private devotion.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

For Ovid, the moment of transformation is haptic. Once Pygmalion’s prayers to Venus were answered, the ensuing transformation gives as evocative a description as any for the sensual and emotional experiences suggested by luxurious ivory:

Recounting the miraculous metamorphosis from cold and hard to warm and yielding, Ovid’s Pygmalion may anticipate the visceral desires of a medieval user of an ivory statuette. As cold as stone when first picked up, ivory quickly takes on heat from the body and retains it, warming to the touch. As already noted, these sensations are linked to the biological makeup of elephantine dentine, wicking away moisture and thereby heat, yielding the sensation of coolness. This phenomenon is due to the high collagen content of dentine (collagen is also the most abundant protein in skin). As an ivory object is held and manipulated, the sensation of coolness, and with it the important index of chastity, diminishes. Ivory undergoes its own metamorphosis.

Intimate knowledge of dentine’s thermal properties is key to understanding the corpus of so-called secular Gothic ivories, the earliest of which date to the years around 1300. These are caskets, adorned with scenes from popular Romances (Figure 1.1) or with vignettes of lovers who caress each other and exchange signs of love (Figure 5.21),Footnote ¹⁴⁶ or mirror backs and combs (Figures 1.24–1.26) carved with flirtatious couples. Such objects seem at first glance to ignore the theological readings of the materiality of ivory laid out in previous chapters.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ If ivory not only signifies chastity but also renders it truly present through its frigidity, as my readings of the scientific and exegetical texts have suggested, then the coy gestures of lovers, with desires far from chaste, seem profoundly antithetical. Some writing tablets even venture into the obscene (Walters Art Museum, 71.267) (Figure 5.22).Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Rather than viewing this prudishly, I suggest that the material contributed to the clever innuendoes encoded in such objects. The jouissance that comes from subverting a well-established material metaphor is evident in the depictions of erotic amusements; the semantic game played by the material echoes and enhances the flirtatious iconography.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The transposition of hallowed concepts to an earthly register is a literary conceit, well studied in vernacular and Latin poetry of the thirteenth century. Whether it is a polyphonic motet juxtaposing courtly vernacular love lyrics with liturgical melody or a Latin parody of the mass composed to honour the god of the tavern, playful appropriation of religious forms for the sake of amusement and humour was common.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ A similar aesthetic, a risqué mixture of sacred and profane, is present in the secular ivories.

Figure 5.21 Casket with courtly scenes. Paris, 1300–1320. Ivory with later silver fittings, 4.8 × 14.4 × 8.9 cm. Louvre, LP 615.

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

Figure 5.22 Cover of a writing tablet with scenes from the tales of Alexander and Virgil. Paris, mid-fourteenth century. Ivory, 9.5 × 5.1 cm. WAM, 71.267.

Photo: The Walters Art Museum, CC0

Unlike objects meant to inhabit a scopic economy, such as the chaste Virgin’s flesh enshrined in abbeys and cathedrals, Gothic mirrors, combs, and caskets are utilitarian items, meant to be picked up, cradled in one’s hands, used, and set down again. The phenomenon of changing temperature revises the metaphor on which ivory’s chastity is based: what of its yielding nature, its acquiescence to human heat and passion when fondled and caressed? Such lived experience made ivories luxuriant gifts for a beloved. In concert with the iconography of amorous lovers, the materiality of ivory enhanced the significance of these objects too, reinforcing their message. The equation of ivory and chastity was sufficiently diffused throughout the visual culture of late thirteenth-century France that its sacred function could be manipulated and played with to become a source of secular pleasure.

Jean de Meung, teasing readers already familiar with Ovid’s version of the Pygmalion tale, deployed the trope of ivory melting into flesh early in the text to frame the sculptor’s frustrated desires, where his yearning for soft flesh rather than hard sculpture comes to no avail (lines 20927–31). In the Roman de la Rose, the transformation is complete by the time Pygmalion returns from the temple, and Jean denies the reader the erotic pleasure of witnessing the conversion from ivory to flesh.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Pygmalion instead gleans the miracle by sight, “Lors vit qu’ele ert vive et charnue” (21133), only afterward confirming with his hand what his eyes told him: “Seizing and tapping her naked flesh … He felt the bones and felt the veins, which were full of blood, and the pulse beating and moving” (21134–9).Footnote ¹⁵² Jean’s emphasis is not so much on the imaginative and poetic potential of materials (wax, ivory, flesh) as on a Christian concept of ensoulment; the miracle is more spiritual than physical. Pygmalion asks for a wife with heart, soul, and life who resembles his ivory (“Qui si bien yvuire resemble,” 21098–21100), and in accepting the petition Venus sends to the image a soul, so that she became a lovely lady (“A l’ymage envoia lors ame, / Si devint sit res bele dame,” 21117–19). Ovid’s concern with material transformation is converted by Jean de Meung into a fantasy of animation.

