Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Author(s): M. B. McNamee
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Sep., 1972), pp. 263-278
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3048995
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263
in Flemish Painting
M. B. McNamee
ment. Close study also shows that there is complete consistency in the way the vested angels are represented by
Flemish artists: they are always dressed in the vestments of
paintings represents a special interpretation of the mass the idea that what Christ offered in his sacrificial giving of
himself at the Last Supper and on Calvary and still offers in
the mass is the totality of himself in time and eternity - from
the moment of his Incarnation to the Last Judgment.5 Not
The presence of vested angels in thirteenth-, fourteenthand fifteenth-century Flemish art needs no demonstration;
they confront us everywhere in the Flemish painting of those
eucharistic significance.
Studies such as Jeanne Villette's L'Ange dans l'art d'occident6 have shown that the angel vested in ecclesiastical garb
does not become a commonplace iconographic device in
understand.4
Western art until the late fourteenth century, and that, even
then, it was most extensively and consistently employed only
in Flanders and in the parts of Germany, France, northern
Flemish art.7
2 Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling and Joos van Cleve are only a few of the Flemish artists who used
grapes or grape vines in the background or sculptural details of their
paintings with a eucharistic significance. A bundle of wheat or wheat
stalks was used for a similar symbolic purpose by several Flemish painters - notably Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der
Goes, David Gerard and Jacob Cornelis van Oostsanen, to mention only
the most important.
this study in the first place. I also owe much to Professor Charles Cuttler
who gave me many helpful suggestions while I was doing my research.
4 The painting is Mary with the Divine Infant and Angels by the Master of
mass, and he actually uses Jan van Eyck's Mystical Lamb and other
Flemish paintings as part of his proof that this was a traditionally accepted concept of the sacrifice of the mass. See his Mysterium Fidei de Augustissimo Corporis et Sanguinis Christi Sacrificio atque Sacramen to Elucidationes,
Paris, 1931.
6J. Villette, L'Ange dans l'art d'occident du XIIfme au XVklme siecle, France,
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Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd ser., eds. Philip
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They are vested, for the most part, in variations of the simple
medieval French art; but the third pair from the bottom is
each side of the altar stand two angels vested in the Eastern
stole or orarion and holding scrolls in one hand on which are
inscribed the words of Christ's judgment of the elect and the
10 Villette, L'Ange dans l'art d'occident, 88, also points out that it is clear
that what some of the angels are wearing are copes and not secular capes
because they are fastened by the liturgical clasp or morse and not by the
band or cord of the secular cape.
known except that they painted in Rome in the second half of the I Ith
century. See Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der Christlichen Kunst, ii, Gerd
Christ.
13 See C. Diehl, Manuel d'art byzantin, Paris, 1925-26, 809-0o, for a description of the Divine Liturgy as it appears in Hagia Sophia in Kief. He
40, says of Christ the High Priest in Oriental iconography: "I1 se rattache
a deux sujets particuliers 'I l'art byzantin: la Communion des Apdtres oui le
Ghent at Urbino, but she points out that it has been combined with
details from the Western liturgy. In it, two angels, vested in amice and alb
hover at each side of the composition in the apse-like setting of the scene.
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in illuminated manuscripts, especially in miniatures representing the angel in scenes of the Visit of the Marys to the
while the angel seated on the tomb in the Visit of the Marys
in the Peribleptos church in Mistra, plate XLIV; and for that in the
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(photo: Alinari-Giraudon)
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amice and alb. And in the early panel painting of the Visit
of the Marys in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in
Rotterdam, which is certainly Eyckian in style, the angel
wears an amice, an alb, a stole, and a maniple on his left
arm - the last, a vestment worn only at the mass (Fig. 13).
We might well ask what accounts for the sudden appearance of the angel in a liturgical garb at the scene of the three
Marys at the tomb. A possible answer may be found in the
the Visit of the Marys: one other occurs in the Paris Brevi-
in the Visit of the Marys wears a white alb and holds a palm
in his hand. The following examples represent a solidification of this tradition. The angel in the Visit of the Marys in
teenth century, the usual garb of the angel in the Visit of the
the Bourgueil Breviary, from the second half of the fourteenth century, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Ms lat. 1043,
Breviary or the Breviary of the Duke of Bedford (I4241435) (Bibliothbque Nationale, Paris, Ms lat. I7294, fol.
