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An Alternative Suggestion Regarding the Origins of the Image ‘The Education of the Virgin’

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Devotion to St. Anne in Texts and Images

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Abstract

The purpose of the chapter is to suggest a solution to the problem of the missing textual source for the image known as the “Education of the Virgin”: the depiction of St. Anne and the child Mary with an open book. It intimates that while such a representation often uses a visual format that suggests that the girl receives tuition in reading, this is in fact intended to illustrate Mary’s instruction concerning her future role as the mother of the Redeemer.

The piece follows the interaction of the educational and prophetic themes in texts referring to Anne and closes by calling attention to a previously unnoticed medieval work that might have had a bearing on the way people interpreted the scene “Education of the Virgin.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Anna Jameson, Legends of the Madonna (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1852; reprint. New York: Frederick G. Kenyon, 1897), 196.

  2. 2.

    Pamela Sheingorn, “The Wise Mother: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” Gesta, 32, 1 (1993), 71.

  3. 3.

    London, British Library, Add. 24797, fol. 2 v. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285–1385, 2 vols., A Survey of the Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles (London: 1986) V, ed. J. J. G. Alexander (London, 1986) I, fig. 2. The earliest known example is that which exists in a section of the Alfonso Psalter dated to the fourteenth century (before 1316). Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285–1385, V, II.

  4. 4.

    London, British Library, Add. 24797, fol.2 v. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285–1385, London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1986; See also Jonathan G. Alexander (ed.), A Survey of the Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, London: Miller, 1986, V, I, Fig. 2. The earliest known example is that in a section of the Alfonso Psalter dated before 1316. L. Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285–1385, V, II.

  5. 5.

    Wendy Scase, “St. Anne and the Education of the Virgin: Literary and Artistic Traditions and their Implications,” in Nicholas Rogers (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford Conn.: Paul Watkins, 1993), 81–96. See also Susan Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,” in Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark et al. (eds.), Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976, reprint 1989, 134–161.

  6. 6.

    Kathryn A. Smith, “The Neville of Hornby Hours and the Design of Literate Devotion,” Art Bulletin, 81/1 (March 1999): 62–193, 77–78. See also K. Smith’s Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours, London: The British Library, 2003.

  7. 7.

    Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. A psalter in the inventory prepared for the Florentine house of Marco Datini (1335–1410) implies that it was used by the young: “1 Children’s Psalter, old and falling to pieces”; quoted in Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato, London: Jonathan Cape, 1957 reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, 277. Children’s interest in reading is further in Origo when Datini’s friend Ser Lapo asks for the return of his Fioretti: “If Monna Margherita keeps my book of San Francesco locked in her chest, I beseech her to send it back; the little boys would take delight in it on winter evenings, for it is, as you know, very easy reading [apertissima lettera].” The closing phrase suggests Ser Lapo might have been reading it with them, perhaps to improve their reading skills. Ibid., 278.

  8. 8.

    Richard de Bury, The Love of Books being the Philobiblon, London: A. Morning, the De la More Press, 1903, 108.

  9. 9.

    Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum publ as Medieval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus, edited by Robert Steele from an early English trans. by John of Trevisa (1326–1402), London: Chatto and Windus, 1924, 51–52, cited in Frances and Joseph Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages, Gies: New York, Harper and Row, 1987, 196.

  10. 10.

    Anne Rudloff Stanton, “The Queen Mary Psalter: A Study of Affect and Audience,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 91, 6, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2001, 84–85.

  11. 11.

