Amanda Luyster

The Chertsey tiles (c. 1250) rank among the most well-known and elaborate medieval floor tiles in England. Their pictorial tile roundels, some of which display Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in combat, have received substantial attention in scholarship, partly because images of the Crusades made before c. 1300 are surprisingly rare.  Despite the broad use in contemporary print and online media of the Chertsey tiles’ representation of Richard and Saladin’s (fictional) battle, however, the puzzle of the Latin texts which originally accompanied these roundels has remained unaddressed.  This is largely due to the tiles’ physical state: although probably intended for Westminster palace under Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, the so-called Chertsey tiles were discovered as a pile of fragments at Chertsey Abbey (Surrey, U.K.).  While previous scholars had pieced together the tiles’ pictorial iconography, the Latin texts remained a puzzle. The Chertsey tiles witness an unusual form of textual fragmentation, in which sequences of one to four letters remain, but due to the tiles’ disordered state at discovery, the ordering of these sequences was unclear. This essay presents an interpretation of the eighty-five extant textual fragments in this series, reconstructing words and some phrases. These phrases suggest particular sources for the combat tiles’ learned program of text and image, ranging from English royal seals, to widespread traditions regarding the Old Testament hero Samson, to Latin histories of warfare.  Reconstructions of the original appearance of the famous roundels when surrounded by their Latin texts are included.

In this essay, I trace networks created by the movement and use of luxury (often imported) and ceremonial textiles in thirteenth-century England. These networks incorporate humans and objects: a particular cloth interacts with human donors, recipients, and royal officials; with scissors and thread; and with inventories, slips of parchment, and labeled chests. My narrative follows textile networks through largely public and dynamic events of gifting between elite individuals and display in royal ceremonial, in which the materiality of textiles enables them to play diverse roles: worn, walked upon, argued over, cut and divided. At the same time, less obvious but crucial events of documentation and storage are also revealed; these actively worked to sustain textiles’ associations with donors and events. I posit that these various public and private networks of people and things functioned to make the value of the gifted and ceremonial textiles “stick” in the memory of individuals—these networks worked to combat the tendency of all historical connections to be forgotten, the tendency of all things to fall apart. Methods informed by actor-network theory (ANT) are recommended as a way to more clearly delineate the processes by which collected objects function within remembering.

The history I relate contains three historical subjects, all of which move – a group of animal fables, a queen, and a translator.  The group of fables relates the history of two jackals, Kalila and Dimna, focusing on Kalila’s rise and fall at the court of the King Lion, and therefore is known as Kalila and Dimna. These stories had travelled, originally from India, via great popularity in Islamic lands, then through Castile and Navarre; they were passed between many hands and carried across many hundreds of miles.  Manuscript copies, some luxurious, some dirty and torn, packed in bags carried on horseback, must have been brought out and handed over with ceremony in many different kinds of rooms, stately and simple.  Eventually one copy, carried by a cleric who had ridden from Navarre, was presented to the French queen, Jeanne de Navarre.  This gift was a Castilian translation of Kalila and Dimna and must have been conveyed sometime before Queen Jeanne’s death in 1305.  Intrigued by the manuscript, Queen Jeanne then asked a little-known physician, Raymond de Béziers, to undertake a Latin translation for her from the Castilian.  Completed in 1313, the resulting illuminated manuscript (BNF MS Latin 8504) is one with which many scholars may be familiar. 

As I hope to show, art historians have not yet fully recognized the political nature of the entire manuscript, nor have they linked its political nature back to the queen.  Indeed, by the time this manuscript was completed, the queen was dead.  Despite Jeanne’s death, I argue that this must remain in many ways her project.  She received the gift that stimulated the translation, and she decided upon and then arranged for the translation.  Therefore, Jeanne provided the frame for the project that her translator then carried forward and presented to her family after her decease.  Below I show that this manuscript needs to be understood in relation to the queen, and that when so considered, it reveals more about its own political nature as well as the active and thoughtful nature of Jeanne’s queenship across multiple locales.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 8504 is a Latin translation of a group of animal fables known as Kalila and Dimna that were popular in Islamic lands. In the illustrations of lat. 8504, Burzuya, the narrator of the frame story, undergoes a previously unrecognized conversion to Christianity. I argue that this conversion scene is significant not only in itself but as the key to a new reading of the manuscript as a whole. Conversio, or a turning toward Christianity, marks the text, characters, structure, and many other aspects of this manuscript. Furthermore, I offer a suggestion about the identity of the translator of the text, Raymond de Béziers, and argue that an understanding of the history of interactions between the town of Béziers and the French crown is relevant to the focus on conversion in lat. 8504.