Both the tale of Pygmalion and his beloved ivory statue and the courtly scenes of lovers on secular ivories might have informed and complicated the devotional experience of owners of small-scale Virgin and Child statuettes. Their embodied, sexual readings stand in a series of inverted relationships to ivory statuettes. Whereas Pygmalion carved his statue of ivory and with it indulged in carnal sin, God created for himself a chaste seat in the Virgin. While Pygmalion prays to Venus to enliven his inanimate love, God himself inseminated the chaste Virgin’s humanity, bringing form to matter. The flesh-like nature of ivory makes it the ideal material for probing, questioning, and contemplating on an emotional level such esoteric points of incarnational theology.

This moralization of the Pygmalion myth as experienced through tactile devotional encounter with an ivory statuette of the Virgin and Child would not have been foreign to the medieval mentalité. An overt Christian reconciliation of the explicit tales of Ovid circulated in the form of the Ovide moralisé. The Old French version was composed in the second decade of the fourteenth century, likely for Queen Jeanne II of Burgundy, wife of Philippe V. An early extant copy of the text, Rouen, Bibliothèque patrimoniale Villon, MS O.4, was owned by Jeanne’s predecessor as queen and peer, Clémence of Hungary, wife of Louis X, and was mentioned in the inventory of her goods upon Clémence’s death: “A large roman covered in vermilion leather of the fables of Ovid which are moralized (rameneez a moralité) on the death of Jesus Christ.”Footnote ¹⁵³ After summarizing the tale, the author offers the reader two alternative means of understanding each myth, one historical and the other mystical.

Foreshadowing Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the historical, euhemerist reading is the most obvious: instead of a sculptor and his statue, we are to understand a gentleman shaping a servant girl to his particular refined predilections. The second, mystical reading, however, resonates strongly with the ivory statuettes of the Virgin and Child and our reading of them:

In the Ovide moralisé, the myth of Pygmalion is recast beyond just the mystery of the Incarnation; it encompasses God’s love for humankind. Like Pygmalion, God is a natural sculptor, a blacksmith. Vile mud is shaped and given an elite, ivory form. To bring the moralization closer to the Genesis story, ivory here becomes a positive adjective for human form, rather than the unformed matter, the clay, from which humans were shaped. Ivory thus connotes a fine, civilized, even courtly form, introduced into base material. God’s work is successful, and humans are filled with good sense and beauty. Like Pygmalion, God falls in love with his creation and makes it his lover (“fist s’amie”). John 3:16 echoes through these lines: “For God so loved the world (dilexit mundum), as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting.” The majority of the moralization treats the first half of the Pygmalion myth, the creation of the beloved statue – that is, humankind – and the affection, gifts, and caresses God bestows upon his treasured work, even after the Fall. The metamorphosis, the work of artifice brought to life, comes only briefly at the end, through the efforts of humanity, through devotion, mortification, penitence, contrition, and compunction. Through these, the Holy Spirit sets sweet love aflame within the human soul (3672–7). The spiritual reading of Ovid’s ivory sculpture ends with a mystical experience described in the florid language of courtly love.

The narrative of the Ovide moralisé resonates with my reading of the ivory statuette at the Cloisters, in which handling increases comprehension. The textual sources validate the seemingly transgressive admixture of the Pygmalion story with the Virgin and Child, and priggish boundaries frequently reflect modern constructions rather than those of medieval subjects. Once a devotional object was removed from its liturgical or paraliturgical framework, it was set free and could prompt a whole range of imaginative connections that nourished the inner lives of its users. Just such a trajectory is apparent in the small-scale ivory statuettes of the Virgin and Child.