    K. Rudy, “An Illustrated Mid-Fifteenth-Century Primer for a Flemish Girl: British Library, Harley MS 3828,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes LXIX (2006): 51–94. See also Miriam Gill, “Female piety and impiety: selected images of women in wall paintings in England after 1300,” in Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih (eds.), Gender and holiness: men, women and saints in late medieval Europe, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, esp. 106–107. Nicholas Rogers notes “the high proportion of identifiable female owners [of imported Flemish books of hours]”; N. Rogers, “Patrons and Purchasers: Evidence for the Original Owners of Books of Hours Produced in the Low Countries for the English Market,” in Als Ich Can: Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers, edited by Bert Cardon et al., Corpus of Illuminated Manuscripts 11–12, Low Countries 8 (Leuven: Peeter 2002), 1165–1181. Of the patron portraits in nine manuscripts reproduced in Nigel Morgan’s volume on English manuscripts produced between 1250 and 1280 none of the four men is shown with a book (though one stands beside a large scroll) whereas four of the five women patrons are depicted with books. See catalogue numbers 101, 104, 111, 126, 157, 159, 166, 176, 184 in Nigel Morgan, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, vol. 4, part II. Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1250–1285, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Claire Donovan observes that “Before the end of the thirteenth century, ordinary laywomen were portrayed in five more [besides the De Brailles Hours, i.e. six] of the eight surviving books of hours made in England;” Claire Donovan, The De Brailles Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in 13th Century Oxford, London: The British Library Publishing Division, and Toronto Medieval Texts & Translations, 1991, 132.

  12. 12.

    Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Psalter MS lat. 1. 77, f. 13 (2397); N. Morgan, A Survey…, II, 164–166, fig. 329.

  13. 13.

    L. Freeman Sandler, “Notes for the Illuminator: The Case of the Omne bonum,” The Art Bulletin 71, 4 (December 1989): 551–564.

  14. 14.

    The possibility of influence from images of Grammatica cannot be completely discounted, though in my opinion the differences between the two argue against it. It is marginally more plausible in scenes of Mary’s education in the Temple.

  15. 15.

    Trens cites as one example a Spanish Renaissance sculpture in which the text is “Ecce virgo concipiet, pariet filium, vocabitur nomen euis Emmanuel”; this is in a private collection, Los Arcos, Navarre. See Manuel Trens, Maria: Iconografia de la Virgen en el Arte Espanol (Madrid: Plus-Ultra, 1944–7), 135–136. Ayers Bagley, in a recent study of more than seventy medieval examples, argues that the image comprehends a greater range of meanings and allusions than literacy alone; A. Bagley, University of Minnesota, “St. Anne Teaching the Virgin 14th–15th centuries,” http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://education.umn.edu/EdPA/iconics/image

  16. 16.

    See among others Sandro Sticca, The Latin Passion Play: Its Origins and Development (Albany: SUNY, 1970); Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, trans. Joseph R. Berrigan, Athens: Georgia, 1988; Ann Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Medieval Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, esp. 64 ff; Nigel Morgan, “Texts and Images of Marian Devotion in Fourteenth-Century Eng land,” England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium (1993), 34–57. K. A. Smith says of the Neville of Hornby Hours: “The primary subject of this work, the Passion of Christ, gives evidence of the centrality of the Passion as a focus of lay devotion in the later Middle Ages”; Smith, “The Neville of Hornby Hours,” 72.

  17. 17.

    Patrick Diehl, The Medieval Religious Lyric, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 147.

  18. 18.

    William D. Wixom, “Late Medieval Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum 1400–1530,” in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, vol. 64, no. 4 (Spring 2007): 10–11. See also W. D. Wixom, “An Enthroned Madonna with the Writing Christ Child,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 57, no. 9 (December, 1970): 287–302.

  19. 19.

    William H Forsyth, “A Fifteenth-Century Virgin and Child Attributed to Claux de Werve,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, vol. 21 (1986): 50. The text was applied to Mary in hours of the Virgin and breviaries and missals at Lauds, Terce and Vespers. Ibid. Alfred Acres, “Rogier van der Weyden’s Painted Texts,” Artibus et Historiae, vol. 21, no. 41 (2000): 75–109, 80.

  20. 20.

    Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theologian: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963, 307, 317–320.

  21. 21.

