Glacial Errata, No. 18

One: Jeanne de Montbaston

Five images this week from one of my favorite artists, someone whose work you’ve probably seen before but whose name you may not know: Jeanne de Montbaston. She’s perhaps most famous for her illustrations of a 14th century illuminated manuscript copy of The Romance of the Rose. which was done sometime, most likely, in the 1340s. Jeanne and her husband Richard were a pair of medieval manuscript illuminators who were well regarded and sought after in their day. From this delightful double portrait (which I used as my original Twitter avatar back in 2009), we know Richard did the lettering, and Jeanne did the illustrations.

Two: The Romance of the Rose

The Romance of the Rose is an incredibly long courtly allegory (it was started by Guillaume de Louris Jean in about 1230, left unfinished, and then continued by Jean de Meun forty years later). In it, the Lover attempts to attain his beloved (the Rose), in a walled garden that becomes an allegory for courtly love; in his quest, he meets with a number of allegorical figures (Beauty, Generosity, etc.) who instruct him in the proper courtly values while also making various generalities about men and women. It’s a tightly constructed allegory, in which nothing exists that does not have a clear symbolic meaning. To be honest, it’s quite tedious at times, though it does culminate in a rather explicit metaphor in which the Lover succeeds in attaining access to the Rose by means of his staff that he uses to pierce her aperture, while his sack containing two hammers dangles outside. (Many years ago, I was known to read this passage aloud at parties, to the delight and horror of my friends.)

Three: Anonymous Virality

No doubt if you’ve spent any time on the Internet in the past fifteen years, you’ve come across some of de Montbaston’s images, including, perhaps, her most famous painting of a nun harvesting dicks from a penis tree. There’s something striking about medieval illuminations, to be sure—they are at once both terribly familiar and yet still strange to us, and so across the distance of nearly a thousand years they’re wondrously uncanny.

But by appreciating de Monstbaston’s images in their original context, not as disembodied one-liners but as part of a complete manuscript, what emerges is not a series of baffling non sequiturs but an artist with a clear vision and visible style.

Partly for that reason, it was almost impossible for me to narrow down her work to five representative images, but luckily the entire manuscript is digitized and freely available, and I highly recommend spending some idle lunch hour one day flipping through the manuscript; you will be endlessly delighted and entranced.

Four: The Shield of Achilles

Jeanne de Montbaston’s work always makes me think of Book 18 of The Iliad and its description of the Shield of Achilles. Patroclus has borrowed Achilles’ armor to fight the Trojans, and falls on the battlefield; Achilles, seeking to avenge him and retrieve his body for burial, needs a new set of armor, so his mother Thetis enlists the great smith Hephaestus to create a new set of armor for him. The description of the shield that Hephaestus forges for Achilles stretches nearly 400 lines, and goes far beyond anything that could be reasonably smithed on a shield: there are the heavens, the sun and the moon, but also two cities, one in which two landowners are involved in a property dispute, adjudicate by a judge, while there is also a wedding of two young people, and laborers at work in vineyards producing grapes for wine, and so forth. It is truly one of the great passages in Homer’s work, the poetry escaping any pretense of realism and pulling the reader forward into an entirely new space.

Five: Marginal Details

The thing about the Shield of Achilles is that, both Achilles and Homer’s audience knows Achilles is fated to die on that battlefield, and so everything depicted on his shield belongs to a world that Achilles himself will never again know. For all of the complexity and depth of the universe that is The Iliad, it never leaves the battlefield except for this one moment, when we see the entire world beyond war, a world of richness and strangeness and banality that brings into sharp relief everything else that Homer depicts.

So, too, with Jeanne de Montbaston’s work. For while she’s best known for her bawdy Surrealism, I’m most moved by her depictions of simple, everyday life—a rabbit hunt, or villagers gathering hay or fetching water from a well—precisely the world which does not exist anywhere in the allegory of The Romance of the Rose itself. In her work she undercuts the holistic totalizing of the allegory, reminding us that beyond courtly love and allegorical figures there remains a normal, everyday world, banal but yet full of wildness and grace.