228v), in which the angel wears an amice and alb. In the
Livre des Trbs Belles Heures du Duc de Berry (some of the
illuminations of which were done by Jan van Eyck), now
preserved in the Museo Civico at Turin, the angel of the
Press, 1932.
16 G. Cohen, Livre de conduite du Rigisseur et le compte des dipenses pour le
Mystire de la Passionjoud e' Mons en 1501, Paris, 1925.
17 See Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, I, 178-97, for a definition
Since these plays were enacted in the church in conjunction with the liturgy and by clerics, it was natural that
dramatic forms we find the directives for dressing the angel or angels in
attached to the Introit of the mass itself, it was later detached from it and
sung at the end of matins which immediately preceded the mass.
18 See Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, I, 451-92; In, 3-172; I99-
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12 The Resurrection and the Angel and Three Marys at the Tomb,
century.
concordia is based have been lost, the Concordia itself may serve
ut ungerent corpus Jhesu. Cum ergo ille residens tres uelut erraneos, ac
in the Prooemium of the Concordia itself that it was based on the customs of
Fleury and Ghent. St. Dunstan, who is supposed to have done some work
on the revision of the Re'gularis Concordia, had found refuge in Saint Peter's
of Ghent during his banishment from England, so the Concordia brings us
Ghent itself.
IIi, fol. I88v-89v: "Dum tertia recitatur lectio, quatuor fratres induant
se, quorum unus alba indutus acsi ad aliud agendum ingrediatur, atque
latenter Sepulchri locum adeat, ibique manu tenens palmam, quietus
the manuscripts we must infer that the plays of the simple sort now under
review were in use for more than five hundred years. Although during the
later Middle Ages arose far more ambitious forms of the Visitatio Sepulchri,
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transferred to the end of Matins which immediately preceded the mass. And in the earliest versions of the plays the
altar itself served as the tomb of Christ,23 an association that
we find occurring later with deliberate symbolical intention
in several Flemish paintings.
In some of the more developed Quem quaeritis Easter plays,
which included the Noli me tangere scene with Mary Magdalene, Christ himself appeared in a chasuble, while the
angel, or in some instances, two angels (to dramatize St.
sepulcher of Christ with the altar had a very ancient tradition behind it.
For instance, Germanus I, Patriarch of Constantanople (733), says in his
Theoria: "Altare est Propitiatorium in quo offerebatur pro peccato, iuxta
24 St. John II: I I-12: "But Mary stood without before the tomb,
weeping. And she bent down, still weeping, and looked into the tomb, and
she saw two angels clothed in white sitting there, one at the head, and
the other at the feet, where the body ofJesus had lain."
25 See Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, I, 369-40o, for a discussion of this late stage of the Easter plays in which Christ himself functioned in chasuble.
Sepulchri and the ministers of the mass all similarly dressed in liturgical
vestments can be was impressed upon the writer in 1963 when he had the
association of the tomb of Christ with the altar of the mass which we see
the altar with the tomb of Christ makes more understandable the reverse
Nativity and the altar is also pertinent to the symbolism of the mass in
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Good examples of the vested angel in early fourteenthcentury Italian art are the Annunciation dated about 1300, in
alb and a stole in the manner of the deacon. See also the
Ages. The more important influence, and the one most relevant to the
etonn6 de voir, vers 1380, le costume des anges se modifier soudain. Ils
tunique decente qui n'est d'aucun pays, d'aucun temps, mais qui semble
le vetement meme de la vie 6ternelle. Ils disparaissent maintenant sous de
lourdes chapes aux couleurs 6clatantes, que ferme une agrafe d'orf6vrerie; un mince cercle d'or serre parfois leurs cheveux blonds. On dirait
de jeunes acolytes servant une messe sans fin. Qui ne connait les anges
musiciens de van Eyck, ces clercs adolescents qui donnent un concert
retable
Gand,
les manuscrits
du anges,
duc de cinquante
Berry. C'est
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apparaissent dans les Mysteres des le XIVe siecle." See the entire chapter, "L'art et le thditre religieux," 35-84. MAle is speaking here mostly
of the theater as it developed outside the church at the end of the Middle
tradition of the vested angel, however, is that of the Latin liturgical plays
that continued to be acted well into the I6th century by clerics inside the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., xxIv, 1943, 327-42. The whole position of
Miale and Cohen in this matter and the criticisms it has evoked from