    Charles P. Parkhurst Jr., “The Madonna of the Writing Christ Child,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 23, no. 4 (December 1941): 292–306; bibliography on p. 304.

  22. 22.

    “Virgin teaching Jesus to read,” Stipple engraving with etching after a drawing by Guercino in the Royal Collections, printed in 1785 by Francesco Bartolozzi, published by Antonio Cesare Poggi, London: British Museum.

  23. 23.

    Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, MS W.249. See Roger S. Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York: Braziller, 1988), 192–193. Other exceptions include an Italian embroidered altar frontal c. 1336 in the Pitti Palace in which the scene follows the birth of Mary in a sequence showing Mary’s life. Christopher Norton, David Park, and Paul Binski , Dominican Painting in East Anglia: The Thornton Parva Retable and the Musée de Cluny Frontal, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Press, 1987, reprinted 1990), fig. 63. In two cycles described by Sheingorn, an embroidered altar frontal of 1320–40 in the Victoria and Albert, and an English wall painting at Croughton, the “Education of the Virgin” episode appears after Mary’s presentation in the temple. Sheingorn “The Wise Mother,” 70. Overall, Wieck’s catalogue includes eight books of hours with cycles of the life of the Virgin that do not include her education, with on the other hand seven examples of the education in the Suffrages of the Saints. Ibid.

  24. 24.

    Eileen W. Tristram states: “…the subject of St. Anne teaching the Virgin may sometimes form part of a ‘history,’ but more frequently appears either singly or beside an Annunciation.” He mentions Annunciation pairings in wall paintings at Croughton and Slapton in Northamptonshire, and at Headington near Oxford (now defaced). Eileen W. Tristram with Monica Bardswell, English Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955, 23, 298.

  25. 25.

    C. Norton, D. Park, and P. Binski , Dominican Painting in East Anglia, 50 ff. Norton et al. comment on the conjunction of the two subjects but they nonetheless assume that teaching Mary to read is primary: “Teaching, which was so important to the Dominican Order, is conspicuously present in the subject of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin to Read.” They note that in Byzantine art this same text was sometimes used in Annunciation scenes, remarking that The Painters Manual of Dionysius of Fourna recommends this usage.

  26. 26.

    Julia A. Finch, “Women and Books: Reading as Ritualized Performance in Medieval Visual Culture,” in Visualizing Rituals: Critical Analysis of Art and Ritual Practice, Julia Kim Werts (ed.), Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006, 49.

  27. 27.

    Book of Hours, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, B 74 G 22, fol. 202r, reproduced in Kathryn M. Rudy, St. Anne in the National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague: Koniklijke Bibliotheek, 2007, fig. 25.

  28. 28.

    The “Anne and Joachim” panel of Strigel’s “Mindelheimer Altar” is reproduced in Julius Baum, Altschwäbische Kunst (Augsburg:, 1923), 58.

  29. 29.

    L. Freeman Sandler, “Notes for the Illuminator: The Case of the Omne bonum,” in The Art Bulletin, 71, 4 (December, 1989): 551–564.

  30. 30.

    MS 198 in the Morgan Library, New York; see Bagley, “Mother as Teacher: St. Anne and Her Daughter,” http://education.umn

  31. 31.

    MS Douce 231 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, fol. 3; reproduced in Sheingorn, “The Wise Mother,” 76.

  32. 32.

    Smith, The Neville of Hornby Hours, 203–205.

  33. 33.

    The text of the sermon is in Helen Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 417. In the fourteenth century Richard Rolle used the same image in his Meditations on the Passion, cited in Smith, The Neville of Hornby Hours, 203–205.

  34. 34.

    Smith, The Neville of Hornby Hours, n. 37.

  35. 35.

    Kathleen Kam erick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500, New York: Palgrave, 2002, 167.

  36. 36.

    See E. L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood.

  37. 37.