The papal palace in Avignon (figure 1) was an architectural
marvel. In describing it, an anonymous fourteenth-century
chronicler enthusiastically noted that the building also displayed
‘marvelous painting and more marvelous writing.’1 The chronicler was referring to a lost cycle painted by the Italian artist Matteo Giovanetti. Giovanetti was known as the ‘painter of the pope,’ and although some of his wall- and ceiling-paintings have been lost, others survive.2 This study focuses on the two remaining cycles that are the most complete. These are the Chapel of St.Martial, dating ca. 1344–46, and the Chapel of St. John, dating ca. 1346–48, both executed under the patronage of Pope Clement VI. The chronicler celebrates the high quality of the painting, but is even more impressed by the ‘more marvelous’— mirabilioribus — painted texts that form part of each ensemble. It is those texts that I will explore most closely.3

In both chapels, substantial painted Latin inscriptions appear
repeatedly within and below the image fields (figure 2).
Although previous scholars have noted the emphasis on the
written word in these programs, none have pursued their analysis further.4 I propose that these texts and, more particularly, the forms in which these texts appear are integral to our understanding of the programs. The letter forms, placement in space, and support on which a text is presented deliver information that directs a particular understanding of the text. More specifically, I show that in each chapel, text forms are nuanced to direct two different interpretations. In the Chapel of St. Martial, the form of the text and its placement within the cycle emphasize the transfer of divine authority from Christ to St. Martial, a French saint seen as the precursor of the French popes, and from St. Martial to the chapel’s patron, Pope Clement VI. In the Chapel of St. John, the appearance of the word is nuanced to suggest silence, dialogue, and divine speech, such that historical scenes are enacted through eyes and ears in a way that makes them seem miraculously present. This presence of historical scenes may be tied to the performance of the Mass, the Divine Office, and other liturgies that allude to and in some sense reenact depicted scenes.

TMR 10.05.04 Robinson and Pinet, Courting the Alhambra (Patton).  Reviewed by Pamela A. Patton
      Southern Methodist University
An admirably substantive offering is made by Amanda Luyster's "Cross-Cultural Style in the Alhambra: Textiles, Identities, and Origins," which argues that the Alhambra paintings reflect their artists' encounter with the northern European figural textiles that were actively admired, imitated, and collected by both Christian and Muslim
rulers in Iberia from the thirteenth century onward. Citing a shift in Andalusi trade patterns from the east-west trajectory of the earlier Middle Ages to a north-south engagement with Gothic Europe, Luyster cites documentary and material evidence of a Nasrid appetite for such works that places them within an Alhambra rich with movable, imported
<i>objets de luxe</i>. Beyond identifying a potential visual source for the Alhambra paintings, Luyster argues persuasively that the paintings' visual resonances with luxury textiles, like the display of such textiles themselves in the Alhambra and elsewhere, served as expressions of the sultan's authority, sophistication, and international stature. In emphasizing the cultural agency of the Nasrids in this process, Luyster's argument plays smoothly into the
broader agenda of the collection as a whole.

Review in TMR 13.06.10 by Julia Walworth:
The intriguing murals in the hall of the château of St Floret in the Auvergne (ca. 1350-60) are based for the most part on scenes from the version of the Tristan story in the <i>Meliadus</i> of Rusticiano da Pisa and constitute the most extensive cycle of wall paintings based on a romance to survive in France. Amanda Luyster examines the images, the accompanying inscriptions and their placement in the room to arrive at a careful and convincing interpretation in which the disposition of the paintings in the architectural space enables the viewer to experience a three-dimensional and temporal narrative. Luyster also places these unusual wall paintings in a wider art-historical and cultural context by linking them with contemporary religious mural cycles.

The categories of sacred and secular are ubiquitous in the interpretation of medieval art. They serve to structure fields of research, essay collections, symposia, museum exhibitions, and course topics. These terms as we
understand them today were not, however, consistently applied in the Middle Ages. Therefore distinguishing between secular and sacred always risks anachronism, imposing the values and divisions of modern mentalities upon medieval thought and practice.1 Indeed the very terms that modern scholars use to distinguish non-sacred works of art – secular, arte profana, weltliche Kunst, svetskoe iskusstva – did not emerge until the seventeenth century and later.2 Equally vexing for the scholar who seeks to define the categories of sacred and secular is their frequent convergence in almost every realm of medieval life, including politics, devotion, domesticity, science, entertainment,
and perceptions of the supernatural. Works of art and architecture physically record this overlap, making absolute distinctions between secular and sacred features in a given monument or object difficult and sometimes unproductive.

