Friar John of Fiesole, O. P., believed to be a self-portrait
If you are
so locked down that the only social event in your month is chemotherapeutical or
ophthalmological, you find yourself searching for challenging things to do
around home, especially on days too hot or too wet to move your molecules in
the garden. An excellent old friend,
once my student and now my teacher, recently came to the rescue by loaning me
two very high-quality jigsaw puzzles produced by a British outfit called
Wentworth. Obviously there has been a
technological revolution in the manufacture of puzzles during the twenty years
my back was turned. Gone are the
imperfectly die-mashed bits of cardboard with wounded, wobbly lobes. These gorgeous things are works of art in and
of themselves: cut by laser saws from slim sheets of strong hardwood with
razor-thin precision. There are no pieces
that almost fit, only very tight fits. This particular company specializes in what
they call “whimsy” pieces. For each
puzzle they make a few intricately shaped pieces to correlate with the larger iconographic
theme of the whole work of art or scene.
The laser control allows fiendishly precise cuts along color lines and
other dirty tricks such as the suppression of right-angled corner pieces. Finally, the printing process by which the
image has been inked upon the wood is of superb quality.
My friend
Frank is among other things a medievalist, and the puzzles he loaned me were
gifts given to him by his brother with his medieval (and Renaissance) interests
in mind. The one I tackled first was
very much down my line: a panel from the fabulous “Silver Chest” or Armadio degli Argenti built to hold the sacred
treasures of the Church of the Annunciation in Florence and painted by Fra
Angelico around 1450. Rarely are the
containers of such objects more precious than the objects themselves, but this
richly painted armadio is quite
literally priceless.
Much of my
own scholarly work has dealt with the cultural contributions of the medieval
mendicant orders, and I have had a particular interest in the visual arts, especially
within the Franciscan Order. Fra
Angelico got his nickname from the nearly supernatural beauty of his
paintings. His more conventional name was
Brother John of Fiesole, and he was a member of the Dominican Order. These two largest orders of friars, though
sharing a great deal in common, were in a sense spiritual rivals, emphasizing
different evangelical vocations. The
Dominicans might be said to be the more intellectual, their most famous
theologian being Thomas Aquinas.
There are
complex theological ideas conveyed by the stunning chromatic beauty in Fra
Angelico’s panels. It was a common
medieval belief that both words and pictures were conventional signs of
communication, and both were extensively used by friar-missionaries, often with
subtle interrelationships. My late
friend Michael Curschmann wrote many important studies of the commerce between
text and image in medieval books and other artifacts.
Fra
Angelico’s design for the amazing coffer is that of a miniature art gallery
depicting mainly a series of small, related scenes taken from the life of
Christ. The principal subjects of the
particular side of the chest reproduced in “my” jigsaw puzzle are the Passion and its post-Resurrection sequence. I think
I detect in several of the small quadrants the definite influence of a famous
fourteenth-century Franciscan work called the Meditations on the Life of Christ, and I may follow that hunch up
with some serious scholarly research if I can ever get back to proper work.
Just for
the moment jigsaw puzzles are probably the appropriate mode. The particular panel of the chest featured in the
puzzle I put together is laid out in twelve sequential “scenes” in four columns
of three-mini panels each intended to be read, as one would the written lines in a book. The specific layout is as follows:
1 VIA DOLORSA 2. STRIPPING 3.CRUCIFIXION 4.DEPOSITION
5. HARROWING 6.QUEM QUAERITIS? 7.ASCENSION 8.PENTECOST
9. and 10.
LAST JUDGMENT 11. CORONATION 12. LEX AMORIS
the puzzle completed
Beginning with Christ’s painful road to Calvary (1), the
“historical” sequence ends with the mytho-poetic Coronation of the Virgin (11). The Last Judgment is divided between two
panels (9 and 10) as Christ sits in glory in his role as judge, with the saved
souls to his right and the damned to his left, sinister in Latin. The final
mini-panel (12) is a theologico-pictorial tract of considerable numerological
ingenuity. On the shield of the female
figure at the left we can read LEX AMORIS,
the “Law of Love,” the concept that is the key to the scheme of the entire
complex work. The whole of this panel is
a symphony of text and image, with each scene appropriately designated with
texts from the Latin Bible. The LEX AMORIS “scene” is mainly textual, but founded in the
mystical meanings of two numbers, seven and twelve. The most prominent pictorial
element—perfectly chosen for a receptacle designed for sacred furniture—is a
large and beautiful seven-branched candlestick or menorah. The seven banners
weaving in and out of its branches are devoted to the seven sacraments of the
Church. On the “north side” of the
picture (taking the cross at the top, the vertical extension of the
candlestick, as representing the east end of a church) we have twelve Hebrew
prophets with their individual prophetic scrolls. On the right (south) the common iconographic
motif of the twelve apostles each with his written clause of the Apostle’s
Creed. This constitutes an allegorical
claim for the spiritual continuity between the prophets and the apostles, and
from Temple to Church. The scribal
banderoles above and below the “Lex Amoris” are the
only ones left blank. What was the
intended missing text?
The "Lex Amoris" (12) with empty banderoles
That is one
of the puzzles generated by another. A
second is more personal. I have a
special, eccentric reason to be enthusiastic about Fra Angelico. For many years I had a low-voltage friendship
with one of the Princeton rare books librarians, Jean Preston, a manuscripts
expert and a scholar extremely knowledgeable about medieval English literature.
Ms. Preston was a very unpretentious,
modest, reserved English lady, of the sort sometimes unkindly called timid or
even mousy, who walked quietly on her little patch of earth leaving no
scuff marks in her wake. I knew she had a
small collection of what she called “treasures,” though I never was privileged
to view them. She retired shortly before
I did, moved back to England, and took up residence in a small and unremarkable
house in Oxford, where she died in 2006.
I had not been in touch with her since she left Princeton. When her executors set out to deal with her
few possessions they discovered they included several extremely valuable books
and paintings, including two small panels
by Fra Angelico. Those two pieces alone went for about four million dollars at auction. But that is
only how the world assesses value. I
think Jean, like Fra Angelico himself, operated according to a different, higher
standard.
from the domestic decorations of Ms. Jean Preston