    Additionally to this, one can mention a Swedish relief from the second half of the fifteenth century, now in the Lund University Historical Museum. It was originally part of an altarpiece in Lund Cathedral, and shows a male teacher with the crowned Mary surrounded by four other young girls, all but one holding books. Lena Liepe, “Maria I templet fran ett altarskap I Lunds domkyrka,” in Iconographisk Post: Nordic Review of Iconography 4 (1992): 26–34. According to the same author, a similar subject, with four maidens depicted behind Mary, appears in a late fifteenth century embroidery in Uppsala Cathedral; Liepe, ibid., p. 32. Also a Presentation of the Virgin in the Czartoriski Museum in Krakow realized by the Westphalian painter Johann Koerbecke (1420–1491) shows the girls’ schoolroom in the background at the top of the stairs.

  38. 38.

    Lionardo Frescobaldi, Giorgio Gucci, and Simone Sigoli, Visit to the Holy Places of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine and Syria in 1384, trans. Theophilus Bellorini and Eugene Hoade, Jerusalem: Franciscan Press, 1948, 189–190. G. Gucci, also noted “the chapel where the Virgin went to school,” ibid, p. 128.

  39. 39.

    “Item voert gyngen wir durch desen boegen neit vern dae is die schole gestanden, dae inne vnse lieue vrauwe in yeren kintlichen dagen so scholen hat gegangen. dae is ablais seuen jair ind vij karenen.” Eberhard von Groote (ed.), Die Pilgerfahrt des Ritters Arnold von Harff von Cöln durch Italien, Syrien, Aegypten, Arabien, Aethiopien, Nubien, Palästina, die Türkei, Frankreich und Spanien, wie er sie in den Jahren 1496 bis 1499 vollendet, beschrieben und durch Zeichnungen erläutert hat (Cologne, 1860), 77; reprinted in many editions by various publishers.

  40. 40.

    Felix Fabri, The Wanderings of Felix Fabri, trans. Aubrey Stewart; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1971, 1, 453–454. I am very grateful to James Bugslag for calling my attention to Fabri’s remarks.

  41. 41.

    Lena Liepe, “Maria I templet fran ett altarskap I Lunds domkyrka,” Iconographisk Post: Nordic Review of Iconography 4 (1992), 26–34. A similar subject, with four maidens shown behind Mary, appears in a late fifteenth-century embroidery in Uppsala Cathedral. (L. Liepe, “Maria I templet fran ett altarskap,” 32) while a Presentation of the Virgin in the Czartoriski Museum in Krakow, by the fifteenth-century Westphalian painter Johann Koerbecke (1420–1491), shows the girls’ schoolroom in the background at the top of the stairs.

  42. 42.

    See Jaroslav Folda, “The Church of St. Anne,” Biblical Archaeologist, 54, 2 (June, 1991): 88–96.

  43. 43.

    Paulette Choné suggests that several Georges de la Tour versions of the subject may have been produced in circles connected with education in the milieu of Blessed Mere Alix Le Clerc (1576–1622) and Pierre Fourier who co-founded the Congrégation Notre-Dame (Chanoinesses de Saint-Augustin) dedicated to the establishing schools for girls; Paulette Choné, Georges de La Tour: un peintre lorrain au XVIIe siècle, Tournai: Casterman, 1996, 152. However, no evidence is adduced to support a connection.

  44. 44.

    Christine Turgeon, Le Fil de l’art: Les Broderies des Ursulines de Québec, Quebec: Musée des Ursulines de Québec, 2002, 77. On Saint Anne in Quebec see Nicole Cloutier, L’iconographie de Sainte-Anne au Québec, Ph.D diss., Université de Montréal, vols. 1–2, 1982.

  45. 45.

    Paul Guérin, Vie des Saints, Paris/Bruxelles/Genève: Victor Palmé, Société belge de librairie Henri Trembley, 1887, 460, cited in Estrella Ruiz-Calvez, “Religion de la mère, Religion des Mères,” in Jean Delumeau (ed.), La Religion de ma mère, Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1992, 125. “Librairie” usually means “bookshop.” However, here “library” (a biblioheque) seems to be a more appropriate translation.