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23-26 Claus Sluter, Well of Moses (details). Dijon, Chartreuse de Champmol
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to Mary's oratory and is observing the scene of the Annunciation from behind the curtain which he has partly drawn
de Berry in the Bibliotheque Royale in Brussels, Ms I Io606 (Fig. 18) where the setting is a small Gothic oratory in
which the Virgin kneels in prayer. The curtain has been
drawn back; and the angel, hovering in the air at the left,
wears an alb (no discernible amice), a dalmatic, and stole
back. The cross on the crystal globe in the lap of God the
Father is, of course, an allusion to the Sacrifice of the Cross
by which the Son being sent now at the Annunciation into
time will redeem the world symbolized by the crystal globe;
and the angel, in turn, vested in the amice, alb, and cope of
time.31
ments of subministers of the mass, e.g., amice, alb and stole as in Robert
30 Young publishes the texts of several such Annunciation plays (see The
Drama of the Medieval Church, H, 245-50). The dramatic performance came
to be known as the Missa Aurea and it was established at Tournai as early
site of the ancient Roman arena. She suggests that this traditional
dramatization of the Annunciation "is undoubtedly reflected in the
prominence given by Giotto to the scene of the Annunciation on the
apsidal arch of the [Scrovegni] chapel." We might also add that the
Campin's M6rode Altarpiece; amice, alb and cope as in Jan van Eyck's
Washington Annunciation and the Adoration of the Lamb, and in Roger van
figures of both the angel Gabriel and the Virgin in their separate little
32 See E. Male: L'Art religieux du XIIe siecle en France. Jtude sur les origines
tradition.
in note 3o. See also his L'art religieux de lafin du moyen-dge en France. Jtude
sur l'iconographie du moyen-dge et sur ses sources d'inspiration, Paris, 1949,
passim.
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4'4
and panel painters of the late Middle Ages did draw considerably upon that source for some of their inspiration. The
closeness with which the details of some illuminations and
Middeleeuwen, Ghent, 1912, 241. Van Puyvelde agrees with Mile con-
early medieval visual arts, but he points out that Mile exaggerated the
French contribution in that influence. He convincingly shows that the
same kind of influence was making itself felt in Flanders simultaneously
with the French influence and frequently independent of it. He specifically points out (pages 239-41) that the Flemish custom of vesting angels
in copes and dalmatics probably owed something to the habit of so vesting them in the medieval liturgical drama.
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chalices which they have dipped from the mystical well filled
from the wine-press in which the body of Christ himself is
being pressed. It should be noted that the priest kneeling in
the foreground of this painting and offering the chalice is
vested, as he should be, in a chasuble. He is the celebrant of
tion of the Well of Life filled with the saving blood of Christ
but two of which are garbed in the vestments of the subministers of the mass. Beginning from the left of the figure of
(worn only at mass), and cope (Fig. 23); an amice, alb and
(Fig. 24). The four angels garbed in exactly correct vestments of the subministers of the mass may very well be
in the West.
34 E. Mile, in L'Art religieux de lafin du Moyen-dge en France, 110-12, discusses the relationship of the Fountain of Life (Fontaine de Vie) and the
Mystical Wine Press (Pressoir Mystique) as symbolizing first the Passion
and death of Christ and finally the Eucharist. He points out that by the
from those they wore in the medieval mystery play called the Jugement de
Jesus. In this play Mary pleads with each of the prophets for a reprieve
for her Son; but each of them as a judge uses words from his own writings
to indicate that Christ must die. The words they use in the play are those
painted on the phylacteries of the prophets in the Well of Moses, convincing evidence of the influence of this medieval mystery play on its
composition. If the function, attitudes and costume of the prophets of
Sluter's Well of Moses came from the tradition of the medieval mystery
play, it is highly probable that the liturgical vestments of its angels came
35 Since seeing final proof of this article, I have had the opportunity of
reading Professor Lotte Brand Philip's excellent new study of the Ghent
Altarpiece (Princeton University Press, 1971), in which she convincingly
same Eternal Mass, are all garbed in the vestments of deacons, sub-
ministers of the Mass, as they would have been in the Byzantine Eternal
Liturgy and as they should be here in this iconographic representation
of the Eternal Mass in which Christ himself is both celebrant and sacri-
ficial victim.
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