The chapters in this collection reconsider the usefulness of the terms ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ through the investigation of medieval monuments and objects that attest to passive convergence, active dialogue, or engineered
friction between these categories. The papers were originally presented in a double session at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Boston in February 2006. Readers might expect, as we did at the outset of this project,
that a close examination of works of art that straddle the divide between sacred and secular would reveal the ineffectiveness of modern designations, which do not always set neatly upon medieval works of art. Yet the following
negotiating secular and sacred in medieval art
chapters generally argue for the retention of these categories because they prove to be valuable tools for analysis. At the same time, several authors
offer alternative terms, in some cases introducing classifications generated from medieval sources themselves. While focusing on specific objects and
monuments, the authors employ innovative methodologies applicable to broad fields of inquiry. In this respect, their arguments resonate beyond the borders of art history and archaeology into related fields such as political
history, science, and literature. In so doing, they raise awareness of the rich complexity of the medieval secular world, which encompassed a vast array of
social practices and cultural categories. At both the micro- and macro-levels, these studies contribute new and provocative conclusions regarding what
secular and sacred meant in the Middle Ages.

The codex Palatino 556 in the Florence Biblioteca Nazionale
is an illuminated manuscript of an Arthurian text written in
lIalian, the Tavola Ritonda (Round Table).' It is notable for its
289 sophisticated pen drawings, which have attracted
scholarly attention since 1927. ~ This manuscript provides one of the very few instances, at least before the advent of the printing press, of Arthurian material that is illustrated entirely wilh line and without color. As such, it both looks and functions differently from most other Arthurian manuscripts.
I will argue that this manuscript, because of its medium and
iconography, not only eschews the traditional ostentation of
many Arthurian works, but also seems to revel in its own
mechanism of representation, allowing certain images,
especially animal images, to shift between different categories of representation. Such ambiguities might not only have been enjoyable for the viewer, but they also tie this heretofore rather isolated manuscript to other works of art that share part of its linear and playfully ambiguous aesthetic. Although the manuscript 's text and the workshop that produced it have been convincingly identified: the relations between Palatino 556 and other visual productions and, in addition, the identity of the patron of this important work, have remained uncertain. The present study, through an attentive reading of the images, provides new evidence and promising candidates.

The argument of this chapter is that a reading of the femme-aux-serpents as a bad mother serves as the key to a fuller reading of the program of the Moissac porch, one which thematically unites its walls and explains iconographic peculiarities which were otherwise puzzling. The idea of the bad mother as antithesis to the perfect mother, Mary, allows us to see the interaction of the femme-aux-serpents and the demon as a hellish inversion of the angel Gabriel's Annunciation to Mary, just across the portal. Just as Mary hears the words of Gabriel and leams that she will conceive, she is at that moment being impregnated, and just as the femme-mer-serpents is being " impregnated" by the
demonic toad, the demon's "annunciation" takes the form of another toad. The unusual emphasis in the Visitation upon the physical realities of pregnancy and the importance of the breast provide striking counterpoint to the bad mother,
who refused to give her milk to babies who would die otherwise. The noticeably heavy and bloated belly of the demon who torments thefemme-aux-serpems and
the parallel swollen moneybag placed across Avarice's stomach create parallels between bad mothering and pitilessness to the needy in general. The whole parable of Dives, when read in conjunction with the textual Visions, matches very closely the description of the bad mother and those who surround her in hell, pitiless to those in need although she has in excess what will nourish them.
Isaiah's scroll announces the motif of pregnancy and mothering at the very outset.

Viewers might see the tympanum as suggesting, then, that God sees and judges behavior, and it is in relation to
that judgment that they would understand the basic contrast set up between the two walls. The walls make manifest the dichotomy between the good and the bad Christian, shown more specifically in the disparity between the good mother
who gives of her milk and herself to those who are in need and the bad mother who, pitiless, keeps what she has to herself.

While visual cultures mingled comfortably along the silk roads and on the shores of the Mediterranean, medieval England has sometimes been viewed – by both medieval and more recent writers – as isolated. In this Element the author introduces new evidence to show that this understanding of medieval England's visual relationship to the rest of the world demands revision. An international team led by the author has completed a digital reconstruction of the so-called Chertsey combat tiles (sophisticated pictorial floor tiles made c. 1250, England), including both images and lost Latin texts. Grounded in the discoveries made while completing this reconstruction, the author proposes new conclusions regarding the historical circumstances within which the Chertsey tiles were commissioned and their significant connections with global textile traditions.