  46. 46.

    Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura (Seville, 1649), ed. F.J. Sanchez Canton, Madrid: Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, 1956, 220. Roelas’ painting is now in the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes in Seville.

  47. 47.

    Pacheco , Arte de la Pintura, 218–220, 222–223.

  48. 48.

    Ibid, 222–223.

  49. 49.

    Ibid.

  50. 50.

    In the background Jouvenet has depicted three young girls of the same age as Mary; they seem to be working on needlework of some kind. This detail might suggest that the scene takes place after Mary’s return from the Temple; the apocryphal gospels describe a similar episode.

  51. 51.

    Antonio Maria Zanetti, Descrizione di tutte le pubbliche pitture della citta Di Venezia (Venice, 1733) 190, cited in William L. Barcham, The Religious Paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo: Piety and Tradition in Eighteenth-century Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 174. Another luxuriant eighteenth century baroque Education of the Virgin altar, that by Cosmos Damian Assam in the Klosterkirche St. Anne in Munich-Lehel, bears the legend “Sancta Anna Ora Pro Nobis.”

  52. 52.

    For reproductions see N. Cloutier, L’Iconographie de Sainte Anne au Québec. The engraving by V.F. Poilly (fl. 1680s) after Rubens for the Confrérie des Marchands, Gantiers et Parfumiers de Paris (1710), is entitled “Oraison à Ste. Anne”; Cloutier, L’Iconographie de Sainte Anne, fig. 30. The engraving by Michel Dossier (1684–1750), also after Rubens, is entitled “Sainte Anne”; ibid., fig. 32; the reversed engraving by Francois Chereau (1680–1729) is also entitled “Sainte Anne”; ibid., fig. 33.

  53. 53.

    For example, the Vita Rhythmica presents problems because it speaks of Mary’s education as taking place after her betrothal, at which point “this child was properly educated by her parents [not exclusively by Anne], and was instructed by them in every discipline.” (“Hec proles a parentibus decenter educatur/Et in omni disciplina per ipsos informature”), in Adolf Vögtlin (ed.), Vita Beate Virginis Marie et Salvatoris Rhythmica (Tübingen: Bibliothek des litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, 1888), lines 529–30. Scase mentions a Latin translation of Ephiphanius, known to have been in Balliol College before 1361, which refers to Mary “having learned to read Hebrew when her father was alive,” in Epiphanius the Monk, Sermo de Vita Sanctissimae Deiparae et de ipsis annis, PG 120, cols. 185–216, cited in Scase, “St. Anne and the Education of the Virgin,” 88–89.

  54. 54.

    Carl H. Benziger, “Eine illustrierte Marienlegende aus dem 15. Jahrhundert” (Kodex Mss. hist Helv. X. 50 Stadtbibliothek Bern), Strassburg: Heitz & Mündel, 1913.

  55. 55.

    See for example Das Leben und Wunderzaichen der allerseeligisten Frawen Annae, transl. by the Anonymous Franciscan, Legenda sanctae Annae, Louvain: Joh. De Westfalia, 1496; Munich: Cornelius Leyffert, 1627, 48–49, in the Bayerisches Nationalbibliothek in Munich, and Jan van Denemarken, Die historie, die ghetiden ende die exempelen vander heyligher vrouwen sint Annen, Antwerp: Geraert Leeu, 1490–1499, 54–55, in the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels.

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  1. College of Liberal Arts, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Virginia Nixon

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  1. Wolfson College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Elena Ene D-Vasilescu

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Nixon, V. (2018). An Alternative Suggestion Regarding the Origins of the Image ‘The Education of the Virgin’. In: Ene D-Vasilescu, E. (eds) Devotion to St. Anne in Texts and Images. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89399-0_4

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